18566	----	English Men of Letters EDITED BY JOHN MORLEY HAWTHORNE BY Henry James, JUNR. London MACMILLAN AND CO 1879 * * * * * CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. EARLY YEARS CHAPTER II. EARLY MANHOOD CHAPTER III. EARLY WRITINGS CHAPTER IV. BROOK FARM AND CONCORD CHAPTER V. THE THREE AMERICAN NOVELS CHAPTER VI. ENGLAND AND ITALY CHAPTER VII. LAST YEARS * * * * * HAWTHORNE. CHAPTER I. EARLY YEARS. It will be necessary, for several reasons, to give this short sketch the form rather of a critical essay than of a biography. The data for a life of Nathaniel Hawthorne are the reverse of copious, and even if they were abundant they would serve but in a limited measure the purpose of the biographer. Hawthorne's career was probably as tranquil and uneventful a one as ever fell to the lot of a man of letters; it was almost strikingly deficient in incident, in what may be called the dramatic quality. Few men of equal genius and of equal eminence can have led on the whole a simpler life. His six volumes of Note-Books illustrate this simplicity; they are a sort of monument to an unagitated fortune. Hawthorne's career had few vicissitudes or variations; it was passed for the most part in a small and homogeneous society, in a provincial, rural community; it had few perceptible points of contact with what is called the world, with public events, with the manners of his time, even with the life of his neighbours. Its literary incidents are not numerous. He produced, in quantity, but little. His works consist of four novels and the fragment of another, five volumes of short tales, a collection of sketches, and a couple of story-books for children. And yet some account of the man and the writer is well worth giving. Whatever may have been Hawthorne's private lot, he has the importance of being the most beautiful and most eminent representative of a literature. The importance of the literature may be questioned, but at any rate, in the field of letters, Hawthorne is the most valuable example of the American genius. That genius has not, as a whole, been literary; but Hawthorne was on his limited scale a master of expression. He is the writer to whom his countrymen most confidently point when they wish to make a claim to have enriched the mother-tongue, and, judging from present appearances, he will long occupy this honourable position. If there is something very fortunate for him in the way that he borrows an added relief from the absence of competitors in his own line and from the general flatness of the literary field that surrounds him, there is also, to a spectator, something almost touching in his situation. He was so modest and delicate a genius that we may fancy him appealing from the lonely honour of a representative attitude--perceiving a painful incongruity between his imponderable literary baggage and the large conditions of American life. Hawthorne on the one side is so subtle and slender and unpretending, and the American world on the other is so vast and various and substantial, that it might seem to the author of _The Scarlet Letter_ and the _Mosses from an Old Manse_, that we render him a poor service in contrasting his proportions with those of a great civilization. But our author must accept the awkward as well as the graceful side of his fame; for he has the advantage of pointing a valuable moral. This moral is that the flower of art blooms only where the soil is deep, that it takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature, that it needs a complex social machinery to set a writer in motion. American civilization has hitherto had other things to do than to produce flowers, and before giving birth to writers it has wisely occupied itself with providing something for them to write about. Three or four beautiful talents of trans-Atlantic growth are the sum of what the world usually recognises, and in this modest nosegay the genius of Hawthorne is admitted to have the rarest and sweetest fragrance. His very simplicity has been in his favour; it has helped him to appear complete and homogeneous. To talk of his being national would be to force the note and make a mistake of proportion; but he is, in spite of the absence of the realistic quality, intensely and vividly local. Out of the soil of New England he sprang--in a crevice of that immitigable granite he sprouted and bloomed. Half of the interest that he possesses for an American reader with any turn for analysis must reside in his latent New England savour; and I think it no more than just to say that whatever entertainment he may yield to those who know him at a distance, it is an almost indispensable condition of properly appreciating him to have received a personal impression of the manners, the morals, indeed of the very climate, of the great region of which the remarkable city of Boston is the metropolis. The cold, bright air of New England seems to blow through his pages, and these, in the opinion of many people, are the medium in which it is most agreeable to make the acquaintance of that tonic atmosphere. As to whether it is worth while to seek to know something of New England in order to extract a more intimate quality from _The House of Seven Gables_ and _The Blithedale Romance_, I need not pronounce; but it is certain that a considerable observation of the society to which these productions were more directly addressed is a capital preparation for enjoying them. I have alluded to the absence in Hawthorne of that quality of realism which is now so much in fashion, an absence in regard to which there will of course be more to say; and yet I think I am not fanciful in saying that he testifies to the sentiments of the society in which he flourished almost as pertinently (proportions observed) as Balzac and some of his descendants--MM. Flaubert and Zola--testify to the manners and morals of the French people. He was not a man with a literary theory; he was guiltless of a system, and I am not sure that he had ever heard of Realism, this remarkable compound having (although it was invented some time earlier) come into general use only since his death. He had certainly not proposed to himself to give an account of the social idiosyncrasies of his fellow-citizens, for his touch on such points is always light and vague, he has none of the apparatus of an historian, and his shadowy style of portraiture never suggests a rigid standard of accuracy. Nevertheless he virtually offers the most vivid reflection of New England life that has found its way into literature. His value in this respect is not diminished by the fact that he has not attempted to portray the usual Yankee of comedy, and that he has been almost culpably indifferent to his opportunities for commemorating the variations of colloquial English that may be observed in the New World. His characters do not express themselves in the dialect of the _Biglow Papers_--their language indeed is apt to be too elegant, too delicate. They are not portraits of actual types, and in their phraseology there is nothing imitative. But none the less, Hawthorne's work savours thoroughly of the local soil--it is redolent of the social system in which he had his being. This could hardly fail to be the case, when the man himself was so deeply rooted in the soil. Hawthorne sprang from the primitive New England stock; he had a very definite and conspicuous pedigree. He was born at Salem, Massachusetts, on the 4th of July, 1804, and his birthday was the great American festival, the anniversary of the Declaration of national Independence.[1] Hawthorne was in his disposition an unqualified and unflinching American; he found occasion to give us the measure of the fact during the seven years that he spent in Europe toward the close of his life; and this was no more than proper on the part of a man who had enjoyed the honour of coming into the world on the day on which of all the days in the year the great Republic enjoys her acutest fit of self-consciousness. Moreover, a person who has been ushered into life by the ringing of bells and the booming of cannon (unless indeed he be frightened straight out of it again by the uproar of his awakening) receives by this very fact an injunction to do something great, something that will justify such striking natal accompaniments. Hawthorne was by race of the clearest Puritan strain. His earliest American ancestors (who wrote the name "Hathorne"--the shape in which it was transmitted to Nathaniel, who inserted the _w_,) was the younger son of a Wiltshire family, whose residence, according to a note of our author's in 1837, was "Wigcastle, Wigton." Hawthorne, in the note in question, mentions the gentleman who was at that time the head of the family; but it does not appear that he at any period renewed acquaintance with his English kinsfolk. Major William Hathorne came out to Massachusetts in the early years of the Puritan settlement; in 1635 or 1636, according to the note to which I have just alluded; in 1630 according to information presumably more accurate. He was one of the band of companions of the virtuous and exemplary John Winthrop, the almost life-long royal Governor of the young colony, and the brightest and most amiable figure in the early Puritan annals. How amiable William Hathorne may have been I know not, but he was evidently of the stuff of which the citizens of the Commonwealth were best advised to be made. He was a sturdy fighting man, doing solid execution upon both the inward and outward enemies of the State. The latter were the savages, the former the Quakers; the energy expended by the early Puritans in resistance to the tomahawk not weakening their disposition to deal with spiritual dangers. They employed the same--or almost the same--weapons in both directions; the flintlock and the halberd against the Indians, and the cat-o'-nine-tails against the heretics. One of the longest, though by no means one of the most successful, of Hawthorne's shorter tales (_The Gentle Boy_) deals with this pitiful persecution of the least aggressive of all schismatic bodies. William Hathorne, who had been made a magistrate of the town of Salem, where a grant of land had been offered him as an inducement to residence, figures in New England history as having given orders that "Anne Coleman and four of her friends" should be whipped through Salem, Boston, and Dedham. This Anne Coleman, I suppose, is the woman alluded to in that fine passage in the Introduction to _The Scarlet Letter_, in which Hawthorne pays a qualified tribute to the founder of the American branch of his race:-- "The figure of that first ancestor, invested by family tradition with a dim and dusky grandeur, was present to my boyish imagination as far back as I can remember. It still haunts me, and induces a sort of home-feeling with the past, which I scarcely claim in reference to the present, phase of the town. I seem to have a stronger claim to a residence here on account of this grave, bearded, sable-cloaked and steeple-crowned progenitor--who came so early, with his Bible and his sword, and trod the unworn street with such a stately port, and make so large a figure as a man of war and peace--a stronger claim than for myself, whose name is seldom heard and my face hardly known. He was a soldier, legislator, judge; he was a ruler in the church; he had all the Puritanic traits, both good and evil. He was likewise a bitter persecutor, as witness the Quakers, who have remembered him in their histories, and relate an incident of his hard severity towards a woman of their sect which will last longer, it is to be feared, than any of his better deeds, though these were many." FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 1: It is proper that before I go further I should acknowledge my large obligations to the only biography of our author, of any considerable length, that has been written--the little volume entitled _A Study of Hawthorne_, by Mr. George Parsons Lathrop, the son-in-law of the subject of the work. (Boston, 1876.) To this ingenious and sympathetic sketch, in which the author has taken great pains to collect the more interesting facts of Hawthorne's life, I am greatly indebted. Mr. Lathrop's work is not pitched in the key which many another writer would have chosen, and his tone is not to my sense the truly critical one; but without the help afforded by his elaborate essay the present little volume could not have been prepared.] William Hathorne died in 1681; but those hard qualities that his descendant speaks of were reproduced in his son John, who bore the title of Colonel, and who was connected, too intimately for his honour, with that deplorable episode of New England history, the persecution of-the so-called Witches of Salem. John Hathorne is introduced into the little drama entitled _The Salem Farms_ in Longfellow's _New England Tragedies_. I know not whether he had the compensating merits of his father, but our author speaks of him, in the continuation of the passage I have just quoted, as having made himself so conspicuous in the martyrdom of the witches, that their blood may be said to have left a stain upon him. "So deep a stain, indeed," Hawthorne adds, characteristically, "that his old dry bones in the Charter Street burial-ground must still retain it, if they have not crumbled utterly to dust." Readers of _The House of the Seven Gables_ will remember that the story concerns itself with a family which is supposed to be overshadowed by a curse launched against one of its earlier members by a poor man occupying a lowlier place in the world, whom this ill-advised ancestor had been the means of bringing to justice for the crime of witchcraft. Hawthorne apparently found the idea of the history of the Pyncheons in his own family annals. His witch-judging ancestor was reported to have incurred a malediction from one of his victims, in consequence of which the prosperity of the race faded utterly away. "I know not," the passage I have already quoted goes on, "whether these ancestors of mine bethought themselves to repent and ask pardon of Heaven for their cruelties, or whether they are now groaning under the heavy consequences of them in another state of being. At all events, I, the present writer, hereby take shame upon myself for their sakes, and pray that any curse incurred by them--as I have heard, and as the dreary and unprosperous condition of the race for some time back would argue to exist--may be now and henceforth removed." The two first American Hathornes had been people of importance and responsibility; but with the third generation the family lapsed into an obscurity from which it emerged in the very person of the writer who begs so gracefully for a turn in its affairs. It is very true, Hawthorne proceeds, in the Introduction to _The Scarlet Letter_, that from the original point of view such lustre as he might have contrived to confer upon the name would have appeared more than questionable. "Either of these stern and black-browed Puritans would have thought it quite a sufficient retribution for his sins that after so long a lapse of years the old trunk of the family tree, with so much venerable moss upon it, should have borne, as its topmost bough, an idler like myself. No aim that I have ever cherished would they recognise as laudable; no success of mine, if my life, beyond its domestic scope, had ever been brightened by success, would they deem otherwise than worthless, if not positively disgraceful. 'What is he?' murmurs one grey shadow of my forefathers to the other. 'A writer of story-books! What kind of a business in life, what manner of glorifying God, or being serviceable to mankind in his day and generation, may that be? Why, the degenerate fellow might as well have been a fiddler!' Such are the compliments bandied between my great grandsires and myself across the gulf of time! And yet, let them scorn me as they will, strong traits of their nature have intertwined themselves with mine." In this last observation we may imagine that there was not a little truth. Poet and novelist as Hawthorne was, sceptic and dreamer and little of a man of action, late-coming fruit of a tree which might seem to have lost the power to bloom, he was morally, in an appreciative degree, a chip of the old block. His forefathers had crossed the Atlantic for conscience' sake, and it was the idea of the urgent conscience that haunted the imagination of their so-called degenerate successor. The Puritan strain in his blood ran clear--there are passages in his Diaries, kept during his residence in Europe, which might almost have been written by the grimmest of the old Salem worthies. To him as to them, the consciousness of _sin_ was the most importunate fact of life, and if they had undertaken to write little tales, this baleful substantive, with its attendant adjective, could hardly have been more frequent in their pages than in those of their fanciful descendant. Hawthorne had moreover in his composition contemplator and dreamer as he was, an element of simplicity and rigidity, a something plain and masculine and sensible, which might have kept his black-browed grandsires on better terms with him than he admits to be possible. However little they might have appreciated the artist, they would have approved of the man. The play of Hawthorne's intellect was light and capricious, but the man himself was firm and rational. The imagination was profane, but the temper was not degenerate. The "dreary and unprosperous condition" that he speaks of in regard to the fortunes of his family is an allusion to the fact that several generations followed each other on the soil in which they had been planted, that during the eighteenth century a succession of Hathornes trod the simple streets of Salem without ever conferring any especial lustre upon the town or receiving, presumably, any great delight from it. A hundred years of Salem would perhaps be rather a dead-weight for any family to carry, and we venture to imagine that the Hathornes were dull and depressed. They did what they could, however, to improve their situation; they trod the Salem streets as little as possible. They went to sea, and made long voyages; seamanship became the regular profession of the family. Hawthorne has said it in charming language. "From father to son, for above a hundred years, they followed the sea; a grey-headed shipmaster, in each generation, retiring from the quarter-deck to the homestead, while a boy of fourteen took the hereditary place before the mast, confronting the salt spray and the gale which had blustered against his sire and grandsire. The boy also, in due time, passed from the forecastle to the cabin, spent a tempestuous manhood, and returned from his world-wanderings to grow old and die and mingle his dust with the natal earth." Our author's grandfather, Daniel Hathorne, is mentioned by Mr. Lathrop, his biographer and son-in-law, as a hardy privateer during the war of Independence. His father, from whom he was named, was also a shipmaster, and he died in foreign lands, in the exercise of his profession. He was carried off by a fever, at Surinam, in 1808. He left three children, of whom Nathaniel was the only boy. The boy's mother, who had been a Miss Manning, came of a New England stock almost as long-established as that of her husband; she is described by our author's biographer as a woman of remarkable beauty, and by an authority whom he quotes, as being "a minute observer of religious festivals," of "feasts, fasts, new-moons, and Sabbaths." Of feasts the poor lady in her Puritanic home can have had but a very limited number to celebrate; but of new-moons, she may be supposed to have enjoyed the usual, and of Sabbaths even more than the usual, proportion. In quiet provincial Salem, Nathaniel Hawthorne passed the greater part of his boyhood, as well as many years of his later life. Mr. Lathrop has much to say about the ancient picturesqueness of the place, and about the mystic influences it would project upon such a mind and character as Hawthorne's. These things are always relative, and in appreciating them everything depends upon the point of view. Mr. Lathrop writes for American readers, who in such a matter as this are very easy to please. Americans have as a general thing a hungry passion for the picturesque, and they are so fond of local colour that they contrive to perceive it in localities in which the amateurs of other countries would detect only the most neutral tints. History, as yet, has left in the United States but so thin and impalpable a deposit that we very soon touch the hard substratum of nature; and nature herself, in the western world, has the peculiarity of seeming rather crude and immature. The very air looks new and young; the light of the sun seems fresh and innocent, as if it knew as yet but few of the secrets of the world and none of the weariness of shining; the vegetation has the appearance of not having reached its majority. A large juvenility is stamped upon the face of things, and in the vividness of the present, the past, which died so young and had time to produce so little, attracts but scanty attention. I doubt whether English observers would discover any very striking trace of it in the ancient town of Salem. Still, with all respect to a York and a Shrewsbury, to a Toledo and a Verona, Salem has a physiognomy in which the past plays a more important part than the present. It is of course a very recent past; but one must remember that the dead of yesterday are not more alive than those of a century ago. I know not of what picturesqueness Hawthorne was conscious in his respectable birthplace; I suspect his perception of it was less keen than his biographer assumes it to have been; but he must have felt at least that of whatever complexity of earlier life there had been in the country, the elm-shadowed streets of Salem were a recognisable memento. He has made considerable mention of the place, here and there, in his tales; but he has nowhere dilated upon it very lovingly, and it is noteworthy that in _The House of the Seven Gables_, the only one of his novels of which the scene is laid in it, he has by no means availed himself of the opportunity to give a description of it. He had of course a filial fondness for it--a deep-seated sense of connection with it; but he must have spent some very dreary years there, and the two feelings, the mingled tenderness and rancour, are visible in the Introduction to _The Scarlet Letter_. "The old town of Salem," he writes,--"my native place, though I have dwelt much away from it, both in boyhood and in maturer years--possesses, or did possess, a hold on my affections, the force of which I have never realized during my seasons of actual residence here. Indeed, so far as the physical aspect is concerned, with its flat, unvaried surface, covered chiefly with wooden houses, few or none of which pretend to architectural beauty; its irregularity, which is neither picturesque nor quaint, but only tame; its long and lazy street, lounging wearisomely through the whole extent of the peninsula, with Gallows Hill and New Guinea at one end, and a view of the almshouse at the other--such being the features of my native town it would be quite as reasonable to form a sentimental attachment to a disarranged chequer-board." But he goes on to say that he has never divested himself of the sense of intensely belonging to it--that the spell of the continuity of his life with that of his predecessors has never been broken. "It is no matter that the place is joyless for him; that he is weary of the old wooden houses, the mud and the dust, the dead level of site and sentiment, the chill east wind, and the chilliest of social atmospheres;--all these and whatever faults besides he may see or imagine, are nothing to the purpose. The spell survives, and just as powerfully as if the natal spot were an earthly paradise." There is a very American quality in this perpetual consciousness of a spell on Hawthorne's part; it is only in a country where newness and change and brevity of tenure are the common substance of life, that the fact of one's ancestors having lived for a hundred and seventy years in a single spot would become an element of one's morality. It is only an imaginative American that would feel urged to keep reverting to this circumstance, to keep analysing and cunningly considering it. The Salem of to-day has, as New England towns go, a physiognomy of its own, and in spite of Hawthorne's analogy of the disarranged draught-board, it is a decidedly agreeable one. The spreading elms in its streets, the proportion of large, square, honourable-looking houses, suggesting an easy, copious material life, the little gardens, the grassy waysides, the open windows, the air of space and salubrity and decency, and above all the intimation of larger antecedents--these things compose a picture which has little of the element that painters call depth of tone, but which is not without something that they would admit to be style. To English eyes the oldest and most honourable of the smaller American towns must seem in a manner primitive and rustic; the shabby, straggling, village-quality appears marked in them, and their social tone is not unnaturally inferred to bear the village stamp. Village-like they are, and it would be no gross incivility to describe them as large, respectable, prosperous, democratic villages. But even a village, in a great and vigorous democracy, where there are no overshadowing squires, where the "county" has no social existence, where the villagers are conscious of no superincumbent strata of gentility, piled upwards into vague regions of privilege--even a village is not an institution to accept of more or less graceful patronage; it thinks extremely well of itself, and is absolute in its own regard. Salem is a sea-port, but it is a sea-port deserted and decayed. It belongs to that rather melancholy group of old coast-towns, scattered along the great sea-face of New England, and of which the list is completed by the names of Portsmouth, Plymouth, New Bedford, Newburyport, Newport--superannuated centres of the traffic with foreign lands, which have seen their trade carried away from them by the greater cities. As Hawthorne says, their ventures have gone "to swell, needlessly and imperceptibly, the mighty flood of commerce at New York or Boston." Salem, at the beginning of the present century, played a great part in the Eastern trade; it was the residence of enterprising shipowners who despatched their vessels to Indian and Chinese seas. It was a place of large fortunes, many of which have remained, though the activity that produced them has passed away. These successful traders constituted what Hawthorne calls "the aristocratic class." He alludes in one of his slighter sketches (_The Sister Years_) to the sway of this class and the "moral influence of wealth" having been more marked in Salem than in any other New England town. The sway, we may believe, was on the whole gently exercised, and the moral influence of wealth was not exerted in the cause of immorality. Hawthorne was probably but imperfectly conscious of an advantage which familiarity had made stale--the fact that he lived in the most democratic and most virtuous of modern communities. Of the virtue it is but civil to suppose that his own family had a liberal share; but not much of the wealth, apparently, came into their way. Hawthorne was not born to a patrimony, and his income, later in life, never exceeded very modest proportions. Of his childish years there appears to be nothing very definite to relate, though his biographer devotes a good many graceful pages to them. There is a considerable sameness in the behaviour of small boys, and it is probable that if we were acquainted with the details of our author's infantine career we should find it to be made up of the same pleasures and pains as that of many ingenuous lads for whom fame has had nothing in keeping. The absence of precocious symptoms of genius is on the whole more striking in the lives of men who have distinguished themselves than their juvenile promise; though it must be added that Mr. Lathrop has made out, as he was almost in duty bound to do, a very good case in favour of Hawthorne's having been an interesting child. He was not at any time what would be called a sociable man, and there is therefore nothing unexpected in the fact that he was fond of long walks in which he was not known to have had a companion. "Juvenile literature" was but scantily known at that time, and the enormous and extraordinary contribution made by the United States to this department of human happiness was locked in the bosom of futurity. The young Hawthorne, therefore, like many of his contemporaries, was constrained to amuse himself, for want of anything better, with the _Pilgrim's Progress_ and the _Faery Queen_. A boy may have worse company than Bunyan and Spenser, and it is very probable that in his childish rambles our author may have had associates of whom there could be no record. When he was nine years old he met with an accident at school which threatened for a while to have serious results. He was struck on the foot by a ball and so severely lamed that he was kept at home for a long time, and had not completely recovered before his twelfth year. His school, it is to be supposed, was the common day-school of New England--the primary factor in that extraordinarily pervasive system of instruction in the plainer branches of learning, which forms one of the principal ornaments of American life. In 1818, when he was fourteen years old, he was taken by his mother to live in the house of an uncle, her brother, who was established in the town of Raymond, near Lake Sebago, in the State of Maine. The immense State of Maine, in the year 1818, must have had an even more magnificently natural character than it possesses at the present day, and the uncle's dwelling, in consequence of being in a little smarter style than the primitive structures that surrounded it, was known by the villagers as Manning's Folly. Mr. Lathrop pronounces this region to be of a "weird and woodsy" character; and Hawthorne, later in life, spoke of it to a friend as the place where "I first got my cursed habits of solitude." The outlook, indeed, for an embryonic novelist, would not seem to have been cheerful; the social dreariness of a small New England community lost amid the forests of Maine, at the beginning of the present century, must have been consummate. But for a boy with a relish for solitude there were many natural resources, and we can understand that Hawthorne should in after years have spoken very tenderly of this episode. "I lived in Maine like a bird of the air, so perfect was the freedom I enjoyed." During the long summer days he roamed, gun in hand, through the great woods, and during the moonlight nights of winter, says his biographer, quoting another informant, "he would skate until midnight, all alone, upon Sebago Lake, with the deep shadows of the icy hills on either hand." In 1819 he was sent back to Salem to school, and in the following year he wrote to his mother, who had remained at Raymond (the boy had found a home at Salem with another uncle), "I have left school and have begun to fit for college under Benjm. L. Oliver, Lawyer. So you are in danger of having one learned man in your family.... I get my lessons at home and recite them to him (Mr. Oliver) at seven o'clock in the morning.... Shall you want me to be a Minister, Doctor, or Lawyer? A Minister I will not be." He adds, at the close of this epistle--"O how I wish I was again with you, with nothing to do but to go a-gunning! But the happiest days of my life are gone." In 1821, in his seventeenth year, he entered Bowdoin College, at Brunswick, Maine. This institution was in the year 1821--a quarter of a century after its foundation--a highly honourable, but not a very elaborately organized, nor a particularly impressive, seat of learning. I say it was not impressive, but I immediately remember that impressions depend upon the minds receiving them; and that to a group of simple New England lads, upwards of sixty years ago, the halls and groves of Bowdoin, neither dense nor lofty though they can have been, may have seemed replete with Academic stateliness. It was a homely, simple, frugal, "country college," of the old-fashioned American stamp; exerting within its limits a civilizing influence, working, amid the forests and the lakes, the log-houses and the clearings, toward the amenities and humanities and other collegiate graces, and offering a very sufficient education to the future lawyers, merchants, clergymen, politicians, and editors, of the very active and knowledge-loving community that supported it. It did more than this--it numbered poets and statesmen among its undergraduates, and on the roll-call of its sons it has several distinguished names. Among Hawthorne's fellow-students was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who divides with our author the honour of being the most distinguished of American men of letters. I know not whether Mr. Longfellow was especially intimate with Hawthorne at this period (they were very good friends later in life), but with two of his companions he formed a friendship which lasted always. One of these was Franklin Pierce, who was destined to fill what Hawthorne calls "the most august position in the world." Pierce was elected President of the United States in 1852. The other was Horatio Bridge, who afterwards served with distinction in the Navy, and to whom the charming prefatory letter of the collection of tales published under the name of _The Snow Image_, is addressed. "If anybody is responsible at this day for my being an author it is yourself. I know not whence your faith came; but while we were lads together at a country college--gathering blueberries in study-hours under those tall Academic pines; or watching the great logs as they tumbled along the current of the Androscoggin; or shooting pigeons and grey squirrels in the woods; or bat-fowling in the summer twilight; or catching trout in that shadowy little stream which, I suppose, is still wandering river-ward through the forest--though you and I will never cast a line in it again--two idle lads, in short (as we need not fear to acknowledge now), doing a hundred things the Faculty never heard of, or else it had been worse for us--still it was your prognostic of your friend's destiny that he was to be a writer of fiction." That is a very pretty picture, but it is a picture of happy urchins at school, rather than of undergraduates "panting," as Macaulay says, "for one and twenty." Poor Hawthorne was indeed thousands of miles away from Oxford and Cambridge; that touch about the blueberries and the logs on the Androscoggin tells the whole story, and strikes the note, as it were, of his circumstances. But if the pleasures at Bowdoin were not expensive, so neither were the penalties. The amount of Hawthorne's collegiate bill for one term was less than 4_l._, and of this sum more than 9_s._ was made up of fines. The fines, however, were not heavy. Mr. Lathrop prints a letter addressed by the President to "Mrs. Elizabeth C. Hathorne," requesting her co-operation with the officers of this college, "in the attempt to induce your son faithfully to observe the laws of this institution." He has just been fined fifty cents for playing cards for money during the preceding term. "Perhaps he might not have gamed," the Professor adds, "were it not for the influence of a student whom we have dismissed from college." The biographer quotes a letter from Hawthorne to one of his sisters, in which the writer says, in allusion to this remark, that it is a great mistake to think that he has been led away by the wicked ones. "I was fully as willing to play as the person he suspects of having enticed me, and would have been influenced by no one. I have a great mind to commence playing again, merely to show him that I scorn to be seduced by another into anything wrong." There is something in these few words that accords with the impression that the observant reader of Hawthorne gathers of the personal character that underlay his duskily-sportive imagination--an impression of simple manliness and transparent honesty. He appears to have been a fair scholar, but not a brilliant one; and it is very probable that as the standard of scholarship at Bowdoin was not high, he graduated none the less comfortably on this account. Mr. Lathrop is able to testify to the fact, by no means a surprising one, that he wrote verses at college, though the few stanzas that the biographer quotes are not such as to make us especially regret that his rhyming mood was a transient one. "The ocean hath its silent caves, Deep, quiet and alone. Though there be fury on the waves, Beneath them there is none." That quatrain may suffice to decorate our page. And in connection with his college days I may mention his first novel, a short romance entitled _Fanshawe_, which was published in Boston in 1828, three years after he graduated. It was probably also written after that event, but the scene of the tale is laid at Bowdoin (which figures under an altered name), and Hawthorne's attitude with regard to the book, even shortly after it was published, was such as to assign it to this boyish period. It was issued anonymously, but he so repented of his venture that he annihilated the edition, of which, according to Mr. Lathrop, "not half a dozen copies are now known to be extant." I have seen none of these rare volumes, and I know nothing of _Fanshawe_ but what the writer just quoted relates. It is the story of a young lady who goes in rather an odd fashion to reside at "Harley College" (equivalent of Bowdoin), under the care and guardianship of Dr. Melmoth, the President of the institution, a venerable, amiable, unworldly, and henpecked, scholar. Here she becomes very naturally an object of interest to two of the students; in regard to whom I cannot do better than quote Mr. Lathrop. One of these young men "is Edward Wolcott, a wealthy, handsome, generous, healthy young fellow from one of the sea-port towns; and the other Fanshawe, the hero, who is a poor but ambitious recluse, already passing into a decline through overmuch devotion to books and meditation. Fanshawe, though the deeper nature of the two, and intensely moved by his new passion, perceiving that a union between himself and Ellen could not be a happy one, resigns the hope of it from the beginning. But circumstances bring him into intimate relation with her. The real action of the book, after the preliminaries, takes up only some three days, and turns upon the attempt of a man named Butler to entice Ellen away under his protection, then marry her, and secure the fortune to which she is heiress. This scheme is partly frustrated by circumstances, and Butler's purpose towards Ellen thus becomes a much more sinister one. From this she is rescued by Fanshawe, and knowing that he loves her, but is concealing his passion, she gives him the opportunity and the right to claim her hand. For a moment the rush of desire and hope is so great that he hesitates; then he refuses to take advantage of her generosity, and parts with her for a last time. Ellen becomes engaged to Wolcott, who had won her heart from the first; and Fanshawe, sinking into rapid consumption, dies before his class graduates." The story must have had a good deal of innocent lightness; and it is a proof of how little the world of observation lay open to Hawthorne, at this time, that he should have had no other choice than to make his little drama go forward between the rather naked walls of Bowdoin, where the presence of his heroine was an essential incongruity. He was twenty-four years old, but the "world," in its social sense, had not disclosed itself to him. He had, however, already, at moments, a very pretty writer's touch, as witness this passage, quoted by Mr. Lathrop, and which is worth transcribing. The heroine has gone off with the nefarious Butler, and the good Dr. Melmoth starts in pursuit of her, attended by young Wolcott. "'Alas, youth, these are strange times,' observed the President, 'when a doctor of divinity and an undergraduate set forth, like a knight-errant and his squire, in search of a stray damsel. Methinks I am an epitome of the church militant, or a new species of polemical divinity. Pray Heaven, however, there be no such encounter in store for us; for I utterly forgot to provide myself with weapons.' "'I took some thought for that matter, reverend knight,' replied Edward, whose imagination was highly tickled by Dr. Melmoth's chivalrous comparison. "'Aye, I see that you have girded on a sword,' said the divine. 'But wherewith shall I defend myself? my hand being empty except of this golden-headed staff, the gift of Mr. Langton.' "'One of these, if you will accept it,' answered Edward, exhibiting a brace of pistols, 'will serve to begin the conflict before you join the battle hand to hand.' "'Nay, I shall find little safety in meddling with that deadly instrument, since I know not accurately from which end proceeds the bullet,' said Dr. Melmoth. 'But were it not better, since we are so well provided with artillery, to betake ourselves, in the event of an encounter, to some stone wall or other place of strength?' "'If I may presume to advise,' said the squire, 'you, as being most valiant and experienced, should ride forward, lance in hand (your long staff serving for a lance), while I annoy the enemy from afar.' "'Like Teucer, behind the shield of Ajax,' interrupted Dr. Melmoth, 'or David with his stone and sling. No, no, young man; I have left unfinished in my study a learned treatise, important not only to the present age, but to posterity, for whose sake I must take heed to my safety. But, lo! who rides yonder?'" On leaving college Hawthorne had gone back to live at Salem. * * * * * CHAPTER II. EARLY MANHOOD. The twelve years that followed were not the happiest or most brilliant phase of Hawthorne's life; they strike me indeed as having had an altogether peculiar dreariness. They had their uses; they were the period of incubation of the admirable compositions which eventually brought him reputation and prosperity. But of their actual aridity the young man must have had a painful consciousness; he never lost the impression of it. Mr. Lathrop quotes a phrase to this effect from one of his letters, late in life. "I am disposed to thank God for the gloom and chill of my early life, in the hope that my share of adversity came then, when I bore it alone." And the same writer alludes to a touching passage in the English Note-Books, which I shall quote entire:-- "I think I have been happier this Christmas (1854) than ever before--by my own fireside, and with my wife and children about me--more content to enjoy what I have, less anxious for anything beyond it, in this life. My early life was perhaps a good preparation for the declining half of life; it having been such a blank that any thereafter would compare favourably with it. For a long, long while, I have occasionally been visited with a singular dream; and I have an impression that I have dreamed it ever since I have been in England. It is, that I am still at college, or, sometimes, even, at school--and there is a sense that I have been there unconscionably long, and have quite failed to make such progress as my contemporaries have done; and I seem to meet some of them with a feeling of shame and depression that broods over me as I think of it, even when awake. This dream, recurring all through these twenty or thirty years, must be one of the effects of that heavy seclusion in which I shut myself up for twelve years after leaving college, when everybody moved onward and left me behind. How strange that it should come now, when I may call myself famous and prosperous!--when I am happy too." The allusion here is to a state of solitude which was the young man's positive choice at the time--or into which he drifted at least under the pressure of his natural shyness and reserve. He was not expansive, he was not addicted to experiments and adventures of intercourse, he was not, personally, in a word, what is called sociable. The general impression of this silence-loving and shade-seeking side of his character is doubtless exaggerated, and, in so far as it points to him as a sombre and sinister figure, is almost ludicrously at fault. He was silent, diffident, more inclined to hesitate, to watch and wait and meditate, than to produce himself, and fonder, on almost any occasion, of being absent than of being present. This quality betrays itself in all his writings. There is in all of them something cold and light and thin, something belonging to the imagination alone, which indicates a man but little disposed to multiply his relations, his points of contact, with society. If we read the six volumes of Note-Books with an eye to the evidence of this unsocial side of his life, we find it in sufficient abundance. But we find at the same time that there was nothing unamiable or invidious in his shyness, and above all that there was nothing preponderantly gloomy. The qualities to which the Note-Books most testify are, on the whole, his serenity and amenity of mind. They reveal these characteristics indeed in an almost phenomenal degree. The serenity, the simplicity, seem in certain portions almost child-like; of brilliant gaiety, of high spirits, there is little; but the placidity and evenness of temper, the cheerful and contented view of the things he notes, never belie themselves. I know not what else he may have written in this copious record, and what passages of gloom and melancholy may have been suppressed; but as his Diaries stand, they offer in a remarkable degree the reflection of a mind whose development was not in the direction of sadness. A very clever French critic, whose fancy is often more lively than his observation is deep, M. Emile Montégut, writing in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_, in the year 1860, invents for our author the appellation of "Un Romancier Pessimiste." Superficially speaking, perhaps, the title is a happy one; but only superficially. Pessimism consists in having morbid and bitter views and theories about human nature; not in indulging in shadowy fancies and conceits. There is nothing whatever to show that Hawthorne had any such doctrines or convictions; certainly, the note of depression, of despair, of the disposition to undervalue the human race, is never sounded in his Diaries. These volumes contain the record of very few convictions or theories of any kind; they move with curious evenness, with a charming, graceful flow, on a level which lies above that of a man's philosophy. They adhere with such persistence to this upper level that they prompt the reader to believe that Hawthorne had no appreciable philosophy at all--no general views that were, in the least uncomfortable. They are the exhibition of an unperplexed intellect. I said just now that the development of Hawthorne's mind was not towards sadness; and I should be inclined to go still further, and say that his mind proper--his mind in so far as it was a repository of opinions and articles of faith--had no development that it is of especial importance to look into. What had a development was his imagination--that delicate and penetrating imagination which was always at play, always entertaining itself, always engaged in a game of hide and seek in the region in which it seemed to him, that the game could best be played--among the shadows and substructions, the dark-based pillars and supports, of our moral nature. Beneath this movement and ripple of his imagination--as free and spontaneous as that of the sea surface--lay directly his personal affections. These were solid and strong, but, according to my impression, they had the place very much to themselves. His innocent reserve, then, and his exaggerated, but by no means cynical, relish for solitude, imposed themselves upon him, in a great measure, with a persistency which helped to make the time a tolerably arid one--so arid a one indeed that we have seen that in the light of later happiness he pronounced it a blank. But in truth, if these were dull years, it was not all Hawthorne's fault. His situation was intrinsically poor--poor with a poverty that one almost hesitates to look into. When we think of what the conditions of intellectual life, of taste, must have been in a small New England town fifty years ago; and when we think of a young man of beautiful genius, with a love of literature and romance, of the picturesque, of style and form and colour, trying to make a career for himself in the midst of them, compassion for the young man becomes our dominant sentiment, and we see the large dry village picture in perhaps almost too hard a light. It seems to me then that it was possibly a blessing for Hawthorne that he was not expansive and inquisitive, that he lived much to himself and asked but little of his _milieu_. If he had been exacting and ambitious, if his appetite had been large and his knowledge various, he would probably have found the bounds of Salem intolerably narrow. But his culture had been of a simple sort--there was little of any other sort to be obtained in America in those days, and though he was doubtless haunted by visions of more suggestive opportunities, we may safely assume that he was not to his own perception the object of compassion that he appears to a critic who judges him after half a century's civilization has filtered into the twilight of that earlier time. If New England was socially a very small place in those days, Salem was a still smaller one; and if the American tone at large was intensely provincial, that of New England was not greatly helped by having the best of it. The state of things was extremely natural, and there could be now no greater mistake than to speak of it with a redundancy of irony. American life had begun to constitute itself from the foundations; it had begun to _be_, simply; it was at an immeasurable distance from having begun to enjoy. I imagine there was no appreciable group of people in New England at that time proposing to itself to enjoy life; this was not an undertaking for which any provision had been made, or to which any encouragement was offered. Hawthorne must have vaguely entertained some such design upon destiny; but he must have felt that his success would have to depend wholly upon his own ingenuity. I say he must have proposed to himself to enjoy, simply because he proposed to be an artist, and because this enters inevitably into the artist's scheme. There are a thousand ways of enjoying life, and that of the artist is one of the most innocent. But for all that, it connects itself with the idea of pleasure. He proposes to give pleasure, and to give it he must first get it. Where he gets it will depend upon circumstances, and circumstances were not encouraging to Hawthorne. He was poor, he was solitary, and he undertook to devote himself to literature in a community in which the interest in literature was as yet of the smallest. It is not too much to say that even to the present day it is a considerable discomfort in the United States not to be "in business." The young man who attempts to launch himself in a career that does not belong to the so-called practical order; the young man who has not, in a word, an office in the business-quarter of the town, with his name painted on the door, has but a limited place in the social system, finds no particular bough to perch upon. He is not looked at askance, he is not regarded as an idler; literature and the arts have always been held in extreme honour in the American world, and those who practise them are received on easier terms than in other countries. If the tone of the American world is in some respects provincial, it is in none more so than in this matter of the exaggerated homage rendered to authorship. The gentleman or the lady who has written a book is in many circles the object of an admiration too indiscriminating to operate as an encouragement to good writing. There is no reason to suppose that this was less the case fifty years ago; but fifty years ago, greatly more than now, the literary man must have lacked the comfort and inspiration of belonging to a class. The best things come, as a general thing, from the talents that are members of a group; every man works better when he has companions working in the same line, and yielding the stimulus of suggestion, comparison, emulation. Great things of course have been done by solitary workers; but they have usually been done with double the pains they would have cost if they had been produced in more genial circumstances. The solitary worker loses the profit of example and discussion; he is apt to make awkward experiments; he is in the nature of the case more or less of an empiric. The empiric may, as I say, be treated by the world as an expert; but the drawbacks and discomforts of empiricism remain to him, and are in fact increased by the suspicion that is mingled with his gratitude, of a want in the public taste of a sense of the proportions of things. Poor Hawthorne, beginning to write subtle short tales at Salem, was empirical enough; he was one of, at most, some dozen Americans who had taken up literature as a profession. The profession in the United States is still very young, and of diminutive stature; but in the year 1830 its head could hardly have been seen above ground. It strikes the observer of to-day that Hawthorne showed great courage in entering a field in which the honours and emoluments were so scanty as the profits of authorship must have been at that time. I have said that in the United States at present authorship is a pedestal, and literature is the fashion; but Hawthorne's history is a proof that it was possible, fifty years ago, to write a great many little masterpieces without becoming known. He begins the preface to the _Twice-Told Tales_ by remarking that he was "for many years the obscurest man of letters in America." When once this work obtained recognition, the recognition left little to be desired. Hawthorne never, I believe, made large sums of money by his writings, and the early profits of these charming sketches could not have been considerable; for many of them, indeed, as they appeared in journals and magazines, he had never been paid at all; but the honour, when once it dawned--and it dawned tolerably early in the author's career--was never thereafter wanting. Hawthorne's countrymen are solidly proud of him, and the tone of Mr. Lathrop's _Study_ is in itself sufficient evidence of the manner in which an American story-teller may in some cases look to have his eulogy pronounced. Hawthorne's early attempt to support himself by his pen appears to have been deliberate; we hear nothing of those experiments in counting-houses or lawyers' offices, of which a permanent invocation to the Muse is often the inconsequent sequel. He began to write, and to try and dispose of his writings; and he remained at Salem apparently only because his family, his mother and his two sisters, lived there. His mother had a house, of which during the twelve years that elapsed until 1838, he appears to have been an inmate. Mr. Lathrop learned from his surviving sister that after publishing _Fanshawe_ he produced a group of short stories entitled _Seven Tales of my Native Land_, and that this lady retained a very favourable recollection of the work, which her brother had given her to read. But it never saw the light; his attempts to get it published were unsuccessful, and at last, in a fit of irritation and despair, the young author burned the manuscript. There is probably something autobiographic in the striking little tale of _The Devil in Manuscript_. "They have been offered to seventeen publishers," says the hero of that sketch in regard to a pile of his own lucubrations. "It would make you stare to read their answers.... One man publishes nothing but school-books; another has five novels already under examination;... another gentleman is just giving up business, on purpose, I verily believe, to avoid publishing my book. In short, of all the seventeen booksellers, only one has vouchsafed even to read my tales; and he--a literary dabbler himself, I should judge--has the impertinence to criticise them, proposing what he calls vast improvements, and concluding, after a general sentence of condemnation, with the definitive assurance that he will not be concerned on any terms.... But there does seem to be one righteous man among these seventeen unrighteous ones, and he tells me, fairly, that no American publisher will meddle with an American work--seldom if by a known writer, and never if by a new one--unless at the writer's risk." But though the _Seven Tales_ were not printed, Hawthorne, proceeded to write others that were; the two collections of the _Twice-Told Tales_, and the _Snow Image_, are gathered from a series of contributions to the local journals and the annuals of that day. To make these three volumes, he picked out the things he thought the best. "Some very small part," he says of what remains, "might yet be rummaged out (but it would not be worth the trouble), among the dingy pages of fifteen or twenty-years-old periodicals, or within the shabby morocco covers of faded _Souvenirs_." These three volumes represent no large amount of literary labour for so long a period, and the author admits that there is little to show "for the thought and industry of that portion of his life." He attributes the paucity of his productions to a "total lack of sympathy at the age when his mind would naturally have been most effervescent." "He had no incitement to literary effort in a reasonable prospect of reputation or profit; nothing but the pleasure itself of composition, an enjoyment not at all amiss in its way, and perhaps essential to the merit of the work in hand, but which in the long run will hardly keep the chill out of a writer's heart, or the numbness out of his fingers." These words occur in the preface attached in 1851 to the second edition of the _Twice-Told Tales_; _à propos_ of which I may say that there is always a charm in Hawthorne's prefaces which makes one grateful for a pretext to quote from them. At this time _The Scarlet Letter_ had just made his fame, and the short tales were certain of a large welcome; but the account he gives of the failure of the earlier edition to produce a sensation (it had been published in two volumes, at four years apart), may appear to contradict my assertion that, though he was not recognised immediately, he was recognised betimes. In 1850, when _The Scarlet Letter_ appeared, Hawthorne was forty-six years old, and this may certainly seem a long-delayed popularity. On the other hand, it must be remembered that he had not appealed to the world with any great energy. _The Twice-Told Tales_, charming as they are, do not constitute a very massive literary pedestal. As soon as the author, resorting to severer measures, put forth _The Scarlet Letter_, the public ear was touched and charmed, and after that it was held to the end. "Well it might have been!" the reader will exclaim. "But what a grievous pity that the dulness of this same organ should have operated so long as a deterrent, and by making Hawthorne wait till he was nearly fifty to publish his first novel, have abbreviated by so much his productive career!" The truth is, he cannot have been in any very high degree ambitious; he was not an abundant producer, and there was manifestly a strain of generous indolence in his composition. There was a loveable want of eagerness about him. Let the encouragement offered have been what it might, he had waited till he was lapsing from middle-life to strike his first noticeable blow; and during the last ten years of his career he put forth but two complete works, and the fragment of a third. It is very true, however, that during this early period he seems to have been very glad to do whatever came to his hand. Certain of his tales found their way into one of the annuals of the time, a publication endowed with the brilliant title of _The Boston Token and Atlantic Souvenir_. The editor of this graceful repository was S. G. Goodrich, a gentleman who, I suppose, may be called one of the pioneers of American periodical literature. He is better known to the world as Mr. Peter Parley, a name under which he produced a multitude of popular school-books, story-books, and other attempts to vulgarize human knowledge and adapt it to the infant mind. This enterprising purveyor of literary wares appears, incongruously enough, to have been Hawthorne's earliest protector, if protection is the proper word for the treatment that the young author received from him. Mr. Goodrich induced him in 1836 to go to Boston to edit a periodical in which he was interested, _The American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge_. I have never seen the work in question, but Hawthorne's biographer gives a sorry account of it. It was managed by the so-called Bewick Company, which "took its name from Thomas Bewick, the English restorer of the art of wood-engraving, and the magazine was to do his memory honour by his admirable illustrations. But in fact it never did any one honour, nor brought any one profit. It was a penny popular affair, containing condensed information about innumerable subjects, no fiction, and little poetry. The woodcuts were of the crudest and most frightful sort. It passed through the hands of several editors and several publishers. Hawthorne was engaged at a salary of five hundred dollars a year; but it appears that he got next to nothing, and did not stay in the position long." Hawthorne wrote from Boston in the winter of 1836: "I came here trusting to Goodrich's positive promise to pay me forty-five dollars as soon as I arrived; and he has kept promising from one day to another, till I do not see that he means to pay at all. I have now broke off all intercourse with him, and never think of going near him.... I don't feel at all obliged to him about the editorship, for he is a stockholder and director in the Bewick Company ... and I defy them to get another to do for a thousand dollars, what I do for five hundred."--"I make nothing," he says in another letter, "of writing a history or biography before dinner." Goodrich proposed to him to write a _Universal History_ for the use of schools, offering him a hundred dollars for his share in the work. Hawthorne accepted the offer and took a hand--I know not how large a one--in the job. His biographer has been able to identify a single phrase as our author's. He is speaking of George IV: "Even when he was quite a young man this King cared as much about dress as any young coxcomb. He had a great deal of taste in such matters, and it is a pity that he was a King, for he might otherwise have made an excellent tailor." The _Universal History_ had a great vogue and passed through hundreds of editions; but it does not appear that Hawthorne ever received more than his hundred dollars. The writer of these pages vividly remembers making its acquaintance at an early stage of his education--a very fat, stumpy-looking book, bound in boards covered with green paper, and having in the text very small woodcuts, of the most primitive sort. He associates it to this day with the names of Sesostris and Semiramis whenever he encounters them, there having been, he supposes, some account of the conquests of these potentates that would impress itself upon the imagination of a child. At the end of four months, Hawthorne had received but twenty dollars--four pounds--for his editorship of the _American Magazine_. There is something pitiful in this episode, and something really touching in the sight of a delicate and superior genius obliged to concern himself with such paltry undertakings. The simple fact was that for a man attempting at that time in America to live by his pen, there were no larger openings; and to live at all Hawthorne had, as the phrase is, to make himself small. This cost him less, moreover, than it would have cost a more copious and strenuous genius, for his modesty was evidently extreme, and I doubt whether he had any very ardent consciousness of rare talent. He went back to Salem, and from this tranquil standpoint, in the spring of 1837, he watched the first volume of his _Twice-Told Tales_ come into the world. He had by this time been living some ten years of his manhood in Salem, and an American commentator may be excused for feeling the desire to construct, from the very scanty material that offers itself, a slight picture of his life there. I have quoted his own allusions to its dulness and blankness, but I confess that these observations serve rather to quicken than to depress my curiosity. A biographer has of necessity a relish for detail; his business is to multiply points of characterisation. Mr. Lathrop tells us that our author "had little communication with even the members of his family. Frequently his meals were brought and left at his locked door, and it was not often that the four inmates of the old Herbert Street mansion met in family circle. He never read his stories aloud to his mother and sisters.... It was the custom in this household for the several members to remain very much by themselves; the three ladies were perhaps nearly as rigorous recluses as himself, and, speaking of the isolation which reigned among them, Hawthorne once said, 'We do not even _live_ at our house!'" It is added that he was not in the habit of going to church. This is not a lively picture, nor is that other sketch of his daily habits much more exhilarating, in which Mr. Lathrop affirms that though the statement that for several years "he never saw the sun" is entirely an error, yet it is true that he stirred little abroad all day and "seldom chose to walk in the town except at night." In the dusky hours he took walks of many miles along the coast, or else wandered about the sleeping streets of Salem. These were his pastimes, and these were apparently his most intimate occasions of contact with life. Life, on such occasions, was not very exuberant, as any one will reflect who has been acquainted with the physiognomy of a small New England town after nine o'clock in the evening. Hawthorne, however, was an inveterate observer of small things, and he found a field for fancy among the most trivial accidents. There could be no better example of this happy faculty than the little paper entitled "Night Sketches," included among the _Twice-Told Tales_. This small dissertation is about nothing at all, and to call attention to it is almost to overrate its importance. This fact is equally true, indeed, of a great many of its companions, which give even the most appreciative critic a singular feeling of his own indiscretion--almost of his own cruelty. They are so light, so slight, so tenderly trivial, that simply to mention them is to put them in a false position. The author's claim for them is barely audible, even to the most acute listener. They are things to take or to leave--to enjoy, but not to talk about. Not to read them would be to do them an injustice (to read them is essentially to relish them), but to bring the machinery of criticism to bear upon them would be to do them a still greater wrong. I must remember, however, that to carry this principle too far would be to endanger the general validity of the present little work--a consummation which it can only be my desire to avert. Therefore it is that I think it permissible to remark that in Hawthorne, the whole class of little descriptive effusions directed upon common things, to which these just-mentioned Night Sketches belong, have a greater charm than there is any warrant for in their substance. The charm is made up of the spontaneity, the personal quality, of the fancy that plays through them, its mingled simplicity and subtlety, its purity and its _bonhomie_. The Night Sketches are simply the light, familiar record of a walk under an umbrella, at the end of a long, dull, rainy day, through the sloppy, ill-paved streets of a country town, where the rare gas-lamps twinkle in the large puddles, and the blue jars in the druggist's window shine through the vulgar drizzle. One would say that the inspiration of such a theme could have had no great force, and such doubtless was the case; but out of the Salem puddles, nevertheless, springs, flower-like, a charming and natural piece of prose. I have said that Hawthorne was an observer of small things, and indeed he appears to have thought nothing too trivial to be suggestive. His Note-Books give us the measure of his perception of common and casual things, and of his habit of converting them into _memoranda_. These Note-Books, by the way--this seems as good a place as any other to say it--are a very singular series of volumes; I doubt whether there is anything exactly corresponding to them in the whole body of literature. They were published--in six volumes, issued at intervals--some years after Hawthorne's death, and no person attempting to write an account of the romancer could afford to regret that they should have been given to the world. There is a point of view from which this may be regretted; but the attitude of the biographer is to desire as many documents as possible. I am thankful, then, as a biographer, for the Note-Books, but I am obliged to confess that, though I have just re-read them carefully, I am still at a loss to perceive how they came to be written--what was Hawthorne's purpose in carrying on for so many years this minute and often trivial chronicle. For a person desiring information about him at any cost, it is valuable; it sheds a vivid light upon his character, his habits, the nature of his mind. But we find ourselves wondering what was its value to Hawthorne himself. It is in a very partial degree a register of impressions, and in a still smaller sense a record of emotions. Outward objects play much the larger part in it; opinions, convictions, ideas pure and simple, are almost absent. He rarely takes his Note-Book into his confidence or commits to its pages any reflections that might be adapted for publicity; the simplest way to describe the tone of these extremely objective journals is to say that they read like a series of very pleasant, though rather dullish and decidedly formal, letters, addressed to himself by a man who, having suspicions that they might be opened in the post, should have determined to insert nothing compromising. They contain much that is too futile for things intended for publicity; whereas, on the other hand, as a receptacle of private impressions and opinions, they are curiously cold and empty. They widen, as I have said, our glimpse of Hawthorne's mind (I do not say that they elevate our estimate of it), but they do so by what they fail to contain, as much as by what we find in them. Our business for the moment, however, is not with the light that they throw upon his intellect, but with the information they offer about his habits and his social circumstances. I know not at what age he began to keep a diary; the first entries in the American volumes are of the summer of 1835. There is a phrase in the preface to his novel of _Transformation_, which must have lingered in the minds of many Americans who have tried to write novels and to lay the scene of them in the western world. "No author, without a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight, as is happily the case with my dear native land." The perusal of Hawthorne's American Note-Books operates as a practical commentary upon this somewhat ominous text. It does so at least to my own mind; it would be too much perhaps to say that the effect would be the same for the usual English reader. An American reads between the lines--he completes the suggestions--he constructs a picture. I think I am not guilty of any gross injustice in saying that the picture he constructs from Hawthorne's American diaries, though by no means without charms of its own, is not, on the whole, an interesting one. It is characterised by an extraordinary blankness--a curious paleness of colour and paucity of detail. Hawthorne, as I have said, has a large and healthy appetite for detail, and one is therefore the more struck with the lightness of the diet to which his observation was condemned. For myself, as I turn the pages of his journals, I seem to see the image of the crude and simple society in which he lived. I use these epithets, of course, not invidiously, but descriptively; if one desire to enter as closely as possible into Hawthorne's situation, one must endeavour to reproduce his circumstances. We are struck with the large number of elements that were absent from them, and the coldness, the thinness, the blankness, to repeat my epithet, present themselves so vividly that our foremost feeling is that of compassion for a romancer looking for subjects in such a field. It takes so many things, as Hawthorne must have felt later in life, when he made the acquaintance of the denser, richer, warmer-European spectacle--it takes such an accumulation of history and custom, such a complexity of manners and types, to form a fund of suggestion for a novelist. If Hawthorne had been a young Englishman, or a young Frenchman of the same degree of genius, the same cast of mind, the same habits, his consciousness of the world around him would have been a very different affair; however obscure, however reserved, his own personal life, his sense of the life of his fellow-mortals would have been almost infinitely more various. The negative side of the spectacle on which Hawthorne looked out, in his contemplative saunterings and reveries, might, indeed, with a little ingenuity, be made almost ludicrous; one might enumerate the items of high civilization, as it exists in other countries, which are absent from the texture of American life, until it should become a wonder to know what was left. No State, in the European sense of the word, and indeed barely a specific national name. No sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no church, no clergy, no army, no diplomatic service, no country gentlemen, no palaces, no castles, nor manors, nor old country-houses, nor parsonages, nor thatched cottages nor ivied ruins; no cathedrals, nor abbeys, nor little Norman churches; no great Universities nor public schools--no Oxford, nor Eton, nor Harrow; no literature, no novels, no museums, no pictures, no political society, no sporting class--no Epsom nor Ascot! Some such list as that might be drawn up of the absent things in American life--especially in the American life of forty years ago, the effect of which, upon an English or a French imagination, would probably as a general thing be appalling. The natural remark, in the almost lurid light of such an indictment, would be that if these things are left out, everything is left out. The American knows that a good deal remains; what it is that remains--that is his secret, his joke, as one may say. It would be cruel, in this terrible denudation, to deny him the consolation of his national gift, that "American humour" of which of late years we have heard so much. But in helping us to measure what remains, our author's Diaries, as I have already intimated, would give comfort rather to persons who might have taken the alarm from the brief sketch I have just attempted of what I have called the negative side of the American social situation, than to those reminding themselves of its fine compensations. Hawthorne's entries are to a great degree accounts of walks in the country, drives in stage-coaches, people he met in taverns. The minuteness of the things that attract his attention and that he deems worthy of being commemorated is frequently extreme, and from this fact we get the impression of a general vacancy in the field of vision. "Sunday evening, going by the jail, the setting sun kindled up the windows most cheerfully; as if there were a bright, comfortable light within its darksome stone wall." "I went yesterday with Monsieur S---- to pick raspberries. He fell through an old log-bridge, thrown over a hollow; looking back, only his head and shoulders appeared through the rotten logs and among the bushes.--A shower coming on, the rapid running of a little barefooted boy, coming up unheard, and dashing swiftly past us, and showing us the soles of his naked feet as he ran adown the path and up the opposite side." In another place he devotes a page to a description of a dog whom he saw running round after its tail; in still another he remarks, in a paragraph by itself--"The aromatic odor of peat-smoke, in the sunny autumnal air is very pleasant." The reader says to himself that when a man turned thirty gives a place in his mind--and his inkstand--to such trifles as these, it is because nothing else of superior importance demands admission. Everything in the Notes indicates a simple, democratic, thinly-composed society; there is no evidence of the writer finding himself in any variety or intimacy of relations with any one or with anything. We find a good deal of warrant for believing that if we add that statement of Mr. Lathrop's about his meals being left at the door of his room, to rural rambles of which an impression of the temporary phases of the local apple-crop were the usual, and an encounter with an organ-grinder, or an eccentric dog, the rarer, outcome, we construct a rough image of our author's daily life during the several years that preceded his marriage. He appears to have read a good deal, and that he must have been familiar with the sources of good English we see from his charming, expressive, slightly self-conscious, cultivated, but not too cultivated, style. Yet neither in these early volumes of his Note-Books, nor in the later, is there any mention of his reading. There are no literary judgments or impressions--there is almost no allusion to works or to authors. The allusions to individuals of any kind are indeed much less numerous than one might have expected; there is little psychology, little description of manners. We are told by Mr. Lathrop that there existed at Salem during the early part of Hawthorne's life "a strong circle of wealthy families," which "maintained rigorously the distinctions of class," and whose "entertainments were splendid, their manners magnificent." This is a rather pictorial way of saying that there were a number of people in the place--the commercial and professional aristocracy, as it were--who lived in high comfort and respectability, and who, in their small provincial way, doubtless had pretensions to be exclusive. Into this delectable company Mr. Lathrop intimates that his hero was free to penetrate. It is easy to believe it, and it would be difficult to perceive why the privilege should have been denied to a young man of genius and culture, who was very good-looking (Hawthorne must have been in these days, judging by his appearance later in life, a strikingly handsome fellow), and whose American pedigree was virtually as long as the longest they could show. But in fact Hawthorne appears to have ignored the good society of his native place almost completely; no echo of its conversation is to be found in his tales or his journals. Such an echo would possibly not have been especially melodious, and if we regret the shyness and stiffness, the reserve, the timidity, the suspicion, or whatever it was, that kept him from knowing what there was to be known, it is not because we have any very definite assurance that his gains would have been great. Still, since a beautiful writer was growing up in Salem, it is a pity that he should not have given himself a chance to commemorate some of the types that flourished in the richest soil of the place. Like almost all people who possess in a strong degree the storytelling faculty, Hawthorne had a democratic strain in his composition and a relish for the commoner stuff of human nature. Thoroughly American in all ways, he was in none more so than in the vagueness of his sense of social distinctions and his readiness to forget them if a moral or intellectual sensation were to be gained by it. He liked to fraternise with plain people, to take them on their own terms, and put himself if possible into their shoes. His Note-Books, and even his tales, are full of evidence of this easy and natural feeling about all his unconventional fellow-mortals--this imaginative interest and contemplative curiosity--and it sometimes takes the most charming and graceful forms. Commingled as it is with his own subtlety and delicacy, his complete exemption from vulgarity, it is one of the points in his character which his reader comes most to appreciate--that reader I mean for whom he is not as for some few, a dusky and malarious genius. But even if he had had, personally, as many pretensions as he had few, he must in the nature of things have been more or less of a consenting democrat, for democracy was the very key-stone of the simple social structure in which he played his part. The air of his journals and his tales alike are full of the genuine democratic feeling. This feeling has by no means passed out of New England life; it still flourishes in perfection in the great stock of the people, especially in rural communities; but it is probable that at the present hour a writer of Hawthorne's general fastidiousness would not express it quite so artlessly. "A shrewd gentlewoman, who kept a tavern in the town," he says, in _Chippings with a Chisel_, "was anxious to obtain two or three gravestones for the deceased members of her family, and to pay for these solemn commodities by taking the sculptor to board." This image of a gentlewoman keeping a tavern and looking out for boarders, seems, from the point of view to which I allude, not at all incongruous. It will be observed that the lady in question was shrewd; it was probable that she was substantially educated, and of reputable life, and it is certain that she was energetic. These qualities would make it natural to Hawthorne to speak of her as a gentlewoman; the natural tendency in societies where the sense of equality prevails, being to take for granted the high level rather than the low. Perhaps the most striking example of the democratic sentiment in all our author's tales, however, is the figure of Uncle Venner, in _The House of the Seven Gables_. Uncle Venner is a poor old man in a brimless hat and patched trousers, who picks up a precarious subsistence by rendering, for a compensation, in the houses and gardens of the good people of Salem, those services that are know in New England as "chores." He carries parcels, splits firewood, digs potatoes, collects refuse for the maintenance of his pigs, and looks forward with philosophic equanimity to the time when he shall end his days in the almshouse. But in spite of the very modest place that he occupies in the social scale, he is received on a footing of familiarity in the household of the far-descended Miss Pyncheon; and when this ancient lady and her companions take the air in the garden of a summer evening, he steps into the estimable circle and mingles the smoke of his pipe with their refined conversation. This obviously is rather imaginative--Uncle Venner is a creation with a purpose. He is an original, a natural moralist, a philosopher; and Hawthorne, who knew perfectly what he was about in introducing him--Hawthorne always knew perfectly what he was about--wished to give in his person an example of humorous resignation and of a life reduced to the simplest and homeliest elements, as opposed to the fantastic pretensions of the antiquated heroine of the story. He wished to strike a certain exclusively human and personal note. He knew that for this purpose he was taking a licence; but the point is that he felt he was not indulging in any extravagant violation of reality. Giving in a letter, about 1830, an account of a little journey he was making in Connecticut, he says, of the end of a seventeen miles' stage, that "in the evening, however, I went to a Bible-class with a very polite and agreeable gentleman, whom I afterwards discovered to be a strolling tailor of very questionable habits." Hawthorne appears on various occasions to have absented himself from Salem, and to have wandered somewhat through the New England States. But the only one of these episodes of which there is a considerable account in the Note-Books is a visit that he paid in the summer of 1837 to his old college-mate, Horatio Bridge, who was living upon his father's property in Maine, in company with an eccentric young Frenchman, a teacher of his native tongue, who was looking for pupils among the northern forests. I have said that there was less psychology in Hawthorne's Journals than might have been looked for; but there is nevertheless a certain amount of it, and nowhere more than in a number of pages relating to this remarkable "Monsieur S." (Hawthorne, intimate as he apparently became with him, always calls him "Monsieur," just as throughout all his Diaries he invariably speaks of all his friends, even the most familiar, as "Mr." He confers the prefix upon the unconventional Thoreau, his fellow-woodsman at Concord, and upon the emancipated brethren at Brook Farm.) These pages are completely occupied with Monsieur S., who was evidently a man of character, with the full complement of his national vivacity. There is an elaborate effort to analyse the poor young Frenchman's disposition, something conscientious and painstaking, respectful, explicit, almost solemn. These passages are very curious as a reminder of the absence of the off-hand element in the manner in which many Americans, and many New Englanders especially, make up their minds about people whom they meet. This, in turn, is a reminder of something that may be called the importance of the individual in the American world; which is a result of the newness and youthfulness of society and of the absence of keen competition. The individual counts for more, as it were, and, thanks to the absence of a variety of social types and of settled heads under which he may be easily and conveniently pigeon-holed, he is to a certain extent a wonder and a mystery. An Englishman, a Frenchman--a Frenchman above all--judges quickly, easily, from his own social standpoint, and makes an end of it. He has not that rather chilly and isolated sense of moral responsibility which is apt to visit a New Englander in such processes; and he has the advantage that his standards are fixed by the general consent of the society in which he lives. A Frenchman, in this respect, is particularly happy and comfortable, happy and comfortable to a degree which I think is hardly to be over-estimated; his standards being the most definite in the world, the most easily and promptly appealed to, and the most identical with what happens to be the practice of the French genius itself. The Englishman is not-quite so well off, but he is better off than his poor interrogative and tentative cousin beyond the seas. He is blessed with a healthy mistrust of analysis, and hair-splitting is the occupation he most despises. There is always a little of the Dr. Johnson in him, and Dr. Johnson would have had woefully little patience with that tendency to weigh moonbeams which in Hawthorne was almost as much a quality of race as of genius; albeit that Hawthorne has paid to Boswell's hero (in the chapter on "Lichfield and Uttoxeter," in his volume on England), a tribute of the finest appreciation. American intellectual standards are vague, and Hawthorne's countrymen are apt to hold the scales with a rather uncertain hand and a somewhat agitated conscience. * * * * * CHAPTER III. EARLY WRITINGS. The second volume of the _Twice-Told Tales_ was published in 1845, in Boston; and at this time a good many of the stories which were afterwards collected into the _Mosses from an Old Manse_ had already appeared, chiefly in _The Democratic Review_, a sufficiently flourishing periodical of that period. In mentioning these things I anticipate; but I touch upon the year 1845 in order to speak of the two collections of _Twice-Told Tales_ at once. During the same year Hawthorne edited an interesting volume, the _Journals of an African Cruiser_, by his friend Bridge, who had gone into the Navy and seen something of distant waters. His biographer mentions that even then Hawthorne's name was thought to bespeak attention for a book, and he insists on this fact in contradiction to the idea that his productions had hitherto been as little noticed as his own declaration that he remained "for a good many years the obscurest man of letters in America," might lead one, and has led many people, to suppose. "In this dismal chamber FAME was won," he writes in Salem in 1836. And we find in the Note-Books (1840), this singularly beautiful and touching passage:-- "Here I sit in my old accustomed chamber, where I used to sit in days gone by.... Here I have written many tales--many that have been burned to ashes, many that have doubtless deserved the same fate. This claims to be called a haunted chamber, for thousands upon thousands of visions have appeared to me in it; and some few of them have become visible to the world. If ever I should have a biographer, he ought to make great mention of this chamber in my memoirs, because so much of my lonely youth was wasted here, and here my mind and character were formed; and here I have been glad and hopeful, and here I have been despondent. And here I sat a long, long time, waiting patiently for the world to know me, and sometimes wondering why it did not know me sooner, or whether it would ever know me at all--at least till I were in my grave. And sometimes it seems to me as if I were already in the grave, with only life enough to be chilled and benumbed. But oftener I was happy--at least as happy as I then knew how to be, or was aware of the possibility of being. By and by the world found me out in my lonely chamber and called me forth--not indeed with a loud roar of acclamation, but rather with a still small voice--and forth I went, but found nothing in the world I thought preferable to my solitude till now.... And now I begin to understand why I was imprisoned so many years in this lonely chamber, and why I could never break through the viewless bolts and bars; for if I had sooner made my escape into the world, I should have grown hard and rough, and been covered with earthly dust, and my heart might have become callous by rude encounters with the multitude.... But living in solitude till the fulness of time was come, I still kept the dew of my youth and the freshness of my heart.... I used to think that I could imagine all passions, all feelings, and states of the heart and mind; but how little did I know!... Indeed, we are but shadows; we are not endowed with real life, and all that seems most real about us is but the thinnest substance of a dream--till the heart be touched. That touch creates us--then we begin to be--thereby we are beings of reality and inheritors of eternity." There is something exquisite in the soft philosophy of this little retrospect, and it helps us to appreciate it to know that the writer had at this time just become engaged to be married to a charming and accomplished person, with whom his union, which took place two years later, was complete and full of happiness. But I quote it more particularly for the evidence it affords that, already in 1840, Hawthorne could speak of the world finding him out and calling him forth, as of an event tolerably well in the past. He had sent the first of the _Twice-Told_ series to his old college friend, Longfellow, who had already laid, solidly, the foundation of his great poetic reputation, and at the time of his sending it had written him a letter from which it will be to our purpose to quote a few lines:-- "You tell me you have met with troubles and changes. I know not what these may have been; but I can assure you that trouble is the next best thing to enjoyment, and that there is no fate in the world so horrible as to have no share in either its joys or sorrows. For the last ten years I have not lived, but only dreamed of living. It may be true that there may have been some unsubstantial pleasures here in the shade, which I might have missed in the sunshine, but you cannot conceive how utterly devoid of satisfaction all my retrospects are. I have laid up no treasure of pleasant remembrances against old age; but there is some comfort in thinking that future years may be more varied, and therefore more tolerable, than the past. You give me more credit than I deserve in supposing that I have led a studious life. I have indeed turned over a good many books, but in so desultory a way that it cannot be called study, nor has it left me the fruits of study.... I have another great difficulty in the lack of materials; for I have seen so little of the world that I have nothing but thin air to concoct my stories of, and it is not easy to give a life-like semblance to such shadowy stuff. Sometimes, through a peephole, I have caught a glimpse of the real world, and the two or three articles in which I have portrayed these glimpses please me better than the others." It is more particularly for the sake of the concluding lines that I have quoted this passage; for evidently no portrait of Hawthorne at this period is at all exact which, fails to insist upon the constant struggle which must have gone on between his shyness and his desire to know something of life; between what may be called his evasive and his inquisitive tendencies. I suppose it is no injustice to Hawthorne to say that on the whole his shyness always prevailed; and yet, obviously, the struggle was constantly there. He says of his _Twice-Told Tales_, in the preface, "They are not the talk of a secluded man with his own mind and heart (had it been so they could hardly have failed to be more deeply and permanently valuable,) but his attempts, and very imperfectly successful ones, to open an intercourse with the world." We are speaking here of small things, it must be remembered--of little attempts, little sketches, a little world. But everything is relative, and this smallness of scale must not render less apparent the interesting character of Hawthorne's efforts. As for the _Twice-Told Tales_ themselves, they are an old story now; every one knows them a little, and those who admire them particularly have read them a great many times. The writer of this sketch belongs to the latter class, and he has been trying to forget his familiarity with them, and ask himself what impression they would have made upon him at the time they appeared, in the first bloom of their freshness, and before the particular Hawthorne-quality, as it may be called, had become an established, a recognised and valued, fact. Certainly, I am inclined to think, if one had encountered these delicate, dusky flowers in the blossomless garden of American journalism, one would have plucked them with a very tender hand; one would have felt that here was something essentially fresh and new; here, in no extraordinary force or abundance, but in a degree distinctly appreciable, was an original element in literature. When I think of it, I almost envy Hawthorne's earliest readers; the sensation of opening upon _The Great Carbuncle_, _The Seven Vagabonds_, or _The Threefold Destiny_ in an American annual of forty years ago, must have been highly agreeable. Among these shorter things (it is better to speak of the whole collection, including the _Snow Image_, and the _Mosses from an Old Manse_ at once) there are three sorts of tales, each one of which has an original stamp. There are, to begin with, the stories of fantasy and allegory--those among which the three I have just mentioned would be numbered, and which on the whole, are the most original. This is the group to which such little masterpieces as _Malvin's Burial_, _Rappacini's Daughter_, and _Young Goodman Brown_ also belong--these two last perhaps representing the highest point that Hawthorne reached in this direction. Then there are the little tales of New England history, which are scarcely less admirable, and of which _The Grey Champion_, _The Maypole of Merry Mount_, and the four beautiful _Legends of the Province House_, as they are called, are the most successful specimens. Lastly come the slender sketches of actual scenes and of the objects and manners about him, by means of which, more particularly, he endeavoured "to open an intercourse with the world," and which, in spite of their slenderness, have an infinite grace and charm. Among these things _A Rill from the Town Pump_, _The Village Uncle_, _The Toll-Gatherer's Day_, the _Chippings with a Chisel_, may most naturally be mentioned. As we turn over these volumes we feel that the pieces that spring most directly from his fancy, constitute, as I have said (putting his four novels aside), his most substantial claim to our attention. It would be a mistake to insist too much upon them; Hawthorne was himself the first to recognise that. "These fitful sketches," he says in the preface to the _Mosses from an Old Manse_, "with so little of external life about them, yet claiming no profundity of purpose--so reserved even while they sometimes seem so frank--often but half in earnest, and never, even when most so, expressing satisfactorily the thoughts which they profess to image--such trifles, I truly feel, afford no solid basis for a literary reputation." This is very becomingly uttered; but it may be said, partly in answer to it, and partly in confirmation, that the valuable element in these things was not what Hawthorne put into them consciously, but what passed into them without his being able to measure it--the element of simple genius, the quality of imagination. This is the real charm of Hawthorne's writing--this purity and spontaneity and naturalness of fancy. For the rest, it is interesting to see how it borrowed a particular colour from the other faculties that lay near it--how the imagination, in this capital son of the old Puritans, reflected the hue of the more purely moral part, of the dusky, overshadowed conscience. The conscience, by no fault of its own, in every genuine offshoot of that sombre lineage, lay under the shadow of the sense of _sin_. This darkening cloud was no essential part of the nature of the individual; it stood fixed in the general moral heaven, under which he grew up and looked at life. It projected from above, from outside, a black patch over his spirit, and it was for him to do what he could with the black patch. There were all sorts of possible ways of dealing with it; they depended upon the personal temperament. Some natures would let it lie as it fell, and contrive to be tolerably comfortable beneath it. Others would groan and sweat and suffer; but the dusky blight would remain, and their lives would be lives of misery. Here and there an individual, irritated beyond endurance, would throw it off in anger, plunging probably into what would be deemed deeper abysses of depravity. Hawthorne's way was the best, for he contrived, by an exquisite process, best known to himself, to transmute this heavy moral burden into the very substance of the imagination, to make it evaporate in the light and charming fumes of artistic production. But Hawthorne, of course, was exceptionally fortunate; he had his genius to help him. Nothing is more curious and interesting than this almost exclusively _imported_ character of the sense of sin in Hawthorne's mind; it seems to exist there merely for an artistic or literary purpose. He had ample cognizance of the Puritan conscience; it was his natural heritage; it was reproduced in him; looking into his soul, he found it there. But his relation to it was only, as one may say, intellectual; it was not moral and theological. He played with it and used it as a pigment; he treated it, as the metaphysicians say, objectively. He was not discomposed, disturbed, haunted by it, in the manner of its usual and regular victims, who had not the little postern door of fancy to slip through, to the other side of the wall. It was, indeed, to his imaginative vision, the great fact of man's nature; the light element that had been mingled with his own composition always clung to this rugged prominence of moral responsibility, like the mist that hovers about the mountain. It was a necessary condition for a man of Hawthorne's stock that if his imagination should take licence to amuse itself, it should at least select this grim precinct of the Puritan morality for its play-ground. He speaks of the dark disapproval with which his old ancestors, in the case of their coming to life, would see him trifling himself away as a story-teller. But how far more darkly would they have frowned could they have understood that he had converted the very principle of their own being into one of his toys! It will be seen that I am far from being struck with the justice of that view of the author of the _Twice-Told Tales_, which is so happily expressed by the French critic to whom I alluded at an earlier stage of this essay. To speak of Hawthorne, as M. Emile Montégut does, as a _romancier pessimiste_, seems to me very much beside the mark. He is no more a pessimist than an optimist, though he is certainly not much of either. He does not pretend to conclude, or to have a philosophy of human nature; indeed, I should even say that at bottom he does not take human nature as hard as he may seem to do. "His bitterness," says M. Montégut, "is without abatement, and his bad opinion of man is without compensation.... His little tales have the air of confessions which the soul makes to itself; they are so many little slaps which the author applies to our face." This, it seems to me, is to exaggerate almost immeasurably the reach of Hawthorne's relish of gloomy subjects. What pleased him in such subjects was their picturesqueness, their rich duskiness of colour, their chiaroscuro; but they were not the expression of a hopeless, or even of a predominantly melancholy, feeling about the human soul. Such at least is my own impression. He is to a considerable degree ironical--this is part of his charm--part even, one may say, of his brightness; but he is neither bitter nor cynical--he is rarely even what I should call tragical. There have certainly been story-tellers of a gayer and lighter spirit; there have been observers more humorous, more hilarious--though on the whole Hawthorne's observation has a smile in it oftener than may at first appear; but there has rarely been an observer more serene, less agitated by what he sees and less disposed to call things deeply into question. As I have already intimated, his Note-Books are full of this simple and almost child-like serenity. That dusky pre-occupation with the misery of human life and the wickedness of the human heart which such a critic as M. Emile Montégut talks about, is totally absent from them; and if we may suppose a person to have read these Diaries before looking into the tales, we may be sure that such a reader would be greatly surprised to hear the author described as a disappointed, disdainful genius. "This marked love of cases of conscience," says M. Montégut, "this taciturn, scornful cast of mind, this habit of seeing sin everywhere and hell always gaping open, this dusky gaze bent always upon a damned world and a nature draped in mourning, these lonely conversations of the imagination with the conscience, this pitiless analysis resulting from a perpetual examination of one's self, and from the tortures of a heart closed before men and open to God--all these elements of the Puritan character have passed into Mr. Hawthorne, or to speak more justly, have _filtered_ into him, through a long succession of generations." This is a very pretty and very vivid account of Hawthorne, superficially considered; and it is just such a view of the case as would commend itself most easily and most naturally to a hasty critic. It is all true indeed, with a difference; Hawthorne was all that M. Montégut says, _minus_ the conviction. The old Puritan moral sense, the consciousness of sin and hell, of the fearful nature of our responsibilities and the savage character of our Taskmaster--these things had been lodged in the mind of a man of Fancy, whose fancy had straightway begun to take liberties and play tricks with them--to judge them (Heaven forgive him!) from the poetic and æsthetic point of view, the point of view of entertainment and irony. This absence of conviction makes the difference; but the difference is great. Hawthorne was a man of fancy, and I suppose that in speaking of him it is inevitable that we should feel ourselves confronted with the familiar problem of the difference between the fancy and the imagination. Of the larger and more potent faculty he certainly possessed a liberal share; no one can read _The House of the Seven Gables_ without feeling it to be a deeply imaginative work. But I am often struck, especially in the shorter tales, of which I am now chiefly speaking, with a kind of small ingenuity, a taste for conceits and analogies, which bears more particularly what is called the fanciful stamp. The finer of the shorter tales are redolent of a rich imagination. "Had Goodman Brown fallen asleep in the forest and only dreamed a wild dream of witch-meeting? Be it so, if you will; but, alas, it was a dream of evil omen for young Goodman Brown! a stern, a sad, a darkly meditative, a distrustful, if not a desperate, man, did he become from the night of that fearful dream. On the Sabbath-day, when the congregation were singing a holy psalm, he could not listen, because an anthem of sin rushed loudly upon his ear and drowned all the blessed strain. When the minister spoke from the pulpit, with power and fervid eloquence, and with his hand on the open Bible of the sacred truth of our religion, and of saint-like lives and triumphant deaths, and of future bliss or misery unutterable, then did Goodman Brown grow pale, dreading lest the roof should thunder down upon the gray blasphemer and his hearers. Often, awaking suddenly at midnight, he shrank from the bosom of Faith; and at morning or eventide, when the family knelt down at prayer, he scowled and muttered to himself, and gazed sternly at his wife, and turned away. And when he had lived long, and was borne to his grave a hoary corpse, followed by Faith, an aged woman, and children, and grandchildren, a goodly procession, besides neighbours not a few, they carved no hopeful verse upon his tombstone, for his dying hour was gloom." There is imagination in that, and in many another passage that I might quote; but as a general thing I should characterise the more metaphysical of our author's short stories as graceful and felicitous conceits. They seem to me to be qualified in this manner by the very fact that they belong to the province of allegory. Hawthorne, in his metaphysical moods, is nothing if not allegorical, and allegory, to my sense, is quite one of the lighter exercises of the imagination. Many excellent judges, I know, have a great stomach for it; they delight in symbols and correspondences, in seeing a story told as if it were another and a very different story. I frankly confess that I have as a general thing but little enjoyment of it and that it has never seemed to me to be, as it were, a first-rate literary form. It has produced assuredly some first-rate works; and Hawthorne in his younger years had been a great reader and devotee of Bunyan and Spenser, the great masters of allegory. But it is apt to spoil two good things--a story and a moral, a meaning and a form; and the taste for it is responsible for a large part of the forcible-feeble writing that has been inflicted upon the world. The only cases in which it is endurable is when it is extremely spontaneous, when the analogy presents itself with eager promptitude. When it shows signs of having been groped and fumbled for, the needful illusion is of course absent and the failure complete. Then the machinery alone is visible, and the end to which it operates becomes a matter of indifference. There was but little literary criticism in the United States at the time Hawthorne's earlier works were published; but among the reviewers Edgar Poe perhaps held the scales the highest. He at any rate rattled them loudest, and pretended, more than any one else, to conduct the weighing-process on scientific principles. Very remarkable was this process of Edgar Poe's, and very extraordinary were his principles; but he had the advantage of being a man of genius, and his intelligence was frequently great. His collection of critical sketches of the American writers flourishing in what M. Taine would call his _milieu_ and _moment_, is very curious and interesting reading, and it has one quality which ought to keep it from ever being completely forgotten. It is probably the most complete and exquisite specimen of _provincialism_ ever prepared for the edification of men. Poe's judgments are pretentious, spiteful, vulgar; but they contain a great deal of sense and discrimination as well, and here and there, sometimes at frequent intervals, we find a phrase of happy insight imbedded in a patch of the most fatuous pedantry. He wrote a chapter upon Hawthorne, and spoke of him on the whole very kindly; and his estimate is of sufficient value to make it noticeable that he should express lively disapproval of the large part allotted to allegory in his tales--in defence of which, he says, "however, or for whatever object employed, there is scarcely one respectable word to be said.... The deepest emotion," he goes on, "aroused within us by the happiest allegory _as_ allegory, is a very, _very_ imperfectly satisfied sense of the writer's ingenuity in overcoming a difficulty we should have preferred his not having attempted to overcome.... One thing is clear, that if allegory ever establishes a fact, it is by dint of overturning a fiction;" and Poe has furthermore the courage to remark that the _Pilgrim's Progress_ is a "ludicrously overrated book." Certainly, as a general thing, we are struck with the ingenuity and felicity of Hawthorne's analogies and correspondences; the idea appears to have made itself at home in them easily. Nothing could be better in this respect than _The Snow-Image_ (a little masterpiece), or _The Great Carbuncle_, or _Doctor Heidegger's Experiment_, or _Rappacini's Daughter_. But in such things as _The Birth-Mark_ and _The Bosom-Serpent_, we are struck with something stiff and mechanical, slightly incongruous, as if the kernel had not assimilated its envelope. But these are matters of light impression, and there would be a want of tact in pretending to discriminate too closely among things which all, in one way or another, have a charm. The charm--the great charm--is that they are glimpses of a great field, of the whole deep mystery of man's soul and conscience. They are moral, and their interest is moral; they deal with something more than the mere accidents and conventionalities, the surface occurrences of life. The fine thing in Hawthorne is that he cared for the deeper psychology, and that, in his way, he tried to become familiar with it. This natural, yet fanciful familiarity with it, this air, on the author's part, of being a confirmed _habitué_ of a region of mysteries and subtleties, constitutes the originality of his tales. And then they have the further merit of seeming, for what they are, to spring up so freely and lightly. The author has all the ease, indeed, of a regular dweller in the moral, psychological realm; he goes to and fro in it, as a man who knows his way. His tread is a light and modest one, but he keeps the key in his pocket. His little historical stories all seem to me admirable; they are so good that you may re-read them many times. They are not numerous, and they are very short; but they are full of a vivid and delightful sense of the New England past; they have, moreover, the distinction, little tales of a dozen and fifteen pages as they are, of being the only successful attempts at historical fiction that have been made in the United States. Hawthorne was at home in the early New England history; he had thumbed its records and he had breathed its air, in whatever odd receptacles this somewhat pungent compound still lurked. He was fond of it, and he was proud of it, as any New Englander must be, measuring the part of that handful of half-starved fanatics who formed his earliest precursors, in laying the foundations of a mighty empire. Hungry for the picturesque as he always was, and not finding any very copious provision of it around him, he turned back into the two preceding centuries, with the earnest determination that the primitive annals of Massachusetts should at least _appear_ picturesque. His fancy, which was always alive, played a little with the somewhat meagre and angular facts of the colonial period and forthwith converted a great many of them into impressive legends and pictures. There is a little infusion of colour, a little vagueness about certain details, but it is very gracefully and discreetly done, and realities are kept in view sufficiently to make us feel that if we are reading romance, it is romance that rather supplements than contradicts history. The early annals of New England were not fertile in legend, but Hawthorne laid his hands upon everything that would serve his purpose, and in two or three cases his version of the story has a great deal of beauty. _The Grey Champion_ is a sketch of less than eight pages, but the little figures stand up in the tale as stoutly, at the least, as if they were propped up on half-a-dozen chapters by a dryer annalist, and the whole thing has the merit of those cabinet pictures in which the artist has been able to make his persons look the size of life. Hawthorne, to say it again, was not in the least a realist--he was not to my mind enough of one; but there is no genuine lover of the good city of Boston but will feel grateful to him for his courage in attempting to recount the "traditions" of Washington Street, the main thoroughfare of the Puritan capital. The four _Legends of the Province House_ are certain shadowy stories which he professes to have gathered in an ancient tavern lurking behind the modern shop-fronts of this part of the city. The Province House disappeared some years ago, but while it stood it was pointed to as the residence of the Royal Governors of Massachusetts before the Revolution. I have no recollection of it, but it cannot have been, even from Hawthorne's account of it, which is as pictorial as he ventures to make it, a very imposing piece of antiquity. The writer's charming touch, however, throws a rich brown tone over its rather shallow venerableness; and we are beguiled into believing, for instance, at the close of _Howe's Masquerade_ (a story of a strange occurrence at an entertainment given by Sir William Howe, the last of the Royal Governors, during the siege of Boston by Washington), that "superstition, among other legends of this mansion, repeats the wondrous tale that on the anniversary night of Britain's discomfiture the ghosts of the ancient governors of Massachusetts still glide through the Province House. And last of all comes a figure shrouded in a military cloak, tossing his clenched hands into the air and stamping his iron-shod boots upon the freestone steps, with a semblance of feverish despair, but without the sound of a foot-tramp." Hawthorne had, as regards the two earlier centuries of New England life, that faculty which is called now-a-days the historic consciousness. He never sought to exhibit it on a large scale; he exhibited it indeed on a scale so minute that we must not linger too much upon it. His vision of the past was filled with definite images--images none the less definite that they were concerned with events as shadowy as this dramatic passing away of the last of King George's representatives in his long loyal but finally alienated colony. I have said that Hawthorne had become engaged in about his thirty-fifth-year; but he was not married until 1842. Before this event took place he passed through two episodes which (putting his falling in love aside) were much the most important things that had yet happened to him. They interrupted the painful monotony of his life, and brought the affairs of men within his personal experience. One of these was moreover in itself a curious and interesting chapter of observation, and it fructified, in Hawthorne's memory, in one of his best productions. How urgently he needed at this time to be drawn within the circle of social accidents, a little anecdote related by Mr. Lathrop in connection with his first acquaintance with the young lady he was to marry, may serve as an example. This young lady became known to him through her sister, who had first approached him as an admirer of the _Twice-Told Tales_ (as to the authorship of which she had been so much in the dark as to have attributed it first, conjecturally, to one of the two Miss Hathornes); and the two Miss Peabodys, desiring to see more of the charming writer, caused him to be invited to a species of _conversazione_ at the house of one of their friends, at which they themselves took care to be punctual. Several other ladies, however, were as punctual as they, and Hawthorne presently arriving, and seeing a bevy of admirers where he had expected but three or four, fell into a state of agitation, which is vividly described by his biographer. He "stood perfectly motionless, but with the look of a sylvan creature on the point of fleeing away.... He was stricken with dismay; his face lost colour and took on a warm paleness ... his agitation was-very great; he stood by a table and, taking up some small object that lay upon it, he found his hand trembling so that he was obliged to lay it down." It was desirable, certainly, that something should occur to break the spell of a diffidence that might justly be called morbid. There is another little sentence dropped by Mr. Lathrop in relation to this period of Hawthorne's life, which appears to me worth quoting, though I am by no means sure that it will seem so to the reader. It has a very simple and innocent air, but to a person not without an impression of the early days of "culture" in New England, it will be pregnant with historic meaning. The elder Miss Peabody, who afterwards was Hawthorne's sister-in-law and who acquired later in life a very honourable American fame as a woman of benevolence, of learning, and of literary accomplishment, had invited the Miss Hathornes to come to her house for the evening, and to bring with them their brother, whom she wished to thank for his beautiful tales. "Entirely to her surprise," says Mr. Lathrop, completing thereby his picture of the attitude of this remarkable family toward society--"entirely to her surprise they came. She herself opened the door, and there, before her, between his sisters, stood a splendidly handsome youth, tall and strong, with no appearance whatever of timidity, but instead, an almost fierce determination making his face stern. This was his resource for carrying off the extreme inward tremor which he really felt. His hostess brought out Flaxman's designs for Dante, just received from Professor Felton, of Harvard, and the party made an evening's entertainment out of them." This last sentence is the one I allude to; and were it not for fear of appearing too fanciful I should say that these few words were, to the initiated mind, an unconscious expression of the lonely frigidity which characterised most attempts at social recreation in the New England world some forty years ago. There was at that time a great desire for culture, a great interest in knowledge, in art, in æsthetics, together with a very scanty supply of the materials for such pursuits. Small things were made to do large service; and there is something even touching in the solemnity of consideration that was bestowed by the emancipated New England conscience upon little wandering books and prints, little echoes and rumours of observation and experience. There flourished at that time in Boston a very remarkable and interesting woman, of whom we shall have more to say, Miss Margaret Fuller by name. This lady was the apostle of culture, of intellectual curiosity, and in the peculiarly interesting account of her life, published in 1852 by Emerson and two other of her friends, there are pages of her letters and diaries which narrate her visits to the Boston Athenæum and the emotions aroused in her mind by turning over portfolios of engravings. These emotions were ardent and passionate--could hardly have been more so had she been prostrate with contemplation in the Sistine Chapel or in one of the chambers of the Pitti Palace. The only analogy I can recall to this earnestness of interest in great works of art at a distance from them, is furnished by the great Goethe's elaborate study of plaster-casts and pencil-drawings at Weimar. I mention Margaret Fuller here because a glimpse of her state of mind--her vivacity of desire and poverty of knowledge--helps to define the situation. The situation lives for a moment in those few words of Mr. Lathrop's. The initiated mind, as I have ventured to call it, has a vision of a little unadorned parlour, with the snow-drifts of a Massachusetts winter piled up about its windows, and a group of sensitive and serious people, modest votaries of opportunity, fixing their eyes upon a bookful of Flaxman's attenuated outlines. At the beginning of the year 1839 he received, through political interest, an appointment as weigher and gauger in the Boston Custom-house. Mr. Van Buren then occupied the Presidency, and it appears that the Democratic party, whose successful candidate he had been, rather took credit for the patronage it had bestowed upon literary men. Hawthorne was a Democrat, and apparently a zealous one; even in later years, after the Whigs had vivified their principles by the adoption of the Republican platform, and by taking up an honest attitude on the question of slavery, his political faith never wavered. His Democratic sympathies were eminently natural, and there would have been an incongruity in his belonging to the other party. He was not only by conviction, but personally and by association, a Democrat. When in later years he found himself in contact with European civilisation, he appears to have become conscious of a good deal of latent radicalism in his disposition; he was oppressed with the burden of antiquity in Europe, and he found himself sighing for lightness and freshness and facility of change. But these things are relative to the point of view, and in his own country Hawthorne cast his lot with the party of conservatism, the party opposed to change and freshness. The people who found something musty and mouldy in his literary productions would have regarded this quite as a matter of course; but we are not obliged to use invidious epithets in describing his political preferences. The sentiment that attached him to the Democracy was a subtle and honourable one, and the author of an attempt to sketch a portrait of him, should be the last to complain of this adjustment of his sympathies. It falls much more smoothly into his reader's conception of him than any other would do; and if he had had the perversity to be a Republican, I am afraid our ingenuity would have been considerably taxed in devising a proper explanation of the circumstance. At any rate, the Democrats gave him a small post in the Boston Custom-house, to which an annual salary of $1,200 was attached, and Hawthorne appears at first to have joyously welcomed the gift. The duties of the office were not very congruous to the genius of a man of fancy; but it had the advantage that it broke the spell of his cursed solitude, as he called it, drew him away from Salem, and threw him, comparatively speaking, into the world. The first volume of the American Note-Books contains some extracts from letters written during his tenure of this modest office, which indicate sufficiently that his occupations cannot have been intrinsically gratifying. "I have been measuring coal all day," he writes, during the winter of 1840, "on board of a black little British schooner, in a dismal dock at the north end of the city. Most of the time I paced the deck to keep myself warm; for the wind (north-east, I believe) blew up through the dock as if it had been the pipe of a pair of bellows. The vessel lying deep between two wharves, there was no more delightful prospect, on the right hand and on the left, than the posts and timbers, half immersed in the water and covered with ice, which the rising and falling of successive tides had left upon them, so that they looked like immense icicles. Across the water, however, not more than half a mile off, appeared the Bunker's Hill Monument, and what interested me considerably more, a church-steeple, with the dial of a clock upon it, whereby I was enabled to measure the march of the weary hours. Sometimes I descended into the dirty little cabin of the schooner, and warmed myself by a red-hot stove, among biscuit-barrels, pots and kettles, sea-chests, and innumerable lumber of all sorts--my olfactories meanwhile being greatly refreshed with the odour of a pipe, which the captain, or some one of his crew, was smoking. But at last came the sunset, with delicate clouds, and a purple light upon the islands; and I blessed it, because it was the signal of my release." A worse man than Hawthorne would have measured coal quite as well, and of all the dismal tasks to which an unremunerated imagination has ever had to accommodate itself, I remember none more sordid than the business depicted in the foregoing lines. "I pray," he writes some weeks later, "that in one year more I may find some way of escaping from this unblest Custom-house; for it is a very grievous thraldom. I do detest all offices; all, at least, that are held on a political tenure, and I want nothing to do with politicians. Their hearts wither away and die out of their bodies. Their consciences are turned to india-rubber, or to some substance as black as that and which will stretch as much. One thing, if no more, I have gained by my Custom-house experience--to know a politician. It is a knowledge which no previous thought or power of sympathy could have taught me; because the animal, or the machine rather, is not in nature." A few days later he goes on in the same strain:-- "I do not think it is the doom laid upon me of murdering so many of the brightest hours of the day at the Custom-house that makes such havoc with my wits, for here I am again trying to write worthily ... yet with a sense as if all the noblest part of man had been left out of my composition, or had decayed out of it since my nature was given to my own keeping.... Never comes any bird of Paradise into that dismal region. A salt or even a coal-ship is ten million times preferable; for there the sky is above me, and the fresh breeze around me, and my thoughts having hardly anything to do with my occupation, are as free as air. Nevertheless ... it is only once in a while that the image and desire of a better and happier life makes me feel the iron of my chain; for after all a human spirit may find no insufficiency of food for it, even in the Custom-house. And with such materials as these I do think and feel and learn things that are worth knowing, and which I should not know unless I had learned them there; so that the present position of my life shall not be quite left out of the sum of my real existence.... It is good for me, on many accounts, that my life has had this passage in it. I know much more than I did a year ago. I have a stronger sense of power to act as a man among men. I have gained worldly wisdom, and wisdom also that is not altogether of this world. And when I quit this earthy career where I am now buried, nothing will cling to me that ought to be left behind. Men will not perceive, I trust, by my look or the tenor of my thoughts and feelings, that I have been a Custom-house officer." He says, writing shortly afterwards, that "when I shall be free again, I will enjoy all things with the fresh simplicity of a child of five years old. I shall grow young again, made all over anew. I will go forth and stand in a summer shower, and all the worldly dust that has collected on me shall be washed away at once, and my heart will be like a bank of fresh flowers for the weary to rest upon." This forecast of his destiny was sufficiently exact. A year later, in April 1841, he went to take up his abode in the socialistic community of Brook Farm. Here he found himself among fields and flowers and other natural products--as well as among many products that could not very justly be called natural. He was exposed to summer showers in plenty; and his personal associations were as different as possible from, those he had encountered in fiscal circles. He made acquaintance with Transcendentalism and the Transcendentalists. * * * * * CHAPTER IV. BROOK FARM AND CONCORD. The history of the little industrial and intellectual association which formed itself at this time in one of the suburbs of Boston has not, to my knowledge, been written; though it is assuredly a curious and interesting chapter in the domestic annals of New England. It would of course be easy to overrate the importance of this ingenious attempt of a few speculative persons to improve the outlook of mankind. The experiment came and went very rapidly and quietly, leaving very few traces behind it. It became simply a charming personal reminiscence for the small number of amiable enthusiasts who had had a hand in it. There were degrees of enthusiasm, and I suppose there were degrees of amiability; but a certain generous brightness of hope and freshness of conviction pervaded the whole undertaking and rendered it, morally speaking, important to an extent of which any heed that the world in general ever gave to it is an insufficient measure. Of course it would be a great mistake to represent the episode of Brook Farm as directly related to the manners and morals of the New England world in general--and in especial to those of the prosperous, opulent, comfortable part of it. The thing was the experiment of a coterie--it was unusual, unfashionable, unsuccessful. It was, as would then have been said, an amusement of the Transcendentalists--a harmless effusion of Radicalism. The Transcendentalists were not, after all, very numerous; and the Radicals were by no means of the vivid tinge of those of our own day. I have said that the Brook Farm community left no traces behind it that the world in general can appreciate; I should rather say that the only trace is a short novel, of which the principal merits reside in its qualities of difference from the affair itself. _The Blithedale Romance_ is the main result of Brook Farm; but _The Blithedale Romance_ was very properly never recognised by the Brook Farmers as an accurate portrait of their little colony. Nevertheless, in a society as to which the more frequent complaint is that it is monotonous, that it lacks variety of incident and of type, the episode, our own business with which is simply that it was the cause of Hawthorne's writing an admirable tale, might be welcomed as a picturesque variation. At the same time, if we do not exaggerate its proportions, it may seem to contain a fund of illustration as to that phase of human life with which our author's own history mingled itself. The most graceful account of the origin of Brook Farm is probably to be found in these words of one of the biographers of Margaret Fuller: "In Boston and its vicinity, several friends, for whose character Margaret felt the highest-honour, were earnestly considering the possibility of making such industrial, social, and educational arrangements as would simplify economies, combine leisure for study with healthful and honest toil, avert unjust collisions of caste, equalise refinements, awaken generous affections, diffuse courtesy, and sweeten and sanctify life as a whole." The reader will perceive that this was a liberal scheme, and that if the experiment failed, the greater was the pity. The writer goes on to say that a gentleman, who afterwards distinguished himself in literature (he had begun by being a clergyman), "convinced by his experience in a faithful ministry that the need was urgent for a thorough application of the professed principles of Fraternity to actual relations, was about staking his all of fortune, reputation, and influence, in an attempt to organize a joint-stock company at Brook Farm." As Margaret Fuller passes for having suggested to Hawthorne the figure of Zenobia in _The Blithedale Romance_, and as she is probably, with one exception, the person connected with the affair who, after Hawthorne, offered most of what is called a personality to the world, I may venture to quote a few more passages from her Memoirs--a curious, in some points of view almost a grotesque, and yet, on the whole, as I have said, an extremely interesting book. It was a strange history and a strange destiny, that of this brilliant, restless, and unhappy woman--this ardent New Englander, this impassioned Yankee, who occupied so large a place in the thoughts, the lives, the affections, of an intelligent and appreciative society, and yet left behind her nothing but the memory of a memory. Her function, her reputation, were singular, and not altogether reassuring: she was a talker, she was _the_ talker, she was the genius of talk. She had a magnificent, though by no means an unmitigated, egotism; and in some of her utterances it is difficult to say whether pride or humility prevails--as for instance when she writes that she feels "that there is plenty of room in the Universe for my faults, and as if I could not spend time in thinking of them when so many things interest me more." She has left the same sort of reputation as a great actress. Some of her writing has extreme beauty, almost all of it has a real interest, but her value, her activity, her sway (I am not sure that one can say her charm), were personal and practical. She went to Europe, expanded to new desires and interests, and, very poor herself, married an impoverished Italian nobleman. Then, with her husband and child, she embarked to return to her own country, and was lost at sea in a terrible storm, within sight of its coasts. Her tragical death combined with many of the elements of her life to convert her memory into a sort of legend, so that the people who had known her well, grew at last to be envied by later comers. Hawthorne does not appear to have been intimate with her; on the contrary, I find such an entry as this in the American Note-Books in 1841: "I was invited to dine at Mr. Bancroft's yesterday, with Miss Margaret Fuller; but Providence had given me some business to do; for which I was very thankful!" It is true that, later, the lady is the subject of one or two allusions of a gentler cast. One of them indeed is so pretty as to be worth quoting:-- "After leaving the book at Mr. Emerson's, I returned through the woods, and, entering Sleepy Hollow, I perceived a lady reclining near the path which bends along its verge. It was Margaret herself. She had been there the whole afternoon, meditating or reading, for she had a book in her hand with some strange title which I did not understand and have forgotten. She said that nobody had broken her solitude, and was just giving utterance to a theory that no inhabitant of Concord ever visited Sleepy Hollow, when we saw a group of people entering the sacred precincts. Most of them followed a path which led them away from us; but an old man passed near us, and smiled to see Margaret reclining on the ground and me standing by her side. He made some remark upon the beauty of the afternoon, and withdrew himself into the shadow of the wood. Then we talked about autumn, and about the pleasures of being lost in the woods, and about the crows, whose voices Margaret had heard; and about the experiences of early childhood, whose influence remains upon the character after the recollection of them has passed away; and about the sight of mountains from a distance, and the view from their summits; and about other matters of high and low philosophy." It is safe to assume that Hawthorne could not on the whole have had a high relish for the very positive personality of this accomplished and argumentative woman, in whose intellect high noon seemed ever to reign, as twilight did in his own. He must have been struck with the glare of her understanding, and, mentally speaking, have scowled and blinked a good deal in conversation with her. But it is tolerably manifest, nevertheless, that she was, in his imagination, the starting-point of the figure of Zenobia; and Zenobia is, to my sense, his only very definite attempt at the representation of a character. The portrait is full of alteration and embellishment; but it has a greater reality, a greater abundance of detail, than any of his other figures, and the reality was a memory of the lady whom he had encountered in the Roxbury pastoral or among the wood-walks of Concord, with strange books in her hand and eloquent discourse on her lips. _The Blithedale Romance_ was written just after her unhappy death, when the reverberation of her talk would lose much of its harshness. In fact, however, very much the same qualities that made Hawthorne a Democrat in polities--his contemplative turn and absence of a keen perception of abuses, his taste for old ideals, and loitering paces, and muffled tones--would operate to keep him out of active sympathy with a woman of the so-called progressive type. We may be sure that in women his taste was conservative. It seems odd, as his biographer says, "that the least gregarious of men should have been drawn into a socialistic community;" but although it is apparent that Hawthorne went to Brook Farm without any great Transcendental fervour, yet he had various good reasons for casting his lot in this would-be happy family. He was as yet unable to marry, but he naturally wished to do so as speedily as possible, and there was a prospect that Brook Farm would prove an economical residence. And then it is only fair to believe that Hawthorne was interested in the experiment, and that though he was not a Transcendentalist, an Abolitionist, or a Fourierite, as his companions were in some degree or other likely to be, he was willing, as a generous and unoccupied young man, to lend a hand in any reasonable scheme for helping people to live together on better terms than the common. The Brook Farm scheme was, as such things go, a reasonable one; it was devised and carried out by shrewd and sober-minded New Englanders, who were careful to place economy first and idealism afterwards, and who were not afflicted with a Gallic passion for completeness of theory. There were no formulas, doctrines, dogmas; there was no interference whatever with private life or individual habits, and not the faintest adumbration of a rearrangement of that difficult business known as the relations of the sexes. The relations of the sexes were neither more nor less than what they usually are in American life, excellent; and in such particulars the scheme was thoroughly conservative and irreproachable. Its main characteristic was that each individual concerned in it should do a part of the work necessary for keeping the whole machine going. He could choose his work and he could live as he liked; it was hoped, but it was by no means demanded, that he would make himself agreeable, like a gentleman invited to a dinner-party. Allowing, however, for everything that was a concession to worldly traditions and to the laxity of man's nature, there must have been in the enterprise a good deal of a certain freshness and purity of spirit, of a certain noble credulity and faith in the perfectibility of man, which it would have been easier to find in Boston in the year 1840, than in London five-and-thirty years later. If that was the era of Transcendentalism, Transcendentalism could only have sprouted in the soil peculiar to the general locality of which I speak--the soil of the old New England morality, gently raked and refreshed by an imported culture. The Transcendentalists read a great deal of French and German, made themselves intimate with George Sand and Goethe, and many other writers; but the strong and deep New England conscience accompanied them on all their intellectual excursions, and there never was a so-called "movement" that embodied itself, on the whole, in fewer eccentricities of conduct, or that borrowed a smaller licence in private deportment. Henry Thoreau, a delightful writer, went to live in the woods; but Henry Thoreau was essentially a sylvan personage and would not have been, however the fashion of his time might have turned, a man about town. The brothers and sisters at Brook Farm ploughed the fields and milked the cows; but I think that an observer from another clime and society would have been much more struck with their spirit of conformity than with their _déréglements_. Their ardour was a moral ardour, and the lightest breath of scandal never rested upon them, or upon any phase of Transcendentalism. A biographer of Hawthorne might well regret that his hero had not been more mixed up with the reforming and free-thinking class, so that he might find a pretext for writing a chapter upon the state of Boston society forty years ago. A needful warrant for such regret should be, properly, that the biographer's own personal reminiscences should stretch back to that period and to the persons who animated it. This would be a guarantee of fulness of knowledge and, presumably, of kindness of tone. It is difficult to see, indeed, how the generation of which Hawthorne has given us, in _Blithedale_, a few portraits, should not at this time of day be spoken of very tenderly and sympathetically. If irony enter into the allusion, it should be of the lightest and gentlest. Certainly, for a brief and imperfect chronicler of these things, a writer just touching them as he passes, and who has not the advantage of having been a contemporary, there is only one possible tone. The compiler of these pages, though his recollections date only from a later period, has a memory of a certain number of persons who had been intimately connected, as Hawthorne was not, with the agitations of that interesting time. Something of its interest adhered to them still--something of its aroma clung to their garments; there was something about them which seemed to say that when they were young and enthusiastic, they had been initiated into moral mysteries, they had played at a wonderful game. Their usual mark (it is true I can think of exceptions) was that they seemed excellently good. They appeared unstained by the world, unfamiliar with worldly desires and standards, and with those various forms of human depravity which flourish in some high phases of civilisation; inclined to simple and democratic ways, destitute of pretensions and affectations, of jealousies, of cynicism, of snobbishness. This little epoch of fermentation has three or four drawbacks for the critic--drawbacks, however, that may be overlooked by a person for whom it has an interest of association. It bore, intellectually, the stamp of provincialism; it was a beginning without a fruition, a dawn without a noon; and it produced, with a single exception, no great talents. It produced a great deal of writing, but (always putting Hawthorne aside, as a contemporary but not a sharer) only one writer in whom the world at large has interested itself. The situation was summed up and transfigured in the admirable and exquisite Emerson. He expressed all that it contained, and a good deal more, doubtless, besides; he was the man of genius of the moment; he was the Transcendentalist _par excellence_. Emerson expressed, before all things, as was extremely natural at the hour and in the place, the value and importance of the individual, the duty of making the most of one's self, of living by one's own personal light and carrying out one's own disposition. He reflected with beautiful irony upon the exquisite impudence of those institutions which claim to have appropriated the truth and to dole it out, in proportionate morsels, in exchange for a subscription. He talked about the beauty and dignity of life, and about every one who is born into the world being born to the whole, having an interest and a stake in the whole. He said "all that is clearly due to-day is not to lie," and a great many other things which it would be still easier to present in a ridiculous light. He insisted upon sincerity and independence and spontaneity, upon acting in harmony with one's nature, and not conforming and compromising for the sake of being more comfortable. He urged that a man should await his call, his finding the thing to do which he should really believe in doing, and not be urged by the world's opinion to do simply the world's work. "If no call should come for years, for centuries, then I know that the want of the Universe is the attestation of faith by my abstinence.... If I cannot work, at least I need not lie." The doctrine of the supremacy of the individual to himself, of his originality and, as regards his own character, _unique_ quality, must have had a great charm for people living in a society in which introspection, thanks to the want of other entertainment, played almost the part of a social resource. In the United States, in those days, there were no great things to look out at (save forests and rivers); life was not in the least spectacular; society was not brilliant; the country was given up to a great material prosperity, a homely _bourgeois_ activity, a diffusion of primary education and the common luxuries. There was therefore, among the cultivated classes, much relish for the utterances of a writer who would help one to take a picturesque view of one's internal possibilities, and to find in the landscape of the soul all sorts of fine sunrise and moonlight effects. "Meantime, while the doors of the temple stand open, night and day, before every man, and the oracles of this truth cease never, it is guarded by one stern condition; this, namely--it is an intuition. It cannot be received at second hand. Truly speaking, it is not instruction but provocation that I can receive from another soul." To make one's self so much more interesting would help to make life interesting, and life was probably, to many of this aspiring congregation, a dream of freedom and fortitude. There were faulty parts in the Emersonian philosophy; but the general tone was magnificent; and I can easily believe that, coming when it did and where it did, it should have been drunk in by a great many fine moral appetites with a sense of intoxication. One envies, even, I will not say the illusions, of that keenly sentient period, but the convictions and interests--the moral passion. One certainly envies the privilege of having heard the finest of Emerson's orations poured forth in their early newness. They were the most poetical, the most beautiful productions of the American mind, and they were thoroughly local and national. They had a music and a magic, and when one remembers the remarkable charm of the speaker, the beautiful modulation of his utterance, one regrets in especial that one might not have been present on a certain occasion which made a sensation, an era--the delivery of an address to the Divinity School of Harvard University, on a summer evening in 1838. In the light, fresh American air, unthickened and undarkened by customs and institutions established, these things, as the phrase is, told. Hawthorne appears, like his own Miles Coverdale, to have arrived at Brook Farm in the midst of one of those April snow-storms which, during the New England spring, occasionally diversify the inaction of the vernal process. Miles Coverdale, in _The Blithedale Romance_, is evidently as much Hawthorne as he is any one else in particular. He is indeed not very markedly any one, unless it be the spectator, the observer; his chief identity lies in his success in looking at things objectively and spinning uncommunicated fancies about them. This indeed was the part that Hawthorne played socially in the little community at West Roxbury. His biographer describes him as sitting "silently, hour after hour, in the broad old-fashioned hall of the house, where he could listen almost unseen to the chat and merriment of the young people, himself almost always holding a book before him, but seldom turning the leaves." He put his hand to the plough and supported himself and the community, as they were all supposed to do, by his labour; but he contributed little to the hum of voices. Some of his companions, either then or afterwards, took, I believe, rather a gruesome view of his want of articulate enthusiasm, and accused him of coming to the place as a sort of intellectual vampire, for purely psychological purposes. He sat in a corner, they declared, and watched the inmates when they were off their guard, analysing their characters, and dissecting the amiable ardour, the magnanimous illusions, which he was too cold-blooded to share. In so far as this account of Hawthorne's attitude was a complaint, it was a singularly childish one. If he was at Brook Farm without being of it, this is a very fortunate circumstance from the point of view of posterity, who would have preserved but a slender memory of the affair if our author's fine novel had not kept the topic open. The complaint is indeed almost so ungrateful a one as to make us regret that the author's fellow-communists came off so easily. They certainly would not have done so if the author of _Blithedale_ had been more of a satirist. Certainly, if Hawthorne was an observer, he was a very harmless one; and when one thinks of the queer specimens of the reforming genus with which he must have been surrounded, one almost wishes that, for our entertainment, he had given his old companions something to complain of in earnest. There is no satire whatever in the _Romance_; the quality is almost conspicuous by its absence. Of portraits there are only two; there is no sketching of odd figures--no reproduction of strange types of radicalism; the human background is left vague. Hawthorne was not a satirist, and if at Brook Farm he was, according to his habit, a good deal of a mild sceptic, his scepticism was exercised much more in the interest of fancy than in that of reality. There must have been something pleasantly bucolic and pastoral in the habits of the place during the fine New England summer; but we have no retrospective envy of the denizens of Brook Farm in that other season which, as Hawthorne somewhere says, leaves in those regions, "so large a blank--so melancholy a deathspot--in lives so brief that they ought to be all summer-time." "Of a summer night, when the moon was full," says Mr. Lathrop, "they lit no lamps, but sat grouped in the light and shadow, while sundry of the younger men sang old ballads, or joined Tom Moore's songs to operatic airs. On other nights there would be an original essay or poem read aloud, or else a play of Shakspeare, with the parts distributed to different members; and these amusements failing, some interesting discussion was likely to take their place. Occasionally, in the dramatic season, large delegations from the farm would drive into Boston, in carriages and waggons, to the opera or the play. Sometimes, too, the young women sang as they washed the dishes in the Hive; and the youthful yeomen of the society came in and helped them with their work. The men wore blouses of a checked or plaided stuff, belted at the waist, with a broad collar folding down about the throat, and rough straw hats; the women, usually, simple calico gowns and hats." All this sounds delightfully Arcadian and innocent, and it is certain that there was something peculiar to the clime and race in some of the features of such a life; in the free, frank, and stainless companionship of young men and maidens, in the mixture of manual labour and intellectual flights--dish-washing and æsthetics, wood-chopping and philosophy. Wordsworth's "plain living and high thinking" were made actual. Some passages in Margaret Fuller's journals throw plenty of light on this. (It must be premised that she was at Brook Farm as an occasional visitor; not as a labourer in the Hive.) "All Saturday I was off in the woods. In the evening we had a general conversation, opened by me, upon Education, in its largest sense, and on what we can do for ourselves and others. I took my usual ground:--The aim is perfection; patience the road. Our lives should be considered as a tendency, an approximation only.... Mr. R. spoke admirably on the nature of loyalty. The people showed a good deal of the _sans-culotte_ tendency in their manners, throwing themselves on the floor, yawning, and going out when they had heard enough. Yet as the majority differ with me, to begin with--that being the reason this subject was chosen--they showed on the whole more interest and deference than I had expected. As I am accustomed to deference, however, and need it for the boldness and animation which my part requires, I did not speak with as much force as usual.... Sunday.--A glorious day; the woods full of perfume; I was out all the morning. In the afternoon Mrs. R. and I had a talk. I said my position would be too uncertain here, as I could not work. ---- said 'they would all like to work for a person of genius.' ... 'Yes,' I told her; 'but where would be my repose when they were always to be judging whether I was worth it or not?.... Each day you must prove yourself anew.' ... We talked of the principles of the community. I said I had not a right to come, because all the confidence I had in it was as an _experiment_ worth trying, and that it was part of the great wave of inspired thought.... We had valuable discussion on these points. All Monday morning in the woods again. Afternoon, out with the drawing party; I felt the evils of the want of conventional refinement, in the impudence with which one of the girls treated me. She has since thought of it with regret, I notice; and by every day's observation of me will see that she ought not to have done it. In the evening a husking in the barn ... a most picturesque scene.... I stayed and helped about half an hour, and then took a long walk beneath the stars. Wednesday.... In the evening a conversation on Impulse.... I defended nature, as I always do;--the spirit ascending through, not superseding, nature. But in the scale of Sense, Intellect, Spirit, I advocated the claims of Intellect, because those present were rather disposed to postpone them. On the nature of Beauty we had good talk. ---- seemed in a much more reverent humour than the other night, and enjoyed the large plans of the universe which were unrolled.... Saturday,--Well, good-bye, Brook Farm. I know more about this place than I did when I came; but the only way to be qualified for a judge of such an experiment would be to become an active, though unimpassioned, associate in trying it.... The girl who was so rude to me stood waiting, with a timid air, to bid me good-bye." The young girl in question cannot have been Hawthorne's charming Priscilla; nor yet another young lady, of a most humble spirit, who communicated to Margaret's biographers her recollections of this remarkable woman's visits to Brook Farm; concluding with the assurance that "after a while she seemed to lose sight of my more prominent and disagreeable peculiarities, and treated me with affectionate regard." Hawthorne's farewell to the place appears to have been accompanied with some reflections of a cast similar to those indicated by Miss Fuller; in so far at least as we may attribute to Hawthorne himself some of the observations that he fathers upon Miles Coverdale. His biographer justly quotes two or three sentences from _The Blithedale Romance_, as striking the note of the author's feeling about the place. "No sagacious man," says Coverdale, "will long retain his sagacity if he live exclusively among reformers and progressive people, without periodically returning to the settled system of things, to correct himself by a new observation from that old standpoint." And he remarks elsewhere that "it struck me as rather odd that one of the first questions raised, after our separation from the greedy, struggling, self-seeking world, should relate to the possibility of getting the advantage over the outside barbarians in their own field of labour. But to tell the truth, I very soon became sensible that, as regarded society at large, we stood in a position of new hostility rather than new brotherhood." He was doubtless oppressed by the "sultry heat of society," as he calls it in one of the jottings in the Note-Books. "What would a man do if he were compelled to live always in the sultry heat of society, and could never bathe himself in cool solitude?" His biographer relates that one of the other Brook Farmers, wandering afield one summer's day, discovered Hawthorne stretched at his length upon a grassy hillside, with his hat pulled over his face, and every appearance, in his attitude, of the desire to escape detection. On his asking him whether he had any particular reason for this shyness of posture--"Too much of a party up there!" Hawthorne contented himself with replying, with a nod in the direction of the Hive. He had nevertheless for a time looked forward to remaining indefinitely in the community; he meant to marry as soon as possible and bring his wife there to live. Some sixty pages of the second volume of the American Note-Books are occupied with extracts from his letters to his future wife and from his journal (which appears however at this time to have been only intermittent), consisting almost exclusively of descriptions of the simple scenery of the neighbourhood, and of the state of the woods and fields and weather. Hawthorne's fondness for all the common things of nature was deep and constant, and there is always something charming in his verbal touch, as we may call it, when he talks to himself about them. "Oh," he breaks out, of an October afternoon, "the beauty of grassy slopes, and the hollow ways of paths winding between hills, and the intervals between the road and wood-lots, where Summer lingers and sits down, strewing dandelions of gold and blue asters as her parting gifts and memorials!" He was but a single summer at Brook Farm; the rest of his residence had the winter-quality. But if he returned to solitude, it was henceforth to be as the French say, a _solitude à deux_. He was married in July 1842, and betook himself immediately to the ancient village of Concord, near Boston, where he occupied the so-called Manse which has given the title to one of his collections of tales, and upon which this work, in turn, has conferred a permanent distinction. I use the epithets "ancient" and "near" in the foregoing sentence, according to the American measurement of time and distance. Concord is some twenty miles from Boston, and even to day, upwards of forty years after the date of Hawthorne's removal thither, it is a very fresh and well-preserved looking town. It had already a local history when, a hundred years ago, the larger current of human affairs flowed for a moment around it. Concord has the honour of being the first spot in which blood was shed in the war of the Revolution; here occurred the first exchange of musket-shots between the King's troops and the American insurgents. Here, as Emerson says in the little hymn which he contributed in 1836 to the dedication of a small monument commemorating this circumstance-- "Here once the embattled farmers stood, And fired the shot heard round the world." The battle was a small one, and the farmers were not destined individually to emerge from obscurity; but the memory of these things has kept the reputation of Concord green, and it has been watered, moreover, so to speak, by the life-long presence there of one of the most honoured of American men of letters--the poet from whom I just quoted two lines. Concord is indeed in itself decidedly verdant, and is an excellent specimen of a New England village of the riper sort. At the time of Hawthorne's first going there it must have been an even better specimen than to-day--more homogeneous, more indigenous, more absolutely democratic. Forty years ago the tide of foreign immigration had scarcely begun to break upon the rural strongholds of the New England race; it had at most begun to splash them with the salt Hibernian spray. It is very possible, however, that at this period there was not an Irishman in Concord; the place would have been a village community operating in excellent conditions. Such a village community was not the least honourable item in the sum of New England civilisation. Its spreading elms and plain white houses, its generous summers and ponderous winters, its immediate background of promiscuous field and forest, would have been part of the composition. For the rest, there were the selectmen and the town-meetings, the town-schools and the self-governing spirit, the rigid morality, the friendly and familiar manners, the perfect competence of the little society to manage its affairs itself. In the delightful introduction to the _Mosses_, Hawthorne has given an account of his dwelling, of his simple occupations and recreations, and of some of the characteristics of the place. The Manse is a large, square wooden house, to the surface of which--even in the dry New England air, so unfriendly to mosses and lichens and weather-stains, and the other elements of a picturesque complexion--a hundred and fifty years of exposure have imparted a kind of tone, standing just above the slow-flowing Concord river, and approached by a short avenue of over-arching trees. It had been the dwelling-place of generations of Presbyterian ministers, ancestors of the celebrated Emerson, who had himself spent his early manhood and written some of his most beautiful essays there. "He used," as Hawthorne says, "to watch the Assyrian dawn, and Paphian sunset and moonrise, from the summit of our eastern hill." From its clerical occupants the place had inherited a mild mustiness of theological association--a vague reverberation of old Calvinistic sermons, which served to deepen its extra-mundane and somnolent quality. The three years that Hawthorne passed here were, I should suppose, among the happiest of his life. The future was indeed not in any special manner assured; but the present was sufficiently genial. In the American Note-Books there is a charming passage (too long to quote) descriptive of the entertainment the new couple found in renovating and re-furnishing the old parsonage, which, at the time of their going into it, was given up to ghosts and cobwebs. Of the little drawing-room, which had been most completely reclaimed, he writes that "the shade of our departed host will never haunt it; for its aspect has been as completely changed as the scenery of a theatre. Probably the ghost gave one peep into it, uttered a groan, and vanished for ever." This departed host was a certain Doctor Ripley, a venerable scholar, who left behind him a reputation of learning and sanctity which was reproduced in one of the ladies of his family, long the most distinguished woman in the little Concord circle. Doctor Ripley's predecessor had been, I believe, the last of the line of the Emerson ministers--an old gentleman who, in the earlier years of his pastorate, stood at the window of his study (the same in which Hawthorne handled a more irresponsible quill) watching, with his hands under his long coat-tails, the progress of Concord fight. It is not by any means related, however, I should add, that he waited for the conclusion to make up his mind which was the righteous cause. Hawthorne had a little society (as much, we may infer, as he desired), and it was excellent in quality. But the pages in the Note-Books which relate to his life at the Manse, and the introduction to the _Mosses_, make more of his relations with vegetable nature, and of his customary contemplation of the incidents of wood-path and way-side, than of the human elements of the scene; though these also are gracefully touched upon. These pages treat largely of the pleasures of a kitchen-garden, of the beauty of summer-squashes, and of the mysteries of apple-raising. With the wholesome aroma of apples (as is indeed almost necessarily the case in any realistic record of New England rural life) they are especially pervaded; and with many other homely and domestic emanations; all of which derive a sweetness from the medium of our author's colloquial style. Hawthorne was silent with his lips; but he talked with his pen. The tone of his writing is often that of charming talk--ingenious, fanciful, slow-flowing, with all the lightness of gossip, and none of its vulgarity. In the preface to the tales written at the Manse he talks of many things and just touches upon some of the members of his circle--especially upon that odd genius, his fellow-villager, Henry Thoreau. I said a little way back that the New England Transcendental movement had suffered in the estimation of the world at large from not having (putting Emerson aside) produced any superior talents. But any reference to it would be ungenerous which should omit to pay a tribute in passing to the author of _Walden_. Whatever question there may be of his talent, there can be none, I think, of his genius. It was a slim and crooked one; but it was eminently personal. He was imperfect, unfinished, inartistic; he was worse than provincial--he was parochial; it is only at his best that he is readable. But at his best he has an extreme natural charm, and he must always be mentioned after those Americans--Emerson, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Lowell, Motley--who have written originally. He was Emerson's independent moral man made flesh--living for the ages, and not for Saturday and Sunday; for the Universe, and not for Concord. In fact, however, Thoreau lived for Concord very effectually, and by his remarkable genius for the observation of the phenomena of woods and streams, of plants and trees, and beasts and fishes, and for flinging a kind of spiritual interest over these things, he did more than he perhaps intended toward consolidating the fame of his accidental human sojourn. He was as shy and ungregarious as Hawthorne; but he and the latter appear to have been sociably disposed towards each other, and there are some charming touches in the preface to the _Mosses_ in regard to the hours they spent in boating together on the large, quiet Concord river. Thoreau was a great voyager, in a canoe which he had constructed himself, and which he eventually made over to Hawthorne, and as expert in the use of the paddle as the Red men who had once haunted the same silent stream. The most frequent of Hawthorne's companions on these excursions appears, however, to have been a local celebrity--as well as Thoreau a high Transcendentalist--Mr. Ellery Channing, whom I may mention, since he is mentioned very explicitly in the preface to the _Mosses_, and also because no account of the little Concord world would be complete which should omit him. He was the son of the distinguished Unitarian moralist, and, I believe, the intimate friend of Thoreau, whom he resembled in having produced literary compositions more esteemed by the few than by the many. He and Hawthorne were both fishermen, and the two used to set themselves afloat in the summer afternoons. "Strange and happy times were those," exclaims the more distinguished of the two writers, "when we cast aside all irksome forms and strait-laced habitudes, and delivered ourselves up to the free air, to live like the Indians or any less conventional race, during one bright semicircle of the sun. Rowing our boat against the current, between wide meadows, we turned aside into the Assabeth. A more lovely stream than this, for a mile above its junction with the Concord, has never flowed on earth--nowhere indeed except to lave the interior regions of a poet's imagination.... It comes flowing softly through the midmost privacy and deepest heart of a wood which whispers it to be quiet; while the stream whispers back again from its sedgy borders, as if river and wood were hushing one another to sleep. Yes; the river sleeps along its course and dreams of the sky and the clustering foliage...." While Hawthorne was looking at these beautiful things, or, for that matter, was writing them, he was well out of the way of a certain class of visitants whom he alludes to in one of the closing passages of this long Introduction. "Never was a poor little country village infested with such a variety of queer, strangely-dressed, oddly-behaved mortals, most of whom took upon themselves to be important agents of the world's destiny, yet were simply bores of a very intense character." "These hobgoblins of flesh and blood," he says in a preceding paragraph, "were attracted thither by the wide-spreading influence of a great original thinker who had his earthly abode at the opposite extremity of our village.... People that had lighted on a new thought or a thought they fancied new, came to Emerson, as the finder of a glittering gem hastens to a lapidary, to ascertain its quality and value." And Hawthorne enumerates some of the categories of pilgrims to the shrine of the mystic counsellor, who as a general thing was probably far from abounding in their own sense (when this sense was perverted), but gave them a due measure of plain practical advice. The whole passage is interesting, and it suggests that little Concord had not been ill-treated by the fates--with "a great original thinker" at one end of the village, an exquisite teller of tales at the other, and the rows of New England elms between. It contains moreover an admirable sentence about Hawthorne's pilgrim-haunted neighbour, with whom, "being happy," as he says, and feeling therefore "as if there were no question to be put," he was not in metaphysical communion. "It was good nevertheless to meet him in the wood-paths, or sometimes in our avenue, with that pure intellectual gleam diffused about his presence, like the garment of a shining one; and he so quiet, so simple, so without pretension, encountering each man alive as if expecting to receive more than he could impart!" One may without indiscretion risk the surmise that Hawthorne's perception, of the "shining" element in his distinguished friend was more intense than his friend's appreciation of whatever luminous property might reside within the somewhat dusky envelope of our hero's identity as a collector of "mosses." Emerson, as a sort of spiritual sun-worshipper, could have attached but a moderate value to Hawthorne's cat-like faculty of seeing in the dark. "As to the daily coarse of our life," the latter writes in the spring of 1843, "I have written with pretty commendable diligence, averaging from two to four hours a day; and the result is seen in various magazines. I might have written more if it had seemed worth while, but I was content to earn only so much gold as might suffice for our immediate wants, having prospect of official station and emolument which would do away with the necessity of writing for bread. These prospects have not yet had their fulfilment; and we are well content to wait, for an office would inevitably remove us from our present happy home--at least from an outward home; for there is an inner one that will accompany us wherever we go. Meantime, the magazine people do not pay their debts; so that we taste some of the inconveniences of poverty. It is an annoyance, not a trouble." And he goes on to give some account of his usual habits. (The passage is from his Journal, and the account is given to himself, as it were, with that odd, unfamiliar explicitness which marks the tone of this record throughout.) "Every day I trudge through snow and slosh to the village, look into the post-office, and spend an hour at the reading-room; and then return home, generally without having spoken a word to any human being.... In the way of exercise I saw and split wood, and physically I was never in a better condition than now." He adds a mention of an absence he had lately made. "I went alone to Salem, where I resumed all my bachelor habits for nearly a fortnight, leading the same life in which ten years of my youth flitted away like a dream. But how much changed was I! At last I had got hold of a reality which never could be taken from me. It was good thus to get apart from my happiness for the sake of contemplating it." These compositions, which were so unpunctually paid for, appeared in the _Democratic Review_, a periodical published at Washington, and having, as our author's biographer says, "considerable pretensions to a national character." It is to be regretted that the practice of keeping its creditors waiting should, on the part of the magazine in question, have been thought compatible with these pretensions. The foregoing lines are a description of a very monotonous but a very contented life, and Mr. Lathrop justly remarks upon the dissonance of tone of the tales Hawthorne produced under these happy circumstances. It is indeed not a little of an anomaly. The episode of the Manse was one of the most agreeable he had known, and yet the best of the _Mosses_ (though not the greater number of them) are singularly dismal compositions. They are redolent of M. Montégut's pessimism. "The reality of sin, the pervasiveness of evil," says Mr. Lathrop, "had been but slightly insisted upon in the earlier tales: in this series the idea bursts up like a long-buried fire, with earth-shaking strength, and the pits of hell seem yawning beneath us." This is very true (allowing for Mr. Lathrop's rather too emphatic way of putting it); but the anomaly is, I think, on the whole, only superficial. Our writer's imagination, as has been abundantly conceded, was a gloomy one; the old Puritan sense of sin, of penalties to be paid, of the darkness and wickedness of life, had, as I have already suggested, passed into it. It had not passed into the parts of Hawthorne's nature corresponding to those occupied by the same horrible vision of things in his ancestors; but it had still been determined to claim this later comer as its own, and since his heart and his happiness were to escape, it insisted on setting its mark upon his genius--upon his most beautiful organ, his admirable fancy. It may be said that when his fancy was strongest and keenest, when it was most itself, then the dark Puritan tinge showed in it most richly; and there cannot be a better proof that he was not the man of a sombre _parti-pris_ whom M. Montégut describes, than the fact that these duskiest flowers of his invention sprang straight from the soil of his happiest days. This surely indicates that there was but little direct connection between the products of his fancy and the state of his affections. When he was lightest at heart, he was most creative, and when he was most creative, the moral picturesqueness of the old secret of mankind in general and of the Puritans in particular, most appealed to him--the secret that we are really not by any means so good as a well-regulated society requires us to appear. It is not too much to say, even, that the very condition of production of some of these unamiable tales would be that they should be superficial, and, as it were, insincere. The magnificent little romance of _Young Goodman Brown_, for instance, evidently means nothing as regards Hawthorne's own state of mind, his conviction of human depravity and his consequent melancholy; for the simple reason that if it meant anything, it would mean too much. Mr. Lathrop speaks of it as a "terrible and lurid parable;" but this, it seems to me, is just what it is not. It is not a parable, but a picture, which is a very different thing. What does M. Montégut make, one would ask, from the point of view of Hawthorne's pessimism, of the singularly objective and unpreoccupied tone of the Introduction to the _Old Manse_, in which the author speaks from himself, and in which the cry of metaphysical despair is not even faintly sounded? We have seen that when he went into the village he often came home without having spoken a word to a human being. There is a touching entry made a little later, bearing upon his mild taciturnity. "A cloudy veil stretches across the abyss of my nature. I have, however, no love of secrecy and darkness. I am glad to think that God sees through my heart, and if any angel has power to penetrate into it, he is welcome to know everything that is there. Yes, and so may any mortal who is capable of full sympathy, and therefore worthy to come into my depths. But he must find his own way there; I can neither guide nor enlighten him." It must be acknowledged, however, that if he was not able to open the gate of conversation, it was sometimes because he was disposed to slide the bolt himself. "I had a purpose," he writes, shortly before the entry last quoted, "if circumstances would permit, of passing the whole term of my wife's absence without speaking a word to any human being." He beguiled these incommunicative periods by studying German, in Tieck and Bürger, without apparently making much progress; also in reading French, in Voltaire and Rabelais. "Just now," he writes, one October noon, "I heard a sharp tapping at the window of my study, and, looking up from my book (a volume of Rabelais), behold, the head of a little bird, who seemed to demand admittance." It was a quiet life, of course, in which these diminutive incidents seemed noteworthy; and what is noteworthy here to the observer of Hawthorne's contemplative simplicity, is the fact that though he finds a good deal to say about the little bird (he devotes several lines more to it) he makes no remark upon Rabelais. He had other visitors than little birds, however, and their demands were also not Rabelaisian. Thoreau comes to see him, and they talk "upon the spiritual advantages of change of place, and upon the _Dial_, and upon Mr. Alcott, and other kindred or concatenated subjects." Mr. Alcott was an arch-transcendentalist, living in Concord, and the _Dial_ was a periodical to which the illuminated spirits of Boston and its neighbourhood used to contribute. Another visitor comes and talks "of Margaret Fuller, who, he says, has risen perceptibly into a higher state since their last meeting." There is probably a great deal of Concord five-and-thirty years ago in that little sentence! * * * * * CHAPTER V. THE THREE AMERICAN NOVELS. The prospect of official station and emolument which Hawthorne mentions in one of those paragraphs from his Journals which I have just quoted, as having offered itself and then passed away, was at last, in the event, confirmed by his receiving from the administration of President Polk the gift of a place in the Custom-house of his native town. The office was a modest one, and "official station" may perhaps appear a magniloquent formula for the functions sketched in the admirable Introduction to The _Scarlet Letter_. Hawthorne's duties were those of Surveyor of the port of Salem, and they had a salary attached, which was the important part; as his biographer tells us that he had received almost nothing for the contributions to the _Democratic Review_. He bade farewell to his ex-parsonage and went back to Salem in 1846, and the immediate effect of his ameliorated fortune was to make him stop writing. None of his Journals of the period from his going to Salem to 1850 have been published; from which I infer that he even ceased to journalise. _The Scarlet Letter_ was not written till 1849. In the delightful prologue to that work, entitled _The Custom-house_, he embodies some of the impressions gathered during these years of comparative leisure (I say of leisure because he does not intimate in this sketch of his occupations that his duties were onerous). He intimates, however, that they were not interesting, and that it was a very good thing for him, mentally and morally, when his term of service expired--or rather when he was removed from office by the operation of that wonderful "rotatory" system which his countrymen had invented for the administration of their affairs. This sketch of the Custom-house is, as simple writing, one of the most perfect of Hawthorne's compositions, and one of the most gracefully and humorously autobiographic. It would be interesting to examine it in detail, but I prefer to use my space for making some remarks upon the work which was the ultimate result of this period of Hawthorne's residence in his native town; and I shall, for convenience' sake, say directly afterwards what I have to say about the two companions of _The Scarlet Letter_--_The House of the Seven Gables_ and _The Blithedale Romance_. I quoted some passages from the prologue to the first of these novels in the early pages of this essay. There is another passage, however, which bears particularly upon this phase of Hawthorne's career, and which is so happily expressed as to make it a pleasure to transcribe it--the passage in which he says that "for myself, during the whole of my Custom-house experience, moonlight and sunshine, and the glow of the fire-light, were just alike in my regard, and neither of them was of one whit more avail than the twinkle of a tallow candle. An entire class of susceptibilities, and a gift connected with them--of no great richness or value, but the best I had--was gone from me." He goes on to say that he believes that he might have done something if he could have made up his mind to convert the very substance of the commonplace that surrounded him into matter of literature. "I might, for instance, have contented myself with writing out the narratives of a veteran shipmaster, one of the inspectors, whom I should be most ungrateful not to mention; since scarcely a day passed that he did not stir me to laughter and admiration by his marvellous gift as a story-teller.... Or I might readily have found a more serious task. It was a folly, with the materiality of this daily life pressing so intrusively upon me, to attempt to fling myself back into another age; or to insist on creating a semblance of a world out of airy matter.... The wiser effort would have been, to diffuse thought and imagination through the opaque substance of to-day, and thus make it a bright transparency ... to seek resolutely the true and indestructible value that lay hidden in the petty and wearisome incidents and ordinary characters with which I was now conversant. The fault was mine. The page of life that was spread out before me was dull and commonplace, only because I had not fathomed its deeper import. A better book than I shall ever write was there.... These perceptions came too late.... I had ceased to be a writer of tolerably poor tales and essays, and had become a tolerably good Surveyor of the Customs. That was all. But, nevertheless, it is anything but agreeable to be haunted by a suspicion that one's intellect is dwindling away, or exhaling, without your consciousness, like ether out of phial; so that at every glance you find a smaller and less volatile residuum." As, however, it was with what was left of his intellect after three years' evaporation, that Hawthorne wrote _The Scarlet Letter_, there is little reason to complain of the injury he suffered in his Surveyorship. His publisher, Mr. Fields, in a volume entitled _Yesterdays with Authors_, has related the circumstances in which Hawthorne's masterpiece came into the world. "In the winter of 1849, after he had been ejected from the Custom-house, I went down to Salem to see him and inquire after his health, for we heard he had been suffering from illness. He was then living in a modest wooden house.... I found him alone in a chamber over the sitting-room of the dwelling, and as the day was cold he was hovering near a stove. We fell into talk about his future prospects, and he was, as I feared I should find him, in a very desponding mood." His visitor urged him to bethink himself of publishing something, and Hawthorne replied by calling his attention to the small popularity his published productions had yet acquired, and declaring that he had done nothing and had no spirit for doing anything. The narrator of the incident urged upon him the necessity of a more hopeful view of his situation, and proceeded to take leave. He had not reached the street, however, when Hawthorne hurried to overtake him, and, placing a roll of MS. in his hand, bade him take it to Boston, read it, and pronounce upon it. "It is either very good or very bad," said the author; "I don't know which." "On my way back to Boston," says Mr. Fields, "I read the germ of _The Scarlet Letter_; before I slept that night I wrote him a note all aglow with admiration of the marvellous story he had put into my hands, and told him that I would come again to Salem the next day and arrange for its publication. I went on in such an amazing state of excitement, when we met again in the little house, that he would not believe I was really in earnest. He seemed to think I was beside myself, and laughed sadly at my enthusiasm." Hawthorne, however, went on with the book and finished it, but it appeared only a year later. His biographer quotes a passage from a letter which he wrote in February, 1850, to his friend Horatio Bridge. "I finished my book only yesterday; one end being in the press at Boston, while the other was in my head here at Salem, so that, as you see, my story is at least fourteen miles long.... My book, the publisher tells me, will not be out before April. He speaks of it in tremendous terms of approbation, so does Mrs. Hawthorne, to whom I read the conclusion last night. It broke her heart, and sent her to bed with a grievous headache--which I look upon, as a triumphant success. Judging from the effect upon her and the publisher, I may calculate on what bowlers call a ten-strike. But I don't make any such calculation." And Mr. Lathrop calls attention, in regard to this passage, to an allusion in the English Note-Books (September 14, 1855). "Speaking of Thackeray, I cannot but wonder at his coolness in respect to his own pathos, and compare it to my emotions when I read the last scene of _The Scarlet Letter_ to my wife, just after writing it--tried to read it rather, for my voice swelled and heaved as if I were tossed up and down on an ocean as it subsides after a storm. But I was in a very nervous state then, having gone through a great diversity of emotion while writing it, for many months." The work has the tone of the circumstances in which it was produced. If Hawthorne was in a sombre mood, and if his future was painfully vague, _The Scarlet Letter_ contains little enough of gaiety or of hopefulness. It is densely dark, with a single spot of vivid colour in it; and it will probably long remain the most consistently gloomy of English novels of the first order. But I just now called it the author's masterpiece, and I imagine it will continue to be, for other generations than ours, his most substantial title to fame. The subject had probably lain a long time in his mind, as his subjects were apt to do; so that he appears completely to possess it, to know it and feel it. It is simpler and more complete than his other novels; it achieves more perfectly what it attempts, and it has about it that charm, very hard to express, which we find in an artist's work the first time he has touched his highest mark--a sort of straightness and naturalness of execution, an unconsciousness of his public, and freshness of interest in his theme. It was a great success, and he immediately found himself famous. The writer of these lines, who was a child at the time, remembers dimly the sensation the book produced, and the little shudder with which people alluded to it, as if a peculiar horror were mixed with its attractions. He was too young to read it himself, but its title, upon which he fixed his eyes as the book lay upon the table, had a mysterious charm. He had a vague belief indeed that the "letter" in question was one of the documents that come by the post, and it was a source of perpetual wonderment to him that it should be of such an unaccustomed hue. Of course it was difficult to explain to a child the significance of poor Hester Prynne's blood-coloured _A_. But the mystery was at last partly dispelled by his being taken to see a collection of pictures (the annual exhibition of the National Academy), where he encountered a representation of a pale, handsome woman, in a quaint black dress and a white coif, holding between her knees an elfish-looking little girl, fantastically dressed and crowned with flowers. Embroidered on the woman's breast was a great crimson _A_, over which the child's fingers, as she glanced strangely out of the picture, were maliciously playing. I was told that this was Hester Prynne and little Pearl, and that when I grew older I might read their interesting history. But the picture remained vividly imprinted on my mind; I had been vaguely frightened and made uneasy by it; and when, years afterwards, I first read the novel, I seemed to myself to have read it before, and to be familiar with its two strange heroines, I mention this incident simply as an indication of the degree to which the success of _The Scarlet Letter_ had made the book what is called an actuality. Hawthorne himself was very modest about it; he wrote to his publisher, when there was a question of his undertaking another novel, that what had given the history of Hester Prynne its "vogue" was simply the introductory chapter. In fact, the publication of _The Scarlet Letter_ was in the United States a literary event of the first importance. The book was the finest piece of imaginative writing yet put forth in the country. There was a consciousness of this in the welcome that was given it--a satisfaction in the idea of America having produced a novel that belonged to literature, and to the forefront of it. Something might at last be sent to Europe as exquisite in quality as anything that had been received, and the best of it was that the thing was absolutely American; it belonged to the soil, to the air; it came out of the very heart of New England. It is beautiful, admirable, extraordinary; it has in the highest degree that merit which I have spoken of as the mark of Hawthorne's best things--an indefinable purity and lightness of conception, a quality which in a work of art affects one in the same way as the absence of grossness does in a human being. His fancy, as I just now said, had evidently brooded over the subject for a long time; the situation to be represented had disclosed itself to him in all its phases. When I say in all its phases, the sentence demands modification; for it is to be remembered that if Hawthorne laid his hand upon the well-worn theme, upon the familiar combination of the wife, the lover, and the husband, it was after all but to one period of the history of these three persons that he attached himself. The situation is the situation after the woman's fault has been committed, and the current of expiation and repentance has set in. In spite of the relation between Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale, no story of love was surely ever less of a "love story." To Hawthorne's imagination the fact that these two persons had loved each other too well was of an interest comparatively vulgar; what appealed to him was the idea of their moral situation in the long years that were to follow. The story indeed is in a secondary degree that of Hester Prynne; she becomes, really, after the first scene, an accessory figure; it is not upon her the _dénoûment_ depends. It is upon her guilty lover that the author projects most frequently the cold, thin rays of his fitfully-moving lantern, which makes here and there a little luminous circle, on the edge of which hovers the livid and sinister figure of the injured and retributive husband. The story goes on for the most part between the lover and the husband--the tormented young Puritan minister, who carries the secret of his own lapse from pastoral purity locked up beneath an exterior that commends itself to the reverence of his flock, while he sees the softer partner of his guilt standing in the full glare of exposure and humbling herself to the misery of atonement--between this more wretched and pitiable culprit, to whom dishonour would come as a comfort and the pillory as a relief, and the older, keener, wiser man, who, to obtain satisfaction for the wrong he has suffered, devises the infernally ingenious plan of conjoining himself with his wronger, living with him, living upon him, and while he pretends to minister to his hidden ailment and to sympathise with his pain, revels in his unsuspected knowledge of these things and stimulates them by malignant arts. The attitude of Roger Chillingworth, and the means he takes to compensate himself--these are the highly original elements in the situation that Hawthorne so ingeniously treats. None of his works are so impregnated with that after-sense of the old Puritan consciousness of life to which allusion has so often been made. If, as M. Montégut says, the qualities of his ancestors _filtered_ down through generations into his composition, _The Scarlet Letter_ was, as it were, the vessel that gathered up the last of the precious drops. And I say this not because the story happens to be of so-called historical cast, to be told of the early days of Massachusetts and of people in steeple-crowned hats and sad coloured garments. The historical colouring is rather weak than otherwise; there is little elaboration of detail, of the modern realism of research; and the author has made no great point of causing his figures to speak the English of their period. Nevertheless, the book is full of the moral presence of the race that invented Hester's penance--diluted and complicated with other things, but still perfectly recognisable. Puritanism, in a word, is there, not only objectively, as Hawthorne tried to place it there, but subjectively as well. Not, I mean, in his judgment of his characters, in any harshness of prejudice, or in the obtrusion of a moral lesson; but in the very quality of his own vision, in the tone of the picture, in a certain coldness and exclusiveness of treatment. The faults of the book are, to my sense, a want of reality and an abuse of the fanciful element--of a certain superficial symbolism. The people strike me not as characters, but as representatives, very picturesquely arranged, of a single state of mind; and the interest of the story lies, not in them, but in the situation, which is insistently kept before us, with little progression, though with a great deal, as I have said, of a certain stable variation; and to which they, out of their reality, contribute little that helps it to live and move. I was made to feel this want of reality, this over-ingenuity, of _The Scarlet Letter_, by chancing not long since upon a novel which was read fifty years ago much more than to-day, but which is still worth reading--the story of _Adam Blair_, by John Gibson Lockhart. This interesting and powerful little tale has a great deal of analogy with Hawthorne's novel--quite enough, at least, to suggest a comparison between them; and the comparison is a very interesting one to make, for it speedily leads us to larger considerations than simple resemblances and divergences of plot. Adam Blair, like Arthur Dimmesdale, is a Calvinistic minister who becomes the lover of a married woman, is overwhelmed with remorse at his misdeed, and makes a public confession of it; then expiates it by resigning his pastoral office and becoming a humble tiller of the soil, as his father had been. The two stories are of about the same length, and each is the masterpiece (putting aside of course, as far as Lockhart is concerned, the _Life of Scott_) of the author. They deal alike with the manners of a rigidly theological society, and even in certain details they correspond. In each of them, between the guilty pair, there is a charming little girl; though I hasten to say that Sarah Blair (who is not the daughter of the heroine but the legitimate offspring of the hero, a widower) is far from being as brilliant and graceful an apparition as the admirable little Pearl of _The Scarlet Letter_. The main difference between the two tales is the fact that in the American story the husband plays an all-important part, and in the Scottish plays almost none at all. _Adam Blair_ is the history of the passion, and _The Scarlet Letter_ the history of its sequel; but nevertheless, if one has read the two books at a short interval, it is impossible to avoid confronting them. I confess that a large portion of the interest of _Adam Blair_, to my mind, when once I had perceived that it would repeat in a great measure the situation of _The Scarlet Letter_, lay in noting its difference of tone. It threw into relief the passionless quality of Hawthorne's novel, its element of cold and ingenious fantasy, its elaborate imaginative delicacy. These things do not precisely constitute a weakness in _The Starlet Letter_; indeed, in a certain way they constitute a great strength; but the absence of a certain something warm and straightforward, a trifle more grossly human and vulgarly natural, which one finds in _Adam Blair_, will always make Hawthorne's tale less touching to a large number of even very intelligent readers, than a love-story told with the robust, synthetic pathos which served Lockhart so well. His novel is not of the first rank (I should call it an excellent second-rate one), but it borrows a charm from the fact that his vigorous, but not strongly imaginative, mind was impregnated with the reality of his subject. He did not always succeed in rendering this reality; the expression is sometimes awkward and poor. But the reader feels that his vision was clear, and his feeling about the matter very strong and rich. Hawthorne's imagination, on the other hand, plays with his theme so incessantly, leads it such a dance through the moonlighted air of his intellect, that the thing cools off, as it were, hardens and stiffens, and, producing effects much more exquisite, leaves the reader with a sense of having handled a splendid piece of silversmith's work. Lockhart, by means much more vulgar, produces at moments a greater illusion, and satisfies our inevitable desire for something, in the people in whom it is sought to interest us, that shall be of the same pitch and the same continuity with ourselves. Above all, it is interesting to see how the same subject appears to two men of a thoroughly different cast of mind and of a different race. Lockhart was struck with the warmth of the subject that offered itself to him, and Hawthorne with its coldness; the one with its glow, its sentimental interest--the other with its shadow, its moral interest. Lockhart's story is as decent, as severely draped, as _The Scarlet Letter_; but the author has a more vivid sense than appears to have imposed itself upon Hawthorne, of some of the incidents of the situation he describes; his tempted man and tempting woman are more actual and personal; his heroine in especial, though not in the least a delicate or a subtle conception, has a sort of credible, visible, palpable property, a vulgar roundness and relief, which are lacking to the dim and chastened image of Hester Prynne. But I am going too far; I am comparing simplicity with subtlety, the usual with the refined. Each man wrote as his turn of mind impelled him, but each expressed something more than himself. Lockhart was a dense, substantial Briton, with a taste for the concrete, and Hawthorne was a thin New Englander, with a miasmatic conscience. In _The Scarlet Letter_ there is a great deal of symbolism; there is, I think, too much. It is overdone at times, and becomes mechanical; it ceases to be impressive, and grazes triviality. The idea of the mystic _A_ which the young minister finds imprinted upon his breast and eating into his flesh, in sympathy with the embroidered badge that Hester is condemned to wear, appears to me to be a case in point. This suggestion should, I think, have been just made and dropped; to insist upon it and return to it, is to exaggerate the weak side of the subject. Hawthorne returns to it constantly, plays with it, and seems charmed by it; until at last the reader feels tempted to declare that his enjoyment of it is puerile. In the admirable scene, so superbly conceived and beautifully executed, in which Mr. Dimmesdale, in the stillness of the night, in the middle of the sleeping town, feels impelled to go and stand upon the scaffold where his mistress had formerly enacted her dreadful penance, and then, seeing Hester pass along the street, from watching at a sick-bed, with little Pearl at her side, calls them both to come and stand there beside him--in this masterly episode the effect is almost spoiled by the introduction of one of these superficial conceits. What leads up to it is very fine--so fine that I cannot do better than quote it as a specimen of one of the striking pages of the book. "But before Mr. Dimmesdale had done speaking, a light gleamed far and wide over all the muffled sky. It was doubtless caused by one of those meteors which the night-watcher may so often observe burning out to waste in the vacant regions of the atmosphere. So powerful was its radiance that it thoroughly illuminated the dense medium of cloud, betwixt the sky and earth. The great vault brightened, like the dome of an immense lamp. It showed the familiar scene of the street with the distinctness of midday, but also with the awfulness that is always imparted to familiar objects by an unaccustomed light. The wooden houses, with their jutting stories and quaint gable-peaks; the doorsteps and thresholds, with the early grass springing up about them; the garden-plots, black with freshly-turned earth; the wheel-track, little worn, and, even in the marketplace, margined with green on either side;--all were visible, but with a singularity of aspect that seemed to give another moral interpretation to the things of this world than they had ever borne before. And there stood the minister, with his hand over his heart; and Hester Prynne, with the embroidered letter glimmering on her bosom; and little Pearl, herself a symbol, and the connecting-link between these two. They stood in the noon of that strange and solemn splendour, as if it were the light that is to reveal all secrets, and the daybreak that shall unite all that belong to one another." That is imaginative, impressive, poetic; but when, almost immediately afterwards, the author goes on to say that "the minister looking upward to the zenith, beheld there the appearance of an immense letter--the letter _A_--marked out in lines of dull red light," we feel that he goes too far and is in danger of crossing the line that separates the sublime from its intimate neighbour. We are tempted to say that this is not moral tragedy, but physical comedy. In the same way, too much is made of the intimation that Hester's badge had a scorching property, and that if one touched it one would immediately withdraw one's hand. Hawthorne is perpetually looking for images which shall place themselves in picturesque correspondence with the spiritual facts with which he is concerned, and of course the search is of the very essence of poetry. But in such a process discretion is everything, and when the image becomes importunate it is in danger of seeming to stand for nothing more serious than itself. When Hester meets the minister by appointment in the forest, and sits talking with him while little Pearl wanders away and plays by the edge of the brook, the child is represented as at last making her way over to the other side of the woodland stream, and disporting herself there in a manner which makes her mother feel herself, "in some indistinct and tantalising manner, estranged from Pearl; as if the child, in her lonely ramble through the forest, had strayed out of the sphere in which she and her mother dwelt together, and was now vainly seeking to return to it." And Hawthorne devotes a chapter to this idea of the child's having, by putting the brook between Hester and herself, established a kind of spiritual gulf, on the verge of which her little fantastic person innocently mocks at her mother's sense of bereavement. This conception belongs, one would say, quite to the lighter order of a story-teller's devices, and the reader hardly goes with Hawthorne in the large development he gives to it. He hardly goes with him either, I think, in his extreme predilection for a small number of vague ideas which are represented by such terms as "sphere" and "sympathies." Hawthorne makes too liberal a use of these two substantives; it is the solitary defect of his style; and it counts as a defect partly because the words in question are a sort of specialty with certain writers immeasurably inferior to himself. I had not meant, however, to expatiate upon his defects, which are of the slenderest and most venial kind. _The Scarlet Letter_ has the beauty and harmony of all original and complete conceptions, and its weaker spots, whatever they are, are not of its essence; they are mere light flaws and inequalities of surface. One can often return to it; it supports familiarity and has the inexhaustible charm and mystery of great works of art. It is admirably written. Hawthorne afterwards polished his style to a still higher degree, but in his later productions--it is almost always the case in a writer's later productions--there is a touch of mannerism. In _The Scarlet Letter_ there is a high degree of polish, and at the same time a charming freshness; his phrase is less conscious of itself. His biographer very justly calls attention to the fact that his style was excellent from the beginning; that he appeared to have passed through no phase of learning how to write, but was in possession of his means from the first of his handling a pen. His early tales, perhaps, were not of a character to subject his faculty of expression to a very severe test, but a man who had not Hawthorne's natural sense of language would certainly have contrived to write them less well. This natural sense of language--this turn for saying things lightly and yet touchingly, picturesquely yet simply, and for infusing a gently colloquial tone into matter of the most unfamiliar import, he had evidently cultivated with great assiduity. I have spoken of the anomalous character of his Note-Books--of his going to such pains often to make a record of incidents which either were not worth remembering or could be easily remembered without its aid. But it helps us to understand the Note-Books if we regard them as a literary exercise. They were compositions, as school boys say, in which the subject was only the pretext, and the main point was to write a certain amount of excellent English. Hawthorne must at least have written a great many of these things for practice, and he must often have said to himself that it was better practice to write about trifles, because it was a greater tax upon one's skill to make them interesting. And his theory was just, for he has almost always made his trifles interesting. In his novels his art of saying things well is very positively tested, for here he treats of those matters among which it is very easy for a blundering writer to go wrong--the subtleties and mysteries of life, the moral and spiritual maze. In such a passage as one I have marked for quotation from _The Scarlet Letter_ there is the stamp of the genius of style. "Hester Prynne, gazing steadfastly at the clergyman, felt a dreary influence come over her, but wherefore or whence she knew not, unless that he seemed so remote from her own sphere and utterly beyond her reach. One glance of recognition she had imagined must needs pass between them. She thought of the dim forest with its little dell of solitude, and love, and anguish, and the mossy tree-trunk, where, sitting hand in hand, they had mingled their sad and passionate talk with the melancholy murmur of the brook. How deeply had they known each other then! And was this the man? She hardly knew him now! He, moving proudly past, enveloped as it were in the rich music, with the procession of majestic and venerable fathers; he, so unattainable in his worldly position, and still more so in that far vista in his unsympathising thoughts, through which she now beheld him! Her spirit sank with the idea that all must have been a delusion, and that vividly as she had dreamed it, there could be no real bond betwixt the clergyman and herself. And thus much of woman there was in Hester, that she could scarcely forgive him--least of all now, when the heavy footstep of their approaching fate might be heard, nearer, nearer, nearer!--for being able to withdraw himself so completely from their mutual world, while she groped darkly, and stretched forth her cold hands, and found him not!" _The House of the Seven Gables_ was written at Lenox, among the mountains of Massachusetts, a village nestling, rather loosely, in one of the loveliest corners of New England, to which Hawthorne had betaken himself after the success of _The Scarlet Letter_ became conspicuous, in the summer of 1850, and where he occupied for two years an uncomfortable little red house which is now pointed out to the inquiring stranger. The inquiring stranger is now a frequent figure at Lenox, for the place has suffered the process of lionisation. It has become a prosperous watering-place, or at least (as there are no waters), as they say in America, a summer-resort. It is a brilliant and generous landscape, and thirty years ago a man of fancy, desiring to apply himself, might have found both inspiration and tranquillity there. Hawthorne found so much of both that he wrote more during his two years of residence at Lenox than at any period of his career. He began with _The House of the Seven Gables_, which was finished in the early part of 1851. This is the longest of his three American novels, it is the most elaborate, and in the judgment of some persons it is the finest. It is a rich, delightful, imaginative work, larger and more various than its companions, and full of all sorts of deep intentions, of interwoven threads of suggestion But it is not so rounded and complete as _The Scarlet Letter_; it has always seemed to me more like a prologue to a great novel than a great novel itself. I think this is partly owing to the fact that the subject, the _donnée_, as the French say, of the story, does not quite fill it out, and that we get at the same time an impression of certain complicated purposes on the author's part, which seem to reach beyond it. I call it larger and more various than its companions, and it has indeed a greater richness of tone and density of detail. The colour, so to speak, of _The House of the Seven Gables_ is admirable. But the story has a sort of expansive quality which never wholly fructifies, and as I lately laid it down, after reading it for the third time, I had a sense of having interested myself in a magnificent fragment. Yet the book has a great fascination, and of all of those of its author's productions which I have read over while writing this sketch, it is perhaps the one that has gained most by re-perusal. If it be true of the others that the pure, natural quality of the imaginative strain is their great merit, this is at least as true of _The House of the Seven Gables_, the charm of which is in a peculiar degree of the kind that we fail to reduce to its grounds--like that of the sweetness of a piece of music, or the softness of fine September weather. It is vague, indefinable, ineffable; but it is the sort of thing we must always point to in justification of the high claim that we make for Hawthorne. In this case of course its vagueness is a drawback, for it is difficult to point to ethereal beauties; and if the reader whom we have wished to inoculate with our admiration inform us after looking a while that he perceives nothing in particular, we can only reply that, in effect, the object is a delicate one. _The House of the Seven Gables_ comes nearer being a picture of contemporary American life than either of its companions; but on this ground it would be a mistake to make a large claim for it. It cannot be too often repeated that Hawthorne was not a realist. He had a high sense of reality--his Note-Books super-abundantly testify to it; and fond as he was of jotting down the items that make it up, he never attempted to render exactly or closely the actual facts of the society that surrounded him. I have said--I began by saying--that his pages were full of its spirit, and of a certain reflected light that springs from it; but I was careful to add that the reader must look for his local and national quality between the lines of his writing and in the _indirect_ testimony of his tone, his accent, his temper, of his very omissions and suppressions. _The House of the Seven Gables_ has, however, more literal actuality than the others, and if it were not too fanciful an account of it, I should say that it renders, to an initiated reader, the impression of a summer afternoon in an elm-shadowed New England town. It leaves upon the mind a vague correspondence to some such reminiscence, and in stirring up the association it renders it delightful. The comparison is to the honour of the New England town, which gains in it more than it bestows. The shadows of the elms, in _The House of the Seven Gables_, are exceptionally dense and cool; the summer afternoon is peculiarly still and beautiful; the atmosphere has a delicious warmth, and the long daylight seems to pause and rest. But the mild provincial quality is there, the mixture of shabbiness and freshness, the paucity of ingredients. The end of an old race--this is the situation that Hawthorne has depicted, and he has been admirably inspired in the choice of the figures in whom he seeks to interest us. They are all figures rather than characters--they are all pictures rather than persons. But if their reality is light and vague, it is sufficient, and it is in harmony with the low relief and dimness of outline of the objects that surround them. They are all types, to the author's mind, of something general, of something that is bound up with the history, at large, of families and individuals, and each of them is the centre of a cluster of those ingenious and meditative musings, rather melancholy, as a general thing, than joyous, which melt into the current and texture of the story and give it a kind of moral richness. A grotesque old spinster, simple, childish, penniless, very humble at heart, but rigidly conscious of her pedigree; an amiable bachelor, of an epicurean temperament and an enfeebled intellect, who has passed twenty years of his life in penal confinement for a crime of which he was unjustly pronounced guilty; a sweet-natured and bright-faced young girl from the country, a poor relation of these two ancient decrepitudes, with whose moral mustiness her modern freshness and soundness are contrasted; a young man still more modern, holding the latest opinions, who has sought his fortune up and down the world, and, though he has not found it, takes a genial and enthusiastic view of the future: these, with two or three remarkable accessory figures, are the persons concerned in the little drama. The drama is a small one, but as Hawthorne does not put it before us for its own superficial sake, for the dry facts of the case, but for something in it which he holds to be symbolic and of large application, something that points a moral and that it behoves us to remember, the scenes in the rusty wooden house whose gables give its name to the story, have something of the dignity both of history and of tragedy. Miss Hephzibah Pyncheon, dragging out a disappointed life in her paternal dwelling, finds herself obliged in her old age to open a little shop for the sale of penny toys and gingerbread. This is the central incident of the tale, and, as Hawthorne relates it, it is an incident of the most impressive magnitude and most touching interest. Her dishonoured and vague-minded brother is released from prison at the same moment, and returns to the ancestral roof to deepen her perplexities. But, on the other hand, to alleviate them, and to introduce a breath of the air of the outer world into this long unventilated interior, the little country cousin also arrives, and proves the good angel of the feebly distracted household. All this episode is exquisite--admirably conceived, and executed with a kind of humorous tenderness, an equal sense of everything in it that is picturesque, touching, ridiculous, worthy of the highest praise. Hephzibah Pyncheon, with her near-sighted scowl, her rusty joints, her antique turban, her map of a great territory to the eastward which ought to have belonged to her family, her vain terrors and scruples and resentments, the inaptitude and repugnance of an ancient gentlewoman to the vulgar little commerce which a cruel fate has compelled her to engage in--Hephzibah Pyncheon is a masterly picture. I repeat that she is a picture, as her companions are pictures; she is a charming piece of descriptive writing, rather than a dramatic exhibition. But she is described, like her companions too, so subtly and lovingly that we enter into her virginal old heart and stand with her behind her abominable little counter. Clifford Pyncheon is a still more remarkable conception, though he is perhaps not so vividly depicted. It was a figure needing a much more subtle touch, however, and it was of the essence of his character to be vague and unemphasised. Nothing can be more charming than the manner in which the soft, bright, active presence of Phoebe Pyncheon is indicated, or than the account of her relations with the poor dimly sentient kinsman for whom her light-handed sisterly offices, in the evening of a melancholy life, are a revelation of lost possibilities of happiness. "In her aspect," Hawthorne says of the young girl, "there was a familiar gladness, and a holiness that you could play with, and yet reverence it as much as ever. She was like a prayer offered up in the homeliest beauty of one's mother-tongue. Fresh was Phoebe, moreover, and airy, and sweet in her apparel; as if nothing that she wore--neither her gown, nor her small straw bonnet, nor her little kerchief, any more than her snowy stockings--had ever been put on before; or if worn, were all the fresher for it, and with a fragrance as if they had lain among the rose-buds." Of the influence of her maidenly salubrity upon poor Clifford, Hawthorne gives the prettiest description, and then, breaking off suddenly, renounces the attempt in language which, while pleading its inadequacy, conveys an exquisite satisfaction to the reader. I quote the passage for the sake of its extreme felicity, and of the charming image with which it concludes. "But we strive in vain to put the idea into words. No adequate expression of the beauty and profound pathos with which it impresses us is attainable. This being, made only for happiness, and heretofore so miserably failing to be happy--his tendencies so hideously thwarted that some unknown time ago, the delicate springs of his character, never morally or intellectually strong, had given way, and he was now imbecile--this poor forlorn voyager from the Islands of the Blest, in a frail bark, on a tempestuous sea, had been flung by the last mountain-wave of his shipwreck, into a quiet harbour. There, as he lay more than half lifeless on the strand, the fragrance of an earthly rose-bud had come to his nostrils, and, as odours will, had summoned up reminiscences or visions of all the living and breathing beauty amid which he should have had his home. With his native susceptibility of happy influences, he inhales the slight ethereal rapture into his soul, and expires!" I have not mentioned the personage in _The House of the Seven Gables_ upon whom Hawthorne evidently bestowed most pains, and whose portrait is the most elaborate in the book; partly because he is, in spite of the space he occupies, an accessory figure, and partly because, even more than the others, he is what I have called a picture rather than a character. Judge Pyncheon is an ironical portrait, very richly and broadly executed, very sagaciously composed and rendered--the portrait of a superb, full blown hypocrite, a large-based, full-nurtured Pharisee, bland, urbane, impressive, diffusing about him a "sultry" warmth of benevolence, as the author calls it again and again, and basking in the noontide of prosperity and the consideration of society; but in reality hard, gross, and ignoble. Judge Pyncheon is an elaborate piece of description, made up of a hundred admirable touches, in which satire is always winged with fancy, and fancy is linked with a deep sense of reality. It is difficult to say whether Hawthorne followed a model in describing Judge Pyncheon; but it is tolerably obvious that the picture is an impression--a copious impression--of an individual. It has evidently a definite starting-point in fact, and the author is able to draw, freely and confidently, after the image established in his mind. Holgrave, the modern young man, who has been a Jack-of-all-trades and is at the period of the story a daguerreotypist, is an attempt to render a kind of national type--that of the young citizen of the United States whose fortune is simply in his lively intelligence, and who stands naked, as it were, unbiased and unencumbered alike, in the centre of the far-stretching level of American life. Holgrave is intended as a contrast; his lack of traditions, his democratic stamp, his condensed experience, are opposed to the desiccated prejudices and exhausted vitality of the race of which poor feebly-scowling, rusty-jointed Hephzibah is the most heroic representative. It is perhaps a pity that Hawthorne should not have proposed to himself to give the old Pyncheon-qualities some embodiment which would help them to balance more fairly with the elastic properties of the young daguerreotypist--should not have painted a lusty conservative to match his strenuous radical. As it is, the mustiness and mouldiness of the tenants of the House of the Seven Gables crumble away rather too easily. Evidently, however, what Hawthorne designed to represent was not the struggle between an old society and a new, for in this case he would have given the old one a better chance; but simply, as I have said, the shrinkage and extinction of a family. This appealed to his imagination; and the idea of long perpetuation and survival always appears to have filled him with a kind of horror and disapproval. Conservative, in a certain degree, as he was himself, and fond of retrospect and quietude and the mellowing influences of time, it is singular how often one encounters in his writings some expression of mistrust of old houses, old institutions, long lines of descent. He was disposed apparently to allow a very moderate measure in these respects, and he condemns the dwelling of the Pyncheons to disappear from the face of the earth because it has been standing a couple of hundred years. In this he was an American of Americans; or rather he was more American than many of his countrymen, who, though they are accustomed to work for the short run rather than the long, have often a lurking esteem for things that show the marks of having lasted. I will add that Holgrave is one of the few figures, among those which Hawthorne created, with regard to which the absence of the realistic mode of treatment is felt as a loss. Holgrave is not sharply enough characterised; he lacks features; he is not an individual, but a type. But my last word about this admirable novel must not be a restrictive one. It is a large and generous production, pervaded with that vague hum, that indefinable echo, of the whole multitudinous life of man, which is the real sign of a great work of fiction. After the publication of _The House of the Seven Gables_, which brought him great honour, and, I believe, a tolerable share of a more ponderable substance, he composed a couple of little volumes, for children--_The Wonder-Book_, and a small collection of stories entitled _Tanglewood Tales_. They are not among his most serious literary titles, but if I may trust my own early impression of them, they are among the most charming literary services that have been rendered to children in an age (and especially in a country) in which the exactions of the infant mind have exerted much too palpable an influence upon literature. Hawthorne's stories are the old Greek myths, made more vivid to the childish imagination by an infusion of details which both deepen and explain their marvels. I have been careful not to read them over, for I should be very sorry to risk disturbing in any degree a recollection of them that has been at rest since the appreciative period of life to which they are addressed. They seem at that period enchanting, and the ideal of happiness of many American children is to lie upon the carpet and lose themselves in _The Wonder-Book_. It is in its pages that they first make the acquaintance of the heroes and heroines of the antique mythology, and something of the nursery fairy-tale quality of interest which Hawthorne imparts to them always remains. I have said that Lenox was a very pretty place, and that he was able to work there Hawthorne proved by composing _The House of the Seven Gables_ with a good deal of rapidity. But at the close of the year in which this novel was published he wrote to a friend (Mr. Fields, his publisher,) that "to tell you a secret I am sick to death of Berkshire, and hate to think of spending another winter here.... The air and climate do not agree with my health at all, and for the first time since I was a boy I have felt languid and dispirited.... O that Providence would build me the merest little shanty, and mark me out a rood or two of garden ground, near the sea-coast!" He was at this time for a while out of health; and it is proper to remember that though the Massachusetts Berkshire, with its mountains and lakes, was charming during the ardent American summer, there was a reverse to the medal, consisting of December snows prolonged into April and May. Providence failed to provide him with a cottage by the sea; but he betook himself for the winter of 1852 to the little town of West Newton, near Boston, where he brought into the world _The Blithedale Romance_. This work, as I have said, would not have been written if Hawthorne had not spent a year at Brook Farm, and though it is in no sense of the word an account of the manners or the inmates of that establishment, it will preserve the memory of the ingenious community at West Roxbury for a generation unconscious of other reminders. I hardly know what to say about it save that it is very charming; this vague, unanalytic epithet is the first that comes to one's pen in treating of Hawthorne's novels, for their extreme amenity of form invariably suggests it; but if on the one hand it claims to be uttered, on the other it frankly confesses its inconclusiveness. Perhaps, however, in this case, it fills out the measure of appreciation more completely than in others, for _The Blithedale Romance_ is the lightest, the brightest, the liveliest, of this company of unhumorous fictions. The story is told from a more joyous point of view--from a point of view comparatively humorous--and a number of objects and incidents touched with the light of the profane world--the vulgar, many-coloured world of actuality, as distinguished from the crepuscular realm of the writer's own reveries--are mingled with its course. The book indeed is a mixture of elements, and it leaves in the memory an impression analogous to that of an April day--an alternation of brightness and shadow, of broken sun-patches and sprinkling clouds. Its dénoûment is tragical--there is indeed nothing so tragical in all Hawthorne, unless it be the murder-of Miriam's persecutor by Donatello, in _Transformation_, as the suicide of Zenobia; and yet on the whole the effect of the novel is to make one think more agreeably of life. The standpoint of the narrator has the advantage of being a concrete one; he is no longer, as in the preceding tales, a disembodied spirit, imprisoned in the haunted chamber of his own contemplations, but a particular man, with a certain human grossness. Of Miles Coverdale I have already spoken, and of its being natural to assume that in so far as we may measure this lightly indicated identity of his, it has a great deal in common with that of his creator. Coverdale is a picture of the contemplative, observant, analytic nature, nursing its fancies, and yet, thanks to an element of strong good sense, not bringing them up to be spoiled children; having little at stake in life, at any given moment, and yet indulging, in imagination, in a good many adventures; a portrait of a man, in a word, whose passions are slender, whose imagination is active, and whose happiness lies, not in doing, but in perceiving--half a poet, half a critic, and all a spectator. He is contrasted, excellently, with the figure of Hollingsworth, the heavily treading Reformer, whose attitude with regard to the world is that of the hammer to the anvil, and who has no patience with his friend's indifferences and neutralities. Coverdale is a gentle sceptic, a mild cynic; he would agree that life is a little worth living--or worth living a little; but would remark that, unfortunately, to live little enough, we have to live a great deal. He confesses to a want of earnestness, but in reality he is evidently an excellent fellow, to whom one might look, not for any personal performance on a great scale, but for a good deal of generosity of detail. "As Hollingsworth once told me, I lack a purpose," he writes, at the close of his story. "How strange! He was ruined, morally, by an over plus of the same ingredient the want of which, I occasionally suspect, has rendered my own life all an emptiness. I by no means wish to die. Yet were there any cause in this whole chaos of human struggle, worth a sane man's dying for, and which my death would benefit, then--provided, however, the effort did not involve an unreasonable amount of trouble--methinks I might be bold to offer up my life. If Kossuth, for example, would pitch the battle-field of Hungarian rights within an easy ride of my abode, and choose a mild sunny morning, after breakfast, for the conflict, Miles Coverdale would gladly be his man, for one brave rush upon the levelled bayonets. Further than that I should be loth to pledge myself." The finest thing in _The Blithdale Romance_ is the character of Zenobia, which I have said elsewhere strikes me as the nearest approach that Hawthorne has made to the complete creation of a _person_. She is more concrete than Hester or Miriam, or Hilda or Phoebe; she is a more definite image, produced by a greater multiplicity of touches. It is idle to inquire too closely whether Hawthorne had Margaret Fuller in his mind in constructing the figure of this brilliant specimen of the strong-minded class and endowing her with the genius of conversation; or, on the assumption that such was the case, to compare the image at all strictly with the model. There is no strictness in the representation by novelists of persons who have struck them in life, and there can in the nature of things be none. From the moment the imagination takes a hand in the game, the inevitable tendency is to divergence, to following what may be called new scents. The original gives hints, but the writer does what he likes with them, and imports new elements into the picture. If there is this amount of reason for referring the wayward heroine of Blithedale to Hawthorne's impression of the most distinguished woman of her day in Boston, that Margaret Fuller was the only literary lady of eminence whom there is any sign of his having known, that she was proud, passionate, and eloquent, that she was much connected with the little world of Transcendentalism out of which the experiment of Brook Farm sprung, and that she had a miserable end and a watery grave--if these are facts to be noted on one side, I say; on the other, the beautiful and sumptuous Zenobia, with her rich and picturesque temperament and physical aspects, offers many points of divergence from the plain and strenuous invalid who represented feminine culture in the suburbs of the New England metropolis. This picturesqueness of Zenobia is very happily indicated and maintained; she is a woman, in all the force of the term, and there is something very vivid and powerful in her large expression of womanly gifts and weaknesses. Hollingsworth is, I think, less successful, though there is much reality in the conception of the type to which he belongs--the strong-willed, narrow-hearted apostle of a special form of redemption for society. There is nothing better in all Hawthorne than the scene between him and Coverdale, when the two men are at work together in the field (piling stones on a dyke), and he gives it to his companion to choose whether he will be with him or against him. It is a pity, perhaps, to have represented him as having begun life as a blacksmith, for one grudges him the advantage of so logical a reason for his roughness and hardness. "Hollingsworth scarcely said a word, unless when repeatedly and pertinaciously addressed. Then indeed he would glare upon us from the thick shrubbery of his meditations, like a tiger out of a jungle, make the briefest reply possible, and betake himself back into the solitude of his heart and mind.... His heart, I imagine, was never really interested in our socialist scheme, but was for ever busy with his strange, and as most people thought, impracticable plan for the reformation of criminals through an appeal to their higher instincts. Much as I liked Hollingsworth, it cost me many a groan to tolerate him on this point. He ought to have commenced his investigation of the subject by committing some huge sin in his proper person, and examining the condition of his-higher instincts afterwards." The most touching element in the novel is the history of the grasp that this barbarous fanatic has laid upon the fastidious and high-tempered Zenobia, who, disliking him and shrinking, from him at a hundred points, is drawn into the gulf of his omnivorous egotism. The portion of the story that strikes me as least felicitous is that which deals with Priscilla and with her mysterious relation to Zenobia--with her mesmeric gifts, her clairvoyance, her identity with the Veiled Lady, her divided subjection to Hollingsworth and Westervelt, and her numerous other graceful but fantastic properties--her Sibylline attributes, as the author calls them. Hawthorne is rather too fond of Sibylline attributes--a taste of the same order as his disposition, to which I have already alluded, to talk about spheres and sympathies. As the action advances, in _The Blithdale Romance_, we get too much out of reality, and cease to feel beneath our feet the firm ground of an appeal to our own vision of the world, our observation. I should have liked to see the story concern itself more with the little community in which its earlier scenes are laid, and avail itself of so excellent an opportunity for describing unhackneyed specimens of human nature. I have already spoken of the absence of satire in the novel, of its not aiming in the least at satire, and of its offering no grounds for complaint as an invidious picture. Indeed the brethren of Brook Farm should have held themselves slighted rather than misrepresented, and have regretted that the admirable genius who for a while was numbered among them should have treated their institution mainly as a perch for starting upon an imaginative flight. But when all is said about a certain want of substance and cohesion in the latter portions of _The Blithedale Romance_, the book is still a delightful and beautiful one. Zenobia and Hollingsworth live in the memory, and even Priscilla and Coverdale, who linger there less importunately, have a great deal that touches us and that we believe in. I said just now that Priscilla was infelicitous; but immediately afterwards I open the volume at a page in which the author describes some of the out-of-door amusements at Blithedale, and speaks of a foot-race across the grass, in which some of the slim young girls of the society joined. "Priscilla's peculiar charm in a foot-race was the weakness and irregularity with which she ran. Growing up without exercise, except to her poor little fingers, she had never yet acquired the perfect use of her legs. Setting buoyantly forth therefore, as if no rival less swift than Atalanta could compete with her, she ran falteringly, and often tumbled on the grass. Such an incident--though it seems too slight to think of--was a thing to laugh at, but which brought the water into one's eyes, and lingered in the memory after far greater joys and sorrows were wept out of it, as antiquated trash. Priscilla's life, as I beheld it, was full of trifles that affected me in just this way." That seems to me exquisite, and the book is full of touches as deep and delicate. After writing it, Hawthorne went back to live in Concord, where he had bought a small house in which, apparently, he expected to spend a large portion of his future. This was in fact the dwelling in which he passed that part of the rest of his days that he spent in his own country. He established himself there before going to Europe, in 1853, and he returned to the Wayside, as he called his house, on coming back to the United States seven years later. Though he actually occupied the place no long time, he had made it his property, and it was more his own home than any of his numerous provisional abodes. I may therefore quote a little account of the house which he wrote to a distinguished friend, Mr. George Curtis. "As for my old house, you will understand it better after spending a day or two in it. Before Mr. Alcott took it in hand, it was a mean-looking affair, with two peaked gables; no suggestiveness about it, and no venerableness, although from the style of its construction it seems to have survived beyond its first century. He added a porch in front, and a central peak, and a piazza at each end, and painted it a rusty olive hue, and invested the whole with a modest picturesqueness; all which improvements, together with its situation at the foot of a wooded hill, make it a place that one notices and remembers for a few moments after passing. Mr. Alcott expended a good deal of taste and some money (to no great purpose) in forming the hillside behind the house into terraces, and building arbours and summer-houses of rough stems and branches and trees, on a system of his own. They must have been very pretty in their day, and are so still, although much decayed, and shattered more and more by every breeze that blows. The hillside is covered chiefly with locust trees, which come into luxuriant blossom in the month of June, and look and smell very sweetly, intermixed with a few young elms, and white pines and infant oaks--the whole forming rather a thicket than a wood. Nevertheless, there is some very good shade to be found there. I spend delectable hours there in the hottest part of the day, stretched out at my lazy length, with a book in my hand, or some unwritten book in my thoughts. There is almost always a breeze stirring along the sides or brow of the hill. From the hill-top there is a good view along the extensive level surfaces and gentle hilly outlines, covered with wood, that characterise the scenery of Concord.... I know nothing of the history of the house except Thoreau's telling me that it was inhabited, a generation or two ago, by a man who believed he should never die. I believe, however, he is dead; at least, I hope so; else he may probably reappear and dispute my title to his residence." As Mr. Lathrop points out, this allusion to a man who believed he should never die is "the first intimation of the story of _Septimius Felton_." The scenery of that romance, he adds, "was evidently taken from the Wayside and its hill." _Septimius Felton_ is in fact a young man who, at the time of the war of the Revolution, lives in the village of Concord, on the Boston road, at the base of a woody hill which rises abruptly behind his house, and of which the level summit supplies him with a promenade continually mentioned in the course of the tale. Hawthorne used to exercise himself upon this picturesque eminence, and, as he conceived the brooding Septimius to have done before him, to betake himself thither when he found the limits of his dwelling too narrow. But he had an advantage which his imaginary hero lacked; he erected a tower as an adjunct to the house, and it was a jocular tradition among his neighbours, in allusion to his attributive tendency to evade rather than hasten the coming guest, that he used to ascend this structure and scan the road for provocations to retreat. In so far, however, as Hawthorne suffered the penalties of celebrity at the hands of intrusive fellow-citizens, he was soon to escape from this honourable incommodity. On the 4th of March, 1853, his old college-mate and intimate friend, Franklin Pierce, was installed as President of the United States. He had been the candidate of the Democratic party, and all good Democrats, accordingly, in conformity to the beautiful and rational system under which the affairs of the great Republic were carried on, begun to open their windows to the golden sunshine of Presidential patronage. When General Pierce was put forward by the Democrats, Hawthorne felt a perfectly loyal and natural desire that his good friend should be exalted to so brilliant a position, and he did what was in him to further the good cause, by writing a little book about its hero. His _Life of Franklin Pierce_ belongs to that class of literature which is known as the "campaign biography," and which consists of an attempt, more or less successful, to persuade the many-headed monster of universal suffrage that the gentleman on whose behalf it is addressed is a paragon of wisdom and virtue. Of Hawthorne's little book there is nothing particular to say, save that it is in very good taste, that he is a very fairly ingenious advocate, and that if he claimed for the future President qualities which rather faded in the bright light of a high office, this defect of proportion was essential to his undertaking. He dwelt chiefly upon General Pierce's exploits in the war with Mexico (before that, his record, as they say in America, had been mainly that of a successful country lawyer), and exercised his descriptive powers so far as was possible in describing the advance of the United States troops from Vera Cruz to the city of the Montezumas. The mouthpieces of the Whig party spared him, I believe, no reprobation for "prostituting" his exquisite genius; but I fail to see anything reprehensible in Hawthorne's lending his old friend the assistance of his graceful quill. He wished him to be President--he held afterwards that he filled the office with admirable dignity and wisdom--and as the only thing he could do was to write, he fell to work and wrote for him. Hawthorne was a good lover and a very sufficient partisan, and I suspect that if Franklin Pierce had been made even less of the stuff of a statesman, he would still have found in the force of old associations an injunction to hail him as a ruler. Our hero was an American of the earlier and simpler type--the type of which it is doubtless premature to say that it has wholly passed away, but of which it may at least be said that the circumstances that produced it have been greatly modified. The generation to which he belonged, that generation which grew up with the century, witnessed during a period of fifty years the immense, uninterrupted material development of the young Republic; and when one thinks of the scale on which it took place, of the prosperity that walked in its train and waited on its course, of the hopes it fostered and the blessings it conferred, of the broad morning sunshine, in a word, in which it all went forward, there seems to be little room for surprise that it should have implanted a kind of superstitious faith in the grandeur of the country, its duration, its immunity from the usual troubles of earthly empires. This faith was a simple and uncritical one, enlivened with an element of genial optimism, in the light of which it appeared that the great American state was not as other human institutions are, that a special Providence watched over it, that it would go on joyously for ever, and that a country whose vast and blooming bosom offered a refuge to the strugglers and seekers of all the rest of the world, must come off easily, in the battle of the ages. From this conception of the American future the sense of its having problems to solve was blissfully absent; there were no difficulties in the programme, no looming complications, no rocks ahead. The indefinite multiplication of the population, and its enjoyment of the benefits of a common-school education and of unusual facilities for making an income--this was the form in which, on the whole, the future most vividly presented itself, and in which the greatness of the country was to be recognised of men. There was indeed a faint shadow in the picture--the shadow projected by the "peculiar institution" of the Southern States; but it was far from sufficient to darken the rosy vision of most good Americans, and above all, of most good Democrats. Hawthorne alludes to it in a passage of his life of Pierce, which I will quote not only as a hint of the trouble that was in store for a cheerful race of men, but as an example of his own easy-going political attitude. "It was while in the lower house of Congress that Franklin Pierce took that stand on the Slavery question from which he has never since swerved by a hair's breadth. He fully recognised by his votes and his voice, the rights pledged to the South by the Constitution. This, at the period when he declared himself, was an easy thing to do. But when it became more difficult, when the first imperceptible murmur of agitation had grown almost to a convulsion, his course was still the same. Nor did he ever shun the obloquy that sometimes threatened to pursue the Northern man who dared to love that great and sacred reality--his whole united country--better than the mistiness of a philanthropic theory." This last invidious allusion is to the disposition, not infrequent at the North, but by no means general, to set a decisive limit to further legislation in favour of the cherished idiosyncrasy of the other half of the country. Hawthorne takes the license of a sympathetic biographer in speaking of his hero's having incurred obloquy by his conservative attitude on the question of Slavery. The only class in the American world that suffered in the smallest degree, at this time, from social persecution, was the little band of Northern Abolitionists, who were as unfashionable as they were indiscreet--which is saying much. Like most of his fellow-countrymen, Hawthorne had no idea that the respectable institution which he contemplated in impressive contrast to humanitarian "mistiness," was presently to cost the nation four long years of bloodshed and misery, and a social revolution as complete as any the world has seen. When this event occurred, he was therefore proportionately horrified and depressed by it; it cut from beneath his feet the familiar ground which had long felt so firm, substituting a heaving and quaking medium in which his spirit found no rest. Such was the bewildered sensation of that earlier and simpler generation of which I have spoken; their illusions were rudely dispelled, and they saw the best of all possible republics given over to fratricidal carnage. This affair had no place in their scheme, and nothing was left for them but to hang their heads and close their eyes. The subsidence of that great convulsion has left a different tone from the tone it found, and one may say that the Civil War marks an era in the history of the American mind. It introduced into the national consciousness a certain sense of proportion and relation, of the world being a more complicated place than it had hitherto seemed, the future more treacherous, success more difficult. At the rate at which things are going, it is obvious that good Americana will be more numerous than ever; but the good American, in days to come, will be a more critical person than his complacent and confident grandfather. He has eaten of the tree of knowledge. He will not, I think, be a sceptic, and still less, of course, a cynic; but he will be, without discredit to his well-known capacity for action, an observer. He will remember that the ways of the Lord are inscrutable, and that this is a world in which everything happens; and eventualities, as the late Emperor of the French used to say, will not find him intellectually unprepared. The good American of which Hawthorne was so admirable a specimen was not critical, and it was perhaps for this reason that Franklin Pierce seemed to him a very proper President. The least that General Pierce could do in exchange for so liberal a confidence was to offer his old friend one of the numerous places in his gift. Hawthorne had a great desire to go abroad and see something of the world, so that a consulate seemed the proper thing. He never stirred in the matter himself, but his friends strongly urged that something should be done; and when he accepted the post of consul at Liverpool there was not a word of reasonable criticism to be offered on the matter. If General Pierce, who was before all things good-natured and obliging, had been guilty of no greater indiscretion than to confer this modest distinction upon the most honourable and discreet of men of letters, he would have made a more brilliant mark in the annals of American statesmanship. Liverpool had not been immediately selected, and Hawthorne had written to his friend and publisher, Mr. Fields, with some humorous vagueness of allusion to his probable expatriation. "Do make some inquiries about Portugal; as, for instance, in what part of the world it lies, and whether it is an empire, a kingdom, or a republic. Also, and more particularly, the expenses of living there, and whether the Minister would be likely to be much pestered with his own countrymen. Also, any other information about foreign countries would be acceptable to an inquiring mind." It would seem from this that there had been a question of offering him a small diplomatic post; but the emoluments of the place were justly taken into account, and it is to be supposed that those of the consulate at Liverpool were at least as great as the salary of the American representative at Lisbon. Unfortunately, just after Hawthorne had taken possession of the former post, the salary attached to it was reduced by Congress, in an economical hour, to less than half the sum enjoyed by his predecessors. It was fixed at 7,500 dollars (£1,500); but the consular fees, which were often copious, were an added resource. At midsummer then, in 1853, Hawthorne was established in England. * * * * * CHAPTER VI. ENGLAND AND ITALY. Hawthorne was close upon fifty years of age when he came to Europe--a fact that should be remembered when those impressions which he recorded in five substantial volumes (exclusive of the novel written in Italy), occasionally affect us by the rigidity of their point of view. His Note-Books, kept during his residence in England, his two winters in Rome, his summer in Florence, were published after his death; his impressions of England, sifted, revised, and addressed directly to the public, he gave to the world shortly before this event. The tone of his European Diaries is often so fresh and unsophisticated that we find ourselves thinking of the writer as a young man, and it is only a certain final sense of something reflective and a trifle melancholy that reminds us that the simplicity which is on the whole the leading characteristic of their pages, is, though the simplicity of inexperience, not that of youth. When I say inexperience, I mean that Hawthorne's experience had been narrow. His fifty years had been spent, for much the larger part, in small American towns--Salem, the Boston of forty years ago, Concord, Lenox, West Newton--and he had led exclusively what one may call a village-life. This is evident, not at all directly and superficially, but by implication and between the lines, in his desultory history of his foreign years. In other words, and to call things by their names, he was exquisitely and consistently provincial. I suggest this fact not in the least in condemnation, but, on the contrary, in support of an appreciative view of him. I know nothing more remarkable, more touching, than the sight of this odd, youthful--elderly mind, contending so late in the day with new opportunities for learning old things, and on the whole profiting by them so freely and gracefully. The Note-Books are provincial, and so, in a greatly modified degree, are the sketches of England, in _Our Old Home_; but the beauty and delicacy of this latter work are so interwoven with the author's air of being remotely outside of everything he describes, that they count for more, seem more themselves, and finally give the whole thing the appearance of a triumph, not of initiation, but of the provincial point of view itself. I shall not attempt to relate in detail the incidents of his residence in England. He appears to have enjoyed it greatly, in spite of the deficiency of charm in the place to which his duties chiefly confined him. His confinement, however, was not unbroken, and his published journals consist largely of minute accounts of little journeys and wanderings, with his wife and his three children, through the rest of the country; together with much mention of numerous visits to London, a city for whose dusky immensity and multitudinous interest he professed the highest relish. His Note-Books are of the same cast as the two volumes of his American Diaries, of which, I have given some account--chiefly occupied with external matters, with the accidents of daily life, with observations made during the long walks (often with his son), which formed his most valued pastime. His office, moreover, though Liverpool was not a delectable home, furnished him with entertainment as well as occupation, and it may almost be said that during these years he saw more of his fellow-countrymen, in the shape of odd wanderers, petitioners, and inquirers of every kind, than he had ever done in his native land. The paper entitled "Consular Experiences," in _Our Old Home_, is an admirable recital of these observations, and a proof that the novelist might have found much material in the opportunities of the consul. On his return to America, in 1860, he drew from his journal a number of pages relating to his observations in England, re-wrote them (with, I should suppose, a good deal of care), and converted them into articles which he published in a magazine. These chapters were afterwards collected, and _Our Old Home_ (a rather infelicitous title), was issued in 1863. I prefer to speak of the book now, however, rather than in touching upon the closing years of his life, for it is a kind of deliberate _résumé_ of his impressions of the land of his ancestors. "It is not a good or a weighty book," he wrote to his publisher, who had sent him some reviews of it, "nor does it deserve any great amount of praise or censure. I don't care about seeing any more notices of it." Hawthorne's appreciation of his own productions was always extremely just; he had a sense of the relations of things, which some of his admirers have not thought it well to cultivate; and he never exaggerated his own importance as a writer. _Our Old Home_ is not a weighty book; it is decidedly a light one. But when he says it is not a good one, I hardly know what he means, and his modesty at this point is in excess of his discretion. Whether good or not, _Our Old Home_ is charming--it is most delectable reading. The execution is singularly perfect and ripe; of all his productions it seems to be the best written. The touch, as musicians say, is admirable; the lightness, the fineness, the felicity of characterisation and description, belong to a man who has the advantage of feeling delicately. His judgment is by no means always sound; it often rests on too narrow an observation. But his perception is of the keenest, and though it is frequently partial, incomplete, it is excellent as far as it goes. The book gave but limited satisfaction, I believe, in England, and I am not sure that the failure to enjoy certain manifestations of its sportive irony, has not chilled the appreciation of its singular grace. That English readers, on the whole, should have felt that Hawthorne did the national mind and manners but partial justice, is, I think, conceivable; at the same time that it seems to me remarkable that the tender side of the book, as I may call it, should not have carried it off better. It abounds in passages more delicately appreciative than can easily be found elsewhere, and it contains more charming and affectionate things than, I should suppose, had ever before been written about a country not the writer's own. To say that it is an immeasurably more exquisite and sympathetic work than any of the numerous persons who have related their misadventures in the United States have seen fit to devote to that country, is to say but little, and I imagine that Hawthorne had in mind the array of English voyagers--Mrs. Trollope, Dickens, Marryat, Basil Hall, Miss Martineau, Mr. Grattan--when he reflected that everything is relative and that, as such books go, his own little volume observed the amenities of criticism. He certainly had it in mind when he wrote the phrase in his preface relating to the impression the book might make in England. "Not an Englishman of them all ever spared America for courtesy's sake or kindness; nor, in my opinion, would it contribute in the least to any mutual advantage and comfort if we were to besmear each other all over with butter and honey." I am far from intending to intimate that the vulgar instinct of recrimination had anything to do with the restrictive passages of _Our Old Home_; I mean simply that the author had a prevision that his collection of sketches would in some particulars fail to please his English friends. He professed, after the event, to have discovered that the English are sensitive, and as they say of the Americans, for whose advantage I believe the term was invented; thin-skinned. "The English critics," he wrote to his publisher, "seem to think me very bitter against their countrymen, and it is perhaps natural that they should, because their self-conceit can accept nothing short of indiscriminate adulation; but I really think that Americans have much more cause than they to complain of me. Looking over the volume I am rather surprised to find that whenever I draw a comparison between the two people, I almost invariably cast the balance against ourselves." And he writes at another time:--"I received several private letters and printed notices of _Our Old Home_ from England. It is laughable to see the innocent wonder with which they regard my criticisms, accounting for them by jaundice, insanity, jealousy, hatred, on my part, and never admitting the least suspicion that there may be a particle of truth in them. The monstrosity of their self-conceit is such that anything short of unlimited admiration impresses them as malicious caricature. But they do me great injustice in supposing that I hate them. I would as soon hate my own people." The idea of his hating the English was of course too puerile for discussion; and the book, as I have said, is full of a rich appreciation of the finest characteristics of the country. But it has a serious defect--a defect which impairs its value, though it helps to give consistency to such an image of Hawthorne's personal nature as we may by this time have been able to form. It is the work of an outsider, of a stranger, of a man who remains to the end a mere spectator (something less even than an observer), and always lacks the final initiation into the manners and nature of a people of whom it may most be said, among all the people of the earth, that to know them is to make discoveries. Hawthorne freely confesses to this constant exteriority, and appears to have been perfectly conscious of it. "I remember," he writes in the sketch of "A London Suburb," in _Our Old Home_, "I remember to this day the dreary feeling with which I sat by our first English fireside and watched the chill and rainy twilight of an autumn day darkening down upon the garden, while the preceding occupant of the house (evidently a most unamiable personage in his lifetime), scowled inhospitably from above the mantel-piece, as if indignant that an American should try to make himself at home there. Possibly it may appease his sulky shade to know that I quitted his abode as much a stranger as I entered it." The same note is struck in an entry in his journal, of the date of October 6th, 1854. "The people, for several days, have been in the utmost anxiety, and latterly in the highest exultation, about Sebastopol--and all England, and Europe to boot, have been fooled by the belief that it had fallen. This, however, now turns out to be incorrect; and the public visage is somewhat grim in consequence. I am glad of it. In spite of his actual sympathies, it is impossible for an American to be otherwise than glad. Success makes an Englishman intolerable, and already, on the mistaken idea that the way was open to a prosperous conclusion of the war, the _Times_ had begun to throw out menaces against America. I shall never love England till she sues to us for help, and, in the meantime, the fewer triumphs she obtains, the better for all parties. An Englishman in adversity is a very respectable character; he does not lose his dignity, but merely comes to a proper conception of himself.... I seem to myself like a spy or traitor when I meet their eyes, and am conscious that I neither hope nor fear in sympathy with them, although they look at me in full confidence of sympathy. Their heart 'knoweth its own bitterness,' and as for me, being a stranger and an alien, I 'intermeddle not with their joy.'" This seems to me to express very well the weak side of Hawthorne's work--his constant mistrust and suspicion of the society that surrounded him, his exaggerated, painful, morbid national consciousness. It is, I think, an indisputable fact that Americans are, as Americans, the most self-conscious people in the world, and the most addicted to the belief that the other nations of the earth are in a conspiracy to undervalue them. They are conscious of being the youngest of the great nations, of not being of the European family, of being placed on the circumference of the circle of civilisation rather than at the centre, of the experimental element not having as yet entirely dropped out of their great political undertaking. The sense of this relativity, in a word, replaces that quiet and comfortable sense of the absolute, as regards its own position in the world, which reigns supreme in the British and in the Gallic genius. Few persons, I think, can have mingled much with Americans in Europe without having made this reflection, and it is in England that their habit of looking askance at foreign institutions--of keeping one eye, as it were, on the American personality, while with the other they contemplate these objects--is most to be observed. Add to this that Hawthorne came to England late in life, when his habits, his tastes, his opinions, were already formed, that he was inclined to look at things in silence and brood over them gently, rather than talk about them, discuss them, grow acquainted with them by action; and it will be possible to form an idea of our writer's detached and critical attitude in the country in which it is easiest, thanks to its aristocratic constitution, to the absence of any considerable public fund of entertainment and diversion, to the degree in which the inexhaustible beauty and interest of the place are private property, demanding constantly a special introduction--in the country in which, I say, it is easiest for a stranger to remain a stranger. For a stranger to cease to be a stranger he must stand ready, as the French say, to pay with his person; and this was an obligation that Hawthorne was indisposed to incur. Our sense, as we read, that his reflections are those of a shy and susceptible man, with nothing at stake, mentally, in his appreciation of the country, is therefore a drawback to our confidence; but it is not a drawback sufficient to make it of no importance that he is at the same time singularly intelligent and discriminating, with a faculty of feeling delicately and justly, which constitutes in itself an illumination. There is a passage in the sketch entitled _About Warwick_ which is a very good instance of what was probably his usual state of mind. He is speaking of the aspect of the High Street of the town. "The street is an emblem of England itself. What seems new in it is chiefly a skilful and fortunate adaptation of what such a people as ourselves would destroy. The new things are based and supported on sturdy old things, and derive a massive strength from their deep and immemorial foundations, though with such limitations and impediments as only an Englishman could endure. But he likes to feel the weight of all the past upon his back; and moreover the antiquity that overburdens him has taken root in his being, and has grown to be rather a hump than a pack, so that there is no getting rid of it without tearing his whole structure to pieces. In my judgment, as he appears to be sufficiently comfortable under the mouldy accretion, he had better stumble on with it as long as he can. He presents a spectacle which is by no means without its charm for a disinterested and unincumbered observer." There is all Hawthorne, with his enjoyment of the picturesque, his relish of chiaroscuro, of local colour, of the deposit of time, and his still greater enjoyment of his own dissociation from these things, his "disinterested and unincumbered" condition. His want of incumbrances may seem at times to give him a somewhat naked and attenuated appearance, but on the whole he carries it off very well. I have said that _Our Old Home_ contains much of his best writing, and on turning over the book at hazard, I am struck with his frequent felicity of phrase. At every step there is something one would like to quote--something excellently well said. These things are often of the lighter sort, but Hawthorne's charming diction lingers in the memory--almost in the ear. I have always remembered a certain admirable characterisation of Doctor Johnson, in the account of the writer's visit to Lichfield--and I will preface it by a paragraph almost as good, commemorating the charms of the hotel in that interesting town. "At any rate I had the great, dull, dingy, and dreary coffee-room, with its heavy old mahogany chairs and tables, all to myself, and not a soul to exchange a word with except the waiter, who, like most of his class in England, had evidently left his conversational abilities uncultivated. No former practice of solitary living, nor habits of reticence, nor well-tested self-dependence for occupation of mind and amusement, can quite avail, as I now proved, to dissipate the ponderous gloom of an English coffee-room under such circumstances as these, with no book at hand save the county directory, nor any newspaper but a torn local journal of five days ago. So I buried myself, betimes, in a huge heap of ancient feathers (there is no other kind of bed in these old inns), let my head sink into an unsubstantial pillow, and slept a stifled sleep, compounded of the night-troubles of all my predecessors in that same unrestful couch. And when I awoke, the odour of a bygone century was in my nostrils--a faint, elusive smell, of which I never had any conception before crossing the Atlantic." The whole chapter entitled "Lichfield and Uttoxeter" is a sort of graceful tribute to Samuel Johnson, who certainly has nowhere else been more tenderly spoken of. "Beyond all question I might have had a wiser friend than he. The atmosphere in which alone he breathed was dense; his awful dread of death showed how much muddy imperfection was to be cleansed out of him, before he could be capable of spiritual existence; he meddled only with the surface of life, and never cared to penetrate further than to ploughshare depth; his very sense and sagacity were but a one-eyed clear-sightedness. I laughed at him, sometimes standing beside his knee. And yet, considering that my native propensities were toward Fairy Land, and also how much yeast is generally mixed up with the mental sustenance of a New Englander, it may not have been altogether amiss, in those childish and boyish days, to keep pace with this heavy-footed traveller and feed on the gross diet that he carried in his knapsack. It is wholesome food even now! And then, how English! Many of the latent sympathies that enabled me to enjoy the Old Country so well, and that so readily amalgamated themselves with the American ideas that seemed most adverse to them, may have been derived from, or fostered and kept alive by, the great English moralist. Never was a descriptive epithet more nicely appropriate than that! Doctor Johnson's morality was as English an article as a beef-steak." And for mere beauty of expression I cannot forbear quoting this passage about the days in a fine English summer:-- "For each day seemed endless, though never wearisome. As far as your actual experience is concerned, the English summer day has positively no beginning and no end. When you awake, at any reasonable hour, the sun is already shining through the curtains; you live through unnumbered hours of Sabbath quietude, with a calm variety of incident softly etched upon their tranquil lapse; and at length you become conscious that it is bedtime again, while there is still enough daylight in the sky to make the pages of your book distinctly legible. Night, if there be any such season, hangs down a transparent veil through which the bygone day beholds its successor; or if not quite true of the latitude of London, it may be soberly affirmed of the more northern parts of the island that To-morrow is born before its Yesterday is dead. They exist together in the golden twilight, where the decrepit old day dimly discerns the face of the ominous infant; and you, though a mere mortal, may simultaneously touch them both, with one finger of recollection and another of prophecy." The Note-Books, as I have said, deal chiefly with, the superficial aspect of English life, and describe the material objects with which the author was surrounded. They often describe them admirably, and the rural beauty of the country has never been more happily expressed. But there are inevitably a great many reflections and incidental judgments, characterisations of people he met, fragments of psychology and social criticism, and it is here that Hawthorne's mixture of subtlety and simplicity, his interfusion of genius with what I have ventured to call the provincial quality, is most apparent. To an American reader this later quality, which is never grossly manifested, but pervades the Journals like a vague natural perfume, an odour of purity and kindness and integrity, must always, for a reason that I will touch upon, have a considerable charm; and such a reader will accordingly take an even greater satisfaction in the Diaries kept during the two years Hawthorne spent in Italy; for in these volumes the element I speak of is especially striking. He resigned his consulate at Liverpool towards the close of 1857--whether because he was weary of his manner of life there and of the place itself, as may well have been, or because he wished to anticipate supersession by the new government (Mr. Buchanan's) which was just establishing itself at Washington, is not apparent from the slender sources of information from which these pages have been compiled. In the month of January of the following year he betook himself with his family to the Continent, and, as promptly as possible, made the best of his way to Rome. He spent the remainder of the winter and the spring there, and then went to Florence for the summer and autumn; after which he returned to Rome and passed a second season. His Italian Note-Books are very pleasant reading, but they are of less interest than the others, for his contact with the life of the country, its people and its manners, was simply that of the ordinary tourist--which amounts to saying that it was extremely superficial. He appears to have suffered a great deal of discomfort and depression in Rome, and not to have been on the whole in the best mood for enjoying the place and its resources. That he did, at one time and another, enjoy these things keenly is proved by his beautiful romance, _Transformation_, which could never have been written by a man who had not had many hours of exquisite appreciation of the lovely land of Italy. But he took It hard, as it were, and suffered himself to be painfully discomposed by the usual accidents of Italian life, as foreigners learn to know it. His future was again uncertain, and during his second winter in Rome he was in danger of losing his elder daughter by a malady which he speaks of as a trouble "that pierced to my very vitals." I may mention, with regard to this painful episode, that Franklin Pierce, whose presidential days were over, and who, like other ex-presidents, was travelling in Europe, came to Rome at the time, and that the Note-Books contain some singularly beautiful and touching allusions to his old friend's gratitude for his sympathy, and enjoyment of his society. The sentiment of friendship has on the whole been so much less commemorated in literature than might have been expected from the place it is supposed to hold in life, that there is always something striking in any frank and ardent expression of it. It occupied, in so far as Pierce was the object of it, a large place in Hawthorne's mind, and it is impossible not to feel the manly tenderness of such lines as these:-- "I have found him here in Rome, the whole of my early friend, and even better than I used to know him; a heart as true and affectionate, a mind much widened and deepened by the experience of life. We hold just the same relation to one another as of yore, and we have passed all the turning-off places, and may hope to go on together, still the same dear friends, as long as we live. I do not love him one whit the less for having been President, nor for having done me the greatest good in his power; a fact that speaks eloquently in his favour, and perhaps says a little for myself. If he had been merely a benefactor, perhaps I might not have borne it so well; but each did his best for the other, as friend for friend." The Note-Books are chiefly taken up with descriptions of the regular sights and "objects of interest," which we often feel to be rather perfunctory and a little in the style of the traditional tourist's diary. They abound in charming touches, and every reader of _Transformation_ will remember the delightful colouring of the numerous pages in that novel, which are devoted to the pictorial aspects of Rome. But we are unable to rid ourselves of the impression that Hawthorne was a good deal bored by the importunity of Italian art, for which his taste, naturally not keen, had never been cultivated. Occasionally, indeed, he breaks out into explicit sighs and groans, and frankly declares that he washes his hands of it. Already, in England, he had made the discovery that he could, easily feel overdosed with such things. "Yesterday," he wrote in 1856, "I went out at about twelve and visited the British Museum; an exceedingly tiresome affair. It quite crushes a person to see so much at once, and I wandered from hall to hall with a weary and heavy heart, wishing (Heaven forgive me!) that the Elgin marbles and the frieze of the Parthenon were all burnt into lime, and that the granite Egyptian statues were hewn and squared into building stones." The plastic sense was not strong in Hawthorne; there can be no better proof of it than his curious aversion to the representation of the nude in sculpture. This aversion was deep-seated; he constantly returns to it, exclaiming upon the incongruity of modern artists making naked figures. He apparently quite failed to see that nudity is not an incident, or accident, of sculpture, but its very essence and principle; and his jealousy of undressed images strikes the reader as a strange, vague, long-dormant heritage of his straight-laced Puritan ancestry. Whenever he talks of statues he makes a great point of the smoothness and whiteness of the marble--speaks of the surface of the marble as if it were half the beauty of the image; and when he discourses of pictures, one feels that the brightness or dinginess of the frame is an essential part of his impression of the work--as he indeed somewhere distinctly affirms. Like a good American, he took more pleasure in the productions of Mr. Thompson and Mr. Brown, Mr. Powers and Mr. Hart, American artists who were plying their trade in Italy, than in the works which adorned the ancient museums of the country. He suffered greatly from the cold, and found little charm in the climate, and during the weeks of winter that followed his arrival in Rome, he sat shivering by his fire and wondering why he had come to such a land of misery. Before he left Italy he wrote to his publisher--"I bitterly detest Rome, and shall rejoice to bid it farewell for ever; and I fully acquiesce in all the mischief and ruin that has happened to it, from Nero's conflagration downward. In fact, I wish the very site had been obliterated before I ever saw it." Hawthorne presents himself to the reader of these pages as the last of the old-fashioned Americans--and this is the interest which I just now said that his compatriots would find in his very limitations. I do not mean by this that there are not still many of his fellow-countrymen (as there are many natives of every land under the sun,) who are more susceptible of being irritated than of being soothed by the influences of the Eternal City. What I mean is that an American of equal value with Hawthorne, an American of equal genius, imagination, and, as our forefathers said, sensibility, would at present inevitably accommodate himself more easily to the idiosyncrasies of foreign lands. An American as cultivated as Hawthorne, is now almost inevitably more cultivated, and, as a matter of course, more Europeanised in advance, more cosmopolitan. It is very possible that in becoming so, he has lost something of his occidental savour, the quality which excites the goodwill of the American reader of our author's Journals for the dislocated, depressed, even slightly bewildered diarist. Absolutely the last of the earlier race of Americans Hawthorne was, fortunately, probably far from being. But I think of him as the last specimen of the more primitive type of men of letters; and when it comes to measuring what he succeeded in being, in his unadulterated form, against what he failed of being, the positive side of the image quite extinguishes the negative. I must be on my guard, however, against incurring the charge of cherishing a national consciousness as acute as I have ventured to pronounce his own. Out of his mingled sensations, his pleasure and his weariness, his discomforts and his reveries, there sprang another beautiful work. During the summer of 1858, he hired a picturesque old villa on the hill of Bellosguardo, near Florence, a curious structure with a crenelated tower, which, after having in the course of its career suffered many vicissitudes and played many parts, now finds its most vivid identity in being pointed out to strangers as the sometime residence of the celebrated American romancer. Hawthorne took a fancy to the place, as well he might, for it is one of the loveliest spots on earth, and the great view that stretched itself before him contains every element of beauty. Florence lay at his feet with her memories and treasures; the olive-covered hills bloomed around him, studded with villas as picturesque as his own; the Apennines, perfect in form and colour, disposed themselves opposite, and in the distance, along its fertile valley, the Arno wandered to Pisa and the sea. Soon after coming hither he wrote to a friend in a strain of high satisfaction:-- "It is pleasant to feel at last that I am really away from America--a satisfaction that I never really enjoyed as long as I stayed in Liverpool, where it seemed to be that the quintessence of nasal and hand-shaking Yankeedom was gradually filtered and sublimated through my consulate, on the way outward and homeward. I first got acquainted with my own countrymen there. At Rome too it was not much better. But here in Florence, and in the summer-time, and in this secluded villa, I have escaped out of all my old tracks, and am really remote. I like my present residence immensely. The house stands on a hill, overlooking Florence, and is big enough to quarter a regiment, insomuch that each member of the family, including servants, has a separate suite of apartments, and there are vast wildernesses of upper rooms into which we have never yet sent exploring expeditions. At one end of the house there is a moss-grown tower, haunted by owls and by the ghost of a monk who was confined there in the thirteenth century, previous to being burnt at the stake in the principal square of Florence. I hire this villa, tower and all, at twenty-eight dollars a month; but I mean to take it away bodily and clap it into a romance, which I have in my head, ready to be written out." This romance was _Transformation_, which he wrote out during the following winter in Rome, and re-wrote during the several months that he spent in England, chiefly at Leamington, before returning to America. The Villa Montauto figures, in fact, in this tale as the castle of Monte-Beni, the patrimonial dwelling of the hero. "I take some credit to myself," he wrote to the same friend, on returning to Rome, "for having sternly shut myself up for an hour or two every day, and come to close grips with a romance which I have been trying to tear out of my mind." And later in the same winter he says--"I shall go home, I fear, with a heavy heart, not expecting to be very well contented there.... If I were but a hundred times richer than I am, how very comfortable I could be! I consider it a great piece of good fortune that I have had experience of the discomforts and miseries of Italy, and did not go directly home from England. Anything will seem like a Paradise after a Roman winter." But he got away at last, late in the spring, carrying his novel with him, and the book was published, after, as I say, he had worked it over, mainly during some weeks that he passed at the little watering-place of Redcar, on the Yorkshire coast, in February of the following year. It was issued primarily in England; the American edition immediately followed. It is an odd fact that in the two countries the book came out under different titles. The title that the author had bestowed upon it did not satisfy the English publishers, who requested him to provide it with another; so that it is only in America that the work bears the name of _The Marble Fawn_. Hawthorne's choice of this appellation is, by the way, rather singular, for it completely fails to characterise the story, the subject of which is the living faun, the faun of flesh and blood, the unfortunate Donatello. His marble counterpart is mentioned only in the opening chapter. On the other hand Hawthorne complained that _Transformation_ "gives one the idea of Harlequin in a pantomime." Under either name, however, the book was a great success, and it has probably become the most popular of Hawthorne's four novels. It is part of the intellectual equipment of the Anglo-Saxon visitor to Rome, and is read by every English-speaking traveller who arrives there, who has been there, or who expects to go. It has a great deal of beauty, of interest and grace; but it has to my sense a slighter value than its companions, and I am far from regarding it as the masterpiece of the author, a position to which we sometimes hear it assigned. The subject is admirable, and so are many of the details; but the whole thing is less simple and complete than either of the three tales of American life, and Hawthorne forfeited a precious advantage in ceasing to tread his native soil. Half the virtue of _The Scarlet Letter_ and _The House of the Seven Gables_ is in their local quality; they are impregnated with the New England air. It is very true that Hawthorne had no pretension to pourtray actualities and to cultivate that literal exactitude which is now the fashion. Had this been the case, he would probably have made a still graver mistake in transporting the scene of his story to a country which he knew only superficially. His tales all go on more or less "in the vague," as the French say, and of course the vague may as well be placed in Tuscany as in Massachusetts. It may also very well be urged in Hawthorne's favour here, that in _Transformation_ he has attempted to deal with actualities more than he did in either of his earlier novels. He has described the streets and monuments of Rome with a closeness which forms no part of his reference to those of Boston and Salem. But for all this he incurs that penalty of seeming factitious and unauthoritative, which is always the result of an artist's attempt to project himself into an atmosphere in which he has not a transmitted and inherited property. An English or a German writer (I put poets aside) may love Italy well enough, and know her well enough, to write delightful fictions about her; the thing has often been done. But the productions in question will, as novels, always have about them something second-rate and imperfect. There is in _Transformation_ enough beautiful perception of the interesting character of Rome, enough rich and eloquent expression of it, to save the book, if the book could be saved; but the style, what the French call the _genre_, is an inferior one, and the thing remains a charming romance with intrinsic weaknesses. Allowing for this, however, some of the finest pages in all Hawthorne are to be found in it. The subject, as I have said, is a particularly happy one, and there is a great deal of interest in the simple combination and opposition of the four actors. It is noticeable that in spite of the considerable length of the story, there are no accessory figures; Donatello and Miriam, Kenyon and Hilda, exclusively occupy the scene. This is the more noticeable as the scene is very large, and the great Roman background is constantly presented to us. The relations of these four people are full of that moral picturesqueness which Hawthorne was always looking for; he found it in perfection in the history of Donatello. As I have said, the novel is the most popular of his works, and every one will remember the figure of the simple, joyous, sensuous young Italian, who is not so much a man as a child, and not so much a child as a charming, innocent animal, and how he is brought to self-knowledge and to a miserable conscious manhood, by the commission of a crime. Donatello is rather vague and impalpable; he says too little in the book, shows himself too little, and falls short, I think, of being a creation. But he is enough of a creation to make us enter into the situation, and the whole history of his rise, or fall, whichever one chooses to call it--his tasting of the tree of knowledge and finding existence complicated with a regret--is unfolded with a thousand ingenious and exquisite touches. Of course, to make the interest complete, there is a woman in the affair, and Hawthorne has done few things more beautiful than the picture of the unequal complicity of guilt between his immature and dimly-puzzled hero, with his clinging, unquestioning, unexacting devotion, and the dark, powerful, more widely-seeing feminine nature of Miriam. Deeply touching is the representation of the manner in which these two essentially different persons--the woman intelligent, passionate, acquainted with life, and with a tragic element in her own career; the youth ignorant, gentle, unworldly, brightly and harmlessly natural--are equalised and bound together by their common secret, which insulates them, morally, from the rest of mankind. The character of Hilda has always struck me as an admirable invention--one of those things that mark the man of genius. It needed a man of genius and of Hawthorne's imaginative delicacy, to feel the propriety of such a figure as Hilda's and to perceive the relief it would both give and borrow. This pure and somewhat rigid New England girl, following the vocation of a copyist of pictures in Rome, unacquainted with evil and untouched by impurity, has been accidentally the witness, unknown and unsuspected, of the dark deed by which her friends, Miriam and Donatello, are knit together. This is _her_ revelation of evil, her loss of perfect innocence. She has done no wrong, and yet wrongdoing has become a part of her experience, and she carries the weight of her detested knowledge upon her heart. She carries it a long time, saddened and oppressed by it, till at last she can bear it no longer. If I have called the whole idea of the presence and effect of Hilda in the story a trait of genius, the purest touch of inspiration is the episode in which the poor girl deposits her burden. She has passed the whole lonely summer in Rome, and one day, at the end of it, finding herself in St. Peter's, she enters a confessional, strenuous daughter of the Puritans as she is, and pours out her dark knowledge into the bosom of the Church--then comes away with her conscience lightened, not a whit the less a Puritan than before. If the book contained nothing else noteworthy but this admirable scene, and the pages describing the murder committed by Donatello under Miriam's eyes, and the ecstatic wandering, afterwards, of the guilty couple, through the "blood-stained streets of Rome," it would still deserve to rank high among the imaginative productions of our day. Like all of Hawthorne's things, it contains a great many light threads of symbolism, which shimmer in the texture of the tale, but which are apt to break and remain in our fingers if we attempt to handle them. These things are part of Hawthorne's very manner--almost, as one might say, of his vocabulary; they belong much more to the surface of his work than to its stronger interest. The fault of _Transformation_ is that the element of the unreal is pushed too far, and that the book is neither positively of one category nor of another. His "moonshiny romance," he calls it in a letter; and, in truth, the lunar element is a little too pervasive. The action wavers between the streets of Rome, whose literal features the author perpetually sketches, and a vague realm of fancy, in which quite a different verisimilitude prevails. This is the trouble with Donatello himself. His companions are intended to be real--if they fail to be so, it is not for want of intention; whereas he is intended to be real or not, as you please. He is of a different substance from them; it is as if a painter, in composing a picture, should try to give you an impression of one of his figures by a strain of music. The idea of the modern faun was a charming one; but I think it a pity that the author should not have made him more definitely modern, without reverting so much to his mythological properties and antecedents, which are very gracefully touched upon, but which belong to the region of picturesque conceits, much more than to that of real psychology. Among the young Italians of to-day there are still plenty of models for such an image as Hawthorne appears to have wished to present in the easy and natural Donatello. And since I am speaking critically, I may go on to say that the art of narration, in _Transformation_, seems to me more at fault than in the author's other novels. The story straggles and wanders, is dropped and taken up again, and towards the close lapses into an almost fatal vagueness. * * * * * CHAPTER VII. LAST YEARS. Of the four last years of Hawthorne's life there is not much to tell that I have not already told. He returned to America in the summer of 1860, and took up his abode in the house he had bought at Concord before going to Europe, and of which his occupancy had as yet been brief. He was to occupy it only four years. I have insisted upon the fact of his being an intense American, and of his looking at all things, during his residence in Europe, from the standpoint of that little clod of western earth which he carried about with him as the good Mohammedan carries the strip of carpet on which he kneels down to face towards Mecca. But it does not appear, nevertheless, that he found himself treading with any great exhilaration the larger section of his native soil upon which, on his return, he disembarked. Indeed, the closing part of his life was a period of dejection, the more acute that it followed directly upon seven years of the happiest opportunities he was to have known. And his European residence had been brightest at the last; he had broken almost completely with those habits of extreme seclusion into which he was to relapse on his return to Concord. "You would be stricken dumb," he wrote from London, shortly before leaving it for the last time, "to see how quietly I accept a whole string of invitations, and, what is more, perform my engagements without a murmur.... The stir of this London life, somehow or other," he adds in the same letter, "has done me a wonderful deal of good, and I feel better than for months past. This is strange, for if I had my choice I should leave undone almost all the things I do." "When he found himself once more on the old ground," writes Mr. Lathrop, "with the old struggle for subsistence staring him in the face again, it is not difficult to conceive how a certain degree of depression would follow." There is indeed not a little sadness in the thought of Hawthorne's literary gift, light, delicate, exquisite, capricious, never too abundant, being charged with the heavy burden of the maintenance of a family. We feel that it was not intended for such grossness, and that in a world ideally constituted he would have enjoyed a liberal pension, an assured subsistence, and have been able to produce his charming prose only when the fancy took him. The brightness of the outlook at home was not made greater by the explosion of the Civil War in the spring of 1861. These months, and the three years that followed them, were not a cheerful time for any persons but army-contractors; but over Hawthorne the war-cloud appears to have dropped a permanent shadow. The whole affair was a bitter disappointment to him, and a fatal blow to that happy faith in the uninterruptedness of American prosperity which I have spoken of as the religion of the old-fashioned American in general, and the old-fashioned Democrat in particular. It was not a propitious time for cultivating the Muse; when history herself is so hard at work, fiction has little left to say. To fiction, directly, Hawthorne did not address himself; he composed first, chiefly during the year 1862, the chapters of which our _Our Old Home_ was afterwards made up. I have said that, though this work has less value than his purely imaginative things, the writing is singularly good, and it is well to remember, to its greater honour, that it was produced at a time when it was painfully hard for a man of Hawthorne's cast of mind to fix his attention. The air was full of battle-smoke, and the poet's vision was not easily clear. Hawthorne was irritated, too, by the sense of being to a certain extent, politically considered, in a false position. A large section of the Democratic party was not in good odour at the North; its loyalty was not perceived to be of that clear strain which public opinion required. To this wing of the party Franklin Pierce had, with reason or without, the credit of belonging; and our author was conscious of some sharpness of responsibility in defending the illustrious friend of whom he had already made himself the advocate. He defended him manfully, without a grain of concession, and described the ex-President to the public (and to himself), if not as he was, then as he ought to be. _Our Old Home_ is dedicated to him, and about this dedication there was some little difficulty. It was represented to Hawthorne that as General Pierce was rather out of fashion, it might injure the success, and, in plain terms, the sale of his book. His answer (to his publisher), was much to the point. "I find that it would be a piece of poltroonery in me to withdraw either the dedication or the dedicatory letter. My long and intimate personal relations with Pierce render the dedication altogether proper, especially as regards this book, which would have had no existence without his kindness; and if he is so exceedingly unpopular that his name ought to sink the volume, there is so much the more need that an old friend should stand by him. I cannot, merely on account of pecuniary profit or literary reputation, go back from what I have deliberately felt and thought it right to do; and if I were to tear out the dedication I should never look at the volume again without remorse and shame. As for the literary public, it must accept my book precisely as I think fit to give it, or let it alone. Nevertheless I have no fancy for making myself a martyr when it is honourably and conscientiously possible to avoid it; and I always measure out heroism very accurately according to the exigencies of the occasion, and should be the last man in the world to throw away a bit of it needlessly. So I have looked over the concluding paragraph and have amended it in such a way that, while doing what I know to be justice to my friend, it contains not a word that ought to be objectionable to any set of readers. If the public of the North see fit to ostracise me for this, I can only say that I would gladly sacrifice a thousand or two dollars, rather than retain the goodwill of such a herd of dolts and mean-spirited scoundrels." The dedication was published, the book was eminently successful, and Hawthorne was not ostracised. The paragraph under discussion stands as follows:--"Only this let me say, that, with the record of your life in my memory, and with a sense of your character in my deeper consciousness, as among the few things that time has left as it found them, I need no assurance that you continue faithful for ever to that grand idea of an irrevocable Union which, as you once told me, was the earliest that your brave father taught you. For other men there may be a choice of paths--for you but one; and it rests among my certainties that no man's loyalty is more steadfast, no man's hopes or apprehensions on behalf of our national existence more deeply heartfelt, or more closely intertwined with his possibilities of personal happiness, than those of Franklin Pierce." I know not how well the ex-President liked these lines, but the public thought them admirable, for they served as a kind of formal profession of faith, on the question of the hour, by a loved and honoured writer. That some of his friends thought such a profession needed is apparent from the numerous editorial ejaculations and protests appended to an article describing a visit he had just paid to Washington, which Hawthorne contributed to the _Atlantic Monthly_ for July, 1862, and which, singularly enough, has not been reprinted. The article has all the usual merit of such sketches on Hawthorne's part--the merit of delicate, sportive feeling, expressed with consummate grace--but the editor of the periodical appears to have thought that he must give the antidote with the poison, and the paper is accompanied with several little notes disclaiming all sympathy with the writer's political heresies. The heresies strike the reader of to-day as extremely mild, and what excites his emotion, rather, is the questionable taste of the editorial commentary, with which it is strange that Hawthorne should have allowed his article to be encumbered. He had not been an Abolitionist before the War, and that he should not pretend to be one at the eleventh hour, was, for instance, surely a piece of consistency that might have been allowed to pass. "I shall not pretend to be an admirer of old John Brown," he says, in a page worth quoting, "any further than sympathy with Whittier's excellent ballad about him may go; nor did I expect ever to shrink so unutterably from any apophthegm of a sage whose happy lips have uttered a hundred golden sentences"--the allusion here, I suppose, is to Mr. Emerson--"as from that saying (perhaps falsely attributed to so honoured a name), that the death of this blood-stained fanatic has 'made the Gallows as venerable as the Cross!' Nobody was ever more justly hanged. He won his martyrdom fairly, and took it fairly. He himself, I am persuaded (such was his natural integrity), would have acknowledged that Virginia had a right to take the life which he had staked and lost; although it would have been better for her, in the hour that is fast coming, if she could generously have forgotten the criminality of his attempt in its enormous folly. On the other hand, any common-sensible man, looking at the matter unsentimentally, must have felt a certain intellectual satisfaction in seeing him hanged, if it were only in requital of his preposterous miscalculation of possibilities." Now that the heat of that great conflict has passed away, this is a capital expression of the saner estimate, in the United States, of the dauntless and deluded old man who proposed to solve a complex political problem by stirring up a servile insurrection. There is much of the same sound sense, interfused with light, just appreciable irony, in such a passage as the following:-- "I tried to imagine how very disagreeable the presence of a Southern army would be in a sober town of Massachusetts; and the thought considerably lessened my wonder at the cold and shy regards that are cast upon our troops, the gloom, the sullen demeanour, the declared, or scarcely hidden, sympathy with rebellion, which are so frequent here. It is a strange thing in human life that the greatest errors both of men and women often spring from their sweetest and most generous qualities; and so, undoubtedly, thousands of warmhearted, generous, and impulsive persons have joined the Rebels, not from any real zeal for the cause, but because, between two conflicting loyalties, they chose that which necessarily lay nearest the heart. There never existed any other Government against which treason was so easy, and could defend itself by such plausible arguments, as against that of the United States. The anomaly of two allegiances, (of which that of the State comes nearest home to a man's feelings, and includes the altar and the hearth, while the General Government claims his devotion only to an airy mode of law, and has no symbol but a flag,) is exceedingly mischievous in this point of view; for it has converted crowds of honest people into traitors, who seem to themselves not merely innocent but patriotic, and who die for a bad cause with a quiet conscience as if it were the best. In the vast extent of our country--too vast by far to be taken into one small human heart--we inevitably limit to our own State, or at farthest, to our own little section, that sentiment of physical love for the soil which renders an Englishman, for example, so intensely sensitive to the dignity and well-being of his little island, that one hostile foot, treading anywhere upon it, would make a bruise on each individual breast. If a man loves his own State, therefore, and is content to be ruined with her, let us shoot him, if we can, but allow him an honourable burial in the soil he fights for." To this paragraph a line of deprecation from the editor is attached; and indeed from the point of view of a vigorous prosecution of the war it was doubtless not particularly pertinent. But it is interesting as an example of the way an imaginative man judges current events--trying to see the other side as well as his own, to feel what his adversary feels, and present his view of the case. But he had other occupations for his imagination than putting himself into the shoes of unappreciative Southerners. He began at this time two novels, neither of which he lived to finish, but both of which were published, as fragments, after his death. The shorter of these fragments, to which he had given the name of _The Dolliver Romance_, is so very brief that little can be said of it. The author strikes, with all his usual sweetness, the opening notes of a story of New England life, and the few pages which have been given to the world contain a charming picture of an old man and a child. The other rough sketch--it is hardly more--is in a manner complete; it was unfortunately deemed complete enough to be brought out in a magazine as a serial novel. This was to do it a great wrong, and I do not go too far in saying that poor Hawthorne would probably not have enjoyed the very bright light that has been projected upon this essentially crude piece of work. I am at a loss to know how to speak of _Septimius Felton, or the Elixir of Life_; I have purposely reserved but a small space for doing so, for the part of discretion seems to be to pass it by lightly. I differ therefore widely from the author's biographer and son-in-law in thinking it a work of the greatest weight and value, offering striking analogies with Goethe's _Faust_; and still more widely from a critic whom Mr. Lathrop quotes, who regards a certain portion of it as "one of the very greatest triumphs in all literature." It seems to me almost cruel to pitch in this exalted key one's estimate of the rough first draught of a tale in regard to which the author's premature death operates, virtually, as a complete renunciation of pretensions. It is plain to any reader that _Septimius Felton_, as it stands, with its roughness, its gaps, its mere allusiveness and slightness of treatment, gives us but a very partial measure of Hawthorne's full intention; and it is equally easy to believe that this intention was much finer than anything we find in the book. Even if we possessed the novel in its complete form, however, I incline to think that we should regard it as very much the weakest of Hawthorne's productions. The idea itself seems a failure, and the best that might have come of it would have been very much below _The Scarlet Letter_ or _The House of the Seven Gables_. The appeal to our interest is not felicitously made, and the fancy of a potion, to assure eternity of existence, being made from the flowers which spring from the grave of a man whom the distiller of the potion has deprived of life, though it might figure with advantage in a short story of the pattern of the _Twice-Told Tales_, appears too slender to carry the weight of a novel. Indeed, this whole matter of elixirs and potions belongs to the fairy-tale period of taste, and the idea of a young man enabling himself to live forever by concocting and imbibing a magic draught, has the misfortune of not appealing to our sense of reality or even to our sympathy. The weakness of _Septimius Felton_ is that the reader cannot take the hero seriously--a fact of which there can be no better proof than the element of the ridiculous which inevitably mingles itself in the scene in which he entertains his lady-love with a prophetic sketch of his occupations during the successive centuries of his earthly immortality. I suppose the answer to my criticism is that this is allegorical, symbolic, ideal; but we feel that it symbolises nothing substantial, and that the truth--whatever it may be--that it illustrates, is as moonshiny, to use Hawthorne's own expression, as the allegory itself. Another fault of the story is that a great historical event--the war of the Revolution--is introduced in the first few pages, in order to supply the hero with a pretext for killing the young man from whose grave the flower of immortality is to sprout, and then drops out of the narrative altogether, not even forming a background to the sequel. It seems to me that Hawthorne should either have invented some other occasion for the death of his young officer, or else, having struck the note of the great public agitation which overhung his little group of characters, have been careful to sound it through the rest of his tale. I do wrong, however, to insist upon these things, for I fall thereby into the error of treating the work as if it had been cast into its ultimate form and acknowledged by the author. To avoid this error I shall make no other criticism of details, but content myself with saying that the idea and intention of the book appear, relatively speaking, feeble, and that even had it been finished it would have occupied a very different place in the public esteem from the writer's masterpieces. The year 1864 brought with it for Hawthorne a sense of weakness and depression from which he had little relief during the four or five months that were left him of life. He had his engagement to produce _The Dolliver Romance_, which had been promised to the subscribers of the _Atlantic Monthly_ (it was the first time he had undertaken to publish a work of fiction in monthly parts), but he was unable to write, and his consciousness of an unperformed task weighed upon him, and did little to dissipate his physical inertness. "I have not yet had courage to read the Dolliver proof-sheet," he wrote to his publisher in December, 1863; "but will set about it soon, though with terrible reluctance, such as I never felt before. I am most grateful to you," he went on, "for protecting me from that visitation of the elephant and his cub. If you happen to see Mr.----, of L----, a young man who was here last summer, pray tell him anything that your conscience will let you, to induce him to spare me another visit, which I know he intended. I really am not well, and cannot be disturbed by strangers, without more suffering than it is worth while to endure." A month later he was obliged to ask for a further postponement. "I am not quite up to writing yet, but shall make an effort as soon as I see any hope of success. You ought to be thankful that (like most other broken-down authors) I do not pester you with decrepit pages, and insist upon your accepting them as full of the old spirit and vigour. That trouble perhaps still awaits you, after I shall have reached a further stage of decay. Seriously, my mind has, for the time, lost its temper and its fine edge, and I have an instinct that I had better keep quiet. Perhaps I shall have a new spirit of vigour if I wait quietly for it; perhaps not." The winter passed away, but the "new spirit of vigour" remained absent, and at the end of February he wrote to Mr. Fields that his novel had simply broken down, and that he should never finish it. "I hardly know what to say to the public about this abortive romance, though I know pretty well what the case will be. I shall never finish it. Yet it is not quite pleasant for an author to announce himself, or to be announced, as finally broken down as to his literary faculty.... I cannot finish it unless a great change comes over me; and if I make too great an effort to do so, it will be my death; not that I should care much for that, if I could fight the battle through and win it, thus ending a life of much smoulder and a scanty fire, in a blaze of glory. But I should smother myself in mud of my own making.... I am not low-spirited, nor fanciful, nor freakish, but look what seem to me realities in the face, and am ready to take whatever may come. If I could but go to England now, I think that the sea-voyage and the 'old Home' might set me all right." But he was not to go to England; he started three months later upon a briefer journey, from which he never returned. His health was seriously disordered, and in April, according to a letter from Mrs. Hawthorne, printed by Mr. Fields, he had been "miserably ill." His feebleness was complete; he appears to have had no definite malady, but he was, according to the common phrase, failing. General Pierce proposed to him that they should make a little tour together among the mountains of New Hampshire, and Hawthorne consented, in the hope of getting some profit from the change of air. The northern New England spring is not the most genial season in the world, and this was an indifferent substitute for the resource for which his wife had, on his behalf, expressed a wish--a visit to "some island in the Gulf Stream." He was not to go far; he only reached a little place called Plymouth, one of the stations of approach to the beautiful mountain scenery of New Hampshire, when, on the 18th of May, 1864, death overtook him. His companion, General Pierce, going into his room in the early morning, found that he had breathed his last during the night--had passed away, tranquilly, comfortably, without a sign or a sound, in his sleep. This happened at the hotel of the place--a vast white edifice, adjacent to the railway station, and entitled the Pemigiwasset House. He was buried at Concord, and many of the most distinguished men in the country stood by his grave. He was a beautiful, natural, original genius, and his life had been singularly exempt from worldly preoccupations and vulgar efforts. It had been as pure, as simple, as unsophisticated, as his work. He had lived primarily in his domestic affections, which were of the tenderest kind; and then--without eagerness, without pretension, but with a great deal of quiet devotion--in his charming art. His work will remain; it is too original and exquisite to pass away; among the men of imagination he will always have his niche. No one has had just that vision of life, and no one has had a literary form that more successfully expressed his vision. He was not a moralist, and he was not simply a poet. The moralists are weightier, denser, richer, in a sense; the poets are more purely inconclusive and irresponsible. He combined in a singular degree the spontaneity of the imagination with a haunting care for moral problems. Man's conscience was his theme, but he saw it in the light of a creative fancy which added, out of its own substance, an interest, and, I may almost say, an importance. THE END. * * * * * Now publishing, in crown 8vo, price 2_s._ 6_d._ ENGLISH MEN OF LETTERS. Edited by JOHN MORLEY. JOHNSON. BY LESLIE STEPHEN. Crown 8vo. 2_s._ 6_d._ "The new series opens well with Mr. Leslie Stephen's sketch of Dr. Johnson. It could hardly have been done better, and it will convey to the readers for whom it is intended a juster estimate of Johnson than either of the two essays of Lord Macaulay."--_Pall Mall Gazette._ SCOTT. By R. H. HUTTON. Crown 8vo. 2_s._ 6_d._ "We could not wish for a more suggestive introduction to Scott and his poems and novels."--_Examiner._ GIBBON. By J. C. 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41309	----	Transcriber's note: Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_). LOVE LETTERS OF NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE Privately Printed The Society of the Dofobs Chicago 1907 Copyright, 1907, by William K. Bixby INTRODUCTORY In "Hawthorne and His Wife" and "Memories of Hawthorne" both Julian Hawthorne and his sister, Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, have given citations from the letters written by Nathaniel Hawthorne to Miss Sophia Peabody during their years of courtship. These excerpts were free and irregular, often, and evidently with specific intent, taken out of order and run together as if for the purpose of illustrating a point or emphasizing a particular phase of character. While the extracts were sufficiently numerous for the object desired, and while they gave an agreeable glimpse of an interesting period of Hawthorne's life, they were necessarily too fragmentary, too lacking in continuity, to convey any adequate idea of the simplicity, beauty, humor and tenderness of the letters, even considered in the matter of a literary style. The original letters were acquired by Mr. William K. Bixby of St. Louis, and, at the urgent request of the Society of the Dofobs, of which he is a highly esteemed and honored member, turned over to the society with the understanding that they should be published for presentation to members only. It was specified also that great care should be exercised in going over the letters, that no apparent confidences should be violated and that all private and personal references, which might wound the feelings of the living or seem to speak ill of the dead, should be eliminated. It is indeed remarkable that in the large number of letters presented there was practically nothing which called for elision, nothing in the lighter mood which breathed a spirit beyond the innocent limits of good-natured banter. The work of the editors was consequently easy and grateful, and the task one of delight. It is not claimed that these love letters, so-called, comprise the entire correspondence on Hawthorne's part between Miss Peabody and himself during the three-and-one-half years of courtship. Naturally a series of letters begun sixty-eight years ago, with all the vicissitudes of a shifting life, would not be preserved intact. But while some letters have been lost or destroyed, and others may not have been permitted for one reason or another to leave the possession of the family, the continuity here preserved is practically as complete as could be desired and fully illustrative of the qualities which make them so worthy of publication. In giving these letters to its members the society has conformed strictly to the exactions of the manuscript save in a few cases perhaps where haste on the part of the writer omitted a word, slightly obscuring the sense. It has been deemed advisible also to omit all notes or paragraphs of explanation. Happily the letters are sufficiently intelligible without such notes, and the conclusion has been reached that no needed purpose can be served by minor explanatory details relating to individuals mentioned or incidents suggested. It has been thought best as well to add a few letters extending beyond the period of courtship. No defence is necessary, for to the last they are "love letters" in the purest and truest sense of the words. This will be vindicated in the perusal. In selecting two letters for facsimile reproduction the choice has fallen upon the letter from Brook Farm under date of April 13, 1841, and that from Salem written in the following year. Both illustrate the quiet, quaint humor of Hawthorne. In the Brook Farm letter he sketches drily his thinly veiled impressions of the community, and herein will be found the famous reference to "Miss Fuller's transcendental heifer" which has fallen little short of immortality. Writing from the old home in Salem he makes his letter conspicuous by the fact that he prophesies banteringly--doubtless he little knew how truly--his own coming fame and the public craze to inspect his belongings. This humorous tribute to himself, in its mock, self-satisfied strain, suggests not so much the mental state of Horace predicting his metamorphosis and immortality as the good-natured prophecy of Burns that "you may expect henceforth to see my birthday inscribed among the wonderful events in the Poor Robin and Aberdeen Almanacks, along with the Black Monday and the Battle of Bothwell Bridge." Horace, Burns, Hawthorne--how all exceeded their predictions, whether gravely or lightly made! It is true that to many persons of sensibility the thought of publishing the love letters of men and women however distinguished or in the public mind is repugnant. It seems to them a violation of a sacred confidence, a wanton exposure of a tenderness not intended for the world as a part of its literary diversion. The objection in many instances is a fair one, and too often the obligation of delicacy has been violated and the dictates of gentle consideration have been unheeded. Of recent years more persons have been shocked than gratified by the exploitation of love letters of famous women or men, and by the ruthless tearing away of the veil which has concealed their happy love life, and this emotion of disapprobation has not been lessened by the apparent fact that a sordid motive inspired the publication. At the outset such impulse of disinclination possessed the gentleman who owns the Hawthorne manuscript and the members of the society with whom he conversed with reference to its appearance in type. It was only after the letters had been carefully read, the motive governing their publication seriously analyzed, and the respectful limits of their circulation considered, that this doubting impulse vanished. That any one can read these letters without a warmer, closer feeling for the "shy, grave Hawthorne" seems impossible. To one who has perused them in manuscript, transcription and proof sheets there comes almost a conviction that he wrote them not merely for the woman waiting for the day when pledges should be sanctified, but with the half wish that all sympathetic spirits might see him and know him as he was. For gaily he speaks of his own bashfulness and reserve; hopefully he passes beyond the drudgery and disappointments of his position in life to the future which allures him; bravely he fights anxiety and care; with quaint humor and lightness of touch he pictures the scenes around that amuse and interest him. And when in loving remembrance he calls for the "Dove," or with mock seriousness chides the "naughty Sophie Hawthorne," a strong affection is breathed in gentleness, a manly tenderness delights in every line. And whether toiling with the measurer in the vessel's hold, or chafing with him in the somberness of the custom house, sharing now his relief from distasteful tasks and now his dreams for a happier day, the reader feels the spirit of the past. And above all the shadowy ghostliness of the threescore years seems to come the perfume of the apple blossoms that fell around the Wayside, with the gentle graciousness of a time well known to all, when youth and love and hope are young. ROSWELL FIELD. TO MISS PEABODY Wednesday Afternoon, March 6th, 1839 _My dearest Sophie:_ I had a parting glimpse of you, Monday forenoon, at your window--and that image abides by me, looking pale, and not so quiet as is your wont. I have reproached myself many times since, because I did not show my face, and then we should both have smiled; and so our reminiscences would have been sunny instead of shadowy. But I believe I was so intent on seeing you, that I forgot all about the desirableness of being myself seen. Perhaps, after all, you did see me--at least you knew that I was there. I fear that you were not quite well that morning. Do grow better and better--physically, I mean, for I protest against any spiritual improvement, until I am better able to keep pace with you--but do be strong, and full of life--earthly life--and let there be a glow in your cheeks. And sleep soundly the whole night long, and get up every morning with a feeling as if you were newly created; and I pray you to lay up a stock of fresh energy every day till we meet again; so that we may walk miles and miles, without your once needing to lean upon my arm. Not but what you _shall_ lean upon it, as much as you choose--indeed, whether you choose or not--but I would feel as if you did it to lighten my footsteps, not to support your own. Am I requiring you to work a miracle within yourself? Perhaps so--yet, not a greater one than I do really believe might be wrought by inward faith and outward aids. Try it, my Dove, and be as lightsome on earth as your sister doves are in the air. Tomorrow I shall expect a letter from you; but I am almost in doubt whether to tell you that I expect it; because then your conscience will reproach you, if you should happen not to have written. I would leave you as free as you leave me. But I do wonder whether you were serious in your last letter, when you asked me whether you wrote too often, and seemed to think that you might thus interfere with my occupations. My dear Sophie, your letters are no small portion of my spiritual food, and help to keep my soul alive, when otherwise it might languish unto death, or else become hardened and earth-incrusted, as seems to be the case with almost all the souls with whom I am in daily intercourse. They never interfere with my worldly business-- neither the reading nor the answering them--(I am speaking of your letters, not of those "earth-incrusted" souls)--for I keep them to be the treasure of my still and secret hours, such hours as pious people spend in prayer; and the communion which my spirit then holds with yours has something of religion in it. The charm of your letters does not depend upon their intellectual value, though that is great, but on the spirit of which they are the utterance, and which is a spirit of wonderful efficacy. No one, whom you would deem worthy of your friendship, could enjoy so large a share of it as I do, without feeling the influence of your character throughout his own--purifying his aims and desires, enabling him to realise that this is a truer world than the feverish one around us, and teaching him how to gain daily entrance into that better world. Such, so far as I have been able to profit by it, has been your ministration to me. Did you dream what an angelic guardianship was entrusted to you? March 7th. Your letter did come. You had not the heart to disappoint me, as I did you, in not making a parting visit, and shall again, by keeping this letter to send by Mary. But I disappoint you in these two instances, only that you may consider it a decree of Fate (or of Providence, which you please) that we shall not meet on the mornings of my departure, and that my letters shall not come oftener than on the alternate Saturday. If you will but believe this, you will be quiet. Otherwise I know that the Dove will flutter her wings, and often, by necessity, will flutter them in vain. So forgive me, and let me have my own way, and believe (for it is true) that I never cause you the slightest disappointment without pain and remorse on my part. And yet, I know that when you wish me to do any particular thing you will always tell me so, and that if my sins of omission or commission should ever wound your heart, you will by no means conceal it. I did enjoy that walk infinitely--for certainly the enjoyment was not all finite. And what a heavenly pleasure we might have enjoyed this very day; the air was so delicious, that it seemed as if the dismal old Custom House was situated in Paradise; and this afternoon, I sat with my window open, to temper the glow of a huge coal fire. It almost seems to me, now, as if beautiful days were wasted and thrown away, when we do not feel their beauty and heavenliness through one another. Your own friend, N. H. Miss Sophia A. Peabody, Salem, Mass. TO MISS PEABODY _Boston_, April 2d, 1839 _Mine own Dove_, I have been sitting by my fireside ever since teatime, till now it is past eight o'clock; and have been musing and dreaming about a thousand things, with every one of which, I do believe, some nearer or remoter thought of you was intermingled. I should have begun this letter earlier in the evening, but was afraid that some intrusive idler would thrust himself between us, and so the sacredness of my letter would be partly lost;--for I feel as if my letters were sacred, because they are written from my spirit to your spirit. I wish it were possible to convey them to you by other than earthly messengers--to convey them directly into your heart, with the warmth of mine still lingering in them. When we shall be endowed with our spiritual bodies, I think they will be so constituted, that we may send thoughts and feelings any distance, in no time at all, and transfuse them warm and fresh into the consciousness of those whom we love. Oh what a bliss it would be, at this moment; if I could be conscious of some purer feeling, some more delicate sentiment, some lovelier fantasy, than could possibly have had its birth in my own nature, and therefore be aware that my Dove was thinking through my mind and feeling through my heart! Try--some evening when you are alone and happy, and when you are most conscious of loving me and being loved by me--and see if you do not possess this power already. But, after all, perhaps it is not wise to intermix fantastic ideas with the reality of our affection. Let us content ourselves to be earthly creatures, and hold communion of spirit in such modes as are ordained to us--by letters (dipping our pens as deep as may be into our hearts) by heartfelt words, when they can be audible; by glances--through which medium spirits do really seem to talk in their own language--and by holy kisses, which I do think have something supernatural in them. And now good night, my beautiful Dove. I do not write any more at present, because there are three more whole days before this letter will visit you: and I desire to talk with you, each of those three days. Your letter did not come today. Even if it should not come tomorrow, I shall not imagine that you forget me or neglect me, but shall heave two or three sighs, and measure salt and coal so much the more diligently. Good night; and if I have any power, at this distance, over your spirit, it shall be exerted to make you sleep like a little baby, till the "Harper of the Golden Dawn" arouse you. Then you must finish that ode. But do, if you love me, sleep. April 3d. No letter, my dearest; and if one comes tomorrow I shall not receive it till Friday, nor perhaps then; because I have a cargo of coal to measure in East Cambridge, and cannot go to the Custom House till the job is finished. If you had known this, I think you would have done your [best] possible to send me a letter today. Doubtless you have some good reason for omitting it. I was invited to dine at Mr. Hooper's; with your sister Mary; and the notion came into my head, that perhaps you would be there,--and though I knew that it could not be so, yet I felt as if it might. But just as I was going home from the Custom House to dress, came an abominable person to say that a measurer was wanted forthwith at East Cambridge; so over I hurried, and found that, after all, nothing would be done till tomorrow morning at sunrise. In the meantime, I had lost my dinner, and all other pleasures that had awaited me at Mr. Hooper's; so that I came back in very ill humor, and do not mean to be very good-natured again, till my Dove shall nestle upon my heart again, either in her own sweet person, or by her image in a letter. But your image will be with me, long before the letter comes. It will flit around me while I am measuring coal, and will peep over my shoulder to see whether I keep a correct account, and will smile to hear my bickerings with the black-faced demons in the vessel's hold, (they look like the forge-men in Retsch's Fridolin) and will soothe and mollify me amid all the pester and plague that is in store for me tomorrow. Not that I would avoid this pester and plague, even if it were in my power to do so. I need such training, and ought to have undergone it long ago. It will give my character a healthy hardness as regards the world; while it will leave my heart as soft--as fit for a Dove to rest upon--as it is now, or ever was. Good night again, gentle Dove. I must leave a little space for tomorrow's record; and moreover, it is almost time that I were asleep, having to get up in the dusky dawn. Did you yield to my conjurations, and sleep well last night? Well then, I throw the same spell over you tonight. April 4th. ½ past 9 P.M. I came home late in the afternoon, very tired, sunburnt and sea-flushed, having walked or sat on the deck of a schooner ever since sunrise. Nevertheless, I purified myself from the sable stains of my profession--stains which I share in common with chimney sweepers--and then hastened to the Custom House to get your letter--for I _knew_ there was one there awaiting me, and now I thank you with my whole heart, and will straight way go to sleep. Do you the same. April 5th. Your yesterday's letter is received, my beloved Sophie. I have no time to answer it: but, like all your communications, personal or written, it is the sunshine of my life. I have been busy all day, and am now going to see your sister Mary--and I hope, Elizabeth. Mr. Pickens is going with me. Miss Sophia A. Peabody, Salem, Mass. TO MISS PEABODY Wednesday, April 17th, 1839--4 o'clock P.M. _My Dearest_: If it were not for your sake, I should really be glad of this pitiless east wind, and should especially bless the pelting rain and intermingled snowflakes. They have released me from the toils and cares of office, and given me license to betake myself to my own chamber; and here I sit by a good coal fire, with at least six or seven comfortable hours to spend before bed-time. I feel pretty secure against intruders; for the bad weather will defend me from foreign invasion; and as to Cousin Haley, he and I had a bitter political dispute last evening, at the close of which he went to bed in high dudgeon, and probably will not speak to me these three days. Thus you perceive that strife and wrangling, as well as east winds and rain, are the methods of a kind Providence to promote my comfort--which would not have been so well secured in any other way. Six or seven hours of cheerful solitude! But I will not be alone. I invite your spirit to be with me--at any hour and as many hours as you please--but especially at the twilight hour, before I light my lamp. Are you conscious of my invitation? I bid you at that particular time, because I can see visions more vividly in the dusky glow of fire light, than either by daylight or lamplight. Come--and let me renew my spell against headache and other direful effects of the east wind. How I wish I could give you a portion of my insensibility!--And yet I should be almost afraid of some radical transformation, were I to produce a change in that respect. God made you so delicately, that it is especially unsafe to interfere with His workmanship. If my little Sophie--mine own Dove--cannot grow plump and rosy and tough and vigorous without being changed into another nature then I do think that for this short life, she had better remain just what she is. Yes; but you will always be the same to me, because we have met in Eternity, and there our intimacy was formed. So get as well as you possibly can, and be as strong and rosy as you will; for I shall never doubt that you are the same Sophie who have so often leaned upon my arm, and needed its superfluous strength. I _was_ conscious, on those two evenings, of a peacefulness and contented repose such as I never enjoyed before. You could not have felt such quiet unless I had felt it too--nor could I, unless you had. If either of our spirits had been troubled, they were then in such close communion that both must have felt the same grief and turmoil. I never, till now, had a friend who could give me repose;--all have disturbed me; and whether for pleasure or pain, it was still disturbance, but peace overflows from your heart into mine. Then I feel that there is a Now--and that Now must be always calm and happy--and that sorrow and evil are but phantoms that seem to flit across it. You must never expect to see my sister E. in the daytime, unless by previous appointment, or when she goes to walk. So unaccustomed am I to daylight interviews, that I never imagine her in sunshine; and I really doubt whether her faculties of life and intellect begin to be exercised till dusk--unless on extraordinary occasions. Their noon is at midnight. I wish you could walk with her; but you must not, because she is indefatigable, and always wants to walk half round the world, when once she is out of doors. April 18th. My Dove--my hopes of a long evening of seclusion were not quite fulfilled; for, a little before nine o'clock John Forrester and Cousin Haley came in, both of whom I so fascinated with my delectable conversation, that they did not take leave till after eleven. Nevertheless, I had already secured no inconsiderable treasure of enjoyment, with all of which you were intermingled. There has been nothing to do at the Custom House today; so I came home at two o'clock, and--went to sleep! Pray Heaven you may have felt a sympathetic drowsiness, and have yielded to it. My nap has been a pretty long one, for--as nearly as I can judge by the position of the sun, it must be as much as five o'clock. I think there will be a beautiful sunset; and perhaps, if we could walk out together, the wind would change and the air grow balmy at once. The Spring is not acquainted with my Dove and me, as the Winter was;--how then can we expect her to be kindly to us? We really must continue to walk out and meet her, and make friends with her; then she will salute your cheek with her balmiest kiss, whenever she gets a chance. As to the east wind, if ever the imaginative portion of my brain recover from its torpor, I mean to personify it as a wicked, spiteful, blustering, treacherous--in short, altogether devilish sort of body, whose principle of life it is to make as much mischief as he can. The west wind--or whatever is the gentlest wind of heaven--shall assume your aspect, and be humanised and angelicised with your traits of character, and the sweet West shall finally triumph over the fiendlike East, and rescue the world from his miserable tyranny; and if I tell the story well, I am sure my loving and beloved West Wind will kiss me for it. When this week's first letter came, I held it a long time in my hand, marvelling at the superscription. How did you contrive to write it? Several times since, I have pored over it, to discover how much of yourself was mingled with my share of it; and certainly there is a grace flung over the fac simile, which was never seen in my harsh, uncouth autograph--and yet none of the strength is lost. You are wonderful. Imitate this. NATH. HAWTHORNE. Friday, April 19th. Your Wednesday's letter has come, dearest. Your letters delight me more than anything, save the sound of your voice; and I love dearly to write to you--so be at peace on that score. You _are_ beautiful, my own heart's Dove. Never doubt it again. I shall really and truly be very glad of the extracts; and they will have a charm for me that could not otherwise have been. I will imagine your voice repeating them, tremulously. The _spell_ which you laid upon my brow will retain its power till we meet again--then it must be renewed. What a beautiful day--and I had a double enjoyment of it, for your sake and my own. I have been to walk this afternoon, to Bunker's Hill and the Navy Yard, and am tired, because I had not your arm to support me. God keep you from East winds and every other evil. Mine own Dove's own Friend, N. H. ½ past 5 P.M. Miss Sophia A. Peabody, Salem, Mass. TO MISS PEABODY _Boston_, April 30th, 6 P.M., 1839 _My beloved_, Your sweetest of all letters found me at the Custom House, where I had almost just arrived, having been engaged all the forenoon in measuring twenty chaldrons of coal--which dull occupation was enlivened by frequent brawls and amicable discussions with a crew of funny little Frenchmen from Acadie. I know not whether your letter was a surprise to me--it seems to me that I had a prophetic faith that the Dove would visit me--but at any rate, it was a joy, as it always is; for my spirit turns to you from all trouble and all pleasure. This forenoon I could not wait as I generally do, to be in solitude before opening your letter; for I expected to be busy all the afternoon, and was already tired with working yesterday and today; and my heart longed to drink your thoughts and feelings, as a parched throat for cold water. So I pressed the Dove to my lips (turning my head away, so that nobody saw me) and then broke the seal. I do think it is the dearest letter you have written, but I think so of each successive one; so you need not imagine that you have outdone yourself in this instance. How did I live before I knew you--before I possessed your affection! I reckon upon your love as something that is to endure when everything that can perish has perished--though my trust is sometimes mingled with fear, because I feel myself unworthy of your love. But if I am worthy of if you will always love me; and if there be anything good and pure in me, it will be proved by my always loving you. After dinner. I had to journey over to East Cambridge, expecting to measure a cargo of coal there; but the vessel had stuck in the mud on her way thither, so that nothing could be done till tomorrow morning. It must have been my guardian angel that steered her upon that mud-bank, for I really needed rest. Did you lead the vessel astray, my Dove? I did not stop to inquire into particulars, but returned home forthwith, and locked my door, and threw myself on the bed, with your letter in my hand. I read it over slowly and peacefully, and then folding it up, I rested my heart upon it, and fell fast asleep. Friday, May 3d. 5 P.M. My dearest, ten million occupations and interruptions, and intrusions, have kept me from going on with my letter; but my spirit has visited you continually, and yours has come to me. I have had to be out a good deal in the east winds; but your spell has proved sovereign against all harm, though sometimes I have shuddered and shivered for your sake. How have you borne it, my poor dear little Dove? Have you been able to flit abroad on today's east wind, and go to Marblehead, as you designed? You will not have seen Mrs. Hooper, because she came up to Boston in the cars on Monday morning. I had a brief talk with her, and we made mutual inquiries, she about you, and I about little C. I will not attempt to tell you how it rejoices me that we are to spend a whole month together in the same city. Looking forward to it, it seems to me as if that month would never come to an end, because there will be so much of eternity in it. I wish you had read that dream-letter through, and could remember its contents. I am very sure that it could not have [been] written by me, however, because I should not think of addressing you as "My dear Sister"--nor should I like to have you call me brother--nor even should have liked it, from the very first of our acquaintance. We are, I trust, kindred spirits, but not brother and sister. And then what a cold and dry annunciation of that awful contingency--the "continuance or not of our acquaintance." Mine own Dove, you are to blame for dreaming such letters, or parts of letters, as coming from me. It was you that wrote it--not I. Yet I will not believe that it shows a want of faith in the steadfastness of my affection, but only in the continuance of circumstances prosperous to our earthly and external connection. Let us trust in GOD for that. Pray to GOD for it, my Dove--for you know how to pray better than I do. Pray, for my sake, that no shadows of earth may ever come between us, because my only hope of being a happy man depends upon the permanence of our union. I have great comfort in such thoughts as those you suggest--that our hearts here draw towards one another so unusually--that we have not cultivated our friendship, but let it grow,--that we have thrown ourselves upon one another with such perfect trust;--and even the deficiency of worldly wisdom, that some people would ascribe to us in following the guidance of our hearts so implicitly, is proof to me that there is a deep wisdom within us. Oh, let us not think but that all will be well! And even if, to worldly eyes, it should appear that our lot is not a fortunate one, still we shall have glimpses, at least--and I trust a pervading sunshine--of a happiness that we could never have found, if we had unquietly struggled for it, and made our own selection of the means and species of it, instead of trusting all to something diviner than our reason. My Dove, there were a good many things that I meant to have written in this letter; but I have continually lapsed into fits of musing, and when I have written, the soul of my thoughts has not readily assumed the earthly garments of language. It is now time to carry the letter to Mary. I kiss you, dearest--did you feel it? Your own friend, NATH. HAWTHORNE, ESQ. (Dear me! What an effect that Esquire gives to the whole letter!) Miss Sophia A. Peabody, Care of Dr. N. Peabody, Salem, Mass. TO MISS PEABODY _Salem_, May 26th, 1839 _Mine own Self_, I felt rather dismal yesterday--a sort of vague weight on my spirit--a sense that something was wanting to me here. What or who could it have been that I so missed? I thought it not best to go to your house last evening; so that I have not yet seen Elizabeth--but we shall probably attend the Hurley-Burley tonight. Would that my Dove might be there! It seems really monstrous that here, in her own home--or what was her home, till she found another in my arms--she should no longer be. Oh, my dearest, I yearn for you, and my heart heaves when I think of you--(and that is always, but sometimes a thought makes me know and feel you more vividly than at others, and _that_ I call "thinking of you")--heaves and swells (my heart does) as sometimes you have felt it beneath you, when your head was resting on it. At such moments it is stirred up from its depths. Then our two ocean-hearts mingle their floods. I do not believe that this letter will extend to three pages. My feelings do not, of their own accord, assume words--at least, not a continued flow of words. I write a few lines, and then I fall a-musing about many things, which seem to have no connection among themselves, save that my Dove flits lightly through them all. I feel as if my being were dissolved and the idea of you were diffused throughout it. Am I writing nonsense? That is for you to decide. You know what is Truth--"what is what"--and I should not dare to say to you what I felt to be other than the Truth--other than the very "what." It is very singular (but I do not suppose I can express it) that, while I love you so dearly, and while I am so conscious of the deep embrace of our spirits, still I have an awe of you that I never felt for anybody else. Awe is not the word, either; because it might imply something stern in you--whereas--but you must make it out for yourself. I do wish that I could put this into words--not so much for your satisfaction (because I believe you will understand) as for my own. I suppose I should have pretty much the same feeling if an angel were to come from Heaven and be my dearest friend--only the angel could not have the tenderest of human natures too, the sense of which is mingled with this sentiment. Perhaps it is because in meeting you, I really meet a spirit, whereas the obstructions of earth have prevented such a meeting in every other place. But I leave the mystery here. Some time or other, it may be made plainer to me. But methinks it converts my love into a religion. And then it is singular, too, that this awe (or whatever it be) does not prevent me from feeling that it is I who have the charge of you, and that my Dove is to follow my guidance and do my bidding. Am I not very bold to say this? And will not you rebel? Oh no; because I possess the power only so far as I love you. My love gives me the right, and your love consents to it. Since writing the above I have been asleep; and I dreamed that I had been sleeping a whole year in the open air; and that while I slept, the grass grew around me. It seemed, in my dream, that the very bed-clothes which actually covered me were spread beneath me, and when I awoke (in my dream) I snatched them up, and the earth under them looked black, as if it had been burnt--one square place, exactly the size of the bedclothes. Yet there was grass and herbage scattered over this burnt space, looking as fresh, and bright, and dewy, as if the summer rain and the summer sun had been cherishing them all the time. Interpret this for me, my Dove--but do not draw any somber omens from it. What is signified [by] my nap of a whole year? (It made me grieve to think that I had lost so much of eternity)--and what was the fire that blasted the spot of earth which I occupied, while the grass flourished all around?--And what comfort am I to draw from the fresh herbage amid the burnt space? But it is a silly dream, and you cannot expound any sense out of it. Generally, I cannot remember what my dreams have been--only there is a confused sense of having passed through adventures, pleasurable or otherwise. I suspect that you mingle with my dreams, but take care to flit away just before I awake, leaving me but dimly and doubtfully conscious of your visits. Do you never start so suddenly from a dream that you are afraid to look round the room, lest your dream-personages (so strong and distinct seemed their existence, a moment before) should have thrust themselves out of dream-land into the midst of realities? I do, sometimes. I wish I were to see you this evening. How many times have you thought of me today? All the time?--Or not at all? Did you ever read such a foolish letter as this? (Here I was interrupted, and have taken a stroll down on the Neck--a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful sunshine, and air, and sea. Would that my Dove had been with me. I fear that we shall perforce lose some of our mutual intimacy with Nature--we walk together so seldom that she will seem more like a stranger. Would that I could write such sweet letters to mine own self, as mine own self writes to me. Good bye, dearest self. Direct yours to NATH. HAWTHORNE, ESQ. Custom-House, Boston. Miss Sophia A. Peabody, No. 4 Avon Place, Boston. TO MISS PEABODY _Boston_, July 3d, 1839 _Most beloved Amelia_, I shall call you so sometimes in playfulness, and so may you; but it is not the name by which my soul recognizes you. It knows you as Sophie; but I doubt whether that is the inwardly and intensely dearest epithet either. I believe that "Dove" is the true word after all; and it never can be used amiss, whether in sunniest gaiety or shadiest seriousness. And yet it is a sacred word, and I should not love to have anybody hear me use it, nor know that GOD has baptised you so--the baptism being for yourself and me alone. By that name, I think, I shall greet you when we meet in Heaven. Other dear ones may call you "daughter," "sister," "Sophia," but when, at your entrance into Heaven, or after you have been a little while there, you hear a voice say "Dove!" then you will know that your kindred spirit has been admitted (perhaps for your sake) to the mansions of rest. That word will express his yearning for you--then to be forever satisfied; for we will melt into one another, and be close, close together then. The name was inspired; it came without our being aware that you were thenceforth to be my Dove, now and through eternity. I do not remember, how nor when it alighted on you; the first I knew, it was in my heart to call you so. Good night now, my Dove. It is not yet nine o'clock; but I am somewhat aweary and prefer to muse about you till bedtime, rather than write. July 5th, ½ past seven P.M. I must, somehow or other, finish this letter tonight, my dearest--or else it would not be sent tomorrow; and then I fear our head would ache, naughty head that it is. My heart yearns to communicate to you; but if it had any other means at hand, it certainly would not choose to communicate by the scratchings of an iron pen, which I am now compelled to use. This must and will inevitably be a dull letter. Oh how different from yours, which I received today. You are absolutely inspired, my Dove; and it is not my poor stupid self that inspires you; for how could I give what is not in me. I wish I could write to you in the morning, before my toils begin; but that is impossible, unless I were to write before daylight. At eventide, my mind has quite lost its elasticity--my heart, even, is weary--and all that I seem capable of doing is to rest my head on its pillow and there lay down the burthen of life. I do not mean to imply that I am unhappy or discontented; for this is not the case; my life is only a burthen, in the same way that it is so to every toilsome man, and mine is a healthy weariness, such as needs only a night's sleep to remove it. But from henceforth forever, I shall be entitled to call the sons of toil my brethren, and shall know how to sympathise with them, seeing that I, likewise, have risen at the dawn and borne the fervor of the mid-day sun, nor turned my heavy footsteps homeward till eventide. Years hence, perhaps, the experience that my heart is acquiring now will flow out in truth and wisdom. You ask me a good many questions, my Dove, and I will answer such of them as now occur to me; and the rest you may ask me again, when we meet. First as to your letters. My beloved, you must write whenever you will--in all confidence that I can never be otherwise than joyful to receive your letters. Do not get into the habit of trying to find out, by any method save your own intuition, what is pleasing and what is displeasing to me. Whenever you need my counsel, or even my reproof, in any serious matter, you will not fail to receive it; but I wish my Dove to be as free as a Bird of Paradise. Now, as to this affair of the letters. I have sometimes been a little annoyed at the smiles of my brother measurers, who, notwithstanding the masculine fist of the direction, seem to know that such delicately sealed and folded epistles can come only from a lady's small and tender hand. But the annoyance is not on my own account; but because it seems as if the letters were prophaned by being smiled at--but this is, after all, a mere fantasy, since the smilers know nothing about my Dove, nor that I really have a Dove; nor can they be certain that the letters come from a lady, nor, especially, can they have the remotest imagination what heavenly letters they are. The sum and substance is, that they are smiling at nothing; and so it is no matter for their smiles. I would not give up one letter to avoid the "world's dread laugh,"--much less to shun the good-natured raillery of three or four people who do not dream of giving pain. Why has my Dove made me waste so much of my letter in this talk about nothing? My dearest, did you really think that I meant to express a doubt whether we should enjoy each other's society so much, if we could be together all the time. No, no; for I always feel, that our momentary and hurried interviews scarcely afford us time to taste the draught of affection that we drink from one another's hearts. There is a precious portion of our happiness wasted, because we are forced to enjoy it too greedily. But I thought, as you do, that there might be more communication of the intellect, as well as communion of heart, if we could be oftener together. Your picture gallery of auxiliary verbs is an admirable fantasy. You are certainly the first mortal to whom it was given to behold a verb; though, it seems as if they ought to be visible, being creatures whose office it is (if I remember my grammar aright) "to be, to do, and to suffer." Therein is comprehended all that we mortals are capable of. No; for, according to the definition, verbs do not feel, and cannot enjoy--they only exist, and act, and are miserable. My Dove and I are no verbs--or if so, we are passive verbs, and therefore happy ones. (Rest of letter missing) To Miss Sophia A. Peabody, Care of Dr. N. Peabody, Salem, Massachusetts. TO MISS PEABODY _Boston_, Monday Eveg July 15th [1839] _My blessed Dove_, Your letter was brought to me at East Cambridge this afternoon:--otherwise I know not when I should have received it; for I am so busy that I know not whether I shall have time to go to the Custom-House these two or three days. I put it in my pocket, and did not read it till just now, when I could be quiet in my own chamber--for I always feel as if your letters were too sacred to be read in the midst of people--and (you will smile) I never read them without first washing my hands! And so my poor Dove is sick, and I cannot take her to my bosom. I do really feel as if I could cure her. [Portion of letter missing] Oh, my dearest, do let our love be powerful enough to make you well. I will have faith in its efficacy--not that it will work an immediate miracle--but it shall make you so well at heart that you cannot possibly be ill in the body. Partake of my health and strength, my beloved. Are they not your own, as well as mine? Yes--and your illness is mine as well as yours; and with all the pain it gives me, the whole world should not buy my right to share in it. My dearest, I will not be much troubled, since you tell me (and your word is always truth) that there is no need. But, oh, be careful of yourself--remembering how much earthly happiness depends on your health. Be tranquil--let me be your Peace, as you are mine. Do not write to me, unless your heart be unquiet, and you think that you can quiet it by writing. God bless mine own Dove. I have kissed those three last words. Do you kiss them too. Miss Sophia A. Peabody, Care of Dr. N. Peabody, Salem, Mass. TO MISS PEABODY Wednesday eveg. July 17th [1839] _My Dearest_, I did not know but you would like another little note--and I think I feel a strange impulse to write, now that the whole correspondence devolves on me. And I wrote my other note in such a hurry, that I quite forgot to give you the praise which you so deserved, for bearing up so stoutly against the terrible misfortune of my non-appearance. Indeed, I do think my Dove is the strongest little dove that ever was created--never did any creature live, who could feel so acutely, and yet endure so well. This note must be a mere word, my beloved--and I wish I could make it the very tenderest word that ever was spoken or written. Imagine all that I cannot write. God bless you, mine own Dove, and make you quite well against I take you to your home--which shall be on Saturday eveg, without fail. Till then, dearest, spend your time in happy thoughts and happy dreams--and let my image be among them. Good bye, mine own Dove--I have kissed that holy word. YOUR OWN, OWN, OWNEST. My Dove must not look for another note. To Miss Sophia A. Peabody, Care of Dr. N. Peabody, Salem, Mass. TO MISS PEABODY _Boston_, July 24th, 1839--8 o'clock P.M. _Mine own_, I am tired this evening, as usual, with my long day's toil; and my head wants its pillow--and my soul yearns for the friend whom God has given it--whose soul He has married to my soul. Oh, my dearest, how that thought thrills me! We _are_ married! I felt it long ago; and sometimes, when I was seeking for some fondest word, it has been on my lips to call you--"Wife"! I hardly know what restrained me from speaking it--unless a dread (for _that_ would have been an infinite pang to me) of feeling you shrink back, and thereby discovering that there was yet a deep place in your soul which did not know me. Mine own Dove, need I fear it now? Are we not married? God knows we are. Often, I have silently given myself to you, and received you for my portion of human love and happiness, and have prayed Him to consecrate and bless the union. Yes--we are married; and as God Himself has joined us, we may trust never to be separated, neither in Heaven nor on Earth. We will wait patiently and quietly, and He will lead us onward hand in hand (as He has done all along) like little children, and will guide us to our perfect happiness--and will teach us when our union is to be revealed to the world. My beloved, why should we be silent to one another--why should our lips be silent--any longer on this subject? The world might, as yet, misjudge us; and therefore we will not speak to the world; but why should we not commune together about all our hopes of earthly and external as well [as] our faith of inward and eternal union? Farewell for tonight, my dearest--my soul's bride! July 25th. 8 o'clock, P.M. How does my Dove contrive to live and thrive, and keep her heart in cheerful trim, through a whole fortnight, with only one letter from me? It cannot be indifference; so it must be heroism--and how heroic! It does seem to me that my spirit would droop and wither like a plant that lacked rain and dew, if it were not for the frequent shower of your gentle and holy thoughts. But then there is such a difference in our situations. My Dove is at home--not, indeed, in her home of homes--but still in the midst of true affections; and she can live a spiritual life, spiritual and intellectual. Now, my intellect, and my heart and soul, have no share in my present mode of life--they find neither labor nor food in it; everything that I do here might be better done by a machine. I _am_ a machine, and am surrounded by hundreds of similar machines;--or rather, all of the business people are so many wheels of one great machine--and we have no more love or sympathy for one another than if we were made of wood, brass, or iron, like the wheels of other pieces of complicated machinery. Perchance--but do not be frightened, dearest--the soul would wither and die within me, leaving nothing but the busy machine, no germ for immortality, nothing that could taste of heaven, if it were not for the consciousness of your deep, deep love, which is renewed to me with every letter. Oh, my Dove, I have really thought sometimes, that God gave you to me to be the salvation of my soul. (Rest of letter missing) TO MISS PEABODY _Boston_, July 30th, 8 (or thereabouts) P.M. [1839] _Beloved_, There was no letter from you to-day; and this circumstance, in connection with your mention of a headache on Sunday, made me apprehensive that my Dove is not well. Yet surely she would write, or cause to be written, intelligence of the fact (if fact it were) to the sharer of her well-being and ill-being. Do, dearest, give me the assurance that you will never be ill without letting me know, and then I shall always be at peace, and will not disquiet myself for the non-reception of a letter; for really, I would not have you crowd your other duties into too small a space, nor dispense with anything that it is desirable to do, for the sake of writing to me. If you were not to write for a whole year, I still should never doubt that you love me infinitely; and I doubt not that, in vision, dream, or reverie, our wedded souls would hold communion throughout all that time. Therefore I do not ask for letters while you are well, but leave all to your own heart and judgment; but if anything, bodily or mental, afflicts my Dove, her beloved _must_ be told. And why was my dearest wounded by that silly sentence of mine about "indifference"? It was not well that she should do anything but smile at it. I knew, just as certainly as your own heart knows, that my letters are very precious to you--had I been less certain of it, I never could have trifled upon the subject. Oh, my darling, let all your sensibilities be healthy--never, never, be wounded by what ought not to wound. Our tenderness should make us mutually susceptible of happiness from every act of each other, but of pain from none; our mighty love should scorn all little annoyances, even from the object of that love. What misery (and what ridiculous misery too) would it be, if, because we love one another better than all the universe besides, our only gain thereby were a more exquisite sensibility to pain for the beloved hand and a more terrible power of inflicting it! Dearest, it never shall be so with us. We will have such an infinity of mutual faith, that even real offenses (should they ever occur) shall not wound, because we know that something external from yourself or myself must be guilty of the wrong, and never our essential selves. My beloved wife, there is no need of all this preachment now; but let us both meditate upon it, and talk to each other about it;--so shall there never come any cloud across our inward bliss--so shall one of our hearts never wound the other, and itself fester with the sore that it inflicts. And I speak now, when my Dove is not wounded nor sore, because it is easier than it might be hereafter, when some careless and wayward act or word of mine may have rubbed too roughly against her tenderest of hearts. Dearest, I beseech you grant me freedom to be careless and wayward--for I have had such freedom all my life. Oh, let me feel that I may even do you a little wrong without your avenging it (oh how cruelly) by being wounded. (Rest of letter missing) TO MISS PEABODY _Custom House_, August 8th, 1839 Your letter, my beloved wife, was duly received into your husband's heart yesterday. I found it impossible to keep it all day long, with unbroken seal, in my pocket; and so I opened and read it on board of a salt vessel, where I was at work, amid all sorts of bustle, and gabble of Irishmen, and other incommodities. Nevertheless its effect was very blessed, even as if I had gazed upward from the deck of the vessel, and beheld my wife's sweet face looking down upon me from a sun-brightened cloud. Dearest, if your dove-wings will not carry you so far, I beseech you to alight upon such a cloud sometimes, and let it bear you to me. True it is, that I never look heavenward without thinking of you, and I doubt whether it would much surprise me to catch a glimpse of you among those upper regions. Then would all that is spiritual within me so yearn towards you, that I should leave my earthly incumbrances behind, and float upward and embrace you in the heavenly sunshine. Yet methinks I shall be more content to spend a lifetime of earthly and heavenly happiness intermixed. So human am I, my beloved, that I would not give up the hope of loving and cherishing you by a fireside of our own, not for any unimaginable bliss of higher spheres. Your influence shall purify me and fit me for a better world--but it shall be by means of our happiness here below. Was such a rhapsody as the foregoing ever written in the Custom House before? I have almost felt it a sin to write to my Dove here, because her image comes before me so vividly--and the place is not worthy of it. Nevertheless, I cast aside my scruples, because, having been awake ever since four o'clock this morning (now thirteen hours) and abroad since sunrise, I shall feel more like holding intercourse in dreams than with my pen, when secluded in my room. I am not quite hopeless, now, of meeting you in dreams. Did you not know, beloved, that I dreamed of you, as it seemed to me, all night long, after that last blissful meeting? It is true, when I looked back upon the dream, it immediately became confused; but it had been vivid, and most happy, and left a sense of happiness in my heart. Come again, sweet wife! Force your way through the mists and vapors that envelope my slumbers--illumine me with a radiance that shall not vanish when I awake. I throw my heart as wide open to you as I can. Come and rest within it, Dove. Oh, how happy you make me by calling me your husband--by subscribing yourself my wife. I kiss that word when I meet it in your letters; and I repeat over and over to myself, "she is my wife--I am her husband." Dearest, I could almost think that the institution of marriage was ordained, first of all, for you and me, and for you and me alone; it seems so fresh and new--so unlike anything that the people around us enjoy or are acquainted with. Nobody ever had a wife but me--nobody a husband, save my Dove. Would that the husband were worthier of his wife; but she loves him--and her wise and prophetic heart could never do so if he were utterly unworthy. _My own Room._ August 9th--about 10 A.M. It is so rare a thing for your husband to find himself in his own room in the middle of the forenoon, that he cannot help advising his Dove of that remarkable fact. By some misunderstanding, I was sent on a fruitless errand to East Cambridge, and have stopped here, on my return to the Custom House, to rest and refresh myself--and what can so rest and refresh me as to hold intercourse with my darling wife? It must be but a word and a kiss, however--a written word and a shadowy kiss. Good bye, dearest. I must go now to hold controversy, I suppose, with some plaguy little Frenchman about a peck of coal more or less; but I will give my beloved another word and kiss, when the day's toil is over. _About 8 o'clock P.M._--I received your letter, your sweet, sweet letter, my sweetest wife, on reaching the Custom House. Now as to that swelled face of ours--it had begun to swell when we last met; but I did not tell you, because I knew that you would associate the idea of pain with it, whereas, it was attended with no pain at all. Very glad am I, that my Dove did not see me when one side of my face was swollen as big as two, for the image of such a monstrous one-sidedness, or double-sidedness, might have haunted her memory through the whole fortnight. Dearest, is it a weakness that your husband wishes to look tolerably comely always in your eyes?--and beautiful if he could!! My Dove is beautiful, and full of grace; she should not have an ugly mate. But to return to this "naughty swelling"--it began to subside on Tuesday, and has now, I think, entirely disappeared, leaving my visage in its former admirable proportion. Nothing is now the matter with me; save that my heart is as much swollen as my cheek was--swollen with love, with pent-up love, which I would fain mingle with the heart-blood of mine own sweet wife. Oh, dearest, how much I have to say to you!--how many fond thoughts. Dearest, I dare not give you permission to go out in the east winds. The west wind will come very often I am sure, if it were only for the sake of my Dove. Have nothing to do with that hateful east wind. Miss Sophia A. Peabody, Care of Dr. N. Peabody, Salem, Mass. TO MISS PEABODY _Boston_, August 21st, 1839 My dearest will be glad to know that her husband has not had to endure the heavy sunshine this afternoon;--he came home at three o'clock or thereabout, and locking the door, betook himself to sleep--first ensuring himself sweet slumber and blissful dreams (if any dreams should come) by reperusing his sweet wife's letter. His wife was with him at the moment of falling asleep, and at the moment of awaking; but she stole away from him during the interval. Naughty wife! Nevertheless, he has slept and is refreshed--slept how long he does not know; but the sun has made a far progress downward, since he closed his eyes. Oh, my wife, if it were possible that you should vanish from me, I feel and know that my soul would be solitary forever and ever. I almost think that there would be no "forever" for me. I could not encounter such a desolate Eternity, were you to leave me. You are my first hope and my last. If you fail me (but there is no such if) I might toil onward through this life without much outward change, but I should sink down and die utterly upon the threshold of the dreary Future. Were _you_ to find yourself deceived, you would betake yourself at once to God and Heaven, in the certainty of there finding a thousand-fold recompense for all earthly disappointment; but with me, it seems as if hope and happiness would be torn up by the roots, and could never bloom again, neither in this soil nor the soil of Paradise. August 22d. Five or six o'clock P.M. I was interrupted by the supper bell, while writing the foregoing sentence; and much that I might have added has now passed out of my mind--or passed into its depths. My beloved wife, let us make no question about our love, whether it be true. Were it otherwise, God would not have left your heart to wreck itself utterly--His angels keep watch over you--they would have given you early and continued warning of the approach of Evil in any shape. Two letters has my Dove blessed me with, since that of Monday--both beautiful--all three, indeed, most beautiful. There is a great deal in all of them that should be especially answered; but how may this be effected in one little sheet?--moreover, it is my pleasure to write in a more desultory fashion. Nevertheless, propound as many questions as you see fit, in your letters, but, dearest, let it be without expectation of a set response. When I first looked at that shadow of the Passing Hour, I thought her expression too sad; but the more I looked the sweeter and pleasanter it grew--and now I am inclined to think that few mortals are waited on by happier Hours than is my Dove, even in her pensive moods. My beloved, you make a Heaven round about you, and dwell in it continually; and as it is your Heaven, so is it mine. My heart has not been very heavy--not desperately heavy--any one time since I loved you; not even your illness and headaches, dearest wife, can make me desperately sad. My stock of sunshine is so infinitely increased by partaking of yours, that even when a cloud flits by, I incomparably prefer its gloom to the sullen, leaden tinge that used to overspread my sky. Were you to bring me, in outward appearance, nothing save a load of grief and pain, yet I do believe that happiness, in no stinted measure, would somehow or other be smuggled into the dismal burthen. But you come to me with no grief--no pain--you come with flowers of Paradise; some in bloom, many in the bud, and all of them immortal. August 23d--between 7 and 8 P.M. Dearest wife, when I think how soon this letter will greet you, it makes my heart yearn towards you so much the more. How much of life we waste! Oh, beloved, if we had but a cottage somewhere beyond the sway of the east wind, yet within the limits of New England, where we could be always together, and have a place to _be_ in--what could we desire more? Nothing--save daily bread, (or rather bread and milk, for I think I should adopt your diet) and clean white apparel every day for mine unspotted Dove. Then how happy I would be--and how good! I could not be other than good and happy, when your kiss would sanctify me at all my outgoings and incomings. And you should draw, and paint, and sculpture, and make music, and poetry too, and your husband would admire and criticise; and I, being pervaded with your spirit, would write beautifully and make myself famous for your sake, because perhaps you would like to have the world acknowledge me--but if the whole world glorified me with one voice, it would be a meed of little value in comparison with my wife's smile and kiss. For I shall always read my manuscripts to you, in the summer afternoons or winter evenings; and if they please you I shall expect a smile and a kiss as my reward--and if they do not please, I must have a smile and kiss to comfort me. Good bye--sweet, sweet, dear, dear, sweetest, dearest wife. I received the kiss you sent me and have treasured it up in my heart. Take one from your own husband. Miss Sophia A. Peabody, Care of Dr. A. Peabody, Salem, Mass. TO MISS PEABODY _Boston_, August 25th, 1839 _Dearest Wife_, I did not write you yesterday, for several reasons--partly because I was interrupted by company; and also I had a difficult letter to project and execute in behalf of an office-seeker; and in the afternoon I fell asleep amid thoughts of my own Dove; and when I awoke, I took up Miss Martineau's Deerbrook, and became interested in it--because, being myself a lover, nothing that treats earnestly of love can be indifferent to me. Some truth in the book I recognised--but there seems to be too much of dismal fantasy. Thus, one way or another, the Sabbath passed away without my pouring out my heart to my sweet wife on paper; but I thought of you, dearest, all day long. Your letter came this forenoon, and I opened it on board of a salt-ship, and snatched portions of it in the intervals of keeping tally. Every letter of yours is as fresh and new as if you had never written a preceding one--each is like a strain of music unheard before, yet all are in sweet accordance--all of them introduce me deeper and deeper into your being, yet there is no sense of surprise at what I see, and feel, and know, therein. I am familiar with your inner heart, as with my home; but yet there is a sense of revelation--or perhaps of recovered intimacy with a dearest friend long hidden from me. Were you not my wife in some past eternity? Dearest, perhaps these speculations are not wise. We will not cast dreamy glances too far behind us or before us, but live our present life in simplicity; for methinks that is the way to realise it most intensely. Good night, most beloved. Your husband is presently going to bed; for the bell has just rung (those bells are always interrupting us, whether for dinner, or supper, or bed-time) and he rose early this morning, and must be abroad at sunrise tomorrow. Good night, my wife. Receive your husband's kiss upon your eyelids. August 27th. ½ past 7 o'clock. Very dearest, your husband has been stationed all day at the end of Long Wharf, and I rather think that he had the most eligible situation of anybody in Boston. I was aware that it must be intensely hot in the middle of the city; but there was only a very short space of uncomfortable heat in my region, half-way towards the center of the harbour; and almost all the time there was a pure and delightful breeze, fluttering and palpitating, sometimes shyly kissing my brow, then dying away, and then rushing upon me in livelier sport, so that I was fain to settle my straw hat tighter upon my head. Late in the afternoon, there was a sunny shower, which came down so like a benediction, that it seemed ungrateful to take shelter in the cabin, or to put up an umbrella. Then there was a rainbow, or a large segment of one, so exceedingly brilliant, and of such long endurance, that I almost fancied it was stained into the sky, and would continue there permanently. And there were clouds floating all about, great clouds and small, of all glorious and lovely hues (save that imperial crimson, which was never revealed save to our united gaze) so glorious, indeed, and so lovely, that I had a fantasy of Heaven's being broken into fleecy fragments, and dispersed throughout space, with its blessed inhabitants yet dwelling blissfully upon those scattered islands. Oh, how I do wish that my sweet wife and I could dwell upon a cloud, and follow the sunset round about the earth! Perhaps she might; but my nature is too earthy to permit me to dwell there with her--and I know well that she would not leave me here. Dearest, how I longed for you to be with me, both in the shower and the sunshine. I did but half see what was to be seen, nor but half feel the emotions which the scene ought to have produced. Had you been there, I do think that we should have remembered this among our most wondrously beautiful sunsets. And the sea was very beautiful too. Would it not be a pleasant life to--but I will not sketch out any more fantasies tonight. Beloved, have not I been gone a great while? Truly it seems to me very long; and it [is] strange what an increase of apparent length is always added by two or three days of the second week. Do not you yearn to see me? I know you do, dearest. How do I know it? How should I, save by my own heart? Dearest wife, I am tired now, and have scribbled this letter in such slovenly fashion that I fear you will hardly be able to read it--nevertheless, I have been happy in writing it. But now, though it is so early yet, I shall throw aside my pen, especially as the paper is so nearly covered. My sweet Dove, Good night. Miss Sophia A. Peabody, Care of Dr. N. Peabody, Salem, Mass. TO MISS PEABODY _Boston_, September 23d 1839. ½ past 6 P.M. Belovedest little wife--sweetest Sophie Hawthorne--what a delicious walk that was, last Thursday! It seems to me, now, as it I could really remember every footstep of it. It is almost as distinct as the recollection of those walks, in which my earthly form did really tread beside your own, and my arm upheld you; and, indeed, it has the same character as those heavenly ramblings;--for did we tread on earth ever then? Oh no--our souls went far away among the sunset clouds, and wherever there was ethereal beauty, there were we, our true selves; and it was there we grew into each other, and became a married pair. Dearest, I love to date our marriage as far back as possible, and I feel sure that the tie had been formed, and our union had become indissoluble, even before we sat down together on the steps of the "house of spirits." How beautiful and blessed those hours appear to me! True; we are far more conscious of our relation, and therefore infinitely happier, now, than we were then; but still those remembrances are among the most precious treasures of my soul. It is not past happiness; it makes a portion of our present bliss. And thus, doubtless, even amid the joys of Heaven, we shall love to look back to our earthly bliss, and treasure it forever in the sum of an infinitely accumulating happiness. Perhaps not a single pressure of the hand, not a glance, not a sweet and tender tone, but will be repeated sometime or other in our memory. Oh, dearest, blessedest Dove, I never felt sure of going to Heaven, till I knew that you loved me; but now I am conscious of God's love in your own. And now, good bye for a little while, mine own wife. I thought it was just on the verge of supper-time when I began to write--and there is the bell now. I was beginning to fear that it had rung unheard while I was communing with my Dove. Should we be the more ethereal, if we did not eat? I have a most human and earthly appetite. Mine own wife, since supper I have been reading over again (for the third time--the two first being aboard my saltship--the Marcia Cleaves) your letter of yesterday--and a dearest letter it is--and meeting with Sophie Hawthorne twice, I took the liberty to kiss her very fervently. Will she forgive me? Do know yourself by that name, dearest, and think of yourself as Sophie Hawthorne? It thrills my heart to write it, and still more, I think, to read it in the fairy letters of your own hand. Oh, you are my wife, my dearest, truest, tenderest, most beloved wife. I would not be disjoined from you for a moment, for all the world. And how strong, while I write, is the consciousness that I am truly your husband! My little Dove. I have observed that butterflies--very broad-winged and magnificent butterflies--frequently come on board of the salt ship when I am at work. What have these bright strangers to do on Long Wharf, where there are no flowers or any green thing--nothing but brick stores, stone piles, black ships, and the bustle of toilsome men, who neither look up to the blue sky, nor take note of these wandering gems of air. I cannot account for them, unless, dearest, they are the lovely fantasies of your mind, which you send thither in search of me. There is the supper-bell. Good-bye, darling. Sept. 25th. Morning.--Dove, I have but a single moment to embrace you. Tell Sophie Hawthorne I love her. Has she a partiality for her own, own HUSBAND. TO MISS PEABODY _Custom House_, October 10th, 1839--½ past 2 P.M. Belovedest, your two precious letters have arrived--the first yesterday forenoon, the second today. In regard to the first, there was a little circumstance that affected me so pleasantly, that I cannot help telling my sweetest wife of it. I had read it over three times, I believe, and was reading it again, towards evening in my room; when I discovered, in a remote region of the sheet, two or three lines which I had not before seen, and which Sophie Hawthorne had signed with her own name. It is the strangest thing in the world that I had not read them before--but certainly it was a happy accident; for, finding them so unexpectedly, when I supposed that I already had the whole letter by heart, it seemed as if there had been a sudden revelation of my Dove--as if she had stolen into my room (as, in her last epistle, she dreams of doing) and made me sensible of her presence at that very moment. Dearest, since writing the above, I have been interrupted by some official business; for I am at present filling the place of Colonel Hall as head of the measurers' department--which may account for my writing to you from the Custom House. It is the most ungenial place in the whole world to write a love-letter in:--not but what my heart is full of love, here as elsewhere: but it closes up, and will not give forth its treasure now. I do wish mine own Dove had been with me, on my last passage to Boston. We should assuredly have thought that a miracle had been wrought in our favor--that Providence had put angelic sentinels round about us, to ensure us the quiet enjoyment of our affection--for, as far as Lynn, I was actually the sole occupant of the car in which I had seated myself. What a blissful solitude would that have been, had my whole self been there! Then would we have flown through space like two disembodied spirits--two or one. Are we singular or plural, dearest? Has not each of us a right to use the first person singular, when speaking in behalf of our united being? Does not "I," whether spoken by Sophie Hawthorne's lips or mine, express the one spirit of myself and that darlingest Sophie Hawthorne? But what a wilful little person she is! Does she still refuse my Dove's proffer to kiss her cheek? Well--I shall contrive some suitable punishment: and if my Dove cannot kiss her, I must undertake the task in person. What a painful duty it will be! October 11th--½ past 4 P.M. Did my Dove fly in with me in my chamber when I entered just now? If so, let her make herself manifest to me this very moment, for my heart needs her presence.--You are not here dearest. I sit writing in the middle of the chamber, opposite the looking-glass; and as soon as I finish this sentence, I shall look therein--and really I have something like a shadowy notion, that I shall behold mine own white Dove peeping over my shoulder. One moment more--I defer the experiment as long as possible, because there is a pleasure in the slight tremor of the heart that this fantasy has awakened. Dearest, if you can make me sensible of your presence, do it now!--Oh, naughty, naughty Dove! I have looked, and saw nothing but my own dark face and beetle-brow. How could you disappoint me so? Or is it merely the defect in my own eyes, which cannot behold the spiritual? My inward eye can behold you, though but dimly. Perhaps, beloved wife, you did not come when I called, because you mistook the locality whence the call proceeded. You are to know, then, that I have removed from my old apartment, which was wanted as a parlor by Mr. and Mrs. Devens, and am now established in a back chamber--a pleasant enough and comfortable little room. The windows have a better prospect than those of my former chamber, for I can see the summit of the hill on which Gardner Greene's estate was situated; it is the highest point of the city, and the boys at play on it are painted strongly against the sky. No roof ascends as high as this--nothing but the steeple of the Park-street church, which points upward behind it. It is singular that such a hill should have been suffered to remain so long, in the very heart of the city; it affects me somewhat as if a portion of the original forest were still growing here. But they are fast digging it away now; and if they continue their labors, I shall soon be able to see the Park-street steeple as far downward as the dial. Moreover, in another direction, I can see the top of the dome of the State-House; and if my Dove were to take wing and alight there (the easiest thing in the world for a dove to do) she might look directly into my window, and see me writing this letter. I glance thither as I write, but can see no Dove there. (Rest of letter missing) TO MISS PEABODY _Boston_, October 3d, 1839. ½ past 7 P.M. _Ownest Dove_; Did you get home safe and sound, and with a quiet and happy heart? Providence acted lovingly toward us on Tuesday evening, allowing us to meet in the wide desert of this world, and mingle our spirits. It would have seemed all a vision then, now we have the symbol of its reality. You looked like a vision, beautifullest wife, with the width of the room between us--so spiritual that my human heart wanted to be assured that you had an earthly vesture on. What beautiful white doves those were, on the border of the vase; are they of mine own Dove's kindred? Do you remember a story of a cat who was changed into a lovely lady?--and on her bridal night, a mouse happened to run across the floor; and forthwith the cat-wife leaped out of bed to catch it. What if mine own Dove, in some woeful hour for her poor husband, should remember her dove-instincts, and spread her wings upon the western breeze, and return to him no more! Then would he stretch out his arms, poor wingless biped, not having the wherewithal to fly, and say aloud--"Come back, naughty Dove!--whither are you going?--come back, and fold your wings upon my heart again, or it will freeze!" And the Dove would flutter her wings, and pause a moment in the air, meditating whether or no she should come back: for in truth, as her conscience would tell her, this poor mortal had given her all he had to give--a resting-place on his bosom--a home in his deepest heart. But then she would say to herself--"my home is in the gladsome air--and if I need a resting-place, I can find one on any of the sunset-clouds. He is unreasonable to call me back; but if he can follow me, he may!" Then would the poor deserted husband do his best to fly in pursuit of the faithless Dove; and for that purpose would ascend to the topmast of a salt-ship, and leap desperately into the air, and fall down head-foremost upon the deck, and break his neck. And there should be engraven on his tombstone--"Mate not thyself with a Dove, unless thou hast wings to fly." Now will my Dove scold at me for this foolish flight of fancy;--but the fact is, my goose quill flew away with me. I do think that I have gotten a bunch of quills from the silliest flock of geese on earth. But the rest of the letter shall be very sensible. I saw Mr. Howes in the reading-room of [the] Athenaeum, between one and two o'clock to-day; for I happened to have had leisure for an early dinner, and so was spending a half-hour turning over the periodicals. He spoke of the long time since your husband had been at his house; and so I promised, on behalf of that respectable personage, that he would spend an evening there on his next visit to Salem. But if I had such a sweetest wife as your husband has, I doubt whether I could find [it] in my heart to keep the engagement. Now, good night, truest Dove in the world. You will never fly away from me; and it is only the infinite impossibility of it that enables me to sport with the idea. Dearest, there was an illegible word in your yesterday's note. I have pored over it, but cannot make it out. Your words are too precious to be thus hidden under their own vesture. Good night, wife! October 4th.--5 or thereabout P.M. Mine own Dove, I dreamed the queerest dreams last night, about being deserted, and all such nonsense--so you see how I was punished for that naughty nonsense of the Faithless Dove. It seems to me that my dreams are generally about fantasies, and very seldom about what I really think and feel. You did not appear visibly in my last night's dreams: but they were made up of desolation; and it was good to awake, and know that my spirit was forever and irrevocably linked with the soul of my truest and tenderest Dove. You have warmed my heart, mine own wife: and never again can I know what it is to be cold and desolate, save in dreams. You love me dearly--don't you? And so my Dove has been in great peril since we parted. No--I do not believe she was; it was only a shadow of peril, not a reality. My spirit cannot anticipate any harm to you, and I trust you to God with securest faith. I know not whether I could endure actually to see you in danger: but when I hear of any risk--as, for instance, when your steed seemed to be on the point of dashing you to pieces (but I do quake a little at that thought) against a tree--my mind does not seize upon it as if it had any substance. Believe me, dearest, the tree would have stood aside to let you pass, had there been no other means of salvation. Nevertheless, do not drive your steed against trees wilfully. Mercy on us, what a peril that was of the fat woman, when she "smashed herself down" beside my Dove! Poor Dove! Did you not feel as if an avalanche had all but buried you. I can see my Dove at this moment, my slender, little delicatest white Dove, squeezed almost out of Christendom by that great mass of female flesh--that ton of woman--that beef-eater and beer-guzzler, whose immense cloak, though broad as a ship's mainsail, could not be made to meet in front--that picture of an ale-wife--that triple, quadruple, dozen-fold old lady. Will not my Dove confess that there is a little _nonsense_ in this epistle? But be not wroth with me, darling wife;--my heart sports with you because it loves you. If you happen to see Sophie Hawthorne, kiss her cheek for my sake. I love her full as well as I do mine own wife. Will that satisfy her, do you think? If not, she is a very unreasonable little person. It is my chiefest pleasure to write to you, dearest. YOUR OWNEST HUSBAND. Miss Sophia A. Peabody, Care of Dr. N. Peabody, Salem, Mass. TO MISS PEABODY _Boston_, October 23d, 1839--½ past 7 P.M. _Dear little Dove_, Here sits your husband, comfortably established for the evening in his own domicile, with a cheerful coal fire making the room a little too warm. I think I like to be a very little too warm. And now if my Dove were here, she and that naughty Sophie Hawthorne, how happy we all three--two--one--(how many are there of us?)--how happy might we be! Dearest, it will be a yet untasted bliss, when, for the first time, I have you in a domicile of my own, whether it be in a hut or a palace, a splendid suit of rooms or an attic chamber. Then I shall feel as if I had brought my wife home at last. Shall Sophie Hawthorne be there too? Yes, mine own Dove, whether you like it or no. You would wonder, were I to tell you how absolutely necessary she has contrived to render herself to your husband. His heart stirs at her very name--even at the thought of her unspoken name. She is his sunshine--she is a happy smile on the visage of his Destiny, causing that stern personage to look as benign as Heaven itself. And were Sophie Hawthorne a tear instead of a smile, still your foolish husband would hold out his heart to receive that tear within it, and doubtless would think it more precious than all the smiles and sunshine in the world. But Sophie Hawthorne has bewitched him--for there is great reason to suspect that she deals in magic. Sometimes, while your husband conceives himself to be holding his Dove in his arms, lo and behold! there is the arch face of Sophie Hawthorne peeping up at him. And again, in the very midst of Sophie Hawthorne's airs, while he is meditating what sort of chastisement would suit her misdemeanors, all of a sudden he becomes conscious of his Dove, with her wings folded upon his heart to keep it warm. Methinks a woman, or angel (yet let it be a woman, because I deem a true woman holier than an angel)-- methinks a woman, then, who should combine the characteristics of Sophie Hawthorne and my Dove would be the very perfection of her race. The heart would find all it yearns for, in such a woman, and so would the mind and the fancy;--when her husband was lightsome of spirit, her merry fantasies would dance hand in hand with his; and when he was overburthened with cares he would rest them all upon her bosom. Dearest, your husband was called on by Mr. Hillard yesterday, who said that he intended soon to take a house in Boston, and, in that case, would like to take your respectable spouse to lodge and breakfast. What thinks my Dove of this? Your husband is quite delighted, because he thinks matters may be managed so that once in a while he may meet his own wife within his own premises. Might it not be so? Or would his wife--most preposterous idea!--deem it a sin against decorum to pay a visit to her husband? Oh, no, belovedest. Your unreserve, your out-gushing frankness, is one of the loveliest results of your purity, and innocence, and holiness. And now good night, wife worshipful and beloved. Amid many musings, nine o'clock has surprised me at this stage of my epistle. October 24th.--½ past 6 P.M. Dearest Dove, your letter came to-day; and I do think it the sweetest of all letters--but you must not therefore suppose that you have excelled yourself; for I think the same of each successive one. My dearest, what a delightful scene was that between Sophie Hawthorne and my Dove, when the former rebelled so stoutly against Destiny, and the latter, with such meek mournfulness, submitted. Which do I love the best, I wonder--my Dove, or my little Wild-Flower? I love each best, and both equally; and my heart would inevitably wither and dry up, and perish utterly, if either of them were torn away from it. Yet, truly I have reason to apprehend more trouble with Sophie Hawthorne than with my Dove. Miss Sophia A. Peabody, Care of Dr. N. Peabody, Salem, Mass. TO MISS PEABODY _Custom House_, Novr. 14th [1839] _My dearest Wife_, May God sustain you under this affliction. I have long dreaded it for your sake. Oh, let your heart be full of love for me now, and realise how entirely my happiness depends on your well-being. You are not your own, dearest--you must not give way to grief. Were it possible, I would come to see you now. I will write you again on Saturday. YOUR OWN HUSBAND. My dearest, this note seems cold and lifeless to me, as if there were no tenderness nor comfort in it. Think for yourself all that I cannot speak. Miss Sophia A. Peabody, Care of Dr. N. Peabody, Salem, Mass. TO MISS PEABODY _Boston_, Novr. 15th--very late [1839] Dearest and best wife, I meant to have written you a long letter this evening; but an indispensable and unexpected engagement with Gen. M'Neil has prevented me. Belovedest, your yesterday's letter was received; and gave me infinite comfort. Yet, Oh, be prepared for the worst--if this may be called worst, which is in truth best for all--and more than all for George. I cannot help trembling for you, dearest. God bless you and keep you. I will write a full letter in a day or two. Meantime, as your husband is to rise with peep of day tomorrow, he must betake him to his mattress. Good night, dearest. YOUR OWNEST. Miss Sophia A. Peabody, Salem. TO MISS PEABODY _Boston_, Nov. 17, 1839--6 P.M. or thereabout. I received no letter from my sweetest wife yesterday; and my heart is not quite at ease about her. Dearest, I pray to God for you--and I pray to yourself, too; for methinks there is within you a divine and miraculous power to counteract all sorts of harm. Oh be strong for the sake of your husband. Let all your love for me be so much added to the strength of your heart. Remember that your anguish must likewise be mine. Not that I would have it otherwise, mine own wife--your sorrows shall be just as precious a possession to me as your joys. Dearest, if you could steal in upon your husband now, you would see a comfortable sight. I wish you would make a sketch of me, here in our own parlour; and it might be done without trusting entirely to imagination, as you have seen the room and the furniture--and (though that would be the least important item of the picture) you have seen myself. I am writing now at my new bureau, which stands between the windows; there are two lamps before me, which show the polished shadings of the mahogany panels to great advantage. A coal fire is burning in the grate--not a very fervid one, but flickering up fitfully, once in a while, so as to remind me that I am by my own fireside. I am sitting in the cane-bottomed rocking-chair (wherein my Dove once sate, but which did not meet her approbation); and another hair-cloth arm-chair stands in front of the fire. Would that I could look round with the assurance of seeing mine own white Dove in it! Not that I want to see her apparition--nor to have her brought here by miracle, but I want that full assurance of peace and joy, which I should have if my belovedest wife were near me in our own parlor. Sophie Hawthorne, what a beautiful carpet did you choose for me! I admire it so much that I can hardly bear to tread upon it. It is fit only to be knelt upon; and I do kneel on it sometimes. As you saw it only in narrow strips, I doubt whether even you can imagine what an effect is produced by the tout ensemble, spreading its fantastic foliage, or whatever it is, all over the floor. Many times today have I found myself gazing at it; and I am almost tempted to call in people from the street to help me admire it worthily. But perhaps they would not quite sympathize with my raptures. I am doubtless somewhat more alive to the merits of this carpet, because it was your choice, and is our mutual property. My Dove, there is an excellent place for a bust over the bookcase which surmounts my bureau; some time or other, I shall behold a creation of your own upon it. At present, I have no work of art to adorn our parlour with, except an allumette-holder, on the mantel-piece ornamented with drawings from Flaxman. It was given me by Elizabeth; and, considerably to my vexation, one of the glasses has been broken, during the recent removal of my household gods. My wife, I like sleeping on a mattress better than on a feather-bed. It is a pity, however, that a mattress looks so lean and lank;--it certainly does not suggest such ideas of comfort and downy repose as a well-filled feather-bed does; but my sleep, I think, is of better quality, though, indeed, there was nothing to complain of on that score, even while I reposed on feathers. You need not be afraid of my smothering in the little bed-room; for I always leave the door open, so that I have the benefit of the immense volume of air in the spacious parlor. Mrs. Hillard takes excellent care of me, and feeds [me] with eggs and baked apples and other delectable dainties; and altogether I am as happily situated as a man can be, whose heart is wedded, while externally he is still a bachelor. My wife, would you rather that I should come home next Saturday and stay till Monday, or that I should come to Thanksgiving and stay the rest of the week? Both I cannot do; but I will try to do the latter, if you wish it; and I think I shall finish the salt-ship which I am now engaged upon, about Thanksgiving time--unless foul weather intervene to retard our progress. How delightfully long the evenings are now! I do not get intolerably tired any longer; and my thoughts sometimes wander back to literature and I have momentary impulses to write stories. But this will not be, at present. The utmost that I can hope to do, will be to portray some of the characteristics of the life which I am now living, and of the people with whom I am brought into contact, for future use. I doubt whether I shall write any more for the public, till I can have a daily or nightly opportunity of submitting my productions to the criticism of Sophie Hawthorne. I have a high opinion of that young lady's critical acumen, but a great dread of her severity--which, however, the Dove will not fail to temper with her sweetness. Dearest, there is nothing at all in this letter; and perhaps it may come to you at a time when your heart needs the strongest, and tenderest, and most comfortable words that mine can speak to it. Yet what could I say, but to assure you that I love you, and partake whatever of good or evil God sends you--or rather, partake whatever good God sends you, whether it come in festal garments or mourning ones; for still it is good, whether arrayed in sable, or flower-crowned. God bless you, belovedest, YOUR OWNEST HUSBAND. Miss Sophia A. Peabody, Care of Dr. N. Peabody, Salem, Mass. TO MISS PEABODY _Boston_, Novr. 19th, 6 P.M., [1839] _Belovedest Wife_, My heart bids me to send you a greeting; and therefore I do it, although I do not feel as if I had many thoughts and words at command tonight, but only feelings and sympathies, which must find their way to you as well as they can. Dearest, I cannot bear to think of you sitting all day long in that chamber, and not a soul to commune with you. But I endeavor, and will still endeavor, to send my soul thither, from out of the toil and tedium of my daily life;--so think, beloved, whenever solitude and sad thoughts become intolerable, that, just at that moment I am near you, and trying to comfort you and make you sensible of my presence. Beloved, it occurs to me, that my earnest entreaties to you to be calm and strong may produce an effect not altogether good. The behests of Nature may perhaps differ from mine, and be wiser. If she bids you shed tears, methinks it will be best to let them flow, and then your grief will melt quietly forth, instead of being pent up till it breaks out in a torrent. But I cannot speak my counsel to you, dearest, so decidedly as if I were with you; for then my heart would know all the state of yours, and what it needed. But love me infinitely, my wife, and rest your heart with all its heaviness on mine. I know not what else to say;--but even that is saying something--is it not, dearest? I rather think, beloved, that I shall come home on Saturday night, and take my chance of being able to come again on Thanksgiving-day. But then I shall not be able to remain the rest of the week. That you want me I know; and, dearest, my head and heart are weary with absence from you; so that it will be best to snatch the first chance that offers. Soon, mine own wife, I shall be able to spend much more time with you. YOUR LOVINGEST HUSBAND. Does Sophie Hawthorne keep up my Dove's spirits? Miss Sophia A. Peabody, Care of Dr. N. Peabody, Salem, Mass. TO MISS PEABODY _Boston_, Novr. 20th, ½ past 8 P.M., [1839] Dearest, you know not how your blessed letter strengthens my heart on your account; for I know by it that God and the angels are supporting you. And, mine own wife, though I thought that I reverenced you infinitely before, yet never was so much of that feeling mingled with my love, as now. You are yourself one of the angels who minister to your departing brother--the more an angel, because you triumph over earthly weakness to perform those offices of affection. I feel, now, with what confidence I can rest upon you in all my sorrows and troubles--as confident of your strength as of your love. Dearest, there is nothing in me worthy of you. My heart is weak in comparison with yours. Its strength, it is true, has never been tried; for I have never been called to minister at the dying bed of a dear friend; but I have often thought, that, in such a scene, I should need support from the dying, instead of being able to give it. I bless God that He has made Death so beautiful as he appears in the scene which you describe--that He has caused the light from the other side to shine over and across the chasm of the grave. My wife, my spirit has never yearned for communion with you so much as it does now. I long to hold you on my bosom--to hold you there silently--for I have no words to write my sympathy, and should have none to speak them. Sometimes, even after all I have now learned of your divine fortitude, I feel as if I shall dread to meet you, lest I should find you quite worn down by this great trial. But, dearest, I will make up my mind to see you pale, and thinner than you were. Only do not be sick--do not give me too much to bear. Novr. 21st, ½ past 5 P.M. Mine own Dove, your fourth letter came today, and all the rest were duly received, and performed their heaven-appointed mission to my soul. The last has left a very cheering influence on my spirit. Dearest, I love that naughty Sophie Hawthorne with an unspeakable affection, and bless God for her every minute; for what my Dove could do without her, passes my comprehension. And, mine own wife, I have not been born in vain, but to an end worth living for, since you are able to rest your heart on me, and are thereby sustained in this sorrow, and enabled to be a help and comfort to your mother, and a ministering angel to George. Give my love to George. I regret that we have known each other so little in life; but there will be time enough hereafter--in that pleasant region "on the other side." Beloved, I shall come on Saturday, but probably not till the five o'clock train, unless it should storm; so you must not expect me till seven or thereabouts. I never did yearn for you so much as now. There is a feeling in me as if a great while had passed since we met. Is it so with you? The days are cold now, the air eager and nipping--yet it suits my health amazingly. I feel as if I could run a hundred miles at a stretch, and jump over all the houses that happen to be in my way. Belovedest, I must bring this letter to a close now, for several reasons--partly that I may carry it to the Post-Office before it closes; for I hate to make your father pay the postage of my wife's letters. Also, I have another short letter of business to write;--and, moreover, I must go forth into the wide world to seek my supper. This life of mine is the perfection of a bachelor-life--so perfectly untrammelled as it is. Do you not fear, my wife, to trust me to live in such a way any longer? Belovedest, still keep up your heart for your husband's sake. I pray to God for quiet sleeps for my Dove, and cheerful awakings--yes, cheerful; for Death moves with a sweet aspect into your household; and your brother passes away with him as with a friend. And now farewell, dearest of wives. You are the hope and joy of your husband's heart. Never, never forget how very precious you are to him. God bless you, dearest. YOUR OWNEST HUSBAND. Miss Sophia A. Peabody, Care of Dr. N. Peabody, Salem, Mass. TO MISS PEABODY _Boston_, Novr. 25th, 1839--6 P.M. _Belovedest Wife_, This very day I have held you in my arms; and yet, now that I find myself again in my solitary room, it seems as if a long while had already passed--long enough, as I trust my Dove will think, to excuse my troubling her with an epistle. I came off in the two o'clock cars, through such a pouring rain, that doubtless Sophie Hawthorne set it down for certain that I should pass the day and night in Salem. And perhaps she and the Dove are now watching, with beating heart, to hear your husband lift the door-latch. Alas, that they must be disappointed! Dearest, I feel that I ought to be with you now; for it grieves me to imagine you all alone in that chamber, where you "sit and _wait_"--as you said to me this morning. This, I trust, is the last of your sorrow, mine own wife; in which you will not have all the aid that your husband's bosom, and the profoundest sympathy that exists within it, can impart. I found your letter in the Measurer's Desk; and though I knew perfectly well that it was there, and had thought of it repeatedly, yet it struck me with a sense of unexpectedness when I saw it. I put it in my breast-pocket, and did not open it till I found myself comfortably settled for the evening; for I took my supper of oysters on my way to my room, and have nothing to do with the busy world till sunrise tomorrow. Oh, mine own beloved, it seems to me the only thing worth living for that I have ever done, or been instrumental in, that God has made me the means of saving you from the heaviest anguish of your brother's loss. Ever, ever, dearest wife, keep my image, or rather my reality, between yourself and pain of every kind. Let me clothe you in my love as in an armour of proof--let me wrap my spirit round about your own, so that no earthly calamity may come in immediate contact with it, but be felt, if at all, through a softening medium. And it is a blessed privilege, and even a happy one, to give such sympathy as my Dove requires--happy to give--and, dearest, is it not also happiness to receive it? Our happiness consists in our sense of the union of our hearts--and has not that union been far more deeply felt within us now, than if all our ties were those of joy and gladness? Thus may every sorrow leave us happier than it found us, by causing our hearts to embrace more closely in the mutual effort to sustain it. Dearest, I pray God that your strength may not fail you at the close of this scene. My heart is not quite at rest about you. It seems to me, on looking back, that there was a vague inquietude within me all through this last visit; and this it was, perhaps, that made me seem more sportive than usual. Did I tell my carefullest little wife that I had bought me a fur cap, wherewith my ears may bid defiance to the wintry blast--a poor image, by the way, to talk of _ears bidding_ defiance. The nose might do it, because it is capable of emitting sounds like a trumpet--indeed, Sophie Hawthorne's nose bids defiance without any sound. But what nonsense this is. Also (I have now been a married man long enough to feel these details perfectly natural, in writing to my wife) your husband, having a particular dislike to flannel, is resolved, every cold morning, to put on two shirts, and has already done so on one occasion, wonderfully to his comfort. Perhaps--but this I leave to Sophie Hawthorne's judgment--it might be well to add a daily shirt to my apparel as the winter advances, and to take them off again, one by one, with the approach of spring. Dear me, what a puffed-out heap of cotton-bagging would your husband be, by the middle of January! His Dove would strive in vain to fold her wings around him. My beloved, this is Thanksgiving week. Do you remember how we were employed, or what our state of feeling was, at this time last year? I have forgotten how far we had advanced into each other's hearts--or rather, how conscious we had become that we were mutually within one another--but I am sure we were already dearest friends. But now our eyes are opened. Now we know that we have found all in each other--all that life has to give--and a foretaste of eternity. At every former Thanksgiving-day I have been so ungrateful to Heaven as to feel that something was wanting, and that my life so far had been abortive; and therefore, I fear, there has often been repining instead of thankfulness in my heart. Now I can thank God that he has given me my Dove, and all the world in her. I wish, dearest, that we could eat our Thanksgiving dinner together; and were it nothing but your bowl of bread and milk, we would both of us be therewith content. But I must sit at our mother's table. One of these days, sweetest wife, we will invite her to our own. Will my Dove expect a letter from me so soon? I have written this evening, because I expect to be engaged tomorrow--moreover, my heart bade me write. God bless and keep you, dearest. YOUR OWNEST DEODATUS. Miss Sophia A. Peabody, Care of Dr. N. Peabody, Salem, Mass. TO MISS PEABODY _Boston_, Novr. 29th, 1839--6 or 7 P.M. _Blessedest wife_, Does our head ache this evening?--and has it ached all or any of the time to-day? I wish I knew, dearest, for it seems almost too great a blessing to expect, that my Dove should come quite safe through the trial which she has encountered. Do, mine own wife, resume all your usual occupations as soon as possible--your sculpture, your painting, your music (what a company of sister-arts is combined in the little person of my Dove!)--and above all, your riding and walking. Write often to your husband, and let your letters gush from a cheerful heart; so shall they refresh and gladden me, like draughts from a sparkling fountain, which leaps from some spot of earth where no grave has ever been dug. Dearest, for some little time to come, I pray you not to muse too much upon your brother, even though such musings should be untinged with gloom, and should appear to make you happier. In the eternity where he now dwells, it has doubtless become of no importance to himself whether he died yesterday, or a thousand years ago; he is already at home in the celestial city--more at home than ever he was in his mother's house. Then, my beloved, let us leave him there for the present; and if the shadows and images of this fleeting time should interpose between us and him, let us not seek to drive them away, for they are sent of God. By and bye, it will be good and profitable to commune with your brother's spirit; but so soon after his release from mortal infirmity, it seems even ungenerous towards himself, to call him back by yearnings of the heart and too vivid picturings of what he was. Little Dove, why did you shed tears the other day, when you supposed that your husband thought you to blame for regretting the irrevocable past? Dearest, I never think you to blame; for you positively have no faults. Not that you always act wisely, or judge wisely, or feel precisely what it would be wise to feel, in relation to this present world and state of being; but it is because you are too delicately and exquisitely wrought in heart, mind, and frame, to dwell in such a world--because, in short, you are fitter to be in Paradise than here. You needed, therefore, an interpreter between the world and yourself--one who should sometimes set you right, not in the abstract (for there you are never wrong) but relatively to human and earthly matters;--and such an interpreter is your husband, who can sympathise, though inadequately, with his wife's heavenly nature, and has likewise a portion of shrewd earthly sense, enough to guide us both through the labyrinths of time. Now, dearest, when I criticise any act, word, thought, or feeling of yours, you must not understand it as a reproof, or as imputing anything wrong, wherewith you are to burthen your conscience. Were an angel, however holy and wise, to come and dwell with mortals, he would need the guidance and instruction of some mortal; and so will you, my Dove, need mine--and precisely the same sort of guidance that the angel would. Then do not grieve, nor grieve your husband's spirit, when he essays to do his office; but remember that he does it reverently, and in the devout belief that you are, in immortal reality, both wiser and better than himself, though sometimes he may chance to interpret the flitting shadows around us more accurately than you. Hear what I say, dearest, in a cheerful spirit, and act upon it with cheerful strength. And do not give an undue weight to my judgment, nor imagine that there is no appeal from it, and that its decrees are not to be questioned. Rather, make it a rule always to question them and be satisfied of their correctness;--and so shall my Dove be improved and perfected in the gift of a human understanding, till she become even _earthly-wiselier_ than her sagacious husband. Undine's husband gave her an immortal soul; my beloved wife must be content with an humbler gift from me, being already provided with as high and pure a soul as ever was created. God bless you, belovedest. I bestow three kisses on the air--they are intended for your eyelids and brow, to drive away the head-ache. YOUR OWNEST. Miss Sophia A. Peabody, Care of Dr. N. Peabody, Salem, Mass. TO MISS PEABODY _Custom-House_, Novr. 30th [1839] _Mine own Dove_, You will have received my letter, dearest, ere now, and I trust that it will have conveyed the peace of my own heart into yours; for my heart is too calm and peaceful in the sense of our mutual love, to be disturbed even by my sweetest wife's disquietude. Belovedest and blessedest, I cannot feel anything but comfort in you. Rest quietly on my deep, deep, deepest affection. You deserve it all, and infinitely more than all, were it only for the happiness you give me. I apprehended that this cup could not pass from you, without your tasting bitterness among its dregs. You have been too calm, my beloved--you have exhausted your strength. Let your soul lean upon my love, till we meet again--then all your troubles shall be hushed. Your ownest, happiest, DEODATUS. How does Sophie Hawthorne do? Expect a letter on Tuesday. God bless my dearest. Miss Sophia A. Peabody, Care of Dr. N. Peabody, Salem, Mass. TO MISS PEABODY _Boston_, December 1st, 1839--6 or 7 P.M. _My Dearest_, The day must not pass without my speaking a word or two to my belovedest wife, of whom I have thought, with tender anxieties mingled with comfortable hopes, all day long. Dearest, is your heart at peace now? God grant it--and I have faith that He will communicate the peace of my heart to yours. Mine own wife, always when there is trouble within you, let your husband know of it. Strive to fling your burthen upon me; for there is strength enough in me to bear it all, and love enough to make me happy in bearing it. I will not give up any of my conjugal rights--and least of all this most precious right of ministering to you in all sorrow. My bosom was made, among other purposes, for mine ownest wife to shed tears upon. This I have known, ever since we were married--and I had yearnings to be your support and comforter, even before I knew that God was uniting our spirits in immortal wedlock. I used to think that it would be happiness enough, food enough for my heart, it I could be the life-long, familiar friend of your family, and be allowed to see yourself every evening, and to watch around you to keep harm away--though you might never know what an interest I felt in you. And how infinitely more than this has been granted me! Oh, never dream, blessedest wife, that you can be other than a comfort to your husband--or that he can be disappointed in you. Mine own Dove, I hardly know how it is, but nothing that you do or say ever surprises or disappoints me; it must be that my spirit is so thoroughly and intimately conscious of you, that there exists latent within me a prophetic knowledge of all your vicissitudes of joy or sorrow; so that, though I cannot foretell them before-hand, yet I recognize them when they come. Nothing disturbs the preconceived idea of you in my mind. Whether in bliss or agony, still you are mine own Dove--still my blessing--still my peace. Belovedest, since the foregoing sentence, I have been interrupted; so I will leave the rest of the sheet till tomorrow evening. Good night, and in writing these words my soul has flown through the air to give you a fondest kiss. Did you not feel it? Decr. 2d.--Your letter came to me at the Custom-House, very dearest, at about eleven o'clock; and I opened it with an assured hope of finding good news about my Dove; for I had trusted very much in Sophie Hawthorne's assistance. Well, I am afraid I shall never find in my heart to call that excellent little person "Naughty" again--no; and I have even serious thoughts of giving up all further designs upon her nose, since she hates so much to have it kissed. Yet the poor little nose!--would it not be quite depressed (I do not mean flattened) by my neglect, after becoming accustomed to such marked attention? And besides, I have a particular affection for that nose, insomuch that I intend, one of these days, to offer it an oblation of rich and delicate odours. But I suppose Sophie Hawthorne would apply her handkerchief, so that the poor nose should reap no pleasure nor profit from my incense. Naughty Sophie Hawthorne! There--I have called her "naughty" already--and on a mere supposition, too. Half a page of nonsense about Sophie Hawthorne's nose! And now have I anything to say to my little Dove? Yes--a reproof. My Dove is to understand, that she entirely exceeds her jurisdiction, in presuming to sit in judgment upon herself, and pass such severe censure as she did upon her Friday's letter--or indeed any censure at all. It was her bounden duty to write that letter; for it was the cry of her heart, which ought and must have reached her husband's ears, wherever in the world he might be. And yet you call it wicked. Was it Sophie Hawthorne or the Dove that called it so? Naughty Sophie Hawthorne--naughty Dove--for I believe they are both partakers of this naughtiness. Dearest, I have never had the good luck to profit much, or indeed any, by attending lectures; so that I think the ticket had better be bestowed on somebody who can listen to Mr. Emerson more worthily. My evenings are very precious to me; and some of them are unavoidably thrown away in paying or receiving visits, or in writing letters of business; and therefore I prize the rest as if the sands of the hour-glass were gold or diamond dust. I have no other time to sit in my parlor (let me call it ours) and be happy by our own fireside--happy in reveries about a certain little wife of mine, who would fain have me spend my evenings in hearing lectures, lest I should incommode her with too frequent epistles. Good bye, dearest. I suppose I have left a dozen questions in your letter unanswered; but you shall ask them again when we meet. Do not you long to see me? Mercy on us,--what a pen! It looks as if I had laid a strong emphasis on that sentence. God bless my Dove, and Sophie Hawthorne too.--So prays their ownest husband. Miss Sophia A. Peabody, Care of Dr. N. Peabody, Salem, Mass. TO MISS PEABODY _Boston_, Decr. 5th, 1839--5 P.M. _Dearest wife_, I do wish that you would evince the power of your spirit over its outward manifestations, in some other way than by raising an inflammation over your eye. Do, belovedest, work another miracle forthwith, and cause this mountain--for I fancy it as of really mountainous bulk--cause it to be cast into the sea, or anywhere else; so that both eyes may greet your husband, when he comes home. Otherwise, I know not but my eyes will have an inflammation too;--they certainly smarted in a very unwonted manner, last evening. "The naughty swelling!" as my Dove (or Sophie Hawthorne) said of the swollen cheek that afflicted me last summer. Will kisses have any efficacy? No; I am afraid not, for if they were medicinal, my Dove's eyelids have been so imbued with them that no ill would have come there. Nevertheless, though not a preventive, a kiss may chance to be a remedy. Can Sophie Hawthorne be prevailed upon to let me try it? I went to see my wife's (and of course my own) sister Mary, on Tuesday evening. She appeared very well; and we had a great deal of good talk, wherein my Dove was not utterly forgotten--(now will Sophie Hawthorne, thinking the Dove slighted, pout her lip at that expression)--well then, my Dove was directly or indirectly concerned in all my thoughts, and most of my words. Mrs. Park was not there, being gone, I believe, to some lecture. Mary and your husband talked with the utmost hopefulness and faith of my Dove's future health and well-being. Dearest, you _are_ well (all but the naughty swelling) and you always will be well. I love Mary because she loves you so much;--our affections meet in you, and so we become kindred. But everybody loves my Dove--everybody that knows her--and those that know her not love her also, though unconsciously, whenever they image to themselves something sweeter, and tenderer, and nobler, than they can meet with on earth. It is the likeness of my Dove that has haunted the dreams of poets, ever since the world began. Happy me, to whom that dream has become the reality of all realities--whose bosom has been warmed, and is forever warmed, with the close embrace of her who has flitted shadowlike away from all other mortals! Dearest, I wish your husband had the gift of making rhymes; for methinks there is poetry in his head and heart, since he has been in love with you. You are a Poem, my Dove. Of what sort, then? Epic?--Mercy on me,--no! A sonnet?--no; for that is too labored and artificial. My Dove is a sort of sweet, simple, gay, pathetic ballad, which Nature is singing, sometimes with tears, sometimes with smiles, and sometimes with intermingled smiles and tears. I was invited to dine at Mr. Bancroft's yesterday with Miss Margaret Fuller; but Providence had given me some business to do; for which I was very thankful. When my Dove and Sophie Hawthorne can go with me, I shall not be afraid to accept invitations to meet literary lions and lionesses, because then I shall put the above-said redoubtable little personage in the front of the battle. What do you think, Dearest, of the expediency of my making a caucus speech? A great many people are very desirous of listening to your husband's eloquence; and that is considered the best method of making my debut. Now, probably, will Sophie Hawthorne utterly refuse to be kissed, unless I give up all notion of speechifying at a caucus. Silly little Sophie!--I would not do it, even if thou thyself besought it of me. Belovedest, I wish, before declining your ticket to Mr. Emerson's lectures, that I had asked whether you wished me to attend them; for if you do, I should have more pleasure in going, than if the wish were originally my own. Dearest wife, nobody can come within the circle of my loneliness, save you;--you are my only companion in the world;--at least, when I compare other intercourse with our intimate communion, it seems as [if] other people were the world's width asunder. And yet I love all the world better for my Dove's sake. Good bye, belovedest. Drive away that "naughty swelling." YOUR OWNEST HUSBAND. Do not expect me till seven o'clock on Saturday--as I shall not leave Boston till sunset. Miss Sophia A. Peabody, Care of Dr. N. Peabody, Salem, Mass. TO MISS PEABODY _Boston_, Decr. 11th, 1839--7 P.M. _Belovedest_, I am afraid you will expect a letter tomorrow--afraid, because I feel very sure that I shall not be able to fill this sheet tonight. I am well, and happy, and I love you dearly, sweetest wife;--nevertheless, it is next to impossibility for me to put ideas into words. Even in writing these two or three lines, I have fallen into several long fits of musing. I wish there was something in the intellectual world analogous to the Daguerrotype (is that the name of it?) in the visible--something which should print off our deepest, and subtlest, and delicatest thoughts and feelings as minutely and accurately as the above-mentioned instrument paints the various aspects of Nature. Then might my Dove and I interchange our reveries--but my Dove would get only lead in exchange for gold. Dearest, your last letter brought the warmth of your very heart to your husband--Belovedest, I cannot possibly write one word more, to-night. This striving to talk on paper does but remove you farther from me. It seems as if Sophie Hawthorne fled away into infinite space the moment I try to fix her image before me in order to inspire my pen;--whereas, no sooner do I give myself up to reverie, than here she is again, smiling lightsomely by my side. There will be no writing of letters in Heaven; at least, I shall write none then, though I think it would add considerably to my bliss to receive them from my Dove. Never was I so stupid as to-night;--and yet it is not exactly stupidity, either, for my fancy is bright enough, only it has, just at this time, no command of external symbols. Good night, dearest wife. Love your husband, and dream of him. Decr. 12th--6 P.M. Blessedest--Dove-ward and Sophie Hawthorne-ward doth your husband acknowledge himself "very reprehensible," for leaving his poor wife destitute of news from him such an interminable time--one, two, three, four days tomorrow noon. After seven years' absence, without communication, a marriage, if I mistake not, is deemed to be legally dissolved. Does it not appear at least seven years to my Dove, since we parted? It does to me. And will my Dove, or naughty Sophie Hawthorne, choose to take advantage of the law, and declare our marriage null and void? Oh, naughty, naughty, naughtiest Sophie Hawthorne, to suffer such an idea to come into your head! The Dove, I am sure, would not disown her husband, but would keep her heart warm with faith and love for a million of years; so that when he returned to her (as he surely would, at some period of Eternity, to spend the rest of eternal existence with her) he would seem to find in her bosom the warmth which his parting embrace had left there. Very dearest, I do wish you would come to see me, this evening. If we could be together in this very parlour of ours, I think you, and both of us, would feel more completely at home than we ever have before in all our lives. Your chamber is but a room in your mother's house, where my Dove cannot claim an independent and separate right; she has a right, to be sure, but it is as a daughter. As a wife, it might be a question whether she has a right. Now this pleasant little room, where I sit, together with the bed-room in which I intend to dream tonight of my Dove, is my dwelling, my castle, mine own place wherein to be, which I have bought, for the time being, with the profits of mine own labor. Then is it not our home? (Rest of letter missing) TO MISS PEABODY _Boston_, Decr. 18th, 1839--nearly 7 P.M. _Belovedest_, I wish you could see our parlour to-night--how bright and cheerful it looks, with the blaze of the coal-fire throwing a ruddy tinge over the walls, in spite of the yellow gleam of two lamps. Now if my Dove were sitting in the easiest of our two easy chairs--(for sometimes I should choose to have her sit in a separate chair, in order to realise our individuality, as well as our unity)--then would the included space of these four walls, together with the little contiguous bed-room, seem indeed like home.--But the soul of home is wanting now. Oh, naughtiest, why are you not here to welcome your husband when he comes in at eventide, chilled with his wintry day's toil? Why does he not find the table placed cosily in front of the fire, and a cup of tea steaming fragrantly--or else a bowl of warm bread and milk, such as his Dove feeds upon? A much-to-be-pitied husband am I, naughty wife--a homeless man--a wanderer in the desert of this great city; picking up a precarious subsistence wherever I happen to find a restaurateur or an oyster-shop--and returning at night to a lonely fireside. Dearest, have I brought the tears into your eyes? What an unwise little person is my Dove, to let the tears gather in her eyes for such nonsensical pathos as this! Yet not nonsensical either, inasmuch as it is a sore trial to your husband to be estranged from that which makes life a reality to him, and to be compelled to spend so many God-given days in a dream--in an outward show, which has nothing to satisfy the soul that has become acquainted with truth. But, mine own wife, if you had not taught me what happiness is, I should not have known that there is anything lacking to me now. I am dissatisfied--not because, at any former period of my life, I was ever a thousandth part so happy as now--but because Hope feeds and grows strong on the happiness within me. Good night, belovedest wife. I have a note to write to Mr. Capen, who torments me every now-and-then about a book which he wants me to manufacture. Hereafter, I intend that my Dove shall manage all my correspondence:--indeed, it is my purpose to throw all sorts of trouble upon my Dove's shoulders. Good night now, dearest.-- December 20th--7 P.M. Blessedest wife--has not Sophie Hawthorne been very impatient for this letter, one half of which yet remains undeveloped in my brain and heart? Would that she could enter those inward regions, and read the letter there--together with so much that never can be expressed in written or spoken words. And can she not do this? The Dove can do it, even if Sophie Hawthorne fail. Dearest, would it be unreasonable for me to ask you to manage my share of the correspondence, as well as your own?--to throw yourself into my heart, and make it gush out with more warmth and freedom than my own pen can avail to do? How I should delight to see an epistle from myself to Sophie Hawthorne, written by my Dove!--or to my Dove, Sophie Hawthorne being the amanuensis! I doubt not, that truths would then be spoken, which my heart would recognise as existing within its depths, yet which can never be clothed in words of my own. You know that we are one another's consciousness--then it is not poss--My dearest, George Hillard has come in upon me, in the midst of the foregoing sentence, and I have utterly forgotten what I meant to say. But it is not much matter. Even if I could convince you of the expediency of your writing my letters as well as your own, still, when you attempted to take the pen out of my hand, I believe I should resist very strenuously. For, belovedest, though not an epistolarian by nature, yet the instinct of communicating myself to you makes it a necessity and a joy to write. Your husband has received an invitation, through Mr. Collector Bancroft, to go to Dr. Channing's to-night. What is to be done? Anything, rather than to go. I never will venture into company, unless I can put myself under the protection of Sophie Hawthorne. She, I am sure, will take care that no harm comes to me. Or my Dove might take me "under her wing." Dearest, you must not expect me too fervently on Christmas eve, because it is very uncertain whether Providence will bring us together then. If not, I shall take care to advise you thereof by letter--which, however, may chance not to come to hand till three o'clock on Christmas day. And there will be my Dove, making herself nervous with waiting for me. Dearest, I wish I could be the source of nothing but happiness to you--and that disquietude, hope deferred, and disappointment, might not ever have aught to do with your affection. Does the joy compensate for the pain? Naughty Sophie Hawthorne--silly Dove--will you let that foolish question bring tears into your eyes? My Dove's letter was duly received. Your lovingest HUSBAND. Miss Sophia A. Peabody, Care of Dr. N. Peabody, Salem, Mass. TO MISS PEABODY _Boston_, December 24th, 1839. 6 or 7 P.M. _My very dearest_, While I sit down disconsolately to write this letter, at this very moment is my Dove expecting to hear her husband's footstep upon the threshold. She fully believes, that, within the limits of the hour which is now passing, she will be clasped to my bosom. Belovedest, I cannot bear to have you yearn for me so intensely. By and bye, when you find that I do not come, our head will begin to ache;--but still, being the "hopingest little person" in the world, you will not give me up, perhaps till eight o'clock. But soon it will be bed-time--it will be deep night--and not a spoken word, not a written line, will have come to your heart from your naughtiest of all husbands. Sophie Hawthorne, at least, will deem him the naughtiest of husbands; but my Dove will keep her faith in him just as firmly and fervently, as if she were acquainted with the particular impossibilities which keep him from her. Dearest wife, I did hope, till this afternoon, that I should be able to disburthen myself of the cargo of salt which has been resting on my weary shoulders for a week past; but it does seem as if Heaven's mercy were not meant for us miserable Custom-House officers. The holiest of holydays--the day that brought ransom to all other sinners--leaves us in slavery still. Nevertheless, dearest, if I did not feel two disappointments in one--your own and mine--I should feel much more comfortable and resigned than I do. If I could have come to you to-night, I must inevitably have returned hither tomorrow evening. But now, in requital of my present heaviness of spirit, I am resolved that my next visit shall be at least one day longer than I could otherwise have ventured to make it. We cannot spend this Christmas eve together, mine own wife; but I have faith that you will see me on the eve of the New Year. Will not you be glad when I come home to spend three whole days, that I was kept away from you for a few brief hours on Christmas eve? For if I went now, I could not be with you then. My blessedest, write and let me know that you have not been very much disturbed by my non-appearance. I pray you to have the feelings of a wife towards me, dearest--that is, you must feel that my whole life is yours, a life-time of long days, and therefore it is no irreparable nor very grievous loss, though sometimes a few of those days are wasted away from you. A wife should be calm and quiet, in the settled certainty of possessing her husband. Above all, dearest, bear these crosses with philosophy for my sake; for it makes me anxious and depressed, to imagine your anxiety and depression. Oh, that you could be very joyful when I come, and yet not sad when I fail to come! Is that impossible, my sweetest Dove?--is it impossible, my naughtiest Sophie Hawthorne? TO MISS PEABODY _Boston_, Jany. 1st, 1840. 6 o'clock P.M. _Belovedest wife_, Your husband's heart was exceedingly touched by that little backhanded note, and likewise by the bundle of allumettes--half a dozen of which I have just been kissing with great affection. Would that I might kiss that poor dear finger of mine! Kiss it for my sake, sweetest Dove--and tell naughty Sophie Hawthorne to kiss it too. Nurse it well, dearest; for no small part of my comfort and cheeriness of heart depends upon that beloved finger. If it be not well enough to bear its part in writing me a letter within a few days, do not be surprised if I send down the best surgeon in Boston to effect a speedy cure. Nevertheless, darlingest wife, restrain the good little finger, if it show any inclination to recommence its labors too soon. If your finger be pained in writing, your husband's heart ought to (and I hope would) feel every twinge. Belovedest, I have not yet wished you a Happy New Year! And yet I have--many, many of them; as many, mine own wife, as we can enjoy together--and when we can no more enjoy them together, we shall no longer think of Happy New Years on earth, but look longingly for the New Year's Day of eternity. What a year the last has been! Dearest, you make the same exclamation; but my heart originates it too. It has been the year of years--the year in which the flower of our life has bloomed out--the flower of our life and of our love, which we are to wear in our bosoms forever. Oh, how I love you, belovedest wife!--and how I thank God that He has made me capable to know and love you! Sometimes I feel, deep, deep down in my heart, how dearest above all things you are to me; and those are blissful moments. It is such a happiness to be conscious, at last, of something real. All my life hitherto, I have been walking in a dream, among shadows which could not be pressed to my bosom; but now, even in this dream of time, there is something that takes me out of it, and causes me to be a dreamer no more. Do you not feel, dearest, that we live above time and apart from time, even while we seem to be in the midst of time? Our affection diffuses eternity round about us. My carefullest little wife will rejoice to know that I have been free to sit by a good fire all this bitter cold day--not but what I have a salt-ship on my hands, but she must have some ballast, before she can discharge any more salt; and ballast cannot be procured till the day after tomorrow. Are not these details very interesting? I have a mind, some day, to send my dearest a journal of all my doings and sufferings, my whole external life, from the time I awake at dawn, till I close my eyes at night. What a dry, dull history would it be! But then, apart from this, I would write another journal of my inward life throughout the self-same day--my fits of pleasant thought, and those likewise which are shadowed by passing clouds--the yearnings of my heart towards my Dove--my pictures of what we are to enjoy together. Nobody would think that the same man could live two such different lives simultaneously. But then, as I have said above, the grosser life is a dream, and the spiritual life a reality. Very dearest, I wish you would make out a list of books that you would like to be in our library; for I intend, whenever the cash and the opportunity occur together, to buy enough to fill up our new book-case; and I want to feel that I am buying them for both of us. When I next come to Salem, you shall read the list, and we will discuss it, volume by volume. I suppose the book-case will hold about two hundred volumes; but you need not calculate upon making such a vast collection all at once. It shall be accomplished in small lots; and then we shall prize every volume, and receive a separate pleasure from the acquisition of it. Does it seem a great while since I left you, dearest? Truly, it does to me. These separations lengthen our earthly lives by at least nine-tenths; but then, in our brief seasons of communion, there is the essence of a thousand years. Was it Thursday that I told my Dove would be the day of my next appearance?--or Friday? "Oh, Friday, certainly!" says Sophie Hawthorne. Well; it must be as naughty Sophie says. Oh, belovedest, I want you. You have given me a new feeling, blessedest wife--a sense, that strong as I may have deemed myself, I am insufficient for my own support; and that there is a tender little Dove, without whose help I cannot get through this weary world at all. God bless you, ownest wife. YOUR OWNEST HUSBAND. Miss Sophia A. Peabody, Care of Dr. N. Peabody, Salem, Mass. TO MISS PEABODY _Boston_, Jany. 3d, 1840--3 P.M. What a best of all possible husbands you have, sweetest wife, to be writing to you so soon again, although he has heard nothing from you since the latter part of the year 1839! What a weary length of time that naughty finger has been ill! Unless there are signs of speedy amendment, we must begin to think of "rotation in office," and the left hand must be nominated to the executive duties of which the right is no longer capable. Yet, dearest, do not imagine that I am impatient. I do indeed long to see your delicatest little penmanship; (what an enormity it would be to call my Dove's most feminine of handwritings pen_man_ship!) but it would take away all the happiness of it, when I reflected that each individual letter had been a pain to you. Nay; I would not have you write, if you find that the impediments of this mode of utterance check the flow of your mind and heart. But you tell me that the wounded finger will be no hindrance to your painting. Very glad am I, dearest; for you cannot think how much delight those pictures are going to give me. I shall sit and gaze at them whole hours together--and these will be my happiest hours, the fullest of you, though all are full of you. I never owned a picture in my life; yet pictures have always been among the earthly possessions (and they are spiritual possessions too) which I most coveted. I know not what value my Dove's pictures might bear at an auction-room; but to me, certainly, they will be incomparably more precious than all the productions of all the painters since Apelles. When we live together in our own home, belovedest, we will paint pictures together--that is, our minds and hearts shall unite to form the conception, to which your hand shall give material existence. I have often felt as if I could be a painter, only I am sure that I could never handle a brush;--now my Dove will show me the images of my inward eye, beautified and etherealised by the mixture of her own spirit. Belovedest, I think I shall get these two pictures put into mahogany frames, because they will harmonize better with the furniture of our parlor than gilt frames would. While I was writing the foregoing paragraph, Mary has sent to inquire whether I mean to go to Salem tomorrow, intending, if I did, to send a letter by me. But, alas! I am not going. The inquiry, however, has made me feel a great yearning to be there. But it is not possible, because I have an engagement at Cambridge on Saturday evening; and even if it were otherwise, it would be better to wait till the middle of the week, or a little later, when I hope to spend three or four days with you. Oh, what happiness, when we shall be able to look forward to an illimitable time in each other's society--when a day or two of absence will be far more infrequent than the days which we spend together now. Then a quiet will settle down upon us, a passionate quiet, which is the consummation of happiness. Dearest, I hope you have not found it impracticable to walk, though the atmosphere be so wintry. Did we walk together in any such cold weather, last winter? I believe we did. How strange, that such a flower as our affection should have blossomed amid snow and wintry winds--accompaniments which no poet or novelist, that I know of, has ever introduced into a love-tale. Nothing like our story was ever written--or ever will be--for we shall not feel inclined to make the public our confidant; but if it could be told, methinks it would be such as the angels might take delight to hear. If I mistake not, my Dove has expressed some such idea as this, in one of her recent letters. Well-a-day! I have strolled thus far through my letter, without once making mention of naughty Sophie Hawthorne. Will she pardon the neglect? Present my profound respects to her beloved nose, and say that I still entreat her to allow my Dove to kiss her cheek. When she complies with this oft-repeated petition, I shall hope that her spirit is beginning to be tamed, and shall then meditate some other and more difficult trials of it. Nonsense! Do not believe me, dear little Sophie Hawthorne. I would not tame you for the whole Universe. But now good bye, dearest wife. Keep yourself in good heart while I am absent, and grow round and plump and rosy;--eat a whole chicken every day;--go to bed at nine o'clock or earlier, and sleep sound till sunrise. Come to me in dreams, beloved. What should I do in this weary world, without the idea of you, dearest! Give my love to your father and mother, and to Elizabeth. God bless you, darling. YOUR OWNEST HUSBAND. Miss Sophia A. Peabody, Care of Dr. N. Peabody, Salem, Mass. TO MISS PEABODY _Boston_, Jany. 24th, 1840--4 P.M. _Ownest Dove_, Your letter came this forenoon, announcing the advent of the pictures; so I came home as soon as I possibly could--and there was the package! I naturally trembled as I undid it, so eager was I to behold them. Dearissima, there never was anything so lovely and precious in this world. They are perfect. So soon as the dust and smoke of my fire had evaporated, I put them on the mantelpiece, and sat a long time before them with clasped hands, gazing, and gazing, and gazing, and painting a fac-simile of them in my heart, in whose most sacred chamber they shall keep a place forever and ever. Belovedest, I was not long in finding out the Dove in the Menaggio. In fact, she was the very first object that my eyes rested on, when I uncovered the picture. She flew straightway into my heart--and yet she remains just where you placed her. Dearest, if it had not been for your strict injunctions that nobody nor anything should touch the pictures, I do believe that my lips would have touched that naughty Sophie Hawthorne, as she stands on the bridge. Do you think the perverse little damsel would have vanished beneath my kiss? What a misfortune would that have been to her poor lover!--to find that he kissed away his mistress. But, at worst, she would have remained on my lips. However, I shall refrain from all endearments, till you tell me that a kiss may be hazarded without fear of her taking it in ill part and absenting herself without leave. Mine ownest, it is a very noble-looking cavalier with whom Sophie is standing on the bridge. Are you quite sure that her own husband is the companion of her walk? Yet I need not ask--for there is the Dove to bear witness to his identity. That true and tender bird would never have alighted on another hand--never have rested so near another bosom. Yes; it must be my very self; and from henceforth it shall be held for an absolute and indisputable truth. It is not my picture, but the very I; and as my inner self belongs to you, there is no doubt that you have caused my soul to pervade the figure. There we are, unchangeable. Years cannot alter us, nor our relation to each other. Ownest, we will talk about these pictures all our lives and longer; so there is no need that I should say all that I think and feel about them now; especially as I have yet only begun to understand and feel them. I have put them into my bed-room for the present, being afraid to trust them on the mantel-piece; but I cannot help going to feast my eyes upon them, every little while. I have determined not to hang them up till after I have been to Salem, for fear of the dust and of the fingers of the chamber-maid and other visitants. Whenever I am away, they will be safely locked up, either in the bureau or in my closet. I shall want your express directions as to the height at which they ought to be hung, and the width of the space between them, and other minutest particulars. We will discuss these matters, when I come home to my wife. Belovedest, there are several obstacles to my coming home immediately. At present, two of the Measurers are employed, and another is detained at his home in Chelsea by the sickness of his family, and Colonel Hall continues too unwell to be at the Custom-House; so that I am the only one in attendance there; and moreover I have a coal vessel to discharge to-morrow. But this state of affairs will not continue long. I think I cannot fail to be at liberty by Tuesday or Wednesday at furthest; and at all events, next week shall not pass without our meeting; even if I should have barely time to press you in my arms, and say goodbye. But the probability is, that I shall come to spend a week. Dearissima, be patient--Sophie Hawthorne as well as the Dove. My carefullest little wife, I am of opinion that Elizabeth has been misinformed as to the increased prevalence of the small-pox. It could not be so generally diffused among the merchants and business-people without my being aware of it; nor do I hear of its committing such fearful ravages anywhere. The folks at the Custom-House know of no such matter; nor does George Hillard. In truth, I had supposed (till I heard otherwise from you) that all cause for alarm was past. Trust me, dearest, there is no need of heart-quake on my account. You have been in greater danger than your husband. God be with you, blessedest and blessingest. I did ... (Remainder of letter missing) Miss Sophia A. Peabody, Care of Dr. N. Peabody, Salem, Mass. TO MISS PEABODY _Boston_, February 7th, 1840--½ past 3 P.M. _Ownest Dove_, Can you reckon the ages that have elapsed since our last embrace? It quite surpasses my powers of computation. I only know that, in some long by-gone time, I had a wife--and that now I am a widowed man, living not in the present, but in the past and future. My life would be empty indeed, if I could neither remember nor anticipate; but I can do both; and so my heart continues to keep itself full of light and warmth. Belovedest, let it be so likewise with you. You promised me--did you not?--to be happy during our separation, and really I must insist upon holding you to your word even if it should involve a miracle. Dearest, I have hung up the pictures--the Isola over the mantel-piece, and the Menaggio on the opposite wall. This arrangement pleased me better, on the whole, than the other which we contemplated; and I cannot perceive but that the light is equally favorable for them both. You cannot imagine how they glorify our parlor--and what a solace they are to its widowed inhabitant. I sit before them with something of the quiet and repose which your own beloved presence is wont to impart to me. I gaze at them by all sorts of light--daylight, twilight, and candle-light; and when the lamps are extinguished, and before getting into bed, I sit looking at these pictures, by the flickering fire-light. They are truly an infinite enjoyment. I take great care of them, and have hitherto hung the curtains before them every morning; and they remain covered till after I have kindled my fire in the afternoon. But I suppose this precaution need not be taken much longer. I think that this slight veil produces a not unpleasing effect, especially upon the Isola--a gentle and tender gloom, like the first approaches of twilight. Nevertheless, whenever I remove the curtains I am always struck with new surprise at the beauty which then gleams forth. Mine ownest, you are a wonderful little Dove. What beautiful weather this is--beautiful, at least, so far as sun, sky, and atmosphere are concerned; though a poor wingless biped, like my Dove's husband, is sometimes constrained to wish that he could raise himself a little above the earth. How much mud and mire, how many pools of unclean water, how many slippery footsteps and perchance heavy tumbles, might be avoided, if we could but tread six inches above the crust of this world. Physically, we cannot do this; our bodies cannot; but it seems to me that our hearts and minds may keep themselves above moral mud-puddles, and other discomforts of the soul's path-way, and so enjoy the sunshine. I have added Coleridge's Poems, a very good edition in three volumes, to our library. Dearest, dearest, what a joy it is to think of you, whenever I buy a book--to think that we shall read them aloud to one another, and that they are to be our mutual and familiar friends for life. I intended to have asked you again for that list which you shewed me; but it will do the next time I come. I mean to go to a book-auction this evening. When our book-case is filled, my bibliomania will probably cease; for its shelves, I think, would hold about all the books that I should care to read--all, at least, that I should wish to possess as household friends. What a reprehensible husband am I, not to have inquired, in the very first sentence of my letter, whether my belovedest has quite recovered from the varioloid! But, in truth, it seemed so long since we parted, that none but chronic diseases can have subsisted from that time to this. I make no doubt, therefore, but that the afflicted arm is entirely recovered, and that only a slight scar remains--which shall be kissed, some time or other. And how are your eyes, my blessedest? Do not torture them by attempting to write, before they are quite well. If you inflict pain on them for such a purpose, your husband's eyes will be sensible of it, when he shall read your letters. Remember that we have now a common property in each other's eyes. Dearest, I have not seen Colonel Hall since my return hither--he being gone to Maine. When he comes back, or shortly thereafter, I will try to prevail on your neglectful spouse to pay you a short visit. Methinks he is a very cold and loveless sort of person. I have been pestering him, ever since I began this letter, to send you some word of affectionate remembrance; but he utterly refuses to send anything, save a kiss apiece to the Dove's eyes and mouth, and to Sophie Hawthorne's nose and foot. Will you have the kindness to see that these valuable consignments arrive at their destination? Dearest wife, the letter-writer belies your ownest husband. He thinks of you, and yearns for you all day long. Miss Sophia A. Peabody, Care of Dr. N. Peabody, Salem, Mass. TO MISS PEABODY _Boston_, Feby. 11th, 1840--7 P.M. _Belovedest_, Your letter, with its assurance of your present convalescence, and its promise (to which I shall hold you fast) that you will never be sick any more, caused me much joy.... Dearest, George Hillard came in just as I had written the first sentence; so we will begin on a new score. Your husband has been measuring coal all day, aboard of a black little British schooner, in a dismal dock at the north end of the city. Most of the time, he paced the deck to keep himself warm; for the wind (north-east, I believe it was) blew up through the dock, as if it had been the pipe of a pair of bellows. The vessel lying deep between two wharves, there was no more delightful prospect, on the right hand and on the left, than the posts and timbers, half immersed in the water, and covered with ice, which the rising and falling of successive tides had left upon them; so that they looked like immense icicles. Across the water, however, not more than half a mile off, appeared the Bunker Hill monument; and what interested me considerably more, a church-steeple, with the dial of a clock upon it, whereby I was enabled to measure the march of the weary hours. Sometimes your husband descended into the dirty little cabin of the schooner, and warmed himself by a red-hot stove, among biscuit-barrels, pots and kettles, sea-chests, and innumerable lumber of all sorts--his olfactories, meanwhile, being greatly refreshed by the odour of a pipe, which the captain or some of his crew were smoking. But at last came the sunset, with delicate clouds, and a purple light upon the islands; and your husband blessed it, because it was the signal of his release; and so he came home to talk with his dearest wife. And now he bids her farewell, because he is tired and sleepy. God bless you, belovedest. Dream happy dreams of me tonight. February 12th--Evening.--All day long again, best wife, has your poor husband been engaged in a very black business--as black as a coal; and though his face and hands have undergone a thorough purification, he feels as if he were not altogether fit to hold communion with his white Dove. Methinks my profession is somewhat akin to that of a chimney-sweeper; but the latter has the advantage over me, because, after climbing up through the darksome flue of the chimney, he emerges into the midst of the golden air, and sings out his melodies far over the heads of the whole tribe of weary earth-plodders. My dearest, my toil today has been cold and dull enough; nevertheless your husband was neither cold nor dull; for he kept his heart warm and his spirit bright with thoughts of his belovedest wife. I had strong and happy yearnings for you to-day, ownest Dove--happy, even though it was such an eager longing, which I knew could not then be fulfilled, to clasp you to my bosom. And now here I am in our parlour, aweary--too tired, almost, to write. Well, dearest, my labors are over for the present. I cannot, however, come home just at present, three of the Measurers being now absent; but you shall see me very soon. Naughtiest, why do you say that you have scarcely seen your husband, this winter? Have there not, to say nothing of shorter visits, been two eternities of more than a week each, which were full of blessings for us? My Dove has quite forgotten these. Oh, well! If visits of a week long be not worth remembering, I shall alter my purpose of coming to Salem for another like space;--otherwise I might possibly have been there, by Saturday night, at furthest. Dear me, how sleepy I am! I can hardly write, as you will discover by the blottings and scratchings. So good-bye now, darlingest;--and I will finish in the freshness of the morning. February 13th--Past 8 A.M. Belovedest, how very soon this letter will be in your hands. It brings us much closer together, when the written words of one of us can come to the heart of the other, in the very same day that they flowed from the heart of the writer. I mean to come home to our parlour early to-day; so, when you receive this letter, you can imagine me there, sitting in front of the Isola. I have this moment interrupted myself to go and look at that precious production. How I wish that naughty Sophie Hawthorne could be induced to turn her face towards me! Nevertheless, the figure is her veritable self, and so would the face be, only that she deems it too beauteous to be thrown away on her husband's gaze. I have not dared to kiss her yet. Will she abide it? My dearest, do not expect me very fervently till I come. I am glad you were so careful of your inestimable eyes as not to write to me yesterday. Mrs. Hillard says that Elizabeth made her a call. Good-bye. I am very well to day, and unspeakably happy in the thought that I have a dearest little wife, who loves me pretty well. God bless her. Miss Sophia A. Peabody, Care of Dr. N. Peabody, Salem, Mass. TO MISS PEABODY _Boston_, March 11th, 1840--2 P.M. _Blessedest_, It seems as if I were looking back to a former state of existence, when I think of the precious hours which we have lived together. And now we are in two different worlds--widowed, both of us--both of us deceased, and each lamenting ... (Portion of letter missing) Belovedest, almost my first glance, on entering our parlor after my return hither, was at the pictures--my very first glance, indeed, as soon as I had lighted the lamps. They have certainly grown more beautiful during my absence, and are still becoming more perfect, and perfecter, and perfectest. I fancied that Sophie Hawthorne, as she stands on the bridge, had slightly turned her head, so as to reveal somewhat more of her face; but if so, she has since turned it back again. I was much struck with the Menaggio this morning;--while I was gazing at it, the sunshine and the shade grew positively real, and I agreed with you, for the time, in thinking this a more superlative picture than the other. But when I came home about an hour ago, I bestowed my chiefest attention upon the Isola; and now I believe it has the first place in my affections, though without prejudice to a very fervent love for the other. ... Dove, there is little prospect for me, indeed; but forgive me for telling you so, dearest--no prospect of my returning so soon as next Monday; but I have good hope to be again at liberty by the close of the week. Do be very good, my Dove--be as good as your nature will permit, naughty Sophie Hawthorne. As to myself, I shall take the liberty to torment myself as much as I please. My dearest, I am very well, but exceedingly stupid and heavy; so the remainder of this letter shall be postponed until tomorrow. Has my Dove flown abroad, this cold, bright day? Would that the wind would snatch her up, and waft her to her husband. How was it, dearest? And how do you do this morning? Is the wind east? The sun shone on the chimney-tops round about here, a few minutes ago; and I hoped that there would be a pleasant day for my Dove to take wing, and for Sophie Hawthorne to ride on horseback; but the sky seems to be growing sullen now. Do you wish to know how your husband will spend the day? First of the first--but there rings the bell for eight o'clock; and I must go down to breakfast. After breakfast;--First of the first, your husband will go to the Post-Office, like a dutiful husband as he is, to put in this letter for his belovedest wife. Thence he will proceed to the Custom House, and finding that there is no call for him on the wharves, he will sit down by the Measurers' fire, and read the Morning Post. Next, at about half past nine o'clock, he will go to the Athenaeum, and turn over the Magazines and Reviews till eleven or twelve, when it will be time to return to the Custom-House to see whether there be a letter from Dove Hawthorne--and also (though this is of far less importance) to see whether there be any demand for his services as Measurer. At one o'clock, or thereabouts, he will go to dinner--but first, perhaps, he will promenade the whole length of Washington street, to get himself an appetite. After dinner, he will take one more peep at the Custom-House, and it being by this time about two o'clock, and no prospect of business to-day, he will feel at liberty to come home to our own parlor, there to remain till supper-time. At six o'clock he will sally forth again, to get some oysters and read the evening papers, and returning between seven and eight, he will read and re-read his belovedest's letter--then take up a book--and go to bed at ten, with a blessing on his lips for the Dove and Sophie Hawthorne. THINE OWNEST. Miss Sophia A. Peabody, Care of Dr. N. Peabody, Salem, Mass. TO MISS PEABODY _Boston_, March 15th, 1840--Forenoon. _Best-belovedest_, Thy letter by Elizabeth came, I believe, on Thursday, and the two which thou didst entrust to the post reached me not till yesterday--whereby I enjoyed a double blessing in recompense of the previous delay. Nevertheless, it were desirable that the new Salem postmaster be forthwith ejected, for taking upon himself to withhold the outpourings of thy heart, at their due season. As for letters of business, which involve merely the gain or loss of a few thousand dollars, let him be as careless as he pleases; but when thou wouldst utter thyself to thy husband, dearest wife, there is doubtless a peculiar fitness of thy communications to that point and phase of our existence, at which they ought to be received. However, come when they will, they are sure to make sweetest music with my heart-strings. Blessedest, what an ugly day is this!--and there thou sittest as heavy as thy husband's heart. And is his heart indeed heavy? Why no--it is not heaviness--not the heaviness, like a great lump of ice, which I used to feel when I was alone in the world--but--but--in short, dearest, where thou art not, there it is a sort of death. A death, however, in which there is still hope and assurance of a joyful life to come. Methinks, if my spirit were not conscious of thy spirit, this dreary snow-storm would chill me to torpor;--the warmth of my fireside would be quite powerless to counteract it. Most absolute little wife, didst thou expressly command me to go to Father Taylor's church this very Sabbath?--(Dinner, or luncheon rather, has intervened since the last sentence)--Now, belovedest, it would not be an auspicious day for me to hear the aforesaid Son of Thunder. Thou knowest not how difficult is thy husband to be touched or moved, unless time, and circumstances, and his own inward state, be in a "concatenation accordingly." A dreadful thing would it be, were Father Taylor to fail in awakening a sympathy from my spirit to thine. Darlingest, pray let me stay at home this afternoon. Some sunshiny Sunday, when I am wide awake, and warm, and genial, I will go and throw myself open to his blessed influences; but now, there is but one thing (thou being absent) which I feel anywise inclined to do--and that is, to go to sleep. May I go to sleep, belovedest? Think what sweet dreams of thee may visit me--think how I shall escape this snow-storm--think how my heavy mood will change, as the mood of mind almost always does, during the interval that withdraws me from the external world. Yes; thou bidst me sleep. Sleep thou too, my beloved--let us pass at one and the same moment into that misty region, and embrace each other there. Well, dearest, I have slept; but Sophie Hawthorne has been naughty--she would not be dreamed about. And now that I am awake again, here are the same snow-flakes in the air, that were descending when I went to sleep. Would that there were an art of making sunshine! Knowest thou any such art? Truly thou dost, my blessedest, and hast often thrown a heavenly sunshine around thy husband's spirit, when all things else were full of gloom. What a woe--what a cloud it is, to be away from thee! How would my Dove like to have her husband continually with her, twelve or fourteen months out of the next twenty? Would not that be real happiness?--in such long communion, should we not feel as if separation were a dream, something that never had been a reality, nor ever could be? Yes; but--for in all earthly happiness there is a but--but, during those twenty months, there would be two intervals of three months each, when thy husband would be five hundred miles away--as far away as Washington. That would be terrible. Would not Sophie Hawthorne fight against it?--would not the Dove fold her wings, not in the quietude of bliss, but of despair? Do not be frightened, dearest--nor rejoiced either--for the thing will not be. It might be, if I chose; but on multitudinous accounts, my present situation seems preferable; and I do pray, that, in one year more, I may find some way of escaping from this unblest Custom-House; for it is a very grievous thraldom. I do detest all offices--all, at least, that are held on a political tenure. And I want nothing to do with politicians--they are not men; they cease to be men, in becoming politicians. Their hearts wither away, and die out of their bodies. Their consciences are turned to India-rubber--or to some substance as black as that, and which will stretch as much. One thing, if no more, I have gained by my Custom-House experience--to know a politician. It is a knowledge which no previous thought, or power of sympathy, could have taught me, because the animal, or the machine rather, is not in nature. Oh my darlingest wife, thy husband's soul yearns to embrace thee! Thou art his hope--his joy--he desires nothing but to be with thee, and to toil for thee, and to make thee a happy wife, wherein would consist his own heavenliest happiness. Dost thou love him? Yes; he knoweth it. God bless thee, most beloved. THINE OWNEST HUSBAND. Miss Sophia A. Peabody, Care of Dr. N. Peabody, Salem, Mass. TO MISS PEABODY (Fragment only) And now good night, best, beautifullest, belovedest, blessingest of wives. Notwithstanding what I have said of the fleeting and unsatisfying bliss of dreams, still, if thy husband's prayers and wishes can bring thee, or even a shadow of thee, into his sleep, thou or thy image will assuredly be there. Good night, ownest. I bid thee good night, although it is still early in the evening; because I must reserve the rest of the page to greet thee upon in the morning. TO MISS PEABODY _Boston_, March 26th, 1840--Afternoon. _Thou dearest wife_, Here is thy husband, yearning for thee with his whole heart--thou, meanwhile, being fast asleep, and perhaps hovering around him in thy dreams. Very dreary are the first few centuries which elapse after our separations, and before it is time to look forward hopefully to another meeting--these are the "dark ages." And hast thou been very good, my beloved? Dost thou dwell in the past and in the future, so that the gloomy present is quite swallowed up in sunshine? Do so, mine ownest, for the sake of thy husband, whose desire it is to make thy whole life as sunny as the scene beyond those high, dark rocks of the Menaggio. Dearest, my thoughts will not flow at all--they are as sluggish as a stream of half-cold lava. Methinks I could sleep an hour or two--perhaps thou art calling to me, out of the midst of thy dream, to come and join thee there. I will take a book, and lie down awhile, and perhaps resume my pen in the evening. I will not say good bye; for I am coming to thee now. March 27th,--Before breakfast.--Good morning, most belovedest. I felt so infinitely stupid, after my afternoon's nap, that I could not possibly write another word; and it has required a whole night's sleep to restore me the moderate share of intellect and vivacity that naturally belongs to me. Dearest, thou didst not come into my dreams, last night; but, on the contrary, I was engaged in assisting the escape of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette from Paris, during the French revolution. And sometimes, by an unaccountable metamorphosis, it seemed as if my mother and sister were in the place of the King and Queen. I think that fairies rule over our dreams--beings who have no true reason or true feeling, but mere fantasies instead of those endowments. Afternoon.--Blessedest, I do think that it is the doom laid upon me, of murdering so many of the brightest hours of the day at that unblest Custom-House, that makes such havoc with my wits; for here I am again, trying to write worthily to my etherealest, and intellectualest, and feelingest, and imaginativest wife, yet with a sense as if all the noblest part of man had been left out of my composition--or had decayed out of it, since my nature was given to my own keeping. Sweetest Dove, shouldst thou once venture within those precincts, the atmosphere would immediately be fatal to thee--thy wings would cease to flutter in a moment--scarcely wouldst thou have time to nestle into thy husband's bosom, ere thy pure spirit would leave what is mortal of thee there, and flit away to Heaven. Never comes any bird of Paradise into that dismal region. A salt, or even a coal-ship is ten million times preferable; for there the sky is above me, and the fresh breeze around me, and my thoughts, having hardly anything to do with my occupation, are as free as air. Nevertheless, belovedest, thou art not to fancy that the above paragraph gives thee a correct idea of thy husband's mental and spiritual state; for he is sometimes prone to the sin of exaggeration. It is only once in a while that the image and desire of a better and happier life makes him feel the iron of his chain; for after all, a human spirit may find no insufficiency of food fit for it, even in the Custom-House. And with such materials as these, I do think, and feel, and learn things that are worth knowing, and which I should not know unless I had learned them there; so that the present portion of my life shall not be quite left out of the sum of my real existence. Moreover, I live through my Dove's heart--I live an intellectual life in Sophie Hawthorne. Therefore ought those two in one to keep themselves happy and healthy in mind and feelings, inasmuch as they enjoy more blessed influences than their husband, and likewise have to provide happiness and moral health for him. Very dearest, I feel a great deal better now--nay, nothing whatever is the matter. What a foolish husband hast thou, misfortunate little Dove, that he will grieve thee with such a long Jeremiad, and after all find out that there is not the slightest cause for lamentation. But so it must often be, dearest--this trouble hast thou entailed upon thyself, by yielding to become my wife. Every cloud that broods beneath my sky, or that I even fancy is brooding there, must dim thy sunshine too. But here is no real cloud. It is good for me, on many accounts, that my life has had this passage in it. Thou canst not think how much more I know than I did a year ago--what a stronger sense I have of power to act as a man among men--what worldly wisdom I have gained, and wisdom also that is not altogether of this world. And when I quit this earthy cavern, where I am now buried, nothing will cling to me that ought to be left behind. Men will not perceive, I trust, by my look, or the tenor of my thoughts and feelings, that I have been a Custom-House officer. Belovedest!--what an awful concussion was that of our two heads. It was as if two worlds had rushed together--as if the Moon (thou art my Moon, gentlest wife) had met in fierce encounter with the rude, rock-promontoried Earth. Dearest, art thou sure that thy delicatest brain has suffered no material harm? A maiden's heart, they say, is often bruised and broken by her lover's cruelty; it was reserved for naughtiest me to inflict those injuries upon my mistress's head.... (Portion of letter missing) To Miss Sophia A. Peabody, Care of Dr. N. Peabody, Salem, Mass. TO MISS PEABODY _Boston_, March 30th, 1840--5 or 6 P.M. _Infinitely belovedest_, Thy Thursday's letter came not till Saturday--so long was thy faith fullest husband defrauded of his rights! Thou mayst imagine how hungry was my heart, when at last it came. Thy yesterday's letter, for a wonder, arrived in its due season, this forenoon; and I could not refrain from opening it immediately; and then and there, in that earthy cavern of the Custom-House, and surrounded by all those brawling slang-whangers, I held sweet communion with my Dove. Dearest, I do not believe that any one of those miserable men ever received a letter which uttered a single word of love and faith--which addressed itself in any manner to the soul. No beautiful and holy woman's spirit came to visit any of them, save thy husband. How blest is he! Thou findest thy way to him in all dismallest and unloveliest places, and talkest with him there, nor can the loudest babble nor rudest clamor shut out thy gentle voice from his ear. Truly, he ought not to bemoan himself any more, as in his last letter, but to esteem himself favored beyond all other mortals;--but truly he is a wayward and incalculable personage, and will not be prevailed with to know his own happiness. The lovelier thou art, mine ownest, the more doth thy unreasonable husband discontent himself to be away from thee, though thou continually sendest him all of thyself that can be breathed into written words. Oh, I want thee with me forever and ever!--at least I would always have the feeling, amid the tumult and unsuitable associations of the day, that the night would bring me to my home of peace and rest--to thee, my fore-ordained wife. Well--be patient, heart! The time will come. Meantime, foolishest heart, be thankful for the much of happiness thou already hast. Dearest, thy husband was very reprehensible, yesterday. Wilt thou again forgive him? He went not to hear Father Taylor preach. In truth, his own private and quiet room did have such a charm for him, after being mixed and tossed together with discordant elements all the week, that he thought his Dove would grant him indulgence for one more Sabbath. Also, he fancied himself unfit to go out, on account of a cold; though, as the disease has quite disappeared to-day, I am afraid he conjured it up to serve his naughty purpose. But, indeed, dearest, I feel somewhat afraid to hear this divine Father Taylor, lest my sympathy with thy admiration of him should be colder and feebler than thou lookest for. Belovedest wife, our souls are in happiest unison; but we must not disquiet ourselves if every tone be not re-echoed from one to the other--if every slightest shade be not reflected in the alternate mirror. Our broad and general sympathy is enough to secure our bliss, without our following it into minute details. Wilt thou promise not to be troubled, should thy husband be unable to appreciate the excellence of Father Taylor? Promise me this; and at some auspicious hour, which I trust will soon arrive, Father Taylor shall have an opportunity to make music with my soul. But I forewarn thee, sweetest Dove, that thy husband is a most unmalleable man;--thou art not to suppose, because his spirit answers to every touch of thine, that therefore every breeze, or even every whirlwind, can upturn him from his depths. Well, dearest, I have said my say, on this matter. What a rain is this, my poor little Dove! Yet as the wind comes from some other quarter than the East, I trust that thou hast found it genial. Good bye, belovedest, till tomorrow evening. Meantime, love me, and dream of me. March 31st.--Evening.--Best Wife, it is scarcely dark yet; but thy husband has just lighted his lamps, and sits down to talk to thee. Would that he could hear an answer in thine own sweet voice; for his spirit needs to be cheered by that dearest of all harmonies, after a long, listless, weary day. Just at this moment, it does seem as if life could not go on without it. What is to be done? Dearest, if Elizabeth Howe is to be with you on Saturday, it would be quite a calamity to thee and thy household, for me to come at the same time. Now will Sophie Hawthorne complain, and the Dove's eyes be suffused, at my supposing that their husband's visit could be a calamity at any time. Well, at least, we should be obliged to give up many hours of happiness, and it would not even be certain that I could have the privilege of seeing mine own wife in private, at all. Wherefore, considering these things, I have resolved, and do hereby make it a decree of fate, that my present widowhood shall continue one week longer. And my sweetest Dove--yes, and naughtiest Sophie Hawthorne too--will both concur in the fitness of this resolution, and will help me to execute it with what of resignation is attainable by mortal man, by writing me a letter full of strength and comfort. And I, infinitely dear wife, will write to thee again; so that, though my earthly part will not be with thee on Saturday, yet thou shalt have my heart and soul in a letter. Will not this be right, and for the best? "Yes, dearest husband," saith my meekest little Dove; and Sophie Hawthorne cannot gainsay her. Mine unspeakably ownest, dost thou love me a million of times as much as thou didst a week ago? As for me, my heart grows deeper and wider every moment, and still thou fillest it in all its depths and boundlessness. Wilt thou never be satisfied with making me love thee? To what use canst thou put so much love as thou continually receivest from me? Dost thou hoard it up, as misers do their treasure? THINE OWN BLESSEDEST HUSBAND. April 1st. Before breakfast.--Good morning, entirely belovedest. Sophie Hawthorne, I have enclosed something for thee in this letter. If thou findest it not, then tell me what thou art. Miss Sophia A. Peabody, Care of Dr. N. Peabody, Salem, Mass. TO MISS PEABODY _Boston_, April 3d, 1840.--Evening. Blessedest wife, thy husband has been busy all day, from early breakfast-time to late in the afternoon; and old Father Time has gone onward somewhat less heavily, than is his wont when I am imprisoned within the walls of the Custom-House. It has been a brisk, breezy day, as thou knowest--an effervescent atmosphere; and I have enjoyed it in all its freshness, breathing air which had not been breathed in advance by the hundred thousand pairs of lungs which have common and indivisible property in the atmosphere of this great city.--My breath had never belonged to anybody but me. It came fresh from the wilderness of ocean. My Dove ought to have shared it with me, and so have made it infinitely sweeter--save her, I would wish to have an atmosphere all to myself. And, dearest, it was exhilarating to see the vessels, how they bounded over the waves, while a sheet of foam broke out around them. I found a good deal of enjoyment, too, in the busy scene around me; for several vessels were disgorging themselves (what an unseemly figure is this--"disgorge," quotha, as if the vessels were sick at their stomachs) on the wharf; and everybody seemed to be working with might and main. It pleased thy husband to think that he also had a part to act in the material and tangible business of this life, and that a part of all this industry could not have gone on without his presence. Nevertheless, my belovedest, pride not thyself too much on thy husband's activity and utilitarianism; he is naturally an idler, and doubtless will soon be pestering thee with bewailments at being compelled to earn his bread by taking some little share in the toils of mortal man. Most beloved, when I went to the Custom-House, at one o'clock, Colonel Hall held up a letter, turning the seal towards me; and he seemed to be quite as well aware as myself, that the long-legged little fowl impressed thereon was a messenger from my Dove. And so, naughtiest, thou art not patient. Well; it will do no good to scold thee. I know Sophie Hawthorne of old--yea, of very old time do I know her; or rather, of very old eternity. There was an image of such a being, deep within my soul, before we met in this dim world; and therefore nothing that she does, or says, or thinks, or feels, ever surprises me. Her naughtiness is as familiar to me as if it were my own. But dearest, do be patient; because thou seest that the busy days are coming again; and how is thy husband to bear his toil lightsomely, if he knows that thou art impatient and disquieted. By and bye, as soon as God will open a way to us, we will help one another bear the burthen of the day, whatever it may be. My little Dove, the excellent Colonel Hall, conceiving, I suppose, that our correspondence must necessarily involve a great expenditure of paper, has imparted to thy husband a quire or two of superfine gilt-edged, which he brought from Congress. The sheet on which I am now writing is a specimen; and he charged me to give thee a portion of it, which I promised to do--but whether I shall convey it to thee in the mass, or sheet by sheet, after spoiling it with my uncouth scribble, is yet undetermined. Which wouldst thou prefer? Likewise three sticks of sealing-[wax] did the good Colonel bestow; but unfortunately it is all red. Yet I think it proper enough that a gentleman should seal all his letters with red sealing-wax; though it is sweet and graceful in my Dove to use fancy-colored. Dearest, the paper thou shalt have, every sheet of it, sooner or later; and only that it is so burthensome to thy foolish husband to carry anything in his hand, I would bring it to thee. Meantime, till I hit upon some other method, I will send it sheet by sheet. Miss Sophia A. Peabody, Care of Dr. N. Peabody, Salem, Mass. TO MISS PEABODY _Custom-House_, April 6th, 1840. 5 P.M. How long it is, belovedest, since I have written thee a letter from this darksome region. Never did I write thee a word from hence that was worth reading, nor shall I now; but perhaps thou wouldst get no word at all, these two or three days, unless I write it here. This evening, dearest, I am to have a visitor--the illustrious Colonel Hall himself; and I have even promised him a bed on my parlor floor--so that, as thou seest, the duties of hospitality will keep me from communion with the best little wife in the world. Hearts never do understand the mystery of separation--that is the business of the head. My sweetest, dearest, purest, holiest, noblest, faithfullest wife, dost thou know what a loving husband thou hast? Dost thou love him most immensely?--beyond conception, and dost thou feel, as he does, that every new throb of love is worth all other happiness in the world? Dearest, my soul drank thy letter this forenoon, and has been conscious of it ever since, in the midst of business and noise and all sorts of wearisome babble. How dreamlike it makes all my external life, this continual thought and deepest, inmostest musing upon thee! I live only within myself; for thou art always there. Thou makest me a disembodied spirit; and with the eve of a spirit, I look on all worldly things--and this it [is] that separates thy husband from those who seem to be his fellows--therefore is he "among them, but not of them." Thou art transfused into his heart, and spread all round about it; and it is only once in a while that he himself is even imperfectly conscious of what a miracle has been wrought upon him. Well, dearest, were ever such words as these written in a Custom-House before? Oh, and what a mighty heave my heart has given, this very moment! Thou art most assuredly thinking of me now, wife of my inmost bosom. Never did I know what love was before--I did not even know it when I began this letter. Ah, but I ought not to say that; it would make me sad to believe that I had not always loved thee. Farewell, now, dearest. Be quiet, my Dove; lest my heart be made to flutter by the fluttering of thy wings. April 7th. 6 P.M. My tenderest Dove, hast thou lived through the polar winter of to-day; for it does appear to me to have been the most uncomfortable day that ever was inflicted on poor mortals. Thy husband has had to face it in all its terrors; and the cold has penetrated through his cloak, through his beaver-cloth coat and vest, and was neutralised nowhere but in the region round about his heart--and that it did not chill him even there, he owes to thee. I know not whether I should not have jumped overboard in despair today, if I had not sustained my spirit by the thought of thee, most beloved wife; for, besides the bleak, unkindly air, I have been plagued by two sets of coal-shovellers at the same time, and have had to keep two separate tallies simultaneously. But, dearest, I was conscious that all this was merely a vision and a phantasy, and that, in reality, I was not half-frozen by the bitter blast, nor plagued to death by those grimy coal-heavers, but that I was basking quietly in the sunshine of eternity, with mine own Dove. Any sort of bodily and earthly torment may serve to make us sensible that we have a soul that is not within the jurisdiction of such shadowy demons--it separates the immortal within us from the mortal. But the wind has blown my brain into such confusion that I cannot philosophise now. Blessingest wife, what a habit I have contracted of late, of telling thee all my grievances and annoyances, as if such trifles were worth telling--or as if, supposing them to be so, they would be the most agreeable gossip in the world to thee. Thou makest me behave like a child, naughtiest. Why dost thou not frown at my nonsensical complaints, and utterly refuse thy sympathy? But I speak to thee of the miseries of a cold day, and blustering wind, and intractable coal-shovellers, with just the same certainty that thou wilt listen lovingly and sympathisingly, as if I were speaking of the momentous and permanent concerns of life. Dearest, ... (portion of letter missing) I do not think that I can come on Friday--there is hardly any likelihood of it; for one of the Measurers is indisposed, which throws additional work on the efficient members of our honorable body. But there is no expressing how I do yearn for thee! The strength of the feeling seems to make my words cold and tame. Dearest, this is but a poor epistle, yet is written in very great love and worship of thee--so, for the writer's sake, thou wilt receive it into thy heart of hearts. God keep thee--and me also for thy sake. THINE OWNEST. Miss Sophia A. Peabody, Care of Dr. N. Peabody, Salem, Mass. TO MISS PEABODY _Boston_, April 15th, 1840.--Afternoon. Belovedest--since writing this word, I have made a considerable pause; for, dearest, my mind has no activity to-day. I would fain sit still, and let thoughts, feelings, and images of thee, pass before me and through me, without my putting them into words, or taking any other trouble about the matter. It must be that thou dost not especially and exceedingly need a letter from me; else I should feel an impulse and necessity to write. I do wish, most beloved wife, that there were some other method of communing with thee at a distance; for really this is not a natural one to thy husband. In truth, I never use words, either with the tongue or pen, when I can possibly express myself in any other way;--and how much, dearest, may be expressed without the utterance of a word! Is there not a volume in many of our glances?--even in a pressure of the hand? And when I write to thee, I do but painfully endeavor to shadow into words what has already been expressed in those realities. In heaven, I am very sure, there will be no occasion for words;--our minds will enter into each other, and silently possess themselves of their natural riches. Even in this world, I think, such a process is not altogether impossible--we ourselves have experienced it--but words come like an earthy wall betwixt us. Then our minds are compelled to stand apart, and make signals of our meaning, instead of rushing into one another, and holding converse in an infinite and eternal language. Oh, dearest, have [not] the moments of our oneness been those in which we were most silent? It is our instinct to be silent then, because words could not adequately express the perfect concord of our hearts, and therefore would infringe upon it. Well, ownest, good bye till tomorrow, when perhaps thy husband will feel a necessity to use even such a wretched medium as words, to tell thee how he loves thee. No words can tell it now. April 15th. Afternoon.--Most dear wife, never was thy husband gladder to receive a letter from thee than to-day. And so thou didst perceive that I was rather out of spirits on Monday. Foolish and faithless husband that I was, I supposed that thou wouldst not take any notice of it; but the simple fact was, that I did not feel quite so well as usual; and said nothing about it to thee, because I knew thou wouldst desire me to put off my departure, which (for such a trifle) I felt it not right to do--and likewise, because my Dove would have been naughty, and so perhaps have made herself ten times as ill as her husband. Dearest, I am quite well now--only very hungry; for I have thought fit to eat very little for two days past; and I think starvation is a remedy for almost all physical evils. You will love Colonel Hall, when I tell you that he has not let me do a ... (few words missing) ... and even to-day he has sent me home to my room, although I assured him that I was perfectly able to work. Now, dearest, it thou givest thyself any trouble and torment about this past indisposition of mine, I shall never dare to tell thee about my future incommodities; but if I were sure thou wouldst estimate them at no more than they are worth, thou shouldst know them all, even to the slightest prick of my finger. It is my impulse to complain to thee in all griefs, great and small; and I will not check that impulse, if thou wilt sympathise reasonably, as well as most lovingly. And now, ownest wife, believe that thy husband is well;--better, I fear, than thou, who art tired to death, and hast even had the headache. Naughtiest, dost thou think that all the busts in the world, and all the medallions and other forms of sculpture, would be worth creating at the expence of such weariness and headaches to thee. I would rather that thy art should be annihilated, than that thou shouldst always pay this price for its exercise. But perhaps, when thou hast my bosom to repose upon, thou wilt no longer feel such overwhelming weariness. I am given thee to repose upon, that so my most tender and sensitivest little Dove may be able to do great works. And dearest, I do by no means undervalue thy works, though I cannot estimate all thou hast ever done at the price of a single throb of anguish to thy belovedest head. But thou has achieved mighty things. Thou hast called up a face which was hidden in the grave--hast re-created it, after it was resolved to dust--and so hast snatched from Death his victory. I wonder at thee, my beloved. Thou art a miracle thyself, and workest miracles. I would not have believed it possible to do what thou hast done--to restore the lineaments of the dead so perfectly that even she who loved him so well can require nothing more;--and this too, when thou hadst hardly known his living face. Thou couldst not have done it, unless God had helped thee. This surely was inspiration, and of the holiest kind, and for one of the holiest purposes. Dearest, I shall long to see thee exceedingly next Saturday; but having been absent from duty for two or three days past it will not be right for me to ask any more time so soon. Dost thou think it would? How naughty was thy husband to waste the first page of this letter in declaiming against the blessed art of writing! I do not see how I could live without it;--thy letters are my heart's food; and oftentimes my heart absolutely insists upon pouring itself out on paper, for thy perusal. In truth, if the heart would do all the work, I should probably write to thee the whole time of my absence; but thou knowest that the co-operation of the hand and head are indispensable; and they, not being able to comprehend the infinite necessity of the heart's finding utterance, are sometimes sluggish. April 17th.--Before breakfast.--Ownest, I am perfectly well this morning. Dost thou love me? Dearest, expect not another letter till Tuesday. Is thy weariness quite gone? THINE OWNEST, OWNEST HUSBAND. Miss Sophia A. Peabody, Care of Dr. N. Peabody, Salem, Mass. TO MISS PEABODY _Boston_, April 19th, 1840.--Forenoon. Dearest, there came no letter from thee yesterday; and I have been a little disquieted with fears that thou art not well and art naughty enough to conceal it from thy husband. But this is a misdemeanor of which my Dove ought not to be lightly suspected. Or perhaps, ownest wife, thou didst imagine that I might mean to surprise thee by a visit, last evening, and therefore, instead of writing, didst hope to commune with me in living words. Best belovedest, if I could have come, I would have given thee notice beforehand; for I love not surprises, even joyful ones--or at least, I would rather that joy should come quietly, and as a matter of course, and warning us of its approach by casting a placid gleam before it. Mine own wife, art thou very well? Thy husband is so, only love-sick--a disease only to be cured by the pressure of a certain heart to his own heart. Belovedest, what a beautiful day was yesterday. Wert thou abroad in the sky and air? Thy husband's spirit did rebel against being confined in his darksome dungeon, at the Custom-House; it seemed a sin--a murder of the joyful young day--a quenching of the sunshine. Nevertheless, there he was kept a prisoner,--till it was too late to fling himself on a gentle wind and be blown away into the country. I foresee, dearest, that thou wilt, now that the pleasant days of May and June are coming, be tormented quite beyond thine infinite patience, with my groans and lamentations at being compelled to lose so much of life's scanty summertime. But thou must enjoy for both of us. Thou must listen to the notes of the birds, because the rumbling of wheels will be always in my ears--thou must fill thyself with the fragrance of wild flowers, because I must breathe in the dust of the city--thy spirit must enjoy a double share of freedom, because thy husband is doomed to be a captive. It is thine office now, most sweet wife, to make all the additions that may be made to our common stock of enjoyment. By and bye, there shall not be so heavy burthen imposed upon thee. When I shall be again free, I will enjoy all things with the fresh simplicity of a child of five years old; thou shalt find thine husband grown young again, made over all anew--he will go forth and stand in a summer shower, and all the worldly dust that has collected on him shall be washed away at once. Then, dearest, whenever thou art aweary, thou shalt lie down upon his heart as upon a bank of fresh flowers. Nearly 6--P.M. Thy husband went out to walk, dearest, about an hour ago, and found it very pleasant, though there was a somewhat cool wind. I went round and across the common, and stood on the highest point of it, whence I could see miles and miles into the country. Blessed be God for this green tract, and the view which it affords; whereby we poor citizens may be put in mind, sometimes, that all God's earth is not composed of brick blocks of houses, and of stone or wooden pavements. Blessed be God for the sky too; though the smoke of the city may somewhat change its aspect--but still it is better than if each street were covered over with a roof. There were a good many people walking on the mall, mechanicks apparently and shopkeepers' clerks, with their wives and sweethearts; and boys were rolling on the grass--and thy husband would have liked to lie down and roll too. Wouldst thou not have been ashamed of him? And, Oh, dearest, thou shouldst have been there, to help me to enjoy the green grass, and the far-off hills and fields--to teach me how to enjoy them, for when I view Nature without thee, I feel that I lack a sense. When we are together, thy whole mind and fancy, as well as thy whole heart, is mine; so that all thy impressions from earth, sea, and sky, are added to all mine. How necessary hast thou made thyself to thy husband, my little Dove! When he is weary and out of spirits, his heart yearneth for thee; and when he is among pleasant scenes, he requireth thee so much the more. My dearest, why didst thou not write to me, yesterday? It were always advisable, methinks, to arrange matters so that a letter may be sent on each Saturday, when I am not coming home; because Sunday leaves me free to muse upon thee, and to imagine the state and circumstances in which thou art--and the present Sunday I have been troubled with fancies that thou art ill of body or ill at ease in mind. Do not thou have any such foolish fancies about me, mine ownest. Oh, how we find, at every moment of our lives, that we ought always to be together! Then there would be none of these needless heartquakes; but now how can they be avoided, when we mutually feel that one-half our being is wandering away by itself, without the guidance and guard of the other half! Well; it will not be always so. Doubtless, God has planned how to make us happy; but thy husband, being of a rebellious and distrustful nature, cannot help wishing sometimes that our Father would let him into His plans. TO MISS PEABODY _Boston_, April 21st, 1840.--Custom-House. I do trust, my dearest, that thou hast been enjoying this bright day for both of us; for thy husband has spent it in his dungeon--and the only ray of light that broke upon him, was when he opened thy letter. Belovedest, I have folded it to my heart, and ever and anon it sends a thrill through me; for thou hast steeped it with thy love--it seems as if thy head were leaning against my breast. I long to get home, that I may read it again and again; for in this uncongenial region, I can but half comprehend it--at least, I feel that there is a richness and sweetness in it, too sacred to be enjoyed, save in privacy. Dearest wife, thy poor husband is sometimes driven to wish that thou and he could mount upon a cloud (as we used to fancy in those heavenly walks of ours) and be borne quite out of sight and hearing of all the world;--then, at last, our souls might melt into each other; but now, all the people in the world seem to come between us. How happy were Adam and Eve! There was no third person to come between them, and all the infinity around them only served to press their hearts closer together. We love [one] another as well as they: but there is no silent and lovely garden of Eden for us. Mine own, wilt thou sail away with me to discover some summer island?--dost thou not think that God has reserved one for us, ever since the beginning of the world? Ah, foolish husband that I am, to raise a question of it, when we have found such an Eden, such an island sacred to us two, whenever, whether in Mrs. Quincy's boudoir, or anywhere else, we have been clasped in one another's arms! That holy circle shuts out all the world--then we are the Adam and Eve of a virgin earth. Now good-bye dearest; for voices are babbling around me, and I should not wonder if thou wert to hear the echo of them, while thou readest this letter. April 22d--6 o'clock P.M. To-day, dearest, I have been measuring salt, on Long-Wharf; and though considerably weary, I feel better satisfied than if I had been murdering the blessed day at the Custom-House. Mine own wife, how very good wast thou, to take me with thee on that sweet walk, last Monday! And how kind-hearted was that sensible old stump! Thou enquirest whether I ever heard a stump speak before. No, indeed; but "stump-speeches" (as thou mayst learn in the newspapers) are very common in the western country. Belovedest, I have met with an immense misfortune. Dost thou sympathise from the bottom of thy heart? Wouldst thou take it upon thyself, if possible? Yea; I know thou wouldst, even without asking the nature of it; and truth to tell, I could be selfish enough to wish that thou mightest share it with me. Now art thou all in a fever of anxiety! I feel the fluttering of thy foolish little heart. Shall I tell thee? No.--Yes; I will. I have received an invitation to a party at General McNeil's, next Friday evening. Why will not people let your poor persecuted husband alone? What possible good can it do for me to thrust my coal-begrimed visage and salt-befrosted locks into good society? What claim have I to be there--a humble Measurer, a subordinate Custom-House officer, as I am! I cannot go. I will not go. I intend to pass that evening with my wife--that is to say, in musings and dreams of her, and moreover, it was an exceeding breach of etiquette, that this belovedest wife was not included in the invitation. My duties began at sunrise, after a somewhat scanty night's rest; for George Hillard and his brother, from London, came to see me, when I was preparing to go [to] bed; and I was kept up pretty late. But I came home at about four o'clock, and straightway went to bed! What a sinful way was that of misusing this summer afternoon! I trust, most dear wife, that the better half of my being has drawn from the sweet day all the honey that it contained. I feel as if it were not so much matter, now, whether my days pass pleasantly or irksomely, since thou canst be living a golden life for both of us. Sometime or other, we will contribute each an equal share of enjoyment. Dearest, thou knowest not how I have yearned for thee. And now there is but one day more of widowhood! Sophie Hawthorne must not expect me any more on Fridays, till the busy season is over. If I can always come on the appointed Saturday, it will be a great mercy of Heaven; but I trust in Heaven's goodness, and the instrumentality of Colonel Hall. Now God bless thee, ownest wife. God bless us. To Miss Sophia A. Peabody, Care of Dr. N. Peabody, Salem, Mass. TO MISS PEABODY _Boston_, May 15th, 1840. _Darlingest_, I did not reach home last night till candle-light, and then I was beyond expression weary and spiritless; and I could as soon have climbed into Heaven without a ladder, as to come to see thee at Mrs. Park's. So, instead of dressing to pay a visit, I undressed and went to bed; but yet I doubt whether I ought not to have gone, for I was restless and wakeful a great part of the night; and it seemed as if I had scarcely fallen asleep, when I awoke with a start, and saw the gray dawn creeping over the roofs of the houses. So then it was necessary for thy poor husband to leave his pillow, without enjoying that half-dreaming interval which I so delight to devote to thee. However the fresh morning air made a new creature of me; and all day I have felt tolerably lively and cheerful--as much so as is anywise consistent with this intolerable position of near distance, or distant nearness, in which we now find ourselves. Truly Providence does not seem to have smiled on this visit of thine, my dearest. The dispensation is somewhat hard to bear. There is a weight and a gnawing at my heart; but, belovedest, do let thy heart be cheerful, for thy husband's sake. Very reviving to me was thy letter, mine ownest. Colonel Hall brought it at noon to the eating-house where we had agreed to dine together; and I forthwith opened it and read it while my beefsteak was broiling. It refreshed me much more than my dinner--which is a great deal for a hungry man to say. Dearest, I am in admirable health; it is not the nature of my present mode of life to make me sick; and my nightly weariness does not betoken anything of that kind. Each day, it is true, exhausts all the life and animation that there is in me; but each night restores as much as will be required for the expenditure of the next day. I think this week has been about as tough as any that I ever experienced. I feel the burthen of such constant occupation the more sensibly, from having had so many idle intervals of late. Oh, dearest, do not thou tire thyself to death. Whenever thou feelest weary, then oughtest thou to glide away from all the world; and go to sleep with the thought of thy husband in thy heart. Why do not people know better what is requisite for a Dove, than thus to keep her wings fluttering all day long, never allowing her a moment to fold them in peace and quietness? I am anxious for thee, mine ownest wife. When I have the sole charge of thee, these things shall not be. Belovedest, didst thou not bless this shower? It caused thy husband's labors to cease for the day, though it confined him in the cabin of the salt-ship till it was over; but when the drops came few and far between, I journeyed hither to our parlor, and began this scribble. Really I did not think my ideas would be alert enough to write half so much; but I have scrawled one line after another; and now I feel much revived, and soothed and cheered in mind. I shall sleep the more quietly, sweetest wife, for having had this talk with thee--thou wilt bless my sleep. I wish that thou couldst receive this letter to-night, because I am sure thou needest it. Let me know, mine ownest, what time thou intendest to go to Salem; and if it be possible, I will come to the Depot to see thee. But do not expect me too fervently, because there are many chances that it will not be in my power. What a time this has been for my Dove and me! Never, since we were married, have the fates been so perverse. And now farewell, my dearest, dearest wife, on whom I repose, in whom I am blest--whom I love with all the heart that is in me, and will love more and more forever, as I grow more worthy to love thee. Be happy, dearest; for my happiness must come through thee. God bless thee, and let me feel his blessing through thy heart. Thy lovingest husband-- DE L'AUBEPINE. TO MISS PEABODY _Boston_, May 19th, 1840 _My dearest_, Where in the world art thou?--or hast thou flown away to Paradise, naughtiest Dove, without bidding thy husband farewell? I know not whereabout this letter will find thee; but I throw it upon the winds in the confidence that some breeze of Heaven will bear it to thee; for I suppose heart never spoke to heart, without being heard, and sooner or later finding a response. Perhaps some hearts that speak to other hearts here on earth may find no response till they have passed far into Eternity; but our hearts catch each other's whispers even here. Happy we! But, belovedest, how is it that thou hast sent me no token of thy existence, since we parted on the Hoopers' doorstep, when thou didst press my hand without a word? It seems an age since then. Thou saidst, on Sunday, that thou shouldst probably return to Salem to-day; but surely thou hast not gone. I feel lonely and not cheerful--my spirit knows not whereabout to seek thee, and so it shivers as if there were no _Thou_ at all--as if my Dove had been only a dream and a vision, and now had vanished into unreality and nothingness. But tomorrow I shall surely hear from thee: and even should it be otherwise, I shall yet know, with everlasting faith, that my Dove's heart has been trying to make me sensible of its embraces all this time. My dearest, was not that a sweet time--that Sabbath afternoon and eve? But why didst thou look up in my face, as we walked, and ask why I was so grave? If I was grave I know no cause for it, beloved. Lights and shadows are continually flitting across my inward sky, and I know neither whence they come nor whither they go; nor do I inquire too closely into them. It is dangerous to look too minutely at such phenomena. It is apt to create a substance, where at first there was a mere shadow. If at any time, dearest wife, there should seem--though to me there never does--but if there should ever seem to be an expression unintelligible from one of our souls to another, we will not strive to interpret it into earthly language, but wait for the soul to make itself understood; and were we to wait a thousand years, we need deem it no more time than we can spare. I speak only in reference to such dim and intangible matters as that which suggested this passage of my letter. It is not that I have any love for mystery; but because I abhor it--and because I have felt, a thousand times, that words may be a thick and darksome veil of mystery between the soul and the truth which it seeks. Wretched were we, indeed, if we had no better means of communicating ourselves, no fairer garb in which to array our essential selves, than these poor rags and tatters of Babel. Yet words are not without their use, even for purposes of explanation,--but merely for explaining outward acts, and all sorts of external things, leaving the soul's life and action to explain itself in its own way. My belovedest, what a misty disquisition have I scribbled! I would not read it over for sixpence. Think not that I supposed it necessary to sermonize thee so; but the sermon created itself from sentence to sentence; and being written, thou knowest that it belongs to thee, and I have no right to keep it back. Dearest, I was up very early this morning, and have had a good deal to do, especially this afternoon. Let me plead this excuse for my dulness and mistiness. I suspect that, hereafter, my little Dove will know how to estimate the difficulty of pouring one's self out in a soul-written letter, amid the distractions of business and society--she herself having experienced these checks upon her outpourings. Now good bye, mine ownest wife. God bless us both--or may God bless either of us, and that one will bless the other. Dost thou sleep well now-a-nights, belovedest? Of whom dost thou dream? Thy husband's long days and short nights hardly leave him time to dream. THINE OWNEST. Dearest, just as I was folding this letter, came thy note. Do thou be at the Depot as soon as possible after eleven; and I will move Heaven and earth to meet thee there. Perhaps a little before eleven. Miss Sophia A. Peabody, South Street. TO MISS PEABODY _Boston_, May 29th, 1840.--6 P.M. _My dearest_, Rejoice with thy husband, for he is free from a load of coal, which has been pressing upon his shoulders throughout all this hot weather. I am convinced that Christian's burthen consisted of coal; and no wonder he felt so much relieved when it fell off and rolled into the sepulchre. His load, however, at the utmost, could not have been more than a few bushels; whereas mine was exactly one hundred and thirty-five chaldrons and seven tubs.... Oh, my dearest, I feel the stroke upon mine own head. Except through thee, I can never feel any torment of that nature; for all these burning suns have blazed upon my head, unprotected except by a black hat, and yet I have felt no more inconvenience than if I had been sitting in the pleasant gloom of a dewy grot. Belovedest, be a great deal more careful of thyself. Remember always that thou art not thine own, but that Providence has entrusted to thy keeping a most delicate physical frame, which belongs wholly to me, and which therefore thou must keep with infinitely more care than thou wouldst the most precious jewel. And yet, I would not have thee anxious and watchful like an invalid; but thou shouldst consider that thou wert created to dwell nowhere but in the clime of Paradise, and wast only placed upon this earth, because thy husband is here and cannot do without thee--and that east-winds and fierce suns are evil unknown in thy native region, and therefore thy frame was not so constructed as to resist them; wherefore thine own wise precautions must be thy safeguard. Blessedest, I kiss thy brow,--at least, I kiss the air thrice; and if none of the three kisses reach thee, then three very precious things will have gone forth from my heart in vain. But if any of thy headache and bewilderment have remained hitherto, and now thou feelest somewhat like a breath of Heaven on thy brow, we will take it for granted that my kisses have found thee out. Good bye now, dearest wife; for I am weary and stupid; and as I need not be at the Custom-House before eight or nine o'clock tomorrow, thou shalt have the rest of the letter freshly written in the morning. Now it will be lucky for thee if thou gettest the last page of this letter entirely full. Dearest, thy last letter had the fragrance of a bank of violets--yea, all sorts of sweet smelling flowers and perfumed shrubs. I can lie down and repose upon it, as upon a bed of roses. It rejoices me to think that my whole being is not enveloped with coal-dust, but that its better half is breathing the breath of flowers. Oh, do be very happy, mine ownest wife, and fill thyself with all gentle pleasures that lie within thy reach; because at present thou hast a double duty to perform in this respect; since, so far as my enjoyments depend on external things, I can contribute nothing to the common stock of happiness. And yet dearest, nothing that I ever enjoyed before can come into the remotest comparison with my continual enjoyment of thy love--with the deep, satisfied repose which that consciousness brings to me; a repose subsisting, and ever to subsist, in the midst of all anxieties, troubles and agitations. Belovedest, I sometimes wish that thou couldst be with [me] on board my salt-vessels and colliers; because there are many things of which thou mightst make such pretty descriptions; and in future years, when thy husband is again busy at the loom of fiction, he would weave in these little pictures. My fancy is rendered so torpid by my ungenial way of life, that I cannot sketch off the scenes and portraits that interest me; and I am forced to trust them to my memory, with the hope of recalling them at some more favorable period. For three or four days past, I have been observing a little Mediterranean boy, from Malaga, not more than ten or eleven years old, but who is already a citizen of the world, and seems to be just as gay and contented on the deck of a Yankee coal-vessel, as he could be while playing beside his mother's door. It is really touching to see how free and happy he is--how the little fellow takes this whole wide world for his home, and all mankind for his family. He talks Spanish--at least, that is his native tongue; but he is also very intelligible in English, and perhaps he likewise has smatterings of the speech of other countries, whither the winds may have wafted this little sea-bird. He is a Catholic; and yesterday, being Friday, he caught some fish and fried them for his dinner, in sweet oil; and really they looked so delicate that I almost wished he would invite me to partake. Every once in a while, he undresses himself and leaps overboard, plunging down beneath the waves, as if the sea were as native to him as the earth; then he runs up the rigging of the vessel, as if he meant to fly away through the air. Do thou remember this little boy, dearest, and tell me of him one of these days; and perhaps I may make something more beautiful of him than thou wouldst think from these rough and imperfect touches. Belovedest, is thy head quite well? Art thou very beautiful now? Dost thou love me infinitely? Miss Sophia A. Peabody, Care of Dr. N. Peabody, Salem, Mass. TO MISS PEABODY _Boston_, June 2d, 1840--Before Breakfast _My dearest_, Thy Friday's letter came in due season to the Custom-House; but Colonel Hall could not find time to bring it to the remote region of the earth, where I was then an exile; so that it awaited me till the next morning. At noon, came thy next letter, at an interval of several hours from the receipt of the former--a space quite long enough to be interposed between thy missives. And yesterday arrived thy letter of the Sabbath--and all three are very precious to thy husband; and the oftener they come the more he needs them. Now I must go down to breakfast. Dost thou not wonder at finding me scribbling between seven and eight o'clock in the morning? I do believe, naughtiest, that thou hast been praying for the non-arrival of salt and coal--not considering that, if thy petitions are heard, the poor Measurers will not earn a sixpence. Belovedest, I know not what counsel to give thee about calling on my sisters; and therefore must leave the matter to thine own exquisite sense of what is right and delicate. We will talk it over at an early opportunity. I think I can partly understand why they appear cool towards thee; but it is for nothing in thyself personally, nor for any unkindness towards my Dove, whom everybody must feel to be the loveablest being in the world. But there are some untoward circumstances. Nevertheless, I have faith that all will be well, and that they will receive Sophie Hawthorne and the Dove into their heart of hearts; so let us wait patiently on Providence, as we always have, and see what time will bring forth. And, my dearest, whenever thou feelest disquieted about things of this sort--if ever that be the case--do thou speak freely to thy husband; for these are matters in which words may be of use, because they concern the relations between ourselves and others. Now, good bye, belovedest, till night. I perceive that the sun is shining dimly; but I fear that there is still an east wind to keep my Dove in her dove-cote. Towards night--Ownest wife, the day has been spent without much pleasure or profit--a part of the time at the Custom-House, waiting there for the chance of work,--partly at the Athenaeum, and partly at a bookstore, looking for something suitable for our library. Among other recent purchases, I have bought a very good edition of Milton (his poetry) in two octavo volumes; and I saw a huge new London volume of his prose works, but it seemed to me that there was but a small portion of it that thou and I should ever care about reading--so I left it on the shelf. Dearest, I have bought some lithographic prints at auction, which I mean to send thee, that thou mayst show them to thy husband, the next afternoon that thou permittest him to spend with thee. Thou art not to expect anything very splendid; for I did not enter the auction-room till a large part of the collection was sold; so that my choice was limited. Perhaps there are one or two not altogether unworthy to be put on the walls of our sanctuary; but this I leave to thy finer judgment. I would thou couldst peep into my room and see thine own pictures, from which I have removed the black veils; and there is no telling how much brighter and cheerfuller the parlor looks now, whenever I enter it. Belovedest, I love thee very especially much today. But then that naughty Sophie Hawthorne--it would be out of the question to treat her with tenderness. Nothing shall she get from me, at my next visit, save a kiss upon her nose; and I should not wonder it she were to return the favor with a buffet upon my ear. Mine own Dove, how unhappy art thou to be linked with such a mate!--to be bound up in the same volume with her!--and me unhappy, too, to be forced to keep such a turbulent little rebel in my inmost heart! Dost thou not think she might be persuaded to withdraw herself, quietly, and take up her residence somewhere else? Oh, what an idea! It makes my heart close its valves and embrace her the more closely. Well, dearest, it is breakfast time, and thy husband hath an appetite. What dost thou eat for breakfast?--but I know well enough that thou never eatest anything but bread and milk and chickens. Dost thou love pigeons in a pie? I am fonder of Dove than anything else--it is my heart's food and sole sustenance. God bless us. THINE OWN HUSBAND. TO MISS PEABODY _Boston_, June 11th, 1840--5 or 6 P.M. _My blessedest_, Thou hast strayed quite out of the sphere of my imagination, and I know not how to represent thy whereabout, any more than if thou hadst gone on pilgrimage beyond the sea, or to the moon. Dost thou still love me, in all thy wanderings? Are there any east-winds there? Truly, now that thou hast escaped beyond its jurisdiction, I could wish that the east wind would blow every day, from ten o'clock till five; for there is great refreshment in it for us poor mortals that toil beneath the sun. Dearest, thou must not think too unkindly even of the east-wind. It is not, perhaps, a wind to be loved, even in its benignest moods; but there are seasons when I delight to feel its breath upon my cheek, though it be never advisable to throw open my bosom and take it into my heart, as I would its gentle sisters of the South and West. To-day, if I had been on the wharves, the slight chill of an east wind would have been a blessing, like the chill of death to a world-weary man. But, dearest, thou wilt rejoice to hear that this has been one of the very idlest days that I ever spent in Boston. Oh, hadst thou been here! In the morning, soon after breakfast, I went to the Athenaeum Gallery; and during the hour or two that I stayed, not a single visitor came in. Some people were putting up paintings in one division of the room; but we might have had the other all to ourselves--thy husband had it all to himself--or rather, he did not have it, nor possess it in fulness and reality, because thou wast not there. I cannot see pictures without thee; so thou must not expect me to criticise this exhibition. There are two pictures there by our friend (thy friend--and is it not the same thing?) Sarah Clark--scenes in Kentucky. Doubtless I shall find them very admirable, when we have looked at them together. The gallery of sculpture I shall not visit, unless I can be there with thee. From the picture gallery I went to the reading-room of the Athenaeum, and there read the magazines till nearly twelve--thence to the Custom-House, and soon afterwards to dinner with Colonel Hall--then back to the Custom-House, but only for a little while. There was nothing in the world to do, and so, at two o'clock, I came home and lay down on the bed, with the Faery Queen in my hand, and my Dove in my heart. Soon a pleasant slumber came over me; it was not a deep, sound sleep, but a slumbrous withdrawing of myself from the external world. Whether thou camest to me in a dream, I cannot tell; but thou didst peep at me through all the interstices of sleep. After I awoke, I did not take up the Faery Queen again, but lay thinking of thee, and at last bestirred myself and got up to write this letter. My belovedest wife, does it not make thee happy to think that thy husband has escaped, for one whole summer day, from his burthen of salt and coal, and has been almost as idle as ever his idle nature could desire?--and this, too, on one of the longest days of all the year! Oh, could I have spent it in some shady nook, with mine own wife! Now good-bye, blessedest. So indolent is thy husband, that he intends now to relieve himself even from the sweet toil of shaping his thoughts of thee into written words; moreover, there is no present need of it, because I am not to be at the Custom-House very early, and can finish this letter tomorrow morning. Good-bye, dearest, and keep a quiet heart. June 12th. ½ past 7 A.M.--Belovedest, art thou not going to be very happy to-day? I hope so, and believe so; and, dearest, if thou findest thyself comfortable at Concord--and if the Emersonians love thee and admire thee as they ought--do not thou too stubbornly refuse to stay a week longer than the term first assigned. (Remainder of letter missing) TO MISS PEABODY _Boston_, June 22d, (Monday) ½ past 4 [1840] Ownest, Colonel Hall put thy letter into my hand at our eating-house, so that its reception was timed very like that of mine to thee; but thy husband cared not for ceremony, nor for the presence of fifty people, but straightway broke the "long-legged little fowl" asunder and began to read. Belovedest, what a letter! Never was so much beauty poured out of any heart before; and to read it over and over is like bathing my brow in a fresh fountain, and drinking draughts that renew the life within me. Nature is kind and motherly to thee, and taketh thee into her inmost heart and cherisheth thee there, because thou lookest on her with holy and loving eyes. My dearest, how canst thou say that I have ever written anything beautiful, being thyself so potent to reproduce whatever is loveliest? If I did not know that thou lovest me, I should even be ashamed before thee. Sweetest wife, it gladdens me likewise that thou meetest with such sympathy there, and that thy friends have faith that thy husband is worthy of thee, because they see that thy wise heart could not have gone astray. Worthy of thee I am not; but thou wilt make me so; for there will be time, or eternity enough, for thy blessed influence to work upon me. Would that we could build our cottage this very now, this very summer, amid the scenes which thou describest. My heart thirsts and languishes to be there, away from the hot sun and the coal-dust and the steaming docks, and the thick-pated, stubborn, contentious men, with whom I brawl from morning till night, and all the weary toil which quite engrosses me, and yet occupies only a part of my being which I did not know existed before I became a Measurer. I do think that I should sink down quite disheartened and inanimate if thou wert not happy, and gathering from earth and sky enjoyment for both of us; but this makes me feel that my real, innermost soul is apart from all these unlovely circumstances,--and that it has not ceased to exist, as I might sometimes suspect, but is nourished and kept alive through thee. Belovedest, if thou findest it good to be there, why wilt thou not stay even a little longer than this week? Thou knowest not what comfort I have in thinking of thee and those beautiful scenes; where the east wind cometh not, and amid those sympathizing hearts, which perhaps thou wilt not find elsewhere--at least not everywhere. I feel as if thou hadst found a haven of peace and rest, where I can trust thee without disquiet, and feel that thou art safe. It thou art well and happy, if thy cheek is becoming rosier, if thy step is light and joyous there, and if thy heart makes pleasant music, then is it not better for thee to stay a little longer? And if better for thee, it is so for thy husband likewise. Now, ownest wife, I do not press thee to stay, but leave it all to thy wisdom, and if thou feelest that it is now time to come home, most gladly will he welcome thee. Dearest, I meant to have written to thee yesterday afternoon, so that thou shouldst have received the letter today, but Mrs. Hillard pressed her husband and myself to take a walk into the country, because his health needed such an excursion. So, after taking a nap, we set forth over the western avenue--a dreary, treeless, fierce-sunshiny, irksome road; but after journeying three or four or five miles, we came to some of the loveliest rural scenery--yes, the very loveliest--that ever I saw in my life. The first part of our road was like the life of toil and weariness that I am now leading; the latter part was like the life that we will lead hereafter. Would that I had thy pen, and I would give thee pictures of beauty to match thine own; but I should only mar my remembrance of them by the attempt. Not a beautiful scene did I behold but I imaged thee in the midst of it--thou wast with me in all the walk, and when I sighed it was for thee, and when I smiled it was for thee, and when I trusted in future happiness, it was for thee; and if I did not doubt and fear, it was altogether because of thee. What else than happiness can God intend for thee?--and if thy happiness, then mine also. On our return, we stopped at Braman's baths, and plunged in, and washed away all stains of earth, and became new creatures. Dearest, I sympathize with thee in thy love of the bath, and conveniences for it must not be forgotten in our domestic arrangements. Yet I am not entirely satisfied with any more contracted bath than the illimitable ocean; and to plunge into it is the next thing to soaring into the sky. This morning I rose early to finish measuring a load of coal, which being accomplished in the forenoon, and there being little prospect of anything more to do, Colonel Hall, who perceived that thy husband's energies were somewhat exhausted by the heat, and by much brawling with the coal-people, did send me home immediately after dinner. So then I took a nap, with a volume of Spenser in my hand, and awaking at four, I re-re-reperused thy last letter, and sat down to pour myself out to thee, and in so doing, dearest wife, I have had great comfort. And now the afternoon is beautiful in its decline; but my feet are somewhat afflicted with yesterday's excursion; so that I am in doubt whether to go out again, although I should like a bath. Belovedest, I must not forget to thank Mr. Emerson for his invitation to Concord; but really it will not be in my power to accept it. Do thou say this in the way it ought to be said, and let him know what a business-machine thy husband is. Now, good-bye. Art thou very happy? I trust so, dearest. Thou hast our whole treasure of happiness in thy keeping. Keep it safe, ownest wife, and add to it continually. God bless thee. Miss Sophia A. Peabody, Care of Rev. R. W. Emerson, Concord, Massachusetts. (Forwarded, Salem). TO MISS PEABODY _Boston_, July 10th, 1840--Morning _Belovedest_, Doubtless thou didst expect a letter from me yesterday; but my days have been so busy, and my evenings so invaded with visitants, that I have not had a moment's time to talk with thee. Scarcely, till this morning, have I been able to read thy letter quietly. Night before last, came Mr. Jones Very; and thou knowest that he is somewhat unconscionable as to the length of his calls. Yesterday I came home early; and had the fates been propitious, thou shouldst have had a long letter; but in the afternoon came Mr. Hillard's London brother, and wasted my precious hours with a dull talk of nothing; and in the evening I was sorely tried with Mr. Conolly, and a Cambridge law-student, who came to do homage to thy husband's literary renown. So my sweetest wife was put aside for these idle people. I do wish the blockheads, and all other blockheads in this world, could comprehend how inestimable are the quiet hours of a busy man--especially when that man has no native impulse to keep him busy, but is continually forced to battle with his own nature, which yearns for seclusion (the solitude of a united two, my belovedest) and freedom to think, and dream, and feel. Well, dearest, thy husband is in perfect health this morning, and good spirits; and much doth he rejoice that thou art so soon to be near him. No tongue can tell--no pen can write what I feel. Belovedest, do not thou make thyself sick in the bustle of removing; for I think that there is nothing more trying, even to a robust frame and rugged spirit, than the disturbance of such an occasion. Now, good-bye; for I must hurry to the Custom-House to see Colonel Hall, who is going out of town for two days, and will probably leave the administration of our department in my hands. God bless thee, belovedest;--and perhaps thou wilt receive another letter before thy advent, but do not thou count upon it. Thine ownest Husband, DE L'AUBEPINE. Miss Sophia A. Peabody, Care of Dr. N. Peabody, Salem, Mass. TO MISS PEABODY 54 Pinckney St., August 9th [1840] _Ownest Dove_, I have almost forgotten how to write letters--not having put pen to paper for that purpose (or any other, indeed) since my last to thee; but I cannot help writing thee a few lines, now when I had hoped to be listening to thy sweetest voice. Art thou much changed in this intervening time? Is thy hair grown gray? Art thou an old woman? Truly, it does appear very, very long to thy husband--an incomputable period. Belovedest, I had been out this forenoon; and when I returned, there was thy letter, lying on the threshold of my chamber-door. I had a presage of calamity, as soon as I saw it. Had I known of this visit of thine aunt, I would have taken the opportunity to go to Salem, and so we would have had next Sunday to ourselves. Does thine aunt say that thou lookest in magnificent health?--and that thou art very beautiful? If she has not yet said so thou shouldst ask her opinion on that point. Belovedest, even if thine aunt Curtis should stay a week, do not thou incommode thy mother and sisters by trying to arrange a meeting. It is very painful to me to disturb and derange anybody in the world. Thou dost not say whether thou art very well to-day--and whether thou art light of heart. I beseech thee never to write me even the shortest note, without giving me a glimpse of thyself in the very moment of writing;--and yet, I leave it all to thee, and withdraw this last petition. Thou knowest best what to write; for thou art an inspired little penwoman. Thy husband is to measure salt at the end of Long Wharf tomorrow, and the next day, and probably the next, and the next. It is as desirable a place and employment as a Measurer can expect; so let thy visions of me be rather pleasurable than otherwise. I am in particularly good health; but my heart hungers for thee--nevertheless, I mean to be cheerful and content. Do thou be so likewise, little Dove--and naughty Sophie Hawthorne too. Now, good-bye. This is a very empty letter--at least, it would be so, if it had not an infinite love in it. God bless thee. Miss Sophia A. Peabody, No. 13 West street, Boston. TO MISS PEABODY 54 Pinckney St. August 24th, ¼ past 6 P.M. [1840] _Own belovedest_, I had a presentiment of a letter from thee this morning; and so was not at all surprised when I saw thy father in the long, low, darksome room where thy husband was in durance. But I had not the least anticipation of the intelligence which thou didst send me; and it is the harder to be borne, because--(do not be naughty, ownest Dove)--I have an indispensable engagement at Cambridge tomorrow afternoon and evening; whereby our meeting must be delayed yet another day. Dearest, do set me a lofty example of patience. Be very good and very quiet, and enjoy thy Aunt Curtis's society to the utmost, and press her to stay with thee till Wednesday at six o'clock. But not an hour longer! Thou must absolutely eject [her] with thine own tender little hands, if she propose to tarry that night also. Belovedest, I went to the Hurley Burley last evening; and considering that it was the first time I had been there without thee since we were married, I enjoyed it very well. We had a good deal of talk; but I missed thy gentle voice, which is surely the sweetest sound that was ever heard anywhere save in Paradise. Thy husband talked somewhat more than is his wont, but said nothing that is at all worth repeating; and I think he might as well have dispensed with saying anything. He shows his wisdom and policy much more in his general silence than in his occasional loquacity. Dearest, if I had not so high a respect for thy judgment, I should pronounce thy husband but a tolerable person, at best; but as thou hast been impelled to give thy precious self to such a man, there must be more in him than ordinary eyes can perceive. Miss Burley proposed to me to write an address of some kind for the Bunker-Hill fair; but I manifested no readiness to comply--neither do I feel any. Has my Dove contributed anything? I went home in the midst of that beautiful rain, and sat up two hours with Elizabeth and Louisa. This has not been a toilsome day, my wife. Indeed, I have had nothing to do; nor is it certain that I shall be employed tomorrow morning. Quite unexpected is this lull amid the tempest of business. I left the Custom-House at about four o'clock, and went to the bath, where I spent half an hour very deliciously. Dearest, we must have all sorts of bathing conveniences in our establishment. Thou art a water-spirit, like Undine. And thy spirit is to mine a pure fountain, in which I bathe my brow and heart; and immediately all the fever of the world departs. Thou art--but I cannot quite get hold of the idea that I meant to express; and as I want to leave a part of the page till tomorrow morning, I will stop here. God bless thee. I think I shall dream of thee to night, for I never loved thee so much. Miss Sophia A. Peabody, No. 13 West street, Boston. TO MISS PEABODY 54 Pinckney St. Sept. 18th, 1840. 8 o'clock P.M. _Sweetest Dove_, Thy father, apparently, did not see fit to carry thy letter to the Custom-House; and yet I think my intuition informed me that a letter was written; for I looked into the Desk very eagerly, although Colonel Hall neither pointed with his finger nor glanced with his eye, as is his custom when anything very precious is in store. It reached me here in mine own tabernacle, about half an hour since, while I sat resting myself from the toils of the day, thinking of thee, my Dove. Thou didst make me happier, last evening, than I ever hoped to be, save in Heaven--and still that same happiness is around me and within me. I am the happier for everything thou dost and sayest--thou canst not possibly act so that I will not love thee better and be the happier for that very individual action. Dearest, it was necessary that I should speak to thee to-night; but thou must not look for such a golden letter as thou didst write this morning; for thy husband is tolerably weary, and has very few thoughts in his mind, though much love in his heart. I cannot do without thy voice--thou knowest not what a sweet influence it has upon me, even apart from the honied wisdom which thou utterest. It thou shouldst talk in an unknown tongue, I should listen with infinite satisfaction, and be much edified in spirit at least, if not in intellect. When thou speakest to me, there is mingled with those earthly words, which are mortal inventions, a far diviner language, which thy soul utters and my soul understands. Ownest Dove, I did not choose to go to Malden this evening, to hear the political lecture which I told thee of; for, indeed, after toiling all day, it is rather too hard to be bothered with such nonsense at night. I have no desire to go anywhither, after sunset, save to see mine own wife; and as to lectures, I love none but "curtain lectures";--for such I suppose thine may be termed, although our beloved so far hath no curtains. Dearest, when we live together, thou wilt find me a most tediously stay-at-home husband. Thou wilt be compelled to rebuke and objurgate me, in order to gain the privilege of spending one or two evenings in a month by a solitary fireside. Sweetest wife, I must bid thee farewell now, exhorting thee to be as happy as the angels; for thou art as good and holy as they, and have more merit in thy goodness than they have; because the angels have always dwelt in sinless heaven; whereas thy pilgrimage has been on earth, where many sin and go astray. I am ashamed of this letter; there is nothing in it worthy of being offered to my Dove; but yet I shall send it; for a letter to one's beloved wife ought not to be kept back for any dimness of thought or feebleness of expression, any more than a prayer should be stifled in the soul, because the tongue of man cannot breathe it eloquently to the Deity. Love has its own omniscience; and what Love speaks to Love is comprehended in the same way that prayers are. Ownest, dost thou not long very earnestly to see thy husband? Well--thou shalt see him on Monday night; and this very night he will come into thy dreams, if thou wilt admit him there. Thy very lovingest, and very sleepiest, HUSBAND. Miss Sophia A. Peabody, Care of Dr. N. Peabody, Boston. TO MISS PEABODY _Salem_, Oct. 4th, 1840--½ past 10 A.M. _Mine ownest_, Here sits thy husband in his old accustomed chamber, where he used to sit in years gone by, before his soul became acquainted with thine. Here I have written many tales--many that have been burned to ashes--many that doubtless deserved the same fate. This deserves to be called a haunted chamber, for thousands upon thousands of visions have appeared to me in it; and some few of them have become visible to the world. If ever I should have a biographer, he ought to make great mention of this chamber in my memoirs, because so much of my lonely youth was wasted here, and here my mind and character were formed; and here I have been glad and hopeful, and here I have been despondent; and here I sat a long, long time, waiting patiently for the world to know me, and sometimes wondering why it did not know me sooner, or whether it would ever know me at all--at least, till I were in my grave. And sometimes (for I had no wife then to keep my heart warm) it seemed as if I were already in the grave, with only life enough to be chilled and benumbed. But oftener I was happy--at least, as happy as I then knew how to be, or was aware of the possibility of being. By and bye, the world found me out in my lonely chamber, and called me forth--not, indeed, with a loud roar of acclamation, but rather with a still, small voice; and forth I went, but found nothing in the world that I thought preferable to my old solitude, till at length a certain Dove was revealed to me, in the shadow of a seclusion as deep as my own had been. And I drew nearer and nearer to the Dove, and opened my bosom to her, and she flitted into it, and closed her wings there--and there she nestles now and forever, keeping my heart warm, and renewing my life with her own. So now I begin to understand why I was imprisoned so many years in this lonely chamber, and why I could never break through the viewless bolts and bars; for if I had sooner made my escape into the world, I should have grown hard and rough, and been covered with earthly dust, and my heart would have become callous by rude encounters with the multitude; so that I should have been all unfit to shelter a heavenly Dove in my arms. But living in solitude till the fulness of time was come, I still kept the dew of my youth and the freshness of my heart, and had these to offer to my Dove. Well, dearest, I had no notion what I was going to write, when I began, and indeed I doubted whether I should write anything at all; for after such communion as that of our last blissful evening, it seems as if a sheet of paper could only be a veil betwixt us. Ownest, in the times that I have been speaking of, I used to think that I could imagine all passions, all feelings, all states of the heart and mind; but how little did I know what it is to be mingled with another's being! Thou only hast taught me that I have a heart--thou only hast thrown a light deep downward, and upward, into my soul. Thou only hast revealed me to myself; for without thy aid, my best knowledge of myself would have been merely to know my own shadow--to watch it flickering on the wall, and mistake its fantasies for my own real actions. Indeed, we are but shadows--we are not endowed with real life, and all that seems most real about us is but the thinnest substance of a dream--till the heart is touched. That touch creates us--then we begin to be--thereby we are beings of reality, and inheritors of eternity. Now, dearest, dost thou comprehend what thou hast done for me? And is it not a somewhat fearful thought, that a few slight circumstances might have prevented us from meeting, and then I should have returned to my solitude, sooner or later (probably now, when I have thrown down my burthen of coal and salt) and never should [have] been created at all! But this is an idle speculation. If the whole world had stood between us, we must have met--if we had been born in different ages, we could not have been sundered. Belovedest, how dost thou do? If I mistake not, it was a southern rain yesterday, and, next to the sunshine of Paradise, _that_ seems to be thy element. Miss Sophia A. Peabody, Care of Dr. N. Peabody, Boston, Mass. TO MISS PEABODY _Salem_, Novr. 27th, Friday [1840] _Dearest Wife_, Never was a wife so yearned for as thou art. I wonder how I could have resolved to be absent from thee so long--it is far too long a time to be wasted in a suspension of life. My heart is sometimes faint for want of thee--and sometimes it is violent and tumultuous for the same cause. How is it with thine, mine ownest? Dost thou not feel, when thou goest to bed, that the day is utterly incomplete?--that it has been an unsatisfactory dream, wherein the soul groped wearily for something that it could not obtain? Thus it is with thy husband. What a history wilt thou have to tell me, when I come back! We shall be a week in getting through it. Poor little Dove, I pity thee now: for I apprehend that, by this time, thou hast got thy husband's dullest of all books to read. And how many pages canst thou read, without falling asleep? Well is it for thee, that thou hast adopted the practice of extending thyself on the sopha, while at thy studies; for now I need be under no apprehension of thy sinking out of a chair. I would, for thy sake, that thou couldst find anything laudable in this awful little volume; because thou wouldst like to tell thy husband that he has done well. Oh, this weather!--how dismal it is. A sullen sky above, and mud and "slosh" below! Thy husband needs thy sunshine, thou cheerfullest little wife; for he is quite pervaded and imbued with the sullenness of all nature. Thou knowest that his disposition is never the most gracious in the world; but now he is absolutely intolerable. The days should be all sunshine when he is away from thee; because, if there were twenty suns in the unclouded sky, yet his most essential sunshine would be wanting. Well, there is one good in absence; it makes me realise more adequately how much I love thee--and what an infinite portion of me thou art. It makes me happy even to yearn and sigh for thee as I do; because I love to be conscious of our deep, indissoluble union--and of the impossibility of living without thee. There is something good in me, else thou couldst not have become one with me, thou holy wife. I shall be happy, because God has made my happiness necessary to that of one whom He loves. Thus is it that I reason with myself; and therefore my soul rejoices to feel the intermingling of our beings, even when it is felt in this longing desire for thee. Dearest, amongst my other reasons for wishing to be in Boston, wouldst thou believe that I am eager to behold thy alabaster vase--and the little flower-vase, and thy two precious pictures? Even so it is. Thou, who art the loadstone of my soul, hast magnetised them, therefore they attract me. I met Frederic Howes last evening, and promised to go there to-night; although he seemed to think that Miss Burley will be in Boston. Perhaps thou wilt see her there. I wonder if she will not come and settle with us in Mr. Ripley's Utopia. And this reminds me to ask whether thou hast drawn those caricatures--especially the one of thy husband, staggering, and puffing, and toiling onward to the gate of the farm, burthened with the unsaleable remnant of Grandfather's Chair. Dear me, what a ponderous, leaden load it will be! Dearest, I am utterly ashamed of my handwriting. I wonder how thou canst anywise tolerate what is so ungraceful, being thyself all grace. But I think I seldom write so shamefully as in this epistle. It is a toil and torment to write upon this sheet of paper; for it seems to be greasy, and feels very unpleasantly to the pen. Moreover the pen itself is very culpable. Yet thou wouldst make the fairest, delicatest strokes upon the same paper, with the same pen. Thou art beautiful throughout, even to the minutest thing. Miss Sophia A. Peabody, Care of Dr. N. Peabody, Boston, Mass. TO MISS PEABODY _Salem_, Jany. 12th, 1841 Infinitely dearest, I went to the post office yesterday, after dinner, and inquiring for a letter, thy "visible silence" was put into my hands. Canst thou remotely imagine how glad I was? Hast thou also been gladdened by an uncouth scribbling, which thy husband dispatched to thee on Monday? Oh, belovedest, no words can tell how thirsty my spirit is for thine! Surely I was very reprehensible to conceive the idea of spending a whole week and more away from thee. Why didst thou not scold me? and go with me wherever I went? Without thee, I have but the semblance of life. All the world hereabouts seems dull and drowsy--a vision, but without any spirituality--and I, likewise an unspiritual shadow, struggle vainly to catch hold of something real. Thou art my reality; and nothing else is real for me, unless thou give it that golden quality by thy touch. Dearest, how camest thou by the headache? Thou shouldst have dreamed of thy husband's breast, instead of that Arabian execution; and then thou wouldst have awaked with a very delicious thrill in thy heart, and no pain in thy head. And what wilt thou do to-day, persecuted little Dove, when thy abiding-place will be a Babel of talkers? Would that Miss Margaret Fuller might lose her tongue!--or my Dove her ears, and so be left wholly to her husband's golden silence! Dearest wife, I truly think that we could dispense with audible speech, and yet never feel the want of an interpreter between our spirits. We have soared into a region where we talk together in a language that can have no earthly echo. Articulate words are a harsh clamor and dissonance. When man arrives at his highest perfection, he will again be dumb!--for I suppose he was dumb at the Creation, and must perform an entire circle in order to return to that blessed state. Cousin Christopher, by thy account, seems to be of the same opinion, and is gradually learning to talk without the use of his voice. Jany. 15th. Friday.--Oh, belovedest, what a weary week is this! Never did I experience the like. I went to bed last night, positively dismal and comfortless. Wilt thou know thy husband's face, when we meet again? Art thou much changed by the flight of years, my poor little wife? Is thy hair turned gray? Dost thou wear a day-cap, as well as a night cap? How long since didst thou begin to use spectacles? Perhaps thou wilt not like to have me see thee, now that Time has done his worst to mar thy beauty; but fear thou not, sweetest Dove, for what I have loved and admired in thee is eternal. I shall look through the envious mist of age, and discern thy immortal grace as perfectly as in the light of Paradise. As for thy husband, he is grown quite bald and gray, and has very deep wrinkles across his brow, and crowsfeet and furrows all over his face. His eyesight fails him, so that he can only read the largest print in the broadest day-light; but it is a singular circumstance, that he makes out to decypher the pygmy characters of thy epistles, even by the faintest twilight. The secret is, that they are characters of light to him, so that he could doubtless read them in midnight darkness. Art thou not glad, belovedest, that thou wast ordained to be a heavenly light to thy husband, amid the dreary twilight of age? Grandfather is very anxious to know what has become of his chair, and the Famous Old People who sat in it. I tell him that it will probably arrive in the course of to-day; and that he need not be so impatient; for the public will be very well content to wait, even were it till Doomsday. He acquiesces, but scolds, nevertheless. I saw thy cousin Mary Tappan yesterday, and felt the better for it, because she is connected with thee in my mind. Dearest, I love thee very much!!!! Art thou not astonished? I wish to ask thee a question, but will reserve it for the extreme end of this letter. I trust that thou art quite well, belovedest. That headache took a very unfair advantage, in attacking thee while thou wast away from thy husband. It is his province to guard thee both from head-ache and heart-ache; and thou performest the same blessed office for him, so far as regards the heart-ache--as to the head-ache, he knows it not, probably because his head is like a block of wood. Now good-bye, dearest, sweetest, loveliest, holiest, truest, suitablest little wife. I worship thee. Thou art my type of womanly perfection. Thou keepest my heart pure, and elevatest me above the world. Thou enablest me to interpret the riddle of life, and fillest me with faith in the unseen and better land, because thou leadest me thither continually. God bless thee forever. Dost thou love me? Miss Sophia A. Peabody, Care of Dr. N. Peabody, Boston, Mass. TO MISS PEABODY _Salem_, Jany. 27th, 1841--½ past 2 P.M. Very dearest, what a dismal sky is this that hangs over us! Thy husband doth but half live to-day--his soul lies asleep, or rather torpid. As for thee, thou hast been prating at a great rate, and has spoken many wonderful truths in to-day's conversation. Belovedest, thou wast very sweet and lovely in our walk yesterday morning; and it gladdens me much that Providence brought us together. Dost thou not think that there is always some especial blessing granted us, when we are to be divided for any length of time? Thou rememberest what a blissful evening came down from Heaven to us, before our last separation; insomuch that our hearts glowed with its influence, all through the ensuing week. And yesterday there came a heavenly morning, and thou camest with it like a rosy vision, which still lingers with me, and will not quite fade away, till it be time for it to brighten into reality. Surely, thou art beloved of Heaven, and all these blessings are vouchsafed for thy sake; for I do not remember that such things used to happen to me, while I was a solitary sinner. Thou bringest a rich portion to thy husband, dearest--even the blessing of thy Heavenly Father. Whenever I return to Salem, I feel how dark my life would be, without the light that thou shedst upon it--how cold, without the warmth of thy love. Sitting in this chamber, where my youth wasted itself in vain, I can partly estimate the change that has been wrought. It seems as it the better part of me had been born, since then. I had walked those many years in darkness, and might so have walked through life, with only a dreamy notion that there was any light in the universe, if thou hadst not kissed mine eye-lids, and given me to see. Thou, belovedest, hast always been positively happy. Not so thy husband--he has only been not miserable. Then which of us has gained the most? Thy husband, assuredly. When a beam of heavenly sunshine incorporates itself with a dark cloud, is not the cloud benefitted more than the sunshine? What a happy image is this!--my soul is the cloud, and thine the sunshine--but a gentler, sweeter sunshine than ever melted into any other cloud. Dearest wife, nothing at all has happened to me, since I left thee. It puzzles me to conceive how thou meetest with so many more events than thy husband. Thou wilt have a volume to tell me, when we meet, and wilt pour thy beloved voice into mine ears, in a stream of two hours' long. At length thou wilt pause, and say--"But what has _thy_ life been?"--and then will thy stupid husband look back upon what he calls his life, for three or four days past, and behold a blank! Thou livest ten times as much [as] he; because thy spirit takes so much more note of things. I met our friend Mr. Howes in the street, yesterday, and held a brief confabulation. He did not inquire how my wife's health is. Was not this a sin against etiquette? Dearest, thy husband's stupid book seems to meet more approbation here, than the former volume did--though _that_ was greeted more favorably than it deserved. There is a superfluity of newspaper puffs here, and a deficiency in Boston, where they are much needed. I ought to love Salem better than I do; for the people have always had a pretty generous faith in me, ever since they knew me at all. I fear I must be undeserving of their praise, else I should never get it. What an ungrateful blockhead thy husband is! Miss Sophia A. Peabody, Care of Dr. N. Peabody, Boston, Mass. TO MISS PEABODY 54 Pinckney St., 12 o'clock A.M. Monday [1841] _Truest Heart_, I cannot come to thee this evening, because my friend Bridge is in town, whom I hardly have seen for years past. Alas! I know not whether I am a very faithful friend to him; for I cannot rejoice that he is here, since it will keep me from my Dove. Thou art my only reality--all other people are but shadows to me: all events and actions, in which thou dost not mingle, are but dreams. Do thou be good, dearest love, and when I come, tomorrow night, let me find thee magnificent. Thou didst make me very happy, yesterday forenoon--thou wast a south-west wind--or the sweetest and wholesomest wind that blows, whichever it may be. I love thee more than I can estimate; and last night I dreamed of thee. I know not exactly what; but we were happy. God bless thee. Thine ownest husband, THEODORE DE L'AUBEPINE. A Madame, Madame Sophie Amelie de L'Aubepine, Rue d'Ouest, a Boston. Miss Sophia A. Peabody, West-street, Boston. TO MISS PEABODY 54 Pinckney St., March 12th,--Sunday [1841] _My Life_, I have come back to thee! Thy heart gives thee no warning of my presence; yet I am here--embracing thee with all the might of my soul. Ah, forgetful Dove! How is it that thou hast had no spiritual intelligence of my advent? I am sure that if yearnings and strivings could have brought my spirit into communion with thine, thou wouldst have felt me within thy bosom. Thou truest-Heart, thou art conscious of me, as much as a heavenly spirit can be, though the veil of mortality. Thou has not forgotten me for a moment. I have felt thee drawing me towards thee, when I was hundreds of miles away. The farther I went, the more was I conscious of both our loves. I cannot write how much I love thee, and what deepest trust I have in thee. Dearest, expect me at six o'clock this afternoon. I have not the watch, as thou knowest, and so it may be a few moments before or after six. Oh, I need thee this very, very moment--my heart throbs, and so does my hand, as thou mayst see by this scribble. God bless thee! I am very well. THINE OWNEST HUSBAND. Miss Sophia A. Peabody, 13 West-street, Boston. TO MISS PEABODY _Salem_, March 18th, 1841 Dearest wife, here is thy poor husband, enduring his banishment as best he may. Methinks all enormous sinners should be sent on pilgrimage to Salem, and compelled to spend a length of time there, proportioned to the enormity of their offenses. Such a punishment would be suited to sinners that do not quite deserve hanging, yet are too aggravated for the States-Prison. Oh, thy naughty husband! If it be a punishment, he well deserves to suffer a life-long infliction of it, were it only for slandering his native town so vilely. Thou must scold him well. But, belovedest, any place is strange and irksome to me, where thou art not; and where thou art, any place will be home. Here I have made a great blot, as thou seest; but, sweetest, there is, at this moment, a portrait of myself in the mirror of that inkspot. Is not that queer to think of? When it reaches thee, it will be nothing but a dull black spot; but now, when I bend over it, there I see myself, as at the bottom of a pool. Thou must not kiss the blot, for the sake of the image which it now reflects; though, if thou shouldst, it will be a talisman to call me back thither again. Thy husband writes thee nonsense, as his custom is. I wonder how thou managest to retain any respect for him. Trust me, he is not worthy of thee--not worthy to kiss the sole of thy shoe. For the future, thou perfectest Dove, let thy greatest condescension towards him, be merely an extension of the tip of thy forefinger, or of thy delicate little foot in its stocking. Nor let him dare to touch it without kneeling--which he will be very ready to do, because he devoutly worships thee; which is the only thing that can be said in his favor. But, think of his arrogance! At this very moment.-- March 19th. Forenoon.--Dearest soul, thou hast irrecoverably lost the conclusion of this sentence; for I was interrupted by a visitor, and have now forgotten what I meant to say. No matter; thou wilt not care for the loss; for, now I think of it, if does not please thee to hear thy husband spoken slightingly of. Well, then thou shouldst not have married such a vulnerable person. But, to thy comfort be it said, some people have a much more exalted opinion of him than I have. The Rev. Mr. Gannet delivered a lecture at the Lyceum here, the other evening, in which he introduced an enormous eulogium on whom dost thou think? Why, on thy respectable husband! Thereupon all the audience gave a loud hiss. Now is my mild little Dove exceedingly enraged, and will plot some mischief and all-involving calamity against the Salem people. Well, belovedest, they did not actually hiss at the praises bestowed on thy husband--the more fools they! Ownest wife, what dost thou think I received, just before I re-commenced this scribble? Thy letter! Dearest, I felt as thou didst about our meeting, at Mrs. Hillard's. It is an inexpressible torment. Thy letter is very sweet and beautiful--an expression of thyself. But I do trust thou hast given Mr. Ripley a downright scolding for doubting either my will or ability to work. He ought to be ashamed of himself, to try to take away the good name of a laboring man, who must earn his bread (and thy bread too) by the sweat of his brow. Sweetest, I have some business up in town; and so must close this letter--which has been written in a great hurry, and is not fit to be sent thee. Say what thou wilt, thy husband is not a good letter-writer; he never writes, unless compelled by an internal or external necessity; and most glad would he be to think that there would never, henceforth, be occasion for his addressing a letter to thee. For would not that imply that thou wouldst always hereafter be close to his bosom? Dearest love, expect me Monday evening. Didst thou expect me sooner? It may not be; but if longing desires could bear me to thee, thou wouldst straightway behold my shape in the great easy chair. God bless thee, thou sinless Eve--thou dearest, sweetest, purest, perfectest wife. THINE OWNEST. Miss Sophia A. Peabody, Care of Dr. N. Peabody, Boston, Mass. TO MISS PEABODY Pinckney St., April 4th, [1841] _Very dearest-est_, I have hitherto delayed to send these stories, because Howes' Masquerade was destroyed by the printers: and I have been in hopes to procure it elsewhere. But my own copy of the Magazine, in Salem, is likewise lost; so that I must buy the Boston Book and request Mary's acceptance of it. Belovedest, how dost thou do this morning? I am very well; and surely Heaven is one with earth, this beautiful day. I met Miss Burley in the street, yesterday, and her face seemed actually to beam and radiate with kindness and goodness; insomuch that my own face involuntarily brightens, whenever I think of her. I thought she looked really beautiful. Oh, dearest, how I wish to see thee! I would thou hadst my miniature to wear in thy bosom; and then I should feel sure that now and then thou wouldst think of me--of which now, thou art aware, there can be no certainty. Sweetest, I feel that I shall need great comfort from thee, when the time of my journey to the far wilderness actually comes. But we will be hopeful--thou shalt fill thy husband with thy hopefulness, and so his toil shall seem light, and he shall sing (though I fear it would be a most unlovely sort of screech) as he drives the plough. Now, belovedest, good-bye. My visit to Salem will be so brief, that a letter would hardly reach thee, before I myself shall return; so it will not be best for me to write. God bless thee and keep thee; which he will do without my prayers, because the good and pure, of which class my Dove is the best and purest, always dwell within the walls of Heaven. I am in great haste, most beloved; so, embracing thee, I remain thy lovingest husband, NATH. HAWTHORNE. Miss Sophia A. Peabody, 13 West street, Boston. * * * * * Transcriber's note: Inconsistent hyphenation and spelling in the original document have been preserved. Obvious typographical errors have been corrected. On page 28, the parenthetical expression starting "(Here I was interrupted," has no end parenthesis. On page 163, the comma after "somewhat less heavily" is possibly unnecessary. 
12563	----	Proofreading Team. CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN NOVELISTS 1900-1920 BY CARL VAN DOREN 1922 To FREDA KIRCHWEY PREFACE _The American Novel_, published last year, undertook to trace the progress of a literary type in the United States from its beginnings to the end of the nineteenth century; _Contemporary American Novelists_ undertakes to study the type as it has existed during the first two decades of the twentieth century. Readers of both volumes may note that in this later volume criticism has tended to supplant history. Only in writing of dead authors can the critic feel that any considerable portion of his task is done when he has arranged them in what he thinks their proper categories and their true perspective. In the case of living authors he has regularly to remember that he works with shifting materials, with figures whose dimensions and importance may be changed by growth, with persons who may desert old paths for new, reveal unsuspected attributes, increase or fade with the mere revolutions of time. All he can expect to do in dealing with any current type as fluid as the novel, is, seizing upon it at some specific moment, to examine the intentions and successes of outstanding or typical individuals and to make the most accurate report possible concerning them. Whatever general tendency there may be ought to appear from his examination. The general tendency appearing most clearly among the novelists here studied is, of course, the drift of naturalism: initiated a full generation ago by several restless spirits, of whom E.W. Howe and Hamlin Garland are the most conspicuous survivors; continued by those young geniuses Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Jack London, all dead before their time, and by Theodore Dreiser, Robert Herrick, Upton Sinclair, happily still alive; given a fresh impulse during the shaken years of the war and of the recovery from war by such satirists as Edgar Lee Masters and Sinclair Lewis and their companions in the new revolt. The intelligent American fiction of the century has to be studied--so far as the novel is concerned--largely in terms of its agreement or its disagreement with this naturalistic tendency, which has been powerful enough to draw Winston Churchill and Booth Tarkington into an approach to its practices, to drive James Branch Cabell and Joseph Hergesheimer into explicit dissent, and to throw into strong relief the balanced independence of Edith Wharton and Willa Cather. The year 1920, marking a peak in the triumph of one or two species of naturalism and in some ways closing a chapter, affords an admirable occasion to take stock. This book, indeed, was planned and begun at the close of that year and has firmly resisted the temptation to do more than glance at most of the work produced since then--even at the price of giving what must seem insufficient notice to _The Triumph of the Egg_ and _Three Soldiers_ and of giving none at all to that still more recent masterpiece _Cytherea_. While criticism pauses to take stock, creation steadily goes on. Acknowledgments are due _The Nation_ for permission to reprint from its pages those portions of the volume which have already been published there. CARL VAN DOREN. March, 1922. CONTENTS I OLD STYLE 1. Local Color 2. Romance II ARGUMENT 1. Hamlin Garland 2. Winston Churchill 3. Robert Herrick 4. Upton Sinclair 5. Theodore Dreiser III ART 1. Booth Tarkington 2. Edith Wharton 3. James Branch Cabell 4. Willa Cather 5. Joseph Hergesheimer IV NEW STYLE 1. Emergent Types _Ellen Glasgow, William Allen White, Ernest Poole, Henry B. Fuller, Mary Austin, Immigrants._ 2. The Revolt from the Village _Edgar Lee Masters, Sherwood Anderson, E.W. Howe, Sinclair Lewis, Zona Gale, Floyd Dell, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dorothy Canfield, 1921._ CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN NOVELISTS CHAPTER I OLD STYLE 1. LOCAL COLOR A study of the American novel of the twentieth century must first of all take stock of certain types of fiction which continue to persist, with varying degrees of vitality and significance, from the last quarter of the century preceding. There is, to begin with, the type associated with the now moribund cult of local color, which originally had Bret Harte for its prophet, and which, beginning almost at once after the Civil War, gradually broadened out until it saw priests in every state and followers in every county. Obedient to the example of the prophet, most of the practitioners of the mode chose to be episodic rather than epic in their undertakings; the history of local color belongs primarily to the historian of the short story. Even when the local colorists essayed the novel they commonly did little more than to expand some episode into elaborate dimensions or to string beads of episode upon an obvious thread. Hardly one of them ever made any real advance, either in art or reputation, upon his earliest important volume: George Washington Cable, after more than forty years, is still on the whole best represented by his _Old Creole Days_; and so--to name only the chief among the survivors--after intervals not greatly shorter are Mary N. Murfree ("Charles Egbert Craddock") by _In the Tennessee Mountains_, Thomas Nelson Page by _In Ole Virginia_, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman by _A Humble Romance and Other Stories_, James Lane Allen by _Flute and Violin_, and Alice Brown by _Meadow-Grass_. The eager popular demand for these brevities does not entirely account for the failure of the type to go beyond its first experimental stage. The defects of local color inhere in the constitution of the cult itself, which, as its name suggests, thought first of color and then of form, first of the piquant surfaces and then--if at all--of the stubborn deeps of human life. In a sense, the local colorists were all pioneers: they explored the older communities as solicitously as they did the new, but they most of them came earliest in some field or other and found--or thought--it necessary to clear the top of the soil before they sank shaft or spade into it. Moreover, they accepted almost without challenge the current inhibitions of gentility, reticence, cheerfulness. They confined themselves to the emotions and the ideas and the language, for the most part, of the respectable; they disregarded the stormier or stealthier behavior of mankind or veiled it with discreet periphrasis; they sweetened their narratives wherever possible with a brimming optimism nicely tinctured with amiable sentiments. Poetic justice prospered and happy endings were orthodox. To a remarkable extent the local colorists passed by the immediate problems of Americans--social, theological, political, economic; nor did they frequently rise above the local to the universal. They were, in short, ordinarily provincial, without, however, the rude durability or the homely truthfulness of provincialism at its best. To reflect upon the achievements of this dwindling cult is to discover that it invented few memorable plots, devised almost no new styles, created little that was genuinely original in its modes of truth or beauty, and even added but the scantiest handful of characters to the great gallery of the imagination. What local color did was to fit obliging fiction to resisting fact in so many native regions that the entire country came in some degree to see itself through literary eyes and therefore in some degree to feel civilized by the sight. This is, indeed, one of the important processes of civilization. But in this case it was limited in its influence by the habits of vision which the local colorists had. They scrutinized their world at the instigation of benevolence rather than at that of intelligence; they felt it with friendship rather than with passion. And because of their limitations of intelligence and passion they fell naturally into routine ways and both saw and represented in accordance with this or that prevailing formula. Herein they were powerfully confirmed by the pressure of editors and a public who wanted each writer to continue in the channel of his happiest success and not to disappoint them by new departures. Not only did this result in confining individuals to a single channel each but it resulted in the convergence of all of them into a few broad and shallow streams. An excellent example may be found in the flourishing cycle of stories which, while Bret Harte was celebrating California, grew up about the life of Southern plantations before the war. The mood of most of these was of course elegiac and the motive was to show how much splendor had perished in the downfall of the old régime. Over and over they repeated the same themes: how an irascible planter refuses to allow his daughter to marry the youth of her choice and how true love finds a way; how a beguiling Southern maiden has to choose between lovers and gives her hand and heart to him who is stoutest in his adherence to the Confederacy; how, now and then, love crosses the lines and a Confederate girl magnanimously, though only after a desperate struggle with herself, marries a Union officer who has saved the old plantation from a marauding band of Union soldiers; how a pair of ancient slaves cling to their duty during the appalling years and will not presume upon their freedom even when it comes; how the gentry, though menaced by a riffraff of poor whites, nevertheless hold their heads high and shine brightly through the gloom; how some former planter and everlasting colonel declines to be reconstructed by events and passes the remainder of his years as a courageous, bibulous, orgulous simulacrum of his once thriving self. Mr. Page's _In Ole Virginia_ and F. Hopkinson Smith's _Colonel Carter of Cartersville_ in a brief compass employ all these themes; and dozens of books which might be named play variations upon them without really enlarging or correcting them. All of them were kindly, humorous, sentimental, charming; almost all of them are steadily fading out like family photographs. The South, however, did not restrict itself wholly to its plantation cycle. In New Orleans Mr. Cable daintily worked the lode which had been deposited there by a French and Spanish past and by the presence still of Creole elements in the population. Yet he too was elegiac, sentimental, pretty, even when his style was most deft and his representations most engaging. Quaintness was his second nature; romance was in his blood. Bras-Coupé, the great, proud, rebellious slave in _The Grandissimes_, belongs to the ancient lineage of those African princes who in many tales have been sold to chain and lash and have escaped from them by dying. The postures and graces and contrivances of Mr. Cable's Creoles are traditional to all the little aristocracies surviving, in fiction, from some more substantial day. Yet in spite of these conventions his better novels have a texture of genuine vividness and beauty. In their portrayal of the manners of New Orleans they have many points of quiet satire and censure that betray a critical intelligence working seriously behind them. That critical disposition in Mr. Cable led him to disagree with the majority of Southerners regarding the justice due the Negroes; and it helped persuade him to spend the remainder of his life in a distant region. The incident is symptomatic. While slavery still existed, public opinion in the South had demanded that literature should exhibit the institution only under a rosy light; public opinion now demanded that the problem in its new guise should still be glossed over in the old way. In neither era, consequently, could an honest novelist freely follow his observations upon Southern life in general. The mind of the herd bore down upon him and crushed him into the accepted molds. It seems a curious irony that the Negroes who thus innocently limited the literature of their section should have been the subjects of a little body of narrative which bids fair to outlast all that local color hit upon in the South. Joel Chandler Harris is not, strictly speaking, a contemporary, but Uncle Remus is contemporary and perennial. His stories are grounded in the universal traits of simple souls; they are also the whimsical, incidental mirror of a particular race during a significant--though now extinct--phase of its career. They are at once as ancient and as fresh as folk-lore. Besides the rich planters and their slaves one other class of human beings in the South especially attracted the attention of the local colorists--the mountaineers. Certain distant cousins of this backwoods stock had come into literature as "Pikes" or poor whites in the Far West with Bret Harte and in the Middle West with John Hay and Edward Eggleston; it remained for Charles Egbert Craddock in Tennessee and John Fox in Kentucky to discover the heroic and sentimental qualities of the breed among its highland fastnesses of the Great Smoky and Cumberland Mountains. Here again formulas sprang up and so stifled the free growth of observation that, though a multitude of stories has been written about the mountains, almost all of them may be resolved into themes as few in number as those which succeeded nearer Tidewater: how a stranger man comes into the mountains, loves the flower of all the native maidens, and clashes with the suspicions or jealousies of her neighborhood; how two clans have been worn away by a long vendetta until only one representative of each clan remains and the two forgive and forget among the ruins; how a band of highlanders defend themselves against the invading minions of a law made for the nation at large but hardly applicable to highland circumstances; how the mountain virtues in some way or other prove superior to the softer virtues--almost vices by comparison--of the world of plains and cities. These formulas, however, resulted from another cause than the popular complacency which hated to be disturbed in Virginia and Louisiana. The mountain people, inarticulate themselves, have uniformly been seen from the outside and therefore have been studied in their surface peculiarities more often than in their deeper traits of character. And, having once entered the realm of legend, they continue to be known by the half-dozen distinguishing features which in legend are always enough for any type. In the North and West, of course, much the same process went on as in the South among the local colorists, conditioned by the same demands and pressures. Because the territory was wider, however, in the expanding sections, the types of character there were somewhat less likely to be confined to one locality than in the section which for a time had a ring drawn round it by its past and by the difficulty of emerging from it; and because the career of North and West was not definitely interrupted by the war, the types of fiction there have persisted longer than in the South, where a new order of life, after a generation of clinging memories, has moved toward popular heroes of a new variety. The cowboy, for instance, legitimate successor to the miners and gamblers of Bret Harte, might derive from almost any one of the states and might range over prodigious areas; it is partly accident, of course, that he stands out so sharply among the numerous conditions of men produced by the new frontier. Except on very few occasions, as in Alfred Henry Lewis's racy Wolfville stories and in Frederick Remington's vivid pictures, in Andy Adams's more minute chronicle _The Log of a Cowboy_, in Owen Wister's more sentimental _The Virginian_, and in O. Henry's more diversified _Heart of the West_ and its fellows among his books, the cowboy has regularly moved on the plane of the sub-literary--in dime novels and, latterly, in moving pictures. He, like the mountaineer of the South, has himself been largely inarticulate except for his rude songs and ballads; formula and tradition caught him early and in fiction stiffened one of the most picturesque of human beings--a modern Centaur, an American Cossack, a Western picaro--into a stock figure who in a stock costume perpetually sits a bucking broncho, brandishes a six-shooter or swings a lariat, rounds up stampeding cattle, makes fierce war on Mexicans, Indians, and rival outfits, and ardently, humbly woos the ranchman's gentle daughter or the timorous school-ma'am. He still has no Homer, no Gogol, no Fenimore Cooper even, though he invites a master of some sort to take advantage of a thrilling opportunity. The same fate of formula and tradition befell another type multiplied by the local novelists--the bad boy. His career may be said to have begun in New England, with Thomas Bailey Aldrich's reaction from the priggish manikins who infested the older "juveniles"; but Mark Twain took him up with such mastery that his subsequent habitat has usually been the Middle West, where a recognized lineage connects Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn with Mitch Miller and Penrod Schofield and their fellow-conspirators against the peace of villages. The bad boy, it must be noticed, is never really bad; he is simply mischievous. He serves as a natural outlet for the imagination of communities which are respectable but which lack reverence for solemn dignity. He can play the wildest pranks and still be innocent; he can have his adolescent fling and then settle down into a prudent maturity. Both the influence of Mark Twain and the local color tendency toward uniformity in type have held the bad boy to a path which, in view of his character, seems singularly narrow. In book after book he indulges in the same practical jokes upon parents, teachers, and all those in authority; brags, fibs, fights, plays truant, learns to swear and smoke, with the same devices and consequences; suffers from the same agonies of shyness, the same indifference to the female sex, the same awkward inclination toward particular little girls. For the most part, thanks to the formulas, he has been examined from the angle of adult irritation or amusement; only very recently--as by Edgar Lee Masters and Sherwood Anderson--has he been credited with a life and passions more or less his own and therefore as fully rounded as his stage of development permits. The American business man, with millions of imaginations daily turned upon him, rarely appears in that fiction which sprang from local color except as the canny trader of some small town or as the ruthless magnate of some glittering metropolis. _David Harum_ remains his rural avatar and _The Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son_ his most popular commentary. Doubtless the existence of this type in every community tends to warn off the searchers after local figures, who have preferred, in their fashion, to be monopolists when they could. Doubtless, also, the American business man has suffered from the critical light in which he has been studied by the reflective novelists. But though the higher grades of literature have refused to pay unstinted tribute and honor to men of wealth, the lower grades have paid almost as lavishly as life itself. Multitudes of poor boys in popular fiction rise to affluence by the practice of the commercial virtues. To be self-made, the axiom tacitly runs, is to be well-made. Time was in the United States when the true hero had to start his career, unaided, from some lonely farm, from some widow's cottage, or from some city slum; and although, with the growth of luxury in the nation, readers have come to approve the heir who puts on overalls and works up in a few months from the bottom of the factory to the top, the standards of success are practically the same in all instances: sleepless industry, restless scheming, resistless will, coupled with a changeless probity in the domestic excellences. Nothing is more curious about the American business man of fiction than the sentimentality he displays in all matters of the heart. He may hold as robustly as he likes to the doctrine that business is business and that business and sympathy will not mix, but when put to the test he must always soften under the pleadings of distress and be malleable to the desires of mother, sweetheart, wife, or daughter. Even when a popular novelist sets out to be reflective--say, for example, Winston Churchill--he takes his hero up to the mountain of success and then conducts him down again to the valley of humiliation, made conscious that the love, after all, either of his family or of his society, is better than lucre. Theodore Dreiser's stubborn habit of presenting his rich men's will to power without abatement or apology has helped to keep him steadily suspected. The popular romancers have contrived to mingle passion for money and susceptibility to moralism somewhat upon the analogy of those lucky thaumaturgists who are able to eat their cake and have it too. A similar mixture occurs in the politician of popular tradition. He hardly ever rises to the dimensions of statesmanship, and indeed rarely belongs to the Federal government at all: Washington has always been singularly neglected by the novelists. The American politician of fiction is essentially a local personage, the boss of ward or village. Customarily he holds no office himself but instead sits in some dusty den and dispenses injustice with an even hand. Candidates fear his influence and either truckle to him or advance against him with the weapons of reform--failing, as a rule, to accomplish anything. Aldermen and legislators are his creatures. His web is out in all directions: he holds this man's mortgage, knows that man's guilty secret, discovers the other's weakness and takes advantage of it. He is cynically illiterate and contemptuous of the respectable classes. If need be he can resort to outrageous violence to gain his ends. And yet, though the reflective novelists have all condemned him for half a century, he sits fast in ordinary fiction, where he is tolerated with the amused fatalism which in actual American life has allowed his lease to run so long. What justifies him is his success--his countrymen love success for its own sake--and his kind heart. Like Robin Hood he levies upon the plethoric rich for the deserving poor; and he yields to the tender entreaties of the widow and the orphan with amiable gestures. The women characters evolved by the school of local color endure a serious restriction from the excessive interest taken by the novelists in the American young girl. Not only has she as a possible reader established the boundaries beyond which they might not go in speaking of sexual affairs but she has dominated the scene of their inventions with her glittering energy and her healthy bloodlessness. Some differences appear among the sections of the country as to what special phases of her character shall be here or there preferred: she is ordinarily most capricious in the Southern, most strenuous in the Western, most knowing in the New York, and most demure in the New England novels. Yet everywhere she considerably resembles a bright, cool, graceful boy pretending to be a woman. Coeducation and the scarcity of chaperons have made her self-possessed to a degree which mystifies readers not duly versed in American folkways. Though she plays at love-making almost from the cradle, she manages hardly ever to be scorched--a salamander, as one novelist suggests, sporting among the flames of life. When native Victorianism was at its height, in the third quarter of the nineteenth century, she inclined to piety as her mode of preservation; at the present moment she inclines to a romping optimism which frightens away both thought and passion. From _The Wide, Wide World_ to _Pollyanna_, however, she has taken habitual advantage of the reverence for the virgin which is one of the most pervasive elements in American popular opinion. That reverence has many charming and wholesome aspects; it has given young women a priceless freedom of movement in America without the penalty of being constantly suspected of sexual designs which they may not harbor. It must be remembered that the Daisy Millers who awaken unjust European gossip are understood at home, and that the understanding given them is a form of homage certainly no less honorable than the compliments of gallantry. In actual experience, however, girls grow up, whereas the popular fiction of the United States has done its best to keep them forever children. Nothing breaks the crystal shallows of their confidence. They are insolently secure in a world apparently made for them. The little difficulties which perturb their courtship are nine-tenths of them superficial and external matters, and the end comes as smoothly as a fairy tale's, before doubt has ever had an opportunity to shatter or passion the occasion to purge a spirit. From Hawthorne to the beginnings of naturalism there was hardly a single profound love story written in America. How could there be when green girls were the sole heroines and censors? Among the older women created by the local color generation there were certain fashionable successes and social climbers in the large cities who have more complex fortunes than the young girls; but for the most part they are merely typical or conventional--as selfish as gold and as hard as agate. On somewhat humbler levels that generation--as Mary Austin has pointed out of American fiction at large--came nearer to reality by its representation of a type peculiar to the United States: the "woman" who is also a "lady"; that is, who combines in herself the functions both of the busy housewife and of the charming ornament of her society. The gradual reduction in America of the servant class has served to develop women who keep books and music beside them at their domestic tasks as pioneer farmers kept muskets near them in the fields. They devote to homely duties the time devoted by European ladies to love, intrigue, public affairs; they preserve, thanks to countless labor-saving devices, for more or less intellectual pursuits the strength which among European women is consumed by habitual drudgery. The combination of functions has probably done much to increase sexlessness and to decrease helplessness, and so to produce almost a new species of womanhood which is bound eventually to be of great moment in the national life. Local color, however, taking the species for granted, seems hardly to have been aware of its significant existence. Only New England emphasized a distinct type: the old maid. She has been studied in that section as in no other quarter of the world. Expansion and emigration after the Civil War drew very heavily upon the declining Puritan stock; and naturally the young men left their native farms and villages more numerously than the young women, who remained behind and in many cases never married. Local fiction fell very largely into the hands of women--Harriet Beecher Stowe, Rose Terry Cooke, Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Alice Brown--who broke completely with the age-old tradition of ridiculing spinsters no longer young. In the little cycles which these story-tellers elaborated the old maid is likely to be the center of her episode, studied in her own career and not merely in that of households upon which she is some sort of parasite. The heroine of Mrs. Freeman's _A New England Nun_ is an illuminating instance: she has been betrothed to an absent, fortune-hunting lover for fourteen years, and now that he is back she finds herself full of consternation at his masculine habits and rejoices when he turns to another woman and leaves his first love to the felicity of her contented cell. What in most literatures appears as a catastrophe appears in New England as a relief. Energy has run low in the calm veins of such women, and they have better things to do than to dwell upon the lives they might have led had marriage complicated them. Here genre painting reaches its apogee in American literature: quaint interiors scrupulously described; rounds of minute activity familiarly portrayed; skimpy moods analyzed with a delicate competence of touch. At the same time, New England literature was now too sentimental and now too realistic to allow all its old maids to remain perpetually sweet and passive. In its sentimental hours it liked to call up their younger days and to show them at the point which had decided or compelled their future loneliness--again and again discovering some act of abnegation such as giving up a lover because of the unsteadiness of his moral principles or surrendering him to another woman to whom he seemed for some reason or other to belong. In its realistic hours local color in New England liked to examine the atrophy of the emotions which in these stories often grows upon the celibate. One formula endlessly repeated deals with the efforts of some acrid spinster--or wife long widowed--to keep a young girl from marriage, generally out of contempt for love as a trivial weakness; the conclusion usually makes love victorious after a thunderbolt of revelation to the hinderer. There are inquiries, too, into the repressions and obsessions of women whose lives in this fashion or that have missed their flowering. Many of the inquiries are sympathetic, tender, penetrating, but most of them incline toward timidity and tameness. Their note is prevailingly the note of elegy; they are seen through a trembling haze of reticence. It is as if they had been made for readers of a vitality no more abundant than that of their angular heroines. It would be possible to make a picturesque, precious anthology of stories dealing with the types and humors of New England. Different writers would contribute different tones: Sarah Orne Jewett the tone of faded gentility brooding over its miniature possessions in decaying seaport towns or in idyllic villages a little further inland; Mary E. Wilkins Freeman the tone of a stern honesty trained in isolated farms and along high, exposed ridges where the wind seems to have gnarled the dispositions of men and women as it has gnarled the apple trees and where human stubbornness perpetually crops out through a covering of kindliness as if in imitation of those granite ledges which everywhere tend to break through the thin soil; Alice Brown the tone of a homely accuracy touched with the fresh hues of a gently poetical temperament. More detailed in actuality than the stories of other sections, these New England plots do not fall so readily into formulas as do those of the South and West; and yet they have their formulas: how a stubborn pride worthy of some supreme cause holds an elderly Yankee to a petty, obstinate course until grievous calamities ensue; how a rural wife, neglected and overworked by her husband, rises in revolt against the treadmill of her dull tasks and startles him into comprehension and awkward consideration; how the remnant of some once prosperous family puts into the labor of keeping up appearances an amount of effort which, otherwise expended, might restore the family fortunes; how neighbors lock horns in the ruthless litigation which in New England corresponds to the vendettas of Kentucky and how they are reconciled eventually by sentiment in one guise or another; how a young girl--there are no Tom Joneses and few Hamlets in this womanly universe--grows up bright and sensitive as a flower and suffers from the hard, stiff frame of pious poverty; how a superb heroism springs out of a narrow life, expressing itself in some act of pitiful surrender and veiling the deed under an even more pitiful inarticulateness. The cities of New England have been almost passed over by the local colorists; Boston, the capital of the Puritans, has singularly to depend upon the older Holmes or the visiting Howells of Ohio for its reputation in fiction. Ever since Hawthorne, the romancers and novelists of his native province have taken, one may say, to the fields, where they have worked much in the mood of Rose Terry Cooke, who called her best collection of stories _Huckleberries_ to emphasize what she thought a true resemblance between the crops and characters of New England--"hardy, sweet yet spicy, defying storms of heat or cold with calm persistence, clinging to a poor soil, barren pastures, gray and rocky hillsides, yet drawing fruitful issues from scanty sources." Alas that as time goes on the issues of such art seem less fruitful than once they seemed; that even Mrs. Freeman's _Pembroke_, one of the best novels of its class, lacks form and structure, and seems to encroach upon caricature in its study of the progress and consequences of Yankee pride. After a fecund generation of such stories Edith Wharton in _Ethan Frome_ has surpassed all her native rivals in tragic power and distinction of language; Robert Frost has been able to distil the essence of all of them in three slender books of verse; Edwin Arlington Robinson in a few brief poems has created the wistful Tilbury Town and has endowed it with pathos at once more haunting and more lasting than that of any New England village chronicled in prose; it has remained for the Pennsylvanian Joseph Hergesheimer in _Java Head_ to seize most artfully upon the riches of loveliness that survive from the hour when Massachusetts was at its noon of prosperity; and local color of the orthodox tradition now persists in New England hardly anywhere except around Cape Cod, of which Joseph C. Lincoln is the dry, quaint, amusing laureate. Through the influence, in important measure, of Howells and the _Atlantic Monthly_ the modes of fiction which were practised east of Albany extended their example to other districts also: to northern New York in Irving Bacheller; to Ohio in Mary S. Watts and Brand Whitlock; to Indiana in Meredith Nicholson; to Wisconsin in Zona Gale; to Iowa and Arkansas in Alice French ("Octave Thanet"); to Kansas in William Allen White; to the Colorado mines in Mary Hallock Foote; to the Virginias in Ellen Glasgow and Henry Sydnor Harrison; to Georgia in Will N. Harben; and to other neighborhoods in other neighborly chroniclers whose mere names could stretch out to a point beyond which critical emphasis would be lost. New York City clung to less tender and more incisive habits of fiction; that city's pace for local color was set by the deft, bright Richard Harding Davis, Henry Cuyler Bunner, Brander Matthews, O. Henry--all well known figures; by the late Herman Knickerbocker Vielé, too little known, in whose novels, such as _The Last of the Knickerbockers_, affectionate accuracy is mated with smiling, graceful humor; and by David Gray, too little known, whose _Gallops_, concerned with the horsy parish of St. Thomas Equinus near New York City, contains the most amusing stories about fashionable sports which this republic has brought forth. In the Middle West Edgar Watson Howe and Hamlin Garland, and in the Far West Frank Norris and Jack London, broke with the customary tendency by turning away from pathos toward tragedy, and away from discreet benevolence toward emphatic candor. The prevailing school of naturalism has made its principal advance upon the passing school of local color by a sacrifice of genial neighborliness; no less exact and detailed in observation than their predecessors, the naturalists have insisted upon bringing criticism in and measuring the most amiable locality by wider standards. Here lies the essential point of difference between the old style and the new. It is by reference to this point that the credit--such as it is--of being quite contemporary must be withheld from so earnest and varied a novelist as Margaret Deland. That theological agonies like those in _John Ward, Preacher_ were actually suffered a generation back and that the book is a valuable document upon the times cannot explain away the fact that Mrs. Deland herself appears to have been partly overwhelmed by the storm which sweeps the parish of her story. So in her later novels which have essayed such problems as divorce, the compulsions of love, the inevitable clash of parents and children, she tugs at Gordian knots with the patient fingers of goodwill when one slash with the intelligence would cut her difficulties away. Suppose it possible, for instance, that the heroine of _The Awakening of Helena Richie_ could have been courageous enough to go to her lover to await the death of her loathsome husband and then could have been so timid as to undergo the perturbations over her conduct which almost break her heart in Old Chester--suppose these contradictions might have dwelt together in Helena, yet could Mrs. Deland not have noted and anatomized them in a way to show that she saw the contradictions even while recording them? Suppose that Elizabeth in _The Iron Woman_ was expected by her community to pay superfluously for an hour's blind folly with a lifetime of unhappiness and did undertake so to pay for it, yet could Mrs. Deland not have pointed out that the situation was repugnant both to ordinary common sense and to the very code of honor and stability which in the end persuades David and Elizabeth to give each other up? The conclusions of these novels, which to thousands of readers have seemed stern and terrible, are in reality terrible chiefly because they are soft--soft with a sentimentalism swathed in folds of piety. The customs of Old Chester stifle its inhabitants, who take a kind of stolid joy in their fetters; and Mrs. Deland, with all her understanding, does not illuminate them. The movements of her imagination are cumbered by a too narrow--however charming--cage. Her excellence belongs to the hours when, not trying to transcend her little Pennsylvania universe, she brings accuracy and shrewdness and felicity to the chronicles of small beer in _Old Chester Tales_ and _Dr. Lavendar's People_. These strictures and this praise she earns by her adherence to the parochial cult of local color. 2. ROMANCE If naturalism was a reaction from the small beer of local color, so, in another fashion, was the flare-up of romance which attended and succeeded the Spanish War. History was suddenly discovered to be wonderful no less than humble life; and so was adventure in the difficult quarters of the earth. That curious, that lush episode of fiction endowed American literature with a phalanx of "best sellers" some of which still continue to be sold, in diminished numbers; and it endowed the national tradition with a host of gallant personages and heroic incidents dug up out of old books or brought back from far quests by land or water. It remains, however, an episode; the rococo romancers did not last. Almost without exception they turned to other methods as the romantic mood faded out of the populace. Of those who had employed history for their substance only James Branch Cabell remained absolutely faithful, revising, strengthening, deepening his art with irony and beauty until it became an art exquisitely peculiar to himself. Mary Johnston was as faithful, but her fidelity had less growth in it. Originally attracted to the heroic legend of colonial Virginia, she has since so far departed from it as to produce in the _Long Roll_ and _Cease Firing_ a wide panorama of the Civil War, in other books to study the historic plight and current unrest of women, and here and there to show an observant consciousness of the changing world; but her imagination long ago sank its deepest roots into the traditions of the Old Dominion. She brings to them, however, no fresh interpretations, as satisfied as any medieval romancer to ring harmonious changes on ancient themes, enlarging them, perhaps, with something spacious in her language and liberal in her sentiments, yet transmitting her material rather as a singer than as a poet, agreeably rather than creatively. As Miss Johnston leans upon history for her favorite staff, so James Lane Allen leans upon "Nature." He is not, indeed, innocent of history. His Kentucky is always conscious of its chivalric past, and his most popular romance, _The Choir Invisible_, has its scene laid in and near the Lexington of the eighteenth century. Nor is he innocent of the devices of local color. His earliest collection of tales--_Flute and Violin_--and his ingratiating comment upon it--_The Blue-Grass Region of Kentucky_--once for all established the character which his chosen district has in the world of the imagination. But from the first he held principles of art which would not allow him to consider either history or local color as ends in themselves. He believed they must be employed, when employed, as elements contributory to some general effect of beauty or of meaning. He has built up beauty with the most deliberate hands, and he has sought to express the highest meanings in his art, seeking to look through the "thin-aired regions of consciousness which are ruled over by Tact to the underworld of consciousness where are situated the mighty workshops, and where toils on forever the cyclopean youth, Instinct." In this important program, however, he has constantly been handicapped by his orthodoxies. John Gray, in _The Choir Invisible_, loving a woman who though in love with him is bound in marriage to another, engages himself to a young girl, shortly afterward to find that his real love is free again; yet with a high gesture of sacrifice he holds to his engagement and enters upon a union of duty which is sure to make two, and possibly three, persons unhappy instead of one, though all of them are equally guiltless. Mr. Allen approves of this immoral arithmetic with a sentimentalism which has drawn rains of tears down thoughtless cheeks. So in _The Reign of Law_ he exhibits a youth extricating himself from an obsolete theology with sufferings which can be explained only on the ground that the theology was too strong ever to have been escaped or the youth too weak ever to have rebelled. And in _Aftermath_, sequel to _A Kentucky Cardinal_, the author sentimentally and quite needlessly stacks the cards against his hero and lets his heroine die, to bring, as he might say, "the eternal note of sadness in." All this to show how "Nature" holds men in her powerful hands and tortures them when they struggle to follow the mind to liberty! To prove a thesis so profoundly true and tragic Mr. Allen can do no more than borrow the tricks of melodrama. Just how melodramatic his sentimentalism forces him to be has often been overlooked because of his diction and his pictures. Though he tends to the mellifluous and the saccharine he has in his better pages a dewy, luminous style, with words choicely picked out and cadences delicately manipulated. By comparison most of the local colorists of his period seem homespun and most of the romancers a little tawdry. His method is the mosaicist's, working self-consciously in fine materials. Movement with him never leaps nor flows; in fact, it seems to dawdle when, too often, he forgets to be vigilant in the interests of simplicity; it is languid with scrupulous hesitations and accumulations. As to his pictures, they come from a Kentucky glorified. When he says that in June there "the warm-eyed, bronzed, foot-stamping young bucks forsake their plowshares in the green rows, their reapers among the yellow beards; and the bouncing, laughing, round-breasted girls arrange their ribbons and their vows," Mr. Allen is remembering Theocritus, the _Pervigilium Veneris_, and the silver ages of literature no less than his own state and his own day. He uses local color habitually to ennoble it, and but for his extravagant taste for sweetness he might have achieved pastorals of an imperishable sort. Even as it is, the _Kentucky Cardinal-Aftermath_ story has all the quaint grace of pressed flowers and remembered valentines, and _Summer in Arcady_, his masterpiece, has at once rich passion and spare form. Here Mr. Allen is at his best, representing young love springing up fiercely, exuberantly, against a lovely background congenial to the human mood. He has not known, however, how to keep up that difficult equilibrium between artifice and simplicity which the idyl demands. His later books tend to be turgid, oppressive, cloying with sentimentalism and amorous obsessions in their graver moments, and in their lighter moments to fall flat from a lack of the true sinews of comedy. Of a temper as different as possible from Mr. Allen's was Edgar Saltus, just dead, who stood alone and decadent in a country which the _fin de siècle_ scarcely touched with its graceful, graceless maladies. He began his career, after a penetrating study of Balzac, with _The Philosophy of Disenchantment_ and _The Anatomy of Negation_, erudite, witty challenges to illusion, deriving primarily from Hartmann and Schopenhauer but enriching their arguments with much inquisitive learning in current French philosophers and poets. Erudition, however, was not Saltus's sole equipment: his pessimism came, in part, from his literary masters but in part also from a temperament which steadily followed its own impulses and arrived at its own destinations. Cynical, deracinated, he turned from his speculative doubts to the positive realities of sense, becoming the historian of love and loveliness in sumptuous, perverse phases. In _Mary Magdalen_ he dressed up a traditional courtesan in the splendors of purple and gold and perfumed her with many quaint, dangerous essences more exciting than her later career as penitent; in _Imperial Purple_ he undertook a chronicle of the Roman emperors from Julius Caesar to Heliogabolus, exhibiting them in the most splendid of all their extravagances and sins; in _Historia Amoris_ he followed the maddening trail of love and in _The Lords of the Ghostland_ the saddening trail of faith through the annals of mankind. He wrote novels, too, of contemporary life, but they are his least notable achievements. His personages in none of these novels manage to convince; his plots are melodrama; his worldly wisdom has smirks and postures in it; his style, now sharp now sagging, is unequal. Saltus could not, it seems, dispense with antiquity and remoteness in his books. Only when buried in the deep world of ancient story or when ranging through the widest field of time did he become most himself. Then he invited no comparisons with familiar actualities and could assemble the most magnificent glories according to his whims and could drape them in the most gorgeous stuffs. What especially touched his imagination was the spectacle of imperial Rome as interpreted to him by French decadence: that lust for power and sensation, those incredible temples, palaces, feasts, revelries, blasphemies, butcheries. Commencing with a beauty which knew no bounds, he moved on to lust or satiety or impotence for his theme; in the end he brought little but a glittering ferocity to that cold chronicle of the czars from Ivan to Catherine, _The Imperial Orgy_. His phrases never failed him, flashing like gems or snakes and clasping his exuberant materials in almost the only discipline they ever had. Wit withheld him from utter lusciousness. Though he employed Corinthian cadences and diction, he kept continually checking them with the cynic twist of some deft colloquialism. To venture into his microcosm is to bid farewell to all that is simple and kindly; it is, however, to discover the terrible beauty that lurks behind corruption, malevolent though delirious. Romance of the traditionary sort, it is plain, has lately lost its vogue in the United States and is being neglected as at almost no other period since Fenimore Cooper established its principal native modes. The ancient romantic matters of the Settlement and the Revolution flourish almost solely in tales for boys. There is of course still a matter of the Frontier, but it is another frontier: the Canadian North and Northwest, Alaska, the islands of the South Seas, latterly the battle fields of France, and always the trails of American exploration wherever they may chance to lead. The performers upon such themes--the Rex Beaches, the Emerson Houghs, the Randall Parrishes, the Zane Greys, the James Oliver Curwoods--march ordinarily under the noisy banner of "red blood" and derive from Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Jack London, those generous boys of naturalism whose temperaments carried them again and again into the territories of vivid danger. Criticism notes in the later annalists of "red blood" their spasmodic energy, their considerable technical knowledge, their stereotyped characters, their recurrent formulas, their uncritical, Rooseveltian opinions, their enormous popularity, their almost complete lack of distinction in style or attitude, and passes by without further obligation than to point out that Stewart Edward White probably deserves to stand first among them by virtue of a certain substantial range and panoramic faithfulness to the life of the lumbermen represented in his most successful book, _The Blazed Trail_. This phase of life deserves particular emphasis for the reason that there has recently been growing up among the lumber-camps from the Bay of Fundy to Puget Sound the legend of a mythical hero named Paul Bunyan who is the only personage of the sort yet invented and elaborated by the ordinary run of men in any American calling. Paul is less a patron saint of the loggers than an autochthonous Munchausen, whose fame has been extended almost entirely by word of mouth among lumbermen resting from their work and vying with one another to see who could tell the most stupendous yarn about Paul's prowess and achievements. The process resembles that which in the folk everywhere has evolved enormous legends about favorite heroes; the legend concerning Paul, however, is essentially native in its accurate geography, in its passion for grotesque exaggeration, in its hilarious metaphors, in its dry, drawling, straight-faced narrative method. Exaggeration such as that in some of these stories verges upon genius. When Paul goes West he carelessly lets his pick drag behind him and cuts out the Grand Canyon of the Colorado; he raises corn in Kansas prodigious enough to suck the Mississippi dry and stop navigation; he builds a hotel so high that he has "the last seven stories put on hinges so's they could be swung back for to let the moon go by"; he achieves such feats of eating and drinking and working and fighting and loving as make Hercules himself seem a pallid fellow who should have gone upon the rowdy American frontier to learn the great ways of adventure. Though it is true that the legend has been developing for many years without adequate literary use of it having yet been made, it lies ready for romance to handle; and no discussion of contemporary American fiction can go deeper than the surfaces without at least mentioning that hilarious chapbook _Paul Bunyan Comes West_. That romance is just now being slighted appears from the lamentable hiatus into which the fame of Charles D. Stewart has lately fallen. His _Partners of Providence_ suffers from the inevitable comparison with _Tom Sawyer_ and _Huckleberry Finn_ which it cannot stand, though it continues the saga of the Mississippi with sympathy and knowledge; but _The Fugitive Blacksmith_ has a flavor which few comparisons and no neglect can spoil. Its protagonist, wrongly accused of a murder which he by mischance finds it difficult to explain, takes to his heels and lives by his mechanic wits among the villages of the lower Mississippi through a diversity of adventures which puts his story among the little masterpieces of the picaresque. Though it is clumsily garnished with irrelevant things, it stands out above them, racy, rememberable. The blacksmith has an ingenuity as varied as his experiences. Whereas other picaroes cheat or fight or love their ways, this hero uses his dexterity at unaccustomed trades until it is little less than intoxicating to see him rise to each emergency. He is a proletarian Odysseus, and his history is a quaint _Odyssey_ of the roving artisan. The matter of the Civil War, though very large in the American memory, has in literature not quite reached a parity with the older matters of the Settlement, the Revolution, and the Frontier, principally, no doubt, because there has been only one period--and that a brief one--of historical romance since the war. In connection with this matter, however, there has been created the legend which at present is surely the most potent of all the legendary elements dear to the American imagination. Abraham Lincoln is, strictly speaking, more than a legend; he has become a cult. Immediately after his death he lived in the national mind for a time as primarily a martyr; then emphasis shifted to his humor and a whole literature of waggish tales and retorts and apologues assembled around his name; then he passed into a more sentimental zone and endless stories were multiplied about his natural piety and his habit of pardoning innocent offenders. Out of the efflorescence of all these aspects of legend which accompanied the centenary of his birth there has since seemed to be emerging--though the older aspects still persist as well--a conception of him as a figure at once lofty and familiar, at once sad and witty, at once Olympian and human. Among poets of all grades of opinion Lincoln is the chief native hero: Edwin Arlington Robinson has best expressed in words as firm as bronze the Master's reputation for lonely pride and forgiving laughter; John Gould Fletcher, with an eloquence found nowhere else in his work, likens Lincoln to a tree so mighty that its branches reach the heavens and its roots the primal rock and nations of men may rest in its shade; Edgar Lee Masters, whose work is full of the shadow and light of Lincoln, has made his most moving lyric an epitaph upon Ann Rutledge, the girl Lincoln loved and lost; and Vachel Lindsay, in Lincoln's own Springfield, during the World War thought of him as so stirred even in death by the horrors which then alarmed the universe that he could not sleep but walked up and down the midnight streets, mourning and brooding. It is precisely thus, in other ages, that saints are said to appear at difficult moments, to quiet the waves or turn the arrow aside. Without these more vulgar manifestations Lincoln nevertheless lives as the founder of every cult lives, in the echoes of his voice on many tongues and in the vibrations of his voice in many affections. The novelists, unfortunately, fall behind the poets in the beauty and wisdom with which they celebrate the figure of Lincoln, though they have produced scores of volumes associated with it, upon the life not only of Lincoln himself but of his mother, of his children, of this or that friend or neighbor. Of the various novels--from Winston Churchill's _The Crisis_ to Irving Bacheller's _A Man for the Ages_--which have sought to mingle the right proportions of rural shrewdness and honorable dignity, no one has yet been equal to the magnitude of its theme. They have followed the customary paths of the historical romance without seeming to realize that in a theme so spacious they could learn from the methods of Plato with Socrates, of Shakespeare with his kingly heroes, of the biographers of Francis of Assisi with their gracious saint. Few literary tasks are harder than the task of the critic holding a steady course through the welter of novels which make a tumult in the world and trying to indicate those which have some genuine significance as works of art or intelligence or as documents upon the time. How shall he dispose, for example, of such beguilers of the millions as Gene Stratton Porter, who piles sentimentalism upon "Nature" till the soft heap defies analysis, and Harold Bell Wright, who cannily mixes sentimentalism with valor and prudence till the resultant blend tempts appetites uncounted? Popularity has its arts no less than excellence; and so has it its own kind of seriousness. Much as the advertiser and the salesman have done to market tons of Mrs. Porter and Mr. Wright, they could not have done it without the assistance furnished them by the fact that their authors believe and feel the things they write. They throb with all the popular impulses; they laugh when the multitude laughs and weep when it weeps; and they have the gift--which is really rare not common--of calling the multitude's attention to their books in which is displayed, as in a consoling mirror, the sweet, rosy, empty features of banality. How shall the patient critic dispose of Robert W. Chambers, who, possessing in a high degree the qualities of narrative, of costume, of dramatic effectiveness, of satire even (as witness _Iole_), has drifted with the fashions for a generation and has latterly allowed himself to decline to the manufacture of literary sillibub in the guise of novels about the smart set and Bohemia? How shall the stern critic dispose of Gertrude Atherton, who knows so much about California, New York, and the international scene but who somehow fails to transmute her materials to any lasting metal and leaves the impression of a vexed aristocrat scolding the age without either convincing it or convicting it of very serious deficiencies? How shall the accurate critic dispose of Frank Harris, who was born in Ireland and who had the most conspicuous part of his career in England, but who is a naturalized American citizen and who has written in _The Bomb_ a vivid and intelligent novel dealing with the Chicago "anarchists" of 1886? How shall the conscientious critic dispose of the Owen Johnsons and the Rupert Hugheses and the Gouverneur Morrises and the George Barr McCutcheons with all their energy and information and good intentions and yet with their fatal lack of true distinction? How shall the tolerant critic dispose of the writers of detective stories whose name is legion and whose art is to fine fiction as arithmetic to calculus--particularly Arthur Reeve, inventor of that Craig Kennedy who with endless ingenuity solves problem after problem by the introduction of scientific and pseudoscientific novelties? How shall the puzzled critic dispose of Alice Duer Miller and her light, bright stories of fashionable life; of Edward Lucas White and his vast panoramas of South America and the ancient world; of Katherine Fullerton Gerould, with her grim tales and her petulant conservatism; of those energetic successors of O. Henry, Edna Ferber and Fanny Hurst; of the late Charles Emmet Van Loan, with his intimate knowledge of sport; of the schools and swarms of men and women who write short stories for the most part but who occasionally essay a novel? How shall the worried critic dispose of the more or less professional humorists who have created characters and localities: Irvin S. Cobb, who, capable of better things, prefers the paths of the grotesque and rolls his bulk through current literature laughing at his own misadventures; Finley Peter Dunne, inventor of that Mr. Dooley who makes it clear that the American tradition which invented Poor Richard is still alive; Ring W. Lardner, master of the racy vernacular of the almost illiterate; George Ade, easily first of his class, fabulist and satirist? Perhaps it is best for the baffled critic to leave all of them to time and, singling out the ten living novelists who seem to him most distinguished or significant, to study them one by one, adding some account of the school of fiction just now predominant. CHAPTER II ARGUMENT 1. HAMLIN GARLAND The pedigree of the most energetic and important fiction now being written in the United States goes unmistakably back to that creative uprising of discontent in the eighties of the last century which brought into articulate consciousness the larger share of the aspects of unrest which have since continued to challenge the nation's magnificent, arrogant grand march. The decade had Henry Adams for its bitter philosopher, despairing over current political corruption and turning away to probe the roots of American policy under Jefferson and his immediate successors; had the youthful Theodore Roosevelt for its standard-bearer of a civic conscience which was, plans went, to bring virtue into caucuses; had Henry George for its spokesman of economic change, moving across the continent from California to New York with an argument and a program for new battles against privilege; had Edward Bellamy for its Utopian romancer, setting forth a delectable picture of what human society might become were the old iniquities reasonably wiped away and co-operative order brought out of competitive chaos; had William Dean Howells for its annalist of manners, turning toward the end of the decade from his benevolent acceptance of the world as it was to stout-hearted, though soft-voiced, accusations brought in the name of Tolstoy and the Apostles against human inequality however constituted; had--to end the list of instances without going outside the literary class--Hamlin Garland for its principal spokesman of the distress and dissatisfaction then stirring along the changed frontier which so long as free land lasted had been the natural outlet for the expansive, restless race. Heretofore the prairies and the plains had depended almost wholly upon romance--and that often of the cheapest sort--for their literary reputation; Mr. Garland, who had tested at first hand the innumerable hardships of such a life, became articulate through his dissent from average notions about the pioneer. His earliest motives of dissent seem to have been personal and artistic. During that youth which saw him borne steadily westward, from his Wisconsin birthplace to windy Iowa and then to bleak Dakota, his own instincts clashed with those of his migratory father as the instincts of many a sensitive, unremembered youth must have clashed with the dumb, fierce urges of the leaders of migration everywhere. The younger Garland hungered on the frontier for beauty and learning and leisure; the impulse which eventually detached him from Dakota and sent him on a trepid, reverent pilgrimage to Boston was the very impulse which, on another scale, had lately detached Henry James from his native country and had sent him to the ancient home of his forefathers in the British Isles. Mr. Garland could neither feel so free nor fly so far from home as James. He had, in the midst of his raptures and his successes in New England, still to remember the plight of the family he had left behind him on the lonely prairie; he cherished a patriotism for his province which went a long way toward restoring him to it in time. Sentimental and romantic considerations, however, did not influence him altogether in his first important work. He had been kindled by Howells in Boston to a passion for realism which carried him beyond the suave accuracy of his master to the somber veracity of _Main-Travelled Roads_, _Prairie Folks_, and _Rose of Dutcher's Coolly_. This veracity was more than somber; it was deliberate and polemic. Mr. Garland, ardently a radical of the school of Henry George, had enlisted in the crusade against poverty, and he desired to tell the unheeded truth about the frontier farmers and their wives in language which might do something to lift the desperate burdens of their condition. Consequently his passions and his doctrines joined hands to fix the direction of his art; he both hated the frontier and hinted at definite remedies which he thought would make it more endurable. It throws a strong light upon the progress of American society and literature during the past generation to point out that the service recently performed by _Main Street_ was, in its fashion, performed thirty years ago by _Main-Travelled Roads_. Each book challenges the myth of the rural beauties and the rural virtues; but whereas Sinclair Lewis, in an intellectual and satiric age, charges that the villagers are dull, Mr. Garland, in a moral and pathetic age, charged that the farmers were oppressed. His men wrestle fearfully with sod and mud and drought and blizzard, goaded by mortgages which may at almost any moment snatch away all that labor and parsimony have stored up. His women, endowed with no matter what initial hopes or charms, are sacrificed to overwork and deprivations and drag out maturity and old age on the weariest treadmill. The pressure of life is simply too heavy to be borne except by the ruthless or the crafty. Mr. Garland, though nourished on the popular legend of the frontier, had come to feel that the "song of emigration had been, in effect, the hymn of fugitives." Illusion no less than reality had tempted Americans toward their far frontiers, and the enormous mass, once under way, had rolled stubbornly westward, crushing all its members who might desire to hesitate or to reflect. The romancers had studied the progress of the frontier in the lives of its victors; Mr. Garland studied it in the lives of its victims: the private soldier returning drably and mutely from the war to resume his drab, mute career behind the plow; the tenant caught in a trap by his landlord and the law and obliged to pay for the added value which his own toil has given to his farm; the brother neglected until his courage has died and proffered assistance comes too late to rouse him; and particularly the daughter whom a harsh father or the wife whom a brutal husband breaks or drives away--the most sensitive and therefore the most pitiful victims of them all. Mr. Garland told his early stories in the strong, level, ominous language of a man who had observed much but chose to write little. Not his words but the overtones vibrating through them cry out that the earth and the fruits of the earth belong to all men and yet a few of them have turned tiger or dog or jackal and snatched what is precious for themselves while their fellows starve and freeze. Insoluble as are the dilemmas he propounded and tense and unrelieved as his accusations were, he stood in his methods nearer, say, to the humane Millet than to the angry Zola. There is a clear, high splendor about his landscapes; youth and love on his desolate plains, as well as anywhere, can find glory in the most difficult existence; he might strip particular lives relentlessly bare but he no less relentlessly clung to the conviction that human life has an inalienable dignity which is deeper than any glamor goes and can survive the loss of all its trappings. Why did Mr. Garland not equal the intellectual and artistic success of _Main-Travelled Roads_, _Prairie Folks_, and _Rose of Dutcher's Coolly_ for a quarter of a century? At the outset he had passion, knowledge, industry, doctrine, approbation, and he labored hard at enlarging the sagas of which these books were the center. Yet _Jason Edwards_, _A Spoil of Office_, _A Member of the Third House_ are dim names and the Far Western tales which succeeded them grow too rapidly less impressive as they grow older. The rise of historical romance among the American followers of Stevenson at the end of the century and the subsequent rise of flippancy under the leadership of O. Henry have both been blamed for the partial eclipse into which Mr. Garland's reputation passed. As a matter of fact, the causes were more fundamental than the mere fickleness of literary reputation or than the demands of editors and public that he repeat himself forever. In that first brilliant cycle of stories this downright pioneer worked with the material which of all materials he knew best and over which his imagination played most eagerly. From them, however, he turned to pleas for the single tax and to exposures of legislative corruption and imbecility about which he neither knew nor cared so much as he knew and cared about the actual lives of working farmers. His imagination, whatever his zeal might do in these different surroundings, would not come to the old point of incandescence. Instead, however, of diagnosing his case correctly Mr. Garland followed the false light of local color to the Rocky Mountains and began the series of romantic narratives which further interrupted his true growth and, gradually, his true fame. He who had grimly refused to lend his voice to the chorus chanting the popular legend of the frontier in which he had grown up and who had studied the deceptive picture not as a visitor but as a native, now became himself a visiting enthusiast for the "high trails" and let himself be roused by a fervor sufficiently like that from which he had earlier dissented. In his different way he was as hungry for new lands as his father had been before him. Looking upon local color as the end--when it is more accurately the beginning--of fiction, he felt that he had exhausted his old community and must move on to fresher pastures. Here the prime fallacy of his school misled him: he believed that if he had represented the types and scenes of his particular region once he had done all he could, when of course had he let imagination serve him he might have found in that microcosm as many passions and tragedies and joys as he or any novelist could have needed for a lifetime. Here, too, the prime penalty of his school overtook him: he came to lay so much emphasis upon outward manners that he let his plots and characters fall into routine and formula. The novels of his middle period--such as _Her Mountain Lover_, _The Captain of the Gray Horse Troop_, _Hester_, _The Light of the Star_, _Cavanagh, Forest Ranger_--too frequently recur to the romantic theme of a love uniting some powerful, uneducated frontiersman and some girl from a politer neighborhood. Pioneer and lady are always almost the same pair in varying costumes; the stories harp upon the praise of plains and mountains and the scorn of cities and civilization. These romances, much value as they have as documents and will long continue to have, must be said to exhibit the frontier as self-conscious, obstreperous, given to insisting upon its difference from the rest of the world. In ordinary human intercourse such insistence eventually becomes tiresome; in literature no less than in life there is a time to remember local traits and a time to forget them in concerns more universal. What concerns of Mr. Garland's were universal became evident when he published _A Son of the Middle Border_. His enthusiasms might be romantic but his imagination was not; it was indissolubly married to his memory of actual events. The formulas of his mountain romances, having been the inventions of a mind not essentially inventive, had been at best no more than sectional; the realities of his autobiography, taking him back again to _Main-Travelled Roads_ and its cycle, were personal, lyrical, and consequently universal. All along, it now appeared, he had been at his best when he was most nearly autobiographical: those vivid early stories had come from the lives of his own family or of their neighbors; _Rose of Dutcher's Coolly_ had set forth what was practically his own experience in its account of a heroine--not hero--who leaves her native farm to go first to a country college and then to Chicago to pursue a wider life, torn constantly between a passion for freedom and a loyalty to the father she must tragically desert. In a sense _A Son of the Middle Border_ supersedes the fictive versions of the same material; they are the original documents and the _Son_ the final redaction and commentary. Veracious still, the son of that border appears no longer vexed as formerly. Memory, parent of art, has at once sweetened and enlarged the scene. What has been lost of pungent vividness has its compensation in a broader, a more philosophic interpretation of the old frontier, which in this record grows to epic meanings and dimensions. Its savage hardships, though never minimized, take their due place in its powerful history; the defeat which the victims underwent cannot rob the victors of their many claims to glory. If there was little contentment in this border there was still much rapture. Such things Mr. Garland reveals without saying them too plainly: the epic qualities of his book--as in Mark Twain's _Life on the Mississippi_--lie in its implications; the tale itself is a candid narrative of his own adventures through childhood, youth, and his first literary period. This autobiographic method, applied with success in _A Daughter of the Middle Border_ to his later life in Chicago and all the regions which he visited, brings into play his higher gifts and excludes his lower. Under slight obligation to imagine, he runs slight risk of succumbing to those conventionalisms which often stiffen his work when he trusts to his imagination. Avowedly dealing with his own opinions and experiences, he is not tempted to project them, as in the novels he does somewhat too frequently, into the careers of his heroes. Dealing chiefly with action not with thought, he does not tend so much as elsewhere to solve speculative problems with sentiment instead of with reflection. In the _Son_ and the _Daughter_ he has the fullest chance to be autobiographic without disguise. Here lies his best province and here appears his best art. It is an art, as he employs it, no less subtle than humane. Warm, firm flesh covers the bones of his chronology. He imparts reality to this or that occasion, like a novelist, by reciting conversation which must come from something besides bare memory. He rounds out the characters of the persons he remembers with a fulness and grace which, lifelike as his persons are, betray the habit of creating characters. He enriches his analysis of the Middle Border with sensitive descriptions of the "large, unconscious scenery" in which it transacted its affairs. If it is difficult to overprize the documentary value of his saga of the Garlands and the McClintocks and of their son who turned back on the trail, so is it difficult to overpraise the sincerity and tenderness and beauty with which the chronicle was set down. 2. WINSTON CHURCHILL The tidal wave of historical romance which toward the end of the past century attacked this coast and broke so far inland as to inundate the entire continent swept Winston Churchill to a substantial peak of popularity to which he has since clung, with little apparent loss, by the exercise of methods somewhat but not greatly less romantic than those which first lifted him above the flood. He came during a moment of national expansiveness. Patriotism and jingoism, altruism and imperialism, passion and sentimentalism shook the temper which had been slowly stiffening since the Civil War. Now, with a rush of unaccustomed emotions, the national imagination sought out its own past, luxuriating in it, not to say wallowing in it. In Mr. Churchill it found a romancer full of consolation to any who might fear or suspect that the country's history did not quite match its destiny. He had enough erudition to lend a very considerable "thickness" to his scene, whether it was Annapolis or St. Louis or Kentucky or upland New England. He had a sense for the general bearings of this or that epoch; he had a firm, warm confidence in the future implied and adumbrated by this past; he had a feeling for the ceremonial in all eminent occasions. He had, too, a knack at archaic costume and knack enough at the idiom in which his contemporaries believed their forebears had expressed themselves. And he had, besides all these qualities needed to make his records heroic, the quality of moral earnestness which imparted to them the look of moral significance. Richard Carvel by the exercise of simple Maryland virtues rises above the enervate young sparks of Mayfair; Stephen Brice in _The Crisis_ by his simple Yankee virtues makes his mark among the St. Louis rebels--who, however, are gallant and noble though misguided men; canny David Ritchie in _The Crossing_ leads the frontiersmen of Kentucky as the little child of fable leads the lion and the lamb; crafty Jethro Bass in _Coniston_, though a village boss with a pocketful of mortgages and consequently of constituents, surrenders his ugly power at the touch of a maiden's hand. To reflect a little upon this combination of heroic color and moral earnestness is to discover how much Mr. Churchill owes to the elements injected into American life by Theodore Roosevelt. Is not _The Crossing_--to take specific illustrations--connected with the same central cycle as _The Winning of the West_? Is not _Coniston_, whatever the date of its events, an arraignment of that civic corruption which Roosevelt hated as the natural result of civic negligence and against which he urged the duty of an awakened civic conscience? In time Mr. Churchill was to extend his inquiries to regions of speculation into which Roosevelt never ventured, but as regards American history and American politics they were of one mind. "Nor are the ethics of the manner of our acquisition of a part of Panama and the Canal," wrote Mr. Churchill in 1918 in his essay on _The American Contribution and the Democratic Idea_, "wholly defensible from the point of view of international democracy. Yet it must be remembered that President Roosevelt was dealing with a corrupt, irresponsible, and hostile government, and that the Canal had become a necessity not only for our own development, but for that of the civilization of the world." And again: "The only real peril confronting democracy is the arrest of growth." Roosevelt himself could not have muddled an issue better. Like him Mr. Churchill has habitually moved along the main lines of national feeling--believing in America and democracy with a fealty unshaken by any adverse evidence and delighting in the American pageant with a gusto rarely modified by the exercise of any critical intelligence. Morally he has been strenuous and eager; intellectually he has been naïve and belated. Whether he has been writing what was avowedly romance or what was intended to be sober criticism he has been always the romancer first and the critic afterwards. And yet since the vogue of historical romance passed nearly a score of years ago Mr. Churchill has honestly striven to keep up with the world by thinking about it. One novel after another has presented some encroaching problem of American civic or social life: the control of politics by interest in _Mr. Crewe's Career_; divorce in _A Modern Chronicle_; the conflict between Christianity and business in _The Inside of the Cup_; the oppression of the soul by the lust for temporal power in _A Far Country_; the struggle of women with the conditions of modern industry in _The Dwelling-Place of Light_. Nothing has hurried Mr. Churchill or forced his hand; he has taken two or three years for each novel, has read widely, has brooded over his theme, has reinforced his stories with solid documentation. He has aroused prodigious discussion of his challenges and solutions--particularly in the case of _The Inside of the Cup_. That novel perhaps best of all exhibits his later methods. John Hodder by some miracle of inattention or some accident of isolation has been kept in his country parish from any contact with the doubt which characterizes his age. Transferred to a large city he almost instantly finds in himself heresies hitherto only latent, spends a single summer among the poor, and in the fall begins relentless war against the unworthy rich among his congregation. Thought plays but a trivial part in Hodder's evolution. Had he done any real thinking or were he capable of it he must long before have freed himself from the dogmas that obstruct him. Instead he has drifted with the general stream and learns not from the leaders but from the slower followers of opinion. Like the politician he absorbs through his skin, gathering premonitions as to which way the crowd is going and then rushing off in that direction. If this recalls the processes of Roosevelt, hardly less does it recall those of Mr. Churchill. Once taken by an idea for a novel he has always burned with it as if it were as new to the world as to him. Here lies, without much question, the secret of that genuine earnestness which pervades all his books: he writes out of the contagious passion of a recent convert or a still excited discoverer. Here lies, too, without much question, the secret of Mr. Churchill's success in holding his audiences: a sort of unconscious politician among novelists, he gathers his premonitions at happy moments, when the drift is already setting in. Never once has Mr. Churchill, like a philosopher or a seer, run off alone. Even for those, however, who perceive that he belongs intellectually to a middle class which is neither very subtle nor very profound on the one hand nor very shrewd or very downright on the other, it is impossible to withhold from Mr. Churchill the respect due a sincere, scrupulous, and upright man who has served the truth and his art according to his lights. If he has not overheard the keenest voices of his age, neither has he listened to the voice of the mob. The sounds which have reached him from among the people have come from those who eagerly aspire to better things arrived at by orderly progress, from those who desire in some lawful way to outgrow the injustices and inequalities of civil existence and by fit methods to free the human spirit from all that clogs and stifles it. But as they aspire and intend better than they think, so, in concert with them, does Mr. Churchill. In all his novels, even the most romantic, the real interest lies in some mounting aspiration opposed to a static régime, whether the passion for independence among the American colonies, or the expanding movement of the population westward, or the crusades against slavery or political malfeasance, or the extrication of liberal temperaments from the shackles of excessive wealth or poverty or orthodoxy. Yet the only conclusions he can at all devise are those which history has devised already--the achievement of independence or of the Illinois country, the abolition of slavery, the defeat of this or that usurper of power in politics. Rarely is anything really thought out. Compare, for instance, his epic of matrimony, _A Modern Chronicle_, with such a penetrating--if satirical--study as _The Custom of the Country_. Mrs. Wharton urges no more doctrine than Mr. Churchill, and she, like him, confines herself to the career of one woman with her successive husbands; but whereas the _Custom_ is luminous with quiet suggestion and implicit commentary upon the relations of the sexes in the prevailing modes of marriage, the _Chronicle_ has little more to say than that after two exciting marriages a woman is ready enough to settle peacefully down with the friend of her childhood whom she should have married in the beginning. In _A Far Country_ a lawyer who has let himself be made a tool in the hands of nefarious corporations undergoes a tragic love affair, suffers conversion, reads a few books of modern speculation, and resolutely turns his face toward a new order. In the same precipitate fashion the heroine of _The Dwelling-Place of Light_, who has given no apparent thought whatever to economic problems except as they touch her individually, suffers a shock in connection with her intrigue with her capitalist employer and becomes straightway a radical, shortly thereafter making a pathetic and edifying end in childbirth. In these books there are hundreds of sound observations and elevated sentiments; the author's sympathies are, as a rule, remarkably right; but taken as a whole his most serious novels, however lifelike and well rounded their surfaces may seem, lack the upholding, articulating skeleton of thought. Much the same lack of spiritual penetration and intellectual consistency which has kept Mr. Churchill from ever building a very notable realistic plot has kept him from ever creating any very memorable characters. The author of ten novels, immensely popular for more than a score of years, he has to his credit not a single figure--man or woman--generally accepted by the public as either a type or a person. With remarkably few exceptions he has seen his dramatis personae from without and--doubtless for that reason--has apparently felt as free to saw and fit them to his argument as he has felt with his plots. Something preposterous in the millionaire reformer Mr. Crewe, something cantankerous and passionate in the Abolitionist Judge Whipple of _The Crisis_, above all something both tough and quaint in the up-country politician Jethro Bass in _Coniston_ resisted the argumentative knife and saved for those particular persons that look of being entities in their own right which distinguishes the authentic from the artificial characters of fiction. For the most part, however, Mr. Churchill has erred in what may be called the arithmetic of his art: he has thought of men and women as mere fractions of a unit of fiction, whereas they themselves in any but romances must be the units and the total work the sum or product of the fictive operation. Naturally he has succeeded rather worse with characters of his own creating, since his conceptions in such cases have come to him as social or political problems to be illustrated in the conduct of beings suitably shaped, than in characters drawn in some measure from history, with their individualities already more or less established. Without achieving fresh or bold interpretations of John Paul Jones or George Rogers Clark or Lincoln, Mr. Churchill has added a good deal to the vividness of their legends; whereas in the case of characters not quite so historical, such as Judge Whipple and Jethro Bass, he has admirably fused his moral earnestness regarding American politics with his sense of spaciousness and color in the American past. After the most careful reflection upon Mr. Churchill's successive studies of contemporary life one recurs irresistibly to his romances. He possesses, and has more than once displayed, a true romantic--almost a true epic--instinct. Behind the careers of Richard Carvel and Stephen Brice and David Ritchie and Jethro Bass appear the procession and reverberation of stirring days. Nearer a Walter Scott than a Bernard Shaw, Mr. Churchill has always been willing to take the memories of his nation as they have come down to him and to work them without question or rejection into his broad tapestry. A naturalistic generation is tempted to make light of such methods; they belong, however, too truly to good traditions of literature to be overlooked. A national past has many uses, and different dispositions find in it instruction or warning, depression or exaltation. Mr. Churchill has found in the American past a cause for exaltation chiefly; after his ugliest chapters the light breaks and he closes always upon the note of high confidence which resounds in the epics of robust, successful nations. If in this respect he has too regularly flattered his countrymen, he has also enriched the national consciousness by the colors which he has brought back from his impassioned forays. Only now and then, it must be remembered, do historical novels pass in their original form from one generation to another; more frequently they suffer a decomposition due to their lack of essential truth and descend to the function of compost for succeeding harvests of romance. Though probably but one or two of Mr. Churchill's books--perhaps not even one--can be expected to outlast a generation with much vitality, he cannot be denied the honor of having added something agreeable if imponderable to the national memory and so of having served his country in one real way if not in another. 3. ROBERT HERRICK If the novels of Robert Herrick were nothing else they would still be indispensable documents upon that first and second decade of the twentieth century in America, when a minority unconvinced by either romance or Roosevelt set out to scrutinize the exuberant complacence which was becoming a more and more ominous element in the national character. Imperialism, running a cheerful career in the Caribbean and in the Pacific, had set the mode for average opinion; the world to Americans looked immense and the United States the most immense potentiality in it. Small wonder then that the prevailing literature gave itself generally to large proclamations about the future or to spacious recollections of the past in which the note was hope unmodified. Small wonder either--be it said to the credit of literature--that the same period caused and saw the development of the most emphatic protest which has come from native pens since the abolition of slavery--not excepting even the literary rebels of the eighties. Much of that protest naturally expressed itself in fiction, of many orders of intelligence and competence and intention. Various voices have been louder or shriller or sweeter or in some cases more thoroughgoing than Mr. Herrick's; but his is the voice which, in fiction, has best represented the scholar's conscience disturbed by the spectacle of a tumultuous generation of which most of the members are too much undisturbed. In particular Mr. Herrick has concerned himself with the status of women in the republic which has prided itself upon nothing more than upon its attitude toward their sex, and he has regularly insisted upon carrying his researches beyond that period of green girlhood which appears to be all of a woman's life that can interest the popular fiction-mongers. He knows, without anywhere putting it precisely into words, that the elaborate language of compliment used by Americans toward women, though deriving perhaps from a time when women were less numerous on the frontier than men and were therefore specially prized and praised, has become for the most part a hollow language. The pioneer woman earned all the respect she got by the equal share she bore in the tasks of her laborious world. Her successor in the comfortable society which the frontier founded by its travail neither works nor breeds as those first women did. But the energy thus happily released, instead of being directed into other useful channels, has been encouraged to spend itself upon the complex arts of the parasite. Ascribe it to the vanity of men who choose to regard women as luxurious chattels and the visible symptoms of success; ascribe it to a wasteful habit practised by a nation never compelled to make the best use of its resources; ascribe it to the craft of a sex quick to seize its advantage after centuries of disadvantage--ascribe it to whatever one will, the fact remains that the United States has evolved a widely admired type of woman who lacks the glad animal spontaneity of the little girl, the ardent abandon of the mistress, the strong loyalty of the wife, the deep, calm, fierce instincts of the mother; and who even lacks--although here a change has taken place since Mr. Herrick began to chronicle her--the confident impulse to follow her own path as an individual, irrespective of her peculiar functions. It must be remembered, of course, that Mr. Herrick has had in mind not the vast majority of women, who in the United States as everywhere else on earth still fully participate in life, but the American Woman, that traditional figure compounded of timid ice and dainty insolence and habitually tricked out with a wealth which holds the world so far away that it cannot see how empty she really is. He has sought in his novels, by dissecting the pretty simulacrum, to show that it has little blood and less soul. At times he writes with a biting animus. In _One Woman's Life_ Milly schemes herself out of the plain surroundings into which she was born, lapses from her designs enough to marry a poor man for love but subsequently wrecks his career and wears him out by her ambitious ignorance, and before she ends the story in the arms of another husband has contrived to waste the savings of a friend of her own sex who tries to help her. In _The Healer_ the doctor's wife continually drags him back from the passionate exercise of his true gift, luring him with her beauty to live in the world which nearly destroys him, though he finally comprehends the danger and escapes her. And in _Together_, its epic canvas crowded with all kinds and conditions of lovers and married couples, Mr. Herrick never spares the type. Other novelists may be content to show her glittering in her maiden plumage; he advances to the point where it becomes clear that the qualities ordinarily exalted in her are nothing but signs of an arrested spiritual and moral development. Hard and wilful enough, she never becomes mature, and she tangles the web of life with the heedless hands of a child. A less reflective novelist might be content with blaming or satirizing her for her blind instinct to marry her richest suitor; for forcing him, once married, to support her and her children at a pitch of luxury which demands that he give up his personal aspirations in art or science or altruism; for struggling so ruthlessly to plant her daughters in prosperous soil which will nourish the "sacred seed" of the race abundantly. Mr. Herrick, however, does not disapprove such instincts for their own sake. He sees in them an element furnishing mankind with one of its valuable sources of stability. What he assails is a national conception which endows women with these instincts in mean, trivial, unenlightened forms. His criticism of the American Woman, indeed, is but an emphatic point in his larger criticism of human life, and he has singled her out essentially, it seems, because of the shallowness of her lovely pretenses. It is the shallowness, not the sex, which arouses him. In _The Common Lot_, in _The Memoirs of an American Citizen_, in _Clark's Field_, and in certain of the strands of _Together_ it is the women who demand that, no matter what happens, they shall be allowed to live their lives upon the high plane of integrity from which the casual world is always trying to pull men and women down. Integrity in love, integrity in personal conduct, integrity in business and public affairs--this Mr. Herrick holds to with a profound, at times a bleak, consistency which has both worried and limited his readers. Integrity in love leads Margaret Pole in _Together_, for instance, from her foolish husband to her lover during one lyric episode and thereafter holds them apart in the consciousness of a love completed and not to be touched with perishable flesh. In novel after novel the characters come to grief from the American habit of extravagance, which, as Mr. Herrick represents it, seems a serious offense against integrity--springing from a failure to control vagrant desires and tying the spirit to the need of superfluous things until it ceases to be itself. And with never wearied iteration he comes back to the problem of how the individual can maintain his integrity in the face of the temptation to get easy wealth and cut a false figure in the world. Possibly it was a youth spent in New England that made Mr. Herrick as sensitive as he has been to the atmosphere of affairs in Chicago, where fortunes have come in like a flood during his residence there, and where the popular imagination has been primarily enlisted in the game of seeing where the next wave will break and of catching its golden spoil. Mr. Herrick has not confined himself to Chicago for his scene; indeed, he is one of the least local of American novelists, ranging as he does, with all the appearances of ease, from New England to California, from farm to factory, from city to suburb, and along the routes of pleasure which Americans take in Europe. But Chicago is the true center of his universe, and he is the principal historian in fiction of that roaring village so rapidly turned town. He has not, however, been blown with the prevailing winds. The vision that has fired most of his fellow citizens has looked to him like a tantalizing but insubstantial mirage. Something in his disposition has kept him cool while others were being made drunk with opportunity. Is it the scholar in him, or the New Englander, or the moralist which has compelled him to count the moral cost of material expansion? In the first of his novels to win much of a hearing, _The Common Lot_, he studies the career of an architect who becomes involved in the frauds of dishonest builders and sacrifices his professional integrity for the sake of quick, dangerous profits. _The Memoirs of an American Citizen_, a precious document now too much neglected, follows a country youth of good initial impulses through his rise and progress among the packers and on to the Senate of the United States. This is one of the oldest themes in literature, one of the themes most certain to succeed with any public: Dick Whittington, the Industrious Apprentice, over again. Mr. Herrick, however, cannot merely repeat the old drama or point the old moral. His hero wriggles upward by devious ways and sharp practices, crushing competitors, diverting justice, and gradually paying for his fortune with his integrity. In the most modern idiom Mr. Herrick asks again and again the ancient question whether the whole world is worth as much as a man's soul. That mystical rigor which permits but one answer to the question suggests to Mr. Herrick two avenues of cure from the evils accompanying the disease he broods upon. One is a return to simple living under conditions which quiet the restless nerves, allay the greedy appetites, and restore the central will. The Master in _The Master of the Inn_, Renault in _Together_, Holden in _The Healer_--all of them utter and live a gospel of health which obviously corresponds to Mr. Herrick's belief. When the world grows too loud one may withdraw from it; there are still uncrowded spaces where existence marches simply. Remembering them, Mr. Herrick's imagination, held commonly on so tight a fist, slips its hood off and takes wing. And yet he knows that the north woods into which a few favored men and women may withdraw are not cure enough for the multitude. They must practise, or some one must practise for their benefit, honorable refusals in the midst of life. The architect's wife in _The Common Lot_, Harrington's sister in _The Memoirs of an American Citizen_, the clear-eyed Johnstons in _Together_--they have or attain the knowledge, which seems a paradox, that selfishness can fatally entangle the individual in the perplexities of existence and that the best chance for disentanglement may come from intelligent unselfishness. _Clark's Field_ amply illustrates this paradox. The field has for many years lain idle in the midst of a growing town because of a flaw in the title, and when eventually the title is quieted and the land is sold it pours wealth upon heads not educated to use it with wisdom. Here is unearned increment made flesh and converted into drama: the field that might have been home and garden and playground becomes a machine, a monster, which gradually visits evil upon all concerned. Then Adelle and her proletarian cousin, aware that the field through the corruption of a well-meant law has grown malevolent, resolve to break the spell by surrendering their selfish interests and accepting the position of unselfish trustees to the estate until--if that time ever comes--some better means may be devised for making the earth serve the purposes of those who live upon it. The solution does not entirely satisfy, of course. At best it is a makeshift if considered in its larger bearings. It comes near, however, to solving the problems as individuals of Adelle and her cousin, who save more in character than they lose in pocket. And it might possibly have come nearer still were it not for the handicap under which Mr. Herrick, for all his intelligence and conscience, has labored as an artist. That handicap is a certain stiffness on the plastic side of his imagination. His conceptions come to him, if criticism can be any judge, with a large touch of the abstract about them; his rationalizing intelligence is always present at their birth. Nor do his narratives, once under way, flow with the sure, effortless movement which is natural to born story-tellers. His imagination, not quite continuous enough, occasionally fails to fuse and shape disparate materials. It is likely to fall short when he essays fancy or mystery, as in _A Life for a Life_; or when he has a whimsy for amusing melodrama, as in _His Great Adventure_. The flexibility which reveals itself in humor or in the lighter irony is not one of his principal endowments. Restrained and direct as he always is so far as language goes, he cannot always keep his action absolutely in hand: this or that person or incident now and then breaks out of the pattern; the skeleton of a formula now and then becomes too prominent. It is his intelligence which makes his satire sharp and significant; it is his conscience which lends passion to his representation and lifts him often to a true if sober eloquence. But in at least two of his novels imagination takes him, as only imagination can take a novelist, beyond the reach of either intelligence or conscience. _Together_, a little cumbersome, a little sprawling, nevertheless glows with an intensity which gives off heat as well as light. It is more than an exhaustive document upon modern marriage; it is interpretation as well. _Clark's Field_, a sparer, clearer story, is even more than interpretation; it is a work of art springing from a spirit which has taken fire and has transmuted almost all its abstract conceptions into genuine flesh and blood. That _Clark's Field_ is Mr. Herrick's latest novel heightens the expectation with which one hears that after a silence of seven years he now plans to return to fiction. 4. UPTON SINCLAIR The social and industrial order which has blacklisted Upton Sinclair has, while increasing his rage, also increased his art. In his youth he was primarily a lyric boy storming the ears of a world which failed to detect in his romances the promise of which he himself was outspokenly confident. His first character--the hero of _Springtime and Harvest_ and of _The Journal of Arthur Stirling_--belonged to the lamenting race of the minor poets, shaped his beauty in deep seclusion, and died because it went unrecognized. Mr. Sinclair, though he had created Stirling in his own image, did not die. Instead he began to study the causes of public deafness and found the injustices which ever since he has devoted his enormous energy to exposing. If that original motive seems inadequate and if traces of it have been partially responsible for his reputation as a seeker of personal notoriety, still it has lent ardor to his crusade. And if he had not discovered so much injustice to chronicle--if there had not been so much for him to discover--he must have lacked the ammunition with which he has fought. As the evidences have accumulated he has been spared the need of complaining merely because another minor poet was neglected and has been able to widen his accusations until they include the whole multitude of oppressions which free spirits have to contend against when they face machines and privilege and mortmain. The industrial system which true prophets have unanimously condemned for a century and a half helped to pack Mr. Sinclair's records from the first; the war, with its vast hysteria and blind panic, made it superfluous for him to add much commentary in _Jimmie Higgins_ and _100%_ to the veritable episodes which he there recounted. On some occasions fact itself has the impetus of propaganda. The times have furnished Mr. Sinclair the keen, cool, dangerous art of Thomas Paine. To mention Paine is to rank Mr. Sinclair with the ragged philosophers among whom he properly belongs, rather than with learned misanthropes like Swift or intellectual ironists like Bernard Shaw. An expansive passion for humanity at large colors all this proletarian radical has written. By disposition very obviously a poet, working with no subtle or complex processes and without any of the lighter aspects of humor, Mr. Sinclair simply refuses to accept existence as it stands and goes on questioning it forever. _Samuel the Seeker_ seems a kind of allegory of its author's own career. He, too, in the fashion of Samuel Prescott, inquires of all he meets why they tolerate injustice and demands that something or other be done at once. These are the methods of the ragged philosophers, whereas the learned understand that justice comes slowly and so rest now and then from effort; and the ironists understand that justice may never come and so now and then sit down, detached and cynical. Naïve inquirers like Upton Sinclair take and give fewer opportunities for comfort. How can any one talk of the long ages of human progress when a child may starve to death in a few days? How can any one take refuge in irony when agony is always abroad, biting and rending? How can any one leave to others the obligation to assail injustice when the responsibility for it lies equally upon all, whether victims or victors, who permit it to continue? A questioner so relentless can very soon bore the questioned, especially if they are less strenuous or less inflamed than he and can keep up his pitch neither of activity nor of anger; but this is no proof that such an inquiry is impertinent or that answers are impossible. Indeed, the chances are that the proportions of this boredom and the animosity resulting from it will depend upon the extent to which grievances do exist about which it is painful to think for the reason that they so plainly should not exist. A complacent reader of any of Mr. Sinclair's better books can stay complacent only by shutting up the book and his mind again. Without doubt the various abuses which these books set forth have their case seriously weakened by the violent quickness with which Mr. Sinclair scents conspiracy among the enemies of justice. It is perhaps not to be wondered at that he should so often fly to this conclusion; he has himself, as his personal history in _The Brass Check_ makes clear enough, been practically conspired against. But some instinct for melodrama in his constitution has led him to invent a larger number of conspirators than has been necessary to illustrate his contention. In _Love's Pilgrimage_, for instance, Thyrsis suffers tortures from the fact that it takes time for a poet, however gifted, to make himself heard. In reality, of course, the blame for this lies in about the same quarter of the universe as that which establishes a period of years between youth and maturity; to complain too bitterly about either ruling is to waste on an inscrutable problem the strength which might better be devoted to an annoying task. Mr. Sinclair, however, cools himself in no such philosophy. He dramatizes Thyrsis's hungry longings and cruel disappointments on Thyrsis's own terms, making the boy out a martyr with powerful forces arrayed against him in a conspiracy to keep ascendant genius down. Consequently the narrative has about it something shrill and febrile; it is keyed too high to carry full conviction to any but those who are straining at a similar leash. So also in _The Profits of Religion_--which is to the present age what _The Age of Reason_ was to an earlier revolutionary generation--Mr. Sinclair excessively simplifies religious history by reducing almost the whole process to a conspiracy on the part of priestcraft to hoodwink the people and so to fatten its own greedy purse. He must know that the process has not been quite so simple; but, leaving to others to say the things that all will say, he studies "supernaturalism as a source of income and a shield to privilege." Here again his instincts and methods as a melodramatist assert themselves: he warms to the struggle and plays his lash upon his conspiring priests in a mood of mingled duty and delight. _The Profits of Religion_ and _The Brass Check_ belong to a series of treatises on the economic interpretation of culture which will later examine education and literature as these two have examined the church and journalism and which collectively will bear the title _The Dead Hand_. Against the malign domination of the present by the past Mr. Sinclair directs his principal assault. In the arts he sees the dead hand holding the classics on their thrones and thrusting back new masterpieces as they appear; in religion he sees it clothing the visions of ancient poets in steel creeds and rituals and denying that such visions can ever come to later spirits; in human society he sees it welding the manacles of caste and hardening this or that temporary pattern of life to a perpetual order. As he repeatedly suspects conspiracy where none exists, so he repeatedly suspects deliberate malice where he should perceive stupidity. Now stupidity, though certainly the cause of more evils than malice can devise, is less employable as a villain: it is not anthropomorphic enough for melodrama. Mr. Sinclair is moral first and then intellectual. Touching upon such a theme as the horrors of venereal disease he feels more than a rational man's contempt for the imbecility of parents who will not instruct their daughters in anything but the sentimental elements of sex; he feels the fury toward them that audiences feel toward villains. It is much the same with his rather absurd novels written to display the follies of fashionable life, _The Metropolis_ and _The Moneychangers_: he finds more crime than folly in the extravagant pursuit of pleasure on the part of the few while the many endure hunger and cold, homelessness and joblessness, ignorance and rebellion and premature decay. Though the satirists may smile at the silly few, the ragged philosophers must weep for the miserable many. Class-consciousness is a great advantage to the writer of exciting fiction, as numerous American novelists have shown--standing ordinarily, however, on the side of the privileged orders. Mr. Sinclair in _The Jungle_, his great success, taking his stand with the unprivileged, with the wretched aliens in the Chicago stockyards, had the advantage that he could represent his characters as actually contending against the conspiracy which always exists when the exploiters of men see the exploited growing restless. What outraged the public was the news, later confirmed by official investigation, that the meat of a large part of the world was being prepared, at great profit to the packers, under conditions abominably unhygienic; what outraged Mr. Sinclair was the spectacle of the lives which the workers in the yards were compelled to lead if they got work--which meant life to them--at all. Thanks to the conspiracy among their masters they could not help themselves; thanks to the weight of the dead hand they could get no help from popular opinion, which saw their plight as something essential to the very structure of society, as Aristotle saw slavery. Mr. Sinclair proclaimed with a ringing voice that their plight was not essential; and he prophesied the revolution with an eloquence which, though the revolution has not come, still warms and lifts the raw material with which he had to deal. Nothing about him has done more to make him an arresting novelist than his conviction that mankind has not yet reached its peak, as the pessimists think; and that the current stage of civilization, with all that is unendurable about it, need last no longer than till the moment when mankind determines that it need no longer endure. He speaks as a socialist who has dug up a multitude of economic facts and can present them with appalling force; he speaks as a poet sustained by visions and generous hopes. How hope has worked in Mr. Sinclair appears with significant emphasis in the contrast between _Manassas_ and _100%_; the two books illustrate the range of American naturalism and the progressive disillusion of a generation. _Manassas_ is the work of a man filled with epic memories and epic expectations who saw in the Civil War a clash of titanic principles, saw a nation being beaten out on a fearful anvil, saw splendor and heroism rising up from the pits of slaughter. And in spite of his fifteen years spent in discovering the other side of the American picture Mr. Sinclair in _Jimmie Higgins_, the story of a socialist who went to war against the Kaiser, showed traces still of a romantic pulse, settling down, however, toward the end, to a colder beat. It is the colder beat which throbs in _100%_, with a temperature that suggests both ice and fire. Rarely has such irony been maintained in an entire volume as that which traces the evolution of Peter Gudge from sharper to patriot through the foul career of spying and incitement and persecution opened to his kind of talents by the frenzy of noncombatants during the war. To this has that patriotism come which on the red fields of Virginia poured itself out in unstinting sacrifice; and, though the sacrifice went on in France and Flanders, was it worth while, Mr. Sinclair implicitly inquires, when the conflict, at no matter how great a distance, could breed such vermin as Peter Gudge? Explicitly he does not answer his question: his art has gone, at least for the moment, beyond avowed argument, merely marshaling the evidence with ironic skill and dispensing with the chorus. _100%_ is a document which honest Americans must remember and point out when orators exclaim, in the accents of official idealism, over the great days and deeds of the great war. The road for Mr. Sinclair to travel is the road of irony and documentation, both of which will hold him back from ineffectual rages and thereby serve to enlarge his influence. Such genius for controversy as his may be neither expected nor advised to look for quieter paths; it feels, with Bernard Shaw, that "if people are rotting and starving in all directions, and nobody else has the heart or brains to make a disturbance about it, the great writers must." It is fair to say, however, that certain readers heartily sympathetic toward Mr. Sinclair observe in him a painful tendency to enjoy scandal for its own sake and to generalize from it to an extent which hurts his cause; observe in him a quite superfluous gusto when it comes to reporting bloody incidents not always contributory to any general design; observe in him a frequent over-use of the shout and the scream. He has himself given an example--_100%_--on which such critical strictures are based; in that best of his novels as well as best of his arguments he has avoided most of his own defects. A revolutionary novelist naturally finds it difficult to represent his world with the quiet grasp with which it can be represented by one who, accepting the present frame of life, has studied it curiously, affectionately, until it has left a firm, substantial image in the mind. The revolutionist must see life as constantly whirling and melting under his gaze; he must bring to light many facts which the majority overlook but which it will seem to him like connivance with injustice to leave in hiding; he must go constantly beyond what is to what ought to be. All the more reason, then, why he should be as watchful as the most watchful artist in his choice and use of the modes of his particular art. It requires at least as much art to convert as to give pleasure. 5. THEODORE DREISER Much concerned about wisdom as Theodore Dreiser is, he almost wholly lacks the dexterous knowingness which has marked the mass of fiction in the age of O. Henry. Not only has Mr. Dreiser never allowed any one else to make up his mind for him regarding the significance and aims and obligations of mankind but he has never made up his mind himself. A large dubitancy colors all his reflections. "All we know is that we cannot know." The only law about which we can be reasonably certain is the law of change. Justice is "an occasional compromise struck in an eternal battle." Virtue and honesty are "a system of weights and measures, balances struck between man and man." Prudence no less than philosophy demands, then, that we hold ourselves constantly in readiness to discard our ancient creeds and habits and step valiantly around the corner beyond which reality will have drifted even while we were building our houses on what seemed the primeval and eternal rock. Tides of change rise from deeps below deeps; cosmic winds of change blow upon us from boundless chaos; mountains, in the long geologic seasons, shift and flow like clouds; and the everlasting heavens may some day be shattered by the explosion or pressure of new circumstances. Somewhere in the scheme man stands punily on what may be an Ararat rising out of the abyss or only a promontory of the moment sinking back again; there all his strength is devoted to a dim struggle for survival. How in this flickering universe shall man claim for himself the honors of any important antiquity or any important destiny? What, in this vast accident, does human dignity amount to? For a philosopher with views so wide it is difficult to be a dramatist or a novelist. If he is consistent the most portentous human tragedy must seem to him only a tiny gasp for breath, the most delightful human comedy only a tiny flutter of joy. Against a background of suns dying on the other side of Aldebaran any mole trodden upon by some casual hoof may appear as significant a personage as an Oedipus or a Lear in his last agony. To be a novelist or dramatist at all such a cosmic philosopher must contract his vision to the little island we inhabit, must adjust his interest to mortal proportions and concerns, must match his narrative to the scale by which we ordinarily measure our lives. The muddle of elements so often obvious in Mr. Dreiser's work comes from the conflict within him of huge, expansive moods and a conscience working hard to be accurate in its representation of the most honest facts of manners and character. Granted, he might reasonably argue, that the plight and stature of all mankind are essentially so mean, the novelist need not seriously bother himself with the task of looking about for its heroic figures. Plain stories of plain people are as valuable as any others. Since all larger doctrines and ideals are likely to be false in a precarious world, it is best to stick as close as possible to the individual. When the individual is sincere he has at least some positive attributes; his record may have a genuine significance for others if it is presented with absolute candor. Indeed, we can partially escape from the general meaninglessness of life at large by being or studying individuals who are sincere, and who are therefore the origins and centers of some kind of reality. That the sincerity which Mr. Dreiser practises differs in some respects from that of any other American novelist, no matter how truthful, must be referred to one special quality of his own temperament. Historically he has his fellows: he belongs with the movement toward naturalism which came to America when Hamlin Garland and Stephen Crane and Frank Norris, partly as a protest against the bland realism which Howells expounded, were dissenting in their various dialects from the reticences and the romances then current. Personally Mr. Dreiser displays, almost alone among American novelists, the characteristics of what for lack of a better native term we have to call the peasant type--the type to which Gorki belongs and which Tolstoy wanted to belong to. Enlarged by genius though Mr. Dreiser is; open as he is to all manner of novel sensations and ideas; little as he is bound by the rigor of village habits and prejudices--still he carries wherever he goes the true peasant simplicity of outlook, speaks with the peasant's bald frankness, and suffers a peasant confusion in the face of complexity. How far he sees life on one simple plane may be illustrated by his short story _When the Old Century Was New_, an attempt to reconstruct in fiction the New York of 1801 which shows him, in spite of some deliberate erudition, to be amazingly unable to feel at home in another age than his own. This same simplicity of outlook makes _A Traveler at Forty_ so revealing a document, makes the Traveler appear a true Innocent Abroad without the hilarious and shrewd self-sufficiency of a frontiersman of genius like Mark Twain. While it is true that Mr. Dreiser's plain-speaking on a variety of topics euphemized by earlier American realists has about it some look of conscious intention, and is undoubtedly sustained by his literary principles, yet his candor essentially inheres in his nature: he thinks in blunt terms before he speaks in them. He speaks bluntly even upon the more subtle and intricate themes--finance and sex and art--which interest him above all others. On the whole he probably succeeds best with finance. The career of Cowperwood in _The Financier_ and _The Titan_, a career notoriously based upon that of Charles T. Yerkes, allowed Mr. Dreiser to exercise his virtue of patient industry and to build up a solid monument of fact which, though often dull enough, nevertheless continues generally to convince, at least in respect to Cowperwood's business enterprises. The American financier, after all, has rarely had much subtlety in his make-up. Single-minded, tough-skinned, ruthless, "suggesting a power which invents man for one purpose and no other, as generals, saints, and the like are invented," he shoulders and hurls his bulk through a sea of troubles and carries off his spoils. Such a man as Frank Cowperwood Mr. Dreiser understands. He understands the march of desire to its goal. He seems always to have been curious regarding the large operations of finance, at once stirred on his poetical side by the intoxication of golden dreams, something as Marlowe was in _The Jew of Malta_, and on his cynical side struck by the mechanism of craft and courage and indomitable impulse which the financier employs. Mr. Dreiser writes, it is true, as an outsider; he simplifies the account of Cowperwood's adventures after wealth, touching the record here and there with the naïve hand of a peasant--even though a peasant of genius--wondering how great riches are actually obtained and guessing somewhat awkwardly at the mystery. And yet these guesses perhaps come nearer to the truth than they might have come were either the typical financier or Mr. Dreiser more subtle. You cannot set a poet to catch a financier and be at all sure of the prize. As it is, this Trilogy of Desire (never completed in the third part which was to show Cowperwood extending his mighty foray into London) is as considerable an epic as American business has yet to show. Cowperwood's lighter hours are devoted to pursuits almost as polygamous as those of the leader of some four-footed herd. In this respect the novels which celebrate him stand close to the more popular _Sister Carrie_ and _Jennie Gerhardt_, both of them annals of women who fall as easily as Cowperwood's many mistresses into the hand of the conquering male. If Mr. Dreiser refuses to withhold his approbation from the lawless financier, he withholds it even less from the lawless lover. No moralism overlays the biology of these novels. Sex in them is a free-flowing, expanding energy, working resistlessly through all human tissue, knowing in itself neither good nor evil, habitually at war with the rules and taboos which have been devised by mankind to hold its amative impulses within convenient bounds. To the cosmic philosopher what does it matter whether this or that human male mates with this or that human female, or whether the mating endures beyond the passionate moment? Viewing such matters thus Mr. Dreiser constantly underestimates the forces which in civil society actually do restrain the expansive moods of sex. At least he chooses to represent love almost always in its vagrant hours. For this his favorite situation is in large part responsible: that of a strong man, no longer generously young, loving downward to some plastic, ignorant girl dazzled by his splendor and immediately compliant to his advances. Mr. Dreiser is obsessed by the spectacle of middle age renewing itself at the fires of youth--an obsession which has its sentimental no less than its realistic traits. What he most conspicuously leaves out of account is the will and personality of women, whom he sees, or at least represents, with hardly any exceptions as mere fools of love, mere wax to the wooer, who have no separate identities till some lover shapes them. To something like this simplicity the rôle of women in love is reduced by those Boccaccian fabulists who adorn the village taproom and the corner grocery. Mr. Dreiser is reported to consider _The 'Genius'_, a massive, muddy, powerful narrative, his greatest novel, though as a matter of fact it cannot be compared with _Sister Carrie_ for insight or accuracy or charm. His partiality may perhaps be ascribed to his strong inclination toward the life of art, through which his 'Genius' moves, half hero and half picaro. Witla remains mediocre enough in all but his sexual unscrupulousness, but he is impelled by a driving force more or less like those forces which impel Cowperwood. The will to wealth, the will to love, the will to art--Mr. Dreiser conceives them all as blind energies with no goal except self-realization. So conceiving them he tends to see them as less conditioned than they ordinarily are in their earthly progress by the resistance of statute and habit. Particularly is this true of his representation of the careers of artists. Carrie becomes a noted actress in a few short weeks; Witla almost as rapidly becomes a noted illustrator; other minor characters here and there in the novels are said to have prodigious power without exhibiting it. Hardly ever does there appear any delicate, convincing analysis of the mysterious behavior of true genius. Mr. Dreiser's artists are hardly persons at all; they are creatures driven, and the wonder lies primarily in the impelling energy. The cosmic philosopher in him sees the beginning and the end of the artistic process better than the novelist in him sees its methods. And the peasant in him, though it knows the world of art as vivid and beautiful and though it has investigated that world at first hand, still leads him to report it in terms often quaint, melodramatic, invincibly rural. Witness the hundreds of times he calls things "artistic." Two of his latest books indicate the range of his gifts and his excellences. In _Hey Rub-A-Dub-Dub_, which he calls A Book of the Mystery and Wonder and Terror of Life, he undertook to expound his general philosophy and produced the most negligible of all his works. He has no faculty for sustained argument. Like Byron, as soon as he begins to reason he is less than half himself. In _Twelve Men_, on the other hand, he displays the qualities by virtue of which he attracts and deserves a serious attention. Rarely generalizing, he portrays a dozen actual persons he has known, all his honesty brought to the task of making his account fit the reality exactly, and all his large tolerance exercised to present the truth without malice or excuses. Here lies the field of his finest victories, here and in those adjacent tracts of other books which are nearest this simple method: his representation of old Gerhardt and of Aaron Berchansky in _The Hand of the Potter_; numerous sketches of character in that broad pageant _A Hoosier Holiday_; the tenderly conceived record of Caroline Meeber, wispy and witless as she often is; the masterly study of Hurstwood's deterioration in _Sister Carrie_--this last the peak among all Mr. Dreiser's successes. Not the incurable awkwardness of his style nor his occasional merciless verbosity nor his too frequent interposition of crude argument can destroy the effect which he produces at his best--that of an eminent spirit brooding over a world which in spite of many condemnations he deeply, somberly loves. Something peasant-like in his genius may blind him a little to the finer shades of character and set him astray in his reports of cultivated society. His conscience about telling the plain truth may suffer at times from a dogmatic tolerance which refuses to draw lines between good and evil or between beautiful and ugly or between wise and foolish. But he gains, on the whole, as much as he loses by the magnitude of his cosmic philosophizing. These puny souls over which he broods, with so little dignity in themselves, take on a dignity from his contemplation of them. Small as they are, he has come to them from long flights, and has brought back a lifted vision which enriches his drab narratives. Something spacious, something now lurid now luminous, surrounds them. From somewhere sound accents of an authority not sufficiently explained by the mere accuracy of his versions of life. Though it may indeed be difficult for a thinker of the widest views to contract himself to the dimensions needed for naturalistic art, and though he may often fail when he attempts it, when he does succeed he has the opportunity, which the mere worldling lacks, of ennobling his art with some of the great light of the poets. CHAPTER III ART 1. BOOTH TARKINGTON Booth Tarkington is the glass of adolescence and the mold of Indiana. The hero of his earliest novel, Harkless in _The Gentleman from Indiana_, drifts through that narrative with a melancholy stride because he has been seven long years out of college and has not yet set the prairie on fire. But Mr. Tarkington, at the time of writing distant from Princeton by about the same number of years and also not yet famous, could not put up with failure in a hero. So Harkless appears as a mine of latent splendors. Carlow County idolizes him, evil-doers hate him, grateful old men worship him, devoted young men shadow his unsuspecting steps at night in order to protect him from the villains of Six-Cross-Roads, sweet girls adore him, fortune saves him from dire adventures, and in the end his fellow-voters choose him to represent their innumerable virtues in the Congress of their country without his even dreaming what affectionate game they are at. This from the creator of Penrod, who at the comical age of twelve so often lays large plans for proving to the heedless world that he, too, has been a hero all along! In somewhat happier hours Mr. Tarkington wrote _Monsieur Beaucaire_, that dainty romantic episode in the life of Prince Louis-Philippe de Valois, who masquerades as a barber and then as a gambler at Bath, is misjudged on the evidence of his own disguises, just escapes catastrophe, and in the end gracefully forgives the gentlemen and ladies who have been wrong, parting with an exquisite gesture from Lady Mary Carlisle, the beauty of Bath, who loves him but who for a few fatal days had doubted. This from the creator of William Sylvanus Baxter, who at the preposterous age of seventeen imagines himself another Sydney Carton and after a silent, agonizing, condescending farewell goes out to the imaginary tumbril! Just such postures and phantasms of adolescence lie behind all Mr. Tarkington's more serious plots--and not merely those earlier ones which he constructed a score of years ago when the mode in fiction was historical and rococo. Van Revel in _The Two Van Revels_, convinced and passionate abolitionist, nevertheless becomes as hungry as any fire-eater of them all the moment Polk moves for war on Mexico, though to Van Revel the war is an evil madness. In _The Conquest of Canaan_ Louden plays Prince Hal among the lowest his town affords, only to mount with a rush to the mayoralty when he is ready. _The Guest of Quesnay_ takes a hero who is soiled with every vileness, smashes his head in an automobile accident, and thus transforms him into that glorious kind of creature known as a "Greek god"--beautiful and innocent beyond belief or endurance. _The Turmoil_ is really not much more veracious, with its ugly duckling, Bibbs Sheridan, who has ideas, loves beauty, and writes verse, but who after years of futile dreaming becomes a master of capital almost overnight. Even _The Magnificent Ambersons_, with its wealth of admirable satire, does not satirize its own conclusion but rounds out its narrative with a hasty regeneration. And what can a critic say of such blatant nonsense as arises from the frenzy of propaganda in _Ramsey Milholland_? Perhaps it is truer to call Mr. Tarkington's plots sophomoric than to call them adolescent. Indeed, the mark of the undergraduate almost covers them, especially of the undergraduate as he fondly imagines himself in his callow days and as he is foolishly instructed to regard himself by the more vinous and more hilarious of the old graduates who annually come back to a college to offer themselves--though this is not their conscious purpose--as an object lesson in the loud triviality peculiar and traditional to such hours of reunion. Adolescence, however, when left to itself, has other and very different hours which Mr. Tarkington shows almost no signs of comprehending. The author of _Penrod_, of _Penrod and Sam_, and of _Seventeen_ passes for an expert in youth; rarely has so persistent a reputation been so insecurely founded. What all these books primarily recall is the winks that adults exchange over the heads of children who are minding their own business, as the adults are not; the winks, moreover, of adults who have forgotten the inner concerns of adolescence and now observe only its surface awkwardnesses. Real adolescence, like any other age of man, has its own passions, its own poetry, its own tragedies and felicities; the adolescence of Mr. Tarkington's tales is almost nothing but farce--staged for outsiders. Not one of the characters is an individual; they are all little monsters--amusing monsters, it is true--dressed up to display the stock ambitions and the stock resentments and the stock affectations and the stock perturbations of the heart which attend the middle teens. The pranks of Penrod Schofield are merely those of Tom Sawyer repeated in another town, without the touches of poetry or of the informing imagination lent by Mark Twain. The sighs of "Silly Bill" Baxter--at first diverting, it is also true--are exorbitantly multiplied till reality drops out of the semblance. Calf-love does not always remain a joke merely because there are mature spectators to stand by nudging one another and roaring at the discomfort which love causes its least experienced victims. Those knowing asides which accompany these juvenile records have been mistaken too often for shrewd, even for profound, analyses of human nature. Actually they are only knowing, as sophomores are knowing with respect to their juniors by a few years. In contemporary American fiction Mr. Tarkington is the perennial sophomore. If he may be said never to have outgrown Purdue and Princeton, so also may he be said never to have outgrown Indiana. In any larger sense, of course, he has not needed to. A novelist does not require a universe in which to find the universe, which lies folded, for the sufficiently perceptive eye, in any village. Thoreau and Emerson found it in Concord; Thomas Hardy in Wessex has watched the world move by without himself moving. But Mr. Tarkington has toward his native state the conscious attitude of the booster. Smile as he may at the too emphatic patriotism of this or that of her sons, he himself nevertheless expands under a similar stimulus. The impulse of Harkless to clasp all Carlow County to his broad breast obviously sprang from a mood which Mr. Tarkington himself had felt. And that impulse of that first novel has been repeated again and again in the later characters. _In the Arena_, fruit of Mr. Tarkington's term in the Indiana legislature, is a study in complacency. Setting out to take the world of politics as he finds it, he comes perilously near to ending on the note of approval for it as it stands--as good, on the whole, as any possible world. His satire, at least, is on the side of the established order. A certain soundness and rightness of feeling, a natural hearty democratic instinct, which appears in the novels, must not be allowed to mislead the analyst of his art. More than once, to his credit, he satirically recurs to the spectacle of those young Indianians who come back from their travels with a secret condescension, as did George Amberson Minafer: "His politeness was of a kind which democratic people found hard to bear. In a word, M. le Duc had returned from the gay life of the capital to show himself for a week among the loyal peasants belonging to the old chateau, and their quaint habits and costumes afforded him a mild amusement." Such passages, however, may be matched with irritating dozens in which Mr. Tarkington swallows Indiana whole. That may have been an easier task than to perform a similar feat with the state to the east of Indiana, which has always been a sort of halfway house between East and West; or with that to the north, with its many alien mixtures; or with that to the south, the picturesque, diversified colony of Virginia; or with that to the west, which, thanks in large part to Chicago, is packed with savagery and genius. Indiana, at any rate till very recently, has had an indigenous population, not too daring or nomadic; it has been both prosperous and folksy, the apt home of pastorals, the agreeable habitat of a sentimental folk-poet like Riley, the natural begetter of a canny fabulist like George Ade. It has a tradition of realism in fiction, but that tradition descends from _The Hoosier School-Master_ and it includes a full confidence in the folk and in the rural virtues--very different from that of E.W. Howe or Hamlin Garland or Edgar Lee Masters in states a little further outside the warm, cozy circle of the Hoosiers. Indiana has a tradition of romance, too. Did not Indianapolis publish _When Knighthood Was in Flower_ and _Alice of Old Vincennes_? They are of the same vintage as _Monsieur Beaucaire_. And both romance and realism in Indiana have traditionally worn the same smooth surfaces, the same simple--not to say silly--faith in things-at-large: God's in His Indiana; all's right with the world. George Ade, being a satirist of genius, has stood out of all this; Theodore Dreiser, Indianian by birth but hopelessly a rebel, has stood out against it; but Booth Tarkington, trying to be Hoosier of Hoosiers, has given himself up to the romantic and sentimental elements of the Indiana literary tradition. To practise an art which is genuinely characteristic of some section of the folk anywhere is to do what may be important and is sure to be interesting. But Mr. Tarkington no more displays the naïveté of a true folk-novelist than he displays the serene vision that can lift a novelist above the accidents of his particular time and place. This Indianian constantly appears, by his allusions, to be a citizen of the world. He knows Europe; he knows New York. Again and again, particularly in the superb opening chapters of _The Magnificent Ambersons_, he rises above the local prejudices of his special parish and observes with a finely critical eye. But whenever he comes to a crisis in the building of a plot or in the truthful representation of a character he sags down to the level of Indiana sentimentality. George Minafer departs from the Hoosier average by being a snob; time--and Mr. Tarkington's plot--drags the cub back to normality. Bibbs Sheridan departs from the Hoosier average by being a poet; time--and Mr. Tarkington's plot--drags the cub back to normality. Both processes are the same. Perhaps Mr. Tarkington would not deliberately say that snobbery and poetry are equivalent offenses, but he does not particularly distinguish. Sympathize as he may with these two aberrant youths, he knows no other solution than in the end to reduce them to the ranks. He accepts, that is, the casual Hoosier valuation, not with pity because so many of the creative hopes of youth come to naught or with regret that the flock in the end so frequently prevails over individual talent, but with a sort of exultant hurrah at seeing all the wandering sheep brought back in the last chapter and tucked safely away in the good old Hoosier fold. Viewed critically this attitude of Mr. Tarkington's is of course not even a compliment to Indiana, any more than it is a compliment to women to take always the high chivalrous tone toward them, as if they were flawless creatures; any more than it is a compliment to the poor to assume that they are all virtuous or to the rich to assume that they are all malefactors of a tyrannical disposition. If Indiana plays microcosm to Mr. Tarkington's art, he owes it to his state to find more there than he has found--or has cared to set down; he owes it to his state now and then to quarrel with the dominant majority, for majorities occasionally go wrong, as well as men; he owes it to his state to give up his method of starting his narrative himself and then calling in popular sentimentalism to advise him how to bring it to an end. According to all the codes of the more serious kinds of fiction, the unwillingness--or the inability--to conduct a plot to its legitimate ending implies some weakness in the artistic character; and this weakness has been Mr. Tarkington's principal defect. Nor does it in any way appear that he excuses himself by citing the immemorial license of the romancer. Mr. Tarkington apparently believes in his own conclusions. Now this causes the more regret for the reason that he has what is next best to character in a novelist--that is, knack. He has the knack of romance when he wants to employ it: a light, allusive manner; a sufficient acquaintance with certain charming historical epochs and the "properties" thereto pertaining--frills, ruffs, rapiers, insinuation; a considerable expertness in the ways of the "world"; gay colors, swift moods, the note of tender elegy. He has also the knack of satire, which he employs more frequently than romance. With what a rapid, joyous, accurate eye he has surveyed the processes of culture in "the Midland town"! How quickly he catches the first gesture of affectation and how deftly he sets it forth, entertained and entertaining! From the chuckling exordium of _The Magnificent Ambersons_ it is but a step to _The Age of Innocence_ and _Main Street_. Little reflective as he has allowed himself to be, he has by shrewd observation alone succeeded in writing not a few chapters which have texture, substance, "thickness." He has movement, he has energy, he has invention, he has good temper, he has the leisure to write as well as he can if he wishes to. And, unlike those dozens of living American writers who once each wrote one good book and then lapsed into dull oblivion or duller repetition, he has traveled a long way from the methods of his greener days. Why then does he continue to trifle with his thread-bare adolescents, as if he were afraid to write candidly about his coevals? Why does he drift with the sentimental tide and make propaganda for provincial complacency? He must know better. He can do better. _February 1921._ POSTSCRIPT.--He has done better. Almost as if to prove a somewhat somber critic in the wrong and to show that newer novelists have no monopoly of the new style of seriousness, Mr. Tarkington has in _Alice Adams_ held himself veracious to the end and has produced a genuinely significant book. Alice is, indeed, less strictly a tragic figure than she appears to be. Desire, in any of the deeper senses, she shows no signs of feeling; what she loves in Russell is but incidentally himself and actually his assured position and his assured prosperity. So considered, her machinations to enchant and hold him have a comic aspect; one touch more of exaggeration and she would pass over to join those sorry ladies of the world of farce who take a larger visible hand in wooing than human customs happen to approve. But Mr. Tarkington withholds that one touch more of exaggeration. He understands that Alice's instinct to win a husband is an instinct as powerful as any that she has and is all that she has been taught by her society to have. In his handling she becomes important; her struggle, without the aid of guardian dowager or beguiling dot, becomes increasingly pathetic as the narrative advances; and her eventual failure, though signalized merely by her resolution to desert the inhospitable circles of privilege for the wider universe of work, carries with it the sting of tragedy. Mr. Tarkington might have gone further than he has behind the bourgeois assumptions which his story takes for granted, but he has probably been wiser not to. Sticking to familiar territory, he writes with the confident touch of a man unconfused by speculation. His style is still swift, still easy, still flexible, still accurate in its conformity to the vernacular. He attempts no sentimental detours and permits himself no popular superfluities. He has retained all his tried qualities of observation and dexterity while admitting to his work the element of a sterner conscience than it has heretofore betrayed. With the honesty of his conclusion goes the mingling of mirth and sadness in _Alice Adams_ as another trait of its superiority. The manners of the young which have always seemed so amusing to Mr. Tarkington and which he has kept on watching and laughing at as his principal material, now practically for the first time have evoked from him a considerate sense of the pathos of youth. It strengthens the pathos of Alice's fate that the comedy holds out so well; it enlarges the comedy of it that its pathos is so essential to the action. Even the most comic things have their tears. _August 1921._ 2. EDITH WHARTON At the outset of the twentieth century O. Henry, in a mood of reaction from current snobbism, discovered what he called the Four Million; and during the same years, in a mood not wholly different, Edith Wharton rediscovered what she would never have called the Four Hundred. Or rather she made known to the considerable public which peeps at fashionable New York through the obliging windows of fiction that that world was not so simple in its magnificence as the inquisitive, but uninstructed, had been led to believe. Behind the splendors reputed to characterize the great, she testified on almost every page of her books, lay certain arcana which if much duller were also much more desirable. Those splendors were merely as noisy brass to the finer metal of the authentic inner circles. These were very small, and they suggested an American aristocracy rather less than they suggested the aborigines of their native continent. Ralph Marvell in _The Custom of the Country_ described Washington Square as the "Reservation," and prophesied that "before long its inhabitants would be exhibited at ethnological shows, pathetically engaged in the exercise of their primitive industries." Mrs. Wharton has exhibited them in the exercise of industries not precisely primitive, and yet aboriginal enough, very largely concerned in turning shapely shoulders to the hosts of Americans anxious and determined to invade their ancient reservations. As the success of the women in keeping new aspirants out of drawing-room and country house has always been greater than the success of the men in keeping them out of Wall Street, the aboriginal aristocracy in Mrs. Wharton's novels transacts its affairs for the most part in drawing-rooms and country houses. There, however, to judge by _The House of Mirth_, _The Custom of the Country_, and _The Age of Innocence_, the life of the inhabitants, far from being a continuous revel as represented by the popular novelists, is marked by nothing so much as an uncompromising decorum. Take the case of Lily Bart in _The House of Mirth_. She goes to pieces on the rocks of that decorum, though she has every advantage of birth except a fortune, and knows the rules of the game perfectly. But she cannot follow them with the impeccable equilibrium which is needful; she has the Aristotelian hero's fatal defect of a single weakness. In that golden game not to go forward is to fall behind. Lily Bart hesitates, oscillates, and is lost. Having left her appointed course, she finds on trying to return to her former society that it is little less impermeable to her than she has seen rank outsiders find it. Then there is Undine Spragg in _The Custom of the Country_, who, marrying and divorcing with the happy insensibility of the animals that mate for a season only, undertakes to force her brilliant, barren beauty into the centers of the elect. Such beauty as hers can purchase much, thanks to the desires of men, and Undine, thanks to her own blindness as regards all delicate disapproval, comes within sight of her goal. But in the end she fails. The custom of her country--Apex City and the easy-going West--is not the decorum of New York reinforced by European examples. Newland Archer and Ellen Olenska in _The Age of Innocence_ neither lose nor seek an established position within the social mandarinate of Manhattan as constituted in the seventies of the last century. They belong there and there they remain. But at what sacrifices of personal happiness and spontaneous action! They walk through their little drama with the unadventurous stride of puppets; they observe dozens of taboos with a respect allied to terror. It is true that they appear to have been the victims of the provincial "innocence" of their generation, but the newer generation in New York is not entirely acquitted of a certain complicity in the formalism of its past. From the first Mrs. Wharton's power has lain in the ability to reproduce in fiction the circumstances of a compact community in a way that illustrates the various oppressions which such communities put upon individual vagaries, whether viewed as sin, or ignorance, or folly, or merely as social impossibility. She has, of course, studied other communities than New York: the priest-ridden Italy of the eighteenth century in _The Valley of Decision_; modern France in _Madame de Treymes_ and _The Reef_; provincial New England in _The Fruit of the Tree_. What characterizes the New York novels characterizes these others as well: a sense of human beings living in such intimate solidarity that no one of them may vary from the customary path without in some fashion breaking the pattern and inviting some sort of disaster. Novels written out of this conception of existence fall ordinarily into partizanship, either on the side of the individual who leaves his herd or on the side of the herd which runs him down or shuts him out for good. Mrs. Wharton has always been singularly unpartizan, as if she recognized it as no duty of hers to do more for the herd or its members than to play over the spectacle of their clashes the long, cold light of her magnificent irony. At the same time, however, her attitude toward New York society, her most frequent theme, has slightly changed. _The House of Mirth_, published in 1905, glows with certain of the colors of the grand style. These appear hardly at all in _The Age of Innocence_, published in 1920, as if Mrs. Wharton's feeling for ceremony had diminished, as if the grand style no longer found her so susceptible as formerly. Possibly her advance in satire may arise from nothing more significant than her retreat into the past for a subject. Nevertheless, one step forward could make her an invaluable satirist of the current hour. Among Mrs. Wharton's novels are two--_Ethan Frome_ and _Summer_--which unfold the tragedy of circumstances apparently as different as possible from those chronicled in the New York novels. Her fashionable New York and her rural New England, however, have something in common. In the desolate communities which witness the agonies of Ethan Frome and Charity Royall not only is there a stubborn village decorum but there are also the bitter compulsions of a helpless poverty which binds feet and wings as the most ruthless decorum cannot bind them, and which dulls all the hues of life to an unendurable dinginess. As a member of the class which spends prosperous vacations on the old soil of the Puritans Mrs. Wharton has surveyed the cramped lives of the native remnant with a pity springing from her knowledge of all the freedom and beauty and pleasure which they miss. She consequently brings into her narrative an outlook not to be found in any of the novelists who write of rural New England out of the erudition which comes of more intimate acquaintanceship. Without filing down her characters into types she contrives to lift them into universal figures of aspiration or disappointment. In _Ethan Frome_, losing from her clear voice for a moment the note of satire, she reaches her highest point of tragic passion. In the bleak life of Ethan Frome on his bleak hillside there blooms an exquisite love which during a few hours of rapture promises to transform his fate; but poverty clutches him, drives him to attempt suicide with the woman he loves, and then condemns him to one of the most appalling expiations in fiction--to a slavery in comparison with which his former life was almost freedom. Not since Hawthorne has a novelist built on the New England soil a tragedy of such elevation of mood as this. Freed from the bondage of local color, that myopic muse, Mrs. Wharton here handles her material not so much like a quarryman finding curious stones and calling out about them as like a sculptor setting up his finished work on a commanding hill. It has regularly been by her novels that Mrs. Wharton has attracted the most attention, and yet her short stories are of a quite comparable excellence. About fifty of them altogether, they show her swift, ironical intelligence flashing its light into numerous corners of human life not large enough to warrant prolonged reports. She can go as far afield as to the ascetic ecstasies and agonies of medieval religion, in _The Hermit and the Wild Woman_; or as to the horrible revenge of Duke Ercole of Vicenza, in _The Duchess at Prayer_; or as to the murder and witchcraft of seventeenth-century Brittany, in _Kerfol_. _Kerfol_, _Afterward_, and _The Lady's Maid's Bell_ are as good ghost stories as any written in many years. _Bunner Sisters_, an observant, tender narrative, concerns itself with the declining fortunes of two shopkeepers of Stuyvesant Square in New York's age of innocence. For the most part, however, the locality and temper of Mrs. Wharton's briefer stories are not so remote as these from the center of her particular world, wherein subtle and sophisticated people stray in the crucial mazes of art or learning or love. Her artists and scholars are likely to be shown at some moment in which a passionate ideal is in conflict with a lower instinct toward profit or reputation, as when in _The Descent of Man_ an eminent scientist turns his feet ruinously into the wide green descent to "popular" science, or as when in _The Verdict_ a fashionable painter of talent encounters the work of an obscure genius and gives up his own career in the knowledge that at best he can never do but third-rate work. Some such stress of conflict marks almost all Mrs. Wharton's stories of love, which make up the overwhelming majority of her work. Love with her in but few cases runs the smooth course coincident with flawless matrimony. It cuts violently across the boundaries drawn by marriages of convenience, and it suffers tragic changes in the objects of its desire. What opportunity has a free, wilful passion in the tight world Mrs. Wharton prefers to represent? Either its behavior must be furtive and hypocritical or else it must incur social disaster. Here again Mrs. Wharton will not be partizan. If in one story--such as _The Long Run_--she seems to imply that there is no ignominy like that of failing love when it comes, yet in another--such as _Souls Belated_--she sets forth the costs and the entanglements that ensue when individuals take love into their own hands and defy society. Not love for itself but love as the most frequent and most personal of all the passions which bring the community into clashes with its members--this is the subject of Mrs. Wharton's curiosity and study. Her only positive conclusions about it, as reflected in her stories, seem to be that love cuts deepest in the deepest natures and yet that no one is quite so shallow as to love and recover from it without a scar. Divorce, according to her representations, can never be quite complete; one of her most amusing stories, _The Other Two_, recounts how the third husband of a woman whose first two husbands are still living gradually resolves her into her true constituency and finds nothing there but what one husband after another has made of her. In stories like this Mrs. Wharton occasionally leaves the restraint of her ordinary manner to wear the keener colors of the satirist. _Xingu_, for instance, with its famous opening sentence--"Mrs. Ballinger is one of the ladies who pursue Culture in bands, as though it were dangerous to meet alone"--has the flash and glitter, and the agreeable artificiality, of polite comedy. Undine Spragg and the many futile women whom Mrs. Wharton enjoys ridiculing more than she gives evidence of enjoying anything else belong nearly as much to the menagerie of the satirist as to the novelist's gallery. It is only in these moments of satire that Mrs. Wharton reveals much about her disposition: her impatience with stupidity and affectation and muddy confusion of mind and purpose; her dislike of dinginess; her toleration of arrogance when it is high-bred. Such qualities do not help her, for all her spare, clean movement, to achieve the march or rush of narrative; such qualities, for all her satiric pungency, do not bring her into sympathy with the sturdy or burly or homely, or with the broader aspects of comedy. Lucidity, detachment, irony--these never desert her (though she wrote with the hysterical pen that hundreds used during the war). So great is her self-possession that she holds criticism at arm's length, somewhat as her chosen circles hold the barbarians. If she had a little less of this pride of dignity she might perhaps avoid her tendency to assign to decorum a larger power than it actually exercises, even in the societies about which she writes. Decorum, after all, is binding chiefly upon those who accept it without question but not upon passionate or logical rebels, who are always shattering it with some touch of violence or neglect; neither does it bind those who stand too securely to be shaken. For this reason the coils of circumstance and the pitfalls of inevitability with which Mrs. Wharton besets the careers of her characters are in part an illusion deftly employed for the sake of artistic effect. She multiplies them as romancers multiply adventures. The illusion of reality in her work, however, almost never fails her, so alertly is her mind on the lookout to avoid vulgar or shoddy romantic elements. Compared to Henry James, her principal master in fiction, whom she resembles in respect to subjects and attitude, she lacks exuberance and richness of texture, but she has more intelligence than he. Compared to Jane Austen, the novelist among Anglo-Saxon women whom Mrs. Wharton most resembles, particularly as regards satire and decorum, she is the more impassioned of the two. It may seem at first thought a little strange to compare the vivid novels of the author of _The House of Mirth_ with the mouse-colored narratives of the author of _Pride and Prejudice_, for the twentieth century has added to all fiction many overtones not heard in the eighteenth. But of no other woman writer since Jane Austen can it be said quite so truthfully as of Mrs. Wharton that her natural, instinctive habitat is a true tower of irony. 3. JAMES BRANCH CABELL Although most novelists with any historical or scholarly hankerings are satisfied to invent here a scene and there a plot and elsewhere an authority, James Branch Cabell has invented a whole province for his imagination to dwell in. He calls it Poictesme and sets it on the map of medieval Europe, but it has no more unity of time and place than has the multitudinous land of _The Faerie Queene_. Around the reigns of Dom Manuel, Count and Redeemer of Poictesme, epic hero of _Figures of Earth_, father of the heroine in _The Soul of Melicent_ (later renamed _Domnei_), father of that Dorothy la Desirée whom Jurgen loved (with some other women), father also of that Count Emmerich who succeeded Manuel as ruler at Bellegarde and Storisende--around the reigns of Manuel and Emmerich the various sagas of Mr. Cabell principally revolve. Scandinavia, however, conveniently impinges upon their province, with Constantinople and Barbary, Massilia, Aquitaine, Navarre, Portugal, Rome, England, Paris, Alexandria, Arcadia, Olympus, Asgard, and the Jerusalems Old and New. As many ages of history likewise converge upon Poictesme in its ostensible thirteenth or fourteenth century, from the most mythological times only a little this side of Creation to the most contemporary America of Felix Kennaston who lives at comfortable Lichfield with two motors and with money in four banks but in his mind habitually bridges the gap by imagined excursions into Poictesme and the domains adjacent. Nothing but remarkable erudition in the antiquities as Cockaigne and Faery could possibly suffice for such adventures as Mr. Cabell's, and he has very remarkable erudition in all that concerns the regions which delight him. And where no authorities exist he merrily invents them, as in the case of his Nicolas of Caen, poet of Normandy, whose tales _Dizain des Reines_ are said to furnish the source for the ten stories collected in _Chivalry_, and whose largely lost masterpiece _Le Roman de Lusignan_ serves as the basis for _Domnei_. One British critic and rival of Mr. Cabell has lately fretted over the unblushing anachronisms and confused geography of this parti-colored world. For less dull-witted scholars these are the very cream of the Cabellian jest. The cream but not the substance, for Mr. Cabell has a profound creed of comedy rooted in that romance which is his regular habit. Romance, indeed, first exercised his imagination, in the early years of the century when in many minds he was associated with the decorative Howard Pyle and allowed his pen to move at the languid gait then characteristic of a dozen inferior romancers. Only gradually did his texture grow firmer, his tapestry richer; only gradually did his gaiety strengthen into irony. Although that irony was the progenitor of the comic spirit which now in his maturity dominates him, it has never shaken off the romantic elements which originally nourished it. Rather, romance and irony have grown up in his work side by side. His Poictesme is no less beautiful for having come to be a country of disillusion; nor has his increasing sense of the futility of desire robbed him of his old sense that desire is a glory while it lasts. He allows John Charteris in _Beyond Life_--for the most part Mr. Cabell's mouthpiece--to set forth the doctrine that romance is the real demiurge, "the first and loveliest daughter of human vanity," whereby mankind is duped--and exalted. "No one on the preferable side of Bedlam wishes to be reminded of what we are in actuality, even were it possible, by any disastrous miracle, ever to dispel the mist which romance has evoked about all human doings." Therefore romance has created the "dynamic illusions" of chivalry and love and common sense and religion and art and patriotism and optimism, and therein "the ape reft of his tail and grown rusty at climbing" has clothed himself so long that as he beholds himself in the delusive mirrors he has for centuries held up to nature he believes he is somehow of cosmic importance. Poor and naked as this aspiring ape must seem to the eye of reason, asks Mr. Cabell, is there not something magnificent about his imaginings? Does the course of human life not singularly resemble the dance of puppets in the hands of a Supreme Romancer? How, then, may any one declare that romance has become antiquated or can ever cease to be indispensable to mortal character and mortal interest? The difference between Mr. Cabell and the popular romancers who in all ages clutter the scene and for whom he has nothing but amused contempt is that they are unconscious dupes of the demiurge whereas he, aware of its ways and its devices, employs it almost as if it were some hippogriff bridled by him in Elysian pastures and respectfully entertained in a snug Virginian stable. His attitude toward romance suggests a cheerful despair: he despairs of ever finding anything truer than romance and so contents himself with Poictesme and its tributaries. The favorite themes of romance being relatively few, he has not troubled greatly to increase them; war and love in the main he finds enough. Besides these, however, he has always been deeply occupied with one other theme--the plight of the poet in the world. That sturdy bruiser Dom Manuel, for instance, is at heart a poet who molds figures out of clay as his strongest passion, although the world, according to its custom, conspires against his instinct by interrupting him with love and war and business, and in the end hustles him away before he has had time to make anything more lovely or lasting than a reputation as a hero. In the amazing fantasy _The Cream of the Jest_ Mr. Cabell has embodied the visions of the romancer Felix Kennaston so substantially that Kennaston's diurnal walks in Lichfield seem hardly as real as those nightly ventures which under the guise of Horvendile he makes into the glowing land he has created. Nor are the two universes separated by any tight wall which the fancy must leap over: they flow with exquisite caprice one into another, as indeed they always do in the consciousness of a poet who, like Kennaston or Mr. Cabell, broods continually over the problem how best to perform his function: "to write perfectly of beautiful happenings." Of all the fine places in the world where beautiful happenings come together, Mr. Cabell argues, incomparably the richest is in the consciousness of a poet who is also a scholar. There are to be found the precious hoarded memories of some thousands of years: high deeds and burning loves and eloquent words and surpassing tears and laughter. There, consequently, the romancer may well take his stand, distilling bright new dreams out of ancient beauty. And if he adds the heady tonic of an irony springing from a critical intelligence, so much the better. When Mr. Cabell wishes to represent several different epochs in _The Certain Hour_ he chooses to tell ten stories of poets--real or imagined--as the persons in whom, by reason of their superior susceptibility, the color of their epochs may be most truthfully discovered; and when he wishes to decant his own wit and wisdom most genuinely the vessel he normally employs is a poet. If the poets and warriors who make up the list of Mr. Cabell's heroes devote their lives almost wholly to love, it is for the reason that no other emotion interests him so much or seems to him to furnish so many beautiful happenings about which to write perfectly. Love, like art, is a species of creation, and the moods which attend it, though illusions, are miracles none the less. Of the two aspects of love which especially attract Mr. Cabell he has given the larger share of his attention to the extravagant worship of women ("domnei") developed out of chivalry--the worship which began by ascribing to the beloved the qualities of purity and perfection, of beauty and holiness, and ended by practically identifying her with the divine. This supernal folly reaches its apogee in _Domnei_, in the careers of Perion and Melicent who are so uplifted by ineffable desire that their souls ceaselessly reach out to each other though obstacles large as continents intervene. For Perion the most deadly battles are but thornpricks in the quest of Melicent; and such is Melicent's loyalty during the years of her longing that the possession of her most white body by Demetrios of Anatolia leaves her soul immaculate and almost unperturbed. In this tale love is canonized: throned on alabaster above all the vulgar gods it diffuses among its worshipers a crystal radiance in which mortal imperfections perish--or are at least forgotten during certain rapturous hours. Ordinarily one cynical touch will break such pretty bubbles; but Mr. Cabell, himself a master of cynical touches and shrewdly anticipant of them, protects his invention with the competent armor of irony, and now and then--particularly in the felicitous tenson spoken by Perion and Demetrios concerning the charms of Melicent--brings mirth and beauty to an amalgam which bids fair to prove classic metal. A much larger share of this mirth appears in _Jurgen_, which narrates with phallic candor the exploits of a middle-aged pawnbroker of Poictesme in pursuit of immortal desire. Of course he does not find it, for the sufficient reason that, as Mr. Cabell understands such matters, the ultimate magic of desire lies in the inaccessibility of the desired; and Jurgen, to whom all women in his amorous Cockaigne are as accessible as bread and butter, after his sly interval of rejuvenation comes back in the end to his wife and his humdrum duty with a definite relief. He may be no more in love with Dame Lisa than with his right hand, and yet both are considerably more necessary to his well-being, he discovers, than a number of more exciting things. Love in _Jurgen_ inclines toward another aspect of the passion which Mr. Cabell has studied somewhat less than the chivalrous--the aspect of gallantry. "I have read," says John Charteris, "that the secret of gallantry is to accept the pleasures of life leisurely, and its inconveniences with a shrug; as well as that, among other requisites, the gallant person will always consider the world with a smile of toleration, and his own doings with a smile of honest amusement, and Heaven with a smile which is not distrustful--being thoroughly persuaded that God is kindlier than the genteel would regard as rational." These are the accents, set to slightly different rhythms, of a Congreve; and if there is anything as remarkable about Mr. Cabell as the fact that he has represented the chivalrous and the gallant attitudes toward love with nearly equal sympathy, it is the fact that in an era of militant naturalism and of renascent moralism he has blithely adhered to an affection for unconcerned worldliness and has airily played Congreve in the midst of all the clamorous, serious, disquisitive bassoons of the national orchestra. In _The Cords of Vanity_ Robert Townsend goes gathering roses and tasting lips almost as if the second Charles were still the lawful ruler of his obedient province of Virginia; and in _The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck_ Rudolph Musgrave, that quaint figure whittled out of chivalry and dressed up in amiable heroics, is plainly contrasted with the glib rogue of genius John Charteris, who, elsewhere in Mr. Cabell's books generally the chorus, here enters the plot and exhibits a sorry gallantry in action. Poictesme, these novels indicate, is not the only country Mr. Cabell knows; he knows also how to feel at home, when he cares to, in the mimic universe of Lichfield and Fairhaven, where gay ribbons perpetually flutter, and where eyes and hands perpetually invite, and where love runs a deft, dainty, fickle course in all weathers. That Felix Kennaston inhabits Lichfield in the flesh and in the spirit elopes into Poictesme may be taken, after a fashion, as allegory with an autobiographical foundation: _The Cream of the Jest_ is, on the whole, the essence of Cabell. The book suggests, moreover, a critical position--which is, that gallantry and Virginia have so far been regrettably sacrificed to chivalry and Poictesme in the career of Mr. Cabell's imagination. Not only the symmetry expected of that career demands something different; so does its success with the gallantries of Lichfield. In spite of all Mr. Cabell's accumulation of erudite allusions the atmosphere of his Poictesme often turns thin and leaves his characters gasping for vital breath; nor does he entirely restore it by multiplying symbols as he does in _Jurgen_ and _Figures of Earth_ until the background of his narrative is studded with rich images and piquant chimeras that perplex more than they illuminate--and sometimes bore. These chivalric loves beating their heads against the cold moon are, after all, follies, however supernal; they are as brief as they are bright; in the end even the greedy Jurgen turns back to honest salt from too much sugar. Now in gallantry as Mr. Cabell conceives and represents it there is always the salt of prudence, of satire, of comedy; and his gifts in this direction are too great to be neglected. The comic spirit, let it be remembered, has led Mr. Cabell from the softness and sweetness which in spots disfigured his earlier romances--such as _The Line of Love and Chivalry_--before he recently revised them; it has happily kept in hand the wild wings of his later love stories; now it deserves to have its way unburdened, at least occasionally. While it almost had its way in Jurgen, where it behaved like a huge organ bursting into uproarious laughter, it still had to carry the burden of much learning. It would be freer of such delectable plunder could it once burst into uproar in the midst of Virginia. Mr. Cabell has singled out two very dissimilar poets for particular compliment: Marlowe and Congreve. As regards the still more particular compliment of imitation, however, he has done Congreve rather less than justice. 4. WILLA CATHER When Willa Cather dedicated her first novel, _O Pioneers!_, to the memory of Sarah Orne Jewett, she pointed out a link of natural piety binding her to a literary ancestor now rarely credited with descendants so robust. The link holds even yet in respect to the clear outlines and fresh colors and simple devices of Miss Cather's art; in respect to the body and range of her work it never really held. The thin, fine gentility which Miss Jewett celebrates is no further away from the rich vigor of Miss Cather's pioneers than is the kindly sentiment of the older woman from the native passion of the younger. Miss Jewett wrote of the shadows of memorable events. Once upon a time, her stories all remind us, there was an heroic cast to New England. In Miss Jewett's time only the echoes of those Homeric days made any noise in the world--at least for her ears and the ears of most of her literary contemporaries. Unmindful of the roar of industrial New England she kept to the milder regions of her section and wrote elegies upon the epigones. In Miss Cather's quarter of the country there were still heroes during the days she has written about, still pioneers. The sod and swamps of her Nebraska prairies defy the hands of labor almost as obstinately as did the stones and forests of old New England. Her Americans, like all the Agamemnons back of Miss Jewett's world, are fresh from Europe, locked in a mortal conflict with nature. If now and then the older among them grow faint at remembering Bohemia or France or Scandinavia, this is not the predominant mood of their communities. They ride powerfully forward on a wave of confident energy, as if human life had more dawns than sunsets in it. For the most part her pioneers are unreflective creatures, driven by some inner force which they do not comprehend: they are, that is perhaps no more than to say, primitive and epic in their dispositions. Is it by virtue of a literary descent from the New England school that Miss Cather depends so frequently upon women as protagonists? Alexandra Bergson in _O Pioneers!_, Thea Kronborg in _The Song of the Lark_, Ántonia Shimerda in _My Ántonia_--around these as girls and women the actions primarily revolve. It is not, however, as other Helens or Gudruns that they affect their universes; they are not the darlings of heroes but heroes themselves. Alexandra drags her dull brothers after her and establishes the family fortunes; Ántonia, less positive and more pathetic, still holds the center of her retired stage by her rich, warm, deep goodness; Thea, a genius in her own right, outgrows her Colorado birthplace and becomes a famous singer with all the fierce energy of a pioneer who happens to be an instinctive artist rather than an instinctive manager, like Alexandra, or an instinctive mother, like Ántonia. And is it because women are here protagonists that neither wars, as among the ancients, nor machines, as among the moderns, promote the principal activities of the characters? Less the actions than the moods of these novels have the epic air. Narrow as Miss Cather's scene may be, she fills it with a spaciousness and candor of personality that quite transcends the gnarled eccentricity and timid inhibitions of the local colorists. Passion blows through her chosen characters like a free, wholesome, if often devastating wind; it does not, as with Miss Jewett and her contemporaries, lurk in furtive corners or hide itself altogether. And as these passions are most commonly the passions of home-keeping women, they lie nearer to the core of human existence than if they arose out of the complexities of a wider region. Something more than Miss Cather's own experience first upon the frontier and then among artists and musicians has held her almost entirely to those two worlds as the favored realms of her imagination. In them, rather than in bourgeois conditions, she finds the theme most congenial to her interest and to her powers. That theme is the struggle of some elect individual to outgrow the restrictions laid upon him--or more frequently her--by numbing circumstances. The early, somewhat inconsequential _Alexander's Bridge_ touches this theme, though Bartley Alexander, like the bridge he is building, fails under the strain, largely by reason of a flawed simplicity and a divided energy. Pioneers and artists, in Miss Cather's understanding of their natures, are practically equals in single-mindedness; at least they work much by themselves, contending with definite though ruthless obstacles and looking forward, if they win, to a freedom which cannot be achieved in the routine of crowded communities. To become too much involved, for her characters, is to lose their quality. There is Marie Tovesky, in _O Pioneers!_, whom nothing more preventable than her beauty and gaiety drags into a confused status and so on to catastrophe. Ántonia, tricked into a false relation by her scoundrel lover, and Alexandra, nagged at by her stodgy family because her suitor is poor, suffer temporary eclipses from which only their superb health of character finally extricates them. Thea Kronborg, troubled by the swarming sensations of her first year in Chicago, has to find her true self again in that marvelous desert canyon in Arizona where hot sun and bright, cold water and dim memories of the cliff-dwelling Ancient People detach her from the stupid faces which have haunted and unnerved her. Miss Cather would not belong to her generation if she did not resent the trespasses which the world regularly commits upon pioneers and artists. For all the superb vitality of her frontier, it faces--and she knows it faces--the degradation of its wild freedom and beauty by clumsy towns, obese vulgarity, the uniform of a monotonous standardization. Her heroic days endure but a brief period before extinction comes. Then her high-hearted pioneers survive half as curiosities in a new order; and their spirits, transmitted to the artists who are their legitimate successors, take up the old struggle in a new guise. In the short story called _The Sculptor's Funeral_ she lifts her voice in swift anger and in _A Gold Slipper_ she lowers it to satirical contempt against the dull souls who either misread distinction or crassly overlook it. At such moments she enlists in the crusade against dulness which has recently succeeded the hereditary crusade of American literature against wickedness. But from too complete an absorption in that transient war she is saved by the same strength which has lifted her above the more trivial concerns of local color. The older school uncritically delighted in all the village singularities it could discover; the newer school no less uncritically condemns and ridicules all the village conventionalities. Miss Cather has seldom swung far either to the right or to the left in this controversy. She has, apparently, few revenges to take upon the communities in which she lived during her expanding youth. An eye bent too relentlessly upon dulness could have found it in Alexandra Bergson, with her slow, unimaginative thrift; or in Ántonia Shimerda, who is a "hired girl" during the days of her tenderest beauty and the hard-worked mother of many children on a distant farm to the end of the story. Miss Cather, almost alone among her peers in this decade, understands that human character for its own sake has a claim upon human interest, surprisingly irrespective of the moral or intellectual qualities which of course condition and shape it. "Her secret?" says Harsanyi of Thea Kronborg in _The Song of the Lark_. "It is every artist's secret ... passion. It is an open secret, and perfectly safe. Like heroism, it is inimitable in cheap materials." In these words Miss Cather furnishes an admirable commentary upon the strong yet subtle art which she herself practises. Fiction habitually strives to reproduce passion and heroism and in all but chosen instances falls below the realities because it has not truly comprehended them or because it tries to copy them in cheap materials. It is not Miss Cather's lucid intelligence alone, though that too is indispensable, which has kept her from these ordinary blunders of the novelist: she herself has the energy which enables her to feel passion and the honesty which enables her to reproduce it. Something of the large tolerance which she must have felt in Whitman before she borrowed from him the title of _O Pioneers!_ breathes in all her work. Like him she has tasted the savor of abounding health; like him she has exulted in the sense of vast distances, the rapture of the green earth rolling through space, the consciousness of past and future striking hands in the radiant present; like him she enjoys "powerful uneducated persons" both as the means to a higher type and as ends honorable in themselves. At the same time she does not let herself run on in the ungirt dithyrambs of Whitman or into his followers' glorification of sheer bulk and impetus. Taste and intelligence hold her passion in hand. It is her distinction that she combines the merits of those oddly matched progenitors, Miss Jewett and Walt Whitman: she has the delicate tact to paint what she sees with clean, quiet strokes; and she has the strength to look past casual surfaces to the passionate center of her characters. The passion of the artist, the heroism of the pioneer--these are the human qualities Miss Cather knows best. Compared with her artists the artists of most of her contemporaries seem imitated in cheap materials. They suffer, they rebel, they gesticulate, they pose, they fail through success, they succeed through failure; but only now and then do they have the breathing, authentic reality of Miss Cather's painters and musicians. Musicians she knows best among artists--perhaps has been most interested in them and has associated most with them because of the heroic vitality which a virtuoso must have to achieve any real eminence. The poet may languish over verses in his garret, the painter or sculptor over work conceived and executed in a shy privacy; but the great singer must be an athlete and an actor, training for months and years for the sake of a few hours of triumph before a throbbing audience. It is, therefore, not upon the revolt of Thea Kronborg from her Colorado village that Miss Cather lays her chief stress but upon the girl's hard, unspeculative, daemonic integrity. She lifts herself from alien conditions hardly knowing what she does, almost as a powerful animal shoulders its instinctive way through scratching underbrush to food and water. Thea may be checked and delayed by all sorts of human complications but her deeper nature never loses the sense of its proper direction. Ambition with her is hardly more than the passion of self-preservation in a potent spirit. That Miss Cather no less truly understands the quieter attributes of heroism is made evident by the career of Ántonia Shimerda--of Miss Cather's heroines the most appealing. Ántonia exhibits the ordinary instincts of self-preservation hardly at all. She is gentle and confiding; service to others is the very breath of her being. Yet so deep and strong is the current of motherhood which runs in her that it extricates her from the level of mediocrity as passion itself might fail to do. Goodness, so often negative and annoying, amounts in her to an heroic effluence which imparts the glory of reality to all it touches. "She lent herself to immemorial human attitudes which we recognize as universal and true.... She had only to stand in the orchard, to put her hand on a little crab tree and look up at the apples, to make you feel the goodness of planting and tending and harvesting at last.... She was a rich mine of life, like the founders of early races." It is not easy even to say things so illuminating about a human being; it is all but impossible to create one with such sympathetic art that words like these at the end confirm and interpret an impression already made. _My Ántonia_, following _O Pioneers!_ and _The Song of the Lark_, holds out a promise for future development that the work of but two or three other established American novelists holds out. Miss Cather's recent volume of short stories _Youth and the Bright Medusa_, striking though it is, represents, it may be hoped, but an interlude in her brilliant progress. Such passion as hers only rests itself in brief tales and satire; then it properly takes wing again to larger regions of the imagination. Vigorous as it is, its further course cannot easily be foreseen; it has not the kind of promise that can be discounted by confident expectations. Her art, however, to judge it by its past career, can be expected to move in the direction of firmer structure and clearer outline. After all she has written but three novels and it is not to be wondered at that they all have about them certain of the graceful angularities of an art not yet complete. _O Pioneers!_ contains really two stories; _The Song of the Lark_, though Miss Cather cut away an entire section at the end, does not maintain itself throughout at the full pitch of interest; the introduction to _My Ántonia_ is largely superfluous. Having freed herself from the bondage of "plot" as she has freed herself from an inheritance of the softer sentiments, Miss Cather has learned that the ultimate interest of fiction inheres in character. It is a question whether she can ever reach the highest point of which she shows signs of being capable unless she makes up her mind that it is as important to find the precise form for the representation of a memorable character as it is to find the precise word for the expression of a memorable idea. At present she pleads that if she must sacrifice something she would rather it were form than reality. If she desires sufficiently she can have both. 5. JOSEPH HERGESHEIMER Joseph Hergesheimer employs his creative strategy over the precarious terrain of the decorative arts, some of his work lying on each side of the dim line which separates the most consummate artifice of which the hands of talent are capable from the essential art which springs naturally from the instincts of genius. On the side of artifice, certainly, lie several of the shorter stories in _Gold and Iron_ and _The Happy End_, for which, he declares, his grocer is as responsible as any one; and on the side of art, no less certainly, lie at least _Java Head_, in which artifice, though apparent now and then, repeatedly surrenders the field to an art which is admirably authentic, and _Linda Condon_, nearly the most beautiful American novel since Hawthorne and Henry James. Standing thus in a middle ground between art and artifice Mr. Hergesheimer stands also in a middle ground between the unrelieved realism of the newer school of American fiction and the genteel moralism of the older. "I had been spared," he says with regard to moralism, "the dreary and impertinent duty of improving the world; the whole discharge of my responsibility was contained in the imperative obligation to see with relative truth, to put down the colors and scents and emotions of existence." And with regard to realism: "If I could put on paper an apple tree rosy with blossom, someone else might discuss the economy of the apples." Mr. Hergesheimer does not, of course, merely blunder into beauty; his methods are far from being accidental; by deliberate aims and principles he holds himself close to the regions of the decorative. He likes the rococo and the Victorian, ornament without any obvious utility, grace without any busy function. He refuses to feel confident that the passing of elegant privilege need be a benefit: "A maze of clipped box, old emerald sod, represented a timeless striving for superiority, for, at least, the illusion of triumph over the littorals of slime; and their destruction in waves of hysteria, sentimentality, and envy was immeasurably disastrous." For himself he clings sturdily, ardently, to loveliness wherever he finds it--preferring, however, its richer, its elaborated forms. To borrow an antithesis remarked by a brilliant critic in the work of Amy Lowell, Mr. Hergesheimer seems at times as much concerned with the stuffs as with the stuff of life. His landscapes, his interiors, his costumes he sets forth with a profusion of exquisite details which gives his texture the semblance of brocade--always gorgeous but now and then a little stiff with its splendors of silk and gold. An admitted personal inclination to "the extremes of luxury" struggles in Mr. Hergesheimer with an artistic passion for "words as disarmingly simple as the leaves of spring--as simple and as lovely in pure color--about the common experience of life and death"; and more than anything else this conflict explains the presence in all but his finest work of occasional heavy elements which weight it down and the presence in his most popular narratives of a constant lift of beauty and lucidity which will not let them sag into the average. One comes tolerably close to the secret of Mr. Hergesheimer's career by perceiving that, with an admirable style of which he is both conscious and--very properly--proud, he has looked luxuriously through the world for subjects which his style will fit. Particularly has he emancipated himself from bondage to nook and corner. The small inland towns of _The Lay Anthony_, the blue Virginia valleys of _Mountain Blood_, the evolving Pennsylvania iron districts of _The Three Black Pennys_, the antique Massachusetts of _Java Head_, the fashionable hotels and houses of _Linda Condon_, the scattered exotic localities of the short stories--in all these Mr. Hergesheimer is at home with the cool insouciance of genius, at home as he could not be without an erudition founded in the keenest observation and research. At the same time, he has not satisfied himself with the bursting catalogues of some types of naturalism. "The individuality of places and hours absorbed me ... the perception of the inanimate moods of place.... Certainly houses and night and hills were often more vivid to me than the people in or out of them." He has loved the scenes wherein his events are transacted; he has brooded over their moods, their significances. Neither pantheistic, however, nor very speculative, Mr. Hergesheimer does not endow places with a half-divine, a half-satanic sentience; instead he works more nearly in the fashion of his master Turgenev, or of Flaubert, scrutinizing the surfaces of landscapes and cities and human habitations until they gradually reveal what--for the particular observer--is the essence of their charm or horror, and come, obedient to the evoking imagination, into the picture. Substantial as Mr. Hergesheimer makes his scene by a masterful handling of locality, he goes still further, adds still another dimension, by his equally masterful handling of the past as an element in his microcosm. "There was at least this to be said for what I had, in writing, laid back in point of time--no one had charged me with an historical novel," he boasts. Readers in general hardly notice how large a use of history appears in, for instance, _The Three Black Pennys_ and _Java Head_. The one goes as far back as to colonial Pennsylvania for the beginning of its chronicle and the other as far as to Salem in the days of the first clipper ship; and yet by no paraphernalia of languid airs or archaic idioms or strutting heroics does either of the novels fall into the orthodox historical tradition. They have the vivid, multiplied detail of a contemporary record. And this is the more notable for the reason that the characters in each of them stand against the background of a highly technical profession--that of iron-making through three generations, that of shipping under sail to all the quarters of the earth. The wharves of Mr. Hergesheimer's Salem, the furnaces of his Myrtle Forge, are thick with accurate, pungent, delightful facts. If he has explored the past in a deliberate hunt for picturesque images of actuality with which to incrust his narrative, and has at times--particularly in _The Three Black Pennys_--given it an exaggerated patina, nevertheless he has refused to yield himself to the mere spell of the past and has regularly subdued its "colors and scents and emotions" to his own purposes. His materials may be rococo, but not his use of them. The conflict between his personal preference for luxury and his artistic passion for austerity shows itself in his methods with history: though the historical periods which interest him are bounded, one may say, by the minuet and the music-box, he permits the least possible contagion of prettiness to invade his plots. They are fresh and passionate, simple and real, however elaborate their trappings. With the fullest intellectual sophistication, Mr. Hergesheimer has artistically the courage of naïveté. He subtracts nothing from the common realities of human character when he displays it in some past age, but preserves it intact. The charming erudition of his surfaces is added to reality, not substituted for it. Without question the particular triumph of these novels is the women who appear in them. Decorative art in fiction has perhaps never gone farther than with Taou Yuen, the marvelous Manchu woman brought home from Shanghai to Salem as wife of a Yankee skipper in _Java Head_. She may be taken as focus and symbol of Mr. Hergesheimer's luxurious inclinations. By her bewildering complexity of costume, by her intricate ceremonial observances, by the impenetrability of her outward demeanor, she belongs rather to art than to life--an Oriental Galatea radiantly adorned but not wholly metamorphosed from her native marble. Only at intervals does some glimpse or other come of the tender flesh shut up in her magnificent garments or of the tender spirit schooled by flawless, immemorial discipline to an absolute decorum. That such glimpses come just preserves her from appearing a mere figure of tapestry, a fine mechanical toy. The Salem which before her arrival seems quaintly formal enough immediately thereafter seems by contrast raw and new, and her beauty glitters like a precious gem in some plain man's house. Much the same effect, on a less vivid scale, is produced in _The Three Black Pennys_ by the presence on the Pennsylvania frontier--it is almost that--of Ludowika Winscombe, who has always lived at Court and who brings new fragrances, new dainty rites, into the forest; and in _Mountain Blood_ by the presence among the Appalachian highlands of that ivory, icy meretrix Meta Beggs who plans to drive the best possible bargain for her virgin favors. Meta carries the decorative traits of Mr. Hergesheimer's women to the point at which they suggest the marionette too much; by his methods, of course, he habitually runs the risk of leaving the flesh and blood out of his women. He leaves out, at least, with no fluttering compunctions, any special concern for the simpler biological aspects of the sex: "It was not what the woman had in common with a rabbit that was important, but her difference. On one hand that difference was moral, but on the other aesthetic; and I had been absorbed by the latter." "I couldn't get it into my head that loveliness, which had a trick of staying in the mind at points of death when all service was forgotten, was rightly considered to be of less importance than the sweat of some kitchen drudge." Such robust doctrine is a long way from the customary sentimentalism of novelists about maids, wives, mothers, and widows. Indeed, Mr. Hergesheimer, like Poe before him, inclines very definitely toward beauty rather than toward humanity, where distinctions may be drawn between them. In Linda Condon, however, his most remarkable creation, he has brought humanity and beauty together in an intimate fusion. Less exotic than Taou Yuen, Linda, with her straight black bang and her extravagant simplicity of taste, is no less exquisite. And like Taou Yuen she affords Mr. Hergesheimer the opportunity he most desires--"to realize that sharp sense of beauty which came from a firm, delicate consciousness of certain high pretensions, valors, maintained in the face of imminent destruction.... In that category none was sharper than the charm of a woman, soon to perish, in a vanity of array as momentary and iridescent as a May-fly." It is as the poet musing upon the fleet passage of beauty rather than as the satirist mocking at the vanity of human wishes that Mr. Hergesheimer traces the career of Linda Condon; but both poet and satirist meet in his masterpiece. A woman as lovely as a lyric, she is almost as insensible as a steel blade or a bright star. The true marvel is that beauty so cold can provoke such conflagrations. Granted--and certain subtle women decline to grant it--that Linda with her shining emptiness could have kindled the passion she kindles in the story, what must be the blackness of her discovery that when her beauty goes she will have left none of the generous affection which, had she herself given it through life, she might by this time have earned in quantities sufficient to endow and compensate her for old age! Mr. Hergesheimer does not soften the blow when it comes--he even adds to her agony the clear consciousness that she cannot feel her plight as more passionate natures might. But he allows her, at the last, an intimation of immortality. From her unresponding beauty, she sees, her sculptor lover has caught a madness eventually sublimated to a Platonic vision which, partially forgetful of her as an individual, has made him and his works great. Without, in the common way, modeling her at all, he has snared the essence of her spirit and has set it--as such mortal things go--everlastingly in bronze. If Mr. Hergesheimer offers Linda in the end only the hard comfort of a perception come at largely through her intellect, still as far as the art of his novel is concerned he has immensely gained by his refusal to make any trivial concession to natural weaknesses. His latest conclusion is his best. _The Lay Anthony_ ends in accident, _Mountain Blood_ in melodrama; _The Three Black Pennys_, more successful than its predecessors, fades out like the Penny line; _Java Head_ turns sharply away from its central theme, almost as if _Hamlet_ should concern itself during a final scene with Horatio's personal perplexities. Now the conclusions of a novelist are on the whole the test of his judgment and his honesty; and it promises much for fiction that Mr. Hergesheimer has advanced so steadily in this respect through his seven books. He has advanced, too, in his use of decoration, which reached its most sumptuous in _Java Head_ and which in _Linda Condon_ happily began to show a more austere control. The question which criticism asks is whether Mr. Hergesheimer has not gone as far as a practitioner of the decorative arts can go, and whether he ought not, during the remainder of the eminent career which awaits him, to work rather in the direction marked by _Linda Condon_ than in that marked by _Java Head_. The rumor that his friends advise him to become a "period novelist" must disquiet his admirers--even those among them who cannot think him likely to act upon advice so dangerous to his art. Doubtless he could go on and write another _Salammbô,_ but he does not need to: he has already written _Java Head_. When a novelist has reached the limits of decoration there still stretches out before him the endless road--which Mr. Hergesheimer has given evidence that he can travel--of the interpretation and elucidation of human character and its devious fortunes in the world. CHAPTER IV NEW STYLE 1. EMERGENT TYPES _Ellen Glasgow_ Fiction, no less than life, has its broad flats and shallows from which distinction emerges only now and then, when some superior veracity or beauty or energy lifts a novelist or a novel above the mortal average. Consider, for example, the work of Ellen Glasgow. In her representations of contemporary Virginia she long stood with the local colorists, practising with more grace than strength what has come to seem an older style; in her heroic records of the Virginia of the Civil War and Reconstruction she frequently fell into the orthodox monotone of the historical romancers. By virtue of two noticeable qualities, however, she has in her later books emerged from the level established by the majority and has ranged herself with writers who seem newer and fresher than her early models. One quality is her sense for the texture of life, which imparts to _The Miller of Old Church_ a thickness of atmosphere decisively above that of most local color novels. She has admitted into her story various classes of society which traditional Virginia fiction regularly neglects; she has enriched her narrative with fresh and sweet descriptions of the soft Virginia landscape; she has bound her plot together with the best of all ligatures--intelligence. If certain of her characters--Abel Revercomb, Reuben Merryweather, Betsey Bottom--seem at times a little too much like certain of Thomas Hardy's rustics, still the resemblance is hardly greater than that which actually exists between parts of rural Virginia and rural Wessex; Miss Glasgow is at least as faithful to her scene as if she had devoted herself solely to a chronicle of rich planters, poor whites, and obeisant freedmen. Without any important sacrifice of reality she has enlarged her material by lifting it toward the plane of the pastoral and rounding it out with poetic abundance instead of whittling it down with provincial shrewdness or weakening it with village sentimentalism. That she does not lack shrewdness appears from the evidences in _Life and Gabriella_ and still more in _Virginia_ of her second distinctive quality--a critical attitude toward the conventions of her locality. In one Miss Glasgow exhibits a modern Virginia woman breaking her medieval shell in New York; in the other she examines the subsequent career of a typical Southern heroine launched into life with no equipment but loveliness and innocence. Loveliness, Virginia finds, may fade and innocence may become a nuisance if wisdom happens to be needed. She fails to understand and eventually to "hold" her husband; she gives herself so completely to her children that in the end she has nothing left for herself and is tragically dispensable to them. _Virginia_ is at once the most thorough and the most pathetic picture extant of the American woman as Victorianism conceived and shaped and misfitted her. But the book is much more than a tract for feminism to point to: it is unexpectedly full and civilized, packed with observation, tinctured with omen and irony. _William Allen White_ If Miss Glasgow emerges considerably--though not immensely--above the deadly levels of fiction, so does William Allen White. What lifts him is his hearty, bubbling energy. He has the courage of all his convictions, of all his sentiments, of all his laughter, of all his tears. He has a multitude of right instincts and sound feelings, and he habitually reverts to them in the intervals between his stricter hours of thought. Such stricter hours he is far from lacking. They address themselves especially to the task of showing why and how corruption works in politics and of tracing those effects of private greed which ruin souls and torture societies. The hero-villains of _A Certain Rich Man_ and of _In the Heart of a Fool_ tread all the paths of selfishness and come to hard ends in punishment for the offense of counting the head higher than the heart. These books being crowded with quite obvious doctrine it is fair to say of them that they directly inculcate the life of simple human virtues and services and accuse the grosser American standards of success. They do this important thing within the limits of moralism, progressivism, and optimism. John Barclay, the rich man, when his evil course is run, hastily, unconvincingly divests himself of his spoils and loses his life in an heroic accident. Thomas Van Dorn, the fool, finally arrives at desolation because there has been no God in his heart, but he has no more instructive background for a contrast to folly than the spectacle of a nation entering the World War with what is here regarded as a vast purgation, a magnificent assertion of the divinity in mankind. How such a conclusion withers in the light and fire of time! Right instincts and sound feelings are not, after all, enough for a novelist: somewhere in his work there must appear an intelligence undiverted by even the kindliest intentions; much as he must be of his world, he must be also in some degree outside it as well as above it. Yet to be of his world with such knowledge as Mr. White has of Kansas gives him one kind of distinction if not a different kind. His two longer narratives sweep epically down from the days of settlement to the time when the frontier order disappeared under the pressure of change. He has a moving erudition in the history and characters and motives and humors of the small inland town; no one has ever known more about the outward customs and behaviors of an American state than Mr. White. His shorter stories not less than his novels are racy with actualities: he has caught the dialect of his time and place with an ear that is singularly exact; he has cut the costumes of his men and villages so that hardly a wrinkle shows. In particular he understands the pathos of boyhood, seen not so much, however, through the serious eyes of boys themselves as through the eyes of reminiscent men reflecting upon young joys and griefs that will shortly be left behind and upon little pomps that can never come to anything. _The Court of Boyville_ is now hilariously comic, now tenderly elegiac. None of Mr. White's contemporaries has quite his power to shift from bursts of laughter to sudden, agreeable tears. That flood of moods and words upon which he can be swept beyond the full control of his analytical faculties is but a symptom of the energy which, when he turns to narrative, sweeps him and his readers out of pedestrian gaits. _Ernest Poole_ By comparison the more critical Ernest Poole suffers from a deficiency of both verve and humor. He began his career with the happy discovery of a picturesque, untrodden neighborhood of New York City in _The Harbor_; he consolidated his reputation with the thoughtful study of a troubled father of troubling daughters in _His Family_; since then he has sounded no new chords, strumming on his instrument as if magic had deserted him. Perhaps it was not quite magic by which his work originally won its hearing. There is something a little unmagical, a little mechanical, about the fancy which personifies the harbor of New York and makes it recur and reverberate throughout that first novel. The matter was significant, but the manner seems only at times spontaneous and at times only industrious. Intelligence, ideas, observations, perception--these hold up well in _The Harbor_; it is poetry that flags, though poetry is invoked to carry out the pattern. Over humor Mr. Poole has but moderate power, as he has perhaps but moderate interest in it: his characters are themselves either fiercely or sadly serious, and they are seen with an eye which has not quite the forgiveness of laughter or the pity of disillusion. Roger Gale in _His Family_ broods, mystified, over what seems to him the drift of his daughters into the furious currents of a new age. Yet they fall into three categories--with some American reservations--of mother, nun, courtesan, about which there is nothing new; and all the tragic elements of the book are almost equally ancient. Without the spacious vision which sees eternities in hours _His Family_ contents itself too much with being a document upon a particular hour of history. It has more kindliness than criticism. Mr. Poole, one hates to have to say, is frequently rather less than serious: he is earnest; at moments he is hardly better than merely solemn. Nevertheless, _The Harbor_ and _His Family_--_His Family_ easily the better of the two--are works of honest art and excellent documents upon a generation. Mr. Poole feels the earth reeling beneath the desperate feet of men; he sees the millions who are hopelessly bewildered; he hears the cries of rage and fear coming from those who foretell chaos; he catches the exaltation of those who imagine that after so long a shadow the sunshine of freedom and justice will shortly break upon them. With many generous expectations he waits for the revolution which shall begin the healing of the world's wounds. Meanwhile he paints the dissolving lineaments of the time in colors which his own softness keeps from being very stern or very deep but which are gentle and appealing. _Henry B. Fuller_ The peculiar strength and the peculiar weakness of Henry B. Fuller lie in his faithful habit of being a dilettante. A generation ago, when the aesthetic poets and critics were in bloom, Mr. Fuller in _The Chevalier of Pensieri-Vani_ and _The Chatelaine of La Trinité_ played with sentimental pilgrimages in Italy or the Alps, packing his narratives with the most affectionate kind of archaeology and yet forever scrutinizing them with a Yankee smile. A little later, when Howells's followers had become more numerous, Mr. Fuller joined them with minute, accurate, amused representations of Chicago in _The Cliff-Dwellers_ and _With the Procession_. Then, as if bored with longer flights, he settled himself to writing sharp-eyed stories concerning the life of art as conducted in Chicago--_Under the Skylights_--and of Americans traveling in Europe--_From the Other Side, Waldo Trench and Others_. After _Spoon River Anthology_ Mr. Fuller took such hints from its method as he needed in the pungent dramatic sketches of _Lines Long and Short_. One of these sketches, called _Postponement_, has autobiography, it may be guessed, in its ironic, wistful record of a Midwestern American who all his life longed and planned to live in Europe but who found himself ready to gratify his desire only in the dread summer of 1914, when peace departed from the earth to stay away, he saw, at least as long as he could hope to live. There is the note of intimate experience, if not of autobiography, in these lucid words spoken about the hero of _On the Stairs_: "he wanted to be an artist and give himself out; he wanted to be a gentleman and hold himself in. An entangling, ruinous paradox." Fate, if not fatalism, has kept Mr. Fuller, this dreamer about old lands, always resident in the noisiest city of the newest land and always less, it seems, than thoroughly expressive. Had there been more passion in his constitution he might, perhaps, have either detached himself from Chicago altogether or submerged himself in it to a point of reconciliation. But passion is precisely what Mr. Fuller seems to lack or to be chary of. He dwells above the furies. As one consequence his books, interesting as every one of them is, suffer from the absence of emphasis. His utterance comes in the tone of an intelligent drawl. Spiritually in exile, he lives somewhat unconcerned with the drama of existence surrounding him, as if his gaze were farther off. Yet though deficiency in passion has made Mr. Fuller an amateur, it has allowed him the longest tether in the exercise of a free, penetrating intelligence. He is not lightly jostled out of his equilibrium by petty irritations or swept off his feet by those torrents of ready emotion which sweep through popular fiction by their own momentum. Whenever, in _A Daughter of the Middle Border_, Hamlin Garland brings Mr. Fuller into his story, there is communicated the sense of a vivid intellect somehow keeping its counsel and yet throwing off rays of suggestion and illumination. Without much question it is by his critical faculties that Mr. Fuller excels. He has the poetic energy to construct, but less frequently to create. Such endowments invite him to the composition of memoirs. He has, indeed, in _On the Stairs_, produced the memoirs, in the form of a novel, of a Chicagoan who could never adapt himself to his native habitat and who gradually sees the control of life slipping out of his hands to those of other, more potent, more decisive, less divided men. But suppose Mr. Fuller were to surrender the ironic veil of fiction behind which he has preferred to hide his own spiritual adventures! Suppose he were avowedly to write the history of the arts and letters in Chicago! Suppose he were, rather more confidingly, to trace the career of an actual, attentive dilettante in his thunderous town! _Mary Austin_ Criticism perceives in Mary Austin the certain signs of a power which, for reasons not entirely clear, has as yet failed to express itself completely in forms of art. She herself prefers less to be judged by any of her numerous books than to be regarded as a figure laboring somewhat anonymously toward the development of a national culture founded at all points on national realities. Behind this preference is a personal experience which must be taken into account in any analysis of Mrs. Austin's work. Born in Illinois, she went at twenty to California, to live between the Sierra Nevada and the Mohave Desert. There she was soon spiritually acclimated to the wilderness, studied among the Indians the modes of aboriginal life, and in time came to bear the relation almost of a prophetess to the people among whom she lived. Her first book, _The Land of Little Rain_, interpreted the desert chiefly as landscape. Since then she has, it may be said, employed the desert as a measure of life, constantly bringing from it a sense for the primal springs of existence into all her comment upon human affairs. _The Man Jesus_ examines the career of a desert-dweller who preached a desert-wisdom to a confused world. Her play _The Arrow Maker_ exhibits the behavior and fortunes of a desert-seeress among her own people. _Love and the Soul-Maker_ anatomizes love as a primal force struggling with and through civilization. From Paiute and Shoshone medicine men, the only poets Mrs. Austin knew during her formative years, she acquired that grounding in basic rhythms which led her to write free verse years before it became the fashion in sophisticated circles and persuaded her that American poetry cannot afford to overlook the experiments and successes of the first American poets in fitting expression to the actual conditions of the continent. It has been of course a regular tradition among novelists in the United States to weigh the "settlements" in a balance and to represent them as lacking the hardy virtues of the backwoods. Mrs. Austin goes beyond this naïve process. Whether she deals with the actual frontier--as in _Isidro_ or _Lost Borders_ or _The Ford_--or with more crowded, more complex regions--as in _The Woman of Genius_ or _26 Jayne Street_--she keeps her particular frontier in mind not as an entity or a dogma but as a symbol of the sources of human life and society. She creates, it seems, out of depths of reflection and out of something even deeper than reflection. She has observed the unconscious instincts of the individual and the long memories of the race. The effect upon her novels of such methods has been to widen their sympathies and to warm and lift their style; it has also been to render them sometimes defective in structure and sometimes obscure in meaning. If they are not glib, neither are they always clean-cut or direct. Along with her generous intelligence she has a good deal of the stubborn wilfulness of genius, and she has never achieved a quite satisfactory fusion of the two qualities. She wears something like the sibyl's robes and speaks with something like the sibyl's strong accents, but the cool, hard discipline of the artist or of the exact scholar only occasionally serves her. Much of her significance lies in her promise. Faithful to her original vision, she has moved steadily onward, growing, writing no book like its predecessor, applying her wisdom continually to new knowledge, leaving behind her a rich detritus which she will perhaps be willing to consider detritus if it helps to nourish subsequent generations. _Immigrants_ The newer stocks and neighborhoods in the United States have their fictive records as well as the longer established ones, and there is growing up a class of immigrant books which amounts almost to a separate department of American literature. From Denmark, Germany, Czecho-Slovakia, Poland, Russia, Rumania, Syria, Italy have come passionate pilgrims who have set down, mostly in plain narratives, the chronicles of their migration. As the first Americans contended with nature and the savages, so these late arrivals contend with men and a civilization no less hostile toward them; their writings continue, in a way, the earliest American tradition of a concern with the risks and contrivances by which pioneers cut their paths. Even when the immigrants write fiction they tend to choose the same materials and thus to fall into formulas, which are the more observable since the writers are the survivors in the struggle and naturally tell about the successes rather than the failures in the process of Americanization. Not all the stocks, of course, are equally interested in fiction or gifted at it: the Russian Jews have the most notable novels to their credit. Though these are generally composed by men not born in this country, in Yiddish, and so belong to the history of that most international of literatures, certain of them, having been translated, belong obviously as well as actually to the common treasure of the nation. Shalom Aleichem's _Jewish Children_ and Leon Kobrin's _A Lithuanian Village_ surely belong, though their scenes are laid in Europe; as do Sholom Asch's vivid, moving novels _Mottke the Vagabond_--concerned with the underworld of Poland--and _Uncle Moses_--concerned with the New York Ghetto--the recent translations of which are slowly bringing to a wider American public the evidence that a really eminent novelist has hitherto been partly hidden by his alien tongue. There is no question whatever that the work of Abraham Cahan, Yiddish scholar, journalist, novelist, belongs to the American nation. As far back as the year in which Stephen Crane stirred many sensibilities with his _Maggie_, the story of an Irish slum in Manhattan, Mr. Cahan produced in _Yekl_ a book of similar and practically equal merit concerning a Jewish slum in the same borough. But it and his later books _The Imported Bridegroom and Other Stories_ and _The White Terror and the Red_ have been overwhelmed by novels by more familiar men dealing with more familiar communities. The same has been true even of his masterpiece, the most important of all immigrant novels, _The Rise of David Levinsky_. It, too, records the making of an American, originally a reader of Talmud in a Russian village and eventually the principal figure in the cloak and suit trade in America. But it does more than trace the career of Levinsky through his personal adventures: it traces the evolution of a great industry and represents the transplanted Russian Jews with affectionate exactness in all their modes of work and play and love--another conquest of a larger Canaan. Here are fused American hope and Russian honesty. At the end David, with all his New World wealth, lacks the peace he might have had but for his sacrifice of Old World integrity and faith. And yet the novel is very quiet in its polemic. Its hero has gained in power; he is no dummy to hang maxims on. Moving through a varied scene, gradually shedding the outward qualities of his race, he remains always an individual, gnawed at by love in the midst of his ambitions, subject to frailties which test his strength. The fact that Mr. Cahan wrote _David Levinsky_ not in his mother-tongue but in the language of his adopted country may be taken as a sign that American literature no less than the American population is being enlarged by the influx of fresh materials and methods. The methods of the Yiddish writers are, as might be expected, those of Russian fiction generally, though in this they were anticipated by the critical arguments of Howells and Henry James and are rivaled by the majority of the naturalistic novelists. Their materials, as might not be expected, have a sort of primitive power by comparison with which the orthodox native materials of fiction seem often pale and dusty. The older Americans, settled into smug routines, lack the vitality, the industry of the newcomers. They are less direct and more provincial; they are bundled up in gentilities and petty habits; they hide behind old-fashioned reticences which soften the drama of their lives. With the newer stocks an ancient process begins again. Their affairs are conducted on the plane of desperate subsistence. Struggling to survive at all, they cry out in the language of hunger and death; almost naked in the struggle, they speak nakedly about livelihood and birth and death. Sooner or later the immigrants must be perceived to have added precious elements of passion and candor to American fiction. 2. THE REVOLT FROM THE VILLAGE _Edgar Lee Masters_ The newest style in American fiction dates from the appearance, in 1915, of _Spoon River Anthology_, though it required five years for the influence of that book to pass thoroughly over from poetry to prose. For nearly half a century native literature had been faithful to the cult of the village, celebrating its delicate merits with sentimental affection and with unwearied interest digging into odd corners of the country for persons and incidents illustrative of the essential goodness and heroism which, so the doctrine ran, lie beneath unexciting surfaces. Certain critical dispositions, aware of agrarian discontent or given to a preference for cities, might now and then lay disrespectful hands upon the life of the farm; but even these generally hesitated to touch the village, sacred since Goldsmith in spite of Crabbe, sacred since Washington Irving in spite of E.W. Howe. The village seemed too cosy a microcosm to be disturbed. There it lay in the mind's eye, neat, compact, organized, traditional: the white church with tapering spire, the sober schoolhouse, the smithy of the ringing anvil, the corner grocery, the cluster of friendly houses; the venerable parson, the wise physician, the canny squire, the grasping landlord softened or outwitted in the end; the village belle, gossip, atheist, idiot; jovial fathers, gentle mothers, merry children; cool parlors, shining kitchens, spacious barns, lavish gardens, fragrant summer dawns, and comfortable winter evenings. These were elements not to be discarded lightly, even by those who perceived that time was discarding many of them as the industrial revolution went on planting ugly factories alongside the prettiest brooks, bringing in droves of aliens who used unfamiliar tongues and customs, and fouling the atmosphere with smoke and gasoline. Mr. Howe in _The Story of a Country Town_ had long ago made it cynically clear--to the few who read him--that villages which prided themselves upon their pioneer energy might in fact be stagnant backwaters or dusty centers of futility, where existence went round and round while elsewhere the broad current moved away from them. Mark Twain in _The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg_ had more recently put it bitterly on record that villages which prided themselves upon their simple virtues might from lack of temptation have become a hospitable soil for meanness and falsehood, merely waiting for the proper seed. And Clarence Darrow in his elegiac _Farmington_ had insisted that one village at least had been the seat of as much restless longing as of simple bliss. _Spoon River Anthology_ in its different dialect did little more than to confirm these mordant, neglected testimonies. That Mr. Masters was not neglected must be explained in part, of course, by his different dialect. The Greek anthology had suggested to him something which was, he said, "if less than verse, yet more than prose"; and he went, with the step of genius, beyond any "formal resuscitation of the Greek epigrams, ironical and tender, satirical and sympathetic, as casual experiments in unrelated themes," to an "epic rendition of modern life" which suggests the novel in its largest aspects. An admirable scheme occurred to him: he would imagine a graveyard such as every American village has and would equip it with epitaphs of a ruthless veracity such as no village ever saw put into words. The effect was as if all the few honest epitaphs in the world had suddenly come together in one place and sent up a shout of revelation. Conventional readers had the thrill of being shocked and of finding an opportunity to defend the customary reticences; ironical readers had the delight of coming upon a host of witnesses to the contrast which irony perpetually observes between appearance and reality; readers militant for the "truth" discovered an occasion to demand that pious fictions should be done away with and the naked facts exposed to the sanative glare of noon. And all these readers, most of them unconsciously no doubt, shared the fearful joy of sitting down at an almost incomparably abundant feast of scandal. Where now were the mild decencies of Tiverton, of Old Chester, of Friendship Village? The roofs and walls of Spoon River were gone and the passers-by saw into every bedroom; the closets were open and all the skeletons rattled undenied; brains and breasts had unlocked themselves and set their most private treasures out for the most public gaze. It was the scandal and not the poetry of _Spoon River_, criticism may suspect, which particularly spread its fame. Mr. Masters used an especial candor in affairs of sex, an instinct which, secretive everywhere, has rarely ever been so much so as in the American villages of fiction, where love ordinarily exhibited itself in none but the chastest phases, as if it knew no savage vagaries, transgressed no ordinances, shook no souls out of the approved routines. Reaction from too much sweet drove Mr. Masters naturally to too much sour; sex in Spoon River slinks and festers, as if it were an instinct which had not been schooled--however imperfectly--by thousands of years of human society to some modification of its rages and some civil direction of its restless power. But here, as with the other aspects of behavior in his village, he showed himself impatient, indeed violent, toward all subterfuges. There is filth, he said in effect, behind whited sepulchers; drag it into the light and such illusions will no longer trick the uninstructed into paying honor where no honor appertains and will no longer beckon the deluded to an imitation of careers which are actually unworthy. Spoon River has not even the outward comeliness which the village of tradition should possess: it is slack and shabby. Nor is its decay chronicled in any mood of tender pathos. What strikes its chronicler most is the general demoralization of the town. Except for a few saints and poets, whom he acclaims with a lyric ardor, the population is sunk in greed and hypocrisy and--as if this were actually the worst of all--complacent apathy. Spiritually it dwindles and rots; externally it clings to a pitiless decorum which veils its faults and almost makes it overlook them, so great has the breach come to be between its practices and its professions. Again and again its poet goes back to the heroic founders of Spoon River, back to the days which nurtured Lincoln, whose shadow lies mighty, beneficent, too often unheeded, over the degenerate sons and daughters of a smaller day; and from an older, robuster integrity Mr. Masters takes a standard by which he morosely measures the purposelessness and furtiveness and supineness and dulness of the village which has forgotten its true ancestors. Anger like his springs from a poetic elevation of spirit; toward the end _Spoon River Anthology_ rises to a mystical vision of human life by comparison with which the scavenging epitaphs of the first half seem, though witty, yet insolent and trivial. It is perhaps not necessary to point out that the numerous poets and novelists who have learned a lesson from the book have learned it less powerfully from the difficult later pages than from those in which the text is easiest. Mr. Masters himself has not always remembered the harder and better lesson. During a half dozen years he has published more than a half dozen books which have all inherited the credit of the _Anthology_ but which all betray the turbulent, nervous habit of experimentation which makes up a large share of his literary character. There comes to mind the figure of a blind-folded Apollo, eager and lusty, who continually runs forward on the trail of poetry and truth but who, because of his blindfoldedness, only now and then strikes the central track. Five of Mr. Masters's later books are collections of miscellaneous verse; during the fruitful year 1920 he undertook two longer flights of fiction. In _Mitch Miller_ he attempted in prose to write a new _Tom Sawyer_ for the Spoon River district; in _Domesday Book_ he applied the method of _The Ring and the Book_ to the material of Starved Rock. The impulse of the first must have been much the same as Mark Twain's: a desire to catch in a stouter net than memory itself the recollections of boyhood which haunt disillusioned men. But as Mr. Masters is immensely less boylike than Mark Twain, elegy and argument thrust themselves into the chronicle of Mitch and Skeet, with an occasional tincture of a fierce hatred felt toward the politics and theology of Spoon River. A story of boyhood, that lithe, muscular age, cannot carry such a burden of doctrine. The narrative is tangled in a snarl of moods. Its movement is often thick, its wings often gummed and heavy. The same qualities may be noted in _Domesday Book_. Its scheme and machinery are promising: a philosophical coroner, holding his inquest over the body of a girl found mysteriously dead, undertakes to trace the mystery not only to its immediate cause but up to its primary source and out to its remotest consequences. At times the tale means to be an allegory of America during the troubled, roiled, destroying years of the war; at times it means to be a "census spiritual" of American society. Elenor Murray, in her birth and love and sufferings and desperate end, is represented as pure nature, "essential genius," acting out its fated processes in a world of futile or corrupting inhibitions. But Mr. Masters has less skill at portraying the sheer genius of an individual than at arraigning the inhibitions of the individual's society. When he steps down from his watch-tower of irony he can hate as no other American poet does. His hates, however, do not always pass into poetry; they too frequently remain hard, sullen masses of animosity not fused with his narrative but standing out from it and adding an unmistakable personal rhythm to the rough beat of his verse. So, too, do his heaps of turgid learning and his scientific speculations often remain undigested. A good many of his characters are cut to fit the narrative plan, not chosen from reality to make up the narrative. The total effect is often crude and heavy; and yet beneath these uncompleted surfaces are the sinews of enormous power: a greedy gusto for life, a wide imaginative experience, tumultuous uprushes; of emotion and expression, an acute if undisciplined intelligence, great masses of the veritable stuff of existence out of which great novels are made. _Sherwood Anderson_ _Spoon River Anthology_ has called forth a smaller number of deliberate imitations than might have been expected, and even they have utilized its method with a difference. Sherwood Anderson, for example, in _Winesburg, Ohio_ speaks in accents and rhythms obstinately his own, though his book is, in effect, the _Anthology_ "transprosed." Instead of inventing Winesburg immediately after Spoon River became famous he began his career more regularly, with the novels _Windy McPherson's Son_ and _Marching Men_, in which he employed what has become the formula of revolt for recent naturalism. In both stories a superior youth, of rebellious energy and somewhat inarticulate ambition, detaches himself in disgust from his native village and makes his way to the city in search of that wealth which is the only thing the village has ever taught him to desire though it is unable to gratify his desires itself; and in both the youth, turned man, finds himself sickening with his prize in his hands and looks about him for some clue to the meaning of the mad world in which he has succeeded without satisfaction. Sam McPherson, after a futile excursion through the proletariat in search of the peace which he has heard accompanies honest toil, settles down to the task of bringing up some children he has adopted and thus of forcing himself "back into the ranks of life." Beaut McGregor, refusing a handsome future at the bar, sets out to organize the workers of Chicago into marching men who drill in the streets and squares at night that they may be prepared for action if only they can find some sort of goal to march upon. These novels ache with the sense of a dumb confusion in America; with a consciousness "of how men, coming out of Europe and given millions of square miles of black fertile land mines and forests, have failed in the challenge given them by fate and have produced out of the stately order of nature only the sordid disorder of man." Out of this ache of confusion comes no lucidity. Sam McPherson is not sure but that he will find parenthood as petty as business was brutal; Beaut McGregor sets his men to marching and their orderly step resounds through the final chapters of his career as here recorded, but no one knows what will come of it--they advance and wheel and retreat as blindly as any horde of peasants bound for a war about which they do not know the causes, in a distant country of which they have never heard the name. Mr. Anderson worked in his first books as if he were assembling documents on the eve of revolution. Village peace and stability have departed; ancient customs break or fade; the leaven of change stirs the lump. From such arguments he turned aside to follow Mr. Masters into verse with _Mid-American Chants_ and into scandal with _Winesburg, Ohio_. But touching scandal with beauty as his predecessor touched it with irony, Mr. Anderson constantly transmutes it. The young man who here sets out to make his fortune has not greatly hated Winesburg, and the imminence of his departure throws a vaguely golden mist over the village, which is seen in considerable measure through his generous if inexperienced eyes. A newspaper reporter, he directs his principal curiosity towards items of life outside the commonplace and thus offers Mr. Anderson the occasion to explore the moral and spiritual hinterlands of men and women who outwardly walk paths strict enough. If the life of the tribe is unadventurous, he seems to say, there is still the individual, who, perhaps all the more because of the rigid decorums forced upon him, may adventure with secret desires through pathless space. Only, the pressure of too many inhibitions can distort human spirits into grotesque forms. The inhabitants of Winesburg tend toward the grotesque, now this organ of the soul enlarged beyond all symmetry, now that wasted away in a desperate disuse. They see visions which in some wider world might become wholesome realities or might be dispelled by the light but which in Winesburg must lurk about till they master and madden with the strength which the darkness gives them. Religion, deprived in Winesburg of poetry, fritters its time away over Pharisaic ordinances or evaporates in cloudy dreams; sex, deprived of spontaneity, settles into fleshly habit or tortures its victim with the malice of a thwarted devil; heroism of deed or thought either withers into melancholy inaction or else protects itself with a sullen or ridiculous bravado. Yet even among such pitiful surroundings Mr. Anderson walks tenderly. He honors youth, he feels beauty, he understands virtue, he trusts wisdom, when he comes upon them. He broods over his creatures with affection, though he makes no luxury of illusions. Much as he has detached himself from the cult of the village, he still cherishes the memories of some specific Winesburg. Much as he has detached himself from the hazy national optimism of an elder style in American thinking, he still cherishes a confidence in particular persons. _Winesburg, Ohio_ springs from the more intimate regions of his mind and is consequently more humane and less doctrinaire than his earlier novels. It has a similar superiority over the book he wrote for 1920, _Poor White_, which returns to the device of a bewildered strong man rising from a dull obscurity, successful but unsatisfied. At the same time _Poor White_ proceeds from an imagination which had been warmed with the creation of Winesburg and its people and is richer, fuller, deeper than the angular sagas of McPherson and McGregor. It does not yet show that Mr. Anderson can construct a large plot or that his vision comes with a steady gleam; it shows, rather, that he is still fumbling in the confusion of current life to get hold of something true and simple and to make it clear. Perhaps he tried in _Poor White_ to manipulate a larger bulk than he is yet ready for. Perhaps because he was aware of that he has worked in his latest book, _The Triumph of the Egg_, with a variety of brief themes and has excelled even _Winesburg_ in both poetry and truth. At least it is certain that he keeps on advancing in his art. Although life has not hardened for him, and he sees it still flowing or whirling, he steadily sharpens his outlines and perfects the fierce intensity of his style. Will his wisdom ever catch up with his passion and his observation? In each successive book he has revealed himself as still hot with the fever of his day's experiences. He has yet to show that he can go through the confusion of new spiritual adventures and then set them down, remembering, in tranquillity. _E.W. Howe_ With _The Anthology of Another Town_ E.W. Howe, obviously on the suggestion of Spoon River, returned to the caustic analysis of American village life which he may be said to have inaugurated in _The Story of a Country Town_ almost forty years before. Then he had been young enough to feel it necessary to invent romantic embroideries for his grim tale, somewhat as Emily Brontë under somewhat similar circumstances has done for _Wuthering Heights_--the novel which Mr. Howe's story most resembles. But all his inventions were stern, full of a powerful dissatisfaction, merciless toward the idyllic versions of country life which sweetened the decade of the eighties. Even among the pioneers whom Mr. Masters idealizes there were, according to the older man, slackness and shabbiness, and at the first opportunity to take their ease in the new world they had won from nature they sank down, too nerveless for passion or violence, into the easy vices: idleness, whining, gossip, drunkenness, sodden inutility. Against such qualities Mr. Howe has from the first proceeded with the doctrines of another Franklin, but of a Franklin without whimsical persuasions or elegant graces. Having apparently come to the conclusion that he was a failure as a novelist because he made no great stir with his experiments in that trade, he confined himself to more or less orthodox journalism for a generation, and then, retiring, founded his organ of "indignation and information"--_E.W. Howe's Monthly_--and began to pour forth the stream of aphoristic honesty which makes him easily first among the rural sages. In no sense, of course, does he assume the cosmopolitan and international attitude which most of the naturalists assume: "Provincialism," he curtly says, "is the best thing in the world." Nor is he in any of the casual senses a radical: "In everything in which man is interested, the world knows what is best for him.... Millions of men have lived millions of years, and tried everything." Neither has he any patience with speculation for its own sake: "There are no mysteries. Where does the wind come from? It doesn't matter: we know the habits of wind after it arrives." As to politics: "The people are always worsted in an election." As to altruism: "The long and the short of it is, whoever catches the fool first is entitled to shear him." As to love: "We cannot permit love to run riot; we must build fences around it, as we do around pigs." As to money: "In theory, it is not respectable to be rich. In fact, poverty is a disgrace." As to literature: "Poets are prophets whose prophesying never comes true." As to prudence: "Trying to live a spiritual life in a material world is the greatest folly I know anything about." As to persistent hopefulness: "Pessimism is always nearer the truth than optimism." When the author of such aphorisms undertook to write another anthology about another town he naturally avoided the mystical elevation of Spoon River as well as its verse; he used the irony of a disillusioned man and the directness of a bullet. His scheme was not to assemble epitaphs for the dead of the village but to tell crisp anecdotes of the living. He had no iniquities in the human order to assail, since he believes that the order is just and that it rarely hurts any one who does not deserve to be hurt by reason of some avoidable imbecility. He made no specialty of scandal; he did not inquire curiously into the byways of sex; he let pathology alone. He appears in the book to be--as he is in the flesh--a wise old man letting his memory run through the town and recalling bits of decent, illuminating gossip. He is willing to tell a fantastic yarn with a dry face or to tuck a tragedy in a sentence; to repeat some village legend in his own low tones or to puncture some village bubble with a cynical inquiry. Yet for all his acceptance and tolerance of the village he is far from helping to continue the sentimental traditions concerning it. The common sense which he considers the basis of all philosophy--"If it isn't common sense, it isn't philosophy"--he has the gift of expounding in a language which is piercingly individual. It strips his village of trivial local color and reduces it to the simplest terms--making it out a more or less fortuitous congregation of human beings of whom some work and some play, some behave themselves and some do not, some consequently prosper and some fail, some are happy and some are miserable. His village is not dainty, like a poem, for the reason that he believes no village ever was; at least he has never seen one like that. Downrightness like his is death to mere pretty notions about tribes and towns quite as truly as are the positive indictments brought against them by Mr. Masters and Mr. Anderson. If Mr. Howe is less vivid than those two, because he distrusts passion and poetry, he is also quieter and surer. "I am not an Agnostic; I _know_.... I have lived a long time, and my real problems have always been simple." _Sinclair Lewis_ _Spoon River Anthology_ was a collection of poems, _Winesburg, Ohio_ was a collection of short stories, _The Anthology of Another Town_ was a collection of anecdotes. It remained for a novel in the customary form, Sinclair Lewis's _Main Street_, to bring to hundreds of thousands the protest against the village which these books brought to thousands. Mr. Lewis, like Mr. Masters, clearly has revenges to take upon the narrow community in which he grew up, nourished, no doubt, on the complacency native to such neighborhoods and yet increasingly resentful. Less poetical than his predecessor, the younger novelist went further in both his specifications and his generalizations. Instead of brooding closely, ironically, profoundly, under the black wings of the thought of death, Mr. Lewis satisfies himself with a slashing portrait of Gopher Prairie done to the life with the fingers of ridicule. He has photographic gifts of accuracy; he has all the arts of mimicry; he has a tireless gusto in his pursuit of the tedious commonplace. Each item of his evidence is convincing, and the accumulation is irresistible. No other American small town has been drawn with such exactness of detail in any other American novel. Various elements of scandal crop out here and there, but the principal accusation which Mr. Lewis brings against his village--and indeed against all villages--is that of being dull. "It is contentment ... the contentment of the quiet dead, who are scornful of the living for their restless walking. It is negation canonized as the one positive virtue. It is the prohibition of happiness. It is slavery self-sought and self-defended. It is dulness made God." Not dulness itself so much as dulness militant and prospering arouses this satirist. The whole world, he believes, is being leveled by the march of machines into one monotonous uniformity, before which all the individual colors and graces and prides and habits flee--or would flee if there were any asylum still uninvaded. Thus Mr. Lewis's voice continues the opposition which Wordsworth raised to the coming of a railroad into his paradise among the Lakes and which Ruskin and Matthew Arnold and William Morris raised to the standardization of life which went on during their century. The American voice, however, speaks of American conditions. The villages of the Middle West, it asseverates, have been conquered and converted by the legions of mediocrity, and now, grown rich and vain, are setting out to carry the dingy banner, led by the booster's calliope and the evangelist's bass drum, farther than it has ever gone before--to make provincialism imperialistic; so that all the native and instinctive virtues, freedoms, powers must rally in their own defense. Mr. Lewis hates such dulness--the village virus--as the saints hate sin. Indeed it is with a sort of new Puritanism that he and his contemporaries wage against the dull a war something like that which certain of their elders once waged against the bad. Only a satiric anger helped out by the sense of being on crusade could have sustained the author of _Main Street_ through the laborious compilation of those brilliant details which illustrate the complacency of Gopher Prairie and which seem less brilliant than laborious to bystanders not particularly concerned in his crusade. The question, of course, arises whether the ancient war upon stupidity is a better literary cause to fight in than the equally ancient war upon sin. Both narrow themselves to doctrinal contentions, apparently forgetting for the moment that either being virtuous or being intelligent is but a half--or thereabouts--of existence, and that the two qualities are hopelessly intertwined. There are thoughtful novelists who, as they do not condemn lapses of virtue too harshly, so also do not too harshly condemn deficiencies of intelligence, feeling that the common humanity of men and women is enough to make them fit for fiction. Mr. Lewis must be thought of as sitting in the seat of the scornful, with the satirists rather than with the poets, must be seen to recall the earlier, vexed, sardonic _Spoon River_ rather than the later, calmer, loftier. Satire and moralism, however, have large rights in the domain of literature. Had Mr. Lewis lacked remarkable gifts he could never have written a book which got its vast popularity by assailing the populace. The reception of _Main Street_ is a memorable episode in literary history. Thousands doubtless read it merely to quarrel with it; other thousands to find out what all the world was talking about; still other thousands to rejoice in a satire which they thought to be at the expense of stupid people never once identified with themselves; but that thousands and hundreds of thousands read it is proof enough that complacency was not absolutely victorious and that the war was on. _Zona Gale_ Before _Main Street_ Sinclair Lewis, though the author of such promising novels as _Our Mr. Wrenn_ and _The Job_, had been forced by the neglect of his more serious work to earn a living with the smarter set among American novelists, writing bright, colloquial, amusing chatter for popular magazines. If it seems a notable achievement for a temper like Mr. Masters's to have helped pave the way to popularity for Mr. Lewis, it seems yet more notable to have performed a similar service for Zona Gale, who for something like a decade before _Spoon River Anthology_ had had a comfortable standing among the sweeter set. She was the inventor of Friendship Village, one of the sweetest of all the villages from Miss Mitford and Mrs. Gaskell down. Friendship lay ostensibly in the Middle West, but it actually stood--if one may be pardoned an appropriate metaphor--upon the confectionery shelf of the fiction shop, preserved in a thick syrup and set up where a tender light could strike across it at all hours. In story after story Miss Gale varied the same device: that of showing how childlike children are, how sisterly are sisters, how brotherly are brothers, how motherly are mothers, how fatherly are fathers, how grandmotherly and grandfatherly are grandmothers and grandfathers, and how loverly are all true lovers of whatever age, sex, color, or condition. But beneath the human kindness which had permitted Miss Gale to fall into this technique lay the sinews of a very subtle intelligence; and she needed only the encouragement of a changing public taste to be able to escape from her sugary preoccupations. Though the action of _Miss Lulu Bett_ takes place in a different village, called Warbleton, it might as well have been in Friendship--in Friendship seen during a mood when its creator had grown weary of the eternal saccharine. Now and then, she realized, some spirit even in Friendship must come to hate all those idyllic posturings; now and then in some narrow bosom there must flash up the fires of youth and revolution. It is so with Lulu Bett, dim drudge in the house of her silly sister and of her sister's pompous husband: a breath of life catches at her and she follows it on a pitiful adventure which is all she has enough vitality to achieve but which is nevertheless real and vivid in a waste of dulness. Here was an occasion to arraign Warbleton as Mr. Lewis was then arraigning Gopher Prairie; Miss Gale, instead of heaping up a multitude of indictments, categorized and docketed, followed the path of indirection which--by a paradoxical axiom of art--is a shorter cut than the highway of exposition or anathema. Her story is as spare as the virgin frame of Lulu Bett; her style is staccato in its lucid brevity, like Lulu's infrequent speeches; her eloquence is not that of a torrent of words and images but that of comic or ironic or tragic meaning packed in a syllable, a gesture, a dumb silence. Miss Gale riddles the tedious affectations of the Deacon household almost without a word of comment; none the less she exhibits them under a withering light. The daughter, she says, "was as primitive as pollen"--and biology rushes in to explain Di's blind philanderings. "In the conversations of Dwight and Ina," it is said of the husband and wife, "you saw the historical home forming in clots in the fluid wash of the community"--and anthropology holds the candle. Grandma Bett is, for the moment, the symbol of decrepit age, as Lulu is the symbol of bullied spinsterhood. Yet in the midst of applications so universal the American village is not forgotten, little as it is alluded to. If the Friendships are sweet and dainty, so are they--whether called Warbleton or something less satiric--dull and petty, and they fashion their Deacons no less than their Pelleases and Ettares. Thus hinting, Miss Gale, in her clear, flutelike way, joins the chorus in which others play upon noisier instruments. _Floyd Dell_ The year which saw the appearance of _Main Street_ and _Miss Lulu Bett_ saw also that of _The Age of Innocence_, Edith Wharton's acid delineation of the village of Manhattan in the genteel seventies, given over to the "innocence that seals the mind against imagination and the heart against experience"; saw Mary Borden's _The Romantic Woman_, with its cosmopolitan amusement at the village of Iroquois, otherwise Chicago; and saw Floyd Dell's _Moon-Calf_, which, standing on the other side of controversy, lacks not only the disposition to sentimentalize the village but even the disposition to ridicule it. Mr. Dell's emancipation is the fruit of a revolutionary detachment from village standards which is too complete to have left traces of any such rupture as is implied in almost every paragraph of _Main Street_. _Moon-Calf_, recounting the adventures of a young poet in certain river counties and towns and villages of Illinois, touches without heat upon the spiritual and intellectual limitations of those neighborhoods. It settles no old scores. It relates an unconventional career without conventional reproaches and also without conventional heroics. Felix Fay dreams and blunders and suffers but he goes on growing like a tree, pushing his head up through one level of development after another until he stands above the minor annoyances of his immaturity and looks out over a broader world. He has a soul which is naturally socialist and yet he never loses himself in proclamations or statistics. He can be fresh and hopeful and yet learn from the remarkable old men he encounters. He lives and loves with an instinctive freedom and yet he holds himself equally secure from devastating extravagances and devastating repressions. Mr. Dell writes as if he had steadier nerves than most of the naturalists; as if he regarded their war upon the village as an ancient brawl which may now be assumed to have been as much settled as it ever will be. At least, it seems scarcely worth wrangling over. The spirit seeking to release itself from trivial conditions behaves most intelligently when it discreetly takes them into account and concerns itself with them only enough to escape entanglements. Mr. Dell leaves it to the moralists and the satirists to whip offenders, while he himself goes on to construct some monument of beauty upon the ground which moralism and satire are laboring to clear. _Moon-Calf_ is very beautiful. Felix has a poetic gift sufficient to warm the record with fine verses and delicate susceptibilities upon which his adventures leave exquisite impressions. Even when his rebellion is at its highest pitch he wastes little energy in hating and so avoids the astringency and perturbation of a state of mind which is always perilous. To say Felix Fay is more or less to mean Floyd Dell, for the narrative is obviously autobiographic at many points. But were it entirely invention it would testify none the less to the affection with which this novelist feels his world and the lucidity with which he represents it. He has a genuine zest for human life, enjoying it, even when it invites mirth or anger, because of the form and color and movement which he perceives everywhere and particularly because of the solid texture of reality of which he is admirably aware. Hatred closes the eyes to a multitude of charms. If Mr. Dell suffered from it he could never have enriched his fabric as he has with so many circumstances chosen with an unargumentative hand; he could never have extracted so much drama out of dusty people. Had he been a sentimentalist he might have fallen into the soft processes of the local color school when it came to portraying the various communities through which Felix takes his way. Instead, the story is everywhere stiffened with intelligence. Felix has no adventures more exciting than his successive discoveries of new ideas. Even the women he loves fit into the pattern of his career as a thinking being, and he emerges, however moved, with a surer grasp of his expanding universe. That grasp would lack much of its confidence if Mr. Dell employed a style less masterly. As it is, he writes with a candid lucidity which everywhere lets in the light and with a grace which rounds off the edges that mark the pamphlet but not the work of art. He can be at once downright and graceful, at once sincere and impersonal, at once revolutionary and restrained, at once impassioned and reflective, at once enamored of truth and scrupulous for beauty. When Felix Fay had escaped his original villages and had taken to the wider pursuit of freedom in Chicago there was another chapter of his career to be recorded; and that Mr. Dell sets down in _The Briary-Bush_, wherein Felix finds that the trail of freedom ends, for him, in madness and loneliness. From the first, though this moon-calf has steadily blundered toward detachment from the common order, some aching instinct has left him hungry for solid ground to stand on. The conflict troubles him. He can succeed in his immediate occupations but he cannot understand his powers or feel confident in his future. His world whirls round and round, menaces, eludes, threatens to vanish altogether. Thrown by dim forces into the arms of Rose-Ann, who seeks freedom no less restlessly than he, he is married, and the two begin their passionate experiment at a union which shall have no bonds but their common determination to be free. Charming slaves of liberty! Felix is at heart a Puritan and cannot take the world lightly, as it comes. His blunders bruise and wound him. He punishes himself for all his vagaries. Rose-Ann is not a Puritan, but she too has instincts that will not surrender, any more than Felix's, to the doctrines which they both profess: jealousy sleeps within her, and potential motherhood. She and Felix come to feel that they have shirked life by their deliberate childlessness and that life has deserted them. Yet separation proves unendurable. So they resume marriage, vowing "not to be afraid of life or of any of the beautiful things life may bring." Among these, of course, are to be children and a house. Is this merely a return to their villages, merely domestic sentimentalism in a lovely guise? Mr. Dell has gone a little too deep to incur the full suspicion. He has got very near to the biological foundations of two lives, where, for the moment, he rests his case. There is more to come, however, in this spiritual history, whether Felix Fay knows it or not. Let the house be built and the children be born, and Felix and Rose-Ann, though citizens and parents, will still be individuals and will still have to find out whether these complicated threads of loyalty last better than the simple threads which broke. Felix, in discovering the lure of stability, has not necessarily completed the circle of his life. Freedom may allure him again. _The Briary-Bush_, less varied than _Moon-Calf_, is decidedly profounder. It hovers over the dark waters of the unconscious on perhaps the surest wings an American novel has ever used. Though it has probed difficult natures and knows them thoroughly it does not flaunt its knowledge but brings it in only when it can throw some revealing light upon the outward perplexities of the lovers. Thus it gives depth and timbre to the story, and yet allows the characters to seem actual persons actually walking the world. At the same time, Mr. Dell does not possess a too vivid sense of externality. In both his novels all facts come through the mist of Felix's habitual confusion, and in that mist they lose dramatic emphasis; muted, they are not able to break up the agreeable monotone in which the narrative is delivered. But underneath these surfaces, seen so poetically, there is a substantial bulk of human life, immemorial folkways powerfully contending with the new rebellion of reason. _F. Scott Fitzgerald_ _Domesday Book_, _Poor White_, _The Anthology of Another Town_, _Main Street_, _Miss Lulu Bett_, _The Age of Innocence_, _The Romantic Woman_, and _Moon-Calf_ would make 1920 remarkable even if that year had not brought forth other novels of equal rank; if it had not brought forth James Branch Cabell's richly symbolical romance _Figures of Earth_ and Upton Sinclair's bitter indictment _100%_. And though most of these seem somber, there came along with them another novel in which were gaiety and high spirits and the fires of youth. F. Scott Fitzgerald in _This Side of Paradise_ also had broken with the village. He wrote of his gilded boys and girls as if average decorum existed only to be shocked. But he made the curious discovery that undergraduates could have brains and still be interesting; that they need not give their lives entirely to games and adolescent politics; that they may have heard of Oscar Wilde as well as of Rudyard Kipling and of Rupert Brooke no less than of Alfred Noyes. Mr. Fitzgerald had indeed his element of scandal to tantalize the majority, who debated whether or not the rising generation could be as promiscuous in its behavior as he made out. It is the brains in the book, however, not the scandal, which finally count. His restless generation sparkles with inquiry and challenge. When its elders have let the world fall into chaos, why, youth questions, should it trust their counsels any longer? Mirth and wine and love are more pleasant than that hollow wisdom, and they may be quite as solid. _This Side of Paradise_ comes to no conclusion; it ends in weariness and smoke, though at last Amory believes he has found himself in the midst of a wilderness of uncertainties. Yet how vivid a document the book is upon a whirling time, and how beguiling an entertainment! The narrative flares up now into delightful verse and now into glittering comic dialogue. It shifts from passion to farce, from satire to lustrous beauty, from impudent knowingness to pathetic youthful humility. It is both alive and lively. Few things more significantly illustrate the moving tide of which the revolt from the village is a symptom than the presence of such unrest as this among these bright barbarians. The traditions which once might have governed them no longer hold. They break the patterns one by one and follow their wild desires. And as they play among the ruins of the old, they reason randomly about the new, laughing. _Dorothy Canfield_ If Floyd Dell seems in _The Briary-Bush_ to hint at the human necessity to turn back by and by from freedom, Dorothy Canfield in _The Brimming Cup_ pretty clearly argues for that necessity. Doubtless it is to go too far to claim, as certain of her critics do, that she had made a counter-attack upon the assailants of the village and the established order, but it is sure that she gave comfort to many spirits disturbed by the radical outbursts of 1920. Already in _The Squirrel Cage_ and _The Bent Twig_ she had shown an affectionate knowledge of the ways of households in small communities; and in _Hillsboro People_ she had added another hardy, kindly neighborhood to the American array of villages in fiction. _The Brimming Cup_ sounded a deeper note than any she had yet struck. Suppose, the novel says, there were a woman who had been trained in the wide world but was now living in a distant village; suppose she had heard and felt the tumult of the age and had begun to question the reality of her contentment; suppose, to make the conflict as dramatic as possible, she should find herself tempted by a new love to give up the settled companionship of her husband and the heavy burden of her children to seek joy in a thrilling passion. Here Dorothy Canfield had an admirable theme and she rose to it with power, but she permitted herself so easy a solution that her argument stumbles lamentably. The lover who disrupts the warm circle of Marise's life is after all only a selfish bounder, a mere villain; stirred as she is by the promises he holds out of rapture and of luxury, she would be simply foolish not to comprehend, as in the end she does, that she must lose far more than she could gain by the exchange she contemplates. Surely this is no argument in favor of loyalty as against love: it is only a defense of loyalty, which does not need it, as against a fleeting instability; and so it is hardly half as significant as it might have been had the conflict been squarely met, great love contending with great loyalty. Yet while the novel thus falls short of what it might have undertaken it has numerous excellences. It is eloquent and passionate and, very often, wise. Rarely have a mother's relations with her children been so subtly represented; rarely have the manners of a New England township been more convincingly portrayed. The setting glows among its green hills and valleys, its snow and flowers. There are minor characters that stand up vividly in the memory, like persons known face to face. The atmosphere is at once tense with desire and spacious with understanding. Though the materials come from an old tradition they have been heated with the fires of the scrutinizing mind which burn beneath the newer novelists. _1921_ That memorable year of fiction which saw so many superior books produced saw them successful beyond any reasonable expectation; and it is scarcely to be wondered at that the year following--with which this chronicle does not undertake to deal--should have responded to such encouragement. If Dorothy Canfield challenged the tendency, Booth Tarkington saw it and ventured _Alice Adams_. Sherwood Anderson in _The Triumph of the Egg_ and Floyd Dell in _The Briary-Bush_ proceeded to other triumphs. Half a dozen competent novelists followed naturalism into the "exposure" of small towns or cramped lives: particularly C. Kay Scott with the hard, crisp _Blind Mice_ and Charles G. Norris, rival of his brother Frank Norris in veracity if not in fire, with _Brass_. John Dos Passos in _Three Soldiers_, the most controverted novel of the year, dealt brilliantly with the unheroic aspects of the American Expeditionary Force. Evelyn Scott in _The Narrow House_ and Ben Hecht in _Erik Dorn_ attempted, as Waldo Frank had already done in _The Dark Mother_ and as some others now did less notably, to find a more elastic, a more impressionistic technique, breaking up the "gray paragraph" and quickening the tempo of their narratives. At the same time romance once more showed its perennial face, suggesting that the future does not belong to naturalism entirely. Donn Byrne in _Messer Marco Polo_ played in a bright Gaelic way with the story of Marco Polo and his quest for Golden Bells, the daughter of Kubla Khan. Robert Nathan wrote, in _Autumn_, an all but perfect native idyl, grounded well enough in local color, as suggestive of the soil as an old farmers' almanac, and yet touched with the universal fingers of the pastoral. If American fiction cannot long escape the village, at least here is a village of a sort hardly thinkable before the revolt began. No matter what a flood of angry truth _Spoon River Anthology_ let in, beauty survives. Many waters cannot quench beauty. What truth extinguishes is the weaker flames. 
19463	----	[Transcriber's note: Obvious printer's errors have been corrected. The original spelling has been retained.] AMERICAN MEN OF LETTERS. Edited By CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER. [Illustration: J. Fenimore Cooper] AMERICAN MEN OF LETTERS. JAMES FENIMORE COOPER. By THOMAS R. LOUNSBURY, Professor Of English In The Sheffield Scientific School, Yale College. BOSTON: HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY. New York: 11 East Seventeenth Street. The Riverside Press, Cambridge. 1884. Copyright, 1882, By THOMAS R. LOUNSBURY _All rights reserved._ _The Riverside Press, Cambridge_: Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Co. PREFATORY NOTE. When Cooper lay on his death-bed he enjoined his family to permit no authorized account of his life to be prepared. A wish even, that was uttered at such a time, would have had the weight of a command; and from that day to this pious affection has carried out in the spirit as well as to the letter the desire of the dying man. No biography of Cooper has, in consequence, ever appeared. Nor is it unjust to say that the sketches of his career, which are found either in magazines or cyclopædias, are not only unsatisfactory on account of their incompleteness, but are all in greater or less degree untrustworthy in their details. It is a necessary result of this dying injunction that the direct and authoritative sources of information contained in family papers are closed to the biographer. Still it is believed that no facts of importance in the record of an eventful and extraordinary career have been omitted or have even been passed over slightingly. A large part of the matter contained in this volume has never been given to the public in any form: and for that reason among others no pains have been spared to make this narrative absolutely accurate, so far as it goes. Correction of any errors, if such are found, will be gratefully welcomed. JAMES FENIMORE COOPER. (p. 001) Chapter I. 1789-1820. In one of the interior counties of New York, less than one hundred and fifty miles in a direct line from the commercial capital of the Union, lies the village of Cooperstown. The place is not and probably never will be an important one; but in its situation and surroundings nature has given it much that wealth cannot furnish or art create. It stands on the southeastern shore of Otsego Lake, just at the point where the Susquehanna pours out from it on its long journey to the Chesapeake. The river runs here in a rapid current through a narrow valley, shut in by parallel ranges of lofty hills. The lake, not more than nine miles in length, is twelve hundred feet above tide-water. Low and wooded points of land and sweeping bays give to its shores the attraction of continuous diversity. About it, on every side, stand hills, which slope gradually or rise sharply to heights varying from two to five hundred feet. Lake, forest, and stream unite to form a scene of quiet but picturesque beauty, that hardly needs the additional charm of romantic association which has been imparted to it. Though it was here that the days of Cooper's childhood were (p. 002) passed, it was not here that he was born. When that event took place the village had hardly even an existence on paper. Cooper's father, a resident of Burlington, New Jersey, had come, shortly after the close of the Revolutionary War, into the possession of vast tracts of land, embracing many thousands of acres, along the head-waters of the Susquehanna. In 1786 he began the settlement of the spot, and in 1788 laid out the plot of the village which bears his name, and built for himself a dwelling-house. On the 10th of November, 1790, his whole family--consisting, with the servants, of fifteen persons--reached the place. The future novelist was then a little less than thirteen months old, for he had been born at Burlington on the 15th of September of the year before. His father had determined to make the new settlement his permanent home. He accordingly began in 1796, and in 1799 completed, the erection of a mansion which bore the name of Otsego Hall. It was then and remained for a long time afterward the largest private residence in that portion of the State. When in 1834 it came into the hands of the son, it still continued to be the principal dwelling in the flourishing village that had grown up about it. On his father's side Cooper was of Quaker descent. The original emigrant ancestor had come over in 1679, and had made extensive purchases of land in the province of New Jersey. In that colony or in Pennsylvania his descendants for a long time remained. Cooper himself was the first one, of the direct line certainly, that ever even revisited the mother-country. These facts are of slight importance in themselves. In the general disbelief, however, which fifty years ago prevailed in Great Britain, that anything good could come out of (p. 003) this western Nazareth. Cooper was immediately furnished with an English nativity as soon as he had won reputation. The same process that gave to Irving a birthplace in Devonshire, furnished one also to him in the Isle of Man. When this fiction was exploded, the fact of emigration was pushed merely a little further back. It was transferred to the father, who was represented as having gone from Buckinghamshire to America. This latter assertion is still to be found in authorities that are generally trustworthy. But the original one served a useful purpose during its day. This assumed birthplace in the Isle of Man enabled the English journalists that were offended with Cooper's strictures upon their country to speak of him, as at one time they often did, as an English renegade. His mother's maiden name was Elizabeth Fenimore, and the family to which she belonged was of Swedish descent. Cooper himself was the eleventh of twelve children. Most of his brothers and sisters died long before him, five of them in infancy. His own name was at first simply James Cooper, and in this way he wrote it until 1826. But in April of that year the Legislature of New York passed an act changing the family name to Fenimore-Cooper. This was done in accordance with the wish of his grandmother, whose descendants in the direct male line had died out. But he seldom employed the hyphen in writing, and finally gave up the use of it altogether. The early childhood of Cooper was mainly passed in the wilderness at the very time when the first wave of civilization was beginning to break against its hills. There was everything in what he saw and heard to impress the mind of the growing boy. He was on the border, if (p. 004) indeed he could not justly be said to be in the midst of mighty and seemingly interminable woods which stretched for hundreds of miles to the westward. Isolated clearings alone broke this vast expanse of foliage, which, covering the valleys and clinging to the sides and crowning the summits of the hills, seemed to rise and fall like the waves of the sea. The settler's axe had as yet scarcely dispelled the perpetual twilight of the primeval forest. The little lake lay enclosed in a border of gigantic trees. Over its waters hung the interlacing branches of mighty oaks and beeches and pines. Its surface was frequented by flocks of wild, aquatic birds,--the duck, the gull, and the loon. In this lofty valley among the hills were also to be found, then as now, in fullest perfection, the clear atmosphere, the cloudless skies, and the brilliant light of midsummer suns, that characterize everywhere the American highlands. More even than the beauty and majesty of nature that lay open to the sight was the mystery that constantly appealed to the imagination in what might lie hidden in the depths of a wilderness that swept far beyond glance of eye or reach of foot. This, indeed, may have affected the feelings of only a few, but there were numerous interests and anxieties which all had in common. The little village had early gone through many of the trials which mark the history of most of the settlements in regions to which few travelers found their way and commerce seldom came. Remote from sources of supply, and difficult of access, it had known the time when its population, scanty as it was, suffered from the scarcity of food. Sullivan's successful expedition against the Six Nations did not suffice to keep it from the alarm of savage attack that never came. The immense forest shutting in the hamlet on every side had (p. 005) terrors to some as real as were its attractions to others. Its recesses were still the refuge of the deer; but they were also the haunt of the wildcat, the wolf, and the bear. All these characteristics of his early home made deep impression upon a nature fond of adventure, and keenly susceptible to the charm of scenery. When afterward in the first flush of his fame Cooper set out to revive the memory of the days of the pioneers, he said that he might have chosen for his subject happier periods, more interesting events, and possibly more beauteous scenes, but he could not have taken any that would lie so close to his heart. The man, indeed, never forgot what had been dear to the boy; and to the spot where his earliest years were spent he returned to pass the latter part of his life. The original settlement, moreover, was composed of a more than usually singular mixture of the motley crowd that always throngs to the American frontier. The shock of convulsions in lands far distant reached even to the highland valley shut in by the Otsego hills. Representatives of almost every nationality in Christendom and believers in almost every creed, found in it an asylum or a home. Into this secluded haven drifted men whose lives had been wrecked in the political storms that were then shaking Europe. Frenchmen, Dutchmen, Germans, and Poles, came and tarried for a longer or shorter time. Here Talleyrand, then an exile, spent several days with Cooper's father, and, true to national instinct, wrote, according to local tradition, complimentary verses, still preserved, on Cooper's sister. An ex-captain of the British army was one of the original merchants of the place. An ex-governor of Martinique was for a time the village (p. 006) grocer. But the prevailing element in the population were the men of New England, born levelers of the forest, the greatest wielders of the axe the world has ever known. Over the somewhat wild and turbulent democracy, made up of materials so diverse, the original proprietor reigned a sort of feudal lord, rather by moral qualities than by any conceded right. Cooper's early instruction was received in the village school, carried on in a building erected in 1795, and rejoicing in the somewhat pretentious name of the Academy. The country at that time, however, furnished few facilities for higher education anywhere; on the frontier there were necessarily none. Accordingly Cooper was early sent to Albany. There he entered the family of the rector of St. Peter's Church, and became, with three or four other boys, one of his private pupils. This gentleman, the son of an English clergyman, and himself a graduate of an English university, had made his ways to these western wilds with a fair amount of classical learning, with thorough methods of study, and as it afterwards turned out, Cooper tells us, with another man's wife. This did not, however, prevent him from insisting upon the immense superiority of the mother-country in morals as well as manners. A man of ability and marked character, he clearly exerted over the impressionable mind of his pupil a greater influence than the latter ever realized. He was in many respects, indeed, a typical Englishman of the educated class of that time. He had the profoundest contempt for republics and republican institutions. The American Revolution he looked upon as only a little less monstrous than the French, which was the sum of all iniquities. Connection with any other church than his own was to be shunned, not at all (p. 007) because it was unchristian, but because it was ungentlemanly and low. But whatever his opinions and prejudices were, in the almost absolute dearth then existing in this country of even respectable scholarship, the opportunity to be under his instruction was a singular advantage. Unfortunately it did not continue as long as it was desirable. In 1802 he died. It had been the intention to fit Cooper to enter the junior class of Yale College; that project had now to be abandoned. Accordingly he became, at the beginning of the second term of its freshman year, a member of the class which was graduated in 1806. He was then but a mere boy of thirteen, and with the exception of the poet Hillhouse, two weeks his junior, was the youngest student in the college. Cooper himself informs us that he played all his first year, and implies that he did little study during those which followed. To a certain extent the comparative excellence of his preparation turned out a disadvantage; the rigid training he had received enabled him to accomplish without effort what his fellow-students found difficult. Scholarship was at so low an ebb that the ability to scan Latin was looked upon as a high accomplishment; and he himself asserts that the class to which he belonged was the first in Yale College that had ever tried it. This may be questioned; but we need not feel any distrust of his declaration, that little learning of any kind found its way into his head. Least of all will he be inclined to doubt it whom extended experience in the class-room has taught to view with profoundest respect the infinite capability of the human mind to resist the introduction of knowledge. Far better than study, Cooper liked to take solitary walks about (p. 008) the wooded hills surrounding New Haven, and the shores of the bay upon which it lies. These nursed the fondness for outdoor life and scenery which his early associations had inspired. In these communings with nature, he was unconsciously storing his mind with impressions and images, in the representation and delineation of which he was afterward to attain surpassing excellence. But the study of scenery, however desirable in itself, cannot easily be included in a college curriculum. No proficiency in it can well compensate for failure in studies of perhaps less intrinsic importance. The neglect of these latter had no tendency to recommend him to the regard of those in authority. Positive faults were in course of time added to negative. A frolic in which he was engaged during his third year was attended by consequences more serious than disfavor. It led to his dismissal. The father took the boy's side, and the usual struggle followed between the parents and those who, according to a pretty well worn-out educational theory, stand to the student in place of parents. In this particular case the latter triumphed, and Cooper left Yale. In spite of his dismissal he retained pleasant recollections of some of his old instructors; and with one of them, Professor Silliman, he kept up in later years friendly personal relations and occasional correspondence. It had been a misfortune for the future author to lose the severe if somewhat wooden drill of his preparatory instructor. It was an additional misfortune to lose the education, scanty and defective as it then was, which was imparted by the college. It might not and probably would not have contributed anything to Cooper's intellectual development in the way of accuracy of thought or of statement. It (p. 009) would not in all probability have added materially to his stock of knowledge. But with all its inefficiency and inadequacy, it would very certainly have had the effect of teaching him to aim far more than he did at perfection of form. He possibly gained more than he lost by being transferred at so early an age to other scenes. But the lack of certain qualities in his writings, which educated men are perhaps the only ones to notice, can be traced pretty directly to this lack of preliminary intellectual drill. His academical career having been thus suddenly cut short, he entered in a little while upon one better suited to his adventurous nature. Boys are sent to sea, he tells us in one of his later novels, for the cure of their ethical ailings. This renovating influence of ocean life he had at any rate a speedy opportunity to try. It was decided that he should enter the navy. The position of his father, who had been for several years a representative in Congress, and was a leading member of the Federalist party, naturally held out assurances that the son would receive all the advancement to which he would be legitimately entitled. At that time no naval school existed. It was the custom, in consequence, for boys purposing to fit themselves for the position of officers to serve a sort of apprenticeship in the merchant marine. Accordingly in the autumn of 1806, Cooper was placed on board a vessel that was to sail from the port of New York with a freight of flour to Cowes and a market. The ship was named the Sterling, and was commanded by Captain John Johnston, of Wiscasset, Maine, who was also part owner. Cooper's position and prospects were well known; but he was employed regularly before the mast and was never admitted to the cabin. The (p. 010) vessel cleared from the port of New York on the 16th of October. The passage was a long and stormy one; forty days went by before land was seen after it had once been left behind. The ship reached the other side just at the time when the British Channel was alive with vessels of war in consequence of one of the periodical anticipations of invasions from France. It went to London, and stayed for some time there discharging its cargo and taking in new. Cooper embraced the opportunity to see all the sights he could of the great metropolis. "He had a rum time of it in his sailor rig," said afterward one of his shipmates, "but hoisted in a wonderful deal of gibberish, according to his own account of the cruise." The Sterling sailed with freight in January, 1807, for the Straits of Gibraltar. It took on board a cargo of barilla at Aguilas and Almeria, and returned to England, reaching the Thames in May. Both going and coming the voyage was a stormy one, and during it several of the incidents occurred that Cooper worked up afterward into powerful passages in his sea novels. In London the vessel lay several weeks, discharging its cargo and taking in more, which this time consisted of dry goods. Towards the end of July, it left London for America, and reached Philadelphia on the 18th of September, after another long and stormy passage of fifty-two days. This was Cooper's introduction to sea life. During the year he had spent in the merchant vessel he had seen a good deal of hard service. His preparatory studies having been completed after a fashion, he now regularly entered the navy. His commission as midshipman bears (p. 011) date the 1st of January, 1808. On the 24th of the following February he was ordered to report to the commanding naval officer at New York. But the records of the government give little information as to the duties to which he was assigned during the years he remained in its service. The knowledge we have of his movements comes mainly from what he himself incidentally discloses in published works or letters of a later period. The facts we learn from all sources together, are but few. He served for a while on board the Vesuvius in 1808. During that year it seemed as if the United States and Great Britain were about to drift into war. Preparations of various kinds were made; and one of the things ordered was the dispatch to Lake Ontario of a party, of which Cooper was one, under the command of Lieutenant Woolsey. The intention was to build a brig of sixteen guns to command that inland water; and the port of Oswego, then a mere hamlet of some twenty houses, was the place selected for its construction. Around it lay a wilderness, thirty or forty miles in depth. Here the party spent the following winter, and during it the Oneida, as the brig was called, was finished. Early in the spring of 1809 it was launched. By that time, however, the war-cloud had blown over, and the vessel was not then used for the purpose for which it had been constructed. More permanent results, however, were accomplished than the building of a ship. The knowledge and experience which Cooper then gained was something beyond and above what belonged to his profession. It is to his residence on the shores of that inland sea that we owe the vivid picture drawn of Lake Ontario in "The Pathfinder" and of the wilderness which then surrounded it on every side. After the completion of the Oneida, Cooper accompanied Lieutenant (p. 012) Woolsey on a visit to Niagara Falls. The navy records show that on the 10th of June, 1809, he was left by his commander in charge of the gunboats on Lake Champlain. They further reveal the fact that on the 27th of September of this same year he was granted a furlough to make a European voyage. This project for some reason was given up, as on the 13th of November, 1809, he was ordered to the Wasp, then under the command of Lawrence, who afterwards fell in the engagement between the Shannon and the Chesapeake. To this officer, like himself a native of Burlington, he was very warmly attached. The next notice of him contained in the official records is to the effect that on the 9th of May, 1810, permission was granted him to go on furlough for twelve months. Whether he availed himself of it is not known. An event soon occurred, however, that put an end to his naval career as effectively as one had previously been put to his collegiate. An attachment had sprung up some time before between him and a Miss DeLancey. On the 1st of January, 1811, the couple were married at Mamaroneck, Westchester County, New York. Cooper was then a little more than twenty-one years old; the bride lacked very little of being nineteen. His wife belonged to a Huguenot family, which towards the end of the seventeenth century had fled from France, and had finally settled in Westchester. During the Revolutionary War the DeLanceys had taken the side of the crown against the colonies. Several of them held positions in the British army. John Peter DeLancey, whose daughter Cooper had married, had been himself a captain in that service. After the recognition of American independence he went to England, but, (p. 013) having resigned his commission, returned in 1789 to this country, and spent the remainder of his life at his home in Mamaroneck. The fact that his kinsmen by marriage had belonged to the defeated party in the Revolutionary struggle led Cooper in his writings to treat the Tories, as they were called, with a fairness and generosity which in that day few were disposed to show, at least in print. This tenderness is plainly to be seen in "The Spy," written at the beginning of his career; it is still more marked in "Wyandotte," produced in the latter part of it, when circumstances had made him profoundly dissatisfied with much that he saw about him. One of the last, though least heated, of the many controversies in which he was engaged was in regard to the conduct on a particular occasion of General Oliver DeLancey, a cousin of his wife's father. This officer was charged unjustly, as Cooper believed, with the brutal treatment of the American General Woodhull, who had fallen into his hands. The discussion in regard to this point was carried on in the "New York Home Journal" in the early part of 1848. It seldom falls to the lot of the biographer to record a home life more serene and happy than that which fell to the share of the man whose literary life is the stormiest to be found in the history of American men of letters. Cooper, like many persons of fiery temperament and strong will, was very easily managed through his affections. In theory he maintained the headship of man in the household in the extremest form. He gives in several of his works no uncertain indication of his views on that point. This only serves to make more conspicuous the fact, which forces itself repeatedly upon the attention, that his movements were largely, if not mainly, (p. 014) by his wife. This becomes noticeable at the very beginning of their union. She was unwilling to undergo the long and frequent separations from her husband that the profession of a naval officer would demand. Accordingly, he abandoned the idea of continuing in it. The acceptance of his resignation bears date the 6th of May, 1811. He had then been regularly in the service a little less than three years and a half. After quitting the navy Cooper led for a long time a somewhat unsettled life. For about a year and a half he resided at Heathcote Hall, Mamaroneck, the residence of his wife's father. He then rented a small cottage in the neighborhood, and in this remained about a year. His early home, however, was the spot to which his heart turned. To Cooperstown, in consequence, he went back in 1814, taking up his residence at a place outside the village limits, called Fenimore. He purposed to devote his attention to agriculture, and accordingly began at this spot the building of a large stone farm house. While it was in process of construction his wife, anxious to be near her own family, persuaded him to go back to Westchester. Thither in 1817 he went, leaving his dwelling at Fenimore unfinished, and in 1823 it was completely destroyed by fire. In Westchester, a few months after his return, he took up his residence, in the town of Scarsdale, on what was called the Angevine farm, from the name of a French family that had occupied it for several generations. The site of his dwelling was a commanding one, and gave from the south front an extensive view of the country about it and of Long Island Sound. It remained his home until the literary profession, upon which he unexpectedly entered, (p. 015) forced him to leave it for New York city. Great changes had occurred during these years, or were occurring, in his personal surroundings. His father had died in 1809, and his mother in 1817. Before 1820 five daughters had been born to him. The first of these did not live to the age of two years; but the others all reached maturity. The second, Susan Augusta, herself an authoress, became in his later years his secretary and amanuensis, and would naturally have written his life, had not his unfortunate dying injunction stood in the way. A son, Fenimore, born at Angevine, in 1821, died early, and his youngest child, Paul, now a lawyer at Albany, was not born until after his removal to New York city. Surrounded by his growing family, he led for the two or three years following 1817 a life that gave no indication of what was to be his career. His thoughts were principally directed to improving the little estate that had come into his possession. He planted trees, he built fences, he drained swamps, he planned a lawn. The one thing which he did not do was to write. CHAPTER II. (p. 016) 1820-1822. Cooper had now reached the age of thirty. Up to this time he had written nothing, nor had he prepared or collected any material for future use. No thought of taking up authorship as a profession had entered his mind. Even the physical labor involved in the mere act of writing was itself distasteful. Unexpectedly, however, he now began a course of literary production that was to continue without abatement during the little more than thirty years which constituted the remainder of his life. Seldom has a first work been due more entirely to accident than that which he composed at the outset of his career. In his home at Angevine he was one day reading to his wife a novel descriptive of English society. It did not please him, and he suddenly laid down the book and said, "I believe I could write a better story myself." Challenged to make good his boast, he sat down to perform the task, and wrote out a few pages of the tale he had formed in his mind. The encouragement of his wife determined him to go on and complete it, and when completed the advice of friends decided him to publish it. Accordingly, on the 10th of November, 1820, a novel in two volumes, entitled "Precaution," made its appearance in New York. In this purely haphazard way did the most prolific of American authors begin his literary life. The work was brought out in a bad shape, and its typographical (p. 017) defects were unconsciously exaggerated by Cooper in a revised edition of it, which was published after his return from Europe. In the preface to the latter he said that no novel of modern times had ever been worse printed than was this story as it originally appeared. The manuscript, he admitted, was bad; but the proof-reading could only be described as execrable. Periods turned up in the middle of sentences, while the places where they should have been knew them not. Passages, in consequence, were rendered obscure, and even entire paragraphs became unintelligible. A careful reading of the edition of 1820 will show something to suggest, but little to justify, these sweeping assertions. But the work has never been much read even by the admirers of the author; and it is a curious illustration of this fact, that the personal friend, who delivered the funeral discourse upon his life and writings, avoided the discussion of it with such care that he was betrayed into exposing the lack of interest he sought to hide. Bryant confessed he had not read "Precaution." He had merely dipped into the first edition of it, and had been puzzled and repelled by the profusion of commas and other pauses. The non-committalism of cautious criticism could hardly hope to go farther. Punctuation has had its terrors and its triumphs; but this victory over the editor of a daily newspaper must be deemed its proudest recorded achievement. The poet went on to say that to a casual inspection the revised edition, which Cooper afterward brought out, seemed almost another work. The inspection which could come to such a conclusion must have been of that exceedingly casual kind which contents itself with contemplating the outside of a book, and disdains to open it. As a matter of (p. 018) fact the changes made hardly extended beyond the correction of some points of punctuation and of some grammatical forms; it was in a few instances only that the construction of the sentences underwent transformation. Not an incident was altered, not a sentiment modified. Such ignorance on the part of a contemporary and personal friend, if it proves nothing else, shows certainly the little hold this novel has had upon the public taste. Nevertheless, the first work of any well-known author must always have a certain interest belonging to it, entirely independent of any value the work may have in itself. In this case, moreover, the character of the tale and the circumstances attending its production are of no slight importance, when taken in connection with the literary history of the times. It was accident that led to the selection of the subject; but as things then were, Cooper was not unlikely, in any event, to have chosen it or one very similar. The intellectual dependence of America upon England at that period is something that it is now hard to understand. Political supremacy had been cast off, but the supremacy of opinion remained absolutely unshaken. Of creative literature there was then very little of any value produced: and to that little a foreign stamp was necessary, to give currency outside of the petty circle in which it originated. There was slight encouragement for the author to write; there was still less for the publisher to print. It was indeed a positive injury ordinarily to the commercial credit of a bookseller to bring out a volume of poetry or of prose fiction which had been written by an American; for it was almost certain to fail to pay expenses. A sort of critical literature was struggling, or rather (p. 019) gasping, for a life that was hardly worth living; for its most marked characteristic was its servile deference to English judgment and dread of English censure. It requires a painful and penitential examination of the reviews of the period to comprehend the utter abasement of mind with which the men of that day accepted the foreign estimate upon works written here, which had been read by themselves, but which it was clear had not been read by the critics whose opinions they echoed. Even the meekness with which they submitted to the most depreciatory estimate of themselves was outdone by the anxiety with which they hurried to assure the world that they, the most cultivated of the American race, did not presume to have so high an opinion of the writings of some one of their countrymen as had been expressed by enthusiasts, whose patriotism had proved too much for their discernment. Never was any class so eager to free itself from charges that imputed to it the presumption of holding independent views of its own. Out of the intellectual character of many of those who at that day pretended to be the representatives of the highest education in this country, it almost seemed that the element of manliness had been wholly eliminated; and that along with its sturdy democracy, whom no obstacles thwarted and no dangers daunted, the New World was also to give birth to a race of literary cowards and parasites. With such a state of feeling prevalent, a work of fiction that concerned America might seem to have small chance of success with Americans themselves. It would not, therefore, have been strange, under any circumstances, that in beginning his career as an author Cooper should have chosen to write a tale of English social life. The fact that he knew (p. 020) personally nothing about what he was describing was in itself no insuperable objection. That ignorance was then and has since been shared by many novelists on both sides of the water, who have treated of the same subject. Relying upon English precedent, he might in fact feel that he was peculiarly fitted for the task. He had cruised a few times up and down the British channel, he had caught limited views of British manners and customs by walking on several occasions the length of Fleet Street and the Strand. Knowledge of America equivalent to this would then have been regarded in England as an ample equipment for an accurate treatise upon the social life of this country, and even upon its existing political condition and probable future. But much more than the choice of a foreign subject did the pretense of foreign authorship prove the servility of feeling prevailing at that time among the educated classes. This was in the first place, to be sure, the result of the freak that led Cooper originally to begin writing a novel; but it was a freak that would never have been carried out, after publication had been decided upon, had he not been fully aware of the fact that the least recommendation of a book to his countrymen would be the knowledge that it was composed by one of themselves. "Precaution" was not merely a tale of English social life, it purported to be written by an Englishman; and it was so thoroughly conformed to its imaginary model that it not only reëchoed the cant of English expression, but likewise the expression of English cant. To talk about dissenters and the establishment was natural and proper enough in a work written ostensibly by the citizen of a country in which there was a state church. But Cooper went much farther than (p. 021) this in the reflections and moral observations which are scattered up and down the pages of this novel. These represent fairly views widely held at the time in America, and may not impossibly express the personal opinions he himself then entertained. He speaks in one place, in his assumed character of an Englishman, of the solidity and purity of our ethics as giving a superior tone to our moral feelings as contrasted with the French. He goes out of his way to compliment George III. One of the personages in the novel was tempted to admit something to his credit that he did not deserve. The love of truth, however, finally prevailed. But it was not because the man himself had any innate love of truth, but because "he had been too much round the person of our beloved monarch not to retain all the impressions of his youth." Passages such as these are remarkable when we consider the sentiments in regard to England that Cooper subsequently came to express. If they do not show with certainty his opinions at that time, they do show the school in which he had been brought up: they mark clearly the extent and violence of the reaction which in after years carried him to the opposite extreme. In its plan and development "Precaution" was a compromise between the purely fashionable novel and that collection of moral disquisitions of which Hannah More's Coelebs was the great exemplar, and still remained the most popular representative. As in most tales of high life, nobody of low condition plays a prominent part in the story, save for the purpose of setting off the dukes, earls, baronets, generals, and colonels that throng its pages. A novelist in his first production never limits his creative activity in any respect; and Cooper, (p. 022) moreover, knew the public well enough to be aware that a fictitious narrative which aimed to describe aristocratic society might perhaps succeed without much literary merit, but would be certain to fail without an abundance of lords. The leading characters, however, whether of higher or lower degree, are planned upon the moral model. They either preach or furnish awful examples. It would certainly be most unfair to an author to judge him, as in this case, by a work which he had begun without any view to publication, and which he afterward learned to think and to speak of slightingly. Still, though, compared with many of his writings, "Precaution" is a novel of little worth, it is, in some respects, a better guide to the knowledge of the man than his better productions. The latter give evidence of his powers; in this are shown certain limitations of his nature and beliefs. Peculiarities, both of thought and feeling, which in his other writings are merely suggested, are here clearly revealed. Some of them will appear strange to those whose conception of his character is derived from facts connected with his later life, or whose acquaintance with his works is limited to those most celebrated. Cooper was, by nature, a man of deep religious feeling. This disposition had been strengthened by his training. But there is something more than deep religious feeling exhibited in his first novel. There runs through it a vein of pietistic narrowness, which seems particularly unsuited to the man whom popular imagination, investing him somewhat with the characteristics of his own creations, has depicted as a ranger of the forests and a rover of the seas. Yet the existence of this vein is plainly apparent, though all his surroundings would (p. 023) seem to have been unfavorable to its birth and development. He shared, to its fullest extent, in the jealousy which at that time, far more than now, prevailed between the Middle States and New England. He was strongly attached to the Episcopal Church, and he had, or fancied he had, a keen dislike to the Puritans and their manners and creeds. To these "religionists," as he was wont to call them, he attributed a great deal that was ungraceful in American life, and a good deal that was disgraceful. But the Puritan element is an irrepressible and undying one in English character. It can be found centuries before it became the designation of a religious body. It can be traced, under various and varying appellations, through every period of English history. It is not the name of a sect, it is not the mark of a creed; it is the characteristic of a race. It is, therefore, never long put under ban before it comes back, and takes its turn in ruling manners and society. The revolt against it in the eighteenth century had stripped from religion everything in the shape of sentiment, and left it merely a business. The reaction which brought the Puritan element again to the front was so intensified by hostility to what were called French principles that the minor literature of the latter half of the reign of George III. exhibits a cant of intolerance from which many of its greatest writers were rarely great enough to be wholly free. This influence is clearly visible in the earliest work of Cooper. There is no charge, probably, he would have denied sooner or disliked more, but in his nature he was essentially a Puritan of the Puritans. Their faults and their virtues, their inconsistencies and their contradictions, were his. Their earnestness, their intensity, their narrowness, their intolerance, their pugnacity, their serious way of looking at (p. 024) human duties and responsibilities, all these elements corresponded with elements in his own character. His, also, were their lofty ideas of personal purity and of personal obligation, extending not merely to the acts of the life, but to the thoughts of the heart. Like them, moreover, he was always disposed to appeal directly to the authority of the Supreme Being. Like them, he had perfect confidence in the absolute knowledge he possessed of what that Being thought and wished. Like them, he considered any controverted question as settled, if he could once bring to bear upon the point in dispute a text beginning, "Thus saith the Lord." No rational creature, certainly, would think of contesting a view of the Creator, or acting contrary to a command coming unmistakably from Him. But at this very point the difficulty begins; and in nothing did Cooper more resemble the Puritans than in his incapacity to see that there was any difficulty at all. It never occurred to him that there might possibly be a vast difference between what the Lord actually said and what James Fenimore Cooper thought the Lord said. It is hardly necessary to add, however, that this characteristic of mind has its advantages as well as disadvantages. It was not unnatural, accordingly, that "Precaution" should exemplify in many cases that narrowness of view which seeks to shape narrow rules for the conduct of life. For its sympathy with this, one of the most distinguishing and disagreeable features of Puritanism, the novel has an interest which could never be aroused by it as a work of art. Extreme sentiments are often expressed by the author in his own person, though they are usually put into the mouths of various actors in the story. Their especial representative is a certain Mrs. (p. 025) Wilson, who was clearly a great favorite of her creator, though to the immense majority of men she would seem as disagreeably strong-minded as most of Cooper's female characters are disagreeably weak-minded. This lady is the widow of a general officer, who, the reader comes heartily to feel, has, most fortunately for himself, fallen in the Peninsular war. From her supreme height of morality she sweeps the whole horizon of human frailties and faults, and looks down with a relentless eye upon the misguided creatures who are struggling with temptations to which she is superior, or are under the sway of beliefs whose folly or falsity she has long since penetrated. In her, indeed, there is no weak compromise with human feelings. The lesson meant to be taught by the novel is the necessity of taking precaution in regard to marriage. One point insisted upon again and again is the requirement of piety in the husband. It is the duty of a Christian mother to guard against a connection with any one but a Christian for her daughters: for throughout the whole work the sovereign right of the parent over the child is not merely implied, it is directly asserted. "No really pious woman," says Mrs. Wilson, "can be happy unless her husband is in what she deems the road to future happiness herself." When she is met by the remark that the carrying out of this idea would give a deadly blow to matrimony, she rises to the occasion by replying that "no man who dispassionately examines the subject will be other than a Christian, and rather than remain bachelors they would take even that trouble." Nor in this was the author apparently expressing an opinion which he did not himself hold in theory, however little he might have regarded it in practice. He takes up the same subject in another place, (p. 026) when speaking in his own person. "Would our daughters," he says, "admire a handsome deist, if properly impressed with the horror of his doctrines, sooner than they would now admire a handsome Mohammedan?" On the matter of Sunday observance the narrowest tenets of Puritanism were preached, and the usual ignorance was manifested that there were two sides to the question. Some of the incidents connected with this subject are curious. One of the better characters in the novel asks his wife to ride out on that day, and she reluctantly consents. This brings at once upon the stage the inevitable Mrs. Wilson, who always stands ready to point a moral, though she can hardly be said to adorn the tale. She draws from the transaction the lesson that it is a warning against marrying a person with a difference of views. In this particular instance the respect of the man for religion had been injurious to his wife, because "had he been an open deist, she would have shrunk from the act in his company on suspicion of its sinfulness." It is justice to add that many of these extreme opinions, at least in the extreme form stated in this work, the author came finally to outgrow if in fact he held them seriously then. There are certain other peculiarities of Cooper's beliefs that "Precaution" exemplifies. He has been constantly criticised for the unvarying and uninteresting uniformity of his female characters. This is hardly just; but it is just in the sense that there was only one type which he ever held up to admiration. Others were introduced, but they were never the kind of women whom he delighted to honor. Of female purity he had the highest ideal. Deference for the female sex as a sex he felt sincerely and expressed strongly. Along with (p. 027) this he seemed to have the most contemptible opinion of the ability of the female individual to take care of herself. On the other hand, if she had the requisite ability, the greater became his contempt; for helplessness, in his eyes, was apparently her chiefest charm. The Emily Moseley of his first novel is the prototype of a long line of heroines, whose combination of propriety and incapacity places them at the farthest possible remove from the heroic. She is worthy of special mention here, only because in this novel he describes in detail the desirable qualities, which in the others are simply implied. He furnishes us, moreover, with the precise training to which she had been subjected by her aunt, Mrs. Wilson. Accordingly, we learn both what, in Cooper's eyes, it was incumbent for a woman to be, and what she ought to go through in order to be that woman. A few sentences taken at random will show the character of this heroine. She was artless, but intelligent; she was cheerful, but pious; she was familiar with all the attainments suitable to her sex and years. Her time was dedicated to work which had a tendency to qualify her for the duties of this life and fit her for the life hereafter. She seldom opened a book unless in search of information. She never read one that contained a sentiment dangerous to her morals, or inculcated an opinion improper for her sex. She never permitted a gentleman to ride with her, to walk with her, to hold with her a tête-à-tête. Nor was this result achieved with difficulty. Though she was natural and unaffected, the simple dignity about her was sufficient to forbid any such request, or even any such thought in the men who had the pleasure, or, as the reader may think, the grief, of her (p. 028) acquaintance. In short, she was not merely propriety personified; she was propriety magnified and intensified. This particular heroine, who could not consistently have read the book in which her own conduct is described, finally disappears as the wife of an equally remarkable earl. Her story, as it is told, however, strikingly exemplifies the carelessness in working up details which is one of Cooper's marked defects. The novel received its name, as has already been implied, because it aimed to set forth the desirability of precaution in the choice of husband or wife. What it actually taught, however, was its undesirability. The misunderstandings, the crosses, the distresses, to which the lovers were subjected in the tale all sprang from excess of care, and not from lack of it; from exercising precaution where precaution did nothing but harm. The work excited but little attention in this country. In the following year it was printed in England by Colburn, and was there noticed without the slightest suspicion of its American authorship. In some quarters it received fairly favorable mention. It could not be hid, however, that the novel, as regarded the general public, had been a failure. Still, it was not so much a failure that the author's friends did not think well of it and see promise in it. They urged him to renewed exertions. He had tried the experiment of depicting scenes he had never witnessed, and a life he had never led. He had, in their opinion, succeeded fairly well in describing what he knew nothing about; they were anxious that he should try his hand at the representation of manners and men of which and whom he knew something. Especially was it made a matter of reproach that he, in heart and soul an (p. 029) American of the Americans, should have gone to a foreign land to fill the imagination of his countrymen with pictures of a social state alien both in feeling and fact to their own. This was an appeal of a kind that was certain to touch Cooper sensibly; for with him love of country was not a sentiment, it was a passion. As a sort of atonement, therefore, for his first work, he determined to inflict, as he phrased it, a second one upon the world. Against this there should be no objection on the score of patriotism. He naturally turned for his subject to the Revolution, with the details of which he was familiar by his acquaintance with the men who had shared prominently in its conduct, and had felt all the keenness of a personal triumph in its success. The very county, moreover, in which he had made his home was full of recollections. Westchester had been the neutral ground between the English forces stationed in New York and the American army encamped in the highlands of the Hudson. Upon it more, perhaps, than upon any other portion of the soil of the revolted colonies had fallen the curse of war in its heaviest form. Back and forth over a large part of it had perpetually ebbed and flowed the tide of battle. Not a road was there which had not been swept again and again by columns of infantry or squadrons of horse. Every thicket had been the hiding-place of refugees or spies; every wood or meadow had been the scene of a skirmish; and every house that had survived the struggle had its tale to tell of thrilling scenes that had taken place within its walls. These circumstances determined Cooper's choice of the place and period. Years before, while at the residence of John Jay, his host had given him, one summer afternoon, the account of a spy that had (p. 030) been in his service during the war. The coolness, shrewdness, fearlessness, but above all the unselfish patriotism, of the man had profoundly impressed the Revolutionary leader who had employed him. The story made an equally deep impression upon Cooper at the time. He now resolved to take it as the foundation of the tale he had been persuaded to write. The result was that on the 22d of December, 1821, the novel of "The Spy" was quietly advertised in the New York papers as on that day published. The reader, however, would receive a very wrong idea of the feelings with which the author began and ended this work of fiction, should he stop short with the account that has just been given. The circumstances attending its composition and publication are, as a matter of fact, almost as remarkable as the story itself. They certainly present a most suggestive picture of the literary state of America at that time. Cooper, for his part, had not the slightest anticipation of the effect that it was going to have upon his future. In writing it he was carrying out the wishes of his friends full as much as his own. Nor, apparently, did they urge the course upon him because they conceived him capable of accomplishing anything very great or even very good. They felt that he could produce something that was not discreditable, and that was all that could reasonably be expected of an American. There was no other novelist in the field. Charles Brockden Brown had been dead several years. Irving and Paulding were writing only short sketches. John Neal, indeed, in addition to the poems, tragedies, reviews, newspaper articles, indexes, and histories he was turning out by wholesale, had likewise perpetrated a novel; but it was never known enough to justify the mention of it as having been forgotten. (p. 031) Here, consequently, was a vacant place that ought to be filled. Cooper was never the man who would be eager to take a place because there was no one else to occupy it; and the way he went at the task he had undertaken gives indirectly a clear insight into an American author's feelings sixty years ago. He entered upon the work not merely without the expectation of success, but almost without the hope of it. The novel was written very hastily; the sheets passed into the hands of the type-setter with scarcely a correction; and so little heart had he in the task that the first volume was printed several months before he felt any inducement to write a line of the second. The propriety of abandoning it entirely, under the apprehension of its proving a serious loss, was debated. "Should chance," he said, in a later introduction to the book, "throw a copy of this prefatory notice into the hands of an American twenty years hence, he will smile to think that a countryman hesitated to complete a work so far advanced, merely because the disposition of the country to read a book that treated of its own familiar interests was distrusted." In this respect the difficulty of his position was made more prominent by its contrast with that of the great novelist who was then occupying the attention of the English-speaking world. Scott, in writing "Waverley," could take for granted that there lay behind him an intense feeling of nationality, which would show itself not in noisy boastfulness, but in genuine appreciation; that with the matter of his work his countrymen would sympathize, whatever might be their opinion as to its execution. No such supposition could be made by Cooper; no such belief inspired him to exertion. He might hope to create interest; he could not (p. 032) venture to assume its existence. One other incident connected with the composition of this work marks even more plainly the almost despairing attitude of his mind. While the second volume was slowly printing, he received an intimation from his publisher that the work might grow to a length that would endanger the profits. The author hereupon adopted a course which is itself a proof of how much stranger is fact than fiction. To placate the publisher and set his mind at rest, the last chapter was written, printed, and paged, not merely before the intervening chapters had been composed, but before they had been fully conceived. It was fair to expect failure for a work which no bookseller had been found willing to undertake at his own risk, and which the author himself set about in a manner so perfunctory. The indifference and carelessness displayed, he said afterward, were disrespectful to the public and unjust to himself; yet they give, as nothing else could, a vivid picture of the literary situation in America at that time. The reluctance and half-heartedness with which Cooper began and completed this work stand, indeed, in sharpest contrast to the existing state of feeling, when it is only the prayers of friends and the tears of relatives that can prevent most of us from publishing some novel we have already written. But almost as it were by accident he had struck into the vein best fitted for the display of his natural powers. In it he succeeded with little effort, where other men with the greatest effort might have failed. The delicate distinctions that underlie character where social pressure has given to all the same outside, it was not his to depict. Still less could he unfold the subtle (p. 033) workings of motives that often elude the observation of the very persons whom they most influence. Such a power is essential to the success of him who seeks to delineate men as seen in conventional society; and largely for the lack of it his first novel had been a failure. It was only at rare intervals, also, that he showed that precision of style and pointed method of statement which, independent of the subject, interest the reader in men and things that are not in themselves interesting. It was the story of adventure, using adventure in its broadest sense, that he was fitted to tell: and fortunately for him Walter Scott, then in the very height of his popularity, had made it supremely fashionable. In this it is only needful to draw character in bold outlines; to represent men not under the influence of motives that hold sway in artificial and complex society, but as breathed upon by those common airs of reflection and swept hither and thither by those common gales of passion that operate upon us all as members of the race. It is not the personality of the actors to which the attention is supremely drawn, though even in that there is ample field for the exhibition of striking characterization. It is the events that carry us along; it is the catastrophe to which they are hurrying that excites the feelings and absorbs the thoughts. There can be no greater absurdity than to speak of this kind of story, as is sometimes done, as being inferior in itself to those devoted exclusively to the delineation of manners or character, or even of the subtler motives which act upon the heart and life. As well might one say that the "Iliad" is a poem of inferior type to the "Excursion." Again, it is only those who think it must be easy to write what it is easy to read who will fall into the mistake of fancying that a novel of (p. 034) adventure which has vitality enough to live does not owe its existence to the arduous, though it may be largely unconscious, exercise of high creative power. No better correction for this error can be found than in looking over the names of the countless imitators of Scott, some of them distinguished in other fields, who have made so signal a failure that even the very fact that they attempted to imitate him at all has been wholly forgotten. "The Spy" appeared almost at the very close of 1821. It was not long before its success was assured. Early in 1822 the newspapers were able to assert that it had met with a sale unprecedented in the annals of American literature. What that phrase meant is partly indicated by the fact that it had then been found necessary to publish a second edition. In March a third edition was put to the press; and in the same month the story was dramatized and acted with the greatest success. Still in the abject dependence upon foreign estimate which was the preëminent characteristic of a large portion of the educated class of that day, many felt constrained to wait for the judgment that would come back from Europe before they could venture to express an opinion which they had the presumption to call their own. Contemporary newspapers more than once mention the relief that was afforded to many when Cooper was spoken of in several of the English journals as "a distinguished American novelist." This, it has been implied, was then a condition of the public mind that no writer could dare wholly to disregard. When the project of abandoning this novel, already half printed, was under discussion, the principal reason that finally decided the author (p. 035) to persevere was the fact that his previous work had received a respectful notice in a few English periodicals. It was thought, in consequence, that in his new venture he would be secure from loss. Still, it is due to his countrymen to say that it was to them alone he owed his first success. In later years the declaration was often made that he would never have been held in honor at home, had it not been for foreign approbation. The assertion he himself indignantly denied. "This work," he said afterward, in speaking of "The Spy," "most of you received with a generous welcome that might have satisfied any one that the heart of this great community is sound." Certain it is that the success of the novel was assured in America some time before the character of its reception in Europe was known. The printed volume was offered to the London publisher Murray, and for terms he was referred to Irving, who was then in England. Murray gave the novel for examination to Gifford, the editor of the "Quarterly." By his advice it was declined,--a result that might easily have been foretold from the hostility of the man to this country. He had made his review an organ of the most persistent depreciation and abuse of America and everything American. A new writer from this side of the ocean was little likely to meet with any favor in his sight, especially when his subject was one that from its very nature could not be flattering to British prejudices. Murray having refused, another publisher was found in Miller, who had also been the first to bring out Irving's "Sketch Book." Early in 1822 the work appeared in England. There its success was full as great as it had been in America. This novel, in fact, made Cooper's reputation both at home and abroad. It is (p. 036) important to bear this in mind, because it is a common notion that it was his delineations of Indian life that brought him his European fame. They established it, but they did not originate it. "The Spy" was a tale of a war, which in character was not essentially different from any other war. So far as the story painted the incidents of a struggle in which the English had been unsuccessful, it could have no right to expect favor from the English public unless there was merit in the execution of the work independent of the subject. The interest with which it was read by a people who could not fail to find portions of it disagreeable, who were moreover accustomed to look with contempt upon everything of American origin, was the best proof that a novelist had arisen whose reputation would stretch beyond the narrow limits of nationality. This was even more strikingly seen, when it came to be translated. If the English opinion was favorable, the French might fairly be called enthusiastic. A version was made into that tongue in the summer of 1822, by the translator of the Waverley Novels. In the absolute ignorance that existed as to its authorship, the work was ascribed by several of the Parisian papers to Fanny Wright, who subsequently achieved a fame of her own as a champion of woman's privileges and denouncer of woman's wrongs. In spite of its anonymous character and of some extraordinary blunders in translation, it was warmly received in France. From that country its reputation in no long space of time spread in every direction; translations followed one after another into all the cultivated tongues of modern Europe; and in all it met the same degree of favor. Nor has lapse of time shaken seriously its popularity. The career of success, which began sixty (p. 037) years ago, has suffered vicissitudes, but never suspension; and to this hour, whatever fault may be found with the work as a whole, the name of Harvey Birch is still one of the best known in fiction. No tale produced during the present century has probably had so extensive a circulation; and the leading character in it has found admirers everywhere and at times imitators. Of this latter statement a striking illustration is given in the memoirs of Gisquet, a prefect of the French police under Louis Philippe. In his chapter on the secret agents employed by him during his administration, he tells the story of one who by the information he imparted rendered important services in preventing the outbreak of civil war. He thus describes the motives which led the man to pursue the course he did. "Struck with the reading," he writes, "of one of Cooper's novels called 'The Spy,' he aspired to the sort of ambition which distinguished the hero of that work, and was desirous of playing in France the part which Cooper has assigned to Harvey Birch during the American war of independence.... Harvey Birch--for he adopted this name in all his reports--never belied his professions of fidelity. He rendered services which would have merited a competent fortune; but when the term of them ended, he contented himself with asking for a humble employment, barely enough to supply his daily necessities." The belief in the reality of the hero has, indeed, been part of the singular fortune of the book. In his account of Nicaragua, published in 1852, Mr. E. G. Squier furnished incidentally interesting testimony to the truth of this statement as well as to the wide circulation of the tale itself. At La Union, the port of San Miguel, he stayed at the house of the commandant of the place. His (p. 038) apartments he found well stocked with books, and among them was this particular novel. "The 'Espy,'" he went on to say, "of the lamented Cooper, I may mention, seems to be better known in Spanish America than any other work in the English language. I found it everywhere; and when I subsequently visited the Indian pueblo of Conchagua, the first alcalde produced it from an obscure corner of the cahildo, as a very great treasure. He regarded it as veritable history, and thought 'Señor Birch' a most extraordinary personage and a model guerillero." CHAPTER III. (p. 039) 1822-1826. Cooper would have been more or less than mortal if the unexpected success achieved by "The Spy" had not incited him to renewed effort. It definitely determined his career, though at the time he did not know it. As yet he was not sure in his own mind whether the favor his book had met was the result of a lucky hit or was due to the display of actual power. There can be no question as to the honesty of his assertion when he published his third novel, that it depended upon certain contingencies whether it would not be the last. But from this time on he wrote incessantly. From 1820 to 1830, including both years, he brought out eleven works. In many respects this was the happiest period of his literary life as well as the most successful. During it he produced many of his greatest creations. One decided failure he made; but with this exception if each new story did not seem to exhibit any new power, it at least gave no sign of weakness, or misdirection of energy. This period is in fact so supremely the creative one of Cooper's life as regards the conception of character and scene that nearly all he did demands careful examination. He first set about a task that lay near his heart. This was to describe the scenes, the manners and customs of his native land, especially of the frontier life in which he had been trained. In 1823, (p. 040) accordingly, appeared "The Pioneers," itself the pioneer of the five famous stories, which now go collectively under the name of the "Leather-Stocking Tales." It was a vivid and faithful picture of the sights he had seen and the men he had met in the home of his childhood, where as a boy he had witnessed the struggles which attend the conquest of man over nature. In it appear in comparatively rude outlines the personages whose names and exploits his pen was afterwards to make famous throughout the civilized world. They are in this work of a far less lofty type than in those which followed. "The Pioneers," in truth, though not a poor story, is much the poorest of the series of which it forms a part. The almost loving interest he took in the matter about which he was writing tempted the author to indulge his recollections at the expense of his judgment. His first novel, he said in the prefatory address to the publisher which appeared in this one, had been written to show that he could write a grave tale, and it was so grave that no one would read it; the second was written to overcome if possible the neglect of the public; but the third was written exclusively to please himself. The story as a story suffered in consequence from the very fascination which the subject had for his mind. So subordinate was it made, especially in the first half, to the description of the scenes, that the details at times become wearisome and the interest often flags. The expectation with which the appearance of this work was awaited is a striking proof of the impression that the previous novel had made. It was to have been brought out as early as the autumn of 1822. But during the summer of that year the yellow fever ravaged New York (p. 041) and largely broke up for a time all kinds of business, including printing. Causes beyond control still further delayed the publication, and it was not until the first of February, 1823, that the book appeared. The public curiosity, however, had been fully excited. Extracts from it--according to a custom then prevalent in England--had been furnished in advance to some of the newspapers, and though these were not the most striking passages, they served to direct attention and awaken expectation. At the close of January, announcement of the precise date of publication was made. Success was certain from the start; but the degree of it outran all anticipation. The evening papers of the first of February were able to state that up to twelve o'clock that day there had been sold three thousand five hundred copies. Even at this period, with a population more than five times as numerous, such a half day's sale, under similar circumstances, would be remarkable. It is little wonder, therefore, that the newspapers of that period felt that only largeness of type and profusion of exclamation points could suitably record such a success. "The Pioneers" was the first work to display a peculiarity of the author's character, which came afterwards into marked prominence. Cooper in a sense belonged to the school of Scott; and he was so far from denying it that in one place he speaks of himself as being nothing more than a chip from the former's block. But his life would have been far happier and his success much greater had he followed in one respect the example of him he called his master. Scott ordinarily did not read criticisms upon his own writings; and when he did, he was careful not to let his equanimity be seriously disturbed even by the severest attacks. (p. 042) of this was no doubt due to prudence; but a good deal of it to contempt. For of all the rubbish that time shoots into the wallet of oblivion, contemporary criticism runs about the least chance of being rescued from the forgetfulness into which it has been thrust. This is a result entirely independent of its goodness or badness. If the criticism is both destructive and just, the very death of the subject against which it is directed causes it to perish in the ruin it has brought about. If it is unjust, it is certain to be speedily forgotten, unless he who suffers from it takes the pains to perpetuate its memory, or some later investigator drags it from its obscurity for the sake of pointing out its absurdity. The creative literature of the past is the utmost the present can be expected to read. Its critical literature, however celebrated in its day, is looked upon with contempt, or at best with a patronizing approval, by the following age, which is always confident that it at least has reached the supreme standard of correct taste, and asks no aid in making up its judgments from those who have gone before. But the philosophy which shows this to be true never lessened one iota the pain which the man of sensitive nature suffers. The extent to which Cooper was affected by hostile criticism is something remarkable, even in the irritable race of authors. He manifested under it the irascibility of a man not simply thin-skinned, but of one whose skin was raw. Meekness was never a distinguishing characteristic of his nature; and attack invariably stung him into defiance or counter-attack. Unfriendly insinuations contained in obscure journals could goad him into remarks upon them, or into a reply to them, which at this date is the only means of preserving the original charge. (p. 043) It was in his prefaces that he was apt to express his resentment most warmly, for he well knew that this was the one part of a book which the reviewer is absolutely certain to read. In these he frequently took occasion to point out to the generation of critical vipers the various offenses of which they were guilty, the stupidities that seemed to belong to their very nature, and that utter lack of literary skill which prevented them from giving a look of sense to the most plausible nonsense they concocted. By Cooper, indeed, the preface was looked upon not as a place to conciliate the reader, but to hurl scorn at the reviewer. In his hands it became a trumpet from which he blew from time to time critic-defying strains, which more than made up in vigor for all they lacked in prudence. This characteristic was early manifested. In the short preface to the second edition of "The Spy," he could not refrain from referring to the friends who had given him good advice, and who had favored him with numberless valuable hints, by the help of which the work might be made excellent. But it is the letter to the publisher, with which "The Pioneers" originally opened, that was the first of his regular warlike manifestoes. Though not very long, two thirds of it was devoted to the men who had publicly found fault with his previous works. He pointed out their discrepancies in taste and the metaphysical obscurity of their opinions. At the conclusion he wrote a sentence which some of them never forgot. He told his publisher that to him alone he should look for the only true account of the reception of his book. "The critics," said he in continuation, "may write as obscurely as they please, and look much wiser than they are; the papers may puff and abuse as their (p. 044) changeful humors dictate; but if you meet me with a smiling face I shall at once know that all is essentially well." Little notice, however, was taken at the time of Cooper's preference of the public opinion which showed itself in buying his books, to that which made it its chief aim to teach him how they ought to be written. The country was too pleased with him and too proud of him to pay any special attention to these momentary ebullitions of dissatisfaction. On his part so great had now become his literary activity, that before "The Pioneers" was published he had set to work upon a new novel, of a kind of which he can justly be described as the creator, and in which he was to be followed by a host of imitators. At a dinner party in New York in 1822, at which Cooper was present, the authorship of the Waverley Novels, still a matter of some uncertainty, came up for discussion. In December of the preceding year "The Pirate" had been published. The incidents in this story were brought forward as a proof of the thorough familiarity with sea-life of him, whoever he was, that had written it. Such familiarity Scott had never had the opportunity to gain in the only way it could be gained. It followed, therefore, that the tale was not of his composition. Cooper, who had never doubted the authorship of these novels, did not at all share in this view. The very reasons that made others feel uncertain led him to be confident. To one like him whose early life had been spent on top-gallant yards and in becketing royals, it was perfectly clear that "The Pirate" was the work of a landsman and not of a sailor. Not that he denied the accuracy of the descriptions so far as they went. The point that he made was that with the same (p. 045) materials far greater effects could and would have been produced, had the author possessed that intimate familiarity with ocean-life which can be his alone whose home for years has been upon the waves. He could not convince his opponents by argument. He consequently determined to convince them by writing a sea-story. We who are familiar with the countless hosts of novels of this nature that have swarmed and are still swarming from the press, cannot realize the apparent peril which at that time existed in this undertaking. No work of the kind, such as he now projected, had ever yet been published. Sailors, indeed, had been introduced into fiction, notably by Smollett, but in no case had there been exhibited the handling and movements of vessels, and the details of naval operations. During the last half-century we have been so surfeited with the sea-story in every form, that most of us have forgotten the fact of its late origin, and that it is to Cooper that it owes its creation. That he created it was not due to any encouragement from others. He had plenty of judicious friends to warn him from the undertaking. Sailors, he was told, might understand and appreciate it, but no one else would. Minute detail, moreover, was necessary to render it intelligible to seamen, and to landsmen it would be both unintelligible and uninteresting on account of the technicalities which must inevitably be found in minute detail. A reputation already well established would be sunk in the treacherous element he was purposing to describe. Cooper persisted in his purpose, but he could not fail to be disturbed by the unfavorable auguries that met him on every side. These naturally had the more weight, as they came from men who were attached to (p. 046) him personally, and who were honestly solicitous for his fame. He was at one time almost inclined to give up the project. But a critical English friend to whom he submitted a portion of the manuscript was delighted with it. In this man's judgment and taste Cooper felt so great confidence that he was induced to persevere. Moreover, to try the effect upon the more peculiar public of seamen, he read an extract to one of his old shipmates, who was also a relative. This was the account of the war-vessel working off shore in a gale. The selection was certainly a happy one. The literature of the sea presents no more thrilling chapter than that which, describing the passage of the great frigate through the narrow channel, gives every detail with such vividness and power that the most unimaginative cannot merely see ship, shore, and foaming water, but almost hear the roaring of the wind, the creaking of the cordage, and the dashing of the waves against the breakers. As he read on the listener's interest kept growing until he was no longer able to remain quiet. Rising from his seat he paced up and down the room furiously until the chapter was finished. Then half ashamed of the excitement into which he had been betrayed, he avenged himself just as if he were a professional reviewer by indulging in a bit of special criticism: "It's all very well," he burst out, "but you have let your jib stand too long, my fine fellow." For once Cooper heeded advice. "I blew it out of the bolt-rope," said he, "in pure spite;" and blown out of the bolt-rope the jib appears in the tale. He now felt reasonably confident of success, and any doubt that might have lingered in his mind was at once swept away by the favorable reception the work met when it came out. Its publication was for (p. 047) a while delayed. Early in the summer of 1823 the first volume had been finished and a portion of the second, but any further progress was checked for the time by an affliction that then befell the author. On the 5th of August his youngest child, Fenimore, then little less than two years old, died at the family residence in Beach Street, New York, and this calamity was followed by illness of his own. "The Pilot," in consequence, though bearing the date of 1823, was not actually furnished to the trade until the 7th of January, 1824. Its success, both in this country and in Europe, was instantaneous. Far-sighted men saw at once that a new realm had been added to the domain of fiction. "The Pilot" is indeed not only the first of Cooper's sea-stories in point of time, but if we regard exclusively the excellence of detached scenes, it may perhaps be justly styled the best of them all. At any rate its place in the highest rank of this species of fiction cannot be disputed, and in spite of the multitude of similar works that have followed in its wake and which have had their seasons of temporary popularity, its hold upon the public has never been lost. Cooper was without question exceptionally fortunate in the materials with which he had to deal. He was never under the necessity of getting up with infinite toil what the modern novelist terms his local coloring. This existed for him ready made. He had only to call to mind the men he had himself met, the hazards he had run, the life he had lived, to be furnished with all the incidents and scenes and characters that were capable of being wrought into romance. His descriptions both of forest and of sea have all that vividness and reality which cannot well be given save by him who has threaded at will every maze of the one and (p. 048) tossed for week after week upon the billows of the other. Moreover, in this particular case, while he satisfied his patriotic feeling in the choice of the time, he displayed great judgment in the selection of the hero. The pilot, though never named, we know to be the extraordinary and daring adventurer, John Paul Jones, and the period is of course the American Revolution. In his literary art, likewise, Cooper has never been equaled by his imitators. Provided he could create the desired effect, he dared to let the reader remain in ignorance of the details he introduced. Enough of technicality was brought in to satisfy the professional seaman, but not so much as to distract the attention of the landsman from the main movement of the story. Contented with this the author did not seek to explain to the latter what he could not well understand without having served personally before the mast. From this rule he never varied, save in the few cases where the interest of the tale could be better served by imparting information than by withholding it. He had a full artistic appreciation of the impressiveness of the unknown. For, in stories of this kind, the vagueness of the reader's knowledge adds to the effect upon his mind, because, while he sees that mighty agencies are at work in perilous situations, his very ignorance of their exact nature deepens the feeling of awe they are of themselves calculated to produce. The wise reticence of Cooper in this respect can be seen by contrasting it with the prodigality of information, contained in more than one modern sea-novel, in which the whole action of the story is arrested to explain a technical operation with the result that the ordinary reader finds the explanation more unintelligible than the technical operation itself. Still, in spite of the excellence of the tales which had followed (p. 049) it, "The Spy" continued with the majority of readers to be the most popular of his works. This fact, coupled with his intense love of country, led him to turn once more for a subject to his native land and to the period in the description of which he had won his first fame. He formed, in fact, a plan of writing a series of works of fiction, the scenes of which should be laid in the various colonies that had shared in the Revolutionary struggle. In pursuance of this scheme, his next work was projected. In February, 1825, appeared "Lionel Lincoln, or the Leaguer of Boston." The first edition had a preliminary title-page, which contained the inscription, "Legends of the Thirteen Republics," followed by this quotation from Hamlet-- "I will fight with him upon this theme Until my eyelids will no longer wag." When the plan he had conceived was given up, this addition naturally disappeared with it. Nothing that industry could do was spared by Cooper to make this work a success. On this account as well as for its reception by the public it stands in marked contrast to "The Spy." In the preparation of it he studied historical authorities, he read state papers, he pored over official documents of all kinds and degrees of dreariness. To have his slightest assertions in accordance with fact, he examined almanacs, and searched for all the contemporary reports as to the condition of the weather. He visited Boston in order to go over in person the ground he was to make the scene of his story. As a result of all this labor he has furnished us an admirable description of the engagement at Concord Bridge, of the running fight of Lexington, (p. 050) and of the battle of Bunker's Hill. Of the last, it is, according to the sufficient authority of Bancroft, the best account ever given. At this point praise must stop. New England was always to Cooper an ungenial clime, both as regards his creative activity and his critical appreciation. The moment he touched its soil, his strength seemed to abandon him. Whatever excellencies this particular work displayed, they were not the excellencies of a novel. Accuracy of detail, even in historical romance, is only a minor virtue. The modern reader is, indeed, often inclined to doubt whether it is a virtue at all now that modern research is constantly showing that so much we have been wont to look upon as fact is nothing more than fable. So superior is the imagination of man turning out to his memory that one is tempted to fancy that instead of going to history for our fiction we shall yet have to turn about and go to fiction for our history. "Lionel Lincoln" is certainly one of Cooper's most signal failures. In writing it he had attempted to do what it did not lie in the peculiar nature of his powers to accomplish. It is the story of crime long hidden from the knowledge of men, but dogging with unceasing activity the memories of those concerned in it. But the secret chambers of the soul into which the guilty man never looks willingly, Cooper could neither enter himself nor lay bare to others. Remorse that gnaws incessantly at every activity of the spirit, the consciousness of sin that haunts the heart and hangs like a burden upon the life, can never well be depicted save by him whose words suggest more than they reveal. Cooper was not a writer of this kind. He belonged to that class of literary artists who convey their precise meaning by exactness and fullness of (p. 051) detail. The vagueness and indefiniteness with which this story abounds is not, therefore, that impressive obscurity which springs from the mysterious; it is, on the contrary, the obscurity of the unintelligible and absurd. In all of Cooper's novels, it is a fault that the characters are often represented as acting without sufficient motive. In the story of adventure this can be pardoned, or at least overlooked; for freak plays an important part in determining the movements of many of us. It is not so, however, in tales containing a plot similar to that of "Lionel Lincoln." The mind revolts at finding the actors in the drama represented as having committed monstrous crimes, without any reason that is worth mentioning. This radical defect in the plan is not counterbalanced by any felicity in the execution. Many of the incidents are more than improbable, they are impossible. The style, likewise, is labored, and the conversations combine the two undesirable peculiarities of being both stilted and dull. The characters, female or male, are in no case successfully drawn. The inferior ones, introduced to amuse, serve only to depress the reader. The hero in the course of the tale does several absurd things; but he finally surpasses himself by hurrying away from the woman he loves, without her knowledge, immediately after he has been joined to her in marriage. The representation of the half-witted Job--a character upon which the author clearly labored hard--neither arouses interest nor touches the heart. It is, indeed, impossible to feel much sympathy with one particular imbecile, no matter how patriotic, in a story where most of the actors are represented as acting like idiots. Nevertheless, his reputation and the real excellence of the battle (p. 052) battle scenes, saved this work from seeming at the time so much of a failure as it actually was. Certainly whatever loss of credit he may have sustained as the result of writing "Lionel Lincoln," was much more than made up by the success of the tale that followed. In 1824 he had gone on an excursion to Saratoga, Lake George, and Lake Champlain, with a small party of English gentlemen. One of these was Mr. Stanley, the future Lord Derby. As they reached Glens Falls and were examining the caverns made by the river at that spot, Mr. Stanley told Cooper that here ought to be laid the scene of a romance. In reply, the novelist assured him that a book should be written in which these caverns should have a place. The promise was fulfilled. On the 4th of February, 1826, "The Last of the Mohicans" made its appearance. It was composed the previous year in a little cottage then situated in a quiet, open country, on which now stands the suburban village of Astoria. A severe illness attacked Cooper during its progress; but whatever effect it had upon his physical frame, it certainly did not impair in the slightest his intellectual force. The success of the work was both instantaneous and prodigious. Owing, perhaps, to the novelty of the scenes and characters, it was even greater in Europe than in America. But there was no lack of appreciation in his own land. In the estimation of his countrymen, the novel at once took its place at the head of his productions. An incidental fact will not only make clear its success, but the state of the book trade at that time. The demand for the work soon became so great and so persistent, that in April it was decided to stereotype it. It deserved fully the success it gained. Of all the novels written (p. 053) by Cooper, "The Last of the Mohicans" is the one in which the interest not only never halts, but never sinks. It is, indeed, an open question, whether a higher art would not have given more breathing-places in this exciting tale, in which the mind is hurried without pause from sensation to sensation. But this is a fault, if it be a fault, which the reader will always forgive, whatever the critic may say. The latter, indeed, can see much to blame if he look at the work purely as an artistic creation. He can find improbability of action, insufficiency of motive, and feebleness of outline in many of the leading characters. But these are minor drawbacks. They sink into absolute insignificance when compared with the wealth of power displayed. As they are unable to retard the unflagging interest with which the story is read, so they do not essentially modify the estimation of it after it has been read. In this work two great achievements were accomplished by Cooper. The first was the idealization of the white hunter whom he had described in "The Pioneers." No one can read the two novels in succession without seeing at once how much Leather-Stocking has gained in dignity. In thought and feeling and habits he is essentially the same; but there was given to his character a poetic elevation which raised it at once to the front rank of the creations of the imagination, and will make it imperishable with English literature. As he appears in "The Pioneers" he is merely an old man who has made his home in the hills in advance of the tide of settlement. He is the solitary hunter who views with dislike clearings and improvements, who cannot breathe freely in streets, who hates the sight of masses of men, who looks with especial loathing upon the civilization whose first work is to fell the trees he has (p. 054) learned to love, whose first exercise of power is to draw the network of the law around the freedom and irresponsibility of forest life. Though full of a simple and somewhat sententious morality, he is querulous, irritable, ignorant. But in "The Last of the Mohicans," while the man continues the same, the aspect he presents is wholly different. All that is weak in his character is in the background; all that is best and strongest comes to the front. He is in the prime of life. Ignorant he still remains of the ways of the world as found in the settlements; but there is no trace of discontent or fretfulness. He has full room for the exercise of his native virtues, and in the character of the acute and daring scout he finds no superior. To him forest and sky are an open book. Knowledge is conveyed to his ears in every sound that breaks the stillness of the summer woods; and to his eyes scarred rock and riven pine and the deserted nest of the eagle have made the paths of the wilderness as plain as the broadest highway. Nor are his moral qualities inferior to his purely professional. His coolness never deserts him, his resources never fail him, and along with the versatility that is never at a loss in the presence of the unexpected is the resolution that never flinches at the approach of the perilous. This delineation has always met with unqualified praise. But the idealization of the Indian character as seen in Chingachcook and Uncas has been the subject of much controversy. This is not the place to express an opinion upon the truth of the representation. It is enough to say here that the view Cooper took was not hastily formed, nor was it the result of accidental prejudices. He studied all the sources of information accessible at that time which threw light upon the (p. 055) Indian character. He visited the deputations from the various tribes that passed through the state of New York on their way to the national capital. In some instances he followed them to Washington. It is obvious that to a man of his poetic temperament they may have appeared in a different light from what they did to the ordinary government agent. Certainly he never found reason to modify his views, though he was familiar with the criticism made upon them. Toward the close of his life he took occasion to reaffirm them. It is also to be added that if he gave especial prominence to certain virtues, real or imaginary, of the Indian race, he was equally careful not to pass over their vices. Most of the warriors he introduces are depicted as crafty, bloodthirsty, and merciless. But whether his representation be true or false, it has from that time to this profoundly affected opinion. Throughout the whole civilized world the conception of the Indian character, as Cooper drew it in "The Last of the Mohicans" and still further elaborated it in the later "Leather-Stocking Tales," has taken permanent hold of the imaginations of men. Individuals may cast it off; but in the case of the great mass it stands undisturbed by doubt or unshaken by denial. This much can be said in its favor irrespective of the question of its accuracy. If Cooper has given to Indian conversation more poetry than it is thought to possess, or to Indian character more virtue, the addition has been a gain to literature, whatever it may have been to truth. CHAPTER IV. (p. 056) 1826-1830. With the publication of "The Last of the Mohicans," Cooper's popularity was at its height. His countrymen were proud of him, proud that he had chosen his native land as the scene of his stories, proud that he had in consequence extended among all cultivated peoples its fame as well as his own. His works were more than read. They were in most cases dramatized and acted as soon as published. Artists vied in making incidents depicted in them the subjects of their paintings. Poems, founded upon them or connected in some way with them, made their appearance in the newspapers. If in many cases these things were in themselves of no value, they at least served to show the widespread popular interest which his writings had aroused. Moreover, his reputation was far from being limited to his own land. No other American, before or since, has enjoyed so wide a contemporary popularity. Irving may have been on the whole a greater favorite in England; but if so, it was largely due to the fact that the subjects upon which he was employed were of special interest to English readers, and his manner of treating them was flattering to English prejudices. But the Continental fame of Cooper was unrivaled, and indeed could fairly be said to hold its own with that of Walter Scott. Long before he went to Europe himself, his works appeared (p. 057) simultaneously in America, England, and France. They were speedily translated into German and Italian, and in most instances soon found their way into the other cultivated tongues of Europe. Everywhere his ability had been recognized by those whose approbation, if it could not confer immortality, was certain to bring with it temporary applause. The admiration expressed for him was far less marked in England than upon the Continent; but even there it could often be termed cordial. It came, too, from those who, whatever estimation we may give to their praise, did not praise lightly. From Miss Edgeworth he received personally a tribute to his success in delineating the characters in which her own reputation had been largely won. On reading "The Spy," she sent him a message, that she liked Betty Flanigan particularly, and that no Irish pen could have drawn her better. Scott had been much struck by the scenes and personages depicted in "The Pilot," the novel he first read, and predicted at once the success of the sea-story and of its creator. Many there were, even in England, who looked upon Cooper as being equal to the great master of historical romance. "Have you read the American novels?" wrote in November, 1824, Mary Russell Mitford to a friend. "In my mind they are as good as anything Sir Walter ever wrote. He has opened fresh ground, too (if one may say so of the sea). No one but Smollett has ever attempted to delineate the naval character; and then his are so coarse and hard. Now this has the same truth and power with a deep, grand feeling.... Imagine the author's boldness in taking Paul Jones for a hero, and his power in making one care for him! I envy the Americans their Mr. Cooper.... There is a certain Long Tom who (p. 058) appears to me the finest thing since Parson Adams." Subsequently, in July, 1826, she spoke thus of "The Last of the Mohicans," in a letter to Haydon: "I like it," she wrote, "better than any of Scott's, except the three first and 'The Heart of Mid-Lothian.'" The praise, indeed, given both then and at a later period, may often seem extravagant. In a passage written in 1835, Barry Cornwall, not merely content with putting Cooper at the head of all American authors, added that he may "dare competition with almost any writer whatever." It need hardly be said that opinions such as these were not to be found generally in the English literary periodicals. Cooper's name was not even mentioned in the great reviews until his fame had been secured without their aid. The success which he won in Great Britain was not due in the slightest to the professional critics. These men fancied they had exhausted the power of panegyric when they went so far as to term him the American Scott. This fact was triumphantly paraded at a later period by a writer in Blackwood, presumably Wilson, as one of the convincing proofs of the untruthfulness of the charge made by Barry Cornwall, that authors from this country were treated with systematic unfairness in English reviews. "Were we ever unjust to Cooper?" he asked. "Why, people call him the American Scott." This sort of patting on the back was thought a proud illustration of the generosity of the British character, and as putting the recipient of it under obligations of everlasting gratitude. There is no doubt, indeed, that the reputation of Cooper suffered all his life by the constant comparison that was made between him and (p. 059) the great Scotch writer. It was to a certain extent inevitable; but it was none the less unfortunate. He could never be judged by what he did; it was always by the fanciful test of how some one else would have done it. This was even more true of his own country than of England. Scott's popularity was greater here than it was anywhere else. There was a feeling akin almost to moral reprobation expressed against any one who should presume to fancy that the best work of any native author could equal the poorest that Scott put forth. The Continental opinion which at that time often reckoned the American novelist as equal, if not superior to his British contemporary, seemed to men here like a profanation. It was, indeed, so said in direct terms. Comparison with Scott, therefore, always put the one compared at a great disadvantage. This, however, is a method of judging that is necessary to some and easy to all. Genuine appreciation demands study and thought. For these comparison is a cheap substitute. To call Cooper the American Scott in compliment in the days of his popularity, and in derision in the days of his unpopularity, was a method of criticism which enabled men to praise or undervalue without taking the trouble to think. Stories were invented and set in circulation of how he himself rejoiced in being so designated. Great, accordingly, was the indignation felt and expressed by these gentry at the presumption of the American author, when at a later period he asserted that so far from taking pride in the title, it merely gave him just as much gratification as any nickname could give a gentleman. It would be, moreover, far from truth to say that in this most (p. 060) prosperous portion of his career his popularity was unmixed in his own country. Even then his success had aroused a good deal of envy. In 1823 he was attacked, in common with many prominent citizens of New York, in a satire called "Gotham and the Gothamites." This was the work of a man of the name of Judah, who, in 1822, had published a dramatic poem styled "Odofried the Outcast." The title was ominous of the fate which the production met. The author naturally felt that the age was unappreciative. To relieve his mind he wrote eleven or twelve hundred lines of fresh drivel, in which he assailed everything and everybody. The satire was of that dreadful kind which requires notes and commentaries to point out who is hit and what is meant; and the annotation, as is usual in such cases, took up much more space than the text. This work--for which the author was sent to jail, though a lunatic asylum would have been a far fitter place--is only of interest here because it bears direct and positive evidence to the fact that at this time Cooper was the most widely read of American authors. But jealousy of his fame could be found among men of much higher pretensions than this wretched poetaster. "The North American Review" had at that time been ponderously revolving through space for several years. It was then a periodical respectable, classical, and dull, all three in an eminent degree. Towards Cooper it struggled in a feeble way to be just, but for all that it was the exponent of a distinctly unfriendly feeling. Among individuals a conspicuous representative of this hostility was the poet Percival. He could not endure the reputation which the novelist had acquired. Percival was a man of a good deal of ability, of a great deal of knowledge, and of an inexhaustible (p. 061) capacity of spinning out verse, never rising much above, nor falling much below mediocrity, which, if mere quantity were the only element to be considered, would have justified him in contracting to produce enough to constitute of itself a national literature. As he invariably proved himself entirely destitute of common sense in his ordinary conduct, he was led to fancy that he was not merely a man of ability, but a man of genius; and during the whole of his life he perpetually posed as that most intolerable of literary nuisances, a man of unappreciated genius. In spite of the fact that he had been hospitably entertained and befriended by Cooper, he could not be satisfied, because their common publisher looked upon the latter as the "greatest literary genius in America." The reception given by the public to the "long, dirty, straggling tales" of the novelist disgusted him. "I ask nothing," he wrote in April, 1823, "of a people who will lavish their patronage on such a vulgar book as "The Pioneers." They and I are well quit. They neglect me, and I despise them." In a later letter he returned to this work. "It might do," he said, "to amuse the select society of a barber's shop or a porter-house. But to have the author step forward on such stilts and claim to be the lion of our national literature, and fall to roaring himself and set all his jackals howling (S. C. & Co.) to put better folks out of countenance--why 'tis pitiful, 'tis wondrous pitiful at least for the country that not only suffers it but encourages it." Percival, indeed, his biographer tells us, was subsequently urged to contribute to "The North American Review" a critical article on "The Prairie," in which simple justice was to be done to Cooper--which phrase had, of course, its (p. 062) usual meaning, that injustice was to be done him. The poet's customary indecision prevailed, however; the country was spared this exhibition of spiteful incapacity, and the novelist was left to stumble along in uncertainty as to his precise position among men of letters. Not but there were plenty of men anxious to show it. Especially was this true of that class which looked upon it as the supreme effort of critical judgment to exaggerate the value of everything written in Europe and depreciate everything of native origin. There was a prevailing belief among those who mistook their own individual impotence for the incapacity of a whole people, that nothing good could come out of America. Many showed their faith by their conduct. In 1834, Cooper himself said that he knew of several instances in which persons had not read anything he had written for the avowed reason that nothing worth reading could be written by one of their countrymen. To all of these it was a subject of some perplexity and of more annoyance that his works should be, if anything, more popular in Europe than they were in his native land. To account for this fact various sage reasons were early suggested and are still occasionally heard. One of these has always been particularly common. This was that it was the novelty of the scenes and characters depicted that attracted attention and not the ability shown in depicting them. At any rate, they wished it understood that if he satisfied the European, he did not satisfy the native world: for if creative power had been denied us, we could at least show that as a compensation we had been supplied with a double portion of refined taste. Speaking in behalf of the American people, these critics expressed anxiety that (p. 063) neither at home nor abroad should Cooper be regarded as obtaining the unqualified admiration or attaining the lofty ideal of "all of us." Against any such impression they entered their humble protest. All that lay in their power should be done to counteract it. This is no one-sided statement of opinions then expressed. These very sentiments in almost these very words can be found in reviews of that period. Cooper at the time of writing his first novel was dwelling at Angevine. When the success of the second made it probable that he would continue for a while his career as an author, and possibly devote his life to it, the necessity arose of changing his residence. His country home was about five and twenty miles from the city, but twenty-five miles in those days of limited mail facilities and limited means of communication was a distance not to be tolerated. Accordingly, in 1822 he moved into New York. Either there or in its suburbs he dwelt until his departure for Europe. Here his youngest child, Paul, was born in 1824, and here, as has already been mentioned, his infant son Fenimore died. His talents and his reputation gave him at once a leading position in society. Nor were his associates inferior men. He founded a club which included on its rolls the residents of New York then best known in literature and law, science and art. The names of many will be even more familiar to our ears than they were to those of their contemporaries. All forms of intellectual activity were represented. To this club belonged, among others, Chancellor Kent the jurist; Verplanck, the editor of Shakespeare; Jarvis the painter; Durand the engraver; DeKay the naturalist; Wiley the publisher; Morse the inventor of the electric telegraph; Halleck and Bryant, the poets. It was sometimes called after the name of its (p. 064) founder; but it more commonly bore the title of the "Bread and Cheese Lunch." It met weekly, and Cooper, whenever he was in the city, was invariably present. More than that, he was the life and soul of it. Though kept up for a while after his departure from the country, it was only a languishing existence it maintained, and even this speedily ended in death. His pecuniary situation had been largely improved by his literary success. The pressure upon his means had in fact been one of the main reasons, if not the main reason, that had led him to contemplate pursuing a literary life. The property left by his father had gradually dwindled in value, partly through lack of careful uninterrupted management. His elder brothers, on whom the administration of the estate had successively devolved, had died. The result was, that he found himself without the means which in his childhood he might justly have looked forward to possessing. So far from being a man of wealth he was in the earlier part of his literary career a poor man. From any difficulties, however, into which he may have fallen he was more than retrieved by the success of what he wrote. Precisely what was the sale of his books, or how much he received for their sale, it would be hard and perhaps impossible now to tell. He was careless himself about preserving any records of such facts. But, besides this natural indifference, he seemed to resent any public reference to the price paid him for his writings as an unauthorized intrusion into his personal affairs. Allusions even to the amount of his receipts he apparently regarded as springing not so much from a feeling of pride in his success, as from a desire to represent him as being under great (p. 065) obligations to his countrymen. In some instances he was certainly correct in so regarding it. On one occasion after his return from Europe, he denied the truth of an assertion made in a newspaper, as to the amount he derived from the sale of each of his novels. "It remains for the public to decide," said he, "whether it will tolerate or not this meddling with private interests by any one who can get the command of a little ink and a few types." In the prefatory address to the publisher which appeared in the first edition of "The Pioneers," he made the statement, that the success of "The Spy," should always remain a secret between themselves. This reticence and dislike of publicity continued throughout the whole of his career. It extended to everything connected with his writings. Our knowledge on these points is, therefore, both scanty and uncertain. The size of the editions has never been given to the public. The sale of "The Pioneers" on the morning of its publication has already been noticed; and there are contemporary newspaper statements to the effect that the first edition of "The Red Rover" consisted of five thousand copies, and that this was exhausted in a few days. But it is only from incidental references of this kind, which can rarely be relied upon absolutely, that we at this late day are able to gain any specific information whatever. He was unquestionably helped in the end, however, by what in the beginning threatened to be a serious if not insuperable obstacle. He was unable to get any one concerned in the book trade to assume the risk of bringing out "The Spy." That had to be taken by the author himself. In the case of this novel, we know positively that Cooper was not only the owner of the copyright, but of all the edition; that he gave (p. 066) directions as to the terms on which the work was to be furnished to the booksellers, while the publishers, Wiley & Halsted, had no direct interest in it, and received their reward by a commission. It is evident that under this arrangement his profits on the sale were far larger than would usually be the case. Whether he followed the same method in any of his later productions, there seems to be no means of ascertaining. Wiley, however, until his death, continued to be his publisher. "The Last of the Mohicans" went into the hands of Carey & Lea of Philadelphia; and this firm, under various changes of name, continued to bring out the American edition of his novels until the year 1844. It was from the sales in this country that most of the income from his books was derived. England, indeed, brought him a large sum, at least up to the passage of the copyright law of 1838; but he gained little pecuniary benefit from the wide circulation of his works on the European continent, whatever may have been the renown. In regard to France, he said in 1834 after his return, that he had paid in taxes to the government of that country, during his different residences in it, considerably more money than was obtained from the sales of the sheets of fourteen books. In Germany, where his writings had an immense circulation, his receipts were still less. But whatever may have been the precise amount acquired by the sale of his works, it was sufficient to pay off heavy debts incurred by others, but which he was compelled to assume, to put him in an independent position and justify him in determining to fulfill a long-cherished desire of spending some time in Europe. Accordingly on the 1st (p. 067) of June, 1826, he sailed with his family--consisting, with the servants, of ten persons--from the port of New York. On the 5th of November, 1833, he landed there on his return. His original intention was to be gone for but five years. To the fixing of this particular time he was apparently influenced by a remark of Jefferson, that no American should remain away for a longer period from the country, because if he did, so rapid were the changes, its facts would have got wholly beyond his knowledge. His absence actually extended to a little less than seven years and a half. Most of this time was spent in France. From Henry Clay, then Secretary of State, he had received the appointment of consul at Lyons. He had asked for it, because he did not wish to have the appearance of expatriating himself; for as the service was then conducted, such a post involved no duties and brought in no returns. His commission bears date the 10th of May, 1826. Even this nominal position he gave up after holding it between two and three years. No resignation of his is on file in the State Department; but a successor was appointed on the 15th of January, 1829. He threw up the place because he had come to entertain the conviction that gross abuses existed in the system of foreign appointments, and it became him to set an example of the principles he professed. It may be well at this point to furnish an outline sketch of his various residences in Europe. The voyage from America lasted about a month; and after staying a few days in England he passed over to France, on the soil of which he first set foot on the 18th of July, 1826. Either in Paris or its immediate neighborhood he remained until February, 1828, when he crossed over to England. Leaving London early in June, (p. 068) he went back to France by the way of Holland and Belgium. In July, 1828, he left Paris for Switzerland, and took up his residence near Berne. After spending some weeks in making excursions from that point, he crossed the Alps in October by the Simplon Pass. The following winter and spring he spent in Florence and its vicinity. In the summer of 1829 he sailed down the Italian coast to Naples, and after staying a few weeks in that city, made a home for himself and his family at Sorrento for nearly three months. The winter of 1829-30 he spent in Rome. In the spring of 1830 he went to Venice. From that place he journeyed to Munich by the Tyrol, and finally settled down in Dresden. From his temporary home in Saxony, however, the July revolution speedily drew him to Paris, and that city he made mainly his residence from that time until his return to America in 1833. There he was, and there he stood his ground during the terrible cholera ravages of 1832. Occasional expeditions he made, and of one in particular, up the Rhine and in Switzerland, he has published a full account. It was eminently characteristic of Cooper, that though he brought with him letters of introduction, he found himself unwilling to deliver a single one of them. Yet, certainly, if any American could be pardoned the use of a custom that has been so much abused, he was the man. But after he had resided quietly in France for a few weeks, he happened to attend a diplomatic dinner given by the United States minister to Canning, then on a visit to Paris. This was the occasion of making his presence known to those who had long before made the acquaintance of his writings. He was at once sought out and welcomed by the most (p. 069) distinguished men of the most brilliant capital in the world. The polish, the grace, the elegance, and the wit of French social life made upon him an impression which he not only never forgot, but which he was afterwards in the habit of contrasting with the social life of England and America, to the manifest disadvantage of both, and with the certain result of provoking the hostility of each. He himself says very little of the reception he met; but we know from other sources how cordial and even deferential it was. He was not a man, indeed, to enjoy being lionized, to be set up, as he expressed it, at a dinner-table as a piece of luxury, like strawberries in February or peaches in April. But he was in a capital where attention is always paid to ability, though rarely with noisy demonstration. He received his full share of it. Without mentioning numerous other evidences, the conspicuous position he held is evident from the way Scott speaks of him in his diary. He mentions meeting him one evening at the Princess Galitzin's in November, 1826. "Cooper was there," said he, "so the Scotch and American lions took the field together." But of all the countries in which he resided he grew to be fondest of Italy. This was partly due to the fact that there he could indulge to the full extent two passions that had come to be a part of his nature--the love of fine skies, and of beautiful scenery. His feelings in regard to this country and to France he expressed on one occasion with a courtliness that was wholly free from the insincerity of the courtier's art. In November, 1830, shortly after his return to Paris from Germany, he was presented to the royal family. The Queen of Louis Philippe, who was the daughter of Ferdinand I., of the Two (p. 070) Sicilies, asked him of all the lands visited by him which he most preferred. "That in which your majesty was born," was the reply, "for its nature, and that in which your majesty reigns for its society." There was not in this the slightest compliment, if by compliment anything is meant inconsistent with the severest truth. "Switzerland," he said afterward, "is the country to astonish and sometimes to delight; but Italy is the land to love." During the nearly two years he remained there, its scenery, its climate, its recollections, and also its people, were constantly gaining a hold upon his heart. No country did he ever leave with so much regret; and when he came to take his final departure, his feelings were such as are experienced by him who is on the point of bidding farewell to a much-loved home. When he passed into the valley of the Adige on his journey to the Tyrol, in 1830, he reversed the usual practice of the traveler who has his eyes fixed only on what is to come. He turned around to cast a last lingering glance at the land he was about to leave behind. Italy was the only country, his wife told him, that she had ever known him to quit looking over the shoulder. His regard for the people was, perhaps, intensified by the reaction against the estimation in which he had been wont to hold them. "The vulgar-minded English,"--he said in one of those deliciously irritating and double-acting sentences he was afterward in the habit of frequently uttering--"talk of the damned Italians, and the vulgar-minded American, quite in rule, imitates his great model." Certainly his prejudices against the inhabitants of that country were soon swept away. He contrasted them favorably with all their neighbors. They were (p. 071) more gracious than the English, more sincere than the French, and infinitely more refined than the Germans. In grace of mind, and in love, and even knowledge of the arts, a large portion of the common Italians were, in his opinion, as much superior to the Anglo-Saxons as civilization is to barbarism. He came in time to have a sort of fondness even for the professional mendicants. He furnishes us a curious picture of the beggars who assembled about his residence daily in Sorrento, to whom he invariably gave a grano apiece. The company, starting out from one or two, had been steadily reinforced by recruits from far and near, till it ran up to the neighborhood of a hundred men, who regularly presented themselves for their pittance. There is no more graphic description in his writings than his account of the scene which took place when a new-comer among the beggars had the indiscretion, on receiving his grano, to wish the giver only a hundred years of life; the indignation of the king of the gang at this exhibition of black ingratitude; the tumult with which the blunder was corrected, and the shouts and outcries with which the pitiful hundred was changed into a thousand years, and long ones at that. During this time his literary activity was unceasing. Before the close of 1830 he had completed four novels: "The Prairie," "The Red Rover," "The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish," and "The Water Witch,"--all of which were devoted to the delineation of scenes and characters belonging to his native land. Before he started for Europe he had begun a new Indian story. This was finished during his early residence in Paris. He had felt it to be a hazardous venture to bring into "The Last of the Mohicans" the personages who had been previously drawn in "The (p. 072) Pioneers." But so great had been his success, and so strongly had the characters taken hold of him, that he determined to renew the experiment for a third time. Leather-Stocking, accordingly, was introduced as living in extreme old age on the Western prairies, and the book ends with his death. The idea of transferring the home of the worn-out hunter to these vast solitudes was suggested, it is fair to infer from Cooper's own words, by the actual career of Daniel Boone, the Kentucky pioneer. The simple story of this man's life was sufficiently remarkable; but in the exaggerated accounts of it that were then current, he was represented as having emigrated, in his ninety-second year, to an estate three hundred miles west of the Mississippi, because he found a population of ten to the square mile inconveniently crowded. On the 17th of May, 1827, "The Prairie" was published. It did not meet with the extraordinary success of "The Last of the Mohicans," nor has it ever been as great a favorite with the general public. It was written in a far more quiet and subdued vein. It never keeps up that prolonged strain upon the feelings which characterizes the work that preceded it, and which while a defect in the eyes of some is to most readers its special charm. There are, indeed, in many of Cooper's stories, situations more thrilling and scenes more stirring than can be found in "The Prairie," though in it there is no lack of these. But of all his tales it is much the most poetical. Man sinks into insignificance in the presence of these mighty solitudes; for throughout the whole book the immensity of nature hangs over the spirit like a pall. Nor were the characters of the principal personages out of harmony with the atmosphere that envelopes the scenes described. In the lonely hunter, now (p. 073) nearing his grave, there is a pathetic grandeur, which is a natural development, and not an artificial addition. Though he has hurried as far away as possible from the din of the settlements, he is no longer querulous and irritable as in his old age in the Otsego hills. He has learned to recognize the inevitable. While he does not cease to regret, he has ceased to denounce. He knows that the majestic solitude of nature will not long remain undisturbed, nor its more majestic silence unbroken; for in every wind that blows from the East he hears the sound of axes and the crash of falling trees that herald the march of civilization across the continent. He sorrows at the ruin impending on all that is dearest to his heart; but he awaits it in dignified submission. In fine contrast to him stands the man who has likewise sought the solitude of the wilderness, not because he loves the beauty and the majesty of primeval nature, but because he hates the restraints that human society has thrown about the indulgence of human passions. Criticism has rarely done justice to the skill and power with which Cooper has drawn the squatter of the prairies, who holds that land should be as free as air; who has traveled hundreds of miles beyond the Mississippi to reach a place where title-deeds are not registered and sheriffs make no levies; who neither fears God nor regards man; to whom the rule of the rifle is the supremest law; and yet who, with all his detestation of the safeguards which society has erected for its security, has a moral code and a rough wild justice of his own. "The Prairie" was followed by "The Red Rover," which came out on the 9th of January, 1828. During the years that followed the publication (p. 074) of "The Pilot," the reputation of that work had been steadily increasing. Time had more than confirmed the first favorable impression. Not only had any lingering prejudice against the sea-story as a story been entirely swept away, but tales of this kind were beginning to be the fashion. Imitators were springing up everywhere. It was natural, therefore, for Cooper to turn his attention once more to a kind of fiction to the composition of which he himself had originally opened the way. After leaving the navy he had become one of the owners of a whaling vessel, and in it had made one or two voyages to Newport. In the harbor of that place he fixed the introduction of his new story of the sea. He had taken up his residence during the summer of 1827 in the little hamlet of St. Ouen on the Seine, not far from Paris. There, in the space of three or four months, "The Red Rover" was written. From the date of its appearance to the present time it has always been justly one of the most popular of his productions, and perhaps, considered as a whole, stands at the head of his sea-tales. On the 6th of November, 1829, succeeded an Indian story of King Philip's war, under the name of "The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish." The fanciful title puzzled, and did not altogether please, the public. As a matter of fact it was used only in this country. In England the novel was called "The Borderers;" in France "The Puritans of America, or the Valley of Wish-ton-Wish." This work was begun during his residence in Switzerland in 1828, and was completed at Florence. It has never been popular, particularly in America. The tale is a tragic one throughout, and the prevailing air of sombreness is rarely lightened by any success in the management of minor incidents. The introduction too was marked by (p. 075) one of Cooper's besetting faults, intolerable prolixity. But the main cause of his failure lay in his inability to delineate the Puritan character. It was not knowledge that was wanting, it was sympathy; or perhaps it is better to say that it was his lack of sympathy which prevented his having any genuine knowledge. He tried in all honesty to depict the men who had founded New England, the men of hard heads and iron hearts, in whom piety and pugnacity were, as in himself, so intimately blended that the transition from the one to the other is a vanishing line whose discovery defies the closest scrutiny. Paradoxical as the assertion may seem, he was too much like the Puritans to do them justice. His character was essentially the same as their own; but the influences under which he had been trained were altogether different. Upon their manners, their ideas, and even their appearance he had early learned to look with aversion; and he had not the power to project his mind out of the circle of notions and prejudices in which he had been brought up. The very name of the Reverend Meek Wolf which he bestowed in this story upon his clergyman, revealed of itself the existence of feelings which put him at once out of that pale of sympathetic thought, which enables the novelist or historian to look with the insight of the spirit upon men and motives which his intellect acting by itself would prompt him to distrust and dislike. To this tale succeeded "The Water Witch." This was begun at Sorrento and finished at Rome, a city which he subsequently used often to speak of as the precise moral antipodes of the capital of the New World, in the harbor of which he had laid much of the scene of this story. It (p. 076) was not till he reached Dresden, however, that he was enabled to have it put in print. On the 11th of December, 1830, it made its appearance in this country. With it ended for a time his fictions that dealt with American life and manners. He now turned to new fields and wrote with different aims. * * * * * During all these years his popularity had continued unabated, though his last two novels could hardly be said to have met with the favor which had been accorded to most of those which had preceded them. It is certainly a convincing proof of the wide reputation he had gained before he went to Europe, that five editions of "The Prairie," the first work he wrote after his arrival, were arranged to be published at the same time. Two were to come out in Paris, one in French and one in English; one in London; one in Berlin; and one in Philadelphia. But even this success was soon surpassed. It is hard to credit the accounts that are given on unimpeachable testimony. One statement, however, is too important to be overlooked, coming from the source it does. In the controversy going on in this country in 1833, in regard to the part Cooper had taken in the finance discussion, which will be mentioned in its proper place, Morse, the inventor of the electric telegraph, published a letter in defense of his absent friend. In it he bore witness in the following words to the popularity of the novelist in the Old World: "I have visited, in Europe, many countries," said he, "and what I have asserted of the fame of Mr. Cooper I assert from personal knowledge. In every city of Europe that I visited the works of Cooper were conspicuously placed in the windows of every bookshop. They (p. 077) are published as soon as he produces them in thirty-four different places in Europe. They have been seen by American travelers in the languages of Turkey and Persia, in Constantinople, in Egypt, at Jerusalem, at Ispahan." CHAPTER V. (p. 078) 1830. The month of December, 1830, which saw the publication of "The Water Witch," closed the first and far the most fortunate decade of Cooper's literary life. In the decade which followed began that career of controversy which lasted, with little intermission, until his death. By it his reputation and his fortunes were profoundly affected. It worked a complete revolution both in the sentiments with which he regarded others, and in the sentiments with which others regarded him. The most intense lover of his country, he became the most unpopular man of letters to whom it has ever given birth. For years a storm of abuse fell upon him, which for violence, for virulence, and even for malignity, surpassed anything in the history of American literature, if not in the history of literature itself. Nor did the effect of this disappear with his life. The misrepresentations and calumnies, which were then set in motion, have not ceased to operate even at this day. Full as marked, still, was the influence which the controversies, in which he was engaged, had upon his literary reputation. A direct result of them at the time was not only to impair the estimation in which his previous writings had been held, but to cause the later productions of his pen to be treated with systematic injustice. Both in England and America the effect of this hostile criticism has not yet died away. On the other hand, it was no one-sided contest that took place. (p. 079) If Cooper was attacked, he, in turn, did his part in attacking. No man has ever criticised his own country more unsparingly, and in some instances more unjustly, than did he, who, in foreign lands, had been its stoutest and most pronounced defender. Nor, in the controversies that followed his return from Europe, did one side conduct itself with perfect righteousness, and the other with deliberate villainy. Had the parties but seen fit to act in this manner, the duties of a biographer would have been sensibly lightened. A fair and dispassionate account of the circumstances that led to the unpopularity which clouded, though it could hardly be said to darken, Cooper's later life, demands a full and careful examination of many facts which, in some instances, seem to have no relation to the subject. Especially is a knowledge of the European estimate of America during the period that the novelist resided abroad a matter of first importance. But even of as great importance is a knowledge of certain traits of his character and of certain sentiments which he strongly felt, and of certain beliefs which he earnestly held. To bring out these points clearly, it is necessary for a while to arrest the progress of the narrative. It is to be remarked at the outset that the first impression which Cooper made upon strangers was rarely in his favor. To this we have the concurrent testimony of those who knew him slightly, and of those who knew him well. It was due to a variety of causes. He had infinite pride, and there was in his manner a self-assertion that often bordered, or seemed to border, upon arrogance. His earnestness, moreover, was often mistaken for brusqueness and violence; for he was, in some measure, of that (p. 080) class of men who appear to be excited when they are only interested. The result was that at first he was apt to repel rather than attract. Without referring to other evidence, we need here only to quote the guarded statement of one of his warmest friends in describing the beginning of their acquaintance. "I remember," says Bryant, "being somewhat startled, coming, as I did, from the seclusion of a country life, with a certain emphatic frankness in his manner which, however, I came at last to like and to admire." But besides this he had other characteristics which, to the majority of men, could not be agreeable. Thoroughly grounded in his own convictions, positive and uncompromising in the expression of them, he had no patience with those--and the number is far from being a small one--who embrace their views loosely, hold them halfheartedly, or defend them ignorantly. The opinions of such he was not content, like most men of ability, with quietly and unobtrusively despising. The contempt he felt he did not pay sufficient deference to human nature to hide. It was inevitable that the self-love of many should be offended by the arbitrariness and imperiousness with which he overrode their opinions, and still more by the unequivocal disdain manifested for them. It must be conceded, also, that to those for whom he felt indifference or dislike, he had in no slight degree that capacity of making himself disagreeable which reaches, and then only in rare instances, the ripened perfection of offensiveness in him who has breathed from earliest youth the social air of England. These were traits that were sure to make him enemies in private life. In public life, moreover, the ardor of his temperament was such as to hurry him into controversy; and the number of those (p. 081) hostile to him on personal grounds, was always liable to receive accessions from men who had never seen him face to face. No gage of battle could be thrown down which he did not stand ready to take up. Opposition only inflamed him; it never daunted him. He had not the slightest particle of that prudence which teaches a man to keep out of contests in which he can gain no advantage, or in which success will be only a little less disastrous than defeat. It hardly needs to be said that a politic line of conduct is usually the very last which a person of such a temperament follows. But when to all these characteristics is added a peculiar sensitiveness to criticism, it is evident that if proper opportunities are offered, personal unpopularity will be certain to result from the ample materials existing for its development. Against this view of his character, it is fair to add here that he had many qualities which would tend to bring about an entirely opposite result. He was more than ordinarily generous; and gave with a liberality that went at times beyond what most men would look upon as prudence. He was prompt to relieve merit that stood in need of help. Many cases of this kind there are unpublished and unknown out of a very small circle; for Cooper was not one to let his left hand know what his right hand was doing. One fact, however, has been so often mentioned, that it is violating no sanctity of private life to repeat it here. He was the first to discover the excellence of Greenough and to make that sculptor known to his countrymen. "Fenimore Cooper saved me from despair," wrote the latter in 1833, "after my second return to Italy. He employed me as I wished to be employed; and has up to this moment been a (p. 082) father to me in kindness." To this generosity, it is to be added that his sense of personal honor was of the loftiest kind. It was sometimes, indeed, carried to an extreme almost Quixotic; so that men morally fat-witted could not even comprehend his principles of action, and men who contented themselves with conventional morality resented his assertion of them as a reflection upon themselves. His loyalty to those who had become dear to him was, moreover, just as conspicuous as his loyalty to what he deemed right. It withstood every chance of change, every accident of time and circumstance, and only gave way on absolute proof of unworthiness. Intimate acquaintance was sure to bring to Cooper respect, admiration, and finally affection. Few men have stood better than he that final test of excellence which rests upon the fact that those who knew him best loved him most. Yet even these were often forced to admit, that it was necessary to know him well to appreciate how generous, how true, and how lofty-minded he was. Besides these traits of character, it is important to understand some of Cooper's political and social opinions. He was an aristocrat in feeling, and a democrat by conviction. To some this seems a combination so unnatural that they find it hard to comprehend it. That a man whose tastes and sympathies and station connect him with the highest class, and to whom contact with the uneducated and unrefined brings with it a sense of personal discomfort and often of disgust, should avow his belief in the political rights of those socially inferior, should be unwilling to deny them privileges which he claims for himself, is something so appalling to many that their minds strive vainly to grasp it. But this feeling was so thoroughly wrought into Cooper's (p. 083) nature that he almost disliked those of his countrymen whom he found not to share in it. "I confess," he wrote at the time when he was generally denounced as an aristocrat, "that I now feel mortified and grieved when I meet with an American gentleman who professes anything but liberal opinions as respects the rights of his fellow-creatures." He went on to explain that by liberal opinions he meant "the generous, manly determination to let all enjoy equal political rights, and to bring those to whom authority is necessarily confided under the control of the community they serve." He despised the cant that the people were their own worst enemies. So far from it, he believed in widening the foundations of society by making representation as real as possible, and thereby giving to every interest in the state its fair measure of power; for no government, in his eyes, could ever be just or pure in which the governors have interests distinct from those of the governed. These opinions he put sometimes in an extreme form. "I have never yet been in a country," he said, "in which what are called the lower orders have not clearer and sounder views than their betters, of the great principles which ought to predominate in the control of human affairs." At the same time his belief in democracy was not in the least one of unmixed admiration. He was far from looking upon it as a perfect form of government. It was only the one that, taking all things into consideration, was attended with fewer evils and greater advantages than any other. It had faults and dangers peculiar to itself. His liberal opinions, he took frequent care to say, had nothing in common with the devices of demagogues who teach the doctrine, that the voice of (p. 084) the people is the voice of God; that the aggregation of fallible parts, acting, too, with diminished responsibilities, forms an infallible whole. Along with this clear understanding of the advantages and disadvantages of democracy there was mingled, however, a weakness of feeling on the subject of position, which occasionally degenerated into an almost ridiculous pettiness. This was especially true of his later life. His utterances were sometimes so apparently contradictory, however, that it is hard to tell whether justice has been done to his real meaning on account of the difficulty of ascertaining what his real meaning was. But he spoke often of "the gentry of America," as if there were or could be here a class of gentlemen outside and independent of those engaged in professions or occupations. He seemed at times to attach that supreme importance to descent which we are usually accustomed to see exhibited in this country only by those who have little or nothing else to boast of. His contempt of trade and of those employed in it had frequently about its expression a spice of affectation. Moreover, he subjected himself to much misrepresentation and ill-will by the manner in which he lectured his countrymen on the distinctions that must prevail in society. There are certain things which are everywhere recognized and quietly accepted: they only become offensive when proclaimed. A man may unhesitatingly acquiesce in his inferiority, socially, to one who is politically only his equal; but he will very naturally resent a reference, by the latter, to the fact of his social inferiority. A good deal of Cooper's later writings was deformed by solemn commonplaces on the inevitable necessity of the existence of class distinctions. This drew upon him the condemnation of many who did not look upon the (p. 085) expression of such views as an offense against truth, but as an offense against good manners. To correct the folly of fools was itself folly; and wise men, no matter what their station in life, did not thank him for the instruction, the very giving of which implied an insult to their intelligence. His remarks on the subject were never heeded, if indeed they were ever read, by those for whom they were specially designed. But to his enemies they furnished ample opportunities for misrepresentation and abuse. But any account of Cooper would be of slight value that failed to take notice of his love of country. No other man of letters has there been in America, or perhaps in any other land, to whom this has been a passion so absorbing. It entered into the very deepest feelings of his heart. Even in the storm of calumny, which fell upon him in his later years, if the flame of his patriotism seemed at times to die away, any little circumstance was sure to revive it at once. No proclaimer of "manifest destiny" ever had more faith than he in the imperial greatness and grandeur to which the republic was to attain. All that in vulgar minds took the shape of braggart boasting, was in his idealized and glorified by his lofty conception of the majestic part which his country was to play in deciding the destinies of mankind. In spite of short-comings he deplored, of perils that he feared, firm in his heart was the conviction that here was to be the home of the great new race that was to rule the world. Other lands might look to the future with hope or doubt; his own was as sure of it as if it lay already in its grasp. This was a confidence that survived all changes, and despised all forebodings. The question of slavery certainly disturbed him, but it did not shake (p. 086) his trust. The prophecies of the dissolution of the Union, current in Europe, he laughed to scorn. Even in the days of nullification his faith never wavered one jot. To no one, more justly than to him, could perpetual thanks have been voted, because he never despaired of the republic. Cooper's lofty views of his country he soon found were essentially different from those entertained abroad. The knowledge of America even now possessed in Europe is not burdensomely great. But in 1830 its ignorance was prodigious; and the nearest approach to interest was usually the result of something of that same vague fear which haunted the citizens of the Roman Empire at the possible perils to civilization that might lie hid in the boundless depths of the German forests. On the Continent the ignorance was greater than it was in England, and Cooper had plenty of opportunities of witnessing the exhibition of it. In the case of the common people he was amused by it. That the whites who had emigrated to America had not yet become entirely black; that it was reasonable to expect that time, while it could not restore their original hue to these deteriorated Europeans tanned to ebony, might in the revolution of the suns elevate them to a fair degree of civilization; these, and similar sage opinions, did not disturb him when uttered by the philosophers of the lower classes. Yet their ignorance, great as it was, he found not to surpass materially that of men who ought to have known better, so long as they pretended to know at all. That the colonies had been settled by convicts, was a common impression among the best educated. While residing in Paris Cooper had the gratification of having his country quoted in the French Chamber of Deputies as an example of the (p. 087) possibility of forming respectable communities by the transportation of criminals. Even men who sympathized with republican institutions, he informs us, did not think of denying the fact; they denied merely the inference. The brilliant publicist, Paul Courier, had asserted it would be as unjust to reproach the modern Romans with being descendants of ravishers and robbers, as it would be to reproach the Americans with being descendants of convicts. All could not be expected, however, to be so liberal as this constitutional reformer. The gross vices which in foreign opinion distinguished the inhabitants of the United States, were held to be the natural consequences of their settlement by felons. Cooper subsequently took care to furnish the sons of the Puritans with all needful information as to the light in which their fathers were viewed in Europe. At the time, however, it was far different. Keenly sensitive to his country's honor, and knowing the morals of his countrymen to be far higher than those of the men of any other land, derogatory statements of this kind were galling in the extreme. But it was the English opinion that Cooper resented most bitterly. This was partly because he believed from the community of origin and speech it ought to be better informed, and partly because he looked upon it as responsible for many of the absurd and erroneous impressions that prevailed in the rest of Europe. His feelings were rendered still keener by the direct contact with English prejudice which he had personally during his residence abroad. The attitude of the Continent towards America was that of supreme ignorance and indifference. But there was at the time something besides that in the attitude of England, so far (p. 088) certainly as it was represented by its periodical literature. In the most favorable cases it was supercilious and patronizing, an attitude which never permits the nation criticising to understand the nation criticised. There was never any effort to penetrate into the real nature of the social and political movements that were taking place on this side of the water. Men were contented with the examination of mere external phenomena, which, whether good or bad in themselves, belonged to a period of growth and were certain to pass away. Not the slightest sympathy existed with the feelings and aspirations of a people closely allied in blood and speech, and the lack of desire involved the lack of ability to enter into the spirit of their institutions. There was no idea that there could be other types of character than those found on British soil, or any room or reason for the play of other social and political forces than were at work in British communities. At the time, however, that Cooper took up his residence in Europe there was more than supercilious indifference in the character of English criticism. There was steady misrepresentation and abuse, due in a few cases to design, in more to ignorance, in most to that disposition on the part of all men to believe readily what they wish ardently. It made little difference whether the writer were Whig or Tory. If anything the open dislike of the latter was preferable to the patronizing regard of the former. In 1804 the poet Moore visited America. He wrote home a number of poetical epistles, in which he told his friends that he had found us old in our youth and blasted in our prime. The demon gold was running loose; everything and everybody was corrupt; truth, (p. 089) conscience, and virtue were regularly made matters of barter and sale. A succession of English travelers repeated from year to year the same dismal story, and their statements were caught up and paraded and dwelt upon in the English periodical press. In "The Quarterly Review," in particular, our condition was constantly held up as an awful example of the results of democratic institutions and universal suffrage. Certain facts and predictions had been repeated so often that they came to be accepted and believed by all. We spoke a dialect of the English tongue; our manners were bad, if we could be said to have any at all; loyalty we could know nothing about, because we had no king; religion we were entirely devoid of, because there was no established church; the federation was steadily tending towards monarchy; the wealthy were longing to be nobles; and the Union could not last above a quarter of a century. Worse than all, intrigue and bribery were sapping the national life; or to use a still favorite phrase of the newspapers, though the repetition of a hundred years has now made it somewhat stale, corruption was preying upon the vitals of the republic. There is not the slightest exaggeration in these statements. Their truth any one familiar with the periodical literature of that period will least of all doubt. There was a perfect agreement between those who visited us and described us and those who drew their description from their imaginations. Nothing distinguished the English traveler or the English reviewer so much as his piety, and his profound conviction that religion could not exist where it was not carefully watched over by an established church. Besides this inevitable moral destitution, we (p. 090) were irreclaimably given over to vulgarity. Manners there could not be in a land abandoned to an unbridled democracy. In the most praiseworthy instances even, men lacked that repose, that fine tact, which were found universally in the higher orders in the mother country. The defect was ineradicable, according to most; for it had its baleful origin in popular institutions themselves. In justice it must be added that there were some who, in consequence of the American passion for traveling, entertained a mild hope that in time this rudeness would wear away, and this total ignorance of good breeding would be enlightened by the polish and refinement that would be picked up from the quantity to be found scattered about foreign courts. The published correspondence of that period is delicious in its frankness. The Englishman, writing to his American friend, never descends from his lofty position of censor both of great and petty morals. The inferiority of manners in this country is a point insisted upon by the former with an assiduity and assurance that are sufficient of themselves to make clear how high was the breeding to which he himself had attained. It makes little difference who write the letters. They all express the same sentiments. They all offer advice as to the best method America can take to retrieve the good opinion of Europe which it has lost. They are careful to say that they entertain the kindest of feelings to the United States; that they neglect no occasion of doing justice to the good and wise that had found there a home. Unfortunately these are few in number; and with a lofty sense of justice they never fail to express disapprobation in strong terms of the vast amount to be condemned in a land which had fallen under the sway of a reckless democracy and a godless church. One English (p. 091) gentleman in the British military service, after being some time in this country, writes, after his return, to an American friend, and thus cheerfully records his impressions. "The frightful effects produced by an unrestrained democracy," he says, "the demoralizing effects produced by universal suffrage never appeared to me so odious as they do now by contrast with the good breeding, the order and mutual support which all give to each other in this country, from the highest to the lowest." This letter belongs to the year 1839, and it only continues a line of remark common for the half-century previous. Everything that came from America, if praised at all, was praised with a qualification. Not a compliment could be uttered of an individual without an implied disparagement of the land that gave him birth. The record of every man who was well received in English society will bear out this assertion. Scott wrote to Southey in 1819, that Ticknor was "a wondrous fellow for romantic lore and antiquarian research, _considering his country_." Even words of genuine affection were often accompanied with an impertinence which has a delightfulness of its own from the utter unconsciousness on the part of the writer or speaker of having said anything out of the way. They were compliments of the kind which intimated that the person addressed was a sort of redeeming feature in a wild waste of desert. "You have taught us," writes in 1840 Mrs. Basil Montagu to Charles Sumner, "to think much more highly of your country--from whom we have hitherto seen no such men." There is nothing to be gained in raking over at this day the ashes of dead controversies and revilings. Americans no longer read the (p. 092) writings of the kind described, and Englishmen have largely forgotten that they were ever written. The new commentators on our habits and customs have taken up a new line of remark, and the new prophets of woe foresee an entirely new class of calamities. But it has been necessary to revive here the memory of the old charges and forebodings, in order to show the state of feeling that would be developed by them in a man of a peculiarly sensitive and proud nature, such as was the subject of this biography. Rubbish as they may seem now, they were to the men of that time a grievous sore. Whatever may have been Cooper's feelings previously, it was not until after he had resided for a while in Europe that any hostility towards England is seen in his works. But there it soon began to manifest itself, though at first rather in the way of defense than attack. As time went on it increased rather than diminished. It largely affected his own fortunes by the personal hostility it provoked in return. To some extent, without doubt, his oft-repeated declaration was true, that in the dependence then existing here upon foreign opinion, every American author held his reputation at the mercy of the British reviewer. It would be unjust to say that it seemed at one period almost as if Cooper had sworn towards England undying hate. But it is certainly a fact that he gave utterance to his inmost feelings when he described it as a country that cast a chill over his affections, a country that all men respected but that few men loved. Yet he had been brought up in the school of the Federalist party, in which admiration for the literature, policy, and morals of the motherland was taught as a duty; in which every door was thrown open to visitors from England as an act of hospitality due to kinsmen separated merely by the accident of (p. 093) position. He himself tells us how, an ardent boy of seventeen, he leaped for the first time upon the soil of Great Britain, feeling for it a love almost as devoted as that which he bore the land of his birth, and looking upon every native of it in the light of a brother. It did not take him long to find out that the fancied tie of kinship was not recognized, that it was even despised; and that if he made friends, it must be in spite of his country, and not because of it. His connection with the navy had also led him to be keenly sensitive to the injustice and indignities connected with the impressment of seamen. In his first voyage in a merchant ship he had seen two native Americans taken from the vessel and forced into the British service. His own captain even had on one occasion been seized, though speedily liberated. There had also been an attempt to press a Swede belonging to the crew, on the ground that his country and England were in alliance, and the latter had therefore a right to his help. These were not the acts to inspire devotion towards the people who committed or who authorized them. The keen resentment Cooper felt for the wrongs then perpetrated upon the American marine he afterward expressed in his novels of "Wing-and-Wing" and "Miles Wallingford." He never forgot those early experiences. When he came to reside in Europe he was as little disposed to forgive the depreciation of his country which he imputed, whether justly or unjustly, to English influence. Distrust became dislike, and dislike deepened into hostility. There is little doubt that with a man of Cooper's nature the revulsion from his original feelings would tend to swing him to the opposite extreme; that, as a consequence of that, he would often fancy (p. 094) insult where none was intended, and impute to design conduct that was the result of chance or even of personal timidity. But making full allowance for this inevitable source of error, there was plenty of reason furnished for offense to a man whose personal pride was equal to that of the whole British aristocracy, and whose pride in his country exceeded even his personal pride. The ignorant criticism which amused most Americans was apt to make him indignant. No compliment, in particular, could be paid with safety to him individually at the expense of his country. This was a practice, however, which the Englishmen of that day seemed to regard as the consummate crown of adulation. Depreciation of America of any sort he resented at once. If conversation touched upon matters discreditable to the United States--which was far from being an uncommon topic--it was very much his practice, instead of listening to it patiently, to bring up matters discreditable to Great Britain. There was unquestionably ample material on both sides with which each could blacken the other. But while this tended to make the conversation less monotonous, it likewise tended to make the converser less popular. Cooper lost early by his bearing in English society much of the favor which he had won from his writings. To this we have positive evidence. It is specifically mentioned in the sketch of his life, which along with his portrait appeared in 1831 in Colburn's "New Monthly Magazine." The article went on, after mentioning this fact, to pay a tribute to his somewhat aggressive patriotism. "Yet he seems," it said, "to claim little consideration on the score of intellectual greatness; he is evidently prouder of his birth than of his genius; and looks, speaks, and walks as if he exulted more in being recognized (p. 095) as an American citizen than as the author of 'The Pilot' and 'The Prairie.'" To a man whose heart was thus full of the future glories of the republic, the indifference and neglect with which it was regarded could not but be galling. Still this was nothing to the positive contempt which often manifested itself in social slights that could be felt but could not well be resented. This was especially noticeable in the case of the legations, the conduct of which was largely under the control of the home government. The English policy was here in marked contrast to that of Russia, which, even at that early day, cultivated almost ostentatiously friendship with America. Between the legations of these two countries there was always the best of understandings. The direct contrary often prevailed between the ministers of Great Britain and of the United States. The influence of the former was frequently thought to be exerted to the social injury of the latter. Whether true or false, this was generally believed. Cooper certainly credited it and looked forward to the time when the whole attitude of England would be altered. We were then less than twelve millions in population; but the day would come when we should be fifty millions. The existing state of things would then be changed. You and I may not live to see it, he wrote substantially to his friends, but our sons and grandsons will. They may not like us any better, but they will take care to hide their feelings. Strong resentment sometimes drove him into taking up positions he would not in his cooler moments have maintained. "As one citizen of the republic," he wrote, "however insignificant, I have no notion of being blackguarded and vituperated half a century and then cajoled (p. 096) into forgetfulness at the suggestion of fear and expediency, as circumstances render our good-will of importance." Not one of these slights and insults would he have the fifty millions forget. He did not bear in mind that fifty millions could not afford to remember. It was like asking the man of middle life to revenge upon the sons the indignities which the boy had received from the fathers. Cooper's residence in England was only for a few months during the first half of the year 1828. With his feelings towards that country and with the feeling entertained in it toward his own, nothing could have made his stay highly pleasant. But it is one of the numerous minor falsehoods that came to be connected with his life, that it was unpleasant. On the contrary, his company was sought by many of the most distinguished men, though in accordance with his usual custom he carried no letters of introduction. At a later period he said that in no country had he been personally so well treated as in England; he was as strongly convinced as his worst enemy, that as an author he had been extolled there beyond his merits; nor had he failed to receive quite as much substantial remuneration as he could properly lay claim to. But the social atmosphere there prevailing was not the atmosphere he loved. The poet Moore relates in his diary a story told him by Sydney Smith of the "touchiness" of "the Republican"--so the American novelist is styled--as evinced by the indignation of the latter at the conduct of Lord Nugent. This nobleman, it appears, invited Cooper to take a walk with him to a certain street. Arriving there he unceremoniously entered the (p. 097) house of a friend and left his companion to make his way back alone. Cooper's resentment of the treatment may have been unwisely shown; for though often termed an aristocrat, he never exhibited in the slightest degree that reticence which is or is supposed to be the peculiar characteristic of aristocracy. But few would now be found to deny that his indignation was both natural and just, and that the act of Lord Nugent was the act of a boor and not of a gentleman. It was certainly unreasonable to expect that a society which could rejoice in this method of rebuking republican pretension could itself be agreeable to a republican. Cooper could not but be offended by the prejudices he found existing against his country and the dislike usually felt and sometimes expressed for it. The only man he met whom he thought well informed about America was Sir James Mackintosh. The ignorance of some of his friends was so great that even to him it caused amusement rather than anger. Many readers will have heard of the practice of "gouging," with which, according to the veracious English traveler of early days, the native American gave the charm of diversity and diversion to a life whose serious thoughts were wholly absorbed in the acquisition of pelf. Some will remember the definition given of it in Grose's "Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue:" "to squeeze out a man's eye with the thumb; a cruel practice used by the Bostonians in America." A curious illustration of the belief in this myth occurred to Cooper. One of his friends in England was an amiable and pleasant man of letters, named William Sotheby, little heard of in these days; and even in his own days he had to endure the double degradation of being called a small poet by the small poets themselves. He was at this time an old gentleman of (p. 098) over seventy, and was preparing to make a creditable close to his career by performing the task, which seems to assume the shape of a duty to every literary Englishman of leisure, of translating the Iliad and the Odyssey. Not unnaturally he was more familiar with the way the wrath of Achilles manifested itself than with the shape taken by the wrath of the men of his race beyond the sea. On one occasion he condoled with Cooper because of the quarrelsomeness and fighting prevalent in America, making during this expression of his sympathy an obvious allusion to gouging. It was useless to attempt setting him right. His interest in ancient fiction had not been so absorbing as to close his mind to the acquisition of modern fact; and to Cooper's denial of what he had implied he listened with a polite but incredulous smile. CHAPTER VI. (p. 099) 1828-1833. Misrepresentation and abuse of his native land it was not in Cooper's nature to bear in silence. His resentment for the imputations cast upon his country began to show itself soon after he had taken up his residence abroad. In "The Red Rover," which appeared in 1827, there are satirical references to the benevolence and piety of the moral missionaries which England had sent among us, and to the correctness and wisdom of current foreign opinion. In the next novel, "The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish," his feelings are still more fully expressed. In this work he puts into the mouth of one of the characters, a physician, an elaborate disquisition upon the degeneracy of man in America. In the course of it the leech informs his opponent that the science and wisdom and philosophy of Europe had been exceedingly active in the investigation of this matter of colonial inferiority, that they had proved to their own perfect satisfaction, which was the same thing as disposing of the question without appeal, that man and beast, plant and tree, hill and dale, lake, pond, sun, air, fire, and water were all wanting in some of the perfectness of the old regions. It was plain we could never hope to reach the exalted excellence they enjoy; and while he respected the patriotism that held the contrary view, he could not, out of deference to it, afford to doubt what had been demonstrated (p. 100) by science and collected by learning. It was not in this indirect way, however, that he could content himself with defending his country. No sooner had he lived in Europe long enough to become acquainted with the erroneous impressions there prevalent, in regard to America, than he set out to prepare a work which should expose their falsity. In it he determined to lay the precise facts before a public which was indisposed to believe anything to the credit, and disposed to believe everything to the discredit of democratic institutions. On the face of it, this was a futile undertaking, no matter how praiseworthy its motive. Nations, no more than individuals, are convinced by what other nations say of themselves; it is only by what they do. In this particular case the difficulty was rendered more insurmountable by the fact that these erroneous impressions prevailed among those who did not care enough about the matter to investigate it seriously, and who would be certain in most cases to refrain from investigating it at all, had they a suspicion that their preconceived beliefs would be overthrown or even shaken, as a result of their examination. The question naturally arises, whether such men could be convinced by facts and arguments, and if so, whether they were worth the trouble of convincing. Why grudge the adherents of a dying cause the dismal enjoyment they receive from contemplating the ruin that is always being wrought, or is always to be wrought, by Democracy to Democracy? Experience led Cooper subsequently to see the uselessness of the experiment he, in this instance, tried. When asked at a later period why some efforts were not made to correct the false notions prevalent (p. 101) in Europe in regard to America, he answered with perfect truth then, that no favorable account would be acceptable; that it would not be enough to confess our real faults, but we should be required to confess the precise faults that, according to the opinions of that quarter of the world, we were morally, logically, and politically bound to possess. By the wide circulation of his fictions he, in truth, did more to remove wrong impressions, dissipate prejudices, and open the eyes of Europe to a knowledge of American life and manners, than could have been accomplished by the longest and most ponderous array of indisputable facts. Facts, however, he at this time purposed to furnish. Accordingly, on the 13th of August, 1828, appeared a work entitled, "Notions of the Americans, Picked up by a Traveling Bachelor." Whatever its actual success, it was a relative failure. Cooper himself tells us that it occasioned him a heavy pecuniary loss. Manner and matter, both foredoomed it to the fate which it met. The plan of it was an unfortunate one as well as a purely artificial one. The views and observations and statements of fact are put into the mouth of a European traveling bachelor, a member of a club of cosmopolites, who, in consequence of meeting an American, named Cadwallader, is persuaded to visit and see for himself the new world. Arriving there he writes letters to his friends, giving an account of his impressions. The fiction of foreign authorship was the first mistake. It could not mislead any one, nor was it intended to mislead any one. But a grave didactic treatise which was designed to convey a truthful impression, lost something and gained nothing by being connected with any artifice, even though not meant to impose upon the reader. Nor was the work interesting to one not (p. 102) specially interested in the subject. To the American it gave the strongest assurances of loyalty to republican institutions on the part of her most widely-known man of letters; but it added little or nothing to the information of which he was already in possession. On the other hand, the laudatory style in which this country was invariably spoken of was certain to be offensive to those whom it was the design of the work to enlighten. The weight of matter, moreover, was not rendered any more endurable by lightness of treatment. At the present day the work is chiefly interesting for the keen observations that are found in it, and for its remarks upon the future of the country rather than upon its then existing state. Cooper's predictions were concerned with the minutest, as well as the greatest subjects. They ranged all the way from the indefinite assurance, that New York must eventually become the gastronomic capital of the globe, to the precise statement, as to the exact number of the population there would be in the United States fifty years from the time in which he was writing. This last prophecy, it is to be said, has turned out singularly true. He fixed the number at fifty millions. That this was no chance guess, but a carefully worked out computation, is evident from the fact that he repeats it several times in this work and occasionally in later ones. He, moreover, assigned definitely forty-three millions to the whites and seven millions to the blacks. It is not for an American to find fault with the laudatory tone of a work which reflects the ardent love of country felt by the writer. Yet in many respects it is a singular production. In manner it is calm, grave, almost philosophical; there is not the slightest effort at (p. 103) fine writing; the tone can never be said to be even fervid. Yet it must be confessed that not in the most exalted of Fourth of July orations does the national eagle scream with a shriller note, or wing his way with a more unflagging flight. Any one who formed his notions of this country exclusively from this book, would be sure to fancy that here at last paradise was reopening to the children of a fallen race. After this remark, it may seem ridiculous, and yet it is perfectly just to say, that Cooper, so far from giving way to exaggeration in his assertions, kept himself well within the bounds of the truth. In the exercise of that duty which presses heavily upon every reviewer, to seem, if not to be wiser than his author, many of the English periodicals, even those most favorable to America, undertook to doubt his statements of fact, to sneer at his prophecies of the future as ludicrous exaggerations, and to term them striking and whimsical instances of Yankee braggadocio, and of the love of building castles in the air. Cooper could not well overstate the material prosperity and progress of the country, nor the inability of men trained under different conditions either to believe it or to comprehend it. Reality soon outran some of his most daring anticipations. His most extravagant statements were speedily more than confirmed by the operation of agencies whose mighty results he could not foresee, because, when he wrote, the agencies themselves did not exist. He had carefully guarded himself in one instance, by saying that he did not expect that the Northwest would be settled within an early period. The precaution was unnecessary. He had been brought up in a town, founded in the wilderness, at a distance of less than one hundred and fifty miles (p. 104) from the commercial capital of the republic. He lived long enough to see the frontiers of civilization pushed one thousand miles west of the line it had held in his boyhood's home. Any wrong impression, therefore, which the work conveyed was not due to the spirit of braggadocio pervading it, as asserted and commented upon by the English reviewers. No false statement was made intentionally; there were very few that were made mistakenly. But though Cooper purposed to tell nothing but truth about his country, he did not feel himself under obligation to tell all the truth. The attention was almost exclusively directed to that side of the national character which lent itself most readily to favorable treatment. What was unfavorable was either omitted altogether, or was very lightly passed over. One letter alone, and that not a long one, was devoted to slavery. It is plain that he was annoyed by it; to some extent, in spite of his confidence, disquieted by it, though the dangers he feared were not the dangers that actually came. Even at that early day there was enough to trouble the lover of his country in the criticism it encountered, for the glaring contrast between its professions of liberty and its practice; but far more in the dimly-seen shape of that gigantic struggle which, though itself vague and undefined, was already beginning to cast its lowering shadow over the future of the republic. So in a similar manner the literature, architecture, and art of America were passed over in a few pages, while letter after letter was given up to a description of its progress in wealth and comfort. Yet no one knew better than Cooper,--at a later period he took care his countrymen should not forget it,--that of all standards by which to test national glory, the material (p. 105) standard is in itself the lowest and most vulgar; and that the difference in real greatness between two places can never be measured by the comparative amount of sugar, or salt, or flour sold in each. Yet he remembered then, what later he seemed to forget, that the necessity of conquering the continent, of making it inhabitable for man, was at the time and must continue long to remain a very positive hindrance to the development of literary and artistic ability, because by the immense rewards it offered it attracted to the development of material resources the intellect and vigor of the entire land. Cooper tells us, as has been said, that he lost money on this work. But there was something more than pecuniary failure that attended it. There were in it statements which met with disfavor at home. More important than these, however, were remarks that aroused personal hostility abroad. He made several references, in particular, to the people of England, and they were not of a kind to conciliate regard for himself and his work. In one place he spoke of the society of that country as being more repulsive, artificial, and cumbered, and, in short, more absurd and frequently less graceful than that of any other European nation. Theoretically, the English care nothing for foreign opinion. They have said it so often among themselves that most of them look upon it as a point which has been settled by the consent of mankind. But like many other beliefs it has become an article of faith without having become an article of practice. To this extent it is true that they care nothing for the remarks of obscure men of which they never hear. On the other hand, no nation is more sensitive to contemporary foreign opinion, coming from writers of distinction. There will be plenty of (p. 106) instances furnished in this one biography to prove fully this assertion. Cooper's attack was never forgotten or forgiven. From this time there was a distinctly hostile feeling manifested toward him in many of the English periodicals. Even before his next work appeared, London correspondents of American newspapers announced that it was going to be severely criticised, inasmuch as the novelist had made himself unpopular in England by the comments made and the views put forth in the "Notions of the Americans." If this were not true, it was at least believed to be true. Certainly the fact of hostility steadily increasing from this period, on the part of the British press, cannot be denied, whatever we may think of the causes that brought it about. Nor did it stop short with depreciation of his works. Literary criticism, even if based merely upon personal dislike, can always resort with safety to the cheap defense that it is honest. But there were reviewers who went farther, who framed for Cooper imaginary feelings and then proceeded to assail him for having them. He was accused, especially, of pluming himself highly upon the title of the "American Scott." Hazlitt, for instance, seeing him strutting, as he terms it, in the streets of Paris, was enabled to detect by the way the novelist walked the way he felt upon this special matter, and afterward to state the conclusion at which he had arrived as a positive fact. Similar specimens of fine critical insight into Cooper's motives and sentiments can be found scattered up and down the pages of English journals. At the time he was bringing out "The Water Witch" in Germany, the revolution in France took place that resulted in the expulsion of (p. 107) the Bourbons and the calling of Louis Philippe to the throne. Paris became at once the Mecca to which the lovers of liberty throughout Europe resorted. Thither Cooper hastened from his home in Dresden. He reached the city in August, 1830. There he watched with the profoundest interest the political movements that were going on about him. The reactionary tendencies that early began to manifest themselves in the rule of the Citizen King, brought to him the same disappointment and the same disgust that it did to all the ardent republicans of the Old World. There is much in what he says to remind the reader of the feelings expressed by Heine, who had likewise hurried to Paris after the July revolution, and who was venting his indignation and contempt in the columns of the Augsburg "Allgemeine Zeitung." Occasional passages bear even a close similarity. Cooper on one occasion describes Louis Philippe walking about among his subjects wearing a white hat, carrying a red umbrella, and evidently laboring to act in an easy and affable manner. "In short," he said in a phrase that might have been written by the great German, "he was condescending with all his might." Close upon the revolution in France followed the revolt of Poland. The insurrection lasted about ten months, and during its progress the feelings of Cooper were profoundly stirred in behalf of that people. With this his personal friendship with the Polish poet, Mickiewicz, had probably a great deal to do; for at Rome a close intimacy had sprung up between him and that author. At a meeting, held in Paris on the 4th of July, 1831, at which Cooper presided, a sum of money was contributed to aid the revolters in their struggle. He presided also at other (p. 108) meetings to advance the same cause, and acted as chairman of a committee to raise funds to assist the Polish soldiers who were fighting for independence, and when this failed, to relieve the exiles in their distress. Two addresses to the American people signed by him in his official capacity--one written in July, 1831, and the other in June, 1832--appeared in the American papers of those years; and the fervor that characterizes them both leaves little doubt as to their authorship. Into the great struggle going on in Europe, either openly or silently between aristocracy and democracy, he now, indeed, threw himself with his whole heart. In certain respects this was a disadvantage. Whenever Cooper's feelings on political subjects were aroused, his literary work betrayed the obtrusion of interests more dominating than those which belong to it legitimately. This was manifested in the three tales which followed. In them the scene of action was not only transferred to European soil, but a direct attempt was avowedly made to apply American principles to European facts. These novels were "The Bravo," which appeared November 29, 1831; "The Heidenmauer," which appeared September 25, 1832; and "The Headsman," which appeared October 18, 1833. The purpose of all these was the direct exaltation of republican institutions, and likewise the exposure of those which paraded in the garb of liberty without possessing its reality. The scenes of two were accordingly laid in the aristocratic cities of Venice and of Berne. The first of the three is generally spoken of as the best, especially by those who have read none of them at all. Little difference will be found, as a matter of fact, between "The Bravo" and "The Headsman" (p. 109) as regards literary merit. "The Heidenmauer" is, however, distinctly inferior, and is in truth one of the most tedious novels that Cooper ever wrote. All were, however, animated by the same spirit. They all assailed oligarchical, and lauded democratic institutions. They were full of denunciations of the accommodating stupidity of patricians who were never able to see anything beneficial to the interests of the state in what was injurious to the interests of their own order. In particular, the doctrine was held up to derision, that while to the ignorant and the low there was ample power given to suffer, there was no power given to understand; and that consequently it was their duty always to obey and never to criticise. In writing this series Cooper was undertaking what was on the face of it a hazardous experiment. The peril was not, as thoughtless criticism has had it, in transferring his scenes and characters to a foreign soil. Human nature suffers no material change in passing from America to Europe. The danger lay in the fact that these were novels written with a purpose. The story was not told for its own sake, but for the sake of enforcing certain political opinions. It required, therefore, unusual skill in its construction and in the management of its details. For whatever may be the exact truth contained in the doctrine of art for art's sake, this is certainly clear, that in a work of fiction designed to advance successfully any cause, or support any theory, the didactic element must be made entirely subordinate to the purely creative element. Otherwise we impart to the novel the tediousness of a homily without its accepted authority. Art must be wooed as a mistress; she can never be commanded as a slave. He, therefore, who seeks to press (p. 110) fiction into a work so foreign to its nature as the inculcation of political opinions, must, if he hopes to succeed, make the story suggest the lesson without conveying it obtrusively. Above all is there need of delicate touch and skillful handling, if the aim be to affect those who are prejudiced against the views expressed, or whose interests are involved in the fate of those attacked. But Cooper's was never a delicate touch. What he thought he never insinuated; what he believed himself he never allowed to make its way indirectly into the minds of others. He always uttered it boldly, and sometimes offensively. Effective this assuredly is in compositions of a certain class; but it is entirely out of place in a work of fiction. In the case of these particular novels the purpose is avowed openly and repeatedly. Cooper, indeed, takes care never to let it escape the reader's attention. He may almost be said to stand by his shoulder to jog him if he once happens to forget that the story has a moral. American institutions, especially, were constantly held up as models in which the best results were seen, and which it was the policy of all other countries to imitate. The course taken was a mark of patriotism; but it was not the way to gain converts. It is, in truth, the misfortune of the novelist, burdened with a moral purpose, that the reader usually feels the burden and is not affected by the moral. It was not by methods like these that Scott threw about chivalry and aristocracy that glamour which outlasts the most minute acquaintance with the reality, and influences the imagination in spite of the protest of the judgment. But another result that followed from writing novels with a purpose, had a more direct influence upon his reputation. It made it impossible (p. 111) that his work should any longer be criticised fairly. This was immediately seen in the case of "The Bravo." This novel had far more success in Europe than in America. But the success was not of a legitimate kind. Parties were at once arrayed for it or against it, not because it was a good or bad production from a literary point of view, but according as men sympathized with or were hostile to the political principles it advocated. It was not the merit of the work that came under consideration, but the merit of the cause. This at once destroyed almost entirely the value of any criticism which the story received. A little while before "The Bravo" appeared, Cooper was unwillingly led to take part in a controversy which, according to his own view, was the remote cause of the hostility he afterwards encountered in his own land. It was at the time that the movement began on the part of Louis Philippe to separate himself from the liberals, of whom Lafayette was the chief representative. A discussion had arisen, in the French Chamber of Deputies, on the desirability of a reduction in the expenses of government. It gave rise to a controversy which extended much beyond the body in which it originated. Lafayette had advocated greater economy. In the course of the debate mentioned, he had referred to the United States as being a country which was cheaply governed, and at the same time well governed. The periodical press at once took up the question. M. Saulnier, one of the editors of the "Revue Britannique," came out with an article, the direct object of which was to prove that a government of three powers, such as was the limited monarchy recently established, was not so expensive as that of a republic. In particular, he claimed that (p. 112) the tax levied per head on the citizens of France was less than that similarly levied on the citizens of the United States. This was a direct attack upon Lafayette, who had for forty years been maintaining that the government of this country was the cheapest known. The attention of Cooper was called to this article, and he was asked to reply. He declined. A little later it was made clear to him that the object with which it was written was to injure Lafayette. The matter then assumed another aspect. To that statesman Cooper was bound by ties of intimate personal friendship and by a common love of this country. At a public dinner, which had been given to Lafayette on the 8th of December, 1830, by the Americans in Paris, Cooper had presided, and in a speech of marked fervor and ability, he had dwelt upon the debt due from the United States to the gallant Frenchman, who had ventured fortune and life to aid a nation struggling against great odds to be free. It was not in his nature to have his deeds give the lie to his words. The fact above mentioned at once overcame his reluctance to engage in the controversy. Accordingly in December, 1831, appeared a "Letter to General Lafayette," preceded by a letter from Lafayette to himself, dated the 22d of November. This was a pamphlet of fifty pages, in which he went into the subject of the cost of the United States government. It produced an immediate reply from M. Saulnier, who went over the ground again, and with a fine air of candor affected to revise his previous statements. As a result he made the cost of the American government a little larger than he had done before. To this Cooper replied in a series of letters published in the "National." The controversy would (p. 113) have ended sooner than it did, had it not been for the appearance of a fresh actor on the scene. This was a certain Mr. Leavitt Harris. He nominally belonged to New Jersey, but a large share of his life had been spent in Russia, and his political notions had apparently become acclimated to that region. He wrote an article on the subject in the shape of a letter to M. Francois Delassert, the vice-president of the Chamber of Deputies. In it he took ground opposite to that taken by Cooper, controverted his facts, and denied his inferences. So great weight was attached to it by the French government party that it was published as a supplementary number of the "Revue Britannique." Mr. Harris had once been left as _chargé d'affaires_ at St. Petersburg during the absence of John Adams at the peace negotiations at Ghent. His letter was accordingly dwelt upon as the production of an American who had been intrusted by his government with high diplomatic position. We who know out of what stuff our foreign agents are sometimes made, would not be likely to attach much weight to the mere fact. But to a foreign nation the opinion of an official seemed naturally more trustworthy than that of a private citizen. To the letter of Mr. Harris, Cooper replied on the 3d of May, 1832. This closed the discussion, at least so far as he was concerned.[1] But the controversy was followed by circumstances of a mortifying character. After the return to America of the United States minister, William (p. 114) C. Rives, Mr. Harris was nominated by the President, and confirmed by the Senate early in March, 1833, as _chargé d'affaires_; and this office he held until the arrival of Edward Livingston, who was appointed minister on the 3d of May of the same year. Previously to this discreditable act, the Department of State had committed one of imbecility. It had issued a circular to the different local authorities of the Union with avowed reference to the finance controversy. Its purport was a request for them to furnish information in regard to the amount of public expenditures over which they had control. Against this course Cooper protested at once in a long and vigorous letter to the American people, written on the 10th of December, 1832, from Vevay, Switzerland, and first printed in the Philadelphia "National Gazette." He took the ground that in such a discussion local burdens ought not to be included. It was, in fact, by confusing various kinds of taxation, and taxation for various objects, that the French government party had been able to make any showing for their own side. The letter was widely circulated, and seems to have served its purpose in suppressing the information that had been asked. [Footnote 1: I express no opinion on the merits of this controversy, for I have seen very slight summaries only of the articles that appeared in the _Revue Britannique_. But it is proper to say that it was the opinion of the French liberals, that Cooper utterly demolished his antagonists in the controversy.] Unfortunately it was not the administration alone that displayed a lack of proper sentiment in this controversy. It is far from being a creditable thing in the history of the country that Cooper was subjected to constant attack, and even abuse, in the American newspapers, for his conduct in this finance discussion. He had been particularly careful to confine his remarks to the cost of government in the United States. He had not touched at all upon the cost of government in France. Yet he was charged with having overstepped the reserve imposed upon (p. 115) foreigners, and of having attacked the administration of a friendly country. The accusation was constantly made against him that he went about "flouting his Americanism throughout Europe," and in this particular case that he had overrated the importance of the controversy, and also the importance of the part he had taken in it. He had, in fact, aroused the hostility of that section of Americans, insignificant in number and ability, but sometimes having social position, who prefer the conveniences of despotism to the inconveniences of liberty. To such men Cooper's intense nationality was a standing reproach. His reputation, moreover, made their own littleness especially conspicuous. Depreciation of him, and of his rank as a man of letters, was a necessity of their case. As they did not express openly their real feelings, they carried on at advantage a war against a man who never had the prudence to hide what he thought. Yet among the better class of Americans abroad, Cooper's attachment to his native land received the recognition it merited. "Cooper's new book, 'The Bravo,'" wrote Horatio Greenough, from Paris, to Rembrandt Peale, in November, 1831, "is taking wonderfully here. If you could transfuse a little of that man's love of country and national pride into the leading members of our high society, I think it would leaven them all." But the attacks in the American newspapers made a painful impression upon a mind that was morbidly sensitive to criticism even from the most insignificant of men. For an act of generous patriotism for which he deserved the thanks of all his countrymen he had received vilification from many of them. These things embittered him. They made him distrustful of the spirit that prevailed in his own land. He (p. 116) began to fancy that the country had gone back instead of forward in national feeling during the years of his absence. He had determined to return, because he was unwilling to have his children brought up on foreign soil and under foreign influences. But for himself he resolved to abandon literature. As soon as he had finished the manuscript he had in hand, he would give up all further thought of writing. "The quill and I are divorced," he wrote to Greenough in June, 1833, "and you cannot conceive the degree of freedom, I could almost say of happiness, I feel at having got my neck out of the halter." Longings for his old sea-life often came over him. "You must not be surprised," he wrote, half-jestingly, to the same friend, "if you hear of my sailing a sloop between Cape Cod and New York." But he had no definite plans marked out. The only thing about which his mind was made up was not to write any more. CHAPTER VII. (p. 117) 1833-1838. On the fifth of November, 1833, Cooper landed at New York. For a few winters that followed he made that city his place of residence. The summers he spent in Cooperstown. To this village he paid a visit in June, 1834, after having been away from it entirely for about sixteen years. The recollections of his early life had always endeared it to his memory, and in it he now determined to take up his permanent abode. Accordingly he acquired possession of his father's old place, which for a long period had remained unoccupied. The house had received from the inhabitants the name of Templeton Hall, with a direct reference to "The Pioneers." Everything about it was rapidly hastening to ruin. Cooper at once began repairs upon it, and after these had been fully completed he made it his only residence. It was in this little village, upon the shore of the lake which his pen has made famous, that he spent the remainder of his life. There he wrote nearly all the works which he produced after his return to his native land. Its seclusion and quiet gave him ample opportunities for undisturbed literary exertion; the beauty of the surroundings ministered constantly to his passion for scenery; and of the world outside he saw sufficient to satisfy his wishes in the frequent journeys which business compelled him to make to the great cities. Yet, though his latter days were spent in the country, the life (p. 118) he led henceforward deserves anything but the name of a pastoral. With the return from Europe begins the epic period of Cooper's career. The next ten years, in particular, were years of battle and storm. He had been criticised harshly and unjustly; he came back prepared and disposed to criticise. His feelings found expression at once. The America to which he had returned seemed to him much worse than that from which he had gone. In his opinion nearly everything had deteriorated. Manners, morals, the whole spirit of the nation, struck him as being on a lower level. Yet the change was not really in the people; it was in himself. The country had been moving on in the line of its natural bustling development; he, on the contrary, had been going back in sentiment. In one particular there was a certain justification for the dislike expressed by him for the novel things he saw. The business of the entire land was in a feverish condition. The Erie Canal, completed the year before his departure for Europe, had opened an unbroken water way from the Atlantic sea-board to the farthest shores of the great lakes. To this stimulus to population and trade was added the expected stimulus of the railroad system, then in its infancy. Both together were disclosing, though more to the imagination than to the eye, the wealth that lay hid in the unsettled regions of the West. They were active agents, therefore, in creating one of those periods of speculative prosperity which are sure to recur when any new and unforeseen avenue to sudden fortune is laid open. The immense field for endeavor revealed by the prospective establishment of flourishing communities reacted unfavorably upon the intellectual movement which had begun in a feeble way (p. 119) to show itself twenty years before. The attraction of mighty enterprises which held out to the hope promises of the highest temporal triumphs, was a competition that mere literary and scholastic pursuits, with their doubtful success and precarious rewards, could not well maintain. The country certainly went back for a time in higher things in consequence of that rapid material progress which drew to its further development the youthful energy and ability of the entire land. To make money and to make it rapidly seemed to be the one object of life. Such a fever of speculative prosperity wholly absorbing the thoughts and activities of men in the acquisition of wealth, would have been viewed by Cooper at any time with indifference, even if it did not inspire disgust. But a greater change than he knew had come over him. It is clear that he had now grown largely out of sympathy with the energy and enterprise which were doing so much to build up the prosperity and power of his country. His nature had come into a profound sympathy with the quiet, the culture, and the polish of the lands he had left behind. His spirit could no longer be incited by the romance that lay hid in the fiery energies of trade. In the tumultuousness of the life about him, he could see little but a restless and vulgar exertion for the creation of wealth. The perpetual bustle and change were not to his taste. He spoke of it afterwards, in one of his works, with a certain grim humor peculiarly his own. America he said, was a country for alibis. The whole nation was in motion; and everybody was everywhere, and nobody was anywhere. Feelings of this kind had begun to come over him long before his (p. 120) return from abroad. He had been affected by his surroundings to an extent of which he was only vaguely conscious. While in Europe he admitted that he found growing in his nature a strong distaste for the common appliances of common life. He had not been long in Florence before these sentiments found utterance. "I begin to feel," he wrote, "I could be well content to vegetate here for one half of my life, to say nothing of the remainder." He drew sharp distinctions between commercial towns and capitals. Even in Italy, Leghorn with its growing trade, its bales of merchandise, its atmosphere filled with the breath of the salt sea mixed with the smell of pitch and tar, seemed mean and vulgar after the refinement and world-old beauty of Florence. He acknowledged that the languor and repose of towns which glory simply in their collections and recollections, were far more suited to his feelings than the activity and tumult of towns whose glory lies in their commercial enterprises. This preference is not uncommon among cultivated men. But it is too much to ask of a nation that it shall exist for the sake of gratifying the æsthetic emotions of travelers. The process of achieving greatness can never be so agreeable to the looker-on as the sight of greatness achieved; but it is unhappily often the case that many things, which the visitor regards as a charm, the native feels to be a reproach. Besides the change of view in himself, there were some actual changes in the country that were not temporary in their nature. The constitution of society had altered at home during his residence abroad, or was rapidly altering. The influence of the old colonial aristocracy was fast dying out. New men were pushing to the wall the descendants of the (p. 121) families that had flourished before the Revolution, and had sought after it to keep up distinctions and exclusiveness which the very success of the struggle in which they had been concerned doomed to an early decay. This was especially noticeable in New York. In such a city social rank must tend, in the long run, to wait upon wealth. The result may be delayed, it cannot be averted. Wealth, too, in most cases, will find its way to the hands of those carrying on great commercial undertakings. That this class would eventually become a controlling one in society, if not the controlling one, was inevitable. It was not likely that men, who were bent on the conquest of the continent, who revolved even in their dreams all forms of the adventurous and the perilous, whose enterprise stopped short only with the impossible, would be content long to submit to a fictitious superiority on the part of those whose thoughts were so taken up with the consideration of what their fathers had been or had done that they forgot to be or to do anything themselves. Yet the latter composed no small share of the class with which Cooper's early associations had lain. He naturally sympathized with them rather than with those who were displacing them. Trade began to seem to him vulgar, and it was doubtless true that many engaged in it, who had become rapidly rich, were vulgar enough. But he made no distinction. He longed for the restoration of a state of things that had gone forever by. He was disposed to feel dissatisfaction with much that was taking place, not because it came into conflict with his judgment, but because it jarred upon his tastes and prejudices. A residence in Europe for a few years had, indeed, done for him (p. 122) what the coming-on of old age does for most. He had become the eulogist of times past. The views which he expressed in private and in public, during the decade that followed his return to America, were not of the kind to make him popular with his countrymen. The manners of the people were, according to him, decidedly worse than they were twenty or thirty years before. The elegant deportment of women had been largely supplanted by the rattle of hoydens and the giggling of the nursery. The class of superior men of the quiet old school were fast disappearing before the "wine-discussing, trade-talking, dollar-dollar set" of the day. Under the blight of this bustling, fussy, money-getting race of social Vandals, simplicity of manners had died out, or was dying out. The architecture of the houses, like the character of the society, was more ambitious than of old, but in far worse taste; in a taste, in fact, which had been corrupted by uninstructed pretension. The towns were larger, but they were tawdrier than ever. The spirit of traffic was gradually enveloping everything in its sordid grasp. There had taken place a vast expansion of mediocrity, well enough in itself, but so overwhelming as nearly to overshadow everything that once stood out as excellent. In most of these remarks I am giving Cooper's sentiments, as far as possible, in his own words. They stung the national vanity to the quick. The bitter resentment they evoked at the time could hardly be understood now; and a great deal of wrath was then kindled at what would meet with assent, at the present day, on account of its justice, or excite amusement on account of its exaggeration. Thurlow Weed, in 1841, expressed a general sentiment about Cooper, with much affluence of capital letter and solemnity of exclamatory punctuation. "He has (p. 123) disparaged, American Lakes," wrote that editor, "ridiculed American Scenery, burlesqued American Coin, and even satirized the American Flag!" Cooper could hardly have expected his strictures to be received with applause, but he was clearly surprised at the outcry they awoke. Yet he had had plenty of opportunities to learn that other countries were as sensitive to criticism as his own. One singular illustration of this feeling had been exhibited at Rome. He had completed his novel of "The Water Witch" and wished to print and publish it in that city. The manuscript was accordingly sent to the censor. It was kept for days, which grew to weeks. It was at last returned with refusal, unless it were subjected to thorough revision. Almost on the opening page occurred a highly objectionable paragraph. "It would seem," Cooper had written, "that as nature has given its periods to the stages of animal life, it has also set limits to all moral and political ascendency. While the city of the Medici is receding from its crumbling walls, like the human form shrinking into 'the lean and slippered pantaloon,' the Queen of the Adriatic sleeping on her muddy isles, and Rome itself is only to be traced by fallen temples and buried columns, the youthful vigor of America is fast covering the wilds of the West with the happiest fruits of human industry." This passage, the censor quietly but severely pointed out, laid down a principle that was unsound, and supported it by facts that were false. A rigid pruning could alone make the work worthy of a license. The consequence was that Cooper carried the manuscript with him to Germany, and it was first published in Dresden, in a land where men were not sensitive to anything that might be said, at any rate about Italy. But the personal unpopularity he brought upon himself by his (p. 124) censorious remarks will not wholly account for the unpopularity as a writer, which it was his fortune, in no short time, to acquire. There were other agencies at work besides those which affected the feeling towards him as a man. Throughout the English-speaking world there had been a literary reaction. Men had begun to tire of the novel of adventure. It was not that it had lost its hold upon the public; it had lost the supreme hold which for twenty years it had maintained. The mighty master was dead; to some extent his influence had died before him. The later work he did, had in several instances detracted from, rather than added to the fame he had won by the earlier. Cooper's own ventures in the field of foreign fiction, whatever their absolute merit, could not be compared with those in which he had drawn the life of the ocean, or the streams and forests of his native land. But outside of any effect produced by poorer production, there could be no doubt of the fact of a change in the public taste. The hero of action had gone by. In his place had come the hero of observation and reflection, who did not do great things, but who said good things. The exquisite and the sentimentalist were the fashion, to be speedily followed, according to the law of reaction, by the boor and the satirist. At the time when Cooper returned from Europe, Bulwer was the popular favorite. Both in England and America he was styled the prince of living novelists; and nowhere was enthusiasm, in his behalf, crazier than in this country. The revolution in taste, moreover, worked directly in his favor in more ways than one. Scott and Cooper's heroes, whether intelligent or not, were invariably moral. But of this sort of men readers were tired. No (p. 125) character could please highly the popular palate in which there was not a distinct flavor of iniquity. More ability and less morality was the opinion generally entertained, though probably not often expressed. Hence it was not unnatural that the sentimental dandies and high-toned villains of Bulwer's earlier novels should have been the heroes to captivate all hearts. The comparatively low estimate into which the novel of adventure had sunk, undoubtedly had a marked effect upon Cooper's reputation. Some of his later work is superior to his earlier from the artistic point of view. Yet it was never received with the same praise, at least in English-speaking countries. More than that, the criticism it received was often excessively depreciatory; nor was this all due to personal unpopularity, though a good deal of it certainly was. He simply wrote in a style which the age had temporarily left behind, and fancied it had outgrown. All that Cooper had to do, all that under any circumstances he could do, was to keep on producing the best that lay in his power; sure to find a certain body of readers in sympathy with him; sure also that some time in the future the revolution of taste would bring him into fashion if he had written anything that really deserved to live. These facts and considerations must, however, be borne in mind in order to understand the gradual growth of the ill-feeling that sprang up between Cooper and his countrymen. To the change of view in himself and to the change of taste in the public, were soon added special circumstances that tended to bring about or increase alienation. But there did not exist toward him, when he came back from Europe, any hostility on the part of his countrymen. Circumstances had led him (p. 126) to suspect such a feeling; but it was mainly the creation of a nature that was morbidly sensitive to criticism. He was not, to be sure, the popular idol at his return that he had been at his departure. But this decline, outside of the causes already mentioned, was due to ignorance rather than dislike. A new generation had, during his absence, come on the scene of active life. To it the influence of his personal presence was unknown. He had been away so long that many looked upon him with the indifference with which foreigners are regarded by the majority; on the other hand, the fact of his being a native prevented others from feeling that interest in him which a foreigner has to some. Whatever hostility actually existed sprang mainly from causes creditable to himself. If Cooper disliked England for its depreciation of America, he hated with a hatred akin to loathing, the recreant Americans who mistook the relation they bore to their native land, and apologized for its character and existence, instead of apologizing for their own. For these men he made no effort to hide the contempt he felt. This class, far larger then in numbers than now, came mainly from the great cities. Many of them had wealth and social position to make up for their lack of ability; some of them were attached to the legations. They naturally resented the low opinion entertained and expressed of them by their countryman, and had doubtless done him some harm, though far less than he supposed. Besides these, however, there were certainly a pretty large number by whom his aggressive patriotism was felt to be a positive bore. To this feeling there had been a good deal of expression given in the newspaper press. Cooper, who never could learn how little effect of itself hostile (p. 127) criticism has upon the reputation of a popular writer, gave to these attacks far more weight than they deserved. It was, therefore, with exaggerated and unnecessary feelings of distrust that he had returned to his native land. He looked for indifference and aversion. Men seldom fail to find in such cases what they expect. He was present at a reception given, a few days after his return, to Commodore Chauncey. Men whom he knew, but had not seen for years, did not come up to speak with him; those who did, addressed him as if he had been gone from the city a few weeks. So much was he chilled by this apparent coldness that he left the room before the dinner was half over. He did not appreciate his own reserve of manner. The indifference which he found was, in many cases, due not to any lack of cordiality in others, but to hesitation at the way in which advances would be received by himself. There was a brusqueness in his address, an apparent assumption in his manner, which had nothing consonant to them in his feelings. But it was only those who knew him intimately that could venture, after long separation, to break in upon this seeming unsociableness and hauteur. On Monday, May 29 1826, just before his departure for Europe, a dinner had been given to Cooper at the City Hotel by the club which he had founded. It partook almost of the nature of an ovation. Chancellor Kent had presided. De Witt Clinton, the governor of the state, General Scott, and many others conspicuous in public life, had honored it with their presence. Charles King, the editor of the "New York American," and subsequently president of Columbia College, had addressed him in a speech full of the heartiest interest in his future and of pride (p. 128) in his past. The Chancellor had voiced the general feeling by toasting him as the "genius which has rendered our native soil classic ground, and given to our early history the enchantment of fiction." No one, in fact, had ever left the country with warmer wishes or more enthusiastic expressions of admiration and regard. It was but little more than a week after his return when another invitation to a public dinner was offered him by some of the most prominent citizens of New York. In this they expressly asserted that he had won their esteem and affection, not merely by his talents, but by his manly defense, while abroad, of the institutions of his country. The invitation seemed to surprise Cooper as well as the language in which it was couched. He thanked the proposers warmly, but he declined it. The refusal was perhaps unavoidable. If so, it was unfortunate; if not, it was a mistake. Had the dinner taken place, it would have shown him the estimation in which he was really held, and would have modified or destroyed any prejudices entertained towards him by others, if any such existed. Up to this period in his public career, Cooper had certainly not done anything to undermine his popularity. He now entered upon a line of conduct which it is charity to call blundering. He began, or at any rate pursued, a controversy, in which nothing was to be gained and everything to be risked, if not actually lost. He not only set himself to defend a course that needed no defense, he replied to attacks, real or imaginary, which could only be raised into importance by receiving from him notice. These attacks were a criticism on "The Bravo" which had appeared in the "New York American;" a criticism on his later writings which was found in the columns of the "New York Commercial Advertiser;" and an (p. 129) editorial article in the "New York Courier and Enquirer." He could not have done a more foolish thing. He knew perfectly well that no writer could be written down save by himself. He has quoted the very remark. But a hundred similar sayings, condensing in a line the wisdom of ages, could never have kept him quiet when an attack was made upon himself. A popular writer has always immense odds in his favor in any controversy he may have with inferior men. He is ordinarily sure of the verdict of posterity, for his is likely to be the only side that will reach its ears. Even during his own time there will always be a large body of admirers who will defend him with more fervor, and advocate his cause with more effect than he has it in his own power to do. But it can and will be done only in the case that he does little or nothing himself. If Cooper had lost any ground in the estimation of the public, all he had to do, in order to regain it, was to remain quiet. The one thing that Cooper could not do was to remain quiet. He determined to set himself right before his countrymen. He speedily had full opportunity to ascertain the results that are pretty sure to follow experiments of this kind. In June, 1834, appeared Cooper's "Letter to His Countrymen." Its publication was no sudden freak, for the year before he had announced the preparation of it. The work is a thin octavo of a little more than one hundred pages; but the damage it wrought him was out of all proportion to its size. The first half of it was taken up with a reply to the comments and criticisms made in the New York journals already mentioned. This was of itself sufficiently absurd, for it revived what had already been forgotten, and gave importance to some things (p. 130) had not been worth reading, let alone remembering. But to this blundering was added a wrongheadedness, of which Cooper's later life was to afford numerous illustrations. The article from the "Courier and Enquirer" is quoted in full in the book. Some of its statements are inaccurate; but no one can read it now without seeing at once that it was written in a spirit that was the very reverse of hostile. To attack a powerful journal for comments clearly dictated by friendly feeling, betrayed more than a lack of prudence; it betrayed a lack of common sense. Moreover, there were other serious defects in the Letter. He criticised at some length certain forms of expression used by one of his assailants. Cooper's remarks on language are almost invariably marked by the pretension and positiveness that characterize the writers on usage who are ignorant of their ignorance; but in this case they are in addition frequently puerile. His personal references were not especially objectionable. But the best that can be asserted of them is, that he said with good taste what it would have been better taste not to say at all. He, however, so contrived to state his position that he laid himself open to the charge that he looked upon the unfavorable opinion expressed of "The Bravo" as being instigated by the French government, and that, in consequence, the ill reception here accorded to his book was not due necessarily to any inferiority in the work itself, but to the machinations of foreign political enemies. He did not so mean it. He meant to imply that there was no limit to the volunteer baseness of men who stand ready to gratify power by doing for it what it would gladly have done, but would never ask to have done. But the other was a (p. 131) natural inference, and it was used against him with marked effect. Worse even than all this, he succeeded in accomplishing in the latter half of his Letter. A most exciting controversy was going on at the time between the President and the Senate of the United States. The bitterness had been aggravated into fury by the removal of the deposits. The Senate had passed a resolution declaring the conduct of the President unconstitutional. Against this resolution Jackson had published a protest. The whole country was in a flame. Into the purely personal controversy in which he was engaged, Cooper lugged in a discussion of the political question that was agitating the nation. He remarked, in the course of it, that if the Union were ever destroyed by errors or faults of an internal origin, it would not be by executive but by legislative usurpation. In order apparently to have neither of the two parties in full sympathy with him, he criticised the appointing power of the President, and his action in filling embassies. It is by the most strained interpretation of the danger to our institutions from imitation of those found in foreign countries, that the political discussion was dragged into this production. The force of folly could hardly go farther. The inevitable result followed. The work pleased nobody, and irritated nearly everybody. Three influential journals were at once made open and active enemies, and in their wake followed a long train of minor newspapers. More than that was effected. The Letter called down upon him the wrath of a great political party, which in the North embraced a large majority of the educated class; and its hostility followed him relentlessly to the grave. Unwise as the work was, however, there (p. 132) was nothing in it to justify the abuse that in consequence fell upon its author. To his statement of the danger of legislative usurpation Caleb Cushing made a dignified, though somewhat rhetorical reply; but while controverting his opinions, he spoke of Cooper personally with great respect. But such was not the treatment he generally received. The language with which he was assailed was of the most insulting and grossly abusive kind. In those days it was called appalling severity. It reads now like very dreary and very vulgar billingsgate. One example will suffice. The "New York Mirror" was then supposed to be the leading literary paper in New York. It was nominally edited by Morris, Willis, and Fay, though the two last were at that time in Europe. Morris is still remembered by two or three songs he wrote. Besides being an editor, he held the position of general of militia; accordingly he was often styled by his admirers, "he of the sword and pen," which was just and appropriate to this extent, that he did as much execution with the one as with the other. His paper intimated that Cooper was willing to transform himself into a baboon for the sake of abusing America, and that his inordinate ambition prompted him to distance all competitors, whether the race were fame or shame. It is proper to add that the tone of the "Mirror" in regard to Cooper was radically changed after the return of Willis from Europe. In his Letter Cooper announced publicly, what he had long before said to his friends, that he had made up his mind to abandon authorship. Such resolutions are mainly remarkable for the fact that they are never kept. But the howl of denunciation that immediately arose would never have suffered him to keep still. From this time dates the beginning of (p. 133) the long and gallant fight he carried on with the American people. Gallant it certainly was, whatever may be thought of its wisdom; for it was essentially the fight of one man against a nation. In politics he had joined the Democratic party, but with some of their tenets he was not in the slightest sympathy. He was, for example, a fierce protectionist, and neglected no opportunity to cover with ridicule the doctrine of free trade. But though practically standing alone, his courage never faltered. The storm of obloquy that fell upon him made him in his turn bitter and unjust in many things he said; but it never once daunted his spirit or shook his resolution. On the contrary, it almost seems as if he were aiming at unpopularity; at any rate he could not be accused of seeking the favor of the public. Its acts he criticised, its opinions he defied. His literary reputation and the sale of his works were seriously affected by the course of conduct he pursued and the hostility it provoked. But he was of that nature that if the certain result of following the path he had marked out for himself had been the hatred of the world, he would never have once deviated from it the breadth of a hair. He was not a man to remain on the defensive. He at once began hostilities. His first attempt was unfortunate enough. This was the satirical novel called "The Monikins," which was published on the 9th of July, 1835. Of all the works written by Cooper this is most justly subject to the criticism conveyed in the German idiom, that "it does not let itself be read." To the immense majority of even the author's admirers, it has been from the very beginning a sealed book. It is invariably dangerous to assert a negative. But if a personal reference may be pardoned, I am disposed to say, that of the generation that (p. 134) has come upon the stage of active life since Cooper's death, I am the only person who has read this work through. The knowledge of it possessed by his contemporaries did not, in many cases, approach to the dignity of being even second-hand. The accounts of it that have come under my own notice, seem often to have been gathered from reviews of it which had themselves been written by men who had never read the original. It is no difficult matter to explain the neglect into which it immediately sank. The work was a satire mainly upon certain of the social and political features to be found in England and America, designated respectively as Leaphigh and Leaplow; though one or two things characteristic of France were transferred to the former country. But satire Cooper could not write. The power of vigorous invective he had in a marked degree. But the wit which plays while it wounds, which while saying one thing means another, which deals in far-off suggestion and remote allusion, this was something entirely unsuited to the directness and energy of his intellect. Moreover, some of his most marked literary defects were seen here exaggerated and unrelieved. In many of his novels there is prolixity in the introduction. Still in these it is often compensated by descriptions of natural scenery so life-like and so enthusiastic that even the most _blasé_ of novel readers is carried along in a state of what may be called endurable tediousness. But in "The Monikins" the introductory tediousness is unendurable. It is not until we are nearly half-way into the work and have actually entered upon the voyage to the land of the monkeys, that the dullness at all disappears. After the country of Leaphigh is reached the story is far less absurd and more entertaining; though (p. 135) Cooper's descriptions are of the nature of caricature rather than of satire. There are, however, many shrewd and caustic remarks scattered up and down the pages of the latter part of the work, but they will never be known to anybody, for nobody will read the book through. The work fell perfectly dead from the press. But its failure had not the least effect in deterring Cooper from continuing in the course upon which he had started. During the years 1836, 1837, and 1838, he published ten volumes of travels. In these he repeated, with emphasis, everything that he had uttered privately or had implied in his previous publications. The first of these works was entitled "Sketches of Switzerland." It was divided into two parts. The first, which was published on May 21, 1836, gave an account of his residence and excursions in that country during the summer and autumn of 1828. The second part, which appeared October 8, 1836, was largely taken up with accounts of matters and things in Paris during the winter of 1831-32, a journey up the Rhine, and a second visit to Switzerland. These two parts made four volumes. The remaining six had the general title of "Gleanings in Europe," and two each were devoted to France, England, and Italy. The first of these was published March 4, 1837; the second September 2 of the same year; and the third, May 26, 1838. They were written in the form of letters, and were pretty certainly made up from letters actually written or memoranda taken at the time. But they were likewise largely interspersed with the expression of views and feelings that he had learned to adopt and cherish since his return to his native land. In the case of England and America, in particular, his remarks (p. 136) may have been full of light, but they did not exhibit sweetness. Probably no set of travels was ever more elaborately contrived to arouse the wrath of readers in both countries, nor one that more successfully fulfilled its mission. His keen observation let no striking traits escape notice. The individual Englishmen he meets and describes could furnish entertainment only to men that were not themselves Englishmen. There is, for instance, the sea-captain who endeavors to compensate for his lack of energy by giving his passenger an account of the marvelous riches of the nobility and gentry. Even more graphically drawn is the islander he met in the Bernese Oberland, who appeared to regard the peak of the Jungfrau with contempt, as if it did very well for Switzerland; and who, when his attention was called to a singularly beautiful effect upon a mountain top, began to tell how cheap mutton was in Herefordshire. Nor were many of his general remarks flattering. As one descended in the social scale he thought the English the most artificial people on earth. Large numbers of them mistook a labored, feigned, heartless manner for high-breeding. The mass of them acted in society like children who have had their hair combed and faces washed, to be shown up in the drawing-room. They were conventional everywhere. The very men whom he met after his arrival in the streets of Southampton, all looked as if they had been born with hat-brushes and clothes-brushes in their hands. As a race, moreover, they had special defects. They lacked delicacy and taste in conferring obligations or paying compliments. They were utterly indifferent to the feelings of others. There was a national propensity to blackguardism; and the English press, in particular, calumniated its enemies, both political and (p. 137) personal, with the coarsest vituperation. These were not the sort of remarks to draw favorable notices from British periodicals. Cooper soon had an opportunity to verify, in his own experience, the truth of the last of his observations that have been cited. Harsh, however, as was his language about England, it bore little comparison to the severity with which he expressed himself about America. The attacks on the newspaper press belong not here, but to the account of the war he waged with it. The omission, however, will hardly be noticed in the multitude of other matters he found to criticise. Manners, customs, society, were touched throughout with an unsparing hand. Common crimes, he admitted, were not so general with us as in Europe, though mainly because we were exempt from temptation, but uncommon meannesses did abound in a large circle of our population. Our two besetting sins were canting and hypocrisy. We had far less publicity in our pleasures than other nations; yet we had scarcely any domestic privacy on account of the neighborhood. The whole country was full of a village-like gossip which caused every man to think that he was a judge of character, when he was not even a judge of facts. In most matters we were humble imitators of the English. All their mistakes and misjudgments we adopted except such as impaired our good opinion of ourselves. It was a consequence that all their errors about foreign countries had become our errors also. In a few cases, indeed, we were compelled to be American; but whenever there was a tolerable chance we endeavored to become second-class English. Wherever making money was in view, we had but one soul and that was inventive enough; but when (p. 138) it came to spending it we did not know how to set about it except by routine. No people traveled as much as we; none traveled with so little enjoyment or so few comforts. Taste and knowledge and tone were too little concentrated anywhere, too much diffused everywhere, to make head against the advances of an overwhelming mediocrity. Of society there was but little; for what it suited the caprice of certain people to call such was little more than the noisy, screeching, hoydenish romping of both sexes. The taint of provincialism was diffused over all feelings and beliefs. Of arts and letters the country possessed none or next to none. Moreover, there was no genuine sympathy with either. To all this dismal prospect there was slight hope of improvement, because there was a disposition to resent any intimation that we could be better than we were at present. It would be a gross error to infer the general character of Cooper's travels from these extracts. They are gathered together from ten volumes, without any of the attendant statements by which they are there in many cases modified. Equally erroneous would it be to suppose that he did not find much to praise as well as to condemn in both England and America. These extracts, however, explain the almost savage vituperation with which Cooper was thenceforth followed in the press of the two countries. The works themselves met with a very slight sale: none of them ever passed into a second edition. Men were not likely to read with alacrity, however much they might with profit, unfavorable opinions entertained of themselves. Cooper himself could not have hoped for much success for his strictures. In fact, he expressly declared the contrary. The most he should expect, he said, would be the secret assent of (p. 139) the wise and good, the expressed censure of the numerous class of the vapid and ignorant, the surprise of the mercenary and the demagogue, and the secret satisfaction of the few who should come after him who would take an interest in his name. Notwithstanding the ferocious criticism with which they were assailed at the time and the forgetfulness into which they have now fallen, Cooper's accounts of the countries in which he lived are among the best of their kind. Books of travel are from their very nature of temporary interest. It requires peculiar felicity of manner to make up long for the fresher matter about foreign lands which newer books contain. Striking descriptions and acute observations will still, however, reward the reader of Cooper's sketches. There are often displayed in them a vigor and a political sagacity which of themselves would justify his being styled the most robust of American authors. Pointed assertions are scattered up and down his pages. Could, for instance, one of the dangers of a democracy be more clearly and ill-naturedly put than by his statement, that the whole science of government in what are called free states, is getting to be a strife in mystification, in which the great secret is to persuade the governed that he is in fact the governor? His books, moreover, while they reflect his prejudices, show an honest desire to be just. He undoubtedly preferred the Continent to England. But in his account of that country, while he had the unfairness of dislike, he never had the unfairness of intentional misrepresentation. There is nothing of that exulting yell with which the British traveler of those days fell foul of some specimen of American ill-breeding or American bumptiousness. Nor did he fail to pay a high tribute to (p. 140) what was best in English society or English character. The gentlemen of that country, in appearance, in attainments, in manliness, and he was inclined to add in principles, he placed at the head of their class in Christendom. His censure of America and the Americans was not at all in the nature of indiscriminate abuse. The fault he found with his countrymen was based mainly upon their mistaken opinion of themselves and of their advantages and disadvantages. You boast, he practically said to them, of the superiority of your scenery, in which you are not to be compared with Europe; but you constantly abuse your climate which is equal to, if not finer, than that of any region in the Old World. You stand up manfully for your manners and tastes, which you ought to correct; but you are incessantly apologizing for your institutions of which you ought to be proud. The defects imputed in Europe to the inhabitants of the United States, such as the want of morals, honesty, order, decency, liberality, and religion, were not at all our defects. These, in fact were, as the world goes, the strong points of American character. On the other hand, those on which we prided ourselves, intelligence, taste, manners, education as applied to all beyond the base of society, were the very points upon which we should do well to be silent. This is certainly not an extreme position. But men are far more affected by the blame bestowed upon their foibles than by the praise given to their virtues; and both in England and America the censures were remembered and the commendations forgotten. Other circumstances also came in now to add to his unpopularity in his own country. A local quarrel in which he accidently became concerned, was followed by (p. 141) consequences which affected his estimation throughout the whole land; but the details of this will require a separate chapter. CHAPTER VIII. (p. 142) 1837-1838. Three miles from Cooperstown, on the western side of Otsego Lake, a low, wooded point of land projects for some distance into the water. It combines two characteristics of an attractive resort: beauty of scenery and easiness of access. On these accounts Cooper's father had refused to sell it when he disposed of his other lands. He had, in fact, specially reserved it for his own use, and for that of his descendants. In 1808, a year before his death, he drew up his will. In it he made a particular devise of this spot. "I give and bequeath," ran the words of the document, "my place, called Myrtle Grove, on the west side of the Lake Otsego, to all my descendants in common until the year 1850; then to be inherited by the youngest thereof bearing my name." Two small buildings had been successively erected by him on the spot. The first he tore down himself, but the second was set on fire after his death, by the carelessness of trespassers using it, and burned to the ground. Shortly after 1821, the only representative of the family living in Cooperstown who was of proper age to be consulted, gave his consent, so far as he was concerned, to the erection of a new building by the community. From that time the Point came to be a place of general resort. To it fishing and picnic parties were in the habit of repairing. An impression (p. 143) sprang up, moreover, that the spot was public property. This impression in the course of years advanced to the dignity of positive assertion. It became in time a universally accepted belief in the minds of the citizens that the place belonged to them. It then only remained to furnish the explanation of how it had happened to come into their possession. This was no difficult achievement. The story was soon generally received that Cooper's father, instead of permitting the public to use the Point, had actually made a gift of it to the public. When Cooper took up his summer residence in the village, after his return from Europe, he found the notion prevalent that the place in question belonged to the community. As executor of his father's will he took pains to correct the error. He informed his fellow-citizens that the Point was private property, and not public; and that while he had no desire to prevent them from resorting to it, he was determined to insist upon the recognition of the real ownership. He might as well have talked to the winds. The community did not bother itself about examining the question of title. It had been in the habit of using the Point without asking any one's consent, and the Point it purposed to keep on using in the same way. Matters reached a crisis in 1837. The building erected on the spot had become dilapidated. Workmen were sent out to repair it, without going through the formality of consulting the owners of the property. A tree was also cut down, which, on account of certain associations connected with his father, Cooper valued particularly. This was not the way to win over to the view of the community the executor of the property. He sent a card at once to the editor of the Democratic newspaper of the (p. 144) village, stating that the Point was private property, and cautioning the public against injuring the trees. Nothing, however, was said about trespassing. The card came too late for publication that week and before another number of the paper appeared, rumor of its existence had got about. Its reported character created ill-feeling, and messages and even threats were sent to Cooper on the subject. These had the effect which might have been expected. He withdrew the original card and published in its stead a simple, ordinary notice of warning against trespassing on the Point, with a few additional facts. The notice, which is dated July 22, 1837, reads as follows:-- "The public is warned against trespassing on the Three Mile Point, it being the intention of the subscriber rigidly to enforce the title of the estate, of which he is the representative, to the same. The public has not, nor has it ever had, any right to the same beyond what has been conceded by the liberality of the owners." The notice was signed by Cooper as the executor of his father's estate. Great was the excitement in the village when it was published. A hand-bill was immediately put into circulation calling a meeting of the citizens, to take into consideration the propriety of defending their rights against the arrogant claims and assumed authority of "one J. Fenimore Cooper." The meeting was accordingly held. There was little difference of sentiment among those present. All were animated, according to the newspaper reports, by the determination to use the Three Mile Point without being indebted to the liberality of Cooper or any one else. Stirring speeches were made. Two or three persons were anxious to delay any action until the question of title had been (p. 145) examined. This proposition was deemed by the immense majority of those present to have a truckling character, and consequently met with no favor. The meeting, accordingly, found immediate relief for its feelings in the usual American way, by passing a series of resolutions. The vigor of these was out of all proportion to the sense. The disposition to defy Cooper shot, in some instances, indeed, beyond its proper mark, and extended even to the rules of grammar. After reciting in a preamble the facts as they understood them, the citizens present went on to express their determination and opinions as follows:-- "Resolved, By the aforesaid citizens that we will wholly disregard the notice given by James F. Cooper, forbidding the public to frequent the Three Mile Point. "Resolved, That inasmuch as it is well known that the late William Cooper intended the use of the Point in question for the citizens of this village and its vicinity, we deem it no more than a proper respect for the memory and intentions of the father, that the son should recognize the claim of the citizens to the use of the premises, even had he the power to deny it. "Resolved, That we will hold his threat to enforce title to the premises, as we do his whole conduct in relation to the matter, in perfect contempt. "Resolved, That the language and conduct of Cooper, in his attempts to procure acknowledgements of 'liberality,' and his attempt to force the citizens into asking his permission to use the premises, has been such as to render himself odious to a greater portion of the citizens of this community. "Resolved, That we do recommend and request the trustees of the Franklin Library, in this village, to remove all books, of which Cooper is (p. 146) the author, from said library. "Resolved also, That we will and do denounce any man as sycophant, who has, or shall, ask permission of James F. Cooper to visit the Point in question. "Resolved, That the proceedings of this meeting be signed by the chairman and secretary, and published in the village papers." Whatever else these proceedings show, they make it clear that the people of Cooperstown had not well improved the opportunity afforded by his residence among them, of becoming well acquainted with the character of their distinguished townsman. Still there was knowledge enough about him to make the officers of the meeting unwilling to publish the resolutions as they had been ordered. He was not a man to be trifled with; and no one cared to make himself personally responsible for what had been said. As a matter of fact the secretary of the meeting furnished Cooper with a copy of the resolutions; and it was the latter that first caused them to be printed. But the story of the meeting speedily found its way into the newspapers. In the accounts of the proceedings that were in circulation, it was said that a resolution had been passed that the works of the novelist should be taken from the library and publicly burned. This was caught up by the press and repeated everywhere throughout the country. To this day the baseless tradition lingers in Cooperstown itself, that this act was not only determined upon but actually done. The matter doubtless was discussed among the other sage proposals that were brought forward at this meeting; and it may be true, as was afterwards suspected, that the original resolution on this point was modified before it was allowed to go out to the public. Under the circumstances only one result was possible. The (p. 147) community were very speedily satisfied that they did not own the Point, and were equally convinced that their prospect of obtaining possession of it by clamor was far from good. Two letters, marked by anything but timidity or amiability, Cooper wrote to the Democratic newspaper of the village. In them he gave fully all the facts in the case. To the assertion paraded in many of the Whig journals of the state, that this meeting showed the spirit of the people in Cooperstown, he made an indignant reply. Such a remark, he said, was a libel on the character of the place. The meeting, he declared, was not composed of a fourth part of the population, or a hundredth part of the respectability of the village. The resolutions he described as being the work of presuming boys, who swagger of time immemorial; of strangers who had lived but a brief time in the county; and of a few disreputable persons who, bent on construing liberty entirely on their own side, interposed against palpable rights and sacred family feelings their gossiping facts, their grasping rapacity, and their ruthless disposition to destroy whatever they could not control. "There is but one legal public," he defiantly concluded his first letter, "and that acts under the obligation of precise oaths, through prescribed forms, and on constitutional principles. Let 'excitement' be flourished as it may, this is the only public to which I shall submit the decision of my rights. So far as my means allow, insult shall be avenged by the law, violence repelled by the strong hand, falsehood put to shame by truth, and sophistry exposed by reason." It is perfectly clear that on the merits of this controversy Cooper was wholly in the right. The bluster of these resolutions exhausted (p. 148) all the courage of his opponents. The question of ownership was at once settled definitely and forever. No one on the spot ever questioned the point any farther, though the original falsehood was steadily repeated by newspapers at a distance, and apparently never once contradicted after its untruth had been shown. Some may think the result might have been reached by milder means, but the spirit shown at the meeting renders this more than doubtful. Cooper even had to pay for the insertion of his letters in the village newspaper. Unfortunately the ill-feeling aroused did not stop here. It gave rise to what may be described as a semi-political controversy--that is, a controversy in which one party attacks a man, and the party to which he belongs does not think it expedient or worth while to defend him. The libel suits to which it directly or indirectly led with the Whig newspapers of the state will demand a separate chapter. Before they were well under way, however, the novelist made up his mind to right himself in another manner, and brought out a work of fiction which seemed expressly contrived to meet the thought of the sacred writer who wished his adversary had written a book. Cooper determined to write a story in which he would set forth the principles involved in the controversy about the Point. There is perhaps no subject that cannot be made interesting by the right treatment. But he was now in a state of mind that would not have permitted him to discuss any matter of this nature in the spirit that belongs to the composition of a work of the imagination. The dispute had embittered his feelings already sore. It had tended to give him a still more distorted view of the country to which he had come back. So completely had (p. 149) his feelings swung around that he now had an eye for little but the worst features of the national character. Passion had largely unbalanced his judgment. Ancient fable has pointed out the danger of falling under the fascinations of the sirens; but even that seems preferable to becoming bewitched by the furies. Still he could not well make a book out of this one event. It could be used to suit all his purposes, however, by being introduced as an incident of an ordinary tale. In this way his side of the story would travel as far as the false assertions about his conduct in the matter which had been circulated not only over America but over Europe. He also set out to bring together in the work he was contemplating all the things that he looked upon with disapprobation and dislike in the social life of this country. His original intention was to begin a story with the landing here of an American family long resident in Europe. Happily he was induced to give an account of the voyage home, and this in the end necessitated the division of the work into two parts. Accordingly on the 16th of August, 1837, appeared the novel of "Homeward Bound," followed in November of the same year by its sequel, entitled "Home as Found." The leading characters are the same in both tales, but the events are entirely unlike. The scene of the first is laid wholly on the water. In its movement, its variety of incidents, and the spirit and energy with which they are told, it is one of the best of Cooper's sea-novels. Nor is this estimate seriously impaired by the fact that it is in some places marred by controversial discussions on liberty and equality, and by the withering exposure of views that no man maintained whose opinions were worth regarding. But these are only occasional (p. 150) blemishes. They do not materially interfere with the progress of the story, which moves on with little variation of interest to the end. On the other hand, the characters are generally as uninteresting as the events are exciting. The chief ones among them have all reached that supreme refinement which justifies them in feeling and decisively pronouncing that whatever is done by anybody but themselves is coarse. But in this work the personages are so subordinate to the scenes that any failure in representing the former is more than counterbalanced by the success shown in depicting the latter. The reverse was the fact when the sequel followed. In this the characters and their views became prominent, and the events were of slight importance. "Home as Found" was far poorer than "Homeward Bound" was good. Never was a more unfortunate work written by any author. This is the fact, whether it be looked at from the literary or the popular point of view. For the latter it is enough to say that the opinions about America which have already been given in the account of his European travels were more than reënforced. He said again what he had said before, and he took pains to add a great deal that had been left unsaid. The new matter surpassed in the energy of invective the old, and its attack was more concentrated. There were in the novel, to be sure, the remarks that had now got to be habitual with Cooper upon the provincialism of the whole country; but it was upon New York city that the vials of his wrath were especially poured. The town, according to the view here expressed of it, was nothing more than a huge expansion of commonplace things. It was a confused and tasteless collection of flaring red brick houses, martin-box churches, and colossal (p. 151) taverns. But the assault made upon its external appearance bore no comparison to that upon its internal life. The city in a moral sense resembled, according to Cooper, a huge encampment. It stood at the farthest remove from the intellectual supremacy and high tone of a genuine capital as distinguished from a great trading port. In its gayeties he saw little better than the struggles of an uninstructed taste, if indeed that could properly be styled gay which was only a strife in prodigality and parade. The conversation of the elders was entirely about the currency, the price of lots, and the latest speculations in towns. The younger society was made up of babbling misses, who prattled as waters flow, without consciousness of effort, and of whiskered masters who fancied Broadway the world; and the two together looked upon the flirtations of miniature drawing-rooms as the ideal of human life in its loftiest aspects. Upon the _literati_ the attack was even more savage. He described this appellation as being given to the most incorrigible members of the book clubs of New York. These had been laboriously employed in puffing each other into celebrity for many weary years, but still remained just as vapid, as conceited, as ignorant, as imitative, as dependent, and as provincial as ever. It is not an easy matter to condense the bitterness of two volumes into a few sentences. Enough has been given, however, to show the character of the strictures. Whatever may be thought of their justice, few will be disposed to deny their vigor. But Cooper, unfortunately for himself, was not satisfied with demolishing what seemed poor in his eyes. He undertook the business of reconstruction, and set up an ideal of how things ought to be. His main agents in this work were the members (p. 152) of the Effingham family, whom he had brought over from Europe in "Homeward Bound." In these and the train dependent upon them, we were to find realized that pure and perfect social state which he contemplated in his own mind. To them were added a few survivors from the old families, as he termed them, which after a manner had ridden out the social gale that had made shipwreck of so many of their original companions. Out of these materials Cooper attempted to build his ideal framework of a life in which men thought rationally and lived nobly. It was here he made his mistake, and it was a signal one. His inability to portray the higher types of character was an absolute bar to success. This was largely due to his inability to catch and reproduce the tone of polished conversation. Never was his weakness in this respect more painfully manifested than in "Home as Found." He could appreciate such conversation; he could bear a part in it; but he could not represent it. His characters taken from low life, whatever critics may say, have usually a marked individuality. But whenever Cooper sought to draw the men and women of cultivated society he achieved at best a doubtful success. In this instance he tried to make them and their words and deeds the vehicle of reproof and satire. His failure was absolute. Modern culture, we all know, consists largely in the most refined method of finding fault. But this his ideal family had not reached. An essentially coarse method of finding fault was the only one to which it had attained. Never, indeed, was a more bumptious, conceited, and disagreeable set of personages created by an author, under the impression that they were the reverse. The simple-minded, (p. 153) thoughtful, and upright Mr. Effingham can speedily be dismissed as merely a mild type of bore. Not so with his daughter Eve, and his cousin John Effingham. The latter plays the part of critic of his country and countrymen. It seems hardly possible that in this narrow-minded, disagreeable, and essentially vulgar character, Cooper could have fancied he was creating anything but a contemptible boor. The contrast between what is said of him, and what is said by him, almost reaches the comic. We read constantly of his caustic satire; we find little of it in his conversation. His fine face is, according to the author, always expressing contempt and sarcasm; but the examples of these that are shown in his speeches are usually specimens of that forcible-feeble straining to be severe which marks the man of violent temper and feeble intellect. As represented, he has neither the feeling, the instincts, nor the manners of a gentleman. He so much dislikes untruth that he insinuates to a guest, very broadly as well as very unjustly, that he is lying. In short, he is one of those rude and vulgar men who fancy that they are frank simply because they are brutal. No civilized society would long tolerate the presence, if even the existence, of such an animal as he is here represented to be. Even he, however, shines by comparison with the heroine. Of her we hear no end of praise. Her delicacy, her plastic simplicity, the simple elegance of her attire, her indescribable air of polish, her surpassing beauty and modesty of mien, are referred to again and again. She is simple, she is feminine, she is dignified. To men her smiles are faint and distant. Across her countenance no unworthy thought has ever left a trace. Once and once only did she fail to keep up to the high (p. 154) level of deportment which she ordinarily maintained. On one occasion "her little foot moved" in spite of the fact that "she had been carefully taught, too, that a ladylike manner required that even this beautiful portion of the female frame should be quiet and unobtrusive." Something, however, must always be pardoned to human nature; and Cooper doubtless felt that it would not do to make his heroine absolutely free from frailty. As a sort of foil to her was introduced her cousin Grace Van Cortlandt. She, to be sure, had not had the advantage of foreign travel; but there was a redeeming feature in her case. She belonged to an old family. She was saved in consequence from being entirely submerged in that sweltering, foaming tide of mediocrity, which called itself New York society. Belonging to an old family did not, however, preserve her from being provincial. She is taken along with the rest to Templeton. On her way thither she is steadily snubbed by the masculine element of the party, and henpecked by the feminine. The reader comes in time to have the sincerest pity for this unfortunate girl, who is made to pay very dearly for the misfortune of being akin to a family whose members had become too superior to be gracious and too polished to be polite. In the composition of this work Cooper seems to have lost all sense of the ridiculous. The personages whom he wished to make particularly attractive are uniformly disagreeable. A French governess appears in the story, who is simply insufferable. He brings in an American woman, Mrs. Bloomfield, as a representative, according to him, of that class which equals, if it does not surpass, in the brilliancy of its conversation the best to be found in European salons. She is introduced discoursing on the civilization of the country in a way that would speedily (p. 155) empty any of the parlors of her native land. Indeed, throughout the work the characters converse as no rational beings ever conversed under any sort of provocation. But it is in the speeches of the heroine that the language reaches its highest development. She can emphatically be said to talk like a book. She does not guess, she hazards conjectures. She playfully addresses her father as "thoughtless, precipitate parent." When she is asked what she thinks of the country now that an attempt was made to take possession of the Point, she describes her character, as drawn in this novel, as no words of another can. "Miss Effingham," she says, "has been grieved, disappointed, nay, shocked, but she will not despair of the republic." Indeed the only person in the work who has any near kinship to humanity is one of the inferior characters, named Aristobulus Bragg. He is the more attractive because he says bright things unconsciously; while the heavy characters say heavy things under the impression that they are light. This book had a profound influence upon Cooper's fortunes. From beginning to end it was a blunder. It cannot receive even the negative praise of being a work in which the best of intentions was marred by the worst of taste. Its spirit was a bad spirit throughout. It was dreadful to think some of the things found in it; but it was more dreadful to say them. There was a great deal of truth in its pages, but if the views expressed in it had been actually inspired, the attitude and tone the author assumed would have prevented his making a convert. To some extent this had been true of "Homeward Bound." Greenough expostulated with Cooper, after reading that novel. "I think," he wrote from (p. 156) Florence, "you lose hold on the American public by rubbing down their shins with brickbats as you do." The most surprising thing connected with "Home as Found," however, is Cooper's unconsciousness, not of the probability, but of the possibility, that he would be charged with drawing himself in the character of Edward Effingham, and to some extent in that of John Effingham. The sentiments advanced were his sentiments, the acts described were in many cases his acts. The absence in a foreign land, the return to America, the scene laid at Templeton, with a direct reference to "The Pioneers," the account of the controversy about the Three Mile Point,--all these fixed definitely the man and the place. Variations in matters of detail would not disturb the truth of the general resemblance. Still Cooper not only did not intend to represent himself, he was unaware that he had done so. Nearly three years after in the columns of a weekly newspaper he stoutly defended himself against the imputation. It was useless. From this time forward the name of Effingham was often derisively applied to him in the controversies in which he was engaged. It was not merely the intemperate spirit exhibited, which destroyed the effect of the shrewd and just comments often appearing in "Home as Found." This was full as much impaired by the display of personal weaknesses. Cooper's foible about descent he could not help exposing. No thoughtful man denies the desirability of honorable lineage, or undervalues the possession of it; but not for the reasons for which the novelist regarded it and celebrated it. There was much in this single story to justify Lowell's sarcasm, uttered ten years later, that (p. 157) Cooper had written six volumes to prove that he was as good as a lord. He traces his families up to remote periods in the past. He thereby shows their superiority to the newly-created family of the English baronet who is brought into the tale. It was to correct the erroneous impression, prevalent in Europe, that there was no stability, no permanent respectability in the society of this country, that he enlarged upon the date to which ancestry could be traced. The difficulty was to persuade anybody that the men who took the pains to look up their forefathers had any superiority to those who shared in the general indifference as to who their forefathers were. He went farther than this in some instances, and expressly implied that blood and birth were necessary to gentility. This was provincialism pushed to an extreme. Whatever we may think of its actual value, English aristocracy resembles in this gold and silver, that it has an accepted value independent of the character of its representatives. It is, therefore, current throughout the civilized world; whereas American aristocracy is like local paper money: worth nothing except in its own country, and even there receiving little recognition or circulation outside of the immediate neighborhood in which it is found. Still, the subject of blood and birth is a solemn one to those who believe in it, and they are absolutely incapable of comprehending the feelings of a world of scoffers, or, if they do, impute them to imperfect mental or spiritual development. On this point Cooper had the misfortune to say what some think but dare not express. The wrath aroused, especially in New York city, by this particular novel, had about it something both fearful and comic. In one (p. 158) respect Cooper had the advantage, and his critics all felt it. His work was certain to be translated into all the principal languages of modern Europe. The picture he drew of New York society would be the one that foreigners would naturally receive as genuine. By them it would be looked upon as the work of a man familiar with what he was describing, the work of a man, moreover, who had been well known in European circles for his intense Americanism. It was vain to protest that it was a caricature. The protest would not be heeded even if it were heard. His enemies might rage; but they were powerless to influence foreign opinion, and they felt themselves so. Rage they certainly did; and if the assault made upon him had been as effective as it was violent, little would have been left of his reputation. Even as late as 1842, during the progress of the libel suits, some one took the pains to produce a novel in two volumes called "'The Effinghams, or Home as I Found It,' by the Author of the 'Victims of Chancery.'" The whole aim of this tale was to satirise Cooper. Mere malignity, however, has little vitality; and in spite of the fact that the work was widely praised by the journals for its "sound American feeling," and for its hits at "the conceited, disappointed, and Europeanized writer of 'Home as Found,'" it passed so speedily to the paper-makers that antiquarian research would now be tasked to find a copy. About the contemporary newspaper notices there was a certain tiger-like ferocity which almost justified much that Cooper said in denunciation of the American press. A specimen, though a somewhat extreme one, of a good deal of the sort of criticism to which the novelist was subjected, can be found in the "New Yorker" for the 1st of December, 1838. This journal was edited by Horace Greeley, (p. 159) but the article in question came probably from the pen of Park Benjamin. It defended Cooper from the charge of vilifying his country in order to make his works salable in England, but it defended him in this way. No motive of that kind was necessary to be supposed. He had an inborn disposition to pour out his bile and vent his spleen. "He is as proud of blackguarding," the article continued, "as a fishwoman of Billingsgate. It is as natural to him as snarling to a tom-cat, or growling to a bull-dog.... He is the common mark of scorn and contempt of every well-informed American. The superlative dolt!" In this refined and chastened style did the defenders of American cultivation preserve its reputation from its traducer. Criticism of the kind just quoted, hurts only the man who utters it and the community which tolerates it. It injured the reputation of the country far more than the work could that it criticised. "Home as Found," as a matter of fact, was prevented from doing any harm, partly by its excessive exaggeration but more by its excessive poorness. As a story it stood in marked contrast to its immediate predecessor. It was as difficult to accompany Cooper on land as it had been to abandon him when on the water. The tediousness of the tale is indeed something appalling to the most hardened novel-reader. The only interest it can possibly have at this day is from the opportunity it affords of studying one phase of the author's character, and of accounting for much of the bitter hostility with which he was assailed. While he was lecturing his countrymen on manners, his own were spoken of in turn in a way that gave especial delight to the enemies he had (p. 160) made by his criticisms. In 1837 Lockhart's "Life of Sir Walter Scott" was appearing. In the diary of that novelist were some references to the American author. "This man," he said, describing his first interview, "who has shown so much genius, has a good deal of the manners, or want of manners, peculiar to his countrymen." Cooper's personal acquaintance with Scott had begun in 1826, just after the latter had set about his gigantic effort to pay off the load of debt in which he had involved himself. The American novelist had made then an attempt to secure for the man he regarded as his master some adequate return from the vast sale of his works in the United States. In this he had been foiled. In the "Knickerbocker Magazine" for April, 1838, he gave an account of these fruitless negotiations. In a later number of the same year he reviewed Lockhart's biography. This work is well known as one of the most entertaining in our literature. But on its appearance it gave a painful shock to the admirers of the great author by the revelations it made of practices which savored more of the proverbial canniness of the Scotchman than of the lofty spirit of the man of honor. Equally surprising was the unconsciousness of the biographer, that there was anything discreditable in what he disclosed. Cooper criticised Scott's conduct in certain matters with a good deal of severity. In regard to some points he took extreme, and what might fairly be deemed Quixotic ground. Yet the general justice of his article will hardly be denied now by any one who is fully cognizant of the facts. Nor, indeed, was it then. "I have just read," wrote Charles Sumner from London to Hillard, in January, 1839, "an article on Lockhart's 'Scott,' written by (p. 161) Cooper in the "Knickerbocker," which was lent me by Barry Cornwall. I think it capital. I see none of Cooper's faults; and I think a proper castigation is applied to the vulgar minds of Scott and Lockhart. Indeed, the nearer I approach the circle of these men the less disposed do I find myself to like them." Sumner subsequently wrote, that Procter fully concurred in the conclusions advanced in the review. But these were not the prevalent opinions, in this country at least. Great was the outcry against Cooper for writing this article; great the outcry against the "Knickerbocker" for printing it. The latter was severely censured for its willingness to prostitute its columns to the service of the former in his slanderous "attempts to vilify the object of his impotent and contemptible hatred." Americans who were averse to Scott's being honestly paid proved particularly solicitous that he should not be honestly criticised. They showed themselves as little scrupulous in defending him after he was dead as they had been in plundering him while he was living. Cooper had previously aroused the resentment of many because he had failed to express gratification or delight at being termed "the American Scott." He had then been assured again and again that there was no danger of the title being applied to him in future; that in ten years their names would never be coupled together, and that he himself would be totally forgotten. It could hardly have been deemed a compliment in a land where scarcely a petty district can exist peacefully and creditably, with a hill three thousand feet in height, which is not in time rendered disreputable by being saddled with the pretentious name of "The American Switzerland." Personal malice alone, however, could impute his disclaimer either to malice or to envy. His own (p. 162) estimate of his relations to the British novelist, he had given many times; and indirectly at that very time in his account in the first "Knickerbocker" article, of his interview with Sir Walter Scott. The latter had been so obliging, he observed, as to make him a number of flattering speeches, which he, however, did not repay in kind. His reserve he thought Scott did not altogether like. In this he was probably mistaken, but the reason he gave for his own conduct savored little of feelings of envy or rivalry. "As Johnson," he wrote, "said of his interview with George the Third, it was not for me to bandy compliments with my sovereign." No attention was paid to these and similar utterances of a man whom his bitterest enemies never once dared to charge with saying a word he did not mean. Few at this day will be disposed to deny the justice of a good deal of the criticism that Cooper passed upon his country and his countrymen. Even now, though many of his strictures are directed against things that no longer exist, there is still much in his writings that can be read with profit. The essential justice of what he said is not impaired by the fact that he was usually indiscreet and intemperate in the saying of it. Nor were his motives of a low kind. He loved his country, and nothing lay dearer to his heart than to have her what she ought to be. The people were the source of power; and it was his cardinal principle that power ought always to be censured rather than flattered. It needed to be told the truth, however unwelcome; and in his eyes, that man was no true patriot who was not willing to encounter unpopularity, if it came in the line of duty. At the same time, while doing full justice to the purity of his motives, we cannot shut our eyes to the defects (p. 163) of his method. His abilities, his reputation, his acquaintance with foreign lands, gave him inestimable advantages for influencing his countrymen, and of educating them in matters where they stood sadly in need of it. But the spirit in which he went to work deprived him of the legitimate influence he should have exerted. Excitement, and passion, and indignation led him often to say the wrong thing. More often they caused him to say the right thing in the wrong way. Nor did he escape the special temptation which speedily besets him who starts out to tell his fellow-men unpleasant truths. Duty of this kind soon begins to have a peculiar fascination of its own. The careful reader cannot fail to see that in process of time the more disagreeable was the truth the more delightful it became to Cooper to tell it. Most unreasonable it certainly was to expect that constant fault-finding would be looked upon as a proof of special attachment. The means, moreover, were not always adapted to the end. Men may possibly be lectured to some extent into the acquisition of the virtues, but they never can be bullied into the graces. Besides all this, in a great deal of Cooper's criticism there were fundamental defects. He constantly confounded the unimportant and the temporary with the important and the permanent. Many of his most violent strictures are devoted to points of little consequence, and the feeling expressed is out of all proportion to the significance of the matter involved. Nothing, for instance, seemed to irritate him more than the preference given by many of his countrymen to the scenery of America over that of Europe. Especially was he indignant with the (p. 164) "besotted stupidity" that could compare the bay of New York with that of Naples. He returned to this topic in book after book. Yet of all the harmless exhibitions of mistaken judgment, that which prefers the scenery of one's own land is what a wise man would be least disposed to find fault with; certainly what he would think least calculated to inspire the wrath of a Juvenal. Cosmopolitanism is well enough in its way. But that ability to see things exactly as they are, which enables a man to criticise his mother with the same impartiality with which he does any other woman, can hardly be thought to mark a high development of his loftier feelings, however creditable it may be to the judicial tone of his mind. Undue preference of the scenery of one's own country is an amiable weakness at which the philosopher may smile, but the patriot can afford to rejoice. There was, moreover, a certain vagueness about much of Cooper's criticism that deprived it of effect. No more striking illustration of this could be found than his constant charge of provincialism made against this country. He repeated it in season and out of season. For several years he hardly published a work which did not contain a number of references to it or assertions of its existence. Provincial enough we certainly were then, if looked at from the point of view of the present time. We in turn may seem so to our descendants. This possibility shows at once the somewhat unreal nature of the accusation. Provincialism, like vulgarity, is a term that defies exact explanation. It is the indefinite and, therefore, unanswerable charge that men constantly bring against those whose standard of living and thinking is different from their own. It depends upon the point of view of the speaker full (p. 165) as much as upon the conduct and opinions of those spoken of. It changes as manners change. Nations not only impute it to one another, but even to themselves at different periods of their history. Made by itself, therefore, it means nothing. Without a specific description of what in particular is meant by provincialism, the charge cannot and ought not to have any weight with those against whom it is directed. Certain incidental facts mentioned in these observations bring also to light another marked defect of Cooper's course. This was not in his views but in his method of enforcing them. He could not refrain from the constant repetition of the same censures. He had never learned literary self-restraint; that special criticisms, in order to have their full weight, must not be forced too often upon the attention, and especially at unseasonable times. The mind revolts at having the same exhibition of personal feeling thrust upon it in the most uncalled-for manner and in the most unexpected places. Even when originally disposed to agree with the view expressed, it will, out of a pure spirit of contradiction, take the side opposed to that which is enforced with exasperating frequency. The fullest sympathizer is sure to get tired of this everlasting slaying of the slain. A similar effect is, indeed, likely to be produced upon the victim of the criticism. Instead of being stirred to reflection, repentance, or even indignation, he simply becomes bored. After a man has been told a hundred times that he is provincial, the remark ceases to be exciting. The things, therefore, that Cooper said incidentally are even now the only ones that make any deep impression upon the mind. Like all men, sensitive to the national honor, he felt keenly the (p. 166) refusal of Congress to pass a copyright law. It led him to say twice, but both times very quietly, that in spite of loud profession there was little genuine sympathy in this country with art, or scholarship, or letters. The absence of all heat and excitement gives to the remark a weight that never belongs to his violent utterances and fierce denunciations. We may hope that we have gained since his time; but even at this day we have little to boast of, if the average cultivation of the people, as well as its average morality, finds expression in the laws. The record in these matters of the highest legislative body in the land is still the most discreditable of that of any nation in Christendom. To gratify the greed of a few traders, it has never refused to lay heavy burdens upon scholarship and letters. It has steadily imposed duties on the introduction of everything that could facilitate the acquisition of learning, and further the development of art. It has persistently stabbed literature under the pretence of encouraging intelligence. It has never once been guilty of the weakness of yielding for a moment to the virtuous impulse that would even contemplate the enactment of a copyright law. If it ever does pass one, it will do so, not because foreign authors have rights, but because native publishers have quarrels. Thus consistent in its unwillingness to do an honest thing from an honest motive, it will even then grant to selfishness what has been invariably denied to justice. There were other than faults of view or faults of statement that mark Cooper's writings at this time. The two novels published during the year 1838 show a radical change in the attitude he assumed to his art. What had been indicated in the stories whose scenes were laid in (p. 167) Europe, was now carried out completely. He may have been unconscious of the difference of his point of view, but none the less did it exist. The novel was no longer something in which he could embody his conceptions of beauty fairer, or truth higher than could actually be found in nature. It no longer served him as a refuge from the din of a clamorous, or the hostility of a censorious world. It became a sort of fortress, from the secure position of which he was enabled to deal out annoyance and defiance to his foes. He had not now so much a story to tell as a sermon to preach; and with him, as with many others, to preach meant to denounce. His spirit for a time became captive to the prejudices and the heated feelings which had been aroused by the sense of the injustice with which he had been treated. Though he at intervals worked himself out of this state of mind, upon much of his later work rested the shadow of the prison-house which he, for a season, had made his abiding-place. The result was that a good deal of what he afterwards wrote was marred by the obtrusion of personal likes and dislikes, and the taint of controversial discussion. These things rarely concerned the story in which they appeared, and they inspired hostility to the writer. Cooper, indeed, never learned to appreciate the fact that a reader has rights which an author is bound to respect. By dragging in irrelevant discussions, moreover, he was taking the surest way to lose the audience he most sought to influence. A little reflection would have taught him that there was little use in a prophet's crying in the wilderness, unless he can succeed in gathering the people together. While, therefore, there can be no justification for the ferocity with which Cooper was assailed, there was some palliation. His course (p. 168) from his return to the country had been wanting in prudence, and at times in common sense. He had plunged at once as a combatant into one of the bitterest political controversies that ever agitated the republic. Hard blows were given and taken. He could scarcely expect that, in the heat of the strife, regard would in all cases be paid to the proprieties and even the decencies of private life. There was much in his later productions, moreover, to alienate many who were honestly disposed to admire him as a writer. Politics we could get at all times and from everybody. If, again, we were hopelessly provincial, if we were irreclaimably given over to vulgarity, we could find out all about it from the latest English traveler, or the review of his work that had appeared in the latest English periodicals. But by Cooper the life of the wilderness and of the sea had been told as by no other writer. Over the fields and forests and streams of his native land he had thrown the glamour of romantic association and lofty deeds. There was something unpleasant in witnessing a man who could do this turning his attention to the discussion of points of etiquette and manners. Beside the waste of power, which is something always disagreeable to contemplate, the subject itself could hardly be called an attractive one. It was a sandy desert to travel over at best. But even those who thought it a thing worth while to do once, could hardly help feeling surprise at the spirit which could induce a man to go over it again and again, enlarge upon its discomforts, its perpetual sameness and barrenness, and point out its incapacity of being made much better. There were even worse things than this. It could scarcely fail to inspire a sentiment almost like disgust to have the creator of Leather-Stocking argue with heat the (p. 169) question whether it is right for a lady to come into a drawing-room at a party without leaning upon the arm of a gentleman; or discourse solemnly upon the proper way of eating eggs, and announce oracularly that all who were acquainted with polite society would agree in denouncing the wine-glass or egg-glass as a vulgar substitute for the egg-cup. Questions like these are usually left to those who have the taste to delight in them and the mental elevation to grasp the difficulties involved in them. They were the more disagreeable when met with in Cooper, because in addition to the pettiness of the subject, there was an apparent unconsciousness on his part that the limits of his own preferences and conclusions were not necessarily those of the human mind. Cooper indeed exemplified in his literary career a story he was in the habit of telling of one of his early adventures. While in the navy he was traveling in the wilderness bordering upon the Ontario. The party to which he belonged came upon an inn where they were not expected. The landlord was totally unprepared, and met them with a sorrowful countenance. There was, he assured them, absolutely nothing in his house that was fit to eat. When asked what he had that was not fit to eat, he could only say in reply that he could furnish them with venison, pheasant, wild duck, and some fresh fish. To the astonished question of what better he supposed they could wish, the landlord meekly replied, that he thought they might have wanted some salt pork. The story was truer of Cooper himself than of his innkeeper. Nature he could depict, and the wild life led in it, so that all men stood ready and eager to gaze on the pictures he drew. He chose too often to inflict upon them, instead of it, the most commonplace of moralizing, the stalest (p. 170) disquisitions upon manners and customs, and the driest discussions of politics and theology. But the moral injury which Cooper received from these controversial discussions and their results was far greater than the intellectual. They swung him off the line of healthful activity. They perverted his judgment. He looked upon the social and political movements that were going on about him with the eye of an irritated and wronged man. Years did not bring to him the philosophic mind, but the spirit of the opinionated partisan and the heated denouncer. He fixed his attention so completely on the tendencies to ill that manifested themselves in the social state, that he often became blind to the counterbalancing tendencies to good. Hence his later judgments were frequently one-sided and partial. He too often took up the rôle of prophesying disasters that never came to pass. Moreover, this habit of looking at one side not only narrowed his mental vision, but turned it in the direction of petty objects. No reader of his later novels can fail to see how often he excites himself over matters of no serious moment; or which, whether serious or slight, are utterly out of place where they are. By many of these exhibitions the indifferent will be amused, but the admirers of the man will feel pained if not outraged. CHAPTER IX. (p. 171) 1837-1842. By the end of 1837 Cooper had pretty sedulously improved every opportunity of making himself unpopular. His criticisms had been distributed with admirable impartiality. Few persons or places could complain that they had been overlooked. The natural satisfaction that any one would have felt in contemplating the punishment inflicted upon his friend or neighbor, was utterly marred by the consideration of the outrage done to himself. There was scarcely a class of Cooper's fellow-citizens whose susceptibilities had not been touched, or whose wrath had not been kindled by something he had said either in public or in private, and by his saying it repeatedly. The sons of the Puritans he had exasperated by styling them the grand inquisitors of private life, and by asserting that a low sort of tyranny over domestic affairs was the direct result of their religious polity. He had roused the resentment of the survivors of the old Federalist party by declaring that its design during the war of 1812 had been disunion, and that in secret many of them still longed for a restoration of monarchy, and sighed for ribbons, stars, and garters. He had not conciliated the party with which he was nominally allied by his incessant attacks upon the doctrine of free-trade. He had made Boston shudder to its remotest suburbs, by stating again and again in the strongest terms that (p. 172) it was in the Middle States alone that the English language was spoken with purity. The New England capital he had further described as a gossiping country town with a tone of criticism so narrow and vulgar as scarcely to hide the parochial sort of venom which engendered it. He had charged upon New Yorkers that their lives were spent in the constant struggle for inordinate and grasping gain; that to talk of dollars was to them a source of endless enjoyment; and that their society had for its characteristic distinction the fussy pretension and swagger that usually mark the presence of lucky speculators in stocks. He had attributed to the whole trading class a jealous and ferocious watchfulness of the pocket, and a readiness to sacrifice at any time the honor of the country for the sake of personal profit. To the native merchants he had denied the name of real merchants. They were simply factors, mere agents, who were ennobled by commerce, but who did not themselves ennoble it. The foreign traders resident here fared no better. They had never read the Constitution of the country they had made their home, and were incapable of understanding it if they should read it. Always judging of American facts in accordance with the antiquated notions in which they had been brought up, they were largely responsible for the erroneous opinions entertained and blundering prophecies made in Europe in regard to the condition and future of the United States. The educated class, above all, he had denounced for its indomitable selfishness and its hatred of the rights of those socially inferior. It was entirely behind the fortunes of the country and still cherished prejudices against democracy that the very stupidest of European conservatives had begun to lay aside. The newspaper (p. 173) press he had assailed with a pungency and vigor which it in vain sought to rival. He was spattered by it, however, with almost every opprobrious term that belongs to the vocabulary of wrath and abuse. Invention was tasked to furnish discreditable reasons for all that he said and did. That inexhaustible capacity of devising base motives for conduct, which is an especial attribute of mean minds, had now opportunity to put forth its full powers in the way of insinuation and assertion. It did not go unimproved. A common charge brought against him after the publication of the "Letter to His Countrymen" was that it had been written for the sake of gaining office. It was even said that Van Buren had a hand in it. Then and afterward, the Whig newspapers represented Cooper as seeking the position of Secretary of the Navy. Denial availed him nothing. It would certainly have not been at all to his discredit to have desired the place; for he knew a great deal about the navy, and its interests were very dear to his heart. For these very reasons his appointment to it would have been in violation of the traditional policy of the government. It was probably never once contemplated by any administration, as it was certainly never asked by Cooper himself. The two extracts that have already been given are doubtless sufficient to satisfy any curiosity that may exist in regard to the way in which he was spoken of by the press of America. Yet coarse as was its vituperation, it was surpassed by that of Great Britain. Englishmen may have felt, and have felt justly, that Cooper took an unfair view of their social life and political institutions. National character sweeps through a range so vast that a man will usually be able to find in it what he goes to seek. Even under the most favorable conditions (p. 174) the tastes of a coterie or the habits of a class are made the standard by which to estimate the tastes and habits of a whole people. Certain it is that the view of any nation is to be distrusted which is not taken from a station of good-will. But granting that Cooper was unjust in his observations, there was nothing he said which afforded the least excuse for the coarse personality with which he was followed from the time he published his volumes on England. The remarks of the ordinary journals can be dismissed without comment. But brutal vituperation was found in abundance in periodicals which claimed to be the representatives of the highest cultivation and refinement. According to "Blackwood's Magazine," Cooper was a vulgar man, who from having been bred to the sea had been enabled to give some striking descriptions of sea-affairs, and in consequence had unluckily imagined himself a universal genius. It went on to add, that on the strength of the trifling reputation he had acquired by stories descriptive of American life, he had come to Europe, and had since been partly traveling on the Continent to pick up materials for novels, and partly residing in England, actively employed in the effort to introduce himself into society. In this it admitted he might have been partially successful, for the English were a very yielding people and did not take much trouble to resist attempts of this kind. "Blackwood," however, was outdone in this rowdy style of reviewing by "Fraser's Magazine." From that periodical we learn that Cooper was "a passable scribbler of passable novels," a "bilious braggart," a "liar," a "full jackass," "a man of consummate and inbred vulgarity," "a bore of the first magnitude in society," who went about fishing for (p. 175) introductions. "But this," it concluded, speaking of his England, "was his last kick, and we shall not disturb his dying moments." Two years later the magazine seemed to think he had some power of kicking left, for it returned to the charge in consequence of his review of Lockhart's "Life of Scott." In this article he was called a "spiteful miscreant," an "insect," a "grub," a "reptile." The "Quarterly Review" was as virulent and violent as the magazines, but the attack was more skillful as well as longer and more elaborate. By garbling extracts it cleverly insinuated a good deal more than it said, and it so contrived to put several things that the reader could hardly fail to draw inferences which the writer must have known to be false. Even these attacks were equaled if not surpassed at a later period by the "London Times." A nominal review in that journal of "Eve Effingham," as "Home as Found" was entitled in England, was really devoted to personal vituperation of the novelist. It ended with the assertion that he was more vulgar than ever, and was the most "affected, offensive, envious, and ill-conditioned" of authors. Altogether Cooper must have been impressed with the effectiveness of the blow which he had struck by the violence with which it was resented. It seems hard to believe that remarks such as have been quoted should have been thought to establish anything but the vulgarity of the men who wrote them. Yet they apparently answered their purpose. The very latest notice of Cooper's life which has appeared in Great Britain, characterizes his work on England as an "outburst of vanity and ill-temper." It certainly contained some ill-judged remarks which have been made the most of by his enemies; but this estimate, like many other assertions in the same sketch, was (p. 176) not got from reading the work itself, but from what British periodicals had said about it. Such was the kind of criticism that the novelist now mainly received in the two great English-speaking countries. These flowers of invective do not constitute an anthology which an Englishman or American of today can read with pleasure, or contemplate with pride. It was the comments made by his countrymen that naturally touched Cooper most nearly. His nature was of a kind to feel keenly, and resent warmly insinuations and charges that impugned the purity of his motives. Nor was his a disposition to rest quiet under attack or to assume merely the defensive. He retorted in letters, in works of fiction, and in books of travel. Finally he resorted to libel suits. Never, indeed, was a fiercer fight carried on by an individual against a power more mighty than Cooper carried on with the press. It had a thousand tongues, he had but one; but it often seemed as if his one had the force of a thousand. The epithets he applied to newspapers were not of the kind with which they were in the habit of celebrating themselves. Their enterprise in obtaining news he described as a mercenary diligence in the collection and diffusion of information, whether true or false. Nor were his comments upon those concerned in carrying them on more favorable. What we should call a reporter he, on one occasion, mildly spoke of as a "miscreant who pandered for the press." In the last novel he wrote, he energetically termed this whole class the funguses of letters who flourished on the dunghill of the common mind; and that in their view the sole use for which the universe was created was to furnish paragraphs for newspapers. Men in the higher grades of the profession fared (p. 177) little better. Against the political journals, in particular, he brought the charge that under the pretence of serving the public they were mainly used to aid the ambition or gratify the spite of their editors. Even as early as 1832, Cooper had awakened the indignation of the press by an incidental remark made in the introduction to "The Heidenmauer." He was describing a journey through a part of Belgium in which the Dutch troops had been operating the week before his arrival. They had been reported as having committed unusual excesses. Of these excesses he said he could find no trace. He went on to add a sentence which has apparently only a slight connection with what had gone before. "Each hour, as life advances," he wrote, "am I made to see how capricious and vulgar is the immortality conferred by a newspaper." This remark was warmly resented. It was asserted to be a declaration, not merely of indifference to the opinion of the press, but of a preference on his part of its censure to its praise. Its business, therefore, was to see that his wishes should be carried out. After the controversy in regard to the Three Mile Point, the attacks of the Whig journals increased in bitterness. The state of mind it caused in Cooper can be seen in a little volume, published by him in April, 1838, entitled "The American Democrat." This work is made up of a singular mixture of abstract discussions on liberty and equality, on the nature of parties, on forms of government, and of remarks on national habits and manners. It is not an interesting hook. Yet it is fair to say of it, that it is animated throughout by a lofty patriotism, and it manifests a clear view of the dangers and duties of a democracy, (p. 178) with its comparative advantages and disadvantages. But it likewise exhibited some of the most uncompromising traits of the author's character. In writing it, he was not aiming at popularity; it might not be much out of the way to say that he was aiming at unpopularity. The doctrine with which he sets out is, that in this country power rests with the people, and power ought always to be chidden rather than commended. He was accordingly liberal in criticism. But the value of what he said was largely impaired, if not wholly destroyed by the one-sidedness of view and tendency to over-statement into which his ardor of feeling now habitually hurried him. In nothing is this extravagance more strikingly seen than in the comments in this work upon the press. There was a great deal of truth in what he said; but the justice of some of his views was deprived of any effect by the exaggeration and consequent injustice of others. The substance of his remarks was that there were more newspapers in this country than in Europe, but they were generally of a lower character. The multiplication of them was due to the fact that little capital was required in their creation, and little intelligence employed in their management. Their number was, therefore, not a thing to be boasted of but rather to be sorrowed over, since the quality diminished in an inverse ratio to the quantity. Nor was there anything in the methods employed by the press that justified any exultation in its prosperity. It tyrannized over public men, over letters, over the stage, over even private life. Under the pretence of preserving public morals, it corrupted them to the core. Under the semblance of maintaining liberty, it was gradually establishing a despotism as rude, as grasping, and as vulgar as (p. 179) that of any state known. It loudly professed freedom of opinion, but exhibited no tolerance. It paraded patriotism, but never sacrificed interest. But its great fundamental failing was the untrustworthiness of its statements. It existed to pervert truth. Its conductors were mainly political adventurers. They were unscrupulous, but they were not so utterly ignorant that they failed to see the necessity of occasionally making correct assertions. It was, however, this mixture of fact with fiction that was the chief cause of the evil influence exerted. The result of it all was that the entire nation, in a moral sense, breathed an atmosphere of falsehood. He concluded his indictment by declaring that the American press would seem to have been expressly devised by the great agent of mischief, to depress and destroy all that was good, and to elevate and advance all that was evil. This style of remark was certainly not designed to win newspaper favor or support. But he went even farther in his novels of "Homeward Bound" and "Home as Found." In those two works he drew the portrait of an American editor in the person of Steadfast Dodge of the Active Inquirer. All the baser qualities of human nature were united in this ideal representative of the press. He was a sneak, a spy, a coward, a demagogue, a parasite, a lickspittle, a fawner upon all from whom he hoped help, a slanderer of all who did not care to endure his society. Such a picture did not rise even to the dignity of caricature. Nor is it relieved either in this work or elsewhere by others drawn favorably. The reader of Cooper will search his writings in vain for a portrait which any member of the editorial profession would be glad to recognize as his own. All this was vigorous enough, but it could hardly be called (p. 180) profitable. Cooper had now cultivated to perfection the art of saying injudicious things as well as the art of saying things injudiciously. His ability in hitting upon the very line of remark that would still further enrage the hostile, and irritate the indifferent and even the friendly, assumed almost the nature of genius. The power of his attacks could not be gainsaid. But while they inspired his opponents with respect, they filled his friends with dismay. He was soon in a singular position. He enjoyed at one and the same time the double distinction of being reviled in England for his aggressive republicanism, and of being denounced in America for aping the airs of the English aristocracy. It hardly seemed a favorable time for beginning hostilities in a new field. Yet it was then that he entered upon his famous legal war with the Whig newspapers of the state of New York. A detailed account of the libel suits instituted by Cooper would form one of the most striking chapters in the history of the American press; and for some reasons it is to be regretted that the plan he had of writing a full account of them was never carried out. Here only a slight summary can be given. It is well to say at the outset that many assertions ordinarily made about them are utterly false. For certain of these prevalent misconceptions Greeley is responsible. He spoke of these trials with some fullness in commenting upon libel suits in his "Recollections of a Busy Life." But Greeley's life was too busy for him always to recollect accurately. While he had not the slightest intention to say anything untrue, what he said was in some instances of this character; though more often it was misleading rather than false. (p. 181) But outside of what Greeley has written, there are several erroneous assertions current. One of the most common of these is the statement that Cooper's success in them was mainly due to the application of the law maxim, that the greater the truth the greater the libel. There was never any ground for even an insinuation of this kind. Cooper, when his attention was called to it, treated it with contempt. "The pretense," he wrote in 1845, "that our courts have ever overruled that the truth is not a complete defense in a libel suit in the civil action, can only gain credit with the supremely ignorant." In criminal indictments the New York statute of 1805 had expressly declared that the truth might be pleaded in evidence by the defense. The Constitution of 1821 made this provision part of the fundamental law, and it was adopted from that into the Constitution of 1846. The assertion owed its origin wholly to the effort of beaten parties to explain their defeat on some other ground than that they had been found guilty of the offense with which they had been charged. A more preposterous statement even than this was that the question involved in these suits was the right of editors to criticise the productions of authors. In not one of these trials was the literary judgment passed by the reviewer mentioned as having the slightest bearing on the case. It ought not to be necessary to say that it was the attack upon the character of the man that alone came under the consideration of the courts, and not that upon the character of the book. The impudent pretense was, however, set up at the time that the press had a right to go behind the writer's work, and assail him himself. "Does an author," said "The New Yorker" in February, (p. 182) 1837, "subject himself to personal criticism by submitting a work to the public? If he makes his work the channel of disparagement upon masses of men, he does." The most marked feature of these trials is that Cooper fought his battle single-handed. With a very few exceptions,--notably the "Albany Argus" and the "New York Evening Post,"--the press of the party with which he was nominally allied, remained neutral. Some of them were even hostile; for the novelist's criticism of editors had known no distinction of politics. On the other hand, the press of the opposition party was united. From East to West they bore down upon Cooper with a common cry. No event in his life showed more plainly the fearless and uncompromising nature of the man; nor again did anything else he was concerned in mark more clearly his versatility and vigor. In these trials he was assisted by his nephew, Richard Cooper, who was his regular counsel. But outside of him, in the civil suits, he had very rarely any help, and in most of them he argued his own cause. Wherever he appeared in person he seems to have come off uniformly victorious. Nor were his victories won over inferior opponents. The reputation of the lawyer is under ordinary conditions limited necessarily to a small circle. Even in that, considering the amount of intellectual acuteness and power displayed, it is an exceedingly transitory reputation. But the men against whom Cooper was pitted stood in the very front rank of their profession. They were leaders of the bar in the greatest state in the Union. Nor have times so far swept by that their names are not still remembered; and stories are still told of their achievements by those who have taken their (p. 183) places. Cooper, not a lawyer by profession, met these men on their own ground and defeated them. It was not long, indeed, after these suits were instituted, that it was claimed by his friends, and often conceded by his foes, that he was the one man in the country best acquainted with the law of libel. Our surprise at his success is increased by the fact that he was not only unpopular himself, but he was engaged in an unpopular cause. The verdicts he won were usually small in amount, but they were wrung from reluctant juries, and frequently in the face of bitter prejudices that had to be overcome before he could hope for a fair consideration of his own side. At the outset the editorial fraternity were disposed to take these libel suits jocularly. They were looked upon as a gigantic joke. Nor did this feeling die out when the first trial resulted in Cooper's favor. It was proposed that the newspapers throughout the country should contribute each one dollar to a fund to be called "The Effingham Libel Fund," out of which all damages awarded the novelist were to be paid. Every additional suit was welcomed with a shout. As time went on this insolence gave way to apprehension. In nearly every case the plaintiff was coming off successful. The comments of the press began to assume an expostulatory tone. Cooper was gravely informed that were he to be tried in the High Court of Public Opinion--this imaginary tribunal was usually made imposing by dignifying its initial letters--for his libels upon his country and his countrymen, the damages he would have to pay would not only sweep away the amounts given him by the results in the regular courts, but even the profits that had accrued from the sale of his novels. These remonstrances were often animated also by a (p. 184) new-born zeal for his literary fame. He was told he was his own greatest enemy. He was doing himself irreparable injury by the course he was taking. He was so acting as to lose the reputation he had early won. This feeling naturally increased in intensity as suits continued to be decided in his favor. The newspapers at last rose to the full appreciation of the situation. The liberty of the press was actually in danger. The trials were said to be conducted in defiance of law as well as justice. The judges belonged to the Democratic party, and they wrested the statutes from their true intent in order to oppress the Whig editor. There came finally to be something exquisitely absurd in the utterances of the journals on the subject of these suits. One would fancy from reading them that the plaintiff was a monster resembling the bloodthirsty ogre of a fairy tale, bullying judges, overawing juries, maliciously bent on crushing the free-born American who should have the temerity to express an unfavorable opinion of his writings. Coriolanus, indeed, never fluttered the dove-cotes in Corioli more effectively than for some years Cooper did the Whig newspaper offices of the state of New York. The origin of the suits was as follows: An account of the circumstances connected with the Three Mile Point controversy appeared, immediately after they had taken place, in the "Norwich Telegraph," a paper published in the neighboring county of Chenango. The article began with a reference to Cooper. "This gentleman," it said, "not satisfied with having drawn upon his head universal contempt from abroad, has done the same thing at Cooperstown where he resides." In this spirit it (p. 185) went on to give its report of the events told in the preceding chapter. "So stands the matter at present," it closed its account, "Mr. J. F. C. threatening the citizens on the one hand, and being derided and despised by them on the other." In conclusion it called upon the "Otsego Republican," the Whig newspaper of Cooperstown, to furnish all the facts in the case. The latter journal was edited by a man named Barber. He was not slow to comply with the request, and in one of the numbers of August, 1837, he republished the article of the "Chenango Telegraph" with additional assertions of his own. The latter belonged more to the realm of fiction than of fact. Three Mile Point he declared had been reserved expressly for the use of the inhabitants of Cooperstown by the father of the novelist. When the notice was published depriving them of their rights, a meeting had been called which had been largely attended. The room was crowded with the industry, intelligence, and respectability of the village. Powerful addresses were made and a series of resolutions were passed. These expressed the feelings of all present. "The remarks," the newspaper continued, "were of a lucid character, and the resolutions, full, pungent, and yet respectful." Two days after this article had appeared, the editor received a letter from Cooper's counsel which was to the effect that he would be prosecuted for libel unless he retracted his statements. On his side the novelist undertook to make perfectly clear to him that his assertions were untrue; but he expected, after the real facts had been set before him and fully examined, that he would take back what he had said. "No atonement," the letter concluded, "will be accepted, that is not first approved of by the plaintiff in the suit." Barber was not (p. 186) disposed either to retract or to investigate the accuracy of the facts he had stated. He published the letter, however, with the usual solemn declaration that seems to be kept in type in all newspaper offices, that in doing what he had done he had been actuated solely by the noblest motives; that he had not published anything libellous; that if in anything he had been misinformed, he held himself always ready to make the proper correction. "In conclusion," he said, "not being sensible of having injured Mr. Cooper, we consider that we have no atonement to offer." Under these circumstances the suit went on. It did not come to final trial until May, 1839, at the Montgomery circuit of the Supreme Court. Joshua A. Spencer was the principal lawyer for the defense, while Cooper conducted his own case. The jury returned a verdict of four hundred dollars for the plaintiff. Eventually the editor sought to evade in various ways the payment of the whole award, and did succeed in evading the payment of a good part of it. A terrible outcry was, however, raised against Cooper because the sheriff levied upon some money that had been carefully laid away and locked up by Barber in a trunk. With this begins the famous series of suits that occupied no small share of the few following years of the author's life. At the time the first one was decided, another was pending against the editor of the "Chenango Telegraph." The leading Whig newspapers naturally took the side of their associates. For a time they had a good deal to say about the greatest slanderer of the whole profession pouncing upon one of the fraternity least able to defend himself, simply because in a moment of haste and excitement he had been guilty of what they were pleased to call (p. 187) a technical libel. It did not seem to occur to them, that any one could be so foolhardy as to make them the object of attack. They did not have to wait long to discover that the influence wielded by a journal was no protection. Besides the newspapers already mentioned, Cooper prosecuted the "Oneida Whig," published at Utica. This suit was tried in April, 1842. Though successful in it, the damages awarded were slight, being but seventy dollars. A suit, tried little more than six months before against the "Evening Signal," of New York city, edited by Park Benjamin, had resulted in the recovery of a larger sum. The amount in this case was three hundred and seventy-five dollars. With these exceptions his suits were directed against the "Courier and Enquirer," edited by James Watson Webb; "the Albany Evening Journal," edited by Thurlow Weed; the "Tribune," edited by Horace Greeley, and the "Commercial Advertiser," edited by William Leet Stone. These were the leading Whig journals in the state, and among the most influential in the whole country. It could not be said that Cooper hesitated about flying at high game. In the controversy with Webb, Cooper had the least success. This was partly due to the fact that it was not a civil action that was brought against the former, but a criminal indictment. Juries might make editors pay for the privilege of expressing their feelings of contempt or hate, but they were not inclined to send them to prison. The indictment in this case was based upon a criticism of "Home as Found." The review, which was of several columns in length, had appeared in the "Courier and Enquirer" of November 22, 1838. There was very little in the way of hostile insinuation and assertion and personal depreciation that (p. 188) could not be found in this article and in some which followed. The attack was moreover a skillful one. It was directed largely against those points where Cooper had fairly laid himself open to ridicule. Especially was this the case in the matter of descent and family. Webb represented the novelist as the son of a humble hawker of fish through the streets of Burlington, who had afterward become a respectable though not a first-class wheelwright. By probity, industry, and enterprise he had finally risen to wealth and position. The maternal grandmother of the author had, according to this same story, for more than twenty years occupied a stall and sold fresh vegetables in the Philadelphia market, and was remarkable for the superior quality of the articles she kept. Webb praised the father at the expense of the son. The former had never been ashamed of his humble origin. On the contrary, he was justly proud of the intelligence and ability which, unaided by any mere external advantages, had raised him to a station in life so much higher than he at first held. Of such a career any child had a right to be proud. These were statements that could not well be resented, conceding that they were injurious, nor could they well be corrected, conceding that they were untrue. Webb, who had recently returned from Europe, asserted, moreover, that he had been present at a dinner-party in London, where "Home as Found" came under discussion. On that occasion he had fallen into a conversation about it with "a nobleman of distinction." The latter informed him that Cooper's attack upon English society had materially injured the sale of his works in that country, and it was evident that he was now seeking to regain the ground and the (p. 189) market he had lost, by praising everything English at the expense of everything American; but as his base motives were now fully understood, no one was led astray. The reported conversation carries internal evidence of its authenticity. It required a very noble lord to impute to a well-known writer motives so very noble; and none but an Englishman could have appreciated so fully the eternal conditions of success in the English market. These remarks of Webb's are, however, merely incidental. His direct personal attack on Cooper rivaled that of the British periodicals in ferocity. "We may and do know him," said he in the only extract for which there is room, "as a base-minded caitiff who has traduced his country for filthy lucre and low-born spleen; but time only can render harmless abroad the envenomed barb of the slanderer who is in fact a traitor to national pride and national character." For this article Webb was indicted by the grand jury of Otsego County, in February, 1839. In June of the same year a second indictment was found against him for saying that the first was secured by political trickery. The trial, for various reasons, did not come off until November, 1841. Webb made a public retraction of the statements upon which the second indictment was found; and this was accepted on the part of the prosecution. On the trial for the first indictment the jury disagreed. The defendant objected to Cooper's summing up the case, and this objection the court sustained. It was a wise policy: for the trials in the civil suits showed that the novelist was full as effective in addressing a jury orally as he ever was in addressing the public in his most successful stories. One amusing feature of this case was that the two volumes of "Home as Found" were read to the jury from (p. 190) beginning to end by the plaintiffs counsel, Ambrose L. Jordan. Cooper was not discouraged by the ill result of this trial. The indictment was still pressed. A second trial took place at Cooperstown in June, 1843. Again the jury disagreed. A third trial is reported to have taken place and to have resulted in the acquittal of Webb; but I find no account of it in the newspapers to which I have had access. The suits brought against the "Albany Evening Journal" were, however, the most striking in this whole contest. They show, too, more clearly than the others, the spirit and methods with which it was waged on both sides. Some features are especially marked. One is the illustration furnished of the onslaughts that were made upon the novelist's character and reputation, not from any real ill-will, but from pure wantonness or at least very slight political hostility. Another is the jaunty superciliousness with which the conductors of the press at first affected to treat the threats of prosecution. More noteworthy than anything else, however, is the view given of the deliberate manner in which Cooper began these suits, and the relentless tenacity with which he followed them up. The "Evening Journal," of which Thurlow Weed was then the head, partly from the political skill of its editor, and partly from its being the organ of the party at the state capital, was, at that time, the most influential Whig journal in New York. Weed published in it, in two different numbers of August, 1837, the articles which had appeared in the "Chenango Telegraph" and the "Otsego Republican" about the Three Mile Point controversy. He accompanied them with some comments of his own in regard to Cooper. "He was, as is known," said he in (p. 191) his second notice, "pretty generally despised abroad. He is now equally distinguished at home." The editor then went on to speak of the act of meanness, as he termed it, which had excited the contempt of the novelist's neighbors; and that the more precise account now furnished by the "Otsego Republican" would rather increase than diminish the measure of scorn that had been aroused. Much was Weed's surprise when, on the 18th of April, 1840, he received a letter from Cooper's counsel requiring a retraction of what had been said in 1837, and a further statement that it must be made within a certain time or a suit for libel would be begun. He treated this notice cavalierly. He was amused by it even more than he was astonished. As it had taken three years for Cooper to bring the suit, he concluded that he would take three weeks at any rate to reply to the demand for a retraction. A second letter from Cooper's counsel, dated the 4th of May, met with the same neglect. Accordingly on the 25th of that month he had the pleasure of announcing that he had been sued for libel by "Mr. John Effingham." The case after being put off once on a very frivolous pretext, came to trial at the Montgomery circuit of the Supreme Court, held at Fonda, in November, 1841. When it was called Weed was not present, nor was counsel for him. Cooper consented to have the case go over for a day. It was then called again. Nothing was seen of the defendant, nothing had been heard from him. The case was accordingly sent to the jury with a speech from the plaintiff's counsel. A verdict of four hundred dollars was returned. Weed arrived at Fonda the evening of that day, and wrote anonymously to the "New York Tribune" an account of what had taken (p. 192) place. In some of its details it was more entertaining than accurate. The reason he gave for his absence from the trial was that he had been kept at home by severe illness in his family. But the result enabled him to notice in this manner the sum awarded by the jury. "This meagre verdict under the circumstances is a severe and mortifying rebuke to Cooper, who had everything his own way. "The value of Mr. Cooper's character, therefore, has been judicially determined. "It is worth exactly four hundred dollars." For the publication of this letter a suit was immediately begun against the "Tribune." But though he wrote for that journal an amusing account of the trial, in his own paper Weed gave vent to the anger which the result had excited. The verdicts gained in his various cases by "this man Cooper," he said, had made "deep inroads upon a fame once bright and enviable, but now sadly dim and dilapidated." He then recited in full the misdeeds of the novelist. "For all this," concluded the aggrieved editor, "connected with the attempt to deprive the citizens of a social privilege with which they were invested by his honored father, we said Mr. Cooper was despised. And for this he prosecuted us. And now having again said it he may again prosecute us, if he wants and thinks he can obtain four hundred dollars more." Weed did not appreciate the fact that he was not dealing with a politician, but with a man indifferent to or rather contemptuous of popular clamor. His challenge was immediately accepted. Early in December, 1841, he was able to announce the fact that he had been (p. 193) sued again. "The sheriff," he said, "has served another writ upon us for an alleged libel upon Cooper. It remains to be seen how much longer courts and juries will sanction this legal persecution of a man, who after libeling his country and calumniating his countrymen, seeks to muzzle a free press." The jocular tone used at first had all vanished. Instead it was replaced by a fierce spirit of wrathfulness and defiance. During the whole of December, 1841, Weed kept constantly republishing extracts from other newspapers reflecting upon and attacking Cooper's character and conduct. These were, he said, "sharp rebukes" of the novelist's "ridiculous and unworthy attempt to disgrace his own country to gain the favor and smiles of the nobility abroad." Some of these newspaper comments furnish very amusing reading now, especially as the impunity of most of the writers was due to their insignificance. "We rejoice," said one of them, "to witness the spirit of independence manifested by the conductors of the press. It proves their incorruptible integrity and their love of principle, their firm hostility to foreign notions, and their detestation of the man who seeks to ape the high and aristocratic manners of English nobility." These valorous declarations came mainly from the country papers of the state of New York, for the "Evening Journal" was the Triton of these minnows. Weed, however, eagerly reproduced everything that came from outside. One article, in particular, from a Chicago paper, was published, in order that Cooper might see "what right-minded and unprejudiced people say and think of him far away in the boundless West." The appeal was to deaf ears. Neither contracted East nor boundless (p. 194) West affected Cooper's resolution. As fast as the articles were republished, they were carefully examined, and prosecutions begun against the "Evening Journal" for those of them containing libelous matter. By the middle of December five suits had been commenced, and more were under consideration. A little later, if contemporary newspaper reports can be trusted, the number had swelled to seven. The editor began to appreciate the difficulty and danger of the situation. His courage, however, did not falter. In fact he looked upon himself as manfully standing in the gap for freedom of speech. "These suits," he said "will determine whether an Independent Press is to be protected in the free exercise of honest opinion, or whether it is to be overawed and silenced by the persecutions of an inflated, litigious, soured novelist, who, in his better days by the favor of the Press, made the money with which he now seeks to oppress its conductors, and sap its independence." He did not purpose to flinch from his duty. Accordingly he announced that he should continue publishing these attacks until Cooper ceased prosecuting. In this determination he was encouraged by the result of two suits tried in April, 1842, in the Otsego County Court. Though he was beaten in both, the verdict was for small amounts. In one case it was fifty-five dollars, in the other eighty-seven dollars. This convinced the press that the tide was turning. Again the country newspapers were filled with libelous paragraphs. Again the novelist was denounced for his heartless abuse of his country, and his soulless and contemptible vanity. Again these strictures were carefully collected from every quarter, no matter how insignificant, and republished in the columns of the "Evening (p. 195) Journal." But these cheerful anticipations were speedily dissipated. Another suit, tried at Fonda in the Supreme Court in May, 1842, resulted in a verdict of three hundred and twenty-five dollars for the plaintiff. The country papers were indignant. One of the editors sagely suggested that "if judge and jury are to carry on this war on the press to gratify individual malignity much further, it would be well for all editors to unite in petitioning the legislature to pass a law that judges should discharge their duties impartially, and juries be composed of honest and intelligent men." This profound suggestion marks pretty plainly the intellectual grade to which most of the writers of these paragraphs had attained. Before it could be acted upon another suit had been decided. In the September term of the Supreme Court held at Cooperstown, a further verdict of two hundred dollars was awarded. In the following month a new suit was begun. Weed had fought his fight manfully. But the business of publishing libelous paragraphs at these rates, low as they were, was ceasing to be either pleasant or profitable. Besides his own counsel fees, the adverse verdicts carried with them heavy costs. He concluded to let the liberty of the press take care of itself. Accordingly, on the 14th of December, 1842, he published, though with a grumbling comment, a retraction of all his previous statements. It had been previously submitted to the eminent lawyer, Daniel Cady, and by him approved. It withdrew, first, the allegations contained the previous year in a specific article in the paper. "On a review of the matter and a better knowledge of the facts," were the words of the retraction, "I feel it to be my duty to withdraw the injurious imputations it contains on the character of Mr. (p. 196) Cooper. It is my wish that this retraction should be as broad as the charges. The 'Albany Evening Journal' having also contained various other articles reflecting on Mr. Cooper's character, I feel it due to that gentleman to withdraw every charge that injuriously affects his character." The course of instruction had been protracted and expensive, but the lesson had been learned at last. The independence of the press had been crushed by the domineering despot of Cooperstown. The controversy threatened to break out again in 1845, but it seems never to have got beyond words. There is a comic element introduced into the whole affair by the fact that the editor of the "Journal" was a profound and even bigoted admirer of his adversary's novels. So fond was he of quoting from them, that according to Greeley, jokers at that time gravely affirmed that Weed had never read but three authors,--Shakespeare, Scott, and Cooper. In the very heat of the controversy he was said to have sat up all night reading "The Pathfinder," which had come out a little while before. Greeley also asserts that the paragraphs which appeared in the "Evening Journal" were merely designed as gentle reminders to the novelist of the folly of the course he was pursuing. This might find belief in a society in which telling a man that he was an object of universal contempt would be deemed an expression of friendly interest in his welfare. When he says, in addition, that there was no shred, no spice of malice in these assaults, he takes away the sole ground on which a plea of palliation can be brought. If not due to that they had not even the poor excuse of weak human nature. They were the wanton acts of a man who attacks another, not from (p. 197) indignation or wrath, but from the mere desire of inflicting annoyance or pain. The controversy with the "Commercial Advertiser" belongs not here but to the account of the "Naval History." It has already been said that the "Tribune" had been sued for the publication of Thurlow Weed's letter describing the trial at Fonda in November, 1841. In December, 1842, this case came off at Ballston. Greeley assumed the conduct of the defense. He was unsuccessful. The jury brought in against him a verdict of two hundred dollars and costs. "We went back to dinner," he wrote, "took the verdict in all meekness, took a sleigh and struck a bee-line for New York." No sooner had he reached the city than he published a most entertaining account of the whole trial. It filled eleven columns of the "Tribune," and the demand for it became so great that it was found necessary to publish it in pamphlet form. For some expressions in it Cooper began another suit. In this instance Greeley gave up the plan of defending himself and intrusted the conduct of his side to Seward. The case dragged on for years in the New York courts, and, so far as I have been able to discover, had not been brought to a final trial before the plaintiff's death. By the end of 1843, Cooper had pretty well reduced the press to silence, so far as comments on his character were concerned. It was insignificance or remoteness alone that protected the libeler. The leading newspapers of the state, however much they might abuse his writings, learned to be very cautious of what they said of him personally. But it was a barren victory he had won. He had lost far more than he had gained. That such would be the result, he knew, while (p. 198) he was engaged in the controversy. It affected, at the time, his literary reputation, and, as a result, the sale of his writings; and since his death it has been a principal agency in keeping alive a distorted and fictitious view of his personal character. A common impression came to be of him something like the description which Greeley's lawyers gave of the estimation in which he was held in Otsego County, in some legal papers bearing the date of July, 1845. This was to the effect that he had acquired and had among his neighbors "the reputation of a proud, captious, censorious, arbitrary, dogmatical, malicious, illiberal, revengeful, and litigious man." This one-sided and hostile view of a strongly-marked character had just enough of truth in it to cause it to be widely received as an accurate and complete picture. In a similar way the notion became current that he sought to ape the manners of the English aristocracy. Whatever Cooper's foibles were, they were none of them imported. He was too proud in feeling and too self-centred in opinion ever to think of aping anything or anybody. But on these points the prejudices and misrepresentations of that day have lasted down to this. The account given makes it clear that the occasion of bringing the first of these libel suits was accidental. But as time went on the prosecution of them assumed to Cooper the shape of a duty. When once it had taken on that character, no possible degree of unpopularity or odium could have prevented him from persisting in his course. He treated with disdain the common arguments used to persuade him to abandon them. To one of these he referred directly in a novel published in 1844. He was insisting upon the superiority of the past to the present, a sentiment which (p. 199) became a favorite burden of his latter-day utterances. "The public sense of right," he said, "had not become blunted by familiarity with abuses, and the miserable and craven apology was never heard for not enforcing the laws that nobody cared for what the newspapers say." He certainly had some justification for the hardest things he thought and said of the press. The newspapers which circulated the false reports about his father's disposition of the property at Three Mile Point never corrected them after the precise facts had been published. Many of them continued to repeat the original statements after they must have known them to be untrue. Nor did they stop here. As the British press had in his case done all it could to justify the charge Cooper made against it of ferocious blackguardism of personal and political foes, so many of the American editors seemed anxious to realize, so far as it lay in their power, the picture that had been drawn of them in the character of Steadfast Dodge. Papers containing offensive paragraphs about Cooper were carefully sent, not directed to him personally, but to his wife and daughters. The fear of punishment is the only motive by which those who commit acts of this kind can possibly be influenced. On the other hand, it is an idle claim that the character of the press has been elevated by libel suits that Cooper or any one else has ever brought. Such prosecutions may be both justifiable and necessary; but the agencies that form and build up intelligence and taste and high principle are not of this negative and restraining character. CHAPTER X. (p. 200) 1839-1843. On the 10th of May, 1839, appeared Cooper's "History of the United States Navy." The work was one which he had long contemplated writing. As far back as 1825 there were newspaper reports that he had the undertaking in mind. He himself, in his parting speech at the dinner given him in May, 1826, just before his departure for Europe, had publicly announced his determination of devoting himself to this subject during his absence abroad. "Encouraged by your kindness," he said, "I will take this opportunity of recording the deeds and sufferings of a class of men to which this nation owes a debt of lasting gratitude--a class of men among whom, I am always ready to declare, not only the earliest, but many of the happiest days of my youth have been passed." The necessity of providing for his family and of paying off debts incurred by others, but for which he was responsible, had prevented the immediate carrying out of this resolution. But it had always been in his thoughts. The delay in the preparation probably added to the value of the history; but its reception would unquestionably have been far different had it been brought out in the height of his popularity. It was a work which for many reasons it was a hard task to make accurate, and a still harder one to make interesting. With slight exceptions the history could be little more than a record of (p. 201) detached combats; and a string of episodes, no matter how brilliant, can never have the attraction which belongs to unity and grandeur of movement. These last can alone characterize the operations of great fleets. Still, for the writing of this history Cooper was peculiarly fitted. He had belonged to the navy in his early life. He had never ceased to feel the deepest interest in its reputation and prosperity. He had contributed to the "Naval Magazine," a periodical published during 1836 and 1837, a series of papers connected with the improvement of its condition. He was, moreover, on terms of intimacy with many of the officers who had won for it distinction; and through them he had access to sources of information that could not be gained from written authorities. He had, besides, the characteristic of loving truth for its own sake, and the disposition to endure any amount of drudgery and encounter any sort of toil in order to secure it. To this were added the special qualifications of the historical eye, which enabled him to seize the important facts in an infinite mass of detail, and the power of describing vividly what he saw clearly. Under such circumstances it was reasonable to expect that his work would satisfy all fair-thinking men. It is, perhaps, correct to say that it did so. But it also gave rise to a controversy which stretched over a longer period and surpassed, in the bitter feelings it aroused, any of the wars in which the navy itself had ever been engaged. There were special difficulties to be encountered with readers on both sides of the ocean. On the one hand, Englishmen had usually forgotten to remember that during the war of 1812 there was any naval combat of importance fought except between the Shannon and the Chesapeake; (p. 202) and even at this day it would be difficult to find in an English writer any account of the naval operations of that war in which that particular engagement does not play the principal part. If any other was forced upon their attention it had become an article of their creed that an American frigate was little else than a line-of-battle ship disguised. Moreover, the effective force of the American vessel was, according to their theory, made up of deserters from the British service. These two explanations of any failure were often combined. It is in this way Captain Brenton, one of their naval historians, calmly shows how it was that the Constitution happened to capture the Guerrière. "We may justly say," he concludes his account, "it was a large British frigate taking a small one." On her part America was not to be outdone in her estimate of national prowess. It had become matter of firm faith with the inhabitants of the United States that their side had suffered no losses worth mentioning during the war of 1812; that the American vessel had been invariably successful, whenever there was any approach to equality of force; and that in every case it was the superior seamanship, courage, and skill of their officers and men that had decided the result in their favor, and not superiority in weight of metal. Neither of these beliefs was of a kind likely to influence Cooper. He had got to that point of feeling in which he looked upon the public opinion of both England and America with a good deal of contempt. It was not to pamper the vanity or flatter the prejudices of either that he wrote, but to state the truth. For this he neglected nothing that lay in his power. He studied public documents of every kind, official (p. 203) reports, all the printed and manuscript material to which he could get access. From officers of the navy who had shared in the actions described he gathered much information which they alone were able to communicate. In one sense he was fully satisfied with what he had done. He did not pretend that in a work which involved the examination and sifting of an almost infinite number of details he had not made some errors. It was only that he had made none intentionally, and that he had put forth his most strenuous exertions to have what he wrote entirely free from mistake. Nor is it possible for any unprejudiced mind to read the history now and not feel the truth of the assertion. Its accuracy and honesty have sometimes been flippantly questioned, but usually by men who have not spent as many days in the study of the subject as Cooper did months. During his lifetime imputations were made in a few cases upon the correctness of his statements. They met then, however, so speedy and effectual a refutation that it was not thought worth while to repeat the criticisms until he was in his grave. Cooper might be wrong in his conclusions; but it was rarely safe to quarrel with his facts. There is more, however, in this history than freedom from intentional perversion of the truth. There are throughout the whole of it the calmness, the judicial spirit, the absence of partisanship which may not of themselves add anything to the interest of the narrative, but are worth everything for the impression of truthfulness it makes. Impartiality is a quality, however, little apt to be commended where our own feelings and interests are concerned. Still, the general fairness of the work was admitted in England, with the qualification, of (p. 204) course that a perfectly trustworthy history could not come from this side of the water. A few malignant attacks were made upon it. One of these, which appeared in the "United Service Journal" for November and December, 1839, is of the nature of a prolonged roar rather than a criticism; but it is worth noticing for the incidental evidence it furnishes of the intense rancor felt towards Cooper by many in England on account of his strictures upon that country in the two volumes devoted to it in his "Gleanings in Europe." The writer made the then usual profession of faith, that the work referred to had been completely crushed by the "Quarterly;" moreover, that the novelist had been convicted by it of the blackest ingratitude for traducing the nation which, we learn from this notice, had fostered his talents for romance. No critic of Cooper, either in Europe or in this country, it is to be remarked here, ever seemed willing to concede that the author had any hand in gaining his own reputation. In America the newspapers constantly assured him that it was due entirely to them. Great Britain assumed that it was to her generous appreciation alone that he was known in either hemisphere. The European main-land was not behind the island in this feeling. "Undoubtedly," wrote Balzac, "Cooper's renown is not due to his countrymen nor to the English: he owes it mainly to the ardent appreciation of France." This sentiment of the novelist's obligation to Great Britain was uppermost in the heart of the reviewer in the "United Service Journal." An uneasy impression, however, weighed upon his mind lest Cooper, who had now suffered annihilation several times without injury, might have survived the particular one inflicted by the (p. 205) "Quarterly." He honestly confessed, therefore, that he had waited some months before criticising the "Naval History," so that he might not look at it with a jaundiced or malignant eye in consequence of his recollections of the previous work on England. It is not worth while to take any further notice of this article, in which wretched criticism was put into still poorer English. But there was one of these reviews to which Cooper felt it incumbent on him to reply. This appeared in the "Edinburgh" for April, 1840. It was studiously fair in tone. It commended the American author's work in many respects. While doing so, however, it attacked him for having made no use of the "Naval History of Great Britain" by William James, a history which it spoke of in a gushing way as approaching "as nearly to perfection in its own line as any historical work perhaps ever did." It also labored heavily to break the force of some of Cooper's statements by charging him with making assertions without evidence or against evidence. James was a veterinary surgeon who had come to this country before the war of 1812 to practice his profession. After the breaking out of hostilities he left it, or rather, as he says, "escaped from it, before being taken prisoner into the interior"--whatever that may mean. In the early part of "the steelyard and arithmetical war," as Cooper phrased it, which has raged with extreme violence ever since the peace of Ghent, James bore a gallant and conspicuous part. He published a pamphlet on the subject, which, in 1817, came out expanded into a volume. In it he showed conclusively that his countrymen had been utterly wrong in supposing that they had met with any naval reverses during the war of 1812. The falsity of this assumption he (p. 206) satisfactorily established by explaining that the Americans were the most inveterate liars upon the face of the earth. By their deceptive and fraudulent accounts they had beguiled the English, a self-distrustful and self-depreciating people, into believing that they had been defeated, where they had really been victorious. Heroes, indeed, can be overcome by sufficient odds; and James was always prepared with ample explanations to account for failure in special cases. He also convicted the officers of the American navy not merely of lying in their official reports--which was a duty expected of them both by government and people--but of cowardice in action, of misconduct in their operations, and of brutality toward enemies whom the chance of war threw into their power. A work like this not merely filled a gap in historical literature, it supplied a national want. It was accordingly received with such favor that its author went on to produce a history of the British navy from 1793 to the accession of George IV. In this he embodied his previous narrative; and a grateful people has never ceased to cherish a work which showed it that it had succeeded where previously it had been laboring under the impression that it had failed. For James and his history Cooper had unbounded contempt. This horse-doctor, as he termed him, he looked upon as being as well fitted to describe a naval engagement as the proverbial horse-marine would be to take part in one. Besides being incapable, he regarded him as eminently dishonest; as vaunting impartiality while elevating discreditable and improbable hearsay into positive assertion, and fortifying his falsehoods by a pretentious parade of figures and official documents. It is hardly going too far to say that, in (p. 207) Cooper's opinion, the remarks of James on American affairs combined all possible forms of misstatement from undesigned misrepresentation to deliberate falsehood. There may be difference of opinion on this point; on another there can be none. The period covered by the British writer is on the whole the most glorious in the long and brilliant naval history of the greatest maritime power the world has ever known. Never was there a greater contrast between the spirit with which things were done and the spirit with which they were told. In no other history known to man does tediousness assume proportions more appalling, do figures seem more juiceless, do the stories of heroic achievement furnish less inspiration than in this of James. If it be true, as some modern writers say, that history to be of value must be void of interest, it may be conceded that this particular work is entitled to that praise of perfection accorded it by the Edinburgh Reviewer. The judgment that held up such a history as a model was not likely to impress a man, who was still under the sway of the old-fashioned notion, that there was no absolutely necessary connection between dullness and accuracy. To this particular criticism Cooper replied in the "Democratic Review" for May and June, 1842. In the first article he exposed the ignorance and dishonesty of James. In the second he devoted himself to the assertions of the "Edinburgh." The game was hardly worth the candle. His arguments could not reach the men who alone needed to know them. In international quarrels of any kind there are few who read both sides. The feeling exists that it is not safe to contaminate the purity of one's faith in his country by the doubts that might arise from (p. 208) merely fancying that an opponent has reasons for his course worth considering. So it was in this case. Few people in the United States saw the "Edinburgh Review," none believed what it said. In England fewer knew even of the existence of the "Democratic Review." The controversy that arose in this country was on an entirely different ground. It was one that could hardly have been foreseen. The personal hostility which Cooper had succeeded in drawing upon himself was never so conspicuously shown as in the treatment which his "Naval History" underwent. At first, indeed, it was received with general favor, though by many it was thought to give too much credit to the English. In a short time, however, attacks were made upon it so virulent, so causeless, and withal so simultaneous, that the mere fact would of itself afford reason for the suspicion that they were concerted. This was practically the case. A certain amount of preliminary detail will make the circumstances clear. The controversy was entirely about the account of a particular action in the war of 1812, and a work containing over fifty chapters was absolutely condemned as partisan and worthless for what was found on a few pages of one chapter. The battle of Lake Erie was fought and won by Commodore Perry on the 10th of September, 1813. It presented the peculiarity that the Lawrence, the flagship of the victorious squadron, had struck to the enemy in the course of the engagement. There was a feeling prevalent among many at the time that Elliott, the second in rank, had not been cordial in his support of his commander, and had left him to bear for a long while the brunt of the fight without hastening in his vessel, the Niagara, (p. 209) to his help. This was, in particular, the general belief among those on board the Lawrence. Perry did not sanction this view at first. Urged by good-nature, according to the theory of his friends, he praised Elliott's conduct in his official report. He went even farther in a letter of the 19th of September. This was in reply to a note from Elliott stating that rumors were current that the Lawrence had been sacrificed because of the lack of proper exertion on the part of the second in command. "I am indignant," wrote Perry, "that any report should be in circulation prejudicial to your character as respects the action of the 10th instant. It affords me pleasure that I have it in my power to assure you that the conduct of yourself, officers, and crew was such as to merit my warmest approbation. And I consider the circumstance of your volunteering and bringing the smaller vessels up to close action as contributing largely to our victory." Such was the situation at the time. A few years later, however, a bitter quarrel sprang up between Perry and Elliott, which apparently owed a good deal of its rancor to the exertions of good-natured friends of both in communicating to each remarks made, or supposed to be made, by the other. An envenomed correspondence took place in 1818. It led to Elliott's challenging Perry, and Perry preferring charges against Elliott for his conduct at the battle of Lake Erie. In the letter accompanying the charges he gave as his reason for changing his opinion as to the behavior of his second in command, that he had been put into possession of fresh facts. The government took no action in the matter, and in the following year Perry died. In 1834 Elliott became the mark of hostility of the Whig press on account of his putting the figure of Andrew Jackson at the (p. 210) figure-head of the Constitution, the war-ship of which he was in command. The old scandal about his conduct at Erie was revived. Elliott did more than defend himself. A life of him was published in 1835, written by another, but from materials evidently that he himself had furnished. It claimed that the success of the battle of Lake Erie was mainly due to his efforts. It naturally produced a feeling of intense bitterness among Perry's friends and relatives. This was the way matters stood at the time that the "Naval History" was brought out. Cooper entered upon the account of the battle of Lake Erie with the common prejudice against Elliott. Nor were efforts lacking to keep it alive and strengthen it, when it was reported in naval circles that he had begun to be uncertain about the justice of his original impressions. Captain Matthew Perry, the brother of the Commodore, forwarded him all the sworn documentary evidence that made against Elliott. He neglected to send any that was given in his favor. Cooper was not the man to be satisfied with this way of writing history. As he examined the subject more and more, he was struck by the conflicting character of the testimony, and the doubt that overhung the whole question. He came finally to the conclusion that it was not a matter he could settle, or, perhaps, any one. He accordingly contented himself with giving as accurate an account of the battle of Lake Erie as he could without entering at all into the details of the controversy. He made not the slightest effort to detract from the praise due to Perry, and, indeed, paid the highest tribute to his skill and conduct. Nor did he give to Elliott any prominence whatever. He had committed, however, the unpardonable sin. He had refused (p. 211) to attack Elliott. He had preferred to accept Perry's original account of the battle, written within five days after it had taken place, to the view he took of it not only five years later, but also after a bitter personal quarrel had sprung up between him and his former second in command. While Cooper had made no special mention of the latter, he had spoken of him respectfully. There was a general feeling that Elliott ought to have been attacked. He was a very unpopular man, and, perhaps, deservedly so; while Perry was both a popular favorite and a popular hero. The refusal of Cooper to join in the general denunciation brought down upon him, not only those who honestly believed him in the wrong, but the whole horde of his own personal enemies who knew little and cared less about this particular subject. In the long list of controversies which the student of literature is under the necessity of examining, none seems so uncalled for and so discreditable to the assailants as this. For it is to be borne in mind that the historian had not made the slightest attempt to injure Perry in the popular estimation, or to elevate the subordinate at the expense of the commander. Yet assertions of this kind were constantly bandied about, though it would not have taken five minutes reading of the work to have shown their falsity. Cooper was frequently spoken of by the press as the detractor of American fame and the slanderer of American character, because he refused to say, on one-sided evidence, that an officer of the United States navy had been willing to sacrifice his superior in a hotly contested battle and imperil the result for the sake of ministering to his own personal ambition, or of gratifying a feeling of personal (p. 212) dislike and envy, of the existence of which at the time there was no proof. Space here exists to notice only the elaborate attacks to which Cooper himself felt constrained to reply. The first of these appeared in four numbers of the "New York Commercial Advertiser" during June, 1839. The articles were written by William A. Duer, who had lately been president of Columbia College. They purported to be a review of the "Naval History," but nothing whatever was said about that work beyond the few pages in which the battle of Lake Erie is described. They were, moreover, so personal in their nature and contained imputations so gross on his character, that Cooper began a libel suit against the journal in which they were published. This finally resulted in one of the most extraordinary trials that has ever been recorded in merely literary annals. The attack in the "Commercial Advertiser" was followed by a similar one in the "North American Review." This was written, however, with more decency, though it again devoted itself mainly to the battle of Lake Erie. It was the work of Alexander Slidell Mackenzie, a naval author, who by three books of travel had gained at the time some literary notoriety. But the notoriety never rose to reputation; and the history which preserves his name at all, preserves it in connection with an event it were well for his memory to have eternally forgotten. It is to be added that he was the brother-in-law of Captain Matthew Perry, and that Duer was his uncle. Hardly had his broadside been delivered, when another attack appeared. The victor of Lake Erie had come from Rhode Island, and Rhode Island rushed to the fray, not to defend her son--for he had not been attacked--but to build up his reputation by (p. 213) ruining that of his enemy. Tristam Burges, when the biography of Elliott, already referred to, had appeared, had delivered a lecture on the battle of Lake Erie before the Rhode Island Historical Society. It was not printed at the time; but no sooner was Cooper's work published than, at the request of Perry's friends and relatives, it was brought out with documents appended. The lecture reads very much like a stump speech of the extreme florid type. It is needless to say that in it Elliott got his full deserts for betraying his commander. It made no direct reference to Cooper, but the whole object was to discredit the account of the battle which he had given. Even this was not all. Mackenzie prepared a life of Perry, which was published early in 1841. In it he attacked Elliott with great bitterness, and was careful to give in an appendix all the sworn testimony on one side, and leave out all the sworn testimony on the other. The biography met with general favor. It was styled a noble work, and the courage manifested by the author in assailing an unpopular man and celebrating a popular hero was, for some reason hard now to be understood, highly commended on all sides. The intense partisanship of the biography can be read on almost every page. But it was warmly welcomed everywhere, for Elliott had few friends even in his own profession. The "North American Review" for July, 1841, in an article written by the late Admiral Charles H. Davis, congratulated the navy on now having a work which gave a true and faithful report of the battle of Lake Erie, and stigmatized Cooper's account as false in spirit, statement, and comment. This was, indeed, the general charge. For a while Cooper was (p. 214) under as heavy a bombardment as Perry himself had been in his flagship. That his feelings were outraged by the injustice of it there can be no question, but it never daunted his spirit. Yet he took not the slightest step without being sure of his ground. He went over the evidence again and again. He talked with officers of the navy who held views opposed to his own; though he said afterward he rarely found that they knew anything about the matter beyond common report. With the exception of a few newspaper articles, however, he published nothing directly in reply until four years after his history was published. In the mean while he pressed the suit against William L. Stone, the editor of the "Commercial Advertiser." That paper at first took the prosecution in the jocular and insolent way then common with the press. Under an announcement of "Stand Clear," it informed its readers early in August, 1839, that "the interesting Mr. J. Effingham Fenimore Cooper is to bring a libel suit against us. None will approach it in interest, importance, or amusement." The editor was telling more truth than he thought. No action, however, was taken by Cooper for nearly a year to carry out his expressed intention. But he could always be depended upon. His suits, though sometimes long in coming, were sure to come at last. Great was the surprise of the editor when, in May, 1840, a process was served upon him for a libel printed eleven months before. He was indignant that the prosecutor had waited so long. A demurrer was filed and argued in July, 1840, at the Utica term of the Supreme Court. The decision was against the defendant. Things now began to look more serious; for while the importance of the suit was increasing, its amusement was diminishing. It, however, hung on in the courts for a year and a half longer. (p. 215) The defendant was naturally unwilling to hasten a trial which was almost certain to end in an adverse verdict. Negotiations between the parties in the autumn of 1841 resulted in a novel agreement. Cooper did not care for damages. It was not money he sought; it was to vindicate the truth of his history and his character as an historian. When, therefore, his adversary suggested that an ordinary jury of twelve men could not well pass upon a question involving the value of conflicting evidence, and minute technical detail, he seized upon the occasion to arrange that it should be tried before a body of referees, consisting of three distinguished lawyers. The proposal was accepted. Never was the eternal question between author and reviewer settled in a more singular and a more thorough way. For the referees were to decide, not merely upon legal points, but upon moral ones. They were to decide whether the author had written a truthful account of the battle of Lake Erie, and whether he had written it in a spirit of truth. On the other hand, they were to decide whether the reviewer had written matter libelous enough to justify a verdict from a jury, and whether in the treatment of the subject for which he criticised the history he had been just and impartial. If the decision were in favor of the author the defendant was not to pay more than two hundred and fifty dollars besides the costs. In any case the beaten party was to publish the full text of the decision, at his own expense, in the cities of New York, Albany, and Washington. The referees agreed upon were Samuel Steevens, named by Cooper; Daniel Lord, Jr., named by Stone; and Samuel A. Foot, chosen by mutual consent. The attendance of many witnesses was rendered unnecessary by the (p. 216) stipulation that a vast mass of documentary testimony in possession of Cooper should be taken in evidence. The referees met in the United States court room in New York city, on the afternoon of Monday, May 16, 1842. A large crowd was in attendance. Public interest had been aroused, not only by the question involved and the novel character of the suit, but by the fact that the historian was to assume the principal conduct of his own side. The trial lasted for five days. After the opening speeches had been made, the taking of oral testimony began. Among the witnesses for the defense were Sands, Mackenzie, and Paulding, all officers of the navy. They were examined in reference to Cooper's account of the battle of Lake Erie and the diagrams by which he represented the positions of the vessels during the engagement. Their views were in all respects opposed to the theory of operations which he had assumed. After the taking of the oral testimony was ended and certain legal questions had been argued, the summing up was begun by William W. Campbell of Otsego, the leading lawyer for the defense. His speech was exceedingly able and effective. Men who were present at the proceedings asserted, when it was finished, that there was no possible way in which its reasoning could be shaken, still less overthrown. At eight o'clock on Thursday evening Cooper began summing up for the prosecution, and continued until ten. On Friday he resumed his argument at four in the afternoon, and six hours had passed before he concluded. His conduct of the case from the beginning had excited surprise and admiration. Friends and foes alike bore witness to the signal ability he had displayed throughout; but his closing speech (p. 217) made an especially profound impression. Its interest, its ingenuity, and its effectiveness were conceded by the defendant himself. It was for a long time after spoken of as one of the finest forensic displays that had ever been witnessed at the New York bar. Among those present at the trial was Henry T. Tuckerman, who has left us an account of the circumstances and of the bearing of the man. "A more unpopular cause," he wrote, "never fell to the lot of a practiced advocate; for the hero of Lake Erie was and had long been one of the most cherished of American victors. We could not but admire the self-possession, coolness, and vigor with which the author, on this occasion, played the lawyer. Almost alone in his opinion,--the tide of public sentiment against his theory of the battle, and the popular sympathy wholly with the received traditions of that memorable day,--he stood collected, dignified, uncompromising; examined witnesses, quoted authorities, argued nautical and naval precedents with a force and a facility which would have done credit to an experienced barrister. On the one hand, his speech was a remarkable exhibition of self-esteem, and on the other, a most interesting professional argument; for when he described the battle, and illustrated his views by diagrams, it was like a chapter in one of his own sea-stories, so minute, graphic, and spirited was the picture he drew. The dogmatism was more than compensated for by the picturesqueness of the scene; his self-complacency was exceeded by his wonderful ability. He quoted Cooper's 'Naval History' as if it were 'Blackstone;' he indulged in reminiscences; he made digressions and told anecdotes; he spoke of the manoeuvres of the vessels, of the shifting of the wind, of the course of the fight, like one whose life had been passed on (p. 218) the quarter-deck. No greater evidence of self-reliance, of indifference to the opinion of the world, and to that of his countrymen in particular, of the rarest descriptive talent, of pertinacity, loyalty to personal conviction, and a manly, firm, yet not unkindly spirit, could be imagined than the position thus assumed, and the manner in which he met the exigency. As we gazed and listened, we understood clearly why, as a man, Cooper had been viewed from such extremes of prejudice and partiality; we recognized at once the generosity and courage, and the willfulness and pride of his character: but the effect was to inspire a respect for the man, such as authors whose errors are moral weaknesses never excite." On the 16th of June the referees rendered their decision on the eight points submitted to them for adjudication. In regard to five of these they were all in full agreement; but in three instances one of the referees dissented from certain portions of the report made by the other two. The first point was whether, according to the evidence and the rules of the law the plaintiff would be entitled to the verdict of a jury in an ordinary suit for libel. They agreed that he would, and accordingly awarded the damages that had been fixed by the original stipulation. The second point was whether in writing his account of the battle of Lake Erie, Cooper had faithfully fulfilled his obligations as an historian. The majority of the referees decided that he had so done. Mr. Foot dissented to this extent, that Cooper had intended to do so, but that from error of judgment or from some cause not impugning the (p. 219) purity of his motives, he had failed in one specified point. This was that the narrative gave the impression that Elliott's conduct in the battle had met with universal approbation, which it had not. The arbitrator added, however, that this was the only particular in which it appeared to him that the historian had failed in fulfilling the high trust he had taken upon himself. The third point was whether the narrative of the battle of Lake Erie was true or not in its essential facts, and if untrue, in what particulars. The majority decided that it was true. Mr. Foot dissented on the same point, to the same extent, and for the same reason, for which he had dissented from the second. The fourth point was whether the account of the battle was written in a spirit of impartiality and justice. They all agreed that it was so written. The fifth point was whether the writer of the criticism, upon which the suit was founded, had faithfully fulfilled the office of a reviewer. If not they were to give the facts upon which their conclusion was based. They unanimously agreed that the writer had not faithfully discharged his obligations as a reviewer; that he had indulged in personal imputations; that he was guilty of misquotations which materially changed the meaning; that his statements were incorrect in several particulars; and that his charge that Cooper had given to Elliott equal credit with Perry in the conduct of the battle was untrue. This last assertion, they add, was made after a careful examination by them of the history itself. The sixth point was whether the review was true or not in its essential facts; and if untrue, in what particulars. They all agreed that (p. 220) it was untrue, and gave the particulars. The seventh point was whether the review was written in a spirit of impartiality and justice. The majority decided that it was not so written. Here again Mr. Foot made a partial dissent. He considered the review to have been written under the influence of a wakeful sensibility, inconsiderately and unnecessarily aroused in defense of the reputation of a beloved and deceased friend. The eighth point was to settle which of the two parties should be required to publish the full text of the decision at his own expense in newspapers published in New York, Washington, and Albany. The referees agreed that this was to be done by the defendant. Thus ended this suit. For Cooper the result was a great personal triumph. He had had to contend with the prejudices of a nation. For months and years he had been persistently assailed with all the weapons that unscrupulous partisanship or unreasoning family affection could wield. He had been compelled to identify his own cause with that of a man who, in addition to unpopularity with members of his own profession, had drawn upon himself the hostility of a political party. He had been under the necessity of controverting, in some particulars, a generally accepted belief. Against him had been arrayed two of the ablest lawyers of the bar. Naval officers of reputation had on the witness stand criticised his theory of the battle and contradicted his statements. He had been assisted in the conduct of the case by his nephew; but outside of this he had received help from no one. Sympathy with him, there was little; desire for his success, there was less; and the referees (p. 221) could hardly fail to feel to some extent the influence that pervaded the whole country. In the face of all these odds he had fought the battle and won it. He had wrung respect and admiration from a hostile public sentiment which he had openly and contemptuously defied. Upon the essential matters in dispute the verdict of three men, of highest rank in their profession and skilled in the weighing of conflicting evidence, had been entirely in his favor. Cooper followed up his victory by a pamphlet which appeared in August, 1843, entitled, "The Battle of Lake Erie: or, Answers to Messrs. Burges, Duer, and Mackenzie." In this he went fully over the ground. No reply was made to it; there was in fact none to be made. The popular tradition could best be maintained by silence. Silence at any rate during his lifetime was preserved, and silence in cases where it would have been creditable to have said something. It certainly affords justification additional to that already given, for the contemptuous opinion expressed by Cooper of the American press, that the newspapers which had been loudest in the denunciation of his history, never so much as alluded to the result of the trial brought to test authoritatively the fairness and impartiality of the narrative for which he had been condemned. After reading patiently all that has been written on both sides of this question, it seems to me that not only was the verdict of the arbitrators a just one, but that Cooper was right in the view he took. Still, where evidence is conflicting there is ample room for difference of opinion; and in regard to the conduct of Elliott at Lake Erie the evidence is diametrically opposed. The only secure method, therefore, of obtaining and maintaining a comfortable bigotry of belief on the (p. 222) subject is to read carefully the testimony on one side and to despise the other so thoroughly as to refrain from even looking at it. This was then and has since been the course followed by the thick and thin partisans of Perry. But whether the conclusion be right or not at which Cooper arrived, there was never the slightest justification for the gross abuse to which he was subjected. He had everything to gain by falling in with the popular tradition and attacking Elliott. Nothing but lofty integrity and love of truth could have made him take the course he did. If a mistake at all, it was a mistake of judgment. But the charges brought against him were based in most instances upon deliberate misrepresentation of what he had said. This was especially true of the criticisms of Duer and Mackenzie. The perversion of meaning of one of his foot-notes is a striking instance of the unscrupulous nature of these attacks. In this Cooper had spoken of the vulgar opinion which celebrated as an act of special gallantry Perry's passing in an open boat from one ship to another as being the very least of his merits; that the same thing was done in the same engagement by others, including Elliott; that there was personal risk everywhere; and that Perry's real merit was his indomitable resolution not to be conquered, and the manner in which he sought new modes of victory when old ones failed. If this be depreciatory, it is depreciatory to say that greater honor is due to him who manifests the skill and fertility of resource of a commander than to him who exhibits the mere valor of a soldier. But in Duer's review of the "Naval History," and Mackenzie's "Life of Perry," the purport of the note was entirely changed. The concluding portion was dishonestly (p. 223) omitted, and a paragraph that gave to the victor of Lake Erie credit for generalship rather than soldiership was converted into an assertion that the risk he had run was of slight consequence. This controversy brought in its train another libel suit. To the editor of the "Commercial Advertiser" the result had caused deep mortification. The reviewer also was naturally dissatisfied with a decision which left upon him the stigma of a libeler. He offered, if the case could be brought before a common jury for another trial, to pay double the amount of damages awarded, provided the result was against him. With such an arrangement Mr. Stone declined to have anything to do. He had had, he said, annoyance enough already with the suit. But he was tempted in a moment of vexation to indulge in remarks which implied that Cooper was in a hurry to get the sum awarded, with the object of putting it into Wall Street "for shaving purposes." The insinuation was uncalled for and unjustifiable; and as the editor subsequently admitted that it was only made in jest, it may be imputed to his credit that he had the grace to be ashamed of it. A libel suit, however, followed. It was at first decided in Cooper's favor. It was then carried up to the Court of Errors, and in December, 1845, more than a year after Mr. Stone's death, that tribunal reversed the decision. The result of the trial was hailed with the keenest delight by the Whig press of the state. "The Great Persecutor," as he was sometimes styled, had been finally foiled. "The rights of the press," said one of the newspapers, "are at last triumphant over the tyranny of courts and the vile constructions of the law of libel." The value of the victory, however, was largely lessened by the little respect in which the Court of Errors was held. This (p. 224) tribunal, which consisted in the majority of cases of the Chancellor and of the members of the state Senate, was swept away by the Constitution of 1846. Its influence had gone long before. Cooper was doubtless giving expression to the general feeling as well as venting his own indignation at this particular decision when he spoke of it, as he did a little later, as a "pitiful imitation of the House of Lords' system," by which a body of "small lawyers, country doctors, merchants, farmers," with occasionally a man of ability, were constituted the highest tribunal in the state. Two other results followed incidentally this controversy about the battle of Lake Erie. One had the nature of comedy, the other partook rather of that of tragedy. Perry, as has been said, was a Rhode Islander, and many of the men he had with him had come from that state. Tristam Burges, in his lecture, had, in many instances, allowed his eloquence to get the better of his sense. In the preface to it, when published, he abandoned the latter altogether. He twice asserted, and gave his reasons for it, that "the fleet and battle of Erie" were to be regarded "as a part of the maritime affairs of Rhode Island." Apparently, however, the whole state took the same view. There seemed to be a feeling prevalent in it that its own reputation lay in destroying the reputation of Perry's second in command. In 1845 Elliott had a medal struck in honor of Cooper. It bore on one side the head of the author surrounded by the words, "The Personification of Honor, Truth, and Justice." At the suggestion of John Quincy Adams copies were sent to the various historical societies of the country. That statesman himself undertook their transmission. Accordingly one was forwarded among (p. 225) the rest to the Rhode Island Society. It reached its destination in March. It threw that body into a tumult of excitement. The trustees reflected upon it anxiously. They referred it to a committee. After prolonged brooding the committee gave birth to a preamble and two resolutions. These were reported to the Society at the meeting of the 10th of September. In one of the resolutions the letter of Adams was embodied, and he was thanked for the care and attention he had displayed in the discharge of the trust committed to him by Commodore Elliott. The second resolution recited substantially that Cooper had not been conducting himself properly in the matter, and had published opinions which the Society could not adopt or sanction. It therefore declined to accept the medal in his honor, and directed the president to transmit it to Adams with the request to return it to Commodore Elliott. Vigorous as this action may now seem, it did not then come up to the level of offended justice. There was to be no tampering with iniquity, even in high places. Elliott was not to succeed in his impudent effort to skulk behind the character of Adams, nor was Adams to escape reproof for the base uses to which he had allowed himself to be put. A motion was accordingly made to strike out the resolution conveying to that statesman the thanks of the Society. It was carried unanimously. The medal was accordingly returned to him with the request that he send it to Elliott with an attested copy of the resolution. Adams's conception of an Historical Society was different from that then entertained in Rhode Island. He clearly thought it no part of their business to be officially engaged in upholding the reputation of favorite sons, (p. 226) or defending the character of heroes. His reply was curt, not to say tart. "I decline the office," he wrote, "requested of me by the Historical Society of Rhode Island, and hold the medal and the copy of the resolution, which they request me to transmit to Commodore Elliott, to be delivered to any person whom they, or you by their direction, may authorize to receive them." Cooper apparently said nothing about this action at the time. He had before been solemnly warned by the Providence newspapers not to risk a controversy with Burges, or, as they more graphically expressed it, not to "get into the talons of the bald-headed eagle of Rhode Island." The threatened danger, however, had not deterred him from exposing the absurdities into which even eagles fall when they use their pinions for writing and not for flying. Not even did he have the fear of the Historical Society itself before his eyes. In 1850 he took occasion to pay his respects to that body. He was then bringing out a revised edition of his novels. In the preface to "The Red Rover," he mentioned the stone tower at Newport, and referred to the way in which he had been assailed for his irreverence in calling it a mill. He repeated this assertion as to its character. He expressed his belief that the building was more probably built upon arches to defend grain from mice than men from savages. "We trust," he added, "this denial of the accuracy of what may be a favorite local theory will not draw upon us any new evidence of the high displeasure of the Rhode Island Historical Society, an institution which displayed such a magnanimous sense of the right, so much impartiality, and so profound an understanding of the laws of nature and of the facts of the day, on a former occasion when we (p. 227) incurred its displeasure, that we really dread a second encounter with its philosophy, its historical knowledge, its wit, and its signal love of justice. Little institutions, like little men, very naturally have a desire to get on stilts; a circumstance that may possibly explain the theory of this extraordinary and very useless fortification. We prefer the truth and common sense to any other mode of reasoning, not having the honor to be an Historical Society at all." No reply, at least no public reply, came from that quarter during his life, to the views he had expressed. It was only when he was unable to defend himself that he was again assailed. In February, 1852, an account of the battle of Lake Erie was delivered before the Rhode Island Historical Society by Usher Parsons, who had been assistant surgeon on board the Lawrence. His testimony had been somewhat severely criticised by Cooper. Now that the latter was in his grave he took occasion to cast imputations upon the motives of the historian, and asperse the honesty of his statements. Parsons added nothing new of moment to the discussion, for what he said was merely a rehash, made in a very bungling way, of the old facts and assertions. But the spirit in which he wrote and the insinuations in which he indulged furnish ample justification for the low opinion which Cooper held of the evidence he had previously given. With the parting shot in the preface to "The Red Rover," the controversy, on Cooper's part, concluded. He had, however, been concerned in another matter, in which the fortunes of his own work and the fortunes of one of its critics were strangely blended. In 1841 an abridged edition of his "Naval History" was brought out in one (p. 228) volume. The publisher was desirous of having it included in the list of books purchased for the district school libraries of New York. With this object in view he offered it, without Cooper's knowledge, to the Secretary of State, John C. Spencer, who was also superintendent of public instruction. To him was confided, by virtue of his office, the selection of the works which should constitute these libraries. He rejected the proposal with uncomplimentary brevity. He would have nothing to do, he informed the publisher, with so partisan a performance. Soon after this he emphasized his opinion of its partisanship by directing the purchase of Mackenzie's "Life of Perry"--a work which was almost avowedly one-sided. There was a retribution almost poetical in the tragedy that followed; for the same lack of mental balance and judgment that had been exhibited in this biography of Perry was to show itself under circumstances peculiarly harrowing. In October, 1841, Spencer joined the administration of John Tyler as Secretary of War. In December, 1842, Mackenzie, then in command of the United States brig Somers, gave a still further proof of his impartiality by hanging on the high seas Spencer's son, an acting midshipman, for alleged mutiny. It was done without even going through the formality of a trial. It was an act of manslaughter, not committed, indeed, from any feeling of malice, but merely from the same lack of judgment that he had displayed in the literary controversy in which he had been engaged. Mackenzie was brought before a naval court-martial, and succeeded with some difficulty in securing an acquittal. In 1844 the proceedings of the trial were published, and annexed to them was an elaborate review of the case by Cooper. It was written in a calm and temperate tone, but (p. 229) it practically settled the question of the character of the act. Cooper's interest in the navy led him also to write a series of lives of officers who had been prominent in its history. The first of these appeared originally in "Graham's Magazine" for October, 1842, and the others are scattered through the volumes of that year and the years succeeding. In 1846 they were published in book form. Among them was a life of Perry. In this he took occasion to reaffirm what he had previously said about the battle of Lake Erie. But the injustice which had been done to him did not lead him to treat with injustice the man whose life he was writing, though it was impossible for him to say what would be satisfactory to Perry's partisans without falsifying what he believed to be the truth. In spite of the numerous attacks made upon it the "Naval History" was successful, as success is measured in technical works of this kind. A second edition, revised and corrected, appeared in April, 1840, and in 1847 a third edition was published. At the time of his death Cooper was projecting a continuation of it, and had gathered together materials for that purpose. The original work ended with the close of the last war with Great Britain. He intended to bring it down to the end of the Mexican War. This was done by another after his death. In 1853 a new edition of the "Naval History" appeared with a continuation prepared by the Reverend Charles W. McHarg. The matter that Cooper had collected was used, but there was very little in what was added that was of his own composition. Of the original work, it is safe to say, that for the period which it covers it is little likely to be superseded as the (p. 230) standard history of the American navy. Later investigation may show some of the author's assertions to be erroneous. Some of his conclusions may turn out as mistaken as have his prophecies about the use of steam in war vessels. But such defects, assuming that they exist, are more than counterbalanced by advantages which make it a final authority on points that can never again be so fully considered. Many sources of information which were then accessible no longer exist. The men who shared in the scenes described, and who communicated information directly to Cooper, have all passed away. These are losses that can never be replaced, even were it reasonable to expect that the same practical knowledge, the same judicial spirit, and the same power of graphic description could be found united again in the same person. CHAPTER XI. (p. 231) 1840-1850. No man could go through the conflicts which Cooper had been carrying on for so many years unharmed or unscarred. For the hostility entertained and expressed toward him in England he cared but little. But though too proud to parade his sufferings, the injustice done him in his own land aroused in his heart an indignation which had in it, however, as much pain as anger. He could not fail to see that he was in a false position, that his motives were misunderstood where even they were not deliberately misrepresented. The generation which had shared in his early triumphs and had gloried in his early fame had largely passed away. From some who survived he had been parted by a separation bitterer than that of death. To the new generation that had come on he appeared only as the captious and censorious critic of his country. His works were read in every civilized country. To many men they had brought all the little knowledge they possessed of America; to certain regions they could almost be said to have first carried its name. But the land which he loved with a passionate fervor seemed largely to have disowned him. It would be vain to deny his sensitiveness to this hostility. Traces of his secret feeling crop out unexpectedly in his later works. They reveal phases of his character which would never be inferred from his acts; they show the existence of sentiments which he would never have (p. 232) directly avowed. "There are men," says the hero of "Afloat and Ashore," "so strong in principle as well as in intellect, I do suppose, that they can be content with the approbation of their own consciences, and who can smile at the praise or censure of the world alike: but I confess to a strong sympathy with the commendation of my fellow-creatures, and a strong distaste for their disapprobation." Especially marked is the reference to himself in the words he puts into the mouth of Columbus in his "Mercedes of Castile." "Genoa," says the navigator, "hath proved but a stern mother to me: and though nought could induce me to raise a hand against her, she hath no longer any claim on my services.... One cannot easily hate the land of his birth, but injustice may lead him to cease to love it. The tie is mutual, and when the country ceases to protect person, property, character, and rights, the subject is liberated from all his duties." It was the attacks connected with the controversy about the "Naval History" that more than anything else embittered Cooper's feelings. He had striven hard to write a full and trustworthy account of the achievements of his country upon the sea. Because he had refused to pervert what he deemed the truth to the gratification of private spite, he had been assailed with a malignity that had hardly stopped short of any species of misrepresentation. Rarely has devotion to the right met with a worse return. The reward of untiring industry, of patriotic zeal, and of conscientious examination of evidence, was little else than calumny and abuse. He felt so keenly the treatment he had received that he regretted having ever written the "Naval History" at all. In (p. 233) a published letter of the early part of 1843 he expressed himself on the matter in words that come clearly from the depths of a wounded spirit. "Were the manuscript of what has been printed," he wrote, "now lying before me unpublished, I certainly should throw it into the fire as an act of prudence to myself and of justice to my children." In his triumphant reply to Burges, Duer, and Mackenzie, while he showed the haughty disdain he felt for the popular clamor which had condemned him without knowledge, he did not seek to hide the bitterness it had caused. "This controversy," he said, "was not of my seeking; for years have I rested under the imputations that these persons have brought against me, and I now strike a blow in behalf of truth, not from any deference to a public opinion that in my opinion has not honesty enough to feel much interest in the exposure of duplicity and artifice, but that my children may point to the facts with just pride that they had a father who dared to stem popular prejudice in order to write truth." It is in these last lines that Cooper unconsciously revealed the strength which enabled him to go through this roar of hostile criticism and calumny without having his whole nature soured. One great resource he possessed, and its influence cannot be overestimated. In the closest and dearest relations of life with which happiness is connected far more intimately than with the most prosperous series of outward events, he was supremely fortunate. In his own home his lot was favored beyond that of most men. However violent the storm without, there he could always find peace and trust and affection. The regard, indeed, felt for him by the female members of his family, may justly be termed devotion. (p. 234) Towards all women he exhibited deference almost to the point of chivalry. But in the case of those of his own household there was mingled with it a tenderness which called forth in return that ardent attachment which strong natures alone seem capable of inspiring. This deference and tenderness were the more conspicuous by contrast with his opinions. These would fill with wrath unspeakable the advocates of women's rights. Nor was he at all particular about mincing their expression. He sometimes gave utterance to them in the most extreme form. He even made his sentiments more emphatic by putting them into the mouths of his female characters. "There is," says the governess in "The Red Rover," "no peace for our feeble sex but in submission; no happiness but in obedience." In his last novel he denounced furiously the law that gave to the wife control over her own property, and predicted, as a consequence, all sorts of disasters to the family that have never come to pass. All this was eminently characteristic. But like many strong men tenacious of acknowledged superiority he was content with the mere concession. That granted, he would yield to submission infinitely more than recognized equality could have a right to expect or could hope to gain. We may think what we please of his views about women; there can be but one opinion as to his conduct towards them. A characteristic instance of the wantonness with which Cooper's acts and motives were deliberately misrepresented during this period occurred in 1841. In that year came out a work, which had, in its day, some little notoriety, but has long ago passed to the limbo of forgotten things. It was called "The Glory and Shame of England." The very title shows that this production was maliciously calculated to make the British (p. 235) lion lash his tail with frenzy: and if we can trust its author, Mr. C. Edwards Lester, it met with fierce opposition from British residents in this country and their sympathizers. In an introductory letter addressed to the Reverend J. T. Headley, he told the story of the experiences his agents had undergone in securing subscriptions. In the course of it he made the following allusion to Cooper. "Already," he wrote, "have several educated and highly respectable young men engaged (with unprecedented success) in procuring subscribers for this work been rudely driven from the houses of Englishmen for crossing their threshold with the prospectus. And I blush (but not for myself or my country) to say that one of our celebrated authors, whose partiality for Republicanism has been more than doubted, threatened to kick one of these young men out of his house (castle) if he did not instantly leave it; exclaiming, 'Why have you the impudence to hand me that prospectus? I understand what the GLORY of England means; but as for the SHAME of England, there is no such thing. The shame is all in that base Democracy, which makes you presume to enter a gentleman's house to ask him to subscribe for such a work.'" This statement was widely copied in the newspapers. But the falsity of the fabrication soon became too apparent for even the journals most hostile to Cooper to endure. They made a vain effort to get from the author a confirmation of his story: but though he did not venture to repeat the lie manfully, he equivocated about it in a sneaking way. The newspapers, feeling, perhaps, that it was undesirable to arm the book agent with new terrors, credited at once the denial the story had received, and took back all imputations based upon it,--a (p. 236) proceeding which ought to have shown Cooper that they were not so utterly given over to the father of all evil as he fancied them. But the author of this impudent falsehood never withdrew it, nor did the publishers of the volume, in which it was contained, disavow it. The extract given above is taken from an edition which bears the date of 1845. It is plain that these calumnious attacks sprang largely from Cooper's personal unpopularity. It is equally plain that his personal unpopularity was mainly due to the censorious tone he had assumed in the criticism of his country and his countrymen. It may accordingly be said that, in one sense, he deserved all that he received. He had pursued a certain line of conduct. He had no reason to complain that it had been followed by the same results here that would have followed similar conduct anywhere. In fact, while his censure of England had been far lighter than that of America, the language used about him in the former country had been far more vulgar and abusive than that used in the latter. But there were facts in his career which his countrymen were bound to bear in mind, but which, on the contrary, they strove hard to forget, and sometimes to pervert. He had been the uncompromising defender of his native land in places where it cost reputation and regard to appear in that light. He was assailed largely by the men who had toadied to a hostile feeling which he himself had confronted. His criticism of America was sometimes just, sometimes unjust. It was in a few instances as full of outrageous misrepresentation as any which he had resented in others. Even when right, it was often wrongly delivered. But in no case did it spring from indifference or dislike. The (p. 237) very loftiness of his aspirations for his country, the very vividness of his conception of what he trusted she was to be, made him far more than ordinarily sensitive to what she was, which fell short of his ideal. Every indignity offered to her he felt as a personal blow; every stain upon her honor as a personal disgrace. He had no fear as to the material greatness of her future. What he could not bear was that the slightest spot should soil the garments of her civilization. It was for her character, her reputation, that he most cared. It is not necessary to maintain that he was as wise as he was patriotic. Had he been in a position where he wielded political power, his impulsive and fiery temperament might very probably have made him an unsafe adviser. His whole idea of foreign policy, as connected with war, may be summed up in the statement that the nation should be as ready to resent a wrong done to ourselves as to repair a wrong done to others. Nothing could be better doctrine in theory. Unfortunately, the nation in all such cases is itself both party and judge, and the question of right becomes, in consequence, a hard one to decide as a matter of fact. Cooper's intense convictions would therefore have been likely to have led the country into war, had he had the control of events,--and war, too, at a time when under the agencies of peace it was daily gathering strength to meet a coming drain upon its resources in a conflict which but few were then far-sighted enough to see would squander wealth as lavishly as it wasted blood. Had it rested with him, it is quite clear that no Ashburton treaty would have been signed. There is a striking passage printed to this day in italics, which he puts into the mouth of Leather-Stocking in the novel of "The Deerslayer." Its point is made specially (p. 238) prominent when it is remembered that this work was written while the controversy was going on between Great Britain and the United States in regard to the Northeastern boundary. "I can see no great difference," says Leather-Stocking, "atween givin' up territory afore a war, out of a dread of war, or givin' it up after a war, because we can't help it--onless it be that the last is most manful and honorable." The features of Cooper's personal character, as well as his prejudices and limitations, are always to be kept in mind because they explain much that is defective in his art, and account for much of his unpopularity. Some of them became unpleasantly conspicuous in the writings of his later years. In 1840 he entered upon a new period of creative activity which lasted until 1850. Between and including those years he brought out seventeen works of fiction. Eleven of them were written during the first half of this period ending with 1845, and even these did not constitute the whole of what he then wrote. This fertility is made the more remarkable by the fact that during this same time he was engaged in the special controversy about the battle of Lake Erie, not to speak of his standing quarrel with the press and his running fight of libel suits in which he was not only plaintiff, but did the main work of the prosecution. It is possible that his unpopularity stirred him to unwonted exertion. There is certainly no question that the years from 1840 to 1845 inclusive, are, as a whole, the supreme creative period of Cooper's career. Its production does not dwarf his early achievement in vigor or interest; but it does often show a far higher mastery of his art. Two of the works then written mark the culmination of his powers. These (p. 239) were the Leather-Stocking tales called "The Pathfinder" and "The Deerslayer." The former appeared on the 14th of March, 1840, the latter on the 27th of August, 1841. They complete the circle of these stories; for others which he contemplated writing he unfortunately never executed. Still the series was a perfect one as it was left. The life of Leather-Stocking was now a complete drama in five acts, beginning with the first war-path in "The Deerslayer," followed by his career of activity and of love in "The Last of the Mohicans" and "The Pathfinder," and his old age and death in "The Pioneers" and "The Prairie." "The Pathfinder" and "The Deerslayer" stand at the head of Cooper's novels as artistic creations. There are others of his works which contain parts as perfect as are to be found in these, and scenes even more thrilling. Not one can be compared with either of them as a finished whole. For once, whether from greater care or happier inspiration, Cooper discarded those features of his writings in which he had either failed entirely, or achieved, at the most, slight success. The leading characters belonged to the class which he drew best, so far as he was a delineator of character at all. Here were no pasteboard figures like Heywood in "The Last of the Mohicans," or Middleton in "The Prairie." Here were no supernumeraries dragged in, in a vain effort to amuse, as the singing-master in the former of these same stories, or the naturalist in the latter. Humor, Cooper certainly had; but it is the humor that gleams in fitful flashes from the men of earnest purposes and serious lives, and gives a momentary relief to the sternness and melancholy of their natures. The power of producing an entire (p. 240) humorous creation he had not at all, and almost the only thing that mars the perfectness of "The Pathfinder" is the occasional effort to make one out of Muir, the character designed to play the part of a villain. But the defects in both these tales are comparatively slight. The plot in each is simple, but it gives plenty of room for the display of those qualities in which Cooper excelled. The scene of the one was laid on Lake Ontario and its shores; the other, on the little lake near which he had made his home; and the whole atmosphere of both is redolent of the beauty and the wildness of nature. These works were a revelation to the men who had begun to despair of Cooper's ever accomplishing again anything worthy of his early renown. They were pure works of art. No moral was everlastingly perking itself in the reader's face, no labored lecture to prove what was self-evident interrupted the progress of the story. There is scarcely an allusion to any of the events which had checkered the novelist's career. References to contemporary occurrences are so slight that they would pass unheeded by any one whose attention had not been called beforehand to their existence. These works showed what Cooper was capable of when he gave full play to his powers, and did not fancy he was writing a novel when he was indulging in lectures upon manners and customs. "It is beautiful, it is grand," said Balzac to a friend, speaking of "The Pathfinder." "Its interest is tremendous. He surely owed us this masterpiece after the last two or three rhapsodies he has been giving us. You must read it. I know no one in the world, save Walter Scott, who has risen to that grandeur and serenity of colors." "Never," he said in another (p. 241) place, "did the art of writing tread closer upon the art of the pencil. This is the school of study for literary landscape-painters." Cooper himself, if contemporary reports are to be trusted, was at the time in the habit of saying that the palm of merit in his writings lay between this novel and "The Deerslayer." He certainly reckoned them the best of the five stories which have the unity of a common interest by having the same hero, and these five he put at the head of his performances. "If anything from the pen of the writer of these romances," he said, toward the close of his life, "is at all to outlive himself, it is unquestionably the series of 'The Leather-Stocking Tales.' To say this is not to predict a very lasting reputation for the series itself, but simply to express the belief that it will outlast any or all of the works from the same hand." But at this time no work of his was treated fairly by the American press. His name was rarely mentioned save in censure or derision. Both "The Pathfinder" and "The Deerslayer" on their first appearance were violently assailed. It is giving praise to a good deal of the contemporary criticism passed upon them to call it merely feeble and senseless. Much of it was marked by a malignity which fortunately was as contemptible intellectually as it was morally. Still, neither this hostile criticism nor Cooper's own personal unpopularity hindered the success of the books. He says, to be sure, in the preface to the revised edition of the Leather-Stocking tales which came out towards the end of his life, that probably not one in ten of those who knew all about the three earlier works of the series had any knowledge of the existence of the two last. This assertion seems exaggerated. It certainly struck many with surprise at the time it was made; for both "The Pathfinder" (p. 242) and "The Deerslayer" had met with a large sale. Between the publication of these two novels appeared, on the 24th of November, 1840, "Mercedes of Castile." The subject of this was the first voyage of Columbus. It had several very obvious defects. It was marred by that prolixity of introduction which was a fault that ran through the majority of Cooper's tales. The reader meets with as many discouragements and rebuffs and turnings aside in getting under way as did the great navigator the story celebrates. There was, moreover, an excess of that cheap moralizing, that dwelling upon commonplace truths, which was another of Cooper's besetting sins. The only effect these discourses have upon the reader is to make him feel that while virtue may be a very good thing, it is an excessively tedious thing. As a novel, "Mercedes of Castile" must be regarded as a failure. On the other hand, as a story of the first voyage of Columbus, told with the special knowledge of a seaman, the accuracy of an historian, and with something of the fervor of a poet, it will always have a peculiar interest of its own. Two sea-stories followed "The Deerslayer." The first of these, entitled "The Two Admirals," was published in April, 1842, and the second in November of the same year. Cooper was at this time engaged in the hottest of his fight with the American press and people. Publicly and privately he was expressing his contempt for nearly everything and everybody. He, in turn, was undergoing assaults from every quarter. It is, therefore, a singular illustration of the love of country which burned in him with an intense, even when hidden, flame, that in (p. 243) in the midst of his greatest unpopularity he was unwilling to desert his own flag for that of the land to which he was forced to go for material. Yet there was every inducement. He wished to do what had never before been done in fiction. His aim was to describe the evolutions of fleets instead of confining himself to the movements of single vessels. But no American fleet had ever been assembled, no American admiral had ever trod a quarter-deck. In order, therefore, to describe operations on a grand scale he had to have recourse to the history of the mother-country; but he purposely put the scene in "The Two Admirals" in a period when the states were still colonies. This novel takes a very high place among the sea-stories, so long as the action is confined to the water. But it suffers greatly from the carelessness and the incompleteness with which the details are worked out. In "Wing-and-Wing," which followed it, the fortune of a French privateer is told. The scene is laid in the Mediterranean, and the time is the end of the last century. Though inferior in power to some of his other sea-stories, it is far from being a poor novel; and it was, in fact, one of the author's favorites. But its greatest interest is in the view it gives of a tendency in Cooper's character which was constantly becoming more pronounced. The Puritanic narrowness of the very deep and genuine religious element in his nature was steadily increasing as time went on. In "Precaution" it has been already observed that the doctrine had been laid down by one of the characters that there should be no marriage between Christians and non-Christians. In "Wing-and-Wing" this doctrine was fully carried out. The heroine is a devout Roman Catholic. She loves devotedly the hero, the captain of the French privateer. She (p. 244) trusts in his honor; she admires his abilities and character; she is profoundly affected by the fervor of the affection he bears to herself. But he is an infidel. He is too honest and honorable to pretend to believe and think differently from what he really believes and thinks. As she cannot convert him, she will not marry him: and in the end succeeds indirectly, by her refusal, in bringing about his death. It never seemed to occur to Cooper that the course of conduct he was holding up as praiseworthy, in his novels, could have little other effect in real life than to encourage hypocrisy where it did not produce misery. The man who, for the sake of gaining a great prize, changes his religious views is sure to have his sincerity distrusted by others. That can be borne. But he is equally certain to feel distrust of himself. He cannot have that perfect confidence in his own convictions, or even in his own character, that would be the case had no considerations of personal advantage influenced him in the slightest in the decision he had made, or the conclusions to which he had come. Even he who believes in this course of action as something to be quietly adopted might wisely refuse to proclaim it loudly as a rule for the conduct of life. The next important work that followed was "Wyandotte; or the Hutted Knoll." It was published on the 5th of September, 1843. The story, as a whole, was a tragic one. In spite of the fact that the events occur in the place and time where some of the author's greatest successes had been achieved, this novel is inferior to all his others that deal with the same scenes. Certain manifestations of his feelings and certain traits of character indicated, rather than expressed, in the tales immediately preceding, were in this one distinctly revealed. His (p. 245) dislike of the newspapers and the critics has been so often referred to that it needs hardly to be said that in all the writings of this period these offenders were soundly castigated. Especially was this true of the preface. It was there, if anywhere, that Cooper was apt to concentrate all the ill-humor he felt--his wrath against the race and his scorn of the individual. But the two feelings that henceforth became conspicuously noticeable in nearly all his writings were his regard for the Episcopal church and his dislike of New England. They manifest themselves sometimes deliciously, sometimes disagreeably. In the midst of a story remote as possible from the occurrences of modern life, suddenly turn up remarks upon the apostolic origin of bishops, or the desirability of written prayers, and the need of a liturgy. The impropriety of their introduction, from a literary point of view, Cooper never had sufficient delicacy of taste to feel. Less excusable were the attacks he made upon those whose religious views differed from his own. The insults he sometimes offered to possible readers were as needless as they were brutal. In one of his later novels he mentioned "the rowdy religion--half-cant, half-blasphemy, that Cromwell and his associates entailed on so many Englishmen." There is little reason to doubt that under proper conditions Cooper could easily have developed into a sincere, narrow-minded, and ferocious bigot.[2] [Footnote 2: Poe wrote a review of _Wyandotte_ which appeared in _Graham's Magazine_ for November, 1843. As notices of Cooper's novels then went, this may be regarded as a favorable one, though in it the critic took occasion to divide works of fiction into two classes: one of a popular sort which anybody could write, and the other of a kind intrinsically more worthy and artistic, and capable of being produced only by the few. At the head of the former class he placed Cooper, but had the grace not to include his own name in the latter class which he had created for himself. The reader will be edified to learn from a life of Poe, written by John H. Ingram (2 vols., London, 1880), that the writing of this review was an act of heroic and even desperate hardihood. Poe, it seems, had before valorously depreciated Halleck; but his crowning act of courage is introduced with the statement that "he dared all _published_ opinion, and in the very teeth of Cooper's supreme popularity ventured upon saying" the remarks which have already been referred to, and which are quoted in full by the biographer, to whom is also to be given the credit of the italicized word in the foregoing quotation. No small share of the common belief in regard to Cooper's character and career is based upon assertions about as trustworthy as this.] Full as marked and even more persistent were his attacks upon (p. 246) New England. There was little specially characteristic of that portion of the country with which he did not find fault. New England cooking of the first class was inferior to that of the second class in the Middle States. The New Yorker of humble life, not of Yankee descent, spoke the language better than thousands of educated men in New England. This dislike kept steadily increasing. As late as 1844, if he sent his heroes to college at all, he sent them to Yale; after that year he transferred them to Princeton. With all this there is constantly seen going on a somewhat amusing struggle between his dislike and the thorough honesty of his nature, which forced him to admit in the men of New England certain characteristics of a high order. Their frugality, their enterprise, their readiness of resource, he could not deny. Still, he continued to imply that these qualities were used pretty generally for selfish ends. In his later works, in consequence, his villains were very apt to be New Englanders. They were not villains of a romantic type. They were mean rather than vicious; crafty rather than bold; given to degrading but at the same time cheap excesses. The first of these (p. 247) these special representatives of the New England character is the powerful but somewhat unpleasant creation of Ithuel Bolt in "Wing-and-Wing," who finds a fitting sequel to a life passed largely in committing acts of doubtful morality in becoming a deacon in a Congregational church. After him follows a succession of personages who represent nearly every conceivable shade of craft, meanness, and dishonesty that is consistent with the respect of the Puritan community about them, and with a high position in the religious society of which they form a part. There was, it must be admitted, some justification for Cooper's feelings towards New England on the score of retaliation. He had been criticised from the beginning in that part of the country with a severity that often approached virulence. He had been denied there the possession of qualities which the rest of the world agreed in according him. Cultivated society has always been afflicted with a class too superlatively intellectual to enjoy what everybody else likes. Of these unhappy beings New England has had the misfortune to have perhaps more than her proper share. It was hardly in human nature that the disparagement he received from these should not have influenced his feelings towards the region which had given them birth and consideration. It is pleasant to turn aside from these scenes and sayings which show the least amiable side of a nature essentially noble, and pass to one of the little incidents that are strikingly characteristic of the man. On board the Sterling, the merchantman on which Cooper's first voyage was made, was a boy younger than himself. His name was Ned Myers. This person had spent his life on the sea. He had belonged to seventy-two crafts, exclusive of prison-ships, transports, and vessels in (p. 248) which he had merely made passages. According to his own calculation he had been twenty-five years out of sight of land. After this long and varied career he had finally landed in that asylum for worn-out mariners, the "Sailors' Snug Harbor." From here, late in 1842, he wrote to Cooper, asking him if he were the one with whom he had served in the Sterling. Cooper, who never forgot a friend, sent him a reply, beginning: "I am your old shipmate, Ned," and told him when and where he could be found in New York. There in a few months they met after an interval of thirty-seven years. Cooper took the battered old hulk of a seaman up to Cooperstown in June, 1843, and entertained him for several weeks. While the two were knocking about the lake, and the latter was telling his adventures, it occurred to the former to put into print the wandering life the sailor had led. Between them the work was done that summer, and in November, 1843, "Ned Myers; or, Life before the Mast" was published. This work has often been falsely spoken of as a novel. It is, on the contrary, a truthful record, so far as dependence can be placed upon the word or the memory of the narrator. "This is literally," said Myers, "my own story, logged by an old shipmate." In 1842 Cooper had entered into an engagement to write regularly for "Graham's Magazine." This periodical, which had been formed not long before by the union of two others, had rapidly risen to high reputation, and claimed a circulation of thirty thousand copies. In the first four numbers of 1843 Cooper published the shortest of his stories. It was entitled "The Autobiography of a Pocket Handkerchief." For some reason not easy to explain, this has never been included in the regular (p. 249) editions of his novels. In it he made in some measure another effort to reproduce the social life of New York city. The previous failure was repeated. An air of ridiculous unreality is given to this part of the story in which the impossible talk of impossible people is paraded as a genuine representation of what takes place in civilized society. The autobiographical form which he had first adopted in this tale he continued in the two series of "Afloat and Ashore." These appeared respectively in June and in December, 1844. They are essentially one novel, though the second part goes usually in this country under the title of "Miles Wallingford," the name of its hero; and in Europe under that of "Lucy Harding," the name of its heroine. This work, the first part more particularly, is a delightful story of adventure. As usual there are startling incidents, perilous situations, and hairbreadth escapes enough to furnish sufficient materials for a dozen ordinary fictions. Yet the probabilities are better preserved than in many of Cooper's novels where the events are far fewer, as well as far less striking. But it is interesting, not merely for the incidents it contains, but for the revelation it makes of the man who wrote it. Expressions of personal feeling and opinion turn up unexpectedly everywhere, and make slight but constantly recurring eddies in the stream of the story. Everything is to be found here which he had ever discussed before. The inferiority of the bay of New York to that of Naples; the miserable cooking and gross feeding of New England; the absolute necessity of a liturgy in religious worship; the contempt he felt for the misguided beings who presume to deny the existence of (p. 250) bishops in the primitive church; his aversion to paper money; his disdain for the shingle palaces of the Grecian temple school; his scorn of the idea that one man is as good as another; these and scores of similar utterances arrest constantly the reader's attention. But they do not jar upon his feelings as in many other of his writings. They are essentially different in tone. There runs through this series a vein of ill-natured amiability or amiable ill-nature--it is hard to say which phrase is more appropriate--which gives to the whole what horticulturists call a delicate sub-acid flavor. The roar of contempt found in previous writings subsided in these into a sort of prolonged but subdued growl. But it is a case in which the reader feels that it is eminently proper that the writer should growl. It is the old man of sixty-five telling the tale of his early years. His preferences for the past do not irritate us, they entertain us. It is right that the world about him should seem meaner and more commonplace than it did in the fever-fit of youth and love, when it was joy merely to live. The work, moreover, has another characteristic that gives it a whimsical attractiveness. It is a tale of the good old times when New York had still some New York feeling left; when her old historic names still carried weight and found universal respect, and her old families still ruled society with a despotic sway; and especially before the whole state had been overrun by the lank, angular, loose-jointed, slouching, shrewd, money-worshiping sons of the Puritans, whose restless activity had triumphed over the slow and steady respectability of the original settlers. The scene of this story, so far as it is laid on land, is mainly in the river counties; but in spite of that fact it is difficult not to think that some recollections of the writer's own youth (p. 251) were not mingled in certain portions of it. Especially is it a hard task not to fancy that in the heroine, Lucy Harding, he was drawing, in some slight particulars at least, the picture of his own wife, and telling the story of his early love. The delineation of the New York life of the past which he had in some measure accomplished in these volumes, he now continued more fully in certain works which took up successive periods in the history of the state. The idea of writing them was suggested by events that were taking place at the time. The troubles which arose in certain counties of New York after the death, in 1839, of Stephen Van Rensselaer, the patroon, were now culminating in a series of acts of violence and bloodshed, perpetrated usually by men disguised as Indians. The questions involved had likewise become subjects of fierce political controversy. Cooper, who saw in the conduct of the tenants and their supporters a dangerous invasion of the rights of property, plunged into the discussion of the matter with all the ardor of his fiery temperament. He worked himself into the highest state of excitement over the proceedings. It was his interest in this matter that led him to compose the three works which are collectively called the Anti-rent novels. These purport to be the successive records of the Littlepage family, and each is in the form of an autobiography. They cover a period extending from the first half of the eighteenth century down to the very year in which he was writing. It was about this time that Cooper's reputation touched the lowest point to which it has ever fallen, so far, at least, as it depends upon the opinion of critics and of men of letters. He was now (p. 252) reaping the fruits of the various controversies in which he had been engaged, and of all the hostility which he had succeeded in inspiring. The two anti-rent novels which appeared in 1845 were "Satanstoe," published in June, and "The Chainbearer," published in November. They may have had a large sale. But there is scarcely a review of the period in which they are even mentioned. Even the newspapers contain merely the barest reference to their existence. It is perhaps partly due to this contemporary silence that these two stories are among the least known and least read of Cooper's productions. Moreover, they are constantly misjudged. The tone which pervades the concluding novel of the series is taken as the tone which pervades the two which preceded it. This is an injustice as well as a mistake. In no sense is "Satanstoe," in particular, a political novel. There is no reference to anti-rentism in it save in the preface. Its only connection with the subject is the account it gives of the manner in which the great estates were originally settled. On the other hand it is a picture of colonial life and manners in New York during the middle of the eighteenth century, such as can be found drawn nowhere else so truthfully and so vividly. It takes rank among the very best of Cooper's stories. The characters are, to a certain extent, the same as in "Afloat and Ashore;" the main difference being, that in the one the events take place principally on land, and in the other on water. Even those majestic first families, whom he had celebrated before, loom up in these pages with renewed and increasing grandeur. But the story is throughout told in a graphic and spirited manner, and as it approaches the end and details the scenes that follow Abercrombie's repulse at Lake George in 1758, it (p. 253) becomes intensely exciting. The villain of the tale is, of course, a New Englander, in this instance a long, ungainly pedagogue from Danbury, Connecticut. He does not, however, blossom out into the full perfection of his rascality until he makes his appearance in "The Chainbearer," the next novel of the series. This tale, though decidedly inferior to "Satanstoe," contains passages of great interest. The description, especially, of the squatter family and the life led by it, is one of Cooper's most powerfully drawn pictures. It has been the misfortune of this series that the member of it which has attracted most attention is "The Redskins; or, Indian and Injin," which came out in July, 1846. This is one of three or four books which, in a certain way, give one a high idea of Cooper's power in the fact that his reputation has been able to survive them. If he had been anxious to help the anti-renters and hurt the patroon, he could hardly have done better than to write this book. As a story it has no merit. The incidents told in it are absurd. It is full, moreover, of the arguments that irritate but do not convince; and is liberally supplied, in addition, with prophecies that have never been realized. Everything that was disagreeable in Cooper's manner and bungling in his art, was conspicuous in this work. His dislikes were not uttered pleasantly, as in "Afloat and Ashore," but with an ill-nature that often bordered upon ferocity. A tone of pretension ran through the whole, a constant reference to what men think who had seen the world, with the implied inference that those who disagreed with the author in opinion had not seen the world. The feeling of the reader is, that if this extravagance and over-statement be the result of travel, men had better stay (p. 254) at home. Nor did Cooper refrain from dragging in everything with which he had found fault before. We are not even spared the everlasting reference to the bays of New York and of Naples. The work is what he himself would have called provincial in the worst sense of that word. Even more than its spirit was its matter extraordinary for a work of fiction. Part of it is little else than a controversial tract on the superiority of Episcopacy; and the temper in which it is written could hardly have been grateful to any but an opponent of that church. "Satanstoe" is full of many of Cooper's likes and dislikes, but there can be no greater contrast conceived than between the tone which pervades that delightful creation, and the boisterous brawling of "The Redskins". With the publication of this series Cooper's career as a creator of works of imagination practically closed. He wrote several novels afterward, but not one of them did anything to advance his reputation. Some of them tended to lower it. This was not due to failure of power, but to its misdirection. The didactic element in his nature had now gained complete mastery over the artistic. The interest, such as it is, which belongs to his later stories, is rarely a literary interest. Not one of them has the slightest pretension to be termed a work of art. There are, at times, passages in them that thrill us, and scenes that display something of his old skill in description. But these are recollections rather than new creations. Cooper's fame would not have been a whit lessened, if every line he wrote after "The Chainbearer" had never seen the light. The works that came out during the remaining years of his life (p. 255) were "The Crater," published October 12, 1847; "Jack Tier," published March 21, 1848; "The Oak Openings," published August 24 of the same year; "The Sea Lions," published April 10, 1849, and "The Ways of the Hour," published April 10, 1850. Of these "Jack Tier" originally made its appearance in "Graham's Magazine" during the years 1845-1847, under the title of "The Islets of the Gulf," and strictly stands first in the order of time. It shares with "The Crater" the distinction of being one of the two best of these later stories. It may be fair to mention that Bryant saw in it as much spirit, energy, invention, and life-like presentation of objects and events as in anything the author ever wrote. This will seem exaggerated praise when one reads it in connection with "The Red Rover," of which it is in some respects a feeble reflection. It was hard for Cooper to be uninteresting when once fairly launched upon the waves. Without denying the existence in "Jack Tier" of passages of marked power, no small share of it was merely a reproduction of what had been done and better done before. The old woman who is constantly misusing nautical terms is the most palpable imitation of the admiral's widow in "The Red Rover." It is a cheap expedient at best, and must at any time be used with extreme moderation. Above all, it is a device which is abused the very moment it is repeated. As displayed in "Jack Tier," it is simply unendurable. Cooper's silly people, in facts are apt to be silly not only beyond human experience but almost beyond human conception. The tragedy, moreover, with which this novel ends is intended to be terrible, while as a matter of fact it is merely grotesque and absurd. The tale reaches a sudden but necessary conclusion because nearly all the characters are disposed of at once by (p. 256) drowning or killing. There is scarcely any one left to carry on the action of the story. "The Crater," which in one sense followed and in another preceded "Jack Tier," has a very special interest to the student of Cooper's character. He had now lived for so long a time a life remote from the real clash of conflicting views that he had finally reached that satisfied state of opinion which thinks the little circle in which it moves is the proper orbit for the revolution of thought of the whole race. As he advanced in years he narrowed instead of broadening. The intensity of his faith coupled with his energy of expression makes this fact very conspicuous; and in "The Crater" the reader is alternately attracted by the shrewd and keen remarks of the writer, and repelled by his illiberality. The novel tells the tale of a shipwrecked mariner cast away on a reef not laid down in any chart and unknown to navigators. This barren spot he makes bud and blossom as the rose. To the new Utopia he has created in the bosom of the Pacific he brings a body of emigrants. Their proceedings are entertainingly told. But the history of the decline of the colony from its primitive state of happiness and perfection, which is designed to furnish a warning, tends instead to fill the irreverent with amusement. While under the control of its founder and governor, who combined all the virtues, it is represented as enjoying peace and prosperity. Demagogism had no control. The reign of gossip had not begun. The great discovery had not been made that men were merely incidents of newspapers. Care was taken that the children should not imbibe any false principles, that is, any principles which the (p. 257) ruling powers thought false. The schools did not furnish much instruction, but owing to this considerate watchfulness they were innocent if they were inefficient. Still this ingenious arrangement for stopping the progress of the human mind could not work forever. From the start there was a dangerous element, though in this case the colonists had not come from New England but from the Middle States. Very speedily that innate depravity of the human heart which does not like to hear a clergyman read prayers, which looks with suspicion upon a liturgy, began to manifest itself. This, however, was kept under control until the arrival of new colonists. This Eden was then invaded not by one serpent only, but by several. Four of them were clergymen; one a Presbyterian, one a Methodist, one a Baptist, and one a Quaker. This was too much for the solitary Episcopalian who had previously been on the ground, and who is represented as combining a weak physical constitution with a very strong conception of his apostolic authority as a divine. It must be conceded that for a population of about five hundred souls the supply of spiritual teachers was ample. With them came also a lawyer and an editor. The seeds of dissolution were at once sown. The colonists became ungrateful, and began to inquire not only into the conduct of their governor, but even into the title by which he held some of his lands. He finally left the spot in disgust, and having first taken the precaution to dispose of his property at a good price, returned to his native country. A natural yearning to see the community he had established led the discoverer to revisit, after a few months, the scene of his trials. He sailed to the spot but he could not find it. A convulsion of nature similar to that which had raised the reef above the level of the (p. 258) waves had sunk it again out of sight. Ungrateful colonists, clergymen, editor, and lawyer, had all perished. In June, 1847, Cooper made a trip to the West, and went as far as Detroit. One result of this journey was the novel of "The Oak Openings; or, the Bee-Hunter." This must be looked upon as a decided failure. The desire to lecture his fellow-men on manners had now given place to a desire to edify them; and he was no more successful in the one than he had been in the other. In this instance the issue of the story depends on the course of an Indian who is converted to Christianity by witnessing the way in which a self-denying Methodist missionary meets his death. The whole winding-up is unnatural, and the process of turning the organizing chief of a great warlike confederacy into a Sunday-school hero is only saved from being commonplace by being absurd. Far more singular, however, was the central idea of "The Sea Lions," the story that followed. This is certainly one of the most remarkable conceptions that it ever entered into the mind of a novelist to create. It shows the intense hold religious convictions were taking of Cooper's feelings, and to what extremes of opinion they were carrying him. In "Wing-and-Wing" the hero had been discarded because he was a thorough infidel. But Cooper's sentiments had now moved a long distance beyond this milk-and-water way of dealing with religious differences. In "The Sea Lions" the hero merely denied the divinity of Christ, while he professed to hold him in reverence as the purest and most exalted of men. But if there was any one point on which the heroine was sound and likewise inflexible, it was the doctrine of the Trinity. Whatever else she (p. 259) doubted, she was absolutely sure of the incarnation. She would not unite herself with one who presumed to "set up his own feeble understanding of the nature of the mediation between God and man in opposition to the plainest language of revelation as well as to the prevalent belief of the Church." In this case the hero is converted, apparently by spending a winter in the Antarctic seas. An important agent in effecting this change of belief is a common seaman who improves every occasion to drop into the conversation going on, some unexpected Trinitarian remark. When the master has almost against hope saved his vessel, and in the thankfulness of his heart invokes blessing on the name of God, Stimson is on hand at his elbow to add, "and that of his only and _true_ Son." This novel is, indeed, a further but unneeded proof of how little Cooper was able to project himself out of the circle of his own feelings, or to aid any cause which he had near to his heart. He had had much to say about New England cant. Yet in this work he can find no words sufficiently strong to praise what he calls the zealous freedom and Christian earnestness of one of the most offensive canters that the whole range of fiction presents. It would be unjust to deny that when in "The Sea Lions" Cooper abandons his metaphysics and turns to his real business, that he creates a powerful story. One may almost be said at times to feel the cold, the desolation, the darkness, and the gloom of an Antarctic winter confronting and overshadowing the spirit. But there can be little that is more tedious than the dry chaff of theological discussion which is here threshed for us over and over again. Believers in the Trinity had as little reason as believers in Episcopacy to rejoice in Cooper's advocacy of their faith. There (p. 260) was nothing original in his views; there was nothing pointed or forcible in his statement of them. He meant to inculcate a lesson, and the only lesson that can possibly be drawn is the sufficiently absurd one that dwellers in the chilly spiritual clime of Unitarianism can be cured of their faith in that icy creed by being subjected to the horrors of a polar winter. Far more clearly does the novel show the falling-off in his artistic conceptions and the narrowing process his opinions were undergoing. At the rate this latter was taking place it seems probable that had he lived to write another novel on a theme similar to this, his hero would have been compelled to abandon his belief in Presbyterianism, Congregationalism, Methodism, or some other ism before he would be found worthy of being joined in the marriage relation to his Episcopalian bride. The "Ways of the Hour" was the last work that Cooper published. Everything he now wrote was written with a special object. The design of this was to attack trial by jury; but he was not prevented by that fact from discussing several other matters that were uppermost in his mind. The incidents of the story utterly destroyed the effectiveness of the lesson that it was intended to convey. It would be dignifying too much many of the events related in it to say that they are improbabilities: they are simply impossibilities. The "Ways of the Hour" was, however, like the preceding novels, often full of suggestive remarks, on many other points than trial by jury. It showed in numerous instances the working of an acute, vigorous, and aggressive intellect. The good qualities it has need not be denied: only they are not the good qualities that belong to fiction. The pecuniary profits that his works brought him during this (p. 261) latter period of his life there are, perhaps, no means of ascertaining. Much of the literary activity of his last years was due to necessity rather than to inspiration. He had been concerned for a long time in company with a number of men of business in a series of cotton speculations, and in others connected with Western lands. In both cases the ventures were unprofitable, and the desire of retrieving his losses was one of the causes that led to this constant literary production. There were other circumstances, too, besides his mere unpopularity that had tended to reduce the amount gained from what he wrote. After 1838, the income received from England naturally fell off, in consequence of the change in the law of copyright. The act of Parliament passed in that year provided that no foreign author outside of British dominions should have copyright in those dominions unless the country to which he belonged gave copyright to the English author. No fault can be found with this legislation on the score of justice. The value of anything produced by a citizen of the United States fell at once as a necessary consequence of the want of protection against piracy. The British publisher, not from any motive of mere personal gain, but from an unselfish desire by retaliatory proceedings to bring about a better state of things, went speedily to work to plunder the American author who favored international copyright in order to show his disgust at the conduct of the American publisher who opposed it. As a matter of fact Cooper's novels were from that time published in Great Britain, in cheap form, and sold at a cheap price. Such reprints could not but lower the amount which could be offered for his work. Newspaper reports, the (p. 262) correctness of which can neither be affirmed nor denied, frequently mention that for the copyright of each of his earlier novels he was in the habit of receiving a thousand guineas. We know positively that for his later tales, as fast as they were written, Bentley, his London publisher, usually paid him three hundred pounds each. In America circumstances of another kind contributed to reduce the profits from his works. Most of them were published at a price that would have required an immense sale to make them remunerative at all. It was about 1840 that two weekly newspapers in New York, "The New World," and "The Brother Jonathan," had begun the practice of reprinting in their columns the writings of the most popular novelists which were then coming out in England. As soon as these were finished they were brought out in parts and sold at a small price. This piracy was so successful that imitators sprang up everywhere. The large publishing houses were soon obliged to follow in the wake of the newspaper establishments. The reign of the so-called "cheap and nasty" literature began. The productions of the greatest foreign novelists were sold for a song. The native writer was subjected to a competition which forced him at once to lower his price or to go unread. Beginning with "Wing-and-Wing," the rate at which Cooper's works were published furnishes a striking commentary upon the cheap professions of sympathy with letters current in this country, indicates suggestively the inspiriting inducements held out by the law-making power to enter upon the career of authorship, and shows with disgraceful clearness how utterly the interests of the men engaged in the creation of literature had been subordinated to the (p. 263) greed of those who traded in it. The barest recital of the facts makes evident the nature of the encouragement given. "Wing-and-Wing" was published at twenty-five cents a volume. So were "Wyandotte," "The Redskins," "The Crater," "Jack Tier," "The Oak Openings," and "The Sea Lions." The four volumes of the series "Afloat and Ashore" were published at thirty-seven and a half cents each; and at the same rate "Satanstoe" came out, and also "Ned Myers." It was not till Cooper's last work appeared that the price went up as high as a dollar and twenty-five cents. This was in one volume; but it is to be kept in mind, in considering these prices, that in America his novels regularly appeared in two. One further experiment Cooper made in a new field; and with it the record of his literary life closes. In the year 1850 he tried the stage. On the 18th of June a comedy written by him was brought out at Burton's Theatre, New York. It was entitled, "Upside Down; or, Philosophy in Petticoats." For the three nights following the 18th it was acted, and was then withdrawn. It has never been played since, nor has it been published. All these years he spent his time mainly in his home at Cooperstown. There, besides the pleasure he found in the improvement of the extensive grounds about his house, he gave full vent to that latent passion for wasting money in agricultural operations, which seems to be one of the most widely-extended peculiarities of the English race. On the eastern shore of the lake, about a mile from the village, he bought a farm of about two hundred acres which he called the "Châlet." The view from it was exceedingly beautiful, looking as it did down the Valley of (p. 264) the Susquehanna. The farm, too, had its picturesque and poetical features; but unhappily it was little adapted to practical agriculture. It stood on a hill-side, the abruptness of which was only occasionally relieved by a few acres of level land. Much of it was still covered with the original forest; and a good deal of the cleared land was full of stumps. To superintend the removal of these latter was one of Cooper's chief relaxations from mental labor. It is a desirable thing to do, but it has never been found pecuniarily profitable in itself. To this place Cooper daily drove in the summer season, and spent two or three hours directing the operations that were going on, finding constantly new ways to spend money, and doubtless pleasing himself occasionally with the fancy that the farm would at some time pay expenses. And in the best sense it did pay expenses. It gave regular diversion to his life; it ministered constantly to his enjoyment of the beautiful in scenery; and it occupied his thoughts with perpetual projects of improvement for which its character furnished unlimited opportunities. He had bought it for pleasure and not for profit; and in that it yielded him a full return for the money invested. CHAPTER XII. (p. 265) 1850-1851. Cooper, at the time he published his last novel, was more than sixty years of age; but as yet he showed no traces of physical or intellectual decay. His literary activity remained unabated, though he was now purposing to direct it to other fields than that of fiction. A decided change was likewise taking place in the estimation in which he was held by the public. He had not become popular, to be sure; but he had become less unpopular. There was, moreover, a feeling pretty generally prevalent that he had been hardly used; that in many respects he had been a wronged and persecuted man. The ranks of those who had remained faithful to him during all these years of obloquy were beginning to be largely swelled from the newer generation which had neither part in, nor knowledge of, the bitter controversies in which he had been concerned. His friends were purposing to give a public dinner in his honor in order to show their regard for him as a man, and their appreciation of the credit his writings had brought to his country. Before this project could be carried into effect, the illness had overtaken him which ended in death. On the other hand time had, in some respect, mollified his own feelings. Many things had occurred to make him more gentle and forbearing. Much of this was certainly due to the increasing strength of his (p. 266) religious convictions, which as has been noticed, steadily deepened during his last years. It is clear from much that appears in his later novels that these had, to some extent, been perverted from their legitimate effect, and had made him at intervals illiberal and even bitter. But they had brought calm to an excitable nature, and healing to a spirit which had been sometimes sorely wounded. In 1851 he carried out a plan long before determined upon. In March of that year he became a communicant in the Episcopal church, and in the following July was confirmed by his brother-in-law, Bishop DeLancey. In the summer of 1850 he was in New York city. "At this time," says Bryant, "his personal appearance was remarkable. He seemed in perfect health, and in the highest energy and activity of his faculties. I have scarcely seen any man at that period of life on whom his years sat more lightly." But even then the disease which was to destroy him was lurking in his system. In the beginning of April, 1851, he came again to New York partly for medical advice, and his changed appearance struck all his friends with surprise and sorrow. The digestive organs were impaired, the liver was torpid, and a general feebleness had taken the place of the vigor for which he had previously been distinguished. He remained several weeks in the city and then returned to Cooperstown. That place he never left again. The disease made rapid advances, and at last became a confirmed dropsy. In the latter part of August his old and intimate friend, Dr. Francis, of New York, went up to Cooper's country home to make a full examination of his condition. He found him worse, if anything, than he expected. There was, in fact, little hope of (p. 267) recovery. The physician told him frankly of the danger he was in, and of the possibilities of restoration to health that still existed. Though his own perception of his condition was too clear to make the announcement a shock, it could not have been other than a disappointment. He had many projects still unfulfilled. Plans of new works were in his mind; and one of them on the "Towns of Manhattan," partly written, was at that very time in press. But he met the news as bravely as he had the various troubles of his eventful life. After Dr. Francis' departure the malady steadily increased, and it soon became evident that expectation of recovery must be given up. During all these days he was quiet and cheerful, and his last hours were full of peace and hope. On Sunday, the 14th of September, 1851, at half-past one in the afternoon, he died. Had he lived one day longer he would have been sixty-two years old. In a little more than four months his wife followed him to the grave. They lie side by side in the grounds of Christ's Church at Cooperstown. His property was found, at his death, to be much impaired in value. Enough was left to insure the family a competency, but it became necessary to give up the mansion where so many years of his life had been passed. The dwelling went, accordingly, into other hands, and it was not a long while after that it burned down. Part of the grounds have since become public property, and that which is not so employed is little better than a waste. The death of men of letters did not excite at that time the attention which interest or fashion pays to it now. Cooper's relations, too, with many, had been of so strained a nature that it was hardly to be (p. 268) expected that his loss should arouse universal regret. Yet it was felt on all hands that a great man had fallen. On the 25th of September, a few days after his death, a meeting was held in the City Hall, New York, with the intent to make a suitable demonstration of respect to his memory. Washington Irving presided, and a committee of prominent men of letters was appointed to carry into effect the measures for which the gathering had been called. A discourse on the life, genius, and writings of the dead author was fixed upon to be given by his intimate friend, William Cullen Bryant. On the 25th of February, 1852, this address was delivered at Metropolitan Hall before the most cultivated audience the city could boast. With a singular ineptitude, not generally appreciated at the time, Daniel Webster was selected to preside. He had nothing to say, and he said it wretchedly. It was doubtful if he had ever read a single work of the novelist. That, at least, is a natural inference from his speech, which, furthermore, is little else than a collection of dreary platitudes. It was after this fashion that he paid his respects to the man whose memory they had come together to honor. "As far as I am acquainted," he remarked, "with the writings of Mr. Cooper, they uphold good sentiments, sustain good morals, and maintain just taste; and after saying this I have next to add, that all his writings are truly patriotic and American throughout and throughout." This did not even reach the respectability of commonplace, and the commonplaces to which Webster soared in other parts of his speech did not have the poor merit of being sonorous. Still he looked so majestic and imposing that most of his audience were profoundly impressed by the justness and value (p. 269) of his observations. Any failure, however, on his part in the matter of what he said, was more than made up by the address delivered by Byrant. It is not very long; it contains a few errors of fact, especially in the dates; but it is not only the most eloquent tribute that has been paid to the dead author, it has also remained during all these years the fullest account of the life he lived, and the work he did. * * * * * More than sixty years have gone by since Cooper began to write; more than thirty since he ceased to live. If his reputation has not advanced during the period that has passed since his death, it has certainly not receded. Nor does it seem likely to undergo much change in the future. The world has pretty well made up its mind as to the value of his work. The estimate in which it is held will not be materially raised or lowered by anything which criticism can now utter. This will itself be criticised for being too obvious; for it can do little but repeat, with variation of phrase, what has been constantly said and often better said before. There is, however, now a chance of its meeting with fairer consideration. The cloud of depreciation which seems to settle upon the achievement of every man of letters soon after death, it was Cooper's fortune to encounter during life. This was partly due to the literary reaction which had taken place against the form of fiction he adopted, but far more to the personal animosities he aroused. We are now far enough removed from the prejudices and passions of his time to take an impartial view of the man, and to state, without bias for or against him, the conclusions to which the world has very generally come as to his merits and defects as a writer. At the outset it is to be said that Cooper is one of the people's (p. 270) novelists as opposed to the novelists of highly-cultivated men. This does not imply that he has not been, and is not still, a favorite with many of the latter. The names of those, indeed, who have expressed excessive admiration for his writings far surpass in reputation and even critical ability those who have spoken of him depreciatingly. Still the general statement is true that it is with the masses he has found favor chiefly. The sale of his works has known no abatement since his death. It goes on constantly to an extent that will surprise any one who has not made an examination of this particular point. His tales continue to be read or rather devoured by the uncultivated many. They are often contemptuously criticised by the cultivated few, who sometimes affect to look upon any admiration they may have once had for them as belonging exclusively to the undisciplined taste of childhood. This state of things may be thought decisive against the permanent reputation of the novelist. The opinion of the cultivated few, it is said, must prevail over that of the uncultivated many. True as this is in certain cases, it is just as untrue in others. It is, in fact, often absurdly false when the general reading public represents the uncultivated many. On matters which come legitimately within the scope of their judgment the verdict of the great mass of men is infinitely more trustworthy than that of any small body of men, no matter how cultivated. Of plenty of that narrow judgment of select circles which mistakes the cackle of its little coterie for the voice of the world, Cooper was made the subject, and sometimes the victim, during his lifetime. There were any number of writers, now never heard of, who were going to outlive him, according to literary prophecies then (p. 271) current, which had everything oracular in their utterance except ambiguity. Especially is this true of the notices of his stories of the sea. As I have turned over the pages of defunct criticism, I have come across the names of several authors whose tales descriptive of ocean life were, according to many contemporary estimates, immensely superior to anything of the kind Cooper had produced or could produce. Some of these writers enjoyed for a time high reputation. Most of them are now as utterly forgotten as the men who celebrated their praises. But however unfair as a whole may be the estimate of cultivated men in any particular case, their adverse opinion is pretty certain to have a foundation of justice in its details. This is unquestionably true in the present instance. Characteristics there are of Cooper's writings which would and do repel many. Defects exist both in manner and matter. Part of the unfavorable judgment he has received is due to the prevalence of minor faults, disagreeable rather than positively bad. These, in many cases, sprang from the quantity of what he did and the rapidity with which he did it. The amount that Cooper wrote is something that in fairness must always be taken into consideration. He who has crowded into a single volume the experience of a life must concede that he stands at great advantage as regards matters of detail, and especially as regards perfection of form, with him who has manifested incessant literary activity in countless ways. It was the immense quantity that Cooper wrote and the haste and inevitable carelessness which wait upon great production, that are responsible for many of his minor faults. Incongruities in the conception of his tales, as well as in their (p. 272) execution, often make their appearance. Singular blunders can be found which escaped even his own notice in the final revision he gave his works. In "Mercedes of Castile," for instance, the heroine presents her lover on his outward passage with a cross framed of sapphire stones. These, she tells him, are emblems of fidelity. When she comes to inquire about them after his return she speaks of them as turquoise. Again, in "The Deerslayer" three castles of a curious set of chessmen are given in one part of the story to the Indians. Later on, two other castles of the same set make their appearance. This is a singular mistake for Cooper to overlook, for chess was a game of which he was very fond. In the matter of language this rapidity and carelessness often degenerated into downright slovenliness. It was bad enough to resort to the same expedients and to repeat the same scenes. Still from this charge few prolific novelists can be freed. But in Cooper there were often words and phrases which he worked to death. In "The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish" there is so perpetual a reference to the quiet way in which the younger Heathcote talks and acts that it has finally anything but a quieting effect upon the reader's feelings. In "The Headsman of Berne," "warm" in the sense of "well-to-do," a disagreeable usage at best, occurs again and again, until the feeling of disagreeableness it inspires at first becomes at last positive disgust. This trick of repetition reaches the climax of meaninglessness in "The Ways of the Hour." During the trial scene the judge repeats on every pretext and as a part of almost every speech, the sentence "time is precious;" and it is about the only point on which he is represented as taking a clear and decided stand. There were other faults in the matter of language that to some (p. 273) will seem far worse. I confess to feeling little admiration for that grammar-school training which consists in teaching the pupil how much more he knows about our tongue than the great masters who have moulded it; which practically sets up the claim that the only men who are able to write English properly are the men who have never shown any capacity to write it at all; and which seeks, in a feeble way, to cramp usage by setting up distinctions that never existed, and laying down rules which it requires uncommon ignorance of the language to make or to heed. Still there are lengths to which the most strenuous stickler for freedom of speech does not venture to go. There are prejudices in favor of the exclusive legitimacy of certain constructions that he feels bound to respect. He recognizes, as a general rule, for instance, that when the subject is in the singular it is desirable that the verb should be in the same number. For conventionalities of syntax of this kind Cooper was very apt to exhibit disregard, not to say disdain. He too often passed the bounds that divide liberty from license. It scarcely needs to be asserted that in most of these cases the violation of idiom arose from haste or carelessness. But there were some blunders which can only be imputed to pure unadulterated ignorance. He occasionally used words in senses unknown to past or present use. He sometimes employed grammatical forms that belong to no period in the history of the English language. A curious illustration of a word combining in itself both these errors is _wists_, a verb, in the third person, singular. If this be anything it should be _wist_, the preterite of _wot_, and should have accordingly the meaning "knew." Cooper uses it in fact as a present with the (p. 274) sense of "wishes." Far worse than occasional errors in the use of words are errors of construction. His sentences are sometimes involved in the most hopeless way, and the efforts of grammar to untie the knot by any means known to it serve only to make conspicuous its own helplessness. All this is, in itself, of slight importance when set off against positive merits. But it is constantly forced upon the reader's attention by the fact that Cooper himself was exceedingly critical on points of speech. He was perpetually going out of his way to impart bits of information about words and their uses, and it is rare that he blunders into correct statement or right inference. He often, indeed, in these matters carried ignorance of what he was talking about, and confidence in his own knowledge of it to the extremest verge of the possible. He sometimes mistook dialectic or antiquated English for classical, and laboriously corrected the latter by putting the former in parentheses by its side. In orthography and pronunciation he had never got beyond that puerile conception which fancies it a most creditable feature in a word that its sound shall not be suggested by anything in its spelling. In the case of proper names this was more than creditable; it was aristocratic. So in "The Crater" great care is taken to tell us that the hero's name, though written Woolston, was pronounced Wooster; and that he so continued to sound it in spite of a miserable Yankee pedagogue who tried hard to persuade him to follow the spelling. So, again, in "The Ways of the Hour" we are sedulously informed that Wilmeter is to be pronounced Wilmington. But absurdities like these belonged not so much to Cooper as to the good old times of gentlemanly ignorance in (p. 275) which he lived. In his etymological vagaries, however, he sometimes left his age far behind. In "The Oak Openings" he enters upon the discussion of the word "shanty." He finds the best explanation of its origin is to suppose it a corruption of _chiènté_, a word which he again supposed might exist in Canadian French, and provided it existed there, he further supposed that in that dialect it might mean "dog-kennel." The student of language, much hardened to this sort of work on the part of men of letters, can read with resignation "this plausible derivation," as it is styled. Cooper, however, not content with the simple glory of originating it, actually uses throughout the whole work _chiènté_ instead of "shanty." This rivals, if it does not outdo, the linguistic excesses of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. There are imperfections far more serious than these mistakes in language. He rarely attained to beauty of style. The rapidity with which he wrote forbids the idea that he ever strove earnestly for it. Even the essential but minor grace of clearness is sometimes denied him. He had not, in truth, the instincts of the born literary artist. Satisfied with producing the main effect, he was apt to be careless in the consistent working out of details. Plot, in any genuine sense of the word "plot," is to be found in very few of his stories. He seems rarely to have planned all the events beforehand; or, if he did, anything was likely to divert him from his original intention. The incidents often appear to have been suggested as the tale was in process of composition. Hence the constant presence of incongruities with the frequent result of bringing about a bungling and incomplete development. The introduction of certain characters is sometimes so heralded as to lead us to expect from (p. 276) them far more than they actually perform. Thus, in "The Two Admirals," Mr. Thomas Wychecombe is brought in with a fullness of description that justifies the reader in entertaining a rational expectation of finding in him a satisfactory scoundrel, capable, desperate, full of resources, needing the highest display of energy and ability to be overcome. This reasonable anticipation is disappointed. At the very moment when respectable determined villainy is in request, he fades away into a poltroon of the most insignificant type who is not able to hold his own against an ordinary house-steward. The prolixity of Cooper's introductions is a fault so obvious to every one that it needs here reference merely and not discussion. A similar remark may be made as to his moralizing, which was apt to be cheap and commonplace. He was much disposed to waste his own time and to exhaust the patience of his reader by establishing with great fullness of demonstration and great positiveness of assertion the truth of principles which most of the human race are humbly content to regard as axioms. A greater because even a more constantly recurring fault is the gross improbability to be found in the details of his stories. There is too much fiction in his fiction. We are continually exasperated by the inadequacy of the motive assigned; we are irritated by the unnatural if not ridiculous conduct of the characters. These are perpetually doing unreasonable things, or doing reasonable things at unsuitable times. They take the very path that must lead them into the danger they are seeking to shun. They engage in making love when they ought to be flying for their lives. His heroes, in particular, exhibit a capacity for going to sleep in critical situations, which may not transcend (p. 277) extraordinary human experience, but does ordinary human belief. Nor is improbability always confined to details. It pervades sometimes the central idea of the story. In "The Bravo," for instance, the hero is the most pious of sons, the most faithful of friends, the most devoted of lovers. The part he has to play in the tale is to appear to be a cutthroat of the worst type, without doing a single thing to merit his reputation. It is asking too much of human credulity to believe that a really good man could long sustain the character of a remorseless desperado by merely making faces. This improbability, moreover, is most marked in the tales which are designed to teach a lesson. A double disadvantage is the result. The story is spoiled for the sake of the moral; and the moral is lost by the grossly improbable nature of the story. In the last novel Cooper wrote this is strikingly seen. He who can credit the possibility of the events occurring that are told in "The Ways of the Hour" must give up at the same time his belief in the maxim that truth is stranger than fiction. It has now become a conventional criticism of Cooper that his characters are conventional. Such a charge can be admitted without seriously disparaging the value of his work. In the kind of fiction to which his writings belong, the persons are necessarily so subordinate to the events that nearly all novelists of this class have been subjected to this same criticism. So regularly is it made, indeed, that Scott when he wrote a review of some of his own tales for the "Quarterly" felt obliged to adopt it in speaking of himself. He describes his heroes as amiable, insipid young men, the sort of pattern people that nobody cares a farthing about. Untrue as this is of many of Scott's creations, (p. 278) it is unquestionably true of the higher characters that Cooper introduces. They are often described in the most laudatory terms; but it is little they do that makes them worthy of the epithets with which they are honored. Their talk is often of a kind not known to human society. One peculiarity is especially noticeable. A stiffness, not to say an appearance of affectation is often given to the conversation by the use of _thou_ and _thee_. This was probably a survival in Cooper of the Quakerism of his ancestors; for he sometimes used it in his private letters. But since the action of his stories was in nearly all cases laid in a period in which the second person singular had become obsolete in ordinary speech, an unnatural character is given to the dialogue, which removes it still farther from the language of real life. His failure in characterization was undoubtedly greatest in the women he drew. Cooper's ardent admirers have always resented this charge. Each one of them points to some single heroine that fulfills the highest requirements that criticism could demand. It seems to me that close study of his writings must confirm the opinion generally entertained. All his utterances show that the theoretical view he had of the rights, the duties, and the abilities of women, were of the most narrow and conventional type. Unhappily it was a limitation of his nature that he could not invest with charm characters with whom he was not in moral and intellectual sympathy. There was, in his eyes, but one praiseworthy type of womanly excellence. It did not lie in his power to represent any other; on one occasion he unconsciously satirized his inability even to conceive of any other. In "Mercedes of Castile" the heroine is (p. 279) thus described by her aunt: "Her very nature," she says, "is made up of religion and female decorum." It is evident that the author fancied that in this commendation he was exhausting praise. These are the sentiments of a man with whom devoutness and deportment have become the culminating conception of the possibilities that lie in the female character. His heroines naturally conformed to his belief. They are usually spoken of as spotless beings. They are made up of retiring sweetness, artlessness, and simplicity. They are timid, shrinking, helpless. They shudder with terror on any decent pretext. But if they fail in higher qualities, they embody in themselves all conceivable combinations of the proprieties and minor morals. They always give utterance to the most unexceptionable sentiments. They always do the extremely correct thing. The dead perfection of their virtues has not the alloy of a single redeeming fault. The reader naturally wearies of these uninterestingly discreet and admirable creatures in fiction as he would in real life. He feels that they would be a good deal more attractive if they were a good deal less angelic. With all their faultlessness, moreover, they do not attain an ideal which is constantly realized by their living, but faulty sisters. They do not show the faith, the devotion, the self-forgetfulness, and self-sacrifice which women exhibit daily without being conscious that they have done anything especially creditable. They experience, so far as their own words and acts furnish evidence of their feelings, a sort of lukewarm emotion which they dignify with the name of love. But they not merely suspect without the slightest provocation, they give up the men to whom they have pledged the devotion of their lives, for reasons for which no one would think of abandoning an ordinary (p. 280) acquaintance. In "The Spy" the heroine distrusts her lover's integrity because another woman does not conceal her fondness for him. In "The Heidenmauer" one of the female characters resigns the man she loves because on one occasion, when heated by wine and maddened by passion, he had done violence to the sacred elements. There was never a woman in real life, whose heart and brain were sound, that conformed her conduct to a model so contemptible. It is just to say of Cooper that as he advanced in years he improved upon this feeble conception. The female characters of his earlier tales are never able to do anything successfully but to faint. In his later ones they are given more strength of mind as well as nobility of character. But at best, the height they reach is little loftier than that of the pattern woman of the regular religious novel. The reader cannot help picturing for all of them the same dreary and rather inane future. He is as sure, as if their career had been actually unrolled before his eyes, of the part they will perform in life. They will all become leading members of Dorcas societies; they will find perpetual delight in carrying to the poor bundles of tracts and packages of tea; they will scour the highways and by-ways for dirty, ragged, hatless, shoeless, and godless children, whom they will hale into the Sunday-school; they will shine with unsurpassed skill in the manufacture of slippers for the rector; they will exhibit a fiery enthusiasm in the decoration and adornment of the church at Christmas and Easter festivals. Far be the thought that would deny praise to the mild raptures and delicate aspirations of gentle natures such as Cooper drew. But in novels, at least, one longs for a (p. 281) ruddier life than flows in the veins of these pale, bleached-out personifications of the proprieties. Women like them may be far more useful members of society than the stormier characters of fiction that are dear to the carnal-minded. They may very possibly be far more agreeable to live with; but they are not usually the women for whom men are willing or anxious to die. These are imperfections that have led to the undue depreciation of Cooper among many highly cultivated men. Taken by themselves they might seem enough to ruin his reputation beyond redemption. It is a proof of his real greatness that he triumphs over defects which would utterly destroy the fame of a writer of inferior power. It is with novels as with men. There are those with great faults which please us and impress us far more than those in which the component parts are better balanced. Whatever its other demerits, Cooper's best work never sins against the first law of fictitious composition, that the story shall be full of sustained interest. It has power, and power always fascinates, even though accompanied with much that would naturally excite repulsion or dislike. Moreover, poorly as he sometimes told his story, he had a story to tell. The permanence and universality of his reputation are largely due to this fact. In many modern creations full of subtle charm and beauty, the narrative, the material framework of the fiction, has been made so subordinate to the delineation of character and motive, that the reader ceases to feel much interest in what men do in the study which is furnished him of why they do it. In this highly-rarefied air of philosophic analysis, incident and event wither and die. Work of this kind is apt to have within its sphere an unbounded popularity; but its sphere is limited, and can never include a tithe of that vast (p. 282) public for which Cooper wrote and which has always cherished and kept alive his memory, while that of men of perhaps far finer mould has quite faded away. It is only fair, also, to judge him by his successes and not by his failures; by the work he did best, and not by what he did moderately well. His strength lies in the description of scenes, in the narration of events. In the best of these he has had no superior, and very few equals. The reader will look in vain for the revelation of sentiment, or for the exhibition of passion. The love-story is rarely well done; but the love-story plays a subordinate part in the composition. The moment his imagination is set on fire with the conception of adventure, vividness and power come unbidden to his pen. The pictures he then draws are as real to the mind as if they were actually seen by the eye. It is doubtless due to the fact that these fits of inspiration came to him only in certain kinds of composition, that the excellence of many of his stories lies largely in detached scenes. Still his best works are a moving panorama, in which the mind is no sooner sated with one picture than its place is taken by another equally fitted to fix the attention and to stir the heart. The genuineness of his power, in such cases, is shown by the perfect simplicity of the agencies employed. There is no pomp of words; there is an entire lack of even the attempt at meretricious adornment; there is not the slightest appearance of effort to impress the reader. In his portrayal of these scenes Cooper is like nature, in that lie accomplishes his greatest effects with the fewest means. If, as we are sometimes told, these things are easily done, the pertinent question always remains, why are they not done. Moreover, while in his higher characters he has almost (p. 283) absolutely failed, he has succeeded in drawing a whole group of strongly-marked lower ones. Birch, in "The Spy," Long Tom Coffin and Boltrope in "The Pilot," the squatter in "The Prairie," Cap in "The Pathfinder," and several others there are, any one of which would be enough of itself to furnish a respectable reputation to many a novelist who fancies himself far superior to Cooper as a delineator of character. He had neither the skill nor power to draw the varied figures with which Scott, with all the reckless prodigality of genius, crowded his canvas. Yet in the gorgeous gallery of the great master of romantic fiction, alive with men and women of every rank in life and of every variety of nature, there is, perhaps, no one person who so profoundly impresses the imagination as Cooper's crowning creation, the man of the forests. It is not that Scott could not have done what his follower did, had he so chosen; only that as a matter of fact he did not. Leather-Stocking is one of the few original characters, perhaps the only great original character, that American fiction has added to the literature of the world. The more uniform excellence of Cooper, however, lies in the pictures he gives of the life of nature. Forest, ocean, and stream are the things for which he really cares; and men and women are the accessories, inconvenient and often uncomfortable, that must be endured. Of the former he speaks with a loving particularity that lets nothing escape the attention. Yet minute as are often his descriptions, he did not fall into that too easily besetting sin of the novelist, of overloading his picture with details. To advance the greater he sacrificed the less. Cooper looked at nature with the eye of a painter and not of a (p. 284) photographer. He fills the imagination even more than he does the sight. Hence the permanence of the impression which he leaves upon the mind. His descriptions, too, produce a greater effect at the time and cling longer to the memory because they fall naturally into the narrative, and form a real part in the development of the story; they are not merely dragged in to let the reader know what the writer can do. "If Cooper," said Balzac, "had succeeded in the painting of character to the same extent that he did in the painting of the phenomena of nature, he would have uttered the last word of our art." This author I have quoted several times, because far better even than George Sand, or indeed any who have criticised the American novelist, he seems to me to have seen clearly wherein the latter succeeded and wherein he failed. To this it is just to add one word which Cooper himself would have regarded as the highest tribute that could be paid to what he did. Whatever else we may say of his writings, their influence is always a healthy influence. Narrow and prejudiced he sometimes was in his opinions; but he hated whatever was mean and low in character. It is with beautiful things and with noble things that he teaches us to sympathize. Here are no incitements to passion, no prurient suggestions of sensual delights. The air which breathes through all his fictions is as pure as that which sweeps the streets of his mountain home. It is as healthy as nature itself. To read one of his best works after many of the novels of the day, is like passing from the heated and stifling atmosphere of crowded rooms to the purity, the freedom, and the boundlessness of the forest. In these foregoing pages I have attempted to portray an author (p. 285) who was something more than an author, who in any community would have been a marked man had he never written a word. I have not sought to hide his foibles and his faults, his intolerance and his dogmatism, the irascibility of his temperament, the pugnacity of his nature, the illiberality and injustice of many of his opinions, the unreasonableness as well as the imprudence of the course he often pursued. To his friends and admirers these points will seem to have been insisted upon too strongly. Their feelings may, to a certain extent, be just. Cooper is, indeed, a striking instance of how much more a man loses in the estimation of the world by the exhibition of foibles, than he will by that of vices. In this work one side of the life he lived--the side he presented to the public--is the only one that, owing to circumstances, could be depicted. It does not present the most attractive features of his character. That exclusiveness of temperament which made him misjudged by the many, endeared him only the more to the few who were in a position to see how different he was from what he seemed. In nothing is the essential sweetness of Cooper's nature more clearly shown than in the intense affection he inspired in the immediate circle which surrounded him or that was dependent upon him. He could not fail to feel keenly at times how utterly his character and motives were misapprehended and belied. "As for myself," says the hero of "Miles Wallingford," "I can safely say that in scarce a circumstance of my life, that has brought me the least under the cognizance of the public, have I ever been judged justly. In various instances have I been praised for acts that were either totally without any merit, or at least the particular merit imputed to them; while I have been even (p. 286) persecuted for deeds that deserved praise." His faults, in fact, were faults of temper rather than of character. Like the defects of his writings, too, they lay upon the surface, and were seen and read of all men. But granting everything that can be urged against him, impartial consideration must award him an ample excess of the higher virtues. His failings were the failings of a man who possessed in the fullest measure vigor of mind, intensity of conviction, and capability of passion. Disagree with him one could hardly help; one could never fail to respect him. Many of the common charges against him are due to pure ignorance. Of these, perhaps, the most common and the most absolutely baseless is the one which imputes to him excessive literary vanity. Pride, even up to the point of arrogance, he had; but even this was only in a small degree connected with his reputation as an author. In the nearly one hundred volumes he wrote, not a single line can be found which implies that he had an undue opinion of his own powers. On the contrary, there are many that would lead to the conclusion that his appreciation of himself and of his achievement was far lower than even the coldest estimate would form. The prevalent misconception on this point was in part due to his excessive sensitiveness to criticism and his resentment of it when hostile. It was partly due, also, to a certain outspokenness of nature which led him to talk of himself as freely as he would talk of a stranger. But his whole conduct showed the falseness of any such impression. From all the petty tricks to which literary vanity resorts, he was absolutely free. He utterly disdained anything that savored of manoeuvring for reputation. He indulged in no devices to revive the decaying attention of the (p. 287) public. He sought no favors from those who were in a position to confer the notoriety which so many mistake for fame. He went, in fact, to the other extreme, and refused an aid that he might with perfect propriety have received. In the early period of his literary career he wrote a good deal for the "New York Patriot," a newspaper edited by his intimate friend, Colonel Gardiner. He objected to the publication in it of a favorable notice, which had been prepared of "The Pioneers," because by the fact of being an occasional contributor he was indirectly connected with the journal. Accordingly the criticism was not inserted. It would not have been possible for him to offer to review his own works, as Scott both offered to do and did of the "Tales of My Landlord," in the "Quarterly." Nor would he have acceded to a request to furnish a review of any production of his own, as Irving did, in the same periodical, of his "Conquest of Granada." No publisher who knew him, even slightly, would have ventured to make him a proposition of the kind. I am expressing no opinion as to the propriety of these particular acts; only that Cooper, constituted as he was, could not for a moment have entertained the thought of doing them. The fearlessness and the truthfulness of his nature are conspicuous in almost every incident of his career. He fought for a principle as desperately as other men fight for life. The storm of detraction through which he went never once shook the almost haughty independence of his conduct, or swerved him in the slightest from the course he had chosen. The only thing to which he unquestioningly submitted was the truth. His loyalty to that was of a kind almost Quixotic. He was in later (p. 288) years dissatisfied with himself, because, in his novel of "The Pilot," he had put the character of Paul Jones too high. He thought that the hero had been credited in that work with loftier motives than those by which he was actually animated. Feelings such as these formed the groundwork of his character, and made him intolerant of the devious ways of many who were satisfied with conforming to a lower code of morality. There was a royalty in his nature that disdained even the semblance of deceit. With other authors one feels that the man is inferior to his work. With him it is the very reverse. High qualities, such as these, so different from the easy-going virtues of common men, are more than an offset to infirmities of temper, to unfairness of judgment, or to unwisdom of conduct. His life was the best answer to many of the charges brought against his country and his countrymen; for whatever he may have fancied, the hostility he encountered was due far less to the matter of his criticisms than to their manner. Against the common cant, that in republican governments the tyranny of public sentiment will always bring conduct to the same monotonous level, and opinion to the same subservient uniformity, Democracy can point to this dauntless son who never flinched from any course because it brought odium, who never flattered popular prejudices, and who never truckled to a popular cry. America has had among her representatives of the irritable race of writers many who have shown far more ability to get on pleasantly with their fellows than Cooper. She has had several gifted with higher spiritual insight than he, with broader and juster views of life, (p. 289) with finer ideals of literary art, and, above all, with far greater delicacy of taste. But she counts on the scanty roll of her men of letters the name of no one who acted from purer patriotism or loftier principle. She finds among them all no manlier nature, and no more heroic soul. APPENDIX. (p. 290) PARTIAL BIBLIOGRAPHY OF COOPER'S WRITINGS. The following list embraces the first editions of Cooper's works; articles contributed to magazines; and two or three of the most important communications sent to the newspapers. The titles of his works, as published in England, were sometimes different from the titles used in the United States; and whenever this is the case the former are subjoined. It is also to be remarked that Cooper's works were sometimes published earlier in Europe than they were in America; but the dates given in this biography belong exclusively to the publication of his works in this country. With the exception of No. 45 and of No. 67, all his tales were originally published in two volumes in America; with the exception of No. 45 they were originally published in three volumes in England. First editions of many of his novels are now rarely to be found in libraries; and the titles given have in several cases, in consequence, been taken from contemporary book notices and not from personal examination. The titles are given in the order of publication of the writings. 1. Precaution; a Novel. 2 vols. New York: A. T. Goodrich & Co., 1820. The English edition appeared in March, 1821. 2. The Spy; a Tale of the Neutral Ground. By the Author of Precaution. 2 vols. New York: Wiley & Halsted, 1821. The English edition appeared in March, 1822. 3. The Pioneers; or the Sources of the Susquehanna. A Descriptive (p. 291) Tale. By the Author of Precaution. 2 vols. New York: Charles Wiley, 1823. The English edition appeared in March, 1823. 4. The Pilot; A Tale of the Sea. By the Author of The Pioneers, etc. 2 vols. New York: Charles Wiley, 1823. The first edition bears the imprint of 1823, but was not actually published until early in January, 1824. 5. Lionel Lincoln; or the Leaguer of Boston. By the Author of The Pioneers, Pilot, etc. 2 vols. New York: Charles Wiley, 1825. 6. The Last of the Mohicans. A Narrative of 1757. By the Author of The Pioneers. 2 vols. Philadelphia: H. C. Carey & I. Lea, 1826. 7. The Prairie; a Tale. By the Author of The Pioneers and The Last of the Mohicans. 2 vols. Philadelphia: Carey, Lea & Carey, 1827. 8. The Red Rover; a Tale. By the Author of The Pilot, etc., etc. 2 vols. Philadelphia: Carey, Lea & Carey, 1828. 9. Notions of the Americans; Picked up by a Travelling Bachelor. 2 vols. Philadelphia: Carey, Lea & Carey, 1828. 10. The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish; a Tale. By the Author of The Pioneers, Prairie, etc., etc. 2 vols. Philadelphia: Carey, Lea & Carey, 1829. In England this was published under the title of "The Borderers; or the Wept of Wish-ton-Wish." It has also been published with the title of "The Heathcotes." 11. The Water-Witch; or the Skimmer of the Seas. A Tale. By the Author of The Pilot, Red Rover, etc., etc., etc. 2 vols. Philadelphia: Carey & Lea, 1830. 12. The Bravo; a Tale. By the Author of The Spy, The Red Rover, The Water Witch, etc., etc., etc. 2 vols. Philadelphia: Carey & Lea, 1831. 13. Letter of J. Fenimore Cooper to Gen. Lafayette on the Expenditure of the United States of America. 50 pp. (p. 292) Paris: Baudry's Foreign Library, 1831. 14. The Heidenmauer; or the Benedictines. A Legend of the Rhine. By the Author of The Prairie, Red Rover, Bravo, etc., etc. 2 vols. Philadelphia: Carey & Lea, 1832. 15. Letter to the American Public. Dated Vevay, Canton de Vaud, Oct. 1, 1832; first published in Philadelphia National Gazette, Dec. 6. The subject is the Expenses' Controversy. It occupies about two columns. 16. The Headsman; or the Abbaye des Vignerons. A Tale. By the Author of The Bravo, etc., etc. 2 vols. Philadelphia: Carey, Lea & Blanchard, 1833. 17. A Letter to His Countrymen. By J. Fenimore-Cooper. 116 pp. New York: John Wiley, 1834. 18. The Monikins; edited by the Author of The Spy. 2 vols. Philadelphia: Carey, Lea & Blanchard, 1835. 19. Comparative Resources of the American Navy. In Naval Magazine, vol. i, No. 1, January, 1836, pp. 19-33. 20. Hints on Manning the Navy, etc., etc. In Naval Magazine, vol. i., No. 2, March, 1836, pp. 176-191. This was published the following May in pamphlet form by the "Committee of Publication for the Naval Magazine." 21. Sketches of Switzerland. By an American. 2 vols. Philadelphia: Carey, Lea & Blanchard, 1836. The English title was "Excursions in Switzerland." 22. Sketches of Switzerland. By an American. Part Second. 2 vols. Philadelphia: Carey, Lea & Blanchard, 1836. The English title was "A Residence in France; with an Excursion up the Rhine, and a Second Visit to Switzerland." 23. Gleanings in Europe. By an American. 2 vols. Philadelphia: Carey, Lea & Blanchard, 1837. This work is devoted to France. Its English title is (p. 293) "Recollections of Europe." 24. Gleanings in Europe. England; by an American. 2 vols. Philadelphia: Carey, Lea & Blanchard, 1837. This was published in England under the title of "England; with Sketches of Society in the Metropolis." 25. Letter to the Editors of the Knickerbocker. (On the relations between himself and Sir Walter Scott, etc.) In Knickerbocker Magazine, vol. xi., April, 1838, pp. 380-386. 26. Gleanings in Europe. Italy; by an American. 2 vols. Philadelphia: Carey, Lea & Blanchard, 1838. Published in England under the title of "Excursions in Italy." 27. The American Democrat; or Hints on the Social and Civic Relations of the United States of America. By J. Fenimore Cooper. Pp. 192. Cooperstown: H. & E. Phinney, 1838. 28. The Chronicles of Cooperstown. Pp. 100. Cooperstown: H. & E. Phinney, 1838. Published anonymously. Republished at Albany in 1862 with additional notes and details bringing the events down to that year. The republication is entitled "A Condensed History of Cooperstown; with a Biographical Sketch of J. Fenimore Cooper. By Rev. T. S. Livermore, A. M." It is a volume of 276 pages, and contains Bryant's funeral discourse on Cooper, with much other matter. The "Chronicles of Cooperstown" extend from page 9 to page 86 inclusive. 29. Homeward Bound; or the Chase. A Tale of the Sea. By the Author of The Pilot, The Spy, etc. 2 vols. Philadelphia: Carey, Lea & Blanchard, 1838. 30. Review of the "Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Bart. By J. G. Lockhart." In Knickerbocker Magazine, October, 1838, vol. xii., pp. 349-366. 31. Home as Found. By the Author of Homeward Bound, The Pioneers, (p. 294) etc., etc. 2 vols. Philadelphia: Lea & Blanchard, 1838. In England published under the title of "Eve Effingham; or Home." 32. The History of the Navy of the United States of America. By J. Fenimore Cooper. 2 vols. Philadelphia: Lea & Blanchard, 1839. 33. Letters in "Cooperstown Freeman's Journal," July 1st and July 8th, 1839. A reply to the criticism upon his Naval History, or rather upon his account of the battle of Lake Erie, which had appeared in the New York Commercial Advertiser in June, 1839. The first letter occupies two columns, the second more than three. 34. The Pathfinder; or the Inland Sea. By the Author of The Pioneers, Last of the Mohicans, etc. 2 vols. Philadelphia: Lea & Blanchard, 1840. 35. Mercedes of Castile; or the Voyage to Cathay. By the Author of The Bravo, The Last of the Mohicans, etc. 2 vols. Philadelphia: Lea & Blanchard, 1840. The English title was "Mercedes of Castile. A Romance of the Days of Columbus." 36. History of the Navy of the United States of America. Abridged in one volume. Pp. 447. Philadelphia: Thomas Cowperthwait & Co., 1841. 37. The Deerslayer; or the First War Path. A Tale. By the Author of The Last of the Mohicans, The Pioneers, etc. 2 vols. Philadelphia: Lea & Blanchard, 1841. 38. "Home as Found. Lost Chapter." Preceded by a "Preface," and a "Letter to the Editor." In the "Brother Jonathan" newspaper of January 1, 1842.--Followed by a Letter to the Editor, from Cooper, on "The Effingham Matter," in same paper for February 12, 1842, and by two articles on "The Effingham Controversy," in the numbers for March 26, 1842, and April 9, 1842. 39. The Two Admirals; a Tale. By the Author of The Pilot, Red (p. 295) Rover, Water Witch, Homeward Bound, etc., etc. 2 vols. Philadelphia: Lea & Blanchard, 1842. 40. Edinburgh Review on James' Naval Occurrences and Cooper's Naval History. In the United States Magazine and Democratic Review, vol. x., for May and June, 1842. First article, pp. 409-435; second article, pp. 515-541. 41. Richard Somers. In Graham's Magazine for October, 1842. 42. William Bainbridge. In Graham's Magazine for November, 1842. 43. The Wing-and-Wing; or Le Feu-Follet. A Tale. By the Author of The Pilot, Red Rover, Two Admirals, Homeward Bound, etc., etc. 2 vols. Philadelphia: Lea & Blanchard, 1842. In England this was published under the title "The Jack o' Lantern (Le Feu-Follet); or the Privateer." 44. Richard Dale. In Graham's Magazine for December, 1842. 45. Autobiography of a Pocket Handkerchief. In Graham's Magazine for January, February, March, and April, 1843. It came out in March among the publications of the "Brother Jonathan" newspaper office, and was then entitled "Le Mouchoir; an Autobiographical Romance." The English title was "The French Governess; or the Embroidered Handkerchief." 46. Oliver Hazard Perry. In Graham's Magazine for May and June, 1843. 47. John Paul Jones. In Graham's Magazine for July and August, 1843. 48. The Battle of Lake Erie; or Answers to Messrs. Burges, Duer, and Mackenzie. By J. Fenimore Cooper. Pp. 118. Cooperstown: H. & E. Phinney, 1843. 49. Wyandotte; or the Hutted Knoll. A Tale. By the Author of The Pathfinder, Deerslayer, Last of the Mohicans, Pioneers, (p. 296) Prairie, etc., etc. 2 vols. Philadelphia: Lea & Blanchard, 1843. 50. Ned Myers; or a Life before the Mast. Edited by J. Fenimore Cooper. Pp. 232. Philadelphia: Lea & Blanchard, 1843. 51. John Shaw. In Graham's Magazine for March, 1844. 52. John Barry. In Graham's Magazine for June, 1844. 53. Afloat and Ashore; or the Adventures of Miles Wallingford. By the Author of The Pilot, Red Rover, The Two Admirals, etc. 2 vols. Philadelphia: Published by the Author, 1844. 54. Proceedings of the Naval Court Martial in the Case of Alexander Slidell Mackenzie, a Commander in the Navy of the United States, etc., including the Charges and Specifications of Charges, preferred against him by the Secretary of the Navy. To which is annexed an Elaborate Review. By James Fennimore Cooper. Pp. 344. New York: Henry G. Langley, 1844. (Cooper's review extends from page 263 to page 344 inclusive. The spelling of the name was due to the publisher.) 55. Afloat and Ashore; or the Adventures of Miles Wallingford. By the Author of The Pilot, Red Rover, etc. Vols. 3 & 4. Published for the Author. New York: Burgess, Stringer & Co., 1844. This second series of Afloat and Ashore goes in this country under the name of "Miles Wallingford." In England it was published as "Lucy Hardinge." 56. John Templer Shubrick. In Graham's Magazine for December, 1844. 57. Melancthon Taylor Woolsey. In Graham's Magazine for January, 1845. 58. Edward Preble. In Graham's Magazine for May and June, 1845. 59. Satanstoe; or the Littlepage Manuscripts. A Tale of the (p. 297) Colony. 2 vols. New York: Burgess, Stringer & Co., 1845. 60. The Chainbearer; or the Littlepage Manuscripts. Edited by the Author of Satanstoe, Spy, Pathfinder, Two Admirals, etc. 2 vols. New York: Burgess, Stringer & Co, 1846. 61. Lives of Distinguished American Naval Officers. By J. Fenimore Cooper. Author of The Spy, The Pilot, etc. 2 vols. Philadelphia: Carey & Hart, 1846. Also, 2 vols. Auburn: Derby & Jackson, 1846. Volume I. contains, in the following order: Bainbridge (No. 42), Somers (No. 41), Shaw (No. 51), Shubrick (No. 56), Preble (No. 58). Volume II. contains: Jones (No. 47), Woolsey (No. 57), Perry (No. 46), and Dale (No. 44); Barry (No. 52) was not included. 62. The Redskins; or Indian and Injin. Being the conclusion of the Littlepage Manuscripts. By the Author of The Pathfinder, Deerslayer, Two Admirals, etc. 2 vols. New York: Burgess & Stringer, 1846. In England the title of this work was "Ravensnest; or the Redskins." 63. The Islets of the Gulf; or Rose Budd. Begun in Graham's Magazine for November, 1846, and continued through every succeeding number until March, 1848, in which month it was concluded. It was published in book form March 21, 1848, by Burgess, Stringer & Co., as "Jack Tier; or the Florida Reefs." In England the title was "Captain Spike; or the Islets of the Gulf." 64. The Crater; or Vulcan's Peak. A Tale of the Pacific. By the Author of Miles Wallingford, The Red Rover, The Pilot, etc., etc. 2 vols. New York: Burgess, Stringer & Co., 1847. The English title was "Mark's Reef; or the Crater." Jack Tier; or the Florida Reefs, 1848. See No. 63. 65. The Oak Openings; or the Bee Hunter. By the Author of The (p. 298) Pioneers, Last of the Mohicans, Pathfinder, Deerslayer, etc., etc. 2 vols. New York: Burgess, Stringer & Co., 1848. The English title was "The Bee Hunter; or the Oak Openings." 66. The Sea Lions; or the Lost Sealers. By the Author of The Crater, etc. 2 vols. New York: Stringer & Townsend, 1849. 67. The Ways of the Hour; a Tale. By the Author of The Spy, The Red Rover, etc., etc. 1 vol. New York: G. P. Putnam, 1850. POSTHUMOUS PUBLICATIONS. 68. Old Ironsides. In Putnam's Magazine, vol. i., No. v., May, 1853, pp. 473-487; and in No. vi., June, 1853, pp. 593-607. This is a history of the United States frigate Constitution. 69. Fragments from a Diary of James Fenimore Cooper. In Putnam's Magazine, new series, vol. i., February, 1868, pp. 167-172; and June, 1868, pp. 730-737. 70. The Battle of Plattsburgh Bay. In January, 1869, of Putnam's Magazine, vol. iii., new series, pp. 49-59. A note to this article says that it was prepared as a lecture to be delivered before the New York Historical Society. The records of that Society, however, contain no reference to any lecture delivered by Cooper. 71. The Eclipse. In Putnam's Magazine, new series, vol. iv., for September, 1869, pp. 352-359. Written about 1831, and gives an account of the eclipse of the sun in June, 1806. Besides these there are numerous letters written to the newspapers, and in particular the letters written to the Paris journal, the "National," in 1833. During Cooper's life it was frequently said that he was engaged in preparing a work on the Middle States of the Union; but no (p. 299) trace of such a production was found among his papers. A work of his on "The Towns of Manhattan" was partly finished and in press at the time of his death; but the portion printed was entirely destroyed by fire. Part of the manuscript, however, was recovered. On the 4th of August, 1841, Cooper also delivered an address before the Literary Societies of Hobart College, Geneva, N. Y.; but this he himself burned on the day it was delivered. A few works have been wrongly attributed to him. One of these is "The Cruise of the Somers; illustrative of the Despotism of the Quarter Deck; and of the Unmanly Conduct of Commander Mackenzie." New York: 1844. Another is "Elinor Wyllys; or the Young Folk of Longbridge." Philadelphia: 1846. Of this novel Cooper was the nominal editor, and to it he contributed a short preface. A third work, which has been falsely attributed to him, is entitled "The Republic of the United States; its Duties to Itself, and its Responsible Relations to other Countries." New York: 1848. INDEX. (p. 300) Adams, John, 113. Adams, John Quincy, 224-226. "Afloat and Ashore," 232, 249-253, 263, 296. Albany, N. Y., 6, 15. "Albany Argus," 182. "Albany Evening Journal," Cooper's libel suits with, 187, 190-196. America, intellectual dependence of, on England in 1820 and later, 18-21, 34, 35, 62, 92; literary state of, in 1820, 30-32. "American Scott, The," Cooper so termed, 58, 106; his feelings about it, 59, 161. "American Democrat, The," 177-179, 293. Angevine, 14-16, 63. Anti-Rent Novels, The, 251-254. Ashburton Treaty, 237. "Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung," 107. "Autobiography of a Pocket Handkerchief," 249, 293. Bainbridge, Commodore William, 295, 297. Balzac, Honoré de, Criticisms of Cooper, 204, 240, 284. Barry Cornwall. See _Procter_. Barry, John, 296, 297. Benjamin, Park, 159; Cooper's libel suit with, 187. Bentley, London publisher of Cooper's later works, 262. "Blackwood's Magazine," 58; abuse of Cooper, 174. Berne, Cooper's residence near, 68. Boone, Daniel, 72. "Borderers, The" (English title), 291. Boston, Cooper's criticism of, 171, 172. Bostonians practice "gouging," 97. "Bravo, The," 108-111, 115, 128, 130, 277, 291. Bread and Cheese Club, founded by Cooper, 63; its members, 63; gives dinner to Cooper, 127. Brenton's, Captain Edward Pelham, "Naval History of Great Britain," 202. British press, Cooper's opinion of, 106, 136, 137; its attacks upon Cooper, 138, 173-176, 199, 236. "Brother Jonathan, The," newspaper, 262, 294, 295. Brown, Charles Brockden, 30. Bryant, William Cullen, 17, 63, 80, 266; delivers funeral oration on Cooper, 268. Bulwer, Sir Edward Lytton, 124, 125. Burges, Tristam, 213, 221, 224, 226, 233, 295. Burlington, N. J., 2, 12. Burton's Theatre, Cooper's comedy acted at, 263. Campbell, Judge William W., 216. Canning, George, 68. "Captain Spike" (English title), 297. Carey and Lea, publishers, 66. "Chainbearer, The," 252-254, 297. Châlet, The, Cooper's farm, near Cooperstown, 263. Champlain, Lake, 12. Chauncey, Commodore Isaac, 127. Chesapeake, American man-of-war, 202. "Chronicles of Cooperstown, The," 293. Clay, Henry, 67. Clinton, DeWitt, 127. "Coelebs," Hannah More's, 21. Colburn, London publisher, 28, 94. "Comparative Resources of the American Navy," 292. Constitution, ship-of-war, 210, 298. Cooper, Fenimore, 15, 63. Cooper, J. F.: born at Burlington, 2; removed to Cooperstown, 2; early education, 6; at Albany, 6; at Yale College, 7; dismissed from college, 8; serves before the mast, 9, 10; enters navy as midshipman, 11; his service, 11; marries, 12; resigns position in the navy, 14; residences from 1811 to 1822, 14, 15; his children, 15; begins literary life, 16; moves into New York city, 63; founds the Bread and Cheese club, 63; has family name changed to Fenimore-Cooper, 3; is given a public dinner, 127; sails for Europe, 67; made consul at Lyons, 67; residences in France, England, Switzerland, Italy, and Germany, 67, 68; cordial reception in Paris, 68, 69; wide extent of his reputation, 56-58, 77; returns to America, 117; refuses a public dinner, 128; resides in New York city, 117; buys his father's house in Cooperstown and makes it his permanent home, 117; has a controversy with citizens of Cooperstown, 142-148; brings a number of newspaper libel suits, 180-197; engages unsuccessfully in business operations, 261; his farm, 263, 264; becomes a communicant in the Episcopal Church, 266; his death, 267; funeral oration over, delivered by Bryant, 268; happiness of his home life, 13, 14, 233, 234, 285; wide circulation of his works, 37, 56, 76, 270; pecuniary profits from their sale, 64-66, 261-263; his success as a lawyer, 182, 189, 216-218, 220; his sensitiveness to criticism, 41-44, 286; defects of his literary art, 50, 51; failure in characterization, 152, 155, 277, 278; female characters, 26-28, 153, 154, 278-281; success in characters from low life, 53-55, 72, 73, 152, 283; fondness for commonplace, 84, 242, 276; prolixity of his introductions, 75, 134, 242, 276; improbability and carelessness in the details of his stories, 51, 53, 276, 277; carelessness in the development of the plot, 28, 271, 272, 275, 276; criticism on language and carelessness in use of it, 130, 272-275; his humor, 119, 239, 240; his fondness for natural scenery, and success in description, 8, 69, 134, 168, 169, 240, 241, 264, 282-284; his political opinions, 82-84, 108, 109; his imperiousness of manner, 79, 80, 286; his pugnacity, 24, 75, 80, 81, 146, 147, 285; his generosity, 81, 82; his patriotism, 49, 85, 86, 94, 110, 115, 128, 231, 237, 238, 243; depth and narrowness of religious feeling, 22-26, 75, 243, 256, 258-261, 266; high sense of honor, 82, 286; love of truth, 202, 203, 222, 232, 287, 288. Cooper, Paul, 15, 63. Cooper, Richard, 182, 185, 220. Cooper, Susan Fenimore, 15. Cooper, William, Cooper's father, 2, 3, 9, 142-145, 188, 192. Cooperstown, situation of, 1, 3, 4; when founded, 2; original population of, 5; Cooper's residences in, 2, 3, 14, 117; his controversy with citizens of, 142-148; farm near, 263, 264; his death at, 266, 267; the Chronicles of, 293. "Cooperstown Freeman's Journal," democratic newspaper, 143, 144; Cooper's letters to, 147, 148, 294. Copyright, international, Cooper's feelings in regard to, 166; pecuniary loss sustained by the lack of one, 261. Copyright law, English, of, 1838, 66, 261. Courier, Paul, liberal sentiments about America, 87. Court of Errors, The, of New York, 228, 229. "Crater, The," 255-258, 274, 297. Cushing, Caleb, replies to Cooper, 132. Dale, Richard, 295, 297. Davis, Admiral Charles H., 213. "Deerslayer, The," 239-242, 272, 294. DeKay, James E., 63. DeLancey family, 12, 13. DeLancey, Susan Augusta, 12-14, 16, 70, 233, 234; married to Cooper, 12; her death, 267. DeLancey, William H., bishop of Western New York, 266. Democratic party, Cooper nominally belonging to, 133, 171. "Democratic Review," 207, 208, 295. Derby, Lord, 52. "Diary of James Fenimore Cooper, Fragments from," 298. Dresden, Saxony, Cooper's residence at, 68, 107, 123. Duer, William Alexander, Cooper's controversy with, 212, 221-223, 233, 295. Durand, Asher B., the engraver, 63. "Eclipse, The," 298. Edgeworth, Maria, 57. "Edinburgh Review, The," 205-208, 295. Elliott, Commodore Jesse, 208-213, 222; has a medal struck in honor of Cooper, 224-226. "Encyclopedia Britannica," notice of Cooper's life in, 175. England, Cooper's residence in, 68, 96; feeling of, towards America, 87-98; criticism of, by Cooper, 105, 130, 137; his work on, 135, 293; hostility expressed for Cooper in, 92, 106, 138, 173-176. Effingham, name applied to Cooper, 156, 158, 183, 191, 294. Episcopal Church, Cooper's attachment to, 23, 245, 249, 254, 257, 259, 260, 266. Erie Lake, Battle of, controversy in regard to, 208-227, 294. European ignorance of America, 86-88, 100, 101. "Eve Effingham" (English title), 294. "Excursions in Italy" (English title), 293. "Excursions in Switzerland" (English title), 292. Expenses' Controversy, The, 76, 111-115, 292. Fay, Theodore S., 132. Federalist Party, 9, 171; Cooper brought up in, 92; feeling of, towards England, 92, 93. Fenimore family, 3, 188. Fenimore, near Cooperstown, Cooper's residence at, 14. Fenimore-Cooper, family name changed to, 3. Florence, Cooper's residence at, 68, 74, 120. Foot, Samuel A., 215-221. France, Cooper's work on, 135, 292, 293. Francis, Dr. John W., 266, 267. "Fraser's Magazine," its attack on Cooper, 174-175. Free trade, Cooper's hostility to, 133, 171. "French Governess, The" (English title), 295. French opinion of Cooper, 36, 204. French social life, Cooper's opinion of, 69. Galitzin, Princess, 69. Gardner, Colonel Charles K., 287. Gifford, William, editor of "The Quarterly," 35. Gisquet, French prefect of police, 37. "Gleanings in Europe," 135-140, 204, 292, 293. Glens Falls, 52. "Glory and Shame of England," attack on Cooper in, 234, 235. "Gotham and the Gothamites," 60. Gouging, prevalence of, in America, 97; practiced by Bostonians, 97. "Graham's Magazine," 229, 245, _note_, 248, 255, 295-297. Greeley, Horace, 159, 180, 181, 187; Cooper's libel suits with, 197, 198. Greenough, Horatio, 81, 115-116, 155. Grose's "Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue," 97. Halleck, Fitzgreene, 63, 246, _note_. Harris, Leavitt, 113, 114. Haydon, Benjamin Robert, 58. Hazlitt, William, 106. Headley, Rev. J. T., 235. "Headsman, The," 108, 109, 272, 292. "Heathcotes, The" (English title), 291. "Heidenmauer, The," 108, 109, 280, 292. Heine, 107. Hillard, George S., 160. Hillhouse, James A., 7. "Hints on Manning the Navy," 292. Hobart College, Cooper's address at, 299. "Home as Found," 149, 150-159, 294. "Home as Found, Lost Chapter of," 294. "Homeward Bound," 149, 150, 152, 155, 293. Impressment of American seamen, 93. Indian character, Cooper's view of, 54, 55. Ingram's, John H., "Life of Poe," 246, _note_. Irving, Washington, 3, 35, 56, 268, 287. "Islets of the Gulf, The." See "_Jack Tier_." Italy, Cooper's work on, 135, 293; attachment of Cooper to, 69-71. "Jack o' Lantern, The" (English title), 295. Jackson, President Andrew, 131, 210. "Jack Tier," 255, 256, 263, 297. James's, William, "Naval History of Great Britain," 205-207, 295; Cooper's opinion of, 206, 207. Jarvis, John Wesley, 63. Jay, John, 29. Jefferson, Thomas, 67. Jones, John Paul, 48, 57, 288, 295, 297. Jordan, Ambrose C., 190. Judah, Samuel B. H., 60. Jury, trial by, 260. Kent, Chancellor James, 63, 127. King, Charles, 127. "Knickerbocker Magazine," 160, 161, 293. Lafayette, 111, 112. "Last of the Mohicans, The," 52-55, 56, 58, 66, 71, 72, 239, 291. Lawrence, Captain James, 12. "Leather-Stocking Tales, The," 40, 55, 239; Cooper's opinion of, 241. Leghorn, 120. Lester, C. Edwards, 235, 236. "Letter to General Lafayette," 112, 291. "Letter to his Countrymen," 129-132, 292. "Letter to the American Public," 114, 292. Libel suits, Cooper's, with the Otsego "Republican," 185, 186; with the Norwich "Telegraph," 184, 186; with the Oneida "Whig," 187; with the New York "Evening Signal," 187; with the New York "Courier and Enquirer," 187-190; with the Albany "Evening Journal," 187, 190, 196; with the New York "Tribune," 187, 197; with the New York "Commercial Advertiser," 187, 197, 212, 214-221, 223-224. "Lionel Lincoln," 49-52, 291. Livermore, Rev. T. S., 293. Livingston, Edward, 114. Lockhart's, John Gibson, "Life of Scott," 160, 161, 293. London, Cooper's residence in, 68, 96-98. "London Times," its attack on Cooper, 175. Lord, Daniel, Jr., 215-221. Louis Philippe, 69, 107. Lowell, James Russell, 156. "Lucy Harding" (English title), 249, 296; 251. Lyons, Cooper consul at, 67. Mackenzie, Alexander Slidell, 212, 213, 216, 221, 222, 233, 295. Mackintosh, Sir James, 97. Mamaroneck, N. Y., 12, 13, 14. Man, Isle of, Cooper reported birthplace in, 3. "Mark's Reef" (English title), 297. McHarg, Rev. C. W., 229. "Mercedes of Castile," 232, 242, 272, 278. Mickiewicz, Adam, 107. Miller, London publisher, 35. "Miles Wallingford," 93, 249, 285, 296. Mitford, Mary Russell, 57. "Monikins, The," 133-135. Montagu, Mrs. Basil, 91. Moore, Thomas, 88, 96. More, Hannah, 21. Morris, George P., 132. Morse, S. F. B., 63, 76. Murray, John, London publisher, 35. Naples, Cooper's residence at, 68. Naples, bay of, compared with that of New York, 164, 249, 254. "National" (Paris), 113, 298. "Naval Magazine," 201, 292. "Naval History of the United States," 200-230, 232, 233, 294. "Naval Officers, Lives of," 228, 229, 297. Neal, John, 30. Ned Myers, 247, 248, 263, 296. New England, Cooper's dislike of, 245, 246, 247, 249, 250, 253, 257, 259; Cooper's unpopularity in, 50, 247. New Haven, 8. "New Monthly Magazine, Colburn's," sketch of Cooper in, 94. Newport, 74; stone tower at, 226. "New World, The," newspaper, 262. New York (city), Cooper's residences in, 15, 47, 63, 67, 117; Cooper's criticism of society in, 150, 151, 158, 249; social life in, 121; Cooper's prophecy about, 102. "New York American," 127, 128. "New York Commercial Advertiser," 129; Cooper's libel suits with, 187, 212, 214-221, 223, 224. "New York Courier and Enquirer," 129, 130; Cooper's libel suits with, 187-190. "New York Evening Post," 182. "New York Evening Signal," Cooper's libel suit with, 187. New York Historical Society, 298. "New York Home Journal," 13. "New York Mirror," 132. "New York Patriot," 287. "New York Tribune," Cooper's libel suits with, 187, 192, 197. "New Yorker, The," 158, 182. Newspapers, Cooper's attacks on, 43, 176-180; libel suits with, 180-199. "North American Review, The," 60, 61, 212, 213. "Norwich Telegraph," Cooper's libel suit with, 184, 185. "Notions of the Americans," 101-106, 291. Nugent, Lord, 96. "Oak Openings, The," 255, 258, 263, 275, 297. "Odofried the Outcast," 60. Old Ironsides, 298. "Oneida Whig, The," Cooper's libel suit with, 187. Ontario, Lake, 11, 169, 240. Otsego Hall, Cooper's residence, 2, 117, 267. Otsego Lake, 1, 4, 117, 142, 240. "Otsego Republican," Cooper's libel suit with, 185, 186. Paris, Cooper's residence at, 67-69, 107. Parsons, Usher, 227. "Pathfinder, The," 11, 239-242, 283, 294. Paulding, James Kirke, 30. Paulding, Hiram, 216. Peale, Rembrandt, 115. Percival, James G., 60-62. Perry, Captain Matthew, 210, 212. Perry, Commodore Oliver H., 208-229, 295, 297. "Philadelphia National Gazette," 114, 292. "Pilot, The," 44-48, 57, 74, 95, 283-288, 291. "Pioneers, The," 39-44, 61, 65, 72, 117, 156, 239, 287, 291. Piracy of books, 261, 262. Plattsburgh Bay, Battle of, 298. Poe, Elgar A., 245, 246, _note_. Poland, revolt of, 107; Cooper's efforts to aid, 108. "Prairie, The," 61, 71, 73, 76, 95, 239, 283, 291. Preble, Edward, 296, 297. "Precaution," 16-28, 243. Price of Cooper's later novels, 262, 263. Princeton College, 246. Procter, Bryan Waller, 58, 161. Provincialism of America, 138, 150, 164, 165, 168. Puritanism, 23-29, 75, 243. "Putnam's Magazine," 298. "Quarterly Review, The," 35, 277, 287; its attacks on America, 89; its attack on Cooper, 205. "Ravensnest" (English title), 297. "Recollections of Europe" (English title), 293. "Redskins, The," 253, 254, 263, 297. "Red Rover, The," 65, 73, 99, 226, 227, 255, 291. Reporters of newspapers, Cooper's attack on, 176. "Residence in France" (English title), 292. Revolution of 1830, French, 106, 107. "Revue Britannique," 111-113. Rhode Island Historical Society, 213; refuses to accept the Cooper medal, 224-227. Rives, William C., 114. Rome, Cooper's residence at, 68, 75. Russia, early cordial relations of, with the United States, 93. Sand, George, 284. "Satanstoe," 252, 253, 254, 263, 296. Saulnier, M., 111, 112. Scott, Sir Walter, 31, 33, 41, 44, 56-59, 91, 110, 124, 277, 278, 283, 287; his mention of Cooper, 69, 160; Lockhart's life of, 159-161. Scott, General Winfield, 127. "Sea Lions, The," 255, 258-260, 263, 298. Sea novel, Cooper's creation of, 44-47, 57, 74. Shannon, English ship-of-war, 12, 202. Shanty, Cooper's derivation of, 275. Shaw, John, 290, 297. Shubrick, John Templer, 296, 297. Silliman, Professor Benjamin, 8. "Sketches of Switzerland," 135-140, 292. Slavery, Cooper's feelings toward, 85, 104. Smith, Sydney, 96. Smollett, Tobias G., 45, 57. Somers, American man-of-war, 228. Somers, Richard, 295, 297. Sorrento, Cooper's residence at, 68, 71, 75. Sotheby, William, 97, 98. Southey, Robert, 91. Spencer, John C., 228. Spencer, Joshua A., 186. "Spy, The," 13, 30-38, 43, 49, 57, 65, 66, 280, 283, 290. Squier, E. G., 37. Steevens, Samuel, 215-221. Sterling, merchant ship, 9, 10, 247, 248. Stone, William Leet, Cooper's libel suits against, 187, 214-221, 223, 224. Sumner, Charles, 91, 160. Susquehanna River, 1, 2, 264. Talleyrand visits Cooper's father, 5. Three Mile Point Controversy, The, 142-148, 156. Ticknor, George, 91. Tories of American Revolution, Cooper's treatment of, 13. "Towns of Manhattan, The," 266, 299. Tuckerman, Henry T., his account of a trial scene, 217, 218. "Two Admirals, The," 242, 243, 276, 295. Tyler, John, President, 228. "United Service Journal," its criticism of Cooper's Naval History, 204, 205. "Upside Down," Cooper's comedy, 263. Van Rensselaer, Stephen, the patroon, 251. Verplanck, Gulian Crommelin, 63. Vesuvius, American man-of-war, 11. "Water Witch, The," 75, 76, 78, 106, 291; refused publication in Rome, 123. Waverley Novels, 31, 44. "Ways of the Hour, The," 255, 260, 263, 272, 274, 277, 298. Webster, Daniel, 268. Weed, Thurlow, 122, 190; Cooper's libel suits against, 187, 190-196; admiration for Cooper's novels, 196. "Wept of Wish-ton-Wish, The," 74, 99, 272, 291. Westchester County, New York, 12, 14, 29. Whig party, its hostility to Cooper 131. Whig press, attacks on Cooper, 147, 148, 158, 159, 173, 177, 180, 184, 185, 199, 211, 235, 241. Wiley, John, publisher, 63, 66. Willis, N. P., 132. Wilson, John, 58. "Wing-and-Wing," 93, 243, 244, 247, 262, 295. Woolsey, Melancthon Taylor, 11, 296, 297. Wright, Fanny, 36. "Wyandotte," 13, 244, 245, 263, 295. Yale College, 246; Cooper's connection with, 7-9. 
13155	----	Proofreading Team. [Illustration: JAMES FENIMORE COOPER.] JAMES FENIMORE COOPER by MARY E. PHILLIPS [Illustration: LEATHERSTOCKING.] New York: John Lane Company London: John Lane: The Bodley Head Toronto: Bell and Cockburn MCMXIII Copyright, 1912 By Mary E. Phillips The University Press, Cambridge, U.S.A. Dedicated To The Young Of All Ages From The Years Of Ten To Ten Times Ten PREFACE The intention of this simply told _personal_ life of James Fenimore Cooper, the creator of American romance, is to have all material _authentic_. The pictures of men, women, places and things are, as nearly as possible, of Cooper's association with them to reproduce a background of his time and to make the _man_--not the author--its central foreground figure. From every available source since the earliest mention of the author's name, both in print and out, material for these pages has been collected. In this wide gleaning in the field of letters--a rich harvest from able and brilliant pens--the gleaner hereby expresses grateful appreciation of these transplanted values. Much, precious in worth and attractive in interest, comes into these pages from the generous and good among the relatives, friends, and admirers of Fenimore Cooper. And more than all others, the author's grand-nephew, the late Mr. George Pomeroy Keese, of Cooperstown, New York, has paid rich and rare tribute to the memory of his uncle, with whom when a boy he came in living touch. Appeals to Cooper's grandson, James Fenimore Cooper, Esq., of Albany, New York, and also to his publishers have been met in a spirit so gracious and their giving has been so generous as to command the grateful service of the writer. For rare values, in service and material, special credits are due to Mr. George Pomeroy Keese, Cooperstown, N.Y.; James Fenimore Cooper, Esq., Albany, N.Y.; Mr. Francis Whiting Halsey, New York City; Mr. Edwin Tenney Stiger, Watertown, Mass.; General James Grant Wilson, New York City; Mr. Horace G. Wadlin, Librarian, Messrs. Otto Fleischner, Assistant Librarian, O.A. Bierstadt, F.C. Blaisdell, and others, of the Boston Public Library; Miss Alice Bailey Keese, Cooperstown, N.Y.; Mrs. T. Henry Dewey, Paris, France; Mrs. Edward Emerson Waters, New York City; and Miss Mary C. Sheridan, Boston, Mass. Mary E. Phillips. INTRODUCTION A life of Cooper, written with some particular reference to the picturesque village among the Otsego hills, where he so long lived and in whose soil he, for some sixty years or more, has slept, has long been needed. That such a book should have become a labor of love in the hands of Miss Phillips is not more interesting than it is fortunate that the task should have been accomplished so conspicuously well. Miss Phillips has borne testimony to the resourcefulness and rare devotion with which the late Mr. Keese assisted her in researches extending over many years. None knew so well as he the personal side of Cooper's whole life story; none so assiduously and so lovingly, during a long life spent in Cooperstown, gathered and tried to preserve in their integrity every significant and interesting detail of it. The turning point in Cooper's life was reached when he went to Cooperstown, although he was little more than a child in arms. Most curious is it that his going should have resulted from the foreclosure of a mortgage. This mortgage had been given in the late Colonial period by George Croghan, and covered a vast tract of native forest lands in Otsego. In these lands, through the foreclosure, Cooper's father, soon after the Revolution, acquired a large interest, which led him to abandon his home of ease and refinement in Burlington, New Jersey, and found a new, and, as it proved to be, a permanent one in the unpeopled wilderness at the foot of Otsego Lake. Except for this accident of fortune, Leatherstocking and his companions of the forest never could have been created by the pen of Cooper. [Illustration: signature 'Francis W. Italsey'] ILLUSTRATIONS JAMES FENIMORE COOPER. From Appleton portrait. By permission of owner, James Fenimore Cooper, Esq., of Albany, N.Y. _Frontispiece_ THE ENGLISH FYNAMORE COUNTRY AND FAMILY ARMS. COOPER'S BIRTHPLACE. Burlington, N.J. From a photograph by George W. Tichnor THE FENIMORE BOX. (Of light and dark woods, size 12-1/2 X 6-3/4 inches.) From photograph by permission of owner, James Fenimore Cooper, Esq., Albany, N.Y. THE SUSQUEHANNA. By W.H. Bartlett CHINGACHGOOK ON COUNCIL ROCK. From a photograph by A.J. Telfer COUNCIL ROCK. From a photograph by A.J. Telfer THE MANOR. From outline on _first_ map of Cooperstown, 1788-1790. By permission of owner, James Fenimore Cooper, Esq. ORIGINAL OTSEGO HALL. From outline on 1800-1808 map of Cooperstown. By permission of owner, James Fenimore Cooper, Esq. JUDGE WILLIAM COOPER. By Gilbert Stuart. By permission of owner, James Fenimore Cooper, Esq. GENERAL WILLIAM HENRY HARRISON. From a portrait by Woods, 1812 WILLIAM HENRY HARRISON, 1800. From "St. Memim's Gallery of Portraits" TALLEYRAND. From a portrait by F. Gérard POINT JUDITH. From a photograph by A.J. Telfer "EDGEWATER." By courtesy of Mr. George Pomeroy Keese MR. AND MRS. GEORGE POMEROY. By the courtesy of Mr. George Pomeroy Keese THE OLD STONE HOUSE. By the courtesy of Mr. George Pomeroy Keese COOPERSTOWN PRIOR TO 1835. From _The Family Magazine_, 1836-1837 DR. THOMAS ELLISON. By the courtesy of Mr. George Pomeroy Keese ST. PETER'S CHURCH, ALBANY, N.Y. By the courtesy of Dr. Joseph Hooper, Durham, Conn. STATE STREET, ALBANY, N.Y., 1802. By the courtesy of Dr. Joseph Hooper "NEAR SHORES" OF NEW HAVEN. From an old print DR. TIMOTHY DWIGHT. From an old print YALE COLLEGE, 1806. By the courtesy of Professor John C. Schwab, Ph.D., Librarian, Yale University WILLIAM JAY IN YOUTH. By Vanderlyn. From Bayard Tuckerman's "William Jay," etc. By courtesy of author and publishers, Dodd, Mead & Co., N.Y. JUDGE WILLIAM JAY. From a crayon by Martin. Dodd, Mead & Co., N.Y. SILHOUETTE OF JAMES COOPER WHEN A STUDENT AT YALE. By the courtesy of Professor John C. Schwab, Ph.D. OUTWARD BOUND. GIBRALTAR. From "_Le Monde Illustré_" SAILOR'S SNUG HARBOR. From _Frank Leslie's Weekly_, Vol. I OTSEGO HALL GATES. By courtesy of Mr. George Pomeroy Keese BUFFALO BURNT. From an old woodcut in Spear's "United States Navy" THE "VESUVIUS." From "Life of Fulton," by J.F. Reigart, 1856 ONTARIO FORESTS. By W.H. Bartlett THE THOUSAND ISLANDS. By W.H. Bartlett THE PORT OF BUFFALO. From an old print CAPTAIN M.T. WOOLSEY. From Spear's "United States Navy" THE PATHFINDER. By F.O.C. Darley A BUBBLE OF A BOAT. By F.O.C. Darley CAPTAIN LAWRENCE. From a portrait by Chappel THE "WASP." From an old print FRAUNCES TAVERN. By the courtesy of Dr. Joseph Hooper, Durham, Conn. LIEUT. GOV. JAMES DE LANCEY'S SEAL. From Vol. I, M.J. Lamb's "History of New York City" HEATHCOTE ARMS. From an old print HON. CALEB HEATHCOTE. From print by V. Belch FRAUNCES TAVERN LONG-ROOM. From "History of New York," by Mary L. Booth, 1857 BURN'S COFFEE HOUSE. From an old print HEATHCOTE HILL. By the courtesy of J.W. Clapp, editor _Richbell Press_, Mamaroneck, N.Y. TANDEM. From a rare old color-print. By the courtesy of George Samuel Tucker, Peterboro, N.H. COOPER'S FENIMORE FARM HOUSE. By the courtesy of Mr. George Pomeroy Keese ELIZABETH FENIMORE COOPER IN THE OLD HALL HOME. By the courtesy of Elizabeth Cooper Keese COOPER'S ANGEVINE FARM HOME. From "Homes of American Authors." G.L. Putnam Sons, 1853 MAMARONECK CREEK SLOOPS. From Bryant's "History of the United States" JUDGE JOHN JAY. From print of Trumbull portrait BEDFORD HOUSE. From an old print BEDFORD HOUSE LIBRARY. From Vol. II, Lamb's "History of New York City" HARVEY BIRCH'S CAVE. By courtesy of Arthur B. Maurice, author of "New York in Fiction" THE LOCUSTS OF COOPER'S TIME. From Lossing's "Field-Book of the War of 1812" THE LOCUSTS OF TO-DAY. By courtesy of the owner, Lawrence Durham, Esq. TITLE-PAGE OF THE FIRST EDITION OF "THE SPY." ENOCH CROSBY. From "History of Westchester County, N.Y." By Spooner and Shenard LAFAYETTE THEATRE. From _New York Mirror_, Vol. V. COOPER'S HEROINES. By courtesy of Rev. Ralph Birdsall and Miss Catherine N. Duyckinck WINDHURST'S NOOK, UNDER THE PARK THEATRE. From "History of New York City," by Mary L. Booth, 1859 JAMES FENIMORE COOPER, 1822. From a photograph of the J.W. Jarvis portrait. By permission of the owner, James Fenimore Cooper, Esq., Albany, N.Y. FITZ-GREENE HALLECK. From print of Inman portrait. By permission of owner, Gen. James Grant Wilson JOSEPH RODMAN DRAKE, From "Poems" CRO' NEST. From "Poems," by Joseph Rodman Drake SAMUEL WOODWORTH. From a rare lithograph THE OLD OAKEN BUCKET. By F.S. Agate CITY HOTEL AND WASHINGTON HALL. From Vol. II, "History of New York City," by M.J. Lamb, and from "Valentine's Manual" EARLY BROADWAY. Old prints WILLIAM WORDSWORTH. By B. Whitechurch COOPER'S NEW YORK CITY HOME IN BEACH STREET. By the courtesy of General James Grant Wilson ST. JOHN'S CHAPEL. From _The York Mirror_ OLD LEATHERSTOCKING. From "The Pioneers" NATTY'S CAVE. From an old print GENERAL JAMES CLINTON. From an old print CLINTON DAM. From a photograph by A.J. Telfer "TALES FOR FIFTEEN, OR IMAGINATION AND HEART." By permission of the owner, James Fenimore Cooper, Esq. CHARLES WILKES. From portrait by Thos. Sully JOHN PAUL JONES. From portrait by C.W. Peale LONG TOM COFFIN. F.O.C. Darley BRYANT, WEBSTER AND IRVING. From sketch by Daniel Huntington by the courtesy of owner, Mr. Day, Boston THE LANDING OF LAFAYETTE, 1824. From "Complete History of Lafayette," 1825 edition LAFAYETTE. Portrait by Sully LAFAYETTE'S BRANDYWINE VASE. From an old print JOB PRAY. By F.O.C. Darley THE BURNING OF CHARLESTOWN. From an old print WHIPPLE HOUSE, AT PROVIDENCE, R.I. From an old print MRS. JAMES MONROE. By the courtesy of General James Grant Wilson PRESIDENT'S HOUSE, WASHINGTON, D.C., 1825. From an old print SUNRISE AT SOUTH MOUNTAIN. Drawn by Harry Fenn for D. Appleton and Co., N.Y. GLENS FALL'S CAVERNS. From "The Hudson," by Lossing HONORABLE MR. STANLEY. Portrait by G. Harlow, 1833 GLENS FALL. By W.H. Bartlett LAKE GEORGE, OR "THE HORICAN." By W.H. Bartlett THE WAGER SEAL (1 X 1-1/8 inches). By permission of the owner, James Fenimore Cooper, Esq. BRYANT. Portrait by Barrett "NATTY, THE TRAPPER." By F.O.C. Darley HENRY CLAY. From a daguerreotype, engraved by Buttre CHANCELLOR KENT. Portrait by Chappel THE U.S.S. "HUDSON." By W.J. Bennett WHITEHALL WHARF, 1826. From "Valentine's Manual" KEEP OF CARISBROOK. By J. and F. Harwood, London, 1841 HAVRE, BY NIGHT. From "Meyer's Universum" WINDMILLS OF MONTMARTRE. From an old French print THE CONVENT ST. MAUR. HOTEL DE JUMIÈGES. Found, verified and photographed for this Life of Cooper by kindness of Mrs. T. Henry Dewey of Paris, France SIR WALTER SCOTT. Portrait by G.S. Newton, 1824 MISS ANNE SCOTT. Portrait by W. Nicholson JAMES FENIMORE COOPER. After portrait by Madame de Mirbel, 1830 PIERRE JEAN DAVID D'ANGERS. Portrait by D'Aubrey. By courtesy of General George T. Cruft JAMES FENIMORE COOPER. From a photograph of the bust by David d'Angers, Paris, 1828. By permission of the owner, James Fenimore Cooper, Esq. MRS. JAMES FENIMORE COOPER. From a photograph of a drawing made at Paris, 1890. By permission of James Fenimore Cooper, Esq. JAMES FENIMORE COOPER. From a photograph of a drawing made at Paris, 1827. By permission of Mr. George Pomeroy Keese PROF. GEORGE WASHINGTON GREEN. By special permission of Mr. William Dean Howells and Harper & Brothers P.T. DE BÉRANGER. From a rare old print TALLEYRAND. From an old engraving DUCHESSE DE BERRI. From Soule photograph CHARLES X of FRANCE. From Soule photograph COOPER'S SUMMER HOME, ST. OUEN, 1827. Found, verified and photographed by the kindness of Mrs. T. Henry Dewey, Paris, France COOPER'S ST. OUEN TERRACE STUDY. Found, verified and photographed by the kindness of Mrs. T. Henry Dewey, Paris, France OLD MILL AT NEWPORT. From an old print THE STRUGGLE. By F.O.C. Darley THE NEWPORT BOX. By permission of the owner, James Fenimore Cooper, Esq. JOHN GIBSON LOCKHART. By Pickersgill NATTY'S LAST CALL. From an old print THE PRINCESS BARBARA VASSILIEWNA GALITZIN From print of portrait by Hein Friedr. Füger LA GRANGE, COUNTRY HOME OF LAFAYETTE. From an old print LA GRANGE ARCHWAY ENTRANCE. From "Complete History of Lafayette" HÔTEL DESSEIN, CALAIS, FRANCE. From a rare old print CLIFFS OF DOVER. By C. Stanfield CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL CHOIR. From Soule photograph GREEN GATE, CANTERBURY. From _Port Folio_, 1814 ST. JAMES PLACE, LONDON. From Thornbury's "Old and New London" SIR FRANCIS CHANTREY. From _European Magazine_, 1822 SAMUEL ROGERS. Portrait by Thomas Lawrence ROGERS' LONDON HOME. From "Bohn's Handbook of London" ROGERS' BREAKFAST-ROOM. From _Illustrated London News_, 1857 CHARLES ROBERT LESLIE. From an old print SIR JAMES MACKINTOSH. Portrait by Thomas Lawrence HOLLAND HOUSE. By Stockdale LIBRARY OF HOLLAND HOUSE. By Charles R. Leslie. Used by permission of the British Museum. From left to right, portrait of Addison, Lord Holland, Lady Holland, Dr. John Allen, Librarian Doggett GILT CHAMBER OF HOLLAND HOUSE. From lithograph by Richardson ROGERS' SEAT. From Leichenstein's "Holland House" LORD GREY. From a portrait by Thomas Lawrence MRS. JOHN GIBSON LOCKHART. From a portrait by W. Nicholson JOANNA BAILLIE. From "Life and Works of J. Baillie" SIR THOMAS LAWRENCE. From the Academy sketch, 1829 HOUSE OF THE GILLMAN'S, HIGHGATE, LONDON. From Hall's "Book of Memories" BOOM KEY AT ROTTERDAM. From an old etching MT. BLANC. By J.M.W. Turner LA LORRAINE VIEW OF BERNESE ALPS. From Swiss print NAHL'S MEMORIAL TO MADAME LANGHAN. From _European Magazine_, 1786 NARRA-MATTAH. By F.O.C. Darley CONNECTICUT EMIGRANTS. From an old print FALL OF THE STAUBBACH. From an old water color THE DEVIL'S BRIDGE. By W.H. Bartlett, 1836 FERNEY, VOLTAIRE'S LAKE LEMAN HOME. From _European Magazine_, 1786 THE SIMPLON PASS. By Lory FLORENCE, ITALY. From an old print PALAZZO RICASOLI, FLORENCE, ITALY. From special drawing by G. Amightti. By courtesy of Signor Agusto Ticci, Florence HORATIO GREENOUGH. From portrait in Boston Athenaeum. By courtesy of Mr. Charles K. Bolton, Librarian BUST OF JAMES FENIMORE COOPER. By Horatio Greenough, in Boston Public Library. By courtesy of the Librarian, Mr. Horace G. Wadlin, and photographed by Arthur Pierce Truette CHANTING CHERUBS. Detail from Raphael's Madonna del Trono LEOPOLD II, GRAND DUKE OF TUSCANY. From Ballou's "Pictorial," Vol. XVII PITTI PALACE, FLORENCE, 1828. From water color, 1830 COUNT ST. LEU. From "_La Jeunesse de Napoleon III_" by Stefane-Pol LETIZIA BOUNAPARTE. From color print by de Delpech MADAME MÈRE. From print of drawing by Princess Charlotte, in Vol. XX, _L'lllustration_ CHURCH OF ST. ILLARIO AND NARROW LANE. From photograph obtained by Sig. Agusto Ticci, Florence, Italy VILLA, ST. ILLARIO. From special photograph obtained by Mrs. T. Henry Dewey, Paris, France CHARIOT RACES, FLORENCE. From an old print GENOA. By Vocher LEGHORN. From an old etching NAPLES. From an old water color CASA TASSO AT SORRENTO. From _"Vita di Torquato Tasso_" by Angelo Solerti CASA TASSO TERRACE-STUDY. From _"Vita di Torquato Tasso_," by Angelo Solerti ST. PETER'S, EXTERIOR, ROME. From an old print ST. PETER'S, INTERIOR. From an old print ADAM MICKIEOWICZ. From the "Life of the Poet" PORTA RIPETTA. From an old etching ROMAN FORUM. By Sargent PORTA DEL POPOLO. From an old print FALLS OF MARMORA AT TERNI. From an old print ANCONA. By S. Prout LORETO. From an old print SCALLA MINELLI, VENICE. From an old print VENICE. By J.B. Pyne PIAZZA SAN MARCO. By Chilone PALACE OF THE DOGE. From an old print TASSO'S WELL. Special photograph by Marjorie Elizabeth Parks THE BRAVO. By F.O.C. Darley GLORY OF THE ASSUMPTION. By Titian ABSOLUTION OF ANTONIO. By F.O.C. Darley ALT MARKET, DRESDEN. From 1830 print by permission of owner, Mayor of Dresden, and courtesy of Herr Rudolf Drescher, Hanau-on-Main, Germany LAFAYETTE'S PARIS HOME, RUE D'ANJOU. From special photograph obtained by Mrs. T. Henry Dewey, Paris, France LAFAYETTE'S BED-ROOM. From "Complete History of Lafayette" LOUIS PHILIPPE. From "_Galerie Napoléon_" GENERAL LAFAYETTE. From lithograph by Delpech QUEEN MARIE AMÉLIE. From an old print S.F.B. MORSE. From _L'Illustration,_ Vols. XXXI and XXXII N.P. WILLIS. By S. Lawrence TUILERIES GARDENS. From an old print TENIER'S WIFE. Portrait by Tenier. From photograph of original by permission of the owner, James Fenimore Cooper, Esq. MRS. JAMES FENIMORE COOPER AND HER SON PAUL. From a photograph of a painting done at Paris, 1831. By permission of owner, James Fenimore Cooper, Esq. THE CHILDREN OF MR. AND MRS. JAMES FENIMORE COOPER. From a photograph (given by Mr. George Pomeroy Keese) of a drawing made in Paris by Miss Susan Cooper. By permission of owner, James Fenimore Cooper, Esq. From left to right, Caroline Martha (Mrs. H.F. Phinney), Susan [unreadable] Fenimore, Anne Charlotte, Maria Frances [unreadable] Cooper THE ANGELUS. By J.F. Millet EUGÈNE-JOSEPH VERBOECKHOVEN. From a print PETER PAUL RUBENS. Portrait by the artist RUBENS' COLOGNE HOME. From Fairholt's "Homes and Haunts of Artists" CONVENT OF NUNNENWORTH. By Tombleson WATCH TOWER ON THE RHINE. From _The Art Journal_, 1880 HEIDELBERG AND CASTLE. From 1840 print VEVAY SHORES OF LAKE LEMAN. From _New England Magazine_ FÉTE DES VIGNERONS. By courtesy of Mrs. Rufus A. Kingman NOAH'S ARK VEVAY. 1833 By courtesy of Mrs. Rufus A. Kingman HOSPICE ST. BERNARD. By Major Cockburn BAY OF NAPLES. By James Hakywill NEW YORK HARBOR. By W.H. Bartlett COOPER'S OTSEGO HALL HOME. By courtesy of Mr. George Pomeroy Keese COPY OF COOPER'S GARDEN SEAT. From photograph by A.J. Telfer COOPER'S LIBRARY AT OTSEGO HALL. From drawing by Mr. George Pomeroy Keese JUDGE NELSON. From photograph by A.J. Telfer WILD ROSE POINT OR THREE MILE POINT. From a photograph by the courtesy of Mr. George Pomeroy Keese COOPER'S NEW YORK CITY HOME, ST. MARK'S PLACE. From a print by the courtesy of owner, General James Grant Wilson HORACE GREELEY. From a portrait by J.C. Buttre PARK BENJAMIN. From a portrait by J.C. Buttre THURLOW WEED. From a portrait by C.B. Hall JAMES FENIMORE COOPER. From a daguerreotype by Brady. By permission of owner, James Fenimore Cooper, Esq. COLONEL JOHN TRUMBULL. From portrait by Waldo and Jewett. CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. From a Paris print COLUMBUS' FLEET. From an old print THE GLIMMERGLASS. From photograph by courtesy of Mr. George Pomeroy Keese OTSEGO LAKE. Inset, Leatherstocking Falls and Natty Bumppo's Cave, from photographs by A.J. Telfer, Cooperstown, N.Y. JESSE D. ELLIOTT'S LAKE ERIE MEDAL. From Spear's "History of the United States Navy" MEDAL GIVEN TO JAMES FENIMORE COOPER BY JESSE D. ELLIOTT. From photograph by the courtesy of Mr. George Pomeroy Keese ISLAND OF ELBA. From an old print ELBA HOME OF NAPOLEON. From Abbott's "Napoleon" BATTLE OF LAKE ERIE. From painting by W.H. Powell COOPER'S DIAGRAM OF THE BATTLE OF LAKE ERIE. COOPER'S DIAGRAM OF THE BATTLE OF "BON HOMME RICHARD" AND THE "SERAPIS." BATTLE OF THE "BON HOMME RICHARD" AND THE "SERAPIS" By J. Rogers STUMP EXTRACTOR. From "The Hudson," by B.J. Lossing THE CHÂLET FARM. From photograph by the courtesy of Mr. George Pomeroy Keese THE ESCAPE. From "Wyandotte." By F.O.C. Darley MISS CAROLINE ADRIANCE FOOTE, AGE 13. From a daguerreotype by the courtesy of Mr. George Pomeroy Keese MISS ALICE TRUMBULL WORTHINGTON. From a daguerreotype by the courtesy of owner, Mrs. Alice Worthington Synnott LIEUT. ALEXANDER SLIDELL MACKENZIE. From Duyckwick's "Cyclopedia of American Literature" HELL GATE. From "Pages and Pictures," by Susan Augusta Cooper NIAGARA FALLS. By W.H. Bartlett JUDGE BAZIL HARRISON OF KALAMAZOO, MICHIGAN. From _Hearth and Home_, 1870 HON. GERRIT SMITH. From an old print WILLIAM BRANDFORD SHUBRICK. From Lossing's "Field-Book of the War of 1812" CHARLES MATHEWS. From "Memorials of Charles Mathew" by Mrs. Mathews JAMES H. HACKETT. From "Modern Standard Drama" STEWART'S MARBLE PALACE. From an old print MISS SUSAN AUGUSTA COOPER, ABOUT 1850. From a daguerreotype. By permission of the owner, James Fenimore Cooper, Esq. OTSEGO LAKE PARTY IN 1840. By J.L. Pease JOE TOM. From a photograph by the courtesy of Mr. George Pomeroy Keese NATTY'S CAVE. From an old print OTSEGO HALL--BACK VIEW. From "Pages and Pictures," by Susan Augusta Cooper JAMES FENIMORE COOPER. From a daguerrotype by Brady. By permission of the owner, [unreadable] Cooper, Esq., Albany, N.Y. THE SWEDISH NIGHTINGALE (JENNY LIND). Portrait by J.W. Orr From Soule photograph JENNY LIND AT CASTLE GARDEN, NEW YORK CITY, 1850. From an old print DR. JOHN WAKEFIELD FRANCIS. From portrait by J. Goldbruam DR. FRANCIS' HOME IN NEW YORK CITY. By Richardson CHRIST'S CHURCH, COOPERSTOWN, N.Y. From a photograph by A.J. Telfer FENIMORE COOPER'S SCREEN GIFT. From a print by courtesy of Miss Alice Bailey Keese BISHOP WILLIAM HEATHCOTE DE LANCEY. From Scharf's "History of Westchester County, NY" DE LANCEY COAT OF ARMS. From "A God-Child of Washington," by Katherine Schuyler Baxter THE NEW HOME AND THE OLD HOME. INDIAN HUNTER. By J.Q.A. Ward COOPER GROUNDS. From a photograph by A.J. Telfer THE CHILDREN'S TRIBUTE. From a photograph by A.J. Telfer LAKE OTSEGO. From a photograph by A.J. Telfer LEATHERSTOCKING FIGURE OF COOPER MEMORIAL. From a photograph by A.J. Telfer LEATHERSTOCKING MONUMENT. By R.E. Launitz, N.A. From a photograph by A.J. Telfer GEORGE POMEROY KEESE. From a photograph by permission of Mrs. George Pomeroy Keese BERRY POMEROY CASTLE. By courtesy of Mr. George Pomeroy Keese Acknowledgment is due The F.A. Ringler Company of New York City and Messrs. John Andrew and Son of Boston, Mass., for the care and interest they have shown in making the cuts used in this volume. [Illustration: THE ENGLISH FYNAMORE COUNTRY AND FAMILY ARMS.] JAMES FENIMORE COOPER [Illustration: COOPER'S BIRTHPLACE, Burlington, N.J.] The light of this world fell on James Fenimore Cooper September 15, 1789. The founder of American romance was born in a quaint, two-storied house of stuccoed brick which now numbers 457 Main St., Burlington, New Jersey. It was then "the last house but one as you go into the country" and among the best of the town. In a like house next door lived the father of the naval hero, Capt. James Lawrence. These two houses opened directly on the street and their slanting roofs were shaded by tall trees rooted at the curbstones. This outline of Fenimore Cooper's birthplace is from the text-picture in "Literary Rambles," by Theodore F. Wolfe, M.D., Ph.D. The first of his father's family in this new country was James Cooper, who came from Stratford-on-Avon, England, in 1679. He and his wife were Quakers, and with Quaker thrift bought wide tracts of land in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Seventy-five years after James Cooper stepped on American soil his great-grandson William was born, December 2, 1754, in Byberry township, Pennsylvania. On December 12, 1775, at Burlington, New Jersey, William Cooper married Elizabeth, daughter of Richard Fenimore, whose family came from Oxfordshire of Old England, and, at intervals, held office in her provinces. James, the future author and named for his grandfather Cooper, was the eleventh of twelve children. About 1807 Cooper, by request of his mother, said he would adopt the name of Fenimore as there were no men of her family to continue it. The change was delayed by the untimely death of Judge Cooper, and also to make less difficult the settlement of his large estate. But in 1826 James Cooper applied to the legislature for his change of name to James Cooper _Fenimore_. This request was not granted, but the change to "James Fenimore Cooper" was made. Cooper's comment on this outcome is a graphic record and "suggests," says an authority, that "the legislature would do well to assume that a petitioner, in such a case, knew better than they did what he wanted." The hyphen, at first used, was soon dropped. And so it was for his mother's sake that he made world-wide his fame by the name of James _Fenimore_ Cooper. [Illustration: THE FENIMORE BOX.] "The Fenimore Box" is an "English measure box, curious, and centuries old, brought over by the first of the name." It descended to Cooper from his mother, Elizabeth Fenimore, and is now treasured as a family heirloom by his grandson, James Fenimore Cooper of Albany, New York. [Illustration: THE SUSQUEHANNA.] As the first James Cooper and his wife were Quakers, perchance the same Quaker thrift influenced William Cooper to follow the lead of George Washington, who, two years before, in order to find out the inland waterways of our country, came from the Mohawk Valley to the headwaters of the Susquehanna--this stream which Fenimore Cooper called "the crooked river to which the Atlantic herself extended an arm of welcome." Lake Otsego--the "Glimmerglass"--William Cooper saw first in the autumn of 1785. "Mt. Vision" was covered with a forest growth so dense that he had to "climb a tree in order to get a view of the lake, and while up the tree" he saw a deer come down "from the thickets and quietly drink of its waters near Otsego Rock." "Just where the Susquehanna leaves the Lake on its long journey to the sea" this famous Council Rock "still shows its chin above the water and marks the spot where Deerslayer met Chingachgook the Great Serpent of the Delawares." Now "its lake margin belongs to a grandson of the author, who also bears his name," is a record found in Dr. Wolfe's "Literary Haunts and Homes." In the red man's tongue Otsego means "a place of friendly meeting" of Indian warriors. The author of "Deerslayer" has immortalized that lake-country in the opening chapter of this book. [Illustration: CHINGACHGOOK ON THE COUNCIL ROCK.] Of this visit to his future home and lands William Cooper has written: "In 1785 I visited the rough and hilly country of Otsego. I was alone, three hundred miles from home, without food of any kind. I caught trout in the brook and roasted them in the ashes. My horse fed on the grass that grew by the edge of the waters. I laid me down to sleep in my watch-coat, nothing but the wilderness about me. In this way I explored the country and formed my plans of future settlement. May, 1786, I opened a sale of forty thousand acres of land, which in sixteen days were all taken up by the poorest order of men." Here William Cooper laid out the site of Cooperstown, which, until 1791, when it became the county-town, was at times also called "Foot-of-the-Lake." He built a store for his sturdy pioneers, giving credit for their simple needs of life, and traded settlement products for them. His tenants put up log houses, and paid rent in butter, wheat, corn, oats, maple-sugar, and finally in pork;--so much that rentals known as "pork leases" were sold like farms. Money was scarce in those days,--when one John Miller, and his father, coming to the Lakeland's point of the river, felled a pine, over which they crossed to the Cooperstown site. Its stump was marked with white paint and called the "bridge-tree" by Fenimore Cooper. His sister Nancy's grandson, Mr. George Pomeroy Keese, from whom much will appear in these pages, has all there is left of that stump. [Illustration: COUNCIL ROCK.] In a few years the town's growth gave such promise that William Cooper began to build his own home. It was generally known as "The Manor," but the patent of Cooperstown was not according to law a manor. It was finished in 1788, when a few streets were laid out and the town's first map was made. And October 10, 1790, he brought his family and servants, some fifteen persons, and their belongings, from Burlington New Jersey, to this early pioneer home. Mr. Keese says that "The Manor" was of wood with outside boarding, unplaned; that it was two stories high, had two wings and a back building added in 1791. It first stood facing Main St. and Otsego Lake and directly in front of the later Otsego Hall, now marked by the Indian Hunter. In 1799 it was moved down the street, and was burned down in 1812. In its time it was the most stately private house for miles around. The second home, Otsego Hall, built in 1798, was of bricks which were made at the outlet of the lake. It had seventy feet of frontage by fifty-six of depth, and had two stories with attic and basement. The main hall measured twenty-four by forty-eight feet and the rooms on either side were twenty feet wide. Otsego Hall is said to have been of the exact, generous proportions of the Van Rensselaer Manor House at Albany, New York, where Judge Cooper was a frequent visitor. His own Hall home on Otsego's southern shore ever had "the air and capacity of a mansion and a history of hospitality well deserved." [Illustration: THE MANOR.] [Illustration: ORIGINAL OTSEGO HALL.] [Illustration: JUDGE WILLIAM COOPER.] To a friend William Cooper wrote: "I began life with a small capital and a large family, and yet I have already settled more acres than any man in America; and I trust no one can justly impute to me any act of oppression. Your good sense and knowledge will excuse this seeming boast." He elsewhere said that he owed his success to "a steady mind, a sober judgment, fortitude, perseverance, and above all, common sense." And here he lived as a wise and kind landlord among his people. For nine years he was First Judge of the County Court of Common Pleas, and he served two terms in Congress. Of Judge William Cooper there are three portraits,--Gilbert Stuart's of 1797-98, Trumbull's of 1806, and one by an unknown artist. His kindly gray eye, robust figure, and firm expression bear out the story of his life as told by these portraits. James Fenimore Cooper, in a letter to his wife, dated Canajoharie, 1834, wrote of his father: "I have been up to the ravine to the old Frey house. It recalled my noble-looking, warmhearted, witty father, with his deep laugh, sweet voice, and fine, rich eye, as he used to light the way with his anecdotes and fun. Old Frey, with his little black peepers, pipe, hearty laugh, broken English, and warm welcome, was in the background. I went to the very spot where one of the old man's slaves amused Sam and myself with an imitation of a turkey that no artist has ever yet been able to supplant in my memory." This Heindrick Frey was a noted character of the Mohawk Valley over one hundred years ago. It was, however, to the first home on Otsego's shore that the future creator of American romance was brought when a babe some thirteen months old. Here, in the heart of the wilderness, his infancy was passed. Otsego Hall sheltered his budding boyhood and young manhood. Grace and refinement dwelt within the household; without, voices of the forest awakened and nurtured his naturally active mind, which later on was not less influenced by the mysteries of the sea. The Six Nations were yet a power in the Mohawk Valley, then the highway to the land of the setting sun beyond. And they are now remembered in the names of the principal lakes and streams of the country that once was theirs. The boy was face-to-face with the "grim warriors, braves, and chieftains that the man, Fenimore Cooper, translated into his pages, with a touch true to the red man's life," his instinct in trading, his friendly and hostile intent. Here Nature was his first and unforgettable teacher. From "Pages and Pictures," by his daughter, Susan Fenimore Cooper, much will be given in this book. Miss Cooper has drawn some pretty pen-pictures of her father's child-life. She writes: "From the first bow and arrow, kite and ball, to later feats in fishing, riding, shooting, and skating, all were connected with his highland home." He was "healthy and active; a brave, blithe-hearted, impetuous, most generous and upright boy." Of his childhood another record is: "A gray-eyed, light-haired, ruddy boy, nimble as a deer and gay as a bird; on the lake, plying his oar lustily or trimming his sail to the mountain breeze; and whenever he found a wave high enough to lift his little boat, his veins would thrill with a strange delight, and he would ask himself whether this was like those ocean waves of which he had heard such wonders." The little lad's next step in learning was taken under the gentle rule of his elder sister, Hannah, who had her schooling in New York City, and afterwards improved her leisure by extensive reading. She was a model of domestic virtues and was greatly beloved, especially by the poor, to whom she was ever an angel of mercy. She often went with her father on his official visits to the seat of government, and when, in 1800, at the age of twenty-three years, she lost her life by a fall from her horse, her early death was widely and deeply mourned. Her memory was always cherished with peculiar tenderness by her brother James, the special charge of her loving care. [Illustration: GENERAL WILLIAM HENRY HARRISON.] A letter, written by him in 1841 to his old "messmate," Commodore Shubrick, reveals no wane of Cooper's love for and pride in this sister, and his letter's "political discovery" reveals that Miss Cooper's attractions were as fully appreciated by the eminent of her own country as by those of foreign shores. So comes into these pages a youthful, slender romance of the later hero of Tippecanoe and still later President of the United States. [Illustration: WILLIAM HENRY HARRISON, 1800.] OTSEGO HALL, COOPERSTOWN, February, 28, 1841. I have made a great political discovery lately, which must not go any further than Mrs. Shubrick and Mary. In 1799, when Congress sat in Philadelphia, my father was a member, as was also General Harrison. You know I had a sister killed by a fall from a horse in 1800. This sister passed the Winter in Philadelphia with my father. Miss Anne Cooper [the author's daughter] was lately in Philadelphia, where she met Mr. Thomas Biddle, who asked if our family were not Harrison men. The reason of so singular a question was asked, and Mr. Biddle answered that in 1799 Mr. Harrison was dying with love for Miss Cooper, that he (Mr. Biddle) was his confidant, and that he _thinks_ but does not _know_ that he was refused. If not refused it was because he was not encouraged to propose, so you see I stand on high grounds and am ready to serve you on occasion. Don't let this go any further, however. I confess to think all the better of the General for this discovery, for it shows that he had forty years ago both taste and judgment in a matter in which men so often fail. Mary will open her eyes at this somewhat wider than ever, but she must not open her mouth until she gives her allegiance to him who will know all her thoughts. With best regards _Yours as ever_, J. FENIMORE COOPER. NOTE.--Later light on the subject reveals Mr. Harrison's "dying of love" as a hearty admiration and esteem for the rare grace and charm of character, mind, and person possessed by Judge Cooper's young daughter. [Illustration: TALLEYRAND.] During 1795 many distinguished exiles came to this new-country home, and among those who found their way to Otsego Hall was the Marquis de Talleyrand, who was pleased to write an acrostic on Miss Cooper, then seventeen. The famous Frenchman's record, in part, of this visit was "_Otsego n'est pas gai_." Compared to the France of Talleyrand's day this record was true. The _Otsego Herald's_ motto of that time was Historic truth our _Herald_ shall proclaim, The Law our guide, the public good our aim. In its issue of October 2, 1795, appeared the celebrated diplomat's Acrostic. Aimable philosophe au printemps de son âge, Ni les temps, ni les lieus n'altèrent son esprit; Ne cèdent qu' à ses goûts simples et son étalage, Au milieu des deserts, elle lit, pense, écrit. Cultivez, belle Anna, votre goût pour l'étude; On ne saurait ici mieux employer son temps; Otsego n'est pas gai--mais, tout est habitude; Paris vous déplairait fort au premier moment; Et qui jouit de soi dans une solitude, Rentrant au monde, est sur d'en faire I'ornement. In affectionate remembrance of Miss Cooper the hill just northwest of Cooperstown was named for her, and "Hannah's Hill" commands one of the town's finest views. In the quiet shades of Christ's Church yard "belle Anna" rests beneath a slab bearing some lines by her father, but not her name. The August before this sad event Judge Cooper gave the first of the many "lake parties" that floated over Otsego--"which no waters can rival." In the fairness of her youth Miss Hannah was there with her little sister, later Mrs. Pomeroy; and also, among the gay "five and twenty friends from Philadelphia," were their brothers. Indian canoes and flat-bottomed skiffs conveyed them to the eastern shore, where, at Two-Mile Point, a frightened fawn, startled from its forest home by the dogs of Shipman the hunter,--who later outlined "Leatherstocking,"--darted from the leafy thicket and plunged into the lake. At once all were in motion to rescue the little creature now swimming for life. It was successfully brought to land and became a great pet with Judge Cooper's children; but one day, frightened by strange, fierce dogs, it bounded into the forest depths for refuge, and never returned. The centennial anniversary of this first picnic was celebrated by the third and fourth generation of Judge Cooper's descendants, who met at Point Judith to honor the occasion. Of the verses written by Mr. George Pomeroy Keese concerning this event two are: [Illustration: POINT JUDITH.] And one hundred years have come and gone Since our country then was new, And now we keep in memory dear Our love for the good and true. To one who came to his forest home And gave to our village its name; To the son, the touch of whose magic pen Has lifted to world-wide fame. In this summer of 1800 Richard, Judge Cooper's eldest son, built his house of frame on "Apple Hill." It was the second villa-like home in the village. Its site, now known as "Fernleigh," is the country-seat of Stephen Clark, Esq. "Edgewater," overlooking Lake Otsego, is the land that, after Judge Cooper's death in 1809, fell to his son Isaac. Here, the following year, Isaac Cooper built his home of brick. Later, it changed in form, use, and ownership, but again became a family possession through the marriage of Mr. Theodore Keese with the daughter of George Pomeroy and Ann Cooper. Renewing in all ways the charm and grace of its early days, "Edgewater," as the home of Mr. George Pomeroy Keese, the grandson of Fenimore Cooper's youngest sister Ann, commands at the foot of the lake its length, breadth, beauty, and inspiration. [Illustration: "EDGEWATER."] The old stone house, known as the "Deacon Pomeroy's place," that stood at the corner of Main and River streets, gives--in a quaint gable--an enduring record of romance in this sister Ann's young-life. It was built of stone in the peculiar herring-bone style by Judge William Cooper for a wedding gift to his only living daughter, Ann, when she married George Pomeroy, grandson of Gen. Seth Pomeroy and lineal descendant of that Sir Ralph de Pomeroy who came to England with William the Conqueror. In this quaint gable appear the intertwined letters G.A.P.C.--the initials of the bridegroom and bride,--with the date 1804 beneath. [Illustration: MR. AND MRS. GEORGE POMEROY.] The Cooper room of this old stone house, now the home of Mrs. Benedict, a granddaughter, shelters family portraits from William Cooper's time down to the present day--five generations. What stories might it not tell of the attractive originals? Many were the letters that Fenimore Cooper wrote from Europe to this sister, Mrs. George Pomeroy, of the old stone house. Mrs. Benedict has also placed there many souvenirs of her sister, Constance Fenimore Woolson, gathered during-her long residence in Europe, including the author's writing-table and her chair. [Illustration: THE OLD STONE HOUSE.] "Master Oliver Cory kept the village school" in those child-days of Fenimore Cooper, and long after. "He was well qualified for that post; laborious, upright, firm, yet patient and kindly by nature. His training of the boys was excellent. Saturdays were given to religious lessons, and he paid careful but quiet attention to their morals and manners." From his sister Hannah's teaching Judge Cooper's youngest son went to Master Cory's school. It was kept in "one of those tasteless buildings that afflict all new countries," and here was called the "Academy." It served Cooperstown in timely ways for religious and political meetings; public courts were held here, and a ball was given now and then under its roof. As to the school, time and incident brought out a taste for music in the pupils of Master Cory. It seems that Judge Cooper had brought from Philadelphia a large upright organ of imposing appearance and power, which he placed in his manor-house hall. Its arrival in the village made a summer's sensation. When put up and adjusted, a rehearsal of country dances, reels, and more serious music came floating through the broad door and ample windows of Otsego Hall into Master Cory's domain, the Academy, which stood in the adjoining street. As, with magic effect the strains of "Hail Columbia" poured into the schoolroom, Master Cory skilfully met a moment of open rebellion with these words: "Boys, that organ is a remarkable instrument. You never heard the like of it before. I give you half an hour's intermission. Go into the street and listen to the music!" [Illustration: COOPERSTOWN PRIOR TO 1835.] These "Academy boys" were ambitious; each annual exhibition was crowded, to listen to the speeches "of Coriolanus, Iago, Brutus, and Cassius" by "raw lads from the village and adjoining farms," in all the bravery of local militia uniform--blue coats "faced with red, matross swords, and hats of '76." On such an occasion James Cooper, then a child of eight years, became the pride and admiration of Master Cory for his moving recitation of the "Beggar's Petition"--acting the part of an old man wrapped in a faded cloak and leaning over his staff. It is recorded that James had the fine, healthy pie-appetite usual to his age, for, says the record, when his eldest brother "was showing the sights of New York to the youngest, he took him to a pasty-shop, and, after watching the boy eat pasty after pasty, said to him: 'Jim, eat all you want, but remember that each one costs the old man a lot.'" Pasty then outbalanced property for "Jim." In due time the lad outgrew the Academy's instruction, but from boy to-man he never outgrew Master Cory's affection, nor his own for the dear home scenes on the shores of the "Haunted Lake," which he was so soon to leave for his first important schooling. The books he wrote later tell how he never forgot the howl of the wolf across the icy field of Otsego on cold winter nights, the peculiar wail of the sharp-toothed panther in the quiet wood roads, nor the familiar springs where the deer lingered latest. One autumn day, while still a pupil under Master Cory's charge, the future author of "The Pioneers" was at play in his father's garden, when suddenly he was surprised by a deer which came leaping over the fence from the street, almost brushing his face as it bounded away into the pine woods at the back of the house. This incident he often related to his children. It was not long before this youngest son was sent from home. The eventful journey to Albany was made in the care of a near and worthy farmer, "who was carrying toward the Hudson a load of wheat from the fields of Otsego." They went over the fine turnpike,--the great highway of that day,--"just finished from the Hudson to Cherry Valley." The child had heard much of this wonder of roads from the gentlemen at his father's table who were interested in it, and he was eager to see its toll-gates and stone bridges. After leaving "the corduroy tracks" leading to it from Cooperstown, the famous turnpike burst upon the gratified schoolboy's vision. As they trotted slowly along the farmer pointed out, among-other marvels of the way, "a tavern for every mile" of the sixty between Albany and Lake Otsego. A long-train of farmers' wagons, filled with the precious wheat, was slowly rolling eastward, passing-emigrant wagons of "growing families" and household gear moving westward to the great lake countries. All this delighted the boy of nine, who was finally set down at the door of St. Peter's Rectory at Albany, New York. Here for four years he became one of the four young pupils of the Rev. Thomas Ellison, rector of the church. Dr. Ellison was an Englishman and a graduate of Oxford--a rare scholar and a king's man. From him came Cooper's strong preference for English church government and equally strong feeling against the Puritans of Old and New England. While the Puritan's character was not pleasing to Cooper, he himself was called a "Puritan of Puritans," and it was to them he referred in the following: "Whatever else I may think of the Yankees,--a calmer, firmer, braver people do not walk this earth." Of this sentiment "The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish," published in 1829, gives ample proof. [Illustration: DR. THOMAS ELLISON.] The Rev. Joseph Hooper, author of the "History of St. Peter's Church, Albany, N.Y.," related an incident of Cooper's old Rectory school days there. The story came to Dr. Hooper from Mr. Edward Floyd de Lancy, son of Bishop de Lancy of Western New York, and is as follows: It was the custom of the Rev. Thomas Ellison when he became too feeble to personally direct his workmen, to sit upon the stoop of the Rectory and watch the removal of the sandbank which covered the chosen site for the new church, corner of State and Lodge streets. Hundreds of loads had to be carted away before the foundation could be laid, and some of the carter's pay tickets on quartered playing-cards are preserved in St. Peter's archives. But the great hole in the ground had a great attraction for the boys of Albany, and they would leap into it to play tag and leap-frog until the stern voice of the Dominie called them to order, when they would scamper away or hide in some corner out of sight of the piercing eyes of Dr. Ellison. Sometimes they would answer him mockingly, to his great annoyance. He could not pursue them, but he could, when his own pupils joined with the other boys, as they often did, give them stern and severe lectures upon their conduct, for they were playing on ground to be used for a sacred purpose. Even the rod of correction was used without curing them of this habit. Young Cooper was often a ringleader, and their pranks would often continue until darkness concealed them from the watchful and angry Rector, to whom, nevertheless, they gave due honor and respect. [Illustration: ST. PETER'S CHURCH, ALBANY, N.Y.] [Illustration: STATE STREET, ALBANY, N.Y., 1802.] From one of his "Sketches of England," written to William, Judge John Jay's second son, comes, in part, Cooper's graphic description of Dr. Ellison: "Thirty-six years ago you and I were school fellows and classmates in the home of a clergyman of the true English school. This man entertained a most profound reverence for the King and the nobility; was not backward in expressing his contempt for all classes of dissenters and all ungentlemanly sects; was particularly severe on the immoralities of the French Revolution, and, though eating our bread, was not especially lenient to our own; compelled you and me to begin Virgil with the eclogues, and Cicero with the knotty phrases that open the oration in favor of the poet Archias, because these writers would not have placed them first in the books if they did not intend people to read them first; spent his money freely and sometimes that of other people; was particularly tenacious of the ritual and of all decencies of the Church; detested a democrat as he did the devil; cracked his jokes daily about Mr. Jefferson, never failing to place his libertinism in strong relief against the approved morals of George III., of several passages in whose history it is charitable to suppose he was ignorant; prayed fervently on Sunday; decried all morals, institutions, churches, manners but those of England from Monday to Saturday." The lad from Otsego soon became a prime favorite with his tutor, who took pleasure in teaching him. The old-fashioned, heroic romances were a rare delight to him,--a taste which was thought to come from his mother, who was very fond of such reading. One vacation, at about the age of eleven, he and a playmate lost themselves in the exciting interest of such a tale; "Don Belianus of Greece" made so deep an impression on Cooper that after reading it he said seriously to his playfellow that he would write a book himself, and would "begin it at once." And, like "Don Belianus of Greece," this story was to have "knights, and squires, and horses, and ladies, and castles and banners." With the glory of his story in mind, the boy had utterly forgotten his hearty dislike of pen-work at school. But his active brain soon put to flight this hobgoblin; he thought of the bit of a blue newspaper--the _Otsego Herald_--printed in Cooperstown by the father of his comrade. So they planned to use the resting-time of the press for the printing of this new book, of which, however, only a few chapters were put in type. The new author soon wearied of his work; but none the less it was the first step in his future literary career. During 1801 a man near fifty, cleanly clad in sailor's gear but without stockings or neckcloth, appeared before Judge Cooper and asked if the lot between Fenimore and the village was for sale. The answer was, "Yes, but the price is high," and naming it, the stranger requested that a deed be made out at once; he counted down the amount in gold, and gave his name as Esaias Hausman. He had built for himself a small rude house on this lot and lived alone in it for years. The secrets of his former life, his wide learning (once found teaching a college president Hebrew), and disappearance at times, were never solved. Only his death revealed a purse of gold worn between his shoulder-blades. There was no will, so to public sale went the little hut and its lake-shore lot. This man of mystery made a deep impression on Cooper's boy-mind, and later, in 1838, was the subject of several pages of the author's "Chronicles of Cooperstown." Then there was James Allen,--a Scotch master-mason,--who came his way from the "Land o' Cakes" in 1801, and found, as an employee of Judge Cooper, an opening for his trade, and soon became a great favorite with the Cooper boys. This master-mason took great pride in exact work, with which no trifling was permitted. No stone could be moved but his true eye would detect it in a flash, and wild was the fury with which his fiery trowel flew for the culprit, and with such convincing force that it was wise to avoid further meddling with the "gude mon's" work. Of "Jamie Allen," master-mason and staunch _auld kirke mon_, many an amusing story is told in Fenimore Cooper's "Wyandotté, or the Hutted Knoll," written in 1843. These men among others marked the unusual in Cooper's vacations from Dr. Ellison's school-rule at Albany. Later in life he wrote a lively memory-sketch of his tutor, the rector of St. Peter's Church. But the death in 1802 of this accomplished gentleman sent his pupil--then a stripling of thirteen--to Yale. He entered the freshman 1802-3 January-term class, and, "excepting the poet Hillhouse, two weeks his junior, James Cooper was the youngest student in college." There "his progress in his studies is said to have been honorable to his talents." And "in the ancient languages he had no superior in his class." [Illustration: "NEAR SHORES" OF NEW HAVEN.] Cooper owned to having learned little at college. When left to his own bent, his early love for out-of-door life drew him to roam the hills and explore near shores, and to his first view of the grand old ocean, which later claimed his tribute of service. For a boyish frolic in his junior year the lad left Yale, and this incident ended his college career. It is of record that Judge Cooper took the boy's part against the faculty version and brought his son home. Yet something from his books James Cooper must have gleaned, for there is a story of a young sailor who, in some public place in the streets of an English port, attracted the curiosity of the crowd by explaining to his companions the meaning of a Latin motto. [Illustration: DR. TIMOTHY DWIGHT.] [Illustration: YALE COLLEGE, 1806.] [Illustration: WILLIAM JAY IN YOUTH.] The Albany, school-boy days of William Jay and James Cooper were renewed at Yale where was welded their strong life-friendship. On the college roll of their time appear amongst other names that of John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, and the scholarly poet Hillhouse of New Haven. In the Dodd, Mead & Company's 1892 issue of "William Jay and the Constitutional Movement for the Abolition of Slavery," by Bayard Tuckerman, with a preface, by John Jay, appears a letter dating 1852, written by Judge William Jay to his grandson. This letter gives graphic glimpses of Yale College life during the student days there of its writer and James Cooper: "The resident graduates were denominated 'Sirs'; their place in Chapel was called 'the Sirs pew'; and when spoken of in college 'Sir' was always placed before their names. At that time the freshmen occupied, in part, the place of sizers in the English universities, and they were required to run errands for the seniors. My room-mate was Sir Holly (Dr. Horace Holly). As a mere freshman, I looked up to my room-mate with great respect, and treated him accordingly. About half past five in winter, the bell summoned us from our beds,--I rose, generally, before six,--made the fire, and then went, pitcher in hand, often wading through snow, for water for Sir Holly and myself. Of the college bell," the letter continues: "at six it called us to prayers in the chapel. We next repaired to the recitation-rooms and recited, by candlelight, the lessons we had studied the preceding evening. At eight we had breakfast,--our meals were taken in a large hall with a kitchen opening into it. The students were arranged at tables according to their classes. All sat on wooden benches, not excepting the tutors; the latter had a table to themselves on an elevated platform whence they had a view of the whole company. But it was rather difficult for them to attend to their plates and to watch two hundred boys at the same time. Salt beef once a day, and dry cod were perhaps the most usual dishes. On Sunday mornings, during the winter, our breakfast-tables were graced with large tin milk-cans filled with stewed oysters; at the proper season we were occasionally treated with green peas. As you may suppose, a goodly number of waiters were needed in the hall. These were all students, and many of them among the best and most esteemed scholars. At nine the bell warned us to our rooms. At twelve it called us to a recitation or a lecture. After dinner we recommenced our studies for the third time, at four o'clock. During study hours the tutors would frequently go the rounds, looking into our rooms to see that we were not playing truant. Before supper, we all attended prayers in the chapel." [Illustration: SILHOUETTE OF JAMES COOPER WHEN A STUDENT AT YALE.] Although, from the necessity of his times, Chief-Justice John Jay was a slave owner, his son, William--refined, benevolent, pleasing in manner, but with a temper easily aroused by injustice--became an early, alert, and strong advocate of the anti-slavery cause. This eminent jurist who built his life upon the plan of his words, "Duties are ours and consequences are God's" (as did also Cooper), was graphically addressed and described by Cooper as "Thou most pugnacious man of peace." [Illustration: OUTWARD BOUND.] Leaving Yale to the more studious, no doubt the young man enjoyed this brief period of home-life and the distinguished guests drawn by its hospitality to Otsego Hall. Yet even this could not for long hold him there. Perhaps he was influenced by what he heard from them of the great outside world, and he, too, wished to see what it was like. As a stepping-stone to a commission in the navy, Judge Cooper secured a berth for his son, who shipped as a sailor before-the-mast in the _Stirling_, of Wiscasset, Maine, John Johnston master and part owner. In the care of a merchant, young Cooper went down to the docks to look about the ship and sign the articles, and the next day he returned in his sailor's garb. The _Stirling_ was taken into the stream, and his new comrades, a mixture of nations,--four Americans, a Portuguese, a Spaniard, a Prussian, a Dane, an Englishman, a Scotch boy, and a Canadian,--tumbled aboard, not quite themselves; but by night they were in working trim. The young commander was described as "kind and considerate of all hands," and the ship as "carrying a motley crew." When "all hands" were called to get the _Stirling_ under way, Cooper, with another boy, was sent aloft to loose the foretopsail. With eager will he tugged stoutly at "the robbins," when the second mate appeared just in time to prevent him from dropping his part of the sail into the top. The good-hearted mate had a kindly mind for the "new hand," and the men were too busy to notice small failures aloft. Young Cooper soon found an old salt who taught him to knot and splice with the best of them, and old Barnstable was repaid for these lessons by the merry times they had together when they got ashore. However, with her cargo of flour, the _Stirling_ sailed from New York in the autumn of 1806 for the English market at Cowes, and therefore when Cooper should have been taking his class degree at Yale, he was outward bound on the sea's highway. Being to the manor born did not admit the sailor before-the-mast to the captain's cabin, but no doubt the long, rough voyage of forty stormy days did make of the young man a jolly tar. Through her usual veil of fog came Cooper's first view of Old England when threatened with Napoleon's invasion. Forty-odd sail of warships were sighted by the night-watch when the _Stirling_ passed the straits of Dover at daybreak. They gave the young man an object-lesson that he never forgot, in the watchfulness and naval power of Great Britain. The _Stirling_ had but dropped anchor in English waters when she was boarded by a British man-of-war's boat-crew, and one of her best hands was forced into the English navy service, and another sailor barely escaped, he having satisfactory papers. At London a third hand was lost, and Captain Johnston himself was seized by a press-gang. [Illustration: GIBRALTAR.] Finally, in round-jacket and tarpaulin, the future guest of Samuel Rogers and Holland House, planted his feet on British soil. At London he saw about everything a gay young fellow of seventeen in sailor's gear could, of that wonderful city,--or so thought Ned Myers, one of his shipmates, who was with him most of the time. Concerning these jaunts Myers says: "I had one or two cruises of a Sunday in the tow of Cooper, who soon became a branch pilot in those waters about the parks and the West End, the Monument, St. Paul's and the lions; Cooper took a look at the arsenal, jewels, and armory [Tower of London]. He had a rum time of it in his sailor's rig; hoisted in a wonderful lot of gibberish." And with his fine stories of each day's sights in old London town, the young sailor would make merry evenings for his forecastle comrades, of whom it is recorded his strength could lay flat on their backs in two minutes. In January the _Stirling_ spread her sails for another stormy passage,--to the straits of Gibraltar. On running out, the ship was boarded by a gun-boat officer, who tried to press a Swede; whereupon, young Cooper thinking it an insult to our flag, began high words with the Englishman, but was soon silenced by Captain Johnston. The _Stirling_ met with various stirring adventures, being chased by a Bay-of-Biscay pirate and rescued by the timely appearance of a British cruiser. It was thick westerly weather when they ran into the straits, and as the English fleet was off Cape Trafalgar, Captain Johnston realized the danger of being run down in the night, and came on deck during the middle watch for a sharp lookout on the forecastle. Night orders were given when came the warning, "Sail ho!" and through the mists and shadows was seen dimly a two-decker bearing directly clown upon them. The Captain ordered the helm "hard up!" and called Cooper to "bring a light." With a leap he rushed to the cabin, seized the light, and in half a minute it was swinging from the mizzen rigging, his promptness saving the ship. So near were the two vessels that the deck officer's voice was distinctly heard calling his quarter-master to "port the helm." As the great mass swept by them she seemed about to crush their railing with the muzzle of her guns. While the _Stirling_ was lying off the old Moorish town of Almaria, Cooper and others were sent ashore in a jolly-boat to boil pitch. To return to the ship they put off in a heavy sea, knowing it would be difficult to work through the surf; but orders were orders, and delay would not help. So off they plunged, when suddenly a breaker "took the bow of the boat, and lifting her almost on end, turned her keel uppermost." All hands got safely ashore--how, none could tell. A second launching resulted as the first, but with a third they succeeded in forging their way out, and boarded the ship. Later they ran short of provisions. But the _Stirling's_ return cargo was brought back safely to London, where the ship lay at anchor for two months or more, and then sailed in July for America. After a voyage of fifty-two days she dropped anchor at Philadelphia, September 18, 1807. So much for this good ship named for Stirling Castle of Bonnie Scotland. Such were the lessons young Cooper learned in this rough but manly school. A brother officer who knew him well said, "He was active, prompt, and efficient, a pleasant shipmate, always ready to do his duty, and rigorous too in exacting it of others." Of Cooper's "Naval History" was added, "It is the noblest tribute ever paid to a noble profession." Aboard the _Stirling_ on these several cruises Cooper learned much that afterwards appeared in his sea tales. It was of this sea-service that he wrote, "I have been myself one of eleven hands, officers included, to navigate a ship of three hundred tons across the Atlantic Ocean; and, what is more, we often reefed topsails with the watch." Of the _Stirling_ he wrote, "The ship was on a bow-line most of the time"; and he thought her "one of the wettest ships that ever floated when heading tip against the sea." A lively account of this eleven months' service is found in Cooper's story of "Ned Myers." This life of his shipmate aboard the _Stirling_ was written in 1843. The old salt was a battered hulk in the "Sailor's Snug Harbor" when Cooper was on the crest of the wave of his literary fame, and the old sailor, wondering if this Cooper could be the comrade of his youth in the _Stirling_ days of yore, wrote, after the twenty-five years of separation, to inquire. The answer was, "I am your old shipmate, Ned." Later, "Ned" was invited to visit the Hall. Many remember the interesting two in 1843. "Hardly a day passed that they were not seen, as the heavy Hall gates swung open at eleven o'clock, coming out for a morning walk or a sail on the lake;--Cooper's portly form, and by his side a shriveled figure with halting step, leaning heavily on a crooked stick which served for a cane. They were as strong in contrast as it was possible for men to be." It was during this visit that the old sailor spun his life-yarn in his own way and Cooper wove it into his book, "Ned Myers." [Illustration: SAILOR'S SNUG HARBOR.] Perhaps the following interesting Cooperstown story of Cooper's youth is of the time of his return from his _Stirling_ voyage. One day a merry group of young men proposed a footrace, the course to be around the square--a distance of about one hundred yards. James Cooper was named as one of the runners, and his rival was soon chosen. According to custom, the village boys, girls, men, and women were spectators. Like a mettlesome steed in curb young Cooper looked at the wager,--a basket of fruit,--then at his race-mate, and accepted the challenge, but not on even terms. It was not enough for a sailor simply to outrun a landsman; he could do more. A little girl stood near, her bright face eager with watching for the fray. Cooper turned quickly and caught her up in his arms, and with the pride and muscle of an athlete exclaimed, "I'll carry her with me and beat you!" Away they flew, Cooper with his laughing burden upon his shoulders; one corner was turned, and the excited crowd saw with surprise James Cooper with his small rider keeping pace with the other flying youth. Another, and the other corners were soon passed; both sprang like race-horses near the end of the course, but Cooper, with his little black-eyed girl aloft and the perspiration pouring down his manly brow and cheeks, was the first to reach the mark, and amidst such cheers and hurrahs as only pioneers can freely give, and as freely enjoy. The fruit he had won, but soon it was shared by all around. That little girl, later the wife of Captain William Wilson, often told the story of her ride on pleasant James Cooper's shoulders. [Illustration: OTSEGO HALL GATES.] While never a rhymester, Cooper, in his early manhood and at rare times after, did write occasional sentimental and comic verses that betokened both clever imagination and other merit. Into the _Otsego Herald_ printing-office a poor epileptic ballad-singer came one day to ask help from a group of gentlemen A purse was made up for him, but he, looking among them, said if one of them would write for him "a few verses--something new"--they would be worth more than the silver given him. Young Cooper offered to try, and asked on what subject he should write "There's nothing sells like ballads," was the reply. So the ballad was promised; and some thirty or more pathetic verses were written at once, about the small frontier village recently burnt by troops under Colonel Murray during the close of the last war with England. This ballad bore the high-sounding title of "Buffalo Burnt, or the Dreadful Conflagration." It won such success among the farm-house gentry that the singer returned for another ballad and obtained it. Some years later Mr. Cooper was invited to a tea-party in a near village, when a young lady, led to the piano for music, began to sing, much to the author's disturbing amazement, "Buffalo Burnt, or the Dreadful Conflagration." [Illustration: BUFFALO BURNT.] So passed the pleasant vacation days of our young sailor, whose training before-the-mast enabled his father to obtain for him a midshipman's commission in the United States Navy, for which James Cooper reported for duty at New York City, January 12, 1808. At the age of nineteen he first served aboard the _Vesuvius._ Thence he was ordered to Oswego, New York, to build the brig _Oneida_ for Lake Ontario service, and which the spring of 1809 saw launched. [Illustration: THE "VESUVIUS."] [Illustration: ONTARIO FORESTS.] While the war flurries which called for the building of the vessel were tethered, Cooper had learned his lesson in ship-building, ship-yard duties, and water-border life; and these served him more than thirty years later in his matchless Indian story, "The Pathfinder." Miss Susan Cooper has left some interesting pages of this period of her father's naval service; in part they read: "In 1808 several young officers under Lieutenant Woolsey were ordered to the shores of Lake Ontario for building a small vessel of war. Among them was Mr. Cooper, then a midshipman in the service. Their road lay for many a mile through the forest to the mouth of the Oswego River,--their destination,--where the _Oneida_, a brig mounting sixteen guns, was built and launched. They enjoyed the wild coloring of frontier life They roamed the forests and explored the shores in leisure hours. Cruises among the Thousand Islands were frequent; many were the fine fish caught and good chowders eaten. The picturesque beauties of the region, the countless islands, were greatly enjoyed and never forgotten by the young midshipman." The youthful officers were ordered to Buffalo, and stopping for the night at a rude frontier inn, it was Cooper's duty to inquire what they might have for supper. "Mine host shook his head ruefully; he could promise very little. 'Give us what you eat yourself; you must have food of some kind,' said Cooper. Mine host looked melancholy; on his honor he assured the young officers he had absolutely nothing to set before them but game, steak, and brook-trout; and, maybe his wife could find cranberries for a tart! A month earlier they should have had a dish of fried pork fit for the President, with a pumpkin pie after it. 'Game's plenty, but nothin' else!' added the publican with a sigh. Mine host was pining for pork! On this expedition Mr. Cooper saw Niagara for the first time. He was struck with the grandeur of the cataract, but felt its sublime character far more deeply on a later visit--after his return from Europe." [Illustration: THE THOUSAND ISLANDS.] [Illustration: THE PORT OF BUFFALO.] When the _Oneida_ was launched the gallant young officers resolved to celebrate the event by giving a ball. "This was an enterprise of a desperate character;--building a brig hundreds of miles from a ship-yard was a trifle to giving a ball in the wilderness. True, one fiddle and half a dozen officers were something; refreshments and a military ball-room might be hoped for; but where, pray, were the ladies to come from?" They would not think of dancing with each other, and ladies must be found. Vigorous efforts were made by sending boats in some directions and carts miles in others, to invite the ladies; and they accepted. As the hour drew near a very delicate point came up for decision--the honors due different fair claimants. After a council of war, Lieutenant Woolsey gave to his master-of-ceremonies these orders: "All ladies, sir, provided with shoes and stockings are to be led to the head of the Virginia reel; ladies with shoes, and without stockings, are considered in the second rank; ladies without shoes or stockings you will lead, gentlemen, to the foot of the country dance!" Such was a grand military ball in Oswego County in 1808-9. [Illustration: CAPTAIN M.T. WOOLSEY.] About this time occurred an amusing incident of their raw young mess-servant, fresh from Ireland: "A table-cloth had taken fire and was in full blaze; Paddy was at the moment filling a teapot from an ample kettle in his hand. 'Pour the water on the table!' called out one of the officers. 'Sure, the wather is _hot_, your honor!' exclaimed Paddy, in great dismay, holding the kettle at a very safe distance from the blazing cloth, and his face such a picture of helpless despair as to make Mr. Cooper heartily laugh at every after-thought of it." The passing of thirty or more years made of this light-hearted young midshipman a well-known writer, with the purpose that his next book should tell of this unforgettable region of the great lakes. He wished to-bring into it the sailors and Indians as, by coming in close contact with them, "he knew their personalities and characteristics." Then, forest scenes without "Natty Bumppo" could scarce come from his pen after the drawings of old "Leatherstocking" of "The Pioneers," "Hawkeye" of "The Mohicans," and the "aged trapper" of "The Prairie." So it came about that "Natty, the lover," stepped into these pages--Natty, "so simple, so tender, so noble and true--what shall be said of him? We must all needs love him; it is not with words but with tears that we wring his hand and part from him on the lake shore" as "The Pathfinder." Glowing and brave proved his Mabel, as "the bubble of a boat floated on the very crest of a foaming breaker,"--yet not for him. But the ripple of the lake's waves and rustling of forest leaves are as unforgettable as the low, sweet tones of "Dew-of-June." Of "The Pathfinder" and Cooper Balzac wrote: "Its interest is tremendous. He surely owed us this masterpiece after the last two or three raphsodies he has given us." [Illustration: THE PATHFINDER.] [Illustration: A BUBBLE OF A BOAT.] In the year 1809 Cooper was attached to a gun-boat serving on Lake Champlain, and on November 13 following, he was ordered to the _Wasp_, under Capt. James Lawrence, of Burlington--a personal friend, and also the heroic commander of the _Chesapeake_ in her action with the _Shannon_, in which his last words were, "Don't give up the ship!" It was aboard the _Wasp_ that Cooper's lifelong friendship with Commodore Shubrick of South Carolina began, who, like himself, and a year younger, was a midshipman. To this friend the author dedicated "The Pilot," "Red Rover," and other stories. [Illustration: CAPTAIN LAWRENCE.] [Illustration: THE "WASP."] Political feeling ran high in those early days of 1809, and prominent persons did not escape from their opponents with hitter feeling only. So it came about that in December of that year, Judge Cooper, on leaving a hot convention, met his death,--the result of a blow on the head, as he was coming down the steps of the State capitol at Albany, New York. No one of his day who was engaged in the work of large buying and selling of land made so deep an impression as did Judge Cooper on his times, and on his author son, whose land books disclose to posterity with historic exactness the hardships and values of the pioneers of our country. After Judge Cooper's death Richard Fenimore, his eldest son, became the head of the family, and it was to him that James wrote from New York, May 18th, 1810 I wrote you yesterday, a letter in a great hurry, as its contents are of some importance. I employ the leisure time offered today, to inform you more fully of my views. When you were in the City, I hinted to you, my intention of resigning at the end of this session of Congress, should nothing be done for the Navy--my only reason at that time was the blasted prospects of the service. I accordingly wrote my resignation and as usual offer'd it to Capt. Lawrence, for his inspection--he very warmly recommended to me to give the service the trial of another year or two--at the same time offering to procure me a furlough which would leave me perfect master of my actions in the interval--I thought it wisest to accept this proposition--at the end of this year I have it in my power to resign, should the situation of the Country warrant it. Like all the rest of the sons of Adam, I have bowed to the influence of the claims of a fair damsel of eighteen. I loved her like a man and told her of it like a sailor. The peculiarity of my situation occasion'd me to act with something like precipitancy. I am perfectly confident, however, I shall never have cause to repent of it--. As you are _cooly_ to decide, I will as _cooly_ give you the qualities of my mistress. Susan De Lancey is the daughter of a man of very respectable connections and a handsome fortune--amiable, sweet-tempered and happy in her disposition.--She has been educated in the country, occasionally trying the temperature of the City--to rub off the rust--but hold a moment, it is enough she pleases _me_ in the qualities of her _person_ and _mind_--. Like a true quixotic lover, I made proposals to her father--he has answered them in the most gentlemanly manner--. You have my consent to address my daughter if you will gain the approbation of your mother--He also informs me that his daughter has an estate in the County of Westchester in reversion, secured to her by a deed in trust to him--. I write all this for _you_--you know _I_ am indifferent to anything of this nature. Now I have to request--you will take your hat and go to mother, the boys, girls, and say to them have you any objection that James Cooper shall marry at a future day, Susan De Lancey. If any of them forbid the bans may the Lord have forgiven them--for I never will--. Then take your pen and write to Mr. De Lancey stating the _happiness_ and _pleasure_ it will give all the family to have this connection completed--all this I wish you to do immediately, as I am deprived of the pleasure of visiting my flame until this is done, by that confounded _bore_, delicacy--be so good as to inclose the letter in one to me, at the same time don't forget to inclose a handsome sum to square the yards here and bring me to Cooperstown. I wish not to interrupt you in your attempt to clear the estate--my expenditure shall be as small as possible. _Your brother,_ James Cooper. The de Lanceys were Huguenots and their loyalty to England during the Revolution made several of them British officers. Although Cooper was ever a staunch American, this incident, with several others in his later life, seemed unfavorable to some few who were only too willing to question his loyalty. [Illustration: FRAUNCES TAVERN.] [Illustration: GOV. JAMES DE LANCEY'S SEAL.] [Illustration: HEATHCOTE ARMS.] Miss de Lancey's great grandfather, Stephen, was the first of this aristocratic Westchester-County family on American soil. He fled from Normandy on the revocation of the edict of Nantes, and in 1686 came to New York. Here his son James became chief-justice and lieutenant-governor, and married Ann, eldest daughter of the Hon. Caleb Heathcote, lord of the manor of Scarsdale, Westchester, and whose manor house was Heathcote Hill, which their fourth son, John Peter de Lancey, Cooper's father-in-law, inherited from his mother. One of a number of services the old-world Derbyshire Heathcote-Hill family rendered to its country was giving to the Bank of England its first president. The de Lancey name still clings to the new-world history in Fraunces Tavern, built by Stephen de Lancey in 1700, for his home. Sixty-two years later it became the tavern of Samuel Fraunces. In 1776 and 1783 it was the headquarters of General Washington, and in its famous _Long Room_ "The Father of his Country" made his farewell address, and bid adieu to his generals. Number 130 Broadway was the de Lancey home of 1730, and here was given the first inauguration ball of our nation. On this site was built "Burn's Coffee House," which teemed with interesting events. The City Hotel took its place in 1806. John Peter de Lancey married Elizabeth, daughter of Col. Richard Floyd, and in 1789 came to Heathcote Hill, Westchester County, which he rebuilt on the site of the old manor house, burned down. In this home he lived out his days. Here his son, William Heathcote, Bishop of Western New York, was born; and also his lovely daughter, Susan Augusta; here she was wooed and won by the handsome young naval officer, and on New Year's day, 1811, became Mrs. James Cooper. In 1899 Dr. Theodore F. Wolfe writes of Cooper and Heathcote Hill--that some of the great trees which waved their green leafage above him lingering here with sweetheart or bride yet shade the grounds, but the household that welcomed him and gave him a beloved daughter lie in a little grass-grown cemetery near to this old home. Mrs. Cooper had a sweet, gracious way of guiding by affection her husband, and he gave her his heart's devotion through the forty years of their happily mated life. Cooper and his young bride began life by playing a game of chess between the ceremony and supper. Then, he driving two horses tandem, they made their wedding journey to Cooperstown in a gig. His furlough ended a few months later, and to please his wife, he resigned in May from the navy. Long afterwards he wrote, "She confesses she would never have done for Lady Collingwood." For a year or more Cooper and his wife lived with her father at Heathcote Hill, Mamaroneck, New York, and afterwards in a near-by cottage on the "Neck," which Cooper named "Closet Hall" because it was so small, and he described it as the home of the Littlepage family in "Satanstoe." Only two old willows remain of the group that almost concealed Cooper's wee house, now entirely rebuilt, and they named the place as the home of Alice B. Havens, who wrote here some of her poems and stories--so Dr. Wolfe writes of Closet Hall. After some brief housekeeping in this "wee home," the young people again made a part of the family at Heathcote Hill, where they lived until 1814. Then, with the two little girls born to them, they went for a short time to Cooperstown, and thence to their Fenimore farm of some one hundred and fifty acres along Otsego's southwestern shores. "On a rising knoll overlooking lake and village a handsome stone house was begun for their life home." The near-by hill, called Mount Ovis, pastured the Merino sheep which he brought into the country. He loved his gardening, and was active for the public good, serving as secretary of the county Agricultural Society, and also of the Otsego County Bible Society. In the full flush of youth and its pleasures there were the pleasant diversions of driving, riding, and rowing. So lived flute-playing Cooper, brave and handsome, at twenty-five. [Illustration: HON. CALEB HEATHCOTE.] [Illustration: FRAUNCES TAVERN.] [Illustration: BURN'S COFFEE HOUSE.] [Illustration: HEATHCOTE HILL.] [Illustration: TANDEM.] [Illustration: COOPER'S FENIMORE FARM HOUSE.] Cooper's mother was then living with her older sons at Otsego Hall, and it is recorded that "she took great delight in flowers, and the end of the long hall was like a green-house, in her time"; that "she was a great reader of romances; a marvelous housekeeper, and beautifully nice and neat in her arrangements: her flower-garden at the south of the house was considered something wonderful in variety of flowers." Between her Old-Hall home and the families of her children,--Richard's on "Apple Hill," Isaac's at "Edgewater," Nancy's at the "Old Stone House," and James's at "Fenimore,"--these years were full of charm and interest for them all, which later became sweet and enduring memories. Sadness crept in, through the loss of James's daughter Elizabeth; but two more came to lift this shadow in the Fenimore home. In 1817 Cooper and his young family started for a few month's visit to Heathcote Hill, and later in this year he lost his mother. As the stone house, then building at Fenimore, burned down in 1823, the land was sold later, and the few months' expected absence grew into seventeen years. Perhaps it was this thread of loss added to his wife's wishes that led Cooper to build a country home on the Scarsdale farm,--a portion of the de Lancey estate, which came to Mrs. Cooper after her marriage. Here he built the picturesque home in which his literary career began. "Nothing that Cooper knew remains excepting the superb land and water view," which drew him to place this home of his there, and he has pictured mile upon mile of the shimmering, sail-dotted Sound in scenes of his "Water Witch." It is of record that the windows of the room in which he wrote "Precaution," "The Spy," and "The Pioneers" overlooked this enchanting vista which then and later claimed place in his books. It was four miles from Mamaroneck and some twenty-five from New York City. The height on which the new house stood was called Angevine, from a former Huguenot tenant. It gave a glorious view over miles of fine wooded country, with a broad reach of Long Island Sound beyond, over which were moving white, glittering sails "a sailor's eye loves to follow." Of active habits and vigorous health, Cooper threw himself with almost boyish eagerness into the improvement and beautifying of this homestead,--planning the barn, building the then new zigzag, ha-ha fence, watching the growth of shrubs and trees that he had transplanted, and with cheering talk lightening the labors of his workmen. [Illustration: ELIZABETH FENIMORE COOPER IN THE OLD HALL HOME.] [Illustration: COOPER'S ANGEVINE FARM HOME.] [Illustration: MAMARONECK CREEK SLOOPS.] "In 1818 Cooper was made paymaster, and in the next year quartermaster in the Fourth Division of Infantry, New York State Militia. As Governor Clinton's aid, in blue and buff uniform, cocked hat, and sword, and title of colonel, he would go to reviews on his favorite horse, 'Bull-head.'" At that time each village on the Sound had its sloop which carried the farmer's produce thrice a week through the perils of Hell Gate to Fulton market, and brought back tea, sugar, cloth, calicoes, and silks, and, perchance, some volume fresh from the London press,--a bit of Byron's brilliance, a romance from the unknown author of "Waverley," one of Miss Edgeworth's charming tales, or the more serious religious work of Wilberforce--which had "arrived by packet-ship from England"--the next day's papers would announce. Lucky was thought the household that could first cut the pages of the new print. Reading, which always enters so naturally into country life, made pleasant their evening hours and rainy days at Angevine. Mr. Cooper was a fine reader. His voice was deep, clear, and expressive, and during those quiet country evenings he often read aloud to one "who listened with affectionate interest through a long life," and he read to her with special pleasure. For Shakespeare he was always ready. Pope, Thompson, and Gray were also in favor, but not more than a page or two at a time of Milton. He thought that Shakespeare should have written "Paradise Lost." "He took the greatest delight in the 'Waverley' novels, and never doubted they were written by Walter Scott, the poet. On one occasion a new novel chanced to lie on the table and he was asked to read it. The title and look of the book were not to his taste; he opened it, however, and began. Suddenly, after reading through a few pages, it was thrown aside in disgust: 'I can write a better book than that myself!' was his exclamation." Mrs. Cooper laughed at the absurd idea that he, who disliked writing even a letter, should write a book, and playfully challenged him to make good his word; and when urged to begin, he at once outlined a tale of English high-life. As the story grew, the writer became interested, and before long the first pages of Cooper's first book, "Precaution, or Prevention is Better than Cure," were written. When finished, much to his amazement, Mrs. Cooper further urged him to publish it; so, with the manuscript, they set out in their gig to seek counsel of the Jays at Bedford, and other friends, who approved. "One lady, not in the secret, felt sure she had read it before." It was published, without the author's name, August 25, 1820, and was credited to an English woman. A.T. Goodrich, the publisher, surprised the public by declaring it the work of an American gentleman of New York. It was soon republished in England, and claimed the attention usually accorded that style of book in its day. Whatever of its worth, the work had awakened Cooper's powers; and its modest success in a field new to him led his friends to urge him to write on subjects that were in near touch with his daily life. None knew better than he the frontier and sea-faring life of his own and earlier times. So, then, for home-country subjects, and thinking it would be his last attempt, he exclaimed, "I will write another book!" and soon decided on patriotism as its _motif_. At this period many were the visits to Judge Jay's Westchester home at Bedford. The house, part of wood and part of stone, had a spacious, comfortable piazza along its front. The interior had more of cheerfulness than of elegance, but a great air of abundance, and was a peaceful shelter for the waning days of that eminent statesman and patriot. Of this household Cooper wrote later: "I scarcely remember to have mingled with any family where there was a more happy union of quiet decorum and high courtesy than I met with beneath the roof of Mr. Jay." To no place more fitting than his wistaria-covered library could Cooper have gone for patriotic inspiration. The venerable Judge, as he smoked his long clay pipe, used to delight in telling anecdotes of the Revolution, "the truth of which," he said, "never had been and never would be written." [Illustration: JUDGE JOHN JAY.] [Illustration: BEDFORD HOUSE.] [Illustration: BEDFORD HOUSE LIBRARY.] One summer afternoon, while sitting on his broad piazza under the lindens, Cooper, with others, listened to the Judge's recital of the story of a spy's great struggles and unselfish loyalty while serving his country in the American Revolution, and the story gave Cooper an idea for his "Harvey Birch." The fact that strolling peddlers, staff in hand and pack on back, were common visitors then at country houses, became another aid. "It was after such a visit of a Yankee peddler of the old sort, to the cottage at Angevine, that Harvey's lot in life was decided--he was to be a spy and a peddler." It was something to the author's after regret that he drew the dignity of George Washington into the "Harper" of this story. [Illustration: HARVEY BIRCH'S CAVE.] "The entire country between the Americans on the skirts of the Highlands and the British on Manhattan--or 'the Neutral Ground'--suffered more in harried skirmishes, pillage, violence, fire, and the taking of life itself, than any of its extent during this strife." Scarsdale and Mamaroneck were in this region, with White Plains close by. Fort Washington was on a near height, and Dobb's Ferry a few miles off. "The Coopers' daily drive from Angevine discovered a pretty thicket, some swampy land, and a cave in which to hide the loyal, to be fed by friendly hands at night until escape was possible. There were also at hand the gloomy horrors of a haunted wood where gliding ghosts fought midnight battles"--all of this the farmers _knew_ and could tell of, too. One of them, "Uncle John," lived just below the home hill in a wee cot of four walls, each of a different color--red, yellow, brown, and white. He frequently came up the Angevine-home hill to tell, between his apples, nuts, and glasses of cider, tales of what he, too, _knew_, to a good listener,--the master of the house. Then there was "Major Brom B., a hero of the great war, with his twenty-seven martial spirits, all uniformed in silver gray, his negro Bonny and his gun, 'the Bucanneer,' had not its fellow on the continent." These were all aids, and sources of unfailing interest about the many Westchester chimney firesides of that day. In his "Literary Haunts and Homes," Dr. Theodore F. Wolfe tells of a fine, old-time home, beyond the valley below Cooper's Angevine farm, where he placed many an exciting scene of this coming tale. In 1899 Dr. Wolfe notes the house as changed, only by a piazza across its front, from the days when Cooper knew it well, and that it was pleasantly shaded by many of the fine, tall trees that gave it the name of "The Locusts," which it kept in his story as the home of the Whartons. The descendants of the family he used to visit still live there, and one of them showed Dr. Wolfe all that was left of "The Four Corners," Betty Flanigan's hotel, whence Harvey Birch, Cooper's hero, escaped in Betty's petticoats. Cooper made these familiar scenes of southern New York the background of his second book, "The Spy, a Tale of the Neutral Ground," which also was published, without the author's name, December 22, 1821. Its success called for a new edition the following March, and its translation into many foreign tongues. Of Cooper's "Betty Flanigan" Miss Edgeworth declared, "An Irish pen could not have drawn her better." Except Irving's "Sketch Book," his "Knickerbocker's History of New York," and Bryant's thin volume of eight poems, there were few books by native writers when "The Spy" appeared; and "then it was that the new world awakened to the surprising discovery of her first _American_ novelist. The glory that Cooper justly won was reflected on his country, of whose literary independence he was the pioneer. 'The Spy' had the charm of reality; it tasted of the soil." While the American press was slow to admit the merit of "The Spy," a cordial welcome was given the book in "The Port Folio." It was written by Mrs. Sarah Hall, mother of the editor, and author of "Conversations on the Bible." This act of timely kindness Cooper never forgot. June 30, 1822, Washington Irving, from London, wrote Mr. John E. Hall, the editor: "'The Spy' is extremely well spoken of by the best circles,--not a bit better than it deserves, for it does the author great credit." [Illustration: THE LOCUSTS OF COOPER'S TIME.] [Illustration: TITLE-PAGE OF THE FIRST EDITION OF "THE SPY."] [Illustration: ENOCH CROSBY.] In 1826, when "The Spy" was before the footlights in Lafayette Theatre, on Broadway, near Canal Street, Enoch Crosby, the supposed original spy, appeared in a box with friends, and "was given thunders of applause." From "Portraits of Cooper's Heroines," by the Rev. Ralph Birdsall of Cooperstown, is gleaned: On the walls of the Newport home of the Rev. John Cornell hang two old portraits that have close connection with the inner history of "The Spy." To their present owner they came from the New York home of his mother, the late Mrs. Isaac Cornell, and to her they came from the Somerville, New Jersey, home of her father, Mr. Richard Bancker Duyckinck, who in his turn received them from his aunt, Mrs. Peter Jay,--the subject of one of these portraits and at one time mistress of the Jay mansion at Rye. Over one hundred years ago it was that, from the walls of this rare old home at Rye, Westchester County, the grace of these ladies on canvas caught James Cooper's thought to use them, by description, in his coming book, "The Spy." Chapter XIII describes closely the personal appearance and style of dress of these portraits. "Jeanette Peyton," the maiden aunt of Cooper's story, owes her mature charm to the portrait of Mary Duyckinck, wife of Peter Jay. From the "cap of exquisite lawn and lace," her gown of rich silk, short sleeves and "large ruffles" of lace which with "the experience of forty years," also veiled her shoulders, to the triple row of large pearls about her throat,--all these details are found in Cooper's text-picture of Jeanette Peyton. His "Sarah Wharton" no less closely follows the portrait of Mrs. Jay's older sister, Sarah Duyckinck, who became Mrs. Richard Bancker. Her name Sarah may have been given purposely to Sarah Wharton of Cooper's story. Cooper was thirty-two when it was written, and it is not unlikely that Mrs. Jay, then eighty-five years of age, was pleased with this delicate tribute the young novelist paid to the beauty of her own and her sister's youth. [Illustration: LAFAYETTE THEATRE.] [Illustration: COOPER'S HEROINES.] Four daughters and a son now shared the author's home life, and in order to place his little girls in a school and be near his publishers, Cooper rented a modest brick house on Broadway, across the street from Niblo's Garden, near No. 585, Astor's home, which was a grand resort of Halleck and Irving, who wrote there a part of his "Life of Washington." Cooper's house was just above Prince Street--then almost out of town. [Illustration: WINDHURST'S NOOK, UNDER THE PARK THEATRE.] The modern club being then unknown, the brilliant men of the day met in taverns, and there talked of "everything under the starry scope of heaven." In the 1820's there was Edward Windhurst's famous nook under the sidewalk below Park Theatre, where Edmund Kean, Junius Brutus Booth, Cooper, Morris, Willis, and Halleck made gay and brilliant talk. In the "Life and Letters of Fitz-greene Halleck," by General James Grant Wilson, it appears that Cooper was warmly attached to Halleck since 1815, when they first met. Fitz-greene Halleck is credited with taking Cooper's earliest books to Europe in 1822 and finding a London publisher for them. The novelist called his friend "The Admirable Croaker," on account of a series of amusing and satirical verses written by Halleck and Drake and published over the signature of "Croaker and Co.," in the public press of that day. Into this atmosphere of charm came delightful and delighting Joseph Rodman Drake, with his "six feet two" of splendid youth; he was thought by some "the handsomest man in New York." From out this brilliant group comes the record that "'Culprit Fay,' written in August, 1816," says Halleck, "came from Cooper, Drake, DeKay, and Halleck, speaking of Scottish streams and their inspiration for poetry. Cooper and Halleck thought our American rivers could claim no such tribute of expression. Drake differed from his friends and made good his stand by producing in three days 'The Culprit Fay' from the Highlands of the Hudson; but," is added, "the Sound from Hunt's Point, his familiar haunt of _salt_ water, made his inspiration." [Illustration: JAMES FENIMORE COOPER, 1822.] [Illustration: FITZ-GREENE HALLECK.] [Illustration: JOSEPH RODMAN DRAKE.] [Illustration: CRO' NEST.] To the City Hotel came Morris again with Dana, Cooper, and his friend, Samuel Woodworth, author of "The Old Oaken Bucket"--to plan "The Mirror," in 1823. [Illustration: SAMUEL WOODWORTH.] [Illustration: THE OLD OAKEN BUCKET.] The story of the old song's writing is: At noon on a summer's day in 1817 Woodworth, whose pen-name was "Selim," walked home to dinner from his office at the foot of Wall Street. Being very warm, he drank a glass of water from his pump, and after drinking it said, "How much more refreshing would be a draught from the old bucket that hung in my father's well!" Then his wife--whom the poet called his inspiration--exclaimed, "Why, Selim, wouldn't that be a pretty subject for a poem?" Thus urged, he began writing at once, and in an hour's time finished the heart-stirring song so well known as "The Old Oaken Bucket." At this City Hotel Cooper himself in 1824 founded "The Bread and Cheese Club"--so named because membership was voted _for_ with bits of bread, and _against_ with bits of cheese. He called it the "Lunch." Later on, the "Lunch, or Cooper's Club," met in Washington Hall, corner of Broadway and Chambers Street. Among its distinguished members were Chancellor Kent, DeKay, naturalist, King, later president of Columbia College, the authors Verplanck, Bryant, and Halleck, Morse the inventor, the artists Durand and Jarvis, and Wiley the publisher. They met Thursday evenings, each member in turn caring for the supper, always cooked to perfection by Abigail Jones--an artist of color, in that line. It was at one of these repasts that Bryant "was struck with Cooper's rapid, lively talk, keen observation, knowledge, and accurate memory of details." Said he: "I remember, too, being somewhat startled, coming as I did from the seclusion of a country life, with a certain emphatic frankness of manner, which, however, I came at last to like and admire." Many an attractive page might be written of these talks with Mathews, rambles with DeKay, and daily chats with his old messmates of the sea, and this "Bread and Cheese Club." Cooper was scarcely in France before he sent frequent missives to his friends at the club to be read at their weekly meetings; but it "missed its founder, went into a decline, and not long afterward quietly expired." General Wilson says that it was at Wiley's, corner of Wall and New Streets, in a small back room christened by Cooper "The Den"--which appeared over the door--that he first met "The Idle Man," R.H. Dana. Here Cooper was in the habit of holding forth to an admiring audience, much as did Christopher North about the same time in "Blackwood's" back parlor in George Street, Edinburgh. John Bartlett's Bookshop, too,--"a veritable treasury of literary secrets,"--in the new Astor House, became a haunt for the bookmen of its times. Cooper was fond of the society of literary men when he could meet them as _men_, and not as lions. He once said: "You learn nothing about a man when you meet him at a show dinner and he sits up to talk _for_ you instead of talking _with_ you. When I was in London Wordsworth came to town, and I was asked to meet him at one of those displays; but I would not go." Then Mrs. Cooper said: "But you met him afterwards, my dear, and was very much pleased with him." To this Cooper replied: "Yes, at Rogers', and _was_ very much pleased with him; but it was because I met him in a place where he felt at home, and he let himself out freely." [Illustration: CITY HOTEL AND WASHINGTON HALL.] [Illustration: EARLY BROADWAY.] [Illustration: WILLIAM WORDSWORTH.] [Illustration: COOPER'S NEW YORK CITY HOME IN BEACH STREET.] [Illustration: ST. JOHN'S CHAPEL.] After some stay on Broadway, Cooper moved his family to their Beach Street abode. Some twenty paces from Hudson it stood,--a brick house of many attractions in the wrought iron railings, marble steps, arched doorway, high ceilings, with heavy, ornate mouldings, massive oaken doors, and Venetian blinds of the deep windows. Spacious and inviting was this city home during the 1820's, in the fashionable district of St. John's. In April, 1823, while living here, Cooper was made a member of the Philadelphia Philosophical Society. August of this year he lost his first son,--the youngest child,--Fenimore; and he himself went through a serious illness, brought on by an accident: "On returning from a New Bedford visit his carriage broke down, and always glad to be afloat, he took passage in a sloop for New York. Being anxious to reach home, when the wind began to fail, and to make the most of the tide, he took the helm and steered the little craft himself through Hell Gate. The day was very stormy, and the trying heat brought on a sudden sun-stroke-like fever." February 3, 1824, his second son, Paul, was born. "The Spy" finished and the glow of success upon its author, he again resolved "to try one more book." For this work his thoughts turned in love to the home of his childhood, so closely associated with the little "Lake of the Fields." "Green-belted with great forest trees was this 'smile of God'--from Mount Vision dreaming at its feet, to the densely wooded 'sleeping lion' guarding its head, nine miles to the north." Of the new book Cooper frankly said: "'The Pioneers' is written exclusively to please myself." Herein Leatherstocking makes his first appearance, and for all time, as Natty Bumppo, "with his silent footfall stepped from beneath the shadows of the old pines into the winter sunlight." [Illustration: OLD LEATHERSTOCKING.] An old hunter--Shipman by name--often came with his rifle and dogs during the early years of the new colony, to offer his game at William Cooper's door, and was a great attraction for the lads of Otsego Hall. A dim memory of Shipman served as an outline only for Cooper's creation, "Natty," as in strength and beauty of character he came from the writer's pen, to live through the five "Leatherstocking Tales," as "the ever familiar friend of boys." While Cooper placed no real character from life in this book, Judge Temple is accepted as a sketch of his father. The aim was to create a character from the class to which each belonged. Thus served brave old Indian John as "Chingachgook"; Mr. Grant, the missionary; and "Monsieur Le Quoi," the Frenchman. In "Chronicles of Cooperstown" it appears that a real "Mr. Le Quoy excited much interest in the place, in being superior to his occupation as a country grocer." One day a Mr. Renouard, a seaman, entered his shop for some tobacco, and returned in a few minutes agitated and pale, excitedly asking, "Who is the man that sold me this tobacco?" At the answer, "Mr. Le Quoy," he replied, "Yes, Mr. Le Quoy de Mesereau. When I went to Martinique to be port-captain of St. Pierre, this man was civil governor of the island, and refused to confirm my appointment." It was learned later that the French Revolution drove Mr. Le Quoy with little money to a New York friend,--a Mr. Murray,--who also knew well Judge Cooper, and they both advised this country store until peaceful France could and did invite its owner to return to his island home. [Illustration: NATTY'S CAVE.] An Indian alarm of the early-village period of 1794 formed the opening chapter of the new book, but the incidents were mainly creations of Cooper's fancy. Yet the pigeon-flights, Natty's cave, which sheltered Elizabeth Temple from the forest fire, and each charming picture of the Glimmerglass country, are true to life. The academy, court-house, jail, inn; the "'Cricket'--that famous old cannon which sent its thunders thousands of times over the Otsego hills on days of rejoicing--are fairly given." The old gun was found when digging the cellar of Judge Cooper's first house, and was said to have been buried by troops under Gen. James Clinton, who marched from Albany against the Indians in 1779. They cut their way through forests, brought their boats to Lake Otsego, and their headquarters were in a log house built on the future site of the first Hall. The place where was the old Clinton Dam is now marked by the Daughters of the American Revolution as the _one_ Cooperstown, connecting link with the War of Independence. [Illustration: GENERAL JAMES CLINTON.] [Illustration: CLINTON DAM.] The outward appearance of the old Hall is fairly given by Cooper's pen, but once within, all is a faithful record, "even to the severed nose of Wolfe, and the urn that held the ashes of Queen Dido." The tale was of a great landlord living among his settlers on property bearing his name. The book was "The Pioneers, or, Sources of the Susquehanna," and "thirty-five hundred copies sold before noon of the day it was published." It was of "The Pioneers" that Bryant wrote: "It dazzled the world by the splendor of its novelty." An interesting incident of Cooper's kindness of heart is of this date and some ten years later came to light as follows: After his return from Europe in 1833 he one day gave to his eldest daughter "a small book bound in boards." It was entitled "Tales for Fifteen, or, Imagination and Heart" by Jane Morgan. He said to her: "Dearie, here is a little book that I wrote for Wiley," adding that he had bought it at a news stand on his way home. It appears "when Wiley failed a number of his patrons wrote stories and gave them to him." These two--one called "Heart" and the other "Imagination" were written by Cooper, but "curiously enough,"--were published under the pen-name of "Jane Morgan." The book is very rare; only two copies are known to be in existence. The thought of writing a romance of the sea first came to Mr. Cooper while dining at Mr. Charles Wilkes', where the table-talk turned on "The Pirate," just issued by the author of "Waverley." When his marine touches were highly praised for their accuracy, Cooper held they were not satisfactory to the nautical reader. His friends thought more accuracy might better please seamen but would prove dull reading for the general public. With his usual spirit, Cooper refused to be convinced, and on his way home that evening "the outlines of a nautical romance were vaguely sketched in his mind"; but he never dreamed it would become one of a series of sea-stories. "I must write one more book--a sea tale--" he said, "to show what can be done in this way by a sailor!" The stirring struggles of the American Revolution again enlisted the author's loyal pen-service in the character of that bold adventurer, John Paul Jones, and his cruise in _The Ranger_, when he made his daring descent upon Whitehaven and St. Mary's Isle, which suggested to Cooper his plot for "The Pilot." Two ships, a frigate and the schooner _Ariel_, were drawn for the tale. During its writing the author had many doubts of its success. Friends thought the sea tame when calm, and unpleasant in storms; and as to ladies--the reading of storms would surely make them seasick. His first encouragement came from an Englishman of taste, though a doubter of American talent. To Cooper's surprise, this authority pronounced his sea tale good. Then came the favorable opinion of Commodore Shubrick, of which the author wrote: "Anxious to know what the effect would be on the public, I read a chapter to S----, now captain, which contained an account of a ship working off-shore in a gale. My listener betrayed interest as we proceeded, until he could no longer keep his seat. He paced the room furiously until I got through, and just as I laid down the paper he exclaimed: 'It is all very well, but you have let your jib stand too long, my fine fellow!' I blew it out of the bolt-rope in pure spite!" And thus it was that when the author "came beating out of the 'Devil's Grip,'" this old messmate jumped from his seat and paced the floor with strides, not letting a detail escape him. Cooper was fully satisfied and accepted the criticism, and the tale, alive with spirited description of sea-action, won the day. It was written with all the author's power and accuracy of detail. In "Mr. Gray" appeared John Paul Jones, while "Long Tom Coffin" was said to be Mr. Irish, the mate of the _Stirling_, in which the lad "Cooper made his voyage before-the-mast." Of this mate and the Yankees the author wrote: "He too was from Nantucket, and was a prime fellow, and fit to command a ship." Prof. Brander Matthews calls this simple-hearted cockswain and Natty Bumppo "co-heirs of time." The famous fifth chapter of "The Pilot" was the first fiction to show that "a master of the sea tale had come into the world, and it has never been surpassed in literature of the sea." This, the third of Cooper's novels, won for him his greatest popularity. It was dedicated to William Branford Shubrick, United States Navy--the author's loyal friend since their days together on the _Wasp_, in 1809. Its inscription reads in part: "My Dear Shubrick--by your old Messmate, the Author." A few days after "The Pilot" was issued, January, 1824, Cooper wrote this friend: "I found Wiley had the book in the hands of his five printers--on my return--for reprint. So much for our joint efforts." Concerning "The Pilot" and its author, this appeared in the _Edinburgh Review_: "The empire of the sea is conceded to him by acclamation." [Illustration: "TALES FOR FIFTEEN, OR IMAGINATION AND HEART."] [Illustration: CHARLES WILKES.] [Illustration: JOHN PAUL JONES.] Meeting Cooper at dinner three months later, Bryant wrote his wife that "he seemed a little giddy with the great success his works have met." Another said: "What wonder that the hearty, breezy author of 'The Spy,' 'The Pioneers,' and 'The Pilot,' should, by a certain 'emphatic frankness of manner,' have somewhat startled the shy, retiring, country poet who had not yet found his place on _The Evening Post!"_ Later, in 1824, to Richard Henry Dana's newsy letter about Cooper's foreign standing, Bryant replies: "What you tell me of the success of our countryman, Cooper, in England, is an omen of good things. I hope it is the breaking of a bright day for American literature." Bryant's memorial address after Cooper's death remains a splendid record of their unclouded friendship, based on mutual respect. It was delivered at Metropolitan Hall, in New York City, February 25, 1852. The occasion was honored by the presence of the most brilliant men of the time. Daniel Webster presided, assisted by William Cullen Bryant, and Washington Irving. At that time these three men were made the subjects of a pencil sketch by Daniel Huntington. [Illustration: LONG TOM COFFIN.] Mr. George Palmer Putnam thus describes a meeting between Irving and Cooper, after the latter's return from Europe: "One day Mr. Irving was sitting at my desk, with his back to the door, when Mr. Cooper came in (a little bustling as usual) and stood at the office entrance, talking. Mr. Irving did not turn (for obvious reasons), and Cooper did not see him. I had acquired caution as to introductions without mutual consent, but with brief thought--sort of instinct--I stoutly obeyed the impulse of the moment, and simply said, 'Mr. Cooper, here is Mr. Irving.' The latter turned, Cooper held out his hand cordially, dashed at once into an animated conversation, took a chair, and, to my surprise and delight, the two authors sat for an hour, chatting in their best manner about almost every topic of the day and former days; and Mr. Irving afterwards frequently alluded to the incident as being a very great gratification to him. Not many months afterwards, he sat on the platform and joined in Bryant's tribute to the genius of the departed novelist." [Illustration: BRYANT, WEBSTER AND IRVING.] September 18, 1851, Irving wrote: "The death of Fenimore Cooper is an event of deep and public concern. To me it comes with a shock; for it seems but the other day that I saw him at Putnam's, in the full vigor of mind and body, 'a very castle of a man.' He left a space in our literature which will not be easily supplied. I shall not fail to attend the proposed meeting." It is recorded that "Yale never, in later years, saw fit to honor herself by giving Cooper his degree, but Columbia, in this instance more intelligent than either Harvard or Yale, in 1824, conferred on the author the honorary degree of A.M." When, in 1824, General Lafayette, as the Nation's guest, landed from the _Cadmus_ at Castle Garden, Mr. Cooper made one of the active committee of welcome and entertainment. Of his part in the Castle-Garden ball, and his enthusiasm, a friend wrote: "After working hard all day in preparations and all night in carrying them out, towards dawn he went to the office of his friend Charles King and wrote out a full and accurate report, which appeared in Mr. King's paper the next day." Concerning this famous Castle-Garden ball, Cooper himself wrote: "A tall spar was raised in the center, a vast awning of sail-cloth covered the whole, which was concealed by flags that gave a soft, airy finish--all flooded by lights. Music of the national air hailed Lafayette's arrival. The brilliant throngs and gay dancers over the floor fell into line like a charm, forming a lane, through which the old man passed, giving and receiving warm and affectionate salutations at every step to the small marquee in the midst, prepared for the 'Guest of the Nation.' He was like a father among his children." In various other ways Cooper paid tributes of courtesy to General Lafayette during this visit to America. [Illustration: THE LANDING OF LAFAYETTE, 1824.] As the three successful books which the author had now written dealt with the strength and struggles of liberty-loving Americans for their new country, his wide sense of justice suggested writing on loyalty from the other point of view--the Mother Country's--as held by men of birth and honor. This loyalty to England Cooper made the subject of his next book. It was a dangerous venture, and a time too near the dearly-bought laurels of our young republic in its separation from England. But the author made every effort for accuracy on all points; he was tireless in his study of history, state papers, official reports, almanacs, and weather-records. A journey "to Yankee Land" familiarized him with every locality he so faithfully described in the pages of "Lionel Lincoln." "A Legend of the Thirteen Republics" was an added title to the first edition only (1825) of "Lionel Lincoln," for Cooper's intention to write a story of each of the thirteen states was given up later, and the title "A Narrative of 1775" took its place. The author himself was not satisfied with this work, nor with the character of "Lionel Lincoln," whose lack of commanding interest makes "Job," his poor half-witted brother and son of "Abigail,"--a tenant of the old warehouse,--the _real_ hero of the book. Of its author, Bancroft the historian wrote: "He has described the battle of Bunker's Hill better than it has ever been described in any other work." Another high authority says: "'Lionel Lincoln' certainly gives spirited battlepieces--notably the battle of Bunker's Hill, which is a masterpiece." Rhode Island people may care to know that a part of this book was written in Providence, in the home of Mr. John Whipple, which stands on the verge of the old elm trees of College Street. Here, too, Cooper may have studied on the opening scenes of "The Red Rover." [Illustration: LAFAYETTE.] [Illustration: LAFAYETTE'S BRANDYWINE VASE.] [Illustration: JOB PRAY.] [Illustration: THE BURNING OF CHARLESTOWN.] Early spring of 1825 found Fenimore Cooper in Washington, whence he wrote: "I have just witnessed one of the most imposing ceremonies of this government; I allude to the inauguration of the President of the United States." It was that of John Quincy Adams, who succeeded James Monroe. Elsewhere one learns that Cooper had dined at the White House; he gave a description of Mrs. Monroe as first lady of the land. [Illustration: WHIPPLE HOUSE, AT PROVIDENCE, R.I.] [Illustration: MRS. JAMES MONROE.] [Illustration: PRESIDENT'S HOUSE, WASHINGTON, D.C., 1825.] Up to this year the author had signed his name "James Cooper"; then, in remembrance of his mother's wish, he changed it, and by the April, 1826, act of Legislature the family name became Fenimore Cooper. During the summer of 1825 Mr. Cooper made one of a party of young men,--which included also the Hon. Mr. Stanley, afterwards Lord Derby, Prime Minister of England, and the Hon. Wortley Montagu, later Lord Wharncliffe, in an excursion to Saratoga and the Lake George country. They went slowly up the Hudson, paid a brief visit to West Point, thence to Catskill, where, like Leatherstocking, they saw "Creation!"--as Natty said, dropping the end of his rod into the water, and sweeping one hand around him in a circle--"all creation, lad." In the hills they saw the two small ponds, and the merry stream crooking and winding through the valley to the rocks; and the "Leap" in its first plunge of two hundred feet: "It's a drop for the old Hudson," added Natty. The Shakers were called upon in their beautiful valley and neat village at Lebanon; good dinners were eaten at friendly tables in Albany; and gay were the times they had in Ballston and Saratoga. Thence to the Lake George region, its wooded heights, islands, crystal lakes, silent shores. For a while they lingered with delight, then turned back for the dark, still caverns in the heart of Glens Fall. These caverns were, Natty said, "Two little holes for us to hide in." He added, "Falls on two sides of us, and the river above and below!--it would be worth the trouble to step up on the height of this rock and look at the pervarcity of the water. It falls by no rule at all." Within the shadows and silence of these caverns Mr. Stanley suggested to Cooper that "here was the very scene for a romance," and the author promised his friend that a book should be written in which these caves would play an important part. A story of strong Indian make-up first came then to the author's mind. Before leaving, these caverns and the surrounding country were closely examined for future use. [Illustration: SUNRISE AT SOUTH MOUNTAIN.] [Illustration: GLEN'S FALL'S CAVERNS.] [Illustration: HONORABLE MR. STANLEY.] Besides his youthful and Lake Ontario experiences with Indians, Cooper followed parties of them from Albany to New York, and several times to Washington, for the purpose of closely studying their natures and habits; all authorities in print were consulted. On his return home the book was begun and rapidly written. "Planned beneath the summer leaves, on the far shore of picturesque Hell Gate, above smiling fields and bowering orchards of his Angevine home, those leaves had scarcely fallen when the story was told--'the most uniformly exciting and powerful of his fictions'--'The Last of the Mohicans,' and Natty and Chingachgook were left in the wilderness beside the rude grave of Uncas." Again they came into the shadow of the unbroken forest, as called for by the _one_ friend he now constantly consulted,--his faithful, loving life-mate. At the time of its writing Cooper had a serious illness, during which his mind was filled with ideas for this book. Suddenly rousing himself one of these autumn afternoons, he called for pen and paper, but too ill to use them, asked Mrs. Cooper, watching anxiously by his side, to write for him. Fearing delirium, she wrote, thinking it would relieve him. A page of notes was rapidly dictated, which seemed to his alarmed nurse but the wild fancies of a fevered brain. It proved to be a clear account of a lively struggle between "Magua" and "Chingachgook," and made the twelfth chapter of the book. Why the author called Lake George by another name is thus explained: "Looking over an ancient map, he found that a tribe of Indians the French called _Les Honcans_ lived by this beautiful sheet of water, and thinking the English name too commonplace and the Indian name too hard to pronounce, he chose the 'Horican' as better suiting simple Natty." This book, "The Last of the Mohicans," proved, perhaps, to be the most popular of all his works up to 1826. [Illustration: GLENS FALL.] [Illustration: LAKE GEORGE, OR "THE HORICAN."] A present-day man-of-letters writes of Cooper: "He paints Indians and Indian scenes with a glow of our sunset skies and the crimson of our autumn maples, and makes them alive with brilliant color. Rifles crack, tomahawks gleam, and arrows dart like sunbeams through the air. Indians fleet of foot and full of graceful movement are these dusky Apollo's Uncas. Cooper's readers never yawn over these tales of the forest or the sea. He is the swan on the lake, the eagle in the air, the deer in the wood, and the wind on the sea." So writes Prof. Brander Matthews. That life-student of the American Indian, Francis Parkman, wrote: "It is easy to find fault with 'The Last of the Mohicans,' but it is far from easy to rival or even approach its excellence." It is said that "Magua," of this book, "is the best-drawn Indian in fiction; from scalp-lock to moccasin tingling with life" and the tension of the canoe-chase on the Horican. During this Lake George excursion a question came up between the Hon. Mr. Stanley, the Hon. Wortley Montagu, and Mr. Cooper as to who was the "Premier Baron of England." Cooper named Lord Henry William Fitzgerald (3rd son of James, 1st Duke of Leinster) 22nd Baron de Ros [b. 1761--d. 1829] as his man; whose title came from Henry I., to Peter, Lord of Holderness called Ros. Each of his two friends claimed another as the "Premier Baron of England." All were so confident that a wager was laid, and later inquiry proved Cooper right. In due time the debt was paid with a large gold, silver-filled seal. On its stone--a chrysoprase--appeared a baron's coronet and the old Scottish proverb: "He that will to Cupar maun to Cupar!" The incident serves to affirm Cooper's wide information and accurate memory. [Illustration: THE WAGER SEAL.] This winter of 1825-26 Cooper and his family made their home at 345 Greenwich Street, not many steps from 92 Hudson Street, where lived the poet William Cullen Bryant, who often went around the corner for a walk with his friend. [Illustration: BRYANT.] General Wilson wrote: "Soon after Bryant went to New York he met Cooper, who, a few days later, said: 'Come and dine with me tomorrow; I live at No. 345 Greenwich Street.' 'Please put that down for me,' said Bryant, 'or I shall forget the place.' 'Can't you remember three-four-five?' replied Cooper bluntly. Bryant did remember 'three-four-five,' not only for that day, but ever afterward." During this spring Cooper followed a deputation of Pawnee and Sioux Indians from New York to Washington, in order to make a close study of them for future use. He was much interested in the chiefs' stories of their wild powers, dignity, endurance, grace, cunning wiles, and fierce passions. The great buffalo hunts across the prairies he had never seen; the fights of mounted tribes and the sweeping fires over those boundless plains all claimed his eager interest and sympathy, with the resulting desire to place "these mounted tribes" and their desert plains beyond the Mississippi in another Indian story. One of the chiefs of this party--a very fine specimen of a warrior, a remarkable man in every way--is credited with being the original of "Hard-Heart" of "The Prairie," which an authority gives as Cooper's favorite book. On a knoll, and within the glory of a western sunset, stood Natty, born of the author's mind and heart, as he first appeared in this book. "The aged trapper--a nobly pathetic figure contrasted with the squatter"--looms up, colossal, against the gleaming radiance of departing day; and full well he knows his own leaving for the long-home is not far off--for the remarkable life of wondrous Leatherstocking closes within these pages. Of other characters and the author Prof. Matthews says: "He was above all things a creator of character.--He can draw women.--The wife of Ishmael Bush, the squatter, mother of seven stalwart sons and sister of a murderous rascal, is an unforgotten portrait, solidly painted by a master." "The Prairie" was begun in the winter of 1826, in the New York, Greenwich-Street home, while Cooper was under the weather from the old fever effects. The closing of his father's estate, and debts contracted against him by those whom he had helped, emptied his purse and left him a poor man. To meet these calls of honor and his own needs, he wrote when not able to do so, and for a short and only time in his life called in the aid of coffee for his work. Wine he drank daily at dinner only, and he never smoked. [Illustration: "NATTY, THE TRAPPER."] [Illustration: HENRY CLAY.] [Illustration: CHANCELLOR KENT.] When Cooper followed the Sioux and Pawnee Indians to Washington, in 1826, Henry Clay, Secretary of State, offered him the appointment of United States Minister to Sweden. It was declined in favor of the consulship to Lyons, France, which latter would allow him more freedom and protect his family in case of foreign troubles. With this trip to Europe in view his family busily studied French and Spanish. Returning to New York, Cooper's club gave him a farewell dinner, at which the author said he intended to write a history of the United States Navy. At this dinner he was toasted by Chancellor Kent as "the genius which has rendered our native soil classic ground, and given to our early history the enchantment of fiction." [Illustration: THE U.S.S. "HUDSON."] May 1 the town house was given up for a month of hotel life, and on June 1, at eleven o'clock, Mr. and Mrs. Cooper and their children boarded the _Hudson_ at Whitehall Wharf for Europe. They left a land-squall--their maid Abigail--ashore and found some rough weather ahead before June 30. "A fine clear day brought in plain sight ninety-seven sail, which had come into the Channel, like ourselves, during the thick weather. The blue waters were glittering with canvas." A little later Cooper wrote: "There is a cry of 'Land!' and I must hasten on deck to revel in the cheerful sight." The _Hudson_ brought up at Cowes, Isle of Wight, July 2, 1826; "after a passage of thirty-one days we first put foot in Europe," wrote Cooper. In this "toy-town" they found rooms at the "Fountain," where the windows gave them pretty vistas, and evening brought the first old-country meal, also the first taste of the famous Isle-of-Wight butter, which, however, without salt they thought "tasteless." As eager newcomers to strange lands, they made several sight-seeing ventures, among which was enjoyed the ivy-clad ruin of Carisbrook, the one-time prison of Charles I. A few days later they landed on the pier at Southampton, which town is recorded as being "noted for long passages, bow-windows, and old maids." Here they found pleasant lodgings, friends, and a sister of Mrs. Cooper's whereby time was pleasantly passed by the family while Cooper went up to London to see his publishers. On his return they were soon aboard the _Camilla_, "shorn of one wing" (one of her two boilers was out of order), and on their way to France. At midnight they were on deck for their first sight of France; "Land!--of ghostly hue in the bright moonlight, and other lights glittering from the two towers on the headlands near by." Landing at the small port of Havre, they had some weary hours of search before finding shelter in _Hotel d'Angleterre_. By a "skirted wonder" of the port their luggage soon passed the customs next morning and they were started for Paris. They were charmed with the dark old sombre, mysterious towers and fantastic roofs of Rouen, where Cooper bought a large traveling carriage, in which they safely passed the "ugly dragons" that "thrust out their grinning heads from the Normandy towns" on the way to the heart of France. From the windmills of Montmartre they took in the whole vast capital at a glance. A short stay was made at a small hotel, where soon after their arrival they engaged "a governess for the girls." She proved to be "a furious royalist," teaching the children that "Washington was a rebel, Lafayette a monster, and Louis XVI a martyr." Under the rule of returned royalists was attempted the exclusion of even the _name_ of Bonaparte from French history. "My girls," Cooper wrote, "have shown me the history of France--officially prepared for schools, in which there is no sort of allusion to him." Their next venture was Hotel de Jumièges in a small garden, far from the Faubourg St. Germain, where they had an apartment of six rooms. Cooper wrote: "The two lower floors were occupied as a girls' boarding-school;--the reason for dwelling in it, our own daughters were in the school; on the second floor there was nothing but our own apartment." And here, next door to their nun-neighbors of the convent St. Maur, Cooper wrote the last pages of "The Prairie." It was published in the autumn of 1826, by Lea and Carey, of Philadelphia. [Illustration: WHITEWALL WHARF, 1826.] [Illustration: KEEP OF CARISBROOK.] [Illustration: HAVRE, BY NIGHT.] [Illustration: WINDMILLS OF MONTMARTRE.] [Illustration: THE CONVENT ST. MAUR.] [Illustration: HOTEL DE JUMIÈGES.] Cooper was very fond of walking, and to get a general idea of Paris he and Captain Chauncey--an old messmate and officer in the navy--made the circuit of the city walls, a distance of nineteen miles, in four hours. For two hours the captain had Cooper "a little on his quarter." "By this time," Cooper wrote, "I ranged up abeam,"--to find a pinching boot on his friend's foot. Near the finish the mate of this "pinching boot" became "too large," and the captain "fell fairly astern." But without stopping, eating, or drinking, they made the distance in four hours to a minute. Washington Irving wrote from Madrid the following spring: "I left Paris before the arrival of Cooper, and regret extremely that I missed him. I have a great desire to make his acquaintance, for I am delighted with his novels. His naval scenes and characters in 'The Pilot' are admirable." Cooper soon became known in France by his presence at a dinner given by the U.S. Minister to Canning then in Paris. In "Bryant and His Friends" General James Grant Wilson says: "Scott and Cooper met at the Princess Galitzin's, in Paris, November, 1826; and, says Scott's diary, 'so the Scotch and American Lions took the field together.'" In Miss Cooper's "Pages and Pictures" appears her father's first interview with the author of "Waverley," of which Cooper wrote in part: "Ten days after the arrival of Sir Walter Scott I ordered a carriage one morning. I had got as far as the lower flight to the door when another carriage-steps rattled, and presently a large, heavy man appeared in the door of the hotel. He was gray, limped a little, walking with a cane. We passed on the stairs, bowing. I was about to enter the carriage when I fancied the face and form were known to me, and it flashed on my mind that the visit might be to myself. The stranger went up the large stone steps, with one hand on the railing and the other on his cane. He was on the first landing as I stopped, and, turning, our eyes met. He asked in French, 'Is it Mr. Cooper that I have the honor to see?' 'I am, sir.' 'Oh, well then, I am Walter Scott.' I ran up, shook the hand he stood holding out to me cordially, and expressed my sense of the honor he was conferring. He told me the Princess Galitzin had been as good as her word and given him my address,--and cutting short ceremony he had driven from his hotel to my lodgings." Realizing all at once that he was speaking French to Cooper's English, he said: "Well, I have been _parlez-vousing_ in a way to surprise you. These Frenchmen have my tongue so set to their lingo I have half forgotten my own language,' he continued in English, and accepted my arm up the next flight of stairs." They had some copyright and other talk, and Sir Walter "spoke of his works with frankness and simplicity"; and as to proof-reading, he said he "would as soon see his dinner after a hearty meal" as to read one of his own tales--"when fairly rid of it." When he rose to go Cooper begged he might have the gratification of presenting his wife. Sir Walter good-naturedly assented. When Mrs. Cooper and their nephew William Cooper were introduced, he sat some little time relating in Scotch dialect some anecdotes. Then his hostess remarked that the chair he sat in had been twice honored that day, as General Lafayette had not left it more than an hour before. Sir Walter was surprised, thinking Lafayette had gone to America to live, and observed, "He is a great man." Two days later Sir Walter had Cooper to breakfast, where the Scotch bard appeared in a newly-bought silk gown, trying "as hard as he could to make a Frenchman of himself." Among others present was Miss Anne Scott, who was her father's traveling companion. "She was in half mourning, and with her black eyes and jet-black hair might very well have passed for a French woman." Of Scott Cooper wrote: "During the time the conversation was not led down to business, he manifested a strong propensity to humor." In naming their common publisher in Paris "he quaintly termed him, with a sort of malicious fun, 'our gosling' (his name was Goselin), adding that he hoped at least he 'laid golden eggs.'" Mr. Cooper was warmly interested in aiding Sir Walter's "Waverley" copyrights in America, and concerning their author he later wrote: "In Auld Reekie, and among the right set, warmed, perhaps, by a glass of 'mountain dew,' Sir Walter Scott, in his peculiar way, is one of the pleasantest companions the world holds." About 1830, when Cooper was sitting for his portrait by Madame de Mirbel, that artist--for its pose--asked him to look at the picture of a distinguished statesman. Cooper said: "No, if I must look at any, it shall be at my master," and lifting his eyes higher they rested on a portrait of Sir Walter Scott. [Illustration: SIR WALTER SCOTT.] [Illustration: MISS ANNE SCOTT.] [Illustration: JAMES FENIMORE COOPER.] [Illustration: PIERRE JEAN DAVID D'ANGERS.] One of Cooper's steadfast friends exclaimed of him:--"What a love he cherished for superior talents in every ennobling pursuit in life!" This characteristic no doubt led him into that day life of Pierre Jean David d'Angers, whose brave soul had battled its way to artistic recognition. In M. Henry Jouin's "David d'Angers et ses Relations Littéraires," Paris, 1890, appear two letter records of this master-sculptor as to Cooper. In that of David to Victor Pavie, November, 1826, is: "Next week I am to dine with Cooper; I shall make his bust. If you have not yet read his works, read them, you will find the characters vigorously traced." A note adds that the sculptor kept his word, and this bust of Cooper appeared in the "Salon of 1827." Paris, March 30, 1828, David again writes of Cooper to Victor Pavie:--"Dear friend, in speaking of the sea, I think of 'The Red Rover' of my good friend Cooper. Have you read it? It interests me much." A note adds: "Without doubt the author had presented his new book to the sculptor," who gave to Cooper this bust, modeled in 1826. Mrs. Cooper thought the bust and the Jarvis portrait of her husband were "perfect likenesses." Later on David's genius again found expression in a bronze medallion of his "good friend Cooper." David has given the striking intellectual of Cooper's head of which an authority of that time wrote: "Nature moulded it in majesty, yet denied it not the gentler graces that should ever adorn greatness." [Illustration: JAMES FENIMORE COOPER.] [Illustration: MRS. JAMES FENIMORE COOPER.] [Illustration: JAMES FENIMORE COOPER.] "In Paris Cooper's style of living gave his ideas of the duties and position of an American gentleman. In a part of the handsome Hotel de Jumièges he lived, keeping his carriage and service required by a modest establishment; and his doors were always open to every American who had claims on his society. Meanwhile nothing was allowed to break in upon his literary duties, for which a part of each day was set aside." So wrote one who became a friend staunch and true at this time in Paris. Of their meeting he wrote: "I shall never forget the first day I saw Cooper. He was at good old General Lafayette's, in the little apartment of the rue d'Anjou,--the scene of many hallowed memories." Lafayette's kind heart had granted an interview to some Indians by whom a reckless white man was filling his purse in parading through Europe. With winning smile the great, good man told these visitors to return to their home while yet they could. Mr. G. continued: "As I was gazing at this scene I saw a gentleman enter whose appearance called off the General's attention. He was in the prime of life (thirty-five), and of that vigor which air and manly exercise give. I had seen the heads of great men, and there were some close to me, but none with such a full, expansive forehead, such strong features, a mouth firm without harshness, and an eye whose clear gray seemed to read you at a glance while it fears not to let you read him in turn. 'Who is he?' I whispered to a grand-daughter of the General near me. 'Mr. Cooper; do you not know Mr. Cooper? Let me introduce you to him.' 'Cooper,' said I to myself; 'can it be that I am within five paces, and that there, too, are the feeble of the race around which his genius has shed a halo like that of Homer's own heros?' I was fresh from 'The Mohicans,' and my hand trembled as it met the cordial grasp of the man to whom I owed so many pleasing hours. I asked about the Indians. 'They are poor specimens,' said he; 'fourth-rate at best in their own woods, and ten-times worse for the lives they are leading here.'" Later, Mr. G. met the author in Lafayette's bed-room, and saw how warmly he was welcomed by the great poet Béranger. Still later Mr. G. and Cooper met in Florence, where they had much fine talking and walking "on calm summer evenings." Of the Bard-of-Avon it is noted that Cooper said: "Shakespeare is my traveling library. To a novel-writer he is invaluable. Publishers will have mottoes for every chapter; I never yet turned over Shakespeare without hitting upon just what I wanted I like to take them, whenever I can, from our own poets. It is a compliment they have a right to, and I am glad when I can pay it." Concerning the author's habits, this friend concludes: "When Cooper left his desk he left his pen on it. He came out into the world to hear and see what other men were doing. If they wanted to hear him, there he was, perfectly ready to express opinions of men or things. It was delightful to hear him talk about his own works, he did it with such a frank, fresh, manly feeling." [Illustration: PROF. GEORGE WASHINGTON GREEN ("MR. G.")] [Illustration: P.T. DE BÉRANGER.] [Illustration: TALLEYRAND.] [Illustration: DUCHESSE DE BERRI.] [Illustration: CHARLES X of FRANCE.] Among the great again was seen the ever-favored yet not "gai" Talleyrand. Of the incident Cooper noted: "It is etiquette for the kings of France to dine in public on January 14 and on the monarch's fête-day." Wishing to see this ceremony, Mr. and Mrs. Cooper were sent the better of the two permissions granted for the occasion. Cooper describes the ceremony--the _entrée_ of Charles X: _"Le Roi_, tall, decidedly graceful; the Dauphin to his right, the Dauphine to his left, and to her right the Duchess of Berri." Passing Cooper, he continues: "Near a little gate was an old man in strictly court-dress. The long white hair that hung down his face, the _cordon bleu_, the lame foot, and the unearthly aspect made me suspect the truth, it was M. de Talleyrand as grand chamberlin, to officiate at the dinner of his master"; whereby proving his own words: "It is not enough to be some one,--it is needful to do something." A near Abbé whispered of Talleyrand to Cooper: "But, sir, he is a cat, that always falls on its feet." Yet of Talleyrand another's record is: "But if Charles Maurice was lame of leg--his wit was keener and more nimble than that of any man in Europe." Brushing past the gorgeous state-table to Mrs. Cooper, the author adds: "She laughed, and said 'it was all very magnificent and amusing,' but some one had stolen her shawl!" [Illustration: COOPER'S SUMMER HOME, ST. OUEN, 1827.] Cooper was ever a home-lover. Wherever he might be in foreign lands, he contrived to have his own roof-tree when possible. Therefore, the summer of 1827 sent them from rue St. Maur to the village of St. Ouen, on the banks of the Seine and a league from the gates of Paris. The village itself was not attractive, but pleasant was the home, next to a small château where Madame de Staël lived when her father, M. Necker, was in power. Some twenty-two spacious, well-furnished rooms this summer home had, in which once lived the Prince de Soubise when _grand veneur_ of Louis XV, who went there at times to eat his dinner--"in what served us for a drawing-room," Cooper wrote. The beautiful garden of shade-trees, shrubbery, and flowers, within gray walls fourteen feet high, was a blooming paradise; and for it all--horses, cabriolet, grand associations--was paid two hundred dollars per month for the season of five. "The Red Rover" was written in these three or four summer months in St. Ouen on the Seine, whence the author's letters tell of watching the moving life on the river, the merry washerwomen as they chatter, joke, and splash beneath his terrace; how he tried punting, and left it to "honest Pierre," who never failed to charge him double fare, and of whom he tells a pretty story; how they all enjoyed the village _fêtes_, with whirligigs and flying-horses, whereby the French contrive to make and spend a few _sous_ pleasantly. "I enjoy all this greatly," wrote Cooper. Excursions were made,--one to Montmorenci, in plain view of Paris; and the author explains that the Montmorenci claim to being "the first Christian baron" is of the Crusade War-Cry date and origin. His wife and he took all the pretty drives in their cabriolet, but later he took to the saddle for the out-of-field paths, where pleasant salutations were exchanged with kindly-hearted peasants. Of these rambles Cooper wrote: "One of my rides is ascending Montmartre by its rear, to the windmills that night and day are whirling their rugged arms over the capital of France." Montmartre, he said, gave him a view "like a glimpse into the pages of history." He often met royalty dashing to and from Paris. The king with his carriage-and-eight, attended by a dozen mounted men, made a royal progress truly magnificent. [Illustration: COOPER'S TERRACE STUDY, ST. OUEN.] [Illustration: OLD MILL AT NEWPORT.] [Illustration: THE STRUGGLE.] Overhanging the river at the garden side was a broad terrace which ended in a pleasant summer-house, and here many pages of the author's next book--"The Red Rover"--were written. After he left the navy, and while he was living in Angevine, Cooper became part owner in a whaling-ship,--_The Union_, of Sag Harbor. She made trips to different parts of the coast, and several times, for the pleasure of it, Cooper played skipper. Under his direction she once carried him to Newport, with which he was greatly pleased. He explored the old ruin there, but no fancy could ever persuade him to see more than a windmill in it; but the charm of Newport's situation, harbor, and shore lines lingered in his mind and served him for the opening and closing scenes of this work. After its publication he received from some Newport gentlemen the gift of a little box made from the keel of the _Endeavor_, Cook's famous exploring ship, which wound up its world-circling voyage in Newport harbor. On the lid of the box was a silver-plate engraving. In Cooper's story the "Red Rover" appears on this Newport scene in the height of his career,--an outlaw in spirit, a corsair in deed. In early life he was of quick mind, strong will, with culture and social position, but wildly passionate and wayward; and smarting under official injustice, in an evil hour he casts his lawlessness loose on the storm-tide of life. The voice of an elder sister, who had given something of a mother's deep love and tenderness to the wayward youth, falls upon his ear. Old memories are awakened; home feeling revives; conscience is aroused, and in the very hour of its greatest triumph the proud spirit bows in penitence,--the Rover surrenders his captives. A like change of heart came, through a mutual love of the birds of heaven, to a real pirate who chanced upon a cabin in the forest's solitude and here confessed his life to its inmate, Audubon, who left this "striking incident" a record in his works. However, "Dick Fid, that arrant old foretop man, and his comrade, Negro Sip, are the true lovers of the narrative;--the last, indeed, is a noble creature, a hero under the skin of Congo." "The Red Rover" is all a book of the sea. In Sir Walter Scott's journal, January, 1828, appears: "I have read Cooper's new novel, 'The Red Rover.' The current of it rolls entirely on the ocean. Something too much of nautical language. It is very clever, though." Its author "has often been idly compared to the author of 'Waverley,' but to no such heritage as Scott's was ever Cooper born. Alone he penetrated the literary wilderness, blazing paths for those who should come after him there";--and a Columbus of letters for others to follow on the sea's highway was he. [Illustration: THE NEWPORT BOX.] [Illustration: JOHN GIBSON LOCKHART.] A misprint in Lockhart's "Life of Scott" made his comment on Cooper most unfortunate by an "s" added to the word manner. Sir Walter's journal reads: "This man who has shown so much genius has a good deal of manner, or want of manner, peculiar to his countrymen." Cooper, hurt to the quick for himself and his country at being rated "a rude boor from the bookless wilds," by one he had called his "sovereign" in past cordial relations, resented this expression in his review of Lockhart's work for the _Knickerbocker Magazine_, 1838, and for so doing he was harshly criticised in England. October, 1864, the literary editor of _The Illustrated London News_ wrote: "I am almost inclined to agree with Thackeray in liking Hawkeye 'better than any of Scott's lot.' What noble stories those five are in which the hero is described from youth to age!" From "Thackeray in the United States," by General James Grant Wilson, comes: "At an American dinner table" (the talk was of Cooper and his writings) "Thackeray pronounced Leatherstocking the greatest character created in fiction since the Don Quixote of Cervantes"; and he thought the death scene in "The Prairie," where the old trapper said "Here!" surpassing anything he had "met in English literature." [Illustration: NATTY'S LAST CALL.] Of Natty's answer to the Spirit Land call Cooper's own words are: "The trapper was placed on a rude seat, which had been made, with studied care, to support his frame in an upright and easy attitude--so as to let the light of the setting sun fall full upon the solemn features. His head was bare, the long, thin locks of gray fluttering lightly in the evening breeze. The first glance of the eye told his former friends that the old man was at length called upon to pay the last tribute of nature. The trapper had remained nearly motionless for an hour. His eyes alone had occasionally opened and shut. When opened, his gaze seemed fastened on the clouds which hung around the western horizon, reflecting the bright colors, and giving form and loveliness to the glorious tints of an American sunset. The hour--the calm beauty of the season--the occasion, all conspired to fill the spectators with solemn awe. Suddenly, while musing on the remarkable position in which he was placed, Middleton felt the hand which he held grasp his own with incredible power, and the old man, supported on either side by his friends, rose upright to his feet. For a moment he looked about him, as if to invite all in presence to listen (the lingering remnant of human frailty), and then, with a fine military elevation of the head, and with a voice that might be heard in every part of that numerous assembly, he pronounced the word--'Here!' "When Middleton and Hard Heart, each of whom had involuntarily extended a hand to support the form of the old man, turned to him again, they found that the subject of their interest was removed forever beyond the necessity of their care." Concerning social life Cooper wrote: "Taking into consideration our tastes and my health, the question has been, not how to get into, but how to keep out of, the great world." But for the happy chance of inquiry at the gate of a friend, the author would "have dined with the French Lord-High-Chancellor, without the smallest suspicion of who he was!" Of French women Cooper adds: "The highest style of French beauty is classical. I cannot recall a more lovely picture than the Duchess de----[this title and blank are said to veil the identity of the Princess Galitzin] in full dress at a carnival ball, where she shone peerless among hundreds of the _élite_ of Europe. And yet this woman was a grandmother!" [Illustration: THE PRINCESS BARBARA VASSILIEWNA GALITZIN.] In a letter dated Paris, November 28, 1826, written by Mrs. Cooper to her sister, appears of Mr. Cooper:--"They make quite a Lion of him and Princesses write to him and he has invitations from Lords and Ladies. He has so many notes from the Princess Galitzin I should be absolutely jealous were it not that she is a Grandmother. We were at a Soirée there the other evening among Dutchesses, Princesses, Countesses, etc." [Illustration: LA GRANGE, COUNTRY HOME OF LAFAYETTE.] [Illustration: LA GRANGE ARCHWAY ENTRANCE.] Once with and twice without Mrs. Cooper, the author visited La Grange, the country home of General Lafayette, some twenty-seven miles from Paris and near Rosay. He tells us that La Grange means barn, granary, or farm, and that the château came to Lafayette through his wife; that it had some five hundred acres of wood, pasture, meadow, and cultivated land; that the house is of hewn stone, good grayish color, with its five plain, round towers and their high, pyramidal slate roofs making a part of the walls; that the end towers are buried in ivy planted by Charles Fox. He tells how small, irregular windows open beautifully through the thick foliage for the blooming faces of children, in their home-part of La Grange. He gives rare pictures of the great stairway, the General's bed-room, cabinet, and library in the tower-angle overlooking the willow-shaded moat. Beneath this library was the author's own bed-room. Then came the array of drawing-rooms and innumerable other rooms, where hospitality seemed to know no limit. Lafayette's cabinet contained many portraits,--one of Madame de Staël, and one of his own father. Of this room, and the library, and his grand old host Cooper wrote: "I passed much of our visit alone with him in these two rooms. No one can be pleasanter in private, and he is full of historical anecdotes that he tells with great simplicity and frequently with great humor." The château stands on three sides of an irregular square, and is one of the most picturesque structures in the country. The winding road enters a thicket of evergreens, crosses a bridge, and passes beneath an arch to the paved court. Together, Cooper and his host had many walks and drives thereabouts, and, all in all, the author fell under the spell of Lafayette's personal charm and his simple integrity of character. Between Lafayette's richness of years and Talleyrand's old age there was a gulf,--one had attained nearly everything worth striving for; the other had lost the same. [Illustration: HÔTEL DESSEIN, CALAIS, FRANCE.] Cooper and his family entered France July, 1826, and February, 1828, they thought the time had come to change the scene, and proceeded to England. "I drove around to the rue d'Anjou to take my leave of General Lafayette," wrote Cooper. To Calais they had rain and chill and darkness most of the way. Passing through the gate, they drove to the inn immortalized by Lawrence Sterne and Beau Brummel, where they found English comfort with French cooking and French taste. One of February's fine days they left the Hotel Dessein to embark for England. After a two-hours' run the cliffs of Dover appeared on each side of that port,--the nearest to the continent,--making these chalk cliffs seem, Cooper says, "a magnificent gateway to a great nation." Leaving the fishing-boats of the French coast, "the lofty canvas of countless ships and several Indiamen rose from the sea," as they shot towards the English shore, many "bound to that focus of coal-smoke, London." Quietly landing at Dover-haven, they went to Wright's tavern, where they missed the French manner, mirrors, and table-service, but "got in their place a good deal of solid, unpretending comfort." In due time Mr. Wright put them and their luggage into a comfortable post-coach, and on the road he called "quite rotten, sir," to London. To Americans, at that date, the road proved good, and also the horses that made the sixteen miles to Canterbury in an hour and a half, where they drove to another Mr. Wright's; going to four of the name between Dover and London, Cooper concluded with an apology that "it was literally all Wright on this road." The visit to Canterbury cathedral was made during "morning vespers in the choir. It sounded odd to hear our own beautiful service in our own tongue, in such a place, after the _Latin_ chants of canons; and we stood listening with reverence without the screen." London met them "several miles in the suburbs down the river," but they suddenly burst out onto Waterloo bridge, over which they were whirled into the Strand and set down at Wright's hotel, Adam Street, Adelphi; "and," wrote Cooper, "we were soon refreshing ourselves with some of worthy Mrs. Wright's excellent tea." [Illustration: CLIFFS OF DOVER.] [Illustration: CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL CHOIR.] [Illustration: GREEN GATE, CANTERBURY.] The second night in London Cooper, stretched out on a sofa, was reading, when some street musicians began to play beneath his window several tunes without success; "finally," he wrote, "the rogues contrived, after all, to abstract half a crown from my pocket by suddenly striking up 'Yankee Doodle!'" After some hunting they took a small house in St. James Place, which gave them "a tiny drawing-room, a dining-room, three bed-rooms, offices, and house-service for a guinea per day." A guinea more weekly was added for their three fires, and their own maid and man gave personal service during this London season. Of his man-servant Cooper wrote: "The English footman I engaged is a steady, little, old man, with a red face and a powdered poll, who appears in black breeches and coat, but who says himself that his size has marred his fortune. He is cockney born, about fifty; quality and splendor act forcibly on his imagination, and he is much condemned in the houses where I visit on account of his dwarfish stature"; and we are told that the English favor pretty faces for their maids and fine figures for their footmen. [Illustration: ST. JAMES PLACE, LONDON.] To a Mr. Spencer whom Cooper met in France was due the visit soon paid him by his near neighbor, the author of the "Pleasures of Memory." Of Samuel Rogers Cooper wrote: "He very kindly sought me out"; and, "few men have a more pleasant way of saying pleasant things." His visit was followed by an invitation to breakfast the next morning. Cooper continues: "It was but a step from my door, and you may be certain I was punctual." He found the poet's home perfection for a bachelor's needs; only eighteen feet front, but the drawing-room and dining-room were lined with old masters. And in the bow-window stood the "Chantrey Vase," placed by its maker when artist workman in the room where he later dined as Chantrey the sculptor and Rogers' honored guest. The library was filled with valuable books and curiosities in history, literature, and art. Of this poet's dream-home Cooper wrote: "Neither he nor any one else has a right to live in so exquisite a house and expect everybody to hold their tongues about it. Taking the house, the host, the mental treats he dispenses, the company, and the tone, it is not easy to conceive of anything better in their way. Commend me in every respect to the delicious breakfasts of St. James Place!" On one occasion, "Rogers, talking of Washington Irving's 'Columbus,' said, 'in his airy, significant way,' as Moore called it, 'It's rather long.' Cooper turned round on him and said sharply, 'That's a short criticism.'" This banker-poet could be severe on his English friends too, as it appears "Lady Holland was always lamenting that she had nothing to do. One day, complaining worse than ever that she did not know 'what to be at,'" said Rogers, "I could not resist recommending her to try a novelty--try and do a little good." [Illustration: SIR FRANCIS CHANTREY.] [Illustration: SAMUEL ROGERS.] [Illustration: ROGERS' LONDON HOME.] [Illustration: ROGERS' BREAKFAST ROOM.] Through Samuel Rogers Cooper was soon dining at Holland House, in the much-carved and gilded room where Sully and embassy supped in 1603. By a word to the porter, Sir James Mackintosh had planned a pleasant half-hour for his American friend in the gardens, where was Rogers' seat, and then in the library on the second floor, where he saw its each-end tables. The generous space between is said to have been paced by "Addison when composing," and his inspiration quickened by kindly "bottles placed on them for that purpose." The artist Charles Robert Leslie caught a rare glimpse on canvas of this library, in which appear his friends Lord and Lady Holland, who were also the host and hostess of Fenimore Cooper. We are told by him that the dining-table was square; that the host had one corner and the hostess the centre; and the American author, "as the stranger, had the honor of a seat next to Lady Holland." When talking, he was offered by her a plate of herring, of which he frankly avowed he "ought to have eaten one, even to the fins and tail"; but little dreaming of their international worth just then, the herring were declined. With good humor his hostess said: "You do not know what you say; they are _Dutch_." With some vigor of look and tone Cooper repeated--"Dutch!" The reply was: "Yes, Dutch; we can only get them _through an ambassador_." Then Cooper rose to the occasion by replying: "There are too many good things of native production to require a voyage to Holland on my account." Of their host Rogers' record was: "Lord Holland always comes down to breakfast like a man upon whom sudden good fortune had just fallen--his was the smile that spoke the mind at ease." And after his death were found on Lord Holland's dressing-table, and in his handwriting, these lines on himself: Nephew of Fox and friend of Gay, Enough my meed of fame If those who deighn'd to observe me say I injured neither name. [Illustration: ROGERS' SEAT.] "Here Rogers sat, and here forever dwell With me, those Pleasures that he sang so well." After dining at Lord Grey's Cooper wrote of him: "He on all occasions acted as if he never thought of national differences"; and the author thought him "the man of most character in his set." We are told that England is the country of the wealthy, and that the king is seldom seen, although the royal start from St. James for Windsor was seen and described as going off "at a slapping pace." [Illustration: CHARLES ROBERT LESLIE.] [Illustration: SIR JAMES MACKINTOSH.] [Illustration: HOLLAND HOUSE.] [Illustration: LIBRARY OF HOLLAND HOUSE.] [Illustration: GILT CHAMBER OF HOLLAND HOUSE.] [Illustration: LORD GREY.] [Illustration: MRS. JOHN GIBSON LOCKHART.] But it was in that dreamland of Rogers' that Cooper's heart found its greatest joy. There he met the artists,--Sir Thomas Lawrence, handsome and well-mannered; Leslie, mild, caring little for aught save his tastes and affections; and Newton, who "thinks himself" English. Here, dining, he meets again Sir Walter Scott, his son-in-law and later biographer, Mr. Lockhart, Sir Walter's daughters, Mrs. Lockhart and Miss Anne Scott. He says Mrs. Lockhart "is just the woman to have success in Paris, by her sweet, simple manners." He had a stately chat with Mrs. Siddons, and Sir James Mackintosh he called "the best talker I have ever seen; the only man I have yet met in England who appears to have any clear or definite notions of us." Rare indeed were these flash-lights of genius that Samuel Rogers charmed to his "feasts of reason and flow of soul." [Illustration: JOANNA BAILLIE.] [Illustration: SIR THOMAS LAWRENCE.] With Mr. Southby Cooper went to see Coleridge at Highgate, where, he says, "our reception was frank and friendly, the poet coming out to meet us in his morning-gown. I rose to take a nearer view of a little picture, when Mr. Coleridge told me it was by his friend Allston." From the bard of Highgate they went to see Miss Joanna Baillie at Hampstead, and found her "a little, quiet woman, a deeply-seated earnestness about her that bespoke the higher impulses within; no one would have thought her little person contained the elements of a tragedy." [Illustration: HOUSE OF THE GILLMAN'S, HIGHGATE, LONDON.] An Amsterdam engagement for early June called Cooper and his family from London before the end of the season, and prompted him to say, "The force of things has moved heavier bodies." Quitting England was by no means easy, but "the weather was fine and the North Sea smooth as a dish." They paddled the whole night long in their "solid good vessel, but slow of foot." With morning "a low spit of land hove in sight, and a tree or a church tower" rose out of the water,--this was Holland. At Rotterdam "the boat was soon alongside the Boom Key." With some fluttering about the dykes and windmills of Dutchland, a flight through Belgium soon brought them once more to Paris. [Illustration: BOOM KEY AT ROTTERDAM.] Cooper was a keen observer and a calm critic of both home and foreign folk. That he was stirred to strong words by unpleasing comments on his country appears in his "Notions of Americans: Picked up by a Traveling Bachelor." This book of facts, showing wide and accurate knowledge, was intended to enlighten and clear away mistakes. Instead of this, it drew upon its writer critical fire both at home and abroad, and was the first of the many shadows of his after life. His stories of our new country taught Europe more about America than Europe had ever learned before. His love for, and faith in, his own country were strong. Abroad he was a staunch defender of her free institutions, and foreigners deemed him more proud of his American birth than of his literary birthright of genius; and yet, at home he was voted "an enemy of all that the fathers of the Republic fought for." However, the opinion of those who knew Cooper best was given by his Bread and Cheese Club friend, Dr. John Wakefield Francis, as,--"He was an American inside and out--a thorough patriot." It was said that as an aristocratic American he never presented letters of introduction. Yet in foreign lands his society was sought by the most distinguished men of his time. However of this, the rare pleasure of these London days he ever held in warm remembrance. Flying from the summer heat of Paris, the family soon left for Switzerland with a team of sturdy Norman horses, a postilion riding the near beast. It slipped and fell, rolled over and caught its rider's leg beneath, but was saved its breaking by the make of his old-fashioned boot, "so with a wry face and a few _sacr-r-r-es,_ he limped back to his saddle." In their salon of the inn at Avallon were curious emblem pictures of different nationalities: one a _belle_ of fair hair; another a _belle_ of raven locks; a third a _belle_ of brown ringlets;--all these for Europe; but for the United States was "a _wench_ as black as coal!" So thought Switzerland of us in the days of 1828. One lovely day Cooper "persuaded A. to share" his seat on the carriage-box. Rounding a ruin height "she exclaimed, 'What a beautiful cloud!' In the direction of her finger I saw," wrote Cooper, "a mass that resembled the highest wreath of a cloud; its whiteness greatly surpassed the brilliancy of vapor. I called to the postilion and pointed out the object. '_Mont Blanc,_ Monsieur!' It was an inspiration when seventy miles by an air line from it. This first view of the hoary Alps always makes a thrilling moment." [Illustration: MONT BLANC.] Later came morning rides and evening strolls. The modest stone country-house which they took for economy and the author's love of quiet home-life was _La Lorraine_, and belonged to the Count de Portales of Neufchâtel. There was a high field near, where, one day, when Mr. Cooper was teaching his little son Paul the "mysteries of flying a kite," they caught the rare fleeting glimpse of a glittering glacier. _La Lorraine,_ only half a mile from Berne, is noted as "one of the pretty little retired villas that dot the landscape," with "the sinuous Aar glancing between" it and the town. The trim little garden and half-ruined fountain were well shaded by trees, and the adjoining farmhouse and barn-yard, all Swiss, made a fine playground for the children's summer holiday. The house and its furniture they found "faultlessly neat." There was a near-by common where hoops, rope-jumping, and kites could be enjoyed. From this point and the cottage windows "was a very beautiful view of the Alps--an unfailing source of delight, especially during the evening hours." Cooper has given some fine descriptions of their life in the glow of this Alpine country; of harvest-time and mountain gleaners. He tells of a visit to Hindelbank to see the sculptor Nahl's wondrous idealism in stone, which represents a young mother, the pastor's wife, and her babe. The infant lies in passive innocence on its mother's bosom, while her face is radiant with the light of a holy joy on the resurrection morn. Her hand is slightly raised in reverent greeting of her Redeemer. Of this work Cooper writes: "I take it to be the most sublime production of its kind in the world." And they found it in "one of the very smallest, humblest churches in Europe." [Illustration: LA LORRAINE VIEW OF BERNESE ALPS.] [Illustration: NAHL'S MEMORIAL TO MADAME LANGHAN.] In the small, uncarpeted study of _La Lorraine_ a new book was planned and begun. For the story's setting the author's mind turned to the far-away, new home-country, and early frontier life in Connecticut. There he brought the transatlantic Puritan and the North American Indian together--the strong, stern Puritan family affection in close contact with the red-man's savage cruelty, dignity, and his adoption of a white child. A fair-haired little girl is torn from her mother and cared for by a young Indian chief, once a captive in the white settlement. Years pass over the bereaved family, when an Indian outbreak restores the lost child to her parents' roof as "Narra-Mattah," the devoted wife of a Narraganset warrior-chief, and the young mother of his little son. This book draws a strong picture of pure family devotion; even the old grandfather's heart, beneath his stiff Puritan garb, beats an unforgettable part. Sorrow for the lost child gave the story its name--"The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish" (then thought to mean in the Indian language, "Place of the Whip-poor-will")and it has been said to describe the settlement of the Fenimore family in America. [Illustration: NARRA-MATTAH.] Many and interesting were their excursions. One was to Interlachen, with its glimpse of the Jungfrau, and the Lauterbrunnen valleys "full of wonder and delight." At Lauterbrunnen they walked to the famous Falls of _Staubbach_, which Cooper describes and explains as meaning "Torrents of Dust." [Illustration: CONNECTICUT EMIGRANTS.] As the summer had fled autumn winds began to whistle through the lindens of _La Lorraine_, and the snow began to fall upon its pretty garden, warning the author to fly south with his fledglings and their mother before the Alpine passes were closed by real winter. Cooper resigned the consulate at Lyons, which was given him solely "to avoid the appearance of going over to the enemy" while abroad. A carriage and two servitors were engaged. One of these, Caspar, had his soldiering under the first Napoleon, and many were the camp tales he had to tell in a way to please his employers. At the old town of Alstetten, with painted wooden houses at the foot of the Am Stoss, they arrived, more than ready for breakfast, which was somewhat delayed because, said Cooper, "our German was by no means classical; and English, Italian, and French were all Hebrew to the good people of the inn." It was "easy to make the hostess understand that we _wished_ to eat,--but _what_ would we eat? In this crisis I bethought me of a long-neglected art, and crowed like a cock. The shrill strain hardly reached the ear of the good woman before it was answered by such laughter as none but village lungs could raise. William--an admirable mimic--began to cackle like a hen. In due time we had a broiled fowl, an _omelette_, and boiled eggs." At another place where they stopped for mid-day luncheon Cooper writes: "We asked for a fruit-tart, and--odors and nosegays!--they gave us one made of onions, which they thought very good fruit in its way, and we ate exactly as much as we wished." [Illustration: FALL OF THE STAUBBACH.] "The baths of Pfäffer," he wrote "in my own unworthy person have wrought a sudden and wondrous cure"; and of his visit to the Devil's Bridge over the Reuss: "We entered a gorge between frightful rocks, where the river was fretting and struggling to get in before us." From the yawning mouth of a gloomy cave came the tinkling bells of pack-horses to Italy by the St. Gothard. To the roar of the river and the rushing of winds without they plunged through this dark "Hole of Uri," which brought them to a rugged rock-rift pass with but a thread of heaven's blue far above them; and here "a slight, narrow bridge of a single arch spanned the gorge with a hardihood that caused one to shudder." Its slender, unrailed, fifteen feet of width was eighty of span, and one hundred above the boiling torrent that fell on broken rocks below, and over it; wrote Cooper: "The wind blew so furiously that I really wished for a rope to hold on by. This was the far-famed Devil's Bridge; other bridges may have been built by imps, but Beëlzebub himself had a hand in this." [Illustration: THE DEVIL'S BRIDGE.] [Illustration: FERNEY, VOLTAIRE'S LAZE LEMAN HOME.] They enjoyed the beauty of Lake Geneva, and were charmed by the attractions of "Ferney," Voltaire's home on Leman's shore, and enjoyed the solemn gorge-valley of the Rhone, and through the Simplon passed into fair Italy. As they "drew near a small chapel in a rock Casper flourished his whip, calling out the word 'Italia!' I pulled off my hat in reverence," wrote the author. Down the steep mountains, over bridged torrents, past the hill-towns and valley-lands, they came to the City of the Lily,--fair Florence of the Arno. "As early as 1829," Cooper thought, "the unification of Italy was irresistible." [Illustration: THE SIMPLON PASS.] [Illustration: FLORENCE, ITALY.] [Illustration: PALAZZO RICASOLI, FLORENCE, ITALY.] In Florence a home was soon found in the Palazzo Ricasoli, Via del Cocomero. Lofty of ceiling--twenty feet--was their apartment, in which they enjoyed "two noble bed-rooms, several smaller ones, a large drawing-room, dining-room, baths, a small court and garden within the iron gates, and all for the modest sum of sixty dollars per month." The oil burned in their lamps the home-folk "would be happy to use on their salads." Here, around the cheering glow of great wood-fires, the American author would gather his friends, old and new. From Otsego days a blazing hearth-stone ever rejoiced his cheery nature, and his way of laying the wood and nursing the flames horrified his Italian servants as waste of fuel. The chill of the _tra montana_ brought into this circle of warmth and light many eminent foreigners; and of home-country folk, that true American, Horatio Greenough, often basked in the bright glow of the author's wood-fires at Florence. Later Greenough wrote: "Fenimore Cooper saved me from despair after my return to Italy. He employed me as I wish to be employed; and up to this moment has been a father to me." Greenough's last work was a bust of his illustrious friend, the American novelist, which he proposed to cast in bronze, at his own expense, and place in the field where stands the Old Mill in Newport, and where the opening scene of "The Red Rover" is laid. He took counsel with Cooper's friends as to a monument to the author, and among his papers was found an elaborate design for the work. [Illustration: HORATIO GREENOUGH.] Cooper loved to encourage rising talent in young artists. He gave them orders, and also his cheering sympathy. One of these wrote that Cooper gave him a free letter-of-credit on his banker in Paris, and added: "I had occasion to use it more than once, and my drafts were always cheerfully accepted. Since then I have paid him, though he never would have asked for the money; nobody but he and I ever knew of the transaction." A Boston man writes of his visit to the Florence studio of Greenough: "My eye fell upon a bust which awakened sea and forest pictures,--the spars of an elegant craft, the lofty figure of a hunter, the dignified bearing of a mysterious pilot." It was the bust of Fenimore Cooper. Of the sculptor it was noted that "he always referred with emotion to the gleam of sunshine which encouraged him at this crisis, in the friendship of our late renowned novelist, Cooper." [Illustration: BUST OF JAMES FENIMORE COOPER.] In the Pitti one day they passed before Raphael's _Madonna del Trono_, and the sculptor pointed out to his companion the fine drawing in the two little angel figures of the foreground, in the act of singing. Cooper asked if the subject would not lend itself to sculpture; afterwards one of his daughters copied the figures, and the result of the mutual interest in the design was an order from Cooper for a group which in a few months Greenough executed in marble. It was exhibited in America under the title of "The Chanting Cherubs." It was Cooper's "Chanting Cherubs"--the first group of its kind from an American chisel --that led to Greenough's order for the statue of Washington, and inspired the pen of Richard Henry Dana to write: Whence came ye, cherubs? from the moon? Or from some shining star? Ye, sure, are sent a blessed boon, From kinder worlds afar; For while I look my heart is all delight: Earth hath no creatures half so pure and bright. [Illustration: CHANTING CHERUBS.] Later on Greenough came to them "all booted and bearded beyond recognition" save in "his walk and his talk." During Cooper's later American press troubles his close friend, Greenough, wrote him: "You lose your hold on the American public with rubbing down their skins with brick-bats." And yet, during Greenough's dark days, he said: "What is the use of blowing up bladders for posterity to jump upon for the mere pleasure of hearing them crack?" The author's keen delight in architecture, sculpture, and painting then gave him daily pleasure in the churches, palaces, and art-galleries of _Bella Firenzi_. Familiar from youth with his father's engravings of antique sculpture subjects, he writes of his first glimpses of the originals in the Pitti: "I stood, hat in hand, involuntarily bowing to the circle of marble figures that surrounded me." [Illustration: LEOPOLD II, GRAND DUKE OF TUSCANY.] [Illustration: PITTI PALACE, FLORENCE, ITALY, 1828.] Attired in "a black coat, breeches, and vest with steel buttons, lace frills and ruff, a sword and a dress-hat," our author was presented at the brilliant Tuscan Court. Grand Duke Leopold II left on Cooper's mind a strong impression of integrity of character; his simplicity and justice were borne out in his greeting: "They tell me you are the author of many books, but as it has never been my good fortune to meet with them, I can say no more on this subject than that I have heard them well spoken of by those who have." Cooper was asked "a hundred questions as to America," and assured of the prince's pleasure in seeing him at court and his being in Tuscany. When leaving Florence Cooper paid his parting respects at the Pitti in an hour's pleasant converse, and then presented the Grand Duke with a copy of "The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish," printed in his city of the Arno. Here Cooper and his family had some gay carnival days with their various friends. Among them was the Count St. Leu, son of Queen Hortense and King Louis of Holland, and the author's sometimes host, and "one of the handsomest men of his age" that Cooper ever met. We are told of the Count: "He lived in good style, having a fine villa where I dined lately, and a palace in town." By those nearest him he was addressed "your Majesty," and held some "little show" of royalty. Princess Charlotte, his wife, and daughter of Joseph Bonaparte, the author also knew. He met Madame Mère, who is described as "a slight old lady, with little remains of beauty except fine black eyes." She was quiet, simple; in short, motherly, when seen by Cooper the winter of 1828-29. [Illustration: COUNT ST. LEU.] [Illustration: LETIZIA BOUNAPARTE.] [Illustration: MADAME MÈRE.] Longing for the open country came with the early Italian spring, and a hillside villa just outside the walls of Florence was secured. A narrow lane ran between this villa _St. Illario_ and its rustic church of the same name. The villa had two projecting wings with belvederes and roofed terraces, one of which connected with the author's study. Herein he wrote of "the witchery of Italy"--the land he loved next to his own. His letters give glorious glimpses of the Arno, their strolls to Bellosguardo's heights, the churches, monasteries, costumes, and songs of the peasants--all attuned to poesy. Frequent were the exchanges of civility between the author's study and the good old _curato_ across the lane. Cooper wrote of him: "The man has some excellent figs, and our cook, having discovered it, lays his trees under contribution." He continues: "One small, green-coated, fresh fig is the precise point of felicity. But the good _curato_, besides his figs, has a pair of uneasy bells in his church-tower that are exactly forty-three feet from my ears, which ring in pairs six or eight times daily. There are matins, noontide, vespers, to say nothing of christenings, weddings, and funerals." Then follows a rare account of a night funeral service ending beneath his study walls. [Illustration: CHURCH OF ST. ILLARIO AND NARROW LANE.] [Illustration: VILLA, ST. ILLARIO.] During the great Florentine _fête_ of St. John, the patron saint of the city,--from the Count St. Leu's windows on the Arno,--the author and his family saw the display of gala-boats decked with thousands of colored-paper lanterns. [Illustration: CHARIOT RACES, FLORENCE.] They enjoyed the chariot races in the wide Piazza Santa Maria Novella, where the small obelisks point the start and finish of the races. These were followed by the _corso dei barberi_--barbed horse-races without riders--down the longest street of the town. Then followed the French Minister's masked ball, amusing as well as splendid, readers of Cooper's "Italy" will find. But more than all, on their return to Villa St. Illario, were they charmed with the brilliant illumination of the noble cathedral dome, which against the dark skies "looked like a line engraving of fire." So closed this festa of Florence in the grand-ducal days, bright in gay gear and alive with everybody, from prince to _contadini_. Then he came in happy touch with the impulsive, laughing, singing, dark-haired Italians, and to the finer aspects of their nature he was partial. They were in sharp contrast to the Puritan band in the valley of the Connecticut, which his pen pictured in the finishing touches of "The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish," when in his study at _Casa Ricasoli._ [Illustration: GENOA.] Press censorship and no English printing-house in Florence forced Cooper to leave his family and go to Marseilles. His letters give some pretty pictures which passed his carriage windows on the way. Of Genoa: "The seaward prospect was glorious." The islands "were borrowed by Leonardo," and a circuit of the city walls was made on horseback. Full of charm and interest was the road "on the margin of the sea"--from Genoa to Nice. In his "Excursions in Italy" appears of Genoa: "I looked back with longing-eyes at _Genoa la Superba_ and thought it well deserved the title." "The whole of this coast," he wrote, "is as picturesque and glorious as the imagination can picture it." He tells of feluccas and other water-craft that claimed a sailor's eye; and the landward views of Mentone, Santa Monica, the heights, arches, and passes, and the wasp-like Villa Franca, perched on its ledge up two hundred feet--for fear of "the bears" said the guide. In Marseilles an English printer was secured and brought back to Florence. Besides being deaf and dumb his name--Richard Heavysides--bore out the burden of an unfortunate temper to the necessity of sending this printer back to Marseilles. Finally, by the kindness of the grand duke's librarian, a small edition of "The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish" was printed, and early sheets sent to publishers in Paris, London, and Philadelphia. In England the book was called "The Borderers," being based on the story of Eunice Williams of Deerfield, Mass., but it was more highly valued in England and France than in America. [Illustration: LEGHORN.] The Mediterranean blue on Cooper's journey to Marseilles allured him into conceiving another sea tale. Its writing, however, was delayed by a mild return of the old fever that was induced by the summer sun of Italy. Longing, therefore, for the water breezes, mid-summer found him within "sight and sound" of the sea waves. He writes "July 29 the whole family went to Leghorn, where the salt air was grateful, and I snuffed the odor of this delightful sea with a feeling that was 'redolent of joy and youth.' We feasted our eyes on the picturesque rigs and barks of those poetical waters, and met several men from the Levant,--an Algerian Rais calmly smoking his chibouque on the deck of his poleacre, many Sardinians, Tuscans, Jews, and three Russians. Rowing under the bows of a Yankee, I found one seated on the windlass playing on the flute,--as cool a piece of impudence as can well be imagined for a Massachusetts man to practice in Italy! The delicious odors of the seaport were inhaled with a delight no language can describe." [Illustration: NAPLES.] At Leghorn Cooper engaged a Genovese felucca, "_La Bella Genovese_,--a craft of thirty tons, beautiful mould, lateen-rigged, carrying two of that sail and a jib, and ten men for her crew." Aboard this small vessel the author and his family spent six days of pure pleasure, yet "somewhat bitten by fleas." They touched at Elba and other islands, and skirted the coasts of Tuscany, the Roman States, and so on to Naples, of which Cooper wrote: "Oh Napoli! glorious, sunny, balmy Napoli!" This cruising along the western coast of Italy in the _Bella Genovese_ suggested to the author one of his favorite stories, "Wing-and-Wing," which was published twelve years later. In Naples several weeks were passed at a hotel; thence to a short-time home of their own on the cliffs of Sorrento. The very air of Italy was a delight to this sunny-hearted sailor, who so deeply felt the charm of all Italian nature. "The house we have taken," he wrote, "is said to be the one in which Tasso was born. It stands on the brow of the cliffs, within the walls of the town, and in plain sight of every object of interest on the bay. We occupy the principal floor only, though I have taken the entire house. There is a chapel beneath the grand _sala_, and kitchens and offices somewhere in those lower regions. We enter by a porte-cochère into a court which has a well with a handsome marble curb and a flight of broad, marble steps fit for a palace." Seaward several rooms led to the _sala_, fifty feet long, and facing the water. Cooper tells of its tiled floor, gilded couches, chairs, and marble busts. The great charm of the house was its terrace, fifty feet long by twenty-five wide, and protected by a stone balustrade, massive and carved, hanging over the blue Mediterranean, and giving to view Vesuvius, Ischia, and all the coast of glorious sea. Hearing an outcry from his son Paul one day, his father found the boy with his head fast between two of these great spindles--"in a way that frightened me as well as the youngster himself. It was like being imbedded in a rock. Below the terrace runs a narrow beach, where our children delight to play, picking up shells and more than shells,--ancient mosaics. There is a little room off from the terrace I use for writing," and where he could watch the beauty of the sea. Much of "The Water Witch" was rapidly written in this study on the inspiring terrace of _Casa Tasso_, Vesuvius in sight. Daily excursions were made. When four-of-the-clock threw the rock shadows far over the water, they went a-boating. On land they made "donkey" and "non-donkey" jaunts. _Capo di Monti_, overlooking the town landing-place, was also a favorite resting-place, and gave some bright pictures of native life. By an amusing practice of giving their king--a fine old mendicant with a lame leg--and his daily-growing train a _grano_ a day at the gate, Cooper and his family on their excursions were freed from an army of beggars. All were grateful, and wished the American _admiral_ "a thousand years,"--save one poor creature, who blundered into "a hundred," upon which his angered fellows cudgeled him with blows and words into shouting, "A thousand years, and long ones." Donkeys and boats were taken for Amalfi with her convent-crowned cliffs above the sea. Not until the chill _tra montana_ and the snow-powdered mountain-tops reminded them that but one fire could be kindled in their vast Sorrento home did they leave it one morning, with ninety-six of their well-wisher beggars in the court to bid them good-speed on their way to the Eternal City. [Illustration: CASA TASSO AT SORRENTO.] [Illustration: CASA TASSO TERRACE-STUDY.] In the autumn of 1830 Cooper and his family entered Rome through the gate of St. John, and drove across the city to the Hotel de Paris, just below the Pincio and near the _Porta del Popolo_. After dinner, with still an hour of daylight, and eager to see what Rome was like, Cooper called a guide, and, holding Paul by the hand, sallied forth through the narrow, crooking streets over the bridge of the angels to St. Peters. "Pushing aside the door, I found myself in the nave of the noblest temple in which any religious rites were ever celebrated. To me there was no disappointment, and as I stood gazing at the glorious pile, the tears forced themselves from my eyes. Even little Paul was oppressed with the vastness of the place, for he clung close to my side and kept murmuring, 'What is this? What is this? Is this a church?' I turned away impressed with the truth that if ever the hand of man had raised a structure to the Deity in the least worthy of His Majesty, it was this!" [Illustration: ST. PETER'S, EXTERIOR, ROME.] [Illustration: ST. PETERS, INTERIOR.] [Illustration: ADAM MICKIEOWICZ.] The usual roof-tree was soon found in the via Ripetta, where their back windows overlooked the tawny Tiber and gave them views of Castle St. Angelo and St. Peter's dome glorified by each day's setting sun, and here was passed their winter in old Rome. The Eternal City's ruins were most interesting to Cooper; it was his special delight to ride for hours with some friend over the Campagna, lingering among fragments of structures or statues of ancient days. Perhaps none who rode with him gave him more pleasure than the famous Polish poet, Adam Mickieowicz,--a man full of originality, genius, and sadness for the fate of his lost country. All of this won Cooper's sympathy and help in zealous writing and speaking for the suffering Poles; and one, Count Truskalaskie Wuskalaskia, later on found a welcome at Otsego Hall. [Illustration: PORTA RIPETTA, WHERE COOPER LIVED IN ROME.] Our author also saw something of social Rome, as is noted: He "was at a grand ball--faultless as to taste and style"--given by a prince to a prince near to the royal family of England. Of compatriots he writes: "_We_ have had a dinner, too, in honor of Washington, at which _I_ had the honor to preside. You will be surprised to hear that we sat down near seventy Yankees in the Eternal City!" [Illustration: ROMAN FORUM.] "The Water Witch," now nearly finished, required printing, which some kind Italian friends nearly brought about in Rome; but the book contained this sentence: "Rome itself is only to be traced by fallen temples and buried columns," which gave offense where none was intended and barred the work's issue there. The story was finished and laid aside until spring, when, after five delightful months in Rome and a few days at Tivoli, Cooper and his family reluctantly drove through the _Porto del Popolo_. In their own carriage, with four white horses, and their servitors in another with four brown ones, they passed up the Adriatic coast to Venice. [Illustration: PORTA DEL POPOLO.] Miss Cooper's "Pages and Pictures" gives her father's graphic account of this interesting journey,--how, in a wild mountain-road they fell in with pilgrims neither way-worn nor solemn, but most willing to talk. They seemed moving pictures with their staffs, scrip, and scallop-shell capes, returning from Rome. Then came Terni and its famous waterfall--a mile away, they knew, for they walked there. Man-made were those falls, by the turning of a pretty stream many hundred years ago. [Illustration: FALLS OF MARMORA AT TERNI.] High bridges and hermit nooks were passed, and then a long aqueduct with _Gothic_ arches, called _Roman_ in the guide-books; an old temple turned into a church, and but a trifle larger than a Yankee corn-crib. Then over the fine road beyond Foligno, and the hill Fiorito, and they rolled easily down into the Ancona country, where they found the shrine of Loreto. [Illustration: ANCONA.] [Illustration: LORETO.] Ancona gave them their first sight of the Adriatic--less beautiful in hue than the Mediterranean blue, it seemed to our travelers. But with a sailor's joy in rope, pitch, and tar, Cooper hurried with his usual boyish eagerness to the port, and with a lively interest examined its several rusty-looking craft. The next day found them again on the way, of which he writes: "Walking ahead of the carriage this morning, we amused ourselves on the beach, the children gathering shells on the shores of the Adriatic." Short stops were made in Bologna and Ferrara, then northward to the coast. Afloat and a pull for an hour brought them to Venice. Through the Grand Canal and under the Rialto they glided to the opening port beyond. They left their craft at the _Leone Bianco_, or white lion. Entering, they found "a large paved hall" a few steps above the water. From their windows they could see the gliding gondolas; beyond the splashing of an oar no sound came from their movement. "Everything was strange," wrote Cooper. "Though a sailor and accustomed to water, I had never seen a city a-float. It was now evening; but a fine moon shedding its light on the scene rendered it fairy-like." That night a friend showed him the other ways than the water-ways of Venice. Through lane-like, shop-lined ways, over bridges, and through the Giant's Clock-tower he passed into the great square of St. Mark, with "much surprise and pleasure." By its glittering lamps, and over it all the moonlight, he felt as if "transported to a scene in the Arabian Nights." [Illustration: SCALLA MINELLA, VENICE.] [Illustration: VENICE.] Later he writes: "I have set up my own gondola and we have been looking at the sights." For weeks their easy gondola--which in form and lightness reminded him so much of the Indian bark-canoe--"went gliding along the noiseless canals," and Cooper studied his Venice for a purpose. He became interested in the details of its singular government and read many books about it. The heartless trifling with sacred personal rights in order to glorify the ruling powers of _San Marco_, as shown by the life of crime in its secret councils, seemed terrible to him. And so came about the thought of writing a book in which both views of the subject, as clear and just as his pen could draw them, should be given. And whoever has read "The Bravo" will know that it faithfully pictures Venetian life. The great Piazza, the splendid church, the towering belfry,--rebuilt,--the small Piazza and its columns; the Palace of the Doge, with its court, well, giant's stairway, lions' mouths, dungeons and roof prisons, and the Bridge-of-Sighs, leading to its neighbor, the Prison Building--all are here, with beautiful _Venetia_ in the pride of her most glorious days near their waning. These and much more make up the fearful picture of Venice's cold cruelty, as revealed to the author of "The Bravo" in authentic historical records. Gelsomina, the jailer's daughter, a sweet and delicately-drawn character, got her name and general character from real life. Miss Cooper writes that when their "family was living on the cliffs of Sorrento a young peasant girl became one of the household,--half nurse, half playfellow to the children. She bore the sweet name of Gelsomina. Simple, innocent, and childlike, yet faithful to duty, Gelsomina was soon in high favor with great and small, and, in charge of the young flock, made one of every family party about the bay." At such times "she was always in gay costume,--light-blue silk jacket with gold lace; a flowing skirt; her dark hair well garnished with long golden pins and bodkins; a gold chain of manifold strands encircled her throat, and drops long and heavy hung from her ears. One afternoon, after playing with her young charges, Gelsomina went for water to that picturesque marble well in the court. While bending over the curbstone and drawing up the bucket, like Zara-of-Moriah fame, she dropped one of her long, heavy ear-rings into the water. Great was the lamentation of the simple creature! Warm was the sympathy of the household." But the old well was far too deep to give up this heirloom and family treasure, which was gone beyond Gelsomina's tears to recover. Gelsomina would have followed her American friends north, but a portly, stately, dignified aunt "would not trust her so far from the orange-groves of Sorrento." When the hour of parting came, pretty Gelsomina received from her mistress a fine pair of new ear-rings, and tears of gratitude fell upon the trinkets as she kissed the hand of the giver. Her name and something of her sweet innocence and fidelity were given to the jailer's daughter of "The Bravo." "The well is deep--far down they lie, beneath the cold, blue water! My ear-rings! my ear-rings!" [Illustration: PIAZZA SAN MARCO.] [Illustration: PALACE OF THE DOGE.] [Illustration: TASSO'S WELL.] This book, one of Cooper's favorite works, was an artist's picture of Venice, and was written to martial music in Paris, in 1830, where Cooper arrived on the eve of a revolution, for a stay of three years. It was published by Lea and Carey, Philadelphia, in 1834, and did not find favor in America, but was much liked in Germany and France. Prof. Brander Matthews writes:--"The scene in which Antonio, the old fisherman, is shrived by the Carmelite monk, in his boat, under the midnight moon upon the lagoon, is one of the finest in the whole range of literature in fiction." [Illustration: THE BRAVO.] Concerning the carrying off of the art treasures of Venice by the French, Cooper wrote: "One great picture escaped them; it stood in a dark chapel completely covered with dust and smoke. Within a few years some artist had the curiosity to examine this then unknown altarpiece. The picture was taken down, and being thoroughly cleaned, proved to be 'The Assumption'"--Titian's masterpiece, some think. It is now in the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice. Cooper tells of a monument Canova had "designed for Titian, beautifully chiseled out of spotless marble." The author found it "beneath the gloomy arches of the church," and thought it "singularly dramatic and startling"; but it had been erected to the honor of Canova himself instead of to the painter! [Illustration: GLORY OF THE ASSUMPTION.] [Illustration: ABSOLUTION OF ANTONIO.] [Illustration: ALT MARKET, DRESDEN.] From Venice Cooper and family went by way of Tyrol to Munich, where he much admired the king of Bavaria's art collections. After this brief visit they moved on to Dresden, passing here some pleasant months in a cheerful apartment overlooking the Alt Market. The quaint and busy show of homely German life, the town, gardens, river, bridge, and fine gallery "worthy of Italy," were enjoyed. _The Water Witch_, "wrecked on the Tiber, was now safely launched on the broader waters of the Elbe." It was issued by Lea and Carey, Philadelphia, in 1830. Comparing national traits became at times an unfortunate habit with Cooper. He was provoked by a Dresden schoolmaster's surprise that his children were not black; and, again, because he could not convince an English scholar that in Boston "to gouge" did not mean the cruel practice "to squeeze out a man's eyes with the thumb." This English scholar was Sir James Mackintosh. On the return to Paris from Germany several places were tried before finding a short distance across the Seine, No. 59 rue St. Dominique,--an off-and-on home for three years. Here the salon was thirty feet long and lofty--to a sailor's delight, seventeen feet; above the doors were paintings in gilded frames; and there were four large mirrors, and vast windows reaching to the floor. The dining-room, even larger, opened on the garden. After this manner the doctor of the Duke of Orleans built his home for himself--and this American tenant. The turmoil in this city of light at once attracted him in the near view of the Revolution of July. Having known General Lafayette since 1824, these two fine men were brought in close touch on Cooper's second visit to Paris. In 1831 the Marquis Lafayette was the center of American life here, and consequently he and our author were constantly and intimately thrown together. [Illustration: LAFAYETTE'S PARIS HOME, RUE D'ANJOU.] Lafayette's neat, simple apartment in a hotel of some pretension was in the rue d'Anjou. There were a large antechamber, two salons, and an inner room, where he wrote, and finally had his bed. His town servants were his German valet, Bastien, who served during the last visit to America, a footman, and a coachman. Cooper wrote: "When I show myself at the door Bastien makes a signal of assent, intimates that the general is at dinner; but I am at once ushered into the bed-room. Here I find Lafayette at table--so small as to be covered with a napkin, his little white dog his only companion." It was understood that the guest had dined, so he takes a seat in the chimney-corner, and as they talk the dinner goes on to its finish of dates, which are shared by the visitor. The last of these pleasant visits grew from the usual half hour to almost two, as they chatted of the great and small and all in their fine way. Lafayette thought Louis Philippe "the falsest man" he ever met. Of Charles X he "spoke kindly," giving him "an exactly opposite character," and Marie Antoinette he believed "an injured woman." [Illustration: GENERAL LAFAYETTE'S BED-ROOM.] [Illustration: LOUIS PHILIPPE.] [Illustration: GENERAL LAFAYETTE.] When Mr. McLane, our minister to England, made a flight to Paris in 1830, Lafayette strongly urged Cooper to give him the pleasure of presenting him with Mr. McLane to Louis Philippe at a Palais Royal "evening." Concerning the event Cooper noted: "Though such a visit was contrary to my quiet habits, I could do nothing but comply." His book on France relates the event and concludes with: "We all got invitations to dine at the palace in a day or two." But Cooper "never had any faith in the republican king," and thought "General Lafayette had been the dupe of his own good faith and kind feelings." Queen Marie Amélie, who was the daughter of Ferdinand I of the two Sicilies, asked Cooper which he most preferred of all the lands he had visited. His quick and strictly truthful reply was: "That in which your majesty was born for its nature, and that in which your majesty reigns for its society." As the "evening" was for men Cooper noticed that "the queen and her ladies wore bonnets." [Illustration: QUEEN MARIE AMÉLIE.] December 8, 1830 the Americans in Paris gave General Lafayette a dinner over which Cooper presided. And, says Professor Lounsbury, "in a speech of marked fervor and ability, he had dwelt upon the debt due from the United States to the gallant Frenchman, who had ventured fortune and life to aid a nation struggling against great odds to be free." As "It was not in his [Cooper's] nature to have his deeds give lie to his words," he was fairly caught in a public controversy that brought upon him the following unpleasant results. During this period a public dispute arose on the comparative expenses of American and French government, which Lafayette was called upon to settle, and he appealed to Cooper as an American authority. In his spirited defense of the gallant Marquis, our author was caught in a maelstrom of harsh criticism. It ended in his victory abroad, but brought upon him uncalled-for comment from the American press for "attacking the authorities of a friendly country"--as that press unjustly termed it. At Paris in 1831, by the request of an English friend, Cooper wrote of "The Great Eclipse" which he saw June 16, 1806, at his Cooperstown home. This account was found after his death and appeared in _Putnam's Magazine_ of 1869. It included a thrilling tragedy and closed as follows: "I have passed a varied and eventful life--but never have I beheld any spectacle which so plainly manifested the majesty of the Creator, or so forcibly taught the lesson of humility to man as the total eclipse of the sun." From Paris, in 1832, Cooper wrote: "I care nothing for criticism, but I am not indifferent to slander. If these attacks on my character should be kept up five years after my return to America, I shall resort to the New York courts for protection." Cooper gave the press the full period, then, said Bryant,--himself an editor,--"he put a hook in the nose of this huge monster of the inky pool, dragged him to land, and made him tractable." After these five years had passed Cooper noted, February, 1843: "I have, beaten every man I have sued who has not retracted his libels." [Illustration: N.P. WILLIS.] In Paris, in 1832, our author was meeting many foreigners of note, and among the Americans was N.P. Willis, then sketching his "Pencillings by the Way," and breakfasting with Cooper, and strolling with him through the Tuileries gardens. [Illustration: S.F.B. MORSE.] Samuel F.B. Morse, who was later to chain electricity for future use, was then a young artist painting in the Louvre, and helping Cooper to buy pictures. Of one purchase is noted: "Shortly after the revolution of 1830, passing through the Carousel, he bought a portrait, covered with dust but of apparent rare beauty, from a dealer in antiques, who said it was a Teniers. This painting was shown to Morse and to Archbishop Luscomb of Paris, also an art critic of his day, both of whom verified the dealer's statement. Catalogues and prints of originals of Tenier's wife later proved the picture to be her portrait painted round in form by that artist and afterwards cut to the square." [Illustration: TUILERIES GARDENS.] [Illustration: TENIER'S WIFE.] Some twenty years later Morse wrote: "We were in daily, almost hourly, intercourse during the years 1832-33. I never met a more sincere, warm-hearted, constant friend." Their relations were ever warm and close. Cooper himself was winning, in the heart of France, a welcome for "the beloved _Bas-de-cuir_ with _la longe carabine,_--that magic rifle of his that so seldom missed its mark and never got out of repair." Surely his life and pursuits conformed to his motto: "Loyalty to truth at any price." Those who best knew him best loved him. The charm of his family life during these pleasant days has found attractive expression in the portraits of his children drawn about this time by his daughter Susan, as shown on the opposite page. [Illustration: MRS. JAMES FENIMORE COOPER AND HER SON PAUL.] [Illustration: THE CHILDREN OF MR. AND MRS. JAMES FENIMORE COOPER.] During the dreadful siege of cholera in Paris, Cooper and his family remained in the stricken city, fearing to fare worse with country discomforts. In contrast to many instances of heroic devotion were artists' funny pictures of the scourge. The Tuileries gardens were deserted, and Paul missed his apple-women friends of the corners between rue St. Dominique and Pont Royal; and the flight through the city of Mr. Van Buren and other friends were a few personal incidents of this awesome time. July 18 Cooper and his family left Paris for the Rhine country. They enjoyed Brussels, and old Antwerp's Dutch art and its beautiful cathedral-tower that Napoleon thought should be kept under glass. They found Liège "alive with people" to greet their arrival at the _Golden Sun_, where they were mistaken for the expected and almost new king, Leopold, and his fine-looking brother. Sad truth brought cold looks and back views among other shadows of neglect. Cooper noted: The "_Golden Sun_ veiled its face from us; we quit the great square to seek more humble lodgings at the _Black Eagle_, a clean, good house." In Liège were seen the venerable, interesting churches, which caused Cooper to think, "I sometimes wish I had been educated a Catholic in order to unite the poetry of religion with its higher principles." He called _The Angelus_ "the open prayer of the fields," and wrote of it: "I remember with pleasure the effect produced by the bell of the village church as it sent its warning voice on such occasions across the plains and over the hills, while we were dwellers in French or Italian hamlets." [Illustration: THE ANGELUS.] In the "Life of Samuel F.B. Morse" by Samuel Irenaeus Prime appears Cooper's letter from "Spa, July 31, 1832," to My Dear Morse: I have had a great compliment paid me, Master Samuel,--You must know there is a great painter in Bruxelles of the name of Verboeckhoven, (which means a _bull and a book baked in an oven!_) who is another Paul Potter. He out does all other men in drawing cattle,--Well, sir, this artist did me the favor to call at Bruxelles with the request that I would let him sketch my face. He came after the horses were ordered, and knowing the difficulty of the task, I thanked him, but was compelled to refuse. On our arrival at Liège, we were told that a messenger from the governor had been to inquire for us, and I began to bethink me of my sins,--however,--it proved Mr. Bull-and-book-baked had come [by dilligence] to Liège (sixty-three miles) and got the governor to give him notice, by means of my passport, when we came. Of course I sat,--the likeness--like all other pictures you have seen of my chameleon face--has a vastly live-like look,--the compliment is none the less, and, provided the artist does not mean to serve me up as a specimen of American wild beasts, I shall thank him for it. To be followed twelve posts by a first-rate artist, who is in favor with the King, is so unusual, that I probed him a little. I found him well skilled in his art,--his gusto for natural subjects, strong,--and his favorite among all my books is "The Prairie," which you know is filled with wild beasts. Here the secret is out.--He sent me a beautiful pencil sketch of a Belgian hind as a memorial of our achievement. [Illustration: EUGÈNE-JOSEPH VERBOECKHOVEN.] Cooper and his family spent some days drinking the waters at Spa, with best effects for Mrs. Cooper--not over-strong since the Paris days. They left its grass of "ghostly green" when the "dog-star raged with all its fury," and "came on old Aix-la-Chapelle, well-cloaked and carriage windows closed." In compliment to the republic of letters the postman called on Cooper here, and like tribute was also paid two posts farther on, where he was asked if he "was the man who wrote books!" That day was well spent when they reached the terrace above the Rhine and got their first view of the towers of Cologne. In "fine, lofty rooms" overlooking a garden, they here enjoyed a night's rest, a breakfast, and then a pilgrimage to "the unfinished cathedral, that wonder of Gothic architecture." A visit was paid to the house in which Rubens was born, it is said, and the very room which sheltered the last moments of Mary of Medicis, wife of Henry IV and mother of Louis XIII of France. Cooper thought it "a better sort of burgher home," and saw it as "a public house." [Illustration: RUBENS' COLOGNE HOME.] Again on the wing, they passed the student-town of Bonn, Rhine ruins of charming legend on the near and far banks of the river, until on an island in the Rhine they found rest and refreshment at a convent-inn. The host, wife, child, cook, and soldiers three, quartered there, gave them welcome and good cheer. Their parlor was that of the lady abbess, and her bedchamber fell to Mrs. Cooper. "The girls were put into cells, where girls ought never to be put," wrote their father. _He_ "sallied forth alone, in quest of sensation," and got it in the muttering of thunder, and the flashing of lightning over the "pitchy darkness of the seven mountains." And he and the fiercely howling winds from the trees had a chase through the gloomy cloisters, whence he saw, in the vast, cavern-like kitchen, the honest islanders eating with relish his surplus supper. [Illustration: CONVENT OF NUNNENWORTH.] As the storm grew in strength Cooper went to the corridor above, leading past their rooms To-and-fro he paced until a bright flash revealed the far, end door to which he went, opened, and entered into utter darkness. Taking a few steps he paused--"for the whole seemed filled by a clatter, as of ten thousand bat-wings against glass." His hand rested on something--he knew not what--when by another vivid flash he saw that he was in an open gallery of the convent chapel. The bat-wings were small, broken panes of the high arched windows, rattling in the gale. Yet by the chasing flashes of angry light he saw beneath him grim figures in the shadowy motions of troubled spirits. They wore upon his nerves, until he caught himself shouting: "'Ship ahoy; ship ahoy! What cheer, what cheer?' in a voice as loud as the winds." He was about to speak when his gallery door opened and the withered face of an old crone appeared by a flash; then came thunder, and the face vanished. After a pause the door opened again, and on the same uncomely face, when, without thought, our author gave a loud, deep groan. The door slammed on the time-stricken form, and he was again alone with the storm-demons who now soon grew drowsy and went to sleep, and he himself went to bed,--and, wrote he, "slept like a postillion in a cock-loft, or a midshipman in the middle-watch." But regret came in the morning when Mrs. Cooper told her husband how a poor old soul, frightened by the storm, had stolen into the chapel to pray, where, on hearing strange groans, she dropped her candle and fled in fear to Madam's maid, who gave her bed-shelter for the night. An after-breakfast look at the storm-ridden chapel disclosed other good reasons than the groans for the poor creature's flight. A peace offering made sweet her next night's sleep, when the travelers had gone on their way, diving here and there into lore and legend of the mighty Rhine-stream. [Illustration: WATCH TOWER ON THE RHINE.] Near the Prussian frontier was "a castle that stood beetling on a crag above the road," where smoke actually arose from a beacon-grate that thrust itself out "from a far-front tower." Such attractions were not to be passed, and up the winding way over two hundred feet they went, and over the small drawbridge, guarded by one groom and the Dutch growl of a ferocious mastiff. In walls, towers, queer gap terraces,--giving lovely glimpses of the Rhine,--court, outside stairways of iron, fine old Knights' Hall--its huge fire-place, and its center droplights of lamps fitted into buckhorns--and curious armor, Cooper found additional material for his prolific pen. During the year 1832 Cooper gave "The Heidenmauer, a Rhine Legend," to the world. While the book itself is full of mediaeval, Rhine-country charm, of brilliant charge and countercharge, of church and state power, unfortunately for its author in its "Introduction" was this sentence: "Each hour, as life advances, am I made to see how capricious and vulgar is the immortality conferred by a newspaper." This brought upon its writer a whirlwind of caustic criticism in the American papers, and soon became a challenge of battle by one who was to prove himself brave, able, fearless, and _right_ through coming years of hot and bitter strife. By one of the leading editors the glove was taken up in these words: "The press has built him up; the press shall pull him down." Posterity has forgotten the stirring conflict, but Cooper's books will never fail to fire the heart and brain of every mother's son for all time. In a skiff, spreading a sprit sail, they crossed the Rhine at Bingen by that postmaster's assurance of "Certainly, as good a ferry as there is in Germany.--_Ja_--_Ja_--we do it often." Through the Duchy of Nassau they tested its wines from Johannesberg to Wiesbaden. Then up the Main to Frankfort, on to Darmstadt, and thence to Heidelberg. It was quite dark when they "crossed the bridge of the Neckar," but "Notwithstanding the obscurity" wrote Cooper, "we got a glimpse of the proud old ruin overhanging the place, looking grand and sombre in the gloom of night." He thought the ruins by daylight "vast, rather than fine" though parts had "the charm of quaintness." The "picturesque tower" was noted, adding "but the finest thing certainly is the view from the garden-terrace above." Below it, unrolls miles of the beautiful Neckar valley country, through which they drove to Ludwigsburg and on to Stuttgart. Beyond, appeared a distant view of "a noble ruin" crowning a conical eminence. This was the Castle of Hohenzollern, "the cradle of the House of Brandenburg" to which a thunderstorm prevented their intended visit. [Illustration: HEIDELBERG AND CASTLE.] Returning to a vale of Wurtemberg they saw "a little rivulet" which began the mighty Danube stream on its way to the Black Sea, and drove up to the inn at Tuttlingen, of which point Cooper wrote: "This is the Black Forest,--The wood was chiefly of larches, whence I presume its name." Warned by their host-postmaster of a long climb of mountain separating the Rhine and Danube rivers, in a coach and six they left him for Schaffhausen and the Rhine Falls. The mountain crest gave them a sweeping view of Lake Constance when its waters looked "dark and wild" wrote Cooper, adding, "we suddenly plunged down to the banks of the Rhine and found ourselves once more before an inn-door, in Switzerland." So in the late summer of this year their second visit was made to the land of Lake Leman, whose waters are overshadowed by noble mountains; and its surface broad, tranquil, and blue. Enchanting distance made a fairy air-castle of a tiny château on a little grassy knoll washed by the lake, but a near view decided the family "to take refuge in a furnished house, _Mon Repose_," in a retired corner quite near the shore at Vevay. [Illustration: VEVAY SHORES OF LAKE LEMAN.] A boat, with honest John Descloux and his two crooked oars, was soon secured, and many an hour was spent listening to his lore of Leman, as they floated their several hours a day over its waters, under fair skies and foul. [Illustration: FÉTE DES VIGNERONS, 1833.] During this Switzerland vacation Cooper's fancy was strongly attracted by Vevay's celebration of an old-time festival, _abbaye des Vignerons_, or great holiday of the vine-dressers. It was "a gay and motley scene, blending the harvest-home with a dash of the carnival spirit." Shepherds and shepherdesses in holiday attire and garlands, tripping the measures of rustic song and dance. Aproned gardeners with rake and spade, their sweethearts with bread-baskets of fruit and flowers, uniting in the dance _à la ronde_, as they came to a certain point in the procession; and so went the reapers, mowers, gleaners, herdsmen, and dairy-maids in Alpine costume, timing their steps to horn and cow-bell, and singing the heart-stirring chorus _Ranz des Vachs_, or the "Cowherds of the Alps," the wild notes coming back in many an Alpine echo. The festival concluded with a rustic wedding, the bride being dowered down to the broom and spindle by the lady of the manor. [Illustration: NOAH'S ARK, VEVAY, 1833.] Such a holiday on the shores of Lake Leman, and the Pass of St. Bernard, Cooper placed as a background for his plot based on the hard old feudal-times law--that (in the canton of Berne) the odious office of executioner or headsman was made a family inheritance. The efforts of the unhappy father and mother to save their son from such a fate make up the pathetic interest of "The Headsman," issued in 1833. The Hospice of St. Bernard so well described in this book was visited by the author the previous year. [Illustration: HOSPICE ST. BERNARD.] When the power to write first dawned on Cooper's mind there came also and grew with it the desire to serve his native land in the field of letters. Love of country and countrymen guided his ardent, generous pen in "The Spy," "The Pioneers," "The Last of the Mohicans," and "The Prairie," written before he went to Europe. European society he entered, and was courted as literary men of reputation are courted there, but always with the honest pride of being an American. Under these pleasant conditions "The Red Rover," "The Traveling Bachelor," "The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish," and "The Water Witch" were written. But "The Bravo" was followed by such "a series of abuse in the public press" at home that when Cooper returned, November 5, 1833, these onsets greatly surprised him. His nature was roused by attack; but "never was he known to quail," wrote a famous English critic of him, and added: "Cooper writes like a hero!" He believed the public press to be a power for life or death to a nation, and held _personal_ rights as sacred; and challenged on these lines he became a lion at bay. Excepting from his fine old personal friends, staunch and true, he had a chilling reception. For saying, at an evening party a few days after landing, that he had been sadly jolted by the bad pavement and was surprised that the town was so poorly lighted, he was seriously warned by these warm friends: "By the shade of Washington! and the memory of Jay! to be more prudent; not a syllable of pavements or a word of lamps could be uttered." Because he thought the bay of Naples of more classic interest than the bay of New York, he was voted "devoid of taste and patriotism." So hurt was he by public distrust that he thought seriously of writing no more; its injustice led him to criticise harshly many changes which had occurred during his absence. The Indian trail had made way for canal-boats, connecting the ocean with the inland seas; the railroads had come, with other active commercial interests, to stay. [Illustration: THE BAY OF NAPLES.] [Illustration: NEW YORK HARBOR.] After their return from Europe Cooper and his family passed some winters in New York City--those of 1833-34 and 1835-36 in Bleecker Street near Thompson. There he "first erected his household gods, French gods these, for the house throughout was equipped with furniture from France, and ministered solely by French servitors," writes Doctor Wolfe. But love for the old Hall on the shores of Otsego grew strong beyond resistance. It was vacant and of forlorn appearance when the author returned to it in 1834. From a simple, roomy, comfortable house it was made over into a picturesque country-seat, from designs, English in style, drawn by Professor Morse, who was at Cooperstown during alterations. Some of these, without thought of the cold Otsego winters--ice and snow on the battlemented roof--made leaks frequent and disturbing. [Illustration: OTSEGO HALL AFTER THE RECONSTRUCTION OF 1834.] In 1835 Cooper wrote of this home: "The Hall is composite enough, Heaven knows, being a mongrel of the Grecian and Gothic orders; my hall, however, is the admiration of all the mountaineers--nearly fifty feet long, twenty-four wide, and fifteen feet high. I have raised the ceiling three feet, and regret it had not been ten. I have aversion to a room under jurymasts." [Illustration: COOPER'S LIBRARY AT OTSEGO HALL.] The library was a well-shaped room of twenty by twenty-four feet, the ceiling twelve feet above. Its deep, dark oak windows opened on the thick shade-trees of the quiet southwest; the walls, well-lined with books of value, could show no complete set of his own. In one corner of this room was a large folding screen on which were pasted print-pictures of places they had visited during their seven years' tour of Europe; a like screen was in the hall. In this library was the author's plain, shining, English walnut writing-table and chair, whose first owner was Richard Fenimore, Cooper's maternal grandfather, of Rancocus, New Jersey; many of Cooper's works were written upon it. On the opposite side of the hall was the author's bedchamber. It is interesting to learn from Mr. Keese that the large north bed-rooms, so cold in winter, were known as "Siberia" and "Greenland," while those on the south, and warm in summer, were called "Florida" and "Italy." We are told the grounds were changed by winding walks and the setting out of trees--not a few with Cooper's own hands. And under these fine trees, in their southwest favored corner, shadows and sunlight play hide and seek about a copy of Mr. and Mrs. Cooper's favorite garden seat. Great gates were made for the garden entrance, as heavy and hard to move as those of "The Hutted Knoll" in the author's story of "Wyandotté." It was indeed an attractive home, made more so by its attractive inmates. Concerning these Mr. Keese writes: "Noting Cooper's fondness for animals, the family brought from Paris a magnificent 'tiger' cat weighing fifteen pounds--'Coquelicot' by name. He lived at the Hall until the day of his death, and occupied the most comfortable chair in the parlor and was rarely disturbed." Finally the old Hall became their only home, and here, in his stronghold at the foot of the Glimmerglass, Cooper kept open house for his friends. [Illustration: COPY OF COOPER'S GARDEN SEAT.] During the summer months he took a lively interest in his garden. From his daughter we learn: "It was his delight to watch the growth of different plants day by day. His hot-beds were of the earliest, and he was the first to grow egg-plant, Brussels sprouts, and other unusual vegetables and fruits." The first and choicest of fruit or vegetable was gathered by himself as a little offering to Mrs. Cooper, and placed by him at her plate at table. And he took great pleasure in carrying with his own hands baskets of choice fruit and vegetables to different friends and neighbors. Many were these that the author and his old shipmate Ned Myers carried about the village to different homes. [Illustration: JUDGE NELSON.] Many also were the talks that Cooper and his friend and constant companion, Judge Nelson, of the Supreme Court, had on garden affairs, as well as on legal and political questions of the day; many were their visits to the hot-beds and melon hills. "Ah, those muskmelons! Carefully were they watched." This penman was frankly proud of his melons, their early growth and flavor. But for all his care this melon-pride met its Waterloo one spring in a special box of superior seed, started in a favored place for light and warmth, and to be early transplanted. Soon the tiny green blades appeared, duly became leaflets, to the joy of the Judge and the planter. "Those two venerable heads bending together in close scrutiny over the young plants was a pleasant sight, in the author's eager interest and genial sympathy of the Judge." But alas! neither jurist nor novelist was a botanist, and the triumphantly expected melon vines basely proved after a few more days of tender nursing to be the leaves of "that vagabond weed, the wild-cucumber vine." Here too he gathered material for future books, and did much writing. Evening twilight often found him pacing the large hall, his hands behind him, his head doing active duty in decisive nods of _yea_ and _nay_, and words spoken aloud for putting on paper in his library next morning. Some of this writing was to his profit and pleasure, and some, alas! to his sad disturbance--as was "A Letter to his Countrymen," published in 1834. A picture of this Otsego-Hall home life would prove a sorry failure with "Pumpkin" left out. Therefore appears Pumpkin, the family horse, who earned his name by drawing a load of pumpkins for Seraphina, the cow, to eat. It is of note that his horseship carried "a very light whisp of a tail, and had a gait all his own in going at times on three legs and, at times, kicking up both hind ones in a way more amusing than alarming, by leaving an interesting doubt as to fore or aft movement, in the mind of his driver." Of Cooper's daily active life Mr. Keese notes: "He rose early, did much writing before breakfasting at nine, and afterwards until eleven o'clock. Then Pumpkin, hitched to his yellow buggy, was brought to the door"; and when her health would allow, Mrs. Cooper often went with her husband to their _châlet_ farm. Sometimes it was his author-daughter who went with her father; and again, some friend was hailed from the street for the trip. These several active hours would give him a fine appetite for their three o'clock dinner, on his return. "The late afternoon and evening were given to friends at home, or to visiting, and often to his favorite game of chess with Mrs. Cooper." Some two years after Cooper's return from abroad, a friend about to sail for Europe met him walking leisurely along Broadway with his coat open and a great string of onions in his hand. Seeing several persons turn to look at him, then speak to each other, the friend too turned--"and behold, it was Cooper!" After greetings he raised his bunch of onions and said: "I have turned farmer, but am obliged to come to town now and then, as you see." Kind remembrances were sent to Greenough; and of Italy he added: "There is no place where mere living is such a luxury." Fenimore Cooper had a keen sense of the ridiculous. His table-talk by his own fireside was full of cheery life, fun, and glowing merriment. "Severe and stern his fine face could be when touching on serious subjects," but his relish of the ludicrous and comical was very strongly marked, and when such came his way in reading, it was carried at once to the family circle and read by him with zest, and a laugh so hearty it brought the tears rolling down his cheeks. While in Europe he outlined a satirical tale in which the men's parts should be seriously assumed by monkeys. An English baronet, Sir John Goldencalf, and a Yankee skipper, Captain Noah Poke, were made to travel together through the different parts of Monkeyland, called Leaphigh, Leaplow, and Leapthrough, representing England, America, and France. This tale was hastily written in his New York home on Bleecker Street near Thompson. Of these countries, their people, and that time, the story was a strong, clever, and ludicrous picture, which in this day would be accepted as such, and be equally helpful and amusing to writers and readers. It was called "The Monikins," and was published in 1835. Delight in the scenery of Switzerland led Cooper to put in book form his notes on his visits to that small country of many interests and magnificent views. Under the name of "Sketches in Switzerland," it was published in 1836. The France and England part of his "Gleanings in Europe" went to print the next year. Concerning his book on old England, Cooper, in the autumn of 1837, writes: "They tell me it has made a stir in London, where I get abused and read _à la Trollope_. It ought to do them good, but whether it does or not depends upon Divine grace." This effort has been called keen, clever, but untimely, tending rather to set people by their ears than to save them from their sins. In the summer of 1837 Cooper found himself facing the disputed ownership of "Three-Mile Point" of Lake Otsego. On his return from Europe he found that his townspeople regarded this point--Myrtle Grove--as belonging to them. But Judge Cooper's will left it to all his heirs until 1850, when it was to go to the youngest bearing his name. While willing to allow the villagers picnic privileges, Cooper insisted on his clear title to this pretty shore point; but Cooperstown Solons hotly fought what they called "the arrogant claims of one J. Fenimore Cooper," who, however, finally proved his title by winning the case at law. But he lost much of the good-will of his townsmen, whom he thought "progressive in killing the red-man and chopping down trees." [Illustration: WILD-ROSE POINT OR THREE-MILE POINT.] The beauty of this Wild-Rose Point claimed Cooper's earliest love. He made it the scene where Deerslayer and Chingachgook rescued Wah-ta-Wah. Its flatiron-shaped pebble-beach jutted out from the lake's west shore and was covered with fine old forest trees garlanded with vines; and from their graveled rootage there gurgled a limpid spring of sweet waters. Then a wild brook came brawling down the hills to find its gentle outlet on the beach. Azalias and wild roses made its shrubbery, while pitcher-plant, moccasin-flower, gentians blue and white, with brilliant lobelias, were among the native blossoms that charmed the author's childhood and made this Three-Mile Point especially dear to him. [Illustration: COOPER'S NEW YORK CITY HOME, ST. MARK'S PLACE.] The Italian part of Cooper's "Gleanings in Europe" was brought to print in 1838, and later in this year appeared "The American Democrat." Then "Homeward Bound," its sequel, "Home as Found," and the "Chronicles of Cooperstown"--all came in hot haste from the author's modest three-story brick home in St. Mark's Place near Third Avenue in New York City. In these books Cooper told his side of foreign and town troubles, and it was said that not ten places or persons could complain in truth that they had been overlooked. Thereby New York society and the American press became greatly excited. Cooper was ever a frank friend or an open enemy. A critic wrote of him and this time: "He had the courage to defy the majority and confound the press, from a heavy sense of duty, with ungrateful truths. With his manly, strong sense of right and wrong he had a high regard for courage in men and purity in women, but, with his keen sense of justice, he was not always judicious. Abroad he defended his country with vigor, and was fearless in warning and advising her, when needful, at home. While he never mistook 'her geese for swans,' he was a patriot to the very core of his heart." However, this over-critical writing soon became newspaper gossip, and began for Cooper six long years of tedious lawsuits, finally settled in his favor in 1843. With such able men as Horace Greeley, Park Benjamin, and Thurlow Weed among others in battle-array against him, Cooper closed this strife himself by making a clear, brilliant, and convincing six-hour address before the court during a profound silence. Well may it be said: "It was a good fight he fought and an honorable victory he won" when he silenced the press as to publishing private or personal affairs. His speech was received with bursts of applause, and of his closing argument an eminent lawyer said: "I have heard nothing like it since the days of Emmet." "It was clear, skilful, persuasive, and splendidly eloquent," is another's record. At the Globe Hotel the author wrote his wife the outcome, and added: "I tell you this, my love, because I know it will give you pleasure." In "American Bookmen," by M.A. De Wolfe Howe, it appears that when going to one of his Cooper trials Mr. Weed picked up a new book to shorten the journey. It proved to be "The Two Admirals," and says Weed: "I commenced reading it in the cars, and became so charmed that I took it into the court-room and occupied every interval that my attention could be withdrawn from the trial with its perusal." Mr. Howe adds: "Plaintiff and defendant have rarely faced each other under stranger conditions." [Illustration: HORACE GREELEY.] [Illustration: PARK BENJAMIN.] [Illustration: THURLOW WEED.] While in the St. Mark's-Place home the family found Frisk, described by Mr. Keese as "a little black mongrel of no breed whatever, rescued from under a butcher's cart in St. Mark's Place, with a fractured leg, and tenderly cared for until recovery. He was taken to Cooperstown, where he died of old age after the author himself. Mr. Cooper was rarely seen on the street without Frisk." The shores of Otsego, "the Susquehanna's utmost spring," Cooper made the scenic part of "Home as Found," but high authority asserts the characters to be creatures of the author's fancy, all save one,--"a venerable figure, tall and upright, to be seen for some three-score years moving to and fro over its waters; still ready to give, still ready to serve; still gladly noting all of good; but it was with the feeling that no longer looked for sympathy." It was of "Home as Found" that Morse wrote to Cooper: "I will use the frankness to say I wish you had not written it. But whenever am I to see you?" The effect of this conflict with the press so cut the sale of Cooper's books that in 1843 he wrote: "I know many of the New York booksellers are afraid to touch my works on account of the press of that righteous and enlightened city." Of these disturbing conditions Balzac's opinion was: "Undoubtedly Cooper's renown is not due to his countrymen nor to the English: he owes it mainly to the ardent appreciation of France." Cooper's income, from England, suffered on account of an act of Parliament change, in 18381 of the copy-right law. But his London publisher, Bentley, was credited with usually giving the author about $1500 each for his later stories. Report gave him about $5000 each for his prior works. May 10, 1839, Cooper published his "History of the United States Navy." It was first favored and then, severely criticised at home and abroad; but the author was fourteen years in gathering his material, and his close contact with navy officers and familiarity with sea life made him well qualified for the work. He had not yet convinced the press that an author's and editor's right to criticise was mutual; that each might handle the other's public work as roughly as he pleased, but neither might touch on the other's private affairs. However, the "Naval History" sold well and has borne the test of time, and still remains an authority on subjects treated. There are many officers who well remember their delight on first reading those accounts of the battles of long-ago, of which Admiral Du Pont said that any lieutenant "should be ashamed not to know by heart." One well qualified to judge called Cooper's "Naval History" "one of the noblest tributes ever paid to a noble profession." When "The Pathfinder" came later from the author's pen critics were startled from the press-estimate of his character by "the novel beauty of that glorious work--I must so call it," said Bryant. Natty's goodness a dangerous gift might prove for popular success, but its appeal to Washington Irving won this record: "They may say what they will of Cooper; the man who wrote this book is not only a great man, but a good man." Balzac held it to be "_un beau livre_" and thought Cooper owed his high place in modern literature to painting of the sea and seamen, and idealizing the magnificent landscapes of America. It was of Cooper and his works that Balzac wrote: "With what amazing power has he painted nature! How all his pages glow with creative fire!" [Illustration: J.W. TRUMBULL.] Concerning Cooper's innate love for his home-country scenery, Dr. Francis gives this incident: "It was a gratifying spectacle to see Cooper with old Colonel Trumbull, the historical painter, discanting on Cole's pencil in delineating American forest-scenery--a theme richest in the world for Cooper. The venerable Colonel with his patrician dignity, and Cooper with his aristocratic bearing, yet democratic sentiment. Trumbull was one of the many old men I knew who delighted in Cooper's writings, and in conversation dwelt upon his captivating genius." [Illustration: JAMES FENIMORE COOPER.] Personally, Mr. Cooper was a noble type of our race. He was of massive, compact form, a face of strong intelligence and glowing with masculine beauty, in his prime. His portraits, though imposing, by no means do justice to the impressive and vivacious presence of the man. This pen picture is by one who knew the author well. [Illustration: CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS.] [Illustration: COLUMBUS' FLEET.] On July 8, of this year, Cooper was made a member of the Georgia Historical Society, and the following autumn "Mercedes of Castile" came from his pen. It relates the first voyage of Columbus, and "with special knowledge of a seaman, the accuracy of an historian, and with something of the fervor of a poet." Gleaning Miss Cooper's "Pages and Pictures," one reads, as to "The Deerslayer": "One pleasant summer evening the author of 'The Pathfinder,' driving along the shady lake shore, was, as usual, singing; not, however, a burst of Burns's 'Scots wha ha' wi' Wallace bled!' or Moore's 'Love's Young Dream,'--his favorites,--but this time a political song of the party opposing his own. Suddenly he paused as a woods' opening revealed to his spirited gray eye an inspiring view of Otsego's poetical waters." When the spell was broken he turned to his beloved daughter and exclaimed: "I must write one more book, dearie, about our little lake!" Another far-seeing look was taken, to people this beautiful scene with the creatures of his fancy, followed by a moment of silence, then cracking his whip, he resumed his song with some careless chat, and drove home. A few days later the first pages of the new book were written. When the touch of Time was frosting his own head, he leads Natty, as a youth, over the first warpath of his hero. And so the "Glimmerglass" and its "Mt. Vision" country grew into the story of "The Deerslayer"; it is "the very soul of the little lake overflowing with youthful freshness and vivid with stirring adventure." [Illustration: THE GLIMMERGLASS.] On the bosom of its waters is anchored "Muskrat Castle," and over it, to and fro, move the "Ark of Floating Tom" and the Indian canoes, which gave a strange, wild interest to the story. Afloat and ashore come those unlike sisters,--proud Judith, handsome but designing, and simple-hearted Hetty, gentle, innocent, and artless; both so real and feminine, and yet so far removed from their supposed father, the buccaneer. Then comes this Uncas of the eagle air, swooping with lithe movement to his rocky trysting-place. And Uncas is in strong contrast with "The Pathfinder's" "Arrowhead," who was a wonder-sketch of the red-man's treachery and vengeance, while his sweet girl-wife, "Dew-of-June," shows, true to life, an Indian woman's unfaltering devotion to her savage lord. Over all its pages broods the commanding spirit of "The Deerslayer,"--the forest's young Bayard who has yet to learn what the taking of human life is like. So, in "The Deerslayer," printed in 1841, the "Little Lake" (Otsego), with its picturesque shores, capes, and forest-crowned heights, was made classic soil. Just back of "The Five-Mile Point."--where Deerslayer gave himself up to merciless Indian justice at the Huron Camp, and later was rescued by British regulars--is the rocky gorge, Mohican Glen, through which a purling brook ripples by its stone-rift banks thatched with great clumps of rose and fern. From the gravel-strewn shore of Hutter's Point beyond, the eyes of Leatherstocking first fell upon the Glimmerglass, and impressed by its wonder and beauty he exclaimed: "This is grand! 't is solemn! 't is an edication of itself." Leaning on his rifle and gazing in every direction, he added: "Not a tree disturbed, but everything left to the ordering of the Lord, to live and die, to His designs and laws! This is a sight to warm the heart." [Illustration: OTSEGO LAKE.] The tribes, hunters, and trappers had their "own way of calling things," and "seeing the whole basin, often fringed with pines, would throw back the hills that hung over it," they "got to calling the place the 'Glimmerglass.'" At Gravelly Point opposite, Deerslayer killed his first Indian, and above are the tree-tops where rose the star that timed Hist's meeting with her lover. Some distance to the north is the spot--now known as the "Sunken Islands"--which marks the site of Muskrat Castle, and is near the last resting-place of Hetty Hutter and her mother. And far to the southwest lies a long, low, curving beach jutting sickle-shape into the lake. As a favored haunt of muskrats, it was once called Muskrat Cove, and now Blackbird Bay. Just beyond lies Fenimore, the home of Cooper's early married life. In the author's pages on England, published in 1837, was expressed a wish to write a story on "the teeming and glorious naval history of that land." Our own country at that time had no fleet, but Cooper's interest in his youthful profession made quite fitting to himself the words of his old shipmate, Ned Myers: "I can say conscientiously that if my life were to be passed over again it would he passed in the navy--God bless the flag!" Out of England's long naval records Cooper made "The Two Admirals," an old-time, attractive story of the evolution of fleets, and the warm friendship between two strong-hearted men in a navy full of such, and at a time before the days of steam. "Cooper's ships live," so says Captain Mahan; and continues: "They are handled as ships then were, and act as ships still would act under the circumstances." This naval historian thought "the water a noble field for the story-teller." "The Two Admirals" first appeared in _Graham's Magazine,_ for which Cooper was regularly engaged to write in 1842. On June 16 of this year a decision was rendered in the "Naval History" dispute. One of the questions was whether Cooper's account of the battle of Lake Erie was accurate and fair and did justice to the officers in command, and whether he was right in asserting that Elliott, second in command, whom Perry at first warmly commended and later preferred charges against, did his duty in that action. Cooper maintained that while Perry's victory in 1813 had won for himself, "as all the world knows, deathless glory," injustice had been done to Elliott. Three arbitrators chosen by the parties to the dispute decided that Cooper had fulfilled his duty as an historian; that "the narrative of his battle of Lake Erie was true; that it was impartial"; and that his critics' "review was untrue, not impartial"; and that they "should publish this decision in New York, Washington, and Albany papers." Later Commodore Elliott presented Cooper with a bronze medal for this able and disinterested "defense of his brother-sailor." [Illustration: JESSE D. ELLIOTT'S LAKE ERIE MEDAL.] [Illustration: MEDAL GIVEN TO JAMES FENIMORE COOPER BY JESSE D. ELLIOTT.] Professor Lounsbury's summary of Cooper's "Naval History" is: "It is safe to say, that for the period which it covers it is little likely to be superseded as the standard history of the American navy. Later investigation may show some of the author's assertions to be erroneous. Some of his conclusions may turn out as mistaken as have his prophecies about the use of steam in war vessels. But such defects, assuming that they exist, are more than counterbalanced by advantages which make it a final authority on points that can never again be so fully considered. Many sources of information which were then accessible no longer exist. The men who shared in the scenes described, and who communicated information directly to Cooper, have all passed away. These are losses that can never be replaced, even were it reasonable to expect that the same practical knowledge, the same judicial spirit and the same power of graphic description could be found united again in the same person." Most amusing was Cooper's own story of a disputing man who being told: "Why, that is as plain as two and two make four," replied: "But I dispute that too, for two and two make twenty-two." Cooper called the Mediterranean, its shores and countries, "a sort of a world apart, that is replete with charms which not only fascinate the beholder, but linger in the memories of the absent like visions of a glorious past." And so his cruise in 1830, in the _Bella Genovese_, entered into the pages of "Wing-and-Wing." The idea was to bring together sailors of all nations--English, French, Italian, and Yankee--on the Mediterranean and aboard a French water-craft of peculiar Italian rig--the lateen sail. These sails spread like the great white wings of birds, and the craft glides among the islands and hovers about every gulf and bay and rocky coast of that beautiful sea. Under her dashing young French captain, Raoul Yvard, _Le Fen Follet_ (Jack-o'-Lantern or fire-fly, as you will) glides like a water-sprite here, there, and everywhere, guided by Cooper's sea phrases,--for which he had an unfailing instinct,--that meant something "even to the land-lubber who does not know the lingo." It is said many down-east fishermen never tire of Cooper, but despise many of his followers because of their misuse of sea terms. But more of "Wing-and-Wing": there was lovely Ghita, so sweet and brave, and anxious for her daring young lover Raoul, and stricken by the tragedies that befell her in the wake of Lord Nelson's fleet. The brown mountains of Porta Farrajo, "a small, crowded town with little forts and a wall," Cooper had seen. [Illustration: ISLAND OF ELBA.] He had tested its best inn, _The Four Nations_, by a good dinner in its dining-room of seven mirrors and a broken tile floor, and had some talk with its host as to their late ruler,--he said Napoleon came that evening, sent at once for Elba's oldest flag, which was run up on the forts as a sign of independence. [Illustration: ELBA HOME OF NAPOLEON.] Cooper saw Napoleon's Elba home,--"a low, small house and two wings, with ten windows in its ninety feet of front." He also saw the more comfortable one-story home of Napoleon's mother. Other isles and shores seen then--during his cruise in the _Bella Genovese_--found place in "Wing-and-Wing," published in 1842. The knowledge thus obtained of localities and the Italians led Cooper to say: "Sooner or later Italy will, inevitably, become a single state; this is a result that I hold to be certain, though the means by which it is to be effected are still hidden." [Illustration: THE BATTLE OF LAKE ERIE.] [Illustration: COOPER'S DIAGRAM OF THE BATTLE OF LAKE ERIE.] During 1843 appeared in _Graham's Magazine_ Cooper's "Life-Sketch of Perry," "The Battle of Lake Erie," and "The Autobiography of a Pocket-handkerchief," or "Social Life in New York." This volume of _Graham's Magazine_ also included the life of "John Paul Jones," wherein appeared Cooper's masterful description of the celebrated battle of the _Bon Homme Richard_--one of the most remarkable in the brief annals of that time of American naval warfare. [Illustration: THE BATTLE OF BON HOMME RICHARD AND THE SERAPIS.] [Illustration: COOPER'S DIAGRAM OF THE BATTLE OF "BON HOMME RICHARD" AND THE "SERAPIS."] Of John Paul Jones himself Cooper wrote: "In battle, Paul Jones was brave; in enterprise, hardy and original; in victory, mild and generous; in motives, much disposed to disinterestedness, though ambitious of renown and covetous of distinction; in pecuniary relations, liberal; in his affections, natural and sincere; and in his temper, except in those cases which assailed his reputation, just and forgiving." Fenimore Cooper was a veritable pioneer in spirit. He delighted in the details of American "clearing,"--from the first opening of the forest to sunlight, by the felling of trees and stump-extractor, to the neat drain and finished stonewall. On the mountain slope of Otsego's shore, and less than two miles from Cooperstown, lay his small farm belted with woodland, from which he had filched it in true pioneer fashion. Concerning Cooper's "costly contest with the soil," Mr. Keese tells us: "The inspiring beauty of its commanding views caught Cooper's fancy for buying it far more than any meager money returns its two hundred acres could promise." [Illustration: STUMP EXTRACTOR.] After ten years of devoted care the author is on record as saying with some humor: "for this year the farm would actually pay expenses." But full returns came in charming views over field, wood, and lake, where his fancy built "Muskrat Castle" and the "Ark of Floating Tom." Besides, its pork and butter were the sweetest, its eggs the whitest and freshest; its new peas and green corn "fit for the pot" were the first in the country. When the morning writing hours were over at the Hall, it was to the Châlet, as he called this farm, that he drove, to look after his horses, cows, pigs, and chickens. [Illustration: THE CHÂLET FARM.] The dumb creatures soon learned to know and love him. They would gather about him and frequently follow him "in a mixed procession often not a little comical. He had a most kindly feeling for all domestic animals," and "was partial to cats as well as dogs; the pet half-breed Angora often perched on his shoulders while he sat writing in the library." Then there were the workmen to direct, for whom he always had a kindly word. One of these said: "We never had to call on him a second time for a bill; he brought us the check. When I knocked at his library door it was surprising how quickly I heard the energetic 'Come in.' When I met him in the street in winter he often said: 'Well, Thomas, what are you driving at?' If work was dull he would try to think of something to set me about." Of Cooper's activity was added: "When the masons were repairing his home, in 1839, he, at fifty, and then quite stout, went up their steep, narrow ladder to the topmost scaffold on the gable end and walked the ridge of the house when the chimney was on fire." The Châlet brought to the author's mind "Wyandotté," or "The Hutted Knoll," a tale of border-life during the colonial period. A family of that time forces from the wilderness an affluent frontier home and settlement for its successors. In "Sassy Dick" the idle and fallen Indian is pathetically portrayed: Dick's return to the dignity of Wyandotté, the Indian chief, by reason of the red-man's fierce instincts, is a pen-picture strong in contrasts, illustrating how "he never forgot a favor nor forgave an injury." This story and that of Ned Myers were published in 1843. [Illustration: THE ESCAPE--FROM "WYANDOTTE"] Of these years there are records of Cooper's kindly love for little folk. Miss Caroline A. Foot, a schoolgirl of thirteen and a frequent visitor at Otsego Hall, had always a warm welcome from Mr. Cooper and his family. When she was about to leave her Cooperstown home for another elsewhere, "she made bold to enter his sanctum, carrying her album in her hand and asking him to write a verse or two in the same." Those verses have been treasured many years by that little girl, who became Mrs. George Pomeroy Keese. Two of her treasured verses are: TO CAROLINE A. FOOT But now, dear Cally, comes the hour When triumph crowns thy will, Submissive to thy winning power I seize the recreant quill: Indite these lines to bless thy days And sing my peans in thy praise. In after life when thou shalt grow To womanhood, and learn to feel The tenderness the aged know To guide their children's weal, Then wilt thou bless with bended knee Some smiling child as I bless thee. J. FENIMORE COOPER. Otsego Hall, August, 1843. [Illustration: Miss CAROLINE ADRIANCE FOOT, AGE 13.] The delight of the winsome little lady was great, not only for the loving sentiment but also for the autograph, which is now both rare and valuable. Not long after the capture of her verses a copy of them was sent to her friend Julia Bryant, daughter of Mr. Cooper's friend, the poet. Miss Julia wrote at once in reply that she never would be happy until she too had some lines over the same autograph. An immediate request was made of Mr. Cooper at his desk in the old Hall library, and with "dear Cally" by his side, he wrote: Charming young lady, Miss Julia by name, Your friend, little Cally, your wishes proclaim; Read this and you'll soon learn to know it, I'm not your papa the great lyric poet. J. FENIMORE COOPER. On page 155 of "The Cooperstown Centennial" there appears "A new glimpse of Cooper"--caught and kept by yet another little girl who firmly believed the author to be "a genuine lover of children." She writes that to meet him on the street "was always a pleasure. His eye twinkled, his face beamed, and his cane pointed at you with a smile and a greeting of some forthcoming humor. When I happened to be passing the gates of the old Hall, and he and Mrs. Cooper were driving home from his farm, I often ran to open the gate for him, which trifling act he always acknowledged with old-time courtesy. His fine garden joined my father's, and once, being in the vicinity of the fence, he tossed me several muskmelons to catch, which at that time were quite rare." In 1844 Mr. Cooper sent this youthful miss a picture-book, "The Young American's Library." "The Primer" came with a note "written on large paper, with a large seal." It was a reprint from an English copy, and kept for sixty years, it is still thought "delightful reading." In part the accompanying note reads: "Hall, Cooperstown, April 22, 1844. Mr. Fenimore Cooper begs Miss Alice Worthington will do him the favor to accept the accompanying book (which was written expressly for Princess Alice of Great Britain). "Mr. Cooper felt quite distressed for Miss Worthington's muff during the late hot weather, and begs to offer her the use of his new ice-house should the muff complain." Miss Alice and her cousin were out walking a very warm April day, with their "precious muffs, which gave him the merry thought about the ice-house." [Illustration: Miss ALICE TRUMBULL WORTHINGTON.] Four years later Miss Worthington received another letter from Mr. Cooper, in acknowledgment of her sending to him a newspaper clipping about one of his books. Of this letter is noted: "His handwriting was fine, beautifully clear, and very distinguished." The note reads: OTSEGO HALL, COOPERSTOWN, Feb. 12, 1848. MY DEAR MISS ALICE WORTHINGTON,--I have received your letter with the most profound sentiments of gratitude. The compliments from the newspapers did not make half the impression that was made by your letter; but the attentions of a young lady of your tender years, to an old man, who is old enough to be her grandfather, are not so easily overlooked. Nor must you mistake the value I attach to the passage cut from the paper, for, even that coming through your little hands is far sweeter than would have been two candy-horns filled with sugar-plums. I hope that you and I and John will have an opportunity of visiting the blackberry bushes next summer. I now invite you to select your party--of as many little girls, and boys, too, if you can find those you like, to go to my farm. It shall be your party, and the invitations must go out in your name. You can have your school if you like. I shall ask only one guest myself, and that will be John, who knows the road. With highest consideration, Your most obliged and humble servant, J. FENIMORE COOPER. During 1844 Cooper brought to print "Afloat and Ashore" and "Miles Wallingford"--"which two are one," he wrote, "with a good deal of love in part second for the delight of the ladies." Adventure is plenty, however, and the water-craft very much alive. In England "Miles Wallingford" appeared under the name of its heroine, Lucy Harding; and, says one: "It is a hard task not to fancy he was drawing, in slight particulars at least, the picture of his own wife, and telling the story of his early love." The tale is of the good old times in New York, and land scenes of her river counties. Those interested in Cooper's review of the naval court-martial of Lieutenant Alexander Slidell Mackenzie, for the execution of Spencer, will find the whole subject and its lesson of fearful retribution in _Graham's Magazine_ of 1843-44. Alleged "mutiny on the high seas" was charged to young Spencer. He was the son of Secretary of State John C. Spencer who, as superintendent of public instruction, rejected with harsh, short comment Cooper's "Naval History" offered (unknown to the author) for school use and directed the purchase of Mackenzie's "Life of Perry." Just as Cooper was putting through the press his severe criticism of Mackenzie's version of the Battle of Lake Erie, the _Somers_ returned from her unfortunate cruise. Cooper instantly stopped his paper at the expense of a round sum to the printer, saying: "The poor fellow will have enough to do to escape the consequences of his own weakness. It is no time to be hard on him now." [Illustration: LIEUT. ALEXANDER SLIDELL MACKENZIE.] The year 1845 brought from Cooper's pen "Satanstoe"--quaint, old-fashioned, and the first of his three anti-rent books. Its hero, a member of the Littlepage family, writes his own life-story. From his home on one of the necks of Long-Island Sound, in Westchester County, he visits New York City, catches a glimpse of the pleasant Dutch life in Albany, and with comrades plunges into the wilderness to examine, work, and settle his new, large grant of land at Mooseridge. Professor Lounsbury's able life of Cooper affirms of "Satanstoe": "It is a picture of colonial life and manners in New York during the eighteenth century, such as can be found drawn nowhere else so truthfully and vividly." The title "Satanstoe" was given in a moment of Cooper's "intense disgust" at the "canting" attempt then made to change the name of the dangerous passage of Hell Gate, East River, to Hurl Gate. [Illustration: HELL GATE.] "The Chainbearer," second of the anti-rent series, was published early in 1846, and continues the story of "Satanstoe" in the person of the hero's son, who finds in the squatters on his wilderness inheritance the first working of the disorderly spirit of anti-rent--the burning question of New York at that time. Honest Andries Coejemans and his pretty niece Ursula, the wily Newcome and rude Thousandacres of this story are each strong types of character. The key to Cooper's own character is expressed in his words: "The most expedient thing in existence is to do right." In the hour of danger to aid in protecting the rights of the people from abuse of these rights by the evil minded among themselves, he held to be the high duty of every honest, generous, and wise citizen. With such sentiments in mind, he wrote "The Redskins"--the third and last of the anti-rent series. Distinguished jurists of our country have declared "remarkable," the legal knowledge and skill in this series of books. Eighteen hundred and forty-six saw also in book form Cooper's "Lives of Distinguished American Naval Officers," which had already appeared in _Graham's Magazine_. Many of these eminent men had been the author's friends and messmates in early life. In 1847 "The Crater, or Vulcan's Peak--A Tale of the Pacific," came from Cooper's pen. The Introduction states that the book was written from the journal of a distinguished member of the Woolston family of Pennsylvania, who "struggled hard to live more in favor with God than in favor with man," and quotes that warning text of Scripture: "Let him that thinketh he standeth, take heed lest he fall!" and adds, "we have endeavored to imitate the simplicity of Captain Woolston in writing this book." The story of "a ship-wrecked mariner, cast away on a reef not laid down on any chart." This barren spot the castaway makes to bloom as a rose, then brings immigrants to his Pacific Eden, which finally vanishes like a dream. The work is said to be an excellent study of the author's own character. Full of spirit and vigor at fifty-eight, Mr. Cooper in June, 1847, made a pleasant few weeks' visit to the middle west, going as far as Detroit. The country beyond Seneca Lake--the prairies and fine open groves of Michigan--was new to him. Affluent towns with well-tilled lands between, full of mid-summer promise, where forty years before he had crossed a wilderness, gave added interest to the entire way. He was far more deeply impressed with sublime Niagara than in his earlier years and before he had seen all the falls of Europe. The idea of weaving its majesty into an Indian story came to him, but, alas! was never written. [Illustration: NIAGARA FALLS.] He was pleased with the growth and promise of Buffalo and Detroit, was charmed with "the beautiful flowery prairies and natural groves of Michigan," and wrote of them: "To get an idea of Prairie Round,--imagine an oval plain of some thirty-thousand acres, of surprising fertility, without an eminence; a few small cavities, however, are springs of water the cattle will drink." In the prairie's center was a forest island of some six hundred acres "of the noblest native trees," and in the heart of this wood was a small round lake a quarter of a mile across. Into this scene Cooper called some creatures of his fancy; among them a bee-hunter, suggested by the following incident. One morning not long after his return from Europe he was passing, as usual, his leisure hours at the mountain farm. While overlooking his workmen he espied a small skiff leaving an opposite shore-point of the lake and making directly for his own landing. Mr. Cooper thought the boatman was on an errand to himself. Presently the stranger, tin pail in hand, made his appearance and inquired of Cooper and his men whether a large swarm of bees had been seen "somewhere there-abouts." He had lost a fine swarm early in the morning several days before, and had since looked in vain for them; but "a near-by farmer's wife had seen them cross the lake that way." No bees had been seen by the men of Châlet. One of them said, however, "bees had been very plenty about the blossoms for a day or two." The farmer began to look about closely, and from the unusual number of bees coming and going among the flowers on the hill, he felt sure his honeybees were lodged somewhere near. So, with Mr. Cooper, much interested, the search for the lost swarm began. A young grove skirted the cliffs; above were scattered some full, tall, forest trees,--here and there one charred and lifeless. The farmer seemed very knowing as to bees, and boasted of having one of the largest bee-sheds in the county. Rustic jokes at his expense were made by the workmen. They asked him which of the great tall trees his bees had chosen; they wished to know, for they would like to see him climb it, as Mr. Cooper had said that no axe should fell his forest favorites. The farmer nodded his head and replied that there was no climbing nor chopping for him that day--the weather was too warm; that he intended to call his bees down--that was his fashion. Taking up his pail he began moving among the flowers, and soon found a honey-bee sipping from the cup of a rose-raspberry. He said he knew at once the face of his own bee, "to say nothin' of the critter's talk"--meaning its buzzing of wings. A glass with honey from the tin pail soon captured the bee: uneasy at first, it was soon sipping the sweets. When quite satisfied it was set free, and its flight closely followed by the farmer's eye. Another bee was found on a head of golden-rod; it was served the same way but set free at an opposite point from the first's release; this second flight was also closely noted. Some twelve of the tiny creatures from the clover and daisies were likewise treated, until the general direction of the flight of all was sure. This "hiving the bees" by the air-line they naturally took to their new home proved the farmer to be right, for an old, half-charred oak-stub, some forty feet high and "one limb aloft was their lighting-place, and there they were buzzing about the old blighted bough." The farmer then went to his boat and brought back a new hive and placed it not far from the old oak; he put honey about its tiny doorway and strewed many flowers around it. With the sunset his bees had taken possession of their new home, and by moonlight they were rowed across the lake and placed beside the mother-swarm in the farmer's garden. [Illustration: JUDGE BAZIL HARRISON OF KALAMAZOO, MICHIGAN.] The author placed this incident in the "Prairie Round" of "The Oak Openings." Its Indian Peter shows how Christian influences in time triumph over revenge--the deadliest passion of the red-man's heart. On New Year's Day, 1848, "The Oak Openings" was begun, and the following spring saw it finished. This note appears in the author's diary: "Saturday, January 1, 1848. Read St. John. No church. Weather very mild, though snow fell in the night. Walking very bad, and I paid no visits outside of the family. Had ---- at dinner. A merry evening with the young people. Played chess with my wife. Wrote a little in 'Oak Openings' to begin the year with." Cooper was a born story-teller, and with a born sailor's love of salt water could not for long keep from spinning tales of the sea. All of which accounts for spirited and original "Jack Tier," which came from his pen in 1848. The story was called at first "Rose Budd"--the name of the young creature who is one of its important characters. But plain, homely, hard-working "Jack," under a sailor's garb, following her commonplace, grasping husband the world over, and finding herself in woman's gear and grief by his side when he made his last voyage of all without her--it is she who had _earned_ the real heroine's right to the name "Jack Tier." It is a story of the treacherous reefs off Florida and the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico. All those quiet years in Cooperstown the author kept pace in mind and interest with the times, and often gave expression to his opinion on current events. Of General Scott in Mexico he wrote, February 1, 1848: "Has not Scott achieved marvels! The gun-thunders in the valley of the Aztecs were heard in echoes across the Atlantic." Years before this the last chapter of "The Spy" paid tribute to the "bravery of Scott's gallant brigade" in 1814, at Lundy's Lane, not far from Niagara. That Cooper strongly condemned Scott's "General Order" is another record of later years. Reform--along all lines of service--was Cooper's watchword; his home-cry, first and last, was to "build up our navy!" And, with his knowledge of naval affairs and accurate estimate of seamen of all grades, what an admirable secretary of our navy these qualifications would have made him! His political instincts seemed clear and unerring. April 13, 1850, he thought "Congress a prodigious humbug; Calhoun's attitude another," as was also Webster's answer, which, however, had "capital faults." From almost a seer and a prophet came in 1850 these words: "We are on the eve of great events. Every week knocks a link out of the chain of the Union." This was written to a dear and valued friend of South Carolina, to whom a few months later he further wrote: "The Southerns talk of fighting Uncle Sam,--that long-armed, well-knuckled, hard-fisted old scamp, Uncle Sam." And among the dearest of his life-long friends stood this "Southern" Commodore, William Branford Shubrick. Yet in close quarters, "he would rather have died than lied to him." His standards of honesty were as rock-hewn; and his words on his friend Lawrence perhaps apply as aptly to himself: "There was no more dodge in him than there was in the mainmast." [Illustration: HON. GERRIT SMITH.] During some years prior to 1850, political party issues on "Anti-slavery," grew from mild to violent. And famous in the annals of Cooperstown was the spirited debate, between Mr. Cooper, for colonization, and his friend, the Hon. Gerrit Smith, for immediate abolition. This vital question of national interest was given able and exhaustive treatment by both debaters who spoke several hours while "The audience listened with riveted attention." At its close the two gentlemen walked arm in arm to the "Hall," Cooper's home, where they dined together. From Mr. Keese comes an anecdote of Commodore Shubrick's visit to his old shipmate at Cooperstown: "Mr. Cooper had a raw Irishman in his employ, as a man of all work. Sending him to the post-office one day for the mail, he told him to ask if there were any letters for Commodore Shubrick. Pat came to the window and with great confidence called out, 'Is there any letter for Commodore Brickbat?' 'Who?' said the astonished postmaster. The name was repeated. A villager coming in at that time, the postmaster asked him if he knew who was visiting Mr. Cooper. 'Commodore Shubrick,' was the reply. 'All, that's the name!' said Pat; 'and sure, didn't I come near it, though!'" [Illustration: WILLIAM BRANDFORD SHUBRICK.] Possibly the sailing of Sir John Franklin in 1845 for the frozen country of the North Star led Fenimore Cooper to write "The Sea Lions," in the winter of 1849. When the Highlands were white, and its tree-life hoary with frost, the author could pen best his picture of a voyage to the ice-bergs, rifts, and snow-drifts, for which his two schooners, both called _The Sea Lion,_ were launched. In the early years of his married life Cooper made many visits to the island home of a relative, by marriage, who, off the eastern shore of Long Island, led a half-sea life that was full of attraction for the young sailor. This gentleman only, his family and dependents, lived on Shelter Island, between which and the mainland all coming and going was by boat. Here they had shooting, fishing, and cruising a-plenty. The author's thorough knowledge of these waters was the probable reason for starting his two sealers from this port in search of valuable sealing-grounds in the polar seas. The schooners and their captains were American. One of the sealers was owned by an old, hard-fisted miser of Puritanic pattern, whose sweet niece Mary, pretty and simply good, makes the very lovable heroine of this book. Beneath the low porch and within the thrifty garden and great orchard of her island home, Mary's heart had been captured by Roswell Gardner, the daring young captain of her uncle's schooner _The Sea Lion_. In the faith of the Star and the Cross the young girl worshipped with strong and childlike piety, while her lover "stood coldly by and erect with covered head,"--a doubter, but honestly striving to find his balance. Mary prays and hopes while the young man sails to the far-away ice land, where, shipwrecked and alone with his Maker, he finds the light of Truth shining for him on the far-away shores of his frozen hold. Of this sea tale Professor Lounsbury writes: "'The Sea Lions' is certainly one of the most remarkable conceptions that it ever entered into the mind of a novelist to create." And he adds: "It is a powerful story." "Ways of the Hour" came from Cooper's pen in 1850. The purpose of this story was to attack trial by jury. From the time of Cooper's friendship with Charles Mathews in the early 1820's, he had been in touch with the stage, and in June, 1850, he mentions writing a three-act play in "ridicule of new notions." The title was "Upside Down; or, Philosophy in Petticoats"--a comedy. Of this play Cooper's friend Hackett, the American Falstaff of that day, wrote him: "I was at Burton's its first night and saw the whole of the play. The first act told well; the second, pretty well, but grew heavy; the third dragged until the conclusion surprised the attention into _warm applause_." [Illustration: JAMES H. HACKETT.] This clever but not over-successful farce closed the literary career of James Fenimore Cooper. [Illustration: CHARLES MATHEWS.] Of Charles Mathews, the peerless comedy artist of England, and Fenimore Cooper, his old-time friend, Dr. John Wakefield Francis, wrote: "During a memorable excursion made to Albany with [the actor] Dunlap, Mathews, and Mr. Cooper in the spring of 1823, I found him abounding in dramatic anecdotes as well as associations the striking scenery of the Hudson brought to mind. 'The Spy' was, however, the leading subject of Mathews' conversation. Cooper unfolded his intention of writing a series of works illustrative of his country, revolutionary occurrences, and the red man of the western world. Mathews expressed in strong terms the patriotic benefits of such an undertaking, and complimented Cooper on the specimen already furnished in Harvey Birch. The approbation of Mathews could never be slightly appreciated. There was little of flattery in him at any time. He was a sort of 'My Lord Lofty,' who valued himself in pride of opinion. Such an individual could not but enlist the feelings of Mr. Cooper. I hardly know whether I have ever seen Mr. Cooper manifest as much enthusiasm with any other person when occasion was felicitous, the subject of interest, and the comedian in his happy vein. Dunlap, were he speaking, might tell you of his [Cooper's] gratuities to the unfortunate playwright and the dramatic performer." In 1832 William Dunlap's "History of the American Theatre" was "Dedicated to James Fenimore Cooper Esq., by his Friend, the Author." It was in this year of 1850 that the author's daughter, Susan Augusta, had her "Rural Hours" about ready to print. And of this book her father wrote: "It will be out in July. There is elegance, purity, knowledge, and grace about it. It will make her _the_ Cooper at once. Quite puts her papa's nose out of joint." More, concerning this book and New York City of that day, appears in her father's letter to her mother, written in that city at the Broadway Hotel, September 19, 1850. BROADWAY HOTEL, September 19, 1850. MY BELOVED S,--The post office is sadly out of joint. I wrote you the day I arrived.... Right and left I hear of "Rural Hours." I am stopped in the street a dozen times a day to congratulate me. The price of the fine edition is $7.00. It will be the presentation volume of the season. I can see that Putnam expects to sell some eight hundred or a thousand of them.... The improvements here are wonderful. They build chiefly of brown freestone and noble edifices of five and six stories with a good deal of architectural pretension.... I sat three times for lithographs yesterday and with vastly better success than before. The pictures are all very like and very pleasing. I am to have one which will fall to your lot as a matter of course. Your letter of Tuesday reached me this morning. You ought to have had three letters from me by Tuesday evening. F.'s [the author's daughter Frances] shawl went by "A." I suppose it is a courting shawl. It is almost the only one of the kind Stewart had--a little too grave perhaps but scarcely so for the country. Stewart is making a palace of a store. He takes the whole front of the block on Broadway with fifteen windows in front--and all of marble. With the tenderest regards to all, I remain yours Most affectionately, J.F.C. [Illustration: STEWART'S MARBLE PALACE.] [Illustration: MISS SUSAN AUGUSTA COOPER ABOUT 1850.] Miss Cooper makes alive each season's charms, as they pass over the Glimmerglass and wane beyond Hannah's Hill. From gentry to humble-folk, real Cooperstown types appear and disappear among these pages; and even the "half-a-dozen stores" have place, where "at the same counter you may buy kid gloves and a spade; a lace veil and a jug of molasses; a satin dress and a broom," among other things of even greater variety. She tells how St. Valentine's Day was celebrated in a very original way as _Vrouwen-Daghe_, or women's day of the old Dutch colonists. [Illustration: OTSEGO LAKE PARTY IN 1840.] She also records that first lake party to Point Judith, given by her grandfather, Judge Cooper, in August, 1799, but leaves the description of her father's lake parties to Mr. Keese: "He was fond of picnic excursions on the lake, generally to the _Three Mile Point_, and often with a party of gentlemen to Gravelly, where the main treat was a chowder, which their host made up with great gusto. He could also brew a bowl of punch for festive occasions, though he himself rarely indulged beyond a glass of wine for dinner." Concerning these festivities Mr. Keese adds: "Lake excursions until 1840 were made by a few private boats or the heavy, flat-bottomed skiff which worthy Dick Case kept moored at the foot of Fair Street. But Dick's joints were too stiff to row more than an easy reach from the village; to the Fairy Spring was the usual measure of his strength. The Three Mile Point was the goal of the best oarsmen. Dick's successor in the thirties was an ugly horse-boat that in 1840 gave place to the famous scow of Joe Tom and his men, which for twenty years took picnic parties to the Point. A president of our country, several governors of the State, and Supreme Court judges were among these distinguished passengers. Doing such duty the scow is seen in the 1840 pictures of Cooperstown. No picnic of his day was complete without famous 'Joe Tom,' who had men to row the scow, clean the fish, stew potatoes, make coffee, and announce the meal. Rowing back in the gloaming of a summer's night, he would awake the echoes of Natty Bumppo's Cave for the pleasure of the company." At times a second echo would return from Hannah's Hill, and a third from Mt. Vision. [Illustration: JOE TOM.] [Illustration: NATTY'S CAVE.] Between the lines can be read the hearty and cheery author's pleasure in all this merriment, yet, none the less, life's shadows exacted full attention, as the following shows: "Cooper took a generous and active part in sending relief to the starving people of Ireland; for, March 8, 1847, James Fenimore Cooper heads his town committee, and, 'in the name of charity and in obedience to the commands of God,' he urges an appeal 'from house to house, for _Food_ is wanting that we possess in abundance.'" "Cooper would admit of no denial of principle but could be lenient to offenders. One day he caught a man stealing fruit from his garden. Instead of flying into a passion, he told him how wrong it was to make the neighbors think there was no way of getting his fruit but by stealing it, and bid him the next time to come in at the gate and ask for it like a true man. Cooper then helped him to fill his basket and let him go." The author's fine fruit trees must have been tempting! One day while walking in the garden with some ladies, Mr. Cooper led the way to a tree well laden with fine apples. Unable to reach them, he called to a boy in the street, and presenting him to his friends as one of the best boys in the village,--one who never disturbed his fruit,--he lifted the little fellow up to the branches to pick apples for the guests, and then filled his pockets as a reward for his honesty, and promised him more when he came again. The delighted boy waited for a few days and then repeated his visit to the tree, but forgetting to ask permission. Not knowing him from frequent intruders, Mr. Cooper's high voice from a distance, added to the savage barking of his watch-dog, frightened the well-meaning forager into a resolve that he would not forget the easier way next time of first asking before picking. [Illustration: OTSEGO HALL--BACK VIEW.] The author's genuine interest in his hometown folk never waned. Among the many and sincere expressions of his good-will were the free lectures he gave to the villagers. His descriptions of naval actions were full of vigor. On the blackboard he presented fleets, changing their positions, moving ship after ship as the contest went on, at the same time stating the facts in history and using his cane as a pointer. [Illustration: JAMES FENIMORE COOPER.] It is of note that Mr. Cooper's personal appearance in 1850 was remarkable. He seemed in perfect health and highest energy and activity of faculties, but the autumn of this year found him in New York City under mild ailments. His friend, Mr. George Washington Green, regretted not noting better his last talk with the author about this time, of which he says: "He excused himself that morning at Putnam's for not rising to shake hands. 'My feet,' said he, 'are so tender that I do not like to stand longer than I can help.' Yet when we walked together into Broadway, I could not help turning now and then to admire his commanding figure and firm bearing. Sixty years seemed to sit lightly on him. After a short stroll we went to his room at the _Globe_ and sat down to talk. I never found him so free upon his own works and literary habits. He confessed his partiality for Leather stocking. Said he: 'I meant to have added one more scene and introduced him in the Revolution, but I thought the public had had enough of him, and never ventured it.'" [Illustration: THE SWEDISH NIGHTINGALE (JENNY LIND).] Cooper's enjoyment of the marvelous voice of "The Swedish Nightingale," as Jenny Lind was called, the publication of his daughter's "Rural Hours," and the active progress of his own book sales are noted in his letter to his beloved wife. BROADWAY HOTEL, Friday, Nov. 15, 1850. MY DEAREST W.,--Julia and Miss Thomas came down with me to hear Jenny Lind. "Have you heard Jenny Lind?" "How do you like Jenny Lind?" are the questions which supplant "Fine weather to-day" and other similar comprehensive remarks. I am patiently waiting for the "Lake Gun" [a magazine article]. I am well and shall commence in earnest next week. Tell Sue [his daughter] I have seen Putnam, who will be delighted to publish her new book. "Naval History" is a little slack for the moment. There are less than a hundred copies of second edition on hand and the third must be shortly prepared. The fine edition will be published to-morrow. About two hundred copies have been sent to the trade and with that issue he will start. He has had five and twenty copies done up in papier machia at $9.00. N---- is well. D.Z. is still here. Old Peter is not yet married, but the affair is postponed until Spring, when the bride and groom will return to America. They wish to prolong the delightful delusion of courtship. I hope they may be as happy as we have been and love each other as much forty--days after their union as we do forty years.... Yours J.F.C. [Illustration: JENNY LIND AT CASTLE GARDEN, NEW YORK CITY, 1850.] At No. 1 Bond Street stood the old-time mansion of Dr. John W. Francis, where were welcomed many eminent in arts and letters at home and abroad, and where their host wrote his "Reminiscences of Sixty Years." Here it was that Cooper, on his last visit to New York, came seeking aid for his failing health. But with December the author returned to Cooperstown, whence he wrote a friend: "I have gone into dock with my old hulk, to be overhauled. Francis says I have congestion, and I must live low, deplete, and take pills. While I am frozen, my wife tells me my hands, feet, and body are absolutely warm. The treatment is doing good. You cannot imagine the old lady's delight at getting me under, in the way of food. I get no meat, or next to none, and no great matter in substitutes. This morning being Christmas, I had a blow-out of oysters, and at dinner it will go hard if I do not get a cut into the turkey. I have lost pounds, yet I feel strong and clearheaded. I have had a narrow escape, if I have escaped." [Illustration: DR JOHN WAKEFIELD FRANCIS.] [Illustration: DR. FRANCIS'S HOME IN NEW YORK CITY.] The following spring Cooper again went to New York City, whence he dates a letter to his wife: Saturday, March 29, 1851 COLLEGE HOTEL, NEW YORK Your letter of Thursday has just reached me. I am decidedly better.--Last night I was actually dissipated. L.---- came for me in a carriage and carried me off almost by force to Doctor Bellows, where I met the Sketch Club, some forty people, many of whom I knew. I stayed until past ten, ate a water ice, talked a great deal, returned, went to bed fatigued and slept it off.--My friends are very attentive to me, they all seem glad to see me and think I am improving, as I certainly am.... I shall come home shortly--I want to be in my garden and I wish to be in your dear hands, love, for though you know nothing you do a great deal that is right. Last evening I passed with Charlotte M.--who wanted to take me home to nurse me. There is no chance of seeing S.----. Adieu, my love.... My blessing on the girls--all four of them. J.F.C. In April, 1851, the poet Bryant wrote of him "Cooper is in town, in ill health. When I saw him last he was in high health and excellent spirits." These spirits were not dashed by the progressing malady that took him home to Cooperstown. Not realizing what illness meant, he bravely accepted what it brought,--the need to dictate the later parts of his "History of the United States Navy," and the "Towns of Manhattan," when he himself could no longer write. The latter was planned, partly written, and in press at the time of his death. That which was printed was burnt, the manuscript in part rescued, and finished by the pen of one of the family. It was Fenimore Cooper's happiness to be blessed with a family whose greatest pleasure was to supply his every needed comfort; and one of his daughters was ever a companion in his pursuits, the wise and willing writer of his letters and dictations, and the most loving, never-tiring nurse of his latter days. Of these last months there is a pretty child-record by a friend who, "entering without notice," one day saw Mr. Cooper "lying at full length on the parlor floor, with a basket of cherries by his side. Upon his chest, vainly trying to bestride the portly form, sat his little grandson, to whom he passed cherries, and who, in turn, with childish glee, was dropping them, one by one, into his grandfather's mouth. The smiles that played over the features of child and man during this sweet and gentle dalliance were something not easily forgotten. A few months after this both child and man had passed beyond 'the smiling'; aye, and 'the weeping,' too." Letters from Cooperstown led Dr. Francis to go there August 27, 1851, to see his esteemed friend in his own home. And of Cooper the Doctor wrote: "I explained to him the nature of his malady--frankly assured him that within the limits of a week a change was indispensable to lessen our forebodings of its ungovernable nature. He listened with fixed attention.--Not a murmur escaped his lips. Never was information of so grave a cast received by any individual in a calmer spirit." So passed the summer days of 1851 with the author, near his little lake, the Glimmerglass, and its Mt. Vision, when one mid-September Sunday afternoon, with his soul's high standard of right and truth undimmed, James Fenimore Cooper crossed the bar. While from youth Cooper was a reverent follower of the Christian faith, his religious nature deepened with added years. Eternal truth grew in his heart and mind as he, in time, learned to look above and beyond this world's sorrows and failures. In July, 1851, he was confirmed in Christ's Church,--the little parish church just over the way from the old-Hall home, whose interests he had faithfully and generously served as sometime warden and as vestryman since 1834. [Illustration: CHRIST'S CHURCH, COOPERSTOWN, N.Y.] Of one such service Mr. Keese writes that in 1840 the original Christ's Church of Cooperstown underwent important alterations. Its entire interior was removed and replaced by native oak. As vestryman Mr. Cooper was prime mover and chairman of the committee of change, and hearing of the chancel screen in the old Johnstown church, first built by Sir William Johnson, he took a carpenter and went there to have drawings made of this white-painted pine screen, which at his own expense he had reproduced with fine, ornamental effect in oak, and made it a gift to Christ's Church. It was removed from Christ's Church about 1891, badly broken and abandoned. This so disturbed Cooper's daughters that his grandson, James Fenimore Cooper of Albany, New York, had the pieces collected, and stored them for using in his Cooperstown home; but he--by request of the Reverend Mr. Birdsall--had them made into two screens for the aisles of the church, where they were erected as a memorial to his father, Paul Fenimore, and his great-grandfather, Judge William Cooper. [Illustration: FENIMORE COOPER'S SCREEN GIFT.] Mr. Keese's words, dating January, 1910, are: "And now comes in a rather singular discovery made by the writer a few days ago: In looking over a book in my library, published about ninety years ago, there is an article on Newstead Abbey, Nottinghamshire, England, with a steel engraving of the front of the Abbey, which is almost identical with the design of the original screen in Christ Church. Who was responsible for transplanting the same to this country appears to be unknown, but the fact is interesting in that Newstead Abbey was the home of the Byron family and that of Lord Byron." In a letter of April 22, 1840, to H. Bleeker, Esq., Cooper wrote of this screen: "I have just been revolutionizing Christ's Church, Cooperstown, not turning out a vestry but converting its pine interior into oak--_bona fide_ oak, and erecting a screen that I trust, though it may have no influence on my soul, will carry my name down to posterity. It is really a pretty thing--pure Gothic, and is the wonder of the country round." Of Cooper himself was said: "Thus step by step his feet were guided into the ways of peace." It was of the Protestant Episcopal church that his wife's brother, William Heathcote de Lancey--a genius of goodness--was bishop. [Illustration: BISHOP WILLIAM HEATHCOTE DE LANCEY.] A beautiful, tender, and touching tribute to the love of his life was Fenimore Cooper's will. In part it reads: "I, James Fenimore Cooper, give and bequeath to my wife, Susan Augusta, all my property, whether personal or mixed, to be enjoyed by her and her heirs forever. I make my said wife the executrix of my will." In a little over four months his wife followed him to the far country. Of his children, Elizabeth, the first-born, died in infancy; Susan Augusta, the author, was the second; the third, Caroline Martha, became Mrs. Henry Frederick Phinney; next came Anne Charlotte, then Maria Frances, who married Richard Cooper; Fenimore, the first son, they lost in babyhood, and Paul Fenimore, the youngest, became a member of the bar in Albany, New York. [Illustration: THE DE LANCEY ARMS.] Cooper left his family a competency, but the Hall home soon passed into other hands; later it was burnt. From rescued brick an attractive house was built on the west bank of the Susquehanna for his daughters Susan Augusta and Anne Charlotte, both now resting near father and mother in Christ's Church yard. Their niece, Miss Susan Augusta Cooper, daughter of their sister, Maria Frances, Mrs. Richard Cooper, now lives in this picturesque house, and there she reverently treasures many personal belongings of her famous grandfather, and also those of her author-aunt, Susan Augusta Cooper, whose best memorial, however, is the noble orphanage on the river-bank some ways below. The oaken doors saved from the flames of the burning Hall served for this new home, which overlooked the grounds of their old home. The site of the latter is marked by Ward's "Indian Hunter." Aptly placed, peering through mists of green toward the author's church-yard grave, he is a most fitting guardian of the one-time garden of Fenimore Cooper. [Illustration: THE NEW HOME AND THE OLD HOME.] [Illustration: INDIAN HUNTER.] By the generosity of the late Mrs. Henry Codman Potter, this hunter's domain has been transformed into beautiful "Cooper Grounds"; and here the red-man of bronze keeps ward and watch over memories that enshrine the genius of a noble soul whose records of this vanishing race are for all time. [Illustration: COOPER GROUNDS.] A gentleman just from continental Europe in 1851 said of people there: "They are all reading Cooper." A traveler, returned from Italy about that time, wrote: "I found all they knew of America--and that was not a little--they had learned from Cooper's novels." When an eminent physician who was called to attend some German immigrants asked how they knew so much of their new-home country, they replied: "We learned it all from Cooper. We have four translations of his works in German, and we all read them." February 22, 1852, Charles G. Leland of Philadelphia wrote of Cooper's works: "There were several translations issued at Frankfort, Germany, in 1824, in two hundred and fifty parts, a second large edition in 1834, and a third in 1851. All his works, more than Scott and Shakespeare, are household words to the German people." Library records of to-day show no waning of this early popularity of the "Leatherstocking Tales" and "Sea Stories" of Fenimore Cooper. In 1883 Victor Hugo told General Wilson that excepting the authors of France, "Cooper was the greatest novelist of the century." It was Balzac who said: "If Cooper had succeeded in the painting of character to the same extent that he did in the painting the phenomena of nature, he would have uttered the last word of our art." From Hanau-on-Main, Germany, January, 1912, Herr Rudolf Drescher writes: "Within two years two new translations of Cooper's complete works have been issued. One at Berlin, the other at Leipsic. 180 pictures by the artist Max Slevogt held one edition at $192, the other with less pictures was $60, and both were sold. Cheaper editions without pictures also met with large sales. I possess an 1826, German copy of 'The Pioneers.'" Another record is, Cooper's works have been seen "in thirty different countries, in the languages of Finland, Turkey and Persia, in Constantinople, in Egypt, at Jerusalem, at Ispahan." The author's literary cruise, dating back three years before the launching of "The Pilot" in 1823, was a long one. And no admiral of mortal fame ever led so sturdy and motley a fleet--from the proud man-of-war to the light felucca, gondola, and bark-canoe--over ocean and inland waters. With visions of forests, its moving spirit and skilful pilot still stands at the helm, the full light of the ages upon "eye, arm, sail, spar, and flag." Thus is Fenimore Cooper firmly anchored in the mind and heart of posterity as the creator of American romance. August, 1907, "Historic Cooperstown" held her Memorial Celebration. Her founder, Judge William Cooper, his hardy pioneers, and the "memory of one whose genius had given her Glimmerglass country world-wide fame," were honored with world-wide tributes. Among these were addresses, heartfelt, and able, from the late Bishop Henry Codman Potter, on "The Religious Future"; Francis Whiting Halsey, on "The Headwaters of the Susquehanna"; George Pomeroy Keese, on "Early Days of Cooperstown," and James Fenimore Cooper of Albany, New York, on his great-grandfather "William Cooper." From "The Cooperstown Centennial" one learns that at five o'clock on Wednesday afternoon of August 7 many people were reverently taking part in solemn services around the grave of James Fenimore Cooper and beneath the glinting tree-shadows of Christ's Church yard. The service began with a procession of young girls in white surrounding the author's last resting-place, where verses on Cooper were recited by Miss Wilkinson; then the little folk sang the lyric tribute of Mr. Saxton: 0, great magician, may the life We lead be such a one as thine-- A simple life, transcending art, A spirit close to Nature's heart, A soul as strong and clear, and fine. [Illustration: THE CHILDREN'S TRIBUTE.] After singing, the children, gathering around, covered the marble slab with their tributes--the flowers of the season. Some poetic pictures in blank verse were given of Cooper's works, by the Reverend Dr. W.W. Battershall of St. Peter's Church in Albany, New York, the present rector, and successor of Doctor Ellison, Cooper's boyhood instructor. Then the Rev. Ralph Birdsall, rector of the author's "little parish church," spoke of Fenimore Cooper's church-yard home: "A marble slab that bears no praise for fame or virtue; only a simple cross, symbol of the faith in which he lived and died, and upon which he based his hopes of immortality." The soldier lying near, brought from the field of honor; the author's old neighbors, who exchanged with him in life the friendly nod; hands that were calloused with the axe and shovel, and Judge Temple's aged slave in narrow home--all sleeping beneath the same sward and glancing shadows are not less honored now than is the plain, unpolished slab of stone, bearing two dates,--of birth and entrance into the life eternal of James Fenimore Cooper. On his airy height of the "Cooper Memorial," gleaming white through the lakewood slope of Mt. Vision, wondrous Leatherstocking stands, a rare tribute to simple, uplifting goodness. Clad in his hunting-shirt, deerskin cap, and leggings, his powder-horn and bullet-pouch swung over his shoulder, his dog Hector at his feet, looking up with speaking expression into the fine, wise, honest face of his master, stands Natty, gazing over all the lake he loved so well. [Illustration: LAKE OTSEGO.] ---- o'er no sweeter lake Shall morning break or noon-cloud sail; No fairer face than thine shall take The sunset's golden veil. J.G. WHITTIER. "Cooper had no predecessor and no successor in his own field of fiction; he stood alone,--he was a creator, and his 'Natty' will stand forever as the most original of pioneer characters," wrote Henry M. Alden. [Illustration: LEATHERSTOCKING.] With Rev. Mr. Birdsall, many think the time has come when the fame of Fenimore Cooper demands a world-given memorial in Cooperstown. A lifelike statue from an _artist's_ chisel should show the "'prose poet of the silent woods and stormy seas' seated, pen in hand, gazing dreamily for inspiration over the Glimmerglass, where the phantom creatures of his genius brood." Let it stand, a new-world literary shrine, in the square fronting the Old-Hall home site, which northward commands a sweeping view of his "little lake" and a side glimpse of lofty Leatherstocking of the tree-tops--not far away. [Illustration: LEATHERSTOCKING MONUMENT.] And strewn the flowers of memory here. For one whose fingers, years ago, Their work well finished, dropped the pen; Whose master mind from land to sea Drew forms heroic, long to be The living types of vanished men. A.B. SAXTON. [Illustration: GEORGE POMEROY KEESE.] IN MEMORIAM GEORGE POMEROY KEESE On April 22, 1910, and at the home of his son, Theodore Keese, in New York City, came the Spirit-Land call to the late George Pomeroy Keese. It was also in New York City that he was born, on January 14, 1828. His parents were Theodore Keese and Georgiann Pomeroy, niece of James Fenimore Cooper. This grand-nephew of the author enjoyed four score and more of full, active years, mostly spent in Cooperstown, N.Y., and he gave of them generously in serving the welfare and interests of that village. There Edgewater, Mr. Keese's attractive home, overlooks, from the south, the entire length and beauty of Lake Otsego, whose waters and banks are haunted by Cooper's creations. From Mr. Keese is quoted: "George Pomeroy of Northampton, Mass., came to Cooperstown among the early settlers in 1801. He married the only living sister of Fenimore Cooper in 1803. "His ancestry dates back to the coming of William the Conqueror from Normandy in 1066. At this time Ralph de Pomeroy accompanied the Norman duke to England and rendered him such valuable assistance that he received from him no fewer than fifty-eight lordships in Devonshire as a reward for his services. Selecting a favorable site, not far from the banks of the river Dart, Ralph de Pomeroy erected thereon the celebrated stronghold that now bears the family name of Berry-Pomeroy Castle, the stately ruins of which are still visited as one of the most picturesque objects of interest in the county of Devon. "The descendants of the founder of Berry-Pomeroy retained the lands belonging to their ancestral home until the time of Edward VI, when at the period of the rebellion of that date they were seized by the crown and bestowed upon the haughty Lord Protector Somerset in whose family they still remain." October 10, 1849, Mr. Keese married Caroline Adriance Foote, daughter of Surgeon Lyman Foote, U.S.A., who, with seven of their children, survives her husband. From childhood Mrs. Keese well knew Fenimore Cooper. From his tender years to the age of twenty-four Mr. Keese lived in close touch with the author until his death in 1851. Afterwards such near association, affection and ability made Mr. Keese a veritable stronghold of authentic values concerning this grand-uncle. After his five years of patient, careful direction given to the preparation of this _personal_ life of James Fenimore Cooper, the spirit of George Pomeroy Keese passed to the Land of Everlasting Light. As a traveled, scholarly, wise, and gentle man, Mr. Keese kept in live pace with current events, and he possessed that strong, rare quality of character which "says little and does much," and compels esteem and devotion from all human kind. Amongst Mr. Keese's various writings is "The Historic Records of Christ's Church, Cooperstown, N.Y." The rector, Reverend Ralph Birdsall, has written of its author: "At the altar of Christ's Church abides the secret that made Mr. Keese a man so widely honored and beloved." MARY E. PHILLIPS. [Illustration: RUINS OF BERRY-POMEROY CASTLE, 1825.] INDEX "Afloat and Ashore," 305 Albany, N.Y., 4, 8, 27-31, 38, 62, 104, 120, 123, 345 Alden, Henry M, 355 Allen, James, 34-35 "American Democrat, The," 272 d'Angers, Pierre Jean David, 144-146 "Autobiography of a Pocket Handkerchief, The," 293 Baillie, Joanna, 183 Balzac, 60, 276, 278, 350 Bancker, Richard, Mrs. (Sarah Duyckinck), 88-89 Bancroft, George, 117 Barnstable, 43 Battershall, W.W., 353 Belgium, 184, 244-247 Bella Genovese, the, 290-293 Benedict, Mrs. Clare, 22-23 Benjamin, Park, 273, 275 Béranger, 151 de Berri, Duchesse, 153 Birdsall, Rev. Ralph, 86, 342, 353-355 Bleeker, H., 343 Bonaparte, Princess Charlotte, 205 Bonaparte, Madame Letizia, 205, 293 Bonaparte, Napoleon I, 44, 137, 192, 244, 292 Bonaparte, Napoleon Louis, Count St Leu, 204-205, 207 Booth, Junius Brutus, 90 Box, Newport, 159 "Bravo, The," 225-229, 259 Bread and Cheese Club, 95-9, 185 Bryant, Julia, 301-302 Bryant, W.C., 84, 105, 110-113, 128, 238, 278, 338 Buffalo, N.Y., 52-56 Burlington, N.J., xii, 1, 2, 8, 60 Canning, George, 139 Case, Dick, 327-328 Cave, Harvey Birch's, 81 "Chainbearer, The," 307-308 Champlain, Lake, 60 Charles X of France, 153, 234 Chauncey, Capt. Isaac, 138 Chauntry, Sir Francis, 174-176 Clay Henry, 131 Clinton, De Witt, 75 Clinton, Gen. James, 104 Cole, Thomas, 278 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 183 Columbus, 281-282 Cooper, Ann, Cooper's sister _See Mrs. Geo. Pomeroy._ Cooper, Anne Charlotte, daughter, 16, 344-345 Cooper, Caroline Martha, 344 Cooper, Elizabeth, daughter, 71-72, 344 Cooper, Elizabeth Fenimore, mother, 2, 3, 64, 71-73 Cooper, Fenimore, son, 88, 100, 345 Cooper, Hannah, sister, 13-19 Cooper, Isaac, brother, 20, 72 Cooper, James, great-great-grandfather, 2. Cooper, James Fenimore. Accuracy, 106, 109, 115-118, 123, 127, 277, 282, 288-290; ancestry, 2-4; birth, 1; boyhood, 12, 13, 19, 23-35, 39; courage, 259, 273, 308; death, 340; honors, public, 99, 111-112, 114, 131, 192, 281; prices of works, 276-277, 350; industry, 43, 114; generosity, 57, 105-106, 219, 329, 332; screen gift, 340-343; love of art, 198, 203, 239-240; marriage, 68; name, change of, 2, 119-120; naval officer, 53-70; patriotism, 64, 79, 185, 232, 243, 258-260, 273; personality, 12, 49, 111-112, 149-152, 259, 267, 269, 280-281. Portraits: bust by d'Angers, 145; bust by Greenough, 198-200; daguerreotype by Brady, 279, 333; in oil by Jarvis, 91, 146; in oil by Madame de Mirbel, 143; Paris drawing (1827), 148; Yale silhouette, 39; sailor, the, 42-48; translations of works, 350. Cooper, James Fenimore, grandson, x, 3-5, 342, 351. Cooper, Maria Frances, daughter, 324, 342-345. Cooper, Paul Fenimore, son, 100, 214, 216-217, 243, 342, 345. Cooper, Richard Fenimore, brother, 20, 26, 62, 72. Cooper, Richard Fenimore, nephew, 344, 345. Cooper, Susan Augusta, wife, 63-65, 68, 71-72, 77, 98, 124-125, 132, 146-147, 154, 165-166, 247, 250, 264, 268, 314, 323-324, 334-338, 343-344. Cooper, Susan Augusta, daughter, 13, 54, 71, 139, 142, 220, 243, 265, 268, 282, 314, 323-327, 334-335, 344-345, 347. Cooper, Susan Augusta, granddaughter, 345, 347. Cooper, William, father, 2, 4-11, 16, 34, 36, 42, 53, 62, 101, 103, 112, 342, 351. Cooper, William, nephew, 142, 193. Cooperstown, N.Y., xi, 15, 33, 69, 71, 274, 296-299, 315, 317, 328, 336, 338-348, 351-354. Châlet Farm, 296-299, 311-314, 327. "Chronicles of," 34, 102. Fenimore Farm home, 71-72. Manor, The, 8, 9, 103. Otsego Hall, 8, 9, 16, 100, 261-265, 300, 317, 340, 345-347. Otsego Lake, 4, 5, 6, 18-21, 27-28, 71, 104, 261, 265, 276, 282-286, 296, 324-328, 340, 356. Three-Mile Point, 270-272, 327-328. Cory, Master Oliver, 23-25. "Crater, The," 308-309. Croghan, Geo., xii. Crosby, Enoch, 80, 86. Dana, Richard Henry, 96, 111, 201. "Deerslayer, The," 5, 282-286. DeKay, James E., 93, 95. Drake, Joseph Rodman, 92-93. Drescher, Rudolf, 350. Dunlap, William, 322-323. Dwight, Timothy, 36, 37. _Edinburgh Review, The_, 110. Elba, 291-293. Elliott, Jesse D., 287-289. Ellison, Dr. Thomas, 28-33, 35, 353. England, 2, 44, 111, 115-118, 169-172, 277, 305. Erie, Lake, Battle of, 293-294, 306. "Excursions in Italy," 210. Fenimore, Elizabeth. _See Mrs. Wm. Cooper_. Fenimore, Richard, 2, 262. Fenimore box, 3. Florence, Palazzo Ricasoli, 197-198. Florence, Villa St. Illario, 206-208. Floyd, Elizabeth, 67. Floyd, Col. Richard, 67. France, 135, 157, 168-169, 228, 237, 243. Francis, Dr. J.W., 186, 278, 322, 336-337, 339-340. Frey, Heindrick, 11, 12. Galitzin, Princess, 139-140, 164-166. Gelsomina, 226-228. George, Lake, 120, 125-126. Germany, 228, 247, 251, 253-255, 349-350. Gibraltar, 46. "Gleanings in Europe," 236, 270. Glens Fall, 122-124. Goodrich, A.T., 78. _Graham's Magazine_, 287, 293, 305, 308. Greeley, Horace, 273, 275. Green, Geo. Washington, 149-152, 332. Greenough, Horatio, 198-203, 268. Grey, Charles, Earl, 181. Hackett, James H., 321. Hall, J.E., 84. Hall, Mrs. Sarah, 84. Halleck, Fitz-Greene, 90, 92-93, 95. Halsey, Francis Whiting, 351. Harrison, Judge Bazil, 313. Harrison, William Henry, 14-16. "Headsman, The," 257. Heathcote, Hon. Caleb, 66. Heidelberg and Castle, 253-254. "Heidenmauer, The," 252. Hell Gate, 100, 124, 176, 307. Holland, 180, 183-184. Holland House, 45, 177-180. Holland, Lady, 176, 180. Holland, Lord, 178-180. "Home as Found," 272, 276. "Homeward Bound," 272. Hooper, Dr. Joseph, 29. Howe, M.A. DeWolfe, 274. Hudson River, The, 93, 120-121. _Hudson_, The, 132-133. Hugo, Victor, 350. Huntington, Daniel, 112-113. Irish, Mr., 109-110. Irving, Washington, 84, 90, 112-113, 138-139, 176, 278. Isle of Wight, 44, 133-134. Italy, 197-268. Jarvis, John Wesley, 91-95. Jay, John, Chief Justice, 32, 41, 77-78, 80, 259. Jay (Mary Duyckinck), Mrs. Peter, 88-89. Jay, William, 32, 34, 41. Johnston, Capt. John, 43-44, 46. Jones, John Paul, 108-109, 294-295. Kean, Edmund, 90. Keese, George Pomeroy Keese, ix, x, xi, 7, 19, 21, 264, 267, 274, 296, 317, 327-328, 340, 342-343, 351, 357. Keese, Mrs. Geo. Pomeroy Keese, 300-301, 357. Kent, Chancellor James, 95, 131-132. King, Charles, 95, 114. _Knickerbocker Magazine_, 162. Lafayette, General, 114-116, 137, 142, 149-157, 166-169, 233-237. de Lancey, Edward Floyd, 29. de Lancey and his seal, Lieut. Gov. James, 65-66. de Lancey, John Peter, 63-64, 66-67. de Lancey, Stephen, 65, 67. de Lancey, Susan Augusta. _See Mrs. J.F. Cooper_. de Lancey, Bishop Wm. Heathcote, 68, 343-344. Lawrence, Capt. James, 1, 60-61, 63, 316. Lawrence, Sir Thomas, 182. Leatherstocking, 5, 19, 59, 100-101, 120, 123-130, 162-164, 189-190, 243, 278, 282, 322, 332-384. Leghorn, 211-212. Leland, Charles G., 349. Leopold II of Tuscany, 202-204. Leslie, Charles Robt., 177-178, 182. "Letter to his Countrymen, A," 267. Lind, Jenny, 334-335. "Lionel Lincoln," 115-118. Lockhart, John Gibson, 161-162, 182. Lockhart, Mrs. Sophia Scott, 181-182. London, 44-45, 47, 134, 170-184, 186, 210. Louis Philippe, 234-236. Lounsbury, Thomas R., 237, 288-290, 307, 320. Luscomb, Archbishop, 240. McLane, Mr. Louis, 235-236. Mackenzie, Lieut. Alex. Slidell, 305-306. Mackintosh, Sir James, 177, 182, 232. Mahan, Capt. A.T., 287. Marie Amélie, 236-237. Mathews, Charles, 320-322. Matthews, Brander, 110, 126, 130, 229. "Mercedes of Castile," 281-282. Mickieowicz, Adam, 218-219. "Mohicans, The Last of the," 269. Monroe, Mrs. Elizabeth, 119. Montague, Wortley, 120, 126. Morris, Geo. P., 90, 93. Morse, Samuel F.B., 95, 239, 243, 262. Myers, Ned, 45, 49, 265, 286, 299. "Myers, Ned," 48-49. Naples and Bay, 212-213, 259-260. "Naval History Dispute," 287-288. "Naval Officers, Lives of Distinguished," 308. "Navy, History of the United States," 48, 277-278, 288-290, 305, 338. Nelson, Judge Samuel, 265, 266. Newport, R.I., 158-159, 198. _News, Illustrated London_, 162. New York City, 67-128, 131-132, 259-269, 323-324. Burn's Coffee House, 67-68. Castle Garden, 114-115, 335. City Hotel, 67, 93, 95. Fraunces Tavern, 67. Homes, Cooper's: Beech St., 98-99. Bleeker St., 260, 269. Broadway, 88, 90, 98. Greenwich St., 128, 130. St. Mark's Place, 272-276. Theatres: Burton's, 321. Lafayette, 87. Park, 90. Washington Hall, 95. Niagara Falls, 56, 309-310, 315. North, Christopher, 96, 259. "Notions of Americans," 185. "Oak Openings, The," 314. Oaken Bucket, The Old, 93-95. _Oneida, The_, 53-54, 56. Ontario, 54, 123. Oswego, N.Y., 53. _Otsego Herald_, 17, 18, 33, 51, 101. Paris, 136, 137-138, 184, 210, 228, 232-243, 248. Parkman, Francis, 126. "Pathfinder, The," 59-60, 278, 282, 283-284. Perry, Oliver Hazard, 287, 293, 305. "Pilot, The," 62, 106-111, 351. "Pioneers, The," 54, 74, 105, 111, 258. Pomeroy, Mr. and Mrs. George, 18, 21-23. _Post, The Evening_, 111. "Prairie, The," 59, 129-130, 138, 162-164, 258. "Precaution," 74, 77-78. Putnam, George P., 112-113, 335. _Putnam's Magazine_, 238. Quoi de Mesereau, Mon. Le, 102. "Recollections of Europe," 135, 157, 168. "Red Rover, The," 62, 98, 118, 146, 156, 158, 160, 198, 238. "Red Skins, The," 308. "Rhine, Excursions up the," and Rhine Country, 244, 247-255. Rogers, Samuel, 45, 174-176, 178, 180-183. Rome, 216-220. Home in, 218. Ruins, 218-220. St. Peter's, 216-218. Sailor's Snug Harbor, 48-49. "Satanstoe," 306-307. Saxton, A.B., 352-356. Scott, Miss Anne, 141-142, 182. Scott, Sir Walter, 76-77, 139-143, 160-162, 182. Scott, Gen. Winfield, 315. "Sea Lions, The," 318-320. Shubrick, Wm. B., 62, 109-110, 316-319. "Sketches of England," 32, 270, 286. Smith, Gerrit, 317. _Somers_, The, 305-306. Sorrento, 213-215, 227-228. Southby, William, 183. Spencer, John C., 305. "Spy, The," 74, 83-87, 100, 111, 258, 315. Stanley, Hon. E.G. (Lord Derby), 120, 123, 126, 127. _Stirling_, The, 43-44, 46-48. Switzerland, 186-196. St. Bernard, Hospice and Pass of, 257-258. Bridge, Devil's, 193-195. Homes, Cooper's: _La Lorraine_, Berne, 187, 189, 191. _Mon Repose_, Vevay, 255. Cooper's book: "Sketches in Switzerland." "Switzerland, Sketches in," 269-270. "Tales for Fifteen," 105-107. Talleyrand, Charles Maurice de, 16-18, 108, 153-154. Thackeray, Wm. M., 162. "Tier Jack," 314-315. Tom, Joe, 328-329. 
40529	----	Transcriber's note This text is an appendix to volume 12 of a 13-volume set of the complete works of Nathaniel Hawthorne entitled: The Complete Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, with Introductory Notes by George Parsons Lathrop and illustrated with Etchings by Blum, Church, Dielman, Gifford, Shirlaw, and Turner in Thirteen Volumes, Volume XII. Tales, Sketches, and other Papers by Nathaniel Hawthorne with a Biographical Sketch by George Parsons Lathrop. BOSTON HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY New York: 11 East Seventeenth Street The Riverside Press, Cambridge 1883. Some illustrations of this work have been moved from the original sequence to enable the contents to continue without interruption. Punctuation inconsistencies have been silently corrected. A list of other corrections made can be found at the end of the book. Mark up: _italics_ +bold+ +Riverside Edition+ THE COMPLETE WORKS OF NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, WITH INTRODUCTORY NOTES BY GEORGE PARSONS LATHROP AND ILLUSTRATED WITH _Etchings by Blum, Church, Dielman, Gifford, Shirlaw, and Turner_ IN THIRTEEN VOLUMES VOLUME XII. [Illustration] TALES, SKETCHES, AND OTHER PAPERS BY NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE _WITH A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH_ BY GEORGE PARSONS LATHROP [Illustration] BOSTON HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY New York: 11 East Seventeenth Street +The Riverside Press, Cambridge+ 1883 Copyright, 1850, 1852, 1862, 1864, and 1876, BY NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, TICKNOR & FIELDS, AND JAMES R. OSGOOD & CO. Copyright, 1878, BY ROSE HAWTHORNE LATHROP. Copyright, 1883, BY HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO. _All rights reserved._ _The Riverside Press, Cambridge:_ Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Co. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. I. THE lives of great men are written gradually. It often takes as long to construct a true biography as it took the person who is the subject of it to complete his career; and when the work is done, it is found to consist of many volumes, produced by a variety of authors. We receive views from different observers, and by putting them together are able to form our own estimate. What the man really was not even himself could know; much less can we. Hence all that we accomplish, in any case, is to approximate to the reality. While we flatter ourselves that we have imprinted on our minds an exact image of the individual, we actually secure nothing but a typical likeness. This likeness, however, is amplified and strengthened by successive efforts to paint a correct portrait. If the faces of people belonging to several generations of a family be photographed upon one plate, they combine to form a single distinct countenance, which shows a general resemblance to them all: in somewhat the same way, every sketch of a distinguished man helps to fix the lines of that typical semblance of him which is all that the world can hope to preserve. This principle applies to the case of Hawthorne, notwithstanding that the details of his career are comparatively few, and must be marshalled in much the same way each time that it is attempted to review them. The veritable history of his life would be the history of his mental development, recording, like Wordsworth's "Prelude," the growth of a poet's mind; and on glancing back over it he too might have said, in Wordsworth's phrases:-- "Wisdom and spirit of the universe! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . By day or star-light thus from my first dawn Of childhood didst thou intertwine for me The passions that build up the human soul; Not with the mean and vulgar works of man, But with high objects, with enduring things-- With life and nature, purifying thus The elements of feeling and of thought, And sanctifying by such discipline Both pain and fear, until we recognize A grandeur in the beatings of the heart." But a record of that kind, except where an autobiography exists, can be had only by indirect means. We must resort to tracing the outward facts of the life, and must try to infer the interior relations. Nathaniel Hawthorne was born on the Fourth of July, 1804, at Salem, Massachusetts, in a house numbered twenty-one, Union Street. The house is still standing, although somewhat reduced in size and still more reduced in circumstances. The character of the neighborhood has declined very much since the period when Hawthorne involuntarily became a resident there. As the building stands to-day it makes the impression simply of an exceedingly plain, exceedingly old-fashioned, solid, comfortable abode, which in its prime must have been regarded as proof of a sufficient but modest prosperity on the part of the occupant. It is clapboarded, is two stories high, and has a gambrel roof, immediately beneath which is a large garret that doubtless served the boy-child well as a place for play and a stimulant for the sense of mystery. A single massive chimney, rising from the centre, emphasizes by its style the antiquity of the building, and has the air of holding it together. The cobble-stoned street in front is narrow, and although it runs from the house towards the water-side, where once an extensive commerce was carried on, and debouches not far from the Custom House where Hawthorne in middle life found plenty of occupation as Surveyor, it is now silent and deserted. He was the second of three children born to Nathaniel Hathorne, sea-captain, and Elizabeth Clarke Manning. The eldest was Elizabeth Manning Hathorne, who came into the world March 7, 1802; the last was Maria Louisa, born January 9, 1808, and lost in the steamer Henry Clay, which was burned on the Hudson River, July 27, 1852. Elizabeth survived all the members of the family, dying on the 1st of January, 1883, when almost eighty-one years old, at Montserrat, a hamlet in the township of Beverly, near Salem. In early manhood, certainly at about the time when he began to publish, the young Nathaniel changed the spelling of his surname to Hawthorne; an alteration also adopted by his sisters. This is believed to have been merely a return to a mode of spelling practised by the English progenitors of the line, although none of the American ancestors had sanctioned it. "The fact that he was born in Salem," writes Dr. George B. Loring, who knew him as a fellow-townsman, "may not amount to much to other people, but it amounted to a great deal to him. The sturdy and defiant spirit of his progenitor, who first landed on these shores, found a congenial abode among the people of Naumkeag, after having vainly endeavored to accommodate itself to the more imposing ecclesiasticism of Winthrop and his colony at Trimountain, and of Endicott at his new home. He was a stern Separatist ... but he was also a warrior, a politician, a legal adviser, a merchant, an orator with persuasive speech.... He had great powers of mind and body, and forms a conspicuous figure in that imposing and heroic group which stands around the cradle of New England. The generations of the family that followed took active and prominent part in the manly adventures which marked our entire colonial period.... It was among the family traditions gathered from the Indian wars, the tragic and awful spectre of the witchcraft delusion, the wild life of the privateer, that he [Nathaniel] first saw the light." The progenitor here referred to is William Hathorne, who came to America with John Winthrop in 1630. He had grants of land in Dorchester, but was considered so desirable a citizen that the town of Salem offered him other lands if he would settle there; which he did. It has not been ascertained from what place William Hathorne originally came. His elder brother Robert is known to have written to him in 1653 from the village of Bray, in Berkshire, England; but Nathaniel Hawthorne says in the "American Note-Books" that William was a younger brother of a family having for its seat a place called Wigcastle, in Wiltshire. He became, however, a person of note and of great usefulness in the community with which he cast his lot, in the new England. Hathorne Street in Salem perpetuates his name to-day, as Lathrop Street does that of Captain Thomas Lathrop, who commanded one of the companies of Essex militia, when John Hathorne was quartermaster of the forces; Thomas Lathrop, who marched his men to Deerfield in 1675, to protect frontier inhabitants from the Indians, and perished with his whole troop, in the massacre at Bloody Brook. The year after that, William Hathorne also took the field against the Indians, in Maine, and conducted a highly successful campaign there, under great hardships. He had been the captain of the first military organization in Salem, and rose to be major. He served for a number of years as deputy in the Great and General Court; was a tax-collector, a magistrate, and a bold advocate of colonial self-government. Although opposed to religious persecution, as a magistrate he inflicted cruelties on the Quakers, causing a woman on one occasion to be whipped through Salem, Boston, and Dedham. "The figure of that first ancestor," Hawthorne wrote in "The Custom House," "invested by family tradition with a dim and dusky grandeur, was present to my boyish imagination as far back as I can remember;" so that it is by no means idle to reckon the history of his own family as among the important elements influencing the bent of his genius. John, the son of William, was likewise a public character; he, too, became a representative, a member of the Governor's council, a magistrate and a military officer, and saw active service as a soldier in the expedition which he headed against St. John, in 1696. But he is chiefly remembered as the judge who presided over the witchcraft trials and displayed great harshness and bigotry in his treatment of the prisoners. His descendants did not retain the position in public affairs which had been held by his father and himself; and for the most part they were sea-faring men. One of them, indeed, Daniel--the grandfather of Nathaniel--figured as a privateer captain in the Revolution, fighting one battle with a British troop-ship off the coast of Portugal, in which he was wounded; but the rest led the obscure though hardy and semi-romantic lives of maritime traders sailing to Africa, India, or Brazil. The privateersman had among his eight children three boys, one of whom, Nathaniel, was the father of the author, and died of fever in Surinam, in the spring of 1808, at the age of thirty-three. HATHORNE FAMILY OF SALEM, MASSACHUSETTS. Hathorne = | +-------------------+-------------+---------+-----+ | | | | Robert Hathorne William, came in the = Anne | John Hathorne of = Sarah writes to his Arbella, with John | | Salem and Lynn, | brother, William, Winthrop 1630; first | | died in Lynn | from Bray (Berks), of Dorchester; | | 12 Dec. 1676. | 1 April, 1653. afterwards of Salem; | | Will sworn to | deputy, speaker of | | 25-1-1677. | the House, | | | Assistant, Major | | | commanding in | | | Indian Wars; ob. | | | 1681 in 74th year of | | | his age. Will proved | | | 28 June, 1681. | | | | | | +--------------------------------------+ | | | | | | +-------------------+ | | | | | Elizabeth = Capt. Richard Davenport | | (?) killed by lightning | | 15 July, 1665. | | | | +-------+-----------+---+--------------+-+---+---------------+ | | | | | | | | | | | John | William b. in | | Phebe b. in Lynn | | | bapt. at Salem | Lynn ---- Nov. | | 22 March, 1665. | | | 18 Oct. 1646. | 1651; d. 14 Sept.| | | | | | 1676. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Sarah bapt. at Salem | | Ebenezer b. in Lynn | | 2 June, 1644. | | ---- March, 1656. | | Priscilla | | | bapt. at Salem | | | 22 July, 1649; Mary b. in Lynn | | m. 15 Jan. 1669 ---- July 1653; | | to Jonathan Shore. d. 31 Dec. 1676. | | | | Nathaniel | named in his | father's will. +-+--------------+--+------+---------------+-+-----+-----------+ | | | | | | | | ---- = ---- | | Nathaniel | | William = Sarah | (dau.) | Helwise | | b. 11 Aug. 1639. | | b. 1 Apr. | | | | | | 1645; | Gervice Helwise | | | | d. 14 July, | in "Urop" | | | | 1676. Captain. | according | | | | | to his gr. | | | | | father's will. | | | | | | | | Anna born | | | | 12 Dec. 1643; | | | | m. 27 Jan. 1664-5 | | | | to Joseph Porter. | | Eleazer b. 1 Aug. 1637; | +-----------+ | m. 28-6-1663, Abigail, | | | dau. of Capt. George | Elizabeth | Curwen, of Salem. | b. 22 July, 1649; | | m. 20-9-1672 Sarah born 11 March, 1644-5; | to Israel Porter. m. 13 April, 1665, to Joseph | Coker of Newbury, and died | 3 Feb'y, 1688. | +-------------------------+ | John b. 4 Aug. 1641 = Ruth dau. of Lieut. representative; Assistant; | George Gardner; Judge in Witchcraft cases; | married 22-1-1674-5. Judge Sup. Court 1702-15; | Colonel; died 10 May, | 1717; will proved 27 June, | 1717. | | +--------------------+--------+-------+----+--+-------------------+ | | | | | | John b. 10 Jan'y 1675. | | | | | | | | Ruth, = James Pitman | Nathaniel = Ebenezer | bapt. | b. 25 Nov.| bapt. Mch. 1685. | Sept. 1694. | 1678. | | Benjamin +--------+ | (named in his | | father's will). John mentioned | in his gr. father's will. | +-------------------+ | Joseph bapt. June, 1691. = Sara dau. of Capt. W. Will proved 15 July, 1762. | Bowditch b. 10 Jan'y, | 1695-6. | +---------------------+-------+---+-------------------+---------+--+ | | | | | | | William = Mary dau. of | | Sarah = Daniel Chever | | | born 20 John Touzell | | bapt. | | | Feb'y, m. 29 March, | | 27 Jan. 1722. | | | 1715-1716. 1741. | | Ebenezer | | Joseph | bapt. 26 Dec. 1725. | | bapt. 4th | +-----------------+ | May, 1718. | | +---------------+ | | | | | Ruth = David Ropes | | m. 30 Sept. +---------------------+ | 1752. | | John bapt. = Susanna Touzell | 22 May, 1719, | will pro. 7 Sept. | d. 6 Feb'y, 1750. | 1802. | | | +--John } | | } ment. in will | +--Susanna} of gr. father. | | Daniel, a mariner; = Rachel Phelps adm. gr. to wid. | 4 May, 1796. | | +----------------+----+--------+---------+---+------+---+ | | | | | | | | Daniel | Eunice | | | Ruth b. | b. 23 June, 1759; | b. 4 Oct. | | | 20 Jan. | d. 13 Mar. 1763. | 1766. | | | 1778; d. | +----------------+ Ob. s. p. | | | 26 July, | | Daniel | | 1847. | Sarah = John Crowninshield. b. 25 July, | | | b. 11 May 1763. 1768. | | Rachel = Simon +-------------------------------+ | | Forrester. | | | Judith = George Archer | -- b. 17 Apr. 1770. m. 2 March, 1792. | | +-------------------------------------------+ | Nathaniel, Sea Captain; b. 19 May, 1775; = Elizabeth Clarke Manning adm. gr. to his wid. 19 Apr. 1808; | b. 6 Sept. 1780; died in Surinam. | died 31 July, 1849. | +-----------------+-----------------+------------------+ | | | Elizabeth Manning | Maria Louisa born 7 March, 1802; | b. 9 Jan'y, 1808; died 1 Jan'y, 1883. | lost in the steamer | Henry Clay, burned | on the Hudson River | 27 July, 1852. | +NATHANIEL+ b. 4 July, 1804; = Sophia, dau. of Doc. Nathl. Peabody, d. at Plymouth, N. H. of Salem; b. 21 Sept. 1809; mar. in 19 May, 1864. Boston July, 1842. Buried at Concord, Mass. 23 May, 1864. He changed his surname to Hawthorne. The founders of the American branch were men of independent character, proud, active, energetic, capable of extreme sternness and endowed with passionate natures, no doubt. But they were men of affairs; they touched the world on the practical side, and, even during the decline of the family fortunes, continued to do so. All at once, in the personality of the younger Nathaniel Hawthorne, this energy which persisted in them reversed its direction, and found a new outlet through the channel of literary expression. We must suppose that he included among his own characteristics all those of his predecessors; their innate force, their endurance, their capacity for impassioned feeling; but in him these elements were fused by a finer prevailing quality, and held in firm balance by his rare temperament. This must be borne in mind, if we would understand the conjunction of opposite traits in him. It was one of his principles to guard against being run away with by his imagination, and to cultivate in practical affairs what he called "a morose common sense." There has been attributed to him by some of those who knew him a certain good-humored gruffness, which might be explained as a heritage from the self-assertive vitality of his ancestors. While at Liverpool he wrote to one of his intimates in this country, and in doing so made reference to another acquaintance as a "wretch," to be away from whom made exile endurable. The letter passed into the hands of the acquaintance thus stigmatized long after Hawthorne was in his grave; but he declared himself to be in no wise disturbed by it, because he knew that the remark was not meant seriously, being only one of the occasional explosions of a "sea-dog" forcefulness, which had come into the writer's blood from his skipper forefathers. Hawthorne had, in fact, parted on friendly terms from the gentleman of whom he thus wrote. On the other hand we have the traits of sensitiveness, great delicacy, reserve and reverie, drawn from both his father and his mother. Captain Hathorne had been a man of fine presence, handsome, kindly, and rather silent; a reader, likewise; and his son's resemblance to him was so marked that a strange sailor stopped Hawthorne on the steps of the Salem Custom House, many years afterward, to ask him if he were not a son or nephew of the Captain, whom he had known. His mother belonged to an excellent family, the Mannings, of English stock, settled in Salem and Ipswich ever since 1680, and still well represented in the former place. She, too, was a very reserved person; had a stately, aristocratic manner; is remembered as possessing a peculiar and striking beauty. Her education was of that simple, austere, but judicious and perfected kind that--without taking any very wide range--gave to New England women in the earlier part of this century a sedate freedom and a cultivated judgment, which all the assumed improvements in pedagogy and the general relations of men and women since then have hardly surpassed. She was a pious woman, a sincere and devoted wife, a mother whose teachings could not fail to impress upon her children a bias towards the best things in life. Nathaniel's sister Elizabeth, although a recluse to the end of her days, and wholly unknown to the public, gave in her own case evidence indisputable of the fine influences which had moulded her own childhood and that of her brother. She showed a quiet, unspoiled, and ardent love of Nature, and was to the last not only an assiduous reader of books but also a very discriminating one. The range of her reading was very wide, but she never made any more display of it than Hawthorne did of his. An intuitive judgment of character was hers, which was really startling at times: merely from the perusal of a book or the inspection of a portrait, she would arrive at accurate estimates of character which revealed a power of facile and comprehensive insight; and her letters, even in old age, flowed spontaneously into utterance of the same finished kind that distinguished Nathaniel Hawthorne's epistolary style. How fresh and various, too, was her interest in the affairs of the world! For many years she had not gone farther from her secluded abode in a farm-house at Montserrat, than to Beverly or Salem; yet I remember that, only six months before her death, she wrote a letter to her niece, a large part of which was devoted to the campaign of the English in Egypt, then progressing: with a lively and clear comprehension she discussed the difficulties of the situation, and expressed the utmost concern for the success of the English army, at the same time that she laughed at herself for displaying, as an old woman, so much anxiety about the matter. Now, a mother who could bring up her daughter in such a way as to make all this possible and natural, must be given much credit for her share in developing an illustrious son. Let us not forget that it was to his mother that Goethe owed in good measure the foundation of his greatness. Mrs. Hathorne had large, very luminous gray eyes, which were reproduced in her son's; so that, on both sides, his parentage entitled him to the impressive personal appearance which distinguished him. In mature life he became somewhat estranged from her, but their mutual love was presumably suspended only for a time, and he was with her at her death, in 1849. She lived long enough to see him famous as the author of "Twice-Told Tales"; but "The Scarlet Letter" had not been written when she died. She, as well as her husband, was one of a family of eight brothers and sisters; these were the children of Richard Manning. Two of the brothers, Richard and Robert, were living in Salem when she was left a widow; Robert being eminent in New England at that time as a horticulturist. She was without resources, other than her husband's earnings, and Robert undertook to provide for her. Accordingly, she removed with her young family to the Manning homestead on Herbert Street, the next street east of Union Street, where Nathaniel was born. This homestead stood upon a piece of land running through to Union Street, and adjoining the garden attached to Hawthorne's birthplace. At that time Dr. Nathaniel Peabody, a physician, occupied a house in a brick block on the opposite side of Union Street; and there in 1809, September 21st, was born his daughter, Sophia A. Peabody, who afterwards became Hawthorne's wife. Her birthplace, therefore, was but a few rods distant from that of her future husband. Sophia Peabody's eldest sister, Mary, who married Horace Mann, noted as an educator and an abolitionist, remembers the child Nathaniel, who was then about five years old. He used to make his appearance in the garden of the Herbert Street mansion, running and dancing about there at play, a vivacious, golden-haired boy. The next oldest sister, who was the first of this family to make the acquaintance of the young author some thirty years later on, was Miss Elizabeth P. Peabody, who has taken an important part in developing the Kindergarten in America. There were plenty of books in the Manning house, and Nathaniel very soon got at them. Among the authors whom he earliest came to know were Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Thomson, and Rousseau. The "Castle of Indolence" was one of his favorite volumes. Subsequently, he read the whole of the "Newgate Calendar," and became intensely absorbed in Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress," which undoubtedly left very deep impressions upon him, traceable in the various allusions to it scattered through his works. He also made himself familiar with Spenser's "Faërie Queen," Froissart's "Chronicles," and Clarendon's "History of the Rebellion." "Being a healthy boy, with strong out-of-door instincts planted in him by inheritance from his sea-faring sire, it might have been that he would not have been brought so early to an intimacy with books, but for an accident similar to that which played a part in the boyhoods of Scott and Dickens. When he was nine years old, he was struck on the foot by a ball, and made seriously lame. The earliest fragment of his writing now extant is a letter to his uncle Robert Manning, at that time in Raymond, Maine, written from Salem, December 9, 1813. It announces that the foot is no better, and that a new doctor is to be sent for. 'Maybe,' the boy writes, 'he will do me some good, for Dr. B---- has not, and I don't know as Dr. K---- will.' He adds that it is now four weeks since he has been to school, 'and I don't know but it will be four weeks longer.'... But the trouble was destined to last much longer than even the young seer had projected his gaze. There was some threat of deformity, and it was not until he was nearly twelve that he became quite well. Meantime, his kind schoolmaster, Dr. Worcester, ... came to hear him his lessons at home. The good pedagogue does not figure after this in Hawthorne's history; but a copy of Worcester's Dictionary still exists and is in present use, which bears in a tremulous writing on the fly-leaf the legend: 'Nathaniel Hawthorne Esq., with the respects of J. E. Worcester.' For a long time, in the worst of his lameness, the gentle boy was forced to lie prostrate, and choosing the floor for his couch, he would read there all day long. He was extremely fond of cats--a taste which he kept through life; and during this illness, forced to odd resorts for amusement, he knitted a pair of socks for the cat who reigned in the household at the time. When tired of reading, he constructed houses of books for the same feline pet, building walls for her to leap, and perhaps erecting triumphal arches for her to pass under."[1] The lexicographer, Dr. Worcester, was then living at Salem in charge of a school, which he kept for a few years; and it was with him that Hawthorne was carrying on his primary studies. He also went to dancing-school, was fond of fishing as well as of taking long walks, and doubtless engaged in the sundry occupations and sports, neither more nor less extraordinary than these, common to lads of his age. He already displayed a tendency towards dry humor. As he brought home from school frequent reports of having had a bout at fisticuffs with another pupil named John Knights, his sister Elizabeth asked him: "Why do you fight with John Knights so often?" "I can't help it," he answered: "John Knights is a boy of very quarrelsome disposition." But all this time an interior growth, of which we can have no direct account, was proceeding in his mind. The loss of the father whom he had had so little chance to see and know and be fondled by, no doubt produced a profound effect upon him. While still a very young child he would rouse himself from long broodings, to exclaim with an impressive shaking of the head: "There, mother! I is going away to sea some time; and I'll never come back again!" The thought of that absent one, whose barque had glided out of Salem harbor bound upon a terrestrial voyage, but had carried him softly away to the unseen world, must have been incessantly with the boy; and it would naturally melt into what he heard of the strange, shadowy history of his ancestors, and mix itself with the ever-present hush of settled grief in his mother's dwelling, and blend with his unconscious observations of the old town in which he lived. Salem then was much younger in time, but much older to the eye, than it is now. In "Alice Doane's Appeal" he has sketched a rapid bird's-eye view of it as it appeared to him when he was a young man. Describing his approach with his sisters to Witch Hill, he says: "We ... began to ascend a hill which at a distance, by its dark slope and the even line of its summit, resembled a green rampart along the road; ... but, strange to tell, though the whole slope and summit were of a peculiarly deep green, scarce a blade of grass was visible from the base upward. This deceitful verdure was occasioned by a plentiful crop of 'wood-wax,' which wears the same dark and gloomy green throughout the summer, except at one short period, when it puts forth a profusion of yellow blossoms. At that season, to a distant spectator the hill appears absolutely overlaid with gold, or covered with a glory of sunshine even under a clouded sky." This wood-wax, it may be said, is a weed which grows nowhere but in Essex County, and, having been native in England, was undoubtedly brought over by the Pilgrims. He goes on: "There are few such prospects of town and village, woodland and cultivated field, steeples and country-seats, as we beheld from this unhappy spot.... Before us lay our native town, extending from the foot of the hill to the harbor, level as a chess-board, embraced by two arms of the sea, and filling the whole peninsula with a close assemblage of wooden roofs, overtopped by many a spire and intermixed with frequent heaps of verdure.... Retaining these portions of the scene, and also the peaceful glory and tender gloom of the declining sun, we threw in imagination a deep veil of forest over the land, and pictured a few scattered villages here and there and this old town itself a village, as when the prince of Hell bore sway there. The idea thus gained of its former aspect, its quaint edifices standing far apart with peaked roofs and projecting stories, and its single meeting-house pointing up a tall spire in the midst; the vision, in short, of the town in 1692, served to introduce a wondrous tale." There were in fact several old houses of the kind here described still extant during Hawthorne's boyhood, and he went every Sunday to service in the First Church, in whose congregation his forefathers had held a pew for a hundred and seventy years. It is easy to see how some of the materials for "The House of the Seven Gables" and "The Scarlet Letter" were already depositing themselves in the form of indelible recollections and suggestions taken from his surroundings. Oppressed by her great sorrow, his mother had shut herself away, after her husband's death, from all society except that of her immediate relatives. This was perhaps not a very extraordinary circumstance, nor one that need be construed as denoting a morbid disposition; but it was one which must have distinctly affected the tone of her son's meditations. In 1818, when he was fourteen years old, she retired to a still deeper seclusion, in Maine; but the occasion of this was simply that her brother Robert, having purchased the seven-mile-square township of Raymond, in that State, had built a house there, intending to found a new home. The year that Hawthorne passed in that spot, amid the breezy life of the forest, fishing and shooting, watching the traits and customs of lumber-men and country-folk, and drinking in the tonic of a companionship with untamed nature, was to him a happy and profitable one. "We are all very well," he wrote thence to his Uncle Robert, in May, 1819: "The fences are all finished, and the garden is laid out and planted.... I have shot a partridge and a henhawk, and caught eighteen large trout out of our brook. I am sorry you intend to send me to school again." He had been to the place before, probably for short visits, when his Uncle Richard was staying there, and his memories of it were always agreeable ones. To Mr. James T. Fields, he said in 1863: "I lived in Maine like a bird of the air, so perfect was the freedom I enjoyed. But it was there I first got my cursed habits of solitude." "During the moonlight nights of winter he would skate until midnight all alone upon Sebago Lake, with the deep shadows of the icy hills on either hand. When he found himself far away from his home and weary with the exercise of skating, he would sometimes take refuge in a log-cabin, where half a tree would be burning on the broad hearth. He would sit in the ample chimney, and look at the stars through the great aperture through which the flames went roaring up. 'Ah,' he said, 'how well I recall the summer days, also, when with my gun I roamed through the woods of Maine!'"[2] Hawthorne at this time had an intention of following the example of his father and grandfather, and going to sea; but this was frustrated by the course of events. His mother, it is probable, would strongly have objected to it. In a boyish journal kept while he was at Raymond he mentions a gentleman having come with a boat to take one or two persons out on "the Great Pond," and adds: "He was kind enough to say that I might go (with my mother's consent), which she gave after much coaxing. Since the loss of my father she dreads to have any one belonging to her go upon the water." And again: "A young man named Henry Jackson, Jr., was drowned two days ago, up in Crooked River.... I read one of the Psalms to my mother this morning, and it plainly declares twenty-six times that 'God's mercy endureth forever.'... Mother is sad; says she shall not consent any more to my swimming in the mill-pond with the boys, fearing that in sport my mouth might get kicked open, and then sorrow for a dead son be added to that for a dead father, which she says would break her heart. I love to swim, but I shall not disobey my mother." This same journal, which seems to have laid the basis of his life-long habit of keeping note-books, was begun at the suggestion of Mr. Richard Manning, who gave him a blank-book, with advice that he should use it for recording his thoughts, "as the best means of his securing for mature years command of thought and language." In it were made a number of entries which testify plainly to his keenness of observation both of people and scenery, to his sense of humor and his shrewdness. Here are a few:-- "Swapped pocket-knives with Robinson Cook yesterday. Jacob Dingley says that he cheated me, but I think not, for I cut a fishing-pole this morning and did it well; besides, he is a Quaker, and they never cheat." "This morning the bucket got off the chain, and dropped back into the well. I wanted to go down on the stones and get it. Mother would not consent, for fear the well might cave in, but hired Samuel Shaw to go down. In the goodness of her heart, she thought the son of old Mrs. Shaw not quite so good as the son of the Widow Hathorne." Of a trout that he saw caught by some men:--"This trout had a droll-looking hooked nose, and they tried to make me believe that, if the line had been in my hands, I should have been obliged to let go, or have been pulled out of the boat. They are men, and have a right to say so. I am a boy, and have a right to think differently." "We could see the White Hills to the northwest, though Mr. Little said they were eighty miles away; and grand old Rattlesnake to the northeast, in its immense jacket of green oak, looked more inviting than I had ever seen it; while Frye's Island, with its close growth of great trees growing to the very edge of the water, looked like a monstrous green raft, floating to the southeastward. Whichever way the eye turned, something charming appeared." The mental clearness, the sharpness of vision, and the competence of the language in this early note-book are remarkable, considering the youth and inexperience of the writer; and there is one sketch of "a solemn-faced old horse" at the grist-mill, which exhibits a delightful boyish humor with a dash of pathos in it, and at the same time is the first instance on record of a mild approach by Hawthorne to the writing of fiction:-- "He had brought for his owner some bags of corn to be ground, who, after carrying them into the mill, walked up to Uncle Richard's store, leaving his half-starved animal in the cold wind with nothing to eat, while the corn was being turned into meal. I felt sorry, and, nobody being near, thought it best to have a talk with the old nag, and said, 'Good morning, Mr. Horse, how are you to-day?' 'Good morning, youngster,' said he, just as plain as a horse can speak; and then said, 'I am almost dead, and I wish I was quite. I am hungry, have had no breakfast, and must stand here tied by the head while they are grinding the corn, and until master drinks two or three glasses of rum at the store, then drag the meal and him up the Ben Ham Hill home, and am now so weak that I can hardly stand. Oh dear, I am in a bad way;' and the old creature cried. I almost cried myself. Just then the miller went down-stairs to the meal-trough; I heard his feet on the steps, and not thinking much what I was doing, ran into the mill, and, taking the four-quart toll-dish nearly full of corn out of the hopper, carried it out, and poured it into the trough before the horse, and placed the dish back before the miller came up from below. When I got out, the horse was laughing, but he had to eat slowly, because the bits were in his mouth. I told him that I was sorry, but did not know how to take them out, and should not dare to if I did.... At last the horse winked and stuck out his lip ever so far, and then said, 'The last kernel is gone;' then he laughed a little, then shook one ear, then the other; then he shut his eyes. I jumped up and said: 'How do you feel, old fellow; any better?' He opened his eyes, and looking at me kindly answered, 'Very much,' and then blew his nose exceedingly loud, but he did not wipe it. Perhaps he had no wiper. I then asked him if his master whipped him much. He answered, 'Not much lately. He used to till my hide got hardened, but now he has a white-oak goad-stick with an iron brad in its end, with which he jabs my hind-quarters and hurts me awfully.'... The goad with the iron brad was in the wagon, and snatching it out I struck the end against a stone, and the stabber flew into the mill-pond. 'There,' says I, 'old colt,' as I threw the goad back into the wagon, 'he won't harpoon you again with _that_ iron.' The poor old brute understood well enough what I said, for I looked him in the eye and spoke horse language." Mother and uncles could hardly have missed observing in him many tokens of a gifted intelligence and an uncommon individuality. The perception of these, added to Mrs. Hawthorne's dread of the sea, may have led to the decision which was taken to send him to college. In 1819 he went back to Salem, to continue his schooling; and one year later, March 7, 1820, wrote to his mother, who was still at Raymond: "I have left school, and have begun to fit for College, under Benjamin L. Oliver, Lawyer. So you are in great danger of having one learned man in your family.... Shall you want me to be a Minister, Doctor, or Lawyer? A minister I will not be." Miss E. P. Peabody remembers another letter of his, in which he touched the same problem, thus: "I do not want to be a doctor and live by men's diseases, nor a minister to live by their sins, nor a lawyer and live by their quarrels. So I don't see that there is anything left but for me to be an author. How would you like some day to see a whole shelf full of books written by your son, with 'Hathorne's Works' printed on the backs?" There appears to have been but little difficulty for him in settling the problem of his future occupation. During part of August and September he amused himself by writing three numbers of a miniature weekly paper called "The Spectator;" and in October we find that he had been composing poetry and sending it to his sister Elizabeth, who was also exercising herself in verse. At this time he was employed as a clerk, for a part of each day, in the office of another uncle, William Manning, proprietor of a great line of stages which then had extensive connections throughout New England; but he did not find the task congenial. "No man," he informed his sister, "can be a poet and a book-keeper at the same time;" from which one infers his distinct belief that literature was his natural vocation. The idea of remaining dependent for four years more on the bounty of his Uncle Robert, who had so generously taken the place of a father in giving him a support and education, oppressed him, and he even contemplated not going to college; but go he finally did, taking up his residence at Bowdoin with the class of 1821. The village of Brunswick, where Bowdoin College is situated, some thirty miles from Raymond, stands on high ground beside the Androscoggin River, which is there crossed by a bridge running zig-zag from bank to bank, resting on various rocky ledges and producing a picturesque effect. The village itself is ranged on two sides of a broad street, which meets the river at right angles, and has a mall in the centre that, in Hawthorne's time, was little more than a swamp. This street, then known as "sixteen-rod road," from its width, continues in a straight line to Casco Bay, only a few miles off; so that the new student was still near the sea and had a good course for his walks. If Harvard fifty and even twenty-five years ago had the look of a rural college, Bowdoin was by comparison an academy in a wilderness. "If this institution," says Hawthorne in "Fanshawe," where he describes it under the name of Harley College, "did not offer all the advantages of elder and prouder seminaries, its deficiencies were compensated to its students by the inculcation of regular habits, and of a deep and awful sense of religion, which seldom deserted them in their course through life. The mild and gentle rule ... was more destructive to vice than a sterner sway; and though youth is never without its follies, they have seldom been more harmless than they were here." The local resources for amusement or dissipation must have been very limited, and the demands of the curriculum not very severe. Details of Hawthorne's four years' stay at college are not forthcoming, otherwise than in small quantity. His comrades who survived him never have been able to give any very vivid picture of the life there, or to recall any anecdotes of Hawthorne: the whole episode has slipped away, like a dream from which fragmentary glimpses alone remain. By one of those unaccountable associations with trifles, which outlast more important memories, Professor Calvin Stowe (to whom the authoress of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" was afterwards married) remembers seeing Hawthorne, then a member of the class below him, crossing the college-yard one stormy day, attired in a brass-buttoned blue coat, with an umbrella over his head. The wind caught the umbrella and turned it inside out; and what stamped the incident on Professor Stowe's mind was the silent but terrible and consuming wrath with which Hawthorne regarded the implement in its utterly subverted and useless state, as he tried to rearrange it. Incidents of no greater moment and the general effect of his presence seem to have created the belief among his fellows that, beneath the bashful quietude of his exterior, was stored a capability of exerting tremendous force in some form or other. He was seventeen when he entered college,--tall, broad-chested, with clear, lustrous gray eyes,[3] a fresh complexion, and long hair: his classmates were so impressed with his masculine beauty, and perhaps with a sense of occult power in him, that they nicknamed him Oberon. Although unusually calm-tempered, however, he was quick to resent disrespectful treatment (as he had been with John Knights), and his vigorous, athletic frame made him a formidable adversary. In the same class with him were Henry W. Longfellow; George Barrell Cheever, since famous as a divine, and destined to make a great stir in Salem by a satire in verse called "Deacon Giles's Distillery," which cost him a thirty days' imprisonment, together with the loss of his pastorate; also John S. C. Abbott, the writer of popular histories; and Horatio Bridge, afterwards Lieutenant in the United States Navy, and now Commander. Bridge and Franklin Pierce, who studied in the class above him, were his most intimate friends. He boarded in a house which had a stairway on the outside, ascending to the second story; he took part, I suppose, in the "rope-pulls" and "hold-ins" between Freshmen and Sophomores, if those customs were practised then; he was fined for card-playing and for neglect of theme; entered the Athenæan Society, which had a library of eight hundred volumes; tried to read Hume's "History of England," but found it "abominably dull," and postponed the attempt; was fond of whittling, and destroyed some of his furniture in gratifying that taste. Such are the insignificant particulars to which we are confined in attempting to form an idea of the externals of his college-life. Pierce was chairman of the Athenæan Society, and also organized a military company, which Hawthorne joined. In the Preface to "The Snow-Image" we are given a glimpse of the simple amusements which occupied his leisure: "While we were lads together at a country college, gathering blueberries in study hours under those tall academic pines; or watching the great logs as they tumbled along the current of the Androscoggin; or shooting pigeons and gray squirrels in the woods; or bat-fowling in the summer-twilight; or catching trouts in that shadowy little stream which, I suppose, is still wandering riverward through the forest." He became proficient in Latin. Longfellow was wont to recall how he would rise at recitation, standing slightly sidewise--attitude indicative of his ingrained shyness--and read from the Roman classics translations which had a peculiar elegance and charm. In writing English, too, he won a reputation, and Professor Newman was often so struck with the beauty of his work in this kind that he would read them in the evening to his own family. Professor Packard says: "His themes were written in the sustained, finished style that gives to his mature productions an inimitable charm. The recollection is very distinct of Hawthorne's reluctant step and averted look, when he presented himself at the professor's study and submitted a composition which no man in his class could equal." Hawthorne always looked back with satisfaction to those simple and placid days. In 1852 he revisited the scene where they were passed, in order to be present at the semi-centennial anniversary of the founding of the college. A letter, from Concord (October 13, 1852), to Lieutenant Bridge, now for the first time published, contains the following reference to that event:-- "I meant to have told you about my visit to Brunswick.... Only eight of our classmates were present, and they were a set of dismal old fellows, whose heads looked as if they had been out in a pretty copious shower of snow. The whole intermediate quarter of a century vanished, and it seemed to me as if they had undergone the miserable transformation in the course of a single night--especially as I myself felt just about as young as when I graduated. They flattered me with the assurance that time had touched me tenderly; but alas! they were each a mirror in which I beheld the reflection of my own age. I did not arrive till after the public exercises were nearly over--and very luckily, too, for my praises had been sounded by orator and poet, and of course my blushes would have been quite oppressive." Hawthorne's rank in his class entitled him to a "part" at Commencement, but the fact that he had not cultivated declamation debarred him from that honor; and so he passed quietly away from the life of Bowdoin and settled down to his career. "I have thought much upon the subject," he wrote to his sister, just before graduation, "and have come to the conclusion that I shall never make a distinguished figure in the world, and all I hope or wish is to plod along with the multitude." But declamation was not essential to his success, which was to be achieved in anything but a declamatory fashion. II. In one sense it was all very simple, this childhood and youth and early training of Hawthorne. We can see that the conditions were not complicated and were quite homely. But the influence of good literature had been at work upon the excellent mental substance derived from a father who was fond of reading and a mother who had the plain elementary virtues on which so much depends, and great purity of soul. The composure and finish of style which he already had at command on going to college were ripened amid the homely conditions aforesaid: there must have been an atmosphere of culture in his home, unpretentious though the mode of life there was. His sister, as I have mentioned, showed much the same tone, the same commanding ease, in her writing. There existed a dignity, a reserve, an instinctive refinement in this old-fashioned household, which moved its members to appropriate the best means of expression as by natural right. They appear to have treated the most ordinary affairs of life with a quiet stateliness, as if human existence were really a thing to be considered with respect, and with a frank interest that might occasionally even admit of enthusiasm or strong feeling with regard to an experience, although thousands of beings might have passed through it before. Our new horizons, physically enlarged by rapid travel, our omnifarious culture, our passion for obtaining a glaze of cosmopolitanism to cover the common clay from which we are all moulded, do not often yield us anything essentially better than the narrow limits of the little world in which Hawthorne grew up. He was now to go back to Salem, which he once spoke of as being apparently for him "the inevitable centre of the universe;" and the conditions there were not radically altered from what they had been before. We can form an outline of him as he was then, or at most a water-color sketch presenting the fresh hues of youth, the strong manly frame of the young graduate, his fine deep-lighted eyes, and sensitively retiring ways. But we have now to imagine the change that took place in him from the recent college Senior to the maturing man; change that gradually transforms him from the visionary outline of that earlier period to a solid reality of flesh and blood, a virile and efficient person who still, while developing, did not lose the delicate sensibility of his young prime. His family having reëstablished themselves in Salem, at the old Herbert Street house, he settled himself with them, and stayed there until December, 1828, meanwhile publishing "Fanshawe" anonymously. They then moved to a smaller house on Dearborn Street, North Salem; but after four years they again took up their abode in the Herbert Street homestead. Hawthorne wrote industriously; first the "Seven Tales of my Native Land," which he burned, and subsequently the sketches and stories which, after appearing in current periodicals, were collected as "Twice-Told Tales." In 1830 he took a carriage trip through parts of Connecticut. "I meet with many marvellous adventures," was a part of his news on this occasion, but they were in reality adventures of a very tame description. He visited New York and New Hampshire and Nantucket, thus extending slightly his knowledge of men and places. A great deal of discursive reading was also accomplished. In 1836 he went to Boston to edit for Mr. S. G. Goodrich "The American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge." It did not turn out to be either useful or entertaining for the editor, who was to be paid but $500 a year for his drudgery, and in fact received only a small part of that sum. Through Goodrich, he became a copious contributor to "The Token," in the pages of which his tales first came to be generally known; but he gave up the magazine after a four months' misery of editorship, and sought refuge once more in his native town. Salem was an isolated place, was not even joined to the outer world by its present link of railroad with Boston, and afforded no very generous diet for a young, vigorous, hungry intellect like that of Hawthorne. Surroundings, however, cannot make a mind, though they may color its processes. He proceeded to extract what he could from the material at hand. "His mode of life at this period was fitted to nurture his imagination, but must have put the endurance of his nerves to the severest test. The statement that for several years 'he never saw the sun' is entirely an error. In summer he was up shortly after sunrise, and would go down to bathe in the sea; but it is true that he seldom chose to walk in the town except at night, and it is said that he was extremely fond of going to fires if they occurred after dark. The morning was chiefly given to study, the afternoon to writing, and in the evening he would take long walks, exploring the coast from Gloucester to Marblehead and Lynn--a range of many miles.... Sometimes he took the day for his rambles, wandering perhaps over Endicott's ancient Orchard Farm and among the antique houses and grassy cellars of old Salem Village, the witchcraft ground; or losing himself among the pines of Montserrat and in the silence of the Great Pastures, or strolling along the beaches to talk with old sailors and fishermen." "He had little communication with even the members of his family. Frequently his meals were brought and left at his locked door, and it was not often that the four inmates of the old Herbert Street mansion met in family circle. He never read his stories aloud to his mother and sisters, as might be imagined from the picture which Mr. Fields draws of the young author reciting his new productions to his listening family; though, when they met, he sometimes read older literature to them. It was the custom in this household for the members to remain very much by themselves: the three ladies were perhaps nearly as rigorous recluses as himself; and, speaking of the isolation which reigned among them, Hawthorne once said, 'We do not even _live_ at our house!' But still the presence of this near and gentle element is not to be underrated, as forming a very great compensation in the cold and difficult morning of his life." Of self-reliant mind, accustomed to solitude and fond of reading, it was not strange that they should have fallen into these habits, which, however peculiarly they may strike others, did not necessarily spring from a morbid disposition, and never prevented the Hawthornes from according a kindly reception to their friends. Nathaniel Hawthorne's own associates were not numerous. There was a good society in the town, for Salem was not, strictly speaking, provincial, but--aided in a degree by the separateness of its situation--retained very much its old independence as a commercial capital. There were people of wealth and cultivation, of good lineage in our simple domestic kind, who made considerable display in their entertainments and were addicted to impressive absences in Paris and London. Among these Hawthorne did not show himself at all. His preference was for individuals who had no pretensions whatever in the social way. Among his friends was one William B. Pike, a carpenter's son, who, after acquiring an ordinary public-school education without passing through the higher grades, adopted his father's trade, became a Methodist class-leader, secondly a disciple of Swedenborg, and at length a successful politician, being appointed Collector of the port of Salem by President Pierce. He is described as having "a strongly marked, benignant face, indicative of intelligence and individuality. He was gray at twenty, and always looked older than his years.... He had a keen sense of the ludicrous, a vivid recollection of localities and incidents, a quick apprehension of peculiarities and traits, and was a most graphic and entertaining narrator."[4] As Mr. James has said: "Hawthorne had a democratic strain in his composition, a relish for the common stuff of human nature. He liked to fraternize with plain people, to take them on their own terms." It was the most natural thing in the world for him to fancy such a man as Pike is represented to have been. His Society in college was the one which displayed a democratic tendency; and, in addition to making friends with persons of this stamp, men of some education and much innate "go," he had a taste for loitering in taverns where he could observe character in the rough, without being called upon to take an active share in talk. "Men," we are told, "who did not meddle with him he loved, men who made no demands on him, who offered him the repose of genial companionship. His life-long friends were of this description, and his loyalty to them was chivalrous and fearless, and so generous that when they differed from him on matters of opinion he rose at once above the difference and adhered to them for what they really were." Inevitably, such a basis for the selection of companions, coupled with his extreme reserve, subjected him to criticism; but when, in 1835, his former classmate, the Rev. George B. Cheever, was thrown into jail on account of the satirical temperance pamphlet which has already been referred to in this sketch, Hawthorne emerged from his strict privacy, and daily visited the imprisoned clergyman. He showed no especial love for his native place, and in return it never made of him a popular idol. At this initial epoch of his career as an author there probably did not exist that active ill-will which his chapter on the Custom House afterwards engendered; he was in fact too little known to be an object of malice or envy, and his humble friendships could not be made the ground of unfavorable insinuations. The town, however, was not congenial to him, and the profound retirement in which he dwelt, the slow toil with scanty meed of praise or gold, and the long waiting for recognition, doubtless weighed upon and preyed upon him. To stop at that would be to make a superficial summary. His seclusion was also of the highest utility to him, nay, almost indispensable to his development; for his mind, which seemed to be only creeping, was making long strides of growth in an original direction, unhindered by arbitrary necessities or by factitious influences. Nevertheless, the process had gone on long enough; and it was well that circumstances now occurred to bring it to a close, to establish new relations, and draw him somewhat farther into the general circle of human movement. Dr. Peabody, who has been spoken of on a preceding page as living on the opposite side of Union Street from Hawthorne's birthplace, had, during the vicissitudes of the young author's education and journeys to and fro, changed his residence and gone to Boston. No acquaintance had as yet sprung up between the two families which had been domiciled so near together, but in 1832 the Peabodys returned to Salem; and Miss Elizabeth, who followed in 1836, having been greatly struck by the story of "The Gentle Boy," and excited as to the authorship, set on foot an investigation which resulted in her meeting Hawthorne. It is an evidence of the approachableness, after all, of his secluded family, that Miss Louisa Hawthorne should have received her readily and with graciousness. Miss Peabody, having formerly seen one of Miss Hawthorne's letters, had supposed that she must be the writer of the stories, under shelter of a masculine name. She now learned her mistake. Months passed without any response being made to her advance. But when the first volume of "Twice-Told Tales" was issued, Hawthorne sent it to her with his compliments. Up to this time she had not obtained even a glimpse of him anywhere; and, in acknowledging his gift, she proposed that he should call at her father's house; but although matters had proceeded thus far, and Dr. Peabody lived within three minutes' walk of Herbert Street, Hawthorne still did not come. It was more than a year afterward that she addressed an inquiry to him about a new magazine, and in closing asked him to bring his sisters to call in the evening of the same day. This time he made his appearance, was induced to accept an invitation to another house, and thus was led into beginning a social intercourse which, though not extensive, was unequalled in his previous experience. About a week after the first call, he came again. Miss Sophia Peabody, who was an invalid, had been unable to appear before, but this time she entered the room; and it was thus that Hawthorne met the lady whom he was to make his wife some two or three years later. She was now about twenty-nine, and younger by five years than Hawthorne. In childhood her health had received a serious shock from the heroic treatment then upheld by physicians, which favored a free use of mercury, so that it became necessary from that time on to nurse her with the utmost care. Many years of invalidism had she suffered, being compelled to stay in a darkened room through long spaces of time, and although a sojourn in Cuba had greatly benefited her, it was believed she could never be quite restored to a normal state of well-being. Despite such serious obstacles, she had gently persisted in reading and study; she drew and painted, and no fear of flippant remark deterred her from attempting even to learn Hebrew. At the same time she was a woman of the most exquisitely natural cultivation conceivable. A temperament inclined like hers, from the beginning, to a sweet equanimity, may have been assisted towards its proper culmination by the habit of patience likely enough to result from the continued endurance of pain; but a serenity so benign and so purely feminine and trustful as that which she not displayed, but spontaneously exhaled, must have rested on a primary and plenary inspiration of goodness. All that she knew or saw sank into her mind and took a place in the interior harmony of it, without ruffling the surface; and all that she thought or uttered seemed to gain a fragrance and a flower-like quality from having sprung thence. Neither were strength of character and practical good sense absent from the company of her calm wisdom and refinement. In brief, no fitter mate for Hawthorne could have existed. Soon after their acquaintance began, she showed him, one evening, a large outline drawing which she had made, to illustrate "The Gentle Boy," and asked him: "Does that look like Ilbrahim?" Hawthorne, without other demonstration, replied quietly: "Ilbrahim will never look otherwise to me." The drawing was shown to Washington Allston, who accorded it his praise; and a Miss Burleigh, who was among the earliest admirers of Hawthorne's genius, having offered to pay the cost of an engraving from it, the design was reproduced and printed with a new special edition of the story, accompanied by a Preface, and a Dedication to Miss Sophia Peabody. The three sisters and two brothers who composed the family of Dr. Peabody were strongly imbued with intellectual tastes: nothing of importance in literature, art, or the philosophy of education escaped them, when once it was brought to their notice by the facilities of the time. Miss Sophia was not only well read and a very graceful amateur in the practice of drawing and painting, but evinced furthermore a somewhat remarkable skill in sculpture. About the year 1831, she modelled a bust of Laura Bridgman, the blind girl, who was then a child of twelve years. This portrait not only was said to be a very good likeness, but--although it is marred by a representation of the peculiar band used to protect the eyes of the patient--has considerable artistic value, and attains very nearly to a classic purity of form and treatment. Miss Peabody also executed a medallion portrait, in relief, of Charles Emerson, the brilliant brother of Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose great promise was frustrated by his premature death. This medallion was done from memory. The artist had once seen Mr. Emerson while he was lecturing, and was so strongly impressed by his eloquent profile that, on going home, she made a memory-sketch of it in pencil, which supplied a germ for the portrait in clay which she attempted after his death. The appearance of the "Twice-Told Tales" in book-form had, like that of the "Gentle Boy" design, been due to the kindness of a friend. In this case it was Lieutenant Bridge who became responsible for the expense; and the volume met with, if not much pecuniary success, a gratifying literary renown. The author sent a copy to Longfellow, who acknowledged it cordially; and then Hawthorne wrote him as follows:-- "By some witchcraft or other--for I really cannot assign any reasonable cause--I have been carried apart from the main current of life, and find it impossible to get back again. Since we last met, which you remember was in Sawtell's room, where you read a farewell poem to the relics of the class--ever since that time I have secluded myself from society; and yet I never meant any such thing nor dreamed what sort of life I was going to lead.... For the last ten years I have not lived, but only dreamed of living.... "As to my literary efforts, I do not think much of them, neither is it worth while to be ashamed of them. They would have been better, I trust, if written under more favorable circumstances." But Longfellow broke out, as it were, into an exulting cry over them, which echoed from the pages of the next "North American Review."[5] His notice was hardly a criticism; it was a eulogy, bristling with the adornment of frequent references to European literature; but it is worth while to recall a few of its sentences. "When a star rises in the heavens," said Longfellow, "people gaze after it for a season with the naked eye, and with such telescopes as they may find. In the stream of thought, which flows so peacefully deep and clear through this book, we see the bright reflection of a spiritual star, after which men will be prone to gaze 'with the naked eye and with the spy-glasses of criticism.'... To this little work we would say, 'Live ever, sweet, sweet book.' It comes from the hand of a man of genius. Everything about it has the freshness of morning and of May.... The book, though in prose, is nevertheless written by a poet. He looks upon all things in a spirit of love and with lively sympathies. A calm, thoughtful face seems to be looking at you from every page; with now and then a pleasant smile, and now a shade of sadness stealing over its features. Sometimes, though not often, it glares wildly at you, with a strange and painful expression, as, in the German romance, the bronze knocker of the Archivarius Lindhorst makes up faces at the student Anselm.... One of the prominent characteristics of these tales is that they are national in their character. The author has wisely chosen his themes among the traditions of New England.... This is the right material for story. It seems as natural to make tales out of old tumble-down traditions as canes and snuff-boxes out of old steeples, or trees planted by great men." This hearty utterance of Longfellow's not only was of advantage to the young author publicly, but also doubtless threw a bright ray of encouragement into the morning-dusk which was then the pervading atmosphere of his little study, which he termed his "owl's nest." "I have to-day," he wrote back, "received and read with huge delight, your review of 'Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales.' I frankly own that I was not without hopes that you would do this kind office for the book; though I could not have anticipated how very kindly it would be done. Whether or no the public will agree to the praise which you bestow on me, there are at least five persons who think you the most sagacious critic on earth, viz., my mother and two sisters, my old maiden aunt, and finally the strongest believer of the whole five, my own self. If I doubt the sincerity and earnestness of any of my critics, it shall be of those who censure me. Hard would be the lot of a poor scribbler, if he may not have this privilege." His pleasant intimacy with the Peabodys went on; the dawn of his new epoch broadened, and he began to see in Miss Sophia Peabody the figure upon which his hopes, his plans for the future converged. Her father's house stood on the edge of the Charter Street Burying-Ground, oldest of the Salem cemeteries. "A three-story wooden house"--thus he has described it--"perhaps a century old, low-studded, with a square front, standing right upon the street, and a small enclosed porch, containing the main entrance, affording a glimpse up and down the street through an oval window on each side: its characteristic was decent respectability, not sinking below the level of the genteel." In his "Note-Books" (July 4, 1837) he speaks of the old graveyard. "A slate gravestone round the borders, to the memory of 'Col. John Hathorne Esq.,' who died in 1717. This was the witch-judge. The stone is sunk deep into the earth, and leans forward, and the grass grows very long around it.... Other Hathornes lie buried in a range with him on either side.... It gives strange ideas, to think how convenient to Dr. P----'s family this burial-ground is,--the monuments standing almost within arm's reach of the side-windows of the parlor--and there being a little gate from the back-yard through which we step forth upon those old graves aforesaid. And the tomb of the P---- family is right in front, and close to the gate." Among the other Hathornes interred there are Captain Daniel, the privateersman, and a Mr. John Hathorne, "grandson of the Hon. John Hathorne," who died in 1758. The specification of his grandfather's name, with the prefix, shows that the relentless condemner of witches was still held in honor at Salem, in the middle of the eighteenth century. Dr. Peabody's house and this adjoining burial-ground form the scene of the unfinished "Dolliver Romance," and also supply the setting for the first part of "Dr. Grimshawe's Secret." In the latter we find it pictured with a Rembrandtesque depth of tone:-- "It stood in a shabby by-street and cornered on a graveyard.... Here were old brick tombs with curious sculpture on them, and quaint gravestones, some of which bore puffy little cherubs, and one or two others the effigies of eminent Puritans, wrought out to a button, a fold of the ruff, and a wrinkle of the skull-cap.... Here used to be some specimens of English garden flowers, which could not be accounted for--unless, perhaps, they had sprung from some English maiden's heart, where the intense love of those homely things and regret of them in the foreign land, had conspired together to keep their vivifying principle.... Thus rippled and surged with its hundreds of little billows the old graveyard about the house which cornered upon it; it made the street gloomy so that people did not altogether like to pass along the high wooden fence that shut it in; and the old house itself, covering ground which else had been thickly sown with bodies, partook of its dreariness, because it hardly seemed possible that the dead people should not get up out of their graves and steal in to warm themselves at this convenient fireside." This was the place in which Hawthorne conducted his courtship; but we ought not to lose sight of the fact that, in the account above quoted, he was writing imaginatively, indulging his fancy, and dwelling on particular points for the sake of heightening the effect. It is not probable that he associated gloomy fantasies with his own experience as it progressed in these surroundings. Here as elsewhere it is important to bear in mind the distinction which Dr. Loring has made: "Throughout life," he declares, "Hawthorne led a twofold existence--a real and a supernatural. As a man, he was the realest of men. From childhood to old age, he had great physical powers. His massive head sat upon a strong and muscular neck, and his chest was broad and capacious. His strength was great; his hand and foot were large and well made.... In walking, he had a firm step and a great stride without effort. In early manhood he had abounding health, a good digestion, a hearty enjoyment of food. His excellent physical condition gave him a placid and even temper, a cheerful spirit. He was a silent man and often a moody one, but never irritable or morose; his organization was too grand for that. He was a most delightful companion. In conversation he was never controversial, never authoritative, and never absorbing. In a multitude his silence was oppressive; but with a single companion his talk flowed on sensibly, quietly, and full of wisdom and shrewdness. He discussed books with wonderful acuteness, sometimes with startling power, and with an unexpected verdict, as if Shakespeare were discussing Ben Jonson. He analyzed men, their characters and motives and capacity, with great penetration, impartially if a stranger or an enemy, with the tenderest and most touching justice if a friend. He was fond of the companionship of all who were in sympathy with this real and human side of his life." But there was another side of his being, for which we may adopt the name that Dr. Loring has given it, the "supernatural." It was this which gave him his high distinction. "When he entered upon his work as a writer, he left behind him his other and accustomed personality by which he was known in general intercourse. In this work he allowed no interference, he asked for no aid. He was shy of those whose intellectual power and literary fame might seem to give them a right to enter his sanctuary. In an assembly of illustrious authors and thinkers, he floated, reserved and silent, around the margin in the twilight of the room, and at last vanished into the outer darkness; and when he was gone, Mr. Emerson said of him: 'Hawthorne rides well his horse of the night.' The working of his mind was so sacred and mysterious to him that he was impatient of any attempt at familiarity or even intimacy with the divine power within him. His love of personal solitude was a ruling passion, his intellectual solitude was an overpowering necessity.... Hawthorne said himself that his work grew in his brain as it went on, and was beyond his control or direction, for nature was his guide.... I have often thought that he understood his own greatness so imperfectly, that he dared not expose the mystery to others, and that the sacredness of his genius was to him like the sacredness of his love." And did not Hawthorne write to his betrothed wife?--"Lights and shadows are continually flitting across my inward sky, and I know not whence they come nor whither they go; nor do I inquire too closely into them. It is dangerous to look too minutely into such phenomena." What we may collect and set down of mere fact about his surroundings and his acts relates itself, therefore, mainly to his outwardly real existence, to the mere shell or mask of him, which was all that anybody could behold with the eyes; and as for the interior and ideal existence, it is not likely that we shall securely penetrate very far, where his own impartial and introverted gaze stopped short. It is but a rough method to infer with brusque self-confidence that we may judge from a few words here and there the whole of his thought and feeling. A fair enough notion may be formed as to the status of his post-collegiate life in Salem, from the data we have, but we can do no more than guess at its formative influence upon his genius. And I should be sorry to give an impression that because his courtship went on in the old house by the graveyard, of which he has written so soberly, there was any shadow of melancholy upon that initiatory period of a new happiness. His reflections concerning the spot had to do with his imaginative, or if one choose, his "supernatural," existence; what actually passed there had to do with the real and the personal, and with the life of the affections. We may be sure that the meeting of two such perfected spirits, so in harmony one with another, was attended with no qualified degree of joy. If it was calm and reticent, without rush of excitement or exuberant utterance, this was because movement at its acme becomes akin to rest. Let us leave his love in that sanctity which, in his own mind, it shared with his genius. Picturesquely considered, however,--and the picturesque never goes very deep,--it is certainly interesting to observe that Hawthorne and his wife, both of Salem families, should have been born on opposite sides of the same street, within the sound of a voice; should have gone in separate directions, remaining unaware of each other's existence; and then should finally have met, when well beyond their first youth, in an old house on the borders of the ancient burial-ground in which the ancestors of both reposed, within hail of the spot where both had first seen the light. When they became engaged, there was opposition to the match on the part of Hawthorne's family, who regarded the seemingly confirmed invalidism of Miss Peabody as an insuperable objection; but this could not be allowed to stand in the way of a union so evidently pointed out by providential circumstance and inherent adaptability in those who were to be the parties to it. The engagement was a long one; but in the interval before her marriage Miss Peabody's health materially improved. III. The new turn of affairs of course made Hawthorne impatient to find some employment more immediately productive than that with the pen. He was profoundly dissatisfied, also, with his elimination from the active life of the world. "I am tired of being an ornament!" he said with great emphasis, to a friend. "I want a little piece of land of my own, big enough to stand upon, big enough to be buried in. I want to have something to do with this material world." And, striking his hand vigorously upon a table that stood by: "If I could only make tables," he declared, "I should feel myself more of a man." President Van Buren had entered on the second year of his term, and Mr. Bancroft, the historian, was Collector of the port of Boston. One evening the latter was speaking, in a circle of whig friends, of the splendid things which the democratic administration was doing for literary men. "But there's Hawthorne," suggested Miss Elizabeth Peabody, who was present. "You've done nothing for him." "He won't take anything," was the answer: "he has been offered places." In fact, Hawthorne's friends in political life, Pierce and Jonathan Cilley, had urged him to enter politics; and at one time he had been offered a post in the West Indies, but refused it because he would not live in a slaveholding community. "I happen to know," said Miss Peabody, "that he would be very glad of employment." The result was that a small position in the Boston Custom House was soon awarded to the young author. On going down from Salem to inquire about it, he received another and better appointment as weigher and gauger. His friend Pike was installed there at the same time. To Longfellow, Hawthorne wrote in good spirits:-- "I have no reason to doubt my capacity to fulfil the duties; for I don't know what they are. They tell me that a considerable portion of my time will be unoccupied, the which I mean to employ in sketches of my new experience, under some such titles as follows: 'Scenes In Dock,' 'Voyages at Anchor,' 'Nibblings of a Wharf Rat,' 'Trials of a Tide-Waiter,' 'Romance of the Revenue Service,' together with an ethical work in two volumes on the subject of Duties; the first volume to treat of moral duties and the second of duties imposed by the revenue laws, which I begin to consider the most important." His hopes regarding unoccupied time were not fulfilled; he was unable to write with freedom during his term of service in Boston, and the best result of it for us is contained in those letters, extracts from which Mrs. Hawthorne published in the first volume of the "American Note-Books." The benefit to him lay in the moderate salary of $1,200, from which the cheapness of living at that time and his habitual economy enabled him to lay up something; and in the contact with others which his work involved. He might have saved time for writing if he had chosen; but the wages of the wharf laborers depended on the number of hours they worked, and Hawthorne--true to his instinct of democratic sympathy and of justice--made it a point to reach the wharf at the earliest hour, no matter what the weather might be, solely for the convenience of the men. "It pleased me," he says in one of his letters, "to think that I also had a part to act in the material and tangible business of life, and that a portion of all this industry could not have gone on without my presence." But when he had had two years of this sort of toil the Whigs elected a President, and Hawthorne was dropped from the civil service. The project of an ideal community just then presented itself, and from Boston he went to Brook Farm, close by in Roxbury. The era of Transcendentalism had arrived, and Dr. George Ripley, an enthusiastic student of philosophy and a man of wide information, sought to give the new tendencies a practical turn in the establishment of a modified socialistic community. The Industrial Association which he proposed to plant at West Roxbury was wisely planned with reference to the conditions of American life; it had no affinity with the erratic views of Enfantin or St. Simon, nor did it in the least partake of the errors of Robert Owen regarding the relation of the sexes; although it agreed with Fourier and Owen both, if I understand the aim rightly, in respect of labor. Dr. Ripley's simple object was to distribute labor in such a way as to give all men time for culture, and to free their minds from the debasing influence of a merely selfish competition. "A few men of like views and feelings," one of his sympathizers has said, "grouped themselves around him, not as their master, but as their friend and brother, and the community at Brook Farm was instituted." Charles A. Dana and Minot Pratt were leading spirits in the enterprise; the young Brownson, George William Curtis, and Horace Sumner (a younger brother of Charles) were also engaged in it, at various times. The place was a kind of granary of true grit. Hawthorne has characterized the community in that remark which he applied to Blithedale: "They were mostly individuals who had gone through such an experience as to disgust them with ordinary pursuits, but who were not yet so old, nor had suffered so deeply, as to lose their faith in the better time to come." Miss E. P. Peabody had at that time left Salem and begun a publishing business in Boston, being one of the first women of our time to embark in an occupation thought to appertain exclusively to men; and at her rooms some of the preliminary meetings of the new association were held. Thus it happened that the scheme was speedily brought to Hawthorne's notice. When his accession to the ranks was announced, Dr. Ripley, as he said to the present writer, felt as if a miracle had occurred, "or as if the heavens would presently be opened and we should see Jacob's Ladder before us. But we never came any nearer to having _that_, than our old ladder in the barn, from floor to hayloft." Besides his belief in the theory of an improved condition of society, and his desire to forward its accomplishment, Hawthorne had two objects in joining the community: one of which was to secure a suitable and economical home after marriage; the other, to hit upon a mode of life which should equalize the sum of his exertions between body and brain. Many persons went thither in just the same frame of mind. From a distance, the life that was led there has a very pretty and idyllic look. There was teaching, and there was intellectual talk; there was hard domestic and farming work in pleasant companionship, and a general effort to be disinterested. The various buildings in which the associators found shelter were baptized with cheerful and sentimental names; The Hive, The Pilgrim House, The Nest, The Eyrie, and The Cottage. The young women sang as they washed the dishes, and the more prepossessing and eligible of the yeomen sometimes volunteered to help them with their unpoetic and saponaceous task. The costume of the men included a blouse of checked or plaided stuff, belted at the waist, and a rough straw hat; and the women also wore hats, in defiance of the fashion then ruling, and chose calico for their gowns. In the evenings, poems and essays composed by the members, or else a play of Shakespeare, would be read aloud in the principal gathering held at one of the houses. A great deal of individual liberty was allowed, and Hawthorne probably availed himself of this to keep as much as possible out of sight. One might fancy, on a casual glance, that Brook Farm was the scene of a prolonged picnic. But it was not so at all. Hawthorne had hoped that by devoting six hours a day to mechanical employments, he could earn the time he needed for writing; but, as it proved, the manual labor more nearly consumed sixteen hours, according to Dr. Ripley, who declared of Hawthorne that "he worked like a dragon!" Sundry of Hawthorne's common sense observations and conclusions upon the advisability of his remaining at the farm are to be found in his "Note-Books," and have often been quoted and criticised. They show that, as might be expected in a person of candor and good judgment, he was considering the whole phenomenon upon the practical side. There is an instructive passage also in "The Blithedale Romance," which undoubtedly refers to his own experience:-- "Though fond of society, I was so constituted as to need these occasional retirements, even in a life like that of Blithedale, which was itself characterized by a remoteness from the world. Unless renewed by a yet further withdrawal towards the inner circle of self-communion, I lost the better part of my individuality. My thoughts became of little worth, and my sensibilities grew as arid as a tuft of moss ... crumbling in the sunshine, after long expectance of a shower." The whole thing was an experiment for everybody concerned, and Hawthorne found it best to withdraw from a further prosecution thereof, as persons were constantly doing who had come to see if the life would suit them. He had contributed a thousand dollars (the chief part of his savings in the Custom House) to the funds of the establishment; and, some time after he quitted the place, an effort was made among the most influential gentlemen of Brook Farm to restore this sum to him, although they were not, I believe, bound to do so. Whether or not they ever carried out this purpose has not been learned. The community flourished for four years and was financially sound, but in 1844 it entered into bonds of brotherhood with a Fourieristic organization in New York, began to build a Phalanstery, attempted to enlarge its range of industry, and came to grief. No one of its chief adherents has ever written its history; but perhaps Mr. Frothingham is right in saying that "Aspirations have no history."[6] At all events Hawthorne, in "The Blithedale Romance," which explicitly disclaims any close adherence to facts or any criticism on the experiment, has furnished the best chronicle it has had, so far as the spirit of the scheme is concerned. Having tried the utmost isolation for ten years in Salem, and finding it unsatisfactory; and having made a venture in an opposite extreme at Brook Farm, which was scarcely more to his liking, Hawthorne had unconsciously passed through the best of preparation for that family life of comparative freedom, and of solitude alternating with a gentle and perfect companionship, on which he was about to enter. In July, 1842, Rev. James Freeman Clarke, of Boston, received the following note, dated from 54 Pinckney Street, which was the residence of Hawthorne's friend, George S. Hillard:-- MY DEAR SIR,--Though personally a stranger to you, I am about to request of you the greatest favor which I can receive from any man. I am to be married to Miss Sophia Peabody; and it is our mutual desire that you should perform the ceremony. Unless it should be decidedly a rainy day, a carriage will call for you at half past eleven o'clock in the forenoon. Very respectfully yours, NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. The wedding took place quietly, and Hawthorne carried his bride to the Manse at Concord, the old parsonage of that town. It belonged to the descendants of Dr. Ezra Ripley, who had been pastor there at the close of the last century; they were relatives of the George Ripley with whom Hawthorne had so recently been associated at Brook Farm. Hawthorne had succeeded in hiring the place for a time, and was happy in beginning his married life in a house so well in keeping with his tastes. The best account of this, his first sojourn in Concord, is to be found in the "American Note-Books," and in the Introduction to the "Mosses from an Old Manse." Here his first child was born, a daughter, to whom the name of Una[7] was given, from "The Faërie Queen"; and here he saw something of Emerson and of Margaret Fuller. Among his visitors, who were never many, was George Stillman Hillard, a Democrat, a lawyer, an editor, an orator in high favor with the Bostonians, and the author of several works both of travel and of an educational kind. Mr. George P. Bradford, with whom Hawthorne had talked and toiled at Brook Farm, was a cousin of the Ripleys, and also came hither as a friend. Another Brook Farmer appeared at the Manse, in the person of one Frank Farley, a man of some originality, who had written a little book on natural scenery and had been a frontiersman, but was subject to a mild, loquacious form of insanity. (Mention of him as "Mr. F----" is made in the "American Note-Books," under date of June 6 and June 10, 1844.) A writer in one of the magazines has recorded the impression which Hawthorne left on the minds of others who saw him during this period, but did not know him. Among the villagers "a report was current that this man Hawthorne was somewhat uncanny--in point of fact, not altogether sane. My friend, the son of a Concord farmer and at that time a raw college youth, had heard these bucolic whisperings as to the sanity of the recluse dweller at the ancient parsonage; but he knew nothing of the man, had read none of his productions, and of course took no interest in what was said or surmised about him. And one day, casting his eye toward the Manse as he was passing, he saw Hawthorne up the pathway, standing with folded arms in motionless attitude, and with eyes fixed upon the ground. 'Poor fellow,' was his unspoken comment: 'he does look as if he might be daft.' And when, on his return a full hour afterward, Hawthorne was still standing in the same place and attitude, the lad's very natural conclusion was, 'The man _is_ daft, sure enough!'" Mr. Thomas Wentworth Higginson has presented quite a different view, in his "Short Studies of American Authors." He says:-- "The self-contained purpose of Hawthorne, the large resources, the waiting power,--these seem to the imagination to imply an ample basis of physical life; and certainly his stately and noble port is inseparable, in my memory, from these characteristics. Vivid as this impression is, I yet saw him but twice, and never spoke to him. I first met him on a summer morning, in Concord, as he was walking along the road near the Old Manse, with his wife by his side and a noble looking baby-boy in a little wagon which the father was pushing. I remember him as tall, firm, and strong in bearing.... When I passed, Hawthorne lifted upon me his great gray eyes with a look too keen to seem indifferent, too shy to be sympathetic--and that was all."[8] Hawthorne's plan of life was settled; he was happily married, and the problems of his youth were solved: his character and his genius were formed. From this point on, therefore, his works and his "Note-Books" impart the essentials of his career. The main business of the biographer is, after this, to put together that which will help to make real the picture of the author grappling with those transient emergencies that constitute the tangible part of his history. A few extracts from letters written to Horatio Bridge, heretofore unpublished, come under this head. _Concord, March_ 25, 1843.--"I did not come to see you, because I was very short of cash--having been disappointed in money that I had expected from three or four sources. My difficulties of this kind sometimes make me sigh for the regular monthly payments of the Custom House. The system of slack payments in this country is most abominable.... I find no difference in anybody in this respect, for all do wrong alike. ---- is just as certain to disappoint me in money matters as any little pitiful scoundrel among the booksellers. For my part, I am compelled to disappoint those who put faith in my engagements; and so it goes round." The following piece of advice with regard to notes for the "Journal of an African Cruiser," by Mr. Bridge, which Hawthorne was to edit, is worth observing and has never before been given to the public:-- "I would advise you not to stick too accurately to the bare facts, either in your descriptions or your narratives; else your hand will be cramped, and the result will be a want of freedom that will deprive you of a higher truth than that which you strive to attain. Allow your fancy pretty free license, and omit no heightening touches merely because they did not chance to happen before your eyes. If they did not happen, they at least ought--which is all that concerns you. This is the secret of all entertaining travellers.... Begin to write always before the impression of novelty has worn off from your mind; else you will soon begin to think that the peculiarities which at first interested you are not worth recording; yet these slight peculiarities are the very things that make the most vivid impression upon the reader." In this same letter (May 3, 1843) he reverts to the financial difficulty, and speaks of a desire to obtain office again, but adds: "It is rather singular that I should need an office; for nobody's scribblings seem to be more acceptable to the public than mine; and yet I still find it a tough match to gain a respectable living by my pen." By November of 1844 he had put things seriously in train for procuring another government position; Polk having been elected to the Presidency. There was a rumor that Tyler had actually fixed upon Hawthorne for the postmastership of Salem, but had been induced to withdraw the name; and this was the office upon which he fixed his hope; but a hostile party made itself felt in Salem, which raised all possible obstacles, and apparently Hawthorne's former chief, Mr. Bancroft,--it may have been for some reason connected with political management,--opposed his nomination. Early in October, 1845, Hawthorne made his farewell to the Old Manse, never to return to the shelter of its venerable and high-shouldered roof. Once more he went to Salem, and halted in Herbert Street. The postmastership had proved unattainable, but there was a prospect of his becoming Naval Officer or Surveyor. The latter position was given him at length; but not until the spring of 1846. On first arriving at Salem, he wrote to Bridge: "Here I am, again established--in the old chamber where I wasted so many years of my life. I find it rather favorable to my literary duties; for I have already begun to sketch out the story for Wiley & Putnam," an allusion to something intended to fill out a volume of the "Mosses," already negotiated for. After his installation as Surveyor he wrote, speaking of his "moderate prosperity," and said further: "I have written nothing for the press since my entrance into office, but intend to begin soon. My 'Mosses' seem to have met with good acceptance." Time went on, however, and he remained, so far as literary production was concerned, inert. He had left the Manning homestead and hired a house in Chestnut Street, which he kept for a year and a half. During this period Mrs. Hawthorne went to Boston for a time, and in Carver Street, Boston, was born their second child and only son, Mr. Julian Hawthorne, who has since made a reputation for himself as a novelist. From Chestnut Street he went to another house, in Mall Street; and it was there that "The Scarlet Letter" was finished, in 1850, four years after he had announced to Bridge that he intended soon to begin composition. The Custom House routine disturbed his creative moods and caused a gradual postponement of literary effort. Of the figure that he made while fulfilling the functions assigned to him, slight traces have been left. We are told, for example, that two Shakers, leaders in their community, visited the Custom House one day, and were conducted through its several departments. On the way out, they passed Hawthorne, and no sooner had they left his room than, the door being shut behind them, the elder brother asked with great interest who that man was. After referring to the strong face, "and those eyes, the most wonderful he had ever beheld," he said: "Mark my words, that man will in some way make a deep impression upon the world." It is also remembered that a rough and overbearing sea-captain attempted to interfere with Hawthorne's exercise of his duty as an inspector of the customs, in charge of the ship. His attempt "was met with such a terrific uprising of spiritual and physical wrath that the dismayed captain fled up the wharf" and took refuge with the Collector, "inquiring with a sailor's emotion and a sailor's tongue: 'What in God's name have you sent on board my ship for an inspector?'" Unexpectedly, in the winter of 1849, he was deprived of his surveyorship; a great surprise to him, because he had understood certain of his fellow-citizens of Salem to have given a pledge that they would not seek his removal, and it appeared that they had, notwithstanding, gone to work to oust him. On finding himself superseded, he walked away from the Custom House, returned home, and entering sat down in the nearest chair, without uttering a word. Mrs. Hawthorne asked him if he was well. "Well enough," was the answer. "What is the matter, then?" said she. "Are you 'decapitated?'" He replied with gloom that he was, and that the occurrence was no joke. "Oh," said his wife, gayly, "now you can write your Romance!" For he had told her several times that he had a romance "growling" in him. "Write my Romance!" he exclaimed. "But what are we to do for bread and rice, next week?" "I will take care of that," she answered. "And I will tell Ann to put a fire in your study, now." Hawthorne was oppressed with anxiety as to means of support for his wife and children; the necessity of writing for immediate returns always had a deterrent and paralyzing effect on his genius; and he was amazed that Mrs. Hawthorne should take his calamity with so much lightness. He questioned her again regarding the wherewithal to meet their current needs, knowing well that he himself had no fund in reserve. His habit had been to hand her the instalments of salary as they came to him from the office; and when he was in need of money for himself he drew again upon her for it. He therefore supposed that everything had been used up from week to week. But Mrs. Hawthorne now disclosed the fact that she had about a hundred and fifty dollars, a sum which for them was a considerable one, their manner of living being extremely plain. Greatly astonished, he asked her where she had obtained so much. "You earned it," she replied, cheerily. Mrs. Hawthorne was in fact overjoyed, on his account, that he had lost his place; feeling as she did that he would now resume his proper employment. The fire was built in the study, and Hawthorne, stimulated by his wife's good spirits, set at once about writing "The Scarlet Letter." Some six months of time were required for its completion, and Mrs. Hawthorne, who was aware that her savings would be consumed in a third of that space, applied herself to increasing the small stock of cash, so that her husband's mind might remain free and buoyant for his writing. She began making little cambric lamp-shades, which she decorated with delicate outline drawings and sent to Boston for sale. They were readily purchased, and, by continuing their manufacture, this devoted wife contrived to defray the expenses of the household until the book was finished. Mr. James T. Fields, the publisher, who was already an acquaintance, and eventually became a friend, of Hawthorne's had been told of the work, and went down to Salem to suggest bringing it out. This was before the story had been fully elaborated into its present form. Hawthorne had written steadily all day, and every day, from the start, but, remembering in what small quantity his books sold, he had come to consider this new attempt a forlorn hope. Mr. Fields found him despondent, and thus narrates the close of the interview:-- "I looked at my watch and found that the train would soon be starting for Boston, and I knew there was not much time to lose in trying to discover what had been his literary work during these last few years in Salem. I remember that I pressed him to reveal to me what he had been writing. He shook his head, and gave me to understand that he had produced nothing. At that moment I caught sight of a bureau or set of drawers near where we were sitting; and immediately it occurred to me that, hidden away somewhere in that article of furniture, was a story or stories by the author of the 'Twice-Told Tales,' and I became so confident that I charged him vehemently with the fact. He seemed surprised, I thought, but shook his head again; and I rose to take my leave, begging him not to come into the cold entry, saying I would come back and see him again in a few days. I was hurrying down the stairs when he called after me from the chamber, asking me to stop a moment. Then, quickly stepping into the entry with a roll of manuscript in his hands, he said: 'How in Heaven's name did you know this thing was here? As you have found me out, take what I have written, and tell me, after you get home and have time to read it, if it is good for anything. It is either very good or very bad--I don't know which.' On my way up to Boston I read the germ of 'The Scarlet Letter;' before I slept that night I wrote him a note all aglow with admiration of the marvellous story he had put into my hands." In a letter to Bridge (April 10, 1850), the author said: "'The Scarlet Letter' has sold well, the first edition having been exhausted in ten days, and the second (5,000 in all) promising to go off rapidly." Speaking of the excitement created among his townspeople by the introductory account of the Custom House, he continued: "As to the Salem people, I really thought I had been exceedingly good-natured in my treatment of them. They certainly do not deserve good usage at my hands, after permitting me ... to be deliberately lied down, not merely once but at two separate attacks, on two false indictments, without hardly a voice being raised on my behalf; and then sending one of their false witnesses to Congress and choosing another as their Mayor. I feel an infinite contempt for them, and probably have expressed more of it than I intended; for my preliminary chapter has caused the greatest uproar that ever happened here since witch-times. If I escape from town without being tarred and feathered, I shall consider it good luck. I wish they _would_ tar and feather me--it would be such an entirely new distinction for a literary man! And from such judges as my fellow-citizens, I should look upon it as a higher honor than a laurel-crown." In the same letter he states that he has taken a house in Lenox, and shall move to it on the 1st of May: "I thank Mrs. Bridge for her good wishes as respects my future removals from office; but I should be sorry to anticipate such bad fortune as ever again being appointed to me." Previous to this, he had written: "I long to get into the country, for my health latterly is not quite what it has been for many years past. I should not long stand such a life of bodily inactivity and mental exertion as I have led for the last few months. An hour or two of daily labor in a garden, and a daily ramble in country air or on the sea-shore, would keep me all right. Here I hardly go out once a week.... I detest this town so much, that I hate to go into the streets, or to have the people see me. Anywhere else I should at once be another man." It was not a very comfortable home, that small red wooden house at Lenox, overlooking the beautiful valley of the Housatonic and surrounded by mountains; but both Hawthorne and his wife bravely made the best of it. Mrs. Hawthorne ornamented an entire set of plain furniture, painted a dull yellow, with copies from Flaxman's outlines, executed with great perfection; and, poor as the place was, it soon became invested by its occupants with something of a poetic atmosphere. After a summer's rest, Hawthorne began "The House of the Seven Gables;" writing to Bridge in October:-- "I am getting so deep into my own book, that I am afraid it will be impossible for me to attend properly to my editorial duties" (connected with a new edition of Lieutenant Bridge's "Journal of an African Cruiser").... "Una and Julian grow apace, and so do our chickens, of which we have two broods. There is one difficulty about these chickens, as well as about the older fowls. We have become so intimately acquainted with every individual of them, that it really seems like cannibalism to think of eating them. What is to be done?" [Illustration: Letter to Mr. Fields. Lenox, January 27. 1851 Dear Fields, I intend to put the House of the Seven Gables into the express man's hands to-day; so that, if you do not soon receive it, you may conclude that it has miscarried--in which case, I shall not consent to the Universe existing a moment longer. I have no copy of it, except the wildest scribble of a first draught; so that it could never be restored. It has met with extraordinary success from that portion of the public to whose judgement it has been submitted, viz. from my wife. I likewise prefer it to the Scarlet Letter; but an author's opinion of his book, just after completing it, is worth little or nothing; he being then in the hot or cold fit of a fever, and certain to rate it too high or too low. * * * * * I had something else to say, but have forgotten what. Truly Yours, Nath. Hawthorne.] His task occupied him all winter. To Mr. Fields at length, on the 27th of January, 1851, he sent the following message:-- "I intend to put 'The House of the Seven Gables' into the expressman's hands to-day; so that, if you do not soon receive it, you may conclude that it has miscarried--in which case, I shall not consent to the universe existing a moment longer. I have no copy of it, except the wildest scribble of a first draught; so that it could never be restored. "It has met with extraordinary success from that portion of the public to whose judgment it has been submitted: viz. from my wife. I likewise prefer it to 'The Scarlet Letter;' but an author's opinion of his book, just after completing it, is worth little or nothing; he being then in the hot or cold fit of a fever, and certain to rate it too high or too low. It has undoubtedly one disadvantage in being brought so close to the present time, whereby its romantic improbabilities become more glaring." The fac simile of a part of the above letter which is reproduced here serves as a fairly good specimen of Hawthorne's handwriting. At the time when it was written, he was not very well, and the fatigue of his long labor upon the book rendered the chirography somewhat less clear in this case than it often was. The lettering in his manuscripts was somewhat larger, and was still more distinct than that in his correspondence. After the new romance had come out and had met with a flattering reception, he inquired of Bridge (July 22, 1851): "Why did you not write and tell me how you liked (or how you did not like) 'The House of the Seven Gables?' Did you feel shy about expressing an unfavorable opinion? It would not have hurt me in the least, though I am always glad to please you; but I rather think I have reached the stage when I do not care very essentially one way or the other for anybody's opinion on any one production. On this last romance, for instance, I have heard and seen such diversity of judgment that I should be altogether bewildered if I attempted to strike a balance;--so I take nobody's estimate but my own. I think it is a work more characteristic of my mind, and more natural and proper for me to write, than 'The Scarlet Letter'--but for that very reason less likely to interest the public.... As long as people will buy, I shall keep at work, and I find that my facility of labor increases with the demand for it." In the May of 1851 another daughter was added to his family. Hawthorne, like his father, had one son and two daughters. Of this youngest one he wrote to Pike, two months after her birth: "She is a very bright and healthy child.... I think I feel more interest in her than I did in the other children at the same age, from the consideration that she is to be the daughter of my age--the comfort (so it is to be hoped) of my declining years." There are some other interesting points in this communication. "What a sad account you give of your solitude, in your letter! I am not likely ever to have that feeling of loneliness which you express; and I most heartily wish you would take measures to remedy it in your own case, by marrying.... Whenever you find it quite intolerable (and I can hardly help wishing that it may become so soon), do come to me. By the way, if I continue to prosper as hitherto in the literary line, I shall soon be in a condition to buy a place; and if you should hear of one, say worth from $1,500 to $2,000, I wish you would keep your eye on it for me. I should wish it to be on the sea-coast, or at all events within easy access to the sea. Very little land would suit my purpose, but I want a good house, with space inside.... I find that I do not feel at home among these hills, and should not consider myself permanently settled here. I do not get acclimated to the peculiar state of the atmosphere; and, except in mid-winter, I am continually catching cold, and am never so vigorous as I used to be on the sea-coast.... Why did you not express your opinion of 'The House of the Seven Gables?'... I should receive friendly censure with just as much equanimity as if it were praise; though certainly I had rather you would like the book than not. At any rate, it has sold finely, and seems to have pleased a good many people better than the other; and I must confess that I myself am among the number.... When I write another romance I shall take the Community for a subject, and shall give some of my experiences at Brook Farm." On the first day of December, 1851, he left Lenox with his wife and children, betaking himself for the winter to West Newton, a suburban village a few miles west of Boston, on the Charles River; there to remain until he could effect the purchase of a house which could serve him as a settled home. The house that he finally selected was an old one in the town of Concord, about a mile easterly from the centre of the village on the road to Lexington, and was then the property of Mrs. Bronson Alcott. During the winter at West Newton he wrote "The Blithedale Romance," which was published early in 1852. In the brief term of two years and a half from the moment of his leaving the Custom House at Salem, he had thus produced four books,--"The Scarlet Letter," "The House of the Seven Gables," "A Wonder-Book for Boys and Girls," and "The Blithedale Romance,"--three of them being the principal works of his lifetime, with which "The Marble Faun" alone stands in the same category. Early in the summer of 1852 he took up his residence in his new home, The Wayside, of which he thus discoursed to Mr. George William Curtis, on the 14th of July, 1852:-- MY DEAR HOWADJI,--I think (and am glad to think) that you will find it necessary to come hither in order to write your Concord Sketches; and as for my old house, you will understand it better after spending a day or two in it. Before Mr. Alcott took it in hand, it was a mean-looking affair, with two peaked gables; no suggestiveness about it and no venerableness, although from the style of its construction it seems to have survived beyond its first century. He added a porch in front, and a central peak, and a piazza at each end, and painted it a rusty olive hue, and invested the whole with a modest picturesqueness; all which improvements, together with its situation at the foot of a wooded hill, make it a place that one notices and remembers for a few moments after passing it. Mr. Alcott expended a good deal of taste and some money (to no great purpose) in forming the hill-side behind the house into terraces, and building arbors and summer-houses of rough stems and branches and trees, on a system of his own. They must have been very pretty in their day, and are so still, although much decayed, and shattered more and more by every breeze that blows. The hill-side is covered chiefly with locust-trees, which come into luxuriant blossom in the month of June, and look and smell very sweetly, intermixed with a few young elms and some white-pines and infant oaks,--the whole forming rather a thicket than a wood. Nevertheless, there is some very good shade to be found there. I spend delectable hours there in the hottest part of the day, stretched out at my lazy length, with a book in my hand or an unwritten book in my thoughts. There is almost always a breeze stirring along the sides or brow of the hill. From the hill-top there is a good view along the extensive level surfaces and gentle, hilly outlines, covered with wood, that characterize the scenery of Concord. We have not so much as a gleam of lake or river in the prospect; if there were, it would add greatly to the value of the place in my estimation. The house stands within ten or fifteen feet of the old Boston road (along which the British marched and retreated), divided from it by a fence, and some trees and shrubbery of Mr. Alcott's setting out. Whereupon I have called it "The Wayside," which I think a better name and more morally suggestive than that which, as Mr. Alcott has since told me, he bestowed on it,--"The Hill-Side." In front of the house, on the opposite side of the road, I have eight acres of land,--the only valuable portion of the place in a farmer's eye, and which are capable of being made very fertile. On the hither side, my territory extends some little distance over the brow of the hill, and is absolutely good for nothing, in a productive point of view, though very good for many other purposes. I know nothing of the history of the house, except Thoreau's telling me that it was inhabited a generation or two ago by a man who believed he should never die.[9] I believe, however, he is dead; at least, I hope so; else he may probably appear and dispute my title to his residence.... I asked Ticknor to send a copy of "The Blithedale Romance" to you. Do not read it as if it had anything to do with Brook Farm (which essentially it has not), but merely for its own story and character. Truly yours, NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. Quite possibly the name of The Wayside recommended itself to him by some association of thought like that which comes to light in the Preface to "The Snow-Image," where, speaking of the years immediately following his college course, he says: "I sat down by the wayside of life like a man under enchantment, and a shrubbery sprung up around me, and the bushes grew to be saplings, and the saplings became trees, until no exit appeared possible through the entangling depths of my obscurity." If so, the simile held good as to his home; for there, too, the shrubbery has sprung up and has grown to saplings and trees, until the house is embosomed in a wood, except for the opening along the road and a small amphitheatre of lawn overlooked by the evergreen-clad hill. Hawthorne's old college friend, Franklin Pierce, after having been to Congress and having risen to the rank of general in the Mexican War, was nominated by the democratic party for the presidency of the United States, at the time when the romancer had established himself in this humble but charming old abode; and it became manifest that the candidate wanted Hawthorne to write a life of him, for use in the campaign. Hawthorne, on being pressed, consented to do so, and a letter which he addressed to Bridge, October 13, 1852, contains some extremely interesting confidences on the subject, which will be entirely new to readers. As they do Hawthorne credit, if considered fairly, and give a striking presentment of the impartiality with which he viewed all subjects, it seems to be proper to print them here. He begins by speaking of "The Blithedale Romance," regarding which he says: "I doubt whether you will like it very well; but it has met with good success, and has brought me (besides its American circulation) a thousand dollars from England, whence likewise have come many favorable notices. Just at this time, I rather think your friend stands foremost there as an American fiction-monger. In a day or two I intend to begin a new romance, which, if possible, I intend to make more genial than the last. "I did not send you the Life of Pierce, not considering it fairly one of my literary productions.... I was terribly reluctant to undertake this work, and tried to persuade Pierce, both by letter and vivâ voce, that I could not perform it as well as many others; but he thought differently, and of course after a friendship of thirty years it was impossible to refuse my best efforts in his behalf, at the great pinch of his life. It was a bad book to write, for the gist of the matter lay in explaining how it happened, that with such extraordinary opportunities for eminent distinction, civil and military, as he has enjoyed, this crisis should have found him so obscure as he certainly was, in a national point of view. My heart absolutely sank at the dearth of available material. However, I have done the business, greatly to Frank's satisfaction; and, though I say it myself, it is judiciously done; and, without any sacrifice of truth, it puts him in as good a light as circumstances would admit. Other writers might have made larger claims for him, and have eulogized him more highly; but I doubt whether any other could have bestowed a better aspect of sincerity and reality on the narrative, and have secured all the credit possible for him without spoiling all by asserting too much. And though the story is true, yet it took a romancer to do it. "Before undertaking it, I made an inward resolution that I would accept no office from him; but to say the truth, I doubt whether it would not be rather folly than heroism to adhere to this purpose, in case he should offer me anything particularly good. We shall see. A foreign mission I could not afford to take;--the consulship at Liverpool I might.... I have several invitations from English celebrities to come over there; and this office would make all straight. He certainly owes me something; for the biography has cost me hundreds of friends here at the North, who had a purer regard for me than Frank Pierce or any other politician ever gained, and who drop off from me like autumn leaves, in consequence of what I say on the slavery question. But they were my real sentiments, and I do not now regret that they are on record." After discussing other topics, he observes further of Pierce: "I have come seriously to the conclusion that he has in him many of the chief elements of a great man; and that if he wins the election he may run a great career. His talents are administrative; he has a subtle faculty of making affairs roll around according to his will, and of influencing their course without showing any trace of his action." Hawthorne did not feel very confident of his friend's election. "I love him," he adds, "and, oddly enough, there is a kind of pitying sentiment mixed with my affection for him just now." * * * * * Mr. Richard Henry Stoddard has set down his reminiscences of two visits paid to Hawthorne at the beginning and after the end of the campaign. In the summer of 1852, Mr. Stoddard was making a short stay in Boston, and dropped in at the Old Corner Bookstore to call upon Mr. Fields, who then had his headquarters there. He found Mr. Edwin P. Whipple, the lecturer and critic, sitting with the publisher. "'We are going to see Hawthorne,' Mr. Fields remarked, in an off-hand way, as if such a visit was the commonest thing in the world. 'Won't you come along?' He knew my admiration for Hawthorne, and that I desired to meet him, if I could do so without being considered an infliction. 'To be sure I will,' I replied.... When we were fairly seated in the train we met a friend of Hawthorne, whom Mr. Fields knew--a Colonel T. I. Whipple--who, like ourselves, was _en route_ for Concord, ... and as General Pierce was then the democratic candidate for the presidency, he was going to see Hawthorne, in order to furnish materials for that work. "We reached The Wayside, where Hawthorne, who had no doubt been expecting visitors, met us at the door. I was introduced to him as being the only stranger of the party, and was greeted warmly, more so than I had dared to hope, remembering the stories I had heard of his unconquerable shyness. He threw open the door of the room on the left, and, telling us to make ourselves at home, disappeared with Colonel Whipple and his budget of biographical memoranda. We made ourselves at home, as he had desired, in what I suppose was the parlor--a cosy but plainly furnished room, with nothing to distinguish it from a thousand other "best rooms" in New England, except a fine engraving on the wall of one of Raphael's Madonnas. We chatted a few moments, and then, as he did not return, we took a stroll over the grounds, under the direction of Mr. Fields. "We had ascended the hill, and from its outlook were taking in the historic country about, when we were rejoined by Hawthorne in the old rustic summer-house. As I was the stranger, he talked with me more than with the others, largely about myself and my verse-work, which he seemed to have followed with considerable attention; and he mentioned an architectural poem of mine and compared it with his own modest mansion. "'If I could build like you,' he said, 'I, too, would have a castle in the air.' "'Give me The Wayside,' I replied, 'and you shall have all the air castles I can build.' "As we rambled and talked, my heart went out towards this famous man, who did not look down upon me, as he might well have done, but took me up to himself as an equal and a friend. Dinner was announced and eaten, a plain country dinner, with a bottle or two of _vin ordinaire_, and we started back to Boston." Pierce having become President-Elect, Mr. Stoddard made another trip to Concord, in the winter of 1852-3, to ask Hawthorne's advice about getting a place in the Custom House. He was taken into the study (at that time in the southeast corner, on the ground-floor and facing the road), where there was a blazing wood-fire. The announcement of dinner cut short their conversation, but after dinner they again retired to the study, where, as Mr. Stoddard says, Hawthorne brought out some cigars, "which we smoked with a will and which I found stronger than I liked. Custom House matters were scarcely touched upon, and I was not sorry, for while they were my ostensible errand there, they were not half so interesting as the discursive talk of Hawthorne. He manifested a good deal of curiosity in regard to some old Brook Farmers whom I knew in a literary way, and I told him what they were doing, and gave him my impressions of the individuality of each. He listened, with an occasional twinkle of the eye, and I can see now that he was amused by my out-spoken detestation of certain literary Philistines. He was out-spoken, too, for he told me plainly that a volume of fairy stories I had just published was not simple enough for the young. "What impressed me most at the time was not the drift of the conversation, but the graciousness of Hawthorne. He expressed the warmest interest in my affairs, and a willingness to serve me in every possible way. In a word, he was the soul of kindness, and when I forget him I shall have forgotten everything else." When Mr. Stoddard got back to New York, he received this letter:-- CONCORD, _March_ 16_th_, 1853. DEAR STODDARD: I beg your pardon for not writing before; but I have been very busy and not particularly well. I enclose a letter to Atherton. Roll up and pile up as much of a snow-ball as you can in the way of political interest; for there never was a fiercer time than this among the office-seekers.... Atherton is a man of rather cold exterior; but has a good heart--at least for a politician of a quarter of a century's standing. If it be certain that he cannot help you, he will probably tell you so. Perhaps it would be as well for you to apply for some place that has a literary fragrance about it--librarian to some department--the office that Lanman held. I don't know whether there is any other such office. Are you fond of brandy? Your strength of head (which you tell me you possess) may stand you in good stead in Washington; for most of these public men are inveterate guzzlers, and love a man that can stand up to them in that particular. It would never do to let them see you corned, however. But I must leave you to find your way among them. If you have never associated with them heretofore, you will find them a new class, and very unlike poets. I have finished the "Tanglewood Tales," and they will make a volume about the size of the "Wonder-Book," consisting of six myths--"The Minotaur," "The Golden Fleece," "The Story of Proserpine," etc., etc., etc., done up in excellent style, purified from all moral stain, re-created good as new, or better--and fully equal, in their way, to "Mother Goose." I never did anything so good as those old baby-stories. In haste, Truly yours, NATH. HAWTHORNE. Nothing could more succinctly illustrate the readiness of Hawthorne's sympathies, and the companionable, cordial ease with which he treated a new friend who approached him in the right way, one who caught his fancy by a frank and simple independence, than this letter to Mr. Stoddard, whom he had spoken with only twice. At that very time his old disinclination to be intruded upon was as strong as ever; for Mr. Fields relates how, just before Hawthorne sailed for England, they walked together near the Old Manse and lay down in a secluded, grassy spot beside the Concord River, to watch the clouds and hear the birds sing. Suddenly, footsteps were heard approaching, and Hawthorne whispered in haste, with much solemnity: "Duck! or we shall be interrupted by somebody." So they were both obliged to prostrate themselves in the grass until the saunterer had passed out of sight. The proposition to accept an office from Pierce was made to him as soon as the new President was inaugurated. Although Hawthorne had considered the possibility, as we have seen, and had decided what he could advantageously take if it were offered, he also had grave doubts with regard to taking any post whatever. When, therefore, the Liverpool consulate was tendered to him, he at first positively declined it. President Pierce, however, was much troubled by his refusal, and the intervention of Hawthorne's publisher, Mr. Ticknor, was sought. Mr. Ticknor urged him to reconsider, on the ground that it was a duty to his family; and Hawthorne, who also naturally felt a strong desire to see England, finally consented. His appointment was confirmed, March 26, 1853; but his predecessor was allowed, by resigning prospectively, to hold over for five months; so that the departure for England was not effected until the midsummer of 1853. IV. The twofold character of Hawthorne's mind is strongly manifested in the diverse nature of the interests which occupied him in Europe, and the tone with which he discussed them, alike in his journals, in his letters, in "Our Old Home," and "The Marble Faun." On the one side, we find the business-like official, attending methodically to the duties of his place, the careful father of a family looking out for his personal interests and the material welfare of his children in the future, the keen and cool-headed observer who is determined to contemplate all the novelties of strange scenes through no one's eyes but his own. On the other side, he presents himself to us as the man of reverie, whose observation of the actual constantly stimulates and brings into play a faculty that perceives more than the actual; the delicate artist, whose sympathies are ready and true in the appreciation of whatever is picturesque or suggestive, or beautiful, whether in nature or in art. Some of the letters which he wrote from Liverpool to his classmate, Horatio Bridge, throw light upon his own affairs and the deliberate way in which he considered them. For instance, under date of March 30, 1854, he wrote:-- "I like my office well enough, but my official duties and obligations are irksome to me beyond expression. Nevertheless, the emoluments will be a sufficient inducement to keep me here for four years, though they are not a quarter part what people suppose them. The value of the office varied between ten and fifteen thousand dollars during my predecessor's term, and it promises about the same now. Secretary Guthrie, however, has just cut off a large slice, by a circular.... Ask ---- to show you a letter of mine, which I send by this steamer, for possible publication in the newspapers. It contains a statement of my doings in reference to the San Francisco [steamship] sufferers. The "Portsmouth Journal," it appears, published an attack on me, accusing me of refusing all assistance until compelled to act by Mr. Buchanan's orders; whereas I acted extra-officially on my own responsibility, throughout the whole affair. Buchanan refused to have anything to do with it. Alas! How we public men are calumniated. But I trust there will be no necessity for publishing my letter; for I desire only to glide noiselessly through my present phase of life. "It sickens me to look back to America. I am sick to death of the continual fuss and tumult, and excitement and bad blood, which we keep up about political topics. If it were not for my children, I should probably never return, but, after quitting office, should go to Italy, to live and die there. If you and Mrs. Bridge would go, too, we might form a little colony amongst ourselves, and see our children grow up together. But it will never do to deprive them of their native land, which, I hope, will be a more comfortable and happy residence in their day than it has been in ours. In my opinion we are the most miserable people on earth." It appears, further, that the appointment of a consul for Manchester was contemplated, which, Hawthorne says, by withdrawing some of the Liverpool perquisites, "would go far towards knocking this consulate in the head." On April 17th, hearing that a bill had been introduced in Congress to put consuls upon salary, instead of granting them fees, he wrote:-- "I trust to Heaven no change whatever will be made in regard to the emoluments of the Liverpool consulate, unless indeed a salary is to be given in addition to the fees, in which case I should receive it very thankfully. This, however, is not to be expected.... A fixed salary (even if it should be larger than any salary now paid by government, with the exception of the President's own) will render the office not worth any man's holding. It is impossible (especially for a man with a family and keeping any kind of an establishment) not to spend a vast deal of money here. The office, unfortunately, is regarded as one of great dignity, and puts the holder on a level with the highest society, and compels him to associate on equal terms with men who spend more than my whole income on the mere entertainments and other trimmings and embroideries of their lives. Then I am bound to exercise some hospitality toward my own countrymen. I keep out of society as much as I decently can, and really practise as stern an economy as ever I did in my life; but nevertheless I have spent many thousands of dollars in the few months of my residence here, and cannot reasonably hope to spend less than $6,000 per annum, even after the expense of setting up an establishment is defrayed. All this is for the merely indispensable part of my living; and unless I make a hermit of myself and deprive my wife and children of all the pleasures and advantages of an English residence, I must inevitably exceed the sum named above.... It would be the easiest thing in the world for me to run in debt, even taking my income at $15,000" (out of which all the clerks and certain other office expenses had to be paid), ... "the largest sum that it ever reached in Crittenden's time. He had no family but a wife, and lived constantly at a boarding-house, and, nevertheless, went away (as he assured me) with an aggregate of only $25,000 derived from his savings. "Now the American public can never be made to understand such a statement as the above; and they would grumble awfully if more than $6,000 per annum were allowed for a consul's salary." But Hawthorne concludes that it would not compensate him to retain the place with a salary even of $10,000; and that if the emoluments should be reduced from their then proportions, "the incumbent must be compelled to turn his official position to account by engaging in commerce--a course which ought not to be permitted, and which no Liverpool consul has ever adopted." There are some references to President Pierce, in the Bridge correspondence, which possess exceptional interest; but I cite only one of them. The great honor of the immense publicity into which Pierce had come as the executive head of the nation, and the centre upon which many conflicting movements and machinations turned, created a danger of misunderstandings with some of his early and intimate friends. In discussing one such case Hawthorne writes (May 1, 1854), with regard to maintaining a friendship for the President:-- "You will say that it is easy for me to feel thus towards him, since he has done his very best on my behalf; but the truth is (alas for poor human nature!) I should probably have loved him better if I had never received any favor at his hands. But all this will come right again, after both he and I shall have returned into private life. It is some satisfaction, at any rate, that no one of his appointments was so favorably criticized as my own; and he should have my resignation by the very next mail, if it would really do him any good." Mr. Pike, who still held a post in the Salem Custom House, had written to Hawthorne not long after his arrival in England, inquiring about the prospect of obtaining some employment in the consular service there; and Hawthorne replied, in a manner that leaves no doubt of his sagacity in perceiving the exact situation of affairs, with its bearings for both Pike and himself, nor of his determination neither to deceive himself nor to give his friend any but the real reasons why he discouraged the inquiry. "LIVERPOOL, _September_ 15, 1853. DEAR PIKE,--I have been intending to write to you this some time, but wished to get some tolerably clear idea of the state of things here before communicating with you. I find that I have three persons in my office: the head-clerk, or vice-consul, at £200, the second clerk at £150, and the messenger, who does some writing, at £80. They are all honest and capable men, and do their duty to perfection. No American would take either of these places for twice the sums which they receive; and no American, without some months' practice, would undertake the duty. Of the two I would rather displace the vice-consul than the second clerk, who does a great amount of labor, and has a remarkable variety of talent,--whereas the old gentleman, though perfect in his own track, is nothing outside of it. I will not part with either of these men unless compelled to do so; and I don't think Secretary Marcy can compel me. Now as to the Manchester branch, it brings me in only about £200. There is a consular agent there, all the business being transacted here in Liverpool. The only reason for appointing an agent would be that it might shut off all attempts to get a separate consulate there. There is no danger, I presume, of such an attempt for some time to come; for Pierce made a direct promise that the place should be kept open for my benefit. Nevertheless efforts will be made to fill it, and very possibly representations may be made from the business men of Manchester that there is necessity for a consul there. In a pecuniary point of view, it would make very little difference to me whether the place were filled by an independent consul or by a vice-consul of my own appointment, for the latter would of course not be satisfied with less than the whole £200. What I should like would be to keep the place vacant and receive the proceeds as long as possible, and at last, when I could do no better, to give the office to you. No great generosity in that to be sure. Thus I have put the matter fairly before you. Do you tell me as frankly how your own affairs stand, and whether you can live any longer in that cursed old Custom House without hanging yourself. Rather than that you should do so I would let you have the place to-morrow, although it would pay you about £100 less than your present office. I suppose as a single man you might live within your income in Manchester; but judging from my own experience as a married man, it would be a very tight fit. With all the economy I could use I have already got rid of $2,000 since landing in England. Hereafter I hope to spend less and save more. In point of emolument, my office will turn out about what I expected. If I have ordinary luck I shall bag from $5,000 to $7,000 clear per annum: but to effect this I shall have to deny myself many things which I would gladly have. Colonel Crittenden told me that it cost him $4,000 to live with only his wife at a boarding-house, including a journey to London now and then. I am determined not to spend more than this, keeping house with my wife and children. I have hired a good house furnished at £160, on the other side of the River Mersey, at Rock Park, where there is good air and play-ground for the children; and I can come over to the city by steamboat every morning. I like the situation all the better because it will render it impossible for me to go to parties, or to give parties myself, and will keep me out of a good deal of nonsense. Liverpool is the most detestable place as a residence that ever my lot was cast in,--smoky, noisy, dirty, pestilential; and the consulate is situated in the most detestable part of the city. The streets swarm with beggars by day and by night. You never saw the like; and I pray that you may never see it in America. It is worth while coming across the sea in order to feel one's heart warm towards his own country; and I feel it all the more because it is plain to be seen that a great many of the Englishmen whom I meet here dislike us, whatever they may pretend to the contrary. My family and myself have suffered very much from the elements; there has not been what we should call a fair day since our arrival, nor a single day when a fire would not be agreeable. I long for one of our sunny days, and one of our good hearty rains. It always threatens to rain, but seldom rains in good earnest. It never _does_ rain, and it never _don't_ rain; but you are pretty sure to get a sprinkling if you go out without an umbrella. Except by the fireside, I have not once been as warm as I should like to be: but the Englishmen call it a sultry day whenever the thermometer rises above 60°. There has not been heat enough in England this season to ripen an apple. My wife and children often talk of you. Even the baby has not forgotten you. Write often, and say as much as you can about yourself, and as little as you please about A----, N----, and B----, and all the rest of those wretches of whom my soul was weary to death before I made my escape. Your friend ever, NATH. HAWTHORNE." Writing to Bridge again, November 28, 1854, he continues, with regard to his consular prospects, by a comparison between the pay received by English consuls and that allowed by the new bill to Americans. Only $7,500 were to be paid the consul at Liverpool. "Now I employ three clerks constantly," says Hawthorne "and sometimes more. The bill provides that these clerks should be Americans; and the whole sum allowed would not do much more than pay competent Americans, whose salaries must be much higher than would content Englishmen of equal qualifications. No consul can keep the office at this rate, without engaging in business--which the bill forbids." He adds that the notion that, by the proposed measure, a fund would be gained from the larger consulates towards paying the salaries of the smaller ones, was mistaken, since "a large part of the income of this consulate arises from business which might just as well be transacted by a notary public as by a consul, and which a consul is therefore not officially bound to do. All such business as this the consul will cease to transact, the moment the avails of it go into the public treasury, instead of his own purse; and thus there will be an immediate falling off of the office to a very considerable extent." Later on, he says: "I should really be ashamed to tell you how much my income is taxed by the assistance which I find it absolutely necessary to render to American citizens, who come to me in difficulty or distress. Every day there is some new claimant, for whom the government makes no provision, and whom the consul must assist, if at all, out of his own pocket. It is impossible (or at any rate very disagreeable) to leave a countryman to starve in the streets, or to hand him over to the charities of an English work-house; so I do my best for these poor devils. But I doubt whether they will meet with quite so good treatment after the passage of the consular bill. If the government chooses to starve the consul, a good many will starve with him." The bill, nevertheless, was passed. Lieutenant Bridge, who was then stationed at Washington, had done all that he could to rouse an effectual opposition to its enactment; and his friend wrote to him from Liverpool (March 23, 1855) thus:-- "I thank you for your efforts against this bill; but Providence is wiser than we are, and doubtless it will all turn out for the best. All through my life, I have had occasion to observe that what seemed to be misfortunes have proved, in the end, to be the best things that could possibly have happened to me; and so it will be with this--even though the mode in which it benefits me may never be made clear to my apprehension. It would seem to be a desirable thing enough that I should have had a sufficient income to live comfortably upon for the rest of my life, without the necessity of labor; but, on the other hand, I might have sunk prematurely into intellectual sluggishness--which now there will be no danger of my doing; though with a house and land of my own, and a good little sum at interest besides, I need not be under any very great anxiety about the future. When I contrast my present situation with what it was five years ago, I see a vast deal to be thankful for; and I still hope to thrive by my legitimate instrument--the pen. One consideration which goes very far towards reconciling me to quitting the office is my wife's health, with which the climate of England does not agree.... In short, we have wholly ceased to regret the action of Congress (which, nevertheless, was most unjust and absurd), and are looking at matters on the bright side. However, I shall be glad to get what advantage I can out of the office, and therefore I hope Pierce will give me as long a line as his conscience will let him." Believing that the office of consul with a salary reduced to $7,500, which was only half the sum it had previously yielded in good years, would not be worth the sacrifice involved in giving himself up to its duties, he purposed resigning within a few months, taking a trip to Italy, and then going home. But, fortunately for his pecuniary welfare, the act of Congress had been so loosely framed (in harmony with the general ignorance on which it was based), that it was left to the President to reappoint old incumbents under the new system or not, as he pleased. Pierce accordingly let Hawthorne's commission run on without interruption, and the consul stayed through the rest of the administration's term. While the matter was still in abeyance, however, the suggestion came from Bridge that he allow himself to be transferred to Lisbon as minister. The prospect was, in one way, seductive. Hawthorne was growing anxious about his wife's health, and felt that nothing could be more delightful than to take her to a warmer climate, which she needed, and thus avoid the temporary separation which might have to be undergone if he remained at Liverpool. The objections were, that he had no acquaintance with diplomacy, did not know Portuguese, and disliked forms and ceremonies. "You will observe," he wrote, "that the higher rank and position of a minister, as compared with a consul, have no weight with me. This is not the kind of honor of which I am ambitious." With a good deal of hesitation he came to the belief that it would be wise for him not to make the change. "But," he remarked, "it was a most kind and generous thing on the part of the President to entertain the idea." His friend, Mr. John O'Sullivan, who had been the founder and editor of the "Democratic Review," to which Hawthorne had contributed copiously during his residence at the Manse, was at this time accredited to the Court of Lisbon, and would doubtless have been provided for in some other way had Hawthorne been promoted to the place. The latter decided to stay at Liverpool, but to send Mrs. Hawthorne to Lisbon, where she would find not only milder air, but also friends in the minister and his wife. She sailed with her daughters in October, 1855, and returned in the following June. Wearisome as the details of his office duty were to him, Hawthorne gave them more than a perfunctory attention. He became greatly aroused by the wrongs and cruelties endured by sailors on the high seas, and sent a long despatch on that subject to the Secretary of State, suggesting action for their relief. He even investigated such minutiæ as the candles used in the British navy, and sent samples of them to Bridge, thinking that it might be desirable to compare them with those in use on American war-ships. Opportunities, however, had occurred for several trips in various directions, to Wales, Furness Abbey, and the Lakes. London was visited just before Mrs. Hawthorne sailed; and during her absence he again went to the capital, and made a tour which included Glasgow, Edinburgh, York, Newcastle, and Salisbury. A few days before her expected return, he said in a letter to Bridge that unless she should prove to be perfectly free from the cough which had troubled her, "I shall make arrangements to give up the consulate in the latter part of autumn, and we will be off for Italy. I wish I were a little richer; but when I compare my situation with what it was before I wrote 'The Scarlet Letter,' I have reason to be satisfied with my run of luck. And, to say the truth, I had rather not be _too_ prosperous: it may be a superstition, but it seems to me that the bitter is very apt to come with the sweet, and bright sunshine casts a dark shadow; so I content myself with a moderate portion of sugar, and about as much sunshine as that of an English summer's day. In this view of the matter, I am disposed to thank God for the gloom and chill of my early life, in the hope that my share of adversity came then, when I bore it alone; and that therefore it need not come now, when the cloud would involve those whom I love. "I make my plans to return to America in about two years from this time. For my own part, I should be willing to stay abroad much longer, and perhaps even to settle in Italy; but the children must not be kept away so long as to lose their American characteristics; otherwise they will be exiles and outcasts through life." The presidential convention of the democratic party was held early in the summer of 1856, and Buchanan, then minister at the Court of St. James, became the candidate. Pierce had also been in the field, but was defeated, and concerning this circumstance Hawthorne wrote, characteristically: "I am sorry Frank has not the nomination, if he wished it. Otherwise, I am glad he is out of the scrape." During the earlier part of his consulship, Hawthorne leased a pleasant dwelling at Rock Ferry, on the opposite side of the Mersey from Liverpool, where he was able to live without going much into society; and while Mrs. Hawthorne was in Portugal, he occupied simple quarters at a boarding-house. Afterwards he settled at Southport for a number of months, in a furnished house. He formed but one intimate friendship, that which attached him to Mr. Henry Bright, a gentleman engaged in business, but gifted with a quick and sympathetic mind and a taste for literature. In London his chief friend was Mr. Francis Bennoch, also a merchant, who consorted much with people of creative genius, and delighted to gather them at his table, where they were entertained with a cordial and charming hospitality. Mr. Bright and Mr. Bennoch have each published a book since then; but although Hawthorne met many persons eminent in literature, and enjoyed meeting them, it was not with any of their number that he formed the closest ties. With relief he heard in April, 1857, that his resignation had been accepted. "Dear Bridge," he wrote, "I have received your letter, and the not unwelcome intelligence that there is another Liverpool consul now in existence.... I am going to Paris in a day or two, with my wife and children, and shall leave them there while I return here to await my successor." He then thanked Bridge for a newspaper paragraph which the latter had caused to be printed, explaining Hawthorne's position in resigning. "I was somewhat apprehensive that my resignation would have been misunderstood," he proceeded, "in consequence of a letter of General Cass to Lord Napier, in which he intimated that any consul found delinquent in certain matters should be compelled to retire.... But for your paragraph, I should have thought it necessary to enlighten the public on the true state of the case as regards the treatment of seamen on our merchant vessels, and I do not know but I may do it yet; in which case I shall prove that General Cass made a most deplorable mistake in the above-mentioned letter to Lord Napier. I shall send the despatch to Ticknor, at any rate, for publication if necessary. I expect great pleasure during my stay on the Continent, and shall come home at last somewhat reluctantly. Your pledge on my behalf of a book shall be honored in good time, if God pleases." The intention of taking his family at once to Paris was given up, and instead Hawthorne went with them to Manchester, the Lakes, and Scotland, and made a pilgrimage to Warwick and Coventry, besides visiting many other places. The new consul, however, postponed his coming until near the end of 1857. Not before January, 1858, did Hawthorne break away from the fascinations of England and cross to the Continent. When, after spending more than a year and a half in Italy, he again set foot in England, it was to establish himself at Redcar, a sea-side town in Yorkshire, where he finished "The Marble Faun" in October, 1859; and thence he betook himself to Leamington, which had greatly pleased him on a previous visit. Here his old friend, Mr. Hillard, called upon him; and in an article printed in the "Atlantic Monthly," in 1870, he says: "The writer of this notice, who confesses to an insatiable passion for the possession of books, and an omnivorous appetite for their contents, was invited by him into his study, the invitation being accompanied with one of his peculiar and indescribable smiles, in which there lurked a consciousness of his (the writer's) weakness. The study was a small square room, with a table and chair, but absolutely not a single book. He liked writing better than reading." Mr. Hillard's implication, however, is a misleading one. "Hawthorne," says Mr. Fields, "was a hearty devourer of books, and in certain moods of mind it made very little difference what the volume before him happened to be.... He once told me that he found such delight in old advertisements in the newspaper files at the Boston Athenæum, that he had passed delicious hours among them. At other times he was very fastidious, and threw aside book after book, until he found the right one. De Quincey was a favorite with him, and the sermons of Laurence Sterne he once commended to me as the best sermons ever written." His correspondence was not "literary," to be sure; but in his letters to Mr. Fields, who had to do so especially with books, occasional references to literature escape him, which did not ordinarily find their way into his letters to other people. From England, in 1854, he wrote to that gentleman: "I thank you for the books you sent me, and more especially for Mrs. Mowatt's 'Autobiography,' which seems to me an admirable book. Of all things I delight in autobiographies; and I hardly ever read one that interested me so much." He did not read for erudition or for criticism, but he certainly read much, and books were companions to him. I have seen several catalogues of libraries which Hawthorne had marked carefully, proving that, although he made no annotations, he had studied the titles with a natural reader's loving fondness. His stay at Leamington was but a brief one, and for that reason he may well have been without books in his study at the moment; he never crowded them about himself, in the rooms where he worked, but his tower-study at The Wayside always contained a few volumes, and a few small pictures and ornaments--enough to relieve his eye or suggest a refreshment to his mind, without distracting him from composition or weakening the absorbed intensity of his thought. The only approach to literary exertion made at Liverpool seems to have been the revision of the "Mosses from an Old Manse," for a reissue at the hands of Ticknor & Fields; employment which led to some reflections upon his own earlier works. "I am very glad that the 'Mosses' have come into the hands of our firm; and I return the copy sent me, after a careful revision. When I wrote those dreamy sketches, I little thought I should ever preface an edition for the press amid the bustling life of a Liverpool consulate. Upon my honor, I am not quite sure that I entirely comprehend my own meaning, in some of those blasted allegories; but I remember that I always had a meaning, or at least thought I had. I am a good deal changed since those times; and, to tell you the truth, my past self is not very much to my taste, as I see myself in this book. Yet certainly there is more in it than the public generally gave me credit for at the time it was written. "But I don't think myself worthy of very much more credit than I got. It has been a very disagreeable task to read the book." He was inveigled, however, into giving encouragement to that unfortunate woman, Miss Delia Bacon, who was engaged in the task of proving that Lord Bacon wrote Shakespeare's plays. He corresponded with her on the subject, and finally agreed, although not assenting to her theory, to write a preface for her book, which he did. She was dissatisfied because he did not accept her views entirely, grew very angry, and even broke off all relations with him, notwithstanding that he had paid the expenses of publication for her. Arriving at Rome in February, 1858, Hawthorne lingered there until late in May, when he retired to Florence, and hired there the Villa Montauto, in the suburb of Bellosguardo. October found him again in Rome, where he spent the winter; leaving the Continent, finally, in June, 1859, for England and Redcar. "I am afraid I have stayed away too long," he wrote from Bellosguardo, to Mr. Fields, in September, 1858, "and am forgotten by everybody. You have piled up the dusty remnants of my editions, I suppose, in that chamber over the shop, where you once took me to smoke a cigar, and have crossed my name out of your list of authors, without so much as asking whether I am dead or alive. But I like it well enough, nevertheless. It is pleasant to feel that at last I am away from America,--a satisfaction that I never enjoyed as long as I stayed in Liverpool, where it seemed to me that the quintessence of nasal and hand-shaking Yankeedom was continually filtered and sublimated through my consulate, on the way outward and homeward. I first got acquainted with my own countrymen there. At Rome, too, it was not much better. But here in Florence, and in the summer-time, and in this secluded villa, I have escaped from all my old tracks and am really remote. "I like my present residence immensely. The house stands on a hill, overlooking Florence, and is big enough to quarter a regiment; insomuch that each member of the family, including servants, has a separate suite of apartments, and there are vast wildernesses of upper rooms, into which we have never yet sent exploring expeditions. "At one end of the house there is a moss-grown tower haunted by the ghost of a monk, who was confined there in the thirteenth century, previous to being burned at the stake in the principal square of Florence. I hire this villa, tower and all, at twenty-eight dollars a month; but I mean to take it away bodily and clap it into a romance which I have in my head ready to be written out." Turning to the topic of home, he went on: "After so long an absence (more than five years already, which will be six before you see me at the Old Corner), it is not altogether delightful to think of returning. Everybody will be changed, and I, myself, no doubt, as much as anybody.... It won't do. I shall be forced to come back again and take refuge in a London lodging. London is like the grave in one respect,--any man can make himself at home there; and whenever a man finds himself homeless elsewhere, he had better either die or go to London. "Speaking of the grave reminds me of old age and other disagreeable matters, and I would remark that one grows old in Italy twice or three times as fast as in other countries. I have three gray hairs now for one that I brought from England, and I shall look venerable indeed by the time I return next summer." The "French and Italian Note-Books" are more prolific in literary hints than the English. At Rome and Florence the practical self, which was necessarily brought forward in the daily round at the consulate and left its impress on the letters to Lieutenant Bridge, retired into the background under the influence of scenes more purely picturesque and poetic than those of England; and the idealizing, imaginative faculty of Hawthorne, being freed from the restraint which had so long cramped it, gained in elasticity from day to day. Four years of confinement to business, broken only at intervals by short episodes of travel, had done no more than impede the current of fancy; had not dried it, nor choked the source. Mr. Fields assures us that, in England, Hawthorne told him he had no less than five romances in his mind, so well planned that he could write any one of them at short notice. But it is significant that, however favorable Italy might be for drawing out and giving free course to this current, he could do little there in the way of embodying his conceptions. He wrote out an extensive first draft of "The Marble Faun" while moving from place to place on the actual ground where the story is laid; but the work itself was written at Redcar, and in the communication last quoted from he had said: "I find this Italian atmosphere not favorable to the close toil of composition, although it is a very good air to dream in. I must breathe the fogs of old England, or the east-winds of Massachusetts, in order to put me into working-trim." Conditions other than physical were most probably responsible, in part, for this state of things. Strong as Hawthorne's nature was on the side of the real, the ideal force within him was so much more puissant, that when circumstances were all propitious--as they were in Italy--it obtained too commanding a sway over him. His dreams, in such case, would be apt to overcome him, to exist simply for their own sake instead of being subordinated to his will; and, in fine, to expend their witchery upon the air, instead of being imprisoned in the enduring form of a book. Being compounded in such singular wise of opposing qualities: the customary, prudential, common sensible ones, and the wise and visionary ones--the outward reticence, and (if we may say so) the inward eloquence--of which we now have a clearer view; being so compounded, he positively needed something stern and adverse in his surroundings, it should seem, both as a satisfaction to the sturdier part of him, and as a healthful check which, by exciting reaction, would stimulate his imaginative mood. He must have precisely the right proportion between these counter influences, or else creation could not proceed. In the Salem Custom House and at the Liverpool consulate there had been too much of the hard commonplace: instead of serving as a convenient foil to the more expansive and lightsome tendencies of his genius, it had weighed them down. But in Italy there was too much freedom, not enough framework of the severe, the roughly real and unpicturesque. Hawthorne's intellectual and poetic nature presents a spectacle somewhat like that of a granite rock upon which delicate vines flourish at their best; but he was himself both rock and vine. The delicate, aspiring tendrils and the rich leafage of the plant, however, required a particular combination of soil and climate, in order to grow well. When he was not hemmed in by the round of official details, England afforded him that combination in bounteous measure. On the publication of "The Marble Faun," the author's friend, John Lothrop Motley, with whom he had talked, of the contemplated romance, in Rome, wrote to him from Walton-on-Thames (March 29, 1860):-- "Everything that you have ever written, I believe, I have read many times, and I am particularly vain of having admired 'Sights from a Steeple,' when I first read it in the Boston 'Token,' several hundred years ago, when we were both younger than we are now; of having detected and cherished, at a later day, an old Apple-Dealer, whom I believe you have unhandsomely thrust out of your presence now that you are grown so great. But the 'Romance of Monte Beni' has the additional charm for me, that it is the first book of yours that I have read since I had the privilege of making your personal acquaintance. My memory goes back at once to those walks (alas, not too frequent) we used to take along the Tiber, or in the Campagna ... and it is delightful to get hold of the book now, and know that it is impossible for you any longer, after waving your wand as you occasionally did then, indicating where the treasure was hidden, to sink it again beyond plummet's sound. "I admire the book exceedingly.... It is one which, for the first reading at least, I didn't like to hear aloud.... If I were composing an article for a review, of course I should feel obliged to show cause for my admiration; but I am only obeying an impulse. Permit me to say, however, that your style seems, if possible, more perfect than ever.... Believe me, I don't say to you half what I say behind your back; and I have said a dozen times that nobody can write English but you. With regard to the story, which has been somewhat criticized, I can only say that to me it is quite satisfactory. I like those shadowy, weird, fantastic, Hawthornesque shapes flitting through the golden gloom, which is the atmosphere of the book. I like the misty way in which the story is indicated rather than revealed; the outlines are quite definite enough from the beginning to the end, to those who have imagination enough to follow you in your airy flights.... The way in which the two victims dance through the Carnival on the last day is very striking. It is like a Greek tragedy in its effect, without being in the least Greek." In this last sentence Mr. Motley struck out an apt distinction; for it is perhaps the foremost characteristic of Hawthorne as a writer that his fictions possessed a plastic repose, a perfection of form, which made them akin to classic models, at the same time that the spirit was throughout eminently that belonging to the mystic, capricious, irregular fantasy of the North. Hawthorne thus made answer from Bath (April 1, 1860):-- MY DEAR MOTLEY,--You are certainly that Gentle Reader for whom all my books were exclusively written. Nobody else (my wife excepted, who speaks so near me that I cannot tell her voice from my own) has ever said exactly what I love to hear. It is most satisfactory to be hit upon the raw, to be shot straight through the heart. It is not the quantity of your praise that I care so much about (though I gather it all up carefully, lavish as you are of it), but the kind, for you take the book precisely as I meant it; and if your note had come a few days sooner, I believe I would have printed it in a postscript which I have added to the second edition, because it explains better than I found possible to do the way in which my romance ought to be taken.... Now don't suppose that I fancy the book to be a tenth part as good as you say it is. You work out my imperfect efforts, and half make the book with your warm imagination, and see what I myself saw but could only hint at. Well, the romance is a success, even if it never finds another reader. We spent the winter in Leamington, whither we had come from the sea-coast in October. I am sorry to say that it was another winter of sorrow and anxiety.... I have engaged our passages for June 16th.... Mrs. Hawthorne and the children will probably remain in Bath till the eve of our departure; but I intend to pay one more visit of a week or two to London, and shall certainly come and see you. I wonder at your lack of recognition of my social propensities. I take so much delight in my friends, that a little intercourse goes a great way, and illuminates my life before and after.... Your friend, NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. One may well linger here, for an instant, over the calm, confident, but deeply vibrating happiness from which those words sprang, concerning his wife, "who speaks so near me that I cannot tell her voice from my own;" and one may profitably lay away, for instruction, the closing lines,--"I take so much delight in my friends, that a little intercourse goes a great way." The allusion to "another winter of sorrow and anxiety" carries us back to the previous winter, passed in Rome, during which Hawthorne's elder daughter underwent a prolonged attack of Roman fever. Illness again developed itself in his family while they were staying at Leamington. In February of 1860 he wrote to Mr. Fields, who was then in Italy:-- "I thank you most heartily for your kind wishes in favor of the forthcoming work ['The Marble Faun'], and sincerely join my own prayers to yours in its behalf, without much confidence of a good result. My own opinion is, that I am not really a popular writer, and that what popularity I have gained is chiefly accidental, and owing to other causes than my own kind or degree of merit. Possibly I may (or may not) deserve something better than popularity; but looking at all my productions, and especially this latter one, with a cold or critical eye, I can see that they do not make their appeal to the popular mind. It is odd enough, moreover, that my own individual taste is for quite another class of works than those which I myself am able to write. If I were to meet with such books as mine by another writer, I don't believe I should be able to get through them." At another time he had written of Anthony Trollope's novels: "They precisely suit my taste; solid and substantial, written on the strength of beef and through the inspiration of ale, and just as real as if some giant had hewn a great lump out of the earth and put it under a glass case, with all its inhabitants going about their daily business and not suspecting that they were made a show of." Before leaving England for the last time, Hawthorne went up alone to London, and spent a week or two among his friends there, staying with Motley, and meeting Lord Dufferin, the Honorable Mrs. Norton, Leigh Hunt, Barry Cornwall, and many other agreeable and noted persons. "You would be stricken dumb," he wrote to his wife, who remained at Bath, "to see how quietly I accept a whole string of invitations, and, what is more, perform my engagements without a murmur.... The stir of this London life, somehow or other, has done me a wonderful deal of good, and I feel better than for months past. This is strange, for if I had my choice, I should leave undone almost all the things I do." In the midst of these social occupations he gave sittings to a young German-American sculptor named Kuntze, who modelled a profile portrait of him in bas-relief. A farewell dinner was given him at Barry Cornwall's; and in June, 1860, he sailed for America, from which he had been absent seven years. There was not yet any serious sign of a failure in his health; but the illness in his family, lasting through two winters, had worn severely upon him; his spirits had begun to droop. "I would gladly journalize some of my proceedings, and describe things and people; but I find the same coldness and stiffness in my pen as always since our return to England:" thus he had written in his Note-Book, while making that final London visit. In Italy, however, he had already shown symptoms of fatigue, saying to Mr. Fields: "I have had so many interruptions from things to see and things to suffer, that the story ['The Marble Faun'] has developed itself in a very imperfect way.... I could finish it in the time that I am to remain here, but my brain is tired of it just now." The voyage put fresh vigor into him, apparently. Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe and Professor Stowe were on board, with their daughters, and Mr. Fields, who was also a passenger, has said: "Hawthorne's love for the sea amounted to a passionate worship, and while I (the worst sailor probably on this planet) was longing, spite of the good company on board, to reach land as soon as possible, Hawthorne was constantly saying in his quiet, earnest way, 'I should like to sail on and on forever, and never touch the shore again.'" His inherited susceptibility to the fascination of the sea no doubt intensified his enjoyment, and he is reported to have talked in a strain of delightful humor while on shipboard. For nearly a year after his return to The Wayside, there is an uneventful gap in his history, concerning which we have very few details. He set about improving his house, and added to it a wing at the back, which, having three stories, rose above the rest of the building, and thus supplied him with a study in the top room, which had the effect of a tower. Meanwhile the political quarrel between the North and the South was rapidly culminating; in a few months the Slave States began their secession, and the Civil War broke out. This affected Hawthorne so deeply that for some time he was unable to engage in imaginative work, and he now relinquished the custom he had maintained for so many years, of keeping a journal. But there are letters which define his state of mind, which make his position clear with regard to the question of the Union, and show the change in his feeling brought on by the course of events. Several years before, while he was still consul, he thus confided to Bridge (January 9, 1857) his general opinion respecting the crisis which even then impended:-- "I regret that you think so doubtfully of the prospects of the Union; for I should like well enough to hold on to the old thing. And yet I must confess that I sympathize to a large extent with the Northern feeling, and think it is about time for us to make a stand. If compelled to choose, I go for the North. At present, we have no country--at least, none in the sense in which an Englishman has a country. I never conceived, in reality, what a true and warm love of country is, till I witnessed it in the breasts of Englishmen. The States are too various and too extended to form really one country. New England is quite as large a lump of earth as my heart can really take in.... However, I have no kindred with nor leaning toward the Abolitionists." When hostilities had begun, he wrote to the same friend, May 26, 1861:-- "The war, strange to say, has had a beneficial effect upon my spirits, which were flagging woefully before it broke out. But it was delightful to share in the heroic sentiment of the time, and to feel that I had a country, a consciousness which seemed to make me young again. One thing as regards this matter I regret, and one thing I am glad of. The regrettable thing is that I am too old to shoulder a musket myself, and the joyful thing is that Julian is too young. He drills constantly with a company of lads, and means to enlist as soon as he reaches the minimum age. But I trust we shall either be victorious or vanquished by that time. Meantime, though I approve the war as much as any man, I don't quite see what we are fighting for or what definite result can be expected. If we pommel the South ever so hard, they will love us none the better for it; and even if we subjugate them, our next step should be to cut them adrift, if we are fighting for the annihilation of slavery. To be sure, it may be a wise object, and offers a tangible result and the only one which is consistent with a future union between North and South. A continuance of the war would soon make this plain to us, and we should see the expediency of preparing our black brethren for future citizenship, by allowing them to fight for their own liberties and educating them through heroic influences. Whatever happens next, I must say that I rejoice that the old Union is smashed. We never were one people, and never really had a country since the Constitution was formed." Thus, then, Hawthorne, who had been brought up politically within the democratic party and thrice held office under its _régime_, had reached the conclusion, four years in advance of the event, that it was time for the North to "make a stand"; and now, while muskets rattled their grim prelude to a long and deadly conflict, he planted himself firmly on the side of the government--was among the first, moreover, to resolve upon that policy of arming the negroes, which was so bitterly opposed and so slow of adoption among even progressive reformers at the North. In his solitude, out of the current of affairs, trying to pursue his own peaceful, artistic calling, and little used to making utterances on public questions, it was not incumbent upon him nor proper to his character to blazon his beliefs where every one could see them. But, these private expressions being unknown, his silence was construed against him. One more reference to the war, occurring in a letter of October 12, 1861, to Lieutenant Bridge, should be recorded in this place:-- "I am glad you take such a hopeful view of our national prospects, so far as regards the war.... For my part, I don't hope (nor indeed wish) to see the Union restored as it was; amputation seems to me much the better plan, and all we ought to fight for is the liberty of selecting the point where our diseased members shall be lopped off. I would fight to the death for the Northern Slave-States, and let the rest go.... I have not found it possible to occupy my mind with its usual trash and nonsense during these anxious times; but as the autumn advances, I find myself sitting down to my desk and blotting successive sheets of paper, as of yore. Very likely I may have something ready for the public long before the public is ready to receive it." It will be seen that he was not hopeful as to the restoration of the entire Union, adhered to his first view indeed, that the scission of a part would be preferable. In declining a cordial invitation from Bridge to come to Washington, in February, 1862, he gave renewed emphasis to this opinion. "I am not very well," he said, "being mentally and physically languid; but I suppose there is an even chance that the trip and change of scene might supply the energy which I lack." He announced that he had begun a new romance, and then turning to the questions of the day, remarked that he "should not much regret an ultimate separation," and that soon; adding that if a strong Union sentiment should not set in at the South, we ought to resolve ourselves into two nations at once. He was evidently growing despondent; a fact which may have been due in part to the physical and mental languor of which he told his friend. Misfortune had once more entered his household; for one of his children was suffering from a peculiarly distressing malady, which imposed a heavy strain upon his nerves and troubled his heart. More than this, he mourned over the multitude of private griefs which he saw or apprehended on every side--griefs resulting from the slaughter that was going on at the seat of war--as acutely as if they had been his own losses. He could not shut out, by any wall of patriotic fire, the terrible shapes of fierce passion and the pathetic apparitions of those whose lives had been blasted by the tragedies of the field. His health, we have already noticed, had begun to falter while he was still abroad. Neither was he free from pecuniary anxieties. He had laid up a modest accumulation from his earnings in the consulate; but the additions to his house, unambitious though they were, had cost a sum which was large in proportion to his resources; the expense of living was increased by the war, and his pen was for the time being not productive. His income from his books was always scanty. He was too scrupulous to be willing to draw upon the principal which had been invested for the future support of his family; and there were times when he was harassed by the need of money. All these causes conspired to reduce his strength; but the omnipresent misery of the war, and the destruction of the Union, which he believed to be inevitable, were perhaps the chief adverse factors in the case. "Hawthorne's life," Mr. Lowell has said to me, "was shortened by the war." The romance mentioned as having been begun during this winter of 1861-62, was probably "Dr. Grimshawe's Secret," the first scheme of which appears as "The Ancestral Footstep;" and it was afterwards merged in "Septimius Felton." Hawthorne, however, did not make satisfactory progress with this work; and throughout the summer of 1862 he seems to have given such energies as he could command to the preparation of the chapters of travel subsequently collected under the title, "Our Old Home." The latter volume appeared at a time of fervid, nay, violent public excitement, caused by the critical state of military matters, the unpopularity of the draft, the increasing boldness of the democratic party at the North in opposing the war and demanding its cessation. To Hawthorne it appeared no more than just that he should dedicate his book to the friend whose public act, in sending him abroad in the government service, had made it possible for him to gather the materials he had embodied in these reminiscences. But his publisher, Mr. Fields, knowing that ex-President Pierce was very generally held to be culpable for his deference towards Southern leaders who had done much to bring on the war, and that he was ranked among the men who were ready to vote against continuing the attempt to conquer the Confederacy, foresaw the clamor which would be raised against Hawthorne if, at such a moment, he linked his name publicly with that of Pierce. He remonstrated upon the proposed dedication. But Hawthorne was not to be turned aside from his purpose by any dread of an outcry which he considered unjust. "I find," he replied, "that it would be a piece of poltroonery in me to withdraw either the dedication or the dedicatory letter, ... and if he [Pierce] is so exceedingly unpopular that his name is enough to sink the volume, there is so much the more need that an old friend should stand by him. I cannot, merely on account of pecuniary profit or literary reputation, go back from what I have deliberately felt and thought it right to do; and if I were to tear out the dedication, I should never look at the volume again without remorse and shame.... If the public of the North see fit to ostracize me for this, I can only say that I would gladly sacrifice a thousand or two of dollars rather than retain the good-will of such a herd of dolts and mean-spirited scoundrels." The language did not lack vigor and warmth; but Dr. Loring has stated that he spoke of the matter to the same effect, "not in the heat of passion, but with a calm and generous courage." The dedicatory letter was printed, of course, and drew down upon Hawthorne abundant condemnation; but he had maintained his integrity. The shock of such an accident was by no means the right sort of tonic for a man of Hawthorne's sensitive disposition when he was already feeble and almost ill. In April, 1862, he had been to Washington, and the things that impressed him there were noted down in an "Atlantic Monthly" paper, entitled "Chiefly About War Matters." At Washington, also, Leutze painted a portrait of him for General Pierce. In July, he took a brief trip with his son to the Maine coast, and began a new journal. There were no other changes of scene for him; the monotony of his life at The Wayside was seldom broken. That this period was for him one of unmitigated gloom cannot truthfully be predicated; he enjoyed his home, he had the society of his wife and children; he had many small and quiet pleasures. But there was likewise much to make him sorrowful, and the tide of vitality was steadily ebbing away. In May, 1863, James Russell Lowell invited him to Elmwood, and Hawthorne agreed to go, but he was finally prevented from doing so by a troublesome cold. The slow and mysterious disease, which was to prove fatal within a year, continued to make inroads upon his constitution. After the publication of "Our Old Home," in the autumn of 1863, there is no certain record of his condition or his proceedings, beyond this, that he went on declining, and that--having abandoned the two preceding phases of his new fiction--he attempted to write the resultant form of it, which was to have been brought out as "The Dolliver Romance." Although the title had not yet been determined upon, he consented to begin a serial publication of the work in the "Atlantic Monthly" for January, 1864. But he wrote to Mr. Fields: "I don't see much probability of my having the first chapter of the Romance ready so soon as you want it. There are two or three chapters ready to be written, but I am not yet robust enough to begin, and I feel as if I should never carry it through.... I can think of no title for the unborn Romance. Always heretofore I have waited till it was quite complete, before attempting to name it, and I fear I shall have to do so now." On the 1st of December, he dispatched the manuscript of the first chapter, with the title of the whole. But he could not follow it up with more, and wrote, about the middle of January, 1864: "I am not quite up to writing yet, but shall make an effort as soon as I see any hope of success." At the end of February: "I hardly know what to say to the public about this abortive Romance, though I know pretty well what the case will be. I shall never finish it..., I cannot finish it unless a great change comes over me; and if I make too great an effort to do so, it will be my death." From this time on he accomplished no work which he was willing to send to the press, although he had among his papers the two fragmentary scenes from "The Dolliver Romance" that were posthumously printed. The wife of ex-President Pierce died in December, 1863, and Hawthorne went to New Hampshire to attend the funeral. When he passed through Boston, on his return, he appeared to Mr. Fields ill and more nervous than usual. Dreary events seemed to thicken around his path. In the last days of March, 1864, Mr. Fields saw him again; and by this time his appearance had greatly changed. "The light in his eye was as beautiful as ever, but his limbs were shrunken, and his usual stalwart vigor [was] utterly gone." A photograph taken not long before that date represents him with cheeks somewhat emaciated, and a worn, strangely anxious, half-appealing expression, which, while singularly delicate and noble, is extremely sad. Soon after this, in March, he set out for Washington with Mr. William Ticknor, Mr. Fields's senior partner in the publishing firm of Ticknor & Fields. The travelling companions spent two or three days in New York, and had got as far as Philadelphia, when Mr. Ticknor was taken suddenly ill, at the Continental Hotel, and died the next day. Stunned, wellnigh shattered by this sinister event, Hawthorne was almost incapacitated for action of any sort; but there were kind and ready friends in Philadelphia who came to his aid, and relieved him from the melancholy duty which he would else have had to meet. He returned to Concord, in what forlorn state an extract from a letter of Mrs. Hawthorne's may best convey: "He came back unlooked for, that day; and when I heard a step on the piazza, I was lying on a couch and feeling quite indisposed. But as soon as I saw him I was frightened out of all knowledge of myself,--so haggard, so white, so deeply scored with pain and fatigue was the face, so much more ill than ever I saw him before." Mrs. Hawthorne still hoped for some favorable turn, if he could but obtain a complete change of scene and escape from the austere New England spring, into some warmer climate. "He has not smiled since he came home till to-day," she wrote, "when I made him laugh, with Thackeray's humor, in reading to him." She was constant in her care; she would scarcely let him go up and down stairs alone. But not the most tender solicitude, nor any encouragement of unquenchable hope, could now avail to help him. The only stratagem that could be devised to win back health and strength was the plan proposed by General Pierce, to take Hawthorne with him on an easy journey by carriage into New Hampshire. They started in May,--the two old college-mates; the ex-President so lately widowed and still in the shadow of his own bereavement, with the famous romancer so mournfully broken, who was never more to be seen in life by those to whom he was dearest. From the Pemigewasset House at Plymouth, New Hampshire, where they had stopped for the night, General Pierce sent the news on May 19, that Hawthorne was dead. "He retired last night," wrote the General, "soon after nine o'clock, and soon fell into a quiet slumber.... At two o'clock I went to H----'s bedside; he was apparently in a sound sleep; and I did not place my hand upon him. At four o'clock I went into his room again, and, as his position was unchanged, I placed my hand upon him and found that life was extinct.... He must have passed from natural slumber to that from which there is no waking, without the slightest movement." Hawthorne was buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery at Concord, on the 24th of May, 1864. The grave was made beneath the shadowing pines of a hill near one of the borders of the beautiful, wooded burial-ground, whence there is a peaceful view over the valley of the Concord River. It was close to the slope where Thoreau now lies, and not far away is the grassy resting-place of Emerson. The spot was one for which Hawthorne had cherished an especial fondness. Emerson, that day, stood beside the grave, and with him Longfellow and Lowell were present; Agassiz, Holmes, James Freeman Clarke, Edwin Whipple, Pierce, and Hillard, had all assembled to pay their last reverence. A great multitude of people attended the funeral service at the old Unitarian First Church in the village, and Mr. Clarke, who had performed the marriage ceremony for Hawthorne, conducted the rites above him dead. It was a perfect day of spring; the roadside banks were blue with violets, the orchards were in bloom; and lilies of the valley, which were Hawthorne's favorites among flowers, had blossomed early as if for him, and were gathered in masses about him. Like a requiem chant, the clear strains that Longfellow wrote in memory of that hour still echo for us its tender solemnity:-- "How beautiful it was, that one bright day In the long week of rain! Though all its splendor could not chase away The omnipresent pain. "The lovely town was white with apple-blooms, And the great elms o'erhead Dark shadows wove on their aerial looms, Shot through with golden thread. "Across the meadows, by the gray old manse, The historic river flowed; I was as one who wanders in a trance, Unconscious of his road. "The faces of familiar friends seemed strange; Their voices I could hear, And yet the words they uttered seemed to change Their meaning to the ear. "For the one face I looked for was not there, The one low voice was mute; Only an unseen presence filled the air, And baffled my pursuit. "Now I look back, and meadow, manse, and stream Dimly my thought defines; I only see--a dream within a dream-- The hill-top hearsed with pines. "I only hear above his place of rest Their tender undertone, The infinite longings of a troubled breast, The voice so like his own. "There in seclusion and remote from men The wizard hand lies cold, Which at its topmost speed let fall the pen, And left the tale half told. "Ah, who shall lift that wand of magic power, And the lost clue regain? The unfinished window in Aladdin's tower Unfinished must remain!" V. This narrative of his career, in one sense so simple, so uneventful, has brought chiefly to the front, as we have followed it, a phase under which Hawthorne appears the most like other men; with motives easily understood, wishing to take his full share in human existence and its responsibilities; devoted in his domestic relations. Moderately ambitious of worldly welfare, but in poverty uncomplaining, he is so coolly practical in his view that he scarcely alludes to the products of his genius except as they may bear upon his material progress. Even this much of the character is uncommon, because of its sterling tone, the large, sustained manliness, and the success with which in the main it keeps itself firmly balanced; but it is a character not difficult to grasp, and one that appeals to every observer. It leaves out a great deal, however. The artist is absent from it. Neither is that essential mystery of organization included which held these elements together, united them with something of import far different, and converted the whole nature into a most extraordinary one, lifting it to a plane high above that on which it might, at first, seem to rest. We know, from brief allusions in his "Note-Books," that Hawthorne was perfectly well aware of his high quality as an artist. He speaks of having won fame in his dismal room in Herbert Street; and at Arezzo, in 1858, the well "opposite Petrarch's birth-house" which Boccaccio introduced into one of his stories, recalls to the American writer one of his own performances. "As I lingered round it I thought of my own town-pump in old Salem, and wondered whether my towns-people would ever point it out to strangers, and whether the stranger would gaze at it with any degree of such interest as I felt in Boccaccio's well. Oh, certainly not; but I made that humble town-pump the most celebrated structure in the good town. A thousand and a thousand people had pumped there, merely to water oxen or fill their tea-kettles; but when once I grasped the handle, a rill gushed forth that meandered as far as England, as far as India, besides tasting pleasantly in every town and village of our own country. I like to think of this, so long after I did it, and so far from home, and am not without hopes of some kindly local remembrance on this score."[10] Such indications of the artistic consciousness are the merest ripples on the surface; the deeper substance of it, with Hawthorne, always remained out of sight. Letters, which are assumed to reveal so much of those who indite them, are, when we come to the fact, very insufficient exponents of character; as, for instance, we may observe in the letters of Michael Angelo, whose mood and manner vary according to the person addressed. Correspondence, it is true, is appetizing to readers, and should be prized for the help it gives in defining an individual, but it does not always do full justice to the larger being included in the whole personality. Hawthorne's letters are more representative of those faculties by which he came into association with his fellows, than of those which tended to separate him from them by making him single and phenomenal, in his function as writer of romance. But in his actual presence there was a something which did most noticeably correspond to the hidden sources of his power, and visibly express them. There was the hale and vigorous port of a man well fitted by his physical constitution to meet the rudest emergency; but there was also a temperament of which the reserve, the delicacy, the tremulous sensitiveness were equal to those of the most finely organized woman. "He was tall and strongly built," wrote his friend Hillard, "with broad shoulders, deep chest, a massive head.... He looked like a man who might have held the stroke oar in a University boat.... But, on the other hand, no man had more of the feminine element than he. He was feminine in his quick perceptions, his fine insight, his sensibility to beauty.... No man comprehended woman better than he. And his face was as mobile and rapid in its changes of expression as that of a young girl.... His eyes would darken visibly under the touch of a passing emotion, like the waters of a fountain ruffled by the breeze of summer. So, too, he was the shyest of men."[11] The same writer adds: "There was nothing morbid in his character or temperament. He was, indeed, much the reverse of morbid. No man of genius ever had less the infirmities of genius than he.... Hawthorne was physically one of the healthiest of men. His pulse always kept even music. He cared nothing for wine or tobacco, or strong coffee or strong tea. He was a sound sleeper and an early riser. He was never moody or fitful or irritable. He was never unduly depressed or unreasonably elated. His spirits were not brilliant, but they were uniform, and, as Mrs. Hawthorne says, 'The airy splendor of his wit and humor was the light of his own home.'" Dr. Loring has supplied another sketch of his appearance in general intercourse, which does a great deal to fill out our conception:-- "He knew no such thing as fear; was scrupulously honest; was unwavering in his fidelity; conscientious in the discharge of his duty. There may have been men of more latent power, but I have known no man more impressive, none in whom the great reposing strength seemed clad in such a robe of sweetness as he wore. I saw him on the day General Pierce was elected to the presidency. It was a bright and delicious day in late autumn. He was standing under the little shaded and embowered piazza of 'The Wayside,' at Concord, in the full vigor of his manhood, radiant with joy at the good fortune of his friend, and with that sad, shy smile playing over his face, which was so touching and charming. I have seen him fishing from the rocks of the Essex County shore at Swampscott, enjoying the bliss of absolute repose and the sweet uncertainty which attends the angler's line. I have sat with him in the dimly lighted room on autumnal evenings, cheerful and vocal with the cricket's chirp, and have heard his wise and sensible talk, uttered in that soft, melodious tone which gave such a peculiar charm to his utterances,--a tone so shy that an intruder would hush it into silence in an instant. I have strolled with him in the darkness of a summer night through the lanes of Concord, assured by his voice, which came up from the grass-grown roadside in a sort of mysterious murmur, that he was my companion still. And everywhere and at all times, he bore about him a strong and commanding presence and impression of unpretending power. I can hardly tell how Hawthorne succeeded in entertaining his companions and securing their entire confidence, unless it was that he displayed great good sense and acuteness and good temper in his intercourse with them, and never misled them by false promises or low appeals. This, in addition to his subtile genius, everywhere recognized and never wholly concealed to even the most commonplace associates, made him a most fascinating friend, as he was really and truly a man of rare quality among ordinary men."[12] The earlier portraits of Hawthorne show the gentleness and the feminine traits in his disposition much more distinctly than those that are best known to the world. There is one, now owned by his cousin, Mr. Richard C. Manning, of Salem, which was painted in 1840 by Charles Osgood, an artist of Salem, and induced this comment from his sister Louisa: "The color is a little too high, to be sure, but perhaps it is a modest blush at the compliments which are paid to your pen." Another, painted by a Mr. C. G. Thompson, at Boston, in 1850 (now owned by Mr. Julian Hawthorne), resembles this, and presents, one would say, the ideal Hawthorne of the "Twice-Told Tales" and "The House of the Seven Gables." The face is smooth shaven and the cheeks are somewhat slender, making all the lines and features contribute to an effect of greater length and of more oval contour than that given by the later representations. The color is delicate; the large eyes look forth with peculiarly fascinating power from beneath a forehead of exceptional height and harmonious prominence. The hair is long, and recedes slightly on both sides of the forehead; a single lock in the middle curving over and drooping forward. There is less firmness about the lips than was characteristic of them in his latter years; they close softly, yet even in their pictured repose they seem to be mobile and ready to quiver with response to some emotion still undefined but liable to make itself felt at any instant. In its surrounding of long hair, and of a collar rising above the jaws, with a large black tie wound about the throat in the manner of a stock but terminating in a large bow at the front, the beardless countenance is stamped with a sort of prevalent aspect of the period when it was painted, which gives it what we call the old-fashioned look. It is, none the less, a striking one; one that arrests the glance immediately, and holds it by a peculiar spell. There is no suggestion of a smile or of cheeriness about it; the eyes even look a little weary, as with too much meditation in the brain behind them; there is not a trace discernible of that sturdy, almost military, resoluteness so marked in the familiar crayon portrait by Rowse, executed after Hawthorne's return from Italy and England. Here the face is pensive, timid, fresh and impressionable as that of some studious undergraduate unusually receptive of ideas, sentiments, and observations: it is, indeed, quiet and thoughtful to the verge of sadness. Longfellow kept always in his study a black-and-white copy from this portrait, and in speaking of it and of the subject's extreme shyness, said that to converse with Hawthorne was like talking to a woman. The Thompson picture was reproduced in 1851, in a steel engraving of considerable merit, and Hawthorne, thanking Mr. Fields for some of the prints, wrote from Lenox: "The children recognized their venerable sire with great delight. My wife complains somewhat of a want of cheerfulness in the face; and, to say the truth, it does appear to be afflicted with a bedevilled melancholy; but it will do all the better for the author of 'The Scarlet Letter.' In the expression there is a singular resemblance (which I do not remember in Thompson's picture) to a miniature of my father." In Rome, Miss Landor modelled a bust, the marble copy of which is now in the Concord Public Library. It is of life-size, and presents the head in a position which raises the chin and inclines the plane of the face slightly backward, so that the effigy might be taken for that of an orator addressing a great audience. This pose was selected by the sculptress because, after due study, she was persuaded that when Hawthorne became interested in conversation and kindled with the desire to set forth his own view, he always raised his head and spoke from a commanding attitude. She chose to perpetuate a momentary action, instead of rendering his customary aspect of holding the chin somewhat down or on a firm level; and this may account for the likeness not being satisfactory to the members of Hawthorne's own family. The bust, however, renders impressively the magnificent proportions of the neck and head and the whole physiognomy. The mouth is not concealed, and, although it exhibits more decision than that of the Thompson picture, it conveys the same general impression of a quickly responsive sensibility. Mr. Thompson made his painting when Hawthorne was forty-six, and Miss Landor had sittings from the author at the age of fifty-four; but the difference in apparent maturity of power in the face would indicate a much longer interval. This is perhaps due to the difference in the means of representation, and to some defect of strength in Mr. Thompson's drawing; but perhaps also the decided change in Hawthorne's general look, which began under the greatly altered conditions attending his European life, proceeded very rapidly. He allowed a thick mustache to grow, during his last stay in England, and it was then that Kuntze modelled his profile, which sets Hawthorne's features before us in a totally different way from any of the other portraits. Unfortunately, Kuntze's relief is reduced to a size below that of life, and the features accordingly assume a cramped relation. The lofty forehead is given its due importance, however, and concentration of impassioned energy is conveyed by the outline of the face, from this point of view. The chin, always forcible as well as delicate, impresses one in this case with a sense of persistent and enduring determination on the part of the original; and with this sense there is mingled an impression of something that approaches sternness, caused, it may be, by the hirsute upper lip. In considering these several representations and the crayon by Rowse, together with the photographs taken after Hawthorne's home-return, it is impossible not to observe that the sturdier and more practical elements in the romancer gained upon him, so far as personal appearance was concerned, with advancing age and a wider experience of life in the large world. But such a series of glimpses can do no more than to suggest disjointedly the union in him of attributes positive and passive, which always struck those who met him. A photograph which was secured before he left England depicts him in a mood and with an air that very happily convey this complete equipment of the man, this wellnigh perfect combination of traits, which enabled him by sympathy to run through the entire gamut of human feeling. His friend, John Lothrop Motley, induced him one day to enter a photographer's establishment, on the plea that he had business of his own there. Hawthorne was given a book to read, while waiting; and when the photographer was ready Motley attracted his friend's attention. Hawthorne looked up with a dawning smile, a bright, expectant glance,--holding the book on his knee meanwhile, with a finger in the place,--and instantly a perfect negative was made. The resulting portraiture showed him absolutely as he was: a breathing form of human nobility; a strong, masculine, self-contained nature, stored in a stalwart frame--the face grown somewhat more rotund than formerly, through material and professional success, and lighted up with captivating but calm geniality; while over the whole presence reigned an exquisite temperance of reserve, that held every faculty in readiness to receive and record each finest fluctuation of joy or sorrow, of earnest or of sport. Such as he there appears, we shall do well to imagine him to ourselves. The tendency at first, among those who judged him from his writings alone, was to set him down as a misanthrope. We need not go to the other extreme now. That he inclined to gravity, in his manner and in his habit of thought, seems to be beyond question; but he was not sombre. Neither was he hilarious. At home, though he was frequently silent, he never appeared to be so from depression, except in seasons of distress at the illness of members of the household; the prevailing effect of his presence, even when he was least communicative, being that of a cheerful calm with mellow humor underlying it. One of his children said to Mr. T. W. Higginson: "There was never such a playmate in all the world." On the other hand, I remember a letter from Hawthorne (no longer accessible for exact quotation), in which he frankly speaks of himself as taking constitutionally a somewhat despondent view of things. But if he did so, he never permitted the shadow to fall upon his friends. "I should fancy from your books," Hillard confessed in a letter to him, "that you were burdened with some secret sorrow, that you had some blue chamber in your soul, into which you hardly dared to enter yourself; but when I see you, you give me the impression of a man as healthy as Adam in Paradise." Mr. Hillard once told the present writer that he had sometimes walked twenty miles along the highway with Hawthorne, not a word being spoken during the entire tramp, and had nevertheless felt as if he were in constant communication with his friend. Mr. Curtis wrote many years ago: "His own sympathy was so broad and sure, that, although nothing had been said for hours, his companion knew that not a thing had escaped his eye, nor a single pulse of beauty in the day or scene or society failed to thrill his heart. In this way his silence was most social. Everything seemed to have been said." His fondness for seclusion, his steady refusal to talk when he did not feel like talking, and his unobtrusive but immovable independence in opinion, together with his complete disregard of conventional requirements in social intercourse, prevented Hawthorne from ever becoming a popular man. But he was the object of a loving admiration and the sincerest friendship, on the part of certain few intimates. Those who knew him best, and had been longest in relations with him, insensibly--as one observer has well suggested--caught from his fine reticence a kindred reluctance to speak about him to others. A degree of reverence was blended with their friendship, which acquired for them a sacred privacy. Having sound health physically, as well as a healthy mind, he enjoyed out-door occupations such as garden-work, rowing, fishing, and walking; but he never rode on horseback. He liked to make pedestrian trips through the country, stopping at haphazard in country taverns and farm-houses and listening to the conversation that went on there. In chance companionship of that sort, he could tolerate much freedom of speech, in consideration of the mother-wit that prompted it; but among men of his own class he never encouraged broad allusions. If anything that savored of the forbidden were introduced, he would not protest, but he at once turned the conversation towards some worthier subject. The practical vein in Hawthorne--his ingrained sympathy with the work-a-day world in which his father and his forefathers had busied themselves-adapted him to the official drudgery to which he devoted nine years of his life; although, while he was occupied with that, the ideal activities of his nature lay dormant. The two sets of faculties never could be exercised in equal measure at the same time: one or the other had to predominate. Yet in the conduct of his own affairs, so far as his pecuniary obligations were concerned, he was very prudent, and to the last degree scrupulous. One or two exceedingly small debts, which he was forced to contract, weighed upon him with a heaviness that to the ordinary commercial mind would be altogether inconceivable; and the relief he experienced when he was able to cancel them was inexpressible. His fault, in business, was that he attributed to other people a sense of honor equal to his own. This entailed upon him sundry losses which he was not well able to afford, through loans made to supposed friends. Notwithstanding the carefulness of his expenditure and a few moderately good receipts from the publication of his books in England, he died leaving a property of little more than twenty thousand dollars, besides his house at Concord and the copyright of his works. In addition to the strong physical frame and tall stature several times noticed in the present sketch, Hawthorne's personal appearance was distinguished by his large and lustrous gray-blue eyes, luxuriant dark brown hair of remarkable fineness, and a delicacy of the skin that gave unusual softness to his complexion; a complexion subdued, but full of "healthy, living color," as Mrs. Hawthorne once described it. "After his Italian journey he altered much, his hair having begun to whiten, and a thick dark mustache being permitted to grow, so that a wit described him as looking like a 'boned pirate.' When it became imperative to shake off his reticence, he seems to have had the power of impressing as much by speech as he had before done by silence. It was the same abundant, ardent, but self-contained and perfectly balanced nature that informed either phase. How commanding was this nature may be judged by the fact related of him by an acquaintance, that rude people jostling him in a crowd would give way at once 'at the sound of his low almost irresolute voice.'... Something even of the eloquent gift of old Colonel Hathorne seemed to be locked within him, like a precious heirloom rarely shown; for in England, where his position called for speech-making, he acquitted himself with brilliant honor. But the effort which this compelled was no doubt commensurate with the success. He never shrank, notwithstanding, from effort, when obligation to others put in a plea. A member of his family has told me that, when talking to any one not congenial to him, the effect of the contact was so strong as to cause an almost physical contraction of his whole stalwart frame, though so slight as to be perceptible only to eyes that knew his informal and habitual aspects; yet he would have sunk through the floor rather than betray his sensations to the person causing them. Mr. Curtis, too, records the amusement with which he watched Hawthorne paddling on the Concord River, with a friend whose want of skill caused the boat continually to veer the wrong way, and the silent generosity with which he put forth his whole strength to neutralize the error, rather than mortify his companion by explanation. His considerateness was always delicate and alert."[13] A niece of Horace Mann, who passed a part of the spring of 1852 with Mr. and Mrs. Hawthorne at West Newton, supplies one little instance of this, which shall be registered here. Mrs. Dean, the lady in question, was then under engagement to teach in Boston, but had an interval of time on her hands before the work should begin. She was invited by the Hawthornes to the West Newton house (at that time owned by Mr. Mann), where she was to occupy a room which had formerly been hers. She found that a fire was carefully laid in the stove every night, to warm the room in the morning, and, thinking that too much trouble was taken on her account, she begged to be allowed to attend to this detail herself. It was then she discovered that it was Hawthorne who made up the fire; and he insisted upon continuing his service. Mrs. Dean also recalls that he listened attentively to the incidental and ordinary chat between Mrs. Hawthorne and herself, seldom making any remark, but, when he did volunteer one, giving it a pungent and epigrammatic or humorous turn. Entering the room where she was constructing a raised map for schoolroom use, he watched her with close interest for a while, and then observed: "I would rather have had the making of the world itself, in the beginning." Taking whatever happened in a spirit always very much the same; reflective, penetrating, quietly sportive--a spirit, likewise, of patience and impartiality--Hawthorne kept his power of appreciation fresh to the very last. He could endure the humdrum tasks of government office, but they did not dull his pleasure in the simplest incidents of home-life, nor his delight in nature. "Every year the recurrent changes of season filled him with untold pleasure; and in the spring, Mrs. Hawthorne has been heard to say, he would walk with her in continuous silence, his heart full of the awe and delight with which the miracle of buds and new verdure inspired him." Taking everything in this spirit, we may repeat, mingling with the rough and the refined, and capable of extracting the utmost intellectual stimulus from the least of mundane phenomena, he maintained intact a true sense of relativity and a knowledge that the attainable best is, in the final analysis, incomplete. Contemplating a rose one day, he said: "On earth, only a flower is perfect." He cherished a deep, strong, and simple religious faith, but never approved of intellectual discussion concerning religion. The slightness of the definite fact, or of the reminiscence vouchsafed by those who knew him, is continually impressed upon us in reviewing this career. Considered in its main outline, how very plain and unambitious is the history! A sea-captain's son, born in Salem; living obscurely; sent up to the rude clearing where a new village was founding in Maine; induced, against his preference, to go to college; writing timid stories and essays, which the world had no suspicion that it needed, and prompted to this by an impulse of which the origin is inexplicable; next, the author coming into notice, but under eclipse now and then from disappearance behind a public office; finally, the acknowledged romancer of indefinitely great endowment--the head of his order in America--sent abroad to an important post, where he is recognized and warmly greeted by every one who can discern clearly: such is the general course of the narrative. Afterwards, the now eminent man comes back to his native land, labors a little longer in comparative obscurity, suffers unmerited obloquy for his fidelity to a personal friend, while perfectly loyal to his government; then dies, and is mourned not alone by those devoted companions who felt him to be the one great fact to them in present human nature, but also by famous scholars and poets, and by a multitude of strangers, who gather around his bier with a stricken sense of loss ineffable. It is very simple; it is very democratic--the unnoticed American boy in humble circumstances becoming the centre of a circle of fame which is still extending its radius. Very simple it is, and yet inexplicable. But if we cannot tell precisely how the mind came into being, nor what were the fostering influences that most cogently aided its growth, we can, at least, pay our reverence to the overruling Power that brings genius to the flowering-point under circumstances seemingly the most unpropitious. In 1863--the last year of his life--Hawthorne wrote to Mr. Stoddard, who had sent him a copy of his poem, "The King's Bell." "I sincerely thank you," he said, "for your beautiful poem, which I have read with a great deal of pleasure. It is such as the public had a right to expect from what you gave us in years gone by; only I wish the idea had not been so sad. I think Felix might have rung the bell once in his lifetime, and again at the moment of death. Yet you may be right. I have been a happy man, and yet I do not remember any one moment of such happy conspiring circumstances that I could have rung a joy-bell for it." Yes, he had been a happy man; one who had every qualification for a rich and satisfactory life, and was able to make such a life out of whatever material offered. He might not have been willing to sound the joy-bell for himself, but the world has rung it because of his birth. As for his death, it is better not to close our sketch with any glimpse of that, because, in virtue of his spirit's survival among those who read and think, he still lives. G. P. L. NEW YORK, _May_ 20, 1883. FOOTNOTES: [1] _A Study of Hawthorne_, III., 67-69. [2] _Yesterdays With Authors_, p. 113. [3] Both his friends, George William Curtis and George S. Hillard, in writing about him, have made the mistake of assigning to him black or dark eyes; an error perhaps due to the depth of shadowed cavity in which they were seen under the high and massive forehead. [4] _Hawthorne and his friends: Harper's Magazine_, vol. 63 (July, 1881). [5] Vol. 45 (July, 1837), p. 59. [6] _Transcendentalism in New England._ [7] She died, unmarried, in September, 1877. [8] The allusion to a baby-boy is confusing, because Mr. Julian Hawthorne was not born at Concord, and when the family returned thither to occupy The Wayside, he was about six years old. [9] This is the first intimation of the story of _Septimius Felton_, so far as local setting is concerned. The scenery of that romance was obviously taken from The Wayside and its hill. [10] _French and Italian Note-Books_, May 30, 1858. A contributor to _Appletons' Journal_, writing in 1875, describes a surviving specimen of the old contrivances which then gave Salem its water-supply. "The presumption is that a description of this particular one answers for Hawthorne's pump, seeing that they were all alike. It is large enough for a mausoleum and looks not unlike one, made of slabs of dingy stone, like stained, gray gravestones set up on one end, in a square at the foundation, but all inclining inward at the top, where they are kept in position by a band of iron. A decaying segment of log appears, in which the pump-handle works in vain, now, however, since, being long out of use, it has no connection with the water below; on the front side are two circular holes, like a pair of great eyes, made for the insertion of the spouts; and, finally, a long-handled iron dish, like a saucepan or warming-pan on a smaller scale, is attached by an iron chain to the stone, by way of drinking-vessel. Altogether, though it may not strike an old Salem resident in that way, it seems to the stranger a very unique, antiquated, and remarkable structure." [11] _Atlantic Monthly_, September, 1870, vol. 26, p. 257. [12] _Papyrus Leaves_, pp. 261, 262. [13] _A Study of Hawthorne_: Chapter, xi., 291, 292. Corrections The first line indicates the original, the second the correction. p. 528: "and Buchanan, the nminister" "and Buchanan, then minister" p. 529: "a book shall he honored" "a book shall be honored" 
6926	----	MEMORIES OF HAWTHORNE By Rose Hawthorne Lathrop PREFACE It will be seen that this volume is really written by Sophia Hawthorne; whose letters from earliest girlhood are so expressed, and so profound in thought and loveliness, that some will of sterner quality than a daughter's must cast them aside. I have tried to weed out those written records of hers (even from 1820) reaching to her last year in 1871, that could give no especial pleasure to any descendant who might come upon them; and I have been astonished to find that there was scarcely one such page. This is the explanation of my return, in the company of the friends of my father and mother, to an old garden, a familiar discourse, and a circle of life that embraced so much beauty. ROSE HAWTHORNE LATHROP. NEW YORK, February 20th, 1897. CONTENTS [online ed: page numbers omitted] CHAPTER I THE HAWTHORNES AND THE PEABODYS The Hawthornes summoned from their quietude by the Peabodys. Sophia Peabody's mother and grandmother, the latter wife of General Palmer, who was prominent in the Revolution. Characteristics of the Misses Peabody. Letters to the Hawthornes from the Peabodys, though so close at hand, because of the difficulty of seeing the former at any time. The dignity of George Peabody's nature. Sophia's fondness for profound books. The great affection of friends for her, who bring rare flowers to the little studio where she is often imprisoned. Elizabeth Hawthorne consents to walk with the Peabodys. Dr. Channing's regard for Sophia's artistic talent and motive. Miss Burley's literary club, to which Hawthorne liked to go with Sophia. The wooing not a moment delayed. Visits from Emerson and Very. Elizabeth goes forth among the most interesting people of Boston, and remains to teach their daughters. CHAPTER II THE DAYS OF THE ENGAGEMENT Hawthorne and Sophia become engaged, but defer the announcement for a year. Sophia visits friends in Boston, and Hawthorne visits Boston also. Washington Allston's deep approval of Sophia's talents. Elizabeth visits the Emersons in Concord, and writes as if from heaven. Mr. Bancroft remarked to Emerson that Hawthorne was exceptionally thorough in business. Sophia draws and paints vigorously in her happy security of the highest love. Letters from Hawthorne to her. Fragment of a Scrap-Book kept by Hawthorne at the Boston Custom House. Friends rejoice in the engagement when it is made known. CHAPTER III THE EARLY DAYS OF THE MARRIAGE The beautiful marriage is appreciated by all. Letters to Mrs. Caleb Foote and to Sophia's mother describe life at the Old Manse in Concord. The birth of Una. Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne skate upon the river near the Manse, with differing aspects. The radiance and sublimity of a Massachusetts winter enrich the landscape. Evening readings by Hawthorne to his wife from the classics begun and always continued. Friends call somewhat frequently, at last, from the outside world; Visits to relatives in Boston and Salem. Mary Peabody becomes the wife of Horace Mann. Sophia describes Una's favorable impression upon the circle of friends in Salem and Boston. Returning to the Old Manse renews the enjoyment of nature and peace. CHAPTER IV LIFE IN SALEM Salem becomes their home for the second time. Letter from George W. Curtis while in Europe. Sophia expresses in a letter to Hawthorne her entire satisfaction, though poor and in the midst of petty cares, under his enchanting protection. Daniel Webster's oration in Salem. Alcott's monologue. Thoreau's lecture. Letters about the attack of certain mistaken people upon Hawthorne as a Democrat and official. Hawthorne writes to Horace Mann upon the subject. The best citizens are active to remedy the offense against Hawthorne. George Mullet's letters describing Hawthorne as official and man. CHAPTER V FROM SALEM TO BERKSHIRE The Hawthornes seek a home by the sea, but drift up to the mountains of Berkshire, and are happy. Letter from Mrs. James R. Lowell, _nee_ White. The Sedgwicks are the kindest friends in the world. Herman Melville is drawn to the life by Mrs. Hawthorne, in a letter to her mother. A poem, by Mrs. Hawthorne, to her husband. CHAPTER VI LENOX Letters and visits from friends are frequent in Lenox, where a literary group begin to suggest flight to the Hawthornes, who have no liking for a fussy succession of intercourse. Hawthorne reads the "House of the Seven Gables" aloud to his wife as he writes it. He sends a long letter to William B. Pike. Charming long letters come from Herman Melville, though he is not far off. CHAPTER VII FROM LENOX TO CONCORD Letter, full of amused astonishment, from Hawthorne to Mrs. Tappan. Descriptions of the divine Lenox home life, by Mrs. Hawthorne. The removal to West Newton, and finally to Concord, is made. Letter from Maria L. Porter, a kindred nature. Mr. Alcott is lovingly analyzed by Mrs. Hawthorne. Letters to her from Mr. Alcott. Letters to her, from Emerson, of an earlier date. Letters from Margaret Fuller. Mrs. Hawthorne describes The Wayside. General Solomon McNiel wields his affable sword. The Emersons pervade the little town like reigning powers. CHAPTER VIII THE LIVERPOOL CONSULATE The Wayside begins to be hospitable in earnest, and Mr. Miller, the artist, talks unceasingly there. Mrs. Hawthorne describes her husband. Hawthorne visits the Isles of Shoals. Ex-President Pierce is insulted and bears it well. Hawthorne visits Brunswick College, and is welcomed back there. A talk on The Wayside hill. The Liverpool Consulate is given to Hawthorne, who visits Washington before embarking for England. Description of Hawthorne by his daughter Rose. The voyage is described in a letter from Mrs. Hawthorne. Field Talfourd pleases her, especially. Mr. Henry Bright shines upon the family. Rose describes him. Mrs. Hawthorne writes to her father about him, his family at their home, and of English ways. CHAPTER IX ENGLISH DAYS: I Hospitable English strangers make the American strangers welcome. An English mansion described by Mrs. Hawthorne. Liverpool organizations honor Hawthorne by attentions. The Squareys of Dacre Hill. Hawthorne's unstinted friendliness towards Americans in distress. The De Quincey family greatly desire to see Hawthorne, Ticknor says. Hawthorne meets the sons of Burns. Liscard Vale and its dinner-party described by Mrs. Hawthorne, who is entertained by the magnificence and the characters richly gathered there. Mrs. Hawthorne tells her father about a visit to Chester on Sunday. The "Westminster Review" praises Hawthorne's art. Distinguished English people seek Hawthorne out. Mr. Martineau described by Mrs. Hawthorne. Mr. Bennoch's first call upon the family. Miss Cushman visits the Hawthornes with her splendid geniality. Mrs. Hawthorne described by her daughter Rose. Hawthorne is hunted to gorgeous dinners against his better instincts. Henry Bright more delightfully drives him to beautiful scenes. "The Scarlet Letter" sells very largely in England, and is read. The Consulate is sighed over by Mrs. Hawthorne. CHAPTER X ENGLISH DAYS: II The Isle of Man is visited as if it were Fairyland. The Consulate is again described by Mrs. Hawthorne. Hawthorne refuses to let two hundred shipwrecked American soldiers die in destitution, and charters a ship to send them home, at some risk of personal bankruptcy. The death of Mrs. Hawthorne's father is communicated to her by her husband. A letter from Una tells about the family and the scene of the country-side, and refers to Lenox pastimes. Visit of the family to Wales. Hawthorne goes to a dinner-party to meet Mr. Buchanan and Miss Lane. Hawthorne and Mrs. Hawthorne described by Rose. Hawthorne still reads aloud in the evenings. Letters from Hawthorne to Rose. His playfulness and generous thought for his children noted. The home life of the family depicted, and also Mrs. Hawthorne's energy of geniality. A sketch of Mr. Bennoch, and a letter from him. Lord Houghton and others try to bring Hawthorne to society by letter. The family go to London for the ostensible purpose of enjoying society, but Hawthorne is obliged to spend part of the time in Liverpool. Mrs. Hawthorne writes to him of London and Henry Bright, who is there, and speaks of Miss Bacon's genius. CHAPTER XI ENGLISH DAYS: III Mrs. Hawthorne's letter to Miss Elizabeth P. Peabody describes Wordsworth's country. The family visit Southport for the winter, for Mrs. Hawthorne's health. A trip to Manchester, for the Exhibition, includes a glimpse of Tennyson and his family. Mrs. Hawthorne carefully describes them. She refers to slavery with contempt. Hawthorne writes to Miss Elizabeth P. Peabody about her anti-slavery essay with frankest honesty and distaste, being importuned for his opinion. His estimate of Goodrich. A visit to Kenilworth by the family is portrayed in a letter of Mrs. Hawthorne's. English days in Leamington are quiet and economical, but always suggestive to imagination. A visit to a genuinely palatial hotel in Bath described by Mrs. Hawthorne. Redcar and Hawthorne's enjoyment of it reproduced by descriptions and diaries. "The Marble Faun" worked out and finished in this seaport town. CHAPTER XII ITALIAN DAYS: I Rome has a superlative effect upon the family. Hawthorne's manner in the midst of the richest scene in history. A host of friends happen to congregate, at Carnival time. Miss Maria Mitchell, Miss Harriet Hosmer, and Miss Elizabeth Hoar described. Una's illness proves the true friendship of lifelong and new acquaintances. C. G. Thompson and his studio sketched. Rome's lasting charm for a little girl evident. CHAPTER XIII ITALIAN DAYS: II Six months in Florence. Mrs. Hawthorne's letters continue to catch and imprison the atmosphere of every scene. The castle of Montauto fascinates the family. Catholicity penetrates the heart of both husband and wife, in spite of much armor. Stella humbly and silently expresses religious gentleness. Spiritualism introduces its clumsy morbidness to Mrs. Hawthorne in the presence of the Brownings. Mr. and Mrs. Browning described from the enthusiastic memory of a child. Motley's letter about "Monte Beni" is given. CHAPTER XIV THE WAYSIDE The Wayside welcomes the family to a life of simplicity, second-rate enjoyment, and sacrifice. Interesting minds working for humanity are the happy reward for a quiet life. Emerson, Alcott, Thoreau and Channing described. Visits to the Fields's in Boston, where rare people are met. The Wayside, quiet as it is, is not quite out of the world, and friends and letters from abroad often follow Hawthorne thither. One of Louisa Alcott's jolly little poems. General Hitchcock is mentioned by Mrs. Hawthorne, who valued him among a group of finest minds. Concord life portrayed in Mrs. Hawthorne's journals and letters. Hawthorne's breaking health soon affects the family with half-admitted dread. President Lincoln becomes a verified ideal. CHAPTER XV THE ARTIST AT WORK Hawthorne's habits of work are described, and his attitude of mind is guessed, by his daughter Rose. The "North British Review" quoted upon Hawthorne's art. His efforts to continue at his work unflinchingly, by means of exercise and hardihood. CHAPTER XVI THE LEAVE-TAKING Emerson and Longfellow write of their desire to be with Hawthorne in companionship. Dr. Holmes flashes joyfully yet longingly as he speaks of Hawthorne's personality. Miss Elizabeth M. Hawthorne makes a visit to The Wayside, and her niece Rose tries to study her. Una's lifelong love and admiration for her. Hawthorne's devoted care for her, which he bequeathed to his family. Mrs. Hawthorne expresses in a letter to a friend some of her vigorous and sublime principles of thought and action. Hawthorne's death comes while he is away from his wife, but she is conscious of its presence. MEMORIES OF HAWTHORNE CHAPTER I THE HAWTHORNES AND THE PEABODYS To my lot have fallen sundry letters of my mother's, received in youth by her sisters and friends, and by her husband and others in later life. I have often read over these magic little pictures of old days, and each time have felt less inclined to let them remain silently in the family. The letters are full of sunshine, which is not even yet in the least dimmed; and there is a pleasant chatter of persons of whom we have heard widely in the most refined atmosphere this country knows. The scene surrounds a soul, my father's, whose excellence grows more and more evident, and who enriches every incident and expression that comes in contact with him. The tone of the life depicted is usually glad; but even where discomfort and sorrow break it, Hawthorne's unflinching endurance suggests unsoured activity and a brave glance. I will preserve, as well as I can by selections, the effect produced upon me by the many packages of letters which I opened some years ago. What Hawthorne cared for is somewhat clearly shown by side-lights; and there is also some explanation from my mother, as unintentionally given as the rest, of why he cared. It was a genial and vivid existence which enveloped her family always; and it became an interesting problem to the Peabodys to entice the reticent Hawthornes into it, from the adjacent Herbert Street,--by gentle degrees, well-adjusted baits, and affectionate compliments. Trout-fishing comes to mind,--and the trout were very skillful in keeping aloof. Nevertheless, Hawthorne liked all he heard and saw at the Peabodys' in Charter Street; and Sophia, his future wife, gleams near him as the unwitting guide to the warm contact with his kind for which he searched, though with delicacy of choice. Sophia's mother had strong intellect and great refinement, as well as a strength of character which gave her the will to teach school for many years, while her own children were growing up. She was very well connected in various directions; in other words, she had sprung from cultivated intelligences. Mrs. Peabody's mother was the wife of Judge Cranch, of Boston, whose sister, the wife of General Palmer, wrote to her in Revolutionary days the following letter, wherein very mild words stand for very strong emotions:-- GERMANTOWN, February 12, 1775. DEAR SISTER,--It is a long time since we have heard from you, except by transient reports that your family was pretty well. I suppose you are all anxious about publick affairs as well as other folks. 'T is a dreadful dull time for writing; this suspense that we are in seems to absorb every Faculty of the mind, especially in our situation where we seldom see anybody from the busy world. Mr. Palmer has been gone a fortnight to Congress, and we have never heard a word from him. The folks are almost impatient to hear what they are about. Certainly we at this time want every motive of Religion to strengthen our souls and bear up our spirits, that we may not faint in the evil time. Why should not there be religious as well as Political correspondencies? I believe much good might be done by such means, as those who are sincerely good would be able to strengthen each other--oh dear! I am so stupid! I wonder whether you feel so, too; but you have little ones about you that will keep you rousing. My Love to them all, together with my Brother. Your affectionate sister, M. PALMER. Literature, art, and intercourse were the three gracious deities of the Peabody home, and many persons came to join the family in worshiping them; so that the pages of all the letters and journals, from which but a fragmentary gleaning has been made, blossom daily with name after name of callers. Elizabeth was profoundly interesting, Mary was brilliant, and Sophia was lovely in her studio, to which everybody eagerly mounted. At about the time when I begin to levy upon the letters, the efforts of these young ladies to establish common ground of friendship with the Hawthornes peep forth in small messages, bequeathed to me by my recluse aunt Ebie Hawthorne. Elizabeth Peabody was the first and most frequent angler at the brookside, and actually succeeded in establishing a sturdy friendship with the young author, who was being sought for by the best people in Salem. His mother and sisters, walks and books, were the principal factors in his capture by the admiring enemy. Elizabeth had already a high intercourse upon high themes with the best minds among manly American thought. Her perfect simplicity of motive and abandonment of selfish, vain effeminateness made her the delight of the great men she met. She was a connoisseur in this field. To such a genial cultivator of development it seemed folly for the women of the Hawthorne family so to conceal their value; it was positively non-permissible for the genius of the family to conceal _his_, and so this New World Walton fished him forth. She sends a note to Herbert Street:-- MY DEAR MRS. HAWTHORNE,--I have taken the liberty to have your book bound before I returned it to you, as it was somewhat abused at the printing-office. And besides, I thought there should be some attempt at harmony between the outside and the inside; and more than that, I wanted in some slight degree to express my respect for it. How happy you must be in reading these tales! For if the genius which produced them is independent of all source but the divine bounty, the holiness and virtue which breathe on every page may be fairly attributed to the sacred influences of a pure New England home, in no small degree. But to enter upon the satisfactions of a mother in such a case I feel to be intruding upon consecrated ground. Yet you will easily pardon the feeling that impels me. With the greatest respect, yours, ELIZABETH P. PEABODY. My mother joins in the pursuit, though interested only in catching a glimpse of the widow and the shy eldest daughter. It must have been worth many experiments to gently succeed in putting their skill in hiding to naught. She slaps a dainty fishing-line through the leaves:-- MY DEAR ELIZABETH,--I send you a volume of Carlyle, lately published. It is well worth reading; and your mother--will she like to read it? I shall charge Bridget to inquire how your mother's and Louisa's headaches are. I should have gone myself to-day to ask, had not the wind been east. Won't you come to walk to-morrow afternoon with my mother, dear Elizabeth, and then I shall see you a few minutes? I want very much to see you, and to show you a certain white vase filled with brilliant flowers, which would charm your eye. I hope you enjoyed the music last evening. Truly yours and Louisa's, S. A. PEABODY. I can imagine nothing more curious to the Peabodys than people who withdrew themselves from choice. My mother was often hidden, because of great delicacy of health, which her ardent pursuance of art constantly fatigued; but she saw so many people that there was scarcely a whole day of isolation. At the Hawthornes', on the contrary, quiet prevailed: caused partly by bereavement, partly by proud poverty, and no doubt not a little by the witch-shadow of Judge Hawthorne's unfortunate condemnation of Rebecca Nurse, whose dying curse was never ignored; partly also by a sense of superiority, which, I think, was the skeleton in every Hawthorne's body at that time. For a year one of the brothers at the Peabodys', George, remained in his room, slowly dying from the effects of over-exertion in athletic sports. He was of large frame and of noble appearance, and was referred to by my mother in after-life with the deepest admiration. She writes:-- "It is difficult to realize how ill he is. He has none of the ways of sick people. His voice is as cheerful as ever, with no whine in its tones. He has no whims. He is always ready to smile, and reads constantly. . . . Mary and I spent the evening with the beloved one. He was pretty cheery, and told a comical anecdote of Dean Swift. He stood up on Friday much more firmly than formerly. Elizabeth Hawthorne sent him Miss Martineau's book, after tea, which was certainly very kind and attentive in her. I am determined to go and see her this week. I spent the morning upon my bed, reading Herodotus. . . . I found that mother had taken James and gone to Paradise after a _hawthorne_ bush. It is a bush for which she has had a longing for several years, but never could get any kind friend to uproot it for her." The highest principles of thought and action are constantly danced about and caressed by my mother in all her letters, as we imagine a Greek maiden paying cheerful homage to beautiful statues of the gods. For instance, in writing to the brother already mentioned, before his illness, she says:-- "I do not like to have you say that you enjoy despising people, George. It would be a little better to say you cannot help it sometimes; and even that is a dangerous attitude of mind. It is better to sorrow over than to despise. You know, Wordsworth says, 'He that feels contempt for any living thing hath faculties which he has never used.'" A message from Mary Peabody shows how intimate Herbert and Charter streets were growing:-- MY DEAR ELIZABETH,--I am very sorry to have been prevented from walking, but I hope to be able to go by Tuesday. George is fast growing weaker, and we do not know what a day may bring forth. Still, I feel it is necessary to take exercise when I can. We do not tell all our fears to Sophia, whom we wish to keep cheerfully employed as long as we can. Will you ask your brother to dine with us to-morrow? Elizabeth [who was then teaching school in Boston] depends upon the pleasure of seeing him when she comes. We dine as early as twelve on Sunday. Yours very truly, MARY T. PEABODY. From this point, the letters and fragments of journals bring to view what Hawthorne saw, and make real to us the woman he soon loved. SALEM, October 22, 1832. I have been in old native Salem for ten days. Betty and I returned by seven o'clock to our minimum of a house, and upon entering I really felt a slight want of breath to find the walls so near together and the ceiling nearly upon my head. But there stood my beloved mother, all in white, her face radiant with welcome and love, and in her arms there was no want of room. In September or October I live _par excellence_. I feel in the abstract just as an autumn leaf _looks_. I step abroad from my clay house, and become a part of the splendor and claritude and vigor around. DEAR BETTY,--I forgot to tell you that mother's garden has been arranged. She is quite happy in it. Father presided over a man as he uprooted and planted. The man was quite an original. He came looking very nice, very gentlemanly, in broadcloth and cambric cravat. But after disappearing into the barn for several minutes, he came forth transformed into a dirty workman, though still somewhat distinguished by his figure and air. He expressed himself in very courtly phrase, also, and was quite sentimental about the shrubbery round the tombs. [A graveyard was close to the house.] I should much like to know the history of his mind and career. . . . The clematis which climbs into my window is all sprouting. My glorious tree--my hieroglyphic for the everlasting forests--is also putting forth leaves, and the robins sing among the branches. Ellen Barstow came with an exquisite crimson rose, for me, which she wished to present herself; and as I was lying down, she went away to come again. So towards tea-time I saw her and Augusta running along. Ellen discovered me at the window, and shouted and flew on. As they were ascending the stairs I heard Ellen say, "Now hold your hand behind you, Augusta!" They entered with hands concealed and gleaming faces, and when they were within reach suddenly the concealed hands were thrust towards my face, each adorned with a crimson rose. My exclamation of delight seemed to fulfill their desires; and now I want to know if it is not worth fifteen years of bodily pain and discomfort to be the cause of such divine sentiment in the souls of so many children as I am? I feel perfectly consecrated by it, and bound over to be worthy of such pure emotions. Oh, _not_ mysterious Providence! How even are thy golden scales--sweetest compensations poising exactly the ills! It is not suffering which I think beautiful or desirable, but what suffering brings along with it, and _causes_. My door was open, and who should unexpectedly come out of Mary's room but Miss Elizabeth Hawthorne, going to walk with Mary. I was very glad to see her, and wanted her to come into my studio, but Mary was in haste to be walking. Miss Hawthorne looked very interesting. They had a delightful ramble, and she sent me a bunch of seaweed fastened to a rock, which she stepped into the sea to get for me. It looks like a drooping plume if it is held up, and I went into George's room to get his admiration; but he persisted in declaring it hideous. I was delighted by her thinking of sending it to me. I happened to be up in the third story just as the children were going home [Mary was teaching two or three little girls], and they went into my studio with Mary. I was very much impressed with what I heard said in tones of reverence. "_Look_ at that hammock! _Oh,_ that picture! And there are the flowers! Oh, _I_ gave her those! Miss Peabody, is that a _bed?_ _Oh,_ how beautifully everything looks! Is Sophia gone out?" I cannot convey to you the intonations of affection and interest which made these sentences so touching. This morning Mary came in and threw at me a beautiful handful of flowers, which I crowed over for a time, and then arose. I worked a little while at my painting, and then Mary Channing came gliding in upon me, like a dream, with more flowers, the Scotch rose and many rare things among them. Mr. Doughty [the artist, who had consented to give Sophia lessons] came, as bright as possible. The cool breezes, the flowers, etc., put him into excellent humor. He said it was luxury to sit and paint here. He created a glowing bank in broad sunshine. Mr. Russell called, and came up into my studio. He thought such a studio and such an occupation must cure the headache. Then I prepared to make several calls, but on my way was arrested by Mr. George Hillard, who was altogether too agreeable to leave. He is amazingly entertaining, to be sure. He remarked what a torment of his life Mr. Reed, the postmaster in Cambridge, was. He is an old man, about a hundred and forty years old, who always made him think of the little end of nothing sharpened off into a point. He had but one joke--to tell people sometimes when they asked for a letter that they must pay half a dollar for it; and then, if in their simplicity they gave it, he would laugh, and say it was a joke. After Mr. Hillard went away, Sally Gardiner came in with an armful of roses, which she poured upon me, taken from Judge Jackson's garden. She had just returned from Milton, and was overflowing with its grandeur and beauty. Yours affectionately, SOPHIE. The somewhat invalided little artist was highly and widely admired; and to illustrate the happy fact I quote this letter, written by her spirited sister Mary:-- BOSTON, June 19, 1833. MY DEAREST,--I went to Dr. Channing's yesterday afternoon and carried him your drawings, with which he was so enchanted that I left them for him to look at again. He gathered himself up in a little striped cloak, and all radiant with that soul of his, said with his most divine inflection, "This is a great and noble undertaking, and will do much for us here." And then he rolled his orbs upon me in that majestic way of his, which, when it melts into loveliness as it sometimes does, so takes captivity captive. In short, he was quite in an ecstasy with you and your notions. [Probably drawings illustrating auxiliary verbs.] He inquired very particularly for you, and showed me all the new books he had just received from England, which he thought a great imposition, they being big books. Edward [his brother] came in, and they greeted affectionately. After a long survey of the Professor, he exclaimed, "Why, Edward, you look gross--take care of the intellect!" Then he handed him one of the great books, just arrived, which was an edition of Thomas Belsham's works, with a likeness of the author. "There," said he, "is a man who had not quite the dimensions of a hogshead; but he was the largest man I ever saw." Edward looked rather uneasy. "William," he replied, "I don't think you are any judge of large men. Last week I looked quite thin, but to-day my head and face are very much swelled." The Doctor, in the simplicity of his heart, never thinks of feelings, only of things, as Plato would say. Your affectionate sister, MARY. Sophia writes to Elizabeth in Boston, in 1838, of her daily life, as follows:-- "I went to my hammock [in the studio] with Xenophon. Socrates was divinest, after Jesus Christ, I think. He lived up to his thought. . . . After dinner, Mary went out 'to take the fresh,' intending to finish the afternoon by a walk with Miss Hawthorne, and I commissioned her to bring home both her and her brother, if he should go, that I might give him my fragrant violets. . . . "Miss Hawthorne came to walk, and remarked to Mary how beautiful the crocuses were which I had given to her brother. Mary told her that I sent them _to her_. 'That is a pretty story,' she replied. 'He never told me so.' "Just after seven Mr. Hawthorne came. He looked very brilliant. . . . His coming here is one sure way of keeping you in mind, and it must be excessively tame for him after his experience of your society and conversation; so that, I think, you will shine the more by contrast." One evening, she says, she "showed him Sarah Clarke's picture of the island, and that gorgeous flower in the Chinese book of which there is a mighty tree in Cuba. And then I turned over the pictures of those hideous birds, which diverted him exceedingly. One he thought deserved study. . . . "I was to go to see his sister Elizabeth that afternoon, and he had heard about it. He asked if I could go, and said he should have waited for me to come if he had not supposed the east wind would prevent me. I said that it would. He wanted to know if I would come the next day. I meant to call Mary, but he prevented me by saying he could not stay long enough. . . . [He seldom stayed unless he found Sophia alone.] "Last evening Mr. Hawthorne came for Mary to go with him to Miss Burley's [to a club which met every week]. Mary could not go. It seemed a shame to refuse him. I came down to catch a glimpse of him. He has a celestial expression which I do not like to lose. . . . "The children have just come in, and brought me a host of odorous violets. I made George a visit in the afternoon, in the midst of my battle with headache, and to my question of 'How dost?' he replied, for the first time, 'Pretty fair,' instead of the unvarying 'Middling.' Skeptics surely cannot disbelieve in one thing that is invisible, and that is Pain." May, 1838. After my siesta I went down to Herbert Street with the book I wished to leave, and when I opened the gate [of the Hawthornes' house] the old woman with her hood on [an aunt of the Hawthornes] was stooping over a flower-bed, planting seeds. She lifted her smiling face, which must have been very pretty in her youth, and said, "How do you do, Miss Peabody?" Yet I never saw her in my life before. She begged me to walk in, but I refused, and gave her my message of thanks for the book. Ever thine wholly, SOPHIECHEN. May 14, 1838. To-day I was tempted to trot about the room and arrange all my vases, and give an air to the various knickknacks. I am much more easily tired than ever before. My walk to Castle Hill before February did not make me feel so hopelessly tired as it now does to walk as far as the Hawthornes'. Mr. Hawthorne had declined to come to dine with you on your arrival, but was to be here directly after dinner. When he came I happened to be the only one ready to go down. His first question was, "Where is Elizabeth?" He was not at all inclined to bear the disappointment of your not being here, after all. He thought it "too bad," "insufferable," "not fair," and wondered what could be the reason. I told him your excuse, and that there was a letter for him, which Mary soon brought. He put it into his pocket without breaking the seal. He looked very handsome, and was full of smiles. I assured him the morning was the best time to do creative work. He said he believed he would go and take a walk in South Salem. "Won't you go?" he asked of me. But the wind was east. MY DEAR LIZZIE,--I can think of nothing now but Charles Emerson. A sudden gloom seems to overshadow me. I hope you will tell us to-morrow whether he is dangerously ill. We had an exquisite visit from Waldo. It was the warbling of the Attic bird. The gleam of his _diffused_ smile; the musical thunder of his voice; his repose, so full of the essence of life; his simplicity--just think of all these, and of my privilege in seeing and hearing him. He enjoyed everything we showed him so much. He talked so divinely to Raphael's Madonna del Pesce. I vainly imagined I was very quiet all the while, preserving a very demure exterior, and supposed I was sharing his oceanic calm. But the next day I was aware that I had been in a very intense state. I told Mary, that night after he had gone, that I felt like a gem; that was the only way I could express it. I don't know what Mary hoped to get from him, but I was sure of drinking in that which would make me paint Cuban skies better than even my recollections could have made me, were they as vivid as the rays of the sun in that sunniest of climates. He made me feel as Eliza Dwight did once, when she looked uncommonly beautiful and animated. I felt as if her beauty was all about the room, and that I was in it, and therefore beautiful too. It seemed just so with Waldo's soul-beauty. Good-by, SOPHY. June 1, 1838. One afternoon Elizabeth Hawthorne came to walk with Mary, and mother went with her instead. She first came up into my chamber, and seemed well pleased with it, but especially admired the elm-tree outside. She looked very interesting. Mother took her to the cold spring, and they did not return till just at dark, loaded with airy anemones and blue violets and a few columbines. They had found Mr. John King and his daughter at the spring, looking for wild-flowers, and mother introduced Miss Hawthorne; but she hung her head and scarcely answered, and did not open her lips again, though Mr. King accompanied them all the way home. He gave mother some columbines, and after a while said, "I must make your bunch like Mrs. Peabody's, my dear," and so put some more into Miss Hawthorne's hand. The day before Mr. Hawthorne had called at noon to see our ladyships, and I never saw him look so brilliantly rayonnant. He said to me, "Your story will be finished soon, Sophia--to-morrow or next day." I was surprised to have the story so appropriated, and I do long to see it. [Probably Edward Randolph's Portrait.] He proposed to Mary to go to the beach the same day, and she consented. He said that he had not spoken to his sister about it, but would do so as soon as he went home. He wished to go early, and have a good walk. Only think what progress! To come and propose a walk at mid-day! He said he had a letter nearly written to you, but should not finish it till you wrote. He seemed quite impatient to hear from you, and remarked that he had not heard since you were here. Mary went to Herbert Street to join Miss Hawthorne for the walk, but did not see her. Her mother said Elizabeth did not want to go because it was windy, and the sun was too hot, and clouds were in the south! (It was the loveliest day in the world.) Was it not too bad to disappoint her brother so? I could have whipped her. When Mary went the next day with the tulips, Louisa told her that Elizabeth was very sorry afterwards that she did not go. A successful visit, almost accidental, upon Ebie Hawthorne pleased Sophia very much, and she writes:-- "She was very agreeable, and took the trouble to go and get some engravings of heads to show me, Wordsworth among the number, which I had never seen before. "Elizabeth also inquired particularly for George, and gave me more books for him. She asked if we did not miss you exceedingly. I should like to have stayed for two or three hours. She came downstairs with me, and out of the door, and talked about the front yard, where her aunt is going to make a garden." Elizabeth Peabody's letters are always delight-, fully direct, and varied in quality of emotion, being equally urgent over philosophy or daily bread, as the ensuing one will show in part:-- 53 MYRTLE STREET, BOSTON, 1838. MY DEAR SOPHIA,--Your beautiful letters require an answer, but I cannot possibly answer them in kind. This evening, notwithstanding the storm, George and Susan Hillard have gone to a singing-school, and left me to amuse myself. I hoped Mr. Hawthorne would come in. I have not seen him yet. Last night I took tea with Sally Gardiner and Miss Jackson, who are still enjoying your Flaxman drawings. Why do not you Salem folks have a hencoop and keep hens! five or six hens would overwhelm you with eggs all the year round. I like to hear the little items about Hawthorne. I had a nice talk with Mr. Capen about him to-day. He has him in his mind, and I hope it will come to some good purpose for the public. Yours truly and ever, E. P. P. Sophia writes:-- July 23, 1838. William White arrived on Saturday. Why did not you send Stuart's Athens by him? He said that he had heard it remarked that Mr. Emerson expected another Messiah. Your slight account of Mr. E.'s "Address" is enough to wake the dead, and I do not know what the original utterance must have done. I told Mary I thought Mr. Emerson was the Word again. She exclaimed, "You blasphemer!" "Do you really think it blasphemy?" said I. "Oh no," she replied. "It is the gospel according to you." Was not that a happy saying? While the maid was at Miss Hurley's on an errand, she saw Mr. Hawthorne enter, probably for a take-leave call. He was here also, looking radiant. He said he took up my Journal [written in Cuba] to bring it back, but my "works were so voluminous that he concluded to send them!" Elizabeth Peabody makes, upon her return to 'Salem for the winter, an heroic move towards gaining a still more affectionate advantage over the solitaries in Herbert Street. A little smile must have given her face its most piquant expression as she wrote:-- Saturday, November 10, 1838. DEAR LOUISA,--You know I want to knit those little stockings and shoes,--I think I will do it in the course of time at your house,--and would thank you to buy the materials for me, and I will pay you what they cost, when I know what it is. I suppose the four or five evenings which I shall anticipate spending with you (in the course of the winter!) will complete the articles. When Elizabeth wakes, please give her this note and rose and book; and when Nathaniel comes to dinner please give him the note I wrote to him. He said he was going to write to-day, and therefore I should prefer that he should not be interrupted on purpose to read it. We will not interrupt the bird in his song. I wonder what sort of a preparation he finds an evening of whist, for the company of the Muse! Yours ever truly, E. P. PEABODY. It is delightful to picture the commotion in the fernlike seclusion which enveloped the women of the Hawthorne household when this note was opened and read. Squirrels aroused, owls awakened, foxes startled, would have sympathized. Louisa, the only really active member of the trio, wonderfully deft in finest sewing and embroidery, generously willing to labor for all the relatives when illness required, may not have felt faint or fierce. But Mrs. Hawthorne, even in the covert of her chamber, where she chiefly resided, no doubt drew back; and Elizabeth's beautiful eyes must have shone superbly. However, to prove that the trio among the ferns (guarding, as testimony proves, Hawthorne himself with unasked care) could serve the needs of others on occasion, I will insert a little letter of a much earlier date, from Louisa. TO MISS MARY MANNING, RAYMOND, MAINE, CARE OF RICHARD MANNING, ESQ. SALEM, March 3, 1831. MY DEAR AUNT,--Uncle Sammie has returned from Boston, and has taken up his abode for the present at uncle Robert's [his brother, who befriended Hawthorne in his early youth], and is much better than we expected to see him. We should have been glad to have him with us, and would have done everything in our power to make him happy. We are so near that he can at any time command our services and our company. Nathaniel goes in to see him, and I am there a great part of the time. Mother has kept about all winter. There have been worse storms than I ever remember; the roads were absolutely impassable, and the snow-banks almost as high as the house. I would write more, but my time is much taken up now. I remain yours, With much affection, M. L. HATHORNE. That the reluctance to be genial with very genial folk was bravely overcome (to some extent) the ensuing notes prove:-- DEAR ELIZABETH,--As you were out on Saturday evening, I hope you will be able to come and spend to-morrow evening with us--will you not? I should be extremely happy to see Mary, though I despair of it; and though I cannot venture to ask Sophia, perhaps you can for me. Pray tell me particularly how your father is; we are all anxious to hear; and whether George is as he was when we heard last. I am, in haste, E, M. H. DEAR ELIZABETH,--Shall we go to the beach? If so, I propose that we set off instanter. I think a sea-breeze would be most refreshing this afternoon. Truly yours, M. T. P. Don't forget to ask your brother. MY DEAR E.,--I am afraid I shall not be able to go and spend an evening with you while the girls are gone. To-morrow, you know, is the eclipse. I wish you would come here in the afternoon. The graveyard is an open place to see it from, and I should be very glad of your company. Yesterday I heard of Nathaniel. A gentleman was shut up with him on a rainy day in a tavern in Berkshire, and was perfectly charmed with his luck. In haste, yours, E. P. P. By and by Elizabeth Peabody returns to Boston, and Sophia goes on with letters:-- I do not think I am subject to my imagination; I can let an idea go to the grave that I see is false. When I am altogether true to the light I have, I shall be in the heaven where the angelic Very now is. I went to see dear Miss Burley, who sent for me to go to her room. She insisted upon accompanying me all the way downstairs, limping painfully, and would open the outer door for me, and bow me out with as much deference as if I had been Victoria, or Hawthorne himself! So much for the Word uttering itself through my fingers in the face of Ilbrahim. [She had just finished illustrating "The Gentle Boy" by a drawing which was greatly praised.] Jones Very came to tea that afternoon. He was troubled at first, but we comforted him with sympathy. His conversation with George was divine, and such level rays of celestial light as beamed from his face upon George, every time he looked up at him, were lovely to behold. We told him of our enjoyment of his sonnets. He smiled, and said that, unless we thought them beautiful because we also heard the Voice in reading them, they would be of no avail. "Since I have shown you my sonnets," said he to me, "I think you should show me your paintings," Mary brought my drawing-book and "AEschylus" [wonderfully perfect drawings from Flaxman's illustrations]. He deeply enjoyed all. I told him of my Ilbrahim. He said he delighted in the "Twice-Told Tales." Yesterday Mr. Hawthorne came in, and said, "I am going to Miss Hurley's, but you must not go. It is too cold. You certainly must not go." I assured him I should go, and was sorry I was not wanted. He laughed, and said I was not. But I persisted. He knew I should be made sick; that it was too cold. Meanwhile I put on an incalculable quantity of clothes. Father kept remonstrating, but not violently, and I gently imploring. When I was ready, Mr. Hawthorne said he was glad I was going. Mary was packed up safely, also. I was very animated, and felt much better than on either of the previous club nights. Mr. Hawthorne declared it must be the spirit of contradiction that made me so; and I told him it was nothing but fact. We walked quite fast, for I seemed stepping on air. It was partly because I had not got tired during the day. It was splendid moonlight. I was not in the least cold, except my thumb and phiz. Mr. H. said he should have done admirably were it not for his nose. He did not believe but that it would moderate, "For God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb, and when you go out we may expect mild weather!" Was not that sweet? Mr. II. and I went into the parlor together, and Miss Burley looked delighted. He was exquisitely agreeable, and talked a great deal, and looked serene and happy and exceedingly beautiful. Miss Burley showed Mary and me some botanical specimens, and he came to the table and added much to the lights. But oh, we missed you so much; Miss Burley said so, and I felt it. They do not understand Very, there. When we were taking leave, Mr. Howes said to Mr. Hawthorne that he hoped nothing would prevent his coming next Saturday. "Oh no," replied he. "It is so much a custom, now, that I cannot do without it." Was not that delightful for Miss Burley's ears? I was so glad he said it. When we came out it was much more moderate, and we got home very comfortably. Mr. H. said he thought of coming for me to walk on Friday, but was afraid the walking was not good enough. I told him how we were all disappointed at his vanishing that night, and he laughed greatly. He said he should not be able to come this evening to meet Very, because he had something to read, for he was engaged Monday and Tuesday evening and could not read then. I am so sorry. Yours affectionately, SOPHIE. CHAPTER II THE DAYS OF THE ENGAGEMENT The engagement of Hawthorne to his future wife was now a fact, but it was not spoken of except to one or two persons. Sophia had slipped away for a visit to friends in Boston; but as Elizabeth was at present in Newton, her letters to the latter continued as follows:-- WEST STREET, BOSTON, May 19, 1839. DEAREST LIZZIE,--Two days ago Mr. Hawthorne came. He said that there was nothing to which he could possibly compare his surprise, to find that the bird had flown when he went to our house. He said he sat for half an hour in the parlor before he knocked to announce his presence, feeling sure I would know he was there, and descend,--till at last he was 'tired of waiting. "Oh, it was terrible to find you gone," he said. And it was such a loss, to be sure, to me not to see him. I am glad you enjoyed his visit so much. He told me he should be at the picture-gallery the next morning [Sophia went very early to avoid the crowd], and there I found him at eight o'clock. He came home with me through a piercing east wind, which he was sure would 'make me ill for a week. In the evening he came to see if it had given me a cold, but it had not. Caroline [Tappan] was busy with her children, and did not come down for half an hour. When she did, she was very agreeable, and so was Mr. Hawthorne. She admired him greatly. He said he should be at the gallery this morning, if possible. I went before eight, and found the room empty, except for Mr. William Russell. Mr. IT. arrived at nine, for, as it was cloudy weather until then, he thought I would not be there, and he came with the sunshine. At ten it began to grow crowded, and we went out. He peremptorily declared I should ride. Washington Allston had a great regard for Sophia's talent in art. Elizabeth refers to it in a letter written while visiting the Emersons:-- CONCORD, MASS., June 23, 1839. Here I am on the Mount of Transfiguration, but very much in the condition of the disciples when they were prostrate in the dust. I got terribly tired in Boston. I went to the Athenaeum Gallery on Monday morning, and in the evening Hawthorne came and said that he went to the Allston gallery on Saturday afternoon. I went to Allston's on Tuesday evening. He was in delightful spirits, but soft as a summer evening. He seemed transported with delight on hearing of your freedom from pain, and was eager to know what you were going to paint. I said you had several things a-going, but did not like to tell of your plans. He said, then you would be more likely to execute them, and that it was a good thing to have several paintings at once, because that would save time, as you could rest yourself by change. I carried to him a volume of "Twice-Told Tales," to exchange for mine. He said he thirsted for imaginative writing, and all the family had read the book with great delight. I am really provoked that I did not bring "The Token" with me, so as to have "The Mermaid" and "The Haunted Mind" to read to people. I was hardly seated here, after tea yesterday, before Mr. Emerson asked me what I had to say of Hawthorne, and told me that Mr. Bancroft said that Hawthorne was the most efficient and best of the Custom House officers. Pray tell that down in Herbert Street. Mr. Emerson seemed all congenial about him, but has not yet read his writings. He is in a good mood to do so, however, and I intend to bring him to his knees in a day or two, so that he will read the book, and all that Hawthorne has written. He is in a delightful state of mind; not yet rested from last winter's undue labors, but keenly industrious. He has uttered no heresies about Mr. Allston, but only beautiful things,--dwelling, however, on his highest merits least. He says Very forbids all correcting of his verses; but nevertheless he [Emerson] selects and combines with sovereign will, "and shall," he says, "make out quite a little gem of a volume." "But," says he, "Hawthorne says he [Very] is always vain. I find I cannot forget that dictum which you repeated; but it is continually confirmed by himself, amidst all his sublimities." And then he repeated some of Very's speeches, and told how he dealt with him. I am very stupid. I have been awake for about two months! Mr. Emerson is very luminous, and wiser than ever. Oh, he is beautiful, and good, and great! Your sister, E. Sophia, once more in Salem, replies:-- June 29, 1839. I am very sorry you were disappointed by not meeting Mr. Hawthorne at the galleries. But I am delighted that you saw Mr. Allston. How kind and inspiring is his interest about my health. I am rejoiced that Mr. Emerson has uttered no heresies about our High Priest of Nature. For him to think that because a man is born to-day instead of yesterday he cannot move the soul seems quite inconsistent with his proclamation that "the sun shines to-day, also!" When some other callers had departed, came Mr. Hawthorne. It was a powerful east wind, and he would not let me go out; but we were both so virtuous that he went alone to Miss Burley's. You never can know what a sacrifice that was! If you could, you would never again accuse either of us of disregard of the claims of others. I told him what Mr. Bancroft said, and he blushed deeply, and replied, "What fame!" After he went away, I read "Bettina von Arnim." She is not to be judged; she is to be received and believed. She is genius, life, love, inspiration. If anybody undertakes to criticise her before me, I intend to vanish, if it is from a precipice into the sea. Tuesday, my Demon called upon me to draw some of the Auxiliary Verbs. . . . July 5. Yesterday was the great day, and this wretched town made no appropriations for celebrating it--not even for the ringing of bells. So the people in wrath hung flags at half-mast, and declared they would toll the bells. Then it was granted that there should be joyful ringing at noon and sunset. They pealed forth jubilantly, and I heard the clash of cymbals in the afternoon. Every soul in America should thrill on the anniversary of the most illustrious event in all history; and as some souls sleep, these should be stirred with bells, trumpets, and eloquence. To-day the Demon demanded the completion of St. George and Una; and, alternating with my music, I drew all the morning. A horse has leaped out of my mind. I wonder what those learned in horses would say to him. George says he is superb. My idea was to have St. George's whole figure express the profoundest repose, command, and self-involvedness, while the horse should be in most vivid action and motion, the glory of his nostrils terrible, "as much disdaining to the curb to yield." The foam of power, and the stillness of power. You must judge if I have succeeded. The figure of Una is now far better than the first one. You cannot imagine with what ease I draw; I feel as if I could and might do anything, now. Next week, if Outlines do not prevail, I shall begin again with oils. I feel on a height. Oh, I am so happy! But I have not ridden horse-back since Tuesday on account of the weather. Is it not well that I kept fast hold of the white hand of Hope, dear Betty? For behold where she has led me! My wildest imaginations, during my hours of sickness in the past, never could have compassed such a destiny. All my life long my word has been, "This is well, and to-morrow it will be better; and God knows when to bring that morrow." You mistake me if you thought I ever believed that we should not be active for others. That is of course. With regard to our own minds, it seems to me we should take holy care of the present moment, and leave the end to God. Now I am indeed made deeply conscious of what it is to be loved. Most tunefully sweet is this voice which affirms ever, for negation belongs to this world only. Its breath so informs the natural body that the spiritual body begins to plume its wings within, and I seem appareled in celestial light. A few paragraphs from letters written by Hawthorne follow:-- Six o'clock, P. M. What a wonderful vision that is--the dream-angel. I do esteem it almost a miracle that your pencil should unconsciously have produced it; it is as much an apparition of an ethereal being as if the heavenly face and form had been shadowed forth in the air, instead of upon paper. It seems to me that it is our guardian angel, who kneels at the footstool of God, and is pointing to us upon earth, and asking earthly and heavenly blessings for us,--entreating that we may not be much longer divided, that we may sit by our own fire-side. . . . BOSTON, September 9, half past eight P. M., 1839. I was not at the end of Long Wharf to-day, but in a distant region; my authority having been put in requisition to quell a rebellion of the captain and "gang" of shovelers aboard a coal-vessel. . . . Well--I have conquered the rebels, and proclaimed an amnesty; so to-morrow I shall return to that Paradise of Measures, the end of Long Wharf. Not to my former salt-ship, she being now discharged; but to another, which will probably employ me wellnigh a fortnight longer. The salt is white and pure--there is something holy in salt. BOSTON, 1839. Your wisdom is not of the earth; it has passed through no other mind, but gushes fresh and pure from your own, and therefore I deem myself the safer when I receive your outpourings as a revelation from Heaven. Not but what you have read, and tasted deeply, no doubt, of the thoughts of other minds; but the thoughts of other minds make no change in your essence, as they do in almost everybody else's essence. You are still sweet Sophie Hawthorne, and still your soul and intellect breathe forth an influence like that of wildflowers, to which God, not man, gives all their sweetness. . . . If the whole world had been ransacked for a name, I do not think that another could have been found to suit you half so well. It is as sweet as a wildflower. You ought to have been born with that very name--only then I should have done you an irreparable injury by merging it in my own. You are fitly expressed to my soul's apprehension by those two magic words--Sophia Hawthorne! I repeat them to myself sometimes; and always they have a new charm. I am afraid I do not write very clearly, having been pretty hard at work since sunrise. You are wiser than I, and will know what I have tried to say. . . . NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. Their engagement was not announced for about a year, because it was expected that it would be a very long one; and also to avoid, for as great an interval as possible, causing consternation in Herbert Street, since there, the approach of any permanent change on Hawthorne's part from a quiet sojourn under shadows and through enchantingly mellowed lights was looked upon as a Waterloo. I go back a little from the last date to give the following fragment of a diary, contained in a small leather-bound memorandum-book, marked on the cover "Scrap-Book, 1839." The period covered is a brief portion of Hawthorne's service as weigher and ganger in the Boston Custom House, a position to which he was appointed by George Bancroft, at that time collector of the port. February 7, 1839. Yesterday and day before, measuring a load of coal from the schooner Thomas Lowder, of St. John, N. B. A little, black, dirty vessel. The coal stowed in the hold, so as to fill the schooner full, and make her a solid mass of black mineral. The master, Best, a likely young man; his mate a fellow jabbering in some strange gibberish, English I believe--or nearer that than anything else--but gushing out all together--whole sentences confounded into one long, unintelligible word. Irishmen shoveling the coal into the two Custom House tubs, to be craned out of the hold, and others wheeling it away in barrows, to be laden into wagons. The first day, I walked the wharf, suffering not a little from cold; yesterday, I sat in the cabin whence I could look through the interstices of the bulkhead, or whatever they call it, into the hold. My eyes, what a cabin! Three paces would more than measure it in any direction, and it was filled with barrels, not clean and new, but black, and containing probably the provender of the vessel; jugs, firkins, the cook's utensils and kitchen furniture--everything grimy and sable with coal dust. There were two or three tiers of berths; and the blankets, etc., are not to be thought of. A cooking stove, wherein was burning some of the coal--excellent fuel, burning as freely as wood, and without the bituminous melting of Newcastle coal. The cook of the vessel, a grimy, unshaven, middle-aged man, trimming the fire at need, and sometimes washing his dishes in water that seemed to have cleansed the whole world beforehand--the draining of gutters, or caught at sink-spouts. In the cessations of labor, the Irishmen in the hold would poke their heads through the open space into the cabin and call "Cook!"--for a drink of water or a pipe--whereupon Cook would fill a short black pipe, put a coal into it, and stick it into the Irishman's mouth. Here sat I on a bench before the fire, the other guests of the cabin being the stevedore, who takes the job of getting the coal ashore, and the owner of the horse that raised the tackle--the horse being driven by a boy. The cabin was lined with slabs--the rudest and dirtiest hole imaginable, yet the passengers had been accommodated here in the trip from New Brunswick. The bitter zero atmosphere came down the companion-way, and threw its chill over me sometimes, but I was pretty comfortable--though, on reaching home, I found that I had swaggered through several thronged streets with coal streaks on my visage. The wharfinger's office is a general resort and refuge for people who have business to do on the wharf, in the spaces before work is commenced, between the hours of one and two, etc. A salamander stove--a table of the signals, wharves, and agent of packets plying to and from Boston--a snuff-box--a few chairs--etc., constituting the furniture. A newspaper. February 11. Talk at the Custom House on Temperance. Gibson gives an account of his brother's sore leg, which was amputated. Major Grafton talks of ancestors settling early in Salem--in 1632. Of a swallow's nest, which he observed, year after year, on revisiting his boyhood's residence in Salem, for thirty years. It was so situated under the eaves of the house, that he could put his hand in and feel the young ones. At last, he found the nest gone, and was grieved thereby. Query, whether the descendants of the original builders of the nest inhabited it during the whole thirty years. If so, the family might vie for duration with the majority of human families. February 15. At the Custom House, Mr. Pike told a story of a human skeleton without a head being discovered in High Street, Salem, about eight years ago--I think in digging the foundations of a building. It was about four feet below the surface. He sought information about the mystery of an old traditionary woman of eighty, resident in the neighborhood. She, coming to the spot where the bones were, lifted up her hands and cried out, "So! they 've found the rest of the poor Frenchman's bones at last!" Then, with great excitement, she told the bystanders how, some seventy-five years before, a young Frenchman had come from over-seas with a Captain Tanent, and had resided with him in Salem. He was said to be very wealthy, and was gayly appareled in the fashion of those times. After a while the Frenchman disappeared and Captain Tanent gave out that he had gone to some other place, and been killed there. After two or three years, it was found that the Captain had grown rich; but he squandered his money in dissipated habits, died poor--and there are now none left of the race. Many years afterwards, digging near his habitation, the workmen found a human skull; and it was supposed to be that of the young Frenchman, who was all along supposed to have been murdered by the Captain. They did not seek for the rest of the skeleton; and no more was seen of it till Mr. Pike happened to be present at the discovery. The bone first found was that of the leg. He described it as lying along horizontally, so that the head was under the corner of the house; and now I recollect that they were digging a post-hole when the last discovery was made, and at that of the head they were digging the foundation of the house. The bones did not adhere together, though the shape of a man was plainly discernible. There were no remnants of clothing. Mr. Pike told furthermore how a lady of truth and respectability--a church member--averred to him that she had seen a ghost. She was 'sitting with an old gentleman, who was engaged in reading the newspaper; and she saw the figure of a woman advance behind him and look over his shoulder. The narrator then called to the old gentleman to look around. He did so rather pettishly, and said, "Well, what do you want me to look round for?" The figure either vanished or went out of the room, and he resumed the reading of his newspaper. Again the narrator saw the same figure of a woman come in and look over his shoulder, bending forward her head. This time she did not speak, but hemmed so as to attract the old gentleman's attention; and again the apparition vanished. But a third time it entered the room, and glided behind the old gentleman's chair, as before, appearing, I suppose, to glance at the newspaper; and this time, if I mistake not, she nodded or made some sort of sign to the woman. How the ghost vanished, I do not recollect; but the old gentleman, when told of the matter, answered very scornfully. Nevertheless, it turned out that his wife had died precisely, allowing for the difference of time caused by distance of place, at the time when this apparition had made its threefold visit. Mr. Pike is not an utter disbeliever in ghosts, and has had some singular experiences himself:--for instance, he saw, one night, a boy's face, as plainly as ever he saw anything in his life, gazing at him. Another time--or, as I think, two or three other times--he saw the figure of a man standing motionless for half an hour in Norman Street, where the headless ghost is said to walk. February 19. Mr. Pike is a shortish man, very stoutly built, with a short neck--an apoplectic frame. His forehead is marked, but not expansive, though large--I mean, it has not a broad, smooth quietude. His face dark and sallow--ugly, but with a pleasant, kindly, as well as strong and thoughtful expression. Stiff, black hair, which starts bushy and almost erect from his forehead--a heavy, yet very intelligent countenance. He is subject to the asthma, and moreover to a sort of apoplectic fit, which compels [him] to sleep almost as erect as he sits; and if he were to lie down horizontally in bed, he would feel almost sure of one of these fits. When they seize him, he awakes feeling as if [his] head were swelled to enormous size, and on the point of bursting--with great pain. He has his perfect consciousness, but is unable to call for assistance, or make any noise except by blowing forcibly with his mouth, and unless this brings help, he must die. When shaken violently, and lifted to a sitting posture, he recovers. After a fit, he feels a great horror of going to bed again. If one were to seize him at his boarding-house, his chance would be bad, because if any heard his snortings, they would not probably know what was the matter. These two afflictions might seem enough to make one man miserable, yet he appears in pretty fair spirits. He is a Methodist, has occasionally preached, and believes that he has an assurance of salvation immediate from the Deity. Last Sunday, he says, he gave religious instruction to a class in the State's Prison. Speaking of his political hostilities, he said that he never could feel ill will against a person when he personally met him, that he was not capable of hatred, but of strong affection,--that he always remembered that "every man once had a mother, and she loved him." A strong, stubborn, kindly nature this. The City-Crier, talking in a familiar style to his auditors-- delivering various messages to them, intermixed with his own remarks. He then runs over his memory to see whether he has omitted anything, and recollects a lost child--"We've lost a child," says he; as if, in his universal sympathy for all who have wants, and seek the gratification of them through his medium, he were one with the parents of the child. He then tells the people, whenever they find lost children, not to keep them overnight, but to bring them to his office. "For it is a cruel thing"--to keep them; and at the conclusion of his lecture, he tells them that he has already worn out his lungs, talking to them of these things. He completely personifies the public, and considers it as an individual with whom he holds converse,--he being as important on his side, as they on theirs. An old man fishing on Long Wharf with a pole three or four feet long--just long enough to clear the edge of the wharf. Patched clothes, old, black coat--does not look as if he fished for what he might catch, but as a pastime, yet quite poor and needy looking. Fishing all the afternoon, and takes nothing but a plaice or two, which get quite sun-dried. Sometimes he hauls up his line, with as much briskness as he can, and finds a sculpin on the hook. The boys come around him, and eye his motions, and make pitying or impertinent remarks at his ill-luck--the old man answers not, but fishes on imperturbably. Anon, he gathers up his clams or worms, and his one sun-baked flounder--you think he is going home--but no, he is merely going to another corner of the wharf, where he throws his line under a vessel's counter, and fishes on with the same deathlike patience as before. He seems not quiet so much as torpid,--not kindly nor unkindly feeling--but not to have anything to do with the rest of the world. He has no business, no amusement, but just to crawl to the end of Long Wharf, and throw his line over. He has no sort of skill in fishing, but a peculiar clumsiness. Objects on a wharf--a huge pile of cotton bales, from a New Orleans ship, twenty or thirty feet high, as high as a house. Barrels of molasses, in regular ranges; casks of linseed oil. Iron in bars landing from a vessel, and the weigher's scales standing conveniently. To stand on the elevated deck or rail of a ship, and look up the wharf, you see the whole space of it thronged with trucks and carts, removing the cargoes of vessels, or taking commodities to and from stores. Long Wharf is devoted to ponderous, evil-smelling, inelegant necessaries of life--such as salt, salt-fish, oil, iron, molasses, etc. Near the head of Long Wharf there is an old sloop, which has been converted into a store for the sale of wooden ware, made at Hingham. It is afloat, and is sometimes moored close to the wharf;--or, when another vessel wishes to take its place, midway in the dock. It has been there many years. The storekeeper lives and sleeps on board. Schooners more than any other vessels seem to have such names as Betsey, Emma-Jane, Sarah, Alice,--being the namesakes of the owner's wife, daughter, or sweet-heart. They are a sort of domestic concern, in which all the family take an interest. Not a cold, stately, unpersonified thing, like a merchant's tall ship, perhaps one of half a dozen, in which he takes pride, but which he does not love, nor has a family feeling for. Now Betsey, or Sarah-Ann, seems like one of the family--something like a cow. Long flat-boats, taking in salt to carry it up the Merrimack canal, to Concord, in New Hampshire. Contrast and similarities between a stout, likely country fellow, aboard one of these, to whom the scenes of a sea-port are entirely new, but who is brisk, ready, and shrewd in his own way, and the mate of a ship, who has sailed to every port. They talk together, and take to each other. The brig Tiberius, from an English port, with seventy or thereabouts factory girls, imported to work in our factories. Some pale and delicate-looking; others rugged and coarse. The scene of landing them in boats, at the wharf-stairs, to the considerable display of their legs;--whence they are carried off to the Worcester railroad in hacks and omnibuses. Their farewells to the men--Good-by, John, etc.,--with wavings of handkerchiefs as long as they were in sight. A pert, petulant young clerk, continually fooling with the mate, swearing at the stevedores and laboring men, who regard him not. Somewhat dissipated, probably. The mate of a coal-vessel--a leathern belt round his waist, sustaining a knife in a leathern sheath. Probably he uses it to eat his dinner with; perhaps also as a weapon. A young sailor, with an anchor handsomely traced on the back of his hand--a foul anchor--and perhaps other naval insignia on his wrists and breast. He wears a sky-blue silk short jacket, with velvet collar--a bosom-pin, etc. An old seaman, seventy years of age--he has spent seven years in the British Navy (being of English birth) and nine in ours; has voyaged all over the world--for instance, I asked if he had ever been in the Red Sea, and he had, in the American sloop of war that carried General Eaton, in 1803. His hair is brown--without a single visible gray hair in it; and he would seem not much above fifty. He is of particularly quiet demeanor--but observant of all things, and reflective--a philosopher in a check shirt and sail-cloth trousers. Giving an impression of the strictest integrity--of inability not to do his duty, and his whole duty. Seemingly, he does not take a very strong interest in the world, being a widower without children; but he feels kindly towards it, and judges mildly of it; and enjoys it very tolerably well, although he has so slight a hold on it that it would not trouble him much to give it up. He said he hoped he should die at sea, because then it would be so little trouble to bury him. Me is a skeptic,--and when I asked him if he would not wish to live again, he spoke doubtfully and coldly. He said that he had been in England within two or three years--in his native county, Yorkshire--and finding his brother's children in very poor condition, he gave them sixty golden sovereigns. "I have always had too many poor friends," he said, "and that has kept me poor." This old man kept tally of the Alfred Tyler's cargo, on behalf of the Captain, diligently marking all day long, and calling "tally, Sir," to me at every sixth tub. Often would he have to attend to some call of the stevedores, or wheelers, or shovelers--now for a piece of spun-yarn--now for a handspike--now for a hammer, or some nails--now for some of the ship's molasses, to sweeten water--the which the Captain afterwards reprehended him for giving. These calls would keep him in about movement enough to give variety to his tallying--he moving quietly about the decks, as if he belonged aboard ship and nowhere else. Then sitting down he would converse (though by no means forward to talk) about the weather, about his recent or former voyages, etc., etc., etc., we dodging the intense sun round the main mast. Sophia writes to Hawthorne from Milton:-- Sunday A. M., May 30, 1841. DEAREST,--The chilling atmosphere keeps me from church to-day. . . . Since I saw you at the Farm, I wish far more than ever to have a home for you to come to, after associating with men at the Farm [Brook Farm] all day. A sacred retreat you should have, of all men. Most people would not desire or like it, but notwithstanding your exquisite courtesy and conformableness and geniality there, I could see very plainly that you were not leading your ideal life. Never upon the face of any mortal was there such a divine expression of sweetness and kindliness as I saw upon yours during the various transactions and witticisms of the excellent fraternity. Yet it was also the expression of a witness and hearer, rather than of comradeship. Had I perceived a particle of even the highest kind of pride in your manner, it would have spoiled the perfect beauty and fitness. M. L. Sturgis, in a little note, gives a glimpse of Sophia's world at that date:-- "I have seen your 'Gentle Boy' to-night. I like it very much indeed. The boy I love already. Do you see Mr. Hawthorne often? It was a shame he did not talk more that night at the Farm. Just recall that beautiful moon over the water, and those dear trees!" Ellen Hooper, when the engagement is known, shows how people felt about the new author:-- "Your note seems to require a mood quite apart from the 'every day' of one's life, wherein to be read and answered. . . . I do not know Mr. Hawthorne--and yet I do; and I love him with that eminently Platonic love which one has for a friend in black and white [print]. He seems very near to me, for he is not only a dreamer, but wakes now and then with a pleasant 'Good-morrow' for shabby human interests. I am glad to hear that he is healthful, for I profoundly admire this quality; and particularly in one who is not entitled to it on the ground of being stupid!" Sophia's aptness for writing poetry led her to inclose this poem to her future husband in one of her letters:-- God granteth not to man a richer boon Than tow'rd himself to draw the waiting soul, Making it swift to pray this high control. Would with according grace its jars attune. And man on man the largest gift bestows When from the vision-mount he sings aloud, And pours upon the unascended crowd Pure Order's heavenly stream that o'er him flows. So thou, my friend, hast risen through thought supreme To central insight of eternal law. Thy golden-cadenced intuitions gleam From that new heaven which John of Patmos saw; And I my spirit lowly bend to thine, In recognition of thy words divine. From Salem she writes to Elizabeth, her summer jaunt being over:-- "I have not touched a pencil since I came home. I cannot be grateful enough that I can be hands and feet to the dearest mother in the world, who has all my life been all things to me, so delicate as I have been. There is pastime, pleasure, and a touch of the infinitely beautiful to me in what is generally considered drudgery; and I find there is nothing so inconsiderable in life that the moving of the spirit of love over it does not commute it into essential beauty." CHAPTER III THE EARLY DAYS OF THE MARRIAGE Just before her marriage, on July 9, 1842, and her residence in the Old Manse, Sophia wrote to Mrs. Caleb Foote, of Salem:-- July 5. MY DEAR MARY,--You mistake much when you say you will not hear from me after I have gone to my own home. I shall tell those who are dear to me that I love them still. I feel to-day like a rising Phoenix. Mr. Hawthorne has been here, looking like the angel of the Apocalypse, so powerful and gentle. It seems as if I were realizing the dreams of the poets in my own person. Just think of the felicity of showing him my inscriptions with pencil and sculpturing-tool--and he so just and severe a critic! He is far the best critic I ever had. The agent of Heaven in this Concord plan was Elizabeth Hoar; a fit minister on such an errand, for minister means angel of God. Her interest has been very great in every detail. . . . Yours affectionately, SOPHIA. The following note is descriptive of the real happiness in the marriage, which was felt and often uttered by friends:-- DEAR SOPHIA,--I am not much used to expressing to others what I feel about them, but I will give way to the feeling which prompts me to tell you how much I think about you now. An event like your marriage with Mr. Hawthorne is, like the presence of a few persons in this world, precious to me as an assurance of the good we all long for. I do not know your husband personally, but I care for him so much that I could well do the thought of him a passing reverence, like the young man who, I was told, uncovered his head as he passed Mr. Hawthorne's house. Perhaps you are too much absorbed to recognize now, even in thought, the greeting of a friend; perhaps we shall meet very little hereafter, as indeed we have hardly been intimate heretofore; but I shall remember you with interest. Affectionately yours, E. S. HOOPER. Mrs. Hawthorne's letters and journals while at the Old Manse now portray a beautiful existence:-- CONCORD, December 18, 1842. MY DEAR MARY [Mrs. Caleb Foote, of Salem],--I hoped I should see you again, before I came home to our Paradise. I intended to give you a concise history of my elysian life. Soon after we returned, my dear lord began to write in earnest; and then commenced my leisure, because, till we meet at dinner, I do not see him. I have had to sew, as I did not touch a needle all summer, and far into the autumn, Mr. Hawthorne not letting me have a needle or a pen in my hand. We were interrupted by no one, except a short call now and then from Elizabeth Hoar, who can hardly be called an earthly inhabitant; and Mr. Emerson, whose face pictured the promised land (which we were then enjoying), and intruded no more than a sunset, or a rich warble from a bird. One evening, two days after our arrival at the Old Manse, George Hillard and Henry Cleveland appeared for fifteen minutes, on their way to Niagara Falls, and were thrown into raptures by the embowering flowers and the dear old house they adorned, and the pictures of Holy Mothers mild on the walls, and Mr. Hawthorne's Study, and the noble avenue. We forgave them for their appearance here, because they were gone as soon as they had come, and we felt very hospitable. We wandered down to our sweet, sleepy river, and it was so silent all around us and so solitary, that we seemed the only persons living. We sat beneath our stately trees, and felt as if we were the rightful inheritors of the old abbey, which had descended to us from a long line. The treetops waved a majestic welcome, and rustled their thousand leaves like brooks over our heads. But the bloom and fragrance of nature had become secondary to us, though we were lovers of it. In my husband's face and eyes I saw a fairer world, of which the other was a faint copy. I fast ceased to represent Lilias Fay, under the influence of happiness, peace, and rest. We explored the woods. Sarah the maid was very tasty, and we had beautiful order; and when we ran races down the avenue, or I danced before my husband to the measures of the great music-box, she declared it did her heart good to see us as joyful as two children. December 30. Sweet, dear Mary, nearly a fortnight has passed since I wrote the above. I really believe I will finish my letter to-day, though I do not promise. That magician upstairs is very potent! In the afternoon and evening I sit in the Study with him. It is the pleasantest niche in our temple. We watch the sun, together, descending in purple and gold, in every variety of magnificence, over the river. Lately, we go on the river, which is now frozen; my lord to skate, and I to run and slide, during the dolphin-death of day. I consider my husband a rare sight, gliding over the icy stream. For, wrapped in his cloak, he looks very graceful; perpetually darting from me in long, sweeping curves, and returning again--again to shoot away. Our meadow at the bottom of the orchard is like a small frozen sea, now; and that is the present scene of our heroic games. Sometimes, in the splendor of the dying light, we seem sporting upon transparent gold, so prismatic becomes the ice; and the snow takes opaline hues, from the gems that float above as clouds. It is eminently the hour to see objects, just after the sun has disappeared. Oh, such oxygen as we inhale! Often other skaters appear,--young men and boys,--who principally interest me as foils to my husband, who, in the presence of nature, loses all shyness, and moves regally like a king. One afternoon, Mr. Emerson and Mr. Thoreau went with him down the river. Henry Thoreau is an experienced skater, and was figuring dithyrambic dances and Bacchic leaps on the ice--very remarkable, but very ugly, methought. Next him followed Mr. Hawthorne who, wrapped in his cloak, moved like a self-impelled Greek statue, stately and grave. Mr. Emerson closed the line, evidently too weary to hold himself erect, pitching headforemost, half lying on the air. He came in to rest himself, and said to me that Hawthorne was a tiger, a bear, a lion,--in short, a satyr, and there was no tiring him out; and he might be the death of a man like himself. And then, turning upon me that kindling smile for which he is so memorable, he added, "Mr. Hawthorne is such an Ajax, who can cope with him!" After the first snowstorm, before it was so deep, we walked in the woods, very beautiful in winter, and found slides in Sleepy Hollow, where we became children, and enjoyed ourselves as of old,--only more, a great deal. Sometimes it is before breakfast that Mr. Hawthorne goes to skate upon the meadow. Yesterday, before he went out, he said it was very cloudy and gloomy, and he thought it would storm. In half an hour, oh, wonder! what a scene! Instead of black sky, the rising sun, not yet above the hill, had changed the firmament into a vast rose! On every side, east, west, north, and south,--every point blushed roses. I ran to the Study, and the meadow sea also was a rose, the reflection of that above. And there was my husband, careering about, glorified by the light. Such is Paradise. In the evening we are gathered together beneath our luminous star, in the Study, for we have a large hanging astral lamp, which beautifully illumines the room, with its walls of pale yellow paper, its Holy Mother over the fireplace, and pleasant books, and its pretty bronze vase, on one of the secretaries, filled with ferns. Except once Mr. Emerson, no one hunts us out in the evening. Then Mr. Hawthorne reads to me. At present we can only get along with the old English writers, and we find that they are the hive from which all modern honey is stolen. They are thick-set with thought, instead of one thought serving for a whole book. Shakespeare is preeminent; Spenser is music. We dare to dislike Milton when he goes to heaven. We do not recognize God in his picture of Him. There is something so penetrating and clear in Mr. Hawthorne's intellect, that now I am acquainted with it, merely thinking of him as I read winnows the chaff from the wheat at once. And when he reads to me, it is the acutest criticism. Such a voice, too,--such sweet thunder! Whatever is not worth much shows sadly, coming through such a medium, fit only for noblest ideas. From reading his books you can have some idea of what it is to dwell with Mr. Hawthorne. But only a shadow of him is found in his books. The half is not told there. Your true friend, SOPHIA A. HAWTHORNE. P. S. Mr. Hawthorne sends his love to your husband. CONCORD, April 6, 1843. MY DEAREST MARY,--I received your letter of April 2 late last evening. It is one, I am sure, which might call a response out of a heart of adamant; and mine, being of a tenderer substance, it answers with all its chords. Dear, sweet, tender, loving Mary, you are more like Herder's Swan than anything else I can think of. The spirits of your translated babes bring you airs from heaven. What a lovely trinity of souls; what a fair star they form, according to Swedenborg's beautiful idea. I doubt not there is a path of descent, like that of Jacob's ladder, from their Father's bosom to your heart, and they ascend and descend, like those angels of his dream. Dear Mary, just imagine my husband in reality, as faintly shadowed in his productions. Fresh as a young fountain, with childlike, transparent emotions; vivid as the flash of a sword in the sun with sharp wit and penetration; of such an unworn, unworldly observance of all that is enacted and thought under the sun; as free from prejudice and party or sectarian bias as the birds, and therefore wise with a large wisdom that is as impartial as God's winds and sunbeams. His frolic is like the sport of Milton's "unarmed youth of heaven." But I will not pretend to describe his intellect; and I have by no means yet searched it out. I repose in it as upon some elemental force, which always seems just created, though we cannot tell when it began to be. Of his beautiful, genial, tender, and great nature I can still less adequately discourse. His magnanimity, strength, and sweetness alternately, and together, charm me. He fascinates, wins, and commands. We have passed the winter delightfully, reading to each other, and lately studying German. I knew a little, just enough to empower me to hold the rod, and be somewhat impertinent, and I have entire preeminence in the way of pronunciation. But ever and anon I am made quite humble by being helped out of thick forests by my knight, instead of guiding him. So we teach each other in the most charming manner, and I call it the royal road to knowledge, finally discovered by us. Mr. Hawthorne writes all the morning. Do you see "The Democratic Review"? In the March number is "The Procession of Life." Mr. Jonathan Phillips told Elizabeth he thought it a great production, and immediately undertook to read all else my husband had written. "The Celestial Railroad," for the April number, is unique, and of deep significance. It is a rare privilege to hear him read his manuscript aloud with the true expression. Elizabeth Hoar has taken tea with us only once this winter, and I have seen her very rarely. The walking is so bad in the country in winter that only tall boots can cope with it. Unawares one foot sinks down to the Celestial Empire, and the other anchors in the moon. I have had to confine myself principally to the avenue, through which our Flibbertigibbet [or Imp] made a clear path for me. Mr. Thoreau has been pretty often, and is very interesting. Mr. Emerson, from January, was at the South; so Sirius was not visible to the eye for nearly three months. Among other things, I have been very much interested in teaching my Irish angel to read and write. She is as bright as Burke, and repays me an hundredfold by her progress. She is so sweet and generous and gentle, that it is pleasant to happen upon her pretty face about the house. Mr. Hawthorne, says I must tell you that he shall be most happy to meet you in heaven; but he wishes you would as a preliminary come and spend a week with us this summer. He says this is the best way to get acquainted with him. To Mrs. Peabody, now living in Boston, Sophia writes:-- May. DARLING MOTHER,--I find my heart cannot rest unless I send you an enormous bunch of columbines; and so I have concluded to take my cake-box and fill it with flowers. My husband and I have gathered all these columbines since dinner, on the bank of the river, two fields off from the battle-ground. Now I think of it, it is Lizzie's favorite wildflower. I cannot bear to think of you as two prisoners in the book-room, at this time. I do not know, however, as Elizabeth would be happy to remain in the country, because men and women are her flowers, and they do not grow on hills and slopes. But you were born to live in a garden, where flowers at your tendance might gladlier grow (according to Milton). We had a letter from Louisa Hawthorne to-day, which says that the cat Beelzebub is dead. We are going to put our Pigwiggin in mourning for her cousin. [Hawthorne was, as all his family were, remarkably fond of cats. He had given Beelzebub his name.] Another letter now goes to Mrs. Foote:-- August 11. BELOVED MARY,--I received your long expected letter during a visit from the Hillards. I feared you were ill, but not that you had forgotten me; for I have an imperturbable faith in the love of my friends which appearances cannot affect. No influenzas or epidemics of any kind reach our old abbey, though in the village of Concord they often prevail. I think the angel who descended with healing in his wings, and stirred the pool of Bethesda, must purify the air around us. We have had a charming summer. At the first flinging open of our doors my father made us a visit of a week, and, according to his love of order, put everything out of doors in place; moved patriarchal boards covered with venerable moss, and vividly exercised all his mechanical powers. Among other things he prepared the clay with which I mould men and heroes, so that I began Mr. Hawthorne's bust. Next came Miss Anna Shaw [Mrs. S. G. Ward], in full glory of her golden curls, flowing free over her neck and brows, so that she looked like the goddess Diana, or Aurora. Everything happened just right. The day she arrived, Mr. Emerson came to dine, and shone back to the shining Anna. He was truly "tangled in the meshes of her golden hair," for he reported in several places how beautiful it was, afterwards. It was very warm, and after Mr. Emerson left us, we went out upon the lawn under the shady trees, and Anna extended herself on the grass, leaning her arms upon a low cricket, and "Sydnian showers of sweet discourse" distilled upon us. Towards sunset we went to the terrace on the bank of the river, and then there was a walk to Sleepy Hollow. Afterwards, we again resorted to the lawn, and the stars all came out over our heads with great brilliancy; and Anna, again upon the grass, pointed out the most beautiful constellations. Now we expect Louisa Hawthorne every day. Excepting for the three weeks and a little more occupied by our friends, we have been quite alone. The 9th of July, our wedding-day, was most heavenly, and at night there was a most lustrous moon. That night Mr. Allston died. Nature certainly arrayed herself in her most lovely guise, to bid him farewell. Mr. Hawthorne has written a little, and cultivated his garden a great deal; and as you may suppose, such vegetables never before were tasted. It is a sober fact, dear Mary, that I never ate any so good. When Apollos tend herds and till the earth, it is but reasonable to expect unusual effects. I planted flowers, which grow pretty well. We have voyaged on the river constantly, harvesting water-lilies; and lately cardinal-flowers, which enrich the borders with their superb scarlet mantles in great conclaves. I have just finished Ranke's "History of the Popes." I stumbled quite accidentally upon ecclesiastical history, lately. I asked my husband to bring me any book that he chanced to touch upon from his Study, one day, and it proved to be "Luther, and the Reformation." So I have gone on and backwards, upon the same subject. I read several volumes of the Theological Library, fretting all the time over the narrow spirit in which great men were written about. Finally I took Ranke. He is splendid and whole-sided, and has given me an idea of the state of Europe from the first times. Elizabeth Hoar came while Susan Hillard was here, looking as usual like the Rose of Sharon, though thinner than ever. Ellery Channing and E. live in a little red cottage on the road, with one acre attached, upon which Ellery has worked very hard. E. keeps a small school for little children. They are very happy, and Ellery is a very charming companion. He talks very agreeably. October 15. BELOVED MARIE,--I received your requiem for Mrs. Peabody [not a near connection of Mrs. Hawthorne's, but of Mr. George Peabody's, the philanthropist] yesterday, and cannot delay responding to it. We talk a great deal about the reality of Heaven and the shadowiness of earth, but no one acts as if it were the truth. It seems as if the benign and tender Father of men, in whose presence we rejoice and confide, became suddenly changed into a dark power, and curtained Himself with gloom, the instant death laid its hand upon our present bodies, and freed the soul for another condition. And this, too, although Jesus Christ at the hour when His spirit resigned the clay rent the veil from top to bottom, and revealed to all eyes the golden cherubim and the Holy of Holies. God alone knows whether I could act my belief in the greatest of all possible earthly separations. But before I loved as I now do heaven was dim to me in comparison. I cannot conceive of a separation for one moment from my transfigured soul in him who is transfused with my being. I am in heaven now. Oh, let me not doubt it, if for a little while a shadow should wrap his material form from my sight. I am in rejoicing and most vigorous health. After breakfast I paint for two or three hours. I am now copying Mr. Emerson's divine Endymion. After dinner we walk till about five. The following letter refers to Sophia's sister Mary, who had become Mrs. Horace Mann:-- DEAREST MARY,--I do not know whether you were ever aware of the peculiar love I have felt from childhood for my precious sister, who is now so blest. It has always been enthusiastic and profound. Her still and perfect disinterestedness, her noiseless self-devotion, her transparent truthfulness and all-comprehensive benevolence through life! No words can ever express what a spear in my side it has been to see her year after year toiling for all but herself, and growing thin and pale with too much effort. Not that ever her heroic heart uttered a word of complaint or depreciation. But so much the more did I feel for her. I saw her lose her enchanting gayety, and become grave and sad, yet could do nothing to restore her spirits. I was hardly aware, until it was removed, how weighty had been the burden of her unfulfilled life upon my heart. At her engagement, all my wings were unfolded, and my body was light as air. Mrs. Mann had been to Europe for her wedding-tour, and was thus welcomed home:-- November 7. BELOVED MARY,--Yesterday noon my dear husband came home from the village but a few seconds--it seemed even to me--after he left me, shining with glad tidings. They were, that the steamer had arrived with you in it! Imagine my joy, for I cannot tell it. You will come and see me, I am sure. I am especially commissioned by Mr. Emerson to request my dear and honorable brother, Mr. Mann, to come to Concord to lecture at the Lyceum as soon as he possibly can. He says that Mr. Hoar told him he had never heard such eloquence from human lips as from Mr. Mann's. "Therefore," says he, "this is the place of all others for him to come and lecture." Tell me beforehand whether your husband eats anything in particular, that I may have it all ready for him. I am in the greatest hurry that mortal has been in since Absalom ran from his pursuers. Your own SOPHIECHEN. The record for Sophia's mother goes on unfailingly:-- November 19. My DEAREST MOTHER,--This Indian summer is very beautiful. The dulcet air and stillness are lovely. This morning we watched the opal dawn, and the stars becoming pale before it, as also the old moon, which rose between five and six o'clock, and, in the form of a boat of pure silvery-gold, floated up the sea of clear, rosy air. I am so very early a riser that the first faint light usually finds me busy. I wish you could see how charmingly my husband's Study looks now. As we abandon our drawing-room this winter, I have hung on his walls the two Lake Como and the Loch Lomond pictures, all of which I painted expressly for him; and the little mahogany centre-table stands under the astral lamp, covered with a crimson cloth. The antique centre-table broke down one day beneath my dear husband's arms, with a mighty sound, astonishing me in my studio below the Study. He has mended it. On one of the secretaries stands the lovely Ceres, and opposite it Margaret Fuller's bronze vase. In the afternoon, when the sun fills the room and lights up the pictures, it is beautiful. Yet still more, perhaps, in the evening, when the astral enacts the sun, and pours shine upon all the objects, and shows, beneath, the noblest head in Christendom, in the ancient chair with its sculptured back [a chair said to have come over in the Mayflower, and owned by the Hawthorne family]; and whenever I look up, two stars beneath a brow of serene white radiate love and sympathy upon me. Can you think of a happier life, with its rich intellectual feasts? That downy bloom of happiness, which unfaithful and ignoble poets have persisted in declaring always vanished at the touch and wear of life, is delicate and fresh as ever, and must remain so if we remain unprofane. The sacredness, the loftiness, the ethereal delicacy of such a soul as my husband's will keep heaven about us. My thought does not yet compass him. December. For the world's eye I care nothing; but in the profound shelter of this home I would put on daily a velvet robe, and pearls in my hair, to gratify my husband's taste. This is a true wife's world. Directly after dinner my lord went to the Athenaeum; and when he returned, he sat reading Horace Walpole till he went out to the wood-house to saw and split wood. Presently I saw, hastening up the avenue, Mr. George Bradford. He stayed to tea. His beautiful character makes him perennial in interest. As my husband says, we can see nature through him straight, without refraction. My water this morning was deadly cold instead of livingly cold, and I knew the Imp must have taken it from some already drawn, instead of right from the well. The maid brought for me from Mrs. Emerson's "The Mysteries of Paris," which I read all the evening. I have been to see E. Channing, who looked very pretty. She has a dog named Romeo, which Mrs. S. G. Ward gave them. I borrowed a book of E. about sainted women. In "The Democratic Review" was my husband's "Fire Worship." I could not wait to read it! It is perfectly inimitable, as usual. His wit is as subtle as fire. This morning I got up by moonlight again, and sewed till Mary brought my fresh-drawn water. The moon did not set till after dawn. To-day I promenaded in the gallery with wadded dress and muff and tippet on. After tea, my lord read Jones Very's criticism upon "Hamlet." This morning was very superb, and the sunlight played upon the white earth like the glow of rubies upon pearls. My husband was entirely satisfied with the beauty of it. He is so seldom fully satisfied with weather, things, or people, that I am always glad to find him pleased. Nothing short of perfection can content him. How can seraphs be contented with less? After breakfast, as I could not walk out on account of the snow, I concluded to housewife. My husband shoveled paths (heaps of snow being trifles to his might), and sawed and split wood, and brought me water from the well. To such uses do seraphs come when they get astray on earth. I painted till after one o'clock. There was a purple and gold sunset. After dinner to-day Mr. Hawthorne went to the village, and brought back "The Salem Gazette." Some one had the impudence to speak of him in it as "gentle Nat Hawthorne." I cannot conceive who could be so bold and so familiar. Gentle he surely is, but such an epithet does not comprehend him, and gives a false idea. As usual after sunset, he went out to find exercise till quite dark. Then he read aloud part of "The Tempest," while I sewed. In the evening he told me about his early life in Raymond [Maine], and he gave me some of Mr. Bridge's famous wine. To-day my husband partly read "Two Gentlemen of Verona." I do not like it much. What a queer mood Shakespeare must have been in, to write it. He seems to be making fun. I wrote to Mrs. Follen, and made up a budget of a paper from my husband for her "Child's Friend." It was the incident of Mr. Raike's life, with regard to his founding of Sunday-schools, most exquisitely told, and set in a frame of precious jewels. Whatever my husband touches turns to gold in the intellectual and spiritual world. I sewed on a purple blouse for him till dusk. We have the luxury of our maid's absence, and Apollo helped me by making the fires. I warmed rice for myself, and had the happiness of toasting his bread. He read aloud "Love's Labour 's Lost," and said that play had no foundation in nature. To-day there have been bright gleams, but no steady sunshine. Apollo boiled some potatoes for breakfast. Imagine him with that magnificent head bent over a cooking-stove, and those star-eyes watching the pot boil! In consequence, there never were such good potatoes before. For dinner we did not succeed in warming the potatoes effectually; but they were edible, and we had meat, cheese, and apples. This is Christmas Day, which I consider the most illustrious and sacred day of the year. Before sunrise, a great, dark blue cloud in the east made me suppose it was to be a dismal day; but I was quite mistaken, for it has been uncommonly beautiful. Peace has seemed brooding "with turtle wing" over the world, and no one stirs, as if all men obeyed the command of the elements, which was, "Be still, as we are." I intended to make a fine bowl of chocolate for my husband's dinner, but he proposed to celebrate Christmas by having no cooking at all. At one o'clock we went together to the village, my husband going to the Athenaeum, and I to Mrs. Emerson's, where Mr. Thoreau was dining. On the way home I saw in the distance the form of forms approaching. We dined on preserved fruits and bread and milk,--quite elegant and very nice. What a miracle my husband is! He has the faculty of accommodating himself to all sorts of circumstances with marvelous grace of soul. In the afternoon he brought me some letters, one being from E. Hooper, with verses which she had written after reading "Fire Worship." The motto is "Fight for your stoves!" and the measure that of "Scots wha hae." It is very good. The maid returned. This morning we awoke to a mighty snowstorm. The trees stood white-armed all around us. In the afternoon some one knocked at the front door. I was amazed, supposing no one could overcome the roads, and thought it must be a government officer. As the door opened, I heard a voice say, "Where is the man?" It was Ellery Channing, who exclaimed, as he appeared at the Study, where we were, that it was the very time to come,--he liked the snow. He looked like a shaggy bear; but his face was quite shining, as usual. He brought some novels and reviews, which Queen Margaret [Fuller] had sent to Ellen Channing [her sister] to read. We had to leave him, while we dined, at three. He would not join us, and made his exit while we were in the dining-room. To-day as I painted the wind arose, and howled and swept about, and clouded the sun, and wearied my spirits. I was obliged to put away my palette at half past twelve o'clock, and then came up, and looked into the Study at my husband. He was writing, and I was conscience-stricken for having interrupted him. We went to walk, and a neighbor invited us to drive to town in his sleigh. I accepted, but my husband did not. The Imp sprang on, as we passed his house; and then I found that the kind old man was Mr. Jarvis of the hill. I went to the post-office, where my husband was reading a letter from Mr. Hillard. We stayed at the Athenaeum till after two, and then braved the warring winds homewards. We had no reading in the evening, for the wind was too noisy. January 1, 1844. A quiet morning at last; the wind had howled itself dead, as if it were the breath of the Old Year, by midnight. On our way home to-day from the Athenaeum, Dr. Bartlett met us, and offered to take me along. On the way he spoke of George Bradford's worshiping Mr. Hawthorne. I had a fine time painting, this morning. Everything went right, and I succeeded quite to my mind. I felt sure my husband above me must also be having a propitious morning. When he came to dinner, he said he did not know as he ever felt so much like writing on any one day. Mr. Emerson called. January 9. BELOVED MOTHER,--I dated all the documents I sent by Plato [Mr. Emerson] a day too late. My husband will dispatch a budget to Mr. Hillard's care, containing a paper which he is to send to Mr. Griswold, editor of "Graham's Magazine." He wrote to my husband, when he took the editorship, and requested him to contribute, telling him he intended to make the magazine of a higher character, and therefore ventured to ask, offering five dollars per page, and the liberty of drawing for the money the moment the article was published. "The Democratic Review" is so poor now that it can only offer twenty dollars for an article of what length soever, so that Mr. Hawthorne cannot well afford to give any but short stories to it; and it is besides sadly dilatory about payment. The last paper he sent to it was a real gift, as it was more than four pages; but he thought its character better suited to the grave "Democrat" than for the other publication. Why did not you send the last number? lie is quite impatient for it. I also long to read again that terrific and true picture of a cold heart. [The Bosom Serpent.] I do not know what the present production is about, even; for I have made it a law to myself never to ask him a word concerning what he is writing, because I always disliked to speak of what I was painting. He often tells me; but sometimes the story remains hidden till he reads it aloud to me, before sending it away. I can comprehend the delicacy and tricksiness of his mood when he is evolving a work of art. He waits upon the light in such a purely simple way that I do not wonder at the perfection of each of his stories. Of several sketches, first one and then another come up to be clothed upon with language, after their own will and pleasure. It is real inspiration, and few are reverent and patient enough to wait for it as he does. I think it is in this way .that he comes to be so void of extravagance in his style and material. He does not meddle with the clear, true picture that is painted on his mind. He lifts the curtain, and we see a microcosm of nature, so cunningly portrayed that truth itself seems to have been the agent of its appearance. Thus his taste is genuine--the most faultless I ever knew. Now, behold! all unforeseen, a criticism upon the genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne! Dear mother, Louisa Hawthorne has sent me some exquisite silk flannel for little shirts, but not quite enough. It is a dollar a yard. Mrs. Emerson says that you will find it at Jacobs', on Tremont Street. I could not refuse my child the luxury of feeling such a material over its dear little bosom. I have to spend a great deal of time in darning the small craters in my stockings. January 21. In the hope of some unoccupied carrier-pigeon's straying this way, I shall write to-day. The extreme cold freezes the ground, and my lord will not consent to my putting foot out of doors, so I remain a singing-bird in my happy cage, endeavoring by walks in the long upper entry (which is enlivened by sundry winds rushing through a broken window-pane) to make some amends for being deprived of the outward world. Yesterday I felt as if I had dieted upon diamonds and were sparkling with rainbow colors like an icicle in the sun. I painted upon Endymion. My husband blasphemes the fierce winds and extreme cold in a very picturesque manner; but the disapprobation he feels is a moral ope, not a physical discomfort. He cleaves the air like a Damascus blade, so finely attempered that he is unharmed. I never knew any person in such fine health as he is; because he is not obtusely well--he has no brute force; but every part of his frame seems in perfect diapason, like a bird's. I should be afraid of him if he were in ferocious health; but his health is heavenly. Endymion will certainly be finished this week if I remain alive, and the sun shines. [It is a picture in pale brown monochromes, of the most remarkable perfection of finish and beauty of draughtsmanship.] I shall ask Plato to carry it to Boston in his arms, unless my honorable brother Horace [Mann] will take it when he comes to lecture. It will be perfectly light, but cannot be given up to the stage-man. I do not want it shown to any person until it be framed, with a glass over it. Daggett must be made to hasten his work; but he is as obstinate and cross as a mule; yet no one can make such superlative frames. The price must be an hundred dollars independently of the frame; if it be worth one cent, it is worth that. I dearly desire that some one I know should possess it. I shall be glad some day to redeem it, for it has come out of my soul. What a record it is of these happy, hopeful days! The divine dream shining in Endymion's face, his body entranced in sleep, his soul bathed in light, every curve flowing in consummate beauty--in some way it is my life. But, for Endymion, I must look upon a small bit of gold. [Her husband would not let her sell the picture, after all.] March 16. MY DEAREST MOTHER,--The sumptuous boxful arrived, and the dressed beef is most acceptable, and the wafers are very nice, Mr. Hawthorne liking them exceedingly. Una went to see her father yesterday morning, the nurse declaring that she looked as nice as silver and pretty as a white rose. Great was his surprise to see his little daughter coming to him! My husband wishes father would please go to the agents for "The Democratic Review," and tell them he is on the free list. The three last numbers have not been sent to him, they having stopped sending at the printing of "The Christmas Banquet." Will father also look into "Graham's Magazine" for March, and see whether it contains "Earth's Holocaust," and if so, send it to us? August. Directly after you left us, baby went to sleep, and slept three hours, during which time I accomplished wonders. We dined upon potatoes, corn, carrots, and whortleberry pudding, quite sumptuously. Our cook was Hyperion, whom we have engaged. He, with his eyes of light, his arched brow, and "locks of lovely splendor," officiated even to dish-washing, with the air of one making worlds. I, with babe on arm, looked at him part of the time. No accident happened, except that a sprigged saucer "came into halves;" and I found that Hyperion, in his new office, had put the ivory handles of the knives into the water, knowing no better, and left the silver to be washed last instead of first. I dragged Una in her carriage in the avenue, and she was very happy. She woke a little after four this morning, and when I first opened my eyes upon her, her feet were "in the sky." I laid the breakfast-table, and prepared everything for Hyperion to cook milk and boil water. At breakfast, baby sat radiant in her coach. George Prescott brought a hot Indian cake from his mother, while we were at table. Before Hyperion had quite finished his kitchen-work, Colonel Hall and his little son came to see him. The Colonel only stayed about an hour, and could not come to dinner. The unhappy lamb was boiled, together with some shelled beans and corn. August 20. Your packet arrived last evening. I am much inclined to have the black woman. My husband says he does not want me to undertake to keep anybody who is apparently innocent, after my late sore experience. He says the old black lady is probably as bad already as she ever will be. If you find the blackey not disinclined to come to such poor folks, I will take her in September. I cannot well ask dear Mary to visit me while my Hyperion is cook and maid. He will not let me go into his kitchen, hardly; but it is no poetry to cook, and wash dishes; and I cannot let him do it for anybody but myself alone. The only way we can make money now seems to be to save it; and as he declares he can manage till September, we will remain alone till then. It is beyond words enchanting to be so. But, I assure you, his office is no sinecure. He actually does everything. And I sit upstairs, and out of doors with baby, more of a queen than ever, for I have a king to my servitor. It would cost too much to board; you know we cannot live cheaper anywhere or anyhow than thus. Again, a letter is sent to Mrs. Caleb Foote:-- The Promised Land. MY DEAR MARY,--You are the most satisfactory person to draw for of any one I know. [Sophia had sent one of her pictures as a present.] Your letter gave me the purest pleasure, for it made me feel as if I had caused two hearts to be glad, and that is worth living for, if it be done but once in a life. . . . We have passed the happiest winter, the long evenings lifted out of the common sphere by the magic of Shakespeare. Mr. Hawthorne read aloud to me all the Plays. And you must know how he reads, before you can have any idea what it was. I can truly say I never comprehended Shakespeare before; and my husband was pleased to declare that he never himself understood him so well, though he has pored over the Plays all his life. All the magnificence, the pomp, the cunning beauty, the wisdom and fine wit, and the grace were revealed to me as by a new light. Every character is unfixed from the page, and stands free in life. Meanwhile I sewed, and whenever a little garment was finished, I held it up, and won a radiant smile for it and the never-weary question (with the charming, arch glance) "Pray, who is that for?" We breakfast about nine o'clock, because we do not dine till three; and we have no tea ceremony, because it broke our evenings too much. I break my fast upon fruit, and we lunch upon fruit, and in the evening, also, partake of that paradisaical food. Mr. Emerson, with his sunrise smile, Ellery Channing, radiating dark light, and, very rarely, Elizabeth Hoar, with spirit voice and tread, have alone varied our days from without; but we have felt no want. My sweet, intelligent maid sings at her work, with melodious note. I do not know what is in store for me; but I know well that God is in the future, and I do not fear, or lose the precious present by anticipating possible evil. I remember Father Taylor's inspired words, "Heaven is not afar. We are like phials of water in the midst of the ocean. Eternity, heaven, God, are all around us, and we are full of God. Let the thin crystal break, and it is all one." Mr. Mann came to Concord to lecture last week. He looked happiest. What can he ask for more, having Mary for his own? Hold me ever as Your true and affectionate friend, SOPHIA. The Hawthornes left the Old Manse for visits to their relatives. Hawthorne went to Salem in advance of his wife, who writes to him:-- BOSTON, August 15. . . . Yesterday your letter raised me to the eighth heaven--one heaven beyond the imagination of the great poet. . . . I am very sorry you did not come, for Mr. Atherton was to be at home at eight o'clock that evening, hoping to see you, and Mr. Pierce was also in the city, desiring to meet you. Una knew Mr. Atherton directly, when I took her to call, and at once challenged him to run after her. Soon afterwards a fine wooden singing-bird arrived, with a card on which was written "for Una Hawthorne." Mrs. Williams called. She asked me to give you a great deal of love. She wished we would visit her in Augusta, Maine. I have taken Una upon the Common several times, and she runs after all babies and dogs. She is so beautiful that I am astonished at her. Frank Shaw says she is perfect, and like Raphael's ideal babies. This morning a letter came to you from the Count [Mr. John O'Sullivan was usually called by this title by the Hawthornes], who has some good proposals. The offer from the "Blatant Beast" [name given by Hawthorne to a certain publisher] of the--But I will send the letter; it will not cost any more than mine alone, thanks to the new law. Having gone to stay for a few days in Herbert Street, Mrs. Hawthorne writes to her mother:-- SALEM, November 19. . . . Father took most beautiful care of us, and did not leave us till we were seated in the cars. Mr. Dike followed. I told him that if he wished to see Una, he could do it by sitting behind. This he did, and kept up a constant talking with her, all the way. She looked lofty and grave, and unfathomable in her eyes; but finally had compassion on him, and faintly smiled in that way which always makes her father say, "Mightily gracious, madam!" An old man by the side of Mr. Dike asked him whether Una were his grandchild! She liked the old man, and smiled at him whenever he spoke to her. Upon arriving in Salem, Mr. Dike went to find my husband; whom, however, I saw afar off in the crowd of ugly men, showing like a jewel (pearl) in an Ethiop's ear, so fine and pale, with the large lids cast down, and a radiant smile on his lips. For the first time since my husband can remember, he dined with his mother! This is only one of the miracles which the baby is to perform. Her grandmother held her on her lap till one of us should finish dining, and then ate her own meal. She thinks Una is a beauty, and, I believe, is not at all disappointed in her. Her grandmother also says she has the most perfect form she ever saw in a baby. She waked this morning like another dawn, and smiled bountifully, and was borne off to the penetralia of the house to see Madam Hawthorne and aunt Elizabeth. My husband's muse is urging him now, and he is writing again. He never looked so excellently beautiful. Una is to be dressed as sumptuously as possible to-day, to visit her grandaunt Ruth [Manning]. Louisa wants her to overcome with all kinds of beauty, outward and inward. I feel just made. All are quite well here, and enjoy the baby vastly. To Hawthorne in Salem:-- BOSTON, December 19. . . . If I asked myself strictly whether I could write to you this evening, I should say absolutely no, for ten thousand different things demand the precious moments while our baby sleeps. . . . I bless God for such a destiny as mine; you satisfy me beyond all things. . . . Una is now downstairs with her aunt Elizabeth, and she shines with perfection of well-being. When she is near a chair, with both hands resting upon it, she will suddenly let go, and for a few glorious seconds maintain her equilibrium, and then down she sits upon the floor. C. Sturgis and Anna Shaw have been to see her. I took her to William Story's yesterday, and he thought her eyes very beautiful, and said he had scarcely ever seen perfectly gray eyes before; and that such were the finest eyes in the world, capable of the most expression. He added, that her eyes were like those of an exquisite child of Raphael's, which he had seen, in oils. Mr. Colton has been again to see you. Perhaps it is quite fortunate that you were guarded from an interview, since you would have refused his offers. When will you come back? Mr. Hillard said you promised to go there again. You can always come here. Your loving wife, PHOEBE. After returning home, Sophia writes:-- CONCORD, January 26, 1845. BEST MOTHER (I like that Swedish epithet),--The jewel is precisely what I wanted. It appears strange for us to make presents of precious stones set in gold; but the occasion is sufficient to justify it. Mrs. Prescott is perpetually doing for me what she will not allow me to pay for, and often what I cannot pay for. She remains rich in consciousness, but the burden of obligation is too great. She papered my kitchen with her own hands, and would not let me even pay for the paper; she also employed her man to put up a partition; and she is stiff-necked as an Israelite on these points. She sends us Indian cakes and milk bread, or any nicety she happens to have. George has the pleasantest way of going of errands about which I cannot employ the Imp, Ben, and he took excellent care of Leo, the dog, during our absence, feeding him so sumptuously that he looked very superb when we returned, only requiring to have an heroic soul to be the Doge of dogs. I never imagined anything so enchanting as Una's rapid development. Every morning, as soon as she is awake, she extends her little hand to the Madonna. Then she points to Loch Lomond (which I have moved to my room), and then to Abbotsford, each time observing something about the pictures, as she gazes into my face. My replies I always feel to be very stupid; but I do as well as I can, considering that I am not now a baby. Another of her acts is to put up her forefinger to my mouth, to be kissed; and often she puts up her own mouth for a kiss, and then smiles with an expression of covert fun--sub ridens, her father calls it. The other evening, while the trees were still crystal chandeliers, it grew dusk before the lamps were lighted; and all at once, behold the full moon rose up from behind the hill "over against our house," exactly between the trees at the entrance of our avenue. Picture to yourself the magnificence. The sharp gleam of the crystals made it seem as if the stars had fallen, and were caught by the branches, and a thousand shining scimitars flashed into view. Una happened to be turned towards the scene. How I wish you could have seen the wonder and gleam of her face! As the moon rose higher and higher, she continued to talk about it, her hand extended. We lighted no lamp that evening. The next morning I asked her where the moon was, and she turned towards the window with a questioning tone. Last evening my better than Epaminondas was stretched upon the floor, for her entertainment. It was the prettiest sight that ever was. Una is as strong as a little lion, and I could dance at any moment. The half-hour glass that you gave me is a great enchantment to my husband, and has already suggested some divine production. To Mrs. Foote, once more:-- Paradise Regained, May 4, 1845. MY DEAR MARY,--My husband and I will be most happy to receive you, I would say at once, but I must wait till these avenue trees are in leaf, because I want you to see our quiet Eden in its full summer dress. It has begun to array itself; and the Balm of Gilead, a significant tree for us, is already in tender green, and the showerful poplar, so mightily abused, is, this lovely morning, becoming golden with new yellow foliage. But as this is our last year in the blessed old abbey, you must see it in perfection. The lawn beneath the trees is already a rich emerald, and large gold stars begin to spangle it. You shall see my little darling running over the green grass, with a continued song of exultation. She thinks this is the first Paradise, and that her father is the primal Adam, and that she possesses the earth, now that she is out of leading-strings. December 7, 1845. I was very glad of an answer to my volume of a letter, and that it gave you satisfaction. Words are a poor portrait of Una, this ray of light. The distinctness and intelligence of her language are a kind of miracle. Her father said one day that she was the book of Revelation. Once, I said for her Mother Goose's "Cushy cow bonny, let down your milk!" and after hearing the whole verse several times she began to repeat it to herself, but said, "Tushy tow bonny, let down Nona's milk!" And she always corrects me if I omit her name. She often says, "Bobby Shafto's done to sea; tome back, marry Nona!" with a very facetious expression. Her father tells her that he shall not allow Bobby to marry her. CHAPTER IV LIFE IN SALEM The Hawthornes now moved to Salem, where they remained for several years. Washington's Birthday, 1846. TRUE MOTHER,--Through the howling storm your little box of benefits came safely. I was especially grateful to hear from you, because I had read in the paper of Mr. Mann's walking into the dock, and feared he might be very ill after it. I was exceedingly relieved to hear that he was none the worse for such an unexpected baptism. I thought that after getting tired and heated by lecturing, the transition might be almost mortal for his delicate frame. I, in my old-fashioned simplicity of faith, would have it that God saved him. My husband has found "The Christmas Banquet," and he has made up the second volume, which I send with this, for dear father to transmit to New York. The second volume must be printed first, because he has not long enough dreamed over the new tale or essay which is to commence the first volume. From all question as to what this precious web may be, last woven in the loom of his genius, I sacredly abstain till the fullness of time. Oh, I am so glad that these scattered jewels are now to be set together! "Zuna" is spreading out her painted tea-set upon a little oval tray that came from beyond sea, in her father's childhood. She plays tea-drinking with infinite grace and skill. Last week Louisa Hawthorne and I spent the day with Mrs. Dike, and Una behaved like a consummate lady, although she frolicked like a child. Mrs. Dike gave her some beautiful silver playthings, with which she had a tea-party. Rebecca Manning [a little cousin] was there, and over their airy tea Una undertook to be agreeable, and began of her own accord to converse, and tell Rebecca about her life in Concord. She said, "In Tontord Zuna went out into the orchard and picked apples in her little basket, for papa and mamma to eat." And then, with a countenance and tone of triumph, she exclaimed, "And papa's boat!" A long letter written by George William Curtis is a bright ray from a beautiful personality, containing these descriptions:-- ROME, January 14, 1847. MY DEAR FRIENDS,--How often in the long sunny silence of that summer voyage, when in the Atlantic all day the sea rippled as gently about the ship as the waters of Walden pour against their shore, and in the Mediterranean the moon would have no other mirror, but entranced its waves to an oily calmness in which she shone unbroken, did I figure you gliding with us on our fairy way to France, Italy, and in the next summer, Switzerland! One day in our voyage we passed the Straits of Gibraltar--seeing land for the first time in twenty-eight days. We came so near and passed so rapidly, saw so distinctly the dusky gray olive foliage of Spain and the little round towers whence the old Spaniards looked for the Moors; and on the other side, so grim and lonely, the intricate mountain outline of Africa, so distinctly, and at night again, and for many days after, the same broad water; that it lies more dreamily in my memory than anything else. . . . On the forty-fifth day I stepped ashore in France; but not without more regret than I thought possible, for the ship; and one of the crew, of my own age, with whom I had seen the stars fade in the morning during his watch, had become very dear to me. Yet in Marseilles everything was quaint. . . . The same features I had always known in a city,--men, houses, streets, squares; but with an expression unknown before. At night, with my sailor friend, I threaded some of the narrower streets, which were like corridors in an unshapely Titan palace. At the doors of the smallest shops on each side sat the spinsters in the moonlight, gossiping and knitting; while over them bent old French tradesmen, in long yarn stockings and velvet knee-breeches. The street was barely wide enough for a carriage, and they talked across; and all was as gay and happy as Arcadia. Every day [in Florence], I was in the galleries, which are freely open to every one, and here saw the grandest works of Raphael in his middle and best style. Of the wonderful feminine grace and tenderness of these, of which no copy can give an idea, I cannot properly speak. From him only have I received the idea of the Immaculate Mother--the union of celestial superiority with human maternity. The innumerable other Madonnas are beautiful pictures; but they are either mere mothers or mere angels. It is the same union in kind with what you may observe in his portrait, where masculine character is so blended and tempered with feminine grace and flexibility. Raphael is the clear, deep, beautiful eye, in which and through which is seen the undoubted heaven. . . . How glad I am that I have a right to send you a letter! I have left a small space into which to squeeze a large love, which I send to Mrs. H., with my thanks for her kind letter, which could not come too late, and which I am very sure highly gratified Mr. Crawford. He desires to make his especial regards to Mrs. H., and said that he should write her a note, if it were not too great a liberty, which he would send in a letter to Mrs. Howe. Mention my name to Una; for in some dim remembrance of Concord meadows I may then figure as a shadowy faun. A long, pleasant letter from George Bradford, the other day, gave me the last news from our old home, which is very placid and beautiful in my memory. I should love to see Ellery Channing's new book. But I am sure that he will never forgive himself for coming to Rome for sixteen days. I am sorry to say good-by. G. W. CURTIS. While on a visit to her mother, Mrs. Hawthorne writes to her husband:-- BOSTON, July. . . . I received your most precious letter yesterday. I do not need to stand apart from daily life to see how fair and blest our lot is. Every mother is not like me--because not every mother has such a father for her children; so that my cares are forever light. Am I not eminently well, round, and rubicund? Even in the very centre of simultaneous screams from both darling little throats, I am quite as sensible of my happiness as when the most dulcet sounds are issuing thence. I have suffered only for you, in my babydom. You ought not to be obliged to undergo the wear and tear of the nursery; it is contrary to your nature and your mood. You were born to muse, and through undisturbed dreams to enlighten the world. Una mourns for you. "Oh, I must go home to see my papa! Oh, when are we going to Salem?" Her little heart has enough of mine in it to feel widowed without you. Julian does not walk yet; but he understands everything, and talks a great deal. There was a sharp contrast between Mrs. Hawthorne's earlier life of intercourse with trooping, charming friends, and devotion to art and literature, and the toils of motherhood in poverty which now absorbed her days. She refers to this new order of existence with joyful patience in the following letters to Mrs. Peabody:-- SALEM, September, 1848. Dora Golden [Julian's nurse] takes this to you. She deferred her visit to Boston for my convenience, because Mr. Hawthorne thought of going to Temple, to visit General Miller; but he did not go. Mr. Hawthorne will contribute to Elizabeth's book, but not for pay. Mary Chase took Una and me to Nahant to see Rebecca Kinsman at her cottage. It was a dear little nest, on the brow of a hill commanding the boundless sea. Una flew around like a petrel; only that her hair floated golden in the sunshine, and the petrel's feathers are gray. You are quite right; I am so happy that I require nothing more. No art nor beauty can excel my daily life, with such a husband and such children, the exponents of all art and beauty. I really have not even the temptation to go out of my house to find anything better. Not that I enjoy less any specimen of earthly or heavenly grace when I meet it elsewhere; but I have so much in perpetual presence that I am not hungry for such things. November 19, 1848. I intended almost every day last week to go to Boston, but was detained by various circumstances. Among other things, Mr. Daniel Webster was to come to lecture, and I thought I must wait to hear him. I am glad I did, for it was a very useful lecture, and in some parts quite grand. It was upon the Constitution--a noble subject. You know he is particularly designated as the Expounder of the Constitution. He stood like an Egyptian column, solid and without any Corinthian grace, but with dignity and composed majesty. He gave a simple statement of facts concerning the formation of our united government; and towards the close, he now and then thundered, and his great cavernous eyes lightened, as he eloquently showed how noble and wonderful it was, and how astonishing the sagacity and insight of those young patriots had been in the memorable Congress. The old Lion walked the stage with a sort of repressed rage, when he referred to those persons who cried out, "Down with the Constitution!" "Madmen! Or most wicked if not mad!" said he, with a glare of fire, as he looked about him. He had risen with his hat in his hand, and held it all the time, making no gestures excepting once, when he referred to the American eagle and flag. He then raised his hand and pointed as if the eagle were cleaving the air; and he said, "Who calls this the Massachusetts eagle, the Illinois eagle,--or this the Virginia flag, or the New Hampshire flag? Are they not the American eagle and the American flag? And wherever the flag waves, let him touch it who dares!" His voice and glance as he pronounced these words were the artillery of a storm; and they were followed by tremendous rolls of applause. Mr. Hawthorne, who is one of the managers of the Lyceum (!) was deputed to go on Monday to West Newton, to see Mr. Mann about lecturing here. Sophia writes to Mrs. Mann, then in Washington:-- "Is Congress behaving any worse than usual? The members are always giving the lie and seizing each other by the collar, ever since the grave and majestic days of the first Sessions, it seems to me. But we have not got to being quite such monkeys as the French are in their Assemblies. Mrs. George Peabody, a week or two ago, gave a great ball, to which she invited us. I heard that Mr. Peabody had put his magnificent Murillo picture in the finest light imaginable, having built a temporary oratory for it, on the piazza upon which the library opens. The library was dark as night, and as I entered it, the only object I could see was this divine Madonna at the end of the illuminated oratory. It is the Annunciation. There is not the smallest glory of color in the picture. The power, the wonder of the picture, is the beauty of the expression and features. Her eyes are lifted and her hands crossed upon her bosom. The features seem hardly material, such a fineness and spiritual light transfigure them. It is the greatest picture I ever saw." A fragment of a letter suggests a lecture and a great innovation. "My husband bought a ticket for himself, and went with me!! Mr. Alcott spent an evening with us a week or more ago, and was very interesting; telling, at my request, about his youth, and peddling, etc. There were six ladies and six gentlemen present last Monday evening. They assembled at Mr. Stone's. Miss Hannah Hodges, Mrs. J. C. Lee, and two ladies whom I did not know, besides Mrs. Stone and myself; Mr. Frothingham, Mr. William Silsbee, Mr. Shackford, of Lynn, Mr. Pike, Mr. Streeter, and my husband, besides Mr. Stone and his son. Mr. Alcott said he would commence with the Nativity, and first read Milton's Hymn. Then he retreated to his corner, and for about an hour and three quarters kept up an even flow of thought, without a word being uttered by any other person present. Then Mr. Stone questioned him upon his use of the word 'artistic;' which provoked a fine analysis from him of the word 'artist' as distinguished from 'artisan.' I thought the whole monologue very beautiful and clear. This evening Mr. Thoreau is going to lecture, and will stay with us. His lecture before was so enchanting; such a revelation of nature in all its exquisite details of wood-thrushes, squirrels, sunshine, mists and shadows, fresh, vernal odors, pine-tree ocean melodies, that my ear rang with music, and I seemed to have been wandering through copse and dingle! Mr. Thoreau has risen above all his arrogance of manner, and is as gentle, simple, ruddy, and meek as all geniuses should be; and now his great blue eyes fairly outshine and put into shade a nose which I once thought must make him uncomely forever." Several letters from Mr. and Mrs. Hawthorne break in upon the usual quietude with allusions to the real hardship of public misapprehension; yet no false statements and judgments were ever more coolly received. Still, Mrs. Hawthorne writes with an excited hand:-- June 8, 1849. MY DEAR FATHER,--Mr. Hawthorne received news by telegraph to-day that he is turned out of office headlong. I have written to mother, and told her, fearing she would hear of it accidentally. We are not cast down at all, and do not be anxious for us. You will see by my letter to mother how we are hopeful and cheerful about it, and expect better things. The cock is crowing the noon of night and I must to bed. I have written a long letter to mother. We are all well. Your affectionate daughter, SOPHIA. The letter to her mother has not been completely preserved, but runs:-- . . . The telegraph to-day brought us news that would have made the cottage [at Lenox] particularly acceptable, because we could have lived there upon our own responsibility--for the Old General has turned Mr. Hawthorne out of the Surveyorship. Do not be troubled; for we are not. Mr. Hawthorne never liked the office at all, and is rather relieved than otherwise that it is taken out of his hands, and has an inward confidence that something much better and more suitable for him will turn up. As for me, you know I am composed of Hope and Faith, and while I have my husband and the children I feel as if Montezuma's diamonds and emeralds were spiritually in my possession. But we look forward with a kind of rapture to the possibility of now going into the country somewhere this summer, and setting Una down in a field, where she so pines to go. Meantime, the newly appointed Surveyor's commission has not arrived, and so Mr. Hawthorne is not yet out of office. I have not seen my husband happier than since this turning out. He has felt in chains for a long time, and being a MAN, he is not alarmed at being set upon his own feet again,--or on his head, I might say,--for that contains the available gold, of a mine scarcely yet worked at all. As Margaret [Fuller] truly said once, "We have had but a drop or so from that ocean." We are both perfectly well, too, and brave with happiness, and "a credence in our hearts, and esperance so absolutely strong, as doth outvie the attest of eyes and ears." (So Shakespeare somewhere speaks for us, somewhat so--but not verbatim, for I forget one or two words.) Above all, it has come in the way of an inevitable Providence to us (whatever knavery some people may have to answer for, who have been the agents in the removal), and I never receive inevitable Providences with resignation merely; but with joy, as certainly, undoubtedly, the best possible events that can happen for me--and immediately I begin to weave the apparent straw into gold, like the maiden in the fairy tale. Good-by now, dear mother. Do not be anxious. I should not have told you this now--fearing you might be troubled--but I was afraid you might see the removal in the papers, or hear of it; and I thought it best to let you know just how it is with us, so that you might not have a shock. Your most affectionate child, SOPHIA. MY DEAR FATHER,--Here is a pretty business, discovered in an unexpected manner to Mr. Hawthorne by a friendly and honorable Whig. Perhaps you know that the President said before he took the chair that he should make no removals, except for dishonesty and unfaithfulness. So that all who voted for him after that declaration pledged themselves to the same course. You know also doubtless that there has never been such a succession of removals of honorable and honest men since we were a nation as since the accession of President Taylor,--not even under Jackson,--who, however, always removed people because they were Whigs, without any covert implication of character. This has been Democratic conduct--to remove for political reasons. This conduct the Whigs always disapproved, and always said that no one ought to be removed but from disability or dishonesty. So that now when any one is removed, it is implied that the person is either a shiftless or a dishonest man. It is very plain that neither of these charges could be brought against Mr. Hawthorne. Therefore a most base and incredible falsehood has been told--written down and signed and sent to the Cabinet in secret. This infamous paper certifies among other things (of which we have not heard)--that Mr. Hawthorne has been in the habit of writing political articles in magazines and newspapers! This he has never done, as every one knows, in his life--not one word of politics was ever written by him. His townsfolk, of course, know it well. But what will surprise you more than this fact is to hear who got up this paper, and perjured his soul upon it; who followed his name with their signatures, and how it was indorsed. It was no less a person than Mr. C. W. U.!!! who has thus proved himself a liar and a most consummate hypocrite; for he has always professed himself the warmest friend. He certifies the facts of the paper; and thirty other gentlemen of Salem sign their names! Among whom are G. D. and young N. S., and Mr. R. R.! Can you believe it? Not one of these gentlemen knew this to be true, because it is not true; and yet, for party ends, they have all perjured themselves to get away this office, and make the President believe there were plausible pretexts; they had no idea it could be found out. But the District Attorney saw the paper. He is a Whig, but friendly to Mr. Hawthorne, on literary grounds; and the District Attorney told a Salem gentleman, also a Whig and a personal friend of Mr. Hawthorne's. Thus, the "murder" is out, through better members of the same party. Mr. Hawthorne took the removal with perfect composure and content, having long expected it on account of his being a Democrat. But yesterday, when he went to Boston and found out this, the lion was roused in him. He says it is a cowardly attack upon his character, done in such secrecy; and that he shall use his pen now in a way he never has done, and expose the lie, addressing the public. Your child, SOPHIA. June 17. MY BLESSED MOTHER,--Your most welcome and beautiful letter of the 11th I very gladly received. You take our reverse of fortune in the way I hoped you would. I feel "beyond the utmost scope and vision of calamity" (as Pericles said to Aspasia), while my husband satisfies my highest ideal, and while the graces of heaven fill the hearts of my children. Everything else is very external. This is the immortal life which makes flowers of asphodel bloom in my path, and no rude step can crush them. I exult in my husband. He stands upon a table-land of high behavior which is far above these mean and false proceedings, with which a party of intriguers are now concerning themselves, and covering themselves with the hopeless mud of Dante's Inferno. The more harm they try to do, deeper down they plunge into the mire; and I doubt if ever in this world some of them will be able to wash their faces clean again. My husband supposed he was removed because he was a Democrat (and you know very well how he has always been a Democrat, not a Locofoco--if that means a lucifer match). Therefore he took it as a matter of course in the way of politics; though it surprised me, because General Taylor had pledged himself not to remove any person for political opinions, but only for dishonesty and inefficiency. This was why all Mr. Hawthorne's Whig as well as Democrat friends were sure he would not be disturbed. He could not even have provoked hostility by having taken any active part in politics,--never writing, never speaking, never moving for the cause. But these intriguers secretly carried out their plan. They wrote in letters false charges which they sent to Washington, and thirty gentlemen signed their names to a paper requesting the appointment of Mr. Putnam. June 21, Thursday. MY OWN DEAR MOTHER,--I am truly disappointed that you have not had this letter before, but the tide of events has hurried me away from it. Now I must write a few words. You never heard of such a time about any one as there has been about Mr. Hawthorne. The whole country is up in arms, and will not allow Mr. Hawthorne to be removed. And now I have the good news to tell you that his removal is suspended at Washington, and he is either to be reinstated if he will consent, or to be presented with a better office. At Washington the Government was deceived, and were not told that the person to be removed was Mr. Hawthorne--so secret and cunning were these four gentlemen of Salem! I cannot tell you all the abominable story now; and it is no matter, since they are caught in their own toils, and defeated. Mr. Hawthorne's name is ringing through the land. All the latent feeling about him now comes out, and he finds himself very famous. Mr. Samuel Hooper has been very active for him. Mr. Howes has done nothing else for ten days but go back and forth to Boston, and come here to see my husband, upon the subject. It has wholly roused him out of his deep affliction for the death of Frederic [his brother], for whom he feels as if he were acting now, so deep was Frederic's love and admiration for Mr. Hawthorne. I wrote the above on my lap, following Julian about, this hottest day. Now I can only say good-by, and implore you to stay through July among the mountains. It is too hot in West Street for you. We are all well, here, and there. When I see you, I will tell you this long story about the removal, which has proved no removal, as Mr. Hawthorne has not left the Custom House, and the commission of the new officer has not arrived. Your loving child, SOPHIA. P. S. Just to show to what a detail of meanness and cunning the reverend person descends, I must tell you that he brought from Washington a paper which he copied from the original memorial there; which memorial was a testimony of the merchants of Salem in favor of Colonel Miller's being Collector. This memorial Mr. Hawthorne, in official capacity as Surveyor of the Port, and acquainted therefore with the merchants, indorsed,--saying that, "to the best of his recollection," these were all the principal merchants, and that they were responsible persons. In the copy which Mr. U. made he left out "to the best of his recollection," and made it read that these were all the merchants of Salem. Stephen C. Phillips's name was not signed. And so Mr. U. brings this to prove that Mr. Hawthorne is impeachable for want of veracity! He tried hard to find that my husband acted politically with regard to Colonel Miller's appointment; and as this was impossible, he thought he would try to prove him a false witness. Did you ever know of such pitiful evasions? But there is no language to describe him. He is, my husband says, the most satisfactory villain that ever was, for at every point he is consummate. The Government had decided to reinstate Mr. Hawthorne before Mr. U.'s arrival at Washington, and his representations changed the purpose. I trust Mr. Everett will be enlightened about the latter, so as to see what an unjust act he has committed by retracting his first letter. "What!" said Charles Sumner of Mr. U., "that smooth, smiling, oily man of God!" Hawthorne has occasion to write to the HON. HORACE MANN, M. C., WEST NEWTON, MASS. SALEM, June 26, 1849. MY DEAR SIR,--I have just received your note, in which you kindly offer me your interest towards reinstating me in the office of Surveyor. I was perfectly in earnest in what I told Elizabeth, and should still be very unwilling to have you enter into treaty with Mr. K., Mr. U., or other members of the local party, in my behalf. But, on returning here, after an absence of two or three days, I found a state of things rather different from what I expected, the general feeling being strongly in my favor, and a disposition to make a compromise, advantageous to me, on the part of some, at least, of those who had acted against me. "The Essex Register," of yesterday, speaks of an intention to offer me some better office than that of which I have been deprived. Now, I do not think that I can, preserving my self-respect, accept of any compromise. No other office can be offered me that will not have been made vacant by the removal of a Democrat; and, even if there were such an office, still, as charges have been made against me, complete justice can be done only by placing me exactly where I was before. This also would be the easiest thing for the Administration to do, as they still hold my successor's commission suspended. A compromise might indeed be made, not with me, but with Captain Putnam, by giving him a place in this Custom House--which would be of greater emolument than my office; and I have reason to believe that the Collector would accede to such an arrangement. Perhaps this idea might do something towards inducing Mr. Meredith to make the reinstatement. I did not intend to involve you in this business; nor, indeed, have I desired any friend to take up my cause; but if, in view of the whole matter, you should see fit to do as Mr. Mills advises, I shall feel truly obliged. Of course, after consenting that you should use your influence in my behalf, I should feel myself bound to accept the reinstatement, if offered. I beg you to believe, also, that I would not allow you to say a word for me, if I did not know that I have within my power a complete refutation of any charges of official misconduct that have been, or may be, brought against me. Sophia and the children are well. The managers of the Lyceum desire to know if you will deliver two lectures for them, before the session of Congress. Very truly yours, NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. SALEM, July 2, 1849. MY DEAR SIR,--I am inclined to think, from various suspicious indications that I have noticed or heard of, between the Whigs and one or two of my subordinate officers, that they are concocting, or have already concocted, a new set of charges against me. Would it not be a judicious measure for you to write to the Department, requesting a copy of these charges, that I may have an opportunity of answering them? There can be nothing (setting aside the most direct false testimony, if even that) which I shall not have it in my power either to explain, defend, or disprove. I had some idea of calling for these charges through the newspapers, but it would bring on a controversy which might be interminable, and would only, however clearly I should prove my innocence, make my reinstatement the more difficult; so that I judge it best to meet the charges in this way--always provided that there are any. It grieves me to give you so much trouble; but you must recollect that it was your own voluntary kindness, and not my importunity, that involves you in it. Very truly yours, NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. The following letter is fragmentary, because of the demands of some autograph-hunter. . . . It occurred to me, after sending off those documents, yesterday, that I ought to have given you some particulars as to the political character and standing of the gentlemen who signed them. B. Barstow, Esq., is Vice-President of the Hickory Club, and a member of the Democratic Town Committee. William B. Pike is Chairman of the Democratic County Committee. T. Burchmore, Jr., Esq., is Chairman of the Democratic Congressional District Committee. Dr. B. E. Browne signs in his own official character as a member of the Democratic State Committee. They have all been active in our local politics, and thoroughly acquainted with the political . . . [mutilated for autograph signature]. As respects the letter from T. Burchmore, Jr., to myself, I wish to say a few words. Mr. Burchmore has, for twenty-five years past, occupied a situation in the Custom House; and for a long time past, though nominally only head clerk, has been the actual head of the establishment, owing to his great business talent and thorough acquaintance with all matters connected with the revenue. He is an upright and honorable . . . [mutilated] . . . in my behalf; and I would wish, therefore, in communicating with the Department, that you would use him as tenderly as possible. Of course, his letter may be sent on, but it would be best not to advert to his being connected with the Custom House; and as he holds his office from the Collector, it is very probable that the Department may not know him in an official character. My successor's commission has not yet arrived. The enemy is very quiet, and I know little or nothing about their motions. Mrs. Mann's letter to Sophia arrived this morning. P. S. The gentlemen above mentioned have a high social standing, as well as a political one. Mr. Barstow, for instance, you may recollect as Vice-President of the Salem Lyceum, where he was introduced to you. SALEM, August 8, 1849. MY DEAR SIR,--My case is so simple, and the necessary evidence comes from so few sources, and is so direct in its application, that I think I cannot mistake my way through it; nor do I see how it can be prejudiced by my remaining quiet, for the present. I will sketch it to you as briefly as possible. Mr. U. accuses me of suspending one or more inspectors for refusing to pay party subscriptions, and avers that I sent them a letter of suspension by a messenger, whom he names, and that--I suppose after the payment of the subscription--I withdrew the suspension. I shall prove that a question was referred to me--as chief executive officer of the Custom House--from the Collector's office, as to what action should be taken on a letter from the Treasury Department, requiring the dismissal of our temporary inspectors. We had two officers in that position. They were Democrats, men with large families and no resources, and irreproachable as officers; and for these reasons I was unwilling that they should lose their situations. In order, therefore, to comply with the spirit of the Treasury order, without ruining these two men, I projected a plan of suspending them from office during the inactive season of the year, but without removing them, and in such a manner that they might return to duty when the state of business should justify it. I wrote an order (which I still have in my possession) covering these objects, which, however, was not intended to be acted on immediately, but for previous consultation with the Deputy Collector and the head clerk. On consulting the latter gentleman, he was of opinion, for various reasons which he cited, that the two inspectors might be allowed to remain undisturbed until further orders from the Treasury; to which, as the responsibility was entirely with the Collector's Department, I made no objection. And here, so far as I had any knowledge or concern, the matter ended. But it is said that I notified the inspectors of their suspension by a certain person, who is named. I have required an explanation of this person, and he at once avowed that, being aware of this contemplated movement, and being in friendly relations with these two men, he thought it his duty to inform them of it; but he most distinctly states that he did it without my authority or knowledge, and that he will testify to this effect whenever I call upon him so to do. I did not inquire what communication he had with the two inspectors, or with either of them; for I look upon his evidence as clearing me, whatever may have passed between him and them. But my idea is (I may be mistaken, but it is founded on some observation of the manoeuvres of small politicians, and knowing the rigid discipline of custom houses as to party subscriptions) that there really was an operation, to squeeze an assessment out of the recusant inspectors, under the terror of an impending removal or suspension; that one of the inspectors turned traitor, and was impelled, by the threats and promises of Mr. U. and his coadjutors, to bring his evidence to a pretty direct point on me; and that Mr. U., in his memorial to the Treasury Department, defined and completed the lie, in such shape as I have given it above. But I do not see how it can stand for a moment against my defense. The head clerk (the same Mr. Burchmore whose letter I transmitted to you) was turned out a week ago, and will gladly give his evidence at any moment, proving the grounds on which I acted. The other person who is said to have acted as messenger is still in office, a weigher and gauger, at a salary of $1500 per annum. He is a poor man, having been in office but two years, and expended all his income in paying debts for which he was an indorser, and he now wishes to get a few hundred dollars to carry him to California, or give him some other start in life. Still, he will come forward if I call upon him, but, of course, would rather wait for his removal, which will doubtless take place before the session of Congress. Meantime, I have no object to obtain, worth purchasing at the sacrifice which he must make. My surveyorship is lost, and I have no expectation, nor any desire, of regaining it. My purpose is simply to make such a defense to the Senate as will insure the rejection of my successor, and thus satisfy the public that I was removed on false or insufficient grounds. Then, if Mr. U. should give me occasion,--or perhaps if he should not,--I shall do my best to kill and scalp him in the public prints; and I think I shall succeed. I mean soon to comply with your kind invitation to come and see you, not on the above business, but because I think of writing a schoolbook,--or, at any rate, a book for the young,--and should highly prize your advice as to what is wanted, and how it should be achieved. I mean, as soon as possible,--that is to say, as soon as I can find a cheap, pleasant, and healthy residence,--to remove into the country, and bid farewell forever to this abominable city; for, now that my mother is gone, I have no longer anything to keep me here. Sophia and the children are pretty well. With my best regards to Mrs. Mann, I am, Very truly yours, NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. P. S. Do pardon me for troubling you with this long letter: but I am glad to put you in possession of the facts, in case of accidents. I will insert here some letters that relate to this time, though written in 1884:-- PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND, September 15. DEAR MRS. LATHROP, . . . That matter of the memorial fountain, or monument [in honor of "The Town Pump "], which the death of Mrs. Brooks prevented our going on with, I trust may yet in the fullness of time be accomplished. I have a plan which may fructify, although some years may intervene before any decided steps can be taken. Perhaps it will be just as well to wait, after all, until some of those wretches who delight in vilifying your father perish from the face of the earth. Let us have patience. They are fast becoming superannuated, and the "venom of their spleen" will perish with them. They comprehend him not, and are willfully blind and deaf. Dr. Wheatland estimates that less than a score of these strange malignants are now to be met with on the streets of Salem. But he has not like me "Unaware, Ranging the woods to start a hare, Come to the mouth of the dark lair, Where growling low, a fierce old bear, Lies amid bones and blood." By the bye, I found once that Miss Savage had wholly forgotten Hawthorne's reference to the Town Pump which closes his Custom House chapter, and so I put "The Scarlet Letter" into my valise (she having lost her copy), and two or three weeks ago I called at her house and read her the passage. Afterwards, I dropped in to see Mullet, and I left the book with him, as he had not read it for many years. I think you will like to see a note he has written me, so I inclose it. Faithfully yours, GEORGE H. HOLDEN. February 5. MY DEAR MRS. LATHROP,--Rummaging among my papers, last evening, I ran across another letter from our "bright-eyed" and noble-hearted friend Mullet, which I think you will be glad to read, because Mullet wrote it. I therefore inclose the letter. Mullet is very hard of hearing, and on that account goes out but little. During the twelve years that I lived in Salem I am sure I never once met him on the street. In fact, I think I never heard of him, even, till after I moved to Providence. I heard of him one day at the "Gazette" office, and forthwith dug him out. He is a great reader. The Harpers have sent me all of Rolfe's Shakespeare, and I found that I have duplicate copies of three or four of the Plays. These duplicates I shall ask Mullet to oblige me by accepting. Mullet is not the chap who bored your father so fearfully by endless talk about Shakespeare and Napoleon, but he is a prodigious admirer of the great dramatist. He has the Plays in one huge, unwieldy volume, and for that reason reads them less than he would if they were in a more handy form. Mullet is a great reader of the old English poets (I don't mean so far back as Chaucer and Spenser), and I suppose he can repeat from memory thousands of lines. I have found no chance to call upon him since I fruitlessly rang his doorbell, as stated in his letter. Please remind me to tell you about an African fetich which Mullet gave me one day, and a reminiscence of your father linked therewith. Ever faithfully, GEORGE H. HOLDEN. SALEM, September 10, 1884. DEAR MR. HOLDEN,--It was my good fortune during the year 1850 to be presented with a copy of "The Scarlet Letter," together with "the compliments of the author." Of course, the gift was highly prized; but its fate was that of many other volumes, borrowed and never returned. A volume of the same, from the late edition issued last year, proved a most welcome visitor to my enforced seclusion. After the lapse of many years I once more had the real pleasure of reading over that popular work. The enjoyment derived from a fresh perusal of the introductory chapter on the Custom House was great indeed. It seemed like living over that period of my existence again. The scenes described in such a masterly manner were vividly before me; and while reading I frequently stopped to laugh at the scrupulously nice delineation. The zest with which I read was heightened by the reproduction of the characters in that superlative picture of word-painting, for they together with the artist were vividly--I had almost said palpably--before me, as though it were a thing of yesterday. How real the "patriarchal body of veterans" appeared, "tipped back in chairs," and "at times asleep; but occasionally might be heard talking together in voices between speech and a snore. There was no more vivacity than in the drowsy drone of so many bumblebees." However much others may be entertained by reading that chapter of exquisite humor, those who were the daily witnesses of the scenes for several years can best appreciate its nicety and drollery. The "veteran shipmaster," concerning whom Hawthorne says, "scarcely a day passed that he did not stir me to laughter and admiration by his marvelous gift as a story-teller," was Captain Stephen Burchmore, the public storekeeper. The stories of themselves were generally extravagant and grotesque. It was "the marvelous gift" of narration that carried people off their legs. I have known the company present to roar with laughter, and not one more convulsed than Mr. Hawthorne. Truly yours, GEORGE W. MULLET. SALEM, October 1, 1883. DEAR MR. HOLDEN,--You request me to "write the particulars about the good turn I had done Hawthorne in sacrificing my own interests in his behalf." Mr. Hawthorne had not been thought of in connection with any office in the Custom House until after arrangements were made to have them filled with others. Richard Lindsay was supported for the surveyorship and myself for the naval office. All necessary documents had been forwarded to Washington, duly authenticated, and tidings of the appointments daily looked for. At this late stage Hawthorne was first suggested for Surveyor. The matter was urgently pushed. To accomplish it, Lindsay must be prevailed upon to withdraw. All were agreed that I was the one to engineer the matter, Lindsay and myself being fast friends, and our relations uninterruptedly pleasant. That he would willingly consent was not expected, and indeed it was problematical if he would at all. I felt exceedingly delicate about suggesting the business, as I had in person been through the country obtaining signatures from resident committees favoring his appointment. I therefore voluntarily offered to withdraw my application for the naval office in favor of Hawthorne, but that found no favor. Finally, to secure the desideratum, I proposed that Lindsay and self both withdraw, and have the offices filled with others. I desired my friend should understand that I asked for no sacrifice I was not willing to share. My withdrawal was stoutly opposed as entirely unnecessary, but it was my ultimatum; on no other condition would I move in the matter. The business was then broken by me to Lindsay, and it required all the persuasion I could exercise to reconcile him to the arrangement. The expedient of my own withdrawal brought it about; otherwise it would not have been accomplished. It now only remained for us to write to Washington, withdrawing our candidatures, and transferring all our support to the applications of Hawthorne for Surveyor and Howard for Naval Officer. Soon their commissions came, and Lindsay and myself were subsequently appointed as inspectors under Hawthorne. At that time I regarded Hawthorne's appointment as decidedly popular with the party, with men of letters, and with the increasing multitude who admired him as one of the brightest stars in the literary firmament. Never have I experienced the least regret for waiving my own advantage to bring the pleasing result about. For nearly four years it brought me almost daily into proximity with him, either officially or casually. The recollection well repays the little sacrifice made. His port, his placidity, his hours of abstraction, his mild, pleasant voice,--no sweeter ever uttered by mortal lips,--are all readily recalled. Truly yours, G. W. MULLET. CHAPTER V FROM SALEM TO BERKSHIRE Plans for retiring into the depths of the country were made, and Horatio Bridge was requested to see what chance there was for a home near the ocean, to which Hawthorne always turned as to the most desirable neighbor. Mr. Bridge responds in part:-- UNITED STATES NAVY YARD, PORTSMOUTH, N. H. August 6, 1849. DEAR HAWTHORNE,--. . . I have looked at a house, which you will probably like . . . and it commands a fine sea view. If it can be hired, it is just the place. . . . We are busy in fixing ourselves in our new quarters, where we shall be most happy to see you. Mrs. Bridge joins me in kind regards to Mrs. H. and yourself. Love to Una and the unseen Julian. Yours ever, H. B. A letter from Mrs. Bridge, which does not mention the year, is a specimen of many similar ones from other friends:-- PHILADELPHIA, July 1. MY DEAR MRS. HAWTHORNE,--I heard yesterday by way of Africa that you had not received a note which I left at the Winthrop House for you last summer. You must have thought me very neglectful. I should have acknowledged the receipt of any book you might have sent me; but most sincerely did I thank you for that which had given me so much pleasure. I remember very distinctly my past knowledge of Mr. Hawthorne as an author, and the bitter tears I shed over "The Gentle Boy." When I had read it until I thought myself quite hardened to its influence, I offered to read it to our dear old nurse, who had been the patient listener to the whole family for many a year. I prided myself upon my nursery reputation for stoicism, which I should lose if my voice faltered. I was beginning to doubt my ability to get calmly through the next page, when the old lady exclaimed, in such a truly yet ludicrously indignant tone, "Dretful creturs!" that I had a fair right to laugh while she wiped the tears off of her spectacles. The time gained placed me on a firmer footing, and I got safely through thereby. I enjoy Mr. Hawthorne's writings none the less now that I can laugh and cry when I am inclined. Will you give him my kindest regards. He is very often mentioned by Mr. Bridge, who, by the way, goes to the Mediterranean in September. I hope to join him there. With much regard, truly yours, C. M. BRIDGE. Promptly, in their hour of misfortune, arrived a letter from one of Mrs. Hawthorne's dearest friends, which I give here:-- STATEN ISLAND, September 10, 1849. Thank you, my dear Sophia, for your letter. I have been thinking a great deal of you lately, and was glad to know of your plans. Before I heard from you, I had expended a great amount of indignation upon "General Taylor" and his myrmidons, and politics and parties, and the whole host of public blessings which produce private misfortunes. I am glad you are going to Lenox, because it is such a beautiful place, and you have so many warm friends there. Life is a pretty sad affair, dear Sophia; at least, I find it so. . . . We have felt, that Bob [Colonel Robert Shaw] required to be removed from home influences, as he has no brothers; and, being unwilling to send him to a school of the usual order, we chose the Jesuit College at Fordham, near New York, where there are a hundred and fifty boys, and a great many holy fathers to teach and take care of them. I inclose a check from Frank, which he hopes Mr. Hawthorne will accept as it is offered, and as lie would do if the fate had been reversed. He does not ask you to accept his gift,--so pay it back when you don't want it, here or hereafter, or never. I only wish it was a thousand. Dear Sophia, when I think of such men as your husband, Page, and some others, so pinched and cramped for this abominable money, it makes me outrageous. If it were one of those trials that do people good, it would be bearable; but it kills one down so. Shakespeare felt it when he said:-- "Tired with all these, for restful death I cry, As, to behold desert a beggar born, And needy nothing trimm'd in jollity." God bless you, dear Sophia,--as He has, notwithstanding General Taylor. Believe me ever most affectionately your friend, S. B. S. Miss Elizabeth Hoar, engaged to Mr. Emerson's brother Charles, who died in youth, writes letters of regret for the departure of the Hawthornes from Concord:-- . . . Remember me to Mr. Hawthorne and beautiful Una. That you three have lived here in Concord for so many fair days is a page of romance which I shall not forget; whatever happens, so much we have and cannot lose. Affectionately always, E. HOAR. . . . I should like very much to see you and Mr. Hawthorne, and your Una and her brother, and have made two unsuccessful efforts to spend a day with you in Salem. I was in New Haven at the time of the publication of the "Mosses," and all my friends were reading them. I found myself quite a lion because I knew Mr. Hawthorne; and became a sort of author in my turn, by telling stories of the inhabitants of the Old Manse, omitted in the printed books. Father was charmed with them, and wrote to me quite at length about them. Pray remember me to Mr. Hawthorne, and give him my thanks for writing the book. Mr. Emerson is in Paris from May 6th to joth, then lectures in London six times, and sees everybody and everything. I am heartily glad. He has letters which are to show him Lamartine. Affectionately yours, ELIZABETH HOAR. The first Mrs. Lowell, who had long been an intimate friend of my mother's, sends beautiful letters, from which I will make selections, too lovely to be set aside:-- "How blessed it is that God sends these 'perpetual messiahs' among us, to lead us back to innocence and free-heartedness and faith. . . . I have seen a picture of the Annunciation in which Mary is reading the prophecy of the Messiah's coming. . . . Mary is a type of all women, and I love the Roman Catholic feeling that enshrines and appeals to her. It has its root in the very deepest principle of life. . . . James is very well, and to say that he is very happy, too, is unnecessary to any one who knows his elastic, joyful nature. . . . When I feel well and strong, I feel so well and strong that I could, like Atlas, bear the world about with me. . . . I love to work with my hands; to nail, to glue, to scour, to dig; all these satisfy a yearning in my nature for something substantial and honest. My mother often tells me I was born to be a poor man's wife, I have such an aptitude for all trades." . . . Is not June the crown of the year, the Carnival of Nature, when the very trees pelt each other with blossoms, and are stirring and bending when no wind is near them, because they are so full of inward life, and must shiver for joy to feel how fast the sap is rushing up from the ground? On such days can you sing anything but, "Oh, beautiful Love"? Doesn't it seem as if Nature wore your livery and wished to show the joy of your heart in every possible form? The everlasting hum and seething of myriad life satisfies and soothes me. I feel as if something were going on in the world, else why all this shouting, and bedecking of every weed in its best, this endless strain from every tiny weed or great oaken flute? All that cannot sing, dances; the gnats in the air and the long-legged spiders on the water. Even the ants and beetles, the workers that are quoted for examples by hoarding men, run about doing nothing, putting their busy antennae into everything, tumbling over the brown mould for sheer enjoyment, and running home at last without the little white paper parcel in their mouths which gives them so respectable an air. Doubtless the poor things are scolded by their infirm parents, who sit sunning themselves at the door of the house. . . . Beetles seem to me to have a pleasant life, because they, who have fed for two or three years underground upon the roots, come forth at last winged, and find their nourishment in the blooms of the very same tree. It comforts me, because we have ourselves to eat many bitter roots here, whose perfect flower shall one day delight us. This, dear Sophia, has been a long ramble. I promised to copy that sonnet of James's for you, so I inclose it. With true sympathy and love, Affectionately yours, MARIA WHITE. From George S. Hillard came the following letter. On the envelope my father has written Hillard's name and "The Scarlet Letter," showing with what interest he preserved this friend's criticism and praise. On the other side of the envelope is written, "Foi, Foi, Faith." No one ever was more faithful to, and consequently ever had more faith in, his friends than my father. BOSTON, March 28, 1850. MY DEAR HAWTHORNE,--You have written a most remarkable book; in point of .literary talent, beyond all your previous efforts; a book full of tragic power, nice observation, delicate tact, and rare knowledge of the human heart. I think it will take a place in our literature among the highest efforts of what may be called the Tragic Muse of fiction. You are, intellectually speaking, quite a puzzle to me. How comes it that with so thoroughly healthy an organization as you have, you have such a taste for the morbid anatomy of the human heart, and such knowledge of it, too? I should fancy from your books that you were burdened with secret sorrow; that you had some blue chamber in your soul, into which you hardly dared to enter yourself; but when I see you, you give me the impression of a man as healthy as Adam was in Paradise. For my own taste, I could wish that you would dwell more in the sun, and converse more with cheerful thoughts and lightsome images, and expand into a story the spirit of the Town Pump. But while waiting for this, let me be thankful for the weird and sad strain which breathes from "The Scarlet Letter," which I read with most absorbing interest. Yours ever, GEO. S. HILLARD. The owner of the cottage which the Hawthornes hired in Lenox sends a welcome:-- DEAR SOPHIA,--Since we came up here, I have examined the little house you think of taking, and cannot but hope you will take the red house in preference; for although that is not so large or convenient as I wish it were for you, it is much more so than the little garden house. You have a rough plan of that, which Mr. Tappan drew for Mr. Hawthorne, and I will give you one of this. There are four good sleeping-rooms upstairs, but without fireplaces, and could only be ameliorated in winter by an entry stove. The house is pleasantly situated, having a view of the Lake, as you know. The road passing by the red house is so little traveled that it is no annoyance. Perhaps you and Mr. Hawthorne would like to come and see the houses for yourselves; if so, we shall be very glad to have you stay with us. I have no time to tell you how lovely it is here, or how glad we are you are coming. Affectionately yours, CAROLINE TAPPAN. The search for a desirable hillside or meadow space where they might make a new home, away from city streets and the hurrying prisoners upon them, was pleasantly ended for the Hawthornes. The transfer of the little family to Lenox soon occurred, and to the "red house," which was in existence until lately. I will quote a description of the cottage and the views about the spot, given in a Stockbridge paper not long after the small dwelling disappeared:-- "On a stand in the curious old hotel in Stockbridge is a charred chunk of an oaken house-beam that is as carefully treasured as if it were of gold; and every guest strolling through the parlor wherein it is shown halts and gazes at it with a singular interest. A placard pinned to the cinder explains in these words why it is treasured and why the people gaze at it: 'Relic from the Hawthorne Cottage.' The Hawthorne Cottage stood half a mile out of Stockbridge on the road to Lenox. It was burned two months ago. It was a little red story-and-a-half house on a lonely farm, and an old farmer, himself somewhat of a bookworm, dwelt in it with his family at the time it mysteriously took fire. The cottage was a landmark, because Nathaniel Hawthorne dwelt therein in 1850 and 1851 for a year and a half. A great many people go out to see the ruins of it. "Drive along a lonely winding road through a homely New England district several hundred yards west of the pretentious mansions of Stockbridge, pass through a breezy open patch of pines, and one comes to a characteristic hillside New England orchard, the branches of whose trees just now are bright with ripening red apples. On the hillslope in the middle of the orchard and overlooking the famous 'Stockbridge Bowl'--a round deep tarn among the hills--are the brick cellar walls and brick underpinning of what was a very humble dwelling--the Hawthorne Cottage. About the ruins is a quiet, modest, New England neighborhood. There is not much to see at the site of the Hawthorne Cottage, yet every day fashionable folk from New York and Boston and a score of western cities drive thither with fine equipages and jingling harness, halt, and look curiously for a minute or two at the green turf of the dooryard and the crumbling brick walls of the cottage site." To go from Salem to Lenox was to contrast very forcibly the somewhat oppressed spirits of historical association with the healthy grandeur of nature. The books my father wrote here embrace this joy of untheoried, peaceful, or gloriously perturbed life of sky and land. Theory of plot or principle was as much beneath him as the cobble-stones; from self-righteous harangues he turned as one who had heard a divine voice that alone deserved to declare. He taught as Nature does, always leading to thoughts of something higher than the dictum of men, and nobler than their greatest beauty of action. He said it was difficult for him to write in the presence of such a view as the "little red house" commanded. It certainly must have been a scene that expressed otherwise unutterable sublimity. But if my father struggled to bring his human power forward in the presence of an outlook that so reminded him of God, he did bring it forward there, and we perceive the aroma and the color which his work could not have gained so well in a town or a village covert. Mrs. Hawthorne's letters, written for the pleasure of her family, in spite of her growing cares, continue to be a source of intelligence to us:-- MY DEAR LIZZIE,--I have just received your letter, for which I am very glad. You say that mother may come to-night. I truly hope she will. But as the heavy fog we had here this morning may have been a rain in Boston, I write now, to request father to go to Oak Hall, or to some ready-made linen-store, and buy Mr. Hawthorne two linen sacks, well made, and good linen. He is a perfect bunch of rags, and he will not let me make him anything to wear--absolutely will not. But he consents that something shall be bought. If mother should be delayed beyond Monday, this can be done; otherwise it cannot. I am very sorry about the little books; but I do not see any help. Ticknor & Co. were going to have illustrations drawn for them, and Mr. Hawthorne thinks they are begun, that money has been expended, and that it is too late to change the plan. He says, he is bound by his engagement, and cannot recede; but that if you can change their purposes independently of him,--if they are willing, he is. Mr. Fields has not said a word about the Fairy Tales, and I do not know whether Mr. H. intends to write them now. I never ask him what he is about. But I know he is not writing seriously this hot weather. God bless you all, SOPHIECHEN. Sunday. MY DEAR MOTHER,--'This has been a dull "heaven's day" for the children, who have not been so merry as on a sunny day. I have read to them, and shown them my drawings of Flaxman's Iliad and Odysse and Hesiod. I wish you could have seen them the other day, acting Giant Despair and Mrs. Diffidence. They were sitting on chairs opposite the doorsteps; Julian with one little leg over the other, in a nonchalant attitude; Una also in negligent position. They were discussing their prisoners, Hopeful and Christian, in very gruff and unamiable voices. "Well, what had we better do with them?" "Oh, beat them pretty well, every day!" The air of the two figures, and their tones, in comparison with the faces and forms, were very funny. I heard Una telling Julian that Christian's bundle was a "bunch of naughtiness." Julian became Columbus all at once, on Friday, and ran in from out of doors to get some blocks to build a cross on the island which he had discovered. He said, "Where is my sword to hold in my hand when I get out of my ship?" [He was between four and five years old.] Sunday, 20th. A famous snowstorm. I read from Spenser to the children, in the morning, of St. George and Una, Una and the Lion, and Prince Arthur. Then, Cinderella. They made an exquisite picture, with the hobby-horse. Julian was upon the horse,--as a king; Una at his side, presenting ambrosia. In the P. M. I read them Andersen's "Angel and Child," "The Swineherd," and "Little Ida's Flowers;" and their father read to them from "The Black Aunt." In the evening my husband read to me the "Death of Adam and Eve," by Montgomery, and something of Crabbe's. Tuesday, 22d. Clear, splendid day. The children took their little straw baskets and went to find flowers. They were gone a great while, and came back with a charming bunch--arbutus, anemones, violets, and houstonia. They went to walk with their father in the afternoon, to the woods and mountains, and brought home arbutus; and Julian, laurel for me to make a wreath for papa's head,--laurel of last year. 23d. Julian arranged his cabinet of shells and animals, hammered, ran like a wolf, told stories to himself, helped me make beds, and held cotton for me to wind, watched Mr. Tappan at his young trees, and when his father came down [from writing upstairs] played with him. I sewed all the evening while my husband read the "Castle of Indolence," and finished it. DEAREST LIZZIE,--Mrs. Sedgwick takes the most kind and motherly interest in my affairs. Both she and her husband come quite often, and Mr. Sedgwick sends Mr. Hawthorne a great many papers. I wish you would tell me whether you think Tall Ann is able to do our work; but from what she said about being deprived of the Church services and Holy Communion, I know she would not do without them. She would be as quiet here as in heaven. There have been a succession of golden days for a long while, and I have thought "Time had run back, and brought the age of gold," it has been so superb. It is now a golden and rose-colored twilight. The most distant mountains are of the palest azure, and the Lake, pale rose. It is haymaking season, and the children roam abroad with the haymakers,--oh, such happy hours! The air is fragrant with the dying breath of clover and sweet-scented grass. Julian is getting nut-brown. He is a real chestnut. We are all wonderfully happy, and I can conceive of no greater peace and content. Last Sunday afternoon we all went to the Lake, and Una and I wove a laurel wreath, and Una crowned her father. For mountain-laurel grows about us. We have now twelve hens. Twice a day we all go and feed them. We go in single file. Mr. Hawthorne called it to-day the procession of the equinoxes. The hens have some of them been named: Snowdrop, Crown Imperial, Queenie, and Fawn. Snowdrop is very handsome and white. Mrs. Hawthorne's mother writes to her in this manner:-- June 8, 1850. MY BELOVED,--Esther Sturgis brought me your letter yesterday. . . . I hope you have time to enjoy this fine weather. I please myself with imagining various enjoyments for you all in the peaceful scenes around you, maugre the household cares that must fall to your lot. May the spirit of inspiration drive all petty cares from your husband, and fill his soul with thoughts that shall bear blessings to ages yet unborn!' He must write--therefore you must court the love of the humble, whose destiny it is to lighten the labors of the gifted ones of the earth. I feel ashamed when I detect myself in thinking that a kitchen-maid is lower in the scale of being than I am. What would the learned and the gifted do if there was no humble one to make the bread that supports life? Kiss your precious little ones, and tell them that grandmamma thinks of them daily; that in spirit she joins in their charming walks, in their search for flowers, in their admiration of the woods, mountains, and fields, and in their holy inspirations while gazing at the glories of the starlit heavens, or the rising or setting sun. May God bless and keep you all. YOUR MOTHER. August 1. MY DEAREST MOTHER,--I was more troubled at the hindrance Mr. Hawthorne suffered by our being without help a fortnight than by anything else, because he would not let me bear any weight of care or labor, but insisted upon doing everything himself. Yet he says that he cannot write deeply during midsummer, at any rate. He can only seize the skirts of ideas and pin them down for further investigation. Besides, he has not recovered his pristine vigor. The year ending in June was the trying year of his life, as well as of mine [on account of political calumny]. I have not yet found again all my wings; neither is his tread yet again elastic. But the ministrations of nature will have their effect in due time. Mr. Hawthorne thinks it is Salem which he is dragging at his ankles still. . . . Yes, we find kindest friends on every side. The truest friendliness is the great characteristic of the Sedgwick family in all its branches. They seem to delight to make happy, and they are as happy as summer days themselves. They really take the responsibility of my being comfortable, as if they were mother, father, brother, sister. We have fallen into the arms of loving-kindness, and cannot suffer for any aid or support in emergencies. This I know will give you a reposeful content concerning us. Mr. Tappan is a horn of benefits. He seems to have the sweetest disposition; and his shy, dark eyes are always gleaming with hospitable smiles for us. We could not be in more agreeable circumstances, very well,--only I feel rather too far from you all. I want you to come, to avoid those terrible prostrations from heat. Here, we will give you a fresh egg every morning, beaten up to a foam with new milk; and you shall have honey in the comb, and sweetest vegetables out of our garden, and currants to refresh your parched mouth. And you shall have peace, and rest, and quiet walks in stately woods; and you shall sit in the barn upon clover hay, and see the dear children play about and rejoice in your presence. You shall see us feed the hennipennies, and hear that most quiet sound of their clucking and murmuring. Last Saturday night who should appear but Mr. O' Sullivan! The last we had heard of him was that he had the yellow fever at New Orleans, and that he was arrested for some movements with regard to Cuba. He is now on bail, and will return to be tried in December. He returned to Stockbridge that night, and on Monday came in a double carriage and took us there, to the house of Mrs. Field, an old friend of his mother's. We were received with the most whole-hearted hospitality, and Una and I stayed all night, and Mr. O'Sullivan brought Mr. Hawthorne and Julian back, because Mr. Hawthorne did not wish to stay. I stayed ostensibly to go to a torchlight festival in an ice glen, but I wished more to see the O'Sullivans than the festival. We had a charming visit. Mrs. Field carried me to the scene of the sacrifice of Everell in "Hope Leslie," for it is upon her estate,--a superb hill covered with laurels,--and this sacrifice rock near the summit, and the council chambers beneath. That was where the noble Magawesca's arm was stricken off. The children enjoyed themselves extremely, and behaved so beautifully that they won all hearts. They thought that there never was such a superb child as Julian, nor such a grace as Una. "They are neither too shy, nor bold," said Mrs. Field, "but just right." There was a huge black Newfoundland dog, Hero, which delighted Julian, and he rode on its back; and a little white silk dog, Fay, very piquant and intelligent. It was a large, rambling mansion, with india-rubber rooms that always stretch to accommodate any number of guests, Mr. O'Sullivan said, such is Mrs. Field's boundless hospitality. The house stands in a bower of trees, and behind it is the richest dell, out of which rises Laurel Hill, which in its season is one of perfect bloom. Rustic seats are at hand all about, and the prettiest winding .paths, and glimpses of the Housatonic River gem the plain. It has not the wide scope and proud effect of our picture, but it is the dearest, sweetest, lovingest retreat one can imagine. Mr. O'Sullivan took me to see Mrs. Harry Sedgwick, in the evening; a noble woman with a gleam in her face. I owed her a call. There I also saw Mrs. Robert Sedgwick, and the Ashburners, who called upon us at Highwood. We went to a bridge where we could see the torchlight party come out of the Ice Glen, and it looked as if a host of stars had fallen out of the sky, and broken to pieces; so said the Count O'S. We waited till they arrived to us, and then we saw Mrs. Charles Sedgwick and her pretty school-girls embark in an endless open omnibus for Lenox. They were all lighted up by the burning torches, and were dressed in fantastic costumes of brilliant colors, scarlet being predominant. Those girls looked like a bouquet of bright flowers, as they sat waving farewells, and receiving with smiles the cheers of all the young gentlemen, who raised their torches and shouted, "Hurrah!" Poor, dear Mrs. Charles! She looked so warm and so flushed--just like a torch, herself!--and so lovely, kind, and happy, in the midst of her living roses. Above, serenely shone myriads of pale stars in the clear sky; around the horizon, heat-lightning flashed. The moon was rising in the east; and in the north, the aurora borealis bloomed like a vast lily. It was really a rare scene. We returned to Mrs. Harry Sedgwick's. There she stood, receiving the greetings of the members of the party; every gentleman bearing a torch, which lighted up a rosy face at his side. Such happiness as they enjoyed--such spirit and such mirth! It was worth witnessing. I found that everybody of note in Stockbridge dearly loves our friend, Mr. O'Sullivan. He is the "pet" and "darling" and "the angelic" with them all. And through him we were known to them. Most affectionately, SOPHIECHEN. September 4. MY DEAREST MOTHER,--To-day, Mr. Hawthorne and Mr. Melville have gone to dine at Pittsfield. Mr. Tappan took them in his carriage. I went to Highwood after breakfast, to ask for the carriage and horses, as you know Mr. Tappan has put them at our disposition, if we will only drive. I found James sitting in state at the gate, in the wagon, and concluded that there was no hope. But behold, Mr. Tappan was just about starting for Pittsfield, himself; and with the most beautiful cordiality of hospitality he said he would come over to take the gentlemen. This would have been no particular courtesy in some persons, but for this shy dear, who particularly did not wish, for some reason, to be introduced to Mr. Melville, it was very pretty. I have no doubt he will be repaid by finding Mr. Melville a very different man from what he imagines, and very agreeable and entertaining. We find him so. A man with a true, warm heart, and a soul and an intellect,--with life to his finger-tips; earnest, sincere, and reverent; very tender and modest. And I am not sure that he is not a very great man; but I have not quite decided upon my own opinion. I should say, I am not quite sure that _I_ do not think him a very great man; for my opinion is, of course, as far as possible from settling the matter. He has very keen perceptive power; but what astonishes me is, that his eyes are not large and deep. He seems to see everything very accurately; and how he can do so with his small eyes, I cannot tell. They are not keen eyes, either, but quite undistinguished in any way. His nose is straight and rather handsome, his mouth expressive of sensibility and emotion. He is tall and erect, with an air free, brave, and manly. When conversing, he is full of gesture and force, and loses himself in his subject. There is no grace nor polish. Once in a while, his animation gives place to a singularly quiet expression, out of these eyes to which I have objected; an indrawn, dim look, but which at the same time makes you feel that he is at that instant taking deepest note of what is before him. It is a strange, lazy glance, but with a power in it quite unique. It does not seem to penetrate through you, but to take you into himself. I saw him look at Una so, yesterday, several times. He says it is Mr. Mathews who is writing in "The Literary World" the visit to Berkshire. Mr. Mathews calls Mr. Hawthorne "Mr. Noble Melancholy," in the next number of the paper. You know, what you read was the introduction only. It is singular how many people insist that Mr. Hawthorne is gloomy, since he is not. He is pensive, perhaps, as all contemplative persons must be; especially when, as in him, "a great heart is the household fire of a grand intellect" (to quote his own words), because he sees and sympathizes with all human suffering. He has always seemed to me, in his remote moods, like a stray Seraph, who had experienced in his own life no evil, but by the intention of a divine intellect, saw and sorrowed over all evil. [Among my mother's early letters to my father, this poem, written in her fine, delicate hand upon old-fashioned fancy note paper, was evidently her expression of this feeling.] THE SERAPH AND THE DOVE. A Seraph strayed to earth from upper spheres, Impelled by inward motion, vague yet strong: He knew not wherefore he must leave the throng Of kindred hierarchs for a world of tears: But, mailed in proof divine, he felt no fears, Obedient to an impulse clear of wrong: And so he ceased awhile his heavenly song, To measure his immortal life by years. His arched brow uprose, a throne of light, Where ordered thought a rule superior held; Within his eyes celestial splendors dwell'd, Ready to glow and bless with subject might, When he should find why God had sent him here, Shot like a star from out his native sphere. He was alone; he stood apart from men: His simple nature could not solve their ways; For he had lived a life of love and praise, And they forgot that God their Source had been. So mused he on the visions of his mind, Which, wondrous fair, recalled his home above: He wist not why he was to space confin'd, But waited, trusting in Omnific love. Then lo! came fluttering to his arms a Dove, Which for her foot had never yet found rest: The Seraph folded her within his breast, And as he felt the brooding warmth, he conscious, smiled and said, "Yes, Father! Heaven can only be where kindred spirits wed!" ["My Dove" was one of my father's names for my mother; he found her a seal with a dove upon it. She several times referred to this title with joy, in talks with me.] As his life has literally been so pure from the smallest taint of earthliness, it can only be because he is a Seer, that he knows of crime. Not Julian's little (no, great) angel heart and life are freer from any intention or act of wrong than his. And this is best proof to me of the absurdity of the prevalent idea that it is necessary to go through the fiery ordeal of sin to become wise and good. I think such an idea is blasphemy and the unpardonable sin. It is really abjuring God's voice within. We have not received, as we ought to have done, the last Saturday's number of "The Literary World." I have a great curiosity to read about "Mr. Noble Melancholy." Poor aunty! [Her aunt Pickman.] I really do not believe Shakespeare will be injured by being spoken of in the same paper with Mr. Hawthorne. But no comparison is made between them, though there is no reason why one great man may not be compared to another. There is no absolute difference in created souls, after all; and the intuitions of genius are identical, necessarily; for what is an intuition of genius but God's truth, revealed to a soul in high communion? I suppose it is not impossible for another Shakespeare to culminate. Even I--little bit of a tot of I--have sometimes recognized my own thought in Shakespeare. But do not tell aunt Pickman of this. Not believing in an absolute source of thought, she would pronounce me either irrecoverably insane or infinitely self-conceited. Here is John.--No more. SOPHIA. CHAPTER VI LENOX One of the authors in that excellent company congregated at this period in this part of Berkshire--Mr. Mansfield--writes to Mrs. Hawthorne for the pleasure of the thing; and one fairly hears the drone of time as the days hang ripe and sleepy upon his hands. I quote a few paragraphs from his letters:-- HOME, January 15, 1851. DEAR MADAM,--It was very kind in you to take up my affairs, and I will say here upon the margin of this reply, that I SHOULD have very much liked your opinion of the "Pundison Letters" I sent out; but now--so long ago is it--I have had time to let my whimsical nature find some other occupation; and the "Up-Country Letters" may lie as they are, not unlikely for the next thousand years. I am absorbed and busied with Bishop Butler's Analogy, which is all things to me at this present; and I am not sure that "The House of the Seven Gables" could tempt me away from it until I get my fill. . . . The Bishop is great, and I hope to have him with me until the frost comes out of the ground, and I can busy myself with Nature herself. I laughed the other day loud and long at a report of the plot of "The House of the Seven Gables," in a letter to a lady. . . . The remark was, that "the plot of 'The House of the Seven Gables' was--deepening damnably." . . . You speak of "the crimson and violet sunrises, and the green and gold sunsets," etc.; and I am glad to get so good an authority for the fact of mixed colors in sunrising. In my little book, I speak somewhere of "the silver and rose tint flame of the morning." . . . My wife, who sends her love, has taken possession of your note, and is to keep it somewhere "with care." That is, it is to be so carefully hidden that no one will ever find it. Perhaps she is a little jealous; but, in any case, she wants the autograph. Please make my regards to the man in "The House of the Seven Gables," and believe me, with sincere respect, Yours--obliged-- L. W. MANSFIELD. HOME, January 22. DEAR MADAM,--I suppose Mr. Hawthorne will smile at the idea of my writing him a letter of condolence, and such I do not intend; but I have been a little provoked at an article in "The Church Review;" and whether Mr. Hawthorne cares for my opinion or not, it will be a relief and satisfaction for me to say my say about it. Nor do I suppose that he can live so exclusively in a world of his own as not to be pleased at knowing that his friends recognize as such any impertinence that may be said about him. In this case also it comes home to the question which I submitted in the "Up-Country Letters," which I sent you. Now I will say (and I venture to say that I am one of twenty thousand respectable people that would say the same) that the little bits of personal description and reference which Mr. Hawthorne has given in two instances have added--I was going to say tenfold to the interest which attaches to all his writings, and so modestly and quietly, and in such exquisite taste were those references made, that it does strike me as the sublime of stupidity that any one could misunderstand them. . . . Please excuse my long letter, and believe me, with sincere regards, yours, L. W. MANSFIELD. My mother's notes of every-day life proceed:-- January 2. This morning, one cloud in the east looked like a goldfish close to the horizon. I began to build a snow-house with the children, and shoveled paths. 5th. I walked out in the splendid sunset with the children, to meet papa. I told them, on the way, the story of Genevieve. 10th. Walked before dinner with the children along the road, telling them of Mary, Queen of Scots. 11th. My husband read me the preface to the third edition of the "Twice-Told Tales." It is absolutely perfect, of course. Sunday, 12th. My husband came down from writing at three. It was reviving to see him. I took dear little Julian and walked to Mr. Wilcox's barn. He enjoyed it as much as I did; the soft hues of the mountains, the slumbering sunshine, and the sparkling snow which towards sunset became violet color. He stooped down to lap up snow, and shouted, "Oh, how pretty!" and I found he was admiring the shining globes. "They lie on the air, mamma!" said he. Mr. Hawthorne received a request for an autograph, and an autobiography! 13th. In the evening my husband said he should begin to read his book ["The House of the Seven Gables "]. Oh, joy unspeakable! 14th. When the children had gone to bed, my husband took his manuscript again. I am always so dazzled and bewildered with the richness of beauty in his productions, that I look forward to a second reading during which I can ponder and muse. The reading closed with a legend, so graphic, so powerful, with such a strain of grace and witchery through it, that I seemed to be in a trance. Such a vision as Alice, with so few touches, such a real existence! The sturdy, handsome, and strong Maule; the inevitable fate, "the innocent suffering for the guilty," seemingly so dark, yet so clear a law! 15th. Sewed all day, thinking only of Maule's Well. The sunset was a great, red ball of fire. In the evening, the manuscript was again read from. How ever more wonderful! How transparent are all events in life to my husband's awful power of insight; and how he perpetually brings up out of the muddied wells the pearl of price! 16th. The sun rose fiery red, like a dog-day sun. Julian is a prisoner, because his india-rubbers are worn out. I looked forward all day to listening to my husband's inspirations in the evening; but behold! he has no more as yet to read. This morning Julian sat down in a little chair and took his father's foot on his lap. "I want to be papa's toadstool!" said Julian, making one of his funniest mistakes. My husband proposed reading "Thalaba." I was glad, though Southey is no favorite of mine. But I like to be familiar with such things, and to hear my husband's voice is the best music. Mrs. Sedgwick called to see us. 18th. In the morning I took the children and went to Luther's. We went to the barn to find him, and there he was, grinding oats. The children were much grieved and very indignant because the horse was in a treadmill, and could not stop if he would. 22d. Mild. In the morning Anna Greene appeared at my door. I was rejoiced to see her. She stayed two hours. In the evening Herman Melville came, and Anna again, also. 23d. Anna Greene came early, and wanted us to walk with her, on this warm, radiant day. We went to the Lake, with the children, and had a delightful talk. In the evening Anna and Caroline Tappan came; and we had champagne and beaten egg, which they thought ethereal beverage. Caroline said she had wanted just this all winter. 24th. In the evening my husband read De Quincey. Sunday, 26th. I read all over to myself "The House of the Seven Gables," in manuscript. 29th. In the midst of a storm, who should appear at the door of our shanty but Sarah Shaw! Anna Greene only began the glories of arrivals. I cannot tell how glad I was to see her. It was perfectly delightful to talk with her again, after a separation of four years. February I. In the evening my husband read "David Copperfield." I cannot express how much I enjoy it, made vocal by him. He reads so wonderfully. Each person is so distinct; his tones are so various, apt, and rich. I believe that in his breast is Gabriel's harp. It is better than any acting I ever saw on the stage. 5th. My husband answered a letter from Robert Adair, of Kentucky, which was to appoint him an honorary member of the Prescott Literary Society there. I took a walk with the children to the brook. 9th. Two proofs came of "The House of the Seven Gables," which I read with fresh interest. There never was such perfection of style. 12th. We all walked out, papa and Una to the Lake, and across it, and Julian and I on the sunny side of the house. There was a golden sunset. 19th. My husband took the children out on the ice-bound lake. He read aloud "Samson Agonistes" in the evening. March 3. Una's birthday. She is seven years old. My husband began "Wallenstein." 5th. Mr. Ticknor sent five engraved heads of Mr. Hawthorne. The face is very melancholy. 8th. Mr. Tappan thinks Mr. Hawthorne's portrait looks like Tennyson. 10th. Mrs. Sedgwick brought me a letter from Elizabeth Bartol. My husband read me Pope's "Epistles." 12th. At dusk arrived Herman Melville from Pittsfield. He was entertained with champagne foam, manufactured of beaten eggs, loaf sugar, and champagne. He invited us all to go and spend to-morrow with him. My husband decided to go, with Una. 13th. Snowstorm. My husband has gone to Pittsfield. As soon as he and Una drove off in the wagon, dear little Julian for the first time thought of himself, and burst into a heart-breaking cry. To comfort him, I told him I would read him "The Bear and the Skrattel," and "Sam, the Cockerel," which made him laugh through floods of tears. Then he relapsed, and said he would do nothing without Una. So I told him he should have the Swiss cottage, the pearls, and the velvet furniture. This was enchantment. During his dinner he discoursed all the time about Giant Despair and Christian. He improvised, while playing ball, a sad tragedy, and among other things said, "I wept, and pitied myself." Now he has stopped playing, for the lambs have come to graze before the windows, and he is talking incessantly about having one for his own pet lamb. It is now snowing thickly. I cannot see the Lake; no farther than the fringe of trees upon the banks. The lambs look anything but snow-white, half covered with snowflakes. Julian ran for his slate, and drew one pretty well. Then Midnight came [dog, man, or cat is not known] and frightened them away, and Julian reminded me of my promise to read "The Bear." This I did, squeaking as sharply as occasion required. "I feel very lonely without papa or Una," said Julian. After dinner he asked me to read to him the story of Sir William Phips. When I put him to bed, he said, as he jumped into it, that the angels were lying down beside him. 14th. What a superb day! But Julian and I are worn out with waiting. Prince Rose-Red talked without one second's intermission the whole time I was dressing him; and I allowed it, as papa and Una were not here to be disturbed by the clishmaclaver. At breakfast we were dismal. Julian mourned for his father most touchingly, and more than for Una. "Oh, dear," said he, "I feel as if I were alone on a great mountain, without papa!" I have clipped off the ends of his long curls; and all of these he has tenderly shut up in a domino-box, to distribute among his friends hereafter. After his dinner, I dressed him to go out. He hopes to meet his father, and get into the wagon. But before he went out I took down the "Twice-Told Tales" from the shelf, to look at the engraving. We enjoyed it very much. Blessed be Phillebrown, blessed be Ticknor, Reed and Fields, blessed be Thompson, C. G. Julian was struck with its life. "It is not a drawn papa," said he, "for it smiles at me, though he does not speak. It is a real papa!" Now that he has gone out, I have put it up before me, so that I can see it every time I lift my eyes. Was ever one so loved? George W. Curtis sends a letter, once more:-- BOSTON, March 19, 1851. MY DEAR MR. HAWTHORNE,--You will see by the book which I send you with this note ["Nile Notes of a Howadji"] that I break our long silence by a speech of some length; and I should not have waited until now to tell you that I had returned, had I not wished to tell you at the same time something of the delights that kept me so long away. For, like a young lover, I think, of course, that no one had ever so good a time as I. In this book I have aimed to convey the character of the satisfaction that I experienced, and that, I am sure, every man like me must needs experience upon the Nile. But you will believe--if you still believe in me--that I have seized this small paper, only that I may not send you preserved in cold ink those fruits of travel that I hope one day to shake upon you, warm from the tongue. I am passing a brace of days only in Boston, having as yet seen no one, and in despair and disgust at the storm. You, I think of in Lenox--which is a summer spot only to my memory; alas! with nothing summery now, I fancy, but your rage at the equinoctial. Does Mrs. Hawthorne yet remember that she sent me a golden key to the studio of Crawford, in Rome? I have neither forgotten that, nor any smallest token of her frequent courtesy in the Concord days. Such be our days forever! Yours truly, GEORGE W. CURTIS. Among many messages from friends there was a welcome note from Cambridge:-- MY DEAR HAWTHORNE,--Mr. Duyckinck and his friend Mr. Beekman, of New York, having read your "Twice-Told Tales" with great wonderment and delight, "desire you of more acquaintance." I therefore am happy to make you known to each other. Yours truly, LONGFELLOW. June 30. Mr. G. P. R. James, the novelist, lived somewhat near, but writes to Hawthorne between calls:-- STOCKBRIDGE, MASS., 4th July, 1851. MY DEAR MR. HAWTHORNE,--The night before last I received the two portentous bundles [essays by Miss Sedgwick's scholars]. Last night--though to give up reading "The House of the Seven Gables" for the purpose of reading a packet of seventy gabbles was like tearing the flesh from my bones--I set to, and got through ten of the compositions--six of the minors and four of the majors. . . . Of what I have read, I am inclined to say, "the devil a barrel a better herring." All contain great inaccuracies of style and grammar; and few display a trace of original thought. As far as I have gone, it is all desk-fancy and "book larning"--parrotism, in short. . . . I was exceedingly sorry to find, from my son and daughter, that you could not bring your young people to our haymaking on Wednesday. But they consoled me with a promise, in your name, of bringing them another day to spend the whole of it with us. I hold you to it; and if you fail, or fail of prompt performance, I shall look upon you as faithless, and mans worn to Yours ever, G. P. R. JAMES. Mrs. Hawthorne writes on:-- MY DEAREST LIZZIE,--What a sumptuous present, or budget of presents, you are making me! I am affronted, if they come in the way of return for the pitiful hospitality you received. You not only had no bed to sleep on, and no room to sleep in, but nothing to eat, besides sewing all the time, and washing your own clothes! I was very unhappy about it all, but thought I would not add to the trouble by complaining, as I did not see how I could remedy the matter. I never intend to have a guest again for so long as father stayed, on Mr. Hawthorne's account. It fairly destroys both his artistic and his domestic life. He has no other life--never visiting, and having nothing to do with the public. I do not know as any one but myself can estimate the cost to him of having a stranger in our courts; especially in these narrow ones. A week or so does very well; but months will not do at all. . . . You know that he has but just stepped over the threshold of a hermitage. He is but just not a hermit still. Hawthorne responds to the substantial friendship of a lifelong comrade:-- LENOX, July 24, 1851. DEAR PIKE,--I should have written to you long since, acknowledging the receipt of your gin, and in answer to your letter, but I have been very busy with my pen. As to the gin, I cannot speak of its quality, for the bottle has not yet been opened, and will probably remain corked until cold weather, when I mean to take an occasional sip. I really thank you for it, however; nor could I help shedding a few quiet tears over that which was so uselessly spilt by the expressman. The most important news I have to tell you (if you have not already heard it) is, that we have another daughter, now about two months old. She is a very bright and healthy child, and neither more nor less handsome than babies generally are. I think I feel more interest in her than I did in the other children at the same age, from the consideration that she is to be the daughter of my age--the comfort (at least, so it is to be hoped) of my declining years--the last child whom I expect or intend to have. What a sad account you give of your solitude, in your letter! I am not likely ever to have the feeling of loneliness which you express; and I most heartily wish that you would take measures to remedy it in your own case, by marrying Miss Brookhouse or somebody else as soon as possible. If I were at all in the habit of shedding tears, I should have felt inclined to do so at your description of your present situation; without family, and estranged from your former friends. Whenever you feel it quite intolerable (and I can hardly help wishing that it may become so soon), do come to me. By the way, if I continue to prosper as heretofore in the literary line, I shall soon be in a condition to buy a place; and if you should hear of one, say, worth from $1500 to $2000, I wish you would keep your eye on it for me. I should wish it to be on the seacoast, or at all events with easy access to the sea. Very little land would suit my purpose, but I want a good house, with space enough inside, and which will not need any considerable repairs. I find that I do not feel at home among these hills, and should not like to consider myself permanently settled here. I do not get acclimated to the peculiar state of the atmosphere, and, except in mid-winter, I am continually catching cold, and am none so vigorous as I used to be on the seacoast. The same is the case with my wife; and though the children seem perfectly well, yet I rather think they would flourish better near the sea. Say nothing about my wishes, but if you see a place likely to suit me, let me know. I shall be in Salem probably as soon as October, and possibly you will have something in view by that time. Why did you not express your opinion of The House of the Seven Gables, which I sent you? I suppose you were afraid of hurting my feelings by disapproval; but you need not have been. I should receive friendly censure with just as much equanimity as if it were praise; though certainly I had rather you would like the book than not. At any rate, it has sold finely, and seems to have pleased a good many people better than the others, and I must confess that I myself am among the number. It is more characteristic of the author, and a more natural book for me to write, than The Scarlet Letter was. When I write another romance, I shall take the Community for a subject, and shall give some of my experiences and observations at Brook Farm. Since the publication of the Seven Gables I have written a book for children, which is to be put to press immediately. My wife, with the baby and Una, is going southward in two or three weeks to see her mother, who, I think, will not survive another winter. I shall remain here with Julian. If you can be spared from that miserable Custom House, I wish you would pay me a visit, although my wife would hardly forgive you for coming while she was away. But I do long to see you, and to talk about a thousand things relating to this world and the next. I am very glad of your testimony in favor of spiritual intercourse. I have heard and read much on the subject, and it appears to me to be the strangest and most bewildering affair I ever heard of. I should be very glad to believe that these rappers are, in any one instance, the spirits of the persons whom they profess themselves to be; but though I have talked with those who have had the freest communication, there has always been something that makes me doubt. So you must allow me to withhold my full and entire belief, until I have heard some of the details of your own spiritual intercourse. On receiving your letter, I wrote to Longfellow, requesting him to forward you any books that might facilitate your progress, in the Swedish language. He has not told me whether or no he did so. I asked him to send them to the Mansion House in Salem. I wish you had rather undertaken Latin, or French, or German, or indeed, almost any other language, in which there would have been a more extensive and attainable literature than in the Swedish. But if it turns out to be a pleasure and improvement to yourself, the end is attained. You will never, I fear (you see that I take a friend's privilege to speak plainly), make the impression on the world that, in years gone by, I used to hope you would. It will not be your fault, however, but the fault of circumstances. Your flower was not destined to bloom in this world. I hope to see its glory in the next. I had much more to say, but it has escaped my memory just now, and it is of no use trying to say any real thing in a letter. Hoping to see you sooner or later, Your friend ever, NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. Excuse this illegible scrawl; but I have contracted such a habit of scrawling that I cannot possibly help it. Mr. Pike was one of the half-earthy intelligences which are capable of bloom, like a granite-strewn hill, revealing upon a closer glance unexpected imagination. I once saw him coming through a little pine grove near The Wayside with my father; it was after our return from England. He was so short, sturdy, phlegmatic of exterior, and plebeian, that I was astonished at my father's pleasure in his company, until I noticed a certain gentleness in his manner of stepping, and heard the modulations of his voice, and caught the fragrance of his humility. One or two letters of his already printed are delightfully straightforward,--even more so in their unabridged state than as they now stand; showing unconsciousness of the methods of a devious subtlety of penetration, though sensitiveness to its influence, as an ox slowly turns his great eye about at the sound of a bee, but never catches a glimpse of him; showing a restful stupidity that nevertheless had enough intellectual fire to take a kind, eager delight in telling, as it were, the sculptor that his clay was gray and his marble white. To a mind whose subtlety could never bewilder itself by no matter what intricacies of sudden turning, the solid stare before his nose of Mr. Pike must have been agreeable, since it was joined to a capital vision of whatever actually crossed that patient gaze, and to a tenderness which sprang like purest refreshment from a hard promise. Anything that can restfully attract a thinker is, of course, at a premium with him. Mr. Pike might be as plebeian as he pleased, the more the better, since he was one of the people who could apprehend truth, talk of love like a troubadour for sincere belief in it, and say a good thing when one least expected him to do so, which is the nick of time for brilliancy. Herman Melville writes, the date being recorded by my father, "Received July 24, 1851," one of the frolicsome letters which it requires second-sight to decipher, the handwriting being, apparently, "writ in water:"-- Tuesday afternoon. MY DEAR HAWTHORNE,--This is not a letter, or even a note, but only a passing word said to you over your garden gate. I thank you for your easy-flowing long letter (received yesterday), which flowed through me, and refreshed all my meadows, as the Housatonic--opposite me--does in reality. I am now busy with various things, not incessantly though; but enough to require my frequent tinkerings; and this is the height of the haying season, and my nag is dragging home his winter's dinners all the time. And so, one way and another, I am not a disengaged man, but shall be very soon. Meantime, the earliest good chance I get, I shall roll down to you, my good fellow, seeing we--that is, you and I--must hit upon some little bit of vagabondism before autumn comes. Graylock--we must go and vagabondize there. But ere we start, we must dig a deep hole, and bury all Blue Devils, there to abide till the Last Day. . . . Good-by. His X MARK. And again:-- PITTSFIELD, Monday afternoon. MY DEAR HAWTHORNE,--People think that if a man has undergone any hardship, he should have a reward; but for my part, if I have done the hardest possible day's work, and then come to sit down in a corner and eat my supper comfortably--why, then I don't think I deserve any reward for my hard day's work--for am I not now at peace? Is not my supper good? My peace and my supper are my reward, my dear Hawthorne. So your joy-giving and exultation-breeding letter is not my reward for my ditcher's work with that book, but is the good goddess's bonus over and above what was stipulated for--for not one man in five cycles, who is wise, will expect appreciative recognition from his fellows, or any one of them. Appreciation! Recognition! Is love appreciated? Why, ever since Adam, who has got to the meaning of his great allegory-- the world? Then we pygmies must be content to have our paper allegories but ill comprehended. I say your appreciation is my glorious gratuity. In my proud, humble way,--a shepherd-king,--I was lord of a little vale in the solitary Crimea; but you have now given me the crown of India. But on trying it on my head, I found it fell down on my ears, notwithstanding their asinine length--for it's only such ears that sustain such crowns. Your letter was handed me last night on the road going to Mr. Morewood's, and I read it there. Had I been at home, I would have sat down at once and answered it. In me divine magnanimities are spontaneous and instantaneous--catch them while you can. The world goes round, and the other side comes up. So now I can't write what I felt. But I felt pantheistic then--your heart beat in my ribs and mine in yours, and both in God's. A sense of unspeakable security is in me this moment, on account of your having understood the book. I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb. Ineffable socialities are in me. I would sit down and dine with you and all the gods in old Rome's Pantheon. It is a strange feeling--no hopefulness is in it, no despair. Content--that is it; and irresponsibility; but without licentious inclination. I speak now of my profoundest sense of being, not of an incidental feeling. Whence come you, Hawthorne? By what right do you drink from my flagon of life? And when I put it to my lips--lo, they are yours and not mine. I feel that the Godhead is broken up like the bread at the Supper, and that we are the pieces. Hence this infinite fraternity of feeling. Now, sympathizing with the paper, my angel turns over another page. You did not care a penny for the book. But, now and then as you read, you understood the pervading thought that impelled the book--and that you praised. Was it not so? You were archangel enough to despise the imperfect body, and embrace the soul. Once you hugged the ugly Socrates because you saw the flame in the mouth, and heard the rushing of the demon,--the familiar,--and recognized the sound; for you have heard it in your own solitudes. My dear Hawthorne, the atmospheric skepticisms steal into me now, and make me doubtful of my sanity in writing you thus. But, believe me, I am not mad, most noble Festus! But truth is ever incoherent, and when the big hearts strike together, the concussion is a little stunning. Farewell. Don't write a word about the book. That would be robbing me of my miserly delight. I am heartily sorry I ever wrote anything about you--it was paltry. Lord, when shall we be done growing? As long as we have anything more to do, we have done nothing. So, now, let us add Moby Dick to our blessing, and step from that. Leviathan is not the biggest fish;--I have heard of Krakens. This is a long letter, but you are not at all bound to answer it. Possibly, if you do answer it, and direct it to Herman Melville, you will missend it--for the very fingers that now guide this pen are not precisely the same that just took it up and put it on this paper. Lord, when shall we be done changing? Ah! it 's a long stage, and no inn in sight, and night coming, and the body cold. But with you for a passenger, I am content and can be happy. I shall leave the world, I feel, with more satisfaction for having come to know you. Knowing you persuades me more than the Bible of our immortality. What a pity, that, for your plain, bluff letter, you should get such gibberish! Mention me to Mrs. Hawthorne and to the children, and so, good-by to you, with my blessing. HERMAN. P. S. I can't stop yet. If the world was entirely made up of Magians, I'll tell you what I should do. I should have a paper-mill established at one end of the house, and so have an endless riband of foolscap rolling in upon my desk; and upon that endless riband I should write a thousand--a million--billion thoughts, all under the form of a letter to you. The divine magnet is on you, and my magnet responds. Which is the biggest? A foolish question--they are One. H. P. P. S. Don't think that by writing me a letter, you shall always be bored with an immediate reply to it--and so keep both of us delving over a writing-desk eternally. No such thing! I sha'n't always answer your letters, and you may do just as you please. Hawthorne is left alone for a few days, while his wife visits her mother, which causes the following notes to be written:-- LENOX, August 8, 1851. OWNEST PHOEBE,--I wrote thee a note yesterday, and sent it to the village by Cornelius; but as he may have neglected to put it in, I write again. If thou wilt start from West Newton on Thursday next, I will meet thee at Pittsfield, which will answer the same purpose as if I came all the way. . . . Julian is very well, and keeps himself happy from morning till night. I hope Una does the same. Give my love to her. . . . Thine, N. H. August 9, Saturday. I received yesterday thy note, in which thou speakest of deferring thy return some days longer. Stay by all means as long as may be needful. Julian gets along perfectly well; and I am eager for thy coming only because it is unpleasant to remain torn asunder. Thou wilt write to tell me finally what day thou decidest upon; but unless I hear further, I shall go to Pittsfield on Saturday, a week from to-day. But if thou seest reason for staying longer do so, that nothing may be left at loose ends. Julian and I had a fine ride yesterday with Herman Melville and two other gentlemen. Mrs. Peters is perfectly angelic. Thinest, N. H. Mrs. Peters, a negress of the dignified type, was the general house-servant, an aged, forbidding, harmlessly morose soul, often recalled by my mother in her references to Lenox, when talking, as she did most easily and fascinatingly, to us children of the past. The picturing of Mrs. Peters always impressed me very much, and she no doubt stood for a suggestion of Aunt Keziah in "Septimius Felton." She was an invaluable tyrant, an unloaded weapon, a creature who seemed to say, "Forget my qualities if you dare--there is one of them which is fatal!" As my parents possessed the capacity to pay respect where it could be earned, the qualities of Mrs. Peters were respected, and she found herself in a sort of heaven of courteous tolerance. Mrs. Hawthorne writes to her mother:-- On Sunday Mr. Samuel G. Ward came to see us. He gave me an excellent drawing of Highwood Porch, for "The Wonder-Book," which he said he had asked Burrill Curtis to draw. We have sent it to Mr. Fields. On Monday Mr. Curtis called. He is taking sketches all about, and is going back to Europe this autumn. Just now, Dr. Holmes and Mr. Upham's son Charles drove up. They came in, a few moments. First came Dr. Holmes, to peep at the Lake through the boudoir window,--for he was afraid to leave the horse, even tied; then he went out for Charles to come in; and Mr. Hawthorne insisted upon holding the horse, and having them both come in. When Dr. Holmes went back, he laughed to see Mr. Hawthorne at his horse's head, and exclaimed, "Is there another man in all America who ever had so great an honor, as to have the author of 'The Scarlet Letter' hold his horse?" My love to your lovely household. Your most Affectionate child, SOPHIA. CHAPTER VII FROM LENOX TO CONCORD The following letters were evoked by one of those entanglements concerning the petty matters of existence which will sometimes occur in the most enchanting web and woof of good feeling and high thought. A luxuriant fruit garden, attached to the "red house," seems to have suddenly cast a spell over its original mistress, and around this humorous tragedy my father throws some gleams of mirth and sense, as follows:-- September 5. DEAR MRS. TAPPAN,--As questions of disputed boundary are very ticklish ones, whether between nations or individuals, I think it best to take the diplomatic correspondence, on our part, into my own hands; and I do it the more readily as I am quite an idle man nowadays, and shall find it rather agreeable than otherwise; whereas Sophia is exceedingly busy, and moreover is averse to any kind of a dispute. You will be kind enough to give me credit for writing in a spirit of undisturbed good humor and friendly courtesy; and this being the case, I shall feel myself safe in writing with likewise the most perfect frankness. In the first place permit me to notice the question which you put to Sophia, whether she would not prefer to receive kindness rather than assume rights. I do not know what would be her reply; but, for myself, in view of the infirmities of human nature in general and my especial infirmities, and how few people are fit even to receive kindnesses, and how far fewer are worthy to do them, I infinitely prefer a small right to a great favor. It was this feeling that made me see the necessity of a sum stipulated in the way of rent, between Mr. Tappan and myself. The little difficulty, in which we now find ourselves, merely serves to confirm me in my principle, and will instruct me in all future cases, to have my rights more sharply defined than they are now. Undoubtedly, by consenting to receive money from me, Mr. Tappan did invest me with certain rights, and among the most evident of them, I consider the property in the fruit. What is a garden without its currant bushes and fruit trees? Last year, no question of this nature was raised: our right seemed to be tacitly conceded, and if you claimed or exercised any manorial privileges, it never came to my knowledge. This season when Mr. Tappan inquired what part of the garden I wanted to cultivate, I supposed that he wished to know in order that he might send Cornelius to plough it--as he very kindly did. It never came into my mind that I should lose the most valuable part of the demesne by failing to plant it. If the fruit trees have suffered by my neglect, this was reasonable ground for remonstrance on Mr. Tappan's part, but would hardly justify him in so summary a measure as that of taking the property out of my hands, at once, and without a word of explanation, or even informing me of the fact. Nor do I conceive that he had any purpose of doing so. At all events, Sophia and I supposed ourselves to be in full possession of that part of the garden, and in having a right of property over its products, more extensive than that of Adam and Eve in Eden, inasmuch as it excluded not a single tree. Such being our view of the matter, you meet Mary Beekman, carrying a basket of fruit. You stop her, look at the contents of the basket, and inquire as to its destination. You ask her (at least so she averred to Mrs. Peters, although she has since qualified her statement) whether it had been given away or sold. You conduct this examination in such a mode, as to make it evident to our servant-girl that you consider Sophia and Mrs. Peters as combining in a depredation on your property. You follow this up with a note of remonstrance to Sophia, in which you take her to task not merely for giving away some of the fruit, but for presuming to choose her own time to gather it for our own use. Now let us suppose the perfectly parallel case, that Mrs. Ward should take upon herself to pursue the same course in regard to the fruit of Highwood. Would Mrs. Tappan have responded to Mrs. Ward by a gentler assertion of right than Sophia's to yourself? I think not. I do not see how you could. And if you did so, it would be purely out of your own abundant grace and good nature, and would by no means be due to any propriety in the supposed behavior of Mrs. Ward. Finally in your note of last evening, you give us very clearly to understand that you look upon us as having no rights here whatever. Allow me to say that this is precisely the crisis which I contemplated when I felt it essential to be understood that I had bought my rights, even from persons so generously disposed as yourself and Mr. Tappan. The right of purchase is the only safe one. This is a world of bargain and sale; and no absurdity is more certain to be exposed than the attempt to make it anything else. As regards the apples of discord (meaning thereby the plums, pears, peaches, and whatever besides) we sincerely hope you will take as many of them as you please, and on such grounds as may cause them to taste most agreeably. If you choose to make a raid, and to seize the fruit with the strong hand, so far from offering any armed resistance, we shall not so much as remonstrate. But would it not be wiser to drop the question of right, and receive it as a free-will offering from us? We have not shrunk from the word "gift," although we happen to be so much the poorer of two parties, that it is rather a suspicious word from you to us. Or, if this do not suit you, you can take the fruit in humble requital of some of the many favors bestowed in times past and which we may perhaps remember more faithfully than you do. And then the recollection of this slight acidity of sentiment, between friends of some years' standing, may impart a pleasant and spirited flavor to the preserves and jams, when they come upon your table. At any rate, take what you want and that speedily, or there will be little else than a parcel of rotten plums to dispute about. With kind regards to Mr. Tappan, Very truly yours, N. H. Mrs. Hawthorne writes to her sister, Miss E. P. Peabody:-- I send you Mr. Tappan's answer, so noble and beautiful. Mr. Hawthorne wrote him a beautiful note in reply, in which he said: "My dear sir, I trust you will not put more weight than it deserves upon a letter which I wrote rather to relieve Sophia of what might have disturbed her, than because I look upon the affair in a serious light. Your own letter is of a character to make one ashamed of any narrower or ignobler sentiment than those of universal beneficence and good will; and I freely confess that the world will not deserve to be called a world of bargain and sale so long as it shall include men like yourself. With much regard truly yours, N. H." Two letters to Mrs. Peabody describe the Lenox scene:-- September 7, Sunday. MY DEAREST MOTHER,--It is heaven's day, to-day, and the Lord's day, and now baby sleeps and Una is at Highwood and Julian at play, and I will begin at least to answer your sweet, patient, wise, and tender letters. Yesterday and to-day have been tropical in heat and richness and expansiveness, and I feel as if it is on such days only that we really live and know how good is GOD. I wish I knew that you enjoy such warmth and are not made languid by it. You will perhaps remember that I am always strongest at 98 degrees Fahrenheit. I delight to think that you also can look forth as I do now upon a broad valley and a fine amphitheatre of hills, and are about to watch the stately ceremony of sunset from your piazza. But you have not this lovely Lake, nor I suppose the delicate purple mist which folds these slumbering mountains in airy veils. Mr. Hawthorne has been lying down in the sunshine, slightly fleckered with the shadows of a tree, and Una and Julian have been making him look like the mighty Tan by covering his chin and breast with long grass-blades, that looked like a verdant and venerable beard. I walked down to them a moment, leaving baby asleep, and while there Una exclaimed, "Oh, how I wish Georgie was here!" [George C. Mann, her cousin.] Thus the dear little boy harmonizes with the large and dreamy landscape, so that his presence would only help the beauty of this peerless day. I never heard Una wish for any one before, when enjoying Elemental life, and her father. Baby Rose has had a carriage for a week or more, and we took her one day down to the Lake. I wish you could have seen her in the wood, when I held her in my arms. She smiled and smiled and smiled, at the trees and the Lake and the wood-land sounds, till she transported mamma almost out of the proprieties. "To kiss her all to pieces," "to hug her to death," "to devour her," were processes to which she rendered herself fearfully liable. How wonderful is this love for which there is no mortal expression, but which we can only shadow forth by death and destruction. Julian has begun to speak to the baby now. He exclaims, "Oh, you darling!" and holds her on his lap, with such a look of bountiful and boundless tenderness and care as would charm you to see. I should as soon expect an angel from the sky to descend to a rough scuffle with a desperado as for Julian to disturb or annoy the little Rosebud. Sometimes we go down to the wood near, and baby sleeps in the carriage to the music of pine-tree murmurs and cricket-chirpings, and once in a while of birds, while Una and Julian build piles of tiny sticks for the fairies' winter fuel, and papa and mamma sit and muse in the breathless noon. But it is seldom warm enough. These last two days are warm enough, and my soul seems to "expand and grow like corn and melons," and I remember all beautiful behavior and noble deeds and grand thoughts and high endeavors'; and the whole vast Universe seems to blend in one single, unbroken recognition of the "Higher Law." Can there be wrong, hate, fraud, injustice, cruelty, war, in such a lovely, fair world as this before my eyes? Cannot cities be abolished, so that men may realize the beauty of love and peace by contemplating the broad and genial spaces where there is no strife? In the country they would see that sunbeams do not wrangle, that forests of trees agree together, that no flower disturbs another flower. I have written and the sun has set; and the moon has risen, and reveals the fine sculpture of nature. Una and Julian and Baby Rose are all in profound repose. Not a sound can be heard but my pen-strokes, and the ever welcome voice of the cricket, which seems expressly created to announce silence and peace. . . . It is very singular how much more we are in the centre of society in Lenox than we were in Salem, and all literary persons seem settling around us. But when they get established here I dare say we shall take flight. . . . Our present picture is Julian, lying on an ottoman in the boudoir, looking at drawings of Grecian gems; and just now he is filled with indignation at the man who sent Hercules the poisoned shirt, because he is contemplating that superb head of the "Suffering Hercules." He says he hopes that man is dead; and I assure him that he is dead, dead, dead, and can send no more poisoned shirts to anybody. It happened to be a woman, however, sad to tell, but I thought I would not reveal to him the terrible story of Dejanira and the wicked Nessus. Una is whittling, but at this instant runs off to help Mary Beekman to do something. Mr. Hawthorne has retired to his Study. Baby sleeps. Good-by, dear mother. Love to your household. Your loving child, SOPHIA. DEAREST MOTHER,--To-day I took Julian for a walk. He waited to speak to his beloved Mr. Tappan, who was in his field. Julian picked up one sheaf after another, and carried them to him, calling, "Mr. Tappan! Mr. Tappan! Here are your oats!" Mr. Tappan turned at last, smiling, and thanked him for his help. The afternoon was so beautiful that every incident seemed like a perfect jewel on a golden crown. The load of yellow sheaves, the rainbow child, the Castilian with his curls and dark smiling eyes [Mr. Tappan]--every object was a picture which Murillo could not paint. I waited for Julian till he ran to me; and when we came into our yard, there was lady baby in her carriage, in a little azure robe, looking like a pale star on a blue sky. We came into the dining-room, and out of the window there was this grand and also exquisite picture--lake, meadow, mountains; forever new, forever changing; now so rich with this peculiar autumn sunshine, like which my husband says there is nothing in the world. The children enjoy, very much, this landscape, while they eat their supper. Una ate hers, and went upstairs to see grand-mamma; and Julian sat on my lap, very tired with play, eating a cold buckwheat cake, and gazing out. "Mamma! Mountain! Lake!" he kept ejaculating. Wise child! What could be added, in the way of adjective, that would enhance? "Thou eye among the blind!" thought his mother. At last he was so weary with sport that he slipped down upon the floor, and lay upon his back, till he finished eating his buckwheat cake. Then I put him to bed. Me clasped his blessed little arms so tightly around my neck, with such an energetic kiss, that we both nearly lost breath. One merry gleam from his eyes was succeeded by a cloud of sleepiness, and he was soon with the angels. For he says the angels take him, when he goes to sleep, and bring him back in the morning. Then I began this letter. Dear little harp-souled Una--whose love for her father grows more profound every day, as her comprehending intellect and heart perceive more and more fully what he is--was made quite unhappy because he did not go at the same time with her to the Lake. His absence darkened all the sunshine to her; and when I asked her why she could not enjoy the walk as Julian did, she replied, "Ah, he does not love papa as I do!" But when we arrived, there sat papa on a rock, and her face and figure were transfigured from a Niobe's to an Allegra's instantly. After I put Julian to bed, I went out to the barn to see about the chickens, and she wished to go. There sat papa on the hay, and like a needle to a magnet she was drawn, and begged to see papa a little longer, and stay with him. Now she has come, weary enough; and after steeping her spirit in this rose and gold of twilight, she has gone to bed. With such a father, and such a scene before her eyes, and with eyes to see, what may we not hope of her? I heard her and Julian talking together about their father's smile, the other day. They had been speaking of some other person's smile--Mr. Tappan's, I believe; and presently Una said, "But you know, Julian, that there is no smile like papa's!" "Oh no," replied Julian. "Not like papas!" Una has such an intuitive perception of spheres, that I do not wonder at her feeling about her father. She can as yet hardly tell why she is so powerfully attracted; but her mother can sympathize,--and knows very well. Do not wait an hour to procure the two last numbers of "The Literary World," and read a new criticism on Mr. Hawthorne. At last some one speaks the right word of him. I have not before heard it. I have been wearied and annoyed hitherto with hearing him compared to Washington Irving and other American writers, and put, generally, second. At last some one dares to say what in my secret mind I have often thought--that he is only to be mentioned with the Swan of Avon; the great heart and the grand intellect combined. I know you will enjoy the words of this ardent Virginian as I do. But it is funny to see how he does not know how this heart and this intellect are enshrined. It was decided to return to the neighborhood of Boston, and for a short time the family remained in West Newton:-- November 28. MY DEAR ELIZABETH,--Here we are, in possession of Mary Mann's house and effects. I took baby on a sledge to see her grandmother Peabody on Thanksgiving Day, who was charmed with my smiling, fair baby. Una reads her grandmother "The Wonder-Book," very sweetly, when she is there. Mother says she could never tire of listening to her. Your affectionate sister, SOPHIA. WEST NEWTON, December 25, 1851. MY DEAR LOUISA [HAWTHORNE],--This very morning I intended to write to you again, to inquire why you neither came nor responded to my letter, and then I received yours. The children watched for you many days, and finally gave you up. They will be delighted at your coming. Pray come as soon as the second week of January. Grace Greenwood spent two or three days, and was very pleasant. Mr. Fields writes from Paris that Mr. Hawthorne's books are printed there as much as in England; that his fame is great there [in England], and that Browning says he is the finest genius that has appeared in English literature for many years. Your affectionate sister, SOPHIA. P. S. [By Hawthorne.] I have published a new collection of tales; but you shall not have a copy till you come for it. N. H. P. S. [By Mrs. Hawthorne.] This new volume of "Twice-Told Tales" was published on Thursday; and yesterday Mr. Ticknor told Nathaniel that he had already sold a thousand copies, and had not enough bound to supply the demand. I give a letter which must have come like the song of a wood-thrush to the author, its diction being as pure as his own, and yet as strong. BROOKLYN; July 7, 1852. MR. HAWTHORNE,--You have expressed the kind hope that your writings might interest those who claim the same birthplace with yourself. And as we need but slight apology for doing what inclination suggests, I easily persuade myself that it will not be very inappropriate for me to assure you that in one heart, at least, pride in your genius and gratitude for high enjoyment owed to you have added to, and made still more sacred, the strong love otherwise felt for the spot where the precious gift of life was received. In earlier days, with your "Twice-Told Tales," you played upon my spirit-harp a sweet melody, the notes of which have never died away--and years after, when my heart was just uplifting itself from a deep sorrow, I read the introduction to your "Mosses from an Old Manse;" and I rejoiced in your words, as a tree, borne down by the wind and storm, rejoices in the first gentle breeze or ray of kindly sunshine. And now, as after repeated griefs and lengthened anxieties I think I am come to that period of second youth of which you speak, I am permitted to delight in the marvelous beauty and infinite delicacy of the narration of "The Scarlet Letter," and the deep insight into human hearts and minds shown in that and the later production. When I am tempted to lay down the burden which, of one kind or another, mortals must daily bear, and forget that "all human liberty is but a restraint self-imposed or consented to," I shall call to mind the touching moment when Hester Prynne sadly bound up her flowing tresses, but just released, and meekly reassumed the badge of her shame. And the little Phoebe,--with her genial sympathies and cheerful tones,--I am not altogether without hope that she may aid me to throw off some of the morbid tendencies which have ever clung to my life (if, perchance, this last moral lesson should not destroy the first); and these sorrows once overcome, existence would not lose its corresponding exquisiteness of enjoyment. I once lived in the "Old Hawthorne house;" whether or not you, sir, ever crossed the threshold tradition hath not deigned to inform me. Possibly you lived there when a child. And if the spirit renew itself once in seven years, as the body is said to do, the soul of those younger hours may have remained, may have shared with us our more ethereal pleasures, while it frowned on our prosaic sports. At least, to some such fancy as this, united with the idea of second childhood before alluded to, must be referred the folly of which I have been guilty in addressing a person, who, so far as bodily presence is concerned, is to me an entire stranger, and to whom I am utterly unknown. However, sir, humbly begging your pardon for this same folly, and entreating that by no accident may the shades of the Salem witches become aware of it, I am yours with much esteem, MARY A. PORTER. Upon the envelope Hawthorne has written, "Answered, July 18th." The letter has been preserved out of many thrown aside, and Mrs. Hawthorne has spoken to me of Mary Porter as of a real friend. Her delicacy and good sense of expression contrast well with the over-fanciful, unliterary quality of the letters of persons who came prominently forward as teachers of thought and literature, and who no doubt jarred miserably in their letters, if not in their conversation, upon the refined skill of Hawthorne and his wife. At any rate (and though the intercourse with these persons to whom I refer with daring comment was received most gratefully and cordially as generally the best to be found) Mary Porter was never forgotten. That my mother and father enjoyed their next home at The Wayside there are immediate letters to prove; but if they had not feasted their eyes upon a vision of beautiful spaces, it might have been less delightful to return to the haunts of friends, and a hollow among hills. One grandeur of the distance they did not leave behind at Lenox: the sunsets to be seen over the meadows between The Wayside and the west are spaciously revealed and splendidly rich. Economy had a restless manner of drifting them from place to place. Now, however, a home was to be bought (the title-deed exists, with Mr. Emerson's name, and that of his wife, attached); so that the drifting appeared to be at an end. I have reserved until now several letters from Concord friends, of an earlier date, in order to show to what the Hawthornes looked forward in the matter of personalities, when re-establishing themselves in the distinguished village. Mr. Alcott was prominent. In her girlhood, Mrs. Hawthorne, hearing from Miss Peabody that Mr. James Freeman Clarke had talked with some amusement of the school prophet's ideas, etc., had written:-- "Mr. Alcott's sublime simplicity and depth of soul would make it impossible for me to make jest of him. I cannot imagine why persons should not do themselves justice and yet be humble as a little child. I do not believe he is in the least self-elated. I should think it impossible, in the nature of things, for him to arrive at the kind of truths he does without entire simplicity of soul. I should think they could not be accessible to one of a contrary character." But, nevertheless, Mr. Alcott's official post seems to have been that of visionary plenipotentiary, and one which was a source of most excellent entertainment. He writes in 1836:-- August 23. DEAR FRIEND,--I have just returned, and find your two letters waiting for me. I have read them with a double sentiment. The interest which you express in my thoughts, and their influence over you, I can explain in no other way than as arising from similarity of temperament and of taste, heightened exceedingly by an instinctive tendency-- almost preternatural--to reverence whatever approaches, either in Spirit or Form, your standard of the Ideal. Of minds of this class it is impious to ask for tempered expressions. They admire, they marvel, they love. These are the law of their being, and to refuse them the homage of this spiritual oneness with the object of their regard, is death! Their words have a significance borrowed from their inmost being, and are to be interpreted, not by ordinary and popular acceptation, but by the genius of the individual that utters them. These have a significance of their own. They commune not with words, but in spite of them. Ordinary minds mistake them. . . . You inquire whether portions of "Psyche" are to be copied for the press. Mr. Emerson has not returned the manuscript. But should I find anything left (after his revisions) worthy of attention, I will send it to you, . . . I send you some numbers of the "Reformer," among others is the one containing Mr. [Orestes] Brownson's notice of the "Story Without An End." The allegories which you copied while with us are also among them. I read your allegory to Mr. Brownson, who was interested in it, and took it for the "Reformer." It is a beautiful thing, and will be useful. . . . Write me as often as you feel inclined. I would write often, were I at all given to the practice. My mind flows not freely and simply in an epistle. Very truly yours, A. BRONSON ALCOTT. P. S. I have read Carlyle's "Schiller." You re-utter my conceptions at the time. You are very kind to propose copying the Young Christ [for Mr. Alcott's schoolroom]. The original is a borrowed one, and a copy would be useful. September 12, 1836. DEAR FRIEND,--I was glad to hear from you again, for I find my thoughts often dwelling on you. The sympathy of spirits is the heart's undersong, and its warblings are heard in the quiet hours of solitude, as if they were from the soft voices of celestial choirs. Music reaches us from the distance, amid the discordant noises of the External. Your remarks on de Maistre have interested me in the book.' Mr. Brownson [afterwards famous as a Catholic writer] takes it to-day, and I shall have the interesting passages from him. If you have a copy of the "Valley of Solitude" [one of my mother's original allegories] will you send it? I am under the impression that you preserved portions of the "Valley," and intended to recall and write out the remainder at your leisure. Now, don't attempt this, because Mr. Thacher wants it for his "Boston Book," but simply tell me how much is preserved. . . . Have you seen Mr. Emerson's "Nature"? If you have not, let me send you a copy. It is a divine poem on the External. It is just to your taste. . . . It reminds me more of Sampson Reid's "Growth of the Mind" than any work of modern date. But it is unlike any other work. I send you Mr. Brownson's notice of it. Mr. Brownson gave us two splendid discourses lately. Surely this man is a terror to pseudo-ministers and would-be philosophers. He is one of the most eloquent preachers. He grapples with the highest truths and deepest wants of our being, and spreads these before the reason as with a light from heaven. He will write to you soon. With great regard, A. BRONSON ALCOTT. Emerson in the same year responded to a gift of some drawings which my mother had made for him, in these kind and thoughtful sentences:-- MY DEAR MISS SOPHIA,--I beg you to accept my thanks for the beautiful drawings you have sent me. . . . I shall keep them as a treasure to be shown to all my friends who have good or capable eyes, that they may rejoice with me in the power of the artist. From these fair forms I hope to receive many a wise suggestion, many a silent reproof. . . . Your obliged friend and servant, R. WALDO EMERSON. And later:-- CONCORD, January 20, 1838. You make me heartily ashamed, my kind friend, by the excess of your praise of two such little books. I could not possibly recognize anything of me in your glowing and pictorial words. So I take it for granted that as a true artist you have the beauty-making eye, which transfigures the landscape and the heads it looks upon, and can read poetry out of dull prose. I am not the less glad to have been the occasion to you of pleasant thoughts, and I delight in the genuine admiration you express of that ideal beauty which haunts us ever and makes actual life look sometimes like the coarsest caricature. I like very well what you say of Flaxman, and shall give him the greater heed. And indeed who can see the works of a great artist without feeling that not so much the private as the common wealth is by him indicated. I think the true soul--humble, rapt, conspiring with all, regards all souls as its lieutenants and proxies--itself in another place--and saith of the Parthenon, of the picture, of the poem,--It is also my work. I can never quarrel with your state of mind concerning original attempts in your own art. I admire it rather. And I am pained to think of the grievous resistance which your genius has been so long tasked to overcome, of bodily suffering. You ask for my lectures. I wish they were fit to send. They should go immediately to Salem if they were. I have not allowed one of them to go in manuscript out of my family. The first one of the course, which is the most presentable, I will cheerfully lend you whenever I can get time to patch his coat a little. It is, however, already promised to two persons. I thank you for the beautiful little drawing you sent me of Perseus. It is admired of all beholders. Tell your sister Elizabeth that her account of Mr. Very interested me much, and I have already begged Mr. Whiting to bring him to our Lyceum, and he promised his good offices to get him here. R. W. EMERSON. A letter mentions a medallion which Mrs. Hawthorne had made of Charles Emerson, after his death:-- CONCORD, May 18, 1840. MY DEAR Miss SOPHIA,--I have begged Mr. Garey to call on you to-day for the medallion to go to Waterford, and the one for New York, if ready . . . one of which I wish to send to Mr. Abel Adams. Elizabeth [Hoar] is very well content with the cast, though she thinks it has lost some of the precision, as well as the agreeable tint, of the clay. All our friends find the likeness--some of them slowly--but all at last. We all count it a beautiful possession; the gift of a Muse, and not the less valuable that it was so unexpected. You must now gratify us all by fixing a time when you will come to Concord and hear what we have to say of it. Will you not come hither the last week of this month, or the second week in June? If neither of these dates suits you, you shall choose any day thereafter, only do not fail us. Your friend and servant, R. W. EMERSON. When arranging to escort the young artist to Concord for the proposed visit, he proceeds:-- . . . In regard to certain expressions in your letter, I ought to say, you will presently be undeceived. Though I am fond of writing, and of public speaking, I am a very poor talker and for the most part very much prefer silence. Of Charles's beautiful talent in that art I have had no share; but our common friend, Mr. Alcott, the prince of conversers, lives little more than a mile from our house, and we will call in his aid, as we often do, to make amends for our deficiency, when you come. . . . Will you say to your sister Elizabeth that I received her kind letter relating to certain high matters, which I have not yet been in the vein to answer,--indeed, I dream that she knows all my answer to that question,--has it ready in her rich suggestion, and only waits for mine to see how well they will tally. I have laid the letter by, shall presently read it again, and if I have anything material, I will write. With great regard, yours, R. W. EMERSON. CONCORD, April 20, 1841. MY DEAR Miss SOPHIA,--Will you accept from my sister Elizabeth Hoar and me the few accompanying prints? A word of apology must go with them. Elizabeth and I sent, last summer, by a gentleman who was going to Europe, an order for a few prints of pictures of Raffaelle and Michel Angelo (specifying particularly the Prophets and Sibyls of Michel), with the hope that we might receive something fit to send you. Our agent was less acquainted with these matters than we supposed; still, we hope they will not be quite without value in your studio, as we have both of us found something to admire in these stern drawings. The Transfiguration is a more spirited copy than most that I have seen, though the principal figure seems never to be quite well copied. Here is a Virgin of Leonardo da Vinci and one from Correggio. Will you have the goodness to thank your sister Elizabeth for the fine statement she has given the Englishwoman [Miss Martineau] of the enterprise we are all so proud of; and I can easily suppose the colonists were content with the portrait. She has in a note propounded to me certain questions which and the like of which I always fancy one can answer with a word, as they arise;--but to answer them with the pen, one must sit like Simmides from month to month, from year to year. With great regard, Your friend and servant, R. WALDO EMERSON. Elizabeth Hoar wishes to keep the Martineau letter a day or two longer. I am also to thank your sister Elizabeth for the summons to the torchlight exhibition, which however I could not easily obey. A fragment, of most informal import, but exemplifying Emerson's quaint agility of expression, written about 1843, runs:-- Do not be chagrined, and excellent lady, if I should demand interest in advance for my loan; but if possibly I can get my errands ready, I shall stop the passing coach, and load you with freight and commissions; not compliments and congratulations, merely. Do not misconceive me--but messages relative to merest chores. And so with thanks, Yours, R. W. E. Margaret Fuller d'Ossoli expresses herself, at the time of my parents' marriage, as thoughtfully as the rest. Her personality never ceased to hover about Concord, even after her death. She is a part of its fascination:-- MY DEAR SOPHIA,--After reading your letter I wanted to write a few lines, as are not in such a hasty, interrupted fashion. Yet not much have I to say, for great occasions of bliss, of bane,--tell their own story, and we would not by unnecessary words come limping after the true sense. If ever mortal was secure of a pure and rational happiness which shall grow and extend into immortal life, I think it is you, for the love that binds you to him you love is wise and pure and religious; it is a love given not chosen, and the growth not of wants and wishes, but of the demands of character. Its whole scope and promise is very fair in my eyes; and in daily life as well as in the long account I think there will be great happiness; for if ever I saw a man who combined delicate tenderness to understand the heart of a woman, with quiet depth and manliness enough to satisfy her, it is Mr. Hawthorne. . . . To one who cannot think of love merely in the heart, or even in the common destiny of two souls, but as necessarily comprehending intellectual friendship too, it seems the happiest lot imaginable that lies before you. . . . The whole earth is decked for a bridal. I see not a spot upon her full and gold-bespangled drapery. All her perfumes breathe, and her eye glows with joy. . . . My affectionate remembrances to your friend. You rightly felt how glad I should be to be thought of in the happy hour. As far as bearing an intelligent heart, I think I deserve to be esteemed a friend. And thus in affection and prayer, dear Sophia, Yours, MARGARET F. A year or two later my father received the following letter from her:-- DEAR MR. HAWTHORNE,--You must not think I have any black design against your domestic peace. Neither am I the agent of any secret tribunal of the dagger and cord; nor am I commissioned by the malice of some baffled lover to make you wretched. Yet it may look so, when you find me once again, in defiance of my failure last summer, despite your letter of full exposition, once more attempting to mix a foreign element in your well compounded cup. But indeed, oh severest and most resolute man, these propositions are none of mine. How can I help it, if gentle souls, ill at ease elsewhere, wish to rest with you upon the margin of that sleepy stream? How can I help it if they choose me for an interpreter? [A suggestion is then made, for the second time, that my parents should admit a friend into the Old Manse as a boarder. The notion was sometimes alluded to by my mother in after-years with unfading horror.] I should like much to hear something about yourselves; what the genius loci says, whether through voice of ghost, or rat, or winter wind, or kettle-singing symphony to the happy duet; and whether by any chance you sometimes give a thought to your friend MARGARET. And again:-- NEW YORK, May 22, evening. DEAR SOPHIA AND MR. HAWTHORNE,--I received your letter and read it with attention; then laid it aside, and thought I would not reply, for so much had been said and written about my pamphlet that I was weary of it, and had turned to other things. When my interest revives, I shall probably make reply, but I hope viva voce. Yes! I hope to see you once more at the clear old house, with the green fields and lazy river; and have, perhaps, sweet hours [fragment torn away] and if all works well, I hope to come. Una alone will be changed; yet still, I think, the same. Farewell, dear friends, now; for this is only meant as a hasty sign of affection from M. Mrs. Hawthorne writes, at the threshold of The Wayside residence:-- June 6, 1852, Sunday. MY DEAREST MOTHER,--Your beautiful little note was very grateful to me. . . . We arrived at the Middlesex Hotel after one o'clock. At four o'clock I was driven to The Wayside. The cart-man had tumbled all the wet mattresses in a heap in the farthest corner of the barn, and I had them all pulled out to dry. It was very hot weather. A good deal was accomplished, when the man and woman who were working for me went to supper, and left me and Una in quiet possession of our home. We set forth slowly village-ward, and met Mr. Emerson and Mr. Thoreau. Mr. Emerson was most cordial, and his beautiful smile added to the wonderful beauty of the sunset. He turned back and walked with us till we met the carriage. The next morning, Una actually nailed down the brown paper upon the dining-room and Study, and was very helpful and charming, and perfectly enchanted with her home. It is really astonishing what magical changes have been wrought inside the horrible old house by painters, paperers, and carpenters, and a little upholstery. The carpet on the Study looks like rich velvet. It has a ground of lapis lazuli blue, and upon that is an acanthus figure of fine wood-color; and then, once in a while is a lovely rose and rosebud and green leaf. I like it even better than when I bought it. The woodwork down-stairs is all painted in oak, and it has an admirable effect, and is quite in keeping with the antiquity of the dwelling. The dining-room is quite elegant, with a handsome paper having a silvery sheen, and the brown and green Brussels carpet. When Mr. Hawthorne arrived, he had quite a civilized impression of the house at first glance, and was delighted with it, not having seen it since his first visit in snow-time, when it seemed fit only for a menagerie of cattle. You will be glad to know that I have done nothing myself, having so many assistants. But it is no sinecure to keep people at work. Una was impatient of waiting for papa and Julian, and walked off to meet them. At last I heard the rumble of the carriage, and took baby out on the piazza. When Julian passed, he was at the open window of the carriage; and baby saw him and screamed for joy; and Julian shouted to see me; and the echoes were fairly roused by the ecstasy of meeting, all round. The other morning, at the Middlesex Hotel, Una remarked that she was going to see Mr. Emerson. I supposed she was jesting; but I missed her soon after, and in about an hour she returned, and said she had been to see him. She had rung at the door, and a servant came, and she inquired for Mr. Emerson! He came out and greeted her very kindly, and said, "I suppose you have come to see Mrs. Emerson." "No," replied Una, "I have come to see you" So he politely put aside his studies, and accompanied his young lady visitor over the gardens and into the Gothic summer-house [constructed of twisted branches by Mr. Alcott]. I called there on my way here, and Mr. Emerson told me that he would like Una to go in and out, just as if it were her own home. I said that he was Una's friend ever since she had heard "The Humble Bee" and "The Rhodora." Una likes her native place prodigiously, and everybody near and far seems quite "angelic," as Julian would say. . . . Last Sunday Mrs. Emerson and her three children came to make a call. The Study is the pet room, the temple of the Muses and the Delphic Shrine. The beautiful carpet lays the foundation of its charms, and the oak woodwork harmonizes with the tint in which Endymion is painted. At last I have Endymion where I always wanted it--in my husband's Study, and it occupies one whole division of the wall. In the corner on that side stands the pedestal with Apollo on it, and there is a fountain-shaped vase of damask and yellow roses. Between the windows is the Transfiguration [given by Mr. Emerson]. (The drawing-room is to be redeemed with one picture only,--Correggio's Madonna and Christ.) On another side of the Study are the two Lake Comos. On another, that agreeable picture of Luther and his family around the Christmas-tree, which Mr. George Bradford gave to Mr. Hawthorne. Mr. Emerson took Julian to walk in the woods, the other afternoon. I have no time to think what to say, for there is a dear little mob around me. Baby looks fairest of fair to-day. She walks miles about the house. Ever and ever your most loving child, SOPHIA. July 4. MY DEAREST MOTHER,--Here is another Sunday again, with seemingly no time between, so fast does, the old Father hasten on. Last week was memorable in the children's life by the occurrence of a party. Mrs. Emerson, with magnificent hospitality, invited all the children in town, from babyhood upwards (and their mothers), for a great festival. Rose and I were prevented from going by the arrival of three gentlemen from Boston, who stayed to tea, one being the brilliant Mr. Whipple. On that day we had five gentlemen, among them another Whipple, a man of genius and a colonel of brave renown, whose hair stands up straight upon his brow, over fine eyes and a swarthy face. He invited us to go to his beautiful home on the borders of Winnipiseogee Lake. A great many gentlemen come to see Mr. Hawthorne all the time from foreign parts. That morning the first arrival was General Solomon McNeil, a veteran of nearly seven feet in height, whose head was amazingly near the ceiling of our low dining-room, and who stooped low to go out of the door. He had an extraordinary face. His gray hair stood up straight, as well as Colonel Whipple's, and was full of demonic energy; and his gray eyes flashed beneath overhanging brows. As he entered the room, I advanced to meet him. He said, "Mrs. Hawthorne, I presume. I have scarcely seen your husband; but I have known him well for fifteen years." (At this, he raised his hand and arm as if he were wielding a sword, with intent to do battle.) "And I told his friend, when I read his book,--his friend who said that he was perfect, except for a want of confidence in his power,--I told him, Never fear; he will go it!" (Another sweep with the sword.) "He will go it! I found ideas there--ideas!" I vanished, to call my husband. Mr. Hawthorne then came in, and we found the old gentleman intently gazing at my husband's portrait,--so intently that he did not observe our entrance, till Mr. Hawthorne spoke. He turned, and placed his hand with such force upon my husband's shoulder that you would have supposed he had dubbed him knight. They left the room to go to the Study, the General brandishing the sword tremendously at every sentence he uttered on the way. It was really good to see such a man; so mighty in physique, with such a strong character, such resolute will, and such a gleam of loving-kindness in his eyes, to temper the force. I have wandered off from the party. The children had a charming time, and brought back word that each had behaved perfectly. The next day I went to tell Mrs. Emerson why Rose and I did not appear. I found Mr. Emerson, sitting on the side doorstep, with Edith on his knee and Edward riding about the lawn on his pony. Mr. Emerson said that "the show of children was very pretty. But Julian! He makes his mark everywhere; there is no child so fine as Julian!" Was not that pleasant to hear from him? I told him how singular it was that Julian should find in Concord the desire of his imagination for two years--a pony [Mr. Emerson had already superintended the little boy's mounting, and falling off from, Edward's pony]; and he smiled like Sirius. "Well, that is good. Send him this afternoon." He then called Edward, and bade him go home with me, mount Julian, and bring him back; and this was accordingly done. But first, Mr. Emerson invited me to go up with him to the hilltop, opposite his house, where there is a fine view. His house is in a thick bower of evergreen and horse-chestnut trees. The grove is Academe, and could not have been more musical or deep; and Plato's disciple walks there. Last week I drew The Wayside for George Putnam, who is going to have it engraved. I must also make sketches of Mr. Emerson's and the Old Manse. To-morrow Una goes to a picnic at Mrs. Pratt's [mother-in-law of a daughter of Mr. Alcott's] with Ellen and Edith Emerson. We expect Louisa Hawthorne this week. She has been coming for a good while, but was delayed by the severe illness of Mrs. Robert Manning. Yesterday Mr. Hawthorne went to Boston to meet Mr. Atherton. A daguerreotypist seized him, and took three pictures of him, from which the man politely asks me to choose. They are somewhat good. Julian had a tooth out the other day, and laughed instead of crying. Edward was so unfortunate a day or two since as to have four teeth drop out at once; and Mr. Emerson says he must be put under a barrel until the others grow. Monday P. M. Mr. Hawthorne, Una, and Julian have gone to the picnic. This morning I went to the post-office, for I did not like to send Una when boys were firing crackers in every direction. Julian always is my shadow--so he went with me. I stopped at Mrs. Emerson's, to ask her when and how her children were going. I found a superb George Washington in the dining-room, nearly as large as life, engraved from Stuart's painting. We saw no one of the family, but finally a door opened, and the rich music of Mr. Emerson's voice filled the entry. Julian ran out at the sound, and Ellen and her father came into the room. Mr. Emerson asked me if that head (pointing to Washington) were not a fine celebration of the Fourth of July. "He would seem to have absorbed into that face all the serenity of these United States, and left none elsewhere, excepting" (and he laid his hand on Julian)--"excepting what is in Julian. Washington is the Great Repose, and Julian is the Little Repose--hereafter to become also the Great Repose!" He asked if Julian were going to the picnic; and I told him "no," as I was not going. "Oh, but if Una is going, that would be a divided cherry, would it not?" Finding that Mrs. Emerson was to go, and that they were all to ride, I of course had no objection. And then Mr. Emerson wanted Mr. Hawthorne to go with him, at five o'clock. My lord consented, and so they are all gone. Last evening, Mrs. Emerson came to see us with her sister, loaded with roses, and she was delighted with our house. Rosebud walked all round with us, in perfect sobriety, listening to our conversation. Is not this hot weather delightful? It is to me luxury and strength. Mr. Hawthorne has sold the grass for thirty dollars. He has cut his bean-poles in his own woods. We find The Wayside prettier and prettier. Baby keeps pulling my arm. Your child, SOPHY. CHAPTER VIII THE LIVERPOOL CONSULATE The letters to Mrs. Peabody sketch on:-- DEAREST MOTHER,--We have had an Englishman here, an artist, whom George Putnam [a cousin] sent to take sketches. He came here with his carpet-bag, and there seemed nothing to be done but to ask him to stay with us while in town. I was the more glad to do so, hoping thereby to save George some pennies, as I was obliged to disappoint him about making the drawings myself. This artist is from the North of England. He seems very good and simple-hearted, and he talks like the Cataract of Lodore. He has the magnetic influence upon Mr. Hawthorne which produces sleepiness. He is enchanted with The Wayside. You know Mr. Hawthorne is a sort of load-stone, which attracts all men's confidences without a word of question, and scarcely any answer; and so Mr. Miller tells his whole life and thoughts. If he has the national reservedness generally, it certainly vanishes in my husband's presence, for it seems as if he could not tell enough. On Monday and Tuesday we expected to have Mr. Ticknor here, whom Mr. Hawthorne wished to see about his book, but he did not come. Mr. Hawthorne feels better now, and looks natural, with living color. [He had been terribly shocked and overcome by the death, by drowning from a burning vessel, of his sister Louisa.] Poor, dear Louisa! It is harder and harder for me to realize that I shall not see her again. And she had such a genuine joy in the children. But it is a positive bliss to me to contemplate Louisa and her mother together. If there is anything immortal in life it is the home relations, and heaven would be no heaven without them. God never has knit my soul with my husband's soul for such a paltry moment as this human life! I have not loved my mother for one short day! My children do not thrill my heart-strings with less than an eternal melody. We know that God cannot trifle! This is all more real to me than what my human eye rests on. I heard one of the truly second-sighted say once, that in a trance he saw the spiritual world; and while gazing enraptured on its green pastures, a spirit whispered to him, "Out of this greenness your earthly pastures are green." Yesterday afternoon Mr. Miller left us. Oh, dear, how the little man talked! I do not know as the Cataract of Lodore is an adequate exemplification, for that has some airy, fairy jets and overfalls. But the good faith and earnestness with which Mr. Miller coined the air into words were more like the noise and pertinacity of a manufactory. He was certainly a new phase of man to me. When he finally vanished, with his portfolio under his arm, my wings sprang up as if an iron band had been holding them down. It was with a truly divine patience that my husband gave ear to this personated Paper-Mill, because he saw that he was good and true and honest. (I might have only said "good.") Into those depths of misty gray light which stand for eyes under my husband's brow, the little man was drawn as by a line. Miss Bremer said to me of Mr. Hawthorne's eyes, "Wonderful, wonderful eyes! They give, but receive not." But they do draw in. Mr. Miller kept his face turned to him, as the sunflower to the sun; and when I spoke, and he tried to turn to me, his head whirled back again. It really is marvelous, how the mighty heart, with its charities, and comprehending humanity, which glows and burns beneath the grand intellect, as if to keep warm and fused the otherwise cold abstractions of thought,--it is marvelous how it opens the bosoms of men. I have seen it so often, in persons who have come to him. So Mr. Melville, generally silent and incommunicative, pours out the rich floods of his mind and experience to him, so sure of apprehension, so sure of a large and generous interpretation, and of the most delicate and fine judgment. Thus only could the poetic insight and far-searching analytic power be safely intrusted to him. To him only who can tenderly sympathize must be given the highest and profoundest insight. How wonderfully it is arranged, that in the very person who most imperiously demands absolute beauty and perfection (for so does Mr. Hawthorne), in this very person is found the subtlest and widest appreciation of human shortcomings, and the pleadings of weakness and failure. In "Blithedale" I think one feels this tender humanity. It will come out more and more. Shall I tell you where I am? I am sitting in our acacia grove, on the hill, with a few pines near enough for me to hear their oceanic murmur. It is only necessary for me to shut my eyes, to hear every variety of water sounds. The pine gives me the long, majestic swell and retreat of the sea waves; the birch, the silvery tinkle of a pebbly brook; the acacia, the soft fall of a cascade; and all mingled together, a sound of many waters most refreshing to the sense. I thank heaven that we possess a hilltop. No amount of plains could compete with the value of this. To look down on the world actually is typical of looking down spiritually, and so it is good. Una and Julian are wandering around; Una having been reading to Julian. Rosebud is asleep. Oh, she enjoys a summer day so much! This morning I set her down on the green grass. Without looking at me, the happiest smile began to dawn over her face; and then she suddenly waved her hands like wings, and set forth. To fall down seemed a new joy. Julian undertook to be her escort. It was a charming picture--the two figures grouped together; the fair little blue-eyed face turned up to the great brown, loving eyes, and all sorts of dulcet sounds responding to one another. I could not help smiling to read in your letter that you would have a rug spread for her. I should as soon think of keeping an untamed bird on a rug as baby. I assure you that since she has had the use of her feet she does not pause in the race of life. . . . It is good to see such an expression of immense satisfaction as dwells upon her face. Most lovingly your child, SOPHIECHEN. September 19. MY DEAR MOTHER,--On Friday Mr. Hawthorne returned from nearly a three weeks' visit to the Isles of Shoals. I did not tell you about it while he was there, because your heart is so tender I knew you would have no peace, and you would all the time be thinking that he was separated from us by water. But here he is, looking in splendid health, all safe and sound. General Pierce, and some other dignitaries with their wives, met Mr. Hawthorne for a day or two; and the rest of the time he had all to himself. I must tell you a story, by which you will be enabled to see into political slander. An officer of the army, resident at Baltimore, told the editor of a paper friendly to General Pierce, that while in Mexico General Pierce was at a gambling-table with another officer; and, a squabble ensuing, this officer struck General Pierce in the face, and that the General took it without a word. He told the editor also that the officer who offered this insult was in California, making it difficult to have a word from him upon the subject. The editor, in perplexity, sent the paragraph to General Pierce, who was at a loss how to prove the utter falsity of the whole story. But, behold, the next thing which he laid his hand upon, on his table, was a letter postmarked "California." He opened it, and it was from the very officer who was said to have insulted him so foully, and was an expression of the highest admiration and respect, and congratulations upon his present position. This was an unanswerable denial; and so he sent the letter to Baltimore. This story, fabricated out of nothing but malice, was meant to injure in two ways, by proving him a gambler, and also pusillanimous. The slanderous officer will probably cease to be one, as I believe falsehood is not considered a military grace. Mr. Hawthorne went to Brunswick, having been cordially invited by the President of the College. He met his classmates there. On account of the heavy rains he was detained so many hours on his way thither that he did not arrive till noon of the day, and thus providentially escaped hearing himself orated and poetized about in the morning. Brunswick was so full that he had to go to Bath to sleep; and there he had funny adventures, some old sea-captains insisting upon considering him a brother, and calling him all the time "Cap'n Hathorne." At the Isles of Shoals he had the ocean all to himself; but when he wished to see human beings, he found Mr. and Mrs. Thaxter very pleasant. Mrs. Thaxter sent Una a necklace of native shells with a gold and coral clasp, Julian a plume made of white owl feathers, and Rosebud a most exquisite wreath of sea-moss upon a card. I kept a journal for my husband, according to his express injunction. The children missed papa miserably, and I could not bear the trial very well. I could not eat, sitting opposite his empty chair at table, and I lost several pounds of flesh. To-day, when baby waked from a nap of four hours and a half, she called for the first time, "Mamma!" I ran up, and she was smiling like a constellation of stars. She mourned after papa a great deal, and sometimes would hold a long discourse about him, pointing all the while at the portrait. One day a neighbor sent me, to cheer my loneliness, the most superb bouquet of rare and costly rosebuds that I ever saw. I put them in the Study, in a pretty champagne-glass [the tall, old-fashioned kind], and they filled the room with fragrance. I tended them very carefully; but they bloomed too fully at last. Yet just at that moment, the lady gave me a fresh supply--the very day before Mr. Hawthorne's return; and on that bright Friday afternoon I put the vase of delicious rosebuds, and a beautiful China plate of peaches and grapes, and a basket of splendid golden Porter apples on his table; and we opened the western door [leading from the Study to the lawn] and let in a flood of sunsetting. Apollo's "beautiful disdain" seemed kindled anew. Endymion smiled richly in his dream of Diana. Lake Como was wrapped in golden mist. The divine form in the Transfiguration floated in light. I thought it would be a pity if Mr. Hawthorne did not come that moment. As I thought this, I heard the railroad-coach--and he was here. He looked, to be sure, as he wrote in one of his letters, "twice the man he was." Dear little Una went to the village with the mail-bag, just before it was time to expect her father, and I told her I hoped she would drive home with him. She met him, caught a glance, and he was gone. It surprised me that her sense of duty prevented her from turning back at once. I asked her why she did not, as the letters were not of so much importance, since papa had come. "Oh," said she, "I did not know but it would be wrong to go back only because I wanted to." At last she came. She entered the Study in a very quiet way (apparently), received his loving greeting, and then, taking off her hat, sat down at my feet to look at him, and hear him. When she went to bed, she said, "Oh, mamma, my head has tingled so, ever since I saw papa, that I could hardly bear the pain! Do not tell him, for it might trouble him." Was it not sweet and heroic in her to keep so quiet for two hours? This is a good specimen of Una's powers of self-sacrifice. It has sometimes made me wish to weep over her delicious tears. Sunday, October 24, 1852. MY DEAREST MOTHER,--To-day we all went into the woods above and behind our house, and sat down and wove wreaths of red and russet leaves, and dreamed and mused with a far-off sound of booming waves and plash of sea on smooth beach in the pine-trees about us. It was beautiful to see the serene gleam of Una's face, fleckered with sunlight; and Julian, with his coronet of curls, sitting quiet in the great peace. My husband, at full length on the carpet of withered pine, presented no hindrance to the tides of divine life that are ready to flow through us, if we will. There are no Words to describe such enjoyment; but you can understand it well. It is the highest wisdom, I think, to sometimes do nothing; but only keep still, and reverently be happy, and receptive of the great omnipresence. How studiously we mortals keep it out of our eternal business. There should be no business at least once a week. I rather think it is the best proof that Moses was inspired that he instituted a Sabbath of rest from labor. God needs not, but man needs, rest. Sunset. I left you to go out again and join my husband on the hilltop, while the children's voices kept us advised of their welfare somewhere about the place. My husband and I sat on a terrace on the side of the hill, both looking off upon the tranquil horizon, beginning to be veiled with a dim blue haze. Una ran up, calling out that Mr. Hosmer wished to see papa and mamma. So we descended, and met the old gentleman on a lower terrace, where I invited him to sit on the green sofa; and we grouped about him. Julian at first went rushing through our ranks like a young Olympian exercising heroic games, and finally extended himself on the grass to listen to the palaver. Mr. Hosmer began with the Great Daniel [Webster], who died at three o'clock this morning. He expressed admiration of him, as we all did; and I thought his death an immense loss. Mr. Hosmer was very glad that he died in the fullness of his power of mind, and not sunken in the socket. He discoursed upon the massive grandeur of his speeches, his wonderful letters, and of all that was mighty in him. Also of his shortcomings and their retribution. You would have liked to have heard Mr. Hosmer glorify John Adams--even his appearance. He said that at eighty-three (when he sat near him every Sunday at church) he was a "perfect beauty;" that his cheeks were as unwrinkled as a girl's, and as fair and white, and his head was a noble crown; and that any woman would fall in love with him. So we talked of great men, till I came in to watch baby's sleep. She soon waked, all smiles and love; and then Mr. Hawthorne and Mr. Hosmer came in, still upon the theme of great men. Mr. Hosmer thought Oliver Cromwell greatest of all, I believe. Una and I made you a wreath of richly tinted oak leaves to-day, and when I go to Newton I will take it. I wish you could hear her repeat poetry in her dulcet, touching tones. I never heard any one repeat poetry so much to my mind. Evening. Mr. Hawthorne is drawn forcibly out of doors by the moon's rays, they are so clear and superb to-night. He looked out and sighed, for he did not really want to go; but he felt under a moral necessity. I walk out in him, being mamma and nurse [Rosebud was still up]. When you write to Mr. Plumly, bless him for me for the mantle [his gift to Mrs. Peabody] and his beautiful, refreshing letter about it. I had a great mind to write to him myself of his appreciation of you and of my husband. What a noble, lovely person he is! Your child, SOPHY. April 14, 1853. My husband went off in a dark rain this morning, on his way to Washington. Mary Herne called to baby to come and take care of her dolly, who was upon the floor in the kitchen. Rose rushed in a breakneck manner across the parlor, exclaiming as if in the utmost maternal distress, "Oh, mershy, mershy!" and rescued Dolly from her peril. She was quite happy and still in the kitchen; and then I heard her shout, "I like it--I like it motch!" I asked Mary what it was that baby liked so "motch." When Mary got up to investigate, she found baby in the closet at the molasses jug, still crying, "I like it--I like it motch!" She was very much diverted by our consternation; and when, at tea-time, I was speaking of it, she burst into inextinguishable laughter; and as soon as she could speak, said, "I glad! Was ever such a mischief?" Twice to-day she began to go into the Study for "papa take her." I sent Julian to the village at five, and he returned in a pouring rain. His sack kept him dry, but he thought he was soaked to the skin because his nose was wet. He brought a letter from Charlotte Bridge, inclosing two notes to my husband from Mr. Bridge. To-day I found nothing in the post-office but Mr. Emerson. He walked along with me and said he had a letter from Mr. Synge [whom Hawthorne met, later, in England], an attache of the British Legation, asking for an autograph of Mr. Hawthorne. Grandpapa, baby, and I sat in the parlor in the afternoon, and baby was in the highest spirits, and conversed for the first time in the most facetious manner, casting side glances, and laughing with a great pretense of being vastly amused, and of superior insight into the bearing of things. April 19. The great day of the Concord fight. I was awakened by cannon and the ringing of bells. The cannon thundered all around the welkin, in a very grand, stately, and leisurely manner. I read the history of the day to the children. What made the morning beautiful and springlike to me was a letter which Julian brought from my husband. April 21. A day like a dulcimer. It was so charming to rake and plant and prune that I remained out a long time, and tore my hands nicely. Julian requested to go and take a quiet walk in the woods, and returned just as I was becoming anxious about him, shouting, with a sweet-brier bush which he had pulled up by the roots in the wood. I took a spade, and dug a great cave, and planted it beneath his western window; and I am sure it must grow for him, for he sent sunshine down into the earth from his eyes upon the roots while I was setting it out. The stage-coach drove up and brought me Mrs. S. G. Ward and Sarah Clarke. Mrs. Ward was cruelly disappointed not to see Mr. Hawthorne; and I told her that he would probably tear his hair when he came back and found what he had lost. "Tell him," said she, "that I tore out all mine." She was splendid and radiant beyond my power to tell; dressed in rich green and a rose-colored bonnet, and her beautiful hair curling round her wonderful face. I do not believe there is another such woman in the world. When she had stepped from the house, Julian begged me to run after her, and tell her she must go to England [whither the family now expected to journey]; and with the most enchanting grace she laughed, and said, "Tell him I certainly shall!" Sunday. At ten, my little flock gathered [Mrs. Hawthorne taught reading, geography, drawing, etc., to several children besides her own, for love, and gave them Sunday-school lessons also]; and I read them the story of Balaam's ass, and about the death of Moses. They were much afflicted that Moses was not allowed to go to the Promised Land. I read that he looked down from Mount Pisgah and saw Canaan and the City of Palms, and showed them my Cuban sketch of a palm, describing exactly how they looked and grew; and the vision of the City of Palms became very beautiful to them. Poor little Mary Ellen felt ill, but she was so interested that I could not persuade her to go home. April 26. I met Mr. Rockwood Hoar, who congratulated us upon our expected residence in England, which he said was "the only place fit to live in out of America." April 29. A neighbor came yesterday with an English white rose, and set out the tree for me. He said it was for Rosebud. We are getting to look quite nice, but all will look black and bare to my husband, after being at the South. Baby is filled with joy to be out in such lovely weather, and makes no hesitation to take the heaviest tools, and dig and rake and hoe. She will not come in even to drink her milk. Some documents came this morning from the State Department, relating to the Consulate at Liverpool. The peach-trees are all in bloom, and the cherry-trees also. I looked about, as I sat down in our pine grove, and tried to bear my husband's absence but it is desolation without him. This is the sweetest place--I really cannot bear to leave it. My scholars drew flowers, this morning. Mr. Emerson and Ellery Charming passed along; and Mr. Emerson asked Julian to go with the children to Fairy Land [in Walden woods]. He went, in a state of ecstatic bliss. He brought me home, in a basket, cowslips, anemones, and violets. In June the voyage to England, as Hawthorne was appointed Consul at Liverpool by President Pierce, was undertaken, and pleasantly accomplished. Hawthorne's "English Note-Books," as well as the elaborated papers that make up "Our Old Home," disclose something of his daily life in England during his consulship; but it was in the rapid, familiar letters of my mother to her family that his life was most freely narrated. I have preserved these letters, and shall give extracts from them in the pages that follow, prefacing and interpolating a few girlish memories of my father and of the places in which I saw him, although they are trivial and meagre in incident. He died the day before my thirteenth birthday, and as my existence had begun at a time when his quiet life was invaded (if we may use that term in connection with a welcome guest) by fame, with its attendant activity in the outside world, my intercourse with him was both juvenile and brief. In England, he mingled more than ever before with the members of literary and fashionable society. I, who in 1853 was but two years old, had to be satisfied with a glance and a smile, which were so much less than he had been able to give to my brother and sister in their happier childhood days, for they had enjoyed hours of his companionship as a constant pastime. I was, moreover, much younger than the others, and was never allowed to grow, as I wished, out of the appellations of Rosebud, Baby, and Bab (as my father always called me), and all the infantine thought which those pet names imply. I longed myself to hear the splendidly grotesque fairy tales, sprung from his delicious jollity of imagination, which Una and Julian had reveled in when our father had been at leisure in Lenox and Concord; and the various frolics about which I received appetizing hints as I grew into girlhood made me seem to myself a stranger who had come too late. But a stranger at Hawthorne's side could be very happy, and, whatever my losses, I knew myself to be rich. In the early years of our stay in England his personality was most radiant. His face was sunny, his aspect that of shining elegance. There was the perpetual gleam of a glad smile on his mouth and in his eyes. His eyes were either a light gray or a violet blue, according to his mood. His hair was brown and waved loosely (I take it very hard when people ask me if it was at all red!), and his complexion was as clear and luminous as his mother's, who was the most beautiful woman some people have ever seen. He was tall, and with as little superfluous flesh and as much sturdy vigor as a young athlete; for his mode of life was always athletic, simple, and abstemious. He leaned his head a little to one side, often, in a position indicating alert rest, such as we find in many Greek statues,--so different from the straight, dogged pose of a Roman emperor. He was very apt to make an assent with an upward movement of the head, a comfortable h'm-m, and a half-smile. Sympathetic he was, indeed, and warm with the fire that never goes out in great natures. He had much dignity; so much that persons in his own country sometimes thought him shy and reticent to the verge of morbidness. But it was merely the gentlemanliness of the man, who was jocund with no one but his intimate friends, and never fierce except with rascals, as I observed on one or two occasions. Those who thought him too silent were bores whom he desired not to attract. Those who thought him unphilosophical (and some philosophers thought that) were not artists, and could not analyze his work. Those who knew him for a man and a friend were manly and salubrious of soul themselves. They have given plenty of testimony as to the good-fellowship of a nature which could be so silent at will. He was usually reserved, but he was ready for action all the time. His full, smooth lips, sensitive as a child's, would tell a student of facial lines how vivid was his life, though absolutely under his cool command. He was a delightful companion even when little was said, because his eyes spoke with a sort of apprehension of your thought, so that you felt that your expression of face was a clear record for him, and that words would have been a sort of anticlimax. His companionship was exquisitely restful, since it was instinctively sympathetic. He did not need to exert himself to know you deeply, and he saw all the good in you there was to know; and the weakness and the wrong of any heart he weighed as nicely in the balance of tender mercy as we could do in pity for ourselves. I always felt a great awe of him, a tremendous sense of his power. His large eyes, liquid with blue and white light and deep with dark shadows, told me even when I was very young that he was in some respects different from other people. He could be most tender in outward action, but he never threw such action away. He knew swine under the cleverest disguise. I speak of outward acts of tenderness. As for his spirit, it was always arousing mine, or any one's, and acting towards one's spiritual being invisibly and silently, but with gentle earnestness. He evinced by it either a sternly sweet dignity of tolerance, or an approbation generous as a broad meadow, or a sadly glanced, adverse comment that lashed one's inner consciousness with remorse. He was meditative, as all those are who care that the world is full of sorrow and sin, but cheerful, as those are who have the character and genius to see the finite beauty and perfection in the world, which are sent to the true-hearted as indications of heaven. He could be full of cheer, and at the same time never lose the solemnity of a perception of the Infinite,--that familiar fact which we, so many of us, have ceased to fear, but which the greatest men so remember and reverence. He never became wholly merged in fun, however gay the games in which he joined with us children; just as a man of refinement who has been in war never quite throws aside the dignity of the sorrow which he has seen. He might seem, at a superficial glance, to be the merriest of us all, but on second thoughts he was not. Of course, there were times when it was very evident to me that my father was as comfortable and happy as he cared to be. When he stood upon the hearth-rug, before the snapping, blushing English fire (always poked into a blaze towards evening, as he was about to enter the parlor),--when he stood there with his hands clasped behind him, swaying from side to side in a way peculiar to him, and which recalled the many sea-swayed ancestors of his who had kept their feet on rolling decks, then he was a picture of benevolent pleasure. Perhaps, for this moment, the soldier from the battlefields of the soul ceased to remember scenes of cruelty and agony. He swayed from side to side, and raised himself on his toes, and creaked his slippered heels jocosely, and smiled upon me, and lost himself in agreeable musings. He was very courteous, entirely sincere, and quiet with fixed principles as a great machine with consistent movement. He treated children handsomely; harshness was not in him to be subdued, and scorn of anything that was honestly developing would have seemed to him blasphemy. He stooped to my intelligence, and rejoiced it. We were usually a silent couple when off for a walk together, or when we met by chance in the household. I suppose that we were seeing which could outdo the other at "holding the tongue." But still, our intercourse, as I remarked before, might be complete. I knew him very well indeed,--' his power, his supremacy of honesty, his wealth of refinement. And he, I was fully aware, could see through me as easily as if I were a soul in one of his own books. Even as a child, knowing that he could not think me a remunerative companion, I realized how remarkable it was that in all his being there was not an atom of the poison of contempt. If he did not love stupidity, he forgave it. If he was strong with analysis and the rejection of all sham and wrong, his hand was ready to grasp s any hand, because it was a human creature's, whose destiny was a part of every destiny--even Christ's. This sympathy, which caused the choice he had made of his character-studies, and brought many confessions to his judgment from bewildered men and women, was with him so entire that it showed itself in the little things of existence, as a whole garden-path is noble with the nature of the rose that stands blooming there. His aspect avoided, as did that of his art, which exactly reproduced his character, anything like self-conscious picturesqueness. It is pleasant to have the object of our regard unconscious of himself. He had a way of ignoring, while observing automatically, all accessories, which reminded us that his soul was ever awake, and waiting to be made free of earthly things and common ideas. During our European life he frequently wore a soft brown felt hat and a brown talma of finest broadcloth, whose Greek-like folds and double-decked effect were artistic, but did not tempt him to pose or remember his material self. He was as forgetful of his appearance as an Irishman of the true quality, who may have heard something about his coat or his hair, but has let slip from his mind what it was, and cares not, so long as the song of his comrades is tender and the laughter generous. In some such downright way, I was convinced, my father regarded the beauty and stateliness which were his, and for which he had been praised all through his existence. He forgot himself in high aims, which are greater than things seen, no matter how fine soever. We made a very happy family group as we gladly followed and looked upon him when he took ship to start for the Liverpool Consulate; and of this journey and the new experiences which ensued my mother writes to Dr. Peabody as follows:-- STEAMER NIAGARA, ATLANTIC OCEAN, July 7, 1853. MY DEAREST FATHER,--It is early morning. Wrapped in furs and blanket shawl, in the sun and close against the vast scarlet cylinder of scalding hot steam, I have seated myself to greet you from Halifax, where we shall arrive to-night. I was glad to leave the sight of you while you were talking with Mr. Fields, whose cheerful face (and words, no doubt) caused you to smile. I was so glad to leave you smiling happily. Then came the cannonade, which was very long. And why do you suppose it was so long? Mr. Ticknor says that always they give a salute of two guns; but that yesterday so many were thundered off because Mr. Hawthorne, the distinguished United States Consul and author, was leaving the shore, and honoring her Majesty's steamship with his presence. While they were stabbing me with their noise I was ignorant of this. Perhaps my wifely pride would have enabled me to bear it better if I had known that the steamer were trembling with honor rendered to my husband. After this we were quiet, enough, for we were moving magically over a sea like a vast pearl, almost white with peace. I never saw anything so fair and lovely as the whole aspect of the mighty ocean. Off on the horizon a celestial blue seemed to meet the sky. Julian sat absorbed. He did not turn his head, but gazed and gazed on this, to him, new and wondrous picture. Seeing a point of land running out, he said, "That, I suppose, is the end of America! I do not think America reaches very far!" I managed to change his beaver and plume for his great straw Fayal hat, but he would not turn his head for it. It was excessively hot. An awning was spread at the stern, and then it was very comfortable. I heard that the British minister was on board, and I searched round to find him out. I decided upon a fine-looking elderly gentleman who was asleep near the helm-house. Afterwards the mail-agent came to Mr. Hawthorne and said the minister wished to make his acquaintance; and behold, here was my minister, a stately, handsome person, with an air noble and of great simplicity and charm of manner. Mr. Hawthorne introduced me, but I had no conversation then. Later, I had a very delightful interview. . . . Near by stood a gentleman whom I supposed his attache; and with him I had a very long and interesting conversation. We had a nice talk about art and Rome, and America and England, and architecture. I do not yet know his name, but only that his brother was joint executor with Sir Robert Peel on the estate of Hadley, the artist. This unknown told me that the minister was an exquisite amateur artist, and his portfolio was full of the finest sketches. This accounted for the serene expression of his eyes, that rest contemplatively upon all objects. Mr. Silsbee looks so thin and pale that I fear for him; but I will take good care of him. At table, Mr. and Mrs. Hawthorne have the seats of honor, on either hand of the captain. He is a very remarkable man. The minister told me that he sailed with him five years ago, when the captain was very young, and he was then astonished at his skill and power of command; that the captains of these great English steamers are picked men, trained in the navy, and eminent for ability and accomplishment, and that Captain Leitch is remarkable among the best. It was good to see his assured military air, as he walked back and forth while we moved out of the beautiful harbor. He made motions with his hand with such an air of majesty and conscious power. His smile is charming, and his voice fine. The enunciation of Mr. Crampton, the minister, is also wonderfully fine. Mr. Crampton says that these steamers have run for seventeen years, and that not one accident has happened, and not a man been lost, except that once a steamer was lost in a fog, but all the passengers and crew were safely got off. Una enjoys herself very much, and reads the "Tanglewood Tales," and walks and races on the upper deck with Julian, this fine cold morning. It is glorious, glorious,--this blue surrounding sea, and no land. Your affectionate daughter, SOPHIA. WATERLOO HOUSE, LIVERPOOL, July 17, Sunday morning. Here we are, dear father, in England; and I cannot realize it, because a moment ago we were in Boston Harbor, and how can I be three thousand miles afar? If we had had more difficulty, storms, and danger, I could realize it better; but it seems like a pleasure excursion on a lake. I sit in a parlor, with one great, broad window from ceiling to floor, a casement opening upon a balcony, which commands a handsome street. It does not look like Boston, and, Mr. Hawthorne says, not like New York, but--like Liverpool. People are going to church, and the bells are chiming in a pleasant jangle. Every gentleman has an umbrella under his arm; for it is bright sunshine one moment, and a merry little shower the next. I spoke in my note from Halifax of Mr. Crampton, and a gentleman whom I thought his attached Mr. Crampton we lost at Halifax, but the supposed attache remained; and I was glad, for he was the most interesting person in the steamer. We in vain tried to discover his name, but at last found it to be Field Talfourd, brother of Sir Thomas Talfourd, author of "Ion." I had very charming conversations with him. He was a perfect gentleman, with an ease of manner so fascinating and rare, showing high breeding, and a voice rich and full. Whenever he spoke, his words came out clear from the surrounding babble and all the noise of the ship, so that I could always tell where he was. He is one of the primitive men, in contradistinction to the derivative (as Sarah Clarice once divided people). He seemed never at a loss on any subject soever; and when the passengers were trying feats of skill and physical prowess to pass the time, I saw Mr. Talfourd exhibit marvelous power as a gymnast in performing a feat which no one else would even attempt. His education was all-sided, body and mind, apparently; and, with all, this charm of gentlemanliness,--not very often met with in America. It seems to require more leisure and a deeper culture than we Americans have yet, to produce such a lovely flower. . . . July 19. We all have colds now, except Mr. Hawthorne, with whom earth's maladies have nothing to do. Julian and Una are homesick for broad fields and hilltops. Julian, in this narrow, high room, is very much like an eagle crowded into a canary-bird's cage! They shall go to Prince's Park as soon as I can find' the way; and there they will see water and green grass and trees. They think of the dear Wayside with despair. As soon as possible we shall go into the country. Yesterday the waning consul, Mr. Crittendon, called. Mr. Hawthorne likes him much. Mr. Silsbee and Mr. Wight called. The latter talked a great deal of transcendental philosophy to me, on the Niagara; and I was sometimes tempted to fling him to the fishes, to baptize him in realities. July 21. An Oxford graduate, who went to see Mr. Hawthorne in Concord, called to see him, and brought his father, a fine-looking gentleman. Their name is Bright. Mary Herne thought the son was Eustace Bright himself! To-day the father came to invite us all out to West Derby to tea on Saturday, and the son is coming for us. There the children will see swans and gardens and green grass, and they are in raptures. Young Henry Bright is a very enthusiastic young gentleman, full of life and emotion; and he very politely brought me from his gardens a radiant bouquet of flowers, among which the heliotrope and moss-roses and all other roses and mignonette make delicious fragrance. Yesterday Miss Lynch sent me a bunch of moss-rose buds--nine! Just think of seeing together nine moss-rose buds! Henry Bright brought the "Westminster Review" to Mr. Hawthorne, and said he should bring him all the new books. Mrs. Train called to see me before she went to town [London], and Mr. Hawthorne and I went back with her to the Adelphi, and walked on to see a very magnificent stone building, called St. George's Hall. It is not quite finished; and as far as the mist would allow me to see, it was sumptuous. . . . We have strawberries as large as small peaches, one being quite a feast, and fine raspberries. The head of the Waterloo House, Mr. Lynn, is a venerable-looking person, resembling one's idea of an ancient duke,--dressing with elaborate elegance, and with the finest ruffled bosoms. Out of peculiar respect to the Consul of the United States, he comes in at the serving of the soup, and holds each plate while I pour the soup, and then, with great state, presents it to the waiter to place before each person. After this ceremony he retires with a respectful obeisance. This homage diverts Mr. Hawthorne so much that I am afraid he will smile some day. The gravity of the servants is imperturbable. One, Mr. Hawthorne calls our Methodist preacher. The service is absolutely perfect. Your affectionate child, SOPHIA. The Brights, especially Henry Bright, appear frequently in the "Note-Books," and their names occur very often in my mother's letters. The young Oxford graduate I remember most distinctly. He was thin, and so tall that he waved like a reed, and so shining-eyed that his eyes seemed like icebergs; they were very prominent. His nose was one of your English masterpieces,--a mountainous range of aristocratic formation; and his far-sweeping eyebrows of delicate brown, his red, red lips and white doglike teeth, and his deeply cleft British chin were a source of fathomless study. In England a man can be extraordinarily ordinary and material; but the men of culture are, as a rule, remarkably forcible in unique and deep-cut characteristics, both of face and of mind, with a prevailing freedom from self-analysis--except privately, no doubt. The strong features of Henry Bright, at any rate, made a total of ravishing refinement. He and my father would sit on opposite sides of the fire; Mr. Bright with a staring, frosty gaze directed unmeltingly at the sunny glow of the coals as he talked, his slender long fingers propping up his charming head (over which his delicately brown hair fell in close-gliding waves) as he leaned on the arm of his easy-chair. Sometimes he held a book of Tennyson's poetry to his near-sighted, prominent eyes, as closely as two materials could remain and not blend into one. He recited "The Brook" in a fine fury of appreciation, and with a sure movement that suggested well the down-tumbling of the frolicking element, with its under-current of sympathizing pathos, the life-blood of the stream. "For men may come, and men may go, but I go on for ever!" rang in my empty little head for years, and summed up, as I guessed, all of Egyptian wisdom and spiritual perpetuity in a single suggestive fact. Mr. Bright had a way of laughing that I could never cease to enjoy, even in the faint echo of retrospect. It always ended in a whispered snort from the great mountain range of his nose. He laughed often, at his own and my father's remarks, and at the close of the tumbling diction of "The Brook;" and he therefore frequently snorted in this sweeping-of-the-wind fashion. I listened, spellbound. He also very gently and breezily expressed his touched sensibility, after some recitation of his of rare lines from other poems, but in the same odd manner. My father stirred this beloved friend with judicious, thought-developing opposition of opinion concerning all sorts of polite subjects, but principally, when I overheard, concerning the respective worth of writers. The small volume of Tennyson which Mr. Bright held in his two hands caressingly, with that Anglo-literary filliping of the leaves which is so great a compliment to any book, contained for him a large share of Great Britain's greatness. His brave heart beat for Tennyson; I think my father's did not, though his head applauded. My mother, for her part, was entranced by the goldsmith's work of the noble poet, and by the gems enclasped in its perfection of formative art,--perfections within the pale of convention and fashion and romantic beauty which make lovely Tennyson's baronial domain. Henry Bright wrote verses, too; and he was beginning to be successful in a certain profound interest which customarily absorbs young men of genuine feeling who are not yet married; and therefore it was worth while to stir the young lover up, and hear what he could say for "The Princess" and "The Lord of Burleigh." My mother, in a letter written six months after we had reached England, and when he was established as a household friend, draws a graphic picture of his lively personality:-- ROCK PARK, December 8. . . . We had a charming visit from Henry Bright a fortnight ago. He stayed all night, and he talks--I was going to say, like a storm; but it is more like a breeze, for he is very gentle. He is extremely interesting, sincere, earnest, independent, warm and generous hearted; not at all dogmatic; full of questions, and with ready answers. He is highly cultivated, and writes for the "Westminster." . . . Eustace Bright, as described in "The Wonder-Book," is so much like him in certain things that it is really curious: "Slender, pale, yet of a healthy aspect, and as light and active as if he had wings to his shoes." He is also near-sighted, though he does not wear spectacles. His eyes are large, bright, and prominent, rather, indicating great facility of language, which he has. He is an Oxford scholar, and has decided literary tastes. He is delicately strung, and is as transparent-minded and pure-hearted as a child, with great enthusiasm and earnestness of character; and, though a Liberal, very loyal to his Queen and very admiring of the aristocracy. This comes partly by blood, as his mother has noble blood in her veins from various directions, even the Percys and Stanleys, and is therefore a native aristocrat. He enjoyed his visit to America extremely, and says Boston is the Mecca of English Unitarians, and Dr. Channing is their patron saint. I like to talk with him: he can really converse. He goes to the Consulate a good deal, for he evidently loves Mr. Hawthorne dearly. I wish my husband could always have visitors so agreeable. The other day a woman went to him about a case in Chancery. Mr. Hawthorne thought she was crazy; and I believe all people are who have a suit in Chancery. A few weeks after the date of the last letters, a visit was paid to the Brights at their family home, and my mother thus writes of it:-- ROCK PARK, February 16, 1854. I returned yesterday from a visit to Sandheys, the domain of Mr. Bright. He has been urging all winter that we should go and dine and stay all night, and I have refused, till last week Mrs. Bright wrote a cordial note and invited Mr. Hawthorne and Una and me to go and meet Mr. and Mrs. James Martineau, and stay two nights. It seemed not possible to refuse without being uncivil, though I did not like to leave Julian and baby so long. Mr. Hawthorne, however, intended to stay but one night, and the next morning would come home and see Julian and Rose, and take Julian to spend the day at the Consulate with him; and we left King, that excellent butler, in the house. It was really safe enough; only, you know, mothers have, perhaps, unfounded alarms. We took a carriage at Pier-head (Una and I) and drove to the Consulate, where we took up Mr. Hawthorne and Mr. Bright. . . . We arrived at about six o'clock, and Una and I had to dress for dinner after our arrival. It was a party of twelve. . . . Mrs. H. [aunt of Henry Bright] is a fashionable lady, who resides in London in season, and out of season at Norris Green. She was dressed in crimson velvet, with pearls and diamonds, and her neck and arms were very fair and pretty. She was resolved to tease Mr. Hawthorne into consenting to go to her ball. Just imagine him in the clutches of a lady of fashion! But he always behaves so superbly under the most trying circumstances, that I was exceedingly proud of him while I pitied him. . . . Finally she could not tell whether he would accept or not, and said she would leave the matter to me, with confidence that I would prevail. . . . Just after luncheon on Tuesday, Mrs. Bright's brother came to tell her that the Great Britain had come, and she would not believe it, because her husband had not telegraphed her about it, . . . that largest ship in the world, belonging to Mr. Bright. It had come back from Australia. . . . Mr. Martineau has a kind of apostolic dignity about him. . . . But the full dress of the gentlemen now requiring a white cravat and tie, they all looked ministerial to me, except the United States Consul, who will hold on to black satin, let the etiquette be what it may. He does not choose to do as the Romans do while in Rome. At least, he is not yet broken in. I suppose it is useless for me to say that he was by far the handsomest person present, and might have been taken for the king of them all. The chandelier that poured floods of light down on the heads beneath was very becoming to him; for the more light there is, the better he looks always. The dinner was exceedingly elegant, and the service as beautiful as silver, finest porcelain, and crystal could make it. And one of the attendants, the coachman, diverted me very much by the air with which he carried off his black satin breeches, white silk long hose, scarlet vest buttoned up with gold, and the antique-cut coat embroidered with silver. Not the autocrat of all the Russias feels grander than these livery servants. The butler, who is really above the livery servants in position, looked meek in his black suit and white vest and cravat, though he had a right to look down on the varlet in small-clothes. This last, however, was much the most imposing, in figure, and fair round red cheeks, and splendid shining black hair. Dear me, what is man! At the sound of a bell, when the dessert was put upon the table, the children came in. They never dine with mamma and papa, . . . and all troop in at dessert, looking so pretty, in full dress, . . . thin white muslin or tulle, with short sleeves and low necks, and long streaming sashes. I found the next day that it was just the same when there was no great party at dinner. Little S. looked funny in his white vest and muslin cravat,--like a picture of the old regime. In the evening we had music, weaving itself into the conversation. Mrs. Bright is . . . a person of delicate and fine taste; . . . she has eight children, but in her face one does not find wearing care. . . . It is a face of great sensibility. . . . Her smile breaks out like real sunshine, revealing a happy and satisfied spirit, a fresh and unworn nature. Her children seem to regard her as a precious treasure. Her husband, with a white head and perfectly Eastern face, is exceedingly pleasant; and when he comes home to dinner he goes to his wife and takes her hand, as if he had been gone many months, and asks her particularly how it is with her, in a tender and at the same time playful way, which causes a great deal of sunshine. Then he runs upstairs to dress, and comes back in an incredibly short time, as nice as a new pin, and overflowing with the kindest hospitality. It is such a pretty scene: the elegant drawing-room, the recess a bow window of great size, filled with such large and clear plate glass that it seems wide open, looking out upon the verdant lawn and rich green-- evergreen--shrubbery; two superb cranes, with stately crests, walking about with proud steps, or with outspread wings half flying, and uttering a short, sharp cry; oval and circular plots of ground surrounded now with snowdrops, about twice as large as those we have in America. Everything is lovely outside. Inside, innumerable gems of art and mechanism cover the tables. . . . In the evening . . . the group of airily dressed children; the tender mother in her rich brocade and lace mantle; the happy father; the agreeable governess (Miss Cumberland is a remarkably accomplished person, and has been with the family fifteen years); the music, talk, and aesthetic tea,--it is a charming picture. . . . The grave butler brings in a tray with cups and saucers and an urn, and leaves the room. H. makes tea, pours it out, and takes it to each person, with a little morsel of spread bread. S. and A. look about for empty cups, and return them to the tray. There is no fuss; it is all enfamille; and the tray is borne off again by the butler, stepping with noiseless feet. There is no noise at any time anywhere in the house, except the angry squall of the cockatoo, who gets into a violent rage once in a while with some invisible foe, and tears his cage, and erects the long feathers on his head like so many swords drawn out of their scabbards. . . . The Brights treated me in the sweetest way, as if they had always known me, and I felt quite at home. H. is to go to her aunt's fancy ball as a mermaid; and on Tuesday I helped sprinkle her sea-green veil with pearls. This family is very charming. Mrs. Bright is the lady of ladies; her children are all clever (in an English sense), and one son a prodigy. . . . They are all good as well as clever; well educated, accomplished, and most entirely united. It is all peace and love and happiness there, and I cannot discover where the shadow is. Health, wealth, cultivation, and all the Christian graces and virtues--I cannot see the trail of the serpent anywhere in that Paradise. . . . Mrs. Bright and I had some nice little talks. She told me elaborately how she admired and loved Mr. Hawthorne's books; how she had found expressed in them what she had found nowhere else; with what rapture one of her sisters read, re-read, and read again "The Wonder-Book;" . . . how Mrs. H. thought him peerless; and so on. There is not the least extravagance about Mrs. Bright, but remarkable sobriety; and so what she said had double force. We talked . . . while we sprinkled pearls over the mermaid's sea-green veil. On Wednesday the sun shone! If you lived here [in or near Liverpool] you would hardly credit such a phenomenon. CHAPTER IX ENGLISH DAYS: I In order to give a full idea of Henry Bright and his home, I have anticipated dates somewhat, but at this point will go back a little to the summer of our arrival in England, since the atmosphere which surrounded Hawthorne and the aspect of typical personalities which he enjoyed are thus easily caught. August 5, 1853. . . . We have been so hospitably received that very little clear leisure has been left for my own private use. . . . The children have suffered very much from confinement within doors and bad air without, and almost "everduring" rain. We find it will not do to remain in the city any longer, and to-morrow we go across the Mersey to Rock-ferry, a fine watering-place, twenty minutes off by steam, where the air is pure and healthy. We had a call from a certain Mrs. R. S. Ely and her mamma. She said she herself was an American. On the afternoon of the same day we received a formal invitation from this lady for a dinner-party. But Mr. Hawthorne was engaged for that day to dine with Mr. Crittendon. As she was a very fine lady, and resides in a very aristocratic street, I was glad to be obliged to refuse, because my brocade was not yet appointed, and I could wear nothing less in state. At the Waterloo we received a call from Mrs. William Rathbone and her daughter, Mrs. Thorn. It was a sister-in-law, Mrs. Richard Rathbone, who wrote that exquisite book, "The Diary of Lady Willoughby." She resides in London. Mr. William Rathbone is a millionaire. His wife is a cordial and excellent lady, who seemed to take us right into her heart, just as the Brights did. . . . We have been to make our promised call at Sandheys. Before we drove there, Mr. Bright took us to Norris Green, the estate of his uncle. How can I convey to you an adequate idea of it? I do not know what we are to do with the regal paradises of England if I cannot cope with this. . . . Here in all directions spread out actual velvet lawns, upon which when I trod I seemed to sink into a downy enchantment; and these lawns were of such a tint, of the most delicate pea-green, with a lustre upon it! . . . Evening. I have been interrupted all day, receiving and making calls. Mr. Hawthorne has made his maiden speech, and followed it by another to-day, when he received the Chamber of Commerce in Mrs. Blodget's great drawing-room. Mrs. William Rathbone sent her carriage to take us to Green Bank. The floors of the halls are almost invariably pavements of stone, sometimes in colored mosaic. . . . By and by came Mr. Rathbone,--a very animated, upright, facetious old gentleman, who seems to enjoy life and his millions quite serenely. He is a person of great energy, and full of benevolence, and the fountain of many of the great charities of Liverpool. Then came his son, and then a pretty lady, Miss Stuart; remarkably pretty she was. We were summoned to tea by what I at first thought was a distant band of music; but I believe it was an East Indian gong, merely stirred into a delicate melody. Tea was at one end of the table, and coffee at the other; and old Mr. Rathbone presided at the coffee, and Mrs. Thorn at the tea. The house was hung with pictures from ceiling to floor, every room I entered. In walking all round the grounds before tea, we came upon a fine view of the Welsh mountains over the sunny slopes; for it proved the loveliest afternoon, though in the morning it rained straight down. Mrs. Thorn spoke to me with great fervor of "The Scarlet Letter." She said that no book ever produced so powerful an effect upon her. She was obliged to put it away when half through, to quiet the tumultuous excitement it caused in her. She said she felt as if each word in it was the only word that ought to be used, and the wholeness, the unity, the perfection of art amazed her. . . . The Chamber of Commerce wished to pay their respects to Mr. Hawthorne; but Mr. Hawthorne could not receive a cloud of gentlemen at our parlor there, unless they had all "stood upon their dignity," as the witty Miss Lynch suggested that Mr. Hawthorne should. The President of the Chamber was a Mr. Barber, and, behold, when we came out to Rockferry he called again, and invited us to dine at Poulton Hall, his country-seat at Bebbington, on this side of the Mersey, where he resides with his two maiden sisters. He came for us in his beautiful carriage,--a chariot it was, with a coachman as straight as a lightning-rod,--and off we bowled to Poulton Hall. [My mother's inexperience concerning splendid effects in luxurious life led her to look upon them in a naive, though perfectly composed manner. One is reminded of the New Adam and Eve, and one is glad that the patient objects of time-honored beauty had found surprise at last.] It is four hundred years old; and there we came upon unspoiled nature, as well as elaborate art. It is an enchanting spot, with a lawn shaded by ancient oaks and other forest trees; but green fields beyond and around that had never been trimmed and repressed into thick velvet. The Hall had belonged to the Greens, and the history of it is full of ghost stories and awful tragedies. We entered a hall, and by the ancient oaken staircase reposed upon the carpet a fox, in a fine attitude, with erect head and brilliant eyes,--really a splendid specimen of a creature. I was surprised at the quiet manner in which he reposed, undisturbed by our entrance; but I was much more astonished to find it was a dead fox stuffed. I could scarcely believe it after I was told. Mr. Barber is a lover of sport, and is going with his family to-morrow to Scotland to hunt grouse. He says that at this season the hills of Scotland are gorgeous with heath flowers, like a carpet of rich dyes. We were ushered into the drawing-room, which looked more like a brilliant apartment in Versailles than what I had expected to see. The panels were richly gilt, with mirrors in the centre, and hangings of gilded paper; and the broad windows were hung with golden-colored damask; the furniture was all of the same hue; with a carpet of superb flowers; and vases of living flowers standing everywhere; and a chandelier of diamonds (as to indefatigable and vivid shining), and candlesticks of the same,--not the long prisms, like those on Mary's astral, but a network of crystals diamond-cut. The two ladies were in embroidered white muslin dresses over rose-colored silk, and black velvet jackets, basque-shaped, with a dozen bracelets on their arms, which were bare, with flowing sleeves. They received us with that whole-hearted cordiality we meet everywhere. They told us some terrible stories about the haunted house, and about a lady who was imprisoned and tortured in one of the attic chambers on account of her faith, and how she resisted to the end, and was starved to death. The room bore the name of the "Martyr's Chamber." ["Dr. Grimshawe's Secret" refers to this mansion.] We went up there, and saw the window in the roof,--so high that the wretched lady could not look out; and the door of solid oak, which was ruthlessly barred. We saw the spot where one of the gentlemen of the former family cut his throat, and was found dead; and Miss Marianne said children had been murdered in the house, and uneasy spirits revisited the "glimpses of the moon." We went all over the house, in which are twenty-five sleeping apartments. One room contains a library in black letter, but that we could only peep at through a great keyhole, because it was barred and padlocked. I think Mr. Hawthorne would like to examine that. The ladies said that, if we wished to go to church, we could tell the beadle of the old Bebbington church to guide us to their pew. We passed this venerable church on our way. Its tower is very fine, and has ivy and golden flowers far up near its summit, and is built of reddish stone. Both ladies spoke of "The Scarlet Letter" with admiration and wonder. They said it had the loftiest moral of any book they had ever read. . . . On Friday, Mr. Hawthorne dined with his worship the Mayor, the Judges, the Grand Jury, the leading members of the bar, and some other gentlemen, at the Town Hall. Mr. Hawthorne said the room was the most stately and handsomest he ever saw. The city plate was superb, and the city livery of the footmen was very splendid, and the footmen themselves very handsome. His worship wore his robes of state, as did the worshipful Judges, with their wigs. Speeches were made, and Mr. Hawthorne made his third speech! Oh, how I wish I could have heard it! . . . This morning the ferry steamers brought over two or three thousand children--boys and girls of the Industrial School--to have a good time. I hope they are kindly treated; but it makes me shudder, and actually weep, to look upon the assemblage of young creatures, not one of them able to call upon a mother; each with a distinct character, each with a human heart. Poor little motherless children! On Sunday afternoon we took a delightful walk. I think we made a circuit of five miles, if not more. We went over Dacre Hill, from which a sweet, tranquil landscape is seen; and onwards, down a lovely lane. These lanes are all bordered with hedges of hawthorn, ivy, and holly; and one of them abounded in lovely harebells, with stems so delicate that I found it very difficult to see and seize them, so as to pluck them. These hedges had not walls before them, and were not too high, so that we could look over into the fields. A well-worn path led from the harebell lane along the edge of a field; and very convenient stone steps led over the walls. When we got to the street, it seemed a very ancient place. This region was once the kingdom of Mercia. The road seemed hewn out of stone. I cannot tell you how much the cottages seemed like the first dwellings that ever were made. . . . When I called on Mrs. Squarey, we found her a pleasant lady, and Una thought she looked like Miss Maria Mitchell, and therefore Una liked her. Our call was extremely agreeable. Mr. Hawthorne insists upon calling her Mrs. Roundey. When Mr. Hawthorne came home this afternoon, he said he met on the other side the children of the Industrial School just landed. He saw them face to face, and he said their faces were uncomely to the last degree. He said he never imagined such faces,--so irredeemably stupid and homely. I do not think I have realized the sin of the Old World in any way so much as in a few faces I saw in Liverpool. It made me shiver and contract to look at them,--so haggard, so without hope or faith, or any sign of humanity. . . . Mr. Hawthorne had a letter from Kossuth to-day. August 26. MY DEAR FATHER,--I am just as stupid as an owl at noonday, but it is a shame that a steamer should go without a letter from me to you, and it shall not. Mr. Hawthorne wishes to escape from too constant invitations to dinner in Liverpool, and by living in Rockferry will always have a good excuse for refusing when there is really no reason or rhyme in accepting, for the last steamer leaves Liverpool at ten in the evening; and I shall have a fair cause for keeping out of all company which I do not very much covet. I have no particular fancy for Liverpool society, except the Rathbones' and Brights'. Mr. Hawthorne was obliged the other day to bury an American captain who died at his boarding-house. He paid for the funeral out of his private purse, though I believe he expects some brother captains will subscribe a part of the amount. Mr. Hawthorne was the whole funeral, and in one of those plumed carriages he followed the friendless captain. The children are delighted with the aspect of things, and with the house, which they think very stately and elegant. I have been racing round the lawn and shrubberies with them. The flowers rejoice. The scarlet geraniums, the crimson and rose-colored fuchsias, the deep garnet carnations, the roses, and the enormous variously colored pansies (pensees) look radiantly in the sun. There are many other kinds of flowers besides; and the beautiful light green, smooth-shaven lawn is a rest to the eyes. There is a vast amount of latent force and energy here, but it takes a cannon to put it in action. Of course there are exceptions enough. Our friend Henry Bright is a slender, diaphanous young gentleman, of a nervous temperament, with no beer or roast beef apparent in his mind or person; and there are doubtless many like him. The English are unfortunate in noses. Their noses are unspiritual, thick at the end; and there is an expression about the mouth of enormous self-complacency. The specimens of this amount to superb sometimes, when the curves of the mouth are Apollo-like. Unfortunately there is too often a deep stain of wine in the cheeks, or a general suffusion; and unless the face is quite pale, one can find no other hue,--no healthy bloom either in man or woman. A young American was found in a deranged state, and taken before a magistrate. There was one of two things to do,--either to put him in the workhouse, or pay his board at the insane hospital. Mr. Hawthorne, of course, chose the latter. It was just like him to choose it. The young man's mother had lately married a second time, and was in Naples. When Mrs. Blodget came to see me, a day or two since, she exclaimed that she knew his mother, and that she was a lady of fortune. . . . September 30. Mr. Hawthorne and Mr. Ticknor had a fine excursion to Old Chester, and were so occupied with it that no time was left for Eaton Hall. Julian has been parading round the garden this morning, blowing a trumpet which papa brought him from Chester, and dragging after him a portentous wooden cannon, which would not help to gain the smallest battle. It is actually a sunny day! . . . A very great joy it is to Rosebud to see the lovely little English robins come to pick up crumbs. They excite a peculiar love. They have great faith in man, and come close to the window without fear. They have told the linnets and thrushes of our hospitality, and the linnets actually come, though with dread and trembling; and they carry off the largest crumbs for their families and neighbors. The English robin is very dear. . . . Mr. Ticknor has been to see De Quincey, and says he is a noble old man and eloquent, and wins hearts in personal intercourse. His three daughters, Margaret, Florence, and Emily, are also very attractive and cultivated, and they are all most impatient to see Mr. Hawthorne. . . . We are all going to Chester first on a Sunday, to attend the Cathedral service with the children. How very singular that this dream of mine, like so many other dreams, is coming true! For I always wished earnestly that the children might go to church first in a grand old cathedral, so that their impression of social worship might be commensurate with its real sublimity. And, behold, it will be so,--for they never yet have been to church. The echoes of those lofty vaults are scarcely ever silent, for an anthem is sung there every day. Afterwards we shall go on a week-day to examine the old town, said to be older than Rome itself! October 5. On Saturday, the ist, Mr. Hawthorne went to dine at Mr. Aikens's with the two sons of Burns, Colonel and Major Burns. He says they were gentlemanly persons, and agreeable, but not resembling their father. After dinner, one of them sang one of Burns's songs, and again another in the drawing-room. . . . Mr. Fields says, "'Tanglewood' is going finely. Three thousand were sold at once on its appearance, and it is still moving rapidly. The notices have been glorious everywhere; and they ought to be, for the book is one of the most delightful which your pen has let slip." October 21. We are going to dine out this evening, at Mr. and Mrs. Charles Holland's, Liscard Vale. These persons Mr. Hawthorne met a little while ago at the house of Mr. Aikens, where he saw the sons of Burns. For the benefit of cousin Mary Loring [the very beautiful and spirited Mrs. George B. Loring, nee Pickman], I will say now that my wreath is just from Paris, and consists of very exquisite flowers that grow in wreaths. Part of it is the blackberry-vine (strange to say), of such cunning workmanship that Julian says he knows the berries are good to eat. The blossoms, and the black and red and green fruit and leaves, are all equally perfect. Then there are little golden balls, to imitate a plant that grows in Ireland,--fretted gold. Small flowers are woven closely in, over the top of the head, and behind the ears the long, streaming vines hang in a cluster. October 23. At sunset the clouds cleared off and the sun shone, so that our drive of six miles to Liscard Vale was much more pleasant than we expected. It was rather dreary; uncultivated moors and sea-nipped foliage. Finally we began to hasten, at a greatly accelerated pace, down, down, and then entered a gate. It was too dark to see distinctly; but, as far as I could discover, the land seemed formed of low hills and vales, with trees in thin groves; and the mouth of the Mersey, and Liverpool glittering with a thousand lights, were visible through the vistas. Mrs. Holland is ladylike, and therefore simple in her manners. Mr. Holland has the figure and air of an American gentleman, rather thin and pale. The drawing-room was beautiful. It was of very great size, and at one end was a window in semicircular form, larger than any but a church window. Depending from the lofty ceiling were several chains, in different parts of the room, holding vases filled with richly colored flowers with long vines streaming. Mr. Hawthorne as chief guest--there were twelve--took Mrs. Holland, and sat at her right hand. The table was very handsome; two enormous silver dish-covers, with the gleam of Damascus blades, putting out all the rest of the light. After the soup, these covers were removed, revealing a boiled turbot under one, and fried fish under the other. The fish was replaced by two other enormous dishes with shining covers; and then the whole table was immediately covered with silver dishes; and in the centre was a tall silver stand holding a silver bowl of celery. It would be useless to try to tell you all the various dishes. A boiled turkey was before Mrs. Holland, and a roasted goose before Mr. Holland; and in the intermediate spaces, cutlets, fricassees, ragouts, tongue, chicken-pies, and many things whose names I did not know, and on a side-table a boiled round of beef as large as the dome of St. Peter's. The pastry of the chicken-pie was of very elaborate sculpture. It was laid in a silver plate, an oak vine being precisely cut all round, and flowers and fruits moulded on the top. It really was a shame to spoil it. All these were then swept off in a very noiseless manner. Grouse and pheasants are always served with the sweets in England, and they appeared at either end of the table. There were napkins under the finger-bowls, upon each of which a castle or palace was traced in indelible ink, and its name written beneath. The wines were port, sherry, madeira, claret, hock, and champagne. I refused the five first, but the champagne was poured into my glass without any question. So now you have the material elements of the dinner-party. Perhaps I cannot give the spiritual so well. Mr. Littledale was a gentleman with a face in full bloom, a very white cravat coming out even with his chin; and within it he bridled with the unmistakable English sense of superiority to the rest of mankind. He is a specimen of the independent, rich country gentleman of England. His conservatories were the best in the world, . . . and so on through all things appertaining to him. One could see directly that any attempt to convince him to the contrary would be utterly futile. His ears were not made to admit any such remarks. . . . He declared that the weather of the last twelve months was unprecedented. I meekly suggested Bulwer's testimony, but he scoffed at it. . . . He discussed with Mrs. Holland the probable merits of a pudding before her, and concluded he would not try it. There was something peremptory, petulant, and whimsical about him. . . . He was precisely a character such as I have read about in English novels, and entertained me very much. He was evidently of the war party of Britain, and thought Kossuth's last letter to the people of Straffan "exceedingly clever." In speaking of contested elections, he referred to one which cost 100,000 pounds; and some one asked Mr. Hawthorne if an election ever cost so much as that in America. Upon this question, a young gentleman, a fair-haired Egbert, with an aristocratic face and head, observed that he supposed 100,000 pounds would purchase all America! Was not that impertinent? Mr. Hawthorne gravely replied that from the number of elections it was impossible that any such purchasing could be made. Opposite me sat a Mrs. Mann;--an old lady with an extraordinary cap, trimmed with pink ribbon, and a magnificent necklace of rubies round her neck, and bracelets of the same. She had a very intelligent face. There was a Mrs. Miller, who floated in fine, white, embroidered muslin, with a long scarlet sash, and a scarlet net upon the back of her head, confining her dark hair in a heavy clump, very low. She was a very romantic, graceful-looking person, slender and pale and elegant; and I had a good deal of conversation with her. She is one of Mr. Hawthorne's profound admirers. . . . She smiled very brightly; but a look of unspeakable sadness alternated with her smile that expressed great suffering of some kind. She spoke of having been ill once, when her friends called her the White Lady of Avenel; and that is just her picture now. Her dress made her fairness so apparent,--the gossamer tissue, the bright scarlet, and raven hair and dark eyes and lashes. The tones of her voice were very airy and distant, so that I could scarcely catch her words; and this I have observed in several English ladies. "Where could Zenobia have found her ever-fresh, rich flower?" asked Mrs. Holland. It is singular to observe how familiar and like a household word Mr. Hawthorne is to all cultivated English people. People who have not heard of Thackeray here, know Mr. Hawthorne. Is not that funny? We ladies had a very good time together in the drawing-room. Coffee was served in exquisite little china cups all flowers and gold. . . . Mr. Holland asked me whether Mr. Hawthorne was mobbed in "the States," and said that if he should go to London it would be hard work for him, for he would inevitably be mobbed. He then remarked that he did not like "Blithedale" so well as the other books. He spoke of Bulwer, and said that when he saw him he concluded it was better never to see an author, for he generally disappointed us; that Bulwer was an entirely made-up man in appearance, effeminate and finical,--flowing curls and curling mustachios, and elaborate and formal manners. I told him I should expect just such a looking person in Bulwer, from reading all his first novels, so very inferior to "The Caxtons" and "My Novel." November 6. MY DEAREST FATHER,--Last Sunday was a day that seemed to be dropped from heaven. I immediately thought that this was the Sunday for Chester. . . . So we sent to Mr. Squarey, who returned word that he would meet us at the depot at nine. We did not pick him out from all others for a companion to the Cathedral, but his wife first requested us to go with them, and so we were, in a certain way, bound not to go without, them. It was very affecting to me when I came suddenly upon the Cathedral. . . . Every "Amen" was slow, solemn, full music, which had a wonderful effect. It was like the melodious assent of all nature and mankind to the preceding prayer,--"So be it!" . . . Una and Julian, especially Julian, suffered much ennui during the sermon; and Una wrote the other day in one of her letters that "it was very tegeuse" (her first attempt at spelling "tedious") "for there was hardly anything in it." Julian inadvertently gaped aloud, which so startled Mr. Hawthorne that he exclaimed, "Good God!" thus making the matter much worse; but as even I, who sat next him, did not hear him, I presume that the same great spaces which took up the canon's voice disposed of Mr. Hawthorne's exclamation. I am sorry the children were obliged to stay through the sermon, as it rather spoiled the effect of the preceding service. It would have been far better to have had another of David's Psalms chanted. While listening to those of the morning lesson, I thought how marvelous it was that these Psalms, sung by the Jewish king and poet to his harp three thousand years ago, should now be a portion of the religious service of nearly all Christendom; so many organs grandly accompanying thousands of voices in praising God in his very words, as the worthiest which man has yet uttered. And they are indeed worthy; and in this stately old Cathedral with its manifold associations they sounded grander, more touching, more eloquent than ever, borne up from the points of the flaming pinnacles, on solemn organ-tones, to God. This united worship affected me very deeply, it is so long since I have been to church,--hardly once since Una was born! You know I always loved to go to church, always supplying by my imagination what I did not find. . . . I think that the English Church is the merest petrifaction now. It has not the fervor and unction of the Roman Catholic even (that is dead enough, and will be dead soon). The English Church is fat, lazy, cold, timid, and selfish. How natural that some strong souls, with warm hearts and the fire of genius in them, should go back to Romanism from its icy presence! November 8. Yesterday afternoon was beautiful, and we (Una, Julian, and I) were quite rejoiced to find Mr. Hawthorne in the ferry-boat when we returned from Liverpool. It was beautiful,--up in the sky, I mean; for there never was anything so nasty as Liverpool. Thousands of footsteps had stirred up the wetness and earth into such a mud-slush as one can have no idea of in America. It was necessary to look aloft into the clean heavens to believe any longer that mud was not eternal, infinite, omnipresent. . . . I left you introduced into the Cathedral cloisters in Chester, but I suppose you do not wish to stay there any longer. We went upon the walls afterwards, as we had three hours upon our hands. I had a great desire to plant my foot in Wales, and so we crossed the river Dee. I stopped to look at the river Dee. It is a mere brook in comparison to our great rivers, though the Concord is no wider in some places. It was flowing peacefully along; and I remembered that Edgar the Peaceable was rowed in triumph by eight kings from his palace on the south bank to the monastery in 973. It was too late to walk far into the immense grounds of Eaton Hall, the seat of the Marquis of Westminster. He is a Norman noble. I told Mr. Squarey that my father was of Welsh descent, and he asked me why I did not fall down and kiss my fatherland. November. Mr. Hawthorne's speeches are never "reported," dear father, or I would send them to you. They remain only in the ear of him who hears them, happy man that he is. Oh, these fogs! If you have read "Bleak House," you have read a description of a London fog; but still you could scarcely have a true image of it. Out of doors one feels hooded with fog, and cannot see his own hand. It is just as if one should jump into a great bag of cotton-wool,--not lamb's wool, for that is a little pervious. Our fogs here are impervious. Mr. Ogden (the large-hearted western gentleman whom Elizabeth knows) called at the Consulate upon Mr. Hawthorne, and Mr. Hawthorne invited him to make us a visit. He is overflowing with life, and seems to have the broad prairies in him. He entertained me very much with an account of the Lord Mayor's dinner in London, and other wonders he had seen. At the dinner he had a peculiarly pleasant, clever, and amiable group immediately around him of baronets. He told us about going with Miss Bacon to the old city of Verulam to see Lord Bacon's estate and his tomb. They went into the vault of the church where the family is buried, but they could not prevail upon the beadle to open the brick sepulchre where Lord Bacon himself is supposed to be interred. The ruins of the castle in which Lord Bacon lived show that it was very rich and sumptuous; and the very grove in which he used to walk and meditate and study stands unmolested,--a grand old grove of stately trees planted by man, for they are in regular rows. When Mr. Hawthorne came home the next evening, he brought me a superb bouquet of flowers, which he said was a parting gift to me from Mr. Ogden, who actually followed him to the boat with them. They are a bright and fragrant memory of that agreeable and excellent gentleman. From the "Westminster Review" which lies on the table I will extract for you one passage: "Few have observed mankind closely enough to be able to trace through all its windings the tortuous course of a man who, having made one false step, finds himself thereby compelled to leave the path of truth and uprightness, and seldom regains it. We can, however, refer to at least one living author who has done so; and in 'The Scarlet Letter' by Hawthorne, the greatest of American novelists, Mr. [Wilkie] Collins might see the mode in which the moral lesson from examples of error and crime ought to be drawn. There is a tale of sin, and its inevitable consequences, from which the most pure need not turn away." In another paper in the same number the reviewer speaks of some one who "writes with the pure poetry of Nathaniel Hawthorne." As I have entered upon the subject of glorification, I will continue a little. From London an American traveler writes to Mr. Hawthorne: "A great day I spent with Sir William Hamilton, and two blessed evenings with De Quincey and his daughters. In De Quincey's house yours is the only portrait. They spoke of you with the greatest enthusiasm, and I was loved for even having seen you. Sir William Hamilton has read you with admiration, and says your 'House of the Seven Gables' is more powerful in description than 'The Scarlet Letter.'" Did I tell you once of an English lady who went to the Consulate to see Mr. Hawthorne, and introduced herself as a literary sister, and who had never been in Liverpool before, and desired Mr. Hawthorne to show her the lions, and he actually escorted her about? An American lady, who knows this Englishwoman, sent the other day a bit of a note, torn off, to Mr. Hawthorne, and on this scrap the English lady says, "I admire Mr. Hawthorne, as a man and as an author, more than any other human being." I have diligently taken cold these four months, and now have a hard cough. It is very noisy and wearying. Mr. Hawthorne does not mind fog, chill, or rain. He has no colds, feels perfectly well, and is the only Phoebus that shines in England. I told you in my last of Lord Dufferin's urgent invitation to Mr. Hawthorne to go to his seat of Clandeboye, in Ireland, four or five hours from Liverpool. Mr. Hawthorne declined, and then came another note. The first was quite formal, but this begins:-- "MY DEAR MR. HAWTHORNE,--. . . Mrs. Norton [his aunt, the Honorable Mrs. Norton] hopes . . . that you will allow her to have the pleasure of receiving you at her house in Chesterfield Street; and I trust you will always remember that I shall esteem it an honor to be allowed to receive you here whenever you may be disposed to pay this country a visit. Believe me, my dear Mr. Hawthorne, "Yours very truly, "DUFFERIN." "CLANDEBOYE, HOLYWOOD." Now have I not given you a fine feast of homage,--"flummery" Mr. Hawthorne calls it? To-morrow is Thanksgiving Day. We are going to observe it in memory of the fatherland. Mr. Bright will dine with us by his own invitation, not knowing it was a festival day with us. He has long been projecting a visit, and finally proposed coming this week. He will remain all night, as Sandheys is on the other side of Liverpool, and his mamma does not wish him to cross the river [usually foggy] in the dark. The English people, the ladies and gentlemen with whom we have become acquainted, are very lovely and affectionate and friendly. They seem lifelong acquaintances. I suppose there is no society in the world that can quite compare to this. It is all stereotyped, crystallized, with the repose and quiet in it of an immovable condition of caste. There is such a simplicity, such an ease, such an entire cordiality, such sweetness, that it is really beautiful to see. It is only when looking at the matter outside--or rather out of it--that one can see any disadvantage or unloveliness. It is a deep and great question,--this about rank. Birth and wealth often are causes of the superior cultivation and refinement that are found with them. In this old civilization there seems to be no jealousy, no effort to alter position. . . . Provided that the lowest orders could be redeemed from the brutal misery in which they are plunged, there could be a little more enjoyment in contemplating and mingling with the higher. But it seems as if everything must be turned upside down rather than for one moment more to tolerate such suffering, such bestiality. There have been one or two individual cases that went before the courts that really make it almost wicked ever to smile again. . . . As Mr. Hawthorne delays to go to London, London is beginning to come to him, for Mr. Holland says he must inevitably be mobbed in England. Two Londoners called lately,--one a Mr. William Jerdan, about seventy years old, a literary man, who for fifty years has been familiar with the best society in London, and knows everybody for whom one cares to ask. He is a perfect mine of rich memories. He pleased me mightily, and made me think of Dr. Johnson. Rose sat on his knee, and gazed with unwinking, earnest eyes into his face. He said he never saw anything like it except the gaze of Talleyrand (whom he knew very well). He said that Talleyrand undertook to look at a man and not allow a man to look into him,--he always fixed such a glance as that upon one. Imperturbably, baby continued to gaze, without any smile; and he kept dodging from her and making funny contortions, but she was not in the least moved. "Why," he exclaimed, "you would be an admirable judge, and I should not like to be the fellow who would take sentence from your Lordship when you get on your black cap!" At last she smiled confidingly at him. "There," he said, "now I have it! She loves me, she loves me!" At eight they left us for London, intending not to shoot through that night, but sleep at Birmingham, halfway. "Oh," said Mr. Jerdan, "I make nothing of going out to dine an hundred miles and returning!" The gentleman with him was Mr. Bennoch, a patron of poets and artists, and as pleasant, merry, and genial as possible. He told Julian that, if he would go to London with him, he should have a pony as low as the table and a dog as high as the pony; but Julian would not, even in prospect of possessing what his heart desireth most. December 8. Yesterday who should come to see me but Mr. James Martineau and his wife! I have the greatest admiration for him as a divine, and I do not know what I expected to see in the outward man. But I was well pleased with his aspect as I found it. He is not tall, and he is pale, though not thin, with the most perfectly simple manners and beautiful expression. It seemed as if he had always been my brother; as if I could find in him counselor, friend, saint, and sage; and I have no doubt it is so, so potent is the aroma of character, without a word or sign. How worse than folly it is to imagine that character can either be cried up or cried down! No veil can conceal, no blazonry exalt, either the good or the evil. A man has only to come in and sit down, and there he is, for better, for worse. I, at least, am always, as it were, hit by a person's sphere; and either the music of the spheres or the contrary supervenes, and sometimes also nothing at all, if there is not much strength of character. Mr. Martineau did not say much; but his voice was very pleasant and sympathetic, and he won regard merely by his manner of being. Mrs. Martineau sat with her back to the only dim light there was, and I could receive no impression from her face; but she seemed pleasant and friendly. Mrs. Martineau said she wished very much that we would go to her party on the 19th, which was their silver wedding day. She said we should meet Mrs. Gaskell, the author of "Mary Barton," "Ruth," and "Cranford," and several other friends. It is the greatest pity that we cannot go; but it would be madness to think of going out at night in these solid fogs with my cough. They live beyond Liverpool, in Prince's Park. Mrs. Martineau showed herself perfectly well-bred by not being importunate. It was a delightful call; and I feel as if I had friends indeed and in need just from that one interview. Mr. Martineau said Una would be homesick until she had some friends of her own age, and that he had a daughter a little older, who might do for one of them. They wished to see Mr. Hawthorne, and came pretty near it, for they could not have got out of the lodge gate before he came home! Was not that a shame? I must tell you that there is a splendid show which Mr. Jerdan wants us to see at Lord Warremore de Tabley's; it is a vast salt mine of twenty acres, cut into a symmetrical columned gallery! He says it shall be lighted up, so that we shall walk in a diamond corridor. Mr. Jerdan said that salt used to be the medium of traffic in those districts; and I think Lord de Tabley [1] is a beauty for having his mines cut in the form of art, instead of hewed and hacked as a Vandal would have done. Mr. Jerdan said that on account of some circumstance he was called Lord de Tableau for a pseudonym, and in the sense I have heard people exclaim to a good child, "Oh, you picture!" [1] Mr. Hawthorne's severe taste is annoyed by that expression, but I must let it go for the sake of what follows. In the "North British Review" this week is a review of Mr. Hawthorne's three last romances. It gives very high praise. December 18. I went to Liverpool yesterday for a Christmas present for you, and got a silver pen in a pearl handle, which you will use for Una's sake. While I was gone, Mr. Martineau and Mrs. Gaskell called! I was very sorry to lose the visit. They left a note from the Misses Yates inviting us to dine to-day and stay all night, and go to Mrs. Martineau's evening party to-morrow! It would be a charming visitation, if it were possible. Mr. Bright cannot find language to express the Misses Yates' delightsomeness, and was wishing that we knew them. By this steamer Mr. Ticknor has sent us a Christmas present of a barrel of apples. I wish you could see Rosebud with her bright cheeks and laughing eyes. A lady thought her four years old, the other day! Julian has to-day gone with his father to the Consulate. Una is in the drawing-room reading Miss Edgeworth. Rose is on the back of my chair. On Christmas night the bells chimed in the dawn, beginning at twelve and continuing till daybreak. I wish you could hear this chiming of bells. It is the most joyful sound you can imagine,--the most hopeful, the most enlivening. I waked before light, and thought I heard some ineffable music. I thought of the song of the angels on that blessed morn; but while listening, through a sudden opening in the air, or breeze blowing towards us, I found it was not the angels, but the bells of Liverpool. One day when I was driving through Liverpool with Una and Julian, these bells suddenly broke forth on the occasion of a marriage, and I could scarcely keep the children in the carriage. They leaped up and down, and Una declared she would be married in England, if only to hear the chime of the bells. The mummers stood at our gate on Christmas morning and sang in the dawn, acting the part of the heavenly host. The Old Year was tolled out and the New Year chimed in also, and again the mummers sang at the gate. Perhaps you have heard of Miss Charlotte Cushman, the actress? The summer before we left America, she sent a note to Mr. Hawthorne, requesting him to sit to a lady for his miniature, which she wished to take to England. Mr. Hawthorne could not refuse, though you can imagine his repugnance on every account. He went and did penance, and was then introduced to Miss Cushman. He liked her for a very sensible person with perfectly simple manners. The other day he met her in Liverpool, and she told him she had been intending to call on me ever since she had been at her sister's at Rose Hill Hall, Woolton, seven miles from Liverpool. Mr. Hawthorne wished me to invite her to dine and pass the night. I invited her to dine on the 29th of December. She accepted and came. I found her tall as her famous character, Meg Merrilies, with a face of peculiar, square form, most amiable in expression, and so very untheatrical in manner and bearing that I should never suspect her to be an actress. She has left the stage now two years, and retires upon the fortune she has made; for she was a very great favorite on the English stage, and retired in the height of her fame. The children liked her prodigiously, and Rose was never weary of the treasures attached to her watch-chain. I could not recount to you the gems clustered there,--such as a fairy tiny gold palette, with all the colors arranged; a tiny easel with a colored landscape, quarter of an inch wide; a tragic and comic mask, just big enough for a gnome; a cross of the Legion of Honor; a wallet, opening with a spring, and disclosing compartments just of a size for the Keeper of the Privy Purse of the Fairy Queen; a dagger for a pygmy; two minute daguerreotypes of friends, each as large as a small pea, in a gold case; an opera-glass; Faith, Hope, and Charity represented by a golden heart and anchor, and I forget what,--a little harp; I cannot remember any more. These were all, I think, memorials of friends. In the morning she sat down to 'Una's beautifully toned piano, and sang one of Lockhart's Spanish ballads, with eloquent expression, so as to make my blood tingle. Hospitality was quite frequent now in our first English home, as many letters affirm. The delightful novelty to my small self of a peep at the glitter of little dinner-parties was as surprising to me as if I could have had a real consciousness of its contrast to all the former simplicity of my parents' life. Down the damask trooped the splendid silver covers, entrancingly catching a hundred reflections from candle-flame and cut-glass, and my own face as I hovered for a moment upon the scene while the butler was gliding hither and thither to complete his artistic arrangements. On my father's side of the family there had been a distinct trait of material elegance, appearing in such evidences as an exquisite tea-service, brought from China by my grandfather, with the intricate monogram and dainty shapes and decoration of a hundred years ago; and in a few chairs and tables that could not be surpassed for graceful design and finish; and so on. As for my mother's traits of inborn refinement, they were marked enough, but she writes of herself to her sister at this time, "You cannot think how I cannot be in the least tonish, such is my indomitable simplicity of style." Her opinion of herself was always humble; and I can testify to the distinguished figure she made as she wore the first ball-dress I ever detected her in. I was supposed to be fast asleep, and she had come to look at me before going out to some social function, as she has told me she never failed to do when leaving the house for a party. Her superb brocade, pale-tinted, low-necked, and short-sleeved, her happy, airy manner, her glowing though pale face, her dancing eyes, her ever-hovering smile of perfect kindness, all flashed upon me in the sudden light as I roused myself. I insisted upon gazing and admiring, yet I ended by indignantly weeping to find that my gentle little mother could be so splendid and wear so triumphant an expression. "She is frightened at my fine gown!" my mother exclaimed, with a changed look of self-forgetting concern; and I never lost the lesson of how much more beautiful her noble glance was than her triumphant one. A faded bill has been preserved, for the humor of it, from Salem days, in which it is recorded that for the year 1841 she ordered ten pairs of number two kid slippers,--which was not precisely economical for a young lady who needed to earn money by painting, and who denied herself a multitude of pleasures and comforts which were enjoyed by relatives and friends. In our early experience of English society, my mother's suppressed fondness for the superb burst into fruition, and the remnants of such indulgence have turned up among severest humdrum for many years; but soon she refused to permit herself even momentary extravagances. To those who will remember duty, hosts of duties appeal, and it was not long before my father and mother began to save for their children's future the money which flowed in. Miss Cushman's vagary of an amusing watch-chain was exactly the sort of thing which they never imitated; they smiled at it as the saucy tyranny over a great character of great wealth. My father's rigid economy was perhaps more un broken than my mother's. Still, she has written, "I never knew what charity meant till I knew my husband." There are many records of his having heard clearly the teaching that home duties are not so necessary or loving as duty towards the homeless. Julian came home from Liverpool with papa one afternoon with four masks, with which we made merry for several days. One was the face of a simpleton, and that was very funny upon papa,--such a transformation! A spectacled old beldame, looking exactly like a terrific auld wife at Lenox, was very diverting upon Julian, turning him into a gnome; and Una was irresistible beneath the mask of a meaningless young miss, resembling a silly-looking doll. Julian put on another with a portentous nose, and then danced the schottische with Una in her doll's mask. Hearing this morning that a gentleman had sent to some regiments 50 pounds worth of postage stamps, he said he thought it would be better to have an arrangement for all the soldiers' letters to go and come free. I do not know but he had better send this suggestion to the "London Times." March 12. Mr. Hawthorne dined at Aigbarth, one of the suburbs of Liverpool, with Mr. Bramley Moore, an M. P. Mr. Moore took an effectual way to secure Mr. Hawthorne, for he went one day himself to his office, and asked him for the very same evening, thus bearding the lion in his den and clutching him. And Mrs. H., the aunt of Henry Bright, would not be discouraged. She could not get Mr. Hawthorne to go to her splendid fancy ball, to meet Lord and Lady Sefton and all the aristocracy of the county . . . but wrote him a note telling him that if he wished for her forgiveness he must agree with me upon a day when we would go and dine with her. Mr. Hawthorne delayed, and then she wrote me a note, appointing the 16th of March for us to go and meet the Martineaus and Brights and remain all night. There was no evading this, so he is going; but I refused. Her husband is a mighty banker, and she is sister of the present Chancellor of the Exchequer, W. E. Gladstone, and they are nobly connected all round. . . . Mr. Hawthorne does not want to go, and especially curses the hour when white muslin cravats became the sine qua non of a gentleman's full dress. Just think how reverend he must look! I believe he would even rather wear a sword and cocked hat, for he declares a white muslin cravat the last abomination, the chief enormity of fashion, and that all the natural feelings of a man cry out against it; and that it is alike abhorrent to taste and to sentiment. To all this I reply that he looks a great deal handsomer with white about his throat than with a stiff old black satin stock, which always to me looks like the stocks, and that it is habit only which makes him prefer it. . . . March 16. Mr. Hawthorne has gone to West Derby to dine . . . and stay all night. He left me with a powerful anathema against all dinner-parties, declaring he did not believe anybody liked them, and therefore they were a malicious invention for destroying human comfort. Mr. Bramley Moore again seized Mr. Hawthorne in the Consulate, the other clay, and dragged him to Aigbarth to dine with Mr. Warren, the author of "Ten Thousand a Year" and "The Diary of a Physician." Mr. Hawthorne liked him very well. Mr. Warren commenced to say something very complimentary to Mr. Hawthorne in a low tone, across an intermediate gentleman, when Mr. Bramley Moore requested that the company might have the benefit of it, so Mr. Warren spoke aloud; and then Mr. Hawthorne had to make a speech in return! We expected Mr. Warren here to dine afterwards, but he has gone home to Hull. Mrs. Sanders again sent a peremptory summons for us all to go to London and make her a visit. I wish Mr. Hawthorne could leave his affairs and go, for she lives in Portman Square, and Mr. Buchanan would get us admitted everywhere. Mr. Sanders has been rejected by the Senate; but I do not suppose he cares much, since he is worth a half million of dollars. Sir Thomas Talfourd, the author of "Ion," suddenly died the other day, universally mourned. I believe his brother Field, who came to England with us, is again in America, now. I trust the rest of the notable men of England will live till I have seen them. This gentleman wished very much to meet Mr. Hawthorne. March 30. Mr. Hawthorne went to Norris Green and dined with the H----s, Martineaus, and Brights, and others, and stayed all night, as appointed. He declared that, when he looked in the glass before going down to dinner, he presented the appearance of a respectable butler, with his white cravat--and thought of hiring himself out. He liked Mr. H. . . . He gives away 7000 pounds a year in charity! Mrs. H. is good, too, for she goes herself and sees into the condition of a whole district in Liverpool, though a dainty lady of fashion. She showed Mr. Hawthorne a miniature of the famous Sir Kenelm Digby, who was her ancestor; and so through his family she is connected with the Percys and the Stanleys, Earls of Derby. Everything was in sumptuous fashion, served by gorgeous footmen. Mr. Hawthorne was chief guest. . . . Mrs. H. has sense, and is rather sentimental, too. She has no children, and had the assurance to tell Mr. Hawthorne she preferred chickens to children. The next day Mr. Bright invited Mr. Hawthorne to drive. Mr. Bright wanted to call on his cousin, Sir Thomas Birch. And as he was the nearest neighbor of the Earl of Derby, he took them to Knowsley, Lord Derby's seat. At Sir Thomas's, Mr. Hawthorne saw a rookery for the first time; and a picture of Lady Birch, his mother, painted by Sir Thomas Lawrence, but not quite finished. It is said to be one of his best pictures. Mr. Hawthorne was disappointed in the house at Knowsley. It was lower than he had imagined, and of various eras, but so large as to be able to entertain an hundred guests. April 14, Good Friday. MY DEAR FATHER,--This is a day of great and solemn fast in England; when all business is suspended, and no work is done in house or street; when there is really a mighty pause in worldly affairs, and all people remind themselves that Christ was crucified, and died for us. From early morning till late evening, all churches are open and service is performed. I wish you could be undeceived about the income of this Consulate. Mr. Hawthorne now knows actually everything about it. . . . He goes from us at nine, and we do not see him again till five!!! I only wish we could be pelted within an inch of our lives with a hailstorm of sovereigns, so as to satisfy every one's most gorgeous hopes; but I am afraid we shall have but a gentle shower, after all. . . . I am sorry I have had the expectation of so much, because I am rather disappointed to be so circumscribed. With my husband's present constant devotion to the duties of his office, he could no more write a syllable than he could build a cathedral. . . . He never writes by candle-light. . . . Mr. Crittendon tells Mr. Hawthorne that he thinks he may save $5000 a year by economy. He himself, living in a very quiet manner, not going into society, has spent $4000 a year. He thinks we must spend more. People will not let Mr. Hawthorne alone, as they have Mr. Crittendon, because they feel as if they had a right to him, and he cannot well forego their claim. "The Scarlet Letter" seems to have placed him on a pinnacle of fame and love here. . . . It will give you pleasure, I think, to hear that Mr. Cecil read a volume of "The Scarlet Letter" the other day which was one of the thirty-fifth thousand of one publisher. Is it not provoking that the author should not have even one penny a volume? I have only room to put in the truest, warmest sympathy with all your efforts and trials, and the wish that I could lift you up out of all, and sorrow that I cannot. Mr. Hawthorne has relations and personal friends who look to him, I think, with great desires. I can demand nothing for mine. Though the great Reform Bill of Lord John Russell was deferred by him the other night to another period on account of war, yet reforms on every point in social life are going on here, or moving to go on. Nothing seems to escape some eye that has suddenly opened. The Earl of Shaftesbury is one of God's Angels of Benefits. The hideous condition of the very poor and even of tradesmen is being demonstrated to the nation; a condition in which, a writer in the London "Athenaeum" says, "Virtue is impossible"! From this most crying and worst evil, up through all things, sounds the trumpet of reform. Such abuse of the good President as there is, is sickening. I hope those who vilify him for doing what he considers his duty have a quarter of his conscience and uprightness. He is a brave man. . . . He wrote Mr. Hawthorne that he had no hope of being popular during the first part of his administration at least. He can be neither bribed, bought, nor tempted in his political course; he will do what he thinks constitutional and right, and find content in it. . . . I wish our Senators had as good manners as the noble lords of Parliament. But we are perfect savages in manners as yet, and have no self-control, nor reverence. The dignity and serenity of maturer age will, I trust, come at last to us. . . . I never dreamed of putting myself into a picture, because I am not handsome enough. But I will endeavor that you have Mr. Hawthorne and Rosebud, some time or other. Mr. Hawthorne looks supremely handsome here; handsomer than anybody I see; every other face looks coarse, compared; and his air and bearing are far superior to those of any Englishman I have seen. The English say that they should suppose he were an Englishman--till he speaks. This is a high compliment from the English. They look at him as much as they can, covertly; as much as they can without being uncivil and staring, as if they wanted to assure themselves that he really were so wondrous handsome. He does not observe this; but it is nuts to me, and / observe it. The lofty, sumptuous apartments become him very much. I always thought he was born for a palace, and he shows that he was. We have had some delightful experiences, and have seen some interesting people, some literary celebrities, and beautiful English life within jealous stone walls, draped with ivy inside. We see why comfort is an essentially English word, and we understand Shakespeare and all the old poets properly now we are on the scene. CHAPTER X ENGLISH DAYS: II DOUGLAS, MONA, July 18. MY DEAR FATHER,--I little dreamed that I should next address you from the Isle of Man! Yet here we all are, with one grievous exception, to be sure; for Mr. Hawthorne, after fetching us one day, and staying the two next, went away to the tiresome old Consulate, so conscientious and devoted is he; for his clerk assured him he might stay a little. Yet I know that there are reasons of state why he should not; and therefore, though I am nothing less than infinitely desolate without him, and hate to look at anything new unless he is looking too, I cannot complain. But is it not wonderful that I am here in this remote and interesting and storied spot?--the last retreat of the little people called fairies, the lurking-place of giants and enchanters. . . . At Stonehenge we found a few rude stones for a temple. I could not gather into a small enough focus the wide glances of Julian's great brown, searching eyes to make him see even what there was; and when finally he comprehended that the circle of stones once marked out a temple, and that the Druids really once stood there, he curled his lip, scornfully exclaiming, "Is that all?" and bounded off to pluck flowers. I think that, having heard of Stonehenge and a Druid temple which was built of stones so large that it was considered almost miraculous that they were moved to their places, he expected to see a temple touching the sky, perhaps. . . . Mr. Hawthorne came back the next Friday, much to our joy, and on Saturday afternoon we walked to the Nunnery with him, which was founded by St. Bridget. A few ruins remain, overgrown with old ivy vines of such enormous size that I think they probably hold the walls together. . . . Julian and Una were enchanted with the clear stream, and Julian was wild for turtles; but there are no reptiles in the Isle of Man. . . . I kept thinking, "And this is the rugged, bare, rocky isle which I dreaded to come to,--this soft, rich, verdant paradise!" It really seems as if the giants had thrown aloft the bold, precipitous rocks and headlands round the edge of the island, to guard the sylvan solitudes for the fairies, whose stronghold was the Isle of Man. I should not have been surprised at any time to have seen those small people peeping out of the wild foxgloves, which are their favorite hiding-places. So poetical is the air of these regions that mermaids, fairies, and giants seem quite natural to it. In the morning of the day we went to the Nunnery Mr. Hawthorne took Julian and went to the Douglas market, which is held in the open air. . . . My husband said that living manners were so interesting and valuable that he would not miss the scene for even Peel Castle. One day, when Una and I went to shop in Douglas, we saw in the market square a second-hand bookstall. I had been trying in vain to get "Peveril of the Peak" at the library and bookstores, and hoped this sales-counter might have it. So I looked over the books, and what do you think I saw? A well-read and soiled copy of the handsome edition of Mr. Hawthorne's "Blithedale Romance"! Yes, even in Mona. We have heard of some families in England who keep in use two copies of "The Scarlet Letter;" but I never dreamed of finding either of these books here. Sunday was the perfectest day in our remembrance. In the morning Mr. Hawthorne walked to Kirk Braddon, and the afternoon we spent on Douglas Head. It is quite impossible to put into words that afternoon. Such softness and splendor and freshness combined in the air; such a clearest sunshine; such a deep blue sea and cloudless blue heaven; such fragrance and such repose. We looked from our great height upon all the beauty and grandeur, and in Mr. Hawthorne's face was a reflection of the incredible loveliness and majesty of the scene. Una was a lily, and Julian a magnolia. I think that for once, at least, Mr. Hawthorne was satisfied with weather and circumstances. Towards sunset the mountains of Cumberland were visible, for the first time during our visit, on the horizon, which proved that even in England the air was clear that day. A pale purple outline of waving hills lay on the silvery sea, which, as it grew later, became opaline in hue. . . . July 20. . . . This morning, soon after ten, we summoned a boat, and were rowed to St. Mary's Rock, which has a good beach on one side, and spent two hours there. There was a delicious air and bright sunshine, and we found innumerable pretty pearl shells among the pebbles; and Julian bathed in the sea. Rosebud enjoyed it very much, and kept close to me all the time. I asked her why she kept so near mamma, and she replied, "Oh, dear mamma, I cannot help it." Once she put her little foot into a pool, and I had to take off her sock and shoe to dry them in the sun. Her snowy little foot and pink toes looked, on the rocks, like a new kind of shell, and I told her I was afraid a gentleman who was seeking shells on the other side of the island would come and take it for a conch shell, and put it in his pocket for his little children. She shouted at this; and then threw back her head, with a' silent laugh, like Leatherstocking, showing all her little pearly teeth,--so pretty with her rosy cheeks and streaming hair. I actually seem in a dream, and not here in bodily presence. I cannot imagine myself here; much less realize it. Through the mist Douglas looked like a vast leviathan asleep on the sea, as we approached. It is a pity that steam should come near such a place, for its bustle is not in harmony with the vast repose. I suppose the world could scarcely furnish another such stately and salubrious spot as exactly this; for the climate of the Isle of Man is extremely mild and genial. From my parlor windows, in the Fort Anne Hotel, I look out on the beautiful crescent harbor from a good height. . . . Mountains rise above high hills on the horizon in soft, large, mellow lines, which I am never weary of gazing at. The hills are of precious emerald stone; the sea is an opal; the distant mountains are a pile of topazes; and the sky is turquoise and gold. But why attempt to put into ink such a magnificent setting as this? No jewels could be compared to it. God alone could mingle these colors and pencil these grand lines. . . . ROCK PARK, August 2. DEAR ELIZABETH,--We returned last Saturday, after a delightful visit to Mona of a fortnight. We had constantly splendid weather, and there was one day which Mr. Hawthorne and I concluded we had never seen equaled in any hemisphere. . . . I took Una and Julian to Glen Darragh to see the ruins of a Druidical temple. . . . We ascended Mount Murray . . . and a magnificent landscape was revealed to us; a fertile valley of immense extent. . . . But before we arrived at Glen Darragh we came to Kirk Braddon, an uncommonly lovely place. I knew that in the churchyard were two very old Runic monuments, so we alighted. . . . The family residence of the late Duke of Atholl is situated at the extremity of a flat meadow; and as far as I could see, it did not seem a very princely residence. But in this country I am often struck with the simplicity and freedom from show which those of real rank are contented with. They seem really to agree with Burns that "the man's the gawd." At Knowsley, the residence of the Earls of Derby, the inside of the mansion was very simple, and they are the proudest nobles of England. We finally arrived at Glen Darragh, and I gazed about in vain to see the ruins of a temple. . . . We came at last to some mounds of earth, with rough stones on their tops, but I could discover no design or order to them, and was quite cast down. But then I saw more, at a short distance, of better hope, and I ran to them, and found they were stones placed in a circular form, inclosing about fourteen yards diameter. These stones, however, were unhewn and of moderate size. And this was all. I broke off a crumb of one of the stones, and looked around me. It was quite desolate, for a large space. Not a tree or a shrub grew near, but grand mountains rose up on every side. Glen Darragh means the vale of oaks, but not an oak could be seen. The singular destruction of trees in this be-battled, be-conquered island is unaccountable. Why invaders should uproot such innocent adorners of the earth is a mystery. It is said that the Druids found a great many pine woods there, and that they up-rooted them and planted their favorite oaks. But pines, oaks, Druids, temples, and all are gone now, except these few stones. I wondered whether any terrible human sacrifices had been offered on the spot where I was standing. The mountains were the same, and the sky was the same; but all else had changed since those fearful days. . . . Of course Rome was here, for where did that proud queen not set her imperial foot? But the only sign of her left is at Castletown: it is an ancient altar. I looked out of the chamber window one night, and at twelve o'clock the golden flush of sunset still glowed in the west, and in the east was an enormous star. We often see Venus very large at home, but this was three times as large as we ever see it. I do not know what this star was. It must have been Venus, however. The star of beauty should surely rise over such a day as this had been. Once we rowed about the island, and it was truly superb--this circumnavigation. We were near enough to the shore to see every house and animal and tree, but far off from dangerous rocks. We passed St. Manghold's Head. The saint was an Irish prince, converted by St. Patrick, and became so eminent for sanctity that St. Bridget came from Ireland to receive the veil from him. It is the most eastern point of the island, and its summit is crested with rocks. Under one is a spring, called St. Manghold's Well, which is thought to have medicinal virtues; and if any one who drinks the waters sits at the same time in the saint's chair,--a rude stone seat near,--they will certainly prove beneficial. We landed at Ramsey, and walked through the town. Towns fade into utter insignificance in that island. Nature is so grand there that houses and streets seem impertinences, and make no account, unless some stately castle towers up. The towns look like barnacles clinging to a majestic ship's sides. . . . This evening Mr. Hawthorne brings me news of the death of L. Howes! We were thinking yesterday what a mournful change had come over that family since we used to go every Saturday evening and see them, in most charming family group, all those bright, intelligent, happy faces gathered round the centre-table or fireside, beaming with life, and mind, and heart. . . . Julian enjoyed the rocks and beaches and sea-bathing at Mona greatly, and on his return here was homesick for it all for two days. Una grew so homesick for Rockferry that she could hardly be kept away till I was ready to come, though she also enjoyed the sea and the island very much. But I think she has inhabitiveness to a great degree. As to Rose, she was like a sunbeam from morning to night. . . . I have a slight journal of my visit to the Isle of Man, written at the earnest request of Mr. Hawthorne. Rose is in no danger of forgetting you. We talk to her about you a great deal, and she is always referring to "When I was in 'Morica." Miss Martineau is about Liverpool, and while I was at the island Mr. Bright took Mr. Hawthorne to see her. She was extremely agreeable and brilliant. She has become quite infidel in her opinions. . . . It must be either a fool or a madman who says there is no GOD. . . . I had a delightful visit from the Cochrans, and went with them to Chester. Martha was deeply affected by the Cathedral, especially by the cloisters. Tears filled her eyes. After luncheon, we went to see a Roman bath and a Roman crypt, the last discovered within a few months. The bath is back of, and beneath, a crockery shop. We saw first a cold bath. It was merely an oblong stone basin, built round a perpetual spring. A high iron railing now guards it, and we looked into what seemed almost a well, where the Romans used to plunge. . . . The black water reflected the candle and glittered far below. It might be the eye of one of the twentieth legion. We then went into a shop and asked for the crypt. The men pointed to a door, which we opened, and nearly tumbled down some stone steps. By degrees our eyes became owlish, and we gradually saw, as if looming out of past ages, the beautiful arches of the roof, and the columns on each side. . . . My mother gives a glimpse of the vicissitudes of the Consulate,--that precinct which I pictured as an ogre's lair, though the ogre was temporarily absent, while my father, like a prince bewitched, had been compelled by a rash vow to languish in the man-eater's place for a term of years:-- "In the evening Mr. Hawthorne told me that there were suddenly thrown upon his care two hundred soldiers who had been shipwrecked in the San Francisco, and that he must clothe and board them and send them home to the United States. They were picked up somewhere on the sea and brought to Liverpool. Mr. Hawthorne has no official authority to take care of any but sailors in distress. He invited the lieutenant to come and stay here, and he must take care of the soldiers, even if the expense comes out of his own purse." [Later.] "Mr. Hawthorne sent to Mr. Buchanan (the Ambassador) about the soldiers, and he would share no responsibility, though it was much more a matter pertaining to his powers than to a consul. . . . Mr. Hawthorne has supplied them with clothes and lodgings, and has finally chartered for their passage home one of the Cunard steamers! Such are his official reverses." "Last Friday I received a note from the wife of the U. S. Consul at London, inviting me and the children to go with Mr. Hawthorne to town, to see the Queen open Parliament. It was such a cordial invitation that it was nearly impossible to refuse; but we could not go, Mr. Hawthorne was so busy with these soldiers, and with trials in the police courts; so that he could not leave his post." [Still later.] "As to shipwrecked sailors, there seems no end to them; and for all Mr. Hawthorne's costs for them he is, of course, repaid. His hands are full all the time. But in the history of the world, it is said, there never were so many shipwrecks as there have been this last winter. The coasts of Great Britain seem to have been nothing but stumbling-blocks in the way of every ship. . . . I have seen, in an American paper, a passage in which the writer undertakes to defend my husband from some dirty aspersions. It seems that some one had told the absolute falsehood that he had shirked all responsibility about the shipwrecked soldiers, and his defender stated the case just as it was, and that Mr. Buchanan declined having anything to do with the matter. The government will make the chartering of the steamer good to Mr. Hawthorne. . . . He has been very busily occupied at the Consulate this winter and spring,--so many disasters at sea, and vagabonds asking for money. He has already lost more than a hundred pounds by these impostors. But he is very careful indeed, and those persons who have proved dishonest were gentlemen in their own esteem, and it was difficult to suspect them. But he is well on his guard now; and he says the moment he sees a coat-tail he knows whether the man it belongs to is going to beg! His life in the Consulate is not charming. He has to pay a great penalty for the result of his toil. Not that he has any drudgery, but he is imprisoned and in harness. He will not let me take a pen in my hand when he is at home, because at any rate I see him so little." Such paragraphs as the one I add, from a little letter of my sister's, often appear; but in this instance it was the glad exclamation of release, just before we removed to Italy:-- "Papa will be with us on Monday, free from the terrors of the old Consulate. Perhaps you can imagine what infinitely joyful news that is to us; and to him, too, as much, if not more so; for he has had all the work, and we have only suffered from his absence." The letters proceed:-- MY DEAR FATHER,--It was delightful to see your handwriting this week, written with the same firmness as ever. It gives me unspeakable satisfaction to know that the drafts Mr. Hawthorne sent contribute to your ease, and supply you with embellishments and luxuries, which in sickness are necessaries. I only wish I could put strength into your limbs, as well as provide you with a stuffed chair to repose them upon. Mr. Hawthorne has wished, you see, to prevent your having any anxiety about little wants. It will be all right for the present, and future too. . . . I suppose the War will affect everything in a disastrous manner, except the End, and that God will take into His own hands for good, no doubt, though not as either party proposes. Here in England we are wholly occupied with the War. No one thinks or talks of anything else. Every face is grave with sorrow for the suffering and slaughter, and then triumphant with pride and joy at the incredible heroism of the troops. . . . In his sermon before the last, Mr. Channing brought out my dearest, inmost doctrines and faith; the sovereignty of good; the unfallen ideal in man; the impossibility of God's ever for one moment turning from man, or being averse to him; the essential transitoriness of evil. . . . I deeply regret that Una and Julian cannot hear the sermons for the little people, for I think it would do much towards saving their souls. My mother's loss in the death of her father was a great grief, which fell upon her at this time. She wrote to my aunt:-- DEAR ELIZABETH,--If anything could have softened such a blow, it would have been the divine way in which my husband told me. If a seraph can look more radiant with love--a flaming love, veiled with most tender, sorrowing sympathy--than he did, I am sure I cannot conceive of it, and am quite contented not to. I saw and felt in a moment how beyond computation and desert I was still rich,--richest. Father's sincerity, his childlike guilelessness, his good sense and rectitude, his unaffected piety,--all and each of his qualities made him interesting to my husband. I really do not believe any one else ever listened to his stories and his conversation with as much love and interest. Whatever is real and simple and true attracts my husband both as a poet and as a man. Genuine nature he always springs to. Father was entirely unspoiled by the world--as pure of it as a dewdrop. This indeed made him a rare person. He seems to stand meekly in the presence of God. Where more arch-angelic intellect--divine genius--would tremble and faint, simple goodness will feel quite at home, with its one talent become two talents, and its faith and hope blossomed into reality. By and by I shall perhaps have a vivid sense of his presence, as I did of mother's, six weeks after her departure. We have been out, for the first time, walking in the garden. The morning was beautiful. The budding shrubbery was on every side, and daisies and wallflowers and auriculas blooming even while a thin veil of snow lay in some places. Una, in writing home to America, portrays the family peace, and the little landscapes of the quieter corners of our "Old Home:"-- "We have got to England at last. It does not seem as if we were in England, but in Boston or Salem. There is not so much noise here as there was in Boston. "Mamma has told you about Mr. Rathbone's place, but I do not think she has told you about one place by the wall. The wall is run over with all sorts of vines, and there are summer-houses close up by the wall, and a little brook rippling in front, and a great many mighty trees in front, so that not a ray of the sun could peep through. "On Sunday, the great Easter Sunday, we went to the Chapel of the Blind, and stayed through the Communion service. Mamma received the sacrament. The sermon was very tiresome. It was about the skins that Adam and Eve wore. . . . I was very much interested in Chester, and all the old things I saw there, especially the Cathedral. As we walked round the cloisters you could almost fancy you saw the monks pacing slowly round, and looking now and then on the beautiful dewy green grass which is in the middle of the cloisters. On Monday my dear godpapa [Mr. O'Sullivan] went to London. Mamma got up at half past four and set on the table some chicken-pie, some oranges, and what she thought to be stout, and some flowers which I had gathered in the morning, and gave all these to him. "Rose is sitting on papa's knee, and through her golden hair I can see her little contented face. She has got down now, and is engaged in a lively discussion with Julian about her name. Julian has been dancing round with the heat, for he thought dancing round would keep him cool. Rose is sitting in mamma's lap now, and she looks so jolly. Her very rosy round face and her waving flowing hair make her look so pretty. She is very sharp, and she has a great deal of fun in her. She has learnt 'Hark, the lark,' 'The Cuckoo,' and 'Where the bee sucks, there suck I.' She says them very prettily, and she has a sweet, simple way of saying what she knows." Thoughts of her own country recall the joys of Lenox:-- "I have been nutting a great many times in Berkshire. Papa and mamma, Julian and I, all took large baskets and went into the woods, and there we would stay sometimes all day, picking walnuts and chestnuts. Perhaps where we were there were mostly walnuts; but still there were a good many chestnuts. We had a very large oven in which we put as many of our nuts as we could, and the rest we put into large bags. We, and the rats and mice, had nice feasts on them every winter. "Papa bought Julian a pop-gun to console him when we were going away to visit the Brights, for he had not been invited. He was very good about it indeed, and fired off his pop-gun in honor of mamma's going away. "Papa gave Julian a new boat a little while ago, a yacht, and mamma has painted it beautifully in oils. I am going to make the sails for it. "Please call me Primrose in your letters. Rose is called Periwinkle. Papa bought her an image of Uncle Tom and Eva, sitting on a bank, and Uncle Tom is reading the Bible. Eva has on a plaid apron, and has yellow cheeks, and is not very pretty. Uncle Tom is not either. Baby was very much pleased." To return to my mother's records:-- RHYL, NORTH WALES. Dr. Drysdale thought we needed another change of air, and so we came south this time. . . . The sun sinks just beside Great Orme's Head, after turning the sea into living gold, and the heights into heaps of amethyst. On the right is only sea, sea, sea. . . . I intended to go to the Queen's Hotel, and knew nothing about the manner of living in the lodging fashion. So we have to submit to German silver and the most ordinary table service. . . . Ever since our marriage we have always eaten off the finest French china, and had all things pretty and tasteful; because, you know, I would never have second-best services, considering my husband to be my most illustrious guest. But now! It is really laughable to think of the appointments of the table at which the Ambassador to Lisbon and the American Consul sat down last Saturday, when they honored me with their presence. And we did laugh, for it was of no consequence,--and the great bow window of our parlor looked out upon the sea. We did not come here to see French china and pure silver forks and spoons, but to walk on the beach, bathe in the ocean, and drive to magnificent old castles,--and get rid of whooping-cough. I had the enterprise to take all the children and Mary, and come without Mr. Hawthorne; for he was in a great hurry to get me off, fearing the good weather would not last. He followed on Saturday with Mr. O'Sullivan, who arrived from Lisbon just an hour before they both started for Rhyl. . . . Julian's worship of nature and natural objects meets with satisfaction here. . . . The following was also written from Rhyl:-- "While the carriage stopped I heard the rapturous warble of the skylark, and finally discovered him, mounting higher still and higher, pressing upwards, and pouring out such rich, delicious music that I wanted to close my eyes and shut out the world, and listen to nothing but that. Not even Shelley's or Wordsworth's words can convey an adequate idea of this song. It seems as if its little throat were the outlet of all the joy that had been experienced on the earth since creation; and that with all its power it were besieging heaven with gratitude and love for the infinite bliss of life. Life, joy, love. The blessed, darling little bird, quivering, warbling, urging its way farther and farther; and finally swooning with excess of delight, and sinking back to earth! You see I am vainly trying to help you to an idea of it, but I cannot do it. I do not understand why the skylark should not rise from our meadows as well, and the nightingale sing to our roses." Society and the sternness of life were, however, but a hair's-breadth away:-- "Monday evening Mr. Hawthorne went to Richmond Hill to meet Mr. Buchanan. The service was entirely silver, plates and all, and in a high state of sheen. The Queen's autograph letter was spoken of (which you will see in the 'Northern Times' that goes with this); and as it happens to be very clumsily expressed, Mr. Hawthorne was much perplexed by Mr. Buchanan's asking him, before the whole company at dinner, 'what he thought of the Queen's letter.' Mr. Hawthorne replied that it showed very kind feeling. 'No,' persisted the wicked Ambassador; 'but what do you think of the style?' Mr. Hawthorne was equal to him, or rather, conquered him, however, for he said, 'The Queen has a perfect right to do what she pleases with her own English.' Mr. Hawthorne thought Miss Lane, Mr. Buchanan's niece, a very elegant person, and far superior to any English lady present. The next evening Mr. Hawthorne went to another dinner at Everton; so that on Wednesday, when we again sat down together, I felt as if he had been gone a month. This second dinner was not remarkable in any way, except that when the ladies took leave they all went to him and requested to shake hands with him! "No act of the British people in behalf of the soldiers has struck me as so noble and touching as that of the reformed criminals at an institution in London. They wished to contribute something to the Patriotic Fund. The only way they could do it was by fasting. So from Sunday night till Tuesday morning they ate nothing, and the money saved (three pounds and over) was sent to the Fund! Precious money is this." In Rockferry, my first remembered home, the personality of my father was the most cheerful element, and the one which we all needed, as the sunshine is needed by an English scene to make its happiness apparent. If he was at all "morbid," my advice would be to adopt morbidness at once. Perhaps he would have been a sad man if he had been an ordinary one. Genius can make charming presences of characters that really are gloomy and savage, being so magical in its transmutation of dry fact. People were glad to be scolded by Carlyle, and shot down by Dr. Johnson. But I am persuaded by reason that those who called Hawthorne sad would have complained of the tears of Coriolanus or Othello; and, with Coriolanus, he could say, "It is no little thing to make mine eyes to sweat compassion." It was the presence of the sorrow of the world which made him silent. Who dares to sneer at that? When I think of my mother,--naturally hopeful, gently merry, ever smiling,--who, while my father lived, was so glad a woman that her sparkling glance was never dimmed, and when I have to acknowledge that even she did not fill us children with the zest of content which he brought into the room for us, I must conclude that genius and cheer together made him life-giving; and so he was enchanting to those who were intimate with him, and to many who saw him for but a moment. Dora Golden, my brother's old nurse, has said that when she first came to the family she feared my father was going to be severe, because he had a way of looking at strangers from under bent brows. But the moment he lifted his head his eyes flashed forth beautiful and kindly. She has told me that my mother and she used to think at dusk, when he entered the room before the lamps were lit, that the place was illuminated by his face; his eyes shone, his whole countenance gleamed, and my mother simply called him "our sunlight." My sister's girlish letters are evidence of the enthusiasm of the family for my father's companionship, and of our stanch hatred for the Consulate because it took him away from us so much. He read aloud, as he always had done, in the easiest, clearest, most genial way, as if he had been born only to let his voice enunciate an endless procession of words. He read "The Lady of the Lake" aloud about this time, and Una wrote expressing our delight in his personality over and above that in his usefulness: "Papa has gone to dine in Liverpool, so we shall not hear 'Don Quixote' this evening, or have papa either." Little references to him show how he was always weaving golden threads into the woof of daily monotony. Julian, seven years old, writes to his grandfather, "Papa has taught Una and me to make paper boats, and the bureau in my room is covered with paper steamers and boats." I can see him folding them now, as if it were yesterday, and how intricate the newspapers became which he made into hulls, decks, and sails. At one time Una bursts out, in recognition of the unbroken peace and good will in the home, "It will certainly be my own fault if I am not pretty good when I grow up, for I have had both example and precept." The nurse to whom I have just referred has said that when Julian was about four, sometimes he would annoy her while she was sewing; and if his father was in the room, she would tell Julian to go to him and ask him to read about Robbie, who was Robinson Crusoe. He would sit quietly all the time his father read to him, no matter for how long. But her master finally told Dora not to send Julian to him in this way to hear "Robinson Crusoe," because he was "tired of reading it to him." The nurse was a bit of a genius herself, in her way, and not to be easily suppressed, and when her charge became fidgety, and she was in a hurry, she made one more experiment with Robbie. Her master turned round in his chair, and for the first time in four years she saw an angry look on his face, and he commanded her "never to do it again." At three years of age Julian played pranks upon his father without trepidation. There was a "boudoir" in the house which had a large, pleasant window, and was therefore thought to be agreeable enough to be used as a prison-house for Una and Julian when they were naughty. Julian conveyed his father into the boudoir, and shut the door on him adroitly. It had no handle on the inner side, purposely, and the astonished parent was caged. "You cannot come out," said Julian, "until you have promised to be a good boy." Through the persistent dignity with which Hawthorne behaved, and with which he was always treated by the household, Julian had felt the down of playful love. Here are letters written to me while I was in Portugal with my mother, in 1856:-- MY DEAR LITTLE ROSEBUD,--I have put a kiss for you in this nice, clean piece of paper. I shall fold it up carefully, and I hope it will not drop out before it gets to Lisbon. If you cannot find it, you must ask Mamma to look for it. Perhaps you will find it on her lips. Give my best regards to your Uncle John and Aunt Sue, and to all your kind friends, not forgetting your Nurse. Your affectionate father, N. H. MY DEAR LITTLE ROSEBUD,--It is a great while since I wrote to you; and I am afraid this letter will be a great while in reaching you. I hope you are a very good little girl; and I am sure you never get into a passion, and never scream, and never scratch and strike your dear Nurse or your dear sister Una. Oh no! my little Rosebud would never do such naughty things as those. It would grieve me very much if I were to hear of her doing such things. When you come back to England, I shall ask Mamma whether you have been a good little girl; and Mamma (I hope) will say: "Yes; our little Rosebud has been the best and sweetest little girl I ever knew in my life. She has never screamed nor uttered any but the softest and sweetest sounds. She has never struck Nurse nor Una nor dear Mamma with her little fist, nor scratched them with her sharp little nails; and if ever there was a little angel on earth, it is our dear little Rosebud!" And when Papa hears this, he will be very glad, and will take Rosebud up in his arms and kiss her over and over again. But if he were to hear that she had been naughty, Papa would feel it his duty to eat little Rosebud up! Would not that be very terrible? Julian is quite well, and sends you his love. I have put a kiss for you in this letter; and if you do not find it, you may be sure that some naughty person has got it. Tell Nurse I want to see her very much. Kiss Una for me. Your loving PAPA. The next letter is of later date, having been written while the rest of the family were in Manchester:-- MY DEAR LITTLE PESSIMA,--I am very glad that Mamma is going to take you to see "Tom Thump;" and I think it is much better to call him Thump than Thumb, and I always mean to call him so from this time forward. It is a very nice name, is Tom Thump. I hope you will call him Tom Thump to his face when you see him, and thump him well if he finds fault with it. Do you still thump dear Mamma, and Fanny, and Una, and Julian, as you did when I saw you last? If you do, I shall call you little Rose Thump; and then people will think that you are Tom Thump's wife. And now I shall stop thumping on this subject. Your friend little Frank Hallet is at Mrs. Blodget's. Do you remember how you used to play with him at Southport, and how he sometimes beat you? He seems to be a better little boy than he was then, but still he is not so good as he might be. This morning he had some very nice breakfast in his plate, but he would not eat it because his mamma refused to give him something that was not good for him; and so, all breakfast-time, this foolish little boy refused to eat a mouthful, though I could see that he was very hungry, and would have eaten it all up if he could have got it into his mouth without anybody seeing. Was not he a silly child? Little Pessima never behaved so,--oh no! There are two or three very nice little girls at Mrs. Blodget's, and also a nice large dog, who is very kind and gentle, and never bites anybody; and also a tabby cat, who very often comes to me and mews for something to eat. So you see we have a very pleasant family; but, for all that, I would rather be at home. And now I have written you such a long letter that my head is quite tired out; and so I shall leave off, and amuse myself with looking at some pages of figures. Be a good little girl, and do not tease Mamma, nor trouble Fanny, nor quarrel with Una and Julian; and when I come home I shall call you little Pessima (because I am very sure you will deserve that name), and shall kiss you more than once. N. H. If he said a few kind words to me, my father gave me a sense of having a strong ally among the great ones of life; and if I were ill, I was roused by his standing beside me to defy the illness. When I was seriously indisposed, at the age of three, he brought me a black doll, which I heard my mother say she thought would alarm me, as it was very ugly, and I had never seen a negro. I remember the much-knowing smile with which my father's face was indefinitely lighted up as he stood looking at me, while I, half unconscious to most of the things of this world, was nevertheless clutching his gift gladly to my heart. The hideous darky was soon converted by my nurse Fanny (my mother called her Fancy, because of her rare skill with the needle and her rich decorations of all sorts of things) into a beautifully dressed footman, who was a very large item in my existence for years. I thought my father an intensely clever man to have hit upon Pompey, and to have understood so well that he would make an angel. All his presents to us Old People, as he called us, were either unusual or of exquisite workmanship. The fairy quality was indispensable before he chose them. We children have clung to them even to our real old age. The fairies were always just round the corner of the point of sight, with me, and in recognition of my keen delight of confidence in the small fry my father gave me little objects that were adapted to them: delicate bureaus with tiny mirrors that had reflected fairy faces a moment before, and little tops that opened by unscrewing them in an unthought-of way and held minute silver spoons. Once he brought home to Julian a china donkey's head in a tall gray hat such as negroes and politicians elect to wear, and its brains were composed entirely of borrowed brilliancy in the shape of matches. We love the donkey still, and it always occupies a place of honor. He brought me a little Bacchus in Parian marble, wearing a wreath of grapes, and holding a mug on his knee, and greeting his jolly stomach with one outspread hand, as if he were inwardly smiling as he is outwardly. This is a vase for flowers, and the white smile of the god has gleamed through countless of my sweetest bouquets. My father's enjoyment of frolicking fun was as hilarious as that accorded by some of us to wildest comic opera. He had a delicate way of throwing himself into the scrimmage of laughter, and I do not for an instant attempt to explain how he managed it. I can say that he lowered his eye-lids when he laughed hardest, and drew in his breath half a dozen times with dulcet sounds and a murmur of mirth between. Before and after this performance he would look at you straight from under his black brows, and his eyes seemed dazzling. I think the hilarity was revealed in them, although his cheeks rounded in ecstasy. I was a little roguish child, but he was the youngest and merriest person in the room when he was amused. Yet he was never far removed from his companion,--a sort of Virgil,--his knowledge of sin and tragedy at our very hearthstones. It was with such a memory in the centre of home joys that the Pilgrim Fathers turned towards the door, ever and anon, to guard it from creeping Indian forms. On Sundays, at sundown, when the winter rain had very likely dulled everybody's sense of more moderate humor, the blue law of quietness was lifted from the atmosphere; and between five and six o'clock we spread butterfly wings again, and had blind man's buff. We ran around the large centre-table, and made this gambol most tempestuously merry. If anything had been left upon the table before we began, it was removed with rapidity before we finished. There was a distinct understanding that our blindfolded father must not be permitted to touch any of us, or else we should be reduced forthwith to our original dust. The pulsing grasp of his great hands and heavy fingers, soft and springing in their manipulation of one's shoulders as the touch of a wild thing, was amusingly harmless, considering the howls with which his onslaught was evaded as long as our flying legs were loyal to us. My father's gentle laughter and happy-looking lips were a revelation during these bouts. I remember with what awe I once tied the blinding handkerchief round his head, feeling the fine crispness of his silky hair, full of electricity, as some people's is only on frosty days; yet without any of that crinkly resistance of most hair that is full of energy. But there were times when I used to stand at a distance and gaze at his peaceful aspect, and wonder if he would ever open the floodgates of fun in a game of romp on any rainy Sunday of the future. If a traveler caught the Sphinx humming to herself, would he not be inclined to sit down and watch her till she did it again? I have referred to his large hand. I shall never see a more reassuring one than his. It was broad, generous, supple. It had the little depressions and the smoothness to be noticed in the hands of truest charity; yet it had the ample outlines of the vigorously imaginative temperament, so different from the hard plumpness of coarseness or brutality. At the point where the fingers joined the back of the hand were the roundings-in that are reminiscent of childhood's simplicity, and are to be found in many philanthropic persons. His way of using his fingers was slow, well thought out, and gentle, though never lagging, that most unpleasant fault indicative of self-absorbed natures. When he did anything with his hands he seemed very active, because thoroughly in earnest. He delighted me by the way in which he took hold of any material thing, for it proved his self-mastery. Strength of will joined to self-restraint is a combination always enjoyable to the onlooker; but it is also evidence of discomfort and effort enough in the heroic character that has won the state which we contemplate with so much approval. I remember his standing once by the fire, leaning upon the mantelpiece, when a vase on the shelf toppled over in some way. It was a cheap, lodging-house article, and yet my father tried to save it from falling to the floor as earnestly as he did anything which he set out to do. His hand almost seized the vase, but it rebounded; and three times he half caught it. The fourth time he rescued it as it was near the floor, having become flushed and sparkling with the effort of will and deftness. For years that moment came back to me, because his determination had been so valiantly intense, and I was led to carry out determinations of all sorts from witnessing his self-respect and his success in so small a matter. People of power care all the time. It is their life-blood to succeed; they must encourage their precision of eye and thought by repeated triumphs, which so soothe and rejoice the nerves. He was very kind in amusing me by aid of my slate. That sort of pastime suited my hours of silence, which became less and less broken by the talkative vein. His forefinger rubbed away defects in the aspect of faces or animals with a lion-like suppleness of sweep that seemed to me to wipe out the world. We also had a delicious game of a labyrinth of lines, which it was necessary to traverse with the pencil without touching the hedges, as I called the winding marks. We wandered in and around without a murmur, and I reveled in delight because he was near. Walking was always a great resource in the family, and it was a half-hearted matter for us unless we were at his side. His gait was one of long, easy steps which were leisurely and not rapid, and he cast an occasional look around, stopping if anything more lovely than usual was to be seen in sky or landscape. It is the people who love their race even better than themselves who can take into their thought an outdoor scene. In England the outdoor life had many enchantments of velvet sward upon broad hills and flowers innumerable and fragrant. A little letter of Una's not long after we arrived in Rockferry alludes to this element in our happiness:-- "We went to take a walk to-day, and I do not think I ever had such a beautiful walk before in all my life. Julian and I got some very pretty flowers, such as do not grow wild in America. I found some exquisite harebells by the roadside, and some very delicate little pink flowers. And I got some wild holly, which is very pretty indeed; it has very glossy and prickery leaves. I have seen a great many hedges made of it since I have been here; for nothing can get over it or get through it, for it is almost as prickery as the Hawthorne [the bush and the family name were always the same thing to us children], of which almost all the hedges in Liverpool, and everywhere I have been, are made; and there it grows up into high trees, so that nothing in the world can look through it, or climb over it, or crawl through it; and I am afraid our poor hedge in Concord will never look so well, because the earth round it is so sandy and dry, and here it is so very moist and rich. It ought to be moist, at any rate, for it rains enough." But later she writes on "the eighteenth day of perfect weather," and where can the weather seem so perfect as in England? After breakfast on Christmas we always went to the places, in that parlor where Christmas found us (nomads that we were), where our mother had set out our gifts. Sometimes they were on the large centre-table, sometimes on little separate tables, but invariably covered with draperies; so that we studied the structure of each mound in fascinated delay, in order to guess what the humps and hubbies might indicate as to the nature of the objects of our treasure-trove. The happy-faced mother, who could be radiant and calm at once,--small, but with a sphere that was not small, and blessed us grandly,-- received gifts that had been arranged by Una and the nurse after all the other El Dorados were thoroughly veiled, and our hearts stood still to hear her musical cry of delight, when, having directed the rest of us to our presents, she at last uncovered her own. Our treasures always exceeded in number and charm our wildest hopes, although simplicity was the rule. Whatever my mother interested herself about, she accomplished with a finish and spirit that distinguished her performance as a title on a reputation distinguishes common clay. She threw over it the faithful ardor which is akin to miracle: the simplest twig in her hand budded; her dewdrops were filled with all the colors of the rainbow, because with her the sun always shone. She writes a description of our happy first Christmas in England, in which are these passages: "We had no St. Nicholas or Christmas-tree; and so, after all had gone to bed, I arranged the presents upon the centre-table in the drawing-room. . . . From a vase in the middle a banner floated with an inscription upon it: 'A Merry Christmas to all!' Una had given Rose a little watch for her footman Pompey; Mrs. O'Sullivan had sent her a porcelain rosary, which was put in a little box; and Mr. Bright had sent her an illuminated edition of 'This is the House that Jack Built.' Julian found a splendid flag from Nurse. This flag was a wonder. . . . The stripes were made of a rich red and white striped satin, which must have been manufactured for the express purpose of composing the American flag. The stars were embroidered in silver on a dark blue satin sky. On the reverse, a rich white satin lining bore Julian's cipher, surrounded with silver embroidery. . . . The children amused themselves with their presents all day. But first I took my new Milton and read aloud to them the Hymn of the Nativity, which I do every Christmas." "How easy it is," my mother writes of a Christmas-tree for poor children, "with a small thing to cause a great joy, if there is only the will to do it!" But most deeply did we delight in the presents given to our beloved parents, whom we considered to be absolutely perfect beings; and there was nothing which we ever perceived to make the supposition unreasonable. In one of Una's girlish letters she declares: "I will tell you what has given me almost--nay, quite as great pleasure as any I have had in England; that is, that Mamma has bought a gold watch-chain. She bought it yesterday at Douglas." We had such thorough lessons in generosity that they sometimes took effect in a genuine self-effacement, like this. A letter from my mother joyfully records of my brother:-- "Julian was asking Papa for a very expensive toy, and his father told him he was very poor this year, because the Consulate had not much business, and that it was impossible to buy him everything that struck his fancy. Julian said no more; and when he went to bed he expressed great condolence, and said he would not ask his father for anything if he were so poor, but that he would give him all his own money (amounting to five-pence halfpenny). When he lay down, his face shone with a splendor of joy that he was able thus to make his father's affairs assume a brighter aspect. This enormous sum of money which Julian had he intended, at Christmas-time, to devote to buying a toy for baby or for Una. He intended to give his all, and he could no more. In the morning, he took an opportunity when I was not looking to go behind his father, and silently handed him the fivepence halfpenny over his shoulder. My attention was first attracted by hearing Mr. Hawthorne say, 'No, I thank you, my boy; when I am starving, I will apply to you!' I turned round, and Julian's face was deep red, and his lips were quivering as he took back the money. I was sorry his father did not keep it, however. I have never allowed the children to hoard money. I think the flower of sentiment is bruised and crushed by a strong-box; and they never yet have had any idea of money except to use it for another's benefit or pleasure. Julian saw an advertisement in the street of the loss of a watch, and some guineas reward. 'Oh,' said he, 'how gladly would I find that watch, and present it to the gentleman, and say, No reward, thank you, sir!'" My sister, who was made quite delicate, at first, by the English climate, and acquired from this temporary check and the position of eldest child a pathetic nobility which struck the keynote of her character, writes from Rockferry: "This morning of the New Year was very pleasant. It was almost as good as any day in winter in America. I went out with Mamma and Sweet Fern [Julian]. The snow is about half a foot deep. Julian is out, now, playing. I packed him up very warmly indeed. I wish I could go out in the new snow very much. Julian is making a hollow house of snow by the rhododendron-tree." What not to do we learned occasionally from the birds. "The little robins and a thrush and some little sparrows have been here this morning; and the thrush was so large that she ate up the crumbs very fast, and the other poor little birds did not dare to come near her till she had done eating." My father used to treat the Old and the New Year with the deepest respect. I never knew the moments to be so immense as when, with pitying gentleness, we silently attended the Old Year across the ghostly threshold of midnight, and my father at last rose reverently from his chair to open the window, through which, at that breath, the first peals would float with new promise and remembering toll. We children were expected to come into the presence of the grown people and enjoy the interesting guests whom we all loved. My father was skillful in choosing friends: they were rare, good men, and he and they really met; their loves and interests and his were stirred by the intercourse, as if unused muscles had been stretched. I could perceive that my father and his best cronies glowed with refreshment. Mr. Bennoch was a great favorite with us. He was short and fat, witty and jovial. He was so different in style and finish from the tall, pale, spiritual Henry Bright (whom my mother speaks of as "shining like a star" during an inspiring sermon) that I almost went to sleep in the unending effort to understand why God made so sharp a variety in types. Mr. Bennoch wrote more poetry than Mr. Bright did, even, and he took delight in breathing the same air with writers. But he himself had no capacity more perfected than that of chuckling like a whole brood of chickens at his own jokes as well as those of others. The point of his joke might be obscure to us, but the chuckle never failed to satisfy. He was a source of entire rest to the dark-browed, deep-eyed thinker who smiled before him. The only anecdote of Mr. Bennoch which I remember is of a Scotchman who, at an inn, was wandering disconsolately about the parlor while his dinner was being prepared. A distinguished traveler--Dickens, I think--was dashing off a letter at the centre-table, describing the weather and some of the odd fellows he had observed in his travels. "And," he wrote, "there is in the room at the present moment a long, lank, red-headed, empty-brained nincompoop, who looks as if he had not eaten a square meal for a month, and is stamping about for his dinner. Now he approaches me as I sit writing, and I hear his step pause behind my chair. The fool is actually looking over my shoulder, and reading these words"--A torrent of Scotch burst forth right here: "It's a lee, sir,--it's a lee! I never read a worrd that yer wrort!" Screams from us; while Mr. Bennoch's sudden aspect of dramatic rage was as suddenly dropped, and he blazed once more with broad smiles, chuckling. I will insert here a letter written by this dear friend in 1861:-- 80 WOOD STREET, LONDON. MY DEAR HAWTHORNE,--A few lines just received from Mr. Fields remind me of my too long silence. Rest assured that you and yours are never long out of our thoughts, and we only wish you were here in our peaceful country, far removed from the terrible anxieties caused by wicked and willful men on one side, and on the other permitted by the incompetents set over you. How little you thought, when you suggested to me the propriety of old soldiers only going into battle, that you should have been absolutely predicting the unhappy course of events! Do you remember adding that "a premium should be offered for men of fourscore, as, with one foot in the grave, they would be less likely to run away"? I observe that the "Herald" advises that "the guillotine should be used in cropping the heads of a lot of the officers, beginning at the city of Washington, and so make room for the young genius with which the whole republic palpitates." . . . Truly, my dear Hawthorne, it is a melancholy condition of things. Let us turn to a far more agreeable subject! It is pleasant to learn that, amid all the other troubles, your domestic anxieties have passed away so far as the health of your family is concerned. The sturdy youth will be almost a man, and Una quite a woman, while Rosebud will be opening day by day in knowledge and deep interest. I hear that your pen is busy, and that from your tower you are looking upon old England and estimating her influences and the character of her people. Recent experiences must modify your judgment in many ways. A romance laid in England, painted as you only can paint, must be a great success. I struggle on, and only wish I were worthy the respect my friends so foolishly exhibit. With affectionate regards to all, ever yours truly, F. BENNOCH. On November 17, 1854, my mother writes:--"Last evening a great package came from Mr. Milnes [Lord Houghton], and it proved to be all his own works, and a splendid edition of Keats with a memoir by Mr. Milnes. This elegant gift was only a return of favors, as Mr. Hawthorne had just sent him some American books. He expended three notes upon my husband's going to meet him at Crewe Hall, two of entreaty and one of regret; but he declares he will have him at Yorkshire. Mrs. Milnes is Lord Crewe's sister. The last note says: 'The books arrived safely, and alas! alone. When I get to Yorkshire, to my own home, I shall try again for you, as I may find you in a more ductile mood. For, seriously, it would be a great injustice--not to yourself, but to us--if you went home without seeing something of our domestic country life: it is really the most special thing about our social system, and something which no other country has or ever will have.'" Another note from Lord Houghton is extant, saying:-- DEAR MR. HAWTHORNE,--Why did not you come to see us when you were in London? You promised to do so, but we sought you in vain. I wanted to see you, mainly for your own sake, and also to ask you about an American book which has fallen into my hands. It is called "Leaves of Grass," and the author calls himself Walt Whitman. Do you know anything about him? I will not call it poetry, because I am unwilling to apply that word to a work totally destitute of art; but, whatever we call it, it is a most notable and true book. It is not written virginibus puerisque; but as I am neither the one nor the other, I may express my admiration of its vigorous virility and bold natural truth. There are things in it that read like the old Greek plays. It is of the same family as those delightful books of Thoreau's which you introduced me to, and which are so little known and valued here. Patmore has just published a continuation of "The Angel in the House," which I recommend to your attention. I am quite annoyed at having been so long within the same four seas with you, and having seen you so little. Mrs. Milnes begs her best remembrances. I am yours very truly, RICHD. MONCKTON MILNES. 16 UPPER BROOK STREET, June 30. It is a perpetual marvel with some people why some others do not wish to be looked at and questioned. Dinner invitations were constantly coming in, and were very apt to be couched in tones of anxious surprise at the difficulty of securing my father. An illustration may be found in this little note from Mr. Procter (father of Adelaide Procter):-- 32 WEYMOUTH STREET, Tuesday morning. DEAR MR. HAWTHORNE,--It seems almost like an idle ceremony to ask you and Mrs. Hawthorne to dine here on Friday; but I cannot help it. I have only just returned from a circuit in the country, and heard this morning that you were likely to leave London in a few days. Yours always sincerely, B. W. PROCTER. It was desirable to meet such people as Mr. Procter, and I have heard enthusiastic descriptions, with which later my mother amused our quiet days in Concord, of the intellectual pleasures that such friendships brought, and of the sounding titles and their magnificent accessories, with human beings involved, against whom my parents were now sometimes thrust by the rapid tide of celebrity. But my father was never to be found in the track of admiring social gatherings except by the deepest scheming. In her first English letters my mother had written: "It is said that there is nothing in Liverpool but dinners. Alas for it!" The buzz of greeting was constant. It must have been delightful in certain respects. She sent home one odd letter as a specimen of hundreds of similar ones which came to my father from admirers. Yet very soon individuals make a crowd, and the person who attracts their attention is more nearly suffocated than the rest quite realize. His attempts at self-preservation are not more than half understood, and, if successful, are remembered with a dash of bitterness by the onlookers. To her husband in Liverpool, Mrs. Hawthorne writes:-- LONDON, September 19. MY DEAREST,--At half past three Mrs. Russell Sturgis came in her sumptuous barouche. We drove all through the fashionable squares and Streets and parks, and all through Kensington, even to the real Holland House. But Leigh Hunt's book went all out of my head when I tried to think what he said about it. Mrs. Sturgis knows him very well, and often visits him in his humble cottage. Oh, dear me! Such superb squares and terraces as I saw! Mrs. Sturgis told me where Sir E. B. Lytton, and many noted and noble persons, lived. We drove through Mayfair, but I did not see Miss Cushman's house, I Bolton Row. We certainly had a fine time. At five we got back, and I found the Ambassador's card, and Miss Lane's, inviting us there this evening. September 20. I was just hurrying off with Mr. Bright when I wrote the two lines of post-script in my letter this morning, in answer to your note,--so like you; so tender and kind. Since I must go away, I ought not to have said a word; but you must ascribe what I said and say to infinite love only; for it is only because of this that I do not look forward with delight to a winter in Lisbon with the O'Sullivans. I could not be happy if you made any sacrifice for me; and as our interests are indissoluble, it would be my sacrifice, too. So I will be good, and not distress you with more regrets. I once thought that no power on earth should ever induce me to live without you, and especially thought that an ocean should never roll between us. But I am over-powered by necessity; and since my life is of importance to you, I will not dare to neglect any means of preserving it. This morning baby was dressed in a beautiful embroidered white frock and blue sash, blue kid shoes, laced with blue ribbon, and blue silk sack fastened with a blue girdle, and a hat trimmed with blue and gray. Her long curls streamed out beneath: She was thus arrayed to visit Portland Place and the Sturgis children. Una looked very lovely in her summer cloud-muslin. Mr. Bright came at twelve o'clock, bringing five or six superb photographs of Cologne; I never saw any so splendid. Then we started for the Crystal Palace. It has been one of the divinest days--one of our days, like that at Stratford-on-Avon.' When we got into the cab, however, Mr. Bright proposed to go to the Houses of Parliament first, and then at last concluded to give up the Crystal Palace, and see the sights of London instead. So we drove to the old St. James's Palace Yard. But a police-officer said we could only go in on Saturday, and then by a ticket from the Lord Chamberlain. I knew that, but supposed Mr. Bright had some other means of gaining admittance. He had not, nevertheless. He took us (Julian was with me) over Westminster Bridge. . . . We went into the Photographic Exhibition of persons and places at the Crimea, which was just like taking up groups of the army and putting them before one's eyes. It must be of wonderful interest to the relatives and friends of those who are there. The room was full of fine-looking, aristocratic people. From this we drove to Kensington Gardens; and I must say, my dear lord, that I never imagined any place so grand and majestic, so royal and superb, as those grounds. The trees--oh, the trees--every one of them kings, emperors, and Czars; so tall, so rich, and the lawn beneath them so sunny-velvet green, all made illustrious by the clearest warm sunshine, and a soft, sweet air. The magnificent groves of trees all round; and far off in the terminus, the towers and pinnacles of the Parliament Houses, and Westminster Abbey towers, rise into the clear sky over the blue waters of the Serpentine. A pretty yacht, with one white wing, slowly moved along. Large, princely lambs grazed on the sunny lawns. I think that thou wouldst have asked no more in the way of a park. We sat down on a felled tree and talked awhile. I would almost give a kingdom to sit on the tree again, with thee. Was not Mr. Bright good and lovely to devote his only whole day in London to me? He certainly is the most amiable and hospitable of mortals. THY DOVE. My mother writes of Miss Bacon, who put Lord Bacon in that place in her heart where Shakespeare should have been:-- MY DEAREST,--I have been reading Miss Bacon's manuscript this afternoon, and it is marvelous. She reveals by her interpretation of Lord Bacon more fully to me what I already divined dimly of the power of Christ over nature; and it is the first word that I have found spoken or written which is commensurate with my actual idea. I felt as if I wanted to take this manuscript and all the others, and run off to some profound retreat, and study it all over, and reproduce it again with my own faculties. Oh, that I could read them with you! I almost begin to love the pain with which I delve after the thoughts presented in such a close and difficult handwriting. To Miss Peabody:-- "Miss Bacon cannot speak out fairly [upon the subject of Bacon and Shakespeare], though there is neither the Tower, the scaffold, nor the pile of fagots to deter her. But she is a wonder and a benefactor,-- and let us not criticise her style; or rather, it is no matter whether we did or not, so much remains for her. I did not see her. I was just going to take Una and call upon her, when she went to Stratford. "I hope Mr. Plumly has not forgotten his project of beneficence [towards her]. It must be a foretaste of heaven to have money to give away." CHAPTER XI ENGLISH DAYS: III Tourist letters describe Wordsworth's house and country at Rydal:-- MY DEAR ELIZABETH,--I had a hope that when I left Rock Park I should be clothed with wings, and be able to write letters and journal and to draw. But I have been particularly wingless during the whole six weeks of our absence, and have clone literally nothing but use my eyes. At Windermere we left Una, Rose, and Nurse at a charming, homelike house, and Mr. Hawthorne, Julian, and I went farther north. We went first to Rydal and Grasmere, and at Grasmere Hotel, which is nearly opposite the grave of Wordsworth, I had set my heart upon writing you a long letter about those sacred places, especially sacred to you, the true lover of Wordsworth. On a most superb afternoon we took an open carriage at Lowood Hotel, where we had been staying for several days, and drove to Grasmere Hotel, where we left our luggage and then drove back to Rydal Water. We alighted just at the commencement of the lake, intending to loiter and enjoy it at leisure. The lake surprised me by its extreme smallness,--in America we should never think of calling it a lake; but it receives dignity from the lofty hills and mountains that embosom it, and I thought it was irreverent in Mr. Hawthorne to say he "could carry it all away in a porringer." It has several very small islands in it, and one rather larger, which is a heronry. The lake and all the parks and grounds around belong to Sir Richard le Fleming, who is Lord of the Manor and of a very ancient family in those regions. We presently came to a fine old crag by the shore, up which were some friendly steps; and we were entirely sure that Wordsworth had often gone up there and looked off upon his beloved Rydal from the summit. We went up and sat down where we knew he must have sat, and there I could have dreamed for many hours. The gleam, the shadow, and the peace supreme were there, and I thought with an infinite joy how human beings have the power to consecrate the earth by genius, heroic deeds, and even homely virtues. The gorgeous richness of the vegetation, the fresh verdure, the living green of the lawns and woodlands, flooded and gilded by the sunshine, made me wonder whether the Delectable Mountain could be much more beautiful, and made me realize deeply the poetic rapture, the noble, sustained enthusiasm of Wordsworth in his descriptions of natural scenery. It is only for perhaps a week in June that we in America can obtain an idea of the magnificent richness and freshness of English scenery. How can I find language airy and delicate enough to picture to you the fields of harebells, tossing their lovely heads on their threadlike stems, and bringing heaven to earth in the hue of their petals! Then the pale golden cuckoo-buds, the yellow gorse, the stately foxglove, standing in rows, like prismatic candelabra, all along the roadside,--and ah me, alas!--the endless trees and vines of wild eglantine, with blossoms of every shade of pink, from carmine to the faintest blush, wreathing themselves about and throwing out into your face and hands long streamers of buds and blossoms, so rarely and exquisitely lovely! One wonders whether it can be true or whether one is dreaming on the Enchanted Plain. I loved Wordsworth as I never could have done if I had not been in the very place that knew him, and seen how and why he worshiped as he did, what really seems there the perpetual Morning of Creation. At the right of the doorstep a superb fuchsia-tree stood, and I asked the man to pluck me one of the jewel blossoms. But he declined to approach so near, as he feared to disturb Mrs. Wordsworth. And he did not introduce us into her presence, because he said Lady le Fleming had told him never to disturb her with visitors, but only show them the outside of the house. He said Lady le Fleming built the house and it was hers, as well as everything else round about. But we might have gone in, we now find, and Mrs. Wordsworth likes very much to see people. So this intelligent man led us through the pretty gardens and grounds, up and up and up innumerable steps in successive short flights, through many wickets, till I began to think we could never reach our goal. Finally we came to a spot of constant shade where was a singularly shaped rock--a kind of slab--thrusting itself out from the wall, in which a brass plate was inserted with an inscription by Wordsworth, which we read. It expressed that he had pleaded for this rock as often as he had for other natural objects. The gardener opened a wicket, after passing the deep, shady nook, and said, "This is Mr. Wordsworth's garden." I looked about and saw troops of flowers, and sought for the white fox-glove, which was a favorite of his, and found it; and the air was loaded with a fine perfume, which I discovered to be from large beds of mignonette. In those paths he walked and watched and tended his plants and shrubs. Presently, after so much mounting of steps, and threading of embowered paths and lanes of flowers, we were ushered into the grounds immediately around the actual house. And the man first took us upon that memorable terraced lawn, in great part made by Wordsworth's own hands. It is circular, and the turf, like thick-piled velvet, yielding to the feet and of delicious green--smooth and soft. Perhaps it is thirty feet in diameter, and double, with a very high step. Beneath it is a gravel walk, and then a hedge of thick shrubs. Julian flung himself at full length on the velvet sward, and Mr. Hawthorne and I sat down on the even tops of two stumps of trees, evidently intended for seats, as one meets them everywhere, arranged for that purpose. But how am I to tell you what I saw from them? Wordsworth must have described it somewhere. It was his beloved view. Richer could not have been the Vale of Cashmere. The mountains take most picturesque forms, and after throwing against the sky bold and grand outlines, they so softly curve down into the lovely dells that they seemed doing homage to beauty, lordly and gentle. And far away at the end of the valley, Windermere, Queen of the Lakes, reposed, gleaming silvery blue. This fair, open eye completed the picture. In that was the soul revealed. I wished I had had my sketch-book to draw just the outlines, but was not too sorry, because I intended to go again, and then I would have it. Now I was content to gaze alone. The attractions of London are fully admitted by Mrs. Hawthorne, in various letters, from which I gather these sentences:-- "At last I have found myself in London society. I suppose Ellen and Mary [her nieces] would like to know what I wore on one occasion. I had on a sky-blue glace silk, with three flounces, which were embroidered with white floss, making a very silvery shine. The dress had low neck and short sleeves; but I wore a jacket of starred blonde with flowing sleeves; and had round me also a shawl of Madeira lace, which, though very airy, fleecy, and cloud-looking, is warm and soft. My headdress was pearl, in the shape of bunches of grapes and leaves, mingled with blue ribbon, with a wreath of pearl-traced leaves round my hair, which was rolled in coronet fashion. Was not that a pretty dress? "Mr. Hawthorne was invited to Monckton Millies' to a dejeuner, and met there Macaulay, Mr. and Mrs. Browning, Lord Stanley, the Marquis of Lansdowne, Lord Goderich, etc. He enjoyed it very much; and the venerable old Marquis seemed bent on doing him honor and showing him respect. He insisted upon Mr. Hawthorne's taking precedence of himself on every occasion. It is an immense disappointment to me that we cannot spend some months within daily reach of London, because I want Mr. Hawthorne to take a very full draught of it. But I shall persuade him to go up to the grim, glorious old city by himself, if possible." My mother had been so seriously attacked by bronchitis as to endanger her lungs, which led to a visit of six months to Lisbon and Madeira, my father remaining at the Consulate. While in exile, she writes to him:-- "I am all the time tumbling into fathomless reveries about going home. "Dearest, I have an idea! Next winter, if you wish to remain in England, and my coughing continues, I will tell you how I might do, and be most happy and comfortable. I might remain in my chamber all winter, and keep it at an even temperature, and exercise by means of the portable gymnasium. I am sure the joy of your presence would be better than any tropic or equator without you. And I hate to be the means of your resigning from the Consulate." We also went to Southport for my mother's health. Here she writes:-- MY DEAR ELIZABETH,--The Doctor will not let me walk more than thirty minutes at a time. Here there are no carriages with horses, but with donkeys, sometimes two or three abreast. They will go out to the edge of the deep sea. The donkeys walk, unless they take it into their heads to run a little. One day I mounted Una and Julian on donkeys, while Rose and I were in the carriage. One little girl belabored the two saddled donkeys, and one guided my two. They were weather-beaten, rosy girls, one with a very sweet young face. The elder conversed with me awhile, and said the young gentleman's donkey was twenty years old and belonged to her brother, who would surely die if they bartered it, "because it is his, you know." She smiled reluctantly when I smiled at her, as if she had too much care to allow herself to smile often, but evidently she was a sound-hearted, healthy, contented child, ready to shine back when shone upon. Mr. Hawthorne now knows what has been my danger, and he is watchful of every breath I draw; and I would not exchange his guardianship for that of any winged angel of the hosts. God has given him to me for my angel, only He makes him visible to my eye, as He does not every one's angel. It seems as if even / never knew what felicity was till now. As the years develop my soul and faculties, I am better conscious of the pure amber in which I find myself imbedded. The Doctor shows me that it is my DUTY to be self-indulgent, and I can be so with a quiet conscience, and shall soon be all right in body, as I am all right in mind and heart. Mr. Hawthorne never has anything. I do not believe there is another spirit so little disturbed by its body as his. . . . Mr. Hawthorne, you may be sure, will take care of me. I should think he would suppose you thought he had no interest in the matter; but he thinks of nothing else, and would give up the Consulate to-day if he saw it was best for me. After so hard a beginning, I long for him to repose from anxiety for the future of our life. I only wish that for others as well as for ourselves the fables about this Consulate had been truths. Because what my husband would like would be to find always his right hand (unknown to his left) full of just what his fellow mortals might need, with no more end of means than there is of will to bestow. In him is the very poetry of beneficence, the pure, unalloyed fountain of bounty. It has been well tested here, where every kind of woe and want have besieged him. That provoking Consular bill has been in force nearly two years, depriving us of our rights to the amount now of about $35,000, because ever since it became the law the times have been more prosperous. The year before that the business was miserable. I think it was unjust that the actual incumbents of the office should not have been allowed to fulfill their terms with the conditions upon which they commenced them. It was a bill hoisted in on the shoulders of the ministerial bill, which very strangely does not come in play till 1857. December u. Mr. Hawthorne is dining in the suburbs of Liverpool this evening, with a Mr. William Browne, M. P., to meet Baron Alderson. It is only the second dinner he has been obliged to sacrifice himself to since we have been in Southport. This Mr. Browne is a venerable gentleman, who takes the trouble to go to the Consulate, and bend his white head in entreaty, and he can no more be refused, all things considered, than two and two can refuse to be four. So, at the present moment, there sits my lord at the gorgeous board, shining like a galaxy with plate and crystal. There was lately a banquet in honor of Mr. Browne, which went off magnificently. All Liverpool and part of the county shared in it; and the town was hung with banners from end to end, and business was suspended. It was a superb day of bright sunshine and perfectly dry streets, and the procession of the selected guests, and then of subscribers, was immensely long. I believe fifteen hundred collated at St. George's Hall; and on an elevated dais the twenty invited guests sat. Mr. Hawthorne was one of these. He had received notice that Monckton Milnes was to give him a toast, and a speech would be expected. You may see by some papers that Mr. Milnes gave "The United States;" but this is a mistake. It was "Nathaniel Hawthorne." He was very cordial and complimentary; but he did not say, as the reporter of the "Post" wrote, "that the 'Scarlet Letter' stuck to the hearts of all who came in contact with it," as if it were a kind of adhesive plaster; but that it "struck to the hearts of all who read it." When Mr. Hawthorne rose there was such a thunder of applause and cheers that, after a while, he actually sat down till quiet was restored. Mr. Channing told me, day before yesterday, that his speech was admirable, and delighted all who knew him, and made the Americans proud of him. He sat beneath, but very near him. Was it not a burning shame that I was not there? Many ladies were present in the galleries, and one of them sent a footman to Mr. Hawthorne, requesting a flower or a leaf as a memento. The modest and generous Mr. Browne [who had just made a public bequest] was overwhelmed with the reverberations of gratitude on every side. Mr. Hawthorne said he liked Lord Stanley, though he was rather disappointed in his appearance. The latter had to respond to "The House of Stanley." Lord Derby was to come, but was unable. Before the banquet, the corner-stone was laid. What a wise way this is--for rich men to make bequests during life. I hope many will do likewise. Yes, I have read about a thousand times over of Mr. Peabody's gift to Baltimore. We have a great many American papers, and the English papers repeat everything of importance. Mr. Browne has done the same thing in Liverpool. December 18. Mr. Hawthorne had a stupid time enough at Mr. Browne's dinner at Richmond Hill. Mr. Browne himself is always stupid, and Mrs. Browne never says a word. The judges were dumb and lofty with their own grandeur, and communicated no ideas. Do you know how very grand the judges are when in acto? Do you know that they are then kings, and when the Queen is present they still have precedence? So Imperial is Law in this realm. In going down to dinner, therefore, at Mr. Browne's (whose dinner they kept waiting exactly an hour) they led the way, followed humbly by the High Sheriff of the county, who is always the first dignitary except where the judges lead. Then went the Mayor, attended by one of his magnificent footmen in the Town livery, which is so very splendid and imposing that "each one looks like twenty generals in full military costume," as Mr. Hawthorne says; with scarlet plush vests, innumerable cordons and tassels of gold, small-clothes, and white hose, and blue coats embroidered with gold flowers. No crowned emperor ever felt so blindingly superb, and how they ever condescend to put down their feet on the floor is a wonder. Mr. Hawthorne followed next to the Mayor. There being no conversation, there was ample time to look at the truly gorgeous appointments of the table, upon which no china appeared, but only massive plate. The epergne was Phoebus Apollo in his chariot of the sun, with four horses galloping perpetually along the table without moving. The dessert-plates were bordered with wreaths of flowers and fruits in high relief, all of silver. Perhaps Mr. Browne's wits have turned to silver, as Midas's surroundings into gold. Mr. Hawthorne has gone to another dinner this evening at the Mayor's. It is a state dinner to my lords the judges. Baron Alderson nearly expires with preeminence on these occasions, and perhaps he will cease to breathe to-night. These are heavy hours to Mr. Hawthorne. London society has put him even more out of patience than usual with Liverpool dinners, and I know he is wishing he were at home at this moment. Last evening he was reading to me the rare and beautiful "Espousals" of Coventry Patmore. Have you seen "The Angel in the House" yet? It takes a truly married husband and wife to appreciate its exquisite meaning and perfection; but with your miraculous power of sympathy and apprehension, I think you will enjoy it, next to us. This evening, as I wrote, Prince Rose-red entered, holding aloft a clay head which he had been modeling. It was a great improvement upon the first attempts, and resembled Chevalier Daddi, Una's music-teacher in Lisbon. He put it upon the grate to bake, and then lay down on the rug, with his head on a footstool, to watch the process. But before it was finished I sent him to bed. It is after ten now, and the Chevalier has become thoroughly baked, with a crack across his left cheek. In all sorts of athletic exercises, in which a young Titan is required, Julian is eminent. Monsieur Huguenin, the gymnast, said that in all his years of teaching athletics, he had never met but once with his equal. Yet he moves in dancing in courtly measures and motions, and when he runs, he throws himself on the wind like a bird, and flits like a greyhound. Julian's great head is a delicately organized one. I am obliged to have all his hats made expressly for him, and my hatter, Mr. Nodder, says he never saw such a circumference in his life. I always look upon his head as one of the planets. Our house has been robbed by two notorious thieves. They had much better have risked their lives in stealing the Hungarian Baron Alderson, whose full dress is incrusted with forty thousand pounds' worth of diamonds and emeralds. We have met with a greater loss than these robbers caused us. Mrs. Blodget has all our luggage at her house in Liverpool; and one of her servant-men opened two of my trunks, which were in the cellar, and stole almost every piece of plate we possess--all the forks and spoons, and so on. He has confessed, while ill in a hospital. But Mr. Hawthorne will not prosecute him. Have you read Froude's history, just published, from the period of the fall of Wolsey to the death of Elizabeth? His style is wholly unlike that of the stately, but rather tiresome unchangeable canter of Macaulay's. Macaulay takes care of his style, but Froude is only interested in his theme. I do not suppose any one historian has yet climbed up to the pinnacle of perfect impartiality,--unless my darling Herodotus, who has the simplicity of a child, and no theories at all. But Macaulay's style tires me. He is so ferociously lucid that he confuses me, as with too much light. It is the regular refrain of his brilliant sentences that finally has the effect of a grand jangle of musical instruments. The Manchester Exhibition framed a particularly rare spectacle:-- MANCHESTER. MY DEAR ELIZABETH,--We are now at Old Trafford, close by the Palace of Art Treasures, which we have come here expressly to see. There is no confusion, no noise, no rudeness of any kind, though there are thousands of the second-class people there every day. If you shut your eyes, you only hear the low thunder of movement. . . . Yesterday we were all there, and met--now, whom do you think? Even Tennyson. He is the most picturesque of men, very handsome and careless-looking, with a wide-awake hat, a black beard, round shoulders, and slouching gait; most romantic, poetic, and interesting. He was in the saloons of the ancient masters. Was not that rare luck for us? Is it not a wonder that we should meet? His voice is also deep and musical, his hair wild and stormy. He is clearly the "love of love and hate of hate," and "in a golden clime was born." He is the Morte d'Arthur, In Memoriam, and Maud. He is Mariana in the moated grange. He is the Lady Clara Vere de Vere and "rare, pale Margaret." There is a fine bust of him in the exhibition, and a beautiful one of Wordsworth. . . . Ary Scheffer's Magdalen, when Christ says, "Mary!" is the greatest picture of his I have ever seen. Ary Scheffer himself was at the exhibition the other day. . . . Again Mr. Hawthorne, Una, and I were at the Palace all day. We went up into the gallery of engraving to listen to the music; and suddenly Una exclaimed, "Mamma! there is Tennyson!" He was sitting by the organ, listening to the orchestra. He had a child with him, a little boy, in whose emotions and impressions he evidently had great interest; and I presumed it was his son. I was soon convinced that I saw also his wife and another little son,--and all this proved true. It was charming to watch the group. Mrs. Tennyson had a sweet face, and the very sweetest smile I ever saw; and when she spoke to her husband or listened to him, her face showered a tender, happy rain of light. She was graceful, too, and gentle, but at the same time had a slightly peasant air. . . . The children were very pretty and picturesque, and Tennyson seemed to love them immensely. He devoted himself to them, and was absorbed in their interest. In him is a careless ease and a noble air which show him of the gentle blood he is. He is the most romantic-looking person. His complexion is _brun_, and he looks in ill health and has a hollow line in his cheeks. . . . Allingham, another English poet, told Mr. Hawthorne that his wife was an admirable one for him,--wise, tender, and of perfect temper; and she looks all this; and there is a kind of adoration in her expression when she addresses him. If he is moody and ill, I am sure she must be a blessed solace to him. When he moved to go, we also moved, and followed him and his family faithfully. By this means we saw him stop at his own photograph, to show it to his wife and children; and then I heard them exclaim in sweet voices, "That is papa!" Passing a table where catalogues were sold, . . . his youngest son stopped with the maid to buy one, while Tennyson and his wife went on and downstairs. So then I seized the youngest darling with gold hair, and kissed him to my heart's content; and he smiled and seemed well pleased. And I was well pleased to have had in my arms Tennyson's child. After my raid I went on. . . . Of this glimpse of the great poet fortunately accorded to our family my father writes in the "Note-Books:" "Gazing at him with all my eyes, I liked him very well, and rejoiced more in him than in all the other wonders of the exhibition." Again my mother refers to the interesting experience:-- MY DEAR ELIZABETH,--My last letter I had not time to even double up myself, as Mr. Hawthorne was booted and spurred for Liverpool before I was aware, and everything was huddled up in a hasty manner. It was something about Tennyson's family that I was saying. I wanted you to know how happy and loving they all seemed together. As Tennyson is in very ill health, very shy and moody, I had sometimes thought his wife might look worn and sad. I was delighted, therefore, to see her serene and sweet face. I cannot say, however, that there was no solicitude in it, but it was a solicitude entirely penetrated with satisfied tenderness. . . . I did not reply to your last long letter to me about slavery. . . . There is not a single person whom I know or ever talked with who advocates slavery. Your letters to me would be far more appropriate to a slaveholder. . . . I do not see how they apply to me at all. . . . There has been the customary misinterpretation of calm justice in the case of my father's moderation during the wild ardor of abolition. This sort of ardor is very likely necessary in great upheavals, but it is not necessary that every individual should join the partisans (while they slash somewhat promiscuously) at the expense of his own merciful discretion. My mother writes in eloquent exposition of her husband's and her own loyalty to the highest views in regard to the relations of all members of the human family, but she never convinced the hot fidelity of the correspondents of her own household. I will add a letter and note, from Hawthorne to Miss Peabody, partly upon this subject:-- LIVERPOOL, August 13th, '57. DEAR E.,--I return this manuscript pamphlet on the Abolition question, for I do not choose to bother Sophia with it; and yet should think it a pity to burn so much of your thought and feeling. You had better publish it. I speak trustingly, though not knowingly, of its merits; for to tell you the truth, I have read only the first line or two, not expecting much benefit even were I to get the whole by heart. No doubt it seems the truth of truth to you; but I do assure you that, like every other Abolitionist, you look at matters with an awful squint, which distorts everything within your line of vision; and it is queer, though natural, that you think everybody squints, except yourselves. Perhaps they do; but certainly you do. As regards Goodrich's accounts of the relations between him and me, it is funny enough to see him taking the airs of a patron; but I do not mind it in the least, nor feel the slightest inclination to defend myself, or be defended. I should as soon think of controverting his statement about my personal appearance (of which he draws no very lovely picture) as about anything else that he says. So pray do not take up the cudgels on my behalf; especially as I perceive that your recollections are rather inaccurate. For instance, it was Park Benjamin, not Goodrich, who cut up the "Story-teller." As for Goodrich, I have rather a kindly feeling towards him, and he himself is a not unkindly man, in spite of his propensity to feed and fatten himself on better brains than his own. Only let him do that, and he will really sometimes put himself to some trouble to do a good-natured act. His quarrel with me was, that I broke away from him before he had quite finished his meal, and while a portion of my brain was left; and I have not the slightest doubt that he really felt himself wronged by my so doing. Really, I half think so too. He was born to do what he did, as maggots to feed on rich cheese. Sophia has enjoyed herself much for some months past, and enjoyment seems to agree with her constitution, for her health and vigour have been very satisfactory. Neither did I ever have a better time in my life, than during our recent tours in England and Scotland. Between us, we might write an immense book of travels. I have six or seven volumes of journals, written during my residence in England; but unfortunately, it is written with so free and truth-telling a pen that I never shall dare to publish it. Perhaps parts of it shall be read to you, some winter evening, after we get home; but I entirely yield the palm to Sophia on the score of fullness and accuracy of description. [Considerably more of the letter is cut off, and the following fragment of another letter is pasted over a portion of the first.] LIVERPOOL, October 8th, '57. DEAR E.,--I read your manuscript Abolition pamphlet, supposing it to be a new production, and only discovered afterwards that it was the one I had sent back. Upon my word, it is not very good; not worthy of being sent three times across the ocean; not so good as I supposed you would always write, on a subject in which your mind and heart were interested. However, since you make a point of it, I will give it to Sophia, and will tell her all about its rejection and return. Pictures of Leamington and its vicinity were sent home, as follows:-- No. 10 LANSDOWNE CIRCUS, LEAMINGTON, WARWICKSHIRE, September 9, 1857. MY DEAR ELIZABETH,--Do not suppose that we are among horses, mountebanks, and clowns by my date. On the contrary, we are in a charming little paradise of gardens, with a park in the centre, towards which all these gardens converge. It is such a paradise as the English only know how to make out of any given flat bit of land. Fancy a circle of houses at the end of a street. They are white stucco houses, with balconies leading out of the drawing-rooms, in which to sit and enjoy the gardens, made up of sunny green lawns, bright rainbow flowers, and dark green shrubbery and trees. The park is full of lovely trees and evergreens, with lawns and gravel-walks. We are in profound quiet. Nothing but a bird's note ever breaks our stillness. The air is full of mignonette, roses, and wallflowers. It is autumn; but the grass and foliage are like those of early spring or summer. In Manchester, which we have lately visited, I found that the foul air of the manufactories made me cough more, and the moment Mr. Hawthorne perceived it, he decided to come away. Nothing but the Palace of Art would ever have made us think of being one hour in such a nasty old ugly place. I could never be weary of looking at some of the masterpieces, to the end of my clays. I should think the Good Shepherd would convert the Jew, Baron L. R., to Christianity; for it is his. No words can possibly do justice to that, or to the Madonna in Glory. . . . September 12. To-day we went to Kenilworth. There was not blue sky enough to encourage Mr. Hawthorne at first; but at eleven o'clock we set forth in very good sunshine, and delicious air. By a short turn out of our Circus we came into a street called Regent's Grove, on account of a lovely promenade between noble trees for a very long-distance, almost to the railroad station; and Una and I walked that way, leaving Mr. Hawthorne and Julian to follow, as we wished to saunter. They overtook us, having gone down the Parade, which is the principal street, containing hotels and shops; and it crosses at right angles Warwick Street, which reaches for several miles, until it arrives at Warwick Castle itself. The bright greens of England seem to be lined with gold; and in the autumn, the leaves merely turn their golden linings. The approach to the domain of Kenilworth is through roads with trees, winding along, and also across a narrow river, which we should call a brook, glimpses of the castle towers appearing at every turn. The grass was very wet, and I had no india-rubbers, and Mr. Hawthorne went off with Una to buy me some, being resolved to make them, I believe, if he could not find any in the only shop not explored, for we had already tried for them. He returned with the only pair in Kenilworth that would fit me--and the last pair the shopman had left in his box. . . . The ivy, after climbing up the sides of the Castle in a diffusive embrace, reaches the crumbling battlements; and to conceal the gnawing teeth of time there, it rises into perfect trees, full and round, where it does not find it lovelier to trail over and hang in festoons and wreaths and tassels. Ivy and time contend for the mastery, and have a drawn battle of it. Enormous hawthorn-trees, large as our largest horse-chestnuts, also abound around the Castle, and are now made rich and brilliant with scarlet haws. Mr. Hawthorne and I were filled with amazement at their size. Instead of the rich silk hangings which graced the walls when Elizabeth entered the banqueting-room, now waved the long wreaths of ivy, and instead of gold borders, was sunshine, and for music and revel--SILENCE-- profound, not even a breeze breaking it. For we had again one of those brooding, still days which we have so often been fortunate enough to have among ruined castles and abbeys. Bare stone seats are still left around Elizabeth's boudoir, upon which, when softly cushioned with gold, she sat, and saw a fair prospect. The park and chase extended twenty miles! Nothing but music can ever equal or surpass architecture in variety of utterance. Music is poetry to the ear, architecture to the eye, and poetry is music and architecture to the soul, for it can reproduce both. Music, however, seems to be freer from all shackles than any other art; and I remember that in one of my essays for Margaret Fuller, I made it out to my own satisfaction to be the apex of expression. The old Glasgow verger of whom I wrote you had not got so far as to see that it needed the "Kist of Whistles," as he called the organ, to make his beloved Cathedral soar and glow with life and praise to its utmost capacity. But I cannot say that it does not sing, even without a sound, in its immortal curves, as Ruskin calls those curves that return in no conceivable time or space. Cathedrals sing, and they also pray, with pointed arches for folded hands. Julian liked these ruins better than any he had seen, he said; and he climbed up on the dismantled turret of Leicester's buildings, and settled himself among the ivy like some rare bird with wonderful eyes. His hair had grown very long, and clustered round his head in hyacinthine fashion, and I think my lord would have been glad to call him his princely boy. [Such things he never allowed himself to say.] All the princeliness that lies in clustering curls Julian has lost to-day, for a hair-dresser has cropped him like a Puritan. As for myself, fine weather, flower-filled lanes, sturdy walks, and the zest of environs that aroused the rest of the family through association as well as loveliness, seemed to awaken in my mind a vivid era that was exciting if laborious. I had night-vigils which were delightfully entertained by a faculty for hearing quite splendid music,--music that my imagination composed with a full orchestra of admirable brilliancy; and I was also able to see in perfect distinctness a splendid bazaar, filled with any quantity of toys, which I could summon at will. But this pastime required a great deal of will-power, a peculiar subtlety of condition, and could only be kept up for a few moments at a time; and in the course of several months the charming capacity was modified to that of being able to evoke most clearly scenes where imaginary characters, more real than actual companions, leaped into being, and talked and moved to any extent. I suppose numbers of people have this faculty, and it is a sovereign protection against ennui; or would be, if remedies could always be relied upon. I mention these matters to prove that I moderately possessed artistic perception. I can see, nevertheless, quite well, that I must have been a very stupid child most of the time, and that the befogged state of my mind was certainly a pity and perhaps a shame. Yet there was a sort of advantage in it: fogs choose with much good sense what they will emphasize; and the intellect bereft of fussy clearness may have a startling grasp that reminds one of occult methods. My observations could not pretend to so much, but they caught truths not very often stared into capture by a little girl; and my father interested me more, and was more frequently the subject of my meditations, than any one else. In Leamington there seemed to be some opportunity for quiet pursuits. In the first place, there were great preparations for Christmas; which means, that my sister Una made a few little hand-worked presents in complete secrecy, and there was a breathless spending of a few sixpences. If a good deal of money was used by my parents, it was never distributed with freedom, but for those luxuries which would gather the least rust; and not a little was exchanged for heavenly treasure itself, in charity that answered appeals too pathetic to disregard. And we children learned--though we did not learn to save money, because our parents could not--to go without the luxuries money oftenest brings; a lesson that comes to happy fruition in maturer life, if there is need of it. I say happy, because we look back with joy to the hours spent in toughening the sinews of endurance. I remember that long and Penelope-like were my own Christmas preparations; but what they evolved is a matter as lost to thought as a breeze on the desert, in spite of the clearness with which I remember the gifts from my sister and our genteel Nurse, Fanny, who was with us again, and shone more sweetly than ever in Leamington. The handsomest objects we had were given us by Fanfan, or Fancy, as my mother called her. My mother writes, "Our Twelfth Cake was a superb little illuminated Book of Ruth, which never can be eaten up, and will be a joy forever to all our posterity after us, and to our contemporaries." I will insert here an account of how perfect the smoothness of English mechanism may be:-- 13 CHARLES STREET, BATH. MY DEAR ELIZABETH,--We asked the porter at the depot to tell us of a good hotel, and he sent us to York House. After being deposited in it, with our stones round our necks (as I call our luggage), we found it was not only the first hotel in Bath, but one famous throughout the land. A terrible fear came over me that a year's income would scarcely defray our expenses even for one day and night; but as we did not arrive till five, we could not leave till the next day. So we had nothing to do but to take it grandly. We were put in possession of a lordly sitting-room, hung with crimson. There was nothing gaudy, but a solid richness. Papa and Mamma were the Duke and Duchess of Maine [in remembrance of a lordly claim at Raymond], Julian was Lord Waldo, and Una, Lady Raymond. The finest cut crystal, and knives and forks with solid silver handles, and spoons too heavy to lift easily, delicate rose and gold china, and an entire service of silver dishes, came upon the table. Our attendants were the Sublime and the Pensive, in the form of two men. The Sublime had a bosom full of linen lilies in peculiarly wide bloom; while the Pensive was adorned rather with snowdrops. Their footfalls were descending snowflakes, their manners devout, solemn, and stately. It was really quite delicious, just for a short time; and it was impossible not to be convinced that we at least came over with William the Conqueror; or we might be descended in a straight line from Prince Bladud, who flourished in Bath eight hundred years before the Christian era. At all events, we were the noblest in the land, and received the salaams of the Sublime and the Pensive as obviously due to our exalted rank. As I looked at my husband, so kingly in aspect by nature, of such high courtesy in manner; and at Una, princesslike, with her sweet dignity, I did not at all wonder at the stolen glances of our waiters; that looking without looking for which a thorough-bred English waiter is so remarkable. Lord Waldo also "bore it well;" and as to the Lady Rose, she might have bloomed in a royal conservatory. Sumptuous wax candles, in richly chased silver candlesticks, lighted us up in the evening. Whenever I left the sitting-room for my chamber, the Sublime was suddenly at the door to open and shut it for me, bowing down with all his lilies. Ah, me! But how can I describe the York House table! Such Apician food, so delicately touched with fire! And who can ever sing adequately the graceful curves in which the Pensive swept off the covers, at the sound of some inaudible music--inaudible except to his ear--as soon as we were all seated! I felt so grand that I was ready to shout with laughter--having gone full circle from the sublime to the ridiculous several times. I felt the ducal coronet on my brow, flashing fine flames from diamonds and emeralds. His Grace's diadem put my eyes out (as it often does, even when not in York House, and we not all in full dress). The weather was dull and cold, and a glorious fire blazed in the large grate, fed and tended by a third noiseless apparition, the Soft, in the shape of a boy, who gently deposited black boulders of coal without raising any dust, and with a brush delicately invited away the ashes from the bars and the hearth, and poked as one would kiss a sleeping babe. The eyes of the Soft did not wander; they were kept snug beneath their lids with well-trained reverence; and this genius of the fire always appeared as soon as the glow began to fade, as if by inspiration. In my large chamber, draped with white muslin over rose color and drab damask, a superb fire glowed. I must make an end of this nonsense. The next day I drove about Bath to get apartments,--the first hour in vain; and everybody said the city was full, and we should not succeed. The children cried out to stay in York House, enjoying the luxury. But again I took a Bath chair, and with Fanny the nurse at my side to talk for me, and Rosebud to look out for signs of "To Let," we tried again, and found this modest house; where, such is the simplicity of my nature, I am ten times as comfortable and at home as at even York House, with its shaded grandeur. Yet I am very fond of splendor, I have to confess; and, moreover, our surprise was great when, upon demanding the account, the Sublime brought on a silver salver charges actually more moderate than those of many inferior hotels all about England. I will proceed here with our visit to Redcar, though that occurred in 1859, when we had returned from Rome. Redcar is in the midst of a stately region, grand with an outline of hard-bosomed, endless beach and vast sky, of sea and sand-hills, where my father stands forth very distinctly in my memory. When he went out at fixed hours of the day, between the hours for writing, he walked over the long, long beach, and very often with my brother and myself; stopping now and then in his firm, regal tread to look at what nature could do in far-stretching color and beckoning horizon line. Along the sand-hills, frolicking in the breeze or faithfully clinging in the strong wind to their native thimbleful of earth, hung the cerulean harebells, to which I ardently clambered, listening for their chimes. In the preface to "Monte Beni," the compliment paid to Redcar is well hidden. My father speaks of reproducing the book (sketched out among the dreamy interests of Florence) "on the broad and dreary sands of Redcar, with the gray German Ocean tumbling in upon me, and the northern blast always howling in my ears." Nothing could have pleased him better as an atmosphere for his work; all that the atmosphere included he did not mean to admit, just then. And London was not so very far away. On September 9, 1859, my mother says in her diary, "My husband gave me his manuscript to read." There are no other entries on that clay or the next, except, "Reading manuscript." On the 11th she says, "Reading manuscript for the second time." The diary refers to reading the manuscript on the third day, but on the two following days, in which she was to finish as much of the romance as was ready, there are wholly blank spaces. These mean more than words to me, who know so well how she never set aside daily rules, and how unbrokenly her little diaries flow on. She writes home:-- "Mr. Hawthorne has about finished his book. More than four hundred pages of manuscripts are now in the hands of the publishers. I have read as much as that, but do not yet know the denouement. He is very well, and in very good spirits, despite all his hard toil of so many months. As usual, he thinks the book good for nothing, and based upon a very foolish idea which nobody will like or accept. But I am used to such opinions, and understand why he feels oppressed with disgust of what has so long occupied him. The true judgment of the work was his first idea of it, when it seemed to him worth the doing. He has regularly despised each one of his books immediately upon finishing it. My enthusiasm is too much his own music, as it were. It needs the reverberation of the impartial mind to reassure him that he has not been guilty of a betise. "Mr. Hawthorne had no idea of portraying me in Hilda. Whatever resemblance one sees is accidental." On November 8 (we were then in Leamington once more) she records in very large script, "My husband to-day finished his book, 'The Romance of Monte Beni.'" My mother was especially fortunate in finding the smallest rose-tinted and most gleaming among the shells which we came across upon the sands, and of these a few superlative but almost invisible specimens were long the cherished possession of her English work-box. She often went with me to the sands, spending much time there; her diary saying: "Superb, calm day. I went on sands with Rosebud to gather shells. Stayed three hours." Or: "Most superb day possible. I went on the sands with Rose, and sat all the morning in a sand-chair, reading, while Rose played. It was a divine day; the air like rose petals, the sky cerulean, the sea sapphire. I felt so serene and quiet;--a great calm." Then comes the inevitable contrast: "Tremendous sea. Rose and I went on the sands to gather shells." These shells, which we could none of us find in so perfect a state as my mother could, were object-lessons to me in the refinements of art, as the harebells were in the refinements of nature; for were not the dancing flowers alive, and the stirless shells the passive work of thought? Sometimes she read Disraeli's "Sibyl," while I built a sand fortress round her; or she read "Venetia," "Oliver Twist," "The Life of Mary II.," "Romany Rye," and "The Lives of the Last Four Popes." She remembered Pio Nono with unflagging interest, and mentions his serious illness, and then his recovery. She read "a queer biography of Wordsworth by Hood," and she regarded Carlyle's diction in the "French Revolution" as "rubbishy." Besides the pilgrimages in search of shells, another pursuit was inaugurated by my mother, in her breathlessly calm way, which was the finding of multitudinous seaweeds of every eccentricity of style. The Yankee elm, the English oak, the kitchen-garden herb, or Italian stone-pine, the fern, and tresses, as they seemed, of women's fair or dusky hair, were all so cleverly imitated by the seaweeds that one might have supposed them to be the schoolbooks of the sea; or the latest news there, regarding the nature of the dry world. Many spare moments were given to mounting these pretty living pictures of growths. My lack of success in producing a single very neat specimen was, I grieve to admit, hardly bettered by any of us; my father joining in the scientific excess only so far as to turn his luminous eyes upon our enthusiasm, with his genial "h'm-m" of permission. Excursions were made to Whitby, Wilton Castle, and other places; and I made an excursion on my own account, which kept me lame for some time. "Rose fell and hurt her knees and elbow, following a monkey." But my most considerate mother would never have let me perceive the humorous and possibly unintelligent aspect of my adventurous spirit; and the next day she tenderly inscribes the historical fact, "Poor baby lame." Here are a few words of testimony, from my sister, to the charm of this shore:-- REDCAR, October 4, 1859. Our last day in Redcar, dearest aunt Lizzie; and a most lovely one it is. The sea seems to reproach us for leaving it. But I am glad we are going, for I feel so homesick that I want constant change to divert my thoughts. How troublesome feelings and affections are! When one ought to forget, they are strongest. Your loving niece, U. H. I thought that the petty lodging in which we were established was an odd nook for my father to be in. I liked to get out with him upon the martial plain of sand and tremendous waves, where folly was not, by law of wind and light of Titan power, and where the most insignificant ornament was far from insignificant: the whorl of an exquisite shell, beautiful and still, as if just dead; or the seaweeds, that are so like pictures of other growths. I felt that this scene was a worthy one for the kind but never familiar man who walked and reflected there. We enjoyed a constant outdoor life. But in those uninspired hours when there was no father in sight, and my mother was resting in seclusion, I played at grocer's shop on the sands with a little girl called Hannah, whom I then despised for her name, her homely neat clothes, her sweetness and silence, and in retrospect learned to love. As we pounded brick, secured sugary-looking sands of different tints, and heaped up minute pebbles, a darkly clad, tastefully picturesque form would approach,--a form to which I bowed down in spirit as, fortunately for me, my father. He would look askance at my utterly useless, time-frittering amusement, which I already knew was withering my brain and soul. In his tacit reproach my small intellect delighted, and loftier thoughts than those of the counter would refresh me for the rest of the day; and I thankfully returned to the heights and lengths of wide nature, full of color and roaring waves. CHAPTER XII ITALIAN DAYS: I My first frequent companionship with my father began in Italy, when I was seven years old. We entered Rome after a long, wet, cold carriage journey that would have disillusionized a Dore. As we jolted along, my mother held me in her arms, while I slept as much as I could; and when I could not, I blessed the patient, weary bosom upon which I lay exhausted. It was a solemn-faced load of Americans which shook and shivered into the city of memories that night. In "Monte Beni," as he preferred to call "The Marble Faun," my father speaks of Rome with mingled contempt for its discomforts and delighted heartiness for its outshining fascinations. "The desolation of her ruin" does not prevent her from being "more intimately our home than even the spot where we were born." A ruin or a picture could not satisfy his heart, which accepted no yoke less strong than spiritual power. Rome supplies the most telling evidence of human failure, because she is the theatre of the greatest human effort, both in the ranks of Satan and of God; and she visibly mourns her sins of mistake at the feet of spiritual victory, Saints Peter and Paul. (As a Catholic, I could hardly win the respect of the gentle reader if I were so un-American as to fear to stand by my belief.) And while the observer in Rome may well feel sad in the midst of reminders of the enormous sins of the past, there is an uplifting, for the soul eager to perceive the truth, in all her assurances of that mercy which is the cause of religion. If the Holy See was established in Rome because it was the city where the worst wickedness upon earth, because the most intelligent, was to be found, we may conclude that the old emperors, stormy and grotesque, are responsible for its melancholy "atmosphere of sin," to which Hilda alludes as a condition of the whole planet; and not the popes who have prayed in Rome, nor the people who believe there. In printed remarks about Italy both my parents say that she most reminds them of what is highest. But, whether chilly or warm, the Eternal City did not at once make a conquest of my father's allegiance, though before he bade it farewell, it had painted itself upon his mind as sometimes the sunniest and most splendid habitation for a populace, that he knew. In the spring my sister wrote:-- "We are having perfectly splendid weather now,--unclouded Italian skies, blazing sun, everything warm and glorious. But the sky is too blue, the sun is too blazing, everything is too vivid. Often I long for the more cloudy skies and peace of that dear, beautiful England. Rome makes us all languid. We have to pay a fearful price for the supreme enjoyment there is in standing on the very spots made interesting by poetry or by prose, imagination, or (which is still more absorbing) truth. Sometimes I wish there had never been anything done or written in the world! My father and I seem to feel in this way more than the rest. We agree about Rome as we did about England." In the course of the winter my mother had written of our chilly reception thus:-- NO. 37 VIA PORTA PINCIANA, 2D PLANO, PALAZZO LAIIAZANI, ROME. MY DEAR ELIZABETH,--I could not have believed I could be in Rome a day without announcing it to you in words and expressions which would have the effect at least of the bell of St. Peter's or the cannon of St. Angelo. . . . But my soul has been iced over, as well as the hitherto flowing fountains of the Piazza, di San Pietro. I have not been able to expand like corn and melons under a summer sun. Nipped have been all my blossoming hopes and enthusiasms, and my hands have been too numb to hold a pen. Added to this, Mr. Hawthorne has had the severest cold he ever had, because bright, keen cold he cannot bear so well as damp; and .Rosebud has not been well since she entered the city. It is colder than for twenty years before. We find it enormously expensive to live in Rome; our apartment is twelve hundred a year. But I am in Rome, Rome, Rome! I have stood in the Forum and beneath the Arch of Titus, at the end of the Sacra Via. I have wandered about the Coliseum, the stupendous grandeur of which equals my dream and hope. I have seen the sun kindling the open courts of the Temple of Peace, where Sarah Clarke said, years ago, that my children would some time play. (It is now called Constantine's Basilica.) I have climbed the Capitoline and stood before the Capitol, by the side of the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius,--the finest in the world [my father calls it "the most majestic representation of kingly character that ever the world has seen "],--once in front' of the Arch of Septimius Severus. I have been into the Pantheon, whose sublime portico quietly rises out of the region of criticism into its own sphere,--a fit entrance to the temple of all the gods. How wise was the wise and tact-gifted Augustus to reject the homage of Agrippa, who built it for his apotheosis, and to dedicate it to the immortal gods! It is now dedicated to the Immortal God. And I have been to St. Peter's! There alone in Rome is perpetual summer. You have heard of the wonderful atmosphere of this world of a basilica. It would seem to be warmed by the ardent soul of Peter, or by the breath of prayer from innumerable saints. One drops the hermetical seal of a curtain behind, upon entering, and behold, with the world is also shut out the bitter cold, and one is folded, as it were, in a soft mantle of down, as if angels wrapped their wings about us. I expanded at once under the invisible sun. There have been moments when I have felt the spell of Rome, but every one says here that it dawns gradually upon the mind. It would not have been so with me, I am convinced, if I had been warm. Who ever heard of an icicle glowing with emotion? What is Rome to a frozen clod? . . . We were not able to seize upon the choicest luxuries of living, as our accommodations, even such as they were, proved to be expensive enough to hamper us. We had all expected to be blissful in Italy, and so the inartistic and inhuman accessories of life were harder to bear there than elsewhere. I remember a perpetual rice pudding (sent in the tin ten-story edifices which caterers supply laden with food), of which the almost daily sight maddened us, and threw us into a Burton's melancholy of silence, for nothing could prevent it from appearing. We all know what such simple despairs can do, and, by concerted movement, they can make Rome tame. If we had sustained ourselves on milk, like Romulus and Remus, and dressed in Russian furs, we might have had fewer vicissitudes in the midst of the classic wonders on all sides. But spring was faithful, and at its return we began to enjoy the scenes of most note within and beyond the walls: the gleaming ruins, and fresh, uncontaminated daisies that trustfully throve beside some of them; the little fountains, with their one-legged or flat-nosed statues strutting ineffectually above them,--fountains either dry as dead revelers or tinkling a pathetic sob into a stone trough; the open views where the colors of sunlit marble and the motions of dancing light surrounded the peasants who sprang up from the ground like belated actors in a drama we only keep with us out of childish delight. My father had never looked so serious as he did now, and he was more slim than in England. He impressed me as permeated by an atmosphere of perception. A magnetic current of sympathy with the city rendered him contemplative and absorbent as a cloud. He was everywhere, but only looked in silence, so far as I was aware. "The Marble Faun" shows what he thought in sentences that reveal, like mineral specimens, strata of ideas stretching far beyond the confines of the novel. While he observed Rome, as he frequently mentions, he felt the sadness of the problems of the race which there were brought to a focus. Yet it is a singular fact that, notwithstanding this regret for her human pathos, perhaps the best book he ever wrote was created among the suggestive qualities of this haven of faith,--the book which inculcates the most sterling hope of any of his works. I saw in my walks with him how much he enjoyed the salable treasures and humble diversions of the thoroughfare, as his readers have always perceived. Ingenuous simplicity, freedom from self-consciousness and whitewash, frank selfishness on a plane so humble that it can do little harm,--all this is amusing and restful after long hours with transcendental folk. In regard to the tenets of these, my mother writes to her sister:-- "I am just on the point of declaring that I hate transcendentalism, because it is full of immoderate dicta which would disorganize society, and should never be uttered, in my opinion, except behind the veil, among priests. As to displaying before the great, innocent eyes of a girl like Una all the horror of a slave-auction--a convent is better than such untimely revelations. Now, you must not think I am a Catholic. I know the Lord withholds the pure from seeing what they should not--blessed be the Lord!--but I will not be the one to put what should not be seen before the eyes of the pure." My father looked in good spirits as we moved along. When he trafficked with an Italian fruit-vender, and put a few big hot chestnuts into his pocket, with a smile for me, I (who found his smile the greatest joy in the world) was persuaded that really fine things were being done. The slender copper piece which was all-sufficient for the transaction not only thrilled the huckster with delight, but became precious to me as my father's supple, broad fingers held it, dark, thin, small, in a respectful manner. He caressed it for a moment with his large thumb,--he who was liberal as nature in June,--and when the fruit-vender was wrought up to the proper point of ecstasy he was allowed to receive the money, which he did with a smile of Italian gracefulness and sparkle, while my father looked conscious of the mirthfulness of the situation with as lofty a manner as you please. As for the peasant women we met, under their little light-stands of head-drapery, they were easily comprehensible, and expressed without a shadow of reserve their vanity and tiger blood by an openly proud smile and a swing of the brilliantly striped skirt. The handsomest men and women possible, elaborately dressed, shone beside tiers of the sweetest bunches of pale violets, or a solitary boy, so beautiful that his human splendor scintillated, small as he was, sat in the pose and apparel that the world knows through pictures, and which pigment can never well render any more than it can catch the power of a sunset or an American autumn. The marble-shops were very pleasant places. A whirring sound lulled the senses into dreamy receptiveness, as the stone wheel heavily turned with soft swiftness, giving the impression that here hard matter was controlled to a nicety by airy forces; and a fragrance floated from the wet marble lather, while the polishing of our newly picked up mementos from the ruins went on, which was as subtle as that of flowers. A man or two, hoary with marble-dust and ennobled by the "bloom" of it, stood tall and sad about the wheel, and we handed to these refined creatures our treasures of giallo-antico and porphyry and other marbles picked up "for remembrance" (and no doubt once pressed by a Caesar's foot or met by a Caesar's glance), in order to observe the fresh color leap to the surface,--yellow, red, black, or green. Far more were we thrilled at finding scraps of iridescent glass lachrymals, containing all the glories of Persian magnificence, while pathetically hinting of the tears of a Roman woman (precious only to herself, whatever her flatterers might aver) two thousand years ago. The heart of Rome was acknowledged to be St. Peter's, and its pulse the Pope. The most striking effect the Holy Father produced upon me, standing at gaze before him with my parents, was when he appeared, in Holy Week, high up in the balcony before the mountainous dome, looking off over the great multitude of people gathered to receive his blessing. Those eyes of his carried expression a long way, and he looked most kingly, though unlike other kings. He was clothed in white not whiter than his wonderful pallor. My father implies in a remark that Pio Nono impressed him by a becoming sincerity of countenance, and this was so entirely my infantile opinion that I became eloquent about the Pope, and was rewarded by a gift from my mother of a little medallion of him and a gold scudo with an excellent likeness thereon, both always tenderly reverenced by me. Going to the Pincian Hill on Sunday afternoons, when my father quite regularly made me his companion, was the event of my week which entertained me best of all. To play a simple game of stones on one of the gray benches in the late afternoon sunshine, with him for courteous opponent, was to feel my eyes, lips, hands, all my being, glow with the fullest human happiness. When he threw down a pebble upon one of the squares which he had marked with chalk, I was enchanted. When one game was finished, I trembled lest he would not go on with another. He was never fatigued or annoyed--outwardly. He had as much control over the man we saw in him as a sentinel on duty. Therefore he proceeded with the tossing of pebbles, genially though quietly, not exhibiting the least reluctance, and uttering a few amused sounds, like mellow wood-notes. Between the buxom groups of luxuriant foliage the great stream of fashion rolled by in carriages, the music of the well-trained band pealing forth upon the breeze; and in the tinted distance, beyond the wall of the high-perched garden which surrounded us, the sunset shook out its pennons. Through the glinting bustle of the crowd and the richness of nature my father peacefully breathed, in half-withdrawn brooding, either pursuing our pebble warfare with kindest stateliness, or strolling beside lovely plots of shadowed grass, fragrant from lofty trees of box. An element by no means slight in the rejoicing of my mind, when I was with him of a Sunday afternoon, was his cigar, which he puffed at very deliberately, as if smoking were a rite. The aroma was wonderful. The classicism which followed my parents about in everything of course connected itself with my father's chief luxury, in the form of a bronze match-box, given him in Rome by my sister, upon which an autumn scene of harvest figures was modeled with Greek elegance, and to this we turned our eyes admiringly during the lighting of the cigar. There was a hunter returning to a home draped with the grape, bringing still more of that fruit, and a rabbit and bird, hung upon a pole, while his wife and child were ever so comfortably disposed upon the threshold, and the hunting-dog affectionately lapped the young matron's hand. An autumn was also depicted on the reverse, presumably a year earlier than the one just described, where two lovers stood among sheaves of wheat, their sickles in hand, and the youth held up a bunch of grapes which the maiden, down-looking, gently raised her arm to receive. At last it would grow too late to play another game, and my father's darkly clothed form would be drawn up, and his strongly beautiful face lifted ominously. Before leaving the hill we went to look over the parapet to the west, where stood, according to "Monte Beni," "the grandest edifice ever built by man, painted against God's loveliest sky." Quoit-players were no doubt rolling their disks upon the road below us; and on the very first glance it almost always happened that a springing, vaporous-looking quoit would appear without one's seeing the man whose hand had sent it on its way. It was a refined pastime, immortalized by the Discobolus, which, however, cannot give the charm of the whirling quoit. The entries in my mother's diary so abound in names and persons met day by day, names both unknown to the world and familiar to it, that it is hard to understand how there was time for sightseeing or illness, or the reading which was kept up. The wife of a distinguished sculptor in Rorffe afterwards said in a letter that this year of 1859 was remarkably for its crowd of tourists, and added that 1860 proved very quiet. It does not sound quiet to hear that she had just enjoyed a horseback ride with Mr. Browning; but Americans and English certainly did have rich enjoyment in Italy in those days, and grew exacting. The jottings of the diary stir the imagination quite pleasantly, beginning January 16, 1859: "Mr. Browning called to visit us. Delightful visit. I read Charlotte Bronte for the second time.--Mrs. Story sent a note to my husband to invite him to tea [my mother being housed with my sick sister] with Mr. Browning.--Mr. Horatio Bridge spent the evening.--Read 'Frederick the Great.'--Mr. Motley called, and brought 'Paradise Lost' for Una.--I went to the sunny Corso with my husband, who is far from well. Mrs. Story asks us to dine with Mr. de Vere, Lady William Russell, Mr. Alison, Mr. Browning, and other interesting people.--Lovely turquoise day. I prepared Julian's Carnival dress. Went to the Hoars' balcony, and the Conservatori passed in gorgeous array. The George Joneses took Una to drive in the Corso, and the Prince of Wales threw her a bouquet from his balcony. I read the 'Howadji in Syria' as I sat at the Hoars' window.--I had a delightful visit from E. Hoar. She saw the Pope yesterday, and he blessed her. Mrs. Story looked very pretty in a carriage at the Carnival, with a hat trimmed with a wreath of violets. --Mr. and Mrs. Story called for us to go to the Doria Villa. We had a glorious excursion, finding rainbow anemones and seeing wonderful views. Mr. Christopher Cranch joined us.--I went to the Vatican for the first time this year, with E. Hoar. We met there Mr. Hawthorne escorting Mrs. Pierce and Miss Vandervoort. We went through all the miles of sculpture.--Una and I called on Mrs. Pierce, Mrs. Browning, Mrs. Pickman, Mrs. Hoar, and met Mrs. Motley. In the afternoon I went with E. Hoar to Mr. Story's studio. Mrs. Pickman called on me.--Mr. Hawthorne and I and Julian went to call on Miss Cushman, and to Mr. Page's studio. Mr. Motley had made a long call early in the day, and teased Mr. Hawthorne to dine with him, to meet Lord Spencer's son.--Mrs. Story brought Una the first lilies-of-the-valley that have bloomed in Rome this year. I went with Rose to Trinita dei Monti to hear the nuns sing vespers. Coming out, I met' Miss Harriet Hosmer.--Superb day. I went with my husband to call at Miss Hosmer's studio, and met the Hon. Mr. Cowper, who stopped to talk. Mr. Browning darted upon us across the Piazza., glowing with cordiality. Miss Hosmer could not admit us, because she was modeling Lady Mordaunt's nose.--Governor Seymour called.--I took Rose to a window in the Carnival. It was a mad, merry time. A gentleman tossed me a beautiful bouquet and a bonbon.--Julian and I went to the Albani Villa with Mrs. Ward and Mr. Charles Sumner. A charming time.--In the twilight I went with Mr. Hawthorne to the Coliseum and the Forum. It grew to lovely moonlight.--After dinner I went to the Pincian gardens with Mr. Hawthorne and Julian. It was moonlight.--Mr. Sumner made a long call." Among the friends much with us was the astronomer, Miss Maria Mitchell, whom we had long known intimately. She smiled blissfully in Rome, as if really visiting a constellation; flashing her eyes with silent laughter, and curling her soft, full, splendid lips with fascinating expressions of satisfaction. I loved her for this, but principally because, while with us in Paris, it was she who had with delicious comradeship introduced me to that perfection of all infantile taste--French gingerbread, warm (on an outdoor counter) with the sunshine of the skies! She had the long list of churches and ruins and pictures catalogued upon her efficient tongue, and she and my mother ran together like sisters to see the sights of beauty and reminiscence; neither of them ever tired, and never disappointed. Her voice was richly mellow, like my father's, and her wit was the merry spray of deep waves of thought. The sculptor, Miss Harriet Hosmer, it was easy to note, charmed the romancer. She was cheerfulness itself, touched off with a jaunty cap. Her smile I remember as one of those very precious gleams that make us forget everything but the present moment. She could be wittily gay; but there was plenty of brain power behind the clever mot, as immensities are at the source of the sun-ray. There was a blessing in the presence of Miss Elizabeth Hoar, once engaged to that beloved brother of Mr. Emerson whom death had taken. She seemed to me (I plead guilty to fancifulness) like a tall, speaking monument, composed of diamonds and pearls. She talked a great deal, gently, with a penetrating sweetness of voice, and looking somewhat down, as those do who have just received the news of a bitter sorrow. She knew everything that was fine in history and poetry and art; and to be near her, and to catch at moments the clear unfaltering challenge of her sad but brave eyes, was to live a little nobler one's self. I will give here two letters from this friend, showing her strength of sympathy and tenderness:-- FLORENCE, May. DEAR SOPHIA,--We are here after a journey entirely prosperous in every respect, driving through a country as lovely as it could be. Such wreaths of hawthorn, such hanging tassels of laburnum, such masses of delicate purple flowers draping the rocks and carpeting every broken ground,--golden broom on every hillside, scarlet poppies illuminating every field of grain, and the richest crimson clover, like endless fields of strawberries,--I never saw before. We have had just clouds enough to make beautiful shadows on the mountains. How I wish you and Una could be floated on a cloud over the charming region. I thought of the dear child at every new flower, but not without a pang; for my only disappointment in leaving Rome (no, the other was that I had not seen Mr. Browning) was that I could not send Una some flowers the morning of our departure. I had set my heart upon it, but could not find any pretty enough. Every fresh spray of hawthorn on our journey renewed the prick of my disappointment. We should have liked to take Julian along with us as our traveling artist, to lay up the flowers for us in imperishable colors [he already painted flowers remarkably]; we were reminded of him very often. I saw dear little Rose's patron, St. Rosa, in the Staffa Gallery at Perugia,--very beautiful. I have much to thank you for, dear Sophia, in all sorts of aid and sympathy. Very charming is the recollection of every meeting with you, from the first lovely Sunday at the Villa Doria; and then the day when we visited the willful Queen of Egypt as she sat waiting to be made again immortal in marble [in Story's studio]. Those days in Rome were made brighter to me by the sunshine of kindness and a hearty sympathy, beginning with the day which will be an exhilarating thought to me as long as I live, when you showed me St. Peter's Piazza under the blue sky; and then we passed the wall of the Capitol, and looked down upon ancient Rome. It was a wonderful day, Sophia, and I shall never forget that you received me in that city. I hope you will have many joyous days before you leave Europe, so that you may all forget the many anxieties of the last three months. I wish to send my love to Mrs. Story. I enjoy the thought of her, and Mr. Story, very much. I have always loved them for their thorough kindness to Margaret [Fuller d'Ossoli], and now I have seen them I love them for themselves. Love and constant remembrance to Una and dear little Rose. You don't know how hard it is not to know about you, day by day. [Later.] I had your other letter in Genoa, and was rejoiced to get it. I had driven with Lizzie and Mr. May the very day before from Villeneuve to Montreux to call upon you, the people at Hotel Byron assuring us you were to spend a month at Montreux. However, the news from Una was precious, for it was the first intelligence we had had since we left the dear child in bed in Rome, with that trickish fever playing about her. I did not receive the note from Mr. Hawthorne. I am almost glad you are not going to take her back into the low ground at Concord this autumn. . . . Many friends were in Rome, both as residents and as tourists, and in all my after-life our two winters there were the richest of memories, in regard both to personalities and exquisite objects, and to scenes of artistic charm. Yet, as I have said elsewhere, if the tall, slender figure of my father were not at hand, even my mother's constantly cheering presence and a talkative group of people could not warm the imagination quite enough. He says, in speaking of the Carnival, "For my part, though I pretended to take no interest in the matter, I could have bandied confetti and nosegays as readily and riotously as any urchin there." These few words explain his magnetism. The decorous pretense of his observant calm could not make us forget the bursts of mirth and vigorous abandon which now and then revealed the flame of unstinted life in his heart. And I, watching constantly as I did, saw a riotous throw of the confetti, a mirthful smile of Carnival spirits, when my father was radiant for a few moments with a youth's, a faun's merriment. Having quoted a letter of my sister's which expresses his opinion and her own of the irksomeness of sight-seeing, however heroic the spot, I will add this little paragraph from the next winter's correspondence, when, though only fifteen, she wrote very well of Europe and America, concluding: "It shows you have not lived in Europe, dear aunt, and do not know what it is to breathe day after day the atmosphere of art, that you can think of our being satisfied. We have seen satisfactorily, but the longer we stay, the higher and deeper is our enjoyment, and the more are our minds fitted to understand and admire, and the nearer do our souls approach in thought and imagination to that fount of glory and beauty, from which the old artists drew so freely." In art, Catholicity was utterly bowed down to by my relatives and their friends, because without it this great art would not have been. For, as scientists and dreamers have proved that gold cannot be made until we know as much as the earth, so uninspired artists have proved that religious art can only grow under conditions known solely to the heart that is Catholic. Every religious school of art which has departed from imitation of the Old Masters has forfeited holiness in depicting the Holy Family. My mother's letters describing my sister's illness with Roman fever recall the many persons of interest whom we saw. She writes: "Carriages were constantly driving to the door with inquiries. People were always coming. Even dear Mrs. Browning, who almost never goes upstairs, came the moment she heard. She was like an angel. I saw her but a moment, but the clasp of her hand was electric, and her voice penetrated my heart. Mrs. Ward, also usually unable to go upstairs, came every day for five days. One day there seemed a cloud of good spirits in the drawing-room, Mrs. Ward, Mrs. Browning, Mrs. Story, and so on, all standing and waiting. Magnificent flowers were always coming, baskets and bouquets, which were presented with tearful eyes. The American minister constantly called. Mr. Aubrey de Vere came. Every one who had seen Una in society or anywhere came to ask. Mrs. Story came three times in one day to talk about a consultation. The doctor wished all the food prepared exactly after his prescription, and would accept no one's dishes. 'Whose broth is this?' 'This is Mrs. Browning's.' 'Then tell Mrs. Browning to write her poesies, and not to meddle with my broths for my patient!' 'Whose jelly is this?' 'Mrs. Story's.' 'I wish Mrs. Story would help her husband to model his statues, and not try to feed Miss Una!' General Pierce came three times a day. I think I owe to him, almost, my husband's life. He was divinely tender, sweet, sympathizing, and helpful." She adds: "No one shared my nursing, because Una wanted my touch and voice; and she was not obliged to tell me what she wanted. For days, she only opened her eyes long enough to see if I were there. For thirty days and nights I did not go to bed; or sleep, except in the morning in a chair, while Miss Shepard watched for an hour or so. Una had intervals of brightness and perfect consciousness. In one of these, she tied up a bouquet of flowers with hands that almost shook the flowers to pieces with their trembling, to send them to a friend who was ill. She raised herself upon her elbow, and wrote with a pencil a graceful note, quoting her father's 'Wonder-Book' in reference to the bouquet." I went with my father and mother to several painters' and sculptors' studios (besides innumerable visits to churches and galleries), all filling my mind with unfailing riches of memory. I hope I shall be pardoned for giving the general effect of this companionship and sight-seeing upon many years of reflection in a strain that is autobiographical. The studio which I best remember was Mr. Thompson's, he who had painted the portrait of my father used in the editions of "Twice-Told Tales." The room was very large, but not very high, and it had a great deal of shadow in it. I did not think he painted as well as Raphael; but I delighted in the smell of his pigments, which were intensely fragrant. I thought his still moist canvas upon the easel, of a little Peter and a well-groomed angel, infinitely amusing. It was history scrubbed, and rather reduced in size. I was half appalled, half fascinated, by my temerity in having such frivolous private opinions of a picture that my mother and father felt the excellence of with reverence and praise. A minute portrait of me was painted by Mr. Thompson; one for which I did not find it at all amusing to sit, as I had to occupy a stiff chair (I think it was even a high stool) without any of the family to keep me in heart, although I had almost never been left with friends in that way, and although I was by that time a perfect recluse in disposition. So I was under the impression that I was being punished by the invisible powers, which I was conscious of eminently deserving. The small painting shows this idea of Purgatorial arrest by a clever touch here and there, without depicting a frown or positive gloom. The patronizing demeanor of an artist at work upon a portrait, which we all know so well,--the inevitable effect of his faith in himself, the very breath of artistic endeavor, without which he would lounge through life asking, "Of what use is it to attempt?"--made me furious, in my naughty, secret mind. I was not accustomed to being patronized; my mother herself had never given me a command. Besides, I was out of temper to think that my quietly observant father had stood in admiration before that picture of the liberating of St. Peter, of which I wearied, liking it so cordially that he had uttered his conclusive, deeply sympathetic "Yes," when my mother gave voice to her praise; whereas I had not had the grace to glow, but voted all the pictures bores in a lump. Mr. Thompson, below the average size, and harmlessly handsome, always wore the prevailing gleam of a smile that showed chiefly at the eyes, offset by a nimbus of gray and black hair. I wondered, even at seven years of age, how sculptors in the flesh could come and carve original conceptions among the unspeakably successful attempts of those who were already thinnest dust, yet whose names have so much personality in them that a sovereign presence fills the place where they are spoken,--sculptors whose statues step as it were unexpectedly (themselves surprised) into sight, with none of the avoirdupois of later stone-work; that heaviness which, in some of the finest of these modern figures, causes them to pause involuntarily, as if snowed upon. The high degree of smoothness of the old statues, as well as their mellowed whiteness, may give life; added to that wonderful deep cutting in all crevices and detail of nature, such as gives, in literature, the life to Balzac's endlessly studied facts of situation. The sugary porousness of much of the inferior marble of to-day arrests the eye, and troubles it. Story's Cleopatra is smooth, close-fibred as glass, and the snowstorm has not been allowed to drift upon the folds of her robe, the interstices of her modeling. She, with a few others of still later date, comes near to the old art, which has as much possibility for our imaginative survey as the plot of "The Marble Faun," so marvelously, so intricately, so unslavishly finished. In looking at the Dying Gladiator, we wonder whether he has already passed on from mastering the thought of his approaching death to the remembrance of his wife and children; or whether upon the agony of the physical pang and the insult to courage, which his wound has brought him to endure, is yet to break the pathos of a hero's regret for the relinquished sweetness of love and home. The Marble Faun suggests the problem as to whether he has for an instant stopped laughing, or will not immediately laugh; and what has a little while ago, or will suddenly cause, the animal fury of gladness to turn this jocund athlete into a dancing, bewilderingly enticing companion, chiming with guffaws and songs. Cleopatra's watchful melancholy partook also of classic momentariness, and I hoped she would spring to her feet. I liked very much to go to Mr. Story's studio, and I thought that for so slight a figure he was remarkably fearless. The arches of triumph, which my mother studied reverently, seemed to me too premeditated and unnecessary; although an architect could no doubt have explained why, even to the present day, the little door for the little cat should supplement the big door of all space, which one would at first take to be a hero's best environment. Not thus unnecessary appeared the Coliseum; haunted by wild beasts, especially lions, leaping (I imagined) in hobgoblin array from the cavernous entrances which were pointed out to me as connected in the days of triumphant tyranny with their donjons. Many tender thoughts filled my reflections as I saw pilgrims visiting, and kneeling before, the black cross in the centre, and the altars around the walls. I delighted to muse within the circular ruin, upon whose upper rim, jagged but sunlit, delicate vegetation found a repentant welcome. The circular form of the ruin is full of eloquence, as one approaches from the Forum. What would be grace in a smaller structure is tragedy in so immense a sweep, which melts into vagueness, or comes mountainously upon you, or swirls before you in a retreating curve that figures the never-changing change of eternity. The tomb of Cecilia Metella, and other successive tombs of the Appian Way beyond the walls, gave me my first impression of death that really was death. There could be, I reflected, looking at the sepulchres of these old Romans, no pretty story about the poor folk having gone to heaven comfortably from their apparent bodies. Here were the ashes of them, after a thousand years, in contemptible little urns; and they were expected to enjoy, in that much impaired state, sundry rusty bric-a-brac, dolls, and tear-vials of spookish iridescence, until, in the vast lapse of time, even a ghost must have got tired. Unaided by the right comment, I was dragged down considerably by those pagan tombs; and as an antidote, the unexplained catacombs were not sufficiently elevating. I did not read the signs of the subterranean churches aright, any more than the uncultivated Yankee reads aright an Egyptian portraiture. Monkish skulls and other unburied bones, seen by the light of moccoletti, were to me nothing but forms of folly. The abounding life of Catholicity was hardly understood by our party, which for some reason seemed inclined to impute the most death to the faith which has the most form. We did not gather how this abounding life can afford, though making more of our little fleshly sojourn than any other patron, to compare a skull with the life of the spirit, and relegate it to ornamentation and symbol. Through the streets of Rome trotted in brown garb and great unloveliness a frequent monk, brave and true; and each of these, I was led by the feminine members of the family, to regard as a probable demon, eager for my intellectual blood. A fairer sight were the Penitents, in neat buff clothes of monastic outline, their faces covered with their hoods, whose points rose overhead like church steeples, two holes permitting the eyes to peep with beetle glistenings upon you. They went hurryingly along, called from their worldly affairs; and my mother imparted to me her belief that they were somewhat free of superstition because undoubtedly clean. Sometimes processions of them, chanting, came slowly through the city, bearing the dead to burial. I did not know, then, that the chanting was the voicing of good, honest, Bible-derived prayers; I thought it was child's play, useless and fascinating. In the churches the chanting monks and boys impressed me differently. Who does not feel, without a word to reveal the fact, the wondrous virtue of Catholic religious observance in the churches? The holiness of these regions sent through me waves of peace. I stepped softly past the old men and women who knelt upon the pavements, and gazed longingly upon their simpler spiritual plane; I drew back reluctantly from the only garden where the Cross is planted in visible, reverential substance. For the year ensuing this life in Rome, I entertained the family with dramatic imitations of religious chants, grumbling out at sundown the low, ominous echoings of the priests, answered by the treble, rapid and trustful, of the little choristers, gladly picturing to myself as I did so the winding processions in St. Peter's. In the square beneath our windows, during Lent, booths were set, and countless flat pancake-looking pieces of dough were caught up by a white-capped and aproned cook, with a long-handled spoon, and fried in olive oil placed in a caldron at the booth's door, to be served to passers in the twinkling of an eye. I watched this process until I grew to regard Lent as a tiresome custom. Having tested the cakes, I found them to be indistinct in taste, for all their pretty buff tint, and the dexterous twist of the cook's wrist as he dumped them and picked them up. If they had been appetizing I should have been sharply interested in the idea of becoming a Catholic, but their entire absence of relish convinced me that the Italians lacked mental grasp and salvation at a single swoop: and this in spite of the fact that one of my mother's most valued friends, Mrs. Ward, had lately joined the Church. It was her husband who said of her, "Whatever church has Anna, has St. Anna!" Perhaps the most exquisite speech ever uttered by a husband. Before this serious season of pancakes, which was all Lent was to me at the time of which I speak, the Carnival had rushed upon my sight, carrying all our friends through its whirlpool. Every gay cloth, shawl, and mat that could be brought into service I had rejoiced to see displayed upon the balconies. A narrow, winding street the Corso seemed, being so full, and the houses so high; and a merry blue strip of heaven far away overhead, glancing along the housetops, assured us space still existed. Sudden descents of flowers upon one's shoulders and lap in the carriage, from a window or a passer, or a kindly feeling stranger in another carriage, made one start in mirthful response. Sudden meetings with dear friends, or friends who seemed almost dear in the cheerful hurly-burly, became part of the funny scrimmage. At each side-street sat on a stony standing horse a beautifully proportioned and equipped guard, in gleaming helmet and calm demeanor. To stand or sit at the windows beside the show was an experience full of pleasure; and if the window was on a level with the heads of the huddling passers, one could be in all the merriment yet not jostled; one could easily pick out a pretty woman or a handsome man to whom to throw a bouquet; and one could see energetic revelers, already well supplied with flowers, reaching high windows with bouquets by means of those wooden contrivances which can be extended or contracted at will, and look like impracticable ladders. The fair recipient at the lattice never failed to respond with an ecstatic smile if this Jacob's ladder had been sufficiently long to reach her welcoming hand. Meantime, many bunches of flowers, some large and elegant, some small and merely gay of color, were being thrown aloft or flung downward, making fountains and cataracts of flowers. Sometimes these bouquets fell into the street dejectedly, upon whose pavement little ragamuffins were always ready to pounce for them, and sell them again as fast as possible to passers who had exhausted their supply, had become mad with the Carnival, and caught sight, in that very moment, of some cherished comrade to whom they wished to throw a greeting. There was an intoxicating enjoyment in being singled out as the recipient of fragrant flowers, sent with a laugh of the eyes; or of a handful of sugared almonds, tossed with a gay shout of compliment. If the passer who thus honored us was a complete stranger, meeting us for this one moment in racial kindness, we felt the untrammeled bonhomie which, God knows, we were expected to feel as a matter of course not for a moment only, but for life. Upon all these things I delighted to think and afterwards to ponder, because I realized that they were of vital interest to the intelligence which was to me greatest and dearest. CHAPTER XIII ITALIAN DAYS: II Between our two winters in Rome we spent the summer in Florence, to which we journeyed by carriage over a road that was hung like a rare gallery with landscapes of the most picturesque description, and bordered close at hand by many a blue or crimson or yellow Italian anemone with its black centre. This experience was all sunshine, all pastime. On the way, stopping at Lake Thrasymene, my mother wrote:-- May 29, 1858. MY DEAR ELIZABETH,--I have just been watching the moon rise over the lake, exactly opposite the window of our parlor. We thought to go out and see the moonlight this evening, when I saw on the horizon what seemed a mighty conflagration, which I immediately supposed must be the moon, though I had never seen it look so red. The clouds were of a fiery splendor, and then the flaming rim of the moon appeared above the mountains, like the shield of some warrior of the great battle between Flaminius and Hannibal on this spot, rising with its ghostly invisible hero to see how it was now on the former field of blood. The "peace supreme" that reigns here this evening distances all thought of war and terror. We left Perugia this afternoon at three o'clock, with the finest weather. Our drive was enchanting all the way, along rich valleys and up mountains. And when climbing mountains we have two milk-white steers which majestically draw us along. Their eyes are deep wells of dark, peaceful light, that seem to express broad levels of rich waving grain, pure lapsing streams, olives and vines, and every other sign of plenty and quiet husbandry, with no end of dawns, twilights, and cool thickets. The golden age of rural life slumbers in their great orbs. Byron calls them "the purest gods of gentle waters." June 7. Here we are, then, in enchanting Florence! I shall try to send you a journal by the Bryants, who are here now. The Brownings are close by, and we are going to see them soon. The language has yet to be made in which to describe beautiful, beautiful Florence, with its air of nectar and sherbet and soft odors, its palaces, Arno, and smooth streets, arched bridges, and all its other charms and splendors. . . . We were hot in the city of Florence. My only consolation was to eat unnumbered cherries and apricots, for I did not as yet like the figs. My brother and I sometimes had a lurid delight in cracking the cherry and apricot stones and devouring the bitter contents, with the dreadful expectation of soon dying from the effects. Altogether I considered our sojourn in the town house, Casa del Bello, a morose experience; but it was, fortunately, short. My mother had a different feeling: she wrote home to America, "It is a delightful residence." Without doubt it contained much engaging finery. Three parlors, giving upon a garden, were absorbed into the "study" for my father alone; and my mother was greatly pleased to find that fifteen easy-chairs were within reach of any whim for momentary rest between the campaigns of sight-seeing. To add to my own arbitrary shadow and regret of that time, the garden at the rear of the house was to me clamp; full of green things and gracefully drooping trees, doubtless, but never embracing a ray of sunshine. Yet it was hot; all was relaxing; summer prevailed in one of its ill-humored moods. To make matters worse, my brother had caught in this Dantesque garden a brown bird, whether because sick or lame I know not. But an imprisoned bird it certainly was; and its prison consisted of a small, cell-like room, bare of anything but the heart-broken glances of its occupant. My father objected to the capture and caging of birds, and looked with cold disapproval upon the hospitable endeavor of my brother to lengthen the existence of a little creature that was really safer in the hands of Dame Nature. Presently the bird from the sad garden died, and then indeed Florence became intolerable to me! I wandered through the long, darkish hall that penetrated our edifice from front to back, and I sometimes emerged into the garden's bosky sullenness in my unsmiling misery. Again my mother's testimony proves my mind to have been strangely influenced by what to her was a garden full of roses, jessamine, orange and lemon trees, and a large willow-tree drooping over a fountain in its midst, with a row of marble busts along a terrace: altogether a place that should have filled me with kittenish glee. The "Note-Books," to be sure, suggest that it harbored malaria. I looked with painful disappointment upon the unceasing dishes of fresh purple figs, which everybody else seemed to enjoy. I saw pale golden wine poured from poetic bottles braided with strands of straw, like pretty girls' heads of flaxen hair; and I was surprised that my father had the joyousness to smile, though sipping what he was later to call "Monte Beni Sunshine." That nothing of misery might be excluded from my dismal round of woe, the only people whom I could go to see were the Powers family, living opposite to us. Mr. Powers petrified me by the sang-froid with which he turned out, and pointed out, his statues. Great artists are apt to be like reflections from a greater light,--they know more about that light, than about themselves; but Mr. Powers seemed to me to defy art to lord it over his splendid mechanical genius, the self he managed so well. To prove beyond a doubt that material could not resist him, he would step from the studio into an adjoining apartment, and strike off button-like bits of metal from an iron apparatus which he had invented. It was either buttons or Venuses with him, indifferently, as I supposed. Gray to me, though "bright" to my mother, were the galleries and narrow halls of marble busts, where started back into this life old Medicean barbarians, of imperial power and worm-like ugliness; presided over, as I looked upon them in memory during my girlhood, by that knightly form of Michel Angelo's seated Lorenzo de' Medici, whose attitude and shadowed eyes seem to express a lofty disapproval of such a world. A morning dawned when the interest in living again became vigorous. A delicate-looking, essentially dignified young gentleman, the Count da Montauto, seeming considerably starved, but fascinatingly blue-blooded, appeared in our tiresome house. I heard that we were to remove to a villa at Bellosguardo, a hill distant fifteen minutes' drive from the city, where the summer was reasonable; and as the count owned this haunt of refreshment, I became enthusiastically tender in my respect for him. For years afterwards my sensibilities were exercised over the question as to where the count was put while we enjoyed the space and loveliness of Montauto; I did not know that he had a palace in town. His sad, sweetly resentful glance had conveyed to me the idea, "Must I still live, if I live beneath my rank, and as a leaser of villas?" One day, happy day, we toiled by carriage, between light-colored walls, sometimes too high for any view,--that once caused my mother a three hours' walk, because of a misturn,--over little hot, dusty roads, out and up to the villa. My father and brother had already walked thither; and my brother's spirits, as he stood beside the high iron gateway, in front of the gray tower which was the theme, or chief outline, of the old country-seat, were pleasant to witness, and illustrated my own pent-up feelings. He shouted and danced before the iron bars of the gate like a humanized note of music, uncertain where it belonged, and glad of it. Our very first knowledge of Montauto was rich and varied, with the relief from pretentiousness which all ancient things enjoy, and with the appealing sweetness of time-worn shabbiness. The walls of the hall and staircase were of gray stone, as were the steps which led echoingly up to the second story of the house. My sister exclaims in delight concerning the whole scene: "This villa,--you have no idea how delightful it is! I think there must be pretty nearly a hundred rooms in it, of all shapes, sizes, and heights. The walls are never less than five feet thick, and sometimes more, so that it is perfectly cool. I should feel very happy to live here always. I am sitting in the loggia, which is delightful in the morning freshness. Oh, how I love every inch of that beautiful landscape!" The tower and the adjacent loggia were the features that preeminently sated our thirst for suggestive charm, and they became our proud boast and the chief precincts of our daily life and social intercourse. The ragged gray giant looked over the road-walls at its foot, and beyond and below them over the Arno valley, rimmed atop with azure distance, and touched with the delicate dark of trees. Internally, the tower (crowned, like a rough old king of the days of the Round Table, with a machicolated summit) was dusty, broken, and somewhat dangerous of ascent. Owls that knew every wrinkle of despair and hoot-toot of pessimism clung to narrow crevices in the deserted rooms, where the skeleton-like prison frameworks at the unglazed windows were in keeping with the dreadful spirits of these unregenerate anchorites. The forlorn apartments were piled one above the other until the historic cylinder of stone opened to the sky. In contrast to the barrenness of the gray inclosures, through the squares of the windows throbbed the blue and gold, green and lilac, of Italian heavens and countryside. At the dangers of the stairway my father laughed, with flashing glances. He always laughed (it was a sound peculiarly passionate and low, full, yet unobtrusive) at dangers in which he could share himself, although so grave when, in the moral turmoil, he was obliged to stand and watch uneven battle; not the less sorry for human nature because weakness comes from our ignoring the weapons we might have used. But on those trembling stairs he approved of the risk we ran, while cautioning me not to drop through one of the holes, and then stumbled within an inch of breaking his own neck, and laughed again. "While gropingly descending these crazy steps one dusky evening, I gratified Julian exceedingly by hitting my nose against the wall," he admits in the "Note-Books." Who would not enjoy seeing a monarch come to so humble a contact with the bulwarks of his tower? Especially if he were royal enough not to take offense at one's mirth, as this one never did. Reaching the topmost heights of the stone pile, shaggy with yellow moss, we eagerly pressed to the battlements and drank in the view, finding all Florence spread out before us, far down from the breeze and light and prospect of our perch,--understanding the joy of falcons that are long hooded, and then finally look. On one side of the tower was the lawn, hemmed round by a somewhat high semicircular stone wall. In front of it was Florence, pinnacled and roof-crowded, across the gentle valley. Not far away rose Galileo's rival tower, and the habitations of one or two friends. On another side of the keep the valley clipped more decidedly; and in the foreground clustered a collection of trees upon a grassy slope, divided from the villa lawn by a low wall, over which my father and mother sometimes bought grapes, figs, pomegranates, and peaches grown upon the place, which were smilingly offered by the count's contadini. These from their numbers were unrecognizable, while their prices for the exquisite fruit were so small that it was a pleasure to be cheated. Behind the tower stretched lengthily the house, its large arched doorway looking upon all comers with a frown of shadow. Still further behind basked a bevy of fruit gardens and olive-tree dotted hill-sides with their vines of the grape. We used to sit on the lawn in the evenings, and sometimes received guests there; looking at the sky, moon, comet, and stars ("flowers of light," my mother called them) as if they were new. Any mortal might have been forgiven for so regarding them, in the sapphire glory of an Italian night. My mother's untiring voice of melodious enthusiasm echoed about the group in ejaculations of praise. In connection with the comet my elders spoke of war and misery, of which it was accused of being the messenger. My child's heart already knew the iron truth, and was not astonished at the intrusion of such a thought, that beauty and peace must always entertain the herald of the other country--the dark one. There was a sadness about Italy, although it lay under "the smile of God," as my father calls its sunshine. He and my mother often mention this shadow, as before remarked, in their records. At times the cause seems to them to come from the "incubus" of the Catholic religion, although they both believed it capable of being wholly perfect. Glorious scenes were constantly soothing this sense of human sorrow, scenes such as cannot be found in regions outside the Church. In the Basilica of San Spirito my mother came upon several visible lovelinesses of elaborate devotion, which with her limpid purity of justice she enthusiastically notes down. She entered the church one day for coolness and rest, and, recognizing its "noble" beauties, she described, in her journal already printed, "a function going on before one of the side-chapels--the burial service of a child. The coffin was covered with a white satin pall, embroidered with purple and gold. The officiating priests were in robes of white satin and gold, and the altar was alight with candles, besides those borne by young boys in white tunics. This scene in the aisle was a splendid picture in the soft gloom of the church; and when the organ burst forth in a kind of tender rapture, rolling pearly waves of harmony along the large spaces, and filling the dome with the foam and spray of interlacing measures, it seemed as if angels were welcoming the young child to heaven." The pettiness of a brief burial service in a private parlor or in a meagre meeting-house would not have touched her heart so profoundly, because it would not have recalled heaven so impressively in all its grandeur and tenderness. She evidently perceived here the sweet and even cheering veracity of a devotion that is glad to remember all the possibilities of reverent observance, each motion and aspect of which have a reference to God and to religious history. Again San Spirito gave her an insight into the dignity of painstaking worship. "While we were walking about, the priests and monks of the Order of St. Augustine, who have a convent attached, came in a procession from the sacristy, and knelt down in their sweeping black robes upon the marble pavement, in two lines, one behind the other, and chanted aloud their Ave Maria. It was a wonderful picture." She still clung to the Puritanical idea that in religion itself, "What looks so wondrous, wondrous fair, His providence has taught us to fear. . . . Angels only are fit to live as monks pretend to live." But she contradicts this theory. No one was more adapted than she to perceive the godliness of the monastic sacrifice, when she realized the object of it. Among her dearest friends and verified ideals were Mr. George Bradford, who always reminded me of a priest of the true type; and Miss Hoar, whose vestal soul, celebrating constant rites over the memory of her dead betrothed, made her the image of a nun. This welcome delicacy and loftiness of self-consecration my mother also observed in the ranks of the sometimes harshly criticised friars. At Fiesole, "A young monk unveiled the picture for us. He was very courteous, and had an air of unusual goodness and sincerity. He is one of those who 'bear witness.' As a matter of course I offered him a fee for his trouble, but he made a sad and decided gesture of refusal, that was very surprising and remarkable; for it was impossible to gainsay him, and I felt embarrassed that I had thought of the gold that perishes in the presence of the heavenly picture and the holy youth. I wish I knew his history." I also wish she had known it, for it would have unveiled for her the most beautiful facts about other holy youths of our own day, as well as similar facts of earlier days,--truths whose purity would have rapt her thought even more deeply than Fra Angelico's purity in art, uncurtained by brave and humble hands for her sight. It is to be observed that her views and tacit beliefs and my father's are identical. They did not really believe that Italy was under an "incubus;" they felt the physical weight of Catholicity, or the Cross, and half guessed its spiritual spring. Some of the rooms at Montauto I studiously avoided. The forlorn cavern of a parlor, or ball-room, I remember to have seen only once. There was a painful vacuum where good spirits ought to have been. Along the walls were fixed seats, like those in the apse of some morally fallen cathedral, and they were covered with blue threadbare magnificence that told the secrets of vanity. Heavy tables crowded down the centre of the room. I came, saw, and fled. The oratory was the most thrilling place of all. It opened out of my sister's room, which was a large, sombre apartment. It was said to attract a frequently seen ghost by the force of its profound twilight and historic sorrows; and my sister, who was courageous enough to startle a ghost, highly approved of this corner of her domain. But she suddenly lost her buoyant taste for disembodied spirits, and a rumor floated mistily about that Una had seen the wretched woman who could not forget her woes in death. In "Monte Beni" this oratory is minutely pictured, where "beneath the crucifix . . . lay a human skull . . . carved in gray alabaster, most skillfully done . . . with accurate imitation of the teeth, the sutures, the empty eye-caverns." Everywhere the intense picturesqueness gave material, at Montauto, for my father's romance. Stella, whom he invited into the story without changing her name, was a sympathetic object in my now somewhat alarmed and lonely days. I call her an "object," because I could not understand a word she said, and she soon gave up opening her lips when we were together. She looked kind, in spite of her rocky hardness of Italian feature, and she fed me on dried melon-seeds when I was at the lowest tide of depression. Sometimes she was to be found at the well, close to the entrance-arch. There the faithful servant let down a bucket by its heavy chain with a doomsday clank. The sunlight revealed the smallness and brilliancy and number of her black braids and the infinite multitude of her wrinkles, as well as the yellowness of her dangling gold earrings and the texture of her parchment-like arms, which were the color of glossy brown leaves. Sometimes she would awaken me from soporific melancholy by allowing herself to be found upon her knees in her bedroom, a bare and colorless abode, her great black crucifix hanging in majestic solitude upon the wall above her handsome old head. I thought her temporarily insane to pray so much, and at all to an audience; but I recognized the gentleness of the attacks, and I somehow loved her for them. Even to the ignorance of error truth can be beautiful. An extremely attractive little Italian maid, of sixteen or less, used also to be found on her knees before the crucifix. Stella was obliged to drive this dark-eyed butterfly to her devotions. If I discovered her, I had no reverence, and tried unmercifully to interrupt her soft whispers. Stella's loving revenge for my wickedness was to give me a tiny wax sleeping Bambino, surrounded by flowers under a convex glass, whose minute face had a heaven of smiling forgiveness in it. Often I surreptitiously studied the smile on the sleeping face. I felt that He loved us even during His sleep; and I cherished the gaze of shining gladness with which Stella herself had placed this treasure in my hand, which could so simply quicken sluggish thought. To give a clearer glimpse of the villa, which with our life there became one of the most precious of our memories, and a glimpse also of one or two people and events, I will insert this letter from my mother:-- August 14, 1858. MY DEAR ELIZABETH,--Una and Rose were getting pale for the first time in their lives, and Mr. Hawthorne was languid and weary of the city life, and an English lady, a friend of the Brownings, told us of this villa, which the Count da Montauto wished to let this summer, though never before, and so we tried for it and got it. It is a most enchanting situation, and the villa is immensely large and very nice. We have an old mediaeval tower at the oldest end, in which Savonarola was confined, and from its summit we have a view which one might dream of, but seldom see. We are so high, however, that from the first floor we have a sweeping view, and look down on the most sumptuous valley of the Arno from our western windows,--a level plain, cultivated every inch with grapes and olives and other fruits; and all round rise up soft hills, and the Apennines afar off where the sun sets. We see the noble white steers slowly moving in the valley, among the trees, ploughing as in the days of Cincinnatus. An infinite peace and quiet reign. We hear birds, and in the evening the cue owl utters his melodious, melancholy one note. The world does not disturb us. The air is as pure and fresh as air can possibly be, blowing from the sweet, carefully tended plain, and sweeping down from the mountains. Near us is the villa and tower of Aurora Leigh, just at the end of our estate, and farther off is Galileo's tower, where he studied the heavens. Northeast from us lies the beautiful Florence, burning in the bottom of the cup of hills, with all its domes and campaniles, palaces and churches. Fiesole, the cradle of Florence, is visible among the heights at the east, and San Miniato, with its grove of cypresses, is farther off to the south. There is no end of beauty and interest, and the view becomes ideal and poetic the moment the sun begins its decline; for then the rose and purple mists drape the hills, and mountains--the common earth--turn to amethysts, topazes, and sapphires, and words can never convey an idea of the opaline heavens, which seem to have illimitable abysses of a penetrable substance, made up of the light of pearls. Literally and carefully I speak of the light of pearls, with the opaline changes. I am quite happy that I have seized the image. The effect is of a roundness with the confused yet clear outline of a pearl, an outline which also is not one, and the light looks living and absorbing. One evening, after the sun went down, rays of blue and rose came from it in a half-wheel shape, so ineffably delicate that if we looked too pryingly they were not there, but if we glanced unawares there they were. It was more like the thought of them than the realities. This summer we have our first sight of Italian sunsets, for we were assured we should have fever if we were out at the hour in Rome. We began by watching them from the bridges over the Arno, which are perhaps the finest points of view, because the river is added. It flows east and west, and so we have all the glory by standing on either of the bridges. The arches, the reflections in the waters, the city's palaces and churches, the distant hills, all come in for a part of the pomp and splendor,--all that man can do, all that God has done, for this lovely land. Una's chamber is in the tower [but approached from the house], a large, lofty, vaulted chamber, with an oratory attached, full of Madonnas, pyxes, "and all sorts," as Mr. Browning says. There is a regular chapel besides. Mr. Hawthorne has a delightful suite of study, saloon, dressing-room, and chamber, away from all the rest of the family. August 25. Last evening Miss Ada Shepard and I went to a neighboring villa to see some table-turning, which I have never seen, nor anything appertaining to spirits. Mr. Frank Boott was there and a Fleming, Una's drawing-master. We tried patiently for two hours with the table, but though it trembled and wavered, nothing came of it; so Miss Shepard then took a pencil and paper for the spirits to write, if they would. [The attempt on Miss Shepard's part was now, and always afterwards, successful. My mother speaks of several somewhat vulgar spirits who caused great merriment.] Then Ada felt quite a different and new power seize her hand, rapidly writing: "Who?" "Mother." "Whose mother?" "Mrs. Hawthorne's. My dear child, I am with you. I wish to speak to you. My dearest child, I am near you. I am oftener with you than with any one." Ada's hand was carried forcibly back to make a strong underline beneath "near," and it was all written with the most eager haste, so that it agitated the medium very much, and me too; for I had kept aloof in mind, because Mr. Hawthorne has such a repugnance to the whole thing. Mrs. Browning is a spiritualist. Mr. Browning opposes and protests with all his might, but he says he is ready to be convinced. Mrs. Browning is wonderfully interesting. She is the most delicate sheath for a soul I ever saw. One evening at Casa Guidi there was a conversation about spirits, and a marvelous story was told of two hands that crowned Mrs. Browning with a wreath through the mediumship of Mr. Hume. Mr. Browning declared that he believed the two hands were made by Mr. Hume and fastened to Mr. Hume's toes, and that he made them move by moving his feet. Mrs. Browning kept trying to stem his flow of eager, funny talk with her slender voice, but, like an arrowy river, he rushed and foamed and leaped over her slight tones, and she could not succeed in explaining how she knew they were spirit hands. She will certainly be in Rome next winter, unless she goes to Egypt. You would be infinitely charmed with Mrs. Browning, and with Mr. Browning as well. The latter is very mobile, and flings himself about just as he flings his thoughts on paper, and his wife is still and contemplative. Love, evidently, has saved her life. I think with you that "'Aurora Leigh' overflows with well-considered thought;" and I think all literature does not contain such a sweet baby, so dewy, so soft, so tender, so fresh. Mr. Hawthorne read me the book in Southport, but I have read it now again, sitting in our loggia, with Aurora's tower full in view. . . . This loggia opened widely to the air on two sides, so that the opalescent views were framed in oblong borders of stone that rested our rejoicing eyes. Under the stone shade, in the centre of the Raphaelesque distances, many mornings were passed ideally. Visitors often joined us here. Among them was Miss Elizabeth Boott, afterwards Mrs. Duveneck, who came with her little sketch-book. She made a water-color portrait of my father, which, as the young artist was then but a girl, looked like a cherub of pug-nosed, pink good nature, with its head loose. I can see that little sketch now, and I feel still a wave of the dizziness of my indignation at its strange depiction of a strong man reduced to dollhood. Miss Boott being a true artist in the bud, there was, of course, the eerie likeness of some unlike portraits. It became famous with us all as the most startling semblance we had ever witnessed. I sincerely wish that the ardor with which the young girl made her sketch could have been used later on a portrait, which certainly would have been superbly honest and vigorous, like all the work that has come from her wonderfully noble nature and her skillful perception. Another young lady appeared against the Raphaelesque landscape. She was very pretty in every way, and my mother was delighted to have her present, and showered endearing epithets upon her. Her large brown eyes were alluring beyond words, and her features pathetically piquant and expressive. Her face was rather round, pale, and emphatically saddened by the great sculptor Regret. She sat in picturesque attitudes, her cheek leaning against her hand, and her elbow somewhere on the back or arm of her chair; yet her positions were never excessive, but eminently gentle. She had been disappointed in love, and one was sure it was not in the love of the young man. She was too pretty to die, but she could look sad, and we all liked to have her with us, and preferred her charming misery to any other mood. The roads going to and fro between the cream-colored stone walls of the surrounding country were unsparingly hot. I can feel now the flash of sunbeams that made me expect to curl up and die like a bit of vegetation in a flame. I tried to feel cooler when I saw the peasant women approaching, bent under their loads of wheat or of brush. If they had no shading load, it made me gasp to observe that their Tuscan hats, as large as cart-wheels and ostensibly meant to shadow their faces, were either dangling in their hands or flapping backward uselessly. It seemed to be no end of a walk to Florence, and the drive thither was also detestable,--all from the heat and dust, and probably only at that time of year. The views of many-colored landscape, hazy with steaming fields, were lovely if you could once muster the energy to gaze across the high road-walls when the thoroughfare sank clown a declivity. After a while there were cottages, outside of which ancient crones sat knitting like the wind, or spinning as smoothly as machines, by the aid of a distaff. Little girls, who were full-fledged peasant women in everything but size, pecked away at their knitting of blue socks, proud of their lately won skill and patient of the undesired toil. They were so small and comely and conformable, and yet conveyed such an idea of volcanic force ready to rebel, that they entranced me. Further inside the heart of the city upstarted the intoxications of sin and the terrible beggars with their maimed children. I never lost the impressions of human wrong there gathered into a telling argument. The crowded hurry and the dirty creatures that attend commercial greed and selfish enjoyment in cities everywhere weltered along the sidewalks and unhesitatingly plunged into the mud of the streets. It seemed to me even then that something should be done for the children maimed by inhuman fathers, and for their weeping mothers too. My father did not forget in his art the note he found in beautiful Florence, though it was too sad to introduce by a definite exposition, and falls upon the ear, in "Monte Beni," like a wordless minor chord. I sometimes went with my mother when she called at Casa Guidi, where the Brownings lived. I had a fixed idea that Galileo belonged to their family circle; and I had a vision of him in my mind which was quite as clear as Mrs. Browning ever was (although I sat upon her lap), representing him as holding the sun captive in his back yard, while he blinked down upon it from a high prison of his own. The house, as I recall it, seemed to have a network of second-story piazzas, and the rooms were very much shadowed and delightfully cool. Mr. Browning was shining in the shadow, by the temperate brightness of mind alone, and ever talking merrily. Cultivated English folk are endowed with sounding gayety of voice, but he surpassed them all, as the medley of his rushing thought and the glorious cheer of his perception would suggest. Mrs. Browning was there: so you knew by her heavy dark curls and white cheeks, but doubted, nevertheless, when you came to meet her great eyes, so dreamy that you wondered which was alive, you or she. Her hand, usually held up to her cheek, was absolutely ghostlike. Her form was so small, and deeply imbedded in a reclining-chair or couch-corner, that it amounted to nothing. The dead Galileo could not possibly have had a wiser or more doubtfully attested being as a neighbor. If the poor scientist had been there to assert that Mrs. Browning breathed, he would probably have been imprisoned forthwith by another incredulous generation. My mother speaks, on her second visit to Rome, of the refreshment of Mr. Browning's calls, and says that the sudden meetings with him gave her weary nerves rest during the strain of my sister's illness. She could not have rejoiced in his spirited loveliness more than the little girl by her side, who sometimes languished for direct personal intercourse in all the panorama of pictures and statues, and friends absorbed in sight-seeing. I had learned to be grateful for art and ruins, if only they were superlative of their kind. I put away a store of such in my fancy. But Mr. Browning was a perfection which looked at me, and moved vigorously! For many years he associated himself in my mind with the blessed visions that had enriched my soul in Italy, and continued to give it sustenance in the loneliness of my days when we again threw ourselves upon the inartistic mercies of a New England village. He grouped himself with a lovely Diana at the Vatican, with some of Raphael's Madonnas and the statue of Perseus, with Beatrice Cenci and the wildflowers of our journeys by vettura, besides a few other faultless treasures deeply appreciated by me. We all noticed Mr. Browning's capacity for springing through substances and covering space without the assistance of time. My mother says in her little diary of Rome, "I met Mr. Browning; or rather, he rushed at me from a distance, and seemed to come through a carriage in his way." It was as if he longed to teach people how to follow his thoughts in poetry, as they flash electrically from one spot to another, thinking nothing of leaping to a mountain-top from an inspection of "callow nestlings," or any other tender fact of smallest interest. Not one of all the cherubs of the great masters had a sunnier face, more dancing curls, or a sweeter smile than he. The most present personality was his; the most distant, even when near, was the personality he married. I have wondered whether the Faun would have sprung with such untainted jollity into the sorrows of to-day if Mr. Browning had not leaped so blithely before my father's eyes. "Browning's nonsense," he writes, "is of a very genuine and excellent quality, the true babble and effervescence of a bright and powerful mind; and he lets it play 'among his friends with the faith and simplicity of a child." I think I must be right in tracing one of the chief enchantments of the story of Dr. Grimshawe to these months upon the hill of Bellosguardo. For at Montauto one of the terrors was the cohort of great spiders. There is no word in the dictionary so large or so menacing as a large spider of the Dr. Grimshawe kind. Such appear, like exclamations, all over the world. I saw one as huge and thrilling as these Italian monsters on the Larch Path at the Wayside, a few years later; but at Montauto they really swaggered and remained. We perceive such things from a great distance, as all disaster may be perceived if we are not more usefully employed. A presentiment whispers, "There he is!" and looking unswervingly in the right direction, there he is, to be sure. I could easily have written a poor story, though not a good novel, upon the effectiveness of these spiders, glaring in the chinks of bed-curtains, or moving like shadows upon the chamber wall or around the windows, and I can guess my father's amusement over them. They were as large as plums, with numerous legs that spread and brought their personality out to the verge of impossibility. I suppose they stopped there, but I am not sure. No wonder the romancer humorously added a touch that made a spider of the doctor himself, with his vast web of pipe-smoke! The great romance of "Monte Beni" is thus referred to by Mr. Motley and his wife; I give a few sentences written by the latter, a friend of many years' standing, and I insert Mr. Motley's letter entire:-- WALTON-ON-THAMES, April 13, 1860. DEAREST SOPHIA,--My pen continues to be the same instrument of torture to me that you remember it always was in my youth, when I used to read your letters with such wonder and delight. This spell is still upon me, for I appreciate the magic of your mind now as much as I did then, and have treasured up every little bit of a note that you wrote me in Rome. I like your fresh feminine enthusiasm, and always feel better and happier under its influence. . . . I am glad that you were so much pleased with Lothrop's letter of praise and thanksgiving; a poor return at best for the happiness we had derived from reading Mr. Hawthorne's exquisite romance. . . . I shall not now attempt to add any poor words of mine to his expressive ones, except to assure you of my deep sympathy for the infinite content and joy you must feel in this new expression of your husband's genius. We were so much pleased to find that he was willing to come to us in London, which we hardly dared to hope for. . . . At least I can promise to attend to him as little as possible. . . . We have taken for the season a small house in Hertford Street, 31, which belongs to Lady Byron, who has fitted it up for her grand-daughter, Lady Annabella King. . . . The eldest brother, Lord Ockham, is a mechanic, and is now working in a machine-shop in Blackwall Island, where he lives. This eccentric course is rather, I fear, the development of a propensity for low company and pursuits than from anything Peter the Greatish there is about him. His father, who is the quintessence of aristocracy, has cast him off. . . . Lothrop was very much gratified by all the fine things you said about him, and so was I; for praise from you means something and is worth having, because it comes from the heart. There is another volume written, . . . but another must be written before either is published. Ever your affectionate M. E. M. The "letter of praise and thanksgiving" referred to above is as follows:-- WALTON-ON-THAMES. MY DEAR HAWTHORNE,--I can't resist the impulse to write a line to you, in order to thank you for the exquisite pleasure I have derived from your new romance. Everything that you have ever written, I believe, I have read many times; and I am particularly vain of having admired "Lights from a Steeple," when I first read it in the "Boston Token," several hundred years ago, when we were both younger than we are now; and of having detected and cherished, at a later day, an "Old Apple Dealer," whom I believe that you have unhandsomely thrust out of your presence, now you are grown so great. But the romance of "Monte Beni" has the additional charm for me that it is the first book of yours that I have read since I had the privilege of making your personal acquaintance. My memory goes back at once to those (alas, not too frequent, but that was never my fault) walks we used to take along the Tiber or in the Campagna, during that dark period when your Una was the cause of such anxiety to your household and to all your friends; and it is delightful to get hold of the book now, and know that it is impossible for you any longer, after waving your wand, as you occasionally did then, indicating where the treasure was hidden, to sink it again beyond the plummet's sound. I admire the book exceedingly. I don't suppose that it is a matter of much consequence to you whether I do or not, but I feel as much disposition to say so as if it were quite an original and peculiar idea of my own, and as if the whole world were not just now saying the same thing. I suppose that your ears are somewhat stunned with your praises, appearing as you do after so long an interval; but I hope that, amid the din, you will not disdain the whisper from such sincere admirers as I am myself, and my wife and daughter are. I don't know which of the trio is the warmest one, and we have been fighting over the book, as it is one which, for the first reading at least, I did not like to hear aloud. I am only writing in a vague, maundering, uncritical way, to express sincere sympathy and gratitude, not to exhibit any dissenting powers, if I have any. If I were composing an article for a review, of course I should feel obliged to show cause for my admiration, but I am now only obeying an impulse. Permit me to say, however, that your style seems, if possible, more perfect than ever. Where, oh where is the godmother who gave you to talk pearls and diamonds? How easy it seems till anybody else tries! Believe me, I don't say to you half what I say behind your back; and I have said a dozen times that nobody can write English but you. With regard to the story, which has been slightly criticised, I can only say that to me it is quite satisfactory. I like those shadowy, weird, fantastic, Hawthornesque shapes flitting through the golden gloom which is the atmosphere of the book. I like the misty way in which the story is indicated rather than revealed. The outlines are quite definite enough, from the beginning to the end, to those who have imagination enough to follow you in your airy flights; and to those who complain, I suppose nothing less than an illustrated edition, with a large gallows on the last page, with Donatello in the most pensive of attitudes, his ears revealed at last through a white nightcap, would be satisfactory. I beg your pardon for such profanation, but it really moves my spleen that people should wish to bring down the volatile figures of your romance to the level of an every-day novel. It is exactly the romantic atmosphere of the book in which I revel. You who could cast a glamour over the black scenery and personalities of ancient and of modern Massachusetts could hardly fail to throw the tenderest and most magical hues over Italy, and you have done so. I don't know that I am especially in love with Miriam or Hilda, or that I care very much what is the fate of Donatello; but what I do like is the air of unreality with which you have clothed familiar scenes without making them less familiar. The way in which the two victims dance through the Carnival on the last day is very striking. It is like a Greek tragedy in its effect, without being in the least Greek. As I said before, I can't single out any special scene, description, or personage by which to justify or illustrate my feeling about the book. That I could do better after a second reading, when it would be easy to be coldly critical. I write now just after having swallowed the three volumes almost at a draught; and if my tone is one of undue exhilaration, I can only say it was you gave me the wine. It is the book--as a whole--that I admire, and I hope you will forgive my saying so in four pages instead of four words. Is there any chance of our seeing you this summer? We expect to be in London next month. It will be very shabby of you not to let us have a glimpse of you; but I know you to be capable of any meanness in that line. At any rate, you can have little doubt how much pleasure it will give us. Pray don't answer this if it is in the least a bore to you to do so. I know that you are getting notes of admiration by the bushel, and I have no right to expect to hear from you. At the same time it would be a great pleasure to me to hear from you, for old (alas, no,--new) acquaintance' sake. I remain very sincerely yours, J. L. MOTLEY. Of the discussions about "Monte Beni" I remember hearing a good deal, as my mother laughingly rehearsed passages in letters and reviews which scolded about Hawthorne's tantalizing vagueness and conscienceless Catholicity. My parents tried to be lenient towards the public, whose excitement was so complimentary, if its usually heavy inability to analyze its best intellectual wine was fatiguing. My father never for a moment expected to be widely understood, although he no doubt hoped to be so in certain cases. He must have easily deduced something in the way of chances for appreciative analysis from prevalent literature. He struck me as a good deal like an innocent prisoner at the bar, and if I had not been a member of his family I might have been sorry for him. As it was, I felt convinced that he could afford to be silent, patient, indifferent, now that his work was perfected. My mother put into words all that was necessary of indignation at people's desire for a romance or a "penny dreadful" that would have been temporary and ineffective. Meantime, such rewards as Mr. Motley offered weighed down the already laden scales on the side of artistic wealth. Perhaps it will not be impertinent for me to remark, in reference to this admirable and delightful letter, that its writer here exemplifies the best feelings about Hawthorne's art without quite knowing it. We see him bubbling glad ejaculations in the true style of an Omar Khayyam who has drained the magic cup handed to him. It is delicious to hear that he was not sure he cared about the personages of a story that had clutched his imagination and heart, until he reeled a little with responsive enchantment; though it is hard to say about what he cared if not about the romancer's powerful allies, who carried his meaning for him. Mr. Motley tries to attribute to the scenes he knew so well in reality, under their new guise of dreamy vividness, the spell which came, I believe, from the reality of moral grandeur, in both its sin and its holiness, but which we so entirely ignore every precious hour by sinking to the realities of bricks and common clay. Miriam and Donatello may seem at first glance like visions; but I have always been taught that their spell lay in our innate sense that they were ourselves, as we really are. The wine of great truth is at first the most heady of all, making its revelations shimmer. CHAPTER XIV THE WAYSIDE In order to give an idea of how it happened that our family could return from Europe to Concord with a few great expectations, I will rehearse somewhat of the charm which had been found in the illustrious village when my father and mother first knew it. There a group of people conversed together who have left an echo that is still heard. There also is still heard "the shot fired round the world," which of course returned to Concord on completing its circuit. But even the endless concourse of visitors, making the claims of any region wearisomely familiar, cannot diminish the simple solemnity of the town's historical as well as literary importance; and indeed it has so many medals for various merit that it is no wonder its residents have a way of speaking about it which some of us would call Bostonian. Emerson, Thoreau, Channing, and Alcott dispersed a fragrance that attracted at once, and all they said was resonant with charity and courage. The first flash of individuality from Emerson could hardly fail to suggest that he resembled the American eagle; and he presided over Concord in a way not unlike our glorious symbol, the Friend of Light. It must have been exhilarating to look forward to many years in Emerson's hamlet. My earliest remembered glimpse of him was when he appeared--tall, side-slanting, peering with almost undue questioning into my face, but with a smile so constant as to seem like an added feature, dressed in a solemn, slender, dark overcoat, and a dark, shadowing hat--upon the Concord highroad; the same yellow thoroughfare which reaches out to. Lexington its papyrus-strip of history. At the onset of Emerson--for psychic men do attack one with their superiority--awe took possession of me; and, as we passed (a great force and a small girl) I wondered if I should survive. I not only did so, but felt better than before. It then became one of my happiest experiences to pass Emerson upon the street. A distinct exaltation followed my glance into his splendid face. Yet I caviled at his self-consciousness, his perpetual smile. I complained that he ought to wait for something to smile at. I could not be sure that he was privately enjoying some joke from Greek fun-makers, remembered under a Concord elm. After a time, I realized that he always had something to smile for, if not to smile at; and that a cheerful countenance is heroic. By and by I learned that he always could find something to smile at, also; for he tells us, "The best of all jokes is the sympathetic contemplation of things by the understanding, from the philosopher's point of view." But, in my unenlightened state, when I saw him begin to answer some question, however trivial, with this smile, slowly, very slowly growing, until it lit up his whole countenance with a refulgent beam before he answered (the whole performance dominated by a deliberation as great and brilliant as the dawn), I argued that this good cheer was out of proportion; that Emerson should keep back a smile so striking and circumstantial for rare occasions, such as enormous surprise; or, he should make it the precursor to a tremendous roar of laughter. I have yet to learn that any one heard him laugh aloud,--which pastime he has called, with certainly a familiar precision that indicates personal experience, a "pleasant spasm," a "muscular irritation." In maturer years I believed that his smile brought refreshment, encouragement, and waves of virtue to those who saw it. To be sure, it was a sort of questioning; sometimes even quizzical; sometimes only a safeguard; but it was eminently kind, and no one else could do it. His manner was patronizing, in spite of its suavity; but it grew finer every spring, until it had become as exquisitely courteous as Sir Philip Sidney's must have been. The arch of his dark eyebrows sometimes seemed almost angry, being quickly lifted, and then bent in a scowl of earnestness; but as age advanced this sternness of brow grew to be, unchangeably, a calm sweep of infinite kindness. It was never so well understood at The Wayside that its owner had retiring habits as when Alcott was reported to be approaching along the Larch Path, which stretched in feathery bowers between our house and his. Yet I was not aware that the seer failed at any hour to gain admittance,--one cause, perhaps, of the awe in which his visits were held. I remember that my observation was attracted to him curiously from the fact that my mother's eyes changed to a darker gray at his advents, as they did only when she was silently sacrificing herself. I clearly understood that Mr. Alcott was admirable; but he sometimes brought manuscript poetry with him, the dear child of his own Muse, and a guest more unwelcome than the enfant terrible of the drawing-room. There was one particularly long poem which he had read aloud to my mother and father; a seemingly harmless thing, from which they never recovered. Out of the mentions made of this effusion I gathered that it was like a moonlit expanse, quiet, somnolent, cool, and flat as a month of prairies. Rapture, conviction, tenderness, often glowed upon Alcott's features and trembled in his voice. I believe he was never once startled from the dream of illusive joy which pictured to him all high aims as possible of realization through talk. Often he was so happy that he could have danced like a child; and he laughed merrily like one; and the quick, upward lift of his head, which his great height induced him to hold, as a rule, slightly bent forward,--this rapid, playful lift, and the glance, bright and eager though not deep, which sparkled upon you, were sweet and good to see. Yet I have noticed his condition as pale and dolorous enough, before the event of his noble daughter's splendid success. But such was not his character; circumstances had enslaved him, and he appeared thin and forlorn by incongruous accident, like a lamb in chains. He might have been taken for a centenarian when I beheld him one day slowly and pathetically constructing a pretty rustic fence before his gabled brown house, as if at the unreasonable command of some latter-day Pharaoh. Ten years afterward he was, on the contrary, a Titan: gay, silvery-locked, elegant, ready to begin his life over again. Alcott represented to me a fairy element in the up-country region in which I so often saw him. I heard that he walked the woods for the purpose of finding odd coils of tree-roots and branches, which would on the instant suggest to him an ingenious use in his art of rustic building. It was rumored that nobody's outlying curios in this line were safe under his eye, and that if you possessed an eccentric tree for a time, it was fated to close its existence in the keeping of Alcott. I imagined his slightly stooping, yet tall and well-grown figure, clothed in black, and with a picturesque straw hat, twining itself in and out of forest aisles, or craftily returning home with gargoyle-like stems over his shoulders. The magic of his pursuit was emphasized by the notorious fact that his handiwork fell together in the middle, faded like shadows from bronze to hoary pallor; its longevity was a protracted death. In short, his arbors broke under the weight of a purpose, as poems become doggerel in the service of a theorist. Truly, Alcott was completely at the beck of illusion; and he was always safer alone with it than near the hard uses of adverse reality. I well remember my astonishment when I was told that he had set forth to go into the jaws of the Rebellion after Louisa, his daughter, who had succumbed to typhus fever while nursing the soldiers. His object was to bring her home; but it was difficult to believe that he would be successful in entering the field of misery and uproar. I never expected to see him again. Almost the only point at which he normally met this world was in his worship of apple-trees. Here, in his orchard, he was an all-admirable human being and lovely to observe. As he looked upon the undulating arms or piled the excellent apples, red and russet, which seemed to shine at his glance, his figure became supple, his countenance beamed with a ruby and gold akin to the fruit. In his orchard by the highroad, with its trees rising to a great height from a basin-shaped side lawn (which may originally have been marshy ground), he seemed to me a perfect soul. We all enjoyed greatly seeing him there, as we wended to and from our little town. No doubt the garden of children at the beginning of his career inspired him likewise; and in it he must have shown the same tender solicitude and benevolence, and beamed upon his young scholars with a love which exquisitely tempered his fantastical suppositions. He often spoke humbly, but he never let people think he was humble. His foibles appeared to me ridiculous, and provoked me exceedingly,-- the brave cat of the proverb must be my excuse,--but I awakened to the eternal verity that some such husks are rather natural to persons of purely distinctive minds, perhaps shielding them. And I think one comes to value a bent blessed with earnest unconsciousness; a not too clever Argus vision; a childlike gullibility and spontaneity. This untarnished gullibility and gentle confidence, for all his self-laudations, Alcott had, and when he did not emerge either from his apple orchard or his inspirations he was essentially wholesome, full of an ardent simplicity, and a happy faith in the capacities given him by his Creator. So that his outline is one of much dignity, in spite of the somewhat capricious coloring of his character; the latter being not unlike the efforts of a nursery artist upon a print of "The Father of His Country," for whom, as he stands proudly upon the page, a green coat and purple pantaloons were not intended, and are only minor incidents of destiny. Mr. Ellery Channing was, I am sure, the townsman who was most gladly welcome. My parents felt great admiration and friendliness for him, and it would be a sacrifice on my own part not to mention this companion of theirs, although I must beg his pardon for doing so. There is no doubt that Concord would have hung with several added pounds of weight upon our imaginations if it had not been for him. Over his tender-heartedness, as I saw him in the old days, played delicious eccentricities, phosphorescent, fitful, touch-me-not antics of feeling. I was glad to meet the long glance of his gray, dazzling eyes, lowered gracefully at last. The gaze seemed to pass through me to the wall, and beyond even that barrier to the sky at the horizon line. It did not disturb me; it had been too kindly to criticise, or so I thought. No doubt Mr. Channing had made his little regretful, uncomplimentary notes in passing, but it was characteristic of his exquisite comradeship towards all that we did not fear his eyes. I say comradeship, although the power which I believed touched him with its wand so mischievously had induced him to drop (as a boy loses successively all his marbles) all his devoted friends, without a word of explanation, because without a shadow of reason; the only thing to be said about it being that the loss was entirely voluntary on the part of this charming boy. He would cease to bow, as he passed. Then he found the marbles again, pocketed them as if nothing had happened, smiled, called, and hob-nobbed. A man's high-water mark is his calibre; and at high-water mark Mr. Channing's sea was to us buoyant, rich-tinted, sunlit; a great force, darkening and dazzling with beautiful emotions. He was in those days devoted to the outer air, and to the wonders of the nature we do not often understand, even when we trap it and classify it. He always invited his favorites to walk with him, and I once had the honor of climbing a very high hill by his side, in time to look at a Concord sunset, which I myself realized was the finest in the world. Another peculiar spirit now and then haunted us, usually sad as a pine-tree--Thoreau. His enormous eyes, tame with religious intellect and wild with the loose rein, making a steady flash in this strange unison of forces, frightened me dreadfully at first. The unanswerable argument which he unwittingly made to soften my heart towards him was to fall desperately ill. During his long illness my mother lent him our sweet old music-box, to which she had danced as it warbled at the Old Manse, in the first year of her marriage, and which now softly dreamed forth its tunes in a time-mellowed tone. When he died, it seemed as if an anemone, more lovely than any other, had been carried from the borders of a wood into its silent depths, and dropped, in solitude and shadow, among the recluse ferns and mosses which are so seldom disturbed by passing feet. Son of freedom and opportunity that he was, he touched the heart by going to nature's peacefulness like the saints, and girding upon his American sovereignty the hair-shirt of service to self-denial. He was happy in his intense discipline of the flesh, as all men are when they have once tasted power--if it is the power which awakens perception of the highest concerns. His countenance had an April pensiveness about it; you would never have guessed that he could write of owls so jocosely. His manner was such as to suggest that he could mope and weep with them. I never crossed an airy hill or broad field in Concord, without thinking of him who had been the companion of space as well as of delicacy; the lover of the wood-thrush, as well as of the Indian. Walden woods rustled the name of Thoreau whenever we walked in them. When we drove from the station to The Wayside, in arriving from Europe, on a hot summer day, I distinctly remember the ugliness of the un-English landscape and the forlornness of the little cottage which was to be our home. Melancholy and stupid days immediately followed (at least they were so in my estimation). I marveled at the amount of sand in the flower-borders and at the horrifying delinquencies of our single servant. For some years I was eager to use all the eloquence I could muster in my epistles to girl friends, in England or anywhere, as to the paucity of life in Concord. Perhaps the following extracts from two letters, one written at Bath, England, and the other at Concord, and never sent, but kept by my mother from the flames with many more of my expressions in correspondence, may convey the feelings of the whole family:-- 31 CHARLES STREET, BATH, ENGLAND. DEAR HANNAH [Redcar Hannah],--When I go home I think that I shall never have such a nice time as when I go home; for I shall have such a big garden, and I shall have little and big girls to come and see me. Never on earth shall I have such a nice time as when I am at home. After the transition:-- CONCORD, MASS. I am in Concord now, and long to see you again, but I suppose that it is useless to think of it. I am going out, after I have done my lessons, to have a good time.--A very good time indeed, to be sure, for there was nothing but frozen ground, and I had to be doing something to keep myself warm, and I had to come back after a little while. I do not know how to keep myself warm. Happy are you who keep warm all the time in England. The frost has made thick leaves on our windows everywhere, and you can hardly see through them. I tried to bring the stimulus of great events into the Concord life by writing stories, of which I would report the progress to my one or two confidantes. My father overheard some vainglorious boasts from my lips, one afternoon, when the windows of the little library where he sat were open; and the small girl who listened to me, wide-eyed, and I myself, proud and glad to have reached a thrilling denouement, were standing beside the sweet-clover bed, not dreaming of anything more severe than its white bloom. A few minutes afterwards, my father hung over me, dark as a prophetic flight of birds. "Never let me hear of your writing stories!" he exclaimed, with as near an approach to anger as I had ever seen in him. "I forbid you to write them!" But I believe this command only added a new attraction to authorship, agreeably haunting me as I beckoned imaginary scenes and souls out of chaos. An oasis bloomed at remote seasons, when we went to visit Mr. and Mrs. Fields in Boston. My mother writes of my reviving, and even becoming radiant, as soon as a visit of this fragrant nature breathed upon me. I joyously begin a letter of my mother's with the following greeting: "As soon as we got to Boston. My dear, dear Papa. We will write to you very promptly indeed. We have got here safely, and are also very glad to get here. We had some rich cake and sherry as soon as we got here.--[My mother proceeds:] Annie glided in upon us, looking excellently lovely. Heart's-Ease [Mr. Fields] appeared just before dinner. He declares that the 'Consular Experiences' is superb.--I write in the deep green shade of this wood of a library. We all went to church through the hot sunshine. Mr. Fields walked on the sunny side, and when Mrs. Fields [Mrs. Meadows was the playful name by which we called her] asked him why, he said, 'Because it makes us grow so. Oh, I am growing so fast I can scarcely get along!' Mr. Fields said it made him very sleepy to go to church, and he thought it was because of the deacons.--He says the world is wild with rapture over your 'Leamington Spa.' He did not know how to express his appreciation of it.--We met Mr. Tom Appleton at the gallery, and he was very edifying. There is a good portrait by Hunt. Mr. Appleton called it 'big art,' which took my fancy, it being so refreshing after hearing so much said about 'high art.' There is a portrait of Hunt by himself, which has a line about the brow that is Michelangelic; 'the bars of Michelangelo.' A head of Fremont was handsome, but showing a man incapable of large combinations. He looks eagle-like and loyal and brilliant, but not wise. We felt quite glorious with the war news, and were surprised to see so few flags flying. To breakfast we had Mr. Dysie. It was pleasant to hear his English brogue--a slight excess of Henry Bright's Lancashire accent. To tea we had Mr. and Mrs. Bartol, and Mr. Fields was so infinitely witty that we all died at the tea-table. Mr. Bartol, in gasps, assured him that he had contrived a way to save the food by keeping us in convulsions during the ceremony of eating, and killing us off at the end. Annie had on a scarlet coronet that made her look enchanting, and Mr. Fields declared she was Moses in the burning bush. Oh, do delay the acacia blossoms till I come! Give a sky full of love to Una and Julian." My father also tasted the piquant flavors of merriment and luxury in this exquisite domicile of Heart's-Ease and Mrs. Meadows. And at The Wayside, too, we had delightful pleasures, in the teeth and front of simplicity and seclusion, sandy flower-borders, rioting weeds, and intense heats. Concord itself could gleam occasionally, even outside of its perfect Junes and Octobers, as we can see here in the merry geniality of Louisa Alcott, who no more failed to make people laugh than she failed to live one of the bravest and best of lives. In return for a package of birthday gifts she sent us a poem, from which I take these verses:-- "The Hawthorne is a gracious tree From latest twig to parent root, For when all others leafless stand It gayly blossoms and bears fruit. On certain days a friendly wind Wafts from its spreading boughs a store Of canny gifts that flutter in Like snowflakes at a neighbor's door. "The spinster who has just been blessed Finds solemn thirty much improved, By proofs that such a crabbed soul Is still remembered and beloved. Kind wishes 'ancient Lu' has stored In the 'best chamber' of her heart, And every gift on Fancy's stage Already plays its little part. "Long may it stand, the friendly tree, That blooms in autumn and in spring, Beneath whose shade the humblest bird May safely sit, may gratefully sing. Time will give it an evergreen name, Axe cannot harm it, frost cannot kill; With Emerson's pine and Thoreau's oak Will the Hawthorne be loved and honored still!" My mother's records, moreover, in letters to her husband, refer to the humble labors that almost filled up her devoted year (her daughters tried to imitate her example), and these references indicate the difference we felt between Europe and home:-- Rose raised all the echoes of the county by screaming with joy over her blooming crocuses, which she found in her garden. The spring intoxicates her with "remembering wine." She hugs and kisses me almost to a mummy, with her raptures. Little spots of green grass choke her with unutterable ecstasy. September 9, 1860. Julian illuminated till tea-time; and after tea I read to both him and Rose a chapter of Matthew, and told them about Paul.--Rosebud has been drawing wonderfully on the blackboard recognizable portraits of Mr. Bennoch, her beloved Charlotte Marston, and Julian. Ben Mann appeared with a letter from dear Nona [Una]; and with one from Bentley, England, modestly asking of thee a book, to publish!--The weeds in the garden now exceed belief. There is not a trace to be seen of the melon or cucumber vines, or squashes, or of the beans towards the lane. All are completely overtopped by gigantic plants, like the Anakins overrunning the Israelites. Such riot of uninvited guests I never imagined. I shall try to do something, but I fear my puny might will not effect much against such hordes. The wet and heat together produce such growths as I never saw except in Cuba. There is a real forest at the back door, between the house and the terraces. The greenness is truly English and Irish.--I picked forty ears of corn to-day.--We all met at the Alcotts' at tea-time. It was a clear, frosty air that bit me as I went in through the sunset. We had a delightful visit. Mr. Alcott was sweet and benign as possible, and Mrs. Alcott looked like Jupiter Olympus.--General Hitchcock has been gone about an hour. Baby had got me some exquisite roses from Mr. Bull's, of various shades from deep crimson to light pink, and I arranged a flat glass dish full on the Roman mosaic table, and a tall glass on the white marble table, and a glass on the Hawthorne tea-table, while the illuminated crocus [a vase] was splendid with dahlias and tiger-lilies beneath the Transfiguration. So the drawing-room looked lovelily, and a fine rose-odor was diffused. All the blinds were open and the shades up, and a glory of greenness refreshed the eyes outside on the plumy, bowery hill and lawn. In this charming apartment I received my General. The most beautiful light of life beamed from his face at my recognition of his ideas, and at any expression of mine which showed a unity with his; or rather with truth. His quiet eyes have gathered innumerable harvests, and his observations are invaluable because impersonal. [He had made a study of the alchemists, and all mystical philosophy.]--Elizabeth Hoar spent the whole of yesterday morning with me. We talked Roman and Florentine talk. She thought our house the most fascinating of mansions. She is always full of St. Paul's charity. On the Roman table was a glass dish of exquisite pond-lilies, which Una brought from the river this morning; and out of the centre of the lilies rose a tall glass of superb cardinal-flowers. On the white table was a glass dish of balsams of every shade of red, from deep crimson through scarlet to pale pink, over to purple and up to white.--Una returned to-day from Boston. She has had a nice visit, and seen many persons, all of whom expressed to her unbounded adoration of you. "Why mamma, how everybody loves, adores him!" said she. Of course.--I had a call from the dancing-master, a most debonair individual, all smile and bow and curvets. I wish you could have seen the man. It was the broad caricature of elegant manners. How funny things are! I can hear you say, "Natur' is cur'ous."--I looked in upon Edith Emerson's party, and she had a large table spread with flowers, cake, and sugar-plums, beneath the trees, and a dozen children were running and laughing round a "pretty Poll," who scolded at them all. Mrs. Emerson was flitting like the spirit of a Lady Abbess in and out, in winged lace headdress and black silk. Your letter was a bomb of joy to me last evening.--I have taken heaps of your clothes to mend. What a rag-fair your closet was--and you did not tell me! Mrs. Alcott brought me some beer made of spruce only, and it was nice. Thou shalt have thy own beer, when you come home.--Bab went to see Mrs. Alcott, and I resumed weeding. At seven I heard thirteen cannon-shots, and did not understand it. Then I possessed The Wayside all alone till near eight of the evening. Not a sound but birds' last notes was to be heard. It was strange and sweet. I thought of you in a sea-breeze with felicity. At about eight I heard little feet racing along the Larch Path, and Baby came to view. She read aloud to me some of your "Virtuoso's Collection," and then to bed, celestial.--A letter came from Mr. Bennoch. He wails like Jeremiah over our war, and longs for a letter from you. He sends cartes de visite of himself and his wife. He looks uncommonly dumpy, with a pair of winged whiskers of astounding effect, and the expression of his face is blandly seraphic. [From my mother's diary.] January 1, 1862. Letter and wine from General Pierce. I heard Mr. Emerson's lecture on War. Furious wind--There is a lovely new moon; a golden boat.--Papa read "The Heart of Mid-Lothian" aloud in the evening.--I wish I knew whether the lines of my hand are like those of Sir Thomas Browne's. --My husband has made an anagram of my name: "A hope while in a storm, aha!"--General Pierce arrived at noon. I went to the Town Hall to hear the Quintette Club play the Fifth Symphony of Beethoven. Mrs. Alcott came with us. Bright moonlight at midnight. General Pierce remained all night.--My husband made an anagram of the General's name, "Princelie Frank." --My husband read aloud to me "Sir Launcelot Greaves." Papa read "Anne of Geierstein."--I prepared Julian for acting Bluebeard; and Ellen Emerson lent me the gear. We worked hard all day.--We received the photographs of Una and myself. Mine of course uncomely.--Mr. Ticknor came to dine; and Mr. Burchmore [son of Stephen Burchmore, whose tales at the Custom House were so inimitable] also came.--My husband is not well. I have been very anxious about him; but he is better this evening, thank God.--My right hand is so bad that I have to bathe it in arnica all the time, for I have worn it out by making shoes [and other ornamented articles for a masquerade to which her children were to go]. [The letters to my father continue.] Ellen and Edith Emerson took tea with Una, and they went home early, at about eight. At ten I heard a man's step and a ring at the door-bell. I went to the door, and not opening it, in a voice of command asked, "Who is it?" No reply. I again fiercely inquired, "WHO IS IT?" "Is Ellen here?" pleaded the surprised, quiet voice of Mr. Emerson! I immediately unlocked my portcullis, and in the lowest tone of woman begged the Sage to excuse my peremptory challenge.--The Masquerade was worth the great trouble taken in preparing for it. Una was quite gorgeous with her glittering embroideries of silver and gold, and her exquisite turban gleaming with precious stones and pearls. The most delicate roses bloomed in her cheeks, and her eyes were like two large radiant stars. She danced with Sir Kenneth of Scotland, personated admirably by Edward Emerson, in armor of black and gold, severe and simple.--[My sister adds her own delighted reference to my mother's.] "Oh, father! I did have the most awfully jolly time at the Masquerade that ever anybody had. It was the most perfectly Arabian Nights' scene, and the Princess Scheherezade [herself] at last saw in very fact one of the scenes that her glowing fancy had painted; but being now freed from the fear of death, her mind had lost its terrific stimulus and returned to its normal condition, or perhaps was a little duller than usual from being so long overtaxed; at all events, she did not compose a new story on the occasion, as might have been expected. A great many people spoke to me of the splendor of my dress. Mamma was so delighted with the becomingness of my black velvet jacket, that she has bought me a splendid dress of the same, and has sent for a bushel of seed-pearls to trim it with. The little bill for these items is awaiting you on your desk. I shall set up for a queen for the rest of my life, and if you are still going to call me Onion, you must find out the Persian for it." [The diary resumes.] My husband read to me his paper on his visit to Washington. Dr. George B. Loring and Mr. Pike [of Salem] came to tea in the evening. Mr. Thoreau died this morning.--The funeral services were in the church. Mr. Emerson spoke. Mr. Alcott read from Mr. Thoreau's writings. The body was in the vestibule, covered with wildflowers. We went to the grave. Thence my husband and I walked to the Old Manse and Monument. Then I went to see Annie Fields at Mr. Emerson's.--Fog and sultry. Brobdingnag dropping from eaves.--Superb morning. My husband transplanted sunflowers [of which he was immensely fond, though lilies-of-the-valley were his favorites].--My husband and Julian went to Boston; and Julian walked home in eight and a half hours [twenty miles].--Una's party took place to-night. Papa illuminated it with his presence.--Pleasant day. Papa magnanimously picked some strawberries.--I went on the hilltop with my husband all the morning [of a Sunday in June].--Our wedding-day. It is very hot and smoky. We think it the smokes of battles.--Very warm and fine. Mr. Alcott worked all day, lacking three hours [in constructing a rustic seat at the foot of our hill]. I went on the hilltop with my husband for a long time. Ineffable felicity.--A perfectly lovely day. I read "Christ the Spirit." Rose had a discourse from the Sermon on the Mount; the four verses about giving alms. We have very nice discourses [my mother's]. Una went to church.--Mr. George Bradford came to see us. Una and Julian went to the Emersons' in the evening.--Read again "Leamington Spa." Inimitable, fascinating.--Thanksgiving Day. We invited Ellery Channing, but he could not come.--Julian and I went to Boston. When I came home I found my husband looking very ill. Julian has gone on a visit to the Fields's.--My husband quite ill. Everything seems sad, when he is ill. I sewed all day.--My husband seems much better. He went up on the hill. Papa and the children played whist in the evening, while I read Charles Reade.--Celia cleared the old attic to-day. I found my dear hanging astral, that lighted my husband in his study at the Old Manse, and also Una's baby socks.--Judge Hoar came to invite my husband to tea with Mr. Eustis and Mr. Bemis and Mr. Emerson. He would not go.--I read ominous news of the war, which quite saddened and alarmed me. I read "Christ the Spirit."--I read about Alchemy and Swedenborg. Ellery Channing came to tea and spent the evening. He asked me if he might bring General Barlow to tea on Tuesday. It was almost immediately after our return home that the first notes of the requiem about to envelop us fell through the sound of daily affairs, at long intervals, because my father, from that year, began to grow less and less vigorous. There are many references in my mother's diaries and letters to my father's enforced monotony, and also to his gradually failing health, which, by the very instinct of loving alarm, we none of us analyzed as fatal; though, from his expression of face, if for no other reason, I judge he himself understood it perfectly. Death sat with him, at his right hand, long before he allowed his physical decline to change his mode of life. He tried to stem the tide setting against him, because it is the drowning man's part, even if hopeless. He walked a great deal upon the high hill-ridge behind the house, his dark, quietly moving figure passing slowly across the dim light of the mingled sky and branches, as seen from the large lawn, around which the embowered terraces rose like an amphitheatre. A friend tells me that, from a neighboring farm, he sometimes watched my father in an occupation which he had undertaken for his health. A cord of wood had been cut upon the hill, and he deliberately dragged it to the lower level of his dwelling, two logs at a time, by means of a rope. Along the ridge and down the winding pine-flanked path he slowly and studiously stepped, musing, looking up, stopping to solve some point of plot or morals; and meanwhile the cord of wood changed its abiding-place as surely as water may wear away a stone. But his splendid vigor paled, his hair grew snowy white, before the end. My mother wrote to him in the following manner from time to time, when he was away for change of scene:-- September 9, 1860. My crown of glory. This morning I waked to clouds and rain, but for myself I did not care, as you were not here to be depressed by it. There was a clear and golden sunset, making the loveliest shadows and lights on the meadows and across my straight path [over the field to the willows, between firs], and now the stars shine.--The way in which Concordians observe Fast is by loafing about the streets, driving up and down, and dawdling generally. No one seems to mourn over his own or his country's sins. Such behavior must disturb our Puritan fathers even on the other side of the Jordan.--In the evening Julian brought me a letter. "It is from New York," said he, "but not from papa." But my heart knew better, though I did not know the handwriting. I clashed it open, and saw "N. H.," and then, "I am entirely well," not scratched out. Thank God! . . . The sun has not shone to-day, and there is now a stormy wind that howls like a beast of prey over its dead. It is the most ominous, boding sound I ever heard. March 15, 1862. The news of your appetite sends new life into me, and immediately increases my own. July. I am afraid you have been in frightful despair at this rainy day. It has flooded here in sheets, with heavy thunder. But I have snatched intervals to weed. I could see and hear everything growing around me in the warm rain. The army corn has hopped up as if it were parched. The yellow lilies are reeling up to the skies. Pig-weed has become camelopard weed. . . . Alas that you should be insulted with dried-apple pie and molasses preserves! Oh, horror! I thought that you would have fresh fruit and vegetables. Pray go to a civilized house and have decent fare.--I know it will do you immense good to make this journey. You should oftener make such visits, and then you would "like things" better. Your spirits get below concert pitch by staying in one place so long at a time. I am glad Leutze keeps you on [to paint Hawthorne's portrait]. Do not come home till the middle of September. Just remember how hot and dead it is here in hot weather, and how you cannot bear it.--I do not think I have a purer pleasure and completer satisfaction, nowadays, than I am conscious of when I get you fairly away from Concord influences. I then sit down and feel rested through my whole constitution. All care seems at an end. I would not have had you here yesterday for all England. It was red-hot from morn to dewy eve. We burned without motion or sound. But you were in Boston, and not under this hill. If you wish me to be happy, you must consent to spend the dog-days at the sea.--After a cool morning followed a red-hot day. It seemed to me more intolerable than any before. You could not have borne such dead weather. The house was a refrigerator in comparison to the outdoor atmosphere.--We have had some intolerably muggy days. That is, they would have been so, if you had not been at the sea.--You have been far too long in one place without change, and I am sure you will get benefit under such pleasant conditions as being the guest of Mr. and Mrs. [Horatio] Bridge, and a witness of such new phases of life as those in Washington.--Splendors upon splendors have been heaped into this day. Loads of silky plumed corn or even sheaves of cardinal-flowers cannot be compared to the new sunshine and the magnificent air which have filled the earth from early dawn. The brook that became a broad river in the flood of yesterday made our landscape perfect. It seemed to me that I must dance and sing, and now I know it was because you were writing to me. Rose and I went down the straight path [called later the Cathedral Aisle] to look at the fresh river. I delayed to be embroidered with gold sun over and over, and through and through. At the gate I was arrested by the tower, also illustrious with the glory of the atmosphere, and very pretty indeed, lifting its nice, shapely head above the decrepit old ridge-pole of the ancient house.--I took my saw and went on a lovely wander, with a fell intent against all dead and confusing branches. How infinitely sweet it is to have access to this woodland virtue! It does me measureless good; and I am sure such air as we have on these fine days must be the effect of heroic and gentle deeds, and is a pledge that there are not tens only, but tens of thousands of heroes on this earth, keeping it in life and being.--Your letter has kindled us all up into lamps of light to-day. But I am wholly dissatisfied with your boarding-house, so full of deaf women, and violin din, and schoolgirls! Pray change your residence and have peace. You will curse your stars if you have to "bellow" for three weeks, when you so hate to speak even in your natural inward tone.--Mary has just sent me a note, saying that there is a paragraph in the paper about your being at Washington, and that the President [Lincoln] received you with especial graciousness. Stay as long as you can, and get great good. I cannot have you return yet.--The President has had a delicious palaver with a deputation of black folk, talking to them as to babies. I suspect the President is a jewel. I like him very well.--If it were not such a bore, I could wish thou mightest be President through this crisis, and show the world what can be done by using two eyes, and turning each thing upside down and inside out, before judging and acting. I should not wonder if thy great presence in Washington might affect the moral air and work good. If you like the President, then give him my love and blessing.--The President's immortal special message fills me with unbounded satisfaction. It is so almost superhumanly wise, moderate, fitting, that I am ready to believe an angel came straight from heaven to him with it. He must be honest and true, or an angel would not come to him. Mary Mann says she thinks the message feeble, and not to the point. But I think a man shows strength when he can be moderate at such a moment as this. Thou hadst better give my high regards to the President. I meant to write to him; but that mood has passed. I wish to express my obligations for the wisdom of his message. CHAPTER XV THE ARTIST AT WORK I was once asked to write of my father's "literary methods," and the idea struck me as delightfully impossible. I wish I knew just what those methods were--I might hope to write a romance. But as the bird on the tree-bough catches here and there a glimpse of what men are about, although he hardly aspires to plough the field himself, or benefit by human labor until the harvest comes, so I have observed some facts and gathered some notions as to how my father thought out his literary work. One method of obtaining his end was to devote himself constantly to writing, whether it brought him money or not. He might not have seemed to be working all the time, but to be enjoying endless leisure in walking through the country or the city streets. But even a bird would have had more penetration than to make such a mistake as to think this. Another wise provision was to love and pity mankind more than he scorned them, so that he never created a character which did not possess a soul--the only puppet he ever contrived of straw, "Feathertop," having an excellent soul until the end of the story. Still another method of gaining his success was to write with a noble respect for his own best effort, on which account he never felt satisfied with his writing unless he had exerted every muscle of his faculty; unless every word he had written seemed to his severest self-criticism absolutely true. He loved his art more than his time, more than his ease, and could thrust into the flames an armful of manuscript because he suspected the pages of weakness and exaggeration. One of his methods of avoiding failure was to be rigorous in the care of his daily existence. A preponderance of frivolous interruption to a modicum of thorough labor at thinking was a system utterly foreign to him. He would not talk with a fool; as a usual thing he would not entertain a bore. If thrown with these common pests, he tried, I think, to study them. And they report that he did so very silently. But he did not waste his time, either by politely chattering with people whom he meant to sneer at after they had turned their backs, or in indulgences of loafing of all sorts which leave a narcotic stupidity in their wake. He had plenty of time, therefore, for thought, and he could think while walking either in the fresh air, or back and forth in his study. Men of success detest inactivity. It is a hardship for them to be as if dead for a single moment. So, when my father could not walk out-of doors during meditation, he moved back and forth in his room, sturdily alert, his hands clasped behind him, quietly thinking, his head either bent forward or suddenly lifted upward with a light in his gray eyes. He wrote principally in the morning, with that absorption and regularity which characterize the labor of men who are remembered. When his health began to show signs of giving way, in 1861, it was suggested by a relative, whose intellect, strength of will, and appetite for theories were of equally splendid proportions, that my father only needed a high desk at which to stand when writing, to be restored to all his pristine vigor. With his usual tolerance of possible wisdom he permitted such a desk to be arranged in the tower-study at The Wayside; but with his inexorable contempt for mistakes of judgment he never, after a brief trial, used it for writing. Upon his simple desk of walnut wood, of which he had nothing to complain, although it barely served its purpose, like most of the inexpensive objects about him, was a charming. Italian bronze ink-stand, over whose cover wrestled the infant Hercules in the act of strangling a goose--in friendly aid of "drivers of the quill." My father wrote with a gold pen, and I can hear now, as it seems, the rapid rolling of his chirography over the broad page, as he formed his small, rounded, but irregular letters, when filling his journals, in Italy. He leaned very much on, his left arm while writing, often holding the top of the manuscript book lovingly with his left hand, quite in the attitude of a boy. At the end of a sentence or two he would sometimes unconsciously bow his head, as if bidding good-by to a thought well rid of for the present in its new garb of ink. In writing he had little care for paper and ink. To be sure, his large, square manuscript was firmly bound into covers, and the paper was usually of a neutral blue; and when I say that he had little care for his mechanical materials I mean that he had no servile anxiety as to how they looked to another person, for I am convinced that he himself loved his manuscript books. There was a certain air of humorous respect about the titles, which he wrote with a flourish, as compared with the involved minuteness of the rest of the script, and the latter covers every limit of the page in a devoted way. His letters were formed obscurely, though most fascinatingly, and he was almost frolicsome in his indifference to the comfort of the compositor. Still he had none of the frantic reconsiderations of Scott or Balzac. If he made a change in a word it was while it was fresh, and no one could obliterate what he had written with a more fearless blot of the finger, or one which looked more earnest and interesting. There was no scratching nor quiddling in the manner with which he fought for his art. Each day he thought out the problems he had set himself before beginning to write, and if a word offended him, as he recorded the result, he thrust it back into chaos before the ink had dried. I think that the manuscript of "Dr. Grimshawe's Secret" is an exception, to some extent. There are many written self-communings and changes in it. My father was declining in health while it was being evolved. But yet, in "The Dolliver Romance," the last work of all in process of development, written while he was physically breaking down, we see the effect of will and heroic attempt. It is the most beautiful of his compositions, because his mind was greater at that time than ever, and because death could not frighten him, and in its very face he desired to complete the proof of his whole power, as the dying soldier rises to the greatest act of his life, having given his life-blood for his country's cause. Though the script of this manuscript is extremely difficult to read, the speculation had evidently been done before taking up the pen. I am not sure but that my father sometimes destroyed first drafts, of which his family knew nothing. Indeed, we have his own word for it that "he passed the day in writing stories and the night in burning them." Nevertheless, his tendency we know to have been that of thinking out his plots and scenes and characters, and transcribing them rapidly without further change. Since he did not write anything wholly for the pleasure of creative writing, but had moral motives and perfect artistic harmony to consider, he could not have indulged in the spontaneous, passionate effusions which are the substance of so much other fiction. He was obliged to train his mind to reflection and judgment, and therefore he never tasted luxury of any kind. The mere enjoyment of historical settings in all their charm and richness, rehabilitated for their own sake or for worldly gain; and that of caricatures of the members of the human family, because they are so often so desperately funny; the gloating over realistic pictures of life as it is found, because life as it is found is a more absorbing study than that of geology or chemistry; the tasting of redundant scenes of love and intrigue, which flatter the reader like experiences of his own,--these excesses he was not willing to admit to his art, a magic that served his literary palate with still finer food. He wrote with temperateness, and in pitying love of human nature, in the instinctive hope of helping it to know and redeem itself. His quality was philosophy, his style forgiveness. And for this temperate and logical and laconic work--giving nothing to the world for its mere enjoyment, but going beyond all that to ennoble each reader by his perfect renunciation of artistic claptrap and artistic license--for this aim he needed a mental method that could entirely command itself, and, when necessary, weigh and gauge with the laborious fidelity of a coal-surveyor, before the account was rendered with pen and ink upon paper. When he brought within his art the personality of a human devil, he honored its humanity, and proved that the real devil is quite another thing. In fact, perhaps he would not have permitted the above epithet. In one of her letters my mother remarks, "I think no sort of man can be called a devil, unless it be a slanderer." Though he dealt with romance he never gave the advantage of an inch to the wiles of bizarre witchery, the grotesque masks of wanton caprice in imagination--those elements which exhibit the intoxication of talent. His terrors were those of our own hearts; his playfulness had the merit of the sunlight. In short, he was artistically con-. secrated, guiding the forces he used with the reins of truth; and he could do this unbrokenly because he governed his character by Christian fellowship. If he shrank from unnecessary interruptions, which jarred the harmony of his artistic life, he nevertheless met courteously any that were to him inevitable. Could he have written with the heart's blood of old Hepzibah if he had failed to put his own shoulder to the domestic wheel, on the plea that it was too deep in the slough of disaster to command his assistance? He did not dread besmirching his hands with any affairs sent him by God. "The heart knoweth its own bitterness, and a stranger intermeddleth not with its joy;" and the joy and the bitterness of creative work are not intermeddled with as much as one might suppose by the outside weather of praise or non-comprehension, if the artist is great enough to keep his private self-respect. I am of the opinion that my father enjoyed his own indifference to his accomplished work, yet knew its value to the minutest ray of the diamond; that he had sharply challenged the enchantment of his first conception, and heard the right watchword, yet recognized that no human conception can fathom the marvels of the superhuman. I believe that the men we admire most, in the small group of great minds, are sufficiently necromantic to look two ways at once--to appreciate and to condemn themselves. So my father heard himself praised with composure, and blamed his skill rejoicingly. Some passages from a copy of an article in "The North British Review" of Edinburgh during 1851 were capable of filling a wife's heart with exultation, and my mother quotes: "'The most striking features in these tales are the extraordinary skill and masterly care which are displayed in their composition. . . . It would be difficult to pick out a page which could be omitted without loss to the development of the narrative and the idea, which are always mutually illustrative to a degree not often attained in any species of modern art. . . . His language, though extraordinarily accurate, is always light and free. . . . We know of nothing equal to it, in its way [the portrayal of Dimmesdale], in the whole circle of English literature;' and much more in the same superlative vein." But if my father could weigh his artistic success with the precision of a coal-heaver, who will ever be able to weigh and gauge the genius which carries methods and philosophies and aims into an atmosphere of wonderful power, where the sunlight and the color and the lightning and frowning clouds transfigure the familiar things of life in glorious haste and inspiration? While following his rules and habits my father was constantly attended by the rapturous spirit of such a genius, transmuting swarming reality into a few symbolic types. Another way in which he effected telling labor was to conserve his force in the matter of wrangling. He kept his temper. He was not without the fires of life, but he banked them. He did not permit disgust at others or at the adverse destiny of the moment to absorb his vitality, by throwing it off in long harangues of rage, long seasons of the sulks. There are no such good calculators as men of consummate genius. They dread the squandering of energy of an Edgar Allan Poe or of a boiling Walter Savage Landor. Temperateness implies the control of fierce elements; and in all management of volcanic power we perceive sweetness and beauty. When my father handled sin, it became uncontaminating tragedy; when he handled vulgarity, as in "The Artist of the Beautiful," it became inevitable pathos; when he handled suspicion, as in "The Birthmark" and "Rappaccini's Daughter," it evolved devoted trust. The frequent question as to whether Hawthorne drew from his family or friends in portraying human nature shows an unfamiliarity with literary art. Portraiture is not art, in literature, though a great artist includes it, if he chooses, in the category of his productions. To any one permeated by the atmosphere of art (though not quite of it) as I was, it seems strange that a truly artistic work should be thought to be an imitation of individual models. The distance of inspiration is the distance of a heavenly fair day, or of a night made luminous by mystery, giving a new quality and a new species of delight to facts about us. In reading the sympathetic merriment of the introduction to "The Scarlet Letter," and then the story itself, we perceive the difference between the charm of a Dutch-like realism and the thrill of imaginative creation, which uses material made incomprehensibly wonderful by God in order to make it comprehensibly wonderful to men. But, of course, the material thus transmuted by the distance of inspiration is only new and fine to men who have ears to hear and eyes to see. My father never imitated the men and women he met, nor man nor woman, and such conceptions of his way would bring us to a dense forest of mistake. In the afternoon my father went, if practicable, into the open spaces of nature, or at least into the fresh air, to gather inspiration for his work. He had no better or stronger or more lavish aids than air and landscape, unless I except his cigar. He never, I think, smoked but one cigar a day, but it was of a quality to make up for this self-denial, and I am sure that he reserved his most puzzling literary involutions for the delicious half-hour of this dainty enjoyment. In 1861 and thereafter he traversed, as has been said, the wooded hilltop behind his home, which was reached by various pretty climbing paths that crept under larches and pines, and scraggy, goat-like apple-trees. We could catch sight of him going back and forth up there, with now and then a pale blue gleam of sky among the trees, against which his figure passed clear. Along this path, made by his own steps only, he thought out the tragedy of "Septimius Felton," who buried the young English officer at the foot of one of the large pines which my father saw at each return. At one end of the hilltop path was a thicket of birch and maple trees; and at the end towards the west and the village was the open brow of the hill, sloping rapidly to the Lexington Road, and overlooking meadows and distant wood-ranges, some of the cottages of humble folk, and the neighboring huge, owlet-haunted elms of Alcott's lawn. Along this path in spring huddled pale blue violets, of a blue that held sunlight, pure as his own eyes. Masses also of sweet-fern grew at the side of these abundant bordering violets, and spacious apartments of brown-floored pine groves flanked the sweet-fern, or receded a little before heaps of blackberry branches and simple flowers. My father's violets were the wonder of the year to us. We never saw so many of these broad, pale-petaled ones anywhere else, until the year of his death, when they greeted him with their celestial color as he was borne into Sleepy Hollow, as if in remembrance of his long companionship on The Wayside hill. It is well with those who forget themselves in generous interest for the hopes, possibilities, and spiritual loftiness of human beings all over the world. Such men may remain poor, may never in life have the full praise of their fellows; but they could easily give testimony as to the delights of praise from God,--that which comes to our lips after little spiritual victories, like spring water on a hot day, and of which the workers in noble thought or adventure drink so deep. These representative men, if they cheer their fancy with fair thoughts of wide public approbation, choose the undying sort, that blooms like the edelweiss beyond the dust of sudden success. Hawthorne worked hard and nobly. Not even the mechanic who toils for his family all day, all week-days of the year, and never swears at wife or child, toils more nobly than this sensitive, warm-hearted, brave, recluse, much-seeing man. He teaches the spiritual greatness of the smallest fidelity, and the spiritual destruction in the most familiar temptations. The Butterfly which he describes floats everywhere through his pages, and it is broken wherever the heart of one of his characters breaks, for there sin has clutched its victim. It floats about us lovingly to attract our attention to higher things; and I am sure the radiant delicacy of the winged creature throbbed on a flower near David Swan, as he slept honestly through the perils of evil. Every touch of inner meaning that he gives speaks of his affection, his desire to bring us accounts of what he has learned of God's benevolence, in his long walks on the thoroughfares and in the byways, and over the uncontaminated open country, of human hope. Poverty, trouble, sin, fraudulent begging, stupidity, conceit,--nothing forced him absolutely to turn away his observation of all these usual rebuffs to sympathy, if his inconvenience could be made another's gain. But he was firm with a manliness that was uncringing before insolence, and did not shrink from speaking home truths that pruned the injurious branches of the will; yet he never could be insulting, because he had no selfish end. As a comrade he led to higher perceptions and moods. The men who chatted with him in the Salem Custom House, the Liverpool Consulate, and elsewhere, never forgot that he was the most inspiring man they had known. All this was work. The idle man, lazy in a drunken carouse, is in a world of his own. His sphere stretches out no connecting tendrils to the spheres of others; he seems to Us dead in spirit; he will tell you he believes in no one's true friendship, and wishes for no companionship; we do not know how to touch his heart, nor in what language to make him hear when we call,--he is in Mars. But the sentinel, still as marble, or moving like a well-adjusted machine that will not defy law--he stirs us by his energy, his laboring vigilance. His care for others would make him surrender his life at once. The trusted soldier has left selfishness and cowardice on the first tenting-ground, and works hard, though he stands statue-like. It is his business to be of use, and he is never useless. So with a great artist. He is brother to gentleman or churl. Hawthorne had not an atom of the poison of contempt. As I have said before, if he did not love stupidity, he forgave it. He was fond of using his hands for work, too; and he had skill in whatever he did. His activity of this manual sort may be inferred from the fact that when a young man he gradually whittled away one of the leaves of his writing-table, while musing over his stories. He did not know, unpleasantly, that he was doing it. What fun he must have had! Think of the rich scenery of thought that spread about him, the people, the subtle motives, the eerie truths, the entrancing outlooks into divine beauty, that entertained him as his sharp blade carved and sliced his table, which gladly gave itself up to such destruction! When he was writing "The Scarlet Letter," as Julian's nurse Dora long delighted to tell, his wife with her dainty care in sewing was making the little boy a shirt of the finest linen, and was putting in one sleeve, while the other lay on the table. Dora saw Hawthorne, who was reading, lay down his book and take up something which he proceeded to cut into shreds with some small scissors that exactly suited him. "Where can the little sleeve be which I finished, and wished to sew in here, my love?" said his blissful wife. Hawthorne (blissfully thinking of his novel) only half heard the question; but on the table was a heap of delicate linen shavings, and the new scissors testified over them. His jack-knife was a never-ending source of pleasure, and he was seldom without the impulse, if a good opportunity offered, to subject a sapling to it for a whistle, or to make some other amusing trifle, or to cut a bit of licorice with a slow, sure movement that made the black lump most acceptable. His mind was never in a stound. It was either observing, or using observations. Of course he lost his way while walking, and destroyed commonplace things while musing; and the world hung just so much the less heavily upon his moving pinions of thought. His diligence of mind is reported of him at an early age. His sister, Ebie Hawthorne, gave me a bust of John Wesley, in clerical white bib, and of a countenance much resembling Alcott's, even to the long, white, waving hair. Its very aspect cried out, though never so mercifully, "My sermon is endless!" Aunt Ebie, hunching her shoulders in mirthful appreciation, said, "Nathaniel always hated it!" Why not? At four years of age he had already had enough of Wesley; and my aunt, with a rejoicing laugh, described how, not being able to induce his elders to act upon his abhorrence of the melancholy, tinted object, at last, in dead of winter, he filled it with water through a hole in the pedestal, which had revealed its hollowness. He then stood the bust upside down against the wall in a cold place, confidently awaiting the freezing of the water, in which event it was to be hoped that the puppet sermonizer would burst, like a pitcher under similar odds. But John Wesley never burst, to the disgust of a broader mind and the offended wonder of childish eyes. CHAPTER XVI THE LEAVE-TAKING A few words from a letter of Emerson's to my mother, written after my father's death, will give a true impression of the friendship which existed strongly between the two lovers of their race, who, though they did not have time to meet often, may be said to have been together through oneness of aim:-- CONCORD, 11th July [1864]. DEAR MRS. HAWTHORNE,--Guests and visitors prevented me from writing you, last evening, to thank you for your note, and to say how much pleasure it gives me, that you find succor and refreshment in sources so pure and lofty. The very selection of his images proves Behman poet as well as saint, yet a saint first, and poet through sanctity. It is the true though severe test to put the Teacher to,--to try if his solitary lessons meet our case. And for these thoughts and experiences of which you speak, their very confines and approaches lift us out of the world. I have twice lately proposed to see you, and once was on my way, and unexpectedly prevented. I have had my own pain in the loss of your husband. He was always a mine of hope to me, and I promised myself a rich future in achieving at some day, when we should both be less engaged to tyrannical studies and habitudes, an unreserved intercourse with him. I thought I could well wait his time and mine for what was so well worth waiting. And as he always appeared to me superior to his own performances, I counted this yet untold force an insurance of a long life. Though sternly disappointed in the manner and working, I do not hold the guarantee less real. But I must use an early hour to come and see you to say more. R. W. EMERSON. If my father expected a full renewal of comradeship with American men of his own circle, and even the deeper pleasure of such friendship in a maturer prime alluded to by Emerson, circumstances sadly intervened. The thunderstorm of the war was not the only cause of his retiring more into himself than he had done in Europe, although he felt that sorrow heavily. Or perhaps I might say with greater correctness that when he appeared, it was without the joyous air that he had lately displayed in England, among his particular friends, when his literary work was over for the time being after the finishing of "Monte Beni." I remember that he often attended the dinners of the Saturday Club. A bill of fare of one of the banquets, but belonging to an early date, 1852, read: "Tremont House. Paran Stevens, Proprietor. Dinner for Twelve Persons, at three o'clock." A superb menu follows, wherein canvas-back ducks and madeira testify to the satisfaction felt by the gentlemen whose names my father penciled in the order in which they sat; Mr. Emerson, Mr. Clough, Mr. Ellery Channing, Mr. Charles Sumner, Mr. Theodore Parker, Mr. Longfellow, Mr. Lowell, Mr. Greenough, Mr. Samuel Ward, and several others making the shining list. His keen care for the health of his forces induced him to hold back from visits even to his best friends, if he were very deeply at work, or paying more rapidly than usual from his capital of physical strength, which had now begun to sink. Lowell tried to fascinate him out of seclusion, in the frisky letter given in "A Study of Hawthorne;" but very likely did not gain his point, since Longfellow and others had infrequent success in similar attempts. I chanced to discover the impression my father made upon Dr. Holmes, as we sat beside each other at a dinner given by the Papyrus Club of Boston more than fifteen years ago, on ladies' night. That same evening I dashed down a verbatim account of part of our conversation, which I will insert here. He passed his card over to my goblet, and took mine. "That is the simplest way, is it not?" he asked. "I was just going to introduce myself," said I. Then Mrs. Elizabeth Stoddard sat down by me, and I turned to speak with her. In a moment Dr. Holmes held my card forward again. "Now let me see!" he said. "And you don't know who I am, yet?" I asked. He smiled, gazed at the card through his eyeglasses, and leaned towards me hesitatingly. "And what _was_ your name?" he ventured. "Rose Hawthorne." He started, and beamed. "There!--I _thought_--but you understand how--if I had made a mistake--Could anything have been worse if you had _not_ been? I was looking, you know, for the resemblance. Some look I seemed to discover, but "---- "The complexion," I helped him by interrupting, "is entirely different." He went on: "I was--no, I cannot say I was intimate with your father, as others may have been; and yet a very delightful kind of intercourse existed between us. I did not see him often; but when I did, I had no difficulty in making him converse with me. My intercourse with your mother was also of a very gratifying nature." To this I earnestly replied respecting the admiration of my parents for him. "I delighted in suggesting a train of thought to your father," Dr. Holmes ran on, in his exquisitely cultured way, and with the _esprit_ which has surprised us all by its loveliness. "Perhaps he would not answer for some time. Sometimes it was a long while before the answer came, like an echo; but it was sure to come. It was as if the high mountain range, you know!--_The house-wall there_ would have rapped out a speedy, babbling response at once; but _the mountain_!--I not long ago was visiting the Custom House at Salem, the place in which your father discovered those mysterious records that unfolded into 'The Scarlet Letter.' Ah, how suddenly and easily genius renders the spot rare and full of a great and new virtue (however ordinary and bare in reality) when _it_ has looked and dwelt! A light falls upon the place not of land or sea! How much he did for Salem! Oh, the purple light, the soft haze, that now rests upon our glaring New England! He has _done_ it, and it will never be harsh country again. How perfectly he understood Salem!" "Salem is certainly very remarkable," I responded. "Yes, certainly so," he agreed. "Strange folk! Salem had a type of itself in its very harbor. The ship America, at Downer's wharf, grew old and went to pieces in that one spot, through years. Bit by bit it fell to atoms, but never ceded itself to the new era. So with Salem, precisely. It is the most delightful place to visit for this reason, because it so carefully retains the spirit of the past; and 'The House of the Seven Gables'!" Dr. Holmes smiled, well knowing the intangibility of that house. Said I: "The people are rich in extraordinary oddities. At every turn a stranger is astonished by some intense characteristic. One feels strongly its different atmosphere." "And their very surroundings bear them out!" Dr. Holmes cried, vivacious in movement and glance as a boy. "Where else are the little door-yards that hold their glint of sunlight so tenaciously, like the still light of wine in a glass? Year after year it is ever there, the golden square of precious sunbeams, held on the palm of the jealous garden-patch, as we would hold the vial of radiant wine in our hand! Do you know?" He so forcibly appealed to my ability to follow his thought that I seemed to know anything he wished. "I hope I shall not be doing wrong," he continued,--"I hope not,--in asking if you have any preference among your father's books; supposing you read them, which I believe is by no means always the case with the children of authors." "I am surprised by that remark. After the age of fifteen, when I read all my father's writings except 'The Scarlet Letter,' which I was told to reserve till I was eighteen, I did not study his books thoroughly till several years ago, in order to cherish the enjoyment of fresh effects,--except 'The Marble Faun,' which I think I prefer." He answered: "I feel that 'The Scarlet Letter' is the greatest. It will be, it seems to me, the one upon which his future renown will rest." I admitted that I also considered it the greatest. In the above conversation I was entranced by what I have experienced often: the praise of my father's personality or work (in many cases by people who have never met him) is not only the courtesy that might be thought decorous towards a member of his family, or the bright zest of a student of literature, but also the glowing ardor of a creature feeling itself a part of him in spirit; one who longs for the human sweetness of the grasp of his hand; who longs to hear him speak, to meet his fellowship, but finds the limit reached in saying, at a distance of time and space, "I love him!" I have lowered my eyes before the emotion to be observed in the faces of some of his readers who were trying to reach him through a spoken word of eagerness. Very few have seen him, but how glad I am to cross their paths! Dr. Holmes's warmth of enthusiasm was so radiant that it could not be forgotten. It lit every word with the magic of the passion we feel for what is perfect, unique, and beyond our actual possession, now and forever. Towards the last an unacknowledged fear took hold of my mother's consciousness, so that she gave every evidence of foretelling my father's death without once presenting the possibility to herself. This little note of mine, dated April 4, 1864, six weeks before he died, shows the truth:-- "I am so glad that you are getting on so well; but for your own sake I think you had better stay somewhere till you get entirely well. Mamma thought from the last letter from Mr. Ticknor that you were not so well; but Julian explained to her that, as Mr. Ticknor said in every line that you were better, he did not see how it could possibly be. I do not either." From the first year of our return to America letters and visitors from abroad had interrupted the sense of utter quiet; and many friends called in amiable pilgrimage. But a week of monotony is immensely long, and a few hours of zest are provokingly short. Nature and seclusion are welcome when, at our option, we can bid them good-by. All England is refreshing with the nearness of London. In the rush of cares and interruptions which we suppose will kill the opportunity, while we half lose ourselves and our intellectual threads of speculation, the flowers of inspiration suddenly blow, the gems flash color. This is a pleasant, but not always an essential satisfaction; yet, in my father's case, I think his life suffered with peculiar severity from the sudden clashing aside of manly interests which he had already denied to himself, or which circumstances had denied to him, with the utmost persistence ever known in so perceptive a genius. He undoubtedly had a large store of inherited experiences to draw upon; he was richly endowed with these, and could sit and walk alone, year after year (except for occasional warm reunions with friends of the cleanest joviality), and feel the intercourse with the world, of his ancestors, stirring in his veins. He tells us that this was ghostly pastime; but it is an inheritance that makes a man well equipped and self-sustained, for all that. When too late, the great men about him realized that they had estimated his presence very cheaply, considering his worth. Should he frequently have sought them out, and asked if they were inclined to spare a chat to Hawthorne; or should they have insisted upon strengthening their greatness from his inimitably pure and unerring perception and his never weary imagination? It is impossible to ignore the superiority of his simplicity of truth over the often labored searchings for it of the men and women he knew, whose very diction shows the straining after effect, the desire to enchant themselves with their own minds, which is the bane of intellect, or else the uneasy skip and jump of a wit that dares not keep still. As time ripens, these things are more and more apparent to all, as they were to him. In a manner similar to Emerson's, who spoke of his regret for losing the chance of associating fully with my father, Longfellow wrote to my mother:-- CAMBRIDGE, June 23, 1864. DEAR MRS. HAWTHORNE,--I have long been wishing to write to you, to thank you for your kind remembrance, in sending me the volume of Goldsmith, but I have not had the heart to do it. There are some things that one cannot say; and I hardly need tell you how much I value your gift, and how often I shall look at the familiar name on the blank leaf--a name which, more than any other, links me to my youth. I have written a few lines trying to express the impressions of May 23, and I venture to send you a copy of them. I had rather no one should see them but yourself; as I have also sent them to Mr. Fields for the "Atlantic." I feel how imperfect and inadequate they are; but I trust you will pardon their deficiencies for the love I bear his memory. More than ever I now regret that I postponed from day to day coming to see you in Concord, and that at last I should have seen your house only on the outside! With deepest sympathy, Yours truly, HENRY W. LONGFELLOW. To go back to our Concord amusements. Mr. Bright caroled out a greeting not very long after our return:-- WEST DERBY, September 8, 1860. MY DEAR MR. HAWTHORNE,--Of course not!--I knew you 'd never write to me, though you declared you would. Probably by this time you've forgotten us all, and sent us off into mistland with Miriam and Donatello; possibly all England looks by this time nothing but mistland, and you believe only in Concord and its white houses, and the asters on the hill behind your house, and the pumpkins in the valley below. Well, at any rate I have not forgotten you or yours; and I feel that, now you have left us, a pleasure has slipped out of our grasp. Do you remember all our talks in that odious office of yours; my visits to Rock-ferry; my one visit, all in the snow, to Southport; our excursions into Wales, and through the London streets, and to Rugby and to Cambridge; and how you plucked the laurel at Addison's Bilton, and found the skeleton in Dr. Williams's library; and lost your umbrella in those dark rooms in Trinity; and dined at Richmond, and saw the old lady looking like a maid of honor of Queen Charlotte's time; and chatted at the Cosmopolitan; and heard Tom Hughes sing the "Tight Little Island;" and--But really I must stop, and can only trust that now at last you will be convinced of my existence, and remember your promise, and write me a good long letter about everything and everybody. "The Marble Faun" [manuscript] is now in process of binding. The photograph came just as I had begun to despair of it, and I lost not a moment in putting the precious manuscript into my binder's hands. I've been for a week's holiday at Tryston, and met several friends of yours: Mr. and Mrs. Tom Hughes, Mrs. and Miss Procter, Mrs. Milnes. The latter spoke most affectionately about you. And so did Mrs. Ainsworth, whom I met two days ago. But she says you promised to write her the story of the Bloody Footstep ["The Ancestral Footstep "], and have never done it. I'm very fond of Mrs. Ainsworth; she talks such good nonsense. She told us gravely, the other day, that the Druses were much more interesting than the Maronites, because they sounded like Drusus and Rome, whereas the Maronites were only like marrons glaces, etc. The H----s are at Norris Green. Mrs. H. is becoming "devout," and will go to church on Wednesdays and Fridays. I want news from your side. What is Longfellow about? Tell me about "Leaves of Grass," which I saw at Milnes's. Who and what is the author; and who buy and who read the audacious (I use mildest epithet) book? I must now bring this letter to an end. Emerson will have forgotten so humble a person as I am; but I can't forget the pleasant day I spent with him. Ask Longfellow to come over here very soon. And for yourself, ever believe me most heartily yours, H. A. BRIGHT. He writes to my mother, "Thank you for the precious autograph letters, and the signatures of the various generals in your war. . . . What a pleasant account you give of Julian. Remember me to him. What a big fellow he has become, and formidable. I sincerely hope he 's given up his old wish to 'kill an Englishman, some day!' Don't forget us all, for we think of all of you." He speaks of my father's friendship as "the proudest treasure of my life." A friend of Mr. Bright's pardons my father's unfeeling indifference by a request:-- WALTHAM HOUSE, WALTHAM CROSS, August 10, 1861. DEAR MR. HAWTHORNE,--Am I not showing my Christian charity when, in spite of the terrible disappointment which I felt at your broken promise to come with Bright to smoke a cigar with me about this time last year, I entreat you, in greeting Mr. Anthony Trollope, who with his wife is about to visit America, to give him an extra welcome and shake of the hand, for the sake of yours most sincerely and respectfully, W. W. SYNGE. I will quote two letters from Mr. Chorley, written before we left England, to show that even writers and friends there could be a trifle irksome in comment. My mother amused me sometimes by telling me how she had written warringly to this noted critic (a cherished acquaintance), when he had printed a disquisition upon "Monte Beni" which did not hit the bull's-eye. But the last supplementary chapter in the Romance was due to his fainting desire for more revelation,--a chapter which my father and mother looked upon as entirely useless, and British. 13 EATON PLACE, WEST, March 6, '60. DEAR MRS. HAWTHORNE,--I cannot but affectionately thank you for your remembrance of me, and your patience with my note.--If I do not return on my own critical fancies about the "Romance" (and pray, recollect, I am the last who would assume that critics wear a mail celestial, and as such can do no wrong)--it may be from some knowledge, that those who have lived with a work while it is growing--and those who greet it, when it is born, complete into life,--cannot see with the same eyes. I don't think, if we three sate together, and could talk the whole dream out, a matter, by the way, hardly possible, we should have so much difference as you fancy--so much did I enjoy, and so deeply was I stirred by the book, that (let alone past associations and predilections) I neither read, nor wrote (meant to write, that is) in a caviling spirit: but that which simply and clearly seemed to present itself in regard to a book which had possessed me (for better for worse) in no common degree--by one on whom (I think is known) I set no common store.--If I have seemed to yourselves hasty or superficial or flippant--all I can say is, such was not my meaning.--Surely the best things can bear the closest looking at,--whether as regards beauty or blemish.-- I repeat that, while I thank you affectionately for the trouble you have taken to expostulate with my frowardness (if so it be)--I am just as much concerned if what was printed gave any pain. But, when I look again (I have been interrupted twenty times since I began this)--did I not say that Hilda was "cousin"--that is, family likeness, not identity--though it means, what I meant, the same sort of light of purity and grace, and redemption let into a maze, through somewhat the same sort of chink.--I totally resist any idea of mannerism, dear friend Hawthorne,--on your part,--and as to the story growing on you, as you grow into it: well, I dare' say that has happened ere this:--the best creations have come by chance: and if Hawthorne did not mean to excite an interest when he wanted merely to make a Roman idyl, why did we go into those Catacombs?-- Might I say (like Moliere's old woman) how earnestly I desire, that for a second edition, a few more openings of the door should be added to the story--towards its close? You have been so kind in bearing with me,--in coming to me when in London,--and in remembering the nothing I could do here to make you welcome, as I fancied you might like best to be welcomed,--that I venture to send you this letter out of my heart,--and if there be nonsense in it, or what may seem spectacled critical pedantry, I must trust to your good nature to allow for them. Won't you come to town again? and wont you eat another cosy dinner at my table?--And pray, dear friend Hawthorne, don't be so long again:--and pray, once for all, recollect that you have no more faithful nor real literary friend (perhaps, too, in other ways might I show it) Than yours as always, HENRY N. CHORLEY. P. S. This is a sort of salad note, written both to "He" and "She" (as they said in old duetts)--once again, excuse every incoherence. I am still very ill--and have all the day been interrupted. 13 EATON PLACE, WEST, March 10, '60. DEAR MRS. HAWTHORNE,--I assure you I feel the good nature not to be on my side of the treaty. It is not common for a critic to get any kind construction, or to be credited with anything save a desire to show ingenuity, no matter whether just or unjust.--Most deeply, too, do I feel the honor of having a suggestion such as mine adopted,--I thought when my letter had gone that I had written in a strange, random humor, and that had I got a "Mind your own business" sort of answer, it was no more than such unasked-for meddling might expect. I am glad with all my heart at what you tell me about the success of the tale. But we really will not wait so long for number five? To-day's train takes you my Italian story:--I had every trouble in the world to find a publisher for it: having the gift of no-success in a very remarkable degree. The dedication tells its own story. It was begun in 1848:--and ended not before the Italian war broke out.--Some of my few readers (within a dozen) are aggrieved at my having only told part of the story of Italian patriotism.--I meant it merely as a picture of manners: and have seen too much of the class "refugee," not to have felt how they have as a class retarded, not aided, the cause of real freedom and high morals. I should have sent it before, but I always feel, like Teresa Panza, when she sent acorns to the Duchess. You will come to town, and eat in my quiet corner before you go, I know:--Perhaps, I may call on you at Easter: as there is just a chance of my being at Birmingham. There is an old house, Compton Wingates, that I very much want to see. Has Hawthorne seen it? Once more thank you affectionately,--these sort of passages are among the very few set-offs to the difficulties of a harsh life and all ungracious career. My seeing you face to face was, I assure you, one of my best pleasures in 1859. Ever yours faithfully, HENRY N. CHORLEY. Hawthorne had returned, for the purpose of cherishing American loyalty in his children, from a scene that was after his own heart, even to the actors in it. He had hoped for quietude and the inimitable flavor of home, of course; but this hope was chiefly a self-persuasion. The title of his first book after returning, "Our Old Home," was a concise confession. He would have considered it a base resource to live abroad during the war, bringing up his son in an alien land, however dear and related it might be to our bone and sinew; and if his children did not enjoy the American phase of the universe in its crude stage, he, at any rate, had done his best to make them love it. His loyalty was always something flawless. A friend might treat him with the grossest dishonor, but he would let you think he was himself deficient in perception or in a proper regard for his money before he would let you guess that his friend should be denounced. With loyal love, he had, for his part, wound about New England the purple haze of which Dr. Holmes spoke in ecstasy, because he had found his country standing only half appreciated, though with a wealth of virtue and meaning that makes her fairer every year. With love, also, he came home, after having barely tasted the delights of London and Oxford completeness. In Concord he entered upon a long renunciation. Of necessity this was beneficial to his art. He was now fully primed with observation, and "The Dolliver Romance," hammered out from several beginnings that he successively cast aside, appeared so exquisitely pure and fine because of the hush of fasting and reflection which environed the worker. It is the unfailing history of great souls that they seem to destroy themselves most in relation to the world's happiness when they most deserve and acquire a better reward. He was starving, but he steadily wrote. He was weary of the pinched and unpromising condition of our daily life, but he smiled, and entertained us and guided us with unflagging manliness, though with longer and longer intervals of wordless reserve. I was never afraid to run to him for his sympathy, as he sat reading in an easy-chair, in some one of those positions of his which looked as if he could so sit and peruse till the end of time. I knew that his response would be so cordially given that it would brim over me, and so melodiously that it would echo in my heart for a great while; yet it would be as brief as the single murmurous stroke of one from a cathedral tower, half startling by its intensity, but which attracts the birds, who wing by preference to that lofty spot. A source of deep enjoyment to my father was a long visit from his sister, Ebie Hawthorne (he having given her that pretty title instead of any other abbreviation of Elizabeth). I came to know her very well in after-years, and was astonished at her magic resemblance to my father in many ways. I always felt her unmistakable power. She was chock-full of worldly wisdom, though living in the utmost monastic retirement, only allowing herself to browse in two wide regions,--the woods and literature. She knew the latest news from the papers, and the oldest classics alongside of them. She was potentially, we thought, rather hazardous, or perverse. But language refuses to explain her. Her brother seemed not to dream of this, yet no doubt relished the fact that a nature as unique as any he had drawn sparkled in his sister. She was a good deal unspiritual in everything; but all besides in her was fine mind, wisdom, and loving-kindness of a lazy, artistic sort. That is to say, she was unregenerate, but excellent; and she fascinated like a wood-creature seldom seen and observant, refined and untrained. My sister was devoted to her, and says, for the hundredth time, in a passage among many pages of their correspondence bequeathed to me:-- My OWN DEAR AUNTIE,--I was made very happy by your letter this week. What perfectly charming letters you write! Now, don't laugh and say I am talking nonsense; it is really true. You make the simplest things interesting by your way of telling them; and your observations and humor are so keen that I often feel sorry the world does not know something of them. I never remember you to have told me anything twice, and that can be said of very few people; but there are few enough people in the least like you, my dearest auntie. . . . Aunt Ebie did not look romantic, or, exactly mysterious, as I first saw her. But she puzzled me splendidly nevertheless. She was knitting some very heavy blue socks in our library, and her needles were extremely large and shining. I do not know why she had undertaken this prosaic occupation. Everybody was, to be sure, knitting socks for the soldiers at that time; but somehow aunt Ebie did not strike me as absolutely benevolent, and I doubt if she would have labored very eagerly for a soldier whom she had never seen. She desired to teach me to knit; and, as I was really afraid of her, I pretended to be anxious to learn. I had been told that it was almost an impossibility to get her to travel even a few miles; that the excitement of change and crowds, and danger from steam and horse, made her extremely tremulous and wretched. I was the more impressed by these quavers in her because I also knew that she had sufficient strength of character to upset a kingdom, if she chose; that she could use a sceptre of keen sarcasm which made heads roll off on all sides; that there was nothing which her large, lustrous eyes could not see, and nothing they could not conceal. To think, then, that she trembled beside a steam-engine made her a problem. She wore a quaintly round dress of lightish-brown mohair, which would not fall into graceful folds. So there she sat in the little library, knitting Titanically; and I sat alone with her, learning to round Hatteras at the heel in a swirl of contradictory impressions. I felt that she ought to have been dressed in soft dark silks, with a large, half-idle fan before her lips. She quickly saw that I was a miniature mystery/ myself, and presently got me out into the woods. Here I came into contact with her for the first time. She stepped along under the trees with great deliberation, holding up the inflexible mohair skirt as if it could tear on brambles or in gales, and looking around quickly and ardently at the sound of a bird-note or the glance of a squirrel-leap; her great eyes peering for a moment from their widely opened lids, and then disappearing utterly again under those white veils. Her dark brown, long lashes and broadly sweeping eyebrows were distinct against the pallor of her skin, which was so delicately clear, yet vigorous, that I felt its gleam as one feels the moon, even if I were not looking directly at her. By and by her cheeks took on a dawn-flush of beautiful pink. The perfection of her health was shown, until her last sickness, by this girlish glow of color in her wood-rambles. Long before we had arrived at a particularly nice flower or species of moss, she knew it was to be found, and gathered it up as Fate makes a clean sweep of all its opportunities. I was almost as happy when out of doors with her as when I was with my father. She had the same eloquence in her silences; and when she spoke, it was with a sympathy that played upon one's whole perception, as a harp is swept inclusively of every string by an eager hurry of music. Still, aunt Ebie seemed to love moss and leaves as much as some people love souls, and I thought she had chosen them as the least dangerous objects of affection; whereas my father seemed most to love souls, and would have saved mine or another's at the expense of all the forests and vines of Eden. To Miss Peabody I wrote of this visit in a manner which shows its reviving effect upon me:-- MY DEAR AUNT LIZZIE,--I like to get your letters, as they tell about everything which everybody does not do. What a pleasant time I did have with aunt Ebie Hawthorne last summer! It was last summer; and all the lovely flowers were nodding, and the sun shone with all its might, and we each took a basket and a book and stayed all the afternoon. We brought home heaps of flowers and greens. I never had such a pleasant time here in the woods. In England my nurse Fanny and I used to take long walks on Sunday through the lanes, or into the parks; and take baskets and pick baskets full of daisies, pink-and-white. Then we went into the endless lanes, long, without a single sign of house or cottage (until we came to walk so far as to come to a little village). Nobody came along in rattling gigs or carriages; on Sunday you would not meet a person. With great ditches on each side, filled with tall grass as high as yourself, if you chose to get down into it. But I used to jump across, to get wild hawthorn and rose and honeysuckle and wall-flowers, and make great bunches of them. And then the buttercups and daisies and violets in the green grass! For in the lanes there was not a sign of earth,--all high, green grass. The sun shining so hot that you could go in your house-dress but for the properness of it. But I cannot explain and you cannot imagine; you must go to the place and look for yourself, and then you will know all about it. The parks are not level at all, but are nothing but high hills all together,--dear!--so lovely to run down and roll over on, and skip rope and jump! My father began to express his wishes in regard to provision for our aunt in case of his death; to burn old letters; and to impart to my mother and Una all that he particularly desired to say to them, among other things his dislike of biographies, and that he forbade any such matter in connection with himself in any distance of the future. This command, respected for a number of years, has been, like all such forcible and prophetic demurs, most signally set aside. It would take long to explain my own modifications of opinion from arguments of fierce resistance to the request for a biographical handling of him; and it matters, no doubt, very little. Such a man must be thoroughly known, as great saints are always sooner or later known, though endeavoring to hide their victories of holiness and charity. Certainly my father did not like to die, though he now wished to do so. My mother, later, often spoke, in consolation for us and for herself, of his dread of helpless old age; and she tried to be glad that his desire to disappear before decrepitude had been fulfilled. But such wise wishes are not carried out as we might choose. The sudden transformation which took place in my father after his coming to America was like an instant's change in the atmosphere from sunshine to dusky cold. I have never had the least difficulty in explaining it to myself. One large item in the sum of his regrets was his unexpectedly narrowed means. It would have required a generous amount of money to put The Wayside and its grounds into the delectable order at first contemplated, to bring them into any sort of English perfection, and my parents found that they could not afford it; and so all resulted in semi-comfort and rough appearances. This narrowing of means was caused not a little by the want of veracity of a person whom my father had trusted with entire affection and a very considerable loan, about which we none of us ever heard again. A crust becomes more than proverbially dry under these circumstances. My mother bore every reverse nobly. She writes, after her husband's death: "I have 'enjoyed life,' and 'its hard pinches' have not too deeply bitten into my heart. But this has been because I am not only hopeful and of indomitable credence by nature, but because this temperament, together with the silent ministry of pain, has helped me to the perfect, the unshadowed belief in the instant providence of God; in his eternal love, patience, sweetness; in his shining face, never averted. It is because I cannot be disappointed on account of this belief. To stand and wait after doing all that is legitimate is my instinct, my best wisdom, my inspiration; and I always hear the still, small voice at last. If man would not babble so much, we could much oftener hear God. The lesson of my life has been patience. It has only made me feel the more humble that God has been so beyond count benignant to me. I have been cushioned and pillowed with tender love from the cradle. Such a mother seldom falls to the lot of mortals. She was the angel of my life. Her looks and tones and her acts of high-bred womanhood were the light and music and model of my childhood. Then God joined my destiny with him who was to be all relations in one. Pain passed away when my husband came. Poverty was lighter than a thistle-down with such a power of felicity to uphold it. With 'lowering clouds' I have never been long darkened, because the sun above has been so penetrating that their tissue has directly become silvered and goldened. Our own closed eyelids are too often the only clouds between us and the ever-shining sun. I hold all as if it were not mine, but God's, and ready to resign it." It seemed to me a terrible thing that one so peculiarly strong, sentient, luminous, as my father should grow feebler and fainter, and finally ghostly still and white. Yet when his step was tottering and his frame that of a wraith, he was as dignified as in the days of greater pride, holding himself, in military self-command, even more erect than before. He did not omit to come in his very best black coat to the dinner-table, where the extremely prosaic fare had no effect upon the distinction of the meal. He hated failure, dependence, and disorder, broken rules and weariness of discipline, as he hated cowardice. I cannot express how brave he seemed to me. The last time I saw him, he was leaving the house to take the journey for his health which led suddenly to the next world. My mother was to go to the station with him,--she who, at the moment when it was said that he died, staggered and groaned, though so far from him, telling us that something seemed to be sapping all her strength; I could hardly bear to let my eyes rest upon her shrunken, suffering form on this day of farewell. My father certainly knew, what she vaguely felt, that he would never return. Like a snow image of an unbending but an old, old man, he stood for a moment gazing at me. My mother sobbed, as she walked beside him to the carriage. We have missed him in the sunshine, in the storm, in the twilight, ever since. INDEX OF PERSONS [online ed: page numbers have been omitted.] Aikens, Mr. Ainsworth, Mrs. Alcott, A. Bronson Alcott, Mrs. A, B. Alcott, Louisa M. Alderson, Baron Allston, Washington Appleton, Thomas G. Atherton, Mr. Bacon, Miss Delia Bancroft, George Barber, Mr. Barstow, B. Barstow, Ellen Bartol, Mr. Bartol, Mrs. Bennoch, Francis Birch, Sir Thomas Blodget, Mrs. Boott, Miss Elizabeth Boott, Frank Bradford, George Bremer, Miss Frederika Bridge, Horatio Bridge, Mrs. Horatio Bright, Henry Browne, William Browning, Mr. Browning, Mrs. Brownson, Orestes Bryant, Mr. and Miss Buchanan, President Burchmore, Captain Stephen Burchmore, T. Burley, Miss Burns, Colonel, 244. Burns, Major Capen, Dr. Cecil, Mr. Channing, Dr. Channing, Dr. W. E. Channing, Edward Channing, Ellery Chorley, Henry N, Clarke, Sarah Cleveland, Henry Clough, A. H. Cochran, Misses Colton, Mr. Crampton, Mr. Cranch, Christopher P. Crauch, Judge Crawford, Mr. Crittendon, Mr. Curtis, Burrill Curtis, George W. Cushman, Charlotte De Quincey, Thomas Dike, Mr. Doughty, Mr. Duffcrin, Lord Dysie, Mr. Ely, Mrs. R. S. Emerson, Charles Emerson, Mrs. R. W. Emerson, R. W. Fields, James T. Fields, Mrs. James T. Fleming, Lady le Foote, Mrs. Caleb Fuller, Margaret Gardiner, Miss Sally Gaskell, Mrs. Goodrich, S. G. Greene, Mrs. Anna Greenough, Mr, H., Mrs. Hawthorne, Mrs. Hawthorne, Elizabeth M. Hawthorne, Louisa Hillard, George S, Hiliard, Mrs, Susan Hoar, E. Rockwood Hoar, Miss Elizabeth Holden, George H. Holland, Mr. and Mrs. Charles Holmes, Dr. O. W. Hooper, Ellen Hooper, Samuel Hosmer, Harriet Hosmer, Mr. Houghton, Lord Howes, Mr. Hughes, Thomas Jackson, Miss James, G. P. R. Jerdan, William Jones, George King, John Lane, Miss Harriet Leitch, Captain Lincoln, President Lindsay, Richard Littledale, Mr. Liverpool, Mayor of Longfellow, Henry W. Loring, Dr. George Loring, Mrs. George B. Lowell, James R. Lowell, Mrs. James R. Lynch, Miss Mann, Horace Mann, Mrs. Horace Manning, Miss Mary Manning, Richard Manning, Samuel Mansfield, L. W. Martineau, Miss Harriet Martineau, Mrs. James Melville, Herman Meredith, Mr. Miller, Colonel Miller, Mr. Miller, Mrs. Mills, Mr. Mitchell, Miss Maria Moore, Bramley Motley, John Lothrop Motley, Mrs. J. L. Mullet, George W. Nurse, Rebecca Ogden, Mr. O'Sullivan, John Palmer, General Palmer, Mrs. General Parker, Theodore Peabody, Dr. Peabody, Elizabeth P. Peabody, George Peabody, Mary T. Peabody, Mrs. Phillebrown, Mr. Phillips, Jonathan Pierce, President Pike, William B. Porter, Mary A. Powers, Hiram Prescott, Mrs. Procter, It. W. Putnam, Captain Rathbone, Mrs. Richard Rathbone, Mrs. William Sanders, Mrs. Sedgwick, Mrs. Seymour, Governor, 364. Shaw, Miss Anna Shaw, Frank Shaw, Sarah Shepard, Miss Ada Silsbee, Mr. Squarey, Mr. Squarey, Mrs. Stevens, Paran Stoddard, Mrs. Elizabeth Story, William W. Sturgis, M. L. Sturgis, Mrs. Russell Sumner, Charles Synge, W. W. Tabley, Lord Warremore de Talfourd, Field Talfourd, Sir Thomas Tappan, Mr. Tappan, Mrs. Tennyson, Lord Thompson, C. G. Thoreau, Henry D. Ticknor, George Thaxter, Mr. and Mrs. Upham, C. W. Very, Jones Ward, Mr. Samuel G. Ward, Mrs. S. G. Warren, Samuel, Webster, Daniel, Whipple, Colonel, White, William, Wordsworth, Mrs. 
7301	----	V-M Österman, Eric Eldred, Charles Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE BY GEORGE E. WOODBERRY PREFACE The narrative of Hawthorne's life has been partly told in the autobiographical passages of his writings which he himself addressed to his readers from time to time, and in the series of "Note Books," not meant for publication but included in his posthumous works; the remainder is chiefly contained in the family biography, "Nathaniel Hawthorne and his Wife" by his son Julian Hawthorne, "Memories of Hawthorne" by his daughter, Mrs. Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, and "A Study of Hawthorne," by his son-in-law, George Parsons Lathrop. Collateral material is also to be found abundantly in books of reminiscences by his contemporaries. These are the printed sources of the present biography. The author takes pleasure in expressing his thanks to his publishers for the ample material they have placed at his disposal; and also to Messrs. Harper and Brothers for their permission to make extracts from Horatio Bridge's "Personal Recollections of Nathaniel Hawthorne," and to Samuel T. Pickard, Esq., author of "Hawthorne's First Diary," and to Dr. Moncure D. Conway, author of "Nathaniel Hawthorne" (Appleton's), for a like courtesy. COLUMBIA COLLEGE, April 1, 1902. CONTENTS CHAP. I. FIRST YEARS II. THE CHAMBER UNDER THE EAVES III. WEIGHER, GAUGER, AND FARMER IV. THE OLD MANSE V. THE SCARLET LETTER VI. LITERARY LABORS VII. LIFE ABROAD VIII. LAST YEARS NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE * * * * * I. FIRST YEARS. The Hathorne family stock, to name it with the ancient spelling, was English, and its old home is said to have been at Wigeastle, Wilton, in Wiltshire. The emigrant planter, William Hathorne, twenty-three years old, came over in the Arbella with Winthrop in 1630. He settled at Dorchster, but in 1637 removed to Salem, where he received grants of land; and there the line continued generation after generation with varying fortune, at one time coming into public service and local distinction, and at another lapsing again into the common lot, as was the case of the long settled families generally. The planter, William Hathorne, shared to the full in the vigor and enterprise of the first generation in New England. He was a leader in war and peace, trade and politics, with the versatility then required for leadership, being legislator, magistrate, Indian fighter, explorer, and promoter, as well as occasionally a preacher; and besides this practical force he had a temper to sway and incite, which made him reputed the most eloquent man in the public assembly. He possessed--and this may indicate another side to his character--a copy of Sir Philip Sidney's "Arcadia," certainly a rare book in the wilderness. He was best remembered, both in local annals and family tradition, as a patriot and a persecutor, for he refused to obey the king's summons to England, and he ordered Quaker women to be whipped through the country-side. The next generation, born in the colony, were generally of a narrower type than their fathers, though in their turn they took up the work of the new and making world with force and conscience; and the second Hathorne, John, of fanatical memory, was as characteristically a latter-day Puritan as his father had been a pioneer. He served in the council and the field, but he left a name chiefly as a magistrate. His duty as judge fell in the witchcraft years, and under that adversity of fortune he showed those qualities of the Puritan temperament which are most darkly recalled; he examined and sentenced to death several of the accused persons, and bore himself so inhumanely in court that the husband of one of the sufferers cursed him,--it must have been dramatically done to have left so vivid a mark in men's minds,--him and his children's children. This was the curse that lingered in the family memory like a black blot in the blood, and was ever after used to explain any ill luck that befell the house. The third heir of the name, Joseph, was a plain farmer, in whose person the family probably ceased from the ranks of the gentry, as the word was then used. The fourth, Daniel, "bold Hathorne" of the Revolutionary ballad, was a privateersman, robust, ruddy of face, blue-eyed, quick to wrath,--a strong-featured type of the old Salem shipmaster. His son, Nathaniel, the fifth descendant, was also bred to the sea, a young man of slight, firm figure, and in face and build so closely resembling his famous son--for he was the father of Hawthorne--that a passing sailor once recognized the latter by the likeness. What else he transmitted to his son, in addition to physique, by way of temperament and inbred capacity and inclination, was to suffer more than a sea-change; but he is recalled as a stern man on deck, of few words, showing doubtless the early aging of those days under the influence of active responsibility, danger, and the habit of command, and, like all these shipmasters--for they were men of some education--he took books to sea with him. He died at Surinam in 1808, when thirty-two years old. He had married Elizabeth Clarke Manning, herself a descendant in the fifth generation of Richard Manning, of St. Petrox Parish, Dartmouth, whose widow emigrated to New England with her children in 1679. Other old colonial families that had blended with the Hathornes and Mannings in these American years were the Gardner, Bowditch, and Phelps stocks, on the one side, and the Giddings, Potter, and Lord, on the other. Of such descent, Nathaniel Hawthorne, the second child and only son of this marriage, was born at Salem, July 4, 1804, in his grandfather Daniel's house, on Union Street, near the wharves. The pleasant, handsome, bright-haired boy was four years old when his mother called him into her room and told him that his father was dead. She soon removed with him and his sisters, of whom Elizabeth was four years older and Louisa two years younger than himself, to her father's house in the adjoining yard, which faced on Herbert Street; and there the young mother, who was still but twenty-seven, following a custom which made much of widows' mourning in those times, withdrew to a life of seclusion in her own room, which, there or elsewhere, she maintained till her death, through a period of forty years; and, as a perpetual outward sign of her solitude, she took her meals apart, never eating at the common table. There is a touch of mercy in life which allows childhood to reconcile itself with all conditions; else one might regret that the lad was to grow up from his earliest memory in the visible presence of this grief separating him in some measure from his mother's life; it was as if there were a ghost in the house; and though early anecdotes of him are few and of little significance, yet in his childish threat to go away to sea and never come back again, repeated through years, one can but trace the deep print of that sorrow of the un-returning ones which was the tragedy of women's lives all along this coast. His mother cared for him none the less, though she was less his companion, and there seems to have been no diminution of affection and kindness between them, though an outward habit of coldness sprang up as time went on. He had his sisters for playmates at first, and as he grew up, he was much looked after by his uncles. His first master was Dr. Worcester, the lexicographer, then just graduated from Yale, who set up a school in Salem; and, the lad being lamed in ball-playing, the young teacher came to the house to carry on the lessons. The accident happened when Hawthorne was nine years old, and the injury, which reduced him to crutches, continued to trouble him till he was twelve, at least, after which, to judge by the fact that he attended dancing-school, he seems to have entirely recovered from it. The habit of reading came to him earlier, perhaps because of his confinement and disability for sports in these three or four years; he was naturally thrown back upon himself. He is seen lying upon the floor habitually, and when not playing with cats--the only boyish fondness told of him--reading Shakspere, Milton, Thomson, the books of the household, not uncommon in New England homes, where good books were as plenty then as all books are now; and on Sundays, at his grandmother Hathorne's, across the yard, he would crouch hour after hour over Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress," that refuge of boyhood on the oldtime Sabbaths. It is recollected that, by the time he was fourteen, he had read Clarendon, Froissart, and Rousseau, besides "The Newgate Calendar," a week-day favorite; and he may be said to have begun youth already well versed in good English books, and with the habit and taste of literary pleasure established as a natural part of life. "The Faërie Queene" was the first book he bought with his own money. He was vigorous enough now; but the two outward circumstances that most affected his boyhood, the monotone of his mother's sorrow and his own protracted physical disability, must have given him touches of gravity and delicacy beyond his years. It is noticeable that nothing is heard of any boy friends; nor did he contract such friendships, apparently, before college days. In the fall of 1818, when Hawthorne was fourteen years old, the family removed to Raymond, in Maine, where the Mannings possessed large tracts of land. The site of this township was originally a grant to the surviving members and the heirs of Captain Raymond's militia company of Beverly, the next town to Salem, for service in the French and Indian war; and Hawthorne's grandfather, Richard Manning, being the secretary of the proprietors, who managed the property and held their meetings in Beverly, had toward the close of the century bought out many of their rights. After his death the estate thus acquired was kept undivided, and was managed for his children by his sons Richard and Robert, and finally at any rate, more particularly by the latter, who stood in the closest relation to Hawthorne of all his uncles, having undertaken to provide for his education. He had built a large, square, hip-roofed house at Raymond, after the model common in his native county of Essex, as a comfortable dwelling, but so seemingly grand amid the humble surroundings of the Maine clearing as to earn the name of "Manning's folly;" and, about 1814, he built a similar house for his sister, near his own, but she had not occupied it until now, when she came to live there, at first boarding with a tenant. It was pleasantly situated, with a garden and apple orchard, and with rows of butternut-trees planted beside it; and perhaps she had sought this retirement with the hope of its being consonant with her own solitude. The country round about was wilderness, most of it primeval woods. The little settlement, only a mill and a country store and a few scattered houses, lay on a broad headland making out into Sebago Lake, better known as the Great Pond, a sheet of water eight miles across and fourteen miles long, and connected with other lakes in a chain of navigable water; to the northwest the distant horizon was filled with the White Mountains, and northward and eastward rose the unfrequented hill and lake country, remarkable only, then as now, for its pure air and waters, and presenting a vast solitude. This was the Maine home of Hawthorne, of which he cherished the memory as the brightest part of his boyhood. The spots that can be named which may have excited his curiosity or interested his imagination are few, and similar places would not be far off anywhere on the coast. There was near his home a Pulpit Rock, such as tradition often preserves, and by the Pond there was a cliff with the usual legend of a romantic leap, and under it were the Indian rock-paintings called the Images; but the essential charm of the place was that in all directions the country lay open for adventure by boat or by trail. Hawthorne had visited the scene before, in summer times, and he revisited it afterward in vacations, but his long stay here was in his fifteenth year, the greater part of which he passed in its neighborhood. The contemporary record of these days is contained in a diary [Footnote: Hawthorne's First Diary, with an account of its discovery and loss. By Samuel T. Pickard. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 1897. The volume has been withdrawn by its editor in consequence of his later doubts of its authenticity.] which has been regarded as Hawthorne's earliest writing. The original has never been produced, and the copy was communicated for publication under circumstances of mystery that easily allow doubts of its authenticity to arise. The diary is said to have been given to him by his uncle Richard "with the advice that he write out his thoughts, some every day, in as good words as he can, upon any and all subjects, as it is one of the best means of his securing for mature years command of thought and language,"--these words being written on the first leaf with the date, "Raymond, June 1, 1816." Whether this inscription and the entries which follow it are genuine must be left undetermined; there is nothing strange in Hawthorne's keeping a boy's diary, and being urged to do so, in view of his tastes and circumstances, and it would be interesting to trace to so early a beginning that habit of the note-book that was such a resource to him in mature years; but the evidence is inconclusive. Whether by his hand or not, the diary embodies the life he led in this region on his visits and during his longer stay; the names and places, the incidents, the people, the quality of the days are the same that the boy knew, wrote of in letters of the time, and remembered as a man; and though the story may be the fabrication of his mulatto boy comrade of those days, it is woven of shreds and patches of reality. After all, the little book is but a lad's log of small doings,--swapping knives, swimming and fishing, of birds and snakes and bears, incidents of the road and excursions into the woods and on the lake, and notices of the tragic accidents of the neighborhood. It has some importance as illustrating the external circumstances of the place, a very rural place indeed, and suggesting that among these country people Hawthorne found the secret of that fellowship--all he ever had--with the rough and unlearned, on a footing of democratic equality, with the ease and naturalness of a man. Here at Raymond in his youth, where his personal superiority was too much a matter of course to be noticed, he must have learned this freemasonry with young and old at the same time that he held apart from all in his own life. For the rest, he has told himself in his undoubted words how he swam and hunted, shot hen-hawks and partridges, caught trout, and tracked bear in the snow, and ran wild, yet not wholly free of the call-whistle of his master-passion: "I ran quite wild," he wrote a quarter-century later, "and would, I doubt not, have willingly run wild till this time, fishing all day long, or shooting with an old fowling-piece; but reading a good deal, too, on rainy days, especially in Shakespeare and 'The Pilgrim's Progress,' and any poetry or light books within my reach. These were delightful days.... I would skate all alone on Sebago Lake, with the deep shadows of the icy hills on either hand. When I found myself far from home, and weary with the exhaustion of skating, I would sometimes take refuge in a log cabin where half a tree would be burning on the broad hearth. I would sit in the ample chimney, and look at the stars through the great aperture through which the flames went roaring up. Ah, how well I recall the summer days, also, when with my gun I roamed at will through the woods of Maine!" In these memories, it is evident, many years, younger and older, are diffused in one recollection. For him, here rather than by his native sea were those open places of freedom that boyhood loves, and with them he associated the beginnings of his spirit,--the dark as well as the bright; near his end he told Fields, as his mind wandered back to these days, "I lived in Maine like a bird of the air, so perfect was the freedom I enjoyed. But it was there I first got my cursed habits of solitude." The tone of these reminiscences is verified by his letters, when he went back to Salem; in the first months he writes of "very hard fits of homesickness;" a year later he breaks out,--"Oh, that I had the wings of a dove, that I might fly hence and be at rest! How often do I long for my gun, and wish that I could again savageize with you! But I shall never again run wild in Raymond, and I shall never be so happy as when I did;" and, after another year's interval, "I have preferred and still prefer Raymond to Salem, through every change of fortune." There can be no doubt where his heart placed the home of his boyhood; nor is it, perhaps, fanciful to observe that in his books the love of nature he displays is rather for the woods than the sea, though he was never content to live long away from the salt air. It was plainly the need of schooling that took him from his mother's home at Raymond and brought him back to Salem by the summer of 1819, when he was just fifteen years old. Even in the winter interval he seems to have gone for a few weeks to the house of the Rev. Caleb Bradley, Stroudwater, Westbrook, in the same county as Raymond, to be tutored. He remained in Salem with his uncles for the next two years, and was prepared for college, partly, at least, by Benjamin Oliver, a lawyer, at the expense of his uncle Robert, and during a portion of this time he earned some money by writing in the office of his uncle William; but he was occupied chiefly with his studies, reading, and early compositions. At the beginning of this period, in his first autumn letters, he mentions having lately read "Waverley," "The Mysteries of Udolpho," "The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom," "Roderick Random," and a volume of "The Arabian Nights;" and he has learned the easy rhyming of first verses, and stuffs his letters with specimens of his skill, clever stanzas, well written, modulated in the cadences of the time, with melancholy seriousness and such play of sad fancy as youthful poets use. He laid little store by his faculty for verse, and yet he had practiced it from an early childish age and had a fair mastery of its simple forms; and once or twice in mature life he indulged himself in writing and even in publishing serious poems. In these years, however, verses were only a part of the ferment of his literary talent, nor have any of them individuality. He practiced prose, too, and in the next summer, 1820, issued four numbers of a boy's paper, "The Spectator," bearing weekly date from August 21 to September 18, and apparently he had made an earlier experiment, without date, in such adolescent journalism; it was printed with a pen on small note-paper, and contained such serious matter as belongs to themes at school on "Solitude" and "Industry," with the usual addresses to subscribers and the liveliness natural to family news-columns. The composition is smooth and the manner entertaining, and there is abundance of good spirits and fun of a boyish sort. The paper shows the literary spirit and taste in its very earliest bud; but no precocity of talent distinguished it, though doubtless the thought of authorship fed on its tender leaves. Such experiments belong to the life of growing boys where education is common and literary facility is thought to be a distinction and sign of promise in the young; and Hawthorne did not in these ways differ from the normal boy who was destined for college. Nothing more than these trifles is to be gleaned of his intellectual life at that time, but two or three letters pleasantly illustrate his brotherly feeling, his spirits, and his uncertainties in regard to the future, at the same time that they display his absorption in the author's craft; and they conclude the narrative of these early days before college. The first was written in October, 1820, just after the last issue of "The Spectator," to his younger sister Louisa, and shows incidentally that these literary pleasures were a family diversion:-- Dear Sister,--I am very angry with you for not sending me some of your poetry, which I consider a great piece of ingratitude. You will not see one line of mine until you return the confidence which I have placed in you. I have bought the "Lord of the Isles," and intend either to send or to bring it to you. I like it as well as any of Scott's other poems. I have read Hogg's "Tales," "Caleb Williams," "St. Leon," and "Mandeville." I admire Godwin's novels, and intend to read them all. I shall read the "Abbot," by the author of "Waverley," as soon as I can hire it. I have read all Scott's novels except that. I wish I had not, that I might have the pleasure of reading them again. Next to these I like "Caleb Williams." I have almost given up writing poetry. No man can be a Poet and a bookkeeper at the same time. I do find this place most "dismal," and have taken to chewing tobacco with all my might, which, I think, raises my spirits. Say nothing of it in your letters, nor of the "Lord of the Isles." ... I do not think I shall ever go to college. I can scarcely bear the thought of living upon Uncle Robert for four years longer. How happy I should be to be able to say, "I am Lord of myself!" You may cut off this part of my letter, and show the other to Uncle Richard. Do write me some letters in skimmed milk. I must conclude, as I am in a "monstrous hurry"! Your affectionate brother, NATH. HATHORNE. P. S. The most beautiful poetry I think I ever saw begins:-- "She 'a gone to dwell in Heaven, my lassie, She's gone to dwell in Heaven: Ye're ow're pure quo' a voice aboon For dwalling out of Heaven." It is not the words, but the thoughts. I hope you have read it, as I know you would admire it. A passage from a second letter, six months later, March 13, 1821, to his mother, reveals the character of his relationship with her:-- I don't read so much now as I did, because I am more taken up in studying. I am quite reconciled to going to college, since I am to spend the vacations with you. Yet four years of the best part of my life is a great deal to throw away. I have not yet concluded what profession I shall have. The being a minister is of course out of the question. I should not think that even you could desire me to choose so dull a way of life. Oh, no, mother, I was not born to vegetate forever in one place, and to live and die as calm and tranquil as--a puddle of water. As to lawyers, there are so many of them already that one half of them (upon a moderate calculation) are in a state of actual starvation. A physician, then, seems to be "Hobson's choice;" but yet I should not like to live by the diseases and infirmities of my fellow-creatures. And it would weigh very heavily on my conscience, in the course of my practice, if I should chance to send any unlucky patient "ad inferum," which being interpreted is, "to the realms below." Oh that I was rich enough to live without a profession! What do you think of my becoming an author, and relying for support upon my pen? Indeed, I think the illegibility of my handwriting is very author-like. How proud you would feel to see my works praised by the reviewers, as equal to the proudest productions of the scribbling sons of John Bull! But authors are always poor devils, and therefore Satan may take them. I am in the same predicament as the honest gentleman in "Espriella's Letters:"-- "I am an Englishman, and naked I stand here, A-musing in my mind what garment I shall wear." But as the mail closes soon, I must stop the career of my pen. I will only inform you that I now write no poetry, or anything else. I hope that either Elizabeth or you will write to me next week. I remain Your affectionate son, NATHL. HATHORNE. Do not show this letter. A third letter, June 19, 1821, also to his mother, on the eve of his departure for college, is interesting for the solicitude it exhibits for her happiness in the solitary life she had come to live. "I hope, dear mother, that you will not be tempted by my entreaties to return to Salem to live. You can never have so much comfort here as you now enjoy. You are now undisputed mistress of your own house.... If you remove to Salem, I shall have no mother to return to during the college vacations, and the expense will be too great for me to come to Salem. If you remain at Raymond, think how delightfully the time will pass, with all your children round you, shut out from the world, and nothing to disturb us. It will be a second Garden of Eden. 'Lo, what an entertaining sight Are kindred who agree!' "Elizabeth is as anxious for you to stay as myself. She says she is contented to remain here for a short time, but greatly prefers Raymond as a permanent place of residence. The reason for my saying so much on this subject is that Mrs. Dike and Miss Manning are very earnest for you to return to Salem, and I am afraid they will commission uncle Robert to persuade you to it. But, mother, if you wish to live in peace, I conjure you not to consent to it. Grandmother, I think, is rather in favor of your staying." A few weeks later, in the summer of 1821, being then seventeen years old, Hawthorne left Salem for Bowdoin College, in Brunswick, Maine, by the mail stage from Boston eastward, and before reaching his destination picked up by the way a Sophomore, Franklin Pierce, afterwards President of the United States, and two classmates of his own, Jonathan Cilley, who went to Congress and was the victim of the well-remembered political duel with Graves, and Alfred Mason; he made friends with these new companions, and Mason became his room-mate for two years. Bowdoin was a small college, graduating at that time about thirty students at its annual Commencement; its professors were kindly and cultivated men, and its curriculum the simple academic course of those days. Hawthorne's class, immortalized fifty years later by Longfellow's grave and tender anniversary lines, "Morituri Salutamus," was destined to unusual distinction in after life. Longfellow, its scholastic star, was a boy of fourteen, favored by the regard of the professors, and belonging to the more studious and steady set of fellows, who gathered in the Peucinian Society. Hawthorne joined the rival organisation, the Athenaeum, a more free and boisterous group of lower standing in their studies, described as the more democratic in their feelings. He is remembered as "a slender lad, having a massive head, with dark, brilliant, and most expressive eyes, heavy eyebrows, and a profusion of dark hair." He carried his head on one side, which gave a singularity to his figure, and he had generally a countrified appearance; but he took his place among his mates without much observation. He was reticent in speech and reserved in manner, and he was averse to intimacy; he had, nevertheless, a full share in collegiate life and showed no signs of withdrawal from the common arena. He did not indulge in sports, saving some rough-and-tumble play, nor did he ride horseback or drive, nor apparently did he care for that side of youthful life at all, though he was willing to fight on occasion, and joined the military company of which Pierce was captain. His athleticism seems to have been confined to his form. He played cards for small stakes, being a member of the Androscoggin Loo Club, and he took his part in the convivial drinking of the set where he made one, winning the repute of possessing a strong head. These indulgences were almost too trifling to deserve mention, for the scale of life at Bowdoin was of the most inexpensive order, and though there was light gambling and occasional jollification, bad habits were practically impossible in these directions. He was certainly not ashamed of his doings, for on being detected in one of these scrapes, at the end of his Freshman year, anticipating a letter of the President, he wrote to his mother, May 30, 1822, an account of the affair:-- MY DEAR MOTHER,--I hope you have safely arrived in Salem. I have nothing particular to inform you of, except that all the card-players in college have been found out, and my unfortunate self among the number. One has been dismissed from college, two suspended, and the rest, with myself, have been fined fifty cents each. I believe the President intends to write to the friends of all the delinquents. Should that be the case, you must show the letter to nobody. If I am again detected, I shall have the honor of being suspended; when the President asked what we played for, I thought it proper to inform him it was fifty cents, although it happened to be a quart of wine; but if I had told him of that, he would probably have fined me for having a blow. There was no untruth in the case, as the wine cost fifty cents. I have not played at all this term. I have not drank any kind of spirits or wine this term, and shall not till the last week. * * * * * He takes up the subject again in a letter to one of his sisters, August 5, 1822:-- "To quiet your suspicions, I can assure you that I am neither 'dead, absconded, or anything worse.' I have involved myself in no 'foolish scrape,' as you say all my friends suppose; but ever since my misfortune I have been as steady as a sign-post, and as sober as a deacon, have been in no 'blows' this term, nor drank any kind of 'wine or strong drink.' So that your comparison of me to the 'prodigious son' will hold good in nothing, except that I shall probably return penniless, for I have had no money this six weeks.... The President's message is not so severe as I expected. I perceive that he thinks I have been led away by the wicked ones, in which, however, he is greatly mistaken. I was full as willing to play as the person he suspects of having enticed me, and would have been influenced by no one. I have a great mind to commence playing again, merely to show him that I scorn to be seduced by another into anything wrong." The last week of the term and the close of the Senior year appear to have been the seasons of conviviality, and Hawthorne's life of this sort ended with his being an officer of the Navy Club, an impromptu association of those of his classmates, fourteen out of thirty-eight, who for one reason or another were not to have a Commencement part on graduation. The Club met at the college tavern, Miss Ward's, near the campus, for weekly suppers and every night during Commencement week; this entertainment was for these youths the happy climax of their academic life together. In his studies Hawthorne must have followed his own will very freely. He refused to declaim, and no power could make him do so, and for this reason he was denied the honor of a Commencement part, which he had won, being number eighteen by rank in his class; he was nervously shy about declaiming, owing, it is said, to his having been laughed at on his first attempt as a school-boy at Salem; but he either delivered or read a Latin theme at a Junior exhibition. He also paid scant attention to mathematics and metaphysics, and had no pride as to failing in recitation in those branches; but he distinguished himself as a Latin scholar and in English. His most fruitful hours, as so often happens, were those spent in the little library of the Athenaeum Society, a collection, as he writes home, of eight hundred books, among which he especially mentions Rees's Cyclopædia--such was the wealth of a boy of genius in those days--but among the eight hundred books it is certain that the bulk of English literature was contained. He practiced writing somewhat, though he had given up poetry; and he played a prank by sending to a Boston paper a fabricated account of one of those destroying insects which visit that region from time to time, with notes on ways of exterminating it,--all for the benefit of his uncle, who took the paper; but no other trace of his composition remains except a memory of his elder sister's that he wrote to her of "progress on my novel." His way of life intellectually had not changed since his schoolboy days, for it is noticeable that then he never mentioned his studies, but only the books he read; so now he read the books for pleasure, and let his studies subsist as best they could in the realm of duty. He was poor, and even in the modest simplicity of this country college, where his expenses could hardly have been three hundred dollars a year, was evidently embarrassed with homely difficulties; the state of his clothes seems to have been on his mind a good deal. But he was self-respecting, patient, and grateful; he formed the good habit of hating debt; and he went on his way little burdened except by doubtful hopes. Though he was familiar with his classmates and contemporaries at college, and firm and fast friends with a few, like Pierce and Cilley, forming with them the ties that last through all things, he had but one confidant, Horatio Bridge, afterwards of the United States Navy. Hawthorne roomed at first with Alfred Mason, in Maine Hall, and being burned out in their Freshman year, they found temporary quarters elsewhere, but when the Hall was rebuilt returned to it and occupied room number nineteen for the Sophomore year. The two chums, however, did not become intimate, beyond pleasant companionship, and they belonged to different societies; and the last two years Hawthorne roomed alone in a private house, Mrs. Cunning's, where both he and Bridge also boarded. It is from the latter, who remained through life one of Hawthorne's most serviceable friends, that the account of his college days mainly comes. He especially remembered, besides such matters of fact as have been recounted, their walks and rambles together in the pine woods that stretched about the college unbroken for miles, and by the river with its rafts of spring logs, and over to the little bay sent up by a far-reaching arm of the sea; and he recalled the confidences of Hawthorne in speaking of his hopes of being a writer, in repeating to him verses as they leaned in the moonlight over the railing of the bridge below the falls, listening to the moving waters, and in allowing him some inward glimpses of his solitary life in the brooding time of youth. Bridge was a fellow of infinite cheer, and praised him, and clapped him, and urged him on, and gave him the best companionship in the world for that time of life, if not for all times,--the companionship of being believed in by a friend. Hawthorne did not forget it, and in due time paid the tribute of grateful remembrance in the preface to the volume he dedicated to Bridge, where he recalled his college days and his friend's part in them. "If anybody is responsible for my being at this day an author, it is yourself. I know not whence your faith came, but while we were lads together at a country college, gathering blueberries in study hours under those tall, academic pines, or watching the great logs as they tumbled along the current of the Androscoggin, or shooting pigeons or gray squirrels in the woods, or bat-fowling in the summer twilight, or catching trout in that shadowy little stream which, I suppose, is still wandering riverward through the forest, though you and I will never cast a line in it again; two idle lads, in short (as we need not fear to acknowledge now), doing a hundred things that the Faculty never heard of, or else it would have been the worse for us--still, it was your prognostic of your friend's destiny that he was to be a writer of fiction." The picture is a vignette of the time, and being in the open, too, pleasantly ends the tale of college. On separating, it is pleasant to notice, the friends exchanged keepsakes. The four years had lapsed quietly and quickly by, and Hawthorne, who now adopted the fanciful spelling of the name after his personal whim, was man grown. There had been trying circumstances in these early days, but he had met them hardily and lightly, as a matter of course; he had practically educated himself by the help of books, and had also discharged his duties as they seemed to the eyes of others; he could go home feeling that he had satisfied his friends. He seems to have feared that he might have satisfied them too well; and, some commendation having preceded him, he endeavored to put them right by a letter to his sister, July 14, 1825:-- "The family had before conceived much too high an opinion of my talents, and had probably formed expectations which I shall never realize. I have thought much upon the subject, and have finally come to the conclusion that I shall never make a distinguished figure in the world, and all I hope or wish is to plod along with the multitude. I do not say this for the purpose of drawing any flattery from you, but merely to set mother and the rest of you right upon a point where your partiality has led you astray. I did hope that uncle Robert's opinion of me was nearer to the truth, as his deportment toward me never expressed a very high estimation of my abilities." This has the ring of sincerity, like all his home letters, and it is true that so far there had been nothing precocious, brilliant, or extraordinary in him to testify of genius,--he was only one of hundreds of New England boys bred on literature under the shelter of academic culture; and yet there may have been in his heart something left unspoken, another mood equally sincere in its turn, for the heart is a fickle prophet. As Mr. Lathrop suggests in that study of his father-in-law which is so subtly appreciative of those vital suggestions apt to escape record and analysis, another part of the truth may lie in the words of "Fanshawe" where Hawthorne expresses the feelings of his hero in a like situation with himself at the end of college days:-- "He called up the years that, even at his early age, he had spent in solitary study,--in conversation with the dead,--while he had scorned to mingle with the living world, or to be actuated by any of its motives. Fanshawe had hitherto deemed himself unconnected with the world, unconcerned in its feelings, and uninfluenced by it in any of his pursuits. In this respect he probably deceived himself. If his inmost heart could have been laid open, there would have been discovered that dream of undying fame, which, dream as it is, is more powerful than a thousand realities." II. THE CHAMBER UNDER THE EAVES. In the summer of 1825 Hawthorne returned to Salem, going back to the old house on Herbert Street,--the home of his childhood, where his mother, disregarding his boyish dissuasions, had again taken up her abode three years before. He occupied a room on the second floor in the southwest sunshine under the eaves, looking out on the business of the wharf-streets; and in it he spent the next twelve years, a period which remained in his memory as an unbroken tract of time preserving a peculiar character. The way of his life knew little variation from the beginning to the end. He lived in an intellectual solitude deepened by the fact that it was only an inner cell of an outward seclusion almost as complete, for the house had the habits of a hermitage. His mother, after nearly a score of years of widowhood, still maintained her separation even from her home world; she is said to have seen none of her husband's relatives and few of her own, and a visitor must have been a venturesome person. The custom of living apart spread through the household. The elder sister, Elizabeth, who was of a strong and active mind capable of understanding and sympathizing with her brother, and the younger sister, Louisa, who was more like other people, stayed in their rooms. The meals of the family, even, which usually go on when everything else fails in the common life of house-mates, had an uncertain and variable element in their conduct, as was not unnatural where the mother never came to the table. The recluse habits of all doubtless increased with indulgence, and after a while Hawthorne himself, who was plainly the centre of interest there, fell into the common ways of isolation. "He had little communication," writes Mr. Lathrop, "with even the members of his family. Frequently his meals were brought and left at his locked door, and it was not often that the four inmates of the old Herbert Street mansion met in family circle. He never read his stories aloud to his mother and sisters, as might be imagined from the picture which Mr. Fields draws of the young author reciting his new productions to his listening family; though, when they met, he sometimes read older literature to them. It was the custom in this household for the several members to remain very much by themselves; the three ladies were perhaps nearly as rigorous recluses as himself; and, speaking of the isolation which reigned among them, Hawthorne once said, 'We do not even _live_ at our house!'" He seldom went out by day, unless for long excursions in the country; an early sea bath on summer mornings and a dark walk after supper, longer in the warm weather, shorter in the winter season, were habitual, and a bowl of thick chocolate with bread crumbed into it, or a plate of fruit, on his return prepared him for the night's work. Study in the morning, composition in the afternoon, and reading in the evening, are described as his routine, but it is unlikely that any such regularity ruled where times and seasons were so much at his own command. He had no visitors and made no friends; hardly twenty persons in the town, he thought, were aware of his existence; but he brought home hundreds of volumes from the Salem Athenaeum, and knew the paths of the woods and pastures and the way along the beaches and rocky points, and he had the stuff of his fantasy with which to occupy himself when nature and books failed to satisfy him. At first there must have been great pleasure in being at home, for he had not really lived a home life since he was fifteen years old, and he was fond of home; and, too, in the young ambition to become a writer and his efforts to achieve success, if not fame, in fiction, and in the first motions of his creative genius, there was enough to fill his mind, to provide him with active interest and occupation, and to abate the sense of loneliness in his daily circumstances: but as youth passed and manhood came, and yet fortune lagged with her gifts, this existence became insufficient for him,--it grew burdensome as it showed barren, and depression set in upon him like a chill and obscure fog over the marshes where he walked. This, however, year dragging after year, was a slow process; and the kind of life he led, its gray and deadening monotone, sympathetic though it was with his temperament, was seen by him better in retrospect than in its own time. It is singular that Hawthorne should have undertaken to live by his pen, or been allowed to do so by his friends, as a practical way of life, but he was indulged at home, the young lord of the family. "We were in those days," says Elizabeth, "almost absolutely obedient to him." Occasionally he thought of going into his uncle's counting-room and so obtaining a business and place in the world, but he never took this step. He probably drifted, more or less, into authorship, partly through a dilatory reluctance to do anything else, and partly led on by the hope of a success with some one of his tales which would justify him. The first attempts he made in the craft are involved in some obscurity. He may have merely carried over from college days what he then had in hand. At all events his sister Elizabeth, from whom the information comes in respect to these details, remembered a little collection which he had prepared for publication with the title "Seven Tales of my Native Land," and she says that she read it in the summer of 1825; in that case these stories must have been written at college, but her memory may have erred. She gives the names of two of them as "Alice Doane" and "Susan Grey," and adds that he told her, while the volume was still in the stage of being offered to publishers, that he would first "write a story which would make a smaller book, and get it published immediately if possible, before the arrangements for bringing out the 'Tales' were completed." This was presumably "Fanshawe," which may also have been the novel she recollected his writing to her about while at college. "Fanshawe" [Footnote: _Fanshawe_. A Tale. Boston: Marsh & Capen, 362 Washington St. Press of Putnam and Hunt, 1828. 12mo. Pp. 141.] was published in 1828 by Marsh and Capen, at Boston, without the author's name but at his expense, one hundred dollars being the sum paid; it failed, and Hawthorne looked on it with so much subsequent displeasure that he called in all the copies he could find and destroyed them, and thus nearly succeeded in sinking the book in oblivion, but the few copies which survived secured its republication after his death. The novel is brief, with a melodramatic plot, well-marked scenes, and strongly contrasted character; the style flows on pleasantly; but the book is without distinction. Like many a just graduated collegian, Hawthorne had recourse to his academic experience in lieu of anything else, and in the setting of the story and some of its delineation of character Longfellow recognized the strong suggestion of Bowdoin days; in the same way the hero, Fanshawe, borrowed something from Hawthorne's own temperament. The figure of the villain, too, adumbrates, though faintly, the type which engaged Hawthorne's mind in later years. "Fanshawe" as a whole in all its scenes, whether in the house of the old President, the tavern, the hut, or the outdoor encounters of the lovers and rivals, is strongly reminiscent of Scott, the management being entirely in his manner; its low-life tragedy, its romantic scenery, and its bookish humor, as well as the characterization in general, are also from Scott; in fact, notwithstanding what Hawthorne had taken from his own observation and feelings, this provincial sketch, for it is no more, is a Scott story, done with a young man's clever mastery of the manner, but weak internally in plot, character, and dramatic reality. It is as destitute of any brilliant markings of his genius as his undergraduate life itself had been, and is important only as showing the serious care with which he undertook the task of authorship. It is the only relic, except the shadowy "Seven Tales," of his literary work in the first three years after leaving college. The "Tales" he is said to have burned; no better publisher appearing, a young Salem printer, Ferdinand Andrews, undertook to bring them out, but as he delayed the matter through lack of capital, Hawthorne, growing impatient and exasperated, recalled the manuscript and destroyed it. The example of Scott was, perhaps, the potent influence in fixing Hawthorne's attention on a definite object, and incited him to seek in the history of his own country, and especially in the colonial tradition of New England, which was so near at hand, the field of fiction. He stored his mind, certainly, with the story of his own people during the two centuries since the settlement, and prepared himself to describe its stirring events and striking characters under the veil of imaginative history. The nature of his reading shows that this was a conscious aim; and, besides, it was an opinion, loudly proclaimed and widely shared in that decade, that American writers should look to their own country for their themes; Cooper was doing so in fiction, and Longfellow felt this predilection in his choice of subject for verse. Salem was a true centre of the old times; and a young imagination in that town and neighborhood, already disposed to writing prose romance, would feel the charm of historical association and naturally catch impulse from the past, especially if, as in the case of Hawthorne, the history of his ancestors was inwoven with its good and evil. It is not surprising therefore that, as Hawthorne had begun, though unsuccessfully, with tales of his native land, he should continue to work the vein; and, to adopt what seems to be a reasonable inference, he now gathered from his materials a new series which he knew as "Provincial Tales," in which it remains doubtful how much of the old survived, for the burnt manuscripts of youth have something of the phoenix in their ashes. The first trace of these is "The Young Provincial," an anonymous piece, [Footnote: It is unquestionable that Hawthorne contributed to annuals and periodicals anonymous tales and sketches that he never claimed, as he states in the preface to _Twice-Told Tales_ and in a letter to Fields in which he beseeches him not to revive them. The identification of such work, however, is beset with much temptation to find a tale genuine, if it can be plausibly so represented, and in few cases can the proof be conclusive. Mr. F. B. Sanborn presents the fullest list, all from _The Token_, which he accepts as genuine, as follows: _The Adventures of a Raindrop_, 1828, _The Young Provincial_, 1830, _The Haunted Quack_ and _The New England Village_, 1831, _My Wife's Novel_, 1832, _The Bald Eagle_, 1833, _The Modern Job_, or _The Philosopher's Stone_, 1834. The correspondence with Goodrich does not indicate that Hawthorne contributed to _The Token_ before the issue for 1831. _The Young Provincial_ seems to be the same sort of a tale as _The Downer's Banner_, as has been intimated above: yet it would, perhaps, be more readily accepted, together with _The Haunted Quack_ and _The Modern Job_. The latest edition of Hawthorne includes all of these tales, given above, except the first and last, but its editor does not vouch for their authenticity.] ascribed to him on internal evidence and contributed to "The Token," an annual published at Boston, for its issue of 1830. The story relates the adventures of a youthful Revolutionary soldier who had handed down to his descendants a "grandfather's gun;" it tells of Bunker Hill, of imprisonment at Halifax and of escape, and it may be from Hawthorne's pen. It must have been written early in 1829, if not before, and it is noticed in the review of "The Token" in Willis's Boston periodical, "The American Monthly Magazine" for September, 1829, where it is described as a "pleasing story, told quite inartificially," and is illustrated by a brief extract. It may not be irrelevant to observe that a similar "provincial tale" appeared in this number of the magazine, "The Downer's Banner," and if it was not by the same youthful author, it shows that the same kind of subject had singularly interested two writers in that neighborhood. It is, however, only in "The Token" that Hawthorne can be further traced. The editor of this annual, which was intended as a literary gift-book for Christmas, was S. G. Goodrich, famous as "Peter Parley" in after days, and to him belongs the honor of being Hawthorne's first literary friend, and he always remained a faithful one. He was a promoter of publishers' enterprises, in that part of the field of literature which is distinctly pervaded with business; and in it he was successful, as the millions of the Peter Parley books abundantly attest. At this time he was sincerely interested, it must be believed, in furthering the interests of American writers and artists, according to his lights and means, and Griswold, who was a good judge, said of him, "It is questionable whether any other person has done as much to improve the style of the book manufacture or to promote the arts of engraving." With such ambitions he had begun, in 1828, the issue of the annual, which is now best remembered, and which in its own day longest survived the changes of public taste. The nature of these volumes, of which there were many in different publishing centres, is well described by a writer in Willis's "Magazine" for 1829: "A few years ago, an elegant taste, joined, perhaps, to a love of 'filthy lucre,' induced some English publishers to give to the world the first specimens of those souvenirs and 'Forget Me Nots' which are now so common through our country. How beautiful they were at their first appearance, the eagerness with which they were read will testify. How rapid was their increase, may be seen by referring to the counters of every book-store. America, ready and willing as she ever is to acknowledge the excellence, and imitate the example of the parent country in every good thing, has imitated and improved upon the plan. We can now boast of a species of literature, which is conducted almost wholly by young men, and which has merited the affection, because it has developed the power of our native genius. Those who have made their first essays in literature, through the medium of the pages of a Souvenir, will gain confidence in proportion as they have tested their own strength. The American annuals do not profess to be the works of the most finished or most accomplished writers of this country. They should not be taken as specimens of what our literature is, but as indications of what it may one day be. They are not the matured fruits, but the bright promise and blossoming of genius; and thus far they have been an honor to the taste and talent of American writers, and monuments of the swift progress of our artists towards excellence in their profession." Such was the contemporary view of the annuals, and it is justified, perhaps, by the fact that Longfellow, for example, was then contributing to the "Atlantic Souvenir" of Philadelphia, the first of the brood, and that Hawthorne found in "The Token" the principal opportunity to obtain a hearing for himself in his first productive years. Mr. Goodrich, in his "Recollections," states that he sought out Hawthorne. "I had seen," he says, "some anonymous publications which seemed to me to indicate extraordinary powers. I inquired of the publishers as to the writer, and through them a correspondence ensued between me and 'N. Hawthorne.' This name I considered a disguise, and it was not till after many letters had passed, that I met the author, and found it to be a true title, representing a very substantial personage." This correspondence began, as nearly as can be judged, in 1829, and in the course of it Hawthorne had already sent to Goodrich "The Young Provincial," if that is to be accepted as by him, and also "Roger Malvin's Burial," and, apparently later than this last, at least three other tales, "The Gentle Boy," "My Uncle Molineaux," and "Alice Doane." He had presented these as specimens of the "Provincial Tales," for which he desired a publisher. Goodrich acknowledges these, January 19, 1830, from Hartford, Connecticut, where he lived, and promises in the note to endeavor to find a publisher for the book when he returns to Boston in April. He adds, "Had 'Fanshawe' been in the hands of more extensive dealers, I do believe it would have paid you a profit;" from which it may be inferred that "Fanshawe" was the anonymous work which had attracted Goodrich's attention. He praises the tales, and offers thirty-five dollars for "The Gentle Boy" to be used in "The Token." The first letter from Hawthorne, in respect to the matter, which has come to light, is on May 6, 1830, and is given in Derby's "Fifty Years." "I send you the two pieces for 'The Token.' They were ready some days ago, but I kept them in expectation of hearing from you. I have complied with your wishes in regard to brevity. You can insert them (if you think them worthy a place in your publication) as by the author of 'Provincial Tales,'--such being the title I propose giving my volume. I can conceive no objection to your designating them in this manner, even if my tales should not be published as soon as 'The Token,' or, indeed, if they never see the light at all. An unpublished book is not more obscure than many that creep into the world, and your readers will suppose that the 'Provincial Tales' are among the latter." The "two pieces" to which he refers were clearly not members of the series he proposed to publish in the book, and perhaps they should be identified as "Sights from a Steeple," certainly, and for the other either "The New England Village" or "The Haunted Quack," both which, besides the first, were published in "The Token" for 1831, and have been ascribed to Hawthorne on internal evidence of the same sort as that on which "The Young Provincial" has been accepted. Goodrich did not find a publisher for the "Provincial Tales," and Hawthorne allowed him to use such as he desired for "The Token" for 1832. The publication of this annual, it should be observed, was prepared for early in the preceding year, and the tales which it contained must be regarded as at least a year old when issued. Thus, in respect to the issue for 1832, just mentioned, Goodrich writes May 31, 1831: "I have made a very liberal use of the privilege you gave me as to the insertion of your pieces in 'The Token.' I have already inserted four of them; namely, 'The Wives of the Dead,' 'Roger Malvin's Burial,' 'Major Molineaux,' and 'The Gentle Boy;'" and he adds that they are as good if not better than anything else he gets; and in a later note, written on the publication of the volume, in October, he says, "I am gratified to find that all whose opinion I have heard agree with me as to the merit of the various pieces from your pen." In this issue, besides the four mentioned, the story "My Wife's Novel" has also been attributed to Hawthorne. The project of the "Provincial Tales" had by this time been abandoned, temporarily at least, and the author's mind turned to other kinds of writing. He had already opened new veins in attempting to sketch contemporary scenes, either after the fashion of the pleasant meditative essay, such as "Sights from a Steeple," or else in the way of humorous description. The scenes he looked down on, in fancy, in this first paper, were the roof-tops and streets and horizon of Salem; but he had wandered in other parts of his native land also, though not widely, and he used these journeys in his compositions. It is noticeable that Hawthorne always used all his material, consumed it, and made stories, essays, and novels of it, except the slag. It was his characteristic from youth. There is the same dubiousness about these journeys, his earliest ventures in the world, as about his first attempts in the field of authorship. He himself says, in the autobiographical notes he furnished to Stoddard, that he left Salem "once a year or thereabouts," for a few weeks; and in his sketches there are traces of these excursions, as at Martha's Vineyard, for example; but their times and localities are verifiable only to a slight degree. It is stated that the fact that his uncles, the Mannings, were interested in stage-lines gave him some privileges as a traveller, or perhaps this only gave occasion for a journey now and then, in which he joined his uncles on some convenient business; thus, it was in company with his uncle Samuel, that he was in New Hampshire in 1831, and visited the Shaker community at Canterbury. Another known journey was in 1830, and took him through Connecticut; and it is said, probably on conjecture, that it was at this time that he went on, by the canal, to Niagara, and visited Ticonderoga on his return. If his writings, in which he described these places, are to be taken literally, he even embarked for Detroit; but information in respect to the whole Niagara excursion is of the scantiest. All that is known is that in some way, during his long stay at Salem in these years, he made himself acquainted with portions of Connecticut, Vermont, New York, and New Hampshire, to add to his knowledge of Massachusetts and Maine; within this rather limited circle his wanderings were confined; and the period when he went about with most freedom and vivacity of impression was the summer of 1830 and, perhaps, the next year or two. These experiences gave him the suggestion and in part the scene of his next compositions, "The Canterbury Pilgrims" and "The Seven Vagabonds," the one a New Hampshire, the other a Connecticut tale, and in Connecticut, too, is laid "The Bald Eagle," a humorous sketch of a reception of Lafayette which failed to come off, attributed to Hawthorne on the same grounds as the other doubtful pieces of these years; these three appeared in "The Token" for 1833, "The Seven Vagabonds" as by the author of "The Gentle Boy," the others anonymously, and, in addition, that issue also contained the historical sketch, "Sir William Pepperell," described as by the author of "Sights from a Steeple." If "The Haunted Quack," which had already appeared in 1831, be regarded as Hawthorne's, the journey by the canal which it records must have taken place as early as 1829, in order for the manuscript to have been ready in time for publication. The particular times and stories, however, are of less importance; nor are these provincial travels noteworthy except for the fact that Hawthorne found in them, whenever or wherever they occurred, suggestions for his pen. The idea which was the germ of his next conception for a book arose out of this country rambling before the days of railroads. At the end of "The Seven Vagabonds," he represented himself as taking up the character of an itinerant story-teller on the impulse of the moment. To this he now returned, and proposed to write a series of tales on the thread of the adventures of this vagrant, and call it "The Story-Teller." The work, such as he here conceived it, exists only as a fragment, "Passages from a Relinquished Work," though he doubtless used elsewhere the stories he intended to incorporate into it. In the young man as he is sketched in the opening passage there is, notwithstanding the affectation of levity, a touch of Hawthorne's own position:-- "I was a youth of gay and happy temperament, with an incorrigible levity of spirit, of no vicious propensities, sensible enough, but wayward and fanciful. What a character was this, to be brought in contact with the stern old Pilgrim spirit of my guardian! We were at variance on a thousand points; but our chief and final dispute arose from the pertinacity with which he insisted on my adopting a particular profession; while I, being heir to a moderate competence, had avowed my purpose of keeping aloof from the regular business of life. This would have been a dangerous resolution, anywhere in the world; it was fatal, in New England. There is a grossness in the conceptions of my countrymen; they will not be convinced that any good thing may consist with what they call idleness; they can anticipate nothing but evil of a young man who neither studies physic, law, nor gospel, nor opens a store, nor takes to farming, but manifests an incomprehensible disposition to be satisfied with what his father left him. The principle is excellent, in its general influence, but most miserable in its effect on the few that violate it. I had a quick sensitiveness to public opinion, and felt as if it ranked me with the tavern-haunters and town-paupers,--with the drunken poet, who hawked his own Fourth of July odes, and the broken soldier who had been good for nothing since the last war. The consequence of all this was a piece of light-hearted desperation." The youth then takes up the character of the writer of "The Seven Vagabonds," saying, "The idea of becoming a wandering story-teller had been suggested, a year or two before, by an encounter with several merry vagabonds in a showman's wagon, where they and I had sheltered ourselves, during a summer shower;" and he announces that he determined to follow that life, the account of which he proceeds to give with this preliminary word of explanation:-- "The following pages will contain a picture of my vagrant life, intermixed with specimens, generally brief and slight, of that great mass of fiction to which I gave existence, and which has vanished like cloud-shapes. Besides the occasions when I sought a pecuniary reward, I was accustomed to exercise my narrative faculty, wherever chance had collected a little audience, idle enough to listen. These rehearsals were useful in testing the strong points of my stories; and, indeed, the flow of fancy soon came upon me so abundantly, that its indulgence was its own reward; though the hope of praise, also, became a powerful incitement. Since I shall never feel the warm gush of new thought, as I did then, let me beseech the reader to believe, that my tales were not always so cold as he may find them now. With each specimen will be given a sketch of the circumstances in which the story was told. Thus my air-drawn pictures will be set in frames, perhaps more valuable than the pictures themselves, since they will be embossed with groups of characteristic figures, amid the lake and mountain scenery, the villages and fertile fields, of our native land. But I write the book for the sake of its moral, which many a dreaming youth may profit by, though it is the experience of a wandering story-teller." He makes the acquaintance of another itinerant, a preacher, Eliakim Abbott, drawn after the fashion of that crude grotesque which is found in Hawthorne's early work, and is not without a reminiscence of Scott in the literary handling; and the two become fellows of the road, the one with a sermon, the other with a story, and their fortune with their audiences is related. The only adventure of note, however, is the appearance of the Story-Teller as an attraction of a traveling theatrical company, by special engagement, announced by posters, which also bear on a pasted slip of paper a notice of Eliakim Abbott's religious meeting. On this occasion he recited with great applause the tale of "Mr. Higginbotham's Catastrophe." With this the fragment ends. It is plain that Hawthorne intended by this scheme to unite with his stories sketches of country life and scenes as he had noticed their features in his wayside travels, and use the latter as the background for his imaginative and fanciful work. These were the two sides of his literary faculty, so far as he had tried his hand, and he would have the benefit of both in one work, which would thereby gain variety and unity. The success of the experiment cannot be thought striking, and it is doubtful how far he carried the actual composition of the intervening scenes. He confided the plan to Goodrich, who did not encourage it, so far as can be judged, but took the opening chapters to the editors of "The New England Magazine" on Hawthorne's behalf. This periodical, which had three years before absorbed Willis's "Magazine," had been conducted on somewhat grave and serious lines, as a kind of Boston cousin, as it were, of the "North American," and was now in a state of change. Mr. Buckingham relinquished the editorship, and the magazine went into the hands of Dr. Samuel G. Howe and John O. Sargent. It was at this favorable moment that Goodrich appeared with Hawthorne's manuscript; the piece was accepted; and it was published, half in the first and half in the second number issued by the new editors, in November and December, 1834. The connection proved a fortunate one for Hawthorne, and "The New England Magazine" [Footnote: In the Riverside edition of Hawthorne's works a paper, _Hints to Young Ambition_, which appeared in _The New England Magazine,_ 1832, signed "H.," is included. The piece is one of several, with the same signature, and there can he little hesitation in rejecting it, as Goodrich would hardly have needed to introduce Hawthorne to a magazine to which he already contributed. The other pieces are not in his vein, and "H." is a common signature in the periodicals of the time. At all events, Hawthorne would have gone further afield for a pseudonym than the initial of his own name, which he is not known ever to have used.] now became equally with "The Token" a constant medium for the publication of his writings of all sorts. Park Benjamin, who was soon associated with Howe and Sargent in the editorship, took sole charge in March, 1835, and was from the first, and always remained, a firm admirer of the new author's genius. To him, next to Goodrich, Hawthorne owed his introduction to such readers as he then had. If Hawthorne made any effort to break a way for himself in reaching the public, it has not been traced, except that one letter exists, January 27, 1832, in which he offers his pen to the "Atlantic Souvenir" of Philadelphia; but that annual was bought out by Goodrich the same year and merged with "The Token," so that Hawthorne's venture only brought him back to the old stand. In 1833 his connection with Goodrich appears to have been temporarily broken, as "The Token" for 1834, which appeared that fall, contains nothing by him. For 1835 he contributed to it "The Haunted Mind" and "The Mermaid, A Revery," now known as "The Village Uncle," anonymously, and "Alice Doane's Appeal" as by the author of "The Gentle Boy." In "Youth's Keepsake" for the same year appeared "Little Annie's Ramble." These stories were published in the fall of 1834, before the venture of "The Story-Teller." Early in 1835 he furnished for the next year's "Token," 1836, "The Wedding Knell" and "The Minister's Black Veil" as by the author of "Sights from a Steeple," and "The May-pole of Merry Mount" as by the author of "The Gentle Boy." What there was left in his hands must have gone almost as a block to "The New England Magazine," and perhaps his stock of unused papers was thus exhausted. To complete the record, he published in this magazine "The Gray Champion" as by the author of "The Gentle Boy," in January; "Old News" anonymously, in February, March, and May; "My Visit to Niagara," in February; "Young Goodman Brown," in April; "Wakefield," in May; "The Ambitious Guest," in June, and in the same month, anonymously in both instances, "Graves and Goblins" and "A Bill from the Town Pump;" "The Old Maid in the Winding Sheet," now known as "The White Old Maid," in July; "The Vision of the Fountain," in August; "The Devil in Manuscript" as by "Ashley A. Royce," in November; "Sketches from Memory" as by "A Pedestrian," in November and December. All these pieces, except as stated above, are given as by the author of "The Gray Champion." It may fairly be thought that he had emptied his desk of its accumulations, though a few tales may have been reserved for Goodrich. Hawthorne had now been before the public with increasing frequency for five years, but he had made little impression, and his success as an author must have remained as doubtful to him as at the start. Goodrich, in the passage already quoted from his "Recollections," went on to describe him during this early time of their acquaintance, and shows how slight was his progress in winning attention:-- "At this period he was unsettled as to his views; he had tried his hand in literature, and considered himself to have met with a fatal rebuff from the reading world. His mind vacillated between various projects, verging, I think, toward a mercantile profession. I combated his despondence, and assured him of triumph if he would persevere in a literary career. He wrote numerous articles which appeared in 'The Token;' occasionally an astute critic seemed to see through them, and to discover the soul that was in them; but in general they passed without notice. Such articles as 'Sights from a Steeple,' 'Sketches beneath an Umbrella,' 'The Wives of the Dead,' 'The Prophetic Pictures,' now universally acknowledged to be productions of extraordinary depth, meaning, and power, extorted hardly a word of either praise or blame, while columns were given to pieces since totally forgotten. I felt annoyed, almost angry, indeed, at this. I wrote several articles in the papers, directing attention to these productions, and finding no echo to my views, I recollect to have asked John Pickering to read some of them, and give me his opinion of them. He did as I requested; his answer was that they displayed a wonderful beauty of style, with a kind of double vision, a sort of second sight, which revealed, beyond the outward forms of life and being, a sort of Spirit World." Park Benjamin, in a notice of "The Token" for 1836 published in "The New England Magazine," October, 1835, gave a single line to the author, speaking of him as "the most pleasing writer of fanciful prose, except Irving, in the country;" and in November of the same year, in a review of the same work, Chorley, the critic of the London "Athenaeum," commended his tales and gave extracts from them. This was the first substantial praise of a nature to encourage the author. In Hawthorne's own eyes the stories and sketches had become a source of depression, and the difficulties he had met with in getting out a book had especially irritated him. It might be thought, perhaps, that he had destroyed a good deal of his work, to judge by his own words, but this seems unlikely, although he may have rewritten some of the earlier pieces. The tale of "The Devil in Manuscript" is taken to be the autobiographical parable, at least, commemorating the burning of the "Seven Tales of my Native Land;" but it was written some years later, and reflects his general experience as a discouraged storyteller, and it contains touches of bitterness more marked than occur elsewhere. Its personal character is emphasized by the hero's name, "Oberon," a familiar signature Hawthorne used in his letters to his old college friend, Bridge. The following passages are distinctly autobiographical, and afford the most vivid view of the young author's inner life:-- "You cannot conceive what an effect the composition of these tales has had on me. I have become ambitious of a bubble, and careless of solid reputation. I am surrounding myself with shadows, which bewilder me, by aping the realities of life. They have drawn me aside from the beaten path of the world, and led me into a strange sort of solitude,--a solitude in the midst of men,--where nobody wishes for what I do, nor thinks nor feels as I do. The tales have done all this. When they are ashes, perhaps I shall be as I was before they had existence. Moreover, the sacrifice is less than you may suppose, since nobody will publish them.... "But the devil of the business is this. These people have put me so out of conceit with the tales, that I loathe the very thought of them, and actually experience a physical sickness of the stomach, whenever I glance at them on the table. I tell you there is a demon in them! I anticipate a wild enjoyment in seeing them in the blaze; such as I should feel in taking vengeance on an enemy, or destroying something noxious.... "But how many recollections throng upon me, as I turn over these leaves! This scene came into my fancy as I walked along a hilly road, on a starlight October evening; in the pure and bracing air, I became all soul, and felt as if I could climb the sky, and run a race along the Milky Way. Here is another tale, in which I wrapt myself during a dark and dreary night-ride in the month of March, till the rattling of the wheels and the voices of my companions seemed like faint sounds of a dream, and my visions a bright reality. That scribbled page describes shadows which I summoned to my bedside at midnight: they would not depart when I bade them; the gray dawn came, and found me wide awake and feverish, the victim of my own enchantments!... "Sometimes my ideas were like precious stones under the earth, requiring toil to dig them up, and care to polish and brighten them; but often a delicious stream of thought would gush out upon the page at once, like water sparkling up suddenly in the desert; and when it had passed, I gnawed my pen hopelessly, or blundered on with cold and miserable toil, as if there were a wall of ice between me and my subject." "Do you now perceive a corresponding difference," inquired I, "between the passages which you wrote so coldly, and those fervid flashes of the mind?" "No," said Oberon, tossing the manuscripts on the table. "I find no traces of the golden pen with which I wrote in characters of fire. My treasure of fairy coin is changed to worthless dross. My picture, painted in what seemed the loveliest hues, presents nothing but a faded and indistinguishable surface. I have been eloquent and poetical and humorous in a dream,--and behold! it is all nonsense, now that I am awake.... "I will burn them! Not a scorched syllable shall escape! Would you have me a damned author--To undergo sneers, taunts, abuse, and cold neglect, and faint praise, bestowed, for pity's sake, against the giver's conscience! A hissing and a laughing-stock to my own traitorous thoughts! An outlaw from the protection of the grave,--one whose ashes every careless foot might spurn, unhonored in life, and remembered scornfully in death! Am I to bear all this, when yonder fire will insure me from the whole? No! There go the tales! May my hand wither when it would write another!" These extracts set forth the mixed emotions of young authorship in a life-like manner. They have the stamp of personal experience. A supplement to them is found in one of his more obscure pieces, "The Journal of a Solitary Man," in which Hawthorne bids farewell to that eidolon of himself which he had embodied as "Oberon." He describes the character as an imaginary friend, from whose journals he gives extracts; but the veil thrown over his own personality is transparent. "Merely skimming the surface of life, I know nothing, by my own experience, of its deep and warm realities. I have achieved none of those objects which the instinct of mankind especially prompts them to pursue, and the accomplishment of which must therefore beget a native satisfaction. The truly wise, after all their speculations, will be led into the common path, and, in homage to the human nature that pervades them, will gather gold, and till the earth, and set out trees, and build a house. But I have scorned such wisdom. I have rejected, also, the settled, sober, careful gladness of a man by his own fireside, with those around him whose welfare is committed to his trust, and all their guidance to his fond authority. Without influence among serious affairs, my footsteps were not imprinted on the earth, but lost in air; and I shall leave no son to inherit my share of life, with a better sense of its privileges and duties, when his father should vanish like a bubble; so that few mortals, even the humblest and the weakest, have been such ineffectual shadows in the world, or die so utterly as I must. Even a young man's bliss has not been mine. With a thousand vagrant fantasies, I have never truly loved, and perhaps shall be doomed to loneliness throughout the eternal future, because, here on earth, my soul has never married itself to the soul of woman. "Such are the repinings of one who feels, too late, that the sympathies of his nature have avenged themselves upon him. They have prostrated, with a joyless life and the prospect of a reluctant death, my selfish purpose to keep aloof from mortal disquietudes, and be a pleasant idler among care-stricken and laborious men. I have other regrets, too, savoring more of my old spirit. The time has been when I meant to visit every region of the earth, except the poles and Central Africa. I had a strange longing to see the Pyramids. To Persia and Arabia, and all the gorgeous East, I owed a pilgrimage for the sake of their magic tales. And England, the land of my ancestors! Once I had fancied that my sleep would not be quiet in the grave unless I should return, as it were, to my home of past ages, and see the very cities, and castles, and battle-fields of history, and stand within the holy gloom of its cathedrals, and kneel at the shrines of its immortal poets, there asserting myself their hereditary countryman. This feeling lay among the deepest in my heart. Yet, with this homesickness for the fatherland, and all these plans of remote travel,--which I yet believe that my peculiar instinct impelled me to form, and upbraided me for not accomplishing,-- the utmost limit of my wanderings has been little more than six hundred miles from my native village. Thus, in whatever way I consider my life, or what must be termed such, I cannot feel as if I had lived at all. "I am possessed, also, with the thought that I have never yet discovered the real secret of my powers; that there has been a mighty treasure within my reach, a mine of gold beneath my feet, worthless because I have never known how to seek for it; and for want of perhaps one fortunate idea, I am to die 'Unwept, unhonored, and unsung.'" "Oberon" is represented as in the position of the "Story-Teller," and leaves home because of some fancied oppression; he visits Niagara, of which he gives some scenes as well as other anecdotes of his pedestrian journey, but he falls ill and determines to return home to die. As he approaches his birthplace he pleases himself with the fancy that there is some youth there whom he can teach by the lesson of his life, and he moralizes in a vein in which self-criticism may be read between the lines:-- "He shall be taught by my life, and by my death, that the world is a sad one for him who shrinks from its sober duties. My experience shall warn him to adopt some great and serious aim, such as manhood will cling to, that he may not feel himself, too late, a cumberer of this overladen earth, but a man among men. I will beseech him not to follow an eccentric path, nor, by stepping aside from the highway of human affairs, to relinquish his claim upon human sympathy. And often, as a text of deep and varied meaning, I will remind him that he is an American." Finally he describes the power he has obtained by the use of his imagination, in the view of life:-- "I have already a spiritual sense of human nature, and see deeply into the hearts of mankind, discovering what is hidden from the wisest. The loves of young men and virgins are known to me, before the first kiss, before the whispered word, with the birth of the first sigh. My glance comprehends the crowd, and penetrates the breast of the solitary man. I think better of the world than formerly, more generously of its virtues, more mercifully of its faults, with a higher estimate of its present happiness, and brighter hopes of its destiny." These passages from "The Devil in Manuscript" and "The Journal of a Solitary Man" may fairly be taken as a contemporary general account of Hawthorne's secret life in the years before his own "Note-Books" begin. The latter afford rather a view of his existence, from day to day. The earliest of them which has survived opens in the summer of 1835, and while containing scraps of information that he had jotted down as in a commonplace book, and also brief memoranda of ideas for tales and sketches, it also keeps record of his observations in his walks and drives, and thus pictures his outward life. He lived at Salem still, in the habits of seclusion that had always obtained in the house, and saw little of mankind. Society, if he sought it at all, was found for him among common people at the tavern or by the wayside, and was of the sort that he enjoyed on his summer journeys. But solitude was his normal state. This was indulged in his own room; or else he took a morning or afternoon to wander out to the near Salem beaches and points, or to the pleasant lanes of Danvers or across the river to the upland or seashore of Beverly. He occasionally drove a dozen miles or more to Ipswich, Nahant, or Andover. What he saw, however, was only rustic life of the countryside, or the natural views of wood and sky and sea, with the nearer objects to attract particular attention, of which he has left so many minute descriptions. His observation at such times, though without the naturalist's preoccupation,--rather with the poet's or novelist's,--was as keen and detailed as Thoreau's. These Note-Books, however, do not open his familiar life except as a record of changing seasons and of detached thoughts to be worked up in fiction. Many of his later tales are found here in the germ, in 1835 and for the year or two after; but the diary is not so much a confidant as it afterward became. The time had now come when he must make some further step in establishing himself in some means of livelihood. He never showed much power of initiative, and at every stage was materially aided by his friends in obtaining employment and position. In this instance it was Goodrich again who gave him opportunity. It was not a great chance, but it was doubtless all Goodrich had to offer. He procured for him the editorship of a small publication which undertook to disseminate popular information, called "The American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge," and published by the Bewick Company, at Boston, with which Goodrich had some connection through his interests in engraving. His salary was to be five hundred dollars, and he entered on his duties about the beginning of 1836. The change was welcomed by his friends, or such of them as were still near enough to him to know of his affairs; and from this time his college mates, Pierce, Cilley, and especially Bridge, interested themselves in his fortunes. Bridge, writing from Havana, February 20, 1836, congratulated him, as did also Pierce from Washington, on the intelligence concerning his "late engagement in active and responsible business," and particularly on his having got "out of Salem," which he credits with "a peculiar dulness;" and in later letters he continues to hearten him, subscribes for his magazine, reads and praises it, in the most cordial and cheering way. But the event did not justify these hopes and prognostications of a better fortune. The magazine was, after all, the merest hack-work. Hawthorne, with the aid of his sister Elizabeth, wrote most of it, compiling the matter from books or utilizing his own notes of travel. In it appeared, of such pieces as have found a place in his works, "An Ontario Steamboat," "The Duston Family," "Nature of Sleep," "Bells," besides much that has been suffered to repose in its scarce pages. The material, though conscientiously dealt with according to the measure of time at his disposal, is the slightest in interest, and the least re-worked from the raw state, of any of his writings. He had, however, little temptation to do more for the magazine than its limited scope required. He found great difficulty in collecting his salary, and for this he blames Goodrich, who had made promises of pay which he kept very imperfectly. Hawthorne states that of forty-five dollars he was to receive on coming to Boston he got only a small part, and on June 3, 1836, he received a notice, in answer to a dunning letter, that the Bewick Company had made an assignment, and he would have to wait until the settlement. Shortly after this he gave up the editorship, and returned to Salem. The incident was unfortunate, as in the course of it he developed a great deal of irritation toward Goodrich, who was his best friend in practical ways, and broke off communication with him. This, however, did not last long; and Goodrich offered him the job of compiling a "Peter Parley" book, for one hundred dollars. He wrote this, also with the aid of his sister Elizabeth, and gave her the money. The volume was "Peter Parley's Universal History on the basis of Geography," [Footnote: _Peter Parley's Universal History on the basis of Geography._ For the Use of Families. Illustrated by Maps and Engravings. Boston: American Stationers' Company. John B. Russell, 1837. 12mo, cloth. 2 vols., pp. 380, 374.] and was published in 1837, and had a very large sale, amounting finally, it is said, to more than a million copies. In the mean time, Hawthorne had found cause of complaint also in his relations with "The New England Magazine." This periodical had come to an end in 1835, and at the close of that year was merged in "The American Monthly Magazine" of New York, whither Park Benjamin, its editor, went. It paid, according to its own statement, only one dollar a page for contributions, but it appears to have been in arrears with Hawthorne at the time of the change. Bridge states that when Hawthorne, in consequence, stopped writing for it, the editor "begged for a mass of manuscript in his possession, as yet unpublished, and it was scornfully bestowed. 'Thus,' wrote Hawthorne, 'has this man, who would be considered a Mæcenas, taken from a penniless writer material incomparably better than any his own brain can supply.'" In this Hawthorne, if correctly reported, was scarcely just. Park Benjamin, who had a violent quarrel with Goodrich, exempted Hawthorne from any adverse criticism, even when writing a short notice of "The Token," and always spoke well of him. The manuscripts he carried to New York could have been but few and slight, unless they were burned in the fire which destroyed the archives of the "American Monthly Magazine" not long afterwards. At all events, the only paper by Hawthorne in that magazine appears to have been "Old Ticonderoga," a note of travel, published in February, 1836, unless "The Journal of a Solitary Man," which did not appear till July, 1837, be added as one of the left-over manuscripts, and also a paper, never yet attributed to him but which seems clearly from his pen, "A Visit to the Clerk of the Weather," anonymously published in May, 1836. Whatever the coolness was between Hawthorne and Benjamin, it was overcome by the end of the year, and the quarrel was made up. In 1836, too, he kept his temper with Goodrich sufficiently to allow him to contribute to "The Token" of 1837, published in the preceding fall, a group of tales, eight in number: "Monsieur du Miroir," as by the author of "Sights from a Steeple;" "Mrs. Bullfrog," as by the author of "The Wives of the Dead;" "Sunday at Home" and "The Man of Adamant," both as by the author of "The Gentle Boy," "David Swan, A Fantasy," "Fancy's Show Box, A Morality," and "The Prophetic Pictures," all anonymously; and "The Great Carbuncle," as by the author of "The Wedding Knell." These papers constituted one third of the volume, and for them he was paid a dollar a page, or one hundred and eight dollars, which may be regarded therefore as the normal price he received from Goodrich. Two of these tales are on subjects set down in his "Note-Book" of 1835; the others are perhaps earlier in conception. These tales were his substantial work for the year. They gave occasion for what appears to have been the first public mention of Nathaniel Hawthorne as the author who had hitherto disguised himself under so many descriptions. It is not surprising that his name was unknown, for he had sedulously suppressed it. His sister, referring to these years, said, "He kept his very existence a secret so far as possible." He had never signed an article in the twelve years since leaving college. He had preferred to become known in "the author of Waverley" style, but the charm did not work. In "The Token" he was, in the main, the author of "Sights from a Steeple" or "The Gentle Boy;" in "The New England Magazine" he was the author of "The Gray Champion." But now his anonymity was to be dissipated in a friendly if rude way. It was, doubtless, Park Benjamin, in New York, who wrote thus of these last tales in "The Token," in "The American Monthly Magazine" for October, 1836:-- "The author of 'Sights from a Steeple,' of 'The Gentle Boy,' and of 'The Wedding Knell,' we believe to be one and the same individual. The assertion may sound very bold, yet we hesitate not to call this author second to no man in this country, except Washington Irving. We refer simply to romance writing; and trust no wise man of Gotham will talk of Dewey, and Channing, and Everett, and Verplanck. Yes, to us the style of NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE is more pleasing, more fascinating, than any one's except their dear Geoffry Crayon! This mention of the real name of our author may be reprobated by him. His modesty is the best proof of his true excellence. How different does such a man appear to us from one who anxiously writes his name on every public post! We have read a sufficient number of his pieces to make the reputation of a dozen of our Yankee scribblers; and yet how few have heard the name above written! He does not even cover himself with the same anonymous shield at all times; but liberally gives the praise, which, concentrated on one, would be great, to several unknowns. If Mr. Hawthorne would but collect his various tales and essays into one volume, we can assure him that their success would be brilliant--certainly in England, perhaps in this country." It was in this way that the world began to hear of Mr. Nathaniel Hawthorne, of Salem; but it was still long before the public knew him. Meanwhile, at the very moment of the disclosure, he was in the lowest ebb of discouragement, in spirits, that he ever knew. It is to this time that his gloomiest memories attached themselves. He had tried to enter the world, he had even tried to earn a living, and had failed. Cilley, his old college mate, was just elected to Congress from Maine, Pierce was just elected Senator from New Hampshire, and Longfellow had found the ways of literature as smooth as the primrose path to the everlasting bonfire. Hawthorne was of a noble disposition, and glad of the fortunes that came to these of his circle in boyhood at Bowdoin; but it was not in human nature to be oblivious of the difference in his own lot. To this mood must be referred the dream he described afterwards as one that recurred through life:-- "For a long, long while I have been occasionally visited with a singular dream; and I have an impression that I have dreamed it ever since I have been in England. It is, that I am still at college,--or, sometimes, even at school,--and there is a sense that I have been there unconscionably long, and have quite failed to make such progress as my contemporaries have done; and I seem to meet some of them with a feeling of shame and depression that broods over me as I think of it, even when awake. This dream, recurring all through these twenty or thirty years, must be one of the effects of that heavy seclusion in which I shut myself up for twelve years after leaving college, when everybody moved onward, and left me behind." Under another picture, he describes this same state in the preface to "The Snow Image," dedicated to Bridge:-- "I sat down by the wayside of life, like a man under enchantment, and a shrubbery sprung up around me, and the bushes grew to be saplings, and the saplings became trees, until no exit appeared possible, through the entangling depths of my obscurity. And there, perhaps, I should be sitting at this moment, with the moss on the imprisoning tree-trunks, and the yellow leaves of more than a score of autumns piled above me, if it had not been for you. For it was through your interposition--and that, moreover, unknown to himself--that your early friend was brought before the public, somewhat more prominently than heretofore, in the first volume of 'Twice-Told Tales.'" Bridge had been, in fact, his only confidant from boyish days. To him he showed the misery of "hope deferred" that then was in his heart, and to him allowed himself to speak in words that went beyond his steady sense of the situation, though representing moments of low courage. "I'm a doomed man," he wrote to him, "and over I must go." It was under the impulse of the sight of this deep discouragement in Hawthorne, in 1836, that this cheerful and sanguine friend made up his mind to find out why Hawthorne could not get a volume of tales published. He applied to Goodrich for information, and received an answer, October 20, 1836, in which it was stated that if a guarantee of two hundred and fifty dollars were furnished by Bridge, an edition of one thousand copies, costing four hundred and fifty dollars and paying Hawthorne a royalty of ten per cent, would be issued. Goodrich was not himself a publisher, at that time, and he elsewhere says that he had previously attempted to have the Stationers' Company, which now undertook the volume on Bridge's guarantee, publish it, but without success; he adds that he relinquished his own rights to Hawthorne, who had sold the tales to him so far as they had appeared in "The Token," and that he also joined in the bond given by Bridge; but in these remarks he seems to be taking credit to himself, for the tales were valueless to him and his property in them was of a sort not often claimed by an editor, while Bridge took the real risk. This transaction was unknown to Hawthorne at the time, and Bridge felt obliged to warn him not to be too grateful to Goodrich. A glance at the other letters of this month shows that Bridge was almost alarmed by Hawthorne's depression, and endeavoring in thoughtful ways to reassure him, as well as to bring him forward in public. "I have just received your last," he writes, October 22, 1836, "and do not like its tone at all. There is a kind of desperate coolness about it that seems dangerous. I fear you are too good a subject for suicide, and that some day you will end your mortal woes on your own responsibility." The prospect of the book, even, was not wholly an undoubted blessing to Hawthorne, now he had come to its realization, and in December, on Christmas Day, the work being then in proofs, Bridge writes to him again:-- "Whether your book will sell extensively may be doubtful; but that is of small importance in the first one you publish. At all events, keep up your spirits till the result is ascertained; and, my word for it, there is more honor and emolument in store for you, from your writings, than you imagine. The bane of your life has been self-distrust. This has kept you back for many years; which, if you had improved by publishing, would long ago have given you what you must now wait a short time for. It may be for the best, but I doubt it. "I have been trying to think what you are so miserable for. Although you have not much property, you have good health and powers of writing, which have made, and can still make, you independent. "Suppose you get but $300 per annum for your writings. You can, with economy, live upon that, though it would be a tight squeeze. You have no family dependent upon you, and why should you 'borrow trouble'? "This is taking the worst view of your case that it can possibly bear. It seems to me that you never look at the bright side with any hope or confidence. It is not the philosophy to make one happy. "I expect, next summer, to be full of money, a part of which shall be heartily at your service, if it comes." Before the new volume went to press Hawthorne had made a connection, apparently on the editor's initiative, with S. Gaylord Clark's "Knickerbocker Magazine," and contributed to it, in the January number, "The Fountain of Youth," now known as "Dr. Heidegger's Experiment"; and in the opening months of the year he was engaged in preparing his usual group of articles for the next "Token." Goodrich had also offered to him a new "Peter Parley" book, on the manners and customs of all nations, for three hundred dollars, but this Hawthorne seems to have declined. "Twice-Told Tales" [Footnote: _Twice-Told Tales_. By Nathaniel Hawthorne. Boston: American Stationers' Co. John B. Russell, 1837. 12mo, cloth. Pp. 334. It contained the following tales: The Gray Champion, Sunday at Home, The Wedding Knell, The Minister's Black Veil, The May-Pole of Merry Mount, The Gentle Boy, Mr. Higginbotham's Catastrophe, Little Annie's Ramble, Wakefield, A Rill from the Town Pump, The Great Carbuncle, The Prophetic Pictures, David Swan, Sights from a Steeple, The Hollow of the Three Hills, The Vision of the Fountain, Fancy's Show Box, Dr. Heidegger's Experiment.] appeared, under the author's name, from the press of the Boston American Stationers' Co., early in March, 1837. It contained eighteen pieces only, out of the thirty-six undoubtedly by Hawthorne published up to this time, to neglect all others which have been ascribed to him during this period; and it must reflect his own judgment of what was best in his work. Far as it was from being a complete collection, it was large and varied enough to afford an adequate experiment of the public taste, and it included all those articles, whether tale or essay, which had made him known in the circle of his readers. The reception of the volume was, he thought, cool, but it sold somewhat from the first, and within two months six or seven hundred copies had been disposed of. Goodrich states that it "was deemed a failure for more than a year, when a breeze seemed to rise and fill its sails, and with it the author was carried on to fame and fortune." Bridge was much pleased with the success of his venture, and when he met Goodrich, in April, some of his good feeling overflowed upon him: "I like him very much better than before," he wrote. "He told me that the book was successful. It seemed that he was inclined to take too much credit to himself for your present standing, on the ground of having early discovered and brought you forward. But, on the whole, I like him much." Hawthorne's view of Goodrich is contained in a letter written to his sister-in-law, Elizabeth Peabody, twenty years later:-- "As regards Goodrich's accounts of the relations between him and me, it is funny enough to see him taking the airs of a patron; but I do not mind it in the least, nor feel the slightest inclination to defend myself or be defended. I should as soon think of controverting his statement about my personal appearance (of which he draws no very lovely picture) as about anything else that he says. So pray do not take up the cudgels on my behalf; especially as I perceive that your recollections are rather inaccurate. For instance, it was Park Benjamin, not Goodrich, who cut up the 'Storyteller.' As for Goodrich, I have rather a kindly feeling towards him, and he himself is a not unkindly man, in spite of his propensity to feed and fatten himself on better brains than his own. Only let him do that, and he will really sometimes put himself to some trouble to do a good-natured act. His quarrel with me was, that I broke away from him before he had quite finished his meal, and while a portion of my brain was left; and I have not the slightest doubt that he really felt himself wronged by my so doing. Really, I half think so too. He was born to do what he did, as maggots to feed on rich cheese." There is something too little generous in this. The record shows beyond any cavil that Goodrich was the first and most constant friend of Hawthorne in the way of helping him to get his work before the public; he was also interested in him, thoughtful for him, and gave him hack work to do, which, though it be a lowly is a true service, however unwelcome the task may be in itself; and he used such influence as he had in introducing Hawthorne to other employers and to publishers. During these twelve years it may fairly be said that Goodrich was the only person, not a relative, who cared for Hawthorne's genius or did anything for him until Park Benjamin appeared as a second in the periodical world and Horatio Bridge came to the rescue as a business friend. It is true that Goodrich did not succeed in exploiting his author; but he paid him the market price and gave him his chance, and after all those days were not for Goodrich what our days have since become for men of his calibre. Advertisement was not then the tenth Muse. If the papers were "cool," as Hawthorne thought, there was a word of comfort here and there in the periodicals. "The American Monthly Magazine," recalling its announcement of Hawthorne as the author of these tales in the preceding fall, took occasion in a notice of "The Token" for 1838 to flatter itself that the new volume was due to its own suggestion; and the writer, who is presumably Park Benjamin, renews his old praise. A later notice of the book itself, ascribed by Mr. Lathrop to Charles Fenno Hoffman, appeared in March, 1838, and, while somewhat ineffective and sentimental, discovers at the end the right new word to say: "His pathos we would call New England pathos, if we were not afraid it would excite a smile; it is the pathos of an American, of a New Englander. It is redolent of the images, objects, thoughts, and feelings that spring up in that soil and nowhere else." It was, however, to Longfellow that both Bridge and Hawthorne looked to help his old college mate's book with the criticism that would have the accent of good taste and literary authority, and would carry weight in those higher social circles where fame was lost and won, at least as was then believed. Hawthorne sent him the volume as soon as it was issued, with a note regretting that they were not better acquainted at college and expressing his gladness in Longfellow's success as a writer, author of "Outre-Mer," and also in obtaining his Harvard professorship; and some three months later he followed this with a letter, so characteristic and valuable autobiographically that it cannot be passed over, and interesting also as beginning that easy and amiable friendliness which continued between them unbroken thereafter:-- "Not to burden you with my correspondence, I have delayed a rejoinder to your very kind and cordial letter, until now. It gratifies me that you have occasionally felt an interest in my situation; but your quotation from Jean Paul about the 'lark's nest' makes me smile. You would have been much nearer the truth if you had pictured me as dwelling in an owl's nest; for mine is about as dismal, and like the owl I seldom venture abroad till after dusk. By some witchcraft or other--for I really cannot assign any reasonable why and wherefore--I have been carried apart from the main current of life, and find it impossible to get back again. Since we last met, which you remember was in Sawtell's room, where you read a farewell poem to the relics of the class,--ever since that time I have secluded myself from society; and yet I never meant any such thing, nor dreamed what sort of life I was going to lead. I have made a captive of myself, and put me into a dungeon, and now I cannot find the key to let myself out,--and if the door were open, I should be almost afraid to come out. You tell me that you have met with troubles and changes. I know not what these may have been, but I can assure you that trouble is the next best thing to enjoyment, and that there is no fate in this world so horrible as to have no share in either its joys or sorrows. For the last ten years, I have not lived, but only dreamed of living. It may be true that there have been some unsubstantial pleasures here in the shade, which I might have missed in the sunshine, but you cannot conceive how utterly devoid of satisfaction all my retrospects are. I have laid up no treasure of pleasant remembrances against old age; but there is some comfort in thinking that future years can hardly fail to be more varied and therefore more tolerable than the past. "You give me more credit than I deserve, in supposing that I have led a studious life. I have indeed turned over a good many books, but in so desultory a way that it cannot be called study, nor has it left me the fruits of study. As to my literary efforts, I do not think much of them, neither is it worth while to be ashamed of them. They would have been better, I trust, if written under more favorable circumstances. I have had no external excitement,--no consciousness that the public would like what I wrote, nor much hope nor a passionate desire that they should do so. Nevertheless, having nothing else to be ambitious of, I have been considerably interested in literature; and if my writings had made any decided impression, I should have been stimulated to greater exertions; but there has been no warmth of approbation, so that I have always written with benumbed fingers. I have another great difficulty in the lack of materials; for I have seen so little of the world that I have nothing but thin air to concoct my stories of, and it is not easy to give a lifelike semblance to such shadowy stuff. Sometimes through a peep-hole I have caught a glimpse of the real world, and the two or three articles in which I have portrayed these glimpses please me better than the others. "I have now, or shall soon have, a sharper spur to exertion, which I lacked at an earlier period; for I see little prospect but that I shall have to scribble for a living. But this troubles me much less than you would suppose. I can turn my pen to all sorts of drudgery, such as children's books, etc., and by and by I shall get some editorship that will answer my purpose. Frank Pierce, who was with us at college, offered me his influence to obtain an office in the Exploring Expedition; but I believe that he was mistaken in supposing that a vacancy existed. If such a post were attainable, I should certainly accept it; for, though fixed so long to one spot, I have always had a desire to run round the world.... I intend in a week or two to come out of my owl's nest, and not return till late in the summer,--employing the interval in making a tour somewhere in New England. You who have the dust of distant countries on your 'sandal-shoon' cannot imagine how much enjoyment I shall have in this little excursion." Longfellow's notice of "Twice-Told Tales" appeared in the July number of "The North American Review," and gave perhaps more pleasure to Hawthorne than he had hoped for; and in acknowledging it he mentions, with a home-touch that carries more gratitude than a score of golden phrases, the happiness that "my mother, my two sisters, and my old maiden aunt" have had in it. The notice itself is elegant, kindly, warm even, with the old-fashioned academic distinction of manner, through which the young poet's picturesque fancy keeps playing, like a flutter of light; it gives one a strange sense of old-world youthfulness to read it now. Its characteristic passages, apart from this glamour, are its praise of the lucid style and of the home-bred quality, "the nationality" of the Tales: "The author has chosen his themes among the traditions of New England, the dusty legends of 'the good old colony times when we lived under a king.' This is the right material for story." But, notwithstanding the good-will of Hawthorne's few friends, and this handsome treatment by that one of them who had the greatest opportunity to applaud him, his place was not yet won. Meanwhile, his political friends had not been idle. The problem of a livelihood, of an active share in the world's business, which Hawthorne now sincerely desired, was not likely to be much advanced by the publication of this volume. In any case, it would seem that Hawthorne's friends were agreed that what he needed was to be got into an entirely different set of surroundings, to have a change of scene. It was, perhaps, with some such idea that Pierce suggested to him to join the South Sea Exploring Expedition, then being planned by Reynolds, as historian. There is something humorous, unconscious though it was, in sending Hawthorne from the monotony and loneliness of Salem to seek society in the polar regions, though no hint of it appears in the correspondence. The scheme appealed to Hawthorne, however, and he was desirous to go; but though his friends were active in his interest, and brought the Maine and New Hampshire delegations to support his candidacy, success was doubtful, and, the expedition being temporarily abandoned, the plan came to nothing. On its failure Hawthorne went to visit Bridge at his home in Augusta, Maine, and passed the month of July with him very happily, as he tells at large in his Note-Books of that period. On his return to Salem at midsummer he could hardly have flattered himself on any perceptible change in his position. He fell into the old life of rambling about the country and writing new tales; and, except that he was in communication with his old friends, Bridge, Pierce, and Cilley, and occasionally saw them in Boston, he was as much isolated and without prospects as ever. The connection he had established with "The Knickerbocker Magazine" he had kept up by contributing to it "A Bell's Biography" as by the author of "Twice-Told Tales," in March, and he now published, in the September issue, "Edward Fane's Rosebud" anonymously. The publication of the book had attracted to him the notice of the new "Democratic Review," edited by John O'Sullivan, a young fellow of enterprise, spirits, and an Irish charm, who had solicited Hawthorne to contribute to it, early in April. In reply to this application, presumably, "A Toll Gatherer's Day," as by the author of "Twice-Told Tales," appeared in the October number. The stories which Hawthorne had prepared in the spring for "The Token" of 1838 now came out in the fall of 1837, five in number: two of them, "Peter Goldthwaite's Treasure" and "The Shaker Bridal" as by the author of the "Twice-Told Tales," and three anonymously, "Night Scenes under an Umbrella," "Endicott and the Red Cross," and "Sylph Etheredge." He still persistently neglected to put his own name to his work. There was a reason for his anonymity in "The Token," but elsewhere he continued his old custom, and was to be known habitually only under the style "The Author of 'Twice-Told Tales,'" which he adopted henceforth. To this time belong some further traces of a more varied mixing with society in Salem than he had hitherto shown. He attended the meetings of a club at Miss Burley's, where the transcendental group appears to have gathered, and among them Jones Very. The most singular episode of the time, however, is one that would hardly be credited, had it not been mentioned by those who should have known the truth. It is said that Hawthorne's sympathies were so engaged by a lady who confided to him the injurious treatment she alleged she had suffered from an acquaintance that he challenged the man to a duel; he went to Washington for the purpose, and was only withdrawn from the affair, under the advice of Cilley and Pierce, by the discovery that he had been practiced upon by the lady, who had been led on by a spirit of mischief or malice to deceive him, there being no basis for the affair. A dark turn is given to the incident by the suggestion that it was the citing of this example of Hawthorne's to his friend Cilley which persuaded the latter to enter on the duel with Graves, in which he lost his life not long after these events. Bridge, however, denies that this was the case, and he should have known. Just when this incident occurred is not stated; but Hawthorne's solitude in Salem must have been less complete than has been represented in order for it to occur at all; and it must be believed that he had at all times associates, whom he met in one way and another, both men and women, however small the circle. The period of twelve years which he used to refer to as the time of his isolation in Salem had now come to an end; but he remained in the old house for some time longer, though with a difference in his mood and life. The habit of seclusion and the sense of separation from the world had been somewhat broken up by the rally that his college friends, led by Bridge, had made for him and the feeling of renewed companionship with them, as well as by his appearance before the public in his own right as the author of "Twice-Told Tales;" the old state of affairs, however, was not ended by these things, but by a more vital matter. There can be no doubt that in his own mind the acquaintance and growing intimacy which now sprang up between himself and Sophia Peabody coincided with the disappearance of the solitary depression of these years,--for him the twelve years ended when he first saw this small, graceful, intensely alive invalid, dressed in a simple white wrapper, who had come down from her room to meet him in the family parlor. She might seem, indeed, like himself, rather a "visitant" than an inhabitant of this planet, and their courtship not unlike one of his own stories of half immaterial lovers who go hand in hand, with sentiments for sentences and great heedlessness of mortal matters, to an idyllic union of hearts. He rose, on her entrance, to greet her, and looked at her with great intentness; and it immediately occurred to her sister that he would fall in love with her. The narrative of this love-making has been very fully told, and in the most lifelike way, since the characters have been allowed to speak for themselves in their diaries and letters. It is a story so touched with delicacies, and with such shades of humor, too, as to defy any re-telling; even to outline it seems crude, because the effect lies all in the details of trifles, phrases, and spontaneous things. The Peabody family was of a type that flourished in that period, as good as was ever produced on this soil, with the most sterling qualities, and blending an intellectual culture of transcendental kinship with practical and hospitable duties. The home, which was one of very moderate means, was characterized by a moral high-mindedness pervading its life, and by those literary and artistic tastes then spreading in the community, which, though it is easy to smile at them in a vein of latter-day superiority, were everywhere the signs of a nascent intellectual life among our people. In this case, the fruits are the best comment on the home, for of the three daughters, the eldest, Elizabeth, passed a much honored and long life as a teacher in Boston, the friend of every good cause; the second, Mary, became the wife of Horace Mann; and the third, Sophia, the wife of Hawthorne. The Peabodys had been neighbors of the Hawthornes in much earlier years, and the elder children had been little playmates together; but the family had removed from Salem, and came back again in 1828. It was not, however, till 1837, on the publication of "Twice-Told Tales," that Elizabeth Peabody recognized in the author the same person she had known as a child. She took steps to renew the acquaintance with his sisters, and so to meet him again, till by many little attentions, notes, books, walks, flowers, and whatever she could invent, she succeeded in establishing an interchange of social civility between the two houses. She affords, in her recollections, the best glimpse of Hawthorne's mother. "Madame Hawthorne," she says, "always looked as if she had walked out of an old picture, with her antique costume, and a face of lovely sensibility and great brightness--for she did not _seem_ at all a victim of morbid sensibility, notwithstanding her all but Hindoo self-devotion to the manes of her husband. She was a woman of fine understanding and very cultivated mind. But she had very sensitive nerves." Elizabeth, Hawthorne's sister, was strong-minded but abnormally retired, jealous of her brother, and not much disposed to have him stolen out of the house. Louisa was more companionable, and with his mother would sit with Hawthorne after tea; and there was an old maiden aunt flitting about in the little garden, apparently as recluse as the rest. With these feminine members of the household Elizabeth Peabody made friends, and though a year elapsed in the process, she then had her reward in receiving Hawthorne and his sisters, who one evening came to call. She ran upstairs to her sister, exclaiming, "Oh, Sophia, you must get up and dress and come down! The Hawthornes are here, and you never saw anything so splendid as he is,--he is handsomer than Lord Byron!" But Sophia did not come down, and it was only on the second call that the two met as has been described. Sophia Peabody was at this time twenty-six years old, having been born in 1811, and had been an invalid through her girlhood; she was afflicted with an acute nervous headache which lasted uninterruptedly, says her son, from her twelfth to her thirty-first year, though the pain was not so severe, her sister remarks, but that she could sometimes read. She had received her education at home, mainly from her sister, who kept a school in the house, and in spite of her ill-health had many and varied acquisitions. She read Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and was somewhat familiar with history. Passages in her journal show the character and range of her reading, which was of that strangely mixed sort that belonged to the notion of culture in those days; thus, for instance, in her twentieth year, she records having read on one day De Gérando, Fénelon, St. Luke and Isaiah, Young, Addison, and four comedies of Shakspere, besides doing some sewing. She was a good French and Italian scholar. Filled with intellectual enthusiasm and ambition as she was, her sensibilities seem rather to have been roused by natural beauty, effects of sky and weather and color, and her active powers took the direction of art; she sketched, painted, and modeled in clay. In 1832 she had gone to Cuba with her mother for three years, and received some benefit from the climate. She had especially practiced horseback-riding there, of which she was fond. No permanent improvement, however, had followed, on her return to Salem in 1835. When Hawthorne came to know her, she was living a half-invalid life, taking her meals in her own room, which she had fitted up with artistic prettiness, and yet suffering the full transcendental tide of culture and emotion. Perhaps no single passage can better illustrate her mind and feelings than a description of Emerson's call in the spring of 1838, which she writes to her sister, whom, at an earlier time, he had taught Greek:-- "We had an exquisite visit from Waldo. It was the warbling of the Attic bird. The gleam of his _diffused_ smile; the musical thunder of his voice; his repose, so full of the essence of life; his simplicity--just think of all these, and of my privilege in seeing and hearing him. He enjoyed everything we showed him so much! He talked so divinely to Raphael's Madonna del Pesce! I vainly imagined I was very quiet all the while, preserving a very demure exterior, and supposed I was sharing his oceanic calm. But the next day I was aware that I had been in a very intense state. I told Mary, that night after he had gone, that I felt like a _gem_; that was the only way I could express it. I don't know what Mary hoped to get from him, but _I_ was sure of drinking in that which would make me paint Cuban skies better than even my recollections could have made me, were they as vivid as the rays of the sun in that sunniest of climates. He made me feel as Eliza Dwight did once, when she looked uncommonly beautiful and animated. I felt as if her beauty was all about the room, and that I was in it, and therefore beautiful too. It seemed just so with Waldo's soul-beauty." She had been in communication with others of the leading spirits of that day besides Emerson. Dr. Channing and Allston sent her messages, kindly and flattering, about her drawings and painting. She had copied some of Allston's pictures. Her studio was the centre of her life; and there her friends "glided in," to use her phrase, with roses and columbines, little girls came to take peeps at its wonders, and from it came the sunshine of the house. Here, to give some further trifling indications, she described herself, after a visit of Hawthorne, as feeling "quite lark-like, or like John of Bologna's Mercury;" or she indulged one of her "dearest visions," which was "to get well enough to go into prisons and tell felons I have sympathy for them, especially women;" or, when Hawthorne called, lamented that she should have to smooth her hair, and dress, "while he was being wasted downstairs." She felt his attractive power from the first, and was happy in his attentions, in the walks they took, in their visits to Miss Burley's weekly meetings, in the picture of Ilbrahim, "The Gentle Boy," which she made for him, in her story, "Edward Randolph's Portrait," which he wrote for her, in the columbines and tulips that strewed the way of love-making, and, in brief, in the thousand trifles of the old story. Hawthorne, on his part, was equally attracted in his different ways, and responded to the vivacity and ebullience of this intense feminine nature disclosed to him in the live woman who had met him, as if coming out of a vision, on life's road. The spring budded and flowered into summer, and when he took his habitual journey into the world,--this time into Berkshire and Vermont, from July 23 to September 24,--meaning, as he told her, to cut himself wholly away from every one, so that even his mother should not know his whereabouts, it is not unlikely that he was desirous of this solitude to think it all over. They became engaged at the close of the year, though the matter was kept a profound secret, there being apparently some apprehension that his mother would not approve of it. His sister Elizabeth, was, perhaps, not very cordial about it, also, but there was, as it proved, no occasion for anxiety. It might well have seemed imprudent for Hawthorne, whose worldly success had been slight, to marry an invalid wife. Fortune, however, was not wholly unkind, and George Bancroft, whose attention had been called to Hawthorne's needs, gave him an appointment at the Boston Custom House as weigher and gauger, at a salary of twelve hundred dollars. It was this opportunity, possibly, which emboldened Hawthorne to take the final step; and marriage would be hoped for, should this experiment of entering on a fixed employment prove successful. During the progress of this courtship, to complete the chronicle of Hawthorne's literary publications, he had written the carrier's address, "Time's Portraiture," for "The Salem Gazette," January 2, 1838, the home paper which had made him known to his fellow-townsmen by reprinting "The Fountain of Youth," in the preceding March; and for the same paper he wrote the address for the following year, January 1, 1839, "The Sister Years." He had also contributed to "The American Monthly Magazine," for January, 1838. an article under his own name on his friend, Thomas Green Fessenden, a Maine politician who had recently died; and to the same periodical, for March, "The Three-fold Destiny" under the old pseudonym of Ashley Allen Royce. It was, however, "The Democratic Review" which served as the principal channel of publication. It contained successively "Footprints on the Beach," January; "Snowflakes," February; "Howe's Masquerade," May; "Edward Randolph's Portrait," July; "Lady Eleanore's Mantle," "Chippings with a Chisel," and a sketch of Jonathan Cilley, his friend who had just been shot by Graves in a duel, all in September; and these tales he signed as by The Author of "Twice-Told Tales." The Province House series was concluded by "Old Esther Dudley," in this same periodical, April, 1839, and to this he affixed his own name for the first time. "The Lily's Quest" had appeared, January 19, 1839. in "The Southern Rose," published at Charleston, South Carolina. Here the first stage of his literary career ended. He was now to leave that chamber under the eaves, in which these years, lengthened to fourteen now, had been spent, but not without a farewell. Here he had written, in 1835, "In this dismal chamber fame was won." A dismal sort of fame he thought it then. It was on returning to it in 1840 that he penned the well-known passage:-- "Here I sit in my old, accustomed chamber, where I used to sit in days gone by.... Here I have written many tales,--many that have been burned to ashes, many that doubtless deserved the same fate. This claims to be called a haunted chamber, for thousands upon thousands of visions have appeared to me in it; and some few of them have become visible to the world. If ever I should have a biographer, he ought to make great mention of this chamber in my memoirs, because so much of my lonely youth was wasted here, and here my mind and character were formed; and here I have been glad and hopeful, and here I have been despondent. And here I sat a long, long time, waiting patiently for the world to know me, and sometimes wondering why it did not know me sooner, or whether it would ever know me at all,--at least, till I were in my grave. And sometimes it seemed as if I were already in the grave, with only life enough to be chilled and benumbed. But oftener I was happy,--at least, as happy as I then knew how to be, or was aware of the possibility of being. By and by, the world found me out in my lonely chamber, and called me forth,--not, indeed, with a loud roar of acclamation, but rather with a still, small voice,--and forth I went, but found nothing in the world that I thought preferable to my old solitude till now.... And now I begin to understand why I was imprisoned so many years in this lonely chamber, and why I could never break through the viewless bolts and bars; for if I had sooner made my escape into the world, I should have grown hard and rough, and been covered with earthly dust, and my heart might have become callous by rude encounters with the multitude.... But living in solitude till the fullness of time was come, I still kept the dew of my youth and the freshness of my heart.... I used to think I could imagine all passions, all feelings, and states of the heart and mind; but how little did I know!... Indeed, we are but shadows; we are not endowed with real life, and all that seems most real about us is but the thinnest substance of a dream,--till the heart be touched. That touch creates us,--then we begin to be,--thereby we are beings of reality and inheritors of eternity." This sentiment always continued to play about this room, and whenever he returned to it he was apt to set down some word of memory. In one passage he even describes it as a shrine of literary pilgrimage, and mentions, with that well-known touch, half fantastic, half grotesque, its various articles of furniture,--the washstand, the mahogany-framed glass, the pine table, the flag-bottomed chair, the old chest of drawers, the closet, the worn-out shoe-brush, imagining the thoughts of the pilgrim on beholding these relics. It was the type for him of the old life of loneliness, of disappointment, of household gloom; but it was also the place where he had spent those "tranquil and not unhappy years," of which he afterwards said these early tales were the memorials; and, however the room might darken in comparison with the happiness of his married life, his last thought in regard to it was that contained in a letter written late in life: "I am disposed to thank God for the gloom and chill of my early life, in the hope that my share of adversity came then, when I bore it alone." III. WEIGHER, GAUGER, AND FARMER. Early in January, 1839, Hawthorne took up his new duties as weigher and gauger in the Boston Custom House. He wrote very cheerfully to Longfellow that he had no reason to doubt his capacity to fulfill his duties, since he had not yet learned what they were, and he indulges his humor in fancying imaginary little essays which he will write in the unoccupied time he pleasantly anticipates will be his lot. He was glad to have a material task to do, something with the stubbornness of fact in its resistance, a practical duty such as belongs in the ordinary lives of men. This desire to come out of his old way of existence, with its preoccupation with the imaginary world, had become a strong and rooted feeling, a fixed idea. "If I could only make tables," he said, "I should feel myself more of a man." In the bustle of the wharves he felt himself in touch with the world's business, and he took hold of his work with interest and vigor as well as with that conscientious fidelity which belonged to his character. Bancroft, a few months later, told Emerson that he was "the most efficient and best of the Custom House officers," and Mr. Lathrop says that he "used to make it a point in all weathers to get to the wharf at the earliest possible hour," so that the laborers, who were employed by the hour, might not lose their time. The life he led is fully described in his own journals, with all its details of shipping business, of the sailors and laborers and their tasks, of the salt, salt fish, oil, iron, molasses, and other inelegant merchandise, and the day's work in its various aspects of character, things, and weather. Hawthorne's powers of observation, which he had previously exercised in the taverns of New England and along his native roadside and beaches, were now fully occupied and newly animated with the novelty of the scene and his part in it. He made these careful notes almost by instinct, but after all, they were of curiously little use to him; it would seem rather that they gave his mind occupation in the intervals of his imaginative creation; they were a resource to him like the recreation of a walk; they represent the vacant and idle times of his genius; and for this reason his observations, which are in the main a kind of admirable reporting, afford a well-nigh complete setting for his life, and constitute an external autobiography. He is hardly to be truly seen apart from them. At the end of six months he had begun to feel the wearisome drag upon his spirits which was to be expected from toilsome days. Practical life as a sort of vacation was welcome, but as it became the continuing business of his time, and that other world of the artistic faculty was now, in turn, known only by visiting glimpses, the look of the facts changed. "I do not mean to imply," he writes, "that I am unhappy or discontented, for this is not the case. My life only is a burden in the same way that it is to every toilsome man; and mine is a healthy weariness, such as needs only a night's sleep to remove it. But from henceforth forever I shall be entitled to call the sons of toil my brethren, and shall know how to sympathize with them, seeing that I likewise have risen at the dawn, and borne the fervor of the midday sun, nor turned my heavy footsteps homeward till eventide." At first, no doubt, the outdoor occupation and the having to do with sea and harbor life, for which he had an hereditary affection, were important elements in his happiness; and the association with rough and hardy men, whose contact with life was primitive and had the genuineness and health of such occupations, was the kind of human companionship which he felt most naturally and pleasurably. But the wearing in of the facts upon him is seen in the way in which the blackness of coal and the whiteness of salt begin to color the page, until it would seem as if he handled and saw no other objects, and also in the comfort that the cold sea-wind, and freshening waves, and the horizon of cloud and green are to him. At the end of a year the signs of weariness come out clear in a well-known passage of the "Note-Books," as a condensed picture of these two years of life:-- "I have been measuring coal all day, on board of a black little British schooner, in a dismal dock at the north end of the city. Most of the time I paced the deck to keep myself warm; for the wind (northeast, I believe) blew up through the dock, as if it had been the pipe of a pair of bellows. The vessel lying deep between two wharves, there was no more delightful prospect, on the right hand and on the left, than the posts and timbers, half immersed in the water, and covered with ice, which the rising and falling of successive tides had left upon them, so that they looked like immense icicles. Across the water, however, not more than half a mile off, appeared the Bunker Hill monument; and, what interested me considerably more, a church-steeple, with the dial of a clock upon it, whereby I was enabled to measure the march of the weary hours. Sometimes I descended into the dirty little cabin of the schooner, and warmed myself by a red-hot stove, among biscuit-barrels, pots and kettles, sea-chests, and innumerable lumber of all sorts,--my olfactories, meanwhile, being greatly refreshed by the odor of a pipe, which the captain or some one of his crew was smoking. But at last came the sunset, with delicate clouds, and a purple light upon the islands; and I blessed it, because it was the signal of my release." He soon began to "pray that in one year more I may find some way of escaping from this unblest Custom House; for it is a very grievous thralldom;" and beginning now to write again, he feels as if "the noblest part of man had been left out of my composition or had decayed out of it since my nature was given to my own keeping." Yet he tries to be just to his experience, and adds what he thought the good of it had been:-- "It is only once in a while that the image and desire of a better and happier life makes me feel the iron of my chain; for, after all, a human spirit may find no insufficiency of food fit for it, even in the Custom House. And, with such materials as these, I do think and feel and learn things that are worth knowing, and which I should not know unless I had learned them there, so that the present portion of my life shall not be quite left out of the sum of my real existence.... It is good for me, on many accounts, that my life has had this passage in it. I know much more than I did a year ago. I have a stronger sense of power to act as a man among men. I have gained worldly wisdom, and wisdom also that is not altogether of this world. And, when I quit this earthly cavern, where I am now buried, nothing will cling to me that ought to be left behind." The rebellion, nevertheless, continued, and as the spring came on the Custom House is a "darksome dungeon," where he "murders the joyful young day," quenching the sunshine; when he shall be free again, he thinks, he will enjoy all things anew like a child of five, and "go forth and stand in a summer shower, and all the worldly dust that has collected on me shall be washed away at once, and my heart will be like a bank of fresh flowers for the weary to rest upon." He goes to the Common, to the highest point, where he could "see miles and miles into the country. Blessed be God for this green tract, and the view which it affords, whereby we poor citizens may be put in mind, sometimes, that all his earth is not composed of blocks of brick houses, and of stone or wooden pavements. Blessed be God for the sky, too, though the smoke of the city may somewhat change its aspect,--but still it is better than if each street were covered over with a roof. There were a good many people walking the mall,--mechanics apparently, and shopkeepers' clerks, with their wives; and boys were rolling on the grass, and I would have liked to lie down and roll too." He looks out over the waters. "The footsteps of May can be traced upon the islands in the harbor, and I have been watching the tints of green upon them gradually deepening, till now they are almost as beautiful as they ever can be." He is convinced that "Christian's burden consisted of coal," and he takes comfort in salt: "Salt is white and pure--there is something holy in salt." Yet this tone was not constant, and from time to time he shows something of his first appreciation and enjoyment of the element of labor and reality in the experience. Almost at the end of his life on the wharf, after more than two years of it, he exemplifies his later feeling perhaps most justly:-- "I have been busy all day, from early breakfast-time till late in the afternoon; and old Father Time has gone onward somewhat less heavily than is his wont when I am imprisoned within the walls of the Custom House. It has been a brisk, breezy day, an effervescent atmosphere, and I have enjoyed it in all its freshness,--breathing air which had not been breathed in advance by the hundred thousand pairs of lungs which have common and invisible property in the atmosphere of this great city. My breath had never belonged to anybody but me. It came fresh from the wilderness of ocean.... It was exhilarating to see the vessels, how they bounded over the waves, while a sheet of foam broke out around them. I found a good deal of enjoyment, too, in the busy scene around me; for several vessels were disgorging themselves (what an unseemly figure is this,--'disgorge,' quotha, as if the vessel were sick) on the wharf, and everybody seemed to be working with might and main. It pleased me to think that I also had a part to act in the material and tangible business of this life, and that a portion of all this industry could not have gone on without my presence. Nevertheless, I must not pride myself too much on my activity and utilitarianism. I shall, doubtless, soon bewail myself at being compelled to earn my bread by taking some little share in the toils of mortal men." The truth was that Hawthorne led a life apart in his own genius, and this life of the spirit rose out of his daily and habitual existence, or flowed through it like a hidden stream, and did not mingle with the tide of the hours as they passed. He felt the need of a fuller, earthly, practical life, a real life, as he would have called it by contrast with the impalpable things of his genius, and sought it in outward employments; but in these, when his spirit awoke, he felt himself a captive, and defrauded of that higher life of the soul; and after the day's work or the year's labor was over, he could not be content with the fact that it had been, and had served its purpose, and was gone, but he still was compelled to ask how it had served this higher life, in what ways it had fed the spirit which should be master of all the days of one's life, and he found no satisfactory answer except the crude one that possibly his experience and observation might be useful, though doubtfully, as material for the books that were to be. After all he was not content with practical life as an end; it was a means only, such was the necessity of his constitution; he felt its interference with his creative faculty and he was far from being convinced that he had gained anything from it which would be fruitful when he should find time and strength to write again. The leisure he had fondly anticipated was only a dream. He had to work too hard. During these two years, from January, 1839, to April, 1841, the other part of Hawthorne's life lay in his companionship with Sophia Peabody. At first, communication was mostly by letters; but the Peabodys removed from Salem to Boston in 1840, and after that the two lovers--for they were lovers in the most simple sense--met constantly. The memorials of the time, touching as they are in their intimacy of feeling, have that essential privacy which best bespeaks a noble nature. The exchanges of confidences, the little gifts, such as the two pictures which she sent him and which he always held so preciously in his affection, the trifles of lovers' talk, like his confession that he always washed his hands before reading her letters, the quiet, firm advice, the consolations, the happy praise he renders her,--all these belong to the love-story, if it must needs be told. But, besides this, Hawthorne felt toward this love of his married life in a peculiar way not often so purely disclosed; there were touches of solemnity in it, something not of this world; there was that sense of what can be described only as sacredness, which he intimates and in part reveals as a thing never absent from his heart, whether with her or away from her. Love had come to him, not in his youth, but after the years of solitude had ripened both heart and imagination,--a man's love; it filled his whole nature, and with it went a feeling of glad release from the past, of the coming of a freeing power bringing new life, which gave something of heavenly gratitude to his bosom. How deep, serious, truly sacred, his love was, can be read in all the lines of his writing that even remotely allude to it; and at this time he gave expression to it with a sincerity so unconscious that in reading his letters--and there are many of them, though happily he destroyed his wife's--one looks straight into his heart. It is strange, he thinks, that "such a flower as our affection should have blossomed amid snow and wintry winds;" and in all ways this love had the singularity that deep natures feel in their own experiences. "I never till now," writes Hawthorne, "had a friend who could give me repose; all have disturbed me, and whether for pleasure or pain, it was still disturbance. But peace overflows from your heart into mine." So one might weave the chain of lovers' phrases, linking the old words over; but here, at least, it will be enough to let one or two separate passages stand for his abiding mood. In June, 1840, he writes to her when she is at Concord:-- "My heart thirsts and languishes to be there, away from the hot sun, and the coal-dust, and the steaming docks, and the thick-pated, stubborn, contentious men, with whom I brawl from morning till night, and all the weary toil that quite engrosses me, and yet occupies only a small part of my being, which I did not know existed before I became a measurer. I do think I should sink down quite disheartened and inanimate if you were not happy, and gathering from earth and sky enjoyment for both of us; but this makes me feel that my real, innermost soul is apart from all these unlovely circumstances, and that it has not ceased to exist, as I might sometimes suspect, but is nourished and kept alive through you. You know not what comfort I have in thinking of you amid those beautiful scenes and amid those sympathizing hearts. If you are well and happy, if your step is light and joyous there, and your cheek is becoming rosier, and if your heart makes pleasant music, then is it not better for you to stay there a little longer? And if better for you, is it not so for me likewise? Now, I do not press you to stay, but leave it all to your wisdom; and if you feel it is now time to come home, then let it be so." Similarly, in the fall of the same year, from Boston, and again from Salem, he sums in memory what this new life had been to him now for nearly two years:-- "Sometimes, during my solitary life in our old Salem house, it seemed to me as if I had only life enough to know that I was not alive; for I had no wife then to keep my heart warm. But, at length, you were revealed to me, in the shadow of a seclusion as deep as my own. I drew nearer and nearer to you, and opened my heart to you, and you came to me, and will remain forever, keeping my heart warm and renewing my life with your own. You only have taught me that I have a heart,--you only have thrown a light, deep downward and upward, into my soul. You only have revealed me to myself; for without your aid my best knowledge of myself would have been merely to know my own shadow,--to watch it flickering on the wall, and mistake its fantasies for my own real actions.... "Whenever I return to Salem, I feel how dark my life would be without the light that you shed upon it,--how cold, without the warmth of your love. Sitting in this chamber, where my youth wasted itself in vain, I can partly estimate the change that has been wrought. It seems as if the better part of me had been born since then. I had walked those many years in darkness, and might so have walked through life, with only a dreamy notion that there was any light in the universe, if you had not kissed my eyelids and given me to see. You, dearest, have always been positively happy. Not so I,--I have only not been miserable." To turn to other matters, the preoccupation of Hawthorne's mind with his business, together with the distraction of his courtship, proved unfavorable to imaginative work. It may be, too, that the impulse to create had been somewhat exhausted by the rapid production of his later tales in the year or two preceding. Only one original story appeared in this period of labor and love, "John Inglefield's Thanksgiving," which was published in the "Democratic Review" for March, 1840, as by the Rev. A. A. Royce. An interesting edition of "The Gentle Boy," [Footnote: _The Gentle Boy._ A Thrice Told Tale. By Nathaniel Hawthorne. With an Original Illustration. Boston: Weeks, Jordan & Co., 121 Washington Street. New York & London: Wiley & Putnam. 1839. 4to. Pp. 20.] under Hawthorne's name, had been issued in 1839 at his own expense; it contained the original sketch of Ibrahim, by Sophia Peabody, engraved by J. Andrews, and was evidently intended only as a kind of lover's gift to her, to whom it was dedicated. He gave his attention now to writing some children's books, partly under the influence of his old "Peter Parley" instruction and experience, and partly, no doubt, under the encouragement and advice of Elizabeth Peabody, who was interested in such literature. The Peabodys, on removing to Boston, had opened a shop, a library and book-store and homoeopathic drug-store, all in one, of which she was the head, and with her name Hawthorne associated his new ventures. He had contemplated writing children's books, as a probable means of profit, before he received his appointment in the Custom House, as he said in his letter to Longfellow; and he merely stuck to the plan under the new conditions. The result was three volumes of historical tales for young people, drawn from New England in the colonial and revolutionary times, under different titles, but making one series: "Grandfather's Chair," [Footnote: _Grandfather's Chair._ A History for Youth. By Nathaniel Hawthorne, author of Twice-Told Tales. Boston: E. P. Peabody. New York: Wiley & Putnam. 1841. 32mo. Pp. vii, 140. The preface is dated Boston, November, 1840.] "Famous Old People," [Footnote: _Famous Old People._ Being the Second Epoch of Grandfather's Chair. By Nathaniel Hawthorne, author of Twice-Told Tales. Boston: E. P. Peabody, 13 West St. 1841. 32mo. Pp. vii, 158. The preface is dated December 30, 1840.] and "Liberty Tree." [Footnote: _Liberty Tree._ With the Last Words of Grandfather's Chair. By Nathaniel Hawthorne, author of Twice-Told Tales. Boston: E. P. Peabody, 13 West St. 1841. 32mo. Pp. vii, 160. The preface is dated Boston, February 27, 1841.] They appeared in rapid succession in 1841, and were successful. But notwithstanding the high character of these little books as entertainment for children, it will hardly be thought that literature had profited much by the devotion of genius to coal and salt and the oversight of day laborers. In the spring of 1841, immediately after the change of administration in March, Hawthorne lost his place in the Custom House, and he at once betook himself to Brook Farm, in Roxbury, a suburb of Boston, or, to give its full name, "The Brook Farm Institute of Agriculture and Education." The place, the celebrities who gathered there in their youth, and their way of life, have all been many times described, so that there is no occasion to renew a detailed account, especially as Hawthorne's interest in the scheme was purely incidental. He must have had his plans already made in preparation for a change in his life. The shop of the Peabodys in Boston was a centre of transcendentalism, "The Dial" being published there; and Hawthorne's attention may have been drawn to the movement for a practical application of the new social ideas by this circumstance, and he may well have made the acquaintance of Ripley, the chief projector, through these family friends. It is to be remembered, too, that he had been interested previously in the community idea, in the case of the Shakers, and had twice written tales on motives suggested by their life. But an experiment in the regeneration of society by a group of radicals would hardly have given him much practical concern, had it not fallen in with some peculiarities of his private position. Something, it is true, is to be allowed for the infection of the time, which would touch a morally speculative mind such as Hawthorne's to some degree; he would have observed these dreamers, breaking out new paths in the hardened old world of custom and inheritance, and would have followed the fortunes of the dream in its effects on individual lives, for it would appeal to the moral imagination and to his general sentiment about human life; but to become one of the promoters would require, in a man so wary, so hard-headed and cool as he naturally was in one half of his brain at least, a certain pressure of fact upon him. No man was less of a reformer than Hawthorne; he was constitutionally phlegmatic about society, a party man in politics, and an ironical critic of all "come-outers," as these people were then popularly named; and, in this instance, which is the only apparently freakish action of his life, he was certainly swayed by what he supposed to be his own interest. He was merely prospecting for a home in which to settle. He was anxious to be married; he was thirty-seven years old, and Sophia was thirty, and the engagement had already lasted two years and more. In this new community hopes were held out that there would be cottages for families, and the whole business of supporting a family was to be simplified and made easier by the joint arrangements of the community, in an economical sense; moreover, that blessed union of manual toil with intellectual labor was a prime part of the enterprise, and something akin to this Hawthorne still very much desired in his own mind. To have some material work to do, to sustain a practical relation with men and their general life, to have daily contact with matter of fact as a means of escape from the old life of shadows, were still very definite and prized ends with him. He was fairly possessed with this idea for some years. It may fairly be believed that he had no ulterior purpose or belief in the affair, but merely for his personal convenience desired on the one hand to solve the old problem of living in the world while not of it, and to provide a house for his wife to come to. He was willing to try the new scheme, nothing else seeming so feasible at the time to accomplish his immediate purpose; and he put into it all his savings, one thousand dollars, but with the idea of withdrawing this capital in case he was dissatisfied with the results, and should return to the ordinary ways of the world. Hawthorne arrived at the farm among the first of the new settlers, in an April snowstorm, on the twelfth of the month, and began at once to make the acquaintance of the barnyard. He was entirely destitute of agricultural talents, original or acquired, a green hand in every sense of the word, with that muscular willingness to learn which exhibits itself by unusual destructive capacity upon implements of toil and the docility of patient farm animals. He had physical strength, and after attempting to chop, hay, and milk, he was given a dung-fork and set to work at a pile of manure. He writes about these details with a softening of the raw facts by elegancies of language, and much gentle fun, but from the start he shows a playfulness of disposition in regard to the whole affair, like a great boy on a vacation, as if the sense of it all being, so far as he was concerned, a surprising joke on a novel scale were in his mind and attitude all the time; and it is this humor, interlacing on the page like sunshine, that makes the life of his narrative. Occasionally there is the touch of true enjoyment out of doors, as when, under the clear blue sky on the hillside, it seemed as if he "were at work in the sky itself," and he notices the wild flowers coming into the chill world; but, as before at the wharf, so now at his farming, doubts assail his mind whether this manual labor is a satisfactory solution of his difficulties in adjusting himself to the world and opening communication with his fellow-men. The disillusion, if there really had ever been any true hope on his part, was effected even more quickly than before. Six weeks of manuring had brought him to enthusiastic thankfulness that it was near done:-- "That abominable gold-mine! Thank God, we anticipate getting rid of its treasures in the course of two or three days! Of all hateful places that is the worst, and I shall never comfort myself for having spent so many days of blessed sunshine there. It is my opinion that a man's soul may be buried and perish under a dung-heap, or in a furrow of the field, just as well as under a pile of money." Ten weeks more finished the matter. "Joyful thought! in a little more than a fortnight I shall be free from my bondage, ... free to enjoy Nature,--free to think and feel!... Even my Custom House experience was not such a thraldom and weariness; my mind and heart were free. Oh, labor is the curse of the world, and nobody can meddle with it without becoming proportionably brutified! Is it a praiseworthy matter that I have spent five golden months in providing food for cows and horses? It is not so." Shortly after this outburst he made a visit to his home at Salem, where he had been much missed. The few letters that his sister Louisa wrote to him after he first went to the farm afford the pleasantest, and almost the only glimpse of his place in the family. His experiment was plainly not welcome to them; his mother "groaned over it;" but, apart from that, in which there may have been some family pride, though there was also real personal solicitude, it is noticeable how his sister counts the weeks he has been gone, and expresses their vehement desires for his return, and shows the thoughtfulness of the family for him in many ways. "Mother apostrophizes your picture because you do not come home," she writes, after "nine weeks" of absence,--"a great deal too long." In that secluded home he must indeed have been missed, and doubtless it seemed to them day by day more certain that he had really gone out from them into another world of his own. When he was in Salem in September, however, he no sooner crossed the threshold than he felt the old deserted life fall on him again like an evil spirit. "How immediately and irrecoverably," he writes to Sophia, "should I relapse into the way of life in which I spent my youth! If it were not for you, this present world would see no more of me forever. The sunshine would never fall on me, no more than on a ghost. Once in a while people might discern my figure gliding stealthily through the dim evening,--that would be all. I should be only a shadow of the night; it is you that give me reality, and make all things real for me. If, in the interval since I quitted this lonely old chamber, I had found no woman (and you were the only possible one) to impart reality and significance to life, I should have come back hither ere now, with a feeling that all was a dream and a mockery." Brook Farm seems to him now only another dream, and he gives his final judgment on that matter:-- "Really I should judge it to be twenty years since I left Brook Farm; and I take this to be one proof that my life there was an unnatural and unsuitable, and therefore an unreal one. It already looks like a dream behind me. The real Me was never an associate of the community; there has been a spectral Appearance there, sounding the horn at daybreak, and milking the cows, and hoeing potatoes, and raking hay, toiling in the sun, and doing me the honor to assume my name. But this spectre was not myself. Nevertheless, it is somewhat remarkable that my hands have, during the past summer, grown very brown and rough, insomuch that many people persist in believing that I, after all, was the aforesaid spectral horn-sounder, cow-milker, potato-hoer, and hay-raker. But such people do not know a reality from a shadow. Enough of nonsense." Nevertheless he went back for a while, not now as a farmhand, but apparently as a boarder, though he was made a trustee of the association and chairman of the committee on finance. He took, from this time, little part in the working life of the community. He had made up his mind that there was to be no home for him there, though "weary, weary, thrice weary of waiting so many ages." He turns his mind to other plans of book-making, but does not have the seclusion he had found necessary for composition, and rather mournfully writes that he "must observe, and think, and feel, and content myself with catching glimpses of things which may be wrought out hereafter." He did observe with his habitual closeness the people who came and went, and the life of the inmates, sitting himself apart a good deal with a book before his face. He made friends with a few, a very few, of whom George Bradford and Frank Farley remained to him in later times; but he was, as always, averse to literary society, and came nearer to men of a different type in his human intercourse. Sophia, who had seen him there amid the fraternity, described his relationship to the others accurately, one of "courtesy and conformableness and geniality;" but, she tells him, the expression of his countenance was "that of a witness and hearer rather than of comradeship." In the fall weather he spent much of his time rambling about, and the scarlet color of the pastures, the warmth of the autumn woods, and the fading of the blue-fringed gentian, last blossom of the year, made up the texture of his notable life, just as similar things had earlier done by the Salem shore. In the spring he left the community, and made ready to go to Concord, where a place had been found for him to settle. In the production of literature, life at Brook Farm had proved as barren as the years on Long Wharf. He had contributed one story, "A Virtuoso's Collection," to "The Boston Miscellany" for May, 1842, and had added one more to his little books, "Biographical Stories [Footnote: _Biographical Stories for Children._ Benjamin West, Sir Isaac Newton, Samuel Johnson, Oliver Cromwell, Benjamin Franklin, Queen Christina. By Nathaniel Hawthorne. Author of Historical Tales for Youth, Twice-Told Tales, etc. Boston: Tappan and Dennet, 114 Washington St. 1842. 18mo. Pp. v, 161. "Historical Tales for Youth" was made up by binding the three Grandfather's Chair books in the 18mo second edition, 1842, together with this volume, and issued as four volumes in two, so labeled on the back.] for Children." The volume was added to the "Grandfather's Chair" series, which was brought out in a new edition in 1842. To the same year belongs the enlarged edition of "Twice-Told Tales," [Footnote: _Twice-Told Tales._ By Nathaniel Hawthorne. Boston: James Munroe and Company. 1842. 2 vols. 12mo. Pp. 331, 356. The first volume contained the same tales as the former edition, with The Toll-Gatherer's Day added. The second volume contained the following: Howe's Masquerade, Edward Randolph's Portrait, Lady Eleanore's Mantle, Old Esther Dudley, The Haunted Mind, The Village Uncle, The Ambitious Guest, The Sister Years, Snowflakes, The Seven Vagabonds, The White Old Maid, Peter Goldthwaite's Treasure, Chippings with a Chisel, The Shaker Bridal, Night Sketches, Endicott and the Red Cross, The Lily's Quest, Footprints on the Sea-Shore, Edward Fane's Rosebud, The Threefold Destiny.] in two volumes, in which the number of stories was doubled, but the collection still left out many titles which were afterwards gathered. Hawthorne had now been practically idle, so far as his genius was concerned, for three years, and had experimented to his heart's content in other modes of life. He had decided on immediate marriage. Sophia had recovered from her invalidism, and the lifelong headache she had experienced disappeared. It remained only to inform Madam Hawthorne of the engagement which had been so long concealed. He felt some trepidation, since, he says, "almost every agitating circumstance of her life had cost her a fit of illness." But his fears were groundless; she came out of her chamber to meet him as soon as he arrived, looking better and more cheerful than usual, and full of kindness. "Foolish me," he writes happily to Sophia, "to doubt that my mother's love could be wise, like all other genuine love!... It seems that our mother had seen how things were a long time ago; at first her heart was troubled, because she knew that much of outward as well as inward fitness was requisite to secure our peace; but gradually and quietly God has taught her that all is good, and so we shall have her fullest blessing and concurrence. My sisters, too, begin to sympathize as they ought, and all is well. God be praised! I thank Him on my knees, and pray Him to make me worthy of the happiness you bring me." The quiet marriage took place on July 9, 1842, at the home of the Peabodys in Boston, and Hawthorne and his wife went to Concord to reside at the Old Manse. IV. THE OLD MANSE. The life upon which the Hawthornes now entered for a period of three years and more was one of village quiet and country happiness. Concord was a characteristic town of eastern Massachusetts, with woodland, pasture, and hill lying unevenly in a diversified landscape, and in the midst the little river winding its slow way along by the famous bridge. The neighbors were few, and for the most part were members of the literary group of residents or visitors which gave Concord its later distinction. Yet even here, amid this rural peace and in so restricted a society, life at the Old Manse had a still deeper seclusion, as of a place of retreat and inviolable privacy; there was an atmosphere of solitude about it, wrapping it round, a sense of life with nature, and only slight and distant contact with the world, the privacy of a house that is snow-bound, lasting on as if by enchantment through July heats as well as February drifts. Hawthorne enjoyed this freedom in the place that first seemed to him like real home; and he and his wife pleased their fancy with thinking of it as a native paradise, with themselves as the new Adam and Eve, a thought which he had held in prospect before marriage and now clung to with a curious tenacity, pursuing it through many changes of idea; and, on the level of fact, he used to write that he had never lived so like a boy since he really was a boy in the old days in Maine. The situation of the house lent itself to his tastes and inclinations. It was set back from the street, toward which an avenue of trees led out, and in the rear was the apple orchard with the river on its edge. He could look from his windows on the life of the road, with its occasional passers-by, for it was seldom that any one turned up the avenue to call; and he could go down to the stream to bathe and fish in summer, and to skate in winter on the black ice. He would wander out over the fields and into the woods with Ellery Channing, and go boating with Thoreau, both of whom were companions he liked to be with; or if he met Margaret Fuller in the paths of Sleepy Hollow, he could spend an hour or two in such half transcendental, half-sentimental talk as he records from such a chance encounter. Emerson came, also, to talk and walk with a man who was so firm-set in his own ways, being attracted to him by the subtleties of personality, for he never could read Hawthorne's tales then or afterwards, so profound was the opposition of their genius. If visitors stayed at the manse, it would be George Bradford, whom Hawthorne respected in the highest degree which his appreciation of others ever reached, or Frank Farley, the half-crazy Brook Farmer, whom he gave himself to in a more self-sacrificing way to aid and comfort in his bewildered and imperfect state; or else Hillard would arrive, with much cheerfulness and news from Longfellow or others of the Cambridge men. But Hawthorne still kept the social world at a distance from his private and intimate self; these men, though he maintained kindly intercourse with them, never penetrated the shell of his true reserve; the contact was but superficial; and though they were good for company, he was often glad when they were gone and he was again alone with nature and his dreams, and the ways and things of household life. In doors, and out doors, too, the new life was full of happiness. The gentle felicity of the literary recluse breathes through the description he gave of the place and time and habits of existence in the Manse, which he wrote out for his readers in the pleasantest of his autobiographical papers; and as for details to supply a more complete picture,--are they not written at large in the family letters? His wife worshiped him, and named him all the names of classic mythology and history,--Endymion, Epaminondas, Apollo,--glorying in his physical kinghood, as she saw it, when he glided skating in the rose-colored air of twilight, and also in the divine qualities of his spirit in doors, where he, on occasion--and the occasion grew more and more frequent--would wash the dishes, do the chores, cook the meals even, relieving her of every care of this kind in servant matters. He read to her in the evenings Macaulay, all of Shakspere, the Sermon on the Mount for Sunday, and generally the old books over, Thomson's "Castle," Spenser's faeryland, and the rest. She rejoiced in him and all that was his; and she painted and modeled a good deal and worked out her artistic instincts very happily for herself, and much to her husband's sympathetic pleasure. Una, the first child, was born March 3, 1844, and with this new revelation life went on in deeper and sweeter ways of feeling, thought, and service. The home is easily to be seen now, though it was then so private a place,--a home essentially not of an uncommon New England type, where refined qualities and noble behavior flourished close to the soil of homely duties and the daily happiness of natural lives under whatever hardships; a home of friendly ties, of high thoughts within, and of poverty bravely borne. There is no other word for it. Into this paradise of the Manse at Concord, set in the very heart of outer and inward peace so complete, poverty had come. Hawthorne had never had any superfluity in the things that give comfort and ease to life even on a small scale. The years at Salem had been marked by strict economies always, it is plain; there was no more than enough in that house, and thence arose in part its proud instinct of isolation; and Bridge, it may be recalled, had cheered up Hawthorne's doubting spirits on one occasion by telling him that the three hundred dollars he earned, at the age of thirty, was sufficient to support him. On such a scale, he would not have called himself poor. But he was poor now, with that frank meaning that the word has to a man willing to do without, who cannot pay his small debts; in fact the smallness of the debt gives its edge to the misery. Hawthorne's whole New England nature rebelled against it; for there is nothing so deep-grained in the old New England character as the dislike to be "dependent," as the word is used. Hawthorne had gone through his training, too, in boyhood; he had never contracted debts till he had the money to pay them; and now he had miscalculated the "honesty"--as he doubtless named it in his thoughts--of other men. He had expected to draw out the thousand dollars invested at Brook Farm, and he supposed he would get it, especially if he really needed it, so unbusiness-like were his ideas; but as a matter of fact, he had lost that money in the speculation as much as if he had risked it in any other way. There was more to justify his irritation in the fact that "The Democratic Review," which had begun by paying five dollars a page, and had dropped to twenty dollars an article independent of length, had practically failed. He could not get paid for his work, and so he could not pay the small bills of household expenses. They were insignificant, in one sense, but the fact that they were not paid was independent of the amount. Emerson told him, so his wife writes, "to whistle for it, ... everybody was in debt, ... all worse than he was." There had been hardship almost from the first, as appears from Hawthorne's anger at Mr. Upham for telling tales in Salem of their "poverty and misery," on which his most significant comment, perhaps, is, "We never have been quite paupers." This was in March, 1843, and it is not unlikely that the modest ways of the house, and possibly that disregard for regular meals in which Hawthorne had long been experienced, may have given an impression of greater economy than there was need of; but, for all Hawthorne's natural disclaimer, the family plainly spent as little as possible, and he found the kitchen garden, whose fortunes he follows with such interest, gave him food as well as exercise. The "Paradisaical dinner," on Christmas Day, 1843, "of preserved quince and apple, dates, and bread and cheese, and milk," though of course its simplicity was only due to the cook's absence in Boston, indicates other difficulties of housekeeping, as also do a hundred half-amusing details of the household life. But the time of trouble came in dead earnest in the course of 1845, and in the fall of that year extremity is seen nigh at hand when Mrs. Hawthorne writes to her mother: "He and Una are my perpetual Paradise, and I besieged heaven with prayers that we might not find it our duty to separate, whatever privations we must outwardly suffer in consequence of remaining together." The way out of all this trouble was found for Hawthorne by the same friends who had formerly rescued him in the time of his bitter discouragement before his engagement. In the spring of 1845, Bridge and Frank Pierce appeared on the scene, and finding Hawthorne at his daily task of chopping wood in the shed, they had a meeting of the old college-boy sort that brightens the page with one of those human scenes that, occurring seldom in Hawthorne's life, have such realistic effect. "Mr. Bridge caught a glimpse of him, and began a sort of waltz towards him. Mr. Pierce followed; and when they reappeared, Mr. Pierce's arm was encircling my husband's old blue frock. How his friends do love him! Mr. Bridge was perfectly wild with spirits. He danced and gesticulated and opened his round eyes like an owl.... My husband says Mr. Pierce's affection for and reliance upon him are perhaps greater than any other person's. He called him 'Nathaniel,' and spoke to him and looked at him with peculiar tenderness." The friends agreed that something should be done for Hawthorne through political influence, and in the course of the succeeding months there was much discussion of one and another office without immediate result; and meanwhile Hawthorne prepared to remove to Salem again, where he would so arrange matters that his mother and sisters should live in the same house with him. He had occasionally visited them during his married life, and on one of these short stays at home an incident occurred that should be recorded, not only for its singularity, but for its glimpse of his mother in a new light. "For the first time since my husband can remember, he dined with his mother! This is only one of the miracles which the baby is to perform. Her grandmother held her on her lap till one of us should finish dining, and then ate her own meal. She thinks Una is a beauty, and, I believe, is not at all disappointed in her. Her grandmother also says she has the most perfect form she ever saw in a baby." It was a year later than this anecdote that the family was reunited in Salem, but before following Hawthorne in his return to his native, though never very well loved town, his literary work in these years at Concord should be looked at. When Hawthorne came to live at the Old Manse it was some time since he had produced any imaginative work, or, indeed, written anything except the stories for children in "Grandfather's Chair," which hardly rise above the class of hack work. Since leaving Salem in January, 1840, he had published but one paper that is remembered in his better writings, and that, "A Virtuoso's Collection," was of a peculiar character, being no more than a play of fancy, a curiosity of literary invention. After the lapse of two years and a half, during which his imagination was uncreative, it might have been anticipated that, under the new conditions of tranquillity and private happiness, in the favorable surroundings of the Manse, he would have shown unusual fruitfulness; but such was not the case. In the additional three years and a half that had now passed since he settled at Concord, he gave to the world only eighteen papers. They did not begin until 1843, and were distributed, for the most part, evenly over the next two years. "Little Daffydowndilly" appeared in "The Boys' and Girls' Magazine" in 1843. Lowell's periodical, "The Pioneer," which lived only through the first three months of that year, contained "The Hall of Fantasy," in the February, and "The Birthmark," in the March number. "The Democratic Review," which was still edited by O'Sullivan, a warm friend though editorially impecunious, received the remaining tales and sketches with a few exceptions. It published them as follows: in 1843, "The New Adam and Eve," February; "Egotism, or The Bosom Serpent," March; "The Procession of Life," April; "The Celestial Railroad," May; "Buds and Bird Voices," June; "Fire Worship," December; in 1844, "The Christmas Banquet," January; "The Intelligence Office," March; "The Artist of the Beautiful," June; "A Select Party," July; "Rappaccini's Daughter," December; in 1845, "P.'s Correspondence," April. "Earth's Holocaust" had appeared in "Graham's Magazine," March, 1844, apparently on Griswold's invitation; and two tales, "Drowne's Wooden Image," and "The Old Apple Dealer," were published, if at all, in some unknown place. All of these appeared under the author's own name, except that he once relapsed into his old habit by sending forth "Rappaccini's Daughter" as a part of the writings of Aubépine, a former pseudonym. "The Celestial Railroad" [Footnote: _The Celestial Railroad._ By Nathaniel Hawthorne. Boston: published by Wilder & Co., No. 46 Washington Street. 1843. 82mo, paper. Pp. 32.] was published separately as a pamphlet. He had edited for "The Democratic Review" also the "Papers of an old Dartmoor Prisoner;" and, in 1845, he assisted his friend Bridge to appear as an author by arranging and revising his "Journal of an African Cruiser." [Footnote: _Journal of an African Cruiser._ Comprising Sketches of the Canaries, The Cape de Verdes, Liberia, Madeira, Sierra Leone, and Other Places of Interest on the West Coast of Africa. By an Officer of the U. S. Navy. Edited by Nathaniel Hawthorne. New York & London: Wiley and Putnam. 1845. 12mo. Pp. 179.] This amount of literary work, taken altogether, is not considerable, and it is noticeable that in the last year, 1845, he seems to have practically ceased writing. He may have been a slow, and possibly an infrequent writer; such, in fact, is the inference to be drawn also from his earlier years, when he does not seem to have been a rapid producer except at the time of the issue of "Twice-Told Tales," when he had the strongest spur of ambition and most felt the need of succeeding. He had written, in all, about ninety tales and sketches in twenty years, so far as is known, of which thirty-nine had been collected in the "Twice-Told Tales." He now took all his new tales and, adding to them five others from his earlier uncollected stock, wrote the introductory sketch of his Concord life, and issued them as "Mosses from an Old Manse" [Footnote: _Mosses from an Old Manse_. By Nathaniel Hawthorne. In two parts. New York: Wiley and Putnam. 1846. 12mo. Pp. 211. The volume, the two parts bound as one, contained The Old Manse, The Birthmark, A Select Party, Young Goodman Brown, Rappaccini's Daughter, Mrs. Bullfrog, Fire Worship, Buds and Bird Voices, Monsieur du Miroir, The Hall of Fantasy, The Celestial Railroad, The Procession of Life.] in Wiley and Putnam's Library of American Books, New York. The work appeared in the earlier part of 1846. Later he was to gather up the yet uncollected papers of the first period, and add the very few tales afterwards written; but, in fact, Hawthorne's activity as a writer of tales practically ended with his leaving Concord. His work of that kind was done; and some idea of what he had accomplished, some analysis of his temperament and art as disclosed in these tales that were the only enduring fruits of the score of years since he left college and began the literary life, may now fairly be built on the total result. These hundred tales and sketches of Hawthorne, broadly speaking, embody the literary results of his life, especially from his thirtieth to his fortieth year, and represent all its activities. In comparison with his later romances on the larger scale of life, they are studies, the 'prentice work of his learning hand, and they disclose successively the varieties and modes of his growth, which was one of slow and almost imperceptible gradations, until his method was fully formed, perhaps unconsciously, and became the artistic mould of his genius. In his first attempts there was little, if anything, more than in the instinctive motions of a bird's wings,--the disposition for flight. He had the faculty of literary expression, which had been nourished within and outwardly shaped in manner by constant contact with the English classic authors, and especially with good prose, clear, simple, and direct, from which melodious cadence had not yet been eliminated. He was touched, also, by some vague literary ambition, not well defined, but predisposed to fiction; and he had a physically indolent habit, which kept him disengaged from practical affairs and led him more and more into meditative ways. He did not have any inspiration from within, any enthusiasm of sympathy or purpose, any life of his own, seeking expression; nor did he find easily a definite subject outside himself to observe, describe, and animate. He turned, in his early tales, to the local traditions and memories of his native place, and his stories were no more than sketched history, provincial in atmosphere; nor did his genius show even faintly in them any of its characteristic lines. Scott, undoubtedly, was the author who had most affected his mental habit, and with this exception, notwithstanding what some critics have alleged of his so-called "American predecessors," Charles Brockden Brown and the author of "Peter Rugg," there is no trace of any other literary influence upon him either in this preparatory time or later in life; but something of Scott is to be found permanently in his creative work,--in the figure-grouping, the high speeches, the oddities of character humorously treated, and especially in the use of set scenes individually elaborated to give the high lights and to advance the story. But Scott's method was at first inadequately applied, nor is there any sign that the young author yet appreciated the artistic capabilities of the material he was using. Hawthorne's instinct was always right in the preferences he showed among his works, of which he was an excellent critic. It was not merely by accident that he was first known as the author of "Sights from a Steeple," though accident may have had its share in the matter; and he long continued to use this signature. This little essay is very carefully written, and displays in remarkable perfection one quality that became so characteristic of his work that he has no rival in it except Poe; it has that harmony of tone which is known as keeping a unity of design and development so pervasive that the heavens above and the earth below are seen from the little steeple as from a centre, and nature and life seem to revolve around the eye at that altitude with complete breadth as well as smallness of proportion. It is the simplest of trifles, as a composition; and, like much of Hawthorne's writing, has a curious accent of the school reader, as if it were meant for that, so well is it adjusted to ready comprehension, so mild is its interest, so matter-of-fact yet playful in fancy is its substance, and so immediate is its village charm. He was proud of it as a piece of writing, and justly enough, for though it may seem like one of the books of Lilliput, it perfectly accomplishes its little life. The type once struck out in this clear way, Hawthorne returned to it again and again, and always with the same happiness in execution and the same delight in the thing itself. In such a frame he would set the miniature of a day, as in "The Toll-Gatherer's Day," or "Footprints on the Sea-Shore," or "Sunday at Home;" or he would enclose a portrait, of Dutch faithfulness in detail, and suggestive also of the school in other ways, as in "The Old Apple Dealer," or with greater breadth of life, in "The Village Uncle." "A Rill from the Town Pump" and "Main Street" belong to the same kind of writing; and most akin to it, at least, are such mingled nature and home pieces as "Snowflakes," "Buds and Bird Voices," and "Fire Worship." These titles cover the whole period of the tales, but there is no change in the manner or quality,--they are all of one kind. To make sketches so slight as these interesting, much more to embalm them in literature, requires some magical touch either in the hand of the author or the heart of the reader. They are the thistledown of literature, creatures of a contemplative idleness as pure as childhood's own, the sun's impartial photography on the film of a rambler's eye; yet in these few pages are condensed some thousands, probably, of Hawthorne's days. The life they depict has been called barren, and the literary product has been described as thin. "What triviality, what monotony, what emptiness!" the critics exclaim. It is, indeed, provincial; rusticity is its element. Hawthorne, however, did not choose it, as a topic, for that reason, with a conscious intention to exploit it. He could not have been aware, he could not have half known even, how provincial it was, for he had never gone out of this countryside in which he was bred, or become acquainted with a different world; even on his journeys in stage-coaches he had not got free of it. The sketches made no artificial appeal; they have the true flavor of the soil, and are written for those who sprang from it and dwelt upon it and would be buried in it. This is the charm that still clings to them, and indeed pervades them like an aromatic odor in East Indian wood. They are true transcripts of life, though vanished now from its place at least in that region, which then enjoyed the seclusion of a nest of villages uninvaded by railroads, and was nearer perhaps to Calcutta and Sumatra and the Gold Coast than to New York. He was not so solitary and alone in this life, after all. That part of New England was not far from being a Forest of Arden, when Emerson might be met any day with a pail berrying in the pastures, or Margaret Fuller reclining by a brook, or Hawthorne on a high rock throwing stones at his own shadow in the water. There was a Thoreau--there still is--in every New England village, usually inglorious. The lone fisherman of the Isaak Walton type had become, in the New World, the wood-walker, the flower-hunter, the bird-fancier, the berry-picker, and many another variety of the modern ruralist. Hawthorne might easily have found a companion or two of similar wandering habits and half hermit-like intellectual life, though seldom so fortunate as to be able to give themselves entirely up to vagrancy of mind, like himself. Thoreau is, perhaps, the type, on the nature side; and Hawthorne was to the village what Thoreau was to the wild wood. The truth of these sketches is their prime quality, for Hawthorne wrote them with the familiar affection and home-attachment of one who had fleeted the golden time of his youth amid these scenes of common day, and prolonged it far into manhood, and should never quite lose its glow of mere existence, its kindliness for humble things, its generous leisure for the perishable beauty of nature dotted here and there with human life. It is a countrified scene that is disclosed, but this truth which characterizes it, this fidelity of fact and sentiment and mood, suggests new and deeper values,--a charm, a health, even a power comes to the surface as one gazes, the power of peace in quiet places; and even a cultivated man, if he be not callous with culture, may feel its attractiveness, a sense that the tide of life grows full in the still coves as well as on all the sounding beaches of the world; and an existence in which the smell of peat-smoke is an event, and the sight of some children paddling in the water is a day's memory, and the mere drawing in of the salt sea wind is life itself, may seem as important in its simplicity as the varied impressions of a day in the season. This was Hawthorne's life; was it after all so valueless? He was well aware that even the native moralist, though unenlightened, would call him to account for wasting his time; and he made his apology after having obeyed his mood:-- "Setting forth at my last ramble on a September morning, I bound myself with a hermit's vow to interchange no thoughts with man or woman, to share no social pleasure, but to derive all that day's enjoyment from shore and sea and sky,--from my soul's communion with these, and from fantasies and recollections, or anticipated realities. Surely here is enough to feed a human spirit for a single day. Farewell, then, busy world! Till your evening lights shall shine along the street,--till they gleam upon my sea-flushed face as I tread homeward,--free me from your ties, and let me be a peaceful outlaw. "... But grudge me not the day that has been spent in seclusion, which yet was not solitude, since the great sea has been my companion, and the little sea-birds my friends, and the wind has told me his secrets, and airy shapes have flitted around me in my hermitage. Such companionship works an effect upon a man's character, as if he had been admitted to the society of creatures that are not mortal. And when, at noontide, I tread the crowded streets, the influence of this day will still be felt; so that I shall walk among men kindly and as a brother, with affection and sympathy, but yet shall not melt into the indistinguishable mass of humankind. I shall think my own thoughts, and feel my own emotions, and possess my individuality unviolated." The apology seems adapted to the comprehension of the native moralist, it must be confessed, and is only an afterthought; for Hawthorne enjoyed his out-door life for its own sake, with little reference to its ameliorating influence on his social behavior. It is his own life, nothing more or less, that he thus describes, in the surroundings that heaven vouchsafed to him for better or worse in the Salem streets, in the Danvers lanes, by the coves of Marblehead, and along the western river uplands or the winding seashore of Beverly beside the islands. If he went far afield to Nantucket, he returned with "Chippings with a Chisel;" if he took an umbrella for a walk in the rain at home, he brought back "Night Sketches." Such was his place. His own delight in this existence is noticeable, for it fitted his nature; in none of his works is the pleasure of the author in writing them so marked a trait, and in none does one come nearer to his natural self. They are complete and intimate revelations of the life of his senses, the sounds and sights and happenings of daily life. They pleased the readers he had at that time in New England, because they were a faithful reproduction of the commonplace, played upon by sentiment and slightly moralized, but quite in the tone of the community; and all men like to see themselves and their ways reflected in the mirror of words. They continue to yield the same mild pleasure now, perhaps rather by virtue of a reminiscent charm, for this life still exists on the horizons of memory as a part of the days gone by. They belong with the literature of the old red schoolhouse, the moss-covered bucket, and the barefoot boy,--they are of a past that was countrified and old-fashioned, and are its best record; and even in the style, the mode of conception, they have the look of antiquated things. Their nearness to the school has been adverted to; the cognate piece, "A Bell's Biography," has the completeness of a boy's composition; there is a touch of nonage in them all, intellectually. In this, too, they are true to the time. Things provincial seen by a provincial mind and set forth by a provincial art,--such are these delicately minute sketches; and unless one takes them so, he misses their excellence, their virtue, the vitality they have. Life in the provinces, however, is also a divine gift, and its values have seldom been better portrayed, its breadth, its narrowness, its shadings through sunshine and nightfall, its sentiment, its miscellaneousness, its weariness; but its controlling characteristic is its rural peace, such as one likes to see in a painting on the wall for year-long contemplation, and if this be broken, it is with real tragedy, disasters of the sea, or such an inland story as the drowning of the young woman at Concord so accurately told in the "Note-Books." Hawthorne's personality counts for much, too, in these pieces, as Irving's also does in his sketches. The sense of a kindly temperament, hospitable to all that lives and is in the dusty world, is felt like a touch of nature making us akin to the writer; the classic quality of the prose itself gilds all with sunshine; and one only needs love of the soil to complete the charm. These records of memory and sentiment, however, belong to Hawthorne's ocular observation, in the main, and to the exterior sphere of his art. It is in the historical tales that his imagination first acts with seeing power; and here, too, the story by which he preferred to be known, "The Gentle Boy," stands out, though its prominence is rather a matter of priority than of distinction, for it is the fruit of his sympathies more than of his imagination. The remembrance of his ancestor's share in the persecution of the Quakers may have suggested the theme, and specially drawn out his own gentleness in the treatment. The singularity of the tale is partly due to the fascination of the child's name, Ilbrahim, which brings before the mind an eastern background, emphasizes his loneliness, and gives a suggestion of Scriptural charm to the narrative. One almost expects to see palm-trees growing up over him. He is, however, not individualized,--he is the universal orphan child; nor does it require any stretch of fancy to see in him the Christchild that St. Christopher bore over the river, for so might that Child have come into this wilderness preaching the eternal lesson. The pathetic story is a fable of piety, in fact, and is somewhat nervelessly handled for reality; the figures seem to glide in their motions, they are not quite set on the earth, they are impalpable except in their emotions. The facts lack firmness, though the feeling is wrought out with truth and refinement and makes an irresistible appeal of pity. It is, however, rather in the second historical tale which Hawthorne chose to stand as his pseudonym of authorship, "The Gray Champion," that he finds the type whose method he afterward repeats while developing it more richly. This tale is a picture, a scene, ending in a tableau; the surrounding stir of life, excitement, and atmosphere is first prepared, then the procession comes down the street, and is arrested, challenged, and thrown back by the venerable figure of the old Puritan who stands alone, like a prophet come back from the dead to deliver the people. The composition, the development, the focusing are in Scott's manner; it is from him that this dramatic presentation of history in a single scene, as here, or by a succession of scenes carrying on a story, is derived; partly pictorial, partly theatrical, always dramatic, this is the method which Hawthorne applied, the art of "The Author of Waverley," who was its great master in English fiction. "Endicott and the Red Cross" is a small study of the same sort; and in that sketch, and elsewhere, it is noticeable that in bearing and language the characters resemble the Covenanters, as Scott fixed the type in literature, more than they recall the real New England Puritans. Hawthorne's interest in colonial history found its most complete early expression in the "Tales of the Province House," in which he for once succeeded in grouping a series in a natural and effective way so as to make a larger whole. "Sir William Howe's Masquerade" is told by a succession of scenes, quite in the manner described, and the suggestion of mystery, the supernatural intention felt in the incident though not explicitly present in the fact, which in this story attends the last descending figure of the line of royal governors, as it also attended the figure of the Gray Champion, is also in Scott's manner, though more subtly effected. In "Edward Randolph's Portrait" the appearance of the picture on the faded canvas is mechanically accounted for, but at the moment of its discovery this same supernatural expectancy, as it were, is aroused in the beholders; the incident itself recalls the appearance of the portrait of old Lord Ravenswood at the marriage ball of "The Bride of Lammermoor," though the analogy may very likely never have occurred to Hawthorne. "Old Esther Dudley" is hardly more than a character portrait,--the memory of the Province House and all it stood for preserved in the devotion of the old servant into whose life it had passed and whose spirit it occupied like a reliquary of old time. The best of these four tales is "Lady Eleanore's Mantle," and it is so because in it Hawthorne's genius passed out of the sphere of history and touched on that universal moral world where his most original creation was to lie. It is necessary here only to observe that in this tale he has fully seized the power of the physical object, plainly sensible to all as matter of fact, to serve as the medium for moral suggestion often difficult to put into words, of that sort whose effect is rather in the feelings than in thought; and this, without turning the object into an express symbol. The mantle of Lady Eleanore is a garment of pride, and also a garment of death in its dread form of pestilence; the story continually returns to it, as its physical theme, and the imagination fixes upon it by a kind of fascination, as through it the double aspect of Lady Eleanore's isolation is sensibly clothed, her haughtiness and her contagion, whose fatal bond is in this mantle, which finally seems not only to express her life but to rule her tragedy. Here one feels a new power, because while Hawthorne still retains the method of narration he had adopted, he has enriched it with an art and genius distinctly his own. In another tale,--which is provincial if not historical, and which was one of his earlier pieces,--"Roger Malvin's Burial," there is also a noticeable beginning in his art, for in this he uses undesigned coincidence to give that impression of a guided accomplishment of fate, which is so dramatically effective to the moral sense. From these few instances it will be observed that Hawthorne reached artistic consciousness, and a mastery of aim and method, slowly and along no one line of development; rather his genius seemingly put forth many tendrils, seeking direction and support and growth, and gradually in these hundred tales he found himself and his art. History assisted Hawthorne's imagination in its operation by affording that firmness and distinctness of outline which was most needed in his work; it gave body to his creations, but in his most characteristic and original tales this body was not to be one of external fact, but of moral thought. His genius contained a primary element of reflection, of meditation on life, of the abstract; and while his imagination might take its start and find an initial impulse, an occasion, in some concrete object on which it fastened, its course in working itself out was governed by this abstract moral intention. In dealing with life directly, and not through history, the tales which are at the least remove from mere observation are those that were immediately suggested by his journeys and embody these experiences in their background if not in the whole; such are "The Seven Vagabonds" and the two Shaker episodes, "The Canterbury Pilgrims" and "A Shaker Bridal." His experiments in the grotesque style, "Mr. Higginbotham's Catastrophe" and "Mrs. Bullfrog," can be left one side, for they never passed the stage of amateurish weakness, and led to nothing. His meditation on life sometimes centres about an individual, but this is only seeming; his real interest was always in collective life or in the atmosphere round about all lives. To take a simple case, but one typical of his point of view and method, "The Haunted Mind" is a study in the night-atmosphere of the human soul, in a certain state, and is rendered with the vividness of personal experience. "Fancy's Show-Box" is a more individualized variant of the same motive, and yet its substance is the frankly abstract question of responsibility for guilt which is not acted but only entertained; and as in this tale the story is of the sins that hover round the soul waiting to be born, so in "David Swan" the story is of the events that might happen to an unsuspecting man, but pass by innocuous after merely shadowing his sleep like a threat. To this atmosphere of life also belongs the elaborate shadow sketch, "Monsieur de Miroir," a motive often treated in literature and here more lightly handled than one would have anticipated, and hence more ineffectively, for Hawthorne's power did not lie in his playfulness of fancy so much as in its darker workings. Hawthorne let his mind brood over these possibilities of life, these half-vital acts, thoughts, and beings, like fears in an anxious mind, things that have only partial being, but are real enough at times to trouble the mind's eye. A touch of this atmosphere of unreality is found, also, in such a tale as "Wakefield," the story of the man who disappeared from his place in life though he remained in the neighborhood unknown; the main theme is rather the man cut off from life, which Hawthorne so often recurred to, but the element of life's contingency, the nearness of an event that might happen but never does, is what makes the strangeness of this curious study. In approaching life itself in its individual forms, the slightness of Hawthorne's attempt in the earlier pieces is very marked. A good example of it is "The Wives of the Dead." Two wives, who suppose their husbands have been lost at sea, are told separately at different hours of the night, in the house they occupy together, that the lost has been saved; each believing the other a widow leaves her to sleep. Here are merely two dramatic moments described and opposed, a perfect example of likeness in difference on a small scale, done with great truth to nature; the sketch is finely wrought, and gains by its intense condensation of situation and its brief single mood. Two such moments, in his simpler tales, Hawthorne was accustomed to take, and treat by opposition; the power lies in the contrast. Such, to give examples, are "The White Old Maid," "Edward Fane's Rosebud," and with less distinctness, "The Wedding Knell," where the contrast goes back to lost youth for effect. In the very artificial fable, which has elements of the fairy story in it, "The Three-fold Destiny," there is this simple construction, and it is found also in "The Prophetic Pictures," though that tale is primarily a study in the idea of fate, a subject seldom touched by Hawthorne, the notion of an inevitable destiny foreseen by the painter's intuition and forecast on the canvas, but implicit from the beginning in character. In all these tales scene, situation, and character, as well as the dialogue, are handled with little variation; pictorial and dramatic effects are sought, and the slight plot is developed, by the means usual to Hawthorne's hand. The allegorizing method, it should be observed, though it appears with greater or less influence, is not employed with any exclusiveness, but takes its place with other resources of his art. In "The Great Carbuncle," however, and in "The Man of Adamant," the allegory is predominant and absorbs the tale. Perhaps it is as an offshoot of this allegorizing mood that the tales of pure fancy should be regarded, those masque-like inventions, "A Select Party" and "The Hall of Fantasy," together with "The Intelligence Office" and "A Virtuoso's Collection," also remnants of old-fashioned ingenuity. In such fantasy Hawthorne found a better channel for that play of his mind which had earlier sought expression in the grotesque; oddity of thought he had in plenty, and the sense of oddity was often as far as his humorous faculty reached, for it was perceptive rather than sympathetic. Of collective life, frankly so treated, Hawthorne wrote frequently,--the group is an important one. The crowd attracted him by its polarity to his own solitude, and it is curious to observe how fond he was of the processional in his work. The simple illustration of this sort is "The Procession of Life;" here he marshals mankind, as with the power of a magician's rod, in hordes. In "The New Adam and Eve" he reviews society in its institutions and its garniture of civilization; and the conception is a happy device by which to obtain the requisite distance and wholeness for a single point of view. "Earth's Holocaust," though superficially different, is a variant of the same theme, presenting the product of life in masses; its inclusion of the indestructibility of the good is noticeable as a philosophical idea such as he rarely introduced in an explicit way. The felicitous allegory of "The Celestial Railroad" satirizes human nature without bitterness; but, while the universality of Bunyan's emblems is strikingly shown by the ease with which they are adapted to the new age of steam, the tale is, as it were, music transposed; the cleverness is Hawthorne's, but Bunyan wrote the piece. These four tales, admirable as they are in breadth, are nevertheless essentially reflective. The imaginative group of the same scope is of a higher rank. In it the general life is set forth with more individuality, though life in the abstract still occupies the foreground. To set aside such a moral parable as "The Lily's Quest," or such an illustration of the power of love to raise a man above himself temporarily as "Drowne's Wooden Image," or such a study of isolation as "The Man of Adamant," in all of which the didacticism is rather nakedly felt, there are two tales that equally exemplify this class, "Dr. Heidegger's Experiment" and "The Christmas Banquet." In the first the ghastliness of the reversal of the course of life backward, as the guests drink the elixir of youth, while it suggests the paltriness of our pleasures, is a powerful lesson in the beneficence of that daily death whereby we resign the past; this rejuvenation violates nature, and so shocks us, and by the very shock we are reconciled with nature, from which we had parted in thought. "The Christmas Banquet" is one of the most artistically conceived of all the tales, though its subject repels us; the wretchedness of life is shown in the persons of numerous guests through a succession of years, with the effect of a multiplicity of instances; yet at the end it is found that the worst wretch of all is the constant guest with the cold, unfeeling heart,--the climax of misery is not to have lived at all. The tale is carefully composed, especially in those points of keeping, balance, and contrast in which Hawthorne was expert, yet by some misadventure it fails to interpret itself clearly. In proportion, however, as imagination enters into these stories under the impulse of the artistic faculty, it will be seen that they lend themselves less readily to such definite classification as has thus far been attempted; the various elements of Hawthorne's genius and art draw together and combine, and in the group that remains to be noticed his originality is most conspicuous, and this requires a more flexible treatment, though without exception these tales fall under the head of the general life set forth reflectively in the forms of concrete imagination. Probably in no one point is Hawthorne's peculiarity so obviously marked as in the persistency with which he clings to a physical image, vividly impressing it upon the mind, like a text which gathers atmosphere and discloses significance under the special treatment of the preacher. It is said that he had, artistically, the allegorizing temperament, and he in fact did use all those forms of imagery--the fable, apologue, parable--which belong to this mode of presentation; but in his most effective work the allegory is more subtly embodied,--it exists in suggestion, and its appeal is as much emotional as didactic. The nucleus of this new mystery is the physical object that he seizes upon and in which his imagination works as if it were clay, recreating it so that it becomes more than pure symbol, as has been illustrated in "Lady Eleanore's Mantle;" and sometimes it is almost vitalized into a life of its own. This power of such an object to become the medium of thought and emotion as well as to convey merely allegorical meaning he gradually discovered; and doubtless he especially valued its function to afford by its crude definiteness a balance to the tenuous and impalpable, the vagueness, refinement, and mystery, to which it is the complement, in his art; he gains reality by its presence for what else, as a whole, might seem too insubstantial, too much a part of that shadow world in which he dreaded to dwell altogether. Such an object is, at all events, a necessity for him in his greater work. A crude form of it is the snake, in the tale of "The Bosom Serpent," one of those "allegories of the heart" which he apparently meant to write in a series of which he never found the key. The idea is an old one; the man with a snake in his bosom is a hypochondriac, who by centring his thoughts on himself has developed this fancy and is tortured by it. The cure is wrought when he forgets himself in returning to the love of his wife. The almost physical dismissal of the serpent into the fountain, which is neither averred nor denied, like a devil cast out as in old times, is puerile; but Hawthorne was, in other tales, not averse to a naturalistic explanation of his mysteries, as if a basis of matter of fact, however irrelevant essentially, gave more plausibility to their truth. If the snake is "egotism," if it is the torture of self in a man, if its cure is the loss of self in love, then making the snake real and physical is absurdity; medicine and morals are confounded; the scientific fact has nothing to do with the artistic meaning and is a concession to the gross senses of the reader. The story illustrates the method, rather than its successful application; for the physical horror is really greater here than the moral revulsion. In "The Minister's Black Veil" the object is more happily dealt with. It is to be noticed that Hawthorne did not invent these objects, he found them; and, in this case, he has used the tradition of an old Puritan minister of the past age. He uses the veil to typify man's concealment of himself from others, even the nearest; and while it visibly isolates the minister among his fellow-men, it finally unites him with them in a single lot; for to the mind's eye, educated by this image to a new power of seeing, all men wear this veil; humanity is clothed with it in life, and moulders away beneath it in the grave, whither its secrets are carried. The seeming exception is found to be the rule; the horror attaching to the one unseen face is now felt in all faces; the race is veiled, and the bit of crape has fallen like the blackness of night upon all life, for life has become a thing of darkness, a concealment. Here the moral idea is predominant, and in it the symbol issues into its full life. Hawthorne's art became always, not only more vividly symbolized, but more deeply moralized. The secrecy of men's bosoms was a matter that interested him very much; the idea had a fascination for him. It is the substance of the tale of "Young Goodman Brown," who goes to the witches' Sabbath in the Essex woods and there sees those who have taught him religion, the righteous and the good, men and women, and his own wife,--sees them or their devil-brewed phantasms; he calls on heaven, and finds himself suddenly alone; but when he returns to the village, and looks again on the venerable fathers and mothers of his childhood and his own tender and loving wife, he cannot free his mind from the doubt,--were they what they seemed or had he indeed beheld them there in the woods at their orgy? It is as if for him the veil were lifted, and he alone saw, like omniscience, into the bosoms of all. Suspicion, arising from his own contact with evil, though he escaped, has imparted the look of hypocrisy to all life; this is his bedevilment. Here the place of the physical object is taken by the incident of the woods, and the moral idea is less clearly stated; the story is one of those whose significance is felt to contain mystery which Hawthorne meant to remain in its dark state. In "The Birthmark" the physical object is again found as the initial point of the tale and the guiding clue of the imagination in working it out. The situation presents the opposition of the love of science to human love, but no conflict is described, because the first is the master passion from the beginning, and, being indulged, leads to the loss of the second in the death of the wife, who perishes in having the birthmark removed. The moral idea, as not unfrequently happens, seems to flake off from the tale, like the moral of the old fable, and is to the effect that imperfection belongs to mortal life, and if it is removed wholly mortality must go with it; and the lesson is of the acceptance of imperfection in what men love, as a permanent condition, and indeed almost as the humanizing feature, of earthly life. It is noticeable that the clergyman, the physician, and the artist are the only specific types that attracted Hawthorne; he held them all romantically, and science he conceived as alchemy. This same predisposition appears in "Rappaccini's Daughter;" she was the experiment of her father in creating a live poison-woman, a vitalized flower, the Dryad as it were of the poison-tree humanized in mortal shape; the physical object is here the flowering tree, with its heavy fragrance; and the plot lies only in the gradual transformation of the young man by continuous and unconscious inoculation until he is drawn into the circle of death to share the woman's isolation as a lover, both being shut off from their kind by the poison atmosphere that exhales from them; the catastrophe lies in the moral idea that for such poison there is no antidote but death, and the lady dies in drinking the draught that should free her. The fact that Hawthorne, when writing the story, said he did not know how it would end, is interesting as indicating that his literary habit was to let the story tell itself from within according to its impulses, and not to shape it from without by his own predetermined purpose; a pure allegorist, it may be observed, would have followed naturally the latter method. This may account for the indefiniteness and mystery of effect often felt, as well as for the inartistic didacticism in the concluding sentences, frequently to be observed, where it appears as one or more afterthoughts possibly to be drawn from the story, but not exhausting its moral significance. In this case, powerful as the tale is, the moral intention is left vague, though except as a parable the invention is meaningless. In the last story to be instanced, "The Artist of the Beautiful," the lucidity of the parable is complete. The physical object is the butterfly; on its wings the tale moves, and perishes in its destruction. The moral idea lies in the exposition of achievement as a freeing of the artist's soul so that his work has become a thing of indifference to him, let its fortunes be what they will,--it is the dead chrysalis from which he has escaped; and the isolation of the artist's life is set forth pathetically but with no suggestion of evil in it, for though the world has rejected him he lives in his own world in the calm of victory. No tale is so delicately wrought as this; in it the symbolism, which is carried out in minute and precise detail, the moral significance, which is as clear as it is deep, and the presence of a spiritual world in life for which a visible language is found, are all present, in harmonious blending; and it has the added and rare charm of happiness without loss of truth. It is unique; and if one were to choose a single tale, best representing Hawthorne's powers, methods, and successes, technically and temperamentally as well as in imaginative reach and spiritual appeal, it is by this he should be known. In these six tales in which Hawthorne's originality is most characteristically expressed, the idea of isolation is common to all; like the secrecy of men's bosoms, this solitude in life is a fixed idea in his imagination, an integral part of life as it was viewed by him, and he seldom freed his attention from it even temporarily. On the other hand, sin, conscience, evil, though their realm is felt to be a neighboring province, are not here directly dealt with. His probings in that sphere belong to a later time. These tales, like the others, are studies of life, not of the evil principle by itself as a thing of special interest; they view life as lying under a shadow, it is true, but this shadow is their atmosphere, not their world. The point should be defined, perhaps more explicitly: the Calvinism of New England, its interest in the perversion of man's will, his sinful state, and the mysterious modes of salvation, is not the region of Hawthorne's imagination, as here disclosed. It is enough to note this, here, as bearing on his representative character. The most surprising thing, however, is that his genius is found to be so purely objective; he himself emphasized the objectivity of his art. From the beginning, as has been said, he had no message, no inspiration welling up within him, no inward life of his own that sought expression. He was not even introspective. He was primarily a moralist, an observer of life, which he saw as a thing of the outside, and he was keen in observation, cool, interested. If there was any mystery in his tales, it was in the object, not in the author's breast; he makes no confessions either direct or indirect,--he describes the thing he sees. He maintained that his tales were perfectly intelligible, and he meant this to apply not only to style but to theme. It is best to cite his own testimony. His personal temper is indicated in the fragmentary phrase in the "Note-Books;" "not that I have any love of mystery, but because I abhor it," he writes; and again in the oft-quoted passage, he describes perfectly the way in which his nature cooperated with his art to give the common ground of human sympathy, but without anything peculiar to himself being called into play:-- "A cloudy veil stretches over the abyss of my nature. I have, however, no love of secrecy and darkness. I am glad to think that God sees through my heart, and, if any angel has power to penetrate into it, he is welcome to know everything that is there. Yes, and so may any mortal who is capable of full sympathy, and therefore worthy to come into my depths. But he must find his own way there. I can neither guide nor enlighten him. It is this involuntary reserve, I suppose, that has given the objectivity to my writings; and when people think that I am pouring myself out in a tale or an essay, I am merely telling what is common to human nature, not what is peculiar to myself. I sympathize with them, not they with me." In the preface to "Twice-Told Tales," which however was prefixed to a late edition and may be fairly held to cover his view of his tales in general, he directs attention to their objectivity in another form:-- "The sketches are not, it is hardly necessary to say, profound; but it is rather more remarkable that they so seldom, if ever, show any design on the writer's part to make them so. They have none of the abstruseness of idea or obscurity of expression which mark the written communications of a solitary mind with itself. They never need translation. It is, in fact, the style of a man of society. Every sentence, so far as it embodies thought or sensibility, may be understood and felt by anybody who will give himself the trouble to read it, and will take up the book in a proper mood." A little further on he adds his statement of what the sketches both are and are not:-- "They are not the talk of a secluded man with his own mind and heart (had it been so, they could hardly have failed to be more deeply and permanently valuable), but his attempts, and very imperfectly successful ones, to open an intercourse with the world." To Hawthorne himself these tales seemed so external; and his analysis, however much may be allowed for modesty in the statement, appears to be true. Hawthorne left himself out of his work, so far as a man can. Indeed, his own life was neither vigorous nor one of much variety of faculty, outside of his art. He had the indolence of the meditative habit, or of the artistic nature, if one chooses to call it so. He clearly spent a great deal of time doing nothing in particular; he read, observed the world of the passing seasons, made long memoranda of nature and human nature and short notes of ideas for tales and sketches, and had in fact large leisure, except in the years when he was in the Boston Custom House, and he was not without leisure even then. He shows no inclination toward scholarship, but was a desultory reader of English, with some French; he had no intellectual interests, apparently, of a philosophical kind; the aloofness in which he stood from Longfellow and Emerson, for example, was not shyness of nature wholly, but stood for the real aloofness of his mind from their ways of life, from the things that absorbed them in their poetic and speculative activity; it is but another example, if it is added that he took no interest in public affairs, truly speaking. He was a Democrat, but that does not fully account for his indifference to those philanthropies which his literary friends shared; for, as a party man, he was not zealous. His nature was torpid in all these ways; there was dullness of temperament, indifference to all except the one thing in which he truly lived, his artistic nature; and here he was an observer, using an objective method with as little indebtedness to personal experience as ever artist had. His reserve amounted to suppression; and, in fact, his personal life was not of the sort that must find a voice. He seemed to feel that the "Twice-Told Tales," at least, which he described as "memorials of tranquil and not unhappy years," had contracted some faintness of life from their author's mind, as if a low vital tone characterized them, owing to his incapacity to yield himself with fullness of power even to this reflective or creative art:-- "They have the pale tint of flowers that blossomed in too retired a shade,--the coolness of a meditative habit, which diffuses itself through the feeling and observation of every sketch. Instead of passion there is sentiment; and, even in what purport to be pictures of actual life, we have allegory, not always so warmly dressed in its habiliments of flesh and blood as to be taken into the reader's mind without a shiver. Whether from lack of power, or an unconquerable reserve, the Author's touches have often an effect of tameness; the merriest man can hardly contrive to laugh at his broadest humor; the tenderest woman, one would suppose, will hardly shed warm tears at his deepest pathos. The book, if you would see anything in it, requires to be read in the clear, brown, twilight atmosphere in which it was written; if opened in the sunshine, it is apt to look exceedingly like a volume of blank pages." This is, of course, the natural overstatement of an author whose work has gone from him and seems less vital because he has outlived it; but nevertheless it contains sound judgment as to the limitations of his art. But notwithstanding Hawthorne's objectivity and reserve, of which he justly makes so much, and the low vital tone of his work, resulting from whatever cause, he did not altogether escape from himself in his art; his shadow followed him into that world. The "clear brown twilight atmosphere" of which he speaks was an affair of temperament; it exhaled from his personality. That recurring idea of isolation, the sense of the secrecy of men's bosoms, the perception of life as always lying in the shadow that falls on it, proceeded from predilections of his own, differentiating him from other men; there may have been no very perilous stuff in his breast, nothing to confess or record peculiar to himself in act or experience, no intensity of self-life, but there was this temperament of the solitary brooder upon life. In that common fund of human nature which he said was the basis of sympathy between himself and the world, there was also some specialization, which is rightly ascribed to his race qualities. He took practically no interest in life except as seen under its moral aspects as a life of the soul; and this absorption in the moral sphere was due to his being a child of New England. It was his inheritance from Puritanism. What distinguished Puritan life and the people who grew up under its influences was an intense self- consciousness of life in the soul,--in a word, spirituality of life; and Hawthorne, as he came to find himself in his growth, disclosed one form of this spirituality both reflectively and imaginatively in his writings, the form that lived in him. The moral world, the supremacy of the soul's interests, how life fared in the soul, was his region; he thought about nothing else. He desired to present what he saw through the medium of romantic art, but he was never able to be wholly content with this medium; he desired to make assurance doubly sure by expressing it in its abstract moral terms also, either explicitly in an idea which shows through the story, or else imperfectly in an allegory or symbol where the moral element should be definitely felt in its intellectual, its unartistic form. The fact that this abstract element really outvalues the tale and its characters is shown, for example, by the lack of interest one feels in the future of his characters, in what becomes of them at the end of the story; they are lost from the mind, because their function is fulfilled in illustrating an idea; and, that once conveyed, the characters cease to have life,--they disappear, like the man of science or the artist of the beautiful, into the background of the general world; they fade out. It is by this abstract moral element that Hawthorne's art is universalized. His manner, it must be acknowledged, retains provinciality; in the best of the tales, just as in those sketches of observation in Salem, there is something countrified in the mode of handling, something archaic and stiff in the literary mould, something awkward, cramped, and bare in the way his art works in its main motions, however felicitous in word and fall is the garment of prose as language. There is a lack of urban ease, certainty, and perfection of manner. The limitation, however, stops there. The world in which the artist works is the universal world of man's nature, just as much as is Shakespeare's. He escapes from provincialism here, in the substance, because he was a New Englander, not in spite of that fact; for the spirituality which is the central fact of New England life itself escapes from provincialism, being a pure expression of that Christianity in which alone true cosmopolitanism is found, of that faith which presents mankind as one and indivisible. Hence arises in Hawthorne a second distinctly Puritan trait, his democracy. He looks only at the soul; all outward distinctions of rank and place, fortune, pride, poverty, disappear as unconcerning things; he sees all men as in the light of the judgment day. He does this naturally, too, almost without knowing it, so inbred in him is that preconception of the Christian soul, whose moral fortune constitutes alone the significance of life. In these ways the race element, the New England element, is shown; from it springs the moral prepossession of his art, its universal quality, and its democratic substance. This was the nucleus of inheritance and breeding, which together with his temperament governs his art from within, even amid all its personal reserve and its objectivity. The gradually increasing power of these elements gave his tales greater intensity and reach, and was to lift his romances to another level; for what was inchoate and experimental in the tales, in many ways, was to receive a new and greater development in his later work, on which his world-wide fame rests. The tales had not brought him fame; as yet, his audience was small, and confined to New England. He had advanced so far as to seem like one talking to his friends, instead of, as at first, one talking to himself in a dark place, as he said; but recognition, such as he desired, he had not obtained. There is certainly some irritation in his repeated references to the early neglect he felt from the public, at the time when, as he says, he "was for a good many years the obscurest man of letters in America." He thought this lack of appreciation palsied his efforts, so that he did not do what he might have done, and it may have been the case; but before the days when he wrote "The Artist of the Beautiful" he must have learned that one must serve the Muses for themselves alone. V. THE SCARLET LETTER. Amid the hard conditions of his life at Concord Hawthorne had decided to place himself again under the aegis of his political friends to earn his living as a public officer. He had no confidence in his literary capacity as a means of livelihood. He found himself, he says, unable to write more than a third of the time, and he composed slowly and with difficulty; he refers more than once to that hatred of the pen which belongs to a tired writer, and he was frequently indisposed to composition for long periods; and, in any event, he thought that what he wrote must appeal necessarily to so small an audience that, should he continue to devote himself exclusively to a literary career, he must do so as a professional hack-writer of children's books, translations, newspaper essays, and such miscellaneous drudgery. His habits, formed in his years at Salem, included an element of large leisure, an indulgence of one's self in times and seasons of mental activity, a certain lethargy of life; and he had not shown any power of sustained production in the monotony of daily work for bread. He felt a dread of such necessity. "God keep me," he writes to Hillard before this time, "from ever being really a writer for bread!" The only alternative for him was office-holding. The election of Polk to the Presidency gave his friends the opening, and the campaign to secure an appointment was begun. Bridge, then living in bachelor quarters at Portsmouth Navy Yard, conceived the rather daring idea of a sailor house-party with Hawthorne as its centre, for the purpose of making him acquainted with the political group in whose hands influence lay; and, if it be remembered that the Hawthornes had not spent an evening out for years, and still continued their seclusive life, the proposition may well seem a bold stroke. The party, however, gathered in the summer of 1845; Franklin Pierce and his wife, Senator Atherton and his wife, of New Hampshire, and Senator Fairfield of Maine, to mention the notables, were the principal guests, and there were several others, making a greater company than Hawthorne had been thrown with since he lodged at Brook Farm. It was an informal naval picnic, apparently, of two or three weeks, and Bridge thought that its main object of popularizing Hawthorne with the Senators was attained. The point of attack was the Salem Post Office, but this proved impracticable, and attention was turned to the Custom House, where either the surveyorship or the naval office might be got. Meanwhile Bancroft offered him a clerkship in the Charlestown Navy Yard, which he declined. He was sufficiently sure of success to make him remove from Concord to Salem to reside, and early in October he was established again in the old chamber of his youth, having decided to share his mother's house for the present. He spent his time in writing the introductory sketch of the Old Manse, and in seeing the "Mosses" through the press. The appointment lagged, owing to local complications in the party, but an arrangement was finally made which was agreeable to all concerned, so that Hawthorne took office without enmity from disappointed candidates who would have benefited if he had not appeared upon the scene backed by what must have been locally regarded as outside interference. He received notice of his nomination as surveyor on March 23, 1846, and it was described "as decidedly popular with the party," as well as with men of letters and the community; he soon took charge of the office, those who had made way for him were appointed inspectors under him, and he entered on the enjoyment of a salary of twelve hundred dollars. It was indeed a singular chance of life that had transformed the recluse romancer of the silent Herbert Street house, where for all the years of early manhood he had lived unnoticed and almost unknown, into the high business official of the Custom House, the lofty neighbor of that humble dwelling, on whose wide granite steps, columned portico, and emblematic eagle, with the flag over all, he must have looked so often with never a thought that there was to be his distinguished place in the world of men; and yet Hawthorne, on coming into this office, seems to have been pleased with a sense of making a part of Salem as his ancestors had done in the old days. He did not love Salem, but genuine truth gives body to those passages of autobiography in which he claims his parentage and kinship and seems writing the obituary of his race there, in connection with his memories of the Custom House. He knew himself a story-teller whom these ancestors would little approve, for all his mask as the surveyor, but in his official place he felt himself a Salemite with some peculiar thoroughness; and, familiar as the passage is, no other words can take the place of his own expression of this sense of rootedness in the soil, which is so close to the secret of his genius:-- "This old town of Salem--my native place, though I have dwelt much away from it, both in boyhood and maturer years--possesses, or did possess, a hold on my affections, the force of which I have never realized during my seasons of actual residence here. Indeed, so far as its physical aspect is concerned, with its flat, unvaried surface, covered chiefly with wooden houses, few or none of which pretend to architectural beauty,--its irregularity, which is neither picturesque nor quaint, but only tame,--its long and lazy street lounging wearisomely through the whole extent of the peninsula, with Gallows Hill and New Guinea at one end, and a view of the almshouse at the other,--such being the features of my native town, it would be quite as reasonable to form a sentimental attachment to a disarranged checkerboard. And yet, though invariably happiest elsewhere, there is within me a feeling for old Salem, which, in lack of a better phrase, I must be content to call affection. The sentiment is probably assignable to the deep and aged roots which my family has struck into the soil. It is now nearly two centuries and a quarter since the original Briton, the earliest emigrant of my name, made his appearance in the wild and forest-bordered settlement, which has since become a city. And here his descendants have been born and died, and have mingled their earthly substance with the soil, until no small portion of it must necessarily be akin to the mortal frame wherewith, for a little while, I walk the streets. In part, therefore, the attachment which I speak of is the mere sensuous sympathy of dust for dust. Few of my countrymen can know what it is; nor, as frequent transplantation is perhaps better for the stock, need they consider it desirable to know. "But the sentiment has likewise its moral quality. The figure of that first ancestor, invested by family tradition with a dim and dusky grandeur, was present to my boyish imagination, as far back as I can remember. It still haunts me, and induces a sort of home-feeling with the past, which I scarcely claim in reference to the present phase of the town. I seem to have a stronger claim to a residence here on account of this grave, bearded, sable-cloaked and steeple-crowned progenitor,--who came so early, with his Bible and his sword, and trode the unworn street with such a stately port, and made so large a figure, as a man of war and peace,--a stronger claim than for myself, whose name is seldom heard and my face hardly known. He was a soldier, legislator, judge; he was a ruler in the Church; he had all the Puritanic traits, both good and evil. He was likewise a bitter persecutor, as witness the Quakers, who have remembered him in their histories, and relate an incident of his hard severity towards a woman of their sect, which will last longer, it is to be feared, than any record of his better deeds, although these were many. His son, too, inherited the persecuting spirit, and made himself so conspicuous in the martyrdom of the witches, that their blood may fairly be said to have left a stain upon him. So deep a stain, indeed, that his old dry bones, in the Charter Street burial-ground, must still retain it, if they have not crumbled utterly to dust!... Let them scorn me as they will, strong traits of their nature have intertwined themselves with mine. "Planted deep, in the town's earliest infancy and childhood, by these two earnest and energetic men, the race has ever since subsisted here,-- always, too, in respectability; never, so far as I have known, disgraced by a single unworthy member; but seldom or never, on the other hand, after the first two generations, performing any memorable deed, or so much as putting forward a claim to public notice. Gradually, they have sunk almost out of sight, as old houses, here and there about the streets, get covered halfway to the eaves by the accumulation of new soil. From father to son, for above a hundred years, they followed the sea; a gray-headed shipmaster, in each generation, retiring from the quarter-deck to the homestead, while a boy of fourteen took the hereditary place before the mast, confronting the salt spray and the gale, which had blustered against his sire and grandsire. The boy, also, in due time, passed from the forecastle to the cabin, spent a tempestuous manhood, and returned from his world-wanderings, to grow old, and die, and mingle his dust with the natal earth. This long connection of a family with one spot, as its place of birth and burial, creates a kindred between the human being and the locality, quite independent of any charm in the scenery or moral circumstances that surround him. It is not love, but instinct. The new inhabitant--who came himself from a foreign land, or whose father or grandfather came--has little claim to be called a Salemite; he has no conception of the oysterlike tenacity with which an old settler, over whom his third century is creeping, clings to the spot where his successive generations have been imbedded. It is no matter that the place is joyless for him; that he is weary of the old wooden houses, the mud and dust, the dead level of site and sentiment, the chill east wind, and the dullest of social atmospheres,--all these, and whatever faults besides he may see or imagine, are nothing to the purpose. The spell survives, and just as powerfully as if the natal spot were an earthly paradise. So has it been in my case. I felt it almost as a destiny to make Salem my home; so that the mould of features and cast of character which had all along been familiar here--ever, as one representative of the race lay down in his grave, another assuming, as it were, his sentry-march along the main street--might still in my little day be seen and recognized in the old town.... On emerging from the Old Manse, it was chiefly this strange, indolent, unjoyous attachment for my native town that brought me to fill a place in Uncle Sam's brick edifice, when I might as well, or better, have gone somewhere else. My doom was on me." Long as this extract is, it dispenses with pages of critical analysis, and the hundred details requisite to build up such an impression of ancestry from the soil, of the way in which the New England past had entered into the fibre of Hawthorne's nature, of the sort of historic consciousness that was latent, like clairvoyance, in his imagination. Here, too, it serves to give Hawthorne a natural right in his new public place in the community. He did not feel himself a stranger there; the floor of the Custom House was as much home to his feet as a ship's deck. He made, it is said, a good surveyor, as in Boston previously he had been an excellent under officer. His duties were not arduous; they consumed about three hours and a half of his day, leaving him ample leisure. He has himself made of his stay at the Custom House a half humorous story by drawing the characters of his associates and setting forth the general atmosphere of the place with such lifelike drollery as only genius can achieve. He does it with no kindly hand. He was capable of great irritation, at times; and, as was shown on rare occasions, he had outbursts of anger. Dr. Loring describes him as "tempestuous and irresistible when aroused," and tells the anecdote of one dismayed captain who "fled up the wharf and took refuge in the office, inquiring, 'What in God's name have you sent on board my ship as an inspector?'" In writing of his old associates satirically, he was not indulging in any rage of anger, but he would hardly have felt the impulse to give his pen such liberty unless grievances had still rankled in his memory. The scene he sets forth is one of burlesque, done like fiction. "On ascending the steps you would discern," he says, "a row of venerable figures, sitting in old-fashioned chairs, which were tipped on their hind legs back against the wall. Oftentimes they were asleep, but occasionally might be heard talking together, in voices between speech and a snore, and with that lack of energy that distinguishes the occupants of almshouses, and all other human beings who depend for subsistence on charity, on monopolized labor, or anything else but their own independent exertions. These old gentlemen--seated, like Matthew, at the receipt of customs, but not very liable to be summoned thence, like him, for apostolic errands--were Custom House officers." When he comes to the details, in this style, the portrait approaches--if it does not realize--caricature. There was another side, we may be sure, to the lives and characters of these men whom Hawthorne has portrayed as if human nature existed to be the pigment of an artist's brush and should laugh or weep, look silly or solemn, at the whim of his temperament and will. All the time he got on with them very amiably, and if he found some of them in his own silent thoughts rather foolish and superfluous, doubtless it would have been the same in any other group among whom his lot might have been thrown. With others of his associates, whatever he thought of them and their ways, he was friendly and tolerant, if not sociable; it was in connection with these that the gossip circulated of his "loafing about with hard drinkers." Dr. Loring describes them to the life as "a group of men all of whom had remarkable characteristics, not of the best many times, but original, strong, highly-flavored, defiant democrats, with whom he was officially connected, who made no appeal to him, but responded to the uncultivated side of his nature, and to whose defects he was blind on account of their originality." This picture must be added to that which Hawthorne gave, and between the two, if some allowance, also, be made for the unfavorable temper in which he wrote, it will appear, perhaps, that in the Custom House he found human nature about as it is always in an office having to do with sea business, in which naturally a rough, racy, unpolished, original, sturdy stock took a leading part, and a place was found for the retired old hulks of the profession to enjoy a comfortable anchorage. Hawthorne, in fact, repeated in the Custom House the experience he had formerly had on the Boston wharf and at Brook Farm. At first, the change was a pleasure and a relief to him. He had once more escaped, if not from the dreamland of his own solitary fancy, at least from the unreality which the literary life seems always to have had for him, and which he now associated particularly with the character of his friendships. The tone of relief is unmistakable:-- "After my fellowship of toil and impracticable schemes with the dreamy brethren of Brook Farm; after living for three years within the subtile influence of an intellect like Emerson's; after those wild, free days on the Assabeth, indulging fantastic speculations, beside our fire of fallen boughs, with Ellery Channing; after talking with Thoreau about pine-trees and Indian relics, in his hermitage at Walden; after growing fastidious by sympathy with the classic refinement of Hillard's culture; after becoming imbued with poetic sentiment at Longfellow's hearth-stone,--it was time, at length, that I should exercise other faculties of my nature, and nourish myself with food for which I had hitherto had little appetite. Even the old inspector was desirable, as a change of diet, to a man who had known Alcott. I look upon it as an evidence, in some measure, of a system naturally well balanced, and lacking no essential part of a thorough organization, that, with such associates to remember, I could mingle at once with men of altogether different qualities, and never murmur at the change." So he mixed in the new scene, laughed with the others at the old sea-yarns and jokes, joined in with his associates on more even terms than was his habit with the literary friends of Concord, and was once more a part of this material world. But it was not long before the old disgust and restlessness came over him; he felt his imaginative nature deadened; this after all was not his own life, and the figures that moved in it, the business they were concerned with, the existence they led round about him took on the same shabby color of fact that had formerly spread over the coal and salt of the wharf, and the manure of Brook Farm; and that feeling of repulsion from it all, which came to involve also a half-contempt for the people and their affairs, grew in him. He describes the torpor that fell upon his faculties; he ceased to write, just as in the earlier time; he could not create, and though he had time enough, and the sea and the woods and the winter moonlight were all there, they did not unlock his magical power as of old. He laments over it, but confesses it; he had temporarily ceased to be a man of letters. Domestic affairs contributed to withhold him from his pen. The old Herbert Street house had proved an inconvenient domicile for the two families, and they had removed to a dwelling in Chestnut Street. For a while Mrs. Hawthorne had been absent in Boston, and there a boy, Julian, had been born, so that there were two children in the nursery. It was in this room that Hawthorne spent his afternoons, for he had no study, and there for a year his desk stood, says his wife, without having been once opened. They moved again to another house, more easily adapted to the needs of both households, in Mall Street, and here Hawthorne again had a study "high from all noise," and Madame Hawthorne was provided for with a suite wholly separate. She and her two daughters still maintained the lifelong habit of isolation. "Elizabeth," says Mrs. Hawthorne, "is an invisible entity. I have seen her but once in two years; and Louisa never intrudes;" and she adds her satisfaction in knowing that Madame Hawthorne would have the pleasure of her son's and the children's company for the rest of her life. "I am so glad to win her out of that Castle Dismal, and from the mysterious chamber into which no mortal ever peeped till Una was born, and Julian,--for they alone have entered the _penetralia_. Into that chamber the sun never shines. Into these rooms in Mall Street it blazes without stint." Mrs. Hawthorne was very happy in this life with her husband, though they were still retired in their habits. He had, however, become an officer of the Lyceum, and they attended the lectures. They went out very seldom, only on such an occasion as when Emerson was visiting a neighbor, for example. The happiness was all indoors and in their hearts. "No art nor beauty," the wife writes, "can excel my daily life, with such a husband and such children, the exponents of all art and beauty. I really have not even the temptation to go out of my house to find anything better." The husband expresses the same felicity, in his turn, repeatedly, as on one occasion during a visit of Mrs. Hawthorne in Boston. "Oh, Phoebe," he writes to her, "I want thee much. Thou art the only person in the world that ever was necessary to me. Other people have occasionally been more or less agreeable; but I think I was always more at ease alone than in anybody's company, till I knew thee. And now I am only myself when thou art within my reach. Thou art an unspeakably beloved woman." They still spent their evenings together, mostly in reading. He never wrote at night, and for a year and a half seems not to have written at all, except some slight unremembered article, it might be, for a Salem newspaper. In November, 1847, he began to compose regularly every afternoon. In the year following he produced "The Snow Image," "The Great Stone Face," "Main Street," and possibly "Ethan Brand," but these, with the exception of the third, which appeared in Elizabeth Peabody's "Aesthetic Papers," 1849, remained unpublished. He had exhausted himself as a writer of short tales and sketches; the kind no longer appealed to him, and he wrote with much difficulty and against the grain. "At length," he writes in a letter of literary business, December 14, 1848, "by main strength I have wrenched and torn an idea out of my miserable brain; or rather, the fragment of an idea, like a tooth ill-drawn, and leaving the roots to torture me." His imagination had, in fact, begun to work upon a larger scale and in a higher world of art, though he apparently did not know the change in scope that he was undergoing, and thought of his new story only as a longer tale; the idea of "The Scarlet Letter," after lying for some years in his brain, was unfolding in the form of a great romance. It was to be his resource when the Custom House failed. It was on June 8, 1849, that the news of his dismissal from office came. Tyler's Whig administration had come in, and Democratic heads would naturally fall; but Hawthorne, having obtained office, as he conceived it, as a literary man provided for by government, had not expected to be turned out on the change of parties, especially as he was not a partisan or in fact a politician at all. He resented the action, even when it was only threatened, as unjust, and took some steps to secure himself in place by suggesting an appeal to men in Boston, among whom he mentions Rufus Choate, "whose favorable influence," he says, "would make it impossible to remove me, and whose support and sympathy might fairly be obtained on my behalf,--not on the ground that I am a very good writer, but because I gained my position, such as it is, by my literary character, and have done nothing to forfeit that tenure." When he found, however, that he had been removed, ostensibly at least, on the ground of a paper forwarded from Salem and charging him with political partisanship, both as a writer for the newspaper press and in his official capacity, his resentment became a much warmer feeling. The story of a removal from office is usually unedifying, and there is no occasion to go into all the details. It appears that one man, Charles W. Upham, was especially singled out by Hawthorne as the principal mover, and on him he deliberately avenged himself at a later time. The charges Hawthorne met very fully and specifically, and showed that he had indeed rather incurred the reproach of his party for not taking a partisan course than deserved the criticism of his enemies. He was, however, very angry; his wife writes to her father, "The lion was roused in him;" and the numerous letters to his friends show that he was much disturbed, but much more by what he regarded as the attack made secretly upon his character than by the loss of the office. There was a small tempest in the town, in which his friends male and female bore their part, and plans of one kind and another were discussed to secure his retention; but, as usually happens in such cases, the affair soon blew over. In a political scuffle, Hawthorne was a man out of his element. The most unfortunate thing in the whole incident was the effect it had on Hawthorne's attachment to his native place. It turned his cold love to a bitter feeling that he never overcame; and it also threw upon Salem the reproach of having injured as well as neglected her most famous son. Citizens of both parties joined in the movement by which he was ousted, and no one of influence withstood them; but there was probably no enmity in the matter, and the simple explanation, perhaps, was that the new candidate had more cordial friends in the community on both sides, for Hawthorne was not personally popular with the merchants as a class. He kept them at a distance just as he did men of letters, and could not mix with them on even and frank terms. Dr. Loring, in discussing the subject of Hawthorne's treatment by his fellow townsmen, very justly says that "Salem did not treat its illustrious son, at all, because he gave it no opportunity." He was, so far as then appeared, an author, forty-five years old, who had written two or three books of short tales and sketches, not yet famous, and he held a not very lucrative public office, which he had secured, not in the usual way, by party service, but by the political influence of his old college mates, who were strangers to the town. He was inoffensive, but he was not liked, and took no pains to make himself one of the community; he was ignored by the citizens of the place because he ignored them, and when his Washington friends lost power, there was no one else interested in keeping him in office, and he had no influence of his own on the spot. In private life he was uncommonly solitary, and he was in no sense a public man. What happened was perfectly natural, and might fairly have been foreseen; for the notion of providing a government post for a man because he was an author, and retaining him in it by a literary tenure, must have seemed very novel to the gentlemen of the Essex district in those days, as it would seem now. But Hawthorne had the sense of superiority, the silent, suppressed pride, the susceptibility of a solitary nature; and whatever might be the public side of the matter, of which he was no very good judge, privately he felt aggrieved and outraged; that irritability toward the general public which has already been remarked upon, just because he was "for some years the most obscure man of letters in America," was condensed, as it were, and discharged upon Salem, which stood as the deaf and blind and hateful embodiment of the unappreciative world that would have none of him, but rather took away the little bread and salt he had contrived to earn for himself, and would not give him room even in a paltry office among the old sea-dogs he has described. "I mean as soon as possible," he writes two months later, "to bid farewell forever to this abominable city." Apart from the disagreeable circumstances of his removal and the penniless condition in which it left him, there is no reason to think that Hawthorne was anything but happy to leave office. His first thought was of his poverty; before he had laid down the telegram he heard the wolf at the door. He at once wrote the news to Hillard, and after saying that he had paid his old debts but had saved nothing, requests his friendly aid in words through which, brief and straight as they are, one feels the stern grip of the fact as it immediately took hold on him, the poor man's need:-- "If you could do anything in the way of procuring me some stated literary employment, in connection with a newspaper, or as corrector of the press to some printing establishment, etc., it could not come at a better time. Perhaps Epes Sargent, who is a friend of mine, would know of something. I shall not stand upon my dignity; that must take care of itself. Perhaps there may be some subordinate office connected with the Boston Athenaeum. Do not think anything too humble to be mentioned to me.... The intelligence has just reached me, and Sophia has not yet heard it. She will bear it like a woman,--that is to say, better than a man." He went home at once to tell his wife, and as his son tells the story, on his meeting her expression of pleasure at seeing him so soon with the remark that "he had left his head behind him," she exclaimed, "Oh, then you can write your book!" and when he smiled and answered that it "would be agreeable to know where their bread and rice were to come from while the story was writing," she brought forth from a hiding-place "a pile of gold"--it appears to have been one hundred and fifty dollars--that she had saved from the household weekly expenses. So for the time being anxiety was lessened. The fact that Hawthorne was glad at heart to be free again comes out in many ways. Something may be due to his wife's bearing the news "better than a man," perhaps, but on the same day it came she is found writing to her mother, "I have not seen my husband happier than since this turning out. He has felt in chains for a long time, and being a man he is not alarmed at being set on his own feet again,--or on his _head_ I might say, for that contains the available gold of a mine scarcely yet worked at all." He himself, a few days later, writes to Hillard, "I have come to feel that it is not good for me to be here. I am in a lower moral state than I have been--a duller intellectual one. So let me go; and, under God's providence, I shall arrive at something better." It would not be long before he would be looking back to the last three years, and saying, "The life of the Custom House lies like a dream behind me," in almost the identical words that he used of Boston wharfs and the Brook Farmers. The pendulum of temperament had swung again to the other extreme, and he was now all for the imaginative world once more. There was, however, to be one sad experience before his new life began. In the midst of these troubles, while he was still writing his vain letters and receiving the vain sympathy of his friends in the injury he had felt, his mother fell into serious illness, and it was plain that the end of her long vigil was near. With that strange impulse which led Hawthorne, out of his sensitive reserve and almost morbid seclusion, to make an open book of his private life, writing it all at large in his journals, he spent the hours of her last days in describing the scenes and incidents of the house in its shadow of death. His wife had the main care of the invalid, and to him was left the charge of the children, Una and Julian, who played in the yard in the warm July weather and were seized with the singular fancy of acting over in their play the scenes of the sick chamber above, while their father watched them from the window of his room and wrote down their prattle. Hawthorne was attached to his mother, and had been a good son, but there was something now that startled his nature, perhaps in the unusual nearness in which he found himself to her life, and he was hardly prepared for the distress of the circumstances. His wife wrote, "My husband came near a brain fever after seeing her for an hour;" and the hour is the one which Hawthorne himself recorded, in a passage vividly recalling the tone and character of those scenes in which Carlyle painted the darker moments of his own shadow-haunted life:-- "About five o'clock I went to my mother's chamber, and was shocked to see such an alteration since my last visit. I love my mother; but there has been, ever since boyhood, a sort of coldness of intercourse between us, such as is apt to come between persons of strong feelings if they are not managed rightly. I did not expect to be much moved at the time,--that is to say, not to feel any overpowering emotion struggling just then,--though I knew that I should deeply remember and regret her. Mrs. Dike was in the chamber; Louisa pointed to a chair near the bed, but I was moved to kneel down close by my mother, and take her hand. She knew me, but could only murmur a few indistinct words; among which I understood an injunction to take care of my sisters. Mrs. Dike left the chamber, and then I found the tears slowly gathering in my eyes. I tried to keep them down, but it would not be; I kept filling up, till, for a few moments, I shook with sobs. For a long time I knelt there, holding her hand; and surely it is the darkest hour I ever lived. Afterwards I stood by the open window and looked through the crevice of the curtain. The shouts, laughter, and cries of the two children had come up into the chamber from the open air, making a strange contrast with the death-bed scene. And now, through the crevice of the curtain, I saw my little Una of the golden locks, looking very beautiful, and so full of spirit and life that she was life itself. And then I looked at my poor dying mother, and seemed to see the whole of human existence at once, standing in the dusty midst of it." The next day the children continued the play--they have never left it off--of their grandmother's death-bed, and Hawthorne writes it all down in his journal with minute realism. His genius felt some appeal in it that let him go on unchecked in the transcript of baby-life mocking death in all innocence and unwitting:-- "Now Una is transformed into grandmamma, and Julian is mamma taking care of her. She groans, and speaks with difficulty, and moves herself feebly and wearisomely; then lies perfectly still, as if in an insensible state; then rouses herself and calls for wine; then lies down on her back with clasped hands; then puts them to her head. It recalls the scene of yesterday to me with frightful distinctness; and out of the midst of it little Una looks at me with a smile of glee. Again, Julian assumes the character. 'You're dying now,' says Una; 'so you must lie still,'"--and so the journal goes on through the slow quarter-hours, till it stops when Madame Hawthorne's heart ceased to beat. The death of his mother removed the last and only reason for Hawthorne's continuing to reside in Salem, but he remained there through the summer and winter. He was hard at work on "The Scarlet Letter," perhaps being more absorbed in it than he ever was in any other of his compositions. It was a time of much trouble in every way. There was sickness in the family, he was himself afflicted with pain, and his wife's sister Elizabeth Peabody seems to have come to the rescue of domestic comfort for the household. O'Sullivan, the kind-hearted editor of the defunct "Democratic Review," bethought himself of his old debt to Hawthorne and sent him a hundred dollars; so the purse was replenished. It was in early winter that the cheerful personality of James T. Fields, the publisher, appeared on the scene, and it was a fortunate hour for Hawthorne that brought such an appreciative, enthusiastic, and faithful friend to his door. Fields was just the man to warm Hawthorne's genius into action,--cordial, whole-souled, and happily not so much a man of letters as to repel him with that alienation which he certainly felt in his contact with authors by profession like Emerson and his other contemporaries. Fields was, too, in a very real sense, the messenger and herald of fame standing at last in the humble doorway of the Mall Street house that had latterly been the scene of such a tangle of human events. The anecdote of what he found there is finely told in his own words:-- "I found him alone in a chamber over the sitting-room of the dwelling; and as the day was cold, he was hovering near a stove. We fell into talk about his future prospects, and he was, as I feared I should find him, in a very desponding mood. 'Now,' said I, 'is the time for you to publish, for I know during these years in Salem you must have got something ready for the press.' 'Nonsense,' said he, 'what heart had I to write anything, when my publishers have been so many years trying to sell a small edition of the "Twice-Told Tales"?' I still pressed upon him the good chances he would have now with something new. 'Who would risk publishing a book for _me_, the most unpopular writer in America?' 'I would,' said I, 'and would start with an edition of two thousand copies of anything you write.' 'What madness!' he exclaimed; 'Your friendship for me gets the better of your judgment. No, no,' he continued; 'I have no money to indemnify a publisher's losses on my account.' I looked at my watch, and found that the train would soon be starting for Boston, and I knew there was not much time to lose in trying to discover what had been his literary work during these last few years in Salem. I remember that I pressed him to reveal to me what he had been writing. He shook his head, and gave me to understand that he had produced nothing. At that moment I caught sight of a bureau or set of drawers near where we were sitting; and immediately it occurred to me that hidden away somewhere in that article of furniture was a story or stories by the author of the 'Twice-Told Tales,' and I became so positive of it that I charged him vehemently with the fact. He seemed surprised, I thought, but shook his head again; and I rose to take my leave, begging him not to come into the cold entry, saying I would come back and see him again in a few days. I was hurrying down the stairs when he called after me from the chamber, asking me to stop a moment. Then quickly stepping into the entry with a roll of manuscript in his hands, he said: 'How, in Heaven's name, did you know this thing was there? As you found me out, take what I have written, and tell me, after you get home and have time to read it, if it is good for anything. It is either very good or very bad,--I don't know which.' On my way up to Boston I read the germ of 'The Scarlet Letter.'" The romance that was thus captured was not yet in the form which it finally took. Hawthorne had conceived it as a rather longer tale of the same sort that he had previously written, and designed to make it one story in a new collection such as his former volumes had been. He thought it was too gloomy to stand alone, and in fact did not suspect that here was a new kind of work, such that it would put an end forever to his old manner of writing. He intended to call the new volume "Old-Time Legends: together with Sketches, Experimental and Ideal,"--a title that is fairly ghostly with the transcendental nonage of his genius, pale, abstract, ineffectual, with oblivion lurking in every syllable. Fields knew better than that. But he gave him something more than advice; he cheered him with his extravagant appreciation, as it seemed to Hawthorne, and invigorated him by a true sympathy with his success. Fields urged that the story be elaborated, filled out, and made into a single volume; and, under this wise suggestion, Hawthorne went to work upon it with renewed interest and with something probably of the power of a new ambition. His friends, too, had come to his aid with material assistance, and apart from the fact that he was thus enabled to go on with the labor of composition, free from the immediate pressure of poverty and its trials of the spirit, he was stimulated by their confidence and kindness to do all he could for himself. Hillard was the medium of this friendliness, and accompanied the considerable sum of money with a letter, January 17, 1850:-- "It occurred to me and some other of your friends that, in consideration of the events of the last year, you might at this time be in need of a little pecuniary aid. I have therefore collected, from some of those who admire your genius and respect your character, the enclosed sum of money, which I send you with my warmest wishes for your health and happiness. I know the sensitive edge of your temperament; but do not speak or think of obligation. It is only paying, in a very imperfect measure, the debt we owe you for what you have done for American Literature. Could you know the readiness with which every one to whom I applied contributed to this little offering, and could you have heard the warm expressions with which some accompanied their gift, you would have felt that the bread you had cast upon the waters had indeed come back to you. Let no shadow of despondency, my dear friend, steal over you. Your friends do not and will not forget you. You shall be protected against 'eating cares,' which, I take it, mean cares lest we should not have enough to eat." Kindly as this letter was, it could only temper what was for Hawthorne a rough and bitter experience; for he had, in intense form, that proud independence in such matters which characterizes the old New England stock. The words he wrote in reply came from the depths of his nature:-- "I read your letter in the vestibule of the Post Office; and it drew--what my troubles never have--the water to my eyes; so that I was glad of the sharply cold west wind that blew into them as I came homeward, and gave them an excuse for being red and bleared. "There was much that was very sweet--and something, too, that was very bitter--mingled with that same moisture. It is sweet to be remembered and cared for by one's friends--some of whom know me for what I am, while others, perhaps, know me only through a generous faith--sweet to think that they deem me worth upholding in my poor work through life. And it is bitter, nevertheless, to need their support. It is something else besides pride that teaches me that ill-success in life is really and justly a matter of shame. I am ashamed of it, and I ought to be. The fault of a failure is attributable--in a great degree at least--to the man who fails. I should apply this truth in judging of other men; and it behooves me not to shun its point or edge in taking it home to my _own_ heart. Nobody has a right to live in the world unless he be strong and able, and applies his ability to good purpose. "The money, dear Hillard, will smooth my path for a long time to come. The only way in which a man can retain his self-respect, while availing himself of the generosity of his friends, is by making it an incitement to his utmost exertion, so that he may not need their help again. I shall look upon it so--nor will shun any drudgery that my hand shall find to do, if thereby I may win bread." Four days after this, on February 3, 1850, he finished "The Scarlet Letter." He read the last scene to his wife, just after writing it, on that evening,--"tried to read it, rather," he wrote to Bridge the next day, "for my voice swelled and heaved, as if I were tossed up and down on an ocean as it subsides after a storm. But I was in a very nervous state then, having gone through a great diversity of emotion while writing it for many months." He had, indeed, put his whole energy into the book, writing "immensely," says his wife in the previous autumn, as much as nine hours a day. He now felt the reaction, and besides he had a less healthy regimen of life than hitherto, and had fallen into middle-age habits of lowered physical tone, less active now in his out-door life these last three or four years. He continues in the letter to Bridge, just quoted: "I long to get into the country, for my health latterly is not quite what it has been for many years past. I should not long stand such a life of bodily inactivity and mental exertion as I have lived for the last few months. An hour or two of daily labor in a garden, and a daily ramble in country air, or on the sea-shore, would keep all right. Here, I hardly go out once a week. Do not allude to this matter in your letters to me, as my wife already sermonizes me quite sufficiently on my habits; and I never own up to not feeling perfectly well. Neither do I feel anywise ill; but only a lack of physical vigor and energy, which reacts upon the mind." "The Scarlet Letter" [Footnote: _The Scarlet Letter_. A Romance. By Nathaniel Hawthorne. Boston: Ticknor, Reed and Fields. 1850. 12mo. Pp. iv, 322.] was already in the publisher's hands, before the last scene was written, and was rapidly put through the press. It was issued early in April in an edition of five thousand copies, which was soon exhausted; a new edition followed at once, and Hawthorne's fame was at last established. "The Scarlet Letter" is a great and unique romance, standing apart by itself in fiction; there is nothing else quite like it. Of all Hawthorne's works it is most identified with his genius in popular regard, and it has the peculiar power that is apt to invest the first work of an author in which his originality finds complete artistic expression. It is seldom that one can observe so plainly the different elements that are primary in a writer's endowment coalesce in the fully developed work of genius; yet in this romance there is nothing either in method or perception which is not to be found in the earlier tales; what distinguishes it is the union of art and intuition as they had grown up in Hawthorne's practice and had developed a power to penetrate more deeply into life. Obviously at the start there is the physical object in which his imagination habitually found its spring, the fantastically embroidered scarlet letter on a woman's bosom which he had seen in the Puritan group described in "Endicott and the Red Cross." It had been in his mind for years, and his thoughts had centred on it and wandered out from it, tracking its mystery. It has in itself that decorative quality, which he sought in the physical object,--the brilliant and rich effect, startling to the eye and yet more to the imagination as it blazes forth with a secret symbolism and almost intelligence of its own. It multiplies itself, as the tale unfolds, with greater intensity and mysterious significance and dread suggestion, as if in mirrors set round about it,--in the slowly disclosed and fearful stigma on the minister's hidden heart over which he ever holds his hand, where it has become flesh of his flesh; in the growing elf-like figure of the child, who, with her eyes always fastened on the open shame of the letter on her mother's bosom or the hidden secret of the hand on her father's breast, has become herself the symbol, half revealed and half concealed, is dressed in it, as every reader remembers, and fantastically embodies it as if the thing had taken life in her; and, as if this were not enough, the scarlet letter, at a climax of the dark story, lightens forth over the whole heavens as a symbol of what cannot be hid even in the intensest blackness of night. The continual presence of the letter seems to have burnt into Hawthorne's own mind, till at the end of the narrative he says he would gladly erase its deep print from the brain where long meditation had fixed it. In no other work is the physical symbol so absorbingly present, so reduplicated, so much alive in itself. It is the brand of sin on life. Its concrete vividness leads the author also by a natural compulsion as well as an artistic instinct to display his story in that succession of high-wrought scenes, tableaux, in fact, which was his characteristic method of narrative, picturesque, pictorial, almost to be described as theatrical in spectacle. The background, also, as in the early tales, is of the slightest, no more than will suffice for the acting of the drama as a stage setting sympathetic with the central scene,--a town, with a prison, a meeting-house, a pillory, a governor's house, other habitations on a street, a lonely cottage by the shore, the forest round about all; and for occasion and accessories, only a woman's sentence, the incidental death of Winthrop unmarked in itself, a buccaneering ship in the harbor, Indians, Spanish sailors, rough matrons, clergy; this will serve, for such was Hawthorne's fine economy, knowing that this story was one in which every materialistic element must be used at its lowest tone. Though the scene lay in this world, it was but transitory scaffolding; the drama was one of the eternal life. The characteristic markings of Hawthorne's genius are also to be found in other points. He does not present the scene of life, the crowd of the world with its rich and varied fullness of interest, complexity of condition and movement, and its interwoven texture of character, event, and fate, such as the great novelists use; he has only a few individual figures, and these are simplified by being exhibited, not in their complete lives, but only in that single aspect of their experience which was absorbing to themselves and constituted the life they lived in the soul itself. There are three characters, Hester, the minister, and the physician; and a fourth, the child, who fulfills the function of the chorus in the old drama, in part a living comment, in part a spectator and medium of sympathy with the main actors. In all four of these that trait of profound isolation in life, so often used before in the earlier tales, is strongly brought out; about each is struck a circle which separates not only one from another, but from all the world, and in the midst of it, as in a separate orb, each lives an unshared life. It is inherent, too, in such a situation that the mystery that had fascinated Hawthorne in so many forms, the secrecy of men's bosoms, should be a main theme in the treatment. He has also had recourse to that method of violent contrast which has been previously illustrated; on the one hand the publicity of detected wrongdoing, on the other the hidden and unsuspected fact; here the open shame and there the secret sin, whose sameness in a double life is expressed by the identity of the embroidered letter and the flesh-wrought stigma. But it is superfluous to illustrate further the genesis of this romance out of Hawthorne's art and matter in his earlier work, showing how naturally it rose by a concentration of his powers on a single theme that afforded them scope, intensity, and harmony at once. The new thing here is the power of his genius to penetrate, as was said above, deep into life. The romance begins where common tales end. The crime has been committed; in it, in its motives, circumstances, explanation, its course of passion and human tide of life, Hawthorne takes no interest. All that is past, and, whatever it was, now exists only as sin; it has passed from the region of earthly fact into that of the soul, out of all that was temporal into the world where eternal things only are. Not crime, not passion, not the temptation and the fall, but only sin now staining the soul in consequence is the theme; and the course of the story concerns man's dealing with sin, in his own breast or the breasts of others. It is a study of punishment, of vengeance if one will; this is the secret of its gloom, for the idea of salvation, of healing, is but little present and is not felt; there is no forgiveness in the end, in any sense to dispel the darkness of evil or promise the dawn of new life in any one of these tortured souls. The sin of the lovers is not the centre of the story, but only its initial source; that sin breeds sin is the real principle of its being; the minister is not punished as a lover, but as the hypocrite that he becomes, and the physician is punished as the revenger that he becomes. Hester's punishment is visibly from the law, and illustrates the law's brutality, the coarse hand of man for justice, the mere physical blow meant to hurt and crush; it is man's social way of dealing with sin, and fails because it makes no connection with the soul; the victim rises above it, is emancipated from its ideas, transforms the symbol of disgrace into a message of mercy to all who suffer, and annuls the gross sentence by her own higher soul-power. The minister's punishment, also, is visibly from the physician, who illustrates man's individual way of dealing with sin in another; but it is not the minister's suffering under the hand of revenge working subtly in secret that arrests our attention; it is the physician's own degeneracy into a devil of hate through enjoyment of the sight and presence of this punishment, that stamps him into the reader's mind as a type of the failure of such a revenge. "Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord" is the text here blazed forth. In the sphere of the soul human law and private revenge have no place. It is in that sphere that Hester is seen suffering in the touch of the child, being unable to adjust the broken harmonies of life; her incapacity to do that is the ever-present problem that keeps her wound open, not to be stanched, but rather breaking with a more intimate pain with the unfolding of little Pearl's wide-eyed soul. In that sphere, too, the minister is seen suffering--not for the original sin, for that is overlaid, whelmed, forgotten, by the second and heavier transgression of hypocrisy, cowardice, desertion,--but merely from self-knowledge, the knowledge that he is a living lie. The characters, so treated, become hardly more than types, humanly outlined in figure, costume, and event, symbolic pictures of states of the soul, so simplified, so intense, so elementary as to belong to a phantasmagoric rather than a realistic world, to that mirror of the soul which is not found in nature but in spiritual self-consciousness, where the soul is given back to itself in its nakedness, as in a secret place. Yet it is in the sense of reality that this romance is most intense. It is a truthful story, above all; and only its truth could make it tolerable to the imagination and heart, if indeed it be tolerable to the heart at all. A part of this reality is due to the fact that there is a story here that lies outside of the moral scheme in which Hawthorne's conscious thought would confine it; the human element in it threatens from time to time to break the mould of thought and escape from bondage, because, simple as the moral scheme is, human life is too complex to be solved by it even in this small world of the three guilty ones and the child. This weakness of the moral scheme, this rude strength of human nature, this sense of a larger solution, are most felt when Hawthorne approaches the love element, and throughout in the character of Hester, in whom alone human nature retains a self-assertive power. The same thing is felt vaguely, but certainly, in the lack of sympathy between Hawthorne and the Puritan environment he depicts. He presents the community itself, its common people, its magistrates and clergy, its customs, temper, and atmosphere, as forbidding, and he has no good word for it; harshness characterizes it, and that trait discredits its ideals, its judgments, and its entire interpretation of life. Hester, outcast from it, is represented as thereby enfranchised from its narrowness, enlightened, escaped into a world of larger truth:-- "The world's law was no law for her mind. It was an age in which the human intellect, newly emancipated, had taken a more active and a wider range than for many centuries before. Men of the sword had overthrown nobles and kings. Men bolder than these had overthrown and rearranged--not actually, but within the sphere of theory, which was their most real abode--the whole system of ancient prejudice, wherewith was linked much of ancient principle. Hester Prynne imbibed this spirit. She assumed a freedom of speculation, then common enough on the other side of the Atlantic, but which our forefathers, had they known it, would have held to be a deadlier crime than that stigmatized by the scarlet letter. In her lonesome cottage, by the sea-shore, thoughts visited her, such as dared to enter no other dwelling in New England; shadowy guests, that would have been as perilous as demons to their entertainer, could they have been seen so much as knocking at her door." This is the foregleam of the next age, felt in her mind, the coming of a larger day. Hawthorne does not develop this or justify it; he only states it as a fact of life. And in the motive of the story, the love of Hester and Arthur, much is left dim; but what is discerned threatens to be unmanageable within the limits of the scheme. Did Hester love her lover, and he love her, through those seven years in silence? Did either of them ever repent their passion for its own sake? And when Hester's womanhood came back in its bloom and her hair fell shining in the forest sunlight, and she took her lover, hand and head and form, in all his broken suffering to her affectionate care and caress, and planned the bold step that they go out together across the seas and live in each other's lives like lovers in truth and reality,--was this only the resurrection of a moment or the firm vital force of a seven years' silent passion? Had either of them ever repented, though one was a coward and the other a condemned and public criminal before the law, and both had suffered? Was not the true sin, as is suggested, the source of all this error, the act of the physician who had first violated Hester's womanhood in a loveless marriage as he had now in Arthur's breast "violated in cold blood the sanctity of a human heart"? "Thou and I," says Arthur, "never did so." The strange words follow, strange for Hawthorne to have written, but better attesting his truth to human nature than all his morality:-- "Never, never!" whispered she. "What we did had a consecration of its own. We felt it so! We said so to each other! Hast thou forgotten it?" "Hush, Hester!" said Arthur Dimmesdale, rising from the ground. "No; I have not forgotten!" That confession is the stroke of genius in the romance that humanizes it with a thrill that is felt through every page of the stubborn, dark, harsh narrative of misery. It was not a sin against love that had been committed; it was a sin against the soul; and the sin against the soul lay in the lack of confession, which becomes the cardinal situation of the romance solved in the minister's dying acknowledgment. But the love problem is never solved, just as the hate problem in the physician is never solved; both Hester and Roger Chillingworth, one with her mystery of enduring love, the other with his mystery of insatiable hatred, are left with the issue, the meaning of their lives inexplicable, untold. Yet it is from the presence of these elements in the story that something of its intense reality comes. It remains true, however, that the essential reality lies in the vivid sense of sin, and its experience in conscience. Hawthorne has not given a historical view of New England life; such a village, with such a tragedy, never existed, in that environing forest of the lone seacoast; but he has symbolized historical New England by an environment that he created round a tragedy that he read in the human heart, and in this tragedy itself he was able also to symbolize New England life in its internal features. One thing stood plainly out in our home Puritanism,--spirituality; the transcendent sense of the reality of the soul's life with God, its conscience, its perils, and its eternal issue. Spirituality remained the inheritance of the New England blood; and Hawthorne, who was no Puritan in doctrine or sympathy even, was Puritan in temperament, and hence to him, too, spirituality in life was its main element. He took that sin of passion which has ever been held typical of sin against the purity of the soul's nature, and transformed it into the symbol of all sin, and in its manifestation revolved the aspects of sin as a presence in the soul after the act,--the broken law disturbing life's external harmonies but working a worse havoc within, mining all with corruption there, while it infects with disease whatever approaches it from without. It is by its moral universality that the romance takes hold of the imagination; the scarlet letter becomes only a pictorial incident, but while conscience, repentance, confession, the modes of punishment, and the modes of absolution remain instant and permanent facts in the life of the soul, many a human heart will read in this book as in a manual of its own intimate hours. The romance is thus essentially a parable of the soul's life in sin; in its narrower scope it is the work of the moral intellect allegorizing its view of life; and where creative genius enters into it, in the Shakespearean sense of life in its own right, it tends to be a larger and truer story breaking the bonds of its religious scheme. It has its roots in Puritanism, but it is only incidentally a New England tale; its substance is the most universal experience of human nature in religious life, taking its forms only, its local habitation and name, from the Puritan colony in America, and these in a merely allegorical, not historical manner. Certain traits, however, ally it more closely to New England Puritanism. It is a relentless tale; the characters are singularly free from self-pity, and accept their fate as righteous; they never forgave themselves, they show no sign of having forgiven one another; even God's forgiveness is left under a shadow in futurity. They have sinned against the soul, and something implacable in evil remains. The minister's dying words drop a dark curtain over all. "Hush, Hester, hush!" said he, with tremulous solemnity. "The law we broke!--the sin here so awfully revealed!--let these alone be in thy thoughts! I fear! I fear! It may be that, when we forgot our God,--when we violated our reverence each for the other's soul,--it was thenceforth vain to hope that we could meet hereafter, in an everlasting and pure reunion." Mercy is but a hope. There is also a singular absence of prayer in the book. Evil is presented as a thing without remedy, that cannot change its nature. The child, even, being the fruit of sin, can bring, Hester and Arthur doubt, no good for others or herself. In the scheme of Puritan thought, however, the atonement of Christ is the perpetual miracle whereby salvation comes, not only hereafter but in the holier life led here by grace. There is no Christ in this book. Absolution, so far as it is hinted at, lies in the direction of public confession, the efficacy of which is directly stated, but lamely nevertheless; it restores truth, but it does not heal the past. Leave the dead past to bury its dead, says Hawthorne, and go on to what may remain; but life once ruined is ruined past recall. So Hester, desirous of serving in her place the larger truth she has come to know, is stayed, says Hawthorne, because she "recognized the impossibility that any mission of divine and mysterious truth should be confided to a woman stained with sin, bowed down with shame, or even burdened with a life-long sorrow." That was never the Christian gospel nor the Puritan faith. Indeed, Hawthorne here and elsewhere anticipates those ethical views which are the burden of George Eliot's moral genius, and contain scientific pessimism. This stoicism, which was in Hawthorne, is a primary element in his moral nature, in him as well as in his work; it is visited with few touches of tenderness and pity; the pity one feels is not in him, it is in the pitiful thing, which he presents objectively, sternly, unrelentingly. It must be confessed that as an artist he appears unsympathetic with his characters; he is a moral dissector of their souls, minute, unflinching, thorough, a vivisector here; and he is cold because he has passed sentence on them, condemned them. There is no sympathy with human nature in the book; it is a fallen and ruined thing suffering just pain in its dying struggle. The romance is steeped in gloom. Is it too much to suggest that in ignoring prayer, the atonement of Christ, and the work of the Spirit in men's hearts, the better part of Puritanism has been left out, and the whole life of the soul distorted? Sin in the soul, the scarlet flower from the dark soil, we see; but, intent on that, has not the eye, and the heart, too, forgotten the large heavens that ensphere all--even this evil flower--and the infinite horizons that reach off to the eternal distance from every soul as from their centre? This romance is the record of a prison-cell, unvisited by any ray of light save that earthly one which gives both prisoners to public ignominy; they are seen, but they do not see. These traits of the book, here only suggested, have kinship with the repelling aspects of Puritanism, both as it was and as Hawthorne inherited it in his blood and breeding; so, in its transcendent spirituality, and in that democracy which is the twin-brother of spirituality in all lands and cultures, by virtue of which Hawthorne here humiliates and strips the minister who is the type of the spiritual aristocrat in the community, there is the essence of New England; but, for all that, the romance is a partial story, an imperfect fragment of the old life, distorting, not so much the Puritan ideal--which were a little matter--but the spiritual life itself. Its truth, intense, fascinating, terrible as it is, is a half-truth, and the darker half; it is the shadow of which the other half is light; it is the wrath of which the other half is love. A book from which light and love are absent may hold us by its truth to what is dark in life; but, in the highest sense, it is a false book. It is a chapter in the literature of moral despair, and is perhaps most tolerated as a condemnation of the creed which, through imperfect comprehension, it travesties. With this book Hawthorne came into fame; but his fellow townsmen were ill pleased to find some disrepute of their own accompanying his success. It is surely to be regretted that this was the case; and, effective as his sketch of the Custom House is, one feels that Hawthorne stooped in taking his literary revenge on his humble associates by holding them up to personal ridicule. The tone of pleasantry veils ill feeling, which is expressed without cover in a letter he wrote to Bridge a day or two before he left the town:-- "As to the Salem people, I really thought that I had been exceedingly good-natured in my treatment of them. They certainly do not deserve good usage at my hands after permitting me to be deliberately lied down--not merely once, but at two several attacks, on two false indictments-- without hardly a voice being raised on my behalf; and then sending one of the false witnesses to Congress, others to the Legislature, and choosing another as the mayor. "I feel an infinite contempt for them--and probably have expressed more of it than I intended--for my preliminary chapter has caused the greatest uproar that has happened here since witch-times. If I escape from town without being tarred and feathered, I shall consider it good luck. I wish they would tar and feather me; it would be such an entirely novel kind of distinction for a literary man. And, from such judges as my fellow-citizens, I should look upon it as a higher honor than a laurel crown." He had said his farewell in the too famous sketch, with an ill grace, shaking the dust of his native place from his feet, and frankly taking upon himself the character of the unappreciated genius, which is seldom a becoming one. The passage fitly closes this chapter in which his nativity, for better or worse, is most apparent. "Soon my old native town will loom upon me through the haze of memory, a mist brooding over and around it, as if it were no portion of the real earth, but an overgrown village in cloud-land, with only imaginary inhabitants to people its wooden houses, and walk its homely lanes, and the unpicturesque prolixity of its main street. Henceforth it ceases to be a reality of my life. I am a citizen of somewhere else. My good townspeople will not much regret me; for--though it has been as dear an object as any, in my literary efforts, to be of some importance in their eyes, and to win myself a pleasant memory in this abode and burial-place of so many of my forefathers--_there_ has never been, for me, the genial atmosphere which a literary man requires, in order to ripen the best harvest of his mind. I shall do better amongst other faces; and these familiar ones, it need hardly be said, will do just as well without me." VI. LITERARY LABORS. In the late spring of 1850 Hawthorne removed his family and household goods to the little red cottage amid the Berkshire Hills which was to be a nature's hermitage to him for the next year and a half. It was a story-and-a-half building, rude and simple, on a great hillside, commanding a view of a small lake below and of beautiful low mountain horizons. Here began again that secluded happy family life which had belonged to the Old Manse, and he was perhaps happier than he had ever been. The home had the same internal look as of old, for he had brought with him the relics of family furniture, the oriental objects from over sea that were heirlooms from his father, and the Italian Madonnas, the casts and paintings with which his wife delighted to surround the home-life in an atmosphere of artistic adornment and suggestion; and, as the quarters were very small, the effect was one of mingled homeliness and refinement. Bridge soon joined them, and devoted himself in a practical way to making things shipshape, providing necessary closets and shelves out of packing boxes, and generally eking out the interior arrangements with a sailor's ready ingenuity. Outside there was a barnyard, and a two-story hencoop to be put to rights, with its brood of pet chickens each with its name,--Snowdrop, Crown Imperial, Queenie, Fawn, and the like decorative appellations. The two children, Una and Julian, were in a paradise. Other friends came, too, to visit or to call. Mrs. Hawthorne soon remarked that they seemed to see more society than ever before. Herman Melville lived near by, at Pittsfield, and became a welcome guest and companion, with his boisterous genuine intellectual spirits and animal strength. Fanny Kemble made an interesting figure on her great black horse at the gate. The Sedgwick neighbors were thoughtful and serviceable. O'Sullivan reappeared for a moment in all his Celtic vivacity, and Fields, Holmes, Duyckinck, and others of the profession came and went in the summer days. Hawthorne breathed the air of successful authorship at last, and knew its vanities and its pleasures. The mail brought him new acquaintances, and now and then a hero-worshiper lingered at the gate for a look. But as the warm days went by, and the frosts came, he found himself in his old sheltering nook, in a place removed from the world, living practically alone with his wife and children, though the increasing sense of friendliness in the world cheered and warmed him. He had, however, begun to age. He was forty-six years old, and the last year had told upon him, with its various anxieties, excitement, and hard labor with the pen. He was more easily fatigued, he was less robust and venturesome, less physically confident. He showed the changes of time. On his arrival, "weary and worn," says his wife, "with waiting for a place to be, to think, and to write in," he gave up with something like nervous fever; "his eyes looked like two immense spheres of troubled light; his face was wan and shadowy, and he was wholly uncomfortable." He soon recovered tone; but though he pleaded that his mind never worked well till the frosts brought out the landscape's autumnal colors and had some similar alchemy for his own brain, it was a needed rest that he enjoyed while giving and receiving these early hospitalities in a new country. He even found the broad mountain view, with the lake in its bosom, a distraction which made it hard for him to write in its presence. He had always been used to narrow outlooks from his windows; even at the Old Manse the scene was small though open. With the coming of the fall days, however, he again took up his writing, and showed how stimulating to his ambition and energies the first taste of popularity had been. Indeed from this time he was more productive than at any other period, and wrote regularly and successfully as he had never before done. The scale of the novel gave more volume to his work of itself, and its mere continuity sustained his effort; moreover the excitement of a new kind of work was a strong stimulus. He now began to write novels, differently studied and composed from his earlier stories, more akin to the usual narrative of fiction. "The Scarlet Letter," a work of pure imagination, was the climax of his tales, the furthest reach of his romantic allegorizing moral art in creation; but he now undertook to utilize his experience and observation in the attempt to delineate life in its commoner and more realistic aspects of character and scene. He began "The House of the Seven Gables" in September and finished it early in January. He wrote regularly, but the story went on more slowly than he had hoped, requiring more care and thought than "The Scarlet Letter," because the latter was all in one tone, while here there was variety. He had to wait for the mood, at times; but the composition was really rapid, and seemed slow only because he was used to the smaller scale of effort. The book was at once sent to press and published in the spring. [Footnote: _The House of The Seven Gables_. A Romance. By Nathaniel Hawthorne. Boston: Ticknor, Reed and Fields. 1851. 12mo. Pp. vi, 344.] "The House of the Seven Gables" is a succession of stories bound together to set forth the history of a family through generations under the aspect of an inherited curse which inheres in the house itself. The origin of the curse and of the plot lies in the founder of the family, Colonel Pyncheon, whose character, wrong-doing, and death make the first act; the second, which is no more than an illustrative episode and serves to fill out the history of the house itself, is the tale of Alice, the mesmerized victim of a later generation, in which the witchcraft element of the first story is half rationalized; the third part, which these two lead up to and explain, is the body of the novel, and contains the working out of the curse and its dissipation in the marriage of the descendants of the Colonel and the old wizard Maule, from whose dying lips it had come. The curse itself, "God will give him blood to drink," is made physical by the fact that death comes to the successive heirs by apoplexy, an end which lends itself to an atmosphere of secrecy, mysteriousness, and judgments; but the permanence of those traits which made the Colonel's character harsh and harmful, his ambition, will-power, and cruelty, gives moral probability to the curse and secures its operation as a thing of nature. There is, nevertheless, a lax unity in the novel, owing to this dispersion of the action; and its somewhat thin material in the contemporary part needs the strengthening and enrichment that it derives from the historical elements. The series is united by the uncut thread of a vengeful punishment that must continue until the original wrong itself shall disappear; but when that happens, the Indian deed hidden behind the portrait is worthless, the male line is extinct, and the house itself a thing of the past. The presence of the past in life, both as inheritance and environment, is the moral theme, and here it is an evil past imparting misery to whomever it touches. The old house is its physical sign and habitation; the inhabitants are its victims, and in the later story they are innocent sufferers, as Alice had been in the intermediate time. Such a canvas is one which Hawthorne loved to fill up with the shadowed lights, the melodramatic coloring and fantastic decorativeness of his fancies. The characters are, as always, few. There are but five of them, Hepzibah, Clifford, Phoebe, the daguerreotypist, and the Judge, with the contributory figures of Uncle Venner and little Ned Higgins. They have also the constant Hawthorne trait of great isolation, and live entirely within the world of the story. In sketching them Hawthorne had recourse to real life, to observation, as also in all the contemporary background and atmosphere. The substance and attraction of the novel lie in this fidelity to the life he knew so minutely; for the plot, the crime, the curse, except in their own historical atmosphere, in the Colonel and in Alice's story, interest us but little and languidly. It is, perhaps, not refining too much to see in the novel a closer relationship to those earlier tales and sketches which drew their matter from observation, were less imaginative, more realistic, and belong to a less purely creative art. If "The Scarlet Letter" was the culmination of the finer tales, "The House of the Seven Gables" is the climax of this less powerful, but more every-day group of the familiar aspect of country life. It was, possibly, with some vague sense of this that Hawthorne preferred this novel as one "more characteristic of my mind, and more proper and natural for me to write;" it came from his more familiar self. He was able to introduce into it that realistic detail concerning trifles which he delighted to record in his journals; and the minute analysis which in the great romance he gave to the feelings and inner life of pain, he here gives rather to the elaboration of the scene, to external things, to the surface and texture of the physical elements. He has succeeded consequently in delineating and coloring a picture of New England conditions with Dutch faithfulness, and this is the charm of the work. It appeals, like life and memory themselves, to the people of that countryside, and goes to their hearts like the sight of home. To others it can be only a provincial study, with the attraction of such life in any land, and for them more dependent on its romantic setting, its moral suggestion, and general human truth. Those who have the secret and are of kin to New England, however, find in the mere description something that endears the book. The life of the little back street, as it revives in Clifford's childishly pleased senses, with its succession of morning carts, its scissor-grinder, and other incidents of the hour; the garden of flowers and vegetables, with the Sunday afternoon in the ruinous arbor, the loaf of bread and the china bowl of currants; the life of the immortal cent-shop, with its queer array, and its string of customers jingling the bell; the hens, evidently transported from the great coop of the Berkshire cottage, but with the value of an event in the novel,--all these things, with a hundred other features that are each but a trifle, make up a glamour of reality that grows over the whole book like the mosses on the house. In the characters themselves this local realism is carried to the highest degree of truth, especially in Hepzibah, who in her half-vital state, with her faded gentility and gentle, heroic heart of patient love, in all her outer queerness and grotesquely thwarted life, is the most wholly alive of all of Hawthorne's characters; in Phoebe, too, though in a different way, is the same truth, a life entirely real; and, on the smaller scale, Uncle Venner is also to be reckoned a character perfectly done. Clifford is necessarily faint, and does not interest one on his own account; he is pitiable, but his love of the beautiful is too much sentimentalized to engage sympathy in the special way that Hawthorne attempts, and one sees in him only the victim of life, the prisoner whom the law mistook and outraged and left ruined; and Holgrave is no more than a spectator, mechanically necessary to the action and useful in other ways, but he does not affect us as a character. There remains Judge Pyncheon, on whom Hawthorne evidently exhausted his skill in the effort to make him repellent. He is studied after the gentleman who was most active in the removal of Hawthorne from the Custom House, and was intended to be a recognizable portrait of him in the community. Perhaps the knowledge of this fact interferes with the proper effect of the character, since it makes one doubt the truth of it. The practice of introducing real persons into literature as a means of revenge by holding them up to detestation is one that seldom benefits either fiction or truth; it was the ugliest feature of Pope's character, and it always affects one as unhandsome treatment. In this instance it detracts from the sense of reality, inasmuch as one suspects caricature. But taken without reference to the original, Judge Pyncheon is somewhat of a stage villain, a puppet; his villainy is presented mainly in his physique, his dress and walk, his smile and scowl, and generally in his demeanor; it is not actively shown, though the reader is told many sad stories of his misbehaviour; even at the end, in the scene in which he comes nearest to acting, the plot never gets further than a threat to do a cruel thing. In other words it is a portrait that is drawn, not a character that is shown in its play of evil power actually embodying itself in life. He is the bogy of the house, the Pyncheon type incarnated in each generation; and when he sits dead in the old chair, he seems less an individual than the Pyncheon corpse. In the long chapter which serves as his requiem, and in which there is the suggestion of Dickens not in the best phase of his art, the jubilation is somewhat diabolic; it affects one as if Hawthorne's thoughts were executing a dance upon a grave. The character is too plainly hated by the author, and it fails to carry conviction of its veracity. Yet in certain external touches and aspects it suggests the hypocrite who everywhere walks the streets, placid, respectable, sympathetic in salutations, but bearing within a cold, gross, cruel, sensual, and selfish nature which causes a shudder at every casual glimpse that betrays its lurking hideousness. The character is thoroughly conceived, but being developed by description instead of action, seems overdone; prosperity has made him too flabby to act, and kills him with a fit as soon as he works himself up to play the role. After all, the story in its contemporary phase is but a small part of the novel, which does not much suffer even if the Judge in his youthful, hard-hearted, cowardly crime and the victim in his aesthetic delicacy are both ineffective in making the impression the author aimed at. The real scene is the singularly trivial and barren life of the old house, where nothing takes place but the purchase of a Jim Crow, a breakfast of mackerel, a talk about chickens, gossip with Uncle Venner, and the passing of a political procession in the street; and one too easily forgets the marvelous art which could make such a life interesting and stimulating and engaging to the affections, even with the aid of Hepzibah and Phoebe in their simpleness. What makes the happiness of the story is to be found in these details, and in the century-old atmosphere which Hawthorne has generated about them, compounding into one element the witchcraft memories, the foreign horizons, the curse in the house, the threadbare gentility, the decay material and spiritual, the odor of time, all of which he had absorbed from his Salem life; thence it came that he was able to give to New England its only imaginative work that has ancestral quality. All this, too, is distilled from the soil. Hawthorne felt in his own life the weight of this past; its elements were familiar and near to him, so that his own family legend imparts coloring to the tale and gives him sympathy with it; and in leaving Salem it was from such a past that he desired to be free. He expresses himself, in these matters, through Holgrave, in his democratic new life urging Hepzibah to abandon gentility and be proud of her cent shop as a genuine thing in a practical and real world,--she would begin to live now at sixty, such was his narrowness of youthful view; but the democratic sentiment is Hawthorne's. So, too, in his rhetorical impeachment of the past, though the passage is meant to summarize the point of view of reform, there is an emphasis such as sincerity gives:-- "'Shall we never, never get rid of this Past?' cried he, keeping up the earnest tone of his preceding conversation. 'It lies upon the Present like a giant's dead body! In fact, the case is just as if a young giant were compelled to waste all his strength in carrying about the corpse of the old giant, his grandfather, who died a long while ago, and only needs to be decently buried. Just think a moment, and it will startle you to see what slaves we are to bygone times,--to Death, if we give the matter the right word!' "'But I do not see it,' observed Phoebe. "'For example, then,' continued Holgrave, 'a dead man, if he happen to have made a will, disposes of wealth no longer his own; or, if he die intestate, it is distributed in accordance with the notions of men much longer dead than he. A dead man sits on all our judgment-seats; and living judges do but search out and repeat his decisions. We read in dead men's books! We laugh at dead men's jokes, and cry at dead men's pathos! We are sick of dead men's diseases, physical and moral, and die of the same remedies with which dead doctors killed their patients! We worship the living Deity according to dead men's forms and creeds. Whatever we seek to do, of our own free motion, a dead man's icy hand obstructs us! Turn our eyes to what point we may, a dead man's white, immitigable face encounters them, and freezes our very heart! And we must be dead ourselves before we can begin to have our proper influence on our own world, which will then be no longer our world, but the world of another generation, with which we shall have no shadow of a right to interfere. I ought to have said, too, that we live in dead men's houses; as, for instance, in this of the Seven Gables!'" This is in the form of dialogue; but Hawthorne's own attitude toward reform is clearly disclosed in the analytic passages in which he discusses Holgrave, though it is observable that he embodies no adverse criticism upon it in the character itself, as he was to do in his next novel. He appears to take the same view of reform that is sometimes found in respect to prayer, that it has great subjective advantages and is good for the soul, but is futile in the world of fact. It was well for Holgrave, he says, to think as he did; this enthusiasm "would serve to keep his youth pure and make his aspirations high," and he goes on with his own judgment on the matter:-- "And when, with the years settling down more weightily upon him, his early faith should be modified by inevitable experience, it would be with no harsh and sudden revolution of his sentiments. He would still have faith in man's brightening destiny, and perhaps love him all the better, as he should recognize his helplessness in his own behalf; and the haughty faith, with which he began life, would be well bartered for a far humbler one at its close, in discerning that man's best directed effort accomplishes a kind of dream, while God is the sole worker of realities." This may be profound truth, as it is intended to be; but it needs no penetration to see here a man whose sympathies with all kinds of those "come-outers" who then multiplied exceedingly in his neighborhood, would be infinitesimal. He had not, however, yet engaged with this problem so closely as he was to do. So far one would discern only that fatalistic and pessimistic trait indicated by "The Scarlet Letter" and found in "The House of the Seven Gables" in the hard conclusion that there was no remedy for the harm that had been done in the long past. The curse was done with now, it is true, by the marriage of Phoebe and Holgrave, but for Clifford and Hepzibah there was no amends for the lives the dead Judge had ruined by the aid of an imperfect and blundering human law; they were wrecks, so Hawthorne represents it,--they had missed life's happiness and were now in hospital, as it were, till they should die; but in their lives evil had been triumphant, had made them innocent victims, and for this there was neither help nor compensation. The irremediableness of the breach that sin makes in the soul had been preached in "The Scarlet Letter;" here is the other half of the truth, as Hawthorne saw it, the irremediableness of the injury done to others. So far as the book has ethical meaning it lies in the implacability of the uncanceled wrong lingering as a curse, destroying the bad and blasting the good descendants of the house, and presenting the mystery of evil as something positive, persisting, and unchecked in its career. The moral element, nevertheless, lies well in the background and is overlaid with romantic and legendary features; its hatefulness in the main story is not the principal theme; and the novel pleases and succeeds, not by these traits, but by its humble realism, its delicate character-drawing, and that ancestral power which makes it the story of a house long lived in. On finishing this work Hawthorne took that rest which he always required after any great intellectual exertion, and spent the time with his children and wife. His second daughter, Rose, was born in the spring. A happier childhood seldom gets into books than that which appears in the reminiscences of this small family, whether they were in Salem, or Berkshire, or Liverpool. Hawthorne lived much with his children, and he had the habit of observing them minutely and writing down the history of their little lives in his journals. All winter their play and recreation, their sayings and adventures and habits, diversified the Berkshire days; they thrived on "the blue nectared air," and had rosy cheeks and abounding spirits, and their heads were stuffed with fairy tales. The year was a glorious one in Julian's memory, and the page he makes of it may be taken as a leaf of his father's life at home, disclosing his daily life and home-nature, as it was through years of domestic happiness. Hawthorne, indeed, is never so attractive as when seen with the light of his children's eyes upon him:-- "He made those spring days memorable to his children. He made them boats to sail on the lake, and kites to fly in the air; he took them fishing and flower-gathering, and tried (unsuccessfully for the present) to teach them swimming. Mr. Melville used to ride or drive up, in the evenings, with his great dog, and the children used to ride on the dog's back. In short, the place was made a paradise for the small people. In the previous autumn, and still more in the succeeding one, they all went nutting, and filled a certain disused oven in the house with such bags upon bags of nuts as not a hundred children could have devoured during the ensuing winter. The children's father displayed extraordinary activity and energy on these nutting expeditions; standing on the ground at the foot of a tall walnut-tree, he would bid them turn their backs and cover their eyes with their hands; then they would hear, for a few seconds, a sound of rustling and scrambling, and, immediately after, a shout, whereupon they would uncover their eyes and gaze upwards; and lo! there was their father--who but an instant before, as it seemed, had been beside them--swaying and soaring high aloft on the topmost branches, a delightful mystery and miracle. And then down would rattle showers of ripe nuts, which the children would diligently pick up, and stuff into their capacious bags. It was all a splendid holiday; and they cannot remember when their father was not their playmate, or when they ever desired or imagined any other playmate than he." The spirit of such a fatherhood, and all this delight in the children's world, was distilled for the great multitude of other children in "The Wonder-Book" and its sequel "Tanglewood Tales." From very early in his career he had written charming childhood sketches, of which "Little Annie's Ramble" and "Little Daffydown-dilly" are easily recalled; and his association with his wife's sister, Elizabeth Peabody, had directed his attention particularly to literature for children, and "Grandfather's Chair" had been the result. Whenever he fell into discouragement in respect to the earning capacity of his pen, his first thought was that he would write children's books for a living. For some time he had meditated a volume which should adapt the classical tales of mythology to the understanding and interests of such children as his own, and he now put the plan in execution. He began "The Wonder-Book" with the summer, and finished it at one effort in six weeks of June and July; the ease with which he accomplished the task indicates how pleasurable it was, and well adapted to his sympathies and powers; and the result was very successful, a book of sunshine from cover to cover. It [Footnote: _A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys_. By Nathaniel Hawthorne, with Engravings by Baker from designs by Billings. Boston: Ticknor, Reed and Fields. 1852. 16mo. Pp. vi. 256.] was published in the fall, and was followed after an interval by its second part, "Tanglewood Tales." [Footnote: _Tanglewood Tales for Girls and Boys_. Being a Second Wonder-Book. By Nathaniel Hawthorne, with Fine Illustrations. Boston: Ticknor, Reed and Fields. 1853. 16mo. Pp. 336.] A multitude of children have loved these books, for whom their very names are a part of the golden haze of memory; and, in view of the association of Hawthorne's genius and temperament with quite other themes and the darker element in grown lives, this band of children make a kind of halo round his figure. Whether the thing done should have been so done, whether Greek should have been turned into Gothic, is a foolish matter. To please a child is warrant enough for any work; and here romantic fancy plays around the beautiful forms and noble suggestion of old heroic and divine life, and marries them to the hillside and fireside of New England childhood with the naturalness of a fairy enchantment; these tales are truly transplanted into the minds of the little ones with whose youngest tendrils of imagination they are intertwined. To tear apart such tender fibres were a poor mode of criticism, for the living fact better speaks for itself; and, in the case of the present writer, whose earliest recollection of the great world of literature, his first dawn-glimpse of it, lying in dreamy beauty, was Bellerophon's pool, the memory is potent and yields an appreciation not to be distilled in any other alembic. Few facts are more fixed in his memory than that he was the child who watched the pool for the tall boy with the shining bridle who was his strange friend from another world. If to wake and feed the imagination and charm it, and fill the budding mind with the true springtime of the soul's life in beautiful images, noble thoughts, and brooding moods that have in them the infinite suggestion, be success for a writer who would minister to the childish heart, few books can be thought to equal these; and the secret of it lies in the wondering sense which Hawthorne had of the mystical in childhood, of that element of purity in being which is felt also in his reverence for womanhood, and which, whether in child or woman, was typical of the purity of the soul itself,--in a word, the spiritual sense of life. His imagination, living in the child-sphere, pure, primitive, inexperienced, found only sunshine there, the freshness of the early world; nor are there any children's books so dipped in morning dews. On finishing "The Wonder-Book" Hawthorne devoted himself to life with Julian for three weeks, during the absence of the rest of the family on a visit, and wrote a daily account of it with such fullness that this history would fill a hundred pages of print. Some passages have been published, and they illustrate how this amusement had taken the place of the earlier note-books which recorded his observations of ordinary and even trivial life round about him. There may be some wonder that a mind of Hawthorne's powers should find its play in such literary journalizing, and the inference is ready that, when not at work in imagination, he was mentally unoccupied; his intellectual interests were, however, always limited in scope, and his readings in the evening to his wife were confined to pure literature; outside of such books he apparently had no intellectual life, and his thoughts and affections found their exercise in the domestic circle just as his eyes were engaged with the look of the landscape, the incidents of the road, and the changes of the weather. His capacity for idleness was great, and as his vigor had already somewhat waned his periods of repose were long. He undertook no new work during the summer, but prepared for the press a new volume of tales, "The Snow Image," [Footnote: _The Snow Image and other Twice-Told Tales_. By Nathaniel Hawthorne. Boston: Ticknor, Reed and Fields. 1852. 12mo, brown cloth. Pp. 273. The contents and source of the tales were as follows: The Snow Image, _International Review_, November, 1850; The Great Stone Face, _National Era_, January 24, 1850; Main Street, _Æsthetic Papers_, 1849; Ethan Brand, _Dollar Magazine_, May, 1851; A Bell's Biography, _Knickerbocker Magazine_, March, 1837; Sylph Etherege, Boston _Token_, 1838; The Canterbury Pilgrims, Boston _Token_, 1833; No. I, Old News, _New England Magazine_, February, 1835; No. II, The Old French War, March, 1835; No. III, The Old Tory, May, 1835; The Man of Adamant, Boston _Token_, 1837; The Devil in Manuscript, _New England Magazine_, May, 1835; John Inglefield's Thanksgiving, _Democratic Review_, March, 1840; Old Ticonderoga, _Democratic Review_, February, 1836; The Wives of the Dead, Boston _Token_, 1832; Little Daffydowndilly, _Boys' and Girls' Magazine_, Boston, 1843; Major Molineux, Boston _Token_, 1832.] which was ready by the first of November and was soon afterwards issued. It is made up of stories and sketches out of old periodicals, which had not been gathered in the former collection, some of them dating from the beginning of his career. Three, however, were later in composition, and were perhaps among those which he had thought of binding up with "The Scarlet Letter," had that been issued according to his original plan as one of several new tales. These three were "The Great Stone Face," from "The National Era," January 24, 1850, "The Snow Image" from "The International Magazine," November, 1850, and "Ethan Brand; a Chapter from an Abortive Romance," from "Holden's Dollar Magazine," May, 1851; they were all published with the author's name. These stories require no comment, as the types to which they belong are well marked. They were, in reality, his last trials of his art as a teller of tales. Late in November, the family again removed to a new dwelling-place. The inland air had proved, it was thought, less favorable to health than was expected, and except in the bracing months of mid-winter Hawthorne found it enervating. He had been, however, very happy in Berkshire, as happy probably as it was in his nature to be, and the distant beauty and near wildness of the country had been attractive; the house, nevertheless, was very small, and he fretted at its inconveniences, not in a disagreeable way, but desiring to have a house and home of his own among more familiar scenes and within reach of the sea; he regarded the new move as a makeshift, and settled in West Newton, a suburb of Boston, where his wife's family lived, until he should purchase a place of his own. The change from the winter picturesqueness of Berkshire was marked, but the village was of the usual New England type and his surroundings were not essentially different from those he was accustomed to at Concord and Salem. West Newton was near to Roxbury and the scenes of his rural experience at Brook Farm; but he hardly needed to refresh his memory of the places and persons that had been so much a part of his life ten years before. Brook Farm, as an experiment in the regeneration of society, had run its course, and was gone; but much that was characteristic of it externally was now to be transferred to the novel Hawthorne had in hand as his next work. "The Blithedale Romance" [Footnote: The Blithedale Romance, By Nathaniel Hawthorne. Boston: Ticknor, Reed and Fields. 1852. 12mo, cloth. Pp. viii, 288.] was written during the winter, and was finished as early as May, 1852, when it was at once issued. It is the least substantial of any of his longer works. It lacks the intensity of power that distinguishes "The Scarlet Letter," and the accumulated richness of surface that belongs to "The House of the Seven Gables," due to the overlaying of story on story in that epitome of a New England family history. "The Blithedale Romance," on the contrary, has both less depth and less inclusiveness; and much of its vogue springs from the fact of its being a reflection of the life of Brook Farm, which possesses an interest in its own right. Hawthorne used his material in the direct way that was his custom, and transferred bodily to his novel, to make its background and atmosphere, what he had preserved in his note-books or memory from the period of his residence with the reformers. The April snowstorm in which he arrived at the farm, his illness there, the vine-hung tree that he made his autumnal arbor, the costume and habits, the fancy-dress party, the Dutch realism of the figure of Silas Foster, and many another detail occur at once to the mind as from this origin; his own attitude is sketched frankly in Miles Coverdale, and the germs of others of the characters, notably Priscilla, are to be found in the same experience. The life of the farmhouse, however, is not of sufficient interest in itself to hold attention very closely, and the socialistic experiment, after all, is not the theme of the story; these things merely afford a convenient and appropriate ground on which to develop a study of the typical reformer, as Hawthorne conceived him, the nature, trials, temptations, and indwelling fate of such a man; and to this task the author addressed himself. In the way in which he worked out the problem, he revealed his own judgment on the moral type brought so variously and persistently under his observation by the wave of reform that was so strongly characteristic of his times. The characters are, as usual, few, and they have that special trait of isolation which is the birthmark of Hawthorne's creations. Zenobia, Priscilla, and Hollingsworth are the trio, who, each in an environment of solitude, make the essence of the plot by their mutual relations. Zenobia is set apart by her secret history and physical nature, and Priscilla by her magnetic powers and enslavement to the mesmerist; Hollingsworth is absorbed in his mission. It is unlikely that Hawthorne intended any of these as a portrait of any real person, though as the seamstress of Brook Farm gave the external figure of Priscilla, it may well be that certain suggestions of temperament were found for the other two characters among his impressions of persons whom he met. Neither Zenobia nor Priscilla, notwithstanding the latter's name, are essentially New England characters; in each of them there is something alien to the soil, and they are represented as coming from a different stock. Hollingsworth, on the other hand, is meant as a native type. The unfolding of the story, and the treatment of the characters, are not managed with any great skill. Hawthorne harks back to his old habits, and does so in a feebler way than would have been anticipated. He interjects the short story of The Veiled Lady, for example, in the middle of the narrative, as he had placed the tale of Alice in "The House of the Seven Gables," but very ineffectively; it is a pale narrative and does not count visibly in the progress of the novel, but only inferentially. He uses also the exotic flower, which Zenobia wears, as a physical symbol, but it plays no part and is only a relic of his old manner. The description of the performance in the country hall seems like an extract from one of the old annuals of the same calibre as the Story-Teller's Exhibition. Mesmerism is the feebler substitute for the old witchcraft element. In a word, the work is not well knit together, and the various methods of old are weakly combined. One comes back to the moral situation as the centre of interest; and in it he exhibits the reformer as failing in the same ways in which other egotists fail, for he perceives in the enthusiasm of the humanitarian only selfishness, arrogance, intolerance in another form. Hollingsworth, with the best of motives apparently, since his cause is his motive, as he believes, is faithless to his associates and willing to wreck their enterprise because it stands in his way and he is out of sympathy with it; he is faithless to Priscilla in so far as he accepts Zenobia because she can aid him with her wealth, and on her losing her wealth he is faithless to her in returning to Priscilla; he has lost the power to be true, in the other relations of life, through his devotion to his cause. One feels that Hollingsworth is the victim of Hawthorne's moral theory about him. It is true that at the end Hawthorne has secured in the character that tragic reversal which is always effective, in the point that Hollingsworth, who set out to be the friend and uplifter and saviour of the criminal classes, sees at last in himself the murderer of Zenobia; but this is shown almost by a side-light, and not as the climax of the plot, perhaps because the reader does not hold him guilty in any true sense of the disaster which overtakes Zenobia. In its main situation, therefore, the plot, while it suggests and illustrates the temptations and failures of a nature such as Hollingsworth's, does not carry conviction. Description takes the place of action; much of Zenobia's life and of Hollingsworth's, also, is left untold in the time after Coverdale left them; as in the case of Judge Pyncheon, the wrong-doing is left much in the shadow, suggested, hinted at, narrated finally, but not shown in the life; and such wrong-doing loses the edge of villainy. It might be believed that Hollingsworth as a man failed; but as a typical man, as that reformer who is only another shape of the selfish and heartless egotist sacrificing everything wrongfully to his philanthropic end, it is not so easily believed that he must have failed; it is the absence of this logical necessity that discredits him as a type, and takes out of his character and career the universal quality. This, however, may be only a personal impression. The truth of the novel, on the ethical side, may be plainer to others; it presents some aspects of moral truth, carefully studied and probably observed, but they seem very partial aspects, and too incomplete to allow them, taken all together, to be called typical. The power of the story lies rather in its external realism, and especially in that last scene, which was taken from Hawthorne's experience at Concord on the night when he took part in rescuing the body of the young woman who had drowned herself; but with the exception of this last scene, and of some of the sketches that reproduce most faithfully the life and circumstances of Brook Farm, the novel does not equal its predecessors in the ethical or imaginative value of its material, in romantic vividness, or in the literary skill of its construction. The elements of the story are themselves inferior; and perhaps Hawthorne made the most of them that they were capable of; but his mind was antipathetic to his main theme. His representation of the New England reformer is as partial as that of the Puritan minister; both are depraved types, and in the former there is not that vivid truth to general human nature which makes the latter so powerful a revelation of the sinful heart. Hawthorne had purchased at some time during the winter, while at work upon this novel, the house at Concord that he named The Wayside. It had belonged to Mr. Alcott, and was an ordinary country residence with about twenty acres of ground, part of which was a wooded hillside rising up steeply back of the house, which itself stood close to the road. The family took possession of this new home early in June, and it soon took on the habitual look of their domicile, which, wherever it might be, had a character of its own. Mrs. Hawthorne, as usual, was much pleased with everything, and wrote an enthusiastic account of its prettiness and comfort, though no important changes were then made in the house itself. She describes the "Study," and the passage, which is in a letter to her mother, gives the very atmosphere of the place:-- "The study is the pet room, the temple of the Muses and the Delphic shrine. The beautiful carpet lays the foundation of its charms, and the oak woodwork harmonizes with the tint in which Endymion is painted. At last I have Endymion where I always wanted it--in my husband's study, and it occupies one whole division of the wall. In the corner on that side stands the pedestal with Apollo on it, and there is a fountain-shaped vase of damask and yellow roses. Between the windows is the Transfiguration [given by Mr. Emerson]. (The drawing-room is to be redeemed with one picture only,--Correggio's Madonna and Christ.) On another side of the Study are the two Lake Comos. On another, that agreeable picture of Luther and his family around the Christmas-tree, which Mr. George Bradford gave to Mr. Hawthorne. Mr. Emerson took Julian to walk in the woods, the other afternoon. I have no time to think what to say, for there is a dear little mob around me. Baby looks fairest of fair to-day. She walks miles about the house." No words but her own do justice to the happiness of her married life. She worshiped her husband, who always remained to her that combination of adorable genius and tender lover and strong man that he had been ten years before when they were wedded. He had been on his part as devoted to her, and especially he had never allowed the burden of poverty to fall upon her in any physical hardship. In the absence of servants, for example, he himself did the work, and would not permit her to task herself with it. He was never a self-indulgent man, except toward his genius; he had early learned the lesson of "doing without," as the phrase is, and she describes him as being "as severe as a Stoic about all personal comforts" and says he "never in his life allowed himself a luxury." Her testimony to his household character is a remarkable tribute, nor does it detract from it to remember that it is an encomium of love:-- "He has perfect dominion over himself in every respect, so that to do the highest, wisest, loveliest thing is not the least effort to him, any more than it is to a baby to be innocent. It is his spontaneous act, and a baby is not more unconscious in its innocence. I never knew such loftiness, so simply borne. I have never known him to stoop from it in the most trivial household matter, any more than in a larger or more public one. If the Hours make out to reach him in his high sphere, their wings are very strong. But I have never thought of him as in time, and so the Hours have nothing to do with him. Happy, happiest is the wife who can bear such and so sincere testimony to her husband after eight years' intimate union. Such a person can never lose the prestige which commands and fascinates. I cannot possibly conceive of my happiness, but, in a blissful kind of confusion, live on. If I can only be so great, so high, so noble, so sweet, as he in any phase of my being, I shall be glad." This was written in the Berkshire days, but it represents her habitual feeling at all times; and now, in the pleasant society of Concord and among the scenes which were endeared to their memory as those of their early married life, this strain of happiness often overflows in her letters like a flood of sunshine. "All that ground," she writes of the neighborhood of the Old Manse, "is consecrated to me by unspeakable happiness; yet not nearly so great happiness as I now have, for I am ten years happier in time, and an uncounted degree happier in kind. I know my husband ten years better, and I have not arrived at the end; for he is still an enchanting mystery, beyond the region I have discovered and made my own. Also, I know partly how happy I am, which I did not well comprehend ten years ago." One scene, out of scores that are contained in her correspondence, is too pretty and characteristic to miss, and, besides, serves by a single glimpse to give the home life of this new Concord sojourn with great vividness, yielding--what is the hardest of all to obtain in such intimate views--its quality, like a tone of color. It describes Hawthorne's return from a three weeks' absence at the Isles of Shoals during which he had also attended his class reunion at Bowdoin:-- "I put the vase of delicious rosebuds, and a beautiful China plate of peaches and grapes, and a basket of splendid golden Porter apples on his table; and we opened the western door and let in a flood of sunsetting. Apollo's 'beautiful disdain' seemed kindled anew. Endymion smiled richly in his dream of Diana. Lake Como was wrapped in golden mist. The divine form in the Transfiguration floated in light. I thought it would be a pity if Mr. Hawthorne did not come that moment. As I thought this, I heard the railroad-coach--and he was here. He looked, to be sure, as he wrote in one of his letters, 'twice the man he was.'" Earlier in the summer this happy home had been shadowed by the tragedy of the death of Hawthorne's sister, Louisa, who was lost in a steamship disaster on the Hudson. Like all such natures, Hawthorne took his griefs hard and in loneliness; but in such a home healing influences were all about him, and even such a sorrow, which he deeply felt, could only add another silence to his life. His summer work, to which he had turned with reluctance and had rapidly finished by the end of August, was the campaign biography of Franklin Pierce, his life-long friend, who was now a candidate for the Presidency. It is a brief but sufficient book, [Footnote: _Life of Franklin Pierce_. By Nathaniel Hawthorne. Boston: Ticknor, Reed and Fields. 1852. Pp. 144. 12mo.] done well though without distinction, and it holds no real place among his works. Much adverse criticism has, however, been made upon him for writing it at all. It is thought that as a man of letters he lost dignity by using his skill for a political end, and also that as a Northerner he placed himself upon the wrong side in the important public questions then coming to a great national crisis. This is an unjust view. It has already become plain, in the course of the story of his life, that he was not a reformer nor in any real sympathy with reform. He was not only not an abolitionist, which in itself, in view of the closeness of his association with the friends of the cause, argues great immobility in his character; he was, on the contrary, a Democrat in national politics, and took the party view of the slavery question, not with any energy, but placidly and stolidly, so far as one can judge. In fact he took little or no interest in the matter. There was no objection in his mind to writing the biography because of Pierce's political position; he did not hesitate on that score. He did not hang back, on the other hand, because he felt that he could not tell the truth about his friend in a book pledged to see only the good in him. He was as honest as the granite, so far as that is concerned; and he respected as well as loved his friend, and was quite willing to serve him by showing his life and character as he knew them. He had no intention to deceive any one by a eulogy. He indulged in no illusions about Pierce, nor about any of his other friends. He was, in fact, an unsparing critic of men's characters, and he had a trait, not rare in New England,--a willingness to underrate men and minimize them. His fellow-citizens are not natural hero-worshipers; to them "a man is a man, for a' that," with an accent that levels down as well as up. Hawthorne had to the full this democratic, familiar, derogatory temper. Pierce was to him a politician, just as Cilley had been, and for politicians as a class he had a well-defined contempt. He believed Pierce to be a man of honor, sagacity, and tact, a true man, not great in any way, but quite the equal of other men in the country and fit in ability, experience, and character to be President, if his fellow-citizens desired him to serve in that office. The biography Hawthorne wrote contains no conscious untruth. It cannot be thought that Hawthorne compromised with himself either with regard to the national question involved or to the personal character of the candidate. His reluctance to write the book had no deeper root than a dislike to seem to be paid for doing it by an office. He knew that Pierce would provide him with a lucrative post in any case; and the public would say that office was his pay. The prospect of this situation was so irksome to him that he decided beforehand to refuse the office, since he preferred rather to do that than to decline the request of his friend to oblige him with his literary service at such a crisis of his career. It is unjust to Hawthorne to suppose that the act had any political complexion, or was anything else than a mere piece of friendliness, natural and proper in itself; his association with the political group, of which Pierce was one, did not proceed from principle, but was an accident of college companionship; the fact is, however strange it may seem, he had no politics, but stood apart from the great antislavery cause just as he did from the transcendental philosophy; neither of these two main movements in the life of his times touched him at all in a personal way. It belongs to the shallowness of his objection to undertake the biography, his dislike to take office as a kind of pay, that it was easily removed. Fields very sensibly persuaded him that he should not neglect so favorable an opportunity to provide for his wife and children, who had no support but his life. When the newly elected President, therefore, offered him the best office in his gift, the Liverpool consulate, Hawthorne decided to take it. The nomination was confirmed March 26, 1853; and, after sending "Tanglewood Tales" to the press, which had been his winter's work, he prepared to leave Concord for a long residence abroad. VII. LIFE ABROAD. Hawthorne left the Wayside home with a good deal of regret for its quiet happiness, and yet with pleasant anticipations of the opportunity of seeing foreign countries. He had the roaming instinct; and, though he had almost completed fifty years of life, its satisfaction had been of the slightest. It is necessary to recall how very little he had seen of the world in order to appreciate at all the way in which England and Italy looked to his middle-aged eyes, the points in which they failed to appeal to him as well as those in which they arrested his interest. With all his love, or at least sentiment, for the sea, this was the first voyage he had made, and finding himself a good sailor he enjoyed it immensely. It was the next thing to commanding a ship himself upon his ancestral element, and he felt the mystery and distance and that vague impression of indefinite time that belong to the ocean atmosphere,--the wish to sail on and on forever. In Liverpool, where he arrived in July, he was plunged at once into a confused mass of new impressions and also into the very mundane duties and surroundings of the consulate. The narrative of his European experiences in every aspect is fully told in the book of reminiscences "Our Old Home," which he published after his return, and in the voluminous note-books kept in his English, French, and Italian sojourns; and this long story is still further enlarged and varied by the letters of the family, and the recollections of his friends. It can be read in detail, and except as a story of detail it has very little interest. The essential point which belongs to his biography is to see how Hawthorne bore himself, the general impression made on him, the ways in which his character came out, in these novel circumstances. At first, he found the office itself very much an old story. In fact, as a matter of routine and a part of daily external affairs, the life of the consulate was that of the Boston coal wharf and the Salem Custom House over again. He repeated the history of these early experiences to the letter, except that he was no longer ridden with the idea that he must go to work in a material, every-day task in order to be a man among men; he was free from that delusion, but at the same time he welcomed the change of life. Politics had already begun to take on that unpleasantness for a Northern man of his affiliations which could make even so dull a participant as he was, in his sluggish conservatism, very uncomfortable; he had felt its rude censures and misapprehensions of delicate personal relations--such as existed between himself and President Pierce--disagreeably near at hand; and he was glad to get away from his native land, upon which before a year had passed he looked back with the feeling that he never desired to return to it. He did not enjoy England so much, however, as this might seem to indicate; and, especially, he did not enjoy his work, for, notwithstanding his philosophy of the usefulness of manual toil and regular occupation of an unliterary kind, the touch of work always disenchanted his mind at once. He liked it no better than on the two previous occasions at Boston and Salem; it bored and wearied him, and just as before, though he does not now complain of the fact, it put an end to his literary activity, paralyzed and sterilized his genius as completely as if it had blasted him with a curse. The difficulty of serving two masters, though it is sometimes thought to be a service peculiarly fitted for men of letters, was illustrated in Hawthorne's career in many ways and on several occasions, but nowhere more plainly than in the period of his five years of atrophy from the time he entered the consulate till the composition of "The Marble Faun." He wrote vigorously in his note-books, from time to time, but such composition was the opiate it had always been for his higher imaginative and moral powers, and exercised only his faculty of observation. The fact that he does not complain of this state of affairs is due probably to his growing weariness of higher literary effort, the true power of his genius, which now had only an ebbing physical force for its basis. He was too much engaged in affairs, and too tired, to write; but he was not displeased to have so good an excuse, and perhaps his ambition was already really satisfied by the success he had achieved, and he felt the spur less. Altogether, the first and lasting impression made by his account of his life at Liverpool is that he was the same discontented employee who had chafed against circumstances before, and had not changed his mind with the skies over him. The expression of his moods has the old touch of irritability, too, in its excess of language, its air of confiding something that one would not say aloud, its half-conscious pettishness. In March, 1854, he writes to Bridge, in this character, though here possibly it is the presence of politics that is the disturbing factor:-- "I like my office well enough, but any official duties and obligations are irksome to me beyond expression. Nevertheless, the emoluments will be a sufficient inducement to keep me here, though they are not above a quarter part what some people suppose them. "It sickens me to look back to America. I am sick to death of the continual fuss and tumult and excitement and bad blood which we keep up about political topics. If it were not for my children I should probably never return, but--after quitting office--should go to Italy, and live and die there. If Mrs. Bridge and you would go, too, we might form a little colony amongst ourselves, and see our children grow up together. But it will never do to deprive them of their native land, which I hope will be a more comfortable and happy residence in their day than it has been in ours. In my opinion, we are the most miserable people on earth. "I wish you would send me the most minute particulars about Pierce--how he looks and behaves when you meet him, how his health and spirits are--and above all, what the public really thinks of him--a point which I am utterly unable to get at through the newspapers. Give him my best regards, and ask him whether he finds his post any more comfortable than I prophesied it would be." Another year's experience completed his dissatisfaction, and it had reached the familiar acute stage, as early as July, 1855, when he indited that well-known note to Mr. Bright, "the tall, slender, good-humored, laughing, voluble" English friend, who had done everything in the world to make him happy:-- Dear Mr. Bright,--I have come back (only for a day or two) to this black and miserable hole. Truly yours, Nath. Hawthorne. There spoke the man, as if the sun had photographed him. It is true that he had a particular occasion for black spirits at the moment, inasmuch as the law reducing the emoluments of the office had just gone into effect, in consequence of which the wages of his slavery were much reduced. He was now very much disposed to resign. He had saved enough money to free his mind from any anxiety for the future, since he thought he could live on what he had with the exercise of economy; the health of Mrs. Hawthorne was somewhat impaired, and it was necessary to arrange a change of residence for her; and he was thoroughly weary of his English surroundings. The President offered him a post in the American Legation at Lisbon, but he declined to consider it; and finally the matter was settled by Mrs. Hawthorne spending the winter at Lisbon with O'Sullivan, who was minister there, while Hawthorne himself retained the consulate and remained in Liverpool, keeping Julian with him while the other two children accompanied their mother. Mrs. Hawthorne, after a delightful visit, returned much improved in health, and it was not until the autumn of 1857 that Hawthorne retired from office, after Buchanan became President. As a consul Hawthorne discharged his duties with fidelity and efficiency, and was in every way a satisfactory officer. He was diligent and attentive in business affairs, and he was especially considerate of the numbers of distressed citizens who naturally drifted into his care and notice, and was always conscientious and generous in dealing with them, while the burden was a heavy charge. The only matter that stands out notably in his official action is his interest in the inhumane treatment of sailors on American ships, and just before he left office he sent a long dispatch to his government in respect to it. His reflections on the subject, which are apposite and sensible enough, are of less interest biographically than a few sentences upon himself in this philanthropic character, which he wrote to his sister-in-law:-- "I do not know what Sophia may have said about my conduct in the Consulate. I only know that I have done no good,--none whatever. Vengeance and beneficence are things that God claims for Himself. His instruments have no consciousness of His purpose; if they imagine they have, it is a pretty sure token that they are _not_ His instruments. The good of others, like our own happiness, is not to be attained by direct effort, but incidentally. All history and observation confirm this. I am really too humble to think of doing good! Now, I presume you think the abolition of flogging was a vast boon to seamen. I see, on the contrary, with perfect distinctness, that many murders and an immense mass of unpunishable cruelty--a thousand blows, at least, for every one that the cat-of-nine-tails would have inflicted--have resulted from that very thing. There is a moral in this fact which I leave you to deduce. God's ways are in nothing more mysterious than in this matter of trying to do good." This is the same voice that was heard in "The House of the Seven Gables" and "The Blithedale Romance," and shows how deep-seated was Hawthorne's antipathy to conscious philanthropy, and doubtless he meant Elizabeth Peabody as she read it to lay it to heart as an abolitionist. If Hawthorne observed much cruelty among the crews of American ships, he must have accepted it as a part of the general misery of the world with as much philosophy as he was master of, while he did his duty with regard to it according to his opportunities. He was well liked by the sea captains who came in contact with him. He had, indeed, a good previous training, inasmuch as his terms of service in the Custom House had made him familiarly acquainted with this seafaring type, to which he was also akin. He met the American captains not only at his office, but at the boarding-house of Mrs. Blodgett, where they resorted in numbers, and where he himself lived at various times, and during the whole period of his wife's absence in Portugal. This house is described by himself as strongly impregnated with tar and bilge-water, and the men as very much alive. He admired them, and thought they contrasted very favorably with Englishmen in vitality, and he liked to be with them. Just as he had associated happily and on equal terms with similar men whom he had known in his own country, and made good-fellowship with them at Salem, he now was a welcome and companionable member of this hardy group, which his son Julian remembered in its general look and quality, and describes in a smoking-room scene that makes this side of Hawthorne more lifelike than it appears elsewhere:-- "The smoking-room was an apartment barely twenty feet square, though of a fair height; but the captains smoked a great deal, and by nine o'clock sat enveloped in a blue cloud. They played euchre with a jovial persistence that seems wonderful in the retrospect, especially as there was no gambling. The small boys in the house (there were two or three) soon succeeded in mastering the mysteries of the game, and occasionally took a hand with the captains. Hawthorne was always ready to play, and used to laugh a great deal at the turns of fortune. He rather enjoyed card-playing, and was a very good hand at whist; and knew, besides, a number of other games, many of which are now out of fashion, but which he, I suppose, had learned in his college days. Be the diversion or the conversation what it might, he was never lacking in geniality and good-fellowship; and sparkles of wit and good humor continually came brightening out of his mouth, making the stalwart captains haw-haw prodigiously, and wonder, perhaps, where his romances came from. Nevertheless, in his official capacity, he sometimes made things (in their own phrase) rather lively for them; and it is a tribute to his unfailing good sense and justice, that his enforcement of the law never made him unpopular." Christmas Day was an occasion of special festivity at this boarding-house, and that of 1855 was unusually distinguished in its annals by the presence of Hawthorne and the legend of the merry-making about him which his friend Bright put into his clever rhymes of the "Song of Consul Hawthorne." Whether in his office, or at the boarding-house, or going about the docks at Liverpool, "Consul Hawthorne" was evidently a very typical New Englander abroad, and popular with his own people. He had laid the author off, and was as purely a practical man of nautical affairs as would be found in any shipping office in the city; and it needed no close observer to see that the native element in him was of a very obstinate and unmalleable nature. It has been suggested that Hawthorne was afraid of liking English people better than an American ought, as he says he suspects Grace Greenwood did:-- "She speaks rapturously of the English hospitality and warmth of heart. I likewise have already experienced something of this, and apparently have a good deal more of it at my option. I wonder how far it is genuine, and in what degree it is better than the superficial good feeling with which Yankees receive foreigners,--a feeling not calculated for endurance, but a good deal like a brushwood fire. We shall see!" He had abundant opportunity to see, for he was very kindly received by the society which it was natural for him to mingle with, and several of his hosts were untiring in their efforts to please him and render him comfortable. He was by no means incapable of social intercourse, notwithstanding his retired habits; the capacity had never been developed by early breeding or by later necessity, and though on his return home, the change in him was noticeable, even under the influence of his foreign travels he remained a silent, difficult, and evasive person in society. When he was among his own old and familiar friends, such as Bridge or Pierce, or with new companions whom he accepted into his circle, such as Fields, he was open enough and took his share genially and sometimes jovially, as well as when he was with the American sea captains or his old associates in Salem; but the touch of social formality, the presence of a stranger, the ways and habits of conventionality shut him up in impenetrable reserve and made him temporarily miserable. In England, however, he was compelled to meet and be met in the ordinary intercourse of men and women, and he fared much better than might have been anticipated. Very greatly to the surprise of his friends he proved an excellent after-dinner speaker, not only on the public occasions where the sense of his official station as a representative of his country would have spurred him to acquit himself well, but also at private parties and in purely personal relations. Like many silent men he was a good listener, and his sensitiveness and mental alertness gave the impression of more sympathy than perhaps he felt. He made himself agreeable, at all events, and he submitted to an amount of human fellowship that was astonishing to himself. The novelty of the society he entered, doubtless, attracted him, and fed his curiosity, as it certainly was an excitement to his wife. They had lived all their lives in a community so much simpler in all the furnishings of refined living, so much less characterized by the material luxuries of wealth, than this in which they now found themselves, that the mere sight of the houses, dinners, and liveries was a new experience, and they observed them like country cousins. The manners of this society, also, arrested their attention. It was inevitable that Hawthorne should maintain an aloofness from all this, nevertheless, with the natural democratic questioning of the reality of the courtesy, the propriety of the system, the kind and quality of the social results. He felt the appeal that this life made, he perceived its fitness to the soil, he saw it as a growth that belonged in its place; but he was thoroughly glad that there was nothing like it in his own country. There is not the slightest hint in any word of his that he regarded himself as an ambassador of friendship in a foreign country or thought that it was any part of his duty to cultivate international good feeling: he felt himself politically, socially, fundamentally, an alien in England, and he preferred to be so; what first struck him were those obvious differences that distinguish the two peoples, and these remained most prominently in his mind. He was a stranger when he landed at Liverpool, and he never suffered the least tincture of naturalization while he was in the country. This attitude determines the point of view in his notes and reminiscences. He was an observer, close and accurate and interested; but he had not that sympathy which seeks to understand, to interpret, to justify what one sees, and to put one's self in accord with it. He had his standards already well fixed, and his limitations which he was not sufficiently aware of to desire to escape. He had, too, the critical spirit which is a New England trait, and with this went its natural attendant, the habit of speaking his mind. In writing down his impressions of English manners and institutions and people, he behaved exactly as he had done in his records of similar things at home; there was no difference in his method or in the character of what he said; he was telling what he saw with that indifference to how it would strike other people which comes near to being unconsciousness. He was a good deal surprised when he discovered that the English did not relish what he said; he protested that he had done them more than justice, that they were too easily hurt, and as for hating them, he adds, "I would as soon hate my own people." There is no ill-nature in "Our Old Home;" there is only the clearly expressed, bare, unsympathetic statement of what he had seen, touched here and there with that irony and humor which were apt to mix with his view of men and things. So the people at Salem had thought he did them injustice in his sketch of his native home, and he in turn had told them that he had treated them very considerately, without enmity or ill feeling of any kind, and in fact what he had written "could not have been done in a better or kindlier spirit nor with a livelier effect of truth." He had written of England in precisely the same way, with that remorseless adherence to his own impression which was second nature to him, and with that willingness to see the wrong side of things that he disliked, to minimize human nature when it bored him, and to get a grim humor out of his victims, which was also a part of his endowment. In all this, as in some other parts of Hawthorne's personality, there is a reminder of Carlyle. The hard judgment he wrote down of Margaret Fuller, for example, and the humorous extravagance of his visit to Martin Tupper, are not to be paralleled except in Carlyle's reminiscences; there was the same unflinching rigor, the same cold obtuseness, the same half-wearied contempt for what excited their humor in both men. In his vexation of spirit Hawthorne is especially suggestive of some discomfortable cousinship between them; and he was often vexed in spirit. He was, it would seem, especially burdened by the material comfort of England, in which he found a grossness but little consonant with his own taste and spirit, and he made of this the type of things English, as it is easy to do:-- "The best thing a man born in this island can do is to eat his beef and mutton and drink his porter, and take things as they are; and think thoughts that shall be so beefish, muttonish, portish, and porterish, that they shall be matters rather material than intellectual. In this way an Englishman is natural, wholesome, and good; a being fit for the present time and circumstances, and entitled to let the future alone!" The ascetic and intellectual element, which was large in his ideal past, was revolted by these things, just as the democratic instincts of his nature were shocked by the aristocratic system of society with its social results. He was, too, always in a certain sense homesick; not that he was anxious to go home or looked forward to his return with great pleasure, but he was a man out of place, and had lost the natural harmonies between the outer and the inner life. He had taken a house at Rock Park, a suburb of Liverpool, but he could not make a home out of it, and his account of his residence there gives the whole interior atmosphere of his English stay. "I remember to this day the dreary feeling with which I sat by our first English fireside and watched the chill and rainy twilight of an autumn day darkening down upon the garden, while the preceding occupant of the house (evidently a most unamiable personage in his lifetime) scowled inhospitably from above the mantelpiece, as if indignant that an American should try to make himself at home there. Possibly it may appease his sulky shade to know that I quitted his abode as much a stranger as I entered it." It is plain to see that he rather endured than enjoyed English life, notwithstanding the true pleasures he found and the kind friends he made. He was a stranger, taking a stranger's view and with much suspicion of his surroundings, anticipating something hostile in them and forestalling it with his own defenses not too friendly in aspect; in a word he was a foreigner, and he never lost the sense of being in a country not his own, to which he felt superior in all essential matters. Some regret has been expressed that he did not come into closer contact with English literary life, and especially with the more famous writers of the day. He did not even make the acquaintance of Dickens, Thackeray, Tennyson, Carlyle, George Eliot, to name the most important, nor was he really introduced to the best intellectual life of England at all. He met several second-rate writers, and he knew the Brownings more particularly in Italy. It is not likely, however, that much was lost by this failure to get into touch with the great masters of his own art or with English thinkers and poets in general. Hawthorne had never cared for such society in his own country, and it was probably by his own choice that he missed the literary sets in London. The distaste that he felt for society seems to have taken an aggravated form where his own craft was concerned, whether through self-consciousness, or the memory of his years of obscurity, or for whatever reason; perhaps he had known authors enough at Concord and had no spirit of adventure left in that direction. His own genius was solitary, and in his friendships literary sympathy had no share, for he neither received nor gave it; in fact, if he became familiar with an author, such as Thoreau or Ellery Channing or Herman Melville, it was with the man, not the author. The terms on which he stood with Longfellow and Emerson are those on which, at the happiest, he might have met Thackeray, Tennyson, or Carlyle; but, though speculation must be vain, it is far more probable that he would have found little congeniality with any one of the three. Lord Houghton appears to have made an effort to take him about, but with so little success that he thought Hawthorne had taken a dislike to him. As it was, Hawthorne saw quite enough, and more than he desired, of literary England; it was mostly weariness to him. It must be acknowledged that the manners and institutions of the country, and its people for the most part, were little to Hawthorne's taste, and he showed this in his book about them; but, for all that, he found the country interesting and often lovely in its picturesque antiquity and softnesses of light and color, and he appreciated to the full the literary and historical sentiment that most appeals to Americans of like education and breeding. He made many excursions in different parts of England, and visited Scotland and the Isle of Man, and he lingered in many towns and villages and was disposed to haunt old places with a pilgrim devotion. He loved the face of the country, too, and notwithstanding its misted and dreary skies, especially over Liverpool, he found some good words for its weather, its seasons, its long days, and all its out-door look. He went about with the mind and senses of a tourist, satiating his instincts for minute and detailed observation and writing it all down; in a spirit, too, of enjoyment and discovery; and out of this satisfaction of his inveterate habits of observing and noting and walking about with no other end in view, just as if he were taking an autumn stroll in Salem, came the felicity of the English notes, which after all deductions is very great in its own field of delicate sentiment and realistic grasp and the atmosphere of a mind. Hawthorne was thoroughly happy in indulging his wandering propensity in such voyages of discovery; especially in London he found a city that satisfied his idea of it, and he seems to have busied himself there for days and weeks in merely going about from point to point and seeing the spectacle of its vast and varied life. Hawthorne's English experiences will, perhaps, be best realized, if he is thought of apart from literature, as a man much identified with the shipping interests and commercial society of Liverpool, and attending to this business rather doggedly and wearily, not especially liking the place or the people, whose ways and notions he was instinctively against, being himself a settled New Englander of a strong race type; and yet, besides this, a man who managed in his four years' residence to see a great deal of the length and breadth of England, as a summer tourist might visit its shrines on pilgrimage. This describes his life, nevertheless, only from the outside; as soon as one opens his note-books, his personality changes the impression, and pervades even his least sympathetic pages with a human quality that wins on the reader in spite of all reservations, and one sees how in the face of his prejudices and limitations England was saved to him by his literary faculty, the interests, susceptibilities, and powers that were his as a man of letters. One finds in his experience, too, besides the consul and the man of letters, a kindly and simple manhood of a more primitive element, the human heart in its own original right, as in the well-known incident of the workhouse child who was so strangely drawn to him. Of the humane actions, however, of which any record remains, none is so honorable as his considerateness, generosity, and conscientiousness in his correspondence with Delia Bacon, whom he endured and befriended with infinite patience and delicacy; the letters which he wrote to her show his character in a very noble light, and bring out one side of his life which has little illustration, his habitual thoughtfulness for the weak. One recalls his care for his Brook Farm friend Farley at Concord, for example; and all his relations with what one may call the wayside acquaintance of life were to his honor. One other incident must also find a place here, which completes an earlier story and rounds out his own conception of integrity. On coming to Liverpool he had incurred heavy expenses, but six months of his more fortunate days had not gone by before he sent to Hillard the money which his friends had given to him in his sore need at Salem while he was writing "The Scarlet Letter." His own words best express the feelings which led him to make this restitution:-- Liverpool, _December 9, 1853._ Dear Hillard,--I herewith send you a draft on Ticknor for the sum (with interest included) which was so kindly given me by unknown friends, through you, about four years ago. I have always hoped and intended to do this, from the first moment when I made up my mind to accept the money. It would not have been right to speak of this purpose before it was in my power to accomplish it; but it has never been out of my mind for a single day, nor hardly, I think, for a single working hour. I am most happy that this loan (as I may fairly call it, at this moment) can now be repaid without the risk on my part of leaving my wife and children utterly destitute. I should have done it sooner; but I felt that it would be selfish to purchase the great satisfaction for myself, at any fresh risk to them. We are not rich, nor are we ever likely to be; but the miserable pinch is over. The friends who were so generous to me must not suppose that I have not felt deeply grateful, nor that my delight at relieving myself from this pecuniary obligation is of any ungracious kind. I have been grateful all along, and am more so now than ever. This act of kindness did me an unspeakable amount of good; for it came when I most needed to be assured that anybody thought it worth while to keep me from sinking. And it did me even greater good than this, in making me sensible of the need of sterner efforts than my former ones, in order to establish a right for myself to live and be comfortable. For it is my creed (and was so even at that wretched time) that a man has no claim upon his fellow-creatures, beyond bread and water and a grave, unless he can win it by his own strength or skill. But so much the kinder were those unknown friends whom I thank again with all my heart. * * * * * This money must have been the first he had saved, and he could now spare it from his income. In the four years that he held the consulate he had held to his main purpose of laying by a competency, and when he resigned, on August 31, 1857, his mind was at ease with regard to the future for himself and his family. His gratitude for this late won independence, humble as it was, must have been deeply felt, as is apparent from his letters at the time; a great weight had been lifted from his spirit, and his happiness was such as only a man with his ideas of personal independence could realize. He proposed now to linger in Europe for some time longer; and when he was relieved from his duties in the fall he went with the family through France to Italy, hoping that the southern winter would be of benefit to Mrs. Hawthorne's still uncertain health. Life in Italy proved far more agreeable than it had been in England, and there were periods in it when Hawthorne enjoyed as great happiness in the placid course of the days as he ever experienced. For the first time in his life he was free from the necessity of labor, and he had recently escaped from that practical business of affairs and daily duties which was always irksome to him. The change, too, from the dark skies of England and its grimy Liverpool materialism to an atmosphere of sun and warmth and artistic beauty was itself enough to reanimate his spirit; and he found at once some congenial society, and not a few who seemed to him like old friends. He appears for the first time in his life really to live with other people, not as an occasional visitant coming out of his hermitage, but as one of themselves. He sought out Story, who was an old neighbor at Salem, though he had known him only slightly, and under his guidance he mixed with the American artists then in Rome,--Miss Hosmer, Thompson, Kopes, and Miss Lander,--as well as with others of the foreigners resident there, Miss Bremer, Mrs. Jameson, and Bryant among the rest; and he became good friends with Motley and his family, whose companionship he enjoyed in a very natural, frank way. The picturesque ruins of Home, its gardens and fountains and the sky and air appealed to him, as if to new senses or at least to senses newly awakened and developed; and he was sensibly attracted by the artistic works on every hand. He was not wholly uncultivated in art, though his aesthetic sense had been rather a hope than a reality all through his life. He had written to his wife before marriage, nearly twenty years ago, "I never owned a picture in my life; yet pictures have been among the earthly possessions (and they are spiritual ones too) which I most coveted;" and in his tales there is a recurring reference to pictures as a part of his imaginative world. The influence of his wife's artistic tastes in his home life had also been a kind of preparation for appreciation of the masterpieces, many of which had long been familiar to his eyes and thoughts in reproductions. In his Boston days he use to visit such collections of pictures as were accessible to him, and he knew sculpture somewhat through casts. Such cultivation, however, was at best a very limited and incomplete preparation, and did not preserve him from the tourist's weariness of galleries. He had wished in London that the Elgin marbles had all been reduced to lime. There was something pictorial in his genius, but painting was slower to give up its secrets to him than sculpture, which, being a more abstract art and simpler in intention, as well as nearer to the living form, made the easier appeal to him. He did not respond to Italian painting very perfectly at the best, and his education hardly proceeded farther than an appreciation of the softer and brighter works of Guido and Raphael, nor did he ever free himself from the intellectual prepossessions of his mind. He did not become even an amateur in art, and he probably knew it; he had begun too late to enter that world; and he contented himself with a moral sympathy, an apprehension of idea and feeling, rather than the seeing eye and understanding heart by which one takes possession of the artistic world as a free citizen there. It was not an important matter, however; his comments on art have only a personal interest, lighting up his own nature; but, within his limits, he enjoyed a new and great experience, one that illumined and softened his mind, in his wanderings about the galleries and churches and his sittings in artists' studios. The contemporary and native world of Italy he attended to but very little, noting its picturesque aspects somewhat, but taking the slightest interest in its people; if he had felt a barrier between himself and the English, here was a gulf of difference that it was hopeless to attempt to pass over, and he left the Italians in the inaccessible foreignness in which he found them. The first four months were spent at Rome, in this gradual opening of his mind to the new impressions of the city, so fascinating to his imagination, and in establishing himself and his family in the new society of their daily life. Late in May, 1858, they went north by the carriage road, and settled at Florence in the Casa Bella, near Casa Guidi, where the Brownings were, and not far from Powers's studio. In August they took possession of the old villa of Montaüto on the hill of Bellosguardo, near the city, which is so closely associated with Hawthorne's Italian days as the tower of Monte Beni. Here he began to write "The Marble Faun," shutting himself up for an hour or two every day in the stern effort, as he describes it, of coming "to close grip with a romance which I have been trying to tear out of my mind." The scene of his labors was quite remote, such a place as he liked to have to write in, and he was undisturbed unless it were by the Spiritualism of the Browning villa, where Mrs. Browning was a believer; and, perhaps under the influence of this association, Mrs. Hawthorne showed more plainly her natural inclination to a more than curious interest in the phenomena. She was, indeed, somewhat a believer in the power of communication with the spiritual world, and its near presence and influence in our lives. The seclusion of the villa of Montaüto was very grateful to Hawthorne, and he writes of it to Fields with almost a home-feeling, as if he had again found a lodging place at least for his wandering Penates:-- "It is pleasant to feel at last that I am really away from America--a satisfaction that I never really enjoyed as long as I stayed in Liverpool, where it seemed to me that the quintessence of nasal and hand-shaking Yankeedom was gradually filtered and sublimated through my consulate, on the way outward and homeward. I first got acquainted with my own countrymen there. At Rome, too, it was not much better. But here in Florence, and in the summer-time, and in this secluded villa, I have escaped out of all my old tracks, and am really remote. I like my present residence immensely. The house stands on a hill, overlooking Florence, and is big enough to quarter a regiment, insomuch that each member of the family, including servants, has a separate suite of apartments, and there are vast wildernesses of upper rooms into which we have never yet sent exploring expeditions. At one end of the house there is a moss-grown tower, haunted by owls and by the ghost of a monk who was confined there in the thirteenth century, previous to being burnt at the stake in the principal square of Florence. I hire this villa, tower and all, at twenty-eight dollars a month; but I mean to take it away bodily and clap it into a romance, which I have in my head, ready to be written out." The kind of life that was led by the family is more vividly sketched by his daughter in her reminiscences of the time, and her pages afford the only full companion picture to those of the Old Manse and the Berkshire cottage, and to some extent supply the lack of that autobiographic background to "The Marble Faun" which the reader misses in Hawthorne's own preface. "The walls of the hall and staircase were of gray stone, as were the steps which led echoingly up to the second story of the house. My sister exclaims in delight concerning the whole scene: 'This villa,--you have no idea how delightful it is! I think there must be pretty nearly a hundred rooms in it, of all shapes, sizes, and heights. The walls are never less than five feet thick, and sometimes more, so that it is perfectly cool. I should feel very happy to live here always. I am sitting in the loggia, which is delightful in the morning freshness. Oh, how I love every inch of that beautiful landscape!' The tower and the adjacent loggia were the features that preëminently sated our thirst for suggestive charm, and they became our proud boast and the chief precincts of our daily life and social intercourse. The ragged gray giant looked over the road-walls at its foot, and beyond and below them over the Arno valley, rimmed atop with azure distance, and touched with the delicate dark of trees. Internally, the tower (crowned, like a rough old king of the days of the Round Table, with a machicolated summit) was dusty, broken, and somewhat dangerous of ascent. Owls that knew every wrinkle of despair and hoot-toot of pessimism clung to narrow crevices in the deserted rooms, where the skeleton-like prison frameworks at the unglazed windows were in keeping with the dreadful spirits of these unregenerate anchorites. The forlorn apartments were piled one above the other until the historic cylinder of stone opened to the sky. In contrast to the barrenness of the gray inclosures, through the squares of the windows throbbed the blue and gold, green and lilac, of Italian heavens and countryside.... "Some of the rooms at Montaüto I studiously avoided. The forlorn cavern of a parlor, or ballroom, I remember to have seen only once. There was a painful vacuum where good spirits ought to have been. Along the walls were fixed seats, like those in the apse of some morally fallen cathedral, and they were covered with blue threadbare magnificence that told the secrets of vanity. Heavy tables crowded down the centre of the room. I came, saw, and fled. The oratory was the most thrilling place of all. It opened out of my sister's room, which was a large, sombre apartment. It was said to attract a frequently seen ghost by the force of its profound twilight and historic sorrows; and my sister, who was courageous enough to startle a ghost, highly approved of this corner of her domain. But she suddenly lost her buoyant taste for disembodied spirits, and a rumor floated mistily about that Una had seen the wretched woman who could not forget her woes in death. In 'Monte Beni' this oratory is minutely pictured, where 'beneath the crucifix ... lay a human skull ... carved in gray alabaster, most skillfully done ... with accurate imitation of the teeth, the sutures, the empty eye-caverns.' Everywhere the intense picturesqueness gave material, at Montaüto, for my father's romance." Amid such surroundings the new romance was sketched out, but not very much progress could have been made with it. In October the family returned to Rome by way of Siena, where some happy days were spent with Story,--a town which impressed Hawthorne almost temperamentally, standing apart in his mind with Perugia. "A thoughtful, shy man," he says, "might settle down here with the view of making the place a home, and spend many years in a sombre kind of happiness." At Rome they settled again in the Piazza Poli, and entered on the winter days with much happiness, feeling acquainted now and partly at home in the city. But a misfortune came to them in the illness of Una, who was taken with Roman fever, and her life was despaired of. Hawthorne always took his sorrows hard, and he suffered much in this period of anxiety, enduring in his stoic way the heavy pressure; happily the doctor proved mistaken in his confidence that the child would die, and though her illness was long, she gradually recovered strength. It was during her convalescence that Pierce came to Rome, and Hawthorne found in his friendship a great support and comfort. It is plain that Pierce was the only man that Hawthorne loved with his full heart, and he had come to recognize the great place this friendship held in his life. His loyalty to Pierce was a true tribute, and its expression does honor to both men:-- "I have found him here in Rome, the whole of my early friend, and even better than I used to know him; a heart as true and affectionate, a mind much widened and deepened by the experience of life. We hold just the same relation to one another as of yore, and we have passed all the turning-off places, and may hope to go on together, still the same dear friends, as long as we live. I do not love him one whit the less for having been President, nor for having done me the greatest good in his power; a fact that speaks eloquently in his favor, and perhaps says a little for myself. If he had been merely a benefactor, perhaps I might not have borne it so well; but each did his best for the other, as friend for friend." The illness of Una had thrown a shadow over these last days at Rome, and it was in any case necessary to take her away. In a characteristic outburst Hawthorne writes to Fields:-- "I bitterly detest Rome, and shall rejoice to bid it farewell forever; and I fully acquiesce in all the mischief and ruin that has happened to it, from Nero's conflagration downward. In fact, I wish the very site had been obliterated before I ever saw it." They left Rome late in May and went by sea to Marseilles, and after a rapid journey up the Rhone and to Geneva went by Paris to London. The return to England was somewhat like homecoming, and during this second residence Hawthorne shows a more sympathetic and contented spirit. He determined to finish his romance here, and settled first at Whitby and afterwards at Redcar, and still later he migrated to Leamington; but the romance was mainly put into shape at Redcar, where the necessary conditions of solitude were best realized. He lived very much as when he had written his other works at home, writing in the morning and spending the rest of the day with the children out of doors on the sands. He finished the book on November 8, and it was published early the following spring. [Footnote: _The Marble Faun_, or the Romance of Monte Beni. By Nathaniel Hawthorne, author of "The Scarlet Letter." Boston: Ticknor and Fields. 1860. 12mo. 2 vols., pp. 283; 288.] Hawthorne came to the writing of "The Marble Faun" after his genius was matured, with his temperament fully ripened, his intellectual and moral and artistic nature consonant in its varied play, and at the height of his literary powers. The story is in one sense a culmination, and it is perhaps his most complete expression of life; but it is less characteristic of him, less peculiarly his own, than the American tales, notwithstanding its greater breadth, its finer beauty, and its more profound mystery. In method he develops nothing new; the scheme, the manner, the tone are the same already made familiar. He had recourse to his life abroad for the realism of the scene, and took out of his note-books and memory the whole visible world of his romance, precisely as he had formerly utilized the New England village life and the Brook Farm experience. He has drunk in the charm of Italy and absorbed the picturesque and artistic atmosphere of Rome and its religious impressiveness; he has taken most delicately and harmoniously into his sensitive temperament the loveliness and the power of both the world of the past and the world of art, and he renders them back in description as they were mirrored in himself; the stir of Roman life, its antiquity, its still and immutable forms of picture and sculpture, are given back with full sympathy and as clearly as the autumn woodland of the old Puritan town in his first romance; and this realism, for such it is notwithstanding its glamour, is the substance of the tale, though it is all surface, just as was the case with "The House of the Seven Gables." He has done for Rome and Italy what he there did for Salem, different as the effect may seem, owing to the greater nobility and dignity of the material. He has also in the management of the story confined himself, as was his wont, to a few characters, Donatello, Miriam, Hilda, and Kenyon, each strictly isolated in peculiar individuality, and offering the opportunity for powerful contrasts; and he has allowed his imagination to find its spring in the symbolism of a physical object, here the marble statue of the faun, and let his moral scheme evolve out of the brooding of his thought upon the spiritual thing thus suggested for the play of meditation. The plot itself, though more definitely disclosed in its main incident of crime, which is made central in the narrative, is of the simplest sort, and no more than enough to provide corporal fact sufficient to give the body of event and situation; and, for the rest, the story both before and after is left wholly vague, the mystery of Donatello's fate repeating the mystery of Miriam's past. In this he showed again his indifference to what became of his characters when they had fulfilled their function artistically; he had no human sympathy with their personal fortunes. This peculiarity is only another phase of the fact that crime itself did not interest him in its mortal career. The use he found in crime was only as the means by which sin was generated in the soul; and his concern was with the latter, not the former. He has projected on such a background and out of such a group of characters an analytic study of the nature of evil, and this is his main theme, overlaid as it is with all the decorative beauty of his interpretation of Italy. He had formerly set forth the history of sin in the heart, taking the evil for granted and reflecting upon it as a thing given; he now looks backward and is engaged with the genesis of sin in a natural man, the coming of sin into the world of nature; and yet this is not all, but he endeavors to think about the meaning of evil, the reason for sin's existence, the old problem fundamental in thought about the spiritual life. It cannot be regarded as a matter on which he came to any satisfactory conclusion or even uttered any novel reflections; and it is this that gives its lack of firmness to the work on the ethical side. Donatello is made into a living soul of a higher capacity by his experience of crime; but Hawthorne suggests that evil serves a good purpose in this only with much reluctance, and indeed he may almost be said to reject this explanation. Donatello became "a sadder and a wiser man," and with that old phrase the issue for him seems to be summed. It is noticeable that, as in "The Scarlet Letter," there is no question of how this soul that has come into a miserable consciousness is to be healed; and it is remarkable that the only consolation the Church can give is vouchsafed by Hawthorne to the heretic Hilda, but not to the child of its own bosom. Hawthorne, if he indicates through Kenyon his ideas, seems to advise, as elsewhere, letting the dead past bury its dead while Donatello and Miriam should go on to what self-sacrificing life they can find. Unsatisfactory as the story is, merely as a tale, it is less vague than the central truth, the moral theme which it embodies. The truth is that after all, in the ethical sphere of the story, Hawthorne has given no more than his meditations, very much at random, upon sin as it appears in the world of nature, and the way in which his chosen characters react under its influence. Hilda is as innocent as Donatello, but her soul frees itself from the contact; and Miriam is as guilty, yet she alone is unaffected by the crime in her essential nature, so far as appears. She is the most vital character in the book, having touches in her of both Hester and Zenobia; the three women are all of one kind in their different environment, and Miriam is the most human of the three,--strong, assertive, practical as they all are, and also entirely resourceless in their tragedies. The romance is not of a kind to sustain very firm critical handling, for its structure is thus weak, not merely in the plot but in its ethical meaning; if the former is left unwrought, so the latter is left unclarified. The power of the work lies rather in its artistic effects, independent of any purpose Hawthorne had in writing; his genius was creative in its own right, and when he had once brought the background, the characters, and the idea together, they in a certain sense took life and built up their own story, while his hand linked picture to picture in the unfolding scene, with a free play of sentiment, fancy, and meditation round about them. Intense points show out, as if by an inner and undesigned brilliancy. The companionship of Donatello, full of the freshness and laughter of the early world, with Miriam tracked by her own terrible secret, is itself a startling situation, and the effecting of their union by a crime, which paralyzes the love of one while it creates the love of the other, is the work of a master imagination. Hilda in her dove-cote, keeping the perpetual lamp burning at the Virgin's shrine and taking into her heart the lovely pictures of old time as a pool reflects heaven in its quiet depths, is a figure of sensitive purity, rendered symbolically, with the same truth and delicacy as Donatello, though so opposed in contrast to his natural innocence blighted and stained; even the quality of mercilessness, which Hawthorne gave her out of his own heart, she turns to favor and to prettiness, till it seems to belong to her as a part of her chastity of nature. The reduplication of the characters in the world of art about them, though it is frequently resorted to by Hawthorne, does not grow monotonous; but by this method he rather animates the external world, as if picture and statue and tower had absorbed life and were permeated with its human emotion. The faun is, perhaps, a somewhat hard symbol, and needs to be vitalized in Donatello before its truth is felt to be alive; but the drawing that reproduces the model as the demon's face, the sketches of Miriam portraying a woman's revengeful mischief, the sights that Donatello and Kenyon shape out of the sunset, the benediction of the statue of the pontiff, the evasive eyes of Beatrice felt in Hilda, Donatello, and Miriam, are instances of borrowed or attributed life, which illustrate how constantly and effectively Hawthorne uses this means of expression, and it is the chief means by which he has integrated and harmonized the various material into a whole artistically felt. It is an error, however, to force his interpretation too far, as in the attempt to see in the Beatrice portrait a shadow of Miriam's mystery; if such a thought crossed his mind, it left no record of itself, and he was as ignorant as others of Miriam's actual past, one may be sure. That unwillingness to be gazed upon, of which he makes so much, recurring to it again and again and most pointedly in Donatello, was the simplest and primary symbol to him, apparently, of the shock of sin, whether it were in the victim like Beatrice or the participant like Donatello or the spectator like Hilda. In Miriam it is less felt, because to her the knowledge of evil had come in her earlier career. It is in rendering this spiritual shock, disturbing the very seat of life, that Hawthorne best succeeds in the moral part of his subject; and it is by awakening some answering vibration in his readers that he imparts to the romance that universal interest which makes it rank so high as it does in the literature of the soul's life. He was not, however, very apt in the mechanics of his art, and in lieu of structure such as a man of far less faculty might be an adept in, he finds in his imagined tale a principle of life itself; his work is seldom well reasoned, but it has vital germs of thought, emotion, and action, and these are loosed into activity and grow of themselves, and he fosters and develops them in his richly brooding mind. So, here, the spiritual shock, which is the central spring of the romance, is allowed to transmit itself in every direction, and he lays bare its workings. It is saddest in Donatello in the moment when he heard the cry of the falling wretch, when he turned cold at Miriam's touch, when he lost his kinship with the wild creatures he loved; and it is fixed in his unquiet, evasive eyes. One loves Donatello, and of no other character of Hawthorne can it be said that it wins affection; and one wishes that, if he must have a soul, he might have come into it in some way of natural kindness dissociated from a moral theory. This theory--and here is the one discord--is, after all, felt to be an exotic in the Italian air. Donatello has been puritanized, and though the character may be a perfect symbolic type, it has nothing racial in it; and to be racial was Donatello's charm. It is the same wherever the story is taken up; it is charming as an artistic work, but when one begins to think about it, the method of approach is proved to be wrong because it solves nothing and ends in futility. It is throughout a Puritan romance, which has wandered abroad and clothed itself in strange masquerade in the Italian air. Hawthorne's personality pervades it, like life in a sensitive hand. It is the best and fullest and most intimate expression of his temperament, of the man he had come to be, and takes the imprint of his soul with minute delicacy and truth. It is a meditation on sin, but so made gracious with beauty as to lose the deformity of its theme; and it suffers a metamorphosis into a thing of loveliness. To us it is in boyhood our dream of Italy, and in after years the best companion of memory; it is also a romance of nature and art, and of the mystery of evil, shot through with such sunshine gleams, with the presence of pure color and divine forms, as to seem like the creations of that old mythic Mediterranean world which, though it held shapes of terror, was the most beautiful land that the imagination has ever known. VIII. LAST YEARS. Hawthorne reached Concord, on his home journey, late in June, 1860, and took possession of the Wayside almost unobserved. He had intended to improve the house and grounds, and set about the task; the well-known tower, in memory of the tower of Montaüto, was added for his study, and some other changes were made, but his funds, which were diminished by an unfortunate loan, were insufficient to enable him to do all he desired. He was welcomed by his old Concord friends, and began again the agreeable village life he had formerly known; but he mingled more on equal terms with other people than had been his custom before his foreign residence had forced him into some share of society. He went not infrequently to the Saturday Club in Boston, and though always a silent and reserved person in such gatherings, his enjoyment of these occasions was as great as he could ever derive from literary companionship, and many of the members were old and familiar acquaintances. It was at home, however, that he spent his days, working in his study over his writing, and pacing the footpath on the hill-ridge back of his house, and from time to time going to the seaside at Beverly or in Maine with his son Julian for a companion. His health was not so firm as it had been. A change seems to have fallen on him with some suddenness on his return to America; for some years, ever since the hard winter of "The Scarlet Letter" at Salem, he had complained of fatigue in writing and of lassitude and slowness of mind; after the winter in Rome he felt this with new weariness, as he says when he practically ended his notebooks in Switzerland, not having the vital impulse to continue them, and in the intervening time he had completed "The Marble Faun;" now he began perceptibly to lose physical force, to grow thin, and to lack energy. He wrote a good deal, sitting down to his desk and "blotting successive sheets of paper as of yore;" but with little satisfaction to himself. The times were unfavorable to peace of mind and the quiet of literary occupation. Secession began soon after he arrived, and war followed in the spring with that outburst of passionate devotion to the Union which was transforming all his neighborhood into a camp and sending all the youth of his people to the battle southward. To Hawthorne, being in such imperfect sympathy with this feeling and the causes which gave it passion, the war was only vexation and disaster, with much meaninglessness, foolishness, uselessness, however he might try to look at it with Northern eyes. In nothing is his natural detachment from life so marked as in this incapacity to understand the national life in so supreme a crisis and under the impulse of so profound a passion. He stood aloof from it, unmoved in his superannuated conservatism, as abroad he had stood aloof from the English life wrapped in his imperturbable New England breeding. He was obliged to take some stand in his own mind, and he naturally went with his own State, never having been really an American, on the national scale, but only a New Englander, as he confessed. During his life at Liverpool, four years before, he had made up his mind which side he would be on, when the prospect of war began to loom up as a possibility, and wrote briefly to Bridge about it:-- "I regret that you think so doubtfully (or, rather, despairingly) of the prospects of the Union; for I should like well enough to hold on to the old thing. And yet I must confess that I sympathize to a large extent with the Northern feeling, and think it is about time for us to make a stand. If compelled to choose, I go for the North. At present we have no country--at least, none in the sense an Englishman has a country. I never conceived, in reality, what a true and warm love of country is till I witnessed it in the breasts of Englishmen. The States are too various and too extended to form really one country. New England is quite as large a lump of earth as my heart can really take in. "Don't let Frank Pierce see the above, or he would turn me out of office, late in the day as it is. However, I have no kindred with, nor leaning towards, the abolitionists." In the first flush of the war he felt the contagion of the patriotic thrill, and was with his friends a "war Democrat;" but his mind was filled with reservations. On May 26, 1861, he again writes to Bridge:-- "The war, strange to say, has had a beneficial effect upon my spirits, which were flagging woefully before it broke out. But it was delightful to share in the heroic sentiment of the time, and to feel that I had a country,--a consciousness which seemed to make me young again. One thing as regards this matter I regret, and one thing I am glad of. The regrettable thing is that I am too old to shoulder a musket myself, and the joyful thing is that Julian is too young. He drills constantly with a company of lads, and means to enlist as soon as he reaches the minimum age. But I trust we shall either be victorious or vanquished before that time. Meantime, though I approve the war as much as any man, I don't quite understand what we are fighting for, or what definite result can be expected. If we pummel the South ever so hard, they will love us none the better for it; and even if we subjugate them, our next step should be to cut them adrift. If we are fighting for the annihilation of slavery, to be sure it may be a wise object, and offer a tangible result, and the only one which is consistent with a future union between North and South. A continuance of the war would soon make this plain to us, and we should see the expediency of preparing our black brethren for future citizenship by allowing them to fight for their own liberties, and educating them through heroic influences. Whatever happens next, I must say that I rejoice that the old Union is smashed. We never were one people, and never really had a country since the Constitution was formed." Six months later he writes again with nearly the same point of view, accepting in fact the theory of disunion as the only possible result:-- "I am glad you take such a hopeful view of our national prospects so far as regards the war; but my own opinion is that no nation ever came safe and sound through such a confounded difficulty as this of ours. For my part I don't hope, nor indeed wish, to see the Union restored as it was. Amputation seems to me much the better plan, and all we ought to fight for is the liberty of selecting the point where our diseased members shall be lop't off. I would fight to the death for the northern slave States and let the rest go." It is this despair of the Union that characterizes his attitude throughout, and with it goes also an absence of belief in the Union; but one feels that he is not deeply interested in the matter for its own sake. Thus after another interval he again writes to Bridge, February 14, 1862:-- "Frank Pierce came here and spent a night, a week or two since, and we mingled our tears and condolences for the state of the country. Pierce is truly patriotic, and thinks there is nothing left for us but to fight it out, but I should be sorry to take his opinion implicitly as regards our chances in the future. He is bigoted to the Union, and sees nothing but ruin without it; whereas I (if we can only put the boundary far enough south) should not much regret an ultimate separation." The next month Hawthorne visited Washington and saw the edges of the conflict, and he wrote out his impressions of men and of the scenes in his article "Chiefly about War Matters," which was published in "The Atlantic Monthly" for July, 1862. The text was sufficiently unsympathetic with the times to trouble the editor's mind, and Hawthorne, to ease the situation, added explanatory comments of his own as if from an editorial pen. The article shows conclusively how little Hawthorne had been affected, how completely he stood out of the national spirit, being as mere an observer of what was going on as at any time in his life and expressing his own view from time to time with entire obliviousness, as in the passages on Lincoln and on John Brown, of everything except his own impression. The judgment he passes on John Brown illustrates, too, better than pages of comment, his mental attitude in politics, its excuses and its limitations:-- "I shall not pretend to be an admirer of old John Brown, any farther than sympathy with Whittier's excellent ballad about him may go; nor did I expect ever to shrink so unutterably from any apothegm of a sage, whose happy lips have uttered a hundred golden sentences, as from that saying (perhaps falsely attributed to so honored a source), that the death of this blood-stained fanatic has 'made the Gallows as venerable as the Cross!' Nobody was ever more justly hanged. He won his martyrdom fairly, and took it firmly. He himself, I am persuaded (such was his natural integrity), would have acknowledged that Virginia had a right to take the life which he had staked and lost; although it would have been better for her, in the hour that is fast coming, if she could generously have forgotten the criminality of his attempt in its enormous folly. On the other hand, any common-sensible man, looking at the matter unsentimentally, must have felt a certain intellectual satisfaction in seeing him hanged, if it were only in requital of his preposterous miscalculation of possibilities." Whatever one may think of this as the truth of common-sense, its publication in the summer of 1862 in Massachusetts showed an impenetrable self-possession in the author, and it is doubtless true, as has been said, that no other Northern man could have written such an article as this, so disengaged from the realities, the passion and prejudices of the time, so cold in observation and so impartial in feeling, so free from any participation in the scene. It was during the winter of this year and the spring of 1863 that Hawthorne renewed his literary work by contributing to "The Atlantic Monthly" the papers afterwards published as "Our Old Home." [Footnote: _Our Old Home_. A Series of English Sketches. By Nathaniel Hawthorne. Boston: Ticknor and Fields. 1863. 12mo. Pp. 398.] The contents of this volume have already been spoken of, and it need only be remarked here that some allowance may fairly be made for their tone and manner on the score of the depression of the time, arising from Hawthorne's increasing ill-health as well as from public confusion. The one memorable incident connected with the new book is the adherence of the author to his design of dedicating it to Franklin Pierce, to whom indeed it fitly belonged. Fields, however, was doubtful how the public would look on a compliment paid to the unpopular ex-President, and on communicating his views to Hawthorne he received this answer:-- "I thank you for your note of the 15th instant, and have delayed my reply thus long in order to ponder deeply on your advice, smoke cigars over it, and see what it might be possible for me to do towards taking it. I find that it would be a piece of poltroonery in me to withdraw either the dedication or the dedicatory letter. My long and intimate personal relations with Pierce render the dedication altogether proper, especially as regards this book, which would have had no existence without his kindness; and if he is so exceedingly unpopular that his name is enough to sink the volume, there is so much the more need that an old friend should stand by him. I cannot, merely on account of pecuniary profit or literary reputation, go back from what I have deliberately felt and thought it right to do; and if I were to tear out the dedication, I should never look at the volume again without remorse and shame. As for the literary public, it must accept my book precisely as I think fit to give it, or let it alone." Hawthorne's decision was in the line of his character, and the dedication itself was in excellent taste. The imaginative work of these last years was considerable in bulk, but it was never brought to any perfection; and though it has been published, the entire mass of it is only a bundle of more or less rough or uncompleted sketches and studies. It is comprised in the group of half-wrought tales, "The Ancestral Footstep," "Septimius Felton," "Dr. Grimshawe's Secret," and "The Dolliver Romance," which are all various shapes of the one work that Hawthorne was trying to evoke from his mind. They are interesting illustrations of the operation of his imagination, of his methods of thought, construction and elaboration, and in general of the manner in which a romance might grow under the hand; but there is little probability, so far as can be judged, that Hawthorne ever before worked in this experimental and ineffectual way. He had sketched an English romance "The Ancestral Foot-Step," in 1858, before his Italian experiences, and laid it aside. It was after his return to Concord that he again took up the scheme, and he attempted to join it with another plan involving a different idea. The four states in which the romance exists are the results of his various efforts, but in none of them is it anything more than inchoate. The idea on the English side of the story sprang from the imprint of a bloody footstep at the foot of the great staircase at Smithell's Hall; on the American side it sprang from a tradition which Thoreau reported about the Concord house, to the effect that a man had lived there in the Revolution who sought the elixir of life. But neither of these two topics developed satisfactorily. The physical type which had served Hawthorne so well hitherto no longer responded to his art; neither the bloody footstep, nor the flower that grew upon the grave, which was after all only a fungus and not the real flower of life, had any story in them, either alone or together, and the figure of Sylph, who embodies allegorically this graveyard flower, has no power to win credence such as other, earlier, symbolic characters had won. The power of narration, the rich surface of romantic art, the character of the physician and the child, the scene of the Revolutionary morning, the English chamber, the white-haired old man, the treasure chest with its secret of golden hair,--all these things are in one or another of these studies, and there is much loveliness of detail; but there is no vitality in any of these; that element of life which has been spoken of before, as the germinal power in Hawthorne's imaginative work, is gone; here are only relics and fragments, the costume and settings, the figures, the sentiment, the beauty of surface, the atmosphere of romance, but the story has refused to take life. Whether it was due to Hawthorne's failing powers or to inherent incapacities of the theme, is immaterial; he was not to finish this last work, and he knew it. He had gone so far as to give Fields the promise of "The Dolliver Romance," as if it were in that form that he meant to reduce the whole; but he did so with no confidence, as appears from his successive notes:-- "There is something preternatural in my reluctance to begin. I linger at the threshold, and have a perception of very disagreeable phantoms to be encountered if I enter.... I don't see much probability of my having the first chapter of the Romance ready as soon as you want it. There are two or three chapters ready to be written, but I am not robust enough to begin, and I feel as if I should never carry it through." And he writes again: "I am not quite up to writing yet, but shall make an effort as soon as I see any hope of success. You ought to be thankful that (like most other broken-down authors) I do not pester you with decrepit pages, and insist upon your accepting them as full of the old spirit and vigor. That trouble, perhaps, still awaits you, after I shall have reached a further stage of decay. Seriously, my mind has, for the present, lost its temper and its fine edge, and I have an instinct that I had better keep quiet. Perhaps I shall have a new spirit of vigor, if I wait quietly for it; perhaps not." In February, 1864, he advises that some notice be given the readers of the magazine that he cannot furnish the promised romance, and he tries to touch the subject with humor, but it is too plain that his spirits are ill at ease:-- "I hardly know what to say to the public about this abortive romance, though I know pretty well what the case will be. I shall never finish it. Yet it is not quite pleasant for an author to announce himself, or to be announced, as finally broken down as to his literary faculty.... I cannot finish it unless a great change comes over me; and if I make too great an effort to do so, it will be my death; not that I should care much for that, if I could fight the battle through and win it, thus ending a life of much smoulder and a scanty fire in a blaze of glory. But I should smother myself in mud of my own making.... I am not low-spirited, nor fanciful, nor freakish, but look what seem to me realities in the face, and am ready to take whatever may come. If I could but go to England now, I think that the sea-voyage and the 'old Home' might set me all right." At the end of March he started south with Ticknor, in hopes of some improvement by the change of air and scene; his companion, who was expected rather to have the care of Hawthorne, was himself taken ill and suddenly died in Philadelphia. The shock to Hawthorne in his state of health was a great one, and he returned home excited and nervous. He failed rapidly, and his family and friends became anxious about him, though they did not anticipate the suddenness of the end. In the middle of May Frank Pierce proposed that they should go to the New Hampshire lakes and up the Pemigewasset, by carriage, and Hawthorne consented. He bade his wife and children good-by, and was perhaps convinced that he would never return; whatever thoughts were in his mind, he kept silence concerning them. The narrative of the journey, with its end, is given by Pierce in a letter to Bridge:-- "I met H. at Boston, Wednesday (11th), came to this place by rail Thursday morning, and went to Concord, N. H., by evening train. The weather was unfavorable, and H. feeble; and we remained at C. until the following Monday. We then went slowly on our journey, stopping at Franklin, Laconia, and Centre Harbor, and reaching Plymouth Wednesday evening (18th). We talked of you, Tuesday, between Franklin and Laconia, when H. said--among other things--'We have, neither of us, met a more reliable friend.' The conviction was impressed upon me, the day we left Boston, that the seat of the disease from which H. was suffering was in the brain or spine, or both; H. walked with difficulty, and the use of his hands was impaired. In fact, on the 17th I saw that he was becoming quite helpless, although he was able to ride, and, I thought, more comfortable in the carriage with gentle motion than anywhere else; for whether in bed or up, he was very restless. I had decided, however, not to pursue our journey beyond Plymouth, which is a beautiful place, and thought, during our ride Wednesday, that I would the next day send for Mrs. Hawthorne and Una to join us there. Alas! there was no next day for our friend. "We arrived at Plymouth about six o'clock. After taking a little tea and toast in his room, and sleeping for nearly an hour upon the sofa, he retired. A door opened from my room to his, and our beds were not more than five or six feet apart. I remained up an hour or two after he fell asleep. He was apparently less restless than the night before. The light was left burning in my room--the door open--and I could see him without moving from my bed. I went, however, between one and two o'clock to his bedside, and supposed him to be in a profound slumber. His eyes were closed, his position and face perfectly natural. His face was towards my bed. I awoke again between three and four o'clock, and was surprised--as he had generally been restless--to notice that his position was unchanged,--exactly the same that it was two hours before. I went to his bedside, placed my hand upon his forehead and temple, and found that he was dead. He evidently had passed from natural sleep to that sleep from which there is no waking, without suffering, and without the slightest movement." The funeral took place at Concord on May 24, 1864, and he was buried in Sleepy Hollow; on his coffin lay his unfinished romance, and his friends stood about the open grave, for he was almost the first of the distinguished group to which he belonged to lay down the pen. Emerson and others whose names have been frequent in this record now lie with him in that secluded spot, which is a place of long memory for our literature. His wife survived him a few years and died in London in 1871; perhaps even more than his genius the sweetness of his home life with her, as it is so abundantly shown in his children's memories, lingers in the mind that has dwelt long on the story of his life. INDEX Advertisement, the tenth Muse. Æsthetic Papers, Hawthorne's contributions to. Alcott, Amos Bronson. Aliston, Washington. American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge, The, Hawthorne edits. American Monthly Magazine, The; Hawthorne's contributions to; Benjamin writes of Hawthorne in. Andrews, Ferdinand, a Salem printer. Androscoggin Loo Club. Annuals, contemporary opinion of. Arbella, the ship. Athenæum Society at Bowdoin College. Athenæum, The London, favorable notice of Hawthorne in. Atherton, Senator Charles G., meets Hawthorne. Atlantic Monthly, The, Hawthorne's contributions to. Atlantic Souvenir, The, Philadelphia. Augusta, Maine, Hawthorne visits Bridge at. Austin, William, so-called "American predecessor" of Hawthorne. Bacon, Delia, Hawthorne's kindness to. Bancroft, George, appoints Hawthorne weigher and ganger in Boston Custom House; offers Hawthorne a clerkship in Charlestown Navy Yard. Benjamin, Park, recognizes Hawthorne's genius; coolness of Hawthorne toward. Bewick Company, The, Boston. Blithedale Romance, The, estimate of; external realism of. Blodgett, Mrs., with whom Hawthorne boarded at Liverpool. Boston American Stationers' Company. Boston Athenæum. Boston Miscellany, The, "A Virtuoso's Collection" published in. Bowditch family, the. Bowdoin College; simplicity of; Hawthorne's distinguished classmates in. Boys' and Girls' Magazine, The, Hawthorne's contributions to. Bradford, George P. Bradley, Rev. Caleb, Hawthorne tutored by. Bremer, Fredrika. Bridge, Horatio, Hawthorne's early confidant; Hawthorne's letters to, quoted; his friendship for; guarantees publication of "Twice-Told Tales"; again aids Hawthorne; Hawthorne assists in revising "Journal of an African Cruiser"; his "naval picnic," _note_; visits Hawthorne in Berkshire; "a reliable friend,". Bright, Henry, his "Song of Consul Hawthorne," Brook Farm; Hawthorne at; broken up. Brown, Charles Brockden, so-called "American predecessor" of Hawthorne. Brownings, the, Robert and Elizabeth Barrett. Bryant, William Cullen. Buchanan, James. Buckingham, Joseph Tinker. Barley, Miss Susan, of Salem. Canterbury, Shaker Community in. Carlyle, Thomas, wherein Hawthorne resembled. Casa Bella, Hawthorne's residence in Florence. Chamber under the Eaves, the. Charming, Ellery. Channing, William Ellery. Choate, Rufus. Chorley, Henry F. Cilley, Jonathan, classmate of Hawthorne; elected to Congress; shot in a duel. Clark, S. Gaylord, editor Knickerbocker Magazine. Concord, Mass., Hawthorne moves to Old Manse in; literary work in; hard conditions of Hawthorne's life in; Hawthorne settles at The Wayside in. Cooper, James Fenimore. Custom House, Boston. Custom House, Salem, Hawthorne appointed surveyor; his sketch of; an antidote to Transcendentalism. Democratic Review, The, Hawthorne's contributions to. Dewey, Rev. Orville. Dial, The, transcendental publication. Diary, Hawthorne's first, _note_. Dickens, Charles, his manner suggested in "House of the Seven Gables". Dike, Mrs. Priscilla Manning. Duyckinck, Evert Augustus. Dwight, Mrs. William (Eliza White). Emerson, Ralph Waldo, his visit to Sophia Peabody; relations with Hawthorne. Everett, Edward. Faërie Queene, The, Hawthorne's first book purchase. Fairfield, Senator John, meets Hawthorne at Portsmouth Navy Yard. Farley, Frank. Fesseuden, Thomas Green. Fields, James T., quoted; his wise suggestion; good advice; Hawthorne writes to, from Montaüto; from Rome; regarding dedication to "Life of Franklin Pierce"; about "The Dolliver Romance". Fuller, Margaret, Hawthorne's hard judgment of. Gardner family, the. Giddings family, the. Goodrich, Samuel Griswold, "Peter Parley"; his "Recollections," quoted; transactions with Hawthorne; Hawthorne's ungenerous view of. Graham's Magazine, Hawthorne's contributions to. Graves, William J., his duel with Jonathan Cilley. "Greenwood, Grace" (Sara Jane Lippincott), Hawthorne's comment on. Griswold, Rufus Wilmot. Hathorne, family stock of. Hathorne, Daniel, of Revolutionary ballad fame. Hathorne, Judge John, of witchcraft memory. Hathorne, Joseph. Hathorne, William, emigrant planter. Hathorne, Nathaniel. Hawthorne, Elizabeth; her mental resemblance to Nathaniel; quoted; "an invisible entity,". Hawthorne, Julian; quoted. Hawthorne, Louisa; letter from Nathaniel to, quoted; no recluse; letters to Nathaniel quoted; death of. Hawthorne, Mrs., mother of Nathaniel; relations with her son; her solitary life; Elizabeth Peabody's description of; delight in her grandchildren; her home in Herbert Street; moves to Mall Street; death. Hawthorne, Nathaniel parentage; date of birth; life at Raymond, Me; returns to Salem; early reading; preparation for college; letters to his sisters and mother; considers choice of profession; enters Bowdoin College; youthful characteristics; excels in Latin and English; narrow circumstances; early friendships; changes spelling of his name; aspirations; manner of life in Salem; a born Solitary; drifts into authorship; choice of subjects; literary ventures; yearly journeys; basis of imaginative work; discouragement; first substantial gains; a close observer; editor of American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge; editorial difficulties; quarrels with Benjamin; his anonymity dispelled; Bridge guarantees publication of "Twice-Told Tales"; Goodrich's services to; reception of "Twice-Told Tales"; Pierce suggests South Sea Exploring Expedition; challenges a man to a duel; his solitude broken; meets Miss Sophia Peabody; is appointed weigher and gauger in Boston Custom House; bids farewell to Herbert Street; practical life wearies; his courtship; loses place in Boston Custom House; reasons for joining Brook Farm; life there; letter to Sophia Peabody; averse to literary society; barren years; marriage; Paradise in the Old Manse, Concord; Una's birth; straits for money; Bridge and Pierce assist; temperament and art analyzed; literary faculty; permanently influenced by Scott; prime qualities in his work; provincial note; primary element in genius; allegorizing temperament; vivid symbolism; his objectivity; a moralist; essentially an artist; capacity for idleness; his democracy; "obscurest man of letters in America,"; made surveyor of the port of Salem; his feeling for Salem; as a government official; literary revenge; gossip concerning; imagination languishes; Julian born; home happiness; dismissed from office; his resentment; his susceptibility; applies to Hillard; his mother's death; visited by Fields; a bitter experience, letter to Hillard; finishes "Scarlet Letter"; fame established; characteristics of his genius; stoicism; unsympathetic as an artist; farewell to Salem; family life in Berkshire; productive period; "House of the Seven Gables" written and published; power of realistic detail; marvelous art; no sympathy with reform; fatalistic trait; Rose born; delight in his children; his "spiritual sense of life"; narrow intellectual interests; temporary residence in West Newton; "Blithedale Romance" written; purchases "The Wayside"; objects to writing Pierce's "Life"; friendship for Pierce; an unsparing critic; accepts Liverpool consulate; life at Liverpool; notable official action; his opinion of philanthropy; kindly received in England; good after-dinner speaker; alien in England; excursions; competence secured; resigns consulate; life in Italy; its influence; begins "Marble Faun"; describes Villa Montaüto; Una's illness; leaves Rome and finishes "Marble Faun"; height of his literary power; sensitive temperament; creative genius; defective technique; his fullest expression; returns to Concord; health fails; despairs of the Union; mental attitude in politics; last days; Works. _Alice Doane's Appeal_; _Ambitious Guest, The_; American Note-Books; Ancestral Footstep, The; _Artist of the Beautiful, The_; _Bald Eagle_; _Bells_; _Bell's Biography, A_; Biographical stories, _note_; _Birthmark, The_; _Buds and Bird Voices_; _Canterbury Pilgrims, The_; _Celestial Railroad, The, note_; _Chiefly about War Matters_; _Chippings with a Chisel_; _Christmas Banquet, The_; _Cilley, Jonathan_; _Custom House, The_; _David Swan_; _Devil in Manuscript, The_; _Diary, First_, authenticity questioned, _note_; Dr. Grimshawe's Secret; Dolliver Romance, The; _Dr. Heidegger's Experiment_; _Downer's Banner, The_; _Drowne's Wooden Image_; _Duston Family, The_; _Earth's Holocaust_; _Edward Fane's Rosebud_; _Edward Randolph's Portrait_; _Egotism, or the Bosom Serpent_; _Endicott and the Red Cross_; _Ethan Brand_; _Fancy's Show Box_; Famous Old People; Fanshawe, _note_; _Fessenden, Thomas Green_; _Fire Worship_; _Footprints on the Sea-Shore_; _Gentle Boy, The, note_; Grandfather's Chair; _Graves and Goblins_; _Gray Champion, The_; _Great Carbuncle, The_; _Great Stone Face, The_; _Hall of Fantasy, The_; _Haunted Mind, The_; _Haunted Quack, The_; _Hollow of the Three Hills, The_; House of the Seven Gables, The; _Howe's Masquerade_; _Intelligence Office, The_; _John Inglefield's Thanksgiving_; _Journal of a Solitary Man_; _Lady Eleanore's Mantle_; Liberty Tree, The, _note_; _Lily's Quest, The_; _Little Annie's Ramble_; _Little Daffydowndilly_; _Main Street_; _Man of Adamant, The_; Marble Faun, The; _Maypole of Merry Mount, The_; _Minister's Black Veil, The_; _Monsieur du Miroir_; Mosses from an Old Manse _note_; _Mr. Higginbotham's Catastrophe_; _Mrs. Bullfrog_; _My Uncle Molineaux_; _My Wife's Novel,_ attributed to Hawthorne; _Nature of Sleep_; _New Adam and Eve, The_; _New England Village, The_; _Ontario Steamboat, An_; _Niagara, My Visit to_; _Old Apple Dealer, The_; _Old Esther Dudley,_ first story to bear Hawthorne's name; _Old French War, The_; _Old Manse, The_; Old News; _Old Ticonderoga_; _Old Tory, The_; Our Old Home _note_; _Papers of an Old Dartmoor Prisoner_; _Passages from a Relinquished Work_; _Pepperell, Sir William_; _Peter Goldthwaite's Treasure_; _"Peter Parley's" Universal History, note_; Pierce, Franklin, Life of; _Procession of Life, The_; _Prophetic Pictures, The_; _Province House Series_; _Provincial Tales_; _P.'s Correspondence_; _Rappaccini's Daughter_; _Rill from the Town Pump, A_; _Roger Malvin's Burial_; Scarlet Letter, The; Septimius Felton; Seven Tales of my Native Land; _Seven Vagabonds, The_; _Shaker Bridal, The_; _Sights from a Steeple_; _Sister Years, The_; _Night Scenes under an Umbrella_; _Sketches from Memory_; _Snowflakes_; Snow Image, The, _note_; _Spectator, The,_ first essay in journalism; _Story-Teller, The_; _Sunday at Home_; _Sylph Etheredge_; Tanglewood Tales; _Three-fold Destiny, The_; _Time's Portraiture_; _Toll Gatherer's Day, The_; Twice-Told Tales, _note_; _Veiled Lady, The_; _Village Uncle, The_; _Virtuoso's Collection, A_; _Vision of the Fountain, The_; _Visit to the Clerk of the Weather, A,_ never yet attributed to Hawthorne; _Wakefield_; _Wedding Knell, The_; _White Old Maid, The_; _Wives of the Dead_; Wonder-Book, A; _Young Goodman Brown_; _Young Provincial, The, note_. Hawthorne, Mrs. Nathaniel. See Sophia Peabody. Hawthorne, Rose, her sketch of Montaüto. Hawthorne, Una, a beautiful child; illness at Rome. Hillard, George S., Hawthorne writes to; letter to Hawthorne. Hoffman, Charles Fenno, his apt characterization of "Twice-Told Tales". Holden's Dollar Magazine, "Ethan Brand" published in. Holmes, Oliver Wendell. Hosmer, Harriet, Houghton, Lord (Richard Monckton Milnes). House of the Seven Gables, The, analysis of; lax unity in; local realism of; suggestion of Dickens in; ancestral quality; ethical meaning in. Howe, Dr. Samuel Gridley. Ilbrahim. International Magazine, The, "Snow Image" published in. Irving, Washington, Hawthorne compared to. Italy, Hawthorne's life in. Jameson, Mrs. Anna. Kemble, Fanny. Knickerbocker Magazine, The, Hawthorne's contributions to. Lander, Louisa. Lathrop, George Parsons, his study of Hawthorne; quoted. Liverpool. Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth; recognizes college days in "Fanshawe,"; Hawthorne's letter to; notices "Twice-Told Tales" in North American Review. Long Wharf. Lord family, the. Loring, Dr. George B., on Hawthorne's connection with Salem Custom House. Maine Hall, at Bowdoin College. Mann, Horace. Manning, Elizabeth Clarke. See Mrs. Hawthorne. Manning, Richard, of St. Petrox Parish. Manning, Richard, Hawthorne's grandfather. Manning, Richard, Hawthorne's uncle. Manning, Robert; undertakes Hawthorne's education. Manning, Samuel, Hawthorne travels with. Manning, William, Hawthorne writes in office of. "Manning's Folly". Marble Faun, The; ethical weakness of; source of its interest; Puritan romance masquerading; analytic study of nature of evil. Marsh and Capen, Boston, publish "Fanshawe" at Hawthorne's expense. Mason, Alfred, Hawthorne's roommate in college. Melville, Herman. Montaüto, villa of, where Hawthorne began "Marble Faun". Morituri Salutamus, Longfellow's. Mosses from an Old Manse. Motley, John Lothrop, Hawthorne's friendliness toward. National Era, The "Great Stone Face" published in. Navy Club. Navy Yard, Charlestown. New England; homes of; colonial tradition of; central fact in life of; the secret of. New England Magazine, The, Hawthorne's contributions to, _note_; Hawthorne noticed in. North American Review, The; Longfellow's notice of "Twice-Told Tales" in. Note-Books, Hawthorne's, beginning of; quoted; his use of. "Oberon," signature Hawthorne used in writing to Bridge; farewell to his eidolon. Old Manse, the. Oliver, Benjamin. O'Sullivan, John, editor "Democratic Review,"; U. S. minister at Lisbon. Our Old Home; remorseless impressionism of, _note_. Outre-Mer. Peabody, Elizabeth, quoted; letters of Hawthorne to. Peabody, Mary (Mrs. Horace Mann). Peabody, Sophia; her love story; Hawthorne's letters to; recovers health and is married; "A New Adam and Eve"; Hawthorne's devotion to; quoted; courage in ill-fortune; spends winter in Lisbon; English life interests; uncertain health; death of. "Peter Parley." See Goodrich, S. G. Peter Parley's Universal History on the basis of Geography, written by Nathaniel and Elizabeth Hawthorne. Peucinian Society, at Bowdoin College. Phelps family, the. Pickering, John. Pierce, Franklin early friendship for Hawthorne; interests himself in his fortunes; elected Senator from New Hampshire; advises change of scene for Hawthorne; his affection for; at Portsmouth Navy Yard; Hawthorne writes Life of; elected President of the United States, and appoints Hawthorne to Liverpool consulate; offers Hawthorne a post in American Legation at Lisbon; Hawthorne's love for; writes Bridge about Hawthorne's last days. Pioneer, The, Hawthorne's contributions to. Plymouth, N. H., Hawthorne's death at. Poe, Edgar Allan, Hawthorne's only rival in harmony of tone. Polk, James K. Portsmouth Navy Yard, political "naval picnic" at. Potter family, the. Powers, Hiram. Raymond, Captain George. Raymond, Maine, Hawthorne's boyhood home. Rome, Hawthorne in. Ropes, Joseph. Salem; Hawthorne born at; Dr. Worcester's school in; Hawthorne's life in; much missed in; unappreciative "of its illustrious son"; Hawthorne characterizes people of; Hawthorne's debt to. Salem Athenæum, The. Salem Gazette, The, Hawthorne writes Carrier's Address for. Salem Lyceum, Hawthorne an officer of. Sargent, Epes. Sargent, John Osborne. Saturday Club, the. Sawtelle, Cullen, a classmate of Hawthorne. "Scarlet Letter, The"; analysis of; genesis of; a study of punishment; reality of; parable of soul's life in sin; moral despair of. Scott, Sir Walter, Hawthorne influenced by. Sebago Lake, Maine. Sedgwick, Catherine Maria. Siena, Hawthorne's happy days at. Sleepy Hollow, Concord, Hawthorne's burial place. Southern Rose, The, Charleston, S. C., "The Lily's Quest" appeared in. Spectator, The, Hawthorne's first essay in journalism. Stoddard, Richard Henry. Story, William Wetmore; Hawthorne's happy days with. Thompson, Launt. Thoreau, Henry D. Ticknor, William D., sudden death of. Token, The; Hawthorne's contributions to; Park Benjamin notices Hawthorne's articles in. Tupper, Martin Farquhar, Hawthorne's visit to. Tyler, John. Upham, Charles W. Verplanck, Gulian Crommelin. Very, Jones. War, the Civil. Wayside, The, Hawthorne's home in Concord. Willis, Nathaniel Parker. Worcester, Dr. Joseph Emerson, Hawthorne's first master. Youth's Keepsake, The, Hawthorne's contributions to. 
7879	----	PASSAGES FROM THE FRENCH AND ITALIAN NOTE-BOOKS OF NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE VOL. I. PASSAGES FROM HAWTHORNE'S NOTE-BOOKS IN FRANCE AND ITALY. FRANCE. Hotel de Louvre, January 6th, 1858.--On Tuesday morning, our dozen trunks and half-dozen carpet-bags being already packed and labelled, we began to prepare for our journey two or three hours before light. Two cabs were at the door by half past six, and at seven we set out for the London Bridge station, while it was still dark and bitterly cold. There were already many people in the streets, growing more numerous as we drove city-ward; and, in Newgate Street, there was such a number of market-carts, that we almost came to a dead lock with some of them. At the station we found several persons who were apparently going in the same train with us, sitting round the fire of the waiting-room. Since I came to England there has hardly been a morning when I should have less willingly bestirred myself before daylight; so sharp and inclement was the atmosphere. We started at half past eight, having taken through tickets to Paris by way of Folkestone and Boulogne. A foot-warmer (a long, flat tin utensil, full of hot water) was put into the carriage just before we started; but it did not make us more than half comfortable, and the frost soon began to cloud the windows, and shut out the prospect, so that we could only glance at the green fields--immortally green, whatever winter can do against them--and at, here and there, a stream or pool with the ice forming on its borders. It was the first cold weather of a very mild season. The snow began to fall in scattered and almost invisible flakes; and it seemed as if we had stayed our English welcome out, and were to find nothing genial and hospitable there any more. At Folkestone, we were deposited at a railway station close upon a shingly beach, on which the sea broke in foam, and which J----- reported as strewn with shells and star-fish; behind was the town, with an old church in the midst; and, close, at hand, the pier, where lay the steamer in which we were to embark. But the air was so wintry, that I had no heart to explore the town, or pick up shells with J----- on the beach; so we kept within doors during the two hours of our stay, now and then looking out of the windows at a fishing-boat or two, as they pitched and rolled with an ugly and irregular motion, such as the British Channel generally communicates to the craft that navigate it. At about one o'clock we went on board, and were soon under steam, at a rate that quickly showed a long line of the white cliffs of Albion behind us. It is a very dusky white, by the by, and the cliffs themselves do not seem, at a distance, to be of imposing height, and have too even an outline to be picturesque. As we increased our distance from England, the French coast came more and more distinctly in sight, with a low, wavy outline, not very well worth looking at, except because it was the coast of France. Indeed, I looked at it but little; for the wind was bleak and boisterous, and I went down into the cabin, where I found the fire very comfortable, and several people were stretched on sofas in a state of placid wretchedness. . . . I have never suffered from sea-sickness, but had been somewhat apprehensive of this rough strait between England and France, which seems to have more potency over people's stomachs than ten times the extent of sea in other quarters. Our passage was of two hours, at the end of which we landed on French soil, and found ourselves immediately in the clutches of the custom-house officers, who, however, merely made a momentary examination of my passport, and allowed us to pass without opening even one of our carpet-bags. The great bulk of our luggage had been registered through to Paris, for examination after our arrival there. We left Boulogne in about an hour after our arrival, when it was already a darkening twilight. The weather had grown colder than ever, since our arrival in sunny France, and the night was now setting in, wickedly black and dreary. The frost hardened upon the carriage windows in such thickness that I could scarcely scratch a peep-hole through it; but, from such glimpses as I could catch, the aspect of the country seemed pretty much to resemble the December aspect of my dear native land,--broad, bare, brown fields, with streaks of snow at the foot of ridges, and along fences, or in the furrows of ploughed soil. There was ice wherever there happened to be water to form it. We had feet-warmers in the carriage, but the cold crept in nevertheless; and I do not remember hardly in my life a more disagreeable short journey than this, my first advance into French territory. My impression of France will always be that it is an Arctic region. At any season of the year, the tract over which we passed yesterday must be an uninteresting one as regards its natural features; and the only adornment, as far as I could observe, which art has given it, consists in straight rows of very stiff-looking and slender-stemmed trees. In the dusk they resembled poplar-trees. Weary and frost-bitten,--morally, if not physically,--we reached Amiens in three or four hours, and here I underwent much annoyance from the French railway officials and attendants, who, I believe, did not mean to incommode me, but rather to forward my purposes as far as they well could. If they would speak slowly and distinctly I might understand them well enough, being perfectly familiar with the written language, and knowing the principles of its pronunciation; but, in their customary rapid utterance, it sounds like a string of mere gabble. When left to myself, therefore, I got into great difficulties. . . . It gives a taciturn personage like myself a new conception as to the value of speech, even to him, when he finds himself unable either to speak or understand. Finally, being advised on all hands to go to the Hotel du Rhin, we were carried thither in an omnibus, rattling over a rough pavement, through an invisible and frozen town; and, on our arrival, were ushered into a handsome salon, as chill as a tomb. They made a little bit of a wood-fire for us in a low and deep chimney-hole, which let a hundred times more heat escape up the flue than it sent into the room. In the morning we sallied forth to see the cathedral. The aspect of the old French town was very different from anything English; whiter, infinitely cleaner; higher and narrower houses, the entrance to most of which seeming to be through a great gateway, affording admission into a central court-yard; a public square, with a statue in the middle, and another statue in a neighboring street. We met priests in three-cornered hats, long frock-coats, and knee-breeches; also soldiers and gendarmes, and peasants and children, clattering over the pavements in wooden shoes. It makes a great impression of outlandishness to see the signs over the shop doors in a foreign tongue. If the cold had not been such as to dull my sense of novelty, and make all my perceptions torpid, I should have taken in a set of new impressions, and enjoyed them very much. As it was, I cared little for what I saw, but yet had life enough left to enjoy the cathedral of Amiens, which has many features unlike those of English cathedrals. It stands in the midst of the cold, white town, and has a high-shouldered look to a spectator accustomed to the minsters of England, which cover a great space of ground in proportion to their height. The impression the latter gives is of magnitude and mass; this French cathedral strikes one as lofty. The exterior is venerable, though but little time-worn by the action of the atmosphere; and statues still keep their places in numerous niches, almost as perfect as when first placed there in the thirteenth century. The principal doors are deep, elaborately wrought, pointed arches; and the interior seemed to us, at the moment, as grand as any that we had seen, and to afford as vast an idea of included space; it being of such an airy height, and with no screen between the chancel and nave, as in all the English cathedrals. We saw the differences, too, betwixt a church in which the same form of worship for which it was originally built is still kept up, and those of England, where it has been superseded for centuries; for here, in the recess of every arch of the side aisles, beneath each lofty window, there was a chapel dedicated to some Saint, and adorned with great marble sculptures of the crucifixion, and with pictures, execrably bad, in all cases, and various kinds of gilding and ornamentation. Immensely tall wax candles stand upon the altars of these chapels, and before one sat a woman, with a great supply of tapers, one of which was burning. I suppose these were to be lighted as offerings to the saints, by the true believers. Artificial flowers were hung at some of the shrines, or placed under glass. In every chapel, moreover, there was a confessional,--a little oaken structure, about as big as a sentry-box, with a closed part for the priest to sit in, and an open one for the penitent to kneel at, and speak, through the open-work of the priest's closet. Monuments, mural and others, to long-departed worthies, and images of the Saviour, the Virgin, and saints, were numerous everywhere about the church; and in the chancel there was a great deal of quaint and curious sculpture, fencing in the Holy of Holies, where the High Altar stands. There is not much painted glass; one or two very rich and beautiful rose-windows, however, that looked antique; and the great eastern window which, I think, is modern. The pavement has, probably, never been renewed, as one piece of work, since the structure was erected, and is foot-worn by the successive generations, though still in excellent repair. I saw one of the small, square stones in it, bearing the date of 1597, and no doubt there are a thousand older ones. It was gratifying to find the cathedral in such good condition, without any traces of recent repair; and it is perhaps a mark of difference between French and English character, that the Revolution in the former country, though all religious worship disappears before it, does not seem to have caused such violence to ecclesiastical monuments, as the Reformation and the reign of Puritanism in the latter. I did not see a mutilated shrine, or even a broken-nosed image, in the whole cathedral. But, probably, the very rage of the English fanatics against idolatrous tokens, and their smashing blows at them, were symptoms of sincerer religious faith than the French were capable of. These last did not care enough about their Saviour to beat down his crucified image; and they preserved the works of sacred art, for the sake only of what beauty there was in them. While we were in the cathedral, we saw several persons kneeling at their devotions on the steps of the chancel and elsewhere. One dipped his fingers in the holy water at the entrance: by the by, I looked into the stone basin that held it, and saw it full of ice. Could not all that sanctity at least keep it thawed? Priests--jolly, fat, mean-looking fellows, in white robes--went hither and thither, but did not interrupt or accost us. There were other peculiarities, which I suppose I shall see more of in my visits to other churches, but now we were all glad to make our stay as brief as possible, the atmosphere of the cathedral being so bleak, and its stone pavement so icy cold beneath our feet. We returned to the hotel, and the chambermaid brought me a book, in which she asked me to inscribe my name, age, profession, country, destination, and the authorization under which I travelled. After the freedom of an English hotel, so much greater than even that of an American one, where they make you disclose your name, this is not so pleasant. We left Amiens at half past one; and I can tell as little of the country between that place and Paris, as between Boulogne and Amiens. The windows of our railway carriage were already frosted with French breath when we got into it, and the ice grew thicker and thicker continually. I tried, at various times, to rub a peep-hole through, as before; but the ice immediately shot its crystallized tracery over it again; and, indeed, there was little or nothing to make it worth while to look out, so bleak was the scene. Now and then a chateau, too far off for its characteristics to be discerned; now and then a church, with a tall gray tower, and a little peak atop; here and there a village or a town, which we could not well see. At sunset there was just that clear, cold, wintry sky which I remember so well in America, but have never seen in England. At five we reached Paris, and were suffered to take a carriage to the hotel de Louvre, without any examination of the little luggage we had with us. Arriving, we took a suite of apartments, and the waiter immediately lighted a wax candle in each separate room. We might have dined at the table d'hote, but preferred the restaurant connected with and within the hotel. All the dishes were very delicate, and a vast change from the simple English system, with its joints, shoulders, beefsteaks, and chops; but I doubt whether English cookery, for the very reason that it is so simple, is not better for men's moral and spiritual nature than French. In the former case, you know that you are gratifying your animal needs and propensities, and are duly ashamed of it; but, in dealing with these French delicacies, you delude yourself into the idea that you are cultivating your taste while satisfying your appetite. This last, however, it requires a good deal of perseverance to accomplish. In the cathedral at Amiens there were printed lists of acts of devotion posted on the columns, such as prayers at the shrines of certain saints, whereby plenary indulgences might be gained. It is to be observed, however, that all these external forms were necessarily accompanied with true penitence and religious devotion. Hotel de Louvre, January 8th.--It was so fearfully cold this morning that I really felt little or no curiosity to see the city. . . . Until after one o'clock, therefore, I knew nothing of Paris except the lights which I had seen beneath our window the evening before, far, far downward, in the narrow Rue St. Honore, and the rumble of the wheels, which continued later than I was awake to hear it, and began again before dawn. I could see, too, tall houses, that seemed to be occupied in every story, and that had windows on the steep roofs. One of these houses is six stories high. This Rue St. Honore is one of the old streets in Paris, and is that in which Henry IV. was assassinated; but it has not, in this part of it, the aspect of antiquity. After one o'clock we all went out and walked along the Rue de Rivoli. . . . We are here, right in the midst of Paris, and close to whatever is best known to those who hear or read about it,--the Louvre being across the street, the Palais Royal but a little way off, the Tuileries joining to the Louvre, the Place de la Concorde just beyond, verging on which is the Champs Elysees. We looked about us for a suitable place to dine, and soon found the Restaurant des Echelles, where we entered at a venture, and were courteously received. It has a handsomely furnished saloon, much set off with gilding and mirrors; and appears to be frequented by English and Americans; its carte, a bound volume, being printed in English as well as French. . . . It was now nearly four o'clock, and too late to visit the galleries of the Louvre, or to do anything else but walk a little way along the street. The splendor of Paris, so far as I have seen, takes me altogether by surprise: such stately edifices, prolonging themselves in unwearying magnificence and beauty, and, ever and anon, a long vista of a street, with a column rising at the end of it, or a triumphal arch, wrought in memory of some grand event. The light stone or stucco, wholly untarnished by smoke and soot, puts London to the blush, if a blush could be seen on its dingy face; but, indeed, London is not to be mentioned, nor compared even, with Paris. I never knew what a palace was till I had a glimpse of the Louvre and the Tuileries; never had my idea of a city been gratified till I trod these stately streets. The life of the scene, too, is infinitely more picturesque than that of London, with its monstrous throng of grave faces and black coats; whereas, here, you see soldiers and priests, policemen in cocked hats, Zonaves with turbans, long mantles, and bronzed, half-Moorish faces; and a great many people whom you perceive to be outside of your experience, and know them ugly to look at, and fancy them villanous. Truly, I have no sympathies towards the French people; their eyes do not win me, nor do their glances melt and mingle with mine. But they do grand and beautiful things in the architectural way; and I am grateful for it. The Place de la Concorde is a most splendid square, large enough for a nation to erect trophies in of all its triumphs; and on one side of it is the Tuileries, on the opposite side the Champs Elysees, and, on a third, the Seine, adown which we saw large cakes of ice floating, beneath the arches of a bridge. The Champs Elysees, so far as I saw it, had not a grassy soil beneath its trees, but the bare earth, white and dusty. The very dust, if I saw nothing else, would assure me that I was out of England. We had time only to take this little walk, when it began to grow dusk; and, being so pitilessly cold, we hurried back to our hotel. Thus far, I think, what I have seen of Paris is wholly unlike what I expected; but very like an imaginary picture which I had conceived of St. Petersburg,-- new, bright, magnificent, and desperately cold. A great part of this architectural splendor is due to the present Emperor, who has wrought a great change in the aspect of the city within a very few years. A traveller, if he looks at the thing selfishly, ought to wish him a long reign and arbitrary power, since he makes it his policy to illustrate his capital with palatial edifices, which are, however, better for a stranger to look at, than for his own people to pay for. We have spent to-day chiefly in seeing some of the galleries of the Louvre. I must confess that the vast and beautiful edifice struck me far more than the pictures, sculpture, and curiosities which it contains,-- the shell more than the kernel inside; such noble suites of rooms and halls were those through which we first passed, containing Egyptian, and, farther onward, Greek and Roman antiquities; the walls cased in variegated marbles; the ceilings glowing with beautiful frescos; the whole extended into infinite vistas by mirrors that seemed like vacancy, and multiplied everything forever. The picture-rooms are not so brilliant, and the pictures themselves did not greatly win upon me in this one day. Many artists were employed in copying them, especially in the rooms hung with the productions of French painters. Not a few of these copyists were females; most of them were young men, picturesquely mustached and bearded; but some were elderly, who, it was pitiful to think, had passed through life without so much success as now to paint pictures of their own. From the pictures we went into a suite of rooms where are preserved many relics of the ancient and later kings of France; more relics of the elder ones, indeed, than I supposed had remained extant through the Revolution. The French seem to like to keep memorials of whatever they do, and of whatever their forefathers have done, even if it be ever so little to their credit; and perhaps they do not take matters sufficiently to heart to detest anything that has ever happened. What surprised me most were the golden sceptre and the magnificent sword and other gorgeous relics of Charlemagne,--a person whom I had always associated with a sheepskin cloak. There were suits of armor and weapons that had been worn and handled by a great many of the French kings; and a religious book that had belonged to St. Louis; a dressing-glass, most richly set with precious stones, which formerly stood on the toilet-table of Catherine de' Medici, and in which I saw my own face where hers had been. And there were a thousand other treasures, just as well worth mentioning as these. If each monarch could have been summoned from Hades to claim his own relics, we should have had the halls full of the old Childerics, Charleses, Bourbons and Capets, Henrys and Louises, snatching with ghostly hands at sceptres, swords, armor, and mantles; and Napoleon would have seen, apparently, almost everything that personally belonged to him,--his coat, his cocked hats, his camp-desk, his field-bed, his knives, forks, and plates, and even a lock of his hair. I must let it all go. These things cannot be reproduced by pen and ink. Hotel de Louvre, January 9th.--. . . . Last evening Mr. Fezaudie called. He spoke very freely respecting the Emperor and the hatred entertained against him in France; but said that he is more powerful, that is, more firmly fixed as a ruler, than ever the first Napoleon was. We, who look back upon the first Napoleon as one of the eternal facts of the past, a great bowlder in history, cannot well estimate how momentary and insubstantial the great Captain may have appeared to those who beheld his rise out of obscurity. They never, perhaps, took the reality of his career fairly into their minds, before it was over. The present Emperor, I believe, has already been as long in possession of the supreme power as his uncle was. I should like to see him, and may, perhaps, do--so, as he is our neighbor, across the way. This morning Miss ------, the celebrated astronomical lady, called. She had brought a letter of introduction to me, while consul; and her purpose now was to see if we could take her as one of our party to Rome, whither she likewise is bound. We readily consented, for she seems to be a simple, strong, healthy-humored woman, who will not fling herself as a burden on our shoulders; and my only wonder is that a person evidently so able to take care of herself should wish to have an escort. We issued forth at about eleven, and went down the Rue St. Honore, which is narrow, and has houses of five or six stories on either side, between which run the streets like a gully in a rock. One face of our hotel borders and looks on this street. After going a good way, we came to an intersection with another street, the name of which I forget; but, at this point, Ravaillac sprang at the carriage of Henry IV. and plunged his dagger into him. As we went down the Rue St. Honore, it grew more and more thronged, and with a meaner class of people. The houses still were high, and without the shabbiness of exterior that distinguishes the old part of London, being of light-colored stone; but I never saw anything that so much came up to my idea of a swarming city as this narrow, crowded, and rambling street. Thence we turned into the Rue St. Denis, which is one of the oldest streets in Paris, and is said to have been first marked out by the track of the saint's footsteps, where, after his martyrdom, he walked along it, with his head under his arm, in quest of a burial-place. This legend may account for any crookedness of the street; for it could not reasonably be asked of a headless man that he should walk straight. Through some other indirections we at last found the Rue Bergere, down which I went with J----- in quest of Hottinguer et Co., the bankers, while the rest of us went along the Boulevards, towards the Church of the Madeleine. . . . This business accomplished, J----- and I threaded our way back, and overtook the rest of the party, still a good distance from the Madeleine. I know not why the Boulevards are called so. They are a succession of broad walks through broad streets, and were much thronged with people, most of whom appeared to be bent more on pleasure than business. The sun, long before this, had come out brightly, and gave us the first genial and comfortable sensations which we have had in Paris. Approaching the Madeleine, we found it a most beautiful church, that might have been adapted from Heathenism to Catholicism; for on each side there is a range of magnificent pillars, unequalled, except by those of the Parthenon. A mourning-coach, arrayed in black and silver, was drawn up at the steps, and the front of the church was hung with black cloth, which covered the whole entrance. However, seeing the people going in, we entered along with them. Glorious and gorgeous is the Madeleine. The entrance to the nave is beneath a most stately arch; and three arches of equal height open from the nave to the side aisles; and at the end of the nave is another great arch, rising, with a vaulted half-dome, over the high altar. The pillars supporting these arches are Corinthian, with richly sculptured capitals; and wherever gilding might adorn the church, it is lavished like sunshine; and within the sweeps of the arches there are fresco paintings of sacred subjects, and a beautiful picture covers the hollow of the vault over the altar; all this, besides much sculpture; and especially a group above and around the high altar, representing the Magdalen smiling down upon angels and archangels, some of whom are kneeling, and shadowing themselves with their heavy marble wings. There is no such thing as making my page glow with the most distant idea of the magnificence of this church, in its details and in its whole. It was founded a hundred or two hundred years ago; then Bonaparte contemplated transforming it into a Temple of Victory, or building it anew as one. The restored Bourbons remade it into a church; but it still has a heathenish look, and will never lose it. When we entered we saw a crowd of people, all pressing forward towards the high altar, before which burned a hundred wax lights, some of which were six or seven feet high; and, altogether, they shone like a galaxy of stars. In the middle of the nave, moreover, there was another galaxy of wax candles burning around an immense pall of black velvet, embroidered with silver, which seemed to cover, not only a coffin, but a sarcophagus, or something still more huge. The organ was rumbling forth a deep, lugubrious bass, accompanied with heavy chanting of priests, out of which sometimes rose the clear, young voices of choristers, like light flashing out of the gloom. The church, between the arches, along the nave, and round the altar, was hung with broad expanses of black cloth; and all the priests had their sacred vestments covered with black. They looked exceedingly well; I never saw anything half so well got up on the stage. Some of these ecclesiastical figures were very stately and noble, and knelt and bowed, and bore aloft the cross, and swung the censers in a way that I liked to see. The ceremonies of the Catholic Church were a superb work of art, or perhaps a true growth of man's religious nature; and so long as men felt their original meaning, they must have been full of awe and glory. Being of another parish, I looked on coldly, but not irreverently, and was glad to see the funeral service so well performed, and very glad when it was over. What struck me as singular, the person who performed the part usually performed by a verger, keeping order among the audience, wore a gold-embroidered scarf, a cocked hat, and, I believe, a sword, and had the air of a military man. Before the close of the service a contribution-box--or, rather, a black velvet bag--was handed about by this military verger; and I gave J----- a franc to put in, though I did not in the least know for what. Issuing from the church, we inquired of two or three persons who was the distinguished defunct at whose obsequies we had been assisting, for we had some hope that it might be Rachel, who died last week, and is still above ground. But it proved to be only a Madame Mentel, or some such name, whom nobody had ever before heard of. I forgot to say that her coffin was taken from beneath the illuminated pall, and carried out of the church before us. When we left the Madeleine we took our way to the Place de la Concorde, and thence through the Elysian Fields (which, I suppose, are the French idea of heaven) to Bonaparte's triumphal arch. The Champs Elysees may look pretty in summer; though I suspect they must be somewhat dry and artificial at whatever season,--the trees being slender and scraggy, and requiring to be renewed every few years. The soil is not genial to them. The strangest peculiarity of this place, however, to eyes fresh from moist and verdant England, is, that there is not one blade of grass in all the Elysian Fields, nothing but hard clay, now covered with white dust. It gives the whole scene the air of being a contrivance of man, in which Nature has either not been invited to take any part, or has declined to do so. There were merry-go-rounds, wooden horses, and other provision for children's amusements among the trees; and booths, and tables of cakes, and candy-women; and restaurants on the borders of the wood; but very few people there; and doubtless we can form no idea of what the scene might become when alive with French gayety and vivacity. As we walked onward the Triumphal Arch began to loom up in the distance, looking huge and massive, though still a long way off. It was not, however, till we stood almost beneath it that we really felt the grandeur of this great arch, including so large a space of the blue sky in its airy sweep. At a distance it impresses the spectator with its solidity; nearer, with the lofty vacancy beneath it. There is a spiral staircase within one of its immense limbs; and, climbing steadily upward, lighted by a lantern which the doorkeeper's wife gave us, we had a bird's-eye view of Paris, much obscured by smoke or mist. Several interminable avenues shoot with painful directness right towards it. On our way homeward we visited the Place Vendome, in the centre of which is a tall column, sculptured from top to bottom, all over the pedestal, and all over the shaft, and with Napoleon himself on the summit. The shaft is wreathed round and roundabout with representations of what, as far as I could distinguish, seemed to be the Emperor's victories. It has a very rich effect. At the foot of the column we saw wreaths of artificial flowers, suspended there, no doubt, by some admirer of Napoleon, still ardent enough to expend a franc or two in this way. Hotel de Louvre, January 10th.--We had purposed going to the Cathedral of Notre Dame to-day, but the weather and walking were too unfavorable for a distant expedition; so we merely went across the street to the Louvre. . . . . Our principal object this morning was to see the pencil drawings by eminent artists. Of these the Louvre has a very rich collection, occupying many apartments, and comprising sketches by Annibale Caracci, Claude, Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci, Michel Angelo, Rubens, Rembrandt, and almost all the other great masters, whether French, Italian, Dutch, or whatever else; the earliest drawings of their great pictures, when they had the glory of their pristine idea directly before their minds' eye,-- that idea which inevitably became overlaid with their own handling of it in the finished painting. No doubt the painters themselves had often a happiness in these rude, off-hand sketches, which they never felt again in the same work, and which resulted in disappointment, after they had done their best. To an artist, the collection must be most deeply interesting: to myself, it was merely curious, and soon grew wearisome. In the same suite of apartments, there is a collection of miniatures, some of them very exquisite, and absolutely lifelike, on their small scale. I observed two of Franklin, both good and picturesque, one of them especially so, with its cloud-like white hair. I do not think we have produced a man so interesting to contemplate, in many points of view, as he. Most of our great men are of a character that I find it impossible to warm into life by thought, or by lavishing any amount of sympathy upon them. Not so Franklin, who had a great deal of common and uncommon human nature in him. Much of the time, while my wife was looking at the drawings, I sat observing the crowd of Sunday visitors. They were generally of a lower class than those of week-days; private soldiers in a variety of uniforms, and, for the most part, ugly little men, but decorous and well behaved. I saw medals on many of their breasts, denoting Crimean service; some wore the English medal, with Queen Victoria's head upon it. A blue coat, with red baggy trousers, was the most usual uniform. Some had short-breasted coats, made in the same style as those of the first Napoleon, which we had seen in the preceding rooms. The policemen, distributed pretty abundantly about the rooms, themselves looked military, wearing cocked hats and swords. There were many women of the middling classes; some, evidently, of the lowest, but clean and decent, in colored gowns and caps; and laboring men, citizens, Sunday gentlemen, young artists, too, no doubt looking with educated eyes at these art-treasures, and I think, as a general thing, each man was mated with a woman. The soldiers, however, came in pairs or little squads, accompanied by women. I did not much like any of the French faces, and yet I am not sure that there is not more resemblance between them and the American physiognomy, than between the latter and the English. The women are not pretty, but in all ranks above the lowest they have a trained expression that supplies the place of beauty. I was wearied to death with the drawings, and began to have that dreary and desperate feeling which has often come upon me when the sights last longer than my capacity for receiving them. As our time in Paris, however, is brief and precious, we next inquired our way to the galleries of sculpture, and these alone are of astounding extent, reaching, I should think, all round one quadrangle of the Louvre, on the basement floor. Hall after hall opened interminably before us, and on either side of us, paved and incrusted with variegated and beautifully polished marble, relieved against which stand the antique statues and groups, interspersed with great urns and vases, sarcophagi, altars, tablets, busts of historic personages, and all manner of shapes of marble which consummate art has transmuted into precious stones. Not that I really did feel much impressed by any of this sculpture then, nor saw more than two or three things which I thought very beautiful; but whether it be good or no, I suppose the world has nothing better, unless it be a few world-renowned statues in Italy. I was even more struck by the skill and ingenuity of the French in arranging these sculptural remains, than by the value of the sculptures themselves. The galleries, I should judge, have been recently prepared, and on a magnificent system,--the adornments being yet by no means completed,--for besides the floor and wall-casings of rich, polished marble, the vaulted ceilings of some of the apartments are painted in fresco, causing them to glow as if the sky were opened. It must be owned, however, that the statuary, often time-worn and darkened from its original brilliancy by weather-stains, does not suit well as furniture for such splendid rooms. When we see a perfection of modern finish around them, we recognize that most of these statues have been thrown down from their pedestals, hundreds of years ago, and have been battered and externally degraded; and though whatever spiritual beauty they ever had may still remain, yet this is not made more apparent by the contrast betwixt the new gloss of modern upholstery, and their tarnished, even if immortal grace. I rather think the English have given really the more hospitable reception to the maimed Theseus, and his broken-nosed, broken-legged, headless companions, because flouting them with no gorgeous fittings up. By this time poor J----- (who, with his taste for art yet undeveloped, is the companion of all our visits to sculpture and picture galleries) was wofully hungry, and for bread we had given him a stone,--not one stone, but a thousand. We returned to the hotel, and it being too damp and raw to go to our Restaurant des Echelles, we dined at the hotel. In my opinion it would require less time to cultivate our gastronomic taste than taste of any other kind; and, on the whole, I am not sure that a man would not be wise to afford himself a little discipline in this line. It is certainly throwing away the bounties of Providence, to treat them as the English do, producing from better materials than the French have to work upon nothing but sirloins, joints, joints, steaks, steaks, steaks, chops, chops, chops, chops! We had a soup to-day, in which twenty kinds of vegetables were represented, and manifested each its own aroma; a fillet of stewed beef, and a fowl, in some sort of delicate fricassee. We had a bottle of Chablis, and renewed ourselves, at the close of the banquet, with a plate of Chateaubriand ice. It was all very good, and we respected ourselves far more than if we had eaten a quantity of red roast beef; but I am not quite sure that we were right. . . . Among the relics of kings and princes, I do not know that there was anything more interesting than a little brass cannon, two or three inches long, which had been a toy of the unfortunate Dauphin, son of Louis XVI. There was a map,--a hemisphere of the world,--which his father had drawn for this poor boy; very neatly done, too. The sword of Louis XVI., a magnificent rapier, with a beautifully damasked blade, and a jewelled scabbard, but without a hilt, is likewise preserved, as is the hilt of Henry IV.'s sword. But it is useless to begin a catalogue of these things. What a collection it is, including Charlemagne's sword and sceptre, and the last Dauphin's little toy cannon, and so much between the two! Hotel de Louvre, January 11th.--This was another chill, raw day, characterized by a spitefulness of atmosphere which I do not remember ever to have experienced in my own dear country. We meant to have visited the Hotel des Invalides, but J----- and I walked to the Tivoli, the Place de la Concorde, the Champs Elysees, and to the Place de Beaujou, and to the residence of the American minister, where I wished to arrange about my passport. After speaking with the Secretary of Legation, we were ushered into the minister's private room, where he received me with great kindness. Mr. ------ is an old gentleman with a white head, and a large, florid face, which has an expression of amiability, not unmingled with a certain dignity. He did not rise from his arm-chair to greet me,--a lack of ceremony which I imputed to the gout, feeling it impossible that he should have willingly failed in courtesy to one of his twenty-five million sovereigns. In response to some remark of mine about the shabby way in which our government treats its officials pecuniarily, he gave a detailed account of his own troubles on that score; then expressed a hope that I had made a good thing out of my consulate, and inquired whether I had received a hint to resign; to which I replied that, for various reasons, I had resigned of my own accord, and before Mr. Buchanan's inauguration. We agreed, however, in disapproving the system of periodical change in our foreign officials; and I remarked that a consul or an ambassador ought to be a citizen both of his native country and of the one in which he resided; and that his possibility of beneficent influence depended largely on his being so. Apropos to which Mr. ------ said that he had once asked a diplomatic friend of long experience, what was the first duty of a minister. "To love his own country, and to watch over its interests," answered the diplomatist. "And his second duty?" asked Mr. ------. "To love and to promote the interests of the country to which he is accredited," said his friend. This is a very Christian and sensible view of the matter; but it can scarcely have happened once in our whole diplomatic history, that a minister can have had time to overcome his first rude and ignorant prejudice against the country of his mission; and if there were any suspicion of his having done so, it would be held abundantly sufficient ground for his recall. I like Mr. ------, a good-hearted, sensible old man. J----- and I returned along the Champs Elysees, and, crossing the Seine, kept on our way by the river's brink, looking at the titles of books on the long lines of stalls that extend between the bridges. Novels, fairy-tales, dream books, treatises of behavior and etiquette, collections of bon-mots and of songs, were interspersed with volumes in the old style of calf and gilt binding, the works of the classics of French literature. A good many persons, of the poor classes, and of those apparently well to do, stopped transitorily to look at these books. On the other side of the street was a range of tall edifices with shops beneath, and the quick stir of French life hurrying, and babbling, and swarming along the sidewalk. We passed two or three bridges, occurring at short intervals, and at last we recrossed the Seine by a bridge which oversteps the river, from a point near the National Institute, and reaches the other side, not far from the Louvre. . . . Though the day was so disagreeable, we thought it best not to lose the remainder of it, and therefore set out to visit the Cathedral of Notre Dame. We took a fiacre in the Place de Carousel, and drove to the door. On entering, we found the interior miserably shut off from view by the stagings erected for the purpose of repairs. Penetrating from the nave towards the chancel, an official personage signified to us that we must first purchase a ticket for each grown person, at the price of half a franc each. This expenditure admitted us into the sacristy, where we were taken in charge by a guide, who came down upon us with an avalanche or cataract of French, descriptive of a great many treasures reposited in this chapel. I understood hardly more than one word in ten, but gathered doubtfully that a bullet which was shown us was the one that killed the late Archbishop of Paris, on the floor of the cathedral. [But this was a mistake. It was the archbishop who was killed in the insurrection of 1848. Two joints of his backbone were also shown.] Also, that some gorgeously embroidered vestments, which he drew forth, had been used at the coronation of Napoleon I. There were two large, full-length portraits hanging aloft in the sacristy, and a gold or silver gilt, or, at all events, gilt image of the Virgin, as large as life, standing on a pedestal. The guide had much to say about these, but, understanding him so imperfectly, I have nothing to record. The guide's supervision of us seemed not to extend beyond this sacristy, on quitting which he gave us permission to go where we pleased, only intimating a hope that we would not forget him; so I gave him half a franc, though thereby violating an inhibition on the printed ticket of entrance. We had been much disappointed at first by the apparently narrow limits of the interior of this famous church; but now, as we made our way round the choir, gazing into chapel after chapel, each with its painted window, its crucifix, its pictures, its confessional, and afterwards came back into the nave, where arch rises above arch to the lofty roof, we came to the conclusion that it was very sumptuous. It is the greatest of pities that its grandeur and solemnity should just now be so infinitely marred by the workmen's boards, timber, and ladders occupying the whole centre of the edifice, and screening all its best effects. It seems to have been already most richly ornamented, its roof being painted, and the capitals of the pillars gilded, and their shafts illuminated in fresco; and no doubt it will shine out gorgeously when all the repairs and adornments shall be completed. Even now it gave to my actual sight what I have often tried to imagine in my visits to the English cathedrals,-- the pristine glory of those edifices, when they stood glowing with gold and picture, fresh from the architects' and adorners' hands. The interior loftiness of Notre Dame, moreover, gives it a sublimity which would swallow up anything that might look gewgawy in its ornamentation, were we to consider it window by window, or pillar by pillar. It is an advantage of these vast edifices, rising over us and spreading about us in such a firmamental way, that we cannot spoil them by any pettiness of our own, but that they receive (or absorb) our pettiness into their own immensity. Every little fantasy finds its place and propriety in them, like a flower on the earth's broad bosom. When we emerged from the cathedral, we found it beginning to rain or snow, or both; and, as we had dismissed our fiacre at the door, and could find no other, we were at a loss what to do. We stood a few moments on the steps of the Hotel Dieu, looking up at the front of Notre Dame, with its twin towers, and its three deep-pointed arches, piercing through a great thickness of stone, and throwing a cavern-like gloom around these entrances. The front is very rich. Though so huge, and all of gray stone, it is carved and fretted with statues and innumerable devices, as cunningly as any ivory casket in which relics are kept; but its size did not so much impress me. . . . Hotel de Louvre, January 12th.--This has been a bright day as regards weather; but I have done little or nothing worth recording. After breakfast, I set out in quest of the consul, and found him up a court, at 51 Rue Caumartin, in an office rather smaller, I think, than mine at Liverpool; but, to say the truth, a little better furnished. I was received in the outer apartment by an elderly, brisk-looking man, in whose air, respectful and subservient, and yet with a kind of authority in it, I recognized the vice-consul. He introduced me to Mr. ------, who sat writing in an inner room; a very gentlemanly, courteous, cool man of the world, whom I should take to be an excellent person for consul at Paris. He tells me that he has resided here some years, although his occupancy of the consulate dates only from November last. Consulting him respecting my passport, he gave me what appear good reasons why I should get all the necessary vises here; for example, that the vise of a minister carries more weight than that of a consul; and especially that an Austrian consul will never vise a passport unless he sees his minister's name upon it. Mr. ------ has travelled much in Italy, and ought to be able to give me sound advice. His opinion was, that at this season of the year I had better go by steamer to Civita Veechia, instead of landing at Leghorn, and thence journeying to Rome. On this point I shall decide when the time comes. As I left the office the vice-consul informed me that there was a charge of five francs and some sous for the consul's vise, a tax which surprised me,--the whole business of passports having been taken from consuls before I quitted office, and the consular fee having been annulled even earlier. However, no doubt Mr. ------ had a fair claim to my five francs; but, really, it is not half so pleasant to pay a consular fee as it used to be to receive it. Afterwards I walked to Notre Dame, the rich front of which I viewed with more attention than yesterday. There are whole histories, carved in stone figures, within the vaulted arches of the three entrances in this west front, and twelve apostles in a row above, and as much other sculpture as would take a month to see. We then walked quite round it, but I had no sense of immensity from it, not even that of great height, as from many of the cathedrals in England. It stands very near the Seine; indeed, if I mistake not, it is on an island formed by two branches of the river. Behind it, is what seems to be a small public ground (or garden, if a space entirely denuded of grass or other green thing, except a few trees, can be called so), with benches, and a monument in the midst. This quarter of the city looks old, and appears to be inhabited by poor people, and to be busied about small and petty affairs; the most picturesque business that I saw being that of the old woman who sells crucifixes of pearl and of wood at the cathedral door. We bought two of these yesterday. I must again speak of the horrible muddiness, not only of this part of the city, but of all Paris, so far as I have traversed it to-day. My ways, since I came to Europe, have often lain through nastiness, but I never before saw a pavement so universally overspread with mud-padding as that of Paris. It is difficult to imagine where so much filth can come from. After dinner I walked through the gardens of the Tuileries; but as dusk was coming on, and as I was afraid of being shut up within the iron railing, I did not have time to examine them particularly. There are wide, intersecting walks, fountains, broad basins, and many statues; but almost the whole surface of the gardens is barren earth, instead of the verdure that would beautify an English pleasure-ground of this sort. In the summer it has doubtless an agreeable shade; but at this season the naked branches look meagre, and sprout from slender trunks. Like the trees in the Champs Elysees, those, I presume, in the gardens of the Tuileries need renewing every few years. The same is true of the human race,--families becoming extinct after a generation or two of residence in Paris. Nothing really thrives here; man and vegetables have but an artificial life, like flowers stuck in a little mould, but never taking root. I am quite tired of Paris, and long for a home more than ever. MARSEILLES. Hotel d'Angleterre, January 15th.--On Tuesday morning, (12th) we took our departure from the Hotel de Louvre. It is a most excellent and perfectly ordered hotel, and I have not seen a more magnificent hall, in any palace, than the dining-saloon, with its profuse gilding, and its ceiling, painted in compartments; so that when the chandeliers are all alight, it looks a fit place for princes to banquet in, and not very fit for the few Americans whom I saw scattered at its long tables. By the by, as we drove to the railway, we passed through the public square, where the Bastille formerly stood; and in the centre of it now stands a column, surmounted by a golden figure of Mercury (I think), which seems to be just on the point of casting itself from a gilt ball into the air. This statue is so buoyant, that the spectator feels quite willing to trust it to the viewless element, being as sure that it would be borne up as that a bird would fly. Our first day's journey was wholly without interest, through a country entirely flat, and looking wretchedly brown and barren. There were rows of trees, very slender, very prim and formal; there was ice wherever there happened to be any water to form it; there were occasional villages, compact little streets, or masses of stone or plastered cottages, very dirty and with gable ends and earthen roofs; and a succession of this same landscape was all that we saw, whenever we rubbed away the congelation of our breath from the carriage windows. Thus we rode on, all day long, from eleven o'clock, with hardly a five minutes' stop, till long after dark, when we came to Dijon, where there was a halt of twenty-five minutes for dinner. Then we set forth again, and rumbled forward, through cold and darkness without, until we reached Lyons at about ten o'clock. We left our luggage at the railway station, and took an omnibus for the Hotel de Provence, which we chose at a venture, among a score of other hotels. As this hotel was a little off the direct route of the omnibus, the driver set us down at the corner of a street, and pointed to some lights, which he said designated the Hotel do Provence; and thither we proceeded, all seven of us, taking along a few carpet-bags and shawls, our equipage for the night. The porter of the hotel met us near its doorway, and ushered us through an arch, into the inner quadrangle, and then up some old and worn steps,--very broad, and appearing to be the principal staircase. At the first landing-place, an old woman and a waiter or two received us; and we went up two or three more flights of the same broad and worn stone staircases. What we could see of the house looked very old, and had the musty odor with which I first became acquainted at Chester. After ascending to the proper level, we were conducted along a corridor, paved with octagonal earthen tiles; on one side were windows, looking into the courtyard, on the other doors opening into the sleeping-chambers. The corridor was of immense length, and seemed still to lengthen itself before us, as the glimmer of our conductor's candle went farther and farther into the obscurity. Our own chamber was at a vast distance along this passage; those of the rest of the party were on the hither side; but all this immense suite of rooms appeared to communicate by doors from one to another, like the chambers through which the reader wanders at midnight, in Mrs. Radcliffe's romances. And they were really splendid rooms, though of an old fashion, lofty, spacious, with floors of oak or other wood, inlaid in squares and crosses, and waxed till they were slippery, but without carpets. Our own sleeping-room had a deep fireplace, in which we ordered a fire, and asked if there were not some saloon already warmed, where we could get a cup of tea. Hereupon the waiter led us back along the endless corridor, and down the old stone staircases, and out into the quadrangle, and journeyed with us along an exterior arcade, and finally threw open the door of the salle a manger, which proved to be a room of lofty height, with a vaulted roof, a stone floor, and interior spaciousness sufficient for a baronial hall, the whole bearing the same aspect of times gone by, that characterized the rest of the house. There were two or three tables covered with white cloth, and we sat down at one of them and had our tea. Finally we wended back to our sleeping-rooms,--a considerable journey, so endless seemed the ancient hotel. I should like to know its history. The fire made our great chamber look comfortable, and the fireplace threw out the heat better than the little square hole over which we cowered in our saloon at the Hotel de Louvre. . . . In the morning we began our preparations for starting at ten. Issuing into the corridor, I found a soldier of the line, pacing to and fro there as sentinel. Another was posted in another corridor, into which I wandered by mistake; another stood in the inner court-yard, and another at the porte-cochere. They were not there the night before, and I know not whence nor why they came, unless that some officer of rank may have taken up his quarters at the hotel. Miss M------ says she heard at Paris, that a considerable number of troops had recently been drawn together at Lyons, in consequence of symptoms of disaffection that have recently shown themselves here. Before breakfast I went out to catch a momentary glimpse of the city. The street in which our hotel stands is near a large public square; in the centre is a bronze equestrian statue of Louis XIV.; and the square itself is called the Place de Louis le Grand. I wonder where this statue hid itself while the Revolution was raging in Lyons, and when the guillotine, perhaps, stood on that very spot. The square was surrounded by stately buildings, but had what seemed to be barracks for soldiers,--at any rate, mean little huts, deforming its ample space; and a soldier was on guard before the statue of Louis le Grand. It was a cold, misty morning, and a fog lay throughout the area, so that I could scarcely see from one side of it to the other. Returning towards our hotel, I saw that it had an immense front, along which ran, in gigantic letters, its title,-- HOTEL DE PROVENCE ET DES AMBASSADEURS. The excellence of the hotel lay rather in the faded pomp of its sleeping-rooms, and the vastness of its salle a manger, than in anything very good to eat or drink. We left it, after a poor breakfast, and went to the railway station. Looking at the mountainous heap of our luggage the night before, we had missed a great carpet-bag; and we now found that Miss M------'s trunk had been substituted for it, and, there being the proper number of packages as registered, it was impossible to convince the officials that anything was wrong. We, of course, began to generalize forthwith, and pronounce the incident to be characteristic of French morality. They love a certain system and external correctness, but do not trouble themselves to be deeply in the right; and Miss M------ suggested that there used to be parallel cases in the French Revolution, when, so long as the assigned number were sent out of prison to be guillotined, the jailer did not much care whether they were the persons designated by the tribunal or not. At all events, we could get no satisfaction about the carpet-bag, and shall very probably be compelled to leave Marseilles without it. This day's ride was through a far more picturesque country than that we saw yesterday. Heights began to rise imminent above our way, with sometimes a ruined castle wall upon them; on our left, the rail-track kept close to the hills; on the other side there was the level bottom of a valley, with heights descending upon it a mile or a few miles away. Farther off we could see blue hills, shouldering high above the intermediate ones, and themselves worthy to be called mountains. These hills arranged themselves in beautiful groups, affording openings between them, and vistas of what lay beyond, and gorges which I suppose held a great deal of romantic scenery. By and by a river made its appearance, flowing swiftly in the same direction that we were travelling,--a beautiful and cleanly river, with white pebbly shores, and itself of a peculiar blue. It rushed along very fast, sometimes whitening over shallow descents, and even in its calmer intervals its surface was all covered with whirls and eddies, indicating that it dashed onward in haste. I do not now know the name of this river, but have set it down as the "arrowy Rhone." It kept us company a long while, and I think we did not part with it as long as daylight remained. I have seldom seen hill-scenery that struck me more than some that we saw to-day, and the old feudal towers and old villages at their feet; and the old churches, with spires shaped just like extinguishers, gave it an interest accumulating from many centuries past. Still going southward, the vineyards began to border our track, together with what I at first took to be orchards, but soon found were plantations of olive-trees, which grow to a much larger size than I supposed, and look almost exactly like very crabbed and eccentric apple-trees. Neither they nor the vineyards add anything to the picturesqueness of the landscape. On the whole, I should have been delighted with all this scenery if it had not looked so bleak, barren, brown, and bare; so like the wintry New England before the snow has fallen. It was very cold, too; ice along the borders of streams, even among the vineyards and olives. The houses are of rather a different shape here than, farther northward, their roofs being not nearly so sloping. They are almost invariably covered with white plaster; the farm-houses have their outbuildings in connection with the dwelling,--the whole surrounding three sides of a quadrangle. We travelled far into the night, swallowed a cold and hasty dinner at Avignon, and reached Marseilles sorely wearied, at about eleven o'clock. We took a cab to the Hotel d'Angleterre (two cabs, to be quite accurate), and find it a very poor place. To go back a little, as the sun went down, we looked out of the window of our railway carriage, and saw a sky that reminded us of what we used to see day after day in America, and what we have not seen since; and, after sunset, the horizon burned and glowed with rich crimson and orange lustre, looking at once warm and cold. After it grew dark, the stars brightened, and Miss M------ from her window pointed out some of the planets to the children, she being as familiar with them as a gardener with his flowers. They were as bright as diamonds. We had a wretched breakfast, and J----- and I then went to the railway station to see about our luggage. On our walk back we went astray, passing by a triumphal arch, erected by the Marseillais, in honor of Louis Napoleon; but we inquired our way of old women and soldiers, who were very kind and courteous,--especially the latter,--and were directed aright. We came to a large, oblong, public place, set with trees, but devoid of grass, like all public places in France. In the middle of it was a bronze statue of an ecclesiastical personage, stretching forth his hands in the attitude of addressing the people or of throwing a benediction over them. It was some archbishop, who had distinguished himself by his humanity and devotedness during the plague of 1720. At the moment of our arrival the piazza was quite thronged with people, who seemed to be talking amongst themselves with considerable earnestness, although without any actual excitement. They were smoking cigars; and we judged that they were only loitering here for the sake of the sunshine, having no fires at home, and nothing to do. Some looked like gentlemen, others like peasants; most of them I should have taken for the lazzaroni of this Southern city,--men with cloth caps, like the classic liberty-cap, or with wide-awake hats. There were one or two women of the lower classes, without bonnets, the elder ones with white caps, the younger bareheaded. I have hardly seen a lady in Marseilles; and I suspect, it being a commercial city, and dirty to the last degree, ill-built, narrow-streeted, and sometimes pestilential, there are few or no families of gentility resident here. Returning to the hotel, we found the rest of the party ready to go out; so we all issued forth in a body, and inquired our way to the telegraph-office, in order to send my message about the carpet-bag. In a street through which we had to pass (and which seemed to be the Exchange, or its precincts), there was a crowd even denser, yes, much denser, than that which we saw in the square of the archbishop's statue; and each man was talking to his neighbor in a vivid, animated way, as if business were very brisk to-day. At the telegraph-office, we discovered the cause that had brought out these many people. There had been attempts on the Emperor's life,-- unsuccessful, as they seem fated to be, though some mischief was done to those near him. I rather think the good people of Marseilles were glad of the attempt, as an item of news and gossip, and did not very greatly care whether it were successful or no. It seemed to have roused their vivacity rather than their interest. The only account I have seen of it was in the brief public despatch from the Syndic (or whatever he be) of Paris to the chief authority of Marseilles, which was printed and posted in various conspicuous places. The only chance of knowing the truth with any fulness of detail would be to come across an English paper. We have had a banner hoisted half-mast in front of our hotel to-day as a token, the head-waiter tells me, of sympathy and sorrow for the General and other persons who were slain by this treasonable attempt. J----- and I now wandered by ourselves along a circular line of quays, having, on one side of us, a thick forest of masts, while, on the other, was a sweep of shops, bookstalls, sailors' restaurants and drinking-houses, fruit-sellers, candy-women, and all manner of open-air dealers and pedlers; little children playing, and jumping the rope, and such a babble and bustle as I never saw or heard before; the sun lying along the whole sweep, very hot, and evidently very grateful to those who basked in it. Whenever I passed into the shade, immediately from too warm I became too cold. The sunshine was like hot air; the shade, like the touch of cold steel,--sharp, hard, yet exhilarating. From the broad street of the quays, narrow, thread-like lanes pierced up between the edifices, calling themselves streets, yet so narrow, that a person in the middle could almost touch the houses on either hand. They ascended steeply, bordered on each side by long, contiguous walls of high houses, and from the time of their first being built, could never have had a gleam of sunshine in them,--always in shadow, always unutterably nasty, and often pestiferous. The nastiness which I saw in Marseilles exceeds my heretofore experience. There is dirt in the hotel, and everywhere else; and it evidently troubles nobody,--no more than if all the people were pigs in a pigsty. . . . Passing by all this sweep of quays, J----- and I ascended to an elevated walk, overlooking the harbor, and far beyond it; for here we had our first view of the Mediterranean, blue as heaven, and bright with sunshine. It was a bay, widening forth into the open deep, and bordered with heights, and bold, picturesque headlands, some of which had either fortresses or convents on them. Several boats and one brig were under sail, making their way towards the port. I have never seen a finer sea-view. Behind the town, there seemed to be a mountainous landscape, imperfectly visible, in consequence of the intervening edifices. THE MEDITERRANEAN SEA. Steamer Calabrese, January 17th.--If I had remained at Marseilles, I might have found many peculiarities and characteristics of that Southern city to notice; but I fear that these will not be recorded if I leave them till I touch the soil of Italy. Indeed, I doubt whether there be anything really worth recording in the little distinctions between one nation and another; at any rate, after the first novelty is over, new things seem equally commonplace with the old. There is but one little interval when the mind is in such a state that it can catch the fleeting aroma of a new scene. And it is always so much pleasanter to enjoy this delicious newness than to attempt arresting it, that it requires great force of will to insist with one's self upon sitting down to write. I can do nothing with Marseilles, especially here on the Mediterranean, long after nightfall, and when the steamer is pitching in a pretty lively way. (Later.)--I walked out with J----- yesterday morning, and reached the outskirts of the city, whence we could see the bold and picturesque heights that surround Marseilles as with a semicircular wall. They rise into peaks, and the town, being on their lower slope, descends from them towards the sea with a gradual sweep. Adown the streets that descend these declivities come little rivulets, running along over the pavement, close to the sidewalks, as over a pebbly bed; and though they look vastly like kennels, I saw women washing linen in these streams, and others dipping up the water for household purposes. The women appear very much in public at Marseilles. In the squares and places you see half a dozen of them together, sitting in a social circle on the bottoms of upturned baskets, knitting, talking, and enjoying the public sunshine, as if it were their own household fire. Not one in a thousand of them, probably, ever has a household fire for the purpose of keeping themselves warm, but only to do their little cookery; and when there is sunshine they take advantage of it, and in the short season of rain and frost they shrug their shoulders, put on what warm garments they have, and get through the winter somewhat as grasshoppers and butterflies do,--being summer insects like then. This certainly is a very keen and cutting air, sharp as a razor, and I saw ice along the borders of the little rivulets almost at noonday. To be sure, it is midwinter, and yet in the sunshine I found myself uncomfortably warm, but in the shade the air was like the touch of death itself. I do not like the climate. There are a great number of public places in Marseilles, several of which are adorned with statues or fountains, or triumphal arches or columns, and set out with trees, and otherwise furnished as a kind of drawing-rooms, where the populace may meet together and gossip. I never before heard from human lips anything like this bustle and babble, this thousand-fold talk which you hear all round about you in the crowd of a public square; so entirely different is it from the dulness of a crowd in England, where, as a rule, everybody is silent, and hardly half a dozen monosyllables will come from the lips of a thousand people. In Marseilles, on the contrary, a stream of unbroken talk seems to bubble from the lips of every individual. A great many interesting scenes take place in these squares. From the window of our hotel (which looked into the Place Royale) I saw a juggler displaying his art to a crowd, who stood in a regular square about him, none pretending to press nearer than the prescribed limit. While the juggler wrought his miracles his wife supplied him with his magic materials out of a box; and when the exhibition was over she packed up the white cloth with which his table was covered, together with cups, cards, balls, and whatever else, and they took their departure. I have been struck with the idle curiosity, and, at the same time, the courtesy and kindness of the populace of Marseilles, and I meant to exemplify it by recording how Miss S------ and I attracted their notice, and became the centre of a crowd of at least fifty of them while doing no more remarkable thing than settling with a cab-driver. But really this pitch and swell is getting too bad, and I shall go to bed, as the best chance of keeping myself in an equable state. ROME. 37 Palazzo Larazani, Via Porta Pinciana, January 24th.--We left Marseilles in the Neapolitan steamer Calabrese, as noticed above, a week ago this morning. There was no fault to be found with the steamer, which was very clean and comfortable, contrary to what we had understood beforehand; except for the coolness of the air (and I know not that this was greater than that of the Atlantic in July), our voyage would have been very pleasant; but for myself, I enjoyed nothing, having a cold upon me, or a low fever, or something else that took the light and warmth out of everything. I went to bed immediately after my last record, and was rocked to sleep pleasantly enough by the billows of the Mediterranean; and, coming on deck about sunrise next morning, found the steamer approaching Genoa. We saw the city, lying at the foot of a range of hills, and stretching a little way up their slopes, the hills sweeping round it in the segment of a circle, and looking like an island rising abruptly out of the sea; for no connection with the mainland was visible on either side. There was snow scattered on their summits and streaking their sides a good way down. They looked bold, and barren, and brown, except where the snow whitened them. The city did not impress me with much expectation of size or splendor. Shortly after coming into the port our whole party landed, and we found ourselves at once in the midst of a crowd of cab-drivers, hotel-runnets, and coin missionaires, who assaulted us with a volley of French, Italian, and broken English, which beat pitilessly about our ears; for really it seemed as if all the dictionaries in the world had been torn to pieces, and blown around us by a hurricane. Such a pother! We took a commissionaire, a respectable-looking man, in a cloak, who said his name was Salvator Rosa; and he engaged to show us whatever was interesting in Genoa. In the first place, he took us through narrow streets to an old church, the name of which I have forgotten, and, indeed, its peculiar features; but I know that I found it pre-eminently magnificent,--its whole interior being incased in polished marble, of various kinds and colors, its ceiling painted, and its chapels adorned with pictures. However, this church was dazzled out of sight by the Cathedral of San Lorenzo, to which we were afterwards conducted, whose exterior front is covered with alternate slabs of black and white marble, which were brought, either in whole or in part, from Jerusalem. Within, there was a prodigious richness of precious marbles, and a pillar, if I mistake not, from Solomon's Temple; and a picture of the Virgin by St. Luke; and others (rather more intrinsically valuable, I imagine), by old masters, set in superb marble frames, within the arches of the chapels. I used to try to imagine how the English cathedrals must have looked in their primeval glory, before the Reformation, and before the whitewash of Cromwell's time had overlaid their marble pillars; but I never imagined anything at all approaching what my eyes now beheld: this sheen of polished and variegated marble covering every inch of its walls; this glow of brilliant frescos all over the roof, and up within the domes; these beautiful pictures by great masters, painted for the places which they now occupied, and making an actual portion of the edifice; this wealth of silver, gold, and gems, that adorned the shrines of the saints, before which wax candles burned, and were kept burning, I suppose, from year's end to year's end; in short, there is no imagining nor remembering a hundredth part of the rich details. And even the cathedral (though I give it up as indescribable) was nothing at all in comparison with a church to which the commissionaire afterwards led us; a church that had been built four or five hundred years ago, by a pirate, in expiation of his sins, and out of the profit of his rapine. This last edifice, in its interior, absolutely shone with burnished gold, and glowed with pictures; its walls were a quarry of precious stones, so valuable were the marbles out of which they were wrought; its columns and pillars were of inconceivable costliness; its pavement was a mosaic of wonderful beauty, and there were four twisted pillars made out of stalactites. Perhaps the best way to form some dim conception of it is to fancy a little casket, inlaid inside with precious stones, so that there shall not a hair's-breadth be left unprecious-stoned, and then to conceive this little bit of a casket iucreased to the magnitude of a great church, without losing anything of the excessive glory that was compressed into its original small compass, but all its pretty lustre made sublime by the consequent immensity. At any rate, nobody who has not seen a church like this can imagine what a gorgeous religion it was that reared it. In the cathedral, and in all the churches, we saw priests and many persons kneeling at their devotions; and our Salvator Rosa, whenever we passed a chapel or shrine, failed not to touch the pavement with one knee, crossing himself the while; and once, when a priest was going through some form of devotion, he stopped a few moments to share in it. He conducted us, too, to the Balbi Palace, the stateliest and most sumptuous residence, but not more so than another which he afterwards showed us, nor perhaps than many others which exist in Genoa, THE SUPERB. The painted ceilings in these palaces are a glorious adornment; the walls of the saloons, incrusted with various-colored marbles, give an idea of splendor which I never gained from anything else. The floors, laid in mosaic, seem too precious to tread upon. In the royal palace, many of the floors were of various woods, inlaid by an English artist, and they looked like a magnification of some exquisite piece of Tunbridge ware; but, in all respects, this palace was inferior to others which we saw. I say nothing of the immense pictorial treasures which hung upon the walls of all the rooms through which we passed; for I soon grew so weary of admirable things, that I could neither enjoy nor understand them. My receptive faculty is very limited, and when the utmost of its small capacity is full, I become perfectly miserable, and the more so the better worth seeing are the things I am forced to reject. I do not know a greater misery; to see sights, after such repletion, is to the mind what it would be to the body to have dainties forced down the throat long after the appetite was satiated. All this while, whenever we emerged into the vaultlike streets, we were wretchedly cold. The commissionaire took us to a sort of pleasure-garden, occupying the ascent of a hill, and presenting seven different views of the city, from as many stations. One of the objects pointed out to us was a large yellow house, on a hillside, in the outskirts of Genoa, which was formerly inhabited for six months by Charles Dickens. Looking down from the elevated part of the pleasure-gardens, we saw orange-trees beneath us, with the golden fruit hanging upon them, though their trunks were muffled in straw; and, still lower down, there was ice and snow. Gladly (so far as I myself was concerned) we dismissed the commissionaire, after he had brought us to the hotel of the Cross of Malta, where we dined; needlessly, as it proved, for another dinner awaited us, after our return on board the boat. We set sail for Leghorn before dark, and I retired early, feeling still more ill from my cold than the night before. The next morning we were in the crowded port of Leghorn. We all went ashore, with some idea of taking the rail for Pisa, which is within an hour's distance, and might have been seen in time for our departure with the steamer. But a necessary visit to a banker's, and afterwards some unnecessary formalities about our passports, kept us wandering through the streets nearly all day; and we saw nothing in the slightest degree interesting, except the tomb of Smollett, in the burial-place attached to the English Chapel. It is surrounded by an iron railing, and marked by a slender obelisk of white marble, the pattern of which is many times repeated over surrounding graves. We went into a Jewish synagogue,--the interior cased in marbles, and surrounded with galleries, resting upon arches above arches. There were lights burning at the altar, and it looked very like a Christian church; but it was dirty, and had an odor not of sanctity. In Leghorn, as everywhere else, we were chilled to the heart, except when the sunshine fell directly upon us; and we returned to the steamer with a feeling as if we were getting back to our home; for this life of wandering makes a three days' residence in one place seem like home. We found several new passengers on board, and among others a monk, in a long brown frock of woollen cloth, with an immense cape, and a little black covering over his tonsure. He was a tall figure, with a gray beard, and might have walked, just as he stood, out of a picture by one of the old masters. This holy person addressed me very affably in Italian; but we found it impossible to hold much conversation. The evening was beautiful, with a bright young moonlight, not yet sufficiently powerful to overwhelm the stars, and as we walked the deck, Miss M------ showed the children the constellations, and told their names. J----- made a slight mistake as to one of them, pointing it out to me as "O'Brien's belt!" Elba was presently in view, and we might have seen many other interesting points, had it not been for our steamer's practice of resting by day, and only pursuing its voyage by night. The next morning we found ourselves in the harbor of Civita Vecchia, and, going ashore with our luggage, went through a blind turmoil with custom-house officers, inspectors of passports, soldiers, and vetturino people. My wife and I strayed a little through Civita Vecchia, and found its streets narrow, like clefts in a rock (which seems to be the fashion of Italian towns), and smelling nastily. I had made a bargain with a vetturino to send us to Rome in a carriage, with four horses, in eight hours; and as soon as the custom-house and passport people would let us, we started, lumbering slowly along with our mountain of luggage. We had heard rumors of robberies lately committed on this route; especially of a Nova Scotia bishop, who was detained on the road an hour and a half, and utterly pillaged; and certainly there was not a single mile of the dreary and desolate country over which we passed, where we might not have been robbed and murdered with impunity. Now and then, at long distances, we came to a structure that was either a prison, a tavern, or a barn, but did not look very much like either, being strongly built of stone, with iron-grated windows, and of ancient and rusty aspect. We kept along by the seashore a great part of the way, and stopped to feed our horses at a village, the wretched street of which stands close along the shore of the Mediterranean, its loose, dark sand being made nasty by the vicinity. The vetturino cheated us, one of the horses giving out, as he must have known it would do, half-way on our journey; and we staggered on through cold and darkness, and peril, too, if the banditti were not a myth,-- reaching Rome not much before midnight. I perpetrated unheard-of briberies on the custom-house officers at the gates, and was permitted to pass through and establish myself at Spillman's Hotel, the only one where we could gain admittance, and where we have been half frozen ever since. And this is sunny Italy, and genial Rome! Palazzo Larazani, Via Porta Pinciana, February 3d.--We have been in Rome a fortnight to-day, or rather at eleven o'clock to-night; and I have seldom or never spent so wretched a time anywhere. Our impressions were very unfortunate, arriving at midnight, half frozen in the wintry rain, and being received into a cold and cheerless hotel, where we shivered during two or three days; meanwhile seeking lodgings among the sunless, dreary alleys which are called streets in Rome. One cold, bright day after another has pierced me to the heart, and cut me in twain as with a sword, keen and sharp, and poisoned at point and edge. I did not think that cold weather could have made me so very miserable. Having caught a feverish influenza, I was really glad of being muffled up comfortably in the fever heat. The atmosphere certainly has a peculiar quality of malignity. After a day or two we settled ourselves in a suite of ten rooms, comprehending one flat, or what is called the second piano of this house. The rooms, thus far, have been very uncomfortable, it being impossible to warm them by means of the deep, old-fashioned, inartificial fireplaces, unless we had the great logs of a New England forest to burn in them; so I have sat in my corner by the fireside with more clothes on than I ever wore before, and my thickest great-coat over all. In the middle of the day I generally venture out for an hour or two, but have only once been warm enough even in the sunshine, and out of the sun never at any time. I understand now the force of that story of Diogenes when he asked the Conqueror, as the only favor he could do him, to stand out of his sunshine, there being such a difference in these Southern climes of Europe between sun and shade. If my wits had not been too much congealed, and my fingers too numb, I should like to have kept a minute journal of my feelings and impressions during the past fortnight. It would have shown modern Rome in an aspect in which it has never yet been depicted. But I have now grown somewhat acclimated, and the first freshness of my discomfort has worn off, so that I shall never be able to express how I dislike the place, and how wretched I have been in it; and soon, I suppose, warmer weather will come, and perhaps reconcile me to Rome against my will. Cold, narrow lanes, between tall, ugly, mean-looking whitewashed houses, sour bread, pavements most uncomfortable to the feet, enormous prices for poor living; beggars, pickpockets, ancient temples and broken monuments, and clothes hanging to dry about them; French soldiers, monks, and priests of every degree; a shabby population, smoking bad cigars,--these would have been some of the points of my description. Of course there are better and truer things to be said. . . . It would be idle for me to attempt any sketches of these famous sites and edifices,--St. Peter's, for example,--which have been described by a thousand people, though none of them have ever given me an idea of what sort of place Rome is. . . . The Coliseum was very much what I had preconceived it, though I was not prepared to find it turned into a sort of Christian church, with a pulpit on the verge of the open space. . . . The French soldiers, who keep guard within it, as in other public places in Rome, have an excellent opportunity to secure the welfare of their souls. February 7th.--I cannot get fairly into the current of my journal since we arrived, and already I perceive that the nice peculiarities of Roman life are passing from my notice before I have recorded them. It is a very great pity. During the past week I have plodded daily, for an hour or two, through the narrow, stony streets, that look worse than the worst backside lanes of any other city; indescribably ugly and disagreeable they are, . . . . without sidewalks, but provided with a line of larger square stones, set crosswise to each other, along which there is somewhat less uneasy walking. . . . Ever and anon, even in the meanest streets, --though, generally speaking, one can hardly be called meaner than another,--we pass a palace, extending far along the narrow way on a line with the other houses, but distinguished by its architectural windows, iron-barred on the basement story, and by its portal arch, through which we have glimpses, sometimes of a dirty court-yard, or perhaps of a clean, ornamented one, with trees, a colonnade, a fountain, and a statue in the vista; though, more likely, it resembles the entrance to a stable, and may, perhaps, really be one. The lower regions of palaces come to strange uses in Rome. . . . In the basement story of the Barberini Palace a regiment of French soldiers (or soldiers of some kind [we find them to be retainers of the Barberini family, not French]) seems to be quartered, while no doubt princes have magnificent domiciles above. Be it palace or whatever other dwelling, the inmates climb through rubbish often to the comforts, such as they may be, that await them above. I vainly try to get down upon paper the dreariness, the ugliness, shabbiness, un-home-likeness of a Roman street. It is also to be said that you cannot go far in any direction without coming to a piazza, which is sometimes little more than a widening and enlarging of the dingy street, with the lofty facade of a church or basilica on one side, and a fountain in the centre, where the water squirts out of some fantastic piece of sculpture into a great stone basin. These fountains are often of immense size and most elaborate design. . . . There are a great many of these fountain-shapes, constructed under the orders of one pope or another, in all parts of the city; and only the very simplest, such as a jet springing from a broad marble or porphyry vase, and falling back into it again, are really ornamental. If an antiquary were to accompany me through the streets, no doubt he would point out ten thousand interesting objects that I now pass over unnoticed, so general is the surface of plaster and whitewash; but often I can see fragments of antiquity built into the walls, or perhaps a church that was a Roman temple, or a basement of ponderous stones that were laid above twenty centuries ago. It is strange how our ideas of what antiquity is become altered here in Rome; the sixteenth century, in which many of the churches and fountains seem to have been built or re-edified, seems close at hand, even like our own days; a thousand years, or the days of the latter empire, is but a modern date, and scarcely interests us; and nothing is really venerable of a more recent epoch than the reign of Constantine. And the Egyptian obelisks that stand in several of the piazzas put even the Augustan or Republican antiquities to shame. I remember reading in a New York newspaper an account of one of the public buildings of that city,--a relic of "the olden time," the writer called it; for it was erected in 1825! I am glad I saw the castles and Gothic churches and cathedrals of England before visiting Rome, or I never could have felt that delightful reverence for their gray and ivy-hung antiquity after seeing these so much older remains. But, indeed, old things are not so beautiful in this dry climate and clear atmosphere as in moist England. . . . Whatever beauty there may be in a Roman ruin is the remnant of what was beautiful originally; whereas an English ruin is more beautiful often in its decay than even it was in its primal strength. If we ever build such noble structures as these Roman ones, we can have just as good ruins, after two thousand years, in the United States; but we never can have a Furness Abbey or a Kenilworth. The Corso, and perhaps some other streets, does not deserve all the vituperation which I have bestowed on the generality of Roman vias, though the Corso is narrow, not averaging more than nine paces, if so much, from sidewalk to sidewalk. But palace after palace stands along almost its whole extent,--not, however, that they make such architectural show on the street as palaces should. The enclosed courts were perhaps the only parts of these edifices which the founders cared to enrich architecturally. I think Linlithgow Palace, of which I saw the ruins during my last tour in Scotland, was built, by an architect who had studied these Roman palaces. There was never any idea of domestic comfort, or of what we include in the name of home, at all implicated in such structures, they being generally built by wifeless and childless churchmen for the display of pictures and statuary in galleries and long suites of rooms. I have not yet fairly begun the sight-seeing of Rome. I have been four or five times to St. Peter's, and always with pleasure, because there is such a delightful, summerlike warmth the moment we pass beneath the heavy, padded leather curtains that protect the entrances. It is almost impossible not to believe that this genial temperature is the result of furnace-heat, but, really, it is the warmth of last summer, which will be included within those massive walls, and in that vast immensity of space, till, six months hence, this winter's chill will just have made its way thither. It would be an excellent plan for a valetudinarian to lodge during the winter in St. Peter's, perhaps establishing his household in one of the papal tombs. I become, I think, more sensible of the size of St. Peter's, but am as yet far from being overwhelmed by it. It is not, as one expects, so big as all out of doors, nor is its dome so immense as that of the firmament. It looked queer, however, the other day, to see a little ragged boy, the very least of human things, going round and kneeling at shrine after shrine, and a group of children standing on tiptoe to reach the vase of holy water. . . . On coming out of St. Peter's at my last visit, I saw a great sheet of ice around the fountain on the right hand, and some little Romans awkwardly sliding on it. I, too, took a slide, just for the sake of doing what I never thought to do in Rome. This inclement weather, I should suppose, must make the whole city very miserable; for the native Romans, I am told, never keep any fire, except for culinary purposes, even in the severest winter. They flee from their cheerless houses into the open air, and bring their firesides along with them in the shape of small earthen vases, or pipkins, with a handle by which they carry them up and down the streets, and so warm at least their hands with the lighted charcoal. I have had glimpses through open doorways into interiors, and saw them as dismal as tombs. Wherever I pass my summers, let me spend my winters in a cold country. We went yesterday to the Pantheon. . . . When I first came to Rome, I felt embarrassed and unwilling to pass, with my heresy, between a devotee and his saint; for they often shoot their prayers at a shrine almost quite across the church. But there seems to be no violation of etiquette in so doing. A woman begged of us in the Pantheon, and accused my wife of impiety for not giving her an alms. . . . People of very decent appearance are often unexpectedly converted into beggars as you approach them; but in general they take a "No" at once. February 9th.--For three or four days it has been cloudy and rainy, which is the greater pity, as this should be the gayest and merriest part of the Carnival. I go out but little,--yesterday only as far as Pakenham's and Hooker's bank in the Piazza de' Spagna, where I read Galignani and the American papers. At last, after seeing in England more of my fellow-compatriots than ever before, I really am disjoined from my country. To-day I walked out along the Pincian Hill. . . . As the clouds still threatened rain, I deemed it my safest course to go to St. Peter's for refuge. Heavy and dull as the day was, the effect of this great world of a church was still brilliant in the interior, as if it had a sunshine of its own, as well as its own temperature; and, by and by, the sunshine of the outward world came through the windows, hundreds of feet aloft, and fell upon the beautiful inlaid pavement. . . . Against a pillar, on one side of the nave, is a mosaic copy of Raphael's Transfiguration, fitly framed within a great arch of gorgeous marble; and, no doubt, the indestructible mosaic has preserved it far more completely than the fading and darkening tints in which the artist painted it. At any rate, it seemed to me the one glorious picture that I have ever seen. The pillar nearest the great entrance, on the left of the nave, supports the monument to the Stuart family, where two winged figures, with inverted torches, stand on either side of a marble door, which is closed forever. It is an impressive monument, for you feel as if the last of the race had passed through that door. Emerging from the church, I saw a French sergeant drilling his men in the piazza. These French soldiers are prominent objects everywhere about the city, and make up more of its sight and sound than anything else that lives. They stroll about individually; they pace as sentinels in all the public places; and they march up and down in squads, companies, and battalions, always with a very great din of drum, fife, and trumpet; ten times the proportion of music that the same number of men would require elsewhere; and it reverberates with ten times the noise, between the high edifices of these lanes, that it could make in broader streets. Nevertheless, I have no quarrel with the French soldiers; they are fresh, healthy, smart, honest-looking young fellows enough, in blue coats and red trousers; . . . . and, at all events, they serve as an efficient police, making Rome as safe as London; whereas, without them, it would very likely be a den of banditti. On my way home I saw a few tokens of the Carnival, which is now in full progress; though, as it was only about one o'clock, its frolics had not commenced for the day. . . . I question whether the Romans themselves take any great interest in the Carnival. The balconies along the Corso were almost entirely taken by English and Americans, or other foreigners. As I approached the bridge of St. Angelo, I saw several persons engaged, as I thought, in fishing in the Tiber, with very strong lines; but on drawing nearer I found that they were trying to hook up the branches, and twigs, and other drift-wood, which the recent rains might have swept into the river. There was a little heap of what looked chiefly like willow twigs, the poor result of their labor. The hook was a knot of wood, with the lopped-off branches projecting in three or four prongs. The Tiber has always the hue of a mud-puddle; but now, after a heavy rain which has washed the clay into it, it looks like pease-soup. It is a broad and rapid stream, eddying along as if it were in haste to disgorge its impurities into the sea. On the left side, where the city mostly is situated, the buildings hang directly over the stream; on the other, where stand the Castle of St. Angelo and the Church of St. Peter, the town does not press so imminent upon the shore. The banks are clayey, and look as if the river had been digging them away for ages; but I believe its bed is higher than of yore. February 10th.--I went out to-day, and, going along the Via Felice and the Via delle Quattro Fontane, came unawares to the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, on the summit of the Esquiline Hill. I entered it, without in the least knowing what church it was, and found myself in a broad and noble nave, both very simple and very grand. There was a long row of Ionic columns of marble, twenty or thereabouts on each side, supporting a flat roof. There were vaulted side aisles, and, at the farther end, a bronze canopy over the high altar; and all along the length of the side aisles were shrines with pictures, sculpture, and burning lamps; the whole church, too, was lined with marble: the roof was gilded; and yet the general effect of severe and noble simplicity triumphed over all the ornament. I should have taken it for a Roman temple, retaining nearly its pristine aspect; but Murray tells us that it was founded A. D. 342 by Pope Liberius, on the spot precisely marked out by a miraculous fall of snow, in the month of August, and it has undergone many alterations since his time. But it is very fine, and gives the beholder the idea of vastness, which seems harder to attain than anything else. On the right hand, approaching the high altar, there is a chapel, separated from the rest of the church by an iron paling; and, being admitted into it with another party, I found it most elaborately magnificent. But one magnificence outshone another, and made itself the brightest conceivable for the moment. However, this chapel was as rich as the most precious marble could make it, in pillars and pilasters, and broad, polished slabs, covering the whole walls (except where there were splendid and glowing frescos; or where some monumental statuary or bas-relief, or mosaic picture filled up an arched niche). Its architecture was a dome, resting on four great arches; and in size it would alone have been a church. In the centre of the mosaic pavement there was a flight of steps, down which we went, and saw a group in marble, representing the nativity of Christ, which, judging by the unction with which our guide talked about it, must have been of peculiar sanctity. I hate to leave this chapel and church, without being able to say any one thing that may reflect a portion of their beauty, or of the feeling which they excite. Kneeling against many of the pillars there were persons in prayer, and I stepped softly, fearing lest my tread on the marble pavement should disturb them,--a needless precaution, however, for nobody seems to expect it, nor to be disturbed by the lack of it. The situation of the church, I should suppose, is the loftiest in Rome: it has a fountain at one end, and a column at the other; but I did not pay particular attention to either, nor to the exterior of the church itself. On my return, I turned aside from the Via delle Quattro Fontane into the Via Quirinalis, and was led by it into the Piazza di Monte Cavallo. The street through which I passed was broader, cleanlier, and statelier than most streets in Rome, and bordered by palaces; and the piazza had noble edifices around it, and a fountain, an obelisk, and two nude statues in the centre. The obelisk was, as the inscription indicated, a relic of Egypt; the basin of the fountain was an immense bowl of Oriental granite, into which poured a copious flood of water, discolored by the rain; the statues were colossal,--two beautiful young men, each holding a fiery steed. On the pedestal of one was the inscription, OPUS PHIDIAE; on the other, OPUS PRAXITELIS. What a city is this, when one may stumble, by mere chance,--at a street corner, as it were,--on the works of two such sculptors! I do not know the authority on which these statues (Castor and Pollux, I presume) are attributed to Phidias and Praxiteles; but they impressed me as noble and godlike, and I feel inclined to take them for what they purport to be. On one side of the piazza is the Pontifical Palace; but, not being aware of this at the time, I did not look particularly at the edifice. I came home by way of the Corso, which seemed a little enlivened by Carnival time; though, as it was not yet two o'clock, the fun had not begun for the day. The rain throws a dreary damper on the festivities. February 13th.--Day before yesterday we took J----- and R----- in a carriage, and went to see the Carnival, by driving up and down the Corso. It was as ugly a day, as respects weather, as has befallen us since we came to Rome,--cloudy, with an indecisive wet, which finally settled into a rain; and people say that such is generally the weather in Carnival time. There is very little to be said about the spectacle. Sunshine would have improved it, no doubt; but a person must have very broad sunshine within himself to be joyous on such shallow provocation. The street, at all events, would have looked rather brilliant under a sunny sky, the balconies being hung with bright-colored draperies, which were also flung out of some of the windows. . . . Soon I had my first experience of the Carnival in a handful of confetti, right slap in my face. . . . Many of the ladies wore loose white dominos, and some of the gentlemen had on defensive armor of blouses; and wire masks over the face were a protection for both sexes,--not a needless one, for I received a shot in my right eye which cost me many tears. It seems to be a point of courtesy (though often disregarded by Americans and English) not to fling confetti at ladies, or at non-combatants, or quiet bystanders; and the engagements with these missiles were generally between open carriages, manned with youths, who were provided with confetti for such encounters, and with bouquets for the ladies. We had one real enemy on the Corso; for our former friend Mrs. T------ was there, and as often as we passed and repassed her, she favored us with a handful of lime. Two or three times somebody ran by the carriage and puffed forth a shower of winged seeds through a tube into our faces and over our clothes; and, in the course of the afternoon, we were hit with perhaps half a dozen sugar-plums. Possibly we may not have received our fair share of these last salutes, for J----- had on a black mask, which made him look like an imp of Satan, and drew many volleys of confetti that we might otherwise have escaped. A good many bouquets were flung at our little R-----, and at us generally. . . . This was what is called masking-day, when it is the rule to wear masks in the Corso, but the great majority of people appeared without them. . . . Two fantastic figures, with enormous heads, set round with frizzly hair, came and grinned into our carriage, and J----- tore out a handful of hair (which proved to be sea-weed) from one of their heads, rather to the discomposure of the owner, who muttered his indignation in Italian. . . . On comparing notes with J----- and R-----, indeed with U---- too, I find that they all enjoyed the Carnival much more than I did. Only the young ought to write descriptions of such scenes. My cold criticism chills the life out of it. February 14th.--Friday, 12th, was a sunny day, the first that we had had for some time; and my wife and I went forth to see sights as well as to make some calls that had long been due. We went first to the church of Santa Maria Maggiore, which I have already mentioned, and, on our return, we went to the Piazza di Monte Cavallo, and saw those admirable ancient statues of Castor and Pollux, which seem to me sons of the morning, and full of life and strength. The atmosphere, in such a length of time, has covered the marble surface of these statues with a gray rust, that envelops both the men and horses as with a garment; besides which, there are strange discolorations, such as patches of white moss on the elbows, and reddish streaks down the sides; but the glory of form overcomes all these defects of color. It is pleasant to observe how familiar some little birds are with these colossal statues,--hopping about on their heads and over their huge fists, and very likely they have nests in their ears or among their hair. We called at the Barberini Palace, where William Story has established himself and family for the next seven years, or more, on the third piano, in apartments that afford a very fine outlook over Rome, and have the sun in them through most of the day. Mrs. S---- invited us to her fancy ball, but we declined. On the staircase ascending to their piano we saw the ancient Greek bas-relief of a lion, whence Canova is supposed to have taken the idea of his lions on the monument in St. Peter's. Afterwards we made two or three calls in the neighborhood of the Piazza de' Spagna, finding only Mr. Hamilton Fish and family, at the Hotel d'Europe, at home, and next visited the studio of Mr. C. G. Thompson, whom I knew in Boston. He has very greatly improved since those days, and, being always a man of delicate mind, and earnestly desiring excellence for its own sake, he has won himself the power of doing beautiful and elevated works. He is now meditating a series of pictures from Shakespeare's "Tempest," the sketches of one or two of which he showed us, likewise a copy of a small Madonna, by Raphael, wrought with a minute faithfulness which it makes one a better man to observe. . . . Mr. Thompson is a true artist, and whatever his pictures have of beauty comes from very far beneath the surface; and this, I suppose, is one weighty reason why he has but moderate success. I should like his pictures for the mere color, even if they represented nothing. His studio is in the Via Sistina; and at a little distance on the other side of the same street is William Story's, where we likewise went, and found him at work on a sitting statue of Cleopatra. William Story looks quite as vivid, in a graver way, as when I saw him last, a very young man. His perplexing variety of talents and accomplishments--he being a poet, a prose writer, a lawyer, a painter, a musician, and a sculptor--seems now to be concentrating itself into this latter vocation, and I cannot see why he should not achieve something very good. He has a beautiful statue, already finished, of Goethe's Margaret, pulling a flower to pieces to discover whether Faust loves her; a very type of virginity and simplicity. The statue of Cleopatra, now only fourteen days advanced in the clay, is as wide a step from the little maidenly Margaret as any artist could take; it is a grand subject, and he is conceiving it with depth and power, and working it out with adequate skill. He certainly is sensible of something deeper in his art than merely to make beautiful nudities and baptize them by classic names. By the by, he told me several queer stories of American visitors to his studio: one of them, after long inspecting Cleopatra, into which he has put all possible characteristics of her time and nation and of her own individuality, asked, "Have you baptized your statue yet?" as if the sculptor were waiting till his statue were finished before he chose the subject of it,--as, indeed, I should think many sculptors do. Another remarked of a statue of Hero, who is seeking Leander by torchlight, and in momentary expectation of finding his drowned body, "Is not the face a little sad?" Another time a whole party of Americans filed into his studio, and ranged themselves round his father's statue, and, after much silent examination, the spokesman of the party inquired, "Well, sir, what is this intended to represent?" William Story, in telling these little anecdotes, gave the Yankee twang to perfection. . . . The statue of his father, his first work, is very noble, as noble and fine a portrait-statue as I ever saw. In the outer room of his studio a stone-cutter, or whatever this kind of artisan is called, was at work, transferring the statue of Hero from the plaster-cast into marble; and already, though still in some respects a block of stone, there was a wonderful degree of expression in the face. It is not quite pleasant to think that the sculptor does not really do the whole labor on his statues, but that they are all but finished to his hand by merely mechanical people. It is generally only the finishing touches that are given by his own chisel. Yesterday, being another bright day, we went to the basilica of St. John Lateran, which is the basilica next in rank to St. Peter's, and has the precedence of it as regards certain sacred privileges. It stands on a most noble site, on the outskirts of the city, commanding a view of the Sabine and Alban hills, blue in the distance, and some of them hoary with sunny snow. The ruins of the Claudian aqueduct are close at hand. The church is connected with the Lateran palace and museum, so that the whole is one edifice; but the facade of the church distinguishes it, and is very lofty and grand,--more so, it seems to me, than that of St. Peter's. Under the portico is an old statue of Constantine, representing him as a very stout and sturdy personage. The inside of the church disappointed me, though no doubt I should have been wonderstruck had I seen it a month ago. We went into one of the chapels, which was very rich in colored marbles; and, going down a winding staircase, found ourselves among the tombs and sarcophagi of the Corsini family, and in presence of a marble Pieta very beautifully sculptured. On the other side of the church we looked into the Torlonia Chapel, very rich and rather profusely gilded, but, as it seemed to me, not tawdry, though the white newness of the marble is not perfectly agreeable after being accustomed to the milder tint which time bestows on sculpture. The tombs and statues appeared like shapes and images of new-fallen snow. The most interesting thing which we saw in this church (and, admitting its authenticity, there can scarcely be a more interesting one anywhere) was the table at which the Last Supper was eaten. It is preserved in a corridor, on one side of the tribune or chancel, and is shown by torchlight suspended upon the wall beneath a covering of glass. Only the top of the table is shown, presenting a broad, flat surface of wood, evidently very old, and showing traces of dry-rot in one or two places. There are nails in it, and the attendant said that it had formerly been covered with bronze. As well as I can remember, it may be five or six feet square, and I suppose would accommodate twelve persons, though not if they reclined in the Roman fashion, nor if they sat as they do in Leonardo da Vinci's picture. It would be very delightful to believe in this table. There are several other sacred relics preserved in the church; for instance, the staircase of Pilate's house up which Jesus went, and the porphyry slab on which the soldiers cast lots for his garments. These, however, we did not see. There are very glowing frescos on portions of the walls; but, there being much whitewash instead of incrusted marble, it has not the pleasant aspect which one's eye learns to demand in Roman churches. There is a good deal of statuary along the columns of the nave, and in the monuments of the side aisles. In reference to the interior splendor of Roman churches, I must say that I think it a pity that painted windows are exclusively a Gothic ornament; for the elaborate ornamentation of these interiors puts the ordinary daylight out of countenance, so that a window with only the white sunshine coming through it, or even with a glimpse of the blue Italian sky, looks like a portion left unfinished, and therefore a blotch in the rich wall. It is like the one spot in Aladdin's palace which he left for the king, his father-in-law, to finish, after his fairy architects had exhausted their magnificence on the rest; and the sun, like the king, fails in the effort. It has what is called a porta santa, which we saw walled up, in front of the church, one side of the main entrance. I know not what gives it its sanctity, but it appears to be opened by the pope on a year of jubilee, once every quarter of a century. After our return . . . . I took R----- along the Pincian Hill, and finally, after witnessing what of the Carnival could be seen in the Piazza del Popolo from that safe height, we went down into the Corso, and some little distance along it. Except for the sunshine, the scene was much the same as I have already described; perhaps fewer confetti and more bouquets. Some Americans and English are said to have been brought before the police authorities, and fined for throwing lime. It is remarkable that the jollity, such as it is, of the Carnival, does not extend an inch beyond the line of the Corso; there it flows along in a narrow stream, while in the nearest street we see nothing but the ordinary Roman gravity. February 15th.--Yesterday was a bright day, but I did not go out till the afternoon, when I took an hour's walk along the Pincian, stopping a good while to look at the old beggar who, for many years past, has occupied one of the platforms of the flight of steps leading from the Piazza de' Spagna to the Triniti de' Monti. Hillard commemorates him in his book. He is an unlovely object, moving about on his hands and knees, principally by aid of his hands, which are fortified with a sort of wooden shoes; while his poor, wasted lower shanks stick up in the air behind him, loosely vibrating as he progresses. He is gray, old, ragged, a pitiable sight, but seems very active in his own fashion, and bestirs himself on the approach of his visitors with the alacrity of a spider when a fly touches the remote circumference of his web. While I looked down at him he received alms from three persons, one of whom was a young woman of the lower orders; the other two were gentlemen, probably either English or American. I could not quite make out the principle on which he let some people pass without molestation, while he shuffled from one end of the platform to the other to intercept an occasional individual. He is not persistent in his demands, nor, indeed, is this a usual fault among Italian beggars. A shake of the head will stop him when wriggling towards you from a distance. I fancy he reaps a pretty fair harvest, and no doubt leads as contented and as interesting a life as most people, sitting there all day on those sunny steps, looking at the world, and making his profit out of it. It must be pretty much such an occupation as fishing, in its effect upon the hopes and apprehensions; and probably he suffers no more from the many refusals he meets with than the angler does, when he sees a fish smell at his bait and swim away. One success pays for a hundred disappointments, and the game is all the better for not being entirely in his own favor. Walking onward, I found the Pincian thronged with promenaders, as also with carriages, which drove round the verge of the gardens in an unbroken ring. To-day has been very rainy. I went out in the forenoon, and took a sitting for my bust in one of a suite of rooms formerly occupied by Canova. It was large, high, and dreary from the want of a carpet, furniture, or anything but clay and plaster. A sculptor's studio has not the picturesque charm of that of a painter, where there is color, warmth, and cheerfulness, and where the artist continually turns towards you the glow of some picture, which is resting against the wall. . . . I was asked not to look at the bust at the close of the sitting, and, of course, I obeyed; though I have a vague idea of a heavy-browed physiognomy, something like what I have seen in the glass, but looking strangely in that guise of clay. . . . It is a singular fascination that Rome exercises upon artists. There is clay elsewhere, and marble enough, and heads to model, and ideas may be made sensible objects at home as well as here. I think it is the peculiar mode of life that attracts, and its freedom from the inthralments of society, more than the artistic advantages which Rome offers; and, no doubt, though the artists care little about one another's works, yet they keep each other warm by the presence of so many of them. The Carnival still continues, though I hardly see how it can have withstood such a damper as this rainy day. There were several people-- three, I think--killed in the Corso on Saturday; some accounts say that they were run over by the horses in the race; others, that they were ridden down by the dragoons in clearing the course. After leaving Canova's studio, I stepped into the church of San Luigi de' Francesi, in the Via di Ripetta. It was built, I believe, by Catherine de' Medici, and is under the protection of the French government, and a most shamefully dirty place of worship, the beautiful marble columns looking dingy, for the want of loving and pious care. There are many tombs and monuments of French people, both of the past and present,-- artists, soldiers, priests, and others, who have died in Rome. It was so dusky within the church that I could hardly distinguish the pictures in the chapels and over the altar, nor did I know that there were any worth looking for. Nevertheless, there were frescos by Domenichino, and oil-paintings by Guido and others. I found it peculiarly touching to read the records, in Latin or French, of persons who had died in this foreign laud, though they were not my own country-people, and though I was even less akin to them than they to Italy. Still, there was a sort of relationship in the fact that neither they nor I belonged here. February 17th.--Yesterday morning was perfectly sunny, and we went out betimes to see churches; going first to the Capuchins', close by the Piazza Barberini. ["The Marble Faun" takes up this description of the church and of the dead monk, which we really saw, just as recounted, even to the sudden stream of blood which flowed from the nostrils, as we looked at him.-- ED.] We next went to the Trinita de' Monti, which stands at the head of the steps, leading, in several flights, from the Piazza de' Spagna. It is now connected with a convent of French nuns, and when we rang at a side door, one of the sisterhood answered the summons, and admitted us into the church. This, like that of the Capuchins', had a vaulted roof over the nave, and no side aisles, but rows of chapels instead. Unlike the Capuchins', which was filthy, and really disgraceful to behold, this church was most exquisitely neat, as women alone would have thought it worth while to keep it. It is not a very splendid church, not rich in gorgeous marbles, but pleasant to be in, if it were only for the sake of its godly purity. There was only one person in the nave; a young girl, who sat perfectly still, with her face towards the altar, as long as we stayed. Between the nave and the rest of the church there is a high iron railing, and on the other side of it were two kneeling figures in black, so motionless that I at first thought them statues; but they proved to be two nuns at their devotions; and others of the sisterhood came by and by and joined them. Nuns, at least these nuns, who are French, and probably ladies of refinement, having the education of young girls in charge, are far pleasanter objects to see and think about than monks; the odor of sanctity, in the latter, not being an agreeable fragrance. But these holy sisters, with their black crape and white muslin, looked really pure and unspotted from the world. On the iron railing above mentioned was the representation of a golden heart, pierced with arrows; for these are nuns of the Sacred Heart. In the various chapels there are several paintings in fresco, some by Daniele da Volterra; and one of them, the "Descent from the Cross," has been pronounced the third greatest picture in the world. I never should have had the slightest suspicion that it was a great picture at all, so worn and faded it looks, and so hard, so difficult to be seen, and so undelightful when one does see it. From the Trinita we went to the Santa Maria del Popolo, a church built on a spot where Nero is said to have been buried, and which was afterwards made horrible by devilish phantoms. It now being past twelve, and all the churches closing from twelve till two, we had not time to pay much attention to the frescos, oil-pictures, and statues, by Raphael and other famous men, which are to be seen here. I remember dimly the magnificent chapel of the Chigi family, and little else, for we stayed but a short time; and went next to the sculptor's studio, where I had another sitting for my bust. After I had been moulded for about an hour, we turned homeward; but my wife concluded to hire a balcony for this last afternoon and evening of the Carnival, and she took possession of it, while I went home to send to her Miss S------ and the two elder children. For my part, I took R-----, and walked, by way of the Pincian, to the Piazza del Popolo, and thence along the Corso, where, by this time, the warfare of bouquets and confetti raged pretty fiercely. The sky being blue and the sun bright, the scene looked much gayer and brisker than I had before found it; and I can conceive of its being rather agreeable than otherwise, up to the age of twenty. We got several volleys of confetti. R----- received a bouquet and a sugar-plum, and I a resounding hit from something that looked more like a cabbage than a flower. Little as I have enjoyed the Carnival, I think I could make quite a brilliant sketch of it, without very widely departing from truth. February 19th.--Day before yesterday, pretty early, we went to St. Peter's, expecting to see the pope cast ashes on the heads of the cardinals, it being Ash-Wednesday. On arriving, however, we found no more than the usual number of visitants and devotional people scattered through the broad interior of St. Peter's; and thence concluded that the ceremonies were to be performed in the Sistine Chapel. Accordingly, we went out of the cathedral, through the door in the left transept, and passed round the exterior, and through the vast courts of the Vatican, seeking for the chapel. We had blundered into the carriage-entrance of the palace; there is an entrance from some point near the front of the church, but this we did not find. The papal guards, in the strangest antique and antic costume that was ever seen,--a party-colored dress, striped with blue, red, and yellow, white and black, with a doublet and ruff, and trunk-breeches, and armed with halberds,--were on duty at the gateways, but suffered us to pass without question. Finally, we reached a large court, where some cardinals' red equipages and other carriages were drawn up, but were still at a loss as to the whereabouts of the chapel. At last an attendant kindly showed us the proper door, and led us up flights of stairs, along passages and galleries, and through halls, till at last we came to a spacious and lofty apartment adorned with frescos; this was the Sala Regia, and the antechamber to the Sistine Chapel. The attendant, meanwhile, had informed us that my wife could not be admitted to the chapel in her bonnet, and that I myself could not enter at all, for lack of a dress-coat; so my wife took off her bonnet, and, covering her head with her black lace veil, was readily let in, while I remained in the Sala Regia, with several other gentlemen, who found themselves in the same predicament as I was. There was a wonderful variety of costume to be seen and studied among the persons around me, comprising garbs that have been elsewhere laid aside for at least three centuries,--the broad, plaited, double ruff, and black velvet cloak, doublet, trunk-breeches, and sword of Queen Elizabeth's time,--the papal guard, in their striped and party-colored dress as before described, looking not a little like harlequins; other soldiers in helmets and jackboots; French officers of various uniform; monks and priests; attendants in old-fashioned and gorgeous livery; gentlemen, some in black dress-coats and pantaloons, others in wide-awake hats and tweed overcoats; and a few ladies in the prescribed costume of black; so that, in any other country, the scene might have been taken for a fancy ball. By and by, the cardinals began to arrive, and added their splendid purple robes and red hats to make the picture still more brilliant. They were old men, one or two very aged and infirm, and generally men of bulk and substance, with heavy faces, fleshy about the chin. Their red hats, trimmed with gold-lace, are a beautiful piece of finery, and are identical in shape with the black, loosely cocked beavers worn by the Catholic ecclesiastics generally. Wolsey's hat, which I saw at the Manchester Exhibition, might have been made on the same block, but apparently was never cocked, as the fashion now is. The attendants changed the upper portions of their master's attire, and put a little cap of scarlet cloth on each of their heads, after which the cardinals, one by one, or two by two, as they happened to arrive, went into the chapel, with a page behind each holding up his purple train. In the mean while, within the chapel, we heard singing and chanting; and whenever the voluminous curtains that hung before the entrance were slightly drawn apart, we outsiders glanced through, but could see only a mass of people, and beyond them still another chapel, divided from the hither one by a screen. When almost everybody had gone in, there was a stir among the guards and attendants, and a door opened, apparently communicating with the inner apartments of the Vatican. Through this door came, not the pope, as I had partly expected, but a bulky old lady in black, with a red face, who bowed towards the spectators with an aspect of dignified complaisance as she passed towards the entrance of the chapel. I took off my hat, unlike certain English gentlemen who stood nearer, and found that I had not done amiss, for it was the Queen of Spain. There was nothing else to be seen; so I went back through the antechambers (which are noble halls, richly frescoed on the walls and ceilings), endeavoring to get out through the same passages that had let me in. I had already tried to descend what I now supposed to be the Scala Santa, but had been turned back by a sentinel. After wandering to and fro a good while, I at last found myself in a long, long gallery, on each side of which were innumerable inscriptions, in Greek and Latin, on slabs of marble, built into the walls; and classic altars and tablets were ranged along, from end to end. At the extremity was a closed iron grating, from which I was retreating; but a French gentleman accosted me, with the information that the custode would admit me, if I chose, and would accompany me through the sculpture department of the Vatican. I acceded, and thus took my first view of those innumerable art-treasures, passing from one object to another, at an easy pace, pausing hardly a moment anywhere, and dismissing even the Apollo, and the Laocoon, and the Torso of Hercules, in the space of half a dozen breaths. I was well enough content to do so, in order to get a general idea of the contents of the galleries, before settling down upon individual objects. Most of the world-famous sculptures presented themselves to my eye with a kind of familiarity, through the copies and casts which I had seen; but I found the originals more different than I anticipated. The Apollo, for instance, has a face which I have never seen in any cast or copy. I must confess, however, taking such transient glimpses as I did, I was more impressed with the extent of the Vatican, and the beautiful order in which it is kept, and its great sunny, open courts, with fountains, grass, and shrubs, and the views of Rome and the Campagna from its windows,--more impressed with these, and with certain vastly capacious vases, and two seat sarcophagi,--than with the statuary. Thus I went round the whole, and was dismissed through the grated barrier into the gallery of inscriptions again; and after a little more wandering, I made my way out of the palace. . . . Yesterday I went out betimes, and strayed through some portion of ancient Rome, to the Column of Trajan, to the Forum, thence along the Appian Way; after which I lost myself among the intricacies of the streets, and finally came out at the bridge of St. Angelo. The first observation which a stranger is led to make, in the neighborhood of Roman ruins, is that the inhabitants seem to be strangely addicted to the washing of clothes; for all the precincts of Trajan's Forum, and of the Roman Forum, and wherever else an iron railing affords opportunity to hang them, were whitened with sheets, and other linen and cotton, drying in the sun. It must be that washerwomen burrow among the old temples. The second observation is not quite so favorable to the cleanly character of the modern Romans; indeed, it is so very unfavorable, that I hardly know how to express it. But the fact is, that, through the Forum, . . . . and anywhere out of the commonest foot-track and roadway, you must look well to your steps. . . . If you tread beneath the triumphal arch of Titus or Constantine, you had better look downward than upward, whatever be the merit of the sculptures aloft. . . . After a while the visitant finds himself getting accustomed to this horrible state of things; and the associations of moral sublimity and beauty seem to throw a veil over the physical meannesses to which I allude. Perhaps there is something in the mind of the people of these countries that enables them quite to dissever small ugliness from great sublimity and beauty. They spit upon the glorious pavement of St. Peter's, and wherever else they like; they place paltry-looking wooden confessionals beneath its sublime arches, and ornament them with cheap little colored prints of the crucifixion; they hang tin hearts and other tinsel and trumpery at the gorgeous shrines of the saints, in chapels that are incrusted with gems, or marbles almost as precious; they put pasteboard statues of saints beneath the dome of the Pantheon; in short, they let the sublime and the ridiculous come close together, and are not in the least troubled by the proximity. It must be that their sense of the beautiful is stronger than in the Anglo-Saxon mind, and that it observes only what is fit to gratify it. To-day, which was bright and cool, my wife and I set forth immediately after breakfast, in search of the Baths of Diocletian, and the church of Santa Maria degl' Angeli. We went too far along the Via di Porta Pia, and after passing by two or three convents, and their high garden walls, and the villa Bonaparte on one side, and the villa Torlonia on the other, at last issued through the city gate. Before us, far away, were the Alban hills, the loftiest of which was absolutely silvered with snow and sunshine, and set in the bluest and brightest of skies. We now retraced our steps to the Fountain of the Termini, where is a ponderous heap of stone, representing Moses striking the rock; a colossal figure, not without a certain enormous might and dignity, though rather too evidently looking his awfullest. This statue was the death of its sculptor, whose heart was broken on account of the ridicule it excited. There are many more absurd aquatic devices in Rome, however, and few better. We turned into the Piazza de' Termini, the entrance of which is at this fountain; and after some inquiry of the French soldiers, a numerous detachment of whom appear to be quartered in the vicinity, we found our way to the portal of Santa Maria degl' Angeli. The exterior of this church has no pretensions to beauty or majesty, or, indeed, to architectural merit of any kind, or to any architecture whatever; for it looks like a confused pile of ruined brickwork, with a facade resembling half the inner curve of a large oven. No one would imagine that there was a church under that enormous heap of ancient rubbish. But the door admits you into a circular vestibule, once an apartment of Diocletian's Baths, but now a portion of the nave of the church, and surrounded with monumental busts; and thence you pass into what was the central hall; now, with little change, except of detail and ornament, transformed into the body of the church. This space is so lofty, broad, and airy, that the soul forthwith swells out and magnifies itself, for the sake of filling it. It was Michael Angelo who contrived this miracle; and I feel even more grateful to him for rescuing such a noble interior from destruction, than if he had originally built it himself. In the ceiling above, you see the metal fixtures whereon the old Romans hung their lamps; and there are eight gigantic pillars of Egyptian granite, standing as they stood of yore. There is a grand simplicity about the church, more satisfactory than elaborate ornament; but the present pope has paved and adorned one of the large chapels of the transept in very beautiful style, and the pavement of the central part is likewise laid in rich marbles. In the choir there are several pictures, one of which was veiled, as celebrated pictures frequently are in churches. A person, who seemed to be at his devotions, withdrew the veil for us, and we saw a Martyrdom of St. Sebastian, by Domenichino, originally, I believe, painted in fresco in St. Peter's, but since transferred to canvas, and removed hither. Its place at St. Peter's is supplied by a mosaic copy. I was a good deal impressed by this picture,--the dying saint, amid the sorrow of those who loved him, and the fury of his enemies, looking upward, where a company of angels, and Jesus with them, are waiting to welcome him and crown him; and I felt what an influence pictures might have upon the devotional part of our nature. The nailmarks in the hands and feet of Jesus, ineffaceable, even after he had passed into bliss and glory, touched my heart with a sense of his love for us. I think this really a great picture. We walked round the church, looking at other paintings and frescos, but saw no others that greatly interested us. In the vestibule there are monuments to Carlo Maratti and Salvator Rosa, and there is a statue of St. Bruno, by Houdon, which is pronounced to be very fine. I thought it good, but scarcely worthy of vast admiration. Houdon was the sculptor of the first statue of Washington, and of the bust, whence, I suppose, all subsequent statues have been, and will be, mainly modelled. After emerging from the church, I looked back with wonder at the stack of shapeless old brickwork that hid the splendid interior. I must go there again, and breathe freely in that noble space. February 20th.--This morning, after breakfast, I walked across the city, making a pretty straight course to the Pantheon, and thence to the bridge of St. Angelo, and to St. Peter's. It had been my purpose to go to the Fontana Paolina; but, finding that the distance was too great, and being weighed down with a Roman lassitude, I concluded to go into St. Peter's. Here I looked at Michael Angelo's Pieta, a representation of the dead Christ, in his mother's lap. Then I strolled round the great church, and find that it continues to grow upon me both in magnitude and beauty, by comparison with the many interiors of sacred edifices which I have lately seen. At times, a single, casual, momentary glimpse of its magnificence gleams upon my soul, as it were, when I happen to glance at arch opening beyond arch, and I am surprised into admiration. I have experienced that a landscape and the sky unfold the deepest beauty in a similar way; not when they are gazed at of set purpose, but when the spectator looks suddenly through a vista, among a crowd of other thoughts. Passing near the confessional for foreigners to-day, I saw a Spaniard, who had just come out of the one devoted to his native tongue, taking leave of his confessor, with an affectionate reverence, which--as well as the benign dignity of the good father--it was good to behold. . . . I returned home early, in order to go with my wife to the Barberini Palace at two o'clock. We entered through the gateway, through the Via delle Quattro Fontane, passing one or two sentinels; for there is apparently a regiment of dragoons quartered on the ground-floor of the palace; and I stumbled upon a room containing their saddles, the other day, when seeking for Mr. Story's staircase. The entrance to the picture-gallery is by a door on the right hand, affording us a sight of a beautiful spiral staircase, which goes circling upward from the very basement to the very summit of the palace, with a perfectly easy ascent, yet confining its sweep within a moderate compass. We looked up through the interior of the spiral, as through a tube, from the bottom to the top. The pictures are contained in three contiguous rooms of the lower piano, and are few in number, comprising barely half a dozen which I should care to see again, though doubtless all have value in their way. One that attracted our attention was a picture of "Christ disputing with the Doctors," by Albert Duerer, in which was represented the ugliest, most evil-minded, stubborn, pragmatical, and contentious old Jew that ever lived under the law of Moses; and he and the child Jesus were arguing, not only with their tongues, but making hieroglyphics, as it were, by the motion of their hands and fingers. It is a very queer, as well as a very remarkable picture. But we passed hastily by this, and almost all others, being eager to see the two which chiefly make the collection famous,--Raphael's Fornarina, and Guido's portrait of Beatrice Cenci. These were found in the last of the three rooms, and as regards Beatrice Cenci, I might as well not try to say anything; for its spell is indefinable, and the painter has wrought it in a way more like magic than anything else. . . . It is the most profoundly wrought picture in the world; no artist did it, nor could do it, again. Guido may have held the brush, but he painted "better than he knew." I wish, however, it were possible for some spectator, of deep sensibility, to see the picture without knowing anything of its subject or history; for, no doubt, we bring all our knowledge of the Cenci tragedy to the interpretation of it. Close beside Beatrice Cenci hangs the Fornarina. . . . While we were looking at these works Miss M------ unexpectedly joined us, and we went, all three together, to the Rospigliosi Palace, in the Piazza di Monte Cavallo. A porter, in cocked hat, and with a staff of office, admitted us into a spacious court before the palace, and directed us to a garden on one side, raised as much as twenty feet above the level on which we stood. The gardener opened the gate for us, and we ascended a beautiful stone staircase, with a carved balustrade, bearing many marks of time and weather. Reaching the garden-level, we found it laid out in walks, bordered with box and ornamental shrubbery, amid which were lemon-trees, and one large old exotic from some distant clime. In the centre of the garden, surrounded by a stone balustrade, like that of the staircase, was a fish-pond, into which several jets of water were continually spouting; and on pedestals, that made part of the balusters, stood eight marble statues of Apollo, Cupid, nymphs, and other such sunny and beautiful people of classic mythology. There had been many more of these statues, but the rest had disappeared, and those which remained had suffered grievous damage, here to a nose, there to a hand or foot, and often a fracture of the body, very imperfectly mended. There was a pleasant sunshine in the garden, and a springlike, or rather a genial, autumnal atmosphere, though elsewhere it was a day of poisonous Roman chill. At the end of the garden, which was of no great extent, was an edifice, bordering on the piazza, called the Casino, which, I presume, means a garden-house. The front is richly ornamented with bas-reliefs, and statues in niches; as if it were a place for pleasure and enjoyment, and therefore ought to be beautiful. As we approached it, the door swung open, and we went into a large room on the ground-floor, and, looking up to the ceiling, beheld Guido's Aurora. The picture is as fresh and brilliant as if he had painted it with the morning sunshine which it represents. It could not be more lustrous in its lines, if he had given it the last touch an hour ago. Three or four artists were copying it at that instant, and positively their colors did not look brighter, though a great deal newer than his. The alacrity and movement, briskness and morning stir and glow, of the picture are wonderful. It seems impossible to catch its glory in a copy. Several artists, as I said, were making the attempt, and we saw two other attempted copies leaning against the wall, but it was easy to detect failure in just essential points. My memory, I believe, will be somewhat enlivened by this picture hereafter: not that I remember it very distinctly even now; but bright things leave a sheen and glimmer in the mind, like Christian's tremulous glimpse of the Celestial City. In two other rooms of the Casino we saw pictures by Domenichino, Rubens, and other famous painters, which I do not mean to speak of, because I cared really little or nothing about them. Returning into the garden, the sunny warmth of which was most grateful after the chill air and cold pavement of the Casino, we walked round the laguna, examining the statues, and looking down at some little fishes that swarmed at the stone margin of the pool. There were two infants of the Rospigliosi family: one, a young child playing with a maid and head-servant; another, the very chubbiest and rosiest boy in the world, sleeping on its nurse's bosom. The nurse was a comely woman enough, dressed in bright colors, which fitly set off the deep lines of her Italian face. An old painter very likely would have beautified and refined the pair into a Madonna, with the child Jesus; for an artist need not go far in Italy to find a picture ready composed and tinted, needing little more than to be literally copied. Miss M------ had gone away before us; but my wife and I, after leaving the Palazzo Rospigliosi, and on our way hone, went into the Church of St. Andrea, which belongs to a convent of Jesuits. I have long ago exhausted all my capacity of admiration for splendid interiors of churches, but methinks this little, little temple (it is not more than fifty or sixty feet across) has a more perfect and gem-like beauty than any other. Its shape is oval, with an oval dome, and, above that, another little dome, both of which are magnificently frescoed. Around the base of the larger dome is wreathed a flight of angels, and the smaller and upper one is encircled by a garland of cherubs,--cherub and angel all of pure white marble. The oval centre of the church is walled round with precious and lustrous marble of a red-veined variety interspersed with columns and pilasters of white; and there are arches opening through this rich wall, forming chapels, which the architect seems to have striven hard to make even more gorgeous than the main body of the church. They contain beautiful pictures, not dark and faded, but glowing, as if just from the painter's hands; and the shrines are adorned with whatever is most rare, and in one of them was the great carbuncle; at any rate, a bright, fiery gem as big as a turkey's egg. The pavement of the church was one star of various-colored marble, and in the centre was a mosaic, covering, I believe, the tomb of the founder. I have not seen, nor expect to see, anything else so entirely and satisfactorily finished as this small oval church; and I only wish I could pack it in a large box, and send it home. I must not forget that, on our way from the Barberini Palace, we stopped an instant to look at the house, at the corner of the street of the four fountains, where Milton was a guest while in Rome. He seems quite a man of our own day, seen so nearly at the hither extremity of the vista through which we look back, from the epoch of railways to that of the oldest Egyptian obelisk. The house (it was then occupied by the Cardinal Barberini) looks as if it might have been built within the present century; for mediaeval houses in Rome do not assume the aspect of antiquity; perhaps because the Italian style of architecture, or something similar, is the one more generally in vogue in most cities. February 21st.--This morning I took my way through the Porta del Popolo, intending to spend the forenoon in the Campagna; but, getting weary of the straight, uninteresting street that runs out of the gate, I turned aside from it, and soon found myself on the shores of the Tiber. It looked, as usual, like a saturated solution of yellow mud, and eddied hastily along between deep banks of clay, and over a clay bed, in which doubtless are hidden many a richer treasure than we now possess. The French once proposed to draw off the river, for the purpose of recovering all the sunken statues and relics; but the Romans made strenuous objection, on account of the increased virulence of malaria which would probably result. I saw a man on the immediate shore of the river, fifty feet or so beneath the bank on which I stood, sitting patiently, with an angling rod; and I waited to see what he might catch. Two other persons likewise sat down to watch him; but he caught nothing so long as I stayed, and at last seemed to give it up. The banks and vicinity of the river are very bare and uninviting, as I then saw them; no shade, no verdure,--a rough, neglected aspect, and a peculiar shabbiness about the few houses that were visible. Farther down the stream the dome of St. Peter's showed itself on the other side, seeming to stand on the outskirts of the city. I walked along the banks, with some expectation of finding a ferry, by which I might cross the river; but my course was soon interrupted by the wall, and I turned up a lane that led me straight back again to the Porta del Popolo. I stopped a moment, however, to see some young men pitching quoits, which they appeared to do with a good deal of skill. I went along the Via di Ripetta, and through other streets, stepping into two or three churches, one of which was the Pantheon. . . . There are, I think, seven deep, pillared recesses around the circumference of it, each of which becomes a sufficiently capacious chapel; and alternately with these chapels there is a marble structure, like the architecture of a doorway, beneath which is the shrine of a saint; so that the whole circle of the Pantheon is filled up with the seven chapels and seven shrines. A number of persons were sitting or kneeling around; others came in while I was there, dipping their fingers in the holy water, and bending the knee, as they passed the shrines and chapels, until they reached the one which, apparently, they had selected as the particular altar for their devotions. Everybody seemed so devout, and in a frame of mind so suited to the day and place, that it really made me feel a little awkward not to be able to kneel down along with them. Unlike the worshippers in our own churches, each individual here seems to do his own individual acts of devotion, and I cannot but think it better so than to make an effort for united prayer as we do. It is my opinion that a great deal of devout and reverential feeling is kept alive in people's hearts by the Catholic mode of worship. Soon leaving the Pantheon, a few minutes' walk towards the Corso brought me to the Church of St. Ignazio, which belongs to the College of the Jesuits. It is spacious and of beautiful architecture, but not strikingly distinguished, in the latter particular, from many others; a wide and lofty nave, supported upon marble columns, between which arches open into the side aisles, and at the junction of the nave and transept a dome, resting on four great arches. The church seemed to be purposely somewhat darkened, so that I could not well see the details of the ornamentation, except the frescos on the ceiling of the nave, which were very brilliant, and done in so effectual a style, that I really could not satisfy myself that some of the figures did not actually protrude from the ceiling,--in short, that they were not colored bas-reliefs, instead of frescos. No words can express the beautiful effect, in an upholstery point of view, of this kind of decoration. Here, as at the Pantheon, there were many persons sitting silent, kneeling, or passing from shrine to shrine. I reached home at about twelve, and, at one, set out again, with my wife, towards St. Peter's, where we meant to stay till after vespers. We walked across the city, and through the Piazza de Navona, where we stopped to look at one of Bernini's absurd fountains, of which the water makes but the smallest part,--a little squirt or two amid a prodigious fuss of gods and monsters. Thence we passed by the poor, battered-down torso of Pasquin, and came, by devious ways, to the bridge of St. Angelo; the streets bearing pretty much their weekday aspect, many of the shops open, the market-stalls doing their usual business, and the people brisk and gay, though not indecorously so. I suppose there was hardly a man or woman who had not heard mass, confessed, and said their prayers; a thing which--the prayers, I mean--it would be absurd to predicate of London, New York, or any Protestant city. In however adulterated a guise, the Catholics do get a draught of devotion to slake the thirst of their souls, and methinks it must needs do them good, even if not quite so pure as if it came from better cisterns, or from the original fountain-head. Arriving at St. Peter's shortly after two, we walked round the whole church, looking at all the pictures and most of the monuments, . . . . and paused longest before Guido's "Archangel Michael overcoming Lucifer." This is surely one of the most beautiful things in the world, one of the human conceptions that are imbued most deeply with the celestial. . . . We then sat down in one of the aisles and awaited the beginning of vespers, which we supposed would take place at half past three. Four o'clock came, however, and no vespers; and as our dinner-hour is five, . . . . we at last cane away without hearing the vesper hymn. February 23d.--Yesterday, at noon, we set out for the Capitol, and after going up the acclivity (not from the Forum, but from the opposite direction), stopped to look at the statues of Castor and Pollux, which, with other sculptures, look down the ascent. Castor and his brother seem to me to have heads disproportionately large, and are not so striking, in any respect, as such great images ought to be. But we heartily admired the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, . . . . and looked at a fountain, principally composed, I think, of figures representing the Nile and the Tiber, who loll upon their elbows and preside over the gushing water; and between them, against the facade of the Senator's Palace, there is a statue of Minerva, with a petticoat of red porphyry. Having taken note of these objects, we went to the museum, in an edifice on our left, entering the piazza, and here, in the vestibule, we found various old statues and relics. Ascending the stairs, we passed through a long gallery, and, turning to our left, examined somewhat more carefully a suite of rooms running parallel with it. The first of these contained busts of the Caesars and their kindred, from the epoch of the mightiest Julius downward; eighty-three, I believe, in all. I had seen a bust of Julius Caesar in the British Museum, and was surprised at its thin and withered aspect; but this head is of a very ugly old man indeed,--wrinkled, puckered, shrunken, lacking breadth and substance; careworn, grim, as if he had fought hard with life, and had suffered in the conflict; a man of schemes, and of eager effort to bring his schemes to pass. His profile is by no means good, advancing from the top of his forehead to the tip of his nose, and retreating, at about the same angle, from the latter point to the bottom of his chin, which seems to be thrust forcibly down into his meagre neck,--not that he pokes his head forward, however, for it is particularly erect. The head of Augustus is very beautiful, and appears to be that of a meditative, philosophic man, saddened with the sense that it is not very much worth while to be at the summit of human greatness after all. It is a sorrowful thing to trace the decay of civilization through this series of busts, and to observe how the artistic skill, so requisite at first, went on declining through the dreary dynasty of the Caesars, till at length the master of the world could not get his head carved in better style than the figure-head of a ship. In the next room there were better statues than we had yet seen; but in the last room of the range we found the "Dying Gladiator," of which I had already caught a glimpse in passing by the open door. It had made all the other treasures of the gallery tedious in my eagerness to come to that. I do not believe that so much pathos is wrought into any other block of stone. Like all works of the highest excellence, however, it makes great demands upon the spectator. He must make a generous gift of his sympathies to the sculptor, and help out his skill with all his heart, or else he will see little more than a skilfully wrought surface. It suggests far more than it shows. I looked long at this statue, and little at anything else, though, among other famous works, a statue of Antinous was in the same room. I was glad when we left the museum, which, by the by, was piercingly chill, as if the multitude of statues radiated cold out of their marble substance. We might have gone to see the pictures in the Palace of the Conservatori, and S-----, whose receptivity is unlimited and forever fresh, would willingly have done so; but I objected, and we went towards the Forum. I had noticed, two or three times, an inscription over a mean-looking door in this neighborhood, stating that here was the entrance to the prison of the holy apostles Peter and Paul; and we soon found the spot, not far from the Forum, with two wretched frescos of the apostles above the inscription. We knocked at the door without effect; but a lame beggar, who sat at another door of the same house (which looked exceedingly like a liquor-shop), desired us to follow him, and began to ascend to the Capitol, by the causeway leading from the Forum. A little way upward we met a woman, to whom the beggar delivered us over, and she led us into a church or chapel door, and pointed to a long flight of steps, which descended through twilight into utter darkness. She called to somebody in the lower regions, and then went away, leaving us to get down this mysterious staircase by ourselves. Down we went, farther and farther from the daylight, and found ourselves, anon, in a dark chamber or cell, the shape or boundaries of which we could not make out, though it seemed to be of stone, and black and dungeon-like. Indistinctly, and from a still farther depth in the earth, we heard voices,--one voice, at least,--apparently not addressing ourselves, but some other persons; and soon, directly beneath our feet, we saw a glimmering of light through a round, iron-grated hole in the bottom of the dungeon. In a few moments the glimmer and the voice came up through this hole, and the light disappeared, and it and the voice came glimmering and babbling up a flight of stone stairs, of which we had not hitherto been aware. It was the custode, with a party of visitors, to whom he had been showing St. Peter's dungeon. Each visitor was provided with a wax taper, and the custode gave one to each of us, bidding us wait a moment while he conducted the other party to the upper air. During his absence we examined the cell, as well as our dim lights would permit, and soon found an indentation in the wall, with an iron grate put over it for protection, and an inscription above informing us that the Apostle Peter had here left the imprint of his visage; and, in truth, there is a profile there,--forehead, nose, mouth, and chin,--plainly to be seen, an intaglio in the solid rock. We touched it with the tips of our fingers, as well as saw it with our eyes. The custode soon returned, and led us down the darksome steps, chattering in Italian all the time. It is not a very long descent to the lower cell, the roof of which is so low that I believe I could have reached it with my hand. We were now in the deepest and ugliest part of the old Mamertine Prison, one of the few remains of the kingly period of Rome, and which served the Romans as a state-prison for hundreds of years before the Christian era. A multitude of criminals or innocent persons, no doubt, have languished here in misery, and perished in darkness. Here Jugurtha starved; here Catiline's adherents were strangled; and, methinks, there cannot be in the world another such an evil den, so haunted with black memories and indistinct surmises of guilt and suffering. In old Rome, I suppose, the citizens never spoke of this dungeon above their breath. It looks just as bad as it is; round, only seven paces across, yet so obscure that our tapers could not illuminate it from side to side,-- the stones of which it is constructed being as black as midnight. The custode showed us a stone post, at the side of the cell, with the hole in the top of it, into which, he said, St. Peter's chain had been fastened; and he uncovered a spring of water, in the middle of the stone floor, which he told us had miraculously gushed up to enable the saint to baptize his jailer. The miracle was perhaps the more easily wrought, inasmuch as Jugurtha had found the floor of the dungeon oozy with wet. However, it is best to be as simple and childlike as we can in these matters; and whether St. Peter stamped his visage into the stone, and wrought this other miracle or no, and whether or no he ever was in the prison at all, still the belief of a thousand years and more gives a sort of reality and substance to such traditions. The custode dipped an iron ladle into the miraculous water, and we each of us drank a sip; and, what is very remarkable, to me it seemed hard water and almost brackish, while many persons think it the sweetest in Rome. I suspect that St. Peter still dabbles in this water, and tempers its qualities according to the faith of those who drink it. The staircase descending into the lower dungeon is comparatively modern, there having been no entrance of old, except through the small circular opening in the roof. In the upper cell the custode showed us an ancient flight of stairs, now built into the wall, which used to lead from the Capitol. The whole precincts are now consecrated, and I believe the upper portion, perhaps both upper and lower, are a shrine or a chapel. I now left S------ in the Forum, and went to call on Mr. J. P. K------ at the Hotel d'Europe. I found him just returned from a drive,--a gentleman of about sixty, or more, with gray hair, a pleasant, intellectual face, and penetrating, but not unkindly eyes. He moved infirmly, being on the recovery from an illness. We went up to his saloon together, and had a talk,--or, rather, he had it nearly all to himself,--and particularly sensible talk, too, and full of the results of learning and experience. In the first place, he settled the whole Kansas difficulty; then he made havoc of St. Peter, who came very shabbily out of his hands, as regarded his early character in the Church, and his claims to the position he now holds in it. Mr. K------ also gave a curious illustration, from something that happened to himself, of the little dependence that can be placed on tradition purporting to be ancient, and I capped his story by telling him how the site of my town-pump, so plainly indicated in the sketch itself, has already been mistaken in the city council and in the public prints. February 24th.--Yesterday I crossed the Ponte Sisto, and took a short ramble on the other side of the river; and it rather surprised me to discover, pretty nearly opposite the Capitoline Hill, a quay, at which several schooners and barks, of two or three hundred tons' burden, were moored. There was also a steamer, armed with a large gun and two brass swivels on her forecastle, and I know not what artillery besides. Probably she may have been a revenue-cutter. Returning I crossed the river by way of the island of St. Bartholomew over two bridges. The island is densely covered with buildings, and is a separate small fragment of the city. It was a tradition of the ancient Romans that it was formed by the aggregation of soil and rubbish brought down by the river, and accumulating round the nucleus of some sunken baskets. On reaching the hither side of the river, I soon struck upon the ruins of the theatre of Marcellus, which are very picturesque, and the more so from being closely linked in, indeed, identified with the shops, habitations, and swarming life of modern Rome. The most striking portion was a circular edifice, which seemed to have been composed of a row of Ionic columns standing upon a lower row of Doric, many of the antique pillars being yet perfect; but the intervening arches built up with brickwork, and the whole once magnificent structure now tenanted by poor and squalid people, as thick as mites within the round of an old cheese. From this point I cannot very clearly trace out my course; but I passed, I think, between the Circus Maximus and the Palace of the Caesars, and near the Baths of Caracalla, and went into the cloisters of the Church of San Gregorio. All along I saw massive ruins, not particularly picturesque or beautiful, but huge, mountainous piles, chiefly of brickwork, somewhat tweed-grown here and there, but oftener bare and dreary. . . . All the successive ages since Rome began to decay have done their best to ruin the very ruins by taking away the marble and the hewn stone for their own structures, and leaving only the inner filling up of brickwork, which the ancient architects never designed to be seen. The consequence of all this is, that, except for the lofty and poetical associations connected with it, and except, too, for the immense difference in magnitude, a Roman ruin may be in itself not more picturesque than I have seen an old cellar, with a shattered brick chimney half crumbling down into it, in New England. By this time I knew not whither I was going, and turned aside from a broad, paved road (it was the Appian Way) into the Via Latina, which I supposed would lead to one of the city gates. It was a lonely path: on my right hand extensive piles of ruin, in strange shapes or shapelessness, built of the broad and thin old Roman bricks, such as may be traced everywhere, when the stucco has fallen away from a modern Roman house; for I imagine there has not been a new brick made here for a thousand years. On my left, I think, was a high wall, and before me, grazing in the road . . . . [the buffalo calf of the Marble Faun.--ED.]. The road went boldly on, with a well-worn track up to the very walls of the city; but there it abruptly terminated at an ancient, closed-up gateway. From a notice posted against a door, which appeared to be the entrance to the ruins on my left, I found that these were the remains of Columbaria, where the dead used to be put away in pigeon-holes. Reaching the paved road again, I kept on my course, passing the tomb of the Scipios, and soon came to the gate of San Sebastiano, through which I entered the Campagna. Indeed, the scene around was so rural, that I had fancied myself already beyond the walls. As the afternoon was getting advanced, I did not proceed any farther towards the blue hills which I saw in the distance, but turned to my left, following a road that runs round the exterior of the city wall. It was very dreary and solitary,-- not a house on the whole track, with the broad and shaggy Campagna on one side, and the high, bare wall, looking down over my head, on the other. It is not, any more than the other objects of the scene, a very picturesque wall, but is little more than a brick garden-fence seen through a magnifying-glass, with now and then a tower, however, and frequent buttresses, to keep its height of fifty feet from toppling over. The top was ragged, and fringed with a few weeds; there had been embrasures for guns and eyelet-holes for musketry, but these were plastered up with brick or stone. I passed one or two walled-up gateways (by the by, the Parts, Latina was the gate through which Belisarius first entered Rome), and one of these had two high, round towers, and looked more Gothic and venerable with antique strength than any other portion of the wall. Immediately after this I came to the gate of San Giovanni, just within which is the Basilica of St. John Lateran, and there I was glad to rest myself upon a bench before proceeding homeward. There was a French sentinel at this gateway, as at all the others; for the Gauls have always been a pest to Rome, and now gall her worse than ever. I observed, too, that an official, in citizen's dress, stood there also, and appeared to exercise a supervision over some carts with country produce, that were entering just then. February 25th.--We went this forenoon to the Palazzo Borghese, which is situated on a street that runs at right angles with the Corso, and very near the latter. Most of the palaces in Rome, and the Borghese among them, were built somewhere about the sixteenth century; this in 1590, I believe. It is an immense edifice, standing round the four sides of a quadrangle; and though the suite of rooms comprising the picture-gallery forms an almost interminable vista, they occupy only a part of the ground-floor of one side. We enter from the street into a large court, surrounded with a corridor, the arches of which support a second series of arches above. The picture-rooms open from one into another, and have many points of magnificence, being large and lofty, with vaulted ceilings and beautiful frescos, generally of mythological subjects, in the flat central part of the vault. The cornices are gilded; the deep embrasures of the windows are panelled with wood-work; the doorways are of polished and variegated marble, or covered with a composition as hard, and seemingly as durable. The whole has a kind of splendid shabbiness thrown over it, like a slight coating of rust; the furniture, at least the damask chairs, being a good deal worn, though there are marble and mosaic tables, which may serve to adorn another palace when this one crumbles away with age. One beautiful hall, with a ceiling more richly gilded than the rest, is panelled all round with large looking-glasses, on which are painted pictures, both landscapes and human figures, in oils; so that the effect is somewhat as if you saw these objects represented in the mirrors. These glasses must be of old date, perhaps coeval with the first building of the palace; for they are so much dimmed, that one's own figure appears indistinct in them, and more difficult to be traced than the pictures which cover them half over. It was very comfortless,-- indeed, I suppose nobody ever thought of being comfortable there, since the house was built,--but especially uncomfortable on a chill, damp day like this. My fingers were quite numb before I got half-way through the suite of apartments, in spite of a brazier of charcoal which was smouldering into ashes in two or three of the rooms. There was not, so far as I remember, a single fireplace in the suite. A considerable number of visitors--not many, however--were there; and a good many artists; and three or four ladies among them were making copies of the more celebrated pictures, and in all or in most cases missing the especial points that made their celebrity and value. The Prince Borghese certainly demeans himself like a kind and liberal gentleman, in throwing open this invaluable collection to the public to see, and for artists to carry away with them, and diffuse all over the world, so far as their own power and skill will permit. It is open every day of the week, except Saturday and Sunday, without any irksome restriction or supervision; and the fee, which custom requires the visitor to pay to the custode, has the good effect of making us feel that we are not intruders, nor received in an exactly eleemosynary way. The thing could not be better managed. The collection is one of the most celebrated in the world, and contains between eight and nine hundred pictures, many of which are esteemed masterpieces. I think I was not in a frame for admiration to-day, nor could achieve that free and generous surrender of myself which I have already said is essential to the proper estimate of anything excellent. Besides, how is it possible to give one's soul, or any considerable part of it, to a single picture, seen for the first time, among a thousand others, all of which set forth their own claims in an equally good light? Furthermore, there is an external weariness, and sense of a thousand-fold sameness to be overcome, before we can begin to enjoy a gallery of the old Italian masters. . . . I remember but one painter, Francia, who seems really to have approached this awful class of subjects (Christs and Madonnas) in a fitting spirit; his pictures are very singular and awkward, if you look at them with merely an external eye, but they are full of the beauty of holiness, and evidently wrought out as acts of devotion, with the deepest sincerity; and are veritable prayers upon canvas. . . . I was glad, in the very last of the twelve rooms, to come upon some Dutch and Flemish pictures, very few, but very welcome; Rubens, Rembrandt, Vandyke, Paul Potter, Teniers, and others,--men of flesh and blood, and warm fists, and human hearts. As compared with them, these mighty Italian masters seem men of polished steel; not human, nor addressing themselves so much to human sympathies, as to a formed, intellectual taste. March 1st.--To-day began very unfavorably; but we ventured out at about eleven o'clock, intending to visit the gallery of the Colonna Palace. Finding it closed, however, on account of the illness of the custode, we determined to go to the picture-gallery of the Capitol; and, on our way thither, we stepped into Il Gesu, the grand and rich church of the Jesuits, where we found a priest in white, preaching a sermon, with vast earnestness of action and variety of tones, insomuch that I fancied sometimes that two priests were in the agony of sermonizing at once. He had a pretty large and seemingly attentive audience clustered round him from the entrance of the church, half-way down the nave; while in the chapels of the transepts and in the remoter distances were persons occupied with their own individual devotion. We sat down near the chapel of St. Ignazio, which is adorned with a picture over the altar, and with marble sculptures of the Trinity aloft, and of angels fluttering at the sides. What I particularly noted (for the angels were not very real personages, being neither earthly nor celestial) was the great ball of lapis lazuli, the biggest in the world, at the feet of the First Person in the Trinity. The church is a splendid one, lined with a great variety of precious marbles, . . . . but partly, perhaps, owing to the dusky light, as well as to the want of cleanliness, there was a dingy effect upon the whole. We made but a very short stay, our New England breeding causing us to feel shy of moving about the church in sermon time. It rained when we reached the Capitol, and, as the museum was not yet open, we went into the Palace of the Conservators, on the opposite side of the piazza. Around the inner court of the ground-floor, partly under two opposite arcades, and partly under the sky, are several statues and other ancient sculptures; among them a statue of Julius Caesar, said to be the only authentic one, and certainly giving an impression of him more in accordance with his character than the withered old face in the museum; also, a statue of Augustus in middle age, still retaining a resemblance to the bust of him in youth; some gigantic heads and hands and feet in marble and bronze; a stone lion and horse, which lay long at the bottom of a river, broken and corroded, and were repaired by Michel Angelo; and other things which it were wearisome to set down. We inquired of two or three French soldiers the way into the picture-gallery; but it is our experience that French soldiers in Rome never know anything of what is around them, not even the name of the palace or public place over which they stand guard; and though invariably civil, you might as well put a question to a statue of an old Roman as to one of them. While we stood under the loggia, however, looking at the rain plashing into the court, a soldier of the Papal Guard kindly directed us up the staircase, and even took pains to go with us to the very entrance of the picture-rooms. Thank Heaven, there are but two of them, and not many pictures which one cares to look at very long. Italian galleries are at a disadvantage as compared with English ones, inasmuch as the pictures are not nearly such splendid articles of upholstery; though, very likely, having undergone less cleaning and varnishing, they may retain more perfectly the finer touches of the masters. Nevertheless, I miss the mellow glow, the rich and mild external lustre, and even the brilliant frames of the pictures I have seen in England. You feel that they have had loving care taken of them; even if spoiled, it is because they have been valued so much. But these pictures in Italian galleries look rusty and lustreless, as far as the exterior is concerned; and, really, the splendor of the painting, as a production of intellect and feeling, has a good deal of difficulty in shining through such clouds. There is a picture at the Capitol, the "Rape of Europa," by Paul Veronese, that would glow with wonderful brilliancy if it were set in a magnificent frame, and covered with a sunshine of varnish; and it is a kind of picture that would not be desecrated, as some deeper and holier ones might be, by any splendor of external adornment that could be bestowed on it. It is deplorable and disheartening to see it in faded and shabby plight,--this joyous, exuberant, warm, voluptuous work. There is the head of a cow, thrust into the picture, and staring with wild, ludicrous wonder at the godlike bull, so as to introduce quite a new sentiment. Here, and at the Borghese Palace, there were some pictures by Garofalo, an artist of whom I never heard before, but who seemed to have been a man of power. A picture by Marie Subleyras--a miniature copy from one by her husband, of the woman anointing the feet of Christ--is most delicately and beautifully finished, and would be an ornament to a drawing-room; a thing that could not truly be said of one in a hundred of these grim masterpieces. When they were painted life was not what it is now, and the artists had not the same ends in view. . . . It depresses the spirits to go from picture to picture, leaving a portion of your vital sympathy at every one, so that you come, with a kind of half-torpid desperation, to the end. On our way down the staircase we saw several noteworthy bas-reliefs, and among them a very ancient one of Curtius plunging on horseback into the chasm in the Forum. It seems to me, however, that old sculpture affects the spirits even more dolefully than old painting; it strikes colder to the heart, and lies heavier upon it, being marble, than if it were merely canvas. My wife went to revisit the museum, which we had already seen, on the other side of the piazza; but, being cold, I left her there, and went out to ramble in the sun; for it was now brightly, though fitfully, shining again. I walked through the Forum (where a thorn thrust itself out and tore the sleeve of my talma) and under the Arch of Titus, towards the Coliseum. About a score of French drummers were beating a long, loud roll-call, at the base of the Coliseum, and under its arches; and a score of trumpeters responded to these, from the rising ground opposite the Arch of Constantine; and the echoes of the old Roman ruins, especially those of the Palace of the Caesars, responded to this martial uproar of the barbarians. There seemed to be no cause for it; but the drummers beat, and the trumpeters blew, as long as I was within hearing. I walked along the Appian Way as far as the Baths of Caracalla. The Palace of the Caesars, which I have never yet explored, appears to be crowned by the walls of a convent, built, no doubt, out of some of the fragments that would suffice to build a city; and I think there is another convent among the baths. The Catholics have taken a peculiar pleasure in planting themselves in the very citadels of paganism, whether temples or palaces. There has been a good deal of enjoyment in the destruction of old Rome. I often think so when I see the elaborate pains that have been taken to smash and demolish some beautiful column, for no purpose whatever, except the mere delight of annihilating a noble piece of work. There is something in the impulse with which one sympathizes; though I am afraid the destroyers were not sufficiently aware of the mischief they did to enjoy it fully. Probably, too, the early Christians were impelled by religious zeal to destroy the pagan temples, before the happy thought occurred of converting them into churches. March 3d.--This morning was U----'s birthday, and we celebrated it by taking a barouche, and driving (the whole family) out on the Appian Way as far as the tomb of Cecilia Metella. For the first time since we came to Rome, the weather was really warm,--a kind of heat producing languor and disinclination to active movement, though still a little breeze which was stirring threw an occasional coolness over us, and made us distrust the almost sultry atmosphere. I cannot think the Roman climate healthy in any of its moods that I have experienced. Close on the other side of the road are the ruins of a Gothic chapel, little more than a few bare walls and painted windows, and some other fragmentary structures which we did not particularly examine. U---- and I clambered through a gap in the wall, extending from the basement of the tomb, and thus, getting into the field beyond, went quite round the mausoleum and the remains of the castle connected with it. The latter, though still high and stalwart, showed few or no architectural features of interest, being built, I think, principally of large bricks, and not to be compared to English ruins as a beautiful or venerable object. A little way beyond Cecilia Metella's tomb, the road still shows a specimen of the ancient Roman pavement, composed of broad, flat flagstones, a good deal cracked and worn, but sound enough, probably, to outlast the little cubes which make the other portions of the road so uncomfortable. We turned back from this point and soon re-entered the gate of St. Sebastian, which is flanked by two small towers, and just within which is the old triumphal arch of Drusus,--a sturdy construction, much dilapidated as regards its architectural beauty, but rendered far more picturesque than it could have been in its best days by a crown of verdure on its head. Probably so much of the dust of the highway has risen in clouds and settled there, that sufficient soil for shrubbery to root itself has thus been collected, by small annual contributions, in the course of two thousand years. A little farther towards the city we turned aside from the Appian Way, and came to the site of some ancient Columbaria, close by what seemed to partake of the character of a villa and a farm-house. A man came out of the house and unlocked a door in a low building, apparently quite modern; but on entering we found ourselves looking into a large, square chamber, sunk entirely beneath the surface of the ground. A very narrow and steep staircase of stone, and evidently ancient, descended into this chamber; and, going down, we found the walls hollowed on all sides into little semicircular niches, of which, I believe, there were nine rows, one above another, and nine niches in each row. Thus they looked somewhat like the little entrances to a pigeon-house, and hence the name of Columbarium. Each semicircular niche was about a foot in its semidiameter. In the centre of this subterranean chamber was a solid square column, or pier, rising to the roof, and containing other niches of the same pattern, besides one that was high and deep, rising to the height of a man from the floor on each of the four sides. In every one of the semicircular niches were two round holes covered with an earthen plate, and in each hole were ashes and little fragments of bones,--the ashes and bones of the dead, whose names were inscribed in Roman capitals on marble slabs inlaid into the wall over each individual niche. Very likely the great ones in the central pier had contained statues, or busts, or large urns; indeed, I remember that some such things were there, as well as bas-reliefs in the walls; but hardly more than the general aspect of this strange place remains in my mind. It was the Columbarium of the connections or dependants of the Caesars; and the impression left on me was, that this mode of disposing of the dead was infinitely preferable to any which has been adopted since that day. The handful or two of dry dust and bits of dry bones in each of the small round holes had nothing disgusting in them, and they are no drier now than they were when first deposited there. I would rather have my ashes scattered over the soil to help the growth of the grass and daisies; but still I should not murmur much at having them decently pigeon-holed in a Roman tomb. After ascending out of this chamber of the dead, we looked down into another similar one, containing the ashes of Pompey's household, which was discovered only a very few years ago. Its arrangement was the same as that first described, except that it had no central pier with a passage round it, as the former had. While we were down in the first chamber the proprietor of the spot--a half-gentlemanly and very affable kind of person--came to us, and explained the arrangements of the Columbarium, though, indeed, we understood them better by their own aspect than by his explanation. The whole soil around his dwelling is elevated much above the level of the road, and it is probable that, if he chose to excavate, he might bring to light many more sepulchral chambers, and find his profit in them too, by disposing of the urns and busts. What struck me as much as anything was the neatness of these subterranean apartments, which were quite as fit to sleep in as most of those occupied by living Romans; and, having undergone no wear and tear, they were in as good condition as on the day they were built. In this Columbarium, measuring about twenty feet square, I roughly estimate that there have been deposited together the remains of at least seven or eight hundred persons, reckoning two little heaps of bones and ashes in each pigeon-hole, nine pigeon-holes in each row, and nine rows on each side, besides those on the middle pier. All difficulty in finding space for the dead would be obviated by returning to the ancient fashion of reducing them to ashes,--the only objection, though a very serious one, being the quantity of fuel that it would require. But perhaps future chemists may discover some better means of consuming or dissolving this troublesome mortality of ours. We got into the carriage again, and, driving farther towards the city, came to the tomb of the Scipios, of the exterior of which I retain no very definite idea. It was close upon the Appian Way, however, though separated from it by a high fence, and accessible through a gateway, leading into a court. I think the tomb is wholly subterranean, and that the ground above it is covered with the buildings of a farm-house; but of this I cannot be certain, as we were led immediately into a dark, underground passage, by an elderly peasant, of a cheerful and affable demeanor. As soon as he had brought us into the twilight of the tomb, he lighted a long wax taper for each of us, and led us groping into blacker and blacker darkness. Even little R----- followed courageously in the procession, which looked very picturesque as we glanced backward or forward, and beheld a twinkling line of seven lights, glimmering faintly on our faces, and showing nothing beyond. The passages and niches of the tomb seem to have been hewn and hollowed out of the rock, not built by any art of masonry; but the walls were very dark, almost black, and our tapers so dim that I could not gain a sufficient breadth of view to ascertain what kind of place it was. It was very dark, indeed; the Mammoth Cave of Kentucky could not be darker. The rough-hewn roof was within touch, and sometimes we had to stoop to avoid hitting our heads; it was covered with damps, which collected and fell upon us in occasional drops. The passages, besides being narrow, were so irregular and crooked, that, after going a little way, it would have been impossible to return upon our steps without the help of the guide; and we appeared to be taking quite an extensive ramble underground, though in reality I suppose the tomb includes no great space. At several turns of our dismal way, the guide pointed to inscriptions in Roman capitals, commemorating various members of the Scipio family who were buried here; among them, a son of Scipio Africanus, who himself had his death and burial in a foreign land. All these inscriptions, however, are copies,--the originals, which were really found here, having been removed to the Vatican. Whether any bones and ashes have been left, or whether any were found, I do not know. It is not, at all events, a particularly interesting spot, being such shapeless blackness, and a mere dark hole, requiring a stronger illumination than that of our tapers to distinguish it from any other cellar. I did, at one place, see a sort of frieze, rather roughly sculptured; and, as we returned towards the twilight of the entrance-passage, I discerned a large spider, who fled hastily away from our tapers,--the solitary living inhabitant of the tomb of the Scipios. One visit that we made, and I think it was before entering the city gates, I forgot to mention. It was to an old edifice, formerly called the Temple of Bacchus, but now supposed to have been the Temple of Virtue and Honor. The interior consists of a vaulted hall, which was converted from its pagan consecration into a church or chapel, by the early Christians; and the ancient marble pillars of the temple may still be seen built in with the brick and stucco of the later occupants. There is an altar, and other tokens of a Catholic church, and high towards the ceiling, there are some frescos of saints or angels, very curious specimens of mediaeval, and earlier than mediaeval art. Nevertheless, the place impressed me as still rather pagan than Christian. What is most remarkable about this spot or this vicinity lies in the fact that the Fountain of Egeria was formerly supposed to be close at hand; indeed, the custode of the chapel still claims the spot as the identical one consecrated by the legend. There is a dark grove of trees, not far from the door of the temple; but Murray, a highly essential nuisance on such excursions as this, throws such overwhelming doubt, or rather incredulity, upon the site, that I seized upon it as a pretext for not going thither. In fact, my small capacity for sight-seeing was already more than satisfied. On account of ------ I am sorry that we did not see the grotto, for her enthusiasm is as fresh as the waters of Egeria's well can be, and she has poetical faith enough to light her cheerfully through all these mists of incredulity. Our visits to sepulchral places ended with Scipio's tomb, whence we returned to our dwelling, and Miss M------ came to dine with us. March 10th.--On Saturday last, a very rainy day, we went to the Sciarra Palace, and took U---- with us. It is on the Corso, nearly opposite to the Piazza Colonna. It has (Heaven be praised!) but four rooms of pictures, among which, however, are several very celebrated ones. Only a few of these remain in my memory,--Raphael's "Violin Player," which I am willing to accept as a good picture; and Leonardo da Vinci's "Vanity and Modesty," which also I can bring up before my mind's eye, and find it very beautiful, although one of the faces has an affected smile, which I have since seen on another picture by the same artist, Joanna of Aragon. The most striking picture in the collection, I think, is Titian's "Bella Donna,"--the only one of Titian's works that I have yet seen which makes an impression on me corresponding with his fame. It is a very splendid and very scornful lady, as beautiful and as scornful as Gainsborough's Lady Lyndoch, though of an entirely different type. There were two Madonnas by Guido, of which I liked the least celebrated one best; and several pictures by Garofalo, who always produces something noteworthy. All the pictures lacked the charm (no doubt I am a barbarian to think it one) of being in brilliant frames, and looked as if it were a long, long while since they were cleaned or varnished. The light was so scanty, too, on that heavily clouded day, and in those gloomy old rooms of the palace, that scarcely anything could be fairly made out. [I cannot refrain from observing here, that Mr. Hawthorne's inexorable demand for perfection in all things leads him to complain of grimy pictures and tarnished frames and faded frescos, distressing beyond measure to eyes that never failed to see everything before him with the keenest apprehension. The usual careless observation of people both of the good and the imperfect is much more comfortable in this imperfect world. But the insight which Mr. Hawthorne possessed was only equalled by his outsight, and he suffered in a way not to be readily conceived, from any failure in beauty, physical, moral, or intellectual. It is not, therefore, mere love of upholstery that impels him to ask for perfect settings to priceless gems of art; but a native idiosyncrasy, which always made me feel that "the New Jerusalem," "even like a jasper stone, clear as crystal," "where shall in no wise enter anything that defileth, neither what worketh abomination nor maketh a lie," would alone satisfy him, or rather alone not give him actual pain. It may give an idea of this exquisite nicety of feeling to mention, that one day he took in his fingers a half-bloomed rose, without blemish, and, smiling with an infinite joy, remarked, "This is perfect. On earth a flower only can be perfect."--ED.] The palace is about two hundred and fifty years old, and looks as if it had never been a very cheerful place; most shabbily and scantily furnished, moreover, and as chill as any cellar. There is a small balcony, looking down on the Corso, which probably has often been filled with a merry little family party, in the carnivals of days long past. It has faded frescos, and tarnished gilding, and green blinds, and a few damask chairs still remain in it. On Monday we all went to the sculpture-gallery of the Vatican, and saw as much of the sculpture as we could in the three hours during which the public are admissible. There were a few things which I really enjoyed, and a few moments during which I really seemed to see them; but it is in vain to attempt giving the impression produced by masterpieces of art, and most in vain when we see them best. They are a language in themselves, and if they could be expressed as well any way except by themselves, there would have been no need of expressing those particular ideas and sentiments by sculpture. I saw the Apollo Belvedere as something ethereal and godlike; only for a flitting moment, however, and as if he had alighted from heaven, or shone suddenly out of the sunlight, and then had withdrawn himself again. I felt the Laocoon very powerfully, though very quietly; an immortal agony, with a strange calmness diffused through it, so that it resembles the vast rage of the sea, calm on account of its immensity; or the tumult of Niagara, which does not seem to be tumult, because it keeps pouring on for ever and ever. I have not had so good a day as this (among works of art) since we came to Rome; and I impute it partly to the magnificence of the arrangements of the Vatican,--its long vistas and beautiful courts, and the aspect of immortality which marble statues acquire by being kept free from dust. A very hungry boy, seeing in one of the cabinets a vast porphyry vase, forty-four feet in circumference, wished that he had it full of soup. Yesterday, we went to the Pamfili Doria Palace, which, I believe, is the most splendid in Rome. The entrance is from the Corso into a court, surrounded by a colonnade, and having a space of luxuriant verdure and ornamental shrubbery in the centre. The apartments containing pictures and sculptures are fifteen in number, and run quite round the court in the first piano,--all the rooms, halls, and galleries of beautiful proportion, with vaulted roofs, some of which glow with frescos; and all are colder and more comfortless than can possibly be imagined without having been in them. The pictures, most of them, interested me very little. I am of opinion that good pictures are quite as rare as good poets; and I do not see why we should pique ourselves on admiring any but the very best. One in a thousand, perhaps, ought to live in the applause of men, from generation to generation, till its colors fade or blacken out of sight, and its canvas rots away; the rest should be put in garrets, or painted over by newer artists, just as tolerable poets are shelved when their little day is over. Nevertheless, there was one long gallery containing many pictures that I should be glad to see again under more favorable circumstances, that is, separately, and where I might contemplate them quite undisturbed, reclining in an easy-chair. At one end of the long vista of this gallery is a bust of the present Prince Doria, a smooth, sharp-nosed, rather handsome young man, and at the other end his princess, an English lady of the Talbot family, apparently a blonde, with a simple and sweet expression. There is a noble and striking portrait of the old Venetian admiral, Andrea Doria, by Sebastian del Piombo, and some other portraits and busts of the family. In the whole immense range of rooms I saw but a single fireplace, and that so deep in the wall that no amount of blaze would raise the atmosphere of the room ten degrees. If the builder of the palace, or any of his successors, have committed crimes worthy of Tophet, it would be a still worse punishment for him to wander perpetually through this suite of rooms on the cold floors of polished brick tiles or marble or mosaic, growing a little chiller and chiller through every moment of eternity,-- or, at least, till the palace crumbles down upon him. Neither would it assuage his torment in the least to be compelled to gaze up at the dark old pictures,--the ugly ghosts of what may once have been beautiful. I am not going to try any more to receive pleasure from a faded, tarnished, lustreless picture, especially if it be a landscape. There were two or three landscapes of Claude in this palace, which I doubt not would have been exquisite if they had been in the condition of those in the British National Gallery; but here they looked most forlorn, and even their sunshine was sunless. The merits of historical painting may be quite independent of the attributes that give pleasure, and a superficial ugliness may even heighten the effect; but not so of landscapes. Via Porta, Palazzo Larazani, March 11th.--To-day we called at Mr. Thompson's studio, and . . . . he had on the easel a little picture of St. Peter released from prison by the angel, which I saw once before. It is very beautiful indeed, and deeply and spiritually conceived, and I wish I could afford to have it finished for myself. I looked again, too, at his Georgian slave, and admired it as much as at first view; so very warm and rich it is, so sensuously beautiful, and with an expression of higher life and feeling within. I do not think there is a better painter than Mr. Thompson living,--among Americans at least; not one so earnest, faithful, and religious in his worship of art. I had rather look at his pictures than at any except the very finest of the old masters, and, taking into consideration only the comparative pleasure to be derived, I would not except more than one or two of those. In painting, as in literature, I suspect there is something in the productions of the day that takes the fancy more than the works of any past age,--not greater merit, nor nearly so great, but better suited to this very present time. After leaving him, we went to the Piazza de' Termini, near the Baths of Diocletian, and found our way with some difficulty to Crawford's studio. It occupies several great rooms, connected with the offices of the Villa Negroni; and all these rooms were full of plaster casts and a few works in marble,--principally portions of his huge Washington monument, which he left unfinished at his death. Close by the door at which we entered stood a gigantic figure of Mason, in bag-wig, and the coat, waistcoat, breeches, and knee and shoe buckles of the last century, the enlargement of these unheroic matters to far more than heroic size having a very odd effect. There was a figure of Jefferson on the same scale; another of Patrick Henry, besides a horse's head, and other portions of the equestrian group which is to cover the summit of the monument. In one of the rooms was a model of the monument itself, on a scale, I should think, of about an inch to afoot. It did not impress me as having grown out of any great and genuine idea in the artist's mind, but as being merely an ingenious contrivance enough. There were also casts of statues that seemed to be intended for some other monument referring to Revolutionary times and personages; and with these were intermixed some ideal statues or groups,--a naked boy playing marbles, very beautiful; a girl with flowers; the cast of his Orpheus, of which I long ago saw the marble statue; Adam and Eve; Flora,--all with a good deal of merit, no doubt, but not a single one that justifies Crawford's reputation, or that satisfies me of his genius. They are but commonplaces in marble and plaster, such as we should not tolerate on a printed page. He seems to have been a respectable man, highly respectable, but no more, although those who knew him seem to have rated him much higher. It is said that he exclaimed, not very long before his death, that he had fifteen years of good work still in him; and he appears to have considered all his life and labor, heretofore, as only preparatory to the great things that he was to achieve hereafter. I should say, on the contrary, that he was a man who had done his best, and had done it early; for his Orpheus is quite as good as anything else we saw in his studio. People were at work chiselling several statues in marble from the plaster models,--a very interesting process, and which I should think a doubtful and hazardous one; but the artists say that there is no risk of mischief, and that the model is sure to be accurately repeated in the marble. These persons, who do what is considered the mechanical part of the business, are often themselves sculptors, and of higher reputation than those who employ them. It is rather sad to think that Crawford died before he could see his ideas in the marble, where they gleam with so pure and celestial a light as compared with the plaster. There is almost as much difference as between flesh and spirit. The floor of one of the rooms was burdened with immense packages, containing parts of the Washington monument, ready to be forwarded to its destination. When finished, and set up, it will probably make a very splendid appearance, by its height, its mass, its skilful execution; and will produce a moral effect through its images of illustrious men, and the associations that connect it with our Revolutionary history; but I do not think it will owe much to artistic force of thought or depth of feeling. It is certainly, in one sense, a very foolish and illogical piece of work,--Washington, mounted on an uneasy steed, on a very narrow space, aloft in the air, whence a single step of the horse backward, forward, or on either side, must precipitate him; and several of his contemporaries standing beneath him, not looking up to wonder at his predicament, but each intent on manifesting his own personality to the world around. They have nothing to do with one another, nor with Washington, nor with any great purpose which all are to work out together. March 14th.--On Friday evening I dined at Mr. T. B. Read's, the poet and artist, with a party composed of painters and sculptors,--the only exceptions being the American banker and an American tourist who has given Mr. Read a commission. Next to me at table sat Mr. Gibson, the English sculptor, who, I suppose, stands foremost in his profession at this day. He must be quite an old man now, for it was whispered about the table that he is known to have been in Rome forty-two years ago, and he himself spoke to me of spending thirty-seven years here, before he once returned home. I should hardly take him to be sixty, however, his hair being more dark than gray, his forehead unwrinkled, his features unwithered, his eye undimmed, though his beard is somewhat venerable. . . . He has a quiet, self-contained aspect, and, being a bachelor, has doubtless spent a calm life among his clay and marble, meddling little with the world, and entangling himself with no cares beyond his studio. He did not talk a great deal; but enough to show that he is still an Englishman in many sturdy traits, though his accent has something foreign about it. His conversation was chiefly about India, and other topics of the day, together with a few reminiscences of people in Liverpool, where he once resided. There was a kind of simplicity both in his manner and matter, and nothing very remarkable in the latter. . . . The gist of what he said (upon art) was condemnatory of the Pre-Raphaelite modern school of painters, of whom he seemed to spare none, and of their works nothing; though he allowed that the old Pre-Raphaelites had some exquisite merits, which the moderns entirely omit in their imitations. In his own art, he said the aim should be to find out the principles on which the Greek sculptors wrought, and to do the work of this day on those principles and in their spirit; a fair doctrine enough, I should think, but which Mr. Gibson can scarcely be said to practise. . . . The difference between the Pre-Raphaelites and himself is deep and genuine, they being literalists and realists, in a certain sense, and he a pagan idealist. Methinks they have hold of the best end of the matter. March 18th.--To-day, it being very bright and mild, we set out, at noon, for an expedition to the Temple of Vesta, though I did not feel much inclined for walking, having been ill and feverish for two or three days past with a cold, which keeps renewing itself faster than I can get rid of it. We kept along on this side of the Corso, and crossed the Forum, skirting along the Capitoline Hill, and thence towards the Circus Maximus. On our way, looking down a cross street, we saw a heavy arch, and, on examination, made it out to be the Arch of Janus Quadrifrons, standing in the Forum Boarium. Its base is now considerably below the level of the surrounding soil, and there is a church or basilica close by, and some mean edifices looking down upon it. There is something satisfactory in this arch, from the immense solidity of its structure. It gives the idea, in the first place, of a solid mass constructed of huge blocks of marble, which time can never wear away, nor earthquakes shake down; and then this solid mass is penetrated by two arched passages, meeting in the centre. There are empty niches, three in a row, and, I think, two rows on each face; but there seems to have been very little effort to make it a beautiful object. On the top is some brickwork, the remains of a mediaeval fortress built by the Frangipanis, looking very frail and temporary being brought thus in contact with the antique strength of the arch. A few yards off, across the street, and close beside the basilica, is what appears to be an ancient portal, with carved bas-reliefs, and an inscription which I could not make out. Some Romans were lying dormant in the sun, on the steps of the basilica; indeed, now that the sun is getting warmer, they seem to take advantage of every quiet nook to bask in, and perhaps to go to sleep. We had gone but a little way from the arch, and across the Circus Maximus, when we saw the Temple of Vesta before us, on the hank of the Tiber, which, however, we could not see behind it. It is a most perfectly preserved Roman ruin, and very beautiful, though so small that, in a suitable locality, one would take it rather for a garden-house than an ancient temple. A circle of white marble pillars, much time-worn and a little battered, though but one of them broken, surround the solid structure of the temple, leaving a circular walk between it and the pillars, the whole covered by a modern roof which looks like wood, and disgraces and deforms the elegant little building. This roof resembles, as much as anything else, the round wicker cover of a basket, and gives a very squat aspect to the temple. The pillars are of the Corinthian order, and when they were new and the marble snow-white and sharply carved and cut, there could not have been a prettier object in all Rome; but so small an edifice does not appear well as a ruin. Within view of it, and, indeed, a very little way off, is the Temple of Fortuna Virilis, which likewise retains its antique form in better preservation than we generally find a Roman ruin, although the Ionic pillars are now built up with blocks of stone and patches of brickwork, the whole constituting a church which is fixed against the side of a tall edifice, the nature of which I do not know. I forgot to say that we gained admittance into the Temple of Vesta, and found the interior a plain cylinder of marble, about ten paces across, and fitted up as a chapel, where the Virgin takes the place of Vesta. In very close vicinity we came upon the Ponto Rotto, the old Pons Emilius which was broken down long ago, and has recently been pieced out by connecting a suspension bridge with the old piers. We crossed by this bridge, paying a toll of a baioccho each, and stopped in the midst of the river to look at the Temple of Vesta, which shows well, right on the brink of the Tiber. We fancied, too, that we could discern, a little farther down the river, the ruined and almost submerged piers of the Sublician bridge, which Horatius Cocles defended. The Tiber here whirls rapidly along, and Horatius must have had a perilous swim for his life, and the enemy a fair mark at his head with their arrows. I think this is the most picturesque part of the Tiber in its passage through Rome. After crossing the bridge, we kept along the right bank of the river, through the dirty and hard-hearted streets of Trastevere (which have in no respect the advantage over those of hither Rome), till we reached St. Peter's. We saw a family sitting before their door on the pavement in the narrow and sunny street, engaged in their domestic avocations,--the old woman spinning with a wheel. I suppose the people now begin to live out of doors. We entered beneath the colonnade of St. Peter's and immediately became sensible of an evil odor,--the bad odor of our fallen nature, which there is no escaping in any nook of Rome. . . . Between the pillars of the colonnade, however, we had the pleasant spectacle of the two fountains, sending up their lily-shaped gush, with rainbows shining in their falling spray. Parties of French soldiers, as usual, were undergoing their drill in the piazza. When we entered the church, the long, dusty sunbeams were falling aslantwise through the dome and through the chancel behind it. . . . March 23d.--On the 21st we all went to the Coliseum, and enjoyed ourselves there in the bright, warm sun,--so bright and warm that we were glad to get into the shadow of the walls and under the arches, though, after all, there was the freshness of March in the breeze that stirred now and then. J----- and baby found some beautiful flowers growing round about the Coliseum; and far up towards the top of the walls we saw tufts of yellow wall-flowers and a great deal of green grass growing along the ridges between the arches. The general aspect of the place, however, is somewhat bare, and does not compare favorably with an English ruin both on account of the lack of ivy and because the material is chiefly brick, the stone and marble having been stolen away by popes and cardinals to build their palaces. While we sat within the circle, many people, of both sexes, passed through, kissing the iron cross which stands in the centre, thereby gaining an indulgence of seven years, I believe. In front of several churches I have seen an inscription in Latin, "INDULGENTIA PLENARIA ET PERPETUA PRO CUNCTIS MORTUIS ET VIVIS"; than which, it seems to me, nothing more could be asked or desired. The terms of this great boon are not mentioned. Leaving the Coliseum, we went and sat down in the vicinity of the Arch of Constantine, and J----- and R----- went in quest of lizards. J----- soon caught a large one with two tails; one, a sort of afterthought, or appendix, or corollary to the original tail, and growing out from it instead of from the body of the lizard. These reptiles are very abundant, and J----- has already brought home several, which make their escape and appear occasionally darting to and fro on the carpet. Since we have been here, J----- has taken up various pursuits in turn. First he voted himself to gathering snail-shells, of which there are many sorts; afterwards he had a fever for marbles, pieces of which he found on the banks of the Tiber, just on the edge of its muddy waters, and in the Palace of the Caesars, the Baths of Caracalla, and indeed wherever else his fancy led him; verde antique, rosso antico, porphyry, giallo antico, serpentine, sometimes fragments of bas-reliefs and mouldings, bits of mosaic, still firmly stuck together, on which the foot of a Caesar had perhaps once trodden; pieces of Roman glass, with the iridescence glowing on them; and all such things, of which the soil of Rome is full. It would not be difficult, from the spoil of his boyish rambles, to furnish what would be looked upon as a curious and valuable museum in America. Yesterday we went to the sculpture-galleries of the Vatican. I think I enjoy these noble galleries and their contents and beautiful arrangement better than anything else in the way of art, and often I seem to have a deep feeling of something wonderful in what I look at. The Laocoon on this visit impressed me not less than before; it is such a type of human beings, struggling with an inextricable trouble, and entangled in a complication which they cannot free themselves from by their own efforts, and out of which Heaven alone can help them. It was a most powerful mind, and one capable of reducing a complex idea to unity, that imagined this group. I looked at Canova's Perseus, and thought it exceedingly beautiful, but, found myself less and less contented after a moment or two, though I could not tell why. Afterwards, looking at the Apollo, the recollection of the Perseus disgusted me, and yet really I cannot explain how one is better than the other. I was interested in looking at the busts of the Triumvirs, Antony, Augustus, and Lepidus. The first two are men of intellect, evidently, though they do not recommend themselves to one's affections by their physiognomy; but Lepidus has the strangest, most commonplace countenance that can be imagined,--small-featured, weak, such a face as you meet anywhere in a man of no mark, but are amazed to find in one of the three foremost men of the world. I suppose that it is these weak and shallow men, when chance raises them above their proper sphere, who commit enormous crimes without any such restraint as stronger men would feel, and without any retribution in the depth of their conscience. These old Roman busts, of which there are so many in the Vatican, have often a most lifelike aspect, a striking individuality. One recognizes them as faithful portraits, just as certainly as if the living originals were standing beside them. The arrangement of the hair and beard too, in many cases, is just what we see now, the fashions of two thousand years ago having come round again. March 25th.--On Tuesday we went to breakfast at William Story's in the Palazzo Barberini. We had a very pleasant time. He is one of the most agreeable men I know in society. He showed us a note from Thackeray, an invitation to dinner, written in hieroglyphics, with great fun and pictorial merit. He spoke of an expansion of the story of Blue Beard, which he himself had either written or thought of writing, in which the contents of the several chambers which Fatima opened, before arriving at the fatal one, were to be described. This idea has haunted my mind ever since, and if it had but been my own I am pretty sure that it would develop itself into something very rich. I mean to press William Story to work it out. The chamber of Blue Beard, too (and this was a part of his suggestion), might be so handled as to become powerfully interesting. Were I to take up the story I would create an interest by suggesting a secret in the first chamber, which would develop itself more and more in every successive hall of the great palace, and lead the wife irresistibly to the chamber of horrors. After breakfast, we went to the Barberini Library, passing through the vast hall, which occupies the central part of the palace. It is the most splendid domestic hall I have seen, eighty feet in length at least, and of proportionate breadth and height; and the vaulted ceiling is entirely covered, to its utmost edge and remotest corners, with a brilliant painting in fresco, looking like a whole heaven of angelic people descending towards the floor. The effect is indescribably gorgeous. On one side stands a Baldacchino, or canopy of state, draped with scarlet cloth, and fringed with gold embroidery; the scarlet indicating that the palace is inhabited by a cardinal. Green would be appropriate to a prince. In point of fact, the Palazzo Barberini is inhabited by a cardinal, a prince, and a duke, all belonging to the Barberini family, and each having his separate portion of the palace, while their servants have a common territory and meeting-ground in this noble hall. After admiring it for a few minutes, we made our exit by a door on the opposite side, and went up the spiral staircase of marble to the library, where we were received by an ecclesiastic, who belongs to the Barberini household, and, I believe, was born in it. He is a gentle, refined, quiet-looking man, as well he may be, having spent all his life among these books, where few people intrude, and few cares can come. He showed us a very old Bible in parchment, a specimen of the earliest printing, beautifully ornamented with pictures, and some monkish illuminations of indescribable delicacy and elaboration. No artist could afford to produce such work, if the life that he thus lavished on one sheet of parchment had any value to him, either for what could be done or enjoyed in it. There are about eight thousand volumes in this library, and, judging by their outward aspect, the collection must be curious and valuable; but having another engagement, we could spend only a little time here. We had a hasty glance, however, of some poems of Tasso, in his own autograph. We then went to the Palazzo Galitzin, where dwell the Misses Weston, with whom we lunched, and where we met a French abbe, an agreeable man, and an antiquarian, under whose auspices two of the ladies and ourselves took carriage for the Castle of St. Angelo. Being admitted within the external gateway, we found ourselves in the court of guard, as I presume it is called, where the French soldiers were playing with very dirty cards, or lounging about, in military idleness. They were well behaved and courteous, and when we had intimated our wish to see the interior of the castle, a soldier soon appeared, with a large unlighted torch in his hand, ready to guide us. There is an outer wall, surrounding the solid structure of Hadrian's tomb; to which there is access by one or two drawbridges; the entrance to the tomb, or castle, not being at the base, but near its central height. The ancient entrance, by which Hadrian's ashes, and those of other imperial personages, were probably brought into this tomb, has been walled up,--perhaps ever since the last emperor was buried here. We were now in a vaulted passage, both lofty and broad, which circles round the whole interior of the tomb, from the base to the summit. During many hundred years, the passage was filled with earth and rubbish, and forgotten, and it is but partly excavated, even now; although we found it a long, long and gloomy descent by torchlight to the base of the vast mausoleum. The passage was once lined and vaulted with precious marbles (which are now entirely gone), and paved with fine mosaics, portions of which still remain; and our guide lowered his flaming torch to show them to us, here and there, amid the earthy dampness over which we trod. It is strange to think what splendor and costly adornment were here wasted on the dead. After we had descended to the bottom of this passage, and again retraced our steps to the highest part, the guide took a large cannon-ball, and sent it, with his whole force, rolling down the hollow, arched way, rumbling, and reverberating, and bellowing forth long thunderous echoes, and winding up with a loud, distant crash, that seemed to come from the very bowels of the earth. We saw the place, near the centre of the mausoleum, and lighted from above, through an immense thickness of stone and brick, where the ashes of the emperor and his fellow-slumberers were found. It is as much as twelve centuries, very likely, since they were scattered to the winds, for the tomb has been nearly or quite that space of time a fortress; The tomb itself is merely the base and foundation of the castle, and, being so massively built, it serves just as well for the purpose as if it were a solid granite rock. The mediaeval fortress, with its antiquity of more than a thousand years, and having dark and deep dungeons of its own, is but a modern excrescence on the top of Hadrian's tomb. We now ascended towards the upper region, and were led into the vaults which used to serve as a prison, but which, if I mistake not, are situated above the ancient structure, although they seem as damp and subterranean as if they were fifty feet under the earth. We crept down to them through narrow and ugly passages, which the torchlight would not illuminate, and, stooping under a low, square entrance, we followed the guide into a small, vaulted room,--not a room, but an artificial cavern, remote from light or air, where Beatrice Cenci was confined before her execution. According to the abbe, she spent a whole year in this dreadful pit, her trial having dragged on through that length of time. How ghostlike she must have looked when she came forth! Guido never painted that beautiful picture from her blanched face, as it appeared after this confinement. And how rejoiced she must have been to die at last, having already been in a sepulchre so long! Adjacent to Beatrice's prison, but not communicating with it, was that of her step-mother; and next to the latter was one that interested me almost as much as Beatrice's,--that of Benvenuto Cellini, who was confined here, I believe, for an assassination. All these prison vaults are more horrible than can be imagined without seeing them; but there are worse places here, for the guide lifted a trap-door in one of the passages, and held his torch down into an inscrutable pit beneath our feet. It was an oubliette, a dungeon where the prisoner might be buried alive, and never come forth again, alive or dead. Groping about among these sad precincts, we saw various other things that looked very dismal; but at last emerged into the sunshine, and ascended from one platform and battlement to another, till we found ourselves right at the feet of the Archangel Michael. He has stood there in bronze for I know not how many hundred years, in the act of sheathing a (now) rusty sword, such being the attitude in which he appeared to one of the popes in a vision, in token that a pestilence which was then desolating Rome was to be stayed. There is a fine view from the lofty station over Rome and the whole adjacent country, and the abbe pointed out the site of Ardea, of Corioli, of Veii, and other places renowned in story. We were ushered, too, into the French commandant's quarters in the castle. There is a large hall, ornamented with frescos, and accessible from this a drawing-room, comfortably fitted up, and where we saw modern furniture, and a chess-board, and a fire burning clear, and other symptoms that the place had perhaps just been vacated by civilized and kindly people. But in one corner of the ceiling the abbe pointed out a ring, by which, in the times of mediaeval anarchy, when popes, cardinals, and barons were all by the ears together, a cardinal was hanged. It was not an assassination, but a legal punishment, and he was executed in the best apartment of the castle as an act of grace. The fortress is a straight-lined structure on the summit of the immense round tower of Hadrian's tomb; and to make out the idea of it we must throw in drawbridges, esplanades, piles of ancient marble balls for cannon; battlements and embrasures, lying high in the breeze and sunshine, and opening views round the whole horizon; accommodation for the soldiers; and many small beds in a large room. How much mistaken was the emperor in his expectation of a stately, solemn repose for his ashes through all the coming centuries, as long as the world should endure! Perhaps his ghost glides up and down disconsolate, in that spiral passage which goes from top to bottom of the tomb, while the barbarous Gauls plant themselves in his very mausoleum to keep the imperial city in awe. Leaving the Castle of St. Angelo, we drove, still on the same side of the Tiber, to the Villa Pamfili, which lies a short distance beyond the walls. As we passed through one of the gates (I think it was that of San Pancrazio) the abbe pointed out the spot where the Constable de Bourbon was killed while attempting to scale the walls. If we are to believe Benvenuto Cellini, it was he who shot the constable. The road to the villa is not very interesting, lying (as the roads in the vicinity of Rome often do) between very high walls, admitting not a glimpse of the surrounding country; the road itself white and dusty, with no verdant margin of grass or border of shrubbery. At the portal of the villa we found many carriages in waiting, for the Prince Doria throws open the grounds to all comers, and on a pleasant day like this they are probably sure to be thronged. We left our carriage just within the entrance, and rambled among these beautiful groves, admiring the live-oak trees, and the stone-pines, which latter are truly a majestic tree, with tall columnar stems, supporting a cloud-like density of boughs far aloft, and not a straggling branch between there and the ground. They stand in straight rows, but are now so ancient and venerable as to have lost the formal look of a plantation, and seem like a wood that might have arranged itself almost of its own will. Beneath them is a flower-strewn turf, quite free of underbrush. We found open fields and lawns, moreover, all abloom with anemones, white and rose-colored and purple and golden, and far larger than could be found out of Italy, except in hot-houses. Violets, too, were abundant and exceedingly fragrant. When we consider that all this floral exuberance occurs in the midst of March, there does not appear much ground for complaining of the Roman climate; and so long ago as the first week of February I found daisies among the grass, on the sunny side of the Basilica of St. John Lateran. At this very moment I suppose the country within twenty miles of Boston may be two feet deep with snow, and the streams solid with ice. We wandered about the grounds, and found them very beautiful indeed; nature having done much for them by an undulating variety of surface, and art having added a good many charms, which have all the better effect now that decay and neglect have thrown a natural grace over them likewise. There is an artificial ruin, so picturesque that it betrays itself; weather-beaten statues, and pieces of sculpture, scattered here and there; an artificial lake, with upgushing fountains; cascades, and broad-bosomed coves, and long, canal-like reaches, with swans taking their delight upon them. I never saw such a glorious and resplendent lustre of white as shone between the wings of two of these swans. It was really a sight to see, and not to be imagined beforehand. Angels, no doubt, have just such lustrous wings as those. English swans partake of the dinginess of the atmosphere, and their plumage has nothing at all to be compared to this; in fact, there is nothing like it in the world, unless it be the illuminated portion of a fleecy, summer cloud. While we were sauntering along beside this piece of water, we were surprised to see U---- on the other side. She had come hither with E---- S------ and her two little brothers, and with our R-----, the whole under the charge of Mrs. Story's nursery-maids. U---- and E---- crossed, not over, but beneath the water, through a grotto, and exchanged greetings with us. Then, as it was getting towards sunset and cool, we took our departure; the abbe, as we left the grounds, taking me aside to give me a glimpse of a Columbarium, which descends into the earth to about the depth to which an ordinary house might rise above it. These grounds, it is said, formed the country residence of the Emperor Galba, and he was buried here after his assassination. It is a sad thought that so much natural beauty and long refinement of picturesque culture is thrown away, the villa being uninhabitable during all the most delightful season of the year on account of malaria. There is truly a curse on Rome and all its neighborhood. On our way home we passed by the great Paolina fountain, and were assailed by many beggars during the short time we stopped to look at it. It is a very copious fountain, but not so beautiful as the Trevi, taking into view merely the water-gush of the latter. March 26th.--Yesterday, between twelve and one, our whole family went to the Villa Ludovisi, the entrance to which is at the termination of a street which passes out of the Piazza Barberini, and it is no very great distance from our own street, Via Porta Pinciana. The grounds, though very extensive, are wholly within the walls of the city, which skirt them, and comprise a part of what were formerly the gardens of Sallust. The villa is now the property of Prince Piombini, a ticket from whom procured us admission. A little within the gateway, to the right, is a casino, containing two large rooms filled with sculpture, much of which is very valuable. A colossal head of Juno, I believe, is considered the greatest treasure of the collection, but I did not myself feel it to be so, nor indeed did I receive any strong impression of its excellence. I admired nothing so much, I think, as the face of Penelope (if it be her face) in the group supposed also to represent Electra and Orestes. The sitting statue of Mars is very fine; so is the Arria and Paetus; so are many other busts and figures. By and by we left the casino and wandered among the grounds, threading interminable alleys of cypress, through the long vistas of which we could see here and there a statue, an urn, a pillar, a temple, or garden-house, or a bas-relief against the wall. It seems as if there must have been a time, and not so very long ago,--when it was worth while to spend money and thought upon the ornamentation of grounds in the neighborhood of Rome. That time is past, however, and the result is very melancholy; for great beauty has been produced, but it can be enjoyed in its perfection only at the peril of one's life. . . . For my part, and judging from my own experience, I suspect that the Roman atmosphere, never wholesome, is always more or less poisonous. We came to another and larger casino remote from the gateway, in which the Prince resides during two months of the year. It was now under repair, but we gained admission, as did several other visitors, and saw in the entrance-hall the Aurora of Guercino, painted in fresco on the ceiling. There is beauty in the design; but the painter certainly was most unhappy in his black shadows, and in the work before us they give the impression of a cloudy and lowering morning which is likely enough to turn to rain by and by. After viewing the fresco we mounted by a spiral staircase to a lofty terrace, and found Rome at our feet, and, far off, the Sabine and Alban mountains, some of them still capped with snow. In another direction there was a vast plain, on the horizon of which, could our eyes have reached to its verge, we might perhaps have seen the Mediterranean Sea. After enjoying the view and the warm sunshine we descended, and went in quest of the gardens of Sallust, but found no satisfactory remains of them. One of the most striking objects in the first casino was a group by Bernini,--Pluto, an outrageously masculine and strenuous figure, heavily bearded, ravishing away a little, tender Proserpine, whom he holds aloft, while his forcible gripe impresses itself into her soft virgin flesh. It is very disagreeable, but it makes one feel that Bernini was a man of great ability. There are some works in literature that bear an analogy to his works in sculpture, when great power is lavished a little outside of nature, and therefore proves to be only a fashion,--and not permanently adapted to the tastes of mankind. March 27th.--Yesterday forenoon my wife and I went to St. Peter's to see the pope pray at the chapel of the Holy Sacrament. We found a good many people in the church, but not an inconvenient number; indeed, not so many as to make any remarkable show in the great nave, nor even in front of the chapel. A detachment of the Swiss Guard, in their strange, picturesque, harlequin-like costume, were on duty before the chapel, in which the wax tapers were all lighted, and a prie-dieu was arranged near the shrine, and covered with scarlet velvet. On each side, along the breadth of the side aisle, were placed seats, covered with rich tapestry or carpeting; and some gentlemen and ladies--English, probably, or American--had comfortably deposited themselves here, but were compelled to move by the guards before the pope's entrance. His Holiness should have appeared precisely at twelve, but we waited nearly half an hour beyond that time; and it seemed to me particularly ill-mannered in the pope, who owes the courtesy of being punctual to the people, if not to St. Peter. By and by, however, there was a stir; the guard motioned to us to stand away from the benches, against the backs of which we had been leaning; the spectators in the nave looked towards the door, as if they beheld something approaching; and first, there appeared some cardinals, in scarlet skull-caps and purple robes, intermixed with some of the Noble Guard and other attendants. It was not a very formal and stately procession, but rather straggled onward, with ragged edges, the spectators standing aside to let it pass, and merely bowing, or perhaps slightly bending the knee, as good Catholics are accustomed to do when passing before the shrines of saints. Then, in the midst of the purple cardinals, all of whom were gray-haired men, appeared a stout old man, with a white skull-cap, a scarlet, gold-embroidered cape falling over his shoulders, and a white silk robe, the train of which was borne up by an attendant. He walked slowly, with a sort of dignified movement, stepping out broadly, and planting his feet (on which were red shoes) flat upon the pavement, as if he were not much accustomed to locomotion, and perhaps had known a twinge of the gout. His face was kindly and venerable, but not particularly impressive. Arriving at the scarlet-covered prie-dieu, he kneeled down and took off his white skull-cap; the cardinals also kneeled behind and on either side of him, taking off their scarlet skull-caps; while the Noble Guard remained standing, six on one side of his Holiness and six on the other. The pope bent his head upon the prie-dieu, and seemed to spend three or four minutes in prayer; then rose, and all the purple cardinals, and bishops, and priests, of whatever degree, rose behind and beside him. Next, he went to kiss St. Peter's toe; at least I believe he kissed it, but I was not near enough to be certain; and lastly, he knelt down, and directed his devotions towards the high altar. This completed the ceremonies, and his Holiness left the church by a side door, making a short passage into the Vatican. I am very glad I have seen the pope, because now he may be crossed out of the list of sights to be seen. His proximity impressed me kindly and favorably towards him, and I did not see one face among all his cardinals (in whose number, doubtless, is his successor) which I would so soon trust as that of Pio Nono. This morning I walked as far as the gate of San Paolo, and, on approaching it, I saw the gray sharp pyramid of Caius Cestius pointing upward close to the two dark-brown, battlemented Gothic towers of the gateway, each of these very different pieces of architecture looking the more picturesque for the contrast of the other. Before approaching the gateway and pyramid, I walked onward, and soon came in sight of Monte Testaccio, the artificial hill made of potsherds. There is a gate admitting into the grounds around the hill, and a road encircling its base. At a distance, the hill looks greener than any other part of the landscape, and has all the curved outlines of a natural hill, resembling in shape a headless sphinx, or Saddleback Mountain, as I used to see it from Lenox. It is of very considerable height,--two or three hundred feet at least, I should say,--and well entitled, both by its elevation and the space it covers, to be reckoned among the hills of Rome. Its base is almost entirely surrounded with small structures, which seem to be used as farm-buildings. On the summit is a large iron cross, the Church having thought it expedient to redeem these shattered pipkins from the power of paganism, as it has so many other Roman ruins. There was a pathway up the hill, but I did not choose to ascend it under the hot sun, so steeply did it clamber up. There appears to be a good depth of soil on most parts of Monte Testaccio, but on some of the sides you observe precipices, bristling with fragments of red or brown earthenware, or pieces of vases of white unglazed clay; and it is evident that this immense pile is entirely composed of broken crockery, which I should hardly have thought would have aggregated to such a heap had it all been thrown here,--urns, teacups, porcelain, or earthen,--since the beginning of the world. I walked quite round the hill, and saw, at no great distance from it, the enclosure of the Protestant burial-ground, which lies so close to the pyramid of Caius Cestius that the latter may serve as a general monument to the dead. Deferring, for the present, a visit to the cemetery, or to the interior of the pyramid, I returned to the gateway of San Paolo, and, passing through it, took a view of it from the outside of the city wall. It is itself a portion of the wall, having been built into it by the Emperor Aurelian, so that about half of it lies within and half without. The brick or red stone material of the wall being so unlike the marble of the pyramid, the latter is as distinct, and seems as insulated, as if it stood alone in the centre of a plain; and really I do not think there is a more striking architectural object in Rome. It is in perfect condition, just as little ruined or decayed as on the day when the builder put the last peak on the summit; and it ascends steeply from its base, with a point so sharp that it looks as if it would hardly afford foothold to a bird. The marble was once white, but is now covered with a gray coating like that which has gathered upon the statues of Castor and Pollux on Monte Cavallo. Not one of the great blocks is displaced, nor seems likely to be through all time to come. They rest one upon another, in straight and even lines, and present a vast smooth triangle, ascending from a base of a hundred feet, and narrowing to an apex at the height of a hundred and twenty-five, the junctures of the marble slabs being so close that, in all these twenty centuries, only a few little tufts of grass, and a trailing plant or two, have succeeded in rooting themselves into the interstices. It is good and satisfactory to see anything which, being built for an enduring monument, has endured so faithfully, and has a prospect of such an interminable futurity before it. Once, indeed, it seemed likely to be buried; for three hundred years ago it had become covered to the depth of sixteen feet, but the soil has since been dug away from its base, which is now lower than that of the road which passes through the neighboring gate of San Paolo. Midway up the pyramid, cut in the marble, is an inscription in large Roman letters, still almost as legible as when first wrought. I did not return through the Paolo gateway, but kept onward, round the exterior of the wall, till I came to the gate of San Sebastiano. It was a hot and not a very interesting walk, with only a high bare wall of brick, broken by frequent square towers, on one side of the road, and a bank and hedge or a garden wall on the other. Roman roads are most inhospitable, offering no shade, and no seat, and no pleasant views of rustic domiciles; nothing but the wheel-track of white dust, without a foot path running by its side, and seldom any grassy margin to refresh the wayfarer's feet. April 3d.--A few days ago we visited the studio of Mr. ------, an American, who seems to have a good deal of vogue as a sculptor. We found a figure of Pocahontas, which he has repeated several times; another, which he calls "The Wept of the Wish-ton-Wish," a figure of a smiling girl playing with a cat and dog, and a schoolboy mending a pen. These two last were the only ones that gave me any pleasure, or that really had any merit; for his cleverness and ingenuity appear in homely subjects, but are quite lost in attempts at a higher ideality. Nevertheless, he has a group of the Prodigal Son, possessing more merit than I should have expected from Mr. ------, the son reclining his head on his father's breast, with an expression of utter weariness, at length finding perfect rest, while the father bends his benign countenance over him, and seems to receive him calmly into himself. This group (the plaster-cast standing beside it) is now taking shape out of an immense block of marble, and will be as indestructible as the Laocoon; an idea at once awful and ludicrous, when we consider that it is at best but a respectable production. I have since been told that Mr. ------ had stolen, adopted, we will rather say, the attitude and idea of the group from one executed by a student of the French Academy, and to be seen there in plaster. (We afterwards saw it in the Medici Casino.) Mr. ------ has now been ten years in Italy, and, after all this time, he is still entirely American in everything but the most external surface of his manners; scarcely Europeanized, or much modified even in that. He is a native of ------, but had his early breeding in New York, and might, for any polish or refinement that I can discern in him, still be a country shopkeeper in the interior of New York State or New England. How strange! For one expects to find the polish, the close grain and white purity of marble, in the artist who works in that noble material; but, after all, he handles club, and, judging by the specimens I have seen here, is apt to be clay, not of the finest, himself. Mr. ------ is sensible, shrewd, keen, clever; an ingenious workman, no doubt; with tact enough, and not destitute of taste; very agreeable and lively in his conversation, talking as fast and as naturally as a brook runs, without the slightest affectation. His naturalness is, in fact, a rather striking characteristic, in view of his lack of culture, while yet his life has been concerned with idealities and a beautiful art. What degree of taste he pretends to, he seems really to possess, nor did I hear a single idea from him that struck me as otherwise than sensible. He called to see us last evening, and talked for about two hours in a very amusing and interesting style, his topics being taken from his own personal experience, and shrewdly treated. He spoke much of Greenough, whom he described as an excellent critic of art, but possessed of not the slightest inventive genius. His statue of Washington, at the Capitol, is taken precisely from the Plodian Jupiter; his Chanting Cherubs are copied in marble from two figures in a picture by Raphael. He did nothing that was original with himself To-day we took R-----, and went to see Miss ------, and as her studio seems to be mixed up with Gibson's, we had an opportunity of glancing at some of his beautiful works. We saw a Venus and a Cupid, both of them tinted; and, side by side with them, other statues identical with these, except that the marble was left in its pure whiteness. We found Miss ------ in a little upper room. She has a small, brisk, wide-awake figure, not ungraceful; frank, simple, straightforward, and downright. She had on a robe, I think, but I did not look so low, my attention being chiefly drawn to a sort of man's sack of purple or plum-colored broadcloth, into the side-pockets of which her hands were thrust as she came forward to greet us. She withdrew one hand, however, and presented it cordially to my wife (whom she already knew) and to myself, without waiting for an introduction. She had on a shirt-front, collar, and cravat like a man's, with a brooch of Etruscan gold, and on her curly head was a picturesque little cap of black velvet, and her face was as bright and merry, and as small of feature as a child's. It looked in one aspect youthful, and yet there was something worn in it too. There never was anything so jaunty as her movement and action; she was very peculiar, but she seemed to be her actual self, and nothing affected or made up; so that, for my part, I gave her full leave to wear what may suit her best, and to behave as her inner woman prompts. I don't quite see, however, what she is to do when she grows older, for the decorum of age will not be consistent with a costume that looks pretty and excusable enough in a young woman. Miss ------ led us into a part of the extensive studio, or collection of studios, where some of her own works were to be seen: Beatrice Cenci, which did not very greatly impress me; and a monumental design, a female figure,--wholly draped even to the stockings and shoes,--in a quiet sleep. I liked this last. There was also a Puck, doubtless full of fun; but I had hardly time to glance at it. Miss ------ evidently has good gifts in her profession, and doubtless she derives great advantage from her close association with a consummate artist like Gibson; nor yet does his influence seem to interfere with the originality of her own conceptions. In one way, at least, she can hardly fail to profit,--that is, by the opportunity of showing her works to the throngs of people who go to see Gibson's own; and these are just such people as an artist would most desire to meet, and might never see in a lifetime, if left to himself. I shook hands with this frank and pleasant little person, and took leave, not without purpose of seeing her again. Within a few days, there have been many pilgrims in Rome, who come hither to attend the ceremonies of holy week, and to perform their vows, and undergo their penances. I saw two of them near the Forum yesterday, with their pilgrim staves, in the fashion of a thousand years ago. . . . I sat down on a bench near one of the chapels, and a woman immediately came up to me to beg. I at first refused; but she knelt down by my side, and instead of praying to the saint prayed to me; and, being thus treated as a canonized personage, I thought it incumbent on me to be gracious to the extent of half a paul. My wife, some time ago, came in contact with a pickpocket at the entrance of a church; and, failing in his enterprise upon her purse, he passed in, dipped his thieving fingers in the holy water, and paid his devotions at a shrine. Missing the purse, he said his prayers, in the hope, perhaps, that the saint would send him better luck another time. April 10th.--I have made no entries in my journal recently, being exceedingly lazy, partly from indisposition, as well as from an atmosphere that takes the vivacity out of everybody. Not much has happened or been effected. Last Sunday, which was Easter Sunday, I went with J----- to St. Peter's, where we arrived at about nine o'clock, and found a multitude of people already assembled in the church. The interior was arrayed in festal guise, there being a covering of scarlet damask over the pilasters of the nave, from base to capital, giving an effect of splendor, yet with a loss as to the apparent dimensions of the interior. A guard of soldiers occupied the nave, keeping open a wide space for the passage of a procession that was momently expected, and soon arrived. The crowd was too great to allow of my seeing it in detail; but I could perceive that there were priests, cardinals, Swiss guards, some of them with corselets on, and by and by the pope himself was borne up the nave, high over the heads of all, sitting under a canopy, crowned with his tiara. He floated slowly along, and was set down in the neighborhood of the high altar; and the procession being broken up, some of its scattered members might be seen here and there, about the church,--officials in antique Spanish dresses; Swiss guards, in polished steel breastplates; serving-men, in richly embroidered liveries; officers, in scarlet coats and military boots; priests, and divers other shapes of men; for the papal ceremonies seem to forego little or nothing that belongs to times past, while it includes everything appertaining to the present. I ought to have waited to witness the papal benediction from the balcony in front of the church; or, at least, to hear the famous silver trumpets, sounding from the dome; but J----- grew weary (to say the truth, so did I), and we went on a long walk, out of the nearest city gate, and back through the Janiculum, and, finally, homeward over the Ponto Rotto. Standing on the bridge, I saw the arch of the Cloaca Maxima, close by the Temple of Vesta, with the water rising within two or three feet of its keystone. The same evening we went to Monte Cavallo, where, from the gateway of the Pontifical Palace, we saw the illumination of St. Peter's. Mr. Akers, the sculptor, had recommended this position to us, and accompanied us thither, as the best point from which the illumination could be witnessed at a distance, without the incommodity of such a crowd as would be assembled at the Pincian. The first illumination, the silver one, as it is called, was very grand and delicate, describing the outline of the great edifice and crowning dome in light; while the day was not yet wholly departed. As ------ finally remarked, it seemed like the glorified spirit of the Church, made visible, or, as I will add, it looked as this famous and never-to-be-forgotten structure will look to the imaginations of men, through the waste and gloom of future ages, after it shall have gone quite to decay and ruin: the brilliant, though scarcely distinct gleam of a statelier dome than ever was seen, shining on the background of the night of Time. This simile looked prettier in my fancy than I have made it look on paper. After we had enjoyed the silver illumination a good while, and when all the daylight had given place to the constellated night, the distant outline of St. Peter's burst forth, in the twinkling of an eye, into a starry blaze, being quite the finest effect that I ever witnessed. I stayed to see it, however, only a few minutes; for I was quite ill and feverish with a cold,--which, indeed, I have seldom been free from, since my first breathing of the genial atmosphere of Rome. This pestilence kept me within doors all the next day, and prevented me from seeing the beautiful fireworks that were exhibited in the evening from the platform on the Pincian, above the Piazza del Popolo. On Thursday, I paid another visit to the sculpture-gallery of the Capitol, where I was particularly struck with a bust of Cato the Censor, who must have been the most disagreeable, stubborn, ugly-tempered, pig-headed, narrow-minded, strong-willed old Roman that ever lived. The collection of busts here and at the Vatican are most interesting, many of the individual heads being full of character, and commending themselves by intrinsic evidence as faithful portraits of the originals. These stone people have stood face to face with Caesar, and all the other emperors, and with statesmen, soldiers, philosophers, and poets of the antique world, and have been to them like their reflections in a mirror. It is the next thing to seeing the men themselves. We went afterwards into the Palace of the Conservatori, and saw, among various other interesting things, the bronze wolf suckling Romulus and Remus, who sit beneath her dugs, with open mouths to receive the milk. On Friday, we all went to see the Pope's Palace on the Quirinal. There was a vast hall, and an interminable suite of rooms, cased with marble, floored with marble or mosaics or inlaid wood, adorned with frescos on the vaulted ceilings, and many of them lined with Gobelin tapestry; not wofully faded, like almost all that I have hitherto seen, but brilliant as pictures. Indeed, some of them so closely resembled paintings, that I could hardly believe they were not so; and the effect was even richer than that of oil-paintings. In every room there was a crucifix; but I did not see a single nook or corner where anybody could have dreamed of being comfortable. Nevertheless, as a stately and solemn residence for his Holiness, it is quite a satisfactory affair. Afterwards, we went into the Pontifical Gardens, connected with the palace. They are very extensive, and laid out in straight avenues, bordered with walls of box, as impervious as if of stone,--not less than twenty feet high, and pierced with lofty archways, cut in the living wall. Some of the avenues were overshadowed with trees, the tops of which bent over and joined one another from either side, so as to resemble a side aisle of a Gothic cathedral. Marble sculptures, much weather-stained, and generally broken-nosed, stood along these stately walks; there were many fountains gushing up into the sunshine; we likewise found a rich flower-garden, containing rare specimens of exotic flowers, and gigantic cactuses, and also an aviary, with vultures, doves, and singing birds. We did not see half the garden, but, stiff and formal as its general arrangement is, it is a beautiful place,--a delightful, sunny, and serene seclusion. Whatever it may be to the pope, two young lovers might find the Garden of Eden here, and never desire to stray out of its precincts. They might fancy angels standing in the long, glimmering vistas of the avenues. It would suit me well enough to have my daily walk along such straight paths, for I think them favorable to thought, which is apt to be disturbed by variety and unexpectedness. April 12th.--We all, except R-----, went to-day to the Vatican, where we found our way to the Stanze of Raphael, these being four rooms, or halls, painted with frescos. No doubt they were once very brilliant and beautiful; but they have encountered hard treatment since Raphael's time, especially when the soldiers of the Constable de Bourbon occupied these apartments, and made fires on the mosaic floors. The entire walls and ceilings are covered with pictures; but the handiwork or designs of Raphael consist of paintings on the four sides of each room, and include several works of art. The School of Athens is perhaps the most celebrated; and the longest side of the largest hall is occupied by a battle-piece, of which the Emperor Constantine is the hero, and which covers almost space enough for a real battle-field. There was a wonderful light in one of the pictures,--that of St. Peter awakened in his prison, by the angel; it really seemed to throw a radiance into the hall below. I shall not pretend, however, to have been sensible of any particular rapture at the sight of these frescos; so faded as they are, so battered by the mischances of years, insomuch that, through all the power and glory of Raphael's designs, the spectator cannot but be continually sensible that the groundwork of them is an old plaster wall. They have been scrubbed, I suppose,--brushed, at least,--a thousand times over, till the surface, brilliant or soft, as Raphael left it, must have been quite rubbed off, and with it, all the consummate finish, and everything that made them originally delightful. The sterner features remain, the skeleton of thought, but not the beauty that once clothed it. In truth, the frescos, excepting a few figures, never had the real touch of Raphael's own hand upon them, having been merely designed by him, and finished by his scholars, or by other artists. The halls themselves are specimens of antique magnificence, paved with elaborate mosaics; and wherever there is any wood-work, it is richly carved with foliage and figures. In their newness, and probably for a hundred years afterwards, there could not have been so brilliant a suite of rooms in the world. Connected with them--at any rate, not far distant--is the little Chapel of San Lorenzo, the very site of which, among the thousands of apartments of the Vatican, was long forgotten, and its existence only known by tradition. After it had been walled up, however, beyond the memory of man, there was still a rumor of some beautiful frescos by Fra Angelico, in an old chapel of Pope Nicholas V., that had strangely disappeared out of the palace, and, search at length being made, it was discovered, and entered through a window. It is a small, lofty room, quite covered over with frescos of sacred subjects, both on the walls and ceiling, a good deal faded, yet pretty distinctly preserved. It would have been no misfortune to me, if the little old chapel had remained still hidden. We next issued into the Loggie, which consist of a long gallery, or arcade or colonnade, the whole extent of which was once beautifully adorned by Raphael. These pictures are almost worn away, and so defaced as to be untraceable and unintelligible, along the side wall of the gallery; although traceries of Arabesque, and compartments where there seem to have been rich paintings, but now only an indistinguishable waste of dull color, are still to be seen. In the coved ceiling, however, there are still some bright frescos, in better preservation than any others; not particularly beautiful, nevertheless. I remember to have seen (indeed, we ourselves possess them) a series of very spirited and energetic engravings, old and coarse, of these frescos, the subject being the Creation, and the early Scripture history; and I really think that their translation of the pictures is better than the original. On reference to Murray, I find that little more than the designs is attributed to Raphael, the execution being by Giulio Romano and other artists. Escaping from these forlorn splendors, we went into the sculpture-gallery, where I was able to enjoy, in some small degree, two or three wonderful works of art; and had a perception that there were a thousand other wonders around me. It is as if the statues kept, for the most part, a veil about them, which they sometimes withdraw, and let their beauty gleam upon my sight; only a glimpse, or two or three glimpses, or a little space of calm enjoyment, and then I see nothing but a discolored marble image again. The Minerva Medica revealed herself to-day. I wonder whether other people are more fortunate than myself, and can invariably find their way to the inner soul of a work of art. I doubt it; they look at these things for just a minute, and pass on, without any pang of remorse, such as I feel, for quitting them so soon and so willingly. I am partly sensible that some unwritten rules of taste are making their way into my mind; that all this Greek beauty has done something towards refining me, though I am still, however, a very sturdy Goth. . . . April 15th.--Yesterday I went with J----- to the Forum, and descended into the excavations at the base of the Capitol, and on the site of the Basilica of Julia. The essential elements of old Rome are there: columns, single, or in groups of two or three, still erect, but battered and bruised at some forgotten time with infinite pains and labor; fragments of other columns lying prostrate, together with rich capitals and friezes; the bust of a colossal female statue, showing the bosom and upper part of the arms, but headless; a long, winding space of pavement, forming part of the ancient ascent to the Capitol, still as firm and solid as ever; the foundation of the Capitol itself, wonderfully massive, built of immense square blocks of stone, doubtless three thousand years old, and durable for whatever may be the lifetime of the world; the Arch of Septimius, Severus, with bas-reliefs of Eastern wars; the Column of Phocas, with the rude series of steps ascending on four sides to its pedestal; the floor of beautiful and precious marbles in the Basilica of Julia, the slabs cracked across,--the greater part of them torn up and removed, the grass and weeds growing up through the chinks of what remain; heaps of bricks, shapeless bits of granite, and other ancient rubbish, among which old men are lazily rummaging for specimens that a stranger may be induced to buy,--this being an employment that suits the indolence of a modern Roman. The level of these excavations is about fifteen feet, I should judge, below the present street, which passes through the Forum, and only a very small part of this alien surface has been removed, though there can be no doubt that it hides numerous treasures of art and monuments of history. Yet these remains do not make that impression of antiquity upon me which Gothic ruins do. Perhaps it is so because they belong to quite another system of society and epoch of time, and, in view of them, we forget all that has intervened betwixt them and us; being morally unlike and disconnected with them, and not belonging to the same train of thought; so that we look across a gulf to the Roman ages, and do not realize how wide the gulf is. Yet in that intervening valley lie Christianity, the Dark Ages, the feudal system, chivalry and romance, and a deeper life of the human race than Rome brought to the verge of the gulf. To-day we went to the Colonna Palace, where we saw some fine pictures, but, I think, no masterpieces. They did not depress and dishearten me so much as the pictures in Roman palaces usually do; for they were in remarkably good order as regards frames and varnish; indeed, I rather suspect some of them had been injured by the means adopted to preserve their beauty. The palace is now occupied by the French Ambassador, who probably looks upon the pictures as articles of furniture and household adornment, and does not choose to have squares of black and forlorn canvas upon his walls. There were a few noble portraits by Vandyke; a very striking one by Holbein, one or two by Titian, also by Guercino, and some pictures by Rubens, and other forestieri painters, which refreshed my weary eyes. But--what chiefly interested me was the magnificent and stately hall of the palace; fifty-five of my paces in length, besides a large apartment at either end, opening into it through a pillared space, as wide as the gateway of a city. The pillars are of giallo antico, and there are pilasters of the same all the way up and down the walls, forming a perspective of the richest aspect, especially as the broad cornice flames with gilding, and the spaces between the pilasters are emblazoned with heraldic achievements and emblems in gold, and there are Venetian looking-glasses, richly decorated over the surface with beautiful pictures of flowers and Cupids, through which you catch the gleam of the mirror; and two rows of splendid chandeliers extend from end to end of the hall, which, when lighted up, if ever it be lighted up, now-a-nights, must be the most brilliant interior that ever mortal eye beheld. The ceiling glows with pictures in fresco, representing scenes connected with the history of the Colonna family; and the floor is paved with beautiful marbles, polished and arranged in square and circular compartments; and each of the many windows is set in a great architectural frame of precious marble, as large as the portal of a door. The apartment at the farther end of the hall is elevated above it, and is attained by several marble steps, whence it must have been glorious in former days to have looked down upon a gorgeous throng of princes, cardinals, warriors, and ladies, in such rich attire as might be worn when the palace was built. It is singular how much freshness and brightness it still retains; and the only objects to mar the effect were some ancient statues and busts, not very good in themselves, and now made dreary of aspect by their corroded surfaces,--the result of long burial under ground. In the room at the entrance of the hall are two cabinets, each a wonder in its way,--one being adorned with precious stones; the other with ivory carvings of Michael Angelo's Last Judgment, and of the frescos of Raphael's Loggie. The world has ceased to be so magnificent as it once was. Men make no such marvels nowadays. The only defect that I remember in this hall was in the marble steps that ascend to the elevated apartment at the end of it; a large piece had been broken out of one of them, leaving a rough irregular gap in the polished marble stair. It is not easy to conceive what violence can have done this, without also doing mischief to all the other splendor around it. April 16th.--We went this morning to the Academy of St. Luke (the Fine Arts Academy at Rome) in the Via Bonella, close by the Forum. We rang the bell at the house door; and after a few moments it was unlocked or unbolted by some unseen agency from above, no one making his appearance to admit us. We ascended two or three flights of stairs, and entered a hall, where was a young man, the custode, and two or three artists engaged in copying some of the pictures. The collection not being vastly large, and the pictures being in more presentable condition than usual, I enjoyed them more than I generally do; particularly a Virgin and Child by Vandyke, where two angels are singing and playing, one on a lute and the other on a violin, to remind the holy infant of the strains he used to hear in heaven. It is one of the few pictures that there is really any pleasure in looking at. There were several paintings by Titian, mostly of a voluptuous character, but not very charming; also two or more by Guido, one of which, representing Fortune, is celebrated. They did not impress me much, nor do I find myself strongly drawn towards Guido, though there is no other painter who seems to achieve things so magically and inscrutably as he sometimes does. Perhaps it requires a finer taste than mine to appreciate him; and yet I do appreciate him so far as to see that his Michael, for instance, is perfectly beautiful. . . . In the gallery, there are whole rows of portraits of members of the Academy of St. Luke, most of whom, judging by their physiognomies, were very commonplace people; a fact which makes itself visible in a portrait, however much the painter may try to flatter his sitter. Several of the pictures by Titian, Paul Veronese, and other artists, now exhibited in the gallery, were formerly kept in a secret cabinet in the Capitol, being considered of a too voluptuous character for the public eye. I did not think them noticeably indecorous, as compared with a hundred other pictures that are shown and looked at without scruple;--Calypso and her nymphs, a knot of nude women by Titian, is perhaps as objectionable as any. But even Titian's flesh-tints cannot keep, and have not kept their warmth through all these centuries. The illusion and lifelikeness effervesces and exhales out of a picture as it grows old; and we go on talking of a charm that has forever vanished. From St. Luke's we went to San Pietro in Vincoli, occupying a fine position on or near the summit of the Esquiline mount. A little abortion of a man (and, by the by, there are more diminutive and ill-shapen men and women in Rome than I ever saw elsewhere, a phenomenon to be accounted for, perhaps, by their custom of wrapping the new-born infant in swaddling-clothes), this two-foot abortion hastened before us, as we drew nigh, to summon the sacristan to open the church door. It was a needless service, for which we rewarded him with two baiocchi. San Pietro is a simple and noble church, consisting of a nave divided from the side aisles by rows of columns, that once adorned some ancient temple; and its wide, unencumbered interior affords better breathing-space than most churches in Rome. The statue of Moses occupies a niche in one of the side aisles on the right, not far from the high altar. I found it grand and sublime, with a beard flowing down like a cataract; a truly majestic figure, but not so benign as it were desirable that such strength should be. The horns, about which so much has been said, are not a very prominent feature of the statue, being merely two diminutive tips rising straight up over his forehead, neither adding to the grandeur of the head, nor detracting sensibly from it. The whole force of this statue is not to be felt in one brief visit, but I agree with an English gentleman, who, with a large party, entered the church while we were there, in thinking that Moses has "very fine features,"--a compliment for which the colossal Hebrew ought to have made the Englishman a bow. Besides the Moses, the church contains some attractions of a pictorial kind, which are reposited in the sacristy, into which we passed through a side door. The most remarkable of these pictures is a face and bust of Hope, by Guido, with beautiful eyes lifted upwards; it has a grace which artists are continually trying to get into their innumerable copies, but always without success; for, indeed, though nothing is more true than the existence of this charm in the picture, yet if you try to analyze it, or even look too intently at it, it vanishes, till you look again with more trusting simplicity. Leaving the church, we wandered to the Coliseum, and to the public grounds contiguous to them, where a score and more of French drummers were beating each man his drum, without reference to any rub-a-dub but his own. This seems to be a daily or periodical practice and point of duty with them. After resting ourselves on one of the marble benches, we came slowly home, through the Basilica of Constantine, and along the shady sides of the streets and piazzas, sometimes, perforce, striking boldly through the white sunshine, which, however, was not so hot as to shrivel us up bodily. It has been a most beautiful and perfect day as regards weather, clear and bright, very warm in the sunshine, yet freshened throughout by a quiet stir in the air. Still there is something in this air malevolent, or, at least, not friendly. The Romans lie down and fall asleep in it, in any vacant part of the streets, and wherever they can find any spot sufficiently clean, and among the ruins of temples. I would not sleep in the open air for whatever my life may be worth. On our way home, sitting in one of the narrow streets, we saw an old woman spinning with a distaff; a far more ancient implement than the spinning-wheel, which the housewives of other nations have long since laid aside. April 18th.--Yesterday, at noon, the whole family of us set out on a visit to the Villa Borghese and its grounds, the entrance to which is just outside of the Porta del Popolo. After getting within the grounds, however, there is a long walk before reaching the casino, and we found the sun rather uncomfortably hot, and the road dusty and white in the sunshine; nevertheless, a footpath ran alongside of it most of the way through the grass and among the young trees. It seems to me that the trees do not put forth their leaves with nearly the same magical rapidity in this southern land at the approach of summer, as they do in more northerly countries. In these latter, having a much shorter time to develop themselves, they feel the necessity of making the most of it. But the grass, in the lawns and enclosures along which we passed, looked already fit to be mowed, and it was interspersed with many flowers. Saturday being, I believe, the only day of the week on which visitors are admitted to the casino, there were many parties in carriages, artists on foot, gentlemen on horseback, and miscellaneous people, to whom the door was opened by a custode on ringing a bell. The whole of the basement floor of the casino, comprising a suite of beautiful rooms, is filled with statuary. The entrance hall is a very splendid apartment, brightly frescoed, and paved with ancient mosaics, representing the combats with beasts and gladiators in the Coliseum, curious, though very rudely and awkwardly designed, apparently after the arts had begun to decline. Many of the specimens of sculpture displayed in these rooms are fine, but none of them, I think, possess the highest merit. An Apollo is beautiful; a group of a fighting Amazon, and her enemies trampled under her horse's feet, is very impressive; a Faun, copied from that of Praxiteles, and another, who seems to be dancing, were exceedingly pleasant to look at. I like these strange, sweet, playful, rustic creatures, . . . . linked so prettily, without monstrosity, to the lower tribes. . . . Their character has never, that I know of, been wrought out in literature; and something quite good, funny, and philosophical, as well as poetic, might very likely be educed from them. . . . The faun is a natural and delightful link betwixt human and brute life, with something of a divine character intermingled. The gallery, as it is called, on the basement floor of the casino, is sixty feet in length, by perhaps a third as much in breadth, and is (after all I have seen at the Colonna Palace and elsewhere) a more magnificent hall than I imagined to be in existence. It is floored with rich marble in beautifully arranged compartments, and the walls are almost entirely eased with marble of various sorts, the prevailing kind being giallo antico, intermixed with verd antique, and I know not what else; but the splendor of the giallo antico gives the character to the room, and the large and deep niches along the walls appear to be lined with the same material. Without coming to Italy, one can have no idea of what beauty and magnificence are produced by these fittings up of polished marble. Marble to an American means nothing but white limestone. This hall, moreover, is adorned with pillars of Oriental alabaster, and wherever is a space vacant of precious and richly colored marble it is frescoed with arabesque ornaments; and over the whole is a coved and vaulted ceiling, glowing with picture. There never can be anything richer than the whole effect. As to the sculpture here it was not very fine, so far as I can remember, consisting chiefly of busts of the emperors in porphyry; but they served a good purpose in the upholstery way. There were also magnificent tables, each composed of one great slab of porphyry; and also vases of nero antico, and other rarest substance. It remains to be mentioned that, on this almost summer day, I was quite chilled in passing through these glorious halls; no fireplace anywhere; no possibility of comfort; and in the hot season, when their coolness might be agreeable, it would be death to inhabit them. Ascending a long winding staircase, we arrived at another suite of rooms, containing a good many not very remarkable pictures, and a few more pieces of statuary. Among the latter, is Canova's statue of Pauline, the sister of Bonaparte, who is represented with but little drapery, and in the character of Venus holding the apple in her hand. It is admirably done, and, I have no doubt, a perfect likeness; very beautiful too; but it is wonderful to see how the artificial elegance of the woman of this world makes itself perceptible in spite of whatever simplicity she could find in almost utter nakedness. The statue does not afford pleasure in the contemplation. In one of these upper rooms are some works of Bernini; two of them, Aeneas and Anchises, and David on the point of slinging a stone at Goliath, have great merit, and do not tear and rend themselves quite out of the laws and limits of marble, like his later sculpture. Here is also his Apollo overtaking Daphne, whose feet take root, whose, finger-tips sprout into twigs, and whose tender body roughens round about with bark, as he embraces her. It did not seem very wonderful to me; not so good as Hillard's description of it made me expect; and one does not enjoy these freaks in marble. We were glad to emerge from the casino into the warm sunshine; and, for my part, I made the best of my way to a large fountain, surrounded by a circular stone seat of wide sweep, and sat down in a sunny segment of the circle. Around grew a solemn company of old trees,--ilexes, I believe,-- with huge, contorted trunks and evergreen branches, . . . . deep groves, sunny openings, the airy gush of fountains, marble statues, dimly visible in recesses of foliage, great urns and vases, terminal figures, temples, --all these works of art looking as if they had stood there long enough to feel at home, and to be on friendly and familiar terms with the grass and trees. It is a most beautiful place, . . . . and the Malaria is its true master and inhabitant! April 22d.--We have been recently to the studio of Mr. Brown [now dead], the American landscape-painter, and were altogether surprised and delighted with his pictures. He is a plain, homely Yankee, quite unpolished by his many years' residence in Italy; he talks ungrammatically, and in Yankee idioms; walks with a strange, awkward gait and stooping shoulders; is altogether unpicturesque; but wins one's confidence by his very lack of grace. It is not often that we see an artist so entirely free from affectation in his aspect and deportment. His pictures were views of Swiss and Italian scenery, and were most beautiful and true. One of them, a moonlight picture, was really magical,-- the moon shining so brightly that it seemed to throw a light even beyond the limits of the picture,--and yet his sunrises and sunsets, and noontides too, were nowise inferior to this, although their excellence required somewhat longer study, to be fully appreciated. I seemed to receive more pleasure front Mr. Brown's pictures than from any of the landscapes by the old masters; and the fact serves to strengthen me in the belief that the most delicate if not the highest charm of a picture is evanescent, and that we continue to admire pictures prescriptively and by tradition, after the qualities that first won them their fame have vanished. I suppose Claude was a greater landscape-painter than Brown; but for my own pleasure I would prefer one of the latter artist's pictures,--those of the former being quite changed from what he intended them to be by the effect of time on his pigments. Mr. Brown showed us some drawings from nature, done with incredible care and minuteness of detail, as studies for his paintings. We complimented him on his patience; but he said, "O, it's not patience,--it's love!" In fact, it was a patient and most successful wooing of a beloved object, which at last rewarded him by yielding itself wholly. We have likewise been to Mr. B------'s [now dead] studio, where we saw several pretty statues and busts, and among them an Eve, with her wreath of fig-leaves lying across her poor nudity; comely in some points, but with a frightful volume of thighs and calves. I do not altogether see the necessity of ever sculpturing another nakedness. Man is no longer a naked animal; his clothes are as natural to him as his skin, and sculptors have no more right to undress him than to flay him. Also, we have seen again William Story's Cleopatra,--a work of genuine thought and energy, representing a terribly dangerous woman; quiet enough for the moment, but very likely to spring upon you like a tigress. It is delightful to escape to his creations from this universal prettiness, which seems to be the highest conception of the crowd of modern sculptors, and which they almost invariably attain. Miss Bremer called on us the other day. We find her very little changed from what she was when she came to take tea and spend an evening at our little red cottage, among the Berkshire hills, and went away so dissatisfied with my conversational performances, and so laudatory of my brow and eyes, while so severely criticising my poor mouth and chin. She is the funniest little old fairy in person whom one can imagine, with a huge nose, to which all the rest of her is but an insufficient appendage; but you feel at once that she is most gentle, kind, womanly, sympathetic, and true. She talks English fluently, in a low quiet voice, but with such an accent that it is impossible to understand her without the closest attention. This was the real cause of the failure of our Berkshire interview; for I could not guess, half the time, what she was saying, and, of course, had to take an uncertain aim with my responses. A more intrepid talker than myself would have shouted his ideas across the gulf; but, for me, there must first be a close and unembarrassed contiguity with my companion, or I cannot say one real word. I doubt whether I have ever really talked with half a dozen persons in my life, either men or women. To-day my wife and I have been at the picture and sculpture galleries of the Capitol. I rather enjoyed looking at several of the pictures, though at this moment I particularly remember only a very beautiful face of a man, one of two heads on the same canvas by Vandyke. Yes; I did look with new admiration at Paul Veronese's "Rape of Europa." It must have been, in its day, the most brilliant and rejoicing picture, the most voluptuous, the most exuberant, that ever put the sunshine to shame. The bull has all Jupiter in him, so tender and gentle, yet so passionate, that you feel it indecorous to look at him; and Europa, under her thick rich stuffs and embroideries, is all a woman. What a pity that such a picture should fade, and perplex the beholder with such splendor shining through such forlornness! We afterwards went into the sculpture-gallery, where I looked at the Faun of Praxiteles, and was sensible of a peculiar charm in it; a sylvan beauty and homeliness, friendly and wild at once. The lengthened, but not preposterous ears, and the little tail, which we infer, have an exquisite effect, and make the spectator smile in his very heart. This race of fauns was the most delightful of all that antiquity imagined. It seems to me that a story, with all sorts of fun and pathos in it, might be contrived on the idea of their species having become intermingled with the human race; a family with the faun blood in them, having prolonged itself from the classic era till our own days. The tail might have disappeared, by dint of constant intermarriages with ordinary mortals; but the pretty hairy ears should occasionally reappear in members of the family; and the moral instincts and intellectual characteristics of the faun might be most picturesquely brought out, without detriment to the human interest of the story. Fancy this combination in the person of a young lady! I have spoken of Mr. Gibson's colored statues. It seems (at least Mr. Nichols tells me) that he stains them with tobacco juice. . . . Were he to send a Cupid to America, he need not trouble himself to stain it beforehand. April 25th.--Night before last, my wife and I took a moonlight ramble through Rome, it being a very beautiful night, warm enough for comfort, and with no perceptible dew or dampness. We set out at about nine o'clock, and, our general direction being towards the Coliseum, we soon came to the Fountain of Trevi, full on the front of which the moonlight fell, making Bernini's sculptures look stately and beautiful, though the semicircular gush and fall of the cascade, and the many jets of the water, pouring and bubbling into the great marble basin, are of far more account than Neptune and his steeds, and the rest of the figures. . . . We ascended the Capitoline Hill, and I felt a satisfaction in placing my hand on those immense blocks of stone, the remains of the ancient Capitol, which form the foundation of the present edifice, and will make a sure basis for as many edifices as posterity may choose to rear upon it, till the end of the world. It is wonderful, the solidity with which those old Romans built; one would suppose they contemplated the whole course of Time as the only limit of their individual life. This is not so strange in the days of the Republic, when, probably, they believed in the permanence of their institutions; but they still seemed to build for eternity, in the reigns of the emperors, when neither rulers nor people had any faith or moral substance, or laid any earnest grasp on life. Reaching the top of the Capitoline Hill, we ascended the steps of the portal of the Palace of the Senator, and looked down into the piazza, with the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius in the centre of it. The architecture that surrounds the piazza is very ineffective; and so, in my opinion, are all the other architectural works of Michael Angelo, including St. Peter's itself, of which he has made as little as could possibly be made of such a vast pile of material. He balances everything in such a way that it seems but half of itself. We soon descended into the piazza, and walked round and round the statue of Marcus Aurelius, contemplating it from every point and admiring it in all. . . . On these beautiful moonlight nights, Rome appears to keep awake and stirring, though in a quiet and decorous way. It is, in fact, the pleasantest time for promenades, and we both felt less wearied than by any promenade in the daytime, of similar extent, since our residence in Rome. In future, I mean to walk often after nightfall. Yesterday, we set out betimes, and ascended the dome of St. Peter's. The best view of the interior of the church, I think, is from the first gallery beneath the dome. The whole inside of the dome is set with mosaic-work, the separate pieces being, so far as I could see, about half an inch square. Emerging on the roof, we had a fine view of all the surrounding Rome, including the Mediterranean Sea in the remote distance. Above us still rose the whole mountain of the great dome, and it made an impression on me of greater height and size than I had yet been able to receive. The copper ball at the summit looked hardly bigger than a man could lift; and yet, a little while afterwards, U----, J-----, and I stood all together in that ball, which could have contained a dozen more along with us. The esplanade of the roof is, of course, very extensive; and along the front of it are ranged the statues which we see from below, and which, on nearer examination, prove to be roughly hewn giants. There is a small house on the roof, where, probably, the custodes of this part of the edifice reside; and there is a fountain gushing abundantly into a stone trough, that looked like an old sarcophagus. It is strange where the water comes from at such a height. The children tasted it, and pronounced it very warm and disagreeable. After taking in the prospect on all sides we rang a bell, which summoned a man, who directed us towards a door in the side of the dome, where a custode was waiting to admit us. Hitherto the ascent had been easy, along a slope without stairs, up which, I believe, people sometimes ride on donkeys. The rest of the way we mounted steep and narrow staircases, winding round within the wall, or between the two walls of the dome, and growing narrower and steeper, till, finally, there is but a perpendicular iron ladder, by means of which to climb into the copper ball. Except through small windows and peep-holes, there is no external prospect of a higher point than the roof of the church. Just beneath the ball there is a circular room capable of containing a large company, and a door which ought to give access to a gallery on the outside; but the custode informed us that this door is never opened. As I have said, U----, J-----, and I clambered into the copper ball, which we found as hot as an oven; and, after putting our hands on its top, and on the summit of St. Peter's, were glad to clamber down again. I have made some mistake, after all, in my narration. There certainly is a circular balcony at the top of the dome, for I remember walking round it, and looking, not only across the country, but downwards along the ribs of the dome; to which are attached the iron contrivances for illuminating it on Easter Sunday. . . . Before leaving the church we went to look at the mosaic copy of the "Transfiguration," because we were going to see the original in the Vatican, and wished to compare the two. Going round to the entrance of the Vatican, we went first to the manufactory of mosaics, to which we had a ticket of admission. We found it a long series of rooms, in which the mosaic artists were at work, chiefly in making some medallions of the heads of saints for the new church of St. Paul's. It was rather coarse work, and it seemed to me that the mosaic copy was somewhat stiffer and more wooden than the original, the bits of stone not flowing into color quite so freely as paint from a brush. There was no large picture now in process of being copied; but two or three artists were employed on small and delicate subjects. One had a Holy Family of Raphael in hand; and the Sibyls of Guercino and Domenichino were hanging on the wall, apparently ready to be put into mosaic. Wherever great skill and delicacy, on the artists' part were necessary, they seemed quite adequate to the occasion; but, after all, a mosaic of any celebrated picture is but a copy of a copy. The substance employed is a stone-paste, of innumerable different views, and in bits of various sizes, quantities of which were seen in cases along the whole series of rooms. We next ascended an amazing height of staircases, and walked along I know not what extent of passages, . . . . till we reached the picture-gallery of the Vatican, into which I had never been before. There are but three rooms, all lined with red velvet, on which hung about fifty pictures, each one of them, no doubt, worthy to be considered a masterpiece. In the first room were three Murillos, all so beautiful that I could have spent the day happily in looking at either of them; for, methinks, of all painters he is the tenderest and truest. I could not enjoy these pictures now, however, because in the next room, and visible through the open door, hung the "Transfiguration." Approaching it, I felt that the picture was worthy of its fame, and was far better than I could at once appreciate; admirably preserved, too, though I fully believe it must have possessed a charm when it left Raphael's hand that has now vanished forever. As church furniture and an external adornment, the mosaic copy is preferable to the original, but no copy could ever reproduce all the life and expression which we see here. Opposite to it hangs the "Communion of St. Jerome," the aged, dying saint, half torpid with death already, partaking of the sacrament, and a sunny garland of cherubs in the upper part of the picture, looking down upon him, and quite comforting the spectator with the idea that the old man needs only to be quite dead in order to flit away with them. As for the other pictures I did but glance at, and have forgotten them. The "Transfiguration" is finished with great minuteness and detail, the weeds and blades of grass in the foreground being as distinct as if they were growing in a natural soil. A partly decayed stick of wood with the bark is likewise given in close imitation of nature. The reflection of a foot of one of the apostles is seen in a pool of water at the verge of the picture. One or two heads and arms seem almost to project from the canvas. There is great lifelikeness and reality, as well as higher qualities. The face of Jesus, being so high aloft and so small in the distance, I could not well see; but I am impressed with the idea that it looks too much like human flesh and blood to be in keeping with the celestial aspect of the figure, or with the probabilities of the scene, when the divinity and immortality of the Saviour beamed from within him through the earthly features that ordinarily shaded him. As regards the composition of the picture, I am not convinced of the propriety of its being in two so distinctly separate parts,--the upper portion not thinking of the lower, and the lower portion not being aware of the higher. It symbolizes, however, the spiritual short-sightedness of mankind that, amid the trouble and grief of the lower picture, not a single individual, either of those who seek help or those who would willingly afford it, lifts his eyes to that region, one glimpse of which would set everything right. One or two of the disciples point upward, but without really knowing what abundance of help is to be had there. April 27th.--To-day we have all been with Mr. Akers to some studios of painters; first to that of Mr. Wilde, an artist originally from Boston. His pictures are principally of scenes from Venice, and are miracles of color, being as bright as if the light were transmitted through rubies and sapphires. And yet, after contemplating them awhile, we became convinced that the painter had not gone in the least beyond nature, but, on the contrary, had fallen short of brilliancies which no palette, or skill, or boldness in using color, could attain. I do not quite know whether it is best to attempt these things. They may be found in nature, no doubt, but always so tempered by what surrounds them, so put out of sight even while they seem full before our eyes, that we question the accuracy of a faithful reproduction of them on canvas. There was a picture of sunset, the whole sky of which would have outshone any gilded frame that could have been put around it. There was a most gorgeous sketch of a handful of weeds and leaves, such as may be seen strewing acres of forest-ground in an American autumn. I doubt whether any other man has ever ventured to paint a picture like either of these two, the Italian sunset or the American autumnal foliage. Mr. Wilde, who is still young, talked with genuine feeling and enthusiasm of his art, and is certainly a man of genius. We next went to the studio of an elderly Swiss artist, named Mueller, I believe, where we looked at a great many water-color and crayon drawings of scenes in Italy, Greece, and Switzerland. The artist was a quiet, respectable, somewhat heavy-looking old gentleman, from whose aspect one would expect a plodding pertinacity of character rather than quickness of sensibility. He must have united both these qualities, however, to produce such pictures as these, such faithful transcripts of whatever Nature has most beautiful to show, and which she shows only to those who love her deeply and patiently. They are wonderful pictures, compressing plains, seas, and mountains, with miles and miles of distance, into the space of a foot or two, without crowding anything or leaving out a feature, and diffusing the free, blue atmosphere throughout. The works of the English watercolor artists which I saw at the Manchester Exhibition seemed to me nowise equal to these. Now, here are three artists, Mr. Brown, Mr. Wilde, and Mr. Mueller, who have smitten me with vast admiration within these few days past, while I am continually turning away disappointed from the landscapes of the most famous among the old masters, unable to find any charm or illusion in them. Yet I suppose Claude, Poussin, and Salvator Rosa must have won their renown by real achievements. But the glory of a picture fades like that of a flower. Contiguous to Mr. Mueller's studio was that of a young German artist, not long resident in Rome, and Mr. Akers proposed that we should go in there, as a matter of kindness to the young man, who is scarcely known at all, and seldom has a visitor to look at his pictures. His studio comprised his whole establishment; for there was his little bed, with its white drapery, in a corner of the small room, and his dressing-table, with its brushes and combs, while the easel and the few sketches of Italian scenes and figures occupied the foreground. I did not like his pictures very well, but would gladly have bought them all if I could have afforded it, the artist looked so cheerful, patient, and quiet, doubtless amidst huge discouragement. He is probably stubborn of purpose, and is the sort of man who will improve with every year of his life. We could not speak his language, and were therefore spared the difficulty of paying him any compliments; but Miss Shepard said a few kind words to him in German. and seemed quite to win his heart, insomuch that he followed her with bows and smiles a long way down the staircase. It is a terrible business, this looking at pictures, whether good or bad, in the presence of the artists who paint them; it is as great a bore as to hear a poet read his own verses. It takes away all my pleasure in seeing the pictures, and even remakes me question the genuineness of the impressions which I receive from them. After this latter visit Mr. Akers conducted us to the shop of the jeweller Castellani, who is a great reproducer of ornaments in the old Roman and Etruscan fashion. These antique styles are very fashionable just now, and some of the specimens he showed us were certainly very beautiful, though I doubt whether their quaintness and old-time curiousness, as patterns of gewgaws dug out of immemorial tombs, be not their greatest charm. We saw the toilet-case of an Etruscan lady,--that is to say, a modern imitation of it,--with her rings for summer and winter, and for every day of the week, and for thumb and fingers; her ivory comb; her bracelets; and more knick-knacks than I can half remember. Splendid things of our own time were likewise shown us; a necklace of diamonds worth eighteen thousand scudi, together with emeralds and opals and great pearls. Finally we came away, and my wife and Miss Shepard were taken up by the Misses Weston, who drove with them to visit the Villa Albani. During their drive my wife happened to raise her arm, and Miss Shepard espied a little Greek cross of gold which had attached itself to the lace of her sleeve. . . . Pray heaven the jeweller may not discover his loss before we have time to restore the spoil! He is apparently so free and careless in displaying his precious wares,--putting inestimable genes and brooches great and small into the hands of strangers like ourselves, and leaving scores of them strewn on the top of his counter,--that it would seem easy enough to take a diamond or two; but I suspect there must needs be a sharp eye somewhere. Before we left the shop he requested me to honor him with my autograph in a large book that was full of the names of his visitors. This is probably a measure of precaution. April 30th.--I went yesterday to the sculpture-gallery of the Capitol, and looked pretty thoroughly through the busts of the illustrious men, and less particularly at those of the emperors and their relatives. I likewise took particular note of the Faun of Praxiteles, because the idea keeps recurring to me of writing a little romance about it, and for that reason I shall endeavor to set down a somewhat minutely itemized detail of the statue and its surroundings. . . . We have had beautiful weather for two or three days, very warm in the sun, yet always freshened by the gentle life of a breeze, and quite cool enough the moment you pass within the limit of the shade. . . . In the morning there are few people there (on the Pincian) except the gardeners, lazily trimming the borders, or filling their watering-pots out of the marble-brimmed basin of the fountain; French soldiers, in their long mixed-blue surtouts, and wide scarlet pantaloons, chatting with here and there a nursery-maid and playing with the child in her care; and perhaps a few smokers, . . . . choosing each a marble seat or wooden bench in sunshine or shade as best suits him. In the afternoon, especially within an hour or two of sunset, the gardens are much more populous, and the seats, except when the sun falls full upon them, are hard to come by. Ladies arrive in carriages, splendidly dressed; children are abundant, much impeded in their frolics, and rendered stiff and stately by the finery which they wear; English gentlemen and Americans with their wives and families; the flower of the Roman population, too, both male and female, mostly dressed with great nicety; but a large intermixture of artists, shabbily picturesque; and other persons, not of the first stamp. A French band, comprising a great many brass instruments, by and by begins to play; and what with music, sunshine, a delightful atmosphere, flowers, grass, well-kept pathways, bordered with box-hedges, pines, cypresses, horse-chestnuts, flowering shrubs, and all manner of cultivated beauty, the scene is a very lively and agreeable one. The fine equipages that drive round and round through the carriage-paths are another noticeable item. The Roman aristocracy are magnificent in their aspect, driving abroad with beautiful horses, and footmen in rich liveries, sometimes as many as three behind and one sitting by the coachman. May 1st.--This morning, I wandered for the thousandth time through some of the narrow intricacies of Rome, stepping here and there into a church. I do not know the name of the first one, nor had it anything that in Rome could be called remarkable, though, till I came here, I was not aware that any such churches existed,--a marble pavement in variegated compartments, a series of shrines and chapels round the whole floor, each with its own adornment of sculpture and pictures, its own altar with tall wax tapers before it, some of which were burning; a great picture over the high altar, the whole interior of the church ranged round with pillars and pilasters, and lined, every inch of it, with rich yellow marble. Finally, a frescoed ceiling over the nave and transepts, and a dome rising high above the central part, and filled with frescos brought to such perspective illusion, that the edges seem to project into the air. Two or three persons are kneeling at separate shrines; there are several wooden confessionals placed against the walls, at one of which kneels a lady, confessing to a priest who sits within; the tapers are lighted at the high altar and at one of the shrines; an attendant is scrubbing the marble pavement with a broom and water, a process, I should think, seldom practised in Roman churches. By and by the lady finishes her confession, kisses the priest's hand, and sits down in one of the chairs which are placed about the floor, while the priest, in a black robe, with a short, white, loose jacket over his shoulders, disappears by a side door out of the church. I, likewise, finding nothing attractive in the pictures, take my departure. Protestantism needs a new apostle to convert it into something positive. . . . I now found my way to the Piazza Navona. It is to me the most interesting piazza in Rome; a large oblong space, surrounded with tall, shabby houses, among which there are none that seem to be palaces. The sun falls broadly over the area of the piazza, and shows the fountains in it;--one a large basin with great sea-monsters, probably of Bernini's inventions, squirting very small streams of water into it; another of the fountains I do not at all remember; but the central one is an immense basin, over which is reared an old Egyptian obelisk, elevated on a rock, which is cleft into four arches. Monstrous devices in marble, I know not of what purport, are clambering about the cloven rock or burrowing beneath it; one and all of them are superfluous and impertinent, the only essential thing being the abundant supply of water in the fountain. This whole Piazza Navona is usually the scene of more business than seems to be transacted anywhere else in Rome; in some parts of it rusty iron is offered for sale, locks and keys, old tools, and all such rubbish; in other parts vegetables, comprising, at this season, green peas, onions, cauliflowers, radishes, artichokes, and others with which I have never made acquaintance; also, stalls or wheelbarrows containing apples, chestnuts (the meats dried and taken out of the shells), green almonds in their husks, and squash-seeds,--salted and dried in an oven,--apparently a favorite delicacy of the Romans. There are also lemons and oranges; stalls of fish, mostly about the size of smelts, taken from the Tiber; cigars of various qualities, the best at a baioccho and a half apiece; bread in loaves or in small rings, a great many of which are strung together on a long stick, and thus carried round for sale. Women and men sit with these things for sale, or carry them about in trays or on boards on their heads, crying them with shrill and hard voices. There is a shabby crowd and much babble; very little picturesqueness of costume or figure, however, the chief exceptions being, here and there, an old white-bearded beggar. A few of the men have the peasant costume,--a short jacket and breeches of light blue cloth and white stockings,--the ugliest dress I ever saw. The women go bareheaded, and seem fond of scarlet and other bright colors, but are homely and clumsy in form. The piazza is dingy in its general aspect, and very dirty, being strewn with straw, vegetable-tops, and the rubbish of a week's marketing; but there is more life in it than one sees elsewhere in Rome. On one side of the piazza is the Church of St. Agnes, traditionally said to stand on the site of the house where that holy maiden was exposed to infamy by the Roman soldiers, and where her modesty and innocence were saved by miracle. I went into the church, and found it very splendid, with rich marble columns, all as brilliant as if just built; a frescoed dome above; beneath, a range of chapels all round the church, ornamented not with pictures but bas-reliefs, the figures of which almost step and struggle out of the marble. They did not seem very admirable as works of art, none of them explaining themselves or attracting me long enough to study out their meaning; but, as part of the architecture of the church, they had a good effect. Out of the busy square two or three persons had stepped into this bright and calm seclusion to pray and be devout, for a little while; and, between sunrise and sunset of the bustling market-day, many doubtless snatch a moment to refresh their souls. In the Pantheon (to-day) it was pleasant looking up to the circular opening, to see the clouds flitting across it, sometimes covering it quite over, then permitting a glimpse of sky, then showing all the circle of sunny blue. Then would come the ragged edge of a cloud, brightened throughout with sunshine, passing and changing quickly,--not that the divine smile was not always the same, but continually variable through the medium of earthly influences. The great slanting beam of sunshine was visible all the way down to the pavement, falling upon motes of dust, or a thin smoke of incense imperceptible in the shadow. Insects were playing to and fro in the beam, high up toward the opening. There is a wonderful charm in the naturalness of all this, and one might fancy a swarm of cherubs coming down through the opening and sporting in the broad ray, to gladden the faith of worshippers on the pavement beneath; or angels bearing prayers upward, or bringing down responses to them, visible with dim brightness as they pass through the pathway of heaven's radiance, even the many hues of their wings discernible by a trusting eye; though, as they pass into the shadow, they vanish like the motes. So the sunbeam would represent those rays of divine intelligence which enable us to see wonders and to know that they are natural things. Consider the effect of light and shade in a church where the windows are open and darkened with curtains that are occasionally lifted by a breeze, letting in the sunshine, which whitens a carved tombstone on the pavement of the church, disclosing, perhaps, the letters of the name and inscription, a death's-head, a crosier, or other emblem; then the curtain falls and the bright spot vanishes. May 8th.--This morning my wife and I went to breakfast with Mrs. William Story at the Barberini Palace, expecting to meet Mrs. Jameson, who has been in Rome for a month or two. We had a very pleasant breakfast, but Mrs. Jameson was not present on account of indisposition, and the only other guests were Mrs. A------ and Mrs. H------, two sensible American ladies. Mrs. Story, however, received a note from Mrs. Jameson, asking her to bring us to see her at her lodgings; so in the course of the afternoon she called on us, and took us thither in her carriage. Mrs. Jameson lives on the first piano of an old palazzo on the Via di Ripetta, nearly opposite the ferry-way across the Tiber, and affording a pleasant view of the yellow river and the green bank and fields on the other side. I had expected to see an elderly lady, but not quite so venerable a one as Mrs. Jameson proved to be; a rather short, round, and massive personage, of benign and agreeable aspect, with a sort of black skullcap on her head, beneath which appeared her hair, which seemed once to have been fair, and was now almost white. I should take her to be about seventy years old. She began to talk to us with affectionate familiarity, and was particularly kind in her manifestations towards myself, who, on my part, was equally gracious towards her. In truth, I have found great pleasure and profit in her works, and was glad to hear her say that she liked mine. We talked about art, and she showed us a picture leaning up against the wall of the room; a quaint old Byzantine painting, with a gilded background, and two stiff figures (our Saviour and St. Catherine) standing shyly at a sacred distance from one another, and going through the marriage ceremony. There was a great deal of expression in their faces and figures; and the spectator feels, moreover, that the artist must have been a devout man,--an impression which we seldom receive from modern pictures, however awfully holy the subject, or however consecrated the place they hang in. Mrs. Jameson seems to be familiar with Italy, its people and life, as well as with its picture-galleries. She is said to be rather irascible in her temper; but nothing could be sweeter than her voice, her look, and all her manifestations to-day. When we were coming away she clasped my hand in both of hers, and again expressed the pleasure of having seen me, and her gratitude to me for calling on her; nor did I refrain from responding Amen to these effusions. . . . Taking leave of Mrs. Jameson, we drove through the city, and out of the Lateran Gate; first, however, waiting a long while at Monaldini's bookstore in the Piazza de' Spagna for Mr. Story, whom we finally took up in the street, after losing nearly an hour. Just two miles beyond the gate is a space on the green campagna where, for some time past, excavations have been in progress, which thus far have resulted in the discovery of several tombs, and the old, buried, and almost forgotten church or basilica of San Stefano. It is a beautiful spot, that of the excavations, with the Alban hills in the distance, and some heavy, sunlighted clouds hanging above, or recumbent at length upon them, and behind the city and its mighty dome. The excavations are an object of great interest both to the Romans and to strangers, and there were many carriages and a great many visitors viewing the progress of the works, which are carried forward with greater energy than anything else I have seen attempted at Rome. A short time ago the ground in the vicinity was a green surface, level, except here and there a little hillock, or scarcely perceptible swell; the tomb of Cecilia Metella showing itself a mile or two distant, and other rugged ruins of great tombs rising on the plain. Now the whole site of the basilica is uncovered, and they have dug into the depths of several tombs, bringing to light precious marbles, pillars, a statue, and elaborately wrought sarcophagi; and if they were to dig into almost every other inequality that frets the surface of the campagna, I suppose the result might be the same. You cannot dig six feet downward anywhere into the soil, deep enough to hollow out a grave, without finding some precious relic of the past; only they lose somewhat of their value when you think that you can almost spurn them out of the ground with your foot. It is a very wonderful arrangement of Providence that these things should have been preserved for a long series of coming generations by that accumulation of dust and soil and grass and trees and houses over them, which will keep them safe, and cause their reappearance above ground to be gradual, so that the rest of the world's lifetime may have for one of its enjoyments the uncovering of old Rome. The tombs were accessible by long flights of steps going steeply downward, and they were thronged with so many visitors that we had to wait some little time for our own turn. In the first into which we descended we found two tombs side by side, with only a partition wall between; the outer tomb being, as is supposed, a burial-place constructed by the early Christians, while the adjoined and minor one was a work of pagan Rome about the second century after Christ. The former was much less interesting than the latter. It contained some large sarcophagi, with sculpture upon them of rather heathenish aspect; and in the centre of the front of each sarcophagus was a bust in bas-relief, the features of which had never been wrought, but were left almost blank, with only the faintest indications of a nose, for instance. It is supposed that sarcophagi were kept on hand by the sculptors, and were bought ready made, and that it was customary to work out the portrait of the deceased upon the blank face in the centre; but when there was a necessity for sudden burial, as may have been the case in the present instance, this was dispensed with. The inner tomb was found without any earth in it, just as it had been left when the last old Roman was buried there; and it being only a week or two since it was opened, there was very little intervention of persons, though much of time, between the departure of the friends of the dead and our own visit. It is a square room, with a mosaic pavement, and is six or seven paces in length and breadth, and as much in height to the vaulted roof. The roof and upper walls are beautifully ornamented with frescos, which were very bright when first discovered, but have rapidly faded since the admission of the air, though the graceful and joyous designs, flowers and fruits and trees, are still perfectly discernible. The room must have been anything but sad and funereal; on the contrary, as cheerful a saloon, and as brilliant, if lighted up, as one could desire to feast in. It contained several marble sarcophagi, covering indeed almost the whole floor, and each of them as much as three or four feet in length, and two much longer. The longer ones I did not particularly examine, and they seemed comparatively plainer; but the smaller sarcophagi were covered with the most delicately wrought and beautiful bas-reliefs that I ever beheld; a throng of glad and lovely shapes in marble clustering thickly and chasing one another round the sides of these old stone coffins. The work was as perfect as when the sculptor gave it his last touch; and if he had wrought it to be placed in a frequented hall, to be seen and admired by continual crowds as long as the marble should endure, he could not have chiselled with better skill and care, though his work was to be shut up in the depths of a tomb forever. This seems to me the strangest thing in the world, the most alien from modern sympathies. If they had built their tombs above ground, one could understand the arrangement better; but no sooner had they adorned them so richly, and furnished them with such exquisite productions of art, than they annihilated them with darkness. It was an attempt, no doubt, to render the physical aspect of death cheerful, but there was no good sense in it. We went down also into another tomb close by, the walls of which were ornamented with medallions in stucco. These works presented a numerous series of graceful designs, wrought by the hand in the short space of (Mr. Story said it could not have been more than) five or ten minutes, while the wet plaster remained capable of being moulded; and it was marvellous to think of the fertility of the artist's fancy, and the rapidity and accuracy with which he must have given substantial existence to his ideas. These too--all of them such adornments as would have suited a festal hall--were made to be buried forthwith in eternal darkness. I saw and handled in this tomb a great thigh-bone, and measured it with my own; it was one of many such relics of the guests who were laid to sleep in these rich chambers. The sarcophagi that served them for coffins could not now be put to a more appropriate use than as wine-coolers in a modern dining-room; and it would heighten the enjoyment of a festival to look at them. We would gladly have stayed much longer; but it was drawing towards sunset, and the evening, though bright, was unusually cool, so we drove home; and on the way, Mr. Story told us of the horrible practices of the modern Romans with their dead,--how they place them in the church, where, at midnight, they are stripped of their last rag of funeral attire, put into the rudest wooden coffins, and thrown into a trench,--a half-mile, for instance, of promiscuous corpses. This is the fate of all, except those whose friends choose to pay an exorbitant sum to have them buried under the pavement of a church. The Italians have an excessive dread of corpses, and never meddle with those of their nearest and dearest relatives. They have a horror of death, too, especially of sudden death, and most particularly of apoplexy; and no wonder, as it gives no time for the last rites of the Church, and so exposes them to a fearful risk of perdition forever. On the whole, the ancient practice was, perhaps, the preferable one; but Nature has made it very difficult for us to do anything pleasant and satisfactory with a dead body. God knows best; but I wish he had so ordered it that our mortal bodies, when we have done with them, might vanish out of sight and sense, like bubbles. A person of delicacy hates to think of leaving such a burden as his decaying mortality to the disposal of his friends; but, I say again, how delightful it would be, and how helpful towards our faith in a blessed futurity, if the dying could disappear like vanishing bubbles, leaving, perhaps, a sweet fragrance diffused for a minute or two throughout the death-chamber. This would be the odor of sanctity! And if sometimes the evaporation of a sinful soul should leave an odor not so delightful, a breeze through the open windows would soon waft it quite away. Apropos of the various methods of disposing of dead bodies, William Story recalled a newspaper paragraph respecting a ring, with a stone of a new species in it, which a widower was observed to wear upon his finger. Being questioned as to what the gem was, he answered, "It is my wife." He had procured her body to be chemically resolved into this stone. I think I could make a story on this idea: the ring should be one of the widower's bridal gifts to a second wife; and, of course, it should have wondrous and terrible qualities, symbolizing all that disturbs the quiet of a second marriage,--on the husband's part, remorse for his inconstancy, and the constant comparison between the dead wife of his youth, now idealized, and the grosser reality which he had now adopted into her place; while on the new wife's finger it should give pressures, shooting pangs into her heart, jealousies of the past, and all such miserable emotions. By the by, the tombs which we looked at and entered may have been originally above ground, like that of Cecilia Metella, and a hundred others along the Appian Way; though, even in this case, the beautiful chambers must have been shut up in darkness. Had there been windows, letting in the light upon the rich frescos and exquisite sculptures, there would have been a satisfaction in thinking of the existence of so much visual beauty, though no eye had the privilege to see it. But darkness, to objects of sight, is annihilation, as long as the darkness lasts. May 9th.--Mrs. Jameson called this forenoon to ask us to go and see her this evening; . . . . so that I had to receive her alone, devolving part of the burden on Miss Shepard and the three children, all of whom I introduced to her notice. Finding that I had not been farther beyond the walls of Rome than the tomb of Cecilia Metella, she invited me to take a drive of a few miles with her this afternoon. . . . The poor lady seems to be very lame; and I am sure I was grateful to her for having taken the trouble to climb up the seventy steps of our staircase, and felt pain at seeing her go down them again. It looks fearfully like the gout, the affection being apparently in one foot. The hands, by the way, are white, and must once have been, perhaps now are, beautiful. She must have been a perfectly pretty woman in her day,--a blue or gray eyed, fair-haired beauty. I think that her hair is not white, but only flaxen in the extreme. At half past four, according to appointment, I arrived at her lodgings, and had not long to wait before her little one-horse carriage drove up to the door, and we set out, rumbling along the Via Scrofa, and through the densest part of the city, past the theatre of Marcellus, and thence along beneath the Palatine Hill, and by the Baths of Caracalla, through the gate of San Sebastiano. After emerging from the gate, we soon came to the little Church of "Domine, quo vadis?" Standing on the spot where St. Peter is said to have seen a vision of our Saviour bearing his cross, Mrs. Jameson proposed to alight; and, going in, we saw a cast from Michael Angelo's statue of the Saviour; and not far from the threshold of the church, yet perhaps in the centre of the edifice, which is extremely small, a circular stone is placed, a little raised above the pavement, and surrounded by a low wooden railing. Pointing to this stone, Mrs. Jameson showed me the prints of two feet side by side, impressed into its surface, as if a person had stopped short while pursuing his way to Rome. These, she informed me, were supposed to be the miraculous prints of the Saviour's feet; but on looking into Murray, I am mortified to find that they are merely facsimiles of the original impressions, which are treasured up among the relics of the neighboring Basilica of San Sebastiano. The marks of sculpture seemed to me, indeed, very evident in these prints, nor did they indicate such beautiful feet as should have belonged to the hearer of the best of glad tidings. Hence we drove on a little way farther, and came to the Basilica of San Sebastiano, where also we alighted, and, leaning on my arm, Mrs. Jameson went in. It is a stately and noble interior, with a spacious unencumbered nave, and a flat ceiling frescoed and gilded. In a chapel at the left of the entrance is the tomb of St. Sebastian,--a sarcophagus containing his remains, raised on high before the altar, and beneath it a recumbent statue of the saint pierced with gilded arrows. The sculpture is of the school of Bernini,--done after the design of Bernini himself, Mrs. Jameson said, and is more agreeable and in better taste than most of his works. We walked round the basilica, glancing at the pictures in the various chapels, none of which seemed to be of remarkable merit, although Mrs. Jameson pronounced rather a favorable verdict on one of St. Francis. She says that she can read a picture like the page of a book; in fact, without perhaps assuming more taste and judgment than really belong to her, it was impossible not to perceive that she gave her companion no credit for knowing one single simplest thing about art. Nor, on the whole, do I think she underrated me; the only mystery is, how she came to be so well aware of my ignorance on artistical points. In the basilica the Franciscan monks were arranging benches on the floor of the nave, and some peasant children and grown people besides were assembling, probably to undergo an examination in the catechism, and we hastened to depart, lest our presence should interfere with their arrangements. At the door a monk met us, and asked for a contribution in aid of his church, or some other religious purpose. Boys, as we drove on, ran stoutly along by the side of the chaise, begging as often as they could find breath, but were constrained finally to give up the pursuit. The great ragged bulks of the tombs along the Appian Way now hove in sight, one with a farm-house on its summit, and all of them preposterously huge and massive. At a distance, across the green campagna on our left, the Claudian aqueduct strode away over miles of space, and doubtless reached even to that circumference of blue hills which stand afar off, girdling Rome about. The tomb of Cecilia Metella came in sight a long while before we reached it, with the warm buff hue of its travertine, and the gray battlemented wall which the Caetanis erected on the top of its circular summit six hundred years ago. After passing it, we saw an interminable line of tombs on both sides of the way, each of which might, for aught I know, have been as massive as that of Cecilia Metella, and some perhaps still more monstrously gigantic, though now dilapidated and much reduced in size. Mrs. Jameson had an engagement to dinner at half past six, so that we could go but a little farther along this most interesting road, the borders of which are strewn with broken marbles; fragments of capitals, and nameless rubbish that once was beautiful. Methinks the Appian Way should be the only entrance to Rome,--through an avenue of tombs. The day had been cloudy, chill, and windy, but was now grown calmer and more genial, and brightened by a very pleasant sunshine, though great dark clouds were still lumbering up the sky. We drove homeward, looking at the distant dome of St. Peter's and talking of many things,--painting, sculpture, America, England, spiritualism, and whatever else came up. She is a very sensible old lady, and sees a great deal of truth; a good woman, too, taking elevated views of matters; but I doubt whether she has the highest and finest perceptions in the world. At any rate, she pronounced a good judgment on the American sculptors now in Rome, condemning them in the mass as men with no high aims, no worthy conception of the purposes of their art, and desecrating marble by the things they wrought in it. William Story, I presume, is not to be included in this censure, as she had spoken highly of his sculpturesque faculty in our previous conversation. On my part, I suggested that the English sculptors were little or nothing better than our own, to which she acceded generally, but said that Gibson had produced works equal to the antique,--which I did not dispute, but still questioned whether the world needed Gibson, or was any the better for him. We had a great dispute about the propriety of adopting the costume of the day in modern sculpture, and I contended that either the art ought to be given up (which possibly would be the best course), or else should be used for idealizing the man of the day to himself; and that, as Nature makes us sensible of the fact when men and women are graceful, beautiful, and noble, through whatever costume they wear, so it ought to be the test of the sculptor's genius that he should do the same. Mrs. Jameson decidedly objected to buttons, breeches, and all other items of modern costume; and, indeed, they do degrade the marble, and make high sculpture utterly impossible. Then let the art perish as one that the world has done with, as it has done with many other beautiful things that belonged to an earlier time. It was long past the hour of Mrs. Jameson's dinner engagement when we drove up to her door in the Via Ripetta. I bade her farewell with much good-feeling on my own side, and, I hope, on hers, excusing myself, however, from keeping the previous engagement to spend the evening with her, for, in point of fact, we had mutually had enough of one another for the time being. I am glad to record that she expressed a very favorable opinion of our friend Mr. Thompson's pictures. May 12th.--To-day we have been to the Villa Albani, to which we had a ticket of admission through the agency of Mr. Cass (the American Minister). We set out between ten and eleven o'clock, and walked through the Via Felice, the Piazza Barberini, and a long, heavy, dusty range of streets beyond, to the Porta Salara, whence the road extends, white and sunny, between two high blank walls to the gate of the villa, which is at no great distance. We were admitted by a girl, and went first to the casino, along an aisle of overshadowing trees, the branches of which met above our heads. In the portico of the casino, which extends along its whole front, there are many busts and statues, and, among them, one of Julius Caesar, representing him at an earlier period of life than others which I have seen. His aspect is not particularly impressive; there is a lack of chin, though not so much as in the older statues and busts. Within the edifice there is a large hall, not so brilliant, perhaps, with frescos and gilding as those at the Villa Borghese, but lined with the most beautiful variety of marbles. But, in fact, each new splendor of this sort outshines the last, and unless we could pass from one to another all in the same suite, we cannot remember them well enough to compare the Borghese with the Albani, the effect being more on the fancy than on the intellect. I do not recall any of the sculpture, except a colossal bas-relief of Antinous, crowned with flowers, and holding flowers in his hand, which was found in the ruins of Hadrian's Villa. This is said to be the finest relic of antiquity next to the Apollo and the Laocoon; but I could not feel it to be so, partly, I suppose, because the features of Autinous do not seem to me beautiful in themselves; and that heavy, downward look is repeated till I am more weary of it than of anything else in sculpture. We went up stairs and down stairs, and saw a good many beautiful things, but none, perhaps, of the very best and beautifullest; and second-rate statues, with the corroded surface of old marble that has been dozens of centuries under the ground, depress the spirits of the beholder. The bas-relief of Antinous has at least the merit of being almost as white and fresh, and quite as smooth, as if it had never been buried and dug up again. The real treasures of this villa, to the number of nearly three hundred, were removed to Paris by Napoleon, and, except the Antinous, not one of them ever came back. There are some pictures in one or two of the rooms, and among them I recollect one by Perugino, in which is a St. Michael, very devout and very beautiful; indeed, the whole picture (which is in compartments, representing the three principal points of the Saviour's history) impresses the beholder as being painted devoutly and earnestly by a religious man. In one of the rooms there is a small bronze Apollo, supposed by Winckelmann to be an original of Praxiteles; but I could not make myself in the least sensible of its merit. The rest of the things in the casino I shall pass over, as also those in the coffee-house,--an edifice which stands a hundred yards or more from the casino, with an ornamental garden, laid out in walks and flower-plats between. The coffee-house has a semicircular sweep of porch with a good many statues and busts beneath it, chiefly of distinguished Romans. In this building, as in the casino, there are curious mosaics, large vases of rare marble, and many other things worth long pauses of admiration; but I think that we were all happier when we had done with the works of art, and were at leisure to ramble about the grounds. The Villa Albani itself is an edifice separate from both the coffee-house and casino, and is not opened to strangers. It rises, palace-like, in the midst of the garden, and, it is to be hoped, has some possibility of comfort amidst its splendors.--Comfort, however, would be thrown away upon it; for besides that the site shares the curse that has fallen upon every pleasant place in the vicinity of Rome, . . . . it really has no occupant except the servants who take care of it. The Count of Castelbarco, its present proprietor, resides at Milan. The grounds are laid out in the old fashion of straight paths, with borders of box, which form hedges of great height and density, and as even as a brick wall at the top and sides. There are also alleys forming long vistas between the trunks and beneath the boughs of oaks, ilexes, and olives; and there are shrubberies and tangled wildernesses of palm, cactus, rhododendron, and I know not what; and a profusion of roses that bloom and wither with nobody to pluck and few to look at them. They climb about the sculpture of fountains, rear themselves against pillars and porticos, run brimming over the walls, and strew the path with their falling leaves. We stole a few, and feel that we have wronged our consciences in not stealing more. In one part of the grounds we saw a field actually ablaze with scarlet poppies. There are great lagunas; fountains presided over by naiads, who squirt their little jets into basins; sunny lawns; a temple, so artificially ruined that we half believed it a veritable antique; and at its base a reservoir of water, in which stone swans seemed positively to float; groves of cypress; balustrades and broad flights of stone stairs, descending to lower levels of the garden; beauty, peace, sunshine, and antique repose on every side; and far in the distance the blue hills that encircle the campagna of Rome. The day was very fine for our purpose; cheerful, but not too bright, and tempered by a breeze that seemed even a little too cool when we sat long in the shade. We enjoyed it till three o'clock. . . . At the Capitol there is a sarcophagus with a most beautiful bas-relief of the discovery of Achilles by Ulysses, in which there is even an expression of mirth on the faces of many of the spectators. And to-day at the Albani a sarcophagus was ornamented with the nuptials of Peleus and Thetis. Death strides behind every man, to be sure, at more or less distance, and, sooner or later, enters upon any event of his life; so that, in this point of view, they might each and all serve for bas-reliefs on a sarcophagus; but the Romans seem to have treated Death as lightly and playfully as they could, and tried to cover his dart with flowers, because they hated it so much. May 15th.--My wife and I went yesterday to the Sistine Chapel, it being my first visit. It is a room of noble proportions, lofty and long, though divided in the midst by a screen or partition of white marble, which rises high enough to break the effect of spacious unity. There are six arched windows on each side of the chapel, throwing down their light from the height of the walls, with as much as twenty feet of space (more I should think) between them and the floor. The entire walls and ceiling of this stately chapel are covered with paintings in fresco, except the space about ten feet in height from the floor, and that portion was intended to be adorned by tapestries from pictures by Raphael, but, the design being prevented by his premature death, the projected tapestries have no better substitute than paper-hangings. The roof, which is flat at top, and coved or vaulted at the sides, is painted in compartments by Michael Angelo, with frescos representing the whole progress of the world and of mankind from its first formation by the Almighty . . . . till after the flood. On one of the sides of the chapel are pictures by Perugino, and other old masters, of subsequent events in sacred history; and the entire wall behind the altar, a vast expanse from the ceiling to the floor, is taken up with Michael Angelo's summing up of the world's history and destinies in his "Last Judgment." There can be no doubt that while these frescos continued in their perfection, there was nothing else to be compared with the magnificent and solemn beauty of this chapel. Enough of ruined splendor still remains to convince the spectator of all that has departed; but methinks I have seen hardly anything else so forlorn and depressing as it is now, all dusky and dim, even the very lights having passed into shadows, and the shadows into utter blackness; so that it needs a sunshiny day, under the bright Italian heavens, to make the designs perceptible at all. As we sat in the chapel there were clouds flitting across the sky; when the clouds came the pictures vanished; when the sunshine broke forth the figures sadly glimmered into something like visibility,--the Almighty moving in chaos,--the noble shape of Adam, the beautiful Eve; and, beneath where the roof curves, the mighty figures of sibyls and prophets, looking as if they were necessarily so gigantic because the thought within them was so massive. In the "Last Judgment" the scene of the greater part of the picture lies in the upper sky, the blue of which glows through betwixt the groups of naked figures; and above sits Jesus, not looking in the least like the Saviour of the world, but, with uplifted arm, denouncing eternal misery on those whom he came to save. I fear I am myself among the wicked, for I found myself inevitably taking their part, and asking for at least a little pity, some few regrets, and not such a stern denunciatory spirit on the part of Him who had thought us worth dying for. Around him stand grim saints, and, far beneath, people are getting up sleepily out of their graves, not well knowing what is about to happen; many of them, however, finding themselves clutched by demons before they are half awake. It would be a very terrible picture to one who should really see Jesus, the Saviour, in that inexorable judge; but it seems to me very undesirable that he should ever be represented in that aspect, when it is so essential to our religion to believe him infinitely kinder and better towards us than we deserve. At the last day--I presume, that is, in all future days, when we see ourselves as we are--man's only inexorable judge will be himself, and the punishment of his sins will be the perception of them. In the lower corner of this great picture, at the right hand of the spectator, is a hideous figure of a damned person, girdled about with a serpent, the folds of which are carefully knotted between his thighs, so as, at all events, to give no offence to decency. This figure represents a man who suggested to Pope Paul III. that the nudities of the "Last Judgment" ought to be draped, for which offence Michael Angelo at once consigned him to hell. It shows what a debtor's prison and dungeon of private torment men would make of hell if they had the control of it. As to the nudities, if they were ever more nude than now, I should suppose, in their fresh brilliancy, they might well have startled a not very squeamish eye. The effect, such as it is, of this picture, is much injured by the high altar and its canopy, which stands close against the wall, and intercepts a considerable portion of the sprawl of nakedness with which Michael Angelo has filled his sky. However, I am not unwilling to believe, with faith beyond what I can actually see, that the greatest pictorial miracles ever yet achieved have been wrought upon the walls and ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. In the afternoon I went with Mr. Thompson to see what bargain could be made with vetturinos for taking myself and family to Florence. We talked with three or four, and found them asking prices of various enormity, from a hundred and fifty scudi down to little more than ninety; but Mr. Thompson says that they always begin in this way, and will probably come down to somewhere about seventy-five. Mr. Thompson took me into the Via Portoghese, and showed me an old palace, above which rose--not a very customary feature of the architecture of Rome--a tall, battlemented tower. At one angle of the tower we saw a shrine of the Virgin, with a lamp, and all the appendages of those numerous shrines which we see at the street-corners, and in hundreds of places about the city. Three or four centuries ago, this palace was inhabited by a nobleman who had an only son and a large pet monkey, and one day the monkey caught the infant up and clambered to this lofty turret, and sat there with him in his arms grinning and chattering like the Devil himself. The father was in despair, but was afraid to pursue the monkey lest he should fling down the child from the height of the tower and make his escape. At last he vowed that if the boy were safely restored to him he would build a shrine at the summit of the tower, and cause it to be kept as a sacred place forever. By and by the monkey came down and deposited the child on the ground; the father fulfilled his vow, built the shrine, and made it obligatory, on all future possessors of the palace to keep the lamp burning before it. Centuries have passed, the property has changed hands; but still there is the shrine on the giddy top of the tower, far aloft over the street, on the very spot where the monkey sat, and there burns the lamp, in memory of the father's vow. This being the tenure by which the estate is held, the extinguishment of that flame might yet turn the present owner out of the palace. May 21st.--Mamma and I went, yesterday forenoon, to the Spada Palace, which we found among the intricacies of Central Rome; a dark and massive old edifice, built around a court, the fronts giving on which are adorned with statues in niches, and sculptured ornaments. A woman led us up a staircase, and ushered us into a great gloomy hall, square and lofty, and wearing a very gray and ancient aspect, its walls being painted in chiaroscuro, apparently a great many years ago. The hall was lighted by small windows, high upward from the floors, and admitting only a dusky light. The only furniture or ornament, so far as I recollect, was the colossal statue of Pompey, which stands on its pedestal at one side, certainly the sternest and severest of figures, and producing the most awful impression on the spectator. Much of the effect, no doubt, is due to the sombre obscurity of the hall, and to the loneliness in which the great naked statue stands. It is entirely nude, except for a cloak that hangs down from the left shoulder; in the left hand, it holds a globe; the right arm is extended. The whole expression is such as the statue might have assumed, if, during the tumult of Caesar's murder, it had stretched forth its marble hand, and motioned the conspirators to give over the attack, or to be quiet, now that their victim had fallen at its feet. On the left leg, about midway above the ankle, there is a dull, red stain, said to be Caesar's blood; but, of course, it is just such a red stain in the marble as may be seen on the statue of Antinous at the Capitol. I could not see any resemblance in the face of the statue to that of the bust of Pompey, shown as such at the Capitol, in which there is not the slightest moral dignity, or sign of intellectual eminence. I am glad to have seen this statue, and glad to remember it in that gray, dim, lofty hall; glad that there were no bright frescos on the walls, and that the ceiling was wrought with massive beams, and the floor paved with ancient brick. From this anteroom we passed through several saloons containing pictures, some of which were by eminent artists; the Judith of Guido, a copy of which used to weary me to death, year after year, in the Boston Athenaeum; and many portraits of Cardinals in the Spada family, and other pictures, by Guido. There were some portraits, also of the family, by Titian; some good pictures by Guercino; and many which I should have been glad to examine more at leisure; but, by and by, the custode made his appearance, and began to close the shutters, under pretence that the sunshine would injure the paintings,--an effect, I presume, not very likely to follow after two or three centuries' exposure to light, air, and whatever else might hurt them. However, the pictures seemed to be in much better condition, and more enjoyable, so far as they had merit, than those in most Roman picture-galleries; although the Spada Palace itself has a decayed and impoverished aspect, as if the family had dwindled from its former state and grandeur, and now, perhaps, smuggled itself into some out-of-the-way corner of the old edifice. If such be the case, there is something touching in their still keeping possession of Pompey's statue, which makes their house famous, and the sale of which might give them the means of building it up anew; for surely it is worth the whole sculpture-gallery of the Vatican. In the afternoon Mr. Thompson and I went, for the third or fourth time, to negotiate with vetturinos. . . . So far as I know them they are a very tricky set of people, bent on getting as much as they can, by hook or by crook, out of the unfortunate individual who falls into their hands. They begin, as I have said, by asking about twice as much as they ought to receive; and anything between this exorbitant amount and the just price is what they thank heaven for, as so much clear gain. Nevertheless, I am not quite sure that the Italians are worse than other people even in this matter. In other countries it is the custom of persons in trade to take as much as they can get from the public, fleecing one man to exactly the same extent as another; here they take what they can obtain from the individual customer. In fact, Roman tradesmen do not pretend to deny that they ask and receive different prices from different people, taxing them according to their supposed means of payment; the article supplied being the same in one case as in another. A shopkeeper looked into his books to see if we were of the class who paid two pauls, or only a paul and a half for candles; a charcoal-dealer said that seventy baiocchi was a very reasonable sum for us to pay for charcoal, and that some persons paid eighty; and Mr. Thompson, recognizing the rule, told the old vetturino that "a hundred and fifty scudi was a very proper charge for carrying a prince to Florence, but not for carrying me, who was merely a very good artist." The result is well enough; the rich man lives expensively, and pays a larger share of the profits which people of a different system of trade-morality would take equally from the poor man. The effect on the conscience of the vetturino, however, and of tradesmen of all kinds, cannot be good; their only intent being, not to do justice between man and man, but to go as deep as they can into all pockets, and to the very bottom of some. We had nearly concluded a bargain, a day or two ago, with a vetturino to take or send us to Florence, via Perugia, in eight days, for a hundred scudi; but he now drew back, under pretence of having misunderstood the terms, though, in reality, no doubt, he was in hopes of getting a better bargain from somebody else. We made an agreement with another man, whom Mr. Thompson knows and highly recommends, and immediately made it sure and legally binding by exchanging a formal written contract, in which everything is set down, even to milk, butter, bread, eggs, and coffee, which we are to have for breakfast; the vetturino being to pay every expense for himself, his horses, and his passengers, and include it within ninety-five scudi, and five crowns in addition for buon-mano. . . . . May 22d.--Yesterday, while we were at dinner, Mr. ------ called. I never saw him but once before, and that was at the door of our little red cottage in Lenox; he sitting in a wagon with one or two of the Sedgewicks, merely exchanging a greeting with me from under the brim of his straw hat, and driving on. He presented himself now with a long white beard, such as a palmer might have worn as the growth of his long pilgrimages, a brow almost entirely bald, and what hair he has quite hoary; a forehead impending, yet not massive; dark, bushy eyebrows and keen eyes, without much softness in them; a dark and sallow complexion; a slender figure, bent a little with age; but at once alert and infirm. It surprised me to see him so venerable; for, as poets are Apollo's kinsmen, we are inclined to attribute to them his enviable quality of never growing old. There was a weary look in his face, as if he were tired of seeing things and doing things, though with certainly enough still to see and do, if need were. My family gathered about him, and he conversed with great readiness and simplicity about his travels, and whatever other subject came up; telling us that he had been abroad five times, and was now getting a little home-sick, and had no more eagerness for sights, though his "gals" (as he called his daughter and another young lady) dragged him out to see the wonders of Rome again. His manners and whole aspect are very particularly plain, though not affectedly so; but it seems as if in the decline of life, and the security of his position, he had put off whatever artificial polish he may have heretofore had, and resumed the simpler habits and deportment of his early New England breeding. Not but what you discover, nevertheless, that he is a man of refinement, who has seen the world, and is well aware of his own place in it. He spoke with great pleasure of his recent visit to Spain. I introduced the subject of Kansas, and methought his face forthwith assumed something of the bitter keenness of the editor of a political newspaper, while speaking of the triumph of the administration over the Free-Soil opposition. I inquired whether he had seen S------, and he gave a very sad account of him as he appeared at their last meeting, which was in Paris. S------, he thought, had suffered terribly, and would never again be the man he was; he was getting fat; he talked continually of himself, and of trifles concerning himself, and seemed to have no interest for other matters; and Mr. ------ feared that the shock upon his nerves had extended to his intellect, and was irremediable. He said that S------ ought to retire from public life, but had no friend true enough to tell him so. This is about as sad as anything can be. I hate to have S------ undergo the fate of a martyr, because he was not naturally of the stuff that martyrs are made of, and it is altogether by mistake that he has thrust himself into the position of one. He was merely, though with excellent abilities, one of the best of fellows, and ought to have lived and died in good fellowship with all the world. S------ was not in the least degree excited about this or any other subject. He uttered neither passion nor poetry, but excellent good sense, and accurate information on whatever subject transpired; a very pleasant man to associate with, but rather cold, I should imagine, if one should seek to touch his heart with one's own. He shook hands kindly all round, but not with any warmth of gripe; although the ease of his deportment had put us all on sociable terms with him. At seven o'clock we went by invitation to take tea with Miss Bremer. After much search, and lumbering painfully up two or three staircases in vain, and at last going about in a strange circuity, we found her in a small chamber of a large old building, situated a little way from the brow of the Tarpeian Rock. It was the tiniest and humblest domicile that I have seen in Rome, just large enough to hold her narrow bed, her tea-table, and a table covered with books,--photographs of Roman ruins, and some pages written by herself. I wonder whether she be poor. Probably so; for she told us that her expense of living here is only five pauls a day. She welcomed us, however, with the greatest cordiality and lady-like simplicity, making no allusion to the humbleness of her environment (and making us also lose sight of it, by the absence of all apology) any more than if she were receiving us in a palace. There is not a better bred woman; and yet one does not think whether she has any breeding or no. Her little bit of a round table was already spread for us with her blue earthenware teacups; and after she had got through an interview with the Swedish Minister, and dismissed him with a hearty pressure of his hand between both her own, she gave us our tea, and some bread, and a mouthful of cake. Meanwhile, as the day declined, there had been the most beautiful view over the campagna, out of one of her windows; and, from the other, looking towards St. Peter's, the broad gleam of a mildly glorious sunset; not so pompous and magnificent as many that I have seen in America, but softer and sweeter in all its changes. As its lovely hues died slowly away, the half-moon shone out brighter and brighter; for there was not a cloud in the sky, and it seemed like the moonlight of my younger days. In the garden, beneath her window, verging upon the Tarpeian Rock, there was shrubbery and one large tree, softening the brow of the famous precipice, adown which the old Romans used to fling their traitors, or sometimes, indeed, their patriots. Miss Bremer talked plentifully in her strange manner,--good English enough for a foreigner, but so oddly intonated and accented, that it is impossible to be sure of more than one word in ten. Being so little comprehensible, it is very singular how she contrives to make her auditors so perfectly certain, as they are, that she is talking the best sense, and in the kindliest spirit. There is no better heart than hers, and not many sounder heads; and a little touch of sentiment comes delightfully in, mixed up with a quick and delicate humor and the most perfect simplicity. There is also a very pleasant atmosphere of maidenhood about her; we are sensible of a freshness and odor of the morning still in this little withered rose,--its recompense for never having been gathered and worn, but only diffusing fragrance on its stem. I forget mainly what we talked about,--a good deal about art, of course, although that is a subject of which Miss Bremer evidently knows nothing. Once we spoke of fleas,--insects that, in Rome, come home to everybody's business and bosom, and are so common and inevitable, that no delicacy is felt about alluding to the sufferings they inflict. Poor little Miss Bremer was tormented with one while turning out our tea. . . . She talked, among other things, of the winters in Sweden, and said that she liked them, long and severe as they are; and this made me feel ashamed of dreading the winters of New England, as I did before coming from home, and do now still more, after five or six mild English Decembers. By and by, two young ladies came in,--Miss Bremen's neighbors, it seemed,--fresh from a long walk on the campagna, fresh and weary at the same time. One apparently was German, and the other French, and they brought her an offering of flowers, and chattered to her with affectionate vivacity; and, as we were about taking leave, Miss Bremer asked them to accompany her and us on a visit to the edge of the Tarpeian Rock. Before we left the room, she took a bunch of roses that were in a vase, and gave them to Miss Shepard, who told her that she should make her six sisters happy by giving one to each. Then we went down the intricate stairs, and, emerging into the garden, walked round the brow of the hill, which plunges headlong with exceeding abruptness; but, so far as I could see in the moonlight, is no longer quite a precipice. Then we re-entered the house, and went up stairs and down again, through intricate passages, till we got into the street, which was still peopled with the ragamuffins who infest and burrow in that part of Rome. We returned through an archway, and descended the broad flight of steps into the piazza of the Capitol; and from the extremity of it, just at the head of the long graded way, where Castor and Pollux and the old milestones stand, we turned to the left, and followed a somewhat winding path, till we came into the court of a palace. This court is bordered by a parapet, leaning over which we saw the sheer precipice of the Tarpeian Rock, about the height of a four-story house. . . . On the edge of this, before we left the court, Miss Bremer bade us farewell, kissing my wife most affectionately on each cheek, . . . . and then turning towards myself, . . . . she pressed my hand, and we parted, probably never to meet again. God bless her good heart! . . . . She is a most amiable little woman, worthy to be the maiden aunt of the whole human race. I suspect, by the by, that she does not like me half so well as I do her; it is my impression that she thinks me unamiable, or that there is something or other not quite right about me. I am sorry if it be so, because such a good, kindly, clear-sighted, and delicate person is very apt to have reason at the bottom of her harsh thoughts, when, in rare cases, she allows them to harbor with her. To-day, and for some days past, we have been in quest of lodgings for next winter; a weary search, up interminable staircases, which seduce us upward to no successful result. It is very disheartening not to be able to place the slightest reliance on the integrity of the people we are to deal with; not to believe in any connection between their words and their purposes; to know that they are certainly telling you falsehoods, while you are not in a position to catch hold of the lie, and hold it up in their faces. This afternoon we called on Mr. and Mrs. ------ at the Hotel de l'Europe, but found only the former at home. We had a pleasant visit, but I made no observations of his character save such as I have already sufficiently recorded; and when we had been with him a little while, Mrs. Chapman, the artist's wife, Mr. Terry, and my friend, Mr. Thompson, came in. ------ received them all with the same good degree of cordiality that he did ourselves, not cold, not very warm, not annoyed, not ecstatically delighted; a man, I should suppose, not likely to have ardent individual preferences, though perhaps capable of stern individual dislikes. But I take him, at all events, to be a very upright man, and pursuing a narrow track of integrity; he is a man whom I would never forgive (as I would a thousand other men) for the slightest moral delinquency. I would not be bound to say, however, that he has not the little sin of a fretful and peevish habit; and yet perhaps I am a sinner myself for thinking so. May 23d.--This morning I breakfasted at William Story's, and met there Mr. Bryant, Mr. T------ (an English gentleman), Mr. and Mrs. Apthorp, Miss Hosmer, and one or two other ladies. Bryant was very quiet, and made no conversation audible to the general table. Mr. T------ talked of English politics and public men; the "Times" and other newspapers, English clubs and social habits generally; topics in which I could well enough bear my part of the discussion. After breakfast, and aside from the ladies, he mentioned an illustration of Lord Ellenborough's lack of administrative ability,--a proposal seriously made by his lordship in reference to the refractory Sepoys. . . . We had a very pleasant breakfast, and certainly a breakfast is much preferable to a dinner, not merely in the enjoyment, while it is passing, but afterwards. I made a good suggestion to Miss Hosmer for the design of a fountain,--a lady bursting into tears, water gushing from a thousand pores, in literal translation of the phrase; and to call the statue "Niobe, all Tears." I doubt whether she adopts the idea; but Bernini would have been delighted with it. I should think the gush of water might be so arranged as to form a beautiful drapery about the figure, swaying and fluttering with every breath of wind, and rearranging itself in the calm; in which case, the lady might be said to have "a habit of weeping." . . . . Apart, with William Story, he and I talked of the unluckiness of Friday, etc. I like him particularly well. . . . We have been plagued to-day with our preparations for leaving Rome to-morrow, and especially with verifying the inventory of furniture, before giving up the house to our landlord. He and his daughter have been examining every separate article, down even to the kitchen skewers, I believe, and charging us to the amount of several scudi for cracks and breakages, which very probably existed when we came into possession. It is very uncomfortable to have dealings with such a mean people (though our landlord is German),--mean in their business transactions; mean even in their beggary; for the beggars seldom ask for more than a mezzo baioccho, though they sometimes grumble when you suit your gratuity exactly to their petition. It is pleasant to record that the Italians have great faith in the honor of the English and Americans, and never hesitate to trust entire strangers, to any reasonable extent, on the strength of their being of the honest Anglo-Saxon race. This evening, U---- and I took a farewell walk in the Pincian Gardens to see the sunset; and found them crowded with people, promenading and listening to the music of the French baud. It was the feast of Whitsunday, which probably brought a greater throng than usual abroad. When the sun went down, we descended into the Piazza del Popolo, and thence into the Via Ripetta, and emerged through a gate to the shore of the Tiber, along which there is a pleasant walk beneath a grove of trees. We traversed it once and back again, looking at the rapid river, which still kept its mud-puddly aspect even in the clear twilight, and beneath the brightening moon. The great bell of St. Peter's tolled with a deep boom, a grand and solemn sound; the moon gleamed through the branches of the trees above us; and U---- spoke with somewhat alarming fervor of her love for Rome, and regret at leaving it. We shall have done the child no good office in bringing her here, if the rest of her life is to be a dream of this "city of the soul," and an unsatisfied yearning to come back to it. On the other hand, nothing elevating and refining can be really injurious, and so I hope she will always be the better for Rome, even if her life should be spent where there are no pictures, no statues, nothing but the dryness and meagreness of a New England village. JOURNEY TO FLORENCE. Civita Castellana, May 24th.--We left Rome this morning, after troubles of various kinds, and a dispute in the first place with Lalla, our female servant, and her mother. . . . Mother and daughter exploded into a livid rage, and cursed us plentifully,--wishing that we might never come to our journey's end, and that we might all break our necks or die of apoplexy,--the most awful curse that an Italian knows how to invoke upon his enemies, because it precludes the possibility of extreme unction. However, as we are heretics, and certain of damnation therefore, anyhow, it does not much matter to us; and also the anathemas may have been blown back upon those who invoked them, like the curses that were flung out from the balcony of St Peter's during Holy Week and wafted by heaven's breezes right into the faces of some priests who stood near the pope. Next we had a disagreement, with two men who brought down our luggage, and put it on the vettura; . . . . and, lastly, we were infested with beggars, who hung round the carriages with doleful petitions, till we began to move away; but the previous warfare had put me into too stern a mood for almsgiving, so that they also were doubtless inclined to curse more than to bless, and I am persuaded that we drove off under a perfect shower of anathemas. We passed through the Porta del Popolo at about eight o'clock; and after a moment's delay, while the passport was examined, began our journey along the Flaminian Way, between two such high and inhospitable walls of brick or stone as seem to shut in all the avenues to Rome. We had not gone far before we heard military music in advance of us, and saw the road blocked up with people, and then the glitter of muskets, and soon appeared the drummers, fifers, and trumpeters, and then the first battalion of a French regiment, marching into the city, with two mounted officers at their head; then appeared a second and then a third battalion, the whole seeming to make almost an army, though the number on their caps showed them all to belong to one regiment,--the 1st; then came a battery of artillery, then a detachment of horse,--these last, by the crossed keys on their helmets, being apparently papal troops. All were young, fresh, good-looking men, in excellent trim as to uniform and equipments, and marched rather as if they were setting out on a campaign than returning from it; the fact being, I believe, that they have been encamped or in barracks within a few miles of the city. Nevertheless, it reminded me of the military processions of various kinds which so often, two thousand years ago and more, entered Rome over the Flaminian Way, and over all the roads that led to the famous city,--triumphs oftenest, but sometimes the downcast train of a defeated army, like those who retreated before Hannibal. On the whole, I was not sorry to see the Gauls still pouring into Rome; but yet I begin to find that I have a strange affection for it, and so did we all,--the rest of the family in a greater degree than myself even. It is very singular, the sad embrace with which Rome takes possession of the soul. Though we intend to return in a few months, and for a longer residence than this has been, yet we felt the city pulling at our heartstrings far more than London did, where we shall probably never spend much time again. It may be because the intellect finds a home there more than in any other spot in the world, and wins the heart to stay with it, in spite of a good many things strewn all about to disgust us. The road in the earlier part of the way was not particularly picturesque,--the country undulated, but scarcely rose into hills, and was destitute of trees; there were a few shapeless ruins, too indistinct for us to make out whether they were Roman or mediaeval. Nothing struck one so much, in the forenoon, as the spectacle of a peasant-woman riding on horseback as if she were a man. The houses were few, and those of a dreary aspect, built of gray stone, and looking bare and desolate, with not the slightest promise of comfort within doors. We passed two or three locandas or inns, and finally came to the village (if village it were, for I remember no houses except our osteria) of Castel Nuovo di Porta, where we were to take a dejeuner a la fourchette, which was put upon the table between twelve and one. On this journey, according to the custom of travellers in Italy, we pay the vetturino a certain sum, and live at his expense; and this meal was the first specimen of his catering on our behalf. It consisted of a beefsteak, rather dry and hard, but not unpalatable, and a large omelette; and for beverage, two quart bottles of red wine, which, being tasted, had an agreeable acid flavor. . . . The locanda was built of stone, and had what looked like an old Roman altar in the basement-hall, and a shrine, with a lamp before it, on the staircase; and the large public saloon in which we ate had a brick floor, a ceiling with cross-beams, meagrely painted in fresco, and a scanty supply of chairs and settees. After lunch, we wandered out into a valley or ravine near the house, where we gathered some flowers, and J----- found a nest with the young birds in it, which, however, he put back into the bush whence he took it. Our afternoon drive was more picturesque and noteworthy. Soracte rose before us, bulging up quite abruptly out of the plain, and keeping itself entirely distinct from a whole horizon of hills. Byron well compares it to a wave just on the bend, and about to break over towards the spectator. As we approached it nearer and nearer, it looked like the barrenest great rock that ever protruded out of the substance of the earth, with scarcely a strip or a spot of verdure upon its steep and gray declivities. The road kept trending towards the mountain, following the line of the old Flaminian Way, which we could see, at frequent intervals, close beside the modern track. It is paved with large flag-stones, laid so accurately together, that it is still, in some places, as smooth and even as the floor of a church; and everywhere the tufts of grass find it difficult to root themselves into the interstices. Its course is straighter than that of the road of to-day, which often turns aside to avoid obstacles which the ancient one surmounted. Much of it, probably, is covered with the soil and overgrowth deposited in later years; and, now and then, we could see its flag-stones partly protruding from the bank through which our road has been cut, and thus showing that the thickness of this massive pavement was more than a foot of solid stone. We lost it over and over again; but still it reappeared, now on one side of us, now on the other; perhaps from beneath the roots of old trees, or the pasture-land of a thousand years old, and leading on towards the base of Soracte. I forget where we finally lost it. Passing through a town called Rignano, we found it dressed out in festivity, with festoons of foliage along both sides of the street, which ran beneath a triumphal arch, bearing an inscription in honor of a ducal personage of the Massimi family. I know no occasion for the feast, except that it is Whitsuntide. The town was thronged with peasants, in their best attire, and we met others on their way thither, particularly women and girls, with heads bare in the sunshine; but there was no tiptoe jollity, nor, indeed, any more show of festivity than I have seen in my own country at a cattle-show or muster. Really, I think, not half so much. The road still grew more and more picturesque, and now lay along ridges, at the bases of which were deep ravines and hollow valleys. Woods were not wanting; wilder forests than I have seen since leaving America, of oak-trees chiefly; and, among the green foliage, grew golden tufts of broom, making a gay and lovely combination of hues. I must not forget to mention the poppies, which burned like live coals along the wayside, and lit up the landscape, even a single one of them, with wonderful effect. At other points, we saw olive-trees, hiding their eccentricity of boughs under thick masses of foliage of a livid tint, which is caused, I believe, by their turning their reverse sides to the light and to the spectator. Vines were abundant, but were of little account in the scene. By and by we came in sight, of the high, flat table-land, on which stands Civita Castellana, and beheld, straight downward, between us and the town, a deep level valley with a river winding through it; it was the valley of the Treja. A precipice, hundreds of feet in height, falls perpendicularly upon the valley, from the site of Civita Castellana; there is an equally abrupt one, probably, on the side from which we saw it; and a modern road, skilfully constructed, goes winding down to the stream, crosses it by a narrow stone bridge, and winds upward into the town. After passing over the bridge, I alighted, with J----- and R-----, . . . . and made the ascent on foot, along walls of natural rock, in which old Etruscan tombs were hollowed out. There are likewise antique remains of masonry, whether Roman or of what earlier period, I cannot tell. At the summit of the acclivity, which brought us close to the town, our vetturino took us into the carriage again and quickly brought us to what appears to be really a good hotel, where all of us are accommodated with sleeping-chambers in a range, beneath an arcade, entirely secluded from the rest of the population of the hotel. After a splendid dinner (that is, splendid, considering that it was ordered by our hospitable vetturino), U----, Miss Shepard, J-----, and I walked out of the little town, in the opposite direction from our entrance, and crossed a bridge at the height of the table-land, instead of at its base. On either side, we had a view down into a profound gulf, with sides of precipitous rock, and heaps of foliage in its lap, through which ran the snowy track of a stream; here snowy, there dark; here hidden among the foliage, there quite revealed in the broad depths of the gulf. This was wonderfully fine. Walking on a little farther, Soracte came fully into view, starting with bold abruptness out of the middle of the country; and before we got back, the bright Italian moon was throwing a shower of silver over the scene, and making it so beautiful that it seemed miserable not to know how to put it into words; a foolish thought, however, for such scenes are an expression in themselves, and need not be translated into any feebler language. On our walk we met parties of laborers, both men and women, returning from the fields, with rakes and wooden forks over their shoulders, singing in chorus. It is very customary for women to be laboring in the fields. TO TERNI.--BORGHETTO. May 25th.--We were aroused at four o'clock this morning; had some eggs and coffee, and were ready to start between five and six; being thus matutinary, in order to get to Terni in time to see the falls. The road was very striking and picturesque; but I remember nothing particularly, till we came to Borghetto, which stands on a bluff, with a broad valley sweeping round it, through the midst of which flows the Tiber. There is an old castle on a projecting point; and we saw other battlemented fortresses, of mediaeval date, along our way, forming more beautiful ruins than any of the Roman remains to which we have become accustomed. This is partly, I suppose, owing to the fact that they have been neglected, and allowed to mantle their decay with ivy, instead of being cleaned, propped up, and restored. The antiquarian is apt to spoil the objects that interest him. Sometimes we passed through wildernesses of various trees, each contributing a different hue of verdure to the scene; the vine, also, marrying itself to the fig-tree, so that a man might sit in the shadow of both at once, and temper the luscious sweetness of the one fruit with the fresh flavor of the other. The wayside incidents were such as meeting a man and woman borne along as prisoners, handcuffed and in a cart; two men reclining across one another, asleep, and lazily lifting their heads to gaze at us as we passed by; a woman spinning with a distaff as she walked along the road. An old tomb or tower stood in a lonely field, and several caves were hollowed in the rocks, which might have been either sepulchres or habitations. Soracte kept us company, sometimes a little on one side, sometimes behind, looming up again and again, when we thought that we had done with it, and so becoming rather tedious at last, like a person who presents himself for another and another leave-taking after the one which ought to have been final. Honeysuckles sweetened the hedges along the road. After leaving Borghetto, we crossed the broad valley of the Tiber, and skirted along one of the ridges that border it, looking back upon the road that we had passed, lying white behind us. We saw a field covered with buttercups, or some other yellow flower, and poppies burned along the roadside, as they did yesterday, and there were flowers of a delicious blue, as if the blue Italian sky had been broken into little bits, and scattered down upon the green earth. Otricoli by and by appeared, situated on a bold promontory above the valley, a village of a few gray houses and huts, with one edifice gaudily painted in white and pink. It looked more important at a distance than we found it on our nearer approach. As the road kept ascending, and as the hills grew to be mountains, we had taken two additional horses, making six in all, with a man and boy running beside them, to keep them in motion. The boy had two club feet, so inconveniently disposed that it seemed almost inevitable for him to stumble over them at every step; besides which, he seemed to tread upon his ankles, and moved with a disjointed gait, as if each of his legs and thighs had been twisted round together with his feet. Nevertheless, he had a bright, cheerful, intelligent face, and was exceedingly active, keeping up with the horses at their trot, and inciting them to better speed when they lagged. I conceived a great respect for this poor boy, who had what most Italian peasants would consider an enviable birthright in those two club feet, as giving him a sufficient excuse to live on charity, but yet took no advantage of them; on the contrary, putting his poor misshapen hoofs to such good use as might have shamed many a better provided biped. When he quitted us, he asked no alms of the travellers, but merely applied to Gaetano for some slight recompense for his well-performed service. This behavior contrasted most favorably with that of some other boys and girls, who ran begging beside the carriage door, keeping up a low, miserable murmur, like that of a kennel-stream, for a long, long way. Beggars, indeed, started up at every point, when we stopped for a moment, and whenever a hill imposed a slower pace upon us; each village had its deformity or its infirmity, offering his wretched petition at the step of the carriage; and even a venerable, white-haired patriarch, the grandfather of all the beggars, seemed to grow up by the roadside, but was left behind from inability to join in the race with his light-footed juniors. No shame is attached to begging in Italy. In fact, I rather imagine it to be held an honorable profession, inheriting some of the odor of sanctity that used to be attached to a mendicant and idle life in the days of early Christianity, when every saint lived upon Providence, and deemed it meritorious to do nothing for his support. Murray's guide-book is exceedingly vague and unsatisfactory along this route; and whenever we asked Gaetano the name of a village or a castle, he gave some one which we had never heard before, and could find nothing of in the book. We made out the river Nar, however, or what I supposed to be such, though he called it Nera. It flows through a most stupendous mountain-gorge; winding its narrow passage between high hills, the broad sides of which descend steeply upon it, covered with trees and shrubbery, that mantle a host of rocky roughnesses, and make all look smooth. Here and there a precipice juts sternly forth. We saw an old castle on a hillside, frowning down into the gorge; and farther on, the gray tower of Narni stands upon a height, imminent over the depths below, and with its battlemented castle above now converted into a prison, and therefore kept in excellent repair. A long winding street passes through Narni, broadening at one point into a market-place, where an old cathedral showed its venerable front, and the great dial of its clock, the figures on which were numbered in two semicircles of twelve points each; one, I suppose, for noon, and the other for midnight. The town has, so far as its principal street is concerned, a city-like aspect, with large, fair edifices, and shops as good as most of those at Rome, the smartness of which contrasts strikingly with the rude and lonely scenery of mountain and stream, through which we had come to reach it. We drove through Narni without stopping, and came out from it on the other side, where a broad, level valley opened before us, most unlike the wild, precipitous gorge which had brought us to the town. The road went winding down into the peaceful vale, through the midst of which flowed the same stream that cuts its way between the impending hills, as already described. We passed a monk and a soldier,--the two curses of Italy, each in his way,-- walking sociably side by side; and from Narni to Terni I remember nothing that need be recorded. Terni, like so many other towns in the neighborhood, stands in a high and commanding position, chosen doubtless for its facilities of defence, in days long before the mediaeval warfares of Italy made such sites desirable. I suppose that, like Narni and Otricoli, it was a city of the Umbrians. We reached it between eleven and twelve o'clock, intending to employ the afternoon on a visit to the famous falls of Terni; but, after lowering all day, it has begun to rain, and we shall probably have to give them up. Half past eight o'clock.--It has rained in torrents during the afternoon, and we have not seen the cascade of Terni; considerably to my regret, for I think I felt the more interest in seeing it, on account of its being artificial. Methinks nothing was more characteristic of the energy and determination of the old Romans, than thus to take a river, which they wished to be rid of, and fling it over a giddy precipice, breaking it into ten million pieces by the fall. . . . We are in the Hotel delle tre Colonne, and find it reasonably good, though not, so far as we are concerned, justifying the rapturous commendations of previous tourists, who probably travelled at their own charges. However, there is nothing really to be complained of, either in our accommodations or table, and the only wonder is how Gaetano contrives to get any profit out of our contract, since the hotel bills would alone cost us more than we pay him for the journey and all. It is worth while to record as history of vetturino commissary customs, that for breakfast this morning we had coffee, eggs, and bread and butter; for lunch an omelette, some stewed veal, and a dessert of figs and grapes, besides two decanters of a light-colored acid wine, tasting very like indifferent cider; for dinner, an excellent vermicelli soup, two young fowls, fricasseed, and a hind quarter of roast lamb, with fritters, oranges, and figs, and two more decanters of the wine aforesaid. This hotel is an edifice with a gloomy front upon a narrow street, and enterable through an arch, which admits you into an enclosed court; around the court, on each story, run the galleries, with which the parlors and sleeping-apartments communicate. The whole house is dingy, probably old, and seems not very clean; but yet bears traces of former magnificence; for instance, in our bedroom, the door of which is ornamented with gilding, and the cornices with frescos, some of which appear to represent the cascade of Terni, the roof is crossed with carved beams, and is painted in the interstices; the floor has a carpet, but rough tiles underneath it, which show themselves at the margin. The windows admit the wind; the door shuts so loosely as to leave great cracks; and, during the rain to-day, there was a heavy shower through our ceiling, which made a flood upon the carpet. We see no chambermaids; nothing of the comfort and neatness of an English hotel, nor of the smart splendors of an American one; but still this dilapidated palace affords us a better shelter than I expected to find in the decayed country towns of Italy. In the album of the hotel I find the names of more English travellers than of any other nation except the Americans, who, I think, even exceed the former; and, the route being the favorite one for tourists between Rome and Florence, whatever merit the inns have is probably owing to the demands of the Anglo-Saxons. I doubt not, if we chose to pay for it, this hotel would supply us with any luxury we might ask for; and perhaps even a gorgeous saloon and state bedchamber. After dinner, J----- and I walked out in the dusk to see what we could of Terni. We found it compact and gloomy (but the latter characteristic might well enough be attributed to the dismal sky), with narrow streets, paved from wall to wall of the houses, like those of all the towns in Italy; the blocks of paving-stone larger than the little square torments of Rome. The houses are covered with dingy stucco, and mostly low, compared with those of Rome, and inhospitable as regards their dismal aspects and uninviting doorways. The streets are intricate, as well as narrow; insomuch that we quickly lost our way, and could not find it again, though the town is of so small dimensions, that we passed through it in two directions, in the course of our brief wanderings. There are no lamp-posts in Terni; and as it was growing dark, and beginning to rain again, we at last inquired of a person in the principal piazza, and found our hotel, as I expected, within two minutes' walk of where we stood. FOLIGNO. May 26th.--At six o'clock this morning, we packed ourselves into our vettura, my wife and I occupying the coupe, and drove out of the city gate of Terni. There are some old towers near it, ruins of I know not what, and care as little, in the plethora of antiquities and other interesting objects. Through the arched gateway, as we approached, we had a view of one of the great hills that surround the town, looking partly bright in the early sunshine, and partly catching the shadows of the clouds that floated about the sky. Our way was now through the Vale of Terni, as I believe it is called, where we saw somewhat of the fertility of Italy: vines trained on poles, or twining round mulberry and other trees, ranged regularly like orchards; groves of olives and fields of grain. There are interminable shrines in all sorts of situations; some under arched niches, or little penthouses, with a brick-tiled roof, just large enough to cover them; or perhaps in some bit of old Roman masonry, on the wall of a wayside inn, or in a shallow cavity of the natural rock, or high upward in the deep cuts of the road; everywhere, in short, so that nobody need be at a loss when he feels the religious sentiment stir within him. Our way soon began to wind among the hills, which rose steep and lofty from the scanty, level space that lay between; they continually thrust themselves across the passage, and appeared as if determined to shut us completely in. A great hill would put its foot right before us; but, at the last moment, would grudgingly withdraw it, and allow us just room enough to creep by. Adown their sides we discerned the dry beds of mountain torrents, which had lived too fierce a life to let it be a long one. On here and there a hillside or promontory we saw a ruined castle or a convent, looking from its commanding height upon the road, which very likely some robber-knight had formerly infested with his banditti, retreating with his booty to the security of such strongholds. We came, once in a while, to wretched villages, where there was no token of prosperity or comfort; but perhaps there may have been more than we could appreciate, for the Italians do not seem to have any of that sort of pride which we find in New England villages, where every man, according to his taste and means, endeavors to make his homestead an ornament to the place. We miss nothing in Italy more than the neat doorsteps and pleasant porches and thresholds and delightful lawns or grass-plots, which hospitably invite the imagination into a sweet domestic interior. Everything, however sunny and luxuriant may be the scene around, is especially dreary and disheartening in the immediate vicinity of an Italian home. At Strettura (which, as the name indicates, is a very narrow part of the valley) we added two oxen to our horses, and began to ascend the Monte Somma, which, according to Murray, is nearly four thousand feet high where we crossed it. When we came to the steepest part of the ascent, Gaetano, who exercises a pretty decided control over his passengers, allowed us to walk; and we all, with one exception, alighted, and began to climb the mountain on foot. I walked on briskly, and soon left the rest of the party behind, reaching the top of the pass in such a short time that I could not believe it, and kept onward, expecting still another height to climb. But the road began to descend, winding among the depths of the hills as heretofore; now beside the dry, gravelly bed of a departed stream, now crossing it by a bridge, and perhaps passing through some other gorge, that yet gave no decided promise of an outlet into the world beyond. A glimpse might occasionally be caught, through a gap between the hill-tops, of a company of distant mountain-peaks, pyramidal, as these hills are apt to be, and resembling the camp of an army of giants. The landscape was not altogether savage; sometimes a hillside was covered with a rich field of grain, or an orchard of olive-trees, looking not unlike puffs of smoke, from the peculiar line of their foliage; but oftener there was a vast mantle of trees and shrubbery from top to bottom, the golden tufts of the broom shining out amid the verdure, and gladdening the whole. Nothing was dismal except the houses; those were always so, whether the compact, gray lines of village hovels, with a narrow street between, or the lonely farm-house, standing far apart from the road, built of stone, with window-gaps high in the wall, empty of glass; or the half-castle, half-dwelling, of which I saw a specimen or two, with what looked like a defensive rampart, drawn around its court. I saw no look of comfort anywhere; and continually, in this wild and solitary region, I met beggars, just as if I were still in the streets of Rome. Boys and girls kept beside me, till they delivered me into the hands of others like themselves; hoary grandsires and grandmothers caught a glimpse of my approach, and tottered as fast as they could to intercept me; women came out of the cottages, with rotten cherries on a plate, entreating me to buy them for a mezzo baioccho; a man, at work on the road, left his toil to beg, and was grateful for the value of a cent; in short, I was never safe from importunity, as long as there was a house or a human being in sight. We arrived at Spoleto before noon, and while our dejeuner was being prepared, looked down from the window of the inn into the narrow street beneath, which, from the throng of people in it, I judged to be the principal one: priests, papal soldiers, women with no bonnets on their heads; peasants in breeches and mushroom hats; maids and matrons, drawing water at a fountain; idlers, smoking on a bench under the window; a talk, a bustle, but no genuine activity. After lunch we walked out to see the lions of Spoleto, and found our way up a steep and narrow street that led us to the city gate, at which, it is traditionally said, Hannibal sought to force an entrance, after the battle of Thrasymene, and was repulsed. The gateway has a double arch, on the inner one of which is a tablet, recording the above tradition as an unquestioned historical fact. From the gateway we went in search of the Duomo, or cathedral, and were kindly directed thither by an officer, who was descending into the town from the citadel, which is an old castle, now converted into a prison. The cathedral seemed small, and did not much interest us, either by the Gothic front or its modernized interior. We saw nothing else in Spoleto, but went back to the inn and resumed our journey, emerging from the city into the classic valley of the Clitumnus, which we did not view under the best of auspices, because it was overcast, and the wind as chill as if it had the cast in it. The valley, though fertile, and smilingly picturesque, perhaps, is not such as I should wish to celebrate, either in prose or poetry. It is of such breadth and extent, that its frame of mountains and ridgy hills hardly serve to shut it in sufficiently, and the spectator thinks of a boundless plain, rather than of a secluded vale. After passing Le Vene, we came to the little temple which Byron describes, and which has been supposed to be the one immortalized by Pliny. It is very small, and stands on a declivity that falls immediately from the road, right upon which rises the pediment of the temple, while the columns of the other front find sufficient height to develop themselves in the lower ground. A little farther down than the base of the edifice we saw the Clitumnus, so recently from its source in the marble rock, that it was still as pure as a child's heart, and as transparent as truth itself. It looked airier than nothing, because it had not substance enough to brighten, and it was clearer than the atmosphere. I remember nothing else of the valley of Clitumnus, except that the beggars in this region of proverbial fertility are wellnigh profane in the urgency of their petitions; they absolutely fall down on their knees as you approach, in the same attitude as if they were praying to their Maker, and beseech you for alms with a fervency which I am afraid they seldom use before an altar or shrine. Being denied, they ran hastily beside the carriage, but got nothing, and finally gave over. I am so very tired and sleepy that I mean to mention nothing else to-night, except the city of Trevi, which, on the approach from Spoleto, seems completely to cover a high, peaked hill, from its pyramidal tip to its base. It was the strangest situation in which to build a town, where, I should suppose, no horse can climb, and whence no inhabitant would think of descending into the world, after the approach of age should begin to stiffen his joints. On looking back on this most picturesque of towns (which the road, of course, did not enter, as evidently no road could), I saw that the highest part of the hill was quite covered with a crown of edifices, terminating in a church-tower; while a part of the northern side was apparently too steep for building; and a cataract of houses flowed down the western and southern slopes. There seemed to be palaces, churches, everything that a city should have; but my eyes are heavy, and I can write no more about them, only that I suppose the summit of the hill was artificially tenured, so as to prevent its crumbling down, and enable it to support the platform of edifices which crowns it. May 27th.--We reached Foligno in good season yesterday afternoon. Our inn seemed ancient; and, under the same roof, on one side of the entrance, was the stable, and on the other the coach-house. The house is built round a narrow court, with a well of water at bottom, and an opening in the roof at top, whence the staircases are lighted that wind round the sides of the court, up to the highest story. Our dining-room and bedrooms were in the latter region, and were all paved with brick, and without carpets; and the characteristic of the whole was all exceeding plainness and antique clumsiness of fitting up. We found ourselves sufficiently comfortable, however; and, as has been the case throughout our journey, had a very fair and well-cooked dinner. It shows, as perhaps I have already remarked, that it is still possible to live well in Italy, at no great expense, and that the high prices charged to the forestieri at Rome and elsewhere are artificial, and ought to be abated. . . . The day had darkened since morning, and was now ominous of rain; but as soon as we were established, we sallied out to see whatever was worth looking at. A beggar-boy, with one leg, followed us, without asking for anything, apparently only for the pleasure of our company, though he kept at too great a distance for conversation, and indeed did not attempt to speak. We went first to the cathedral, which has a Gothic front, and a modernized interior, stuccoed and whitewashed, looking as neat as a New England meeting-house, and very mean, after our familiarity with the gorgeous churches in other cities. There were some pictures in the chapels, but, I believe, all modern, and I do not remember a single one of them. Next we went, without any guide, to a church attached to a convent of Dominican monks, with a Gothic exterior, and two hideous pictures of Death,--the skeleton leaning on his scythe, one on each side of the door. This church, likewise, was whitewashed, but we understood that it had been originally frescoed all over, and by famous hands; but these pictures, having become much injured, they were all obliterated, as we saw,--all, that is to say, except a few specimens of the best preserved, which were spared to show the world what the whole had been. I thanked my stars that the obliteration of the rest had taken place before our visit; for if anything is dreary and calculated to make the beholder utterly miserable, it is a faded fresco, with spots of the white plaster dotted over it. Our one-legged boy had followed us into the church and stood near the door till he saw us ready to come out, when he hurried on before us, and waited a little way off to see whither we should go. We still went on at random, taking the first turn that offered itself, and soon came to another old church,--that of St. Mary within the Walls,--into which we entered, and found it whitewashed, like the other two. This was especially fortunate, for the doorkeeper informed us that, two years ago, the whole church (except, I suppose, the roof, which is of timber) had been covered with frescos by Pinturicchio, all of which had been ruthlessly obliterated, except a very few fragments. These he proceeded to show us; poor, dim ghosts of what may once have been beautiful,--now so far gone towards nothingness that I was hardly sure whether I saw a glimmering of the design or not. By the by, it was not Pinturicchio, as I have written above, but Giotto, assisted, I believe, by Cimabue, who painted these frescos. Our one-legged attendant had followed us also into this church, and again hastened out of it before us; and still we heard the dot of his crutch upon the pavement, as we passed from street to street. By and by a sickly looking man met us, and begged for "qualche cosa"; but the boy shouted to him, "Niente!" whether intimating that we would give him nothing, or that he himself had a prior claim to all our charity, I cannot tell. However, the beggar-man turned round, and likewise followed our devious course. Once or twice we missed him; but it was only because he could not walk so fast as we; for he appeared again as we emerged from the door of another church. Our one-legged friend we never missed for a moment; he kept pretty near us,--near enough to be amused by our indecision whither to go; and he seemed much delighted when it began to rain, and he saw us at a loss how to find our way back to the hotel. Nevertheless, he did not offer to guide us; but stumped on behind with a faster or slower dot of his crutch, according to our pace. I began to think that he must have been engaged as a spy upon our movements by the police who had taken away my passport at the city gate. In this way he attended us to the door of the hotel, where the beggar had already arrived. The latter again put in his doleful petition; the one-legged boy said not a word, nor seemed to expect anything, and both had to go away without so much as a mezzo baioccho out of our pockets. The multitude of beggars in Italy makes the heart as obdurate as a paving-stone. We left Foligno this morning, and, all ready for us at the door of the hotel, as we got into the carriage, were our friends, the beggar-man and the one-legged boy; the latter holding out his ragged hat, and smiling with as confident an air as if he had done us some very particular service, and were certain of being paid for it, as from contract. It was so very funny, so impudent, so utterly absurd, that I could not help giving him a trifle; but the man got nothing,--a fact that gives me a twinge or two, for he looked sickly and miserable. But where everybody begs, everybody, as a general rule, must be denied; and, besides, they act their misery so well that you are never sure of the genuine article. PERUGIA. May 25th.--As I said last night, we left Foligno betimes in the morning, which was bleak, chill, and very threatening, there being very little blue sky anywhere, and the clouds lying heavily on some of the mountain-ridges. The wind blew sharply right in U----'s face and mine, as we occupied the coupe, so that there must have been a great deal of the north in it. We drove through a wide plain--the Umbrian valley, I suppose--and soon passed the old town of Spello, just touching its skirts, and wondering how people, who had this rich and convenient plain from which to choose a site, could think of covering a huge island of rock with their dwellings,--for Spello tumbled its crooked and narrow streets down a steep descent, and cannot well have a yard of even space within its walls. It is said to contain some rare treasures of ancient pictorial art. I do not remember much that we saw on our route. The plains and the lower hillsides seemed fruitful of everything that belongs to Italy, especially the olive and the vine. As usual, there were a great many shrines, and frequently a cross by the wayside. Hitherto it had been merely a plain wooden cross; but now almost every cross was hung with various instruments, represented in wood, apparently symbols of the crucifixion of our Saviour,--the spear, the sponge, the crown of thorns, the hammer, a pair of pincers, and always St. Peter's cock, made a prominent figure, generally perched on the summit of the cross. From our first start this morning we had seen mists in various quarters, betokening that there was rain in those spots, and now it began to spatter in our own faces, although within the wide extent of our prospect we could see the sunshine falling on portions of the valley. A rainbow, too, shone out, and remained so long visible that it appeared to have made a permanent stain in the sky. By and by we reached Assisi, which is magnificently situated for pictorial purposes, with a gray castle above it, and a gray wall around it, itself on a mountain, and looking over the great plain which we had been traversing, and through which lay our onward way. We drove through the Piazza Grande to an ancient house a little beyond, where a hospitable old lady receives travellers for a consideration, without exactly keeping an inn. In the piazza we saw the beautiful front of a temple of Minerva, consisting of several marble pillars, fluted, and with rich capitals supporting a pediment. It was as fine as anything I had seen at Rome, and is now, of course, converted into a Catholic church. I ought to have said that, instead of driving straight to the old lady's, we alighted at the door of a church near the city gate, and went in to inspect some melancholy frescos, and thence clambered up a narrow street to the cathedral, which has a Gothic front, old enough, but not very impressive. I really remember not a single object that we saw within, but am pretty certain that the interior had been stuccoed and whitewashed. The ecclesiastics of old time did an excellent thing in covering the interiors of their churches with brilliant frescos, thus filling the holy places with saints and angels, and almost with the presence of the Divinity. The modern ecclesiastics do the next best thing in obliterating the wretched remnants of what has had its day and done its office. These frescos might be looked upon as the symbol of the living spirit that made Catholicism a true religion, and glorified it as long as it did live; now the glory and beauty have departed from one and the other. My wife, U----, and Miss Shepard now set out with a cicerone to visit the great Franciscan convent, in the church of which are preserved some miraculous specimens, in fresco and in oils, of early Italian art; but as I had no mind to suffer any further in this way, I stayed behind with J----- and R-----, who we're equally weary of these things. After they were gone we took a ramble through the city, but were almost swept away by the violence of the wind, which struggled with me for my hat, and whirled R----- before it like a feather. The people in the public square seemed much diverted at our predicament, being, I suppose, accustomed to these rude blasts in their mountain-home. However, the wind blew in momentary gusts, and then became more placable till another fit of fury came, and passed as suddenly as before. We walked out of the same gate through which we had entered,--an ancient gate, but recently stuccoed and whitewashed, in wretched contrast to the gray, venerable wall through which it affords ingress,--and I stood gazing at the magnificent prospect of the wide valley beneath. It was so vast that there appeared to be all varieties of weather in it at the same instant; fields of sunshine, tracts of storm,--here the coming tempest, there the departing one. It was a picture of the world on a vast canvas, for there was rural life and city life within the great expanse, and the whole set in a frame of mountains,--the nearest bold and dust-net, with the rocky ledges showing through their sides, the distant ones blue and dim,--so far stretched this broad valley. When I had looked long enough,--no, not long enough, for it would take a great while to read that page,--we returned within the gate, and we clambered up, past the cathedral and into the narrow streets above it. The aspect of everything was immeasurably old; a thousand years would be but a middle age for one of those houses, built so massively with huge stones and solid arches, that I do not see how they are ever to tumble down, or to be less fit for human habitation than they are now. The streets crept between them, and beneath arched passages, and up and down steps of stone or ancient brick, for it would be altogether impossible for a carriage to ascend above the Grand Piazza, though possibly a donkey or a chairman's mule might find foothold. The city seems like a stony growth out of the hillside, or a fossilized city,--so old and singular it is, without enough life and juiciness in it to be susceptible of decay. An earthquake is the only chance of its ever being ruined, beyond its present ruin. Nothing is more strange than to think that this now dead city--dead, as regards the purposes for which men live nowadays--was, centuries ago, the seat and birthplace almost of art, the only art in which the beautiful part of the human mind then developed itself. How came that flower to grow among these wild mountains? I do not conceive, however, that the people of Assisi were ever much more enlightened or cultivated on the side of art than they are at present. The ecclesiastics were then the only patrons; and the flower grew here because there was a great ecclesiastical garden in which it was sheltered and fostered. But it is very curious to think of Assisi, a school of art within, and mountain and wilderness without. My wife and the rest of the party returned from the convent before noon, delighted with what they had seen, as I was delighted not to have seen it. We ate our dejeuner, and resumed our journey, passing beneath the great convent, after emerging from the gate opposite to that of our entrance. The edifice made a very good spectacle, being of great extent, and standing on a double row of high and narrow arches, on which it is built up from the declivity of the hill. We soon reached the Church of St. Mary of the Angels, which is a modern structure, and very spacious, built in place of one destroyed by an earthquake. It is a fine church, opening out a magnificent space in its nave and aisles; and beneath the great dome stands the small old chapel, with its rude stone walls, in which St. Francis founded his order. This chapel and the dome appear to have been the only portions of the ancient church that were not destroyed by the earthquake. The dwelling of St. Francis is said to be also preserved within the church; but we did not see it, unless it were a little dark closet into which we squeezed to see some frescos by La Spagna. It had an old wooden door, of which U---- picked off a little bit of a chip, to serve as a relic. There is a fresco in the church, on the pediment of the chapel, by Overbeck, representing the Assumption of the Virgin. It did not strike me as wonderfully fine. The other pictures, of which there were many, were modern, and of no great merit. We pursued our way, and came, by and by, to the foot of the high hill on which stands Perugia, and which is so long and steep that Gaetano took a yoke of oxen to aid his horses in the ascent. We all, except my wife, walked a part of the way up, and I myself, with J----- for my companion, kept on even to the city gate,--a distance, I should think, of two or three miles, at least. The lower part of the road was on the edge of the hill, with a narrow valley on our left; and as the sun had now broken out, its verdure and fertility, its foliage and cultivation, shone forth in miraculous beauty, as green as England, as bright as only Italy. Perugia appeared above us, crowning a mighty hill, the most picturesque of cities; and the higher we ascended, the more the view opened before us, as we looked back on the course that we had traversed, and saw the wide valley, sweeping down and spreading out, bounded afar by mountains, and sleeping in sun and shadow. No language nor any art of the pencil can give an idea of the scene. When God expressed himself in the landscape to mankind, he did not intend that it should be translated into any tongue save his own immediate one. J----- meanwhile, whose heart is now wholly in snail-shells, was rummaging for them among the stones and hedges by the roadside; yet, doubtless, enjoyed the prospect more than he knew. The coach lagged far behind us, and when it came up, we entered the gate, where a soldier appeared, and demanded my passport. We drove to the Grand Hotel de France, which is near the gate, and two fine little boys ran beside the carriage, well dressed and well looking enough to have been a gentleman's sons, but claiming Gaetano for their father. He is an inhabitant of Perugia, and has therefore reached his own home, though we are still little more than midway to our journey's end. Our hotel proves, thus far, to be the best that we have yet met with. We are only in the outskirts of Perugia; the bulk of the city, where the most interesting churches and the public edifices are situated, being far above us on the hill. My wife, U----, Miss Shepard, and R----- streamed forth immediately, and saw a church; but J-----, who hates them, and I remained behind; and, for my part, I added several pages to this volume of scribble. This morning was as bright as morning could be, even in Italy, and in this transparent mountain atmosphere. We at first declined the services of a cicerone, and went out in the hopes of finding our way to whatever we wished to see, by our own instincts. This proved to be a mistaken hope, however; and we wandered about the upper city, much persecuted by a shabby old man who wished to guide us; so, at last, Miss Shepard went back in quest of the cicerone at the hotel, and, meanwhile, we climbed to the summit of the hill of Perugia, and, leaning over a wall, looked forth upon a most magnificent view of mountain and valley, terminating in some peaks, lofty and dim, which surely must be the Apennines. There again a young man accosted us, offering to guide us to the Cambio or Exchange; and as this was one of the places which we especially wished to see, we accepted his services. By the by, I ought to have mentioned that we had already entered a church (San Luigi, I believe), the interior of which we found very impressive, dim with the light of stained and painted windows, insomuch that it at first seemed almost dark, and we could only see the bright twinkling of the tapers at the shrines; but, after a few minutes, we discerned the tall octagonal pillars of the nave, marble, and supporting a beautiful roof of crossed arches. The church was neither Gothic nor classic, but a mixture of both, and most likely barbarous; yet it had a grand effect in its tinted twilight, and convinced me more than ever how desirable it is that religious edifices should have painted windows. The door of the Cambio proved to be one that we had passed several times, while seeking for it, and was very near the church just mentioned, which fronts on one side of the same piazza. We were received by an old gentleman, who appeared to be a public officer, and found ourselves in a small room, wainscoted with beautifully carved oak, roofed with a coved ceiling, painted with symbols of the planets, and arabesqued in rich designs by Raphael, and lined with splendid frescos of subjects, scriptural and historical, by Perugino. When the room was in its first glory, I can conceive that the world had not elsewhere to show, within so small a space, such magnificence and beauty as were then displayed here. Even now, I enjoyed (to the best of my belief, for we can never feel sure that we are not bamboozling ourselves in such matters) some real pleasure in what I saw; and especially seemed to feel, after all these ages, the old painter's devout sentiment still breathing forth from the religious pictures, the work of a hand that had so long been dust. When we had looked long at these, the old gentleman led us into a chapel, of the same size as the former room, and built in the same fashion, wainscoted likewise with old oak. The walls were also frescoed, entirely frescoed, and retained more of their original brightness than those we had already seen, although the pictures were the production of a somewhat inferior hand, a pupil of Perugino. They seemed to be very striking, however, not the less so, that one of them provoked an unseasonable smile. It was the decapitation of John the Baptist; and this holy personage was represented as still on his knees, with his hands clasped in prayer, although the executioner was already depositing the head in a charger, and the blood was spouting from the headless trunk, directly, as it were, into the face of the spectator. While we were in the outer room, the cicerone who first offered his services at the hotel had come in; so we paid our chance guide, and expected him to take his leave. It is characteristic of this idle country, however, that if you once speak to a person, or connect yourself with him by the slightest possible tie, you will hardly get rid of him by anything short of main force. He still lingered in the room, and was still there when I came away; for, having had as many pictures as I could digest, I left my wife and U---- with the cicerone, and set out on a ramble with J-----. We plunged from the upper city down through some of the strangest passages that ever were called streets; some of them, indeed, being arched all over, and, going down into the unknown darkness, looked like caverns; and we followed one of them doubtfully, till it opened out upon the light. The houses on each side were divided only by a pace or two, and communicated with one another, here and there, by arched passages. They looked very ancient, and may have been inhabited by Etruscan princes, judging from the massiveness of some of the foundation stones. The present inhabitants, nevertheless, are by no means princely,--shabby men, and the careworn wives and mothers of the people,--one of whom was guiding a child in leading-strings through these antique alleys, where hundreds of generations have trod before those little feet. Finally we came out through a gateway, the same gateway at which we entered last night. I ought to have mentioned, in the narrative of yesterday, that we crossed the Tiber shortly before reaching Perugia, already a broad and rapid stream, and already distinguished by the same turbid and mud-puddly quality of water that we see in it at Rome. I think it will never be so disagreeable to me hereafter, now that I find this turbidness to be its native color, and not (like that of the Thames) accruing from city sewers or any impurities of the lowlands. As I now remember, the small Chapel of Santa Maria degl' Angeli seems to have been originally the house of St. Francis. May 29th.--This morning we visited the Church of the Dominicans, where we saw some quaint pictures by Fra Angelico, with a good deal of religious sincerity in them; also a picture of St. Columba by Perugino, which unquestionably is very good. To confess the truth, I took more interest in a fair Gothic monument, in white marble, of Pope Benedict XII., representing him reclining under a canopy, while two angels draw aside the curtain, the canopy being supported by twisted columns, richly ornamented. I like this overflow and gratuity of device with which Gothic sculpture works out its designs, after seeing so much of the simplicity of classic art in marble. We then tried to find the Church of San Pietro in Martire, but without success, although every person of whom we inquired immediately attached himself or herself to us, and could hardly be got rid of by any efforts on our part. Nobody seemed to know the church we wished for, but all directed us to another Church of San Pietro, which contains nothing of interest; whereas the right church is supposed to contain a celebrated picture by Perugino. Finally, we ascended the hill and the city proper of Perugia (for our hotel is in one of the suburbs), and J----- and I set out on a ramble about the city. It was market-day, and the principal piazza, with the neighboring streets, was crowded with people. . . . The best part of Perugia, that in which the grand piazzas and the principal public edifices stand, seems to be a nearly level plateau on the summit of the hill; but it is of no very great extent, and the streets rapidly run downward on either side. J----- and I followed one of these descending streets, and were led a long way by it, till we at last emerged from one of the gates of the city, and had another view of the mountains and valleys, the fertile and sunny wilderness in which this ancient civilization stands. On the right of the gate there was a rude country-path, partly overgrown with grass, bordered by a hedge on one side, and on the other by the gray city wall, at the base of which the track kept onward. We followed it, hoping that it would lead us to some other gate by which we might re-enter the city; but it soon grew so indistinct and broken, that it was evidently on the point of melting into somebody's olive-orchard or wheat-fields or vineyards, all of which lay on the other side of the hedge; and a kindly old woman of whom I inquired told me (if I rightly understood her Italian) that I should find no further passage in that direction. So we turned back, much broiled in the hot sun, and only now and then relieved by the shadow of an angle or a tower. A lame beggar-man sat by the gate, and as we passed him J----- gave him two baiocchi (which he himself had begged of me to buy an orange with), and was loaded with the pauper's prayers and benedictions as we entered the city. A great many blessings can be bought for very little money anywhere in Italy; and whether they avail anything or no, it is pleasant to see that the beggars have gratitude enough to bestow them in such abundance. Of all beggars I think a little fellow, who rode beside our carriage on a stick, his bare feet scampering merrily, while he managed his steed with one hand, and held out the other for charity, howling piteously the while, amused me most. PASSIGNANO. May 29th.--We left Perugia at about three o'clock to-day, and went down a pretty steep descent; but I have no particular recollection of the road till it again began to descend, before reaching the village of Magione. We all, except my wife, walked up the long hill, while the vettura was dragged after us with the aid of a yoke of oxen. Arriving first at the village, I leaned over the wall to admire the beautiful paese ("le bel piano," as a peasant called it, who made acquaintance with me) that lay at the foot of the hill, so level, so bounded within moderate limits by a frame of hills and ridges, that it looked like a green lake. In fact, I think it was once a real lake, which made its escape from its bed, as I have known some lakes to have done in America. Passing through and beyond the village, I saw, on a height above the road, a half-ruinous tower, with great cracks running down its walls, half-way from top to bottom. Some little children had mounted the hill with us, begging all the way; they were recruited with additional members in the village; and here, beneath the ruinous tower, a madman, as it seemed, assaulted us, and ran almost under the carriage-wheels, in his earnestness to get a baioccho. Ridding ourselves of these annoyances, we drove on, and, between five and six o'clock, came in sight of the Lake of Thrasymene, obtaining our first view of it, I think, in its longest extent. There were high hills, and one mountain with its head in the clouds, visible on the farther shore, and on the horizon beyond it; but the nearer banks were long ridges, and hills of only moderate height. The declining sun threw a broad sheen of brightness over the surface of the lake, so that we could not well see it for excess of light; but had a vision of headlands and islands floating about in a flood of gold, and blue, airy heights bounding it afar. When we first drew near the lake, there was but a narrow tract, covered with vines and olives, between it and the hill that rose on the other side. As we advanced, the tract grew wider, and was very fertile, as was the hillside, with wheat-fields, and vines, and olives, especially the latter, which, symbol of peace as it is, seemed to find something congenial to it in the soil stained long ago with blood. Farther onward, the space between the lake and hill grew still narrower, the road skirting along almost close to the water-side; and when we reached the town of Passignano there was but room enough for its dirty and ugly street to stretch along the shore. I have seldom beheld a lovelier scene than that of the lake and the landscape around it; never an uglier one than that of this idle and decaying village, where we were immediately surrounded by beggars of all ages, and by men vociferously proposing to row us out upon the lake. We declined their offers of a boat, for the evening was very fresh and cool, insomuch that I should have liked an outside garment,--a temperature that I had not anticipated, so near the beginning of June, in sunny Italy. Instead of a row, we took a walk through the village, hoping to come upon the shore of the lake, in some secluded spot; but an incredible number of beggar-children, both boys and girls, but more of the latter, rushed out of every door, and went along with us, all howling their miserable petitions at the same moment. The village street is long, and our escort waxed more numerous at every step, till Miss Shepard actually counted forty of these little reprobates, and more were doubtless added afterwards. At first, no doubt, they begged in earnest hope of getting some baiocchi; but, by and by, perceiving that we had determined not to give them anything, they made a joke of the matter, and began to laugh and to babble, and turn heels over head, still keeping about us, like a swarm of flies, and now and then begging again with all their might. There were as few pretty faces as I ever saw among the same number of children; and they were as ragged and dirty little imps as any in the world, and, moreover, tainted the air with a very disagreeable odor from their rags and dirt; rugged and healthy enough, nevertheless, and sufficiently intelligent; certainly bold and persevering too; so that it is hard to say what they needed to fit them for success in life. Yet they begin as beggars, and no doubt will end so, as all their parents and grandparents do; for in our walk through the village, every old woman and many younger ones held out their hands for alms, as if they had all been famished. Yet these people kept their houses over their heads; had firesides in winter, I suppose, and food out of their little gardens every day; pigs to kill, chickens, olives, wine, and a great many things to make life comfortable. The children, desperately as they begged, looked in good bodily ease, and happy enough; but, certainly, there was a look of earnest misery in the faces of some of the old women, either genuine or exceedingly well acted. I could not bear the persecution, and went into our hotel, determining not to venture out again till our departure; at least not in the daylight. My wife and the rest of the family, however, continued their walk, and at length were relieved from their little pests by three policemen (the very images of those in Rome, in their blue, long-skirted coats, cocked chapeaux-bras, white shoulder-belts, and swords), who boxed their ears, and dispersed them. Meanwhile, they had quite driven away all sentimental effusion (of which I felt more, really, than I expected) about the Lake of Thrasymene. The inn of Passignano promised little from its outward appearance; a tall, dark old house, with a stone staircase leading us up from one sombre story to another, into a brick-paved dining-room, with our sleeping-chambers on each side. There was a fireplace of tremendous depth and height, fit to receive big forest-logs, and with a queer, double pair of ancient andirons, capable of sustaining them; and in a handful of ashes lay a small stick of olive-wood,--a specimen, I suppose, of the sort of fuel which had made the chimney black, in the course of a good many years. There must have been much shivering and misery of cold around this fireplace. However, we needed no fire now, and there was promise of good cheer in the spectacle of a man cleaning some lake-fish for our dinner, while the poor things flounced and wriggled under the knife. The dinner made its appearance, after a long while, and was most plentiful, . . . . so that, having measured our appetite in anticipation of a paucity of food, we had to make more room for such overflowing abundance. When dinner was over, it was already dusk, and before retiring I opened the window, and looked out on Lake Thrasymene, the margin of which lies just on the other side of the narrow village street. The moon was a day or two past the full, just a little clipped on the edge, but gave light enough to show the lake and its nearer shores almost as distinctly as by day; and there being a ripple on the surface of the water, it made a sheen of silver over a wide space. AREZZO. May 30th.--We started at six o'clock, and left the one ugly street of Passignano, before many of the beggars were awake. Immediately in the vicinity of the village there is very little space between the lake in front and the ridge of hills in the rear; but the plain widened as we drove onward, so that the lake was scarcely to be seen, or often quite hidden among the intervening trees, although we could still discern the summits of the mountains that rise far beyond its shores. The country was fertile, presenting, on each side of the road, vines trained on fig-trees; wheat-fields and olives, in greater abundance than any other product. On our right, with a considerable width of plain between, was the bending ridge of hills that shut in the Roman army, by its close approach to the lake at Passignano. In perhaps half all hour's drive, we reached the little bridge that throws its arch over the Sanguinetto, and alighted there. The stream has but about a yard's width of water; and its whole course, between the hills and the lake, might well have been reddened and swollen with the blood of the multitude of slain Romans. Its name put me in mind of the Bloody Brook at Deerfield, where a company of Massachusetts men were massacred by the Indians. The Sanguinetto flows over a bed of pebbles; and J----- crept under the bridge, and got one of them for a memorial, while U----, Miss Shepard, and R----- plucked some olive twigs and oak leaves, and made them into wreaths together,--symbols of victory and peace. The tower, which is traditionally named after Hannibal, is seen on a height that makes part of the line of enclosing hills. It is a large, old castle, apparently of the Middle Ages, with a square front, and a battlemented sweep of wall. The town of Torres (its name, I think), where Hannibal's main army is supposed to have lain while the Romans came through the pass, was in full view; and I could understand the plan of the battle better than any system of military operations which I have hitherto tried to fathom. Both last night and to-day, I found myself stirred more sensibly than I expected by the influences of this scene. The old battle-field is still fertile in thoughts and emotions, though it is so many ages since the blood spilt there has ceased to make the grass and flowers grow more luxuriantly. I doubt whether I should feel so much on the field of Saratoga or Monmouth; but these old classic battle-fields belong to the whole world, and each man feels as if his own forefathers fought them. Mine, by the by, if they fought them at all, must have been on the side of Hannibal; for, certainly, I sympathized with him, and exulted in the defeat of the Romans on their own soil. They excite much the same emotion of general hostility that the English do. Byron has written some very fine stanzas on the battle-field,--not so good as others that he has written on classical scenes and subjects, yet wonderfully impressing his own perception of the subject on the reader. Whenever he has to deal with a statue, a ruin, a battle-field, he pounces upon the topic like a vulture, and tears out its heart in a twinkling, so that there is nothing more to be said. If I mistake not, our passport was examined by the papal officers at the last custom-house in the pontifical territory, before we traversed the path through which the Roman army marched to its destruction. Lake Thrasymene, of which we took our last view, is not deep set among the hills, but is bordered by long ridges, with loftier mountains receding into the distance. It is not to be compared to Windermere or Loch Lomond for beauty, nor with Lake Champlain and many a smaller lake in my own country, none of which, I hope, will ever become so historically interesting as this famous spot. A few miles onward our passport was countersigned at the Tuscan custom-house, and our luggage permitted to pass without examination on payment of a fee of nine or ten pauls, besides two pauls to the porters. There appears to be no concealment on the part of the officials in thus waiving the exercise of their duty, and I rather imagine that the thing is recognized and permitted by their superiors. At all events, it is very convenient for the traveller. We saw Cortona, sitting, like so many other cities in this region, on its hill, and arrived about noon at Arezzo, which also stretches up a high hillside, and is surrounded, as they all are, by its walls or the remains of one, with a fortified gate across every entrance. I remember one little village, somewhere in the neighborhood of the Clitumnus, which we entered by one gateway, and, in the course of two minutes at the utmost, left by the opposite one, so diminutive was this walled town. Everything hereabouts bears traces of times when war was the prevalent condition, and peace only a rare gleam of sunshine. At Arezzo we have put up at the Hotel Royal, which has the appearance of a grand old house, and proves to be a tolerable inn enough. After lunch, we wandered forth to see the town, which did not greatly interest me after Perugia, being much more modern and less picturesque in its aspect. We went to the cathedral,--a Gothic edifice, but not of striking exterior. As the doors were closed, and not to be opened till three o'clock, we seated ourselves under the trees, on a high, grassy space surrounded and intersected with gravel-walks,--a public promenade, in short, near the cathedral; and after resting ourselves here we went in search of Petrarch's house, which Murray mentions as being in this neighborhood. We inquired of several people, who knew nothing about the matter; one woman misdirected us, out of mere fun, I believe, for she afterwards met us and asked how we had succeeded. But finally, through ------'s enterprise and perseverance, we found the spot, not a stone's-throw from where we had been sitting. Petrarch's house stands below the promenade which I have just mentioned, and within hearing of the reverberations between the strokes of the cathedral bell. It is two stories high, covered with a light-colored stucco, and has not the slightest appearance of antiquity, no more than many a modern and modest dwelling-house in an American city. Its only remarkable feature is a pointed arch of stone, let into the plastered wall, and forming a framework for the doorway. I set my foot on the doorsteps, ascended them, and Miss Shepard and J----- gathered some weeds or blades of grass that grew in the chinks between the steps. There is a long inscription on a slab of marble set in the front of the house, as is the fashion in Arezzo when a house has been the birthplace or residence of a distinguished man. Right opposite Petrarch's birth-house--and it must have been the well whence the water was drawn that first bathed him--is a well which Boccaccio has introduced into one of his stories. It is surrounded with a stone curb, octagonal in shape, and evidently as ancient as Boccaccio's time. It has a wooden cover, through which is a square opening, and looking down I saw my own face in the water far beneath. There is no familiar object connected with daily life so interesting as a well; and this well or old Arezzo, whence Petrarch had drunk, around which he had played in his boyhood, and which Boccaccio has made famous, really interested me more than the cathedral. It lies right under the pavement of the street, under the sunshine, without any shade of trees about it, or any grass, except a little that grows in the crevices of its stones; but the shape of its stone-work would make it a pretty object in an engraving. As I lingered round it I thought of my own town-pump in old Salem, and wondered whether my townspeople would ever point it out to strangers, and whether the stranger would gaze at it with any degree of such interest as I felt in Boccaccio's well. O, certainly not; but yet I made that humble town-pump the most celebrated structure in the good town. A thousand and a thousand people had pumped there, merely to water oxen or fill their teakettles; but when once I grasped the handle, a rill gushed forth that meandered as far as England, as far as India, besides tasting pleasantly in every town and village of our own country. I like to think of this, so long after I did it, and so far from home, and am not without hopes of some kindly local remembrance on this score. Petrarch's house is not a separate and insulated building, but stands in contiguity and connection with other houses on each side; and all, when I saw them, as well as the whole street, extending down the slope of the hill, had the bright and sunny aspect of a modern town. As the cathedral was not yet open, and as J----- and I had not so much patience as my wife, we left her and Miss Shepard, and set out to return to the hotel. We lost our way, however, and finally had to return to the cathedral, to take a fresh start; and as the door was now open we went in. We found the cathedral very stately with its great arches, and darkly magnificent with the dim rich light coming through its painted windows, some of which are reckoned the most beautiful that the whole world has to show. The hues are far more brilliant than those of any painted glass I saw in England, and a great wheel window looks like a constellation of many-colored gems. The old English glass gets so smoky and dull with dust, that its pristine beauty cannot any longer be even imagined; nor did I imagine it till I saw these Italian windows. We saw nothing of my wife and Miss Shepard; but found afterwards that they had been much annoyed by the attentions of a priest who wished to show them the cathedral, till they finally told him that they had no money with them, when he left them without another word. The attendants in churches seem to be quite as venal as most other Italians, and, for the sake of their little profit, they do not hesitate to interfere with the great purposes for which their churches were built and decorated; hanging curtains, for instance, before all the celebrated pictures, or hiding them away in the sacristy, so that they cannot be seen without a fee. Returning to the hotel, we looked out of the window, and, in the street beneath, there was a very busy scene, it being Sunday, and the whole population, apparently, being astir, promenading up and down the smooth flag-stones, which made the breadth of the street one sidewalk, or at their windows, or sitting before their doors. The vivacity of the population in these parts is very striking, after the gravity and lassitude of Rome; and the air was made cheerful with the talk and laughter of hundreds of voices. I think the women are prettier than the Roman maids and matrons, who, as I think I have said before, have chosen to be very uncomely since the rape of their ancestresses, by way of wreaking a terrible spite and revenge. I have nothing more to say of Arezzo, except that, finding the ordinary wine very bad, as black as ink, and tasting as if it had tar and vinegar in it, we called for a bottle of Monte Pulciano, and were exceedingly gladdened and mollified thereby. INCISA. We left Arezzo early on Monday morning, the sun throwing the long shadows of the trees across the road, which at first, after we had descended the hill, lay over a plain. As the morning advanced, or as we advanced, the country grew more hilly. We saw many bits of rustic life,--such as old women tending pigs or sheep by the roadside, and spinning with a distaff; women sewing under trees, or at their own doors; children leading goats, tied by the horns, while they browse; sturdy, sunburnt creatures, in petticoats, but otherwise manlike, at work side by side with male laborers in the fields. The broad-brimmed, high-crowned hat of Tuscan straw is the customary female head-dress, and is as unbecoming as can possibly be imagined, and of little use, one would suppose, as a shelter from the sun, the brim continually blowing upward from the face. Some of the elder women wore black felt hats, likewise broad-brimmed; and the men wore felt hats also, shaped a good deal like a mushroom, with hardly any brim at all. The scenes in the villages through which we passed were very lively and characteristic, all the population seeming to be out of doors: some at the butcher's shop, others at the well; a tailor sewing in the open air, with a young priest sitting sociably beside him; children at play; women mending clothes, embroidering, spinning with the distaff at their own doorsteps; many idlers, letting the pleasant morning pass in the sweet-do-nothing; all assembling in the street, as in the common room of one large household, and thus brought close together, and made familiar with one another, as they can never be in a different system of society. As usual along the road we passed multitudes of shrines, where the Virgin was painted in fresco, or sometimes represented in bas-reliefs, within niches, or under more spacious arches. It would be a good idea to place a comfortable and shady seat beneath all these wayside shrines, where the wayfarer might rest himself, and thank the Virgin for her hospitality; nor can I believe that it would offend her, any more than other incense, if he were to regale himself, even in such consecrated spots, with the fragrance of a pipe or cigar. In the wire-work screen, before many of the shrines, hung offerings of roses and other flowers, some wilted and withered, some fresh with that morning's dew, some that never bloomed and never faded,--being artificial. I wonder that they do not plant rose-trees and all kinds of fragrant and flowering shrubs under the shrines, and twine and wreathe them all around, so that the Virgin may dwell within a bower of perpetual freshness; at least put flower-pots, with living plants, into the niche. There are many things in the customs of these people that might be made very beautiful, if the sense of beauty were as much alive now as it must have been when these customs were first imagined and adopted. I must not forget, among these little descriptive items, the spectacle of women and girls bearing huge bundles of twigs and shrubs, or grass, with scarlet poppies and blue flowers intermixed; the bundles sometimes so huge as almost to hide the woman's figure from head to heel, so that she looked like a locomotive mass of verdure and flowers; sometimes reaching only half-way down her back, so as to show the crooked knife slung behind, with which she had been reaping this strange harvest-sheaf. A Pre-Raphaelite painter--the one, for instance, who painted the heap of autumnal leaves, which we saw at the Manchester Exhibition--would find an admirable subject in one of these girls, stepping with a free, erect, and graceful carriage, her burden on her head; and the miscellaneous herbage and flowers would give him all the scope he could desire for minute and various delineation of nature. The country houses which we passed had sometimes open galleries or arcades on the second story and above, where the inhabitants might perform their domestic labor in the shade and in the air. The houses were often ancient, and most picturesquely time-stained, the plaster dropping in spots from the old brickwork; others were tinted of pleasant and cheerful lines; some were frescoed with designs in arabesques, or with imaginary windows; some had escutcheons of arms painted on the front. Wherever there was a pigeon-house, a flight of doves were represented as flying into the holes, doubtless for the invitation and encouragement of the real birds. Once or twice I saw a bush stuck up before the door of what seemed to be a wine-shop. If so, it is the ancient custom, so long disused in England, and alluded to in the proverb, "Good wine needs no bush." Several times we saw grass spread to dry on the road, covering half the track, and concluded it to have been cut by the roadside for the winter forage of his ass by some poor peasant, or peasant's wife, who had no grass land, except the margin of the public way. A beautiful feature of the scene to-day, as the preceding day, were the vines growing on fig-trees (?) [This interrogation-mark must mean that Mr. Hawthorne was not sure they were fig-trees.--ED.], and often wreathed in rich festoons from one tree to another, by and by to be hung with clusters of purple grapes. I suspect the vine is a pleasanter object of sight under this mode of culture than it can be in countries where it produces a more precious wine, and therefore is trained more artificially. Nothing can be more picturesque than the spectacle of an old grapevine, with almost a trunk of its own, clinging round its tree, imprisoning within its strong embrace the friend that supported its tender infancy, converting the tree wholly to its own selfish ends, as seemingly flexible natures are apt to do, stretching out its innumerable arms on every bough, and allowing hardly a leaf to sprout except its own. I must not yet quit this hasty sketch, without throwing in, both in the early morning, and later in the forenoon, the mist that dreamed among the hills, and which, now that I have called it mist, I feel almost more inclined to call light, being so quietly cheerful with the sunshine through it. Put in, now and then, a castle on a hilltop; a rough ravine, a smiling valley; a mountain stream, with a far wider bed than it at present needs, and a stone bridge across it, with ancient and massive arches;--and I shall say no more, except that all these particulars, and many better ones which escape me, made up a very pleasant whole. At about noon we drove into the village of Incisa, and alighted at the albergo where we were to lunch. It was a gloomy old house, as much like my idea of an Etruscan tomb as anything else that I can compare it to. We passed into a wide and lofty entrance-hall, paved with stone, and vaulted with a roof of intersecting arches, supported by heavy columns of stuccoed-brick, the whole as sombre and dingy as can well be. This entrance-hall is not merely the passageway into the inn, but is likewise the carriage-house, into which our vettura is wheeled; and it has, on one side, the stable, odorous with the litter of horses and cattle, and on the other the kitchen, and a common sitting-room. A narrow stone staircase leads from it to the dining-room, and chambers above, which are paved with brick, and adorned with rude frescos instead of paper-hangings. We look out of the windows, and step into a little iron-railed balcony, before the principal window, and observe the scene in the village street. The street is narrow, and nothing can exceed the tall, grim ugliness of the village houses, many of them four stories high, contiguous all along, and paved quite across; so that nature is as completely shut out from the precincts of this little town as from the heart of the widest city. The walls of the houses are plastered, gray, dilapidated; the windows small, some of them drearily closed with wooden shutters, others flung wide open, and with women's heads protruding, others merely frescoed, for a show of light and air. It would be a hideous street to look at in a rainy day, or when no human life pervaded it. Now it has vivacity enough to keep it cheerful. People lounge round the door of the albergo, and watch the horses as they drink from a stone trough, which is built against the wall of the house, and filled with the unseen gush of a spring. At first there is a shade entirely across the street, and all the within-doors of the village empties itself there, and keeps up a babblement that seems quite disproportioned even to the multitude of tongues that make it. So many words are not spoken in a New England village in a whole year as here in this single day. People talk about nothing as if they were terribly in earnest, and laugh at nothing as if it were all excellent joke. As the hot noon sunshine encroaches on our side of the street, it grows a little more quiet. The loungers now confine themselves to the shady margin (growing narrower and narrower) of the other side, where, directly opposite the albergo, there are two cafes and a wine-shop, "vendita di pane, vino, ed altri generi," all in a row with benches before them. The benchers joke with the women passing by, and are joked with back again. The sun still eats away the shadow inch by inch, beating down with such intensity that finally everybody disappears except a few passers-by. Doubtless the village snatches this half-hour for its siesta. There is a song, however, inside one of the cafes, with a burden in which several voices join. A girl goes through the street, sheltered under her great bundle of freshly cut grass. By and by the song ceases, and two young peasants come out of the cafe, a little affected by liquor, in their shirt-sleeves and bare feet, with their trousers tucked up. They resume their song in the street, and dance along, one's arm around his fellow's neck, his own waist grasped by the other's arm. They whirl one another quite round about, and come down upon their feet. Meeting a village maid coming quietly along, they dance up and intercept her for a moment, but give way to her sobriety of aspect. They pass on, and the shadow soon begins to spread from one side of the street, which presently fills again, and becomes once more, for its size, the noisiest place I ever knew. We had quite a tolerable dinner at this ugly inn, where many preceding travellers had written their condemnatory judgments, as well as a few their favorable ones, in pencil on the walls of the dining-room. TO FLORENCE. At setting off [from Incisa], we were surrounded by beggars as usual, the most interesting of whom were a little blind boy and his mother, who had besieged us with gentle pertinacity during our whole stay there. There was likewise a man with a maimed hand, and other hurts or deformities; also, an old woman who, I suspect, only pretended to be blind, keeping her eyes tightly squeezed together, but directing her hand very accurately where the copper shower was expected to fall. Besides these, there were a good many sturdy little rascals, vociferating in proportion as they needed nothing. It was touching, however, to see several persons--themselves beggars for aught I know--assisting to hold up the little blind boy's tremulous hand, so that he, at all events, might not lack the pittance which we had to give. Our dole was but a poor one, after all, consisting of what Roman coppers we had brought into Tuscany with us; and as we drove off, some of the boys ran shouting and whining after us in the hot sunshine, nor stopped till we reached the summit of the hill, which rises immediately from the village street. We heard Gaetano once say a good thing to a swarm of beggar-children, who were infesting us, "Are your fathers all dead?"--a proverbial expression, I suppose. The pertinacity of beggars does not, I think, excite the indignation of an Italian, as it is apt to do that of Englishmen or Americans. The Italians probably sympathize more, though they give less. Gaetano is very gentle in his modes of repelling them, and, indeed, never interferes at all, as long as there is a prospect of their getting anything. Immediately after leaving Incisa, we saw the Arno, already a considerable river, rushing between deep banks, with the greenish line of a duck-pond diffused through its water. Nevertheless, though the first impression was not altogether agreeable, we soon became reconciled to this line, and ceased to think it an indication of impurity; for, in spite of it, the river is still to a certain degree transparent, and is, at any rate, a mountain stream, and comes uncontaminated from its source. The pure, transparent brown of the New England rivers is the most beautiful color; but I am content that it should be peculiar to them. Our afternoon's drive was through scenery less striking than some which we had traversed, but still picturesque and beautiful. We saw deep valleys and ravines, with streams at the bottom; long, wooded hillsides, rising far and high, and dotted with white dwellings, well towards the summits. By and by, we had a distant glimpse of Florence, showing its great dome and some of its towers out of a sidelong valley, as if we were between two great waves of the tumultuous sea of hills; while, far beyond, rose in the distance the blue peaks of three or four of the Apennines, just on the remote horizon. There being a haziness in the atmosphere, however, Florence was little more distinct to us than the Celestial City was to Christian and Hopeful, when they spied at it from the Delectable Mountains. Keeping steadfastly onward, we ascended a winding road, and passed a grand villa, standing very high, and surrounded with extensive grounds. It must be the residence of some great noble; and it has an avenue of poplars or aspens, very light and gay, and fit for the passage of the bridal procession, when the proprietor or his heir brings home his bride; while, in another direction from the same front of the palace, stretches an avenue or grove of cypresses, very long, and exceedingly black and dismal, like a train of gigantic mourners. I have seen few things more striking, in the way of trees, than this grove of cypresses. From this point we descended, and drove along an ugly, dusty avenue, with a high brick wall on one side or both, till we reached the gate of Florence, into which we were admitted with as little trouble as custom-house officers, soldiers, and policemen can possibly give. They did not examine our luggage, and even declined a fee, as we had already paid one at the frontier custom-house. Thank heaven, and the Grand Duke! As we hoped that the Casa del Bello had been taken for us, we drove thither in the first place, but found that the bargain had not been concluded. As the house and studio of Mr. Powers were just on the opposite side of the street, I went to it, but found him too much engrossed to see me at the moment; so I returned to the vettura, and we told Gaetano to carry us to a hotel. He established us at the Albergo della Fontana, a good and comfortable house. . . . Mr. Powers called in the evening,--a plain personage, characterized by strong simplicity and warm kindliness, with an impending brow, and large eyes, which kindle as he speaks. He is gray, and slightly bald, but does not seem elderly, nor past his prime. I accept him at once as an honest and trustworthy man, and shall not vary from this judgment. Through his good offices, the next day, we engaged the Casa del Bello, at a rent of fifty dollars a month, and I shall take another opportunity (my fingers and head being tired now) to write about the house, and Mr. Powers, and what appertains to him, and about the beautiful city of Florence. At present, I shall only say further, that this journey from Rome has been one of the brightest and most uncareful interludes of my life; we have all enjoyed it exceedingly, and I am happy that our children have it to look back upon. June 4th.--At our visit to Powers's studio on Tuesday, we saw a marble copy of the fisher-boy holding a shell to his ear, and the bust of Proserpine, and two or three other ideal busts; various casts of most of the ideal statues and portrait busts which he has executed. He talks very freely about his works, and is no exception to the rule that an artist is not apt to speak in a very laudatory style of a brother artist. He showed us a bust of Mr. Sparks by Persico,--a lifeless and thoughtless thing enough, to be sure,--and compared it with a very good one of the same gentleman by himself; but his chiefest scorn was bestowed on a wretched and ridiculous image of Mr. King, of Alabama, by Clark Mills, of which he said he had been employed to make several copies for Southern gentlemen. The consciousness of power is plainly to be seen, and the assertion of it by no means withheld, in his simple and natural character; nor does it give me an idea of vanity on his part to see and hear it. He appears to consider himself neglected by his country,--by the government of it, at least,--and talks with indignation of the byways and political intrigue which, he thinks, win the rewards that ought to be bestowed exclusively on merit. An appropriation of twenty-five thousand dollars was made, some years ago, for a work of sculpture by him, to be placed in the Capitol; but the intermediate measures necessary to render it effective have been delayed; while the above-mentioned Clark Mills-- certainly the greatest bungler that ever botched a block of marble--has received an order for an equestrian statue of Washington. Not that Mr. Powers is made bitter or sour by these wrongs, as he considers them; he talks of them with the frankness of his disposition when the topic comes in his way, and is pleasant, kindly, and sunny when he has done with it. His long absence from our country has made him think worse of us than we deserve; and it is an effect of what I myself am sensible, in my shorter exile: the most piercing shriek, the wildest yell, and all the ugly sounds of popular turmoil, inseparable from the life of a republic, being a million times more audible than the peaceful hum of prosperity and content which is going on all the while. He talks of going home, but says that he has been talking of it every year since he first came to Italy; and between his pleasant life of congenial labor, and his idea of moral deterioration in America, I think it doubtful whether he ever crosses the sea again. Like most exiles of twenty years, he has lost his native country without finding another; but then it is as well to recognize the truth,--that an individual country is by no means essential to one's comfort. Powers took us into the farthest room, I believe, of his very extensive studio, and showed us a statue of Washington that has much dignity and stateliness. He expressed, however, great contempt for the coat and breeches, and masonic emblems, in which he had been required to drape the figure. What would he do with Washington, the most decorous and respectable personage that ever went ceremoniously through the realities of life? Did anybody ever see Washington nude? It is inconceivable. He had no nakedness, but I imagine he was born with his clothes on, and his hair powdered, and made a stately bow on his first appearance in the world. His costume, at all events, was a part of his character, and must be dealt with by whatever sculptor undertakes to represent him. I wonder that so very sensible a man as Powers should not see the necessity of accepting drapery, and the very drapery of the day, if he will keep his art alive. It is his business to idealize the tailor's actual work. But he seems to be especially fond of nudity, none of his ideal statues, so far as I know them, having so much as a rag of clothes. His statue of California, lately finished, and as naked as Venus, seemed to me a very good work; not an actual woman, capable of exciting passion, but evidently a little out of the category of human nature. In one hand she holds a divining-rod. "She says to the emigrants," observed Powers, "'Here is the gold, if you choose to take it.'" But in her face, and in her eyes, very finely expressed, there is a look of latent mischief, rather grave than playful, yet somewhat impish or sprite-like; and, in the other hand, behind her back, she holds a bunch of thorns. Powers calls her eyes Indian. The statue is true to the present fact and history of California, and includes the age-long truth as respects the "auri sacra fames." . . . . When we had looked sufficiently at the sculpture, Powers proposed that we should now go across the street and see the Casa del Bello. We did so in a body, Powers in his dressing-gown and slippers, and his wife and daughters without assuming any street costume. The Casa del Bello is a palace of three pianos, the topmost of which is occupied by the Countess of St. George, an English lady, and two lower pianos are to be let, and we looked at both. The upper one would have suited me well enough; but the lower has a terrace, with a rustic summer-house over it, and is connected with a garden, where there are arbors and a willow-tree, and a little wilderness of shrubbery and roses, with a fountain in the midst. It has likewise an immense suite of rooms, round the four sides of a small court, spacious, lofty, with frescoed ceilings and rich hangings, and abundantly furnished with arm-chairs, sofas, marble tables, and great looking-glasses. Not that these last are a great temptation, but in our wandering life I wished to be perfectly comfortable myself, and to make my family so, for just this summer, and so I have taken the lower piano, the price being only fifty dollars per month (entirely furnished, even to silver and linen). Certainly this is something like the paradise of cheapness we were told of, and which we vainly sought in Rome. . . . To me has been assigned the pleasantest room for my study; and when I like I can overflow into the summer-house or an arbor, and sit there dreaming of a story. The weather is delightful, too warm to walk, but perfectly fit to do nothing in, in the coolness of these great rooms. Every day I shall write a little, perhaps,--and probably take a brief nap somewhere between breakfast and tea,--but go to see pictures and statues occasionally, and so assuage and mollify myself a little after that uncongenial life of the consulate, and before going back to my own hard and dusty New England. After concluding the arrangement for the Casa del Bello, we stood talking a little while with Powers and his wife and daughter before the door of the house, for they seem so far to have adopted the habits of the Florentines as to feel themselves at home on the shady side of the street. The out-of-door life and free communication with the pavement, habitual apparently among the middle classes, reminds me of the plays of Moliere and other old dramatists, in which the street or the square becomes a sort of common parlor, where most of the talk and scenic business of the people is carried on. June 5th.--For two or three mornings after breakfast I have rambled a little about the city till the shade grew narrow beneath the walls of the houses, and the heat made it uncomfortable to be in motion. To-day I went over the Ponte Carraja, and thence into and through the heart of the city, looking into several churches, in all of which I found people taking advantage of the cool breadth of these sacred interiors to refresh themselves and say their prayers. Florence at first struck me as having the aspect of a very new city in comparison with Rome; but, on closer acquaintance, I find that many of the buildings are antique and massive, though still the clear atmosphere, the bright sunshine, the light, cheerful hues of the stucco, and--as much as anything else, perhaps--the vivacious character of the human life in the streets, take away the sense of its being an ancient city. The streets are delightful to walk in after so many penitential pilgrimages as I have made over those little square, uneven blocks of the Roman pavement, which wear out the boots and torment the soul. I absolutely walk on the smooth flags of Florence for the mere pleasure of walking, and live in its atmosphere for the mere pleasure of living; and, warm as the weather is getting to be, I never feel that inclination to sink down in a heap and never stir again, which was my dull torment and misery as long as I stayed in Rome. I hardly think there can be a place in the world where life is more delicious for its own simple sake than here. I went to-day into the Baptistery, which stands near the Duomo, and, like that, is covered externally with slabs of black and white marble, now grown brown and yellow with age. The edifice is octagonal, and on entering, one immediately thinks of the Pantheon,--the whole space within being free from side to side, with a dome above; but it differs from the severe simplicity of the former edifice, being elaborately ornamented with marble and frescos, and lacking that great eye in the roof that looks so nobly and reverently heavenward from the Pantheon. I did little more than pass through the Baptistery, glancing at the famous bronze doors, some perfect and admirable casts of which I had already seen at the Crystal Palace. The entrance of the Duomo being just across the piazza, I went in there after leaving the Baptistery, and was struck anew--for this is the third or fourth visit--with the dim grandeur of the interior, lighted as it is almost exclusively by painted windows, which seem to me worth all the variegated marbles and rich cabinet-work of St. Peter's. The Florentine Cathedral has a spacious and lofty nave, and side aisles divided from it by pillars; but there are no chapels along the aisles, so that there is far more breadth and freedom of interior, in proportion to the actual space, than is usual in churches. It is woful to think how the vast capaciousness within St. Peter's is thrown away, and made to seem smaller than it is by every possible device, as if on purpose. The pillars and walls of this Duomo are of a uniform brownish, neutral tint; the pavement, a mosaic work of marble; the ceiling of the dome itself is covered with frescos, which, being very imperfectly lighted, it is impossible to trace out. Indeed, it is but a twilight region that is enclosed within the firmament of this great dome, which is actually larger than that of St. Peter's, though not lifted so high from the pavement. But looking at the painted windows, I little cared what dimness there might be elsewhere; for certainly the art of man has never contrived any other beauty and glory at all to be compared to this. The dome sits, as it were, upon three smaller domes,--smaller, but still great,--beneath which are three vast niches, forming the transepts of the cathedral and the tribune behind the high altar. All round these hollow, dome-covered arches or niches are high and narrow windows crowded with saints, angels, and all manner of blessed shapes, that turn the common daylight into a miracle of richness and splendor as it passes through their heavenly substance. And just beneath the swell of the great central dome is a wreath of circular windows quite round it, as brilliant as the tall and narrow ones below. It is a pity anybody should die without seeing an antique painted window, with the bright Italian sunshine glowing through it. This is "the dim, religious light" that Milton speaks of; but I doubt whether he saw these windows when he was in Italy, or any but those faded or dusty and dingy ones of the English cathedrals, else he would have illuminated that word "dim" with some epithet that should not chase away the dimness, yet should make it shine like a million of rubies, sapphires, emeralds, and topazes,--bright in themselves, but dim with tenderness and reverence because God himself was shining through them. I hate what I have said. All the time that I was in the cathedral the space around the high altar, which stands exactly under the dome, was occupied by priests or acolytes in white garments, chanting a religious service. After coming out, I took a view of the edifice from a corner of the street nearest to the dome, where it and the smaller domes can be seen at once. It is greatly more satisfactory than St. Peter's in any view I ever had of it,--striking in its outline, with a mystery, yet not a bewilderment, in its masses and curves and angles, and wrought out with a richness of detail that gives the eyes new arches, new galleries, new niches, new pinnacles, new beauties, great and small, to play with when wearied with the vast whole. The hue, black and white marbles, like the Baptistery, turned also yellow and brown, is greatly preferable to the buff travertine of St. Peter's. From the Duomo it is but a moderate street's length to the Piazza del Gran Duca, the principal square of Florence. It is a very interesting place, and has on one side the old Governmental Palace,--the Palazzo Vecchio,--where many scenes of historic interest have been enacted; for example, conspirators have been hanged from its windows, or precipitated from them upon the pavement of the square below. It is a pity that we cannot take as much interest in the history of these Italian Republics as in that of England, for the former is much the more picturesque and fuller of curious incident. The sobriety of the Anglo-Saxon race--in connection, too, with their moral sense--keeps them from doing a great many things that would enliven the page of history; and their events seem to come in great masses, shoved along by the agency of many persons, rather than to result from individual will and character. A hundred plots for a tragedy might be found in Florentine history for one in English. At one corner of the Palazzo Vecchio is a bronze equestrian statue of Cosmo de' Medici, the first Grand Duke, very stately and majestic; there are other marble statues--one of David, by Michael Angelo--at each side of the palace door; and entering the court I found a rich antique arcade within, surrounded by marble pillars, most elaborately carved, supporting arches that were covered with faded frescos. I went no farther, but stepped across a little space of the square to the Loggia di Lanzi, which is broad and noble, of three vast arches, at the end of which, I take it, is a part of the Palazzo Uffizi fronting on the piazza. I should call it a portico if it stood before the palace door; but it seems to have been constructed merely for itself, and as a shelter for the people from sun and rain, and to contain some fine specimens of sculpture, as well antique as of more modern times. Benvenuto Cellini's Perseus stands here; but it did not strike me so much as the cast of it in the Crystal Palace. A good many people were under these great arches; some of whom were reclining, half or quite asleep, on the marble seats that are built against the back of the loggia. A group was reading an edict of the Grand Duke, which appeared to have been just posted on a board, at the farther end of it; and I was surprised at the interest which they ventured to manifest, and the freedom with which they seemed to discuss it. A soldier was on guard, and doubtless there were spies enough to carry every word that was said to the ear of absolute authority. Glancing myself at the edict, however, I found it referred only to the furtherance of a project, got up among the citizens themselves, for bringing water into the city; and on such topics, I suppose there is freedom of discussion. June 7th.--Saturday evening we walked with U---- and J----- into the city, and looked at the exterior of the Duomo with new admiration. Since my former view of it, I have noticed--which, strangely enough, did not strike me before--that the facade is but a great, bare, ugly space, roughly plastered over, with the brickwork peeping through it in spots, and a faint, almost invisible fresco of colors upon it. This front was once nearly finished with an incrustation of black and white marble, like the rest of the edifice; but one of the city magistrates, Benedetto Uguccione, demolished it, three hundred years ago, with the idea of building it again in better style. He failed to do so, and, ever since, the magnificence of the great church has been marred by this unsightly roughness of what should have been its richest part; nor is there, I suppose, any hope that it will ever be finished now. The campanile, or bell-tower, stands within a few paces of the cathedral, but entirely disconnected from it, rising to a height of nearly three hundred feet, a square tower of light marbles, now discolored by time. It is impossible to give an idea of the richness of effect produced by its elaborate finish; the whole surface of the four sides, from top to bottom, being decorated with all manner of statuesque and architectural sculpture. It is like a toy of ivory, which some ingenious and pious monk might have spent his lifetime in adorning with scriptural designs and figures of saints; and when it was finished, seeing it so beautiful, he prayed that it might be miraculously magnified from the size of one foot to that of three hundred. This idea somewhat satisfies me, as conveying an impression how gigantesque the campanile is in its mass and height, and how minute and varied in its detail. Surely these mediaeval works have an advantage over the classic. They combine the telescope and the microscope. The city was all alive in the summer evening, and the streets humming with voices. Before the doors of the cafes were tables, at which people were taking refreshment, and it went to my heart to see a bottle of English ale, some of which was poured foaming into a glass; at least, it had exactly the amber hue and the foam of English bitter ale; but perhaps it may have been merely a Florentine imitation. As we returned home over the Arno, crossing the Ponte di Santa Trinita, we were struck by the beautiful scene of the broad, calm river, with the palaces along its shores repeated in it, on either side, and the neighboring bridges, too, just as perfect in the tide beneath as in the air above,--a city of dream and shadow so close to the actual one. God has a meaning, no doubt, in putting this spiritual symbol continually beside us. Along the river, on both sides, as far as we could see, there was a row of brilliant lamps, which, in the far distance, looked like a cornice of golden light; and this also shone as brightly in the river's depths. The lilies of the evening, in the quarter where the sun had gone down, were very soft and beautiful, though not so gorgeous as thousands that I have seen in America. But I believe I must fairly confess that the Italian sky, in the daytime, is bluer and brighter than our own, and that the atmosphere has a quality of showing objects to better advantage. It is more than mere daylight; the magic of moonlight is somehow mixed up with it, although it is so transparent a medium of light. Last evening, Mr. Powers called to see us, and sat down to talk in a friendly and familiar way. I do not know a man of more facile intercourse, nor with whom one so easily gets rid of ceremony. His conversation, too, is interesting. He talked, to begin with, about Italian food, as poultry, mutton, beef, and their lack of savoriness as compared with our own; and mentioned an exquisite dish of vegetables which they prepare from squash or pumpkin blossoms; likewise another dish, which it will be well for us to remember when we get back to the Wayside, where we are overrun with acacias. It consists of the acacia-blossoms in a certain stage of their development fried in olive-oil. I shall get the receipt from Mrs. Powers, and mean to deserve well of my country by first trying it, and then making it known; only I doubt whether American lard, or even butter, will produce the dish quite so delicately as fresh Florence oil. Meanwhile, I like Powers all the better, because he does not put his life wholly into marble. We had much talk, nevertheless, on matters of sculpture, for he drank a cup of tea with us, and stayed a good while. He passed a condemnatory sentence on classic busts in general, saying that they were conventional, and not to be depended upon as trite representations of the persons. He particularly excepted none but the bust of Caracalla; and, indeed, everybody that has seen this bust must feel the justice of the exception, and so be the more inclined to accept his opinion about the rest. There are not more than half a dozen--that of Cato the Censor among the others--in regard to which I should like to ask his judgment individually. He seems to think the faculty of making a bust an extremely rare one. Canova put his own likeness into all the busts he made. Greenough could not make a good one; nor Crawford, nor Gibson. Mr. Harte, he observed,--an American sculptor, now a resident in Florence,--is the best man of the day for making busts. Of course, it is to be presumed that he excepts himself; but I would not do Powers the great injustice to imply that there is the slightest professional jealousy in his estimate of what others have done, or are now doing, in his own art. If he saw a better man than himself, he would recognize him at once, and tell the world of him; but he knows well enough that, in this line, there is no better, and probably none so good. It would not accord with the simplicity of his character to blink a fact that stands so broadly before him. We asked him what he thought, of Mr. Gibson's practice of coloring his statues, and he quietly and slyly said that he himself had made wax figures in his earlier days, but had left off making them now. In short, he objected to the practice wholly, and said that a letter of his on the subject had been published in the London "Athenaeum," and had given great offence to some of Mr. Gibson's friends. It appeared to me, however, that his arguments did not apply quite fairly to the case, for he seems to think Gibson aims at producing an illusion of life in the statue, whereas I think his object is merely to give warmth and softness to the snowy marble, and so bring it a little nearer to our hearts and sympathies. Even so far, nevertheless, I doubt whether the practice is defensible, and I was glad to see that Powers scorned, at all events, the argument drawn from the use of color by the antique sculptors, on which Gibson relies so much. It might almost be implied, from the contemptuous way in which Powers spoke of color, that he considers it an impertinence on the face of visible nature, and would rather the world had been made without it; for he said that everything in intellect or feeling can be expressed as perfectly, or more so, by the sculptor in colorless marble, as by the painter with all the resources of his palette. I asked him whether he could model the face of Beatrice Cenci from Guido's picture so as to retain the subtle expression, and he said he could, for that the expression depended entirely on the drawing, "the picture being a badly colored thing." I inquired whether he could model a blush, and he said "Yes"; and that he had once proposed to an artist to express a blush in marble, if he would express it in picture. On consideration, I believe one to be as impossible as the other; the life and reality of the blush being in its tremulousness, coming and going. It is lost in a settled red just as much as in a settled paleness, and neither the sculptor nor painter can do more than represent the circumstances of attitude and expression that accompany the blush. There was a great deal of truth in what Powers said about this matter of color, and in one of our interminable New England winters it ought to comfort us to think how little necessity there is for any hue but that of the snow. Mr. Powers, nevertheless, had brought us a bunch of beautiful roses, and seemed as capable of appreciating their delicate blush as we were. The best thing he said against the use of color in marble was to the effect that the whiteness removed the object represented into a sort of spiritual region, and so gave chaste permission to those nudities which would otherwise suggest immodesty. I have myself felt the truth of this in a certain sense of shame as I looked at Gibson's tinted Venus. He took his leave at about eight o'clock, being to make a call on the Bryants, who are at the Hotel de New York, and also on Mrs. Browning, at Casa Guidi. END OF VOL. I. 
7877	----	PASSAGES FROM THE ENGLISH NOTE-BOOKS By Nathaniel Hawthorne VOL. II. PASSAGES FROM HAWTHORNE'S ENGLISH NOTE-BOOKS. LONDON.--MILTON-CLUB DINNER. April 4th, 1856.--On Tuesday I went to No. 14 Ludgate Hill, to dine with Bennoch at the Milton Club; a club recently founded for dissenters, nonconformists, and people whose ideas, religious or political, are not precisely in train with the establishment in church and state. I was shown into a large reading-room, well provided with periodicals and newspapers, and found two or three persons there; but Bennoch had not yet arrived. In a few moments, a tall gentleman with white hair came in,--a fine and intelligent-looking man, whom I guessed to be one of those who were to meet me. He walked about, glancing at the periodicals; and soon entered Mr. Tupper, and, without seeing me, exchanged warm greetings with the white-haired gentleman. "I suppose," began Mr. Tupper, "you have come to meet--" Now, conscious that my name was going to be spoken, and not knowing but the excellent Mr. Tupper might say something which he would not, quite like me to overhear, I advanced at once, with outstretched hand, and saluted him. He expressed great joy at the recognition, and immediately introduced me to Mr. Hall. The dining-room was pretty large and lofty, and there were sixteen guests at table, most of them authors, or people connected with the press; so that the party represented a great deal of the working intellect of London at this present day and moment,--the men whose plays, whose songs, whose articles, are just now in vogue. Mr. Tom Taylor was one of the very few whose writings I had known anything about. He is a tall, slender, dark young man, not English-looking, and wearing colored spectacles, so that I should readily have taken him for an American literary man. I did not have much opportunity of talking with him, nor with anybody else, except Dr. ------, who seemed a shrewd, sensible man, with a certain slight acerbity of thought. Mr. Herbert Ingram, recently elected member of Parliament, was likewise present, and sat on Bennoch's left. It was a very good dinner, with an abundance of wine, which Bennoch sent round faster than was for the next day's comfort of his guests. It is singular that I should thus far have quite forgotten W------ H--------, whose books I know better than those of any other person there. He is a white-headed, stout, firm-looking, and rather wrinkled-faced old gentleman, whose temper, I should imagine, was not the very sweetest in the world. There is all abruptness, a kind of sub-acidity, if not bitterness, in his address; he seemed not to be, in short, so genial as I should have anticipated from his books. As soon as the cloth was removed, Bennoch, without rising from his chair, made a speech in honor of his eminent and distinguished guest, which illustrious person happened to be sitting in the selfsame chair that I myself occupied. I have no recollection of what he said, nor of what I said in reply, but I remember that both of us were cheered and applauded much more than the occasion deserved. Then followed about fifty other speeches; for every single individual at table was called up (as Tupper said, "toasted and roasted"), and, for my part, I was done entirely brown (to continue T-----'s figure). Everybody said something kind, not a word or idea of which can I find in my memory. Certainly, if I never get any more praise in my life, I have had enough of it for once. I made another little bit of a speech, too, in response to something that was said in reference to the present difficulties between England and America, and ended, as a proof that I deemed war impossible, with drinking success to the British army, and calling on Lieutenant Shaw, of the Aldershott Camp, to reply. I am afraid I must have said something very wrong, for the applause was vociferous, and I could hear the gentlemen whispering about the table, "Good!" "Good!" "Yes, he is a fine fellow,"--and other such ill-earned praises; and I took shame to myself, and held my tongue (publicly) the rest of the evening. But in such cases something must be allowed to the excitement of the moment, and to the effect of kindness and goodwill, so broadly and warmly displayed; and even a sincere man must not be held to speak as if he were under oath. We separated, in a blessed state of contentment with one another, at about eleven; and (lest I should starve before morning) I went with Mr. D------ to take supper at his house in Park Lane. Mr. D------ is a pale young gentleman, of American aspect, being a West-Indian by birth. He is one of the principal writers of editorials for the Times. We were accompanied in the carriage by another gentleman, Mr. M------, who is connected with the management of the same paper. He wrote the letters from Scutari, which drew so much attention to the state of the hospitals. Mr. D------ is the husband of the former Miss ------, the actress, and when we reached his house, we found that she had just come home from the theatre, and was taking off her stage-dress. Anon she came down to the drawing-room,--a seemingly good, simple, and intelligent lady, not at all pretty, and, I should think, older than her husband. She was very kind to me, and told me that she had read one of my books--The House of the Seven Gables--thirteen years ago; which I thought remarkable, because I did not write it till eight or nine years afterwards. The principal talk during supper (which consisted of Welsh-rabbit and biscuits, with champagne and sodawater) was about the Times, and the two contributors expressed vast admiration of Mr. ------, who has the chief editorial management of the paper. It is odd to find how little we outsiders know of men who really exercise a vast influence on affairs, for this Mr. ------ is certainly of far more importance in the world than a minister of state. He writes nothing himself; but the character of the Times seems to depend upon his intuitive, unerring judgment; and if ever he is absent from his post, even for a day or two, they say that the paper immediately shows it. In reply to my questions, they appeared to acknowledge that he was a man of expediency, but of a very high expediency, and that he gave the public the very best principles which it was capable of receiving. Perhaps it may be so: the Times's articles are certainly not written in so high a moral vein as might be wished; but what they lack in height they gain in breadth. Every sensible man in England finds his own best common-sense there; and, in effect, I think its influence is wholesome. Apropos of public speaking, Dr. ------ said that Sir Lytton Bulwer asked him (I think the anecdote was personal to himself) whether he felt his heart beat when he was going to speak. "Yes." "Does your voice frighten you?" "Yes." "Do all your ideas forsake you?" "Yes." "Do you wish the floor to open and swallow you?" "Yes." "Why, then, you'll make an orator!" Dr. ------ told of Canning, too, how once, before rising to speak in the House of Commons, he bade his friend feel his pulse, which was throbbing terrifically. "I know I shall make one of my best speeches," said Canning, "because I'm in such an awful funk!" President Pierce, who has a great deal of oratorical power, is subject to a similar horror and reluctance. REFORM-CLUB DINNER. April 5th.--On Thursday, at eight o'clock, I went to the Reform Club, to dine with Dr. ------. The waiter admitted me into a great basement hall, with a tessellated or mosaic or somehow figured floor of stone, and lighted from a dome of lofty height. In a few minutes Dr. ------ appeared, and showed me about the edifice, which is very noble and of a substantial magnificence that was most satisfactory to behold,--no wood-work imitating better materials, but pillars and balustrades of marble, and everything what it purports to be. The reading-room is very large, and luxuriously comfortable, and contains an admirable library: there are rooms and conveniences for every possible purpose; and whatever material for enjoyment a bachelor may need, or ought to have, he can surely find it here, and on such reasonable terms that a small income will do as much for him as a far greater one on any other system. In a colonnade, on the first floor, surrounding the great basement hall, there are portraits of distinguished reformers, and black niches for others yet to come. Joseph Hume, I believe, is destined to fill one of these blanks; but I remarked that the larger part of the portraits, already hung up, are of men of high rank,--the Duke of Sussex, for instance; Lord Durham, Lord Grey; and, indeed, I remember no commoner. In one room, I saw on the wall the fac-simile, so common in the United States, of our Declaration of Independence. Descending again to the basement hall, an elderly gentleman came in, and was warmly welcomed by Dr. ------. He was a very short man, but with breadth enough, and a back excessively bent,--bowed almost to deformity; very gray hair, and a face and expression of remarkable briskness and intelligence. His profile came out pretty boldly, and his eyes had the prominence that indicates, I believe, volubility of speech, nor did he fail to talk from the instant of his appearance; and in the tone of his voice, and in his glance, and in the whole man, there was something racy,--a flavor of the humorist. His step was that of an aged man, and he put his stick down very decidedly at every footfall; though as he afterwards told me that he was only fifty-two, he need not yet have been infirm. But perhaps he has had the gout; his feet, however, are by no means swollen, but unusually small. Dr. ------ introduced him as Mr. Douglas Jerrold, and we went into the coffee-room to dine. The coffee-room occupies one whole side of the edifice, and is provided with a great many tables, calculated for three or four persons to dine at; and we sat down at one of these, and Dr. ------ ordered some mulligatawny soup, and a bottle of white French wine. The waiters in the coffee-room are very numerous, and most of them dressed in the livery of the Club, comprising plush breeches and white-silk stockings; for these English Reformers do not seem to include Republican simplicity of manners in their system. Neither, perhaps, is it anywise essential. After the soup, we had turbot, and by and by a bottle of Chateau Margaux, very delectable; and then some lambs' feet, delicately done, and some cutlets of I know not what peculiar type; and finally a ptarmigan, which is of the same race of birds as the grouse, but feeds high up towards the summits of the Scotch mountains. Then some cheese, and a bottle of Chambertin. It was a very pleasant dinner, and my companions were both very agreeable men; both taking a shrewd, satirical, yet not ill-natured, view of life and people, and as for Mr. Douglas Jerrold, he often reminded me of E---- C------, in the richer veins of the latter, both by his face and expression, and by a tincture of something at once wise and humorously absurd in what he said. But I think he has a kinder, more genial, wholesomer nature than E----, and under a very thin crust of outward acerbity I grew sensible of a very warm heart, and even of much simplicity of character in this man, born in London, and accustomed always to London life. I wish I had any faculty whatever of remembering what people say; but, though I appreciate anything good at the moment, it never stays in my memory; nor do I think, in fact, that anything definite, rounded, pointed, separable, and transferable from the general lump of conversation was said by anybody. I recollect that they laughed at Mr. ------, and at his shedding a tear into a Scottish river, on occasion of some literary festival. . . . They spoke approvingly of Bulwer, as valuing his literary position, and holding himself one of the brotherhood of authors; and not so approvingly of Charles Dickens, who, born a plebeian, aspires to aristocratic society. But I said that it was easy to condescend, and that Bulwer knew he could not put off his rank, and that he would have all the advantages of it in spite of his authorship. We talked about the position of men of letters in England, and they said that the aristocracy hated and despised and feared them; and I asked why it was that literary men, having really so much power in their hands, were content to live unrecognized in the State. Douglas Jerrold talked of Thackeray and his success in America, and said that he himself purposed going and had been invited thither to lecture. I asked him whether it was pleasant to a writer of plays to see them performed; and he said it was intolerable, the presentation of the author's idea being so imperfect; and Dr. ------ observed that it was excruciating to hear one of his own songs sung. Jerrold spoke of the Duke of Devonshire with great warmth, as a true, honest, simple, most kind-hearted man, from whom he himself had received great courtesies and kindnesses (not, as I understood, in the way of patronage or essential favors); and I (Heaven forgive me!) queried within myself whether this English reforming author would have been quite so sensible of the Duke's excellence if his Grace had not been a duke. But indeed, a nobleman, who is at the same time a true and whole-hearted man, feeling his brotherhood with men, does really deserve some credit for it. In the course of the evening, Jerrold spoke with high appreciation of Emerson; and of Longfellow, whose Hiawatha he considered a wonderful performance; and of Lowell, whose Fable for Critics he especially admired. I mentioned Thoreau, and proposed to send his works to Dr. ------, who, being connected with the Illustrated News, and otherwise a writer, might be inclined to draw attention to then. Douglas Jerrold asked why he should not have them too. I hesitated a little, but as he pressed me, and would have an answer, I said that I did not feel quite so sure of his kindly judgment on Thoreau's books; and it so chanced that I used the word "acrid" for lack of a better, in endeavoring to express my idea of Jerrold's way of looking at men and books. It was not quite what I meant; but, in fact, he often is acrid, and has written pages and volumes of acridity, though, no doubt, with an honest purpose, and from a manly disgust at the cant and humbug of the world. Jerrold said no more, and I went on talking with Dr. ------; but, in a minute or two, I became aware that something had gone wrong, and, looking at Douglas Jerrold, there was an expression of pain and emotion on his face. By this time a second bottle of Burgundy had been opened (Clos Vougeot, the best the Club could produce, and far richer than the Chambertin), and that warm and potent wine may have had something to do with the depth and vivacity of Mr. Jerrold's feelings. But he was indeed greatly hurt by that little word "acrid." "He knew," he said, "that the world considered him a sour, bitter, ill-natured man; but that such a man as I should have the sane opinion was almost more than he could bear." As he spoke, he threw out his arms, sank back in his seat, and I was really a little apprehensive of his actual dissolution into tears. Hereupon I spoke, as was good need, and though, as usual, I have forgotten everything I said, I am quite sure it was to the purpose, and went to this good fellow's heart, as it came warmly from my own. I do remember saying that I felt him to be as genial as the glass of Burgundy which I held in my hand; and I think that touched the very right spot; for he smiled, and said he was afraid the Burgundy was better than he, but yet he was comforted. Dr. ------ said that he likewise had a reputation for bitterness; and I assured him, if I might venture to join myself to the brotherhood of two such men, that I was considered a very ill-natured person by many people in my own country. Douglas Jerrold said he was glad of it. We were now in sweetest harmony, and Jerrold spoke more than it would become me to repeat in praise of my own books, which he said he admired, and he found the man more admirable than his books! I hope so, certainly. We now went to the Haymarket Theatre, where Douglas Jerrold is on the free list; and after seeing a ballet by some Spanish dancers, we separated, and betook ourselves to our several homes. I like Douglas Jerrold very much. April 8th.--On Saturday evening, at ten o'clock, I went to a supper-party at Mr. D------'s, and there met five or six people,--Mr. Faed, a young and distinguished artist; Dr. Eliotson, a dark, sombre, taciturn, powerful-looking man, with coal-black hair, and a beard as black, fringing round his face; Mr. Charles Reade, author of Christie Johnstone and other novels, and many plays,--a tall man, more than thirty, fair-haired, and of agreeable talk and demeanor. On April 6th, I went to the Waterloo station, and there meeting Bennoch and Dr. ------, took the rail for Woking, where we found Mr. Hall's carriage waiting to convey us to Addlestone, about five miles off. On arriving we found that Mr. and Mrs. Hall had not yet returned from church. Their place is an exceedingly pretty one, and arranged in very good taste. The house is not large; but is filled, in every room, with fine engravings, statuettes, ingenious prettinesses or beautifulnesses in the way of flower-stands, cabinets, and things that seem to have bloomed naturally out of the characters of its occupants. There is a conservatory connected with the drawing-room, and enriched with lovely plants, one of which has a certain interest as being the plant on which Coleridge's eyes were fixed when he died. This conservatory is likewise beautified with several very fine casts of statues by modern sculptors, among which was the Greek Slave of Powers, which my English friends criticised as being too thin and meagre; but I defended it as in accordance with American ideas of feminine beauty. From the conservatory we passed into the garden, but did not minutely examine it, knowing that Mr. Hall would wish to lead us through it in person. So, in the mean time, we took a walk in the neighborhood, over stiles and along by-paths, for two or three miles, till we reached the old village of Chertsey. In one of its streets stands an ancient house, gabled, and with the second story projecting over the first, and bearing an inscription to the purport that the poet Cowley had once resided, and, I think, died there. Thence we passed on till we reached a bridge over the Thames, which at this point, about twenty-five miles from London, is a narrow river, but looks clean and pure, and unconscious what abominations the city sewers will pour into it anon. We were caught in two or three showers in the course of our walk; but got back to Firfield without being very much wetted. Our host and hostess had by this time returned from church, and Mrs. Hall came frankly and heartily to the door to greet us, scolding us (kindly) for having got wet. . . . I liked her simple, easy, gentle, quiet manners, and I liked her husband too. He has a wide and quick sympathy, and expresses it freely. . . . The world is the better for him. The shower being now over, we went out upon the beautiful lawn before his house, where there were a good many trees of various kinds, many of which have been set out by persons of great or small distinction, and are labelled with their names. Thomas Moore's name was appended to one; Maria Edgeworth's to another; likewise Fredrika Bremer's, Jenny Lind's; also Grace Greenwood's, and I know not whose besides. This is really a pleasant method of enriching one's grounds with memorials of friends, nor is there any harm in making a shrubbery of celebrities. Three holes were already dug, and three new trees lay ready to be planted, and for me there was a sumach to plant,--a tree I never liked; but Mr. Hall said that they had tried to dig up a hawthorn, but found it clung too fast to the soil. So, since better might not be, and telling Mr. Hall that I supposed I should have a right to hang myself on this tree whenever I chose, I seized a spade, and speedily shovelled in a great deal of dirt; and there stands my sumach, an object of interest to posterity! Bennoch also and Dr. ------ set out their trees, and indeed, it was in some sense a joint affair, for the rest of the party held up each tree, while its godfather shovelled in the earth; but, after all, the gardener had more to do with it than we. After this important business was over, Mr. Hall led us about his rounds, which are very nicely planned and ordered; and all this he has bought, and built, and laid out, from the profits of his own and his wife's literary exertions. We dined early, and had a very pleasant dinner, and, after the cloth was removed, Mr. Hall was graciously pleased to drink my health, following it with a long tribute to my genius. I answered briefly; and one half of my short speech was in all probability very foolish. . . . After the ladies (there were three, one being a girl of seventeen, with rich auburn hair, the adopted daughter of the Halls) had retired, Dr. ------ having been toasted himself, proposed Mrs. Hall's health. I did not have a great deal of conversation with Mrs. Hall; but enough to make me think her a genuine and good woman, unspoilt by a literary career, and retaining more sentiment than even most girls keep beyond seventeen. She told me that it had been the dream of her life to see Longfellow and myself! . . . . Her dream is half accomplished now, and, as they say Longfellow is coming over this summer, the remainder may soon be rounded out. On taking leave, our kind hosts presented me with some beautiful flowers, and with three volumes of a work, by themselves, on Ireland; and Dr. ------ was favored also with some flowers, and a plant in a pot, and Bennoch too had his hands full, . . . . and we went on our way rejoicing. [Here follows an account of the Lord Mayor's dinner, taken mostly for Our Old Home; but I think I will copy this more exact description of the lady mentioned in "Civic Banquets."--ED.] . . . . My eyes were mostly drawn to a young lady, who sat nearly opposite me, across the table. She was, I suppose, dark, and yet not dark, but rather seemed to be of pure white marble, yet not white; but the purest and finest complexion, without a shade of color in it, yet anything but sallow or sickly. Her hair was a wonderful deep raven-black, black as night, black as death; not raven-black, for that has a shiny gloss, and hers had not, but it was hair never to be painted nor described,--wonderful hair, Jewish hair. Her nose had a beautiful outline, though I could see that it was Jewish too; and that, and all her features, were so fine that sculpture seemed a despicable art beside her, and certainly my pen is good for nothing. If any likeness could be given, however; it must be by sculpture, not painting. She was slender and youthful, and yet had a stately and cold, though soft and womanly grace; and, looking at her, I saw what were the wives of the old patriarchs in their maiden or early-married days,--what Judith was, for, womanly as she looked, I doubt, not she could have slain a man in a just cause,--what Bathsheba was, only she seemed to have no sin in her,-- perhaps what Eve was, though one could hardly think her weak enough to eat the apple. . . . Whether owing to distinctness of race, my sense that she was a Jewess, or whatever else, I felt a sort of repugnance, simultaneously with my perception that she was an admirable creature. THE HOUSE OF COMMONS. At ten o'clock the next day [after the Lord Mayor's dinner] I went to lunch with Bennoch, and afterwards accompanied him to one of the government offices in Downing Street. He went thither, not on official business, but on a matter connected with a monument to Miss Mitford, in which Mr. Harness, a clergyman and some sort of a government clerk, is interested. I gathered from this conversation that there is no great enthusiasm about the monumental affair among the British public. It surprised me to hear allusions indicating that Miss Mitford was not the invariably amiable person that her writings would suggest; but the whole drift of what they said tended, nevertheless, towards the idea that she was an excellent and generous person, loved most by those who knew her best. From Downing Street we crossed over and entered Westminster Hall, and passed through it, and up the flight of steps at its farthest end, and along the avenue of statues, into the vestibule of the House of Commons. It was now somewhat past five, and we stood at the inner entrance of the House, to see the members pass in, Bennoch pointing out to me the distinguished ones. I was not much impressed with the appearance of the members generally; they seemed to me rather shabbier than English gentlemen usually, and I saw or fancied in many of them a certain self-importance, as they passed into the interior, betokening them to be very full of their dignity. Some of them looked more American--more like American politicians--than most Englishmen do. There was now and then a gray-headed country gentleman, the very type of stupidity; and two or three city members came up and spoke to Bennoch, and showed themselves quite as dull, in their aldermanic way, as the country squires. . . . Bennoch pointed out Lord John Russell, a small, very short, elderly gentleman, in a brown coat, and so large a hat--not large of brim, but large like a peck-measure--that I saw really no face beneath it. By and by came a rather tall, slender person, in a black frock-coat, buttoned up, and black pantaloons, taking long steps, but I thought rather feebly or listlessly. His shoulders were round, or else he had a habitual stoop in them. He had a prominent nose, a thin face, and a sallow, very sallow complexion; . . . . and had I seen him in America I should have taken him for a hard-worked editor of a newspaper, weary and worn with night-labor and want of exercise,--aged before his time. It was Disraeli, and I never saw any other Englishman look in the least like him; though, in America, his appearance would not attract notice as being unusual. I do not remember any other noteworthy person whom we saw enter; in fact, the House had already been some time in session, and most of the members were in their places. We were to dine at the Refectory of the House with the new member for Boston; and, meanwhile, Bennoch obtained admittance for us into the Speaker's gallery, where we had a view of the members, and could hear what was going on. A Mr. Muntz was speaking on the Income Tax, and he was followed by Sir George Cornewall Lewis and others; but it was all very uninteresting, without the slightest animation or attempt at oratory,--which, indeed, would have been quite out of place. We saw Lord Palmerston; but at too great a distance to distinguish anything but a gray head. The House had daylight in it when we entered, and for some time afterwards; but, by and by, the roof, which I had taken to be a solid and opaque ceiling, suddenly brightened, and showed itself to be transparent; a vast expanse of tinted and figured glass, through which came down a great, mild radiance on the members below. The character of the debate, however, did not grow more luminous or vivacious; so we went down into the vestibule, and there waited for Mr. ------, who soon came and led us into the Refectory. It was very much like the coffee-room of a club. The strict rule forbids the entrance of any but members of Parliament; but it seems to be winked at, although there is another room, opening beyond this, where the law of seclusion is strictly enforced. The dinner was good, not remarkably so, but good enough,--a soup, some turbot or salmon, cutlets, and I know not what else, and claret, sherry, and port; for, as Mr. ------ said, "he did not wish to be stingy." Mr. ------ is a self-made man, and a strong instance of the difference between the Englishman and the American, when self-made, and without early education. He is no more a gentleman now than when he began life, --not a whit more refined, either outwardly or inwardly; while the American would have been, after the same experience, not distinguishable outwardly, and perhaps as refined within, as nine tenths of the gentlemen born, in the House of Commons. And, besides, an American comes naturally to any distinctions to which success in life may bring him; he takes them as if they were his proper inheritance, and in no wise to be wondered at. Mr. ------, on the other hand, took evidently a childish delight in his position, and felt a childish wonder in having arrived at it; nor did it seem real to him, after all. . . . We again saw Disraeli, who has risen from the people by modes perhaps somewhat like those of Mr. ------. He came and stood near our table, looking at the bill of fare, and then sat down on the opposite side of the room with another gentleman, and ate his dinner. The story of his marriage does him much credit; and indeed I am inclined to like Disraeli, as a man who has made his own place good among a hostile aristocracy, and leads instead of following them. From the House of Commons we went to Albert Smith's exhibition, or lecture, of the ascent of Mont Blanc, to which Bennoch had orders. It was very amusing, and in some degree instructive. We remained in the saloon at the conclusion of the lecture; and when the audience had dispersed, Mr. Albert Smith made his appearance. . . . Nothing of moment happened the next day, at least, not till two o'clock, when I went with Mr. Bowman to Birch's eating-house (it is not Birch's now, but this was the name of the original founder, who became an alderman, and has long been dead) for a basin of turtle-soup. It was very rich, very good, better than we had at the Lord Mayor's, and the best I ever ate. In the evening, Mr. J. B. Davis, formerly our Secretary of Legation, called to take us to dine at Mr. ------'s in Camden Town. Mr. ------ calls his residence Vermont House; but it hardly has a claim to any separate title, being one of the centre houses of a block. I forget whether I mentioned his calling on me. He is a Vermonter, a graduate of Yale College, who has been here several years, and has established a sort of book brokerage, buying libraries for those who want them, and rare works and editions for American collectors. His business naturally brings him into relations with literary people; and he is himself a kindly and pleasant man. On our arrival we found Mr. D------ and one of his sisters already there; and soon came a Mr. Peabody, who, if I mistake not, is one of the Salem Peabodys, and has some connection with the present eminent London Mr. Peabody. At any rate, he is a very sensible, well-instructed, and widely and long travelled man. Mr. Tom Taylor was also expected; but, owing to some accident or mistake, he did not come for above an hour, all which time our host waited. . . . But Mr. Tom Taylor, a wit, a satirist, and a famous diner out, is too formidable and too valuable a personage to be treated cavalierly. In the interim Mr. ------ showed us some rare old books, which he has in his private collection, a black-letter edition of Chaucer, and other specimens of the early English printers; and I was impressed, as I have often been, with the idea that we have made few, if any, improvements in the art of printing, though we have greatly facilitated the modes of it. He showed us Dryden's translation of Virgil, with Dr. Johnson's autograph in it and a large collection of Bibles, of all dates,--church Bibles, family Bibles of the common translation, and older ones. He says he has written or is writing a history of the Bible (as a printed work, I presume). Many of these Bibles had, no doubt, been in actual and daily use from generation to generation; but they were now all splendidly bound, and were likewise very clean and smooth,--in fact, every leaf had been cleansed by a delicate process, a part of which consisted in soaking the whole book in a tub of water, during several days. Mr. ------ is likewise rich in manuscripts, having a Spanish document with the signature of the son of Columbus; a whole little volume in Franklin's handwriting, being the first specimen of it; and the original manuscripts of many of the songs of Burns. Among these I saw "Auld Lang Syne," and "Bruce's Address to his Army." We amused ourselves with these matters as long as we could; but at last, as there was to be a party in the evening, dinner could no longer be put off; so we took our seats at table, and immediately afterwards Mr. Taylor made his appearance with his wife and another lady. Mr. Taylor is reckoned a brilliant conversationist; but I suppose he requires somebody to draw him out and assist him; for I could hear nothing that I thought very remarkable on this occasion. He is not a kind of man whom I can talk with, or greatly help to talk; so, though I sat next to him, nothing came of it. He told me some stories of his life in the Temple,--little funny incidents, that he afterwards wrought into his dramas; in short, a sensible, active-minded, clearly perceptive man, with a humorous way of showing up men and matters. . . . I wish I could know exactly what the English style good conversation. Probably it is something like plum-pudding,--as heavy, but seldom so rich. After dinner Mr. Tom Taylor and Mr. D------, with their respective ladies, took their leave; but when we returned to the drawing-room, we found it thronged with a good many people. Mr. S. C. Hall was there with his wife, whom I was glad to see again, for this was the third time of meeting her, and, in this whirl of new acquaintances, I felt quite as if she were an old friend. Mr. William Howitt was also there, and introduced me to his wife,--a very natural, kind, and pleasant lady; and she presented me to one or two daughters. Mr. Marston, the dramatist, was also introduced to me; and Mr. Helps, a thin, scholarly, cold sort of a man. Dr. Mackay and his wife were there, too; and a certain Mr. Jones, a sculptor,--a jolly, large, elderly person, with a twinkle in his eye. Also a Mr. Godwin, who impressed me as quite a superior person, gentlemanly, cultivated, a man of sensibility; but it is quite impossible to take a clear imprint from any one character, where so many are stamped upon one's notice at once. This Mr. Godwin, as we were discussing Thackeray, said that he is most beautifully tender and devoted to his wife, whenever she can be sensible of his attentions. He says that Thackeray, in his real self, is a sweet, sad man. I grew weary of so many people, especially of the ladies, who were rather superfluous in their oblations, quite stifling me, indeed, with the incense that they burnt under my nose. So far as I could judge, they had all been invited there to see me. It is ungracious, even hoggish, not to be gratified with the interest they expressed in me; but then it is really a bore, and one does not know what to do or say. I felt like the hippopotamus, or-- to use a more modest illustration--like some strange insect imprisoned under a tumbler, with a dozen eyes watching whatever I did. By and by, Mr. Jones, the sculptor, relieved me by standing up against the mantel-piece, and telling an Irish story, not to two or three auditors, but to the whole drawing-room, all attentive as to a set exhibition. It was very funny. The next day after this I went with Mr. Bowman to call on our minister, and found that he, and four of the ladies of his family, with his son, had gone to the Queen's Drawing-room. We lunched at the Wellington; and spent an hour or more in looking out of the window of that establishment at the carriages, with their pompous coachmen and footmen, driving to and from the Palace of St. James, and at the Horse Guards, with their bright cuirasses, stationed along the street. . . . Then I took the rail for Liverpool. . . . While I was still at breakfast at the Waterloo, J----- came in, ruddy-cheeked, smiling, very glad to see me, and looking, I thought, a good deal taller than when I left him. And so ended my London excursion, which has certainly been rich in incident and character, though my account of it be but meagre. SCOTLAND.--GLASGOW. May 10th.--Last Friday, May 2d, I took the rail, with Mr. Bowman, from the Lime Street station, for Glasgow. There was nothing of much interest along the road, except that, when we got beyond Penrith, we saw snow on the tops of some of the hills. Twilight came on as we were entering Scotland; and I have only a recollection of bleak and bare hills and villages dimly seen, until, nearing Glasgow, we saw the red blaze of furnace-lights at frequent iron-founderies. We put up at the Queen's Hotel, where we arrived about ten o'clock; a better hotel than I have anywhere found in England,--new, well arranged, and with brisk attendance. In the morning I rambled largely about Glasgow, and found it to be chiefly a modern-built city, with streets mostly wide and regular, and handsome houses and public edifices of a dark gray stone. In front of our hotel, in an enclosed green space, stands a tall column surmounted by a statue of Sir Walter Scott,--a good statue, I should think, as conveying the air and personal aspect of the man. There is a bronze equestrian statue of the Queen in one of the streets, and one or two more equestrian or other statues of eminent persons. I passed through the Trongate and the Gallow-Gate, and visited the Salt-Market, and saw the steeple of the Tolbooth, all of which Scott has made interesting; and I went through the gate of the University, and penetrated into its enclosed courts, round which the College edifices are built. They are not Gothic, but of the age, I suppose, of James I.,--with odd-looking, conical-roofed towers, and here and there the bust of a benefactor in niches round the courts, and heavy stone staircases ascending from the pavement, outside the buildings, all of dark gray granite, cold, hard, and venerable. The University stands in High Street, in a dense part of the town, and a very old and shabby part, too. I think the poorer classes of Glasgow excel even those in Liverpool in the bad eminence of filth, uncombed and unwashed children, drunkenness, disorderly deportment, evil smell, and all that makes city poverty disgusting. In my opinion, however, they are a better-looking people than the English (and this is true of all classes), more intelligent of aspect, with more regular features. I looked for the high cheek-bones, which have been attributed, as a characteristic feature, to the Scotch, but could not find them. What most distinguishes them front the English is the regularity of the nose, which is straight, or sometimes a little curved inward; whereas the English nose has no law whatever, but disports itself in all manner of irregularity. I very soon learned to recognize the Scotch face, and when not too Scotch, it is a handsome one. In another part of the High Street, up a pretty steep slope, and on one side of a public green, near an edifice which I think is a medical college, stands St. Mungo's Cathedral. It is hardly of cathedral dimensions, though a large and fine old church. The price of a ticket of admittance is twopence; so small that it might be as well to make the entrance free. The interior is in excellent repair, with the nave and side aisles, and clustered pillars, and intersecting arches, that belong to all these old churches; and a few monuments along the walls. I was going away without seeing any more than this; but the verger, a friendly old gentleman, with a hearty Scotch way of speaking, told me that the crypts were what chiefly interested strangers; and so he guided me down into the foundation-story of the church, where there is an intricacy and entanglement of immensely massive and heavy arches, supporting the structure above. The view through these arches, among the great shafts of the columns, was very striking. In the central part is a monument; a recumbent figure, if I remember rightly, but it is not known whom it commemorates. There is also a monument to a Scotch prelate, which seems to have been purposely defaced, probably in Covenant times. These intricate arches were the locality of one of the scenes in "Rob Roy," when Rob gives Frank Osbaldistone some message or warning, and then escapes from him into the obscurity behind. In one corner is St. Mungo's well, secured with a wooden cover; but I should not care to drink water that comes from among so many old graves. After viewing the cathedral, I got back to the hotel just in time to go from thence to the steamer wharf, and take passage up the Clyde. There was nothing very interesting in this little voyage. We passed many small iron steamers, and some large ones; and green fields along the river-shores, villas, villages, and all such suburban objects; neither am I quite sure of the name of the place we landed at, though I think it was Bowling. Here we took the railway for Balloch; and the only place or thing I remember during this transit was a huge bluff or crag, rising abruptly from a river-side, and looking, in connection with its vicinity to the Highlands, just such a site as would be taken for the foundation of a castle. On inquiry it turned out that this abrupt and double-headed hill (for it has two summits, with a cleft between) is the site of Dumbarton Castle, for ages one of the strongest fortresses in Scotland, and still kept up as a garrisoned place. At the distance and point of view at which we passed it, the castle made no show. Arriving at Balloch, we found it a small village, with no marked features, and a hotel, where we got some lunch, and then we took a stroll over the bridge across the Levers, while waiting for the steamer to take us up Loch Lomond. It was a beautiful afternoon, warm and sunny; and after walking about a mile, we had a fine view of Loch Lomond, and of the mountains around and beyond it,--Ben Lomond among the rest. It is vain, at a week's distance, to try to remember the shapes of mountains; so I shall attempt no description of them, and content myself with saying that they did not quite come up to my anticipations. In due time we returned to our hotel, and found in the coffee-room a tall, white-haired, venerable gentleman, and a pleasant-looking young lady, his daughter. They had been eating lunch, and the young lady helped her father on with his outside garment, and his comforter, and gave him his stick, just as any other daughter might do,--all of which I mention because he was a nobleman; and, moreover, had engaged all the post-horses at the inn, so that we could not continue our travels by land, along the side of Loch Lomond, as we had first intended. At four o'clock the railway train arrived again, with a very moderate number of passengers, who (and we among them) immediately embarked on board a neat little steamer which was waiting for us. The day was bright and cloudless; but there was a strong, cold breeze blowing down the lake, so that it was impossible, without vast discomfort, to stand in the bow of the steamer and look at the scenery. I looked at it, indeed, along the sides, as we passed, and on our track behind; and no doubt it was very fine; but from all the experience I have had, I do not think scenery can be well seen from the water. At any rate, the shores of Loch Lomond have faded completely out of my memory; nor can I conceive that they really were very striking. At a year's interval, I can recollect the cluster of hills around the head of Lake Windermere; at twenty years' interval, I remember the shores of Lake Champlain; but of the shores of this Scottish lake I remember nothing except some oddly shaped rocks, called "The Cobbler and his Daughter," on a mountain-top, just before we landed. But, indeed, we had very imperfect glimpses of the hills along the latter part of the course, because the wind had grown so very cold that we took shelter below, and merely peeped at Loch Lomond's sublimities from the cabin-windows. The whole voyage up Loch Lomond is, I think, about thirty-two miles; but we landed at a place called Tarbet, much short of the ultimate point. There is here a large hotel; but we passed it, and walked onward a mile or two to Arroquhar, a secluded glen among the hills, where is a new hotel, built in the old manor-house style, and occupying the site of what was once a castle of the chief of the MacFarlanes. Over the portal is a stone taken from the former house, bearing the date 1697. There is a little lake near the house, and the hills shut in the whole visible scene so closely that there appears no outlet nor communication with the external world; but in reality this little lake is connected with Loch Long, and Loch Long is an arm of the sea; so that there is water communication between Arroquhar and Glasgow. We found this a very beautiful place; and being quite sheltered from all winds that blew, we strolled about late into the prolonged twilight, and admired the outlines of the surrounding hills, and fancied resemblances to various objects in the shapes of the crags against the evening sky. The sun had not set till nearly, if not quite, eight o'clock; and before the daylight had quite gone, the northern lights streamed out, and I do not think that there was much darkness over the glen of Arroquhar that night. At all events, before the darkness came, we withdrew into the coffee-room. We had excellent beds and sleeping-rooms in this new hotel, and I remember nothing more till morning, when we were astir betimes, and had some chops for breakfast. Then our host, Mr. Macregor, who is also the host of our hotel at Glasgow, and has many of the characteristics of an American landlord, claiming to be a gentleman and the equal of his guests, took us in a drosky, and drove us to the shore of Loch Lomond, at a point about four miles from Arroquhar. The lake is here a mile and a half wide, and it was our object to cross to Inversnaid, on the opposite shore; so first we waved a handkerchief, and then kindled some straw on the beach, in order to attract the notice of the ferryman at Inversnaid. It was half an hour before our signals and shoutings resulted in the putting off of a boat, with two oarsmen, who made the transit pretty speedily; and thus we got across Loch Lomond. At Inversnaid there is a small hotel, and over the rock on which it stands a little waterfall tumbles into the lake,--a very little one, though I believe it is reckoned among the other picturesque features of the scene. We were now in Rob Roy's country, and at the distance of a mile or so, along the shore of the lake, is Rob Roy's cave, where he and his followers are supposed to have made their abode in troublous times. While lunch was getting ready, we again took the boat, and went thither. Landing beneath a precipitous, though not very lofty crag, we clambered up a rude pathway, and came to the mouth of the cave, which is nothing but a fissure or fissures among some great rocks that have tumbled confusedly together. There is hardly anywhere space enough for half a dozen persons to crowd themselves together, nor room to stand upright. On the whole, it is no cave at all, but only a crevice; and, in the deepest and darkest part, you can look up and see the sky. It may have sheltered Rob Roy for a night, and might partially shelter any Christian during a shower. Returning to the hotel, we started in a drosky (I do not know whether this is the right name of the vehicle, or whether it has a right name, but it is a carriage in which four persons sit back to back, two before and two behind) for Aberfoyle. The mountain-side ascends very steeply from the inn door, and, not to damp the horse's courage in the outset, we went up on foot. The guide-book says that the prospect from the summit of the ascent is very fine; but I really believe we forgot to turn round and look at it. All through our drive, however, we had mountain views in plenty, especially of great Ben Lomond, with his snow-covered head, round which, since our entrance into the Highlands, we had been making a circuit. Nothing can possibly be drearier than the mountains at this season; bare, barren, and bleak, with black patches of withered heath variegating the dead brown of the herbage on their sides; and as regards trees the hills are perfectly naked. There were no frightful precipices, no boldly picturesque features, along our road; but high, weary slopes, showing miles and miles of heavy solitude, with here and there a highland hut, built of stone and thatched; and, in one place, an old gray, ruinous fortress, a station of the English troops after the rebellion of 1715; and once or twice a village of hills, the inhabitants of which, old and young, ran to their doors to stare at us. For several miles after we left Inversnaid, the mountain-stream which makes the waterfall brawled along the roadside. All the hills are sheep-pastures, and I never saw such wild, rough, ragged-looking creatures as the sheep, with their black faces and tattered wool. The little lambs were very numerous, poor things, coming so early in the season into this inclement region; and it was laughable to see how invariably, when startled by our approach, they scampered to their mothers, and immediately began to suck. It would seem as if they sought a draught from the maternal udder, wherewith to fortify and encourage their poor little hearts; but I suppose their instinct merely drove them close to their dams, and, being there, they took advantage of their opportunity. These sheep must lead a hard life during the winter; for they are never fed nor sheltered. The day was sunless, and very uncomfortably cold; and we were not sorry to walk whenever the steepness of the road gave us cause. I do not remember what o'clock it was, but not far into the afternoon, when we reached the Baillie Nicol-Jarvie Inn at Aberfoyle; a scene which is much more interesting in the pages of Rob Roy than we found it in reality. Here we got into a sort of cart, and set out, over another hill-path, as dreary as or drearier than the last, for the Trosachs. On our way, we saw Ben Venue, and a good many other famous Bens, and two or three lochs; and when we reached the Trosachs, we should probably have been very much enraptured if our eyes had not already been weary with other mountain shapes. But, in truth, I doubt if anybody ever does really see a mountain, who goes for the set and sole purpose of seeing it. Nature will not let herself be seen in such cases. You must patiently bide her time; and by and by, at some unforeseen moment, she will quietly and suddenly unveil herself, and for a brief space allow you to look right into the heart of her mystery. But if you call out to her peremptorily, "Nature! unveil yourself this very moment!" she only draws her veil the closer; and you may look with all your eyes, and imagine that you see all that she can show, and yet see nothing. Thus, I saw a wild and confused assemblage of heights, crags, precipices, which they call the Trosachs, but I saw them calmly and coldly, and was glad when the drosky was ready to take us on to Callender. The hotel at the Trosachs, by the by, is a very splendid one, in the form of an old feudal castle, with towers and turrets. All among these wild hills there is set preparation for enraptured visitants; and it seems strange that the savage features do not subside of their own accord, and that there should still be cold winds and snow on the top of Ben Lomond, and rocks and heather, and ragged sheep, now that there are so many avenues by which the commonplace world is sluiced in among the Highlands. I think that this fashion of the picturesque will pass away. We drove along the shore of Lake Vennachar, and onward to Callender, which I believe is either the first point in the Lowlands or the last in the Highlands. It is a large village on the river Teith. We stopped here to dine, and were some time in getting any warmth into our benumbed bodies; for, as I said before, it was a very cold day. Looking from the window of the hotel, I saw a young man in Highland dress, with bare thighs, marching through the village street towards the Lowlands, with a martial and elastic step, as if he were going forth to conquer and occupy the world. I suppose he was a soldier who had been absent on leave, returning to the garrison at Stirling. I pitied his poor thighs, though he certainly did not look uncomfortable. After dinner, as dusk was coming on and we had still a long drive before us (eighteen miles, I believe), we took a close carriage and two horses, and set off for Stirling. The twilight was too obscure to show many things along the road, and by the time we drove into Stirling we could but dimly see the houses in the long street in which stood our hotel. There was a good fire in the coffee-room, which looked like a drawing-room in a large old-fashioned mansion, and was hung round with engravings of the portraits of the county members, and a master of fox-hounds, and other pictures. We made ourselves comfortable with some tea, and retired early. In the morning we were stirring betimes, and found Stirling to be a pretty large town, of rather ancient aspect, with many gray stone houses, the gables of which are notched on either side, like a flight of stairs. The town stands on the slope of a hill, at the summit of which, crowning a long ascent, up which the paved street reaches all the way to its gate, is Stirling Castle. Of course we went thither, and found free entrance, although the castle is garrisoned by five or six hundred men, among whom are barelegged Highlanders (I must say that this costume is very fine and becoming, though their thighs did look blue and frost-bitten) and also some soldiers of other Scotch regiments, with tartan trousers. Almost immediately on passing the gate, we found an old artillery-man, who undertook to show us round the castle. Only a small portion of it seems to be of great antiquity. The principal edifice within the castle wall is a palace, that was either built or renewed by James VI.; and it is ornamented with strange old statues, one of which is his own. The old Scottish Parliament House is also here. The most ancient part of the castle is the tower, where one of the Earls of Douglas was stabbed by a king, and afterwards thrown out of the window. In reading this story, one imagines a lofty turret, and the dead man tumbling headlong from a great height; but, in reality, the window is not more than fifteen or twenty feet from the garden into which he fell. This part of the castle was burned last autumn; but is now under repair, and the wall of the tower is still stanch and strong. We went up into the chamber where the murder took place, and looked through the historic window. Then we mounted the castle wall, where it broods over a precipice of many hundred feet perpendicular, looking down upon a level plain below, and forth upon a landscape, every foot of which is richly studded with historic events. There is a small peep-hole in the wall, which Queen Mary is said to have been in the habit of looking through. It is a most splendid view; in the distance, the blue Highlands, with a variety of mountain outlines that I could have studied unweariably; and in another direction, beginning almost at the foot of the Castle Hill, were the Links of Forth, where, over a plain of miles in extent the river meandered, and circled about, and returned upon itself again and again and again, as if knotted into a silver chain, which it was difficult to imagine to be all one stream. The history of Scotland might be read from this castle wall, as on a book of mighty page; for here, within the compass of a few miles, we see the field where Wallace won the battle of Stirling, and likewise the battle-field of Bannockburn, and that of Falkirk, and Sheriffmuir, and I know not how many besides. Around the Castle Hill there is a walk, with seats for old and infirm persons, at points sheltered from the wind. We followed it downward, and I think we passed over the site where the games used to be held, and where, this morning, some of the soldiers of the garrison were going through their exercises. I ought to have mentioned, that, passing through the inner gateway of the castle, we saw the round tower, and glanced into the dungeon, where the Roderic Dhu of Scott's poem was left to die. It is one of the two round towers, between which the portcullis rose and fell. EDINBURGH.--THE PALACE OF HOLYROOD. At eleven o'clock we took the rail for Edinburgh, and I remember nothing more, except that the cultivation and verdure of the country were very agreeable, after our experience of Highland barrenness and desolation, until we found the train passing close at the base of the rugged crag of Edinburgh Castle. We established ourselves at Queen's Hotel, in Prince's Street, and then went out to view the city. The monument to Sir Walter Scott--a rather fantastic and not very impressive affair, I thought-- stands almost directly in front of a hotel. We went along Prince's Street, and thence, by what turns I know not, to the Palace of Holyrood, which stands on a low and sheltered site, and is a venerable edifice. Arthur's Seat rises behind it,--a high hill, with a plain between. As we drew near the Palace, Mr. Bowman, who has been here before, pointed out the windows of Queen Mary's apartments, in a circular tower on the left of the gateway. On entering the enclosed quadrangle, we bought tickets for sixpence each, admitting us to all parts of the Palace that are shown to visitors; and first we went into a noble hall or gallery, a long and stately room, hung with pictures of ancient Scottish kings; and though the pictures were none of them authentic, they, at least, answer an excellent purpose in the way of upholstery. It was here that the young Pretender gave the ball which makes one of the scenes in Waverley. Thence we passed into the old historic rooms of the Palace,--Darnley's and Queen Mary's apartments, which everybody has seen and described. They are very dreary and shabby-looking rooms, with bare floors, and here and there a piece of tapestry, faded into a neutral tint; and carved and ornamented ceilings, looking shabbier than plain whitewash. We saw Queen Mary's old bedstead, low, with four tall posts,--and her looking-glass, which she brought with her from France, and which has often reflected the beauty that set everybody mad,--and some needlework and other womanly matters of hers; and we went into the little closet where she was having such a cosey supper-party with two or three friends, when the conspirators broke in, and stabbed Rizzio before her face. We saw, too, the blood-stain at the threshold of the door in the next room, opening upon the stairs. The body of Rizzio was flung down here, and the attendant told us that it lay in that spot all night. The blood-stain covers a large space,--much larger than I supposed,--and it gives the impression that there must have been a great pool and sop of blood on all the spot covered by Rizzio's body, staining the floor deeply enough never to be washed out. It is now of a dark brown hue; and I do not see why it may not be the genuine, veritable stain. The floor, thereabouts, appears not to have been scrubbed much; for I touched it with my finger, and found it slightly rough; but it is strange that the many footsteps should not have smoothed it, in three hundred years. One of the articles shown us in Queen Mary's apartments was the breastplate supposed to have been worn by Lord Ruthven at the murder, a heavy plate of iron, and doubtless a very uncomfortable waistcoat. HOLYROOD ABBEY. From the Palace, we passed into the contiguous ruin of Holyrood Abbey; which is roofless, although the front, and some broken columns along the nave, and fragments of architecture here and there, afford hints of a magnificent Gothic church in bygone times. It deserved to be magnificent; for here have been stately ceremonials, marriages of kings, coronations, investitures, before the high altar, which has now been overthrown or crumbled away; and the floor--so far as there is any floor --consists of tombstones of the old Scottish nobility. There are likewise monuments, bearing the names of illustrious Scotch families; and inscriptions, in the Scotch dialect, on the walls. In one of the front towers,--the only remaining one, indeed,--we saw the marble tomb of a nobleman, Lord Belhaven, who is represented reclining on the top,--with a bruised nose, of course. Except in Westminster Abbey, I do not remember ever to have seen an old monumental statue with the nose entire. In all political or religious outbreaks, the mob's first impulse is to hit the illustrious dead on their noses. At the other end of the Abbey, near the high altar, is the vault where the old Scottish kings used to be buried; but, looking in through the window, I saw only a vacant space,--no skull, nor bone, nor the least fragment of a coffin. In fact, I believe the royal dead were turned out of their last home, on occasion of the Revolutionary movements, at the accession of William III. HIGH STREET AND THE GRASS-MARKET. Quitting the Abbey and the Palace, we turned into the Canongate, and passed thence into High Street, which, I think, is a continuation of the Canongate; and being now in the old town of Edinburgh, we saw those immensely tall houses, seven stories high, where the people live in tiers, all the way from earth to middle air. They were not so quaint and strange looking as I expected; but there were some houses of very antique individuality, and among them that of John Knox, which looks still in good repair. One thing did not in the least fall short of my expectations,--the evil odor, for which Edinburgh has an immemorial renown,--nor the dirt of the inhabitants, old and young. The town, to say the truth, when you are in the midst of it, has a very sordid, grimy, shabby, upswept, unwashen aspect, grievously at variance with all poetic and romantic associations. From the High Street we turned aside into the Grass-Market, the scene of the Porteous Mob; and we found in the pavement a cross on the site where the execution of Porteous is supposed to have taken place. THE CASTLE. Returning thence to the High Street, we followed it up to the Castle, which is nearer the town, and of more easy access from it, than I had supposed. There is a large court or parade before the castle gate, with a parapet on the abrupt side of the hill, looking towards Arthur's Seat and Salisbury Crags, mud overhanging a portion of the old town. As we leaned over this parapet, my nose was conscious of the bad odor of Edinburgh, although the streets, whence it must have come, were hundreds of feet below. I have had some experience of this ugly smell in the poor streets of Liverpool; but I think I never perceived it before crossing the Atlantic. It is the odor of an old system of life; the scent of the pine forests is still too recent with us for it to be known in America. The Castle of Edinburgh is free (as appears to be the case with all garrisoned places in Great Britain) to the entrance of any peaceable person. So we went in, and found a large space enclosed within the walls, and dwellings for officers, and accommodation for soldiers, who were being drilled, or loitering about; and as the hill still ascends within the external wall of the castle, we climbed to the summit, and there found an old soldier whom we engaged to be our guide. He showed us Mons Meg, a great old cannon, broken at the breech, but still aimed threateningly from the highest ramparts; and then he admitted us into an old chapel, said to have been built by a Queen of Scotland, the sister of Harold, King of England, and occupying the very highest part of the hill. It is the smallest place of worship I ever saw, but of venerable architecture, and of very solid construction. The old soldier had not much more to show us; but he pointed out the window whence one of the kings of Scotland is said, when a baby, to have been lowered down, the whole height of the castle, to the bottom of the precipice on which it stands,--a distance of seven hundred feet. After the soldier had shown us to the extent of his jurisdiction, we went into a suite of rooms, in one of which I saw a portrait of Queen Mary, which gave me, for the first time, an idea that she was really a very beautiful woman. In this picture she is wonderfully so,--a tender womanly grace, which was none the less tender and graceful for being equally imbued with queenly dignity and spirit. It was too lovely a head to be cut off. I should be glad to know the authenticity of this picture. I do not know that we did anything else worthy of note, before leaving Edinburgh. There is matter enough, in and about the town, to interest the visitor for a very long time; but when the visit is calculated on such brevity as ours was, we get weary of the place, before even these few hours come to an end. Thus, for my part, I was not sorry when, in the course of the afternoon, we took the rail for Melrose, where we duly arrived, and put up at the George Inn. MELROSE. Melrose is a village of rather antique aspect, situated on the slope and at the bottom of the Eildon Hills, which, from this point of view, appear like one hill, with a double summit. The village, as I said, has an old look, though many of the houses have at least been refronted at some recent date; but others are as ancient, I suppose, as the days when the Abbey was in its splendor,--a rustic and peasant-like antiquity, however, low-roofed, and straw-thatched. There is an aged cross of stone in the centre of the town. Our first object, of course, was to see the Abbey, which stands just on the outskirts of the village, and is attainable only by applying at a neighboring house, the inhabitant of which probably supports himself, and most comfortably, too, as a showman of the ruin. He unlocked the wooden gate, and admitted us into what is left of the Abbey, comprising only the ruins of the church, although the refectory, the dormitories, and the other parts of the establishment, formerly covered the space now occupied by a dozen village houses. Melrose Abbey is a very satisfactory ruin, all carpeted along its nave and transepts with green grass; and there are some well-grown trees within the walls. We saw the window, now empty, through which the tints of the painted glass fell on the tombstone of Michael Scott, and the tombstone itself, broken in three pieces, but with a cross engraven along its whole length. It must have been the monument of an old monk or abbot, rather than a wizard. There, too, is still the "marble stone" on which the monk and warrior sat them down, and which is supposed to mark the resting-place of Alexander of Scotland. There are remains, both without and within the Abbey, of most curious and wonderfully minute old sculpture,--foliage, in places where it is almost impossible to see them, and where the sculptor could not have supposed that they would be seen, but which yet are finished faithfully, to the very veins of each leaf, in stone; and there is a continual variety of this accurate toil. On the exterior of the edifice there is equal minuteness of finish, and a great many niches for statues; all of which, I believe, are now gone, although there are carved faces at some points and angles. The graveyard around the Abbey is still the only one which the village has, and is crowded with gravestones, among which I read the inscription of one erected by Sir Walter Scott to the memory of Thomas Pardy, one of his servants. Some sable birds--either rooks or jackdaws-- were flitting about the ruins, inside and out. Mr. Bowman and I talked about revisiting Melrose by moonlight; but, luckily, there was to be no moon that evening. I do not myself think that daylight and sunshine make a ruin less effective than twilight or moonshine. In reference to Scott's description, I think he deplorably diminishes the impressiveness of the scene by saying that the alternate buttresses, seen by moonlight, look as if made of ebon and ivory. It suggests a small and very pretty piece of cabinet-work; not these gray, rough walls, which Time has gnawed upon for a thousand years, without eating them away. Leaving the Abbey, we took a path or a road which led us to the river Tweed, perhaps a quarter of a mile off; and we crossed it by a foot-bridge,--a pretty wide stream, a dimpling breadth of transparent water flowing between low banks, with a margin of pebbles. We then returned to our inn, and had tea, and passed a quiet evening by the fireside. This is a good, unpretentious inn; and its visitors' book indicates that it affords general satisfaction to those who come here. In the morning we breakfasted on broiled salmon, taken, no doubt, in the neighboring Tweed. There was a very coarse-looking man at table with us, who informed us that he owned the best horse anywhere round the Eildon Hills, and could make the best cast for a salmon, and catch a bigger fish than anybody,--with other self-laudation of the same kind. The waiter afterwards told us that he was the son of an Admiral in the neighborhood; and soon, his horse being brought to the door, we saw him mount and ride away. He sat on horseback with ease and grace, though I rather suspect, early as it was, that he was already in his cups. The Scotch seem to me to get drunk at very unseasonable hours. I have seen more drunken people here than during all my residence in England, and, generally, early in the day. Their liquor, so far as I have observed, makes them good-natured and sociable, imparting a perhaps needed geniality to their cold natures. After breakfast we took a drosky, or whatever these fore-and-aft-seated vehicles are called, and set out for DRYBURGH ABBEY, three miles distant. It was a cold though rather bright morning, with a most shrewd and bitter wind, which blew directly in my face as I sat beside the driver. An English wind is bad enough, but methinks a Scotch one, is rather worse; at any rate, I was half frozen, and wished Dryburgh Abbey in Tophet, where it would have been warmer work to go and see it. Some of the border hills were striking, especially the Cowden Knowe, which ascends into a prominent and lofty peak. Such villages as we passed did not greatly differ from English villages. By and by we came to the banks of the Tweed, at a point where there is a ferry. A carriage was on the river-bank, the driver waiting beside it; for the people who came in it had already been ferried across to see the Abbey. The ferryman here is a young girl; and, stepping into the boat, she shoved off, and so skilfully took advantage of the eddies of the stream, which is here deep and rapid, that we were soon on the other side. She was by no means an uncomely maiden, with pleasant Scotch features, and a quiet intelligence of aspect, gleaming into a smile when spoken to; much tanned with all kinds of weather, and, though slender, yet so agile and muscular that it was no shame for a man to let himself be rowed by her. From the ferry we had a walk of half a mile, more or less, to a cottage, where we found another young girl, whose business it is to show the Abbey. She was of another mould than the ferry-maiden,--a queer, shy, plaintive sort of a body,--and answered all our questions in a low, wailing tone. Passing through an apple-orchard, we were not long in reaching the Abbey, the ruins of which are much more extensive and more picturesque than those of Melrose, being overrun with bushes and shrubbery, and twined about with ivy, and all such vegetation as belongs, naturally, to old walls. There are the remains of the refectory, and other domestic parts of the Abbey, as well as the church, and all in delightful state of decay,--not so far gone but that we had bits of its former grandeur in the columns and broken arches, and in some portions of the edifice that still retain a roof. In the chapter-house we saw a marble statue of Newton, wofully maltreated by damps and weather; and though it had no sort of business there, it fitted into the ruins picturesquely enough. There is another statue, equally unauthorized; both having been placed here by a former Earl of Buchan, who seems to have been a little astray in his wits. On one side of the church, within an arched recess, are the monuments of Sir Walter Scott and his family,--three ponderous tombstones of Aberdeen granite, polished, but already dimmed and dulled by the weather. The whole floor of the recess is covered by these monuments, that of Sir Walter being the middle one, with Lady (or, as the inscription calls her, Dame) Scott beyond him, next to the church wall, and some one of his sons or daughters on the hither side. The effect of his being buried here is to make the whole of Dryburgh Abbey his monument. There is another arched recess, twin to the Scott burial-place, and contiguous to it, in which are buried a Pringle family; it being their ancient place of sepulture. The spectator almost inevitably feels as if they were intruders, although their rights here are of far older date than those of Scott. Dryburgh Abbey must be a most beautiful spot of a summer afternoon; and it was beautiful even on this not very genial morning, especially when the sun blinked out upon the ivy, and upon the shrubberied paths that wound about the ruins. I think I recollect the birds chirruping in this neighborhood of it. After viewing it sufficiently,--sufficiently for this one time,--we went back to the ferry, and, being set across by the same Undine, we drove back to Melrose. No longer riding against the wind, I found it not nearly so cold as before. I now noticed that the Eildon Hills, seen from this direction, rise from one base into three distinct summits, ranged in a line. According to "The Lay of the Last Minstrel," they were cleft into this shape by the magic of Michael Scott. Reaching Melrose . . . . without alighting, we set off for ABBOTSFORD, three miles off. The neighborhood of Melrose, leading to Abbotsford, has many handsome residences of modern build and very recent date,--suburban villas, each with its little lawn and garden ground, such as we see in the vicinity of Liverpool. I noticed, too, one castellated house, of no great size, but old, and looking as if its tower were built, not for show, but for actual defence in the old border warfare. We were not long in reaching Abbotsford. The house, which is more compact, and of considerably less extent than I anticipated, stands in full view from the road, and at only a short distance from it, lower down towards the river. Its aspect disappointed me; but so does everything. It is but a villa, after all; no castle, nor even a large manor-house, and very unsatisfactory when you consider it in that light. Indeed, it impressed me, not as a real house, intended for the home of human beings,--a house to die in or to be born in,--but as a plaything,-- something in the same category as Horace Walpole's Strawberry Hill. The present owner seems to have found it insufficient for the actual purposes of life; for he is adding a wing, which promises to be as extensive as the original structure. We rang at the front door (the family being now absent), and were speedily admitted by a middle-aged or somewhat elderly man,--the butler, I suppose, or some upper servant,--who at once acceded to our request to be permitted to see the house. We stepped from the porch immediately into the entrance-hall; and having the great Hall of Battle Abbey in my memory, and the ideal of a baronial hall in my mind, I was quite taken aback at the smallness and narrowness and lowness of this; which, however, is a very fine one, on its own little scale. In truth, it is not much more than a vestibule. The ceiling is carved; and every inch of the walls is covered with claymores, targets, and other weapons and armor, or old-time curiosities, tastefully arranged, many of which, no doubt, have a history attached to them,--or had, in Sir Walter's own mind. Our attendant was a very intelligent person, and pointed out much that was interesting; but in such a multitudinous variety it was almost impossible to fix the eye upon any one thing. Probably the apartment looked smaller than it really was, on account of being so wainscoted and festooned with curiosities. I remember nothing particularly, unless it be the coal-grate in the fireplace, which was one formerly used by Archbishop Sharpe, the prelate whom Balfour of Burley murdered. Either in this room or the next one, there was a glass case containing the suit of clothes last worn by Scott,--a short green coat, somewhat worn, with silvered buttons, a pair of gray tartan trousers, and a white hat. It was in the hall that we saw these things; for there too, I recollect, were a good many walking-sticks that had been used by Scott, and the hatchet with which he was in the habit of lopping branches from his trees, as he walked among them. From the hall we passed into the study;--a small room, lined with the books which Sir Walter, no doubt, was most frequently accustomed to refer to; and our guide pointed out some volumes of the Moniteur, which he used while writing the history of Napoleon. Probably these were the driest and dullest volumes in his whole library. About mid-height of the walls of the study there is a gallery, with a short flight of steps for the convenience of getting at the upper books. A study-table occupied the centre of the room, and at one end of the table stands an easy-chair, covered with morocco, and with ample space to fling one's self back. The servant told me that I might sit down in this chair, for that Sir Walter sat there while writing his romances, "and perhaps," quoth the man, smiling, "you may catch some inspiration." What a bitter word this would have been if he had known me to be a romance-writer! "No, I never shall be inspired to write romances!" I answered, as if such an idea had never occurred to me. I sat down, however. This study quite satisfied me, being planned on principles of common-sense, and made to work in, and without any fantastic adaptation of old forms to modern uses. Next to the study is the library, an apartment of respectable size, and containing as many books as it can hold, all protected by wire-work. I did not observe what or whose works were here; but the attendant showed us one whole compartment full of volumes having reference to ghosts, witchcraft, and the supernatural generally. It is remarkable that Scott should have felt interested in such subjects, being such a worldly and earthly man as he was; but then, indeed, almost all forms of popular superstition do clothe the ethereal with earthly attributes, and so make it grossly perceptible. The library, like the study, suited me well,--merely the fashion of the apartment, I mean,--and I doubt not it contains as many curious volumes as are anywhere to be met with within a similar space. The drawing-room adjoins it; and here we saw a beautiful ebony cabinet, which was presented to Sir Walter by George IV.; and some pictures of much interest,--one of Scott himself at thirty-five, rather portly, with a heavy face, but shrewd eyes, which seem to observe you closely. There is a full-length of his eldest son, an officer of dragoons, leaning on his charger; and a portrait of Lady Scott,--a brunette, with black hair and eyes, very pretty, warm, vivacious, and un-English in her aspect. I am not quite sure whether I saw all these pictures in the drawing-room, or some of them in the dining-room; but the one that struck me most--and very much indeed--was the head of Mary, Queen of Scots, literally the head cut off and lying on a dish. It is said to have been painted by an Italian or French artist, two days after her death. The hair curls or flows all about it; the face is of a death-like hue, but has an expression of quiet, after much pain and trouble,--very beautiful, very sweet and sad; and it affected me strongly with the horror and strangeness of such a head being severed from its body. Methinks I should not like to have it always in the room with me. I thought of the lovely picture of Mary that I had seen at Edinburgh Castle, and reflected what a symbol it would be,--how expressive of a human being having her destiny in her own hands,--if that beautiful young Queen were painted as carrying this dish, containing her own woful head, and perhaps casting a curious and pitiful glance down upon it, as if it were not her own. Also, in the drawing-room, there was a plaster cast of Sir Walter's face, taken after death; the only one in existence, as our guide assured us. It is not often that one sees a homelier set of features than this; no elevation, no dignity, whether bestowed by nature or thrown over them by age or death; sunken cheeks, the bridge of the nose depressed, and the end turned up; the mouth puckered, and no chin whatever, or hardly any. The expression was not calm and happy; but rather as if he were in a perturbed slumber, perhaps nothing short of nightmare. I wonder that the family allow this cast to be shown,--the last record that there is of Scott's personal reality, and conveying such a wretched and unworthy idea of it. Adjoining the drawing-room is the dining-room, in one corner of which, between two windows, Scott died. It was now a quarter of a century since his death; but it seemed to me that we spoke with a sort of hush in our voices, as if he were still dying here, or had but just departed. I remember nothing else in this room. The next one is the armory, which is the smallest of all that we had passed through; but its walls gleam with the steel blades of swords, and the barrels of pistols, matchlocks, firelocks, and all manner of deadly weapons, whether European or Oriental; for there are many trophies here of East Indian warfare. I saw Rob Roy's gun, rifled and of very large bore; and a beautiful pistol, formerly Claverhouse's; and the sword of Montrose, given him by King Charles, the silver hilt of which I grasped. There was also a superb claymore, in an elaborately wrought silver sheath, made for Sir Walter Scott, and presented to him by the Highland Society, for his services in marshalling the clans when George IV. came to Scotland. There were a thousand other things, which I knew must be most curious, yet did not ask nor care about them, because so many curiosities drive one crazy, and fret one's heart to death. On the whole, there is no simple and great impression left by Abbotsford; and I felt angry and dissatisfied with myself for not feeling something which I did not and could not feel. But it is just like going to a museum, if you look into particulars; and one learns from it, too, that Scott could not have been really a wise man, nor an earnest one, nor one that grasped the truth of life; he did but play, and the play grew very sad toward its close. In a certain way, however, I understand his romances the better for having seen his house; and his house the better for having read his romances. They throw light on one another. We had now gone through all the show-rooms; and the next door admitted us again into the entrance-hall, where we recorded our names in the visitors' book. It contains more names of Americans, I should judge, from casting my eyes back over last year's record, than of all other people in the world, including Great Britain. Bidding farewell to Abbotsford, I cannot but confess a sentiment of remorse for having visited the dwelling-place--as just before I visited the grave of the mighty minstrel and romancer with so cold a heart and in so critical a mood,--his dwelling-place and his grave whom I had so admired and loved, and who had done so much for my happiness when I was young. But I, and the world generally, now look at him from a different point of view; and, besides, these visits to the actual haunts of famous people, though long dead, have the effect of making us sensible, in some degree, of their human imperfections, as if we actually saw them alive. I felt this effect, to a certain extent, even with respect to Shakespeare, when I visited Stratford-on-Avon. As for Scott, I still cherish him in a warm place, and I do not know that I have any pleasanter anticipation, as regards books, than that of reading all his novels over again after we get back to the Wayside. [This Mr. Hawthorne did, aloud to his family, the year following his return to America.--ED.] It was now one or two o'clock, and time for us to take the rail across the borders. Many a mile behind us, as we rushed onward, we could see the threefold Eildon Hill, and probably every pant of the engine carried us over some spot of ground which Scott has made fertile with poetry. For Scotland--cold, cloudy, barren little bit of earth that it is--owes all the interest that the world feels in it to him. Few men have done so much for their country as he. However, having no guide-book, we were none the wiser for what we saw out of the window of the rail-carriage; but, now and then, a castle appeared, on a commanding height, visible for miles round, and seemingly in good repair,--now, in some low and sheltered spot, the gray walls of an abbey; now, on a little eminence, the ruin of a border fortress, and near it the modern residence of the laird, with its trim lawn and shrubbery. We were not long in coming to BERWICK, a town which seems to belong both to England and Scotland, or perhaps is a kingdom by itself, for it stands on both sides of the boundary river, the Tweed, where it empties into the German Ocean. From the railway bridge we had a good view over the town, which looks ancient, with red roofs on all the gabled houses; and it being a sunny afternoon, though bleak and chill, the sea-view was very fine. The Tweed is here broad, and looks deep, flowing far beneath the bridge, between high banks. This is all that I can say of Berwick (pronounced Berrick), for though we spent above an hour at the station waiting for the train, we were so long in getting our dinner, that we had not time for anything else. I remember, however, some gray walls, that looked like the last remains of an old castle, near the railway station. We next took the train for NEWCASTLE, the way to which, for a considerable distance, lies within sight of the sea; and in close vicinity to the shore we saw Holy Isle, on which are the ruins of an abbey. Norham Castle must be somewhere in this neighborhood, on the English shore of the Tweed. It was pretty late in the afternoon--almost nightfall--when we reached Newcastle, over the roofs of which, as over those of Berwick, we had a view from the railway, and like Berwick, it was a congregation of mostly red roofs; but, unlike Berwick (the atmosphere over which was clear and transparent), there came a gush of smoke from every chimney, which made it the dimmest and smokiest place I ever saw. This is partly owing to the iron founderies and furnaces; but each domestic chimney, too, was smoking on its own account,--coal being so plentiful there, no doubt, that the fire is always kept freshly heaped with it, reason or none. Out of this smoke-cloud rose tall steeples; and it was discernible that the town stretched widely over an uneven surface, on the banks of the Tyne, which is navigable up hither ten miles from the sea for pretty large vessels. We established ourselves at the Station Hotel, and then walked out to see something of the town; but I remember only a few streets of duskiness and dinginess, with a glimpse of the turrets of a castle to which we could not find our way. So, as it was getting twilightish and very cold, we went back to the hotel, which is a very good one, better than any one I have seen in the South of England, and almost or quite as good as those of Scotland. The coffee-room is a spacious and handsome apartment, adorned with a full-length portrait of Wellington, and other pictures, and in the whole establishment there was a well-ordered alacrity and liberal provision for the comfort of guests that one seldom sees in English inns. There are a good many American guests in Newcastle, and through all the North. An old Newcastle gentleman and his friend came into the smoking-room, and drank three glasses of hot whiskey-toddy apiece, and were still going on to drink more when we left them. These respectable persons probably went away drunk that night, yet thought none the worse of themselves or of one another for it. It is like returning to times twenty years gone by for a New-Englander to witness such simplicity of manners. The next morning, May 8th, I rose and breakfasted early, and took the rail soon after eight o'clock, leaving Mr. Bowman behind; for he had business in Newcastle, and would not follow till some hours afterwards. There is no use in trying to make a narrative of anything that one sees along an English railway. All I remember of this tract of country is that one of the stations at which we stopped for an instant is called "Washington," and this is, no doubt, the old family place, where the De Wessyngtons, afterwards the Washingtons, were first settled in England. Before reaching York, first one old lady and then another (Quaker) lady got into the carriage along with me; and they seemed to be going to York, on occasion of some fair or celebration. This was all the company I had, and their advent the only incident. It was about eleven o'clock when I beheld York Cathedral rising huge above the old city, which stands on the river Ouse, separated by it from the railway station, but communicating by a ferry (or two) and a bridge. I wandered forth, and found my way over the latter into the ancient and irregular streets of YORK, crooked, narrow, or of unequal width, puzzling, and many of them bearing the name of the particular gate in the old walls of the city to which they lead. There were no such fine, ancient, stately houses as some of those in Shrewsbury were, nor such an aspect of antiquity as in Chester; but still York is a quaint old place, and what looks most modern is probably only something old, hiding itself behind a new front, as elsewhere in England. I found my way by a sort of instinct, as directly as possible, to YORK MINSTER. It stands in the midst of a small open space,--or a space that looks small in comparison with the vast bulk of the cathedral. I was not so much impressed by its exterior as I have usually been by Gothic buildings; because it is rectangular in its general outline and in its towers, and seems to lack the complexity and mysterious plan which perplexes and wonder-strikes me in most cathedrals. Doubtless, however, if I had known better how to admire it, I should have found it wholly admirable. At all events, it has a satisfactory hugeness. Seeking my way in, I at first intruded upon the Registry of Deeds, which occupies a building patched up against the mighty side of the cathedral, and hardly discernible, so small the one and so large the other. I finally hit upon the right door, and I felt no disappointment in my first glance around at the immensity of enclosed space;--I see now in my mind's eye a dim length of nave, a breadth in the transepts like a great plain, and such an airy height beneath the central tower that a worshipper could certainly get a good way towards heaven without rising above it. I only wish that the screen, or whatever they call it, between the choir and nave, could be thrown down, so as to give us leave to take in the whole vastitude at once. I never could understand why, after building a great church, they choose to sunder it in halves by this mid-partition. But let me be thankful for what I got, and especially for the height and massiveness of the clustered pillars that support the arches on which rests the central tower. I remember at Furness Abbey I saw two tall pillars supporting a broken arch, and thought it, the most majestic fragment of architecture that could possibly be. But these pillars have a nobler height, and these arches a greater sweep. What nonsense to try to write about a cathedral! There is a great, cold bareness and bleakness about the interior; for there are very few monuments, and those seem chiefly to be of ecclesiastical people. I saw no armed knights, asleep on the tops of their tombs; but there was a curious representation of a skeleton, at full length, under the table-slab of one of the monuments. The walls are of a grayish hue, not so agreeable as the rich dark tint of the inside of Westminster Abbey; but a great many of the windows are still filled with ancient painted glass, the very small squares and pieces of which are composed into splendid designs of saints and angels, and scenes from Scripture. There were a few watery blinks of sunshine out of doors, and whenever these came through the old painted windows, some of the more vivid colors were faintly thrown upon the pavement of the cathedral,--very faintly, it is true; for, in the first place, the sunshine was not brilliant; and painted glass, too, fades in the course of the ages, perhaps, like all man's other works. There were two or three windows of modern manufacture, and far more magnificent, as to brightness of color and material beauty, than the ancient ones; but yet they looked vulgar, glaring, and impertinent in comparison, because such revivals or imitations of a long-disused art cannot have the good faith and earnestness of the originals. Indeed, in the very coloring, I felt the same difference as between heart's blood and a scarlet dye. It is a pity, however, that the old windows cannot be washed, both inside and out, for now they have the dust of centuries upon them. The screen or curtain between the nave and choir has eleven carved figures, at full length, which appeared to represent kings, some of them wearing crowns, and bearing sceptres or swords. They were in wood, and wrought by some Gothic hand. These carvings, and the painted windows, and the few monuments, are all the details that the mind can catch hold of in the immensity of this cathedral; and I must say that it was a dreary place on that cold, cloudy day. I doubt whether a cathedral is a sort of edifice suited to the English climate. The first buildings of the kind were probably erected by people who had bright and constant sunshine, and who desired a shadowy awfulness--like that of a forest, with its arched wood-paths--into which to retire in their religious moments. In America, on a hot summer's day, how delightful its cool and solemn depths would be! The painted windows, too, were evidently contrived, in the first instance, by persons who saw how effective they would prove when a vivid sun shone through them. But in England, the interior of a cathedral, nine days out of ten, is a vast sullenness, and as chill as death and the tomb. At any rate, it was so to-day, and so thought one of the old vergers, who kept walking as briskly as he could along the width of the transepts. There were several of these old men when I first came in, but they went off, all but this one, before I departed. None of them said a word to me, nor I to them; and admission to the Minster seems to be entirely free. After emerging from this great gloom, I wandered to and fro about York, and contrived to go astray within no very wide space. If its history be authentic, it is an exceedingly old city, having been founded about a thousand years before the Christian era. There used to be a palace of the Roman emperors here, and the Emperor Severus died here, as did some of his successors; and Constantine the Great was born here. I know not what, if any, relics of those earlier times there may be; but York is still partly surrounded with a wall, and has several gates, which the city authorities take pains to keep in repair. I grow weary in my endeavor to find my way back to the railway, and inquired it of one of the good people of York,--a respectable, courteous, gentlemanly person,-- and he told me to walk along the walls. Then he went on a considerable distance; but seemed to repent of not doing more for me; so he waited till I came up, and, walking along by my side, pointed out the castle, now the jail, and the place of execution, and directed me to the principal gateway of the city, and instructed me how to reach the ferry. The path along the wall leads, in one place, through a room over the arch of a gateway,--a low, thick-walled, stone apartment, where doubtless the gatekeeper used to lodge, and to parley with those who desired entrance. I found my way to the ferry over the Ouse, according to this kind Yorkist's instructions. The ferryman told me that the fee for crossing was a halfpenny, which seemed so ridiculously small that I offered him more; but this unparalleled Englishman declined taking anything beyond his rightful halfpenny. This seems so wonderful to me that I can hardly trust my own memory. Reaching the station, I got some dinner, and at four o'clock, just as I was starting, came Mr. Bowman, my very agreeable and sensible travelling companion. Our journeying together was ended here; for he was to keep on to London, and I to return to Liverpool. So we parted, and I took the rail westward across England, through a very beautiful, and in some degree picturesque, tract of country, diversified with hills, through the valleys and vistas of which goes the railroad, with dells diverging from it on either hand, and streams and arched bridges, and old villages, and a hundred pleasant English sights. After passing Rochdale, however, the dreary monotony of Lancashire succeeded this variety. Between nine and ten o'clock I reached the Tithebarn station in Liverpool. Ever since until now, May 17th, I have employed my leisure moments in scribbling off the journal of my tour; but it has greatly lost by not having been written daily, as the scenes and occurrences were fresh. The most picturesque points can be seized in no other way, and the hues of the affair fade as quickly as those of a dying dolphin; or as, according to Audubon, the plumage of a dead bird. One thing that struck me as much as anything else in the Highlands I had forgotten to put down. In our walk at Balloch, along the road within view of Loch Lomond and the neighboring hills, it was a brilliant sunshiny afternoon, and I never saw any atmosphere so beautiful as that among the mountains. It was a clear, transparent, ethereal blue, as distinct as a vapor, and yet by no means vaporous, but a pure, crystalline medium. I have witnessed nothing like this among the Berkshire hills nor elsewhere. York is full of old churches, some of them very antique in appearance, the stones weather-worn, their edges rounded by time, blackened, and with all the tokens of sturdy and age-long decay; and in some of them I noticed windows quite full of old painted glass, a dreary kind of minute patchwork, all of one dark and dusty hue, when seen from the outside. Yet had I seen them from the interior of the church, there doubtless would have been rich and varied apparitions of saints, with their glories round their heads, and bright-winged angels, and perhaps even the Almighty Father himself, so far as conceivable and representable by human powers. It requires light from heaven to make them visible. If the church were merely illuminated from the inside,--that is, by what light a man can get from his own understanding,--the pictures would be invisible, or wear at best but a miserable aspect. LIVERPOOL. May 24th.--Day before yesterday I had a call at the Consulate from one of the Potentates of the Earth,--a woolly-haired negro, rather thin and spare, between forty and fifty years of age, plainly dressed; at the first glimpse of whom, I could readily have mistaken him for some ship's steward, seeking to enter a complaint of his captain. However, this was President Roberts, of Liberia, introduced by a note from Mrs. O'Sullivan, whom he has recently met in Madeira. I was rather favorably impressed with him; for his deportment was very simple, and without any of the flourish and embroidery which a negro might be likely to assume on finding himself elevated from slavery to power. He is rather shy, reserved, at least, and undemonstrative, yet not harshly so,--in fine, with manners that offer no prominent points for notice or criticism; although I felt, or thought I felt, that his color was continually before his mind, and that he walks cautiously among men, as conscious that every new introduction is a new experiment. He is not in the slightest degree an interesting man (so far as I discovered in a very brief interview), apart from his position and history; his face is not striking, nor so agreeable as if it were jet black; but there may be miles and miles of depth in him which I know nothing of. Our conversation was of the most unimportant character; for he had called merely to deliver the note, and sat only a few minutes, during which he merely responded to my observations, and originated no remarks. Intelligence, discretion, tact--these are probably his traits; not force of character and independence. The same day I took the rail from the Little Street station for MANCHESTER, to meet Bennoch, who had asked me thither to dine with him. I had never visited Manchester before, though now so long resident within twenty miles of it; neither is it particularly worth visiting, unless for the sake of its factories, which I did not go to see. It is a dingy and heavy town, with very much the aspect of Liverpool, being, like the latter, built almost entirely within the present century. I stopped at the Albion Hotel, and, as Bennoch was out, I walked forth to view the city, and made only such observations as are recorded above. Opposite the hotel stands the Infirmary,--a very large edifice, which, when erected, was on the outskirts, or perhaps in the rural suburbs, of the town, but it is now almost in its centre. In the enclosed space before it stands the statue of Peel, and sits a statue of Dr. Dalton, the celebrated chemist, who was a native of Manchester. Returning to the hotel, I sat down in the room where we were to dine, and in due time Bennoch made his appearance, with the same glow and friendly warmth in his face that I had left burning there when we parted in London. If this man has not a heart, then no man ever had. I like him inexpressibly for his heart and for his intellect, and for his flesh and blood; and if he has faults, I do not know them, nor care to know them, nor value him the less if I did know them. He went to his room to dress; and in the mean time a middle-aged, dark man, of pleasant aspect, with black hair, black eyebrows, and bright, dark eyes came in, limping a little, but not much. He seemed not quite a man of the world, a little shy in manner, yet he addressed me kindly and sociably. I guessed him to be Mr. Charles Swain, the poet, whom Mr. Bennoch had invited to dinner. Soon came another guest whom Mr. Swain introduced to me as Mr. ------, editor of the Manchester Examiner. Then came Bennoch, who made us all regularly acquainted, or took for granted that we were so; and lastly appeared a Mr. W------, a merchant in Manchester, and a very intelligent man; and the party was then complete. Mr. Swain, the poet, is not a man of fluent conversation; he said, indeed, very little, but gave me the impression of amiability and simplicity of character, with much feeling. Mr. W------ is a very sensible man. He has spent two or three years in America, and seems to have formed juster conclusions about us than most of his countrymen do. He is the only Englishman, I think, whom I have met, who fairly acknowledges that the English do cherish doubt, jealousy, suspicion, in short, an unfriendly feeling, towards the Americans. It is wonderful how every American, whatever class of the English he mingles with, is conscious of this feeling, and how no Englishman, except this sole Mr. W------, will confess it. He expressed some very good ideas, too, about the English and American press, and the reasons why the Times may fairly be taken as the exponent of British feeling towards us, while the New York Herald, immense as its circulation is, can be considered, in no similar degree or kind, the American exponent. We sat late at table, and after the other guests had retired, Bennoch and I had some very friendly talk, and he proposed that on my wife's return we should take up our residence in his house at Blackheath, while Mrs. Bennoch and himself were absent for two months on a trip to Germany. If his wife and mine ratify the idea, we will do so. The next morning we went out to see the Exchange, and whatever was noticeable about the town. Time being brief, I did not visit the cathedral, which, I believe, is a thousand years old. There are many handsome shops in Manchester; and we went into one establishment, devoted to pictures, engravings, and decorative art generally, which is most perfect and extensive. The firm, if I remember, is that of the Messrs. Agnew, and, though originating here, they have now a house in London. Here I saw some interesting objects, purchased by them at the recent sale of the Rogers collection; among other things, a slight pencil and water-color sketch by Raphael. An unfinished affair, done in a moment, as this must have been, seems to bring us closer to the hand that did it than the most elaborately painted picture can. Were I to see the Transfiguration, Raphael would still be at the distance of centuries. Seeing this little sketch, I had him very near me. I know not why,-- perhaps it might be fancied that he had only laid down the pencil for an instant, and would take it up again in a moment more. I likewise saw a copy of a handsome, illustrated edition of Childe Harold, presented by old John Murray to Mr. Rogers, with an inscription on the fly-leaf, purporting that it was a token of gratitude from the publisher, because, when everybody else thought him imprudent in giving four hundred guineas for the poem, Mr. Rogers told him it would turn out the best bargain he ever made. There was a new picture by Millais, the distinguished Pre-Raphaelite artist, representing a melancholy parting between two lovers. The lady's face had a great deal of sad and ominous expression; but an old brick wall, overrun with foliage, was so exquisitely and elaborately wrought that it was hardly possible to look at the personages of the picture. Every separate leaf of the climbing and clustering shrubbery was painfully made out; and the wall was reality itself, with the weather-stains, and the moss, and the crumbling lime between the bricks. It is not well to be so perfect in the inanimate, unless the artist can likewise make man and woman as lifelike, and to as great a depth, too, as the Creator does. Bennoch left town for some place in Yorkshire, and I for Liverpool. I asked him to come and dine with me at the Adelphi, meaning to ask two or three people to meet him; but he had other engagements, and could not spare a day at present, though he promises to come before long. Dining at Mr. Rathbone's one evening last week (May 21st), it was mentioned that BORROW, author of the Bible in Spain, is supposed to be of gypsy descent by the mother's side. Hereupon Mr. Martineau mentioned that he had been a schoolfellow of Borrow, and though he had never heard of his gypsy blood, he thought it probable, from Borrow's traits of character. He said that, Borrow had once run away from school, and carried with him a party of other boys, meaning to lead a wandering life. If an Englishman were individually acquainted with all our twenty-five millions of Americans, and liked every one of them, and believed that each man of those millions was a Christian, honest, upright, and kind, he would doubt, despise, and hate them in the aggregate, however he might love and honor the individuals. Captain ------ and his wife Oakum; they spent all evening at Mrs. B------'s. The Captain is a Marblehead man by birth, not far from sixty years old; very talkative and anecdotic in regard to his adventures; funny, good-humored, and full of various nautical experience. Oakum (it is a nickname which he gives his wife) is an inconceivably tall woman,-- taller than he,--six feet, at least, and with a well-proportioned largeness in all respects, but looks kind and good, gentle, smiling,--and almost any other woman might sit like a baby on her lap. She does not look at all awful and belligerent, like the massive English women one often sees. You at once feel her to be a benevolent giantess, and apprehend no harm from her. She is a lady, and perfectly well mannered, but with a sort of naturalness and simplicity that becomes her; for any the slightest affectation would be so magnified in her vast personality that it would be absolutely the height of the ridiculous. This wedded pair have no children, and Oakum has so long accompanied her husband on his voyages that I suppose by this time she could command a ship as well as he. They sat till pretty late, diffusing cheerfulness all about them, and then, "Come, Oakum," cried the Captain, "we must hoist sail!" and up rose Oakum to the ceiling, and moved tower-like to the door, looking down with a benignant smile on the poor little pygmy women about her. "Six feet," did I say? Why, she must be seven, eight, nine; and, whatever be her size, she is as good as she is big. June 11th.--Monday night (9th), just as I was retiring, I received a telegraphic message announcing my wife's arrival at SOUTHAMPTON. So, the next day, I arranged the consular business for an absence of ten days, and set forth with J-----, and reached Birmingham, between eight and nine, evening. We put up at the Queen's Hotel, a very large establishment, contiguous to the railway. Next morning we left Birmingham, and made our first stage to Leamington, where we had to wait nearly an hour, which we spent in wandering through some of the streets that had been familiar to us last year. Leamington is certainly a beautiful town, new, bright, clean, and as unlike as possible to the business towns of England. However, the sun was burning hot, and I could almost have fancied myself in America. From Leamington we took tickets for Oxford, where we were obliged to make another stop of two hours; and these we employed to what advantage we could, driving up into town, and straying hither and thither, till J-----'s weariness weighed upon me, and I adjourned with him to a hotel. Oxford is an ugly old town, of crooked and irregular streets, gabled houses, mostly plastered of a buff or yellow hue; some new fronts; and as for the buildings of the University, they seem to be scattered at random, without any reference to one another. I passed through an old gateway of Christ Church, and looked at its enclosed square, and that is, in truth, pretty much all I then saw of the University of Oxford. From Christ Church we rambled along a street that led us to a bridge across the Isis; and we saw many row-boats lying in the river,--the lightest craft imaginable, unless it were an Indian canoe. The Isis is but a narrow stream, and with a sluggish current. I believe the students of Oxford are famous for their skill in rowing. To me as well as to J----- the hot streets were terribly oppressive; so we went into the Roebuck Hotel, where we found a cool and pleasant coffee-room. The entrance to this hotel is through an arch, opening from High Street, and giving admission into a paved court, the buildings all around being part of the establishment,--old edifices with pointed gables and old-fashioned projecting windows, but all in fine repair, and wearing a most quiet, retired, and comfortable aspect. The court was set all round with flowers, growing in pots or large pedestalled vases; on one side was the coffee-room, and all the other public apartments, and the other side seemed to be taken up by the sleeping-chambers and parlors of the guests. This arrangement of an inn, I presume, is very ancient, and it resembles what I have seen in the hospitals, free schools, and other charitable establishments in the old English towns; and, indeed, all large houses were arranged on somewhat the same principle. By and by two or three young men came in, in wide-awake hats, and loose, blouse-like, summerish garments; and from their talk I found them to be students of the University, although their topics of conversation were almost entirely horses and boats. One of them sat down to cold beef and a tankard of ale; the other two drank a tankard of ale together, and went away without paying for it,--rather to the waiter's discontent. Students are very much alike, all the world over, and, I suppose, in all time; but I doubt whether many of my fellows at college would have gone off without paying for their beer. We reached Southampton between seven and eight o'clock. I cannot write to-day. June 15th.--The first day after we reached Southampton was sunny and pleasant; but we made little use of the fine weather, except that S----- and I walked once along the High Street, and J----- and I took a little ramble about town in the afternoon. The next day there was a high and disagreeable wind, and I did not once stir out of the house. The third day, too, I kept entirely within doors, it being a storm of wind and rain. The Castle Hotel stands within fifty yards of the water-side; so that this gusty day showed itself to the utmost advantage,--the vessels pitching and tossing at their moorings, the waves breaking white out of a tumultuous gray surface, the opposite shore glooming mistily at the distance of a mile or two; and on the hither side boatmen and seafaring people scudding about the pier in waterproof clothes; and in the street, before the hotel door, a cabman or two, standing drearily beside his horse. But we were sunny within doors. Yesterday it was breezy, sunny, shadowy, showery; and we ordered a cab to take us to Clifton Villa, to call on Mrs. ------, a friend of B------'s, who called on us the day after our arrival. Just, as we were ready to start, Mrs. ------ again called, and accompanied us back to her house. It is in Shirley, about two miles from Southampton pier, and is a pleasant suburban villa, with a pretty ornamented lawn and shrubbery about it. Mrs. ------ is an instructress of young ladies; and at B------'s suggestion, she is willing to receive us for two or three weeks, during the vacation, until we are ready to go to London. She seems to be a pleasant and sensible woman, and to-morrow we shall decide whether to go there. There was nothing very remarkable in this drive; and, indeed, my stay hereabouts thus far has been very barren of sights and incidents externally interesting, though the inner life has been rich. Southampton is a very pretty town, and has not the dinginess to which I have been accustomed in many English towns. The High Street reminds me very much of American streets in its general effect; the houses being mostly stuccoed white or light, and cheerful in aspect, though doubtless they are centuries old at heart. The old gateway, which I presume I have mentioned in describing my former visit to Southampton, stands across High Street, about in the centre of the town, and is almost the only token of antiquity that presents itself to the eye. June 17th.--Yesterday morning, June 16th, S-----, Mrs. ------, and I took the rail for Salisbury, where we duly arrived without any accident or anything noticeable, except the usual verdure and richness of an English summer landscape. From the railway station we walked up into Salisbury, with the tall spire (four hundred feet high) of the cathedral before our eyes. Salisbury is an antique city, but with streets more regular than I have seen in most old towns, and the houses have a more picturesque aspect than those of Oxford, for instance, where almost all are mean-looking alike,--though I could hardly judge of Oxford on that hot, weary day. Through one or more of the streets there runs a swift, clear little stream, which, being close to the pavement, and bordered with stone, may be called, I suppose, a kennel, though possessing the transparent purity of a rustic rivulet. It is a brook in city garb. We passed under the pointed arch of a gateway, which stands in one of the principal streets, and soon came in front of THE CATHEDRAL. I do not remember any cathedral with so fine a site as this, rising up out of the centre of a beautiful green, extensive enough to show its full proportions, relieved and insulated from all other patchwork and impertinence of rusty edifices. It is of gray stone, and looks as perfect as when just finished, and with the perfection, too, that could not have come in less than six centuries of venerableness, with a view to which these edifices seem to have been built. A new cathedral would lack the last touch to its beauty and grandeur. It needs to be mellowed and ripened, like some pictures; although I suppose this awfulness of antiquity was supplied, in the minds of the generation that built cathedrals, by the sanctity which they attributed to them. Salisbury Cathedral is far more beautiful than that of York, the exterior of which was really disagreeable to my eye; but this mighty spire and these multitudinous gray pinnacles and towers ascend towards heaven with a kind of natural beauty, not as if man had contrived them. They might be fancied to have grown up, just as the spires of a tuft of grass do, at the same time that they have a law of propriety and regularity among themselves. The tall spire is of such admirable proportion that it does not seem gigantic; and indeed the effect of the whole edifice is of beauty rather than weight and massiveness. Perhaps the bright, balmy sunshine in which we saw it contributed to give it a tender glory, and to soften a little its majesty. When we went in, we heard the organ, the forenoon service being near conclusion. If I had never seen the interior of York Cathedral, I should have been quite satisfied, no doubt, with the spaciousness of this nave and these side aisles, and the height of their arches, and the girth of these pillars; but with that recollection in my mind they fell a little short of grandeur. The interior is seen to disadvantage, and in a way the builder never meant it to be seen; because there is little or no painted glass, nor any such mystery as it makes, but only a colorless, common daylight, revealing everything without remorse. There is a general light hue, moreover, like that of whitewash, over the whole of the roof and walls of the interior, pillars, monuments, and all; whereas, originally, every pillar was polished, and the ceiling was ornamented in brilliant colors, and the light came, many-hued, through the windows, on all this elaborate beauty, in lieu of which there is nothing now but space. Between the pillars that separate the nave from the side aisles, there are ancient tombs, most of which have recumbent statues on them. One of these is Longsword, Earl of Salisbury, son of Fair Rosamond, in chain mail; and there are many other warriors and bishops, and one cross-legged Crusader, and on one tombstone a recumbent skeleton, which I have likewise seen in two or three other cathedrals. The pavement of the aisles and nave is laid in great part with flat tombstones, the inscriptions on which are half obliterated, and on the walls, especially in the transepts, there are tablets, among which I saw one to the poet Bowles, who was a canon of this cathedral. The ecclesiastical dignitaries bury themselves and monument themselves to the exclusion of almost everybody else, in these latter times; though still, as of old, the warrior has his place. A young officer, slain in the Indian wars, was memorialized by a tablet, and may be remembered by it, six hundred years hence, as we now remember the old Knights and Crusaders. It deserves to be mentioned that I saw one or two noses still unbroken among these recumbent figures. Most of the antique statues, on close examination, proved to be almost, entirely covered with names and initials, scratched over the once polished surface. The cathedral and its relics must have been far less carefully watched, at some former period, than now. Between the nave and the choir, as usual, there is a screen that half destroys the majesty of the building, by abridging the spectator of the long vista which he might otherwise have of the whole interior at a glance. We peeped through the barrier, and saw some elaborate monuments in the chancel beyond; but the doors of the screen are kept locked, so that the vergers may raise a revenue by showing strangers through the richest part of the cathedral. By and by one of these vergers came through the screen, with a gentleman and lady whom he was taking round, and we joined ourselves to the party. He showed us into the cloisters, which had long been neglected and ruinous, until the time of Bishop Dennison, the last prelate, who has been but a few years dead. This Bishop has repaired and restored the cloisters in faithful adherence to the original plan; and they now form a most delightful walk about a pleasant and verdant enclosure, in the centre of which sleeps good Bishop Dennison, with a wife on either side of him, all three beneath broad flat stones. Most cloisters are darksome and grim; but these have a broad paved walk beneath the vista of arches, and are light, airy, and cheerful; and from one corner you can get the best possible view of the whole height and beautiful proportion of the cathedral spire. One side of this cloistered walk seems to be the length of the nave of the cathedral. There is a square of four such sides; and of places for meditation, grave, yet not too sombre, it seemed to me one of the best. While we stayed there, a jackdaw was walking to and fro across the grassy enclosure, and haunting around the good Bishop's grave. He was clad in black, and looked like a feathered ecclesiastic; but I know not whether it were Bishop Dennison's ghost, or that of some old monk. On one side of the cloisters, and contiguous to the main body of the cathedral, stands the chapter-house. Bishop Dennison had it much at heart to repair this part of the holy edifice; and, if I mistake not, did begin the work; for it had been long ruinous, and in Cromwell's time his dragoons stationed their horses there. Little progress, however, had been made in the repairs when the Bishop died; and it was decided to restore the building in his honor, and by way of monument to him. The repairs are now nearly completed; and the interior of this chapter-house gave me the first idea, anywise adequate, of the splendor of these Gothic church edifices. The roof is sustained by one great central pillar of polished marble,--small pillars clustered about a great central column, which rises to the ceiling, and there gushes out with various beauty, that overflows all the walls; as if the fluid idea had sprung out of that fountain, and grown solid in what we see. The pavement is elaborately ornamented; the ceiling is to be brilliantly gilded and painted, as it was of yore, and the tracery and sculptures around the walls are to be faithfully renewed from what remains of the original patterns. After viewing the chapter-house, the verger--an elderly man of grave, benign manner, clad in black and talking of the cathedral and the monuments as if he loved them--led us again into the nave of the cathedral, and thence within the screen of the choir. The screen is as poor as possible,--mere barren wood-work, without the least attempt at beauty. In the chancel there are some meagre patches of old glass, and some of modern date, not very well worth looking at. We saw several interesting monuments in this part of the cathedral,--one belonging to the ducal family of Somerset, and erected in the reign of James I.; it is of marble, and extremely splendid and elaborate, with kneeling figures and all manner of magnificence,--more than I have seen in any monument except that of Mary of Scotland in Westminster Abbey. The more ancient tombs are also very numerous, and among them that of the Bishop who founded the cathedral. Within the screen, against the wall, is erected a monument, by Chantrey, to the Earl of Malmesbury; a full-length statue of the Earl in a half-recumbent position, holding an open volume and looking upward,--a noble work,--a calm, wise, thoughtful, firm, and not unbenignant face. Beholding its expression, it really was impossible not to have faith in the high character of the individual thus represented; and I have seldom felt this effect from any monumental bust or statue, though I presume it is always aimed at. I am weary of trying to describe cathedrals. It is utterly useless; there is no possibility of giving the general effect, or any shadow of it, and it is miserable to put down a few items of tombstones, and a bit of glass from a painted window, as if the gloom and glory of the edifice were thus to be reproduced. Cathedrals are almost the only things (if even those) that have quite filled out my ideal here in this old world; and cathedrals often make me miserable from my inadequacy to take them wholly in; and, above all, I despise myself when I sit down to describe them. We now walked around the Close, which is surrounded by some of the quaintest and comfortablest ecclesiastical residences that can be imagined. These are the dwelling-houses of the Dean and the canons, and whatever other high officers compose the Bishop's staff; and there was one large brick mansion, old, but not so ancient as the rest, which we took to be the Bishop's palace. I never beheld anything--I must say again so cosey, so indicative of domestic comfort for whole centuries together,--houses so fit to live in or to die in, and where it would be so pleasant to lead a young wife beneath the antique portal, and dwell with her till husband and wife were patriarchal,--as these delectable old houses. They belong naturally to the cathedral, and have a necessary relation to it, and its sanctity is somehow thrown over them all, so that they do not quite belong to this world, though they look full to overflowing of whatever earthly things are good for man. These are places, however, in which mankind makes no progress; the rushing tumult of human life here subsides into a deep, quiet pool, with perhaps a gentle circular eddy, but no onward movement. The same identical thought, I suppose, goes round in a slow whirl from one generation to another, as I have seen a withered leaf do in the vortex of a brook. In the front of the cathedral there is a most stately and beautiful tree, which flings its verdure upward to a very lofty height; but far above it rises the tall spire, dwarfing the great tree by comparison. When the cathedral had sufficiently oppressed us with its beauty, we returned to sublunary matters, and went wandering about Salisbury in search of a luncheon, which we finally took in a confectioner's shop. Then we inquired hither and thither, at various livery-stables, for a conveyance to Stonehenge, and at last took a fly from the Lamb Hotel. The drive was over a turnpike for the first seven miles, over a bare, ridgy country, showing little to interest us. We passed a party of seven or eight men, in a coarse uniform dress, resembling that worn by convicts and apparently under the guardianship of a stout, authoritative, yet rather kindly-looking man with a cane. Our driver said that they were lunatics from a neighboring asylum, out for a walk. Seven miles from Salisbury, we turned aside from the turnpike, and drove two miles across Salisbury Plain, which is an apparently boundless extent of unenclosed land, treeless and houseless. It is not exactly a plain, but a green sea of long and gentle swells and subsidences, affording views of miles upon miles to a very far horizon. We passed large flocks of sheep, with the shepherds watching them; but the dogs seemed to take most of the care of the flocks upon their own shoulders, and would scamper to turn the sheep when they inclined to stray whither they should not; and then arose a thousand-fold bleating, not unpleasant to the ear; for it did not apparently indicate any fear or discomfort on the part of the flock. The sheep and lambs are all black-faced, and have a very funny expression. As we drove over the plain (my seat was beside the driver), I saw at a distance a cluster of large gray stones, mostly standing upright, and some of them slightly inclined towards each other, --very irregular, and so far off forming no very picturesque or noteworthy spectacle. Of course I knew at once that this was STONEHENGE, and also knew that the reality was going to dwindle wofully within my ideal, as almost everything else does. When we reached the spot, we found a picnic-party just finishing their dinner, on one of the overthrown stones of the druidical temple; and within the sacred circle an artist was painting a wretched daub of the scene, and an old shepherd --the very Shepherd of Salisbury Plain sat erect in the centre of the ruin. There never was a ruder thing than Stonehenge made by mortal hands. It is so very rude that it seems as if Nature and man had worked upon it with one consent, and so it is all the stranger and more impressive from its rudeness. The spectator wonders to see art and contrivance, and a regular and even somewhat intricate plan, beneath all the uncouth simplicity of this arrangement of rough stones; and certainly, whatever was the intellectual and scientific advancement of the people who built Stonehenge, no succeeding architects will ever have a right to triumph over them; for nobody's work in after times is likely to endure till it becomes a mystery as to who built it, and how, and for what purpose. Apart from the moral considerations suggested by it, Stonehenge is not very well worth seeing. Materially, it is one of the poorest of spectacles, and when complete, it must have been even less picturesque than now,--a few huge, rough stones, very imperfectly squared, standing on end, and each group of two supporting a third large stone on their tops; other stones of the same pattern overthrown and tumbled one upon another; and the whole comprised within a circuit of about a hundred feet diameter; the short, sheep-cropped grass of Salisbury Plain growing among all these uncouth bowlders. I am not sure that a misty, lowering day would not have better suited Stonehenge, as the dreary midpoint of the great, desolate, trackless plain; not literally trackless, however, for the London and Exeter Road passes within fifty yards of the ruins, and another road intersects it. After we had been there about an hour, there came a horseman within the Druid's circle,--evidently a clerical personage by his white neckcloth, though his loose gray riding pantaloons were not quite in keeping. He looked at us rather earnestly, and at last addressed Mrs. ------, and announced himself as Mr. Hinchman,--a clergyman whom she had been trying to find in Salisbury, in order to avail herself of him as a cicerone; and he had now ridden hither to meet us. He told us that the artist whom we found here could give us more information than anybody about Stonehenge; for it seems he has spent a great many years here, painting and selling his poor sketches to visitors, and also selling a book which his father wrote about the remains. This man showed, indeed, a pretty accurate, acquaintance with these old stones, and pointed out, what is thought to be the altar-stone, and told us of some relation between this stone and two other stones, and the rising of the sun at midsummer, which might indicate that Stonehenge was a temple of solar worship. He pointed out, too, to how little depth the stones were planted in the earth, insomuch that I have no doubt the American frosts would overthrow Stonehenge in a single winter; and it is wonderful that it should have stood so long, even in England. I have forgotten what else he said; but I bought one of his books, and find it a very unsatisfactory performance, being chiefly taken up with an attempt to prove these remains to be an antediluvian work, constructed, I think the author says, under the superintendence of Father Adam himself! Before our departure we were requested to write our names in the album which the artist keeps for the purpose; and he pointed out Ex-President Fillmore's autograph, and those of one or two other Americans who have been here within a short time. It is a very curious life that this artist leads, in this great solitude, and haunting Stonehenge like the ghost of a Druid; but he is a brisk little man, and very communicative on his one subject. Mr. Hinchman rode with us over the plain, and pointed out Salisbury spire, visible close to Stonehenge. Under his guidance we returned by a different road from that which brought us thither,--and a much more delightful one. I think I never saw such continued sylvan beauty as this road showed us, passing through a good deal of woodland scenery,--fine old trees, standing each within its own space, and thus having full liberty to outspread itself, and wax strong and broad for ages, instead of being crowded, and thus stifled and emaciated, as human beings are here, and forest-trees are in America. Hedges, too, and the rich, rich verdure of England; and villages full of picturesque old houses, thatched, and ivied, or perhaps overrun with roses,--and a stately mansion in the Elizabethan style; and a quiet stream, gliding onward without a ripple from its own motion, but rippled by a large fish darting across it; and over all this scene a gentle, friendly sunshine, not ardent enough to crisp a single leaf or blade of grass. Nor must the village church be forgotten, with its square, battlemented tower, dating back to the epoch of the Normans. We called at a house where one of Mrs. ------'s pupils was residing with her aunt,--a thatched house of two stories high, built in what was originally a sand-pit, but which, in the course of a good many years, has been transformed into the most delightful and homelike little nook almost that can be found in England. A thatched cottage suggests a very rude dwelling indeed; but this had a pleasant parlor and drawing-room, and chambers with lattice-windows, opening close beneath the thatched roof; and the thatch itself gives an air to the place as if it were a bird's nest, or some such simple and natural habitation. The occupants are an elderly clergyman, retired from professional duty, and his sister; and having nothing else to do, and sufficient means, they employ themselves in beautifying this sweet little retreat--planting new shrubbery, laying out new walks around it, and helping Nature to add continually another charm; and Nature is certainly a more genial playfellow in England than in my own country. She is always ready to lend her aid to any beautifying purpose. Leaving these good people, who were very hospitable, giving tea and offering wine, we reached Salisbury in time to take the train for Southampton. June 18th.--Yesterday we left the Castle Hotel, after paying a bill of twenty pounds for a little more than a week's board. In America we could not very well have lived so simply, but we might have lived luxuriously for half the money. This Castle Hotel was once an old Roman castle, the landlord says, and the circular sweep of the tower is still seen towards the street, although, being painted white, and built up with modern additions, it would not be taken for an ancient structure. There is a dungeon beneath it, in which the landlord keeps his wine. J----- and I, quitting the hotel, walked towards Shinley along the water-side, leaving the rest of the family to follow in a fly. There are many traces, along the shore, of the fortifications by which Southampton was formerly defended towards the water, and very probably their foundations may be as ancient as Roman times. Our hotel was no doubt connected with this chain of defences, which seems to have consisted of a succession of round towers, with a wall extending from one to another. We saw two or three of these towers still standing, and likely to stand, though ivy-grown and ruinous at the summit, and intermixed and even amalgamated with pot-houses and mean dwellings; and often, through an antique arch, there was a narrow doorway, giving access to the house of some sailor or laborer or artisan, and his wife gossiping at it with her neighbor, or his children playing about it. After getting beyond the precincts of Southampton our walk was not very interesting, except to J-----, who kept running down to the verge of the water, looking for shells and sea-insects. June 29th.--Yesterday, 28th, I left Liverpool from the Lime Street station; an exceedingly hot day for England, insomuch that the rail carriages were really uncomfortable. I have now passed over the London and Northwestern Railway so often that the northern part of it is very wearisome, especially as it has few features of interest even to a new observer. At Stafford--no, at Wolverhampton--we diverged to a track which I have passed over only once before. We stopped an hour and a quarter at Wolverhampton, and I walked up into the town, which is large and old,--old, at least, in its plan, or lack of plan,--the streets being irregular, and straggling over an uneven surface. Like many of the English towns, it reminds me of Boston, though dingier. The sun was so hot that I actually sought the shady sides of the streets; and this, of itself, is one long step towards establishing a resemblance between an English town and an American one. English railway carriages seem to me more tiresome than any other; and I suppose it is owing to the greater motion, arising from their more elastic springs. A slow train, too, like that which I was now in, is more tiresome than a quick one, at least to the spirits, whatever it may be to the body. We loitered along through afternoon and evening, stopping at every little station, and nowhere getting to the top of our speed, till at last, in the late dusk, we reached GLOUCESTER, and I put up at the Wellington Hotel, which is but a little way from the station. I took tea and a slice or two of ham in the coffee-room, and had a little talk with two people there; one of whom, on learning that I was an American, said, "But I suppose you have now been in England some time?" He meant, finding me not absolutely a savage, that I must have been caught a good while ago. . . . The next morning I went into the city, the hotel being on its outskirts, and rambled along in search of the cathedral. Some church-bells were chiming and clashing for a wedding or other festal occasion, and I followed the sound, supposing that it might proceed from the cathedral, but this was not the case. It was not till I had got to a bridge over the Severn, quite out of the town, that I saw again its tower, and knew how to shape my course towards it. I did not see much that was strange or interesting in Gloucester. It is old, with a good many of those antique Elizabethan houses with two or three peaked gables on a line together; several old churches, which always cluster about a cathedral, like chickens round a hen; a hospital for decayed tradesmen; another for bluecoat boys; a great many butcher's shops, scattered in all parts of the town, open in front, with a counter or dresser on which to display the meat, just in the old fashion of Shakespeare's house. It is a large town, and has a good deal of liveliness and bustle, in a provincial way. In short, judging by the sheep, cattle, and horses, and the people of agricultural aspect that I saw about the streets, I should think it must have been market-day. I looked here and there for the old Bell Inn, because, unless I misremember, Fielding brings Tom Jones to this inn, while he and Partridge were travelling together. It is still extant; for, on my arrival the night before, a runner from it had asked me to go thither; but I forgot its celebrity at the moment. I saw nothing of it in my rambles about Gloucester, but at last I found THE CATHEDRAL, though I found no point from which a good view of the exterior can be seen. It has a very beautiful and rich outside, however, and a lofty tower, very large and ponderous, but so finished off, and adorned with pinnacles, and all manner of architectural devices,--wherewith these old builders knew how to alleviate their massive structures,--that it seems to sit lightly in the air. The porch was open, and some workmen were trundling barrows into the nave; so I followed, and found two young women sitting just within the porch, one of whom offered to show me round the cathedral. There was a great dust in the nave, arising from the operations of the workmen. They had been laying a new pavement, and scraping away the plaster, which had heretofore been laid over the pillars and walls. The pillars come out from the process as good as new,--great, round, massive columns, not clustered like those of most cathedrals; they are twenty-one feet in circumference, and support semicircular arches. I think there are seven of these columns, on each side of the nave, which did not impress me as very spacious; and the dust and racket of the work-people quite destroyed the effect which should have been produced by the aisles and arches; so that I hardly stopped to glance at this part, though I saw some mural monuments and recumbent statues along the walls. The choir is separated from the nave by the usual screen, and now by a sail-cloth or something of that kind, drawn across, in order to keep out the dust, while the repairs are going on. When the young woman conducted me hither, I was at once struck by the magnificent eastern window, the largest in England, which fills, or looks vast enough to fill, all that end of the cathedral,--a most splendid window, full of old painted glass, which looked as bright as sunshine, though the sun was not really shining through it. The roof of the choir is of oak and very fine, and as much as ninety feet high. There are chapels opening from the choir, and within them the monuments of the eminent people who built them, and of benefactors or prelates, or of those otherwise illustrious in their day. My recollection of what I saw here is very dim and confused; more so than I anticipated. I remember somewhere within the choir the tomb of Edward II. with his effigy upon the top of it, in a long robe, with a crown on his head, and a ball and sceptre in his hand; likewise, a statue of Robert, son of the Conqueror, carved in Irish oak and painted. He lolls in an easy posture on his tomb, with one leg crossed lightly over the other, to denote that he was a Crusader. There are several monuments of mitred abbots who formerly presided over the cathedral. A Cavalier and his wife, with the dress of the period elaborately represented, lie side by side in excellent preservation; and it is remarkable that though their noses are very prominent, they have come down from the past without any wear and tear. The date of the Cavalier's death is 1637, and I think his statue could not have been sculptured until after the Restoration, else he and his dame would hardly have come through Cromwell's time unscathed. Here, as in all the other churches in England, Cromwell is said to have stabled his horses, and broken the windows, and belabored the old monuments. There is one large and beautiful chapel, styled the Lady's Chapel, which is, indeed, a church by itself, being ninety feet long, and comprising everything that appertains to a place of worship. Here, too, there are monuments, and on the floor are many old bricks and tiles, with inscriptions on them, or Gothic devices, and flat tombstones, with coats of arms sculptured on them; as, indeed, there are everywhere else, except in the nave, where the new pavement has obliterated them. After viewing the choir and the chapels, the young woman led me down into the crypts below, where the dead persons who are commemorated in the upper regions were buried. The low ponderous pillars and arches of these crypts are supposed to be older than the upper portions of the building. They are about as perfect, I suppose, as when new, but very damp, dreary, and darksome; and the arches intersect one another so intricately, that, if the girl had deserted me, I might easily have got lost there. These are chapels where masses used to be said for the souls of the deceased; and my guide said that a great many skulls and bones had been dug up here. No doubt a vast population has been deposited in the course of a thousand years. I saw two white skulls, in a niche, grinning as skulls always do, though it is impossible to see the joke. These crypts, or crypts like these, are doubtless what Congreve calls the "aisles and monumental caves of Death," in that passage which Dr. Johnson admired so much. They are very singular,--something like a dark shadow or dismal repetition of the upper church below ground. Ascending from the crypts, we went next to the cloisters, which are in a very perfect state, and form an unbroken square about the green grass-plot, enclosed within. Here also it is said Cromwell stabled his horses; but if so, they were remarkably quiet beasts, for tombstones, which form the pavement, are not broken, nor cracked, nor bear any hoof-marks. All around the cloisters, too, the stone tracery that shuts them in like a closed curtain, carefully drawn, remains as it was in the days of the monks, insomuch that it is not easy to get a glimpse of the green enclosure. Probably there used to be painted glass in the larger apertures of this stone-work; otherwise it is perfect. These cloisters are very different from the free, open, and airy ones of Salisbury; but they are more in accordance with our notions of monkish habits; and even at this day, if I were a canon of Gloucester, I would put that dim ambulatory to a good use. The library is adjacent to the cloisters, and I saw some rows of folios and quartos. I have nothing else to record about the cathedral, though if I were to stay there a month, I suppose it might then begin to be understood. It is wicked to look at these solemn old churches in a hurry. By the by, it was not built in a hurry; but in full three hundred years, having been begun in 1188 and only finished in 1498, not a great many years before Papistry began to go out of vogue in England. From Gloucester I took the rail for Basingstoke before noon. The first part of the journey was through an uncommonly beautiful tract of country, hilly, but not wild; a tender and graceful picturesqueness,--fine, single trees and clumps of trees, and sometimes wide woods, scattered over the landscape, and filling the nooks of the hills with luxuriant foliage. Old villages scattered frequently along our track, looking very peaceful, with the peace of past ages lingering about them; and a rich, rural verdure of antique cultivation everywhere. Old country-seats--specimens of the old English hall or manor-house--appeared on the hillsides, with park-scenery surrounding the mansions; and the gray churches rose in the midst of all the little towns. The beauty of English scenery makes me desperate, it is so impossible to describe it, or in any way to record its impression, and such a pity to leave it undescribed; and, moreover, I always feel that I do not get from it a hundredth or a millionth part of the enjoyment that there really is in it, hurrying past it thus. I was really glad when we rumbled into a tunnel, piercing for a long distance through a hill; and, emerging on the other side, we found ourselves in a comparatively level and uninteresting tract of country, which lasted till we reached Southampton. English scenery, to be appreciated and to be reproduced with pen and pencil, requires to be dwelt upon long, and to be wrought out with the nicest touches. A coarse and hasty brush is not the instrument for such work. July 6th.--Monday, June 30th, was a warm and beautiful day, and my wife and I took a cab from Southampton and drove to NETLEY ABBEY, about three or four miles. The remains of the Abbey stand in a sheltered place, but within view of Southampton Water; and it is a most picturesque and perfect ruin, all ivy-grown, of course, and with great trees where the pillars of the nave used to stand, and also in the refectory and the cloister court; and so much soil on the summit of the broken walls, that weeds flourish abundantly there, and grass too; and there was a wild rosebush, in full bloom, as much as thirty or forty feet from the ground. S----- and I ascended a winding stair, leading up within a round tower, the steps much foot-worn; and, reaching the top, we came forth at the height where a gallery had formerly run round the church, in the thickness of the wall. The upper portions of the edifice were now chiefly thrown down; but I followed a foot-path, on the top of the remaining wall, quite to the western entrance of the church. Since the time when the Abbey was taken from the monks, it has been private property; and the possessor, in Henry VIII.'s days, or subsequently, built a residence for himself within its precincts out of the old materials. This has now entirely disappeared, all but some unsightly old masonry, patched into the original walls. Large portions of the ruin have been removed, likewise, to be used as building-materials elsewhere; and this is the Abbey mentioned, I think, by Dr. Watts, concerning which a Mr. William Taylor had a dream while he was contemplating pulling it down. He dreamed that a part of it fell upon his head; and, sure enough, a piece of the wall did come down and crush him. In the nave I saw a large mass of conglomerated stone that had fallen from the wall between the nave and cloisters, and thought that perhaps this was the very mass that killed poor Mr. Taylor. The ruins are extensive and very interesting; but I have put off describing them too long, and cannot make a distinct picture of them now. Moreover, except to a spectator skilled in architecture, all ruined abbeys are pretty much alike. As we came away, we noticed some women making baskets at the entrance, and one of them urged us to buy some of her handiwork; for that she was the gypsy of Netley Abbey, and had lived among the ruins these thirty years. So I bought one for a shilling. She was a woman with a prominent nose, and weather-tanned, but not very picturesque or striking. TO BLACKHEATH. On the 6th July, we left the Villa, with our enormous luggage, and took our departure from Southampton by the noon train. The main street of Southampton, though it looks pretty fresh and bright, must be really antique, there being a great many projecting windows, in the old-time style, and these make the vista of the street very picturesque. I have no doubt that I missed seeing many things more interesting than the few that I saw. Our journey to London was without any remarkable incident, and at the Waterloo station we found one of Mr. Bennoch's clerks, under whose guidance we took two cabs for the East Kent station at London Bridge, and there railed to Blackheath, where we arrived in the afternoon. On Thursday I went into London by one of the morning trains, and wandered about all day,--visiting the Exhibition of the Royal Academy, and Westminster Abbey and St. Paul's, the two latter of which I have already written about in former journals. On Friday, S-----, J-----, and I walked over the heath, and through the Park to Greenwich, and spent some hours in the Hospital. The painted hall struck me much more than at my first view of it; it is very beautiful indeed, and the effect of its frescoed ceiling most rich and magnificent, the assemblage of glowing hues producing a general result of splendor. . . . In the evening I went with Mr. and Mrs. ------ to a conversazione at Mrs. Newton Crosland's, who lives on Blackheath. . . . I met with one person who interested me,--Mr. Bailey, the author of Festus; and I was surprised to find myself already acquainted with him. It is the same Mr. Bailey whom I met a few months ago, when I first dined at Mr. -----'s,--a dark, handsome, rather picturesque-looking man, with a gray beard, and dark hair, a little dimmed with gray. He is of quiet and very agreeable deportment, and I liked him and believed in him. . . . There is sadness glooming out of him, but no unkindness nor asperity. Mrs. Crosland's conversazione was enriched with a supper, and terminated with a dance, in which Mr. ------ joined with heart and soul, but Mrs. ------ went to sleep in her chair, and I would gladly have followed her example if I could have found a chair to sit upon. In the course of the evening I had some talk with a pale, nervous young lady, who has been a noted spiritual medium. Yesterday I went into town by the steamboat from Greenwich to London Bridge, with a nephew of Mr. ------'s, and, calling at his place of business, he procured us an order from his wine-merchants, by means of which we were admitted into THE WINE-VAULTS OF THE LONDON DOCKS. We there found parties, with an acquaintance, who was going, with two French gentlemen, into the vaults. It is a good deal like going down into a mine, each visitor being provided with a lamp at the end of a stick; and following the guide along dismal passages, running beneath the streets, and extending away interminably,--roughly arched overhead with stone, from which depend festoons of a sort of black fungus, caused by the exhalations of the wine. Nothing was ever uglier than this fungus. It is strange that the most ethereal effervescence of rich wine can produce nothing better. The first series of vaults which we entered were filled with port-wine, and occupied a space variously estimated at from eleven to sixteen acres,--which I suppose would hold more port-wine than ever was made. At any rate, the pipes and butts were so thickly piled that in some places we could hardly squeeze past them. We drank from two or three vintages; but I was not impressed with any especial excellence in the wine. We were not the only visitors, for, far in the depths of the vault, we passed a gentleman and two young ladies, wandering about like the ghosts of defunct wine-bibhers, in a Tophet specially prepared for then. People employed here sometimes go astray, and, their lamps being extinguished, they remain long in this everlasting gloom. We went likewise to the vaults of sherry-wine, which have the same characteristics as those just described, but are less extensive. It is no guaranty for the excellence or even for the purity of the wine, that it is kept in these cellars, under the lock and key of the government; for the merchants are allowed to mix different vintages, according to their own pleasure, and to adulterate it as they like. Very little of the wine probably comes out as it goes in, or is exactly what it pretends to be. I went back to Mr. ------'s office, and we drove together to make some calls jointly and separately. I went alone to Mrs. Heywood's; afterwards with Mr. ------ to the American minister's, whom we found at home; and I requested of him, on the part of the Americans at Liverpool, to tell me the facts about the American gentleman being refused admittance to the Levee. The ambassador did not seem to me to make his point good for having withdrawn with the rejected guest. July 9th. (Our wedding-day.)--We were invited yesterday evening to Mrs. S. C. Hall's, where Jenny Lind was to sing; so we left Blackheath at about eight o'clock in a brougham, and reached Ashley Place, as the dusk was gathering, after nine. The Halls reside in a handsome suite of apartments, arranged on the new system of flats, each story constituting a separate tenement, and the various families having an entrance-hall in common. The plan is borrowed from the Continent, and seems rather alien to the traditionary habits of the English; though, no doubt, a good degree of seclusion is compatible with it. Mr. Hall received us with the greatest cordiality before we entered the drawing-room. Mrs. Hall, too, greeted us with most kindly warmth. Jenny Lind had not yet arrived; but I found Dr. Mackay there, and I was introduced to Miss Catherine Sinclair, who is a literary lady, though none of her works happen to be known to me. Soon the servant announced Madam Goldschmidt, and this famous lady made her appearance, looking quite different from what I expected. Mrs. Hall established her in the inner drawing-room, where was a piano and a harp; and shortly after, our hostess came to me, and said that Madam Goldschmidt wished to be introduced to me. There was a gentle peremptoriness in the summons, that made it something like being commanded into the presence of a princess; a great favor, no doubt, but yet a little humbling to the recipient. However, I acquiesced with due gratitude, and was presented accordingly. She made room for me on the sofa, and I sat down, and began to talk. Jenny Lind is rather tall,--quite tall, for a woman,--certainly no beauty, but with sense and self-reliance in her aspect and manners. She was suffering under a severe cold, and seemed worn down besides, so probably I saw her under disadvantages. Her conversation is quite simple, and I should have great faith in her sincerity; and there is about her the manner of a person who knows the world, and has conquered it. She said something or other about The Scarlet Letter; and, on my part, I paid her such compliments as a man could pay who had never heard her sing. . . . Her conversational voice is an agreeable one, rather deep, and not particularly smooth. She talked about America, and of our unwholesome modes of life, as to eating and exercise, and of the ill-health especially of our women; but I opposed this view as far as I could with any truth, insinuating my opinion that we are about as healthy as other people, and affirming for a certainty that we live longer. In good faith, so far as I have any knowledge of the matter, the women of England are as generally out of health as those of America; always something has gone wrong with them; and as for Jenny Lind, she looks wan and worn enough to be an American herself. This charge of ill-health is almost universally brought forward against us nowadays,--and, taking the whole country together, I do not believe the statistics will bear it out. The rooms, which were respectably filled when we arrived, were now getting quite full. I saw Mr. Stevens, the American man of libraries, and had some talk with him; and Durham, the sculptor; and Mr. and Mrs. Hall introduced me to various people, some of whom were of note,--for instance, Sir Emerson Tennent, a man of the world, of some parliamentary distinction, wearing a star; Mr. Samuel Lover, a most good-natured, pleasant Irishman, with a shining and twinkling visage; Miss Jewsbury, whom I found very conversable. She is known in literature, but not to me. We talked about Emerson, whom she seems to have been well acquainted with while he was in England; and she mentioned that Miss Martineau had given him a lock of hair; it was not her own hair, but a mummy's. After our return, Mrs. ------ told us that Miss Jewsbury had written, among other things, three histories, and as she asked me to introduce her to S-----, and means to cultivate our acquaintance, it would be well to know something of them. We were told that she is now employed in some literary undertaking of Lady Morgan's, who, at the age of ninety, is still circulating in society, and is as brisk in faculties as ever. I should like to see her ladyship, that is, I should not be sorry to see her; for distinguished people are so much on a par with others, socially, that it would be foolish to be overjoyed at seeing anybody whomsoever. Leaving out the illustrious Jenny Lind, I suspect that I was myself the greatest lion of the evening; for a good many persons sought the felicity of knowing me, and had little or nothing to say when that honor and happiness was conferred on them. It is surely very wrong and ill-mannered in people to ask for an introduction unless they are prepared to make talk; it throws too great an expense and trouble on the wretched lion, who is compelled, on the spur of the moment, to convert a conversable substance out of thin air, perhaps for the twentieth time that evening. I am sure I did not say--and I think I did not hear said-- one rememberable word in the course of this visit; though, nevertheless, it was a rather agreeable one. In due season ices and jellies were handed about; and some ladies and gentlemen--professional, perhaps--were kind enough to sing songs, and play on the piano and harp, while persons in remote corners went on with whatever conversation they had in hand. Then came supper; but there were so many people to go into the supper-room that we could not all crowd thither together, and, coming late, I got nothing but some sponge-cake and a glass of champagne, neither of which I care for. After supper, Mr. Lover sang some Irish songs, his own in music and words, with rich, humorous effect, to which the comicality of his face contributed almost as much as his voice and words. The Lord Mayor looked in for a little while, and though a hard-featured Jew enough, was the most picturesque person there. July 10th.--Mrs. Heywood had invited me to dinner last evening. . . . Her house is very finely situated, overlooking Hyde Park, and not a great way from where Tyburn tree used to stand. When I arrived, there were no guests but Mr. and Mrs. D------; but by and by came Mr. Monckton Milnes and lady, the Bishop of Lichfield, Mr. Tom Taylor, Mr. Ewart, M. P., Sir Somebody Somerville, Mr. and Mrs. Musgrave, and others. Mr. Milnes, whom I had not seen for more than a year, greeted me very cordially, and so did Mr. Taylor. I took Mrs. Musgrave in to dinner. She is an Irish lady, and Mrs. Heywood had recommended her to me as being very conversable; but I had a good deal more talk with Mrs. M------, with whom I was already acquainted, than with her. Mrs. M------ is of noble blood, and therefore not snobbish,--quite unaffected, gentle, sweet, and easy to get on with, reminding me of the best-mannered American women. But how can anything characteristic be said or done among a dozen people sitting at table in full dress? Speaking of full dress, the Bishop wore small-clothes and silk stockings, and entered the drawing-room with a three-cornered hat, which he kept flattened out under his arm. He asked the briefest blessing possible, and, sitting at the ultra end of the table, I heard nothing further from him till he officiated as briefly before the cloth was withdrawn. Mrs. M------ talked about Tennyson, with whom her husband was at the University, and whom he continues to know intimately. She says that he considers Maud his best poem. He now lives in the Isle of Wight, spending all the year round there, and has recently bought the place on which he resides. She was of opinion that he would have been gratified by my calling on him, which I had wished to do, while we were at Southampton; but this is a liberty which I should hardly venture upon with a shy man like Tennyson,--more especially as he might perhaps suspect me of doing it on the score of my own literary character. But I should like much to see him Mr. Tom Taylor, during dinner, made some fun for the benefit of the ladies on either side of him. I liked him very well this evening. When the ladies had not long withdrawn, and after the wine had once gone round, I asked Mr. Heywood to make my apologies to Mrs. Heywood, and took leave; all London lying betwixt me and the London Bridge station, where I was to take the rail homeward. At the station I found Mr. Bennoch, who had been dining with the Lord Mayor to meet Sir William Williams, and we railed to Greenwich, and reached home by midnight. Mr. and Mrs. Bennoch have set out on their Continental journey to-day,--leaving us, for a little space, in possession of what will be more like a home than anything that we shall hereafter find in England. This afternoon I had taken up the fourth volume of Jerdan's Autobiography,--wretched twaddle, though it records such constant and apparently intimate intercourse with distinguished people,--and was reading it, between asleep and awake, on the sofa, when Mr. Jerdan himself was announced. I saw him, in company with Mr. Bennoch, nearly three years ago, at Rock Park, and wondered then what there was in so uncouth an individual to get him so freely into polished society. He now looks rougher than ever,--time-worn, but not reverend; a thatch of gray hair on his head; an imperfect set of false teeth; a careless apparel, checked trousers, and a stick, for he had walked a mile or two from his own dwelling. I suspect--and long practice at the Consulate has made me keen-sighted-- that Mr. Jerdan contemplated some benefit from my purse; and, to the extent of a sovereign or so, I would not mind contributing to his comfort. He spoke of a secret purpose of Mr. ------ and himself to obtain me a degree or diploma in some Literary Institution,--what one I know not, and did not ask; but the honor cannot be a high one, if this poor old fellow can do aught towards it. I am afraid he is a very disreputable senior, but certainly not the less to be pitied on that account; and there was something very touching in his stiff and infirm movement, as he resumed his stick and took leave, waving me a courteous farewell, and turning upon me a smile, grim with age, as he went down the steps. In that gesture and smile I fancied some trace of the polished man of society, such as he may have once been; though time and hard weather have roughened him, as they have the once polished marble pillars which I saw so rude in aspect at Netley Abbey. Speaking of Dickens last evening, Mr. ------ mentioned his domestic tastes,--how he preferred home enjoyments to all others, and did not willingly go much into society. Mrs. ------, too, the other day told us of his taking on himself all possible trouble as regards his domestic affairs. . . . There is a great variety of testimony, various and varied, as to the character of Dickens. I must see him before I finally leave England. July 13th.--On Friday morning (11th), at nine o'clock, I took the rail into town to breakfast with Mr. Milnes. As he had named a little after ten as the hour, I could not immediately proceed to his house, and so walked moderately over London Bridge and into the city, meaning to take a cab from Charing Cross, or thereabouts. Passing through some street or other, contiguous to Cheapside, I saw in a court-yard the entrance to the Guildhall, and stepped in to look at it. It is a spacious hall, about one hundred and fifty feet long, and perhaps half as broad, paved with flagstones which look worn and some of them cracked across; the roof is very lofty and was once vaulted, but has been shaped anew in modern times. There is a vast window partly filled with painted glass, extending quite along each end of the hall, and a row of arched windows on either side, throwing their light from far above downward upon the pavement. This fashion of high windows, not reaching within twenty or thirty feet of the floor, serves to give great effect to the large enclosed space of an antique hall. Against the walls are several marble monuments; one to the Earl of Chatham, a statue of white marble, with various allegorical contrivances, fronting an obelisk or pyramid of dark marble; and another to his son, William Pitt, of somewhat similar design and of equal size; each of them occupying the whole space, I believe, between pavement and ceiling. There is likewise a statue of Beckford, a famous Lord Mayor,--the most famous except Whittington, and that one who killed Wat Tyler; and like those two, his fame is perhaps somewhat mythological, though he lived and bustled within less than a century. He is said to have made a bold speech to the King; but this I will not believe of any Englishman--at least, of any plebeian Englishman--until I hear it. But there stands his statue in the Guildhall in the act of making his speech, as if the monstrous attempt had petrified him. Lord Nelson, too, has a monument, and so, I think, has some other modern worthy. At one end of the hall, under one of the great painted windows, stand three or four old statues of mediaeval kings, whose identities I forget; and in the two corners of the opposite end are two gigantic absurdities of painted wood, with grotesque visages, whom I quickly recognized as Gog and Magog. They stand each on a pillar, and seem to be about fifteen feet high, and look like enormous playthings for the children of giants; and it is strange to see them in this solemn old hall, among the memorials of dead heroes and statesmen. There is an annual banquet in the Guildhall, given by the Lord Mayor and sheriffs, and I believe it is the very acme of civic feasting. After viewing the hall, as it still lacked something of ten, I continued my walk through that entanglement of city streets, and quickly found myself getting beyond my reckoning. I cannot tell whither I went, but I passed through a very dirty region, and I remember a long, narrow, evil-odored street, cluttered up with stalls, in which were vegetables and little bits of meat for sale; and there was a frowzy multitude of buyers and sellers. Still I blundered on, and was getting out of the density of the city into broader streets, but still shabby ones, when, looking at my watch, I found it to be past ten, and no cab-stand within sight. It was a quarter past when I finally got into one; and the driver told me that it would take half an hour to go from thence to Upper Brook Street; so that I was likely to exceed the license implied in Mr. Milnes's invitation. Whether I was quite beyond rule I cannot say; but it did not lack more than ten minutes of eleven when I was ushered up stairs, and I found all the company assembled. However, it is of little consequence, except that if I had come early, I should have been introduced to many of the guests, whom now I could only know across the table. Mrs. Milnes greeted me very kindly, and Mr. Milnes came towards me with an elderly gentleman in a blue coat and gray pantaloons,--with a long, rather thin, homely visage, exceedingly shaggy eyebrows, though no great weight of brow, and thin gray hair, and introduced me to the Marquis of Lansdowne. The Marquis had his right hand wrapped up in a black-silk handkerchief; so he gave me his left, and, from some awkwardness in meeting it, when I expected the right, I gave him only three of my fingers,--a thing I never did before to any person, and it is droll that I should have done it to a Marquis. He addressed me with great simplicity and natural kindness, complimenting me on my works, and speaking about the society of Liverpool in former days. Lord Lansdowne was the friend of Moore, and has about him the aroma communicated by the memories of many illustrious people with whom he has associated. Mr. Ticknor, the Historian of Spanish Literature, now greeted me. Mr. Milnes introduced me to Mrs. Browning, and assigned her to me to conduct into the breakfast-room. She is a small, delicate woman, with ringlets of dark hair, a pleasant, intelligent, and sensitive face, and a low, agreeable voice. She looks youthful and comely, and is very gentle and lady-like. And so we proceeded to the breakfast-room, which is hung round with pictures; and in the middle of it stood a large round table, worthy to have been King Arthur's, and here we seated ourselves without any question of precedence or ceremony. On one side of me was an elderly lady, with a very fine countenance, and in the course of breakfast I discovered her to be the mother of Florence Nightingale. One of her daughters (not Florence) was likewise present. Mrs. Milnes, Mrs. Browning, Mrs. Nightingale, and her daughter were the only ladies at table; and I think there were as many as eight or ten gentlemen, whose names--as I came so late--I was left to find out for myself, or to leave unknown. It was a pleasant and sociable meal, and, thanks to my cold beef and coffee at home, I had no occasion to trouble myself much about the fare; so I just ate some delicate chicken, and a very small cutlet, and a slice of dry toast, and thereupon surceased from my labors. Mrs. Browning and I talked a good deal during breakfast, for she is of that quickly appreciative and responsive order of women with whom I can talk more freely than with any man; and she has, besides, her own originality, wherewith to help on conversation, though, I should say, not of a loquacious tendency. She introduced the subject of spiritualism, which, she says, interests her very much; indeed, she seems to be a believer. Mr. Browning, she told me, utterly rejects the subject, and will not believe even in the outward manifestations, of which there is such overwhelming evidence. We also talked of Miss Bacon; and I developed something of that lady's theory respecting Shakespeare, greatly to the horror of Mrs. Browning, and that of her next neighbor,--a nobleman, whose name I did not hear. On the whole, I like her the better for loving the man Shakespeare with a personal love. We talked, too, of Margaret Fuller, who spent her last night in Italy with the Brownings; and of William Story, with whom they have been intimate, and who, Mrs. Browning says, is much stirred about spiritualism. Really, I cannot help wondering that so fine a spirit as hers should not reject the matter, till, at least, it is forced upon her. I like her very much. Mrs. Nightingale had been talking at first with Lord Lansdowne, who sat next her, but by and by she turned to nee, and began to speak of London smoke Then, there being a discussion about Lord Byron on the other side of the table, she spoke to me about Lady Byron, whom she knows intimately, characterizing her as a most excellent and exemplary person, high-principled, unselfish, and now devoting herself to the care of her two grandchildren,--their mother, Byron's daughter, being dead. Lady Byron, she says, writes beautiful verses. Somehow or other, all this praise, and more of the same kind, gave me an idea of an intolerably irreproachable person; and I asked Mrs. Nightingale if Lady Byron were warm-hearted. With some hesitation, or mental reservation,--at all events, not quite outspokenly,--she answered that she was. I was too much engaged with these personal talks to attend much to what was going on elsewhere; but all through breakfast I had been more and more impressed by the aspect of one of the guests, sitting next to Milnes. He was a man of large presence,--a portly personage, gray-haired, but scarcely as yet aged; and his face had a remarkable intelligence, not vivid nor sparkling, but conjoined with great quietude,--and if it gleamed or brightened at one time more than another, it was like the sheen over a broad surface of sea. There was a somewhat careless self-possession, large and broad enough to be called dignity; and the more I looked at him, the more I knew that he was a distinguished person, and wondered who. He might have been a minister of state; only there is not one of them who has any right to such a face and presence. At last,--I do not know how the conviction came,--but I became aware that it was Macaulay, and began to see some slight resemblance to his portraits. But I have never seen any that is not wretchedly unworthy of the original. As soon as I knew him, I began to listen to his conversation, but he did not talk a great deal, contrary to his usual custom; for I am told he is apt to engross all the talk to himself. Probably he may have been restrained by the presence of Ticknor, and Mr. Palfrey, who were among his auditors and interlocutors; and as the conversation seemed to turn much on American subjects, he could not well have assumed to talk them down. I am glad to have seen him,--a face fit for a scholar, a man of the world, a cultivated intelligence. After we left the table, and went into the library, Mr. Browning introduced himself to me,--a younger man than I expected to see, handsome, with brown hair. He is very simple and agreeable in manner, gently impulsive, talking as if his heart were uppermost. He spoke of his pleasure in meeting me, and his appreciation of my books; and--which has not often happened to me--mentioned that The Blithedale Romance was the one he admired most. I wonder why. I hope I showed as much pleasure at his praise as he did at mine; for I was glad to see how pleasantly it moved him. After this, I talked with Ticknor and Miles, and with Mr. Palfrey, to whom I had been introduced very long ago by George Hillard, and had never seen him since. We looked at some autographs, of which Mr. Milnes has two or three large volumes. I recollect a leaf from Swift's Journal to Stella; a letter from Addison; one from Chatterton, in a most neat and legible hand; and a characteristic sentence or two and signature of Oliver Cromwell, written in a religious book. There were many curious volumes in the library, but I had not time to look at them. I liked greatly the manners of almost all,--yes, as far as I observed,-- all the people at this breakfast, and it was doubtless owing to their being all people either of high rank or remarkable intellect, or both. An Englishman can hardly be a gentleman, unless he enjoy one or other of these advantages; and perhaps the surest way to give him good manners is to make a lord of him, or rather of his grandfather or great-grandfather. In the third generation, scarcely sooner, he will be polished into simplicity and elegance, and his deportment will be all the better for the homely material out of which it is wrought and refined. The Marquis of Lansdowne, for instance, would have been a very commonplace man in the common ranks of life; but it has done him good to be a nobleman. Not that his tact is quite perfect. In going up to breakfast, he made me precede him; in returning to the library, he did the same, although I drew back, till he impelled me up the first stair, with gentle persistence. By insisting upon it, he showed his sense of condescension much more than if, when he saw me unwilling to take precedence, he had passed forward, as if the point were not worth either asserting or yielding. Heaven knows, it was in no humility that I would have trodden behind him. But he is a kind old man; and I am willing to believe of the English aristocracy generally that they are kind, and of beautiful deportment; for certainly there never can have been mortals in a position more advantageous for becoming so. I hope there will come a time when we shall be so; and I already know a few Americans, whose noble and delicate manners may compare well with any I have seen. I left the house with Mr. Palfrey. He has cone to England to make some researches in the State Paper Office, for the purposes of a work which he has in hand. He mentioned to me a letter which he had seen, written from New England in the time of Charles II. and referring to the order sent by the minister of that day for the appearance of Governor Bellingham and my ancestor on this side of the water. The signature of this letter is an anagram of my ancestor's name. The letter itself is a very bold and able one, controverting the propriety of the measure above indicated; and Mr. Palfrey feels certain that it was written by my aforesaid ancestor. I mentioned my wish to ascertain the place in England whence the family emigrated; and Mr. Palfrey took me to the Record Office, and introduced me to Mr. Joseph Hunter,--a venerable and courteous gentleman, of antiquarian pursuits. The office was odorous of musty parchments, hundreds of years old. Mr. Hunter received me with great kindness, and gave me various old records and rolls of parchment, in which to seek for my family name; but I was perplexed with the crabbed characters, and soon grew weary and gave up the quest. He says that it is very seldom that an American family, springing from the early settlers, can be satisfactorily traced back to their English ancestry. July 16th.--Monday morning I took the rail from Blackheath to London. It is a very pleasant place, Blackheath, and far more rural than one would expect, within five or six miles of London,--a great many trees, making quite a mass of foliage in the distance; green enclosures; pretty villas, with their nicely kept lawns, and gardens, with grass-plots and flower borders; and village streets, set along the sidewalks with ornamental trees; and the houses standing a little back, and separated one from another,--all this within what is called the Park, which has its gateways, and the sort of semi-privacy with which I first became acquainted at Rock Park. From the London Bridge station I took a cab for Paddington, and then had to wait above two hours before a train started for Birkenhead. Meanwhile I walked a little about the neighborhood, which is very dull and uninteresting; made up of crescents and terraces, and rows of houses that have no individuality, and second-rate shops,--in short, the outskirts of the vast city, when it begins to have a kind of village character but no rurality or sylvan aspect, as at Blackheath. My journey, when at last we started, was quite unmarked by incident, and extremely tedious; it being a slow train, which plods on without haste and without rest. At about ten o'clock we reached Birkenhead, and there crossed the familiar and detestable Mersey, which, as usual, had a cloudy sky brooding over it. Mrs. Blodgett received me most hospitably, but was impelled, by an overflow of guests, to put me into a little back room, looking into the court, and formerly occupied by my predecessor, General Armstrong. . . . She expressed a hope that I might not see his ghost,--nor have I, as yet. Speaking of ghosts, Mr. H. A. B------ told me a singular story to-day of an apparition that haunts the Times Office, in Printing-House Square. A Mr. W------ is the engineer of the establishment, and has his residence in the edifice, which is built, I believe, on the site of Merchant Taylor's school,--an old house that was no longer occupied for its original purpose, and, being supposed haunted, was left untenanted. The father-in-law of Mr. W------, an old sea-captain, came on a visit to him and his wife, and was put into their guest-chamber, where he passed the night. The next morning, assigning no very satisfactory reason, he cut his visit short and went away. Shortly afterwards, a young lady came to visit the W------'s; but she too went away the next morning,--going first to make a call, as she said, to a friend, and sending thence for her trunks. Mrs. W------ wrote to this young lady, asking an explanation. The young lady replied, and gave a singular account of an apparition,-- how she was awakened in the night by a bright light shining through the window, which was parallel to the bed; then, if I remember rightly, her curtains were withdrawn, and a shape looked in upon her,--a woman's shape, she called it; but it was a skeleton, with lambent flames playing about its bones, and in and out among the ribs. Other persons have since slept in this chamber, and some have seen the shape, others not. Mr. W------ has slept there himself without seeing anything. He has had investigations by scientific people, apparently under the idea that the phenomenon might have been caused by some of the Times's work-people, playing tricks on the magic-lantern principle; but nothing satisfactory has thus far been elucidated. Mr. B------ had this story from Mrs. Gaskell. . . . Supposing it a ghost, nothing else is so remarkable as its choosing to haunt the precincts of the Times newspaper. July 29th.--On Saturday, 26th, I took the rail from the Lime Street station for London, via the Trent Valley, and reached Blackheath in the evening. . . . Sunday morning my wife and I, with J-----, railed into London, and drove to the Essex Street Chapel, where Mr. Channing was to preach. The Chapel is the same where Priestley and Belsham used to preach,--one of the plainest houses of worship I was ever in, as simple and undecorated as the faith there inculcated. They retain, however, all the form and ceremonial of the English Established Church, though so modified as to meet the doctrinal views of the Unitarians. There may be good sense in this, inasmuch as it greatly lessens the ministerial labor to have a stated form of prayer, instead of a necessity for extempore outpourings; but it must be, I should think, excessively tedious to the congregation, especially as, having made alterations in these prayers, they cannot attach much idea of sanctity to them. [Here follows a long record of Mr. Hawthorne's visit to Miss Bacon,-- condensed in Our Old Hone, in the paper called "Recollections of a Gifted Woman."] August 2d.--On Wednesday (30th July) we went to Marlborough House to see the Vernon gallery of pictures. They are the works, almost entirely of English artists of the last and present century, and comprise many famous paintings; and I must acknowledge that I had more enjoyment of them than of those portions of the National Gallery which I had before seen,-- including specimens of the grand old masters. My comprehension has not reached their height. I think nothing pleased me more than a picture by Sir David Wilkie,--The Parish Beadle, with a vagrant boy and a monkey in custody; it is exceedingly good and true throughout, and especially the monkey's face is a wonderful production of genius, condensing within itself the whole moral and pathos of the picture. Marlborough House was the residence of the Great Duke, and is to be that of the Prince of Wales, when another place is found for the pictures. It adjoins St. James's Palace. In its present state it is not a very splendid mansion, the rooms being small, though handsomely shaped, with vaulted ceilings, and carved white-marble fireplaces. I left S----- here after an hour or two, and walked forth into the hot and busy city with J-----. . . . I called at Routledge's bookshop, in hopes to make an arrangement with him about Miss Bacon's business. But Routledge himself is making a journey in the north, and neither of the partners was there, so that I shall have to go thither some other day. Then we stepped into St. Paul's Cathedral to cool ourselves, and it was delightful so to escape from the sunny, sultry turmoil of Fleet Street and Ludgate, and find ourselves at once in this remote, solemn, shadowy seclusion, marble-cool. O that we had cathedrals in America, were it only for the sensuous luxury! We strolled round the cathedral, and I delighted J----- much by pointing out the monuments of three British generals, who were slain in America in the last war,--the naughty and bloodthirsty little man! We then went to Guildhall, where I thought J----- would like to see Gog and Magog; but he had never heard of those illustrious personages, and took no interest in them. . . . But truly I am grateful to the piety of former times for raising this vast, cool canopy of marble [St. Paul's] in the midst of the feverish city. I wandered quite round it, and saw, in a remote corner, a monument to the officers of the Coldstream Guards, slain in the Crimea. It was a mural tablet, with the names of the officers on an escutcheon; and two privates of the Guards, in marble bas-relief, were mourning over them. Over the tablet hung two silken banners, new and glossy, with the battles in which the regiment has been engaged inscribed on them,--not merely Crimean but Peninsular battles. These banners will bang there till they drop away in tatters. After thus refreshing myself in the cathedral, I went again to Routledge's in Farrington Street, and saw one of the firm. He expressed great pleasure at seeing me, as indeed he might, having published and sold, without any profit on my part, uncounted thousands of my books. I introduced the subject of Miss Bacon's work; and he expressed the utmost willingness to do everything in his power towards bringing it before the world, but thought that his firm--it being their business to publish for the largest circle of readers--was not the most eligible for the publication of such a book. Very likely this may be so. At all events, however, I am to send him the manuscript, and he will at least give me his advice and assistance in finding a publisher. He was good enough to express great regret that I had no work of my own to give him for publication; and, truly, I regret it too, since, being a resident in England, I could now have all the publishing privileges of a native author. He presented me with a copy of an illustrated edition of Longfellow's Poems, and I took my leave. Thence I went to the Picture Gallery at the British Institution, where there are three rooms full of paintings by the first masters, the property of private persons. Every one of them, no doubt, was worth studying for a long, long time; and I suppose I may have given, on an average, a minute to each. What an absurdity it would seem, to pretend to read two or three hundred poems, of all degrees between an epic and a ballad, in an hour or two! And a picture is a poem, only requiring the greater study to be felt and comprehended; because the spectator must necessarily do much for himself towards that end. I saw many beautiful things,--among them some landscapes by Claude, which to the eye were like the flavor of a rich, ripe melon to the palate. August 7th.--Yesterday we took the rail for London, it being a fine, sunny day, though not so very warm as many of the preceding days have been. . . . We went along Piccadilly as far as the Egyptian Hall. It is quite remarkable how comparatively quiet the town has become, now that the season is over. One can see the difference in all the region west of Temple Bar; and, indeed, either the hot weather or some other cause seems to have operated in assuaging the turmoil in the city itself. I never saw London Bridge so little thronged as yesterday. At the Egyptian Hall, or in the same edifice, there is a gallery of pictures, the property of Lord Ward, who allows the public to see them, five days of the week, without any trouble or restriction,--a great kindness on his Lordship's part, it must be owned. It is a very valuable collection, I presume, containing specimens of many famous old masters; some of the early and hard pictures by Raphael and his master and fellow-pupils,--very curious, and nowise beautiful; a perfect, sunny glimpse of Venice, by Canaletto; and saints, and Scriptural, allegorical, and mythological people, by Titian, Guido, Correggio, and many more names than I can remember. There is likewise a dead Magdalen by Canova, and a Venus by the same, very pretty, and with a vivid light of joyous expression in her face; . . . . also Powers's Greek Slave, in which I see little beauty or merit; and two or three other statues. We then drove to Ashley Place, to call on Mrs. S. C. Hall, whom we found at home. In fact, Wednesday is her reception-day; although, as now everybody is out of town, we were the only callers. She is an agreeable and kindly woman. She told us that her husband and herself propose going to America next year, and I heartily wish they may meet with a warm and friendly reception. I have been seldom more assured of the existence of a heart than in her; also a good deal of sentiment. She had been visiting Bessie, the widow of Moore, at Sloperton, and gave S----- a rose from his cottage. Such things are very true and unaffected in her. The only wonder is that she has not lost such girlish freshness of feeling as prompts them. We did not see Mr. Hall, he having gone to the Crystal Palace. Taking our leave, we returned along Victoria Street--a new street, penetrating through what was recently one of the worst parts of the town, and now bordered with large blocks of buildings, in a dreary, half-finished state, and left so for want of funds--till we came to Westminster Abbey. We went in and spent an hour there, wandering all round the nave and aisles, admiring the grand old edifice itself, but finding more to smile at than to admire in the monuments. . . . The interior view of the Abbey is better than can be described; the heart aches, as one gazes at it, for lack of power and breadth enough to take its beauty and grandeur in. The effect was heightened by the sun shining through the painted window in the western end, and by the bright sunshine that came through the open portal, and lay on the pavement,--that space so bright, the rest of the vast floor so solemn and sombre. At the western end, in a corner from which spectators are barred out, there is a statue of Wordsworth, which I do not recollect seeing at any former visit. Its only companion in the same nook is Pope's friend, Secretary Craggs. Downing Street, that famous official precinct, took its name from Sir George Downing, who was proprietor or lessee of property there. He was a native of my own old native town, and his descendants still reside there,--collateral descendants, I suppose,--and follow the drygoods business (drapers). August 10th.--I journeyed to Liverpool via Chester. . . . One sees a variety of climate, temperature, and season in a ride of two hundred miles, north and south, through England. Near London, for instance, the grain was reaped, and stood in sheaves in the stubble-fields, over which girls and children might be seen gleaning; farther north, the golden, or greenish-golden, crops were waving in the wind. In one part of our way the atmosphere was hot and dry; at another point it had been cooled and refreshed by a heavy thunder-shower, the pools of which still lay along our track. It seems to me that local varieties of weather are more common in this island, and within narrower precincts, than in America. . . . I never saw England of such a dusky and dusty green before,--almost sunbrowned, indeed. Sometimes the green hedges formed a marked framework to a broad sheet of golden grain-field. As we drew near Oxford, just before reaching the station I had a good view of its domes, towers, and spires,--better, I think, than when J----- and I rambled through the town a month or two ago. Mr. Frank Scott Haydon, of the Record Office, London, writes me that he has found a "Henry Atte Hawthorne" on a roll which he is transcribing, of the first Edward III. He belonged to the Parish of Aldremeston, in the hundred of Blakenhurste, Worcester County. August 21st.--Yesterday, at twelve o'clock, I took the steamer for Runcorn, from the pier-head. In the streets, I had noticed that it was a breezy day; but on the river there was a very stiff breeze from the northeast, right ahead, blowing directly in our face the whole way; and truly this river Mersey is never without a breeze, and generally in the direction of its course,--an evil-tempered, unkindly, blustering wind, that you cannot meet without being exasperated by it. As it came straight against us, it was impossible to find a shelter anywhere on deck, except it were behind the stove-pipe; and, besides, the day was overcast and threatening rain. I have undergone very miserable hours on the Mersey, where, in the space of two years, I voyaged thousands of miles,--and this trip to Runcorn reminded me of them, though it was less disagreeable after more than a twelvemonth's respite. We had a good many passengers on board, most of whom were of the second class, and congregated on the forward deck; more women than men, I think, and some of them with their husbands and children. Several produced lunch and bottles, and refreshed themselves very soon after we started. By and by the wind became so disagreeable that I went below, and sat in the cabin, only occasionally looking out, to get a peep at the shores of the river, which I had never before seen above Eastham. However, they are not worth looking at; level and monotonous, without trees or beauty of any kind,--here and there a village, and a modern church, on the low ridge behind; perhaps, a windmill, which the gusty day had set busily to work. The river continues very wide--no river indeed, but an estuary--during almost the whole distance to Runcorn; and nearly at the end of our voyage we approached some abrupt and prominent hills, which, many a time, I have seen on my passages to Rock Ferry, looking blue and dim, and serving for prophets of the weather; for when they can be distinctly seen adown the river, it is a token of coming rain. We met many vessels, and passed many which were beating up against the wind, and which keeled over, so that their decks must have dipped,--schooners and vessels that come from the Bridgewater Canal. We shipped a sea ourselves, which gave the fore-deck passengers a wetting. Before reaching Runcorn, we stopped to land some passengers at another little port, where there was a pier and a lighthouse, and a church within a few yards of the river-side,--a good many of the river-craft, too, in dock, forming quite a crowd of masts. About ten minutes' further steaming brought us to Runcorn, where were two or three tall manufacturing chimneys, with a pennant of black smoke from each; two vessels of considerable size on the stocks; a church or two; and a meagre, uninteresting, shabby, brick-built town, rising from the edge of the river, with irregular streets,--not village-like, but paved, and looking like a dwarfed, stunted city. I wandered through it till I came to a tall, high-pedestalled windmill on the outer verge, the vans of which were going briskly round. Thence retracing my steps, I stopped at a poor hotel, and took lunch, and, finding that I was in time to take the steamer back, I hurried on board, and we set sail (or steam) before three. I have heard of an old castle at Runcorn, but could discover nothing of it. It was well that I returned so promptly, for we had hardly left the pier before it began to rain, and there was a heavy downfall throughout the voyage homeward. Runcorn is fourteen miles from Liverpool, and is the farthest point to which a steamer runs. I had intended to come home by rail,--a circuitous route,--but the advice of the landlady of the hotel, and the aspect of the weather, and a feeling of general discouragement prevented me. An incident in S. C. Hall's Ireland, of a stone cross, buried in Cromwell's time, to prevent its destruction by his soldiers. It was forgotten, and became a mere doubtful tradition, but one old man had been told by his father, and he by his father, etc., that it was buried near a certain spot; and at last, two hundred years after the cross was buried, the vicar of the parish dug in that spot and found it. In my (English) romance, an American might bring the tradition from over the sea, and so discover the cross, which had been altogether forgotten. August 24th.--Day before yesterday I took the rail for Southport,--a cool, generally overcast day, with glimmers of faint sunshine. The ride is through a most uninteresting tract of country, at first, glimpses of the river, with the thousands of masts in the docks; the dismal outskirts of a great town, still spreading onward, with beginnings of streets, and insulated brick buildings and blocks; farther on, a wide monotony of level plain, and here and there a village and a church; almost always a windmill in sight, there being plenty of breeze to turn its vans on this windy coast. The railway skirts along the sea the whole distance, but is shut out from the sight of it by the low sand-hills, which seem to have been heaped up by the waves. There are one or two lighthouses on the shore. I have not seen a drearier landscape, even in Lancashire. Reaching Southport at three, I rambled about, with a view to discover whether it be a suitable residence for my family during September. It is a large village, or rather more than a village, which seems to be almost entirely made up of lodging-houses, and, at any rate, has been built up by the influx of summer visitors,--a sandy soil, level, and laid out with well-paved streets, the principal of which are enlivened with bazaars, markets, shops, hotels of various degrees, and a showy vivacity of aspect. There are a great many donkey-carriages,--large vehicles, drawn by a pair of donkeys; bath-chairs, with invalid ladies; refreshment-rooms in great numbers,--a place where everybody seems to be a transitory guest, nobody at home. The main street leads directly down to the sea-shore, along which there is an elevated embankment, with a promenade on the top, and seats, and the toll of a penny. The shore itself, the tide being then low, stretched out interminably seaward, a wide waste of glistering sands; and on the dry border, people were riding on donkeys, with the drivers whipping behind; and children were digging with their little wooden spades; and there were donkey-carriages far out on the sands,--a pleasant and breezy drive. A whole city of bathing-machines was stationed near the shore, and I saw others in the seaward distance. The sea-air was refreshing and exhilarating, and if S----- needs a seaside residence, I should think this might do as well as any other. I saw a large brick edifice, enclosed within a wall, and with somewhat the look of an almshouse or hospital; and it proved to be an Infirmary, charitably established for the reception of poor invalids, who need sea-air and cannot afford to pay for it. Two or three of such persons were sitting under its windows. I do not think that the visitors of Southport are generally of a very opulent class, but of the middle rank, from Manchester and other parts of this northern region. The lodging-houses, however, are of sufficiently handsome style and arrangement. OXFORD. [Mr. Hawthorne extracted from his recorded Oxford experiences his excursion to Blenheim, but left his observations of the town itself untouched,--and these I now transcribe.--ED.] August 31st.--. . . . Yesterday we took the rail for London, and drove across the city to the Paddington station, where we met Bennoch, and set out with him for Oxford. I do not quite understand the matter, but it appears that we were expected guests of Mr. Spiers, a very hospitable gentleman, and Ex-Mayor of Oxford, and a friend of Bennoch and of the Halls. Mr. S. C. Hall met us at the Oxford station, and under his guidance we drove to a quiet, comfortable house in St. Giles Street, where rooms had been taken for us. Durham, the sculptor, is likewise of the party. After establishing ourselves at these lodgings, we walked forth to take a preliminary glimpse of the city, and Mr. Hall, being familiar with the localities, served admirably as a guide. If I remember aright, I spoke very slightingly of the exterior aspect of Oxford, as I saw it with J----- during an hour or two's stay here, on my way to Southampton (to meet S----- on her return from Lisbon). I am bound to say that my impressions are now very different; and that I find Oxford exceedingly picturesque and rich in beauty and grandeur and in antique stateliness. I do not remember very particularly what we saw,--time-worn fronts of famous colleges and halls of learning everywhere about the streets, and arched entrances; passing through which, we saw bits of sculpture from monkish hands,--the most grotesque and ludicrous faces, as if the slightest whim of these old carvers took shape in stone, the material being so soft and manageable by them; an ancient stone pulpit in the quadrangle of Maudlin College (Magdalen), one of only three now extant in England; a splendid--no, not splendid, but dimly magnificent--chapel, belonging to the same College, with painted windows of rare beauty, not brilliant with diversified hues, but of a sombre tint. In this chapel there is an alabaster monument,--a recumbent figure of the founder's father, as large as life,--which, though several centuries old, is as well preserved as if fresh from the chisel. In the High Street, which, I suppose, is the noblest old street in England, Mr. Hall pointed out, the Crown Inn, where Shakespeare used to spend the night, and was most hospitably welcomed by the pretty hostess (the mother of Sir William Davenant) on his passage between Stratford and London. It is a three-story house, with other houses contiguous,--an old timber mansion, though now plastered and painted of a yellowish line. The ground-floor is occupied as a shoe-shop; but the rest of the house is still kept as a tavern. . . . It is not now term time, and Oxford loses one of its most characteristic features by the absence of the gownsmen; but still there is a good deal of liveliness in the streets. We walked as far as a bridge beyond Maudlin College, and then drove homeward. At six we went to dine with the hospitable Ex-Mayor, across the wide, tree-bordered street; for his house is nearly opposite our lodgings. He is an intelligent and gentlemanly person, and was Mayor two years ago, and has done a great deal to make peace between the University and the town, heretofore bitterly inimical. His house is adorned with pictures and drawings, and he has an especial taste for art. . . . The dinner-table was decorated with pieces of plate, vases, and other things, which were presented to him as tokens of public or friendly regard and approbation of his action in the Mayoralty. After dinner, too, he produced a large silver snuff-box, which had been given him on the same account; in fact, the inscription affirmed that it was one of five pieces of plate so presented. The vases are really splendid,--one of them two feet high, and richly ornamented. It will hold five or six bottles of wine, and he said that it had been filled, and, I believe, sent round as a loving-cup at some of his entertainments. He cordially enjoys these things, and his genuine benevolence produces all this excellent hospitality. . . . But Bennoch proposed a walk, and we set forth. We rambled pretty extensively about the streets, sometimes seeing the shapes of old edifices dimly and doubtfully, it being an overcast night; or catching a partial view of a gray wall, or a pillar, or a Gothic archway, by lamplight. . . . The clock had some time ago struck eleven, when we were passing under a long extent of antique wall and towers, which were those of Baliol College. Mr. D------ led us into the middle of the street, and showed us a cross, which was paved into it, on a level with the rest of the road. This was the spot where Latimer and Ridley and another Bishop were martyred in Bloody Mary's time. There is a memorial to them in another street; but this, where I set my foot at nearly midnight, was the very spot where their flesh burned to ashes, and their bones whitened. It has been a most beautiful morning, and I have seen few pleasanter scenes than this street in which we lodge, with its spacious breadth, its two rows of fine old trees, with sidewalks as wide as the whole width of some streets; and, on the opposite side, the row of houses, some of them ancient with picturesque gables, partially disclosed through the intervening foliage. . . . From our window we have a slantwise glimpse, to the right, of the walls of St. John's College, and the general aspect of St. Giles. It is of an antiquity not to shame those mediaeval halls. Our own lodgings are in a house that seems to be very old, with panelled walls, and beams across the ceilings, lattice-windows in the chambers, and a musty odor such as old houses inevitably have. Nevertheless, everything is extremely neat, clean, and comfortable; and in term time our apartments are occupied by a Mr. Stebbing, whose father is known in literature by some critical writings, and who is a graduate and an admirable scholar. There is a bookcase of five shelves, containing his books, mostly standard works, and indicating a safe and solid taste. After lunch to-day we (that is, Mrs. Hall, her adopted daughter, S-----, and I, with the Ex-Mayor) set forth, in an open barouche, to see the remarkables of Oxford, while the rest of the guests went on foot. We first drew up at New College (a strange name for such an old place, but it was new some time since the Conquest), and went through its quiet and sunny quadrangles, and into its sunny and shadowy gardens. I am in despair about the architecture and old edifices of these Oxford colleges, it is so impossible to express them in words. They are themselves--as the architect left them, and as Time has modified and improved them--the expression of an idea which does not admit of being otherwise expressed, or translated into anything else. Those old battlemented walls around the quadrangles; many gables; the windows with stone pavilions, so very antique, yet some of them adorned with fresh flowers in pots,--a very sweet contrast; the ivy mantling the gray stone; and the infinite repose, both in sunshine and shadow,--it is as if half a dozen bygone centuries had set up their rest here, and as if nothing of the present time ever passed through the deeply recessed archway that shuts in the College from the street. Not but what people have very free admittance; and many parties of young men and girls and children came into the gardens while we were there. These gardens of New College are indescribably beautiful,--not gardens in an American sense, but lawns of the richest green and softest velvet grass, shadowed over by ancient trees, that have lived a quiet life here for centuries, and have been nursed and tended with such care, and so sheltered from rude winds, that certainly they must have been the happiest of all trees. Such a sweet, quiet, sacred, stately seclusion-- so age-long as this has been, and, I hope, will continue to be--cannot exist anywhere else. One side of the garden wall is formed by the ancient wall of the city, which Cromwell's artillery battered, and which still retains its pristine height and strength. At intervals, there are round towers that formed the bastions; that is to say, on the exterior they are round towers, but within, in the garden of the College, they are semicircular recesses, with iron garden-seats arranged round them. The loop-holes through which the archers and musketeers used to shoot still pierce through deep recesses in the wall, which is here about six feet thick. I wish I could put into one sentence the whole impression of this garden, but it could not be done in many pages. We looked also at the outside of the wall, and Mr. Parker, deeply skilled in the antiquities of the spot, showed us a weed growing,--here in little sprigs, there in large and heavy festoons,--hanging plentifully downward from a shallow root. It is called the Oxford plant, being found only here, and not easily, if at all, introduced anywhere else. It bears a small and pretty blue flower, not altogether unlike the forget-me-not, and we took some of it away with us for a memorial. We went into the chapel of New College, which is in such fresh condition that I think it must be modern; and yet this cannot be, since there are old brasses inlaid into tombstones in the pavement, representing mediaeval ecclesiastics and college dignitaries; and busts against the walls, in antique garb; and old painted windows, unmistakable in their antiquity. But there is likewise a window, lamentable to look at, which was painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds, and exhibits strikingly the difference between the work of a man who performed it merely as a matter of taste and business, and what was done religiously and with the whole heart; at least, it shows that the artists and public of the last age had no sympathy with Gothic art. In the chancel of this church there are more painted windows, which I take to be modern, too, though they are in much better taste, and have an infinitely better effect, than Sir Joshua's. At any rate, with the sunshine through them, they looked very beautiful, and tinted the high altar and the pavement with brilliant lines. The sacristan opened a tall and narrow little recess in the wall of the chancel, and showed it entirely filled with the crosier of William of Wickham. It appears to be made of silver gilt, and is a most rich and elaborate relic, at least six feet high. Modern art cannot, or does not, equal the chasing and carving of this splendid crosier, which is enriched with figures of saints and, apostles, and various Gothic devices,--very minute, but all executed as faithfully as if the artist's salvation had depended upon every notch he made in the silver. . . . Leaving New College, Bennoch and I, under Mr. Parker's guidance, walked round Christ Church meadows, part of our way lying along the banks of the Cherwell, which unites with the Isis to form the Thames, I believe. The Cherwell is a narrow and remarkably sluggish stream; but is deep in spots, and capriciously so,--so that a person may easily step from knee-deep to fifteen feet in depth. A gentleman present used a queer expression in reference to the drowning of two college men; he said "it was an awkward affair." I think this is equal to Longfellow's story of the Frenchman who avowed himself very much "displeased" at the news of his father's death. At the confluence of the Cherwell and Isis we saw a good many boats, belonging to the students of the various colleges; some of them being very large and handsome barges, capable of accommodating a numerous party, with room on board for dancing and merry-making. Some of them are calculated to be drawn by horses, in the manner of canal-boats; others are propellable by oars. It is practicable to perform the voyage between Oxford and London--a distance of about one hundred and thirty miles--in three days. The students of Oxford are famous boatmen; there is a constant rivalship, on this score, among the different colleges; and annually, I believe, there is a match between Oxford and Cambridge. The Cambridge men beat the Oxonians in this year's trial. On our return into the city, we passed through Christ Church, which, as regards the number of students, is the most considerable college of the University. It has a stately dome; but my memory is confused with battlements, towers, and gables, and Gothic staircases and cloisters. If there had been nothing else in Oxford but this one establishment, my anticipations would not have been disappointed. The bell was tolling for worship in the chapel; and Mr. Parker told us that Dr. Pusey is a canon, or in some sort of dignity, in Christ Church, and would soon probably make his appearance in the quadrangle, on his way to chapel; so we walked to and fro, waiting an opportunity to see him. A gouty old dignitary, in a white surplice, came hobbling along from one extremity of the court; and by and by, from the opposite corner, appeared Dr. Pusey, also in a white surplice, and with a lady by his side. We met him, and I stared pretty fixedly at him, as I well might; for he looked on the ground, as if conscious that he would be stared at. He is a man past middle life, of sufficient breadth and massiveness, with a pale, intellectual, manly face. He was talking with the lady, and smiled, but not jollily. Mr. Parker, who knows him, says that he is a man of kind and gentle affections. The lady was his niece. Thence we went through High Street and Broad Street, and passing by Baliol College,--a most satisfactory pile and range of old towered and gabled edifices,--we came to the cross on the pavement, which is supposed to mark the spot where the bishops were martyred. But Mr. Parker told us the mortifying fact, that he had ascertained that this could not possibly have been the genuine spot of martyrdom, which must have taken place at a point within view, but considerably too far off to be moistened by any tears that may be shed here. It is too bad. We concluded the rambles of the day by visiting the gardens of St. John's College; and I desire, if possible, to say even more in admiration of them than of those of New College,--such beautiful lawns, with tall, ancient trees, and heavy clouds of foliage, and sunny glimpses through archways of leafy branches, where, to-day, we could see parties of girls, making cheerful contrast with the sombre walls and solemn shade. The world, surely, has not another place like Oxford; it is a despair to see such a place and ever to leave it, for it would take a lifetime and more than one, to comprehend and enjoy it satisfactorily. At dinner, to-day, the golden vases were all ranged on the table, the largest and central one containing a most magnificent bouquet of dahlias and other bright-hued flowers. On Tuesday, our first visit was to Christ Church, where we saw the large and stately hall, above a hundred feet long by forty wide, and fifty to the top of its carved oaken roof, which is ornamented with festoons, as it were, and pendants of solid timber. The walls are panelled with oak, perhaps half-way upward, and above are the rows of arched windows on each side; but, near the upper end, two great windows come nearly to the floor. There is a dais, where the great men of the College and the distinguished guests sit at table, and the tables of the students are arranged along the length of the hall. All around, looking down upon those who sit at meat, are the portraits of a multitude of illustrious personages who were members of the learned fraternity in times past; not a portrait being admitted there (unless it he a king, and I remember only Henry VIII.) save those who were actually students on the foundation, receiving the eleemosynary aid of the College. Most of them were divines; but there are likewise many statesmen, eminent during the last three hundred years, and, among many earlier ones, the Marquis of Wellesley and Canning. It is an excellent idea, for their own glory, and as examples to the rising generations, to have this multitude of men, who have done good and great things, before the eyes of those who ought to do as well as they, in their own time. Archbishops, Prime Ministers, poets, deep scholars,--but, doubtless, an outward success has generally been their claim to this position, and Christ Church may have forgotten a better man than the best of them. It is not, I think, the tendency of English life, nor of the education of their colleges, to lead young men to high moral excellence, but to aim at illustrating themselves in the sight of mankind. Thence we went into the kitchen, which is arranged very much as it was three centuries ago, with two immense fireplaces. There was likewise a gridiron, which, without any exaggeration, was large enough to have served for the martyrdom of St. Lawrence. The college dinners are good, but plain, and cost the students one shilling and eleven pence each, being rather cheaper than a similar one could be had at an inn. There is no provision for breakfast or supper in commons; but they can have these meals sent to their rooms from the buttery, at a charge proportioned to the dishes they order. There seems to be no necessity for a great expenditure on the part of Oxford students. From the kitchen we went to the chapel, which is the cathedral of Oxford, and well worth seeing, if there had not been so many other things to see. It is now under repair, and there was a great heap of old wood-work and panelling lying in one of the aisles, which had been stripped away from some of the ancient pillars, leaving them as good as new. There is a shrine of a saint, with a wooden canopy over it; and some painted glass, old and new; and a statue of Cyril Jackson, with a face of shrewdness and insight; and busts, as mural monuments. Our next visit was to MERTON COLLEGE, which, though not one of the great colleges, is as old as any of them, and looks exceedingly venerable. We were here received by a friend of Mr. Spiers, in his academic cap, but without his gown, which is not worn, except in term time. He is a very civil gentleman, and showed us some antique points of architecture,--such as a Norman archway, with a passage over it, through which the Queen of Charles I. used to go to chapel; and an edifice of the thirteenth century, with a stone roof, which is considered to be very curious. How ancient is the aspect of these college quadrangles! so gnawed by time as they are, so crumbly, so blackened, and so gray where they are not black,--so quaintly shaped, too, with here a line of battlement and there a row of gables; and here a turret, with probably a winding stair inside; and lattice-windows, with stone mullions, and little panes of glass set in lead; and the cloisters, with a long arcade, looking upon the green or pebbled enclosure. The quality of the stone has a great deal to do with the apparent antiquity. It is a stone found in the neighborhood of Oxford, and very soon begins to crumble and decay superficially, when exposed to the weather; so that twenty years do the work of a hundred, so far as appearances go. If you strike one of the old walls with a stick, a portion of it comes powdering down. The effect of this decay is very picturesque, and is especially striking, I think, on edifices of classic architecture, such as some of the Oxford colleges are, greatly enriching the Grecian columns, which look so cold when the outlines are hard and distinct. The Oxford people, however, are tired of this crumbly stone, and when repairs are necessary, they use a more durable material, which does not well assort with the antiquity into which it is intruded. Mr. E------ showed us the library of Merton College. It occupies two sides of an old building, and has a very delightful fragrance of ancient books. The halls containing it are vaulted, and roofed with oak, not carved and ornamented, but laid flat, so that they look very like a grand and spacious old garret. All along, there is a row of alcoves on each side, with rude benches and reading-desks, in the simplest style, and nobody knows how old. The books look as old as the building. The more valuable were formerly chained to the bookcases; and a few of them have not yet broken their chains. It was a good emblem of the dark and monkish ages, when learning was imprisoned in their cloisters, and chained in their libraries, in the days when the schoolmaster had not yet gone abroad. Mr. E------ showed us a very old copy of the Bible; and a vellum manuscript, most beautifully written in black-letter and illuminated, of the works of Duns Scotus, who was a scholar of Merton College. He then showed us the chapel, a large part of which has been renewed and ornamented with pictured windows and other ecclesiastical splendor, and paved with encaustic tiles, according to the Puseyite taste of the day; for Merton has adopted the Puseyite doctrines, and is one of their chief strongholds in Oxford. If they do no other good, they at least do much for the preservation and characteristic restoration of the old English churches; but perhaps, even here, there is as much antiquity spoiled as retained. In the portion of the chapel not yet restored, we saw the rude old pavement, inlaid with gravestones, in some of which were brasses, with the figures of the college dignitaries, whose dust slumbered beneath; and I think it was here that I saw the tombstone of Anthony-a-Wood, the gossiping biographer of the learned men of Oxford. From the chapel we went into the college gardens, which are very pleasant, and possess the advantage of looking out on the broad verdure of Christ Church meadows and the river beyond. We loitered here awhile, and then went to Mr. ------'s rooms, to which the entrance is by a fine old staircase. They had a very comfortable, aspect,--a wainscoted parlor and bedroom, as nice and cosey as a bachelor could desire, with a good collection of theological books; and on a peg hung his gown, with a red border about it, denoting him to be a proproctor. He was kind enough to order a lunch, consisting of bread and cheese, college ale, and a certain liquor called "Archdeacon." . . . . We ate and drank, . . . . and, bidding farewell to good Mr. E------, we pursued our way to the RATCLIFFE LIBRARY. This is a very handsome edifice, of a circular shape; the lower story consisting altogether of arches, open on all sides, as if to admit anybody to the learning here stored up. I always see great beauty and lightsomeness in these classic and Grecian edifices, though they seem cold and intellectual, and not to have had their mortar moistened with human life-blood, nor to have the mystery of human life in them, as Gothic structures do. The library is in a large and beautiful room, in the story above the basement, and, as far as I saw, consisted chiefly or altogether of scientific works. I saw Silliman's Journal on one of the desks, being the only trace of American science, or American learning or ability in any department, which I discovered in the University of Oxford. After seeing the library, we went to the top of the building, where we had an excellent view of Oxford and the surrounding country. Then we went to the Convocation Hall, and afterwards to the theatre, where S----- sat down in the Chancellor's chair, which is very broad, and ponderously wrought of oak. I remember little here, except the amphitheatre of benches, and the roof, which seems to be supported by golden ropes, and on the wall, opposite the door, some full-length portraits, among which one of that ridiculous coxcomb, George IV., was the most prominent. These kings thrust themselves impertinently forward by bust, statue, and picture, on all occasions, and it is not wise in them to show their shallow foreheads among men of mind. THE BODLEIAN LIBRARY. Mr. Spiers tried to get us admittance to the Bodleian Library; but this is just the moment when it is closed for the purpose of being cleaned; so we missed seeing the principal halls of this library, and were only admitted into what was called the Picture Gallery. This, however, satisfied all my desires, so far as the backs of books are concerned, for they extend through a gallery, running round three sides of a quadrangle, making an aggregate length of more than four hundred feet,--a solid array of bookcases, full of books, within a protection of open iron-work. Up and down the gallery there are models of classic temples; and about midway in its extent stands a brass statue of Earl Pembroke, who was Chancellor of the University in James I's time; not in scholarly garb, however, but in plate and mail, looking indeed like a thunderbolt of war. I rapped him with my knuckles, and he seemed to be solid metal, though, I should imagine, hollow at heart. A thing which interested me very much was the lantern of Guy Fawkes. It was once tinned, no doubt, but is now nothing but rusty iron, partly broken. As this is called the Picture Gallery, I must not forget the pictures, which are ranged in long succession over the bookcases, and include almost all Englishmen whom the world has ever heard of, whether in statesmanship or literature, I saw a canvas on which had once been a lovely and unique portrait of Mary of Scotland; but it was consigned to a picture-cleaner to be cleansed, and, discovering that it was painted over another picture, he had the curiosity to clean poor Mary quite away, thus revealing a wishy-washy woman's face, which now hangs in the gallery. I am so tired of seeing notable things that I almost wish that whatever else is remarkable in Oxford could be obliterated in some similar manner. From the Bodleian we went to THE TAYLOR INSTITUTE, which was likewise closed; but the woman who had it in charge had formerly been a servant of Mr. Spiers, and he so overpersuaded her that she finally smiled and admitted us. It would truly have been a pity to miss it; for here, on the basement floor, are the original models of Chantrey's busts and statues, great and small; and in the rooms above are a far richer treasure,--a large collection of original drawings by Raphael and Michael Angelo. These are far better for my purpose than their finished pictures,--that is to say, they bring me much closer to the hands that drew them and the minds that imagined them. It is like looking into their brains, and seeing the first conception before it took shape outwardly (I have somewhere else said about the same thing of such sketches). I noticed one of Raphael's drawings, representing the effect of eloquence; it was a man speaking in the centre of a group, between whose ears and the orator's mouth connecting lines were drawn. Raphael's idea must have been to compose his picture in such a way that their auricular organs should not fail to be in a proper relation with the eloquent voice; and though this relation would not have been individually traceable in the finished picture, yet the general effect--that of deep and entranced attention--would have been produced. In another room there are some copies of Raphael's cartoons, and some queer mediaeval pictures, as stiff and ugly as can well be conceived, yet successful in telling their own story. We looked a little while at these, and then, thank Heaven! went home and dressed for dinner. I can write no more to-day. Indeed, what a mockery it is to write at all! [Here follows the drive to Cumnor Place, Stanton Harcourt, Nuneham Courtney, Godstowe, etc.,--already published in Our Old Home.--ED.] September 9th.--The morning after our excursion on the Thames was as bright and beautiful as many preceding ones had been. After breakfast S----- and I walked a little about the town, and bought Thomas a Kempis, in both French and English, for U----. . . . Mr. De la Motte, the photographer, had breakfasted with us, and Mr. Spiers wished him to take a photograph of our whole party. So, in the first place, before the rest were assembled, he made an experimental group of such as were there; and I did not like my own aspect very much. Afterwards, when we were all come, he arranged us under a tree in the garden,--Mr. and Mrs. Spiers, with their eldest son, Mr. and Mrs. Hall and Fanny, Mr. Addison, my wife and me,--and stained the glass with our figures and faces in the twinkling of an eye; not S-----'s face, however, for she turned it away, and left only a portion of her bonnet and dress,--and Mrs. Hall, too, refused to countenance the proceeding. But all the rest of us were caught to the life, and I was really a little startled at recognizing myself so apart from myself, and done so quickly too. This was the last important incident of our visit to Oxford, except that Mr. Spiers was again most hospitable at lunch. Never did anybody attend more faithfully to the comfort of his friends than does this good gentleman. But he has shown himself most kind in every possible way, and I shall always feel truly grateful. No better way of showing our sense of his hospitality, and all the trouble he has taken for us (and our memory of him), has occurred to us, than to present him with a set of my Tales and Romances; so, by the next steamer, I shall write to Ticknor and Fields to send them, elegantly bound, and S----- will emblazon his coat of arms in each volume. He accompanied us and Mr. and Mrs. Hall to the railway station, and we left Oxford at two o'clock. It had been a very pleasant visit, and all the persons whom we met were kind and agreeable, and disposed to look at one another in a sunny aspect. I saw a good deal of Mr. Hall. He is a thoroughly genuine man, of kind heart and true affections, a gentleman of taste and refinement, and full of humor. On the Saturday after our return to Blackheath, we went to HAMPTON COURT, about which, as I have already recorded a visit to it, I need say little here. But I was again impressed with the stately grandeur of Wolsey's great Hall, with its great window at each end, and one side window, descending almost to the floor, and a row of windows on each side, high towards the roof, and throwing down their many-colored light on the stone pavement, and on the Gobelin tapestry, which must have been gorgeously rich when the walls were first clothed with it. I fancied, then, that no modern architect could produce so fine a room; but oddly enough, in the great entrance-hall of the Euston station, yesterday, I could not see how this last fell very much short of Wolsey's Hall in grandeur. We were quite wearied in passing through the endless suites of rooms in Hampton Court, and gazing at the thousands of pictures; it is too much for one day,--almost enough for one life, in such measure as life can be bestowed on pictures. It would have refreshed us had we spent half the time in wandering about the grounds, which, as we glimpsed at them from the windows of the Palace, seemed very beautiful, though laid out with an antique formality of straight lines and broad gravelled paths. Before the central window there is a beautiful sheet of water, and a fountain upshooting itself and plashing into it, with a continuous and pleasant sound. How beautifully the royal robe of a monarchy is embroidered! Palaces, pictures, parks! They do enrich life; and kings and aristocracies cannot keep these things to themselves, they merely take care of them for others. Even a king, with all the glory that can be shed around him, is but the liveried and bedizened footman of his people, and the toy of their delight. I am very glad that I came to this country while the English are still playing with such a toy. Yesterday J----- and I left Blackheath, and reached Liverpool last night. The rest of my family will follow in a few days; and so finishes our residence in Bennoch's house, where I, for my part, have spent some of the happiest hours that I have known since we left our American home. It is a strange, vagabond, gypsy sort of life,--this that we are leading; and I know not whether we shall finally be spoiled for any other, or shall enjoy our quiet Wayside, as we never did before, when once we reach it again. The evening set in misty and obscure; and it was dark almost when J----- and I arrived at the landing stage on our return. I was struck with the picturesque effect of the high tower and tall spire of St. Nicholas, rising upward, with dim outline, into the duskiness; while midway of its height the dial-plates of an illuminated clock blazed out, like two great eyes of a giant. September 13th.--On Saturday my wife, with all her train, arrived at Mrs. B------'s; and on Tuesday--vagabonds as we are--we again struck our tent, and set out for SOUTHPORT. I do not know what sort of character it will form in the children,--this unsettled, shifting, vagrant life, with no central home to turn to, except what we carry in ourselves. It was a windy day, and, judging by the look of the trees, on the way to Southport, it must be almost always windy, and with the blast in one prevailing direction; for invariably their branches, and the whole contour and attitude of the tree, turn from seaward, with a strangely forlorn aspect. Reaching Southport, we took an omnibus, and under the driver's guidance came to our tall stone house, fronting on the sands, and styled "Brunswick Terrace." . . . . The English system of lodging-houses has its good points; but it is, nevertheless, a contrivance for bearing the domestic cares of home about with you whithersoever you go; and immediately you have to set about producing your own bread and cheese. However, Fanny took most of this trouble off our hands, though there was inevitably the stiffness and discomfort of a new housekeeping on the first day of our arrival; besides that, it was cool, and the wind whistled and grumbled and eddied into the chinks of the house. Meanwhile, in all my experience of Southport, I have never yet seen the sea, but only an interminable breadth of sands, looking pooly or plashy in some places, and barred across with drier reaches of sand, but no expanse of water. It must be miles and miles, at low water, to the veritable sea-shore. We are about twenty miles north of Liverpool, on the border of the Irish Sea; and Ireland and, I suppose, the Isle of Man intervene betwixt us and the ocean, not much to our benefit; for the air of the English coast, under ocean influences, is said to be milder than when it comes across the land,--milder, therefore, above or below Ireland, because then the Gulf Stream ameliorates it. Betimes, the forenoon after our arrival, I had to take the rail to Liverpool, but returned, a little after five, in the midst of a rain,-- still low water and interminable sands; still a dreary, howling blast. We had a cheerful fireside, however, and should have had a pleasant evening, only that the wind on the sea made us excessively drowsy. This morning we awoke to hear the wind still blustering, and blowing up clouds, with fitful little showers, and soon blowing them away again, and letting the brightest of sunshine fall over the plashy waste of sand. We have already walked forth on the shore with J----- and R-----, who pick up shells, and dig wells in the sand with their little wooden spades; but soon we saw a rainbow on the western sky, and then a shower came spattering down upon us in good earnest. We first took refuge under the bridge that stretches between the two portions of the promenade; but as there was a chill draught there, we made the best of our way home. The sun has now again come out brightly, though the wind is still tumbling a great many clouds about the sky. Evening.--Later, I walked out with U----, and, looking seaward, we saw the foam and spray of the advancing tide, tossed about on the verge of the horizon,--a long line, like the crests and gleaming helmets of an army. In about half an hour we found almost the whole waste of sand covered with water, and white waves breaking out all over it; but, the bottom being so nearly level, and the water so shallow, there was little of the spirit and exultation of the sea in a strong breeze. Of the long line of bathing-machines, one after another was hitched to a horse, and trundled forth into the water, where, at a long distance from shore, the bathers found themselves hardly middle deep. September 19th.--The wind grumbled and made itself miserable all last night, and this morning it is still howling as ill-naturedly as ever, and roaring and rumbling in the chimneys. The tide is far out, but, from an upper window, I fancied, at intervals, that I could see the plash of the surf-wave on the distant limit of the sand; perhaps, however, it was only a gleam on the sky. Constantly there have been sharp spatters of rain, hissing and rattling against the windows, while a little before or after, or perhaps simultaneously, a rainbow, somewhat watery of texture, paints itself on the western clouds. Gray, sullen clouds hang about the sky, or sometimes cover it with a uniform dulness; at other times, the portions towards the sun gleam almost lightsomely; now, there may be an airy glimpse of clear blue sky in a fissure of the clouds; now, the very brightest of sunshine comes out all of a sudden, and gladdens everything. The breadth of sands has a various aspect, according as there are pools, or moisture enough to glisten, or a drier tract; and where the light gleams along a yellow ridge or bar, it is like sunshine itself. Certainly the temper of the day shifts; but the smiles come far the seldomest, and its frowns and angry tears are most reliable. By seven o'clock pedestrians began to walk along the promenade, close buttoned against the blast; later, a single bathing-machine got under way, by means of a horse, and travelled forth seaward; but within what distance it finds the invisible margin I cannot say,--at all events, it looks like a dreary journey. Just now I saw a sea-gull, wheeling on the blast, close in towards the promenade. September 21st.--Yesterday morning was bright, sunny and windy, and cool and exhilarating. I went to Liverpool at eleven, and, returning at five, found the weather still bright and cool. The temperature, methinks, must soon diminish the population of Southport, which, judging from appearances, must be mainly made up of temporary visitors. There is a newspaper, The Southport Visitor, published weekly, and containing a register of all the visitants in the various hotels and lodging-houses. It covers more than two sides of the paper, to the amount of some hundreds. The guests come chiefly from Liverpool, Manchester, and the neighboring country-towns, and belong to the middle classes. It is not a fashionable watering-place. Only one nobleman's name, and those of two or three baronets, now adorn the list. The people whom we see loitering along the beach and the promenade have, at best, a well-to-do, tradesmanlike air. I do not find that there are any public amusements; nothing but strolling on the sands, donkey-riding, or drives in donkey-carts; and solitary visitors must find it a dreary place. Yet one or two of the streets are brisk and lively, and, being well thronged, have a holiday aspect. There are no carriages in town save donkey-carts; some of which are drawn by three donkeys abreast, and are large enough to hold a whole family. These conveyances will take you far out on the sands through wet and dry. The beach is haunted by The Flying Dutchman, --a sort of boat on wheels, schooner-rigged with sails, and which sometimes makes pretty good speed, with a fair wind. This morning we have been walking with J----- and R----- out over the "ribbed sea sands," a good distance from shore. Throughout the week, the tides will be so low as not to cover the shallow basin of this bay, if a bay it be. The weather was sullen, with now and then a faint gleam of sunshine, lazily tracing our shadows on the sand; the wind rather quieter than on preceding days. . . . In the sunshine the sands seem to be frequented by great numbers of gulls, who begin to find the northern climate too wintry. You see their white wings in the sunlight, but they become almost or quite invisible in the shade. We shall soon have an opportunity of seeing how a watering-place looks when the season is quite over; for we have concluded to remain here till December, and everybody else will take flight in a week or two. A short time ago, in the evening, in a street of Liverpool, I saw a decent man, of the lower orders, taken much aback by being roughly brushed against by a rowdy fellow. He looked after him, and exclaimed indignantly, "Is that a Yankee?" It shows the kind of character we have here. October 7th.--On Saturday evening, I gave a dinner to Bennoch, at the Adelphi Hotel. The chief point or characteristic of English customs was, that Mr. Radley, our landlord, himself attended at table, and officiated as chief waiter. He has a fortune of 100,000 pounds,--half a million of dollars,--and is an elderly man of good address and appearance. In America, such a man would very probably be in Congress; at any rate, he would never conceive the possibility of changing plates, or passing round the table with hock and champagne. Some of his hock was a most rich and imperial wine, such as can hardly be had on the Rhine itself. There were eight gentlemen besides Bennoch. A donkey, the other day, stubbornly refusing to come out of a boat which had brought him across the Mersey; at last, after many kicks had been applied, and other persecutions of that kind, a man stepped forward, addressing him affectionately, "Come along, brother,"--and the donkey obeyed at once. October 26th.--On Thursday, instead of taking the rail for Liverpool, I set out, about eleven, for a long walk. It was an overcast morning, such as in New England would have boded rain; but English clouds are not nearly so portentous as American in that respect. Accordingly, the sun soon began to peep through crevices, and I had not gone more than a mile or two when it shone a little too warmly for comfort, yet not more than I liked. It was very much like our pleasant October days at home; indeed, the climates of the two countries more nearly coincide during the present month than at any other season of the year. The air was almost perfectly still; but once in a while it stirred, and breathed coolly in my face; it is very delightful, this latent freshness, in a warm atmosphere. The country about Southport has as few charms as it is possible for any region to have. In the close neighborhood of the shore, it is nothing but sand-hillocks, covered with coarse grass; and this is the original nature of the whole site on which the town stands, although it is now paved, and has been covered with soil enough to make gardens, and to nourish here and there a few trees. A little farther inland the surface seems to have been marshy, but has been drained by ditches across the fields and along the roadside; and the fields are embanked on all sides with parapets of earth which appear as if intended to keep out inundations. In fact, Holland itself cannot be more completely on a level with the sea. The only dwellings are the old, whitewashed stone cottages, with thatched roofs, on the brown straw of which grow various weeds and mosses, brightening it with green patches, and sprouting along the ridgepole,--the homeliest hovels that ever mortals lived in, and which they share with pigs and cows at one end. Hens, too, run in and out of the door. One or two of these hovels bore signs, "Licensed to sell beer, ale, and tobacco," and generally there were an old woman and some children visible. In all cases there was a ditch, full of water, close at hand, stagnant, and often quite covered with a growth of water-weeds,--very unwholesome, one would think, in the neighborhood of a dwelling; and, in truth, the children and grown people did look pale. In the fields, along the roadside, men and women were harvesting their carrots and other root-crops, especially digging potatoes,--the pleasantest of all farm labor, in my opinion, there being such a continual interest in opening the treasures of each hill. As I went on, the country began to get almost imperceptibly less flat, and there was some little appearance of trees. I had determined to go to Ormskirk, but soon got out of the way, and came to a little hamlet that looked antique and picturesque, with its small houses of stone and brick, built, with the one material and repaired with the other perhaps ages afterward. Here I inquired my way of a woman, who told me, in broad Lancashire dialect, "that I main go back, and turn to my left, till I came to a finger-post"; and so I did, and found another little hamlet, the principal object in which was a public-house, with a large sign, representing a dance round a Maypole. It was now about one o'clock; so I entered, and, being ushered into what, I suppose, they called the coffee-room, I asked for some cold neat and ale. There was a jolly, round, rather comely woman for a hostess, with a free, hospitable, yet rather careless manner. The coffee-room smelt rather disagreeably of bad tobacco-smoke, and was shabbily furnished with an old sofa and flag-bottomed chairs, and adorned with a print of "Old Billy," a horse famous for a longevity of about sixty years; and also with colored engravings of old-fashioned hunting-scenes, conspicuous with scarlet coats. There was a very small bust of Milton on the mantel-piece. By and by the remains of an immense round of beef, three quarters cut away, were put on the table; then some smoking-hot potatoes; and finally the hostess told me that their own dinner was just ready, and so she had brought me in some hot chops, thinking I might prefer them to the cold meat. I did prefer them; and they were stewed or fried chops, instead of broiled, and were very savory. There was household bread too, and rich cheese, and a pint of ale, home brewed, not very mighty, but good to quench thirst, and, by way of condiment, some pickled cabbage; so, instead of a lunch, I made quite a comfortable dinner. Moreover, there was a cold pudding on the table, and I called for a clean plate, and helped myself to some of it. It was of rice, and was strewn over, rather than intermixed, with some kinds of berries, the nature of which I could not exactly make out. I then set forth again. It was still sunny and warm, and I walked more slowly than before dinner; in fact, I did little more than lounge along, sitting down, at last, on the stone parapet of a bridge. The country grew more pleasant, more sylvan, and, though still of a level character, not so drearily flat. Soon appeared the first symptom that I had seen of a gentleman's residence,--a lodge at a park gate, then a long stretch of wall, with a green lawn, and afterwards an extent of wooded land; then another gateway, with a neat lodge on each side of it, and, lastly, another extent of wood. The Hall or Mansion-house, however, was nowhere apparent, being, doubtless, secluded deep and far within its grounds. I inquired of a boy who was the owner of the estate, and he answered, "Mr. Scarisbrick"; and no doubt it is a family of local eminence. Along the road,--an old inn; some aged stone houses, built for merely respectable occupants; a canal, with two canal-boats, heaped up with a cargo of potatoes; two little girls, who were watching lest some cows should go astray, and had their two little chairs by the roadside, and their dolls and other playthings, and so followed the footsteps of the cows all day long. I met two boys, coming from Ormskirk, mounted on donkeys, with empty panniers, on which they had carried vegetables to market. Finally, between two and three o'clock, I saw the great tower of Ormskirk Church, with its spire, not rising out of the tower, but sprouting up close beside it; and, entering the town, I directed my steps first to this old church. ORMSKIRK CHURCH. It stands on a gentle eminence, sufficient to give it a good site, and has a pavement of flat gravestones in front. It is doubtless, as regards its foundation, a very ancient church, but has not exactly a venerable aspect, being in too good repair, and much restored in various parts; not ivy-grown, either, though green with moss here and there. The tower is square and immensely massive, and might have supported a very lofty spire; so that it is the more strange that what spire it has should be so oddly stuck beside it, springing out of the church wall. I should have liked well enough to enter the church, as it is the burial-place of the Earls of Derby, and perhaps may contain some interesting monuments; but as it was all shut up, and even the iron gates of the churchyard closed and locked, I merely looked at the outside. From the church, a street leads to the market-place, in which I found a throng of men and women, it being market-day; wares of various kinds, tin, earthen, and cloth, set out on the pavements; droves of pigs; ducks and fowls; baskets of eggs; and a man selling quack medicines, recommending his nostrums as well as he could. The aspect of the crowd was very English,--portly and ruddy women; yeomen with small-clothes and broad-brimmed hats, all very quiet and heavy and good-humored. Their dialect was so provincial that I could not readily understand more than here and there a word. But, after all, there were few traits that could be made a note of. I soon grew weary of the scene, and so I went to the railway station, and waited there nearly an hour for the train to take me to Southport. Ormskirk is famous for its gingerbread, which women sell to the railway passengers at a sixpence for a rouleau of a dozen little cakes. November 30th.--A week ago last Monday, Herman Melville came to see me at the Consulate, looking much as he used to do, and with his characteristic gravity and reserve of manner. . . . We soon found ourselves on pretty much our former terms of sociability and confidence. . . . He is thus far on his way to Constantinople. I do not wonder that he found it necessary to take an airing through the world, after so many years of toilsome pen-labor, following upon so wild and adventurous a youth as his was. I invited him to come and stay with us at Southport, as long as he might remain in this vicinity, and accordingly he did come the next day. . . . . On Wednesday we took a pretty long walk together, and sat down in a hollow among the sand-hills, sheltering ourselves from the high cool wind. Melville, as he always does, began to reason of Providence and futurity, and of everything else that lies beyond human ken. . . . He has a very high and noble nature, and is better worth immortality than the most of us. . . . On Saturday we went to Chester together. I love to take every opportunity of going to Chester; it being the one only place, within easy reach of Liverpool, which possesses any old English interest. We went to THE CATHEDRAL. Its gray nave impressed me more than at any former visit. Passing into the cloisters, an attendant took possession of us, and showed us about. Within the choir there is a profusion of very rich oaken carving, both on the screen that separates it from the nave, and on the seats and walls; very curious and most elaborate, and lavished (one would say) most wastefully, where nobody would think of looking for it,--where, indeed, amid the dimness of the cathedral, the exquisite detail of the elaboration could not possibly be seen. Our guide lighted some of the gas-burners, of which there are many hundreds, to help us see them; but it required close scrutiny, even then. It must have been out of the question, when the whole means of illumination were only a few smoky torches or candles. There was a row of niches, where the monks used to stand, for four hours together, in the performance of some of their services; and to relieve them a little, they were allowed partially to sit on a projection of the seats, which were turned up in the niche for that purpose; but if they grew drowsy, so as to fail to balance themselves, the seat was so contrived as to slip down, thus bringing the monk to the floor. These projections on the seats are each and all of them carved with curious devices, no two alike. The guide showed us one, representing, apparently, the first quarrel of a new-married couple, wrought with wonderful expression. Indeed, the artist never failed to bring out his idea in the most striking manner,--as, for instance, Satan, under the guise of a lion, devouring a sinner bodily; and again in the figure of a dragon, with a man halfway down his gullet, the legs hanging out. The carver may not have seen anything grotesque in this, nor intended it at all by way of joke; but certainly there would appear to be a grim mirthfulness in some of the designs. One does not see why such fantasies should be strewn about the holy interior of a cathedral, unless it were intended to contain everything that belongs to the heart of man, both upward and downward. In a side aisle of the choir, we saw a tomb, said to be that of the Emperor Henry IV. of Germany, though on very indistinct authority. This is an oblong tomb, carved, and, on one side, painted with bright colors and gilded. During a very long period it was built and plastered into the wall, and the exterior side was whitewashed; but, on being removed, the inner side was found to have been ornamented with gold and color, in the manner in which we now see it. If this were customary with tombs, it must have added vastly to the gorgeous magnificence, to which the painted windows and polished pillars and ornamented ceilings contributed so much. In fact, a cathedral in its fresh estate seems to have been like a pavilion of the sunset, all purple and gold; whereas now it more resembles deepest and grayest twilight. Afterwards, we were shown into the ancient refectory, now used as the city grammar-school, and furnished with the usual desks and seats for the boys. In one corner of this large room was the sort of pulpit or elevated seat, with a broken staircase of stone ascending to it, where one of the monks used to read to his brethren, while sitting at their meals. The desks were cut and carved with the scholars' knives, just as they used to be in the school-rooms where I was a scholar. Thence we passed into the chapter-house, but, before that, we went through a small room, in which Melville opened a cupboard, and discovered a dozen or two of wine-bottles; but our guide told us that they were now empty, and never were meant for jollity, having held only sacramental wine. In the chapter-house, we saw the library, some of the volumes of which were antique folios. There were two dusty and tattered banners hanging on the wall, and the attendant promised to make us laugh by something that he would tell us about them. The joke was that these two banners had been in the battle of Bunker Hill; and our countrymen, he said, always smiled on hearing this. He had discovered us to be Americans by the notice we took of a mural tablet in the choir, to the memory of a Lieutenant-Governor Clarke, of New York, who died in Chester before the Revolution. From the chapter-house he ushered us back into the nave, ever and anon pointing out some portion of the edifice more ancient than the rest, and when I asked him how he knew this, he said that he had learnt it from the archaeologists, who could read off such things like a book. This guide was a lively, quick-witted man, who did his business less by rote, and more with a vivacious interest, than any guide I ever met. After leaving the cathedral we sought out the Yacht Inn, near the water-gate. This was, for a long period of time, the principal inn of Chester, and was the house at which Swift once put up, on his way to Holyhead, and where he invited the clergy to come and sup with him. We sat down in a small snuggery, conversing with the landlord. The Chester people, according to my experience, are very affable, and fond of talking with strangers about the antiquities and picturesque characteristics of their town. It partly lives, the landlord told us, by its visitors, and many people spend the summer here on account of the antiquities and the good air. He showed us a broad, balustraded staircase, leading into a large, comfortable, old-fashioned parlor, with windows looking on the street and on the Custom House that stood opposite. This was the room where Swift expected to receive the clergy of Chester; and on one of the window-panes were two acrid lines, written with the diamond of his ring, satirizing those venerable gentlemen, in revenge for their refusing his invitation. The first line begins rather indistinctly; but the writing grows fully legible, as it proceeds. The Yacht Tavern is a very old house, in the gabled style. The timbers and framework are still perfectly sound. In the same street is the Bishop's house (so called as having been the residence of a prelate long ago), which is covered with curious sculpture, representing Scriptural scenes. And in the same neighborhood is the county court, accessible by an archway, through which we penetrated, and found ourselves in a passage, very ancient and dusky, overlooked from the upper story by a gallery, to which an antique staircase ascended, with balustrades and square landing-places. A printer saw us here, and asked us into his printing-office, and talked very affably; indeed, he could have hardly been more civil, if he had known that both Melville and I have given a good deal of employment to the brethren of his craft. December 15th.--An old gentleman has recently paid me a good many visits,--a Kentucky man, who has been a good deal in England and Europe generally without losing the freshness and unconventionality of his earlier life. He was a boatman, and afterwards captain of a steamer on the Ohio and Mississippi; but has gained property, and is now the owner of mines of coal and iron, which he is endeavoring to dispose of here in England. A plain, respectable, well-to-do-looking personage, of more than seventy years; very free of conversation, and beginning to talk with everybody as a matter of course; tall, stalwart, a dark face, with white curly hair and keen eyes; and an expression shrewd, yet kindly and benign. He fought through the whole War of 1812, beginning with General Harrison at the battle of Tippecanoe, which he described to me. He says that at the beginning of the battle, and for a considerable time, he heard Tecumseh's voice, loudly giving orders. There was a man named Wheatley in the American camp, a strange, incommunicative person,--a volunteer, making war entirely on his own book, and seeking revenge for some relatives of his, who had been killed by the Indians. In the midst of the battle this Wheatley ran at a slow trot past R------ (my informant), trailing his rifle, and making towards the point where Tecumseh's voice was heard. The fight drifted around, and R------ along with it; and by and by he reached a spot where Wheatley lay dead, with his head on Tecumseh's breast. Tecumseh had been shot with a rifle, but, before expiring, appeared to have shot Wheatley with a pistol, which he still held in his hand. R------ affirms that Tecumseh was flayed by the Kentucky men on the spot, and his skin converted into razor-straps. I have left out the most striking point of the narrative, after all, as R------ told it, viz. that soon after Wheatley passed him, he suddenly ceased to hear Tecumseh's voice ringing through the forest, as he gave his orders. He was at the battle of New Orleans, and gave me the story of it from beginning to end; but I remember only a few particulars in which he was personally concerned. He confesses that his hair bristled upright--every hair in his head--when he heard the shouts of the British soldiers before advancing to the attack. His uncomfortable sensations lasted till he began to fire, after which he felt no more of them. It was in the dusk of the morning, or a little before sunrise, when the assault was made; and the fight lasted about two hours and a half, during which R------ fired twenty-four times; and said he, "I saw my object distinctly each time, and I was a good rifle-shot." He was raising his rifle to fire the twenty-fifth time, when an American officer, General Carroll, pressed it down, and bade him fire no more. "Enough is enough," quoth the General. For there needed no more slaughter, the British being in utter rout and confusion. In this retreat many of the enemy would drop down among the dead, then rise, run a considerable distance, and drop again, thus confusing the riflemen's aim. One fellow had thus got about four hundred and fifty yards from the American line, and, thinking himself secure, he made a derisive gesture. "I'll have a shot at him anyhow," cried a rifleman; so he fired, and the poor devil dropped. R------ himself, with one of his twenty-four shots, hit a British officer, who fell forward on his face, about thirty paces from our line, and as the enemy were then retreating (they advanced and were repelled two or three times) he ran out, and turned him over on his back. The officer was a man about thirty-eight, tall and fine-looking; his eyes were wide open, clear and bright, and were fixed full on R------ with a somewhat stern glance, but there was the sweetest and happiest smile over his face that could be conceived. He seemed to be dead;--at least, R------ thinks that he did not really see him, fixedly as he appeared to gaze. The officer held his sword in his hand, and R------ tried in vain to wrest it from him, until suddenly the clutch relaxed. R------ still keeps the sword hung up over his mantel-piece. I asked him how the dead man's aspect affected him. He replied that he felt nothing at the time; but that ever since, in all trouble, in uneasy sleep, and whenever he is out of tune, or waking early, or lying awake at night, he sees this officer's face, with the clear bright eyes and the pleasant smile, just as distinctly as if he were bending over him. His wound was in the breast, exactly on the spot that R------ had aimed at, and bled profusely. The enemy advanced in such masses, he says, that it was impossible not to hit them unless by purposely firing over their heads. After the battle, R------ leaped over the rampart, and took a prisoner who was standing unarmed in the midst of the slain, having probably dropped down during the heat of the action, to avoid the hail-storm of rifle-shots. As he led him in, the prisoner paused, and pointed to an officer who was lying dead beside his dead horse, with his foot still in the stirrup. "There lies our General," said he. The horse had been killed by a grape-shot, and Pakenham himself, apparently, by a six-pounder ball, which had first struck the earth, covering him from head to foot with mud and clay, and had then entered his side, and gone upward through his breast. His face was all besmirched with the moist earth. R------ took the slain General's foot out of the stirrup, and then went to report his death. Much more he told me, being an exceedingly talkative old man, and seldom, I suppose, finding so good a listener as myself. I like the man,--a good-tempered, upright, bold and free old fellow; of a rough breeding, but sufficiently smoothed by society to be of pleasant intercourse. He is as dogmatic as possible, having formed his own opinions, often on very disputable grounds, and hardened in them; taking queer views of matters and things, and giving shrewd and not ridiculous reasons for them; but with a keen, strong sense at the bottom of his character. A little while ago I met an Englishman in a railway carriage, who suggests himself as a kind of contrast to this warlike and vicissitudinous backwoodsman. He was about the same age as R------, but had spent, apparently, his whole life in Liverpool, and has long occupied the post of Inspector of Nuisances,--a rather puffy and consequential man; gracious, however, and affable, even to casual strangers like myself. The great contrast betwixt him and the American lies in the narrower circuit of his ideas; the latter talking about matters of history of his own country and the world,--glancing over the whole field of politics, propounding opinions and theories of his own, and showing evidence that his mind had operated for better or worse on almost all conceivable matters; while the Englishman was odorous of his office, strongly flavored with that, and otherwise most insipid. He began his talk by telling me of a dead body which he had lately discovered in a house in Liverpool, where it had been kept about a fortnight by the relatives, partly from want of funds for the burial, and partly in expectation of the arrival of some friends from Glasgow. There was a plate of glass in the coffin-lid, through which the Inspector of Nuisances, as he told me, had looked and seen the dead man's face in an ugly state of decay, which he minutely described. However, his conversation was not altogether of this quality; for he spoke about larks, and how abundant they are just now, and what a good pie they make, only they must be skinned, else they will have a bitter taste. We have since had a lark-pie ourselves, and I believe it was very good in itself; only the recollection of the Nuisance-man's talk was not a very agreeable flavor. A very racy and peculiarly English character might be made out of a man like this, having his life-concern wholly with the disagreeables of a great city. He seemed to be a good and kindly person, too, but earthy,--even as if his frame had been moulded of clay impregnated with the draining of slaughter-houses. December 21st.--On Thursday evening I dined for the first time with the new Mayor at the Town Hall. I wish to preserve all the characteristic traits of such banquets, because, being peculiar to England, these municipal feasts may do well to picture in a novel. There was a big old silver tobacco-box, nearly or quite as large round as an ordinary plate, out of which the dignitaries of Liverpool used to fill their pipes, while sitting in council or after their dinners. The date "1690" was on the lid. It is now used as a snuff-box, and wends its way, from guest to guest, round the table. We had turtle, and, among other good things, American canvasback ducks. . . . These dinners are certainly a good institution, and likely to be promotive of good feeling; the Mayor giving them often, and inviting, in their turn, all the respectable and eminent citizens of whatever political bias. About fifty gentlemen were present that evening. I had the post of honor at the Mayor's right hand; and France, Turkey, and Austria were toasted before the Republic, for, as the Mayor whispered me, he must first get his allies out of the way. The Turkish Consul and the Austrian both made better English speeches than any Englishman, during the evening; for it is inconceivable what shapeless and ragged utterances Englishmen are content to put forth, without attempting anything like a wholeness; but inserting a patch here and a patch there, and finally getting out what they wish to say, indeed, but in most disorganized guise. . . . I can conceive of very high enjoyment in making a speech; one is in such a curious sympathy with his audience, feeling instantly how every sentence affects them, and wonderfully excited and encouraged by the sense that it has gone to the right spot. Then, too, the imminent emergency, when a man is overboard, and must sink or swim, sharpens, concentrates, and invigorates the mind, and causes matters of thought and sentiment to assume shape and expression, though, perhaps, it seemed hopeless to express them, just before you rose to speak. Yet I question much whether public speaking tends to elevate the orator, intellectually or morally; the effort, of course, being to say what is immediately received by the audience, and to produce an effect on the instant. I don't quite see how an honest man can be a good and successful orator; but I shall hardly undertake to decide the question on my merely post-prandial experience. The Mayor toasted his guests by their professions,--the merchants, for instance, the bankers, the solicitors,--and while one of the number responded, his brethren also stood up, each in his place, thus giving their assent to what he said. I think the very worst orator was a major of Artillery, who spoke in a meek, little, nervous voice, and seemed a good deal more discomposed than probably he would have been in the face of the enemy. The first toast was "The Ladies," to which an old bachelor responded. December 31st.--Thus far we have come through the winter, on this bleak and blasty shore of the Irish Sea, where, perhaps, the drowned body of Milton's friend Lycidas might have been washed ashore more than two centuries ago. This would not be very likely, however, so wide a tract of sands, never deeply covered by the tide, intervening betwixt us and the sea. But it is an excessively windy place, especially here on the Promenade; always a whistle and a howl,--always an eddying gust through the corridors and chambers,--often a patter of hail or rain or snow against the windows; and in the long evenings the sounds outside are very much as if we were on shipboard in mid-ocean, with the waves dashing against the vessel's sides. I go to town almost daily, starting at about eleven, and reaching Southport again at a little past live; by which time it is quite dark, and continues so till nearly eight in the morning. Christmas time has been marked by few characteristics. For a week or two previous to Christmas day, the newspapers contained rich details respecting market-stalls and butchers' shops,--what magnificent carcasses of prize oxen and sheep they displayed. . . . The Christmas Waits came to us on Christmas eve, and on the day itself, in the shape of little parties of boys or girls, singing wretched doggerel rhymes, and going away well pleased with the guerdon of a penny or two. Last evening came two or three older choristers at pretty near bedtime, and sang some carols at our door. They were psalm tunes, however. Everybody with whom we have had to do, in any manner of service, expects a Christmas-box; but, in most cases, a shilling is quite a satisfactory amount. We have had holly and mistletoe stuck up on the gas-fixtures and elsewhere about the house. On the mantel-piece in the coroner's court the other day, I saw corked and labelled phials, which it may be presumed contained samples of poisons that have brought some poor wretches to their deaths, either by murder or suicide. This court might be wrought into a very good and pregnant description, with its grimy gloom illuminated by a conical skylight, constructed to throw daylight down on corpses; its greasy Testament covered over with millions of perjured kisses; the coroner himself, whose life is fed on all kinds of unnatural death; its subordinate officials, who go about scenting murder, and might be supposed to have caught the scent in their own garments; its stupid, brutish juries, settling round corpses like flies; its criminals, whose guilt is brought face to face with them here, in closer contact than at the subsequent trial. O---- P------, the famous Mormonite, called on me a little while ago,--a short, black-haired, dark-complexioned man; a shrewd, intelligent, but unrefined countenance, excessively unprepossessing; an uncouth gait and deportment; the aspect of a person in comfortable circumstances, and decently behaved, but of a vulgar nature and destitute of early culture. I think I should have taken him for a shoemaker, accustomed to reflect in a rude, strong, evil-disposed way on matters of this world and the next, as he sat on his bench. He said he had been residing in Liverpool about six months; and his business with me was to ask for a letter of introduction that should gain him admittance to the British Museum, he intending a visit to London. He offered to refer me to respectable people for his character; but I advised him to apply to Mr. Dallas, as the proper person for his purpose. March 1st, 1857.--On the night of last Wednesday week, our house was broken into by robbers. They entered by the back window of the breakfast-room, which is the children's school-room, breaking or cutting a pane of glass, so as to undo the fastening. I have a dim idea of having heard a noise through my sleep; but if so, it did not more than slightly disturb me. U---- heard it, she being at watch with R-----; and J-----, having a cold, was also wakeful, and thought the noise was of servants moving about below. Neither did the idea of robbers occur to U----. J-----, however, hearing U---- at her mother's door, asking for medicine for R-----, called out for medicine for his cold, and the thieves probably thought we were bestirring ourselves, and so took flight. In the morning the servants found the hall door and the breakfast-room window open; some silver cups and some other trifles of plate were gone from the sideboard, and there were tokens that the whole lower part of the house had been ransacked; but the thieves had evidently gone off in a hurry, leaving some articles which they would have taken, had they been more at leisure. We gave information to the police, and an inspector and constable soon came to make investigations, taking a list of the missing articles, and informing themselves as to all particulars that could be known. I did not much expect ever to hear any more of the stolen property; but on Sunday a constable came to request my presence at the police-office to identify the lost things. The thieves had been caught in Liverpool, and some of the property found upon them, and some of it at a pawnbroker's where they had pledged it. The police-office is a small dark room, in the basement story of the Town Hall of Southport; and over the mantel-piece, hanging one upon another, there are innumerable advertisements of robberies in houses, and on the highway,--murders, too, and garrotings; and offences of all sorts, not only in this district, but wide away, and forwarded from other police-stations. Bring thus aggregated together, one realizes that there are a great many more offences than the public generally takes note of. Most of these advertisements were in pen and ink, with minute lists of the articles stolen; but the more important were in print; and there, too, I saw the printed advertisement of our own robbery, not for public circulation, but to be handed about privately, among police-officers and pawnbrokers. A rogue has a very poor chance in England, the police being so numerous, and their system so well organized. In a corner of the police-office stood a contrivance for precisely measuring the heights of prisoners; and I took occasion to measure J-----, and found him four feet seven inches and a half high. A set of rules for the self-government of police-officers was nailed on the door, between twenty and thirty in number, and composing a system of constabulary ethics. The rules would be good for men in almost any walk of life; and I rather think the police-officers conform to them with tolerable strictness. They appear to be subordinated to one another on the military plan. The ordinary constable does not sit down in the presence of his inspector, and this latter seems to be half a gentleman; at least, such is the bearing of our Southport inspector, who wears a handsome uniform of green and silver, and salutes the principal inhabitants, when meeting them in the street, with an air of something like equality. Then again there is a superintendent, who certainly claims the rank of a gentleman, and has perhaps been an officer in the army. The superintendent of this district was present on this occasion. The thieves were brought down from Liverpool on Tuesday, and examined in the Town Hall. I had been notified to be present, but, as a matter of courtesy, the police-officers refrained from calling me as a witness, the evidence of the servants being sufficient to identify the property. The thieves were two young men, not much over twenty,--James and John Macdonald, terribly shabby, dirty, jail-bird like, yet intelligent of aspect, and one of them handsome. The police knew them already, and they seemed not much abashed by their position. There were half a dozen magistrates on the bench,--idle old gentlemen of Southport and the vicinity, who lounged into the court, more as a matter of amusement than anything else, and lounged out again at their own pleasure; for these magisterial duties are a part of the pastime of the country gentlemen of England. They wore their hats on the bench. There were one or two of them more active than their fellows; but the real duty was done by the Clerk of the Court. The seats within the bar were occupied by the witnesses, and around the great table sat some of the more respectable people of Southport; and without the bar were the commonalty in great numbers; for this is said to be the first burglary that has occurred here within the memory of man, and so it has caused a great stir. There seems to be a strong case against the prisoners. A boy attached to the railway testified to having seen them at Birchdale on Wednesday afternoon, and directed them on their way to Southport; Peter Pickup recognized them as having applied to him for lodgings in the course of that evening; a pawnbroker swore to one of them as having offered my top-coat for sale or pledge in Liverpool; and my boots were found on the feet of one of them,--all this in addition to other circumstances of pregnant suspicion. So they were committed for trial at the Liverpool assizes, to be holden some time in the present month. I rather wished them to escape. February 27th.--Coming along the promenade, a little before sunset, I saw the mountains of the Welsh coast shadowed very distinctly against the horizon. Mr. Channing told me that he had seen these mountains once or twice during his stay at Southport; but, though constantly looking for them, they have never before greeted my eyes in all the months that we have spent here. It is said that the Isle of Man is likewise discernible occasionally; but as the distance must be between sixty and seventy miles, I should doubt it. How misty is England! I have spent four years in a gray gloom. And yet it suits me pretty well. TO YORK. April 10th.--At Skipton. My wife, J-----, and I left Southport to-day for a short tour to York and its neighborhood. The weather has been exceedingly disagreeable for weeks past, but yesterday and to-day have been pleasant, and we take advantage of the first glimpses of spring-like weather. We came by Preston, along a road that grew rather more interesting as we proceeded to this place, which is about sixty miles from Southport, and where we arrived between five and six o'clock. First of all, we got some tea; and then, as it was a pleasant sunset, we set forth from our old-fashioned inn to take a walk. Skipton is an ancient town, and has an ancient though well-repaired aspect, the houses being built of gray stone, but in no picturesque shapes; the streets well paved; the site irregular and rising gradually towards Skipton Castle, which overlooks the town, as an old lordly castle ought to overlook the feudal village which it protects. The castle was built shortly after the Conquest by Robert de Romeli, and was afterwards the property and residence of the famous Cliffords. We met an honest man, as we approached the gateway, who kindly encouraged us to apply for admittance, notwithstanding it was Good Friday; telling us how to find the housekeeper, who would probably show us over the castle. So we passed through the gate, between two embattled towers; and in the castle court we met a flock of young damsels, who had been rambling about the precincts. They likewise directed us in our search for the housekeeper, and S-----, being bolder than I in such assaults on feudal castles, led the way down a dark archway, and up an exterior stairway, and, knocking at a door, immediately brought the housekeeper to a parley. She proved to be a nowise awful personage, but a homely, neat, kindly, intelligent, and middle-aged body. She seemed to be all alone in this great old castle, and at once consented to show us about,--being, no doubt, glad to see any Christian visitors. The castle is now the property of Sir R. Tufton; but the present family do not make it their permanent residence, and have only occasionally visited it. Indeed, it could not well be made an eligible or comfortable residence, according to modern ideas; the rooms occupying the several stories of large round towers, and looking gloomy and sombre, if not dreary,--not the less so for what has been done to modernize them; for instance, modern paper-hangings, and, in some of the rooms, marble fireplaces. They need a great deal more light and higher ceilings; and I rather imagine that the warm, rich effect of glowing tapestry is essential to keep one's spirit cheerful in these ancient rooms. Modern paper-hangings are too superficial and wishy-washy for the purpose. Tapestry, it is true, there is now, completely covering the walls of several of the rooms, but all faded into ghastliness; nor could some of it have been otherwise than ghastly, even in its newness, for it represented persons suffering various kinds of torture, with crowds of monks and nuns looking on. In another room there was the story of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, and other subjects not to be readily distinguished in the twilight that was gathering in these antique chambers. We saw, too, some very old portraits of the Cliffords and the Thanets, in black frames, and the pictures themselves sadly faded and neglected. The famous Countess Anne of Pembroke, Dorset, and Montgomery was represented on one of the leaves of a pair of folding doors, and one of her husbands, I believe, on the other leaf. There was the picture of a little idiot lordling, who had choked himself to death; and a portrait of Oliver Cromwell, who battered this old castle, together with almost every other English or Welsh castle that I ever saw or heard of. The housekeeper pointed out the grove of trees where his cannon were planted during the siege. There was but little furniture in the rooms; amongst other articles, an antique chair, in which Mary, Queen of Scots, is said to have rested. The housekeeper next took us into the part of the castle which has never been modernized since it was repaired, after the siege of Cromwell. This is a dismal series of cellars above ground, with immensely thick walls, letting in but scanty light, and dim staircases of stone; and a large hall, with a vast fireplace, where every particle of heat must needs have gone up chimney,--a chill and heart-breaking place enough. Quite in the midst of this part of the castle is the court-yard,--a space of some thirty or forty feet in length and breadth, open to the sky, but shut completely in on every side by the buildings of the castle, and paved over with flat stones. Out of this pavement, however, grows a yew-tree, ascending to the tops of the towers, and completely filling, with its branches and foliage, the whole open space between them. Some small birds--quite a flock of them--were twittering and fluttering among the upper branches. We went upward, through two or three stories of dismal rooms,--among others, through the ancient guard-room,--till we came out on the roof of one of the towers, and had a very fine view of an amphitheatre of ridgy hills which shut in and seclude the castle and the town. The upper foliage was within our reach, close to the parapet of the tower; so we gathered a few twigs as memorials. The housekeeper told us that the yew-tree is supposed to be eight hundred years old, and, comparing it with other yews that I have seen, I should judge that it must measure its antiquity by centuries, at all events. It still seems to be in its prime. Along the base of the castle, on the opposite side to the entrance, flows a stream, sending up a pleasant murmur from among the trees. The housekeeper said it was not a stream, but only a "wash," whatever that may be; and I conjecture that it creates the motive-power of some factory-looking edifices, which we saw on our first arrival at Skipton. We now took our leave of the housekeeper, and came homeward to our inn, where I have written the foregoing pages by a bright fire; but I think I write better descriptions after letting the subject lie in my mind a day or two. It is too new to be properly dealt with immediately after coming from the scene. The castle is not at all crumbly, but in excellent repair, though so venerable. There are rooks cawing about the shapeless patches of their nests, in the tops of the trees. In the castle wall, as well as in the round towers of the gateway, there seem to be little tenements, perhaps inhabited by the servants and dependants of the family. They looked in very good order, with tokens of present domesticity about them. The whole of this old castle, indeed, was as neat as a new, small dwelling, in spite of an inevitable musty odor of antiquity. April 11th.--This morning we took a carriage and two horses, and set out for BOLTON PRIORY, a distance of about six miles. The morning was cool, with breezy clouds, intermingled with sunshine, and, on the whole, as good as are nine tenths of English mornings. J----- sat beside the driver, and S----- and I in the carriage, all closed but one window. As we drove through Skipton, the little town had a livelier aspect than yesterday when it wore its Good Friday's solemnity; but now its market-place was thronged, principally with butchers, displaying their meat under little movable pent-houses, and their customers. The English people really like to think and talk of butcher's meat, and gaze at it with delight; and they crowd through the avenues of the market-houses and stand enraptured round a dead ox. We passed along by the castle wall, and noticed the escutcheon of the Cliffords or the Thanets carved in stone over the portal, with the motto Desormais, the application of which I do not well see; these ancestral devices usually referring more to the past, than to the future. There is a large old church, just at the extremity of the village, and just below the castle, on the slope of the hill. The gray wall of the castle extends along the road a considerable distance, in good repair, with here and there a buttress, and the semicircular bulge of a tower. The scenery along the road was not particularly striking,--long slopes, descending from ridges; a generally hard outline of country, with not many trees, and those, as yet, destitute of foliage. It needs to be softened with a good deal of wood. There were stone farm-houses, looking ancient, and able to last till twice as old. Instead of the hedges, so universal in other parts of England, there were stone fences of good height and painful construction, made of small stones, which I suppose have been picked up out of the fields through hundreds of years. They reminded me of old Massachusetts, though very unlike our rude stone walls, which, nevertheless, last longer than anything else we build. Another New England feature was the little brooks, which here and there flowed across our road, rippling over the pebbles, clear and bright. I fancied, too, an intelligence and keenness in some of the Yorkshire physiognomies, akin to those characteristics in my countrymen's faces. We passed an ancient, many-gabled inn, large, low, and comfortable, bearing the name of the Devonshire House, as does our own hotel, for the Duke of Devonshire is a great proprietor in these parts. A mile or so beyond, we came to a gateway, broken through what, I believe, was an old wall of the Priory grounds; and here we alighted, leaving our driver to take the carriage to the inn. Passing through this hole in the wall, we saw the ruins of the Priory at the bottom of the beautiful valley about a quarter of a mile off; and, well as the monks knew how to choose the sites of their establishments, I think they never chose a better site than this,--in the green lap of protecting hills, beside a stream, and with peace and fertility looking down upon it on every side. The view down the valley is very fine, and, for my part, I am glad that some peaceable and comfort-loving people possessed these precincts for many hundred years, when nobody else knew how to appreciate peace and comfort. The old gateway tower, beneath which was formerly the arched entrance into the domain of the Priory, is now the central part of a hunting-seat of the Duke of Devonshire, and the edifice is completed by a wing of recent date on each side. A few hundred yards from this hunting-box are the remains of the Priory, consisting of the nave of the old church, which is still in good repair, and used as the worshipping-place of the neighborhood (being a perpetual curacy of the parish of Skipton), and the old ruined choir, roofless, with broken arches, ivy-grown, but not so rich and rare a ruin as either Melrose, Netley, or Furness. Its situation makes its charm. It stands near the river Wharfe,--a broad and rapid stream, which hurries along between high banks, with a sound which the monks must have found congenial to their slumberous moods. It is a good river for trout, too; and I saw two or three anglers, with their rods and baskets, passing through the ruins towards its shore. It was in this river Wharfe that the boy of Egremont was drowned, at the Strid, a mile or two higher up the stream. In the first place, we rambled round the exterior of the ruins; but, as I have said, they are rather bare and meagre in comparison with other abbeys, and I am not sure that the especial care and neatness with which they are preserved does not lessen their effect on the beholder. Neglect, wildness, crumbling walls, the climbing and conquering ivy; masses of stone lying where they fell; trees of old date, growing where the pillars of the aisles used to stand,--these are the best points of ruined abbeys. But, everything here is kept with such trimness that it gives you the idea of a petrifaction. Decay is no longer triumphant; the Duke of Devonshire has got the better of it. The grounds around the church and the ruins are still used for burial, and there are several flat tombstones and altar tombs, with crosiers engraved or carved upon them, which at first I took to be the memorials of bishops or abbots, and wondered that the sculpture should still be so distinct. On one, however, I read the date 1850 and the name of a layman; for the tombstones were all modern, the humid English atmosphere giving them their mossy look of antiquity, and the crosier had been assumed only as a pretty device. Close beside the ruins there is a large, old stone farm-house, which must have been built on the site of a part of the Priory,--the cells, dormitories, refectory, and other portions pertaining to the monks' daily life, I suppose, and built, no doubt, with the sacred stones. I should imagine it would be a haunted house, swarming with cowled spectres. We wished to see the interior of the church, and procured a guide from this farm-house,--the sexton, probably,--a gray-haired, ruddy, cheery, and intelligent man, of familiar though respectful address. The entrance of the church was undergoing improvement, under the last of the abbots, when the Reformation occurred; and it has ever remained in an unfinished state, till now it is mossy with age, and has a beautiful tuft of wall-flowers growing on a ledge over the Gothic arch of the doorway. The body of the church is of much anterior date, though the oaken roof is supposed to have been renewed in Henry VIII's time. This, as I said before, was the nave of the old Abbey church, and has a one-sided and unbalanced aspect, there being only a single aisle, with its row of sturdy pillars. The pavement is covered with pews of old oak, very homely and unornamental; on the side opposite the aisle there are two or three windows of modern stained glass, somewhat gaudy and impertinent; there are likewise some hatchments and escutcheons over the altar and elsewhere. On the whole, it is not an impressive interior; but, at any rate, it had the true musty odor which I never conceived of till I came to England,--the odor of dead men's decay, garnered up and shut in, and kept from generation to generation; not disgusting nor sickening, because it is so old, and of the past. On one side of the altar there was a small square chapel,--or what had once been a chapel, separated from the chancel by a partition about a man's height, if I remember aright. Our guide led us into it, and observed that some years ago the pavement had been taken up in this spot, for burial purposes; but it was found that it had already been used in that way, and that the corpses had been buried upright. Inquiring further, I found that it was the Clapham family, and another that was called Morley, that were so buried; and then it occurred to me that this was the vault Wordsworth refers to in one of his poems,--the burial-place of the Claphams and Mauleverers, whose skeletons, for aught I know, were even then standing upright under our feet. It is but a narrow place, perhaps a square of ten feet. We saw little or nothing else that was memorable, unless it were the signature of Queen Adelaide in a visitors' book. On our way back to Skipton it rained and hailed, but the sun again shone out before we arrived. We took the train for Leeds at half past ten, and arrived there in the afternoon, passing the ruined Abbey of Kirkstall on our way. The ruins looked more interesting than those of Bolton, though not so delightfully situated, and now in the close vicinity of manufactories, and only two or three miles from Leeds. We took a dish of soup, and spent a miserable hour in and about the railway station of Leeds; whence we departed at four, and reached YORK in an hour or two. We put up at the Black Swan, and before tea went out, on the cool bright edge of evening, to get a glimpse of the cathedral, which impressed me more grandly than when I first saw it, nearly a year ago. Indeed, almost any object gains upon me at the second sight. I have spent the evening in writing up my journal,--an act of real virtue. After walking round the cathedral, we went up a narrow and crooked street, very old and shabby, but with an antique house projecting as much as a yard over the pavement on one side,--a timber house it seemed to be, plastered over and stained yellow or buff. There was no external door, affording entrance into this edifice; but about midway of its front we came to a low, Gothic, stone archway, passing right through the house; and as it looked much time-worn, and was sculptured with untraceable devices, we went through. There was an exceedingly antique, battered, and shattered pair of oaken leaves, which used doubtless to shut up the passage in former times, and keep it secure; but for the last centuries, probably, there has been free ingress and egress. Indeed, the portal arch may never have been closed since the Reformation. Within, we found a quadrangle, of which the house upon the street formed one side, the others being composed of ancient houses, with gables in a row, all looking upon the paved quadrangle, through quaint windows of various fashion. An elderly, neat, pleasant-looking woman now came in beneath the arch, and as she had a look of being acquainted here, we asked her what the place was; and she told us, that in the old Popish times the prebends of the cathedral used to live here, to keep them from doing mischief in the town. The establishment, she said, was now called "The College," and was let in rooms and small tenements to poor people. On consulting the York Guide, I find that her account was pretty correct; the house having been founded in Henry VI.'s time, and called St. William's College, the statue of the patron saint being sculptured over the arch. It was intended for the residence of the parsons and priests of the cathedral, who had formerly caused troubles and scandals by living in the town. We returned to the front of the cathedral on our way homeward, and an old man stopped us, to inquire if we had ever seen the Fiddler of York. We answered in the negative, and said that we had not time to see him now; but the old gentleman pointed up to the highest pinnacle of the southern front, where stood the Fiddler of York, one of those Gothic quaintnesses which blotch the grandeur and solemnity of this and other cathedrals. April 12th.--This morning was bleak and most ungenial; a chilly sunshine, a piercing wind, a prevalence of watery cloud,--April weather, without the tenderness that ought to be half revealed in it. This is EASTER SUNDAY, and service at the cathedral commenced at half past ten; so we set out betimes and found admittance into the vast nave, and thence into the choir. An attendant ushered S----- and J----- to a seat at a distance from me, and then gave me a place in one of the stalls where the monks used to sit or kneel while chanting the services. I think these stalls are now appropriated to the prebends. They are of carved oaken wood, much less elaborate and wonderfully wrought than those of Chester Cathedral, where all was done with head and heart, each a separate device, instead of cut, by machinery like this. The whole effect of this carved work, however, lining the choir with its light tracery and pinnacles, is very fine. The whole choir, from the roof downward, except the old stones of the outer walls, is of modern renovation, it being but a few years since this part of the cathedral was destroyed by fire. The arches and pillars and lofty roof, however, have been well restored; and there was a vast east window, full of painted glass, which, if it be modern, is wonderfully chaste and Gothic-like. All the other windows have painted glass, which does not flare and glare as if newly painted. But the light, whitewashed aspect of the general interior of the choir has a cold and dreary effect. There is an enormous organ, all clad in rich oaken carving, of similar pattern to that of the stalls. It was communion day, and near the high altar, within a screen, I saw the glistening of the gold vessels wherewith the services were to be performed. The choir was respectably filled with a pretty numerous congregation, among whom I saw some officers in full dress, with their swords by their sides, and one, old white-bearded warrior, who sat near me, seemed very devout at his religious exercises. In front of me and on the corresponding benches, on the other side of the choir, sat two rows of white-robed choristers, twenty in all, and these, with some women; performed the vocal part of the music. It is not good to see musicians, for they are sometimes coarse and vulgar people, and so the auditor loses faith in any fine and spiritual tones that they may breathe forth. The services of Easter Sunday comprehend more than the ordinary quantity of singing and chanting; at all events, nearly an hour and a half were thus employed, with some intermixture of prayers and reading of Scriptures; and, being almost congealed with cold, I thought it would never come to an end. The spirit of my Puritan ancestors was mighty within me, and I did not wonder at their being out of patience with all this mummery, which seemed to me worse than papistry because it was a corruption of it. At last a canon gave out the text, and preached a sermon about twenty minutes long,--the coldest, driest, most superficial rubbish; for this gorgeous setting of the magnificent cathedral, the elaborate music, and the rich ceremonies seem inevitably to take the life out of the sermon, which, to be anything, must be all. The Puritans showed their strength of mind and heart by preferring a sermon an hour and a half long, into which the preacher put his whole soul, and lopping away all these externals, into which religious life had first leafed and flowered, and then petrified. After the service, while waiting for my wife in the nave, I was accosted by a young gentleman who seemed to be an American, and whom I have certainly seen before, but whose name I could not recollect. This, he said, was his first visit to York, and he was evidently inclined to join me in viewing the curiosities of the place, but, not knowing his name, I could not introduce him to my wife, and so made a parting salute. After dinner, we set forth and took a promenade along the wall, and a ramble through some of the crooked streets, noting the old, jutting-storied houses, story above story, and the old churches, gnawed like a bone by the tooth of Time, till we came suddenly to the Black Swan before we expected it. . . . I rather fancy that I must have observed most of the external peculiarities at my former visit, and therefore need not make another record of them in this journal. In the course of our walk we saw a procession of about fifty charity-school boys, in flat caps, each with bands under his chin, and a green collar to his coat; all looking unjoyous, and as if they had no home nor parents' love. They turned into a gateway, which closed behind them; and as the adjoining edifice seemed to be a public institution,--at least, not private,--we asked what it was, and found it to be a hospital or residence for Old Maiden ladies, founded by a gentlewoman of York; I know not whether she herself is of the sisterhood. It must be a very singular institution, and worthy of intimate study, if it were possible to make one's way within the portal. After writing the above, J----- and I went out for another ramble before tea; and, taking a new course, we came to a grated iron fence and gateway, through which we could see the ruins of St. Mary's Abbey. They are very extensive, and situated quite in the midst of the city, and the wall and then a tower of the Abbey seem to border more than one of the streets. Our walk was interesting, as it brought us unexpectedly upon several relics of antiquity,--a loop-holed and battlemented gateway; and at various points fragments of the old Gothic stone-work, built in among more recent edifices, which themselves were old; grimness intermixed with quaintness and grotesqueness; old fragments of religious or warlike architecture mingled with queer domestic structures,--the general effect sombre, sordid, and grimy; but yet with a fascination that makes us fain to linger about such scenes, and come to them again. We passed round the cathedral, and saw jackdaws fluttering round the pinnacles, while the bells chimed the quarters, and little children played on the steps under the grand arch of the entrance. It is very stately, very beautiful, this minster; and doubtless would be very satisfactory, could I only know it long and well enough,--so rich as its front is, even with almost all the niches empty of their statues; not stern in its effect, which I suppose must be owing to the elaborate detail with which its great surface is wrought all over, like the chasing of a lady's jewel-box, and yet so grand! There is a dwelling-house on one side, gray with antiquity, which has apparently grown out of it like an excrescence; and though a good-sized edifice, yet the cathedral is so large that its vastness is not in the least deformed by it. If it be a dwelling-house, I suppose it is inhabited by the person who takes care of the cathedral. This morning, while listening to the tedious chanting and lukewarm sermon, I depreciated the whole affair, cathedral and all; but now I do more justice, at least to the latter, and am only sorry that its noble echoes must follow at every syllable, and re-reverberate at the commas and semicolons, such poor discourses as the canon's. But, after all, it was the Puritans who made the sermon of such importance in religious worship as we New-Englanders now consider it; and we are absurd in considering this magnificent church and all those embroidered ceremonies only in reference to it. Before going back to the hotel, I went again up the narrow and twisted passage of College Street, to take another glance at St. William's College. I underestimated the projection of the front over the street; it is considerably more than three feet, and is about eight or nine feet above the pavement. The little statue of St. William is an alto-relievo over the arched entrance, and has an escutcheon of arms on each side, all much defaced. In the interior of the quadrangle, the houses have not gables nor peaked fronts, but have peaked windows on the red-tiled roofs. The doorway, opposite the entrance-arch, is rather stately; and on one side is a large, projecting window, which is said to belong to the room where the printing-press of Charles I. was established in the days of the Parliament. THE MINSTER. Monday, April 13th.--This morning was chill, and, worse, it was showery, so that our purposes to see York were much thwarted. At about ten o'clock, however, we took a cab, and drove to the cathedral, where we arrived while service was going on in the choir, and ropes were put up as barriers between us and the nave; so that we were limited to the south transept, and a part of one of the aisles of the choir. It was dismally cold. We crept cheerlessly about within our narrow precincts (narrow, that is to say, in proportion to the vast length and breadth of the cathedral), gazing up into the hollow height of the central tower, and looking at a monumental brass, fastened against one of the pillars, representing a beruffed lady of the Tudor times, and at the canopied tomb of Archbishop de Grey, who ruled over the diocese in the thirteenth century. Then we went into the side aisle of the choir, where there were one or two modern monuments; and I was appalled to find that a sermon was being preached by the ecclesiastic of the day, nor were there any signs of an imminent termination. I am not aware that there was much pith in the discourse, but there was certainly a good deal of labor and earnestness in the preacher's mode of delivery; although, when he came to a close, it appeared that the audience was not more than half a dozen people. The barriers being now withdrawn, we walked adown the length of the nave, which did not seem to me so dim and vast as the recollection which I have had of it since my visit of a year ago. But my pre-imaginations and my memories are both apt to play me false with all admirable things, and so create disappointments for me, while perhaps the thing itself is really far better than I imagine or remember it. We engaged an old man, one of the attendants pertaining to the cathedral, to be our guide, and he showed us first the stone screen in front of the choir, with its sculptured kings of England; and then the tombs in the north transept,-- one of a modern archbishop, and one of an ancient one, behind which the insane person who set fire to the church a few years ago hid himself at nightfall. Then our guide unlocked a side door, and led us into the chapter-house,--an octagonal hall, with a vaulted roof, a tessellated floor, and seven arched windows of old painted glass, the richest that I ever saw or imagined, each looking like an inestimable treasury of precious stories, with a gleam and glow even in the sullen light of this gray morning. What would they be with the sun shining through them! With all their brilliancy, moreover, they were as soft as rose-leaves. I never saw any piece of human architecture so beautiful as this chapter-house; at least, I thought so while I was looking at it, and think so still; and it owed its beauty in very great measure to the painted windows: I remember looking at these windows from the outside yesterday, and seeing nothing but an opaque old crust of conglomerated panes of glass; but now that gloomy mystery was radiantly solved. Returning into the body of the cathedral, we next entered the choir, where, instead of the crimson cushions and draperies which we had seen yesterday, we found everything folded in black. It was a token of mourning for one of the canons, who died on Saturday night. The great east window, seventy-five feet high, and full of old painted glass in many exquisitely wrought and imagined Scriptural designs, is considered the most splendid object in the Minster. It is a pity that it is partially hidden from view, even in the choir, by a screen before the high altar; but indeed, the Gothic architects seem first to imagine beautiful and noble things, and then to consider how they may best be partially screened from sight. A certain secrecy and twilight effect belong to their plan. We next went round the side aisles of the choir, which contain many interesting monuments of prelates, and a specimen of the very common Elizabethan design of an old gentleman in a double ruff and trunk breeches, with one of his two wives on either side of him, all kneeling in prayer; and their conjoint children, in two rows, kneeling in the lower compartments of the tomb. We saw, too, a rich marble monument of one of the Strafford family, and the tombstone of the famous Earl himself,--a flat tombstone in the pavement of the aisle, covering the vault where he was buried, and with four iron rings fastened into the four corners of the stone whereby to lift it. And now the guide led us into the vestry, where there was a good fire burning in the grate, and it really thawed my heart, which was congealed with the dismal chill of the cathedral. Here we saw a good many curious things,--for instance, two wooden figures in knightly armor, which had stood sentinels beside the ancient clock before it was replaced by a modern one; and, opening a closet, the guide produced an old iron helmet, which had been found in a tomb where a knight had been buried in his armor; and three gold rings and one brass one, taken out of the graves, and off the finger-bones of mediaeval archbishops,--one of them with a ruby set in it; and two silver-gilt chalices, also treasures of the tombs; and a wooden head, carved in human likeness, and painted to the life, likewise taken from a grave where an archbishop was supposed to have been buried. They found no veritable skull nor bones, but only this block-head, as if Death had betrayed the secret of what the poor prelate really was. We saw, too, a canopy of cloth, wrought with gold threads, which had been borne over the head of King James I., when he came to York, on his way to receive the English Crown. There were also some old brass dishes, In which pence used to be collected in monkish times. Over the door of this vestry were hung two banners of a Yorkshire regiment, tattered in the Peninsular wars, and inscribed with the names of the battles through which they had been borne triumphantly; and Waterloo was among them. The vestry, I think, occupies that excrescential edifice which I noticed yesterday as having grown out of the cathedral. After looking at these things, we went down into the crypts, under the choir. These were very interesting, as far as we could see them; being more antique than anything above ground, but as dark as any cellar. There is here, in the midst of these sepulchral crypts, a spring of water, said to be very pure and delicious, owing to the limestone through which the rain that feeds its source is filtered. Near it is a stone trough, in which the monks used to wash their hands. I do not remember anything more that we saw at the cathedral, and at noon we returned to the Black Swan. The rain still continued, so that S----- could not share in any more of my rambles, but J----- and I went out again, and discovered the Guildhall. It is a very ancient edifice of Richard II.'s time, and has a statue over the entrance which looks time-gnawed enough to be of coeval antiquity, although in reality it is only a representation of George II. in his royal robes. We went in, and found ourselves in a large and lofty hall, with an oaken roof and a stone pavement, and the farther end was partitioned off as a court of justice. In that portion of the hall the Judge was on the bench, and a trial was going forward; but in the hither portion a mob of people, with their hats on, were lounging and talking, and enjoying the warmth of the stoves. The window over the judgment-seat had painted glass in it, and so, I think, had some of the hall windows. At the end of the hall hung a great picture of Paul defending himself before Agrippa, where the Apostle looked like an athlete, and had a remarkably bushy black beard. Between two of the windows hung an Indian bell from Burmah, ponderously thick and massive. Both the picture and the bell had been presented to the city as tokens of affectionate remembrance by its children; and it is pleasant to think that such failings exist in these old stable communities, and that there are permanent localities where such gifts can be kept from generation to generation. At four o'clock we left the city of York, still in a pouring rain. The Black Swan, where we had been staying, is a good specimen of the old English inn, sombre, quiet, with dark staircases, dingy rooms, curtained beds,--all the possibilities of a comfortable life and good English fare, in a fashion which cannot have been much altered for half a century. It is very homelike when one has one's family about him, but must be prodigiously stupid for a solitary man. We took the train for Manchester, over pretty much the same route that I travelled last year. Many of the higher hills in Yorkshire were white with snow, which, in our lower region, softened into rain; but as we approached Manchester, the western sky reddened, and gave promise of better weather. We arrived at nearly eight o'clock, and put up at the Palatine Hotel. In the evening I scrawled away at my journal till past ten o'clock; for I have really made it a matter of conscience to keep a tolerably full record of my travels, though conscious that everything good escapes in the process. In the morning we went out and visited the MANCHESTER CATHEDRAL, a particularly black and grimy edifice, containing some genuine old wood carvings within the choir. We stayed a good while, in order to see some people married. One couple, with their groomsman and bride's-maid, were sitting within the choir; but when the clergyman was robed and ready, there entered five other couples, each attended by groomsman and bride's-maid. They all were of the lower orders; one or two respectably dressed, but most of them poverty-stricken,--the men in their ordinary loafer's or laborer's attire, the women with their poor, shabby shawls drawn closely about them; faded untimely, wrinkled with penury and care; nothing fresh, virgin-like, or hopeful about them; joining themselves to their mates with the idea of making their own misery less intolerable by adding another's to it. All the six couple stood up in a row before the altar, with the groomsmen and bride's-maids in a row behind them; and the clergyman proceeded to marry them in such a way that it almost seemed to make every man and woman the husband and wife of every other. However, there were some small portions of the service directed towards each separate couple; and they appeared to assort themselves in their own fashion afterwards, each one saluting his bride with a kiss. The clergyman, the sexton, and the clerk all seemed to find something funny in this affair; and the woman who admitted us into the church smiled too, when she told us that a wedding-party was waiting to be married. But I think it was the saddest thing we have seen since leaving home; though funny enough if one likes to look at it from a ludicrous point of view. This mob of poor marriages was caused by the fact that no marriage fee is paid during Easter. This ended the memorable things of our tour; for my wife and J----- left Manchester for Southport, and I for Liverpool, before noon. April 19th.--On the 15th, having been invited to attend at the laying of the corner-stone of MR. BROWNE'S FREE LIBRARY, I went to the Town Hall, according to the programme, at eleven o'clock. There was already a large number of people (invited guests, members of the Historical Society, and other local associations) assembled in the great hall-room, and one of these was delivering an address to Mr. Browne as I entered. Approaching the outer edge of the circle, I was met and cordially greeted by Monckton Milnes, whom I like, and who always reminds me of Longfellow, though his physical man is more massive. While we were talking together, a young man approached him with a pretty little expression of surprise and pleasure at seeing him there. He had a slightly affected or made-up manner, and was rather a comely person. Mr. Milnes introduced him to me as Lord ------. Hereupon, of course, I observed him more closely; and I must say that I was not long in discovering a gentle dignity and half-imperceptible reserve in his manner; but still my first impression was quite as real as my second one. He occupies, I suppose, the foremost position among the young men of England, and has the fairest prospects of a high course before him; nevertheless, he did not impress me as possessing the native qualities that could entitle him to a high public career. He has adopted public life as his hereditary profession, and makes the very utmost of all his abilities, cultivating himself to a determined end, knowing that he shall have every advantage towards attaining his object. His natural disadvantages must have been, in some respects, unusually great; his voice, for instance, is not strong, and appeared to me to have a more positive defect than mere weakness. Doubtless he has struggled manfully against this defect; and it made me feel a certain sympathy, and, indeed, a friendliness, for which he would not at all have thanked me, had he known it. I felt, in his person, what a burden it is upon human shoulders, the necessity of keeping up the fame and historical importance of an illustrious house; at least, when the heir to its honors has sufficient intellect and sensibility to feel the claim that his country and his ancestors and his posterity all have upon him. Lord ------ is fully capable of feeling these claims; but I would not care, methinks, to take his position, unless I could have considerably more than his strength. In a little while we formed ourselves into a procession, four in a row, and set forth from the Town Hall, through James Street, Lord Street, Lime Street, all the way through a line of policemen and a throng of people; and all the windows were alive with heads, and I never before was so conscious of a great mass of humanity, though perhaps I may often have seen as great a crowd. But a procession is the best point of view from which to see the crowd that collects together. The day, too, was very fine, even sunshiny, and the streets dry,--a blessing which cannot be overestimated; for we should have been in a strange trim for the banquet, had we been compelled to wade through the ordinary mud of Liverpool. The procession itself could not have been a very striking object. In America, it would have had a hundred picturesque and perhaps ludicrous features,--the symbols of the different trades, banners with strange devices, flower-shows, children, volunteer soldiers, cavalcades, and every suitable and unsuitable contrivance; but we were merely a trail of ordinary-looking individuals, in great-coats, and with precautionary umbrellas. The only characteristic or professional costume, as far as I noticed, was that of the Bishop of Chester, in his flat cap and black-silk gown; and that of Sir Henry Smith, the General of the District, in full uniform, with a star and half a dozen medals on his breast. Mr. Browne himself, the hero of the day, was the plainest and simplest man of all,--an exceedingly unpretending gentleman in black; small, white-haired, pale, quiet, and respectable. I rather wondered why he chose to be the centre of all this ceremony; for he did not seem either particularly to enjoy it, or to be at all incommoded by it, as a more nervous and susceptible man might have been. The site of the projected edifice is on one of the streets bordering on St. George's Hall; and when we came within the enclosure, the corner-stone, a large square of red freestone, was already suspended over its destined place. It has a brass plate let into it, with an inscription, which will perhaps not be seen again till the present English type has grown as antique as black-letter is now. Two or three photographs were now taken of the site, the corner-stone, Mr. Browne, the distinguished guests, and the crowd at large; then ensued a prayer from the Bishop of Chester, and speeches from Mr. Holme, Mr. Browne, Lord ------, Sir John Pakington, Sir Henry Smith, and as many others as there was time for. Lord ------ acquitted himself very creditably, though brought out unexpectedly, and with evident reluctance. I am convinced that men, liable to be called on to address the public, keep a constant supply of commonplaces in their minds, which, with little variation, can be adapted to one subject about as well as to another; and thus they are always ready to do well enough, though seldom to do particularly well. From the scene of the corner-stone, we went to St. George's Hall, where a drawing-room and dressing-room had been prepared for the principal guests. Before the banquet, I had some conversation with Sir James Kay Shuttleworth, who had known Miss Bronte very intimately, and bore testimony to the wonderful fidelity of Mrs. Gaskell's life of her. He seemed to have had an affectionate regard for her, and said that her marriage promised to have been productive of great happiness; her husband being not a remarkable man, but with the merit of an exceeding love for her. Mr. Browne now took me up into the gallery, which by this time was full of ladies; and thence we had a fine view of the noble hall, with the tables laid, in readiness for the banquet. I cannot conceive of anything finer than this hall: it needs nothing but painted windows to make it perfect, and those I hope it may have one day or another. At two o'clock we sat down to the banquet, which hardly justified that name, being only a cold collation, though sufficiently splendid in its way. In truth, it would have been impossible to provide a hot dinner for nine hundred people in a place remote from kitchens. The principal table extended lengthwise of the hall, and was a little elevated above the other tables, which stretched across, about twenty in all. Before each guest, besides the bill of fare, was laid a programme of the expected toasts, among which appeared my own name, to be proposed by Mr. Monckton Milnes. These things do not trouble me quite as much as they used, though still it sufficed to prevent much of the enjoyment which I might have had if I could have felt myself merely a spectator. My left-hand neighbor was Colonel Campbell of the Artillery; my right-hand one was Mr. Picton, of the Library Committee; and I found them both companionable men, especially the Colonel, who had served in China and in the Crimea, and owned that he hated the French. We did not make a very long business of the eatables, and then came the usual toasts of ceremony, and afterwards those more peculiar to the occasion, one of the first of which was "The House of Stanley," to which Lord ------ responded. It was a noble subject, giving scope for as much eloquence as any man could have brought to bear upon it, and capable of being so wrought out as to develop and illustrate any sort of conservative or liberal tendencies which the speaker might entertain. There could not be a richer opportunity for reconciling and making friends betwixt the old system of society and the new; but Lord ------ did not seem to make anything of it. I remember nothing that he said excepting his statement that the family had been five hundred years connected with the town of Liverpool. I wish I could have responded to "The House of Stanley," and his Lordship could have spoken in my behalf. None of the speeches were remarkably good; the Bishop of Chester's perhaps the best, though he is but a little man in aspect, not at all filling up one's idea of a bishop, and the rest were on an indistinguishable level, though, being all practised speakers, they were less hum-y and ha-y than English orators ordinarily are. I was really tired to death before my own turn came, sitting all that time, as it were, on the scaffold, with the rope round my neck. At last Monckton Milnes was called up and made a speech, of which, to my dismay, I could hardly hear a single word, owing to his being at a considerable distance, on the other side of the chairman, and flinging his voice, which is a bass one, across the hall, instead of adown it, in my direction. I could not distinguish one word of any allusions to my works, nor even when he came to the toast, did I hear the terms in which he put it, nor whether I was toasted on my own basis, or as representing American literature, or as Consul of the United States. At all events, there was a vast deal of clamor; and uprose peers and bishop, general, mayor, knights and gentlemen, everybody in the hall greeting me with all the honors. I had uprisen, too, to commence my speech; but had to sit down again till matters grew more quiet, and then I got up, and proceeded to deliver myself with as much composure as I ever felt at my own fireside. It is very strange, this self-possession and clear-sightedness which I have experienced when standing before an audience, showing me my way through all the difficulties resulting from my not having heard Monckton Milnes's speech; and on since reading the latter, I do not see how I could have answered it better. My speech certainly was better cheered than any other; especially one passage, where I made a colossus of Mr. Browne, at which the audience grew so tumultuous in their applause that they drowned my figure of speech before it was half out of my mouth. After rising from table, Lord ------ and I talked about our respective oratorical performances; and he appeared to have a perception that he is not naturally gifted in this respect. I like Lord ------, and wish that it were possible that we might know one another better. If a nobleman has any true friend out of his own class, it ought to be a republican. Nothing further of interest happened at the banquet, and the next morning came out the newspapers with the reports of my speech, attributing to me a variety of forms of ragged nonsense, which, poor speaker as I am, I was quite incapable of uttering. May 10th.--The winter is over, but as yet we scarcely have what ought to be called spring; nothing but cold east-winds, accompanied with sunshine, however, as east-winds generally are in this country. All milder winds seem to bring rain. The grass has been green for a month,--indeed, it has never been entirely brown,--and now the trees and hedges are beginning to be in foliage. Weeks ago the daisies bloomed, even in the sandy grass-plot bordering on the promenade beneath our front windows; and in the progress of the daisy, and towards its consummation, I saw the propriety of Burns's epithet, "wee, modest, crimson-nipped flower,"--its little white petals in the bud being fringed all round with crimson, which fades into pure white when the flower blooms. At the beginning of this month I saw fruit-trees in blossom, stretched out flat against stone walls, reminding me of a dead bird nailed against the side of a barn. But it has been a backward and dreary spring; and I think Southport, in the course of it, has lost its advantage over the rest of the Liverpool neighborhood in point of milder atmosphere. The east-wind feels even rawer here than in the city. Nevertheless, the columns, of the Southport Visitor begin to be well replenished with the names of guests, and the town is assuming its aspect of summer life. To say the truth, except where cultivation has done its utmost, there is very little difference between winter and summer in the mere material aspect of Southport; there being nothing but a waste of sand intermixed with plashy pools to seaward, and a desert of sand-hillocks on the land side. But now the brown, weather-hardened donkey-women haunt people that stray along the reaches, and delicate persons face the cold, rasping, ill-tempered blast on the promenade, and children dig in the sands; and, for want of something better, it seems to be determined that this shall be considered spring. Southport is as stupid a place as I ever lived in; and I cannot but bewail our ill fortune to have been compelled to spend so many months on these barren sands, when almost every other square yard of England contains something that would have been historically or poetically interesting. Our life here has been a blank. There was, indeed, a shipwreck, a month or two ago, when a large ship came ashore within a mile from our windows; the larger portion of the crew landing safely on the hither sands, while six or seven betook themselves to the boat, and were lost in attempting to gain the shore, on the other side of the Ribble. After a lapse of several weeks, two or three of their drowned bodies were found floating in this vicinity, and brought to Southport for burial; so that it really is not at all improbable that Milton's Lycidas floated hereabouts, in the rise and lapse of the tides, and that his bones may still be whitening among the sands. In the same gale that wrecked the above-mentioned vessel, a portion of a ship's mast was driven ashore, after evidently having been a very long time in and under water; for it was covered with great barnacles, and torn sea-weed, insomuch that there was scarcely a bare place along its whole length; clusters of sea-anemones were sticking to it, and I know not what strange marine productions besides. J----- at once recognized the sea-anemones, knowing them by his much reading of Gosse's Aquarium; and though they must now have been two or three days high and dry out of water, he made an extempore aquarium out of a bowl, and put in above a dozen of these strange creatures. In a little while they bloomed out wonderfully, and even seemed to produce young anemones; but, from some fault in his management, they afterwards grew sickly and died. S----- thinks that the old storm-shattered mast, so studded with the growth of the ocean depths, is a relic of the Spanish Armada which strewed its wrecks along all the shores of England; but I hardly think it would have taken three hundred years to produce this crop of barnacles and sea-anemones. A single summer might probably have done it. Yesterday we all of us except R----- went to Liverpool to see the performances of an American circus company. I had previously been, a day or two before, with J-----, and had been happy to perceive that the fact of its being an American establishment really induced some slight swelling of the heart within me. It is ridiculous enough, to be sure, but I like to find myself not wholly destitute of this noble weakness, patriotism. As for the circus, I never was fond of that species of entertainment, nor do I find in this one the flash and glitter and whirl which I remember in other American exhibitions. [Here follow the visits to Lincoln and Boston, printed in Our Old Home. --ED.] May 27th.--We left Boston by railway at noon, and arrived in PETERBOROUGH in about an hour and a quarter, and have put up at the Railway Hotel. After dinner we walked into the town to see THE CATHEDRAL, of the towers and arches of which we had already had a glimpse from our parlor window. Our journey from Boston hitherward was through a perfectly level country,--the fens of Lincolnshire,--green, green, and nothing else, with old villages and farm-houses and old church-towers; very pleasant and rather wearisomely monotonous. To return to Peterborough. It is a town of ancient aspect; and we passed, on our way towards the market-place, a very ancient-looking church, with a very far projecting porch, opening in front and on each side through arches of broad sweep. The street by which we approached from our hotel led us into the market-place, which had what looked like an old Guildhall on one side. On the opposite side, above the houses, appeared the towers of the cathedral, and a street leads from the market-place to its front, through an arched gateway, which used to be the external entrance to the abbey, I suppose, of which the cathedral was formerly the church. The front of the cathedral is very striking, and unlike any other that I have seen; being formed by three lofty and majestic arches in a row, with three gable peaks above them, forming a sort of colonnade, within which is the western entrance of the nave. The towers are massive, but low in proportion to their bulk. There are no spires, but pinnacles and statues, and all the rich detail of Gothic architecture, the whole of a venerable gray line. It is in perfect repair, and has not suffered externally, except by the loss of multitudes of statues, gargoyles, and miscellaneous eccentricities of sculpture, which used to smile, frown, laugh, and weep over the faces of these old fabrics. We entered through a side portal, and sat down on a bench in the nave, and kept ourselves quiet; for the organ was sounding, and the choristers were chanting in the choir. The nave and transepts are very noble, with clustered pillars and Norman arches, and a great height under the central tower; the whole, however, being covered with plaster and whitewash, except the roof, which is of painted oak. This latter adornment has the merit, I believe, of being veritably ancient; but certainly I should prefer the oak of its native hue, for the effect of the paint is to make it appear as if the ceiling were covered with imitation mosaic-work or an oil-cloth carpet. After sitting awhile, we were invited by a verger, who came from within the screen, to enter the choir and hear the rest of the service. We found the choristers there in their white garments, and an audience of half a dozen people, and had time to look at the interior of the choir. All the carved wood-work of the tabernacle, the Bishop's throne, the prebends' stalls, and whatever else, is modern; for this cathedral seems to have suffered wofully from Cromwell's soldiers, who hacked at the old oak, and hammered and pounded upon the marble tombs, till nothing of the first and very few of the latter remain. It is wonderful how suddenly the English people lost their sense of the sanctity of all manner of externals in religion, without losing their religion too. The French, in their Revolution, underwent as sudden a change; but they became pagans and atheists, and threw away the substance with the shadow. I suspect that the interior arrangement of the choir and the chancel has been greatly modernized; for it is quite unlike anything that I have seen elsewhere. Instead of one vast eastern window, there are rows of windows lighting the Lady Chapel, and seen through rows of arches in the screen of the chancel; the effect being, whoever is to have the credit of it, very rich and beautiful. There is, I think, no stained glass in the windows of the nave, though in the windows of the chancel there is some of recent date, and from fragments of veritable antique. The effect of the whole interior is grand, expansive, and both ponderous and airy; not dim, mysterious, and involved, as Gothic interiors often are, the roundness and openness of the arches being opposed to this latter effect. When the chanting came to a close, one verger took his stand at the entrance of the choir, and another stood farther up the aisle, and then the door of a stall opened, and forth came a clerical dignity of much breadth and substance, aged and infirm, and was ushered out of the choir with a great deal of ceremony. We took him for the bishop, but he proved to be only a canon. We now engaged an attendant to show us through the Lady Chapel and the other penetralia, which it did not take him long to accomplish. One of the first things he showed us was the tombstone, in the pavement of the southern aisle, beneath which Mary, Queen of Scots, had been originally buried, and where she lay for a quarter of a century, till borne to her present resting-place in Westminster Abbey. It is a plain marble slab, with no inscription. Near this, there was a Saxon monument of the date 870, with sculpture in relief upon it,--the memorial of an Abbot Hedda, who was killed by the Danes when they destroyed the monastery that preceded the abbey and church. I remember, likewise, the recumbent figure of the prelate, whose face has been quite obliterated by Puritanic violence; and I think that there is not a single tomb older than the parliamentary wars, which has not been in like manner battered and shattered, except the Saxon abbot's just mentioned. The most pretentious monument remaining is that of a Mr. Deacon, a gentleman of George I.'s time, in wig and breeches, leaning on his elbow, and resting one hand upon a skull. In the north aisle, precisely opposite to that of Queen Mary, the attendant pointed out to us the slab beneath which lie the ashes of Catharine of Aragon, the divorced queen of Henry VIII. In the nave there was an ancient font, a venerable and beautiful relic, which has been repaired not long ago, but in such a way as not to lessen its individuality. This sacred vessel suffered especial indignity from Cromwell's soldiers; insomuch that if anything could possibly destroy its sanctity, they would have effected that bad end. On the eastern wall of the nave, and near the entrance, hangs the picture of old Scarlet, the sexton who buried both Mary of Scotland and Catharine of Aragon, and not only these two queens, but everybody else in Peterborough, twice over. I think one feels a sort of enmity and spite against these grave-diggers, who live so long, and seem to contract a kindred and partnership with Death, being boon companions with him, and taking his part against mankind. In a chapel or some side apartment, there were two pieces of tapestry wretchedly faded, the handiwork of two nuns, and copied from two of Raphael's cartoons. We now emerged from the cathedral, and walked round its exterior, admiring it to our utmost capacity, and all the more because we had not heard of it beforehand, and expected to see nothing so huge, majestic, grand, and gray. And of all the lovely closes that I ever beheld, that of Peterborough Cathedral is to me the most delightful; so quiet it is, so solemnly and nobly cheerful, so verdant, so sweetly shadowed, and so presided over by the stately minster, and surrounded by ancient and comely habitations of Christian men. The most enchanting place, the most enviable as a residence in all this world, seemed to me that of the Bishop's secretary, standing in the rear of the cathedral, and bordering on the churchyard; so that you pass through hallowed precincts in order to come at it, and find it a Paradise, the holier and sweeter for the dead men who sleep so near. We looked through the gateway into the lawn, which really seemed hardly to belong to this world, so bright and soft the sunshine was, so fresh the grass, so lovely the trees, so trained and refined and mellowed down was the whole nature of the spot, and so shut in and guarded from all intrusion. It is in vain to write about it; nowhere but in England can there be such a spot, nor anywhere but in the close of Peterborough Cathedral. May 28th.--I walked up into the town this morning, and again visited the cathedral. On the way, I observed the Falcon Inn, a very old-fashioned hostelry, with a thatched roof, and what looked like the barn door or stable door in a side front. Very likely it may have been an inn ever since Queen Elizabeth's time. The Guildhall, as I supposed it to be, in the market-place, has a basement story entirely open on all sides, but from its upper story it communicates with a large old house in the rear. I have not seen an older-looking town than Peterborough; but there is little that is picturesque about it, except within the domain of the cathedral. It was very fortunate for the beauty and antiquity of these precincts, that Henry VIII. did not suffer the monkish edifices of the abbey to be overthrown and utterly destroyed, as was the case with so many abbeys, at the Reformation; but, converting the abbey church into a cathedral, he preserved much of the other arrangement of the buildings connected with it. And so it happens that to this day we have the massive and stately gateway, with its great pointed arch, still keeping out the world from those who have inherited the habitations of the old monks; for though the gate is never closed, one feels himself in a sacred seclusion the instant he passes under the archway. And everywhere there are old houses that appear to have been adapted from the monkish residences, or from their spacious offices, and made into convenient dwellings for ecclesiastics, or vergers, or great or small people connected with the cathedral; and with all modern comfort they still retain much of the quaintness of the olden time,--arches, even rows of arcades, pillars, walls, beautified with patches of Gothic sculpture, not wilfully put on by modern taste, but lingering from a long past; deep niches, let into the fronts of houses, and occupied by images of saints; a growth of ivy, overspreading walls, and just allowing the windows to peep through,--so that no novelty, nor anything of our hard, ugly, and actual life comes into these limits, through the defences of the gateway, without being mollified and modified. Except in some of the old colleges of Oxford, I have not seen any other place that impressed me in this way; and the grounds of Peterborough Cathedral have the advantage over even the Oxford colleges, insomuch that the life is here domestic,--that of the family, that of the affections,--a natural life, which one deludes himself with imagining may be made into something sweeter and purer in this beautiful spot than anywhere else. Doubtless the inhabitants find it a stupid and tiresome place enough, and get morbid and sulky, and heavy and obtuse of head and heart, with the monotony of their life. But still I must needs believe that a man with a full mind, and objects to employ his affection, ought to be very happy here. And perhaps the forms and appliances of human life are never fit to make people happy until they cease to be used for the purposes for which they were directly intended, and are taken, as it were, in a sidelong application. I mean that the monks, probably, never enjoyed their own edifices while they were a part of the actual life of the day, so much as these present inhabitants now enjoy them when a new use has grown up apart from the original one. Towards noon we all walked into the town again, and on our way went into the old church with the projecting portal, which I mentioned yesterday. A woman came hastening with the keys when she saw us looking up at the door. The interior had an exceeding musty odor, and was very ancient, with side aisles opening by a row of pointed arches into the nave, and a gallery of wood on each side, and built across the two rows of arches. It was paved with tombstones, and I suppose the dead people contributed to the musty odor. Very naked and unadorned it was, except with a few mural monuments of no great interest. We stayed but a little while, and amply rewarded the poor woman with a sixpence. Thence we proceeded to the cathedral, pausing by the way to look at the old Guildhall, which is no longer a Guildhall, but a butter-market; and then we bought some prints of exterior and interior views of the Minster, of which there are a great variety on note-paper, letter-sheets, large engravings, and lithographs. It is very beautiful; there seems to be nothing better than to say this over again. We found the doors most hospitably open, and every part entirely free to us,--a kindness and liberality which we have nowhere else experienced in England, whether as regards cathedrals or any other public buildings. My wife sat down to draw the font, and I walked through the Lady Chapel meanwhile, pausing over the empty bed of Queen Mary, and the grave of Queen Catharine, and looking at the rich and sumptuous roof, where a fountain, as it were, of groins of arches spouts from numberless pilasters, intersecting one another in glorious intricacy. Under the central tower, opening to either transept, to the nave, and to the choir, are four majestic arches, which I think must equal in height those of which I saw the ruins, and one, all but perfect, at Furness Abbey. They are about eighty feet high. I may as well give up Peterborough here, though I hate to leave it undescribed even to the tufts of yellow flowers, which grow on the projections high out of reach, where the winds have sown their seeds in soil made by the aged decay of the edifice. I could write a page, too, about the rooks or jackdaws that flit and clamor about the pinnacles, and dart in and out of the eyelet-holes, the piercings,--whatever they are called,--in the turrets and buttresses. On our way back to the hotel, J----- saw an advertisement of some knights in armor that were to tilt to-day; so he and I waited, and by and by a procession appeared, passing through the antique market-place, and in front of the abbey gateway, which might have befitted the same spot three hundred years ago. They were about twenty men-at-arms on horseback, with lances and banners. We were a little too near for the full enjoyment of the spectacle; for, though some of the armor was real, I could not help observing that other suits were made of silver paper or gold tinsel. A policeman (a queer anomaly in reference to such a mediaeval spectacle) told us that they were going to joust and run at the ring, in a field a little beyond the bridge. TO NOTTINGHAM. May 28th.--We left Peterborough this afternoon, and, however reluctant to leave the cathedral, we were glad to get away from the hotel; for, though outwardly pretentious, it is a wretched and uncomfortable place, with scanty table, poor attendance, and enormous charges. The first stage of our journey to-day was to Grantham, through a country the greater part of which was as level as the Lincolnshire landscapes have been, throughout our experience of them. We saw several old villages, gathered round their several churches; and one of these little communities, "Little Byforth," had a very primitive appearance,--a group of twenty or thirty dwellings of stone and thatch, without a house among them that could be so modern as a hundred years. It is a little wearisome to think of people living from century to century in the same spot, going in and out of the same doors, cultivating the same fields, meeting the same faces, and marrying one another over and over again; and going to the same church, and lying down in the same churchyard,--to appear again, and go through the same monotonous round in the next generation. At Grantham, our route branches off from the main line; and there was a delay of about an hour, during which we walked up into the town, to take a nearer view of a tall gray steeple which we saw from the railway station. The streets that led from the station were poor and commonplace; and, indeed, a railway seems to have the effect of making its own vicinity mean. We noticed nothing remarkable until we got to the marketplace, in the centre of which there is a cross, doubtless of great antiquity, though it is in too good condition not to have been recently repaired. It consists of an upright pillar, with a pedestal of half a dozen stone steps, which are worn hollow by the many feet that have scraped their hobnailed shoes upon them. Among these feet, it is highly probable, may have been those of Sir Isaac Newton, who was a scholar of the free school of this town; and when J----- scampered up the steps, we told him so. Visible from the market-place also stands the Angel Inn, which seems to be a wonderfully old inn, being adorned with gargoyles and other antique sculpture, with projecting windows, and an arched entrance, and presenting altogether a frontispiece of so much venerable state that I feel curious to know its history. Had I been aware that the chief hotel of Grantham were such a time-honored establishment, I should have arranged to pass the night there, especially as there were interesting objects enough in the town to occupy us pleasantly. The church--the steeple of which is seen over the market-place, but is removed from it by a street or two--is very fine; the tower and spire being adorned with arches, canopies, and niches,--twelve of the latter for the twelve Apostles, all of whom have now vanished,--and with fragments of other Gothic ornaments. The jackdaws have taken up their abodes in the crevices and crannies of the upper half of the steeple. We left Grantham at nearly seven, and reached NOTTINGHAM just before eight. The castle, situated on a high and precipitous rock, directly over the edge of which look the walls, was visible, as we drove from the station to our hotel. We followed the advice of a railway attendant in going first to the May Pole, which proved to be a commercial inn, with the air of a drinking-shop, in a by-alley; and, furthermore, they could not take us in. So we drove to the George the Fourth, which seems to be an excellent house; and here I have remained quiet, the size of the town discouraging me from going out in the twilight which was fast coming on after tea. These are glorious long days for travel; daylight fairly between four in the morning and nine at night, and a margin of twilight on either side. May 29th.--After breakfast, this morning, I wandered out and lost myself; but at last found the post-office, and a letter from Mr. Wilding, with some perplexing intelligence. Nottingham is an unlovely and uninteresting town. The castle I did not see; but, I happened upon a large and stately old church, almost cathedralic in its dimensions. On returning to the hotel, we deliberated on the mode of getting to Newstead Abbey, and we finally decided upon taking a fly, in which conveyance, accordingly, we set out before twelve. It was a slightly overcast day, about half intermixed of shade and sunshine, and rather cool, but not so cool that we could exactly wish it warmer. Our drive to Newstead lay through what was once a portion of Sherwood Forest, though all of it, I believe, has now become private property, and is converted into fertile fields, except where the owners of estates have set out plantations. We have now passed out of the fen-country, and the land rises and falls in gentle swells, presenting a pleasant, but not striking, character of scenery. I remember no remarkable object on the road,--here and there an old inn, a gentleman's seat of moderate pretension, a great deal of tall and continued hedge, a quiet English greenness and rurality, till, drawing near NEWSTEAD ABBEY, we began to see copious plantations, principally of firs, larches, and trees of that order, looking very sombre, though with some intermingling of lighter foliage. It was after one when we reached "The Hut,"--a small, modern wayside inn, almost directly across the road from the entrance-gate of Newstead. The post-boy calls the distance ten miles from Nottingham. He also averred that it was forbidden to drive visitors within the gates; so we left the fly at the inn, and set out to walk from the entrance to the house. There is no porter's lodge; and the grounds, in this outlying region, had not the appearance of being very primly kept, but were well wooded with evergreens, and much overgrown with ferns, serving for cover for hares, which scampered in and out of their hiding-places. The road went winding gently along, and, at the distance of nearly a mile, brought us to a second gate, through which we likewise passed, and walked onward a good way farther, seeing much wood, but as yet nothing of the Abbey. At last, through the trees, we caught a glimpse of its battlements, and saw, too, the gleam of water, and then appeared the Abbey's venerable front. It comprises the western wall of the church, which is all that remains of that fabric,--a great, central window, entirely empty, without tracery or mullions; the ivy clambering up on the inside of the wall, and hanging over in front. The front of the inhabited part of the house extends along on a line with this church wall, rather low, with battlements along its top, and all in good keeping with the ruinous remnant. We met a servant, who replied civilly to our inquiries about the mode of gaining admittance, and bade us ring a bell at the corner of the principal porch. We rang accordingly, and were forthwith admitted into a low, vaulted basement, ponderously wrought with intersecting arches, dark and rather chilly, just like what I remember to have seen at Battle Abbey; and, after waiting here a little while, a respectable elderly gentlewoman appeared, of whom we requested to be shown round the Abbey. She courteously acceded, first presenting us to a book in which to inscribe our names. I suppose ten thousand people, three fourths of them Americans, have written descriptions of Newstead Abbey; and none of them, so far as I have read, give any true idea of the place; neither will my description, if I write one. In fact, I forget very much that I saw, and especially in what order the objects came. In the basement was Byron's bath,--a dark and cold and cellarlike hole, which it must have required good courage to plunge into; in this region, too, or near it, was the chapel, which Colonel Wildman has decorously fitted up, and where service is now regularly performed, but which was used as a dog's kennel in Byron's time. After seeing this, we were led to Byron's own bedchamber, which remains just as when he slept in it,--the furniture and all the other arrangements being religiously preserved. It was in the plainest possible style, homely, indeed, and almost mean,--an ordinary paper-hanging, and everything so commonplace that it was only the deep embrasure of the window that made it look unlike a bedchamber in a middling-class lodging-house. It would have seemed difficult, beforehand, to fit up a room in that picturesque old edifice so that it should be utterly void of picturesqueness; but it was effected in this apartment, and I suppose it is a specimen of the way in which old mansions used to be robbed of their antique character, and adapted to modern tastes, before mediaeval antiquities came into fashion. Some prints of the Cambridge colleges, and other pictures indicating Byron's predilections at the time, and which he himself had hung there, were on the walls. This, the housekeeper told us, had been the Abbot's chamber, in the monastic time. Adjoining it is the haunted room, where the ghostly monk, whom Byron introduces into Don Juan, is said to have his lurking-place. It is fitted up in the same style as Byron's, and used to be occupied by his valet or page. No doubt in his Lordship's day, these were the only comfortable bedrooms in the Abbey; and by the housekeeper's account of what Colonel Wildman has done, it is to be inferred that the place must have been in a most wild, shaggy, tumble-down condition, inside and out, when he bought it. It is very different now. After showing us these two apartments of Byron and his servant, the housekeeper led us from one to another and another magnificent chamber fitted up in antique style, with oak panelling, and heavily carved bedsteads, of Queen Elizabeth's time, or of the Stuarts, hung with rich tapestry curtains of similar date, and with beautiful old cabinets of carved wood, sculptured in relief, or tortoise-shell and ivory. The very pictures and realities, these rooms were, of stately comfort; and they were called by the name of kings,--King Edward's, King Charles II's, King Henry VII's chamber; and they were hung with beautiful pictures, many of them portraits of these kings. The chimney-pieces were carved and emblazoned; and all, so far as I could judge, was in perfect keeping, so that if a prince or noble of three centuries ago were to come to lodge at Newstead Abbey, he would hardly know that he had strayed out of his own century. And yet he might have known by some token, for there are volumes of poetry and light literature on the tables in these royal bedchambers, and in that of Henry VII. I saw The House of the Seven Gables and The Scarlet Letter in Routledge's edition. Certainly the house is admirably fitted up; and there must have been something very excellent and comprehensive in the domestic arrangements of the monks, since they adapt themselves so well to a state of society entirely different from that in which they originated. The library is a very comfortable room, and provocative of studious ideas, though lounging and luxurious. It is long, and rather low, furnished with soft couches, and, on the whole, though a man might dream of study, I think he would be most likely to read nothing but novels there. I know not what the room was in monkish times, but it was waste and ruinous in Lord Byron's. Here, I think, the housekeeper unlocked a beautiful cabinet, and took out the famous skull which Lord Byron transformed into a drinking-goblet. It has a silver rim and stand, but still the ugly skull is bare and evident, and the naked inner bone receives the wine. I should think it would hold at least a quart,--enough to overpower any living head into which this death's-head should transfer its contents; and a man must be either very drunk or very thirsty, before he would taste wine out of such a goblet. I think Byron's freak was outdone by that of a cousin of my own, who once solemnly assured me that he had a spittoon made out of the skull of his enemy. The ancient coffin in which the goblet-skull was found was shown us in the basement of the Abbey. There was much more to see in the house than I had any previous notion of; but except the two chambers already noticed, nothing remained the least as Byron left it. Yes, another place there was,--his own small dining-room, with a table of moderate size, where, no doubt, the skull-goblet has often gone its rounds. Colonel Wildman's dining-room was once Byron's shooting-gallery, and the original refectory of the monks. It is now magnificently arranged, with a vaulted roof, a music-gallery at one end, suits of armor and weapons on the walls, and mailed arms extended, holding candelabras. There are one or two painted windows, commemorative of the Peninsular war, and the battles in which the Colonel and his two brothers fought,--for these Wildmen seem to have been mighty troopers, and Colonel Wildman is represented as a fierce-looking mustachioed hussar at two different ages. The housekeeper spoke of him affectionately, but says that he is now getting into years, and that they fancy him failing. He has no children. He appears to have been on good terms with Byron, and had the latter ever returned to England, he was under promise to make his first visit to his old home, and it was in such an expectation that Colonel Wildman had kept Byron's private apartments in the same condition in which he found them. Byron was informed of all the Colonel's fittings up and restorations, and when he introduces the Abbey in Don Juan, the poet describes it, not as he himself left it, but as Colonel Wildman has restored it. There is a beautiful drawing-room, and all these apartments are adorned with pictures, the collection being especially rich in portraits by Sir Peter Lely,--that of Nell Gwynn being one, who is one of the few beautiful women whom I have seen on canvas. We parted with the housekeeper, and I with a good many shillings, at the door by which we entered; and our next business was to see the private grounds and gardens. A little boy attended us through the first part of our progress, but soon appeared the veritable gardener,--a shrewd and sensible old man, who has been very many years on the place. There was nothing of special interest as concerning Byron until we entered the original old monkish garden, which is still laid out in the same fashion as the monks left it, with a large, oblong piece of water in the centre, and terraced banks rising at two or three different stages with perfect regularity around it; so that the sheet of water looks like the plate of an immense looking-glass, of which the terraces form the frame. It seems as if, were there any giant large enough, he might raise up this mirror and set it on end. In the monks' garden, there is a marble statue of Pan, which, the gardener told us, was brought by the "Wicked Lord" (great-uncle of Byron) from Italy, and was supposed by the country people to represent the Devil, and to be the object of his worship,--a natural idea enough, in view of his horns and cloven feet and tail, though this indicates, at all events, a very jolly devil. There is also a female statue, beautiful from the waist upward, but shaggy and cloven-footed below, and holding a little cloven-footed child by the hand. This, the old gardener assured us, was Pandora, wife of the above-mentioned Pan, with her son. Not far from this spot, we came to the tree on which Byron carved his own name and that of his sister Augusta. It is a tree of twin stems,--a birch-tree, I think,--growing up side by side. One of the stems still lives and flourishes, but that on which he carved the two names is quite dead, as if there had been something fatal in the inscription that has made it forever famous. The names are still very legible, although the letters had been closed up by the growth of the bark before the tree died. They must have been deeply cut at first. There are old yew-trees of unknown antiquity in this garden, and many other interesting things; and among them may be reckoned a fountain of very pure water, called the "Holy Well," of which we drank. There are several fountains, besides the large mirror in the centre of the garden; and these are mostly inhabited by carp, the genuine descendants of those which peopled the fish-ponds in the days of the monks. Coming in front of the Abbey, the gardener showed us the oak that Byron planted, now a vigorous young tree; and the monument which he erected to his Newfoundland dog, and which is larger than most Christians get, being composed of a marble, altar-shaped tomb, surrounded by a circular area of steps, as much as twenty feet in diameter. The gardener said, however, that Byron intended this, not merely as the burial-place of his dog, but for himself too, and his sister. I know not how this may have been, but this inconvenience would have attended his being buried there, that, on transfer of the estate, his mortal remains would have become the property of some other man. We had now come to the empty space,--a smooth green lawn, where had once been the Abbey church. The length had been sixty-four yards, the gardener said, and within his remembrance there had been many remains of it, but now they are quite removed, with the exception of the one ivy-grown western wall, which, as I mentioned, forms a picturesque part of the present front of the Abbey. Through a door in this wall the gardener now let us out. . . . In the evening our landlady, who seems to be a very intelligent woman, of a superior class to most landladies, came into our parlor, while I was out, and talked about the present race of Byrons and Lovelaces, who have often been at this house. There seems to be a taint in the Byron blood which makes those who inherit it wicked, mad, and miserable. Even Colonel Wildman comes in for a share of this ill luck, for he has almost ruined himself by his expenditure on the estate, and by his lavish hospitality, especially to the Duke of Sussex, who liked the Colonel, and used often to visit him during his lifetime, and his Royal Highness's gentlemen ate and drank Colonel Wildman almost up. So says our good landlady. At any rate, looking at this miserable race of Byrons, who held the estate so long, and at Colonel Wildman, whom it has ruined in forty years, we might see grounds for believing in the evil fate which is supposed to attend confiscated church property. Nevertheless, I would accept the estate, were it offered me. . . . . Glancing back, I see that I have omitted some items that were curious in describing the house; for instance, one of the cabinets had been the personal property of Queen Elizabeth. It seems to me that the fashion of modern furniture has nothing to equal these old cabinets for beauty and convenience. In the state apartments, the floors were so highly waxed and polished that we slid on them as if on ice, and could only make sure of our footing by treading on strips of carpeting that were laid down. June 7th.--We left Nottingham a week ago, and made our first stage to Derby, where we had to wait an hour or two at a great, bustling, pell-mell, crowded railway station. It was much thronged with second and third class passengers, coming and departing in continual trains; for these were the Whitsuntide holidays, which set all the lower orders of English people astir. This time of festival was evidently the origin of the old "Election" holidays in Massachusetts; the latter occurring at the same period of the year, and being celebrated (so long as they could be so) in very much the same way, with games, idleness, merriment of set purpose, and drunkenness. After a weary while we took the train for MATLOCK, via Ambergate, and arrived of the former place late in the afternoon. The village of Matlock is situated on the banks of the Derwent, in a delightful little nook among the hills, which rise above it in steeps, and in precipitous crags, and shut out the world so effectually that I wonder how the railway ever found it out. Indeed, it does make its approach to this region through a long tunnel. It was a beautiful, sunny afternoon when we arrived, and my present impressions are, that I have never seen anywhere else such exquisite scenery as that which surrounds the village. The street itself, to be sure, is commonplace enough, and hot, dusty, and disagreeable; but if you look above it, or on either side, there are green hills descending abruptly down, and softened with woods, amid which are seen villas, cottages, castles; and beyond the river is a line of crags, perhaps three hundred feet high, clothed with shrubbery in some parts from top to bottom, but in other places presenting a sheer precipice of rock, over which tumbles, as it were, a cascade of ivy and creeping plants. It is very beautiful, and, I might almost say, very wild; but it has those characteristics of finish, and of being redeemed from nature, and converted into a portion of the adornment of a great garden, which I find in all English scenery. Not that I complain of this; on the contrary, there is nothing that delights an American more, in contrast with the roughness and ruggedness of his native scenes,--to which, also, he might be glad to return after a while. We put up at the old Bath Hotel,--an immense house, with passages of such extent that at first it seemed almost a day's journey from parlor to bedroom. The house stands on a declivity, and after ascending one pair of stairs, we came, in travelling along the passageway, to a door that opened upon a beautifully arranged garden, with arbors and grottos, and the hillside rising steep above. During all the time of our stay at Matlock there was brilliant sunshine, and, the grass and foliage being in their freshest and most luxuriant phase, the place has left as bright a picture as I have anywhere in my memory. The morning after our arrival we took a walk, and, following the sound of a church-bell, entered what appeared to be a park, and, passing along a road at the base of a line of crags, soon came in sight of a beautiful church. I rather imagine it to be the place of worship of the Arkwright family, whose seat is in this vicinity,--the descendants of the famous Arkwright who contributed so much towards turning England into a cotton manufactory. We did not enter the church, but passed beyond it, and over a bridge, and along a road that ascended among the hills and finally brought us out by a circuit to the other end of Matlock village, after a walk of three or four miles. In the afternoon we took a boat across the Derwent,--a passage which half a dozen strokes of the oars accomplished, --and reached a very pleasant seclusion called "The Lovers' Walk." A ferriage of twopence pays for the transit across the river, and gives the freedom of these grounds, which are threaded with paths that meander and zigzag to the top of the precipitous ridge, amid trees and shrubbery, and the occasional ease of rustic seats. It is a sweet walk for lovers, and was so for us; although J-----, with his scramblings and disappearances, and shouts from above, and headlong scamperings down the precipitous paths, occasionally frightened his mother. After gaining the heights, the path skirts along the precipice, allowing us to see down into the village street, and, nearer, the Derwent winding through the valley so close beneath us that we might have flung a stone into it. These crags would be very rude and harsh if left to themselves, but they are quite softened and made sweet and tender by the great deal of foliage that clothes their sides, and creeps and clambers over them, only letting a stern face of rock be seen here and there, and with a smile rather than a frown. The next day, Monday, we went to see the grand cavern. The entrance is high up on the hillside, whither we were led by a guide, of whom there are many, and they all pay tribute to the proprietor of the cavern. There is a small shed by the side of the cavern mouth, where the guide provided himself and us with tallow candles, and then led us into the darksome and ugly pit, the entrance of which is not very imposing, for it has a door of rough pine boards, and is kept under lock and key. This is the disagreeable phase-one of the disagreeable phases--of man's conquest over nature in England,--cavern mouths shut up with cellar doors, cataracts under lock and key, precipitous crags compelled to figure in ornamented gardens,--and all accessible at a fixed amount of shillings or pence. It is not possible to draw a full free breath under such circumstances. When you think of it, it makes the wildest scenery look like the artificial rock-work which Englishmen are so fond of displaying in the little bit of grass-plot under their suburban parlor windows. However, the cavern was dreary enough and wild enough, though in a mean sort of way; for it is but a long series of passages and crevices, generally so narrow that you scrape your elbows, and so low that you hit your head. It has nowhere a lofty height, though sometimes it broadens out into ample space, but not into grandeur, the roof being always within reach, and in most places smoky with the tallow candles that have been held up to it. A very dirty, sordid, disagreeable burrow, more like a cellar gone mad than anything else; but it served to show us how the crust of the earth is moulded. This cavern was known to the Romans, and used to be worked by them as a lead-mine. Derbyshire spar is now taken from it; and in some of its crevices the gleam of the tallow candles is faintly reflected from the crystallizations; but, on the whole, I felt like a mole, as I went creeping along, and was glad when we came into the sunshine again. I rather think my idea of a cavern is taken from the one in the Forty Thieves, or in Gil Blas,--a vast, hollow womb, roofed and curtained with obscurity. This reality is very mean. Leaving the cavern, we went to the guide's cottage, situated high above the village, where he showed us specimens of ornaments and toys manufactured by himself from Derbyshire spar and other materials. There was very pretty mosaic work, flowers of spar, and leaves of malachite, and miniature copies of Cleopatra's Needle, and other Egyptian monuments, and vases of graceful pattern, brooches, too, and many other things. The most valuable spar is called Blue John, and is only to be found in one spot, where, also, the supply is said to be growing scant. We bought a number of articles, and then came homeward, still with our guide, who showed us, on the way, the Romantic Rocks. These are some crags which have been rent away and stand insulated from the hillside, affording a pathway between it and then; while the places can yet be seen where the sundered rocks would fit into the craggy hill if there were but a Titan strong enough to adjust them again. It is a very picturesque spot, and the price for seeing it is twopence; though in our case it was included in the four shillings which we had paid for seeing the cavern. The representative men of England are the showmen and the policemen; both very good people in their way. Returning to the hotel, J----- and his mother went through the village to the river, near the railway, where J----- set himself to fishing, and caught three minnows. I followed, after a while, to fetch them back, and we called into one or two of the many shops in the village, which have articles manufactured of the spar for sale. Some of these are nothing short of magnificent. There was an inlaid table, valued at sixty guineas, and a splendid ornament for any drawing-room; another, inlaid with the squares of a chess-board. We heard of a table in the possession of the Marquis of Westminster, the value of which is three hundred guineas. It would be easy and pleasant to spend a great deal of money in such things as we saw there; but all our purchases in Matlock did not amount to more than twenty shillings, invested in brooches, shawl-pins, little vases and toys, which will be valuable to us as memorials on the other side of the water. After this, we visited a petrifying cave, of which there are several hereabouts. The process of petrifaction requires some months, or perhaps a year or two, varying with the size of the article to be operated upon. The articles are placed in the cave, under the drippings from the roof, and a hard deposit is formed upon them, and sometimes, as in the case of a bird's-nest, causes a curious result,-- every straw and hair being immortalized and stiffened into stone. A horse's head was in process of petrifaction; and J----- bought a broken eggshell for a penny, though larger articles are expensive. The process would appear to be entirely superficial,--a mere crust on the outside of things,--but we saw some specimens of petrified oak, where the stony substance seemed to be intimately incorporated with the wood, and to have really changed it into stone. These specimens were immensely ponderous, and capable of a high polish, which brought out beautiful streaks and shades. One might spend a very pleasant summer in Matlock, and I think there can be no more beautiful place in the world; but we left it that afternoon, and railed to Manchester, where we arrived between ten and eleven at night. The next day I left S----- to go to the Art Exhibition, and took J----- with me to Liverpool, where I had an engagement that admitted of no delay. Thus ended our tour, in which we had seen but a little bit of England, yet rich with variety and interest. What a wonderful land! It is our forefathers' land; our land, for I will not give up such a precious inheritance. We are now back again in flat and sandy Southport, which, during the past week, has been thronged with Whitsuntide people, who crowd the streets, and pass to and fro along the promenade, with a universal and monotonous air of nothing to do, and very little enjoyment. It is a pity that poor folks cannot employ their little hour of leisure to better advantage, in a country where the soil is so veined with gold. These are delightfully long days. Last night, at half past nine, I could read with perfect ease in parts of the room remote from the window; and at nearly half past eleven there was a broad sheet of daylight in the west, gleaming brightly over the plashy sands. I question whether there be any total night at this season. June 21st.--Southport, I presume, is now in its most vivid aspect; there being a multitude of visitors here, principally of the middling classes, and a frequent crowd, whom I take to be working-people from Manchester and other factory towns. It is the strangest place to come to for the pleasures of the sea, of which we scarcely have a glimpse from month's end to mouth's end, nor any fresh, exhilarating breath from it, but a lazy, languid atmosphere, brooding over the waste of sands; or even if there be a sulky and bitter wind blowing along the promenade, it still brings no salt elixir. I never was more weary of a place in all my life, and never felt such a disinterested pity as for the people who come here for pleasure. Nevertheless, the town has its amusements; in the first place, the daylong and perennial one of donkey-riding along the sands, large parties of men and girls pottering along together; the Flying Dutchman trundles hither and thither when there is breeze enough; an arch cry-man sets up his targets on the beach; the bathing-houses stand by scores and fifties along the shore, and likewise on the banks of the Ribble, a mile seaward; the hotels have their billiard-rooms; there is a theatre every evening; from morning till night comes a succession of organ-grinders, playing interminably under your window; and a man with a bassoon and a monkey, who takes your pennies and pulls off his cap in acknowledgment; and wandering minstrels, with guitar and voice; and a Highland bagpipe, squealing out a tangled skein of discord, together with a Highland maid, who dances a hornpipe; and Punch and Judy,--in a word, we have specimens of all manner of vagrancy that infests England. In these long days, and long and pleasant ones, the promenade is at its liveliest about nine o'clock, which is but just after sundown; and our little R----- finds it difficult to go to sleep amid so much music as comes to her ears from bassoon, bagpipe, organ, guitar, and now and then a military band. One feature of the place is the sick and infirm people, whom we see dragged along in bath-chairs, or dragging their own limbs languidly; or sitting on benches; or meeting in the streets, and making acquaintance on the strength of mutual maladies,--pale men leaning on their ruddy wives; cripples, three or four together in a ring, and planting their crutches in the centre. I don't remember whether I have ever mentioned among the notabilities of Southport the Town Crier,--a meek-looking old man, who sings out his messages in a most doleful tone, as if he took his title in a literal sense, and were really going to cry, or crying in the world's behalf; one other stroller, a foreigner with a dog, shaggy round the head and shoulders, and closely shaven behind. The poor little beast jumped through hoops, ran about on two legs of one side, danced on its hind legs, or on its fore paws, with its hind ones straight up in the air,--all the time keeping a watch on his master's eye, and evidently mindful of many a beating. June 25th.--The war-steamer Niagara came up the Mersey a few days since, and day before yesterday Captain Hudson called at my office,--a somewhat meagre, elderly gentleman, of simple and hearty manners and address, having his purser, Mr. Eldredge, with him, who, I think, rather prides himself upon having a Napoleonic profile. The captain is an old acquaintance of Mrs. Blodgett, and has cone ashore principally with a view to calling on her; so, after we had left our cards for the Mayor, I showed these naval gentlemen the way to her house. Mrs. Blodgett and Miss W------ were prodigiously glad to see him and they all three began to talk of old times and old acquaintances; for when Mrs. Blodgett was a rich lady at Gibraltar, she used to have the whole navy-list at her table,--young midshipmen and lieutenants then perhaps, but old, gouty, paralytic commodores now, if still even partly alive. It was arranged that Mrs. Blodgett, with as many of the ladies of her family as she chose to bring, should accompany me on my official visit to the ship the next day; and yesterday we went accordingly, Mrs. Blodgett, Miss W------, and six or seven American captains' wives, their husbands following in another boat. I know too little of ships to describe one, or even to feel any great interest in the details of this or of any other ship; but the nautical people seemed to see much to admire. She lay in the Sloyne, in the midst of a broad basin of the Mersey, with a pleasant landscape of green England, now warm with summer sunshine, on either side, with churches and villa residences, and suburban and rural beauty. The officers of the ship are gentlemanly men, externally very well mannered, although not polished and refined to any considerable extent. At least, I have not found naval men so, in general; but still it is pleasant to see Americans who are not stirred by such motives as usually interest our countrymen,--no hope nor desire of growing rich, but planting their claims to respectability on other grounds, and therefore acquiring a certain nobleness, whether it be inherent in their nature or no. It always seems to me they look down upon civilians with quiet and not ill-natured scorn, which one has the choice of smiling or being provoked at. It is not a true life which they lead, but shallow and aimless; and unsatisfactory it must be to the better minds among them; nor do they appear to profit by what would seem the advantages presented to them in their world-wide, though not world-deep experience. They get to be very clannish too. After seeing the ship, we landed, all of us, ladies and captain, and went to the gardens of the Rock Ferry Hotel, where J----- and I stayed behind the rest. TO SCOTLAND. June 28th.--On the 26th my wife, J-----, and I left Southport, taking the train for Preston, and as we had to stop an hour or two before starting for Carlisle, I walked up into the town. The street through which most of my walk lay was brick-built, lively, bustling, and not particularly noteworthy; but, turning a little way down another street, the town had a more ancient aspect. The day was intensely hot, the sun lying bright and broad as ever I remember it in an American city; so that I was glad to get back again to the shade and shelter of the station. The heat and dust, moreover, made our journey to Carlisle very uncomfortable. It was through very pretty, and sometimes picturesque scenery, being on the confines of the hill-country, which we could see on our left, dim and blue; and likewise we had a refreshing breath from the sea in passing along the verge of Morecambe Bay. We reached Carlisle at about five o'clock, and, after taking tea at the Bush Hotel, set forth to look at the town. The notable objects were a castle and a cathedral; and we first found our way to the castle, which stands on elevated ground, on the side of the city towards Scotland. A broad, well-constructed path winds round the castle at the base of the wall, on the verge of a steep descent to the plain beneath, through which winds the river Eden. Along this path we walked quite round the castle, a circuit of perhaps half a mile,-- pleasant, being shaded by the castle's height and by the foliage of trees. The walls have been so much rebuilt and restored that it is only here and there that we see an old buttress, or a few time-worn stones intermixed with the new facing with which the aged substance is overlaid. The material is red freestone, which seems to be very abundant in this part of the country. We found no entrance to the castle till the path had led us from the free and airy country into a very mean part of the town, where the wretched old houses thrust themselves between us and the castle wall, and then, passing through a narrow street, we walked up what appeared like a by-lane, and the portal of the castle was before us. There was a sentry-box just within the gate, and a sentinel was on guard, for Carlisle Castle is a national fortress, and has usually been a depot for arms and ammunition. The sergeant, or corporal of the guard, sat reading within the gateway, and, on my request for admittance, he civilly appointed one of the soldiers to conduct us to the castle. As I recollect, the chief gateway of the castle, with the guard-room in the thickness of the wall, is situated some twenty yards behind the first entrance where we met the sentinel. It was an intelligent young soldier who showed as round the castle, and very civil, as I always find soldiers to be. He had not anything particularly interesting to show, nor very much to say about it; and what he did say, so far as it referred to the history of the castle, was probably apocryphal. The castle has an inner and outer ward on the descent of the hill; and included within the circuit of the exterior wall. Having been always occupied by soldiers, it has not been permitted to assume the picturesque aspect of a ruin, but the buildings of the interior have either been constantly repaired, as they required it, or have been taken down when past repair. We saw a small part of the tower where Mary, Queen of Scots, was confined on her first coming to England; these remains consist only of a portion of a winding stone staircase, at which we glanced through a window. The keep is very large and massive, and, no doubt, old in its inner substance. We ascended to the castle walls, and looked out over the river towards the Scottish hills, which are visible in the distance,--the Scottish border being not more than eight or nine miles off. Carlisle Castle has stood many sieges, and witnessed many battles under its walls. There are now, on its ramparts, only some half a dozen old-fashioned guns, which our soldier told us had gone quite out of use in these days. They were long iron twelve-pounders, with one or two carronades. The soldier was of an artillery regiment, and wore the Crimean medal. He said the garrison now here consists only of about twenty men, all of whom had served in the Crimea, like himself. They seem to lead a very dull and monotonous life, as indeed it must be, without object or much hope, or any great employment of the present, like prisoners, as indeed they are. Our guide showed us on the rampart a place where the soldiers had been accustomed to drop themselves down at night, hanging by their hands from the top of the wall, and alighting on their feet close beside the path on the outside. The height seemed at least that of an ordinary house, but the soldier said that nine times out of ten the fall might be ventured without harm; and he spoke from experience, having himself got out of the castle in this manner. The place is now boarded up, so as to make egress difficult or impossible. The castle, after all, was not particularly worth seeing. The soldier's most romantic story was of a daughter of Lord Scroope, a former governor of the castle, when Mary of Scotland was confined here. She attempted to assist the Queen in escaping, but was shot dead in the gateway by the warder; and the soldier pointed out the very spot where the poor young lady fell and died;--all which would be very interesting were there a word of truth in the story. But we liked our guide for his intelligence, simplicity, and for the pleasure which he seemed to take, as an episode of his dull daily life, in talking to strangers. He observed that the castle walls were solid, and, indeed, there was breadth enough to drive a coach and four along the top; but the artillery of the Crimea would have shelled them into ruins in a very few hours. When we got back to the guard-house, he took us inside, and showed the dismal and comfortless rooms where soldiers are confined for drunkenness, and other offences against military laws, telling us that he himself had been confined there, and almost perished with cold. I should not much wonder if he were to get into durance again, through misuse of the fee which I put into his hand at parting. The cathedral is at no great distance from the castle; and though the streets are mean and sordid in the vicinity, the close has the antique repose and shadowy peace, at once domestic and religious, which seem peculiar and universal in cathedral closes. The foundation of this cathedral church is very ancient, it having been the church portion of an old abbey, the refectory and other remains of which are still seen around the close. But the whole exterior of the building, except here and there a buttress, and one old patch of gray stones, seems to have been renewed within a very few years with red freestone; and, really, I think it is all the more beautiful for being new,--the ornamental parts being so sharply cut, and the stone, moreover, showing various shadings, which will disappear when it gets weatherworn. There is a very large and fine east window, of recent construction, wrought with delicate stone tracery. The door of the south transept stood open, though barred by an iron grate. We looked in, and saw a few monuments on the wall, but found nobody to give us admittance. The portal of this entrance is very lovely with wreaths of stone foliage and flowers round the arch, recently carved; yet not so recently but that the swallows have given their sanction to it, as if it were a thousand years old, and have built their nests in the deeply carved recesses. While we were looking, a little bird flew into the small opening between two of these petrified flowers, behind which was his nest, quite out of sight. After some attempts to find the verger, we went back to the hotel. . . . In the morning my wife and J----- went back to see the interior of the cathedral, while I strayed at large about the town, again passing round the castle site, and thence round the city, where I found some inconsiderable portions of the wall which once girt it about. It was market-day in Carlisle, and the principal streets were much thronged with human life and business on that account; and in as busy a street as any stands a marble statue, in robes of antique state, fitter for a niche in Westminster Abbey than for the thronged street of a town. It is a statue of the Earl of Lonsdale, Lord Lieutenant of Cumberland, who died about twenty years ago. [Here follows the record of the visits to the "Haunts of Burns," already published in Our Old Home.--ED.] GLASGOW. July 1st.--Immediately after our arrival yesterday, we went out and inquired our way to the cathedral, which we reached through a good deal of Scotch dirt, and a rabble of Scotch people of all sexes and ages. The women of Scotland have a faculty of looking exceedingly ugly as they grow old. The cathedral I have already noticed in the record of my former visit to Scotland. I did it no justice then, nor shall do it any better justice now; but it is a fine old church, although it makes a colder and severer impression than most of the Gothic architecture which I have elsewhere seen. I do not know why this should be so; for portions of it are wonderfully rich, and everywhere there are arches opening beyond arches, and clustered pillars and groined roofs, and vistas, lengthening along the aisles. The person who shows it is an elderly man of jolly aspect and demeanor; he is enthusiastic about the edifice, and makes it the thought and object of his life; and being such a merry sort of man, always saying something mirthfully, and yet, in all his thoughts, words, and actions, having reference to this solemn cathedral, he has the effect of one of the corbels or gargoyles,--those ludicrous, strange sculptures which the Gothic architects appended to their arches. The upper portion of the minster, though very stately and beautiful, is not nearly so extraordinary as the crypts. Here the intricacy of the arches, and the profound system on which they are arranged, is inconceivable, even when you see them,--a whole company of arches uniting in one keystone; arches uniting to form a glorious canopy over the shrine or tomb of a prelate; arches opening through and beyond one another, whichever way you look,-- all amidst a shadowy gloom, yet not one detail wrought out the less beautifully and delicately because it could scarcely be seen. The wreaths of flowers that festoon one of the arches are cut in such relief that they do but just adhere to the stone on which they grow. The pillars are massive, and the arches very low, the effect being a twilight, which at first leads the spectator to imagine himself underground; but by and by I saw that the sunshine came in through the narrow windows, though it scarcely looked like sunshine then. For many years these crypts were used as burial-ground, and earth was brought in, for the purpose of making graves; so that the noble columns were half buried, and the beauty of the architecture quite lost and forgotten. Now the dead men's bones and the earth that covered them have all been removed, leaving the original pavement of the crypt, or a new one in its stead, with only the old relics of saints, martyrs, and heroes underneath, where they have lain so long that they have become a part of the spot. . . . I was quite chilled through, and the old verger regretted that we had not come during the late hot weather, when the everlasting damp and chill of the spot would have made us entirely comfortable. These crypts originated in the necessity of keeping the floor of the upper cathedral on one level, the edifice being built on a declivity, and the height of the crypt being measured by the descent of the site. After writing the above, we walked out and saw something of the newer portion of Glasgow; and, really, I am inclined to think it the stateliest of cities. The Exchange and other public buildings, and the shops in Buchanan Street, are very magnificent; the latter, especially, excelling those of London. There is, however, a pervading sternness and grimness resulting from the dark gray granite, which is the universal building-material both of the old and new edifices. Later in the forenoon we again walked out, and went along Argyle Street, and through the Trongate and the Salt-Market. The two latter were formerly the principal business streets, and together with High Street, the abode of the rich merchants and other great people of the town. High Street, and, still more, the Salt-Market, now swarm with the lower orders to a degree which I never witnessed elsewhere; so that it is difficult to make one's way among the sullen and unclean crowd, and not at all pleasant to breathe in the noisomeness of the atmosphere. The children seem to have been unwashed from birth. Some of the gray houses appear to have once been stately and handsome, and have their high gable ends notched at the edges, like a flight of stairs. We saw the Tron steeple, and the statue of King William III., and searched for the Old Tolbooth. . . . Wandering up the High Street, we turned once more into the quadrangle of the University, and mounted a broad stone staircase which ascends square, and with right-angular turns on one corner, on the outside of the edifices. It is very striking in appearance, being ornamented with a balustrade, on which are large globes of stone, and a great lion and unicorn curiously sculptured on the opposite side. While we waited here, staring about us, a man approached, and offered to show us the interior. He seemed to be in charge of the College buildings. We accepted his offer, and were led first up this stone staircase, and into a large and stately hall, panelled high towards the ceiling with dark oak, and adorned with elaborately carved cornices, and other wood-work. There was a long reading-table towards one end of the hall, on which were laid pamphlets and periodicals; and a venerable old gentleman, with white head and bowed shoulders, sat there reading a newspaper. This was the Principal of the University, and as he looked towards us graciously, yet as if expecting some explanation of our entrance, I approached and apologized for intruding on the plea of our being strangers and anxious to see the College. He made a courteous response, though in exceedingly decayed and broken accents, being now eighty-six years old, and gave us free leave to inspect everything that was to be seen. This hall was erected two years after the Restoration of Charles II., and has been the scene, doubtless, of many ceremonials and high banquetings since that period; and, among other illustrious personages, Queen Victoria has honored it with her presence. Thence we went into several recitation or lecture rooms in various parts of the buildings; but they were all of an extreme plainness, very unlike the rich old Gothic libraries and chapels and halls which we saw in Oxford. Indeed, the contrast between this Scotch severity and that noble luxuriance, and antique majesty, and rich and sweet repose of Oxford, is very remarkable, both within the edifices and without. But we saw one or two curious things,--for instance, a chair of mahogany, elaborately carved with the arms of Scotland and other devices, and having a piece of the kingly stone of Scone inlaid in its seat. This chair is used by the Principal on certain high occasions, and we ourselves, of course, sat down in it. Our guide assigned to it a date preposterously earlier than could have been the true one, judging either by the character of the carving or by the fact that mahogany has not been known or used much more than a century and a half. Afterwards he led us into the Divinity Hall, where, he said, there were some old portraits of historic people, and among them an original picture of Mary, Queen of Scots. There was, indeed, a row of old portraits at each end of the apartment,--for instance, Zachariah Boyd, who wrote the rhyming version of the Bible, which is still kept, safe from any critical eye, in the library of the University to which he presented this, besides other more valuable benefactions,--for which they have placed his bust in a niche in the principal quadrangle; also, John Knox makes one of the row of portraits; and a dozen or two more of Scotch worthies, all very dark and dingy. As to the picture of Mary of Scotland, it proved to be not hers at all, but a picture of Queen Mary, the consort of William III., whose portrait, together with that of her sister, Queen Anne, hangs in the same row. We told our guide this, but he seemed unwilling to accept it as a fact. There is a museum belonging to the University; but this, for some reason or other, could not be shown to us just at this time, and there was little else to show. We just looked at the gardens, but, though of large extent, they are so meagre and bare--so unlike that lovely shade of the Oxford gardens--that we did not care to make further acquaintance with them. Then we went back to our hotel, and if there were not already more than enough of description, both past and to come, I should describe George's Square, on one side of which the hotel is situated. A tall column rises in the grassy centre of it, lifting far into the upper air a fine statue of Sir Walter Scott, which we saw to great advantage last night, relieved against the sunset sky; and there are statues of Sir John Moore, a native of Glasgow, and of James Watt, at corners of the square. Glasgow is certainly a noble city. After lunch we embarked on board the steamer, and came up the Clyde. Ben Lomond, and other Highland hills, soon appeared on the horizon; we passed Douglas Castle on a point of land projecting into the river; and, passing under the precipitous height of Dumbarton Castle, which we had long before seen, came to our voyage's end at this village, where we have put up at the Elephant Hotel. July 2d.--After tea, not far from seven o'clock, it being a beautiful decline of day, we set out to walk to DUMBARTON CASTLE, which stands apart from the town, and is said to have been once surrounded by the waters of the Clyde. The rocky height on which the castle stands is a very striking object, bulging up out of the Clyde, with abrupt decision, to the elevation of five hundred feet. The summit is cloven in twain, the cleft reaching nearly to the bottom on the side towards the river, but not coming down so deeply on the landward side. It is precipitous all around; and wherever the steepness admits, or does not make assault impossible, there are gray ramparts round the hill, with cannon threatening the lower world. Our path led its beneath one of these precipices several hundred feet sheer down, and with an ivied fragment of ruined wall at the top. A soldier who sat by the wayside told us that this was called the "Lover's Leap," because a young girl, in some love-exigency, had once jumped down from it, and came safely to the bottom. We reached the castle gate, which is near the shore of the Clyde, and there found another artillery soldier, who guided us through the fortress. He said that there were now but about a dozen soldiers stationed in the castle, and no officer. The lowest battery looks towards the river, and consists of a few twelve-pound cannon; but probably the chief danger of attack was from the land, and the chief pains have been taken to render the castle defensible in that quarter. There are flights of stone stairs ascending up through the natural avenue, in the cleft of the double-summited rock; and about midway there is an arched doorway, beneath which there used to be a portcullis,--so that if an enemy had won the lower part of the fortress, the upper portion was still inaccessible. Where the cleft of the rock widens into a gorge, there are several buildings, old, but not appertaining to the ancient castle, which has almost entirely disappeared. We ascended both summits, and, reaching the loftiest point on the right, stood upon the foundation of a tower that dates back to the fifth century, whence we had a glorious prospect of Highlands and Lowlands; the chief object being Ben Lomond, with its great dome, among a hundred other blue and misty hills, with the sun going down over them; and, in another direction, the Clyde, winding far downward through the plain, with the headland of Dumbeck close at hand, and Douglas Castle at no great distance. On the ramparts beneath us the soldier pointed out the spot where Wallace scaled the wall, climbing an apparently inaccessible precipice, and taking the castle. The principal parts of the ancient castle appear to have been on the other and lower summit of the hill, and thither we now went, and traced the outline of its wall, although none of it is now remaining. Here is the magazine, still containing some powder, and here is a battery of eighteen-pound guns, with pyramids of balls, all in readiness against an assault; which, however, hardly any turn of human affairs can hereafter bring about. The appearance of a fortress is kept up merely for ceremony's sake; and these cannon have grown antiquated. Moreover, as the soldier told us, they are seldom or never fired, even for purposes of rejoicing or salute, because their thunder produces the singular effect of depriving the garrison of water. There is a large tank, and the concussion causes the rifts of the stone to open, and thus lets the water out. Above this battery, and elsewhere about the fortress, there are warders' turrets of stone, resembling great pepper-boxes. When Dr. Johnson visited the castle, he introduced his bulky person into one of these narrow receptacles, and found it difficult to get out again. A gentleman who accompanied him was just stepping forward to offer his assistance, but Boswell whispered him to take no notice, lest Johnson should be offended; so they left him to get out as he could. He did finally extricate himself, else we might have seen his skeleton in the turret. Boswell does not tell this story, which seems to have been handed down by local tradition. The less abrupt declivities of the rock are covered with grass, and afford food for a few sheep, who scamper about the heights, and seem to have attained the dexterity of goats in clambering. I never knew a purer air than this seems to be, nor a lovelier golden sunset. Descending into the gorge again, we went into the armory, which is in one of the buildings occupying the space between the two hill-tops. It formerly contained a large collection of arms; but these have been removed to the Tower of London, and there are now only some tattered banners, of which I do not know the history, and some festoons of pistols, and grenades, shells, and grape and canister shot, kept merely as curiosities; and, far more interesting than the above, a few battle-axes, daggers, and spear-heads from the field of Bannockburn; and, more interesting still, the sword of William Wallace. It is a formidable-looking weapon, made for being swayed with both hands, and, with its hilt on the floor, reached about to my chin; but the young girl who showed us the armory said that about nine inches had been broken off the point. The blade was not massive, but somewhat thin, compared with its great length; and I found that I could blandish it, using both hands, with perfect ease. It is two-edged, without any gaps, and is quite brown and lustreless with old rust, from point to hilt. These were all the memorables of our visit to Dumbarton Castle, which is a most interesting spot, and connected with a long series of historical events. It was first besieged by the Danes, and had a prominent share in all the warfare of Scotland, so long as the old warlike times and manners lasted. Our soldier was very intelligent and courteous, but, as usual with these guides, was somewhat apocryphal in his narrative; telling us that Mary, Queen of Scots, was confined here before being taken to England, and that the cells in which she then lived are still extant, under one of the ramparts. The fact is, she was brought here when a child of six years old, before going to France, and doubtless scrambled up and down these heights as freely and merrily as the sheep we saw. We now returned to our hotel, a very nice one, and found the street of Dumbarton all alive in the summer evening with the sports of children and the gossip of grown people. There was almost no night, for at twelve o'clock there was still a golden daylight, and Yesterday, before it died, must have met the Morrow. In the lower part of the fortress there is a large sun-dial of stone, which was made by a French officer imprisoned here during the Peninsular war. It still numbers faithfully the hours that are sunny, and it is a lasting memorial of him, in the stronghold of his enemies. INVERANNAN. Evening.--After breakfast at Dumbarton, I went out to look at the town, which is of considerable size, and possesses both commerce and manufactures. There was a screw-steamship at the pier, and many sailor-looking people were seen about the streets. There are very few old houses, though still the town retains an air of antiquity which one does not well see how to account for, when everywhere there is a modern front, and all the characteristics of a street built to-day. Turning from the main thoroughfare I crossed a bridge over the Clyde, and gained from it the best view of the cloven crag of Dumbarton Castle that I had yet found. The two summits are wider apart, more fully relieved from each other, than when seen from other points; and the highest ascends into a perfect pyramid, the lower one being obtusely rounded. There seem to be iron-works, or some kind of manufactory, on the farther side of the bridge; and I noticed a quaint, chateau-like mansion, with hanging turrets standing apart from the street, probably built by some person enriched by business. We left Dumbarton at noon, taking the rail to Balloch, and the steamer to the head of Loch Lomond. Wild mountain scenery is not very good to describe, nor do I think any distinct impressions are ever conveyed by such attempts; so I mean to be brief in what I saw about this part of our tour, especially as I suspect that I have said whatever I knew how to say in the record of my former visit to the Highlands. As for Loch Lomond, it lies amidst very striking scenery, being poured in among the gorges of steep and lofty mountains, which nowhere stand aside to give it room, but, on the contrary, do their best to shut it in. It is everywhere narrow, compared with its length of thirty miles; but it is the beauty of a lake to be of no greater width than to allow of the scenery of one of its shores being perfectly enjoyed from the other. The scenery of the Highlands, so far as I have seen it, cannot properly be called rich, but stern and impressive, with very hard outlines, which are unsoftened, mostly, by any foliage, though at this season they are green to their summits. They have hardly flesh enough to cover their bones,--hardly earth enough to lie over their rocky substance,--as may be seen by the minute variety,--the notched and jagged appearance of the profile of their sides and tops; this being caused by the scarcely covered rocks wherewith these great hills are heaped together. Our little steamer stopped at half a dozen places on its voyage up the lake, most of them being stations where hotels have been established. Morally, the Highlands must have been more completely sophisticated by the invention of railways and steamboats than almost any other part of the world; but physically it can have wrought no great change. These mountains, in their general aspect, must be very much the same as they were thousands of years ago; for their sides never were capable of cultivation, nor even with such a soil and so bleak an atmosphere could they have been much more richly wooded than we see them now. They seem to me to be among the unchangeable things of nature, like the sea and sky; but there is no saying what use human ingenuity may hereafter put them to. At all events, I have no doubt in the world that they will go out of fashion in due time; for the taste for mountains and wild scenery is, with most people, an acquired taste, and it was easy to see to-day that nine people in ten care nothing about them. One group of gentlemen and ladies--at least, men and women--spent the whole time in listening to a trial for murder, which was read aloud by one of their number from a newspaper. I rather imagine that a taste for trim gardens is the most natural and universal taste as regards landscape. But perhaps it is necessary for the health of the human mind and heart that there should be a possibility of taking refuge in what is wild and uncontaminated by any meddling of man's hand, and so it has been ordained that science shall never alter the aspect of the sky, whether stern, angry, or beneficent,-- nor of the awful sea, either in calm or tempest,--nor of these rude Highlands. But they will go out of general fashion, as I have said, and perhaps the next fashionable taste will be for cloud land,--that is, looking skyward, and observing the wonderful variety of scenery, that now constantly passes unnoticed, among the clouds. At the head of the lake, we found that there was only a horse-cart to convey our luggage to the hotel at Inverannan, and that we ourselves must walk, the distance being two miles. It had sprinkled occasionally during our voyage, but was now sunshiny, and not excessively warm; so we set forth contentedly enough, and had an agreeable walk along an almost perfectly level road; for it is one of the beauties of these hills, that they descend abruptly down, instead of undulating away forever. There were lofty heights on each side of us, but not so lofty as to have won a distinctive name; and adown their sides we could see the rocky pathways of cascades, which, at this season, are either quite dry, or mere trickles of a rill. The hills and valleys abound in streams, sparkling through pebbly beds, and forming here and there a dark pool; and they would be populous with trout if all England, with one fell purpose, did not come hither to fish them. A fisherman must find it difficult to gratify his propensities in these days; for even the lakes and streams in Norway are now preserved. J-----, by the way, threatens ominously to be a fisherman. He rode the latter portion of the way to the hotel on the luggage-cart; and when we arrived, we found that he had already gone off to catch fish, or to attempt it (for there is as much chance of his catching a whale as a trout), in a mountain stream near the house. I went in search of him, but without success, and was somewhat startled at the depth and blackness of some of the pools into which the stream settled itself and slept. Finally, he came in while we were at dinner. We afterwards walked out with him, to let him play at fishing again, and discovered on the bank of the stream a wonderful oak, with as many as a dozen holes springing either from close to the ground or within a foot or two of it, and looking like twelve separate trees, at least, instead of one. INVERSNAID. July 3d.--Last night seemed to close in clear, and even at midnight it was still light enough to read; but this morning rose on us misty and chill, with spattering showers of rain. Clouds momentarily settled and shifted on the hill-tops, shutting us in even more completely than these steep and rugged green walls would be sure to do, even in the clearest weather. Often these clouds came down and enveloped us in a drizzle, or rather a shower, of such minute drops that they had not weight enough to fall. This, I suppose, was a genuine Scotch mist; and as such it is well enough to have experienced it, though I would willingly never see it again. Such being the state of the weather, my wife did not go out at all, but I strolled about the premises, in the intervals of rain-drops, gazing up at the hillsides, and recognizing that there is a vast variety of shape, of light and shadow, and incidental circumstance, even in what looks so monotonous at first as the green slope of a hill. The little rills that come down from the summits were rather more distinguishable than yesterday, having been refreshed by the night's rain; but still they were very much out of proportion with the wide pathways of bare rock adown which they ran. These little rivulets, no doubt, often lead through the wildest scenery that is to be found in the Highlands, or anywhere else, and to the formation and wildness of which they have greatly contributed by sawing away for countless ages, and thus deepening the ravines. I suspect the American clouds are more picturesque than those of Great Britain, whatever our mountains may be; at least, I remember the Berkshire hills looking grander, under the influence of mist and cloud, than the Highlands did to-day. Our clouds seem to be denser and heavier, and more decided, and form greater contrasts of light and shade. I have remarked in England that the cloudy firmament, even on a day of settled rain, always appears thinner than those I had been accustomed to at home, so as to deceive me with constant expectations of better weather. It has been the same to-day. Whenever I looked upward, I thought it might be going to clear up; but, instead of that, it began to rain more in earnest after midday, and at half past two we left Inverannan in a smart shower. At the head of the lake, we took the steamer, with the rain pouring more heavily than ever, and landed at Inversnaid under the same dismal auspices. We left a very good hotel behind us, and have come to another that seems also good. We are more picturesquely situated at this spot than at Inverannan, our hotel being within a short distance of the lake shore, with a glen just across the water, which will doubtless be worth looking at when the mist permits us to see it. A good many tourists were standing about the door when we arrived, and looked at us with the curiosity of idle and weather-bound people. The lake is here narrow, but a hundred fathoms deep; so that a great part of the height of the mountains which beset it round is hidden beneath its surface. July 4th.--This morning opened still misty, but with a more hopeful promise than yesterday, and when I went out, after breakfast, there were gleams of sunshine here and there on the hillsides, falling, one did not exactly see how, through the volumes of cloud. Close beside the hotel of Inversnaid is the waterfall; all night, my room being on that side of the house, I had heard its voice, and now I ascended beside it to a point where it is crossed by a wooden bridge. There is thence a view, upward and downward, of the most striking descents of the river, as I believe they call it, though it is but a mountain-stream, which tumbles down an irregular and broken staircase in its headlong haste to reach the lake. It is very picturesque, however, with its ribbons of white foam over the precipitous steps, and its deep black pools, overhung by black rocks, which reverberate the rumble of the falling water. J----- and I ascended a little distance along the cascade, and then turned aside; he going up the hill, and I taking a path along its side which gave me a view across the lake. I rather think this particular stretch of Loch Lomond, in front of Inversnaid, is the most beautiful lake and mountain view that I have ever seen. It is so shut in that you can see nothing beyond, nor would suspect anything more to exist than this watery vale among the hills; except that, directly opposite, there is the beautiful glen of Invernglass, which winds away among the feet of Ben Crook, Ben Ein, Ben Vain, and Ben Voirlich, standing mist-inwreathed together. The mists, this morning, had a very soft and beautiful effect, and made the mountains tenderer than I have hitherto felt them to be; and they lingered about their heads like morning-dreams, flitting and retiring, and letting the sunshine in, and snatching it away again. My wife came up, and we enjoyed it together, till the steamer came smoking its pipe along the loch, stopped to land some passengers, and steamed away again. While we stood there, a Highlander passed by us, with a very dark tartan, and bare shanks, most enormously calved. I presume he wears the dress for the sole purpose of displaying those stalwart legs; for he proves to be no genuine Gael, but a manufacturer, who has a shooting-box, or a share in one, on the hill above the hotel. We now engaged a boat, and were rowed to Rob Roy's cave, which is perhaps half a mile distant up the lake. The shores look much more striking from a rowboat, creeping along near the margin, than from a steamer in the middle of the loch; and the ridge, beneath which Rob's cave lies, is precipitous with gray rocks, and clothed, too, with thick foliage. Over the cave itself there is a huge ledge of rock, from which immense fragments have tumbled down, ages and ages ago, and fallen together in such a way as to leave a large irregular crevice in Rob Roy's cave. We scrambled up to its mouth by some natural stairs, and scrambled down into its depths by the aid of a ladder. I suppose I have already described this hole in the record of my former visit. Certainly, Rob Roy, and Robert Bruce, who is said to have inhabited it before him, were not to be envied their accommodations; yet these were not so very intolerable when compared with a Highland cabin, or with cottages such as Burns lived in. J----- had chosen to remain to fish. On our return from the cave, we found that he had caught nothing; but just as we stepped into the boat, a fish drew his float far under water, and J------ tugging at one end of the line, and the fish at the other, the latter escaped, with the hook in his month. J------ avers that he saw the fish, and gives its measurement as about eighteen inches; but the fishes that escape us are always of tremendous size. The boatman thought, however, that it might have been a pike. THE TROSACHS' HOTEL.--ARDCHEANOCHROCHAN. July 5th.--Not being able to get a post-chaise, we took places in the omnibus for the bead of Loch Katrine. Going up to pay a parting visit to the waterfall before starting, I met with Miss C------, as she lately was, who is now on her wedding tour as Mrs. B------. She was painting the falls in oil, with good prospect of a successful picture. She came down to the hotel to see my wife, and soon afterwards J----- and I set out to ascend the steep hill that comes down upon the lake of Inversnaid, leaving the omnibus to follow at leisure. The Highlander who took us to Rob Roy's cave had foreboded rain, from the way in which the white clouds hung about the mountain-tops; nor was his augury at fault, for just at three o'clock, the time he foretold, there were a few rain-drops, and a more defined shower during the afternoon, while we were on Loch Katrine. The few drops, however, did not disturb us; and, reaching the top of the hill, J----- and I turned aside to examine the old stone fortress which was erected in this mountain pass to bridle the Highlanders after the rebellion of 1745. It stands in a very desolate and dismal situation, at the foot of long bare slopes, on mossy ground, in the midst of a disheartening loneliness, only picturesque because it is so exceedingly ungenial and unlovely. The chief interest of this spot in the fact that Wolfe, in his earlier military career, was stationed here. The fortress was a very plain structure, built of rough stones, in the form of a parallelogram, one side of which I paced, and found it between thirty and forty of my paces long. The two ends have fallen down; the two sides that remain are about twenty feet high, and have little port-holes for defence, but no openings of the size of windows. The roof is gone, and the interior space overgrown with grass. Two little girls were at play in one corner, and, going round to the rear of the ruin, I saw that a small Highland cabin had been built against the wall. A dog sat in the doorway, and gave notice of my approach, and some hens kept up their peculiarly domestic converse about the door. We kept on our way, often looking back towards Loch Lomond, and wondering at the grandeur which Ben Vain and Ben Voirlich, and the rest of the Ben fraternity, had suddenly put on. The mists which had hung about them all day had now descended lower, and lay among the depths and gorges of the hills, where also the sun shone softly down among them, and filled those deep mountain laps, as it were, with a dimmer sunshine. Ben Vain, too, and his brethren, had a veil of mist all about them, which seemed to render them really transparent; and they had unaccountably grown higher, vastly higher, than when we viewed them from the shore of the lake. It was as if we were looking at them through the medium of a poet's imagination. All along the road, since we left Inversnaid, there had been the stream, which there formed the waterfall, and which here was brawling down little declivities, and sleeping in black pools, which we disturbed by flinging stones into them from the roadside. We passed a drunken old gentleman, who civilly bade me "good day"; and a man and woman at work in a field, the former of whom shouted to inquire the hour; and we had come in sight of little Loch Arklet before the omnibus came up with us. It was about five o'clock when we reached the head of LOCH KATRINE, and went on board the steamer Rob Roy; and, setting forth on our voyage, a Highland piper made music for us the better part of the way. We did not see Loch Katrine, perhaps, under its best presentment; for the surface was roughened with a little wind, and darkened even to inky blackness by the clouds that overhung it. The hill-tops, too, wore a very dark frown. A lake of this size cannot be terrific, and is therefore seen to best advantage when it is beautiful. The scenery of its shores is not altogether so rich and lovely as I had preimagined; not equal, indeed, to the best parts of Loch Lomond,--the hills being lower and of a more ridgy shape, and exceedingly bare, at least towards the lower end. But they turn the lake aside with headland after headland, and shut it in closely, and open one vista after another, so that the eye is never weary, and, least of all, as we approach the end. The length of the loch is ten miles, and at its termination it meets the pass of the Trosachs, between Ben An and Ben Venue, which are the rudest and shaggiest of hills. The steamer passes Ellen's Isle, but to the right, which is the side opposite to that on which Fitz-James must be supposed to have approached it. It is a very small island, situated where the loch narrows, and is perhaps less than a quarter of a mile distant from either shore. It looks like a lump of rock, with just soil enough to support a crowd of dwarf oaks, birches, and firs, which do not grow so high as to be shadowy trees. Our voyage being over, we landed, and found two omnibuses, one of which took us through the famous pass of the Trosachs, a distance of a mile and a quarter, to a hotel, erected in castellated guise by Lord Willoughby d'Eresby. We were put into a parlor within one of the round towers, panelled all round, and with four narrow windows, opening through deep embrasures. No play-castle was ever more like the reality, and it is a very good hotel, like all that we have had experience of in the Highlands. After tea we walked out, and visited a little kirk that stands near the shore of Loch Achray, at a good point of view for seeing the hills round about. This morning opened cloudily; but after breakfast I set out alone, and walked through the pass of the Trosachs, and thence by a path along the right shore of the lake. It is a very picturesque and beautiful path, following the windings of the lake,--now along the beach, now over an impending bank, until it comes opposite to Ellen's Isle, which on this side looks more worthy to be the island of the poem than as we first saw it. Its shore is craggy and precipitous, but there was a point where it seemed possible to land, nor was it too much to fancy that there might be a rustic habitation among the shrubbery of this rugged spot. It is foolish to look into these matters too strictly. Scott evidently used as much freedom with his natural scenery as he did with his historic incidents; and he could have made nothing of either one or the other if he had been more scrupulous in his arrangement and adornment of them. In his description of the Trosachs, he has produced something very beautiful, and as true as possible, though certainly its beauty has a little of the scene-painter's gloss on it. Nature is better, no doubt, but Nature cannot be exactly reproduced on canvas or in print; and the artist's only resource is to substitute something that may stand instead of and suggest the truth. The path still kept onward, after passing Ellen's Isle, and I followed it, finding it wilder, more shadowy with overhanging foliage of trees, old and young,--more like a mountain-path in Berkshire or New Hampshire, yet still with an Old World restraint and cultivation about it,--the farther I went. At last I came upon some bars, and though the track was still seen beyond, I took this as a hint to stop, especially as I was now two or three miles from the hotel, and it just then began to rain. My umbrella was a poor one at best, and had been tattered and turned inside out, a day or two ago, by a gust on Loch Lomond; but I spread it to the shower, and, furthermore, took shelter under the thickest umbrage I could find. The rain came straight down, and bubbled in the loch; the little rills gathered force, and plashed merrily over the stones; the leaves of the trees condensed the shower into large drops, and shed them down upon me where I stood. Still I was comfortable enough in a thick Skye Tweed, and waited patiently till the rain abated; then took my way homeward, and admired the pass of the Trosachs more than when I first traversed it. If it has a fault, it is one that few scenes in Great Britain share with it,--that is, the trees and shrubbery, with which the precipices are shagged, conceal them a little too much. A crag, streaked with black and white, here and there shows its head aloft, or its whole height from base to summit, and suggests that more of such sublimity is bidden than revealed. I think, however, that it is this unusual shagginess which made the scene a favorite with Scott, and with the people on this side of the ocean generally. There are many scenes as good in America, needing only the poet. July 6th.--We dined yesterday at the table d'hote, at the suggestion of the butler, in order to give less trouble to the servants of the hotel, and afford them an opportunity to go to kirk. The dining-room is in accordance with the rest of the architecture and fittings up of the house, and is a very good reproduction of an old baronial hall, with high panellings and a roof of dark, polished wood. There were about twenty guests at table; and if they and the waiters had been dressed in mediaeval costume, we might have imagined ourselves banqueting in the Middle Ages. After dinner we all took a walk through the Trosachs' pass again, and by the right-hand path along the lake as far as Ellen's Isle. It was very pleasant, there being gleams of calm evening sunshine gilding the mountain-sides, and putting a golden crown occasionally on the Tread of Ben Venue. It is wonderful how many aspects a mountain has,--how many mountains there are in every single mountain!---how they vary too, in apparent attitude and bulk. When we reached the lake its surface was almost unruffled, except by now and then the narrow pathway of a breeze, as if the wing of an unseen spirit had just grazed it in flitting across. The scene was very beautiful, and, on the whole, I do not know that Walter Scott has overcharged his description, although he has symbolized the reality by types and images which it might not precisely suggest to other minds. We were reluctant to quit the spot, and cherish still a hope of seeing it again, though the hope does not seem very likely to be gratified. This was a lowering and sullen morning, but soon after breakfast I took a walk in the opposite direction to Loch Katrine, and reached the Brig of Turk, a little beyond which is the new Trosachs' Hotel, and the little rude village of Duncraggan, consisting of a few hovels of stone, at the foot of a bleak and dreary hill. To the left, stretching up between this and other hills, is the valley of Glenfinlas,--a very awful region in Scott's poetry and in Highland tradition, as the haunt of spirits and enchantments. It presented a very desolate prospect. The walk back to the Trosachs showed me Ben Venue and Ben An under new aspects,--the bare summit of the latter rising in a perfect pyramid, whereas from other points of view it looks like quite a different mountain. Sometimes a gleam of sunshine came out upon the rugged side of Ben Venue, but his prevailing mood, like that of the rest of the landscape, was stern and gloomy. I wish I could give an idea of the variety of surface upon one of these hillsides,--so bulging out and hollowed in, so bare where the rock breaks through, so shaggy in other places with heath, and then, perhaps, a thick umbrage of birch, oak, and ash ascending from the base high upward. When I think I have described them, I remember quite a different aspect, and find it equally true, and yet lacking something to make it the whole or an adequate truth. J----- had gone with me part of the way, but stopped to fish with a pin-hook in Loch Achray, which bordered along our path. When I returned, I found him much elated at having caught a fish, which, however, had got away, carrying his pin-hook along with it. Then he had amused himself with taking some lizards by the tail, and had collected several in a small hollow of the rocks. We now walked home together, and at half past three we took our seats in a genuine old-fashioned stage-coach, of which there are few specimens now to be met with. The coachman was smartly dressed in the Queen's scarlet, and was a very pleasant and affable personage, conducting himself towards the passengers with courteous authority. Inside we were four, including J-----, but on the top there were at least a dozen, and I would willingly have been there too, but had taken an inside seat, under apprehension of rain, and was not allowed to change it. Our drive was not marked by much describable incident. On changing horses at Callender, we alighted, and saw Ben Ledi behind us, making a picturesque background to the little town, which seems to be the meeting-point of the Highlands and Lowlands. We again changed horses at Doune, an old town, which would doubtless have been well worth seeing, had time permitted. Thence we kept on till the coach drew up at a spacious hotel, where we alighted, fancying that we had reached Stirling, which was to have been our journey's end; but, after fairly establishing ourselves, we found that it was the BRIG OF ALLAN. The place is three miles short of Stirling. Nevertheless, we did not much regret the mistake, finding that the Brig of Allan is the principal Spa of Scotland, and a very pleasant spot, to all outward appearance. After tea we walked out, both up and down the village street, and across the bridge, and up a gentle eminence beyond it, whence we had a fine view of a glorious plain, out of which rose several insulated headlands. One of these was the height on which stands Stirling Castle, and which reclines on the plain like a hound or a lion or a sphinx, holding the castle on the highest part, where its head should be. A mile or two distant from this picturesque hill rises another, still more striking, called the Abbey Craig, on which is a ruin, and where is to be built the monument to William Wallace. I cannot conceive a nobler or more fitting pedestal. The sullenness of the day had vanished, the air was cool but invigorating, and the cloud scenery was as fine as that below it. . . . Though it was nearly ten o'clock, the boys of the village were in full shout and play, for these long and late summer evenings keep the children out of bed interminably. STIRLING. July 7th.--We bestirred ourselves early this morning, . . . . and took the rail for Stirling before eight. It is but a few minutes' ride, so that doubtless we were earlier on the field than if we had slept at Stirling. After our arrival our first call was at the post-office, where I found a large package containing letters from America, but none from U----. We then went to a bookseller's shop, and bought some views of Stirling and the neighborhood; and it is surprising what a quantity and variety of engravings there are of every noted place that we have visited. You seldom find two sets alike. It is rather nauseating to find that what you came to see has already been looked at in all its lights, over and over again, with thousand-fold repetition; and, beyond question, its depictment in words has been attempted still oftener than with the pencil. It will be worth while to go back to America, were it only for the chance of finding a still virgin scene. We climbed the steep slope of the Castle Hill, sometimes passing an antique-looking house, with a high, notched gable, perhaps with an ornamented front, until we came to the sculptures and battlemented wall, with an archway, that stands just below the castle. . . . A shabby-looking man now accosted us, and could hardly be shaken off. I have met with several such boors in my experience of sight-seeing. He kept along with us, in spite of all hints to the contrary, and insisted on pointing out objects of interest. He showed us a house in Broad Street, below the castle and cathedral, which he said had once been inhabited by Henry Darnley, Queen Mary's husband. There was little or nothing peculiar in its appearance; a large, gray, gabled house standing lengthwise to the street, with three windows in the roof, and connected with other houses on each side. Almost directly across the street, he pointed to an archway, through the side of a house, and, peeping through it, we found a soldier on guard in a court-yard, the sides of which were occupied by an old mansion of the Argyle family, having towers at the corners, with conical tops, like those reproduced in the hotel at the Trosachs. It is now occupied as a military hospital. Shaking off our self-inflicted guide, we now made our way to the castle parade, and to the gateway, where a soldier with a tremendously red nose and two medals at once took charge of us. Beyond all doubt, I have written quite as good a description of the castle and Carse of Stirling in a former portion of my journal as I can now write. We passed through the outer rampart of Queen Anne; through the old round gate-tower of an earlier day, and beneath the vacant arch where the portcullis used to fall, thus reaching the inner region, where stands the old palace on one side, and the old Parliament House on the other. The former looks aged, ragged, and rusty, but makes a good appearance enough pictorially, being adorned all round about with statues, which may have been white marble once, but are as gray as weather-beaten granite now, and look down from between the windows above the basement story. A photograph would give the idea of very rich antiquity, but as it really stands, looking on a gravelled court-yard, and with "CANTEEN" painted on one of its doors, the spectator does not find it very impressive. The great hall of this palace is now partitioned off into two or three rooms, and the whole edifice is arranged to serve as barracks. Of course, no trace of ancient magnificence, if anywise destructible, can be left in the interior. We were not shown into this palace, nor into the Parliament House, nor into the tower, where King James stabbed the Earl of Douglas. When I was here a year ago, I went up the old staircase and into the room where the murder was committed, although it had recently been the scene of a fire, which consumed as much of it as was inflammable. The window whence the Earl's body was thrown then remained; but now the whole tower seems to have been renewed, leaving only the mullions of the historic window. We merely looked up at the new, light-colored freestone of the restored tower in passing, and ascended to the ramparts, where we found one of the most splendid views, morally and materially, that this world can show. Indeed, I think there cannot be such a landscape as the Carse of Stirling, set in such a frame as it is,--the Highlands, comprehending our friends, Ben Lomond, Ben Venue, Ben An, and the whole Ben brotherhood, with the Grampians surrounding it to the westward and northward, and in other directions some range of prominent objects to shut it in; and the plain itself, so worthy of the richest setting, so fertile, so beautiful, so written over and over again with histories. The silver Links of Forth are as sweet and gently picturesque an object as a man sees in a lifetime. I do not wonder that Providence caused great things to happen on this plain; it was like choosing a good piece of canvas to paint a great picture upon. The battle of Bannockburn (which we saw beneath us, with the Gillie's Hill on the right) could not have been fought upon a meaner plain, nor Wallace's victory gained; and if any other great historic act still remains to be done in this country, I should imagine the Carse of Stirling to be the future scene of it. Scott seems to me hardly to have done justice--to this landscape, or to have bestowed pains enough to put it in strong relief before the world; although it is from the light shed on it, and so much other Scottish scenery, by his mind, that we chiefly see it, and take an interest in it. . . . I do not remember seeing the hill of execution before,--a mound on the same level as the castle's base, looking towards the Highlands. A solitary cow was now feeding upon it. I should imagine that no person could ever have been unjustly executed there; the spot is too much in the sight of heaven and earth to countenance injustice. Descending from the ramparts, we went into the Armory, which I did not see on my former visit. The superintendent of this department is an old soldier of very great intelligence and vast communicativeness, and quite absorbed in thinking of and handling weapons; for he is a practical armorer. He had few things to show us that were very interesting,--a helmet or two, a bomb and grenade from the Crimea; also some muskets from the same quarter, one of which, with a sword at the end, he spoke of admiringly, as the best weapon in the collection, its only fault being its extreme weight. He showed us, too, some Minie rifles, and whole ranges of the old-fashioned Brown Bess, which had helped to win Wellington's victories; also the halberts of sergeants now laid aside, and some swords that had been used at the battle of Sheriffmuir. These latter were very short, not reaching to the floor, when I held one of them, point downward, in my hand. The shortness of the blade and consequent closeness of the encounter must have given the weapon a most dagger-like murderousness. Ranging in the hall of arms, there were two tattered banners that had gone through the Peninsular battles, one of them belonging to the gallant 42d Regiment. The armorer gave my wife a rag from each of these banners, consecrated by so much battle-smoke; also a piece of old oak, half burned to charcoal, which had been rescued from the panelling of the Douglas Tower. We saw better things, moreover, than all these rusty weapons and ragged flags; namely, the pulpit and communion-table of John Knox. The frame of the former, if I remember aright, is complete; but one or two of the panels are knocked out and lost, and, on the whole, it looks as if it had been shaken to pieces by the thunder of his holdings forth,--much worm-eaten, too, is the old oak wood, as well it may be, for the letters MD (1500) are carved on its front. The communion-table is polished, and in much better preservation. Then the armorer showed us a Damascus blade, of the kind that will cut a delicate silk handkerchief while floating in the air; and some inlaid matchlock guns. A child's little toy-gun was lying on a workbench among all this array of weapons; and when I took it up and smiled, he said that it was his son's. So he called in a little fellow four years old, who was playing in the castle yard, and made him go through the musket exercise, which he did with great good-will. This small Son of a Gun, the father assured us, cares for nothing but arms, and has attained all his skill with the musket merely by looking at the soldiers on parade. . . . Our soldier, who had resigned the care of us to the armorer, met us again at the door, and led us round the remainder of the ramparts, dismissing us finally at the gate by which we entered. All the time we were in the castle there had been a great discordance of drums and fifes, caused by the musicians who were practising just under the walls; likewise the sergeants were drilling their squads of men, and putting them through strange gymnastic motions. Most, if not all, of the garrison belongs to a Highland regiment, and those whom we saw on duty, in full costume, looked very martial and gallant. Emerging from the castle, we took the broad and pleasant footpath, which circles it about midway on the grassy steep which descends from the rocky precipice on which the walls are built. This is a very beautiful walk, and affords a most striking view of the castle, right above our heads, the height of its wall forming one line with the precipice. The grassy hillside is almost as precipitous as the dark gray rock that rises out of it, to form the foundations of the castle; but wild rose-bushes, both of a white and red variety, are abundant here, and all in bloom; nor are these the only flowers. There is also shrubbery in some spots, tossing up green waves against the precipice; and broad sheets of ivy here and there mantle the headlong rock, which also has a growth of weeds in its crevices. The castle walls above, however, are quite bare of any such growth. Thus, looking up at the old storied fortress, and looking down over the wide, historic plain, we wandered half-way round the castle, and then, retracing our steps, entered the town close by an old hospital. A hospital it was, or had been intended for; but the authorities of the town had made some convenient arrangement with those entitled to its charity, and had appropriated the ancient edifice to themselves. So said a boy who showed us into the Guildhall,--an apartment with a vaulted oaken roof, and otherwise of antique aspect and furniture; all of which, however, were modern restorations. We then went into an old church or cathedral, which was divided into two parts; one of them, in which I saw the royal arms, being probably for the Church-of-England service, and the other for the Kirk of Scotland. I remember little or nothing of this edifice, except that the Covenanters had uplifted it with pews and a gallery, and whitewash; though I doubt not it was a stately Gothic church, with innumerable enrichments and incrustations of beauty, when it passed from popish hands into theirs. Thence we wandered downward, through a back street, amid very shabby houses, some of which bore tokens of having once been the abodes of courtly and noble personages. We paused before one that displayed, I think, the sign of a spirit-retailer, and looked as disreputable as a house could, yet was built of stalwart stone, and had two circular towers in front, once, doubtless, crowned with conical tops. We asked an elderly man whether he knew anything of the history of this house; and he said that he had been acquainted with it for almost fifty years, but never knew anything noteworthy about it. Reaching the foot of the hill, along whose back the streets of Stirling run, and which blooms out into the Castle Craig, we returned to the railway, and at noon took leave of Stirling. I forgot to tell of the things that awakened rather more sympathy in us than any other objects in the castle armory. These were some rude weapons--pikes, very roughly made; and old rusty muskets, broken and otherwise out of order; and swords, by no means with Damascus blades-- that had been taken from some poor weavers and other handicraft men who rose against the government in 1820. I pitied the poor fellows much, seeing how wretched were their means of standing up against the cannon, bayonets, swords, shot, shell, and all manner of murderous facilities possessed by their oppressors. Afterwards, our guide showed, in a gloomy quadrangle of the castle, the low windows of the dungeons where two of the leaders of the insurrectionists had been confined before their execution. I have not the least shadow of doubt that these men had a good cause to fight for; but what availed it with such weapons! and so few even of those! . . . . I believe I cannot go on to recount any further this evening the experiences of to-day. It has been a very rich day; only that I have seen more than my sluggish powers of reception can well take in at once. After quitting Stirling, we came in somewhat less than an hour to LINLITHGOW, and, alighting, took up our quarters at the Star and Garter Hotel, which, like almost all the Scottish caravan-saries of which we have had experience, turns out a comfortable one. . . . We stayed within doors for an hour or two, and I busied myself with writing up my journal. At about three, however, the sky brightened a little, and we set forth through the ancient, rusty, and queer-looking town of Linlithgow, towards the palace and the ancient church, which latter was one of St. David's edifices, and both of which stand close together, a little removed from the long street of the village. But I can never describe them worthily, and shall make nothing of the description if I attempt it now. July 8th.--At about three o'clock yesterday, as I said, we walked forth through the ancient street of Linlithgow, and, coming to the market-place, stopped to look at an elaborate and heavy stone fountain, which we found by an inscription to be the fac-simile of an old one that used to stand on the same site. Turning to the right, the outer entrance to the palace fronts on this market-place, if such it be; and close to it, a little on one side, is the church. A young woman, with a key in her hand, offered to admit us into the latter; so we went in, and found it divided by a wall across the middle into two parts. The hither portion, being the nave, was whitewashed, and looked as bare and uninteresting as an old Gothic church of St. David's epoch possibly could do. The interior portion, being the former choir, is covered with pews over the whole floor, and further defaced by galleries, that unmercifully cut midway across the stately and beautiful arches. It is likewise whitewashed. There were, I believe, some mural monuments of Bailies and other such people stuck up about the walls, but nothing that much interested me, except an ancient oaken chair, which the girl said was the chair of St. Crispin, and it was fastened to the wall, in the holiest part of the church. I know not why it was there; but as it had been the chair of so distinguished a personage, we all sat down in it. It was in this church that the apparition of St. James appeared to King James IV., to warn him against engaging in that war which resulted in the battle of Flodden, where he and the flower of his nobility were slain. The young woman showed us the spot where the apparition spake to him,--a side chapel, with a groined roof, at the end of the choir next the nave. The Covenanters seem to have shown some respect to this one chapel, by refraining from drawing the gallery across its height; so that, except for the whitewash, and the loss of the painted glass in the window, and probably of a good deal of rich architectural detail, it looks as it did when the ghostly saint entered beneath its arch, while the king was kneeling there. We stayed but a little while in the church, and then proceeded to the palace, which, as I said, is close at hand. On entering the outer enclosure through an ancient gateway, we were surprised to find how entire the walls seemed to be; but the reason is, I suppose, that the ruins have not been used as a stone-quarry, as has almost always been the case with old abbeys and castles. The palace took fire and was consumed, so far as consumable, in 1745, while occupied by the soldiers of General Hawley; but even yet the walls appear so stalwart that I should imagine it quite possible to rebuild and restore the stately rooms on their original plan. It was a noble palace, one hundred and seventy-five feet in length by one hundred and sixty-five in breadth, and though destitute of much architectural beauty externally, yet its aspect from the quadrangle which the four sides enclose is venerable and sadly beautiful. At each of the interior angles there is a circular tower, up the whole height of the edifice and overtopping it, and another in the centre of one of the sides, all containing winding staircases. The walls facing upon the enclosed quadrangle are pierced with many windows, and have been ornamented with sculpture, rich traces of which still remain over the arched entrance-ways; and in the grassy centre of the court there is the ruin and broken fragments of a fountain, which once used to play for the delight of the king and queen, and lords and ladies, who looked down upon it from hall and chamber. Many old carvings that belonged to it are heaped together there; but the water has disappeared, though, had it been a natural spring, it would have outlasted all the heavy stone-work. As far as we were able, and could find our way, we went through every room of the palace, all round the four sides. From the first floor upwards it is entirely roofless. In some of the chambers there is an accumulation of soil, and a goodly crop of grass; in others there is still a flooring of flags or brick tiles, though damp and moss-grown, and with weeds sprouting between the crevices. Grass and weeds, indeed, have found soil enough to flourish in, even on the highest ranges of the walls, though at a dizzy height above the ground; and it was like an old and trite touch of romance, to see how the weeds sprouted on the many hearth-stones and aspired under the chimney-flues, as if in emulation of the long-extinguished flame. It was very mournful, very beautiful, very delightful, too, to see how Nature takes back the palace, now that kings have done with it, and adopts it as a part of her great garden. On one side of the quadrangle we found the roofless chamber where Mary, Queen of Scots, was born, and in the same range the bedchamber that was occupied by several of the Scottish Jameses; and in one corner of the latter apartment there is a narrow, winding staircase, down which I groped, expecting to find a door, either into the enclosed quadrangle or to the outside of the palace. But it ends in nothing, unless it be a dungeon; and one does not well see why the bedchamber of the king should be so convenient to a dungeon. It is said that King James III. once escaped down this secret stair, and lay concealed from some conspirators who had entered his chamber to murder him. This range of apartments is terminated, like the other sides of the palace, by a circular tower enclosing a staircase, up which we mounted, winding round and round, and emerging at various heights, until at last we found ourselves at the very topmost point of the edifice; and here there is a small pepper-box of a turret, almost as entire as when the stones were first laid. It is called Queen Margaret's bower, and looks forth on a lovely prospect of mountain and plain, and on the old red roofs of Linlithgow town, and on the little loch that lies within the palace grounds. The cold north-wind blew chill upon us through the empty window-frames, which very likely were never glazed; but it must be a delightful nook in a calmer and warmer summer evening. Descending from this high perch, we walked along ledges and through arched corridors, and stood, contemplative, in the dampness of the banqueting-hall, and sat down on the seats that still occupy the embrasures of the deep windows. In one of the rooms, the sculpture of a huge fireplace has recently been imitated and restored, so as to give an idea of what the richness of the adornments must have been when the building was perfect. We burrowed down, too, a little way, in the direction of the cells, where prisoners used to be confined; but these were too ugly and too impenetrably dark to tempt us far. One vault, exactly beneath a queen's very bedchamber, was designated as a prison. I should think bad dreams would have winged up, and made her pillow an uncomfortable one. There seems to be no certain record as respects the date of this palace, except that the most recent part was built by James I., of England, and bears the figures 1620 on its central tower. In this part were the kitchens and other domestic offices. In Robert Bruce's time there was a castle here, instead of a palace, and an ancestor of our friend Bennoch was the means of taking it from the English by a stratagem in which valor went halves. Four centuries afterwards, it was a royal residence, and might still have been nominally so, had not Hawley's dragoons lighted their fires on the floors of the magnificent rooms; but, on the whole, I think it more valuable as a ruin than if it were still perfect. Scotland, and the world, needs only one Holyrood; and Linlithgow, were it still a perfect palace, must have been second in interest to that, from its lack of association with historic events so grand and striking. After tea we took another walk, and this time went along the High Street, in quest of the house whence Bothwellhaugh fired the shot that killed the Regent Murray. It has been taken down, however; or, if any part of it remain, it has been built into and incorporated with a small house of dark stone, which forms one range with two others that stand a few feet back from the general line of the street. It is as mean-looking and commonplace an edifice as is anywhere to be seen, and is now occupied by one Steele, a tailor. We went under a square arch (if an arch can be square), that goes quite through the house, and found ourselves in a little court; but it was not easy to identify anything as connected with the historic event, so we did but glance about us, and returned into the street. It is here narrow, and as Bothwellhaugh stood in a projecting gallery, the Regent must have been within a few yards of the muzzle of his carbine. The street looks as old as any that I have seen, except, perhaps, a vista here and there in Chester,--the houses all of stone, many of them tall, with notched gables, and with stone staircases going up outside, the steps much worn by feet now dust; a pervading ugliness, which yet does not fail to be picturesque; a general filth and evil odor of gutters and people, suggesting sorrowful ideas of what the inner houses must be, when the outside looks and smells so badly; and, finally, a great rabble of the inhabitants, talking, idling, sporting, staring about their own thresholds and those of dram-shops, the town being most alive in the long twilight of the summer evening. There was nothing uncivil in the deportment of these dirty people, old or young; but they did stare at us most unmercifully. We walked very late, entering, after all that we had seen, into the palace grounds, and skirting along Linlithgow Loch, which would be very beautiful if its banks were made shadowy with trees, instead of being almost bare. We viewed the palace on the outside, too, and saw what had once been the principal entrance, but now looked like an arched window, pretty high in the wall; for it had not been accessible except by a drawbridge. I might write pages in telling how venerable the ruin, looked, as the twilight fell deeper and deeper around it; but we have had enough of Linlithgow, especially as there have been so many old palaces and old towns to write about, and there will still be more. We left Linlithgow early this morning, and reached Edinburgh in half an hour. To-morrow I suppose I shall try to set down what I see; at least, some points of it. July 9th.--Arriving at EDINBURGH, and acting under advice of the cabman, we drove to Addison's Alma Hotel, which we find to be in Prince's Street, having Scott's monument a few hundred yards below, and the Castle Hill about as much above. The Edinburgh people seem to be accustomed to climb mountains within their own houses; so we had to mount several staircases before we reached our parlor, which is a very good one, and commands a beautiful view of Prince's Street, and of the picturesque old town, and the valley between, and of the castle on its hill. Our first visit was to the castle, which we reached by going across the causeway that bridges the valley, and has some edifices of Grecian architecture on it, contrasting strangely with the nondescript ugliness of the old town, into which we immediately pass. As this is my second visit to Edinburgh, I surely need not dwell upon describing it at such length as if I had never been here before. After climbing up through various wards of the castle to the topmost battery, where Mons Meg holds her station, looking like an uncouth dragon,--with a pile of huge stone balls beside her for eggs,--we found that we could not be admitted to Queen Mary's apartments, nor to the crown-room, till twelve o'clock; moreover, that there was no admittance to the crown-room without tickets from the crown-office, in Parliament Square. There being no help for it, I left my wife and J----- to wander through the fortress, and came down through High Street in quest of Parliament Square, which I found after many inquiries of policemen, and after first going to the Justiciary Court, where there was a great throng endeavoring to get in; for the trial of Miss Smith for the murder of her lover is causing great excitement just now. There was no difficulty made about the tickets, and, returning, found S----- and J-----; but J----- grew tired of waiting, and set out to return to our hotel, through the great strange city, all by himself. Through means of an attendant, we were admitted into Queen Margaret's little chapel, on the top of the rock; and then we sat down, in such shelter as there was, to avoid the keen wind, blowing through the embrasures of the ramparts, and waited as patiently as we could. Twelve o'clock came, and we went into the crown-room, with a throng of other visitors,--so many that they could only be admitted in separate groups. The Regalia of Scotland lie on a circular table within an iron railing, round and round which the visitors pass, gazing with all their eyes. The room was dark, however, except for the dim twinkle of a candle or gaslight; and the regalia did not show to any advantage, though there are some rich jewels, set in their ancient gold. The articles consist of a two-handed sword, with a hilt and scabbard of gold, ornamented with gems, and a mace, with a silver handle, all very beautifully made; besides the golden collar and jewelled badge of the Garter, and something else which I forget. Why they keep this room so dark I cannot tell; but it is a poor show, and gives the spectator an idea of the poverty of Scotland, and the minuteness of her sovereignty, which I had not gathered from her royal palaces. Thence we went into Queen Mary's room, and saw that beautiful portrait-- that very queen and very woman--with which I was so much impressed at my last visit. It is wonderful that this picture does not drive all the other portraits of Mary out of the field, whatever may be the comparative proofs of their authenticity. I do not know the history of this one, except that it is a copy by Sir William Gordon of a picture by an Italian, preserved at Dunrobin Castle. After seeing what the castle had to show, which is but little except itself, its rocks, and its old dwellings of princes and prisoners, we came down through the High Street, inquiring for John Knox's house. It is a strange-looking edifice, with gables on high, projecting far, and some sculpture, and inscriptions referring to Knox. There is a tobacconist's shop in the basement story, where I learned that the house used to be shown to visitors till within three months, but it is now closed, for some reason or other. Thence we crossed a bridge into the new town, and came back through Prince's Street to the hotel, and had a good dinner, as preparatory to fresh wearinesses; for there is no other weariness at all to be compared to that of sight-seeing. In mid afternoon we took a cab and drove to Holyrood Palace, which I have already described, as well as the chapel, and do not mean to meddle with either of them again. We looked at our faces in the old mirrors that Queen Mary brought from France with her, and which had often reflected her own lovely face and figure; and I went up the winding stair through which the conspirators ascended. This, I think, was not accessible at my former visit. Before leaving the palace, one of the attendants advised us to see some pictures in the apartments occupied by the Marquis of Breadalbane during the queen's residence here. We found some fine old portraits and other paintings by Vandyke, Sir Peter Lely, Sir Godfrey Kneller, and a strange head by Rubens, amid all which I walked wearily, wishing that there were nothing worth looking at in the whole world. My wife differs altogether from me in this matter; . . . . but we agreed, on this occasion, in being tired to death. Just as we got through with the pictures, I became convinced of what I had been dimly suspecting all the while, namely, that at my last visit to the palace I had seen these selfsame pictures, and listened to the selfsame woman's civil answers, in just the selfsame miserable weariness of mood. We left the palace, and toiled up through the dirty Canongate, looking vainly for a fly, and employing our time, as well as we could, in looking at the squalid mob of Edinburgh, and peeping down the horrible vistas of the closes, which were swarming with dirty life, as some mouldy and half-decayed substance might swarm with insects,--vistas down alleys where sin, sorrow, poverty, drunkenness, all manner of sombre and sordid earthly circumstances, had imbued the stone, brick, and wood of the habitations for hundreds of years. And such a multitude of children too; that was a most striking feature. After tea I went down into the valley between the old town and the new, which is now laid out as an ornamental garden, with grass, shrubbery, flowers, gravelled walks, and frequent seats. Here the sun was setting, and gilded the old town with its parting rays, making it absolutely the most picturesque scene possible to be seen. The mass of tall, ancient houses, heaped densely together, looked like a Gothic dream; for there seemed to be towers and all sorts of stately architecture, and spires ascended out of the mass; and above the whole was the castle, with a diadem of gold on its topmost turret. It wanted less than a quarter of nine when the last gleam faded from the windows of the old town, and left the crowd of buildings dim and indistinguishable, to reappear on the morrow in squalor, lifting their meanness skyward, the home of layer upon layer of unfortunate humanity. The change symbolized the difference between a poet's imagination of life in the past--or in a state which he looks at through a colored and illuminated medium--and the sad reality. This morning we took a cab, and set forth between ten and eleven to see Edinburgh and its environs; driving past the University, and other noticeable objects in the old town, and thence out to Arthur's Seat. Salisbury Crags are a very singular feature of the outskirts. From the heights, beneath Arthur's Seat, we had a fine prospect of the sea, with Leith and Portobello in the distance, and of a fertile plain at the foot of the hill. In the course of our drive our cabman pointed out Dumbiedikes' house; also the cottage of Jeanie Deans,--at least, the spot where it formerly stood; and Muschat's Cairn, of which a small heap of stones is yet remaining. Near this latter object are the ruins of St. Anthony's Chapel, a roofless gable, and other remains, standing on the abrupt hillside. We drove homeward past a parade-ground on which a body of cavalry was exercising, and we met a company of infantry on their route thither. Then we drove near Calton Hill, which seems to be not a burial-ground, although the site of stately monuments. In fine, we passed through the Grass-Market, where we saw the cross in the pavement in the street, marking the spot, as I recorded before, where Porteous was executed. Thence we passed through the Cowgate, all the latter part of our drive being amongst the tall, quaint edifices of the old town, alike venerable and squalid. From the Grass-Market the rock of the castle looks more precipitous than as we had hitherto seen it, and its prisons, palaces, and barracks approach close to its headlong verge, and form one steep line with its descent. We drove quite round the Castle Hill, and returned down Prince's Street to our hotel. There can be no other city in the world that affords more splendid scenery, both natural and architectural, than Edinburgh. Then we went to St. Giles's Cathedral, which I shall not describe, it having been kirkified into three interior divisions by the Covenanters; and I left my wife to take drawings, while J----- and I went to Short's Observatory, near the entrance of the castle. Here we saw a camera-obscura, which brought before us, without our stirring a step, almost all the striking objects which we had been wandering to and fro to see. We also saw the mites in cheese, gigantically magnified by a solar microscope; likewise some dioramic views, with all which I was mightily pleased, and for myself, being tired to death of sights, I would as lief see them as anything else. We found, on calling for mamma at St. Giles's, that she had gone away; but she rejoined us between four and five o'clock at our hotel, where the next thing we did was to dine. Again after dinner we walked out, looking at the shop-windows of jewellers, where ornaments made of cairngorm pebbles are the most peculiar attraction. As it was our wedding-day, . . . . I gave S----- a golden and amethyst-bodied cairngorm beetle with a ruby head; and after sitting awhile in Prince's Street Gardens, we came home. July 10th.--Last evening I walked round the castle rock, and through the Grass-Market, where I stood on the inlaid cross in the pavement, thence down the High Street beyond John Knox's house. The throng in that part of the town was very great. There is a strange fascination in these old streets, and in the peeps down the closes; but it doubtless would be a great blessing were a fire to sweep through the whole of ancient Edinburgh. This system of living on flats, up to I know not what story, must be most unfavorable to cleanliness, since they have to fetch their water all that distance towards heaven, and how they get rid of their rubbish is best known to themselves. My wife has gone to Roslin this morning, and since her departure it has been drizzly, so that J----- and I, after a walk through the new part of the town, are imprisoned in our parlor with little resource except to look across the valley to the castle, where Mons Meg is plainly visible on the upper platform, and the lower ramparts, zigzagging about the edge of the precipice, which nearly in front of us is concealed or softened by a great deal of shrubbery, but farther off descends steeply down to the grass below. Somewhere on this side of the rock was the point where Claverhouse, on quitting Edinburgh before the battle of Killiecrankie, clambered up to hold an interview with the Duke of Gordon. What an excellent thing it is to have such striking and indestructible landmarks and time-marks that they serve to affix historical incidents to, and thus, as it were, nail down the Past for the benefit of all future ages! The old town of Edinburgh appears to be situated, in its densest part, on the broad back of a ridge, which rises gradually to its termination in the precipitous rock, on which stands the castle. Between the old town and the new is the valley, which runs along at the base of this ridge, and which, in its natural state, was probably rough and broken, like any mountain gorge. The lower part of the valley, adjacent to the Canongate, is now a broad hollow space, fitted up with dwellings, shops, or manufactories; the next portion, between two bridges, is converted into an ornamental garden free to the public, and contains Scott's beautiful monument,--a canopy of Gothic arches and a fantastic spire, beneath which he sits, thoughtful and observant of what passes in the contiguous street; the third portion of the valley, above the last bridge, is another ornamental garden, open only to those who have pass-keys. It is an admirable garden, with a great variety of surface, and extends far round the castle rock, with paths that lead up to its very base, among leafy depths of shrubbery, and winds beneath the sheer, black precipice. J----- and I walked there this forenoon, and took refuge from a shower beneath an overhanging jut of the rock, where a bench had been placed, and where a curtain of hanging ivy helped to shelter us. On our return to the hotel, we found mamma just alighting from a cab. She had had very bad fortune in her excursion to Roslin, having had to walk a long distance to the chapel, and being caught in the rain; and, after all, she could only spend seven minutes in viewing the beautiful Roslin architecture. MELROSE. July 11th.--We left Edinburgh, where we had found at Addison's, 87 Prince's Street, the most comfortable hotel in Great Britain, and went to Melrose, where we put up at the George. This is all travelled ground with me, so that I need not much perplex myself with further description, especially as it is impossible, by any repetition of attempts, to describe Melrose Abbey. We went thither immediately after tea, and were shown over the ruins by a very delectable old Scotchman, incomparably the best guide I ever met with. I think he must take pains to speak the Scotch dialect, he does it with such pungent felicity and effect, and it gives a flavor to everything he says, like the mustard and vinegar in a salad. This is not the man I saw when here before. The Scotch dialect is still, in a greater or less degree, universally prevalent in Scotland, insomuch that we generally find it difficult to comprehend the answers to our questions, though more, I think, from the unusual intonation than either from strange words or pronunciation. But this old man, though he spoke the most unmitigated Scotch, was perfectly intelligible,--perhaps because his speech so well accorded with the classic standard of the Waverley Novels. Moreover, he is thoroughly acquainted with the Abbey, stone by stone; and it was curious to see him, as we walked among its aisles, and over the grass beneath its roofless portions, pick up the withered leaves that had fallen there, and do other such little things, as a good housewife might do to a parlor. I have met with two or three instances where the guardian of an old edifice seemed really to love it, and this was one, although the old man evidently had a Scotch Covenanter's contempt and dislike of the faith that founded the Abbey. He repeated King David's dictum that King David the First was "a sair saint for the crown," as bestowing so much wealth on religious edifices; but really, unless it be Walter Scott, I know not any Scotchman who has done so much for his country as this same St. David. As the founder of Melrose and many other beautiful churches and abbeys, he left magnificent specimens of the only kind of poetry which the age knew how to produce; and the world is the better for him to this day,--which is more, I believe, than can be said of any hero or statesman in Scottish annals. We went all over the ruins, of course, and saw the marble stone of King Alexander, and the spot where Bruce's heart is said to be buried, and the slab of Michael Scott, with the cross engraved upon it; also the exquisitely sculptured kail-leaves, and other foliage and flowers, with which the Gothic artists inwreathed this edifice, bestowing more minute and faithful labor than an artist of these days would do on the most delicate piece of cabinet-work. We came away sooner than we wished, but we hoped to return thither this morning; and, for my part, I cherish a presentiment that this will not be our last visit to Scotland and Melrose. . . . J----- and I then walked to the Tweed, where we saw two or three people angling, with naked legs, or trousers turned up, and wading among the rude stones that make something like a dam over the wide and brawling stream. I did not observe that they caught any fish, but J----- was so fascinated with the spectacle that he pulled out his poor little fishing-line, and wished to try his chance forthwith. I never saw the angler's instinct stronger in anybody. We walked across the foot-bridge that here spans the Tweed; and J----- observed that he did not see how William of Deloraine could have found so much difficulty in swimming his horse across so shallow a river. Neither do I. It now began to sprinkle, and we hastened back to the hotel. It was not a pleasant morning; but we started immediately after breakfast for ABBOTSFORD, which is but about three miles distant. The country between Melrose and that place is not in the least beautiful, nor very noteworthy,--one or two old irregular villages; one tower that looks principally domestic, yet partly warlike, and seems to be of some antiquity; and an undulation, or rounded hilly surface of the landscape, sometimes affording wide vistas between the slopes. These hills, which, I suppose, are some of them on the Abbotsford estate, are partly covered with woods, but of Scotch fir, or some tree of that species, which creates no softened undulation, but overspreads the hill like a tightly fitting wig. It is a cold, dreary, disheartening neighborhood, that of Abbotsford; at least, it has appeared so to me at both of my visits,--one of which was on a bleak and windy May morning, and this one on a chill, showery morning of midsummer. The entrance-way to the house is somewhat altered since my last visit; and we now, following the direction of a painted finger on the wall, went round to a side door in the basement story, where we found an elderly man waiting as if in expectation of visitors. He asked us to write our names in a book, and told us that the desk on the leaf of which it lay was the one in which Sir Walter found the forgotten manuscript of Waverley, while looking for some fishing-tackle. There was another desk in the room, which had belonged to the Colonel Gardiner who appears in Waverley. The first apartment into which our guide showed us was Sir Walter's study, where I again saw his clothes, and remarked how the sleeve of his old green coat was worn at the cuff,--a minute circumstance that seemed to bring Sir Walter very near me. Thence into the library; thence into the drawing-room, whence, methinks, we should have entered the dining-room, the most interesting of all, as being the room where he died. But this room seems not to be shown now. We saw the armory, with the gun of Rob Roy, into the muzzle of which I put my finger, and found the bore very large; the beautifully wrought pistol of Claverhouse, and a pair of pistols that belonged to Napoleon; the sword of Montrose, which I grasped, and drew half out of the scabbard; and Queen Mary's iron jewel-box, six or eight inches long, and two or three high, with a lid rounded like that of a trunk, and much corroded with rust. There is no use in making a catalogue of these curiosities. The feeling in visiting Abbotsford is not that of awe; it is little more than going to a museum. I do abhor this mode of making pilgrimages to the shrines of departed great men. There is certainly something wrong in it, for it seldom or never produces (in me, at least) the right feeling. It is an odd truth, too, that a house is forever after spoiled and ruined as a home, by having been the abode of a great man. His spirit haunts it, as it were, with a malevolent effect, and takes hearth and hall away from the nominal possessors, giving all the world the right to enter there because he had such intimate relations with all the world. We had intended to go to Dryburgh Abbey; but as the weather more than threatened rain, . . . . we gave up the idea, and so took the rail for Berwick, after one o'clock. On our road we passed several ruins in Scotland, and some in England,--one old castle in particular, beautifully situated beside a deep-banked stream. The road lies for many miles along the coast, affording a fine view of the German Ocean, which was now blue, sunny, and breezy, the day having risen out of its morning sulks. We waited an hour or more at Berwick, and J----- and I took a hasty walk into the town. It is a rough and rude assemblage of rather mean houses, some of which are thatched. There seems to have been a wall about the town at a former period, and we passed through one of the gates. The view of the river Tweed here is very fine, both above and below the railway bridge, and especially where it flows, a broad tide, and between high banks, into the sea. Thence we went onward along the coast, as I have said, pausing a few moments in smoky Newcastle, and reaching Durham about eight o'clock. DURHAM. I wandered out in the dusk of the evening,--for the dusk comes on comparatively early as we draw southward,--and found a beautiful and shadowy path along the river-side, skirting its high banks, up and adown which grow noble elms. I could not well see, in that obscurity of twilight boughs, whither I was going, or what was around me; but I judged that the castle or cathedral, or both, crowned the highest line of the shore, and that I was walking at the base of their walls. There was a pair of lovers in front of me, and I passed two or three other tender couples. The walk appeared to go on interminably by the river-side, through the same sweet shadow; but I turned and found my way into the cathedral close, beneath an ancient archway, whence, issuing again, I inquired my way to the Waterloo Hotel, where we had put up. ITEMS.--We saw the Norham Castle of Marmion, at a short distance from the station of the same name. Viewed from the railway, it has not a very picturesque appearance,--a high, square ruin of what I suppose was the keep.--At Abbotsford, treasured up in a glass case in the drawing-room, were memorials of Sir Walter Scott's servants and humble friends,--for instance, a brass snuff-box of Tom Purdie,--there, too, among precious relics of illustrious persons.--In the armory, I grasped with some interest the sword of Sir Adam Ferguson, which he had worn in the Peninsular war. Our guide said, of his own knowledge, that "he was a very funny old gentleman." He died only a year or two since. July 11th.--The morning after our arrival in Durham being Sunday, we attended service in the cathedral. . . . We found a tolerable audience, seated on benches, within and in front of the choir; and people continually strayed in and out of the sunny churchyard and sat down, or walked softly and quietly up and down the side aisle. Sometimes, too, one of the vergers would come in with a handful of little boys, whom he had caught playing among the tombstones. DURHAM CATHEDRAL has one advantage over the others which I have seen, there being no organ-screen, nor any sort of partition between the choir and nave; so that we saw its entire length, nearly five hundred feet, in one vista. The pillars of the nave are immensely thick, but hardly of proportionate height, and they support the round Norman arch; nor is there, as far as I remember, a single pointed arch in the cathedral. The effect is to give the edifice an air of heavy grandeur. It seems to have been built before the best style of church architecture had established itself; so that it weighs upon the soul, instead of helping it to aspire. First, there are these round arches, supported by gigantic columns; then, immediately above, another row of round arches, behind which is the usual gallery that runs, as it were, in the thickness of the wall, around the nave of the cathedral; then, above all, another row of round arches, enclosing the windows of the clere-story. The great pillars are ornamented in various ways,--some with a great spiral groove running from bottom to top; others with two spirals, ascending in different directions, so as to cross over one another; some are fluted or channelled straight up and down; some are wrought with chevrons, like those on the sleeve of a police-inspector. There are zigzag cuttings and carvings, which I do not know how to name scientifically, round the arches of the doors and windows; but nothing that seems to have flowered out spontaneously, as natural incidents of a grand and beautiful design. In the nave, between the columns of the side aisles, I saw one or two monuments. . . . The cathedral service is very long; and though the choral part of it is pleasant enough, I thought it not best to wait for the sermon, especially as it would have been quite unintelligible, so remotely as I sat in the great space. So I left my seat, and after strolling up and down the aisle a few times, sallied forth into the churchyard. On the cathedral door there is a curious old knocker, in the form of a monstrous face, which was placed there, centuries ago, for the benefit of fugitives from justice, who used to be entitled to sanctuary here. The exterior of the cathedral, being huge, is therefore grand; it has a great central tower, and two at the western end; and reposes in vast and heavy length, without the multitude of niches, and crumbling statues, and richness of detail, that make the towers and fronts of some cathedrals so endlessly interesting. One piece of sculpture I remember,--a carving of a cow, a milk-maid, and a monk, in reference to the legend that the site of the cathedral was, in some way, determined by a woman bidding her cow go home to Dunholme. Cadmus was guided to the site of his destined city in some such way as this. It was a very beautiful day, and though the shadow of the cathedral fell on this side, yet, it being about noontide, it did not cover the churchyard entirely, but left many of the graves in sunshine. There were not a great many monuments, and these were chiefly horizontal slabs, some of which looked aged, but on closer inspection proved to be mostly of the present century. I observed an old stone figure, however, half worn away, which seemed to have something like a bishop's mitre on its head, and may perhaps have lain in the proudest chapel of the cathedral before occupying its present bed among the grass. About fifteen paces from the central tower, and within its shadow, I found a weather-worn slab of marble, seven or eight feet long, the inscription on which interested me somewhat. It was to the memory of Robert Dodsley, the bookseller, Johnson's acquaintance, who, as his tombstone rather superciliously avers, had made a much better figure as an author than "could have been expected in his rank of life." But, after all, it is inevitable that a man's tombstone should look down on him, or, at all events, comport itself towards him "de haut en bas." I love to find the graves of men connected with literature. They interest me more, even though of no great eminence, than those of persons far more illustrious in other walks of life. I know not whether this is because I happen to be one of the literary kindred, or because all men feel themselves akin, and on terms of intimacy, with those whom they know, or might have known, in books. I rather believe that the latter is the case. My wife had stayed in the cathedral, but she came out at the end of the sermon, and told me of two little birds, who had got into the vast interior, and were in great trouble at not being able to find their way out again. Thus, two winged souls may often have been imprisoned within a faith of heavy ceremonials. We went round the edifice, and, passing into the close, penetrated through an arched passage into the crypt, which, methought, was in a better style of architecture than the nave and choir. At one end stood a crowd of venerable figures leaning against the wall, being stone images of bearded saints, apostles, patriarchs, kings,--personages of great dignity, at all events, who had doubtless occupied conspicuous niches in and about the cathedral till finally imprisoned in this cellar. I looked at every one, and found not an entire nose among them, nor quite so many heads as they once had. Thence we went into the cloisters, which are entire, but not particularly interesting. Indeed, this cathedral has not taken hold of my affections, except in one aspect, when it was exceedingly grand and beautiful. After looking at the crypt and the cloisters, we returned through the close and the churchyard, and went back to the hotel through a path by the river-side. This is the same dim and dusky path through which I wandered the night before, and in the sunshine it looked quite as beautiful as I knew it must,-- a shadow of elm-trees clothing the high bank, and overarching the paths above and below; some of the elms growing close to the water-side, and flinging up their topmost boughs not nearly so high as where we stood, and others climbing upward and upward, till our way wound among their roots; while through the foliage the quiet river loitered along, with this lovely shade on both its banks, to pass through the centre of the town. The stately cathedral rose high above us, and farther onward, in a line with it, the battlemented walls of the old Norman castle, gray and warlike, though now it has become a University. This delightful walk terminates at an old bridge in the heart of the town; and the castle hangs immediately over its busiest street. On this bridge, last night, in the embrasure, or just over the pier, where there is a stone seat, I saw some old men seated, smoking their pipes and chatting. In my judgment, a river flowing through the centre of a town, and not too broad to make itself familiar, nor too swift, but idling along, as if it loved better to stay there than to go, is the pleasantest imaginable piece of scenery; so transient as it is, and yet enduring,--just the same from life's end to life's end; and this river Wear, with its sylvan wildness, and yet so sweet and placable, is the best of all little rivers,--not that it is so very small, but with a bosom broad enough to be crossed by a three-arched bridge. Just above the cathedral there is a mill upon its shore, as ancient as the times of the Abbey. We went homeward through the market-place and one or two narrow streets; for the town has the irregularity of all ancient settlements, and, moreover, undulates upward and downward, and is also made more unintelligible to a stranger, in its points and bearings, by the tortuous course of the river. After dinner J----- and I walked along the bank opposite to that on which the cathedral stands, and found the paths there equally delightful with those which I have attempted to describe. We went onward while the river gleamed through the foliage beneath us, and passed so far beyond the cathedral that we began to think we were getting into the country, and that it was time to return; when all at once we saw a bridge before us, and beyond that, on the opposite bank of the Wear, the cathedral itself! The stream had made a circuit without our knowing it. We paused upon the bridge, and admired and wondered at the beauty and glory of the scene, with those vast, ancient towers rising out of the green shade, and looking as if they were based upon it. The situation of Durham Cathedral is certainly a noble one, finer even than that of Lincoln, though the latter stands even at a more lordly height above the town. But as I saw it then, it was grand, venerable, and sweet, all at once; and I never saw so lovely and magnificent a scene, nor, being content with this, do I care to see a better. The castle beyond came also into the view, and the whole picture was mirrored in the tranquil stream below. And so, crossing the bridge, the path led us back through many a bower of hollow shade; and we then quitted the hotel, and took the rail for YORK, where we arrived at about half past nine. We put up at the Black Swan, with which we had already made acquaintance at our previous visit to York. It is a very ancient hotel; for in the coffee-room I saw on the wall an old printed advertisement, announcing that a stage-coach would leave the Black Swan in London, and arrive at the Black Swan in York, with God's permission, in four days. The date was 1706; and still, after a hundred and fifty years, the Black Swan receives travellers in Coney Street. It is a very good hotel, and was much thronged with guests when we arrived, as the Sessions come on this week. We found a very smart waiter, whose English faculties have been brightened by a residence of several years in America. In the morning, before breakfast, I strolled out, and walked round the cathedral, passing on my way the sheriff's javelin-men, in long gowns of faded purple embroidered with gold, carrying halberds in their hands; also a gentleman in a cocked hat, gold-lace, and breeches, who, no doubt, had something to do with the ceremonial of the Sessions. I saw, too, a procession of a good many old cabs and other carriages, filled with people, and a banner flaunting above each vehicle. These were the piano-forte makers of York, who were going out of town to have a jollification together. After breakfast we all went to the cathedral, and no sooner were we within it than we found how much our eyes had recently been educated, by our greater power of appreciating this magnificent interior; for it impressed us both with a joy that we never felt before. J----- felt it too, and insisted that the cathedral must have been altered and improved since we were last here. But it is only that we have seen much splendid architecture since then, and so have grown in some degree fitted to enjoy it. York Cathedral (I say it now, for it is my present feeling) is the most wonderful work that ever came from the hands of man. Indeed, it seems like "a house not made with hands," but rather to have come down from above, bringing an awful majesty and sweetness with it and it is so light and aspiring, with all its vast columns and pointed arches, that one would hardly wonder if it should ascend back to heaven again by its mere spirituality. Positively the pillars and arches of the choir are so very beautiful that they give the impression of being exquisitely polished, though such is not the fact; but their beauty throws a gleam around them. I thank God that I saw this cathedral again, and I thank him that he inspired the builder to make it, and that mankind has so long enjoyed it, and will continue to enjoy it. July 14th.--We left York at twelve o'clock, and were delayed an hour or two at Leeds, waiting for a train. I strolled up into the town, and saw a fair, with puppet-shows, booths of penny actors, merry-go-rounds, clowns, boxers, and other such things as I saw, above a year ago, at Greenwich fair, and likewise at Tranmere, during the Whitsuntide holidays. We resumed our journey, and reached Southport in pretty good trim at about nine o'clock. It has been a very interesting tour. We find Southport just as we left it, with its regular streets of little and big lodging-houses, where the visitors perambulate to and fro without any imaginable object. The tide, too, seems not to have been up over the waste of sands since we went away; and far seaward stands the same row of bathing-machines, and just on the verge of the horizon a gleam of water, --even this being not the sea, but the mouth of the river Ribble, seeking the sea amid the sandy desert. But we shall soon say good-by to Southport. OLD TRAFFORD, MANCHESTER. July 22d.--We left Southport for good on the 20th, and have established ourselves in this place, in lodgings that had been provided for us by Mr. Swain; our principal object being to spend a few weeks in the proximity of the Arts' Exhibition. We are here, about three miles from the Victoria Railway station in Manchester on one side, and nearly a mile from the Exhibition on the other. This is a suburb of Manchester, and consists of a long street, called the Stratford Road, bordered with brick houses two stories high, such as are usually the dwellings of tradesmen or respectable mechanics, but which are now in demand for lodgings, at high prices, on account of the Exhibition. It seems to be rather a new precinct of the city, and the houses, though ranged along a continuous street, are but a brick border of the green fields in the rear. Occasionally you get a glimpse of this country aspect between two houses; but the street itself, even with its little grass-plots and bits of shrubbery under the front windows, is as ugly as it can be made. Some of the houses are better than I have described; but the brick used here in building is very unsightly in hue and surface. Betimes in the morning the Exhibition omnibuses begin to trundle along, and pass at intervals of two and a half minutes through the day,--immense vehicles constructed to carry thirty-nine passengers, and generally with a good part of that number inside and out. The omnibuses are painted scarlet, bordered with white, have three horses abreast, and a conductor in a red coat. They perform the journey from this point into town in about half an hour; and yesterday morning, being in a hurry to get to the railway station, I found that I could outwalk them, taking into account their frequent stoppages. We have taken the whole house (except some inscrutable holes, into which the family creeps), of respectable people, who never took lodgers until this juncture. Their furniture, however, is of the true lodging-house pattern, sofas and chairs which have no possibility of repose in them; rickety tables; an old piano and old music, with "Lady Helen Elizabeth" somebody's name written on it. It is very strange how nothing but a genuine home can ever look homelike. They appear to be good people; a little girl of twelve, a daughter, waits on table; and there is an elder daughter, who yesterday answered the door-bell, looking very like a young lady, besides five or six smaller children, who make less uproar of grief or merriment than could possibly be expected. The husband is not apparent, though I see his hat in the hall. The house is new, and has a trim, light-colored interior of half-gentility. I suppose the rent, in ordinary times, might be 25 pounds per annum; but we pay at the rate of 335 pounds for the part which we occupy. This, like all the other houses in the neighborhood, was evidently built to be sold or let; the builder never thought of living in it himself, and so that subtile element, which would have enabled him to create a home, was entirely left out. This morning, J----- and I set forth on a walk, first towards the palace of the Arts' Exhibition, which looked small compared with my idea of it, and seems to be of the Crystal Palace order of architecture, only with more iron to its glass. Its front is composed of three round arches in a row. We did not go in. . . . Turning to the right, we walked onward two or three miles, passing the Botanic Garden, and thence along by suburban villas, Belgrave terraces, and other such prettinesses in the modern Gothic or Elizabethan style, with fancifully ornamented flower-plats before them; thence by hedgerows and fields, and through two or three villages, with here and there an old plaster and timber-built thatched house, among a street full of modern brick-fronts,--the alehouse, or rural inn, being generally the most ancient house in the village. It was a sultry, heavy day, and I walked without much enjoyment of the air and exercise. We crossed a narrow and swift river, flowing between deep banks. It must have been either the Mersey, still an infant stream, and little dreaming of the thousand mighty ships that float on its farther tide, or else the Irwell, which empties into the Mersey. We passed through the village beyond this stream, and went to the railway station, and then were brought back to Old Trafford, and deposited close by the Exhibition. It has showered this afternoon; and I beguiled my time for half an hour by setting down the vehicles that went past; not that they were particularly numerous, but for the sake of knowing the character of the travel along the road. July 26th.--Day before yesterday we went to the Arts' Exhibition, of which I do not think that I have a great deal to say. The edifice, being built more for convenience than show, appears better in the interior than from without,--long vaulted vistas, lighted from above, extending far away, all hung with pictures; and, on the floor below, statues, knights in armor, cabinets, vases, and all manner of curious and beautiful things, in a regular arrangement. Scatter five thousand people through the scene, and I do not know how to make a better outline sketch. I was unquiet, from a hopelessness of being able to enjoy it fully. Nothing is more depressing to me than the sight of a great many pictures together; it is like having innumerable books open before you at once, and being able to read only a sentence or two in each. They bedazzle one another with cross lights. There never should be more than one picture in a room, nor more than one picture to be studied in one day. Galleries of pictures are surely the greatest absurdities that ever were contrived, there being no excuse for them, except that it is the only way in which pictures can be made generally available and accessible. We went first into the Gallery of British Painters, where there were hundreds of pictures, every one of which would have interested me by itself; but I could not fix nay mind on one more than another, so I wandered about, to get a general idea of the Exhibition. Truly it is very fine; truly, also, every great show is a kind of humbug. I doubt whether there were half a dozen people there who got the kind of enjoyment that it was intended to create,--very respectable people they seemed to be, and very well behaved, but all skimming the surface, as I did, and none of them so feeding on what was beautiful as to digest it, and make it a part of themselves. Such a quantity of objects must be utterly rejected before you can get any real profit from one! It seemed like throwing away time to look twice even at whatever was most precious; and it was dreary to think of not fully enjoying this collection, the very flower of Time, which never bloomed before, and never, by any possibility, can bloom again. Viewed hastily, moreover, it is somewhat sad to think that mankind, after centuries of cultivation of the beautiful arts, can produce no more splendid spectacle than this. It is not so very grand, although, poor as it is, I lack capacity to take in even the whole of it. What gave me most pleasure (because it required no trouble nor study to come at the heart of it) were the individual relics of antiquity, of which there are some very curious ones in the cases ranged along the principal saloon or nave of the building. For example, the dagger with which Felton killed the Duke of Buckingham,--a knife with a bone handle and a curved blade, not more than three inches long; sharp-pointed, murderous-looking, but of very coarse manufacture. Also, the Duke of Alva's leading staff of iron; and the target of the Emperor Charles V., which seemed to be made of hardened leather, with designs artistically engraved upon it, and gilt. I saw Wolsey's portrait, and, in close proximity to it, his veritable cardinal's hat in a richly ornamented glass case, on which was an inscription to the effect that it had been bought by Charles Kean at the sale of Horace Walpole's collection. It is a felt hat with a brim about six inches wide all round, and a rather high crown; the color was, doubtless, a bright red originally, but now it is mottled with a grayish hue, and there are cracks in the brim, as if the hat had seen a good deal of wear. I suppose a far greater curiosity than this is the signet-ring of one of the Pharaohs, who reigned over Egypt during Joseph's prime ministry,--a large ring to be worn on the thumb, if at all,--of massive gold, seal part and all, and inscribed with some characters that looked like Hebrew. I had seen this before in Mr. Mayer's collection in Liverpool. The mediaeval and English relics, however, interested me more,--such as the golden and enamelled George worn by Sir Thomas More; or the embroidered shirt of Charles I.,--the very one, I presume, which he wore at his execution. There are no blood-marks on it, it being very nicely washed and folded. The texture of the linen cloth--if linen it be--is coarser than any peasant would wear at this day, but the needle-work is exceedingly fine and elaborate. Another relic of the same period,--the Cavalier General Sir Jacob Astley's buff-coat, with his belt and sword; the leather of the buff-coat, for I took it between my fingers, is about a quarter of an inch thick, of the same material as a wash-leather glove, and by no means smoothly dressed, though the sleeves are covered with silver-lace. Of old armor, there are admirable specimens; and it makes one's head ache to look at the iron pots which men used to thrust their heads into. Indeed, at one period they seem to have worn an inner iron cap underneath the helmet. I doubt whether there ever was any age of chivalry. . . . It certainly was no chivalric sentiment that made men case themselves in impenetrable iron, and ride about in iron prisons, fearfully peeping at their enemies through little slits and gimlet-holes. The unprotected breast of a private soldier must have shamed his leaders in those days. The point of honor is very different now. I mean to go again and again, many times more, and will take each day some one department, and so endeavor to get some real use and improvement out of what I see. Much that is most valuable must be immitigably rejected; but something, according to the measure of my poor capacity, will really be taken into my mind. After all, it was an agreeable day, and I think the next one will be more so. July 28th.--Day before yesterday I paid a second visit to the Exhibition, and devoted the day mainly to seeing the works of British painters, which fill a very large space,--two or three great saloons at the right side of the nave. Among the earliest are Hogarth's pictures, including the Sigismunda, which I remember to have seen before, with her lover's heart in her hand, looking like a monstrous strawberry; and the March to Finchley, than which nothing truer to English life and character was ever painted, nor ever can be; and a large stately portrait of Captain Coram, and others, all excellent in proportion as they come near to ordinary life, and are wrought out through its forms. All English painters resemble Hogarth in this respect. They cannot paint anything high, heroic, and ideal, and their attempts in that direction are wearisome to look at; but they sometimes produce good effects by means of awkward figures in ill-made coats and small-clothes, and hard, coarse-complexioned faces, such as they might see anywhere in the street. They are strong in homeliness and ugliness, weak in their efforts at the beautiful. Sir Thomas Lawrence attains a sort of grace, which you feel to be a trick, and therefore get disgusted with it. Reynolds is not quite genuine, though certainly he has produced some noble and beautiful heads. But Hogarth is the only English painter, except in the landscape department; there are no others who interpret life to me at all, unless it be some of the modern Pre-Raphaelites. Pretty village scenes of common life,--pleasant domestic passages, with a touch of easy humor in them,--little pathoses and fancynesses, are abundant enough; and Wilkie, to be sure, has done more than this, though not a great deal more. His merit lies, not in a high aim, but in accomplishing his aim so perfectly. It is unaccountable that the English painters' achievements should be so much inferior to those of the English poets, who have really elevated the human mind; but, to be sure, painting has only become an English art subsequently to the epochs of the greatest poets, and since the beginning of the last century, during which England had no poets. I respect Haydon more than I once did, not for his pictures, they being detestable to see, but for his heroic rejection of whatever his countrymen and he himself could really do, and his bitter resolve to achieve something higher,-- failing in which, he died. No doubt I am doing vast injustice to a great many gifted men in what I have here written,--as, for instance, Copley, who certainly has painted a slain man to the life; and to a crowd of landscape-painters, who have made wonderful reproductions of little English streams and shrubbery, and cottage doors and country lanes. And there is a picture called "The Evening Gun" by Danby,--a ship of war on a calm, glassy tide, at sunset, with the cannon-smoke puffing from her porthole; it is very beautiful, and so effective that you can even hear the report breaking upon the stillness, with so grand a roar that it is almost like stillness too. As for Turner, I care no more for his light-colored pictures than for so much lacquered ware or painted gingerbread. Doubtless this is my fault, my own deficiency; but I cannot help it,--not, at least, without sophisticating myself by the effort. The only modern pictures that accomplish a higher end than that of pleasing the eye--the only ones that really take hold of my mind, and with a kind of acerbity, like unripe fruit--are the works of Hunt, and one or two other painters of the Pre-Raphaelite school. They seem wilfully to abjure all beauty, and to make their pictures disagreeable out of mere malice; but at any rate, for the thought and feeling which are ground up with the paint, they will bear looking at, and disclose a deeper value the longer you look. Never was anything so stiff and unnatural as they appear; although every single thing represented seems to be taken directly out of life and reality, and, as it were, pasted down upon the canvas. They almost paint even separate hairs. Accomplishing so much, and so perfectly, it seems unaccountable that the picture does not live; but Nature has an art beyond these painters, and they leave out some medium,--some enchantment that should intervene, and keep the object from pressing so baldly and harshly upon the spectator's eyeballs. With the most lifelike reproduction, there is no illusion. I think if a semi-obscurity were thrown over the picture after finishing it to this nicety, it might bring it nearer to nature. I remember a heap of autumn leaves, every one of which seems to have been stiffened with gum and varnish, and then put carefully down into the stiffly disordered heap. Perhaps these artists may hereafter succeed in combining the truth of detail with a broader and higher truth. Coming from such a depth as their pictures do, and having really an idea as the seed of them, it is strange that they should look like the most made-up things imaginable. One picture by Hunt that greatly interested me was of some sheep that had gone astray among heights and precipices, and I could have looked all day at these poor, lost creatures,--so true was their meek alarm and hopeless bewilderment, their huddling together, without the slightest confidence of mutual help; all that the courage and wisdom of the bravest and wisest of them could do being to bleat, and only a few having spirits enough even for this. After going through these modern masters, among whom were some French painters who do not interest me at all, I did a miscellaneous business, chiefly among the water-colors and photographs, and afterwards among the antiquities and works of ornamental art. I have forgotten what I saw, except the breastplate and helmet of Henry of Navarre, of steel, engraved with designs that have been half obliterated by scrubbing. I remember, too, a breastplate of an Elector of Saxony, with a bullet-hole through it. He received his mortal wound through that hole, and died of it two days afterwards, three hundred years ago. There was a crowd of visitors, insomuch that, it was difficult to get a satisfactory view of the most interesting objects. They were nearly all middling-class people; the Exhibition, I think, does not reach the lower classed at all; in fact, it could not reach them, nor their betters either, without a good deal of study to help it out. I shall go to-day, and do my best to get profit out of it. July 30th.--We all, with R----- and Fanny, went to the Exhibition yesterday, and spent the day there; not J-----, however, for he went to the Botanical Gardens. After some little skirmishing with other things, I devoted myself to the historical portraits, which hang on both sides of the great nave, and went through them pretty faithfully. The oldest are pictures of Richard II. and Henry IV. and Edward IV. and Jane Shore, and seem to have little or no merit as works of art, being cold and stiff, the life having, perhaps, faded out of them; but these older painters were trustworthy, inasmuch as they had no idea of making a picture, but only of getting the face before them on canvas as accurately as they could. All English history scarcely supplies half a dozen portraits before the time of Henry VIII.; after that period, and through the reigns of Elizabeth and James, there are many ugly pictures by Dutchmen and Italians; and the collection is wonderfully rich in portraits of the time of Charles I. and the Commonwealth. Vandyke seems to have brought portrait-painting into fashion; and very likely the king's love of art diffused a taste for it throughout the nation, and remotely suggested, even to his enemies, to get their pictures painted. Elizabeth has perpetuated her cold, thin visage on many canvases, and generally with some fantasy of costume that makes her ridiculous to all time. There are several of Mary of Scotland, none of which have a gleam of beauty; but the stiff old brushes of these painters could not catch the beautiful. Of all the older pictures, the only one that I took pleasure in looking at was a portrait of Lord Deputy Falkland, by Vansomer, in James I.'s time,--a very stately, full-length figure in white, looking out of the picture as if he saw you. The catalogue says that this portrait suggested an incident in Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto; but I do not remember it. I have a haunting doubt of the value of portrait-painting; that is to say, whether it gives you a genuine idea of the person purporting to be represented. I do not remember ever to have recognized a man by having previously seen his portrait. Vandyke's pictures are full of grace and nobleness, but they do not look like Englishmen,--the burly, rough, wine-flushed and weather-reddened faces, and sturdy flesh and blood, which we see even at the present day, when they must naturally have become a good deal refined from either the country gentleman or the courtier of the Stuarts' age. There is an old, fat portrait of Gervoyse Holles, in a buff-coat,--a coarse, hoggish, yet manly man. The painter is unknown; but I honor him, and Gervoyse Holles too,--for one was willing to be truly rendered, and the other dared to do it. It seems to be the aim of portrait-painters generally, especially of those who have been most famous, to make their pictures as beautiful and noble as can anywise consist with retaining the very slightest resemblance to the person sitting to them. They seldom attain even the grace and beauty which they aim at, but only hit some temporary or individual taste. Vandyke, however, achieved graces that rise above time and fashion, and so did Sir Peter Lely, in his female portraits; but the doubt is, whether the works of either are genuine history. Not more so, I suspect, than the narrative of a historian who should seek to make poetry out of the events which he relates, rejecting those which could not possibly be thus idealized. I observe, furthermore, that a full-length portrait has seldom face enough; not that it lacks its fair proportion by measurement, but the artist does not often find it possible to make the face so intellectually prominent as to subordinate the figure and drapery. Vandyke does this, however. In his pictures of Charles I., for instance, it is the melancholy grace of the visage that attracts the eye, and it passes to the rest of the composition only by an effort. Earlier and later pictures are but a few inches of face to several feet of figure and costume, and more insignificant than the latter because seldom so well done; and I suspect the same would generally be the case now, only that the present simplicity of costume gives the face a chance to be seen. I was interrupted here, and cannot resume the thread; but considering how much of his own conceit the artist puts into a portrait, how much affectation the sitter puts on, and then again that no face is the same to any two spectators; also, that these portraits are darkened and faded with age, and can seldom be more than half seen, being hung too high, or somehow or other inconvenient, on the whole, I question whether there is much use in looking at them. The truest test would be, for a man well read in English history and biography, and himself an observer of insight, to go through the series without knowing what personages they represented, and write beneath each the name which the portrait vindicated for itself. After getting through the portrait-gallery, I went among the engravings and photographs, and then glanced along the old masters, but without seriously looking at anything. While I was among the Dutch painters, a gentleman accosted me. It was Mr. J------, whom I once met at dinner with Bennoch. He told me that "the Poet Laureate" (as he called him) was in the Exhibition rooms; and as I expressed great interest, Mr. J------ was kind enough to go in quest of him. Not for the purpose of introduction, however, for he was not acquainted with Tennyson. Soon Mr. J------ returned, and said that he had found the Poet Laureate,--and, going into the saloon of the old masters, we saw him there, in company with Mr. Woolner, whose bust of him is now in the Exhibition. Gazing at him with all my eyes, I liked him well, and rejoiced more in him than in all the other wonders of the Exhibition. How strange that in these two or three pages I cannot get one single touch that may call him up hereafter! I would most gladly have seen more of this one poet of our day, but forbore to follow him; for I must own that it seemed mean to be dogging him through the saloons, or even to look at him, since it was to be done stealthily, if at all. He is as un-English as possible; indeed an Englishman of genius usually lacks the national characteristics, and is great abnormally. Even the great sailor, Nelson, was unlike his countrymen in the qualities that constituted him a hero; he was not the perfection of an Englishman, but a creature of another kind,--sensitive, nervous, excitable, and really more like a Frenchman. Un-English as he was, Tennyson had not, however, an American look. I cannot well describe the difference; but there was something more mellow in him,--softer, sweeter, broader, more simple than we are apt to be. Living apart from men as he does would hurt any one of us more than it does him. I may as well leave him here, for I cannot touch the central point. August 2d.--Day before yesterday I went again to the Exhibition, and began the day with looking at the old masters. Positively, I do begin to receive some pleasure from looking at pictures; but as yet it has nothing to do with any technical merit, nor do I think I shall ever get so far as that. Some landscapes by Ruysdael, and some portraits by Murillo, Velasquez, and Titian, were those which I was most able to appreciate; and I see reason for allowing, contrary to my opinion, as expressed a few pages back, that a portrait may preserve some valuable characteristics of the person represented. The pictures in the English portrait-gallery are mostly very bad, and that may be the reason why I saw so little in them. I saw too, at this last visit, a Virgin and Child, which appeared to me to have an expression more adequate to the subject than most of the innumerable virgins and children, in which we see only repetitions of simple maternity; indeed, any mother, with her first child, would serve an artist for one of them. But, in this picture the Virgin had a look as if she were loving the infant as her own child, and at the same time rendering him an awful worship, as to her Creator. While I was sitting in the central saloon, listening to the music, a young man accosted me, presuming that I was so-and-so, the American author. He himself was a traveller for a publishing firm; and he introduced conversation by talking of Uttoxeter, and my description of it in an annual. He said that the account had caused a good deal of pique among the good people of Uttoxeter, because of the ignorance which I attribute to them as to the circumstance which connects Johnson with their town. The spot where Johnson stood can, it appears, still be pointed out. It is on one side of the market-place, and not in the neighborhood of the church. I forget whether I recorded, at the time, that an Uttoxeter newspaper was sent me, containing a proposal that a statue or memorial should be erected on the spot. It would gratify me exceedingly if such a result should come from my pious pilgrimage thither. My new acquaintance, who was cockneyish, but very intelligent and agreeable, went on to talk about many literary matters and characters; among others, about Miss Bronte, whom he had seen at the Chapter Coffee-House, when she and her sister Anne first went to London. He was at that time connected with the house of ------ and ------, and he described the surprise and incredulity of Mr.------, when this little, commonplace-looking woman presented herself as the author of Jane Eyre. His story brought out the insignificance of Charlotte Bronte's aspect, and the bluff rejection of her by Mr. ------, much more strongly than Mrs. Gaskell's narrative. Chorlton Road, August 9th.--We have changed our lodgings since my last date, those at Old Trafford being inconvenient, and the landlady a sharp, peremptory housewife, better fitted to deal with her own family than to be complaisant to guests. We are now a little farther from the Exhibition, and not much better off as regards accommodation, but the housekeeper is a pleasant, civil sort of a woman, auspiciously named Mrs. Honey. The house is a specimen of the poorer middle-class dwellings as built nowadays,--narrow staircase, thin walls, and, being constructed for sale, very ill put together indeed,--the floors with wide cracks between the boards, and wide crevices admitting both air and light over the doors, so that the house is full of draughts. The outer walls, it seems to me, are but of one brick in thickness, and the partition walls certainly no thicker; and the movements, and sometimes the voices, of people in the contiguous house are audible to us. The Exhibition has temporarily so raised the value of lodgings here that we have to pay a high price for even such a house as this. Mr. Wilding having gone on a tour to Scotland, I had to be at the Consulate every day last week till yesterday; when I absented myself from duty, and went to the Exhibition. U---- and I spent an hour together, looking principally at the old Dutch masters, who seem to me the most wonderful set of men that ever handled a brush. Such lifelike representations of cabbages, onions, brass kettles, and kitchen crockery; such blankets, with the woollen fuzz upon them; such everything I never thought that the skill of man could produce! Even the photograph cannot equal their miracles. The closer you look, the more minutely true the picture is found to be, and I doubt if even the microscope could see beyond the painter's touch. Gerard Dow seems to be the master among these queer magicians. A straw mat, in one of his pictures, is the most miraculous thing that human art has yet accomplished; and there is a metal vase, with a dent in it, that is absolutely more real than reality. These painters accomplish all they aim at,--a praise, methinks, which can be given to no other men since the world began. They must have laid down their brushes with perfect satisfaction, knowing that each one of their million touches had been necessary to the effect, and that there was not one too few nor too many. And it is strange how spiritual and suggestive the commonest household article--an earthen pitcher, for example-- becomes, when represented with entire accuracy. These Dutchmen got at the soul of common things, and so made them types and interpreters of the spiritual world. Afterwards I looked at many of the pictures of the old masters, and found myself gradually getting a taste for them; at least, they give me more and more pleasure the oftener I come to see them. Doubtless, I shall be able to pass for a man of taste by the time I return to America. It is an acquired taste, like that for wines; and I question whether a man is really any truer, wiser, or better for possessing it. From the old masters, I went among the English painters, and found myself more favorably inclined towards some of them than at my previous visits; seeing something wonderful even in Turner's lights and mists and yeasty waves, although I should like him still better if his pictures looked in the least like what they typify. The most disagreeable of English painters is Etty, who had a diseased appetite for woman's flesh, and spent his whole life, apparently, in painting them with enormously developed busts. I do not mind nudity in a modest and natural way; but Etty's women really thrust their nudity upon you with malice aforethought, . . . . and the worst of it is they are not beautiful. Among the last pictures that I looked at was Hogarth's March to Finchley; and surely nothing can be covered more thick and deep with English nature than that piece of canvas. The face of the tall grenadier in the centre, between two women, both of whom have claims on him, wonderfully expresses trouble and perplexity; and every touch in the picture meant something and expresses what it meant. The price of admission, after two o'clock, being sixpence, the Exhibition was thronged with a class of people who do not usually come in such large numbers. It was both pleasant and touching to see how earnestly some of them sought to get instruction from what they beheld. The English are a good and simple people, and take life in earnest. August 14th.--Passing by the gateway of the Manchester Cathedral the other morning, on my way to the station, I found a crowd collected, and, high overhead, the bells were chiming for a wedding. These chimes of bells are exceedingly impressive, so broadly gladsome as they are, filling the whole air, and every nook of one's heart with sympathy. They are good for a people to rejoice with, and good also for a marriage, because through all their joy there is something solemn,--a tone of that voice which we have heard so often at funerals. It is good to see how everybody, up to this old age of the world, takes an interest in weddings, and seems to have a faith that now, at last, a couple have come together to make each other happy. The high, black, rough old cathedral tower sent out its chime of bells as earnestly as for any bridegroom and bride that came to be married five hundred years ago. I went into the churchyard, but there was such a throng of people on its pavement of flat tombstones, and especially such a cluster along the pathway by which the bride was to depart, that I could only see a white dress waving along, and really do not know whether she was a beauty or a fright. The happy pair got into a post-chaise that was waiting at the gate, and immediately drew some crimson curtains, and so vanished into their Paradise. There were two other post-chaises and pairs, and all three had postilions in scarlet. This is the same cathedral where, last May, I saw a dozen couples married in the lump. In a railway carriage, two or three days ago, an old merchant made rather a good point of one of the uncomfortable results of the electric telegraph. He said that formerly a man was safe from bad news, such as intelligence of failure of debtors, except at the hour of opening his letters in the morning; and then he was in some degree prepared for it, since, among (say) fifteen letters, he would be pretty certain to find some "queer" one. But since the telegraph has come into play, he is never safe, and may be hit with news of failure, shipwreck, fall of stocks, or whatever disaster, at all hours of the day. I went to the Exhibition on Wednesday with U----, and looked at the pencil sketches of the old masters; also at the pictures generally, old and new. I particularly remember a spring landscape, by John Linnell the younger. It is wonderfully good; so tender and fresh that the artist seems really to have caught the evanescent April and made her permanent. Here, at least, is eternal spring. I saw a little man, behind an immense beard, whom I take to be the Duke of Newcastle; at least, there was a photograph of him in the gallery, with just such a beard. He was at the Palace on that day. August 16th.--I went again to the Exhibition day before yesterday, and looked much at both the modern and ancient pictures, as also at the water-colors. I am making some progress as a connoisseur, and have got so far as to be able to distinguish the broader differences of style,-- as, for example, between Rubens and Rembrandt. I should hesitate to claim any more for myself thus far. In fact, however, I do begin to have a liking for good things, and to be sure that they are good. Murillo seems to me about the noblest and purest painter that ever lived, and his "Good Shepherd" the loveliest picture I have seen. It is a hopeful symptom, moreover, of improving taste, that I see more merit in the crowd of painters than I was at first competent to acknowledge. I could see some of their defects from the very first; but that is the earliest stage of connoisseurship, after a formal and ignorant admiration. Mounting a few steps higher, one sees beauties. But how much study, how many opportunities, are requisite to form and cultivate a taste! The Exhibition must be quite thrown away on the mass of spectators. Both they and I are better able to appreciate the specimens of ornamental art contained in the Oriental Room, and in the numerous cases that are ranged up and down the nave. The gewgaws of all Time are here, in precious metals, glass, china, ivory, and every other material that could be wrought into curious and beautiful shapes; great basins and dishes of embossed gold from the Queen's sideboard, or from the beaufets of noblemen; vessels set with precious stones; the pastoral staffs of prelates, some of them made of silver or gold, and enriched with gems, and what have been found in the tombs of the bishops; state swords, and silver maces; the rich plate of colleges, elaborately wrought,--great cups, salvers, tureens, that have been presented by loving sons to their Alma Mater; the heirlooms of old families, treasured from generation to generation, and hitherto only to be seen by favored friends; famous historical jewels, some of which are painted in the portraits of the historical men and women that hang on the walls; numerous specimens of the beautiful old Venetian glass, some of which looks so fragile that it is a wonder how it could bear even the weight of the wine, that used to be poured into it, without breaking. These are the glasses that tested poison, by being shattered into fragments at its touch. The strangest and ugliest old crockery, pictured over with monstrosities,--the Palissy ware, embossed with vegetables, fishes, lobsters, that look absolutely real; the delicate Sevres china, each piece made inestimable by pictures from a master's hand;--in short, it is a despair and misery to see so much that is curious and beautiful, and to feel that far the greater portion of it will slip out of the memory, and be as if we had never seen it. But I mean to look again and again at these things. We soon perceive that the present day does not engross all the taste and ingenuity that has ever existed in the mind of man; that, in fact, we are a barren age in that respect. August 20th.--I went to the Exhibition on Monday, and again yesterday, and measurably enjoyed both visits. I continue to think, however, that a picture cannot be fully enjoyed except by long and intimate acquaintance with it, nor can I quite understand what the enjoyment of a connoisseur is. He is not usually, I think, a man of deep, poetic feeling, and does not deal with the picture through his heart, nor set it in a poem, nor comprehend it morally. If it be a landscape, he is not entitled to judge of it by his intimacy with nature; if a picture of human action, he has no experience nor sympathy of life's deeper passages. However, as my acquaintance with pictures increases, I find myself recognizing more and more the merit of the acknowledged masters of the art; but, possibly, it is only because I adopt the wrong principles which may have been laid down by the connoisseurs. But there can be no mistake about Murillo,-- not that I am worthy to admire him yet, however. Seeing the many pictures of Holy Families, and the Virgin and Child, which have been painted for churches and convents, the idea occurs, that it was in this way that the poor monks and nuns gratified, as far as they could, their natural longing for earthly happiness. It was not Mary and her heavenly Child that they really beheld, or wished for; but an earthly mother rejoicing over her baby, and displaying it probably to the world as an object worthy to be admired by kings,--as Mary does, in the Adoration of the Magi. Every mother, I suppose, feels as if her first child deserved everybody's worship. I left the Exhibition at three o'clock, and went to Manchester, where I sought out Mr. C S------- in his little office. He greeted me warmly, and at five we took the omnibus for his house, about four miles from town. He seems to be on pleasant terms with his neighbors, for almost everybody that got into the omnibus exchanged kindly greetings with him, and indeed his kindly, simple, genial nature comes out so evidently that it would be difficult not to like him. His house stands, with others, in a green park,--a small, pretty, semi-detached suburban residence of brick, with a lawn and garden round it. In close vicinity, there is a deep clough or dell, as shaggy and wild as a poet could wish, and with a little stream running through it, as much as five miles long. The interior of the house is very pretty, and nicely, even handsomely and almost sumptuously, furnished; and I was very glad to find him so comfortable. His recognition as a poet has been hearty enough to give him a feeling of success, for he showed me various tokens of the estimation in which he is held,--for instance, a presentation copy of Southey's works, in which the latter had written "Amicus amico,--poeta poetae." He said that Southey had always been most kind to him. . . . There were various other testimonials from people of note, American as well as English. In his parlor there is a good oil-painting of himself, and in the drawing-room a very fine crayon sketch, wherein his face, handsome and agreeable, is lighted up with all a poet's ecstasy; likewise a large and fine engraving from the picture. The government has recognized his poetic merit by a pension of fifty pounds,--a small sung, it is true, but enough to mark him out as one who has deserved well of his country. . . . The man himself is very good and lovable. . . . I was able to gratify him by saying that I had recently seen many favorable notices of his poems in the American newspapers; an edition having been published a few months since on our side of the ocean. He was much pleased at this, and asked me to send him the notices. . . . August 30th.--I have been two or three times to the Exhibition since my last date, and enjoy it more as I become familiar with it. There is supposed to be about a third of the good pictures here which England contains; and it is said that the Tory nobility and gentry have contributed to it much more freely and largely than the Whigs. The Duke of Devonshire, for instance, seems to have sent nothing. Mr. Ticknor, the Spanish historian, whom I met yesterday, observed that we should not think quite so much of this Exhibition as the English do after we have been to Italy, although it is a good school in which to gain a preparatory knowledge of the different styles of art. I am glad to hear that there are better things still to be seen. Nevertheless, I should suppose that certain painters are better represented here than they ever have been or will be elsewhere. Vandyke, certainly, can be seen nowhere else so well; Rembrandt and Rubens have satisfactory specimens; and the whole series of English pictorial achievement is shown more perfectly than within any other walls. Perhaps it would be wise to devote myself to the study of this latter, and leave the foreigners to be studied on their own soil. Murillo can hardly have done better than in the pictures by him which we see here. There is nothing of Raphael's here that is impressive. Titian has some noble portraits, but little else that I care to see. In all these old masters, Murillo only excepted, it is very rare, I must say, to find any trace of natural feeling and passion; and I am weary of naked goddesses, who never had any real life and warmth in the painter's imagination,--or, if so, it was the impure warmth of an unchaste woman, who sat for him. Last week I dined at Mr. F. Heywood's to meet Mr. Adolphus, the author of a critical work on the Waverley Novels, published long ago, and intended to prove, from internal evidence, that they were written by Sir Walter Scott. . . . His wife was likewise of the party, . . . . and also a young Spanish lady, their niece, and daughter of a Spaniard of literary note. She herself has literary tastes and ability, and is well known to Prescott, whom, I believe, she has assisted in his historical researches, and also to Professor Ticknor; and furthermore she is very handsome and unlike an English damsel, very youthful and maiden-like; and her manners have all ardor and enthusiasm that were pleasant to see, especially as she spoke warmly of my writings; and yet I should wrong her if I left the impression of her being forthputting and obtrusive, for it was not the fact in the least. She speaks English like a native, insomuch that I should never have suspected her to be anything else. My nerves recently have not been in an exactly quiet and normal state. I begin to weary of England and need another clime. September 6th.--I think I paid my last visit to the Exhibition, and feel as if I had had enough of it, although I have got but a small part of the profit it might have afforded me. But pictures are certainly quite other things to me now from what they were at my first visit; it seems even as if there were a sort of illumination within them, that makes me see them more distinctly. Speaking of pictures, the miniature of Anne of Cleves is here, on the faith of which Henry VIII. married her; also, the picture of the Infanta of Spain, which Buckingham brought over to Charles I. while Prince of Wales. This has a delicate, rosy prettiness. One rather interesting portion of the Exhibition is the Refreshment-room, or rather rooms; for very much space is allowed both to the first and second classes. I have looked most at the latter, because there John Ball and his wife may be seen in full gulp aid guzzle, swallowing vast quantities of cold boiled beef, thoroughly moistened with porter or bitter ale; and very good meat and drink it is. At my last visit, on Friday, I met Judge Pollock of Liverpool, who introduced me to a gentleman in a gray slouched hat as Mr. Du Val, an artist, resident in Manchester; and Mr. Du Val invited me to dine with him at six o'clock. So I went to Carlton Grove, his residence, and found it a very pretty house, with its own lawn and shrubbery about it. . . . There was a mellow fire in the grate, which made the drawing-room very cosey and pleasant, as the dusk came on before dinner. Mr. Du Val looked like an artist, and like a remarkable man. . . . We had very good talk, chiefly about the Exhibition, and Du Val spoke generously and intelligently of his brother-artists. He says that England might furnish five exhibitions, each one as rich as the present. I find that the most famous picture here is one that I have hardly looked at, "The Three Marys," by Annibal Caracci. In the drawing-room there were several pictures and sketches by Du Val, one of which I especially liked,--a misty, moonlight picture of the Mersey, near Seacombe. I never saw painted such genuine moonlight. . . . I took my leave at half past ten, and found my cab at the door, and my cabman snugly asleep inside of it; and when Mr. Du Val awoke him, he proved to be quite drunk, insomuch that I hesitated whether to let him clamber upon the box, or to take post myself, and drive the cabman home. However, I propounded two questions to him: first, whether his horse would go of his own accord; and, secondly, whether he himself was invariably drunk at that time of night, because, if it were his normal state, I should be safer with him drunk than sober. Being satisfied on these points, I got in, and was driven home without accident or adventure; except, indeed, that the cabman drew up and opened the door for me to alight at a vacant lot on Stratford Road, just as if there had been a house and home and cheerful lighted windows in that vacancy. On my remonstrance he resumed the whip and reins, and reached Boston Terrace at last; and, thanking me for an extra sixpence as well as he could speak, he begged me to inquire for "Little John" whenever I next wanted a cab. Cabmen are, as a body, the most ill-natured and ungenial men in the world; but this poor little man was excellently good-humored. Speaking of the former rudeness of manners, now gradually refining away, of the Manchester people, Judge ------ said that, when he first knew Manchester, women, meeting his wife in the street, would take hold of her dress and say, "Ah, three and sixpence a yard!" The men were very rough, after the old Lancashire fashion. They have always, however, been a musical people, and this may have been a germ of refinement in them. They are still much more simple and natural than the Liverpool people, who love the aristocracy, and whom they heartily despise. It is singular that the great Art-Exhibition should have come to pass in the rudest great town in England. LEAMINGTON. Lansdowne Cirrus, September 10th.--We have become quite weary of our small, mean, uncomfortable, and unbeautiful lodgings at Chorlton Road, with poor and scanty furniture within doors, and no better prospect from the parlor windows than a mud-puddle, larger than most English lakes, on a vacant building-lot opposite our house. The Exhibition, too, was fast becoming a bore; for you must really love a picture, in order to tolerate the sight of it many times. Moreover, the smoky and sooty air of that abominable Manchester affected my wife's throat disadvantageously; so, on a Tuesday morning, we struck our tent and set forth again, regretting to leave nothing except the kind disposition of Mrs. Honey, our housekeeper. I do not remember meeting with any other lodging-house keeper who did not grow hateful and fearful on short acquaintance; but I attribute this, not so much to the people themselves, as, primarily, to the unfair and ungenerous conduct of some of their English guests, who feel so sure of being cheated that they always behave as if in an enemy's country, and therefore they find it one. The rain poured down upon us as we drove away in two cabs, laden with mountainous luggage to the London Road station; and the whole day was grim with cloud and moist with showers. We went by way of Birmingham, and stayed three hours at the great dreary station there, waiting for the train to Leamington, whither Fanny had gone forward the day before to secure lodgings for us (as she is English, and understands the matter) We all were tired and dull by the time we reached the Leamington station, where a note from Fanny gave us the address of our lodgings. Lansdowne Circus is really delightful after that ugly and grimy suburb of Manchester. Indeed, there could not possibly be a greater contrast than between Leamington and Manchester,--the latter built only for dirty uses, and scarcely intended as a habitation for man; the former so cleanly, so set out with shade trees, so regular in its streets, so neatly paved, its houses so prettily contrived and nicely stuccoed, that it does not look like a portion of the work-a-day world. KENILWORTH. September 13th.--The weather was very uncertain through the last week, and yesterday morning, too, was misty and sunless; notwithstanding which we took the rail for Kenilworth before eleven. The distance from Leamington is less than five miles, and at the Kenilworth station we found a little bit of an omnibus, into which we packed ourselves, together with two ladies, one of whom, at least, was an American. I begin to agree partly with the English, that we are not a people of elegant manners. At all events there is sometimes a bare, hard, meagre sort of deportment, especially in our women, that has not its parallel elsewhere. But perhaps what sets off this kind of behavior, and brings it into alto relievo, is the fact of such uncultivated persons travelling abroad, and going to see sights that would not be interesting except to people of some education and refinement. We saw but little of the village of Kenilworth, passing through it sidelong fashion, in the omnibus; but I learn that it has between three and four thousand inhabitants, and is of immemorial antiquity. We saw a few old, gabled, and timber-framed houses; but generally the town was of modern aspect, although less so in the immediate vicinity of the castle gate, across the road from which there was an inn, with bowling-greens, and a little bunch of houses and shops. Apart from the high road there is a gate-house, ancient, but in excellent repair, towered, turreted, and battlemented, and looking like a castle in itself. Until Cromwell's time, the entrance to the castle used to be beneath an arch that passed through this structure; but the gate-house being granted to one of the Parliament officers, he converted it into a residence, and apparently added on a couple of gables, which now look quite as venerable as the rest of the edifice. Admission within the outer grounds of the castle is now obtained through a little wicket close beside the gate-house, at which sat one or two old men, who touched their hats to us in humble willingness to accept a fee. One of them had guide-books for sale; and, finding that we were not to be bothered by a cicerone, we bought one of his books. The ruins are perhaps two hundred yards from the gate-house and the road, and the space between is a pasture for sheep, which also browse in the inner court, and shelter themselves in the dungeons and state apartments of the castle. Goats would be fitter occupants, because they would climb to the tops of the crumbling towers, and nibble the weeds and shrubbery that grow there. The first part of the castle which we reach is called Caesar's Tower, being the oldest portion of the ruins, and still very stalwart and massive, and built of red freestone, like all the rest. Caesar's Tower being on the right, Leicester's Buildings, erected by the Earl of Leicester, Queen Elizabeth's favorite, are on the left; and between these two formerly stood other structures which have now as entirely disappeared as if they had never existed; and through the wide gap, thus opened, appears the grassy inner court, surrounded on three sides by half-fallen towers and shattered walls. Some of these were erected by John of Gaunt; and among these ruins is the Banqueting-Hall,-- or rather was,--for it has now neither floor nor roof, but only the broken stone-work of some tall, arched windows, and the beautiful, old ivied arch of the entrance-way, now inaccessible from the ground. The ivy is very abundant about the ruins, and hangs its green curtains quite from top to bottom of some of the windows. There are likewise very large and aged trees within the castle, there being no roof nor pavement anywhere, except in some dungeon-like nooks; so that the trees having soil and air enough, and being sheltered from unfriendly blasts, can grow as if in a nursery. Hawthorn, however, next to ivy, is the great ornament and comforter of these desolate ruins. I have not seen so much nor such thriving hawthorn anywhere else,--in the court, high up on crumbly heights, on the sod that carpets roofless rooms,--everywhere, indeed, and now rejoicing in plentiful crops of red berries. The ivy is even more wonderfully luxuriant; its trunks being, in some places, two or three feet in diameter, and forming real buttresses against the walls, which are actually supported and vastly strengthened by this parasite, that clung to them at first only for its own convenience, and now holds them up, lest it should be ruined by their fall. Thus an abuse has strangely grown into a use, and I think we may sometimes see the same fact, morally, in English matters. There is something very curious in the close, firm grip which the ivy fixes upon the wall, closer and closer for centuries. Neither is it at all nice as to what it clutches, in its necessity for support. I saw in the outer court an old hawthorn-tree, to which a plant of ivy had married itself, and the ivy trunk and the hawthorn trunk were now absolutely incorporated, and in their close embrace you could not tell which was which. At one end of the Banqueting-Hall, there are two large bay-windows, one of which looks into the inner court, and the other affords a view of the surrounding country. The former is called Queen Elizabeth's Dressing-room. Beyond the Banqueting-Hall is what is called the Strong Tower, up to the top of which we climbed principally by the aid of the stones that have tumbled down from it. A lady sat half-way down the crumbly descent, within the castle, on a camp-stool, and before an easel, sketching this tower, on the summit of which we sat. She said it was Amy Robsart's Tower; and within it, open to the day, and quite accessible, we saw a room that we were free to imagine had been occupied by her. I do not find that these associations of real scenes with fictitious events greatly heighten the charm of them. By this time the sun had come out brightly, and with such warmth that we were glad to sit down in the shadow. Several sight-seers were now rambling about, and among them some school-boys, who kept scrambling up to points whither no other animal, except a goat, would have ventured. Their shouts and the sunshine made the old castle cheerful; and what with the ivy and the hawthorn, and the other old trees, it was very beautiful and picturesque. But a castle does not make nearly so interesting and impressive a ruin as an abbey, because the latter was built for beauty, and on a plan in which deep thought and feeling were involved; and having once been a grand and beautiful work, it continues grand and beautiful through all the successive stages of its decay. But a castle is rudely piled together for strength and other material conveniences; and, having served these ends, it has nothing left to fall back upon, but crumbles into shapeless masses, which are often as little picturesque as a pile of bricks. Without the ivy and the shrubbery, this huge Kenilworth would not be a pleasant object, except for one or two window-frames, with broken tracery, in the Banqueting-Hall. . . . We stayed from eleven till two, and identified the various parts of the castle as well as we could by the guide-book. The ruins are very extensive, though less so than I should have imagined, considering that seven acres were included within the castle wall. But a large part of the structures have been taken away to build houses in Kenilworth village and elsewhere, and much, too, to make roads with, and a good deal lies under the green turf in the court-yards, inner and outer. As we returned to the gate, my wife and U---- went into the gate-house to see an old chimney-piece, and other antiquities, and J----- and I proceeded a little way round the outer wall, and saw the remains of the moat, and Lin's Tower,--a real and shattered fabric of John of Gaunt. The omnibus now drove up, and one of the old men at the gate came hobbling up to open the door, and was rewarded with a sixpence, and we drove down to the King's Head. . . . We then walked out and bought prints of the castle, and inquired our way to the church and to the ruins of the Priory. The latter, so far as we could discover them, are very few and uninteresting; and the church, though it has a venerable exterior, and an aged spire, has been so modernized within, and in so plain a fashion, as to have lost what beauty it may once have had. There were a few brasses and mural monuments, one of which was a marble group of a dying woman and her family by Westmacott. The sexton was a cheerful little man, but knew very little about his church, and nothing of the remains of the Priory. The day was spent very pleasantly amid this beautiful green English scenery, these fine old Warwickshire trees, and broad, gently swelling fields. LIVERPOOL. September 17th.--I took the train for Rugby, and thence to Liverpool. The most noticeable character at Mrs. Blodgett's now is Mr. T------, a Yankee, who has seen the world, and gathered much information and experience already, though still a young man,--a handsome man, with black curly hair, a dark, intelligent, bright face, and rather cold blue eyes, but a very pleasant air and address. His observing faculties are very strongly developed in his forehead, and his reflective ones seem to be adequate to making some, if not the deepest, use of what he sees. He has voyaged and travelled almost all over the world, and has recently published a book of his peregrinations, which has been well received. He is of exceeding fluent talk, though rather too much inclined to unfold the secret springs of action in Louis Napoleon, and other potentates, and to tell of revolutions that are coming at some unlooked-for moment, but soon. Still I believe in his wisdom and foresight about as much as in any other man's. There are no such things. He is a merchant, and meditates settling in London, and making a colossal fortune there during the next ten or twenty years; that being the period during which London is to hold the exchanges of the world, and to continue its metropolis. After that, New York is to be the world's queen city. There is likewise here a young American, named A------, who has been at a German University, and favors us with descriptions of his student life there, which seems chiefly to have consisted in drinking beer and fighting duels. He shows a cut on his nose as a trophy of these combats. He has with him a dog of St. Bernard, who is a much more remarkable character than himself,--an immense dog, a noble and gentle creature; and really it touches my heart that his master is going to take him from his native snow-mountain to a Southern plantation to die. Mr. A------ says that there are now but five of these dogs extant at the convent; there having, within two or three years, been a disease among them, with which this dog also has suffered. His master has a certificate of his genuineness, and of himself being the rightful purchaser; and he says that as he descended the mountain, every peasant along the road stopped him, and would have compelled him to give up the dog had he not produced this proof of property. The neighboring mountaineers are very jealous of the breed being taken away, considering them of such importance to their own safety. This huge animal, the very biggest dog I ever saw, though only eleven months old, and not so high by two or three inches as he will be, allows Mr. ------ to play with him, and take him on his shoulders (he weighs, at least, a hundred pounds), like any lapdog. LEAMINGTON. Lansdowne Circus, October 10th.--I returned hither from Liverpool last week, and have spent the time idly since then, reposing myself after the four years of unnatural restraint in the Consulate. Being already pretty well acquainted with the neighborhood of Leamington, I have little or nothing to record about the prettiest, cheerfullest, cleanest of English towns. On Saturday we took the rail for Coventry, about a half-hour's travel distant. I had been there before, more than two years ago. . . . No doubt I described it on my first visit; and it is not remarkable enough to be worth two descriptions,--a large town of crooked and irregular streets and lanes, not looking nearly so ancient as it is, because of new brick and stuccoed fronts which have been plastered over its antiquity; although still there are interspersed the peaked gables of old-fashioned, timber-built houses; or an archway of worn stone, which, if you pass through it, shows like an avenue from the present to the past; for just in the rear of the new-fangled aspect lurks the old arrangement of court-yards, and rustiness, and grimness, that would not be suspected from the exterior. Right across the narrow street stands St. Michael's Church with its tall, tall tower and spire. The body of the church has been almost entirely recased with stone since I was here before; but the tower still retains its antiquity, and is decorated with statues that look down from their lofty niches seemingly in good preservation. The tower and spire are most stately and beautiful, the whole church very noble. We went in, and found that the vulgar plaster of Cromwell's time has been scraped from the pillars and arches, leaving them all as fresh and splendid as if just made. We looked also into Trinity Church, which stands close by St. Michael's, separated only, I think, by the churchyard. We also visited St. John's Church, which is very venerable as regards its exterior, the stone being worn and smoothed--if not roughened, rather--by centuries of storm and fitful weather. This wear and tear, however, has almost ceased to be a charm to my mind, comparatively to what it was when I first began to see old buildings. Within, the church is spoiled by wooden galleries, built across the beautiful pointed arches. We saw nothing else particularly worthy of remark except Ford's Hospital, in Grey Friars' Street. It has an Elizabethan front of timber and plaster, facing on the street, with two or three peaked gables in a row, beneath which is a low, arched entrance, giving admission into a small paved quadrangle, open to the sky above, but surrounded by the walls, lozenge-paned windows, and gables of the Hospital. The quadrangle is but a few paces in width, and perhaps twenty in length; and, through a half-closed doorway, at the farther end, there was a glimpse into a garden. Just within the entrance, through an open door, we saw the neat and comfortable apartment of the Matron of the Hospital; and, along the quadrangle, on each side, there were three or four doors, through which we glanced into little rooms, each containing a fireplace, a bed, a chair or two,--a little, homely, domestic scene, with one old woman in the midst of it; one old woman in each room. They are destitute widows, who have their lodging and home here,--a small room for each one to sleep, cook, and be at home in,--and three and sixpence a week to feed and clothe themselves with,--a cloak being the only garment bestowed on them. When one of the sisterhood dies each old woman has to pay twopence towards the funeral; and so they slowly starve and wither out of life, and claim each their twopence contribution in turn. I am afraid they have a very dismal time. There is an old man's hospital in another part of the town, on a similar plan. A collection of sombre and lifelike tales might be written on the idea of giving the experiences of these Hospitallers, male and female; and they might be supposed to be written by the Matron of one, who had acquired literary taste and practice as a governess,--and by the Master of the other, a retired school-usher. It was market-day in Coventry, and far adown the street leading from it there were booths and stalls, and apples, pears, toys, books, among which I saw my Twice-Told Tales, with an awful portrait of myself as frontispiece,--and various country produce, offered for sale by men, women, and girls. The scene looked lively, but had not much vivacity in it. October 27th.--The autumn has advanced progressively, and is now fairly established, though still there is much green foliage, in spite of many brown trees, and an enormous quantity of withered leaves, too damp to rustle, strewing the paths,--whence, however, they are continually swept up and carried off in wheelbarrows, either for neatness or for the agricultural worth, as manure, of even a withered leaf. The pastures look just as green as ever,--a deep, bright verdure, that seems almost sunshine in itself, however sombre the sky may be. The little plats of grass and flowers, in front of our circle of houses, might still do credit to an American midsummer; for I have seen beautiful roses here within a day or two; and dahlias, asters, and such autumnal flowers, are plentiful; and I have no doubt that the old year's flowers will bloom till those of the new year appear. Really, the English winter is not so terrible as ours. October 30th.--Wednesday was one of the most beautiful of all days, and gilded almost throughout with the precious English sunshine,--the most delightful sunshine ever made, both for its positive fine qualities and because we seldom get it without too great an admixture of water. We made no use of this lovely day, except to walk to an Arboretum and Pinetum on the outskirts of the town. U---- and Mrs. Shepard made an excursion to Guy's Cliff. [Here comes in the visit to Leicester's Hospital and Redfern's Shop, and St. Mary's Church, printed in Our Old Home.--ED.] From Redfern's we went back to the market-place, expecting to find J----- at the Museum, but the keeper said he had gone away. We went into this museum, which contains the collections in Natural History, etc., of a county society. It is very well arranged, and is rich in specimens of ornithology, among which was an albatross, huge beyond imagination. I do not think that Coleridge could have known the size of the fowl when he caused it to be hung round the neck of his Ancient Mariner. There were a great many humming-birds from various parts of the world, and some of their breasts actually gleamed and shone as with the brightest lustre of sunset. Also, many strange fishes, and a huge pike taken from the river Avon, and so long that I wonder how he could turn himself about in such a little river as the Avon is near Warwick. A great curiosity was a bunch of skeleton leaves and flowers, prepared by a young lady, and preserving all the most delicate fibres of the plant, looking like inconceivably fine lace-work, white as snow, while the substance was quite taken away. In another room there were minerals, shells, and a splendid collection of fossils, among which were remains of antediluvian creatures, several feet long. In still another room, we saw some historical curiosities,--the most interesting of which were two locks of reddish-brown hair, one from the head and one from the beard of Edward IV. They were fastened to a manuscript letter which authenticates the hair as having been taken from King Edward's tomb in 1739. Near these relics was a seal of the great Earl of Warwick, the mighty kingmaker; also a sword from Bosworth Field, smaller and shorter than those now in use; for, indeed, swords seem to have increased in length, weight, and formidable aspect, now that the weapon has almost ceased to be used in actual warfare. The short Roman sword was probably more murderous than any weapon of the same species, except the bowie-knife. Here, too, were Parliamentary cannon-balls, etc. . . . [The visit to Whitnash intervenes here.--ED.] LONDON. 24 Great Russell Street, November 10th.--We have been thinking and negotiating about taking lodgings in London lately, and this morning we left Leamington and reached London with no other misadventure than that of leaving the great bulk of our luggage behind us,--the van which we hired to take it to the railway station having broken down under its prodigious weight, in the middle of the street. On our journey we saw nothing particularly worthy of note,--but everywhere the immortal verdure of England, scarcely less perfect than in June, so far as the fields are concerned, though the foliage of the trees presents pretty much the same hues as those of our own forests, after the gayety and gorgeousness have departed from them. Our lodgings are in close vicinity to the British Museum, which is the great advantage we took them for. I felt restless and uncomfortable, and soon strolled forth, without any definite object, and walked as far as Charing Cross. Very dull and dreary the city looked, and not in the least lively, even where the throng was thickest and most brisk. As I trudged along, my reflection was, that never was there a dingier, uglier, less picturesque city than London; and that it is really wonderful that so much brick and stone, for centuries together, should have been built up with so poor a result. Yet these old names of the city--Fleet Street, Ludgate Hill, the Strand-used to throw a glory over these homely precincts when I first saw them, and still do so in a less degree. Where Farrington Street opens upon Fleet Street, moreover, I had a glimpse of St. Paul's, along Ludgate Street, in the gathering dimness, and felt as if I saw an old friend. In that neighborhood--speaking of old friends--I met Mr. Parker of Boston, who told me sad news of a friend whom I love as much as if I had known him for a lifetime, though he is, indeed, but of two or three years' standing. He said that my friend's bankruptcy is in to-day's Gazette. Of all men on earth, I had rather this misfortune should have happened to any other; but I hope and think he has sturdiness and buoyancy enough to rise up beneath it. I cannot conceive of his face otherwise than with a glow on it, like that of the sun at noonday. Before I reached our lodgings, the dusk settled into the streets, and a mist bedewed and bedamped me, and I went astray, as is usual with me, and had to inquire my way; indeed, except in the principal thoroughfares, London is so miserably lighted that it is impossible to recognize one's whereabouts. On my arrival I found our parlor looking cheerful with a brisk fire; . . . . but the first day or two in new lodgings is at best an uncomfortable time. Fanny has just come in with more unhappy news about ------. Pray Heaven it may not be true! . . . . Troubles are a sociable brotherhood; they love to come hand in hand, or sometimes, even, to come side by side, with long looked-for and hoped-for good fortune. . . . November 11th.--This morning we all went to the British Museum, always a most wearisome and depressing task to me. I strolled through the lower rooms with a good degree of interest, looking at the antique sculptures, some of which were doubtless grand and beautiful in their day. . . . The Egyptian remains are, on the whole, the more satisfactory; for, though inconceivably ugly, they are at least miracles of size and ponderosity,--for example, a hand and arm of polished granite, as much as ten feet in length. The upper rooms, containing millions of specimens of Natural History, in all departments, really made my heart ache with a pain and woe that I have never felt anywhere but in the British Museum, and I hurried through them as rapidly as I could persuade J----- to follow me. We had left the rest of the party still intent on the Grecian sculptures; and though J----- was much interested in the vast collection of shells, he chose to quit the Museum with me in the prospect of a stroll about London. He seems to have my own passion for thronged streets, and the utmost bustle of human life. We went first to the railway station, in quest of our luggage, which we found. Then we made a pretty straight course down to Holborn, and through Newgate Street, stopping a few moments to look through the iron fence at the Christ's Hospital boys, in their long blue coats and yellow petticoats and stockings. It was between twelve and one o'clock; and I suppose this was their hour of play, for they were running about the enclosed space, chasing and overthrowing one another, without their caps, with their yellow petticoats tucked up, and all in immense activity and enjoyment. They were eminently a healthy and handsome set of boys. Then we went into Cheapside, where I called at Mr. Bennett's shop, to inquire what are the facts about ------. When I mentioned his name, Mr. Bennett shook his head and expressed great sorrow; but, on further talk, I found that he referred only to the failure, and had heard nothing about the other rumor. It cannot, therefore, be true; for Bennett lives in his neighborhood, and could not have remained ignorant of such a calamity. There must be some mistake; none, however, in regard to the failure, it having been announced in the Times. From Bennett's shop--which is so near the steeple of Bow Church that it would tumble upon it if it fell over--we strolled still eastward, aiming at London Bridge; but missed it, and bewildered ourselves among many dingy and frowzy streets and lanes. I bore towards the right, however, knowing that that course must ultimately bring me to the Thames; and at last I saw before me ramparts, towers, circular and square, with battlemented summits, large sweeps and curves of fortification, as well as straight and massive walls and chimneys behind them (all a great confusion--to my eye), of ancient and more modern structure, and four loftier turrets rising in the midst; the whole great space surrounded by a broad, dry moat, which now seemed to be used as an ornamental walk, bordered partly with trees. This was the Tower; but seen from a different and more picturesque point of view than I have heretofore gained of it. Being so convenient for a visit, I determined to go in. At the outer gate, which is not a part of the fortification, a sentinel walks to and fro, besides whom there was a warder, in the rich old costume of Henry VIII's time, looking very gorgeous indeed,--as much so as scarlet and gold can make him. As J----- and I were not going to look at the Jewel-room, we loitered about in the open space, before the White Tower, while the tall, slender, white-haired, gentlemanly warder led the rest of the party into that apartment. We found what one might take for a square in a town, with gabled houses lifting their peaks on one side, and various edifices enclosing the other sides, and the great White Tower,--now more black than white,--rising venerable, and rather picturesque than otherwise, the most prominent object in the scene. I have no plan nor available idea of it whatever in my mind, but it seems really to be a town within itself, with streets, avenues, and all that pertains to human life. There were soldiers going through their exercise in the open space, and along at the base of the White Tower lay a great many cannon and mortars, some of which were of Turkish manufacture, and immensely long and ponderous. Others, likewise of mighty size, had once belonged to the famous ship Great Harry, and had lain for ages under the sea. Others were East-Indian. Several were beautiful specimens of workmanship. The mortars--some so large that a fair-sized man might easily be rammed into them--held their great mouths slanting upward to the sky, and mostly contained a quantity of rain-water. While we were looking at these warlike toys,--for I suppose not one of them will ever thunder in earnest again,--the warder reappeared with his ladies, and, leading us all to a certain part of the open space, he struck his foot on the small stones with which it is paved, and told us that we were standing on the spot where Anne Boleyn and Catharine Parr were beheaded. It is not exactly in the centre of the square, but on a line with one of the angles of the White Tower. I forgot to mention that the middle of the open space is occupied by a marble statue of Wellington, which appeared to me very poor and laboriously spirited. Lastly, the warder led us under the Bloody Tower, and by the side of the Wakefield Tower, and showed us the Traitor's Gate, which is now closed up, so as to afford no access to the Thames. No; we first visited the Beauchamp Tower, famous as the prison of many historical personages. Some of its former occupants have left their initials or names, and inscriptions of piety and patience, cut deep into the freestone of the walls, together with devices--as a crucifix, for instance--neatly and skilfully done. This room has a long, deep fireplace; it is chiefly lighted by a large window, which I fancy must have been made in modern times; but there are four narrow apertures, throwing in a little light through deep alcoves in the thickness of the octagon wall. One would expect such a room to be picturesque; but it is really not of striking aspect, being low, with a plastered ceiling,--the beams just showing through the plaster,--a boarded floor, and the walls being washed over with a buff color. A warder sat within a railing, by the great window, with sixpenny books to sell, containing transcripts of the inscriptions on the walls. We now left the Tower, and made our way deviously westward, passing St. Paul's, which looked magnificently and beautifully, so huge and dusky as it was, with here and there a space on its vast form where the original whiteness of the marble came out like a streak of moonshine amid the blackness with which time has made it grander than it was in its newness. It is a most noble edifice; and I delight, too, in the statues that crown some of its heights, and in the wreaths of sculpture which are hung around it. November 12th.--This morning began with such fog, that at the window of my chamber, lighted only from a small court-yard, enclosed by high, dingy walls, I could hardly see to dress. It kept alternately darkening, and then brightening a little, and darkening again, so much that we could but just discern the opposite houses; but at eleven or thereabouts it grew so much clearer that we resolved to venture out. Our plan for the day was to go in the first place to Westminster Abbey; and to the National Gallery, if we should find time. . . . The fog darkened again as we went down Regent Street, and the Duke of York's Column was but barely visible, looming vaguely before us; nor, from Pall Mall, was Nelson's Pillar much more distinct, though methought his statue stood aloft in a somewhat clearer atmosphere than ours. Passing Whitehall, however, we could scarcely see Inigo Jones's Banqueting-House, on the other side of the street; and the towers and turrets of the new Houses of Parliament were all but invisible, as was the Abbey itself; so that we really were in some doubt whither we were going. We found our way to Poets' Corner, however, and entered those holy precincts, which looked very dusky and grim in the smoky light. . . . I was strongly impressed with the perception that very commonplace people compose the great bulk of society in the home of the illustrious dead. It is wonderful how few names there are that one cares anything about a hundred years after their departure; but perhaps each generation acts in good faith in canonizing its own men. . . . But the fame of the buried person does not make the marble live,--the marble keeps merely a cold and sad memory of a man who would else be forgotten. No man who needs a monument ever ought to have one. The painted windows of the Abbey, though mostly modern, are exceedingly rich and beautiful; and I do think that human art has invented no other such magnificent method of adornment as this. Our final visit to-day was to the National Gallery, where I came to the conclusion that Murillo's St. John was the most lovely picture I have ever seen, and that there never was a painter who has really made the world richer, except Murillo. November 12th.--This morning we issued forth, and found the atmosphere chill and almost frosty, tingling upon our cheeks. . . . The gateway of Somerset House attracted us, and we walked round its spacious quadrangle, encountering many government clerks hurrying to their various offices. At least, I presumed them to be so. This is certainly a handsome square of buildings, with its Grecian facades and pillars, and its sculptured bas-reliefs, and the group of statuary in the midst of the court. Besides the part of the edifice that rises above ground, there appear to be two subterranean stories below the surface. From Somerset House we pursued our way through Temple Bar, but missed it, and therefore entered by the passage from what was formerly Alsatia, but which now seems to be a very respectable and humdrum part of London. We came immediately to the Temple Gardens, which we walked quite round. The grass is still green, but the trees are leafless, and had an aspect of not being very robust, even at more genial seasons of the year. There were, however, large quantities of brilliant chrysanthemums, golden, and of all hues, blooming gorgeously all about the borders; and several gardeners were at work, tending these flowers, and sheltering them from the weather. I noticed no roses, nor even rose-bushes, in the spot where the factions of York and Lancaster plucked their two hostile flowers. Leaving these grounds, we went to the Hall of the Middle Temple, where we knocked at the portal, and, finding it not fastened, thrust it open. A boy appeared within, and the porter or keeper, at a distance, along the inner passage, called to us to enter; and, opening the door of the great hall, left us to view it till he should be at leisure to attend to us. Truly it is a most magnificent apartment; very lofty,--so lofty, indeed, that the antique oak roof was quite hidden, as regarded all its details, in the sombre gloom that brooded under its rafters. The hall was lighted by four great windows, I think, on each of the two sides, descending half-way from the ceiling to the floor, leaving all beneath enclosed by oaken panelling, which, on three sides, was carved with escutcheons of such members of the society as have held the office of reader. There is likewise, in a large recess or transept, a great window, occupying the full height of the hall, and splendidly emblazoned with the arms of the Templars who have attained to the dignity of Chief Justices. The other windows are pictured, in like manner, with coats of arms of local dignitaries connected with the Temple; and besides all these there are arched lights, high towards the roof, at either end full of richly and chastely colored glass, and all the illumination that the great hall had come through these glorious panes, and they seemed the richer for the sombreness in which we stood. I cannot describe, or even intimate, the effect of this transparent glory, glowing down upon us in that gloomy depth of the hall. The screen at the lower end was of carved oak, very dark and highly polished, and as old as Queen Elizabeth's time. The keeper told us that the story of the Armada was said to be represented in these carvings, but in the imperfect light we could trace nothing of it out. Along the length of the apartment were set two oaken tables for the students of law to dine upon; and on the dais, at the upper end, there was a cross-table for the big-wigs of the society; the latter being provided with comfortable chairs, and the former with oaken benches. From a notification, posted near the door, I gathered that the cost of dinners is two shillings to each gentleman, including, as the attendant told me, ale and wine. I am reluctant to leave this hall without expressing how grave, how grand, how sombre, and how magnificent I feel it to be. As regards historical association, it was a favorite dancing-hall of Queen Elizabeth, and Sir Christopher Hatton danced himself into her good graces here. We next went to the Temple Church, and, finding the door ajar, made free to enter beneath its Norman arches, which admitted us into a circular vestibule, very ancient and beautiful. In the body of the church beyond we saw a boy sitting, but nobody either forbade or invited our entrance. On the floor of the vestibule lay about half a score of Templars,--the representatives of the warlike priests who built this church and formerly held these precincts,--all in chain armor, grasping their swords, and with their shields beside them. Except two or three, they lay cross-legged, in token that they had really fought for the Holy Sepulchre. I think I have seen nowhere else such well-preserved monumental knights as these. We proceeded into the interior of the church, and were greatly impressed with its wonderful beauty,--the roof springing, as it were, in a harmonious and accordant fountain, out of the clustered pillars that support its groined arches; and these pillars, immense as they are, are polished like so many gems. They are of Purbeck marble, and, if I mistake not, had been covered with plaster for ages until latterly redeemed and beautified anew. But the glory of the church is its old painted windows; and, positively, those great spaces over the chancel appeared to be set with all manner of precious stones,--or it was as if the many-colored radiance of heaven were breaking upon us,--or as if we saw the wings of angels, storied over with richly tinted pictures of holy things. But it is idle to talk of this marvellous adornment; it is to be seen and wondered at, not written about. Before we left the church, the porter made his appearance, in time to receive his fee,-- which somebody, indeed, is always ready to stretch out his hand for. And so ended our visit to the Temple, which, by the by, though close to the midmost bustle of London, is as quiet as if it were always Sunday there. We now went to St. Paul's. U---- and Miss Shepard ascended to the Whispering Gallery, and we, sitting under the dome, at the base of one of the pillars, saw them far above us, looking very indistinct, for those misty upper-depths seemed almost to be hung with clouds. This cathedral, I think, does not profit by gloom, but requires cheerful sunshine to show it to the best advantage. The statues and sculptures in St. Paul's are mostly covered with years of dust, and look thereby very grim and ugly; but there are few memories there from which I should care to brush away the dust, they being, in nine cases out of ten, naval and military heroes of second or third class merit. I really remember no literary celebrity admitted solely on that account, except Dr. Johnson. The Crimean war has supplied two or three monuments, chiefly mural tablets; and doubtless more of the same excrescences will yet come out upon the walls. One thing that I newly noticed was the beautiful shape of the great, covered marble vase that serves for a font. From St. Paul's we went down Cheapside, and, turning into King Street, visited Guildhall, which we found in process of decoration for a public ball, to take place next week. It looked rather gewgawish thus gorgeous, being hung with flags of all nations, and adorned with military trophies; and the scene was repeated by a range of looking-glasses at one end of the room. The execrably painted windows really shocked us by their vulgar glare, after those of the Temple Hall and Church; yet, a few years ago, I might very likely have thought them beautiful. Our own national banner, I must remember to say, was hanging in Guildhall, but with only ten stars, and an insufficient number of stripes. November 15th.--Yesterday morning we went to London Bridge and along Lower Thames Street, and quickly found ourselves in Billingsgate Market, --a dirty, evil-smelling, crowded precinct, thronged with people carrying fish on their heads, and lined with fish-shops and fish-stalls, and pervaded with a fishy odor. The footwalk was narrow,--as indeed was the whole street,--and filthy to travel upon; and we had to elbow our way among rough men and slatternly women, and to guard our heads from the contact of fish-trays; very ugly, grimy, and misty, moreover, is Billingsgate Market, and though we heard none of the foul language of which it is supposed to be the fountain-head, yet it has its own peculiarities of behavior. For instance, U---- tells me that one man, staring at her and her governess as they passed, cried out, "What beauties!"--another, looking under her veil, greeted her with, "Good morning, my love!" We were in advance, and heard nothing of these civilities. Struggling through this fishy purgatory, we caught sight of the Tower, as we drew near the end of the street; and I put all my party under charge of one of the Trump Cards, not being myself inclined to make the rounds of the small part of the fortress that is shown, so soon after my late visit. When they departed with the warder, I set out by myself to wander about the exterior of the Tower, looking with interest at what I suppose to be Tower Hill,--a slight elevation of the large open space into which Great Tower Street opens; though, perhaps, what is now called Trinity Square may have been a part of Tower Hill, and possibly the precise spot where the executions took place. Keeping to the right, round the Tower, I found the moat quite surrounded by a fence of iron rails, excluding me from a pleasant gravel-path, among flowers and shrubbery, on the inside, where I could see nursery-maids giving children their airings. Possibly these may have been the privileged inhabitants of the Tower, which certainly might contain the population of a large village. The aspect of the fortress has so much that is new and modern about it that it can hardly be called picturesque, and yet it seems unfair to withhold that epithet from such a collection of gray ramparts. I followed the iron fence quite round the outer grounds, till it approached the Thames, and in this direction the moat and the pleasure-ground terminate in a narrow graveyard, which extends beneath the walls, and looks neglected and shaggy with long grass. It appeared to contain graves enough, but only a few tombstones, of which I could read the inscription of but one; it commemorated a Mr. George Gibson, a person of no note, nor apparently connected with the place. St. Katharine's Dock lies along the Thames, in this vicinity; and while on one side of me were the Tower, the quiet gravel-path, and the shaggy graveyard, on the other were draymen and their horses, dock-laborers, sailors, empty puncheons, and a miscellaneous spectacle of life,--including organ-grinders, men roasting chestnuts over small ovens on the sidewalk, boys and women with boards or wheelbarrows of apples, oyster-stands, besides pedlers of small wares, dirty children at play, and other figures and things that a Dutch painter would seize upon. I went a little way into St. Katharine's Dock, and found it crowded with great ships; then, returning, I strolled along the range of shops that front towards this side of the Tower. They have all something to do with ships, sailors, and commerce; being for the sale of ships' stores, nautical instruments, arms, clothing, together with a tavern and grog-shop at every other door; bookstalls, too, covered with cheap novels and song-books; cigar-shops in great numbers; and everywhere were sailors, and here and there a soldier, and children at the doorsteps, and women showing themselves at the doors or windows of their domiciles. These latter figures, however, pertain rather to the street up which I walked, penetrating into the interior of this region, which, I think, is Blackwall--no, I forget what its name is. At all events, it has an ancient and most grimy and rough look, with its old gabled houses, each of them the seat of some petty trade and business in its basement story. Among these I saw one house with three or four peaks along its front,--a second story projecting over the basement, and the whole clapboarded over. . . . There was a butcher's stall in the lower story, with a front open to the street, in the ancient fashion, which seems to be retained only by butchers' shops. This part of London having escaped the Great Fire, I suppose there may be many relics of architectural antiquity hereabouts. At the end of an hour I went back to the Refreshment-room, within the outer gate of the Tower, where the rest of us shortly appeared. We now returned westward by way of Great Tower Street, Eastcheap, and Cannon Street, and, entering St. Paul's, sat down beneath the misty dome to rest ourselves. The muffled roar of the city, as we heard it there, is very soothing, and keeps one listening to it, somewhat as the flow of a river keeps us looking at it. It is a grand and quiet sound; and, ever and anon, a distant door slammed somewhere in the cathedral, and reverberated long and heavily, like the roll of thunder or the boom of cannon. Every noise that is loud enough to be heard in so vast an edifice melts into the great quietude. The interior looked very sombre, and the dome hung over us like a cloudy sky. I wish it were possible to pass directly from St. Paul's into York Minster, or from the latter into the former; that is, if one's mind could manage to stagger under both in the same day. There is no other way of judging of their comparative effect. Under the influence of that grand lullaby,--the roar of the city,--we sat for some time after we were sufficiently rested; but at last plunged forth again, and went up Newgate Street, pausing to look through the iron railings of Christ's Hospital. The boys, however, were not at play; so we went onward, in quest of Smithfield, and on our way had a greeting from Mr. Silsbee, a gentleman of our own native town. Parting with him, we found Smithfield, which is still occupied with pens for cattle, though I believe it has ceased to be a cattle-market. Except it be St. Bartholomew's hospital on one side, there is nothing interesting in this ugly square; though, no doubt, a few feet under the pavement there are bones and ashes as precious as anything of the kind on earth. I wonder when men will begin to erect monuments to human error; hitherto their pillars and statues have only been for the sake of glorification. But, after all, the present fashion may be the better and wholesomer. . . . November 16th.--Mr. Silsbee called yesterday, and talked about matters of art, in which he is deeply interested, and which he has had good opportunities of becoming acquainted with, during three years' travel on the Continent. He is a man of great intelligence and true feeling, and absolutely brims over with ideas,--his conversation flowing in a constant stream, which it appears to be no trouble whatever to him to keep up. . . . He took his leave after a long call, and left with us a manuscript, describing a visit to Berlin, which I read to my wife in the evening. It was well worth reading. He made an engagement to go with us to the Crystal Palace, and came rather for that purpose this morning. We drove to the London Bridge station, where we bought return tickets that entitled us to admission to the Palace, as well as conveyance thither, for half a crown apiece. On our arrival we entered by the garden front, thus gaining a fine view of the ornamental grounds, with their fountains and stately pathways, bordered with statues; and of the edifice itself, so vast and fairy-like, looking as if it were a bubble, and might vanish at a touch. There is as little beauty in the architecture of the Crystal Palace, however, as was possible to be with such gigantic use of such a material. No doubt, an architectural order of which we have as yet little or no idea is to be developed from the use of glass as a building-material, instead of brick and stone. It will have its own rules and its own results; but, meanwhile, even the present Palace is positively a very beautiful object. On entering we found the atmosphere chill and comfortless,--more so, it seemed to me, than the open air itself. It was not a genial day; though now and then the sun gleamed out, and once caused fine effects in the glasswork of a crystal fountain in one of the courts. We were under Mr. Silshee's guidance for the day, . . . . and first we looked at the sculpture, which is composed chiefly of casts or copies of the most famous statues of all ages, and likewise of those crumbs and little fragments which have fallen from Time's jaw,--and half-picked bones, as it were, that have been gathered up from spots where he has feasted full,--torsos, heads and broken limbs, some of them half worn away, as if they had been rolled over and over in the sea. I saw nothing in the sculptural way, either modern or antique, that impressed me so much as a statue of a nude mother by a French artist. In a sitting posture, with one knee over the other, she was clasping her highest knee with both hands; and in the hollow cradle thus formed by her arms lay two sweet little babies, as snug and close to her heart as if they had not yet been born,--two little love-blossoms,--and the mother encircling them and pervading them with love. But an infinite pathos and strange terror are given to this beautiful group by some faint bas-reliefs on the pedestal, indicating that the happy mother is Eve, and Cain and Abel the two innocent babes. Then we went to the Alhambra, which looks like an enchanted palace. If it had been a sunny day, I should have enjoyed it more; but it was miserable to shiver and shake in the Court of the Lions, and in those chambers which were contrived as places of refuge from a fervid temperature. Furthermore, it is not quite agreeable to see such clever specimens of stage decoration; they are so very good that it gets to be past a joke, without becoming actual earnest. I had not a similar feeling in respect to the reproduction of mediaeval statues, arches, doorways, all brilliantly colored as in the days of their first glory; yet I do not know but that the first is as little objectionable as the last. Certainly, in both cases, scenes and objects of a past age are here more vividly presented to the dullest mind than without such material facilities they could possibly be brought before the most powerful imagination. Truly, the Crystal Palace, in all its departments, offers wonderful means of education. I marvel what will come of it. Among the things that I admired most was Benvenuto Cellini's statue of Perseus holding the head of Medusa, and standing over her headless and still writhing body, out of which, at the severed neck, gushed a vast exuberance of snakes. Likewise, a sitting statue, by Michel Angelo, of one of the Medici, full of dignity and grace and reposeful might. Also the bronze gate of a baptistery in Florence, carved all over with relieves of Scripture subjects, executed in the most lifelike and expressive manner. The cast itself was a miracle of art. I should have taken it for the genuine original bronze. We then wandered into the House of Diomed, which seemed to me a dismal abode, affording no possibility of comfort. We sat down in one of the rooms, on an iron bench, very cold. It being by this time two o'clock, we went to the Refreshment-room and lunched; and before we had finished our repast, my wife discovered that she had lost her sable tippet, which she had been carrying on her arm. Mr. Silsbee most kindly and obligingly immediately went in quest of it, . . . . but to no purpose. . . . Upon entering the Tropical Saloon, we found a most welcome and delightful change of temperature among those gigantic leaves of banyan-trees, and the broad expanse of water-plants, floating on lakes, and spacious aviaries, where birds of brilliant plumage sported and sang amid such foliage as they knew at home. Howbeit, the atmosphere was a little faint and sickish, perhaps owing to the odor of the half-tepid water. The most remarkable object here was the trunk of a tree, huge beyond imagination, --a pine-tree from California. It was only the stripped-off bark, however, which had been conveyed hither in segments, and put together again beyond the height of the palace roof; and the hollow interior circle of the tree was large enough to contain fifty people, I should think. We entered and sat down in all the remoteness from one another that is attainable in a good-sized drawing-room. We then ascended the gallery to get a view of this vast tree from a more elevated position, and found it looked even bigger from above. Then we loitered slowly along the gallery as far as it extended, and afterwards descended into the nave; for it was getting dusk, and a horn had sounded, and a bell rung a warning to such as delayed in the remote regions of the building. Mr. Silsbee again most kindly went in quest of the sables, but still without success. . . . I have not much enjoyed the Crystal Palace, but think it a great and admirable achievement. November 19th.--On Tuesday evening Mr. Silsbee came to read some letters which he has written to his friends, chiefly giving his observations on Art, together with descriptions of Venice and other cities on the Continent. They were very good, and indicate much sensibility and talent. After the reading we had a little oyster-supper and wine. I had written a note to ------, and received an answer, indicating that he was much weighed down by his financial misfortune. . . . However, he desired me to come and see him; so yesterday morning I wended my way down into the city, and after various reluctant circumlocutions arrived at his house. The interior looked confused and dismal. It seems to me nobody else runs such risks as a man of business, because he risks everything. Every other man, into whatever depth of poverty he may sink, has still something left, be he author, scholar, handicraftman, or what not; the merchant has nothing. We parted with a long and strong grasp of the hand, and ------ promised to come and see us soon. . . . On my way home I called at Truebner's in Pater Noster Row. . . . I waited a few minutes, he being busy with a tall, muscular, English-built man, who, after he had taken leave, Truebner told me was Charles Reade. I once met him at an evening party, but should have been glad to meet him again, now that I appreciate him so much better after reading Never too Late to Mend. December 6th.--All these days, since my last date, have been marked by nothing very well worthy of detail and description. I have walked the streets a great deal in the dull November days, and always take a certain pleasure in being in the midst of human life,--as closely encompassed by it as it is possible to be anywhere in this world; and in that way of viewing it there is a dull and sombre enjoyment always to be had in Holborn, Fleet Street, Cheapside, and the other busiest parts of London. It is human life; it is this material world; it is a grim and heavy reality. I have never had the same sense of being surrounded by materialisms and hemmed in with the grossness of this earthly existence anywhere else; these broad, crowded streets are so evidently the veins and arteries of an enormous city. London is evidenced in every one of them, just as a megatherium is in each of its separate bones, even if they be small ones. Thus I never fail of a sort of self-congratulation in finding myself, for instance, passing along Ludgate Hill; but, in spite of this, it is really an ungladdened life to wander through these huge, thronged ways, over a pavement foul with mud, ground into it by a million of footsteps; jostling against people who do not seem to be individuals, but all one mass, so homogeneous is the street-walking aspect of them; the roar of vehicles pervading me,--wearisome cabs and omnibuses; everywhere the dingy brick edifices heaving themselves up, and shutting out all but a strip of sullen cloud, that serves London for a sky,--in short, a general impression of grime and sordidness; and at this season always a fog scattered along the vista of streets, sometimes so densely as almost to spiritualize the materialism and make the scene resemble the other world of worldly people, gross even in ghostliness. It is strange how little splendor and brilliancy one sees in London,--in the city almost none, though some in the shops of Regent Street. My wife has had a season of indisposition within the last few weeks, so that my rambles have generally been solitary, or with J----- only for a companion. I think my only excursion with my wife was a week ago, when we went to Lincoln's Inn Fields, which truly are almost fields right in the heart of London, and as retired and secluded as if the surrounding city were a forest, and its heavy roar were the wind among the branches. We gained admission into the noble Hall, which is modern, but built in antique style, and stately and beautiful exceedingly. I have forgotten all but the general effect, with its lofty oaken roof, its panelled walls, with the windows high above, and the great arched window at one end full of painted coats of arms, which the light glorifies in passing through them, as if each were the escutcheon of some illustrious personage. Thence we went to the chapel of Lincoln's Inn, where, on entering, we found a class of young choristers receiving instruction from their music-master, while the organ accompanied their strains. These young, clear, fresh, elastic voices are wonderfully beautiful; they are like those of women, yet have something more birdlike and aspiring, more like what one conceives of the singing of angels. As for the singing of saints and blessed spirits that have once been human, it never can resemble that of these young voices; for no duration of heavenly enjoyments will ever quite take the mortal sadness out of it. In this chapel we saw some painted windows of the time of James I., a period much subsequent, to the age when painted glass was in its glory; but the pictures of Scriptural people in these windows were certainly very fine,--the figures being as large as life, and the faces having much expression. The sunshine came in through some of them, and produced a beautiful effect, almost as if the painted forms were the glorified spirits of those holy personages. After leaving Lincoln's Inn, we looked at Gray's Inn, which is a great, quiet domain, quadrangle beyond quadrangle, close beside Holborn, and a large space of greensward enclosed within it. It is very strange to find so much of ancient quietude right in the monster city's very jaws, which yet the monster shall not eat up,--right in its very belly, indeed, which yet, in all these ages, it shall not digest and convert into the same substance as the rest of its bustling streets. Nothing else in London is so like the effect of a spell, as to pass under one of these archways, and find yourself transported from the jumble, mob, tumult, uproar, as of an age of week-days condensed into the present hour, into what seems an eternal sabbath. Thence we went into Staple Inn, I think it was,--which has a front upon Holborn of four or five ancient gables in a row, and a low arch under the impending story, admitting you into a paved quadrangle, beyond which you have the vista of another. I do not understand that the residences and chambers in these Inns of Court are now exclusively let to lawyers; though such inhabitants certainly seem to preponderate there. Since then J----- and I walked down into the Strand, and found ourselves unexpectedly mixed up with a crowd that grew denser as we approached Charing Cross, and became absolutely impermeable when we attempted to make our way to Whitehall. The wicket in the gate of Northumberland House, by the by, was open, and gave me a glimpse of the front of the edifice within,--a very partial glimpse, however, and that obstructed by the solid person of a footman, who, with some women, were passing out from within. The crowd was a real English crowd, perfectly undemonstrative, and entirely decorous, being composed mostly of well-dressed people, and largely of women. The cause of the assemblage was the opening of Parliament by the Queen, but we were too late for any chance of seeing her Majesty. However, we extricated ourselves from the multitude, and, going along Pall Mall, got into the Park by the steps at the foot of the Duke of York's Column, and thence went to the Whitehall Gateway, outside of which we found the Horse Guards drawn up,--a regiment of black horses and burnished cuirasses. On our way thither an open carriage came through the gateway into the Park, conveying two ladies in court dresses; and another splendid chariot pressed out through the gateway,--the coachman in a cocked hat and scarlet and gold embroidery, and two other scarlet and gold figures hanging behind. It was one of the Queen's carriages, but seemed to have nobody in it. I have forgotten to mention what, I think, produced more effect on me than anything else, namely, the clash of the bells from the steeple of St. Martin's Church and those of St. Margaret. Really, London seemed to cry out through them, and bid welcome to the Queen. December 7th.--This being a muddy and dismal day, I went only to the BRITISH MUSEUM, which is but a short walk down the street (Great Russell Street). I have now visited it often enough to be on more familiar terms with it than at first, and therefore do not feel myself so weighed down by the many things to be seen. I have ceased to expect or hope or wish to devour and digest the whole enormous collection; so I content myself with individual things, and succeed in getting now and then a little honey from them. Unless I were studying some particular branch of history or science or art, this is the best that can be done with the British Museum. I went first to-day into the Townley Gallery, and so along through all the ancient sculpture, and was glad to find myself able to sympathize more than heretofore with the forms of grace and beauty which are preserved there,--poor, maimed immortalities as they are,--headless and legless trunks, godlike cripples, faces beautiful and broken-nosed,-- heroic shapes which have stood so long, or lain prostrate so long, in the open air, that even the atmosphere of Greece has almost dissolved the external layer of the marble; and yet, however much they may be worn away, or battered and shattered, the grace and nobility seem as deep in them as the very heart of the stone. It cannot be destroyed, except by grinding them to powder. In short, I do really believe that there was an excellence in ancient sculpture, which has yet a potency to educate and refine the minds of those who look at it even so carelessly and casually as I do. As regards the frieze of the Parthenon, I must remark that the horses represented on it, though they show great spirit and lifelikeness, are rather of the pony species than what would be considered fine horses now. Doubtless, modern breeding has wrought a difference in the animal. Flaxman, in his outlines, seems to have imitated these classic steeds of the Parthenon, and thus has produced horses that always appeared to me affected and diminutively monstrous. From the classic sculpture, I passed through an Assyrian room, where the walls are lined with great slabs of marble sculptured in bas-relief with scenes in the life of Senmacherib, I believe; very ugly, to be sure, yet artistically done in their own style, and in wonderfully good preservation. Indeed, if the chisel had cut its last stroke in them yesterday, the work could not be more sharp and distinct. In glass cases, in this room, are little relics and scraps of utensils, and a great deal of fragmentary rubbish, dug up by Layard in his researches,-- things that it is hard to call anything but trash, but which yet may be of great significance as indicating the modes of life of a long-past race. I remember nothing particularly just now, except some pieces of broken glass, iridescent with certainly the most beautiful hues in the world,--indescribably beautiful, and unimaginably, unless one can conceive of the colors of the rainbow, and a thousand glorious sunsets, and the autumnal forest-leaves of America, all condensed upon a little fragment of a glass cup,--and that, too, without becoming in the least glaring or flagrant, but mildly glorious, as we may fancy the shifting lines of an angel's wing may be. I think this chaste splendor will glow in my memory for years to come. It is the effect of time, and cannot be imitated by any known process of art. I have seen it in specimens of old Roman glass, which has been famous here in England; but never in anything is there the brilliancy of these Oriental fragments. How strange that decay, in dark places, and underground, and where there are a billion chances to one that nobody will ever see its handiwork, should produce these beautiful effects! The glass seems to become perfectly brittle, so that it would vanish, like a soap-bubble, if touched. Ascending the stairs, I went through the halls of fossil remains,--which I care little for, though one of them is a human skeleton in limestone,-- and through several rooms of mineralogical specimens, including all the gems in the world, among which is seen, not the Koh-i-noor itself, but a fac-simile of it in crystal. I think the aerolites are as interesting as anything in this department, and one piece of pure iron, laid against the wall of the room, weighs about fourteen hundred pounds. Whence could it have come? If these aerolites are bits of other planets, how happen they to be always iron? But I know no more of this than if I were a philosopher. Then I went through rooms of shells and fishes and reptiles and tortoises, crocodiles and alligators and insects, including all manner of butterflies, some of which had wings precisely like leaves, a little withered and faded, even the skeleton and fibres of the leaves represented; and immense hairy spiders, covering, with the whole circumference of their legs, a space as big as a saucer; and centipedes little less than a foot long; and winged insects that look like jointed twigs of a tree. In America, I remember, when I lived in Lenox, I found an insect of this species, and at first really mistook it for a twig. It was smaller than these specimens in the Museum. I suppose every creature, almost, that runs or creeps or swims or flies, is represented in this collection of Natural History; and it puzzles me to think what they were all made for, though it is quite as mysterious why man himself was made. By and by I entered the room of Egyptian mummies, of which there are a good many, one of which, the body of a priestess, is unrolled, except the innermost layer of linen. The outline of her face is perfectly visible. Mummies of cats, dogs, snakes, and children are in the wall-cases, together with a vast many articles of Egyptian manufacture and use,--even children's toys; bread, too, in flat cakes; grapes, that have turned to raisins in the grave; queerest of all, methinks, a curly wig, that is supposed to have belonged to a woman,--together with the wooden box that held it. The hair is brown, and the wig is as perfect as if it had been made for some now living dowager. From Egypt we pass into rooms containing vases and other articles of Grecian and Roman workmanship, and funeral urns, and beads, and rings, none of them very beautiful. I saw some splendid specimens, however, at a former visit, when I obtained admission to a room not indiscriminately shown to visitors. What chiefly interested me in that room was a cast taken from the face of Cromwell after death; representing a wide-mouthed, long-chinned, uncomely visage, with a triangular English nose in the very centre. There were various other curiosities, which I fancied were safe in my memory, but they do not now come uppermost. To return to my to-day's progress through the Museum;--next to the classic rooms are the collections of Saxon and British and early English antiquities, the earlier portions of which are not very interesting to me, possessing little or no beauty in themselves, and indicating a kind of life too remote from our own to be readily sympathized with. Who cares for glass beads and copper brooches, and knives, spear-heads, and swords, all so rusty that they look as much like pieces of old iron hoop as anything else? The bed of the Thames has been a rich treasury of antiquities, from the time of the Roman Conquest downwards; it seems to preserve bronze in considerable perfection, but not iron. Among the mediaeval relics, the carvings in ivory are often very exquisite and elaborate. There are likewise caskets and coffers, and a thousand other Old World ornamental works; but I saw so many and such superior specimens of them at the Manchester Exhibition, that I shall say nothing of them here. The seal-ring of Mary, Queen of Scots, is in one of the cases; it must have been a thumb-ring, judging from its size, and it has a dark stone, engraved with armorial bearings. In another case is the magic glass formerly used by Dr. Doe, and in which, if I rightly remember, used to be seen prophetic visions or figures of persons and scenes at a distance. It is a round ball of glass or crystal, slightly tinged with a pinkish hue, and about as big as a small apple, or a little bigger than an egg would be if perfectly round. This ancient humbug kept me looking at it perhaps ten minutes; and I saw my own face dimly in it, but no other vision. Lastly, I passed through the Ethnographical Rooms; but I care little for the varieties of the human race,--all that is really important and interesting being found in our own variety. Perhaps equally in any other. This brought me to the head of one of the staircases, descending which I entered the library. Here--not to speak of the noble rooms and halls--there are numberless treasures beyond all price; too valuable in their way for me to select any one as more curious and valuable than many others. Letters of statesmen and warriors of all nations, and several centuries back,--among which, long as it has taken Europe to produce them, I saw none so illustrious as those of Washington, nor more so than Franklin's, whom America gave to the world in her nonage; and epistles of poets and artists, and of kings, too, whose chirography appears to have been much better than I should have expected from fingers so often cramped in iron gauntlets. In another case there were the original autograph copies of several famous works,--for example, that of Pope's Homer, written on the backs of letters, the direction and seals of which appear in the midst of "the Tale of Troy divine," which also is much scratched and interlined with Pope's corrections; a manuscript of one of Ben Jonson's masques; of the Sentimental Journey, written in much more careful and formal style than might be expected, the book pretending to be a harum-scarum; of Walter Scott's Kenilworth, bearing such an aspect of straightforward diligence that I shall hardly think of it again as a romance;--in short, I may as well drop the whole matter here. All through the long vista of the king's library, we come to cases in which--with their pages open beneath the glass--we see books worth their weight in gold, either for their uniqueness or their beauty, or because they have belonged to illustrious men, and have their autographs in them. The copy of the English translation of Montaigne, containing the strange scrawl of Shakespeare's autograph, is here. Bacon's name is in another book; Queen Elizabeth's in another; and there is a little devotional volume, with Lady Jane Grey's writing in it. She is supposed to have taken it to the scaffold with her. Here, too, I saw a copy, which was printed at a Venetian press at the time, of the challenge which the Admirable Crichton caused to be posted on the church doors of Venice, defying all the scholars of Italy to encounter him. But if I mention one thing, I find fault with myself for not putting down fifty others just as interesting,--and, after all, there is an official catalogue, no doubt, of the whole. As I do not mean to fill any more pages with the British Museum, I will just mention the hall of Egyptian antiquities on the ground-floor of the edifice, though I did not pass through it to-day. They consist of things that would be very ugly and contemptible if they were not so immensely magnified; but it is impossible not to acknowledge a certain grandeur, resulting from the scale on which those strange old sculptors wrought. For instance, there is a granite fist of prodigious size, at least a yard across, and looking as if it were doubled in the face of Time, defying him to destroy it. All the rest of the statue to which it belonged seems to have vanished; but this fist will certainly outlast the Museum, and whatever else it contains, unless it be some similar Egyptian ponderosity. There is a beetle, wrought out of immensely hard black stone, as big as a hogshead. It is satisfactory to see a thing so big and heavy. Then there are huge stone sarcophagi, engraved with hieroglyphics within and without, all as good as new, though their age is reckoned by thousands of years. These great coffins are of vast weight and mass, insomuch that when once the accurately fitting lids were shut down, there might have seemed little chance of their being lifted again till the Resurrection. I positively like these coffins, they are so faithfully made, and so black and stern,--and polished to such a nicety, only to be buried forever; for the workmen, and the kings who were laid to sleep within, could never have dreamed of the British Museum. There is a deity named Pasht, who sits in the hall, very big, very grave, carved of black stone, and very ludicrous, wearing a dog's head. I will just mention the Rosetta Stone, with a Greek inscription, and another in Egyptian characters which gave the clew to a whole field of history; and shall pretermit all further handling of this unwieldy subject. In all the rooms I saw people of the poorer classes, some of whom seemed to view the objects intelligently, and to take a genuine interest in them. A poor man in London has great opportunities of cultivating himself if he will only make the best of them; and such an institution as the British Museum can hardly fail to attract, as the magnet does steel, the minds that are likeliest to be benefited by it in its various departments. I saw many children there, and some ragged boys. It deserves to be noticed that some small figures of Indian Thugs, represented as engaged in their profession and handiwork of cajoling and strangling travellers, have been removed from the place which they formerly occupied in the part of the Museum shown to the general public. They are now in the more private room, and the reason of their withdrawal is, that, according to the Chaplain of Newgate, the practice of garroting was suggested to the English thieves by this representation of Indian Thugs. It is edifying, after what I have written in the preceding paragraph, to find that the only lesson known to have been inculcated here is that of a new mode of outrage. December 8th.--This morning, when it was time to rise, there was but a glimmering of daylight, and we had candles on the breakfast-table at nearly ten o'clock. All abroad there was a dense dim fog brooding through the atmosphere, insomuch that we could hardly see across the street. At eleven o'clock I went out into the midst of the fog-bank, which for the moment seemed a little more interfused with daylight; for there seem to be continual changes in the density of this dim medium, which varies so much that now you can but just see your hand before you, and a moment afterwards you can see the cabs dashing out of the duskiness a score of yards off. It is seldom or never, moreover, an unmitigated gloom, but appears to be mixed up with sunshine in different proportions; sometimes only one part sun to a thousand of smoke and fog, and sometimes sunshine enough to give the whole mass a coppery line. This would have been a bright sunny day but for the interference of the fog; and before I had been out long, I actually saw the sun looking red and rayless, much like the millionth magnification of a new halfpenny. I was bound towards Bennoch's; for he had written a note to apologize for not visiting us, and I had promised to call and see him to-day. I went to Marlborough House to look at the English pictures, which I care more about seeing, here in England, than those of foreign artists, because the latter will be found more numerously and better on the Continent. I saw many pictures that pleased me; nothing that impressed me very strongly. Pictorial talent seems to be abundant enough, up to a certain point; pictorial genius, I should judge, is among the rarest of gifts. To be sure, I very likely might not recognize it where it existed; and yet it ought to have the power of making itself known even to the uninstructed mind, as literary genius does. If it exist only for connoisseurs, it is a very suspicious matter. I looked at all Turner's pictures, and at many of his drawings; and must again confess myself wholly unable to understand more than a very few of them. Even those few are tantalizing. At a certain distance you discern what appears to be a grand and beautiful picture, which you shall admire and enjoy infinitely if you can get within the range of distinct vision. You come nearer, and find only blotches of color and dabs of the brush, meaning nothing when you look closely, and meaning a mystery at the point where the painter intended to station you. Some landscapes there were, indeed, full of imaginative beauty, and of the better truth etherealized out of the prosaic truth of Nature; only it was still impossible actually to see it. There was a mist over it; or it was like a tract of beautiful dreamland, seen dimly through sleep, and glimmering out of sight, if looked upon with wide-open eyes. These were the more satisfactory specimens. There were many others which I could not comprehend in the remotest degree; not even so far as to conjecture whether they purported to represent earth, sea, or sky. In fact, I should not have known them to be pictures at all, but might have supposed that the artist had been trying his brush on the canvas, mixing up all sorts of hues, but principally white paint, and now and then producing an agreeable harmony of color without particularly intending it. Now that I have done my best to understand them without an interpreter, I mean to buy Ruskin's pamphlet at my next visit, and look at them through his eyes. But I do not think that I can be driven out of the idea that a picture ought to have something in common with what the spectator sees in nature. Marlborough House may be converted, I think, into a very handsome residence for the young Prince of Wales. The entrance from the court-yard is into a large, square central hall, the painted ceiling of which is at the whole height of the edifice, and has a gallery on one side, whence it would be pleasant to look down on a festal scene below. The rooms are of fine proportions, with vaulted ceilings, and with fireplaces and mantel-pieces of great beauty, adorned with pillars and terminal figures of white and of variegated marble; and in the centre of each mantel-piece there is a marble tablet, exquisitely sculptured with classical designs, done in such high relief that the figures are sometimes almost disengaged from the background. One of the subjects was Androcles, or whatever was his name, taking the thorn out of the lion's foot. I suppose these works are of the era of the first old Duke and Duchess. After all, however, for some reason or other, the house does not at first strike you as a noble and princely one, and you have to convince yourself of it by examining it more in detail. On leaving Marlborough House, I stepped for a few moments into the National Gallery, and looked, among other things, at the Turners and Claudes that hung there side by side. These pictures, I think, are quite the most comprehensible of Turner's productions; but I must say I prefer the Claudes. The latter catches "the light that never was on sea or land" without taking you quite away from nature for it. Nevertheless, I will not be quite certain that I care for any painter except Murillo, whose St. John I should like to own. As far as my own pleasure is concerned, I could not say as much for any other picture; for I have always found an infinite weariness and disgust resulting from a picture being too frequently before my eyes. I had rather see a basilisk, for instance, than the very best of those old, familiar pictures in the Boston Athenaeum; and most of those in the National Gallery might soon affect me in the same way. From the Gallery I almost groped my way towards the city, for the fog seemed to grow denser and denser as I advanced; and when I reached St. Paul's, the sunny intermixture above spoken of was at its minimum, so that, the smoke-cloud grew really black about the dome and pinnacles, and the statues of saints looked down dimly from their standpoints on high. It was very grand, however, to see the pillars and porticos, and the huge bulk of the edifice, heaving up its dome from an obscure foundation into yet more shadowy obscurity; and by the time I reached the corner of the churchyard nearest Cheapside, the whole vast cathedral had utterly vanished, leaving "not a wrack behind," unless those thick, dark vapors were the elements of which it had been composed, and into which it had again dissolved. It is good to think, nevertheless,--and I gladly accept the analogy and the moral,--that the cathedral was really there, and as substantial as ever, though those earthly mists had hidden it from mortal eyes. I found ------ in better spirits than when I saw him last, but his misfortune has been too real not to affect him long and deeply. He was cheerful, however, and his face shone with almost its old lustre. It has still the cheeriest glow that I ever saw in any human countenance. I went home by way of Holborn, and the fog was denser than ever,--very black, indeed more like a distillation of mud than anything else; the ghost of mud,--the spiritualized medium of departed mud, through which the dead citizens of London probably tread in the Hades whither they are translated. So heavy was the gloom, that gas was lighted in all the shop-windows; and the little charcoal-furnaces of the women and boys, roasting chestnuts, threw a ruddy, misty glow around them. And yet I liked it. This fog seems an atmosphere proper to huge, grimy London; as proper to London as that light neither of the sun nor moon is to the New Jerusalem. On reaching home, I found the same fog diffused through the drawing-room, though how it could have got in is a mystery. Since nightfall, however, the atmosphere is clear again. December 20th.--Here we are still in London, at least a month longer than we expected, and at the very dreariest and dullest season of the year. Had I thought of it sooner, I might have found interesting people enough to know, even when all London is said to be out of town; but meditating a stay only of a week or two (on our way to Rome), it did not seem worth while to seek acquaintances. I have been out only for one evening; and that was at Dr. ------'s, who had been attending all the children in the measles. (Their illness was what detained us.) He is a homoeopathist, and is known in scientific or general literature; at all events, a sensible and enlightened man, with an un-English freedom of mind on some points. For example, he is a Swedenborgian, and a believer in modern spiritualism. He showed me some drawings that had been made under the spiritual influence by a miniature-painter who possesses no imaginative power of his own, and is merely a good mechanical and literal copyist; but these drawings, representing angels and allegorical people, were done by an influence which directed the artist's hand, he not knowing what his next touch would be, nor what the final result. The sketches certainly did show a high and fine expressiveness, if examined in a trustful mood. Dr. ------ also spoke of Mr. Harris, the American poet of spiritualism, as being the best poet of the day; and he produced his works in several volumes, and showed me songs, and paragraphs of longer poems, in support of his opinion. They seemed to me to have a certain light and splendor, but not to possess much power, either passionate or intellectual. Mr. Harris is the medium of deceased poets, Milton and Lord Byron among the rest; and Dr. ------ said that Lady Byron--who is a devoted admirer of her husband, in spite of their conjugal troubles--pronounced some of these posthumous strains to be worthy of his living genius. Then the Doctor spoke of various strange experiences which he himself has had in these spiritual matters; for he has witnessed the miraculous performances of Home, the American medium, and he has seen with his own eyes, and felt with his own touch, those ghostly hands and arms the reality of which has been certified to me by other beholders. Dr. ------ tells me that they are cold, and that it is a somewhat awful matter to see and feel them. I should think so, indeed. Do I believe in these wonders? Of course; for how is it possible to doubt either the solemn word or the sober observation of a learned and sensible man like Dr. ------? But again, do I really believe it? Of course not; for I cannot consent to have heaven and earth, this world and the next, beaten up together like the white and yolk of an egg, merely out of respect to Dr. ------'s sanity and integrity. I would not believe my own sight, nor touch of the spiritual hands; and it would take deeper and higher strains than those of Mr. Harris to convince me. I think I might yield to higher poetry or heavenlier wisdom than mortals in the flesh have ever sung or uttered. Meanwhile, this matter of spiritualism is surely the strangest that ever was heard of; and yet I feel unaccountably little interest in it,--a sluggish disgust, and repugnance to meddle with it,--insomuch that I hardly feel as if it were worth this page or two in my not very eventful journal. One or two of the ladies present at Dr. ------'s little party seemed to be mediums. I have made several visits to the picture-galleries since my last date; and I think it fair towards my own powers of appreciation to record that I begin to appreciate Turner's pictures rather better than at first. Not that I have anything to recant as respects those strange, white-grounded performances in the chambers at the Marlborough House; but some of his happier productions (a large landscape illustrative of Childe Harold, for instance) seem to me to have more magic in them than any other pictures. I admire, too, that misty, morning landscape in the National Gallery; and, no doubt, his very monstrosities are such as only he could have painted, and may have an infinite value for those who can appreciate the genius in them. The shops in London begin to show some tokens of approaching Christmas; especially the toy-shops, and the confectioners',--the latter ornamenting their windows with a profusion of bonbons and all manner of pygmy figures in sugar; the former exhibiting Christmas-trees, hung with rich and gaudy fruit. At the butchers' shops, there is a great display of fat carcasses, and an abundance of game at the poulterers'. We think of going to the Crystal Palace to spend the festival day, and eat our Christmas dinner; but, do what we may, we shall have no home feeling or fireside enjoyment. I am weary, weary of London and of England, and can judge now how the old Loyalists must have felt, condemned to pine out their lives here, when the Revolution had robbed them of their native country. And yet there is still a pleasure in being in this dingy, smoky, midmost haunt of men; and I trudge through Fleet Street and Ludgate Street and along Cheapside with an enjoyment as great as I ever felt in a wood-path at home; and I have come to know these streets as well, I believe, as I ever knew Washington Street in Boston, or even Essex Street in my stupid old native town. For Piccadilly or for Regent Street, though more brilliant promenades, I do not care nearly so much. December 27th.--Still leading an idle life, which, however, may not be quite thrown away, as I see some things, and think many thoughts. The other day we went to Westminster Abbey, and through the chapels; and it being as sunny a day as could well be in London, and in December, we could judge, in some small degree, what must have been the splendor of those tombs and monuments when first erected there. I presume I was sufficiently minute in describing my first visit to the chapels, so I shall only mention the stiff figure of a lady of Queen Elizabeth's court, reclining on the point of her elbow under a mural arch through all these dusty years; . . . . and the old coronation-chair, with the stone of Scone beneath the seat, and the wood-work cut and scratched all over with names and initials. . . . I continue to go to the picture-galleries. I have an idea that the face of Murillo's St. John has a certain mischievous intelligence in it. This has impressed me almost from the first. It is a boy's face, very beautiful and very pleasant too, but with an expression that one might fairly suspect to be roguish if seen in the face of a living boy. About equestrian statues, as those of various kings at Charing Cross, and otherwhere about London, and of the Duke of Wellington opposite Apsley House, and in front of the Exchange, it strikes me as absurd, the idea of putting a man on horseback on a place where one movement of the steed forward or backward or sideways would infallibly break his own and his rider's neck. The English sculptors generally seem to have been aware of this absurdity, and have endeavored to lessen it by making the horse as quiet as a cab-horse on the stand, instead of rearing rampant, like the bronze group of Jackson at Washington. The statue of Wellington, at the Piccadilly corner of the Park, has a stately and imposing effect, seen from far distances, in approaching either through the Green Park, or from the Oxford Street corner of Hyde Park. January 3d, 1858.--On Thursday we had the pleasure of a call from Mr. Coventry Patmore, to whom Dr. Wilkinson gave me a letter of introduction, and on whom I had called twice at the British Museum without finding him. We had read his Betrothal and Angel in the House with unusual pleasure and sympathy, and therefore were very glad to make his personal acquaintance. He is a man of much more youthful aspect than I had expected, . . . . a slender person to be an Englishman, though not remarkably so had he been an American; with an intelligent, pleasant, and sensitive face,--a man very evidently of refined feelings and cultivated mind. . . . He is very simple and agreeable in his manners; a little shy, yet perfectly frank, and easy to meet on real grounds. . . . He said that his wife had proposed to come with him, and had, indeed, accompanied him to town, but was kept away. . . . We were very sorry for this, because Mr. Patmore seems to acknowledge her as the real "Angel in the House," although he says she herself ignores all connection with the poem. It is well for her to do so, and for her husband to feel that the character is her real portrait; and both, I suppose, are right. It is a most beautiful and original poem,--a poem for happy married people to read together, and to understand by the light of their own past and present life; but I doubt whether the generality of English people are capable of appreciating it. I told Mr. Patmore that I thought his popularity in America would be greater than at home, and he said that it was already so; and he appeared to estimate highly his American fame, and also our general gift of quicker and more subtle recognition of genius than the English public. . . . We mutually gratified each other by expressing high admiration of one another's works, and Mr. Patmore regretted that in the few days of our further stay here we should not have time to visit him at his home. It would really give me pleasure to do so. . . . I expressed a hope of seeing him in Italy during our residence there, and he seemed to think it possible, as his friend, and our countryman, Thomas Buchanan Read, had asked him to come thither and be his guest. He took his leave, shaking hands with all of us because he saw that we were of his own people, recognizing him as a true poet. He has since given me the new edition of his poems, with a kind rote. We are now making preparations for our departure, which we expect will take place on Tuesday; and yesterday I went to our Minister's to arrange about the passport. The very moment I rang at his door, it swung open, and the porter ushered me with great courtesy into the anteroom; not that he knew me, or anything about me, except that I was an American citizen. This is the deference which an American servant of the public finds it expedient to show to his sovereigns. Thank Heaven, I am a sovereign again, and no longer a servant; and really it is very singular how I look down upon our ambassadors and dignitaries of all sorts, not excepting the President himself. I doubt whether this is altogether a good influence of our mode of government. I did not see, and, in fact, declined seeing, the Minister himself, but only his son, the Secretary of Legation, and a Dr. P------, an American traveller just from the Continent. He gave a fearful account of the difficulties that beset a person landing with much luggage in Italy, and especially at Civita Vecchia, the very port at which we intended to debark. I have been so long in England that it seems a cold and shivery thing to go anywhere else. Bennoch came to take tea with us on the 5th, it being his first visit since we came to London, and likewise his farewell visit on our leaving for the Continent. On his departure, J----- and I walked a good way down Oxford Street and Holborn with him, and I took leave of him with the kindest wishes for his welfare. END OF VOL. II. 
11549	----	Distributed Proofreaders [Transcriber's Note: Footnotes have been numbered and relocated to the end of the chapter in which they occur. They are marked by [1], [2], etc.] THE LIFE AND LETTERS OF ELIZABETH PRENTISS AUTHOR OF _STEPPING HEAVENWARD_ BY GEORGE L. PRENTISS This memoir was undertaken at the request of many of Mrs. Prentiss' old and most trusted friends, who felt that the story of her life should be given to the public. Much of it is in the nature of an autobiography. Her letters, which with extracts from her journals form the larger portion of its contents, begin when she was in her twentieth year, and continue almost to her last hour. They are full of details respecting herself, her home, her friends, and the books she wrote. A simple narrative, interspersed with personal reminiscences, and varied by a sketch of her father, and passing notices of others, who exerted a moulding influence upon her character, completes the story. A picture is thus presented of the life she lived and its changing scenes, both on the natural and the spiritual side. While the work may fail to interest some readers, the hope is cherished that, like STEPPING HEAVENWARD, it will be welcomed into Christian homes and prove a blessing to many hearts; thus realising the desire expressed in one of her last letters: _Much of my experience of life has cost me a great price and I wish to use it for strengthening and comforting other souls._ G. L. P. KAUINFELS, September 11, 1882. CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. THE CHILD AND THE GIRL. 1818-1839. I. Birth-place and Ancestry. The Payson Family. Seth Payson. Edward Payson. His Mother. A Sketch of his Life and Character. The Fervor of his Piety. Despondent Moods, and their Causes. His bright, natural Traits. How he prayed and preached. Conversational Gift. Love to Christ. Triumphant Death. II. Birth and Childhood of Elizabeth Payson. Early Traits. Devotion to her Father. His Influence upon her. Letters to her Sister. Removal to New York. Reminiscences of the Payson Family. III. Recollections of Elizabeth's Girlhood by an early Friend and Schoolmate. Her own Picture of herself before her Father's Death. Favorite Resorts. Why God permits so much Suffering. Literary Tastes. Letters. "What are Little Babies For?" Opens a School. Religious Interest. IV. The dominant Type of Religious Life and Thought in New England in the First Half of this Century. Literary Influences. Letter of Cyrus Hamlin. A strange Coincidence. CHAPTER II. THE NEW LIFE IN CHRIST. 1840-1841. I. A memorable Experience. Letters to her Cousin. Goes to Richmond as a Teacher. Mr. Persico's School. Letters. II. Her Character as a Teacher. Letters. Incidents of School Life. Religious Struggles, Aims, and Hope. Oppressive Heat and Weariness. III. Extracts from her Richmond Journal. CHAPTER III. PASSING FROM GIRLHOOD INTO WOMANHOOD. 1841-1845. I. At Home Again. Marriage of her Sister. Ill-health. Letters. Spiritual Aspiration and Conflict. Perfectionism. "Very, Very Happy." Work for Christ what makes Life attractive. Passages from her Journal. A Point of Difficulty. II. Returns to Richmond. Trials There. Letters. Illness. School Experiences. "To the Year 1843." Glimpses of her daily Life. Why her Scholars love her So. Homesick. A Black Wedding. What a Wife should be. "A Presentiment." Notes from her Diary. III. Her Views of Love and Courtship. Visit of her Sister and Child. Letters. Sickness and Death of Friends. Ill-health. Undergoes a surgical Operation. Her Fortitude. Study of German. Fenelon. CHAPTER IV. THE YOUNG WIFE AND MOTHER. 1845-1850. I. Marriage and Settlement in New Bedford. Reminiscences. Letters. Birth of her First Child. Death of her Mother-in-Law. Letters. II. Birth of a Son. Death of her Mother. Her Grief. Letters. Eddy's Illness and her own Cares. A Family Gathering at Newburyport. Extracts from Eddy's Journal. III. Further Extracts from Eddy's Journal. Ill-Health. Visit to Newark. Death of her Brother-in-Law, S. S. Prentiss. His Character. Removal to Newark. Letters. CHAPTER V. IN THE SCHOOL OF SUFFERING. 1851-1858. I. Removal to New York, and first Summer there. Letters. Loss of Sleep and Anxiety about Eddy. Extracts from Eddy's Journal, Describing his last Illness and Death. Lines entitled, "To My Dying Eddy.". II. Birth of her Third Child. Reminiscences of a Sabbath Evening Talk. Story of the Baby's Sudden Illness and Death. Summer of 1852. Lines entitled, "My Nursery." III. Summer at White Lake. Sudden Death of her Cousin, Miss Shipman. Quarantined. _Little Susy's Six Birthdays_. How she wrote it. _The Flower of the Family_. Her Motive in Writing it. Letter of Sympathy to a bereaved Mother. A Summer at the Seaside. _Henry and Bessie._ IV. A memorable Year. Lines on the Anniversary of Eddy's Death. Extracts from her Journal. _Little Susy's Six Teachers_. The Teachers' Meeting. A New York Waif. Summer in the Country. Letters. _Little Susy's Little Servants_. Extracts from her Journal. "Alone with God." V. Ready for new Trials. Dangerous Illness. Extracts from her Journal. Visit to Greenwood. Sabbath Meditations. Birth of another Son. Her Husband resigns his Pastoral Charge. Voyage to Europe. CHAPTER VI. IN RETREAT AMONG THE ALPS. 1858-1860. I. Life Abroad. Letters about the Voyage, and the Journey from Havre to Switzerland. Chateau d'Oex. Letters from there. The Châlet Rosat. The Free Church of the Canton de Vaud. Pastor Panchàud. II. Montreux. The Swiss Autumn. Castle of Chillon. Death and Sorrow of Friends at Home. Twilight Talks. Spring Flowers. III. The Campagne Genevrier. Vevay. Beauty of the Region. Birth of a Son. Visit from Professor Smith. Excursion to Chamouni. Whooping-cough and Scarlet-fever among the Children. Doctor Curchod. Letters. IV. Paris. Sight-seeing. A sick Friend. London and its Environs. The Queen and Prince Albert. The Isle of Wight. Homeward. CHAPTER VII. THE STRUGGLE WITH ILL-HEALTH. 1861-1865. I. At Home again in New York. The Church of the Covenant. Increasing Ill-health. The Summer of 1861. Death of Louisa Payson Hopkins. Extracts from her Journal. Summer of 1862. Letters. Despondency. II. Another care-worn Summer. Letters from Williamstown and Rockaway. Hymn on Laying the Corner-stone of the Church of the Covenant. III. Happiness in her Children. The Summer of 1864. Letters from Hunter. Affliction among Friends. IV. Death of President Lincoln. Dedication of the Church of the Covenant. Growing Insomnia. Resolves to try the Water-cure. Its beneficial Effects. Summer at Newburgh. Reminiscences of an Excursion to Palz Point. Death of her Husband's Mother. Funeral of her Nephew, Edward Payson Hopkins. CHAPTER VIII. THE PASTOR'S WIFE AND DAUGHTER OF CONSOLATION. 1866-1868. I. Happiness as a Pastor's Wife. Visits to Newport and Williamstown. Letters. The Great Portland Fire. First Summer at Dorset. The new Parsonage occupied. Second Summer at Dorset. _Little Lou's Sayings and Doings_. Project of a Cottage. Letters. _The Little Preacher_. Illness and Death of Mrs. Edward Payson and of Little Francis. II. Last Visit from Mrs. Stearns. Visits to old Friends at Newport and Rochester. Letters. Goes to Dorset. _Fred and Maria and Me_. Letters. III. Return to Town. Death of an old Friend. Letters and Notes of Love and Sympathy. An Old Ladies' Party. Scenes of Trouble and Dying Beds. Fifty Years Old. Letters. CHAPTER IX. STEPPING HEAVENWARD. 1869. I. Death of Mrs. Stearns. Her Character. Dangerous Illness of Prof. Smith. Death at the Parsonage. Letters. A Visit to Vassar College. Letters. Getting ready for the General Assembly. "Gates Ajar". II. How she earned her Sleep. Writing for young Converts about speaking the Truth. Meeting of the General Assembly in the Church of the Covenant. Reunion, D.D.'s, and Strawberry Short-cake. "Enacting the Tiger." Getting Ready for Dorset. Letters. III. The new Home in Dorset. What it became to her. Letters from there. IV. Return to Town. Domestic Changes. Letters. "My Heart sides with God in everything." Visiting among the Poor. "Conflict isn't Sin." Publication of _Stepping Heavenward_. Her Misgivings about it. How it was received. Reminiscences by Miss E. A. Warner. Letters. The Rev. Wheelock Craig. V. Recollections by Mrs. Henry B. Smith CHAPTER X. ON THE MOUNT. 1870. I. A happy Year. Madame Guyon. What sweetens the Cup of earthly Trials and the Cup of earthly Joy. Death of Mrs. Julia B. Cady. Her Usefulness. Sickness and Death of other Friends. "My Cup runneth over." Letters. "More Love to Thee, O Christ". II. Her Silver Wedding. "_I have lived, I have loved_." No Joy can put her out of Sympathy with the Trials of Friends. A Glance backward. Last Interview with a dying Friend. More Love and more Likeness to Christ. Funeral of a little Baby. Letters to Christian Friends. III. Lines on going to Dorset. A Cloud over her. Faber's Life. Loving Friends for one's own sake and loving them for Christ's sake. The Bible and the Christian Life. Dorset Society and Occupations. Counsels to a young Friend in Trouble. "Don't stop praying for your Life!" Cure for the Heart-sickness caused by the Sight of human Imperfections. Fenelon's Teaching about Humiliation and being patient with Ourselves. IV. _The Story Lizzie Told_. Country and City. The Law of Christian Progress. Letters to a Friend bereft of three Children. Sudden Death of another Friend. "Go on; step faster." Fenelon and his Influence upon her religious Life. Lines on her Indebtedness to him. CHAPTER XI. IN HER HOME. I. Home-life in New York. II. Home-life in Dorset. III. Further Glimpses of her Dorset Life. CHAPTER XII. THE TRIAL OF FAITH. 1871-1872. I. Two Years of Suffering. Its Nature and Causes. Spiritual Conflicts. Ill-health. Faith a Gift to be won by Prayer. Death-bed of Dr. Skinner. Visit to Philadelphia. "Daily Food." How to read the Bible so as to love it more. Letters of Sympathy and Counsel. "Prayer for Holiness brings Suffering." Perils of human Friendship. II. Her Husband called to Chicago. Lines on going to Dorset. Letters to young Friends on the Christian Life. Narrow Escape from Death. Feeling on returning to Town. Her "Praying Circle." The Chicago Fire. The true Art of Living. God our only safe Teacher. An easily-besetting Sin. Counsels to young Friends. Letters. III. "Holiness and Usefulness go hand-in-hand." No two Souls dealt with exactly alike. Visits to a stricken Home. Another Side of her Life. Visit to a Hospital. Christian Friendship. Letters to a bereaved Mother. Submission not inconsistent with Suffering. Thoughts at the Funeral of a little "Wee Davie." Assurance of Faith. Funeral of Prof. Hopkins. His Character. IV. Christian Parents to expect Piety in their Children. Perfection. "People make too much Parade of their Troubles." "Higher Life" Doctrines. Letter to Mrs. Washburn. Last Visit to Williamstown. CHAPTER XIII. PEACEABLE FRUIT. 1873-1874. I. Effect of spiritual Conflict upon her religious Life. Overflowing Affections. Her Husband called to Union Theological Seminary. Baptism of Suffering. The Character of her Friendships. No perfect Life. Prayer. "Only God can satisfy a Woman." Why human Friendship is a Snare. Letters. II. Goes to Dorset. Christian Example. At Work among her Flowers. Dangerous Illness. Her Feeling about Dying. Death an "Invitation" from Christ. "The Under-current bears _Home_." "More Love, more Love!" A Trait of Character. Special Mercies. What makes a sweet Home. Letters. III. Change of Home and Life in New York. A Book about Robbie. Her Sympathy with young People. "I have in me two different Natures." What Dr. De Witt said at the Grave of his Wife. The Way to meet little Trials. Faults in Prayer-meetings. How special Theories of the Christian Life are formed. Sudden Illness of Prof. Smith. Publication of _Golden Hours_. How it was received. IV. Incidents of the Year 1874. Starts a Bible-reading in Dorset. Begins to take Lessons in Painting. A Letter from her Teacher. Publication of _Urbane and His Friends_. Design of the Work. Her Views of the Christian Life. The Mystics. The Indwelling Christ. An Allegory. CHAPTER XIV. WORK AND PLAY. 1875-1877. I. A Bible-reading in New York. Her Painting. "Grace for Grace." Death of a young Friend. The Summer at Dorset. Bible-readings there. Encompassed with Kindred. Typhoid Fever in the House. Watching and Waiting. The Return to Town. A Day of Family Rejoicing. Life a "Battle-field." II. The Moody and Sankey Meetings. Her Interest in them. Mr. Moody. Publication of _Griselda_. Goes to the Centennial. At Dorset again. Her Bible-readings. A Moody-meeting Convert. Visit to Montreal. Publication of _The Home at Greylock_. Her Theory of a happy Home. Marrying for Love. Her Sympathy with young Mothers. Letters. III. The Year 1877. Death of her Cousin, the Rev. Charles H. Payson. Last Illness and Death of Prof. Smith. "Let us take our Lot in Life just as it comes." Adorning one's Home. How much Time shall be given to it? God's Delight in His beautiful Creations. Death of Dr. Buck. Visiting the sick and bereaved. An Ill-turn. Goes to Dorset. The Strangeness of Life. Kauinfels. The Bible-reading. Letters. IV. Return to Town. Recollections of this Period. "Ordinary" Christians and Spiritual Conflict. A tired Sunday Evening. "We may make an Idol of our Joy." Publication of _Pemaquid_. Kezia Millet. CHAPTER XV. FOREVER WITH THE LORD. 1878. I. Enters upon her last Year on Earth. A Letter about The Home at Greylock. Her Motive in writing Books. Visit to the Aquarium. About "Worry." Her Painting. Saturday Afternoons with her. What she was to her Friends. Resemblance to Madame de Broglie. Recollections of a Visit to East River. A Picture of her by an old Friend. Goes to Dorset. Second Advent Doctrine. Last Letters. II. Little Incidents and Details of her last Days on Earth. Last Visit to the Woods. Sudden Illness. Last Bible-reading. Last Drive to Hager Brook. Reminiscence of a last Interview. Closing Scenes. Death. The Burial. APPENDIX CHAPTER I. THE CHILD AND THE GIRL. 1818-1839. I. Birth-place and Ancestry. Seth Payson. Edward Payson. His Mother. A Sketch of his Life and Character. The Fervor of his Piety. Despondent Moods and their Cause. Bright, natural Traits. How he prayed and preached. Conversational Gift. Love to Christ. Triumphant Death. Mrs. Prentiss was fortunate in the place of her birth. She first saw the light at Portland, Maine. Maine was then a district of Massachusetts, and Portland was its chief town and seaport, distinguished for beauty of situation, enterprise, intelligence, social refinement and all the best qualities of New England character. Not a few of the early settlers had come from Cape Cod and other parts of the old Bay State, and the blood of the Pilgrim Fathers ran in their veins. Among its leading citizens at that time were such men as Stephen Longfellow, Simon Greenleaf, Prentiss Mellen, Samuel Fessenden, Ichabod Nichols, Edward Payson, and Asa Cummings; men eminent for private and public virtue, and some of whom were destined to become still more widely known, by their own growing influence, or by the genius of their children. But while favored in the place of her birth, Mrs. Prentiss was more highly favored still in her parentage. For more than half a century the name of her father has been a household word among the churches not of New England only, but throughout the land and even beyond the sea. It is among the most beloved and honored in the annals of American piety. [1] He belonged to a very old Puritan stock, and to a family noted during two centuries for the number of ministers of the Gospel who have sprung from it. The first in the line of his ancestry in this country was Edward, who came over in the brig Hopewell, William Burdeck, Master, in 1635-6, and settled in the town of Roxbury. He was a native of Nasing, Essex Co., England. Among his fellow-passengers in the Hopewell was Mary Eliot, then a young girl, sister of John Eliot, the illustrious "Apostle to the Indians." Some years later she became his wife. Their youngest son, Samuel, was father of the Rev. Phillips Payson, who was born at Dorchester, Massachusetts, 1705, and settled at Walpole, in the same State, in 1730. He had four sons in the ministry, all, like himself, graduates of Harvard College. The youngest of these, the Rev. Seth Payson, D.D., Mrs. Prentiss' grandfather, was born September 30, 1758, was ordained and settled at Rindge, New Hampshire, December 4, 1782, and died there, after a pastorate of thirty-seven years, February 26, 1820. His wife was Grata Payson, of Pomfret, Conn. He was a man widely known in his day and of much weight in the community, not only in his own profession but in civil life, also, having several times filled the office of State senator. When in 1819 a plan was formed to remove Williams College to a more central location, and several towns competed for the honor, Dr. Payson was associated with Chancellor Kent of New York, and Governor John Cotton Smith of Connecticut, as a committee to decide upon the rival claims. He is described as possessing a sharp, vigorous intellect, a lively imagination, a very retentive memory, and was universally esteemed as an able and faithful minister of Christ. [2] Edward, the eldest son of Seth and Grata Payson, was born at Rindge, July 25, 1783. His mother was noted for her piety, her womanly discretion, and her personal and mental graces. Edward was her first-born, and from his infancy to the last year of his life she lavished upon him her love and her prayers. The relation between them was very beautiful. His letters to her are models of filial devotion, and her letters to him are full of tenderness, good sense, and pious wisdom. He inherited some of her most striking traits, and through him they passed on to his youngest daughter, who often said that she owed her passion for the use of the pen and her fondness for rhyming to her grandmother Grata. [3] Edward Payson was in all respects a highly-gifted man. His genius was as marked as his piety. There is a charm about his name and the story of his life, that is not likely soon to pass away. He belonged to a class of men who seem to be chosen of Heaven to illustrate the sublime possibilities of Christian attainment--men of seraphic fervor of devotion, and whose one overmastering passion is to win souls for Christ and to become wholly like Him themselves. Into this goodly fellowship he was early initiated. There is something startling in the depth and intensity of his religious emotions, as recorded in his journal and letters. Nor is it to be denied that they are often marred by a very morbid element. Like David Brainerd, the missionary saint of New England, to whom in certain features of his character he bore no little resemblance, Edward Payson was of a melancholy temperament and subject, therefore, to sudden and sharp alternations of feeling. While he had great capacity for enjoyment, his capacity for suffering was equally great. Nor were these native traits suppressed, or always overruled, by his religious faith; on the contrary, they affected and modified his whole Christian life. In its earlier stages, he was apt to lay too much stress by far upon fugitive "frames," and to mistake mere weariness, torpor, and even diseased action of body or mind, for coldness toward his Saviour. And almost to the end of his days he was, occasionally, visited by seasons of spiritual gloom and depression, which, no doubt, were chiefly, if not solely, the result of physical causes. It was an error that grew readily out of the brooding introspection and self-anatomy which marked the religious habit of the times. The close connection between physical causes and morbid or abnormal conditions of the spiritual life, was not as well understood then as it is now. Many things were ascribed to Satanic influence which should have been ascribed rather to unstrung nerves and loss of sleep, or to a violation of the laws of health. [4] The disturbing influence of nervous and other bodily or mental disorders upon religious experience deserves a fuller discussion than it has yet received. It is a subject which both modern science and modern thought, if guided by Christian wisdom, might help greatly to elucidate. The morbid and melancholy element, however, was only a painful incident of his character. It tinged his life with a vein of deep sadness and led to undue severity of self-discipline; but it did not seriously impair the strength and beauty of his Christian manhood. It rather served to bring them into fuller relief, and even to render more striking those bright natural traits--the sportive humor, the ready mother wit, the facetious pleasantry, the keen sense of the ridiculous, and the wondrous story-telling gift--which made him a most delightful companion to young and old, to the wise and the unlettered alike. It served, moreover, to impart peculiar tenderness to his pastoral intercourse, especially with members of his flock tried and tempted like as he was. He had learned how to counsel and comfort them by the things which he also had suffered. He may have been too exacting and harsh in dealing with himself; but in dealing with other souls nothing could exceed the gentleness, wisdom, and soothing influence of his ministrations. As a preacher he was the impersonation of simple, earnest, and impassioned utterance. Although not an orator in the ordinary sense of the term, he touched the hearts of his hearers with a power beyond the reach of any oratory. Some of his printed sermons are models in their kind; that _e.g._ on "Sins estimated by the Light of Heaven," and that addressed to Seamen. His theology was a mild type of the old New England Calvinism, modified, on the one hand, by the influence of his favorite authors--such as Thomas à Kempis, and Fenelon, the Puritan divines of the seventeenth century, John Newton and Richard Cecil--and on the other, by his own profound experience and seraphic love. Of his theology, his preaching and his piety alike, Christ was the living centre. His expressions of personal love to the Saviour are surpassed by nothing in the writings of the old mystics. Here is a passage from a letter to his mother, written while he was still a young pastor: I have sometimes heard of spells and charms to excite love, and have wished for them, when a boy, that I might cause others to love me. But how much do I now wish for some charm which should lead men to love the Saviour!... Could I paint a true likeness of Him, methinks I should rejoice to hold it up to the view and admiration of all creation, and be hid behind it forever. It would be heaven enough to hear Him praised and adored. But I can not paint Him; I can not describe Him; I can not make others love Him; nay, I can not love Him a thousandth part so much as I ought myself. O, for an angel's tongue! O, for the tongues of ten thousand angels, to sound His praises. He had a remarkable familiarity with the word of God and his mind seemed surcharged with its power. "You could not, in conversation, mention a passage of Scripture to him but you found his soul in harmony with it--the most apt illustrations would flow from his lips, the fire of devotion would beam from his eye, and you saw at once that not only could he deliver a sermon from it, but that the ordinary time allotted to a sermon would be exhausted before he could pour out the fullness of meaning which a sentence from the word of God presented to his mind." [5] He was wonderfully gifted in prayer. Here all his intellectual, imaginative, and spiritual powers were fused into one and poured themselves forth in an unbroken stream of penitential and adoring affection. When he said, "Let us pray," a divine influence seemed to rest upon all present. His prayers were not mere pious mental exercises, they were devout inspirations. No one can form an adequate conception of what Dr. Payson was from any of the productions of his pen. Admirable as his written sermons are, his extempore prayers and the gushings of his heart in familiar talk were altogether higher and more touching than anything he wrote. It was my custom to close my eyes when he began to pray, and it was always a letting down, a sort of rude fall, to open them again, when he had concluded, and find myself still on the earth. His prayers always took my spirit into the immediate presence of Christ, amid the glories of the spiritual world; and to look round again on this familiar and comparatively misty earth was almost painful. At every prayer I heard him offer, during the seven years in which he was my spiritual guide, I never ceased to feel new astonishment, at the wonderful variety and depth and richness and even novelty of feeling and expression which were poured forth. This was a feeling with which every hearer sympathised, and it is a fact well-known, that Christians trained under his influence were generally remarkable for their devotional habits. [6] Dr. Payson possessed rare conversational powers and loved to wield them in the service of his Master. When in a genial mood--and the mild excitement of social intercourse generally put him in such a mood--his familiar talk was equally delightful and instructive. He was, in truth, an improvisatore. Quick perception, an almost intuitive insight into character, an inexhaustible fund of fresh, original thought and incident, the happiest illustrations, and a memory that never faltered in recalling what he had once read or seen, easy self-control, and ardent sympathies, all conspired to give him this preeminence. Without effort or any appearance of incongruity he could in turn be grave and gay, playful and serious. This came of the utter sincerity and genuineness of his character. There was nothing artificial about him; nature and grace had full play and, so to say, constantly ran into each other. A keen observer, who knew him well, both in private and in public, testifies: "His facetiousness indeed was ever a near neighbor to his piety, if it was not a part of it; and his most cheerful conversations, so far from putting his mind out of tune for acts of religious worship, seemed but a happy preparation for the exercise of devotional feelings." [7] This coexistence of serious with playful elements is often found in natures of unusual depth and richness, just as tragic and comic powers sometimes co-exist in a great poet. The same qualities that rendered him such a master of conversation, lent a potent charm to his familiar religious talks in the prayer-meeting, at the fireside, or in the social circle. Always eager to speak for his Master, he knew how to do it with a wise skill and a tenderness of feeling that disarmed prejudice and sometimes won the most determined foe. Even in administering reproof or rebuke there was the happiest union of tact and gentleness. "What makes you blush so?" said a reckless fellow in the stage, to a plain country girl, who was receiving the mail-bag at a post office from the hand of the driver. "What makes you blush so, my dear?" "Perhaps," said Dr. Payson, who sat near him and was unobserved till now, "Perhaps it is because some one spoke rudely to her when the stage was along here the last time." Edward Payson was graduated at Harvard College in the class of 1803. In the autumn of that year he took charge of an academy then recently established in Portland. Resigning this position in 1806, he returned home and devoted himself to the study of divinity under his father's care. He was licensed to preach in May, 1807, and a few months later received a unanimous call to Portland, where he was ordained in December of the same year. On the 8th of May, 1811, he was married to Ann Louisa Shipman, of New Haven, Conn. An extract from a manly letter to Miss Shipman, written a few weeks after their engagement, will show the spirit which inspired him both as a lover and a husband: When I wrote my first letter after my late visit, I felt almost angry with you and quite so with myself. And why angry with you? Because I began to fear you would prove a dangerous rival to my Lord and Master, and draw away my heart from His service. My Louisa, should this be the case, I should certainly hate you. I am Christ's; I must be Christ's; He has purchased me dearly, and I should hate the mother who bore me, if she proved even the _innocent_ occasion of drawing me from Him. I feared that you would do this. For a little time the conflict of my feelings was dreadful beyond description. For a few moments I wished I had never seen you. Had you been a right hand, or a right eye, had you been the life-blood in my veins (and you are dear to me as either) I must have given you up, had I continued to feel as I did. But blessed be God, He has shown me my weakness only to strengthen me. I now feel very differently. I still love you dearly as ever, but my love leads me _to_ Christ and not _from_ Him. Dr. Payson received repeated invitations to important churches in Boston and New York, but declining them all, continued in the Portland pastorate until his death, which occurred October 22, 1827, in the forty-fifth year of his age. The closing months of his life were rendered memorable by an extraordinary triumph of Christian faith and patience, as well as of the power of mind over matter. His bodily suffering and agonies were indescribable, but, like one of the old martyrs in the midst of the flames, he seemed to forget them all in the greatness of his spiritual joy. In a letter written shortly after his death, Mrs. Payson gives a touching account of the tender and thoughtful concern for her happiness which marked his last illness. Knowing, for example, that she would be compelled to part with her house, he was anxious to have a smaller one purchased and occupied at once, so that his presence in it for a little while might make it seem more home-like to her and to her children after he was gone. "To tell you (she adds) what he was the last six memorable weeks would be altogether beyond my skill. All who beheld him called his countenance angelic." She then repeats some of his farewell words to her. Begging that, she would "not dwell upon his poor, shattered frame, but follow his blessed spirit to the realms of glory," he burst forth into an exultant song of delight, as if already he saw the King in His beauty! The well-known letter to his sister Eliza, dated a few weeks before his departure, breathes the same spirit. Here is an extract from it: Were I to adopt the figurative language of Bunyan, I might date this letter from the land of Beulah, of which I have been for some weeks a happy inhabitant. The celestial city is full in my view. Its glories beam upon me, its breezes fan me, its odors are wafted to me, its sounds strike upon my ear, and its spirit is breathed into my heart. Nothing separates me from it but the river of death, which now appears but as an insignificant rill, that may be crossed at a single step, whenever God shall give permission. The Sun of Righteousness has been gradually drawing nearer and nearer, appearing larger and brighter as He approached, and now He fills the whole hemisphere, pouring forth a flood of glory, in which I seem to float like an insect in the beams of the sun, exulting yet almost trembling while I gaze on this excessive brightness, and wondering, with unutterable wonder, why God should deign thus to shine upon a sinful worm. A single heart and a single tongue seem altogether inadequate to my wants; I want a whole heart for every separate emotion, and a whole tongue to express that emotion. But why do I speak thus of myself and my feelings? why not speak only of our God and Redeemer? It is because I know not what to say--when I would speak of them my words are all swallowed up. And thus, gazing already upon the Beatific Vision, he passed on into glory. What is written concerning his Lord and Master might with almost literal truth have been inscribed over his grave: _The zeal of Thy house hath eaten me up._ * * * * * II. Birth and Childhood of Elizabeth Payson. Early Traits. Devotion to her Father. His Influence upon her. Letters to her Sister. Removal to New York. Reminiscences of the Payson Family. Elizabeth Payson was born "about three o'clock"--so her father records it--on Tuesday afternoon, October 26, 1818. She was the fifth of eight children, two of whom died in infancy. All good influences seem to have encircled her natal hour. In a letter to his mother, dated October 27, Dr Payson enumerates six special mercies, by which the happy event had been crowned. One of them was the gratification of the mother's "wish for a daughter rather than a son." Another was God's goodness to him in sparing both the mother and the child in spite of his fear that he should lose them. This fear, strangely enough, was occasioned by the unusual religious peace and comfort which he had been enjoying. He had a presentiment that in this way God was forearming him for some extraordinary trial; and the loss of his wife seemed to him most likely to be that trial. "God has been so gracious to me in spiritual things, that I thought He was preparing me for Louisa's death. Indeed it may be so still, and if so His will be done. Let Him take all--and if He leaves us Himself we still have all and abound." The next day he writes: Still God is kind to us. Louisa and the babe continue as well as we could desire. Truly, my cup runs over with blessings. I can still scarcely help thinking that God is preparing me for some severe trial; but if He will grant me His presence as He does now, no trial can seem severe. Oh, could I now drop the body, I would stand and cry to all eternity without being weary: God is holy, God is just, God is good; God is wise and faithful and true. Either of His perfections alone is sufficient to furnish matter for an eternal, unwearied song. Could I sing upon paper I should break forth into singing, for day and night I can do nothing but sing "Let the saints be joyful," etc., etc. But I must close. I can not send so much love and thankfulness to my parents as they deserve. My present happiness, all my happiness I ascribe under God to them and their prayers. Surely, a home inspired and ruled by such a spirit was a sweet home to be born into! The notices of Elizabeth's childhood depict her as a dark-eyed, delicate little creature, of sylph-like form, reserved and shy in the presence of strangers, of a sweet disposition, and very intense in her sympathies. "Until I was three years old mother says I was a little angel," she once wrote to a friend. Her constitution was feeble, and she inherited from her father his high-strung nervous temperament. "I never knew what it was to feel well," she wrote in 1840. Severe pain in the side, fainting turns, the sick headache, and other ailments troubled her, more or less, from infancy. She had an eye wide open to the world about her, and quick to catch its varying aspects of light and beauty, whether on land or sea. The ships and wharves not far from her father's house, the observatory and fort on the hill overlooking Casco Bay, the White Mountains far away in the distance, Deering's oaks, the rope-walk, and the ancient burying-ground--these and other familiar objects of "the dear old town," commemorated by Longfellow in his poem entitled "My Lost Youth," were indelibly fixed in her memory and followed her wherever she went, to the end of her days. In her movements she was light-footed, venturesome to rashness, and at times wild with fun and frolic. Her whole being was so impressionable that things pleasant and things painful stamped themselves upon it as with the point of a diamond. Whatever she did, whatever she felt, she felt and did as for her life. Allusion has been made to the intensity of her sympathies. The sight or tale of suffering would set her in a tremor of excitement; and in her eagerness to give relief she seemed ready for any sacrifice, however great. This trait arrested the observant eye of her father, and he expressed to Mrs. Payson his fear lest it might some day prove a real misfortune to the child. "She will be in danger of marrying a blind man, or a helpless cripple, out of pure sympathy," he once said. But by far the strongest of all the impressions of her childhood related to her father. His presence was to her the happiest spot on earth, and any special expression of his affection would throw her into an ecstasy of delight. When he was away she pined for his return. "The children all send a great deal of love, and Elizabeth says, Do tell Papa to come home," wrote her mother to him, when she was six years old. Her recollections of her father were singularly vivid. She could describe minutely his domestic habits, how he looked and talked as he sat by the fireside or at the table, his delight in and skillful use of carpenters' tools, his ingenious devices for amusing her and diverting his own weariness as he lay sick in bed, _e.g._, tearing up sheets of white paper into tiny bits, and then letting her pour them out of the window to "make believe it snowed," or counting all the bristles in a clothes-brush, and then as she came in from school, holding it up and bidding her guess their number--his coolness and efficiency in the wild excitements of a conflagration, the calm deliberation with which he walked past the horror-stricken lookers on and cut the rope by which a suicide was suspended; these and other incidents she would recall a third of a century after his death, as if she had just heard of or just witnessed them. To her child's imagination his memory seemed to be invested with the triple halo of father, hero, and saint. A little picture of him was always near her. She never mentioned his name without tender affection and reverence. Nor is this at all strange. She was almost nine years old when he died; and his influence, during these years, penetrated to her inmost being. She once said that of her father's virtues one only--punctuality--had descended to her. But here she was surely wrong. Not only did she owe to him some of the most striking peculiarities of her physical and mental constitution, but her piety itself, if not inherited, was largely inspired and shaped by his. In the whole tone and expression of her earlier religious life, at least, one sees him clearly reflected. His devotional habits, in particular, left upon her an indelible impression. Once, when four or five years old, rushing by mistake into his room, she found him prostrate upon his face--completely lost in prayer. A short time before her death, speaking of this scene to a friend, she remarked that the remembrance of it had influenced her ever since. What somebody said of Sara Coleridge might indeed have been said with no less truth of Elizabeth Payson: "Her father had looked down into her eyes and left in them the light of his own." The only records of her childhood from her own pen consist of the following letters, written to her sister, while the latter was passing a year in Boston. She was then nine years old. PORTLAND, _May 18, 1828._ My dear sister:--I thank you for writing to such a little girl as I am, when you have so little time. I was going to study a little catechism which Miss Martin has got, but she said I could not learn it. I want to learn it. I do not like to stay so long at school. We have to write composition by dictation, as Miss Martin calls it. She reads to us out of a book a sentence at a time. We write it and then we write it again on our slates, because we do not always get the whole; then we write it on a piece of paper. Miss Martin says I may say my Sunday-school [lesson] there. Mr. Mitchell has had a great many new books. I have been sick. Doctor Cummings has been here and says E. is better and he thinks he will not have a fever.... G. goes to school to Miss Libby, and H. goes to Master Jackson. H. sends his love. Good-bye. Your affectionate sister, E. PAYSON, _September 29, 1828._ My dear sister:--I think you were very kind to write to me, when you have so little time. I began to go to Mrs. Petrie's school a week ago yesterday. I stay at home Mondays in the morning to assist in taking care of Charles or such little things as I can do. G. goes with me. When mother put Charles and him to bed, as soon as she had done praying with them, G. said, Mother, will this world be all burnt up when we are dead? She said, Yes, my dear, it will. What, and all the dishes too? will they melt like lead? and will the ground be burnt up too? O what a nasty fire it will make. I saw the Northern lights last night. I sleep in a very large pleasant room in the bed with mother.... I have a very pleasant room for my baby-house over the porch which has two windows and a fireplace in it, and a little cupboard too. E. Wood and I are as intimate as ever. I suppose you know that Mr. Wood is building him a brick house. Mrs. Merril's little baby is dead. It was buried yesterday afternoon. Mr. Mussey lives across the street from us. He has a great many elm trees in his front yard. His house is three stories high and the trees reach to the top. We have heard two or three times from E. since he went away. Yesterday all the Sabbath-schools walked in a procession and then went to our meeting-house and Mr. William Cutter addressed them. I am your affectionate sister, E. Payson. Her feeble constitution exposed her to severe attacks of disease, and in May, 1830, she was brought to the verge of the grave by a violent fever. Her mother was deeply moved by this event, and while recording in her journal God's goodness in sparing Elizabeth, wonders whether it is to the end that she may one day devote herself to her Saviour and do something for the "honor of religion." In the latter part of 1830 Mrs. Payson removed to New York, where her eldest daughter opened a school for girls. It was during this residence in New York that Elizabeth, at the age of twelve years, made a public confession of Christ and came to the Lord's table for the first time. She was received into the Bleecker street--now the Fourth avenue--Presbyterian church, then under the pastoral care of the Rev. Erskine Mason, D.D., May 1, 1831. Toward the close of the same year the family returned to Portland. In a letter addressed to her husband, one of Mrs. Prentiss' oldest friends now living, Miss Julia D. Willis, has furnished the following reminiscences of her early years. While they confirm what has been said about her childhood, they are especially valuable for the glimpses they give of her father and mother and sister. The Willis and Payson families were very intimate and warmly attached to each other. Mr. Nathaniel Willis, the father of N. P. Willis the poet, was well known in connection with "The Boston Recorder," of which he was for many years the conductor and proprietor. Both Mr. and Mrs. Willis cherished the most affectionate veneration for the memory of Dr. Payson. So long as she lived their house was a home to Mrs. Payson and her daughters, whenever they visited Boston. As a preacher Dr. Payson could not fail to make a strong impression even on a child. Years ago in New York I once told Mrs. Prentiss, who was too young, at her father's death, to remember him well in the pulpit, that the only public speaker who ever reminded me of him, was Edwin Booth in Hamlet. I surprised, and, I am afraid, a little shocked her, but it was quite true. The slender figure, the dark, brilliant eyes, the deep earnestness of tone, the rapid utterance combined with perfect distinctness of enunciation, in spite of surroundings the best calculated to repel such an association, recalled him vividly to my memory. My father's connection with the religious press after his removal from Portland to Boston, brought many clergymen to our house, who often, in the kindness of their hearts, requited hospitality by religious conversation with the children, not church members, and presumably, therefore, impenitent. I did not always appreciate this kindness as it deserved, and often exercised considerable ingenuity to avoid being alone with them. In Dr. Payson's case, I soon learned, on the contrary, to seek such occasions. I was sure that before long he would look up from his book, or his manuscript, and have something pleasant or playful to say to me. His general conversation, however, was oftener on religious than on any other subjects, but it was so evidently from the fullness of his heart, and his vivid imagination afforded him such a wealth of illustration, that it was delightful even to an "impenitent" child. Years afterward when I read in his Memoir of his desponding temperament, of his seasons of gloom, of the sense of sin under which he was bowed down, it seemed impossible to me that it could be _my_ Dr. Payson. I visited Portland and was an inmate of his family, at the commencement of the illness that finally proved fatal. He was not confined to his bed, or to his room, but he was forbidden, indeed unable, to preach, unable to write or study; he could only read and think. Still he did not shut himself up in his study with his sad thoughts. I remember him as usually seated with his book by the side of the fire, surrounded by his family, as if he would enjoy their society as long as possible, and the children's play was never hushed on his account. Nor did he forget the young visitor. When the elder daughter, to whom my visit was made, was at school, he would care for my entertainment by telling a story, or propounding a riddle, or providing an entertaining book to beguile the time till Louisa's return. Among the group in that cheerful room, I remember Lizzy well, a beautiful child, slender, dark-eyed, light-footed, very quiet, evidently observant, but saying little, affectionate, yet not demonstrative. One evening during my visit, Mrs. Payson not being quite well, the elders had retired early, leaving Louisa and myself by the side of the fire, she preparing her school lesson and I occupied in reading. The lesson finished, Louisa proposed retiring, but I was too much interested in my book to leave it and promised to follow soon. She left me rather reluctantly, and I read on, too much absorbed in my book to notice the time, till near midnight, when I was startled by hearing Dr. Payson's step upon the stairs. I expected the reproof which I certainly deserved, but though evidently surprised at seeing me, he merely said, "You here? you must be cold. Why did you let the fire go out?" Bringing in some wood he soon rekindled it, and began to talk to me of the book I was reading, which was one of Walter Scott's poems. He then spoke of a poem which he had been reading that day, Southey's "Curse of Kehama." He related to me with perfect clearness the long and rather involved story, with that wonderful memory of his, never once forgetting or confusing the strange Oriental names, and repeating word for word the curse: I charm thy life, from the weapons of strife, From stone and from wood, from fire and from flood, From the serpent's tooth, and the beasts of blood, From sickness I charm thee, and time shall not harm thee, etc., etc. I listened, intent, fascinated, forgot to ask why he was there instead of in his bed, forgot that it was midnight instead of mid-day. It was not till on bidding me good night he added, "I hope you will have a better night than I shall," that it occurred to me that he must be suffering. The next day I learned from his wife that when unable to sleep on account of his racking cough, he often left his bed at night, the cough being more endurable when in a sitting posture. I never saw Dr. Payson after that visit, nor for several years any of the family, except Louisa, who spent a year with us while attending school in Boston to fit herself as a teacher to aid in the support of her younger brothers and sister. When I was next with them, Louisa was already at the head of a school in which her young sister was the brightest pupil, and to the profits of which she laid no personal claim, all going untouched into the family purse. Several young girls, Louisa's pupils, had been received as boarders in the family, and occasionally a clergyman was added to the number. It was during this visit that I first learned to appreciate Mrs. Payson. Now that she stood alone at the head of the household, either her fine qualities were in bolder relief, or I being older, was better able to estimate them. The singular vivacity of her intellect made her a delightful companion. Then her youth had been passed in the literary circles of New Haven and Andover, and she had much to tell of distinguished people known to me only by reputation. I admired her firm yet gentle rule, so skilfully adapted to the varying natures under her charge; her conscientious study of that homely virtue economy, so distasteful to one of her naturally lavish temper, always ready to give to those in need to an extent which called forth constant remonstrances from more prudent friends; her alacrity also in all household labors, which the more excited my wonder, knowing the little opportunity she could have had to practise them amid the wealth of her father's house before the Embargo, which later wrecked his fortune with those of so many other New England merchants. She was, indeed, of a most noble nature, hating all meanness and injustice, and full of helpful kindness and sympathy. No woman ever had warmer or more devoted friends. Both at this time and in subsequent visits, as she advanced from childhood to girlhood, I remember Lizzy well; although my attention was chiefly absorbed by the elder sister of my own age, my principal companion when present, and correspondent when absent. The two sisters were strongly contrasted. Louisa, as a child, was afflicted with a sensitive, almost morbid shyness and reserve, and an incapacity for enjoying the society of other children whose tastes were uncongenial with her own. The shyness passed with her childhood, but the sensitiveness and exclusiveness never quite left her. Her love of books was a passion, and she would resent an unfair criticism of a favorite author as warmly as if it were an attack on a personal friend. To Lizzy, on the contrary, a friend was a book which she loved to read. Human nature was her favorite study. There seemed to be no one in whom she could not find something to interest her, none with whom there was not some point of sympathy. Combined with this wide and genial sympathy was another quality which helped to endear her to her companions, viz., an entire absence of all attempt to show her best side, or put the best face on anything that concerned her. An ingenuous frankness about herself and her affairs--even about her little weaknesses--was one of her most striking traits. No one, indeed, could know her without learning to love her dearly. Yet if I should say that in my visits to Portland, Lizzy always appeared to me pre-eminently the life and charm of the household, it would not be exactly true, though she would have been so of almost any other household. The Payson family was a delightful one to visit, all were so bright, and in the contest of wits that took place often between Lizzy and her merry brothers, it was sometimes hard to tell which bore off the palm. I do not know that I ever thought of her at that time as an author. If anybody had predicted to me that one of that group would be the writer of books, which would not only have a wide circulation at home, but be translated into foreign languages, I should certainly have selected Louisa, and I think most persons who knew them would have done the same. The elder sister's passion for books, her great powers of acquisition, the range of her attainments--embracing not only modern languages and their literature, but Latin, Greek and Hebrew--her ability to maintain discussions on German metaphysics and theology with learned Professors, all seemed to point her out as the one likely to achieve distinction in the literary world. I do not remember whether it was Lizzy's early contributions to "The Youth's Companion," showing already the germ of the creative power in her, or her letters to her sister, which first suggested to me that the pleasure her friends found in her conversation might yet be enjoyed by those who would never see her. Louisa had given up her school for the more congenial employment of contributing to magazines and reviews and of writing children's books. And as the greater literary resources of Boston drew her thither, she was often for months a welcome guest at our house, where she first met Professor Hopkins of Williamstown, and whom she afterward married. The letters which Lizzy wrote to her at those times were never allowed to be the monopoly of one person; we all claimed a right to read them. The ease with which in these she seemed to talk with her pen, the mingled pathos and humor with which she would relate all the little joys and sorrows of daily life, leaving her readers between a smile and a tear, showed the same characteristics which afterward made her published writings so much more generally attractive than the graver ones of her elder sister. But Louisa's failing health soon after her marriage, and the long years of suffering which followed, prevented her ever doing justice to the expectations her friends had formed for her. The occasion of my next visit to Portland was a letter from Mrs. Payson to my mother, who was her constant correspondent, in which she spoke sadly of an indisposition she feared was the precursor of serious illness, but which chiefly troubled her on account of Lizzy's distress that her school prevented her being constantly with her mother. An offer on my part to come and take her place, in her hours of necessary absence, was at once accepted. Mrs. Payson's illness proved less serious than had been feared, and once more I passed several pleasant weeks in that house; but the pleasantest hours of the day were those in which Lizzy, returning from school, sat down at her mother's bedside and amused her with her talk about her pupils, their various characters and the progress they had made in their studies, or related little incidents of the school-room--with her usual frankness not omitting those which revealed some fault, or what she considered such, on her part, especially her impulsiveness that led her often to say things she afterward regretted. As an example, one of her pupils was reading French to her and coming to the expression Mon Dieu! so common in French narratives, had pronounced it so badly that Lizzy exclaimed, "Mon Doo? He would not know himself what you meant!" The laugh which it was impossible to repress, did not diminish her compunction at what she feared her pupils would regard as irreverence on her part. I believe I always cherished sufficient affection for my teachers, and yet I was not a little astonished on accompanying Lizzy to school one day, to see as we turned the corner of a street a rush of girls with unbonneted heads, to greet their young teacher for whom they had been watching, and escort her to her throne in the school-room, and evidently in their hearts. For a year or two after this visit I have no recollection of her, or indeed of any of the Payson family. Death, meanwhile, had been busy in my own home, and my memory is a blank for anything beyond that sad circle. Since that date you have known her better than I. I wish that these recollections of a time when I knew her better than you, were not so meagre. If we were not thousands of miles apart, and I could talk with you, instead of writing to you, perhaps they would not appear quite so unsatisfying. Yet, trivial as they are, I send them, in the persuasion that any trifle that concerned her or hers is of interest to you. GENEVA, Switzerland, _Feb. 1, 1879._ * * * * * III. Recollections of Elizabeth's Girlhood by an early Friend and Schoolmate. Her own Picture of Herself before her Father's Death. Favorite Resorts. Why God permits so much Suffering. Literary Tastes. Letters. "What are Little Babies For?" Opens a School. Religious Interest. It is to be regretted that the letters referred to by Miss Willis, and indeed nearly all of Elizabeth's family letters, written before she left her mother's roof, have disappeared. But the following recollections by Mrs. M. C. H. Clark, of Portland, will in part supply their place and serve to fill up the outline, already given, of the first twenty years of her life. In the volume of sketches entitled, "Only a Dandelion," you will find, in the story of Anna and Emily, some very pleasing incidents relating to the early life of dear Elizabeth. Anna was Lizzy Wood, her earliest playmate and friend. Miss Wood was a sweet girl, the only sister of Dr. William Wood, of Portland. She died at an early age. Emily was Mrs. Prentiss herself. I remember her once telling me about the visit at "Aunt W.'s," and believe that nearly all the details of the story are founded in fact. It is her own picture of herself as a little girl, drawn to the life. Several traits of the character of Emily, as given in the sketch, are on this account worthy of special note. One is her very intense desire not only to be loved, but to be loved _alone_, or much more than any one else; and to be assured of it "over and over again." When Anna returned from her journey, she brought the same presents to Susan Morton as to Emily. On discovering this fact Emily was greatly distressed. "I thought you would be so glad to get all these things!" said Anna. "And so I am," said Emily, "I only want you to love me better than any other little girl, because I love you better." "Well, and so I do," returned Anna; "I love you ten times as well as I love Susan Morton." This satisfied Emily, and "for many days her restless little heart was as quiet and happy as a lamb's." Another trait is brought out in the incident that occurred on her returning home from Anna's. She had written, or rather scratched, the word "Anna," over one whole side of her room, while odd lines of what purported to be poetry filled the other. But this was not all. Her sister produced the beautiful Bible which had been given Emily by her Aunt Lucy, on her seventh birthday, and showed her father how all its blank leaves were covered with Annas. Her father took the book with reverence, and Emily understood and felt the seriousness with which he examined her idle scrawls. It was a look that would have risen up before her and made her stay her hand, should she ever again in her life-long have been tempted thus to misuse the word of God; just as the angel stood before Balaam in the narrow path he was struggling to push through. But Emily never again was thus tempted; and ever after her Bible was sacredly kept free from "blot, or wrinkle, or any such thing." Her father now took her with him to his study, and gave her a great many pieces of paper, some large and some small, on which he told her with a smile, she could write Anna's name to her heart's content. Emily felt very grateful; this little kindness on her father's part did her more good than a month's lecture could have done, and made her resolve never to do anything that could possibly grieve him again. She went away to her own little baby-house and wrote on one of the bits of paper, some verses, in which she said she had the best father in the world. When they were done, she read them over once or twice, and admired them exceedingly; after which, with a very mysterious air, she went and threw them into the kitchen fire. This incident, so prettily related, illustrates the intensity of her friendships, shows that she had begun to write verses when a mere child, and gives a very pleasant glimpse of her father and of her devotion to him. My intimate acquaintance with her commenced in 1832, when we were members of Miss Tyler's Sabbath-school class. Miss Tyler was a daughter of Rev. Dr. Bennett Tyler, her father's successor. She was greatly pleased when I told her I was going to attend her sister's school, which was opened in the spring of 1833, on the corner of Middle and Lime streets. My seat was next to hers and we were placed in the same classes. Our homes were near each other on Franklin street, and we always walked back and forth together. She was at this time a prolific writer of notes. Sometimes she would meet me on Monday morning with not less than four, written since we had parted on Saturday afternoon. She used to complain now and then, that I wrote her only one to four or five of hers to me. In the pleasant summer afternoons we loved to take long walks together. One was down by the shore behind the eastern promenade. Here we would find a sheltered nook, and with our backs to the world and our faces toward the islands and the ocean, would sit in "rapt enjoyment" of the scene, speaking scarcely a word, until one or the other exclaimed with a long-drawn sigh: "Well, it is time for us to go home." Another of our places of resort was the old cemetery on Congress street, which in those days was very retired. Our favorite spot here was the summit of a tomb, which stood on the highest point in the grounds. It was the old style of tomb--a broad marble slab, supported by six small stone pillars on a stone foundation, and surrounded by two steps raised above the soil. It was a very quiet retreat. We could hear the distant hum of the city and at the same time enjoy a view of the water and shipping, as the land sloped down toward the harbor. I remember well that one dark spring day, as we sat there cuddled up under the broad slab, Lizzy gave me an account of a book she had just been reading. It was the Memoir of Miss Susanna Anthony, by old Dr. Hopkins, of Newport. She told me what a good and holy woman Miss Anthony was, how much she suffered and how beautifully she bore her sufferings. My sympathy was strongly excited and I exclaimed, "I do not see how it is _right_ for God, who can control all things, to permit such suffering!" Lizzy replied very sweetly, "Well, Carrie, we can't understand it, but I have been thinking that this _might_ be God's way of preparing His children for very high degrees of service on earth, or happiness in heaven." I was deeply impressed with this remark; somehow it seemed to _stand by me_, and I think it was a corner-stone of her faith. This summer--that of 1833--her mother fitted up for her exclusive use a small room called the "Blue Room," where she had all her books and treasures--among them a writing desk which had been her father's. Here all her leisure hours were spent. It was my privilege to be admitted to this sanctuary, and many pleasant hours we passed together there. I think Elizabeth was always religious. She knew a great deal then about the Bible and often talked with me of divine things. She seemed to feel a deep interest in my spiritual welfare. She loved to share with me her favorite books. To her I was indebted for my acquaintance with George Herbert, and with Wordsworth. She induced me to read "Owen on the 133d Psalm," and Flavel's "Fountain of Life." In 1834 we both began to attend the Free street Seminary, of which the Rev. Solomon Adams was then Principal. Her sister had become assistant teacher with him. Our desks adjoined each other and we were together a great deal. She was an admirable scholar, very studious, prompt and ready at recitation. Her influence and example, added to her friendship and sympathy, were invaluable to me at this period. One day, about this time, she told me of her engagement with Mr. Willis, to become a contributor to "The Youth's Companion." This paper was one of the first, if not the first, of its class published in this country, and had a wide circulation among the children throughout New England. Most of the pieces in "Only a Dandelion," first appeared, I think, in the "Youth's Companion," among the rest several in verse. They are written in a sprightly style, are full of bright fancies as well as sound feeling and excellent sense, and foretoken plainly the author of the 'Susy' books. In 1835 Lizzy went to Ipswich and spent the summer in the school there. It was then under the care of Miss Grant, and was the most noted institution of its kind in New England. A year or two later, Mr. N. P. Willis returned from Europe, and with his English bride made a short visit at Mrs. Payson's. Miss Payson talked with him of Elizabeth's taste for writing poetry and showed him some of her pieces. He praised and encouraged her warmly, and this was, I think, one of the influences that strengthened her in the purpose to become an author. Upon my telling her one day how much I liked a certain Sunday-school book I had just read, she smilingly asked, "What would you think if some day I should write a book as good as that?" I saw a good deal of her home life at this time. It was full of filial and sisterly love and devotion. Amidst the household cares by which her mother was often weighed down and worried, she was an ever-near friend and sympathizer. To her brothers, too, she endeared herself exceedingly by her helpful, cheery ways and the strong vein of fun and mirthfulness which ran through her daily life. In the spring of 1837 Mrs. Payson sold her house on Franklin street and rented one in the upper part of the city. Lizzy used to call it "the pumpkin house," because it was old and ugly; but its situation and the opportunity to indulge her rural tastes made amends for all its defects. In a letter to her friend Miss E. T. of Brooklyn, N. Y., dated May 21, 1837, she thus refers to it: Since your last letter arrived we have left our pleasant home for an old yellow one above John Neal's. Now don't imagine it to be a delicate straw-color, neither the smiling hue of the early dandelion. No, it once shone forth in all the glories of a deep pumpkin; but time's "effacing fingers" have sadly marred its beauty. Mr. Neal's Aunt Ruth, a quiet old Quakeress, occupies a part of it and we Paysons bestow ourselves in the remainder. This comes to you from its great garret. Here I sit every night till after dark as merry as a grig. "The mind is its own place." With all the inconveniences of the house I would not exchange it at present for any other in the city. The situation is perfectly delightful. Casco Bay and part of Deering's Oaks lie in full view. [8] The Oaks are within a few minutes' walk. Back-Cove is seen beyond, and rising far above the _blue_ White Mountains. The Arsenal stares us in the face, if we look out the end windows and the Westbrook meeting-house is nearer than Mr. Vail's by a quarter of a mile. I never believed there was anything half so fine in this region. I think nothing of walking anywhere now. One day, after various domestic duties, I worked in my tiny garden four hours, and in the afternoon a party of girls came up for me to go with them to Bramhall's hill. We walked from three till half past six, came back and ate a hasty, with some of us a _furious_ supper, and then all paraded down to second parish to singing-school. I expect to live out in the air most of the summer. I mean to have as pleasant a one as possible, because we shall never live so near the Oaks and other pretty places another summer. If you were not so timid I should wish you were here to run about with me, but who ever heard of E. T. _running_? Now, Ellen, I never was _meant_ to be dignified and sometimes--yea, often--I run, skip, hop, and _once_ I did climb over a fence! Very unladylike, I know, but I am not a lady. In the fall of 1837 Mrs. Payson moved again. The incident deserves mention, as it brought Lizzy into daily intercourse with the Rev. Mr. French and his wife. Mr. French was rector of the Episcopal church in Portland, and afterward Professor and Chaplain at West Point. He was a man of fine literary culture and Mrs. French was a very attractive woman. In a letter dated "Night before Thanksgiving," and addressed to the early friend already mentioned, Lizzy refers to this removal and also gives a glimpse of her active home life: I have been busy all day and am so tired I can scarcely hold a pen. Amidst the beating of eggs, the pounding of spices, the furious rolling of pastry of all degrees of shortness, the filling of pies with pumpkins, mince-meat, apples, and the like, the stoning of raisins and washing of currants, the beating and baking of cake, and all the other _ings_, (in all of which I have had my share) thoughts of your ladyship have somehow squeezed themselves in. We have really bidden adieu to "Pumpkin Place," as Mrs. Willis calls it, and established ourselves in a house formerly occupied by old Parson Smith--and very snug and comfortable we are, I assure you. In the midst of our "moving," after I had packed and stowed and lifted, and been elbowed by all the sharp corners in the house, and had my hands all torn and scratched, I spied the new "Knickerbocker" 'mid a heap of rubbish and was tempted to peep into it. Lo and behold, the first thing that met my eye was the Lament of the Last Peach. [9] I didn't care to read more and forthwith returned to fitting of carpets and arranging tables and chairs and bureaus--but all the while meditating how I should be revenged upon you. As to ----'s request I am sorry to answer nay; for I feel it would be the greatest presumption in me to think of writing for a magazine like that. I do not wish to publish anything, anywhere, though it would be quite as wise as to entrust my scraps to _your_ care. My mother often urges me to send little things which she happens to fancy, to this and that periodical. Without her interference nothing of mine would ever have found its way into print. But mammas look with rose-colored spectacles on the actions and performances of their offspring. Have you laughed over the Pickwick Papers? We have almost laughed ourselves to death over them. I have not seen Lizzy D. for a long time, but hear she is getting along rapidly. If I could go to school two years more, I should be glad, but of course that is out of the question.... It is easier for you to write often than it is for me. You have not three tearing, growing brothers to mend and make for. I am become quite expert in the arts of patching and darning. I am going to get some pies and cake and raisins and other goodies to send to our girl's sick brother. If I had not so dear and happy a home, I should envy you yours. You say you do not remember whether I love music or not. I love it extravagantly _sometimes_--but have not the knowledge to enjoy scientific performances. The simple melody of a single voice is my delight. Mrs. French, the Episcopal minister's wife, who is a great friend of ours and lives next door (so near that she and sister talk together out of their windows), has a baby two days old with black curly hair and black eyes, and I shall have a nice time with it this winter. Do you love babies? The question with which this letter closes, suggests one of Lizzy's most striking and loveliest traits. She had a perfect passion for babies, and reveled in tending, kissing, and playing with them. Here are some pretty lines in one of her girlish contributions to "The Youth's Companion," which express her feeling about them: What are little babies for? Say! say! say! Are they good-for-nothing things? Nay! nay! nay! Can they speak a single word? Say! say! say! Can they help their mothers sew? Nay! nay! nay! Can they walk upon their feet? Say! say! say! Can they even hold themselves? Nay! nay! nay! What are little babies for? Say! say! say! Are they made for us to love? _Yea_! YEA!! YEA!!! In the fall of 1838 Mrs. Payson purchased a house in Cumberland street, which continued to be her residence until the family was broken up. You remember the charming little room Lizzy had fitted up over the hall in this house, how nicely she kept it, and how happy she was in it. One of the windows looked out on a little flower garden and at the close of the long summer days the sunset could be enjoyed from the west window. She had had some fine books given her, which, added to the previous store, made a somewhat rare collection for a young girl in those days. About this time, having been relieved of her part of domestic service by the coming into the family of a young relative--whose devotion to her was unbounded--she opened in the house a school for little girls. It consisted at first of perhaps eight or ten, but their number increased until the house could scarcely hold them. She was a born teacher and her young pupils fairly idolized her. [10] In this year, too, she took a class in the Sabbath-school composed of nearly the same group who surrounded her on the week-days, and they remained under her care as long as she lived in Portland. The Rev. Mr. Vail having retired from the pastorate of the second parish in the autumn of 1837, Cyrus Hamlin, just from the Theological Seminary at Bangor, became the stated supply for some months. His preaching attracted the young people and during the winter and spring there was much interest in all the Congregational churches. Following the example of the other pastors, Mr. Hamlin invited persons seriously disposed to meet him for religious conversation. Elizabeth besought me, with all possible earnestness and affection, to "go to Mr. Hamlin's meeting." One day she came to see me a short time before the hour, saying that I was ever on her mind and in her prayers, that she had talked with Mr. Hamlin about me, nor would she leave me until I had promised to attend the meeting. I did so; and from that time we were united in the strong bonds of Christian love and sympathy. What a spiritual helper she was to me in those days! What precious notes I was all the time receiving from her! The memory of her tender, faithful friendship is still fresh and delightful, after the lapse of more than forty years. [11] In the summer of 1838 the Rev. Jonathan B. Condit, D.D., was called from his chair in Amherst College and installed pastor of our church. He was a man of very graceful and winning manners and wonderfully magnetic. He at once became almost an object of worship with the enthusiastic young people. The services of the Sabbath and the weekly meetings were delightful. The young ladies had a praying circle which met every Saturday afternoon, full of life and sunshine. Indeed, the exclusive interest of the season was religious; our reading and conversation were religious; well-nigh the sole subject of thought was learning something new of our Saviour and His blessed service. All Lizzy's friends and several of her own family were rejoicing in hope. And she herself was radiant with joy. For a little while it seemed almost as if the shadows in the Christian path had fled away, and the crosses vanished out of sight. The winter and spring of 1840 witnessed another period of general religious interest in Portland. Large numbers were gathered into the churches. Lizzy was greatly impressed by the work, her own Christian life was deepened and widened, she was blessed in guiding several members of her beloved Sunday-school class to the Saviour, and was thus prepared, also, for the sharp trial awaiting her in the autumn of the same year, when she left her home and mother for a long absence in Richmond. From her earliest years she was in the habit of keeping a journal, and she must have filled several volumes. I wonder that she did not preserve them as mementos of her childhood and youth. Perhaps because her afterlife was so happy that she never needed to refer to such reminiscences of days gone by. I have thus given you, in a very informal manner, some recollections of her earlier years. I have been astonished to find how vividly I recalled scenes, events and conversations so long past. I was startled and shocked when the news came of her sudden death. But I can not feel that she was called to her rest too soon. She seemed to me singularly happy in all the relations of life; and then as an author, hers was an exceptional case of full appreciation and success. I have ever regarded her as "favored among women"--blessed in doing her Master's will and testifying for Him, blessed in her home, in her friends, and in her work, and blessed in her death. PORTLAND, _December 31, 1878._ * * * * * IV. The Dominant Type of Religious Life and Thought in New England in the First Half of this Century. Literary Influences. Letter of Cyrus Hamlin. A Strange Coincidence. A brief notice of the general type of religious life and thought, which prevailed at this time in New England, will throw light upon both the preceding and following pages. Elizabeth's early Christian character, although largely shaped by that of her father, was also, like his, vitally affected by the religious spirit and methods then dominant. Several distinct elements entered into the piety of New England at that period, (1.) There was, first of all, the old Puritan element which the Pilgrim Fathers and their immediate successors brought with them from the mother-country, and which had been nourished by the writings of the great Puritan divines of the seventeenth century--such as Baxter, Howe, Bunyan, Owen, Matthew Henry, and Flavel--by the "Imitation of Christ," and Bishop Taylor's "Holy Living and Dying," and by such writers as Doddridge, Watts, and Jonathan Edwards of the last century. This lay at the foundation of the whole structure, giving it strength, solidity, earnestness, and power. (2.) But it was modified by the so-called Evangelical element, which marked large sections of the Church of England and most of the Dissenting bodies in Great Britain during the last half of the eighteenth and the early part of the nineteenth century. The writings of John Newton, Richard Cecil, Hannah More, Thomas Scott, Cowper, Wilberforce, Leigh Richmond, John Foster, Andrew Fuller, and Robert Hall--not to mention others--were widely circulated in New England and had great influence in its pulpits and its Christian homes. Their admirable spirit infused itself into thousands of lives, and helped in many ways to improve the general tone both of theological and devotional sentiment. (3.) But another element still was the new Evangelistic spirit, which inaugurated and still informs those great movements of Christian benevolence, both at home and abroad, that are the glory of the age. Dr. Payson's ministry began just before the formation of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, and before his death mission-work had come to be regarded as quite essential to the piety and prosperity of the Church. The Lives of David Brainerd, Henry Martyn, Harriet Newell, and others like them, were household books. (4.) Nor should the "revival" element be omitted in enumerating the forces that then shaped the piety and religious thought of New England. The growth of the Church and the advancement of the cause of Christ were regarded as inseparable from this influence. A revival was the constant object of prayer and effort on the part of earnest pastors and of the more devout among the people. Far more stress was laid upon special seasons and measures of spiritual interest and activity than now--less upon Christian nurture as a means of grace, and upon the steady, normal development of church life. Many of the most eminent, devoted, and useful servants of Christ, whose names, during the last half century, have adorned the annals of American faith and zeal, owed their conversion, or, if not their conversion, some of their noblest and strongest Christian impulses, to "revivals of religion." (5.) To all these should perhaps, be added another element--namely, that of the new spirit of reform and the new ethical tone, which, during the third and fourth decades of this century especially, wrought with such power in New England. Of this influence and of the philanthropic idea that inspired it, Dr. Channing may be regarded as the most eminent representative. It brought to the front the humanity and moral teaching of Christ, as at once the pattern and rule of all true progress, whether individual or social; and it was widely felt, even where it was not distinctly recognised or understood. Whatever errors or imperfections may have belonged to it, this influence did much to soften the dogmatism of opinion, to arouse a more generous, catholic type of sentiment, to show that the piety of the New Testament is a principle of universal love to man, as well as of love to God, and to emphasise the sovereign claims of personal virtue and social justice. These truths, to be sure, were not new; but in the great moral-reform movements and conflicts--to a certain extent even in theological discussions--that marked the times, they were asserted and applied with extraordinary clearness and energy of conviction; and, as the event has proved, they were harbingers of a new era of Christian thought, culture and conduct, both in private and public life. Such were some of the religious influences which surrounded Mrs. Prentiss during the first twenty years of her life, and which helped to form her character. She was also strongly affected, especially while passing from girlhood into early womanhood, by the literary influences of the day. Poetry and fiction were her delight. She was very fond of Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Longfellow; while the successive volumes of Dickens were read by her with the utmost avidity. Mrs. Payson's house was a good deal visited by scholars and men of culture. Her eldest daughter had already become somewhat widely known by her writings. In the extent, variety and character of her attainments she was, in truth, a marvel. Indeed, she quite overshadowed the younger sister by her learning and her highly intellectual conversation. And yet Elizabeth also attracted no little attention from some who had been first drawn to the house by their friendship for Louisa. [12] Among her warmest admirers was Mr. John Neal, then well known as a man of letters; he predicted for her a bright career as an author. Still, it was her personal character that most interested the visitors at her mother's house. This may be illustrated by an extract from a letter of Mr. Hamlin to a friend of the family in New York, written in April, 1838, while he was their temporary pastor. Mr. Hamlin has since become known throughout the Christian world by his remarkable career as a missionary in Turkey, and as organiser of Robert College. A few months after the letter was written he set sail for Constantinople, accompanied by his wife, whose early death was the cause of so much grief among all who knew her. [13] I should like to write a long letter about dear Elizabeth. I have seen her more since Louisa left and I love her more. She has a peculiar charm for me. I think she has a quick and excellent judgment, refined sensibilities, and an _instinctive_ perception of what is fit and proper.... It seems to me there is a great deal of purity--of the _spirituelle_--about her feelings. But I can not tell you exactly what it is that makes me think so highly of her. It is a nameless something resulting from her whole self, from her sweet face and mouth, her eye full of love and soul, her form and motion. I do not think she likes me much, I have paid so much attention to Louisa and so little to herself. Yet she is not one of those who _claim_ attention, but rather shrinks from it. She may have faults of which I have no knowledge. But I am charmed with everything I have seen of her. How strange are the chance coincidences of human life! In another letter to the same friend in New York, in which Mr. Hamlin refers in a similar manner to Elizabeth, occur these words: In a few weeks I hope to be in Dorset, among the Green Mountains, where my thoughts and feelings have their centre above all places on this earth. I wish you could be present at my wedding there on the third of September. How little did he dream, when penning these words, or did his friend dream while reading them, that, after the lapse of more than forty years, the "dear Elizabeth" would find her grave near by the old parsonage in which that wedding was to be celebrated, while the dust of the lovely daughter of Dorset would be sleeping on the distant shores of the Bosphorus! [1] For many years after the publication of his Memoir, it was so often given to children at their baptism that at one time those who bore it, in and out of New England, were to be numbered by hundreds, if not thousands. "I once saw the deaths of _three_ little Edward Paysons in one paper," wrote Mrs. Prentiss in 1832. [2] He was the author of a curious work entitled, "Proofs of the real Existence, and dangerous Tendency, of Illuminism." Charlestown, 1802. By "Illuminism" he means an organised attempt, or conspiracy, to undermine the foundations of Christian society and establish upon its ruins the system of atheism. [3] "I spent part of last evening reading over some old letters of my grandmother's and never realised before what a remarkable woman she was both as to piety and talent."--_From a letter of Mrs. Prentiss, written in 1864._ [4] In a letter to his mother,--written when Elizabeth was three years old, he says: "E. has a terrible abscess, which we feared would prove too much for her slender constitution. We were almost worn out with watching; and, just as she began to mend, I was seized with a violent ague in my face, which gave me incessant anguish for six days and nights together, and deprived me almost entirely of sleep. Three nights I did not close my eyes. When well nigh distracted with pain and loss of sleep, Satan was let loose upon me, to buffet me, and I verily thought would have driven me to desperation and madness." [5] The late President Wayland. [6] Prof. Calvin E. Stowe, D.D. [7] The late Rev. Absalom Peters, D.D. [8] I can see the breezy dome of groves, The shadows of Deering's Woods; And the friendships old and the early loves Come back with a Sabbath sound, as of doves In quiet neighborhoods. And the verse of that sweet old song, It flutters and murmurs still: "A boy's will is the wind's will, And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts." --LONGFELLOW'S _My Lost Youth._ [9] "The Lament of the Last Peach" had been written by her a year before when in Brooklyn, and her friend's brother had sent it to "The Knickerbocker," the popular Magazine of that day. Here it is: LAMENT OF THE LAST PEACH. In solemn silence here I live, A lone, deserted peach; So high that none but birds and winds My quiet bough can reach. And mournfully, and hopelessly, I think upon the past; Upon my dear departed friends, And I, the last--the last. My friends! oh, daily one by one I've seen them drop away; Unheeding all the tears and prayers That vainly bade them stay. And here I hang alone, alone-- While life is fleeing fast; And sadly sigh that I am left The last, the last, the last. Farewell, then, thou my little world My home upon the tree, A sweet retreat, a quiet home Thou mayst no longer be; The willow trees stand weeping nigh, The sky is overcast, The autumn winds moan sadly by, And say, the last--the last! [10] "Dear Lizzy is in her little school. Her pupils love her dearly. She will have about thirty in the summer."--_Letter of Mrs. Payson, March 28, 1839_. [11] Three years later Elizabeth thus referred to this period in the life of her friend:--"During the time in which she was seeking the Saviour with all her heart, I was much with her and had an opportunity to see every variety of feeling as she daily set the whole before me. The affection thus acquired is, I believe, never lost. If I live forever, I shall not lose the impressions which I then received--the deep anxiety I felt lest she should finally come short of salvation, and then the happiness of having her lost in contemplation of the character of Him whom she had so often declared it impossible to love." [12] Old friends of her father also became much interested in her. Among them was Simon Greenleaf, the eminent writer on the law of evidence, and Judge Story's successor at Harvard. On removing to Cambridge, in 1833, he gave her with his autograph a little volume entitled, "Hours for Heaven; a small but choice selection of prayers, from eminent Divines of the Church of England," which long continued to be one of her books of devotion. [13] See the touching memorial of her, "Light on the Dark River," prepared by her early friend, Mrs. Lawrence. CHAPTER II. THE NEW LIFE IN CHRIST. 1840-1841. I. A Memorable Experience. Letters to her Cousin. Goes to Richmond as a Teacher. Mr. Persico's School. Letters. Miss Payson was now in her twenty-first year, a period which she always looked back to as a turning-point in her spiritual history. The domestic influences that encompassed her childhood, her early associations, and the books of devotion which she read, all conspired to imbue her with an earnest sense of divine things, and while yet a young girl, as we have seen, she publicly devoted herself to the service of her God and Saviour. For several years her piety, if marked by no special features, was still regarded by her young friends, and by all who knew her, as of a decided character. But during the general religious interest in the winter of 1837-8, even while absorbed in solicitude for others, she began herself to question its reality. "For some months I had no hope that I was a Christian, and _pride_ made me go on just as if I felt myself perfectly safe. Nothing could at that time have made me willing to have any eye a witness to my daily struggles." And yet she "often longed for the sympathy and assistance of Christian friends," and to her unwillingness to confide in them she afterwards attributed much of the suffering that followed. "I do not know exactly how I passed out of that season, but my school commenced in April, and I became so interested in it that I had less time to think of and to watch myself. The next winter most of my scholars were deeply impressed by divine things, and, of course, I could not look on without having my own heart touched. It was my privilege to spend many delightful weeks in watching the progress of minds earnestly seeking the way of life and early consecrating themselves to their Saviour." [1] But after a while a severe reaction set in and in the course of the summer she became careless in her religious habits, shrank from the Lord's table as a "place of absolute torture," and while spending a fortnight in Boston in the fall, entirely omitted all exercises of private devotion. She had now reached a crisis which was to decide her course for life. During the winter of 1839-40, she passed through very deep and harrowing exercises of soul. Her spiritual nature was shaken to its foundation, and she could say with the Psalmist, _Out of the depths have I cried unto Thee, O Lord._ For several months she was in a state similar to that which the old divines depict so vividly as being "under conviction." Her sense of sin, and of her own unworthiness in the sight of God, grew more and more intense and oppressive. At times she abandoned all hope, accused herself of having played the hypocrite, and fancied she was given over to hardness of heart. At length she sought counsel of her pastor and confided to him her trouble, but he "did not know exactly what to do with me." In the midst of her distress, and as its effect, no doubt, she was taken ill and confined to her room, where in solitude she passed several weeks seeking rest and finding none. "Sometimes I tried to pray, but this only increased my distress and made me cry out for annihilation to free me from the agony which seemed insupportable." With a single interval of comparative indifference, this state of mind continued for nearly four months. She thus describes it: It was in vain that I sought the Lord in any of the lofty pathways through which my heart wished to go. At last I found it impossible to carry on the struggle any longer alone. I would gladly have put myself at the feet of a little child, if by so doing I could have found peace. I felt so guilty and the character of God appeared so perfect in its purity and holiness, that I knew not which way to turn. The sin which distressed me most of all was the rejection of the Saviour. This haunted me constantly and made me fly first to one thing and then another, in the hope of finding somewhere the peace which I would not accept from Him. It was at this time that I kept reading over the first twelve chapters of Doddridge's "Rise and Progress,"--the rest of the book I abhorred. So great was my agony that I can only wonder at the goodness of Him who held my life in His hands, and would not permit me in the height of my despair to throw myself away. It was in this height of despair that thoughts of the infinite grace and love of Christ, which she says she had hitherto repelled, began to irradiate her soul. A sermon on His ability to save "unto the uttermost" deeply affected her. [2] "While listening to it my weary spirit _rested_ itself, and I thought, 'surely it can not be wrong to think of the Saviour, although He is not mine.' With this conclusion I gave myself up to admire, to love and to praise Him, to wonder why I had never done so before, and to hope that all the great congregation around me were joining with me in acknowledging Him to be chief among ten thousand and the One altogether lovely." On going home she could at first scarcely believe in her own identity, the feeling of peace and love to God and to all the world was so unlike the turbulent emotions that had long agitated her soul. "From this time my mind went slowly onward, examining the way step by step, trembling and afraid, yet filled with a calm contentment which made all the dealings of God with me appear just right. I know myself to be perfectly helpless. I can not promise to do or to be anything; but I do want to put everything else aside, and to devote myself entirely to the service of Christ." Her account of this memorable experience is dated August 28, 1840. "While writing it," she adds, "I have often laid aside my pen, to sit and think over in silent wonder the way in which the Lord has led me." How in later years she regarded certain features of this experience, is not fully known. The record passed at once out of her hands, and until after her death was never seen by anyone, excepting the friend for whose eye it was written. Many of its details had, probably, faded entirely from her memory. It can not be doubted, however, that she would have judged her previous state much less severely, would hardly have charged it with hypocrisy, or denied that the Saviour had been graciously leading her, and that she had some real love to Him, before as well as after this crisis. So much may be inferred from the record itself and from the narrative in the preceding chapter. Her tender interest in the spiritual welfare of her friends and pupils, the high tone of religious sentiment that marks her early writings, the books she delighted in, her filial devotion, the absolute sincerity of her character, all forbid any other conclusion. [3] The indications, too, are very plain that her morbidly-sensitive, melancholy temperament had much to do with this experience. Her account of it shows, also, that her mind was unhappily affected by certain false notions of the Christian life and ordinances then, and still, more or less prevalent--notions based upon a too narrow and legal conception of the Gospel. Hence, her shrinking from the Lord's table as a place of "torture," instead of regarding it in its true character, as instituted on purpose to feed hungry souls, like her own, with bread from heaven. But for all that, the experience was a blessed reality and, as these pages will attest, wrought a lasting change in her religious life. No doubt the Spirit of God was leading her through all its dark and terrible mazes. It virtually ended a conflict which the intensely proud elements of her nature rendered inevitable, if she was to become a true heroine of faith--the conflict between her Master's will and her own. Her Master conquered, and henceforth to her dying hour His will was the sovereign law of her existence, and its sweetest joy also. The following extracts from letters to her cousin, George E. Shipman, of New York, now widely known as the founder of a Foundling Home at Chicago, will throw additional light upon her state of mind at this period. Mr. Shipman was the friend to whom the account of her experience already mentioned was addressed. He had just spent several weeks in Portland, and to his Christian sympathy, kindness, and counsels while there and during the two following years, she felt herself very deeply indebted. [4] PORTLAND, _August 22, 1840._ I am always wondering if any body in the world is the better off for my being in it. And so if I was of any comfort to you, I am very glad of it. I do want, I confess, the privilege of offering you sometimes the wine and oil of consolation, and if I do it in such a way as to cause pain with my unskilful hand, why, you must forgive me.... Mr. ---- talked to me as if he imagined me a blue-stocking. Just because my sister wears spectacles, folks take it for granted that I also am literary. _Aug. 25th._--You ask if I find it easy to engage in religious meditation, referring in particular to that on our final rest. This is another of my trials. I can not meditate upon anything, except indeed it be something quite the opposite of what I wish to occupy my mind. You know that some Christians are able in their solitary walks and rides to hold, all the time, communion with God. I can very seldom do this. Yesterday I was obliged to take a long walk alone, and it was made very delightful in this way; so that I quite forgot that I was alone.... I am beginning to feel, that I have enough to do without looking out for a great, wide place in which to work, and to appreciate the simple lines: "The trivial round, the common task, Would furnish all we ought to ask; Room to deny ourselves; a road To bring us daily nearer God." Those words "daily nearer God" have an inexpressible charm for me. I long for such nearness to Him that all other objects shall fade into comparative insignificance,--so that to have a thought, a wish, a pleasure apart from Him shall be impossible. _Sept. 12th._--At Sabbath-school this morning, while talking with my scholars about the Lord Jesus, my heart, which is often so cold and so stupid, seemed completely melted within me, with such a view of His wonderful, wonderful love for sinners, that I almost believed I had never felt it till then. Such a blessing is worth toiling and wrestling for a whole life. If a glimpse of our Saviour here upon earth can be so refreshing, so delightful, what will it be in heaven! _Sept. 17th._--I have been reading to-day some passages from Nevins' "Practical Thoughts." [5] Perhaps you have seen them; if so, do you remember two articles headed, "I must pray more," and "I must pray differently"? They interested me much because in some measure they express my own feelings. I have less and less confidence in _frames_, as they are called. I am glad that you think it better to have a few books and to read them over and over, for my own inclination leads me to that. One gets attached to them as to Christian friends. Do not hesitate to direct me over and over again, to go with difficulties and temptations and sin to the Saviour. I love to be led there and _left_ there. Sometimes when the exceeding "sinfulness of sin" becomes painfully apparent, there is nothing else for the soul to do but to lie in the dust before God, without a word of excuse, and that feeling of abasement in His sight is worth more than all the pleasures in the world.... You will believe me if I own myself tired, when I tell you that I made fourteen calls this afternoon. But even the unpleasant business of call-making has had one comfort. Some of the friends of whom I took leave, spoke so tenderly of Him whose name is so precious to His children that my heart warmed towards them instantly, and I thought it worth while to have parting hours, sad though they may be, if with them came so naturally thoughts of the Saviour. Besides, I have been thinking since I came home, that if I did not love Him, it could not be so refreshing to hear unexpectedly of Him.... I did not know that mother had anything to do with your father's conversion, and when I mentioned it to her she seemed much surprised and said she did not know it herself. Pray tell me more of it, will you? I have felt that if, in the course of my life, I should be the means of leading one soul to the Saviour, it would be worth staying in this world for no matter how many years. Did you ever read Miss Taylor's "Display"? Sister says the character of Emily there is like mine. I think so myself save in the best point. We come now to an important change in her outward life. She had accepted an invitation to become a teacher in Mr. Persico's school at Richmond, Virginia. Mr. Persico was an Italian, a brother of the sculptor of that name, a number of whose works are seen at Washington. He early became interested in our institutions, and as soon as he was able, came to this country and settled in Philadelphia as an artist. He married a lady of that city, and afterward on account of her health went to Richmond, where he opened a boarding and day school for girls. There were four separate departments, one of which was under the sole care of Miss Payson. Her letters to her family, written at this time, have all been lost, but a full record of the larger portion of her Richmond life is preserved in letters to her cousin, Mr. Shipman. The following extracts from these letters show with what zeal she devoted herself to her new calling and how absorbed her heart was still in the things of God. They also throw light upon some marked features of her character. BOSTON, _September 23._ I had, after leaving home, an attack of that terrible pain, of which I have told you, and believed myself very near death. It became a serious question whether, if God should so please, I could feel willing to die there alone, for I was among entire strangers. I never enjoyed more of His presence than that night when, sick and sad and full of pain, I felt it sweet to put myself in His hands to be disposed of in His own way. The attack referred to in this letter resembled _angina pectoris_, a disease to which for many years she was led to consider herself liable. Whatever it may have been, its effect was excruciating. "Mother was telling me the other day," she wrote to a friend, "that in her long life she had never seen an individual suffer more severe bodily pain than she had often tried to relieve in me. I remember scores of such hours of real agony." In the present instance the attack was doubtless brought on, in part at least, by mental agitation. "No words," she wrote a few months later, "can describe the anguish of my mind the night I left home; it seemed to me that all the agony I had ever passed through was condensed into a small space, and I certainly believe that I should die, if left to a higher degree of such pain." RICHMOND, _September 30, 1840._ About twelve o'clock, when it was as dark as pitch, we were all ordered to prepare for a short walk. In single file then out we went. It seems that a bridge had been burned lately, and so we were all to go round on foot to another train of cars. There were dozens of bright, crackling bonfires lighted at short intervals all along, and as we wound down narrow, steep and rocky pathways, then up steps which had been rudely cut out in the side of the elevated ground, and as far as we could see before us could watch the long line of moving figures in all varieties of form and color, my spirits rose to the very tiptop of enjoyment. I wished you could have a picture of the whole scene, which, though one of real life, was to me at least exceedingly beautiful. We reached Richmond at one o'clock. Mr. Persico was waiting for us and received us cordially.... When I awoke at eight o'clock, I felt forlorn enough. Imagine, if you can, the room in which I opened my eyes. It is in the attic, is very low and has two windows. My first thought was, "I never can be happy in this miserable hole;" but in a second this wicked feeling took flight, and I reproached myself for my ingratitude to Him who had preserved me through all my journey, had made much of it so delightful and profitable, and who still promised to be with me. _Oct. 2._--I will try to give you some account of our doings, although we are not fully settled. We have risen at six so far, but intend to be up by five if we can wake. As soon as we are dressed I take my Bible out into the entry, where is a window and a quiet corner, and read and think until Louisa [6] is ready to give me our room and take my place. At nine we go into school, where Miss Lord [7] reads a prayer, and from that hour until twelve we are engaged with our respective classes. At twelve we have a recess of thirty minutes. This over, we return again to school, where we stay until three, when we are to dine. All day Saturday we are free. This time we are to have Monday, too, as a special holiday, because of a great Whig convention which is turning the city upside-down. There is one pleasant thing, pleasant to me at least, of which I want to tell you. As Mr. Persico is not a religious man, I supposed we should have no blessing at the table, and was afraid I should get into the habit of failing to acknowledge God there. But I was much affected when, on going to dine the first day I came, he stood leaning silently and reverentially over his chair, as if to allow all of us time for that quiet lifting up of the heart which is ever acceptable in the sight of God. It is very impressive. Miss Lord reads prayers at night, and when Mrs. Persico comes home we are to have singing.... That passage in the 119th Psalm, of which you speak, is indeed delightful. I will tell you what were some of my meditations on it. I thought to myself that if God continued His faithfulness toward me, I shall have afflictions such as I now know nothing more of than the name, for I need them constantly. I have trembled ever since I came here at the host of new difficulties to which I am exposed. Surely I did again and again ask God to decide the question for me as to whether I should leave home or not, and believed that He _had_ chosen for me. It certainly was against my own inclinations.... _Oct. 12th._--This morning I had a new scholar, a pale, thin little girl who stammers, and when I spoke to her, and she was obliged to answer, the color spread over her face and neck as if she suffered the utmost mortification. I was glad when recess came, to draw her close to my side and to tell her that I had a friend afflicted in the same way, and that consequently, I should know how to understand and pity her. She held my hand fast in hers and the tears came stealing down one after another, as she leaned confidingly upon my shoulder, and I could not help crying too, with mingled feelings of gratitude and sorrow. Certainly it will be delightful to soothe and to console this poor little thing.... You do not like poetry and I have spent the best part of my life in reading or trying to write it. N. P. Willis told me some years ago, that if my husband had a soul, he would love me for the poetical in me, and advised me to save it for him. _Oct. 27th._--Sometimes when I feel almost sure that the Saviour has accepted and forgiven me and that I _belong to Him_, I can only walk my room repeating over and over again, _How wonderful_! And then when my mind strives to take in this love of Christ, it seems to struggle in vain with its own littleness and falls back weary and exhausted, to _wonder_ again at the heights and depths which surpass its comprehension.... If there is a spark of love in my heart for anybody, it is for this dear brother of mine, and the desire to have his education thorough and complete has grown with my growth. You, who are not a sister, can not understand the feelings with which I regard him, but they are such as to call forth unbounded love and gratitude toward those who show kindness to him. _Nov. 3d._--I have always felt a peculiar love for the passage that describes the walk to Emmaus. I have tried to analyse the feeling of pleasure which it invariably sheds over my heart when dwelling upon it, especially upon the words, "Jesus Himself drew near and went with them," and these, "He made as though He would go further," but yielded to their urgent, "Abide with us." ... This is one of the comforts of the Christian; God understands him fully whether he can explain his troubles or not. Sometimes I think all of a sudden that I do not love the Saviour at all, and am ready to believe that all my pretended anxiety to serve Him has been but a matter of feeling and not of principle; but of late I have been less disturbed by this imagination, as I find it extends to earthly friends who are dear to me as my own soul. I thought once yesterday that I didn't love anybody in the world and was perfectly wretched in consequence. _Nov. 12th._--The more I try to understand myself, the more I am puzzled. That I am a mixture of contradictions is the opinion I have long had of myself. I call it a compound of sincerity and reserve. Unless you see just what I mean in your own consciousness, I doubt whether I can explain it in words. With me it is both an open and a shut heart--open when and where and as far as I please, and shut as tight as a vise in the same way. I was probably born with this same mixture of frankness and reserve, having inherited the one from my mother and the other from my father.... I have often thought that, humanly speaking, it would be a strange, and surely a very sad thing if we none of us inherit any of our father's piety; for when he prayed for his children it was, undoubtedly, that we might be very peculiarly the Lord's. H. was to be the missionary; but if he can not go himself, and is prospered in business, I hope he will be able to help send others. I have been frightened, of late, in thinking how little good I am doing in the world. And yet I believe that those who love to do good always find opportunities enough, wherever they are. Whether I shall do any here, I dare not try to guess. _Dec. 3d._--How I thank you for the interest you take in my Bible class. They are so attentive to every word I say that it makes me deeply feel the importance of seeking each of those words from the Holy Spirit. Many of them had not even a Bible of their own until now, nor were they in the habit of reading it at all. Among others there are two grand-daughters of Patrick Henry. I wish I could give you a picture of them, as they sit on Sabbath evening around the table with their eyes fixed so eagerly on my face, that if I did not feel that the Lord Jesus was present, I should be overwhelmed with confusion at my unworthiness.... Mr. Persico is a queer man. Last Sabbath Miss L. asked him if he had been to church. "Oui, Mlle.," said he; "_vous_ étiez à l'église de l'homme--_moi_, j'étais à l'église de Dieu--dans les bois." There is the bell for prayers; it is an hour since I began to write, but I have spent a great part of it with my eyes shut because I happened to feel more like meditating than writing, if you know what sort of a feeling that is. Oh, that we might be enabled to go onward day by day--and _upward too_. I have been making violent efforts for years to become meek and lowly in heart. At present I do hope that I am less irritable than I used to be. It was no small comfort to me when sister was home last summer, to learn from her that I had succeeded somewhat in my efforts. But though I have not often the last year been guilty of "harsh speeches," I have felt my pride tugging with all its might to kindle a great fire when some unexpected trial has caught me off my guard. I am persuaded that real meekness dwells deep within the heart and that it is only to be gained by communion with our blessed Saviour, who when He was reviled, reviled not again. _Sabbath Evening, 8th._--I wanted to write last evening but had a worse pain in my side and left arm than I have had since I came here. While it lasted, which was an hour and a half, I had such pleasant thoughts for companions as would make any pain endurable. I was asking myself if, supposing God should please suddenly to take me away in the midst of life, whether I should feel willing and glad to go, and oh, it did seem _delightful_ to think of it, and to feel sure that, sooner or later, the summons will come. Those pieces which you marked in the "Observer" I have read and like them exceedingly, especially those about growth in grace.... You speak of the goodness of God to me in granting me so much of His presence, while I am here away from all earthly friends. Indeed I want to be able to praise Him as I never yet have done, and I don't know where to begin. I have felt more pain in this separation from home on mother's account than any other, as I feel that she needs me at home to comfort and to love her. Since she lost her best earthly friend I have been her constant companion. I once had a secret desire for a missionary life, if God should see fit to prepare me for it, but when I spoke of it to mother she was so utterly overcome at its bare mention that I instantly promised I would _never_ for any inducement leave or forsake her. I want you to pray for me that if poor mother's right hand is made forever useless, [8] I may after this year be a right hand for her, and be enabled to make up somewhat to her for the loss of it by affection and tenderness and sympathy.... I don't remember feeling any way in particular, when I first began to "write for the press," as you call it. I never could realise that more than half a dozen people would read my pieces. Besides, I have no desire of the sort you express, for fame. I care a great deal too much for the approbation of those I love and respect, but not a fig for that of those I don't like or don't know. * * * * * II. Her Character as a Teacher. Letters. Incidents of School-Life. Religious Struggles, Aims, and Hopes. Oppressive Heat and Weariness. Miss Payson had been in Richmond but a short time before she became greatly endeared to Mr. and Mrs. Persico, and to the whole school. She had a rare natural gift for teaching. Fond of study herself, she knew how to inspire her pupils with the same feeling. Her method was excellent. It aimed not merely to impart knowledge but to elicit latent powers, and to remove difficulties out of the way. While decided and thorough, it was also very gentle, helpful, and sympathetic. She had a quick perception of mental diversities, saw as by intuition the weak and the strong points of individual character, and was skillful in adapting her influence, as well as her instructions, to the peculiarities of every one under her care. The girls in her own special department almost idolised her. The parents also of some of them, who belonged to Richmond and its vicinity, seeing what she was doing for their daughters, sought her acquaintance and showed her the most grateful affection. Although her school labors were exacting, she carried on a large correspondence, spent a good deal of time in her favorite religious reading, and together with Miss Susan Lord, the senior teacher and an old Portland friend, pursued a course of study in French and Italian. At the table Mr. Persico spoke French, and in this way she was enabled to perfect herself in the practice of that language. Of her spiritual history and of incidents of her school life during the new year, some extracts from letters to her cousin will give her own account. RICHMOND, _January 3, 1841._ If I tell you that I am going to take under my especial care and protection one of the family--a little girl of eleven years whom nobody can manage at all, you may wonder why. I found on my plate at dinner a note from Mrs. Persico saying that if I wanted an opportunity of doing good, here was one; that if Nannie could sleep in my room, etc., it might be of great benefit to her. The only reason why I hesitated was the fear that she might be in the way of our best hours. But I have thought all along that I was living too much at my ease, and wanted a place in which to deny myself for the sake of the One who yielded up every comfort for my sake. Nannie has a fine character but has been mismanaged at home, and since coming here. She often comes and puts her arms around me and says, "There is _one_ in this house who loves me, I do _know_." I receive her as a trust from God, with earnest prayer to Him that we may be enabled to be of use to her. From morning to night she is found fault with, and this is spoiling her temper and teaching her to be deceitful.... I have been reading lately the Memoir of Martyn. I have, of course, read it more than once before, but everything appears to me now in such a different light. I rejoice that I have been led to read the book just now. It has put within me new and peculiar desires to live wholly for the glory of God. _Jan.13th._--I understand the feeling about wishing one's self a dog, or an animal without a soul. I have sat and watched a little kitten frisking about in the sunshine till I could hardly help killing it in my envy--but oh, how different it is now! I have felt lately that perhaps God has something for me to do in the world. I am satisfied, indeed, that in calling me nearer to Himself He has intended to prepare me for His service. Where that is to be is no concern of mine as yet. I only wish to belong to Him and wait for His will, whatever it may be. _Jan. 14th_.--I used to go through with prayer merely as a duty, but now I look forward to the regular time for it, and hail opportunities for special seasons with such delight as I once knew nothing of. Sometimes my heart feels ready to break for the longing it hath for a nearer approach to the Lord Jesus than I can obtain without the use of words, and there is not a corner of the house which I can have to myself. I think sometimes that I should be thankful for the meanest place in the universe. You ask if I ever dream of seeing the Lord. No--I never did, neither should I think it desirable; but a few days ago, when I woke, I had fresh in my remembrance some precious words which, as I had been dreaming, He had spoken to me. It left an indescribable feeling of love and peace on my mind. I seemed in my dream to be very near Him, and that He was encouraging me to ask of Him all the things of which I felt the need. _Jan. 17th_.--I did not mean to write so much about myself, for when I took out my letter I was thinking of things and beings far above this world. I was thinking of the hour when the Christian first enters into the joy of his Lord, when the first note of the "new song" is borne to his ear, and the first view of the Lamb of God is granted to his eye. It seems to me as if the bliss of that one minute would fully compensate for all the toils and struggles he must go through here; and then to remember the ages of happiness that begin at that point! Oh, if the unseen presence of Jesus can make the heart to sing for joy in the midst of its sorrow and sin here, what will it be to dwell with Him forever! My Bible class, which consists now of eighteen, is every week more dear to me. I am glad that you think poor Nannie well off. She has an inquiring mind, and though before coming here she had received no religious instruction and had not even a Bible, she is now constantly asking me questions which prove her to be a first-rate thinker and reasoner. She went to the theatre last night and came home quite disgusted, saying to herself, "I shouldn't like to die in the midst of such gayeties as these." She urged me to tell her if I thought it wrong for her to go, but I would not, because I did not want her to stay away for my sake. I want her to settle the question fairly in her own mind and to be guided by her own conscience rather than mine. She is so grateful and happy that, if the sacrifice had been greater, we should be glad that we had made it. And then if we can do her any good, how much reason we shall have to thank God for having placed her here! _Feb. 11th._--My thoughts of serious things should, perhaps, be called prayers, rather than anything else. I have constant need of looking up to God for help, so utterly weak and ignorant am I and so dependent upon Him. Sometimes in my walks, especially those of the early morning, I take a verse from the "Daily Food" to think upon; at others, if my mind is where I want it should be, everything seems to speak and suggest thoughts of my Heavenly Father, and when it is otherwise I feel as if that time had been wasted. This is not "keeping the mind on the stretch," and is delightfully refreshing. All I wish is that I were always thus favored. As to a hasty temper, I know that anybody who ever lived with me, until within the last two or three years, could tell you of many instances of outbreaking passion. I am ashamed to say how recently the last real tempest occurred, but I will not spare myself. It was in the spring of 1838, and I did not eat anything for so long that I was ill in bed and barely escaped a fever. Mother nursed me so tenderly that, though she forgave me, I _never_ shall forgive myself. Since then I should not wish you to suppose that I have been perfectly amiable, but for the last year I think I have been enabled in a measure to control my temper, but of that you know more than I do, as you had a fair specimen of what I am when with us last summer. It has often been a source of encouragement to me that everybody said I was gentle and amiable till my father's death, when I was nine years old.... While reading to-night that chapter in Mark, where it speaks of Jesus as walking on the sea, I was interested in thinking how frequently such scenes occur in our spiritual passage over the sea which is finally to land us on the shores of the home for which we long. "While they were toiling in rowing," Jesus went to them upon the water and "would have passed by" till He heard their cries, and then He manifested Himself unto them saying, _"It is I."_ And when He came to them, the wind ceased and they "wondered." Surely we have often found in our toiling that Jesus was passing by and ready at the first trembling fear to speak the word of love and of consolation and to give us the needed help, and then to leave us _wondering_ indeed at the infinite tenderness and kindness so unexpectedly vouchsafed for our relief. _Feb. 13th_--I do not think we should make our enjoyment of religion the greatest end of our struggle against sin. I never once had such an idea. I think we should fight against sin simply because it is something hateful to God, because it is something so utterly unlike the spirit of Christ, whom it is our privilege to strive to imitate in all things. On all points connected with the love I wish to give my Saviour, and the service I am to render Him, I feel that I want teaching and am glad to obtain assistance from any source. I hardly know how to answer your question. I do not have that constant sense of the Saviour's presence which I had here for a long time, neither do I feel that I love Him as I thought I did, but it is not always best to judge of ourselves by our feelings, but by the general principle and guiding desire of the mind. I do think that my prevailing aim is to do the will of God and to glorify Him in everything. Of this I have thought a great deal of late. I have not a very extensive sphere of action, but I want my conduct, my every word and look and motion, to be fully under the influence of this desire for the honor of God. You can have no idea of the constant observation to which I am exposed here. _Feb. 21st._--I spent three hours this afternoon in taking care of a little black child (belonging to the house), who is very ill, and as I am not much used to such things, it excited and worried me into a violent nervous headache. I finished Brainerd's Life this afternoon, amid many doubts as to whether I ever loved the Lord at all, so different is my piety from that of this blessed and holy man. The book has been a favorite with me for years, but I never felt the influence of his life as I have while reading it of late. She alludes repeatedly in her correspondence to the delight which she found on the Sabbath in listening to that eminent preacher and divine, the Rev. Dr. Wm. S. Plumer, who was then settled in Richmond. In a letter to her cousin she writes: I have become much attached to him; he seems more than half in heaven, and every word is full of solemnity and feeling, as if he had just held near intercourse with God. I wish that you could have listened with me to his sermons to-day. They have been, I think, blessed messages from God to my soul. All her letters at this time glow with religious fervor. "How wonderful is our divine Master!" she seemed to be always saying to herself. "It has become so delightful to me to speak of His love, of His holiness, of His purity, that when I try to write to those who know Him not, I hardly know what is worthy of even a mention, if He is to be forgotten." And several years afterwards she refers to this period as a time when she "shrank from everything that in the slightest degree interrupted her consciousness of God." The following letter to a friend, whose name will often recur in these pages, well illustrates her state of mind during the entire winter. _To Miss Anna S. Prentiss. Richmond, Feb 26, 1841._ Your very welcome letter, my dear Anna, arrived this afternoon, and, as my labors for the week are over, I am glad of a quiet hour in which to thank you for it. I do not thank you simply because you have so soon answered my letter, but because you have told me what no one else could do so well about your own very dear self. When I wrote you I doubted very much whether I might even allude to the subject of religion, although I wished to do so, since that almost exclusively has occupied my mind during the last year. I saw you in the midst of temptations to which I have ever been a stranger, but which I conceived to be decidedly unfavorable to growth in any of the graces which make up Christian character. It was not without hesitation that I ventured to yield to the promptings of my heart, and to refer to the only things which have at present much interest for it. I can not tell you how I do rejoice that you have been led to come out thus upon the Lord's side, and to consecrate yourself to His service. My own views and feelings have within the last year undergone such an entire change, that I have wished I could take now some such stand in the presence of all who have known me in days past, as this which you have taken. My first and only wish is henceforth to live but for Him, who has graciously drawn my wandering affections to Himself.... You speak of the faintness of your heart--but "they who wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength," and I do believe the truth of these precious words; not only because they are those of God, but also because my own experience adds happy witness to them. I have lived many years with only just enough of hope to keep me from actual despair. The least breath was sufficient to scatter it all and to leave me, fearful and afraid, to go over and over again the same ground; thus allowing neither time nor strength for progress in the Christian course. I trust that you will not go through years of such unnecessary darkness and despondency. There is certainly enough in our Saviour, if we only open our eyes that we may see it, to solve every doubt and satisfy every longing of the heart; and He is willing to give it in full measure. When I contemplate the character of the Lord Jesus, I am filled with wonder which I can not express, and with unutterable desires to yield myself and my all to His hand, to be dealt with in His own way; and His way is a blessed one, so that it is delightful to resign body and soul and spirit to Him, without a will opposed to His, without a care but to love Him more, without a sorrow which His love can not sanctify or remove. In following after Him faithfully and steadfastly, the feeblest hopes may be strengthened; and I trust that you will find in your own happy experience that "joy and peace" go hand in hand with love--so that in proportion to your devotion to the Saviour will be the blessedness of your life. When I begin I hardly know where to stop, and now I find myself almost at the end of my sheet before I have begun to say what I wish. This will only assure you that I love you a thousand times better than I did when I did not know that your heart was filled with hopes and affections like my own, and that I earnestly desire, if Providence permits us to enjoy intercourse in this or in any other way, we may never lose sight of the one great truth that we are _not our own._ I pray you sometimes remember me at the throne of grace. The more I see of the Saviour, the more I feel my own weakness and helplessness and my need of His constant presence, and I can not help asking assistance from all those who love Him.... Oh, how sorry I am that I have come to the end! I wish I had any faculty for expressing affection, so that I might tell you how much I love and how often I think of you. Her cousin having gone abroad, a break in the correspondence with him occurred about this time and continued for several months. In a letter to her friend, Miss Thurston, dated April 21st, she thus refers to her school: There are six of us teachers, five of them born in Maine--which is rather funny, as that is considered by most of the folks here as the place where the world comes to an end. Although the South lifts up its wings and crows over the North, it is glad enough to get its teachers there, and ministers too, and treats them very well when it gets them, into the bargain. We have in the school about one hundred and twenty-five pupils of all ages. I never knew till I came here the influence which early religious education exerts upon the whole future age. There is such a wonderful difference between most of these young people and those in the North, that you might almost believe them another race of beings. Mrs. Persico is beautiful, intelligent, interesting, and pious. Mr. Persico is just as much like John Neal as difference of education and of circumstances can permit. Mr. N.'s strong sense of justice, his enthusiasm, his fun and wit, his independence and self-esteem, his tastes, too, as far as I know them, all exist in like degree in Mr. Persico. The early spring, with its profusion of flowers of every hue, so far in advance of the spring in her native State, gave her the utmost pleasure; but as the summer approached, her health began to suffer. The heat was very intense, and hot weather always affected her unhappily. "I feel," she wrote, "as if I were in an oven with hot melted lead poured over my brain." Her old trouble, too--"organic disease of the heart" it was now suspected to be--caused her much discomfort. "While writing," she says in one of her letters, "I am suffering excruciating pain; I can't call it anything else." Her physical condition naturally affected more or less her religious feelings. Under date of July 12th, she writes: The word _conflict_ expresses better than any other my general state from day to day. I have seemed of late like a straw floating upon the surface of a great ocean, blown hither and thither by every wind, and tossed from wave to wave without the rest of a moment. It was a mistake of mine to imagine that God ever intended man to rest in this world. I see that it is right and wise in Him to appoint it otherwise.... While suffering from my Saviour's absence, nothing interests me. But I was somewhat encouraged by reading in my father's memoir, and in reflecting that he passed through far greater spiritual conflicts than will probably ever be mine.... I see now that it is not always best for us to have the light of God's countenance. Do not spend your time and strength in asking for me that blessing, but this--that I may be transformed into the image of Christ in His own time, in His own way. Early in August she left Richmond and flew homeward like a bird to its nest. * * * * * III. Extracts from her Richmond Journal. Were her letters to her cousin the only record of Miss Payson's Richmond life, one might infer that they give a complete picture of it; for they were written in the freedom and confidence of Christian friendship, with no thought that a third eye would ever see them. But it had another and hidden side, of which her letters contain only a partial record. Her early habit of keeping a journal has been already referred to. She kept one at Richmond, and was prevented several years later from destroying it, as she had destroyed others, by the entreaty of the only person who ever saw it. This journal depicts many of her most secret thoughts and feelings, both earthward and heavenward. Some passages in it are of too personal a nature for publication, but the following extracts seem fairly entitled to a place here, as they bring out several features of her character with sunlike clearness, and so will help to a better understanding of the ensuing narrative: RICHMOND, _October 3, 1840._ How funny it seems here! Everything is so different from home! I foresee that I shan't live nearly a year under these new influences without changing my old self into something else. Heaven forbid that I should grow old because people treat me as if I were grown up! I hate old young folks. Well! whoever should see me and my scholars would be at a loss to know wherein consists the difference between them and me. I am only a little girl after all, and yet folks do treat me as if I were as old and as wise as Methusaleh. And Mr. Persico says, "Oui, Madame." Oh! oh! oh! It makes me feel so ashamed when these tall girls, these damsels whose hearts are developed as mine won't be these half dozen years (to say nothing of their minds), ask me if they may go to bed, if they may walk, if they may go to Mr. So-and-so's, and Miss Such-a-one's to buy--a stick of candy for aught I know. Oh, oh, oh! I shall have to take airs upon myself. I shall have to leave off little words and use big ones. I shall have to leave off sitting curled up on my feet, turkey-fashion. I shall have to make wise speeches (But a word in your ear, Miss--I _won't_). _Oct. 27th_--This Richmond is a queer sort of a place and I should be as miserable in it as a fish out of water, only there is sunshine enough in my heart to make any old hole bright. In the first place, this dowdy chamber is in one view a perfect den--no carpet, whitewashed walls, loose windows that have the shaking palsy, fire-red hearth, blue paint instead of white, or rather a suspicion that there was once some blue paint here. But what do I care? I'm as merry as a grig from morning till night. The little witches down-stairs love me dearly, everybody is kind, and--and--and--when everybody is locked out and I am locked into this same room, this low attic, there's not a king on the earth so rich, so happy as I! Here is my little pet desk, here are my books, my papers. I can write and read and study and moralise, I don't pretend to say _think_--and then besides, every morning and every night, within these four walls, heaven itself refuses not to enter in and dwell--and I may grow better and better and happier and happier in blessedness with which nothing may intermeddle. Mr. Persico is a man by himself, and quite interesting to me in one way, that is, in giving me something to puzzle out. I like him for his exquisite taste in the picture line and for having adorned his rooms with such fine ones--at least they're fine to my inexperienced eye; for when I'm in the mood, I can go and sit and dream as it seemeth me good over them, and as I dream, won't good thoughts come into my heart? As to Mrs. P., I hereby return my thanks to Nature for making her so beautiful. She has a face and figure to fall in love with. K. has also a fine face and a delicate little figure. Miss ---- I shall avoid as far as I can do so. I do not think her opinions and feelings would do me any good. She has a fine mind and likes to cultivate it, and for that I respect her, but she has nothing natural and girlish in her, and I am persuaded, never had. She hates little children; says she hates to hear them laugh, thinks them little fools. Why, how odd all this is to me! I could as soon hate the angels in heaven and hate to hear them sing. That, to be sure, is my way, and the other way is hers--but somehow it doesn't seem good-hearted to be so very, very superior to children as to shun the little loving beautiful creatures. I don't believe I ever shall grow up! But, Miss ----, I don't want to do you injustice, and I'm much obliged to you for all the flattering things you've said about me, and if you like my eyes and think there is congeniality of feeling between us, why, I thank you. But oh, don't teach me that the wisdom of the world consisteth in forswearing the simple beauties with which life is full. Don't make me fear my own happy girlhood by talking to me about love--oh, don't! _Dec. 1._--I wonder if all the girls in the world are just alike? Seems to me they might be so sweet and lovable if they'd leave off chattering forever and ever about lovers.... If mothers would keep their little unfledged birds under their own wings, wouldn't they make better mother- birds? Now some girls down-stairs, who ought to be thinking about all the beautiful things in life but just lovers, are reading novels, love-stories and poetry, till they can't care for anything else.... Now, Lizzy Payson, where's the use of fretting so? Go right to work reading Leighton and you'll forget that all the world isn't as wise as you think you are, you little vain thing, you! Alas and alas, but this is such a nice world, and the girls don't know it! _Dec. 2._--What a pleasant walk I had this morning on Ambler's Hill. The sun rose while I was there and I was so happy! The little valley, clothed with white houses and completely encircled by hills, reminded me of the verse about the mountains round about Jerusalem. Nobody was awake so early and I had all the great hill to myself, and it was so beautiful that I could have thrown myself down and kissed the earth itself. Oh, sweet and good and loving Mother Nature! I choose you for my own. I will be your little lady-love. I will hunt you out whenever you hide, and you shall comfort me when I am sad, and laugh with me when I'm merry, and take me by the hand and lead me onward and upward till the image of the heavenly forceth out that of the earthly from my whole heart and soul. Oh, how I prayed for a holy heart on that hillside and how sure I am that I shall grow better! and what companionable thoughts I've had all day for that blessed walk! _8th._--My life is a nice little life just now, as regular as clockwork. We walk and we keep school, and our scholars kiss and love us, and we kiss and love them, and we read Lamartine and I worship Leighton, good, wise, holy Leighton, and we discourse about everything together and dispute and argue and argue and dispute, and I'm quite happy, so I am! As to Lamartine, he's no great things, as I know of, but I want to keep up my knowledge of French and so we read twenty pages a day. And as to our discourses, my fidgety, moralising sort of mind wants to compare its doctrines with those of other people, though it's as stiff as a poker in its own opinions. You're a very consistent little girl! you call yourself a child, are afraid to open your mouth before folks, and yet you're as obstinate and proud as a little man, daring to think for yourself and act accordingly at the risk of being called odd and incomprehensible. I don't care, though! Run on and break your neck if you will. You're nothing especial after all. _9th._--To-night, in unrolling a bundle of work I found a little note therein from mother. Whew, how I kissed it! I thought I should fly out of my senses, I was so glad. But I can't fly now-a-days, I'm growing so unetherial. Why, I take up a lot of room in the world and my frocks won't hold me. That's because my heart is so quiet, lying as still as a mouse, after all its tossings about and trying to be happy in the things of this life. Oh, I am so happy now in the _other_ life! But as for telling other people so--as for talking religion--I don't see how I _can._ It doesn't come natural. Is it because I am proud? But I pray to be so holy, so truly a Christian, that my _life_ shall speak and gently persuade all who see me to look for the hidden spring of my perpetual happiness and quietness. The only question is: Do I live so? I'm afraid I make religion seem too grave a thing to my watching maidens down-stairs; but, oh, I'm afraid to rush into _their_ pleasures. _25th._-- ... I've been "our Lizzy" all my life and have not had to display my own private feelings and opinions before folks, but have sat still and listened and mused and lived within myself, and shut myself up in my corner of the house and speculated on life and the things thereof till I've got a set of notions of my own which don't _fit into_ the notions of anybody I know. I don't open myself to anybody on earth; I can not; there is a world of something in me which is not known to those about me and perhaps never will be; but sometimes I think it would be _delicious_ to love a mind like mine in some things, only better, wiser, nobler. I do not quite understand life. People don't live as they were made to live, I'm sure ... I want _soul._ I want the gracious, glad spirit that finds the good and the beautiful in everything, joined to the manly, exalted intellect--rare unions, I am sure, yet possible ones. Little girl! Do you suppose such a soul would find anything in yours to satisfy it? No--no--no--I do not. I know I am a poor little goose which ought to be content with some equally poor little gander, but I _won't._ I'll never give up one inch of these the demands of my reason and of my heart for all the truths you tell me about myself--never! But descend from your elevation, oh speculating child of mortality, and go down to school. Oh, no, no school for a week, and I guess I'll spend the week in fancies and follies. It won't hurt me. I've done it before and got back to the world as satisfied as ever, indeed I have. _Jan. 1, 184l._--We've been busy all the week getting our presents ready for the servants, and a nice time I've had this morning, seeing them show their ivory thereat. James made a little speech, the amount of which was, he hoped I wouldn't get married till I'd "done been" here two or three years, because my face was so pleasant it was good to look at it! I was as proud as Lucifer at this compliment, and shall certainly look pleasant all day to-day, if I never did before. Monsieur and the rest wished me, I won't say how many, good wishes, rushing at me as I went in to breakfast--and Milly privately informed Lucy that she liked Miss Payson "a heap" better than she did any body else, and then came and begged me to buy her! I buy her! Heaven bless the poor little girl. I had some presents and affectionate notes from different members of the family and from my scholars--also letters from sister and Ned, which delighted me infinitely more than I'm going to tell _you_, old journal. Took tea at Mr. P.'s and Mrs. P. laughed at her husband because he had once an idea of going to New England to get my little ladyship to wife (for the sake of my father, of course). Mr. P. blushed like a boy and fidgeted terribly, but I didn't care a snap--I am not old enough to be wife to anybody, and I'm not going to mind if people do joke with me about it. I've had better things to think of on this New Year's day--good, heavenward thoughts and prayers and hopes, and if I do not become more and more transformed into the Divine, then are prayers and hopes things of nought. Oh, how dissatisfied I am with myself. How I long to be like unto Him into whose image I shall one day be changed when I see Him as He is! I believe nobody understands me on religious points, for I can not, and, it seems to me, _need_ not parade my private feelings before the world. Cousin G., God bless him! knows enough, and yet my letters to him do not tell the hundredth part of that which these four walls might tell, if they would. I do not know that I am not wrong, but I do dislike the present style of talking on religious subjects. Let people pray--earnestly, fervently, not simply morning and night, but the _whole day long_, making their lives one continued prayer; but, oh, don't let them tell others of, or let others know _half_ how much of communion with Heaven is known to their own hearts. Is it not true that those who talk most, go most to meetings, run hither and thither to all sorts of societies and all sorts of readings--is it not true that such people would not find peace and contentment--yes, blessedness of blessedness--in solitary hours when to the Searcher of hearts alone are known their aspirations and their love? I do not know, I am puzzled; but I may say here, where nobody will ever see it, what I _do_ think, and I say it to my own heart as well as over the hearts of others--there is not enough of real, true communion with God, not enough nearness to Him, not enough heart-searching before Him; and too much parade and bustle and noise in doing His work on earth. Oh, I do not know exactly what I mean--but since I have heard so many apparently Christian people own that of this sense of nearness to God they know absolutely nothing--that they pray because it is their habit without the least expectation of meeting the great yet loving Father in their closets--since I have heard this I am troubled and perplexed. Why, is it not indeed true that the Christian believer, God's own adopted, chosen, beloved child, may speak face to face with his Father, humbly, reverently, yet as a man talketh with his friend? Is it not true? Do not I _know_ that it is so? Oh, I sometimes want the wisdom of an angel that I may not be thus disturbed and wearied. _14th._--Now either Miss ----'s religion is wrong and mine right, or else it's just the other way. I wrote some verses, funny ones, and sent her to-day, and she returned for answer that verse in Proverbs about vinegar on nitre, and seemed distressed that I ever had such worldly and funny thoughts. I told her I should like her better if she ever had any but solemn ones, whence we rushed into a discussion about proprieties and I maintained that a mind was not in a state of religious health, if it could not _safely_ indulge in thoughts funny as funny could be. She shook her head and looked as glum as she could, and I'm really sorry that I vexed her righteous soul, though I'm sure I feel funny ever so much of the time, can not help saying funny things and cutting up capers now and then. I'll take care not to marry a glum man, anyhow; not that I want my future lord and master to be a teller of stories, a wit, or a particularly funny man--but he shan't wear a long face and make me wear a long one, though he may be as pious as the day is long and _must_ be, what's more. Oh, my! I don't think I was so very naughty. I saw Miss ---- laughing privately at these same verses, and she rushed in to Mrs. P. and read them to her, and then copied them for her aunt and paid twenty-five cents postage on the letter. I should like to know how she dared waste so much time in unholy employments! As I was saying, and am always thinking, it's rather queer that people are so oddly different in their ideas of religion. Heaven forbid I should trifle with serious and holy thoughts of my head and heart--but if my religion is worth a straw, such verse-writing will not disturb it. _January 16th_.--I wonder what's got into me to-day--I feel cross, without the least bit of reason for so feeling. I guess I'm not well, for I'm sure I've felt like one great long sunbeam, I don't know how many months, and it doesn't come natural to be fretful. _17th_.--I knew I wasn't well yesterday and to-day am half sick. We got through breakfast at twenty minutes to eleven, and as I was up at seven, I got kind o' hungry and out of sorts. This afternoon went to church and heard one of Dr. E.'s argumentative sermons. But there's something in those Prayer-book prayers, certainly, if men won't or can't put any grace into their sermons. I wish I had a perfect ideal Sunday in my head or heart, or both. If I'm _very_ good I'm tired at night, and if I'm bad my conscience smites me--so any way I'm not very happy just now and I'm sick and mean to go to bed and so! _18th_.--Had a talk with Nannie. She has a thoughtful mind and who knows but we may do her some good. I love to have her here, and for once in my life like to feel a little bit--just the least bit--_old_; that is, old enough to give a little sage advice to the poor thing, when she asks it. She says she won't read any more novels and will read the Bible and dear knows what else she said about finding an angel for me to marry, which heaven forbid she should do, since I'm too fond of being a little mite naughty, to desire anything of that sort. After she was in bed she began to say her prayers most vehemently and among other things, prayed for Miss Payson. I had the strangest sensation, and yet an almost heavenly one, if I may say so. May it please Heaven to listen to her prayer for me, and mine for her, dear child. But suppose I do her no good while she lives so under my wing? _19th._--Up early--walked and read Leighton. Mr. P. amused us at dinner by giving a funny account in his funny way, of a mistake of E.---- H.----'s. She asked me the French for _as_. "Aussi" quoth I. Thereupon she tucked a great O. C. into her exercise and took it to him and they jabbered and sputtered over it, and she insisted that Miss Payson said so and he put his face right into hers and said, "Will you try to prove that Miss Payson is a fool, you little goose?" and at last Miss A. understood and explained. Read Leighton after school and thirty-two pages of Lamartine--then Mr. P. called--then Miss ---- teased me to love her and kept me in her paws till the bell rang for tea. Why can't I like her? I should be so ashamed if I should find out after all that she is as good as she _seems_, but I never did get cheated yet when I trusted my own mother wits, my instinct, or whatever it is by which I know folks--and she is found wanting by this something. _28th_.--Mrs. Persico has comforted me to-day. She says Mr. T. came to Mr. P. with tears in his eyes (could such a man shed tears?) and told him that I should be the salvation of his child--that she was already the happiest and most altered creature, and begged him to tell me so. I was ashamed and happy too--but I think Mr. P. should have told him that if good has been done to Nannie, it is _as_ much--to say the least--owing to Louisa as to me. L. always joins me in everything I do and say for her, and I would not have even an accident deprive her of her just reward for anything. Nannie sat on the floor to-night in her night-gown, thinking. At last she said, "Miss Payson?" "Well, little witch?" "You wouldn't care much if you should die to-night, should you?" "No, I think not." "Nor I," said she. "Why, do you think you should be better off than you are here?" "Yes, in heaven," said she. "Why how do you know you'll go to heaven?" She looked at me seriously and said, "Oh, I don't know--I don't know--I don't think I should like to go to the other place." We had then a long talk with her and it seems she's a regular little believer in Purgatory--but I wouldn't dispute with her. I guess there's a way of getting at her heart better than that.... Why is it that I have such a sensitiveness on religious points, such a dread of having my own private aims and emotions known by those about me? Is it right? I should like to be just what the Christian ought to be in these relations. Miss ---- expects me to make speeches to her, but I _can not_. If I thought I knew ever so much, I could not, and she annoys me so. Oh, I wish it didn't hurt my soul so to touch it! It's just like a butterfly's wing--people can't help tearing off the very invisible _down_ so to speak, for which they take a fancy to it, if they get it between fingers and thumb, and so I have to suffer for their curiosity's sake. Am I bound to reveal my heart-life to everybody who asks? Must I not believe that the heavenly love may, in one sense, be _hidden_ from outward eye and outward touch? or am I wrong? _Feb. 1, 184l._--Rose later than usual--cold, dull, rainy morning. Read in Life of Wilberforce. Defended Nannie with more valor than discretion. This evening the storm departed and the moonlight was more beautiful than ever; and I was so sad and so happy, and the life beyond and above seemed so beautiful. Oh, how I have longed to-day for heaven within my own soul! There has been much unspoken prayer in my heart to-night. I don't know what I should do if I could have my room all to myself--and not have people know it if even a good thought comes into my mind. I shall be happy in heaven, I know I shall--for even here prayer and praise are so infinitely more delightful than anything else. _3d._--Woke with headache, got through school as best I could, then came and curled myself up in a ball in the easy-chair and didn't move till nine, when I crept down to say good-bye to poor Mrs. Persico. Miss L. and Miss J. received me in their room so tenderly and affectionately that I was ashamed. What makes them love me? I am sure I should not think they could. _10th._--I wonder who folks think I am, and what they think? Sally R---- sent me up her book of autographs with a request that I would add mine. I looked it over and found very great names, and did not know whether to laugh or cry at her funny request, which I couldn't have made up my mouth to grant. How queer it seems to me that people won't let me be a little girl and will act as if I were an old maid or matron of ninety-nine! Poor Mr. Persico is terribly unhappy and walks up and down perpetually with _such_ a step. _12th._-- ... I am sure that in these little things God's hand is just as clearly to be seen as in His wonderful works of power, and tried to make Miss ---- see this, but she either couldn't or wouldn't. It seems to me that God is my Father, my own Father, and it is so natural to turn right to Him, every minute almost, with either thank-offerings or petitions, that I never once stop to ask if such and such a matter is sufficiently great for His notice. Miss ---- seemed quite astonished when I said so. _16th._-- ... I've been instituting an inquiry into myself to-day and have been worthily occupied in comparing myself to an onion, though in view of the fragrance of that highly useful vegetable, I hope the comparison won't go on all fours But I have as many natures as an onion has--what d'ye call 'em--coats? First the outside skin or nature--kind o' tough and ugly; _any_body may see that and welcome. Then comes my next nature--a little softer--a little more removed from curious eyes; then my inner one--myself--that 'ere little round ball which nobody ever did or ever will see the whole of--at least, s'pose not. Now most people see only the outer rind--a brown, red, yellow, tough skin and that's all; but I _think_ there's something inside that's better and more truly an onion than might at first be guessed. And so I'm an onion and that's the end. _17th._--Mrs. P.'s birthday, in honor of which cake and wine. Mr. P. was angry with us because we took no wine. If he had asked me civilly to drink his wife's health, I should probably have done so, but I am not to be _frightened_ into anything. I made a funny speech and got him out of his bearish mood, and then we all proceeded to the portico to see if the new President had arrived--by which means we obtained a satisfactory view of two cows, three geese, one big boy in a white apron and one small one in a blue apron, three darkies of feminine gender and one old horse; but Harrison himself we saw not. Mr. Persico says it's Tyler's luck to get into office by the death of his superior, and declares Harrison must infallibly die to secure John Tyler's fate. It's to be hoped this won't be the case. [9] _March 6th._--Miss L. read to us to-day some sprightly and amusing little notes written her years ago by a friend with whom she still corresponds. I was struck with the contrast between these youthful and light-hearted fragments and her present letters, now that she is a wife and mother. I wonder if there is always this difference between the girl and woman? If so, heaven forbid I should ever cease to be a child! _18th._--Headache--Nannie sick; held her in my arms two or three hours; had a great fuss with her about taking her medicine, but at last out came my word _must_, and the little witch knew it meant all it said and down went the oil in a jiffy, while I stood by laughing at myself for my pretension of dignity. The poor child couldn't go to sleep till she had thanked me over and over for making her mind and for taking care of her, and wouldn't let go my hand, so I had to sit up until very late--and then I was sick and sad and restless, for I couldn't have my room to myself and the day didn't seem finished without it. It is a perfect mystery to me how folks get along with so little praying. Their hearts must be better than mine, or something. What is it? But if God sees that the desire of my whole heart is to-night--has been all day--towards Himself, will He not know this as prayer, answer it as such? Yes, prayer is certainly something more than bending of the knees and earnest words, and I do believe that goodness and mercy will descend upon me, though with my lips I ask not. _24th._--Had a long talk with Mr. Persico about my style of governing. He seemed interested in what I had to say about appeals to the conscience, but said my _youthful enthusiasm_ would get cooled down when I knew more of the world. I told him, very pertly, that I hoped I should never know the world then. He laughed and asked, "You expect to make out of these stupid children such characters, such hearts as yours?" "No--but better ones." He shook his head and said I had put him into good humor. I don't know what he meant. I've been acting like Sancho to-day--rushing up stairs two at a time, frisking about, catching up Miss J---- in all her maiden dignity and tossing her right into the midst of our bed. Who's going to be "schoolma'am" out of school? Not I! I mean to be just as funny as I please, and what's more I'll make Miss ---- funny, too,--that I will! She'd have so much more health--Christian health, I mean--if she would leave off trying to get to heaven in such a dreadful bad "way." I can't think _religion_ makes such a long, gloomy face. It must be that she is wrong, or else I am. I wonder which? Why it's all sunshine to me--and all clouds to her! Poor Miss ----, you might be so happy! _April 9th._--Holiday. We all took a long walk, which I enjoyed highly. I was in a half moralising mood all the way, wanted to be by myself very much. We talked more than usual about home and I grew so sad. Oh, I wonder if anybody loves me as _I love_! I wonder! I long for mother, and if I could just see her and know that she is happy and that she will be well again! It is really a curious question with me, whether provided I ever fall in love (for I'll _fall_ in love, else not go in at all) I shall leave off loving mother best of anybody in the world? I suppose I shall be in love sometime or other, but that's nothing to do with me now nor I with it. I've got my hands full to take care of my naughty little self. _17th._--Mrs. Persico got home to-night [10] and what a meeting we had! what rejoicing! How beautiful she looked as she sat in her low chair, and we stood and knelt in a happy circle about her! A queen--an angel--could not have received love and homage with a sweeter grace. Sue Irvine cried an hour for joy and I wished I were one of the crying sort, for I'm sure I was glad enough to do almost anything. Beautiful woman! We sang to her the Welcome Home, Miss F. singing as much with her eyes as with her voice, and Mr. and Mrs. Persico both cried, he like a little child. Oh, that such evenings as this came oftener in one's life! All that was beautiful and good in each of our hidden natures came dancing out to greet her at her coming, and all petty jealousies were so quieted and--why, what a rhapsody I'm writing! And to-morrow, our good better natures tucked away, dear knows where, we shall descend with business-like airs to breakfast, wish each other good morning, pretend that we haven't any hearts. Oh, is this life! I won't believe it. Our good genius has come back to us; now all things will again go on smoothly; once more I can be a little girl and frolic up here instead of playing Miss Dignity down-stairs. _May 7th._--This evening I passed unavoidably through Miss ----'s room. She was reading Byron as usual and looked so wretched and restless, that I could not help yielding to a loving impulse and putting my hand on hers and asking why she was so sad. She told me. It was just what I supposed. She is trying to be happy, and can not find out how; reads Byron and gets sickly views of life; sits up late dreaming about love and lovers; then, too tired to pray or think good thoughts, tosses herself down upon her bed and wishes herself dead. She did not tell me this, to be sure, but I gathered it from her story. I alluded to her religious history and present hopes. She said she did not think continued acts of faith in Christ necessary; she had believed on Him once, and now He would save her whatever she did; and she was not going to torment herself trying to live so very holy a life, since, after all, she should get to heaven just as well through Him as if she had been particularly good (as she termed it). I don't know whether a good or a bad spirit moved me at that minute, but I forgot that I was a mere child in religious knowledge, and talked about _my_ doctrine and made it a very beautiful one to my mind, though I don't think she thought it so. Oh, for what would I give up the happiness of praying for a holy heart--of striving, struggling for it! Yes, it is indeed true that we are to be saved simply, only, apart from our own goodness, through the love of Christ. But who can believe himself thus chosen of God--who can think of and hold communion with Infinite Holiness, and not long for the Divine image in his own soul? It is a mystery to me--these strange doctrines. Is not the fruit of love aspiration after the holy? Is not the act of the new-born soul, when it passes from death unto life, that of desire for assimilation to and oneness with Him who is its all in all? How can love and faith be _one act_ and then cease? I dare not believe--I would not for a universe believe--that my very sense of safety in the love of Christ is not to be just the sense that shall bind me in grateful self-renunciation wholly to His service. Let me be _sure_ of final rest in heaven--sure that at this moment I am really God's own adopted child; and I believe my prayers, my repentings, my weariness of sin, would be just what they now are; nay, more deep, more abundant. Oh, it is _because_ I believe--fully believe that I shall be saved through Christ--that I want to be like Him here upon earth It is because I do not fear final misery that I shrink from sin and defilement here. Oh, that I could put into that poor bewildered heart of hers just the sweet repose upon the ever present Saviour which He has given unto me! The quietness with which my whole soul rests upon Him is such blessed quietness! I shall not soon forget this strange evening. [1] She refers to this, doubtless, in a note to Mr. Hamlin, dated March 28, 1839. Mr. H. was then in Constantinople. "It seems as if a letter to go so far ought to be a good one, so I am afraid to write to you. But we '_think to you_' every day, and hope you think of us sometimes. I have been so happy all winter that I have some happiness to spare, and if you need any you shall have as much as you want." [2] The sermon was preached by her pastor, the Rev. Dr. Condit, April 19th. [3] There is one thing I recall as showing the very early religious tendency of Lizzy's mind. It was a little prayer meeting which she held with a few little friends, as long ago as her sister kept school in the large parlor of the house on Middle street, before the death of her father. It assembled at odd hours and in odd places. I also remember her interest in the spiritual welfare of her young companions, after the return of the family from their sojourn in New York. She showed this by accompanying some of us, in the way of encouragement, to Dr. Tyler's inquiry-meeting. Then during the special religious interest of 1838, she felt still more deeply and entered heartily into the rejoicing of those of us who at that time found "peace in believing." The next year I accompanied my elder sister Susan to Richmond, and during my absence she gave up her Christian hope and passed through a season of great darkness and despondency, emerging, however, into the light upon a higher plane of religious experience and enjoyment. She sometimes thought this the very beginning of the life of faith in her soul. But as I used to say to her when the next year we were together at Richmond, it seemed to me quite impossible that any one who had not already received the grace of God, could have felt what she had felt and expressed. I do not doubt in the least that for years she had been a true follower of Christ.--_Letter from Miss Ann Louisa P. Lord, dated Portland, December 30, 1878_. [4] It may be proper to say here, that while but few of her letters are given entire, it has not been deemed needful specially to indicate all the omissions. In some instances, also, where two letters, or passages of letters, relate to the same subject, they have been combined. [5] An excellent little work by Rev. William Nevins, D.D. Dr. Nevins was pastor of the first Presbyterian Church in Baltimore, where he died in 1835, at the age of thirty-seven. He was one of the best preachers and most popular religious writers of his day. [6] Miss Ann Louisa P. Lord. [7] Miss Susan Lord. [8] Referring to a serious accident, by which her mother was for some time deprived of the use of her right hand. [9] But, singularly enough, it was. President Harrison died April 4, 1841, just a month after his inauguration, and Mr. Tyler succeeded him. [10] From Philadelphia, where she had undergone a surgical operation. CHAPTER III. PASSING FROM GIRLHOOD INTO WOMANHOOD. 1841-1845. I. At Home again. Marriage of her Sister. Ill-Health. Letters. Spiritual Aspiration and Conflict. Perfectionism. "Very, very Happy." Work for Christ what makes Life attractive. Passages from Her Journal. A Point of Difficulty. Not long after Elizabeth's return from Richmond, her sister was married to the Rev. Albert Hopkins, Professor in Williams College. The wedding had been delayed for her coming. "I would rather wait six years than not have you present," her sister wrote. This event brought her into intimate relations with a remarkable man; a man much beloved in his day, and whose name will often reappear in these pages. The next two or three months showed that her Richmond life, although so full of happy experiences, had yet drawn heavily upon her strength. They were marked by severe nervous excitement and fits of depression. This, however, passed away and she settled down again into a busy home life. But it was no longer the home life of the past. The year of absence had left a profound impression upon her character. Her mind and heart had undergone a rapid development. She was only twenty-two on her return, and had still all the fresh, artless simplicity of a young girl, but there was joined to it now the maturity of womanhood. Of the rest of the year a record is preserved in letters to her cousin. These letters give many little details respecting her daily tasks and the life she led in the family and in the world; but they are chiefly interesting for the light they shed upon her progress heavenward. Her whole soul was still absorbed in divine things. At times her delight in them was sweet and undisturbed; then again, she found herself tossed to and fro upon the waves of spiritual conflict. Perfectionism was just then much discussed, and the question troubled her not a little, as it did again thirty years later. But whether agitated or at rest, her thoughts all centered in Christ, and her constant prayer was for more love to Him. PORTLAND, _Sept. 15, 1841._ The Lord Jesus is indeed dear to me. I can not doubt it. His name is exceedingly precious. Oh, help me, my dear cousin, to love Him more, to attain His image, to live only for Him! I blush and am ashamed when I consider how inadequate are the returns I am making Him; yet I can praise Him for all that is past and trust Him for all that is to come. I can not tell you how delightful prayer is. I feel that in it I have communion with God--that He is here--that He is mine and that I am His. I long to make progress every day, each minute seems precious, and I constantly tremble lest I should lose one in returning, instead of pressing forward with all my strength. No, not _my_ strength, for I have none, but with all which the Lord gives me. How can I thank you enough that you pray for me! _Sept. 18th._--I am all the time so nervous that life would be insupportable if I had not the comfort of comforts to rejoice in. I often think mother would not trust me to carry the dishes to the closet, if she knew how strong an effort I have to make to avoid dashing them all to pieces. When I am at the head of the stairs I can hardly help throwing myself down, and I believe it a greater degree of just such a state as this which induces the suicide to put an end to his existence. It was never so bad with me before. Do you know anything of such a feeling as this? To-night, for instance, my head began to feel all at once as if it were enlarging till at last it seemed to fill the room, and I thought it large enough to carry away the house. Then every object of which I thought enlarged in proportion. When this goes off the sense of the contraction is equally singular. My head felt about the size of a pin's head; our church and everybody in it appeared about the bigness of a cup, etc. These strange sensations terminate invariably with one still more singular and particularly pleasant. I can not describe it--it is a sense of smoothness and a little of dizziness. If you never had such feelings this will be all nonsense to you, but if you have and can explain them to me, why I shall be indeed thankful. I have been subject to them ever since I can remember. I never met with a physician yet who seemed to know what is the matter with me, or to care a fig whether I got well or not. All they do is to roll up their eyes and shake their heads and say, "Oh!" ... As to the wedding, we had a regular fuss, so that I hardly knew whether I was in the body or out of it. The Professor was here only two days. He is very eminently holy, his friends say, and from what I saw of him, I should think it true. This was the point which interested sister in him. As soon as the wedding was over my spirits departed and fled. It is true enough that "marriage involves one union, but _many separations_." _Oct. 17th._--We had a most precious sermon this afternoon from the Baptist minister on the words, "Christ is all and in all." I longed to have you hear the Saviour thus dwelt upon. I did not know how full the Apostles were of His praise--how constantly they dwelt upon Him, till it was spread before me thus in one delightful view. Oh, may He become our all--our beginning and our ending--our first and our last! I do love to hear Him thus honored and adored. Let us, dear cousin, look at our Saviour more. Let us never allow aught to come between our hearts and our God. Speak to me as to your own soul, urging me onward, and if you do not see the fruits of your faithfulness here, may you see when sowing is turned to reaping. _Oct. 24th._--I must call upon you to rejoice with me that I have to-day got back my old Sunday-school class. I wondered at their being so earnest about having me again, yet I trust that God has given me this hold upon their affections for some good purpose.... I do not know exactly how to discriminate between the suggestions of Satan and those of my own heart, but for a week past, even while my inclinations and my will were set upon Christ, something followed me in my down-sittings and my uprisings, urging me to hate the Lord Jesus; asking if His strict requirements were not too strait to be endured; and it has grieved me deeply that such a thought could find its way into my mind. "I have prayed for thee that thy faith fail not" is my last refuge. How graciously did Jesus provide a separate consolation for each difficulty which He foresaw could meet His disciples on their way. _Nov. 8th._--Mother has been sick. The doctor feared inflammation of the brain; but she is better now. I have had my first experience as a nurse, and Dr. Mighels says I am a good one. Whenever I think of God's wonderful, _wonderful_ goodness to me and of my own sinfulness, I want to find a place low at the foot of the cross where I may cover my face in the dust, and yet go on praising Him. You do not know how all things have been made new to me within less than two years. Still, I struggle fiercely every hour of my life. For instance, my desire to be much beloved by those dear to me, is a source of constant grief. Some weeks ago, a person, who probably did not know this, told me that I was remarkably lovable and that everybody said so. I was so foolish, so wicked, as to be more pleased by this than I dare to tell--but enough so to give me after-hours of bitter sorrow. Sometimes it seems to me that I grow prouder every day, and I wanted to ask mother if she did not think so; but I thought perhaps God is showing me my pride as I had never seen it that I may wage war against this, His enemy and mine. I do not believe anybody else has such an evil nature as I. But let us never rest till we are satisfied with being counted as nothing, that our Saviour may be all in all. It seems no small portion of the joy I long for in heaven, to be thus self-forgetful in love to Christ. How strange that we do not now supremely love Him. How I do long to live with those who praise Him. I long to have every Christian with whom I meet speak of Him with love and exalt Him. [1] _Nov. 12th._--I have been very unwell and low-spirited. The cause of this, folks seem to agree, was over-exertion during mother's sickness. To tell the truth, I was so anxious about her that I did not try to save my strength at all, and excitement kept me up, so that I was not conscious of any special fatigue till all was over and the reaction came, when I just went into a dead-and-alive state and had the "blues" outrageously. It seemed as if I could do nothing but fold my hands and cry. Sister is coming home this winter. I would like you to see this letter of hers. She is as nearly a perfectionist now as your father is. She begs me to read the New Testament and to pray for a knowledge of the truth. And so I have for a year and a half, and this is what I learn thereby: "The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked"--at least such I find mine to be. To be sure, that I am not perfect is no proof that I may not become so; however, I feel most sympathy with those who, like Martyn, Brainerd, and my father, had to _fight_ their way through. Yet her remarks threw my mind into great confusion at first and I knew not what to do; thereupon I went at once with my difficulties to the Lord and tried to _seek the truth_, whatever it might be, from Him. It seems to me that I am safe while in His hands, and that if those things are essential, He will not withhold them from me. Truly, if there is a royal road to holiness, and if in one moment of time sin may be crushed and forever slain, I of all others should know it; for at present the way is thronged with difficulties. [2] It seems to me that I am made of wants"--I need everything. At the same time, how great is the goodness of God to me! I long to have my heart so filled with the one single image of my Redeemer, that it shall ever flow in spontaneous adoration. Such a Saviour! I am pained to the very depths of my soul because I love Him so little.... If I am only purified and made entirely the Lord's, let Him take His own course and make the refining process ever so painful. "When the shore is won at last, Who will count the billows past?" _Dec. 16th._--Do you remember what father said about losing his will when near the close of his life? That remark has always made the subject of a _lost will_ interesting to me. There is another place where he wishes he had known this blessedness twenty years before. [3] _Dec. 18th._--"I am very, very happy; and yet it is hardly a happiness which I can describe. You know what it is to rejoice in the sweet consciousness that there is a Saviour--a near and a present Saviour; and thus am I now rejoicing; grateful to Him for His holy nature, for His power over me, for His dealings with me, for a thousand things which I can only try to express to Him. Oh, how excellent above all treasures does He now appear! One minute of nearness to the Lord Jesus contains more of delight than years spent in intercourse with any earthly friend. I could not but own to-night that God can make me happy without a right hand or a right eye. Lord, make me Thine, and I will cheerfully give Thee all. _Dec. 22d._--"As to my Italian and Tasso, I am ashamed to tell you how slow I have been. Between company and housework and sewing I have my hands about full, and precious little time for reading and study. Still, I feel that I live a life of too much ease. I should love to spend the rest of my existence in the actual service of the Lord, without a question as to its ease and comfort. Reading Brainerd this afternoon made me long for his loose hold on earthly things. I do not know how to attain to such a spirit. Is it by prayer alone and the consequent sense of the worth of Divine things that this deadness to the world is to be gained--or, by giving up, casting away the treasures which withdraw the heart or have a tendency to withdraw it from God? This is quite an interesting question to me now, and I should really like it settled. The thought of living apart from God is more dreadful than any affliction I can think of. Here are some passages from two leaves of her journal which escaped the flames. They touch upon another side of her life at this period. _December 1, 184l._--"I went to the sewing-circle this afternoon and had such a stupid time! Enough gossip and nonsense was talked to make one sick, and I'm sure it wasn't the fault of my head that my hair didn't stand on end. Now my mother is a very sensible mother, but when she urges me into company and exhorts me to be more social, she runs the risk of having me become as silly as the rest of 'em. She fears I may be harmed by reading, studying and staying with her, but heaven forbid I should find things in books worse than things out of them. I can't think the girls are the silly creatures they make themselves appear. They want an aim in life, some worthy _object;_ give them that, and the good and excellent which, I am sure, lies hidden in their nature, will develop itself at once. When the young men rushed in and the girls began looking unutterable things, I rushed out and came home. I can't and won't talk nonsense and flirt with those boys! Oh, what is it I do want? Somebody who feels as I feel and thinks as I think; but where shall I find the somebody? _7th._--"Frolicked with G., rushed up stairs with a glass-lamp in my hand, went full tilt against the door, smashed the lamp, got the oil on my dress, on two carpets, besides spattering the wall. First consequence, a horrible smell of lamp-oil; Second, great quakings, shakings, and wonderings what my ma would say when she came home; Third, ablutions, groanings, ironings; Fourth, a story for the Companion long enough to pay for that 'ere old lamp. Letting alone that, I've been a very good girl to-day; studied, made a call, went to see H. R. with books, cakes, apples, and what's more, my precious tongue wherewith I discoursed to her. _14th._--"Busy all day. Carried a basket full of "wittles" to old Ma'am Burns, heard an original account of the deluge from the poor woman, wished I was as near heaven as she seems to be, studied, sewed, taught T. and E., tried to be a good girl and didn't have the blues once. _20th._--"Spent most of the afternoon with Lucy, who is sick. She held my hand in hers and kissed it over and over, and expressed so much love and gratitude and interest in the Sunday-school that I felt ashamed. _24th_--Helped mother bake all the morning, studied in the afternoon, got into a frolic, and went out after dark with G. to shovel snow, and then paddled down to L----'s with a Christmas-pudding, whereby I got a real backache, legache, neckache, and all-overache, which is just good enough for me. I was in the funniest state of mind this afternoon! I guess anybody, who had seen me, would have thought so! _25th, Saturday._--Got up early and ran down to Sally Johnson's with a big pudding, consequence whereof a horrible pain in my side. I don't care, though. I do love to carry puddings to good old grannies. _Jan. 1, 1842._--Began the New Year by going to see Lucy, fainting, tumbling down flat on the floor and scaring everybody half out of their wits. I don't think people ought to like me, on the whole, but when they do, aint I glad? I wonder if perfectly honest-hearted people want to be loved better than they deserve, as in one sense I, with yet a pretty honest heart, do? I wonder how other folks think, feel inside? Wish I knew! Most of the year 1842 was passed at home in household duties, in study, and in trying to do good. Never had she been busier, or more helpful to her mother; and never more interested in the things of God. It was a year of genuine spiritual growth and also of sharp discipline. The true ideal of the Christian life revealed itself to her more and more distinctly, while at the same time she had opportunity both to learn and to practise some of its hardest lessons. A few extracts from letters to her cousin will give an inkling of its character. _March 19, 1842._--Sometimes I have thought my desire to live for my Saviour and to labor for Him had increased. It certainly seems wonderful to me now that I could ever have wished to die, as I used to do, _when I had done nothing for God_. The way of life which appears most attractive, is that spent in persevering and unwearying toil for Him. There was a warmth and a fervency to my religious feelings the first year after my true hope which I do not find now and often sigh for; but I think my mind is more seriously determined for God than it was then, and that my principles are more fixed. Still I am less than the least of all.... I have read not quite five cantos of Tasso. You will think me rather indolent, but I have had a great deal to do, which has hindered study and reading. _May 3d_--The Christian life was never dearer to me than it is now, but it throngs with daily increasing difficulties. You, who have become a believer in perfection, may say that this conflict is not essential, and indeed I have been so weary, of late, of struggling that I am almost ready to fly to the doctrine myself. I have certainly been made more willing to seek knowledge on this point from the Holy Spirit. _Sept. 30th_--You speak of indulging unusually, of late, in your natural vivacity and finding it prejudicial. Here is a point on which I am completely bewildered. I find that if for a month or two I steadily set myself to the unwearied pursuit of spirituality of mind and entire weanedness from the world, a sad reaction _will_ follow. My efforts slightly relax, I indulge in mirthful or worldly (in the sense of not religious) conversation, delight in it, and find my health and spirits better for it. But then my spiritual appetites at once become less keen, and from conversation I go to reading, from reading to writing, and then comes the question: Am I not going back?--and I turn from all to follow hard after the Lord. Is this a part of our poor humanity, above which we can not rise? This is a hard world to live in; and it will prove a trying one to me or I shall love it dearly. I have had temptations during the last six months on points where I thought I stood so safely that there was no danger of a fall. Perhaps it is good for us to be allowed to go to certain lengths, that we may see what wonderful supplies of grace our Lord gives us every hour of our lives. _October 1st_--I have had two or three singular hours of excitement since I left writing to you last evening. If you were here I should be glad to read you a late passage in my history which has come to its crisis and is over with--thanks to Him, who so wonderfully guides me by His counsel. If I ever saw the hand of God distinctly held forth for my help, I have seen it here, coming in the right time, in the right way, _all_ right. * * * * * II. Returns to Richmond. Trials there. Letters. Illness. School Experiences. "To the Year 1843." Glimpses of her daily Life. Why her Scholars love her so. Homesick. A Black Wedding. What a Wife should be. "A Presentiment." Notes from her Diary. In November of this year, at the urgent solicitation of Mr. Persico, Miss Payson returned to Richmond, and again became a teacher in his school. But everything was now changed, and that for the worse. Mr. Persico, no longer under the influence of his wife, who had fallen a prey to cruel disease, lost heart, fell heavily in debt, and became at length hopelessly insolvent. Later, he is said to have been lost at sea on his way to Italy. The whole period of Miss Payson's second residence in Richmond was one of sharp trial and disappointment. But it brought out in a very vivid manner her disinterestedness and the generous warmth of her sympathies. At the peril of her health she remained far into the summer of 1843, faithfully performing her duties, although, as she well knew, it was doubtful if she would receive any compensation for her services. As a matter of fact, only a pittance of her salary was ever paid. Of this second residence in Richmond no other record is needed than a few extracts from letters written to a beloved friend who was passing the winter at the South, and whose name has already been mentioned. A sentence in the first of these letters deserves to be noted as affording a key to one side of her character, namely: "the depressing sense of inferiority which was born with me." All her earlier years were shadowed by this morbid feeling; nor was she ever quite free from its influence. It was, probably, at once a cause and an effect of the sensitive shyness that clung to her to the last. Perhaps, too, it grew in part out of her irrepressible craving for love, coupled with utter incredulity about herself possessing the qualities which rendered her so lovable. "It is one of the faults of my character," she wrote, "to fancy that nobody cares for me." When, dear Anna, I had taken my last look at the last familiar face in Portland (I fancy you know whose face it was) I became quite as melancholy as I ever desire to be, even on the principle that "by the sadness of the countenance the heart is made better." I dare say you never had a chance to feel, and therefore will not be able to understand, the depressing sense of inferiority which was born with me, which grew with my growth and strengthened with my strength, and which, though somewhat repressed of late years, gets the mastery very frequently and makes me believe myself the most unlovable of beings. It was with this feeling that I left home and journeyed hither, wondering why I was made, and if anybody on earth will ever be a bit the happier for it, and whether I shall ever learn where to put myself in the scale of being. This is not humility, please take notice--for humility is contented, I think, with such things as it hath. _To Miss Anna S. Prentiss. Richmond, Nov. 26, 1842_ When I reached Richmond last night, tired and dusty and stupefied, I felt a good deal like crawling away into some cranny and staying there the rest of my life; but this morning, when I had remembered mother's existence and yours and that of some one or two others, I felt more disposed to write than anything else. Your note was a great comfort to me during two and a half hours at Portsmouth, and while on my journey. I thought pages to you in reply. How I should love to have you here in Richmond, even if I could only see you once a month, or _know_ only that you were here and never see you! With many most kind friends about me, I still shall feel very keenly the separation from you. There is nobody here to whom I can speak confidingly, and my hidden spirit will have to sit with folded wings for eight months to come. To whom shall I talk about you, pray? On the way hither I fell in love with a little girl who also fell in love with me, and as I sat with her over our lonely fire at Philadelphia and in Washington, I could not help speaking of you now and then, till at last she suddenly looked up and asked me if you hadn't a brother, which question effectually shut my mouth. In a religious point of view I am sadly off here. There is a different atmosphere in the house from what there used to be, and I look forward with some anxiety to the future. The "little girl" referred to received soon after a letter from Miss Payson. In enclosing it to a friend, more than thirty-seven years later, she wrote: "I cried bitterly when she left us for Richmond. She was out and out good and true. When my father was taking leave of us, the last night in Washington, she proposed that as we had enjoyed so much together, we should not separate without a prayer of thanks and blessing-seeking, a proposal to which my father most heartily responded." Here is an extract from the letter: When I look over my school-room I am frequently reminded of you, for my thirty-six pupils are, most of them, about your age. I have some very lovable girls under my wing. I should be too happy if there were no "unruly members" among these good and gentle ones; but in the little world where I shall spend the greater part of the next eight months, as well as in the great and busy one, which as yet neither you or I know much about, I fancy there are mixtures of "the just and the unjust," of "the evil and the good." We have a very pleasant family this year. The youngest (for I omit the black baby in the kitchen) we call Lily. She is my pet and plaything, and is quite as affectionate as you are. Then comes a damsel named Beatrice, who has taken me upon _trust_ just as you did. You may be thankful that your parents are not like hers, for she is to be educated _for the world_; music, French and Italian crowd almost everything else out of place, and as for religious influences, she is under them here for the first time. How thankful I feel when I see such cases as this, that God gave me pious parents, who taught me from my very birth, that His fear is the _beginning_ of wisdom! My room-mate we call Kate. She is pious, intelligent, and very warm-hearted, and I love her dearly. She is an orphan--Mrs. Persico's daughter ... I am rather affectionate by nature, if not in practice, and though I know that nearness to the Friend, whom I hope I have chosen, could make me happy in any circumstances, I do not pretend to be above the desire for earthly friends, provided He sees fit to give them to me. I believe my father used to say that we could not love them too much, if we only gave Him the first place in our hearts. Let us earnestly seek to make Him our all in all. It is delightful, in the midst of adversities and trials, to be able to say "There is none upon earth that I desire besides Thee," but it requires more grace, I think, to be able to use such language when the world is bright about us. You have known little of sorrow as yet, but if you have given your whole, undivided heart to God, you will not need affliction, or to have your life made so desolate that "weariness must toss you to His breast." There is a bright side to religion, and I love to see Christians walking in the sunshine. I trust you have found this out for yourself, and that your hope in Christ makes you happy in the life that now is, as well as gives you promise of blessedness in that which is to come. Before she had been long in Richmond she was seized with an illness which caused her many painful, wearisome days and nights. Referring to this illness, in a letter to Miss Prentiss, she writes: It is dull music being sick away from one's mother, but I have a knack at submitting myself to my fate; so my spirit was a contented one, and I was not for a moment unhappy, except for the trouble which I gave those who had to nurse me. I thought of you, at least two-thirds of the time. As my little pet, Lily L., said to me last night, when she had very nearly squeezed the breath out of my body, "I love you a great deal harder than I hug you"; so I say to you--I love you harder than I tell, or can tell you. A happy New-Year to you, dear Anna. How much and how little in those few old words! Consider yourself kissed and good-night. The "New Year" was destined to be a very eventful one alike to her friend and to herself. She seemed to have a presentiment of it, at least in her own case, as some lines written on a blank leaf of her almanac for that year attest: With mingling hope and trust and fear I bid thee welcome, untried year; The paths before me pause to view; Which shall I shun and which pursue? I read my fate with serious eye; I see dear hopes and treasures fly, Behold thee on thy opening wing Now grief, now joy, now sorrow bring. God grant me grace my course to run With one blest prayer--_His_ will be done. A little journal kept by her during the following months gives bright glimpses of her daily life. The entries are very brief, but they show that while devoted to the school, she also spent a good deal of time among her books, kept up a lively correspondence with absent friends, and contributed her full share to the entertainment of the household by "holding soirees" in her room, "reading to the girls," writing stories for them, and helping to "play goose" and other games. _To Miss Anna S. Prentiss, Richmond, Feb. 22, 1843._ Thanks to the Father of his Country for choosing to be born in Virginia! for it gives us a holiday, and I can write to you, dearest of Annas. You don't know how delighted I was to get your long-watched-for letter. You very kindly express the wish that you could bear some of my school drudgery with me. I would not give you that, but you should have love from some of these warm-hearted damsels, which would make you happy even in the midst of toil and vexation. I can't think what makes my scholars love me so. I'm sure it is a gift for which I should be grateful, as coming from the same source with all the other blessings which are about me. I believe my way of governing is a more fatiguing one than that of scolding, fretting, and punishing. There is a little bit of a tie between each of these hearts and mine--and the least mistake on my part severs it forever; so I have to be exceedingly careful what I do and say. This keeps me in a constant state of excitement and makes my pulse fly rather faster than, as a pulse arrived at years of discretion, it ought to do. I come out of school so happy, though half tired to death, wishing I were better, and hoping I shall become so; for the more my scholars love me, the more I am ashamed that I am not the pink of perfection they seem to fancy me. _Evening._--I have just come up here to my lonely room (which, if I hadn't the happiest kind of a heart in the world, would look right gloomy) and have read for the third time your dear, good letter, and all I wish is that I could tell you how I love you, and how angry I am with myself that I did not know and love you sooner. It seems so odd that we should have been born and "raised" so near each other and yet apart. You say you are a believer in destiny. So am I--particularly in affairs of the heart; and I hope that we are made friends now for something more than the satisfaction which we find in loving. I am in danger of forgetting that I am to stay in this world only a little while and then _go home._ Will you help me to bear it in mind?... How must the "Pilgrim's Progress" interest a mind that has never learned the whole book by rote in childhood. I have often wished I could read it as a first-told tale, and so I wish about the xiv. of John and some other chapters in the Bible. Your incidental mention that you have family prayers every evening produced a thousand strange sensations in my mind. I hardly know why. Did I ever tell you how I love and admire the new Bishop Johns? And how if I _am_ a "good Presbyterian," as they say here, I go to hear him whenever and wherever he preaches. I don't think him a _great_ man, but he has that sincerity and truthfulness of manner which win your love at once. [4] ... What nice times you must have studying German! I dreamed the night I read your account of it that I was with you, and that you said I was as stupid as an owl. I have the queerest mind somehow. It won't work like those of other people, but goes the farthest way round when it wants to go home, and I never could do anything with it but just let it have its own way, and live the longer. They are having a nice time down in the parlor worshipping Miss Ford, the light and sunshine of the house, who leaves to-morrow for Natchez, and I am going down to help them. So, good-night. _To the same. April 24._ Since I wrote you last we have all had a good deal to put our patience and philosophy and faith to the test, and I must own that I have been for some weeks about as uncomfortable as mortal damsel could be. Everything went wrong with Mr. Persico, and his gloom extended to all of us. I never spent such melancholy weeks in my life, and became so homesick that I could hardly drag myself into school. In the midst of it, however, I made fun for the rest, as I believe I should do in a dungeon; and now it is all over, I look back and laugh still. We had a black wedding--a very black one--in my schoolroom the other night; our cook having decided to take to herself a lord and master. It was the funniest affair I ever saw. Such comical dresses! such heaps of cake, wine, coffee, and candy! such kissings and huggings! The man who performed the ceremony prayed that they might _obey each other,_ wherein I think he showed his originality and good sense, too. Then he held a book upside down and pretended to read, dear knows what! but the Professor--that is to say, Mrs. P.--laughed so loud when he said, "Will you take this _wo-_man to be your wedded _husband_" that we all joined in full chorus, whereupon the poor priest (who was only the sexton of St. James') was so confused that he married them over twice. I never saw a couple in their station in life provided with a tenth part of the luxuries with which they abounded. We worked all day Saturday in the kitchen, making and icing cake for them, and a nice frolic we had of it, too. Do you love babies? We have a black one in the lot whom I pet for want of something on which to expend my love. When I find anything that will interest the whole family, I read it aloud for general edification. The girls persuaded me into writing a story to read to them, and locked me into my room till it was done. It was the first love-story I ever wrote, for hitherto I have not known enough about such things to be able to do it. This reminds me that you asked if I intend forgetting you after I am married. I have no sort of idea what I shall do, provided I ever marry. But if I ever fall in love I dare say I shall do it so madly and absorbingly as to become, in a measure and for a season, forgetful of everything and everybody else. Still, though I hate professions, I don't see how I can ever cease to love you, whatever else I forget or neglect. There is a restlessness in my affection for you that I don't understand--a half wish to avoid enjoyment now, that I may in some future time share it with you. And yet I have a presentiment that we may have sympathy in trials of which I now know nothing. I am ashamed of myself, of late, that these subjects of love and matrimony find a place in my thoughts which I never have been in the habit of giving them, but people here talk of little else and I am borne on with the current. I think that to give happiness in married life a woman should possess oceans of self-sacrificing love and I, for one, haven't half of that self-forgetting spirit which I think essential. I am glad you like the "Christian Year," and I see you are quite an Episcopalian. Well, if you are like the good old English divines, nobody can find fault with your choice. Mr. Persico was brought up a Catholic but professes to be a nothingarian now. For myself, this only I know that I earnestly wish all the tendencies of my heart to be heavenward, and I believe that the sincere inquirer after truth will be guided by the Infinite Mind. And so on that faith I venture myself and feel safe as a child may feel, who holds his father's hand. Life seems full of mysteries to me of late--and I am tempted to strange thoughtfulness in the midst of its gayest scenes. How true was the "presentiment" described in this letter, will appear in her correspondence with the same friend more than a quarter of a century later. _To Anna S. Prentiss, Richmond, June 1, 1843_ I believe you and I were intended to know each other better I have found a certain something in you that I have been wanting all my life. While I wish you to know me just as I am, faults and all, I can t bear to think of ever seeing anything but the good and the beautiful in your character, dear Anna, and I believe my heart would break outright should I find you to be otherwise than just that which I imagine you are. I don't know why I am saying this; but I have learned more of the world during the last year than in any previous half dozen of my life, and the result is dissatisfaction and alarm at the things I see about me. I wish I could always live, as I have hitherto done, under the shelter of my mother's wing.... I ought to ask your pardon for writing in this horrid style, but I was born to do things by steam, I believe, and can't do them moderately. As I write to, so I love you, dear Anna, with all my interests and energies tending to that one point. I was amused the other day with a young lady who came and sat on my bed when I was sick (for I am just getting well from a quite serious illness), and after some half dozen sighs, wished she were Anna Prentiss that she might be loved as intensely as she desired. This is a roundabout way of saying how very dear you are to me. What chatter-boxes girls are! I wonder how many times I've stopped to say "My dear, don't talk so much--for I am writing in school." _June 27th_--Mr. ---- brought "The Home" to me and I have laughed and cried over it to my heart's content. Out of pure self-love, because they said she was like me, I liked poor Petra with the big nose, best of the bunch--though, to be sure, they liken me to somebody or other in every book we read till I begin to think myself quite a bundle of contradictions. I have a thousand and one things to say to you, but I wonder if as soon as I see you I shall straightway turn into a poker, and play the stiffy, as I always do when I have been separated from my friends. I am writing in a little bit of a den which, by a new arrangement, I have all to myself. What if there's no table here and I have to write upon the bureau, sitting on one foot in a chair and stretching upwards to reach my paper like a monkey? What do I care? I am writing to _you_, and your spirit, invoked when I took possession of the premises, comes here sometimes just between daylight and dark, and talks to me till I am ready to put forth my hand to find yours. Oh! Anna, you must be everything that is pure and good, through to the very depths of your heart, that mine may not ache in finding it has loved only an imaginary being. Not that I expect you to be perfect--for I shouldn't love you if you were immaculate--but pure in aim and intention and desire, which I believe you to be. _29th._--Do you want to know what mischief I've just been at? There lay poor Miss ----, alias "Weaky" as we call her, taking her siesta in the most innocent manner imaginable, with a babe-in-the-wood kind of air, which proved so highly attractive that I could do no less than pick her up in my arms and pop her (I don't know _but_ it was _head_ first), right into the bathing-tub which happened to be filled with fresh cold water. Poor, good little Weaky! There she sits shaking and shivering and laughing with such perfect sweet humor, that I am positively taking a vow never to do so again. Well, I had something quite sentimental to say to you when I began writing, but as the spirit moved me to the above perpetration of nonsense, I've nothing left in me but fun, and for that you've no relish, have you? I made out to cry yesterday and thereby have so refreshed my soul as to be in the best possible humor just now. The why and wherefore of my tears, which by the way I don't shed once in an age, was briefly the withdrawal from school of one of my scholars, one who had so attached herself to me as to have become almost a part of myself, and whom I had taught to love you, dear Anna, that I might have the exquisite satisfaction of talking about you every day--a sort of sweet interlude between grammar and arithmetic which made the dull hours of school grow harmonious. She had a presentiment that her life was to close with our school session, from which I couldn't move her even when her health was good, and she says that she prays every day, not that her life may be lengthened, but that she may die before I am gone. I am superstitious enough to feel that the prayer may have its answer, now that I see her drooping and fading away without perceptible disease. The only time I ever witnessed the rite of confirmation was when the hands of the good bishop rested upon her head, and no wonder if I have half taken up arms in defense of this "laying-on of hands," out of the abundance of my heart if not from the wisdom of my head. Well, I've lost my mirthful mood, speaking of her, and don't know when it will come again. I have taken it into my head that you will visit Niagara on your way home from the South and have half a mind to go there myself. Did your brother bring home the poems of R. M. Milnes? I half hope that he did not, since I want to see you enjoy them for the first time, particularly a certain "Household Brownie" story, with which I fell in love when President Woods sent us the volume. Here follow a few entries in her diary: _May 1._---Holiday. Into the country all of us, white, black, and gray. Sue Empie devoted herself to me like a lover and so did Sue Lewis, so I was not at a loss for society. My girls made a bower, wherein I was ensconced and obliged to tell stories to about forty listeners till my tongue ached. _July 18th._--Left Richmond. _Aug. 2nd._--Left Reading for Philadelphia. _5th._--Williamstown and saw mother, sister and baby. _16th._--President Hopkins' splendid address before the Alumni--also that of Dr. Robbins. _18th._--Left Williamstown and reached Nonantum House at night. Saw Aunt Willis, Julia, Sarah, Ellen, etc. _22nd._--Came home, oh so very happy! Dear, good home! _23rd._--Callers all day, the second of whom was Mr. P. There have been nineteen people here and I'm tired! _25th._--What _didn't_ I hear from Anna P. to-day! _31st._--Rode with Anna P. to Saccarappa to see Rev. Mr. and Mrs. H. B. Smith--took tea at the P.s and went with them to the Preparatory Lecture. I do nothing but go about from place to place. _Sept. 1st._--Just as cold as cold could be all day. Spent evening at Mrs. B.'s, talking with Neal Dow. _9th._--Cold and blowy and disagreeable. Went to see Carrie H. Came home and found Mr. P. here; he stayed to tea--read us some interesting things--told us about Mary and William Howitt. _10th._--Our church was re-opened to-day. Mr. Dwight preached in the morning and Mr. Chickering in the afternoon. September 11th she marked with a white stone and kept ever after as one of the chief festal days of her life, but of the reason why there is here no record. The diary for the rest of the year is blank with the exception of a single leaf which contains these sentences: "Celle qui a besoin d'admirer ce qu'elle aime, celle, don't le jugement est pénétrant, bien que son imagination exaltée, il n'y a pour elle qu'un objet dans l'univers." "Celui qu'on aime, est le vengeur des fautes qu'on a commis sur cette terre; la Divinité lui prête son pouvoir." MAD. DE STAEL. * * * * * III. Her Views of Love and Courtship. Visit of her Sister and Child. Letters. Sickness and Death of Friends. Ill-Health. Undergoes a Surgical Operation. Her Fortitude. Study of German. Fenelon. The records of the next year and a half are very abundant, in the form of notes, letters, verses and journals; but they are mostly of too private a character to furnish materials for this narrative, belonging to what she called "the deep story of my heart." They breathe the sweetness and sparkle with the morning dew of the affections; and while some of them are full of fun and playful humor, others glow with all the impassioned earnestness of her nature, and others still with deep religious feeling. She wrote: My heart seems to me somewhat like a very full church at the close of the services--the great congregation of my affections trying to find their way out and crowding and hindering each other in the general rush for the door. Don't you see them--the young ones scampering first down the aisle, and the old and grave and stately ones coming with proud dignity after them?... I feel now that "dans les mystères de notre nature aimer, _encore aimer,_ est ce qui nous est resté de notre heritage céleste," and oh, how I thank God for my blessed portion of this celestial endowment! Love in a word was to her, after religion, the holiest and most wonderful reality of life; and in the presence of its mysteries she was--to use her own comparison--"like a child standing upon the seashore, watching for the onward rush of the waves, venturing himself close to the water's edge, holding his breath and wooing their approach, and then, as they come dashing in, retreating with laughter and mock fear, only to return to tempt them anew." Her only solicitude was lest the new interest should draw her heart away from Him who had been its chief joy. In a letter to her cousin, she touches on this point: You know how by circumstances my affections have been repressed, and now, having found _liberty to love,_ I am tempted to seek my heaven in so loving. But, my dear cousin, there is nothing worth having apart from God; I feel this every day more and more and the fear of satisfying myself with something short of Him--this is my only anxiety. This drives me to the throne of His grace and makes me refuse to be left one moment to myself. I believe I desire first of all to love God supremely and to do something for Him, if He spares my life. Early in December her sister, Mrs. Hopkins, with an infant boy, came to Portland and passed a part of the winter under the maternal roof. The arrival of this boy--her mother's first grandchild--was an event in the family history. Here is her own picture of the scene: It was a cold evening, and grandmamma, who had been sitting by the fire, knitting and reading, had at last let her book fall from her lap, and had dropped to sleep in her chair. The four uncles sat around the table, two of them playing chess, and two looking on, while Aunt Fanny, with her cat on her knees, studied German a little, looked at the clock very often, and started at every noise. "I have said, all along, that they wouldn't come," she cried at last. "The clock has just struck nine, and I am not going to expect them any longer. I _knew_ Herbert would not let Laura undertake such a journey in the depth of winter; or, at any rate, that Laura's courage would tail at the last moment." She had hardly uttered these words, when there was a ring at the doorbell, then a stamping of feet on the mat, to shake off the snow, and in they Came, Lou, and Lou's papa, and Lou's mamma, bringing ever so much fresh, cold air with them. Grandmamma woke up, and rose to meet them with steps as lively as if she were a young girl; Aunt Fanny tossed the cat from her lap, and seized the bundle that held the baby; the four uncles crowded about her, eager to get the first peep at the little wonder. There was such a laughing, and such a tumult, that poor Lou, coming out of the dark night into the bright room, and seeing so many strange faces, did not know what to think. When his cloaks and shawls and capes were at last pulled off by his auntie's eager hands, there came into view a serious little face, a pair of bright eyes, and a head as smooth as ivory, on which there was not a single hair. His sleeves were looped up with corals, and showed his plump white arms, and he sat up very straight, and took a good look at everybody. "What a perfect little beauty!" "What _splendid_ eyes!" "What a lovely skin!" "He's the perfect image of his father!" "He's _exactly_ like his mother!" "What a dear little nose!" "What fat little hands, full of dimples!" "Let _me_ take him!" "Come to his own grandmamma!" "Let his uncle toss him--so he will!" "What does he eat?" "Is he tired?" "Now, _Fanny!_ you've had him ever since he came; he wants to come to me; I know he does!" These, and nobody knows how many more exclamations of the sort, greeted the ears of the little stranger, and were received by him with unruffled gravity. "Aunt Fanny" devoted herself during the following weeks to the care of her little nephew. Her letters written at the time--some of them with him in her arms--are full of his pretty ways; and when, more than a score of years later, he had given his young life to his country and was sleeping in a soldier's grave, his "sayings and doings" formed the subject of one of her most attractive juvenile books. A few extracts from her letters will give glimpses of her state of mind during this winter, and show also how the thoughtful spirit, which from the first tempered the excitements of her new experience, was deepened by the loss of very dear friends. PORTLAND, _December 9, 1843._ Last evening I spent at Mrs. H.----'s with Abby and a crowd of other people. John Neal told me I had a great bump of love of approbation, and conscientiousness very large, and self-esteem hardly any; and that he hoped whoever had most influence over me would remedy that evil. He then went on to pay me the most extravagant compliments, and said I could become distinguished in any way I pleased. Thinks I to myself, "I should like to be the best little wife in the world, and that's the height of my ambition." Don't imagine now that I believe all he says, for he has been saying just such things to me since I was a dozen years old, and I don't see as I am any great things yet. Do you? _Jan. 3d, 1844._--Sister is still here and will stay with us a month or two yet. Her husband has gone home to preach and pray himself into contentment without her. Though he was here only a week, his quiet Christian excellence made us all long to grow better. It is always the case when he comes, though he rather lives than talks his religion. I never saw, as far as piety is concerned, a more perfect specimen of a man in his every-day life. Do you pray for me every night and every morning? Don't forget how I comfort myself with thinking that you every day ask for me those graces of the Spirit which I so long for. Indeed, I have had lately such heavenward yearnings!... Why do you ask _if_ I pray for you, as if I could love you and _help_ praying for you continually and always. I have no light sense of the holiness a Christian minister should possess. I half wish there were no veil upon my heart on this point, that you might see how, from the very first hour of your return from abroad, my interest in you went hand-in-hand with this _looking upward_. _Jan. 22d._--We have all been saddened by the repeated trials with which our friends the Willises are visited this winter. Mrs. Willis is still very ill, and there is no hope of her recovery; and Ellen, the pet of the whole household--the always happy, loving, beautiful young thing--who had been full of delight in the hope of becoming a mother, lies now at the point of death; having lost her infant, and with it her bright anticipations. For fourteen years there had not been a physician in their house, and you may imagine how they are all now taken, as it were, by surprise by the first break death has threatened to make in their peculiarly happy circle. Our love for all the family has grown with our growth and strengthened with our strength, and what touches them we all feel. _Feb. 8th._--How is it that people who have no refuge in God live through the loss of those they love? I am very sad this morning, and almost wish I had never loved you or anybody. Last night we heard of the death of Julia Willis' sister, and this morning learn that a dear little girl in whom we all were much interested, and whom I saw on Saturday only slightly unwell, is taken away from her parents, who have no manner of consolation in losing this only child. There is a great cloud throughout our house, and we hardly know what to do with ourselves. When I met mother and sister yesterday on my return from your house, I saw that something was the matter of which they hesitated to tell me; and of whom should I naturally think but of you--you in whom my life is bound up; and, when mother finally came to put her arms around me, I suffered for the moment that intensity of anguish which I should feel in knowing that something dreadful had befallen you. She told me, however, of poor Ellen's death, and I was so lost in recovering you again that I cared for nothing else all the evening, and until this morning had scarcely thought of the aching, aching hearts she has left behind. Her poor young husband, who loved her so tenderly, is half-distracted. Oh, I have blessed God to-day that until He had given me a sure and certain hold upon Himself, He had not suffered me to love as I love now! It is a mystery which I can not understand, how the heart can live on through the moment which rends it asunder from that of which it has become a part, except by hiding itself in God. I have felt Ellen's death the more, because she and her husband were associated in my mind with you. I hardly know how or why; but she told me much of the history of her heart when I saw her last summer on my way home from Richmond, at the same time that she spoke much of you. She had seen you at our house before you went abroad, and seemed to have a sort of presentiment that we should love each other. But I ought to beg you to forgive me for sending you this gloomy page; yet I was restless and wanted to tell you the thoughts that have been in my heart towards you to-day--the serious and saddened love with which I love you, when I think of you as one whom God may take from me at any moment. I do not know that it is unwise to look this truth in the face sometimes--for if ever there was heart tempted to idolatry, to giving itself up fully, utterly, with perfect abandonment of every other hope and interest, to an earthly love, so is mine tempted now. _Feb. 13th._--Mother is going to Boston with sister on Saturday, provided I am well enough (which I mean to be), as Mrs. Willis has expressed a strong wish to see her once more. We heard from them yesterday again. Poor Ellen's coffin was placed just where she stood as a bride, less than eight months ago, and her little infant rested on her breast. There is rarely a death so universally mourned as hers; she was the most winning and attractive young creature I ever saw. _Feb. 21st._--Are you in earnest? Are you in earnest? Are you really coming home in March? I am afraid to believe, afraid to doubt it. I am crying and laughing and writing all at once. You would not tell me so unless you _really were coming_, I know ... And you are coming home! (How madly my heart is beating! lie still, will you?) I almost feel that you are here and that you look over my shoulder and read while I write. Are you sure that you will come? Oh, don't repent and send me another letter to say that you will wait till it is pleasanter weather; it is pleasant now. I walked out this morning, and the air was a spring air, and gentlemen go through the streets with their cloaks hanging over their arms, and there is a constant plashing against the windows, of water dripping down from the melting snow; yes, I verily believe that it is warm, and that the birds will sing soon--I do, upon my word ... I wouldn't have the doctor come and feel my pulse this afternoon for anything. He would prescribe fever powders or fever drops, or something of the sort, and bleed me and send me to bed, or to the insane hospital; I don't know which. I could cry, sing, dance, laugh, all at once. Oh, that I knew exactly when you will be here--the day, the hour, the minute, that I might know to just what point to govern my impatient heart--for it would be a pity to punish the poor little thing too severely. I have been reading to-day something which delighted me very much; do you remember a little poem of Goethe's, in which an imprisoned count sings about the flower he loves best, and the rose, the lily, the pink, and the violet, each in turn fancy themselves the objects of his love. [5] You see I put you in the place of the prisoner at the outset, and I was to be the flower of his love, whatever it might be. Well, it was the "Forget-me-not." If there were a flower called the "Always-loving," maybe I might find out to what order and class I belong. Dear me; there's the old clock striking twelve, and I verily meant to go to bed at ten, so as to sleep away as much of the time as possible before your coming, but I fell into a fit of loving meditation, and forgot everything else. You should have seen me pour out tea to-night! Why, the first thing I knew, I had poured it all out into my own cup till it ran over, and half filled the waiter, which is the first time I ever did such a ridiculous thing in my life. But, dearest, I bid you good night, praying you may have sweet dreams and an inward prompting to write me a long, long, blessed letter, such as shall make me dance about the house and sing. _Feb. 22d._--Oh, I am frightened at myself, I am so happy! It seems as if even this whole folio would not in the least convey to you the gladness with which my heart is dancing and singing and making merry. The doctor seems quite satisfied with my shoulder, and says "_it's first-rate;_" so set your heart at rest on that point. I hope there'll be nobody within two miles of our meeting. Suppose you stop in some out of the way place just out of town, and let me trot out there to see you? Oh, are you really coming? _To G, E. S. March 4, 1844._ I must write a few lines to tell you, my dear cousin, that I am thinking of and praying for you on your birthday. I have but one request to offer either for you or for myself, and that is for more love to our Redeemer. I bless God that I have no other want.... I do not know why it is, but I never have thought so much of death and of the certainty that I, sooner or later, must die, as within a few months past. I am not exactly superstitious, but this daily and hourly half-presentiment that my life will not be a long one, is singularly subduing, and seems to lay a restraining hand upon future plans. I am not sorry, whatever may be the event, that it is so. I dread clinging to this world and seeking my rest in it. I am not afraid to die, or afraid that anything I love may be taken from me; I only have this serious and thoughtful sense of death upon my mind. You know how we have loved the Willis family, and can imagine how we felt the death of their youngest daughter, who was dear to everybody. And Mrs. Willis is, probably, not living. This has added to my previous feeling on the subject, which was, perhaps, first occasioned by the sudden and terrible loss of my poor friend, Mr. Thatcher, a year ago this month. [6] God forbid I should ever forget the lessons He saw I needed, and dare to feel that there is a thing upon earth which death may not touch. Oh, in how many ways He has sought to win my whole heart for His own! _March 22d._--I was interrupted last night by the arrival of G. L. P., after his four months' absence in Mississippi, improved in health, and in looks, and in spirits, and quite as glad to see me, I believe, as even you, in your goodness of heart, say my lover ought to be. But I will tell you the truth, my dear cousin, I am _afraid_ of love. There is no other medium, save that of the happiness of loving and being loved, by which my affections could be effectually turned from divine to earthly things. Am I not then on dangerous ground? Yet God mercifully shows me that it is so, and when I think how He has saved me hitherto through sharp temptations, it seems wicked, distrust of Him, not to feel that He will save me through those to come. I know now there are some of the great lessons of life yet to be learned; I believe I must _suffer_ as long as I have an earthly existence. Will not then God make that suffering but as a blessed reprover to bring me nearer Himself? I hope so. During the winter her health had become so much impaired, that great anxiety was felt as to the issue. In a letter to her friend, Miss Ellen Thurston, dated April 20, 1844, she writes: You remember, perhaps, that on the afternoon you were so good as to come and spend with me, I was making a fuss about a little thing on my shoulder. Well, I had at last to have it removed, and though the operation was not in itself very painful, its effects on my whole nervous system have been most powerful. I have lost all regular habits of sleep--for a week I do not know that I slept two hours--and am ready to fly into a fit at the bare thought of sitting still long enough to write a common letter. I have, however, the consolation of being pitied and consoled with, as there's something in the idea of cutting at the flesh which touches the heart, a thousand times more than some severer sufferings would do. I am getting quite thin and weak upon it, and I believe mother firmly expects me to shrink into nothing, though I am a pretty bouncing girl still. Owing to some mishap the healing process was entirely thwarted, and after a very trying summer, the operation had to be repeated. This time it was performed by that eminent surgeon and admirable Christian man, Dr. John C. Warren of Boston, assisted by his son, Dr. J. M. W. Dr. Warren told Miss Payson's friend, who had accompanied an invalid sister to New York, that he thought it would require "about five minutes;" but it proved to be much more serious than he had anticipated. Miss Willis, in her letter from Geneva already quoted, thus refers to it: My next meeting with Lizzy revealed a striking trait of her character, which hitherto I had had no opportunity of observing--her wonderful fortitude under suffering. I was at the seashore with my sister and family when, her little child being taken suddenly very ill in the night, I went up to Boston by an early train to bring down as soon as possible our family physician. On arriving at his house I was disappointed at being told that he could not come at once, being engaged to perform an operation that morning. While waiting for the return train, I called at my father's office and was surprised to hear that Lizzy was the patient. A painful tumor had developed itself on the back of her neck, and she had come up with her mother to Boston to consult Dr. Warren, who had advised its immediate removal. I went at once to see her. She greeted me with even more than her usual warmth and after stating in a few words the object of her coming to Boston and that she was expecting the doctors every moment, she added: "You will stay with me, I am sure. Mother insists on being present, but she can not bear it. She will be sure to faint. If you will promise to stay, I can persuade her to remain in the next room." Seeing the distress in my face at the request, she said, "I will be very good. You will have nothing to do but sit in the room, to satisfy mother." It was impossible to refuse and I remained. There was no chloroform then to give blessed unconsciousness of suffering and every pang had to be endured, but she more than kept her promise to "be good." Not a sound or a movement betrayed suffering. She spoke only once. After the knife was laid aside and the threaded needle was passed through the quivering flesh to draw the gaping edges of the wound together, she asked, after the first stitch had been completed, in a low, almost calm tone, with only a slight tremulousness, how many more were to be taken. When the operation was over, and the surgeons were preparing to depart, she questioned them minutely as to the mark which would be left after healing. I was surprised that she could think of it at such a moment, knowing how little value she had always set on her personal appearance, but her mother explained it afterward by referring to her betrothal to you, and the fear that you would find the scar disfiguring. [7] In a letter to Mrs. Stearns, [8] she herself writes, Sept. 6: I had no idea of the suffering which awaited me. I thought I should get off as I did the first time. But I have a great deal to be thankful for. On Wednesday, to my infinite surprise and gladness, George pounced down upon me from New York, having been quite cut to the heart by the account mother gave him. Everybody is so kind, and I have had so many letters, and seen so many sympathising faces, and "dear Lizzy" sounds so sweet to my insatiable ears; and yet--and yet--I would rather die than live through the forty-eight hours again which began on Monday morning. Somebody must have prayed for me, or I never should have got through. An extract from another of her letters, dated Portland, September 11th, belongs here: I must tell you, too, about Dr. Warren (the old one). When mother asked him concerning the amount he was to receive from her for his professional services, he smiled and said: "I shall not charge _you_ much, and as for Miss Payson, when she is married and rich, she may pay me and welcome--but not till then." I told him I never expected to be rich, and he replied, with what mother thought an air of contentment that said he knew all about it: "Well, we can be happy without riches," and such a good, happy smile shone all over his face as I have seldom been so fortunate as to see in an old man. As for the young one, he seemed as glad when I was dressed on Sunday with a clean frock and no shawl, as if it were really a matter of consequence to him to see his patients looking comfortable and well. I am getting along finely; there is only one spot on my shoulder which is troublesome, and they ordered me on a very strict diet for that--so I am half-starved this blessed minute. We went to Newburyport on Monday, and stayed there with Anna till yesterday afternoon. I think the motion of the cars hurt me somewhat, but by the time you get here I do hope I shall be quite well. _Evening_.-- ... I have had such happy thoughts and prayers to-night! You should certainly have knelt with me in my little room, where, for the first time a year ago this evening, I asked God to bless _us_; and you too, perhaps, then began first to pray for me. Oh, what a wonderful time it was!... I hope you have prayed for me to-day--I don't mean as you always do, but with new prayers wherewith to begin the new year. God bless you and love you! But this period was also one of large mental growth. It was marked especially by two events that had a shaping influence upon both her intellectual and religious character. One was the study of German. She was acquainted already with French and Italian; she now devoted her leisure hours to the language and works of Schiller and Goethe. These opened to her a new world of thought and beauty. Her correspondence contains frequent allusions to the progress of her German reading. Here is one in a letter to her cousin: I have read George Herbert a good deal this winter. I have also read several of Schiller's plays--William Tell and Don Carlos among the rest--and got a great deal more excited over them than I have over anything for a long while. George has a large German library, but I don't suppose I shall be much the wiser for it, unless I turn to studying theology. Did you read in Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, the "Bekenntnisse einer schönen Seele"? I do think it did my soul good when I read it last July. The account she gives of her religious history reminded me of mine in some points very strongly. The other incident was her introduction to the writings of Fenelon--an author whom, in later years, she came to regard as an oracle of spiritual wisdom. In the letter just quoted, she writes: "I am reading Fenelon's 'Maximes des Saints,' and many of his ideas please me exceedingly. Some of his 'Lettres Spirituelles' are delicious--so heavenly, so child-like in their spirit." [9] [1] _Jan, 1, 1845._--I used never to confide my religious feelings to any one in the world. I went on my toilsome, comfortless way quite by myself. But when at the end of this long, gloomy way, I saw and knew and rejoiced in Christ, then I forgot myself and my pride and my reserve, and was glad if a little child would hear me say "I love Him!"--glad if the most ignorant, the most hitherto despised, would speak of Him. [2] Later she writes: "I have had a long talk with sister to-day about Leighton. She claims him, as all the Perfectionists do, as one of their number; though, by the way, in the common acceptation of the word, she is not a Perfectionist herself, but only on the boundary-line of the enchanted ground. I am completely puzzled when I think on such subjects. I doubt if sister is right, yet know not where she is wrong. She does not obtrude her peculiar opinions on any one, and I began the conversation this afternoon myself." [3] "Oh, what a blessed thing it is to lose one's will! Since I have lost my will I have found happiness. There can be no such thing as disappointment to me, for I have no desires but that God's will may be accomplished." "Christians might avoid much trouble if they would only believe what they profess, viz.: that God is able to make them happy without anything but Himself. They imagine that if such a dear friend were to die, or such and such blessings to be removed, they should be miserable; whereas God can make them a thousand times happier without them. To mention my own case: God has been depriving me of one blessing after another; but as every one was removed, He has come in and filled up its place; and now, when I am a cripple and not able to move, I am happier than ever I was in my life before or ever expected to be; and if I had believed this twenty years ago, I might have been spared much anxiety." [4] The Right Rev. John Johns, Bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church of Virginia, was a man of apostolic simplicity and zeal, and universally beloved. An almost ideal friendship existed between him and Dr. Charles Hodge, of Princeton. _Dear, blessed, old John,_ Dr. H. called him when he was seventy-nine years old. See Life of Dr. Hodge, pp. 564-569. Bishop Johns died in 1876. [5] Das Blümlein Wunderschön. _Lied des gefangenen Grafen_, is the title of the poem. Goethe's Samtliche Werke. Vol. I., p. 151. [6] See appendix A, p. 533. [7] The horrible operation is over, Heaven be praised! It was far more horrible than we had anticipated. They were _an hour and a quarter_, before all was done. I was very brave at first and wouldn't leave the room, but I found myself so faint that I feared falling and had to go. Lizzy behaved like a heroine indeed, so that even the doctors admired her fortitude. She never spoke, but was deadly faint, so that they were obliged to lay her down that the dreadful wound might bleed; then there was an artery to be taken up and tied; then six stitches to be taken with a great big needle. Most providentially dear Julia Willis came in about ten minutes before the doctors and though she was greatly distressed, she never faints, and staid till Lizzy was laid in bed.... She was just like a marble statue, but even more beautiful, while the blood stained her shoulders and bosom. You couldn't have looked on such suffering without fainting, man that you are.--_From a letter of Mrs. Payson, dated Boston, Sept. 2, 1844._ [8] Her friend, Miss Prentiss, had been married, in the previous autumn, to the Rev. Jonathan F. Stearns, of Newburyport. [9] "Explication des Maximes des Saints sur la Vie Intérieure" is the full title of the famous little work first named. It appeared in January, 1697. If measured by the storm it raised in France and at Rome, or by the attention it attracted throughout Europe, its publication may be said to have been one of the most important theological events of that day. The eloquence of Bossuet and the power of Louis XIV. were together exerted to the utmost in order to brand its illustrious author as a heretical Quietist; and, through their almost frantic efforts, it was at last condemned in a papal brief. But, for all that, the little work is full of the noblest Christian sentiments. It pushes the doctrine of pure love, perhaps, to a perilous extreme, but still an extreme that leans to the side of the highest virtue. After its condemnation the Pope, Innocent XII., wrote to the French prelates, who had been most prominent in denouncing Fenelon: _Peccavit excessu amoris divini, sed vos peccastis defectu amoris proximi_--i.e., "He has erred by too much love of God, but ye have erred by too little love of your neighbor." CHAPTER IV. THE YOUNG WIFE AND MOTHER. 1845-1850. I. Marriage and Settlement in New Bedford. Reminiscences. Letters. Birth of her First Child. Death of her Sister-in-Law. Letters. On the 16th of April, 1845, Miss Payson was married to the Rev. George Lewis Prentiss, then just ordained as pastor of the South Trinitarian church in New Bedford, Mass. Here she passed the next five and a half years; years rendered memorable by precious friendships formed in them, by the birth of two of her children, by the death of her mother, and by other deep joys and sorrows. New Bedford was then known, the world over, as the most important centre of the whale-fishery. In quest of the leviathans of the deep its ships traversed all seas, from the tumbling icebergs of the Arctic Ocean to the Southern Pacific. But it was also known nearer home for the fine social qualities of its people. Many of the original settlers of the town were Quakers, and its character had been largely shaped by their friendly influence. Husbands and wives, whether young or old, called each other everywhere by their Christian names, and a charming simplicity marked the daily intercourse of life. Into this attractive society Mrs. Prentiss was at once welcomed. The Arnold family in particular--a family representing alike the friendly spirit, the refinement and taste, the wealth, and the generous hospitality of the place--here deserve mention. Their kindness was unwearied; flowers and fruit came often from their splendid garden and greenhouses; and, in various other ways, they contributed from the moment of her coming to render New Bedford a pleasant home to her. But it was in her husband's parish that she found her chief interest and joy. His people at first welcomed her in the warmest manner on her sainted father's account, but they soon learned to love her for her own sake. She early began to manifest among them that wonderful sympathy, which made her presence like sunshine in sick rooms and in the house of mourning, and, in later years, endeared her through her writings to so many hearts. While her natural shyness and reserve caused her to shrink from everything like publicity, and even from that leadership in the more private activities of the church which properly belonged to her sex and station, any kind of trouble instantly aroused and called into play all her energies. The sickness and death of little children wrought upon her with singular power; and, in ministering aid and comfort to bereaved mothers, she seemed like one specially anointed of the Lord for this gentle office. Now, after the lapse of more than a third of a century, there are those in New Bedford and its vicinity who bless her memory, as they recall scenes of sharp affliction cheered by her presence and her loving sympathy. The following reminiscences by one of her New Bedford friends, written not long after her death, belong here: Oh, that I had the pen of a ready writer! How gladly would I depict her just as she came to New Bedford, a youthful bride and our pastor's wife, more than a third of a century ago! My remembrances of her are still fresh and delightful; but they have been for so many years _silent_ memories that I feel quite unable fully to express them. And yet I will try to give you a few simple details. Several things strike me as I recall her in those days. Our early experiences in the struggle of life had been somewhat similar and this drew us near to each other. She was naturally very shy and in the presence of strangers, or of uncongenial persons, her reserve was almost painful; but with her friends--especially those of her own sex--all this vanished and she was full of animated talk. Her conversation abounded in bright, pointed sayings, in fine little touches of humor, in amusing anecdotes and incidents of her own experience, which she related with astonishing ease and fluency, sometimes also in downright girlish fun and drollery; and all was rendered doubly attractive by her low, sweet woman's voice and her merry, fitful laugh. Yet these things were but the sparkle of a very deep and serious nature. Even then her religious character was to me wonderful. She seemed always to know just what was prompting her, whether, nature or grace; and her perception of the workings of the two principles was like an instinct. While I, though cherishing a Christian hope, was still struggling in bondage under the law, she appeared to enjoy to the full the glorious liberty of the children of God. And when I would say to her that I was constantly doing that which I ought not and leaving undone so much that I ought to do, she would try to comfort me and to encourage me to exercise more faith by responding, "Oh, you don't know what a great sinner I am; but Christ's love is greater still." There was a helpful, assuring, sunshiny influence about her piety which I have rarely seen or felt in any other human being. And almost daily, during all the years of separation, I have been conscious of this influence in my own life. I remember her as very retiring in company, even among our own people. But if there were children present, she would gather them about her and hold them spell-bound by her talk. Oh, she was a marvellous storyteller! How often have I seen her in the midst of a little group, who, all eyes and ears, gazed into her face and eagerly swallowed every word, while she, intent on amusing them, seemed quite unconscious that anybody else was in the room. Mr. H---- used to say, "How I envy those children and wish I were one of them!" Mrs. Prentiss received much attention from persons outside of our congregation, and who, from their position and wealth, were pretty exclusive in their habits. But they could not resist the attraction of her rare gifts and accomplishments. New Bedford at that time, as you know, had a good deal of intellectual and social culture. This was particularly the case among the Unitarians, whose minister, when you came to us, was that excellent and very superior man, the Rev. Ephraim Peabody, D.D., afterwards of King's Chapel in Boston. One of the leading families of his flock was the "Arnold family," whose garden and grounds were then among the finest in the State and at whose house such men as Richard H. Dana, the poet, the late Professor Agassiz, and others eminent for their literary and scientific attainments, were often to be seen. This whole family were warmly attached to Mrs. Prentiss, and after you left New Bedford, often referred to their acquaintance with her in the most affectionate manner. And I believe Mr. Arnold and his daughter used to visit you in New York. The father, mother, daughter, and aunt are all gone. And what a change have all these vanished years wrought in the South Trinitarian society! I can think of only six families then worshipping there, that are worshipping there now. But so long as a single one remains, the memory of Mrs. Prentiss will still be precious in the old church. The story of the New Bedford years may be told, with slight additions here and there, by Mrs. Prentiss' own pen. Most of her letters to her own family are lost; but the letters to her husband, when occasionally separated from her, and others to old friends, have been preserved and afford an almost continuous narrative of this period. A few extracts from some of those written in 1845, will show in what temper of mind she entered upon her new life. The first is dated Portland, January both, just after Mr. Prentiss received the call to New Bedford: I have wished all along, beyond anything else, not so much that we might have a pleasant home, pleasant scenery and circumstances, good society and the like, as that we might have good, holy influences about us, and God's grace and love within us. And for you, dear George, I did not so much desire the intellectual and other attractions, about which we have talked sometimes, as a dwelling-place among those whom you might train heavenward or who would not be a hindrance in your journey thither. Through this whole affair I know I have thought infinitely more of you than of myself. And if you are happy at the North Pole shan't I be happy there too? I shall be heartily thankful to see you a pastor with a people to love you. Only I shall be jealous of them. To her friend, Miss Thurston, she writes from New Bedford, April 28th: I thank you with all my heart for your letter and for the very pretty gift, which I suppose to be the work of your own hands. I can not tell you how inexpressibly dear to me are all the expressions of affection I have received and am receiving from old friends. We have been here ten days, and very happy days they have been to me, notwithstanding I have had to see so many strange faces and to talk to so many new people. And both my sister and Anna tell me that the first months of married life are succeeded by far happier ones still; so I shall go on my way rejoicing. As to what your brother says about disappointment, nobody believes his doctrine better than I do; but life is as full of blessings as it is of disappointments, I conceive, and if we only know how, we may often, out of mere _will_, get the former instead of the latter. I have had some experience of the "conflict and dismay" of this present evil world; but then I have also had some of its smiles. Neither of these ever made me angry with this life, or in love with it. I believe I am pretty cool and philosophical, but it won't do for me at this early day to be boasting of what is in me. I shall have to wait till circumstances bring it out. I can only answer for the past and the present--the one having been blessed and gladdened and the other _being_ made happy and cheerful by lover and husband. I'll tell you truly, as I promised to do, if my heart sings another tune on the 17th of April, 1848. I only hope I shall enter soberly and thankfully on my new life, expecting sunshine and rain, drought and plenty, heat and cold--and adapting myself to alternations contentedly--but who knows? We are boarding at a hotel, which is not over pleasant. However, we have two good rooms and have home things about us. I like to sit at work while Mr. Prentiss writes his sermons and he likes to have me--so, for the present, a study can be dispensed with. In a few weeks we hope to get to housekeeping. I like New Bedford very much. To her husband she writes, June 18: I can not help writing you again, though I did send you a letter last night. It is a very pleasant morning, and I think of you all the time and love you with the happiest tears in my eyes. I have just been making some nice crispy gingerbread to send Mrs. H----, as she has no appetite, and I thought anything from home would taste good to her. I hope this will please you. Mother called with me to see her yesterday. She looks very ill. I have no idea she will ever get well. We had a nice time at the garden last night. Mr. and Miss Arnold came out and walked with us nearly an hour, though tea was waiting for them, and Miss A. was very particularly attentive to me (for your dear sake!), and gave me flowers, beautiful ones, and spoke with much interest of your sermons. Oh, I am ready to jump for joy, when I think of seeing you home again. Do please be glad as I am. I suppose your mother wants you too; but then she can't love you as I do--I'm sure she can't--with all the children among whom she has to divide her heart. Give my best love to her and Abby. How I wish I were in Portland, helping you pack your books. But I can't write any more as we are going to Mrs. Gibbs' to tea. Mother is reading Hamlet in her room. She is enjoying herself very much. Mrs. Gibbs, whose name occurs in this letter, was one of those inestimable friends, who fulfill the office of mother, as it were, to the young minister's wife. She was tenderly attached to Mrs. Prentiss and her loving-kindness, which was new every morning and fresh every evening, ceased only with her life. Her husband, the late Capt. Robert Gibbs, was like her in unwearied devotion to both the pastor and the pastor's wife. The summer was passed in getting settled in her new home, and receiving visits from old friends. Early in the autumn she spent several weeks in Portland. After her return, Nov. 2, she writes to Miss Thurston: I was in Portland after you had left, and got quite rested and recruited after my summer's fatigue, so that I came home with health and strength, if not to lay my hand to the plough, to apply it to the broom-handle and other articles of domestic warfare. Just what I expected would befall me has happened. I have got immersed in the whirlpool of petty cares and concerns which swallow up so many other and higher interests, and talk as anxiously about good "help" and bad, as the rest of 'em do. I sometimes feel really ashamed of myself to see how virtuously I fancy I am spending my time, if in the kitchen, and how it seems to be wasted if I venture to take up a book. I take it that wives who have no love and enthusiasm for their husbands are more to be pitied than blamed if they settle down into mere cooks and good managers.... We have had right pleasant times since coming home; never pleasanter than when, for a day or two, I was without "help," and my husband ground coffee and drew water for me, and thought everything I made tasted good. One of the deacons of our church--a very old man--prays for me once a week at meeting, especially that my husband and I may be "mutual comforts and enjoyments of each other," which makes us laugh a little in our sleeves, even while we say Amen in our hearts. We have been reading aloud Mary Howitt's "Author's Daughter," which is a very good story indeed--don't ask me if I have read anything else. My mind has become a complete mummy, and therefore incapable of either receiving or originating a new idea. I did wade through a sea of words, and nonsense on my way home in the shape of two works of Prof. Wilson--"The Foresters" and "Margaret Lindsay"--which I fancy he wrote before he was out of his mother's arms or soon after leaving them. The girls in Portland are marrying off like all possessed. It reminds me of a shovel full of popcorn, which the more you watch it the more it won't pop, till at last it all goes racketing off at once, pop, pop, pop; without your having time to say Jack Robinson between. My position as wife of a minister secures for me many affectionate attentions, and opens to me many little channels of happiness, which conspire to make me feel contented and at home here. I do not know how a stranger would find New Bedford people, but I am inclined to think society is hard to get into, though its heart is warm when you once do get in. We are very pleasantly situated, and our married life has been abundantly blessed. I doubt if we could fail to be contented anywhere if we had each other to love and care for. We went to hear Templeton sing last night. I was perfectly charmed with his hunting song and with some others, and better judges than I were equally delighted. I had a letter from Abby last week. She is in Vicksburg and in fine spirits, and fast returning health. Her letters during 1846 glow with the sunshine of domestic peace and joy. In its earlier months her health was unusually good and she depicts her happiness as something "wonderful." All the day long her heart, she says, was "running over" with a love and delight she could not begin to express. But her letters also show that already she was having foretastes of that baptism of suffering, which was to fit her for doing her Master's work. In January she revisited Portland, where she had the pleasure of meeting Prof, and Mrs. Hopkins with their little boy, and of passing several weeks in the society of her own and her husband's family. But Portland had now lost for her much of its attraction. "I've seen all the folks," she wrote, "and we've said about all we've got to say to each other, and though I love to be at home, of course, it is not the home it used to be before you had made such another dear, dear home for me. Oh, do you miss me? do you feel a _little bit_ sorry you let me leave you? Do say, yes.... But I can't write, I am so happy! I am so glad I am going home!" Early in December her first child was born. Writing a few weeks later to Mrs. Stearns, she thus refers to this event: What a world of new sensations and emotions come with the first child! I was quite unprepared for the rush of strange feelings--still more so for the saddening and chastening effect. Why should the world seem more than ever empty when one has just gained the treasure of a living and darling child? The saddening effect in her own case was owing in part, no doubt, to anxiety occasioned by the fatal illness of her husband's eldest sister, to whom she was tenderly attached. The following letter was written under the pressure of this anxiety: _To Miss Thurston, New Bedford, Jan. 31, 1847_ I dare say the idea of _Lizzy Payson_ with a _baby_ seems quite funny to you, as it does to many of the Portland girls; but I assure you it doesn't seem in the least funny to me, but as natural as life and I may add, as wonderful, almost. She is a nice little plump creature, with a fine head of dark hair which I take some comfort in brushing round a quill to make it curl, and a pair of intelligent eyes, either black or blue, nobody knows which. I find the care of her very wearing, and have cried ever so many times from fatigue and anxiety, but now I am getting a little better and she pays me for all I do. She is a sweet, good little thing, her chief fault being a tendency to dissipation and sitting up late o' nights. The ladies of our church have made her a beautiful little wardrobe, fortunately for me. I had a lot of company all summer; my sister, her husband and boy, Mr. Stearns and Anna, Mother Prentiss, Julia Willis, etc. I had also my last visit from Abby, whom I little thought then I should never see again. Our happiness in our little one has been checked by our constant anxiety with regard to Abby's health, and it is very hard now for me to give up one who has become in every sense a sister, and not even to have the privilege of bidding her farewell. George went down about a week since and will remain till all is over. I do not even know that while I write she is yet living. She had only one wish remaining and that was to see George, and she was quite herself the day of his arrival, as also the day following, and able to say all she desired. Since then she has been rather unconscious of what was passing, and I fervently trust that by this time her sufferings are over and that she is where she longed and prayed to be. [1] You can have no idea how alike are the emotions occasioned by a birth and a death in the family. They seem equally solemn to me and I am full of wonder at the mysterious new world into which I have been thrown. I used to think that the change I saw in young, giddy girls when they became mothers, was owing to suffering and care wearing upon the spirits, but I see now that its true source lies far deeper. My brother H. has been married a couple of months, so I have one sister more. I shall be glad when they are all married. Some sisters seem to feel that their brothers are lost to them on their marriage, but if I may judge by my husband, there is fully as much gain as loss. I am sure no son or brother could be more devoted to mother and sisters than he is. Of course the baby is his perfect comfort and delight; but I need not enlarge on this point, as I suppose you have seen papas with their first babies. A great sucking of a very small thumb admonishes me that the little lady in the crib meditates crying for supper, so I must hurry off my letter. Abby Lewis Prentiss died on Saturday, January 30, 1847, at the age of thirty-two. Long and wearisome sufferings, such as usually attend pulmonary disease, preceded the final struggle. It was toward the close of a stormy winter's day, that she gently fell asleep. A little while before she had imagined herself in a "very beautiful region" which her tongue in vain attempted to describe, surrounded by those she loved. Among her last half-conscious utterances was the name of her brother Seargent. The next morning witnessed a scene of such wondrous splendor and loveliness as made the presence of Death seem almost incredible. The snow-fall and mist and gloom had ceased; and as the sun rose, clear and resplendent, every visible object--the earth, trees, houses--shone as if enameled with gold and pearls and precious stones. It was the Lord's day; and well did the aspect of nature symbolise the glory of Him, who is the Resurrection and the Life. On receiving the news of his sister's death, her brother Seargent, writing to his mother, thus depicted her character: My heart bleeds to the core, as I sit down to mingle my tears with yours, my dear, beloved mother. I can not realise that it is all over; that I shall never again, in this world, see our dear, dear Abby. Gladly would I have given my own life to preserve hers. But we have consolation, even in our extreme grief; for she was so good that we know she is now in heaven, and freed from all care, unless it be that her affectionate heart is still troubled for us, whom she loved so well. We can dwell with satisfaction, after we have overcome the first sharpness of our grief, upon her angel-like qualities, which made her, long before she died, fit for the heaven where she now is.... You have lost the purest, noblest, and best of daughters; I, a sister, who never to my knowledge did a selfish act or uttered a selfish thought. With the exception of yourself, dear mother, she was, of all our family circle, the best prepared to enter her Father's house. Some extracts from letters written at this time, will show the tenderness of Mrs. Prentiss' sisterly love and sympathy, and give a glimpse also of her thoughts and occupations as a young mother. _To Mrs. Stearns, New Bedford, Feb. 17, 1847_ If I loved you less, my dear Anna, I could write you twenty letters where I now can hardly get courage to undertake one. How very dearly I do love you I never knew, till it rushed upon my mind that we might sometime lose you as we have lost dear Abby. How mysteriously your and Mary's and my baby are given us just at this very time, when our hearts are so sore that we are almost afraid to expose them to new sufferings by taking in new objects of affection! But it does seem to me a great mercy that, trying as it is in many respects, these births and this death come almost hand in hand. Surely we three young mothers have learned lessons of life that must influence us forever in relation to these little ones! I have been like one in the midst of a great cloud, since the birth of our baby, entirely unconscious how much I love her; but I am just beginning to take comfort in and feel sensible affection for her. I long to show the dear little good creature to you. But I can hardly give up my long-cherished plans and hopes in regard to Abby's seeing and loving our first child. Almost as much as I depended on the sympathy and affection of my own mother in relation to this baby, I was depending on Abby's. But I rejoice that she is where she is, and would not have her back again in this world of sin and conflict and labor, for a thousand times the comfort her presence could give. But you don't know how I dread going home next summer and not finding her there! It was a great mercy that you could go down again, dear Anna. And indeed there are manifold mercies in this affliction--how many we may never know, till we get home to heaven ourselves and find, perhaps, that this was one of the invisible powers that helped us on our way thither. I had a sweet little note from your mother to-day. I would give anything if I could go right home, and make her adopt me as her daughter by a new adoption, and be a real blessing and comfort to her in this lonely, dark time. Eddy Hopkins calls my baby _his_. How children want to use the possessive case in regard to every object of interest! I find the blanket that Mrs. Gibbs knit for me so infinitely preferable, from its elasticity, to common flannel, that I could not help knitting one for you. If I say that I have thought as many affectionate thoughts to you, while knitting it, as it contains stitches, I fancy I speak nothing but truth and soberness--for I love you now with the love I have returned on my heart from Abby, who no longer is in want of earthly friends. Dear little baby thought I was knitting for her special pleasure, for her bright eyes would always follow the needles as she lay upon my lap, and she would smile now and then as if thanking me for my trouble. The ladies have given her an elegant cloak, and Miss Arnold has just sent her a little white satin bonnet that was made in England, and is quite unlike anything I ever saw. Only to think, I walked down to church last Sunday and heard George preach once more! _March 3d._--We could with difficulty, and by taking turns, get through reading your letter--not only because you so accurately describe our own feelings in regard to dear Abby, but because we feel so keenly for you. I often detect myself thinking, "Now I will sit down and write Abby a nice long letter"; or imagining how she will act when we go home with our baby; and as you say, I dream about her almost every night. I used always to dream of her as suffering and dying, but now I see her just as she was when well, and hear her advising this and suggesting that, just as I did when she was here last summer. Life seems so different now from what it did! It seems to me that my _youth_ has been touched by Abby's death, and that I can never be so cheerful and light-hearted as I have been. But, dear Anna, though I doubt not this is still more the case with you, and that you see far deeper into the realities of life than I do, we have both the consolations that are to be found in Christ--and these will remain to us when the buoyancy and the youthful spirit have gone from our hearts. _March 12th._ ... I had been reading a marriage sermon to George from "Martyria," and we were having a nice _conjugal_ talk just as your little stranger was coming into the world. G. is so hurried and driven that he can not get a moment in which to write. He has a funeral this afternoon, that of Mrs. H., a lady whom he has visited for two years, and a part, if not all, of that time once a week. I have made several calls since I wrote you last--two of them to see babies, one of whom took the shine quite off of mine with his great blue-black eyes and eyelashes that lay halfway down his cheeks. The latter part of April she visited Portland; while there she wrote to her husband, April 27: Just as I had the baby to sleep and this letter dated, I was called down to see Dr. and Mrs. Dwight and their little Willie. The baby woke before they had finished their call, and behaved as prettily and looked as bright and lovely as heart could wish. Dr. Dwight held her a long time and kissed her heartily. [2] I got your letter soon after dinner, and from the haste and the _je ne sais quoi_ with which it was written, I feared you were not well. Alas, I am full of love and fear. How came you to _walk_ to Dartmouth to preach? Wasn't it by far too long a walk to take in one day? I heard Dr. Carruthers on Sunday afternoon. He made the finest allusion to my father I ever heard and mother thought of it as I did. To-day I have had a good many callers--among the rest Deacon Lincoln. [3] When he saw the baby he said, "Oh, what a homely creature. Do tell if the New Bedford babies are so ugly?" Mrs. S., thinking him in earnest, rose up in high dudgeon and said, "Why, we think her beautiful, Deacon Lincoln." "Well, I don't wonder," said he. I expect she will get measles and everything else, for _lots_ of children come to see her and eat her up. Mother, baby and I spend to-morrow at your mother's. Do up a lot of sleeping and grow fat, pray do! And oh, love me and think I am a darling little wife, and write me loving words in your next letter. _Wednesday_.--We have a fine day for going up to your mother's. And the baby is bright as a button and full of fun. Aren't you glad? _To Mrs. Stearns, Portland, May 22, 1847_ We have just been having a little quiet Saturday evening talk about dear Abby, as we sat here before the lighting of the lamps, and I dare say I was not the only one who wished you here too. I came up here from my mother's on Monday morning and have had a delightful week. I can not begin to tell you how glad I am that we are going to make you a little visit on our way home. I do so want to see you and your children, and show you our darling little baby that I can hardly wait till the time comes. I suppose you have got your little folks off to bed, and so if you will take a peep into the parlor here you will see how we are all occupied--mother in her rocking-chair, with her "specs" on, studying my Dewees on Children; George toe to toe with her, reading some old German book, and Lina [4] curled upon the sofa, asleep I fancy, while I sit in the corner and write you from dear Abby's desk with her pen. Mercy and Sophia watch over the cradle in the dining-room, where mother's fifteenth grandchild reposes, unconscious of the honor of sleeping where honorables, reverends, and reverendesses have slumbered before her. How strange it seems that _my_ baby is one of this family--bone of their bone, and flesh of their flesh! I need not say how I miss dear Abby, for you will see at once that that which was months ago a reality to you, has just become such to me. It pains me to my heart's core to hear how she suffered. Dear, dear Abby! how I did love her, and how thankful I am for her example to imitate and her excellencies to rejoice in! Your uncle James Lewis [5] spent last night here, and this morning he prayed a delightful prayer, which really softened my whole soul. I do not know when I have had my own wants so fervently expressed, or been more edified at family worship, and his allusion to Abby was very touching. The following extracts from letters written to her husband, while he was absent in Maine, may be thought by some to go a little too much into the trifling details of daily life and feeling, but do not such details after all form no small part of the moral warp and woof of human experience? _To her husband New Bedford, August 27th_. I heard this morning that old Mrs. Kendrick was threatened with typhus fever, and went down soon after breakfast to see how she did, and, as I found Mrs. Henrietta had watched with her and was looking all worn out, I begged her to let me have her baby this afternoon, that she might have a chance to rest; so, after dinner, Sophia went down and got her. At first she set up a lamentable scream, but we huddled on her cloak and put her with our baby into the carriage and gave them a ride. She is a _proper_ heavy baby, and my legs ache well with trotting round the streets after the carriage. Think of me as often as you can and pray for me, and I will think of you and pray for you all the time. _Tuesday Evening_.--You see I am writing you a sort of little journal, as you say you like to know all I do while you are away. Our sweet baby makes your absence far less intolerable than it used to be before she came to comfort me.... I have felt all soul and as if I had no body, ever since your precious letter came this morning. I have so pleased myself with imagining how funny and nice it would be if I could creep in unperceived by you, and hear your oration! I long to know how you got through, and what Mr. Stearns and Mr. Smith thought of it. I always pray for you more when you are away than I do when you are at home, because I know you are interrupted and hindered about your devotions more or less when journeying. I have had callers a great part of to-day, among them Mrs. Leonard, Mrs. Gen. Thompson, Mrs. Randall, and Capt. Clark. [6] Capt. C. asked for nobody but the baby. The little creature almost sprang into his arms. He was much gratified and held her a long while, kissing and caressing her. I think it was pretty work for you to go to reading your oration to your mother and old Mrs. Coe, when you hadn't read it to me. I felt a terrible pang of jealousy when I came to that in your letter. I am going now to call on Miss Arnold. _Friday, Sept, 3d._--Yesterday forenoon I was _perfectly wretched_. It came over me, as things will in spite of us, "Suppose he didn't get safely to Brunswick!" and for several hours I could not shake it off. It had all the power of reality, and made me so faint that I could do nothing and fairly had to go to bed. I suppose it was very silly, and if I had not tried in every way to rise above it might have been even wicked, but it frightened me to find how much I am under the power of mere feeling and fancy. But do not laugh at me. Sometimes I say to myself, "What MADNESS to love any human being so intensely! What would become of you if he were snatched from you?" and then I think that though God justly denies us comfort and support for the future, and bids us lean upon Him _now_ and trust Him for the rest, He can give us strength for the endurance of His most terrible chastisements when their hour comes. _Saturday._--I am a mere baby when I think of your getting sick in this time of almost universal sickness and sorrow and death.... Yesterday Mrs. Gibbs and Mrs. Leonard took me, with Sophia and baby, to the cemetery, and on a long ride of three hours--all of which was delightful. In the afternoon baby had an ill-turn which alarmed me excessively, because so many children are sick, but I gave her medicine and think she will soon be well again. Mrs. Gibbs and Mrs. Randall and others sent me yesterday a dozen large peaches, two melons, a lot of shell-beans and tomatoes, a dish of blackberries and some fried corn-cakes--not an atom of the whole of which shall I touch, taste, handle, or smell; so you need not fear my killing myself. Mrs. Capt. Delano, where the Rev. Mr. Brock from England stayed, has just lost two children after a few days' illness. They were buried in one coffin. Old Gideon Howland, the richest man here, is also dead. The papers are full of deaths. Our dear baby is nine months old to-day, and may God, if He _sees best_, spare her to us as many more; and if He does not, I feel as if I could give her up to Him--but we don't know what we can do till the time comes. I hear her sweet little voice down stairs and it sounds happy, so I guess she feels pretty comfortable. _Sabbath Evening._--The baby is better, and I dare say it is my imagination that says she looks pale and puny. She is now asleep in your study, where too I am sitting in your chair. I came down as soon as I could this morning, and have stayed here all day. It is so quiet and pleasant among your books and papers, and it was so dull up-stairs! I thought before your letter came, while standing over the green, grassy graves of Lizzie Read, Mary Rodman, and Mrs. Cadwell, [7] how I should love to have dear Abby in such a green, sweet spot, where we could sometimes go together to talk of her. I must own I should like to be buried under grass and trees, rather than cold stone and heavy marble. Should not you? * * * * * II. Birth of a Son. Death of her Mother. Her Grief. Letters. Eddy's Illness and her own Cares. A Family Gathering at Newburyport. Extracts from Eddy's Journal. Passing over another year, which was marked by no incidents requiring special mention, we come again to a birth and a death in close conjunction. On the 22d of October, 1848, her second child, Edward Payson, was born. On the 17th of November, her mother died. Of the life of this child she herself has left a minute record, portions of which will be given later. In a letter to his sister, dated New Bedford, November 21st, her husband thus refers to her mother's departure: We have just received the sad intelligence of Mother Payson's death. She passed away very peacefully, as if going to sleep, at half-past five on Friday afternoon. Dear Lizzy was at first quite overwhelmed, as I knew she would be--for her attachment to her mother was uncommonly tender and devoted; but she is now perfectly tranquil and will soon, I trust, be able to think of her irreparable loss with a melancholy pleasure even. There is much in the case that is peculiarly fitted to produce a cheerful resignation. Mrs. Payson has been a severe sufferer; and since the breaking up of her home in Portland, she has felt, I think, an increasing detachment from the world. I was exceedingly struck with this during her visit here last winter. She seemed to me to be fast ripening for heaven. It is such a comfort to us that she was able to _name_ our little boy! [8] Mrs. Payson died in the 65th year of her age. She was a woman of most attractive and admirable qualities, full of cheerful life and energy, and a whole-hearted disciple of Jesus. A few extracts from Mrs. Prentiss' letters will show how deeply she felt her loss. To her youngest brother she writes: How gladly I would go, if I could, to see you all, and talk over with you the thousand things that are filling our minds and hearts! We can not drain this bitter cup at one draught and then go on our way as though it had never been. The loss of a mother is never made up or atoned for; and ours was such a mother; so peculiar in her devotion and tenderness and sympathy! I can not mourn that her sorrowful pilgrimage is over, can not think for a moment of wishing she were still on earth, weeping and praying and suffering--but for myself and for you and for all I mourn with hourly tears. She has sacrificed herself for us. To her friend, Miss Lord, she writes, Jan. 31: It seems to me that every day and hour I miss my dear mother more and more, and I feel more and more painfully how much she suffered during her last years and months. Dear Louise, I thought I knew that she could not live long, but I never realised it, and even now I keep trying to hope that she has not really gone. Just in this very spot where I now sit writing, my dear mother's great easy-chair used to sit, and here, only a year ago, she was praying for and loving me. O, if I had only _known_ she was dying then, and could have talked with her about heaven till it had grown to seeming like a home to which she was going, and whither I should follow her sooner or later! But it is all over and I would not have her here again, if the shadow of a wish could restore her to us. I only earnestly long to be fitting, day by day, to meet her again in heaven. God has mingled many great mercies with this affliction, and I do not know that I ever in my life so felt the delight of praying to and thanking Him. When I begin to pray I have so much to thank Him for, that I hardly know how to stop. I have always thought I would not for the universe be left unchastised--and now I feel the smart, I still can say so. Lotty's visit was a great comfort and service to me, but I was very selfish in talking to her so much about my own loss, while she was so great a sufferer under hers. Since she left my little boy has been worse than ever and pined away last week very rapidly. You can form no idea, by any description of his sufferings, of what the dear little creature has undergone since his birth. I feel a perfect longing to see Portland and mother's many dear friends there, especially your mother and a few like her. I am very tired as I have written a great part of this with baby in my lap--so I can write no more. _To Mrs. Stearns, Feb. 17, 1849._ Dear little Eddy has found life altogether unkind thus far, and I have had many hours of heartache on his account but I hope he may weather the storm and come out safely yet. The doctor examined him all over yesterday, particularly his head, and said he could not make him out a _sick_ child, but that he thought his want of flesh owing partly to his sufferings but more to the great loss of sleep occasioned by his sufferings. Instead of sleeping twelve hours out of the twenty-four, he sleeps but about seven and that by means of laudanum. Isn't it a mercy that I have been able to bear so well the fatigue and care and anxiety of these four hard months? I feel that I have nothing to complain of, and a _great deal_ to be thankful for. On the whole, notwithstanding my grief about my dear mother's loss, and my perplexity and distress about baby, I have had as much real happiness this winter as it is possible for one to glean in such unfavorable circumstances. _By far_ the greatest trial I have to contend with, is that of losing all power to control my time. A little room all of my own, and a regular hour, morning and night, all of my own would enable me, I think, to say, "_Now_ let life do its worst!" I am no stranger, I assure you, to the misgivings you describe in your last letter; I think them the result of the _wish_ without the _will_ to be holy. We pray for sanctification and then are afraid God will sanctify us by stripping us of our idols and feel distressed lest we can not have them and Him too. Reading the life of Madame Guyon gave me great pain and anxiety, I remember. I thought that if such spiritual darkness and trial as she was in for many years, was a necessary attendant on eminent piety, I could not summon courage to try to live such a life. Of all the anguish in the world there is nothing like this--the sense of God, without the sense of nearness to Him. I wish you would always "think aloud" when you write to me. I long to see you and the children and Mr. S., and so does George. Poor G. has had a very hard time of it ever since little Eddy's birth--so much care and worry and sleeplessness and labor, and how he is ever to get any rest I don't see. These are the times that try our souls. Let nobody condole with me about our _bodies_. It is the struggle to be patient and gentle and cheerful, when pressed down and worn upon and distracted, that costs us so much. I think when I have had all my children, if there is anything left of me, I shall write about the "Battle of Life" more eloquently than Dickens has done. I had a pleasant dream about mother and Abby the other night. They came together to see me and both seemed so well and so happy! I feel _perfectly happy_ now, that my dear mother has gone home. _To the Same, May 7, 1849._ I used to think it hard to be sick when I had dear mother hanging over me, doing all she could for my relief, but it is harder to be denied the poor comfort of being let alone and to have to drag one's self out of bed to take care of a baby. Mr. Stearns must know how to pity me, for my real sick headaches are very like his, and when racked with pain, dizzy, faint and exhausted with suffering, starvation and sleeplessness, it is terrible to have to walk the room with a crying child! I thought as I lay, worn out even to childishness, obliged for the baby's sake to have a bright sunlight streaming into the chamber, and to keep my eyes and ears on the alert for the same cause, how still we used to think the house must be left when my father had these headaches and how mother busied herself all day long about him, and how nice his little plate of hot steak used to look, as he sat up to eat it when the sickness had gone--and how I am suffering here all alone with nobody to give me even a look of encouragement. George was out of town on my sickest day. When he was at home he did everything in the world he could do to keep the children still, but here they must be and I must direct about every trifle and have them on the bed with me. I am getting desperate and feel disposed to run furiously in the traces till I drop dead on the way. Don't think me very wicked for saying so. I am jaded in soul and body and hardly know what I do want. If T. comes, George, at all events, will get relief and that will take a burden from my mind.... I want Lina to come this summer. There is a splendid swing on iron hooks under a tree, at the house we are going to move into. Won't that be nice for Jeanie and Mary's other children, if they come? I wish I had a little fortune, not for myself but to gather my "folks" together with. I shall not write you, my dear, another complaining letter; do excuse this. This letter shows the extremity of her trouble; but it is a picture, merely. The reality was something beyond description; only young mothers, who know it by experience, can understand its full meaning. Now, however, the storm for a while abated. The young relative, whose loving devotion had ministered to the comfort of her dying mother, came to her own relief and passed the next six months at New Bedford, helping take care of Eddy. In the course of the spring, too, his worst symptoms disappeared and hope took the place of fear and despondency. Referring to this period, his mother writes in Eddy's journal: On the Saturday succeeding his birth, we heard of my dear mother's serious illness, and, when he was about three weeks old, of her death. We were not surprised that his health suffered from the shock it thus received. He began at once to be affected with distressing colic, which gave him no rest day or night. His father used to call him a "little martyr," and such indeed he was for many long, tedious months. On the 16th of February, the doctor came and spent two hours in carefully investigating his case. He said it was a most trying condition of things, and he would gladly do something to relieve me, as he thought I had been through "enough to _kill ten men_." ... When Eddy was about eight months old, the doctor determined to discontinue the use of opiates. He was now a fine, healthy baby, bright-eyed and beautiful, and his colic was reducing itself to certain seasons on each day, instead of occupying the whole day and night as heretofore. We went through fire and water almost in trying to procure for him natural sleep. We swung him in blankets, wheeled him in little carts, walked the room with him by the hour, etc., etc., but it was wonderful how little sleep he obtained after all. He always looked wide awake and as if he did not _need_ sleep. His eyes had gradually become black, and when, after a day of fatigue and care with him he would at last close them, and we would flatter ourselves that now we too should snatch a little rest, we would see them shining upon us in the most amusing manner with an expression of content and even merriment. About this time he was baptized. I well remember how in his father's study, and before taking him to church, we gave him to God. He was very good while his papa was performing the ceremony, and looked so bright and so well, that many who had never seen him in his state of feebleness, found it hard to believe he had been aught save a vigorous and healthy child. My own health was now so broken down by long sleeplessness and fatigue, that it became necessary for me to leave home for a season. Dr. Mayhew promised to run in _every day_ to see that all went well with Eddy. His auntie was more than willing to take this care upon herself, and many of our neighbors offered to go often to see him, promising to do everything for his safety and comfort if I would only go. Not aware how miserable a state I was in, I resolved to be absent only one week, but was away for a whole month. A part of the month, with her husband and little daughter, she passed at Newburyport. His brother, S. S. Prentiss--whose name was then renowned all over the land as an orator and patriot--had come North for the last time, bringing his wife and children with him. It was a never-to-be-forgotten family gathering under the aged mother's roof. On my return (she continues in Eddy's journal) I found him looking finely. He had had an ill-turn owing to teething which they had kept from me, but had recovered from it and looked really beautiful. His father and uncle S. S. had been to see him once during our vacation, and we were now expecting them again with his Aunt Mary and her three children and his grandmother. We depended a great deal on seeing Eddy and Una together, as she was his _twin_ cousin and only a few hours older than he. But on the very evening of their arrival he was taken sick, and, although they all saw him that night looking like himself, by the next morning he had changed sadly. He grew ill and lost flesh and strength very fast, and no remedies seemed to have the least effect on his disorder, which was one induced by teething.... For myself I did not believe anything could now save my precious baby, and had given him to God so unreservedly, that I was not conscious of even a wish for his life.... When at last we saw evident tokens of returning health and strength, we felt that we received him a second time as from the grave. To me he never seemed the same child. My darling Eddy was lost to me and another--_and yet the same_--filled his place. I often said afterward that a little stranger was running about my nursery, not mine, but God's. Indeed, I can't describe the peculiar feelings with which I always regarded him after this sickness, nor how the thought constantly met me, "He is not mine; he is God's." Every night I used to thank Him for sparing him to me one day longer; thus truly enjoying him _a day at a time_. An extract from a letter to Miss Lord, written on the anniversary of her mother's death, will close the account of this year. If I were in Portland now, I should go right down to see you. I feel just like having a dear, old-fashioned talk with you. I was thinking how many times death had entered that old Richmond circle of which you and I once formed a part; Mrs. Persico, Susan, Charlotte Ford, Kate Kennedy, and now our own dearest Lotty, all gone. I can not tell you how much I miss and grieve for Lotty. [9] I can not be thankful enough that I went to Portland in the summer and had that last week with her, nor for her most precious visit here last winter. Whenever you think of any little thing she said, I want you to write it down for me, no matter whether it seems worth writing or not. I know by experience how precious such things are. This is a sad day to me. Indeed, all of this month has been so, recalling as it has done, all I was suffering at this time last year, and all my dear mother was then suffering. I can hardly realise that she has been in heaven a whole year, and that I feel her loss as vividly as if it were but yesterday--indeed, more so. I do not feel that this affliction has done me the good that it ought to have done and that I hoped it would. As far as I have any excuse it lies in my miserable health. I want so much to be more of a Christian; to live a life of constant devotion. Do tell me, when you write, if you have such troubled thoughts, and such difficulty in being steadfast and unmovable? Oh, how I sigh for the sort of life I led in Richmond, and which was more or less the life of the succeeding years at home! My husband tries to persuade me that the difference is more in my way of life, and that then being my time for contemplation, now is my time for action. But I know, myself, that I have lost ground. You must bear me in mind when you pray, my dear Louise, for I never had so much need of praying nor so little time or strength for it. * * * * * III. Further Extracts from Eddy's Journal. Ill-health. Visit to Newark. Death of her Brother-in-law, S. S. Prentiss. His Character. Removal to Newark. Letters. The record of the new year opens with this entry in Eddy's journal: _January, 1850._--Eddy is now fourteen months old, has six teeth, and walks well, but with timidity. He is, at times, really beautiful. He is very affectionate, and will run to meet me, throw his little arms round my neck and keep pat-pat-patting me, with delight. Miss Arnold sent him, at New Year's, a pretty ball, with which he is highly pleased. He rolls it about by knocking it with a stick, and will shout for joy when he sees it moving. He is _crazy_ to give everybody something, and when he is brought down to prayers, hurries to get the Bible for his father, his little face all smiles and exultation, and his body in a quiver with emotion. He is like lightning in all his movements, and is never still for an instant. It is worth a good deal to see his face, it is so _brimful_ of life and sunshine and gladness. Her letters, written during the winter and spring, show how in the midst of bodily suffering, depression, and sorrow her views of life were changing and her faith in God growing stronger. Three of her brothers were now in California, seeking their fortunes in the newly-discovered gold mines. To one of them she writes, March 10th: I was delighted yesterday by the reception of your letter. I do not wonder that Lotty's death affected you as it did--but however sharp the instruments by which these lessons come to us, they are full of good when they do come. As I look back to the time when I did not know what death was doing and could do, I seem to myself like a child who has not yet been to school. The deaths of our dear mother and of Lotty have taken fast hold of me. Life is _entirely changed_. I do not say this in a melancholy or repining temper, for I would not have life appear otherwise than in its true light. All my sickly, wicked disgust with it has been put to the blush and driven away. I see now that to live for God, whether one is allowed ability to be actively useful or not, is a great thing, and that it is a wonderful mercy to be allowed to live and suffer even, if thereby one can glorify Him. I desire to live if it is God's will, though I confess heaven looks most attractive when either sin, sorrow, or sickness weary me. But I must not go on at this rate, for I could not in writing begin to tell you how different everything looks as I advance into a knowledge of life and see its awful sorrows and sufferings and changes and know that I am subject to all its laws, soon to take my turn in its mysterious close. My dear brother, let us learn by heart the lessons we are learning, and go in their strength and wisdom all our days.... Our children are well. Eddy has gone to be weighed (he weighed twenty-four pounds). He is a fine little fellow. I have his nurse still, and ought to be in excellent health, but am a nervous old thing, as skinny and bony as I can be. I can think of nothing but birds' claws when I look at my hands. But I have so much to be thankful for in my dear husband and my sweet little children, and love all of you so dearly, that I believe I am as rich as if I had the flesh and strength of a giant. I am going this week to hear Miss Arnold read a manuscript novel. This will give spice to my life. Warmest love to you all. Again, May 10th, she writes: It would be a great pleasure to me to keep a journal for you if I were well enough, but I am not. I have my sick headache now once a week, and it makes me really ill for about three days. Towards night of the third day I begin to brighten up and to eat a morsel, but hardly recover my strength before I have another pull-down, just as I had got to this point the door-bell rang, and lo! a beautiful May-basket hanging on the latch for "Annie," full of pretty and good things. I can hardly wait till morning to see how her eyes will shine and her little feet fly when she sees it. George has been greatly distressed about S. S., and has, I think, very little, if any, hope that he will recover. Dr. Tappan [10] spent Tuesday night here. We had a really delightful visit from him. He spoke highly of your classmate, Craig, who is just going to be married. He told us a number of pleasant anecdotes about father. Eddy has got big enough to walk in the street. He looks like a little picture, with his great forehead and bright eyes. He is in every way as large as most children are at two years. His supreme delight is to tease A. by making believe strike her or in some other real boy's hateful way. She and he play together on the grass-plat, and I feel quite matronly as I sit watching them with their balls and wheel-barrows and whatnots. This little scamp has, I fear, broken my constitution to pieces. It makes me crawl all over when I think of you three fagging all day at such dull and unprofitable labor. But I am sure Providence will do what is really best for you all. We think and talk of and pray for you every day and more than once a day, and, in all my ill-health and sufferings, the remembrance of you is pleasant and in great measure refreshing. I depend more upon hearing from you all than I can describe. What an unconquerable thing family affection is! She thus writes, May 30th, to her old Portland friend, Miss Lord: I have written very few letters and not a line of anything else the past winter, owing to the confusion my mind is in most of the time from distress in my head. Three days out of every seven I am as sick as I well can be--the rest of the time languid, feeble, and exhausted by frequent faint turns, so that I can't do the smallest thing in my family. I hardly know what it is so much as to put a clean apron on to one of my children. To me this is a constant pain and weariness; for our expense in the way of servants is greater than we can afford and everything is going to destruction under my face and eyes, while I dare not lift a finger to remedy it. I live in constant alternations of hope and despondency about my health. Whenever I feel a little better, as I do to-day, I am sanguine and cheerful, but the next ill-turn depresses me exceedingly. I don't think there is any special danger of my dying, but there is a good deal of my getting run down beyond the power of recovery, and of dragging out that useless existence of which I have a perfect horror. But I would not have you think I am not happy; for I can truly say that I _am_, most of the time, as happy as I believe one can be in this world. All my trials and sufferings shut me up to the one great Source of peace, and I know there has been need of every one of them. I have not yet made my plans for the summer. Our doctor urges me to go away from the children and from the salt water, but I do not believe it would do me a bit of good. I want you to see my dear little boy. He is now nineteen months old and as fat and well as can be. He is a beautiful little fellow, we think, and very interesting. He is as gallant to A. as you please, and runs to get a cushion for her when their supper is carried in, and won't eat a morsel himself till he sees her nicely fixed. George has gone to Boston, and I am lonely enough. I would write another sheet if I dared, but I don't dare. What she here says of her happiness, amidst the trials of the previous winter, is repeated a little later in a letter to her husband: I can truly say I have not spent a happier winter since our marriage, in spite of all my sickness. It seems to me I can never recover my spirits and be as I have been in my best days, but what I lose in one way perhaps I shall gain in another. Just think how my ambition has been crushed at every point by my ill-health, and even the ambition to be useful and a comfort to those about me trampled underfoot, to teach me what I could not have learned in any other school! In the month of June she went on a visit to Newark, New Jersey, where her husband's mother and sister now resided; Dr. Stearns having in the fall of 1849 accepted a call to the First Presbyterian church in that city. While she was in Newark news came of the dangerous illness, and, soon after, of the death at Natchez of her brother-in-law, Mr. S. S. Prentiss. The event was a great shock to her, and she knew that it would be a crushing blow to her husband. Her letters to him, written at this time, are full of the tender love and sympathy that infuse solace into sorrow-stricken hearts. Here is an extract from one of them, dated July 11th: I can't tell you how it grieves and distresses me to have had this long-dreaded affliction come upon you when you were alone. Though I could do so little to comfort you, it seems as if I _must_ be near you.... But I know I am doing right in staying here--doing as you would tell me to do, if I could have your direct wish, and you don't know how thankful I am that it has pleased God to let me be with dear mother at a time when she so needed constant affection and sympathy. Yes there are wonderful mercies with this heavy affliction, and we all see and feel them. Poor mother has borne all the dreadful suspense and then the second blow of to-day far better than any of us dared to hope, but she weeps incessantly. Anna is with her all she can possibly be, and Mr. Stearns is an angel of mercy. I have prayed for you a great deal this week, and I know God is with you, comforts you, and will enable you to bear this great sorrow. And yet I can't help feeling that I want to comfort you myself. Oh, may we all reap its blessed fruits as long as we live! Let us withdraw a while from everything else, that we may press nearer to God. We were in a state of terrible suspense all day Tuesday, all day Wednesday, and until noon to-day; starting at every footfall, expecting telegraphic intelligence either from you or from the South, and deplorably ignorant of Seargent's alarming condition, notwithstanding all the warning we had had. With one consent we had put far off the evil day.... And now I must bid you good-night, my dearest husband, praying that you may be the beloved of the Lord and rest in safety by Him. The early years of Mrs. Prentiss' married life were in various ways closely connected with that of this lamented brother; so much so that he may be said to have formed one of the most potent, as well as one of the sunniest, influences in her own domestic history. Not only was he very highly gifted, intellectually, and widely known as a great orator, but he was also a man of extraordinary personal attractions, endeared to all his friends by the sweetness of his disposition, by his winning ways, his wit, his playful humor, his courage, his boundless generosity, his fraternal and filial devotion, and by the charm of his conversation. His death at the early age of forty-one called forth expressions of profound sorrow and regret from the first men of the nation. After the lapse of nearly a third of a century his memory is still fresh and bright in the hearts of all, who once knew and loved him. [11] Notwithstanding the shock of this great affliction, Mrs. Prentiss returned to New Bedford much refreshed in body and mind. In a letter to her friend Miss Lord, dated September 14th, she writes: I spent six most profitable weeks at Newark; went out very little, saw very few people, and had the quiet and retirement I had long hungered and thirsted for. Since I have had children my life has been so distracted with care and sickness that I have sometimes felt like giving up in despair, but this six weeks' rest gave me fresh courage to start anew. I have got some delightful books--Manning's Sermons. [12] They are (letting the High-churchism go) most delightful; I think Susan would have feasted on them. But she is feasting on angels' food and has need of none of these things. In October of this year Mrs. Prentiss bade adieu to New Bedford, never to revisit it, and removed to Newark; her husband having become associate pastor of the Second Presbyterian church in that place. In the spring of the following year he accepted a call to the Mercer street Presbyterian church in New York, and that city became her home the rest of her days. Although she tarried so short a time in Newark, she received much kindness and formed warm friendships while there. She continued to suffer much, however, from ill-health and almost entirely suspended her correspondence. A few letters to New Bedford friends are all that relate to this period. In one to Mrs. J. P. Allen, dated November 2d, she thus refers to an accident, which came near proving fatal: Yesterday we went down to New York to hear Jenny Lind; a pleasure to remember for the rest of one's life. If anything, she surpassed our expectations. In coming home a slight accident to the cars obliged us to walk about a mile, and I must needs fall into a hole in the bridge which we were crossing, and bruise and scrape one knee quite badly. The wonder is that I did not go into the river, as it was a large hole, and pitch dark. I think if I had been walking with Mr. Prentiss I should not only have gone in myself, but pulled him in too; but I had the arm of a stronger man, who held me up till I could extricate myself. You can't think how I miss you, nor how often I wish you could run in and sit with me, as you used to do. I have always loved you, and shall remember you and yours with the utmost interest. We had a pleasant call the other day from Captain Gibbs. Seeing him made me homesick enough. I could hardly keep from crying all the time he stayed. It seems to us both as if we had been gone from New Bedford more months than we have days. Mr. Prentiss said yesterday that he should expect if he went back directly, to see the boys and girls grown up and married. _To Mrs. Reuben Nye, Newark, Feb 12, 1851._ Mr. Prentiss and Mr. Poor have just taken Annie and Eddy out to walk, and I have been moping over the fire and thinking of New Bedford friends, and wishing one or more would "happen in." I am just now getting over a severe attack of rheumatism, which on leaving my back intrenched itself in Mr. P.'s shoulder. I dislike this climate and am very suspicious of it. Everybody has a horrible cold, or the rheumatism, or fever and ague. Mr. Prentiss says if I get the latter, he shall be off for New England in a twinkling. I think he is as well as can be expected while the death of his brother continues so fresh in his remembrance. All the old cheerfulness, which used to sustain me amid sickness and trouble, has gone from him. But God has ordered the iron to enter his soul, and it is not for me to resist that will. Our children are well. We have had much comfort in them both this winter. Mother Prentiss is renewing her youth, it is so pleasant to her to have us all near her. (Eddy and A. are hovering about me, making such a noise that I can hardly write. Eddy says, "When I was tired, _Poor_ tarried me.") Mr. Poor carries all before him. [13] He is _very_ popular throughout the city, and I believe Mrs. P. is much admired by their people. Mr. Prentiss is preaching every Sabbath evening, as Dr. Condit is able to preach every morning now. I feel as much at home as I possibly could anywhere in the same time, but instead of mourning less for my New Bedford friends, I mourn more and more every day. To Mrs. Allen she writes, Feb. 21: I know all about those depressed moods, when it costs one as much to smile, or to give a pleasant answer, as it would at other times to make a world. What a change it will be to us poor sickly, feeble, discouraged ones, when we find ourselves where there is neither pain or lassitude or fatigue of the body, or sorrow or care or despondency of the mind! I miss you more and more. People here are kind and excellent and friendly, but I can not make them, as yet, fill the places of the familiar faces I have left in New Bedford. I am all the time walking through our neighborhood, dropping into Deacon Barker's or your house, or welcoming some of you into our old house on the corner. Eddy is pretty well. He is a sweet little boy, gentle and docile. He learns to talk very fast, and is crazy to learn hymns. He says, "Tinkle, tinkle _leetleeverybody_, and give 'tatoes to beggar boys." Mother Prentiss seems to _thrive_ on having us all about her. She lives so far off that I see her seldom, but Mr. P. goes every day, except Sundays, when he can't go--rain or shine, tired or not tired, convenient or not convenient. Since my mother's death he has felt that he must do quickly whatever he has to do for his own. [1] "I found dear Abby still alive and rejoiced beyond expression to see me. She had had a very feeble night, but brightened up towards noon and when I arrived seemed entirely like her old self, smiling sweetly and exclaiming, "This is the last blessing I desired! Oh, how good the Lord is, isn't He?" It was very delightful. The doctor has just been in and he says she may go any instant, and yet may live a day or two. Mother is wonderfully calm and happy, and the house seems like the very gate of heaven.... I so wish you could have seen Abby's smile when I entered her room. And then she inquired so affectionately for you and baby: "Now tell me everything about them." She longs and prays to be gone. There is something perfectly childlike about her expressions and feelings, especially toward mother. She can't bear to have her leave the room and holds her hand a good deal of the time. She sends ever so much love."-- _Extract from a letter, dated Portland, January 27, 1847._ [2] The late Rev. William T. Dwight, D.D., pastor of the Third Church in Portland. He was a son of President Dwight, an accomplished man, a noble Christian citizen, and one of the ablest preachers of his day. For many years his house almost adjoined Mrs. Payson's, and both he and Mrs. Dwight were among her most cherished friends. [3] A devoted friend of her father's, one of his deacons, and a genial, warm-hearted, good man. [4] A niece of her husband, a lovely child, who died a few years later in Georgia. [5] Rev. James Lewis, a venerated elder and local preacher of the Methodist Episcopal Church, then nearly eighty years of age. He died in 1855, universally beloved and lamented. He entered upon his work in 1800. During most of those fifty-five years he was wont to preach every Sabbath, often three times, rarely losing an appointment by sickness, and still more rarely by storms in summer or winter. He lived in Gorham, Maine, and his labors were pretty equally divided among all the towns within fifteen miles round. His rides out and back, often over the roughest roads or through heavy snows, averaged, probably, from fifteen to twenty miles. It was estimated that he had officiated at not less than 1,500 funerals, sometimes riding for the purpose forty miles. His funeral and camp-meeting sermons included, he could not have preached less than from 8,000 to 9,000 times. He never received a dollar of compensation for his ministerial services. Though a hard-working farmer, his hospitality to his itinerant brethren was unbounded. In several towns of Cumberland and adjoining counties, he was the revered patriarch, as half a century earlier he had been the youthful pioneer of Methodism. When he departed to be with Christ, there was no better man in all the State to follow after him. [6] One of a number of old whaling captains in her husband's congregation, in whom she was interested greatly. They belonged to a class of men _sui generis_--men who had traversed all oceans, had visited many lands, and were as remarkable for their jovial large-hearted, social qualities, when at home, as for their indomitable energy, Yankee push, and adventurous seamanship, when hunting the monsters of the deep on the other side of the globe. [7] Two bright girls and a young mother, who had died not long before. [8] Her sickness lasted six weeks, dating from the day of her being entirely confined to bed. Her life was prolonged much beyond what her physicians or any one else who saw her, had believed possible. During the last week her sufferings were less, and she lay quiet part of the time. Friday morning she had an attack of faintness, in the course of which she remarked "I am dying." She recovered and before noon sank into a somnolent state from which she never awoke. Her breathing became softer and fainter till it ceased at half-past five in the afternoon. Oh, what a transition was that! from pain and weariness and woe to the world of light! to the presence of the Saviour! to unclouded bliss! I felt, and so I believe did all assembled round her bed, that it was time for exultation rather than grief. We could not think of ourselves, so absorbed were we in contemplation of her happiness. She was able to say scarcely anything during her sickness, and left not a single message for the absent children, or directions to those who were present. Her extreme weakness, and the distressing effect of every attempt to speak, made her abandon all such attempts except in answer to questions. But the tenor of her replies to all inquiries was uniform, expressing entire acquiescence in the will of God, confidence in Him through Christ, and a desire to depart as soon as He should permit. Tranquillity and peace, unclouded by a single doubt or fear, seem to have filled her mind. There were several reasons which led us to decide that the interment should take place here; but on the following Saturday a gentleman arrived from Portland, sent by the Second Parish to remove the remains to that place, if we made no objection. As we made none, the body was disinterred and taken to P., my brother G. accompanying it. So that her mortal remains now rest with those of my dear father.--_Letter from Mrs. Hopkins to her aunt in New Haven, dated Williamstown, Dec. 1, 1848._ [9] The wife of her brother, Mr. Henry M. Payson. [10] The Rev. Benjamin Tappan, D.D., an old friend of her father's and one of the patriarchs of the Maine churches. [11] See appendix B, p. 534, for a brief sketch of his life. [12] Sermons by Henry Edward Manning, Archdeacon of Chichester (now Cardinal Manning), 1st, 2d, and 3d Series. [13] The Rev. D. W. Poor, D.D., now of Philadelphia. He had been settled at Fair Haven, near New Bedford, and was then a pastor in Newark. CHAPTER V. IN THE SCHOOL OF SUFFERING. 1851-1858. I. Removal to New York and first Summer there. Letters. Loss of Sleep and Anxiety about Eddy. Extracts from Eddy's Journal, describing his last Illness and Death. Lines entitled "To my Dying Eddy." Mrs. Prentiss' removal to New York was an important link in the chain of outward events which prepared her for her special life-work. It introduced her at once into a circle unsurpassed, perhaps, by any other in the country, for its intelligence, its domestic and social virtues, and its earnest Christian spirit. The Mercer street Presbyterian church contained at that time many members whose names were known and honored the world over, in the spheres of business, professional life, literature, philanthropy, and religion; and among its homes were some that seemed to have attained almost the perfection of beauty. In these homes the new pastor's wife soon became an object of tender love and devotion. Here she found herself surrounded by all congenial influences. Her mind and heart alike were refreshed and stimulated in the healthiest manner. And to add to her joy, several dear old friends lived near her and sat in adjoining pews on the Sabbath. But happy as were the auspices that welcomed her to New York, the experience of the past two years had taught her not to expect too much from any outward conditions. She entered, therefore, upon this new period of her life in a very sober mood. Nor had many months elapsed before she began to hear premonitory murmurs of an incoming sea of trouble. Most of the summer of 1851 she remained in town with the children. An extract from a letter to her youngest brother, dated August 1, will show how she whiled away many a weary hour: It has been very hot this summer; our house is large and cool, and above all, I have a nice bathing-room opening out of my chamber, with hot and cold water and a shower-bath, which is a world of comfort. We spent part of last week at Rockaway, L. I., visiting a friend. [1] I nearly froze to death, but George and the children were much benefited. I have improved fast in health since we came here. Yesterday I walked two and a half miles with George, and a year ago at this time I could not walk a quarter of a mile without being sick after it for some days. When I feel miserably I just put on my bonnet and get into an omnibus and go rattlety-bang down town; the air and the shaking and the jolting and the sight-seeing make me feel better and so I get along. If I could safely leave my children I should go with George. He hates to go alone and surely I hate to be left alone; in fact instead of liking each other's society less and less, we every day get more and more dependent on each other, and take separation harder and harder. Our children are well. To her husband, who had gone to visit an old friend, at Harpswell, on the coast of Maine, she writes a few days later: On Saturday very early Professor Smith called with the House of Seven Gables. I read about half of it in the evening. One sees the hand of the _artist_ as clearly in such a work as in painting, and the hand of a skilful one, too. I have read many books with more interest, but never one in which I was so diverted from the story to a study of the author himself. So far there is nothing exciting in it. I don't know who supplied the pulpit on Sunday morning. The sermon was to young men, which was not so appropriate as it might have been, considering there were no young men present, unless I except our Eddy and other sprigs of humanity of his age. I suppose you will wonder what in the world I let Eddy go for. Well, I took a fancy to let Margaret try him, as nobody would know him in the gallery and he coaxed so prettily to go. He was highly excited at the permission, and as I was putting on his sacque, I directed Margaret to take it off if he fell asleep. "Ho! I shan't go to sleep," quoth he; "Christ doesn't have rocking-chairs in His house." He set off in high spirits, and during the long prayer I heard him laugh loud; soon after I heard a rattling as of a parasol and Eddy saying, "There it is!" by which time Margaret, finding he was going to begin a regular frolic, sagely took him out. _August 7th_--The five girls from Brooklyn all spent yesterday here. They had a regular frolic towards night, bathing and shower-bathing. Afterwards we all went on top of the house. It was very pleasant up there. I took the children to Barnum's Museum, as I proposed doing. They were delighted, particularly with the "Happy Family," which consisted of cats, rats, birds, dogs, rabbits, monkeys, etc., etc., dwelling together in unity. I observed that though the cats forbore to lay a paw upon the rats and mice about them, they yet took a melancholy pleasure in _looking_ at these dainty morsels, from which nothing could persuade them to turn off their eyes. I am glad that you got away from New Bedford alive and that you did not stay longer, but hearing about our friends there made me quite long to see them myself. Do have just the best time in the world at Harpswell, and don't let the Rev. Elijah drown you for the sake of catching your mantle as you go down. I dare not tell you how much I miss you, lest you should think I do not rejoice in your having this vacation. May God bless and keep you. During the autumn she suffered much again from feeble health and incessant loss of sleep. "I have often thought," she wrote to a friend, "that while so stupefied by sickness I should not be glad to see my own mother if I had to speak to her." But neither sick days nor sleepless nights could quench the Brightness of her spirit or wholly spoil her enjoyment of life. A little diary which she kept contains many gleams of sunshine, recording pleasant visits from old friends, happy hours and walks with the children, excursions to Newark, and how "amazingly" she "enjoyed the boys" (her brothers) on their return from the pursuit of golden dreams in California. In the month of November the diary shows that her watchful eye observed in Eddy signs of disease, which filled her with anxiety. Before the close of the year her worst fears began to be realised. She wrote, Dec. 31: "I am under a constant pressure of anxiety about Eddy. How little we know what the New Year will bring forth." Early in January, 1852, his symptoms assumed a fatal type, and on the 16th of the same month the beautiful boy was released from his sufferings, and found rest in the kingdom of heaven, that sweet home of the little children. A few extracts from Eddy's journal will tell the story of his last days: On the 19th of December the Rev. Mr. Poor was here. On hearing of it, Eddy said he wanted to see him. As he took now so little interest in anything that would cost him an effort, I was surprised, but told Annie to lead him down to the parlor; on reaching it they found Mr. Poor not there, and they then went up to the study. I heard their father's joyous greeting as he opened his door for them, and how he welcomed Eddy, in particular, with a perfect shower of kisses and caresses. This was the last time the dear child's own feet ever took him there; but his father afterwards frequently carried him up in his arms and amused him with pictures, especially with what Eddy called the "bear books." [2] One morning Ellen told him she was going to make a little pie for his dinner, but on his next appearance in the kitchen told him she had let it burn all up in the oven, and that she felt _dreadfully_ about it. "Never mind, Ellie," said he, "mamma does not like to have me eat pie; but when I _get well_ I shall have as many as I want." On the 24th of December Mr. Stearns and Anna were here. I was out with the latter most of the day; on my return Eddy came to me with a little flag which his uncle had given him, and after they had left us he ran up and down with it, and as my eye followed him, I thought he looked happier and brighter and more like himself than I had seen him for a long time. He kept saying, "Mr. Stearns gave me this flag!" and then would correct himself and say, "I mean my _Uncle_ Stearns." On this night he hung up his bag for his presents, and after going to bed, surveyed it with a chuckle of pleasure peculiar to him, and finally fell asleep in this happy mood. I took great delight in arranging his and A.'s presents, and getting them safely into their bags. He enjoyed Christmas as much as I had reason to expect he would, in his state of health, and was busy among his new playthings all day. He had taken a fancy within a few weeks to kneel at family prayers with me at my chair, and would throw one little arm round my neck, while with the other hand he so prettily and seriously covered his eyes. As their heads touched my face as they knelt, I observed that Eddy's felt hot when compared with A.'s; just enough so to increase my uneasiness. On entering the nursery on New Year's morning, I was struck with his appearance as he lay in bed; his face being spotted all over. On asking Margaret about it, she said he had been crying, and that this occasioned the spots. This did not seem probable to me, for I had never seen anything of this kind on his face before. How little I knew that these were the last tears my darling would ever shed. On Sunday morning, January 4, not being able to come himself, Dr. Buck sent Dr. Watson in his place. I told Dr. W. that I thought Eddy had water on the brain; he said it was not so, and ordered nothing but a warm bath. On Thursday, January 8, while Margaret was at dinner, I knelt by the side of the cradle, rocking it very gently, and he asked me to tell him a story. I asked what about, and he said, "A little boy," on which I said something like this: Mamma knows a dear little boy who was very sick. His head ached and he felt sick all over. God said, I must let that little lamb come into my fold; then his head will never ache again, and he will be a very happy little lamb. I used the words little lamb because he was so fond of them. Often he would run to his nurse with his face full of animation and say, "Marget! Mamma says I am her little lamb!" While I was telling him this story his eyes were fixed intelligently on my face. I then said, "Would you like to know the name of this boy?" With eagerness he said, "Yes, yes, mamma!" Taking his dear little hand in mine, and kissing it, I said, "It was Eddy." Just then his nurse came in and his attention was diverted, so I said no more. On Sunday, January 11, at noon, while they were all at dinner, I was left alone with my darling for a few moments, and could not help kissing his unconscious lips. To my utter amazement he looked up and plainly recognised me and warmly returned my kiss. Then he said feebly, but distinctly twice, "I want some meat and potato." I do not think I should have been more delighted if he had risen from the dead, once more to recognise me. Oh, it was _such_ a comfort to have one more kiss, and to be able to gratify one more wish! On Friday, January 16th, his little weary sighs became more profound, and, as the day advanced, more like groans; but appeared to indicate extreme fatigue, rather than severe pain. Towards night his breathing became quick and laborious, and between seven and eight slight spasms agitated his little feeble frame. He uttered cries of distress for a few minutes, when they ceased, and his loving and gentle spirit ascended to that world where thousands of holy children and the blessed company of angels and our blessed Lord Jesus, I doubt not, joyfully welcomed him. Now we were able to say, _It is well with the child!_ "Oh," said the gardener, as he passed down the garden-walk, "who plucked that flower? Who gathered that plant?" His fellow-servants answered, "The MASTER!" And the gardener held his peace. The feelings of the mother's heart on Friday found vent in some lines entitled _To My Dying Eddy; January 16th_. Here are two stanzas: Blest child! dear child! For thee is Jesus calling; And of our household thee--and only thee! Oh, hasten hence! to His embraces hasten! Sweet shall thy rest and safe thy shelter be. Thou who unguarded ne'er hast left our threshold, Alone must venture now an unknown way; Yet, fear not! Footprints of an Infant Holy Lie on thy path. Thou canst not go astray. In a letter to her friend Mrs. Allen, of New Bedford, dated January 28, she writes: During our dear little Eddy's illness we were surrounded with kind friends, and many prayers were offered for us and for him. Nothing that could alleviate our affliction was left undone or unthought of, and we feel that it would be most unchristian and ungrateful in us to even wonder at that Divine will which has bereaved us of our only boy--the light and sunshine of our household. We miss him _sadly_. I need not explain to you, who know all about it, _how_ sadly; but we rejoice that he has got away from this troublous life, and that we have had the privilege of giving so dear a child to God. When he was well he was one of the happiest creatures I ever saw, and I am sure he is well now, and that he is as happy as his joyous nature makes him susceptible of becoming. God has been most merciful to us in this affliction, and, if a bereaved, we are still a _happy_ household and full of thanksgiving. Give my love to both the children and tell them they must not forget us, and when they think and talk of their dear brother and sisters in heaven, they must sometimes think of the little Eddy who is there too. * * * * * II. Birth of her Third Child. Reminiscence of a Sabbath-Evening Talk. Story of the Baby's Sudden Illness and Death. Summer of 1852. Lines entitled "My Nursery." The shock of Eddy's death proved almost too much for Mrs. Prentiss' enfeebled frame. She bore it, however, with sweet submission, and on the 17th of the following April her sorrow was changed to joy, and Eddy's empty place filled, as she thought, by the birth of Elizabeth, her third child, a picture of infantine health and beauty. But, although the child seemed perfectly well, the mother herself was brought to the verge of the grave. For a week or two her life wavered in the balance, and she was quite in the mood to follow Eddy to the better country. Her husband, recording a "long and most interesting conversation" with her on Sabbath evening, May 2d, speaks of the "depth and tenderness of her religious feelings, of her sense of sin and of the grace and glory of the Saviour," and then adds, "Her old Richmond exercises seem of late to have returned with their former strength and beauty increased many-fold." On the 14th of May she was able to write in pencil these lines to her sister, Mrs. Hopkins: I little thought that I should ever write to you again, but I have been brought through a great deal, and now have reason to expect to get well. I never knew how much I loved you till I gave up all hope of ever seeing you again, and I have not strength yet to tell you all about it. Poor George has suffered much. I hope all will be blessed to him and to me. I am still confined to bed. The doctor thinks there may be an abscess near the hip-joint, and, till that is cured, I can neither lie straight in bed or stand on my feet or ride out. Everybody is kind. Our cup has run over. It is a sore trial not to be allowed to nurse baby. She is kept in another room. I only see her once a day. She begins to smile, and is very bright-eyed. I hope your journey will do you good. If you can, do write a few lines--not more. But, good-by. Hardly had she penned these lines, when, like a thunderbolt from a clear sky, another stunning blow fell upon her. On the 19th of May, after an illness of a few hours, Bessie, too, was folded forever in the arms of the Good Shepherd. Here is the mother's own story of her loss: Our darling Eddy died on the 16th of January. The baby he had so often spoken of was born on the 17th of April. I was too feeble to have any care of her. Never had her in my arms but twice; once the day before she died and once while she was dying. I never saw her little feet. She was a beautiful little creature, with a great quantity of dark hair and very dark blue eyes. The nurse had to keep her in another room on account of my illness. When she was a month old she brought her to me one afternoon. "This child is perfectly beautiful," said she; "to-morrow I mean to dress her up and have her likeness taken." I asked her to get me up in bed and let me take her a minute. She objected, and I urged her a good deal, till at last she consented. The moment I took her I was struck by her unearthly, absolutely angelic expression; and, not having strength enough to help it, burst out crying bitterly, and cried all the afternoon while I was struggling to give her up. Her father was at Newark. When he came home at dark I told him I was sure that baby was going to die. He laughed at me, said my weak health made me fancy it, and asked the nurse if the child was not well. She said she was--perfectly well. My presentiment remained, however, in full force, and the first thing next morning I asked Margaret to go and see how baby was. She came back, saying, "She is very well. She lies there on the bed scolding to herself." I cried out to have her instantly brought to me. M. refused, saying the nurse would be displeased. But my anxieties were excited by the use of the word "scolding," as I knew no baby a month old did anything of that sort, and insisted on its being brought to me. The instant I touched it I felt its head to be of a burning heat, and sent for the nurse at once. When she came, I said, "This child is _very sick_." "Yes," she said, "but I wanted you to have your breakfast first. At one o'clock in the night I found a little swelling. I do not know what it is, but the child is certainly very sick." On examination I knew it was erysipelas. "Don't say that," said the nurse, and burst into tears. I made them get me up and partly dress me, as I was so excited I could not stay in bed. Dr. Buck came at ten o'clock; he expressed no anxiety, but prescribed for her and George went out to get what he ordered. The nurse brought her to me at eleven o'clock and begged me to observe that the spot had turned black. I knew at once that this was fearful, fatal disease, and entreated George to go and tell the doctor. He went to please me, though he saw no need of it, and gave the wrong message to the doctor, to the effect that the swelling was increasing, to which the doctor replied that it naturally would do so. The little creature, whose moans Margaret had termed scolding, now was heard all over that floor; every breath a moan that tore my heart in pieces. I begged to have her brought to me but the nurse sent word she was too sick to be moved. I then begged the nurse to come and tell me exactly what she thought of her, but she said she could not leave her. I then crawled on my hands and knees into the room, being unable then and for a long time after to bear my own weight. What a scene our nursery presented! Everything upset and tossed about, medicines here and there on the floor, a fire like a fiery furnace, and Miss H. sitting hopelessly and with falling tears with the baby on a pillow in her lap--all its boasted beauty gone forever. The sight was appalling and its moans heart-rending. George came and got me back to my sofa and said he felt as if he should jump out of the window every time he heard that dreadful sound. He had to go out and made me promise not to try to go to the nursery till his return. I foolishly promised. Mrs. White [3] called, and I told her I was going to lose my baby; she was very kind and went in to see it but I believe expressed no opinion as to its state. But she repeated an expression which I repeated to myself many times that day, and have repeated thousands of times since--"_God never makes a mistake_." Margaret went soon after she left to see how the poor little creature was, and did not come back. Hour after hour passed and no one came. I lay racked with cruel torture, bitterly regretting my promise to George, listening to those moans till I was nearly wild. Then in a frenzy of despair I pulled myself over to my bureau, where I had arranged the dainty little garments my darling was to wear, and which I had promised myself so much pleasure in seeing her wear. I took out everything she would need for her burial, with a sort of wild pleasure in doing for her one little service, where I had hoped before to render so many. She it was whom we expected to fill our lost Eddy's vacant place; we thought we had _had_ our sorrow and that now our joy had come. As I lay back exhausted, with these garments on my breast, Louisa Shipman [4] opened the door. One glance at my piteous face, for oh, how glad I was to see her! made her burst into tears before she knew what she was crying for. "Oh, go bring me news from my poor dying baby!" I almost screamed, as she approached me. "And see, here are her grave-clothes." "Oh, Lizzy, have you gone crazy?" cried she, with a fresh burst of tears. I besought her to go, told her how my promise bound me, made her listen to those terrible sounds which two doors could not shut out. As she left the room she met Dr. B. and they went to the nursery together. She soon came back, quiet and composed, but very sorrowful. "Yes, she is dying," said she, "the doctor says so; she will not live an hour." ... At last we heard the sound of George's key. Louise ran to call him. I crawled once more to the nursery, and snatched my baby in fierce triumph from the nurse. At least once I would hold my child, and nobody should prevent me. George, pale as death, baptized her as I held her in my trembling arms; there were a few more of those terrible, never-to-be-forgotten sounds, and at seven o'clock we were once more left with only one child. A short, sharp conflict, and our baby was gone. Dr. B. came in later and said the whole thing was to him like a thunderclap--as it was to her poor father. To me it followed closely on the presentiment that in some measure prepared me for it. Here I sit with empty hands. I have had the little coffin in my arms, but my baby's face could not be seen, so rudely had death marred it. Empty hands, empty hands, a worn-out, exhausted body, and unutterable longings to flee from a world that has had for me so many sharp experiences. God help me, my baby, my baby! God help me, my little lost Eddy! But although the death of these two children tore with anguish the mother's heart, she made no show of grief, and to the eye of the world her life soon appeared to move on as aforetime. Never again, however, was it exactly the same life. She had entered into the fellowship of Christ's sufferings, and the new experience wrought a great change in her whole being. A part of the summer and the early autumn of 1852 were passed among kind friends at Newport, in Portland, and at the Ocean House on Cape Elizabeth. She returned much refreshed, and gave herself up cheerfully to her accustomed duties. But a cloud rested still upon her home, and at times the old grief came back again with renewed poignancy. Here are a few lines expressive of her feelings. They were written in pencil on a little scrap of paper: MY NURSERY. 1852. I thought that prattling boys and girls Would fill this empty room; That my rich heart would gather flowers From childhood's opening bloom. One child and two green graves are mine, This is God's gift to me; A bleeding, fainting, broken heart-- This is my gift to Thee. * * * * * III. Summer at White Lake. Sudden Death of her Cousin, Miss Shipman. Quarantined. _Little Susy's Six Birthdays._ How she wrote it. _The Flower of the Family._ Her Motive in writing it. Letter of Sympathy to a bereaved Mother. A Summer at the Seaside. _Henry and Bessie._ The year 1853 was passed quietly and in better health. In the early summer she made a delightful visit at The Island, near West Point, the home of the author of "The Wide, Wide World." She was warmly attached to Miss Warner and her sister, and hardly less so to their father and aunt, whose presence then adorned that pleasant home with so much light and sweetness. Early in August she went with her husband and child to White Lake, Sullivan Co., N. Y., where, in company with several families from the Mercer street church, she spent six weeks in breathing the pure country air, and in healthful outdoor exercise. [5] About the middle of October she was greatly distressed by the sudden death of the young cousin, already mentioned, who was staying with her during her husband's absence on a visit to New Bedford. Miss Shipman was a bright, attractive girl, and enthusiastic in her devotion to Mrs. Prentiss. The latter, in a letter to her husband, dated Saturday morning, October 15th, 1853, writes: I imagine you enjoying this fine morning, and can't rejoice enough, that you are having such weather. A. is bright and well and is playing in her baby-house and singing. Louise is still quite sick, and I see no prospect of her not remaining so for some time. The morning after you left I thought to be sure she had the small-pox. The doctor, however, calls it a rash. It makes her look dreadfully and feel dreadfully. She gets hardly a moment of sleep and takes next to no nourishment. Arrowroot is all the doctor allows. He comes twice a day and seems _very_ kind and full of compassion. She crawled down this morning to the nursery, and seems to be asleep now. Mrs. Bull very kindly offered to come and do anything if Louise should need it, but I do not think she will be sick enough for that. I feel well and able to do all that is necessary. The last proof-sheets came last night, so that job is off my hands. [6] And now, darling, I can't tell you how I miss you. I never missed you more in my life, if as much. I hope you are having a nice visit. Give my love to Capt. and Mrs. Gibbs and all our friends. Your most loving little wife. On the following Wednesday, October 19th, she writes to her husband's mother: You will be shocked to hear that Louisa Shipman died on Sunday night and was buried yesterday. Her disease was spotted fever of the most malignant character, and raged with great fury. She dropped away most unexpectedly to us, before I had known five minutes that she was in danger, and I came near being entirely alone with her. Dr. M. happened to be here and also her mother-in-law; but I had been alone in the house with her all day. It is a dreadful shock to us all, and I feel perfectly stupefied. George got home in time for the funeral, but Dr. Skinner performed the services. Anna will go home to-morrow and tell you all about it. She and Mr. S. slept away, as the upper part of the house is airing; and to-night they will sleep at Prof. Smith's. The case was even more fearful than she supposed while writing this letter. Upon her describing it to Dr. Buck, who called a few hours later, he exclaimed, "Why, it was malignant small-pox! You must all be vaccinated instantly and have the bedding and house disinfected." This was done; but it was too late. Her little daughter had the disease, though in a mild form; and one of her brothers, who was passing the autumn with her, had it so severely as barely to escape with his life. She herself became a nurse to them both, and passed the next two months quarantined within her own walls. To her husband's mother she wrote: I am not allowed to see _anyone_--am very lonesome, and hope Anna will write and tell me every little thing about you all. The scenes I have lately passed through make me tremble when I think what a fatal malady lurks in every corner of our house. And speaking after the manner of men, does it not seem almost incredible that this child, watched from her birth like _the apple of our eyes_, should yet fall into the jaws of this loathsome disease? I see more and more that parents _must_ leave their children to Providence. In the early part of this year Mrs. Prentiss wrote _Little Susy's Six Birthdays_, the book that has given so much delight to tens of thousands of little children, wherever the English tongue is spoken. Like most of her books, it was an inspiration and was composed with the utmost rapidity. She read the different chapters, as they were written, to her husband, child and brother, who all with one voice expressed their admiration. In about ten days the work was finished. The manuscript was in a clear, delicate hand and without an erasure. Upon its publication it was at once recognised as a production of real genius, inimitable in its kind, and neither the popular verdict nor the verdict of the children as to its merits has ever changed. Mrs. Prentiss, as has been stated already, began to write for the press at an early age. But from the time of her going to Richmond till 1853--a period of thirteen years--her pen was well nigh idle, except in the way of correspondence. When, therefore, she gave herself again to literary labor, it was with a largely increased fund of knowledge and experience upon which to draw. These thirteen years had taught her rich lessons, both in literature and in life. They had been especially fruitful in revealing to her the heart of childhood and quickening her sympathy with its joys and sorrows. And all these lessons prepared her to write Little Susy's Six Birthdays and the other Susy books. The year 1854 was marked by the birth of her fourth child, and by the publication of _The Flower of the Family._ This work was received with great favor both at home and abroad. It was soon translated into French under the title, _La Fleur de la Famille,_ and later into German under the title, _Die Perle der Familie_. In both languages it received the warmest praise. In a letter to her friend Mrs. Clark, of Portland, she thus refers to this book: I long to have it doing good. I never had such desires about anything in my life; and I never sat down to write without first praying that I might not be suffered to write anything that would do harm, and that, on the contrary, I might be taught to say what would do good. And it has been a great comfort to me that every word of praise I ever have received from others concerning it has been "it will do good," and this I have had from so many sources that amid much trial and sickness ever since its publication, I have had rays of sunshine creeping in now and then to cheer and sustain me. To the same friend, just bereft of her two children, she writes a few months later: Is it possible, is it possible that you are made childless? I feel distressed for you, my dear friend; I long to fly to you and weep with you; it seems as if I _must_ say or do something to comfort you. But God only can help you now, and how thankful I am for a throne of grace and power where I can commend you, again and again, to Him who doeth all things well. I never realise my own affliction in the loss of my children as I do when death enters the house of a friend. Then I feel that _I can't have it so._ But why should I think I know better than my Divine Master what is good for me, or good for those I love! Dear Carrie,'! trust that in this hour of sorrow you have with you that Presence, before which alone sorrow and sighing flee away. _God_ is left; _Christ_ is left; sickness, accident, death can not touch you here. Is not this a blissful thought?... As I sit at my desk my eye is attracted by the row of books before me, and what a comment on life are their very titles: "Songs in the Night," "Light on Little Graves," "The Night of Weeping," "The Death of Little Children," "The Folded Lamb," "The Broken Bud," these have strayed one by one into my small enclosure, to speak peradventure a word in season unto my weariness. And yet, dear Carrie, this is not all of life. You and I have tasted some of its highest joys, as well as its deepest sorrows, and it has in reserve for us only just what is best for us. May sorrow bring us both nearer to Christ! I can almost fancy my little Eddy has taken your little Maymee by the hand and led her to the bosom of Jesus. How strange our children, our own little infants, have seen Him in His glory, whom we are only yet longing for and struggling towards! If it will not frighten you to own a Unitarian book, there is one called "Christian Consolation" by Rev. A. P. Peabody, that I think you would find very profitable. I see nothing, or next to nothing, Unitarian in it, while it is _full_ of rich, holy experience. One sermon on "Contingent Events and Providence" touches your case exactly. No event of special importance marked the year 1855. She spent the month of July among her friends in Portland, and the next six weeks at the Ocean House on Cape Elizabeth. This was one of her favorite places of rest. She never tired of watching the waves and their "multitudinous laughter," of listening to the roar of the breakers, or climbing the rocks and wandering along the shore in quest of shells and sea-grasses. In gathering and pressing the latter, she passed many a happy hour. In August of this year appeared one of her best children's books, _Henry and Bessie; or, What they Did in the Country._ * * * * * IV. A Memorable Year. Lines on the Anniversary of Eddy's Death. Extracts from her Journal. _Little Susy's Six Teachers._ The Teachers' Meeting. A New York Waif. Summer in the Country. Letters. _Little Susy's Little Servants._ Extracts from her Journal. "Alone with God." The records of the year 1856 are singularly full and interesting. It was a year of poignant suffering, of sharp conflicts of soul, and of great peace and joy. Its earlier months, especially, were shadowed by a dark cloud of anxiety and distress. And her feeble bodily state caused by care-worn days and sleepless nights, added to the trouble. Old sorrows, too, came back again. On the 16th of January, the anniversary of Eddy's death, she gave vent to her feelings in some pathetic verses, of which the following lines form a part: Four years, four weary years, my child, Four years ago to-night, With parting cry of anguish wild Thy spirit took its flight; ah me! Took its eternal flight. And in that hour of mortal strife I thought I felt the throe, The birth-pang of a grief, whose life Must soothe my tearless woe, must soothe And ease me of my woe. Yet folded far through all these years, Folded from mortal eyes, Lying alas "too deep for tears," Unborn, unborn it lies, within My heart of heart it lies. My sinless child! upon thy knees Before the Master pray; Methinks thy infant hands might seize And shed upon my way sweet peace; Sweet peace upon my way. Here follow some extracts from her journal. _Jan 3d. 1856._--Had no time to write on New Year's day, as we had a host of callers. It was a very hard day, as I was quite unwell, and had at last to give up and go to bed. _15th_--Am quite uneasy about baby, as it seems almost impossible she should long endure such severe pain and want of sleep. My life is a very anxious one. I feel every day more and more longing for my home in heaven. Sometimes I fear it amounts almost to a sinful longing--for surely I ought to be willing to live or die, just as God pleases. _Feb. 1st._--I have had no heart to make a record of what has befallen us since I last wrote. And yet I may, sometime, want to recall this experience, painful as it is. Dear little baby had been improving in health, and on Wednesday we went to dine at Mrs. Wainright's. We went at four. About eight, word came that she was ill. When I got home I found her insensible, with her eyes wide open, her breathing terrific, and her condition in every respect very alarming. Just as Dr. Buck was coming in, she roused a little, but soon relapsed into the same state. He told us she was dying. I felt like a stone, _In a moment_ I seemed to give up my hold on her. She appeared no longer mine but God's. It is always so in such great emergencies. _Then_, my will that struggles so about trifles, makes no effort. But as we sat hour after hour watching the alternations of color in her purple face and listening to that terrible gasping, rattling sound, I said to myself "A few more nights like this, and I do believe my body and soul would yield to such anguish." Oh, why should I try to tell myself what a night it was. God knows, God only! How He has smitten me by means of this child, He well knows. She remained thus about twelve hours. Twelve hours of martyrdom to me such as I never had known. Then to our unspeakable amazement she roused up, nursed, and then fell into a sweet sleep of some hours. _Sunday, Feb. 3d._--The stupor, or whatever it is, in which that dreadful night has left me, is on me still. I have no more sense or feeling than a stone. I kneel down before God and do not say a word. I take up a book and read, but get hold of nothing. At church I felt afraid I should fall upon the people and tear them. I could wish no one to pity me or even know that I am smitten. It does seem to me that those who can sit down and cry, know nothing of misery. _Feb. 4th_.--At last the ice melts and I can get near my God--my only comfort, my only joy, my All in all! This morning I was able to open my heart to Him and to cast some of this burden on Him, who alone _knows_ what it is.... I see that it is sweet to be a pilgrim and a stranger, and that it matters _very little_ what befalls me on the way to my blessed home. If God pleases to spare my child a little longer, I will be very thankful. May He take this season, when earthly comfort fails me, to turn me more than ever to Himself. For some months I have enjoyed a _great deal_ in Him. Prayer has been very sweet and I have had some glimpses of joys indescribable. _6th._--She still lives. I know not what to think. One moment I think one thing and the next another. It is harder to submit to this suspense than to a real, decided blow. But I desire to leave it to my God. He knows all her history and all mine. He orders all these aggravating circumstances and I would not change them. My darling has not lived in vain. For eighteen months she has been the little rod used by my Father for my chastisement and not, I think, quite in vain. Oh my God! stay not Thy hand till Thou hast perfected that which concerneth me. Send anything rather than unsanctified prosperity. _Feb. 10th._--To help divert my mind from such incessant brooding over my sorrows, I am writing a new book. I had just begun it when baby's ill-turn arrested me. I trust it may do some little good; at least I would not dare to write it, if it _could_ do none. May God bless it! _Feb. 14th._--Wanted to go to the prayer-meeting but concluded to take A. to hear Gough at the Tabernacle. Seeing such a crowd always makes me long to be in that happy crowd of saints and angels in heaven, and hearing children sing so sweetly made me pray for an entrance into the singing, praising multitude there. Oh, when shall I be one of that blessed company who _sin_ not! My book is done; may God bless it to _one_ child at least--then it will not have been wasted time. The book referred to was _Little Susy's Six Teachers_. It was published in the spring, and at once took its place beside the _Six Birthdays_ in the hearts of the children; a place it still continues to hold. The six teachers are Mrs. Love, Mr. Pain, Aunt Patience, Mr. Ought, Miss Joy, and the angel Faith. At the end of six years they hold a meeting and report to little Susy's parents what they have been doing. The closing chapter, herewith quoted, gives an account of this meeting, and may serve as a specimen of the style and spirit of all the Little Susy books. "If Mr. Pain is to be at the meeting, I can't go," said Miss Joy. She stood on tip-toe before the glass, dressing herself in holiday clothes. "Perhaps he would be willing to leave his rod behind him," said Mrs. Love. "I will ask him at all events." Mr. Pain thought he should not feel at home without his rod. He said he always liked to have it in his hands, whether he was to use it or not. Miss Joy was full of fun and mischief about this time, so she slipped up slyly behind Mr. Pain while he was talking and snatched away the rod before he could turn round. Mrs. Love smiled on seeing this little trick, and they all went down to the parlor and seated themselves with much gravity. Little Susy sat in the midst in her own low chair looking wide awake, you may depend. Her papa and mamma sat on each side like two judges. Mrs. Love rocked herself in the rocking-chair in a contented, easy way; and Aunt Patience, who liked to do such things, helped Miss Joy to find the leaves of her report--which might have been rose-leaves, they were so small. Mr. Ought looked very good indeed, and the angel Faith shone across the room like a sunbeam. "Susy will be six years old to-morrow," said her papa. "You have all been teaching her ever since she was born. We will now listen to your reports and hear what you have taught her, and whether you have done her any good." They were all silent, but everybody looked at Mrs. Love as much as to say she should begin. Mrs. Love took out a little book with a sky-blue cover and began to read: "I have not done much for Susy, but love her dearly; and I have not taught her much, but to love everybody. When she was a baby I tried to teach her to smile, but I don't think I could have taught her if Miss Joy had not helped me. And when she was sick, I was always sorry for her, and tried to comfort her." "You have done her a great deal of good," said Susy's papa, "we will engage you to stay six years longer, should God spare her life." Then Mr. Pain took up his book. It had a black cover, but the leaves were gilt-edged and the cover was spangled with stars. "I have punished Susy a good many times," said Mr. Pain. "Sometimes I slapped her with my hand; sometimes I struck her with my rod; sometimes I made her sick; but I never did any of these things because I was angry with her or liked to hurt her. I only came when Mrs. Love called me." "You have taught her excellent lessons," said Susy's papa, "if it had not been for you she would be growing up disobedient and selfish. You may stay six years longer." Then Mr. Pain made a low bow and said he was thinking of going away and sending his brother, Mr. Sorrow, and his sister, Mrs. Disappointment, to take his place." "Oh, no!" cried Susy's mamma, "not yet, not yet! Susy is still so little!" Then Mr. Pain said he would stay without a rod, as Susy was now too old to be whipped. Then Miss Joy took up her book with its rainbow cover and tried to read. But she laughed so heartily all the time, and her leaves kept flying out of her hands at such a rate, that it was not possible to understand what she was saying. It was all about clapping hands and running races, and picking flowers and having a good time. Everybody laughed just because she laughed, and Susy's papa could hardly keep his face grave long enough to say: "You have done more good than tongue can tell. You have made her just such a merry, happy, laughing little creature as I wanted her to be. You must certainly stay six years longer." Then Mr. Ought drew forth his book. It had silver covers and its leaves were of the most delicate tissue. "I have taught little Susy to be good," said he. "Never to touch what is not hers; never to speak a word that is not true; never to have a thought she would not like the great and holy God to see. If I stay six years longer I can teach her a great deal more, for she begins now to understand my faintest whisper. She is such a little girl as I love to live with." Then Susy turned rosy-red with pleasure, and her papa and mamma got up and shook hands with Mr. Ought and begged him never, never to leave their darling child as long as she lived. It was now the turn of Aunt Patience. Her book had covers wrought by her own hands in grave and gay colors well mingled together. "When I first came here," she said, "Susy used to cry a great deal whenever she was hurt or punished. When she was sick she was very hard to please. When she sat down to learn to sew and to read and to write, she would break her thread in anger, or throw her book on the floor, or declare she never could learn. But now she has left off crying when she is hurt, and tries to bear the pain quietly. When she is sick she does not fret or complain, but takes her medicine without a word. When she is sewing she does not twitch her thread into knots, and when she is writing she writes slowly and carefully. I have rocked her to sleep a thousand times. I have been shut up in a closet with her again and again, and I hope I have done her some good and taught her some useful lessons." "Indeed you have, Aunt Patience," said Susy's papa, "but Susy is not yet perfect. We shall need you six years longer." And now the little angel Faith opened his golden book and began to read: "I have taught Susy that there is another world besides this, and have told her that it is her real home, and what a beautiful and happy one it is. I have told her a great deal about Jesus and the holy angels. I do not know much myself. I am not very old, but if I stay here six years longer I shall grow wiser and I will teach Susy all I learn, and we will pray together every morning and every night, till at last she loves the Lord Jesus with all her heart and soul and mind and strength." Then Susy's papa and mamma looked at each other and smiled, and they both said: "Oh, beautiful angel, never leave her!" And the angel answered: "I will stay with her as long as she lives, and will never leave her till I leave her at the very door of heaven." Then the teachers began to put up their books, and Susy's papa and mamma kissed her, and said: "We have had a great deal of comfort in our little daughter; and, with God's blessing, we shall see her grow up a loving, patient, and obedient child--full of joy and peace and rich in faith and good works." So they all bade each other good-night and went thankfully to bed. The next entry in the journal notes a trait of character, or rather of temperament, which often excited the wonder and also the anxiety of her friends. It caused her no little discomfort, but she could never withstand its power. _March 21st_.--I have been busy with a sewing fit and find the least interesting piece of work I can get hold of, as great a temptation as the most charming. For if its _charm_ does not absorb my time and thoughts, the eager haste to finish and get it out of the way, does. This is my life. I either am stupefied by ill-health or sorrow, so as to feel no interest in anything, or am _absorbed_ in whatever business, work or pleasure I have on hand. But neither anxiety about her child, household cares, or any work she had in hand, so absorbed her thoughts as to render her insensible to the sorrows and trials of others. On the contrary, they served rather to call forth and intensify her kindly sympathies. A single case will illustrate this. A poor little girl--one of those waifs of humanity in which a great city abounds--had been commended to her by a friend. In a letter to this friend, dated March 17, 1856, she writes: That little girl came, petticoat and all; we gave her some breakfast, and I then went down with her to Avenue A. On the way, she told me that you gave her some money. To my great sorrow we found, on reaching the school, that they could not take another one, as they were already overflowing. As we came out, I saw that the poor little soul was just ready to burst into tears, and said to her "Now you're disappointed, I know!" whereupon she actually looked up into my face and _smiled_. You know I was afraid I never should make her smile, she looked so forlorn. I brought her home to get some books, as she said she could read, and she is to come again to-morrow. A lady to whom I told the whole story, sent me some stockings that would about go on to her big toe; however, they will be nice for her little sister. The weather has been so mild that I thought it would not be worth while to make her a cloak or anything of that sort; but next fall I shall see that she is comfortably clad, if she behaves as well as she did the day she was here. Oh, dear! what a drop in the great bucket of New York misery, one such child is! Yet somebody must look out for the drops, and I am only too thankful to seize on this one. In June she went, with the children, to Westport, Conn., where in rural quiet and seclusion she passed the next three months. Here are some extracts from her letters, written from that place: Westport, _June 25, 1856._ We had a most comfortable time getting here; both the children enjoyed the ride, and baby seemed unusually bright. Judge Betts was very attentive and kind to us. Mrs. G. grows more and more pleasant every day. We have plenty of good food, but she worries because I do not eat more. You know I never was famous for eating meat, and country dinners are not tempting. You can't think how we enjoy seeing the poultry fed. There are a hundred and eighty hens and chickens, and you should see baby throw her little hand full of corn to them. We went strawberrying yesterday, all of us, and the way she was poked through bars and lifted over stone-walls would have amused you. She is already quite sunburnt; but I think she is looking sweetly. I find myself all the time peeping out of the window, thinking every step is yours, or that every wagon holds a letter for me. _To Miss A. H. Woolsey, Westport, June 27._ Mr. P. enclosed your kind note in one of his own, after first reading it himself, if you ever heard of such a man. I had to laugh all alone while reading it, which was not a little provoking. We are having very nice times here indeed. Breakfast at eight, dinner at half-past twelve, and tea at half-past six, giving us an afternoon of unprecedented length for such lounging, strawberrying or egg-hunting as happens to be on the carpet. The air is perfectly loaded with the fragrance of clover blossoms and fresh hay. I never saw such clover in my life; roses are nothing in comparison. I only want an old nag and a wagon, so as to drive a load of children about these lovely regions, and that I hope every moment to attain. To be sure, it would be amazingly convenient if I had a table, and didn't have to sit on the floor to write upon a trunk; but then one can't have everything, and I am almost too comfortable with what I have. A. is busy reading Southey to her "children"; baby is off searching for eggs, and her felicity reached its height when she found an ambitious hen had laid two in her carriage, which little thought what it was coming to the country for. I think the dear child already looks better; she lives in the open air and enjoys everything. Mrs. Buck lives about half a mile below us, and we run back and forth many times a day. I have already caught the country fashion of rushing to the windows the moment a wheel or an opening gate is heard. I fancy everybody is bringing me a letter or else want to send one to the office, and the only way to do that is to scream at passers-by and ask them if they are going that way. If you hear that I am often seen driving a flock of geese down the road, or climbing stone walls, or creeping through bar fences, you needn't believe a word of it, for I am a pattern of propriety, and pride myself on my dignity. I hope, now you have begun so charmingly, that you will write again. You know what letters are in the country. _To her Husband, Westport, June 27._ I wonder where you are this lovely morning? Having a nice time somewhere, I do hope, for it is too fine a day to be lost. If you want to know where I am, why I'm sitting at the window writing on a trunk that I have just lifted into a chair, in order to make a table. For table there, is none in this room, and how am I to write a book without one? If ever I get down to the village, I hope to buy, beg, borrow or steal one, and until that time am putting off beginning my new Little Susy. [7] That note from Miss Warner, by the by, spoke so enthusiastically of the Six Teachers that I felt compensated for the mortification of hearing -------- call it a "nice" book. You will be sorry to hear that I have no prospect of getting a horse. I am quite disappointed, as besides the pleasure of driving our children, I hoped to give Mrs. Buck and the boys a share in it. Only to think of her bringing up from the city a beefsteak for baby, and proposing that the doctor should send a small piece for her every day! Thank you, darling, for your proposal about the Ocean House. I trust no such change will be needful. We are all comfortable now, the weather is delicious, and there are so many pretty walks about here, that I am only afraid I shall be too well off. Everything about the country is charming to me, and I never get tired of it. The first few days nurse seemed a good deal out of sorts; but I must expect some such little vexations; of course, I can not have perfection, and for dear baby's sake I shall try to exercise all the prudence and forbearance I can. _Sunday._--We went to church this morning and heard a most instructive and, I thought, superior sermon from Mr. Burr of Weston, on progress in religious knowledge. He used the very illustration about the cavern and the point of light that you did. _July 7th._--We all drove to the beach on Saturday. It was just the very day for such a trip, and baby was enchanted. She sat right down and began to gather stones and shells, as if she had the week before her. We were gone three hours and came home by way of the village, quite in the mood for supper. Yesterday we had a pleasant service; Mr. Atkinson appears to be a truly devout, heavenly man to whom I felt my heart knit at the outset on this account, I am taking great delight in reading the Memoir of Miss Allibone. [8] How I wish I had a friend of so heavenly a temper! I fear my new Little Susy will come out at the little end of the horn. I am sure it won't be so good as the others. It is more than one quarter done. _July 21st._--What do you think I did this forenoon? Why, I finished Little Susy and shall lay it aside for some days, when I shall read it over, correct, and pack it off out of the way. Yes, I wish you would bring my German Hymn Book. I am so glad you liked the hymns I had marked! [9] And do get well so as not to have to leave off preaching the Gospel. My heart dies within me whenever I think of your leaving the ministry. Every day I live, it appears to me that the office of a Christian pastor and teacher is the best in the world. I shall not be able to write you a word to-morrow, as we are to go to Greenfield Hill to Miss Murray's, and you must take to-morrow's love to-night--if you think you can stand so much at once. God be with you and bless you. _July 30th._--Baby and I have just been having a great frolic. She was so pleased with your message that she caught up your letter and kissed it, which I think very remarkable in a child who, I am sure, never saw such a thing done. A. seems well and happy, and is as good as I think we ought to expect. I see more and more every day, that if there ever _was_ such a thing as human perfection, it was as long ago as David's time when, as he says, he saw the "end" of it. How very kind the W.'s have been! _August 3d._--I got hold of Dr. Boardman's "Bible in the Family," at the Bucks yesterday, and brought it home to read. I like it very much. There is a vein of humor running through it which, subdued as it is, must have awakened a good many smiles. He quotes some lines of Coleridge, which I wonder I did not have as a motto for Susy's Teachers: Love, Hope and Patience, these must be thy graces, And in thine own heart let them first _keep school_. _To Miss Mary B. Shipman, Westport, August 11._ Dr. Buck, who has seen her twice since we came here, thinks baby wonderfully improved, and says every day she lives increases her chance of life. I have been exceedingly encouraged by all he has said, and feel a great load off my heart. Last Friday, on fifteen minutes' notice, I packed up and went _home_, taking nurse and biddies, of course. I was so restless and so perfectly _possessed_ to go to meet George, that I could not help it. We went in the six o'clock train, as it was after five when I was "taken" with the fit that started me off; got home in a soft rain, and to our great surprise and delight found G. there, he having got homesick at Saratoga, and just rushed to New York on his way here. We had a great rejoicing together, you may depend, and I had a charming visit of nearly three days. We got back on Monday night, rather tired, but none of us at all the worse for the expedition. Mr. P. sits here reading the Tribune, and A. is reading "Fremont's Life." She is as brown as an Indian and about as wild. A few passages from her journal will also throw light upon this period: _June 30th._--I am finding this solitude and leisure very sweet and precious; God grant it may bear the rich and abundant fruit it ought to do! Communion with Him is such a blessing, here at home in my own room, and out in the silent woods and on the wayside. Saturday, especially, I had a long walk full of blissful thoughts of Him whom I do believe I love--oh, that I loved Him better!--and in the evening Mrs. Buck came and we had some very sweet beginnings of what will, I trust, ripen into most profitable Christian communion. My heart delights in the society of those who love Him. Yesterday I had a more near access to God in prayer than usual, so that during the whole service at church I could hardly repress tears of joy and gratitude. _July 7th._--I do trust God's blessed, blessed Spirit is dealing faithfully with my soul--searching and sifting it, revealing it somewhat to itself and preparing it for the indwelling of Christ. This I do heartily desire. Oh, God! search me and know me, and show me my own guilty, poor, meagre soul, that I may turn from it, humbled and ashamed and penitent, to my blessed Saviour. How very, very thankful I feel for this seclusion and leisure; this quiet room where I can seek my God and pray and praise, unseen by any human eye--and which sometimes seems like the very gate of heaven. _July 23d._--This is my dear little baby's birthday. I was not able to sleep last night at all, but at last got up and prayed specially for her. God has spared her two years; I can hardly believe it! Precious years of discipline they have been, for which I do thank Him. I have prayed much for her to-day, and with some faith, that if her life is spared it will be for His glory. How far rather would I let her go this moment, than grow up without loving Him! Precious little creature! _27th._--This has been one of the most oppressive days I ever knew. I went to church, however, and enjoyed all the services unusually. As we rode along and I saw the grain ripe for the harvest, I said to myself, "God gathers in _His_ harvest as soon as it is ripe, and if I devote myself to Him and pray much and turn entirely from the world I shall ripen, and so the sooner get where I am _all the time_ yearning and longing to go!" I fear this was a merely selfish thought, but I do not know. This world seems less and less homelike every day I live. The more I pray and meditate on heaven and my Saviour and saints who have crossed the flood, the stronger grows my desire to be bidden to depart hence and go up to that sinless, blessed abode. Not that I forget my comforts, my mercies here; they are _manifold_; I know they are. But Christ appears so precious; sin so dreadful! so dreadful! To-day I gave way to pride and irritation, and my agony on account of it outweighs weeks of merely earthly felicity. The idea of a Christian as he should be, and the reality of most Christians--particularly myself--why, it almost makes me shudder; my only comfort is, in heaven, I _can_ not sin! In heaven I shall see Christ, and see Him as He is, and praise and honor Him as I never do and never shall do here. And yet I know my dear little ones need me, poor and imperfect a mother as I am; and I pray every hour to be made willing to wait for their sakes. For at the longest it will not be long. Oh, I do believe it is the _sin_ I dread and not the suffering of life--but I know not; I may be deluded. My love to my Master seems to me very shallow and contemptible. I am astonished that I love anything else. Oh, that He would this moment come down into this room and tell me I never, never, shall grieve Him again! Some verses entitled "Alone with God," belong here: Into my closet fleeing, as the dove Doth homeward flee, I haste away to ponder o'er Thy love Alone with Thee! In the dim wood, by human ear unheard, Joyous and free, Lord! I adore Thee, feasting on Thy word, Alone with Thee! Amid the busy city, thronged and gay, But One I see, Tasting sweet peace, as unobserved I pray Alone with Thee! Oh, sweetest life! Life hid with Christ in God! So making me At home, and by the wayside, and abroad, Alone with Thee! WESTPORT, _August 22, 1856._ * * * * * V. Ready for new Trials. Dangerous Illness. Extracts from her Journal. Visit to Greenwood. Sabbath Meditations. Birth of another Son. Her Husband resigns his pastoral Charge. Voyage to Europe. The summer at Westport was so beneficial to the baby and so full both of bodily and spiritual refreshment to herself, that on returning to town, she resumed her home tasks with unwonted ease and comfort. The next entry in her journal alludes to this: _November 27th_.--Two months, and not a word in my journal! I have done far more with my needle and my feet than with my pen. One comes home from the country to a good many cares, and they are worldly cares, too, about eating and about wearing. I hope the worst of mine are over now and that I shall have more leisure. But no, I forget that now comes the dreaded, dreaded experience of weaning baby. But what then? I have had a good rest this fall. Have slept unusually well; why, only think, some nights not waking once--and some nights only a few times; and then we have had no sickness; baby better--all better. Now I ought to be willing to have the trials I need so much, seeing I have had such a rest. And heaven! heaven! let me rest on that precious word. Heaven is at the end and God is there. Early in March, 1857, she was taken very ill and continued so until May. For some weeks her recovery seemed hardly possible. She felt assured her hour had come and was eager to go. All the yearnings of her heart, during many years, seemed on the point of being gratified. The next entry in her journal refers to this illness: _Sunday, May 24th, 1857._--Just reading over the last record how ashamed I felt of my faithlessness! To see dear baby so improved by the very change I dreaded, and to hear her pretty, cheerful prattle, and to find in her such a source of joy and comfort--what undeserved, what unlooked-for mercies! But like a physician who changes his remedies as he sees occasion, and who forbears using all his severe ones at once, my Father first relieved me from my wearing care and pain about this dear child, and then put me under new discipline. It is now nearly six months since I have been in usual health, and eight weeks of great prostration and suffering have been teaching me many needed lessons. Now, contrary to my hopes and expectations, I find myself almost well again. At first, having got my heart _set_ toward heaven and after fancying myself almost there, I felt disappointed to find its gates still shut against me. [10] But God was very good to me and taught me to yield in this point to His wiser and better will; He made me, as far as I know, as peaceful in the prospect of living as joyful in the prospect of dying. Heaven did, indeed, look very attractive when I thought myself so near it; I pictured myself as no longer a sinner but a blood-washed saint; I thought I shall soon see Him whom my soul loveth, and see Him as He is; I shall never wound, never grieve Him again, and all my companions will be they who worship Him and adore Him. But not yet am I there! Alas, not yet a saint! My soul is oppressed, now that health is returning, to find old habits of sin returning too, and this monster Self usurping God's place, as of old, and pride and love of ease and all the infirmities of the flesh thick upon me. After being encompassed with mercies for two months, having every comfort this world could offer for my alleviation, I wonder at myself that I can be anything but a meek, docile child, profiting by the Master's discipline, sensible of the tenderness that went hand-in-hand with every stroke, and walking softly before God and man! But I am indeed a wayward child and in need of many more stripes. May I be made willing and thankful to bear them. Indeed, I do thank my dear Master that He does not let me alone, and that He has let me suffer so much; it has been a rich experience, this long illness, and I do trust He will so sanctify it that I shall have cause to rejoice over it all the rest of my life. Now may I return patiently to all the duties that lie in my sphere. May I not forget how momentous a thing death appeared when seen face to face, but be ever making ready for its approach. And may the glory of God be, as it never yet has been, my chief end. My love to Him seems to me so very feeble and fluctuating. Satan and self keep up a continual struggle to get the victory. But God is stronger than either. He must and will prevail, and at last, and in a time far better than any I can suggest, He will open those closed gates and let me enter in to go no more out, and then "I shall never, never sin." As might be inferred from this record, she was at this time in the sweetest mood, full of tenderness and love. The time of the singing of birds had now come, and all nature was clothed with that wondrous beauty and verdure which mark the transition from spring to summer. The drives, which she was now able to take into the country, on either side of the river, gave her the utmost delight. On the 30th of May--the day that has since become consecrated to the memory of the Nation's heroic dead--she went, with her husband and eldest daughter, to visit and place flowers upon the graves of Eddy and Bessie. Never is Greenwood more lovely and impressive than at the moment when May is just passing into June. It is as if Nature were in a transfiguration and the glory of the Lord shone upon the graves of our beloved! Mrs. Prentiss made no record of this visit, but on the following day thus wrote in her journal: _May 31st._--Another peaceful, pleasant Sunday, whose only drawback has been the want of strength to get down on my knees and praise and pray to my Saviour, as I long to do. For well as I am and astonishingly improved in every way, a very few minutes' use of my voice, even in a whisper, in prayer, exhausts me to such a degree that I am ready to faint. This seems so strange when I can go on talking to any extent--but then it is talking without emotion and in a desultory way. Ah well! God knows best in what manner to let me live, and I desire to ask for nothing but a docile, acquiescent temper, whose only petition shall be, "What wilt Thou have me to do?" not how can I get most enjoyment along the way. I can not believe if I am His child, that He will let anything hinder my progress in the divine life. It seems dreadful that I have gone on so slowly, and backward so many times--but then I have been thinking this is "to humble and to prove me, and to do me good in the latter end." ... I thank my God and Saviour for every faint desire He gives me to see Him as He is, and to be changed into His image, and for every struggle against sin He enables me to make. It is all of Him. I do wish I loved Him better! I do wish He were never out of my thoughts and that the aim to do His will swallowed up all other desires and strivings. Satan whispers that will never be. But it shall be! One day--oh, longed-for, blessed, blissful day!--Christ will become my All in all! Yes, even mine! This is the last entry in her journal for more than a year; her letters, too, during the same period are very few. In August of 1857, she was made glad by the birth of another son, her fifth child. Her own health was now much better than it had been for a long time; but that of her husband had become so enfeebled that in April, 1858, he resigned his pastoral charge and by the advice of his physician determined to go abroad, with his family, for a couple years; the munificent kindness of his people having furnished him with the means of doing so. The tender sympathy and support which she gave him in this hour of extreme weakness and trial, more than everything else, after the blessing of Heaven, upheld his fainting spirits and helped to restore him at length to his chosen work. They set sail for the old world in the steamship Arago, Capt. Lines, June 26th, amidst a cloud of friendly wishes and benedictions. [1] The friend was Mr. Wm. G. Bull, who had a summer cottage at Rockaway. He was a leading member of the Mercer street church and one of the best of men. The poor and unfortunate blessed him all the year round. To Mrs. Prentiss and her husband he was indefatigable in kindness. He died at an advanced age in 1859. [2] Godman's "American Natural History." [3] Mrs. Norman White, mother of the Rev. Erskine N. White, D.D., of New York. [4] Her cousin, whose sudden death occurred under the same roof in October of the next year. [5] "We were all weighed soon after coming here," she wrote, "and my ladyship weighed 96, which makes me out by far the leanest of the ladies here. When thirteen years old I weighed but 50 pounds." [6] Referring to "Little Susy's Six Birthdays." [7] _Little Susy's Little Servants._ [8] A Life bid with Christ in God, being a memoir of Susan Allibone. By Alfred Lee, Bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church in Delaware. [9] See appendix C, p. 539. [10] Many years afterward, speaking to a friend of this illness, she related the following incident. One day she lay, as was supposed, entirely unconscious and _in articulo mortis_. Repeated but vain attempts had been made to administer a medicine ordered by the doctor to be used in case of extremity. Her husband urged one more attempt still; it might possibly succeed. She heard distinctly every word that was spoken and instantly reasoned within herself, whether she should consent or refuse to swallow the medicine. Fancying herself just entering the eternal city, she longed to refuse but decided it would be wrong and so consented to come back again to earth. CHAPTER VI. IN RETREAT AMONG THE ALPS. 1858-1860. I. Life abroad. Letters about the Voyage and the Journey from Havre to Switzerland. Chateau d'Oex. Letters from there. The Châlet Rosat. The Free Church of the Canton de Vaud. Pastor Panchaud. Mrs. Prentiss passed more than two years abroad, mostly in Switzerland. They were years burdened with heavy cares, with ill-health and keen solicitude concerning her husband. But they were also years hallowed by signal mercies of Providence, bright every now and then with floods of real sunshine, and sweetened by many domestic joys. Although quite secluded from the world a large portion of the time, her solitude was cheered by the constant arrival of letters from home. During these years also she was first initiated into full communion with Nature; and what exquisite pleasure she tasted in this new experience, her own pen will tell. Indeed, this period affords little of interest except that which blossomed out of her domestic life, her friendships, and her love of nature. She travelled scarcely at all and caught only fugitive glimpses of society or of the treasures of European art. A few simple records, therefore, of her retired home-life and of the impressions made upon her by Alpine scenery, as contained in her letters, must form the principal part of this chapter. Her correspondence, while abroad, would make a large volume by itself; in selecting from it what follows, the aim has been to present, as far as possible, a continuous picture of her European sojourn, drawn by herself. Were a faithful picture of its quiet yet varied scenes to be drawn by another hand, it would include features wholly omitted by her; features radiant with a light and beauty not of earth. It would reflect a sweet patience, a heroic fortitude, a tender sympathy, a faith in God and an upholding, comforting influence, which in sharp exigencies the Christian wife and mother knows so well how to exercise, and which are inspired only by the Lord Jesus Himself. The friend to whom the following letter was addressed years ago passed away from earth. But her name is still enshrined in many hearts. The story of her generous and affectionate kindness, as also that of her children, would fill a whole chapter. "You will never know how we have loved and honored you all, _straight through_" wrote Mrs. Prentiss to one of them, many years later. _To Mrs. Charles W. Woolsey, Havre, July 11, 1858._ How many times during our voyage we had occasion to think of and thank you and yours, a dozen sheets like this would fail to tell you. Of all your kind arrangements for our comfort not one failed of its object. Whether the chair or my sacque had most admirers I do not know, but I can't imagine how people ever get across the ocean without such consolations on the way. As to the grapes they kept perfectly to the last day and proved delicious; the box then became a convenient receptacle for the children's toys; while the cake-box has turned into a medicine-chest. We had not so pleasant a voyage as is usual at this season, it being cold and rainy and foggy much of the time. However, none of us suffered much from sea-sickness--Mr. Prentiss not in the least; his chief discomfort was from want of sleep. On the whole, we had a less dreary time than we anticipated, and perhaps the stupidity in which we were engulfed for two weeks was a wholesome refuge from the excitement of the month previous to our departure. We landed in a deluge of rain, and the only article in our possession that alarmed the officers of the Custom House was _not_ the sewing-machine, which was hardly vouchsafed a look, but your cake-box. We were thankful to tumble pell-mell into a carriage, and soon to find ourselves in a comfortable room, before a blazing fire. We go round with a phrase-book and talk out of it, so if anybody ever asks you what sort of people the Prentiss family are and what are our conversational powers, you may safely and veraciously answer, "They talk like a book." M. already asks the French names of almost everything and is very glad to know that "we have got at Europe," and when asked how she likes France, declares, "Me likes _that_." We go off to Paris in the morning. I will let Mr. Prentiss tell his own story. Meanwhile we send you everyone our warmest love and thanks. After a few days in Paris the family hastened to Chateau d'Oex, where New York friends awaited them. Chateau d'Oex is a mountain valley in the canton of Vaud, on the right bank of the Sarine, twenty-two miles east of Lausanne, and is one of the loveliest spots in Switzerland. Aside from its natural beauties, it has some historical interest. It was once the home of the Counts of Gruyere, and the ruins of their ancient chateau are still seen there. The Free church of the village was at this time under the care of Pastor Panchaud, a favorite pupil and friend of Vinet. He was a man of great simplicity and sweetness of character, an excellent preacher, and wholly devoted to his little flock. Mrs. Prentiss and her husband counted his society and ministrations a smile of Heaven upon their sojourn in Chateau d'Oex. _To Mrs. Henry B. Smith, Chateau D'Oex July 25, 1858._ Our ride from Havre to Paris was charming. We had one of those luxurious cars, to us unknown, which is intended to hold only eight persons, but which has room for ten; the weather was perfect, and the scenery all the way very lovely and quite novel. A. and I kept mourning for you and M. to enjoy it with us, and both agreed that we would gladly see only half there was to see, and go half the distance we were going, if we could only share with you our pleasures of every kind. On reaching Paris and the hotel we found we could not get pleasant rooms below the fifth story. They were directly opposite the garden of the Tuileries, where birds were flying and singing, and it was hard to realise that we were in the midst of that great city. We went sight-seeing very little. A. and I strolled about here and there, did a little shopping, stared in at the shop windows, wished M. had this and you had that, and then strolled home and panted and toiled and groaned up our five flights, and wrote in our journals, or rested, or made believe study French. We went to the Jardin des Plantes in order to let the children see the Zoological Garden. We also drove through the Bois de Boulogne, and spent part of an evening in the garden of the Palais Royal, and watched the people drinking their tea and coffee, and having all sorts of good times. We found Paris far more beautiful than we expected, and certainly as to cleanliness it puts New York ages behind. We were four days in coming from Paris to this place. We went up the lake of Geneva on one of the finest days that could be asked for, and then the real joy of our journey began; Paris and all its splendors faded away at once and forever before these mountains, and as George had never visited Geneva, or seen any of this scenery, my pleasure was doubled by his. Imagine, if you can, how we felt when Mt. Blanc appeared in sight! We reached Vevay just after sunset, and were soon established in neat rooms of quite novel fashion. The floors were of unpainted white wood, checked off with black walnut; the stairs were all of stone, the stove was of porcelain, and every article of furniture was odd. But we had not much time to spend in looking at things within doors, for the lake was in full view, and the mountain tops were roseate with the last rays of the setting sun, and the moon soon rose and added to the whole scene all it wanted to make us half believe ourselves in a pleasant dream. I often asked myself, "Can this be I!" "And _if_ it be I, as I hope it be"-- Early next morning, which was dear little M.'s birthday, we set off in grand style for Chateau d'Oex. We hired a monstrous voiture which had seats inside for four, and on top, with squeezing, seats for three, besides the driver's seat; had five black horses, and dashed forth in all our splendor, ten precious souls and all agog. I made a sandwich between Mr. S. and George on top, and the "bonnes" and children were packed inside. This was our great day. The weather was indescribably beautiful; we felt ourselves approaching a place of rest and a welcome home; the scenery was magnificent, and already the mountain air was beginning to revive our exhausted souls and bodies. We sat all day hand in hand, literally "lost in wonder." With all I had heard ever since I was born about these mountains, I had not the faintest idea of their real grandeur and beauty. We arrived here just after sunset, and soon found ourselves among our friends. Mrs. Buck brought us up to our new home, which we reached on foot (as our voiture could not ascend so high) by a little winding path, by the side of which a little brook kept running along to make music for us. It is a regular Swiss châlet, much like the little models you have seen, only of a darker brown, and on either side the mountains stand ranged, so that look where we will we are feasted to our utmost capacity. We have four small, but very neat, pretty rooms. Our floors are of unpainted pine, as white and clean as possible. The room in which we spend our time, and where I am now writing, I must fully set before you.... Our centre table has had a nice new red cover put on it to-day, with a vase of flowers; it holds all our books, and is the ornament of the room. In front of the sofa is a red rug on which we say our prayers. Over it is a picture, and over G.'s table is another. Out of the window you see first a pretty little flower garden, then the valley dotted with brown châlets, then the background of mountains. Behind the house you go up a little winding path--and can go on forever without stopping if you choose--along the sides of which flowers such as we cultivate at home grow in profusion; you can't help picking them and throwing them away to snatch a new handful. The brook takes its rise on this side, and runs musically along as you ascend. Yesterday we all went to church at nine and a half o'clock, and had our first experience of French preaching, and I was relieved to find myself understanding whole sentences here and there. And now I need not, I suppose, wind up by saying we are in a charming spot. All we want, as far as this world goes, is health and strength with which to enjoy all this beauty and all this sweet retirement, and these, I trust, it will give us in time. Isabella "wears like gold." She is everything I hoped for, and from her there has not been even a _tone_ of discomfort since we left. But my back aches and my paper is full. We all send heaps of love to you all and long to hear. _August 10th._--We breakfast at eight on bread and honey, which is the universal Swiss breakfast, dine at one, and have tea at seven. I usually sew and read and study all the forenoon. After dinner we take our Alpen- stocks and go up behind the house--a bit of mountain-climbing which makes me realise that I am no longer a young girl. I get only so high, and then have to come back and lie down. George and Annie beat me all to pieces with their exploits. I do not believe we could have found anywhere in the world a spot better adapted to our needs. How _you_ would enjoy it! I perfectly yearn to show you these mountains and all this green valley. The views I send will give you a very good idea of it, however. The smaller châlet in the print is ours. In a little summer house opposite Isabella now sits at work on the sewing-machine. My best love to all three of your dear "chicks," and to your husband if "he's willin'." _To Mrs. H.B. Washburn, Chateau d'Oex, August 21, 1858._ ... We slipped off without any leave-taking, which I was not sorry for. I did not want to bid you good-bye. We had to say it far too often as it was, and, when we fairly set sail we had not an emotion left, but sank at once into a state of entire exhaustion and stupidity.... We thought Paris very beautiful until we came in view of the Lake of Geneva, Mt. Blanc, and other handiworks of God, when straightway all its palaces and monuments and fountains faded into insignificance. I began to feel that it was wicked for a few of my friends, who were born to enjoy the land of lakes and mountains, not to be here enjoying it, and you were one of them, you may depend. However, whenever I have had any such pangs of regret in relation to you, I have consoled myself with the reflection that with your enthusiastic temperament, artist eye, and love of nature, you never would survive even a glimpse of Switzerland; the land of William Tell would be the death of you. When you are about eighty years old, have cooled down about ten degrees below zero, have got a little dim about the eyes, and a little stiff about the knees, it may possibly be safe for you to come and break yourself in gradually. I have not forgotten how you felt and what you did at the White Mountains, you see. Well, joking apart, we are in a spot that would just suit you in every respect. We are not in a street or a road or any of those abominations you like to shun, but our little châlet, hardly accessible save on foot, is just tucked down on the side of the gentle slope leading up the mountain. It is remote from all sights but those magnificent ones afforded by the range of mountains, the green rich valley, and the ever-varying sky and cloudland, and all sounds save that of a brook which runs hurrying down its rocky little channel and keeps us company when we want it. I ought, however, to add that my view of this particular valley is that of a novice. People say the scenery here is tame in comparison with what may be seen elsewhere; but look which way I will, from front windows or back windows, at home or abroad, I am as one at a continual feast; and what more can one ask? Mr. Prentiss feels that this secluded spot is just the place for him, and as it is a good point from which to make excursions on foot or otherwise, he and Mr. Stearns have already made several trips and seen splendid sights. How much we have to be grateful for! For my part, I would rather--far rather--have come here and stayed here blindfold, than not to have come with my dear husband. So all I have seen and am experiencing I regard as beauty and felicity _thrown in_. _To Mrs. Abigail Prentiss, Chateau d'Oex, Sept. 5, 1858._ I wish we had you, my dear mother, here among these mountains, for the cool, bracing air would help to build you up. Both Mr. Stearns and George have come back from Germany looking better than when they started on their trip two weeks ago. It has been very cold; the thermometer some mornings at eight o'clock standing at 46º, and the mountains being all covered with snow. We slept with a couple of bottles of hot water at our feet, and two blankets and a comforter of eiderdown over us, after going to bed early to get warm. My sewing-machine is a great comfort, and the peasants enjoy coming down from the mountains to see it. Besides, I find something to do on it every day. I often wish I could set you down in the midst of the church to which we go every Sunday, if only to show you how the people dress. A bonnet is hardly seen there; everybody wearing a black silk cap or a bloomer. _I_ wear a bloomer; a brown one trimmed with brown ribbon. An old lady sits in front of me who wears a white cap much after the fashion of yours, and on top of that is perked a monstrous bloomer trimmed with black gauze ribbon. Her dress is linsey-woolsey, and for outside garment she wears a black silk half-handkerchief, as do all the rest. No light dress or ribbon is seen. I must tell you now something that amused A. and me very much yesterday at dinner. A French gentleman, who married a Spanish lady four years ago, sits opposite us at the table, and he and his wife are quite fascinated with M., watch all her motions, and whisper together about all she does. Yesterday they got to telling us that the lady had been married when only twelve years old to a gentleman of thirty-two, had two children, and was a grandmother, though not yet thirty-six years old. She said she carried her doll with her to her husband's house, and he made her learn a geography lesson every day till she was fourteen, when she had a baby of her own. I asked her if she loved her husband, and she said "Oh, yes," only he was very grave and scolded her and shut her up when she wouldn't learn her lessons. She said that her own mother when thirty-six years old had fourteen children, all of whom are now living, twelve of them boys, and that the laws of Spain allow the father of six sons to ask a favor for them of the King, but the father of twelve may ask a favor for each one; so every one of her brothers had an office under the Government or was an officer in the army. I don't know when I have been more amused, for she, like all foreigners, was full of life and gesture, and showed us how she tore her hair and threw down her books when angry with her husband. The children are all bright and well. The first time we took the cars after landing, M. was greatly delighted. "Now we're going to see grandma," she cried. Mrs. Buck got up a picnic for her, and had a treat of raspberries and sponge-cake--frosted. The cake had "M." on the top in red letters. Baby is full of life and mischief. The day we landed he said "Papa," and now he says "Mamma." Isabella [1] is everything we could ask. She is trying to learn French, and A. hears her recite every night. George found some furnished rooms at Montreux, which he has taken for six months from October, and we shall thus be keeping house. A. has just rushed in and snatched her French Bible, as she is going to the evening service with some of the English family. You will soon hear all about us from Mr. Stearns. The following letter will show how little power either her own cares, or the charms of nature around her, had to quench her sympathy for friends in sorrow: _To Miss A. H. Woolsey, Chateau D'Oex, Sept. 11, 1858._ We received your kind letter this morning. We had already had our sympathies excited in behalf of you all, by seeing a notice of the death of the dear little child in a paper lent to us by Mrs. Buck, and were most anxious to hear all the particulars you have been so good as to give us. This day, which fifteen years ago we marked with a white stone, and which we were to celebrate with all our hearts, has passed quite wearily and drearily. There is something indescribably sad in the details of the first bereavement which has fallen within the circle of those we love; perhaps, too, old sorrows of our own clamored for a hearing; and then, too, there was the conviction, "This is not all death will do while the ocean severs you from kindred and friends." We longed to speak to you many words of affectionate sympathy and Christian cheer; but long before we can make them reach you, I trust you will have felt sure that you were at least remembered and prayed for. It is a comfort that no ocean separates us from Him who has afflicted you. The loss to you each and all is very great, but to the mother of such a child it is beyond description. Faith alone can bear her through it, but faith _can_. What a wonderful little creature the sweet Ellie must have been! We were greatly touched by your account of her singing that beautiful hymn. It must have been divinely ordered that she should leave such a precious legacy behind her. And though her loveliness makes her loss the greater, the loss of an unlovely wayward child would surely be a heavier grief. I never know where to stop when I begin to talk about the death of a little one; but before I stop I want to ask you to tell Mrs. H. one word from me, which will not surprise and will perhaps comfort her. It is this. Neither his father nor myself would be willing to have God now bereave us of the rich experience of seven years ago, when our noble little boy was taken away. We have often said this to each other, and oftener said it to Him, who if He took, also gave much. But after all, we can not _say_ much to comfort either Mrs. H. or you. We can only truly, heartily and always sympathise with you.... Mr. Prentiss and Mr. Stearns have spent a fortnight in jaunting about; beginning at Thun and ending at Munich. They both came home looking fresher and better than when they left, but Mr. P. is not at all well now, and will have his ups and downs, I suppose, for a long time to come.... We can step out at any moment into a beautiful path, and, turn which way we will, meet something charming. Yesterday he came back for me, having found a new walk, and we took our sticks, and went to enjoy it together till we got, as it were, fairly locked in by the mountains, and could go no further. Only to think of having such things as gorges and water-falls and roaring brooks, right at your back door! The seclusion of this whole region is, however, its great charm to us, and to tell the truth, the primitive simplicity of style of dress, etc., is quite as charming to me as its natural beauty. We took tea one night last week with the pastor of the Free church; he lives in a house for which he pays thirty dollars a year, and we were quite touched and pleased with his style of living; white pine walls and floors, unpainted, and everything else to match. We took our tea at a pine table, and the drawing-room to which we retired from it, was a corner of the same room, where was a little mite of a sofa and a few books, and a cheerful lamp burning. All this time I have not answered your question about the Fourth of July. We had great doings, I assure you. Mr. P. made a speech, and ran up and down the saloon like a war horse. He was so excited and pale that I did not enjoy it much, thinking any instant he would faint and fall. Mr. Cleaveland was the orator of the day and acquitted himself very well, they all said. I was in my berth at the time of its delivery, saving myself for the dinner and toasts, and so did not hear it. The whole affair is to be printed. There was a great cry of "Prentiss! Prentiss!" after the "Captain's dinner," and at last the poor man had to respond in a short speech to a toast to the ladies. I suppose you know that he considers all women as angels. Mr. Stearns left us on Thursday to set his face homewards. * * * * * II. Montreux. The Swiss Autumn. Castle of Chillon. Death and Sorrow of Friends at Home. Twilight Talks. Spring Flowers. Early in October the family removed to Montreux, at the upper end of the lake of Geneva, where the next six months were passed in what was then known as the Maison des Bains. Montreux was at this time the centre of a group of pleasant villages, scattered along the shore of the lake, or lying back of it among the hills. One of these villages, Clarens, was rendered famous in the last century by the pen of Rousseau, and early in this by the pen of Byron. The grave of Vinet, the noble leader, and theologian of the Free Church of the canton of Vaud, now renders the spot sacred to the Christian scholar. Montreux was then a favorite resort of invalids in quest of a milder climate. At many points it commands fine views of the lake, and the whole region abounds in picturesque scenery. The Maison des Bains is said to have long since disappeared; but in 1858, it seemed to hang upon the side of the Montreux hill and was one of the most noticeable features of the landscape, as seen from the passing steamer. _To Mrs. Henry B. Smith, Montreux, October 31, 1858._ Your letter was a real comfort and I am so thankful to the man that invented letter-writing that I don't know what to do. We feast on everything we hear from home, however sick, or weak; it is a sort of sea-air appetite. Your letters are not a thousandth part long enough, but if you wrote all the time I suppose they wouldn't be.... You see I am experimenting with two kinds of ink, hoping my letters may be more easy to read. George tried it the other day by writing me a little note, telling me first how he loved me in black ink and then how he loved me in blue, after which he tore it up; wasn't that a shame? Anna writes that you seemed miserable the day she was at your house. The fact is, people of such restless mental activity as you and I, my dear, never need expect to be well long at a time--for, as soon as we get a little health we consume it just as children do candy. George and I are both able, however, to take long walks, and the other day we went to see the castle of Chillon. I was much impressed with all I saw. Under Byron's name, which I saw on one of the columns, there were the initials "H. B. S."--"H. B. Smith," says I. "You don't say so!" cries George, "where? let me see--oh, I don't think it can be his, for here are some more letters," which I knew all the time, but for all that H. B. S. _does_ stand for H. B. Smith. There are ever so many charming walks about here and from some points the scenery is wonderfully picturesque. I never was in the country so late as to see the trees after a frost, and although the foliage here is less brilliant, it is said, than that of American forests, I find it hard to believe that there can be anything more beautiful than the wooded mountains covered with the softest tints of every shade and coloring interspersed with snowcapped peaks and bare, gray rocks. The glory has departed somewhat within two days, as we have had a little snow-storm, and the leaves have fallen sadly. We began to have a fire yesterday and to put on some of our winter clothing; yet roses bloom just outside our door, and mignonette, nasturtiums, and a variety of other flowers adorn every house. The Swiss love for flowers is really beautiful. I wish you would let the children go to the hot-house which they pass on the way from school and get me some flower-seeds, as it will be pleasant to me to have the means of giving pleasure. I presume the gardener would be able to select a dozen or so of American varieties which would be a treasure here. I amuse myself with making flower-pictures, with which to enliven our parlor, and assure you that these works of art are remarkable specimens of genius. I do not know where the time goes, but I do not have half enough of it, or else do not understand the art of making the most of it. We have just subscribed to a library at a franc a month, and hope to read a little French.... I suppose Z. will be a regular young lady by the time we come home, and that I shall be afraid of her, as I am of all young ladies. How nicely she and M. would look in the jaunty little hats they all wear here. I wonder if the fashion will stretch across the ocean? I dare say it will. Never was there anything so becoming in the world. _To Mrs. Stearns, Montreux, Nov. 21, 1858._ We were glad to hear from your last letter that you are all so well, and especially to hear such good accounts of Mr. Stearns. It is a real comfort to us to find that his little trip has done him so much good. I was sorry to hear of the loss of that friend of the Thurstons in the Austria, for I heard Ellen speak of her in the most rapturous manner. This world is full of mysteries. Only to think of the shock George received when expecting to meet Mr. Butler in Paris and perhaps spend several weeks with him there, he heard at Geneva the news of his sudden death! [2] He loved and honored Mr. B. most warmly and truly. You will remember that the latter came abroad on account of the health of his daughter; her younger sister accompanied them, and they were all full of the brightest anticipations. But the same steamer which brought them over, carried home his remains on the next trip, and those two poor young girls are left in a strange land, afflicted and disappointed and alone. Mr. Butler died a most peaceful and happy death, and George was very glad to be in Paris in time to comfort the young ladies, who were perfectly delighted to see him. He got back yesterday very much exhausted and has spent most of the day on the sofa. A. has a teacher who comes three times a week from Vevay, and spends most of the day. She is a young lady of about twenty-five, well educated and accustomed to teaching, and has taken hold of A. with no little energy. She can not speak a word of English. Tell your A. we can't get over it that the horses, dogs and cats here all understand French. I have been ever so busy fixing and fussing for winter, which has come upon us all in a rush. Isabella has been bewitched for about a week, having got at last a letter from her beau, and every speck of work she has done on the sewing machine was either wrongside out or upside down. While George was gone I made up a lot of flower-pictures to adorn the walls of our parlor; he is walking about admiring them, and I wish you would drop in and help him. He had a real homesick fit to see you all to-day, feeling so tired after his journey; but seems brighter to-night, and promises faithfully to get well now, right off. _Dec. 5th._--The death of Sarah P. must have excited all your sympathies. The loss of a little child--and I shudder when I recall the pangs of such a loss!--can be nothing in comparison with such an affliction as this. I well remember what a bright young thing she was. Her poor mother's grief and amazement must be all the greater for the fact of the perfect vigor and sound health which had, as it were, assured her of long life and happiness and usefulness. I had an inexpressible sadness upon me as soon as I heard that she was dangerously ill; often in such moments one bitterly realises that all this world's idols are likewise perishable. A.'s teacher gives lessons also in a family half an hour from Vevay, who are going to Germany to spend a year, and she gave such an account of the place, that George let her persuade him into going to see it, as the owner desired to rent it during his absence. He took A. with him, as I could not go. They came back in ecstasies, and have both set their hearts so on taking it that I should not at all wonder if that should be the end. We left some of our things at Chateau d'Oex, fully expecting to return there, but this Vevay country seat with its cherry, apple and pear trees, its seclusion, its vicinity to reading-room and library, has quite disgusted George with the idea of spending another summer "en pension." The family entertained G. and A. very hospitably, gave them a lunch of bologna sausage, bread and butter, cake, wine and grapes, and above all, the little girls gave A. two little Guinea pigs, which you may imagine filled her with delight. The whole affair was very agreeable to her, as she had not spoken to a child (save M.) since we came to Montreux. _January 3d, 1859._--We read your letter, written at Bedford, with no little interest and sympathy. While we could not but rejoice that one more saint had got safely and without a struggle home, we felt the exceeding disappointment you must have had in losing the last smile you came so near receiving. [3] I think you had a sort of presentiment last winter what this one might bring forth, for I remember your saying it would probably be the last visit to you, and that you wanted to make it as pleasant as possible. And pleasant I do not doubt you and the whole household made it to her. Still there always will be regrets and vain wishes after the death of one we love. What a pity that we can not be to our friends while they live all we wish we had been after they have gone! George and I feel an almost childish clinging to mother, while we hope and believe she will live to bless us if we ever return home. _Jan. 23d._--We have been afflicted in the sudden death of our dear friend, Mrs. Wainwright. The news came upon us without preparation--for she was ill only a few days--and was a great shock to us. You and mother know what she was to us during the whole time of our acquaintance with her; I loved her most heartily. I can not get over the saddening impression which such deaths cause, by receiving new ones; our lives here are so quiet and uneventful, that we have full leisure to meditate on the breaches already made in our circle of friends at home, and to forebode many more such sorrowful tidings. Mrs. Wainwright was like a _mother_ to me, and I am too old to take up a new friend in her place. [4] I do not know whether I mentioned the afflictions of my cousin H. They have been very great, and have excited my sympathies keenly. Her first child died when eighteen months old, after a feeble, suffering life. Then the second child, an amiable, loving creature--I almost see her now sitting up so straight with her morsel of knitting in her hands!--she was taken sick and died in five days. Her sister, about eight years old, came near dying of grief; she neither played, ate or slept, and they wrote me that her wails of anguish were beyond description. Just as she was getting a little over the first shock, the little boy, then about three years old, died suddenly of croup. Poor H. is almost broken-hearted. I have felt dreadfully at being away when she was so afflicted; they had not been long enough in New York to have a minister of their own, and they all said, oh, if George and I had only been there! Her letters during the rest of the winter are tinged with the sadness caused by these and other distressing afflictions among friends at home. Her sympathies were kept under a constant strain. But her letters contain also many gleams of sunshine. Although very quiet and secluded, and often troubled by torturing neuralgic pains, as well as by sudden shocks of grief, her life at Montreux was not without its own peculiar joys. One of the greatest of these was to while away the twilight or evening hours in long talks with her husband about home and former days. Distance, together with the strange Alpine scenes about her, seemed to have the effect of a score of years in separating her from the past, and throwing over it a mystic veil of tenderness and grace. Old times and old friends, when thus viewed from the beautiful shores of Lake Leman, appeared to the memory in a softened light and invested with something of that ideal loveliness which the grave itself imparts to the objects of our affections. Many of these old friends, indeed, had passed through the Grave--some, long before, some recently--and to talk of _them_ was sweet talk about the blessed home above, as well as the home beyond the ocean. Another joy that helped to relieve the monotony and weariness of the Montreux life, was in her children; especially as, on the approach of spring, she wandered with them over the hill-sides in quest of flowers; then her delight knew no bounds. In a letter to Mrs. Washburn, dated March 19, she writes: M. and G. catch A.'s and my enthusiasm, and come with their little hands full of dandelions, buttercups and daisies, and their hats full of primroses. Even Mr. Prentiss conies in with his hands full of crocuses, purple and white, and lots of an extremely pretty flower, "la fille avant la mère," which he gathers on the mountains where I can not climb.... I often think of you and Mrs. B----, when I revel among the beautiful profusion of flowers with which this country is adorned. So early as it is, the hills and fields are _covered_ with primroses, daisies, cowslips, violets, lilies, and I don't know what not; in five minutes we can gather a basketful. * * * * * III. The Campagne Genevrier. Vevay. Beauty of the Region. Letters. Birth of a Son. Visit from Professor Smith. Excursion to Chamouni. Whooping-cough and Scarlet-fever among the Children. Doctor Curchod. Letters. At the end of March the family removed to the campagne Genevrier, about two miles back of Vevay, in the direction of St. Leger. At one point it overlooked the town and the lake, and commanded a fine view of the mountains of Savoy and of the distant Jura range. On the opposite shore of the lake is the village where Lord Byron passed some time in 1816, and where he is said to have written the wonderful description of a thunder-storm, in the third canto of Childe Harold. At all events the very scene, so vividly depicted by him, was witnessed from Genevrier. [5] _To Mrs. Stearns, Genevrier, April 5, 1859_ Your letter describing how nicely your party went off, followed us from Montreux, to enliven us here in our new home. We only wish we could have been there. You need not have apologised for giving so many details, for it is just such little events of your daily life that we want to hear about. My mouth quite waters for a bit of the cake they sent you; I remember Mrs. Dr. J. and others used to send us big loaves which were delicious, and such as I never tasted out of Newark. We came here last Thursday in a great snow-storm, which was cheerless and cold enough after the warm weather we had had for so many weeks. I do not suppose more snow fell on any day through the winter, and we all shivered and lamented and huddled over the fire at a great rate. Yet I have just been driven indoors by the heat of the sun, having begun to write at a little table just outside the house, and fires and snow have disappeared. George has gone to town with Jules in the wagon to buy sugar, oil, oats, buttons, and I do not know what not, and is no doubt thinking of you all; for we do nothing but cry out how we wish you were here with us to enjoy this beautiful spot. We are entirely surrounded by mountains in the distance, and with green fields, vineyards, and cultivated grounds nearer home. How your children would delight in the flowers, the white doves, the seven little tiny guinea pigs, no bigger than your Annie's hand shut up, and the ample, neat play-places all about us. I can't tell you how George and I enjoy seeing M. trotting about, so eager and so happy, and gathering up, as we hope, health and strength every hour! We find the house, on the whole, very convenient, and it is certainly as pleasant as can be; every room cheerful and every window commanding a view which is ravishing. _To Mrs. Smith, Genevrier, April 7, 1859._ You will be surprised, I dare say, to hear that I am writing out of doors; I can hardly, myself, believe that it is possible to do so with comfort and safety at this season, but it is perfectly charming weather, neither cold or hot, and with a small shawl and my bloomer on, I am out a large part of the day. You would fly here in a balloon if you knew what a beautiful spot we are in. We are surrounded with magnificent views of both the lake and the mountains, and can not turn in any direction without being ravished. The house is pretty, and in most respects well and even handsomely furnished; damask curtains, a Titian, a Rembrandt, and a Murillo in the parlor; the floors are waxed and carpetless, to be sure, but Mrs. Buck has given us lots of large pieces of carpeting such as are used in this country to cover the middle of the rooms, and these will make us comfortable next winter. But the winters here are so short that one hardly gets fixed to meet them, when they are over. We have quite a nice garden, from which we have already eaten lettuce, spinach, and parsley; our potatoes were planted a day or two ago, and our peas are just up. One corner of the house, unconnected with our part, is occupied by a farmer who rents part of the land; he is obliged to do our marketing, etc., and we get milk and cream from him. I wish the latter was as easy to digest as it is palatable and cheap. They beat it up here till it looks like pure white lather and eat it with sugar. The grounds about our house are very neat and we shall have oceans of flowers of all sorts; several kinds are in full bloom now. The wild flowers are so profuse, so beautiful and so various that A. and I are almost demented on the subject. From the windows I see first the wide, gravelled walk which runs round the house; then a little bit of a green lawn in which there is a little bit of a pond and a tiny _jet d'eau_ which falls agreeably on the ear; beyond this the land slopes gently upward till it is not land but bare, rugged mountain, here and there sprinkled with snow and interspersed with pine-trees. The sloping land is ploughed up and men and women are busy sowing and planting; too far off to disturb us with noise, but looking, the women at least, rather picturesque in their short blue dresses and straw hats. On the right hand the Dent du Midi is seen to great advantage; it is now covered with snow. The little village of St. Leger lies off in the distance; you can just see its roofs and the quaint spire of a very old church; otherwise you see next to no houses, and the stillness is very sweet. _Now_ won't you come? The children seem to enjoy their liberty greatly, and are running about all the time. They have each a little garden and I hope will live out of doors all summer. The state of her health during the next three months was a source of constant and severe suffering, but could not quench her joy in the wonders of nature around her. "My drives about this lovely place," she wrote in June, "have begun to give me an _immense_ amount of pleasure; indeed, my faculty for enjoyment is so great, that I sometimes think one day's felicity pays for weeks of misery, and that if it hadn't been for my poor health, I should have been _too_ happy here." Nor did her suffering weaken in the least her sympathy with the troubles of her friends at home. While for the most part silent as to her own peculiar trials, her letters were full of cheering words about theirs. To one of these she wrote at this time: God has taken care that we should not enjoy so much of this world's comfort since we left home as to _rest_ in it. Your letters are so sad, that I have fancied you perhaps overestimated our situation, feeling that you and your feeble husband were bearing the burden and heat of the day while we were standing idle. My dear ----, there are trials everywhere and in every sphere, and every heart knoweth its own bitterness, or else physical burdens are sent to take the place of mental depression. After all, it will not need more than _an hour_ in heaven to make us ashamed of our want of faith and courage here on earth. Do cheer up, dear child, and "look aloft!" Poor Mr. ----! I know his work is hard and up the hill, but it will not be _lost_ work and can not last forever. It seems to me God might accept with special favor the services of those who "_toil_ in rowing." After all, it is not the _amount_ of work He regards, but the spirit with which it is done. Early in July she was made glad by the birth of her sixth child--her "Swiss boy," as she liked to call him. Her gladness was not a little increased by a visit soon after from Professor Henry B. Smith, of the Union Theological Seminary. This visit was one of the memorable events of her life abroad. Professor Smith was not merely a great theologian and scholar; he was also a man of most attractive personal qualities. And, when unbending among friends from his exacting literary labors, the charm of his presence and conversation was perfect. His spirits ran high, and he entered with equal zest into the amusements of young or old. His laugh was as merry as that of the merriest girl; no boy took part more eagerly in any innocent sport; nobody could beat him in climbing a mountain. He was a keen observer, and his humor--sometimes very dry, sometimes fresh and bright as the early dew--rendered his companionship at once delightful and instructive. His learning and culture were so much a part of himself, that his most familiar talk abounded in the happiest touches about books and art and life. All his finest traits were in full play while he was at Genevrier, and, when he left, his visit seemed like a pleasant dream. _To Mrs. Smith, Genevrier, July 25th._ I am only too glad of the chance your husband gives me to write you another bit of a note. We are enjoying his visit amazingly. There are only two drawbacks to its felicity; one is that he won't stay all summer, and the other that you are not here. The children were enchanted with the presents he brought them. When I shall be on my feet and well and strong again time only can tell. A. has _devoted_ herself to me in the sweetest way. What she has been to me all winter and up to this time, tongue could not tell. My doctor is as kind as a brother. He was a perfect stranger to me, and was brought to my bedside when I was writhing in agony; but in ten minutes his tenderness and sympathy made me forget that he was a stranger, and, through that long night of distress and the long day that followed, he did _every_ thing that mortal could do to relieve and comfort me. He brought his wife up to see me the other day, and I begged her to tell him how grateful I felt. "He _is_ kind," she answered, "but then he _loves you so!_" (They both speak English.) I am so puffed up by his praises! I am sure I thought I groaned, but he says "pas une gemissement." _August 14th._--Our two husbands have gone to Lausanne for the day, taking A. with them. They seem to be having real nice times together, and if, as your husband says, "his old wife were here," his felicity and ours would be too great. They lounge about, talk, drink soda-water, and view the prospect. Dr. Buck came up from Geneva on Thursday and spent the night and part of Friday with us, and it would have done you good to hear him and your husband laugh. He was quite enchanted with the place, and says we never shall want to go home. _August 23d._--Your husband has given me leave to write you a little bit of a note out of my little bit of a heart on this little bit of paper. He and A. have just gone off to get some pretty grass for you. He will tell you when he gets home how he baptized his namesake on Sunday. We have enjoyed his visit more than tongue can tell. George says _he_ has enjoyed it as much as he thought he should, and I am sure I have enjoyed it a great deal more, as I have been so much better in health than I expected. But how you must miss him! On the 12th of September--a faultless autumn day--she set out with her husband and eldest daughter for Chamouni. It was her first excursion for pleasure since coming to Switzerland. A visit to this great and marvelous handiwork of God is an event in the dullest life. In her case the experience was so full of delight, that it seemed almost to compensate for the cares and disappointments of the whole previous year. The plan was to return to Genevrier and then pass on to the Bernese Oberland, but the visit to Chamouni proved to be her last as well as her first pleasure excursion in Switzerland. _To Mrs. Stearns, Genevrier, October 2, 1859._ I have, been so absorbed with anxiety about the children since we got back from our journey, that I have not felt like writing you a description of it. George told you, I suppose, that the news awaiting us when we reached Vevay was of the baby's having whooping-cough. It was a great shock to us, for the weather was dismally cold, and it did not seem as if the little thing could get safely through the disease at so unfavorable a time of year. Then there were the other two to have it also. On Friday last baby's cry had become a sad sort of wail, and he was so pale and weak, that I did not see how he was going to rally; but he is better to-day, so that I begin to take breath.... To go back to Chamouni, it seems a mercy that we went when we did. We enjoyed the whole trip. We made the excursion to the Mer de Glace in a pouring rain, without injury to any of us, and were well repaid for our trouble by the novelty of the whole expedition and the extraordinary sights we saw. George intended taking us to the Oberland if we found the children well on our return, but all hope of accomplishing another journey was destroyed when we found what different business was before us. It is a real disappointment, for the weather is now mild and very fine, just adapted to journeying, and so many things have conspired to confine me to this spot, that I have found it quite hard to be as patient and cheerful as I am sure I ought to be. Alas and alas! what an insatiable thing human nature is! How it craves _every_ thing the world can offer, instead of contenting itself with what ought to content it. However, I shall soon get over my fidgets, and as to George, of course he is only disappointed for me and A., as he has visited the Oberland, and was only going to give us pleasure. And, if I must choose between the two, I'd rather have the littlest baby in the world than see all the biggest mountains in it. We are thankful to hear that mother still continues to be so well. We long to see her, and I think a look at her or a smile from her would do George good like a medicine. _October 17th._--I went to church yesterday for the first time in ten months; we came out at half-past ten, so you see we have a tolerably long day before us when church is done. It is not at all like going to church at home; you not only find it painful to listen with such strict attention as the foreign tongue requires, but you miss the neat, well-ordered sanctuary, the picture of family life (for there are no little children present!) and the agreeable array of dress. The flapping, monstrous bloomers tire your eyes, and so do the grotesque, coarse clothes and the tokens of extreme poverty. I grow more and more patriotic every day, and am astonished at what I see and hear of life in Europe. I snatched one afternoon when the baby was better than usual to go to Villeneuve with George to call on Mr. and Mrs. H. and the sister of Mrs. H., who is one of our Mercer street young ladies. They were at the Hotel Byron, where you stayed. What a beautiful spot it is! Mr. H. afterwards came and dined with us, and was so charmed with the place that he was tempted to take it when we leave; his wife, however, had set her heart on going home at that time, as she had left one child there. The vintage is going on here at Genevrier to-day, and we are all invited to go and eat our fill. _To Mrs. Henry B. Smith, Genevrier, Oct. 20, 1859._ You ask how I find time to make flower-pictures. Why, I have been confined to the house a good deal by the baby's sickness, and could hardly set myself about anything else when I was not watching and worrying about him. When we got home from Chamouni we found him with what proved to be a very serious disease in the case of so young a child. It has shaken his little frame nearly to pieces, leaving him after weeks of suffering not much bigger than a doll, and all eyes and bones. It was a pretty hard struggle for life, and I hardly know how he has weathered the storm. The idea of leaving our dear little Swiss baby in a little Swiss grave, instead of taking him home with us, was very distressing to me, and I can not help earnestly desiring that death may not assail us in this foreign land. Our trip to Chamouni was very pleasant and did me a deal of good. If I could have kept on the mule-riding and mountain-viewing a few weeks I should have got quite built up, but the children's coughs made it impossible to take any more journeys. Mr. de Palèzieux, our landlord, called Monday to see if I would sell him my sewing-machine, as his wife was crazy to have one, and didn't feel as if she could wait to get one from New York. I told him I would, and all night could not sleep for teaching him how to use it--for his wife is in Germany, and he had to learn for her. I invited him to come to dinner on Wednesday and take his lessons. On Tuesday George said he wanted me to make a pair of sleeves for Mrs. Tholuck before the machine went off, so I went to town to get the stuff, at three o'clock began the sleeves and worked like a lion for a little over two hours, when they were done, beautifully. This morning I made four collars, which I shall want for Christmas presents, and a shirt for Jules (our old hired man), who never had one made of linen, and will go off the handle when he gets it. So I am tolerably used up, and shall be almost glad to send away the tempter to-morrow, though I dare say I shall miss it. I wish you could look out of my window this minute, and see how beautiful the autumnal foliage is already beginning to look. But my poor old head, what shall I do with it! You ask about my health; I am as well as I can be without sleep. I have had only one really good night since the baby came, to say nothing of those before; some worse than others, to be sure; but all wakeful to a degree that tries my faith not a little. I don't see what is to hinder my going crazy one of these days. However, I won't if I can help it. George goes to Germany this week. Well, my dear, good-bye. _To Mrs. Stearns, Dec. 12th._ George got home a fortnight ago, after his three weeks' absence; looking nicely, and more like himself than I have seen him in a long time. He had a most refreshing time in Germany among his old friends. It does my heart good to see him so cheery and hopeful. I have just seen the three babies safely in bed, after no little scampering and carrying-on, and now am ready for a little chat with you and dear mother. George sits by me, piously reading "Adam Bede." I was disappointed in the "Minister's Wooing," which he brought from Germany, and can not think Mrs. Stowe came up to herself this time, whatever the newspapers may say about it; and as for the plot, I don't see why she couldn't have let Mary marry good old Dr. Hopkins, who was vastly more of a man than that harum-scarum James. As to "Adam Bede," I think it a wonderful book, beyond praise. I hope these literary observations will be blessed to you, my dear. Mrs. Tholuck sent me a very pretty worsted cape to wear about house, or under a cloak. We went to Lausanne last Wednesday (George, A. and I) to do a little shopping for Christmas, and had quite a good time, only as life is always mingled in sweet and bitter, bitter and sweet, we had the melancholy experience of finding, when we got ready to come home, that Jules had taken a drop too much, and was in a state of ineffable silliness, which made George prefer to drive himself. We begin now to think and talk about Paris. We have been buying this afternoon some Swiss châlets and other things, brought to the door by two women, and I had hard work to keep George from taking a bushel or two. He got leaf-cutters enough to stab all his friends to the heart. Most of our lady friends will receive a salad-spoon and fork from one or the other of us. In fact, I have no doubt we shall be seized at the Custom-house as merchants in disguise. Well, I must bid you good night. The latter part of December her husband was requested to go to Paris and take the temporary charge of the American chapel there. He decided to do so, with the understanding that she and the children should soon follow him. But scarcely had he left Geneva, when first one and then another of the children was seized with scarlet fever. Here are a few extracts from her letters on the subject: _Dec. 31st._--Jules had hardly gone to the office, when I became satisfied that G. had scarlet fever beyond a doubt, and therefore sent Jeanette instantly to town to tell the doctor so, and to ask him to come up. He came, and said at once I was quite right.... As to our leaving here, he said decidedly that it _could_ not be under less than forty days. I can not tell you, my darling, how grieved I am for you to hear this news. Now I know your first impulse will be to come home, and perhaps to renounce the chaplaincy, but I beg you to think twice--thrice before you decide to do so.... How one thing hurries on after another! But it is the universal cry, everywhere; everybody is groaning and travailing in pain together; and we shall doubtless learn, in eternity, that our lot was not peculiar, but that we had millions of unknown fellow-sufferers on the way. Don't be too disappointed, but let us rather be thankful, that if our poor children must be sick, it was here and not in Paris, and now, good night. Betake yourself to your knees, when you have read this, and pray for us with all your might. Jan. 5, 1860.--The doctor has been here and says the other children must not meet G. till the end of this month, unless they are taken sick meantime. Poor M. melted like a snow-flake in the fire, when she heard that; she begins to miss her little playmate, and keeps running to say things to him through the key-hole, and to serenade him with singing, accompanied with a rattling of knives. I see but one thing to be done; for you to stay and preach and me to stay and nurse, each in the place God has assigned us.... You must pray for me, that I may be patient and willing to have my coming to Europe turn out a failure as far as my special enjoyment of it is concerned. There are better things than going to Paris, being with you and hearing you preach; pray that I may have them in full measure. I can't bear to stop writing--good-bye, my dearest love! _Jan. 15th_--If you could look in upon us this evening, you would be not a little surprised to see me writing in the corner of my room, close to the wash-stand where my lamp is placed; but you would see at a glance that the curtain of the bed is let down to shade our darling little M.'s eyes, as she lies close at my side. How sorry I am, as you can not see all this, to have to tell it to you! I have let her decide for me, and she wants dear papa to know that she is sick. Oh, why need I add another care to those you already suffer on our account!... As to baby, we are disposed to think that _he has had the fever_. Of course we do not know, but it is pleasant to hope the best.... And now, my precious darling, you see there is more praying work to do, as I hinted in my Saturday's note when my heart was pretty heavy within me. I need not tell you what to ask for the dear child; but for me do pray that I may have no will of my own. All these trials and disappointments are so purely Providential that it frightens me to think I may have much secret discontent about them, or may like to plan for myself in ways different from God's plans. Yet in the midst of so much care and fatigue I hardly know how I do feel; I am like a feather blown here and there by an unexpected whirlwind and I suppose I ought not to expect much of myself. "Though He slay me yet will I trust in Him," I keep saying over and over to myself, and if you are going to write a new sermon this week, suppose you take that for your text. I have not had one regret that you went to Paris, and as to your coming on, I do hope you will not think of it, unless you are sent for. You could do nothing and would be very lonely and uncomfortable. The doctor told me to tell you to stay where you were, and that you ought to rejoice that the children are not sick in Paris. I do trust that in the end we shall come forth from this troublous time like gold from the furnace. So far I have been able to do all that was necessary and I trust I shall continue so. God bless you, and bring us to a happy meeting in His own good time! _To Mrs. Stearns, Genevrier, Jan. 21, 1860._ ... Boiling over does one good of itself, and I am sure you feel the better for having done so. I do not know why _men_ seem to get along without such reliefs as women almost always seek in this way; whether there is less water in their kettles or whether their kettles are bigger than ours and boil with more safety. It is a comfort to believe that, whatever our troubles, in the end all will work together for our good. The new year has opened upon us here at Genevrier pretty gloomily, as George has told you. You will not be surprised, therefore, to hear that M. is also quite sick, much sicker than G. She is one of those meek, precious little darlings whom it is painful to see suffer, and I have hardly known what I was about, or where I was, since she was taken down. My baby is deserted by us all; I have only seen him in _moments_ for three weeks. You can not think how lonely poor A. is; half the time she eats alone in the big solitary dining-room; nobody has any time to walk out with her, what few children she knew are afraid to come here or to have her come nigh them, and I feel as if I should fly, when I think of it--for she is not strong or well and her life here in Switzerland has been a series of disappointments and anxieties. The only leisure moments I can snatch in the course of the twenty-four hours I have to spend in writing to George; but the last few evenings M. has slept, so that I could play a game of chess with her and try to cheer and brace her up against next day's dreariness. All her splendid dreams of getting off from this solitude to the life and stir of Paris have been dissipated, but she has never uttered one word of complaint; I have not heard her say as much as "Isn't it too bad!" And indeed we ought none of us to say so or to feel so, for the doctor assures me that for three such delicate children as he considers ours, to pass safely through whooping-dough and scarlet-fever, is a perfect wonder and that he is sure it is owing to the pure country air. And when I think how different a scene our house might present if our three little ones had been snatched away, as three or four even have been from other families, I am ashamed of myself that I dare to sigh, that I am lonely and friendless here, or that I have anything to complain of. It has been no small trial, however, to pass through such anxieties in so remote a place, with George gone; while on the other hand I have been most thankful that he has been spared all the details of the children's ailments, and permitted once more to feel himself about his Master's business. Providence most plainly called him to Paris, and I trust he will stay there and get good till we can join him. But I feel uneasy about him, too, lest his anxiety about the children should hang as a dead weight on his not quite rested head and heart. At any rate, I shall be tolerably glad to see him again at the end of our two months' separation. How I should love to drop in on you to-night! Doesn't it seem as if one _could_ if one tried hard enough! Well, good night to you. _To Mrs. Smith, Genevrier, Jan. 29, 1860._ I believe George has written you about our private hospital. He had not been gone to Paris forty-eight hours when G. was taken sick; that was a month ago, and I have only tasted the air twice in all that time. G. had the disease lightly. M., poor little darling, was much sicker than he was. It is a fortnight since she was taken and she hardly sits up at all; an older child would be in bed, but little ones never will give up if they can help it; I suppose it is because they can be held in the arms and rocked, and carried about. I have passed through some most anxious hours on account of M., and it seems little less than a miracle that she is still alive. The baby is well, and he is a nice little rosy fellow. It was a dreadful disappointment to us to be detained here instead of going to Paris. I felt that I couldn't live longer in such entire solitude; and just then, lo and behold, George was whisked off and I was shut up closer than ever. It is a great comfort to me that he got off just when he did, and has had grace to stay away; on the other hand, I need not say how his absence has aggravated my cares, how solitary the season of anxiety has been, and how, at times, my faith and courage have been put to their utmost stretch. The whole thing has been so evidently ordered and planned by God that I have not dared to complain; but, my dear child, if you had come in now and then with a little of your strengthening talk, I can't deny I should have been most thankful. It has been pretty trying for George to hear such doleful accounts from home, but I hope the worst is over, and that we shall be the wiser and the better for this new lesson of life. Dr. Curchod's rule is the same as Dr. Buck's--forty days confinement to one room; so we have a month more to spend here. I am afraid I am writing a gloomy letter. If I am, you must try to excuse me and say, "Poor child, she isn't well, and she hasn't had any good sleep lately, and she's tired, and I don't believe she _means_ to grumble." Do so much for me, and I'll do as much for you sometime. I hear your husband has taken up a Bible-class. It is perfectly shocking. Does he _want_ to kill himself, or what ails him? The pleasantest remembrance we shall have of this place is his visit.... Our doctor and his family stand out as bright lights in this picture; he has been like a brother in sympathy and kindness. We shall never forget it. God has been so good to you and to me in sparing our children when assailed by so fearful a disease, that we ought to love Him better than we ever did. I do so want my weary solitude to bear that fruit. * * * * * IV. Paris. Sight-seeing. A sick Friend. London and its Environs. The Queen and Prince Albert. The Isle of Wight. Homeward. On the 20th of February the family gladly bade adieu to Switzerland and set out for Paris, arriving there on the morning of the 22d. Mrs. Prentiss was overjoyed to find herself once more in the world. On the 23d she wrote to Mrs. Smith: We have got here safe and sound with our little batch of invalids. They bore the journey very well and are heartily glad to get into the world again. I am chock-full of worldliness. All I think of is dress and fashion, and, on the whole, I don't know that you are worth writing to, as you were never in Paris and don't know the modes, and have perhaps foolishly left off hoops and open sleeves. I long, however, to hear from you and your new babby, and will try to keep a small spot swept clear of finery in my heart of hearts, where you can sit down when you've a mind. Our little fellow is getting to be a sweet-looking baby, with what his nurse calls a most "gracieuse" smile--if you can guess what kind of a smile that is. But he is getting teeth and is looking delicate and soft, and your Hercules will knock him down, I know. But Paris was far from fulfilling to her or to the children the bright anticipations with which it had been looked forward to from lonely Genevrier. The weather could hardly have been worse; the house soon became another hospital; and sight-seeing was a task. Friends, however, soon gathered about her, and by their hospitality and little kindnesses, relieved the tedium of the weary days. _To Mrs. Stearns, Paris, March 27, 1860._ We pass many lonely hours in this big city, and often long for you and Mr. Stearns to drop in, or for a chance to run in to see dear mother. Getting nearer home makes it attractive. It works in the natural life just as it does in the spiritual in that respect. The weather is _dreadful_ and has been for five months--scarcely one cheery day in that whole time. What with this and the children's ill-health, I should not wonder if we left Paris as ignorant of its beauties as when we came. But I hope we shall not let that worry us too much, but rather be thankful that, bad as things are, they are not so bad as they might be. Our sympathies are greatly excited now for the Rev. Mr. Little, formerly of Bangor, who is in Paris--alone, friendless, and sick. If we could by any miraculous power stretch our scanty accommodations, we should certainly take him home and nurse him till his wife could be got here. You know, perhaps, that Mrs. Little is a daughter of Dr. Cornelius; and, when I recall the love and honor I was taught to feel towards him when I was a little girl, my heart quite yearns towards her, especially in this time of fearful anxiety about her husband. How insignificant my own trials look to me, when I think of the sorrow which is probably before her. _April 26th._--Our patience is still tried by the cold, damp, and most unwholesome weather, which prevents the children from going to see anything. But we do not care so much for ourselves or for them as for poor Mr. Little, who is exceedingly feeble, chiefly confined to his room, and so forlorn in this strange, homeless land. While George was with him last evening, he had a bad fit of coughing, which resulted in the raising of a gill or so of blood. I know you will feel interested to hear about him, and will not wonder that our hearts are so full of sympathy for him and for his poor wife, that we can hardly talk of anything else. He expects her in about a week. What a coming to Europe for her! How little those who stand on the shore to watch the departure of a foreign steamer, know what they do when they envy its passengers!... We buckled on our armor and began sight-seeing the other day, going to see the Sainte Chapelle and the galleries and museum of the Louvre among the rest. The Sainte Chapelle is quite unlike anything I ever saw and delighted us extremely. As to the Louvre, one needs several entire days to do justice to it, besides an amount of youthful enthusiasm and bodily strength which we do not possess; for, amid midnight watchings over our sick children and the like, the oil of gladness has about burnt out, and we find sight-seeing a weary task. _May 25th._--It does seem as if George's preaching was listened to with more and more serious attention, and it may be seen long after he has rested from his labors on earth, that he has done a good work here. We both are much interested in Professor [6] Huntington's sermons, [7] sent us by Miss W. This is a great deal for me to say, because I do not like to read sermons. During the last three weeks, before Mr. and Mrs. Little left, we accomplished very little. It was not that we did or could do so very much for them, but they had nobody to depend on but us, and George was constantly going back and forth trying to make them comfortable, arranging all their affairs, etc. She had a weary, anxious two weeks here, and now has set her face homewards, not knowing but Mr. L. may sink before reaching America. It is a great comfort to us to have been able to soothe them somewhat as long as they stayed in Paris. George says it was worth coming here for that alone. I say _we,_ but I _mean_ George, for what was done he did. The most I could do was to feel dreadfully for them. [8] We are now to begin sight-seeing again, and do all we can as speedily as possible, for only two weeks remain. The children are now pretty well. The baby is at that dangerous age when they are forever getting upon their feet and tumbling over backward on their heads. M. is the oddest little soul. Belle says she would rather go to a funeral than see all the shops in Paris, and, when they are out, she can hardly keep her from following every such procession they meet. I asked her the last time they went out if she had had a nice walk. She said not very nice, as she had only seen _one_ pretty thing, and that was a police-officer taking a man to jail. The idea of going to England is very pleasant, and, if we only keep tolerably well, I think it will do us all good. What is dear mother doing about these times? I always think of her as sitting by the little work-table in her room, knitting and watching the children. Give lots of love and kisses to her, and tell her we long to see her face to face. Kiss all the children for us--I suppose they'll let _you_! boys and all--and you may do as much for Mr. S. if you want to. Good-bye. On the 7th of June the family left Paris for London. A first visit to England-- That precious stone set in the silver sea-- is always an event full of interest to children of the New England Puritans. The "sceptered isle" is still in a sense their mother-country, and a thousand ancestral ties attract them to its shores. There is no other spot on earth where so many lines of their history, domestic and public, meet. And in London, what familiar memories are for them associated with almost every old street and lane and building! The winter and spring of 1860 had been cold, wet and cheerless well-nigh beyond endurance; and the summer proved hardly less dreary. It rained nearly every day, sometimes all day and all night; the sun came out only at long intervals, and then often but for a moment; the atmosphere, much of the time, was like lead; the moon and stars seemed to have left the sky; even the English landscape, in spite of its matchless verdure and beauty, put on a forbidding aspect. All nature, indeed, was under a cloud. This, added to her frail health, made the summer a very trying one to Mrs. Prentiss, and yet it afforded her not a little real delight. Some of her pleasantest days in Europe were spent in England. The following extracts are from a little journal kept by her in London: _June 10th._--We went this morning to hear Dr. Hamilton, and were greatly edified by the sermon, which was on the text: "Hitherto hath the Lord helped us." In the afternoon we decided to go to Westminster Abbey. It began to rain soon after we got out, and we had a two miles' walk through the mud. The old abbey looked as much like its picture as it could, but pictures can not give a true idea of the grandeur of such a building. We were a little late, and every seat was full and many were standing, as we had to do through the whole service. The sermon struck me as a very ordinary affair, though it was delivered by a lord. But the music was so sweet, performed for aught I know by angel--for the choir was invisible--and we stood surrounded by such monuments and covered by such a roof, that we were not quite throwing away our time. Albert B---- dined with us, and in the evening, with one accord, we went to hear Dr. Hamilton again. We had good seats and heard a most beautiful as well as edifying discourse on the first verses of the 103d Psalm. Some of the images were very fine, and the whole tone of the sermon was moderate, sensible, and serious. I use these words advisedly, for I had an impression that he was a flowery, popular man whom I should not relish. At the close of the service a little prayer-meeting of half an hour was held, and we came home satisfied with our first English Sunday, feeling some of our restless cravings already quieted as only contact with God's own people could quiet them. _11th._--Went to see the Crystal Palace. It proved a fine day, and we took M. with us. None of us felt quite well, but we enjoyed this new and beautiful scene for all that. It is a little fairy land. _14th._--Went to Westminster Abbey, and spent some time there. On coming out we made a rapid, but quite amusing passage through several courts where we saw numerous great personages in stiff little gray wigs. To my untrained, irreverent eyes they all looked perfectly funny. George was greatly interested and edified. It has been raining and shining by turns all day, and is this evening very cold. _15th._--Another of those days which the English so euphoniously term "_nasty_." Not knowing what else to do with it, we set off in search of No. 5 Sermon Lane, a house connected with a stereoscopic establishment in Paris, which we reached after many evolutions and convolutions, and found it to be a wholesale concern only. Pitying us for the trouble we had been at in seeking them, they let us have what views we wanted, but at higher prices than they sell them at Paris. We then went to the Tract House, and while selecting French and other tracts, a gentleman came and asked for a quantity of the "Last Hours of Dr. Payson." _16th._--Went to the Tower, and had a most interesting visit there. We were particularly struck by some spots shown us by one of the wardens, after the regular round had been gone through with, and the other visitors dispersed--namely, the cell where prisoners were confined with thumbscrews attached to elicit confession, and the floor where Lady Jane Grey was imprisoned. We looked from the window where she saw her husband carried to execution, and A. was locked up in the room so as to be able to say she had been a prisoner in the Tower. _17th._--Heard Dr. Hamilton again. Met Dr. and Mrs. Adams of New York there, and had a most kind and cordial greeting from them. Dr. A. introduced us to Dr. Hamilton. In the evening we went to hear Dr. Adams at Dr. H.'s church, and came home quite proud of our countryman, who gave us a most excellent sermon. At the close of the service Dr. H. invited us to take tea with him next week, and introduced us to his wife; a young, quiet little lady, looking as unlike most of us American parsonesses as possible, her parochial cares being, perhaps, less weighty than ours. _18th._--Two things made this day open pleasantly. One was a decided attempt on the part of the sun to come out and shine. The second was Dr. Adams' dropping in and taking breakfast with us. We also got letters from home, and the news that Mr. Little had reached New York in safety. After lunch, George went off in glory to the House of Commons, hinting that he might stay there till to-morrow morning, and begging for a night-key to let himself in. The rest of us went to the Zoological Garden, which is much more ample and interesting than the Jardin des Plantes. _20th._--Yesterday it poured in torrents all day, so that going out was not possible. To-day we went out in the drops and between the drops, to do a little shopping in the way of razors, scissors, knives, needles, and such like sharp and pointed things. We stepped into Nesbit's and took a view of Little Susy, who looked as usual, bought a few books, subscribed to a library, coveted our neighbor's property, and came home covered with mud and mire. _22d._--Went out to Barnet to call on Miss Bird. On reaching the station, we found Miss B. awaiting us with phaeton and pony. We were driven over a pretty three miles route to "Hurst Cottage," where we were introduced to Mrs. Bird and a younger daughter, and I had a nice little lunch, together with pleasant chat about America in general and E. L. S. in particular. Miss Bird said she showed her likeness to a gentleman, who is a great physiognomist, and asked his opinion of her. He replied, "She is a genius, a poetess, a Christian, and a true wife and mother." We then went up-stairs, and looked at Miss B.'s little study, after which she took us to see the church in Hadley, a very old building dating back to 1494. It has been repaired and restored and is a beautiful little church. On leaving it Miss Bird came with us a part of the way to the station and we got home in good season for dinner. The weather, true to its rule, could not last fine, and so this evening it is raining again. [9] _24th._--No rain all day! Can it be true? George went in the morning to hear Mr. Binney, and A. and I to Dr. Hamilton's, who preached a very good sermon on a favorite text of mine, "I beseech Thee show me Thy glory." In the evening Dr. Patton, of New York, induced us to go with himself and wife to a meeting at a theatre three miles off. The Rev. Mr. Graham preached. It was an interesting, but touching and saddening sight to look upon the congregation; to wonder why they came, and whether they would come again, and whether under those stolid and hardened faces there yet lay humanity. Many came with babies in their arms, who made themselves very much at home; some were in dirty week-day clothes; "some in rags and some in jags." Coming home we passed the spot where John Rogers was burned, and that where in time of the plague dead bodies were thrown in frightful heaps into one grave. _25th._--We took tea at Dr. Hamilton's, where we had a very pleasant evening, meeting Dr. and Mrs. Adams, as well as all Dr. H.'s session. Dr. H. strikes one most agreeably, and seems as genial and as full of life as a boy. _26th._--Visited Windsor Castle with Dr. Adams and his party, ten of us in all. We drove afterward to see the country church-yard, where Grey wrote his elegy and where he now lies buried. This was a most charming little trip and we all enjoyed it exceedingly. The young folks gathered leaves and flowers for their books. _29th._--Last evening we had a nice time and a cup of tea with the Adamses. To-day--another nasty day--they lunched with us, which broke up its gloom and we went with them to see Sloan's museum, a most interesting collection. We all enjoyed its novelty as well as its beauty. She also records the pleasure with which she visited the National Gallery, Madame Tussaud's Collection, the British Museum, Richmond, the Kew Gardens, and Bunhill Fields Burying-Ground, and, in particular, the grave of "Mr. John Bunyan." Not long before leaving London she attended a Sunday evening service for the people in Westminster Abbey, which interested her deeply. It suggested--or rather was the original of--the scene in The Story Lizzie Told: When we first got into that grand place, I was scared, and thought they would drive us poor folks out. But when I looked round, most everybody was poor too. At last I saw some of them get down on their knees, and some shut their eyes, and some took off their hats and held them over their faces. Father couldn't, because he had me in his arms; and so I took it off, and held it for him. "What's it for?" says I. "Hush," says father, "the parson's praying." When I showed IT to God, the room seemed full of Him. But that's a small room. The church is a million and a billion times as big, isn't it, ma'am? But when the minister prayed, that big church seemed just as full as it could hold. Then, all of a sudden, they burst out a-singing. Father showed me the card with large letters on it, and says he, "Sing, Lizzie, Sing!" And so I did. It was the first time in my life. The hymn said, Jesus, lover of my soul, Let me to Thy bosom fly, and I whispered to father, "Is Jesus God?" "Yes, yes," said he, "Sing, Lizzie, sing!" After the praying and the singing, came the preaching, I heard every word. It was a beautiful story. It told how sorry Jesus was for us when we did wrong, bad things, and how glad He was when we were good and happy. It said we must tell Him all our troubles and all our joys, and feel sure that He knew just how to pity us, because He had been a poor man three and thirty years, on purpose to see how it seemed. The most stirring sight by far which she witnessed while in London, was a review of 20,000 volunteers by the Queen in Hyde Park, on the 23d of June. She waited for it several hours, standing much of the time upon a camp-stool. As her Majesty appeared, accompanied by Prince Albert, the curiosity of the immense crowd "rose to such a pitch that every conceivable method was resorted to, to catch a glimpse of the field. Men climbed on each other's shoulders, gave 'fabulous prices' for chairs, boxes, and baskets, raised their wives and sweethearts high in the air, and so by degrees our view was quite obstructed." [10] The scene did not, perhaps, in numbers or in the brilliant array of fashion, rank, and beauty surpass, nor in military pomp and circumstance did it equal, a grand review she had witnessed not long before in the Champ de Mars; but in other respects it was far more impressive. Among the volunteers were thousands of young men in whose veins ran the best and most precious blood in England. And then to an American wife and mother, Queen Victoria was a million times more interesting than Louis Napoleon. She stood then, as happily she still stands, at the head of the Christian womanhood of the world; and that in virtue not solely of her exalted position and influence, but of her rare personal and domestic virtues as well. She was then also at the very height of her felicity. How little she or any one else in that thronging multitude dreamed, that before the close of the coming year the form of the noble Prince, who rode by her side wearing an aspect of such manly beauty and content, and who was so worthy to be her husband, would lie mouldering in the grave! [11] About the middle of July Mrs. Prentiss with her husband and children left London for Ventnor on the Isle of Wight, where, in spite of cold and rainy weather, she passed two happy months. With the exception of Chateau d'Oex, no place in Europe had proved to her such a haven of rest. Miss Scott, the hostess, was kindness itself. The Isle of Wight in summer is a little paradise; and in the vicinity of Ventnor are some of its loveliest scenes. Her enjoyment was enhanced by the society of Mr. and Mrs. Jacob Abbott, who were then sojourning there. An excursion taken with Mr. Abbott was doubly attractive; for, as might be inferred from his books, he was one of the most genial and instructive of companions, whether for young or old. A pilgrimage to the home and grave of the Dairyman's Daughter and to the grave of "Little Jane," and a day and night at Alum Bay, were among the pleasantest incidents of the summer at Ventnor. Of the visit to "Little Jane's" grave she gives the following account in her journal: _Aug. 10th._--To-day being unusually fine, we undertook our long-talked-of expedition to Brading. On reaching the churchyard we asked a little boy who followed us in if he could point out "Little Jane's" grave; he said he could and led us at once to the spot. How little she dreamed that pilgrimages would be made to her grave! Our pigmy guide next conducted us to the grave-stones, where her task was learned. "How old are you, little fellow?" I asked. "_Getting an to five_," he replied. "And does everybody who comes here give you something?" "_Some_ don't." "That's very naughty of them," I continued; "after all your trouble they ought to give you something." A shrewd smile was his answer, and George then gave him some pennies. "What do you do with your pennies?" I asked. "I puts them in my pocket." "And then what do you do?" "I saves them up." "And what then?" "My mother buys shoe's when I get enough. She is going to buy me some soon with _nails_ in them! These are dropping to pieces" (no such thing). "If that is the case," quoth George, "I think I must give you some more pennies." "Thank you," said the boy. "Do you see my sword?" George then asked him if he went to church and to Sunday-school. "Oh, yes, and there was an organ, and they learned to sing psalms." "And to love God?" asked George. "Yes, yes," he answered, but not with much unction, and so we turned about and came home. _To Mrs. Stearns, Ventnor, Aug. 24, 1860._ As this is to be our last letter home, it ought to be a very brilliant one, but I am sure it won't; and when I look back over the past two years and think how many stupid ones I have written you, I feel almost ashamed of myself. But on the other hand I wonder I have written no duller ones, for our staying so long at a time in one place has given small chance for variety and description. It is raining and blowing at a rate that you, who are roasting at home, can hardly conceive; we agreed yesterday that if you were blindfolded and suddenly set down here and told to guess what season of the year it was, you would judge by your feelings and the wind roaring down the chimney, that it was December. However disagreeable this may be it is more invigorating than hot weather, and George and the children have all improved very much. George enjoys bathing and climbing the "downs" and the children are out nearly all day when it does not rain. You may remember that the twilight is late in England, and even the baby is often out till half-past eight or nine.... I just keep my head above water by having no cares or fatigue at night. I feel _dreadfully_ that I am so helpless a creature, but I believe God keeps me so for my mortification and improvement, and that I ought to be willing to lead this good-for-nothing life if He chooses. We have had the pleasure of meeting Mr. and Mrs. Abbott here. They have gone now to spend the winter in Paris. Mrs. A. sent her love to you again and again, and I was very glad to meet her for your sake as well as her own, and to know Mr. A. better than I did before, and it was very pleasant to George to chat with him. We walked together to see Shanklin Chine. A. went with us, and Mr. Abbott amused her so on the way that she came home quite dissatisfied with her stupid papa and mamma. We are talking of little else now but getting home, and it is a pity you could not take down the walls of our hidden souls and see the various wishes and feelings we have on the subject. I forgot to say how glad we were that you found George Prentiss such a nice boy. [12] I always loved him for Abby's sake and he certainly was worthy of the affection she felt for him as the most engaging child I ever knew; he is a thorough Prentiss still, it seems. What is he going to be? You must feel queer to have a boy in college; it is like a strange dream. Our boys are two spunky little toads who need, or will need, all our energies to bring up. I have quite got my hand out, M. is so good--and hate to begin. But good-bye, with love to mother, Mr. S. and the children. The family embarked at Cowes on the magnificent steamship "Adriatic," September 13th, and, after a rough voyage, reached New York on the 24th of the same month. Old friends awaited their coming and welcomed them home again with open arms. It was a happy day for Mrs. Prentiss, and in the abundance of its joy she forgot the anxious and solitary months through which she had just been passing. She came back with four children instead of three; her husband was, partially at least, restored to health; and she breathed once more her native air. [1] A most faithful servant, to whom Mrs. P. was greatly attached. [2] The Hon. Benjamin F. Butler, of New York, was one of the most honored members of the Mercer street church. He was known throughout the country as an eminent lawyer and patriotic citizen. In the circle of his friends he was admired and beloved for his singular purity of character, his scholarly tastes, the kindness of his heart, and all the other fine qualities that go to form the Christian gentleman. During a portion of President Jackson's administration Mr. Butler was Attorney-General of the United States. He died in the sixty-third year of his age. [3] Referring to the death of Dr. Stearns' mother, Mrs. Abigail Stearns, of Bedford, Mass. [4] Mrs. Wainwright and her husband, the late Eli Wainwright, were members of the old Mercer street Presbyterian church, and both of them unwearied in their kindness to Mrs. Prentiss and her husband. [5] "Far along, From peak to peak, the rattling crags among, Leaps the live thunder! Not from one lone cloud, But every mountain now hath found a tongue, And Jura answers, through her misty shroud, Back to the joyous Alps, which call to her aloud!" [6] Now Bishop of the P. E. Church of Central New York. [7] "Christian Believing and Living." [8] The Rev. George B. Little was born in Castine, Maine, December 21, 1821. He was graduated at Bowdoin College in 1843. Having studied theology at Andover, he was ordained in 1849 pastor of the First Congregational church in Bangor, Me. In 1850 he married Sarah Edwards, daughter of that admirable and whole-souled servant of Christ, the Rev. Elias Cornelius, D.D. In November, 1857, Mr. Little was installed as pastor of the Congregational church in West Newton, Mass. Early in March, 1860, he went abroad for his health, but returned home again in May, and died among his own people, July 20, 1860. The last words he littered were, "I shall soon be with Christ." Mr. Little was a man of superior gifts, full of scholarly enthusiasm, and devoted to his Master's work. [9] Miss Bird is known to the world by her remarkable books of travel in Japan and elsewhere. [10] An account of the Volunteer Review in Hyde Park is given in Sir Theodore Martin's admirable Life of the Prince Consort, Vol. V., pp. 105-6, Am. Ed. The Prince himself, in responding to a toast the same evening, speaks of it as "a scene which will never fade from the memory of those who had the good fortune to be present." [11] It is hardly possible to allude to the great affliction of this illustrious lady without thinking also of the persistent acts of womanly sympathy by which, during the anguish and suspense of the past two months, she has tried to minister comfort to the stricken wife of our suffering and now sainted President. Certainly, the whole case is unique in the history of the world. By this most tender and Christ-like sympathy, she has endeared herself in a wonderful manner to the heart of the American people. God bless Queen Victoria! they say with one voice.--_New York, September_ 24, 1881. [12] The eldest son of her brother-in-law, Mr. S. S. Prentiss, a youth of rare promise, and who had especially endeared himself to his Aunt Abby. He died of fever at Tallahoma, Tennessee, during the war. CHAPTER VII THE STRUGGLE WITH ILL-HEALTH. 1861-1865. I. At Home again in New York. The Church of the Covenant. Increasing Ill-health. The Summer of 1861. Death of Louisa Payson Hopkins. Extracts from her Journal. Summer of 1862. Letters. Despondency. We come now to a new phase of Mrs. Prentiss' experience as a pastor's wife. Before her husband resigned his New York charge, during the winter of 1857-8, the question of holding a service in the upper part of the city, with the view to another congregation, was earnestly discussed in the session and among the leading members of the church, but nothing then came of it. Soon after his return from Europe, however, the project was revived, and resulted at length in the formation of the Church of the Covenant. In consequence of the great civil war, which was then raging, the undertaking encountered difficulties so formidable, that nothing but extraordinary zeal, liberality, and wise counsel on the part of his friends and the friends of the movement could overcome them. For two or three years the new congregation held service in what was then called Dodworth's Studio Building at the corner of Fifth avenue and Twenty-sixth street, but in 1864 it entered the chapel on Thirty-fifth street, and in 1865 occupied the stately edifice on Park avenue. In the manifold labors, trials, and discouragements connected with this work, Mrs. Prentiss shared with her husband; and, when finally crowned with the happiest success, it owed perhaps as much to her as to him. This brief statement seems needful in order to define and render clear her position, as a pastor's wife, during the next twelve years. After spending some weeks in Newark and Portland, she found herself once more in New York in a home of her own and surrounded by friends, both old and new. The records of the following four or five years are somewhat meagre and furnish few incidents of special significance. The war, with its terrible excitement and anxieties, absorbed all minds and left little spare time for thought or feeling about anything else. Domestic and personal interests were entirely overshadowed by the one supreme interest of the hour--that of the imperiled National life. It was for Mrs. Prentiss a period also of almost continuous ill-health. The sleeplessness from which she had already suffered so much assumed more and more a chronic character, and, aggravated by other ailments and by the frequent illness of her younger children, so undermined her strength, that life became at times a heavy burden. She felt often that her days of usefulness were past. But the Master had yet a great work for her to do, and-- In ways various, Or, might I say, contrarious-- He was training her for it during these years of bodily infirmity and suffering. The summer of 1861 was passed at Newport. In a letter to Mrs. Smith, dated July 28th, she writes: We find the Cliff House delightful, within a few minutes' walk of the sea, which we have in full view from one of our windows. And we have no lack of society, for the Bancrofts, Miss Aspinwall and her sister, as well as the Skinners, are very friendly. But I am so careworn and out of sorts, that this beautiful ocean gives me little comfort. I seem to be all the time toting one child or another about, or giving somebody paregoric or rhubarb, or putting somebody to sleep, or scolding somebody for waking up papa, who is miserable, and his oration untouched. There, don't mind me; it's at the end of a churchless Sunday, and I dare say I am "only peevis'," as the little boy said. But in a few weeks the children were well again and her own health so much improved, that she was able to indulge in surf-bathing, which she "enjoyed tremendously," and early in the fall the whole family returned to town greatly refreshed by the summer's rest. On the 24th of January, 1862, her sister, Mrs. Hopkins, died. This event touched her deeply. She hurried off to Williamstown, whence she wrote to her husband, who was unable to accompany her: If you had known that I should not get here till half-past nine last night, and that in an open sleigh from North Adams, you would not have let me come. But so far I am none the worse for it; and, when I came in and found the Professor and T. and Eddy sitting here all alone and so forlorn in their unaccustomed leisure, I could not be thankful enough that a kind Providence had allowed me to come. It is a very great gratification to them all, especially to the Professor, and even more so than I had anticipated. In view of the danger of being blocked up by another snow-storm, I shall probably think it best to return by another route, which they all say is the best. I hope you and my precious children keep well. No picture of Mrs. Prentiss' life would be complete, in which her sister's influence was not distinctly visible. To this influence she owed the best part of her earlier intellectual training; and it did much to mould her whole character. Mrs. Hopkins was one of the most learned, as well as most gifted, women of her day; and had not ill-health early disabled her for literary labors, she might, perhaps, have won for herself an enduring name in the literature of the country. There were striking points of resemblance between her and Sara Coleridge; the same early intellectual bloom; the same rare union of feminine delicacy and sensibility with masculine strength and breadth of understanding; the same taste for the beautiful in poetry, in art, and in nature, joined to similar fondness for metaphysical studies; the same delight in books of devotion and in books of theology; and the same varied erudition. Only one of them seems to have been an accomplished Hebraist, but both were good Latin and Greek scholars; and both were familiar with Italian, Spanish, French, and German. Even in Sara Coleridge's admiration and reverence for her father, Mrs. Hopkins was in full sympathy with her. She lacked, indeed, that poetic fancy which belonged to the author of "Phantasmion;" nor did she possess her mental self-poise and firmness of will; but in other respects, even in physical organization and certain features of countenance, they were singularly alike. And they both died in the fiftieth year of their age. Louisa Payson was born at Portland, February 24, 1812. Even as a child she was the object of tender interest to her father on account of her remarkable intellectual promise. He took the utmost pains to aid and encourage her in learning to study and to think. The impression he made upon her may be seen in the popular little volume entitled "The Pastor's Daughter," which consists largely of conversations with him, written out from memory after his death. She was then in her sixteenth year. The records of the next eight years, which were mostly spent in teaching, are very meagre; but a sort of literary journal, kept by her between 1835 and 1840, shows something of her mental quality and character, as also of her course of reading. She was twenty-three years old when the journal opens. Here are a few extracts from it: BOSTON, Nov. 18, 1835. Last evening I passed in company with Mr. Dana. [1] I conversed with him only for a few moments about Mr. Alcott's school, and had not time to ask one of the ten thousand questions I wished to ask. I have been trying to analyse the feeling I have for men of genius, Coleridge, Wordsworth and Dana, for example. I can understand why I feel for them unbounded admiration, reverence and affection, but I hardly know why there should be so much excitement--painful excitement--mingled with these emotions. Next to possessing genius myself would be the pleasure of living with one who possessed it. _Nov. 19th._--I have read to-day one canto of Dante's Inferno and eight or ten pages of Cicero de Amicitia. In this, as well as in de Senectute which I have just finished, I am much interested. I confess I am not a little surprised to find how largely the moderns are indebted to the ancients; how many wise observations on life, and death, the soul, time, eternity, etc, have been repeated by the sages of every generation since the days of Cicero. _Jan. 14th, 1836._--I spent last evening with Mr. Dana, and the conversation was, of course, of great interest. We talked of some of the leading Reviews of the day, and then of the character of our literature as connected with our political institutions. This led to a long discussion of the latter subject, but as the same views are expressed in Mr. D.'s article on Law, I shall pass it over. [2] I differed from him in regard to the French comedies, especially those of Moliere; however, he allowed that they contain genuine humor, but they are confined to the exhibition of _one_ ridiculous point in the character, instead of giving us the whole man as Shakespeare does. _Sept, 22d._--This morning I have had one of the periods of _insight,_ when the highest spiritual truths pertaining to the divine and human natures, become their own light and evidence, as well as the evidence of other truths. No speculations, no ridicule can shake my faith in that which I thus see and feel. I was particularly interested in thinking of the regeneration of the spirit and the part which Faith, Hope, and Love, have in effecting it. _Sab. 23d._--It seems to me that this truth alone, there is a God, is sufficient, rightly believed, to make every human being absolutely and perfectly happy. _Jan. 14th, 1839._--Wednesday evening attended Mr. Emerson's lecture on Genius, of which I shall _attempt_ to say nothing except that it was most delightful. Thursday morning Mr. Emerson [3] called to see me and gave me a ticket for his course. Afterwards Mr. Dana called. It seems to me that I have lived _backwards;_ in other words, the faculties of my mind which were earliest developed, were those which in other minds come last--reflection and solidity of judgment; while fancy and imagination, in so far as I have any at all, have followed. _Sat. Jan. 26th._--My occupations in the way of books at present, consist in reading "Antigone," Guizot's "History," Lockhart's "Scott," and _sundries._ I am also translating large extracts from Claudius, with a view to writing an article about him, if the fates shall so will it. [4] _Thurs. Jan. 1st._--Mr. Emerson's lecture last night was on Comedy. He professed to enter on the subject with reluctance, as conscious of a deficiency in the organ of the ludicrous--a profession, however, that was not substantiated very well by the lecture itself, which convulsed the audience with laughter. He spoke in the commencement of the silent history written in the faces of an assembly, making them as interesting to a spectator as if their lives were written in their features. _25th._--I began yesterday Schleiermacher's "Christliche Glaube"--a profound, learned, and difficult work, I am told--Jouffroy's "Philosophical Writings," Landor's "Pericles and Aspasia," and "The Gurney Papers." Considering that I was already in the midst of several books, this is rather too much, but I could not help it; the books were lent me and must be read and returned speedily. I have been all the morning employed in writing an abstract of the Report of the Prison Discipline Society, and am wearied and stupefied. _Jan. 7th, 1840._--Went to Mr. Ripley's where I met Dr. Channing, and listened to a discussion of Spinoza's religious opinions. This afternoon Mr. D. came again; talked about the Trinity and other theological points. This evening, heard Prof. Silliman. I have nearly finished Fichte, and like him on the whole exceedingly, though I think he errs in placing the roots of the speculative in the practical reason. It seems to me that neither grows out of the other, but that they are coincident spheres. Still, there is a truth, a great truth, in what he says. It is true that action is often the most effectual remedy against speculative doubts and perplexities. When you are in the dark about this or that point, ask what command does conscience impose upon me at this moment--obey it and you will find light. These extracts will suffice to show the quality and extent of her reading. What sort of fruit her reading and study bore may be seen by her articles on Claudius and Goethe, in the New York Review. No abler discussion of the genius and writings of Goethe had at that time appeared in this country; while the article on Claudius was probably the first to make him known to American readers. During many of the later years of her life Mrs. Hopkins was a martyr to ill-health. The story of her sufferings, both physical and mental, as artlessly told in little diaries which she kept, is "wondrous pitiful;" no pen of fiction could equal its simple pathos. Again and again, as she herself knew, she was on the very verge of insanity; nothing, probably, saving her from it but the devotion of her husband, who with untiring patience and a mother's tenderness ministered, in season and out of season, to her relief. Often would he steal home from his beloved Observatory, where he had been teaching his students how to watch the stars, and pass a sleepless night at her bedside, reading to her and by all sorts of gentle appliances trying to soothe her irritated nerves. And this devotion ran on, without variableness or shadow of turning, year after year, giving itself no rest until her eyes were closed in death. [5] Let us now resume our narrative. A portion of the summer of 1862 was passed by Mrs. Prentiss at Newport. Her season of rest was again invaded by severe illness among her children. Under date of August 3d, she writes to Mrs. Smith: I can see that our landlady, who has good sense and experience, thinks G. will not get well. Sometimes, in awful moments, I think so too; but then I cheer up and get quite elated. Last night as I lay awake, too weary to sleep, I heard a harsh, rasping sound like a large saw. I thought some animal unknown to me must be making it, it was so regular and frequent. But after a time I found it was a dying young soldier who lives farther from this house than Miss H. does from our house in New York. His fearful cough! Oh, this war! this war! I never hated and revolted against it as I did then. I had heard some one say such a young man lay dying of consumption in this street, but till then was too absorbed with my own incessant cares to hear the cough, as the rest had done. I never realised how I felt about our country till I found the terror of losing, a link out of that little golden chain that encircles my sweetest joys, was a _kindred_ suffering. Have the times ever looked so black as they do now? We seem to be drifting round without chart or pilot. Two weeks later, August 17th, she writes to her cousin, Miss Shipman: G. is really up and about, looking thin and white, and feeling hungry and weak; but little H. has been sick with the same disease these ten days past. I got your letter and the little cat, for which G. and I thank you very much. I should think it would about kill you to cook all day even for our soldiers, but on the whole can not blame any one who wants to get killed in their service. I am impressed more and more with their claims upon us, who confront every danger and undergo every suffering, while we sit at home at our ease. However, the ease I have enjoyed during the last five weeks has not been of a very luxurious kind, and I have felt almost discouraged, as day after day of confinement and night after night of sleeplessness has pulled down my strength. But, what am I doing? Complaining, instead of rejoicing that I am not left unchastised. After a careworn summer at Newport, she went with the children to Williamstown, where a month was passed with her brother-in-law, Professor Hopkins. The following letters relate to this visit: _To her Husband, Williamstown, Sept. 19, 1862._ I am glad to find that you place reliance on the reports of our late victory, for I have been in great suspense, seeing only The World, which was throwing up its hat and declaring the war virtually ended. I have no faith in such premature assertions, of which we have had so many, but was most anxious to know your opinion. Do not fail to keep me informed of what is going on. The children are all out of doors and enjoying themselves. The Professor has gone on horseback to see about his buckwheat. He took me up there yesterday afternoon, and I crawled through forty fences (more or less) and got a vast amount of exercise, which did not result in any better sleep, however, than no exercise does. Caro. H. read me yesterday a most interesting letter from her brother Henry, describing the scene at Bull Run when he went there five days after the battle. It is very painful to find such mismanagement as he deplores. He gave a most touching account of a young fellow who lay mortally wounded, where he had lain uncared-for with his companions the five days, and whom they were obliged to decline removing, as they had only room for a portion of the hopeful cases. After beseeching Mr. H. to see that he was removed, and entreating to know when and how he was ever to get home if they left him, he was told that it was not possible to make room for him in this train of ambulances. As Mr. H. tore himself away, he heard him say, "Here, Lord, I give myself away; 'Tis all that I can do." The torture of the wounded men in the ambulances was so frightful, that Mr. H. gave each of them morphine enough to kill three well men. They "cried for it like dogs and licked my hands lest they should lose a drop," he adds. As a contrast to this letter, some of the new recruits came into the Professor's grounds yesterday to get bouquets, and thought if _their_ folks had a "yard" so gayly decked with flowers they would feel set up. _To Mrs. Smith, Williamstown, Sept. 25, 1862._ I have been feeling languid, or lazy, ever since I came here, and for a few days past have been miserable; but I am better to-day. This place is perfectly lovely and grows upon me every day. But the Professor is entirely absorbed in his loss. He does not know it, or else thinks he does not show it, for he makes no complaint, but it is in every tone and word and look. It is plain that Louisa's ill-health, which might have weaned a selfish man from her, only endeared her to him; she was so entirely his object day and night, that he misses her and the _care_ of her, as a mother does her sick child. If we ride out he says, "Here I often came with _her_;" if a bird sings, "That is a note she used to love;" if we see a flower, "That is one of the flowers she loved." He has an astonishing amount of journal manuscripts, and I think may in time prepare something from them.... Isn't it frightful how cotton goods have run up! I gave twenty cents for a yard of silicia (is that the way to spell it?) and suppose everything else has rushed up too. I hope you are prepared to tell me exactly what to buy and instruct me in the way I should go. _To her Husband, Williamstown, Sept. 26._ I spent yesterday forenoon looking over Louisa's papers and found an enormous mass of manuscript; journals, extract books, translations, and work enough planned and begun for many lifetimes. It was very depressing. One's only refuge is faith in God, and in the certainty that her lingering illness was more acceptable to Him than years of active usefulness, and such extraordinary usefulness even as she was so fitted for. I read over some of my own letters written many, many years ago; and the sense this gave me of lost youth and vivacity and energy, was, for a time, most painful.... I have felt for a long while greatly discouraged and depressed, yes, weary of my life, because it seems to me that broken down and worn out as I am, and full of faults under which I groan, being burdened, I could not make you happy. But your last letter comforted me a good deal. I see little for us to do but what you suggest: to cheer each other up and wear out rather than rust out. It is more and more clear to me, that patience is our chief duty on earth, and that we can not rest here. I am anxious to know what you think of the President's Proclamation. [6] The Professor likes it. He seems able to think of little but his loss. Even when speaking in the most cheerful way, tears fill his eyes, and the other day putting a letter into my hands to read, he had to run out of the room. The letter stated that fifty young persons owed their conversion to Louisa's books; it was written some years ago. His mother spent Saturday here. She is very bright and cheerful and full of sly humor; he did everything to amuse her and she enjoyed her visit amazingly. I long to see you. Letters are more and more unsatisfactory, delusive things. M. is going to have a "party" this afternoon, and is going to one this forenoon. The others are bright and busy as bees. Good-bye. A tinge of sadness is perceptible in most of her letters during this year. Her sister's death, the fearful state of the country, protracted sickness among her children, and her own frequent ill-turns and increasing sense of feebleness, all conspired to produce this effect. But in truth her heart was still as young as ever and a touch of sympathy, or an appeal to her love of nature, instantly made it manifest. An extract from a letter to Miss Anna Warner, dated New York, December 16th, may serve as an instance: I wanted to write a book when the trunk came this afternoon; that is, a book full of thanks and exclamation marks. You could not have bought with money anything for my Christmas present, that could give half the pleasure. I shut myself up in my little room up-stairs (I declare I don't believe you saw that room! did you?), and there I spread out my mosses and my twigs and my cones and my leaves and admired them till I had to go out and walk to compose myself. Then the children came home and they all admired too, and among us we upset my big work-basket and my little work-basket, and didn't any of us care. My only fear is that with all you had to do you did too much for me. Those little red moss cups are _too_ lovely! and as to all those leaves how I shall leaf out! G. asked me who sent me all those beautiful things. "Miss Warner," quoth I absently. "Didn't Miss Anna send any of them?" he exclaimed. So you see you twain do not pass as one flesh here. I have read all the "Books of Blessing" [7] save Gertrude and her Cat--but though I like them all very much, my favorite is still "The Prince in Disguise." If you come across a little book called "Earnest," [8] published by Randolph, do read it. It is one of the few _real_ books and ought to do good. I have outdone myself in picture-frames since you left. I got a pair of nippers and some wire, which were of great use in the operation. I am now busy on Mr. Bull, for Mr. Prentiss' study. To one of her sisters-in-law she wrote, under the same date: I do not know as I ever was so discouraged about my health as I have been this fall. Sometimes I think my constitution is quite broken down, and that I never shall be good for anything again. However, I do not worry one way or the other but try to be as patient as I can. I have been a good deal better for some days, and if you could see our house you would not believe a word about my not being well, and would know my saying so was all a sham. To tell the truth, it does look like a garden, and when I am sick I like to lie and look at what I did when I wasn't; my wreaths, and my crosses, and my vines, and my toadstools, and other fixins. Yesterday I made a bonnet of which I am justly proud; to-morrow I expect to go into mosses and twigs, of which Miss Anna Warner has just sent me a lot. She and her sister were here about a fortnight. They grow good so fast that there is no keeping track of them. Does any body in Portland take their paper? [9] The children are all looking forward to Christmas with great glee. It is a mercy there are any children to keep up one's spirits in these times. Was there ever anything so dreadful as the way in which our army has just been driven back! [10] But if we had had a brilliant victory perhaps the people would have clamored against the emancipation project, and anything is better than the perpetuation of slavery. Our congregation is fuller than ever, but there is no chance of building even a chapel. Shopping is pleasant business now-a-days, isn't it? We shall have to stop sewing and use pins. * * * * * II. Another care-worn Summer. Letters from Williamstown and Rockaway. Hymn on Laying the Corner-stone of the Church of the Covenant. The records of 1863 are confined mostly to her letters written during the summer. In June she went again with the younger children to Williamstown, where she remained a month. The family then proceeded to Rockaway, Long Island, and spent the rest of the season there in a cottage, kindly placed at their disposal by Mrs. William G. Bull. They passed through New York barely in time to escape the terrible riots, which raged there with such fury in the early part of July. A few extracts from her letters belonging to this period follow: _To her Husband, Troy, June 10._ I hope you'll not be frightened to get a letter mailed here; anyhow I can't resist the temptation to write, though standing up in a little newspaper office. We were routed up at half past five this morning by pounds and yells about taking the "Northern Railroad." On reaching Troy the captain bid us hurry or we should lose the train, and we did hurry, though I pretty well foresaw our fate, and after a running walk of a quarter of a mile, we had the felicity of finding the train had left and that the next one would not start till twelve. The little darlings are bearing the disappointment sweetly. 4 P.M.--After depositing my note in the Post-office, we strolled about awhile and then came across to a hotel, where I ordered a lunch-dinner. We got through at twelve and marched to the station, expecting to start at once, when M. came running up to me declaring there was no train to Williamstown till five o'clock. My heart fairly turned over; however, I did not believe it, but on making inquiries it proved to be only too true. For a minute I sat in silent despair. Just then the landlord of the hotel drew nigh and said to me, "You don't look very healthy, Mrs.; if you'll walk over to my house, I will give you a bedroom free of charge and you can lie down and rest awhile." Over to his house we went, weary enough. After awhile, finding them all forlorn, I got a carriage and we drove out; on coming back I ordered some ice-cream, which built us all up amazingly. The children are now counting the minutes till five. One of the boys is perched on a wash-stand with his feet dangling down through the hole where the bowl should be; the other is eating crackers; the landlord is anxious I should take a glass of wine; and M. is everywhere at once, having nearly worn out my watch-pocket to see what time it was. _Monday, June 21st._--It is now going on a fortnight since we left home. Oh, if it were God's will, how I should love to get well, pay you back some of the debts I owe you, be a better mother to my children, write some more books, and make you love me so you wouldn't know what to do with yourself! Just to see how it would seem to be well, and to show you what a splendid creature I could be, if once out of the harness! A modest little list you will say!... I said to myself, Is it after all such a curse to suffer and to be a source of suffering to others? Isn't it worth while to pay something for warm human sympathies and something for rich experience of God's love and wisdom? And I felt, that for you to have a radiant, cheerful, health-happy wife was not, perhaps, so good for you, as a minister of Christ's gospel, as to have the poor feeble creature whose infirmities keep you anxious and off the top of the wave. Saturday afternoon the Professor took me off strawberrying again. Can you believe that till this June I never went strawberrying in my life? I don't eat them, so the fun is in the picking. Do you realise how kind the Professor is to me? I am afraid I don't. He works very hard, too hard, I think; but perhaps he does it as a refuge from his loneliness. His heart seems still full of tenderness toward Louisa. Yesterday he took me aside and told me, with much emotion, that he dreamed the night before that she floated towards him with a leaf in her hand, on which she wrote the words "Sabbath peacefulness." I love him much, but am afraid of him, as I am of all men--even of you; you need not laugh, I am. To Mrs. Smith she writes from Rockaway, July 24th: We were glad to hear that you were safely settled at Prout's Neck, far from riots, if not from rumors thereof. We have as convenient and roomy and closetty a cottage as possible. We are within three minutes or so of the beach, and go back and forth, bathe, dig sand, and stare at the ocean according to our various ages and tastes. I really do not know how else we spend our time. I sew a little, and am going to sew more when my machine comes; read a little, doze a little, and eat a good deal. The butcher calls every morning, and so does the baker with excellent bread; twice a week clams call at thirty cents the hundred; we get milk, butter, and eggs without much trouble; and ice and various vegetables without any, as Mrs. Bull sends them to us every day, with sprinklings of fruit, pitchers of cream, herring and whatever is going. We either sit on the beach looking and listening to the waves, every evening, or we run in to Mrs. Bull's; or gather about our parlor-table reading. By ten we are all off to bed. George does nothing but race back and forth to New York on Seminary business; he has gone now. I went with him the other day. The city looks pinched and wo-begone. We were caught in that tornado and nearly pulled to pieces. _27th._--You will be sorry to hear that our last summer's siege with dysentery bids fair to be repeated. Yesterday, when the disease declared itself, I must own that for a few hours I felt about heart-broken. My own strength is next to nothing, and how to face such a calamity I knew not. Ah, how much easier it is to pray daily, "Oh, Jesus Christus, wachs in mir!" than to consent to, yea rejoice in, the terms of the grant! Well, George went for the doctor. His quarters at this season are right opposite; he is a German and brother of the author Auerbach. We brought G.'s cot into our room and George and I took care of him till three o'clock, when for the first time since we had children, I gave out and left the poor man to get along as nurse as he best could. I can tell you it comes hard on one's pride to resign one's office to a half-sick husband. I think I have let the boys play too hard in the sun. I long to have you see this pretty cottage and this beach. _Aug. 3d._--The children are out of the doctor's hands and I do about nothing at all. I hope you are as lazy as I am. Today I bathed, read the paper and finished John Halifax. I wish I could write such a book! To Miss Gilman she writes, August 10th: We have the nicest of cottages, near the sea. I often think of you as I sit watching the waves rush in and the bathers rushing out. I have not yet thanked you for the hymns you sent me. The traveller's hymn sounds like George Withers. Mr. P. borrowed a volume of his poems which delights us both. I am glad you are asking your mother questions about your father. I am amazed at myself for not asking my dear mother many a score about my father, which no human being can answer now. I do not like to think of you all leaving New York. Few families would be so missed and mourned. I can sympathise with you in regard to your present Sunday "privileges." We have a long walk in glaring sunshine, sit on bare boards, live through the whole (or nearly the whole) Prayer-book, and then listen, if we can, to a sermon three-quarters of an hour long, its length not being its chief fault. I am utterly unable to bear such fatigue, and spend my time chiefly at home, with some hope of more profit, at any rate. How true it is that our Master's best treasures are kept in earthen vessels! Humanly speaking, we should declare it to be for His glory to commit the preaching of His gospel to the best and wisest hands. But His ways are not as our ways.... I feel such a longing, when Sunday conies, to spend it with good people, under the guidance of a heaven-taught man. A minister has such wonderful opportunity for doing good! It seems dreadful to see the opportunity more than wasted. The truth is, we all need, ministers and all, a closer walk with God. If a man comes down straight from the mount to speak to those who have just come from the same place, he must be in a state to edify and they to be edified. From New York she writes to Miss Shipman, October 24th: Your letter came just as we started for Poughkeepsie. The Synod met there and I was invited to accompany George, and, quite contrary to my usual habits, I went. We had a nice time. I feel that you are in the best place in the world. Next to dying and going home one's self, it must be sweet to accompany a Christian friend down to the very banks of the river. Isn't it strange that after such experiences we can ever again have a worldly thought, or ever lose the sense of the reality of divine things! But we are like little children--ever learning and ever forgetting. Still, it is well to be learning, and I envy you your frequent visits to the house of mourning. You will miss your dear friend very much. I know how you love her. How many beloved ones you have already lost for a season!... Don't set me to making brackets. I am as worldly now as I can be, and my head full of work on all sorts of things. I made two cornucopias of your pattern and filled them with grasses and autumn leaves, and they were magnificent. I got very large grasses in the Rockaway marshes. The children are all well and as gay as larks. Early in November the corner-stone of the Church of the Covenant was laid. She wrote the following hymn for the occasion: A temple, Lord, we raise; Let all its walls be praise To Thee alone. Draw nigh, O Christ, we pray, To lead us on our way, And be Thou, now and aye, Our corner-stone. In humble faith arrayed, We these foundations laid In war's dark day. Oppression's reign o'erthrown, Sweet peace once more our own, Do Thou the topmost stone Securely lay. And when each earth-built wall Crumbling to dust shall fall, Our work still own. Be to each faithful heart That here hath wrought its part, What in Thy Church Thou art-- The Corner-stone. * * * * * III. Happiness in her Children. The Summer of 1864. Letters from Hunter. Affliction among Friends. In the early part of 1864 she was more than usually afflicted with neuralgic troubles and that "horrid calamity," as she calls it, sleeplessness. "I know just how one feels when one can't eat or sleep or talk. I declare, a good deal of the time pulling words out of me is like pulling out teeth." Still (she writes to a sister-in-law, Jan. 15th), we are a happy family in spite of our ailments. I suffer a great deal and cause anxiety to my husband by it, but then I enjoy a great deal and so does he, and our younger children--to say nothing of A.--are sources of constant felicity. Do not you miss the hearing little feet pattering round the house? It seems to me that the sound of my six little feet is the very pleasantest sound in the world. Often when I lie in bed racked with pain and exhausted from want of food--for my digestive organs seem paralysed when I have neuralgia--hearing these little darlings about the house compensates for everything, and I am inexpressibly happy in the mere sense of possession. I hate to have them grow up and to lose my pets, or exchange them for big boys and girls. I suppose your boys are a great help to you and company too, but I feel for you that you have not also a couple of girls.... Poor Louisa! It is very painful to think what she suffered. Her death was such a shock to me, I can hardly say why, that I have never been since what I was before. I suppose my nervous system was so shattered, that so unexpected a blow would naturally work unkindly. Early in the following summer she was distressed by the sudden bereavement of dear friends and by the death of her nephew, who fell in one of the battles of the Wilderness. In a letter to Miss Gilman, dated June 18th, she refers to this: Your dear little flowers came in excellent condition, but at a moment when I could not possibly write to tell you so. The death of Mrs. R. H. broke my heart. I only knew her by a sort of instinct, but I sorrowed in her mother's sorrow and in that of her sisters. Death is a blessed thing to the one whom it leads to Christ's kingdom and presence, but oh, how terrible for those it leaves fainting and weeping behind! We expect to go off for the summer on next Thursday. We go to Hunter, N. Y., in the region of the Catskills. My husband's mother has been with me during the last six weeks and has just gone home, and I have now to do up the last things in a great hurry. You may not know that my A. and M. S., and a number of other young people of their age, joined our church on last Sunday. I can hardly realise my felicity. I seem to myself to have a new child. Your sister may have told you of the loss of Professor Hopkins' son. He was the first grandchild in our family and his father's _all_. We may never hear what his fate was, but the suspense has been dreadful. Her interest in the national struggle was intense and her conviction of its Providential character unwavering. To a friend, who seemed to her a little lukewarm on the subject, she wrote at this time: For my part, I am sometimes afraid I shall die of joy if we ever gain a complete and final victory. You can call this spunk if you choose. But my spunk has got a backbone of its own and that is deep-seated conviction, that this is a holy war, and that God himself sanctions it. He spares nothing precious when He has a work to do. No life is too valuable for Him to cut short, when any of His designs can be furthered by doing so. But I could talk a month and not have done, you wicked unbeliever. _To her Husband, Hunter, June 27, 1864._ This morning, after breakfast, I sallied out with six children to take a most charming walk, scramble, climb, etc. We put on our worst old duds, tuck up our skirts June 27, knee-high, and have a regular good time of it. If you were awake so early as eight o'clock--I don't believe you were! you might have seen us with a good spy-glass, and it would have made your righteous soul leap for joy to see how we capered and laughed, and what strawberries we picked, and how much of a child A. turned into. They all six "played run" till they had counted twelve and then they tumbled down and rolled in the grass, till I wondered what their bones were made of. I do not see that we could have found a better place for the children. What with the seven calves, the cows, the sheep, the two pet lambs, the dogs, hens, chickens, horses, etc., they are perfectly happy. Just now they have been to see the butter made and to get a drink of buttermilk. We have lots of strawberries and cream, pot-cheese, Johnny-cakes, and there are always eggs and milk at our service. From diplomatic motives I advise you not to say too much about Hunter to people asking questions. It would entirely spoil its only great charm if a rush of silly city folks should scent it out. It is really a primitive place and that you can say. Mr. Coe preached an excellent sermon on Sunday morning. _To Mrs. Smith, Hunter, July 4, 1864._ I have just been off, all alone, foraging, and have come home bringing my sheaves with me: ground pine and red berries, with which I have made a beautiful wreath. I have also adorned the picture of Gen. Grant with festoons of evergreens, conjuring him the while not to disappoint our hopes, but to take Richmond. Alas! you may know, by this time, that he can't; but in lack of news since a week ago, I can but hope for the best. I've taken a pew and we contrive to squeeze into it in this wise: first a child, then a mother, then a child, then an Annie, then a child, the little ones being stowed in the cracks left between us big ones. Mr. R., the parson, looking fit to go straight into his grave, was up here to get a wagon as he was going for a load of chips. His wife was at home sick, without any servant, had churned three hours and the butter wouldn't come, and has a pew full of little ones. Oh, my poor sisters in the ministry! my heart aches for them. Mr. R. gave us a superior sermon last Sunday.... I know next to nothing about what is going on in the world. But George writes that he feels decidedly pleased with the look of things. He has been carrying on like all possessed since I left, having company to breakfast, lunch, dinner, and finally went and had Chi Alpha all himself. _July 25th._--We went one day last week on a most delightful excursion, twenty-one of us in all. Our drive was splendid and the scenery sublime; even we distinguished Swiss travellers thought so! We came to one spot where ice always is found, cut out big pieces, ate it, drank it, threw it at each other and carried on with it generally. We had our dinner on the grass in the woods. We brought home a small cartload of natural brackets; some of them beautiful. _August 1st._--You have indeed had a "rich experience." [11] We all read your letter with the deepest interest and feel that it would have been good to be there. Your account of Caro shows what force of character she possessed, as well as what God's grace can do and do quickly. This is not the first time He has ripened a soul into full Christian maturity with almost miraculous rapidity. A veteran saint could not have laid down his armor and adjusted himself to meet death with more calmness than did this young disciple. I do not wonder her family were borne, for the time, above their sorrow, but alas! their bitter pangs of anguish are yet to meet them. Her poor mother! How much she has suffered and has yet to suffer! all the more because she bears it so heroically. _To Miss Emily S. Gilman, Hunter, Aug 1, 1864._ You must have wondered why I did not answer your letter and your book, for both of which I thank you. Well, it has been such dry, warm weather, that I have not felt like writing; besides, for nurse I have only a little German girl fourteen years old, who never was out of New York before, and whom I have been so determined on spoiling that I couldn't bear to take her off from her play to mend, patch, darn, wash faces, necks, feet, etc., and unconsciously did every thing there was to do for the children and a little more besides. I like the little book very much. You have the greatest knack, you girls, of lighting on nice books and nice hymns. We are right in the midst of most charming walks. Here is a grove and there is a brook; here is a creek, almost a river (big enough at any rate to get on to the map) and there a mountain. As to ferns and mosses for your poetical side, and as for raspberries and blackberries for your t'other side, time would fail me if I should begin to speak of them. I think a great deal of you and your sisters when off on foraging expeditions, and wish you were here notwithstanding you are mossy and ferny there. We have as yet made only one excursion. That was delightful and gave us our first true idea of the Catskills. Before Mr. P. came I usually went off on my forenoon walk alone, unless the children trooped after, and came home a miniature Birnam wood, with all sorts of things except creeping things and flying fowl. I have just finished reading to M. and a little girl near her age, a little French book you would like, called "Augustin." I never met with a sweeter picture of a loving child anywhere. Well, I may as well stop writing. Remember me lovingly to all your dear household. To Mrs. Stearns she writes, Sept. 16: How much faith and patience we poor invalids do need! The burden of life sits hard on our weary shoulders. I think the mountain air has agreed with our children better than the seaside has done, but George craves the ocean and the bathing. He spent this forenoon, as he has a good many others, in climbing the side of the mountain for exercise, views, and blackberries. I go with him sometimes. We had a few days' visit from Prof. Hopkins. He has heard confirmation of the rumors of poor Eddy's death and burial. He means to go to Ashland as soon as the state of the country makes it practicable, but has little hope of identifying E.'s remains. It is a great sorrow to him to _lose all he had_ in this horrible way, but he bears it with wonderful faith and patience, and says he never prayed for his son's life after he went into action. Some letters received by him, give a pleasant idea of the Christian stand E. took after entering the army. I believe this is Lizzie P----'s wedding day. There is a beautiful rainbow smiling on it from our mountain home, and I hope a real one is glorifying hers. _To Miss Gilman, Hunter, Sept. 17._ Oh, I wish you were here on this glorious day! The foliage has begun to turn a little, and the mountains are in a state bordering on perfection. It is wicked for me stay in-doors even to write this, but it seems as if a letter from here would carry with it a savor of mountain air, and must do you more good than one from the city could. I wish I had thought sooner to ask you if you would like some of our mosses. I _thought_ I had seen mosses before, but found I had not. I will enclose some dried specimens. I thought, while I was in the woods this morning, that I never had thanked God half enough for making these lovely things and giving us tastes wherewith to enjoy them. You ask if I have spilled ink all down the side of this white house. Yes, I have, wo be unto me. I was sick abed and got up to write to Mr. P., not wanting him to know I was sick, and one of the children came in and I snatched him up in my lap to hug and kiss a little, and he, of course, hit the pen and upset the inkstand and burst out crying at my dismay. Then might have been seen a headachy woman catching the apoplexy by leaning out of the window and scrubbing paint, sacrificing all her nice rags in the process, and dreadfully mortified into the bargain.... Yesterday we were all caught in a pouring rain when several miles from home on the side of the mountain, blackberrying. We each took a child and came rolling and tearing down through the bushes and over stones, H.'s little legs flying as little legs rarely fly. We nearly died with laughing, and if I only knew how to draw, I could make you laugh by giving you a picture of the scene. You will judge from this that we are all great walkers; so we are. I take the children almost everywhere, and they walk miles every day. Well, I will go now and get you some scraps of pressed mosses. * * * * * IV. The Death of President Lincoln. Dedication of the Church of the Covenant. Growing Insomnia. Resolves to try the Water-cure. Its beneficial Effects. Summer at Newburgh. Reminiscence of an Excursion to Paltz Point. Death of her Husband's Mother. Funeral of her Nephew, Edward Payson Hopkins. Two events rendered the month of April, 1865, especially memorable to Mrs. Prentiss. One was the assassination of President Lincoln on the evening of Good Friday. She had been very ill, and her husband, on learning the dreadful news from the morning paper, thought it advisable to keep it from her for a while; but one of the children, going into her chamber, burst into tears and thus betrayed the secret. Her state of nervous prostration and her profound, affectionate admiration for Mr. Lincoln, made the blow the most stunning by far she ever received from any public calamity. It was such, no doubt, to tens of thousands; indeed, to the American people. No Easter morning ever before dawned upon them amid such a cloud of horror, or found them so bowed down with grief. The younger generation can hardly conceive of the depth and intensity, or the strange, unnatural character, of the impression made upon the minds of old and young alike, by this most foul murder. [12] The other event was of a very different character and filled her with great joy. It was the dedication, on the last Sunday in April, of the new church edifice, whose growth she had watched with so much interest. In the spring of 1865 she was induced, by the entreaty of friends who had themselves tested his skill, to consult Dr. Schieferdecker, a noted hydropathist, and later to place herself under his care. In a letter to her cousin, Miss Shipman, she writes: "I want to tell you, but do not want you to mention it to anyone, that I have been to see Dr. Schieferdecker to know what he thought of my case. He says that I might go on dieting to the end of my days and not get well, but that his system could and would cure me, only it would take a _long_ time. I have not decided whether to try his process, but have no doubt he understands my disease." Dr. Schieferdecker had been a pupil and was an enthusiastic disciple of Priesnitz. He had unbounded faith in the healing properties of water. He was very impulsive, opinionated, self-confident, and accustomed to speak contemptuously of the old medical science and those who practised it. But for all that, he possessed a remarkable sagacity in the diagnosis and treatment of chronic disease. Mrs. Prentiss went through the "cure" with indomitable patience and pluck, and was rewarded by the most beneficial results. Her sleeplessness had become too deep-rooted to be overcome, but it was greatly mitigated and her general condition vastly improved. She never ceased to feel very grateful to Dr. Schieferdecker for the relief he had afforded her, and for teaching her how to manage herself; for after passing from under his care, she still continued to follow his directions. "No tongue can tell how much I am indebted to him," she wrote in 1869. "I am like a ship that after poking along twenty years with a heavy load on board, at last gets into port, unloads, and springs to the surface." _To Miss E. S. Gilman, New York, Feb. 23, 1865._ It is said to be an ill wind that blows nobody good, and as I am still idling about, doing absolutely nothing but receive visits from neuralgia, I have leisure to think of poor Miss ----. I wrote to ask her if there was anything she wanted and could not get in her region; yesterday I received her letter, in which she mentions a book, but says "anything that is useful for body or mind" would be gratefully received. Now I got the impression from that article in the Independent, that she could take next to no nourishment. Do you know what she _does_ take, and can you suggest, from what you know, anything she would like? What's the use of my being sick, if it isn't for her sake or that of some other suffering soul? I want, very much, to get some things together and send her; nobody knows who hasn't experienced it, how delightfully such things break in on the monotony of a sick-room. Just yet I am not strong enough to do anything; my hands tremble so that I can hardly use even a pen; yet you need not think I am much amiss, for I go out every pleasant day, to ride, and some days can take quite a walk. The trouble is that when the pain returns, as it does several times a day, it knocks my strength out of me. I hope when all parts of my frame have been visited by this erratic sprite, it may find it worth while to beat a retreat. Only to think, we are going to move to No. 70 East Twenty-seventh street, and you have all been and gone away! The rent is _enormous_, $1,000 having been just added to an already high price. Our people have taken that matter in hand and no burden of it will come on us. I received your letter and am much obliged to you for writing to Miss ----, for me; the reason I did not do it was, that it seemed like hurrying her up to thank me for the little drop of comfort I sent her. Dear me! it's hard to be sick when people send you quails and jellies, and fresh eggs, and all such things--but to be sick and suffer for necessaries must be terrible. _To the Same, New York, March 9, 1865._ I thank you for the details of Miss ----'s case, as I wished to describe them to some friends. I sent her ten dollars yesterday for two of my friends. I also sent off a box by express, for the contents of which I had help. The things were such as I had persuaded her to mention; a new kind of farina, figs, two portfolios (of course she didn't ask for two, but I had one I thought she would, perhaps, like better than the one I bought), a few crackers, and several books. Mr. P. added one of those beautiful large-print editions of the Psalms which will, I think, be a comfort to her. I shall also send Adelaide Newton by-and-by; I thought she had her hands full of reading for the present, and the great thing is not to heap comforts on her all at once and then leave her to her fate, but keep up a stream of such little alleviations as can be provided. She said, she had poor accommodations for writing, so I greatly enjoyed fitting up the portfolio which was none the worse for wear, with paper and envelopes, a pencil with rubber at the end, a cunning little knife, some stamps, for which there was a small box, a few pens, etc. I know it will please you to hear of this, and as the money was furnished me for the purpose, you need not set it down to my credit. I meant to go to see your sister, but my head is still in such a weak state that though I go to walk nearly every day, I can not make calls. It is five weeks since I went to church, for the same reason. It is a part of God's discipline with me to keep me shut up a good deal more than the old Adam in me fancies; but His way is _absolutely perfect_, and I hope I wouldn't change it in any particular, if I could. Have you Pusey's tract, "Do all to the Lord Jesus"? If not, I must send it to you. It seems as if I had a lot of things I wanted to say, but after writing a little my hands and arms begin to tremble so that I can hardly write plainly. You never saw such a lazy life as I lead now-a-days; I can't do _any_ thing. I advise you to do what you have to do for Christ _now_; by the time you are as old as I am perhaps you will have the will and not the power. Well, good-bye till next time. The summer of this year was passed at Newburgh in company with the Misses Butler--now Mrs. Kirkbride, of Philadelphia, and Mrs. Booth, of Liverpool--and the families of Mr. William Allen Butler, Mr. B. F. Butler, and Mr. John P. Crosby, to all of whom Mrs. Prentiss was strongly attached. The late Mr. Daniel Lord, the eminent lawyer, with a portion of his family, had also a cottage near by and was full of hospitable kindness. In spite of the exacting hydropathic treatment, she found constant refreshment and delight in the society of so many dear friends. "The only thing I have to complain of" she wrote, "is everybody being too good to me. How different it is being among friends to being among strangers!" In a letter to her husband, dated New York, Sept. 15, 1879, Mr. William Allen Butler gives the following reminiscence of an excursion to Paltz Point and an evening at Newburgh: From the date you, give in your note (to which I have just recurred) of our trip to Paltz Point, it seems that in writing you to-day I have unwittingly fallen on the anniversary of that pleasant excursion. Without this reminder I could not have told the day or the year, but of the excursion itself I have always had a vivid and delightful recollection; and, if I am not mistaken, Mrs. Prentiss enjoyed it as fully as any one of the merry party. It was only on that jaunt and in our summer home at Newburgh that I had the opportunity of knowing her readiness to enter into that kind of enjoyment, which depends upon the co-operation of every member of a circle for the entertainment of all. The elements of our group were well commingled, and the bright things evoked by their contact and friction were neither few nor far between. The game to which you allude of "Inspiration" or "Rhapsody" was a favorite. The evening at Paltz Point called out some clever sallies, of which I have no record or special recollection; but I know that then, as always, Mrs. Prentiss seemed to have at her pencil's point for instant use the wit and fancy so charmingly exhibited in her writings. She published somewhere an account of one of our inspired or rhapsodical evenings, but greatly to my regret failed to include in it her own contribution which was the best of all. I distinctly remember the time and scene--the September evening--the big, square sitting-room of the old Seminary building in which you boarded--the bright faces whose radiance made up in part for the limitations of artificial light--the puzzled air which every one took on when presented with the list of unmanageable words, to be reproduced in their consecutive order in prose or verse composition within the next quarter or half hour--the stillness which supervened while the enforced "pleasures" of "poetic pains" or prose agony were being undergone--the sense of relief which supplemented the completion of the batch of extempore effusions--and the fun which their reading provoked. Mrs. Prentiss had contrived out of the odd and incoherent jumble of words a choice bit of poetic humor and pathos, which I never quite forgave her for omitting in the publication of the nonsense written by other hands. These trifles as they seemed at the time, and as in fact they were, become less insignificant in the retrospect, as we associate them with the whole character and being we instinctively love to place at the farthest remove from gloom or sadness, and as they rediscover to us in the distance the native vivacity and grace of which they were the chance expression. Since that summer of 1865, having lived away from New York, I saw little of Mrs. Prentiss, but I have a special remembrance of one little visit you made at our home in Yonkers which she seemed very much to enjoy--saying of the reunion which made it so pleasant to the members of our family and all who happened to be together at the time, that it was "like heaven." [13] During the summer of 1865 the sympathies of Mrs. Prentiss were much wrought upon by the sickness and death of her husband's mother, who entered into rest on the 9th of August, in the eighty-fourth year of her age. On the 12th of the previous January, she with the whole family had gone to Newark to celebrate the eighty-third birthday of this aged saint. Had they known it was to be the last, they could have wished nothing changed. It was a perfect winter's day, and the scene in the old parsonage was perfect too. There, surrounded by children and children's children, sat the venerable grandmother with a benignant smile upon her face and the peace of God in her heart. As she received in birthday gifts and kisses and congratulations their loving homage, the measure of her joy was full, and she seemed ready to say her _Nunc dimittis_. She belonged to the number of those holy women of the old time who trusted in God and adorned themselves with the ornament of a meek and quiet spirit, and whose children to the latest generation rise up and call them blessed. In the course of this year her sympathies were also deeply touched by repeated visits from her brother-in-law, Professor Hopkins, on his way to and from Virginia. Allusion has been made already to the death of her nephew, Lieutenant Edward Payson Hopkins. He was killed in battle while gallantly leading a cavalry charge at Ashland, in Virginia, on the 11th of May, 1864. In June of the following year his father went to Ashland with the hope of recovering the body. Five comrades had fallen with Edward, and the negroes had buried them without coffins, side by side, in two trenches in a desolate swampy field and under a very shallow covering of earth. The place was readily discovered, but it was found impossible to identify the body. The disappointed father, almost broken-hearted, turned his weary steps homeward. When he reached Williamstown his friends said, "He has grown ten years older since he went away." Several months later he learned that there were means of identification which could not fail, even if the body had already turned to dust. Accordingly he again visited Ashland, attended this time by soldiers, a surgeon, and Government officials. His search proved successful, and, to his joy, not only was the body identified, but, owing to the swampy nature of the ground, it was found to be in an almost complete state of preservation. There was something wonderfully impressive in the grave aspect and calm, gentle tone of the venerable man, as with his precious charge he passed through New York on his way home. In a letter to Mrs. Prentiss, dated January 2d, 1866, he himself tells the story of the re-interment at Williamstown: ... After stopping a minute at my door the wagon passed at once to the cemetery, and the remains were deposited in the tomb. This was on Thursday. After consulting with my brother and his son (the chaplain) I determined to wait till the Sabbath before the interment. Accordingly, at 3 o'clock--after the afternoon service--the remains of my dear boy were placed beside those of his mother. The services were simple, but solemn in a high degree. They were opened by an address from Harry. Prayer followed by Rev. Mr. Noble, now supplying the desk here. He prefaced his prayer by saying that he never saw Edward but once, when he preached at Williamstown at a communion and saw him sitting beside me and partaking with me. Singing then followed by the choir of which Eddy was for a long time a member. The words were those striking lines of Montgomery: Go to the grave in all thy glorious prime, etc. After which the coffin was lowered to its place by young men who were friends of Edward in his earlier years. The state of the elements was exceedingly favorable to the holding of such an exercise in the open air at a season generally so inclement. The night before there was every appearance of a heavy N. E. storm. But Sabbath morning it was calm. As I went to church I noticed that the sun rested on the Vermont mountains just north of us, though with a mellowed light as if a veil had been thrown over them. In the after part of the day the open sky had spread southward--so that the interment took place when the air was as mild and serene as spring, just as the last sun of the year was sinking towards the mountains. Almost the entire congregation were present.... Thus, dear sister, I have given you a brief account of the solemn but peaceful winding up of what has been to me a sharp and long trial, and I know to yourself and family also. In eternity we shall more clearly read the lesson which even now, in the light of opening scenes, we are beginning to interpret. [1] Richard H. Dana, the poet. [2] The article referred to appeared in The Biblical Repository and Quarterly Observer for January, 1835. Vol V., pp. 1-32. It is entitled, "What form of Law is best suited to the individual and social nature of man?" [3] Mr. Ralph Waldo Emerson. [4] The article appeared in the New York Review for July, 1839. [5] Some passages from the little diaries referred to, together with further extracts from her literary journal, will be found in appendix D, p. 541. [6] The Proclamation of Emancipation. [7] By Anna Warner. [8] By her friend, Mrs. Frederick G. Burnham. [9] "The Little Corporal." [10] At Fredericksburg. [11] Referring to the sudden death of a young niece of Mrs. S. [12] This was written before the assassination of President Garfield. [13] The "Rhapsody," referred to by Mr. Butler was preserved by a young lady of the party, and will be found in appendix E, p. 555. CHAPTER VIII. THE PASTOR'S WIFE AND DAUGHTER OF CONSOLATION. 1866-1868. I. Happiness as a Pastor's Wife. Visits to Newport and Williamstown Letters. The great Portland Fire. First Summer at Dorset. The new Parsonage occupied. Second Summer at Dorset. _Little Lou's Sayings and Doings_. Project of a Cottage. Letters. _The Little Preacher_. Illness and Death of Mrs. Edward Payson and of Little Francis. We now enter upon the most interesting and happiest period of Mrs. Prentiss's experience as a pastor's wife. The congregation of the Church of the Covenant had been slowly forming in "troublous times"; it was composed of congenial elements, being of one heart and one mind; some of the most cultivated families and family-circles in New York belonged to it; and Mrs. Prentiss was much beloved in them all. What a help-meet she was to her husband and with what zeal and delight she fulfilled her office, especially that of a daughter of consolation, among his people, will soon appear. How ignorant we often are, at the time, of the turning-points in our life! We inquire for a summer boarding-place and decide upon it without any thought beyond the few weeks for which it was engaged; and yet, perhaps, our whole earthly future or that of those most dear to us, is to be vitally affected by this seemingly trifling decision. So it happened to Mrs. Prentiss in 1866. Early in May her husband and his brother-in-law, Dr. Stearns, went, at a venture, to Dorset, Vt., and there secured rooms for their families during the summer. But little did either she, or they, dream that Dorset was to be henceforth her summer home and her resting-place in death! [1] The Portland fire, to which reference is made in the following letters, occurred on the 4th of July, and consumed a large portion of the city. _To Miss Mary B. Shipman, Dorset, July 25, 1866._ Never in my life did I live through such a spring and early summer as this! As to business and bustle, I mean. You must have given me up as a lost case! But I have thought of you every day and longed to hear how you were getting on, and whether you lived through that dreadful weather. Annie went with the children to Williamstown about the middle of June; I nearly killed myself with getting them ready to go and could see the flesh drop off my bones. George and I went to Newport on what Mrs. Bronson called our "bridal trip," and stayed eleven days. Mr. and Mrs. McCurdy were kindness personified. We came home and preached on the first Sunday in July, and then went to Greenfield Hill to spend the Fourth with Mrs. Bronson. [2] That nearly finished me, and then I went to Williamstown on that hot Friday and was quite finished on reaching there, to hear about the fire in Portland. Did you ever hear of anything so dreadful? I did not know for several days but H. and C. were burnt out of house and home; most of my other friends I knew were, and can there be any calamity like being left naked, hungry and homeless, everything gone forever.... But let no one say a word that has a roof over his head. All my father's sermons were burned, the house where most of us were born, his church, etc. Fancy New Haven stripped of its shade-trees, and you can form some idea of the loss of Portland in that respect. Well, I might go on talking forever, and not have said anything. [3] The heat upset G. and we have been fighting off sickness for a week, I getting wild with loss of sleep. We are enchanted with Dorset. We are so near the woods and mountains that we go every day and spend hours wandering about among them. If there is any difference, I think this place even more beautiful than Williamstown; it suits us better as a summer retreat, from its great seclusion. I am, that is we are, mean enough to want to keep it as quiet and secluded as it is now, by not letting people know how nice it is; a very few fashionably dressed people would just spoil it for us. So keep our counsel, you dear child. A few days later she writes to Mrs. Smith, then in Europe: On the sixth, a day of fearful heat, I went to Williamstown, where I found all the children as well as possible, but heard the news of the Portland fire which almost killed me. All my father's manuscripts are destroyed; we always meant to divide them among us and ought to have done it long ago. I heard of any number of injudicious babies as taking the inopportune day succeeding the fire to enter on the scene of desolation; all born in tents. I am sorry my children will never see my father's church, nor the house where I was born; but private griefs are nothing when compared with a calamity that is so appalling and that must send many a heart homeless and aching to the grave. I spent two weeks at Williamstown, when George came for me, and the weather cooling off, we had a comfortable journey here. We are perfectly delighted with Dorset; the sweet seclusion is most soothing, and the house is very pleasant. Mr. and Mrs. F. are intelligent, agreeable people, and do all they can to make us comfortable. The mountains are so near that I hear the crows cawing in the trees. We are making pretty things and pressing an unheard-of quantity of ferns. We go to the woods regularly every morning and stay the whole forenoon. In the afternoon we rest, read, write, etc.; sometimes we drive and always after tea George walks with me about two miles. I hope the war is not impeding your movements. I suppose you will call this a short letter, but I think it is as long as is good for you. All my dear nine pounds gained at Newburgh have gone by the board. _August 20th._--I am sorry you had such hot weather in Paris, but hope it passed off as our heat did. Dr. Hamlin's two youngest daughters have been here, and came to see me; they are both interesting girls, and the elder of the two really brilliant. They had never been here before, and were carried away with the beauties of their mother's birthplace. I wish you could see my room. Every pretty thing grows here and has come to cheer and beautify it. The woods are everywhere, and as for the views, oh my child! However, I do not suppose anything short of Mt. Blanc will suit you now. In April, 1867, the parsonage on Thirty-fifth street was occupied. It had been built more especially for her sake, and was furnished by the generosity of her friends. Her joy in entering it was completed by a "house-warming," at the close of which a passage of Scripture was read by Prof. Smith, "All hail the power of Jesus's name" sung, and then the blessing of Heaven invoked upon the new home by that holy man of God, Dr. Thomas H. Skinner. Here she passed the next six years of her life. Here she wrote the larger portion of "Stepping Heavenward." And here the cup of her domestic joy, and of joy in her God and Saviour often ran over. Here, too, some of her dearest Christian friendships were formed and enjoyed. The summer of 1867 was passed at Dorset. In less than a month of it she wrote one of her best children's books, _Little Lou's Sayings and Doings_; and much of the remainder was spent in discussing with her husband the project of building a cottage of their own. In a letter to her cousin, Miss Shipman, dated Sept. 21, she writes: We have had our heads full all summer, of building a little cottage here. We are having a plan made, and have about fixed on a lot. We are rather tired of boarding; George hates it, and Dorset suits us as well, I presume, as any village would. It is a lovely spot, and the people are as intelligent as in other parts of New England. The Professor is disappointed at our choosing this rather than Williamstown, but it would be no rest to us to go there. We have not decided to build; it may turn out too expensive; but we have taken lots of comfort in talking about it. We have been on several excursions, one of them to the top of Equinox. It is a hard trip, fully six miles walking and climbing. I have amused myself with writing some little books of the Susy sort: four in less than a month, A.'s sickness taking a good piece of time out of that period. They are to appear, or a part of them, in the Riverside next winter, and then to be issued in book-form by Hurd and Houghton. This will a good deal more than furnish our cottage and what trees and shrubs we want, so that I feel justified in undertaking that expense. We had two weeks at Newport before we came here, and Mr. and Mrs. McCurdy overwhelmed us with kindness, paying our traveling expenses, etc., and keeping up one steady stream of such favors the whole time. I never saw such people. How delightful it must be to be able to express such benevolence! Well; you and I can be faithful in that which is least, at any rate. We have all had plenty to read all summer, and have sat out of doors and read a good deal. I am going now to carry a little wreath to a missionary's wife who is spending the summer here; a nice little woman; this will give me a three miles walk and about use up the rest of the forenoon. In the afternoon I have promised to go to the woods with the children, all of whom are as brown as Indians. My room is all aflame with two great trees of maple; I never saw such a beautiful velvety color as they have. We have just had a very pleasant excursion to a mountain called Haystack, and ate our dinner sitting round in the grass in view of a splendid prospect.... I have thus given you the history of our summer, as far as its history can be written. Its ecstatic joys have not been wanting, nor its hours of shame and confusion of face; but these are things that can not be described. What a mystery life is, and how we go up and down, glad to-day and sorrowful to-morrow! I took real solid comfort thinking of you and praying for you this morning. I love you dearly and always shall. Good-bye, dear child. The "four little books" afford a good illustration of the ease and rapidity with which she composed. When once she had fixed upon a subject, her pen almost flew over the paper. Scarcely ever did she hesitate for a thought or for the right words to express it. Her manuscript rarely showed an erasure or any change whatever. She generally wrote on a portfolio, holding it upon her knees. Her pen seemed to be a veritable part of herself; and the instant it began to move, her face glowed with eager and pleasurable feeling. "A kitten (she wrote to a maiden friend) a kitten without a tail to play with, a mariner without a compass, a bird without wings, a woman without a husband (and fifty-five at that!) furnish faint images of the desolation of my heart without a pen." But although she wrote very fast, she never began to write without careful study and premeditation when her subject required it. About this time _The Little Preacher_ appeared. The scene of the story is laid in the Black Forest. Before writing it she spent a good deal of time in the Astor Library, reading about peasant life in Germany. In a letter from a literary friend this little work is thus referred to: I want to tell you what a German gentleman said to me the other day about your "Little Preacher." He was talking with me of German peasant life, and inquired if I had read your charming story. He was delighted to find I knew you, and exclaimed enthusiastically: "I wish I knew her! I would so like to thank her for her perfect picture. It is a miracle of genius," he added, "to be able thus to portray the life of a _foreign_ people." He is very intelligent, and so I know you will be pleased with his appreciation of your book. He said if he were not so poor, he would buy a whole edition of the "Little Preacher" to give to his friends. During the autumn of this year her sister-in-law, Mrs. Edward Payson, died after a lingering, painful illness. The following letter, dated October 28, was written to her shortly before her departure: I have been so engrossed with sympathy for Edward and your children, that I have but just begun to realise that you are about entering on a state of felicity which ought, for the time, to make me forget them. Dear Nelly, _I congratulate you with all my heart._ Do not let the thought of what those who love you must suffer in your loss, diminish the peace and joy with which God now calls you to think only of Himself and the home He has prepared for you. Try to leave them to His kind, tender care. He loves them better than you do; He can be to them more than you have been; He will hear your prayers and all the prayers offered for them, and as one whom his mother comforteth, so will He comfort them. We, who shall be left here without you, can not conceive the joys on which you are to enter, but we know enough to go with you to the very gates of the city, longing to enter in with you to go no more out. All your tears will soon be wiped away; you will see the King in His beauty; you will see Christ your Redeemer and realise all He is and all He has done for you; and how many saints whom you have loved on earth will be standing ready to seize you by the hand and welcome you among them! As I think of these things my soul is in haste to be gone; I long to be set free from sin and self and to go to the fellowship of those who have done with them forever, and are perfect and entire, wanting nothing. Dear Nelly, I pray that you may have as easy a journey homeward as your Father's love and compassion can make for you; but these sufferings at the worst can not last long, and they are only the messengers sent to loosen your last tie on earth, and conduct you to the sweetest rest. But I dare not write more lest I weary your poor worn frame with words. May the very God of peace be with you every moment, even unto the end, and keep your heart and mind stayed upon Him! Mrs. Payson had been an intimate friend of her childhood, and was endeared to her by uncommon loveliness and excellence of character. The bereaved husband, with his little boy, passed a portion of the ensuing winter at the parsonage in New York. There was something about the child, a sweetness and a clinging, almost wild, devotion to his father, which, together with his motherless state, touched his aunt to the quick and called forth her tenderest love. Many a page of Stepping Heavenward was written with this child in her arms; and perhaps that is one secret of its power. When, not very long afterwards, he went to his mother, Mrs. Prentiss wrote to the father: Only this morning I was trying to invent some way of framing my little picture of Francis, so as to see it every day before my eyes. And now this evening's mail brings your letter, and I am trying to believe what it says is true. If grief and pain could comfort you, you would be comforted; we all loved Francis, and A. has always said he was too lovely to live. How are you going to bear this new blow? My heart aches as it asks the question, aches and trembles for you. But perhaps you loved him so, that you will come to be willing to have him in his dear mother's safe keeping; will bear your own pain in future because through your anguish your lamb is sheltered forever, to know no more pain, to suffer no more for lack of womanly care, and is already developing into the rare character which made him so precious to you. Oh do try to rejoice for him while you can not but mourn for yourself. At the longest you will not have long to suffer; we are a short-lived race. But while I write I feel that I want some one to speak a comforting word to me; I too am bereaved in the death of this precious child, and my sympathy for you is in itself a pang. Dear little lamb! I can not realise that I shall never see that sweet face again in this world; but I shall see it in heaven. God bless and comfort you, my dear afflicted brother. I dare not weary you with words which all seem a mockery; I can only assure you of my tenderest love and sympathy, and that we all feel with and for you as only those can who know what this child was to you. I am going to bed with an aching heart, praying that light may spring out of this darkness. Give love from us all to Ned and Will. Perhaps Ned will kindly write me if you feel that you can not, and tell me all about the dear child's illness. * * * * * II. Last Visit from Mrs. Stearns. Visits to old Friends at Newport and Rochester. Letters. Goes to Dorset. _Fred and Maria and Me_. Letters. The life of a pastor's wife is passed in the midst of mingled gladness and sorrow. While somebody is always rejoicing, somebody, too, is always sick or dying, or else weeping. How often she goes with her husband from the wedding to the funeral, or hurries with him from the funeral to the wedding. And then, perhaps, in her own family circle the same process is repeated. The year 1868 was marked for Mrs. Prentiss in an unusual degree by the sorrowful experience. The latter part of May Mrs. Stearns, then suffering from an exhausting disease, came to New York and spent several weeks in hopes of finding some relief from change of scene. But her case grew more alarming; she passed the summer at Cornwall on the Hudson in great pain and feebleness, and was then carried home to lie down on her dying bed. _To Mrs. Stearns, Newport, July 7, 1868._ We had a dreadful time getting here; I did not sleep a wink; there were 1,250 passengers on board, almost piled on each other, and such screaming of babies it would be hard to equal. There are lots of people here we know; ever so many stopped to speak to us after church. We are in the midst of a perfect world of show and glitter. But how many empty hearts drive up and down in this gay procession of wealth and fashion! I shall think of you a good deal to-day, as setting forth on your journey and reaching your new home. I do hope you will find it refreshing to go up the river, and that your rooms will be pleasant and airy. We shall be anxious to hear all about it. It is a constant lesson to be with Mrs. McCurdy. I think she is a true Christian in all her views of life and death. Her sweet patience, cheerfulness and contentment are a continual reproof to me. Here she is so lame that she can go nowhere--a lameness of over twenty years--restricted to the plainest food, liable to die at any moment, yet the very happiest, sunniest creature I ever saw. She says, with tears, that God has been _too good_ to her and given her too much; that she sometimes fears He does not love her because He gives her such prosperity. I reminded her of the four lovely children she had lost. "Yes," she says, "but how many lovely ones I have left!" She says that the long hours she has to spend alone, on account of her physical infirmities, are never lonely or sad; she sings hymns and thinks over to herself all the pleasures she has enjoyed in the past, in her husband and children and devoted servants. She goes up to bed singing, and I hear her singing while she dresses. She said, the other day, that at her funeral she hoped the only services would be prayers and hymns of praise. I think this very remarkable from one who enjoys life as she does. [4] _To the Same, Newport, July 20._ George and I went to Rochester, taking M. with us, last Wednesday and got back Friday night. We had one of those visits that make a mark in one's life; seeing Mr. and Mrs. Leonard, and Mrs. Randall, and Miss Deborah, [5] so fond of us, and all together we were stirred up as we rarely are, and refreshed beyond description. We rowed on Mr. Leonard's beautiful, nameless lake, fished, gathered water-lilies, ate black Hamburg grapes and broiled chickens, and wished you had them in our place. Mr. L.'s mother is a sweet, calm old lady, with whom I wanted to have a talk about Christian perfection, in which she believes; but there was no time. It was a great rest to unbend the bow strung so high here at Newport, where there is so much of receiving and paying visits. I have been reading a delightful French book, the history of a saintly Catholic family of great talent and culture, six of whom, in the course of seven years, died the most beautiful, happy deaths. I am going to make an abstract of it, for I want everybody I love to get the cream of it. You would enjoy it; I do not know whether it has been translated. _To the Same, Dorset, July 26._ Here begins my first letter to you from your old room, whence I hope to write you regularly every week. That is the one only little thing I can do to show how truly and constantly I sympathise with you in your sore straits. It distresses me to hear how much you are suffering, and at the same time not to be near enough to speak a word of good cheer, or to do anything for your comfort. It grieves me to find how insecure my health is, for I had promised to myself to be your loving nurse, should any turn in your disease make it desirable. Miss Lyman boards here, but rooms at the Sykes', and her friend Miss Warner is also here, but rooms out. Miss W. is in delicate health, takes no tea or coffee, and is full of humor. We have run at and run upon each other, each trying to get the measure of the other, and shall probably end in becoming very good friends. It is a splendid day, and we feel perfectly at home, only missing you and finding it queer to be occupying your room. What a nice room it is! How I wish you were sitting here with me behind the shade of these maple trees, and that I could know from your own lips just how you are in body and mind. But I suppose the weary, aching body has the soul pretty well enchained. Never mind, dear, it won't be so always; by and by the tables will be turned, and you will be the conqueror. I like to think that far less than a hundred years hence we shall all be free from the law of sin and death, and happier in one moment of our new existence, than through a whole life-time here. Rest must and will come, sooner or later, to you and to me and to all of us, and it will be glorious. You may have seen a notice of the death of Prof. Hopkins' mother at the age of ninety-five. But for this terribly hot weather, I presume she might have lived to be one hundred. I shall not write you such a long letter again, as it will tire you, and if you would rather have two short ones a week, I will do that. Let me know if I tire you. Now good-bye, dear child; may God bless and keep you and give you all the faith and patience you need. _To Miss Mary B. Shipman, Dorset, Aug. 2, 1868._ We spent rather more than two weeks at Newport, taking two or three days to run to Rochester, Mass., to see some of our old New Bedford friends. We had a charming time with them, as they took us up just where they left us nearly twenty years ago. Oh, how our tongues did fly! We left Newport for home on Tuesday night about two weeks ago. I went on board and went to bed as well as usual, tossed and turned a few hours, grew faint and began to be sick, as I always am now if I lose my sleep; got out of bed and could not get back again, and so lay on the floor all the rest of the night without a pillow, or anything over me and nearly frozen. The boys were asleep, and anyhow it never crossed my mind to let them call George, who was in another state-room. He says that when he came in, in the morning, I looked as if I had been ill six months, and I am sure I felt so. Imagine the family picture we presented driving from the boat all the way home, George rubbing me with cologne, A. fanning me, the rest crying! On Saturday more dead than alive I started for this place, and by stopping at Troy four or five hours, getting a room and a bed, I got here without much damage. Our house is very pretty, and I suppose it will be done by next year. Oh, how they do poke! George is so happy in watching it, and in working in his woods, that I am perfectly delighted that he has undertaken this project. It may add years to his life. Imagine my surprise at receiving from Scribner a check for one hundred and sixty-four dollars for six months of Fred and Maria and Me. The little thing has done well, hasn't it? I feel now as if I should never write, any more; letter-writing is only talking and is an amusement, but book-writing looks formidable. Excuse this horrid letter, and write and let me know how you are. Meanwhile collect grasses, dip them in hot water, and sift flour over them. Good-bye, dear. _Fred and Maria and Me_ first appeared anonymously in the Hours at Home, in 1865. It had been written several years before, and, without the knowledge of Mrs. Prentiss, was offered by a friend to whom she had lent the manuscript, to the Atlantic Monthly and to one or two other magazines, but they all declined it. She herself thus refers to it in a letter to Mrs. Smith, July 13: "I have just got hold of the Hours at Home. I read my article and was disgusted with it. My pride fell below zero, and I wish it would stay there." But the story attracted instant attention. "Aunt Avery" was especially admired, as depicting a very quaint and interesting type of New England religious character in the earlier half of the century. Such men as the late Dr. Horace Bushnell and Dr. William Adams were unstinted in their praise. In a letter to Mrs. Smith, dated a few months later, Mrs. Prentiss writes: "Poor old Aunt Avery! She doesn't know what to make of it that folks make so much of her, and has to keep wiping her spectacles. I feel entirely indebted to you for this thing ever seeing the light." When published as a book, _Fred and Maria and Me_ was received with great favor, and had a wide circulation. In 1874 a German translation appeared. [6] Although no attempt is made to reproduce the Yankee idioms, much of the peculiar spirit and flavor of the original is preserved in this version. _To Mrs. H. B. Smith, Dorset, August 4, 1868._ Miss Lyman says I have no idea of what Miss W. really is; she looks as if she would drop to pieces, can not drive out, far less walk, and every word she speaks costs her an effort. Miss Lyman is not well either; and what with their health and mine, and A.'s, I see little of them. But what I do see is delightful, and I feel it to be a real privilege to get what scraps of their society I can. Our house proves to be far prettier and more tasteful than I supposed. I am writing up lots of letters, and if I ever get well enough, shall try to begin on my Katy once more. But since reading the Récit d'une Soeur, I am disgusted with myself and my writings. I ache to have you read it. Miss Lyman and Miss Warner send love to you. I do not like Miss L.'s hacking cough, and she says she does not believe Miss W. will live through the winter. Among us we contrive to keep up a vast amount of laughter; so we shall probably live forever. _August 18th._--I have enjoyed Miss Lyman wonderfully, but want to get nearer to her. I see that she is one who does not find it easy to express her deepest and most sacred feelings. I read Katy to her and Miss W., as they were kind enough to propose I should, and they made some valuable suggestions to which I shall attend if I ever get to feeling able to begin to write again. I am as well as ever save in one respect, and that is my sleep; I do not sleep as I did before I left home, while I ought to sleep better, as I work several hours a day in the woods, in fact do almost literally nothing else.... But after all, we are having the nicest time in the world. I have not seen George so like himself for many years; he lives out of doors, pulls down fences, picks up brushwood, and keeps happy and well. I feel it a real mercy that his thoughts are agreeably occupied this summer, as otherwise he would be incessantly worried about Anna. We work together a good deal; this morning I spoiled a new hatchet in cutting down milkweed where our kitchen garden is to be and we are literally raising our Ebenezer, which we mean to conceal with vines in due season. George is just as proud of our woods as if he created every tree himself. The minute breakfast is over the boys dart down to the house like arrows from the bow, and there they are till dinner, after which there is another dart and it is as much as I can do to get them to bed; I wonder they don't sleep down there on the shavings. The fact is the whole Prentiss family has got house on the brain. There, this old letter is done, and I am going to bed, all black and blue where I have tumbled down, and as tired as tired can be. _Aug. 28th._--I made a fire in MY woods yesterday, and another to-day, when I melted glue, and worked at my rustic basket, and felt extremely happy and amiable. _Sept. 13th._--Miss Warner told me to-night that she thought my Katy story commonplace at the beginning, but that she changed her mind afterward. Of course I wrote a story about that marigold of G---- W----'s and I am dying to inflict it on you. Then if you like it, hurrah! _To Miss Woolsey, Dorset, Aug. 13, 1868._ I was right glad to get your letter yesterday, and to learn a little of your whereabouts and whatabouts. You may imagine "him" as seated, spectacles on nose, reading The Nation at one end of the table, and "her" as established at the other. This table is homely, but has a literary look, got up to give an air to our room; books and papers are artistically scattered over it; we have two bottles of ink apiece, and a box of stamps, a paper cutter and a pen-wiper between us. Two inevitable vases containing ferns, grasses, buttercups, etc., remind us that we are in the country, and a "natural bracket" regales our august noses with an odor of its own. A can of peaches without any peaches in it, holds a specimen of lycopodium, and a marvelous lantern that folds up into nothing by day and grows big at night, brings up the rear. But the most wonderful article in this room is a bookcase made by "him," all himself, in which may be seen a big volume of Fenelon, Taylor's Holy Living and Dying, the Récit d'une Soeur, which have you read? Les Soirées de Saint Petersbourg, Prayers of the Ages, a volume of Goethe, Aristotle's Ethics and some other Greek books; the Life of Mrs. Fry, etc. etc. Such a queer hodge-podge of books as we brought with us, and such a book-case! The first thing "he" ever made for "her" in his mortal life. Our house isn't done, and what fun to watch it grow, to discuss its merits and demerits, to grab every check that comes in from magazine and elsewhere, and turn it into chairs and tables and beds and blankets! Then for "them boys," what treasures in the way of bits of boards, and what feats of climbing and leaping! Above all, think of "him" in an old banged-in hat, and "her" in a patched old gown, gathering brushwood in their woods, making it up into heaps, and warming themselves by the fires it is agoing for to make. "Stick after stick did Goody pull!" Mr. P. is unusually well. His house is the apple of his eye, and he is renewing his youth. Thus far the project has done him a world of good. _To Mrs. Stearns, Dorset, September 13, 1863._ Yesterday Mr. F. and George drove somewhere to look at sand for mortar, and the horse took fright and wheeled round and pitched George out, bruising him in several places, but doing no serious harm. But I shudder when I think how the meaning might be taken out of everything in this world, for me, at least, by such an accident. He preached all day to-day; in the afternoon at Rupert. I find my mission-school a good deal of a tax on time and strength, and it is discouraging business, too. One of the boys, fourteen years old, found the idea that God loved him so irresistibly ludicrous, that his face was a perfect study. I often think of you as these "active limbs of mine" take me over woods and fields, and remind myself that the supreme happiness of my father's life came to him when he called himself what you call yourself--a cripple. If it is not an expensive book, I think you had better buy A Sister's Story, of which I wrote to you, as it would be a nice Sunday book to last some time; the Catholicism you would not mind, and the cultivated, high-toned Christian character you would enjoy. The boys complain, as George and I do, that the days are not half long enough. They have got their bedsteads and washstands done, and are now going to make couches for George and myself, and an indefinite number of other articles. _Sept. 20th._--I am greatly relieved, my dear Anna, to hear that you have got safely into your new home, and that you like it, and long to see you face to face. George has no doubt told you what a happy summer we have had. It has not been unmingled happiness--that is not to be found in this world--but in many ways it has been pleasant in spite of what infirmities of the flesh we carry with us everywhere, our anxiety about and sympathy with you, and the other cares and solicitudes that are inseparable from humanity. I had a great deal of comfort in seeing Miss Lyman while she was here, and in knowing her better, and now I am finding myself quite in love with her intimate friend, Miss Warner, who has been here all summer. A gentler, tenderer spirit can not exist. Mrs. F.'s brother was here with his wife, some weeks ago, and they were summoned home to the death-bed of their last surviving child. Mrs. F. read me a letter yesterday describing her last hours, which were really touching and beautiful, especially the distributing among her friends the various pretty things she had made for them during her illness, as parting gifts. I suppose this will be my last letter from Dorset and from your old room. Well, you and I have passed some happy hours under this roof. Good-bye, dear, with love to each and all of your beloved ones. _To Miss Eliza A. Warner, Dorset, Sept. 27, 1868._ I was so nearly frantic, my dear Fanny, from want of sleep, that I could not feel anything. I was perfectly stupid, and all the way home from East Dorset hardly spoke a word to my dear John, nor did he to me. [7] The next day he said such lovely things to me that I hardly knew whether I was in the body or out of it, and then came your letter, as if to make my cup run over. I longed for you last night, and it is lucky for your frail body that can bear so little, that you were not in your little room at Mrs. G.'s; but not at all lucky for your heart and soul. I hope God will bless us to each other. It is not enough that we find in our mutual affection something cheering and comforting. It must make us more perfectly His. What a wonderful thing it is that coming here entire strangers to each other, we part as if we had known each other half a century! I am not afraid that we shall get tired of each other. The great point of union is that we have gone to our Saviour, hand in hand, on the supreme errand of life, and have not come away empty. All my meditations bring me back to that point; or, I should rather say, to Him. I came here praying that in some way I might do something for Him. The summer has gone, and I am grieved that I have not been, from its beginning to its end, so like Him, so full of Him, as to constrain everybody I met to love Him too. Isn't there such power in a holy life, and have not some lived such a life? I hardly know whether to rejoice most in my love for Him, or to mourn over my meagre love; so I do both. When I think that I have a new friend, who will be indulgent to my imperfections, and is determined to find something in me to love, I am glad and thankful. But when, added to that, I know she will pray for me, and so help my poor soul heavenward, it does seem as if God had been too good to me. You can do it lying down or sitting up, or when you are among other friends. It is true, as you say, that I do not think much of "lying-down prayer" in my own case, but I have not a weak back and do not need such an attitude. And the praying we do by the wayside, in cars and steamboats, in streets and in crowds, perhaps keeps us more near to Christ than long prayers in solitude could without the help of these little messengers, that hardly ever stop running to Him and coming back with the grace every moment needs. You can put me into some of these silent petitions when you are too tired to pray for me otherwise. I have been writing this in my shawl and bonnet, expecting every instant to hear the bell toll for church, and now it is time to go. Good-bye, dear, till by and by. Well, I have been and come, and--wonder of wonders!--I have had a little tiny bit of a very much needed nap. Mr. Pratt gave us a really good sermon about living to Christ, and I enjoyed the hymns. We have had a talk, my John and I, about death, and I asked him which of us had better go first, and, to my surprise, he said he thought _I_ should. I am sure that was noble and unselfish in him. But I am not going to have even a wish about it. God only knows which had better go first, and which stay and suffer. Some of His children _must_ go into the furnace to testify that the Son of God is there with them; I do not know why I should insist on not being one of them. Sometimes I almost wish we were not building a house. It seems as if it might stand in the way, if it should happen I had a chance to go to heaven. I should almost feel mean to do that, and disappoint my husband who expects to see me so happy there. But oh, I do so long to be perfected myself, and to live among those whose one thought is Christ, and who only speak to praise Him! I like you to tell me, as you do in your East Dorset letter, how you spend your time, etc. I have an insatiable curiosity about even the outer life of those I love; and of the inner one you can not say too much. Good-bye. We shall have plenty of time in heaven to say all we have to say to each other. * * * * * III. Return to Town. Death of an old Friend. Letters and Notes of Love and Sympathy. An Old Ladies' Party. Scenes of Trouble and Dying Beds. Fifty Years old. Letters. Her return to town brought with it a multitude of cares. The following months drew heavily upon her strength and sympathies; but for all that they were laden with unwonted joy. The summer at Dorset had been a very happy one. While there she had finished _Stepping Heavenward_ and on coming back to her city home, the cheery, loving spirit of the book seemed still to possess her whole being. Katy's words at its close were evidently an expression of her own feelings: Yes, I love everybody! That crowning joy has come to me at last. Christ is in my soul; He is mine; I am as conscious of it as that my husband and children are mine; and His Spirit flows forth from mine in the calm peace of a river, whose banks are green with grass, and glad with flowers. _To Miss Eliza A. Warner, New York, Oct. 5, 1868_ This is the first moment since we reached home, in which I could write to you, but I have had you in my heart and in my thoughts as much as ever. We had a prosperous journey, but the ride to Rupert was fearfully cold. I never remember being so cold, unless it was the night I reached Williamstown, when I went to my dear sister's funeral.... I have told you this long story to try to give you a glimpse of the distracted life that meets us at our very threshold as we return home. And now I'm going to trot down to see Miss Lyman, whom I shall just take and hug, for I am so brimful of love to everybody that I must break somebody's bones, or burst. John preached _delightfully_ yesterday; I wanted you there to hear. But all my treasures are in earthen vessels; he seems all used up by his Sunday and scarcely touched his breakfast. I don't see how his or my race can be very long, if we live in New York. All the more reason for running it well. And what a blessed, blessed life it is, at the worst! "Central peace subsisting at the heart of endless agitation." Good-bye, dear; consider yourself embraced by a hearty soul that heartily loves you, and that soul lives in E. P. On the 25th of October Mr. Charles H. Leonard, an old and highly esteemed friend, died very suddenly at his summer home in Rochester, Mass. He was a man of sterling worth, generous, large-hearted, and endeared to Mrs. Prentiss and her husband by many acts of kindness. He was one of the founders of the Church of the Covenant and had also aided liberally in building its pleasant parsonage. _To Miss Eliza A. Warner, New York, Oct. 26, 1868._ I am reminded as I write my date, that I am fifty years old to-day. My John says it is no such thing, and that I am only thirty; but I begin to feel antiquated, dilapidated, and antediluvian, etc., etc. I write to let you know that we are going to Rochester, Mass., to attend the funeral of a dear friend there. It seems best for me to risk the wear and tear of the going and the coming, if I can thereby give even a little comfort to one who loves me dearly, and who is now left without a single relative in the world. For twenty-four years these have been faithful friends, loving us better every year, members of our church in New Bedford, Mercer street, and then here. They lived at Rochester during the summer and we visited them there (you may remember my speaking of it) just before we went to Dorset. Mrs. Leonard was then feeling very uneasy about her husband, but he got better and seemed about as usual, till last Tuesday, when he was stricken down with paralysis and died on Saturday. Somebody said that spending so large a portion of my time as I do in scenes of sorrow, she wondered God did not give me more strength. But I think He knows just how much to give. I have been to Newark twice since I wrote you. Mrs. Stearns is in a very suffering condition; I was appalled by the sight; appalled at the weakness of human nature (its physical weakness). But I got over that, and had a sweet glimpse at least of the _eternal_ felicity that is to be the end of what at longest is a brief period of suffering. I write her a little bit of a note every few days. I feel like a ball that now is tossed to Sorrow and tossed back by Sorrow to Joy. For mixed in with every day's experience of suffering are such great, such unmerited mercies. Two or three of the little notes follow: MY DEAREST ANNA :-I long to be with you through the hours that are before you, and to help cheer and sustain you in the trial of faith and patience to which you are called. But unless you need me I will not go, lest I should be the one too many in your state of excitement and suspense. We all feel anxiety as to the result of the incision, but take comfort in casting our care upon God. May Christ Jesus, our dear Saviour, who loves and pities you infinitely more than any of us do, be very near you in this season of suspense. I would gladly exchange positions with you if I might, and if it were best; but as I may not, and it is not best, because God wills otherwise, I earnestly commend you to His tender sympathy. If He means that you shall be restored to health, He will make you happy in living; if He means to call you home to Himself, He will make you happy in dying. Dear Anna, stay yourself on Him: He has strength enough to support you, when all other strength fails. Remember, as Lizzy Smith said, you are "encompassed with prayers." _Friday Afternoon_, MY DEAR ANNA :-I send you a "lullaby" for next Sunday, which I met with at Dorset, and hope it will speak a little word and sing a little song to you while the rest are at church. How I do wish I could see you every day! I feel restless with longing; but you are hardly able to take any comfort in a long visit and it is such a journey to make for-a short one! But, as I said the other day, if at any time you feel a little stronger and it would comfort you even a little bit to see me, I will drop everything and run right over. It seems hard to have you suffer so and do nothing for you. But don't be discouraged; pain can't last forever. "I know not the way I am going But well do I know my Guide! With a childlike trust I give my hand, To the mighty Friend at my side. The only thing that I say to Him As He takes it, is, 'Hold it fast. Suffer me not to lose my way, And bring me home at last!'" MY DEAR ANNA:-I feel such tender love and pity for you, but I know you are too sick to read more than a few words. "In the furnace God may prove thee, Thence to bring thee forth more bright But can never cease to love thee: Thou art precious in His sight!" Your ever affectionate LIZZY. _To Mrs. Lenard, Friday, Oct. 30, 1858._ We got home safely last evening before any of the children had gone to bed, and they all came running to meet us most joyfully. This morning I am restless and can not set about anything. It distresses me to think how little human friendship can do for such a sorrow as yours. When a sufferer is on the rack he cares little for what is said to him though he may feel grateful for sympathy. I found it hard to tear myself away from you so soon, but all I could do for you there I could do all along the way home and since I have got here: love you, be sorry for you, and constantly pray for you. I am sure that He who has so sorely afflicted you accepts the patience with which you bear the rod, and that when this first terrible amazement and bewilderment are over, and you can enter into communion and fellowship with Him, you will find a joy in Him that, hard as it is to the flesh to say so, transcends all the sweetest and best joys of human life. You will have nothing to do now but to fly to Him. I have seen the time when I could hide myself in Him as a little child hides in its mother's arms, and so have thousands of aching hearts. In all our afflictions He is afflicted. But I must not weary you with words. May God bless and keep you, and fully reveal Himself unto you! _To Miss. E. A. Warner, New York, Nov. 2, 1868._ I have been lying on the sofa in my room, half asleep, and feeling rather guilty at the lot of gas I was wasting, but too lazy or too tired to get up to turn it down. Your little "spray" hangs right over the head of my bed, an it was it was slightly dilapidated by its journey hither, I have tucked in a bit of green fern with it to remind me that I was not always in the sere and yellow leaf, but had a spring-time once. To think of your going for to go and write verses to me in my old age! I have just been reading them over and think it was real good of you to up and say such nice things in such a nice way. I'd no idea you _could!_ We did not come home from Rochester through Boston; if we had done so I meant to go and see you. I made it up in many loving thoughts to you on our twelve hours' journey. Poor Mrs. L. met me with open arms, and I was thankful indeed that I went, though every word I said in the presence of her terrible grief, sounded flat and cold and dead. How little the tenderest love and sympathy can do, in such sorrows! She was so bewildered and appalled by her sudden bereavement, that it was almost a mockery to say a word; and yet I kept saying what I _know_ is true, that Christ in the soul is better than any earthly joy. Both Mr. Prentiss and myself feel the reaction which must inevitably follow such a strain. You ask if I look over the past on my birthdays. I suppose I used to do it and feel dreadfully at the pitiful review, but since I have had the children's to celebrate, I haven't thought much of mine. But this time, being fifty years old, did set me upon thinking, and I had so many mercies to recount and to thank God for, that I hardly felt pangs of any sort. I suppose He controls our moods in such seasons, and I have done trying to force myself into this or that train of thought. I am sure that a good deal of what used to seem like repentance and sorrow for sin on such occasions, was really nothing but wounded pride that wished it could appear better in its own eyes. God has been so good to me! I wish I could begin to realise how good! I think a great many thoughts to you that I can't put on paper. Life seems teaching some new, or deepening the impression of some old, lesson, all the time. You think A. may have looked scornfully at your little "spray." Well, she didn't; she said, "What's that funny little thing perched up there? Well, it's pretty anyhow." Among the rush of visitors to-day were Miss Haines and the W----s. I fell upon Miss W. and told her about you, furiously; then we got upon Miss Lyman, and it did my very soul good to hear Miss Haines praise and magnify her. Never shall I cease to be thankful for being with her at Dorset, to say nothing, dear, of you! Do you know that there are twelve cases of typhoid fever at Vassar? and that Miss Lyman is not as well as she was? I feel greatly concerned about her, not to say troubled. I don't suppose I shall ever hear her pray. But I shall hear her and help her praise. I don't believe a word about there being different grades of saints in heaven. Some people think it modest to say that they don't expect to get anywhere near so and so, they are so--etc., etc. But I expect to be mixed all up with the saints, and to take perfect delight in their testimony to my Saviour. Can you put up with this miserable letter? Folks can't rush to Newark and to Rochester and agonise in every nerve at the sufferings of others, and be quite coherent. I have sense enough left to know that I love you dearly, and that I long to see you and to take sweet counsel with you once more. Don't fail to give me the helping hand. The following was written to Mrs. Stearns on her silver-wedding day, Nov. 15: MY DEAREST ANNA: I have thought of you all day with the tenderest sympathy, knowing how you had looked forward to it, and what a contrast it offers to your bridal day twenty-five years ago. But I hope it has not been wholly sad. You have a rich past that can not be taken from you, and a richer future lies before you. For I can see, though through your tears you can not, that the Son of God walks with you in this furnace of affliction, and that He is so sanctifying it to your soul, that ages hence you will look on this day as better, sweeter, than the day of your espousals. It is hard now to suffer, but after all, the _light_ affliction is nothing, and the _weight_ of glory is everything. You may not fully realise this or any other truth, in your enfeebled state, but truth remains the same whether we appreciate it or not; and so does Christ. Your despondency does not prove that He is not just as near to you as He is to those who see Him more clearly; and it is better to be despondent than to be self-righteous. Don't you see that in afflicting you He means to prove to you that He loves you, and that you love Him? Don't you remember that it is His son--not His enemy--that He scourgeth? The greatest saint on earth has got to reach heaven on the same terms as the greatest sinner; unworthy, unfit, good-for-nothing; but saved through grace. Do cheer and comfort yourself with these thoughts, my dearest Anna, and your sick-room will be the happiest room in your house, as I constantly pray it may be! Your ever affectionate Lizzy. _To Miss E.A.W., New York, Nov. 17, 1868_ You ask how I sleep. I always sleep better at home than elsewhere; this is one great reason why we decided to have a home all the year round. I have to walk four or five miles a day, which takes a good deal of time, these short days, but there is no help for it. I do not think the time is lost when I am out of doors; I suppose Christ may go with us, _does_ go with us, wherever we go. But I am too eager and vehement, too anxious to be working all the time. Why, no, I don't think it _wrong_ to want to be at work provided God gives us strength for work; the great thing is not to repine when He disables us. I don't think, my dear, that you need trouble yourself about my dying at present; it is not at all likely that I shall. I feel as if I had got to be _tested_ yet; this sweet peace, of which I have so much, almost startles me. I keep asking myself whether it is not a stupendous delusion of Satan and my own wicked heart. How I wish I could see you to-night! There is so much one does not like to put on paper that one would love to say. _Thursday, 4 P.M._--Well, my lunch-party is over, and my sewing society is re-organised, and before I go forth to tea, let me finish and send off this epistle. We had the Rev. Mr. and Mrs. Washburn, of Constantinople, Dr. Chickering, and Prof, and Mrs. Smith; gave them cold turkey, cold ham, cold ice-cream and hot coffee; that was about all, for society in New York is just about reduced down to eating and drinking together, after which you go about your business. I am re-reading Leighton on 1st Peter; I wonder if you like it as much as my John and I do! I hope your murderous book goes on well; then you can take your rest next summer. Now I must get ready for my long walk down and over to Ninth st., to see a tiny little woman, and English at that. Her prayer at our meeting yesterday moved us all to tears. _To Miss Eliza A. Warner, New York, Nov. 25, 1868_ Mr. Prentiss complained yesterday that no letters came, an unheard-of event in our family history, and this morning found _twelve_ sticking in the top of the box; among them was yours, but I was just going off to my Prayer-meeting, and had to put it into my pocket and let it go too. I am glad you sent me Mrs. Field's letter and poem; she is a genius, and writes beautifully. And how glad you must be to hear about your books. I can't imagine what better work you want than writing. In what other way could you reach so many minds and hearts? You must always send me such letters. Before I forget it, let me tell you of a real Thanksgiving present we have just had; three barrels of potatoes, some apples, some dried apples, cranberries, celery, canned corn, canned strawberries, and two big chickens. _After church, Thursday._--I must indulge myself with going on with my letter, for after dinner I want to play with the children, and make this day mean something to them besides pies. For everybody spoke for pies this year (you know we almost never make such sinful things) and they all said ice-cream wouldn't do at all, so yesterday I made fourteen of these enormities, and mean to stuff them (the children, not the pies!) so that they won't want any more for a year. I want to tell you about some pretty coincidences; we went to church in a dismal rain, and Mr. Prentiss preached on the _beauty_ of holiness, and every time he said anything that made sunshine particularly appropriate, the sun came in in floods, then disappeared till the next occasion. For instance, he spoke of the sunshine of a happy home as so much brighter than that of the natural sun, and the whole church was instantly illuminated; then he said that if we had each come there with ten million sorrows, Christ could give us light, when, lo, the church glowed again; and so on half-a-dozen times, till at last he quoted the verse _"And the Lamb is the light thereof,"_ when a perfect blaze of effulgence made those mysterious, words almost startling. And then he wound up by describing the Tyrolese custom on which Mrs. Field's poem is founded, which he had himself seen and enjoyed, and of which, it seems, he spoke at East Dorset last summer at the Sunday-school. [8] I read the poem and letter to him the instant we got home, and he admired them both. It was a little singular that her poem and his sermon came to me at almost the identical moment, wasn't it? I must tell you about an old ladies' party given by Mrs. Cummings, wife of him who prepared my father's memoir. [9] She had had a fortune left to her and was all the time doing good with it, and it entered her head to get up a very nice supper for twenty-six old ladies, the youngest of whom was seventy-five (the Portland people rarely die till they're ninety or so). She sent carriages for all who couldn't walk, and when they all got together, the lady who described the scene to me, said it was indescribably beautiful, all congratulating each other that they were so far on in their pilgrimage and so near heaven! Lovely, wasn't it? I wish I could spend the rest of my life with such people! Then she spoke of Mrs. C.'s face during the last six months of her life, when it had an expression so blest, so seraphic, that it was a delight to look upon it--and how she had all the members of the ladies' prayer-meeting come and kiss her good-bye after she was too weak to speak. And now the children have got together again, and I must go and stay with them till their bed-time, when, partly for the sake of the walk, partly because they asked us, we twain are going to see the Smiths. I rather think, my dear, that if, as you say, you could see all my thoughts, you would drop me as you would a hot potato. You would see many good thoughts, I won't deny that, and some loving ones; but you would also see an abominable lot of elated, conceited, horrid ones; self-laudation even at good planned to do, and admired before done. But God can endure what no mortal eye could; He does not love us because we are so lovely, but because He always loves what He pities. I fall back upon this thought whenever I feel discouraged; I was going to say _sad_, but that isn't the word, for I never do feel sad except when I've been eating something I'd no business to! Good-bye, dearie. _To the Same, New York, Dec. 3, 1868._ I think I must indulge myself, my dear, in writing to you to-night, it being really the only thing I want to do, unless it be to lie half asleep on the sofa. And that I can't do, for there's no sofa in the room! The cold weather has made it agreeable to have a fire in the dining-room grate, and this makes it a cheerful resort for the children, especially as the long table is very convenient for their books, map-drawing, etc. And wherever the rest are the mother must be; I suppose that is the law of a happy family, in the winter at least. The reason I am so tired to-night is that I have been unexpectedly to Newark. I went, as soon as I could after breakfast, to market, and then on a walk of over two miles to prepare myself for our sewing-circle! I met our sexton as I was coming home, and asked him to see what ailed one of the drawers of my desk that wouldn't shut. We had a terrible time with it, and I had to take everything out, and turn my desk topsy-turvy, and your letters and all my other papers got raving distracted, and all mixed up with bits of sealing-wax, old pens, and dear knows what not, when down comes A. from the school-room, to say that Mrs. Stearns had sent for me to come right out, thinking she was dying. I knew nothing about the trains, always trusting to Mr. Prentiss about that, but in five minutes I was off, and on reaching the depot found I had lost a train by ten minutes, and that there wouldn't be another for an hour. Then I had leisure to remember that Mr. P. was to get home from Dorset, that I had left no message for him, had hid away all the letters that had come in his absence, where he couldn't find them; that if it was necessary for me to stay at Newark all night he would be dreadfully frightened, etc., etc. Somehow I felt very blue, but at last concluded to get rid of a part of the time by hunting up some dinner at a restaurant. When I at last got to Newark, I found that Mrs. Stearns' disease had suddenly developed several unfavorable symptoms. She had made up her mind that all hope was over, had taken leave of her family, and now wanted to bid me good-bye. She held my hands fast in both hers, begging me to talk. I spoke freely to her about her death; she pointed up once to an illumination I gave her last spring: SIMPLY TO THY CROSS I CLING. "That," she said, "is all I can do." I said all I could to comfort her, but I do not know whether God gave me the right word or not. On my return, as I got out of the stage near the corner of our street, whom should my weary eyes light on but my dear good man, just got home from Dorset; how surprised and delighted we were to meet so unexpectedly! M. rushed to meet us, and afterward said to me, "I have three great reliefs; you have got home; papa has got home; and Aunt Anna is still alive." My children were never so lovely and loving as they are this winter; my home is almost too luxurious and happy; such things don't belong to this world. We have just heard of the death in Switzerland of Mr. Prentiss' successor at New Bedford, classmate of one of my brothers, and some one has sent a plaintive, sweet little dying song written at Florence by him. Now I am too fagged to say another word. _Dec. 4th._--"I do not get _any_ time to write; each day brings its own special work that can't be done to-morrow; as to letters, I scratch them off at odd moments, when too tired to do anything else. What a resource they are! They do instead of crying for me. And how many I get every week that are loving and pleasant! What do you think of this? I hope it will make you laugh--a lady told me she never confessed her sins aloud (in prayer) lest Satan should find out her weak points and tempt her more effectually! And I want to ask you if you ever offer to pray with people? I never do, and yet there are cases when nothing else seems to answer. Oh, how many questions of duty come up every hour, and how many reasons we have every hour to be ashamed of ourselves! _Monday morning._--It was a shame to write to you, when I was so tired that I could not write legibly, but my heart was full of love, and I longed to be near you. Now Monday has come, a lowering, forbidding day, yet all is sunshine in my soul, and I hope that may make my home light to my beloved ones, and even reach you, wherever you are. I am going to run out to see how Mrs. Stearns is. Our plan is for me to make arrangements to stay with her, if I can be of any use or comfort. I literally love the house of mourning better than the house of feasting. All my long, long years of suffering and sorrow make sorrow-stricken homes homelike, and I can not but feel, because I know it from experience, that Christ loves to be in such homes. So you may congratulate me, dear, if I may be permitted to go where He goes. I wish you could have heard yesterday's sermon about God's having as _characteristic, individual_ a love to each of us as we have to our friends. Think of that, dear, when you remember how I loved you in Mrs. G.'s little parlor! Can you realise that your Lord and Saviour loves you infinitely more? I confess that such conceptions are hard to attain.... Can't you do M---- S---- up in your next letter, and send her to me on approbation? Instead of being satisfied that I've got you, I want her and everybody else who is really good, to fill up some of the empty rooms in my heart. This is a rambling, scrambling letter, but I don't care, and don't believe you do. Well, good-bye; thank your stars that this bit of paper hasn't got any arms and can't hug you! _To Mrs. Leonard, New York, Dec. 13, 1868._ There is half an hour before bed-time, and I have been thinking of and praying for you, till I feel that I _must_ write. I forgot to tell you, how the verses in my Daily Food, on the day of your dear husband's death, seem meant for you: "Thou art my refuge and portion."--Ps. cxliii. 5. 'Tis God that lifts our comforts high, Or sinks them in the grave; He gives, and blessed be His name! He takes but what He gave. The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away.--JOB i. 21. I have had this little book thirty-three years, it has travelled with me wherever I have been, and it has been indeed my song in the house of my pilgrimage. This has been our communion Sunday, and I have been very glad of the rest and peace it has afforded, for I have done little during the last ten days but fly from one scene of sorrow to another, from here to Newark and from Newark to Brooklyn.... So I have alternated between the two dying beds; yesterday Jennie P. went into a convulsion just as I entered the room, and did not fully come out of it for an hour and a half, when I had to come away in order to get home before pitch dark. What a terrible sight it is! They use chloroform, and that has a very marked effect, controlling all violence in a few seconds. Whether the poor child came out of that attack alive I do not know; I had no doubt she was dying till just before I came away, when she appeared easier, though still unconscious. The family seem nearly frantic, and the sisters are so upset by witnessing these turns, that I shall feel that I must be there all I can. I am in cruel doubt which household to go to, but hope God will direct. Mr. Prentiss is a good deal withered and worn by his sister's state; he had never, by any means, ceased to hope, and he is much afflicted. She and Jennie may live a week or more, or go at any moment. In my long hours of silent musing and prayer, as I go from place to place, I think often of you. I think one reason why we do not get all the love and faith we sigh for is that we try to force them to come to us, instead of realising that they must be God's free gifts, to be won by prayer.... And now Mr. P. has come up-stairs rolled up in your afghan, and we have decided to go to both Newark and Brooklyn to-morrow, so I know I ought to go to bed. You must take this letter as a great proof of my love to you, though it does not say much, for I am bewildered by the scenes through which I am passing, and hardly fit therefore to write. What I do not say I truly feel, real, deep, constant sympathy with you in your sorrow and loneliness. May God bless you in it. [1] Dorset is situated in Bennington county, about sixty miles from Troy and twenty-five miles from Rutland. Its eastern portion lies in a deep-cut valley along the western slope of the Green Mountain range, on the line of the Bennington and Rutland railroad. Its western part--the valley in which Mrs. Prentiss passed her summers--is separated from East Dorset by Mt. Aeolus, Owl's Head, and a succession of maple-crested hills, all belonging to the Taconic system of rocks, which contains the rich marble, slate, and limestone quarries of Western Vermont. In the north this range sweeps round toward the Equinox range, enclosing the beautiful and fertile upland region called The Hollow. Dorset belonged to the so-called New Hampshire Grants, and was organised into a township shortly before the Revolutionary War. Its first settlers were largely from Connecticut and Massachusetts. They were a hardy, intelligent, liberty-loving race, and impressed upon the town a moral and religious character, which remains to this day. [2] Mrs. Arthur Bronson, of New York. A life of Mrs. Prentiss would scarcely be complete without a grateful mention of this devoted friend and true Christian lady. She was the centre of a wide family circle, to all of whose members, both young and old, she was greatly endeared by the beauty and excellence of her character. She died shortly after Mrs. Prentiss. [3] While supposing that her brothers had been burnt out and had, perhaps, lost everything, she wrote to her husband with characteristic generosity: "If they did not kill themselves working at the fire, they will kill themselves trying to get on their feet again. Every cent I have I think should be given them. My father's church and everything associated with my youth, gone forever! I can't think of anything else." [4] Mrs. McCurdy died at her home in New York in December, 1876. A few sentences from a brief address at the funeral by her old pastor will not be here out of place. "Her natural character was one of the loveliest I have ever known. Its leading traits were as simple and clear as daylight, while its cheering effect upon those who came under its influence was like that of sunshine. She was not only very happy herself--enjoying life to the last in her home and her friends--but she was gifted with a disposition and power to make others happy such as falls to the lot of only a select few of the race. Her domestic and church ties brought her into relations of intimate acquaintance and friendship with some of the best men of her times. I will venture to mention two of them: her uncle, the late Theodore Frelinghuysen, one of the noblest men our country has produced, eminent alike as statesman, scholar, and Christian philanthropist; and the sainted Thomas H. Skinner, her former pastor. Her sick-room--if sick-room is the proper name--in which, during the last seventeen years, she passed so much of her time, was tinged with no sort of gloom; it seemed to have two doors, one of them opening into the world, through which her family and friends passed in and out, learning lessons of patience and love and sweet contentment: the other opening heavenward, and ever ajar to admit the messenger of her Lord, in whatever watch he should come to summon her home. The place was like that upper chamber facing the sunrising, and whose name was _Peace_, in which Bunyan's Pilgrim was lodged on the way to the celestial city. How many pleasant and hallowed memories lead back to that room!" [5] Old New Bedford friends. [6] Fritz und Maria und Ich. Von Mrs. Prentiss. Deutsche autorisirte Ausgabe. Von Marie Morgenstern. Itzchoe, 1874. [7] She gave me the pet-name of "Fanny" because she did not like mine, and there was an old joke about "John."--E. A. W. [8] The custom related to a pious salutation, with which two _friends_, or even _strangers_, greet each other, when meeting on the mountain highways and passes in certain districts of Tyrol. _"Gelobt sei Jesu Christ!"_ cries one; _"In Ewigkeit, Amen!"_ answers the other (_i.e._, "Praised be Jesus Christ!" "For evermore, Amen!") The following lines are from Mrs. F.'s Poem: "When the poor peasant, alpenstock in hand, Toils up the steep, And finds a friend upon the dizzy height Amid his sheep, "They do not greet each other as in our Kind English way, Ask not for health, nor wish in cheerful phrase prosperous day; "Infinite thoughts alone spring up in that Great solitude, Nothing seems worthy or significant But heavenly good; "So in this reverent and sacred form Their souls outpour,-- Blessed be Jesus Christ's most holy name! 'For evermore!'" [9] Rev. Asa Cummings, D.D., of Portland, for many years editor of the Christian Mirror; one of the weightiest, wisest and best men of his generation. CHAPTER IX. STEPPING HEAVENWARD. 1869. I. Death of Mrs. Stearns. Her Character. Dangerous Illness of Prof. Smith. Death at the Parsonage. Letters. A Visit to Vassar College. Letters. Getting ready for General Assembly. "Gates Ajar." A little past three o'clock on Saturday afternoon, January 2, 1869, Anna S. Prentiss, wife of the Rev. Jonathan F. Stearns, D.D., fell asleep in Jesus. The preceding pages show what strong ties bound Mrs. Prentiss to this beloved sister. Their friendship dated back thirty years; it was cemented by common joys and common sorrows in some of their deepest experiences of life; and it had been kept fresh and sweet by frequent intercourse and correspondence. Mrs. Stearns was a woman of uncommon attractions and energy of character. She impressed herself strongly upon all who came within the sphere of her influence; the hearts of her husband's people, as well as his own and those of her children, trusted in her; and the whole community where she dwelt mourned her loss. She had been especially endeared to her brother Seargent, with whom she spent several winters in the South prior to her marriage. Her influence over him, at a critical period of his life, was alike potent and happy; their relation to each other was, in truth, full of the elements of romance; and some of his letters to her are exquisite effusions of fraternal confidence and affection. [1] Her letters to him, beginning when she was a young girl and ending only with his life, would form a large volume. "You excel any one I know," he wrote to her, "in the kind and gentle art of letter-writing." In the midst of his early professional triumphs he writes: You do not know what obligations I am under to you; I owe all my success in this country to the fact of having so kind a mother and such sweet affectionate sisters as Abby and yourself. It has been my only motive to exertion; without it I should long since have thrown myself away. Even now, when, as is frequently the case, I feel perfectly reckless both of life and fortune, and look with contempt upon them both, the recollection that there are two or three hearts that beat for me with real affection, even though far away--comes over me as the music of David did over the dark spirit of Saul. I still feel that I have something worth living for. For years her letters helped to cherish and deepen this feeling. He thus refers to one of them: I can not tell how much I thank you for it. I cried like a child while reading it, and even now the tears stand in my eyes, as I think of its expressions of affection, sympathy, and good sense.... I wish you were here now--oh, how I do wish it! But you will come next fall, won't you? and be to me The antelope whose feet shall bless With her light step my loneliness. But my candle burns low, and it is past the witching hour of night. Whether sleeping or waking, God bless you and our dear mother, and all of you. Good-night--good-night. My love loads this last line. To Mrs. Prentiss and her husband, the death of Mrs. Stearns was an irreparable loss. It took out of their life one of its greatest earthly blessings. The new year opened with another painful shock--the sudden and dangerous illness of her husband's bosom friend, Henry Boynton Smith. Prof. Smith was to have made one of the addresses at the funeral of Mrs. Stearns; but instead of doing so, he was obliged to take to his bed, and, soon afterwards, to flee for his life beyond the sea. To this affliction the reader is indebted for the letters to Mrs. Smith, contained in this chapter. On the 16th of February another niece of her husband, a sweet child of seventeen, was brought to the parsonage very ill and died there before the close of the month. Her letters will show how she was affected by these troubles. _To Mrs. Leonard, New York, Jan. 9, 1869._ So many unanswered letters lie piled on my desk that I hardly know which to take up first, but my heart yearns over you, and I can not help writing you. No wonder you grow sadder as time passes and the beloved one comes not, and comes not. I wish I could help you bear your burden, but all I can do is to be sorry for you. The peaceable fruits of sorrow do not ripen at once; there is a long time of weariness and heaviness while this process is going on; but I do not, will not doubt, that you will taste these fruits, and find them very sweet. One of the hard things about bereavement is the physical prostration and listlessness which make it next to impossible to pray, and quite impossible to feel the least interest in anything. We must bear this as a part of the pain, believing that it will not last forever, for nothing but God's goodness does. How I wish you were near us, and that we could meet and talk and pray together over all that has saddened our lives, and made heaven such a blessed reality! There is not much to tell about the last hours of our dear sister. She had rallied a good deal, and they all thought she was getting well; but the day after Christmas typhoid symptoms began to set in. I saw her on the Monday following, found her greatly depressed, and did not stay long. On Saturday morning, we got a dispatch we should have received early on New Year's day, saying she was sinking. We hurried out, found her flushed and bright, but near her end, having no pulse at either wrist, and her hands and feet cold. She had had a distressing day and night, but now seemed perfectly easy; knew us, gave us a glad welcome, reminded me that I had promised to go with her to the end, and kissed us heartily. Every time we went near her she gave us such a glad smile that it was hard to believe she was going so soon. She talked incessantly, with no signs of debility, but it was the restlessness of approaching death. At three in the afternoon they all came into the room, as they always did at that hour. She said a few things, and evidently began to lose her sight, for as Lewis was about to leave the room, she said, "Good-night, L.," and then to me, "Why, Lizzy dear, you are not going to stay all night?" I said, "Oh yes, don't you know I promised to stay with A., who will be so lonely?" She looked pleased, but greatly surprised, her mind being so weak, and in a few seconds she laid her restless hands on her breast, her eyes became fixed, and the last gentle breaths began to come and go. "Is the doctor here?" she asked. We told her no, and then Mr. S. and the nurse, who were close each side of her, began to repeat a verse or two of Scripture; then seeing she was apparently too far gone to hear, Mr. S. leaned over and whispered, "My darling!" She made no response, on which he said, "She can make no response," and she said, "But I hear," gave one or two more gentle little breaths, and was gone. I forgot to say that after her eyes were fixed, hearing Mr. S. groan, she _stopped dying_, turned and gave a parting look! I never saw an easier death, nor such a bright face up to the very last. One of the doctors coming in, in the morning, was apparently overcome by the extraordinary smile she gave him, for he turned away immediately without a word, and left the house. I staid, as they wished me to do, till Monday night, when I came home quite used up. Your sorrow, and the sorrow at Brooklyn, and now this one, have come one after another until it seemed as if there was no end to it; such is life, and we must bear it patiently, knowing the end will be the more joyful for all that saddened the way. I shall always let you know if anything of special interest occurs in the church or among ourselves. After loving you so many years, I am not likely to forget you now. The addresses at Mrs. S.'s funeral will probably be published, and we will send you a copy. Mr. P. is bearing up bravely, but feels the listlessness of which I spoke, and finds sermonising hard work. He joins me in love to you. Do write often. _To Miss Eliza A. Warner, New York, Feb. 16, 1869._ On coming home from church on Sunday afternoon I found one of the Brooklyn family waiting to tell us that another of the girls was very ill, that they were all worn out and nearly frantic, and asking if she might be brought here to be put under the care of some German doctor, as Dr. Smith had given her up. In the midst of my sorrow for the poor mother, I thought of myself. How could I, who had not been allowed to invite Miss Lyman here, undertake this terrible care? You know what a fearful disease it is--how many convulsions they have; but you don't know the harm it did me just seeing poor Jennie P. in one. Yesterday I tried hard to let God manage it, but I know I wished He would manage it so as to spare me; it takes so little to pull me down, and so little to destroy my health. But I wasn't in a good frame, couldn't write a Percy for the Observer, got a letter from some house down town, asking me to write them Susy books, got a London Daily News containing a nice notice of Little Lou, but nought consoled me. [2] In fact, I dawdled so long over H.'s lessons, which I always hear after breakfast, that I had not my usual time to pray; and that, of itself, would spoil any day. After dinner came two of the Prentiss sisters to say that Dr. [Horatio] Smith said Eva's one chance of getting well was to come here for change of air and scene--would I take her and her mother? Of course I would. They then told me that Dr. Smith had said his brother's case was perfectly hopeless. This upset me. My feet turned into ice and my head into a ball of fire. As soon as they left, I had the spare room arranged, and then went out and walked till dark to cool off my head, but to so little purpose that I had a bad night; the news about Prof. S. was so dreadful. Mr. Prentiss was appalled, too. I had to make this a day of rest--not daring to work after such a night. Got up at seven or so, took my bath, rung the bell for prayers at twenty minutes of eight. After breakfast heard H.'s lessons, then read the 20th chapter of Matthew; and mused long on Christ's coming to minister--not to be ministered unto. Prayed for poor Mrs. Smith and a good many weary souls, and felt a little bit better. Then went down to Randolph's at the request of a lady, who wanted him to sell some books she had got up for a benevolent object. He said he'd take twelve. Then to the Smiths, burdened with my sad secret. Got home tired and depressed. Tried to get to sleep and couldn't, tried to read and couldn't. At last they came with the sick girl, and one look at the poor, half- fainting child, and her mother's "Nobody in the world but you would have let us come," made them welcome; and I have rejoiced ever since that _God let_ them come. One of the first things they said took my worst burden off my back; the whole story about Prof. Smith was a dream! Can you conceive my relief? We had dinner. Eva ate more than she had done for a long time. We had a long talk with her mother after dinner; then I went up to the sick-room and stayed an hour or so; then had a call; then ran out to carry a book to a widowed lady, that I hoped would comfort her; then home, and with Eva till tea-time. Then had some comfort in laying all these cares and interests in those loving Arms that are always so ready to take them in. I enjoy praying in the morning best, however--perhaps because less tired; but sometimes I think it is owing to a sort of night-preparation for it; I mean, in the wakeful times of night and early morning. _Wednesday, 17th_--While I was writing the above all the Brooklyn Prentisses went to bed, and we New York Prentisses went to the Sunday- school rooms next door to a church-gathering. There are three rooms that can be thrown together, and they were bright and fragrant with flowers, most of which the young men sent me afterwards, exquisite things. I had a precious talk with Dr. Abbot, one of whose feet, to say the least, is already on the topmost round. I only wish he was a woman. The church was open, and we all went in and listened to some fine music. Coming out I said to a gentleman who approached me, "How is little baby?" "Which little baby?" "Why, the youngest." "Oh, we haven't any baby." And lo! I had mistaken my man! Imagine how _he_ felt and how _I_ felt! We got home at eleven P.M., and so ended my day of rest. I have 540 things to say, but there is so much going on that I shall defraud you of them--aren't you glad? Have you read the "Gates Ajar"? I have, with real pain. I do not think you will be so shocked at it as I am, but hope you don't like it. It is full of talent, but has next to no Christ in it, and my heaven is full of Him. I have finished Faber. How queer he is with his 3's and 5's and 6's and 7's! I feel all done up into little sums in addition, and that's about all I know of myself--he's bewildered me so. There are fine things in it, and I took the liberty of making a wee cross against some of them, which you can rub out. Miss L. sent me another of his books, which I am reading now--"All for Jesus." _To Mrs. Henry B. Smith, New York, March 22, 1869_ We were gladdened early this morning by the arrival of your letter, and the good news it contained. I had a dreadful fright on the day you reached Southampton. Mr. Moore sent up a cable dispatch announcing the fact, and as it came directed to both of us, and I supposed it to be from you, I thought some terrible thing had happened. I paraded down to M. with your letter, and she, at the same time, paraded up here with the one to her and the rest. So we got all the news there was, and longed for more. I hope the worst is now over. I have just got home from a visit of four days and nights to Miss Lyman. I enjoyed it exceedingly, and wish I could tell you all about it, but can't in a letter. She has turns of looking absolutely _aged_, and seems a good deal of the time in a perfect worry, I don't know what about. Otherwise she is better than last summer. I never saw her when at work before, and perhaps she always appears so. We had two or three good rousing laughs, however, and that did us both good. I did not know she was so fond of flowers; she buys them and keeps loads of them about her parlors, library, and bedroom. What a world it is there! I only wish she was happier in her work, but perhaps if we could get behind the scenes, we should find all human workers have their sorrows and misgivings and faintings. According to her I had an "inquiry meeting" once or twice; believe it if you can and dare. It was certainly very pleasant to get into such an intelligent Christian atmosphere, and on the whole I've got rather converted to Vassar. I have been greatly delighted with a present of one of my father's cuff- buttons (which I well remember), and a lock of his hair.... I haven't got anything more to say. Oh, Mrs. ---- left that on her card here the other day, and we called on her this afternoon. What a jolly old lady she is! Of course, anybody could believe in perfection who was as fat and well as she! _To Mrs. Leonard, New York, April 5, 1869_ If I should send you a letter every time I send you a thought, you would be quite overwhelmed with them. Now that Mrs. S. has gone away, and some of my pressing cares are over, I miss you more than ever. We have had a good deal to sadden us this winter, beginning with your sorrow, which was also ours; and Eva P.'s death, occurring as it did in our house, was a distressing one. She was here about a fortnight, and the first week came down to her meals, though she kept in her room the rest of the time. On Tuesday night of the second week she was at the tea-table, and played a duet with A. after tea. Soon after she was taken with distress for breath, and was never in bed again, but sat nearly double in a chair, with one of us supporting her head. It was agonizing suffering to witness, and the care of her was more laborious than anyone can conceive, who did not witness or participate in it. We had at last to have six on hand to relieve each other. She died on Saturday, after four terrible days and nights. We knew she would die here when they first proposed her coming, but did not like to refuse her last desire, and are very glad we had the privilege of ministering to her last wants.... For you I desire but one thing--a full possession of Christ. Let us turn away our eyes from everything that does not directly exalt Him in our affections; we are poor without Him, no matter what our worldly advantages are; rich with Him when stripped of all besides. Still I know you are passing through deep waters, and at times must well nigh sink. But your loving Saviour will not let you sink, and He never loved you so well as He does now. How often I long to fly to you in your lonely hours! But I can not, and so I turn these longings into prayers. I hope you pray for me, too. You could not give me anything I should value so much, and it is a great comfort to me to know that you love me. I care more to be loved than to be admired, don't you? I hope that by next winter you may feel that you can come and see us; I want to see you, not merely to write to you and get answers. I send you a picture of our nest at Dorset. Good-bye. _To Miss E. A. Warner, New York, April 20, 1869_ I opened your letter in the street, and was at once confronted with a worldly-looking bit of silk! How _can_ you! Why don't you follow my example and dress in sackcloth and ashes? I think however, if you _will_ be worldly you have done it very prettily, and on the whole don't know that it is any wickeder than I have been in translating a "dramatic poem" in five acts from the German, only you've got your dress done and I'm only half through my play; and there's no knowing how bad I shall get before I am through. I wonder if you are sitting by an open window, as I am, and roasting at that? I had a drive with A. and M. through the Park yesterday, and saw stacks of hyacinths in bloom, and tulips and violets and dandelions; a willow-tree not far from my window has put on its tender green, and summer seems close at hand. I have been to an auction and got cheated, as I might have known I should; and the other day I had my pocket picked. As to "Gates Ajar," most people are enchanted with it; but Miss Lyman regards it as I do, and so do some other elect ladies. I have just written to see if she will come down and get a little rest, now the weather is so fine. Mr. P. has gone to Dorset to be gone all the week, and I am buying up what is to be bought, begrudging every cent! mean wretch that I am. I have looked through and read parts of "Patience Strong's Outings"--an ugly title, and a transcendental style, but beautiful in conception, and taken off the stilts, in execution. I do not like the cant of Unitarians any better than they like ours, but I like what is elevating in any sect. I have had a present of a lot of table-linen, towels, etc., for Dorset, and feel a good deal like a young housekeeper. I wonder how soon you go back to Northampton? How queer it must be to be able to float round! It is a pity you could not float to New York, and get a good hugging from this old woman. We expect 250 ministers here in May at general assembly (I ought to have spelt it with a big G and a big A). My dear child, what makes you get blue? I don't much believe in any blue devils save those that live in the body and send sallies into the mind. Perhaps I should, though, if I had not a husband and children to look after; how little one can judge for another! * * * * * II. How she earned her Sleep. Writing for young Converts about speaking the Truth. Meeting of the General Assembly in the Church of the Covenant. Reunion. D.D.s and Strawberry Short-cake. "Enacting the Tiger." Getting ready for Dorset. Letters. This year was one of the busiest of her life; and it were hard to say which was busiest, her body or mind; her hand, heart, or brain. This relentless activity was caused in part by the increasing difficulty of obtaining sleep. Incessant work seemed to be, in her case, a sort of substitute for natural rest and a solace for the loss of it. She alludes to this constant struggle with insomnia in a letter to Miss Warner, dated May 9th: If you knew the whole story you would not envy my power of driving about so much. You can lie down and sleep when you please; I must earn my sleep by hard work, which uses up so much time that I wonder I ever accomplish anything. I believe that God arranges our various burdens and fits them to our backs, and that He sets off a loss against a gain, so that while some seem more favored than others, the mere aspect deceives. I have to make it my steady object throughout each day, so to spend time and strength as to obtain sleep enough to carry me through the next; it is thus I have acquired the habit of taking a large amount of exercise, which keeps me out of doors when I am longing to be at work within. You say I seem to be always in a flood of joy; well, that too is _seems_. I think I know what joy in God means, though perhaps I only begin to know; but I am a weak creature; I fall into snares and get entangled--not nearly so often as I used to do, but still do get into them. I have a perfect horror of them; the thought of having anything come between God and my soul makes me so restless and uneasy that I hardly know which way to turn. I have been very much absorbed of late in various interests, and am sure they have contrived to occupy me too much; pressing cares do sometimes, and oh, how ashamed I am! Do write for young inquirers, if your heart prompts you to do it. I don't know what to think of your suggestion that in writing for young converts I should impress it upon them to speak the truth. It seems to me just like telling them not to commit murder; and that would be absurd. Do Christians cheat and tell lies? I have a great aversion to writing about such things; if children are not trained _at home_ to be upright and full of integrity, it can't be that books can rectify that loss. You may reply that home-training is defective in thousands of cases; yes, that is true, but I have a feeling that truth and honesty must spring from a soil early prepared for them, and that a young person who is in the _habit_ of falsehood is not a Christian and needs to go back to first principles. I can't endure subterfuges, misrepresentation, and the like; the whole foundation looks wrong when people indulge themselves in them, and to say to a Christian, "I hope you are truthful," is to my mind as if I should say to him, "I hope you wash your face and hands every day." Now if your observation says I am wrong, let's know; I am open to conviction. _To Mrs. H. B. Smith, New York, May 24, 1869._ It has just come to me that the true way to enjoy writing and to have you enjoy hearing, is to keep a sort of journal, where little things will have a chance to speak for themselves. We are now in the midst of General Assembly. Mr. Stearns is here, and we have sprinklings of ministers to dine and to tea at all sorts of odd hours.... I can't help loving what is Christlike in people, whether I like their natural characters or not; after all, what else is there in the world worth much love? My Katy seems to be ploughing her way with more or less success, and making friends and foes. You, who helped me fashion her, would be interested in the letters I get from wives, showing that the want of demonstration in men is a wide-spread evil, under which women do groan being burdened. _Entre nous_, Mrs. Dr. ---- is one, and I got a letter to-day from Michigan to the same effect. We are having delightful weather for the meetings. Yesterday morning Dr. John Hall preached in our church, and it was crammed full to Overflowing.... Lew. S. [3] has decided to study theology. We are all glad. He and I have got quite acquainted of late and talk most learnedly together. Did I tell you I have translated a German dramatic poem in five acts? Miss Anna Nevins says I have done it extremely well. I don't know about that, but my whole soul got into it somehow, and I did not know whether I was in the body or out of it for two or three weeks. I wish I could do things decently and in order. There is to be a great party at Apollo Hall this evening for both Assemblies. I am going and expect to get tired to death. _26th_--It was a brilliant scene at Apollo Hall. Everybody was there, and the hall was finely adapted to the purpose of accommodating the 2,000 people present. The speeches were very poor. I went to the prayer-meeting this morning. The church was full, galleries and all, and the spirit was excellent. Many men shed tears in speaking for reunion, and, from what Mr. Stearns reports of the meeting of the Committee last night, union may be considered as good as restored. You will hear nothing else from me; it is all I hear talked about. _Monday, 3l_.--Hot as need be. Dr. B., of Brooklyn, dined with us; said he never ate strawberry short-cake before, and was reading Katy. It is awful to think how many D.D.s are doing it (eating short-cake, I mean, of course!) Hope the Assembly will wind up to-night. _June 5_.--We are so glad you have got to La Tour and find it so pleasant there, and that you have met Dr. and Mrs. Guthrie, and that they have met you instead of the blowsy-towsy American women, who make one so ashamed of them. If I wasn't going to Dorset, I should wish I were going where you are; but then, you see, I _am_ going to Dorset!... I have been to the Central Park with Mrs. ---, who talked in one steady stream all the way. I was sleepy and the carriage very noisy; and take it altogether, what a farce life is sometimes! the intercourse of human beings outsides touching outsides, the heart and soul lying to all intents and purposes as dead as a door-nail. Do you ever feel mentally and spiritually alone in the world? Perhaps everybody does. _To Miss E. A. Warner, New York, June 4, 1869._ I concluded you had gone and died and got buried without letting me know, when your letter reached me _via_ Dorset. What possessed you to send it there when you knew, you naughty thing! that I was having General Assembly, I can't imagine; but I suppose, being a Congregationalist, you thought General Assembly wasn't nothing, and that I could entertain squads of D.D.s for a fortnight more or less, just as well at Dorset as I could here. My dear, read the papers and go in the way you should go, and behave yourself! As if 250 ministers haven't worn streaks in the grass round the church, haven't (some of 'em) been here to dinner and eaten my strawberry short-cake and cottage puddings and praised my coffee and drank two cups apiece all round, and as if I hadn't been set up on end for those of 'em to look at who are reading Katy, and as if going furiously to work, after they'd all gone, didn't use me up and send me "lopping" down on sofas, sighing like a what's-its-name. Well, well; the ignorance of you country folks and the wisdom of us city folks! We hope to get to Dorset by the 17th of this month; it depends upon how many interruptions I have and how many days I have to lie by. I can't imagine why I break down so, for I don't know when I've been so well as during this spring; but Mr. P. and A. say I work like a tiger, and I s'pose I do without knowing it. I am so glad you had a pleasant Sunday. No doubt you had more bodily strength with which to enjoy spiritual things. A weak body hinders prayer and praise when the heart would sing, if it were not in fetters that cramp and exhaust it. _Monday_--To-day I have been enacting the tiger again, and worked furiously. A. half scolds and half entreats, but I can't help it; if I work I work, and so there it is. I have bought a dinner-set, and had a long visit from my old Mary, who wept over and kissed me, and am going out to call on Mrs. Woolsey this evening. To-morrow A.'s scholars are to come and make an address to her and give her a picture. She is not to know it till they arrive. It is really cold after the very hot weather, and some are freezing and some have internal pains. I wish you could have seen me this forenoon at work in the attic--a mass of dust, feathers, and perplexity. I got hold of one of my John's innumerable trunks of papers, and found among them the MSS. of several of my books laid up in lavender, which I pitched into the ash-barrel. I suppose he thinks I may distinguish myself some time, and that the discerning world will be after a scratch of my gifted pen! Have you read "Gates Off the Hinges"? The next thing will be, "There Aint no Gates." * * * * * III. The new Home in Dorset. What it became to her. Letters from there. A notable incident of this year was the entering upon housekeeping at Dorset under her own roof. As is usual in such cases, the process was somewhat wearisome and trying, but the result was most happy. All the bright anticipations, with which the event had been so long looked forward to, were more than realised. For the next ten summers the Dorset home was to her a sweet haven of rest from the agitations, cares, and turmoil of New York life. It seemed at the time a venturesome, almost a rash thing, to build it; but when she left it for her home above, the building of the house seemed to have been an inspiration of Providence. While contributing greatly to her happiness, it probably added several years to her life. The four months which she passed each season at Dorset were spent largely in the open air, and in such varied and pleasant exercise as exerted the most healthful, soothing influence upon both body and soul. It was just this fruit her husband hoped might, by the blessing of Heaven, blossom out of the new home, and in later years he used often to say to her, that if the place should be of a sudden annihilated, he should still feel that it had paid for itself many times over. _To Mrs. Smith, Dorset, July 19, 1869._ How many times during the last month I have been reminded of your saying you had lived through the agony of getting your house ready to rent. I can sum up all I have been through by saying that almost everything has turned out the reverse of what I expected. In the first place, I broke down just as we were to start to come here, and had to be left behind to pick up life enough to undertake the journey; then the car we chartered did not get here for a week, and nobody but A. had anything to wear, and all my flowers died for want of water. The car, too, was broken into and my idols of tin pans all taken, with some other things, and when it did arrive it was unpacked, and our goods brought here, in a regular deluge, the like of which has not been seen since the days of Noah. For days everything was in dire confusion; but for all that our own home was delightful, and we had the most outrageous appetites you ever heard of. George is in ecstasies with his house, his land, his pig, and his horse.... I hope you are not sick and tired of all this rigmarole; it isn't in human nature to move into a house of its own and talk of anything else. I got a warm-hearted letter a few days ago from the city of Milwaukee, from an unknown western sister, beginning, "Whom not having seen I love," and going on to say that Katy describes herself and her lot exactly, only she had no Martha on hand. I get so many such testimonies. I am going to spare your eyes and brains by winding up this epistle and going to bed. I do not think your husband ought to come home till he has recovered his power of sleeping. I know how to pity him, if anybody does, and I know how loss of sleep cripples. Good-night, dear child. "God bless me and my wife; You and your wife, Us four And no more." _To Mrs. Leonard, Dorset, August 3, 1869._ Your last letter endeared you to me more than ever, and I have longed to answer it, but we have been in such a state of confusion that writing has been a task. The whole house has been painted inside and out since we entered it, and I dare say you know what endless uproar the flitting from room to room to accommodate painters, causes. We have just been admitted to our parlor, but it is in no order, and the dining-room is still piled with trunks. But the house is lovely, and we shall feel well repaid for the severe labor it has cost us, when it is done and we can settle down in it. I write to ask you to send me by express what numbers of Stepping Heavenward you have on hand. I would not give you the trouble to do this if I could get them in any other way, but I can not, as all back numbers are gone, and the copy I have has been borrowed and worn, so as to be illegible in many places. Randolph is to publish the work and says he wants it soon. I am constantly receiving testimonies as to its usefulness, and hope it will do good to many who have not seen it in the Advance. How I do long to see you! I think of you many times every day, and thank God that He enables you to glorify Him in bearing your great sorrow. Sometimes I feel as if I _must_ see Mr. L.'s kind face once more, but I remind myself that by patiently waiting a little while, I shall see it and the faces of all the sainted ones who have gone before. Next to faith in God comes patience; I see that more and more, and few possess enough of either to enable them to meet the day of bereavement without dismay. We are constantly getting letters from afflicted souls that can not see one ray of light, and keep reiterating, "I am not reconciled." How fearful it must be to kick thus against the pricks, already sharp enough! I believe fully with you that there is no happiness on earth, as there is none in heaven, to be compared with that of losing all things to possess Christ. I look back to two points in my life as standing out from all the rest of it as seasons of peculiar joy, and they are the points where I was crushed under the weight of sorrow. How wonderful this is, how incomprehensible to those who have not learned Christ! Do write me oftener; you are very dear to me, and your letters always welcome. I love you for magnifying the Lord in the midst of your distress; you could not get so into my heart in any other way. _To Mrs. Smith, Dorset, August 8, 1869._ Half of your chickens are safely here, well and bright, and settled I hope, for the summer. A., and M., who seems as joyous as a lark, are like Siamese twins, with the advantage of untying at night and sleeping in different beds. I have not been well, and did not go to church to-day; but Prof. Robinson of Rochester, N. Y., preached a very superior sermon, George says. They have gone to our woods together. We took tea a few nights ago at the Pratts, being invited to meet him and Mrs. R. They asked many questions about you and your husband. We find the Pratts charming neighbors in their way, modest, kind, and good. They take the Advance, read Katy, and like it. _Aug. 21st_--As we have only had sixteen in our family of late, I have not had much to do. Yesterday we made up a party to the quarry and had just got seated, twenty-nine in all, to eat a very nice dinner, when it began to rain in floods. Each grabbed his plate, if he could, and rushed to a blacksmith's shop not far off; twenty or thirty workmen rushed there too, and there we were, cooped up in the dirt, to finish our meal as we best could. It soon stopped pouring and we had a delightful drive home. Mr. B. F. B., with two of his boys, was with us. He is charmed with our house and its views. Katy has made her last appearance in the Advance, but I keep getting letters about her from all quarters, and the editors say they have had hundreds. [4] H. has caught up with Hal and they are exactly of a height, and I feel as if I had a dear little pair of twins. Last Sunday evening the three boys laid their heads in my lap together, all alike content. * * * * * IV. Return to Town. Domestic Changes. Letters. "My Heart sides with God in everything." Visiting among the Poor. "Conflict isn't Sin." Publication of _Stepping Heavenward_. Her Misgivings about it. How it was received. Reminiscences by Miss Eliza A. Warner. Letters. The Rev. Wheelock Craig. Early in October she returned to town and began to make ready for the departure of her eldest daughter to Europe, where she was to pass the next year with the family of Prof. Smith. The younger children had thus far been taught by their sister, and her leaving home was fraught with no little trial both to them and to the mother. _To Mrs. Smith, New York, October 12._ I can fully sympathise with the sad toss you are in about staying abroad another year, but we feel that there is no doubt you have decided wisely and well. But the bare mention of your settling down at Vevay has driven us all wild. What hallucination could you have been laboring under? Why, your husband would go off the handle in a week! To be sure it is beautiful for situation as Mount Zion itself, but one can't live on beauty; one must have life and action, and stimulus; in other words, human beings. They're all horrid (except you), but we can't do without 'em. What I went through at lonely Genevrier! "Oh Solitude, where are the charms That sages have seen in thy face!" We took it for granted that you would settle in some German city, near old friends; it is true, they mayn't be all you want, but anything is better than nothing, and you would stagnate and moulder all away at Vevay. What is there there? Why, a lake and some mountains, and you can't spend a year staring at them. Well, I dare say light will be let in upon you. I hope A. will behave herself; you must rule it over her with a rod of iron (as if you could!), and make her stand round. Her going plunges us into a new world of care and anxiety and tribulation; we have thrust our children out into, or on to, the great ocean, and are about ready to sink with them. If I could sit down and cry, it would do me lots of good, but I can't. Then how am I to spare my twin-boy, and my A. and my M.? Who is to keep me well snubbed? Who is to tell me what to wear? Who is to keep Darby and Joan from settling down into two fearful old pokes? Your husband suggests that "if I have a husband, etc." I have had one with a vengeance. He has worked like seventeen mad dogs all summer, and I have hardly laid eyes on him. When I have, it has been to fight with him; he would come in with a hoe or a rake or a spade in his hand, and find me with a broom, a shovel, or a pair of tongs in mine, and without a word we would pitch in and have an encounter. Of all the aggravating creatures, hasn't he been aggravating! Sometimes I thought he had run raving distracted, and sometimes I dare say, he thought I had gone melancholy mad. He persists to this day that the work did him good, and that he enjoyed his summer. Well, maybe he did; I suppose he knows. How glad I am for you that you are to have the children go to you. It seems to be exactly the right thing. I hope to get a copy of Katy to send by the girls, but can't think of anything else. As A. is to be where you are, you will probably be kept well posted in the doings of our family. I do hope she will not be a great addition to your cares, but have some misgivings as to the effect so long absence from home may have upon her. What a world this is for shiftings and siftings! _To G. S. P. October, 1869._ I always thought George McDonald a little audacious, though I like him in the main. There is a fallacy in this cavil, you may depend. Some years ago, when I was a little befogged by plausible talk, Dr. Skinner came to our house, got into one of his best moods, and preached a regular sermon on the glory of God, that set me all right again. I am not skilled in argument, but my heart sides with God in everything, and my conception of His character is such a beautiful one that I feel that He can not err. I do not like the expression, "He's aye thinking about his own glory" (I quote from memory); it belittles the real fact, and almost puts the Supreme Being on a level with us poor mortals. The more time we spend upon our knees, in real communion with God, the better we shall comprehend His wonderful nature, and how impossible it is to submit that nature to the rules by which we judge human beings. Every turn in life brings me back to this--_more prayer_.... I shall go with much pleasure to see Mrs. G. and may God give me some good word to say to her. I almost envy you your sphere of usefulness, but unless I give up mine, can not get fully into it. I want you to know that next to being with my Saviour, I love to be with His sufferers; so that you can be sure to remember me, when you have any on your heart.... P. S. I have hunted up Mrs. G. and had such an interesting talk with her that she has hardly been out of my mind since. It is a very unusual case, and the fact that her husband is a Jew, and loves her with such real romance, is an obstacle in her way to Christ. When you can get a little spare time I wish you would run in and let us talk her case over. I'm ever so glad that I'm growing old every day, and so becoming better fitted to be the dear and loving friend to young people I want to be. I wish we both loved our Saviour better, and could do more for Him. The days in which I do nothing specifically for Him seem such meagre, such lost days. You seemed to think, the last time I saw you, that you were not so near Him as you were last year. I think we can't always know our own state. It does not follow that a season of severe conflict is a sign of estrangement from God. Perhaps we are never dearer to Him than when we hate ourselves most, and fancy ourselves intolerable in His sight. _Conflict isn't sin._ _To Miss E. A. Warner, New York, October 11, 1869._ I hear with great concern that Miss Lyman's health is so much worse, that she is about to leave Vassar. Is this true? I can not say I should be very sorry if I should hear she was going to be called up higher. It seems such a blessed thing to finish up one's work when the Master says we may, and going to be with Him. I can fully sympathise with the feeling that made Mrs. Graham say, as she closed her daughter's eyes, "I wish you joy, my darling!" But I should want to see her before she went; that would be next best to seeing her after she got back. If you meet with a dear little book called "The Melody of the 23d Psalm," do read it; it is by Miss Anna Warner, and shows great knowledge of, and love for, the Bible. In a few weeks I shall be able to send you a copy of Stepping Heavenward. We have been home rather more than a week and the house is all upside down, outwardly and inwardly. For A. sails for Europe on the 21st with M. and Hal Smith, to be gone a year, and this involves sending the other children to school, and various trying changes of the sort. Tossing my long sheltered lambs into the world has cost me inexpressible pain; only a mother can understand how much and why; and they, on their part, go into it shrinking and quivering in every nerve. To their father, as well as to me, this has been a time of sore trial, and we are doing our best to keep each other up amid the discouragements and temptations that confront us. For each new phase of life brings more or less of both. _Stepping Heavenward_ was published toward the end of October, having appeared already as a serial in the Chicago Advance. The first number of the serial was printed February 4, 1869. The work was planned and the larger part of it composed during the winter and spring of 1867-8. Referring more especially to this part of it, she once said to a friend: "Every word of that book was a prayer, and seemed to come of itself. I never knew how it was written, for my heart and hands were full of something else." By "something else" she had in mind the care of little Francis. The ensuing summer the manuscript was taken with her to Dorset, carefully revised and finished before her return to the city. In revising it she had the advantage of suggestions made by her friends, Miss Warner and Miss Lyman, both of them Christian ladies of the best culture and of rare good sense. Notwithstanding the favor with which the work had been received as issued in The Advance, Mrs. Prentiss had great misgiving about its success--a misgiving that had haunted her while engaged in writing it. But all doubt on the subject was soon dispelled: The response to "Stepping Heavenward" was instant and general. Others of her books were enjoyed, praised, laughed over, but this one was taken by tired hands into secret places, pored over by eyes dim with tears, and its lessons prayed out at many a Jabbok. It was one of those books which sorrowing, Mary-like women read to each other, and which lured many a bustling Martha from the fretting of her care-cumbered life to ponder the new lesson of rest in toil. It was one of those books of which people kept a lending copy, that they might enjoy the uninterrupted companionship of their own. The circulation of the book was very large. Not to speak of the thousands which were sold here, it went through numerous editions in England. From England it passed into Australia. It fell into the family of an afflicted Swiss pastor, and the comfort which it brought to that stricken household led to its translation into French by one of the pastor's daughters. It passed through I know not how many editions in French. [5] In Germany it came into the hands of an invalid lady who begged the privilege of translating it. The first word of a favorite German hymn, "Heavenward doth our journey tend; We are strangers here on earth," furnished the title for the German translation--"Himmelan." It appeared just after the French war, and went as a comforter into scores of the homes which war had desolated, and frequent testimony came back to her of the deep interest excited by the book, and of the affectionate gratitude called out toward the author. She seemed to have inspired her translator, whose letters to her breathe the warmest affection and the most enthusiastic admiration. It would be easy to fill up the time that remains with grateful testimonies to the work of this book. From among a multitude I select only one: A manufacturer in a New England town, a stranger, wrote to her expressing his high appreciation of the book, and saying that he had four thousand persons in his employ, and a circulating library of six thousand volumes for their use, in which were two copies of "Stepping Heavenward." He adds, "I hear in every direction of the good it is doing, and a wealthy friend has written to me saying that she means to put a copy into the hand of every bride of her acquaintance." [6] Several chapters might be filled with letters received by Mrs. Prentiss, expressing the gratitude of the writers for the spiritual help and comfort _Stepping Heavenward_ had given them. These letters came from all parts of this country, from Europe, and even from the ends of the earth; and they were written by persons belonging to every class in society. Among them was one, written on coarse brown grocery paper, from a poor crippled boy in the interior of Pennsylvania, which she especially prized. It led to a friendly correspondence that continued for several years. The book was read with equal delight by persons not only of all classes, but of all creeds also; by Calvinists, Arminians, High Churchmen, Evangelicals, Unitarians, and Roman Catholics. [7] It was, however, wholly unnoticed by most of the organs of literary opinion in this country; although abroad it attracted at once the attention of men and women well known in the world of letters, and was praised by them in the highest terms. [8] Miss Eliza A. Warner, in the following Reminiscences, gives some interesting incidents in reference to _Stepping Heavenward_. That summer in Dorset--the summer of 1868--is one full of bright and pleasant memories which it is delightful to recall. I had heard much of Mrs. Prentiss from mutual friends, and been exceedingly interested in her books, so that when I found we were to be fellow-boarders for the summer I was greatly pleased; yet I felt a little shy at meeting one of whose superiority in many lines I had heard so much. How well I remember that bright morning in July on which we first met on our way to the breakfast-table! I can hear now the frank, cheery voice with which she greeted me, and see her large dark eyes, so full of animation and kindly interest, which a moment after sparkled with fun as she recalled an old joke familiar to my friends, and, it seemed, to her also. I was put at my ease at once, and from that moment onward felt the wonderful fascination of a manner so peculiarly her own; it was a frank, whole-souled, sincere manner, with a certain indescribable piquancy and sprightliness blending with the earnestness which made her very individual and very charming. For the next two months we were a good deal together. I think it was a very happy summer to her. You were building the house in Dorset for a summer home, and the planning for this and watching its progress was a pleasant occupation. And she was such an enthusiastic lover of nature that the out-of-door life she led was a constant enjoyment. She would spend hours rambling in the woods, collecting ferns, mosses, trailing vines, and every lovely bit of blossom and greenery that met her eye--and nothing pretty escaped it--and there was always an added freshness and brightness in her face when she came home laden with these treasures, and eager to exhibit them. "Oh, you don't go crazy over such things as I do," she would say as she held them up for our admiration. She filled her room with these woodland beauties, and pressed quantities of them to carry to her city home. In that beautiful valley among the Green Mountains, some of whose near summits rise to the height of three thousand feet, her enthusiasm for fine scenery had full scope. She would watch with delight the sunset glow as it spread and deepened along those mountain peaks, suffusing them with a glory which we likened to that of the New Jerusalem; and as we sat and watched this glory slowly fade, tint by tint, into the gray twilight, her talk would be of heaven and holiness and Christ. Whatever she felt, she felt intensely, and she threw her whole heart and soul into all she said or did; this was one great secret of the power of her personal presence; she felt so keenly herself, she made others feel. Those summer days were long and bright and beautiful, but none too long for her. She was one of the most industrious persons I have ever known, and her writing, reading and sewing, and the care of her children, over the formation of whose characters she watched closely and wisely, occupied every moment of her time, except when she was out of doors, trying by exercise in the open air to secure a good night's sleep; not an easy thing for her to do in those days. Early in August we were joined by Miss Hannah Lyman, of Vassar College, a mutual friend and a most delightful addition to our little party. We knew Mrs. Prentiss spent a part of every day in writing, but she said nothing of the nature of her work. Do you remember coming into the parlor one morning, where Miss Lyman and I were sitting by ourselves, and telling us that she was writing a story, but had become so discouraged she threatened to throw it aside as not worth finishing? "I like it myself," you added, "it really seems to me one of the best things she has ever written, and I am trying to get her to read it to you and see what you think of it." Of course, both Miss Lyman and myself were eager to hear it, and promised to tell her frankly how we liked it. The next morning she came to our room with a little green box in her hand, saying, with her merry laugh, "Now you've got to do penance for your sins, you two wicked women!" and, sitting down by the window, while we took our sewing, she began to read us in manuscript the work which was destined to touch and strengthen so many hearts--"which," to use the words of another, "has become a part of the soul-history of many thousands of Christian women--young and old--at home and abroad." It was a rare treat to listen to it, with comments from her interspersed; some of them droll and witty, others full of profound religious feeling. Now and then, as we queried if something was not improbable or unnatural, she would give us bits of history from her own experience or that of her friends, going to show that stranger things had occurred in real life. I need not say we insisted on its being finished, feeling sure it would do great good; though I must confess that I do not think either of us, much as we enjoyed it, was fully aware of its great merits. I was much impressed by her singleness of purpose; her one great desire so evidently being that her writings should help others to know and to love Christ and His truth, that she thought little or nothing of her own reputation. She went on with her work, occasionally reading to us what she had added. In those days she always spoke of it as her "Katy book," no other title having been given to it. But one morning she came to the breakfast-table with her face all lighted up. "I've got a name for my book," she exclaimed; "it came to me while I was lying awake last night. You know Wordsworth's Stepping Westward? I am going to call it Stepping Heavenward--don't you like it? I do." We all felt it was exactly the right name, and she added, "I think I will put in Wordsworth's poem as a preface." Of the heart-communings on sacred things that made that summer so memorable to me I can not speak; and yet, more than anything else, these gave a distinctive character to our intercourse. Her faith and love were so ardent and persuading, so much a part of herself, that no one could be with her without recognising their power over her life. She was interested in everything about her, without a particle of cant, full of playful humor and bright fancies; but the love of Christ was the absorbing interest of her life--almost a passion, it might be called, so fervent and rapturous was her devotion to Him, so great her longing for communion with Him and for a more complete conformity to His perfect will. As I have said, all her emotions were intense and her religious affections had the same warmth and glow. Believing in Christ was to her not so much a duty as the deepest joy of her life, heightening all other joys, and she was not satisfied until her friends shared with her in this experience. She believed it to be attainable by all, founded on a complete submitting of the human to the Divine will in all things, great and small. Truly of her it might be said, if of any human being, "_she hath loved much_." _To Mrs. Smith, New York, Nov. 16, 1869._ Your arrangements at Heidelberg seem to me to be as delightful as anything can be in a world where nothing is ideal. Be sure to let A. bear her full share of the expense, and be a mother to her if you can. The gayest outside life has an undertone of sadness, and I do not doubt she will have hours of unrest which she will hardly know how to account for. I am afraid Heidelberg will be rather narrow bounds for your husband, and hope he may decide to go to Egypt in case his ear gets quite well. How fortunate that he is near a really good aurist. I am always nervous about ear-troubles. Fancy your having to shout your love to him! In a letter written about two weeks ago, Miss Lyman says, "How am I? Longing for a corner in which to stop trying to live, and lie down and die," and adds that she is now too feeble to travel. I suppose she is liable to break down at any moment, but I do hope she won't be left to go abroad. I judge from what you say of Mr. H. that he is slipping off. I always look at people who are going to heaven with a sort of curiosity and envy; it is next best to seeing one who has just come thence. Get all the good out of him you can; there is none too much saintliness on earth. I wonder how you spend your time? Do, some time, write the history of one day; what you said to that funny cook, and what she said to you; what you thought and what you did; and what you didn't think and didn't did. _Friday, 19th._--Thanksgiving has come and gone beautifully. It was a perfect day as to weather. Our congregation joined Dr. Murray's, and he gave us an excellent sermon. The four Stearnses came in to dinner and seemed to enjoy it. I suppose you all celebrated the day in Yankee fashion and got up those abominations--mince pies. When I told L. about ----'s fourth marriage, he said it reminded him of a place he had seen, where a man lay buried in the midst of a lot of women, the sole inscription on his gravestone being "Our Husband." Mrs. ---- says the tiffs between my Katy and her husband are exactly like those she had with hers, and Mrs. ---- said very much the same thing--after hearing which, I gave up. Tell A. I had a call yesterday from Mrs. S----, who came to town to spend Thanksgiving at her father's, and fell upon my neck and ate me up three several times. I tell you what it is, it's nice to have people love you, whether you deserve it or not, and this warm-hearted, enthusiastic creature really did me good. Dr. Skinner sent us an extraordinary book to read called "God's Furnace." There is a good deal of egotism in it and self-consciousness, and a good deal of genuine Christian experience. I read it through four times, and, when I carried it back and was discussing it with him, he said he had too. It seems almost incredible that a wholly sanctified character could publish such a book, made up as it is of the author's own letters and journal and most sacred joys and sorrows; but perhaps when I get sanctified I shall go to printing mine--it really seems to be a way they have. The Hitchcocks sailed yesterday, and it must have cheered them to set forth on so very fine a day. Give my love to everybody straight through from Hal up to your husband and Mr. H. _Later_.--Of course, my letters to A. are virtually to you, too, as far as you can be interested in the little details of which they are made up. Randolph showed George a letter about Katy, which he says beats anything we have heard yet, which is saying a good deal. One lady said Earnest was _exactly_ like her husband, another that he was _painfully_ so; indeed, many sore hearts are making such confessions. So I begin to think there is even more sorrowfulness and unrest in the world than I thought there was. You would get sick unto death of the book if I should tell a quarter of what we hear about it, good and bad. It quite refreshed me to hear that a young lady wanted to punch me. Craig's Life is very touching. His delight in Christ and in close fellowship with Him is beautiful; but it is painful to see that dying man wandering about Europe alone, when he ought to have been breathing out his life in the arms he loved so well. How did poor Mrs. C. live through the week of suspense that followed the telegram announcing his illness? for one must love such a man very deeply, I think. Well, he doesn't care now where he died or when, and he has gone where he belonged. I miss you all ever so much, and George keeps up one constant howl for your husband. It is a mystery to me what any of you find in my letters, they do seem so flat to me. What fun it would be if you would _all_ write me a round letter! I would write a rouser for it. Lots of love. The Rev. Wheelock Craig, whose Life is referred to by Mrs. Prentiss in the preceding letter, was her husband's successor in the pastorate of the South Trinitarian church, New Bedford. [9] * * * * * V. Recollections by Mrs. Henry B. Smith. The following Recollections from the pen of Mrs. Smith may fitly close the present chapter: NORTHAMPTON, _January 2, 1879_. MY DEAR DR. PRENTISS:--I have been trying this beautiful snowy day, which shuts us in to our own thoughts, to recall some of my impressions of your dear wife, but I find it very difficult; there was such variety to her, and so much of her, and the things which were most characteristic are so hard to be described. I read "Stepping Heavenward" in MS. before we went to Europe in 1869. I remember she used to say that I was "Katy's Aunt," because we talked her over with so much interest. She sent me a copy to Heidelberg, where I began at once translating it into German as my regular exercise. I was delighted to give my copy to Mrs. Prof. K. in Leipsic, as _the_ American story which I was willing to have her translate into German, as she had asked for one. There is no need of telling you about the enthusiasm which the book created. Women everywhere said, "It seems to be myself that I am reading about"; and the feeling that they, too, with all their imperfections, might be really stepping heavenward, was one great secret of its inspiration. One little incident may interest you. My niece, Mrs. Prof. Emerson, was driving alone toward Amherst, and took into her carriage a poor colored woman who was walking the same way. The woman soon said, "I have been thinking a good deal of you, Mrs. E., and of your little children, and I have been reading a book which I thought you would like. It was something about walking towards heaven." "Was it 'Stepping Heavenward'?" "Yes, that was it." How naturally, modestly, almost indifferently, she received the tributes which poured in upon her! Yet, though she cared little for praise, she cared much for love, and for the consciousness that she was a helper and comforter to others. On reading the book again this last summer, I was struck by seeing how true a transcript of herself, in more than one respect, was given in Katy. "Why can not I make a jacket for my baby without throwing into it the ardor of a soldier going into battle?" How ardently she threw herself into everything she did! In friendship and love and religion this outpouring of herself was most striking. Her earlier books she always read or submitted to me in manuscript, and she showed so little self-interest in them, and I so much, that they seemed a sort of common property. I think that I had quite as much pleasure in their success and far more pride, than herself. The Susy books I always considered quite as superior in their way as Stepping Heavenward. They are still peerless among books for little children. "Henry and Bessie," too, contains some of the most beautiful religious teaching ever written. "Fred and Maria and Me" she used to talk about almost as if I had written it, for no other reason than that I liked it so much. My sister says that her daughter Nettie read "Little Susy" through _twelve times_, getting up to read it before breakfast. She printed (before she could write) a little letter of thanks to your wife, who sent her the following pretty note in reply: NEW YORK, _January 10, 1854._ MY DEAR "NETTIE":--What a nice little letter you wrote me! It pleased me very much. I shall keep it in my desk, and when I am an old woman, I shall buy a pair of spectacles, and sit down in the chimney-corner, and read it. When you learn to write with your own little fingers, I hope you will write me another letter. Your friend, with love, AUNT SUSAN. She did nothing for effect, and made little or no effort merely to please; she was almost too careless of the impression which she made upon others, and, on this account, strangers sometimes thought her cold and unsympathetic. But touch her at the right point and the right moment, and there was no measure to her interest and warmth. She hated all pretense and display, and the slightest symptom of them in others shut her up and kept her grave and silent, and this, not from a severe or Pharisaic spirit, but because the atmosphere was so foreign to her that she could not live in it. "I pity people that have any _sham_ about them when I am by," she said one day. "I am dreadfully afraid of young ladies," she said at another time. She could not adapt herself to the artificial and conventional. Yet with young ladies who loved what she loved she was peculiarly free and playful and _forth-giving_, and such were among her dearest and most lovingly admiring friends. When we met, there were no preliminaries; she plunged at once into the subject which was interesting her, the book, the person, the case of sickness or trouble, the plan, the last shopping, the game, the garment, the new preparation for the table--in a way peculiarly her own. One could never be with her many minutes without hearing some bright fancy, some quick stroke of repartee, some ludicrous way of putting a thing. But whether she told of the grumbler who could find nothing to complain of in heaven except that "his halo didn't fit," or said in her quick way, when the plainness of a lady's dress was commended, "Why, I didn't suppose that anybody could go _to heaven_ now-a-days without an overskirt," or wrote her sparkling impromptu rhymes for our children's games, her mirth was all in harmony with her earnest life. Her quick perceptions, her droll comparisons, her readiness of expression, united with her rare and tender sympathies, made her the most fascinating of companions to both young and old. Our little Saturday tear, with our children, while our husbands were at Chi Alpha, were rare times. My children enjoyed "Aunt Lizzy" almost as much as I did. She was usually in her best mood at these times. When you and Henry came in, on your return from Chi Alpha, you looked in upon, or, rather, you completed a happier circle than this impoverished earth can ever show us again. Her acquisitions were so rapid, and she made so little show of them, that one might have doubted their thoroughness, who had no occasion to test them. Her beautiful translation of Griselda was a surprise to many. I remember her eager enthusiasm while translating it. The writing of her books was almost an inspiration, so rapid, without copying, almost without alteration, running on in her clear, pure style, with here and there a radiant sparkle above the full depths. It sometimes seemed as if she were interested only in those whom she knew she could benefit. If so, it was from her ever-present consciousness of a consecrated life. She constantly sought for ways of showing her love to Christ, especially to His sick and suffering and sorrowing ones. Life with her was peculiarly intense and earnest; she looked upon it more as a discipline and a hard path, and yet no one had a quicker or more admiring eye for the flowers by the wayside. I always thought that her great _forte_ was the study of character. She laid bare and dissected everybody, even her nearest friends and herself, to find what was in them; and what she found, reproduced in her books, was what gave them their peculiar charm of reality. The growth of the religious life in the heart was the one most interesting subject to her. I never could fully understand the deep sadness which was the groundwork of her nature. It certainly did not prevent the most intense enjoyment of her rich temporal and spiritual blessings, while it indicated depths which her friends did not fathom. It was partly constitutional, doubtless, and partly, I suppose, from her keener sensitiveness, her larger grasp, her stronger convictions, her more vivid vision, and more ardent desires. Even the glowing, almost seraphic love of Christ which was the chief characteristic of her later life was, in her words, "but longing and seeking." She was an exile yearning for her home, "stepping heavenward," and knowing better than the rest of us what it meant. These things come to me now, and yet how much I have omitted--her industry so varied and untiring, her generosity (so many gifts of former days are around me now), her interest in my children, her delight in flowers and colors and all beautiful things, her ready sympathy--but it is an almost inexhaustible subject. She comes vividly before me now, seated on the floor in her room, with her work around her, making something for such and such a person. What the void in your life must be those who knew most of her manifold, exalted, inspiring life can but imagine. "Nay, Hope may whisper with the dead By bending forward where they are; But Memory, with a backward tread, Communes with them afar! "The joys we lose are but forecast, And we shall find them all once more; We look behind us for the past, But, lo! 'tis all before!" [1] See _Memoir of S. S. Prentiss_, edited by his Brother, and published by Charles Scribner's Sons. New Edition. 1879. [2] The following is part of the notice in the London Daily News: "We are, unfortunately, ignorant of _Little Susy's Six Birthdays_, but if that book be anything like as good as the charming volume before us by the same author, ycleped _Little Lou's Sayings and Doings_, it deserves an extraordinary popularity.... _Little Lou._ is one of the most natural stories in the world, and reads more like a mother's record of her child's sayings and doings than like a fictitious narrative. Little Lou, be it remarked, is a true baby throughout, instead of being a precocious little prig, as so many good children are in print. The child's love for his mother and his mother's love for him is described in the prettiest way possible." [3] Now Professor of Theology at Bangor. [4] The following is an extract from a letter of one of the editors of The Advance, Mr. J. B. T. Marsh, dated Chicago, August 10,1869:--"You will notice that the story is completed this week; I wish it could have continued six months longer. I have several times been on the point of writing you to express my own personal satisfaction--and more than satisfaction--in reading it, and to acquaint you with the great unanimity and _volume_ of praise of it, which has reached us from our readers. I do not think anything since the National Era and 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' times has been more heartily received by newspaper readers. I am sure it will have a great sale if rightly brought before the public. A publisher from London was in our office the other day, signifying a desire to make some arrangement to bring it out there. I have heard almost no unfavorable criticism of the story--nothing which you could make serviceable in its revision. I have heard Dr. P. criticise Ernest--of course the character and not your portrayal. For myself I consider the character a natural and consistent one. Perhaps few men are found who are quite so blind to a wife's wants and yet so devoted, but--I don't know what the wives might say. We have had hundreds of letters of which the expression has been, 'We quarrel to see who shall have the first reading of the story.' I congratulate you most heartily upon its great success and the great good it has done and will yet do. I think if you should ever come West my wife would overturn almost any stone for the sake of welcoming you to the hospitality of our cottage on the Lake Michigan shore." [5] _Marchant vers le Ciel_ is the title of the French translation. [6] _Memorial discourse_ by the Rev. Marvin R. Vincent, D.D. [7] The following is an extract from a letter, dated New Orleans, and written after Mrs. Prentiss' death: "We called one day to see a poor dressmaker who was dying of consumption. She was an educated woman, a devout Roman Catholic, and a person whom we had long respected and esteemed for her integrity, her love of independence, and her extraordinary powers of endurance. Her husband, a prosperous merchant, had died suddenly, and his affairs being mismanaged, she was obliged, although a constant invalid, to earn a support for many years by the most unremitting labor. We found her reading; 'Stepping Heavenward,' which she spoke of in the warmest terms. We told her about the authoress, of her suffering from ill-health, and of her recent death. She listened eagerly and asked questions which showed the deepest interest in the subject. Soon after she left the city, and a few weeks later we heard of her death." [8] One of them--said to have been an eminent German theologian--used this strong language respecting it: "Schon manche gute, edle, segensreiche Gabe ist uns aus Nordamerika gekommen, aber wir stehen nicht au, diese als die beste zu bezeichnen unter allen, die uns von dort zu Gesichte gekommen." [9] See A Memorial of the Character, Work, and Closing Days of Rev. Wheelock Craig, New Bedford. Mr. Craig was born in Augusta, Maine, July 11, 1824. He entered Bowdoin College in 1839, and was graduated with honor in the class of 1843. He then entered the Theological Seminary at Bangor, where he graduated in 1847. After preaching a couple of years at New Castle, Me., he accepted a call to New Bedford, and was installed there December 4, 1850. In 1859 he received a call to the chair of Modern Languages in Bowdoin College, which he declined. After an earnest and faithful ministry of more than seventeen years, he went abroad for his health in May, 1868. He visited Ireland, England, Scotland, and then passing over to the Continent, travelled through Belgium, Holland, Switzerland, and so southward as far as Naples, where he arrived the last of September. Here he was taken seriously ill, and advised to hasten back to Switzerland. In great weakness he passed through Rome, Florence, Turin, Geneva, and reached Neuchatel on the 4th of November in a state of utter exhaustion. There, encompassed by newly-made friends and tenderly cared for, he gently breathed his last on the 28th of November. Two names, in particular, deserve to be gratefully mentioned in connection with Mr. Craig's last hours, viz.: that of his countryman, Mr. W. C. Cabot, and that of the Rev. Dr. Godet, of Neuchatel. Of the former he said the day before his death: "He saw me coming from Geneva a perfect stranger--lying sick, helpless, wretched, and miserable in the ears--and spoke to me, inquired who I was, and took care of me. Anybody else would have gone by on the other side. He brought me to this hotel, and remained with me, and did everything for me; and, fearing that I might be ill some time, and uneasy about money matters, he sent me a letter of credit for two hundred pounds. Such noble and generous conduct to an entire stranger was never heard of." To Dr. Godet he had a letter from Prof. Henry B. Smith, of New York. But he needed no other introduction to that warm- hearted and eminent servant of God than his sad condition and his love to Christ. "From the first quarter of an hour," wrote Dr. Godet to Mrs. Craig, "we were like two brothers who had known each other from infancy. He knew not a great deal of French, and I not more of English; but the Lord was between him and me." "Prof. Godet and family are like the very angels of God," wrote Mr. Craig to his wife. His last days were filled with inexpressible joy in his God and Saviour. Shortly before his departure he said to Dr. Godet and the other friends who were by his bedside, "_There shall be no night there, but the Lamb which is in the midst of the throne shall be their light._" Mr. Craig had a highly poetical nature, refined spiritual sensibilities, and a soul glowing with love to his Master. He was also a vigorous and original thinker. Some passages in his letters and journal are as racy and striking as anything in John Newton or Cecil. Mrs. Prentiss greatly enjoyed reading them to her friends. Some of them she copied and had published in the Association Monthly. CHAPTER X. ON THE MOUNT. 1870. I. A happy Year. Madame Guyon. What sweetens the Cup of earthly Trials and the Cup of earthly Joy. Death of Mrs. Julia B. Cady. Her Usefulness. Sickness and Death of other Friends. "My Cup runneth over." Letters. "More Love to Thee, O Christ." In every earnest life there usually comes a time when it reaches its highest point, whether of power or of enjoyment; a time when it is in --the bright, consumate flower. The year 1870 formed such a period in the life of Mrs. Prentiss. None that went before, or that followed after, equalled it, as a whole, in rich, varied and happy experiences. It was full of the genial, loving spirit which inspired the Little Susy books and Stepping Heavenward; full, too, of the playful humor which runs through Fred and Maria and Me; and full, also, of the intense, overflowing delight in her God and Saviour that breathes in the Golden Hours. From its opening to its close she was--to borrow an expression from her Richmond journal--"one great long sunbeam." Everywhere, in her home, with her friends, by sick and dying beds, in the house of mourning, in the crowded street or among her flowers at Dorset, she seemed to be attired with constant brightness. Of course, there were not wanting hours of sadness and heart-sinking; nor was her consciousness of sin or her longing to be freed from it, perhaps, ever keener and more profound; but still the main current of her existence flowed on, untroubled, to the music of its own loving, grateful and adoring thoughts. Often she would say that God was too good to her; that she was _satisfied_ and had nothing more to ask of life; her cup of domestic bliss ran over; and as to her religious joy, it was at times too much for her frail body, and she begged that it might be transferred to other souls. Her letters give a vivid picture of her state of mind during this memorable year; and yet only a picture. The sweet reality was beyond the power of words. In the early part of this year the correspondence of Madame Guyon and Fenelon fell into her hands, and was eagerly read by her. The perusal of this correspondence led, somewhat later, to a careful study of the Select Works, Autobiography, and Spiritual Letters of Madame Guyon, thus forming an important incident in her religious history. Heretofore she had known Madame Guyon chiefly through the Life by Prof. Upham and the little treatise entitled A Short and very Easy Method of Prayer; and both seem rather to have repelled her. In 1867 she wrote to a friend: There is a book I would be glad to have you read, and which I think you would wish to own; 'Thoughts on Personal Religion,' by Goulburn. I never read a modern religious book that had in it so much, that really edified me. I take for granted you have Thomas à Kempis; on that and on Fenelon I have feasted for years every day; I like strengthening food and whatever deals a blow at this monster Self. Madame Guyon I do not understand. But now she began to feel, as so many earnest seekers after holiness had felt before her, the strong attraction of this remarkable woman. While never becoming to her what Fenelon was, Madame Guyon for several years exerted a decided influence upon her views of the Christian life; nor is there reason to think that this influence was not, on the whole, salutary. Notwithstanding her grave errors and the extravagances which marred her career, Madame Guyon was no doubt one of the holiest, as she was certainly one of the most gifted, women of her own or any other age. [1] _To Mrs. J Elliot Condict, New York, Jan. 2, 1870._ It has been a real disappointment not to see you. How quickly we learn to lean on earthly things! I am afraid I prize Christian fellowship too much, and that I am behaving in a miserly way about all divine gifts, shutting myself up here in this room, which often seems like the gate of heaven, and luxuriating in it, instead of going about preaching the glad tidings to other souls. Yet work for Christ, when He gives it, is sweet, too, and if answering your note is the little tiny bit He offers me at this moment, how glad I am. Though I am not, just now, in the furnace as you are, there is no knowing how soon I shall be, and I remember well enough how the furnace feels, to have deep sympathy with you in your trials. Sympathy, but not regret; I can't make myself be very sorry for Christ's disciples when He takes them in hand--He does it so tenderly, so wisely, so lovingly; and it can hardly be true, can it? that He is just as near and dear to me when my cup is as full of earthly blessings as it can hold, as He is to you whose cup He is emptying? I have always thought they knew and loved Him best who knew Him in His character of Chastiser; but perhaps one never loses the memory of His revelations of Himself in that form, and perhaps that tender memory saddens and hallows the day of prosperity. At any rate, you and I seem to be in full sympathy with each other; your empty cup isn't empty, and my full one would be bitter if love to Christ did not sweeten it. It matters very little on what paths we are walking, since we find Him in every one. How ashamed we shall be when we get to heaven, of our talk about our trials here! Why don't we sing songs instead? We know how, for He has put the songs into our mouths. I think I know something about the land of Beulah, but I don't quite _live_ in it yet; and yet what is this joy if it isn't beatitude, if it is not a foretaste of that which is to come? It isn't joy in what He has done for me, a sinner, but adoring joy for what He is, though I do not _begin to know_ what He is. It will take an eternity to learn that lesson. Do you really mean to say that Miss K. is going to pray for _me_? How delightful! I am _greedy_ for prayer; nobody is rich enough to give me anything I so long for; indeed when my husband begged me to tell him what I wanted at Christmas, I couldn't think of a thing; but oh, what unutterable longing I have for more of Christ. Why should we not speak freely to each other of Him? Don't apologise for it again. The wonder is that we have the heart to speak of anything else. Sometimes I am almost frightened at the expressions of love I pour out upon Him, and wonder if I am really in earnest; if I really mean all I say. Is it even so with you? It is not foolish, is it? Perhaps He likes to hear our poor stammerings, when we can not get our emotions and our thoughts into words. _To Miss E. A. Warner, New York, Jan. 7, 1870._ I find letters more and more unsatisfactory. How little I know of your real life, how little you know of mine! So much is going on all the time that I should run and tell you about if you lived here, but which it would take too long to write. I have very precious Christian friends within six months, who take, or rather to whom I give, more time than I could or would spare for any ordinary friendship; one of them has spent four hours in my room with me at a time, and we had wonderful communings together. Then two dear friends have died. One of the two, of whom you have heard me speak, was the most useful woman in our church; my husband and I both wept over her death. The other directed in dying that a copy of Stepping Heavenward should be given to each of her Sunday scholars; a lifelong fear of death was taken away, and she declared it pleasanter and easier to die than to live; her last words, five minutes before she drew her last gentle breath, came with the upward, dying look, "Wonderful love!" You can't think how sweet it is to be a pastor's wife; to feel the _right_ to sympathise with those who mourn, to fly to them at once, and join them in their prayers and tears. It would be pleasant to spend one's whole time among sufferers, and to keep testifying to them what Christ can and will become to them, if they will only let Him.... No, I never "Dialed" or was transcendental. I don't think knowledge will come to us by intuition in heaven, though knowledge enough to get started there, will. But I don't much care how it will be. I know we shall learn Christ there. I have read lately Prof. Phelps on the Solitude of Christ; it is a suggestive little book which I like much. Have you ever read the Life of Mrs. Hawkes? It is interesting because she records so many of Cecil's wonderful remarks--such, e.g., as these: "a humble, kind silence often utters much." "To-morrow you and I shall walk together in a garden, when I hope to talk with you about everything but sadness." I am going to ask a favor of you, though I hate to put you to the trouble. In writing a telegram in great haste and sorrow, I accidentally used and cut into the lines you copied for me--Sabbath hymn in sickness. It was a real loss, and if you ever feel a little stronger than usual, will you make me another copy? I so often want to comfort sick persons with it. I have half promised to write a serial for a magazine, the organ of the Young Men's Christian Association, though I know nothing of young men and hate to write serials. I wish I could hide in some hole. I get bright letters from A., who is having a very nice time. I write her every day; wretched letters, which she thinks delightful, fortunately. We have a quiet time this winter, but such nice things can't last, and I am afraid of this world anyhow. I know you pray for me, as I do for you and Miss L. every day. I have a thousand things to say that I shall have to put off till I see you. Good-bye, dearie. _To Mrs. Condict, Sunday, March 6, 1870._ I have had some really sweet days, shut up with my dear little boy. He is better, and I am comparatively at leisure again, and so happy in meditating on the character of my Saviour, and in the sense of His nearness, that I _ache_, and have had to beg Him to give me no more, but to carry this joy to you and to Miss K. and to two friends, who, languishing on dying beds, need it so much. [2] If I could shed tears I should not have to tell you this, and indeed it is nothing new; but one must have vent in some way. And this reminds me to explain to you why to three dear Christian friends I now and then send verses; they are my tears of joy or sorrow, and when I feel most deeply it is a relief to versify, and a pleasure to open my heart to those who feel as I do. I have been in print ever since I was sixteen years old, and admiration is an old story; I care very little for it; but I do crave and value sympathy with those who love Christ. And it is such a new thing to open my heart thus! I have written any number of verses that no human being has ever seen, because they came from the very bottom of my heart. I wish I could put into words all the blessed thoughts I had last week about God's dear will: it was a week of such sweet content with the work He gave me to do; naturally I hate nursing, and losing the air makes me feel unwell; but what can't God do with us? I love, dearly, to have a _Master_. I fancy that those who have strong wills, are the ones to enjoy God's sovereignty most. I wonder if you realise what a very happy creature I am? and how much _too good_ God is to me? I don't see how He can heap such mercies on a poor sinner; but that only shows how little I know Him. But then, I am learning to know Him, and shall go on doing it forever and ever; and so will you. I am not sure that it is best for us, once safe and secure on the Rock of Ages, to ask ourselves too closely what this and that experience may signify. Is it not better to be thinking of the Rock, not of the feet that stand upon it? It seems to me that we ought to be unconscious of ourselves, and that the nearer we get to Christ, the more we shall be taken up with Him. We shall be like a sick man who, after he gets well, forgets all the old symptoms he used to think so much of, and stops feeling his pulse, and just enjoys his health, only pointing out his _physician_ to all who are diseased. You will see that this is in answer to a portion of your letter, in which you say Miss K. interprets to you certain experiences. If I am wrong I am willing to be set right; perhaps I have not said clearly what I meant to say. I certainly mean no _criticism_ on you or her, but am only thinking aloud and querying. _To Miss E. A. Warner, New York, March 27, 1870._ You ask if I revel in the Pilgrim's Progress. Yes, I do. I think it an amazing book. It seems to me almost as much an inspiration as the Bible itself. [3] I am glad you liked that hymn. I write in verse whenever I am deeply stirred, because, though as full of tears as other people, I can not shed them. But I never showed any of these verses to any one, not even my husband, till this winter. But if I were more with you no doubt I should venture to let you run over some of them, at least those my dear husband has seen and likes. I have felt about hymns just as you say you do, as if I loved them more than the Bible. But I have got over that; I prayed myself out of it, not loving hymns the less, but the Bible more. I wonder if you sing; I can't remember; if you do, I will send you, sometime, a hymn to sing for my sake, called "More love to Thee, O Christ." Only to think, our silver wedding comes next month, and A. and the Smiths away! I have been interrupted by callers, and must have been in the parlor several hours. You can't think what a sweet, peaceful winter this has been, nor how good the children are. My cup has just run over, and at times I am too happy to be comfortable, if you know what that means; not having a strong body, I suppose you do. Mrs. B. has been in a very critical state of late, but she is rallying, and I may, perhaps, have the privilege of seeing her again. I have had some precious times with her in her sick-room; last Friday, a week ago, she prayed with me in the sweetest temper of mind, and came with me when I took leave, to the head of the stairs, full of love and smiles. _To a Young Friend, April 5, 1870._ I wish that hymn for the sick-room were mine, but it is not. I will enclose one that is, which my dear husband has kindly had printed; perhaps you will like to sing it to the tune of "Nearer, my God, to Thee." There is not much in it, but you can put everything into it as you make it your prayer. I can't help feeling that every soul I meet, of whom I can ask, What think you of Christ? and get the glad answer, "He is the chiefest among ten thousand, _the One_ altogether lovely"--is a blessing as well as a comfort to mine; and whenever you can and do say it, you will become more dear to me. Your God and Saviour won you as an easy victory, but He had to fight for me. It seems to me now that He ought to have all there is of me--which, to be sure, isn't much--and I hope He is taking it. His ways with me have been perfectly beautiful and infinite in long-suffering and patience. _April 11th._--Your note has reawakened a question I have often had occasion to ask myself before. Why do my friends speak of my letters as giving more pleasure or profit than anything that goes to them from me in print? Is human nature so selfish? Must everybody have everything to himself? It might seem so at first blush, but I think there are two sides to this question. May it not be possible that God sends a message directly from _one_ heart to _another_ as He does not to the _many?_ Does He not speak through the living voice and the pen that is that voice, as He does not do in the less unconstrained form of print? At any rate, I love to believe that He directs each word and look and tone; _inspires_ rather, I should say. I should like you to offer a special prayer for us on Saturday. That day completes twenty-five years of married life to us, and, though it has its shades as well as its lights, I do not think I can do better for you than ask that you may have such years, "For who the backward scene hath scanned But blessed the Father's guiding hand?" I can more truly thank Him for His chastisements than for His worldly indulgences; the latter urge from, the former drive to Him. I am saying a great thing in a feeble way, and you may multiply it by ten thousand, and it will still be weak. The hymn, "More Love to Thee, O Christ," belongs, probably, as far back as the year 1856. Like most of her hymns, it is simply a prayer put into the form of verse. She wrote it so hastily that the last stanza was left incomplete, one line having been added in pencil when it was printed. She did not show it, not even to her husband, until many years after it was written; and she wondered not a little that, when published, it met with so much favor. * * * * * II. Her Silver Wedding. "_I have Lived, I have Loved_." No Joy can put her out of Sympathy with the Trials of Friends. A Glance backward. Last Interview with a dying Friend. More Love and more Likeness to Christ. Funeral of a little Baby. Letters to Christian Friends. If 1870 was the crowning year in Mrs. Prentiss' life, the 16th of April was that year's most precious jewel. As the time drew nigh, a glow of tender, grateful recollection suffused her countenance. Her eyes are homes of silent prayer. She talked of the past, like one lost in wonder, while the light and beauty of the vanished years appeared still to rest upon her spirit. The day itself, which had been kept from the knowledge of most of her friends, was full of sweet content, rehearsing, as it were, all the days of her married life; and, at its close, the measure of her earthly joy seemed to be perfect and entire, wanting nothing. _To Mrs. Leonard, New York, April 16, 1845-1870._ Do you know that it is just twenty-five years since we first met? How gladly would I spend the day of our silver wedding with you! You will see that I am near in spirit, at all events. My thoughts have been busy the past week with reviewing the years through which I have travelled, hand in hand, with my dear husband; years full of sin, full of suffering, full of joy; brimful of the loving-kindness and tender mercy that smote often and smote surely. Your last letter only confirms what I already knew, but am never tired of hearing repeated, the faithfulness of God to those whom He afflicts. When we once find out what He is to an aching, empty heart, we want to make everybody see just what we see, and, until we try in vain, think we can. I had very peculiar feelings in relation to you when your dear husband was, for a time, parted from you. I knew God would never afflict you so, if He had not something beautiful and blissful to give in place of what He took. And what can we ask for that compares for one instant with "the almost constant felt presence of our Saviour's sympathy and support"? Our human nature would like to have the earthly and the divine friendship at once; but, if we must choose between the twain, surely you and I would choose Christ without one moment's hesitation. I hope you mention my name every day to Him as I do yours, as I _love_ to do. I enclose, and want you, when by yourself, to sing for my sake a little hymn that I am sure is the language of your heart. My dear husband had a few copies struck off to give friends. Write soon and often. Oh, that you lived here or at Dorset. Good-bye, with warmest love, now _twenty-five_ years old! _To Mrs. Condict, New York, April 20, 1870._ Last Saturday was the twenty-fifth anniversary of our marriage, and a very happy day to us both. My dear husband wrote me a letter that made me tremble, lest he should get such hold of me as no human being must have. I have a very curious feeling about life; a _satisfied_ one, and as if it could not possibly give me much more than I now have. _"I have lived, I have loved."_ [4] People often say they have so much to live for; I can't feel so, though I am not only willing, but glad to live while my husband and children need me; and yet--and yet--to have this problem solved, and to be forever with the Lord! I want to see you. I can no longer see my dear Mrs. B.; she is too ill, and that makes me miss you the more. I hope that little MS. of mine did not task your sympathies; I don't want you to pity me, but to magnify Him who took such pains with me, and is carrying on just such work in thousands of hearts and lives. What goodness! What condescension! The least we can do who have suffered much is to love much.... I have been studying the Bible on the subject of giving personal testimony, and think it makes this a plain duty. There is nothing like the influence of one living soul on another. Then why should we not naturally speak to everybody who will listen, of what fills our thoughts; our Saviour, His beauty, His goodness, His faithfulness, His wisdom! I don't believe a full heart _can help_ running over. _To a young Friend, April 21, 1870._ I was right sorry to lose your Saturday's call. It was a happy day to me, but I can conceive of no enjoyment of any sort that would put me out of sympathy with the trials of friends: "Old and young are bringing troubles, Great and small, for me to hear; _I have often blessed by sorrows That drew other's grief so near."_ I thought I was saying a very ordinary thing when I spoke of thanking God for His long years of discipline, but very likely life did not look to me at your age as it does now. I was rather startled the other day, to find it written in German, in my own hand, "I can not say the will is there," referring to a hymn which says, "Der Will ist da, die Kraft ist klein, Doch wird dir nicht zuwider seyn." I suppose there was some great struggle going on when this foolish heart said that, just as if God did not _invariably_ do for us the very best that can be done. [5] You speak of having your love to Jesus intensified by interviews with me. It can hardly be otherwise, when those meet together who love Him, and it is a rule that works both ways; acts and reacts. I should be thankful if no human being could ever meet me, even in a chance way, and not go away clasping Him the closer, and if I could meet no one who did not so stir and move me. It is my constant prayer. I have such insatiable longings to know and love Him better that I go about hungering and thirsting for the fellowship of those who feel so too; when I meet them I call them my "benedictions." Next best to being with Christ Himself, I love to be with those who have His spirit and are yearning for more of His likeness. You speak of putting "deep and dark chasms between" yourself and Christ. He lets us do this that we may learn our nothingness, our weakness, and turn, disgusted, from ourselves to Him. May I venture to assure you that the "chasms" occur less and less frequently as one presses on, till finally they turn into "mountains of light." Get and keep a will for God, and everything that will is ready for will come. This is about a tenth part of what I might say. _To Miss E. A. Warner, New York, April 25, 1870._ I wish I could describe to you my last interview with Mrs. B. She had altered so in two weeks in which I had not seen her, that I should not have known her. She spoke with difficulty, but by getting close to her mouth I could hear all she said. She went back to the first time she met me, told me her heart then knitted itself to mine, and how she had loved me ever since, etc., etc. I then asked her if she had any parting counsel to give me: "No, not a word.".... Some one came in and wet her lips, gave her a sprig of citronatis, and passed out. I crushed it and let her smell the bruised leaves, saying, "You are just like these crushed leaves." She smiled, and replied, "Well, I haven't had one pain too many, not one. But the agony has been dreadful. I won't talk about that; I just want to see your sunny face." I asked if she was rejoicing in the hope of meeting lost friends and the saints in heaven. She said, with an expressive look, "Oh, no, I haven't got so far as _that_. I have only got as far as Christ." "For all that," I said, "you'll see my father and mother there." "Why, so I shall," with another bright smile. But her lips were growing white with pain, and I came away. Did I tell you it was our silver wedding-day on the 16th? We had a very happy day, and if I could see you I should like to tell you all about it. But it is too long a story to tell in writing. I don't see but I've had everything this life can give, and have a curious feeling as if I had got to a stopping-place. I heard yesterday that two of M.'s teachers had said they looked at her with perfect awe on account of her goodness. I really never knew her to do anything wrong. _To a young Friend New York, May 1, 1870._ I could write forever on the subject of Christian charity, but I must say that in the case you refer to, I think you accuse yourself unduly. We are not to part company with our common sense because we want to clasp hands with the Love that thinketh no evil, and we can not help seeing that there are few, if any, on earth without beams in their eyes and foibles and sins in their lives. The fact that your friend repented and confessed his sin, entitled him to your forgiving love, but not to the ignoring of the fact that he was guilty.... Temptations come sometimes in swarms, like bees, and running away does no good, and fighting only exasperates them. The only help must come from Him who understands and can control the whole swarm. You ask for my prayers, and I ask for yours. I long ago formed the habit of praying at night individually, if possible, for all who had come to me through the day, or whom I had visited; but you contrive to get a much larger share than that. I love to think of your future holiness and usefulness as even in the very least linked to my prayers. Oh, I ought to know how to pray a great deal better than I do, for forty years ago, save one, I this day publicly dedicated myself to Christ. I write to you because I like to do so, recognising no difference between writing and talking. When no better work comes to me, I am glad to give the little pleasure I can, in notes and letters. He who knows how poor we are, how little we have to give, does not disdain even a note like this, since it is written in love to Him and to one of His own dear ones. _May 23d._--Your last letter was like a fragrant breath of country air, redolent of flowers, and all that makes rural scenes so sweet. But better still, it was fragrant with love to Him who is the bond between us, in whose name and for whose sake we are friends. I wish I loved Him better and were more like Him; perhaps that is about as far as we get in this world, for no matter how far we advance, we are never satisfied; there is always something ahead; I doubt if any one ever said, even in a whisper and to himself, "Now I love my Saviour as much as a human soul can." You speak of my having given you "counsels." Have I had the presumption to do that? Two-thirds of the time I feel as if I wanted somebody to counsel me; the only thing I really know that you do not, is what it is to be beaten with persistent, ceaseless stripes, year after year, year after year, with scarcely breathing time between. I don't know whether this is most an argument against me, or for God; on the whole it is most for Him, who was so good and kind as never to spare me for my writhing and groaning. Truly as I value this discipline, I want you to give yourself to Him so unreservedly that you will not need such sharp treatment. I am not going to keep writing and getting you in debt. All I ask is if you ever feel a little under the weather and want a specially loving or cheering word, to give me the chance to speak or write it. A chapter might be written about Mrs. Prentiss' love for little children, the enthusiasm with which she studied all their artless ways, her delight in their beauty, and the reverence with which she regarded the mystery of their infant being. Her faith in their real, complete humanity, their susceptibility to spiritual influences, and, when called from earth, their blessed immortality in and through Christ, was very vivid; and it was untroubled by any of those distressing doubts, or misgivings, that are engendered by the materialistic spirit and science of the age. Contempt for them shocked her as an offence against the Holy Child Jesus, their King and Saviour. Her very look and manner as she took a young infant, especially a sick or dying infant, in her arms and gave it a loving kiss, seemed to say: Sweet baby, little as thou art, Thou art a human whole; Thou hast a little human heart, Thou hast a deathless soul. [6] The following letter to a Christian mother, dated May 13th, will show her feeling on this subject: This morning we attended the funeral of a little baby, eight months old. My husband, in his remarks, said that though born and ever continuing to be a sufferer, it was never saddened by this fellowship with Christ; and that he believed it was a partaker of His holiness, and glad through His indwelling, even though unconscious of it. During the last days of its life, after each paroxysm of coughing, it would look first at its mother, then at its father, for sympathy, and then look upward with a face radiant beyond description. I can't tell you how it touched me to think that I had in that baby a little Christian _sister_--not merely redeemed, but sanctified from its birth--and I know it will touch and strengthen you to hear of it. I felt a reverence for that tiny, lifeless form, that I can not put into words. And, indeed, why should it be harder for God to enter into the soul of an infant than into our "unlikeliest" ones? ... I see more and more that if we have within us the mind of Christ, we must bear the burden of other griefs than our own; He did not merely _pity_ suffering humanity; He _bore_ our griefs, and in all our afflictions He was afflicted. _To Mrs. Condict, June 6, 1870._ If you can get hold of the April number of the Bibliotheca Sacra, read an article in it called "Psychology in the Life, Work and Teachings of Jesus." I think it very striking and very true. Praying for Dr. ---- this morning, I had such a peaceful feeling that he was safe. Do you feel so about him? I had a very different experience about another man who has been to see me since I began this letter, and who said I was the first _happy_ person he ever met. May God lay that to his heart!... Rummaging among dusty things in the attic this forenoon with great repugnance, I found such a beautiful letter from my husband, written for my solace in Switzerland when he was in Paris (he wrote me every day, sometimes twice a day, during the two months of our enforced separation) that even the drudgery of getting my hands soiled and my back broken was sweetened. That's the way God keeps on spoiling us; one good thing after another till we are ashamed. Well, let us step onward, hand in hand. I wonder which of us will outrun the other and step in first? I am so glad I'm willing to live. In the course of this spring _The Percys_ was published. The story first came out as a serial in the New York Observer. It was translated into French under the title _La Famille Percy_. In 1876 a German version appeared under the title _Die Familie Percy_. It was also republished in London. [7] * * * * * III. Lines on going to Dorset. A Cloud over her. Faber's Life. Loving Friends for one's own sake and loving them for Christ's sake. The Bible and the Christian Life. Dorset Society and Occupations. Counsels to a young Friend in Trouble. "Don't stop praying for your Life!" Cure for the Heart-sickness caused by a Sight of human Imperfections. Fenelon's Teaching about Humiliation and being patient with Ourselves. The following lines, found among her papers after her death, show in what spirit she went to Dorset: Once more I change my home, once more begin Life in this rural stillness and repose; But I have brought with me my heart of sin, And sin nor quiet nor cessation knows. Ah, when I make the final, blessed change, I shall leave that behind, shall throw aside Earth's soiled and soiling garments, and shall range Through purer regions like a youthful bride. Thrice welcome be that day! Do thou, meanwhile, My soul, sit ready, unencumbered wait; The Master bides thy coming, and His smile Shall bid thee welcome at the golden gate. DORSET, June 15, 1870. _To Mrs. Condict, Dorset, June 18, 1870._ I would love to have you here with me in this dear little den of mine and see the mountains from my window. My husband has gone back to town, and my only society is that of the children, so you would be most welcome if you should come in either smiling or sighing. I have had a cloud over me of late. Do you know about Mr. Prentiss' appointment by General Assembly to a professorship at Chicago? His going would involve not only our tearing ourselves out of the heart of our beloved church, but of my losing you and Miss K., and of our all losing this dear little home. Of course, he does not want to go, and I am shocked at the thought of his leaving the ministry; but, on the other hand, there is a right and a wrong to the question, and we ought to want to do whatever God chooses. The thought of giving up this home makes me know better how to sympathise with you if you have to part with yours. I do think it is good for us to be emptied from vessel to vessel, and there is something awful in the thought of having our own way with leanness in the soul. I am greatly pained in reading Faber's Life and Letters, at the shocking way in which he speaks of Mary, calling her his mamma, and praying to her and to Joseph, and nobody knows who not. It seems almost incredible that this is the man who wrote those beautiful strengthening hymns. It sets one to praying "Hold Thou me up and I shall be safe." ... I should have forgotten the lines of mine you quote if you had not copied them. God give to you and to me a thousandfold more of the spirit they breathe, and make us wholly, wholly His own! My repugnance to go to Chicago makes me feel that perhaps that is just the wrench I need. Well, good-bye; at the longest we have not long to stay in this sphere of discipline and correction. _To Mr. G. S. P., Dorset, July 13, 1870._ I had just come home from a delicious little tramp through our own woods when your letter came, and now, if you knew what was good for you, you would drop in and take tea and spend the evening with us. I should like you to see our house and our mountains, and our cup that runs over till we are ashamed. Had I not known you wouldn't come I should have given you a chance, especially as my husband was gone and I was rather lonely; though to be sure he always writes me every day. On the way up here I was glad of time to think out certain things I had been waiting for leisure to attend to. One had some connection with you, as well as one or two other friends. I had long felt that there was a real, though subtle, difference between human--and, shall I say divine?--affection, but did not see just what it was. Turning it over in my mind that day, it suddenly came to me as this. Human friendship may be entirely selfish, giving only to receive in return, or may be partially so--yet still selfish. But the love that grows out of the love of Christ, and that delights in His image wherever it is seen, claims no response; loves because it is its very nature to do so, because it can not help it, and this without regard to what its object gives. I dare not pretend that I have fully reached this state, but I have entered this land, and know that it is one to be desired as a home, an abiding place. I have thought painfully of the narrow quarters and the hot nights endured by so many in New York, during this unusually warm weather--especially of Mrs. G. with three restless children in bed with her and her poor lonely heart. I can not but believe that Christ has real purposes of mercy to her soul. I feel interested in Mr. H.'s summer work in a hard field. In place of aversion to young men, I am beginning to realise how true work for Christ one may do by praying persistently for them, especially those consecrated to the ministry of His gospel. I do hope Christ will have the whole of you, and that you will have the whole of Him. When you write, let me know how you like my beloved Fenelon. Still, you may not like him. Some Christians never get to feeding on these mystical writers, and get on without them. _To Mrs. Condict, Dorset, July 18, 1870._ I was greatly struck with these words yesterday: "As for God His way is perfect"; think of reading the Bible through four times in one year, and nobody knows how many times since, and never resting on these words. Somehow they charmed me. And these words have been ringing in my ears, "Earth looks so little and so low," while conscious that when I can get ferns and flowers, it does not look so "little" or so "low," as it does when I can't. My cook, who is a Romanist, has been prevented from going to her own church seven miles off, by the weather, ever since we came here, and last Sunday said she meant to go to ours. Mr. P. preached on God's character as our Physician, and she was delighted. I think it was hearing one of his little letters to the children that made her realise, that he was a Christian man whom she might safely hear; at any rate, I feel greatly pleased and comforted that she could appreciate such a subject. I fear you are suffering from the weather; we never knew anything like it here. We do not suffer, but wake up every morning _bathed_ in a breeze that refreshes for the day; I mean we do not suffer while we keep still. I am astonished at God's goodness in giving us this place; not His goodness itself, but towards _us_. If Mrs. Brinsmade [8] left much of such material as the extract you sent me, I wonder Dr. B. did not write her memoir. The more I read of what Christ said about faith, the more impressed I am. Just now I am on the last chapters in the gospel of John, and feel as if I had never read them before. They are just wonderful. We have to read the Bible to understand the Christian life, and we must penetrate far into that life in order to understand the Bible. How beautifully the one interprets the other! I want you to let me know, without telling her that I asked you, if Miss K. could make me a visit if it were not for the expense? _To Miss E. A. Warner, Dorset, July 20, 1870._ Did you ever use a fountain pen? I have had one given me, and like it so much that I sent for one for my husband, and one for Mr. Pratt. When one wants to write in one's lap, or out of doors, it is delightful. Mrs. Field came over from East Dorset on Sunday to have her baby baptized. They had him there in the church through the whole morning service, and he was as quiet as any of us. The next day Mrs. F. came down and spent the morning with me, sweeter, more thoughtful than ever, if changed at all. Dr. and Mrs. Humphrey, of Philadelphia, are passing the summer here at the tavern, and we spend most of our evenings there, or they come here. Mrs. H. is a very superior woman, and though I was determined not to like her, because I have so many people on hand already, I found I could not help it. She is as furious about mosses and lichens and all such things as I am, and the other day took home a _bushel-basket_ of them. She is an earnest Christian, and has passed through deep waters; I ought to have reversed the order of those clauses. Excuse this rather hasty letter; I feared you might fancy your book lost. If you are alive, let me know it, also if you are dead. _To a young Friend, Dorset, Aug. 8, 1870._ I dare not answer your letter, just received, in my own strength, but must pray over it long. It is a great thing to learn how far our doubts and despondencies are the direct result of physical causes, and another great thing is, when we can not trace any such connexion, to bear patiently and quietly what God _permits_, if He does not authorise. I have no more doubt that you love Him, and that He loves you, than that I love Him and that He loves me. You have been daily in my prayers. Temptations and conflict are inseparable from the Christian life; no strange thing has happened to you. Let me comfort you with the assurance that you will be taught more and more by God's Spirit how to resist; and that true strength and holy manhood will spring up from this painful soil. Try to take heart; there is more than one foot-print on the sands of time to prove that "some forlorn and shipwrecked brother" has traversed them before you, and come off conqueror through the Beloved. _Don't stop praying for your life._ Be as cold and emotionless as you please; God will accept your naked faith, when it has no glow or warmth in it; and in His own time the loving, glad heart will come back to you. I deeply feel for and with you, and have no doubt that a week among these mountains would do more towards uniting you to Christ than a mile of letters would. You can't complain of any folly to which I could not plead guilty. I have put my Saviour's patience to every possible test, and how I love Him when I think what He will put up with. You ask if I "ever feel that religion is a sham"? No, never. I _know_ it is a reality. If you ask if I am ever staggered by the inconsistencies of professing Christians, I say yes, I am often made heartsick by them; but heartsickness always makes me run to Christ, and one good look at Him pacifies me. This is in fact my panacea for every ill; and as to my own sinfulness, that would certainly overwhelm me if I spent much time in looking at it. But it is a monster whose face I do not love to see; I turn from its hideousness to the beauty of His face who sins not, and the sight of "yon lovely Man" ravishes me. But at your age I did this only by fits and starts, and suffered as you do. So I know how to feel for you, and what to ask for you. God purposely sickens us of man and of self, that we may learn to "look long at Jesus." And this brings me to what you say about Fenelon's going too far, when he says we may judge of the depth of our humility by our delight in humiliation, etc. No, he does not go a bit too far. Paul says, "I will _glory_ in my infirmities"--"I take _pleasure_ in infirmities, in reproaches, in necessities, in persecution, in distresses for Christ's sake; for when I am weak, then am I strong." I think this a great attainment; but that His disciples may reach it, though only through a humbling, painful process. Then as to God's glory. We say, "Man's chief end is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever." Now, can we enjoy Him till we do glorify Him? Can we enjoy Him while living for ourselves, while indulging in sin, while prayerless and cold and dead? Does not God directly seek our highest happiness when He strips us of vainglory and self-love, embitters the poisonous draught of mere human felicity, and makes us fall down before Him lost in the sense of His beauty and desirableness? The connexion between glorifying and enjoying Him is, to my mind, perfect--one following as the _necessary sequence_ of the other; and facts bear me out in this. He who has let self go and lives only for the honor of God, is the free, the happy man. He is no longer a slave, but has the liberty of the sons of God; for "him who honors me, I will honor." Satan has befogged you on this point. He dreads to see you ripen into a saintly, devoted, useful man. He hopes to overwhelm and ruin you. But he will not prevail. You have solemnly given yourself to the Lord; you have chosen the work of winning and feeding souls as your life-work, and you can not, must not go back. These conflicts are the lot of those who are training to be the Lord's true yoke-fellows. Christ's sweetest consolations lie behind crosses, and He reserves His best things for those who have the courage to press forward, fighting for them. I entreat you to turn your eyes away from self, from man, and look to Christ. Let me assure you, as a fellow-traveller, that I have been on the road and know it well, and that by and by there won't be such a dust on it. You will meet with hindrances and trials, but will fight quietly through, and no human ear hear the din of battle, no human eye perceive fainting or halting or fall. May God bless you, and become to you an ever-present, joyful reality! Indeed He will; only wait patiently. In glancing over this, I see that I have here and there repeated myself. Do excuse it. I believe it is owing to the way the flies harass and distract me. _August 17th._--I feel truly grateful to God if I have been of any comfort to you. I know only too well the shock of seeing professors of even sinless perfection guilty of what I consider sinful sin, and my whole soul was so staggered that for some days I could not pray, but could only say, "O God, if there be any God, come to my rescue." ... But God loves better than He knows us, and foresaw every infidelity before He called us to Himself. Nothing in us takes Him, therefore, by surprise. Fenelon teaches what no other writer does--to be "patient with ourselves," and I think as you penetrate into the Christian life, you will agree with him on every point as I do. _August 19th._--I have had a couple of rather sickish days since writing the above, but am all right again now. Hot weather does not agree with me. I used to reproach myself for religious stupidity when not well, but see now that God Is my kind Father--not my hard taskmaster, expecting me to be full of life and zeal when physically exhausted. It takes long to learn such lessons. One has to penetrate deeply into the heart of Christ to begin to know its tenderness and sympathy and forbearance. You can't imagine how Miss K. has luxuriated in her visit, nor how good she thinks we all are. She holds views to which I can not quite respond, but I do not condemn or reject them. She is a modest, praying, devoted woman; not disposed to obtrude, much less to urge her opinions; full of Christian charity and forbearance; and I am truly thankful that she prays for me and mine; in fact, she loves to pray so, that when she gets hold of a new case, she acts as one does who has found a treasure. I wish you were looking out with me on the beautiful array of mountains to be seen from every window of our house and breathing this delicious air. _September 25th._--We expect now to go home on Friday next, though if I had known how early the foliage was going to turn this year, I should have planned to stay a week longer to see it in all its glory. It is looking very beautiful even now, and our eyes have a perpetual feast. We have had a charming summer, but one does not want to play all the time, and I hope God has work of some sort for me to do at home during the winter. Meanwhile, I wish I could send you a photograph of the little den where I am now writing, and the rustic adornings which make it _sui generis_, and the bit of woods to be seen from its windows, that, taking the lead of all other Dorset woods, have put on floral colors, just because they are ours and know we want them looking their best before we go away. But this wish must yield to fate, like many another; and, as I have come to the end of my paper, I will love and leave you. * * * * * IV. _The Story Lizzie Told._ Country and City. The Law of Christian Progress. Letters to a Friend bereft of three Children. Sudden Death of another Friend. "Go on; step faster." Fenelon and his Influence upon her religious Life. Lines on her Indebtedness to him. _The Story Lizzie Told_ was published about this time. It had already appeared in the Riverside Magazine. The occasion of the story was a passage in a letter from London written by a friend, which described in a very graphic and touching way the yearly exhibition of the Society for the Promotion of Window Gardening among the Poor. The exhibition was held at the "Dean's close" at Westminster and the Earl of Shaftesbury gave the prizes. [9] No one of Mrs. Prentiss's smaller works, perhaps, has been so much admired as _The Story Lizzie Told_. It was written at Dorset in the course of a single day, if not at a single sitting; and so real was the scene to her imagination that, on reading it in the evening to her husband, she had to stop again and again from the violence of her emotion. "What a little fool I am!" she would say, after a fresh burst of tears. [10] _To Mrs. Leonard, New York, Oct. 16, 1870._ Your letter came in the midst of the wear and tear of A.'s return to us. We were kept in suspense about her from Monday, when she was due, till, Friday when she came, and it is years since I have got so excited and wrought up. They had a dreadful passage, but she was not sick at all. Prof. Smith is looking better than I ever saw him, and we are all most happy in being together once more. I can truly re-echo your wish that you lived half way between us and Dorset, for then we should see you once a year at least. I miss you and long to see you. How true it is that each friend has a place of his own that no one else can fill! I do not doubt that the 13th of October was a silvery wedding-day to your dear husband. His loss has made Christ dearer to you, and so has made your union more perfect. I suppose you were never so much one as you are now. We have had a delightful summer, not really suffering from the heat; though, of course, we felt it more or less. All our nights were cool.... I can not tell you how Mr. P. and myself enjoy our country home. It seems as if we had slipped into our proper nook. But if we are going to do any more brainwork, we must be where there is stimulus, such as we find here. What a mixed-up letter! I have almost forgotten how to write, in adorning my house and sowing my seeds and the like. _To Mrs. Frederick Field, New York, Oct. 19th, 1870._ I deeply appreciate the Christian kindness that prompted you to write me in the midst of your sorrow. I was prepared for the sad news by a dream only last night. I fancied myself seeing your dear little boy lying very restlessly on his bed, and proposing to carry him about in my arms to relieve him. He made no objection, and I walked up and down with him a long, long time, when some one of the family took him from me. Instantly his face was illumined by a wondrous smile of delight that he was to leave the arms of a stranger to go to those familiar to him--such a smile, that when I awoke this morning I said to myself, "Eddy Field has gone to the arms of his Saviour, and gone gladly." You can imagine how your letter, an hour or two later, touched me. But you have better consolation than dreams can give; in the belief that your child will develop, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, into the perfect likeness of Christ, and in your own submission to the unerring will of God. I sometimes think that patient sufferers suffer most; they make less outcry than others, but the grief that has little vent wears sorely. "Grace does not steel the faithful heart That it should feel no ill," and you have many a pang yet before you. It must be so very hard to see twin children part company, to have their paths diverge so soon. But the shadow of death will not always rest on your home; you will emerge from its obscurity into such a light as they who have never sorrowed can not know. We never know, or begin to know, the great Heart that loves us best, till we throw ourselves upon it in the hour of our despair. Friends say and do all they can for us, but they do not know what we suffer or what we need; but Christ, who formed, has penetrated the depths of the mother's heart. He pours in the wine and the oil that no human hand possesses, and "as one whom his mother comforteth, so will He comfort you." I have lived to see that God never was so good to me as when He seemed most severe. Thus I trust and believe it will be with you and your husband. Meanwhile, while the peaceable fruits are growing and ripening, may God help you through the grievous time that must pass--a grievous time in which you have my warm sympathy. I know only too well all about it. "I know my griefs; but then my consolations, My joys, and my immortal hopes I know"-- joys unknown to the prosperous, hopes that spring from seed long buried in the dust. I shall read your books with great interest, I am sure, and who knows how God means to prepare you for future usefulness along the path of pain? "Every branch that beareth fruit He purgeth it, that it may bring forth more fruit." What an epitaph your boy's own words would be--"It is beautiful to be dead"! _To the Same, New York, Nov 30th, 1870._ I thank you so much for your letter about your precious children. I remember them well, all three, and do not wonder that the death of your first-born, coming upon the very footsteps of sorrow, has so nearly crushed you. But what beautiful consolations God gave you by his dying bed! "All safe at God's right hand!" What more can the fondest mother's heart ask than such safety as this? I am sure that there will come to you, sooner or later, the sense of Christ's love in these repeated sorrows, that in your present bewildered, amazed state you can hardly realise. Let me tell you that I have tried His heart in a long storm--not so very different from yours--and that I know something of its depths. I will enclose you some lines that may give you a moment's light. Please not to let them go out of your hands, for no one--not even my husband--has ever seen them. I am going to send my last book to your lonely little boy. You will not feel like reading it now, but perhaps the 33d chapter, and some that follow, may not jar upon you as the earlier part would. To go back again to the subject of Christ's love for us, of which I never tire, I want to make you feel that His sufferers are His happiest, most favored disciples. What they learn about Him---His pitifulness, His unwillingness to hurt us, His haste to bind up the very wounds He has inflicted---endear Him so, that at last they burst out into songs of thanksgiving, that His "donation of bliss" included in it such donation of pain. Perhaps I have already said to you, for I am fond of saying it, "The love of Jesus---what it is, Only His sufferers know." You ask if your heart will ever be lightsome again. Never again with the lightsomeness that had never known sorrow, but light even to gayety with the new and higher love born of tribulation. Just as far as a heavenly is superior even to maternal love, will be the elevation and beauty of your new joy; a joy worth all it costs. I know what sorrow means; I know it well. But I know, too, what it is to pass out of that prison-house into a peace that passes all understanding; and thousands can say the same. So, my dear suffering sister, look on and look up; lay hold on Christ with _both your poor, empty hands_; let Him do with you what seemeth Him good; though He slay you, still trust in Him; and I dare in His name to promise you a sweeter, better life than you could have known had He left you to drink of the full, dangerous cups of unmingled prosperity. I feel such real and living sympathy with you, that I would love to spend weeks by your side, trying to bind up your broken heart. But for the gospel of Christ, to hear of such bereavements as yours would appall, would madden one. Yet, what a halo surrounds that word "but"! _To Miss E. A. Warner, New York, Dec 14, 1870._ I have not behaved according to my wont, and visited the sick even by way of a letter. And by this time I hope you are quite well again, and do not need ghostly counsels.... I have felt very badly about Miss Lyman's dying at Vassar, but since Mrs. S.'s visit and learning how beloved she is there, have changed my mind. What does it matter, after all, from what point of time or space we go home; how we shall smile, after we get there, that we ever gave it one moment's thought! You ask what I am doing; well, I am taking a vacation and not writing anything to speak of, yet just as busy as ever; not one moment in which to dawdle, though I dare say I seem to the folks here at home to be sitting round doing nothing. I must give you a picture of one day and you must photograph one of yours, as we have done before. Got up at seven and went through the usual forms; had prayers and breakfast, and started off to school with M. Came home and had a nice quiet time reading, etc.; at eleven went to my meeting, which was a tearful one, as one of our members who knelt with us only a week before, was this day to be buried out of our sight. She was at church on Sunday afternoon at four P.M., to present her baby in baptism, and at half-past two the following morning was in heaven. We all went together to the funeral after the meeting, and gathered round the coffin with the feeling that she belonged to us. When I got home I found a despatch from Miss W., saying they should be here right away. I had let one of my women go out of town to a sick sister, so I must turn chamber-maid and make the bed, dust, clear out closet, cupboard, and bureau forthwith. This done, they arrived, which took the time till half-past seven, when I excused myself and went to an evening meeting, knowing it would be devoted to special prayer for the husband and children of her who had gone. Got home half an hour behind time and found a young man awaiting me who was converted last June, as he hopes, while reading Stepping Heavenward. I had just got seated by him when our doctor was announced; he had lost his only grandchild and had come to talk about it. He stayed till half-past nine, when I went back to my young friend, who stayed till half-past ten and gave a very interesting history which I have not time to put on paper. He writes me since, however, about his Christian life that "it gets sweeter and sweeter," and I know you will be glad for me that I have this joy. _Saturday Morning._--I was interrupted there, had visitors, had to go to a fair, company again, so that I had not time to eat the food I needed, went to see a poor sick girl, had more visitors, and at last, at eleven P.M., scrambled into bed. Now I am finishing this, and if nobody hinders, am going to mail it, and then go after a block of ice-cream for that sick girl (isn't it nice, we can get it now done up in little boxes, just about as much as an invalid can eat at one time). Then I am going to see a poor afflicted soul that can't get any light on her sorrow. Here comes my dear old man to read his sermon, so good-bye. _To a young Friend, Dec. 20, 1870._ I have been led, during the last month or two, to a new love of the Holy Spirit, or perhaps to more consciousness of the silent, blessed work He is doing in and for us? and for those whose souls lie as a heavy and yet a sweet burden upon our own. And joining with you in your prayers, seeking also for myself what I sought for you, I found myself almost startled by such a response as I can not describe. It was not joy, but a deep solemnity which enfolded me as with a garment, and if I ever pass out of it, which I never want to do, I hope it will be with a heart more than ever consecrated and set apart for Christ's service. The more I reflect and the more I pray, the more life narrows down to one point--What am I being for Christ, what am I doing for Him? Why do I tell you this? Because the voice of a fellow-traveller always stimulates his brother-pilgrim; what one finds and speaks of and rejoices over, sets the other upon determining to find too. God has been very good to you, as well as to me, but we ought to whisper to each other now and then, "Go on, step faster, step surer, lay hold on the Rock of Ages with both hands." You never need be afraid to speak such words to me. I want to be pushed on, and pulled on, and coaxed on. The allusion to her "beloved Fenelon," in several of the preceding letters, renders this a suitable place to say a word about him and his influence upon her religious character. "Fenelon I _lean_ on," she wrote. Her delight in his writings dated back more than a quarter of a century, and continued, unabated, to the end of her days. She regarded him with a sort of personal affection and reverence. Her copy of "Spiritual Progress," composed largely of selections from his works, is crowded with pencil-marks expressive of her sympathy and approval; not even her Imitation of Christ, Sacra Privata, Pilgrim's Progress, Saints' Everlasting Rest, or Leighton on the First Epistle of Peter, contain so many. These pencil-marks are sometimes very emphatic, underscoring or inclosing now a single word, now a phrase, anon a whole sentence or paragraph; and it requires but little skill to decipher, in these rude hieroglyphics, the secret history of her soul for a third of a century-- one side, at least, of this history. What she sought with the greatest eagerness, what she most loved and most hated, her spiritual aims, struggles, trials, joys and hopes, may here be read between the lines. And a beautiful testimony they give to the moral depth, purity and nobleness of her piety! The story is not, indeed, complete; her religious life had other elements, not found, or only partially found, in Fenelon; elements centering directly in Christ and His gospel, and which had their inspiration in her Daily Food and her New Testament. What attracted her to Fenelon was not the doctrine of salvation as taught by him--she found it better taught in Bunyan and Leighton--it was his marvellous knowledge of the human heart, his keen insight into the proper workings of nature and grace, his deep spiritual wisdom, and the sweet mystic tone of his piety. And then the two great principles pervading his writings--that of pure love to God and that of self-crucifixion as the way to perfect love--fell in with some of her own favorite views of the Christian life. In the study of Fenelon, as of Madame Guyon, her aim was a purely practical one; it was not to establish, or verify, a theory, but to get aid and comfort in her daily course heavenward. What Fenelon was to her in this respect she has herself recorded in the following lines, found, after her death, written on a blank page of her "Spiritual Progress": Oh wise and thoughtful words! oh counsel sweet, Guide in my wanderings, spurs unto my feet, How often you have met me on the way, And turned me from the path that led astray; Teaching that fault and folly, sin and fall, Need not the weary pilgrim's heart appall; Yea more, instructing how to snatch the sting From timid conscience, how to stretch the wing From the low plane, the level dead of sin, And mount immortal, mystic joys to win. One hour with Jesus! How its peace outweighs The ravishment of earthly love and praise; How dearer far, emptied of self to lie Low at His feet, and catch, perchance, His eye, Alike content when He may give or take, The sweet, the bitter, welcome for His sake! [1] John Wesley, after having pointed out what he considered the grand source of all her mistakes; namely, the being guided by inward impressions and the light of her own spirit rather than by the written Word, and also her error in teaching that God never purifies a soul but by inward and outward suffering--then adds: "And yet with all this dross how much pure gold is mixed! So did God wink at involuntary ignorance. What a depth of religion did she enjoy! How much of the mind that was in Christ Jesus! What heights of righteousness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost! How few such instances do we find of exalted love to God, and our neighbor; of genuine humility; of invincible meekness and unbounded resignation! So that, upon the whole, I know not whether we may not search many centuries to find another woman who was such a pattern of true holiness." [2] See the lines MY CUP RUNNETH OVER, _Golden Hours_, p. 43. [3] "I know of no book, the Bible excepted as above all comparison, which I, according to my judgment and experience, could so safely recommend as teaching and enforcing the whole saving truth according to the mind that was in Christ Jesus, as the Pilgrim's Progress. It is, in my conviction, incomparably the best _summa theologiæ evangelicæ_ ever produced by a writer not miraculously inspired. I read it once as a theologian--and let me assure you, there is great theological acumen in the work--once with devotional feelings, and once as a poet. I could not have believed beforehand that Calvinism could be painted in such exquisitely delightful colors."--COLERIDGE. [4] The allusion is to Thekla's song in Part I., Act iii., sc. 7 of Schiller's Wallenstein. Du Heilige, rufe dein Kind zurück! Ich habe genossen das irdische Glück, _Ich habe gelebt und gelibet._ [5] The hymn referred to is Paul Gerhardt's, beginning: Wir singen dir, Immanuel, Du Lebensfürst und Gnadenquell. It was one of her favorite German hymns. The lines she quotes belong to the tenth stanza; "Ich kann nicht sagen Der Will ist da," are the words pencilled in the margin. [6] Hartley Coleridge's Poems. Vol. II., p. 139. [7] But greatly to Mrs. Prentiss' annoyance, with the title changed to _Ever Heavenward_--as if to make it appear to be a sequel to Stepping Heavenward. [8] Wife of the late Rev. Horatio Brinsmade, D.D., of Newark, N. J. [9] "Polly" was particularly happy; six years old, I should say, shabby, though evidently washed up for the occasion, and very pretty and all pink with excitement. "Polly, I _knowed_ you'd get a prize," I heard a young woman, tired out with carrying her own big baby, say. And then she came upon her own geranium with three blossoms on it and marked "Second Prize," and said, "I _can't_ believe it," when they told her that that meant six shillings. But the plant which my companion and myself both cried over, was a little bit of a weedy marigold, the one poor little flower on it carefully fastened about with a paper ring, such as high and mighty greenhouse men sometimes put round a choice rose in bud. That was all; just this one common, very single little flower, with "Lizzie" Something's name attached and the name of her street. All the streets were put upon the tickets and added greatly to the pathetic effect; just the poorest lanes and alleys in London. Nobody seemed to claim the marigold. Perhaps it was the great treasure of some sick child who couldn't come to look at it. It was certain not to get a prize, but the child has found something by this time tucked down in the pot and carefully covered over by F., when no one was looking, with a pinch of earth taken from a more prosperous plant alongside. [10] Miss W. showed me a very pleasant letter of Lady Augusta Stanley, the wife of Dean Stanley, to a Miss C., through whom she received from Miss W.'s little niece a copy of _The Story Lizzie Told_. Lady Stanley is herself, I believe, at the head of the Society which holds the annual Flower Show. She says in her letter that she had just returned from Scotland, reaching home quite late in the evening. Before retiring, however, she had read your story through. She praises it very warmly, and wonders how anybody but a "Londoner" could have written it.--_Letter to Mrs. P., dated New York, September, 1872._ CHAPTER XI. IN HER HOME. The letters in the preceding chapters give a glimpse, here and there, of Mrs. Prentiss' home, but relate chiefly to the religious side of her character. What was her manner of life among her children? How were her temper and habits as a mother affected by the ardor and intensity of her Christian feeling? A partial answer to these questions is contained in letters written to her eldest daughter, while the latter was absent in Europe. These letters show the natural side of her character; and although far from reflecting all its light and beauty--no words could do that!--they depict some of its most interesting traits. They are frankness itself and betray not the least respect of persons; but if she speaks her mind in them without much let or hindrance, it is always done in the pleasantest way. In the portions selected for publication the aim has been to let her be seen, so far as possible, just as she appeared in her daily home-life, both in town and country. I. Home-life in New York. New York, _October_ 22, 1869. I have promised to walk to school with M. this morning, and while I am waiting for her to get ready, will begin my letter to you. We got home from seeing you off all tired out, and I lay on the sofa all the time till I went to bed, except while eating my dinner, and I think papa did pretty much the same. The moment we had done dinner, H. and Jane appeared, carrying your bureau drawer between them, and we had a great time over the presents you were thoughtful enough to leave behind you. My little sacque makes me look like 500 angels instead of one, and I am ever so glad of it, and the children were all delighted with their things. Well, I have escorted M. to school, come home and read the Advance, and Hearth and Home, and it is now eleven o'clock and the door-bell has only rung twice! Papa says you are out of sight of land, and as it is a warm day and we are comfortable, we hope you are. But it is dreadful to have to wait so long before hearing. _23d._--Papa says this must be mailed by nine o'clock; so I have hurried up from breakfast to finish it. Mr. and Mrs. S. spent most of last evening with us. They shouted over my ferrotypes. Mr.---- also called and expressed as much surprise at your having gone to Europe as if the sky had fallen. I read my sea-journal to the children last evening, and though it is very flat and meagre in itself, H., to whom it was all brand new, thought it ought to be published forthwith. No time for another word but love to all the S.'s, big and little, high and low, great and small. Your affectionate Mammy. _Oct. 28th._--I can hardly believe that it is only a week today that we saw you and your big steamer disappear from view. H. said last night that it seemed to him one hundred years ago, and we all said amen. So how do you suppose it will seem ten months hence? I hope you do not find the time so long. I take turns waiting upon the children to school, which they are very strict about, and they enjoy their teachers amazingly. I received this morning a very beautiful and touching letter from a young lady in England about the Susy books. They are associated in her mind and those of her family with a "Little Pearlie" whose cunning little photograph she enclosed, who taught herself to read in a fortnight from one of them, and was read to from it on her dying bed, and after she became speechless she made signs to have her head wet as Susy's was. I never received such a letter among all I have had. Randolph sent me twelve copies of Stepping Heavenward, and I have had my hands full packing and sending them. M. is reading aloud to H. a charming story called "Alone in London." I am sure I could not read it aloud without crying. The following is the letter from England: To THE AUTHOR OF "LITTLE SUSY": I feel as if I had a perfect right to call you "My dear friend," so much have I thought of you this last year and a half. Bear with me while I tell you why. A year ago last Christmas we were a large family--father, mother, and eight children, of whom I, who address you, am the eldest. The youngest was of course the pet, our bright little darling, rather more than five. That Christmas morning, of course, there were gifts for all; and among the treasures in the smallest stocking was a copy of "Little Susy's Six Teachers," for which I desire to thank you now. Many times I have tried to do so, but I could not; the trouble which came upon us was too great and awful in its suddenness. Little Pearl, so first called in the days of a fragile babyhood--Dora Margaret was her real name--taught herself to read from her "Little Susy," during the first fortnight she had it. And she would sit for hours, literally, amusing and interesting herself by it. She talked constantly of the Six Teachers, and a word about them was enough to quell any rising naughtiness. "Pearlie, what would Mr. Ought say?" or "Don't grieve Mrs. Love," was always sufficient. Do you know what it is to have one the youngest in a large family? My darling was seventeen years younger than I. I left school when she was born to take the oversight of the nursery, which dear mamma's illness and always delicate health prevented her from doing. I had nursed her in her illnesses, dressed her, made the little frocks--now laid so sadly by--and to all the rest of us she had been more like a child than a sister. Friends used to say, "It is a wonder that child is not spoiled"; but they could never say she _was_. Merry, full of life and fun she always was, quick and intelligent, full of droll sayings which recur to us now with _such_ a pain. From Christmas to the end of February we often remarked to one another how good that child was! laughing and playing from morning to night, yet never unruly or wild. That February we had illness in the house. Jessie, the next youngest, had diphtheria, but she recovered, and we trusted all danger was passed, when one Monday evening--the last in the month--our darling seemed ill. The next day we recognised the symptoms we had seen in Jessie, and the doctor was called in. Tuesday and Wednesday he came and gave no hint of danger, but on Wednesday night we perceived a change and on Thursday came the sentence: No hope. Oh friend, dear friend! how can I tell you of the long hours when we could not help our darling--of the dark night when, forbidden the room from the malignity of the case, we went to bed to coax mamma to do so--of the grey February dawn when there came the words, "Our darling is _quite well_ now"--quite well, forever taken from the evil to come. The Sunday night before, she came into the parlor with "Susy" under her arm and petitioned for some one to read the "Teachers' meeting." "Why, you read it twice this afternoon," said one. "Yes, I know--but it's so nice," was the reply. "Pearlie will be six in September," said the gentle mother; "we must have a Teachers' meeting for her, I think." "But perhaps I sha'n't ever be six," said the little one. "Oh Pearlie, why do you say so?" "Well, people don't all be six, you know," affirmed our darling with solemn eyes and two dimples in the rosy cheeks, that were hid forever from us before the next Sabbath day. On the Wednesday we borrowed from a little friend the other books of the series, thinking they might afford some amusement for the weary hours of illness, and Annie, my next sister, read four of the birthdays to her and then wished to stop, fearing she might be too fatigued. "No, read one more," was the request, and "That will do--I'm five, read the last to-morrow," she said, when it was complied with. Ah me! with how many tears we took up that book again. That Wednesday she sat up in bed, a glass of medicine in her hand. "Mamma," she said, "Miss Joy has gone quite away and only left Mr. Pain. She can't come back till my throat is well." "But Mrs. Love is here, is she not?" "Oh, yes," and the dear heavy eyes turned from one to another. In the night, when she lay dying, came intervals of consciousness; in one of these she took her handkerchief and gave it to papa, who watched by her, asking him to wet it and put it on her head. When he told us, we recollected the incident when Susy in the favorite book was ill. And can you understand how our hearts felt very tender toward you and we said you must be thanked. I should weary you if I told you all the incidents that presented themselves of how sweet and good she was in her illness; how in the agony of those last hours, when no fear of infection could restrain the passionate kisses papa was showering on her, the dear voice said with a stop and an effort between each word, "Don't kiss me on my mouth, papa; you may catch it"; how everything she asked for was prefaced by "please," how self was always last in her thoughts. "I'm keeping you awake, you darling." "Don't stand there--you'll be so tired--sit down or go down-stairs, if you like." I will send you a photograph of little Pearlie; it is the best we have, but was taken when she was only two years old. She was very small for her age and had been very delicate until the last year of her life. In writing thus to thank you I am not only doing an act of justice to yourself, but fulfilling wishes now rendered binding. Often and often my dear mamma said, "How I wish we knew the lady who wrote Little Susy!" Her health, always delicate, never recovered from the shock of Pearlie's death, and suddenly, on the morning of the first of May, the Angel of Death darkened our dwelling with the shadow of his wings. Not long did he linger--only two hours--and our mother had left us. She was with her treasure and the Saviour, who said so lovingly on earth, "Come unto Me." But words can not express such trouble as that. We have not realised it yet. Forgive me if my letter is abrupt and confused. I have only desired to tell you simply the simple tale--if by any chance it should make you thank God more earnestly for the great gift He has given you--a holy gift indeed; for can you think the lessons from "Susy," so useful and so loved on earth, could be suddenly forgotten when the glories of heavens opened on our darling's view? I can not myself. I think, perhaps, our Father's home may be more like our human ones, where His love reigns, than our wild hearts allow themselves to imagine; and I think the two, on whose behalf I thank you now, may one day know you and thank you themselves. Dear "Aunt Susan," believe me to be, your unknown yet grateful friend, LIZZIE WRAITH L----. Mrs. Prentiss at once answered this letter, and not long after received another from Miss L----, dated January 9, 1870, breathing the same grateful feeling and full of interesting details. The following is an extract from it: I was so surprised, dear unknown friend, to receive your kind letter so soon. Indeed, I hardly expected a reply at all. When I wrote to you, I did not know that I was addressing a daughter of the "Edward Payson" whose name is fragrant even on this side of the Atlantic. Had I known it I think I should not have ventured to write--so I am glad I did not. If you should be able to write again, and have a carte-de-visite to spare, may I beg it, that I may form some idea of the friend, "old enough to be my mother"? Are you little and slight, like my real mother, I wonder, or stately and tall? I will send you a photograph of the monument which the ladies of papa's church and congregation have erected to dear mamma, in our beautiful cemetery, where the snowdrops will be already peeping, and where roses bloom for ten months out of the twelve. _Nov. 3d._--Here beginneth letter No. 3. We heard of your arrival at Southampton by a telegram last evening. We long to get a letter. Before I forget it let me tell you that Alice H. and Julia W. have both got babbies. We are getting nicely settled for the winter; the children are all behaving beautifully. _Saturday, 6th._--Well, I have just been to see Mrs. F., and found her a bright, frank young thing, fresh and simple and very pleasing. Her complexion is like M----'s, and the lower part of her face is shaped like hers, dark eyebrows, light hair, _splendid_ teeth, and I suppose would be called very pretty by you girls. Take her altogether I liked her very much. We hear next to nothing from Stepping Heavenward, and begin to think it is going to fall dead. _Monday, 14th._--Your Southampton letter has just come and we are delighted to hear that you had such a pleasant voyage, and found so many agreeable people on board.... Yesterday afternoon was devoted to hearing a deeply interesting description from Dr. Hatfield, followed by Mr. Dodge, of the re-union of the two Assemblies at Pittsburgh. Dr. H. made us all laugh by saying that as the New School entered the church where they were to be received and united to the Old School, the latter rose and sang "Return, ye ransomed sinners, home!" Oh, I don't know but it was just the other way; it makes no great difference, for as Dr. H. remarked, "we're all ransomed sinners." _Nov. 30th._--Mr. Abbot dined here on Sunday. He came in again in the evening, and it would have done you good to hear what he said about the children. They are all well and happy, and give me very little trouble. I do not feel so well on the late dinner, and have awful dreams.----I was passing the C----s, after writing the above, and she called me in to see her new parlors. They are beautiful; a great deal of bright, rich coloring, and various articles of furniture of his own designing. _Thursday._----You and M. will be shocked to hear that Julia W. died last night. As Mr. W. was at church on Sunday, we supposed all danger was over. We heard it through a telegram sent to your father. _December 4, 1869._--I need not tell you that we all remember that this is your birthday, dear child, and that the remembrance brings you very near. I wish I could send you, for a birthday present, all that I have, this morning, asked God to give you. You may depend upon it, that while some people may get along through life at a certain distance from Him, _you_ are not one of that sort. You may find a feverish joy, but never abiding _peace_, out of Him. Remember this whenever you feel the oppression of that vague sense of unrest, of which, I doubt not, you have a great deal underneath a careless outside; this is the thirst of the soul for the only fountain at which it is worth while to drink. You never will be really happy till Christ becomes your dearest and most intimate friend. _7th._--We have had a tremendous fall of snow, and Culyer says M. ought to wait an hour before starting for school, but she is not willing and I am going with her to see that she is not buried alive. Good-bye again, dearie! Will begin a new letter right away. _Dec. 9th_--We went to see Mrs. W. this afternoon. Julia had typhoid fever, which ran twenty-one days, and was delirious a good deal of the time. She got ready to die before her confinement, though she said she expected to live. After she became so very ill Mrs. W. heard her praying for something "for Christ's sake," "for the sake of Christ's _sufferings_," and once asked her what it was she was asking for so earnestly. "Oh, to get well for Edward's sake and the baby's," she replied. A few days before her death she called Mrs. W. to "come close" to her, and said, "I am going to die. I did not think so when baby was born, dear little thing--but now it is impressed upon me that I am." Mrs. W. said they hoped not, but added, "Yet suppose you _should_ die, what then?" "Oh I have prayed, day and night, to be reconciled, and I am, _perfectly_ so. God will take care of Edward and of my baby. Perhaps it is better so than to run the risk--" She did not finish the sentence. The baby looks like her. Mrs. W. told her you had gone to Europe with M., and she expressed great pleasure; but if she had known where _she_ was going, and to what, all she would have done would have been to give thanks "for Christ's sake." I do not blame her, however, for clinging to life; it was natural she should. _10th_--We went, last evening, to hear Father Hyacinthe lecture on "Charite" at the Academy of Music. I did not expect to understand a word, but was agreeably disappointed, as he spoke very distinctly. Still I did not enjoy hearing as well as I did reading it this morning--for I lost some of the best things in a really fine address. It was a brilliant scene, the very elite of intellectual society gathered around one modest, unpretentious little man. Dr. and Mrs. Crosby were in the box with us, and she, fortunately, had an opera glass with her, so that we had a chance to study his really good face. The only book I expect to write this winter is to you; I am dreadfully lazy since you left, and don't do anything but haze about. There is a good deal of lively talk at the table; the children are waked up by going to school, and there is some rivalry among them, each maintaining that his and hers is the best. _Dec. 15th._--We have cards for a "Soiree musicale" at Mrs. ----'s, which is to be a great smash-up. She called here to-day and wept and wailed over and kissed me. I have been to see how Mrs. C. is. She is a little worse to-day, and he and her father scarcely leave her. He wrung my hand all to pieces, poor man. Her illness is exciting great sympathy in our church, and nobody seems willing to let her go. Dr. Adams spent last evening here. He is splendid company; I really wish he would come once a week. Everybody is asking if I meant in Katy to describe myself. I have no doubt that if I should catch an old toad, put on to her a short gown and petticoat and one of my caps, everybody would walk up to her and say, "Oh, how do you do, Mrs. Prentiss, you look more like yourself than common; I recognise the picture you have drawn of yourself in Stepping Heavenward and in the Percys," etc., etc., etc., _ad nauseam_. The next book I write I'll make my heroine black and everybody will say, "Oh, here you are again, black to the life!" _Dec. 18th._--You and M. will not be surprised to hear that Mrs. C.'s sufferings are over. She died this morning. Papa and I are greatly shaken. With much hesitation I decided to go over there to see her mother, and the welcome I got from her and from Mr. C. are things to remember for a life-time. I will never hesitate again to fly to people in trouble. If you were here I would tell you all about my visit, but I can't write it down. It seems so sad, just as they had got into their lovely new home--sad for _him_, I mean; as for her I can only wish her joy that she is not weeping here below as he is. I stayed till it was time for church, and when I entered it I was met by many a tearful face; papa announced her death from the pulpit, and is going, this afternoon, to throw aside the sermon he intended to preach, and extemporise on "the first Sunday in heaven." The children are going in, this noon, to sing; as to the Mission festival, that is to be virtually given up; the children are merely to walk in, receive their presents, and go silently out. It is a beautiful day to go to heaven in. Mrs. C. did not know she was going to die, but that is of no consequence. Only one week ago yesterday she was at the Industrial school, unusually bright and well, they all say. Well, I see everything double and had better stop writing. _Monday, 20th._--Your nice letter was in the letter-box as I started for school with H.; I called to papa to let him know it was there and went off, begrudging him the pleasure of reading it before I did. When I got home there was no papa and no letter to be found; I looked in every room, on his desk and on mine, posted down to the letter-box and into the parlor, in vain. At last he came rushing home with it, having carried it to market, lest I should get and read it alone! So we sat down and enjoyed it together.... I take out your picture now and then, when, lo, a big lump in my throat, notwithstanding which I am glad we let you go; we enjoy your enjoyment, and think it will make the old nest pleasanter to have been vacated for a while. Papa and I agreed before we got up this morning that the only fault we had to find with God was, that He was too good to us. I can't get over the welcome I got from Mr. C. yesterday. He said I seemed like a mother to him, which made me feel very old on the one hand, and very happy on the other. If I were you I wouldn't marry anybody but a minister; it gives one such lots of people to love and care for. Old Mrs. B. is failing, and lies there as peaceful and contented as a little baby. I never got sweeter smiles from anybody. I have got each of the servants a pretty dress for Christmas; I feel that I owe them a good deal for giving me such a peaceful, untroubled home. _Dec. 23d._--It rained very hard all day yesterday till just about the time of the funeral, half-past three, when the church was well filled, the Mission-school occupying seats by themselves and the teachers by themselves.... I thought as I listened to the address that it would reconcile me to seeing you lying there in your coffin, if such a record stood against your name. Papa read, at the close, a sort of prophetic poem of Mrs. C.'s, which she wrote a year or more ago, of which I should like to send you all a copy, it is so good in every sense. He wants me to send you a few hasty lines I scribbled off on Sunday noon, with which he closed his sermon that afternoon, and repeated again at the funeral, but it is not worth the ink. After the service the mission children went up to look at the remains, and passed out; then the rest of the congregation. One of the mission children fainted and fell, and was carried out in Mr. L.'s arms. After the rest dispersed papa took me in, and there we saw a most touching sight; a dozen poor women and children weeping about the coffin, offering a tribute to her memory, sweeter than the opulent display of flowers did. _Evening._--The interment took place to-day, at Woodlawn. Mr. C. wished me to go, and I did. On the way home a gentlemanly-looking man stepped up to your father, and taking his hand said, "I never saw you till to-day, but I _love_ you; yes, there is no other word!" Wasn't it nice of him? _Dec. 24th._--Papa went in last evening, for a half hour, to see ---- and his bride, at their great reception, drank two glasses of "coffee sangaree," and brought me news that overcame me quite,--namely, that ---- was delighted with my book. Nesbit & Co. sent me a copy of their reprint of it. They have got it up beautifully with six colored illustrations, most of them very good; little Earnest is as cunning as he can be, and the old grandpa is perfect. Katy, however, has her hair in a waterfall in the year 1835 and even after, wears long dresses, and always has on a _sontag_ or something like one. She goes to see Dr. Cabot in a red sacque, and a red hat, and has a muff in her lap. Mrs. ---- was here the other day to say that I had drawn her husband's portrait _exactly_ in Dr. Elliot. I have been out with M. all the morning, doing up our last shopping. We came home half frozen, and had lunch together, when lo, a magnificent basket of flowers from Mrs. D. and some candy from the party; papa and G. came home and we all fell to making ourselves sick.... I have bought lots of candy and little fancy cakes to put in the children's stockings. I know it is very improper, but one can't be good always. Dr. P. is sick with pneumonia. Mrs. P. has just sent me a basket of fresh eggs, and an illustrated edition of Longfellow's "Building of the Ship." _25th._--I wish you a Merry Christmas, darling, and wonder what you are all doing to celebrate this day. We have had great times over our presents.... I got a note from Mr. Abbot saying that a friend of his in Boston had given away fourteen Katies, all he could get, and that the bookseller said he could have sold the last copy thirty times over. Neither papa nor I feel quite up to the mark to-day; we probably got a little cold at Mrs. C.'s grave, as the wind blew furiously, and the hymn, and prayer, and benediction took quite a time. _26th._--Dr. P. is worse. Papa has been to see him since church, and Dr. B., who was there, said that Dr. Murray quoted from Katy in his sermon to-day, and then pausing long enough to attract everybody's attention, he said he wished each of them to procure and read it. I hope you and Mrs. Smith won't get sick hearing about it; I assure you I don't tell you half I might. _Evening_.--Mr. C. has been here this evening to show us a poem by his wife, just come out in the January number of the Sabbath at Home, in which she asks the New Year what it has in store for her, and says if it is _death_, it is only going home the sooner. Neither he, or anyone, had seen it or heard of it, and it came to them with overwhelming power and consolation as the last utterance of her Christian faith. [1] _Dec. 30th, 1869._--Your letter came yesterday morning, after breakfast, and was read to an admiring audience of Prentisses by papa, who occasionally called for counsel as to this word and that. We like the plan made for the winter, and hope it will suit all round. You had such a grand birth-day that I don't see what there was left for Christmas, and hope you got nothing but a leather button. My Percys end to-day, and I am shocked at the wretched way in which I ended them. I wish you would buy a copy of Griseldis for me. Why don't you tell what you are reading? I got for M. "A Sister's Bye Hours," by Jean Ingelow, and find it a delightful book; such lots of quiet humor and so much good sense and good feeling; you girls would enjoy reading it aloud together. _Jan. 3d, 1870._--You will want to hear all about New Year's day, and where shall I begin unless at the end thereof, when your and Mrs. Smith's letters came, and which caused papa ungraciously to leave me to entertain, while he greedily devoured them and his dinner. In spite of rain we had a steady flow of visitors. I will enclose a list for your delectation, for as reading a cook-book sort of feeds one, reading familiar names sort of comforts one. Mr. ---- was softer and more languishing than ever, and appeared like a man who had been fed on honey off the tips of a canary bird's feather.... Papa and I agreed, talking it over last evening, that it is a bad plan for husbands and wives not to live and die together, as the one who is left is apt to cut up. He hinted that I was "so fond of admiration" that he was afraid I should, if he died. On questioning him as to what he meant by this abominable speech, he said he meant to pay me a compliment!!! that he thought me very susceptible when people loved me and very fond of being loved--which I am by him; all other men I hate. My cousin G. dined with us on Friday and took me to the meeting held annually at Dr. Adams' church. I like him ever so much, though he _is_ a man. G. has brought me in some dandelions from the church-yard. We have not had one day of severe cold yet, and there is a great deal of sickness about in consequence. _Friday._--I spent a part of last evening in writing an article about Mrs. C.'s poem for the Sabbath at Home, and have a little fit of indigestion as my reward. Have been to see my sick woman with jelly and consolation, and from there to Mrs. D., who gave me a beautiful account of Mrs. Coming's last days and of her readiness and gladness to go. I was at the meeting at Dr. Rogers' yesterday afternoon and heard old Dr. Tyng for the first time, and he spoke beautifully.... Well, Chi Alpha [2] is over; we had a very large attendance and the oysters were burnt. It is dreadfully trying when Maria never once failed before to have them so extra nice. Dr. Hall came and told me he had been sending copies of Fred and Maria and Me to friends in Ireland. Martha and Jane, and M. and H. were all standing in a row together when the parsons come out to tea, and one of them marched up to the row, saying to papa, Are these your children? when Martha and Jane made a precipitate retreat into the pantry. Good-night, darling; lots of love to Mrs. Smith and all of them. Your affectionate "Marm-er." _11th._--Yours came to-day, and papa and I had a brief duel with hair-pins and pen-knives as to which should read it aloud to the other, and I beat. I should have enjoyed Eigensinn, I am sure; you know I have read it in German.... The children all three are lovely, and what with them and papa and other things my cup is running over tremendously. I have just heard that a poor woman I have been to see a few times, died this morning. I always came away from her crestfallen, thinking I was the biggest poke in a sick-room there ever was, but she sent me a dying message that quite comforted me. She had once lived in plenty, but was fearfully destitute, and I fear she and her family suffered for want of common necessaries. _Thursday._--I had an early and a long call from one of our church, who wanted to tell me, among other things, that her husband scolded her for bumping her head in the night; she wept and I condoled; she went away at last smiling. Then I went to the sewing circle and idled about till one; then I had several calls. Then papa and I went out to make a lot of calls. Then came a note from a sick lady, whom I shall go to see in spite of my horror of strangers. Papa got a letter from Prof. Smith which gave us great pleasure. Z. was here yesterday; I asked her to stay to lunch, bribing her with a cup of tea, and so she stayed and we had a real nice time; when she went away I told her I was dead in love with her. _Friday Evening._--The children have all gone to bed; M. and G. have been reading all the evening; M. busy on Miss Alcott's "Little Women," and G. shaking his sides over old numbers of the Riverside. Papa says our house ought to have a sign put out, "Souls cured here"; because so many people come to tell their troubles. People used to do just so to my mother, and I suppose always do to parsons' wives if they'll let 'em. _Monday._--Papa preached delightfully yesterday. Mr. B. took a pew and Mr. I don't know who took another. Your letter came this morning and was full of interesting things. I hope Mrs. S. will send me her own and Jean Ingelow's verses. What fun to get into a correspondence with her! I have had an interesting time to-day. Dr. Skinner lent me some months ago a little book called "God's Furnace"; I didn't like it at first, but read it through several times and liked it better and better each time. And to-day Mrs. ---- brought the author to spend a few hours (she lives out of town), and we three black-eyed women had a remarkable time together. There is certainly such a thing as a heaven below, only it doesn't last as the real heaven will. We had Mr. C. to tea last night; after tea he read us three poems of his wife, and papa was weak enough to go and read him some verses of mine, which he ought not to have done till I am dead and gone. Then he played and sang with the children, and we had prayers, and I read scraps to him and papa from Faber's "All for Jesus" and Craig's Memoir. M. is lying on the sofa studying, papa is in his study, the boys are hazing about; it snows a little and melts as it falls, and so, with love to all, both great and small, I am your loving "ELDERLY LADY WITH GREY PUFFS." _February 8th, 1870._--We are having a tremendous snow-storm for a wonder. I started out this morning with G., and when we got to the Fifth avenue clock he found he should be late unless he ran, and I was glad to let him go and turn back to meet M., who had heavy books besides her umbrella. The wind blew furiously, my umbrella broke and flew off in a tangent, and when I got it, it turned wrong side out and I came near ascending as in a balloon; M. soon came in sight and I convoyed her safely to school. Mrs. ---- told a friend of ours that Mr. and Mrs. Prentiss really _enjoyed_ Mrs. C----'s death, and they seemed destitute of natural affection; and that as for Mrs. P. it was plain she had never suffered in any way. Considering the tears we both shed over Mrs. C., and some other little items in our past history, we must set Mrs. ---- down as wiser than the ancients. _Sunday Evening._--Yesterday Lizzy B. came to say that her mother was "in a gully" and wanted me to come and pull her out. I went and found her greatly depressed, and felt sure it was all physical, and not a case for special spiritual pulling. So I coaxed her, laughed at her, and cheered her all I could. She said she had been "a solemn pig" for a week, in allusion to some pictures Dr. P. had drawn for her and for me illustrating the solemn pig and the jolly pig. Mr. Randolph has sent up a letter from a man in Nice whose wife wants to translate Katy into French. I sent word they might translate it into Hottentot for all me. Good-night, my dear, I am sound asleep. Your affectionate Mother PRENTISS. _Tuesday._--On Sunday papa preached a sermon in behalf of the Mission, asking for $35,000 to build a chapel, for which Mr. Cady had made a plan. I got greatly stirred up, as I hope everybody did. Mr. Dodge will give one-quarter of the sum needed. It is Washington's birthday, and the children are all at home from school, and are at the dining-room table drawing maps. Mr. and Mrs. G. called, but I was out seeing a poor woman, whose romance of love and sorrow I should like to tell you about if it would not fill a book. She says Bishop S. has supported her and her three children for seven months out of his own pocket. _Saturday, Feb. 26th._--Your two last letters, together with Mrs. Smith's, were all in the box as I was starting with M. for her music. My children pulled in opposite directions, but I pushed on, and papa saved the letters to read to me when I got back. He reads them awfully, and will puzzle over a word long enough for me to have leisure to go crazy and recover my sanity. However, nobody shall make fun of him save myself; so look out. The boys have gone skating to-day for the third time this winter, there has been so little cold weather. _Sunday Evening._--I did not mean to plague you with Stepping Heavenward any more, but we have had a scene to-day which will amuse you and Mrs. Smith. Just before service began, an aristocratic-looking lady seated in front of Mrs. B. began to talk to her, whereupon Mrs. B. turned round and announced to the congregation that I was the subject of it by pointing me out, and then getting up and bringing her to our pew. Once there, she seized me by the hand and said, "I am Mrs. ----. I have just read your book and been carried away with it. I knew your husband thirty-three years ago, and have come here to see you both," etc., etc. Finding she could get nothing out of me, she fell upon M., and asked her if I was her sister, which M. declared I was not. After church I invited her to step into the parsonage, and she stepped in for an hour and told this story: She had had the book lent her, and yesterday, lunching at Mrs. A.'s, asked her if she had read it, and finding she had not, made her promise to get it. She then asked who this E. Prentiss was, and a lady present enlightened her. "What! my sister's beloved Miss Payson, and married to George Prentiss, my old friend!! I'll go there to church to-morrow and see for myself." So it turns out that she was a Miss ----, of Mississippi; that your father gallanted her to Louisville, when she was going there to be married at sixteen years of age; that she was living in Richmond at the time I was teaching there, her sister boarding in the house with me. Such talking, such life and enthusiasm you never saw in a woman of forty-eight! "Well," she winds up at last, "I've found two _treasures_, and you needn't think I'm going to let you go. I'll go home and tell Mr. ---- all about it." Papa and I have called each other "two treasures" ever since she went away. The whole scene worked him up and did him good, for he always loves to have his Southern friends drum him up and talk to him of your Uncle Seargent and Aunt Anna. Mr. ---- is one of our millionaires, and she married him a year ago after thirteen years of widowhood. She says she still has 200 "negroes," who won't go away and won't work, and she has them to support. She talked very rationally about the war, and says not a soul at the South would have slavery back if they could.... I called at Mrs. B.'s yesterday--at exactly the right moment, she said; for five surgeons had just decided that the operation had been a failure, and that she must die. Her husband looked as white as this paper, and the girls were in great distress, but Mrs. B. looked perfectly radiant. _Saturday, March 5th._--Yesterday I went to make a ghostly call on Mrs. B., and kept her and the girls screaming with laughter for an hour, which did me lots of good, and I hope did not hurt them. I have written the 403d page of my serial to-day, and hope it is the last. It will soon be time to think of the spring shopping. I don't know what any of us need, and never notice what people are wearing unless I notice by going forth on a tour of observation. _Sunday Evening._--After church this afternoon Mrs. N. and Mrs. V. came in to tell us about the death of that servant of theirs, whom they nursed in their own house, who has been dying for seven months, of cancer. She died a most fearless, happy death, and I wish I knew I should be as patient in my last illness as they represent her as being. Your letters to the children came yesterday afternoon to their great delight. In an evil moment I told the boys that I had seen it stated, in some paper, that _benzole_ would make paper transparent, and afterwards evaporate and leave the paper uninjured. They drove me raving distracted with questions about it, so that I had to be put in a strait-jacket. The ingenuity and persistence of these questions, asked by each, in separate interviews, was beyond description. _Tuesday._--For once I have been caught napping, and have not mailed my weekly letter. But you will be expecting some irregularity about the time of your flight to Berlin. I called at Mrs. M.'s to-day, and ran on at such a rate that Mrs. Woolsey, who was there, gave me ten dollars for poor folks, and said she wished I'd stay all day. Afterwards I went down town to get Stepping Heavenward for Mr. C., and as he wanted me to write something in it, have just written this: "Mr. C. from Mrs. Prentiss, in loving memory of one who 'did outrun' us, and stepped into heaven first." Mr. Bates showed me a half-column notice of it in the Liberal Christian, [3] of all places! by very far the warmest and best of all that have appeared. Papa is at Dr. McClintock's funeral. I declare, if it isn't snowing again, and the sun is shining! Now comes a letter from Uncle Charles, saying that your Uncle H. has lost that splendid little girl of his; the only girl he ever had, and the child of his heart of hearts. Mrs. W. says she never saw papa and myself look so well, but some gentleman told Mr. Brace, who told his wife, who told me, that I was killing myself with long walks. I can not answer your questions about Mr. ----'s call. So much is all the time going on that one event speedily effaces the impression of another. _March 12th._--Julia Willis spent the evening here not long ago, and made me laugh well. She took me on Friday to see Fanny Fern, who hugged and kissed me, and whom it was rather pleasant to see after nearly, if not quite, thirty years' separation. She says nobody but a Payson could have written Stepping Heavenward, which is absurd. _March 17th._--I went to the sewing circle [4] and helped tuck a quilt, had a talk with Mrs. W., got home at a quarter of one and ate two apples, and have been since then reading the secret correspondence of Madame Guyon and Fenelon in old French. _Saturday, 19th._--Have just seen M. to the Conservatory; met Dr. Skinner on the way home, who said he had been reading Stepping Heavenward, and he hoped he should step all the faster for it. Z. has often invited us to come to see her new home, and as the 16th comes on a Saturday, we are talking a little of all going up to lunch with her. _Evening_.--It has been such a nice warm day. I had a pleasant call from Mrs. Dr. ----. She asked me if I did not get the theology of Stepping Heavenward out of my father's "Thoughts," but as I have not read them for thirty years, I doubt if I did, and as I am older than my father was when he uttered those thoughts, I have a right to a theology of my own. _Monday._--Yesterday, in the afternoon, we had the Sunday-school anniversary, which went off very well. Mr. C. came to tea; after it and prayers, we sat round the table and I read scraps from Madame Guyon and Fenelon, and we talked them over. Papa was greatly pleased at the latter's saying he often stopped in the midst of his devotions to play. Quand je suis seul, je joue quelquefois comme un petit enfant, même en faisant oraison. Il m'arrive quelquefois de sauter et de rire tout seul comme un fou dans ma chambre. Avant-hier, étant dans la sacristie et répondant à une personne qui me questionnait, pour ne la point scandaliser sur la question, je m'embarrassai, et je fis une espèce de mensonge; cela me donna quelque répugnance à dire la Messe, mais je ne laissai pas de la dire. I do not advise _you_ to stop to play in the midst of your prayers, or to tell "une espèce de mensonge!" till you are as much of a saint as he was. [5] _Saturday, 26th._--Your letter and Mrs. Smith's came together this afternoon. It is pleasant to hear from papa's old friends at Halle, and he will be delighted, when he comes home from Chi Alpha, where he is now. Lizzy B. called this afternoon; she wanted to open out her poor sick heart to me. She quoted to me several things she says I wrote her a few weeks ago, but I have not the faintest recollection of writing them. That shows what a harum-scarum life I lead. _March 31st._--We spent Tuesday evening at the Skinners. We had a charming visit; no one there but Mrs. Sampson and her sister, and Dr. S. wide awake and full of enthusiasm. We did not get to bed till midnight. Mrs. ---- came this morning and begged me to lend her some money, as she had got behindhand. I let her have five dollars, though I do not feel sure that I shall see it again, and she wept a little weep, and went away. A lady told cousin C. she had heard I was so shy that once having promised to go to a lunch party, my courage failed at the last moment, so that I could not go. I shall expect to learn next that my hair is red. _Monday, April 4th._--Your presents came Saturday while I was out. We are all delighted with them, but I was most so, for two such darling little vases were surely never before seen. M. had Maggie to spend Saturday afternoon and take tea. She asked me if I did not make a distinction between talent and genius, which papa thought very smart of her. I read aloud to them all the evening one of the German stories by Julius Horn. Mr. and Mrs. C. came in after church and I asked them to stay to tea, which they did. After it was over, and we had had prayers, we had a little sing, Mrs. C. playing, and among other things, sang a little hymn of mine which I wrote I know not when, but which papa liked well enough to have printed. If copies come to-day, as promised, I will enclose one or two. After the singing papa and I took turns, as we could snatch a chance from each other, in reading to them from favorite books, which they enjoyed very much. _April 9th._--We called on Mrs. H. M. Field yesterday, and I never saw (or rather heard) her so brilliant. In the evening I read aloud to the children a real live, wide-awake Sunday-school book, called "Old Stories in a New Dress"; Bible stories, headed thus: "The Handsome Rebel," "The Young Volunteer," "The Ingenious Mechanics." _April 16th._--I can not go to bed, my dear chicken, till I have told you what a charming day we have had. To go back to yesterday, my headache entirely disappeared by the time the Skinners got here, and we had a pleasant cosy evening with them, and at the end made Dr. Skinner pray over us.... Everything went off nicely. The children enjoyed the trip tremendously, and hated to come away. We picked a lot of "filles avant la mère" and they came home in good condition. Mr. Woolsey and Z. gave me a little silver figure holding a cup, on blue velvet, which is ever so pretty. We got home at half-past six. Later in the evening President Hopkins called to offer his congratulations. And now I am tired, I can tell you. It is outrageous for you and the Smiths to be away; I don't see how you can have the heart. You ought to come by dispatch as telegrams. _17th._--Dr. Hopkins preached a splendid sermon [6] for us this morning, and came in after it for a call. He asked me last night if I felt conceited about my book; so I said to him, "I like to give people as good as they send--don't you feel a little conceited after that sermon?" on which he gave me a good shaking. _18th._--I have been writing notes of thanksgiving, each of which dear papa reads through rose-colored spectacles and says, "You do beat all!" I have enjoyed writing them, instead of finding it a bore. We shall be curious to hear how you celebrated our wedding-day. Well, good-bye, old child. I shall begin another letter to-day, as like as not. _Monday, April 25th._--Friday morning, in the midst of my plans for helping Aunt E. shop, came a message from Mrs. B. that she wanted to see me. I had not expected to see her again, and of course was glad to go. She had altered so that I should not have known her, and it was hard to hear what she had to say, she is so feeble. She went back to the first time she saw me, told me what I had on, and how her heart was knitted to me. She then spoke of her approaching death; said she had no ecstasies, no revelations, but had been in perfect peace, suffering agonies of pain, yet not one pain too many. I asked her if she had any parting counsel to give me. "No, not a word; I only wanted to see your sunny face once more, and tell you what a comfort you have been to me in this sickness." This all came at intervals, she was so weak. She afterward said, "I feel as if I never was acquainted with Christ till now. I tell my sons to become INTIMATELY ACQUAINTED with Him." I asked her if she took pleasure in thinking of meeting friends in heaven. With a sweet, somewhat comical smile, she said, "No, I haven't got so far as that. I think only of meeting Christ." "For all that," I said, "you will soon see my father and mother and other kindred souls." Her face lighted up again. "Why, so I shall!" Her lips were growing white with pain while this bright smile was on them, and I came away, though I should gladly have listened to her by the hour, everything was so natural, sound, and-heavenly. Shopping after it did not prove particularly congenial; but we must shop, as well as die. _April 29th._--Your first Dresden letter has just come; yes, it was long enough, though you did not tell us how the cat did. You speak as if you were going to Paris, but papa is positive you are not. Yesterday was a lovely day, though very hot. Dr. Adams came and drove papa to the Park. Late in the afternoon I went to see Mrs. G., the woman whose husband is in jail. She is usually all in a muss, but this time was as nice as could be, the floor clean and everything in order. The baby, a year old, had learned to walk since I was last there, and came and planted herself in front of me, and stared at me out of two great bright eyes most of the time. I had a nice visit, as Mrs. G. seems to be making a good use of her troubles. After I got home, Dr. and Mrs. C. arrived and we had dinner and a tremendous thunder shower, after which he went out to make forty-'leven calls. He was pleased to say that he wanted his wife to see the lovely family picture we make! It is a glum, cold, lowering morning, but the C.'s are going to see the Frenches at West Point, and Miss Lyman at Vassar. _Monday._--I went to Miss C.'s (the dressmaker) again to-day, and found her much out of health, and about reducing her business and moving. One of the old sisters had been reading Stepping Heavenward, and almost ate me up. I got a pleasant word about it last night, from Mrs. General Upton, who has just died at Nassau. I have seen Mrs. B. to-day; she did not open her eyes, but besought me to pray for her release. She can't last long. The boys are off rolling hoop again, and M. is out walking with Ida. Papa informed me last night that I had got a very pretty bonnet. The bonnets now consist of a little fuss and a good many flowers. Papa has gone to Dorset, and has had a splendid day for his journey. _Thursday, May 12th._--Yesterday Miss ---- came to tell me about the killing of her brother on the railroad, and to cry her very heart out on my shoulder. In the midst of it came a note from Lizzy B., saying her mother had just dropped away. I called there early this morning. We then went to the Park with your uncle and aunt; after which they left and I rushed out to get cap and collar to wear at Mrs. ----'s dinner. I got back in time to go to the funeral at four P.M. Dr. Murray made an excellent, appreciative address; papa then read extracts from a paper of mine (things she had said), the prayer followed, and then her sons sang a hymn. [7] I came home tired and laid me down to rest; at half-past six it popped into my head that I was not dressed, and I did it speedily. We supposed we were only to meet the Rev. Dr. and Mrs. ----, of Brooklyn, but, lo! a lot of people in full dress. We had a regular state dinner, course after course. Dr. ---- sat next me and made himself very agreeable, except when he said I was the most subtle satirist he ever met (I did run him a little). Mrs. ---- is a picture. She had a way of looking at me through her eyeglass till she put me out of countenance, and then smiling in a sweet, satisfied manner, and laying down her glass. We came home as soon as the gentlemen left the table, and got here just as the clock was striking twelve. _Friday._--We began this day by going at ten A.M. to the funeral of Mrs. W.'s poor little baby, and the first words papa read, "It is better to go to the house of mourning than to the house of feasting," etc., explained his and my state of mind after last night's dissipation. He made a very touching address. Later in the day we went out to see Miss ----, as we had promised to do. We went through the Park, lingered there a while, and then went on and made a long call. When we rose to come away, she said she never let people go away without lunch and made us go down to the following: buns, three kinds of cake, pies, doughnuts, cheese, lemonade, apples, oranges, pine-apples, a soup tureen of strawberries, a quart of cream, two custard puddings, one hot and one cold, home-made wine, cold corned beef, cold roast beef, and for aught I know 40 other things. We came away awfully tired, and papa complained of want of appetite at dinner!! Good-bye, dearie. I forgot to tell you the boys have got a dog. He came of his own accord and has made them very happy. We haven't let papa see him, you may depend. _Wed., May 18th._--Papa is packing his trunk for Philadelphia, and I am sitting at my new library table to write on my letter. I went yesterday to see that lady who has fits. She had one in the morning that lasted over an hour and a half. She is a very bright, animated creature and does not look older than you. _Thursday._--Papa got off yesterday at eleven for the General Assembly and I went to Mrs. D.'s and stayed four hours. She sent for Mr. S.'s baby, who does not creep, but walks in the quaintest little way. I shall write a note to Mr. S., who feels anxious at its not creeping, fearing its limbs will not be strong, to tell him that I hitched along exactly so. Now let me give you the history of this busy day. We got up early and Miss F. called with M.'s two dresses. After prayers and breakfast I wrote to papa, went to school with H., and marketed. Came home and found a letter from Cincinnati, urging for two hymns right away for a new hymn-book. They had several of mine already. I said, "Go to, let us make a hymn" (Prof. Smith in his Review) and made and sent them. Then I wrote to Mr. S. and to Mrs. Charles W----. [8] Then Mrs. C. came and stayed till nearly four, when she left and I went down to Twenty-second street to call on a lady at the Water Cure. Then I went to see Mrs. C. (the wife of the Rev. Mr. C.). I think I told you she had lost her little Florence. I do not remember ever seeing a person so broken down by grief; she seemed absolutely heart-broken. I could not get away till five, and then I took two stages and got home as soon as I could, knowing the children would be famishing. So now count up my various professions, chaplain, marketer, hymnist, consoler of Mr. S., Mrs. W., Mrs. C., and let me add, of Dr. B., who came and made a long call. I am now going to lie down and read till I get rested, for my brain has been on the steady stretch for thirteen hours, one thing stepping on the heels of another. [9] _May 23d._--If your eyes were bright enough you might have seen me and my cousin George P---- tearing down Broadway this afternoon, as if mad dogs were after us. He wanted me to have a fountain pen, and the only way to accomplish it was to take me down to the place where they are sold, below the Astor House. I wanted to walk, and so did he, but he had got to be on a boat for Norwich at five P.M. and pack up between while; however, he concluded to risk it, hence the way we raced was a caution. I have just written him a long letter in rhyme with my new pen, and now begin one in prose to you. I have just got a letter from an anonymous admirer of Stepping Heavenward, enclosing ten dollars to give away; I wish it was a thousand! The children are in tribulation about their kitten, who committed suicide by knocking the ironing-board on to herself. H. made a diagram of the position of the board that I might fully comprehend the situation, and then showed me how the corpse lay. They were not willing to part with the remains, and buried them in the yard. _Saturday._--I went to Yonkers with M. and H. to spend the day with Mrs. B. Her children are sweet and interesting as ever; but little Maggie, now three years old, is the "queen of the house." She is a perfect specimen of what a child should be--gladsome, well, bright, and engaging. Her cheeks are rosy and shining, and she keeps up an incessant chatter. They are all wild about her, from papa and mamma down to the youngest child. * * * * * II. Home-Life in Dorset. DORSET, June 10, 1870. Here we are again in dear old Dorset. We got here about ten on Wednesday evening, expecting to find the house dark and forlorn, but Mrs. F. had been down and lighted it up, and put on the dining-table bread, biscuits, butter, cakes, eggs, etc., enough to last for days. Thursday was hotter than any day we had had in New York, and not very good, therefore, for the hard work of unpacking, and the yet harder work of sowing our flower-seeds in a huge bed shaped like a palm-leaf. But, with M.'s help, it was done before one o'clock to-day--a herculean task, as the ground had to be thoroughly dug up with a trowel; stones, sticks, and roots got out, and the earth sifted in our hands. The back of my neck and my ears are nearly blistered. M. is standing behind me now anointing me with cocoa butter. Our place looks beautifully. Some of the trees set out are twelve or fifteen feet high, and when fully leaved will make quite a show. Papa is to be here about ten days, as he greatly needs the rest; he will then go home till July 1st, when he will bring Jane and Martha. I told Martha I thought it very good of Maria to be willing to come with me, and she said she did not think it needed much goodness, and that _anybody_ would go with me _any_where. The boys have a little black and tan dog which Culyer gave them, and M.'s bird is a fine singer. Our family circle now consists of Pa Prentiss, Ma " Min." Geo. " Hen. " Maria " (horse) Coco " (cow) Sukey " (dog) Nep " (bird) Cherry " We never saw Dorset so early, and when the foliage was in such perfection. Last Tuesday I reached our door perfectly and disgracefully loaded with parcels, and said to myself, "I wonder what Mr. M. would say if he saw me with this load?" when instantly he opened the door to let me in! Account for this if you can. Why should I have thought of him among all the people I know? Did his mind touch mine through the closed door? It makes me almost shudder to think such things can be. Well, I must love and leave you. I am going to have a small basket on the table in the hall with ferns, mosses, and shells in it. They all send love from Pa Prentiss down to Sukey. What a pity you could not come home for the summer and go back again! I believe I'll go to your bedroom door and say, "I wonder whether Annie would shriek out if she saw me in this old sacque, instead of her pretty one?" and perhaps you'll open and let me in. Will you or won't you? Now I'm going to ride. I've been and I've got back, and I'm frozen solid, and am glad I've got back to my den. G. and H. are now in the kitchen making biscuits. Good-bye, chicken. Mamma PRENTISS. _June 12th._--Everybody is in bed save Darby and Joan. We slept last night under four blankets and a silk comforter, which will give you a faint idea of the weather. It has been beautiful to-day, and we have sat out of doors a good deal. Papa and the boys went out to our hill after tea last evening and picked two quarts of strawberries, so as to have a short-cake to-day. M. took me yesterday to see a nest in the orchard which was full of birds parted into fours--not a crack between, and one of them so crowded that it filled about no space at all. The hymn says, "Birds in their little nests agree," and I should think they would, for they have no room to disagree in. They all four stared at us with awful, almost embarrassing solemnity, and each had a little yellow moustache. I had no idea they lived packed in so--no wonder they looked melancholy. The sight of them, especially of the one who had no room at all, made me quite low-spirited. _Wednesday._--Your letter reached us on Monday, and we all went out and sat in a row on the upper step, like birds on a telegraph wire, and papa read it aloud. I am lying by to-day--writing, reading, lounging, and enjoying the scenery. You ought to see papa eat strawberries!!! They are very plentiful on our hill. The grass on the lawn is pricking up like needles; easy to see if you kneel down and stare hard, but absolutely invisible otherwise; yet papa keeps calling me to look out of the window and admire it, and shouts to people driving by to do the same. He has just come in, and I told him what I was saying about him, on which he gave me a good beating, doubled up his fist at me, and then kissed me to make up.... _Don't sew_ Isn't it enough that I have nearly killed myself with doing it? We have just heard of the death of Dickens and the sensation it is making in England. _Thursday._--This bird of ours is splendid. I have just framed the two best likenesses of you and hung them up in front of my table. You would laugh at papa's ways about coffee. He complains that he drank too much at Philadelphia, and says that with strawberries we don't need it, and that I may tell Maria so. I tell her, and lo! the next morning there it is. I ask the meaning, and she says he came down saying I did not feel very well and needed it! The next day it appears again. Why? He had been down and ordered it because it was _good_. The next day he orders it because it is his last day here but one, and to-morrow it will be on the table because it is the last! Dreadful man! and yet I hate to have him go. _Friday._--I drove papa to Manchester, and as usual, this exploit brought on a thunder shower, with a much needed deluge of rain. I had a hard time getting home, and got wet to the skin. I had not only to drive, but keep a roll of matting from slipping out, hold up the boot and the umbrella, and keep stopping to get my hat out of my eyes, which kept knocking over them. Then Coco goes like the wind this summer. Fortunately I had my waterproof with me and got home safely. The worst of it is that, in my bewilderment, I refused to let a woman get in who was walking to South Dorset. I shall die of remorse.. Well, well, how it is raining, to be sure. _Monday._--I hear that papa sent a dispatch to somebody to know how I got here from Manchester. I do not wonder he is worried. I am such a poor driver, and it rained so dreadfully. M. follows me round like a little dog; if I go down cellar she goes down; if I pick a strawberry she picks one; if I stop picking she stops. She is the sweetest lamb that ever was, and I am the Mary that's got her. I don't believe anybody else in the world loves me so well, unless it possibly is papa, and he doesn't follow me down cellar, and goes off and picks strawberries all by himself, and that on Sunday, too, when I had forbidden berrypicking! We are rioting in strawberries, just as we did last summer. We live a good deal at sixes and sevens, but nobody cares. This afternoon I have been arranging a basket for the hall table, with mosses, ferns, shells and white coral; ever so pretty. _Wednesday._--It is a splendid day and I expect papa. The children have not said a word about their food, though partly owing to no butcher and partly to the heat, I have had for two days next to nothing; picked fish one day and fish picked the next. We regarded to-day's dinner as a most sumptuous one, and I am sure Victoria's won't taste so good to her. Letters keep pouring in, urging papa to accept the Professorship at Chicago, and declaring the vote of the Assembly to be the voice of God. Of course, if he must accept, we should have to give up our dear little home here. But to me his leaving the ministry would be the worst thing about it. After dinner the boys carried me off bodily to see strawberries and other plants; then they made me go to the mill, and by that time I had no hair-pins on my head, to say nothing of hair. The boys are working away like all possessed. A little bird, probably one of those hatched here, has just come and perched himself on the piazza, railing in front of me, and is making me an address which, unfortunately, I do not understand.... You have inherited from me a want of reverence for relics and the like. I wouldn't go as far as our barn to see the fig-leaves Adam and Eve wore, or all the hair of all the apostles; and when people are not born hero-worshippers, they can't even worship themselves as heroes. Fancy Dr. Schaff sending me back the MS. of a hymn I gave him, from a London printing-office! What could I do with it? cover jelly with it? He sent me a beautiful copy of his book, "Christ in Song." _Thursday, June 30th._--Papa, with J. and M., came late last night, and we all made as great a time as if the Great Mogul had come. They give a most terrific account of the heat in the city. You ask how Stepping Heavenward is selling. So far 14,000. Nidworth has been a complete failure, though the publishers write me that it is a "gem." [10] _Monday, July 4th._--M. is so absorbed in the study of Vick's floral catalogue that she speaks of seeing such a thing in the Bible or Dictionary, when she means that she saw it in Vick. I did the same thing last night. She and I get down on our knees and look solemnly at the bare ground and point out up-springing weeds as better than nothing. I had a long call this morning from Mrs. F. Field, of East Dorset. They had a dear little bright-eyed baby baptized yesterday, which sat through all the morning service and behaved even better than I did, for it had no wandering thoughts. Mrs. F. said some friends of hers in Brooklyn received letters from France and from Japan simultaneously, urging them to read Stepping Heavenward, which was the first they heard of it. We have celebrated the glorious Fourth by making and eating ice-cream. Papa brought a new-fashioned freezer, that professed to freeze in two minutes. We screwed it to the wood-house floor--or rather H. did--put in the cream, and the whole family stood and watched papa while he turned the handle. At the end of two minutes we unscrewed the cover and gazed inside, but there were no signs of freezing, and to make a long story short, instead of writing a book as I said I should, there we all were from half-past twelve to nearly two o'clock, when we decided to have dinner and leave the servants to finish it. It came on to the table at last, was very rich and rather good. The boys spent the afternoon in the woods firing off crackers. M. went visiting and papa took me to drive, it being a delightful afternoon. The boys have a few Roman candles which they are going to send off as soon as it gets dark enough. _July 13th._--This is a real Dorset day, after a most refreshing rain, and M. and I have kept out of doors the whole morning, gardening and in the woods. Dr. and Mrs. Humphrey came down and spent last evening. She is bright and wide awake, and admired everything from the scenery out of doors to the matting and chintzes within. I told her there was nothing in the house to be compared with those who lived in it. Here comes a woman with four quarts of black raspberries and a fuss to make change. Papa and the boys are getting in the last hay with Albert. M. has just brought in your letter. We are glad you have seen those remarkable scenes [at Ober-Ammergau].One would fancy it would become an old story. I should not like to see the crucifixion; it must be enough to turn one's hair white in a single night. _Saturday._--Yesterday I went with the children to walk round Rupert. We turned off the road to please the boys, to a brook with a sandy beach, where all three fell to digging wells, and I fell to collecting wild grape-vine and roots for my rustic work, and fell into the brook besides. We all enjoyed ourselves so much that we wished we had our dinners and could stay all day. On the way home, just as we got near Col. Sykes', we spied papa with the phaeton, and all got in. We must have cut a pretty figure, driving through the village; M. in my lap, G. in papa's, and H. everywhere in general. _July 14th._--Miss Vance was in last evening after tea, and says our lawn is getting on extremely well and that our seeds are coming up beautifully. This greatly soothed M.'s and my own uneasy heart, as we had rather supposed the lawn ought to be a thick velvet, and the seeds we sowed two weeks ago up and blooming. If vegetable corresponded to animal life, this would be the case. Fancy that what were eggs long after we came here, and then naked birds, are now full-fledged creatures on the wing, all off getting to housekeeping, each on his own hook! _July 18th._--M. and I went on a tramp this forenoon and while we were gone Mrs. M. O. R. and Mary and Mrs. Van W. called. They brought news of the coming war. Papa showed them all over the house, not excepting your room, which I think a perfect shame--for the room looks forlorn. I think men ought to be suppressed, or something done to them. Maria told me she thought papa's sermon Sunday was "ilegant." _21st._--I feel greatly troubled lest this dreadful war should cut us off from each other. Mr. Butler writes that he does not see how people are to get home, and we do not see either. Papa says it will probably be impossible to have the Evangelical Alliance. And how prices of finery will go up! _July 27th._--M.'s and my own perseverance at our flower-bed is beginning, at last, to be rewarded. We have portulaccas, mignonette, white candy-tuft, nasturtiums, eutocas, etc.; and the morning-glories, which are all behindhand, are just beginning to bloom. Never were flowers so fought for. It is the lion and the unicorn over again. I have nearly finished "Soll und Haben," and feel more like talking German than English. The Riverside Magazine has just come and completed my downfall, as it has a syllable left out of one of my verses, as has been the case with a hymn in the hymn-book at Cincinnati and one in the Association Monthly. I am now fairly entitled to the reputation of being a jolty rhymster. It has been a trifle cooler to-day and we are all refreshed by the change. _Friday._--Papa read me last evening a nice thing about Stepping Heavenward from Dr. Robinson in Paris and a lady in Zurich, and I went to bed and slept the sleep of the just--till daylight, when five hundred flies began to flap into my ears, up my nose, take nips off my face and hands, and drove me distracted. They woke papa, too, but he goes to sleep between the pecks. _August 4th._--Tuesday I went on a tramp with M. and brought home a gigantic bracket. We met papa as we neared the house, and he had had his first bath in his new tank at the mill, and was wild with joy, as were also the boys. After dinner I made a picture frame of mosses, lichens, and red and yellow toadstools, ever so pretty; then proofs came, then we had tea, and then went and made calls. Yesterday on a tramp with M., who wanted mosses, then home with about a bushel of ground-pine. Every minute of the afternoon I spent in trimming the grey room with the pine and getting up my bracket, and now the room looks like a bower of bliss. I was to go with M. on another tramp to-day, but it rains, and rain is greatly needed. The heat in New York is said to exceed anything in the memory of man, something absolutely appalling. _Friday._--Here I am on the piazza with Miss K. by my side, reading the Life of Faber. She got here last night in a beautiful moonlight, and as I had not told her about the scenery, she was so enchanted with it on opening her blinds this morning, that she burst into tears. I drove her round Rupert and took her into Cheney's woods, and the boys invited us down to their workshop; so we went, and I was astonished to find that the bath-house is really a perfect affair, with two dressing-rooms and everything as neat as a pink. Miss K. is charmed with everything, the cornucopias, natural brackets, crosses, etc., and her delusion as to all of us, whom she fancies saints and angels, is quite charming, only it won't last. _13th._--There is a good deal of sickness about the village. I made wine-jelly for four different people yesterday, and the rest of the morning Miss K., Mrs. Humphrey, and myself sat on a shawl in our woods, talking. We have had a tremendous rain, to our great delight, and the air is cooler, but the grasshoppers, which are like the frogs of Egypt, are not diminished, and are devouring everything. I got a letter from cousin Mary yesterday, who says she has no doubt we shall get the ocean up here, somehow, and raise our own oysters and clams. _16th._--Papa and I went to Manchester to-day to make up a lot of calls, and among other persons, we saw Mrs. C. of Troy, a bright-eyed old lady who was a schoolmate of my mother's. She could not tell me anything about her except that she was very bright and animated, and that I knew before. Mrs. Wickham asked me to write some letters for a fair to be held for their church to-morrow; so I wrote three in rhyme, not very good. _August 20th._--After dinner papa went to Manchester, taking both boys, and I went off with M. to Cheney's woods, where we got baskets full of moss, etc., and had a good time. The children are all wild on the subject of flowers and spend the evening studying the catalogues, which they ought to know by heart. I wonder if I have told you how our dog hates to remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy? The moment the church-bell begins to ring, no matter where he is, or how soundly asleep, he runs out and gazes in the direction of the church, and as the last stroke strikes, lifts his nose high in the air and sets up the most awful wails, howls, groans, despairing remonstrances you can imagine. No games with the boys to-day--no romps, no going to Manchester, everybody telling me to get off their Sunday clothes--aow! aow! aow! Dr. Adams' house has been broken into and robbed, and so has Dr. Field's. Mrs. H. gave us the history of a conflict in Chicago between her husband and a desperate burglar armed with a dirk, who wanted, but did not get a large sum of money under his pillow; also, of his being garroted and robbed, and having next day sent him a purse of $150, two pistols, a slug, a loaded cane, and a watchman's rattle. Imagine him as going about loaded with all these things! I never knew people who had met with such bewitching adventures, and she has the brightest way of telling them. Papa has got a telegram from Dr. Schaff asking him to come on to his little Johnny's funeral. This death must have been very sudden, as Dr. Schaff wrote last Tuesday that his wife was sick, but said nothing of Johnny. He is the youngest boy, about nine years old, I think, and you will remember they lost Philip, a beautiful child, born the same day as our G., the summer we were at Hunter. When the despatch came papa and M. thought it was bad news about you, and I only thought of Mr. Stearns! There is no accounting for the way in which the human mind works. And now for bed, you sleepy head. _Monday._--A splendid day, and we have all been as busy as bees, if not as useful,--H. making a whip to chastise the cow with, M., Nep and myself collecting mosses and toadstools; of the latter I brought home 185! We were out till dinner-time, and after dinner I changed the mosses in my baskets and jardinet, no small job, and M. spread out her treasures. She has at last found her enthusiasm, and I am so glad not only to have found a mate in my tramps, but to see such a source of pleasure opening before her as woods, fields and gardens have always been to me. We lighted this morning on what I supposed to be a horned-headed, ferocious snake, and therefore took great pleasure in killing. It turned out to be a common striped snake that had got a frog partly swallowed, and its legs sticking out so that I took them to be horns. Nep relieved his mind by barking at it. I announced at dinner that I was going to send for Vick's catalogue of bulbs, which news was received with acclamation. The fact is, we all seem to be born farmers or florists; and unless you bring us home something in the agricultural line, I don't know that you can bring us anything we would condescend to look at. It is awful to read of the carnage going on in Europe. _Aug. 27th._--Papa got home Tuesday night. Johnny Schaff's death was from a fall; he left the house full of life and health, and in a few minutes was brought in insensible, and only lived half an hour.... I take no pleasure in writing you, because we feel that you are not likely to get my letters. Still, I can not make up my mind to stop writing. Never was a busier set of people than we. In the evening I read to the children from the German books you sent them; am now on Thelka Von Grumpert's, which is a really nice book. I tell papa we are making an idol out of this place, but he says we are not. _Tuesday._--We all set out to climb the mountain near Deacon Kellogg's. We snatched what we could for our dinner, and when we were ready to eat it, it proved to be eggs, bread and meat, cake, guava jelly, cider and water. We enjoyed the splendid view and the dinner, and then papa and the boys went home, and M., Nep and myself proceeded to climb higher, Nep so affectionate that he tired me out hugging me with his "arms," as H. calls them, and nearly eating me up, while M. was shaking with laughter at his silly ways. We were gone from 10 A.M. to nearly 6 P.M., and brought home in baskets, bags, pockets and bosom, about thirty natural brackets, some very large and fearfully heavy. One was so heavy that I brought it home by kicking it down the mountain. I have just got some flower seeds for fall planting, and the children are looking them over as some would gems from the mine. _Thursday, September 1st._--Your letter has come, and we judge that you have quite given up Paris; what a pity to have to do it! We spent yesterday at Hager brook with Mrs. Humphrey and her daughters; papa drove us over in the straw wagon and came for us about 6 P.M. We had lobster salad and marmalade, bread and butter and cake, and we roasted potatoes and corn, and the H.'s had a pie and things of that sort. When they saw the salad they set up such shouts of joy that papa came to see what was the matter. We had a nice time. Today I have had proofs to correct and letters to write, and berries to dry, but not a minute to sit down and think, everybody needing me at once. All are busy as bees and send lots of love. Give ever so much to the Smiths. _September 8th._--Here we are all sitting round the parlor table. The last three days have each brought a letter from you, and to-day one came from Mrs. S. to me, and one from Prof. S. to papa. I have no doubt that the decision for you to return is a wise one and hope you will fall in with it cheerfully. Dr. Schaff is here, and yesterday papa took him to Hager brook, and to-day to the quarries; splendid weather for both excursions, and Dr. S. seems to have enjoyed them extremely. Last evening he read to us some private letters of Bismarck, which were very interesting and did him great credit in every way. I had a long call from M. H. to-day; she looked as sweet as possible and I loaded her with flowers. Papa is writing Mr. B. to thank him for a basket of splendid peaches he sent us to-day. H. has just presented me with three pockets full of toadstools. M. walked with me round Rupert square this afternoon, and we met a crazy woman who said she wondered I did not go into fits, and asked me why I didn't. In return I asked her where she lived, to which she replied, "In the world." We are all on the _qui vive_ about the war news, especially Louis Napoleon's downfall, and you may depend we are glad he has used himself up. You can not bring anything to the children that will please them as seeds would. It delights me to see them so interested in garden work. Perhaps this will be my last letter. Your loving Mammie. * * * * * III. Further Glimpses of her Dorset Life. The following Recollections of Mrs. Prentiss by her friend, Mrs. Frederick Field, now of San Jose, California, afford additional glimpses of her home life in Dorset. The picture is drawn in fair colors; but it is as truthful as it is fair: It was the first Sunday in September, 1866. A quiet, perfect day among the green hills of Vermont; a sacramental Sabbath, and we had come seven miles over the mountain to go up to the house of the Lord. I had brought my little two-months-old baby in my arms, intending to leave her during the service at our brother's home, which was near the church. I knew that Mrs. Prentiss was a "summer-boarder" in this home, that she was the wife of a distinguished clergyman, and a literary woman of decided ability; but it was before the "Stepping Heavenward" epoch of her life, and I had no very deep interest in the prospect of meeting her. We went in at the hospitably open door, and meeting no one, sat down in the pleasant family living-room. It was about noon, and we could hear cheerful voices talking over the lunch-table in the dining-room. Presently the door opened, and a slight, delicate-featured woman, with beautiful large dark eyes, came with rapid step into the room, going across to the hall door; but her quick eye caught a glimpse of my little "bundle of flannel," and not pausing for an introduction or word of preparatory speech, she came towards me with a beaming face and outstretched hands:-- "O, have you a baby there? How delightful! I haven't seen one for such an age,--please, may I take it? the darling tiny creature!--a girl? How lovely!" She took the baby tenderly in her arms and went on in her eager, quick, informal way, but with a bright little blush and smile,--"I'm not very polite--pray, let me introduce myself! I'm Mrs. Prentiss, and you are Mrs. F---, I know." After a little more sweet, motherly comment and question over the baby,--"a touch of nature" which at once made us "akin," she asked, "Have you brought the baby to be christened?" I said, No, I thought it would be better to wait till she was a little older. "O, no!" she pleaded, "do let us take her over to the church now. The younger the better, I think; it is so uncertain about our keeping such treasures." I still objected that I had not dressed the little one for so public an occasion. "O, never mind about that," she said. "She is really lovelier in this simple fashion than to be loaded with lace and embroidery." Then, her sweet face growing more earnest,--"There will be more of us here to-day than at the next communion--_more of us to pray for her._" The little lamb was taken into the fold that day, and I was Mrs. Prentiss' warm friend forevermore. Her whole beautiful character had revealed itself to me in that little interview,--the quick perception, the wholly frank, unconventional manner, the sweet motherliness, the cordial interest in even a stranger, the fervent piety which could not bear delay in duty, and even the quaint, original, forcible thought and way of expressing it, "There'll be more of us here to pray for her to-day." For seven successive summers I saw more or less of her in this "Earthly Paradise," as she used to call it, and once I visited her in her city home. I have been favored with many of her sparkling, vivacious letters, and have read and re-read all her published writings; but that first meeting held in it for me the key-note of all her wonderfully beautiful and symmetrical character. She brought to that little hamlet among the hills a sweet and wholesome and powerful influence. While her time was too valuable to be wasted in a general sociability, she yet found leisure for an extensive acquaintance, for a kindly interest in all her neighbors, and for Christian work of many kinds. Probably the weekly meeting for Bible-reading and prayer, which she conducted, was her closest link with the women of Dorset; but these meetings were established after I had bidden good-bye to the dear old town, and I leave others to tell how their "hearts burned within them as she opened to them the Scriptures." She had in a remarkable degree the lovely feminine gift of _home-making_. She was a true decorative artist. Her room when she was boarding, and her home after it was completed, were bowers of beauty. Every walk over hill and dale, every ramble by brookside or through wildwood, gave to her some fresh home-adornment. Some shy wildflower or fern, or brilliant-tinted leaf, a bit of moss, a curious lichen, a deserted bird's-nest, a strange fragment of rock, a shining pebble, would catch her passing glance and reveal to her quick artistic sense possibilities of use which were quaint, original, characteristic. One saw from afar that hers was a poet's home; and, if permitted to enter its gracious portals, the first impression deepened into certainty. There was as strong an individuality about her home, and especially about her own little study, as there was about herself and her writings. A cheerful, sunny, hospitable Christian home! Far and wide its potent influences reached, and it was a beautiful thing to see how many another home, humble or stately, grew emulous and blossomed into a new loveliness. Mrs. Prentiss was naturally a shy and reserved woman, and necessarily a pre-occupied one. Therefore she was sometimes misunderstood. But those who--knew her best, and were blest with her rare intimacy, knew her as "a perfect woman nobly planned." Her conversation was charming. Her close study of nature taught her a thousand happy symbols and illustrations, which made both what she said and wrote a mosaic of exquisite comparisons. Her studies of character were equally constant and penetrating. Nothing escaped her; no peculiarity of mind or manner failed of her quick observation, but it was always a kindly interest. She did not ridicule that which was simply ignorance or weakness, and she saw with keen pleasure all that was quaint, original, or strong, even when it was hidden beneath the homeliest garb. She had the true artist's liking for that which was simple and _genre_. The common things of common life appealed to her sympathies and called out all her attention. It was a real, hearty interest, too--not feigned, even in a sense generally thought praiseworthy. Indeed, no one ever had a more intense scorn of every sort of _feigning_. She was honest, truthful, _genuine_ to the highest degree. It may have sometimes led her into seeming lack of courtesy, but even this was a failing which "leaned to virtue's side." I chanced to know of her once calling with a friend on a country neighbor, and finding the good housewife busy over a rag-carpet. Mrs. Prentiss, who had never chanced to see one of these bits of rural manufacture in its elementary processes, was full of questions and interest, thereby quite evidently pleasing the unassuming artist in assorted rags and home-made dyes. When the visitors were safely outside the door, Mrs. Prentiss' friend turned to her with the exclamation, "What tact you have! She really thought you were interested in her work!" The quick blood sprang into Mrs. Prentiss' face, and she turned upon her friend a look of amazement and rebuke. "Tact!" she said, "I despise such tact!--do you think _I would look or act a lie?_" She was an exceedingly practical woman, not a dreamer. A systematic, thorough housekeeper, with as exalted ideals in all the affairs which pertain to good housewifery as in those matters which are generally thought to transcend these humble occupations. Like Solomon's virtuous woman she "looked well after the ways of her household." Methodical, careful of minutes, simple in her tastes, abstemious, and therefore enjoying evenly good health in spite of her delicate constitution--this is the secret of her accomplishing so much. Yet all this foundation of exactness and diligence was so "rounded with leafy gracefulness" that she never seemed angular or unyielding. With her children she was a model disciplinarian, exceedingly strict, a wise law-maker; yet withal a tender, devoted, self-sacrificing mother. I have never seen such exact obedience required and given--or a more idolized mother. "Mamma's" word was indeed _Law_, but--O, happy combination!--it was also _Gospel_! How warm and true her friendship was! How little of selfishness in all her intercourse with other women! How well she loved to be of _service_ to her friends! How anxious that each should reach her highest possibilities of attainment! I record with deepest sense of obligation the cordial, generous, sympathetic assistance of many kinds extended by her to me during our whole acquaintance. To every earnest worker in any field she gladly "lent a hand," rejoicing in all the successes of others as if they were her own. But if weakness, or trouble, or sorrow of any sort or degree overtook one she straightway became as one of God's own ministering spirits--an angel of strength and consolation. Always more eager, however, that _souls should grow than that pain should cease_. Volumes could be made of her letters to friends in sorrow. One tender monotone steals through them all,-- 'Come unto me, my kindred, I enfold you In an embrace to sufferers only known; Close to this heart I tenderly will hold you, Suppress no sigh, keep back no tear, no moan. "Thou Man of Sorrows, teach my lips that often Have told the sacred story of my woe, To speak of Thee till stony griefs I soften, Till hearts that know Thee not learn Thee to know. "Till peace takes place of storm and agitation, Till lying on the current of Thy will There shall be glorying in tribulation, And Christ Himself each empty heart shall fill." Few have the gift or the courage to deal faithfully yet lovingly with an erring soul, but she did not shrink back even from this service to those she loved. I can bear witness to the wisdom, penetration, skill, and fidelity with which she probed a terribly wounded spirit, and then said with tender solemnity, "_I think you need a great deal of good praying._" O, "vanished hand," still beckon to us from the Eternal Heights! O, "voice that is still," speak to us yet from the Shining Shore! "Still let thy mild rebuking stand Between us and the wrong, And thy dear memory serve to make Our faith in goodness strong." [1] See the poem in the appendix to Golden Hours, with the "Reply of the New Year," written by Mrs. Prentiss. [2] A clerical circle of New York. [3] A Unitarian paper, published in New York. [4] An association of ladies for providing garments and other needed articles in aid of families of Home and Foreign missionaries, especially of those connected in any way with their own congregation. Such a circle is found in most of the American churches. [5] The passage occurs in a letter to Madame Guyon, dated June 9, 1689. For another extract from the same letter see appendix F, p. 557. [6] On the Resurrection of Christ. [7] Helen Rogers Blakeman, wife of W. N. Blakeman, M.D., was born on the 20th of December, 1811, in the city of New York. She was a granddaughter of the Rev. James Caldwell, of Elizabethtown, New Jersey, the Revolutionary patriot. The tragical fate of her grandmother has passed into history. When the British forces reached Connecticut Farms, on the 7th of June, 1780, and began to burn and pillage the place, Mrs. Caldwell, who was then living there, retired with her two children--one an infant in her arms--to a back room in the house. Here, while engaged in prayer, she was shot through the window. Two bullets struck her in the breast and she fell dead upon the floor. The infant in her arms was Mrs. Blakeman's mother. On the father's side, too, she was of an old and God-fearing family. [8] "Your precious lamb was very near my heart; few knew so well as I did all you suffered for and with her, for few have been over just the ground I have. But that is little to the purpose; what I was going to say is this,--'God never makes a mistake.' You know and feel it, I am sure, but when we are broken down with grief, we like to hear simple words, oft repeated. On this anniversary of my child's death, I feel drawn to you. It was a great blow to us because it came to hearts already sore with sorrow for our boy, and because it came so like a thunderclap, and because she suffered so. Your baby's death brought it all back."--_From the Letter to Mrs. W._ [9] "I must tell you what a busy day I had yesterday, being chaplain, marketer, mother, author, and consoler from early morning till nine at night.... A letter came from Cincinnati from the editor of the hymn-book of the Y.M.C.A., saying he had some of my hymns in it, and had stopped the press in order to have two more, which he wanted 'right away.' I was exactly in the mood; it was our little Bessie's anniversary, she had been in heaven _eighteen_ years; think what she has already gained by my one year of suffering! and I wanted to spend it for others, not for myself."--_Letter to her Husband, May 20_. [10] Nidworth, and His Three Magic Wands, published by Roberts Brothers. CHAPTER XII. THE TRIAL OF FAITH. 1871-1872. I. Two Years of Suffering. Its Nature and Causes. Spiritual Conflicts. Ill-health. Faith a Gift to be won by Prayer. Death-bed of Dr. Skinner. Visit to Philadelphia. "Daily Food." How to read the Bible so as to love it more. Letters of Sympathy and Counsel. "Prayer for Holiness brings Suffering." Perils of human Friendship. If in the life of Mrs. Prentiss the year 1870 was marked with a white stone as one of great happiness, the two following years were marked by unusual and very acute suffering. Perhaps something of this was, sooner or later, to have been looked for in the experience of one whose organization, both physical and mental, was so intensely sensitive. Tragical elements are latent in every human life, especially in the life of woman. And the finer qualities of her nature, her vast capacity of loving and of self-sacrifice, her peculiar cares and trials, as well as outward events, are always tending to bring these elements into action. What scenes surpassing fable, scenes both bright and sad, belong to the secret history of many a quiet woman's heart! Then our modern civilization, while placing woman higher in some respects than she ever stood before, at the same time makes her pay a heavy price for her advantages. In the very process of enlarging her sphere and opportunities, whether intellectual or practical, and of educating her for their duties, does it not also expose her to moral shocks and troubles and lacerations of feeling almost peculiar to our times? Nor is religion wholly exempt from the spirit that rules the age or the hour. There is a close, though often very subtle, connexion between the two; just as there is between the working of nature and grace in the individual soul. The phase of her history upon which Mrs. Prentiss was now entering can not be fully understood without considering it in this light. The melancholy that was deep-rooted in her temperament, and her tender, all-absorbing sympathies, made her very quick to feel whatever of pain or sorrow pervaded the social atmosphere about her. The thought of what others were suffering would intrude even upon her rural retreat among the mountains, and render her jealous of her own rest and joy. And then, in all her later years, the mystery of existence weighed upon her heart more and more heavily. In a nature so deep and so finely strung, great happiness and great sorrow are divided by a very thin partition. But spiritual trials and conflict gave its keenest edge to the suffering of these years. Such trials and conflict indeed were not wanting in the earliest stages of her religious life, nor had they been wanting all along its course; but they came now with a power and in a manner almost wholly new; and, while not essentially different from those which have afflicted God's children in all ages, they are yet traceable, in no small degree, to special causes and circumstances in her own case. Early in 1870 she had fallen in with a book entitled "God's Furnace," and a few months later had made the acquaintance of its author--a remarkable woman, of great strength of character, of deep religious experience, and full of zeal for God. Her book was introduced to the Christian public by a distinguished Presbyterian clergyman, and was highly recommended by other eminent divines. By means of this work, as well as by correspondence and an occasional visit, she exerted for a time a good deal of influence over Mrs. Prentiss. At first this influence seemed to be stimulating and healthful, but it was not so in the end. The points of sympathy and the points of difference between them will come out so plainly in Mrs. Prentiss' letters that they need not be indicated here. It would not be easy to imagine two women more utterly dissimilar, except in love to God, devotion to their Saviour, and delight in prayer. These formed the tie between them. Miss ----'s last days were sadly clouded by mental trouble and disease. A little book called "Holiness through Faith," published about this time, was another disturbing influence in Mrs. Prentiss' religious life. This work and others of a similar character presented a somewhat novel theory of sanctification--a theory zealously taught, and which excited considerable attention in certain circles of the Christian community. It was, in brief, this: As we are justified by faith without the deeds of the law, even so are we sanctified by faith; in other words, as we obtain forgiveness and acceptance with God by a simple act of trust in Christ, so by simple trust in Christ we may attain personal holiness; it is as easy for divine grace to save us at once from the power, as from the guilt, of sin. For more than thirty years Mrs. Prentiss had made the Christian life a matter of earnest thought and study. The subject of personal holiness in particular had occupied her attention. Whatever promised to shed new light upon it she eagerly read. Her own convictions, however, were positive and decided; and, although at first inclined to accept the doctrine of "Holiness through Faith," further reflection satisfied her that, as taught by its special advocates, it was contrary to Scripture and experience, and was fraught with mischief. Certain unhappy tendencies and results of the doctrine, both at home and abroad, as shown in some of its teachers and disciples, also forced her to this conclusion. Folly of some sort is indeed one of the fatal rocks upon which all overstrained theories of sanctification are almost certain to be wrecked; and in excitable, crude natures, the evil is apt to take the form either of mental extravagance, perhaps derangement, or of silly, if not still worse, conduct. But, while deeply impressed with the mischief of these Perfectionist theories, Mrs. Prentiss felt the heartiest sympathy with all earnest seekers after holiness, and was grieved by what seemed to her harsh or unjust criticisms upon them. What were her own matured views on the subject will appear in the sequel. It is enough to say here that "Holiness through Faith" and other works, in advocacy of the same or similar doctrines, meeting her as they did when under a severe mental strain, and touching her at a most sensitive point--for holiness was a passion of her whole soul--had for a time a more or less bewildering effect. She kept pondering the questions they raised, until the native hue of her piety--hitherto so resolute and cheerful--became "sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought." The inward conflict which has been referred to she described sometimes, in the language of the old divines, as the want of God's "sensible presence," or of "conscious" nearness to and communion with Christ; sometimes, as a state of "spiritual deprivation or aridity"; and then again, as a work of the Evil One. She laid much stress upon this last point. Her belief in the existence of Satan and his influence over human souls was as vivid as that of Luther; she did not hesitate to accuse him of being the fomenter and, in a sense, the author of her distress; the warnings of the Bible against his "wiles" she accepted as in full force still; and she could offer with all her heart, and with no doubt as to the literal meaning of its closing words, the petition of the old Litany: "That it may please Thee to strengthen such as do stand, and to comfort and help the weak-hearted, and to raise up those who fall, and finally to _beat down Satan under our feet_." The coming trouble seems to have cast its shadow across her path even before the close of 1870. Early in 1871 it was upon her in power. Her letters contain very interesting and pathetic allusions to this experience. But they do not explain it. Nor is it easy to explain. In the absence of certain inciting causes from without, it would never, perhaps, have assumed a serious form. But these sharp spiritual trials are generally complicated with external causes, or occasions; ill-health, morbid constitutional tendencies, loss of sleep, wearing cares and responsibilities, sudden calamities, worldly loss or disappointment, and the like. It is in the midst of such conditions that pious souls are most apt to be assailed by gloom and despondency. And yet distressing inward struggles and depression arise sometimes in the midst of outward prosperity and even of unusual religious enjoyment. In truth, among all the phenomena of the Christian life none are more obscure or harder to seize than those connected with spiritual conflict and temptation. They belong largely to that _terra incognita_, the dark back-ground of human consciousness, where are the primal forces of the soul and the mustering-place of good and evil. A certain mystery enshrouds all profound religious emotion; whether of the peace of God that passeth all understanding, or of the anguish that comes of spiritual desertion. Those who are in the midst of the battle, or bear its scars, will instantly recognise an experience like their own; to all others it must needs remain inexplicable. Even in the natural life our deepest joys and sorrows are mostly inarticulate; the great poets come nearest to giving them utterance; but how much the reality always surpasses the descriptions of the poet's pen, even though it be the pen of a Shakespeare, or a Goethe! Mrs. Prentiss never afterward referred to this "fiery trial" without strong emotion. It terrified her to think of anyone she loved as exposed to it; and--not to speak of other classes--she seemed to regard those as specially exposed to it, who had just passed, or were passing, through an unusually rich and happy religious experience. One of her last letters, addressed to a dear Christian friend, related to this very point. Here are a few sentences from it: I want to give you EMPHATIC warning that you were never in such danger in your life. This is the language of bitter, bitter experience and is not mine alone. Leighton says the great Pirate lets the empty ships go by and robs the full ones. [1] ... I do hope you will go on your way rejoicing, unto the perfect day. Hold on to Christ with your teeth [2] if your hands get crippled; He, alone, is stronger than Satan; He, alone, knows _all_ "sore temptations" mean. This, certainly, is strong language and will sound very strange and extravagant in many ears; and yet is it really stronger language than that often used by inspired prophets and apostles? or than that of Augustine, Bernard, Luther, Hooker, Fenelon, Bunyan, and of many saintly women, whose names adorn the annals of piety? Strong as it is, it will find an echo in hearts that have been assailed by the "fiery darts of the adversary," and have learned to cry unto God out of the depths of mental anguish and gloom; while others still in the midst of the conflict, will, perhaps, be helped and comforted to read of the manner in which Mrs. Prentiss passed through it. Nothing in the story of her religious life is more striking and beautiful. Her faith never failed; she glorified God in the midst of it all; she thanked her Lord and Master for "taking her in hand," and begged Him not to spare her for her crying, if so be she might thus learn to love Him more and grow more like Him! And, what is especially noteworthy, her own suffering, instead of paralysing, as severe suffering sometimes does, active sympathy with the sorrows and trials of others, had just the contrary effect. "How soon," she wrote to a friend, "our dear Lord presses our experiences into His own service! How many lessons He teaches us in order to make us 'sons' (or daughters) 'of consolation!'" To another friend she wrote: I did not perceive any selfishness in you during our interview, and you need not be afraid that I am so taken up with my own affairs as to feel no sympathy with you in yours. What are we made for, if not to bear each other's burdens? And this ought to be the effect of trial upon us; to make us, in the very midst of it, unusually interested in the interests of others. This is the softening, sanctifying tendency of tribulation, and he who lacks it needs harder blows. At no period of her life was she more helpful to afflicted and tempted souls. In visits to sick-rooms and dying beds, and in letters to friends in trouble, her heart "like the noble tree that is wounded itself when it gives the balm," poured itself forth in the most tender, soothing ministrations. It seemed at times fairly surcharged with love. Meanwhile she kept her pain to herself; only a few intimate friends, whose prayers she solicited, knew what a struggle was going on in her soul; to all others she appeared very much as in her happiest days. "It is a little curious," she wrote to a young friend, "that suffering as I really am, nobody sees it. 'Always bright!' people say to me to my amazement.... I can add nothing but love, of which I am so full that I keep giving off in thunder and lightning." The preceding account would be incomplete without adding that the state of her health during this period, combined with a severe pressure of varied and perplexing cares, served to deepen the distress caused by her spiritual trials. Whatever view may be taken of the origin and nature of such trials, it is certain that physical depression and the mental strain that comes of anxious, care-worn thoughts, if not their source, yet tend always greatly to intensify them. In the present case the trials would, perhaps, not have existed without the cares and the ill-health; while the latter, even in the entire absence of the former, would have occasioned severe suffering. _To Mrs. Frederick Field, New York, Jan. 8, 1871._ 'If I need make any apology for writing you so often, it must be this--I can not help it. Having dwelt long in an obscure, oftentimes dark valley, and then passed out into a bright plane of life, I am full of tender yearnings over other souls, and would gladly spend my whole time and strength for them. I long, especially, to see your feet established on an immovable Rock. It seems to me that God is preparing you for great usefulness by the fiery trial of your faith. "They learn in suffering what they teach in song." Oh how true this is! Who is so fitted to sing praises to Christ as he who has learned Him in hours of bereavement, disappointment and despair? What you want is to let your intellect go overboard, if need be, and to take what God gives just as a little child takes it, without money and without price. Faith is His, unbelief ours. No process of reasoning can soothe a mother's empty, aching heart, or bring Christ into it to fill up all that great waste room. But faith can. And faith is His gift; a gift to be won by prayer--prayer persistent, patient, determined; prayer that will take no denial; prayer that if it goes away one day unsatisfied, keeps on saying, "Well, there's to-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow; God may wait to be gracious, and I can wait to receive, but receive I must and will." This is what the Bible means when it says, "the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence and the violent take it by force." It does not say the eager, the impatient take it by force, but the violent--they who declare, "I will not let Thee go except Thou bless me." This is all heart, not head work. Do I know what I am talking about? Yes, I do. But my intellect is of no use to me when my heart is breaking. I must get down on my knees and own that I am less than nothing, seek _God_, not joy; _consent_ to suffer, not cry for relief. And how transcendently good He is when He brings me down to that low place and there shows me that that self-renouncing, self-despairing spot is just the one where He will stoop to meet me! My dear friend, don't let this great tragedy of sorrow fail to do _everything_ for you. It is a dreadful thing to lose children; but a _lost sorrow_ is the most fearful experience life can bring, I feel this so strongly that I could go on writing all day. It has been said that the intent of sorrow is to "toss us on to God's promises." Alas, these waves too often toss us away out to sea, where neither sun or stars appear for many days. I pray, earnestly, that it may not be so with you. Among Mrs. Prentiss' most beloved and honored friends in New York was the Rev. Dr. Thomas H. Skinner, the first pastor of the Mercer street church, and then, for nearly a quarter of a century, Professor in the Union Theological Seminary. His attachment to her, as also that of his family, was very strong. Dr. Skinner had been among the leaders of the so-called New School branch of the Presbyterian Church. He was a preacher of great spiritual power, an able, large-hearted theologian, and a man of most attractive personal and social qualities. He was artless as a little child, full of enthusiasm for the best things, and a pattern of saintly goodness. It used to be said that every stone and rafter in the Church of the Covenant had felt the touch of his prayers. This venerable servant of God entered into his rest on the 1st of February, 1871, in the 80th year of his age. In a letter to her cousin, Rev. George S. Payson, Mrs. Prentiss thus refers to his last hours: You will hear at dear Dr. Skinner's funeral to-morrow his dying testimony, and I want you to know that it was whispered in my enraptured ear, that I was privileged to spend the whole of Tuesday and all he lived of Wednesday, at his side, and that mine were the hands that closed his eyes and composed his features in death. What blissful moments were mine, as I saw his sainted soul fly home; how near heaven seemed and still seems! _To Miss E. S. Gilman, New York, Feb. 7, 1871._ I am glad to hear that you have such an interesting class, and yet more glad that you see how much Christian culture they need. I am astonished every day by confessions made to me by young people as to their woful state before God, and do hope that all this is to prepare me to write something for them. I began a series of articles in the Association Monthly, called "Twilight Talks," which may perhaps prove to be in a degree what you want, but still there is much land untraversed. Meanwhile I want to encourage you in your work, by letting you feel my deep sympathy with you in it, and to assure you that nothing will be so blessed to your scholars as personal holiness in yourself. We _must_ practise what we preach, and give ourselves wholly to Christ if we want to persuade others to do it. I am saying feebly what I feel very deeply and constantly. You will rejoice with me that I had the rare privilege of being with dear Dr. Skinner during his last hours. If you have a copy of Watts and Select hymns, read the 106th hymn of the 2d book, beginning at the 2d verse, "Lord, when I quit this earthly stage," and fancy, if you can, the awe and the delight with which I heard him repeat those nine verses, as expressive of his dying love to Christ. I feel that God is always too good to me, but to have Him make me witness of that inspiring scene, humbles me greatly. In how many ways He seeks us, now smiling, now caressing, now reproving, now thwarting, and _always_ doing the very best thing for us that infinite love and goodness can! Let us love Him better and better every day, and count no work for Him too small and unnoticed to be wrought thankfully whenever He gives the opportunity. I hope I am learning to honor the day of small things. _To Mrs. Humphrey, New York, March 14, 1871._ So you have at last broken the ice and made out, after almost a year, to write that promised letter! Well, it was worth waiting for, and welcome when it came, and awakened in me an enthusiasm about seeing the dear creature, of which I hardly thought my old heart was capable (that statement is an affectation; my heart isn't old, and never will be). Our plan now is, if all prospers, to go to Philadelphia on Friday afternoon, spend the night with you, Saturday with Mrs. Kirkbride, and Sunday and part of Monday with you. I hope you mean to let us have a quiet little time with you, unbeknown to strangers, whom I dread and shrink from.... _March 28th._--What a queer way we womenkind have of confiding in each other with perfectly reckless disregard of consequences! It is a mercy that men are, for the most part, more prudent, though not half so delightful!... Well, I'm ever so glad I've seen you in your home, only I found you more frail (in the way of health) than I found you fair. We hear that your husband preached "splendidly," as of course we knew he would, and the next exchange I shall be there to hear as well as to see. Coming out of the cars yesterday, I picked up a "Daily Food," dropped, I suppose, by its owner, "Sarah ----," of Philadelphia, given her by "Miss H. in 1853." It has travelled all over Europe, and is therefore no doubt precious to her who thus made it her friend. Now how shall I get it to her? Can you learn her address, or shall I write to her at a venture, without one? I know how I felt--when I once lost mine; it was given me in 1835, and has gone with me ever since whenever I have journeyed (as I was so happy as to find it again). [3] I think if I have the pleasure of restoring it to its owner, she will feel glad that it did not fall into profane hands. I thought it right to look through it, in order to get some clue, if possible, to its destination; I fancy it was the silent comforter of a wife who went abroad with her husband for his health, and came home a widow; God bless her, whoever she is, for she evidently believes in and loves Him. What sort of a world can it be to those who don't? [4] Remember me affectionately to yourself and your dear ones, and now we've got a-going, let's go ahead. _April 1st._--What a pity it is that one can't have a separate language with which to address each beloved one! It seems so mean to use the same words to two or three or four people one loves so differently! Now about my visit to you. One reason why I did not stay longer was your looking worn out. When I am feeling so dragged, visitors are a great wear and tear to me. But I am afraid my selfishness would have got the upperhand of me if that were the whole story. I can't put into words the perfect horror I have of being made into a somebody; it fairly hurts me, and if I had stayed a week with you and the host of people you had about you, I should have shriveled up into the size of a pea. I can't deny having streaks of conceit, but I _know_ enough about myself to make my rational moments bid me keep in the background, and it excruciates me to be set up on a pinnacle. So don't blame me if I fled in terror, and that I am looking forward to your visit, when I hope to have delightful pow-wows with you all by ourselves. I am glad that little book can be returned, and I will mail it to you. I _couldn't_ send it without a loving word; it seemed to fall so providentially into my hands and knock so at the door of my heart. In what strange ways people get introduced to each other, and how subtle are the influences that excite a bond of sympathy!... What do you do with girls who fall madly and desperately in love with you? Do you laugh at them, or scold them, or love them, or what? I used to do just such crazy things, and am not sure I never do them now. Did you ever live in a queerer world than this is? _To Miss E.S. Gilman, New York, April 29, 1871._ The subject of your letter is one that greatly interests me, and I should be glad to get more light upon it myself. As far as I know, those who live apart from the world, communing with God and working for Him chiefly in prayer, have least temptation to wandering and distracted thoughts, and are more devout and spiritual than those of us who live more in the world. But it stands to reason that we _can't_ all live so. The outside work must go on, and somebody must do it. But of course we have the hardest time, since while _in_ the world we must not be of it. I have come, of late, to think that both classes are needed, the contemplative and the active, and God does certainly take the latter aside now and then as you suggest, by sickness and in other ways, to set them thinking. Holiness is not a mere abstraction; it is praying and loving and being consecrate, but it is also the doing kind deeds, speaking friendly words, being in a crowd when we thirst to be alone, and so on and so on. The study of Christ's life on earth reveals Him to us as incessantly busy, yet taking _special_ seasons for prayer. It seems to me that we should imitate Him in this respect, and when we find ourselves particularly pressed by outward cares and duties, break short off and withdraw from them till a spiritual tone returns. For we can do nothing well unless we do it consciously for Christ, and this consciousness sometimes gets jostled out of us when we undertake to do too much. The more perfectly He is formed in us the more light we shall get on every path of duty, the less likely to go astray from the happy medium of not all contemplation, not all activity. And to have Him thus to dwell in us we are led to pray by His own last prayer for us on earth, when He asked for the "_I in them_." Let us pray for each other that this may be our blessed lot. Nothing will fit us for life but this. In ourselves we do nothing but err and sin. In Him we are complete. * * * * * II. Her Husband called to Chicago. Lines on going to Dorset. Letters to young Friends, on the Christian Life. Narrow Escape from Death. Feeling on returning to Town. Her "Praying Circle." The Chicago Fire. The true Art of Living. God our only safe Teacher. An easily-besetting Sin. Counsels to young Friends. Letters. Mrs. Prentiss' letters relating to her husband's call to Chicago require perhaps an explanatory word. She had some very pleasant associations with Chicago. It was the home of a brother and sister-in-law, to whom she was deeply attached, and of other dear relatives. There Stepping Heavenward had first appeared, and many unknown friends--grateful for the good it had done them--were eager to form her acquaintance and bid her welcome to the great city of the Interior. And yet the thought of removing there filled her with the utmost distress. Had her husband's call been to some distant post in the field of Foreign Missions, her language on the subject could hardly have been stronger. But this language in reality expresses simply the depth of her devotion to her church and her friends in New York, her morbid shyness and shrinking from the presence of strangers, and, especially, her vivid sense of physical inability to make the change without risking the loss of what health and power of sleep still remained to her. Misgiving on this last point caused her husband to hesitate long before accepting the call, and to feel in after years that his decision to accept it, although conscientiously made, had been a grave mistake. _To Mrs. Condict, New York, June 3, 1871._ I knew that you would rather hear from me than through the papers, the fact that Mr. Prentiss has been once more unanimously elected by the General Assembly to the Chicago Professorship. He has come home greatly perplexed as to his duty, and prepared to do it, at any reasonable cost, if he can only find out what it is. We built our Dorset house not as a mere luxury, but with the hope that the easy summer there would so build up our health as to increase and prolong our usefulness; but going to Chicago would deprive us of that, besides cutting us off from all our friends. But we want to know no will but God's in this question, and I am sure you and Miss K. will join us in the prayer that we may not so much as _suggest_ to Him what path He will lead us into. The experience of the past winter would impress upon me the fact that _place and position_ have next to nothing to do with happiness; that we can be wretched in a palace, radiant in a dungeon. Mr. P. said yesterday that it broke his heart to hear me talk of giving up Dorset; but perhaps this heartbreaking is exactly what we need to remind us of what for many years we never had a chance to forget, that we are pilgrims and strangers on the earth. Two lines of my own keep running in my head: Oh foolish heart, oh faithless heart, oh heart on ruin bent, Build not with too much care thy nest, thou art in banishment. I have seen the time when the sense of being a pilgrim and a stranger was very sweet; and God can sweeten whatever He does to us. So though perplexed we are not in despair, and if we feel that we are this summer living in a tent that may soon blow down, it is just what you are doing, and in this point we shall have fellowship. I am sure it is good for us to have God take up the rod, even if He lays it down again without inflicting a blow. I know we are going to pray till light comes. I feel very differently about it from what I did last summer. The mental conflicts of the past winter have created a good deal of indifference to everything. Without conscious union and nearness to my Saviour I can't be happy anywhere; for years He has been the meaning of everything, and when He only _seems_ gone (I know it is only seeming) I don't much care where I am. I am just trying to be patient till He makes Satan let go of me. Excuse this selfish letter, and write me one just as bad! On the 7th of June she went to Dorset with her husband and the younger children. The following lines, found among her papers, will show in what temper of mind she went. It is worth noting that they were written on Monday, and express a week-day, not merely a passing Sabbath feeling: Once more at home, once more at home-- For what, dear Lord, I pray? To seek enjoyment, please myself, Make life a summer's day? I shrink, I shudder at the thought; For what is home to me, When sin and self enchain my heart, And keep it far from Thee? There is but one abiding joy, Nor place that joy can give; It is Thy presence that makes home, That makes it "life to live." That presence I invoke; naught else I venture to entreat; I long to see Thee, hear Thy voice, To sit at Thy dear feet. _To a young Friend, Dorset, June 12, 1871._ I trust it is an omen of good that the first letters I have received since coming here this summer, have been full of the themes I love best. I was much struck with the sentence you quote, "They can not go back," etc., [5] and believe it is true of you. Being absorbed in divine things will not make you selfish; you will be astonished to find how loving you will gradually grow toward everybody, how interested in their interests, how happy in their happiness. And if you want work for Christ (and the more you love Him the more you will _long_ for it), that work will come to you in all sorts of ways. I do not believe much in duty-work; I think that work that tells is the spontaneous expression of the love within. Perhaps you have not been sick enough yourself to be skilful in a sick-room; perhaps your time for that sort of work hasn't come. I meant to get you a little book called "The Life of Faith"; in fact, I went down town on purpose to get it, and passed the Episcopal Sunday-school Union inadvertently. I think that little book teaches how _every_thing we do may be done for Christ, and I know by what little experience I have had of it, that it is a blessed, thrice blessed way to live. A great deal is meant by the "cup of cold water," and few of us women have great deeds to perform, and we must unite ourselves to Him by little ones. The life of constant self-discipline God requires is a happy one; you and I, and others like us, find a wild, absorbing joy in loving and being loved; but sweet, abiding peace is the fruit of steady check on affections that _must_ be tamed and kept under. Is this consistent with what I have just said about growing more loving as we grow more Christlike? Yes, it is; for _that_ love is absolutely unselfish, it gives much and asks nothing, and there is nothing restless about it.... I have been very hard at work ever since I came here, with my darling M. as my constant, joyous comrade. We have been busy with our flower-beds, sowing and transplanting, and half the china closet has tumbled out of doors to serve as protection from the sun. Mr. Prentiss says we do the work of three days in one, which is true, for we certainly have performed great feats. The night we got here we found the house lighted up, and the dining-table covered with good things. People seem glad to see us back. I don't know which of my Dorset titles would strike you as most appropriate; one man calls me a "branch," another "a child of nature," and another "Mr. Prentiss' woman," with the consoling reflection that I sha'n't rust out. _To Mrs. Smith, Dorset, August 6, 1871._ I don't know when I have written so few letters as I have this summer. My right hand has forgot its cunning under the paralysis, under which my heart has suffered, and which is now beginning to affect my health quite unfavorably. It seems as if body and soul, joints and marrow, were rudely separating. Poor George is half-distracted with the weight of the questions concerning Chicago, and I think almost anything would be better than this crucifying suspense. But I try not to make a fuss. Mrs. D---- can tell you that I have said to her many times, during the last few years, that, according to the ordinary run of life, things would not long remain with us as they were; they were too good to last. I have read and re-read "Spiritual Dislodgments," and remember it well. I certainly wish for such dislodgments in me and mine, if we need them. George has got hold of a book of A.'s, which delights him, Letters of William Von Humboldt. [6] I suppose you recommended it to her. You _must_ make your plans to come here this summer; I don't seem fully to have a thing till you've seen it. _To Mrs. Humphrey, Dorset, Aug. 8, 1871._ It took you a good while to answer my last letter, and I have been equally lazy about writing since yours strayed this way. Letter-writing has always been a resource and a pastime to me; a refuge in head-achy and rainy days, and a tiny way to give pleasure or do good, when other paths were hedged up. But this summer I have left almost everybody in the lurch, partly from being more or less unwell and out of spirits, partly because the Chicago question, remaining unsettled, has been such a damper that I hadn't much heart to speak either of it or of anything else. We are perplexed beyond measure what to do; the thought of losing _my minister_ and having him turn into a professor, agonizes me; on the other hand, who knows but he needs the rest that change of labor and the five months' vacation would give him? _His_ chief worry is the effect the attending funerals all the time has already had on my health. One day I part with and bury (in imagination!) now this friend, now that, and this mournful work does not sharpen one's appetite or invigorate one's frame. I don't know how we've stood the conflict; and it seems rather selfish to allude to my part of it; but women live more in their friendships than men do, and the thought of tearing up all our roots is more painful to me than to my husband, and he will not lose what I must lose in addition, and as I have said before, my minister, which is the hardest part of it. I want you to know what straits we are in, in the hope that you and yours will be stirred up to pray that we may make no mistake, but go or stay as the Lord would have us. We have found our little home a nice refuge for us in the storm; Mr. P. says he should have gone distracted in a boarding-house. I do not envy you the Conway crowd. But I fancy it is a good region for collecting mosses and like treasures. I think the prettiest thing in our house is a flattish bracket, fastened to the wall and filled with flowers; it looks like a graceful, meandering letter S and is one of the idols I bow down to.... I have "Holiness through Faith"; the first time I read it at Mr. R----'s request, I said I believed every word of it, but this summer, reading it in a different mood, it puzzles me. The idea is plausible; if God tells us to be holy, as He certainly does, is it not for Him to provide the way for our being so, and is it likely He needs our whole lives before He can accomplish His own design? I talked with Mr. Prentiss about it, and at first he rejected the thought of holiness through faith, but last night we got upon the subject again and he was interested in some sentences I read to him and said he must examine the book. When are you coming to spend that week in Dorset? Love to each and all. _To a young Friend, Kauinfels, Sept. 9, 1871._ I have had many letters to write to-day, for to-day our fate is sealed, and we are to go. But I must say a few words to you before going to bed, for I want to tell you how very glad I am that you have been enabled to take a step [7] which will, I am sure, lead the way to other steps, increase your holiness, your usefulness, and your happiness. May God bless you in this attempt to honor Him, and open out before you new fields wherein to glorify and please Him. This has not been a sorrowful day to me. I hope I am offering to a "patient God a patient heart." I do not want to make the worst of the sacrifice He requires, or to fancy I am only to be happy on my own conditions. He has been most of the time for years "the spring of all my joys, the life of my delights." Where He is, I want to be; where He bids me go, I want to go, and to go in courage and faith. Anything is better than too strong cleaving to this world. As I was situated in New York, I lacked not a single earthly blessing. I had a delightful home, freedom from care, and a circle of friends whom I loved with all my heart, and who loved me in a way to satisfy even my rapacity. Only one thing was wanting to my perfect felicity--a heart absolutely holy; and was I likely to get that when my earthly cup was so full? At any rate I am content. Now and then, as the reality of this coming separation overwhelms me, I feel a spasm of pain at my heart (I don't suppose we are expected to cease to be human beings or to lose our sensibilities), but if my Lord and Master will go with me, and keeps on making me more and more like Himself, I can be happy anywhere and under any conditions, or be made content not to be happy. All this is of little consequence in itself, but perhaps it may make me more of a blessing to others, which, next to personal holiness, is the only thing to be sought very earnestly. As to my relation to you, He who brought you under my wing for a season has something better for you in store. _That's His way._ And wherever I am, if it is His will and His Spirit dictates the prayer, I shall pray for you, and that is the best service one soul can render another. About this time she and her husband had an almost miraculous escape from instant death. They had been calling upon friends in East Dorset and were returning home. Not far from that village is a very dangerous railroad crossing; and, as the sight or sound of cars so affrighted Coco as to render him uncontrollable, special pains had been taken not to arrive at the spot while a train was due. But just as they reached it, an "irregular" train, whose approach was masked behind high bushes, came rushing along unannounced, and had they been only a few seconds later, would have crushed them to atoms. So severe was the shock and so vivid the sense of a Providential escape, that scarcely a word was spoken during the drive home. The next morning she gave her husband a very interesting account of the thoughts that, like lightning, flashed upon her mind while feeling herself in the jaws of death. They related exclusively to her children--how they would receive the news, and what would become of them. [8] Late in September she returned to town, still oppressed by the thought of going to Chicago. In a letter to Mrs. Condict, dated October 2d, she writes: We got home on Friday night, and very early on Saturday were settled down into the old routine. But how different everything is! At church tearful, clouded faces; at home, warmhearted friends looking upon us as for the last time. It is all right. I would not venture to change it if I could; but it is hard. At times it seems as if my heart would literally break to pieces, but we are mercifully kept from realising our sorrows all the time. The waves dash in and almost overwhelm, but then they sweep back and are stayed by an almighty, kind hand.... It is like tearing off a limb to leave our dear prayer-meeting. Next to my closet, it has been to me the sweetest spot on earth. I never expect to find such another. To another friend she writes a day or two later: My heart fairly _collapses_ at times, at the thought of tearing myself away from those whom Christian ties have made dearer to me than my kindred after the flesh. And then comes the precious privilege and relief of telling my yet dearer and better Friend all about it, and the sweet peace begotten of yielding my will to His. I want to be of all the use and comfort to you and to the other dear ones He will let me be during these few months. Do pray for me that I may so live Christ as to bear others along with me on a resistless tide. Those lines you copied for me are a great comfort: "Rather walking with Him by faith, Than walking alone in the light." Of the little praying circle, alluded to in her letter to Mrs. C., one of its members writes: It was unique even among meetings of its own class. Held in an upper chamber, never largely attended and sometimes only by the "two or three," it was almost unknown except to the few, who regarded it as among their chiefest religious privileges. All the other members would gladly have had Mrs. Prentiss assume its entire leadership; but she assumed nothing and was no doubt quite unconscious as to how large an extent she was the life and soul of the meeting. In the familiar conversation of the hour nothing fell from her lips but such simple words as, coming from a glowing heart, strengthened and deepened the spiritual life of all who heard them. She had, in a degree I never knew equalled, the gift of leading the devotions of others. But there was not the slightest approach to performance in her prayers; she abhorred the very thought of it. Those who knelt with her can never forget the pure devotion which breathed itself forth in simple exquisite language; but it was something beyond the power of description. Another member of the circle writes: Her prayers were so simple, so earnest, so childlike. We all felt we were in the very presence of our loving Father. One thing especially always impressed me during that sacred hour--it was her _quietness of manner_. She was very cordial and affectionate in her greetings with each one, as we assembled, and then a holy awe, a solemn hush, came over her spirit and she seemed like one who saw the Lord! O how we all miss her! There is never a meeting but we keep her in remembrance and talk together lovingly about her. _To a Friend, Oct. 21, 1871._ Mr. Prentiss sent in his resignation last evening, and the church refused unanimously to let him go. "Praise God from whom all blessings flow" penetrated the walls of the parsonage, as they sang it when the decision was made, and so we knew our fate before a whole parlorful rushed in to shake hands, kiss, and congratulate. You would have been delighted had you been here. Prof. Smith, who took strong ground in favor of his going, takes just as strong ground in favor of his staying. I feel that all this is the result of prayer. I never got any light on the Chicago question when I prayed about it; never could _see_ that it was our duty to go; but I yielded my judgment and my will, because my husband thought that he must go. I think our very reluctance to it made us shrink from evading it; we were so afraid of opposing God's will. Now the matter is taken out of our hands and we have only to resume our work here. God grant that this baptism of fire may purge and purify us and prepare us to be a great blessing to the church. It is a most awe-inspiring providence, God's burning us out of Chicago, and we feel like putting our shoes from off our feet and adoring Him in silence.... Pray that the lessons we have been learning through so many trying months may help us to be helping hands to those who may pass through similar straits. One of my brothers was burnt out, and his own and his wife's letters drew tears even down to the kitchen. For two days and a night they lost their baby, five months old, in addition to all the other horrors. But they found refuge with a dear cousin, who has filled his house to overflowing. I may have spoken of this cousin to you: he has a foundling home on Müller's trust system. Before taking leave of the call to Chicago a word should be added to what she says concerning it in her letters. The prospect of her husband's accepting the call rendered the summer a very trying one; but it was far from being all gloom. She had a marvellous power of extracting amusement out of the most untoward situation. In 1843 she wrote from Richmond, referring to Mr. Persico's troubles: "I never spent such melancholy weeks in my life; in the midst of it, however, I made fun for the rest, as I believe I should do in a dungeon." It was so in the present case. She relieved the weariness of many an anxious hour by "making fun for the rest." As an illustration, one evening at Dorset, while sitting at the parlor-table with her children and a young friend who was visiting her, she seized a pencil and wrote for their entertainment a ludicrous version of the Chicago affair in two parts. The paper which was preserved by her young friend, illustrates also another trait which she thus describes at the close of a frolicsome letter to Miss E. A. Warner: "It is one of the peculiar peculiarities of this woman that she usually carries on, when she wants to hide her feelins." Part I. begins thus: Where are the Prentisses? Gone to Chicago, Gone bag and baggage, the whole crew and cargo. Well, they _would_ go, now let's talk 'em over, And see what compensation we can discover. They are all "talked over" and then in Part II. the scene changes to Chicago itself: Sing a song of sixpence, a pocket full of rye, Here's the tribe of Prentisses just agoing by; Dr. Prentiss he, Mrs. Prentiss she, And a lot of young ones that all begin with P. Well, let us view them with our eyes, And then begin to criticise. And first the doctor, what of him? The doctor having been fully discussed, the criticism proceeds: Now for his wife; well, who would guess She had set up as authoress! Why, she looks just like all of us, Instead of being in a muss Like other literary folks. They say she likes her little jokes, As well as those who've less to say Of stepping on the heavenward way. Mrs. P. having been disposed of: Next comes Miss P.; how she will make The hearts of all the students quake! She'll wind them round her fingers' ends, And find in them one hundred friends. They'll sit on benches in a row And watch her come, and watch her go; But they'll be safe, the precious rogues, Since she don't care for theologues. The other children next pass in review and the whole closes with the remark: Time, and Time only, will make clear Why the poor geese came cackling here. _To a young Friend, New York, Nov., 1871._ My heart is as young and fresh as any girl's, and I am _almost_ as prone to make idols out of those I love, as I ever was; and this is inconsistent with the devotion owed to God. I do not mean that I really love anybody better than I do Him, but that human friendships tempt me. This easily-besetting sin of mine has cost me more anguish than tongue can tell, and I deeply feel the need of more love to Christ because of my earthly tendencies. I know I would sacrifice every friend to Christ, but I am not always disentangled. How strange this is, how passing strange!... In a religious way I find myself much better off here than at Dorset. But there is yet something apparently "far off, unattained and dim" that I once thought I had caught by the wing, and enjoyed for a season, but which has flown away. I am afraid I am one who has got to be a religious enthusiast, or else dissatisfied and restless. When I give way to an impulse to the first, I care for nothing worldly, and am at peace. But I am unfitted for daily life, for secular talk and reading. Is it so with you? Does it run in our blood? I do long and pray for more light; and I _will_ pray for more love, cost what it may. Sometimes I long to get to heaven, where I shall not have to be curbing my heart with bit and bridle, and can be as loving as I want to be--as I _am_. _To a young Friend abroad--New York, Dec. 8, 1871._ There never will come a time in my life when I shall not need all my Christian friends can do for me in the way of prayer. I am glad you are making such special effort to oppose the icebergs of foreign life; God will meet and bless you in it. Let us, if need be, forsake all others to cleave only unto Him. I don't know of any real misery except coldness between myself and Him. I feel warm and tender sympathy with you in all your struggles, temptations, joys, hopes and fears. As you grow older you will _settle_ more; your troubles, your ups and downs, belong chiefly to your youth. Yes, you are right in saying that Mr. P---- could go through mental conflicts in silence; he does not pine for sympathy as you and I do. You and I are like David, though I forget, at the moment, what he said happened to him when he "kept silence." (On the whole, I don't think he said anything!) I think the proper attitude to take when restless and lonesome and homesick for want of God's sensible presence, is just what we take when we are missing earthly friends for whom we yearn, and whose letters, though better than nothing, do not half feed our hungry hearts, or fill our longing arms. And that attitude is patient waiting. We are such many-sided creatures that I do not doubt you are getting pleasure and profit out of this European trip, although it is alloyed by so much mental suffering. But such is life. It has in it nothing perfect, nothing ideal. And this conviction, deepened every now and then by some new experience, tosses me anew, again and again, back on to that Rock of Ages that ever stands sure and steadfast, and on whom our feet may rest. It is well to have the waves and billows of temptation beat upon us; if only to magnify this Rock and teach us what a refuge He is. I went, last night, with Mr. Prentiss and most of the children, to hear the freedmen and women in a concert at Steinway Hall. It was _packed_ with a brilliant, delighted audience, and it was most interesting to see these young people, simple, dignified, earnest, full of love to Christ, and preparing, by education, to work for Him. They sang "Keep me from sinking down" most sweetly and touchingly. I see you have the blues as I used to do, at your age, and hope you will outgrow them as I have done. I _suffer_ without being _depressed_ in the sense in which I used to be; it is hard to make the distinction, but I am sure there is one. I do not know how far this change has come to me as a happy wife and mother, or how far it is religious. _Aunt Jane's Hero_ was published in 1871. It is hardly inferior to Stepping Heavenward in its pictures of life and character, or in the wisdom of its teaching. The object of the book is to depict a home whose happiness flows from the living Rock, Christ Jesus. It protests also against the extravagance and other evils of the times, which tend to check the growth of such homes, and aims to show that there are still treasures of love and peace on earth, that may be bought without money and without price. * * * * * III. "Holiness and Usefulness go hand-in-hand." No two Souls dealt with exactly alike. Visits to a stricken Home. Another Side of her Life. Visit to a Hospital. Christian Friendship. Letters to a bereaved Mother. Submission not inconsistent with Suffering. Thoughts at the Funeral of a little "Wee Davie." Assurance of Faith. Funeral of Prof. Hopkins. His Character. She entered the new year with weary steps, but with a heart full of tenderness and sympathy. A circle of young friends, living in different parts of the country, looked eagerly to her at this time for counsel, and she was deeply interested in their spiritual progress. She wrote to one of them, January 6, 1872: Your letter has filled my heart with joy. What a Friend and Saviour we have, and how He comes to meet us on the sea, if we attempt to walk there in faith! I trust your path now will be the ever brightening one that shall shine more and more unto the perfect day. Holiness and usefulness go hand in hand, and you will have new work to do for the Lord; praying work especially. _Pray for me_, for one thing; I need a great deal of grace and strength just now. And pray for all the souls that are struggling toward the light. O that everybody lived only for Christ! A few weeks later, writing to the same friend, she thus refers to the "fiery trials" through which she was passing: This season of temptation came right on the heels, if I may use such an expression, of great spiritual illumination. Of all the years of my life, 1869-70 was the brightest, and it seems as if Satan could not endure the sight of so much love and joy, and so took me in hand. I have not liked to say much about this to young people, lest it should discourage them; but I hope you will not allow it to affect you in that way, for you must remember that no two souls are dealt with exactly alike, and that the fact that many are looking up to me may have made it necessary for our dear Lord to let Satan harass and trouble me as he has done. No, let us not be discouraged, either you or I, but rejoice that we are called of our God and Saviour to give Him all we have and all we are.... If we spent more time in thanking God for what He _has_ done for us, He would do more. Malignant scarlet fever and other diseases, had invaded and isolated the household mentioned in the following letter. Their gratitude to Mrs. Prentiss was most touching; it was as if she had been to them an angel from heaven. The story of her visits and loving sympathy became a part of their family history. _To Mrs. Humphrey, New York, Jan. 26, 1872._ I came home half frozen from my early walk this morning, to get warm not only at the fire, but at your letter, which I found awaiting me. I am glad if you got anything out of your visit here. I rather think you and I shall "rattle on" together after we get to heaven.... You say, "How skilfully God does fashion our crosses for us!" Yes, He does. And for my part, I don't want to rest and be happy without crosses--for I can't _do_ without them. People who set themselves up to be pastors and teachers must "learn in suffering" what they teach in sermon and book. I felt a good deal reproved for making so much of mine, however, by my further visits to the house of mourning of which we spoke to you. The little boy died early on the next day, and before his funeral his poor mother, neglected by everybody else, found it some comfort to get into my arms and cry there. It made no difference that twenty years had passed since I had had a sorrow akin to hers; we mothers may cease to grieve, outwardly, but we never forget what has gone out of our sight, or ever grow unsympathetic because time has soothed and quieted us. But I need not say this to _you_. This was on Saturday; all day Monday I was there watching a most lovely little girl, about six years old, writhing in agony; she died early next morning. The next eldest has been in a critical state, but will probably recover a certain degree of health, but as a helpless cripple. Well, I felt that death alone was _inexorable_--other enemies we may hope and pray and fight against--and that while my children lived, I need not despair. The tax on my sympathies in the case of those half-distracted parents has been terrible, and yet I wouldn't accept a cold heart if I had the offer of it. To give you another side of my life, let me tell you of a pleasant dinner party one night last week, when we met Gov. and Mrs. C----, of Massachusetts, and I fell in love with her then and there.... Well, this is a queer world, full of queer things and queer people. Will the next one be more commonplace? I know not. Good-bye. Word has come from that afflicted household that the grandfather has died suddenly of heart disease. His wife died a few weeks ago. Mr. Prentiss saw him on Saturday in vigorous health. _To Miss Rebecca F. Morse, New York, March 5,1872._ Can you tell me where the blotting-pads can be obtained? I have got into a hospital of _spines_; in other words, of people who can only write lying on their backs, one of them an authoress, and I think it would be a mercy to them if I could furnish them with the means of writing with more ease than they do now. I was sorry you could not come last Friday, and hope you will be able to join us Saturday, when the club meets here.... How you would have enjoyed yesterday afternoon with me! I went to call on a lady from Vermont, who is here for spinal treatment, and found in her room another of the patients. Two such bright creatures I never met at once, and we got a-going at such a rate that though I had never seen either of them before, I stayed nearly three hours! I mean to have another dose of them before long, and give them another dose of E. P. I have been reading a book called "The Presence of Christ" [9]--which I liked so well that I got a copy to lend. It is not a great book, but I think it will be a useful one. It says we are all idolaters, and reminds me of my besetting sins in that direction. I feel overwhelmed when I think how many young people are looking to me for light and help, knowing how much I need both myself.... Every now and then some Providential event occurs that wakes us up, and we find that we have been asleep and dreaming, and that what we have been doing that made us fancy ourselves awake, was mechanical. I must be off now to my sewing society, which is a great farce, since I can earn thirty or forty times as much with my pen as I can with my needle, and if they would let me stay at home and write, I would give them the results of my morning's work. But the minute I stop going everybody else stops. _To Mrs. Condict, April 7, 1872._ How I should love to spend this evening with you! This has been our Communion Sunday, and I am sure the service would have been very soothing to your poor, sore heart. And yet why do I say _poor_ when I know it is _rich_? Oh, you might have the same sorrow without faith and patience with which to bear it, and think how dreadful that would be! Your little lamb has been spending his first Sunday with the Good Shepherd and other lambs of the flock, and has been as happy as the day is long. Perhaps your two children and mine are claiming kinship together. If they met in a foreign land they would surely claim it for our sakes; why not in the land that is not foreign, and not far off? But still these are not the thoughts to bring you special comfort. "Thy will be done!" does the whole. And yet my heart aches for you. Some one, who had never had a real sorrow, told Mrs. N. that if she submitted to God's will as she ought, she would cease to suffer. What a fallacy this is! Mrs. N. was comforted by hearing that your little one was taken away by the consequences of the fever, as her Nettie was, for she had reproached herself with having neglected her to see to Johnny, who died first, and thought this neglect had allowed her to take cold. I feel very sorry when mothers torture themselves in this needless way, as if God could not avert ill consequences, if He chose. I have shed more than one tear to-day. I heard last night that my dearly-loved brother, Prof. Hopkins, is on his dying-bed. I never thought of his dying, he comes of such a long-lived race. I expect to go to see him, and if I find I can be of any use or comfort, stay a week or two. His death will come very near to me, but he is a saintly man, and I am glad for him that he can go. How thankful we shall be when our turn comes! The ladies at our little meeting were deeply interested in what I had to tell them about your dear boy, and prayed for you with much feeling. May our dear Lord bless you abundantly with His sweet presence! I know He will. And yet He has willed it that you should suffer. "Himself hath done it!" Oh how glad He will be when the dispensation of suffering is over, and He can gather His beloved round Him, tearless, free from sorrow and care, and all forever at rest. _May 5th._--Yesterday, the friend at East Dorset whose three children died within a few weeks of each other, sent me some verses, of which I copy one for you: "The eye of faith beholds A golden stair, like that of old, whereon Fair spirits go and come; God's angels coming down on errands sweet, Our angels going home." I hope this golden stair, up which your dear boy climbed "with shout and song," is covered with God's angels coming down to bless and comfort you. One of the most touching passages in the Bible, to my mind, is that which describes angels as coming to minister to Jesus after His temptations in the wilderness. It gives one such an idea of His helplessness! Just as I was going out to church this morning, Mr. Prentiss told me of the death of a charming "baby-boy," one of our lambs, and I could scarcely help bursting into tears, though I had only seen him once. You can hardly understand how I feel, as a pastor's wife, toward our people. Their sorrows come right home. I have a friend also hanging in agonizing suspense over a little one who has been injured by a fall; she is sweetly submissive, but you know what a mother's heart is. I have yet another friend, who has had to give up her baby. She is a young mother, and far from her family, but says she has "perfect peace." So from all sides I hear sorrowful sounds, but so much faith and obedience mingled with the sighs, that I can only wonder at what God can do. _To Miss Morse, May 7, 1872._ How true and how strange it is that our deepest sorrows, spring from our sweetest affections; that as we love much, we suffer much. What instruments of torture our hearts are! The passage you quote is all true but people are apt to be impatient in affliction, eager to drink the bitter cup at a draught rather than drop by drop, and fain to dig up the seed as soon as it is planted, to see if it has germinated. I am fond of quoting that passage about "the peaceable fruit of righteousness" coming "afterward." I have just come from the funeral of a little "Wee Davie"; all the crosses around his coffin were tiny ones, and he had a small floral harp in his hand. I thought as I looked upon his face, still beautiful, though worn, that even babies have to be introduced to the cross, for he had a week of fearful struggle before he was released.... I enclose an extract I made for you from a work on the baptism of the Holy Spirit. This was all the paper I had at hand at the moment. The recipe for "curry" I have copied into my recipe-book, and the two lines at the top of the page I addressed to M. A queer mixture of the spiritual and the practical, but no stranger than life's mixtures always are. _To a young Friend, New York, May 20th, 1872._ As to assurance of faith, I think we may all have that, and in my own darkest hours this faith has not been disturbed. I have just come home from a brief visit to Miss ----, with whom I had some interesting discussions. I use the word _discussions_ advisedly, for we love each other in constant disagreement. She believes in holiness by faith, while denying that she has herself attained it. I think her life, as far as I can see it, very true and beautiful. We spent a whole evening talking about temptation. Not long ago I met with a passage, in French, to this effect--I quote from memory only: "God has some souls whom He can not afflict in any ordinary way, for they love Him so that they are ready for any outward sorrow or bereavement. He therefore scourges them with inward trials, vastly more painful than any outward tribulation could be; thus crucifying them to self." I can not but think that this explains Mrs. ----'s experience, and perhaps my own; at any rate I feel that we are all in the hands of an unerring Physician, who will bring us, through varying paths, home to Himself. I had a call the other day from an intelligent Christian woman, whom I had not seen for eighteen years. She said that some time ago her attention was called to the subject of personal holiness, and as she is a great reader, she devoured everything she could get hold of, and finally became a dogmatic perfectionist. But experience modified these views, and she fell back on the Bible doctrine of an indwelling Christ, with the conviction that just in proportion to this indwelling will be the holiness of the soul. This is precisely my own belief. This is the doctrine I preached in Stepping Heavenward and I have so far seen nothing to change these views, while I desire and pray to be taught any other truth if I am wrong. I believe God does reveal Himself and His truth to those who are willing to know it. _To Miss Morse, New York, May 31, 1872._ I got home yesterday from Williamstown, where I went, with my husband, to attend the funeral of my dearly beloved brother, Professor Hopkins. He literally starved to death. He died as he had lived, beautifully, thinking of and sending messages to all his friends, and on his last day repeating passages of Scripture and even, weak as he was, joining in hymns sung at his bedside. The day of the funeral was a pretty trying one for me, as there was not only his loss to mourn, but there were traces of my darling mother and sister, who both died in that house, all over it; some of my mother's silver, a white quilt she made when a girl, my sister's library, her collection of shells and minerals, her paintings, her little conservatory, the portrait of her only child, dressed in his uniform (he was killed in one of the battles of the Wilderness). Then, owing to the rain, none of us ladies were allowed to go into the cemetery, and I had thought much of visiting my sister's grave and seeing her boy lying on one side and her husband on the other. But our disappointments are as carefully planned for us as our sorrows, so I have not a word to say. After services at the house, we walked to the church, which we entered through a double file of uncovered students. One of the most touching things about the service was the sight of four students standing in charge of the remains, two at the head and two at the foot of the coffin. His poor folks came in crowds, with their hands full of flowers to be cast into his grave. My brother said he never saw so many men shed tears at a funeral, and I am sure I never did; some sobbing as convulsively as women. I could not help asking myself when my heart was swelling so with pain, whether love _paid_. Love is sweet when all goes well, but oh how fearfully exacting it is when separation comes! How many tithes it takes of all we have and are! A worthy young woman in our church has been driven into hysterics by reading "Holiness through Faith." I went to see her as soon as I got home from W. yesterday, but she was asleep under the influence of an opiate. There is no doubt that too much self-scrutiny is pernicious, especially to weak-minded, ignorant young people. It was said of Prof. Hopkins that he would have been a mystic but for his love to souls, and I am afraid these new doctrines tend too much to the seeking for peace and joy, too little to seeking the salvation of the careless and worldly. But I hesitate to criticise any class of good people, feeling that those who live in most habitual communion with God receive light directly and constantly from on high; and of that communion we can not seek too much. [10] * * * * * IV. Christian Parents to expect Piety in their Children. Perfection. "People make too much Parade of their Troubles." "Higher Life" Doctrines. Letter to Mrs. Washburn. Last Visit to Williamstown. Early in June she went to Dorset. The summer, like that of 1871, was shadowed by anxiety and inward conflict; but her care-worn thoughts were greatly soothed by her rural occupations, by visits from young friends, and by the ever-fresh charms of nature around her. _To a Christian Friend, Dorset, June 9, 1872._ I was obliged to give up my much-desired visit to you. We went on to the funeral of Prof. Hopkins, and that took three days out of the busy time just before coming here. I particularly wanted you to know _at the time_ that my three younger children united with the church on Sunday last, but had not a moment in which to write you. It was a touching sight to our people. Mr. P. looked down on his children so lovingly, and kissed them when the covenant had been read. He said ---'s face was so full of soul that he could not help it, and his heart yearned over them all. Someone said there was not a dry eye in the house. I felt not elated, not cast down, but at peace. I think it plain that Christian parents are to _expect_ piety in their children, and expect it early. In mine it is indeed "first the blade," and they will, no doubt, have their trials and temptations. But it seems to me I must leave them in God's hands and let Him lead them as He will. It was very sweet to have the elements passed to me by their young hands. Offer one earnest prayer for them at least, that they may prove true soldiers and servants of Jesus Christ. No doubt your two little sainted ones looked on and loved the children of their mother's friend. The following testimony of one of President Garfield's classmates and intimate friends may fitly be added here: "For him there was but one Mark Hopkins in all the world; but for Professor Albert Hopkins also, or 'Prof. Al.,' as he was called in those days, the General--not only while at college, but all through life-- entertained the highest regard, both as a man and a scholar. His intellectual attainments were thought by Gen. G. to be of an unusually fine order, rivalling those of his brother, and often eliciting the admiration not only of himself, but of all the other students. In speaking of his Williamstown life, Gen. Garfield always referred to Prof. Hopkins in the most affectionate manner; and, both from his own statements and my personal observation, I know that their mutual college relations were of the pleasantest nature possible." On the subject of perfection, you say I am looking for angelic perfection. I see no difference in kind. Perfection is perfection to my mind, and I have always thought it a dangerous thing for a soul to fancy it had attained it. Yet, in her last letters to me, Miss ---- virtually professes to have become free from sin. She says self and sin are the same thing, and that she is entirely dead to self. What is this but complete sanctification? What can an angel say more? I feel painfully bewildered amid conflicting testimonies, and sometimes long to flee away from everybody. Miss ----'s last letter saddened me, I will own. You say, "I am in danger of becoming morbid, or stupid, or wild, or something I ought not." Why in danger? According to your own doctrine you are safe; being "entirely sanctified from moment to moment." At any rate I can say nothing "to quicken" you, for I _am_ morbid and stupid, though just now not wild. Those sharp temptations have ceased, though perhaps only for a season; but I have been physically weakened by them, and have got to take care of myself, go to bed early, and vegetate all I can--and this when I ought to be hard at work ministering to other souls. The fact is, I don't know anything and don't do anything, but just get through the day somehow, wondering what all this strange, unfamiliar state of things will end in. Poor M---- has gone crazy on "Holiness through Faith," and will probably have to go to an asylum.... Our little home looks and is very pleasant. I take some comfort in it, and try to realise the goodness that gives me such a luxury. But a soul that has known what it is to live to Christ can be _happy_ only in Him. May He be all in all to you, and consciously so to me in His own good time. _To Miss Woolsey, Dorset, June 23, 1872._ I wish you could come and take a look at us this quiet afternoon. Not a soul is to be seen or heard; the mountains are covered with the soft haze that says the day is warm but not oppressive, and here and there a brilliantly colored bird flies by, setting "Tweedle Dum," our taciturn canary, into tune. M. and I have driven at our out-door work like a pair of steam-engines, and you can imagine how dignified I am from the fact that an old fuddy-duddy who does occasional jobs for me, summons me to my window by a "Hullo!" beneath it, while G. says to us, "Where are you girls going to sit this afternoon?" Your sister's allusion to Watts and Select Hymns reminds me of ages long past, when I used to sing the whole book through as I marched night after night through my room, carrying a colicky baby up and down for fifteen months, till I became a living skeleton. We do contrive to live through queer experiences. _To a young Friend, Dorset, Aug. 3, 1872._ The lines you kindly copied for me have the ring of the true metal and I like them exceedingly. People make too much parade of their troubles and too much fuss about them; the fact is we are all born to tribulation, as we also are to innumerable joys, and there is no sense in being too much depressed or elated by either. "The saddest birds a season find to sing." Few if any lives flow in unmingled currents. As to myself, my rural tastes are so strong, and I have so much to absorb and gratify me, that I _need_ a mixture of experience. Two roses that bloomed in my garden this morning, made my heart leap with delight, and when I get off in the woods with M., and we collect mosses and ferns and scarlet berries, I am conscious of great enjoyment in them. At the same time, if I thought it best to tell the other side of the story, I should want some very black ink with which to do it. We must take life as God gives it to us, without murmurings and disputings, and with the checks on our natural eagerness that keeps us mindful of Him. You speak of the "Higher Life people." I still hold my judgment in suspense in regard to their doctrines, reading pretty much all they send me, and asking daily for light from on high. I have had some talks this summer with Dr. Stearns on these subjects, and he urges me to keep where I am, but I try not to be too much influenced for or against doctrines I do not, by experience, understand. Let us do the will of God (and suffer it) and we shall learn of the doctrine. _To Mrs. Washburn, Kauinfels, Friday Evening, (September, 1872)._ I have done nothing but tear my hair ever since you left, to think I let you go. It would have been so easy to send you to Manchester to-morrow morning, after a night here, and an evening over our little wood-fire, but we were so glad to see you both, so bewildered by your sudden appearance, that neither of us thought of it till you were gone. And now you are still within reach, and we want you to reconsider your resolution to turn your backs upon us after such a long, fatiguing journey, and eating no salt with us. I did not urge your staying because I do so hate to be urged myself. But I want you to feel what a great pleasure it would be to us if you could make up your minds to stay at least over Sunday, or if to-morrow and Sunday are unpleasant, just a day or two more, to take our favorite drives with us, and give us what you may never have a chance to give us again. I declare I shall think you are crazy, if you don't stay a few days, now that you are here. We have been longing to have you come, and only waiting for our place to be a little less naked in order to lay violent hands on you; but now you have seen the nakedness of the land, we don't care, but want you to see more of it. This is the time, and _exactly_ the time, when we have nothing to do but to enjoy our visitors, and next year the house may be running over. And if you don't come now, you'll have the plague of having to come some other time, and it is a long, formidable journey. Why _didn't_ we just take and lock you up when we had hold of you! Well, now I've torn out _all_ my hair, and people will be saying, "Go up, thou bald-head." Besides--you left them bunch-berries! and do you suppose you can go home without them? Why, it wouldn't be safe. You would be run off the track, and scalded by steam, and broken all to pieces, and caught on the cow-catcher, and get lost, and be run away with, and even struck by lightning, I shouldn't wonder. And now if you go in to-morrow's train you'll catch the small-pox and the measles and the scarlet fever and the yellow fever, and all the colors-in-the-rainbow fever, and go into a consumption and have the pleurisy, and the jaundice and the tooth-ache and the headache, and, above all, the conscience-ache. And you never ate any of our corn or our beans! You never so much as asked the receipt for our ironclads! You haven't seen our cow. You haven't been down cellar. You haven't fished in our brook. You haven't been here at all, now I come to think of it. I dreamed you flew through, but it was nothing _but_ a dream. And the houses have a habit of burning down, and ours is going to do as the rest do, and then how'll you feel in your minds? And when folks set themselves up against us, and won't let us have our own way, why then "I tell my daughter What _makes_ folks do as they'd oughter not, And why _don't_ they do as they'd oughter?" And we all pine away and die like the babes in the woods, and nobody's left to cover us up with leaves. Send all these arguments home by telegram, and your folks will shoot you if you dare to go. I could write another sheet if it would do any good. Now do lay my words to heart, and come right back. _To Miss Morse, Dorset, Oct. 7, 1872._ I sent home my servants a month ago, and they have been getting the parsonage to rights, while I have in their places two dear old souls who came to live with me twenty years ago. One stayed ten years and then got married, the other I parted with when my children died because I did not need her. It has been a green spot in the summer to have these affectionate, devoted creatures in the house. We have had only one slight frost, but the woods have been gradually changing, and are in spots very beautiful. We (you know what that word means) have been off gathering bright leaves for ourselves and the servants, who care for pretty things just as we do. Yet not a flower has gone; we have had a host of verbenas and gladioli, some Japanese lilies, and so on, and have been able to give some pleasure to those who have not time to cultivate them for themselves. It has been a dreadful season for sickness here, and flowers have been wanted in many a sick-room, and at some funerals. Since I wrote you last "we" have been to Williamstown. I wanted to get possession of my sister's private papers. Everything passed off nicely; I burned a large amount and brought away a trunk full, a part of which I have been reading with deep interest. Her journals date back to the age of fifteen, though to read the early ones you would never dream of her being less than twenty or thirty. She was a wonderful woman, and as I found such ample material for a memorial of her life, I felt half tempted to carry out her husband's wishes and complete one. But on the whole I do not think I shall. You can imagine how my soul has been stirred by the whole thing; the farewell to the familiar objects of my childhood, the sense of a new race taking possession of her conservatory, her shells, her minerals, her pictures, her German, French, Italian, Spanish, Latin, Hebrew and Greek library--dear me! but I need not enlarge on it to you. And how stupid it is not to forget it all alongside of her ten years in heaven! [1] "Especially after a time of some special seasons of grace, and some special new supplies of grace, received in such seasons, (as after the holy sacrament), then will he set on most eagerly, when he knows of the richest booty. The pirates that let the ships pass as they go by empty, watch them well, when they return richly laden; so doth this great Pirate."--Archbishop Leighton, on I Peter, v. 8. [2] "Cynegvius, a valiant Athenian, being in a great sea-fight against the Medes, espying a ship of the enemy's well manned, and fitted for service, when no other means would serve, he grasped it with his hands to maintain the fight; and when his right hand was cut off, he held close with his left; but both hands being taken off, he held it fast with his teeth." [3] The following lines found on one of its blank pages were written perhaps at this time: Precious companion! rendered dear By trial-hours of many a year, I love thee with a tenderness Which words have never yet defined. When tired and sad and comfortless, With aching heart and weary mind, How oft thy words of promise stealing Like Gilead's balm-drops--soft and low. Have touched the heart with power of healing, And soothed the sharpest hour of woe. [4] A friend writing to Mrs. Prentiss, under date of September 24, 1872, refers to Lady Stanley's high praise of The Story Lizzie Told, and then adds: "You must be so accustomed to friendly 'notices'--so almost bored by them--that I hesitate to tell you of meeting another admirer of yours in the person of Mrs. ----, of Philadelphia, who was indebted to you for the return of a little text-book. She means to call on you some day, if she is ever in New York, to thank you in person for that act of kindness of yours, and for your 'Stepping Heavenward.' She is a daughter of the late Chief Justice of Pennsylvania. Her mother, a staunch old Scotch lady over 80, has just returned from Europe. Mrs. ---- is a very interesting woman, of warm religious feelings and very outspoken. She was the companion of the famous Mrs. H., of Philadelphia, all through the war,--as one of the independent workers, or perhaps in connection with the Christian Commission. She witnessed the battle of Chancellorsville--a part of it at Mary's Heights, and has told me a great deal that was thrilling--told as _she_ tells it--even at this late day. She has the profoundest belief in what is called the 'work of faith' by prayer and I don't believe she would shrink from accepting Prof. Tyndall's challenge." [5] From the "Power of the Cross of Christ." [6] "Briefe an eine Freundin," a remarkable little book, full of light and sweetness. [7] Praying before others. [8] Since the warning we had the other day that we may be snatched from our children, ought we not to try to form some plan for them in case of such an emergency? I can't account for it, that in those fearful moments I thought only of them. I should have said I ought to have had some thought of the world we seemed to be hurrying to. I suppose there was the instinctive yet blind sense that the preparation for the next life had been made for us by the Lord, and that, as far as that life was concerned, we had nothing to do but to enter it. I shudder when I think what a desolate home this might be to-day. Poor things! they've got everything before them, without one experience and discipline!--_From a letter to her husband, dated Dorset, Sept. 17, 1871._ [9] The Presence of Christ. Lectures on the XXIII. Psalm. By Anthony W. Thorold, Lord Bishop of Rochester. A. D. F. Randolph & Co. [10] Albert Hopkins was born in Stockbridge, Mass., July 14,1807. He was graduated at Williams College in the class of 1826, and three years later became Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy in the same institution. Astronomy was afterward added to his chair. In 1834 he went abroad. In the summer of 1835 he organised and conducted a Natural History expedition to Nova Scotia, the first expedition of the kind in this country. Two years later he built at his own expense, and in part by the labor of his own hands, the astronomical observatory at Williamstown. In this also, it is said, in advance of all others erected exclusively for purposes of instruction. He was a devoted and profound student, as well as an accomplished teacher, of natural science. But he was still more distinguished for his piety and his religious influence in the college. Hundreds of students in successive classes learned to love and revere him as a holy man of God--many of them as their spiritual father. The history of American colleges affords probably no instance of a happier, or more remarkable, union of true science with that personal holiness and zeal for God, by which hearts are won for Christ. Full of faith and of the Holy Ghost, he did the work of an evangelist for more than forty years--not in the college only, but all over the town. During the last six years of his life he devoted himself especially to the White Oaks--a district in the north-east part of Williamstown-which had long before excited his sympathy on account of the poverty, vice, and degradation which marked the neighborhood. He identified himself with the population by buying and carrying on a small farm among them. He also established a Sunday-school, and then he built with the aid of friends a tasteful chapel, which was dedicated in October, 1866. Later "the Church of Christ in the White Oaks" was organised, and here, as his failing strength allowed, he preached and labored the rest of his days. Prof. Hopkins was an enthusiastic lover of nature. A few years before his death he organised a society called "The Alpine Club," composed chiefly of young ladies, with whom, as their chosen leader, he made excursions summer after summer--camping out often among the hills. He took them to many a picturesque nook and retreat, of which they had never heard, in the mountains near by. He also explored with them other interesting and remoter portions of northern Berkshire, and interpreted to them on the spot the thoughts of God, as they appeared in the infinitely varied and beautiful details of His works. In these excursions he seemed as young as any of his young companions, with feelings as fresh and joyous as theirs. In earlier years he was a very grave man, with something of the old Puritan sternness in his looks and ways, and he bore still the aspect of a homo gravis; but his gentleness, his tender devotion to the gay young companions who surrounded him, and the almost boyish delight with which he shared in their pleasures, took away all its sternness and lighted up his strongly-marked countenance with singular grace and beauty. In these closing years of his life he was, indeed, the ideal of a ripe and noble Christian manhood. His name is embalmed in the memory of a great company of his old pupils, now scattered far and wide, from the White House at Washington to the remotest corners of the earth. P.S.--This was written soon after the inauguration of Gen. Garfield, to whom allusion is made. His high regard for the venerable ex-President of Williams College--the Rev. Dr. Mark Hopkins--he made known to the whole country, but the younger brother was also the object of his warmest esteem and love, and the feeling was heartily reciprocated. Nearly a score of years ago, when he was just emerging into public notice from the bloody field of Chickamauga, Prof. Hopkins spoke of him to the writer in terms so full of praise and so prophetic of his future career, that they seem in perfect harmony with the sentiment at once of admiration and poignant grief which to-day moves the heart of the whole American people--yea, one might almost say, which is inspiring all Christendom.--_Saturday, Sept. 24, 1881._ CHAPTER XIII. PEACEABLE FRUIT. 1873-1874. I. Effect of spiritual Conflict upon her religious Life. Overflowing Affections. Her Husband called to Union Theological Seminary. Baptism of Suffering. The Character of her Friendships. No perfect Life. Prayer. "Only God can satisfy a Woman." Why human Friendship is a Snare. Letters. The trouble which had so long weighed upon her heart, crossed with her the threshold of 1873, but long before the close of the year it had in large measure passed away. Such suffering, however, always leaves its marks behind; and when complicated with ill-health or bodily weakness, often lingers on after its main cause has been removed. It was so in her case; she was, perhaps, never again conscious of that constant spiritual delight which she had once enjoyed. But if less full of sunshine, her religious life was all the time growing deeper and more fruitful, was centering itself more entirely in Christ and rising faster heavenward. Its sympathies also became, if possible, still more tender and loving. Her whole being, indeed, seemed to gather new light and sweetness from the sharp discipline she had been passing through. Even when most tried and tempted, as has been said, she had kept her trouble to herself; few of her most intimate friends knew of its existence; to the world she appeared a little more thoughtful and somewhat careworn, but otherwise as bright as ever. But now, at length, the old vivacity and playfulness and merry laugh began to come back again. Never did her heart glow with fresher, more ardent affections. In a letter to a young cousin, who was moving about from place to place, she says: I shall feel more free to write often, if you can tell me that the postmaster at C. forwards your letters from the office at no expense to you, as he ought to do. It is very silly in me to mind your paying three cents for one of my love-letters, but it's a Payson trait, and I can't help it, though I should be provoked enough if you _did_ mind paying a dollar apiece for them. There's consistency for you! Well, I know, and I'm awfully proud of it, that you'll get very few letters from as loving a fountain as my heart is. I've got enough to drown a small army--and sometimes when you're homesick, and cousin-Lizzy-sick, and friend-sick, I shall come to you, done up in a sheet of paper, and set you all in a breeze. Her letters during the first half of this year were few, and relate chiefly to those aspects of the Christian life with which her own experience was still making her so familiar. "God's plan with most of us," she wrote to Mrs. Humphrey, "appears to be a design to make us flexible, twisting us this way and that, now giving, now taking; but always at work for and in us. Almost every friend we have is going through some peculiar discipline. I fancy there is no period in our history when we do not _need_ and _get_ the sharp rod of correction. The thing is to grow strong under it, and yet to walk softly." "I do not care how much I suffer," she wrote to a friend, "if God will purge and purify me and fit me for greater usefulness. What are trials but angels to beckon us nearer to Him! And I do hope that mine are to be a blessing to some other soul, or souls, in the future. I can't think suffering is meant to be wasted, if fragments of bread created miraculously, were not." She studied about this time with great interest the teaching of Scripture concerning the baptism of the Holy Ghost. The work of the Spirit had not before specially occupied her thoughts. In her earlier writings she had laid but little stress upon it--not because she doubted its reality or its necessity, but because her mind had not been led in that direction. Stepping Heavenward is full of God and of Christ, but there is in it little express mention of the Spirit and His peculiar office in the life of faith. When this fact was brought to her notice she herself appeared to be surprised at it, and would gladly have supplied the omission. To be sure, there is no mention at all of the Holy Spirit in several of the Epistles of the New Testament; but a carefully-drawn picture of Christian life and progress, like Stepping Heavenward, would, certainly, have been rendered more complete and attractive by fuller reference to the Blessed Comforter and His inspiring influences. _To a young Friend, New York, Jan. 8, 1873._ I feel very sorry for you that you are under temptation. I have been led, for some time, to pray specially for the tempted, for I have learned to pity them as greater sufferers than those afflicted in any other way. For, in proportion to our love to Christ, will be the agony of terror lest we should sin and fall, and so grieve and weary Him. "One sinful wish could make a hell of heaven"; strong language, but not too strong, to my mind. I can only say, suffer, but do not yield. Sometimes I think that silent, submissive patience is better than struggle. It is sweet to be in the sunshine of the Master's smile, but I believe our souls need winter as well as summer, night as well as day. Perhaps not to the end; I have not come to that yet, and so do not know; I speak from my own experience, as far as it goes. Temptation has this one good side to it: it keeps us _down_; we are ashamed of ourselves, we see we have nothing to boast of. I told you, you will perhaps remember, that you were going to enter the valley of humiliation in which I have dwelt so long, but I trust we are only taking it in our way to the land of Beulah. And how we "pant to be there"! What a curious friendship ours has been! and it is one that can never sever--unless, indeed, we fall away from Christ, which may He in mercy forbid!... I do pray for you twice every day, and hope you pray for me. I do long so to know the truth and to enter into it. Certainly I have got some new light during the last year, in the midst of my trials, both within and without. To another young friend she writes a few days later: I remember when I was, religiously, at your age I was longing for holiness, but my faith staggered at some of the conditions for it. I had no conception, much as Christ was to me, what He was going to become. But I wish I could make you a birth-day present of my experience since then, and you could have Him now, instead of learning, as I had to learn Him, in much tribulation. _To Mrs. Condict, Jan. 15, 1873._ I have been meaning, for some days, to write you about the Professorship. [1] It is a new one, and is called "the Skinner and McAlpine" chair, and Mr. Prentiss says there could not be a more agreeable field of usefulness. It is most likely that he will feel it to be his duty to accept. As to myself, I am about apathetic on the subject. My will has been broken over the Master's knee, if I may use such an expression, by so much suffering, that I look with indifference on such outward changes. We can be made willing to be burnt alive, if need be. For four or five years to come I shall not be obliged to leave the church I love so dearly; if the Seminary is moved out to Harlem, it will be different; but it is not worth while to think of that now. It seems to me that Mr. P. has reached an age when, never being very strong, a change like this may be salutary. _February 3d._--You will be sorry to hear that dear Mrs. C. is quite sick. Her daughters are all worn out with the care of her. I was there all day Saturday, but I can do nothing in the way of night watching; nor much at any time. A very little over-exertion knocks me up this winter. It is just as much as I can do to keep my head above water.... Sometimes I think that the _dreadful_ experience I have been passing through is God's way of baptizing me; some _have_ to be baptized with suffering. Certainly He has been sitting as the Refiner, bringing down my pride, emptying me of this and that, and not leaving me a foot to stand on. If it all ends in sanctification I don't care what I suffer. Though cast down, I am not in despair. It is an encouragement to hear Mahan compare states of the soul to house-cleaning time. [2] It is just so with me. Every chair and table, every broom and brush is out of place, topsy-turvy.... But I can't believe God has been wasting the last two years on me; I can't help hoping that He is answering my prayer, my cry for holiness--only in a strange way. Dr. and Mrs. Abbot spent Sunday and Monday with us a week ago, and I read to them Dr. Steele's three tracts and lent them Mahan. They were much interested, but I do not know how much struck. I can not smile, as some do, at Dr. Steele's testimony. I believe in it fully and heartily. If I do not know what it is to "find God real," I do not know anything. Never was my faith in the strongest doctrines of Christianity stronger than it is now. _Feb. 13th._--I spent part of yesterday in reading Stepping Heavenward! You will think that very strange till I add that it was in German; and, as the translator has all my books, I wanted to know whether she had done this work satisfactorily before authorising her to proceed with the rest. She has omitted so much, that it is rather an abridgment than a translation; otherwise it is well done. But she has so purged it of vivacity, that I am afraid it will plod on leaden feet, if it plods at all, heavenward. And now I must hurry off to my sewing-circle. _To a young Friend, April 4, 1873._ I want to correct any mistaken impression I have made on you in conversation. The utmost I meant to say was, that I had got new light intellectually, or theologically, on the subject of the working of the Spirit. In the sense in which I use the words "baptism of the Holy Ghost," I certainly do not consider that I have received it. I think it means _perfect consecration_.... Thus far, no matter what people profess, I have never come into close contact with any life that I did not find more or less imperfect. I find, in other words, the best human beings fallible, and _very fallible_. The best I can say of myself is, that I see the need of _immense_ advances in the divine life. I find it hard to be patient with myself when I see how far I am from reaching even my own poor standard; but if I do not love Christ and long to please Him, I do not love anybody or anything. And if I have talked less to you on these sacred subjects this winter, it has been partly owing to my seeing less of you, and an impalpable but real barrier between us which I have not known how to account for, but which made me cautious in pushing religion on you. Young people usually have their ups and downs and fluctuations of feeling before they settle down on to fixed _principles_, paying no regard to feeling, and older Christians should bear with them, make allowance for this, and never obtrude their own views or experiences. I think you will come out all right. Satan will fight hard for you, and perhaps for a time get the upper hand; but I believe the Lord and Master will prevail. Perhaps we are never dearer to Him than when the wings on which we once _flew_ to Him, hang drooping and broken at our side, and we have to make our weary way on foot. I am always thankful to have my heart stirred and warmed by Christian letters or conversation; always glad to see any signs of the presence of the Holy Spirit at work in a human soul. But never force yourself to write or talk of spiritual things; try rather to get so full of Christ that mention of Him shall be natural and spontaneous. _To the Same, April 15, 1873._ I have just been reading the sermon of Dr. Hopkins on prayer you sent me. It sounds just like him. I think his brother and mine (by marriage) would have treated the subject just as logically and far more practically; still, under the circumstances, that was not desirable. As to myself, I would rather have the simple testimony of some unknown praying woman, who is in the habit of "_waiting_" on God, than all the theological discussions in the world. The subject, as you know, is one of deep interest to me. I have not answered your letter, because I was not quite sure what it was best to say. During the winter I was not sure what had come between us, and thought it best to let time show; and I have been harassed and perplexed by certain anxieties, with which it did not seem necessary to trouble you, to a degree that may have given me a preoccupied manner. There have been points where I wanted a divine illumination which I did not get. I wanted to hear, "This is the way, walk in it"; but that word has not come yet, and almost all my spiritual life has been running in that one line, keeping me, necessarily, out of sympathy with everybody. As far as this has been a fault, it has reacted upon you, to whom I ought to have been more of a help. But I can say that it delights me to see you even trying to take a step onward, and to know that while still young, and with the temptations of youth about you, you have set your face heavenward. Your temptations, like mine, are through the affections. "Only God can satisfy a woman"; and yet we try, every now and then, to see if we can't find somebody else worth leaning on. _We never shall_, and it is a great pity we can not always realise it. I never deliberately make this attempt now, but am still liable to fall into the temptation. I am _sure_ that I can never be really happy and at rest out of or far from Christ, nor do I want to be. Getting new and warm friends is all very well, but I emerge from this snare into a deepening conviction that I must learn to say, "None but Christ."... Now, dear ----, it is a dreadful thing to be cold towards our best Friend'; a calamity if it comes upon us through Satan; a sin and folly if it is the result of any fault or omission of our own. There is but one refuge from it, and that is in just going to Him and telling Him all about it. We can not force ourselves to love Him, but we can ask Him to _give_ us the love, and sooner or later He _will_. He may seem not to hear, the answer may come gradually and imperceptibly, but it will come. He has given you one friend at least who prays for your spiritual advance every day. I hope you pray thus for me. Friendship that does not do that is not worth the name. _April 17th_.--Of course, I'll take the will for the deed and consider myself covered with "orange blossoms," like a babe in the wood. And it is equally of course that I was married with lots of them among my lovely auburn locks, and wore a veil in point lace twenty feet long. I have had several titles given me in Dorset--among others, a "child of nature"--and last night I was shown a letter in which (I hope it is not wicked to quote it in such a connexion) I am styled "a Princess in Christ's Kingdom." Can you cap this climax? * * * * * II. Goes to Dorset. Christian Example. At Work among her Flowers. Dangerous Illness. Her Feeling about Dying. Death an "Invitation" from Christ. "The Under-current bears _Home_." "More Love, More love!" A Trait of Character. Special Mercies. What makes a sweet Home. Letters. Early in June, accompanied by the three younger children, she went to Dorset. This change always put her into a glow of pleasurable emotion. Once out of the city, she was like a bird let loose from its cage. In a letter to her husband, dated "Somewhere on the road, five o'clock P.M.," she wrote: "M. is laughing at me because, Paddy-like, I proposed informing you in a P. S. that we had reached Dorset; as if the fact of mailing a letter there could not prove it. So I will take her advice and close this now. I feel that our cup of mercies is running over. We ought to be ever so good! And I _am_ ever so loving!" "We are all as gay as larks," she wrote a few days later; and in spite of heat, drought, over-work and sickness, she continued in this mood most of the summer. But while "gay as a lark," she was also grave and thoughtful. Her delight in nature seemed only to increase her interest in divine things and her longing to be like Christ. In a letter to one of her young friends, having spoken of prayer as "the greatest favor one friend can render another," she adds: But perhaps I may put one beyond it--Christian example. I ought to be so saintly, so consecrated, that you could not be with me and not catch the very spirit of heaven; never get a letter from me that did not quicken your steps in the divine life. But while I believe the principle of love to Christ is entrenched in the depths of my soul, the emotion of love is hot always in that full play I want it to be. No doubt He judges us by the principle He sees to exist in us, but we can't help judging ourselves, in spite of ourselves, by our feelings. At church this morning my mind kept wandering to and fro; I thought of you about twenty times; thought about my flowers; thought of 501 other things; and then got up and sang "I love Thy kingdom, Lord," as if I cared for that and nothing else. What He has to put up with in me! But I believe in Him, I love Him, I hate everything in my soul and in my life that is unlike Him. I hope the confession of my shortcomings won't discourage you; it is no proof that at my age you will not be far beyond such weakness and folly as often carry me away captive.... As far as earthly blessings go I am as near perfect happiness as a human being can be; everything is _heaped_ on me. What I want is more of Christ, and that is what I hope you pray that I may have. To another young friend she writes, June 12th: We have varied experiences, sick or well, and the discipline of a heart not perfectly satisfied with what it gets from God, often alternates with the peace of which you speak as just now yours. What a blessed thing this "very peace of God" is! There is no earthly joy to be compared with it. But to go patiently on without it, when it is not given, is, I think, a great achievement; for instance, if I held no communication with you for a year, would it not be a wonderful proof of your love to and faith in me, if you kept on writing me and telling me your joys and trials? To go back--I have been a good deal confused by the contradictory testimony of different Christians, and am driven more and more to a conviction that human beings, _at the best_, are very fallible. We must get our light directly from on high. At the same time we influence each other for right or for wrong, and one who is thoroughly upright and true, will, unconsciously, influence and help those about him.... I am enjoying, as I always do, having the three younger children close about me here, and all sleeping on my floor. We are really like _four_ children, continually frolicking together. We are all crowded now into my den, and I wish you were here with us to be the "_fifth_ kitten." Did you ever read that story? _To Mrs. Catherine G. Leeds, Dorset, July 12, 1873._ It was ever so kind in you to let us share in your relief and pleasure, and we unite in affectionate congratulations to you all. I do hope this new and precious treasure will be spared to his dear mother, and grow up to be her stay and staff years hence. It is the nicest thing in the world to have a baby. What marvels they are in every respect, but especially in their royal power over us! In spite of the dry weather we have had a pleasant summer, so far. Just before we entirely burned up and turned to tinder, showers came to our relief, and our gardens are putting on some faint smiles and making some promises. I did not allow a drop of water to be wasted for weeks; dish-water, soap-suds, dairy water, everything went to my flower-beds, and each night, after Mr. Prentiss came, a barrel-full was carted up from the pond for me; how many the rest used I don't know. Disposing of such a load has not been blessed to my health, and I have had to draw in my horns a little, but M. and I work generally like two day-laborers for the wages we get, and those wages are flowers here, there and everywhere, to say nothing of ferns, brakes, mosses, scarlet berries, and the like. And when flowers fail we fall back on different shades of green; the German ivy being relieved by a background of dark foliage, or light grasses against grave ones; and when we hit on any new combination, each summons the other to be lost in admiration. And when we are too sore and stiff from weeding, grass-shearing or watering, we fall to framing little pictures, or to darning stockings, which she does so beautifully that it has become a fine art with her, or I betake myself to the sewing-machine and stitch for legs that seem to grow long by the minute. What the rest of the family are about meanwhile, I can not exactly say. Mr. Prentiss sits in a chair with an umbrella over his head, and pulls up a weed now and then, and then strolls off with a straw in his mouth; he also drives off sometimes on foraging expeditions, and comes back with butter, eggs, etc., and on hot days takes a bath where a stream of cold water dashes over him; "splendid" he says, and "horrid" I say. The boys are up to everything; they are carpenters, and plumbers, and trouters, and harnessers, and drivers; H. has just learned to solder, and saves me no little trouble and expense by stopping leakages; heretofore every holey vessel had to be sent out of town. Both boys have gardens and sell vegetables to their father at extraordinary prices, and they are now filling up a deep ditch 500 feet long at a "York shilling" an hour--men get a "long shilling" and do the work no better. With the money thus made they buy tools of all sorts, seeds and fruit trees, but no nonsense. Three happier children than these three can not be found.... You may be interested, too, to know what are the famous works of art we are framing, as above referred to. Well, photographs of our kindred and friends for one thing: my brothers, my husband's mother and other relatives of his, Prof. and Mrs. Smith, Mr. and Mrs. B. B., and so on, a good deal as it has happened, for everybody hasn't been photographed; and some bodies have not given us their pictures--you, for instance, and if you want to be hung as high as Haman in my den, nine feet square, where I write, why, you can. Last summer I had a mania for illuminating, and made about a cord of texts and mottoes; I can't paint, so I cut letters out of red, blue and black paper, and deceived thereby the very elect, for even Mrs. Washburn was taken in, and said they were painted nicely. Your little note has drawn large interest, hasn't it? Well, it deserved its fate. Hardly had she finished this letter when she was taken very ill. For a while it seemed as if the time of her departure had come. At her request the children were called to her bedside, and she gave them in turn her dying counsels, bade them live for Christ as the only true, abiding good, and then kissed each of them good-bye. She was much disappointed on finding that her sickness, after all, was not an "invitation" from the Master. "You don't get away _this_ time," said her husband to her, half playfully, half exultingly, referring to her eagerness to go. And here it may not be amiss to say a word as to her state of mind respecting death. After her release her husband thus described it to a friend: Her feeling about dying seemed to me to be almost unique. In all my pastoral experience, at least, I do not recall another case quite like it. Her faith in a better world, that is, a heavenly, was quite as strong as her faith in God and in Christ; she regarded it as the true home of the soul; and the tendency of a good deal of modern culture to put _this_ world in its place as man's highest sphere and end, struck her as a mockery of the holiest instincts at once of humanity and religion. Death was associated in her mind with the instant realisation of all her sweetest and most precious hopes. She viewed it as an invitation from the King of Glory to come and be with Him. During the more than three-and-thirty years of our married life I doubt if there was ever a time when the summons would have found her unwilling to go; rarely, if ever, a time when she would not have welcomed it with great joy. On putting to her the question, "Would you be ready to go _now?_" she would answer, "Why, yes," in a tone of calm assurance, rather of visible delight, which I can never forget. And during all her later years her answer to such a question would imply a sort of astonishment, that anybody could ask it. So strong, indeed, was her own feeling about death as a real boon to the Christian, that she was scarcely able, I think, fully to sympathise with those who regarded it with misgiving or terror. The point may be illustrated, perhaps, by referring to her perfect fearlessness and repose in the midst of the most terrific thunder-storm. No matter how vivid the lightning's flashes or how near and loud the claps that followed, they affected her nerves as little as any summer breeze--scarcely ever awaking her if asleep, or hindering her from going to sleep if awake. And so it was with regard to the terrors of death. But not merely was there an absence of all apparent dread of death, but an exulting joy in the thought of it. There is a passage in The Home at Greylock, which was evidently inspired by her own experience. It is where old Mary, when her first wild burst of grief was over, said: Sure she's got her wish and died sudden. She was always ready to go, and now she's gone. Often's the time I've heard her talk about dying, and I mind a time when she thought she was going, and there was a light in her eye, and "What d'ye think of that?" says she. I declare it was just as she looked when she says to me, "Mary, I'm going to be married, and what d'ye think of that?" says she. This feeling about death is the more noteworthy in her case because of her very deep, poignant sense of sin and of her own unworthiness. _To a Friend, Dorset, July 27, 1873._ This is my third Sunday home from church. I have been confined to my bed only about a week, but it took me some days to run down to that point, and now it is taking some to run me up again. I had two or three very suffering days and nights, and the doctor was here nearly all of one day and night, but was very kind, understood my case and managed it admirably. He is from Manchester and is son of a missionary. [3] You speak in your letter of being oppressed by the heat, and wearied by visitors, and say that prayer is little more than uttering the name of Jesus. I have asked myself a great many times this summer how much that means. "All I can utter sometimes is Thy name!" This line expresses my state for a good while. Of course getting out of one house into another and coming up here, all in the space of one month, was a great tax on time and strength, and all my regular habits _had_ to be broken up. Then before the ram was put in I over-exerted myself, unconsciously, carrying too heavy pails of water to my flower-beds, and so broke down. For some hours the end looked very near, but I do not know whether it was stupidity or faith that made me so content to go. I am afraid that a good deal of what passes for the one is really the other. Fortunately for us, our faith does not entitle us to heaven any more than our stupidity shuts us out of it; when we get there it will be through Him who loved us. But if I may judge by the experience of this little illness, our hearts are not so tied to or in love with this world as we fear. We make the most of it as long as we _must_ stay in it; but the under-current bears _home_. The following extract from a letter to a young relative, dated Sept. 23d, furnishes at once a key to several marked traits of her character and a practical comment upon her own hymn, "More love to Thee, O Christ!" I had no right to leave my friend undefended. I prayed to do it aright. If I did not I am not ashamed to say I am sorry for it, and ask you to forgive me. And if I were twice as old as I am, and you twice as young, I would do it. I will not tolerate anything wrong in myself. I hate, I hate sin against my God and Saviour, and sin against the earthly friends whom I love with such a passionate intensity that they are able to wring my heart out, and always will be, if I live to be a hundred.... People who feel strongly express themselves strongly; vehemence is one of my faults. Let us pray for each other. We have great capacities for enjoyment, but we suffer more keenly than many of our race. I have been an intense sufferer in many ways; the story would pain you; nobody can go through this world with a heart and a soul, and jog along smoothly long at a time.... I do not remember ever having a discussion on paper with my husband; we should not dare to run the risk. But I know I said something once in a letter, I forget what, that made him snatch the first train and rush to set things right, though it cost him a two days' journey. We are tremendous lovers still. Write and tell me we've kissed and made up! We both mean well; we don't want to hurt each other; but each has one million points that are very vulnerable. And neither can know these points in the other by intuition; a cry of pain will often be the first intimation that the one can hurt the other just there. We must touch each other with the tips of our fingers.... To love Christ more--this is the deepest need, the constant cry of my soul. Down in the bowling-alley, and out in the woods, and on my bed, and out driving, when I am happy and busy, and when I am sad and idle, the whisper keeps going up for more love, more love, more love! _To a Christian Friend, Dorset, Oct. 3, 1873._ I do hope you will be in New York this winter and your mother, too. What a blessing to have a mother with whom one can hold Christian communion! You need some trials as a set-off to it. You say few live up to what light they have; it is true; I think we get light just as fast as we are ready for it. At the same time I must own that I have not all the light I need. I am still puzzled as to the true way to live; how far to cherish a spirit that makes one sit very lightly to all earthly things, when that spirit unfits one, to a great extent, to be an agreeable, thoroughly sympathising companion to one's children, for instance. My children have a real horror of Miss ----, because she thinks and talks on only one subject; of course it never would do for me to do as she does, as far as they are concerned. Perhaps the problem may be solved by a resort to the fact that we are not called to the same experience. And yet an experience of as perfect love and faith as is ever vouchsafed to a soul on earth, is what I long for. At times my heart dies within me when I realise how much I need. As you say, no doubt the mental strain I had been passing through prepared the way for my break-down in health; as I lay, as I thought, dying, I said so to myself. That strain is over; I am in a sense at rest; but not satisfied. I have been too near to Christ to be _happy_ in anything else; I don't mean by that, however, that I never _try_ to be happy in other things--alas, I do. As to the minor trials, no life is without them. But what mercies we get every now and then! The other day three letters came to me by one mail, each of which was important, and came from exactly the quarter where I was troubled, and dispersed the trouble to a great degree. In fact I am overwhelmed with mercies, and dreadfully stupid and unthankful for them. I have had also some experiences of late of the smallness and meanness, of which you have had specimens. One has to betake oneself to prayer to get a sight of One, who is large-hearted and noble and good and true. Oh, how narrow human narrowness must look to Him! I don't know how many times I have smiled at your remark about Miss ----: "She seems to have such a hard time to learn her lessons." I feel sorry for her in one sense, but if she belongs to Christ, isn't He home enough for her? I think it _always_ a very doubtful experiment to offer other people a home with you; and equally doubtful whether such an offer is wisely accepted. Being a saint does not, I am sorry to say, necessarily make one an agreeable addition to the family circle as God has formed it; if His hand _sends_ this new element into the house, of course one may expect grace to bear it; but voluntarily to seek it argues either want of experience or an immense power of self-sacrifice. I should prefer Miss ----'s friends agreeing to give her an independent home, as far as a boarding-house can furnish a home. And if it provides a place in which to pray, as sweet a home may be found there as anywhere. We go to town on the ninth of this month. Mr. Prentiss has been gone some time, and has entered upon his new duties with great delight. I must confess that if I were going to choose my work in life, I could think of nothing more congenial than to train young Christians. It has come over me lately that _all_ those whom he now instructs, have more or less of the new life in them. I am sorry, however, to add that some young theological friends of mine deny this. They say that many young men preparing for the ministry give no other sign of piety. Young people judge hastily and severely. As soon as I get over my first hurry, after reaching home, I hope you will come and see me.... You speak of my experience on my sick-bed as a precious one. To tell you the truth, it does not seem so to me; I mean, nothing extraordinary. Not to want to go, if invited, would be a contradiction to most of my life. But as I was _not_ invited I realise that I am needed here; and I am afraid it was selfish to be so delighted to go, horribly selfish. * * * * * III. Change of Home and Life in New York. A Book about Robbie. Her Sympathy with young People. "I have in me Two different Natures." What Dr. De Witt said at the Grave of his Wife. The Way to meet little Trials. Faults in Prayer-Meetings. How special Theories of the Christian Life are formed. Sudden Illness of Prof. Smith. Publication of _Golden Hours_. How it was received. Her return from Dorset brought with it a new order of life. The transfer of her husband to a theological chair was almost as great a change to her as to him. In ceasing to be a pastor's wife she gave up a position, which for more than a quarter of a century had been to her a spring of constant joy, and which, notwithstanding its cares, she regarded as one of the most favored on earth. While in the parsonage, too, she was in the midst of her friends; the removal to Sixty-first street left the most of them at a distance; and distance in New York is no slight hindrance to the full enjoyment of social intimacy and fellowship. Several weeks after the return to town were devoted to the congenial task of fitting-up and adorning the new home. Then for the first time in many years she found herself at leisure; and one of its earliest fruits was a selection of stray religious verses for publication; which, however, soon gave way to a volume of her own. She was able also to give special attention to her favorite religious reading. The sharp trials and suffering of the previous years showed their effect in deepened spiritual convictions, humility and tenderness of feeling, but not in repressing her natural playfulness. At times her spirits were still buoyant with fun and laughter. An extract from a letter to her youngest daughter, who with her sister was on a visit at Portland, will give a glimpse of this gay mood. Such mishaps as she recounts are liable to occur in the best-regulated households, especially on a change of servants; but they were rare in her experience and so the more amused her: I undertook to get up a nice dinner for Dr. and Mrs. V----, about which I must now tell you. First I was to have raw oysters on the shell. _Blunder 1st_, small tea-plates laid for them. Ordered off, and big ones laid. _Blunder 2d_, five oysters to be laid on each plate, instead of which five were placed on platters at each end, making ten in all for the whole party! Ordered a change to the original order. Result, a terrific sound in the parlor of rushing feet and bombardment of oyster-shells. Dinner was announced from Dr. P., who asked, helplessly, where he should place Mrs. V----. _Blunder 4th_ by Mrs. P., who remarked that she had got fifty pieces of shell in her mouth. _Blunder 5th_ by Dr. P., who failed to perceive that the boiled chickens were garnished with a stunning wine-jelly and regarding it as gizzards, presented it only to the boys! _Blunder 6th_. Cranberry-jelly ordered. Cranberry as a dark, inky fluid instead; gazed upon suspiciously by the guests, and tasted sparingly by the family.--And now prepare for _blunder No_. 7, bearing in mind that it is the third course. _Four_ prairie hens instead of two! The effect on the Rev. Mrs. E. Prentiss was a resort to her handkerchief, and suppression of tears on finding none in her pocket. _Blunder 8th_. Iauch's biscuit glacé stuffed with hideous orange-peel. _Delight 1st_, delicious dessert of farina smothered in custard and dear to the heart of Dr. V----. _Blunder 9th_. No hot milk for the coffee, delay in scalding it, and at last serving it in a huge cracked pitcher. _Blunder 10th_. Bananas, grapes, apples, and oranges forgotten at the right moment and passed after the coffee and of course declined. But hearing that Miss H. V. was fond of bananas, I seized the fruit-basket and poured its contents into one napkin, and a lot of chocolate-cake into another, and sent them to the young princesses in the parsonage, who are, no doubt, dying of indigestion, this morning. Give my love to C. and F., and a judicious portion to the old birds. _To a young Friend, Oct. 19,1873._ I am sorry that we played hide-and-go-seek with each other when you were in town. I have seen all my most intimate friends since I came home; I mean all who live here. There are just eight of them, but they fill my heart so that I should have said, at a guess, there were eighty! Try the experiment on yourself and tell me how many such friends you have. It is very curious. I have just got hold of some leaves of a journal rescued from the flames by my (future) husband, written at the age of 22, in which I describe myself as "one great long sunbeam." It recalled the sweet life in Christ I was then leading, and made me feel that if I had got so far on as a girl, I ought to be _infinitely_ farther on as a woman. Still, in spite of all shame and regrets, I had a long list of mercies to recount at the communion-table to-day. Among other things I feel that I know and love you better than heretofore, and it is pleasant to love. I must not forget to answer your little niece's questions. I remember her father's calling with your sister, but I don't remember any little girl as being with them, much less "kissing her because she liked the Susy books." As to writing more about Robbie, I can't do that till I get to heaven, where he has been ever so many years. Give my love to the wee maiden, and tell her I should love to kiss her. No trait in Mrs. Prentiss was more striking than her sympathy with young people, especially with young girls, and her desire to be religiously helpful to them. But her interest in them was not confined to the spiritual life. She delighted to join them in their harmless amusements, and to take her part in their playful contests, whether of wit or knowledge. Her friend, Miss Morse, thus recalls this feature of her character: In Mrs. Prentiss' life the wise man's saying, _A merry heart doeth good like a medicine_, was beautifully exemplified. Yet few were thoroughly acquainted with this phase of her character. Those who knew her only through her books, or her letters of Christian sympathy and counsel--many even who came into near and tender personal relations to her--failed to see the frolicsome side of her nature which made her an eager participant in the fun of young people--in a merry group of girls the merriest girl among them. In contests where playful rhymes were to be composed at command, on a moment's notice, she sharpened the wits of her companions by her own zest, but in most cases herself bore off the palm. She always entered into such contests with an unmistakable desire to win. I remember one evening in her own home in Dorset, when four of us were engaged in a game of verbarium, two against two--the opposite party were gaining rapidly. She suddenly turned to her partner with a comical air of chagrin and exclaimed: "Why is it they are winning the game? You and I are a great deal brighter than they!" The first time I ever saw Mrs. Prentiss was through an invitation to her home to meet about half a dozen young persons of my own age. She was in one of her merriest moods. Games of wit were played and she took part with genuine interest. She at once impressed me with the feeling that she was one of us, and that this arose from no effort to be sympathetic, but was simply part of her nature. This brightness wonderfully attracted young people to her, and gave her an influence with them that she could not otherwise have exercised. She recognised it in herself as a power, and used it, as she did all her powers, for the service of her Master. Young Christians, seeing that her deeply religious life did not interfere with her keen enjoyment of all innocent pleasures, realised that there need be no gloominess for them, either, in a life consecrated to God. Just as her line of thought would often lie absorbingly in some one direction for quite a period of time, so her fun ran "in streaks," as she would have been likely to express it. One winter she amused herself and her friends by a great number of charades and enigmas, many of which I copied and still possess. They were dashed off with an ease and rapidity quite remarkable. And I believe the same thing was true of most of her books. I have watched her when she was writing some funny piece of rhyme, and as her pen literally flew over the paper, I could hardly believe that she was actually composing as she wrote. One day two young girls were translating one of Heine's shorter poems. They had agreed to send their several versions to an absent friend, who on his part was to return his own to them. Mrs. Prentiss entered heartily into the plan and in an hour had written as many as a dozen translations, all in English rhyme and differing entirely one from the other. The stimulating effect on the genius of her companions was such that over thirty translations were produced in that one afternoon. In thinking of the ease with which Mrs. Prentiss would suddenly turn from grave to gay and the reverse, I often recall her answer when I one day remarked on this trait in her. "Yes, I have in me two very different natures. Did you ever hear the story of the dog, who by an accident was cut in two, and was joined together by a wonderful healing salve? Unfortunately, the pieces were not put together properly, so two of his legs stood up in the air. At first his master thought it a great misfortune, but he found that the dog, when a little accustomed to his strange new form, would run until tired on two legs, and then by turning himself over he would have a fresh unused pair to start with, and so he did double duty! I am like that dog. When I am tired of running on one nature, I can turn over and run on the other, and it rests me." [4] I want to spend a few minutes of this my birthday in talking with you in reply to your letter. _To a Christian Friend, New York, Oct. 26, 1873._ I want to tell you how I love you, because you "learn your lessons" so easily, and how thankful I am that in your great trials and afflictions you have been enabled to glorify God. How small trouble is when set over against that! Is not Christ enough for a human soul? Does it really need anything else for its happiness? You will remember that when Madame Guyon was not only homeless, but deprived of her liberty, she was perfectly happy. "A little bird am I." [5] It seems to me that when God takes away our earthly joys and props, He gives Himself most generously; and is there any joy on earth to be compared for a moment with such a gift?... My husband has just come in and described the scene at Mrs. De Witt's funeral, [6] when her husband said, _Good-bye, dear wife, you have been my greatest blessing next to Christ_; and he added, "and that I can say of you." This was very sweet to me, for _I_ have faults of manner that often annoy him--I am so vehement, so positive, and lay down the law so! But I believe the grace of God can cure faults of all sorts, be they deep-seated or external. And I ought to be one of the best women in the world, if I am good in proportion to the gifts with which I am overwhelmed. I count it not the least of your and my mercies, that we have been permitted to add four little children to the happy company above. No wonder you miss your darling boy, but I am sure you would not call him back. Have you any choice religious verses not in any book, that you would like to put into one I am going to get up? _To the Same, Nov. 12th._ I want you and your mother to know what I am now busy about, hoping it may set you to praying over it. When I asked you for bits of poetry, I meant pieces gleaned from time to time from newspapers. My plan was to make a compilation, interspersing verses of my own anonymously. But Mr. Randolph has convinced me that it is my duty and privilege to have the little book all original, and to appear as mine; and in unexpected ways my will about it has been broken, and I have ceased from all morbid shyness about it, and am only too thankful that God is willing thus to use me for His own glory. Of course, I shall meet with a good deal of misapprehension and disgust from some quarters, but not from you or yours. It is a comfort, on the other hand, to think of once more ministering to longing or afflicted souls, as I hope to do in these lines, written for no human eye. You say Jesus is pained when His dear ones suffer. I hardly think that can be. Tender sympathy He no doubt feels, but not pain. If He did, He would be miserable all the time, the world is so full of misery. When I look back over my own life, the precious times were generally seasons of great suffering; so much so, that the idea of discipline has become a hobby. But one can only learn all this by experience. Mrs. ---- says she never sings the verse containing "E'en though it be a cross that raiseth me," and that little children never talk in that way to their mothers, and, therefore, we ought not to talk so to God! I did not argue with her about it, but I felt thankful that I could sing and say that line very earnestly, and had been taught to do so by the Spirit of God. _To a Friend in Texas, New York, Dec. 1, 1873._ I am glad you like Faber better on a closer acquaintance. He certainly has said some wonderful things among many weak and foolish ones. What you quote from him about thanksgiving is very true. Our gratitude bears no sort of comparison with our petitions or our sighs and groans. It is contemptible in us to be such thankless beggars. As to domestic cares, you know Mrs. Stowe has written a beautiful little tract on this subject--"Earthly Care a Heavenly Discipline." God never places us in any position in which we can not grow. We may fancy that He does. We may fear we are so impeded by fretting, petty cares that we are gaining nothing; but when we are not sending any branches upward, we may be sending roots downward. Perhaps in the time of our humiliation, when everything seems a failure, we are making the best kind of progress. God delights to try our faith by the conditions in which He places us. A plant set in the shade shows where its heart is by turning towards the sun, even when unable to reach it. We have so much to distract us in this world that we do not realise how truly and deeply, if not always warmly and consciously, we love Christ. But I believe that this love is the strongest principle in every regenerate soul. It may slumber for a time, it may falter, it may freeze nearly to death; but sooner or later it will declare itself as the ruling passion. You should regard all your discontent with yourself as negative devotion, for that it really is. Madame Guyon said boldly, but truly, "O mon Dieu, plutot pecheur que superbe," and that is the consoling word I feel like sending you to-day. I know all about these little domestic foxes that spoil the vines, and sympathise with you in yours. But if some other trial would serve God's purpose, He would substitute it. _To a young Friend, New York, Dec. 3, 1873._ I was interested in what you wrote about Miss G. and of Dr. C.'s meeting. You say she spends her time in young works of benevolence. This shows that her piety is of the genuine sort. It is hard to have faith in mere talk. It is a great mystery to me, that, while we meet with negative faults in ordinary prayer-meetings, we find so many positive faults in more earnest ones. Perhaps there is less of self in those who conduct them than we imagine. I always regret to see talk to each other supplant address to God in such meetings--always. As to Miss ---- and others making a "creed" as you say out of their experience, I think it may be accounted for in this way: They come suddenly into possession of thoughts and emotions to which others are led gradually; they are startled and overwhelmed by the novelty of the revelations, and at once form a theory on the subject; and, having formed the theory, they fall to so interpreting the Bible as to support it. Those who reach the point they have reached more slowly are not startled, and do not need to form theories or seek for unscriptural expressions with which to declare what they have learned. They are probably less self-conscious, because they have not been aiming to enter any school formed by man, but have been simply following after Christ; hardly knowing what they expect will be the result, but getting a great deal of sweet peace on the way. And they also acquire, gradually, a certain kind of heaven-taught wisdom, whose access comes not with observation; blessed truths revealed by the Holy Spirit, full of strength and consolation. At any rate, this is as far as I have come to; there may be oceans of knowledge I have yet to acquire, which will modify or wholly change my range of thought. And, according to what light I have, I am inclined to advise you not to confuse yourself with trying to believe in or experience this or that because others do, but to get as close to Christ as you can every day of your life; feeling sure that if you do, He by His Spirit will teach you all you need to know. There has been to my mind, during the last few weeks, something awe-inspiring in the sense I have had of the way in which God instructs His ignorant, forgetful, stupid children. Such goodness, such patience, such love! And, on the other hand, our _amazing_ coldness and ingratitude. _To Mrs. Smith, New York, Dec. 21, 1873._ I wanted to see you before you left, but it would have been cruel to add to the cares and distractions amid which you were hurrying off. [7] ... I am reading, with great interest, the letters of Sara Coleridge. What strikes me most in her is, that knowing so much of her, one still feels what _lots_ there is more to her one does not know. _22d._--Strangely enough, in writing you last evening, I forgot to tell you how much prayer is being offered for you and your husband, and what intense sympathy is expressed. Dr. Vincent said he could not bear to hear another word about his sufferings. Mrs. L---- said, "I do love that man." Mrs. D., herself all knotted up with rheumatism, would hardly speak of herself when she heard he was so ill; and this is only a specimen of the deep feeling expressed on all sides.... I am glad you find anything to like in my poor little book. I hear very little about it, but its publication has brought a blessing to my soul, which shows that I did right in thus making known my testimony for Christ. My will in the matter was quite overturned. The "poor little book" appeared under the title of _Religious Poems_, afterwards changed to _Golden Hours; Hymns and Songs of the Christian Life_. In a letter of Mrs. Prentiss to a friend, written in 1870, occurs this passage: Most of my verses are too much my own personal experience to be put in print now. After I am dead I hope they may serve as language for some other hearts. After I am dead! That means, oh ravishing thought! that I shall be in heaven one day. Until the fall of 1873 her husband and two or three friends only knew of the existence of these verses, and their publication had not crossed her mind. But shortly after her return from Dorset she was persuaded to let Mr. Randolph read them. She soon received from him the following letter: The poems _must_ be printed, and at once! "We"--that is, the firm living at Yonkers--read aloud all the pieces, except those in the book, at one sitting, and would have gone on to the end but that the eyes gave out. Out of the lot three or four pieces were laid aside as not up to the standard of the others. The female member of the firm said that Mrs. Prentiss would do a wrong if she withheld the poems from the public. This member said _he_ should give up writing, or trying to write, religious verses. I am not joking. The book must be printed. We were charmed with the poems. Some of them have all the quaintness of Herbert, some the simple subjective fervor of the German hymns, and some the glow of Wesley. They are, as Mrs. R. said, out of the beaten way, _and all true_. So they differ from the conventional poetry. If published, there may be here and there some sentimental soul, or some soul without sentiment, or some critic who doats on Robt. Browning and don't understand him, or on Morris, or Rossetti, because _they_ are high artists, who may snub the book. Very well; for compensation you will have the fact that the poems will win for you a living place in the hearts of thousands--in a sanctuary where few are permitted to enter. A day or two later Mr. Randolph wrote in reply to her misgivings: If I had the slightest thought that you would make even a slight mistake in publishing, I would say so. As I have already said, I am _sure_ that the book would prove a blessing in ten thousand ways, and at the same time add to your reputation as a writer. She could not resist this appeal. The assurance that the verses would prove a blessing to many souls disarmed her scruples and she consented to their publication. The most of them, unfortunately, bore no date. But all, or nearly all of them, belong to the previous twenty years, and they depict some of the deepest experiences of her Christian life during that period; they are her tears of joy or of sorrow, her cries of anguish, and her songs of love and triumph. Some of them were hastily written in pencil, upon torn scraps of paper, as if she were on a journey. Were they all accompanied with the exact time and circumstances of their composition, they would form, in connection with others unpublished, her spiritual autobiography from the death of Eddy and Bessie, in 1852, to the autumn of 1873. [8] As she anticipated, the volume met in some quarters with anything but a cordial reception; the criticisms upon it were curt and depreciatory. Its representation of the Christian life was censured as gloomy and false. It was even intimated that in her expressions of pain and sorrow, there was more or less poetical affectation. Alluding to this in a letter to a friend, she writes: I have spoken of the deepest, sorest pain; not of trials, but of sorrow, not of discomfort, but of suffering. And all I have spoken of, I have felt. Never could I have known Christ, had I not had large experience of Him as a chastiser.... You little know the long story of my life, nor is it necessary that you should; but you must take my word for it that if I do not know what suffering means, there is not a soul on earth that does. It has not been my habit to say much about this; it has been a matter between myself and my God; but the _results_ I have told, that He may be glorified and that others may be led to Him as the Fountain of life and of light. I refer, of course, to the book of verses; I never called them poems. You may depend upon it the world is brimful of pain in some shape or other; it is a "_hurt_ world." But no Christian should go about groaning and weeping; though sorrowing, he should be always rejoicing. During twenty years of my life my kind and wise Physician was preparing me, by many bitter remedies, for the work I was to do; I can never thank or love Him enough for His unflinching discipline. Even the favorable notices of the volume, with two or three exceptions, evinced little sympathy with its spirit, or appreciation of its literary merits. [9] But while failing to make any public impression, the little book soon found its way into thousands of closets and sick-rooms and houses of mourning, carrying a blessing with it. Touching and grateful testimonies to this effect came from the East and the farthest West and from beyond the sea. The following is an extract from, a letter to Mr. Randolph, written by a lady of New York eminent for her social influence and Christian character: The book of heart-hymns is wonderful, as I expected from the specimens which you read to me from the little scraps of paper from your desk. Do you know that I _lived_ on them ("The School" and "My Expectation is from Thee") and was greedy to get the book that I might read them again and again. And behold, the volume is full of the things I have felt so often, _expressed_ as no one ever expressed them before. I am overwhelmed every time I read it. Mr ---- and the children have quite laughed at "Mamma's enthusiasm" over a book of poems, as I am considered very prosaic. I made C. read two or three of them and he _surrenders_. N. too, who is full of appreciation of poetry as well as of the _best things_, is equally delighted. I carried the volume to a sick friend and read to her out of it. I wish you could have seen how she was comforted! I do not know Mrs. Prentiss, but if you ever get a chance, I would like you to tell her what she has done for me. A highly cultivated Swiss lady wrote from Geneva: What a precious, precious book! and what mercy in God to enable us to understand, and say Amen from the heart to every line! It was He who caused you to send me a book I so much needed--and I thank Him as much as you. * * * * * IV. Incidents of the Year 1874. Prayer. Starts a Bible-Reading in Dorset. Begins to take Lessons in Painting. A Letter from her Teacher. Publication of _Urbane and his Friends_. Design of the Work. Her views of the Christian Life. The Mystics. The Indwelling Christ. An Allegory. During the winter and early spring of 1874 Mrs. Prentiss found much delight in attending a weekly Bible-reading, held by Miss Susan Warner. She was deeply impressed with the advantages of such a mode of studying the Word of God, and in the course of the summer was led to start a similar exercise in Dorset. Her letters will show how much satisfaction it gave her during all the rest of her life. Another incident, that left its mark upon this year, was the sudden and dangerous illness of her husband. His life was barely saved by an immediate surgical operation. He convalesced very slowly and it was many months before she recovered from the shock. _To a Christian Friend, Jan. 25, 1874._ I do not perfectly understand what you say about prayer, but it reminds me of Mrs.----'s expressing surprise at my praying. She said she did not, because Christ was all round her. But it is no less a fact that Christ Himself spent hours in prayer, using language when He did so. That does not prove, however, that He did not hold silent, mystical communion with the Father. It seems to me that communion is one thing, and intercessory prayer another; my own prayers are chiefly of the latter class; the sweet sense of communion of which I have had so much, has been greatly wanting; I dare not ask for it; I must pray as the Spirit gives me utterance. No doubt your experience is beyond mine; I can conceive of a silence that unites, not separates, as existing between Christ and the soul. As to her of whom we sadly spoke, I am so absolutely lost in confusion of thought that I feel as if chart and compass had gone overboard. I believe there can be falls from the highest state of grace, and that sometimes a fall is the best thing that can happen to one; but it is an appalling thought. How wary all this should make you and me!... Though I have felt the greatest respect for Miss ----, I have often wondered why I did not _love_ her more. Well, we have a new reason for fleeing to Christ in this perplexity and disappointment. I had let her be in many things my oracle, and perhaps no human being ought to be that. Shall we ever learn to put no confidence in the flesh? My husband thinks Miss ---- insane. _To a young Friend, Jan 27, 1874._ The comfort I have had as the fruit of close acquaintance with a sick-room! I see more and more how _wise_ God was, as well as how good, in hiding me away during all the years that might have been very tempting, had I had my freedom. My publishing this book [10] was a sort of miracle; I _never_ meant to do it, but my will was taken away and it was done in one short month. I should not expect a girl as young as yourself to respond to much of it, but I am glad you found anything to which you could.... When I received my own great blessing thirty-five years ago, I was younger than you are now, and hadn't half the light you have, nor did I know exactly what to aim at, but blundered and suffered not a little.... It seems to me that it is eminently fitting that we should go to the throne of grace together, and expect, in so doing, a different kind of blessing from that sought alone, in the closet. I never feel any embarrassment in praying with those older and better than myself; the better they are, the less disposed they will be to look down upon me. The truth is, we are all alike in being poor and needy, and it is a good thing to get together and confess this to our Father, in each other's hearing. I can unite cordially with anyone, man, woman or child, who really _prays_. A very illiterate person could win my heart if I knew he truly loved the Lord Jesus, no matter how clumsily he expressed that love; and his prayers would edify me. Perhaps you can not look at this matter exactly as I do. I know I _suffered_ for years, whenever I prayed with others, old or young; but I persevered in what I believed to be a duty, until, not so very long ago, the duty became a pleasure, all fear of man being taken away. I never think anything about what sort of a prayer I make; in fact _I_ make no prayer; we have to speak as the Spirit gives us utterance. _To Mrs. Condict, Kauinfels,_ [11] _Aug. 16, 1874._ Yesterday Miss H. came down and asked me if I would start a Bible-reading at her house. I told her I would with pleasure. This morning I decided to open with the Sermon on the Mount, and have been studying the first promise. Do take your Bible and study that verse by reading the references. I am _delighted_ that our dear Lord has at last pointed out my mission to this village. I have long prayed that He would open a way of access to hearts here. Pray next Wednesday afternoon that I may be a witness for Him. There are a number of families boarding in town, who will join the reading. Miss H. wanted to give notice from the pulpit, but I could not consent to that.... You say your mother asks about my book. It is a queer one, and I am not satisfied with it; but my husband is, and thinks it will do good. God grant it may. I entitle it Paths of Peace; or, Christian Friends in Council. [12] After the most earnest prayer for light, I can not preach sinless perfection. I think God has provided a way to perfection, and that that is, "looking unto Jesus." If the "higher life" means utter sinlessness then I shall have to own that I have never had any experience of it. Mr. P. has given me a world of anxiety. He will go round everywhere, even on jolting straw-rides; his wound is nearly healed, however. He is _looking_ the picture of health, but feels uncomfortable and sleeps restlessly. I went up to the tavern lately as a great piece of self-denial to call on a lady boarding there, and found I had thus stumbled on to fine gold; the gold you and I love. She is the wife of the Rev. Mr. R., of Flushing. Soon after returning to town she began to take lessons in oil painting. Her teacher was Mrs. Julia H. Beers--now Mrs. Kempson--a lady gifted with much of the artistic power belonging to her distinguished brothers, William and James M. Hart. In this new pursuit Mrs. Prentiss passed many very busy and happy hours. The following letter to her husband gives Mrs. Kempson's recollections of them: FIRTREE COTTAGE, METUCHEN, _Jan. 27, 1880._ My dear Dr. Prentiss:--When the news came of Mrs. Prentiss' death I felt that I had lost a friend whose place could not be filled. I never had a pupil in whom I was so much interested, or one that I loved so dearly. She has told me many times that "the days spent with me were red-letter days in her life." They certainly were in my own. I shall never forget her first visit to my studio on the corner of Fifth avenue and Twenty-sixth street. We had not met before, and I felt somewhat awed in the presence of an authoress. But in a few minutes we were fast friends. Taking one of my portfolios in her arms she asked, "May I sit down on the floor and take this in my lap?" Of course I assented. She pored over the contents with the delight of a child. Then turning to me she said, "This is what I have had a craving for all my life. There has always been a want unsupplied; I knew not what it was; but now I know. It was a reaching out for the beautiful. Look at my white hair and tell me if it would be possible for me to learn." I replied, "Yes, if you desire to do so." "Will you take me for a pupil?" she asked. "I do not know which end of the brush to use." "No matter," I said; "I can teach you." She became my pupil and you know the result. But you can not know, as I do, the delight she took in her studies. My ordinary pupils were limited to two hours. But I said to her, "Come at ten and stay as long as you please." Punctual to the moment she came, seated herself at her easel, and rarely left it while the light lasted. I never saw such enthusiasm or such appreciation. At first her progress was slow, but as she gained knowledge of the materials, it became very rapid. In my opinion she had remarkable talent, and, if spared, might even have made herself a name as an artist. I have had hundreds of pupils, but not one of them ever made such progress. What a delight it was to teach her! All her quaint sayings and her beautifully expressed thoughts I treasured up as precious things. She always brought brightness to the studio with her. I can see her so plainly this moment as she came in one morning. "Well," she said, "I thought when I commenced painting if ever I painted a daisy that did not need to be labeled, I should be proud, and I have done it." I wish, dear Dr. Prentiss, I could recall the thousand and one pleasant things that every now and then have occurred to me, while I was thinking of her. I tried to write to you when I heard of your great loss, but my heart failed me. I could not, nor can I, imagine you living without her. In her last letter to me she says, speaking of my daughter's marriage: I hope thirty years hence the twain will be as much in love with each other as two old codgers of my acquaintance, who go on talking heavenly nonsense to each other after the most approved fashion. How little I then dreamed that we should never meet again! I should much like to see you all. I have not forgotten that pleasant summer at Dorset in 1875, nor the great pan of blackberries you picked for me with your own hands. With kindest regards, very sincerely, JULIA H. KEMPSON. _To Mrs. Humphrey, New York, Dec. 1874._ After learning how to manage a "Bible-reading" by attending Miss Warner's once a week for four or five months, I got my tongue so loosed that I have held one by request at Dorset. The interest in it did not flag all summer, and ladies, young and old, came from all directions, not only to the readings, but with tears to open their hearts to me. Some hitherto worldly ones were among the number. I have also helped to start one at Elizabeth, another at Orange, another at Flushing. My husband says if one were held in every church in the land the country would be revolutionised. It is just such work as you would delight in. Do forgive the blots; I am tearing away on this letter so that I forget myself and dip up too much ink. I have been urged to hold three readings a week in different parts of the city, but that is not possible. You can't imagine how thankful I am that I have at last found a sphere of usefulness in Dorset. We had a great shock last spring when Mr. Prentiss was stricken down; I do not dare to think how hard it would have been to become husbandless and homeless at one blow. But I well know that no earthly circumstances need really destroy our happiness in that which is, after all, _our Life_. Even if it is only for the few years before our boys leave home, never to return permanently to it, I shall be thankful to have it left as it is--if that is best. If I had not known what my husband's trouble was, and summoned aid in the twinkling of an eye, Dr. Buck says he would have died. He would certainly have died if he had been at Dorset. He has never recovered his strength, but is able to give his lectures. Although I did very little nursing, I got a good deal run down, especially from losing sleep, and have had to go to bed at half-past eight or nine all summer and thus far in the winter. I am taking lessons this winter in oil-painting with A. She has the advantage of me in having had lessons in drawing, while I have had none. My teacher says she never had a beginner do better than I, so I think beginners very awkward mortals, who get paint all over their clothes, hands and faces, and who, if they get a pretty picture, know in the secrecy of their guilty consciences it was done by a compassionate artist who would fain persuade one into the fancy that the work was one's own. What you say about my having done you good surprises me. Whatever treasure God has in me is hidden in an earthen vessel and unseen by my own eyes.... I feel every day how much there is to learn, how much to unlearn, and that no genuine experience is to be despised. Some people roundly berate Christians for want of faith in God's word, when it is want of faith in their own private interpretation of His word. I think that when the very best and wisest of mankind get to heaven, they'll get a standard of holiness that might make them blush; only it is not likely they _will_ blush. In the latter part of this year _Urbane and His Friends_ appeared. Urbane is an aged pastor and his Friends are members of his flock, whom he had invited to meet him from week to week for Christian counsel and fellowship. Some of their names, Antiochus, Hermes, Junia, Claudia, Apelles and the like, sound rather strange, but, together with those more familiar, they are all borrowed from the New Testament. _Urbane and His Friends_ is the only book of a didactic sort written by Mrs. Prentiss. It is not, however, wholly didactic, but contains also touches of narrative and character that add to its interest. Among the topics discussed are: The Bible, Temptation, Faith, Prayer, the Mystics, "The Higher Christian Life," Service, Pain and Sorrow, Peace and Joy, and the Indwelling Christ. She was dissatisfied with the work and required some persuasion before she would consent to its being published. But its spiritual tone, its tenderness, its "sweet reasonableness," and the bright little pictures of Christian truth and life, which enliven its pages, have led some to prize it more than any other of her writings. And here it may not be out of place to insert the following letter of her husband, written several months after her death. It gives her matured views on certain points relating to the Christian life, about which there has been no little difference of opinion: NEW YORK, _April 16, 1879._ MY DEAR FRIEND:--Many thanks for your kind words about Urbane and His Friends. So far at least as the aim and spirit of the book are concerned, no praise could exceed its merits. It was written with a single desire to honor Christ by aiding and cheering some of His disciples on their way heavenward. At that time, as you know, there was a good deal of discussion about "the Higher Christian Life" and "Holiness through Faith." She herself had felt some of the difficulties connected with the subject, and was anxious to reach out a helping hand to others similarly perplexed. I do not think her mind was specially adapted to the didactic style, nor was it much to her taste. When writing in that style her pen did not seem to be entirely at ease, or to move quite at its own sweet will. Careful statement and nice theological distinctions were not her forte. And yet her mental grasp of Christian doctrine in its vital substance was very firm, and her power of observing, as well as depicting, the most delicate and varying phenomena of the spiritual life was like an instinct. A purer or more whole-hearted love of "the truth as it is in Jesus," I never witnessed in any human being. At the same time she was very modest and distrustful of her own judgment when opposed to that of others whom she regarded as experienced Christians. I wish you could enjoy a tithe of the happiness that was mine during the winter and spring of 1873-4, as, evening after evening, she talked over with me the various points discussed in her book, and then read to me what she had written. Those were golden hours indeed--hours in which was fulfilled the saying that is written--_And it came to pass that while they communed together and reasoned, Jesus Himself drew near_. As I look back to the Sabbath evenings passed with her in such converse, they seem to me radiant still with the glory of the risen Christ. Nor am I able to imagine what else than His presence could have rendered them, at the time, so soothing and blissful. You refer to her fondness for the mystics. She thought that Christian piety owes a large debt of gratitude to such writers as Thomas à Kempis, Madame Guyon, Fenelon, Leighton, Tersteegen, and others like them in earlier and later times, to whom "the secret of the Lord" seemed in a peculiar manner to have been revealed, and who with seraphic zeal trod as well as taught the paths of peace and holiness. While she was writing the chapter on the Mystics, I showed her Coleridge's tribute to them in his Biographia Literaria, which greatly pleased her. It is her own experience that she puts into the mouth of Urbane, where he says, after quoting Coleridge's tribute, "I have no recollection of ever reading this passage till today, but had _toiled out_ its truth for myself, and now set my hand and seal to it." [13] It is for her, too, as well as for himself, that Urbane speaks, where, in answer to Hermes' question, "Who are the Mystics?" he says: They are the men and women known to every age of the Church, who usually make their way through the world completely misunderstood by their fellow-men. Their very virtues sometimes appear to be vices. They are often the scorn and contempt of their time, and are even persecuted and thrown into prison by those who think they thus do our Lord service. But now and then one arises who sees, or thinks he sees, some clue to their lives and their speech. Though not of them, he feels a mysterious kinship to them that makes him shrink with pain when he hears them spoken of unjustly. Now, I happen to be such a man. I have not built up any pet theory that I want to sustain; I am not in any way bound to fight for any school; but I should be most ungrateful to God and man if I did not acknowledge that I owe much of the sum and substance of the best part of my life to mystical writers--aye, and mystical thinkers, whom I know in the flesh.... I use Christ as a magnet, and say to all who cleave to Him--even when I can not perfectly agree with them on every point of doctrine: You love Christ, therefore I love you. Closely allied to her fondness for the Mystics was her delight in the doctrine of the indwelling Christ. For more than thirty years it was a favorite subject of our Sunday and week-day talk. The closing chapters of the Gospel of John, the Epistle to the Ephesians, and other parts of the New Testament, in which this most precious truth is enshrined, were especially dear to her. So too, and for the same reason, was Lavater's hymn beginning, O Jesus Christus, wachs in mir-- a hymn with which we became acquainted soon after our marriage, and which I do not doubt she repeated to herself many thousands of times. [14] The surest way, as she thought, of rising above the bondage of "frames" and entering into the glorious liberty of the sons of God, is to become fully conscious of our actual union to Christ and of what is involved in this thrice-sacred union. It is not enough that we trust in Him as our Saviour and the Lord our Righteousness; He must also dwell in our hearts by faith as our spiritual life. The union is indeed mystical and indescribable, but none the less real or less joy-inspiring for all that. We want no metaphor and no mere abstraction in our souls; we want Christ Himself. We want to be able to say in sublime contradiction, "I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me." And this, too, is the way of sanctification, as well as of rest of conscience. For just in proportion as Christ lives in the soul, self goes out and with it sin. Just in proportion as self goes out, Christ comes in, and with Him righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost. But as, in her view, the doctrine of an indwelling Christ did not supplant the doctrine of an atoning and interceding Christ, so neither did it supplant that of Christ as our Example or annul the great law of self-sacrifice by which, following in His steps, we also are to be made perfect through suffering. Such is a brief outline of her teaching on this subject in Urbane and His Friends. And from its publication until her death, her theory of the way of holiness reduced itself more and more to these two simple points: Christ in the flesh showing and teaching us how to live, and Christ in the Spirit living in us. And this presence of Christ in the soul she regarded, I repeat, as an actual, as well as actuating, presence; mediated indeed, like His sacrifice upon the cross, by the Holy Ghost. But, as "through the Eternal Spirit He offered HIMSELF without spot unto God," even so in and through the same Eternal Spirit, He HIMSELF comes and takes up His abode in the hearts of His faithful disciples. His indwelling is not a mere metaphor, not a bare moral relation, but the most blessed reality--a veritable union of life and love. She thought that much of the meaning and comfort of the doctrine was sometimes lost by not keeping this point in mind. In a letter written not long before her death, she reiterated very strongly her conviction on this subject, appealing to our Lord's teaching in the seventeenth chapter of John. [15] And this brings me to what you say about the chapter entitled The Mystics of To-day; or, "The Higher Christian Life," and to your inquiry as to her later views on the question. You are quite right in supposing that while writing this chapter she had a good deal of sympathy with some of the advocates of the "Higher Life" doctrine. She heartily agreed with them in believing that it is the privilege of Christ's disciples to rise to a much higher state of holy love, assurance, and rest of soul than the most of them seem ever to reach in this world; and further, that such a spiritual uplifting may come, and sometimes does come, in the way of a sudden and extraordinary experience. But it is never without a history. She gives a beautiful picture of such an experience in the case of Stephanas, who was "as gay as any boy," and then adds: "Now, the descent of the blessing was sudden and lifted him at once into a new world, but the preparation for it had been going on ever since he learned to pray." But while agreeing with the advocates of the Higher Life doctrine in some points, she was far from agreeing with them in all. And her disagreement increased and grew more decided in her later years. The subject is often alluded to in her letters to Christian friends; and should these letters ever be published, they will answer your inquiry much better than I can do. The points in the "Higher Life" and "Holiness through Faith" views which she most strongly dissented from, related to the question of perfection. The Christian life--this was her view--is subject to the great law of growth. It is a process, an education, and not a mere volition, or series of volitions. Its progress may be rapid, but, ideally considered, each new stage is conditioned by the one that went before: _first the blade, then the ear, after that the full corn in the ear_. It embraces the whole spirit and soul and body; and its perfect development, therefore, is a very comprehensive thing, touching the length and breadth, the depth and height of our entire being. It is also, in its very nature, conflict as well as growth; the forces of evil must be vanquished, and these forces, whether acting through body, soul, or spirit, are very subtle, treacherous, and often occult, as well as very potent; the best man on earth, if left to himself, would fall a prey to them. No fact of religious experience is more striking than this, that the higher men rise in real goodness--the nearer they come to God, the more keen-eyed and distressed are they to detect evil in themselves. Their sense of sin seems to be in a sort of inverse ratio to their freedom from its power. And we meet with a similar fact in the natural life. The finer and more exalted the sentiment of purity and honor, the more sensitive will one be to the slightest approach to what is impure or dishonorable in one's own character and conduct. Such is substantially her ground of dissent from the "Higher Life" theory. Her own sense of sin was so profound and vivid that she shuddered at the thought of claiming perfection for herself; and it seemed to her a very sad delusion for anybody else to claim it. True holiness is never self-conscious; it does not look at itself in the glass; and if it did, it would see only Christ, not itself, reflected there. This was her way of looking at the subject; and she came to regard all theories, still more all professions, of entire sanctification as fallacious and full of peril--not a help, but a serious hindrance to real Christian holiness. For several years she not only read but carefully studied the most noted writers who advocated the "Higher Life" and "Holiness through Faith" doctrines, and her testimony was that they had done her harm. "I find myself spiritually injured by them," she wrote to a friend less than two years before her death. "How do you explain the fact," she added, "that truly good people are left to produce such an effect? Is it not to shut us up to Christ? What a relief it will be to get beyond our own weaknesses, and those of others! I long for that day." I have just alluded to her deep, vivid consciousness of sin. It would have been an intolerable burden, had not her feeling of God's infinite grace and love in Christ been still more vivid and profound. The little allegory in the ninth chapter of Urbane and His Friends expresses very happily this feeling. There are several other points in her theory of the Christian life, to which she attached much importance. One is the close connexion between suffering in some form and holiness, or growth in grace. The cross the way to the crown--this thought runs, like a golden thread, through all the records of her religious history. She expressed it while a little girl, as she sat one day with a young friend on a tombstone in the old burying-ground at Portland. It occurs again and again in her early letters; in one written in 1840 she says: "I thought to myself that if God continued His faithfulness towards me, I shall have afflictions such as I now know nothing more of than the name"; in another written four years later, in the midst of the sweetest joy: "I know there are some of the great lessons of life yet to be learned; I believe I must _suffer_ as long as I have an earthly existence." And in after years, when it formed so large an element in her own experience, she came to regard suffering, when sanctified by the word of God and by prayer, as the King's highway to Christian perfection. This point is often referred to and illustrated in her various writings--more especially in Stepping Heavenward and Golden Hours. Possibly she carried her theory a little too far; perhaps it does not appear to be always verified in actual Christian experience; but, certainly, no one can deny that it is in harmony with the general teaching of inspired Scripture and with the spirit of catholic piety in all ages. [16] Another point, which also found illustration in her books, is the vital connexion between the habit of devout communion with God in Christ and all the daily virtues and charities of religion; another still is the close affinity between depth in piety and the highest, sweetest enjoyment of earthly good. Her own Christian life was to me a study from the beginning. It had heights and depths of its own, which awed me and which I could not fully penetrate. Jonathan Edwards' exquisite description of Sarah Pierrepont at the age of thirteen, Mrs. Edwards' own account of her religious exercises after her marriage, and Goethe's "Confessions of a Beautiful Soul," always reminded me of some of its characteristic features. If my pastoral ministrations gave any aid and comfort to other souls, I can truly say it was all largely due to her. And as for myself, my debt of gratitude to her as a spiritual helper and friend in Christ was, and is, and ever will be, unspeakable. The instant I began to know her, I began to feel the cheering influence and uplifting power of her faith. For more than a third of a century it was the most constant and by far the strongest human force that wrought in my religious life. Nor was it a human force alone; for surely faith like hers is in real contact with Christ Himself and is an inspiration of His Spirit. She longed so to live and move and have her being in love to Christ, that nobody could come near her without being straightway reminded of Him. She seemed to be always saying to herself, in the words of an old Irish hymn: [17] Christ with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me, Christ within me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me, Christ at my right, Christ at my left, Christ in the heart of every man who thinks of me, Christ in the mouth of every man who speaks to me, Christ in every eye that sees me, Christ in every ear that hears me. Such was her constant prayer; and it was answered in the experience of many souls, whose faith was kindled into a brighter flame by the intense ardor of hers. So long and so closely, in my own mind, was she associated with Christ, that the thought of her still reminds me of Him as naturally as does reading about Him in the New Testament. The allegory referred to above is here given: A benevolent man found a half-starved, homeless, blind beggar-boy in the streets of a great city. He took him, just as he was, to his own house, adopted him as his own son, and began to educate him. But the boy learned very slowly, and his face was often sad. His father asked him why he did not fix his mind more upon his lessons, and why he was not cheerful and happy, like the other children. The boy replied that his mind was constantly occupied with the fear that he had not been really adopted as a son, and might at any moment learn his mistake. _Father_. But can you not believe me when I assure you that you are my own dear son? _Boy_. I can not, for I can see no reason why you should adopt me. I was a poor, bad boy; you did not need any more children, for you had a house full of them, and I never can do anything for you. _Father_. You can love me and be happy, and as you grow older and stronger you can work for me. _Boy_. I am afraid I do not love you; that is what troubles me. _Father_. Would you not be very sorry to have me deny that you are my son, and turn you out of the house? _Boy_. Oh, yes! But perhaps that is because you take good care of me, not because I love you. _Father_. Suppose, then, I should provide some one else to take care of you, and should then leave you. _Boy_. That would be dreadful. _Father_. Why? You would be taken good care of, and have every want supplied. _Boy_. But I should have no father. I should lose the best thing I have. I should be lonely. _Father_. You see you love me a little, at all events. Now, do you think I love you? _Boy_. I don't see how you can. I am such a bad boy and try your patience so. And I am not half as thankful to you for your goodness as I ought to be. Sometimes, for a minute, I think to myself, He _is_ my father and he really loves me; then I do something wrong, and I think nobody would want such a boy, nobody can love such a boy. _Father_. My son, I tell you that I do love you, but you can not believe it because you do not know me. And you do not know me because you have not seen me, because you are blind. I must have you cured of this blindness. So the blind boy had the scales removed from his eyes and began to see. He became so interested in using his eyesight that, for a time, he partially lost his old habit of despondency. But one day, when it began to creep back, he saw his father's face light up with love as one after another of his children came to him for a blessing, and said to himself: _They_ are his own children, and it is not strange that he loves them, and does so much to make them happy. But I am nothing but a beggar-boy; he can't love me. I would give anything if he could. Then the father asked why his face was sad, and the boy told him. _Father_. Come into this picture gallery and tell me what you see. _Boy_. I see a portrait of a poor, ragged, dirty boy. And here is another. And another. Why, the gallery is full of them! _Father_. Do you see anything amiable and lovable in any of them? _Boy_. Oh, no. _Father_. Do you think I love your brothers? _Boy_. I know you do! _Father_. Well, here they are, just as I took the poor fellows out of the streets. _Boy_. Out of the streets as you did me? They are all your adopted sons? _Father_. Every one of them. _Boy_. I don't understand it. What made you do it? _Father_. I loved them so that I could not help it. _Boy_. I never heard of such a thing! You loved those miserable beggar- boys? Then you must be made of Love! _Father_. I am. And that is the reason I am so grieved when some such boys refuse to let me become their father. _Boy_. Refuse? Oh, how can they? Refuse to become your own dear sons? Refuse to have such a dear, kind, patient father? Refuse _love?_ _Father_. My poor blind boy, don't you now begin to see that I do not wait for these adopted sons of mine to wash and clothe themselves, to become good, and obedient, and affectionate, but loved them _because_ they were such destitute, wicked, lost boys? I did not go out into the streets to look for well-dressed, well-cared-for, faultless children, who would adorn my house and shine in it like jewels. I sought for outcasts; I loved them as outcasts; I knew they would be ungrateful and disobedient, and never love me half as much as I did them; but that made me all the more sorry for them. See what pains I am taking with them, and how beautifully some of them are learning their lessons. And now tell me, my son, in seeing this picture gallery, do you not begin to see me? Could anything less than love take in such a company of poor beggars? _Boy_. Yes, my father, I do begin to see it. I do believe that I know you better now than I ever did before. I believe you love even me. And now I _know_ that I love you! _Father_. Now, then, my dear son, let that vexing question drop forever, and begin to act as my son and heir should. You have a great deal to learn, but I will myself be your teacher, and your mind is now free to attend to my instructions. Do you find anything to love and admire in your brothers? _Boy_. Indeed I do. _Father_. You shall be taught the lessons that have made them what they are. Meanwhile I want to see you look cheerful and happy, remembering that you are in your father's heart. _Boy_. Dear father, I will! But oh, help me to be a better son! _Father_. Dear boy, I will. [1] In Union Theological Seminary, New York. [2] The Baptism of the Holy Ghost, by Rev. Asa Mahau, D.D., p. 118. [3] Dr. L. H. Hemenway. [4] Some of the charades referred to will be found in appendix E, p. 556. [5] Referring to the following hymn composed by Madame Guyon in prison: A little bird I am, Shut out from fields of air, And in my cage I sit and sing To Him who placed me there. Well-pleased a prisoner to be, Because, my God, it pleaseth Thee. Naught have I else to do; I sing the whole day long; And He, whom most I love to please, Doth listen to my song. He caught and bound my wandering wing, But still He bends to hear me sing. [6] Mrs. De Witt was the wife of the Rev. Thomas De Witt, D.D., a man of deep learning, an able preacher in the Dutch language as well as the English, and universally revered for his exalted Christian virtues. He was a minister of the Collegiate Church, New York, for nearly half a century. He died May 18, 1874, in the eighty-third year of his age. Here are other sentences uttered by him at the grave of his wife: "Farewell, my beloved, honored, and faithful wife! The tie that united us is severed. Thou art with Jesus in glory; He is with me by His grace. I shall soon be with you. Farewell!" [7] Prof. Smith had been suddenly stricken down by severe illness and with difficulty removed to the well-known Sanitarium at Clifton Springs. [8] Referring to the book in a letter to a friend, written shortly after its publication, she says: "Of course it will meet with rough treatment in some quarters, as indeed it has already done. I doubt if any one works very hard for Christ who does not have to be misunderstood and perhaps mocked." [9] One of the best notices appeared in The Churchman, an Episcopal newspaper then published at Hartford, but since transferred to New York. Here is a part of it: "For purity of thought, earnestness and spirituality of feeling, and smoothness of diction, they are all, without exception, good--if they are not great. If no one rises to the height which other poets have occasionally reached, they are, nevertheless, always free from those defects which sometimes mar the perfectness of far greater productions. Each portrays some human thirst or longing, and so touches the heart of every thoughtful reader. There is a sweetness running through them all which comes from a higher than earthly source, and which human wisdom can neither produce nor enjoy." [10] _Golden Hours_. [11] The name given to the Dorset home. [12] Afterwards changed to _Urbane and His Friends_. [13] The passage from Coleridge is as follows: "The feeling of gratitude which I cherish towards these men has caused me to digress further than I had foreseen or proposed; but to have passed them over in an historical sketch of my literary life and opinions, would have seemed like the denial of a debt, the concealment of a boon; for the writings of these mystics acted in no slight degree to prevent my mind from being imprisoned within the outline of any dogmatic system. They contributed to keep alive the _heart_ in the _head_; gave me an indistinct, yet stirring and working presentiment that all the products of the mere _reflective_ faculty partook of DEATH, and were as the rattling of twigs and sprays in winter, into which a sap was yet to be propelled from some root to which I had not penetrated, if they were to afford my soul either food or shelter. If they were too often a moving cloud of smoke to me by day, yet they were always a pillar of fire throughout the night, during my wanderings through the wilderness of doubt, and enabled me to skirt, without crossing, the sandy desert of utter unbelief." [14] See her translation of the hymn in _Golden Hours_, p. 123. The original will be found in appendix C, p. 540. [15] I in them and Thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one.--V. 23. [16] There should be no greater comfort to Christian persons, than to be made like unto Christ, by suffering patiently adversities, troubles, and sicknesses. For He himself went not up to joy, but first He suffered pain; He entered not into His glory, before He was crucified. So truly our way to eternal joy is to suffer here with Christ.--(The Book of Common Prayer.) [17] Ascribed to St. Patrick, on the occasion of his appearing before King Laoghaire. CHAPTER XIV. WORK AND PLAY. 1875-1877. I. A Bible-reading in New York. Her Painting. "Grace for Grace." Death of a young Friend. The Summer at Dorset. Bible-readings there. Encompassed with Kindred. Typhoid Fever in the House. Watching and Waiting. The Return to Town. A Day of Family Rejoicing. Life a "Battle-field." Her time and thoughts during 1875 were mostly taken up by her Bible- readings, her painting, the society of kinsfolk from the East and the West, getting her eldest son ready for college, and by the dangerous illness of her youngest daughter. Some extracts from the few letters belonging to this year will give the main incidents of its history. _To a young Friend, Jan. 13, 1875._ I have had two Bible-readings, and they bid fair to be more like those of last winter than I had dared to hope. There are earnest, thoughtful, praying souls present, who help me in conducting the meeting, and you would be astonished to see how much better I can do when not under the keen embarrassment of delivering a lecture, as at Dorset.... I have a young friend about your age who is dying of consumption, and it is very delightful to see how happy she is. She used to attend the Bible-readings last winter. About the painting? Well, I have dug away, and Mrs. Beers painted out and painted in, till I have got a beautiful great picture almost entirely done by her. Then I undertook the old fence with the clematis on it here at home, and made a _horrid_ daub. She painted most of that out, and is having me do it at the studio. Meanwhile, I have worked on another she lent me, and finished it to-day, and they all say that it is a success. In my last two lessons Mrs. B. contrived to let some light into my bewildered brain, and says that if I paint with her this winter and next summer I shall be able to do what I please. My most discouraging time, she says, is over. Not that I have been discouraged an atom! I have great faith in a strong will and a patient perseverance, and have had no idea of saying die.... Some lady in Philadelphia bought forty copies of Urbane. It was very discriminating in you to see how comforting to me would be that passage from Robertson. God only fully knows how I have got my "education." The school has at times been too awful to talk about to any being save Him. [1] _To Mrs. Humphrey, New York, April 6, 1875._ My point about "Grace for Grace" [2] is this: I believe in "growth in grace," but I also believe in, because I have experienced it and find my experience in the Word of God, a work of the Spirit subsequent to conversion (not necessary in all cases, perhaps, but in all cases where Christian life begins and continues feebly), which puts the soul into new conditions of growth. If a plant is sickly and drooping, you must change its atmosphere before you can cure it or make it grow. A great many years ago, _disgusted_ with my spiritual life, I was led into new relations to Christ to which I could give no name, for I never had heard of such an experience. When we moved into this house, I found a paper that had long been buried among rubbish, in which I said, "I am one great long sunbeam"; and I don't know any words, that, on the whole, could better cover most of my life since then. I have been a great sufferer, too; but that has, in the main, nothing to do with one's relation to Christ, except that most forms of pain bring Him nearer. Now, one can not read "Grace for Grace" without loving and sympathising with the author, because of his deep-seated longing for, and final attainment of, holiness; but it seemed to me there was a good deal of needless groping, which more looking to Christ might have spared him. It is, as you say, curious to see how people who agree in so many points differ so in others. I suspect it is because our degrees of faith vary; the one who believes most gets most. The subject of sin _versus_ sinlessness is the vexed question, on which, as fast as most people get or think they get light, somebody comes along and snuffs out their candles with unceremonious finger and thumb. A dearly-beloved woman spent a month with me last spring. She thinks she is "kept" from sin, and certainly the change from a most estimable but dogmatic character is absolutely wonderful.... There was this discrepancy between her experience and mine, with, on all other points, the most entire harmony. She had had no special, joyful revelations of Christ to her soul, and I had had them till it seemed as if body and soul would fly apart. On the other hand she had a sweet sense of freedom from sin which transcended anything I had ever had consciously; although I really think that when one is "looking unto Jesus," one is not likely to fall into much noticeable sin. Talking with Miss S. about the two experiences of my dear friend and myself, she said that it could be easily explained by the fact that _all_ the gifts of the Spirit were rarely, if ever, given to one soul. She is very (properly) reticent as to what she has herself received, but she behaved in such a beautiful, Christlike way on a point where we differed, a point of practice, that I can not doubt she has been unusually blest. Early in May of this year she was afflicted by the sudden death in Paris of a very dear friend of her eldest daughter, Miss Virginia S. Osborn. [3] During the previous summer Miss Osborn had passed several weeks at Dorset and endeared herself, while there, to all the family. The following is from a letter of Mrs. Prentiss to the bereaved mother: I feel much more like sitting down and weeping with you than attempting to utter words of consolation. Nowhere out of her own home was Virginia more beloved and admired than in our family; we feel afflicted painfully at what to our human vision looks like an unmitigated calamity. But if it is so hard for us to bear, to whom in no sense she belonged, what a heartrending event this is to you, her mother! What an amazement, what a mystery. But it will not do to look upon it on this side. We must not associate anything so unnatural as death with a being so eminently formed for life. We must look beyond, as soon as our tears will let us, to the sphere on which she has been honored to enter in her brilliant youth; to the society of the noblest and the best human beings earth has ever known; to the fulness of life, the perfection of every gift and grace, to congenial employment, to the welcome of Him who has conquered death and brought life and immortality to light. If we think of her as in the grave, we must own that hers was a hard lot; but she is not in a grave; she is at home; she is well, she is happy, she will never know a bereavement, or a day's illness, or the infirmities and trials of old age; she has got the secret of perpetual youth. But while these thoughts assuage our grief, they can not wholly allay it. We have no reason to doubt that she would have given and received happiness here upon earth, had she been spared; and we can not help missing her, mourning for her, longing for her, out of the very depths of our hearts. The only real comfort is that God never makes mistakes; that He would not have snatched her from us, if He had not had a reason that would satisfy us if we knew it. I can not tell you with what tender sympathy I think of your return to your desolate home; the agonizing meeting with your bereaved boys; the days and nights that have to be lived through, face to face with a great sorrow. May God bless and keep you all. _To Mrs. Condict, Dorset, July 11, 1875._ I have been sitting at my window, enjoying the clear blue sky, and the "living green" of the fields and woods, and wishing you were here to share it all with me. But as you are not, the next best thing is to write you. You seem to have been wafted into that strange sea-side spot, to do work there, and I hope you will have health and strength for it. One of the signs of the times is the way in which the hand of Providence scatters "city folks" all about in waste places, there to sow seed that in His own time shall spring up and bear fruit for Him. I was shocked at what you said about Miss ---- not recognising you. It seemed almost incredible. Mr. Prentiss has persuaded me to have a family Bible-reading on Sunday afternoon, as we have no service, and studying up for it this morning I came to this proverb which originated with Huss, whose name in Bohemian signifies goose. He said at the stake: "If you burn a goose a swan will rise from its ashes"; and I thought--Well, Miss ----'s usefulness is at an end, but God can, and no doubt will, raise up a swan in her place. About forty now attend my Bible-reading. We have my eldest brother here and he is a perfect enthusiast about Dorset, and has enjoyed his visit immensely. He said yesterday that he had laughed more that afternoon than in the previous ten years. We expect Dr. Stearns and his daughter on the 20th, and when they leave Mr. P. intends to go to Maine and try a change of air and scene. I hate to have him go; his trouble of last year keeps me uneasy, if he is long out of my sight. _To the Same, Dorset, Aug., 1875._ I have just written a letter to my husband, from whom I have been separated a whole day. He has gone to Maine, partly to see friends, partly to get a little sea air. He wanted me to go with him, but it would have ended in my getting down sick. This summer I am encompassed with relatives; two of my brothers, a nephew, a cousin, a second cousin, and in a day or two one brother's wife and child, and two more second cousins are to come; not to our house, but to board next door. There is a troop of artists swarming the tavern; all ladies, some of them very congenial, cultivated, excellent persons. They are all delighted with Dorset, and it is pleasant to stumble on little groups of them at their work. A. has been out sketching with them and succeeds very well. I have given up painting landscapes and taken to flowers. I have just had a visit here in my room from three humming-birds. They are attracted by the flowers... One of the cousins is just now riding on the lawn. Her splendid hair has come down and covers her shoulders; and with her color, always lovely, heightened by exercise and pleasure, she makes a beautiful picture. What is nicer than an unsophisticated young girl? I have no time for reading this summer among the crowd; but one can not help thinking wherever one is, and I have come to this conclusion: happiness in its strictest sense is found only in Christ; at the same time there are many sources of enjoyment independently of Him. It is getting dark and I can not see my lines. I am more and more puzzled about good people making such mistakes. Dr. Stearns says that the Rev. Mr. ---- has been laying his hands on people and saying, "Receive the Holy Ghost." Such excesses give me great doubt and pain. _To the Same, Sept. 3, 1875._ Your letter came to find me in a sorrowful and weary spot. My dear M. lies here with typhoid fever, and my heart and soul and body are in less than a fortnight of it pretty well used up, and my husband is in almost as bad a case with double anxiety, he and A. expecting every hour to see me break down. It has been an awful pull for us all, for not one of us has an atom of health to spare, and only keep about by avoiding all the wear and tear we can. Dr. Buck has sent us an excellent English nurse; she came yesterday and insisted on sitting up with M. all night and we all _dropped_ into our beds like so many shot birds. I heard her go down for ice three times, so I knew my precious lamb was not neglected, and slept in peace. We are encompassed with mercies; the physician who drives over from Manchester is as skilful as he is conscientious; this house is admirably adapted to sickness, the stairway only nine feet high, plenty of water, and my room, which I have given her, admits of her lying in a draught as the doctor wishes her to do. While the nurse is sleeping, as she is now, A. and I take turns sitting out on the piazza, where there is a delicious breeze almost always blowing. The ladies here are disappointed that I can no longer hold the Bible- readings, but it is not so much matter that I am put off work if you are put on it; the field is one, and the Master knows whom to use and when and where. We have been reading with great delight a little book called "Miracles of Faith." I am called to M., who has had a slight chill, and of course high fever after it. It seems painfully unnatural to see my sunbeam turned into a dark cloud, and it distresses me so to see her suffer that I don't know how I am going to stand it. But I won't plague you with any more of this, nor must I forget how often I have said, "Thy will be done." You need not doubt that God's will looks so much better to us than our own, that nothing would tempt us to decide our child's future. _To her eldest Son, Dorset, Sept. 19, 1875._ Your letters are a great comfort to us, and the way to get many is to write many. M.'s fever ran twenty-one days, as the doctor said it would, and began to break yesterday. On Friday it ran very high; her pulse was 120 and her temperature 105--bad, bad, bad. She is very, very weak. We have sent away Pharaoh and the kitten; Pha _would_ bark, and Kit _would_ come in and stare at her, and both made her cry. The doctor has the house kept still as the grave; he even brought over his slippers lest his step should disturb her. She is not yet out of danger; so you must not be too elated. We four are sitting in the dining-room with a hot fire; papa is reading aloud to A. and H.; it is evening, and M. has had her opiate, and is getting to sleep. I have not much material of which to make letters, sitting all day in a dark room in almost total silence. The artists are rigging up the church beautifully with my flowers, etc., Mr. Palmer and Mr. Lawrence lending their aid. Your father is reading about Hans Andersen; you must read the article in the Living Age, No. 1,631; it is ever so funny. I had such a queer dream last night. I dreamed that Maggie plagued us so that your father went to New York and brought back _two_ cooks. I said I only wanted one. "Oh, but these are so rare," he said; "come out and see them." So he led me into the kitchen, and there sat at the table, eating dinner very solemnly, two _ostriches_! Now what that dream was made of I can not imagine. Now I must go to bed, pretty tired. When you are lonely and blue, think how we all love you. Goodnight, dear old fellow. _Sept. 21st._--It cuts me to the heart, my precious boy, that your college life begins under such a shadow. But I hope you know where to go in both loneliness and trouble. You may get a telegram before this reaches you; if you do not you had better pack your valise and have it ready for you to come at a minute's warning. The doctor gives us hardly a hope that M. will live; she may drop away at any moment. While she does live you are better off at Princeton; but when she is gone we shall all want to be together. We shall have her buried here in Dorset; otherwise I never should want to come here again. A. said this was her day to write you, but she had no heart to do it. The only thing I can do while M. is asleep, is to write letters about her. Good-night, dear boy. _22d_--The doctor was here from eight to nine last night and said she would suffer little more and sleep her life away. _She_ says she is nicely and the nurse says so. Your father and I have had a good cry this morning, which has done us no little service. Dear boy, this is a bad letter for you, but I have done the best I can. _To Mrs. George Payson, New York, Oct. 31, 1875_ I hope you received the postal announcing our safe arrival home. I have been wanting to answer your last letter, but now that the awful strain is over I begin to flag, am tired and lame and sore, and any exertion is an effort. But after all the dismal letters I have had to write, I want to tell you what a delightful day yesterday was to us all; G. home from Princeton, all six of us at the table at once, "eating our meat with gladness"; the pleasantest _family_ day of our lives. M.'s recovery during the last week has been little short of miraculous. We got her home, after making such a bugbear of it, in perfect comfort. We left Dorset about noon in a close carriage; the doctor and his wife were at the station and weighed M., when we found she had lost thirty-six pounds. The coachman took her in his arms and carried her into the car, when who should meet us but the Warners. On reaching the New York depot, George rushed into the car in such a state of wild excitement that he took no notice of any one but M.; he then flew out and a man flew in, and without saying a word snatched her up in his arms, whipped her into a reclining-chair, and he and another man scampered with her to the carriage and seated her in it; I had to run to keep up with them, and nearly knocked down a gigantic policeman who was guarding it. The Warners spent the night here and left next morning before I was up, so afraid of making trouble.... A friend has put a carriage at our disposal, and M. is to drive every day when and where and as long as she pleases. And now I hope I shall have something else to write about.... As to the Bible-readings, I do not find commentaries of much use. Experience of life has been my chief earthly teacher, and one gains that every day. You must not write me such long letters; it is too much for you. How I do wish you would do something desperate about getting well! At any rate, _don't_, any of you, have typhoid fever. It is the very meanest old snake of a fox I ever heard of, making its way like a masked burglar. _To Mrs. Condict, New York, Nov 7, 1875._ We came home on the 27th of October; M. bore the journey wonderfully well, and has improved so fast that she drives all round the Park every day, Miss W. having put a carriage at our disposal. How delightful it is to get my family together once more no tongue can tell, nor did I realise all I was suffering till the strain was over. I am longing to get physical strength for work, but my husband is very timid about my undertaking anything.... Dr. Ludlow [4] was here one day last week to ask me to give a talk, in his study, to some of his young Christians; but my husband told him it was out of the question at present. I shall be delighted to do it; much of my experience of life has cost me a great price, and I want to use it for the strengthening and comforting of other souls. No doubt you feel so too. Whatever may be said to the contrary by others, to me life has been a battle-field, and I believe always will be; but is the soldier necessarily unhappy and disgusted because he is fighting? I trow not. I am reading the history of the Oxford Conference; [5] there is a great deal in it to like, but what do you think of this saying of its leader? "Did it ever strike you, dear Christian, that if the poor world could know what we are in Christ, it would worship us?" [6] _I_ say _Pshaw!_ What a fallacy! _Why_ should it worship us when it rejects Christ? Well, we have to take even the best people as they are. A few weeks later she met a company of the young ladies of Dr. Ludlow's church and gave them a familiar talk on the Christian life. The following letter from Dr. L. will show how much they were interested: DEAR MRS. PRENTISS:--I find that you have so taken hold of the young ladies of my church that it will be hard for you to relieve yourself of them. They insist on meeting you again. The hesitancy to ask you questions last Thursday was due to the large number present. I have asked _only the younger ones_ to come this week--those who are either "seeking the way," or are just at its beginning. _Five_ of those you addressed last week have announced their purpose of confessing Christ at the coming Communion. Several questions have come from those silent lips which I am requested to submit to you: "What is it to believe?" "How much feeling of love must I have before I can count myself Jesus' disciple?" "I am troubled with my lack of feeling. I know that sin is heinous, but do not feel deep abhorrence of it. I know that Jesus will save me, but I have no enthusiasm of gratitude. Am I a Christian?" "I am afraid to confess Christ lest I should not honor Him in my life, for I am naturally impulsive and easily fall into religious thoughtlessness. Should I wait for an inward assurance of strength, or begin a Christian life trusting Him to help me?" Any of these topics will be very pertinent. I trust that nothing will prevent you from being present on Thursday afternoon. I will call for you. The limited number who will be present will give you a better working basis than you had last week. The _older young_ ladies have assented to their exclusion this week on the condition that at some time they too can come. Very gratefully yours, JAMES M. LUDLOW. In a letter dated May 3, 1880, Dr. Ludlow thus refers to these meetings: I regret that I can not speak more definitely of Mrs. Prentiss' conversations with the young ladies of my charge, as it was my custom to withdraw from the room after a few introductory words, so that she could speak to them with the familiarity of a mother. I know that all that group felt the warmth of her interest in them, the charm of her character which was so refined by her love of Christ and strengthened by her experience of needed grace, as well as the wisdom of her words. I was impressed, from so much as I did hear of her remarks, with her ability to combine rarest beauty and highest spirituality of thought with the utmost simplicity of language and the plainest illustrations. Her conversation was like the mystic ladder which was "_set up on the earth,_ and the top of it _reached to heaven._" Her most solemn counsel was given in such a way as never to repress the buoyant feeling of the young, but rather to direct it toward the true "joy of the Lord." She seemed to regard the cheer of to-day as much of a religious duty as the hope for to-morrow, and those with whom she conversed partook of her own peace. I shall always remember these meetings as among the happiest and most useful associations of my ministry in New York. * * * * * II. The Moody and Sankey Meetings. Her Interest in them. Mr. Moody. Publication of _Griselda_. Goes to the Centennial. At Dorset again. Her Bible-reading. A Moody-Meeting Convert. Visit to Montreal. Publication of _The Home at Greylock_. Her Theory of a happy Home. Marrying for Love. Her Sympathy with young Mothers. Letters. The early months of 1876 were very busily spent in painting pictures for friends, in attendance upon Mr. Moody's memorable services at the Hippodrome, and in writing a book for young mothers. Before going to Dorset for the summer she passed a week at Philadelphia, visiting the Centennial Exhibition. Her letters during the winter and spring of this year relate chiefly to these topics. _To a Christian Friend, Feb. 22, 1976._ You gave me a good deal of a chill by your long silence, and I find it a little hard to be taken up and dropped and then taken up; still, almost everybody has these fitful ways, and very likely I myself among that number. Your little boy must take a world of time, and open a new world of thought and feeling. But don't spoil him; the best child can be made hateful by mismanagement. I am trying to write a book for mothers and find it a discouraging work, because I find, on scrutiny, such awfully radical defects among them. And yet such a book would have helped me in my youthful days. You ask if I have been to hear Moody; yes, I have and am deeply interested in him and his work. Yesterday afternoon he had a meeting for Christian workers, in which his sound common-sense created great merriment. Some objected to this, but I liked it because it was so genuine, and, to my mind, not un-Christlike. So many fancy religion and a long face synonymous. How stupid it is! I wonder they don't object to the sun for shining. I am glad you think Urbane may be useful, for I hear little from it. Junia's story is true as far as the laudanum and the blindness go; it happened years ago. I do not know what religious effect it had. As to the friend of whom you speak, she would not love you as you say she does if her case was hopeless; at least I don't think so. I am oppressed with the case of one who wants me to help him to Christ, while unwilling to confide to me his difficulties. How little they know how we care for their souls! _To Mrs. George Payson, Feb 28, 1876._ I have been trying to do more than any mortal can, and now must stop to take breath and write to you. In the first place, M.'s illness cut out three months; then fitting up G.'s room at Princeton took a large part of the next three; then ever so many people wanted me to paint them pictures; then I began a book; then Moody and Sankey appeared, and I wanted to hear them, and was needed to work in co-operation with them. I don't know how you feel about Moody, but I am in full sympathy with him, and last Friday the testimony of four of the cured "gin-pigs" (their own language) was the most instructive, interesting language I ever heard from human lips. In talking to those he has drawn into the inquiry rooms, I find the most bitterly wretched ones are back-sliders; they are not without hope, and expect to be saved at last; but they have been trying what the world could do for them and found it a failure. Their anguish was harrowing; one after another tried to help them, and gave up in despair. I had a vase given me at Christmas somewhat like yours, but a trifle larger, and shaped like a fish. The flowers never fell out but once. I had two little tables given me on which to set my majolica vases, with India-rubber plants, which will grow where nothing else will; also a desk and bookcase, and two splendid specimens of grass which grew in California, and had been bleached to a creamy white. They are more beautiful than Pampa, or even feather-grass. A. is driven to death about a fair for the Young Women's Christian Association. I have given it a German tragedy which I translated a few years ago. [7] They expect to make $1,600 on it, but Randolph says if they make half that they may thank their stars. I have spent all my evenings of late in revising it, and it goes to the printers to-day. George is going to deliver a literary lecture for the same object this evening, this being the age of obedient parents. No, I never saw and never painted any window-screens. The best things I have done are trailing arbutus and apple-blossoms. A. invited me to do apple-blossoms for her, and said she should have to own that I had more artistic power than herself. I don't agree with her, but it is a matter of no consequence, anyhow. It is a shame for you to buy Little Lou; I meant to send you one and thought I had done so. The bright speeches are mostly genuine, made by Eddy Hopkins and Ned and Charley P. How came you to have blooming hepaticas? It is outrageous. My plants do better this winter than ever before. I have had hyacinths in bloom, and a plant given me, covered with red berries, has held its own. It hangs in a glass basket the boys gave me and has a white dove brooding over it. Let me inform you that I have lost my mind. A friend dined with us on Sunday, and I asked him when I saw him last. "Why, yesterday," he said, "when I met you at Randolph's by appointment." There, I must stop and go to work on one of my numerous irons. The "German tragedy" referred to fell into her hands in the spring of 1869, and her letters, written at the time, show how it delighted her. It is, indeed, a literary gem. The works of its author, Baron Münch- Bellinghausen--for Friederich Halm is a pseudonym--are much less known in this country than they deserve to be. He is one of the most gifted of the minor poets of Germany, a master of vivid style and of impressive, varied, and beautiful thought. _Griselda_ first appeared at Vienna in 1835. It was enthusiastically received and soon passed through several editions. The scene of the poem is laid in Wales, in the days of King Arthur. The plot is very simple. Percival, count of Wales, who had married Griselda, the daughter of a charcoal burner, appears at court on occasion of a great festival, in the course of which he is challenged by Ginevra, the Queen, to give an account of Griselda, and to tell how he came to wed her. He readily consents to do so, but has hardly begun when the Queen and ladies of the court, by their mocking air and questions, provoke him to such anger that swords are at length drawn between him and Sir Lancelot, a friend of the Queen, and only the sudden interposition of the King prevents a bloody conflict. The feud ends in a wager, by which it is agreed that if Griselda's love to Percival endure certain tests, the Queen shall kneel to her; otherwise, Percival shall kneel to the Queen. The tests are applied, and the young wife's love, although perplexed and tortured in the extreme, triumphantly endures them all. The character of Griselda, as maiden, daughter, wife, mother, and woman, is wrought with exquisite skill, and betokens in the author rare delicacy and nobility of sentiment, as well as deep knowledge of the human heart. The following extract gives a part of Percival's description of Griselda: PERCIVAL. Plague take these women's tongues! GINEVRA (_to her party_). Control your wit and mirth, compose your faces, That longer yet this pastime may amuse us! Now, Percival, proceed! PERCIVAL. What was I saying? I have it now! Beside the brook she stood; Her dusky hair hung rippling round her face. And perched upon her shoulders sat a dove; Right home-like sat she there, her wings scarce moving. Now suddenly she stoops--I mean the maiden-- Down to the spring, and lets her little feet Sink in its waters, while her colored skirt Covered with care what they did not conceal; And I within the shadow of the trees, Inly admired her graceful modesty. And as she sat and gazed into the brook, Plashing and sporting with her snow-white feet, She thought not of the olden times, when girls Pleased to behold their faces smiling back From the smooth water, used it as their mirror By which to deck themselves and plait their hair; But like a child she sat with droll grimaces, Delighted when the brook gave back to her Her own distorted charms; so then I said: Conceited is she not. KENNETH. The charming child! ELLINOR. What is a collier's child to you! By heaven! Don't make me fancy that you know her, Sir! PERCIVAL. And now resounding through the mountain far, From the church-tower rang forth the vesper-bell, And she grew grave and still, and shaking quickly From off her face the hair that fell around it, She cast a thoughtful and angelic glance Upward, where clouds had caught the evening red. And her lips gently moved with whispered words, As rose-leaves tremble when the soft winds breathe. O she is saintly, flashed it through my soul; She marking on her brow the holy cross, Lifted her face, bright with the sunset's flush, While holy longing and devotion's glow, Moistened her eye and hung like glory round her. Then to her breast the little dove she clasped, Embraced, caressed it, kissed its snow-white wings, And laughed; when, with its rose-red bill, it pecked, As if with longing for her fresh young lips. How she'd caress it, said I to myself, Were this her child, the offspring of her love! And now a voice resounded through the woods, And cried, "Griselda," cried it, "Come, Griselda!" While she, the distant voice's sound distinguished, Sprang quickly up, and scarcely lingering Her feet to dry, ran up the dewy bank With lightning speed, her dove in circles o'er her, Till in the dusky thicket disappeared For me the last edge of her flutt'ring robe. "Obedient is she," said I to myself; And many things revolving, turned I home. GINEVRA. By heaven! You tell your tale so charmingly, And with such warmth and truth to life, the hearer Out of your words can shape a human form. Why, I can see this loveliest of maidens Sit by the brook-side making her grimaces; They are right pretty faces spite of coal-smut. Is it not so, Sir Percival? Mrs. Prentiss' translation is both spirited and faithful--faithful in following even the irregularities of metre which mark the original. It won the praise and admiration of some of the most accomplished judges in the country. The following extract from a letter of the late Rev. Henry W. Bellows, D.D., may serve as an instance: I read it through at one sitting and enjoyed it exceedingly. What a lovely, pure, and exalting story it is! I confess that I prefer it to Tennyson's recent dramas or to any of the plays upon the same or kindred themes that have lately appeared from Leighton and others. The translation is melodious, easy, natural, and hardly bears any marks of the fetters of a tongue foreign to its author. How admirable must have been the knowledge of German and the skill in English of the translator! _To Mrs. Condict, New York, May 2, 1876._ I do not know but I have been on too much of a drive all winter, for besides writing my book I have been painting pictures for friends, and am now at work on some wild roses for Mrs. D.'s golden wedding next Monday, and yesterday I wrote her some verses for the occasion. The work at the Hippodrome took a great deal of my time, and there is a poor homeless fellow now at work in my garden, whom it was my privilege to lead to Christ there, and who touched me not a little this morning by bringing me three plants out of his scanty earnings. He has connected himself with our Mission and has made friends there. I do not know what Faber says about the silence of Christ, but I know that as far as our own consciousness goes, He often answers never a word, and that the grieved and disappointed heart must cling to Him more firmly than ever at such times. We live in a mystery, and shall never be satisfied till we see Him as He is. I am enjoying a great deal in a great many ways, but I am afraid I should _run_ in if the gates opened. If I go to the Centennial it will be to please some of the family, not myself. You ask about my book; it is a sort of story; had to be to get read; I could finish it in two weeks if needful. When I wrote it no mortal knows; I should _say_ that about all I had done this winter was to hold my Bible-reading, paint, and work in the revival. I have so few interruptions compared with my previous life, that I hardly have learned to adjust myself to them. _To Miss E. A. Warner, Philadelphia, May 30, 1876._ We came here on a hospitable invitation to spend a week in the Centennial grounds, and yesterday passed several hours in wandering about, bewildered and amazed at the hosts of things we saw, and the host we didn't see. We found ourselves totally ignorant of Norway, for instance, whose contributions are full of artistic grace and beauty; and I suppose we shall go on making similar discoveries about other nations. As to the thirty-two art galleries we have only glanced at them. What interested me most was groups of Norwegians, Lapps and other Northerners, so life-like that they were repeatedly addressed by visitors--wonderful reproductions. The extent of this Exhibition is simply beyond description. The only way to get any conception of it is to make a railroad circuit of the grounds. I have had a _very_ busy winter; held a Bible-reading once a week, written a book, painted lots of pictures to give away, and really need rest, only I hate rest.... We find out where our hearts really are when we get these fancied invitations homeward. I look upon Christians who are, at such times, reluctant to go, with unfeigned amazement. The spectacle, too often seen, of shrinking from the presence of Christ, is one I can not begin to understand. I should think it would have been a terrible disappointment to you to get so far on and then have to come back; but we can be made willing for anything. I am glad you liked Griselda; I knew you would. [8] The extreme heat and her unusually enfeebled state rendered the summer a very trying one; but its discomfort was in a measure relieved by the extraordinary loveliness of the Dorset scenery this season. There was much in this scenery to remind her of Chateau d'Oex, where she had passed such happy weeks in the summer and autumn of 1858. If not marked by any very grand features, it is pleasing in the highest degree. In certain states of the atmosphere the entire landscape--Mt. Equinox, Sunset Mountain, Owl's Head, Green Peak, together with the intervening hills, and the whole valley--becomes transfigured with ever-varying forms of light and shade. At such times she thought it unsurpassed by anything of the kind she had ever witnessed, even in Switzerland. The finest parts of this enchanting scene were the play of the cloud-shadows, running like wild horses across the mountains, and the wonderful sunsets; and both were in full view from the windows of her "den." Her eyes never grew weary of feasting upon them. The cloud-shadows, in particular, are much admired by all lovers of nature. [9] _To Mrs. George Payson, Kauinfels, July 8, 1876._ We have been here four weeks, and ought to have been here six, for I can not bear heat; it takes all the life out of me. Last night when I went up to my room to go to bed, the thermometer was 90°... Are you not going to the Centennial? George and I went on first and stayed at Dr. Kirkbride's. They were as kind as possible, and we all enjoyed a great deal. What interested me most were _wonderful_ life-like figures (some said wax, but they were no more wax than you are) of Laplanders, Swedes, and Norwegians, dressed in clothes that had been worn by real peasants, and done by an artistic hand. Next to these came the Japanese department; amazing bronzes, amazing screens ($1,000 a pair, embroidered exquisitely), lovely flowers painted on lovely vases, etc., etc., etc., ad infinitum. The Norwegian jewelry was also a surprise and delight; I don't care for jewelry generally, but these silvery lace-like creations took me by storm. Among other pretty things were lots of English bedrooms, exquisitely furnished and enormously expensive. The horticultural department was very poor, except the rhododendrons, which drove me crazy. I only took a chair twice. You pay sixty cents an hour for one with a man to propel it, but can have one for three hours and make your husband (or wife!) wheel you. You do not pay entrance fee for children going in your arms, and I saw boys of eight or nine lugged in by their fathers and mothers. We think everybody should go who can afford it. Several countries had not opened when we were there; Turkey and Spain, for instance; and if Switzerland was ready we did not see it. The more I think of the groups I spoke of, the more I am lost in admiration. A young mother kneeling over a little dead baby, and the stern grief of the strong old grandfather, brought a lump into my throat; the young father was not capable of such grief as theirs, and sat by, looking subdued and tender, but nothing more. The artist must be a great student of human nature. I went, every day, to study these domestic groups; at first they did not attract the crowd; but later it was next to impossible to get at them. Every one was taken from life, and you see the grime on their knuckles. Almost every face expressed strong and agreeable character. There were very few good and a great many had pictures. Of statuary "The Forced Prayer" was very popular; the child has his hands folded, but is in anything but a saintly temper, and two tears are on his cheeks. I should like to own it. If I had had any money to spare I should have bought something from Japan and something from Denmark. I do not think any one can realise, who has not been there, what an education such an Exposition is. China's inferiority to Japan I knew nothing about. A. goes out sketching every day. The other day I found her painting a white flower which she said she got from the lawn; it was something like a white lockspur, only very much prettier, and was, of course, not a wild flower, as she supposed, or, at any rate, not indigenous to this soil. She declared it had no leaves, but I made her go out and show me the plant; it grew about ten inches high, with leaves like a lily, and then came the pure, graceful flowers. _To Mrs. Condict, Dorset, July 9, 1876._ There has been a great change here in religious interest, the foundation of which is thought to have been laid in the Bible-readings. I am ashamed to believe it, all I say and do seems so flat; but our Lord can overrule incompetence. The ladies are eager to have the readings resumed, but I can not undertake it unless I get stronger. The Rev. Mr. and Mrs. Reed are doing a quiet work among non-churchgoers at the other end of the village. She has been to every house in the neighborhood and "compelled them to come in," having meetings at her own house. _Of course the devil is on hand._ He reminds me of a slug that sits on my rose bushes watching for the buds to open, when he falls to and devours them, instanter. I am sure it is as true of him as of the Almighty, that he never slumbers or sleeps. His impertinences increase daily. One of the last things I did before leaving home was to decide to bring here one of the Hippodrome converts, about whom I presume I wrote you. We knew next to nothing about him, and I could ill afford to support him; but I was his only earthly friend. He had no home, no work, and I felt I ought to look after him. We gave him a little room in the old mill, and he is perfectly happy; calls his room his "castle," does not feel the heat, takes care of my garden, enjoys haying, has put everything in order, is as strong as a horse, and a comfort to us all; being willing to turn his hand to anything. In the evenings he has made for me a manilla mat, of which I am very proud. He has been all over the world and picked up all sorts of information. He went to hear Mr. Prentiss' centennial address on the Fourth at a picnic, and I was astonished when he came back at his intelligent account of it. Everybody likes him, and he has proved a regular institution. I would not have had a flower but for him, for I can not work out in such a blazing sun as we have had. [10] My book is to be called, I believe, "The Home at Greylock"; but I don't know. My husband and Mr. Randolph fussed so over the title that I said it would end in being called "Much Ado about Nothing." _They_, being men, look at the financial question, to which I never gave a thought. Even Satan has never so much as whispered, Write to make money; don't be too religious in your books. Still he may do it, now I have put it into his head. How little any of us know what he won't make us do! I enjoyed the Centennial more than I expected to do, but got my fill very soon, and was glad to go home. No account of the Dorset home would be complete without some reference to "the old mill." It had been dismantled during the war, but, at the request of the neighbors, was now restored to its original use. It also contained the boys' workshop, a bathing-room, an ice-house, a ram, and a bowling-alley; formed, indeed, together with the pond and the boat, part and parcel of the Dorset home itself. _To Mrs. James Donaghe, Dorset, July 15, 1876._ I have hardly put pen to paper since I came here. I never could endure heat; it always laid me flat. Yesterday there was a let-up to the torrid zone, and to-day it is comparatively cool. Yesterday the mother of our pastor here got her release. I cried for joy, for she has been a great sufferer, and had longed to die. What a mystery death is! I went in to see how she was, and she had just breathed her last, and there lay her poor old body, eighty-two years old, looking as rent and torn as one might suppose it would after a fight of thirty years between the soul and itself. I have wondered if the heat, so dreadful to many, had not been good for you. A rheumatic boy, who works for us off and on, says it has been splendid for him. We heard yesterday that Dr. Schaff had lost his eldest daughter after a ten days' illness with typhoid fever. He has been greatly afflicted again and again and again by such bereavements, but this must be hardest of all. [11] There is a different religious atmosphere here now from anything we have ever known. The ladies hoped to begin the Bible-readings right off, but it was out of the question. I expect such a number of guests this week that I dare not undertake it. I wish you were coming, too. How you would enjoy sitting on the piazza watching the shadows on the mountains! We have had some magnificent sunsets this season. Mr. Prentiss and I drive every night after tea, a regular old Darby and Joan. Generally, I prefer working in the garden to driving, but this time it has been too hot, and we have next to no flowers. It quite grieves me that I have nothing to lay on Grandma Pratt's coffin. However, _she won't care!_ Won't it be nice to get rid of these frail, troublesome bodies of ours, and live without them! I hope I shall see you in heaven, with plenty of room and no rheumatism. How could you make such a time over that doggerel! [12] Such things are a drug in this house. I thought I had a long letter from you, and it was that stuff! My last book is all printed. My husband kindly corrected the proof-sheets for me; a thing I hate to do. He likes the book better than I do. I always get tired of my books by the time they are done. I read very little; only some few devotional books over and over. I wonder if you have read "Miracles of Faith"? It is a remarkable little book. Do write and let me know how you and your husband are. We make great account of our afternoon mail. She alludes in the preceding letter to the guests she was expecting. The entertainment of friends formed a marked feature of her Dorset life; and it called into play the brightest traits of her character. Her visitors always went away feeling like one who has been gazing upon a beautiful landscape or listening to sweet music, so charming was her hospitality. One of them, writing to her husband a year after her death, thus refers to it: I seem to see the Dorset hills now with their beautiful cloud-shadows and lovely blue. I can see in my mind your pleasant home and all the faces, including the dear one you miss this summer. What a delightful home she made! The "good cheer" she furnished for the minds, hearts, and bodies of her guests was something remarkable. I shall never forget my visits; I was in a state of high entertainment from beginning to end. What entertaining stories she told! what practical wisdom she gave out in the most natural and incidental way! and what housekeeping! Common articles of food seemed to possess new virtues and zest. I always went away full of the marvels of the visit, as well as loaded down with many little tokens of her kindness and thoughtfulness. _To Mrs. Condict, Dorset, Sept. 9, 1876._ What interested me most at the Centennial was in the Main Building, and two things stand out, prominently, in my memory. The first is groups of Swedish figures, dressed in national costume, and all done by the hand of a real artist. Especially examine the dead baby and its weeping mother and rugged old wounded grandfather; it will remind you of the words, "A little child shall lead them." Next in interest to me were the Japanese bronzes and screens; next wares from Denmark, butterflies and feathers from Brazil. In the art department a picture called "Betty" in the British division, up in a corner, and in statuary "The Forced Prayer." Both my girls agreed with me in the main; the boys cared most for Machinery hall, and my husband for Queensland, for which I did not care a fig. Last Sunday was as perfect here as with you. My husband preached at Pawlet, about six miles from here, and I went with him. He preached a very earnest sermon on prayer. My Bible-reading is thronged, and I can't but hope the Holy Spirit is helping my infirmities and blessing souls. My heart yearns over these women, many of whom have faces stamped with care. There is a class here that nobody has any idea how to get at. To meet their case, apostolic work needs to be done. Do you know that Irishmen are buying up the New England farms at a great rate? _To Mrs. Donaghe, Dorset, Sept. 10, 1876._ The extraordinary heat has worked unfavorably on both my husband and myself; he has been under medical treatment most of the time, forlorn and depressed. I have just pushed through as I could; my Bible-reading, which has been wonderfully attended, being the only work I have done. The weather is cool now and I feel stronger. A party of young people, who were coming to call on A., were upset just above us; two had broken legs, others bruises and cuts, and one had both knee-pans seriously injured. We got her here and put her to bed, and then I started off to get the rest; but the surgeon, on arriving, decided they should be removed at once, and got them all safely back to Manchester. _To Mrs. Condict, New York, Oct. 16, 1876._ Since my last letter I have been to Montreal, fled from and settled down here. My book is out in England, and my husband sat up till midnight, reading an English copy of it, although he had heard me read it aloud when written, and read it twice in proof-sheets. He thinks it will be a useful book. I feel sure you will agree with me in its main points. God grant it may send many a bewildered mother to her knees! Miss S. called here a few days ago; she has written a book called "The Fullness of the Blessing,"--one object of which is to prove that sanctification is not, can not be instantaneous.... I do hope the book will do good. It seems timely to me, for I shudder when I hear that A. and B. "professed sanctification" on such and such a day. My visit to Montreal gave me indignant pain when I saw crowds kneeling to the Virgin, and not to Christ, in those costly churches and cathedrals. As to Miss ---- I do not know enough of her to form an opinion of her state; I incline, however, to think that demoniac possession is sometimes permitted. Fenelon, you know, thinks we should not be too eager for spiritual delight. He is entirely right when he says that the "night of faith" may witness a faith dearer to God than that of sensible delight. I love Job when he says, "Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him," more than I do David when he is in green pastures and beside still waters; it does not require much faith to be happy there. _Nov. 12th._--I am glad Greylock reached you in safety, and sorry I could not correct its numerous misprints. Your question about Kitty I don't quite understand; I did not mean to say that her parents had no more trouble with her, but they had no more fights growing out of self-will on both sides. I know that there is no end to trouble with obstinate or otherwise naughty children, only if the mother lives close to Christ the fault will be on their side, not hers. You speak, by-the-bye, of my using the word Christ rather than the word Jesus. I do so because it means more to my mind, and because the apostles use it much more frequently. I do hope my book will be a comfort and help to many well-meaning but inexperienced mothers. And I wish I practised more perfectly what I preach. But I have my infirmities and find it hard to be always on my guard.... A. and I are taking drawing-lessons of a very superior French teacher, who offers us the privilege of spending our whole time in her studio, with "conseil." _The Home at Greylock_ was published the latter part of October. It embodied, as she said, the results of thirty years of experience and reflection. Its views of marriage and of the office of a Christian mother found frequent expression in her other writings and in her correspondence. She placed religion and love alike at the foundation of a true home; the one to connect it with heaven above, the other to make it a heaven upon earth. She enjoined it upon her young friends, as they desired enduring domestic felicity, to marry first of all for love. To one of them, who was tempted, as she feared, to marry out of gratitude rather than from love, she wrote: We women are exacting creatures; and you can not please us unless we have the whole of you. Oh, if you knew the sacredness, the beauty, the sweetness of married life, as I do, you would as soon think of entering heaven without a wedding garment, as of venturing on its outskirts even, save by the force of a passionate, overwhelming power that is stronger than death itself! How warmly she sympathised with mothers, especially with young mothers, in their peculiar experiences and how great she thought their privilege to be, her writings testify. The same trait is brought out still more fully in her letters. "Only a mother," she wrote, "knows the varied discipline of hopes and fears and joys and sorrows through which a mother passes to glory--for this is the mother's pathway, and she rarely walks on a higher road or one that may so lead to perfection." Some of her letters addressed to bereaved mothers have already been given. But if her heart was always touched with grief by the death of an infant, it seemed to leap for joy whenever she heard that in the home of a friend a child was coming or had just arrived. Here are samples of her letters on such occasions. _To Mrs. ----, Jan 10, 1874._ You little know into what a new world you are going to be introduced! I wouldn't be a bit frightened, if I were you; it is ever so much more likely that you'll get through safely, than that you will not; and then what joy! You will be a very loving, devoted mother, and I hope this little one will only be the beginning of a houseful. I spoke for ten, but only had six; and our dear Lord had to take two of them back.... I have just run over your letter again, and want to reiterate my charge to you to feel no fear about your future. If you live and have a child, your joy will be wonderful, but if you do not live (here) it will be because you are going to dwell with Christ, which is better than having a thousand children. So I see nothing but bright sides for you. _To the Same, April 18 10, 1874._ By this time you ought to be able to receive letters; at any rate I am going to write one and you can do as you please about reading it. Well, isn't a baby an institution? I am sure you had no idea what a delightful thing it is to be a mother, and that you have had a most bewildering experience of both suffering and joy. I shall want to hear all about the young gentleman when you get strong enough to write an enthusiastic letter about him; nor have I any objection to hear how his mother is behaving under these new circumstances. What does your husband think of the upsetting of all home customs and the introduction of this young hero therein? Thank him for sending me the news in good season. I should not have liked it from a stranger. And by-the-bye, don't let your children say parp-er and marm-er, as nine children out of ten do. I daresay you never meant they should, having a little mite of sense of your own. Now this is all a new mother ought to read at once, so with lots of congratulations and thanksgivings, good-bye. The following is an extract from a letter to another friend, dated Feb. 20, 1875: Your last letter was so eloquent in its happiness that in writing an article for a magazine on the subject of education, I could not help beginning "The King is coming," and depicting his heralds... I am indeed rejoicing in your joy, and hope the little queen will long sit on the right royal throne of your heart. Keep me posted as to Miss Baby's progress. I know a family where the first son was called "Boy" for years, the servants addressing him as "Master Boy." Here are the opening sentences of the article referred to: The King is at hand. Heralds have been announcing his advent in language incomprehensible to man, but which woman understands as she does her alphabet. A dainty basket, filled with mysteries half hidden, half displayed; soft little garments, folded away in ranks and files; here delicate lace and cambric; there down and feathers and luxury. The King has come. Limp and pink, a nothing and nobody, yet welcomed and treasured as everything and everybody, his wondrous reign begins. His kingdom is the world. His world is peopled by two human beings. Yesterday, they were a boy and a girl. To-day, they are man and woman, and are called father and mother. Their new King is imperious. He has his own views as to the way he shall live and move and have his being. He has his own royal table, at which he presides in royal pomp. His waiting-maid is refined and educated--his superior in everyway. He takes his meals from her when he sees fit; if he can not sleep, he will not allow her to do so. His treasurer is a man whom thousands look up to, and reverence, but, in this little world, he is valued only for the supplies he furnishes, the equipages he purchases, the castle in which young royalty dwells. The picture is not unpleasing, however; the slaves have the best of it, after all. The reign is not very long. Two years later, there is a descent from the throne, to make room for the Queen. She is a great study to him. He puts his fingers into her eyes to learn if they are little blue lakelets. He grows chivalrous and patronizing. So the world of home goes on. The King and Queen give place to new Kings and Queens, but, though dethroned, they are still royal; their wants are forestalled, they are fed, clothed, instructed, but above all, beloved. When did their education begin? At six months? A year? Two years? No; it began when _they_ began; the moment they entered the little world they called theirs. Every touch of the mother's hand, every tone of her voice, educates her child. It never remembers a time when she was not its devoted lover, servant, vassal, slave. Many an ear enjoys, is soothed by music, while ignorant of its laws. So the youngest child in the household is lulled by uncomprehended harmonies from its very birth. Affections group round and bless it, like so many angels; it could not analyse or comprehend an angel, but it could feel the soft shelter of his wings. [13] The following was addressed to a friend, whose home was already blessed with six fine boys: DORSET, _Sept. 16, 1868._ Dear Mr. B.:--I am just as glad as I can be! I _said_ it was a girl, and I _knew_ it was a girl, and that is the reason it _is_ a girl. Give my best love to Mrs. B., and tell her I hope this little damsel will be to her like a Sabbath of rest, after the six week and work days she has had all along. It is hard to tell which one loves best, one's girls or one's boys, but it is pleasant to have both kinds... I hope your place has as appropriate a name as ours has had given to it--"Saints' Rest"!!--and that you will fill it full of saints and angels; only let them be girls, you have had boys enough. * * * * * III. The Year 1877. Death of her Cousin, the Rev. Charles H. Payson. Illness and Death of Prof. Smith. "Let us take our Lot in Life just as it comes." Adorning one's Home. How much Time shall be given to it? God's Delight in His beautiful Creations. Death of Dr. Buck. Visiting the sick and bereaved. An Ill-turn. Goes to Dorset. The Strangeness of Life. Kauinfels. The Bible-reading. Letters. During the early months of 1877 Mrs. Prentiss' sympathies were much excited by sickness and death among her friends. "I spend a deal of time," she wrote, "at funerals and going to see people in affliction, and never knew anything like it." And wherever she went, it was as a daughter of consolation. The whole year, indeed, was marked by a very tender and loving spirit, as also by unwonted thoughtfulness. But it was marked no less by the happiest, most untiring activity of both hands and brain. During the month of January she wrote the larger portion of a new serial for The Christian at Work. It would seem as if she foresaw the end approaching and was pressing toward it with eager steps and a glad heart. _To her eldest Son, New York, Jan. 28, 1877._ The great event of last week was cousin Charles' unexpected death. [14] Your father and I attended the funeral, in his church, which was crowded to overflowing with a weeping audience. Most of the ministers we know were there. Cousin G. came on Friday night and said nothing would comfort him like hearing your father preach and he promised to do so. I went with him to Inwood, and we have just got back. Your father preached a beautiful sermon and paid a glowing tribute to cousin Charles in it, and I am very glad I went. After the funeral yesterday I came home and put up some chicken-jelly I had made for Prof. Smith, and carried it down to him; there I met Dr. Gould, of Rome, who had seen him, and said he considered his case a very critical one. _Feb. 4th_.--Your father was invited to repeat his lecture on Recollections of Hurstmonceux and Rydal Mount, and did so, yesterday morning, in our lecture-room, which was filled with a fine audience, mostly strangers. What have you on your natural bracket? And have you put up your leaves on your windows? Mine are looking splendidly. H. is burning one of them with a magnifying-glass your father gave me at Christmas. The sun does lie delightfully in this room. I must now go to the Smiths. All send love. Prof. Smith passed away peacefully in the early morning on the 7th of February. One of his last conscious utterances was addressed to Mrs. Prentiss: "I have ceased to cumber myself with the things of time and sense, and have had some precious thoughts about death." Henry Boynton Smith was one of those men who enrich life by their presence, and seem to render the whole world poorer by their absence. He was strongly attached to Mrs. Prentiss; for more than forty years the relation between him and her husband resembled that of brothers; Mrs. Smith was one of her oldest and most beloved friends, and for a quarter of a century the two families had dwelt together in unity. And, then, with one of the saddest and one of the happiest events of her domestic history--the burial of her little Bessie, at which he ministered with Christlike sympathy, and at the baptism of her Swiss boy who bore his name--he was tenderly associated. It is not strange, therefore, that his death, as well as the wearisome years of invalidism which preceded it, touched her deeply. What manner of man he was; how gifted, wise and large-hearted; how devoted to the cause of his Lord and Saviour; what a leader and master-workman in sacred science and in the Church of Christ; how worthy of love and admiration--all this may be seen and read elsewhere. [15] _To Mrs. Condict, Feb. 14, 1877._ Before I go down to the meeting at Mrs. D.'s I must have a little chat with you, in reply to your last two letters. I felt like shrieking aloud when you contrasted your life with mine. But it is impossible to state fully why. Yet I may say one thing; I have had to learn what I teach in loneliness, suffering, conflict, and dismay, which I do not believe you have physical strength to bear. The true story of my life will never be written. But whatever you do, don't envy it. And I do not mean by that, that I am a disappointed, unhappy woman; _far from it_. But I enjoy and suffer intensely, and one insulting word about Greylock, for instance, goes on stinging and cutting me, amid forgetfulness of hundreds of kind ones. [16] Let us take our lot in life just as it comes, courageously, patiently, and faithfully, never wondering at anything the Master does. I am concerned just as you are about my interest in things of time and sense. But I have not the faintest doubt that if we could have all we want in Christ, inferior objects would fade and fall. But we live in a strange world, amid many claims on time and thought; we can not dwell in a convent, and must dwell among human beings, and fall more or less under their influence. We shall get out of all this by and by. _Feb. 27th._--This winter I am drawing in charcoal under an accomplished teacher; she has so large a class that I had to withdraw from it and take private lessons. She has invited A. to assist her in teaching little ones twice a week, which materially curtails her bill. A. was introduced to one youth, aged five, as _Monsieur_ So and So; he had his easel, his big portfolio, and charcoal, in great style, but only took one lesson, he hated it so. I don't see what his mother was made of. I sympathise with your fear of spending too much time adorning your home, etc., etc. It is a nice question how far to go and how far to stay. But I honestly believe that a bare, blank, prosaic house makes religion appear dreadfully homely. We enjoy seeing our children enjoy their work and their play; is our Father unwilling to let us enjoy ours? In a German book [17] I translated, a little boy is very happy in making a scrap-book for a little friend, and God is represented as being glad to see him so happy. And I don't believe He begrudged your making me that pretty picture, or did not wish me to make yours. (By-the-bye, when you have time, tell me how to do it.) It seems to me we are meant to use _all_ the faculties God gives us; to abuse them is another thing. I feel that I am having a vacation, and wonder how long it is going to last. I do not know how I should have stood the _tremendous_ change in my life, through my husband's change of profession, if I had not had this resource of painting. O, how I do miss his preaching! How I miss my pastoral work! Dr. Buck is on his dying bed, and longing to go. [18] _To her eldest Son, New York, March 11, 1877._ We had an excellent sermon from Dr. Vincent this morning, which he repeated by request. Last evening we had Chi Alpha, and as I saw this body of men enter the dining-room, I wondered whether I had borne any minister to take up your father's and my work when we lay it down. _18th._--I thought within myself, as I listened to a sermon on the union of Christ and the believer, whether I should have the bliss of hearing you preach. Let me see; how old should I have to be, at soonest? Sixty-two; the age at which my ancestors died, unless they died young. I got a beautiful letter, a few days ago, from a minister in Philadelphia, the Rev. Mr. Miller, who has 1,300 members in his church, and says if he could afford it he would give a copy of Greylock to every young mother in it. I went to Mrs. P.'s funeral on Friday. She wanted to die suddenly, and had her wish. She ate her breakfast on Tuesday; then went into the office and arranged papers there; her husband went out at ten, and shortly after, she began to feel sick and the girls made her go to bed. One of them went out to do some errands, and the other sat in the room; she soon heard a sound that made her think her mother wanted something, and on going to her found her dead. Dr. P. got home at twelve, long after all was over. He told me it was the most extraordinary death he ever heard of, but his theory was that a small clot of blood arrested the circulation, as she had no disease. I had a talk with C. about his wife's sudden death. I had already written him and sent him a note. I cut from the Evening Post the slip I enclose about Mr. Moody's question-drawer. I wish I could hope for as sudden a death as Mrs. P.'s. _To Mrs. Condict, April 16, 1877._ I am glad you liked the picture. Did you know that you too can get leaves and flowers in advance of spring, by keeping twigs in warm water? I had forsythia bloom, and other things leafed beautifully. It is said that apple and pear blossoms will come out in the same way, if placed in the sun in glass cans. I have been thinking, lately, that if I enjoy my imperfect work, how God, who has made so many beautiful, as well as useful, things, must enjoy His faultless creations. My work is still to go from house to house where sickness and death are so busy. Mrs. F. G. has just lost her two only children within a day of each other. Neither her mother nor sister could go near her during their illness or after their death, because of the flock of little ones in their house, and it was not safe to have a funeral. Dr. Hastings made a prayer; he said the scene was heart-rending. _May 3d._--Dr. Storrs preached for us last Sunday, and said one striking thing I must tell you on the passage, "They were stoned, were sawn asunder, they were tempted," etc. He said many thought the word _tempted_ out of place amid so many horrors, but that it held its true position, since few things could cause such anguish to a Christian heart as even a suggestion of infidelity to its Lord. To this à Kempis adds the _hell_ of not knowing whether one had yielded or not. _May 17th._--"Misery loves company"; and so I am writing to you. Perhaps it will be some consolation to you that I too have been knocked up for two weeks, one of which I spent in bed. Nothing serious the matter, only put down and kept down; not agreeable, but necessary. How _astounded_ we shall be when we wake up in heaven and find our hateful old bodies couldn't get in!... M. is making, and H. has made, a picture scrap-book for a hospital in Syria. Your mother might enjoy that. We all _crave_ occupation. "Imprisonment with hard labor" never seems to me so frightful as imprisonment and nothing to do, does. Did you ever hear the story of the man who spent years in a dark dungeon, idle, and then found some pins in his coat, which he spent years in losing, and crawling about and finding? Well, I have got rid of a wee morsel of this weary day in writing this, and you will get rid of another morsel in reading it. So we'll patch each other up, and limp along together, and by and by go where there it no limping and no patching. The new serial, her Bible-readings, and painting, with visits to sick- rooms and to the house of mourning, during the early half of this year, left little time for correspondence. Her letters were few and brief; but they are marked, as was her life, by unusual quietness and depth of feeling. Her delight was still to speak in them a helpful and cheering word to souls struggling with their own imperfections, or with trials of the way. A single extract will illustrate the gentle wisdom of her counsels: I think there is such a thing as peace of conscience even in this life. I do not mean careless peace, or heedless peace; I mean calm consciousness of an understanding, so to speak, between the soul and its Lord. A wife, for instance, may say and do things to her husband that show she is human; yet, at the same time, the two may live together loyally, and be happy. And unless a Christian is aware of having on hand an idol, dearer than God, I see no reason why he should not live in peace, even while aware that he is not yet finished (perfect). We love God more than we are aware; when He slays us we trust in Him, when He strikes us we kiss His hand. Her own mood at this time was singularly grave and pensive. She felt more and more keenly the moral puzzle and contradictions of existence. "From beginning to end, in every aspect," she wrote to a friend, "life grows more mysterious to me, not to say queer--for that is not what I mean. Such strange things are all the time happening, and even good people doing and saying things that nearly drive one wild.... We live in a mixed state, in a kind of see-saw: we go up and then we go down; go down and then fly up." Still this strange, ever-changing mystery of life, although it sometimes perplexed her in the extreme, did not make her unhappy. "I have great sources of enjoyment," she adds, "and do enjoy a good deal; infinitely more than I deserve." Early in June she and the younger children went to Dorset. On reaching there, she wrote to her husband: Here we are, sitting by the fire in our dear little parlor. We made a very comfortable journey to Manchester, but the ride from there here was rather cheerless and cold, as they forgot to send wraps. The neighbors had sent in various good things, and the strawberries looked very nice. It rains, but M. and I have surveyed the garden, and she says it is looking better than usual. I only wish you were here. Your love is intensely precious to me, as I know mine is to you. How thankful we ought to be that we have loved each other through thick and thin! This is God's gift. I can not write legibly with this pencil, nor see very well, as it is a dark day, and yet too early for a lamp. The latter part of June she made a short visit with her husband to Montreal. A pleasant incident of this journey was an excursion to Quebec, where two charming days were spent in seeing the Falls of Montmorenci, the Plains of Abraham, and other objects of interest in and about that remarkable city. During the ride in the cars from Montreal to St. Albans, she called the attention of her husband to a paragraph from an English newspaper containing an account of the death of a miner by an explosion, on whose breast was found a lock of hair inscribed with the name of "Jessie." She remarked that the incident would serve as an excellent hint for a story. This was the origin of _Gentleman Jim_, the pathetic little tale published shortly after her death. Soon after her return from Montreal she began painting in water-colors, which afforded her much delight during the rest of her life. The following note to Mrs. Ellen S. Fisher, of Brooklyn, dated July 2d, will show how her lessons were taken: Will you kindly inform me as to your method of teaching your system of water-colors by mail, and as to terms. I have not had time to do anything in that line, as I had to go to Canada (by-the-bye, you can get delightful Chinese white paint there in tubes). My daughter says she thinks she heard you say that you would paint a little flower-piece reasonably, or perhaps you have one to spare now. I should like a few wild flowers against a blue sky. I got half a dozen Parian vases at Montreal--each a group of three--and filled with daisies and a few grasses, they are exquisite. Some of them are in imitation of the hollow toadstools one finds in the woods. _To Mrs. Condict, Kauinfels, July 23, 1877._ Kauinfels is a word we invented, after spending no little time, by referring to a spot in a favorite brook as "the place where the old cow fell in"; it looked so German and pleased us so much that we concluded to give our place that name. We are fond of odd names. We have a dog Pharaoh and a horse Shoo Fly. Then we had Shadrach, Meseck, and Abednego for cats. We had a dog named Penelope Ann--a splendid creature, but we had to part with her. My Bible-reading began two weeks ago, and neither rain nor shine keeps people away. For a small village the attendance is very large. I do not know how much good they do, but it is a comfort to try. I can't get over Miss ---'s tragical end. She must have suffered dreadfully. I do not doubt her present felicity, nor that she counts her life on earth as anything more than a moment's space. I do not feel sure that she did me any good. I saw so much that was morbid when she visited me here, that I never enjoyed her as I did when I knew her less. But there is nothing morbid about her now. _To Mrs. James Donaghe, Dorset, Aug. 20, 1877._ Yesterday was the first fine day we have had in a long time, and, as I sat enjoying it on the front porch, how I wished I could transport you here and share these mountains with you! To-day is equally fine, and how gladly would I bottle it up and send it to you! A score of times I have asked myself why I do not bring you here, and then been reminded that you can not leave your husband. I do not write many letters this summer. We have three or four guests nearly all the time. This uses up what little brain I have left, and by half-past eight or nine I have to go to bed. I am unusually well, but work hard in the garden all the forenoon and get tired. Yesterday the Rev. Mr. Reed, of Flushing, preached a most impressive sermon on the denial of self. In the afternoon he preached to a neighborhood meeting at his own house, to which we three girls go, namely, M., her friend Hatty K., and myself. I give Thursdays pretty much up to my Bible-reading--studying for it in the morning and holding it at three in the afternoon. Utter unfitness for this or any other work for the Master makes me very dependent on Him. The service is largely attended, and how I get courage to speak to so many, I know not. [Illustration: The Dorset Home.] A. is gone to Portland and Prout's Neck. Mr. P. is unusually well this summer, and has actually worked a little in my garden. He is going to Saratoga this week to visit Mrs. Bronson.... M. is a kind of supplement to her father; I love in her what I love in him, and she loves in me what he loves; we never had a jar in our lives, and are more like twin-sisters than mother and daughter. Hatty K. is like a second M. to me. At this moment they are each painting a plate. They work all the morning in the garden, and in the afternoon sit in my room sewing "for the poor" like two Dorcases, or drive, or row on the pond. They also study their Greek Testament together like a pair of twins. Just here Mr. P. came driving up to take me out to make calls. We made three together, and then I made three alone. Now we are going to have tea, and should be glad if you could take it with us. _To Mrs. Condict, Kauinfels, Sept. 13, 1877._ Since you left, I have been very busy in various ways; among other things, helping Hatty collect her last trophies, pack her various plants, and the like. Then there is a woman, close by, who is very sick and very poor, and the parson and his wife (meaning himself and myself) must needs pack a big basket of bread, butter, tea, apples, etc., for her watchers and family, with extract of beef for her. That was real fun, as you may suppose. I mean to devote Thursdays to such doings, including the Bible-readings. I took for my Bible-reading this afternoon, the subject of confession of sin, and should really like to know what perfectionists would say to the passages of Scripture relating to it. However, I know they would explain them away or throw them under the table, as they do all the Bible says about the discipline of life. Our bad Pharaoh lifted up his voice in every hymn at Mrs. Reed's last Sunday, and little Albert fairly shrieked with laughter. If next Sunday is pleasant we are to go to Pawlet to preach. Good-night. [19] _To Mrs. Fisher, Kauinfels, Sept. 15, 1877._ Excuse my keeping your pictures so long. It is owing to my having so much company. We feel it a duty to share our delightful home here with friends. Will you send me some more pictures, and in your letter please tell me how to make the light-green in the large arbutus leaf; I tried all sorts of experiments, but failed to get such a toned-down tint. My copy is pretty, as I have improved a good deal on the whole; but my work looks parvenu. I had to use a powerful magnifying-glass to puzzle out your delicate touches, and your work bore the test, it is so well done. My work, viewed in the same way, is horrid. A. has been to Portland and found there some exquisite placques; some of them of a _very_ delicate cream color; others of a least suspicion of pink. She began to paint thorn apples on one; but a day or two later, found some of the foliage we had thrown away, turned to most delicious browns; so she painted the leaves in those shades, only--and the effect is richly and gravely autumnal. I hope your eyes are better. * * * * * IV. Return to Town. Recollections of this Period. "Ordinary" Christians and spiritual Conflict. A tired Sunday Evening. "We may make an Idol of our Joy." Publication of _Pemaquid_. Kezia Millet. She returned to town early in October and began at once to prepare for the winter's work. Her industry was a marvel. The following references to this period are from reminiscences, written by her husband after her death: She lost not a day, scarcely an hour. The next eight months were among the busiest of her life; and in some respects, I think, they were also among the happiest. She resumed her painting with new zeal and delight. It was a never-failing resource, when other engagements were over. Hour after hour, day after day, and week after week she would sit near the western window of her sunshiny chamber, absorbed in this fascinating occupation. Rarely did I fail to find her there, on going in to kiss her good-bye, as I started for my afternoon lecture. How often the scene comes back again! Were I myself a painter I could reproduce it to the life. Her posture and expression of perfect contentment, her quick and eager movements, all are as vividly present to my mind, as if I saw and parted from her there yesterday! One morning each week was devoted to her Bible-reading; the others, when pleasant, were generally spent in going down town with M. in quest of painting materials, shopping, making calls, etc., etc. She was much exercised in the early part of the winter by a burglary, which robbed her of a beautiful French mantel clock given her on our silver wedding-day by a dear friend; and by the loss of my watch, stolen from me in the cars on my way home from the Seminary--a beautiful watch with a chain made of her hair and that which once "crowned little heads laid low." She had ordered it of Piguet, when we were in Geneva in 1858, and given it to me in memory of our marriage. But _her_ grief over the loss of the watch was small compared with mine, then and even since. What precious memories can become associated with such an object! One of the books which she read during the winter was "Les Miserables" by Victor Hugo. She read it in the original in a copy given her by Miss Woolsey. She was quite captivated by this work, and some of its most striking scenes and incidents she repeated to me, during successive mornings, before we got up. Her power of remembering and reproducing, in all its details, and with all the varying lights and shades, any story which she had read was something almost incredible. It always seemed to me like magic. Her father possessed the same power and perhaps she inherited it from him. [20] The following letter will show that while her mind was still exercised about the doctrines taught by writers on the "Higher Life" and "Holiness through Faith," it was in the way of a deepening conviction that these doctrines are not in harmony with the teaching of Scripture or with Christian experience. Referring to some of these writers, she says: _To a Christian Friend, Oct. 21, 1877._ I have not only no unkind feeling towards them, but have no doubt they have lived near to Christ. But this I believe to have been their state of mind for years, though perhaps not consciously: Most Christians are "ordinary." Nearly all are a set of miserable doubters. Most of them believe the Christian life a warfare. Most of them imagine it is also a state of discipline, and make much of chastening, even going so far as to thank God for His strokes of Fatherly love! Strange love, to be sure! They also fancy they can work out their own salvation. Now we are not "ordinary" Christians. We understand God's Word perfectly; and when He says, "Work out your own salvation," He means nothing by it except this, that _He_ will work it in you to will and to do, and you are to do nothing, but _let_ Him thus work. And furthermore, we know His mind beyond dispute; we can not err in judgment. Therefore, if you doubt our doctrine, it is the same as doubting God, and you should fall on your knees and pray to read Scripture as we do. As to the Christian life being a conflict, why, you "ordinary" Christians are all wrong. Satan never tempts us, though he tempted our Lord; it comes natural to us to go into Canaan with one bound; the old-fashioned saints were ridiculous in "fighting the good fight of faith." Look at the characters in the Bible, "resisting unto blood, striving against sin"; what blunderers they were to do that!... In our enlightened day nobody is "chastened"; it used to be done to every son the Father received and it was a token of His love. He knows better now. He chastens no one; or if He does, we will cover it up and ignore it; religion is all rapture, and this is not a scene of probation. Still if you insist that you have been smitten, it only shows how very "ordinary" you are, and how angry God is with you. Now you may ask why I have taken time to write this, since you are not led away by these errors. Well, they are pleasant and very plausible writers, and it has puzzled me to learn just where they were wrong. So I have been thinking aloud, or thinking on paper, and perhaps you may find one or more persons entangled in this attractive web, and be able to help them out. How a good man and a good woman ever fell into such mischievous mistakes, I can not imagine.... As to you and me, I see nothing strange in the weaning from self God is giving us. It is natural to believe that He weans us from the breast of comfort in which we had delighted, because He has strong meat in store for us. I know I was awfully selfish about my relation to Christ, and went about for years on tip-toe, as it were, for fear of disturbing and driving Him away; but I do not know that I should _dare_ to live so again. And how better can He show us our weakness than by making it plain that we, who thought we were so strong in prayer, are almost "dumb before Him"! My dear friend, I believe more and more in the _deep_ things of God. "STRENGTH is born In the deep silence of long-suffering hearts, Not amid joy." Imagine soldiers getting ready for warfare, being told by their commander that they had no need to drill, and had nothing to do but drink nectar! As to being brought low, I will own that I have not been entirely left of God to my own devices and desires; if I had been, I should have gone overboard. He had such a grip of me that He _couldn't_ let go. I saw a man apply a magnet to steel pens the other day, and that's the way I clung to God; there was no power in me to hold on, the magnetism was in Him, and so I hung on. Wasn't it so with you? And now to change the subject again; if you have any faded ferns, vines, leaves on hand, you can paint and make them beautiful again. For a light wall, paint them with Caledonian brown, and they will have a very rich effect. I expect a patent-right for this invention. The vivid sense of human weakness and of the sharp discipline of life, which she expresses in this letter, was deepened by hearing what a sea of trouble some of her friends had been suddenly engulphed in. Early in October she wrote to one of them: For some time before I left Dorset, your image met me everywhere I went, and I felt sure something was happening to you, though not knowing whether you were enjoying or suffering. And since then there has been nothing I could do for you but to pray that your faith may bear this test and that you may deeply realise that-- God is the refuge of His saints, When storms of sharp distress invade. The longer I live the more conscious I am of human frailty, and of the constant, overwhelming need we _all_ have of God's grace.... I can not but hope things will turn out better than they seem. But if not, there is God; nothing of this sort can take Him from you. You have longed and prayed for holiness; this fearful event may bring the blessing. May God tenderly bless and keep you, dear child. But vivid as was her sense of human weakness and of the imperfections cleaving to the best of men, while yet in the flesh, she still held fast to the conviction, uttered so often in "Urbane and His Friends" and in her other writings, that it is the privilege of every disciple of Jesus to attain, by faith, to high degrees of Christian holiness, and that, too, without consuming a whole lifetime in the process. In a letter to a young friend she says: Your letter shows me that I have expressed my views very inadequately in Urbane, or that you have misunderstood what I have said there.... "There _is_ a shorter way"; a better way; God never meant us to spend a lifetime amid lumbering machinery by means of which we haul ourselves laboriously upward; the work is His, not ours, and when I said I believed in "holiness through faith," I was not thinking of the book by that title, but of utterances made by the Church ages before its author saw the light of day. We _can not_ make ourselves holy. We are born sinners. A certain school believe that they are "kept" by the grace of God from all sin. I do not say that they are not. But I do say that I think it requires superhuman wisdom to _know_ positively that one not only keeps all God's law, but leaves no single duty undone. Think a minute. Law proceeds from an infinite mind; can finite mind grasp it so as to know, through its own consciousness, that it comes up to this standard? On the other hand, I do believe that a way has been provided for us to be set free from an "evil conscience"; that we may live in such integrity and uprightness as to be at peace with God; not being afraid to let His pure eye range through and through us, finding humanity and weakness, but also finding something on which His eye can rest with delight--namely, His own Son. Every day I live I see that faith is my only hope, as perhaps I never saw it before.... Read over again the experience of Antiochus; he got in early life what dear Dr. ---- only found on his deathbed, and so may you. _To Miss E. A. Warner, New York, Oct. 28, 1877._ I am too tired on Sunday evenings to find much profit in reading, and have been sitting idle some minutes, asking myself how I should spend the hour till bed-time, if I could pick and choose among human occupations. I decided that if I had just the right kind of a neighbor, I should like to have her come in, or if there was the right kind of a little prayer-meeting round the corner, I would go to that. Then I concluded to write to you, in answer to your letter of July 24. I write few letters during the summer, because it seems a plain duty to keep out of doors as much as I possibly can; then we have company all the time, and they require about all the social element there is in me. We feel that we owe it to Him who gives us our delightful home to share it with others, especially those who get no mountain breezes save through us; of some I must pay travelling expenses, or they can not come at all. Their enjoyment is sufficient pay. My Bible-reading takes all the time of two days not spent in outdoor exercise, as I have given up almost everything of help in preparation for it but that which is given me in answer to prayer and study of the Word. I am kept, to use a homely expression, with my nose pretty close to the grindstone; in other words, am kept low and little. But God blesses the work exactly as if I were a better woman. Sometimes I think how poor He must be to use such instruments as He does. How is the niece you spoke of as so ill and so happy? For my part I am _confounded_ when I see people hurt and distressed when invited home. How a loving Father must feel when His children shrink back crying, "I have so much to live for!" or, in other words, so little to die for. It frightens me sometimes to recall such cases. And now I am going to tote my old head to bed. It is 59 years old and has to go early. _To Mrs. Fisher, Oct. 31, 1877._ With young children, and artistic work to do, the wonder is not that you have to neglect other things, but that you ever find time to attend to any one outside of house and home. I do not want you to make a care and trouble of me; I feel it a privilege to _try_ even to copy anything from your hand, and am willing to bide my time. It is shocking to think of your summer's work being burned up; no money can compensate for such a loss--I hate to think of it. I have had your landscape framed, and it is the finest thing in the house. _Nov. 9th._--I have your apple-blossoms ready to mail with this. I found the subject very difficult, and at one time thought I should have to give it up; but your directions are so clear and to the point that I have succeeded in getting a picture we all think pretty, though wanting in the tender grace of yours. The picture, which is a gentle blaze of beauty, has just reached me. We have had burglars in the house, and one of my songs of praise is that they did not take the little gem I got from you last summer. Glad you are a _woman_ and not all artist. _To Mrs. Condict, Nov. 24, 1877_ As to the running fern, I paint it the color of black walnut, and round placques it looks like carving. Emerald green I hate, but it is a popular color, and A. was obliged to put it into the flower pictures she painted on portfolios. I am glad you are still interested in your painting. I have just finished the second reading of Miss Smiley's book, and marked passages which I am sure you will like. I will mail my copy to you. As to joy--"the fruits of the Spirit" come naturally to those in the Spirit, and joy is one. But we may make an idol of our joy, and so have to part with it. There may come a period when God says, virtually, to the soul, "You clung to Me when I smiled upon and caressed you; let Me see how you will behave when I smile and speak comfortably no more." Fenelon says, "To be constantly in a state of enjoyment that takes away the feeling of the cross, and to live in a fervor of devotion that keeps Paradise constantly open--this is not dying upon the cross and becoming nothing." [21] When I look at the subject at a distance, as it were, remembering that this life is mere preparation for the next, it seems _likely_ that we shall have religious as well as other discipline; if we ascend the mount of Transfiguration it is not that we may _dwell_ there, though it is natural to wish we could. And the fact is, no matter what professions of rapture people make, if they believe in Christ and love Him as they ought to do, what they have enjoyed will be nothing when compared with going to live _with_ Him forever, surrounded by sanctified beings all united in adoring Him. When I think of this my courage grows apace, and I say to myself, I may never live in heaven again here below; but I certainly shall, above; and can't I be patient till then? I wonder if you know that I am going to begin a Bible-reading on the first Wednesday in December? I have a very kind letter from Mr. Peter Carter, who says Kezia would make the fortune of any book. Kezia is one of the characters in _Pemaquid; or, a Story of Old Times in New England_, then recently published. She had written it with "indescribable ease and pleasure," to use her own words, mostly during the previous January. The pictures of New England life--especially its religious life--in old times are vivid and faithful; and the character of Kezia Millet for originality, quiet humor, and truth to nature, surpasses any other in her writings, with the exception, perhaps, of Aunt Avery in "Fred and Maria and Me." The following is an extract from a letter of Mr. Hallock, the publisher of "The Christian at Work," dated Aug. 25, 1877, in which he begged her to gratify its readers by telling them more about Ruth and Juliet. She accordingly added some pages to the last chapter, although not quite enough to satisfy the curiosity about Juliet: Let me express to you my _personal_ thanks for your most excellent serial. I feel that it has done a real good to thousands. You need to be placed in my position, receiving hundreds of letters daily from your readers, to be able to fully appreciate how intensely interested they are in the story. It does not seem to satisfy them to feel assured of Ruth's marriage, but they want _to be there_ and see it. Juliet, too, is not with them, as with you, a mere impersonation, but a living reality, and they will never rest till they hear from her. If I was a betting man I would bet five to one that what your husband struck out, is just exactly what is wanted. What do we men know about such things, anyhow? A lady friend, well qualified to judge, writes to her: I have read "Pemaquid," and have laughed till I cried, then cried and laughed together. In my humble opinion it is the brightest book you have written. You know how to make a saint and how to make a sinner. As for old Kezia Millet, with her great loving heart, if she is not a model of Christian "_consistency_" and a natural born poet, where will you find one? She is perfectly fascinating. How do you keep your wit so ready and so bright? I suppose you'll answer, "by using it." The chapter which contains Mrs. Woodford's interview with Rev. Mr. Strong (the dear old saint) in her penitential mood, is very, very admirable. _To Mrs. George Payson, Dec. 20, 1877._ Before the year quite departs, I must tell you, my dear Margaret, how glad I am that you appreciate my dear, good bad Kezia. It is nineteen years since I read Adam Bede, but I remember Mrs. Poysen in general. Kezia is not an imitation of her; the main points of her character were written out long before Adam Bede appeared; I destroyed the book in which I trotted her out, but kept _her_, and once in a while tried her on my husband, but as he did not seem to see it, put her away in her green box, biding my time. As to Juliet, my good man _loathes_ so to read about bad people that he almost made me cut out all my last mention of her. I was in an unholy frame when I did it, and with reason, for they who like Pemaquid best, say it was a mistake not to dispose of her in some way. But as to Mrs. Woodford being a model mother, I did not aim to make her a model anything. All I wanted of her was to bring out the New England pecularities as they would appear to a worldly stranger. As to all parties _seeming_ indifferent about Juliet, you may be right; I was behind the scenes and knew they were not; but as I say, what I thought the best part of her, George made me cut out. No, I never knew any one sing exactly like Kezia, but there are such cases on record. There was "the Singing Cobbler," whose wife complained of him in court, and he defended himself so wittily in verse, that everybody sided with him, and his wife forgave his offence, whatever it might be. [22] [1] The following is the passage referred to: "If you aspire to be a son of consolation; if you would partake of the priestly gift of sympathy; if you would pour something beyond commonplace consolation into a tempted heart; if you would pass through the intercourse of daily life with the delicate tact that never inflicts pain; if to that most acute of human ailments--mental doubt, you are ever to give effectual succor, you must be content to pay the price of the costly education. Like Him, you must suffer, being tempted." [2] By the late Rev. William James, D.D. [3] See appendix G, p.557. [4] Then pastor of the Collegiate Reformed Church, Fifth avenue and Forty-eighth street, now of Brooklyn. [5] "Account of the Union Meeting for the Promotion of Scriptural Holiness, held at Oxford, August 29 to September 7, 1874." [6] "Account of the Union Meeting for the Promotion of Scriptural Holiness, held at Oxford, August 29 to September 7, 1874." P. 59. [7] GRISELDA; A Dramatic Poem in Five Acts. _Translated from the German of_ FRIEDERICH HALM (Baron Münch-Bellinghausen), _by Mrs. E. Prentiss._ [8] How glad I was to see Griselda's fair face! She is a gem, and I am sure will prove a blessing as she moves about the world in her nobleness and purity, so exceedingly womanly and winning. The book is full of poetry, and held me spell-bound to the close. It is very musical, too, in its rich, pure English. I don't know how much of its poetic charm lies in the original or in your rendering, but as it is, it is "just lovely," as the girls say.--_Letter from Miss Warner._ [9] In a letter written in 1879, just after a visit to Dorset, Dr. Hamlin thus refers to them: "Now that I have seen again those lights and shadows of the Green Mountains, as they lie around your Dorset home, I must tell you why they awakened such deep emotions. Forty-one years ago I was married to Miss Henrietta Jackson, the youngest daughter of the venerated and beloved pastor of Dorset, and we left that lovely valley for our oriental home. I had heard from her lips a glowing description of the magic work of light and shade upon those uplands and heights that lie west of the valley, before I had seen the place. The first morning of my first visit I recognised the truth and accuracy of her description, and was forced to confess that, although I had always admired cloud-shadows, I had never seen them in such rich display and constant recurrence. There were certain days, which we called field-days, when all their resources were called out, and they seemed hurrying in swift battalions to some great contest or grand coronation scene. But at other times they rested in calm repose as though the pulse of nature had ceased to beat... In our home upon the Bosphorus we were sometimes reminded of these scenes of her native valley. When, occasionally, the Black Sea clouds floated down in broken masses, and floods of light here and there poured through the darkly shadowed landscape, lighting up fragments of hill and vale to the very summits of Alem Dagh, her soul took flight to her beloved Dorset and all other thoughts vanished." [10] On hearing of Mrs. Prentiss' death, the "poor, homeless fellow" wrote to her husband a touching letter of sympathy. The following is an extract from it: It was, I must acknowledge, a cherished desire of your dear departed lady that I should walk in the footsteps of the Lord Jesus, and, to obtain that grace, I must invoke God's Power that I may accomplish that great Result. Dear sir, I would like to suggest to you that I am disgusted with a wandering life; would like to see Dorset next Summer and look on the grave of my greatest friend. Nothing could give me greater Pleasure than to be under the Influence of your Christian family; now, if I had any Employment, no matter how simple, in that locality for the winter, then I would feel Happy to go next season to your country Residence and offer my services free. [11] Meeta Sophia Schaff died July 14, 1876, in the twenty-first year of her age. She had just returned from the Centennial. She was a young lady of unusual loveliness of character, and was deeply lamented by a wide circle of friends, both young and old. [12] A printed copy of Lines on her Golden Wedding, written by Mrs. Prentiss. [13] The article is entitled _Educated while Educating_, and appeared in the Brooklyn Journal of Education for March, 1875. [14] The Rev. C. H. Payson. See the interesting Memoir of him, entitled "All for Christ," edited by his brother George, and published by the American Tract Society. [15] See HENRY BOYNTON SMITH; His Life and Work. Edited by his Wife. A. C. Armstrong & Son. 1880. [16] His biographer, Mr. Moore, relates of Lord Byron that in all the plenitude of his fame, he confessed that "the depreciation of the lowest of mankind was more painful to him than the applause of the highest was pleasing." [17] _Peterchen and Gretchen_. She translated it at Genevrier during the illness of her children. [18] Dr. Gurdon Buck. He died shortly afterwards. For more than a quarter of a century be had been a faithful friend of Mrs. Prentiss, and as their family physician had made both her and her husband his debtors alike by his kindness and his skill. With a generosity so characteristic of his profession, he refused, during all these years, to receive any compensation for his services. As a surgeon he stood in the front rank; some of the operations, performed by him, attracted wide attention for then--novelty and usefulness. He published an account of them, with illustrations, which greatly interested Mrs. Prentiss. She was almost as fond of reading about remarkable eases in surgery as about remarkable criminal trials. Dr. Buck was one of the founders and first ruling elders of the Church of the Covenant. His gratuitous labors in connection with the New York Hospital and other public institutions were very great. He was a man of solid worth, modest, upright, and devoted to his Lord and Master. [19] "One of my brightest recollections of this season at Dorset is our last Sunday before returning to town. We went in the phaeton to Pawlet, where I preached for the Rev. Mr. Aiken. The morning was pleasant, the road lay through a lovely mountain valley, and the beauty of nature was made perfect by the sweet Sabbath stillness; and our thoughts were in unison with the scene and the day. I preached on Rest in Christ, and the service was very comforting to us both. How well I recall the same drive and a similar service early in September of 1876, when prayer was my theme! What sweet talks and sweeter fellowship we had together by the way, going and coming!"--_Recollections of_ 1877-8. [20] Recollections of 1876-7 [21] "Better is it sometimes to go down into the pit with him, who beholding darkness and bewailing the loss of consolation, crieth from the bottom of the lowest hell, My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me? than continually to walk arm in arm with angels, to sit, as it were, in Abraham's bosom, and to have no thought, no cogitation but this, '_I thank my God it is not with me as it is with other men._'"--HOOKER. [22] A list of Mrs. Prentiss' writings, with brief notices of some of them, will be found at the end of the appendix, p. 568. CHAPTER XV. FOREVER WITH THE LORD. 1878. "But a bound into home immortal, And blessed, blessed years." I. Enters upon her last Year on Earth. A Letter about The Home at Greylock. Her Motive in writing Books. Visit to the Aquarium. About "Worry." Her Painting. Saturday Afternoons with her. What she was to her Friends. Resemblance to Madame de Broglie. Recollections of a Visit to East River. A Picture of her by an old Friend. Goes to Dorset. Second Advent Doctrine. Last Letters. Mrs. Prentiss crossed the threshold of her last year on earth with hands and thoughts still unusually busied. Her weekly Bible-reading, painting in oils and in water-colors, needle-work, and other household duties, left her no idle moment. "My fire is so full of irons," she wrote, "that I do not know which one to take out." Nor was her heart less busy than her hands and brain. Twice in January, once in February, and again in April, death invaded the circle of her friends; and when her friends were in trouble she was always in trouble, too. [1] These deaths led to earnest talk with her husband on the mystery of earthly existence, and on the power of faith in Christ to sustain the soul in facing its great trials. "I am filled with ever fresh wonder at this amazing power," she said. Such subjects always interested her deeply; never more so than at this time, when, although she knew it not, her feet were drawing so near to the pearly gates. The keynote of her being throughout this last winter was one of unwonted seriousness. A certain startling intensity of thought and feeling showed itself every now and then. It was painfully evident that she was under a severe strain, both physical and mental. Again and again, as spring advanced, the anxiety of her husband was aroused to the highest pitch by what seemed to him indications that the unresting, ever-active spirit was fast wearing away the frail body. At times, too, there was a light in her eye and in her face an "unearthly, absolutely angelic expression"--to use her own words about her little Bessie, six and twenty years before--that filled him with a strange wonder, and which, after her departure, he often recalled as prophetic of the coming event and the glory that should follow. But while to his ear an undertone of unusual seriousness, deepening ever and anon into a strain of the sweetest tenderness and pathos, ran through her life during all these early months of 1878, there was little change in its outward aspect. She was often gay and full as ever of bright, playful fancies. Never busier, so was she never more eager to be of service to her friends--and never was she more loving to her children, or more thoughtful of their happiness. She proposed for their gratification and advantage to write four new books, one for each of them, provided only they and their father would furnish her with subjects. The plan seemed to please her greatly, and, had she been spared, would probably have been carried into effect--for it was just the sort of stimulus she needed to set her mind in action. Once furnished with a subject, her pen, as has been said before, always moved with the utmost ease and rapidity. But while she wrote very easily, she did not write without reflection. 'She had a keen sense of character in all its phases, and her individual portraits, like those of Katy, Mrs. Grey and Margaret, Aunt Avery and Kezia Millet, were worked out with the utmost care, the result of years of observation and study being embodied in them. And here, in passing, it may not be out of place to dwell for an instant upon her motives and experience as an author. From first to last she wrote, not to get gain or to win applause, but to do good; and herein she had her reward, good measure, pressed down and running over. But of that kind of reward which gratifies literary taste and ambition, she had almost none. Her books, even those most admired by the best judges, and which had the widest circulation, both at home and abroad, attracted but little attention from the press. The organs of literary intelligence and criticism scarcely noticed them at all. Nor is it known that any attempt was ever made to analyse any of her more striking characters, or to point out the secret of her power and success as a writer. To be sure, she had never sought or counted upon this sort of recognition; and yet that she was keenly alive to a word of discriminating praise, will appear from a letter to Mrs. Condict, dated Jan. 20th: The burglary was on this wise, as far as we know. One man stood on the front steps, and another slipped the hasp to one of the parlor windows, stepped in, took a very valuable French clock, given me on my silver- wedding day, and all the hats and overcoats from the hall. This was all they had time to do before our night-watchman came round; they left the window wide open, and at 4 A.M. Pat rang the bell and informed Mr. Prentiss that such was the case. We feel it a great mercy that we were not attacked and maltreated. Poor A. was sitting up in bed, hearing what was going on, but being alone on the third floor, did not dare to move. I have just finished a short story called Gentleman Jim, which I am going to send to Scribner's; very likely it will get overlooked and lost. I received, not long ago, a letter from Mr. Cady [2] about Greylock, which he had just read. It was a gratification to both my husband and myself, as the most discriminating letter I ever received; and after the first rush of pleasure, the Evil One troubled me, off and on, for two or three hours, but at last I reminded him that I long ago chose to cast in my lot with the people of God, and so be off the line of human notice or applause, and that I was glad I had been enabled to do it, since literary ambition is unbecoming a Christian woman. There are 500 other things I should say, if you were here! The following is a part of the letter referred to: The day after "New Year's" I was visited with a severe cold and general prostration that has kept me in my bed--_giving me time!_ As soon as I was strong enough to read I had "The Home" brought. After reading it I felt I ought to tell you how deeply I was impressed with the usefulness, excellence, and spirit of the book. As to its usefulness, you are to be envied; to have brought light, as I believe you have, to a large number of people upon the most precious and vital interests of life, is something worth living and suffering for. The good sense, wisdom, experience, and Christian faith embodied in it must make it a strong helper and friend to many a home in trouble and to many perplexed and discouraged hearts, who will doubtless rise up some day to call you "blessed." Though you cared less about the manner than the matter, I was impressed by its literary qualities. The scene at the death of Mrs. Grey and parting of herself and Margaret is as highly artistic and beautiful as anything I can think of. The contrast of good and bad, or good and indifferent, is common enough; but the contrast of what is noble and what is "saintly" is something infinitely higher and subtler. I can't imagine anything more exquisitely tender and beautiful than Mrs. Grey's departure, but it is the more realised by the previous action of Margaret. The few lines in which this is told bring their whole character--in each case--vividly before you. But I see that if the book had previously to this point been differently written it would have been impossible to have rendered this scene so remarkably impressive. The story of "Eric" is extremely quaint and charming; it is a vein I am not familiar with in your writings. It is a little classic. This quaint child's story and the death of Mrs. Grey affect me as a fine work of art affects one, whenever I recall them. The trite saying is still true, "A thing of beauty is a joy forever." You know children complain of some sweets that they leave a bad taste--and works of fiction often do with me. I feel tired and dissatisfied after I have passed out of their excitements; but the heavenly atmosphere of this book left me better; I know that the Blessed Spirit must have influenced you in the writing of it, and I doubt not His blessing will accompany its teachings. Now will you excuse this blotty letter--written in bed--and accept my thanks for all the good your book has done me. The following is her reply: DEAR MR. CADY:--Your letter afforded me more satisfaction than I know how to explain. It is true that I made up my mind, as a very young girl, to keep out of the way of literary people, so as to avoid literary ambition. Nor have I regretted that decision. Yet the human nature is not dead in me, and my instincts still crave the kind of recognition you have given me. I have had heaps of letters from all parts of this country, England, Scotland, Ireland, Germany, and Switzerland, about my books, till I have got sick and tired of them. And the reason I tired of them was, that in most cases there was no discrimination. People liked their religious character, and of course I wanted them to do so. But you appreciate and understand everything in Greylock, and have, therefore, gratified my husband and myself. Not a soul out of this house, for instance, has ever so much as alluded to my little Eric, except one friend who said, "We thought that part of the book forced, and supposed A. wrote it." Nobody has ever alluded to Margaret, save yourself. I hoped a sequel to the book might be called for, when I meant to elaborate her character. Still, it would have been very hard.... I am not sorry that I chose the path in life I did choose. A woman should not live for, or even desire, fame. This is yet more true of a Christian woman. If I had not steadily suppressed all such ambition, I might have become a sour, disappointed woman, seeing my best work unrecognised. But it has been my wish to "Dare to be little and unknown, Seen and loved by God alone." Your letter for a few hours, did stir up what I had always trampled down; but only for that brief period, and then I said to myself, God has only taken me at my word; I have asked Him, a thousand times, to make me smaller and smaller, and crowd the self out of me by taking up all the room Himself. There is so much of that work yet to be done, that I wonder He ventures to make so many lines fall to me in pleasant places, and that I have such a goodly heritage. I trust He will bless you for your labor of love to me. I do not like the idea of your buying my books. Greylock being for mothers, I never dreamed of men reading it. Have you had The Story Lizzie Told, Six Little Princesses, The Little Preacher, and Nidworth? Neither of these is really a child's book, and the next time you are sick, if you have not read them, I shall love to send them to you. If this is conceit, I have the effrontery not to be a mite ashamed of it! The following notes to Mrs. Fisher show how pleasantly she sympathised with her teacher as a young mother, while taking lessons of and admiring her as an artist: NEW YORK, _February 4, 1878._ What a relief to have the days come long again! On Saturday I found in A.'s portfolio a study you lent her; exquisite ferns behind the fallen trunk of a tree, and a tiny group of orange-colored toad-stools. I will send it with its two lovely sisters, when I get through with them. I wish you could get time to come to see me, or that I could get time to go to see you. But it is my unlucky nature to have a great many irons in the fire at once. I am glad your baby keeps well, and hope he will grow up to be a great comfort to you. _Feb. 23d._--I have just received your letter. I have my hands full and there is no need to hurry you. As to "worry" not being of faith, I do not suppose it is. But a young mother can not be _all_ faith. I do not envy people who love so lightly that they have no wringing out of the heart when they lose their dear ones; nor can I understand her who says she can sit and read the newspaper, while her babies are crying. "None are so old as they who have outlived enthusiasm"; and who should be enthusiastic if a mother may not? I don't think God has laid it up against me that I nearly killed myself for the sake of my babies, because when He took two away within three months of each other, my faith in Him did not falter.... Dear Mrs. Fisher, if you love God nothing but His best things will ever come to you. This is the experience of a very young, old woman, and I hope it will comfort you. _April 21st._--Such a fight as I have had with your exquisite studies, and how I have been beaten! I failed entirely in the golden-rod, and do not get the brilliant yellow of the mullein flower; one could not easily fail on the saggitarius, and the clover was tolerable. I think I will take no more lessons at present, as I have much to do in getting another boy fitted for college. After I get settled at Dorset I want to make a desperate effort to paint from nature, and if I have any success, send to you for criticism. "Fools rush in where angels fear to tread," and I am afraid you will be disgusted with my work, which will be in the dark, since I have had no instruction in copying nature.... Perhaps you may put alongside of the rejection of your picture a lady's telling me about one of my books into which I had thrown an experience of the last thirty years of my life, "There was nothing in it." "Il faut souffrir pour etre belle." As long as memory lasts I shall rejoice that I have seen and studied your work. I remember what a splendid fellow your baby was a year ago. It will depend on your maternal prayers and discipline whether he grows up to be your comfort. A few extracts from her letters will give further glimpses of the manner in which she passed these closing months of her life in New York-- especially of her delight in the weekly Bible-reading. One of the ladies who attended it, thus refers to that exercise: You remember that for one or two years she was a member of a small circle, that met weekly for Bible-study. When the leader of this circle removed from the city, Mrs. Prentiss was urgently requested to become its teacher, and she consented to do so. For the last four years of her life she threw her whole soul into this exercise. Every week the appointed morning found her surrounded by a little group of from eight to fifteen, each with an open Bible and all intent less to analyse the word of God than to feed upon it and "grow thereby." And what a wonderful teacher she was! Not neglectful of any helps that dictionary or commentator might give, her chief source of light was none of these, but was received in answer to the promise, "If any man will do the will of God he shall know of the doctrine." She wished the service to be entirely informal, and that each one present should do her part to aid in the study. This brought out diverse views and different standards of opinion. Here her keen intellect, her warm heart, the rich stores of her experience and her "sanctified common sense" all found play, and many of the words that fell from her lips dwell in the memory as little less than inspired. The last winter of this service showed some marked differences from previous years. As eager as ever to have questions asked and answered by others, yet from the moment she commenced to speak she scarcely paused till the hour was finished, her eyes sparkling and her whole manner intensely earnest. Often those words of the Psalmist passed through my mind, _The zeal of Thy house hath eaten me up._ Her love for her work and zeal in doing it were visibly consuming her. At the last meeting I asked her if she should commence the Bible-reading at Dorset immediately. She said no, she must rest a little; she would wait till her garden was made. When next I heard from her flowers and her Bible-study she had made the "bound into home immortal." And all who loved her must rejoice with her; else have we failed to learn one of the clearest lessons of her life: _For me to live is Christ, and to die is gain._ _To Mrs. Condict, Feb. 14, 1878._ Is it possible I had portiére on the brain when I wrote you last? I thought I had just caught the disease. I am very fond of needle-work, but for years have nearly abandoned it, because I could not thread my needle. But the portiére is made with a large worsted needle and will give me pleasant work for the evening. I am getting my hand in on a contumacious closet door that won't stay open in my bedroom.... Imitation Macaroni, By the author of Pemaquid: Boil hominy overnight. Next day's dinner prepare like macaroni, with a little milk and grated cheese and bake. Good for a change and cheaper. _March 9th._--What an improvement on the old fashion of _reading_ the Bible is the present _search_ of the Word! It is, as you say, fascinating work. I have just given M. an admirable book called "Emphatic Diaglott," being the Greek Testament with a literal translation; still even that can be misunderstood by one who has a false theory to sustain. The spiritual conflicts I have passed through have been a blessing, as I am beginning to see; I can understand better _how_ such conflicts may prepare one for work. This afternoon I have, as usual, been getting ready for the Wednesday reading, and as I was requested to speak of the Holy Spirit, have been poring over the Bible and am astonished at the frequency and variety of passages in which He is spoken of. But I feel painfully unfit to guide even this little circle of women, and would be so glad to sit as a learner. Some of the children were going, last Friday night, to see the Aquarium, and some educated horses and dogs there, and they persuaded me to go. The performance was wonderful, but I could not help thinking of all these poor animals had gone through in learning all these incredible feats; each horse responding to his own name, each dog barking in response to his; two dogs hanging a third, cutting him down, when he lay apparently dead, other dogs driving in, in a cart, and carrying away the body; others waltzing on their hind legs, and others jumping the rope. Two horses played see-saw, and one rolled a barrel up an inclined plane with his fore legs; he _hated_ to do it. But the marvellous fishes and sea-flowers charmed me most. _To Mrs. Reed, New York, March 13, 1878._ ... I have had a busy winter. We had a variety of losses, and I undertook, therefore, to manufacture Reed, most of my Christmas gifts, which were, chiefly, umbrella racks; this took time. Then my Bible-reading uses up pretty much one day. I never felt so unfit for it, or more determined to keep it up as long as one would come. Besides that, I have read and painted more or less and sewed a good deal; on the whole, have had more vacation than work, at least one looking on would say so. But we all lead two lives, and one of them is penetrated and understood by no mortal eye. I heard such a sermon from Dr. Bevan last Sunday night on the text, "They saw God and did eat and drink." He divided mankind into four classes: Those who do eat and drink and do not see God; those who do not see Him and do not eat and drink; those who see Him and do not eat and drink (he handled them tenderly); and those who see Him and yet eat and drink. I hope I have made its outline plain to you. It took hold of me. _To Mrs. Donaghe, New York, April 26, 1878._ I am living my life among breakings-up; you gone, Mrs. Smith about to flee to Northampton, and our neighbor Miss W. storing her furniture and probably leaving New York for good. On the other hand, M. spends most of her time in helping Mr. and Mrs. Talbot get to rights in apartments they have just taken. Mr. T., as I suppose you know, is pastor of our Mission and as good as gold. God has been pleased greatly to bless two ladies, who attend the Bible-reading, and I am sure He loves to have us study His Word. The more I dig into it the richer I find it, and I have had some delightful hours this winter in preparing for my Wednesday work. There is to be a Women's Exchange in this city, where everything manufactured by them (except underclothing) will be exposed for sale; embroidery, pickles, preserves, confectionery, and articles rejected by the Society of Decorative Art. I hope it will be a success, and help many worthy women, all over the land, to help themselves.... I find it hard to consent to your having, at your age, to flit about from home to home, but a loving Father has a mansion for you beyond all the changes and chances of this strange complicated life. If He gives you His presence, that will be a home. I wish you could visit us at Dorset. A visit to Dorset was afterward arranged, and one of Mrs. Prentiss' last letters was addressed to this old friend, giving her directions how to get there. [3] _To Mrs. Condict, New York, May 6, 1878._ My last Bible-reading, or rather one of the last, was on prayer; as I could not do justice to it in one reading, I concluded to make a resumé of the whole subject. Though I devoted all the readings to this topic last summer, yet it loomed up wonderfully in this resumé. Last week the subject was "the precious blood of Christ," and in studying up the word "precious" I lighted on these lovely verses, Deut. xxxiii. 13-16. Since I began to _study_ the Bible, it often seems like a new book. And that passage thrilled the ladies, as a novelty. I am to have but one more reading. The last sermon I heard was on lying. That is not one of my besetting sins, but, on the other hand, I push the truth too far, haggling about evils better let alone. A. has just finished a splendid placque to order; a Japanese figure, with exquisite foliage in black and grey as background. I have a widow lady every Saturday to paint with me; she has a large family, limited means, and delicate health; and I want to aid her all I can. She enjoys these afternoons so much, and is doing so well. The lady herself thus recalls these afternoons: How dearly I should love to add but one little flower to her wreath of immortelles! I cherish memories of her as among the pleasantest of my life. I recall her room so bright and cheery, just like herself, and all the incidents of those Saturday afternoons. When she first asked me to paint with her, I thought it very kind, but with her multiplicity of cares, felt it must be burdensome to her, and that possibly she would even forget the invitation, and so I hesitated about going. But when the week came round everything was made ready to give me a cordial welcome. Again and again I found my chair, palette and other materials waiting for me, while she sat in her little nook, busy as a bee over some painting of her own. One day, passing about the room, I saw on her book-shelves, arranged with order and precision, nine little butter plates in the form of pansies. I uttered an exclamation of delight, and she from her corner, with the artlessness of a child, said, "I _put_ them there for you to see." Another time she sprang up with her quick, light step, and ran to the yard to fetch a flower for me to copy, apparently thoughtless of two flights of stairs to tax her strength. Sometimes she would read to me verses of poetry that pleased her. Once I remember her throwing herself at my feet, and when I stopped to listen to the reading, she said, "Oh, go right on with your painting." Now she would relate some amusing anecdote that almost convulsed me with laughter, and then again speak of some serious theme with such earnestness of feeling! She was eager to give of her store of strength and cheer to others, but the store seemed inexhaustible. The more she gave, the more one felt that there was enough and to spare. I looked forward to my little weekly visit as to an oasis in the desert; not that all else was bleak, but that spot seemed to me so very refreshing and attractive. Little did I think, when she loaded me down that last day with all I could carry, then ran down to the parlor to show me some choice articles there which she knew would give me pleasure--little did I think that I should see her again no more! Not a day passed after leaving her that she was not an inspiration to me. While painting a wayside flower I would think, "Mrs. Prentiss would like this"--or, "In the fall I must show that to Mrs. Prentiss." Even in my dreams she was present with me, and one morning, only a little while before she passed from us, I waked with a heavy burden upon my spirits--for it seemed to me as if she were gone. The impression was so strong that I spoke of it at the time, and for days could not throw it off. But at last, saying to myself, "Oh, it is only a dream," I answered her little note, making, of course, no reference to my strange feelings in regard to her. Her letter, by a singular mistake, is dated "Kauinfels, _October_ 10, 1878," nearly two months after she had fallen asleep. How just like her is this passage in it: "I wish you could leave your little flock, and take some rest with us. It would do you good, I am sure. Is it impossible? you do look so tired." My letter in reply must have been one of the very last received by her. In it I spoke of having just re-read Stepping Heavenward and Aunt Jane's Hero, and of having enjoyed them almost as much as at the first. This was, perhaps, one reason why she had been so constantly in my thoughts. When the news came that she had left us, I was at first greatly shocked and grieved--for I felt that I had lost no ordinary friend--but when I considered how complete her life had been in all that makes life noble and beautiful, and how meet it was that, having borne the burden and heat of the day, she should now rest from her labors, it seemed selfish to give way to sorrow and not rather to rejoice that she had gone to be with Christ. Scores of such grateful testimonies as this might be given. To all who knew and loved her well, Mrs. Prentiss was "an inspiration." They delighted to talk about her to each other and even to strangers. They repeated her bright and pithy sayings. They associated her with favorite characters in the books they read. The very thought of her wrought upon them with gracious and cheering influence. An extract from a letter of one of her old and dearest friends, written to her husband after her death, will illustrate this: On the very morning of her departure I had been conversing with my physician about her. He spoke in admiration of her published works, and I tried to give him a description of her personal characteristics. The night before, in my hours of sleeplessness, I recounted the names of friends who I thought had been most instrumental in moulding my character, and Mrs. Prentiss led the list. How little did I dream that already her feet had safely touched "the shining shore"! In all the three and thirty years of our acquaintance I loved her DEARLY and reverenced her most deeply; but between us there was such a gulf that I always felt unworthy to touch even the hem of her garment. Whenever I did touch it, strength and comfort were imparted to me. How much I was indebted to her most tender sympathy and her prayers in my own great sorrow, only another world will reveal. Is it not a little remarkable that her last letter to me, written only a few weeks before her death, closed with a benediction? I could go on talking about her without end; for I have often said that there was more of her, and to her, and in her, than belonged to any five women I ever knew. How exceedingly lovely she was in her own home! I remember you once said to me, "The greatest charm of my wife is, after all, her perfect naturalness." All who knew her, must have recognised the same winning characteristic. She was always fresh and always new--for she had "the well-spring of wisdom as a flowing brook." ... Were you not struck, in reading Thomas Erskine's letters on the death of Madame de Broglie, by the wonderful likeness between her and dear Mrs. Prentiss? Twin sisters could scarcely have resembled each other more perfectly. Such passages as the following quite startled me: Her friendship has been to me a great gift. She has been a witness to me for God, a voice crying in the wilderness. She has been a warner and a comforter. I have seen her continually thirsting after a spiritual union with God. I have heard the voice of her heart crying after God out from the midst of all things which make this life pleasant and satisfying.... She had all the gifts of mind and character--intelligence, imagination, nobleness, and thoughts that wandered through eternity. She had a heart fitted for friendship, and she had friends who could appreciate her; but God suffered her not to find rest in these things, her ear was open to His own paternal voice, and she became His child, in the way that the world is not and knoweth not. I see her before me, her loving spirit uttering itself through every feature of her beautiful and animated countenance.... There was an unspeakable charm about her. She had a truth and simplicity of character, which one rarely finds even in the highest order of men. I know nobody like her now. I hope to pass eternity with her. It is wonderful to think what a place she has occupied in my life since I became acquainted with her. You know it is my belief that we become better acquainted with our friends after they have passed on "within the veil." And may it not be that they become better acquainted with us, too, loving us more perfectly and forgiving all that has been amiss? [4] _To her eldest son, New York, May 12, 1878._ This is your father's birthday, and I have given him, to his great delight, a Fairbanks postal scale. His twenty-years-old one would not weigh newspapers or books, and it is time for an improvement on it. On Thursday evening there was a festival at our church in aid of sick mission children. Everybody was there with their children, and it was the nicest affair we ever had. M. and I went and enjoyed it ever so much. I took between four and five dollars to spend, though I had given between twenty and thirty to the mission, but did not get a chance to spend much, as Mr. M. took me in charge and paid for everything I ate. Your father and I rather expect to go to East River, Conn., tomorrow to help Mrs. Washburn celebrate her seventieth birthday; but the weather is so cold he doubts whether I had better go. A. went on a long drive on Friday and brought back a host of wild flowers, which I tried with some failure and some success to paint. _May 19th._--We went to East River on Monday afternoon and came home on Thursday, making a delightful visit. On Tuesday Mrs. W. and I went to Norwich to see the Gilmans. I was very tired when we got back, and had to go to bed at half-past seven. The next day it rained; so Mrs. W. and I fell to painting. She became so interested in learning Mrs. Fisher's system that she got up at five the next morning and worked two hours. In the evening your father gave his lecture at a little club-room, got up chiefly by Mr. and Mrs. Washburn at their own expense. It is just such a room as I should like to build at Dorset. On Thursday morning Mrs. W. took me out to drive through their own woods and dug up some wild flowers for me. A. has a Miss Crocker, an artistic friend from Portland, staying with her--a very nice, plucky girl. She wants me to let her take my portrait. [5] H. is full of a story of a pious dog, who was only fond of people who prayed, went to church regularly, and, when not prevented, to all the neighborhood prayer-meetings, which were changed every week from house to house; his only knowledge of where they would be held being from Sunday notices from the pulpit! I believe this the more readily because of Pharaoh's always going to my Bible-reading at Dorset and never barking there, whereas if I went to the same house to call he barked dreadfully. We are constantly wondering what you boys will be. Good men, I hope, at any rate. Good-night, with a kiss from your affectionate mother. The substance of the following letter of Mrs. Washburn, giving an account of the visit to East River, as also her impressions of Mrs. Prentiss, was written in response to one received by her from an old friend in Turk's Island: [6] I am most thankful that we had that last visit from dear Mrs. Prentiss. It was a rare favor to us that she came. Her health was very delicate, and a slight deviation from the regular routine of home life was apt to give her sleepless nights. Dr. P. had sent us word that he was going to be in New Haven, and would give us a call before returning to New York. We' were overjoyed at the prospect of seeing him, and wrote immediately begging Mrs. Prentiss to come with him. She, ever ready to sacrifice her own ease for the sake of giving pleasure to others, and knowing that the 15th of May would be my 70th anniversary, and that I perfectly longed to see her, took the risk of personal suffering upon herself to satisfy my earnest desire, and came. They arrived on the 13th in the late afternoon train. She was so bright and cheerful it was difficult to notice any traces of the weariness which she must have felt. We passed a delightful evening, and as Dr. P. was to spend a part of the next day in New Haven, we formed a plan for Mrs. Prentiss and me to go to Norwich at the same time and make a brief visit to our mutual friends, the Misses Gilman. Mr. Washburn telegraphed to them that we were coming. On arriving at New London we found, to our dismay, that we had been misinformed in regard to the trains, and that the one we had taken did not connect with the one to Norwich, which had been gone two hours. So there we were, left alone on the platform, strangers in the place, with no means of either going on or returning. What should we do? Our first thought was to procure, if possible, some conveyance to take us to Norwich and back; but this we found could not be done, for want of time, the distance between the two cities being fourteen miles or more. Fortunately for us, a young lad appeared, who promised to take us to our friends in Norwich, allow us half an hour to spend with them, and drive to the station there in time for the return train to New London and East River. He looked so honest and true that we felt we could trust him, and we acceded to his terms at once. As soon as he could get his carriage ready we started off on our untried way. It began at the foot of a long hill, and continued up and down over a succession of the same kind, with very rare exceptions of a level space between them, through the whole distance. But the scenery was so varied and beautiful, we thought if our only object in setting out had been a drive, we could not have chosen one more charming. The weather was fine, and dear Mrs. Prentiss in her happiest mood. As for me, nothing marred my enjoyment but fear that the fatigue would be too much for her, and an undercurrent of anxiety lest by some mishap we should fail to re-arrive at the home-station in time to meet our husbands who would be waiting for us. But if she had any such misgivings nothing in word or manner betrayed it. So entire was her self-control, and so delicate her tact, not to throw the faintest shadow across the wisdom of my precipitate arrangements. She was as happy as a bird all the way, and talked delightfully. We found our friends had been in a state of great excitement on our account, having received the telegram, and knowing that we had taken the wrong train; so that our unexpected arrival was greeted with even more than their usual cordiality; and they were specially gratified to see Mrs. Prentiss, who almost without looking, discovered a hundred beauties in and around their lovely home, which it would have taken the eyes of an ordinary guest a week to notice. The very shortness of our time to stay, intensified our enjoyment while it lasted. Our half hour was soon over, and we came away with our hands full of flowers and our hearts as full of love. We arrived in good time and met our husbands waiting for us at the station. Dear Mrs. Prentiss did not appear to be very much fatigued while recounting in her inimitably pleasant manner the various experiences of the day. A restful night prepared her for the quiet enjoyments of the next day, which we spent mostly at home, merely making short calls in the morning on my two sisters, and slowly driving, or rather, as I call it, "taking a walk in the buggy," through the woods, stopping every few minutes to look at, or gather ferns or mosses or budding wild flowers that could not escape her beauty-loving eye. The afternoon we remained in the house, occupied with our pencils. She painted a spray of trailing arbutus, talking while she was doing it, as nobody else could, about things beloved and fair. Our darling Julia was with us, completely charmed with her, and as busy as we, trying with her little hands to make pictures as pretty as ours. In the evening Dr. P. gave his most interesting lecture on "Recollections of Hurstmonceaux" in our reading-room; but Mrs. Prentiss was not able to go, which I regretted the more because I knew many ladies would be there who came almost as much to see her as to hear him. They were greatly disappointed, but enjoyed every word of the lecture, as well they might. The next day was all too short. It seemed to me that I _could not_ let them go. But she had more than enough for her ever busy hands and mind and heart to do in preparation for going to her summer home, and we _had_ to say good-bye. A few short, characteristic, loving notes came from the city, before she left, and I did not hear from her at Dorset till the overwhelming news came of her death. I could not control my grief. Little Julia tried to comfort me with her sweet sympathy. "Dear grandma," she said, "I am sorry too. I can not feel so bad as you do, because you loved her so much, and you loved her so long; but _I_ loved her too, and I can think just how she looked when she sat right there by that little table talking, and painting those beautiful flowers. Oh! I am very sorry." And here the poor child's tears flowed again with mine. So will all the children who knew her say, "We remember just how she looked." Yes, there was no mistaking or forgetting that kindly, loving "look." Julia's mother had felt its influence from her own early childhood till she left her precious little one to receive it in her stead. To each of these half-orphaned ones in turn, I had to read "Little Susy's Six Birthdays," and both always said to me when I finished, "Please read it again." She could read and understand the heart of children through and through, as indeed she could everybody's. And that was, perhaps, her chiefest charm; a keen eye to see and a true heart to sympathise and love. She was absolutely sincere, and no one could help feeling that she was so. We felt ourselves fairly imaged when standing before her, as in a clear plate-glass mirror. There were no distorted lines caused by her own imperfections; for although she considered herself "compassed with infirmity," no one else could take such a view of her, but only saw the abundant charity which could cover and forgive a multitude of failings in others. We felt that if there was any good in us, she knew it, and even when she saw them "with all our faults she loved us still," and loved to do us good. You would like me to tell you "how she looked." You can form some idea from her picture, but not an adequate one. Her face defied both the photographer's and the painter's art. The crayon likeness, taken shortly before her death by Miss Crocker, a young artist from Maine, is, in some respects, excellent. The eyes and mouth--not to speak of other features--are very happily reproduced. She was of medium height, yet stood and walked so erect as to appear taller than she really was. Her dress, always tasteful, with little or no ornament that one could remember, was ever suited to the time and place, and seemed the most becoming to her which could have been chosen. She was perfectly natural, and, though shy and reserved among strangers, had a quiet, easy grace of manner, that showed at once deference for them and utter unconsciousness of self. Her head was very fine and admirably poised. She had a symmetrical figure, and her step to the last was as light and elastic as a girl's. When I first knew her, in the flush and bloom of young maternity, her face scarcely differed in its curving outlines from what it was more than a quarter of a century later, when the joys and sorrows of full-orbed womanhood had stamped upon it indelible marks of the perfection they had wrought. Her hair was then a dark-brown; her forehead smooth and fair, her general complexion rich without much depth of color except upon the lips. In silvering her clustering locks time only added to her aspect a graver charm, and harmonised the still more delicate tints of cheek and brow. Her eyes were black, and at times wonderfully bright and full of spiritual power; but they were shaded by deep, smooth lids which gave them when at rest a most dove-like serenity. Her other features were equally striking; the lips and chin exquisitely moulded and marked by great strength as well as beauty. Her face, in repose, wore the habitual expression of deep thought and a soft earnestness, like a thin veil of sadness, which I never saw in the same degree in any other. Yet when animated by interchange of thought and feeling with congenial minds, it lighted up with a perfect radiance of love and intelligence, and a most beaming smile that no pen or pencil can describe--least of all in my hand, which trembles when I try to sketch the faintest outline. Hundreds of heart-stirring memories crowd upon me as I write, but it is impossible to give them expression. Her books give you the truest transcript of herself. She wrote, as she talked, from the heart. To those who knew her, a written page in almost any one of them recalls her image with the vividness of a portrait; and they can almost hear her musical voice as they read it themselves. But, alas! in reality-- No more her low sweet accents can we hear No more our plaints can reach her patient ear. O! loved and lost, oh! trusted, tried, and true, O! tender, pitying eyes forever sealed; How can we bear to speak our last adieu? How to the grave the precious casket yield, And to those old familiar places go That knew thee once, and never more shall know? I hear from heaven a voice angelic cry, "Blessed, thrice blessed are the dead who lie Beneath the flowery sod and graven stone." "Yea," saith the answering Spirit, "for they rest Forever from the labors they have done. Their works do follow them to regions blest; No stain hereafter can their lustre dim; The dead in Christ from henceforth live in Him." O! doubly dear transfigured friend on high, We, through our tears, behold thine eyelids dry. By Him who suffered once, and once was dead, But liveth evermore through endless days, God hath encircled thy redeemed head With rays of glory and eternal praise, And with His own kind hand wiped every trace Of tears, and pain and sorrow from thy face. C. W. WILDWOOD, March 7, 1880. One of the notes referred to is as follows: DEAR MRS. WASHBURN:--If you judge by my handwriting, you will have to conclude that I am 100 years old. But it all comes of my carrying a heavy bag too long, and is all my own fault for trying to do too many errands in one trip. Your dear little chair, the like of which I should love to give to 540 people, only cost $2.50, so I enclose my check for the rest of your $10. We sent off Mrs. Badger's parcel early this morning. I hope digging and driving and packing and climbing in my behalf, has not quite killed you. A lot of flowers in two boxes came to me from Matteawan while I was gone, and as my waitress fancied I had been shopping--as if I _should_ shop at East River!--she did not open the boxes or inform the children, so the spectacle of withered beauty was not very agreeable. A. and M. send love and thanks. The flowers you gave me look beautifully. Give our love to Mr. W. and Julia, and write about her. We shall not soon forget our charming visit to East River! In acknowledging this note Mrs. Washburn alludes to one of Mrs. Prentiss' most striking traits--the eager promptitude with which she would execute little commissions for her friends. It was as if she had taken a vow that there should not be one instant's delay. I do hope you have not been made sick by doing so many errands in such a short time. The little chair has come and Mr. W. is much pleased with it. Nobody is so punctual as you. We were all amazed at receiving the picture so soon. How could you possibly have gotten home and packed it and marked the catalogues and bought the chair and written the check and sent me the little package of Japanese corn-seed and written me the note and have had a moment even to look at A.'s portrait? It is a mystery to me. You are a wonder of a woman! You are a genius! You are a _beloved friend!_ I thank you again and again. Just think of the good you have done us. Shall I send you some more daisies? I have written in the greatest haste. That is the reason I have done no better and not because I am seventy years old. Here is her last note to Mrs. Washburn, dated June 3: The box of daisies, clover, and grass came on Saturday. We set the plants out in the box in which they came, and mixed the grass with what cut flowers we had, in the very prettiest receptacle for flowers I ever saw, just given M. The plants look this morning like a piece of Wildwood and a piece of you, and will gladden every spring we live to see.... We are packing for Dorset, though we do not mean to go if this weather lasts. I wonder if you have a "daily rose"? I have just bought one; first heard of it at the Centennial. It is said to bloom every day from May to December. I am going out, now, to do ever so many errands for H.'s outfit for college. Give our dear love to Mr. Washburn and Julia. O, what a mercy it is to have somebody to love. [7] On the 6th of June Mrs. Prentiss went to Dorset for the last time. Her husband, after her departure, thus referred to this period: For four or five weeks after coming here she was very much occupied about the house, and seemed rather weary and care-worn. But the pressure was then over and she had leisure for her flowers and her painting, for going to the woods with the girls, and for taking her favorite drives with me. She spoke repeatedly of you and other friends. On the 23d of July I started for Monmouth Beach. The week preceding this little journey was one of the happiest of our married life. No words can tell how sweet and loving and bright--in a word, how just like herself--she was. The impassion of that week accompanied me to the sea-side and continued with me during my whole stay there. As day after day I sat looking out upon the ocean, or walked alone up and down the shore, she was still in all my thoughts. The noise of the breakers, the boundless expanse of waters, the passing ships, going out and coming in, recalled similar scenes long ago on the coast of Maine, before and after our marriage--scenes with which her image was indissolubly blended. Then I met old friends and found new ones, who talked to me with grateful enthusiasm of "Stepping Heavenward," "More Love to Thee, O Christ," and other of her writings. In truth, my feelings about her, while I was at Monmouth Beach, were quite peculiar and excite my wonder still. I scarcely know how to describe them. They were at times very intense, and, I had almost said, awe-struck, seemed bathed in a sweet Sabbath stillness, and to belong rather to the other world than to this of time and sense. How do you explain this? Was my spirit, perhaps, touched in some mysterious way by the coming event? Certainly, had I been warned that she was so soon to leave me, I could hardly have passed those days of absence in a mood better attuned to that in which I now think of her as forever at home with the Lord. The following are two of her last letters: _To Mrs. Condict, Kauinfels, July 22, 1878._ To begin with the most important part of your letter. I reply that neither Mr. Prentiss or myself have ever had any sympathy with Second Adventists. All the talk about it seems to us mere speculation and probable doom to disappointment. I do not see that it is as powerful a stimulant to holiness as the uncertainty of life is. Christ may come any day; but He may not come for ages; but we must and _shall_ die in the merest fragment of an age, and see Him as He is. It will be a day of unspeakable joy, when we meet Him here or there. I shrink from unprofitable discussion of points that, after all, can only be tested by time and events. I do not think our expecting Christ will bring Him a minute sooner, for the early church expected Him, yet He came not. There has been so much wildness in theories on this subject that I am sore when I hear new ones advanced; none of these theories have proved to be correct, and I do not imagine any of them will. I have been busy indoors, upholstering not only curtains and couches, but ever so many boxes, as our bureaus are shallow and our closets small. I made one for A. large enough for her to get into, and she uses it as she would a room, suspending objects from the sides and keeping all her artistic implements in it. I began my Bible-reading last Thursday, the hottest day we have had; but there was a good attendance. My G. met with an accident from the circular saw which alarmed and distressed me so that his father had to hartshorn and fan me, while the girls did what they could for G. till the doctor could be got from Factory Point. His eyebrow was cut open and his forehead gashed, but all healed wonderfully, and we have reason to be thankful that he did not lose an eye, as he was so near doing. At any time when you must have change, let me know, as there are often gaps between guests, and sometimes those we expected, fail. Mr. Prentiss is, apparently, benefited by hot weather, and is unusually well. Thanks for the needles, which will be a great comfort. Have you painted a horse-shoe? I had one given me; black ground and blue forget-me-nots, and hung by a blue ribbon. I am going to paint one for M. and Hatty. I feel as if I had left out something I wanted to say. _To Mrs. George Payson, Kauinfels, Aug. 1, 1878._ I am all alone in the house, this evening, and as this gives me room at the table, I am going to begin to answer your letter. George is out of town, and all the rest, including the servants, have gone to see the Mistletoe Bough. It is astonishing how slowly you get well; and yet with such heat and such smells as you have in Chicago, it is yet more astonishing that you live at all. I thought it dreadful to have the thermometer stand at 90° in my bedroom, three weeks running, and to sniff a bad sniff now and then from our pond, when the water got low, but I see I was wrong. We have next to no flowers this summer; white flies destroyed the roses, frost killed other things, and then the three weeks of burning heat, with no rain, finished up others. Portulacca is our rear-guard, on which we fall back, filling empty spaces with it, and I grow more fond of it every year. A good many verbenas sowed themselves, but came up too late to be of any use. We have a splendid bed of pansies, sown by a friend here. I have not done much indoors but renovate the house, but that has been a great job. I brought up a Japanese picture-book to use as a cornice in my den, but A. persuaded me to get some wall paper, and use the pictures as a dado for the dining-room. The effect is very unique and pretty. I expect George home to-morrow; he has been spending a delightful week at Monmouth Beach, visiting friends. I wish I could send you some of our delicious ice-cream. We have it twice a week, with the juices of what fruit is going; peaches being best. We have not had much company yet. Last Saturday a friend of A.'s came and goes with her to Prout's Neck to-morrow. We do not count Hatty K. as company, but as one of us. She gets the brightest letters from Rob S., son of George. I should burst and blow up if my boys wrote as well. They have telephone and microphone on the brain, and such a bawling between the house and the mill you never heard. It is nice for us when we want meal, or to have a horse harnessed. Have you heard of the chair, with a fan each side, that fans you twenty-five minutes from just seating yourself in it. It must be delightful, especially to invalids, and ought to prolong life for them.... The clock is striking nine, my hour for fleeing to get ready for bed, but none of the angels have come home from the Mistletoe Bough, and so I suppose I shall have to make haste slowly in undressing. Love to all. _Aug. 3d._--I am delighted that you enjoyed the serge so much; I knew you would. I forgot to answer your question about books. Have you read "Noblesse Oblige"? We admire it extremely. There are two works by this title; one poor. I read "Les Miserables" last winter, and got greatly interested in it; whether there is a good English translation, I do not know. "That Lass o' Lowrie's" you have probably read. I saw a Russian novel highly praised the other day; "Dosea," translated from the French by Mary Neal (Sherwood); "Victor Lascar" is said to be good. I have, probably, praised "Misunderstood" to you. "Strange Adventures of a Phaeton" we liked; also "The Maid of Sker" and "Off the Skelligs"; its sequel is "Fated to be Free." Two tongues are running like mill-clappers, so good-night. * * * * * II. Little Incidents and Details of her last Days on Earth. Last Visit to the Woods. Sudden Illness. Last Bible-reading. Last Drive to Hager-Brook. Reminiscence of a last Interview. Closing Scenes. Death. The Burial. Her last days on earth were now close at hand. Such days have in themselves, of necessity, no virtue above other days; and yet a tender interest clings to them simply as the last. Their conjunction with death and the Life beyond seems to invest whatsoever comes to pass in them--even trifles light as air--with unwonted significance. Soon after her sudden departure her husband noted down, for the satisfaction of absent friends, such little incidents and details as could be recalled of her last ten days on earth. The following is a part of this simple record: _Sunday, Aug. 4, 1878._--To-day she went to the house of God for the last time; and, as would have been her wish, had she known it was for the last time, heard me preach. There was much in both the tone and matter of the sermon, that made it seem, afterwards, as if it had been written in full view of the approaching sorrow. A good deal of the day at home was spent in getting ready for her Bible-reading on the ensuing Thursday. At four o'clock in the afternoon she and the girls, M. and H., usually drove in the phaeton over to the Rev. Mr. Reed's, on the West road, to attend a neighborhood prayer-meeting; but to-day, on account of a threatening thunder-shower, they did not go. She enjoyed this little meeting very much. _Monday, Aug. 5th._--Soon after breakfast, she and the girl--"we three girls," as she used to say--started off, carrying each a basket, for the Cheney woods in quest of ferns; it having been arranged that at ten o'clock I should come with the phaeton to fetch her and the baskets home. The morning, although warm, was very pleasant and all three were in high spirits. Before leaving the house, she ran up to her "den"--so she called the little room where she wrote and painted--to get something; and on passing out of it through the chamber, where just then I was shaving, she suddenly stopped, and pointing at me with her forefinger, her eye and face beaming with love and full of sweet witchery, she exclaimed in a tone of pretended anger: "How dare you, sir, to be shaving in my room?" and in an instant she was gone! A minute or two later I looked after her from the window and saw her, with her two shadows, hurrying towards the woods. At the time appointed, I went for her. She awaited me sitting on the ground on the further side of the woods, near the old sugar-house. The three baskets, all filled with beautiful ferns, were placed in the phaeton and we drove home. The Cheney woods, as we call them, form one of the attractions of Dorset. They are quite extensive, abound in majestic sugar-maples, some of which have been "tapped," it is said, for more than sixty successive seasons, and at one point in them is a water-shed dividing into two little rivulets, one of which, after mingling with the waters of the Battenkill and the Hudson, finds its way at last into the Atlantic Ocean; while the other reaches the same ocean through Pawlet River, Lake Champlain and the St. Lawrence River. These woods and our own, together with the mountain and waterfall and groves beyond Deacon Kellogg's, where she often met her old friend "Uncle Isaac," [8] were her favorite resorts. A little while after returning home I found her in her little room, looking well and happy, and busy with her brush. The girls, also, on reaching the house found her there. But somewhat later, without our knowledge, she went out and worked for a long time on and about the lawn. There was a breeze, but the rays of the sun were scorchingly hot and she doubtless exerted herself, as she was always tempted to do, beyond her strength. I was occupied until noon at the mill and later, in the field, watching the men cradling oats. On coming in to dinner, a little past one, I was startled not to find her at the table, "Where is mamma?" said I to M. "She is not feeling very well," M. answered, "and said she would not come down, as she did not want any dinner." I ran up-stairs, found her in her little room, and asked her what was the matter. She replied that she had been troubled with a little nausea and felt weak, but it was nothing serious. I went back to the table, but with a worried, anxious mind. Somewhat later she lay down on the bed and the prostration became so great, that I rubbed her hands vigorously and administered hartshorn. It occurred to me at once that she had barely escaped a sunstroke. After rallying from this terrible fit of exhaustion, she seemed quite like herself again, and listened with much interest while the girls read to her out of Boswell's Johnson. She was in a sweet, gentle mood all the afternoon. "I prayed this morning," she said, "that I might be a comfort to-day to everybody in the house." _Tuesday, Aug.6th._--She passed the day in bed; feeble, but otherwise seeming still like herself. In the course of the morning we persuaded her to let Margaret, Eddy's old nurse, make her some milk-toast, which she enjoyed so much that she said, "I wish, Margaret, you were well enough to come and be our cook." M. had taken the place of our two servants, who were gone to East Dorset to a Confirmation, at which their bishop was to be present. Throughout the day she was in a very tender, gentle mood, as she had been on the previous afternoon. She was much exercised by the sudden death of the mother of one of our servants, the news of which came while they were away. Had the case been that of a near relative, she could hardly have shown warmer sympathy, or administered consolation in a more considerate manner. During the day there was more or less talk about the Bible-reading and I begged her to give it up. We finally agreed that the girls should drive over to Mrs. Reed's and ask her to take charge of it. They did so; but at Mrs. R.'s suggestion it was decided not to give up the meeting, but to convert it, if needful, into a little service of prayer and praise. This arrangement seemed to please her. Although feeling very weak, she did not appear at all depressed and was alive to everything that was going on in the room. The girls having written to a friend who was to visit us the next week, she asked if they had mentioned her illness. They both replied no--for each supposed the other had done it. "Then (said she) you had better add a postscript, telling her that I lie at the point of death." _Wednesday, Aug. 7th._--A beautiful day. She got up, put on a dressing-gown, and sat most of the day in the easy-chair, or rather the _sea_-chair, given us by my dear friend, Mr. Howland, when we went to Europe in 1858. She looked very lovely and we all enjoyed sitting and talking with her in her chamber. The girls arranged her hair to please their own taste, and then told her how very charming she was! She liked to be petted by them; and they were never so happy as in petting and "fussing" about her. She spent an hour or two in looking over a package of old Agriculturists, that had belonged to her brother-in-law, Prof. Hopkins, of Williams College. She delighted in such reading, and nothing curious and interesting, or suggestive, escaped her notice. She called my attention to an article on raising tomatoes, and cut it out for me; and also cut out many other articles for her own use. Towards night she dressed herself and came down to tea. She remained in the parlor, talking with me and the boys, and reading the paper, until the girls returned from the Wednesday evening meeting. Something had occurred to excite their mirth, and they came home in such a "gale" that she playfully rebuked them for being so light-minded. But at the same time she couldn't help joining in their mirth. In truth, she was quite as much a girl as either of them; and her laugh was as merry. _Thursday, Aug. 8th._--She seemed to feel much better this morning. Before getting up we talked about her Bible-reading, and she asked me various questions concerning the passage that was to be its theme, namely, John xv. 27. She referred particularly to our Lord's sayings, at the beginning of the sixteenth chapter, on the subject of persecution, and told me how very strange and impressive they seemed to her, coming, as they did, in the midst of His last conversation with His disciples--a conversation so full of divine tenderness and love. This was almost the last of innumerable and never-to-be-forgotten talks which we had had together, during more than a third of a century, upon passages of Holy Scripture. After breakfast she went to her workshop and painted six large titles; and then went down to the piazza and painted a chair for Hatty. She also assisted the girls in watering her flowers. "She came round to the back stoop Thursday morning (one of the servants told me afterwards) and I said to her, 'Mis Prentiss, and how d'ye feel?' and she said, 'Ellen, I feel _weak_, but I shall be all right when I get my strength.'" I still felt troubled about her holding the Bible-reading and tried to dissuade her from attempting it. She had set her heart upon it, however, and said that the disappointment at giving it up would be worse than the exertion of holding it. Her preparation was all made; the ladies would be there, some of them from a distance, expecting to see her, and she could not bear to lose the meeting. So I yielded. We were expecting Dr. Vincent by the afternoon train and I was to go to the station for him. Just as I was seated in the carriage and was about to start, she came out on the porch, already dressed for the Bible-reading, and with an expression of infinite sweetness, half playful and half solemn, pointing at me with her finger, said slowly: "_You pray--one--little--prayer for me_." Never shall I forget that arch expression--so loving, so spiritual, and yet so stamped with marks of suffering--the peculiar tones of her voice, or that dear little gesture! Of her last Bible-reading the following brief account is prepared from the recollections kindly furnished me by several of the ladies who were present: HER LAST BIBLE-READING. There was something very impressive in Mrs. Prentiss' Bible-readings. She seemed not unlike her gifted father in the power she possessed of captivating those who heard her. Her manner was perfectly natural, quiet, and even shy; it evidently cost her considerable effort to speak in the presence of so many listeners. She rarely looked round or even looked up; but a sort of magnetic influence attracted every eye to _her_ and held all our hearts in breathless attention. Her style was entirely conversational; her sentences were short, clear as crystal, full of happy turns, and always fresh and to the point. The tones of her voice were peculiar; I scarcely know how to describe them; they had such a fine, subtle, _womanly_ quality, were touched--especially at this last reading--with such tenderness and depth of feeling; I only know that as we heard them, it was almost as if we were listening to the voice of an angel! And they are, I am sure, echoing still in all our memories. The first glance at her, as she entered the room, a little before three o'clock on the 8th of August, showed that she was not well. Her eyes were unusually bright, but the marks of recent or approaching illness were stamped upon her countenance. It was lighted up, indeed, with even unwonted animation and spiritual beauty; but it had also a pale and wearied look. The reading was usually opened with a silent prayer and closed with two or three short oral prayers. The subject this afternoon was the last verse of the fifteenth chapter of the Gospel according to John: _And ye also shall bear witness, because ye have been with me from the beginning_. Witnessing for Christ, this was her theme. She began by giving a variety of Scripture references illustrative of the nature and different forms of Christian witness-bearing. It was her custom always to unfold the topic of the reading, and to verify her own views of it, by copious and carefully prepared citations from the Word of God. A Bible-reading, as she conducted it, was not merely a study of a text, or passage of Scripture, by itself, but study of it in its vital relations to the whole teaching of the Bible on the subject in hand. In the present instance her references were all written out and were so numerous and so skilfully arranged that they must have cost her no little labor. Feeling, apparently, too feeble to read them herself, she turned to her daughter, who sat by her mother's side, and requested her to do it. After the references had been given and the passages read, she went on to express her own thoughts on the subject. And, surely, had she been fully conscious that this was the last opportunity she would ever have of thus bearing witness for Christ, her words could not have been more happily chosen. Would that they could be recalled just as they issued from her own lips! But it is not possible so to recall them. One might as well try to reproduce the sunset scene on the evening of her burial. For even if the exact words could be repeated, who could bring back again her tender, loving accents, or that strange earnestness and "unction from the Holy One" with which they were uttered? Or who could bring back again the awe-struck, responsive emotions that thrilled our hearts? The simplest outline of this farewell talk is all that is now practicable. Had we known what was coming, our memories would, no doubt, have been rendered thereby sevenfold more retentive, and little that fell from her lips would have been lost. Her first point was the great variety of ways in which we can bear witness for Christ. We can do it in private as well as in public; and it is in the private spheres and familiar daily intercourse of life that most of us are called to give this testimony, and to give it by manifesting in this intercourse and in these retired spheres the spirit of our Master. What an opportunity does the family, for example, afford for constant and most effective witness-bearing! How a mother may honor Christ in what she says to her children about Him and especially by the manner in which she fulfils her every-day home duties! How a wife may thus testify of Christ to her worldly, unconverted husband! And here she spoke of one form of _public_ testimony which everybody might and ought to give. "I can not (she said) see all the faces in this room but there may be those here who have never confessed Christ before men by uniting with His visible church. Let me tell any such who may be present that they are grieving their Saviour by refusing to give Him this testimony of their love and devotion." In referring to this subject she remarked that young persons, after having united with the church, sometimes felt greatly disheartened and thought themselves the worst Christians in the world. But this was often a very wrong feeling. Their sense of their own weakness and unworthiness might come from the Holy Comforter; and we should be very careful how we treat Him. His influence is a very tender, sacred thing, and, like the sensitive plant, recoils at the touch of a rude hand. I have wanted, she said, to speak _cheerful, comforting_ words to you to-day. It was the particular desire of my husband this morning that I should do so. He thought that young Christians, especially, needed much encouragement on this point. It was a great thing to lead them to feel that they could please their Master and be witnesses for Him in quiet, simple ways, and that, too, every day of their lives. Our Lord, to be sure, does not really _need_ our services. He could quite easily dispense with them. But He lets us work for Him somewhat as a mother lets her little child do things for her--not because she needs the child's help, but because she loves to see the child trying to please her. "And yet, Mrs. Prentiss (asked one of the ladies), does there not come a time when the child is really of service to the mother?" "I thank you for the suggestion (she replied); I left my remark incomplete. Yes, it is true such a time does come. And so, in a certain sense, it may be said, perhaps, that God needs the services of His children. But how easily He can dispense with the best and most useful of them! One may seem to have a great task to perform in the service of the Master, but in the midst of it he is taken away, and, while he is missed, the work of God goes right on. God does not see such a difference as we do, she said, between what we call great and small services rendered to Him. A cup of cold water given in Christ's name, if that is all one can give, is just as acceptable as the richest offering; and so is a tea-spoonful, if one has no more to give. Christ loves to be loved; and the smallest testimony of real love is most pleasing to Him. And love shown to one of His suffering disciples He regards as love to Himself. So a little child, just carrying a flower to some poor invalid, may thus do Christ honor and become more endeared to Him. There is no one, old or young, who has not the power of blessing other souls. We all have far more influence, both for good and evil, than we dream of." In the course of her talk she alluded to the trials of life and the shortness of them at the longest. We are all passing away, one after another. Our intimate friends will mourn for us when we are gone, but the world will move on just the same. And we should not allow ourselves to be troubled lest when our time comes we may be afraid to die. Dying grace is not usually given until it is needed. Death to the disciple of Jesus is only stepping from one room to another and far better room of our Father's house. And how little all the sorrows of the way will seem to us when we get to our home above! I suppose St. Paul, amidst the bliss of heaven, fairly _laughs_ at the thought of what he suffered for Christ in this brief moment of time. And as she said this, she gently waved her hand in the way of emphasis. No one of us who saw it will soon forget that little gesture! In one part of her remarks she cautioned us against hasty and harsh judgments. We should cover with our charity the faults and imperfections of those about us, as nature hides with her mossy covering the unsightly stone. She referred to the case of children: a child often has a sweet disposition until five or six years of age and then becomes very irritable and cross, causing the parents much anxiety--and, perhaps, much impatience. And yet it may not be the child's fault at all; but only the effect of ill-health, too much study and confinement, or pure mismanagement. A large portion of the disobedience and wrong temper of children comes from improper food or loss of sleep, or something of that sort. And it is not cross fretful _children_ alone that need to be judged tenderly. A consumptive friend of hers, rendered nervous and weak by long sickness, upon being asked one morning, as usual, about her health, replied: "Don't ask me again--_I feel as if I could throw this chair at you._" Now I do not think, said Mrs. Prentiss, that this speech was a sin in the sight of God. He saw in it nothing but the poor invalid's irritable nerves, God judges us according to the thoughts and intentions of the heart; and we ought, as far as possible, to judge each other in the same way. And when we ourselves are the ones really at fault, we ought to confess it. I never shall forget how humiliated I felt when my mother once came to me and asked my forgiveness--but I loved her ten times as much for it. Prayer was another point touched upon in this last Bible-reading. She almost always had something fresh and striking to say about prayer. It was one of her favorite topics. I recall two or three of her remarks at this time. "Always move the lips in prayer. It helps to keep one's thoughts from wandering." "A mother can pray with a sick child on her lap more acceptably than to leave it alone in order to go and pray by herself." "Accustom yourself to turn all your wants, cares and trials into prayer. If anything troubled or annoyed my mother she went straight to the 'spare room,' no matter how cold the weather, and we children knew it was to pray. I shall never forget its influence over me." "When a question as to duty comes up, I think we can soon settle it in this way: 'Am I living near to Christ? Am I seeking His guidance? Am I renouncing self in what I undertake to do for Him?' If we can say yes to these questions, we may safely go into any path where duty lies." "We never dread to hear people pray who pray truly and in the Spirit. They may be unlearned. They may be intellectually weak. But if they pray habitually in the closet, they will edify out of it." Such is a poor, meagre account of this last precious Bible-reading. Possibly some of the things here recorded belonged to previous readings--though Mrs. Prentiss occasionally repeated remarks on points to which she attached special importance. "Some good (she said) will come of these meetings, I feel sure. It is impossible that you should take so much pains, and some of you put yourselves to so much inconvenience, in order to come here and study together God's Word--and His blessing not follow." The blessing has already followed, good measure, pressed down and running over, and it will continue to follow in days to come; especially the blessings of this last meeting, when, in a strain so sweet and tender--as though she had a new glimpse of heaven and the heart of God--our beloved and now sainted teacher urged us to bear witness for Christ and showed us so plainly how to do it. At the close of the meeting she looked very pale and seemed much exhausted. "You are ill, Mrs. Prentiss," said one of the ladies, distressed by her appearance. "Yes," she said, "I _am_." Still, it seemed a great pleasure to her to have met us once more. Nor can I help thinking that, even if she herself had no presentiment of what was coming, she was yet led of the Spirit, the blessed Comforter, to hold this last Bible-reading. It was itself just such a testimony for Christ as fitly crowned her consecrated and beautiful life. Upon my return from the station with Dr. Vincent she met us on the porch, bade him welcome to Dorset, told him with what extraordinary care the girls had made ready his room, and appeared in excellent spirits all the rest of the day. While at tea she expressed to Dr. V. our regret that Dr. Poor could not have made his visit at the same time; although, to be sure, they might, if together, have "brought the house down" upon our heads by the explosions of their mirth. She then related some amusing anecdotes of a queer, crotchety old domestic of ours in New Bedford a third of a century ago, and of her delight when Dr. Poor (then settled at Fair Haven, opposite New Bedford) got married, because "_now_, it was to be hoped, he would stay at home with his wife and not be coming over all the time and drinking up our tea!" On my asking her about the Bible-reading, she said she got through with it very well, expressed surprise at the large attendance, and spoke of the deep interest manifested. After tea she sat with us in the parlor for some time and then, kissing M. good-night, omitted Hatty and the boys (a most unusual thing), remarking, as she left for her chamber, "Well, I'm not going to kiss all this roomful." _Friday, Aug.9th_--A severe thunder-storm had set in early last night and continued at short intervals throughout the day. She was very anxious that Dr. Vincent should enjoy his visit, and on his account was disturbed by the weather; otherwise, a thunder-storm seemed to exhilarate her, as is said to have been the case with her father. She spent most of Friday in her "den," finishing a little picture and chatting from time to time with the girls who were busy in the adjoining room. Dr. Vincent and I sat a part of the forenoon on the piazza under her window and whiled away the time, he in telling and I in listening to any number of amusing stories. She called the attention of M. and H. to our unclerical behavior: "Just hear those doctors of divinity giggling like two schoolgirls!" But nobody enjoyed more an amusing story, or told one with more zest than she did herself. I forget whether it was on Friday, or an earlier day, that she showed me a remarkable letter she had received, during my absence at the sea-side, from London. It was written by a young wife and mother nearly related to two of the most honored families of England, and sought her counsel in reference to certain questions of duty that had grown out of special domestic trials. "Stepping Heavenward," the writer said, had formed an era in her religious life; she had read it through _from fifty to sixty times_; it had its place by the side of her Bible; and no words could express the good it had done her, or the comfort she had derived from its pages. "The Home at Greylock" had also been of great help to her as a wife and mother; and she could not but hope that one whose books had been such a blessing to her, might be able to render her still greater and more direct aid by personal counsel. The letter, which was beautifully written and was full of the most grateful feelings, appealed very strongly to her sympathy. But it was never answered. _Saturday, Aug. 10th_--She had a tolerable night, but on coming down to breakfast said, in reply to Dr. Vincent's question, How she felt? "I feel like bursting out crying." After prayers, however, when the plans for the day were arranged and a drive to Hager brook--a picturesque mountain glen and waterfall--was made the order of the forenoon, she proposed to go with us. I had almost feared to suggest it, and yet was greatly relieved to find that she felt able to take the ride. It was decided, therefore, that she, Hatty K., Dr. Vincent and I should form the party. As we drove toward the village I noticed that Dr. Wyman was just stopping at our next neighbor's. Dr. Hemenway, our old physician, had removed to St. Paul's, and Dr. W. had taken his place. I was rejoiced to see him, both on her account and my own. I had not been well myself during the week, and although I had repeatedly proposed to call in the doctor for her, she stoutly refused. So, after getting a prescription for myself, I said, "And now, doctor, I want you to do something for my wife," relating to him her ill-turn on Monday. "Certainly (the doctor replied) she needs some _arsenicum_," which he gave her, promising to call and see us on the next Monday. As we rode on Dr. Vincent suggested, laughingly, what a strange story might be based upon Dr. W.'s prescription. "I might report, for example, that I myself saw the author of 'Stepping Heavenward' eating arsenic!" She joined heartily in the laugh and during all the rest of the drive conversed with great animation. She related several anecdotes of her early life, talked with admiration of the writings and genius of Mrs. Stowe--one Of whose New England stories she had just been reading--and seemed exactly like herself. Upon reaching the brook in East Rupert and starting with Dr. Vincent for the glen, I said to her, "Now don't walk off out of sight, where I can't see you when we come back." "Oh yes, I shall," she replied in her pleasant way. "After we were left alone that Saturday morning (Hatty writes) Mrs. Prentiss gathered quite a bunch of the wild ageratum, and then dug up the roots of three wild clematis vines with her scissors. She then called my attention to the thimbleberry bushes along the edge of the brook, admiring the foliage of the plant and expressing the determination to have one or more in her garden next year." On coming down from the glen I found her sitting on the ground near the brook. Taking her by the hand--for she seemed very tired--I helped her to rise and walked back with her toward the carriage. Just before reaching the road she saw some clusters of clematis on the side of the brook, which at her desire I gathered. It was the last service of the kind ever performed for her, and I am so thankful that no hands but mine were privileged to perform it! During the drive home she said almost nothing and was, evidently, feeling very much wearied. We returned by the West road and on passing in at our gate I observed that Dr. Wyman's gig was still in front of Miss Kent's. "Why, Lizzy, Dr. Wyman is still here," said I. "Then, I would like to see him now rather than wait till Monday," she said, to my surprise. I went immediately and asked him to call. It was, I think, between eleven and twelve o'clock. He came very soon and she received him in the parlor. I noticed at once that she was extremely nervous and agitated, while explaining to him her symptoms; and not being able to recall some point, she remarked that her mind had been much confused all the week. Just then she rose hastily, excused herself, and went up to her room. "_She is very ill_ (said the doctor, turning to me) and must go to bed instantly." While he was preparing her medicines Judge M. and family from New York, who were sojourning at Manchester, called; but learning of her illness, soon left. Later in the day I told her who had called and how much Mrs. M. and the young ladies admired her flowers, especially the portulacas. She seemed pleased and said to me, "You had better, then, prepare two little boxes of portulacas and send them over to Mrs. M. to keep in her windows while she stays at the Equinox House." A few days after her death I did so and received a touching note of thanks from Mrs. M. As the doctor directed, she at once took to her bed. For an hour or two her prostration was extreme, and she nearly fainted. Her head shook and her condition verged on a collapse. I rubbed her hands vigorously, gave her a restorative, and gradually her strength returned. In speaking of the attack she said the sense of weakness was so terrible that she would gladly have died on the spot. In the course of the afternoon, however, she was so much easier that the girls read to her again out of Boswell's Johnson and she seemed to listen with all the old interest. It pleased her greatly to have them read to her; and she loved to talk with them about the books read and especially to discuss the characters depicted in any of them. Toward evening George brought in some trout, which he had caught for her out of our brook. Her appetite was exceedingly poor, but she was very fond of trout and G. often caught a little mess for her supper. Our brook never seemed so dear to me, nor did its rippling music ever sound so sweet, as when I did the same thing, before he came home from Princeton and took the privilege out of my hands. When he brought in the trout, Ellen went to his mother's chamber and asked if they should not be kept for breakfast? "No, they are very nice and you had better have them for supper." "Shan't I save some for your breakfast?" asked Ellen, knowing how fond she was of them. "No," said she, "the doctor says I must take nothing but beef-tea." "And d'ye feel better, Mis' Prentiss?" continued Ellen. "Oh I feel better, Ellen, but I'm very weak--I shall be all right in a few days." After tea she insisted on sending for Mrs. Sarah C. Mitchell, of Philadelphia, whom she had been unable to see on the previous Monday. Mrs. M. was the last person out of the family, with whom she conversed, excepting the doctors and nurse. [9] _Sunday, Aug. 11th._--She slept better than I feared, but awoke very feeble, taking no nourishment except a little beef-tea. She lay quiet a part of the time; but the quiet intervals grew shorter and were followed by most distressing attacks. M. and I sat by her bed, but could do nothing to relieve her. My fears had now become thoroughly aroused and I awaited the arrival of the doctor with the most intense anxiety. Hour after hour of the morning, however, passed slowly away and he did not come. At length a messenger brought word from the "West road," where he had been called at midnight, that an urgent telegram had summoned him to Arlington and that he should not be able to reach Dorset before one or two o'clock P.M. The anguish of the suspense during the next three or four hours was something dreadful. When the bell rang for church she desired that M. should go, as Dr. Vincent was to preach, and it would give a little relief from the strain that was upon her. Soon after M. had left, during an interval of comparative ease, she fixed her eyes upon me with a most tender, loving expression, and in a sort of beseeching tone, said, "Darling, don't you think you could ask the Lord to let me go?" Perceiving, no doubt, how the question affected me, she went on to give some reasons for wishing to go. She spoke very slowly, in the most natural, simple way, and yet with an indescribable earnestness of look and voice, as if aware that she was uttering her dying words. I can not recall all that she said, but its substance, and some of the exact expressions, are indelibly impressed upon my memory. For my and the children's sake she had been willing and even desired to live; and for several years had made extraordinary efforts to keep up, although much of the time the burden of ill-health, as I well knew, had been well-nigh insupportable. So far as this world was concerned, few persons in it had such reasons for wishing to live, or so much to render life attractive. But the feeling in her heart had become overpowering that no earthly happiness, no interest, no distraction, could any longer satisfy her, or give her content, away from Christ; and she longed to be with Him, where He is. During the past three months especially, she had passed through very unusual exercises of mind with reference to this subject; and it seemed to her as if she had now reached a point beyond which she could not go. She evidently had in view the dreadful _sleeplessness_, to which she had been so in bondage for a quarter of a century, whose grasp had become more and more relentless, and the effects of which upon her nervous system were such as words can hardly describe. No human being but myself had any conception of her suffering, both physical and mental, from this cause. To return to her conversation.... In answer to a question which I put to her later, about her view of heaven and of the relation of the saints in glory to their old friends there and here, she replied, in substance, that to her view _heaven is being with Christ and to be with Christ is heaven_. By this she did not mean, I am sure, to imply any doubt respecting the immortality of Christian love and friendship, or that our individual human affections will survive the grave. Often had she delighted herself in the thought of meeting her sainted father and mother in heaven, of meeting there Eddy and Bessie and other dear ones who had gone before; and certain I am, too, she believed that those who are gone before retain their peculiar interest in those who are toiling after, only her mind was so absorbed in the thought of the presence and beatific vision of Christ in His glory that, for the moment, it was lost to everything else. She then said that, in the event of her death, she would like to be buried in Dorset, where we could easily visit her grave. "But I do not expect to go now," she added. This meant, as I interpret it, that she regarded so speedy a departure to be with Christ as something _too good to be true_. Repeatedly, when very ill, she had thought herself on the verge of heaven and had been called back to earth, and she feared it would be so now. Hardly had this never-to-be-forgotten conversation come to a close when her feet entered "the swelling of Jordan," and found no rest until they walked the "sweet fields beyond." Her disease (gastro-enteritis) returned with great violence; the medical appliances seemed to have little or no effect; and the paroxysms of pain were excruciating. A chill, also, began to creep over her. About two o'clock, to my inexpressible relief, the doctor arrived. Her first thought was that he should rest a little and that some ice-cream should be brought to him. In answer to his inquiries she told him that she had never known agony such as she had endured that forenoon, and he immediately applied remedies adapted to the case. But they afforded only temporary relief. A terrible restlessness seized upon her and would not let go its hold. Towards evening she got into the sea-chair, and remained in it near the open window until morning. On leaving for the night Dr. Wyman intrusted her to the care of Dr. Slocum, who had recently come to Dorset. Dr. S. remained with her all night and was indefatigable in trying to alleviate her sufferings. "How kind he is!" she said to me once when he had left the room. M. sat up with me till towards morning and assisted in giving the medicines. Her distress could only be assuaged by inhaling chloroform every few minutes and by the constant use of ice. As from time to time, going down for the ice, I stepped out on the piazza, the scene that met my eye was in strange contrast to the one I had just left. Within the sick-chamber it was a night dark with suffering and anxiety; as the hours passed slowly away, my heart almost died in the shadow of the coming event; all was gloom and agitation except the sweet patience of the sufferer. But the beauty and stillness of the night out of doors was something marvellous. The light of the great harvest moon was like the light of the sun. It flooded hills and valley with its splendor. The outlines of each mountain, of every tree, and of all visible objects, far or near, were as distinct as those of the stars, or of the moon itself. As I stood and gazed upon the infinite beauty of the scene, I felt, as never in my life before, how helpless is Nature in the presence of a great trouble. The beauty of the night was fully matched by that of the morning. As the first rays of the sun crossed the mountains and shone down upon the valley, I said to myself, even while my heart was racked with anxious foreboding--"How wonderful! How wonderful!" _Monday, Aug. 12th._--For some hours she seemed much more comfortable, and, in the course of the morning, of her own accord, was removed from the chair to the bed. "On Monday morning (writes Dr. Wyman) I found her with temperature nearly normal, pulse less than 100, and other symptoms improved. This gave us hope that the worst was passed, but it was only the lull before the storm." She was for the most part quiet and took little notice of anything that was going on. During the forenoon M. tried to get some rest in the sea-chair by the window, while Hatty kept her place by the bed. Several times Lizzy looked round the room as if in quest of some one. Hatty perceiving this and guessing what it meant, stepped aside (she was between the bed and the chair so as to intercept the view), when she fixed her eyes upon M. and rested as if she had found what she sought. Having been up most of the night, I also tried to get a little rest in another room, and later went out in search of a nurse and engaged an excellent one, Mrs. C., who came early in the afternoon. Notwithstanding my deep anxiety I was deceived by the more favorable symptoms, and did not allow myself, during the day, to think she would not recover. In the early evening I wrote to A., who was absent in Maine: I am sorry to say that your mother had a very trying day yesterday and has been extremely weak and exhausted to-day.... Nervous prostration appears to be the great trouble. She has rested quietly much of the time to-day and the medicines seem to be doing their work; and in a couple of days, I trust, she may be greatly improved. You know how these ill-turns upset her and how quickly she often rallies from them. She is very anxious you should not shorten your visit on her account. Soon after this letter was written, the whole aspect of the case suddenly changed. The unfavorable symptoms had returned with renewed violence. Dr. W. asked her, during one of the paroxysms, about the pain. She answered that it was not a pain--it was a distress, an _agony_. But from first to last she never uttered a groan--not during the sharpest paroxysms of distress. She seemed to say to herself, in the words of two favorite German mottoes, which she had illumined and placed on the wall over her bed, _Geduld, Mein Herz!_ (Patience, My Heart!)--_Stille, Mein Wille!_ (Still, My Will!) "The patient and uncomplaining manner," writes Dr. Wyman, "in which the most agonizing pains which it has ever been my lot to witness were borne--with no repining, no murmur, no fretfulness, but quiet, peaceful submission to endure and suffer--will not soon be forgotten." At eleven o'clock, when the doctor left, I sent the nurse away for a couple of hours rest and took her place by the sick-bed. Lizzy, who had already begun to feel the effects of the morphine, lay motionless, and breathed somewhat heavily, but not alarmingly so. _Tuesday, Aug. 13th._--Shortly after one o'clock I called the nurse and, directing her to summon me at once in the event of any change, retired to the green-room for a little rest. The girls had been persuaded before the doctor left, to throw themselves on their bed. Everything was quiet until about three o'clock, when Hatty knocked at my door with a message from the nurse. I hurried down and saw at the first glance as I entered the room, that a great change had taken place. It seemed as if I heard the crack of doom and that the world was of a sudden going to pieces. I went to G.'s room, woke him, told him what I feared, and desired him to go for Dr. Slocum as quickly as possible. He was dressed in an instant, as it were, and gone. In the meantime I woke H., and told him his mother, I feared, was dying. When Dr. Slocum arrived he felt her pulse, looked at her and listened to her breathing for a minute or two, and then, turning slowly to me, said, _It is death!_ This was not far from four o'clock. I asked if I had better send at once for Dr. Wyman? "He can do nothing for her," was the reply, "but you had better send." I requested G. to call Albert, and tell him to go for Dr. W. as fast as possible. "I will saddle Prince and go myself," G. said; and in a few minutes he was riding rapidly towards Factory Point. I then knocked at Dr. Poor's door. Upon opening it and being told what was coming, he was so completely stunned that he could with difficulty utter a word. He had arrived the previous afternoon on the same train by which Dr. Vincent left. I had tried by telegraph to _prevent_ his coming; but a kind Providence so ordered it that my message reached Burlington, where he had been on a visit, just after he had started for Dorset. The night, like that of Sunday, was as day for brightness. Never shall I forget its wondrous beauty, although it seemed only a mockery of my distress. Soon after the first rays of the sun appeared, Dr. Wyman came, but only to repeat, _It is death_. I asked him how long she might be a dying. "Perhaps several hours; but she may drop away at any moment." We all gathered about her bed and watched the ebbing tide of life. The girls were already kneeling together on the left side. They never changed their posture for more than four hours; they wept, but made no noise. The boys stood at the foot of the bed, deeply moved, but calm and self-possessed. The strain was fearful; and yet it was relieved by blessed thoughts and consolations. Although the chamber of death, it was the chamber of peace, and a light not of earth shone down upon us all. He who was seen walking, unhurt, in the midst of the fire and whose form was like the Son of God, seemed to overshadow us with His presence. As the end drew near, we all knelt together and my old friend, Dr. Poor, commended the departing spirit to God and invoked for us, who were about to be so heavily bereaved, the solace and support of the blessed Comforter.... The breathing had now grown slower and less convulsive, and at length became gentle almost like that of one asleep; the distressed look changed into a look of sweet repose; the eyes shut; the lips closed; and the whole scene recalled her own lines: Oh, where are words to tell the joy unpriced Of the rich heart, that breasting waves no more, Drifts thus to shore, Laden with peace and tending unto Christ! About half-past seven it became evident that the mortal struggle was on the point of ending. For several minutes we could scarcely tell whether she still lived or not; and at twenty minutes before eight she drew one long breath and all was over. Again we knelt together, and in our behalf Dr. Poor gave thanks to Almighty God for the blessed saint now at rest in Him--and for all she had been to us and all she had done for Him, through the grace of Christ her Saviour. The following account of the burial was written by the Rev. Dr. Vincent and appeared in the New York Evangelist: DORSET, VT. _August 16, 1878._ This lovely valley has been, for the past few days, "a valley of the shadow." It is not the least significant tribute to one so widely known as Mrs. Prentiss, that her death has affected with such real sorrow, and with such a deep sense of loss, this little rural community which has been her home during a large part of the last ten years. It would have been hard to find among all who gathered at the funeral services on Wednesday, a face which did not bear the marks of true sorrow and of tender sympathy; while from the groups of sunburned farmers gathered round the door or walking towards the cemetery, were often heard the words "a great loss." * * * * * The funeral took place at the house on Wednesday afternoon, and was conducted by the Rev. P. S. Pratt, pastor of the old Congregational Church of Dorset; assisted by Dr. Vincent, and Dr. D. W. Poor. Mr. Pratt read the twenty-third Psalm and a part of the fourteenth chapter of John, which was followed by the hymn, "O gift of gifts, O grace of faith," after which Dr. Poor delivered a most appropriate, tender, and interesting address. Dr. Vincent then offered prayer, and the hymn "Nearer, my God, to Thee," was sung, closing the services at the house. The large assemblage passed in succession by the casket, where lay such an image of perfect rest as one is rarely favored to see. All traces of struggle and pain had faded from the expressive face, and nothing was left but the sweetness of eternal repose. It was now a little after six o'clock, and the shadows were lengthening in the valley at the close of one of those rare days of the ripe summer, which only the hill-countries develop in their perfect loveliness. The long procession moved from the house, and at the distance of about a quarter of a mile entered the little cemetery; and as it mounted the slope on which was the grave, the scene was one of most pathetic beauty. Standing in the shadow of the hills which bound the valley on the east, the eye ranged southward to the long, undulating outline of the Green Mountain, coming round to the Equinox range on the west, "muffled thick" to its very crest with the green maples and pines, and still farther round to the bold hills and sloping uplands on the north. Below lay the quiet village, at our feet "God's acre," with the train of mourners winding among the white stones. Who could stand there, compassed about by the mountains, and in the shadow of that great sorrow, and not whisper the words of the Pilgrim Psalm, "I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills. Whence should help come to me? My help cometh from Jehovah, who made heaven and earth." As the casket was borne to the grave, the setting sun, which for the last half hour had been hidden by a mass of clouds, burst out in full splendor, gilding the mountain-tops and shedding his parting rays upon the group around the tomb, the stricken family, the weeping neighbors and friends, especially the women whom for some years past she had been in the habit of meeting at her weekly Bible-reading, and some of whom had walked each week for miles along the mountain roads, through storm and heat, to drink of the living waters which flowed at her touch. Dr. Vincent, holding in his hand a little, well-worn volume, and standing at the foot of the grave, spoke substantially as follows: I am glad, my friends, that I am not one of those who know God only as they find Him identified with the woods and fields and streams. If this were so, I should turn from the grave of this beloved friend, and go my way in utter heart-sickness and hopelessness; for Nature would but mock me to-day with her fulness of summer life. These forest-clad mountains, that waving grain, those woods, pulsating with the hum of insects and with the song of birds, all speak of life, while we stand here at the close of a precious and useful human life, to lay in the dust all that remains of what was so dear, and so fruitful in good. But, thanks to God, we are not here as those who face an insoluble riddle. We believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, and in the resurrection of the dead; and with this key in our hand, we stand here at the grave's mouth, and looking backward, interpret the lesson of this closed life; and looking forward, gaze with hope into the future. Thus Nature becomes our consoler instead of our mocker; a type, and not a contradiction of human immortality. Thus, and only thus, do we find ourselves at the standpoint from which Christ viewed nature when He said, "Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit"; the standpoint from which Paul viewed nature when he wrote, "That which thou sowest is not quickened except it die; and that which thou sowest, thou sowest not that body which shall be, but bare grain, it may chance of wheat, or of some other grain; but God giveth it a body as He willeth, and to every seed his own body. So also is the resurrection of the dead. It is sown in corruption, it is raised in incorruption. It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power. It is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body." And thus too we can understand the words which I read from this little volume, the daily companion of our friend for many years, containing a passage of Scripture for every day in the year, and marked everywhere with her notes of special anniversaries and memorable incidents. Was it merely an accidental coincidence that, on the morning of the thirteenth of August, on which she exchanged earth for heaven, the passage for the day was, "I heard a voice from heaven saying unto me, Write, Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord, from henceforth, yea, saith the Spirit, that they may rest from their labors, and their works do follow them." There are two thoughts in this verse which seem to me to be fraught with comfort and hope to us as we gather round this grave. There is the thought of rest. "They rest from their labors." Bethink you of the long life marked by the discipline of sorrow, and by those unwearied labors for others. Bethink you of the racking agony of the last two days; and how blessed, how soothing the contrast introduced by the words--"She rests from her labors." Still is the busy hand; at rest the active brain; completed the discipline; the pain ended forever. The other thought is that her work is not done, so far as its results are concerned. "Their works do follow them." Think you that because she will no longer meet you in her weekly Bible-readings, because her pen will no more indite the thoughts which have made so many patient under life's burdens, and helped so many to make of their burdens steps on which to mount heavenward--think you her work is ended? Nay. Go into yonder field, and pluck a single head of wheat, and plant the grains, and you know that out of each grain which falls into the ground and dies, there shall spring up an hundred-fold. Shall you recognise so much multiplying power in a corn of wheat, and not discern the infinitely greater power of multiplication enfolded in a holy life and in a holy thought? No. Through the long years in which her mortal remains shall be quietly resting beneath this sod, the work of her tongue and pen shall be reproducing itself in new forms of power, of faith, and of patience. And yet we seem to want something more than these two thoughts give us. It does not satisfy us to contemplate only rest from labor and the perpetuated fruits of labor. And that something this same little volume gives us in the words appointed for this day, on which we commit her mortal part to the grave: "For God is not unrighteous to forget your work and labor of love, which ye have showed toward His name, in that ye have ministered to the saints and do minister. Be not slothful, but followers of them who, through faith and patience, inherit the promises." Here the veil is lifted, and we get the glimpse we want of her inheritance and reward in heaven. She has inherited the promises; such promises as these: "If children, then heirs, heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ; if so be that we suffer with Him, that we may be also glorified together." "They shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more, neither shall the sun light on them, nor any heat; for the Lamb which is in the midst of the throne shall feed them, and shall lead them to living fountains of waters, and God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes." "They shall see His face, and His name shall be in their foreheads." "To him that overcometh will I grant to sit with me in my throne, even as I also overcame, and am set down with my Father in His throne." Thus we commit this mortal body to the ground in hope, and with assurances of victory. Oh, it is one of the most wonderful of facts, that at the grave's very portal, amid all the tears and desolation which death brings, we can stand and sing hymns of triumph--even that song which, from the morning when the angels met Mary at the Lord's empty supulchre, has been sounding over the graves of the dead in Christ--"O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? The sting of death is sin; and the strength of sin is the law; but thanks be to God, who giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ." How sweet, how impressive, is this scene! No wonder that we linger here while Nature, at this evening hour, speaks to us so tenderly and beautifully of rest. Even as yonder clouds break from the setting sun, and are tinged with glory by its parting beams, so our sorrow is illumined by this truth of the Resurrection. There is no terror in death, and relieved by such a faith and hope, our thoughts are all of peace, and flow naturally into the mould of those familiar lines: "So fades a summer cloud away, So sinks the gale when storms are o'er, So gently shuts the eye of day, So dies a wave along the shore." But this scene is adapted also to kindle aspiration in our hearts-- aspiration to be followers of them who, through faith and patience, inherit the promises. Her victory over death is the victory of love to Christ; and that same victory may be yours through the same Christ in whose name she conquered. Shall we not pray that His love may be shed abroad in all our hearts in richer measure? And can we better frame that prayer than in those lines which she wrote out of her own heart? Let us then sing MORE LOVE TO THEE, O CHRIST. More love, O Christ, to Thee! Hear Thou the prayer I make On bended knee: This is my earnest plea,-- More love, O Christ, to Thee! More love, O Christ, to Thee! More love to Thee. Once earthly joy I craved, Sought peace and rest; Now Thee alone I seek; Give what is best! This all my prayer shall be,-- More love, O Christ, to Thee! More love to Thee. Let sorrow do its work, Send grief and pain; Sweet are Thy messengers, Sweet their refrain, When they can sing with me More love, O Christ, to Thee! More love to Thee. Then shall my latest breath Whisper Thy praise! This be the parting cry My heart shall raise, This still its prayer shall be, More love, O Christ, to Thee! More love to Thee. After the singing of these words, Mr. Pratt, according to the old country custom, returned thanks to the assembled friends in the name of the family, for their sympathy and aid in the burial of their dead. The several members of the household each laid a floral offering upon the casket lid, and the body was lowered into the grave. Dr. Vincent uttered the solemn words of committal to the dust, and Dr. Poor pronounced the parting blessing in the words, "The God of peace who brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus, that Great Shepherd of the sheep, through the blood of the Everlasting Covenant, make you perfect in every good work to do His will, working in you that which is well-pleasing in His sight, through Jesus Christ, to whom be glory forever and ever. Amen." Thus the valley of the shadow has been irradiated. To those who have been permitted to participate in these closing scenes, it has seemed like standing at heaven's gate. The valley of the shadow has become a transfiguration mountain, where we have seen the Lord. * * * * * Hardly had the news of her death left Dorset when there began to pour in upon its stricken household a stream of the tenderest Christian sympathy; nor did the stream cease until it had brought loving messages from the remotest parts of the land. Her friends seemed overcome with special wonder that she could have died, so vividly was she associated in their thoughts with life and sunlight. For months, too, after the return of the family to their city home, letters from far and near continued to bear witness to the mingled emotions of sorrow and of thanksgiving excited by her sudden departure from earth--sorrow for a great personal loss; thanksgiving that she had gone to be forever with the Lord. A little volume of selections from these varied testimonies would form a very touching and precious tribute to her memory. "The human heart," to use her own words, "was made by so delicate, so cunning a hand, that it needs less than a breath to put it out of tune; and an invisible touch, known only to its own consciousness, may set all its silvery bells to ringing out a joyous chime. Happy he, thrice blessed she, who is striving to hush its discords and to awaken its harmonies by never so imperceptible a motion!" Surely, the triple benediction belonged to her. Already tens of thousands, both young and old, who never saw her face, but have been aided and cheered by her writings, gladly call her "thrice blessed." May this story of her life serve to increase their number and so to render her name dearer still. Above all, may it help to inspire some other souls with her own impassioned and adoring love to our Lord Jesus Christ. [1] She was specially touched by the sudden decease of Mrs. Harriet Woolsey Hodge, of Philadelphia, to whom both for her mother's and her own sake she was warmly attached. [2] J. Cleveland Cady, the distinguished architect. [3] Mrs. Antoinette Donaghe died at Staunton, Va., April 14, 1882. Her last years were passed amid great bodily sufferings, which she bore with the patience of a saint. She was a woman of uncommon excellence, a true Christian lady, and much endeared to a wide circle of friends in New Haven, New York, and elsewhere. Her husband, Mr. James Donaghe, a most worthy man, for many years a prominent citizen of New Haven, died on the 1st of January, 1878. He and Mrs. Donaghe were among the original members of the Church of the Covenant. [4] The book alluded to is Letters of Thomas Erskine of Linlathen. From 1800 till 1840. Edited by Dr. Hanna, and republished by G. P. Putnam's Sons. The Duchess de Broglie was born in Paris, in 1797, and died in September, 1838, at the age of forty-one. She was the only daughter of the celebrated Madame de Stael. Some pleasant glimpses of her are given in the Life, Letters, and Journals of George Ticknor. Vol. I., pp. 128-139. Vol. II., pp. 103-139. [5] The portrait in this volume is from a drawing by Miss Crocker, engraved by A. H. Ritchie. Miss C., after pursuing her studies for some time in Paris, has opened a studio in New York. [6] In this letter she told me how much good Stepping Heavenward had done her and how sorry she felt on hearing of Mrs. P.'s death, that she had never written, as she longed to do, to thank her for it. "Dear soul! (she added) perhaps she knows now how many hearts she has lifted up and comforted by her wonderful words."--_From a letter of Mrs. W._ [7] Mr. Washburn died on Sunday, the 18th of September, 1881, aged 80 years. He was born in Farmington, Conn. His father, the Rev. Joseph Washburn, pastor of the Congregational Church in F., was cut off in the prime of a beautiful and saintly manhood. He inherited some of his father's most attractive traits and was a model of Christian fidelity and uprightness. In a notice which appeared in the New York Evangelist, shortly after his death, President Porter, of Yale College, whose father succeeded the Rev. Mr. Washburn as pastor of the church in Farmington, thus refers to his life at Wildwood: "Some twenty years since he retired for a part of eight years to the singularly beautiful house which was selected and prepared by the taste of himself and wife, near East River, a district in Madison, which he has for several years made his permanent residence. His life was singularly even in its course and happy in its allotments; a blessing to himself and a blessing to the world. His memory will long be cherished by the many who knew him as one whom to know was to love and honor." [8] Mr. Isaac Farwell, or "Uncle Isaac," as everybody called him, was the most remarkable man in Dorset. He died in 1881 in the 102d year of his age. His centennial was celebrated on the 14th of July, 1879; the whole town joining in it. He was full of interest in life, retained his mental powers unimpaired, and would relate incidents that occurred in the last century, as if they had just happened. Mrs. Prentiss was fond of meeting him: and after her departure he delighted to recall his talks with her and to tell where he had seen her creeping through fences, laden with rustic trophies, as she and her daughter came home from their tramps in the fields and over the hills. [9] The following is an extract from a letter of Mrs. M. giving an account of the interview: It was of her I thought, as an hour before sunset, on that day, I passed through the grounds to the door of her beautiful home. I thought of her as I had seen her busy at work among her flowers on the morning of the day when the fatal illness began, wearing a straw hat, with broad brim to protect her from the heat of the sun. Several of her family were standing around her, and the pleasant picture we saw as we drove by the lovely lawn is fresh and green in my memory now. Once, after this, I had seen her, at our last precious Bible-reading (though little thought we then it would be our last), when she so earnestly urged us to be true "witnesses" for our Master and Lord and gently bade us God-speed, "_encouraging_" us also, as she expressed it, "by the particular desire of my husband to-day," in the heavenward path. I knew that she was not quite well, and as I entered the house was invited to her chamber. I found her attired as usual, but reclining on the bed, apparently only for quiet rest. Her greeting was warm, her eyes bright, she was very cheerful, and, I think, was not then suffering from pain. To my inquiries after her health, she replied, that she had been at first prostrated by the heat of the sun, remaining at work in it too long, with no idea of danger from the exposure; "but now," she said, "I do not think much is the matter with me"--though afterwards she added, "The doctor has said something to my husband which has alarmed him about me, and he is anxious, but I can not perceive any reason for this." We talked of many familiar things, even of home-like methods of cookery, and she kindly sent for a small manuscript receipt-book of her own to lend me, looking it over and turning down the leaves at some particular receipts which she approved, and "those were my mother's," she said of several. She spoke of her engagements and the guests she loved to entertain, adding that she thought God had given this pleasant home, surrounded by such beautiful things in nature, that others too might be made happy in enjoying them. All the time while listening to her remarks, and deeply interested in every one she made, the strong desire was in my heart to speak to her of her works, of my appreciation of their great usefulness, and how God had blessed her in permitting her to do so much to benefit others. I longed to say to her, "O had you only written the books for the little ones, 'Little Susy's Six Birthdays,' and its companions, it would have been well worth living for! had you never written anything but 'The Flower of the Family,' it were a blessing for you to have lived! And 'Stepping Heavenward'--what a privilege to have lived to write only that volume!" I could scarcely refrain from pouring out before her the thoughts which warmed my heart, but I had been told that she preferred not to be spoken to of her works, and I refrained. Only once, when we were alone, I said, with some emotion, "I am so glad to have seen you; it was because _you_ were here that I wished to come to this village; this was the strong attraction." ... Thus I parted from her. I shall not look upon her again until the day when "those who sleep in Jesus shall God bring with Him." APPENDIX A. The allusion is to a young officer of the navy, James Swan Thatcher--a grandson of General Knox, the friend of Washington, and a younger brother of Lieutenant, afterwards the gallant Rear Admiral, Henry Knox Thatcher. He had become deeply interested in Miss Payson, and at length solicited her hand. The story of his hopeless attachment to her, as disclosed after his death, is most touching. He would spend hours together late into the night in walking about the house, which, to borrow his brother's expression, "his love had placed on holy ground." He was a young man of singular purity and nobleness of character--"one of a thousand," to use her own words--and, although she could not accept him as a lover, she cherished for him a very cordial friendship. Not long after, he was lost at sea. In later years she often referred to him and his tragical end with the tenderest feeling. The following is an extract from a letter of Rear Admiral Thatcher to her husband, written several months after her death and shortly before his own: I have read with great interest your reference to my dear and only brother, James Swan Thatcher. It carried me back to one of the saddest afflictions of my life. We had both been stationed at Portland for the purpose of recruiting some of the hardy sons of Maine as seamen for the U. S. naval service. The wife of the Rev. Dr. Dwight had advised my calling upon Mrs. Payson, Cumberland street, to obtain quarters. I did so, and with my wife removed from a noisy hotel to the quiet of that most desirable retreat. My brother made frequent visits to us, and, by invitation of Mrs. Payson, dined with us on Sundays, and passed the hours between meetings, accompanying the ladies to church in the afternoons. This led to an acquaintance between Miss Payson and himself. As they were both highly intellectual and were both "stepping heavenward," they naturally fancied each other's conversation and formed a mutual friendship. Until after my dear brother's death I never imagined that it was more than a fondness for Miss Payson's conversational gifts that induced him to call so frequently at Cumberland street.... James was unexpectedly ordered to join the U. S. schooner Grampus at Norfolk, Va., for a winter cruise on the Southern coast for relief of distressed merchant vessels. The cruise continued for some weeks without entering any port, but about the 20th of March, 1843, the Grampus appeared off the bar of Charleston, S. C., and sent in a letter-bag for mailing. That night there came on a terrible gale and the Grampus disappeared forever--no vestige of her ever having been seen. She was commanded by Lt.-Commander Albert E. Downes, a good man and a fine seaman, and who as a midshipman had sailed with me three years before in the Pacific. My brother was educated for the law, and studied his profession with the Hon. John Holmes, and, after completing his studies, became Mr. Holmes' law-partner. But he being my only brother, I was very desirous that he should obtain a commission as a purser in the navy, in order that we might be associated on duty; and, at Mr. H.'s request, he was appointed by General Harrison soon after his inauguration. My brother then joined me in Portland. It is a consolation to know that he lived and died in the exercise of those Christian sentiments which were deeply instilled into his mind by the society of your angelic wife, who has preceded you to our home of rest. God grant that we may all meet there! * * * * * B. S. S. PRENTISS. One of the best informed writers on the history of the Revolutionary times and of the war for the Union thus introduces a notice of Mr. Prentiss: Small in stature; limping in gait; broad-chested; a high intellectual forehead; manly beauty in every feature; a voice of remarkable sweetness and flexibility; a mild but deeply penetrating eye; a most retentive memory; endowed with varied knowledge by extensive reading; unrivaled in power of oratory; frank in thought, speech, and manner; patient and forbearing in temper; powerfully governed by the affections, and with unbounded generosity of disposition, Seargent Smith Prentiss was one of the most remarkable characters in our history. Living persons who were adults a generation ago will remember how the newspapers between 1835 and 1850 were filled with his praises as a citizen unapproachable in oratory, whether he spoke as an advocate at the bar, a debater in the halls of legislation, or at occasional public gatherings. [1] S. S. Prentiss was born at Portland, Maine, September 30, 1808. While yet an infant, he was reduced by a violent fever to the verge of the grave and deprived for several years of the use of his limbs, the right leg remaining lame and feeble to the last. For his partial recovery he was indebted to the unwearied care and devotion of his mother, herself in delicate health. During the war of 1812 his father removed to Gorham. At the academy in this town, then one of the best in Maine, Seargent was fitted for Bowdoin College, where he was graduated in the class of 1826, at the age of seventeen. After studying law for a year with Judge Pierce, of Gorham, he set out for what was at that day the Far West, in quest of fortune. Having tarried a few months at Cincinnati, he then made his way down the Mississippi to Natchez, where he obtained the situation of tutor in a private family. Here he completed his legal studies; was admitted to the bar in June, 1829, soon afterwards became the law-partner of Gen. Felix Huston, and almost at a bound stood in the front rank of his profession in the State. "Boundless good-nature," to use the language of Dr. Lossing; "keen logic; quickness and aptness at repartee; overflowing but kindly wit; an absolute earnestness and sincerity in all he undertook to do, made him a universal favorite in every circle." In 1832 Mr. Prentiss removed to Vicksburg. John M. Chilton, a leading member of the bar of that place, thus describes his first appearance in the Circuit Court of Warren county: There arrived, with other members of the bar, from Natchez, a limping youth in plain garb, but in whose bearing there was a manly, indeed almost a haughty, mien; in whose cheek a rich glow, telling the influence of more northern climes; in whose eye a keen but meditative expression; and in whose voice and conversation a vivacity and originality that attracted every one, and drew around him, wherever he appeared, a knot of listeners, whose curiosity invariably yielded in a few moments to admiration and delight. There was then a buzz of inquiry, succeeded by a pleased look of friendly recognition, and a closer approach, and in most instances an introduction, to the object of this general attraction, so soon as it was told that the stranger was S. S. Prentiss, of Natchez. His fame had preceded him, and men were surprised to see only beardless youth in one whose speeches, and learning, and wit, and fine social qualities, had already rendered him at Natchez "the observed of all observers." Society in the Southwest at that day was full of perils to young men, especially to young men of talent and generous, impressionable natures. Drinking, duelling, and gambling widely prevailed. It was a period of "flush times," and wild, reckless habits. Mr. Prentiss did not wholly escape the contagion; but his faults and errors were very much exaggerated in many of the stories that found currency concerning him. One of his friends wrote after his death: "I have heard many anecdotes of him, which I considered of doubtful authority; for he is a traditional character all over Mississippi--their Cid, their Wallace, their Coeur de Lion, and all the old stories are wrought over again, and annexed to his name." Another of his friends, who knew him long and intimately, the late Balie Peyton, of Tennessee, testified: "No man ever left a purer fame than Seargent S. Prentiss, in all that constitutes high honor and spotless integrity of character. His principles remained as pure, and his heart continued as warm and fresh, as at the instant he bade farewell to his mother." From his settlement at Vicksburg his career as a lawyer was one of remarkable success; and it were hard to say in what department of his profession he most excelled, whether in the varied contests of the _Nisi Prius_ courts, in an argument on a difficult question of legal construction, or in discussing a fundamental principle of jurisprudence. In 1833, at the age of 24, he appeared before the Supreme Court at Washington, where, in spite of his youth, he at once attracted the notice of Chief Justice Marshall. "I made a speech three or four hours long (he wrote to his mother); and I suppose you will say I have acquired a great deal of brass since I left home, when I tell you that I was not at all abashed or alarmed in addressing so grave a set of men as their Honors the Judges of the Supreme Court of the United States." In attending the circuit courts of Mississippi he had experiences of the roughest sort and many a hairbreadth escape. He wrote: I travel entirely on horseback; and have had to swim, on my horse, over creeks and bayous that would astonish you Northerners. Beyond Pearl river I had to ride, and repeatedly to swim, through a swamp four miles in extent, in which the water was all the time up to the horse's belly. What do you think of that for a lawyer's life? In the winter of 1836-7 he won the great "Commons" suit, which involved a considerable portion of the town of Vicksburg. This made him, as was supposed, one of the richest men in the State. About this time he was induced to run for the legislature of Mississippi. He was elected, and at once took a foremost position as leader of his party. The next summer he visited his home, and by a speech at a Whig political meeting in Portland, on the Fourth of July, he so electrified his hearers by his eloquence that he was pronounced, in the East, the most finished orator of his time; as he really was. He became a candidate for a seat in Congress, and made the most remarkable electioneering canvass ever recorded. Traveling on horseback, he visited forty-five counties in a sparsely-settled country. For ten weeks he traveled thirty miles each week-day, and spoke each day two hours. He had announced his engagements beforehand, and never missed one. Mississippi was a strong "Jackson State," but Mr. Prentiss carried it for the Whigs. His seat was contested by his Democratic opponent, and his speech in the House of Representatives at Washington in favor of his claim gained for him a national reputation as the greatest orator of the age. It occupied three days in its delivery. He had not spoken long before intelligence of his wonderful oratory reached the Senate chamber and drew its members to the other House. Rumors of his speech ran through the city, and before it was concluded the anxiety to hear him became intense. The galleries of the House became densely packed, chiefly with ladies, and the lobbies were crowded with foreign ministers, heads of departments, judges, officers of the army and navy, and distinguished citizens. Among the charmed auditors were the best American statesmen of the time who then occupied seats in both branches of Congress--John Quincy Adams leading those of the Representatives, and Daniel Webster and Henry Clay of the Senate. The entire self-possession of Mr. Prentiss, then only twenty-nine years of age, never forsook him in such an august presence. There was no straining for effect, no trick of oratory; but, from the first to the last sentence, everything in manner, as in matter, seemed perfectly natural, as if he were addressing a jury on an ordinary question of law. This feature of his speech--this evidence of sincerity in every word--with the almost boyish beauty of his face, bound his distinguished audience as with a magic spell. When, at the conclusion of the speech, Mr. Webster left the hall, he remarked to a friend, with his comprehensive brevity, "Nobody can equal that!" [2] Mr. Prentiss was rejected by the casting vote of the Speaker, Mr. Polk, and the election sent back to the people; when, after another extraordinary canvass, he was triumphantly returned. After the adjournment of Congress he visited his mother in Portland. About this time a great reception was given to Mr. Webster, as defender of the Constitution, in Faneuil Hall, and Mr. Prentiss was invited to be present and address the assemblage. His speech on the occasion is still fresh in the memory of all who heard it. He was called upon late in the evening, and after a succession of very able speakers; but hardly had the vast audience heard the tap of his cane, as he stepped forward, and caught the first sound of his marvellous voice, when he held them, as it were, spell-bound. Before he had uttered a word, indeed, he had taken possession of his audience by his very look--for, when aroused by a great occasion, his countenance flashed like a diamond. Gov. Everett, who presided at the banquet, himself an orator of classic power, thus referred to Mr. Prentiss' address, in a letter written more than a dozen years later: It seemed to me the most wonderful specimen of sententious fluency I had ever witnessed. The words poured from his lips in a torrent, but the sentences were correctly formed, the matter grave and important, the train of thought distinctly pursued, the illustrations wonderfully happy, drawn from a wide range of reading, and aided by a brilliant imagination. That it was a carefully prepared speech, no one could believe for a moment. It was the overflow of a full mind, swelling in the joyous excitement of the friendly reception, kindling with the glowing themes suggested by the occasion, and not unmoved by the genius of the place. Sitting by Mr. Webster, I asked him if he had ever heard anything like it? He answered, "Never, except from Mr. Prentiss himself." Political life was exceedingly distasteful to Mr. Prentiss and he soon abandoned it and returned with fresh zeal to the practice of his profession. The applauses of the world seemed never for an instant to deceive him. He wrote after a great speech at Nashville, addressed, it was estimated, to 40,000 people: "They heap compliments upon me till I am almost crushed beneath them." And yet in the midst of such popular ovations he wrote to his sister: I laugh at those who look upon the uncertain, slight, and changeable regards of the multitude, as worthy even of comparison with the true affection of one warm heart. I have ever yearned for affection; I believe it is the only thing of which I am avaricious. I never had any personal ambition, and do not recollect the time when I would not have exchanged the applause of thousands for the love of one of my fellow-beings. In 1842 his yearning for affection was satisfied by his marriage to Miss Mary Jane Williams, of Natchez; and henceforth his life was full of the sweetest domestic peace and joy. From the moment of first leaving home he had carried on a constant correspondence with his mother, sisters, and brothers, in the North; and he kept it up while he lived. He took a special interest in the education of his youngest brother, and at one time had planned to join him in Germany for purposes of study and travel. All the later years of his life were years of unwearied toil and struggle. In 1845 a case involving the validity of his title to the "Commons" property, was decided against him in the Supreme Court of the United States; thus wresting from him at a blow that property and the costly buildings which he had erected upon it. In consequence of this misfortune and of his abhorrence of repudiation, which, in spite of his determined opposition, had, unhappily, been foisted upon his adopted State, he removed to New Orleans in 1846. Here, notwithstanding that he had to master a new system of law, he at once took his natural position as a leader of the bar; and but for failing health, would no doubt have in the end repaired his shattered fortunes and made himself a still more brilliant name among the remarkable men of the country. He died at Natchez, July 1, 1850, in the forty-second year of his age, universally beloved and lamented. He left a wife and four young children, three of whom still survive. Mr. Prentiss was a natural orator. Even as a boy he attracted everybody's attention by the readiness and charm of his speech. But all this would have contributed little toward giving him his marvellous power over the popular mind and heart, had he not added to the rare gifts of nature the most diligent culture, a deep study of life and character, and a wonderful knowledge of books. The whole treasury of general literature--more especially of English poetry and fiction--was at his command; Shakespeare, Milton, and Byron he almost knew by heart; with the Bible, Pilgrim's Progress, and Sir Walter Scott, he seemed to be equally familiar; and from all these sources he drew endless illustrations in aid of his argument, whether it was addressed to a jury, to a judge, to the people, or to the legislative assembly. When, for example, he undertook to show the wrongfulness of Mississippi repudiation, he would refer to Wordsworth as "a poet and philosopher, whose good opinion was capable of adding weight even to the character of a nation," and then expatiate, with the enthusiasm of a scholar, upon the noble office of such men in human society. He had corresponded with Mr. Wordsworth and knew that members of his family had suffered heavily from the dishonesty of the State; and perhaps no passages in his great speeches against repudiation were more effective than those in which he thus brought his fine literary taste and feeling to the support of the claims of public honesty. This feature of his oratory, together with the large ethical element which entered into it, was, no doubt, a principal source of its extraordinary power. It would be hard to say in what department of oratory he most excelled. On this point the following is the testimony of Henry Clay, himself a great orator as well as a great statesman, and one of Mr. P.'s most devoted and admiring friends: Mr. Prentiss was distinguished, as a public speaker, by a rich, chaste, and boundless imagination, the exhaustless resources of which, in beautiful language and happy illustrations, he brought to the aid of a logical power, which he wielded to a very great extent. Always ready and prompt, his conceptions seemed to me almost intuitive. His voice was fine, softened, and, I think, improved, by a slight lisp, which an attentive observer could discern. The great theatres of eloquence and public speaking in the United States are the legislative hall, the forum, and the stump, without adverting to the pulpit. I have known some of my contemporaries eminently successful on one of these theatres, without being able to exhibit any remarkable ability on the others. Mr. Prentiss was brilliant and successful on them all. Of the attractions of his personal and social character the testimonies are very striking. Judge Bullard, in a eulogy pronounced before the bar of New Orleans, thus refers to his own experience: What can I say of the noble qualities of his heart? Who can describe the charms of his conversation? Old as I am, his society was one of my greatest pleasures--I became a boy again. His conversation resembled the ever-varying clouds that cluster round the setting sun of a summer evening--their edges fringed with gold, and the noiseless and harmless flashes of lightning spreading, from time to time, over their dark bosom. In a similar strain Gov. J. J. Crittenden, of Kentucky, wrote of him shortly after his death: It was impossible to know him without feeling for him admiration and love. His genius, so rich and rare; his heart, so warm, generous, and magnanimous; and his manners, so graceful and genial, could not fail to impress these sentiments upon all who approached him. Eloquence was a part of his nature, and over his private conversations as well as his public speeches it scattered its sparkling jewels with more than royal profusion. * * * * * C. Here are the first stanzas of some of her favorite German hymns, referred to in this letter: Jesus, Jesus, nichts als Jesus Soll mein Wunsch sein und mein Ziel; Jetzund mach ich ein Verbündniss, Dass ich will, was Jesus will; Denn mein Herz, mit ihm erfüllt, Rufet nur; Herr, wie du willt. _Written by Elizabeth, Countess of Schwartzburg_, 1640-1672. Gott ist gegenwärtig! Lasset uns anbeten, Und in Erfurcht vor ihn treten; Gott ist in der mitten! Alles in uns schweige Und sich innig vor ihm beuge; Wer ihn kennt, wer ihn nennt, Schlagt die Augen nieder, Kommt, ergebt euch wieder. _By Gerhard Tersteegen_, 1697-1769. Zum Ernst, zum Ernst ruft Jesu Geist inwendig; Zum Ernst ruft auch die Stimme seiner Braut; Getreu und ganz, und bis zum Tod beständig. Ein reines Herz allein den reinen schaut. _By the Same_. Wir singen dir, Immanuel, Du Lebensfürst und Gnadenquell, Du Himmelsblum und Morgenstern, Du Jungfrausohn, Herr aller Herrn. _Paul Gerhard_, 1606-1676. Such, wer da will, ein ander Ziel Die Seligkeit zu finden, Mein Herz allein bedacht soll sein Auf Christum sich zu gründen: Sein Wort ist wahr, sein Werk ist klar, Sein heilger Mund hat Kraft und Grund, All Feind zü überwinden. _George Weissel_, 1590-1635. Gott, mein einziges Vertrauen, Gott, du meine Zuversicht, Deine Augen zu mir schauen, Deine Hülf versage mir nicht; Lass mich nicht vergeblich schreien, Sondern hör und lass gedeihen; So will ich, Gott, halten still, Gott, dein Will ist auch mein Will. _Elizabeth Eleonore, Duchess of Sax-Meiningen_, 1658-1729. O Durchbrecher aller Bande, Der du immer bei uns bist, Bei dem Shaden, Spott und Schande Lauter Lust und Himmel ist, Uebe femer dein Gerichte Wider unsern Adamssinn, Bis dein treues Angesichte Uns führt aus dem Kerken hin. _Gotter. Arnold_, 1666-1714. * * * * * _Lavater's Hymn._ HE MUST INCREASE, BUT I MUST DECREASE. --John iii. 30. O Jesus Christus, ivachs in mir, Und alles andre schwinde! Mein Herz sei täglich näher dir, Und ferner von der Sünde. Lass täglich deine Huld und Macht Um meine Schwachheit schweben! Dein Licht verschlinge meine Nacht, Und meinen Tod dein Leben! Beim Sonnenstrahle deines Lichts Lass jeden Wahn verschwinden! Dein Alles, Christus, und mein nichts, Lass täglich mich empfinden. Sei nahe mir, werf ich mich hin, Wein ich vor dir in stillen; Dein reiner gottgelassner Sinn Beherrsche meinen Willen. Blick immer herrlicher aus mir Voll Weisheit Huld und Freude, Ich sei ein lebend Bild von dir Im Gluck, und wenn ich leide. Mach alles in mir froh und gut, Dass stets ich minder fehle; Herr, deiner Menschen-Liebe Glut Durchglühe meine Seele. Es weiche Stolz, und Trägheit weich; Und jeder Leichtsinn fliehe, Wenn, Herr, nach dir und deinem Reich Ich redlich mich bemühe. Mein eignes, eitles, leeres Ich Sei jeden Tag geringer. O rd ich jeden Tag durch dich Dein würdigerer Junger. Von dir erfüllter jeden Tag Und jeden von mir leerer! O du, der uber Flehn vermag, Sei meines Flehns erhörer! Der Glaub an dich und deine Kraft Sei Trieb von jedem Triebe! Sei du nur meine Leidenschaft, Du meine Freud und Liebe! * * * * * D. A few extracts from the little diaries referred to are here given: _May 15, 1857._--Box came from Mrs. Bumstead--my dear, kind friend-- containing _everything_; salmon, tomatoes, oranges, peaches, prunes, cocoa and ham, tea and sugar from her father.[3] How pleasant the kindness of friends! _21st._--Worked at planting aster seeds and putting in verbena cuttings--all in my room, of course. _23d._--First hepaticas in garden. Sweet peas coming up. Brownie hatched--_one_ chicken. _June 1st._--Books from dear Lizzy. "Sickness," may it do me good. [4] _28th._--Sent flowers to the B.'s, flowers and strawberries to Mrs. N., green peas to E. M., and trout to Mother Hopkins. _July 2d._--Continue to send strawberries--yesterday to the B.'s--to-day to A. B. and Miss G., with rosebuds. _Oct. 11th._--A beautiful autumn day. Could not leave my bed till near noon. Then Albert drove me down the lane and carried me into the woods in his arms. Eddy has collected $30 for Kansas. [5] _25th._--My whole time, night and day, is spent in setting traps for sleep. To-day the money was sent for Kansas--$55, of which $9 was from us. _Nov. 4th._--Election day. Great excitement. _5th._--Wretched news; it is feared that Buchanan is elected. _Nov. 17th._--The anniversary of my dear mother's death. My own can not be far distant. _I earnestly entreat that none of my friends will wear mourning for me_. _January 1, 1858._--Outwardly all looks dark--health at the lowest--brain irritated and suffering inexpressibly--but _underneath all_, thank God, some patience, some resignation, some quiet trust. If it were not for wearing out my friends! But this care, too, I must learn to cast on Him. _5th._--Albert is reading Miss Bronte's Life to me, and oh, how many chords vibrate deep in my soul as I hear of her _shyness_; her dread of coming in contact with others; her morbid sensitiveness and intense suffering from lowness of spirits; her thirst for knowledge, her consciousness of personal defects, etc., etc., etc. _9th._--Storms to-day "like mad." Present from Julia Willis. Each day seems a week long, but let me be thankful that I have a chair to sit in, limbs free from palsy, books of all sorts to be read, and kind friends to read. Oh, yes; let me be _thankful_. A. brought "School-days at Rugby." _22d._--Eddy began to wear his coat! A. read to me Tom Brown's "School-days." _23d._--LOVE is the word that fills my horizon to-day. God is Love; I must be like Him. _Feb. 3d._--How lovely seem the words DUTY and KIGHT! How I long to be spotless--all pure within and without!... Albert read from Adolph Monod. What a precious book! _23d._--To-morrow I shall be forty-six years old. If I said one hundred I should believe it as well. _24th._--My birthday.... I feel disposed to take as my motto for this year, "I will hope continually, and will yet praise Thee _more and more_" Eddy began Virgil to-day. _27th._--Woke with a strong impression that I am Christ's, His servant, and as such have nothing to do for myself--no separate interest. Oh, to feel this and _act_ upon it always. And not _only_ a servant, but a _child_; and therefore entitled to feel an interest in the affairs of the _Family_. Albert read from the Silent Comforter the piece called "Wearisome Nights," which is an exact expression of my state and feelings. Long to do some good, at least by praying for people. A note from Mrs. C. Stoddard to my husband and myself, which was truly refreshing. _26th._--This morning God assisted me out of great weakness to converse and pray with my beloved child. He also prayed. I can not but entertain a trembling hope that he is indeed a Christian. So great a mercy would fill me with transport. _April 6th._--"I love the Lord because He hath heard my voice and my supplication" (Ps. cxvi. I). Albert read this psalm to me nearly fifteen years ago, the morning of the day succeeding that on which God had delivered me out of great danger and excruciating sufferings and had given us a _living child_. Our hearts swelled with thankfulness then; now we have received our child a second time--anew _gift_. _June 8th._--A.'s holiday. First strawberry! and first rose! (cinnamon). _July 3d._--Oh, my dear, dear sister Lizzy! Shall I never see you again in this world? I fancied I was familiar with the thought and reconciled to it, but now it agonizes me. [6] _Dec. 26th._--I do long to submit to--no, to accept joyfully--the will of God in everything; to see only Love in every trial. But to be made a whip in His hand with which to scourge others--I, who so passionately desire to give pleasure, to give only pain--I, who so hate to cause suffering, to inflict nothing else on my best friends--oh, this is _hard_!... I write by feeling with eyes closed. It is midnight; and, as usual, I am and have been sleepless. I am full of tossings to and fro until the dawn. All temporal blessings seem to be expressed by one word--_Sleep_.... Disease is advancing with rapid strides; many symptoms of paralysis; that or insanity certain, unless God in mercy to myself and my friends takes me home first. _31st._--"Here then to Thee Thine own I leave-- Mould as Thou wilt Thy passive clay; But let me all Thy stamp receive, But let me all Thy words obey. Serve with a single heart and eye, And to Thy glory live or die." _Jan. 26, 1859._--Cars ran through from Adams to Troy _first time_. Eddy studying Greek, Latin, etc., at school; Geology at home. _Feb. 3d._--Much of the day in intense bodily anguish, but have had lately more of Christ in my heart. Albert is reading me a precious sermon by Huntingdon on "a life hid with Christ in God." Oh, to learn more of Christ and His love! _5th._--O God, who art _rich_ in mercy, if Thou art looking for some creature on whom to bestow it, behold the poorest, neediest, emptiest of all Thou hast made, and _satisfy_ me with Thy mercy. _Sunday, 6th._--How thankful I am for the many good books I have! and oh, how I stand _amazed_ at the faith and patience of God's dear children (Mrs. Coutts, _e.g._), to _read_ of whose sufferings makes my heart bleed and almost murmur on their account. _March 17th._--"So foolish was I and ignorant, I was as a _beast_ before Thee." Oh, howr it comforts me that there is such a verse in the Bible as this! It comes _near_ describing my folly, stupidity, ignorance, and blindness.... Quite overcome to-day by a most unexpected favor from my dear friends the Jameses, [7] who I thought had forgotten me. _April 12th._--My love to my dear, dear sister. I shall never see her, never write to her, but we will spend eternity together. _Dec 1st._--Albert opened the _piano_, and, for the first time in _six years_, I touched it. Beautiful flower-pictures from Lizzy. [8] _Sunday, Jan._ 1, 1860.--"Out of weakness were made strong." This is the verse which has been given me as a motto for the year. May it be fulfilled in my experience! But should it not be so to my apprehension, may I be able to say, "Most gladly, therefore, will I glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me." _March 26th._--For several days I have been led to pray that the indwelling Spirit may indite my petitions. To-day He leads me to pray for the annihilation of self. My whole soul cries out for this--to forget my own sorrows, wants, sins even, and lose myself in Christ.... O precious Saviour, let me see Thee; let me behold Thy beauty; let me hear Thy voice; let me wash Thy feet with tears; let me gaze on Thee forever. _March 31st._--A remarkable day. 1st. Weather like Indian summer. 2d. After a very poor night, expecting to spend the day in bed, I was so strengthened as to ride up to the mountain with Albert and to enjoy seeing the mosses. In the P.M. rode again with Eddy. _June 30th._--For years I have been constantly fearing insanity or palsy. Now I hear of Mrs. ---- struck with paralysis and my dear friend ---- with mental alienation, while I am spared. _June 27th._--Let a person take a delicately-strung musical instrument and strike blows on it with a hammer till nearly every string is broken and the whole instrument trembles and shrieks under the infliction--that is what has been done to me. Words are entirely inadequate to paint what I suffer. _June 30th._--Another great mercy. A letter from N. P. W. [9] Under date of June 4th, I wrote, "May God bless," etc., and God has blessed him. Oh, praise, praise to Him who hears even before we ask. _April 26, 1861._--"Hangs my helpless soul on Thee." Oh, how many thousand times do I repeat this line during the sleepless hours of my wretched nights! As the year advanced, the entries became fewer and fewer; some of them, by reason of extreme weakness and suffering, having been left unfinished. But no weakness or suffering could wholly repress her love of Nature. Imprisoned within the same pages that record her nights and days of anguish are exquisite bits of fern, delicate mosses, rose-leaves, and other flowers pressed and placed there by her own hand. But far more touching than these mementoes of her love of Nature are the passages in this diary of her last year on earth, that express her love to Christ and testify to His presence and supporting grace in what she describes as "the fathomless abyss of misery" in which she was plunged. They remind one of the tints of unearthly light and beauty that adorn sometimes the face of a thundercloud. They are such as the following: _June 11, 1861._--Blessed be God for comfort. I see my sins all gone--all set down to Christ's account; and not only so, but--oh, wonder!--all His merits transferred to me. Well may it be said, "Let us come boldly to the throne of grace." Why not be bold with such--just like presenting an order at a bank. _Nov. 6th._--Come, O come, dear Lord Jesus! Come to this town, this church, this family, and oh, come to this poor longing famished heart. _Sunday, Nov. 10th._--A better night and some peace of mind. But O my Saviour, support me; let not the fiery billows swallow me up! And O let me not fail to be thankful for the mercies mingled in my cup of suffering--a pleasant room adorned with gifts of love from absent friends, and just now with beautiful mosses brought from the woods by my dear husband. The next entry contains directions respecting parting gifts to be sent to her sister and other absent friends after her death. Then comes the last entry, which is as follows: "I need not be afraid to ask to be--first, 'holy and without blame before Him in love'; second, 'filled with all the fullness of God'; third--." Here her pen dropped from her hand, and a little later her wearisome pilgrimage was over, and she entered into the saint's everlasting rest. * * * * * Further extracts from her literary journal: _Tuesday, Jan. 11, 1836._--Last meeting of the class. Mr. Dana made some remarks intended as a sort of leave-taking. He spoke of the importance of having some fixed _principles_ of criticism. These principles should be obtained from within--from the study of our own minds. If we try many criticisms by this standard, we shall turn away from them dissatisfied. Addison's criticisms on Milton are often miserable, and, where he is right, it seems to be by a sort of accident. He constantly appeals to the French critics as authorities. Another advantage will result from establishing principles of judging--we shall acquire self-knowledge. We can not ask ourselves, Is this true? does it accord with my own consciousness? etc., without gaining an acquaintance with ourselves. And then, in general, the more the taste is cultivated and refined, the more we shall find to like. Critics by rule, who have one narrow standard by which they try everything, may find much to condemn and little to approve: but it is not so in nature, nor with those who judge after nature. The great duty is to learn to be happy in ourselves.... I am surprised (said Mr. Dana) to find how much my present tastes and judgments are those of my childhood. In some respects, to be sure, I have altered; but, in general, the authors I loved and sympathised with then, I love and sympathise with now. When I was connected with the North-American, I wrote a review of Hazlitt's British Poets, in which I expressed my opinion of Pope and of Wordsworth. The sensation it excited is inconceivable. One man said I was mad and ought to be put in a strait-jacket. However, I did not mind it much, so long as they did not put me in one--that, to be sure, I should not have liked very well. Public opinion has changed since then. Many of the old _prose_ writers are very fine. Jeremy Taylor, though I admire him exceedingly, has been, I think, rather indiscriminately praised.... To come to the poets again, Young should be read and thought upon. He is often antithetical, but is a profound thinker. I was quite ashamed the other day on taking up his works to find how many of my thoughts he had expressed better than I could express them. I am convinced there is nothing new under the sun. Collins has written but little, but he is a most graceful and beautiful creature. For faithfulness of portraiture and bringing out every-day characters, Crabbe is unrivalled in modern days. And Wordsworth--he and Coleridge have been obliged to make minds to understand them. Who equals Wordsworth in purity, in majesty, in tranquil contemplation, in childlikeness? Coleridge is exerting a great influence in this country, especially over the minds of some of the young men. _Friday._--To-day by invitation I attended the first meeting of the new class and heard the introductory lecture. Mr. D. began by speaking of the object of the formation of the class. I shall adopt the first person in writing what he said, though I do not pretend to give his words. I have not invited you here to amuse an idle hour, or to afford you a topic of conversation when you meet. One great design has been to cherish in you a love of home and of solitude. Yet this is not all, for of what advantage is it to be at home, unless home is a place for the unfolding of warm affections? and of what use is solitude, unless it be improved by patient thought, self-study and a communion with those great minds who became great by thinking. But it is not merely thinking as an operation of the intellect that is necessary; it must be affectionate thinking; there must be heartfelt love, and this can be attained only by a _habit_ of loving.... I would not impart sternness to the beautiful countenance of English literature. Beautiful indeed it is, but not like the beauty of the human face, that may be discovered by all who have eyes to look upon it; the heart as well as the head must engage, or as Coleridge says, _the heart in the head_. Let us not approach with carelessness or light-mindedness. Poetry requires a peculiar state of mind, a peculiar combination of mental and moral qualifications to be feelingly apprehended. But there--I will not write a word more. It is a shame to spoil anything so beautiful. Poor Mr. Dana! I hope he will never know to what he has been subjected. _Wednesday._--Everybody has set out to invite me to visit them. I made two visits last evening, one to Mrs. Robinson, where I had a fine opportunity to settle some of my Hebrew difficulties with Prof. R., and saw De Wette's translations of Job. This evening I am to make two more, and to-morrow I spend the day out and receive company in the evening. So much for dissipation, and for study. PORTLAND, March 1, 1836. I believe there is scarcely any branch of knowledge in which I am so deficient as history, both ecclesiastical and profane. I have never been much interested _facts_, considered simply as facts, and that is about all that is to be found in most historical works. The relations of facts to each other and of all to reason, in other words, the philosophy of history, are not often to be found in books, and I have not hitherto been able to supply the want from my own mind. _April 16, 1836._--If my bump of combativeness does not grow it won't be for want of exercise. I have had another dispute of two hours' length to-day with another person. Subjects, Cousin--Locke--innate ideas--idea of space--of spirit-life, materialism--phrenology--Upham--wine--alcohol--etc. _June._--My patience has been sorely tried this afternoon. I was visiting and Coleridge was dragged in, as it seemed for the express purpose of provoking me by abusing him--just as anybody might show off a lunatic.... But I did not and never will dispute on such subjects with those who seek not to know the truth. _Feb. 6, 1837._--Why is it that our desires so infinitely transcend our capacities? We grasp at everything--do so by the very constitution of our natures; and seize--less than nothing. We can not rest without perfection in _everything_, yet the labor of a life devoted to _one thing_, only shows us how unattainable it is. I am oppressed with gloom--oh, for light, light, light! _Feb. 20th._--Alas! my feelings of discouragement and despondency, instead of diminishing, strengthen every day. I have been ill for the last fortnight; and possibly physical causes have contributed to shroud my mind in this thick darkness. Yet I can not believe that conviction so clear, conclusions so irresistible as those which weigh me down, are entirely the result of morbid physical action. In order to prove that they are not, and to have the means of judging hereafter of the rationalness of my present judgments, I will record the grounds of my despondency. As nearly as I can recollect, the thought which oftenest pressed itself upon me, when these feelings of gloom began, was that I was living to no purpose. I was conscious, not only of a conviction that I _ought_ to live to do good, but of an _intense desire_ to do good--to _know_ that I was living to some purpose; and I felt perfectly certain that this knowledge was essential to my happiness. I began to wonder that I had been contented to seek knowledge all my life for my own pleasure, or with an indefinite idea that it might contribute in some way to my usefulness,--without any distinct plan.... I then began to inquire what results I had of "all my labor which I have taken under the sun" and these are my conclusions: 1. I have not that mental discipline, or that command of my own powers, which is one of the most valuable results of properly directed study. I can not grasp a subject at once, and view it in all its bearings. 2. I have not that self-knowledge which is another sure result of proper study. I do not know what I am capable of, nor what I am particularly fitted for, nor what I am most deficient in. I am forever pouring into my own mind, and yet never find out what is there. 3d. I have no principle of arrangement or assimilation which might unite all my scattered knowledge. Oh, how different if I had had one definite object which, like the lens, should concentrate all the scattered rays to one focus. I met with this remark of Sir Egerton Bridges to-day; it applies to me exactly: "I have never met with one who seemed to have the same overruling passion for literature as I have always had. A thousand others have pursued it with more principle, reason, method, fixed purpose, and effect; mine I admit to have been pure, blind, unregulated love." 4th. I have lost the power of thinking for myself. My memory, which was originally good, has been so washed away by the floods of trash which have been poured into it, that now it scarcely serves me at all. A pleasant picture this of a mind, which ought to be in the full maturity of its powers. And much reason have I to hope that with such an instrument I shall leave an impress on other minds!... How I envy the other sex! They have certain fixed paths marked out for them--regular professions and trades--between which they may make a choice and know what they have to do. A friend, to whom I had spoken of some of these feelings, tried last night to convince me that they are the result of physical derangement, and not at all the expression of a sane mind in a sound body. I laughed at him, but have every now and then a suspicion that he was right. _Feb. 25th._--Last evening we had the company of some friends who are interested in the subjects which I love most to talk about. We had a good deal of conversation about books, authors, the laws of mind and spirit, etc. My enthusiasm on these subjects revived; I felt a genial glow resulting from the action of mind upon mind, and the delight of finding sympathy in my most cherished tastes and pursuits. Whether it is owing to this or not, I can not say; but I must confess to a new change of mood, and, consequently, of opinion. I mean that my studies have not only regained their former attractions in my eyes, but that it seems unquestionably right and proper to pursue them (when they interfere with no positive duty) as a means of expanding and strengthening the mind-- even when I can not point out the precise _use_ I expect to make of such acquisition.... One of my friends tried to convince me last night that I was not deficient in invention, because I assigned the fact that I am so, as a reason for attempting translation rather than original writing. Several others have labored to convince me of the same thing. Strange that they can be so mistaken! I know that I have no fancy, from having tried to exert it; and, as this is the lower power and implied in imagination, of course I have none of the latter faculty. The only two things which look like it are my enthusiasm and my relish for works of a high imaginative order. _Feb. 28th._--... Oh, how transporting--how infinite will be the delight when _all_ truth shall burst upon us as ONE beautiful and perfect whole--each distinct ray harmonising and blending with every other, and all together forming one mighty flood of radiance!... I can not remember all the thoughts which have given so much pleasure this evening; I only know that I have been very happy, and wondered not a little at my late melancholy. I believe it must have been partly caused by looking at myself (and that, too, as if I were a little, miserable, isolated wretch), instead of contemplating those things which have no relation to space and time and matter--the eternal and the infinite--or, if I thought of myself at all, feeling that I am part of a great and wonderful whole. It seems as if a new inner sense had been opened, revealing to me a world of beauty and perfection that I have never before seen. I am filled with a strange, yet sweet astonishment. _Sept. 24, 1837._--I have been profoundly interested in the character of Goethe, from reading Mrs. Austin's "Characteristics" of him. Certainly, very few men have ever lived of equally wonderful powers. A thing most remarkable in him is what the Germans call Vielseitigkeit, many-sidedness. There was no department of science or art of which he was wholly ignorant, while in very many of both classes his knowledge was accurate and profound. Most men who have attained to distinguished excellence, have done so by confining themselves to a single department--frequently being led to the choice by a strong, original bias. Even when this is not the case, there is some _class_ of objects or pursuits, towards which a particular inclination is manifested; one loves facts, and devotes himself to observations and experiments; another loves principles and seeks everywhere to discover a _law_. One cherishes the Ideal, and neglects and despises the Real, while another reverses his judgment. We have become so accustomed to this one-sidedness that it occasions no wonder, and is regarded as the natural state of the mind. Thus we are struck with astonishment on finding a mind like Goethe's equally at home in the Ideal and the Real; equally interested in the laws of poetical criticism, and the theory of colors, equally attentive to a drawing of a new species of plants, and to the plan of a railroad or canal. In short, with the most delicate sense of the Beautiful, the most accurate conception of the mode of its representation, and the most intense longing for it (which alone would have sufficed to make him an Idealist) he united a fondness for observation, a love of the actual in nature, and a susceptibility to deep impressions from and interest in the objects of sense, which would have seemed to mark him out for a Realist. But is not this the true stale of the mind, instead of being; one which should excite astonishment? Is it not one-sidedness rather than many-sidedness that should be regarded as strange? Is it not as much an evidence of disease as the preponderance of one element or function in the physical constitution? _26th._--I have been thinking more about this many-sidedness of Goethe. It is by no means that _versatility_ which distinguishes so many second-rate geniuses, which inclines to the selection of many pursuits, but seldom permits the attainment of distinguished excellence in one. It was one and the same principle acting throughout, the striving after unity. It was this which made him seek to idealise the actual, and to actualise the Ideal. The former he attempted by searching in each outward object for the law which governed its existence and of which its outward development was but an imperfect symbol, the latter by giving form and consistency to the creations of his own fancy. Thus _the one_ was ever-present to him, and he sought it not in one path, among the objects of one science alone, but everywhere in nature and out. In all that was genuine nature he knew that it was to be found; that it was _not_ to be found in the acquired and the artificial was perhaps the reason of his aversion for them. This aversion he carried so far that even acquired virtue was distasteful to him. Whatever may be thought of such a distaste esthetically, we must think that, morally, it was carrying his principle rather to an extreme. I have just come across a plan of study which I formed some months ago and I could not but smile to see how nothing of it has been accomplished. I was to divide my attention between philosophy, language (not languages), and poetry. The former I was to study by topics; e.g., take the subject of perception, write out my own ideas upon it, if I had any, and then read those of other people. In studying language, or rather ethnography, I intended--1. To take the Hebrew roots, trace all the derivatives and related words first in that language, then in others. 2. To examine words relating to the spiritual, with a view to discover their original picture-meaning. 3. Search for a type or symbol in nature of every spiritual fact. Under the head of poetry I mean, to study the great masters of epic and dramatic poetry, especially Shakspeare and Milton, and from them make out a science of criticism. Alas! _April 5, 1838._--I have been thinking about myself--what a strange, wayward, incomprehensible being I am, and how completely misunderstood by almost everybody. Uniting excessive pride with excessive sensitiveness, the greatest ardor and passionateness of emotion with an irresolute will, a disposition to _distrust_, in so far only as the affection of others for me is concerned, with the extreme of confidence and credulity in everything else--an incapability of expressing, except occasionally as it were in gushes, any strong feeling--a tendency to melancholy, yet with a susceptibility of enjoyment almost transporting--subject to the most sudden, unaccountable and irresistible changes of mood--capable of being melted and moulded to anything by kindness, but as cold and unyielding as a rock against harshness and compulsion--such are some of the peculiarities which excellently prepare me for un-happiness. It is true that sometimes I am conscious of none of them--when for days together I pursue my regular routine of studies and employments, half mechanically--or when completely under the influence of the outward, I live for a time in what is around me. But this never lasts long. One of the most painful feelings I ever know is the sense of an unappeasable craving for sympathy and appreciation--the desire to be understood and loved, united with the conviction that this desire can never be gratified. I feel _alone_, different from all others and of course misunderstood by them. The only other feeling I have more miserable than this is the sense of being _worse_ than all others, and utterly destitute of anything excellent or beautiful. Oh! what mysteries are wrapped up in the mind and heart of man! What a development will be made when the light of another world shall be let in upon these impenetrable recesses! BOSTON, _Jan. 7, 1839._--I came here on the last day of the last year, and have since then been very much occupied in different ways. Yesterday, I heard President Hopkins all day, and in the evening, a lecture from Dr. Follen on Pantheism. The most abstract of all pantheistic systems he described to be that of the Brahmans, as taught in the Vedas and Vedashta, and also at _first_ by Schelling, viz., that the _absolute_ is the first principle of all things; and this absolute is not to be conceived of as possessing any attribute at all--not even that of existence. A system a little less abstract is that of the Eleatics, who believed in the absolute as existing. Then that of Giordano Bruno, who made _soul_ and _matter_ the formative principle and the principal recipient of forces--to be the ground of the universe. Then Spinoza, who postulated _thought_ as the representative of the spiritual, and _extension_ as that of the material principle; and these together are his _originaux_. From thence sprang the spiritual pantheists--such as Schelling, Fichte, and Hegel--and the material pantheists. _Wednesday, April 10th._--To-morrow I go to Andover. Have been indescribably hurried of late. Have finished Claudius--am reading Prometheus and Kant's Critique. _April 19th_.--Am reading Seneca's Medea and Southey's Life of Cowper. ANDOVER, _May 13th._--Dr. Woods was remarking to-day at dinner on the influence of _hope_ in sustaining under the severest sufferings. It recalled a thought which occurred to me the other day in reading Prometheus; that, regarded as an example of unyielding determination and unconquerable fortitude he is not equal to Milton's Satan. For he has before him not only the _hope_, but the _certainty_ of ultimate deliverance, whereas Satan bears himself up, by the mere force of his will, unsustained by hope, "which comes to all," but not to him. _15th_.--It has just occurred to me that the doctrine of the soul's mortality seems to have _no_ point of contact with humanity. It surely can not have been entertained as being agreeable to man's _wishes_. And what is there in the system of things, or in the nature of the mind, to suggest it? On the contrary, everything looks in an opposite direction. How is it _possible_ to help seeing that the soul is not here in its proper element, in its native air? How is it possible to escape the conviction that all its unsatisfied yearnings, its baffled aims, its restless, agonizing aspirings after a _something_, clearly perceived to exist, but to be here unattainable--that all these things point to _another_ life, the _only_ true life of the soul? There is such a manifest disproportion between all objects of earthly attainment and the capacities of the spirit, that, unless man is immortal, he is vastly more to be pitied than the meanest reptile that crawls upon the earth. So I thought as I was walking this morning and saw a frog swimming in a puddle of water. I could hardly help envying him when I considered that _his_ condition was suited to his nature, and that he has no wants which are not supplied. _June 17th._--I am reading Goethe's Conversations with Eckermann. One thing I remark is this--he does not, as most men do, make the degree of sympathy he finds in others the measure of his interest in them and attention to them. Goethe looked at all as specimens of human nature, and, therefore, all worthy of study. But, after all, this way of looking at others seems to be more suited to the _artist_ than to the man; and I can not conceive of any but a very passionless and immobile person who could do it.... Does all nature furnish one type of the soul? If so, it might be the ocean; the rough, swelling, fluctuating, unsounded ocean. Shall it ever _rest? Rest?_ What an infinite, mournful sweetness in the word! How perfectly sure I feel that my soul can never rest in _itself_, nor in anything of earth; if I find peace, it must be in the bosom of God. _July 2d._--The vulgar proverb, "It never rains but it pours," is fully illustrated in my case. Last week I would have given half the world for a new book; yesterday and today have overflooded me. Mr. Hubbard has sent me Prof. Park's "German Selections," Pliny, Heeren's Ancient Greece, two volumes of the Biblical Repository, and two of his own magazines; Mr. Judd has sent me two volumes of Carlyle, and Mr. Ripley four of Lessing--all of these must be despatched _à la hâte. July 5th._--Last evening we spent upon the Common witnessing a beautiful exhibition of fireworks. This morning I have been to Union wharf to see the departure of some missionaries. For a few minutes, time seemed a speck and eternity near--but how transient with me are such impressions! I am indulging myself too much of late in a sort of sentimental reverie. Life and its changes, the depths of the soul, the fluctuations of passion and feeling--these are the subjects which attract my thoughts perpetually.... We spent last evening at Richard H. Dana's. _He_ does not separate his intellectual and sentimental tastes from his moral convictions as I do--I mean that neither in books nor men does he find pleasure unless they are such as his conscience approves. _Tuesday, 9th._--Have visited the Allston gallery and seen Rosalie for the last time before going home. I could not have believed that I should feel such a pang at parting from a picture. I did not succeed in getting to the gallery before others--but, no matter. I forgot the presence of everybody else and sat for an hour before Rosalie without moving. I took leave of the other pictures mentally, for I could not look. Farewell, sweet Beatrice, lovely Inez, beautiful Ursulina--dear, dear Rosalie, farewell! _Monday, 15th._--Yesterday I was happy; to-day I am not exactly unhappy, but morbid and anxious. I feel continually the pressure of obligation to write something, in order to contribute toward the support of the family--and yet, I can not write. Mother wants me to write children's books; Lizzy wants me to write a book of Natural Philosophy for schools. I wish I had a "vocation." _Sabbath._--Stayed at home on account of the rain and read one of Tholuck's sermons to Julia. Wrote in my other journal some account of my thoughts and feelings. Burned up part of an old diary. _Thursday, July 25th._--"My soul is dark." What with the sin I find within me, and the darkness and error, disputes and perplexities around me, I well-nigh despair. Whether I seek to _discover_ truth or to _live_ it, I am _equally_ unsuccessful. "I grope at noon-day as in the night." But there is a God, holy and changeless. He _is_. From eternity to eternity, He IS. On this Rock will I rest----. I stopped a moment and my eye was caught by the waving trees. What do they say to me? How silent they are! and yet how _eloquent!_ And here I sit--to myself the centre of the world, wondering and speculating about this same little self. Do the trees so? No; they wave and bend and bloom for _others._ I am ready to join with Herbert in wishing that I were a tree; then "At least some bird would trust Her household to me, and I should be just." _Evening._--I read to-day another of Lessing's tragedies--"Miss Sarah Sampson,"--which I do not like nearly as well as Mina von Barnhelm. We were engaged to take tea with "the Mayor," and went with many tremblings and hesitations on account of the rain. Very few there, and a most uncommonly stupid time. _Saturday Evening._--I have been alone for a little while, and, as usual, this time brings with it thronging remembrances of absent friends. Their forms flit before me; their spirits are around me; I feel their presence--almost; dear friends, almost I clasp you in my arms. My soul yearns for love and sympathy. I do bless and praise my God for all His goodness to me in this respect, for my _many_ tender and faithful and devoted friends. Part of the day I spent in arranging shells in my cabinet of drawers. This afternoon I went to Mr. Prentiss' library and obtained Schlegel's Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature. _Monday Morning._--Have been trying to rouse myself to write Lessing, but can not. It looks so little. When it is all done, what will it amount to? Why, I shall get a few dollars for mother, which will go to buy bread and butter--and that's the end of it. _Evening._--S. W. and M. W. made a call on us and the former played and sang. Then we sat up till after eleven naming each of our acquaintances after some flower. _Aug. 8th_,--Oh, what a happy half hour I had last evening, looking at the sky after sunset! We went down to the water--it was smooth as a crystal lake. The horizon was all in a glow--the softest, mellowest, warmest glow, and above dark, heavy clouds of every variety of form--the clouds and the glow alike reflected in the answering heaven below--I was almost _too_ happy; but--it _faded_. _Evening_.--I had something to wake me up this afternoon, viz., the arrival of the July No. of the New York Review, containing "Claudius." This led to some conversation about writing, its pecuniary profitableness, subjects for it, etc. Julia wished I would take some other topics besides German authors, but when I told her the alternative would be metaphysics, she laughed and retracted the wish. We then laughed over several schemes such as these--that one of us should write a review and another make the book for it afterward; that I should review some book which did not exist and give professed extracts from it, etc. Soon after Mrs. D. came in and began to talk about "Undine," which she and her husband have just been reading--the new translation. I was amused at their opinion of it. The most absurd, ridiculous story, she said--with no _rationality_, nothing that one can _understand_ in it--and so on, showing that she had not the slightest idea of a work of fancy merely. I have been wishing, as I often do, for some records of my past life. What could I not give for a daily journal as minute as this, beginning from my childhood! My past life is mostly a blank to me. _Aug. 15th_.--I am beginning to see dimly some new truths--such I believe them to be--in theology. I am inclined to think, but do not feel sure, that Redemption, instead of being merely a necessary _remedy_ for a great evil, is in itself the highest positive good, and that the state into which it brings man, of union with God, is a far nobler and better condition than that of primitive innocence, and at the same time a condition attainable in no other way than through redemption, and, of course, through sin. In this case the plan of redemption, instead of being an _afterthought_ of the divine mind (speaking anthropomorphically), is that in reference to which the whole world-system was contrived. These thoughts were partly suggested by reading Schleiermacher, who, if I understand him, has some such notions. If there is any truth in them, do they not throw light on the much-vexed question why God permitted the introduction of moral evil? Another point which I feel confident is misunderstood by our theologians is the nature of the redemptive act. The work of Christ in redemption is generally explained to be His incarnation, sufferings, and death, by which He made _atonement_ to justice for the sins of the world. This, it is true, is a part of what He did; it is that part which He performed in reference to God and His law, but it is not what Coleridge calls the "spiritual and transcendent act" by which He made us one with Himself, and thus secured the possibility of our restoration to spiritual life. _Aug. 17th_.--Have devoted almost the whole day to Coleridge's Literary Remains, which Mr. Davenport brought me. My admiration, even veneration, for his almost unequalled power is greater than ever, but I can not help thinking that his studies--some of them--exerted an unfavorable influence upon him, especially, perhaps, Spinoza. _Aug. 22d_--Mr. Park sent me the Life of Mackintosh by his son. I rejoiced much too soon over it, for it proves very uninteresting. This is partly to be accounted for from my want of interest in politics, etc. In great measure, however, it is the fault of the biographer, who has shown us the man at a distance, on stilts, or at best only in his most outward circumstances, never letting us know, as Carlyle says, what sort of stockings he wore, and what he ate for dinner. I don't think Sir James himself has much _inwardness_ to him, but certainly his son has shown us only the outermost shell. Have read the Iliad and Schleiermacher to-day. _Aug. 24th_.--A queer circumstance happened this evening. Col. Kinsman and Mr. C. S. Davies called. I was considering what unusual occurrence could have brought Mr. D. here, when he increased my wonder still more by disclosing his errand. He had received, he said, a letter from Prof. Woods, requesting that I, or a "lady whose taste was as correct in dress as in literature," would decide upon the fashion of a gown to be worn by him at his inauguration as President of Bowdoin College, and forthwith procure such a gown to be made. _Aug. 25th_.--I have been reading the second volume of Mackintosh, which is much better than the first, and gives a higher opinion of him. He is certainly well described by Coleridge as the "king of men of talent." It is curious, by the way, to compare what M. says of C.: "It is impossible to give a stronger example of a man, whose talents are beneath his understanding, and who trusts to his ingenuity to atone for his ignorance.... Shakespeare and Burke are, if I may venture on the expression, above talent; but Coleridge is not!" Ah, well--_de gustibus_, etc. I have been as busy as a bee all day; wrote notes, prepared for leaving home, read Schleiermacher, and Philip von Artevelde, which delighted me; walked after tea with Lizzy, then examined my papers to see what is to be burned. I wish I knew what I was made for--I mean, in _particular_--what I _can_ do, and what I _ought_ to do. I can not bear to live a life of literary self-indulgence, which is no better than another self-indulgence. I _do want_ to be of some use in the world, but I am infinitely perplexed as to the _how_ and the _what_. _Aug. 26th_.--Hurried through the last 200 pages of Mackintosh today. On the whole, there is much to _like_ as well as to admire in him. One thing puzzles me in his case as in others: How men who give no signs through a long life of anything more than the most cold and distant _respect_ for religion--the most unfrequent and uninterested remembrance, if any at all--of the Saviour, all at once become so devout--I mean it not disrespectfully--on their death-beds. What strange doubts this and other like mysteries suggest! After tea I carried a bouquet to Mrs. French. Saw all the way a sky so magnificent that words can do no justice to it--splendors piled on splendors, till my soul was fairly sick with admiration. Mrs. French asked me if life ever looked sad and wearisome to me. _Ever!_ BOSTON, _Saturday morning, Sept. 8th_--The rain keeps me home from church, but I still have the more time for reading and reflection. At every change in my outward situation I find myself forming new purposes and plans for the future.... I _will_ trust that, by the grace of God, the ensuing winter shall be a period of more vigorous effort and more persevering self-culture than any previous season of my life. Above all, let me remember that intellectual culture is worthless when dissociated from moral progress; that true spiritual growth embraces both; and the latter as the basis and mould of the former. Let me remember, too, that in the universe _everything_ may be had for a price, but nothing can be had without price. The price of successful self-culture is unremitted toil, labor, and self-denial; am I willing to pay it? I feel that I need light and strength and life; may I find them in _Christ!_ As to studies, I mean to study the Bible _much;_ also dogmatic theology--which of late has an increasing interest for me--and ecclesiastical history. To the Spirit of all Truth I surrender my mind. _Monday._--I have fallen in with Swedenborg's writings. Wonder whether the destiny which seems to bring to us just what we chance to be interested in is a real ordinance of fate or only a seeming one--because interest in a subject makes us observant. Am reading Greek with Julia. We began the sixth book of the Iliad. _Tuesday_.--Fifty lines in Homer; Companion proofs; Schleiermacher; the prologue and first scene of Terence's comedy of Andria; two Nos. of N. Nickleby, and walked round the Common with Julia twice. _Wednesday_.--Studies the same as yesterday, except that I read less of Schleiermacher and spent an hour or so upon Lessing. Read "Much Ado about Nothing," and disliked Beatrice less than ever before. But I am not satisfied with Claudio; he is not _half_ sorry and remorseful enough for the supposed death of Hero--and then to think of his being willing to marry another right off! Oh, it is abominable! Walked over _four miles_ in the morning, and out again before tea. _Tuesday, Sept. 17th_--Well. The family are off--Mr. and Mrs. Willis, and Julia too--and the Recorder and Companion [10] are left for a fortnight in my charge. I have been much interested in what I have read to-day in Schleiermacher. It is his evolution of the idea of God--if I may so say--from holy, human consciousness. It recalls some thoughts which I had on this subject once before, and which I began to write about. My notion was this--that an absolutely perfect idea of man implies, contains an idea of God. I have a great mind to try and make something out of it, only I am so hurried just now. They keep sending me papers to make selections for the Recorder, and I have just been writing an article for the Companion. I spend half my time looking over newspapers. Double, double toil and trouble; most wearisome and profitless. Would not edit a paper for the world. No truth can be said to be seen _as it is_ until it is seen in its relation to all other truths. In this relation only is it true.... No _error_ is understood till we have seen all the truth there is in it, and, therefore, as Coleridge says, you must "understand an author's ignorance, or conclude yourself ignorant of his understanding." _Monday, 30th._--I have been very happy this afternoon--writing all the time with a genial flow of thought and without effort. How I love to feel that for this I am indebted to God. He is my intellectual source, the Father of my spirit, as well as the author of everything morally good in me. _Friday, Oct. 4th._--I have been too busy reading and writing for the last few days to find time for my journal. I go on with Schleiermacher and have resumed Lessing. I am reading the Memoir of Mrs. S. L. Smith and Tappan's "Review of Edwards on the Will." Fifty lines in the Iliad with Julia. Finished the Andria and to-day began the Adelphi. I am amused at comparing the comedy of that day with the modern French school. Davus in Andria is but a rough sketch of Moliere's valet, and the whole plot is so bungling in comparison. Have had very few attacks of melancholy lately; because, I suppose, my health is good and I am constantly employed. _Evening_.--I never came nearer losing my wits with delight than this afternoon. Went to call on Mr. and Mrs. Ripley, and saw his fine library of German books. The sight was enough to excite me to the utmost, but to be told that they were all at my service put me into such an ecstasy that I could hardly behave with decency. I selected several immediately and promised myself fuller examination of the library very soon.... Mr. R. proposed to me to translate something for his series. Shall I? [11] _Sabbath Evening, Oct. 13th_.--I have just been writing to my dear brother G., for whom as well as for my other brothers, I feel the greatest solicitude. I have separate sources of anxiety for each of them, and hope that the intenseness of this anxiety will make me more earnest in commending them to God. _Oct. 14th_.--Gave up the time usually devoted to Lessing to writing two articles for the Mother's Magazine. Read Homer, and the 149th and 150th Psalms and the first chapter of Genesis in Hebrew. Read or rather _studied_ Schleiermacher. Corrected proof. Read several articles in the Biblical Repository--one by Prof. Park--aloud to Julia. On the whole, I have been pretty industrious. Oh, how many reasons I have for gratitude! Health, friends, books--nothing is wanting but the heart to enjoy God in all. Wrote to mother. _Oct. 17th._--This morning dear Lizzy came; of course the day has been given up to _miscellanies_. _Oct. 21st._--Mr. Albro [12] called and stayed till dinner-time. After dinner read Greek with Julia and then wrote a notice of Gesenius' Hebrew Grammar, and then set off for Lucy's, where the others were already gone. Mr. Albro has concluded to read Schleiermacher with me--that is, to keep along at the same rate, that we may talk about it. Letter from mother, and notes from Mr. Condit and Mr. Hamlin, with a copy of "Payson's Thoughts" in Armenian. Have just finished reading Mr. Ripley's Reply to Mr. Norton. Mr. Willis is forming a Bible-class for me to teach on the Sabbath--am very glad. _Nov. 14th._--Finished Lessing yesterday, and hope for a little rest from hurry. Shall resume Schleiermacher and take up Fichte on the Destination of Man. _Nov. 22nd._--I am afraid that I may have to be resigned to a very great misfortune; namely, to the partial loss of eyesight--for a time at least; so yesterday I resolved to give them a holiday, though sorely against my will, by not opening a book the whole day. Whether I should have succeeded in observing such a desperate resolution without the aid of circumstances is quite problematical, but Mr. Gray opportunely came with a request that I should take a ride with him to Cambridge, and visit the libraries there. This occupied four or five hours, and a lyceum lecture provided for the evening. I have always congratulated myself on being so little dependent on _others_ for entertainment--but never considered how entirely I am dependent on _books_. If I should be deprived of the use of my eyes, I should be a most miserable creature. _Thanksgiving, Nov. 29th._--A very pleasant and delightful day--our hearts full of gladness and, I hope, of gratitude. I hope dear mother and all at home are as happy. _Dec. 25th._--How plain that all the creations of the ancient mythology are but representations of something in the heart of man!... What is the end of man? Infinite contradictions--all opposites blended into one--a mass of confused, broken parts, of disjointed fragments--such _is_ he. The circumstances that surround him--the events that happen unto him, are no less strange. What shall be the end? Oh then, abyss of futurity, declare it! unfold thy dark depths--let a voice come up from thy cloudy infinite--let a ray penetrate thy unfathomable profound. If we could but _rest_ till the question is decided! if we could but float softly on the current of time till we reach the haven! But no, we must _act_. We must _do_ something. _I_ must do something _now_--WHAT? _Evening._ But as the morning. In the afternoon I was talking with L. W. [13] with as much eagerness and vivacity as if I had never known a cloud. This evening I was going to a _dance_ at the _Insane_ Hospital. For me truly it has been a day of opposites--all the elements of life have met and mingled in it. _Wednesday, 26th._--The end of man, says Carlyle, is an action, not a thought. This is partly true, though all noble action has its root in thought. Thought, indeed, in its true and highest sense, _is_ action. It is never lost. If uttered, it may breathe inspiration into a thousand minds and become the impulse to ten thousand good actions. If unuttered, and terminating in no single outward act, it yet has an emanative influence; it impregnates the man and makes itself felt in his life. A man can not do so noble and godlike a thing as to think, without being the better for it. Indeed, the distinction between thought and action is not always an accurate one. Many thoughts deserve the name of activities much better than certain movements of the muscles and changes of the outward organization which we denominate actions. In this sense, it is better of the two to think without acting than to act without thinking. Mrs. Hopkins was the author of the following works, intended mostly for the young. Some of them have had a wide circulation. They are written in an attractive style and breathe the purest spirit of Christian love and wisdom: 1. The Pastor's Daughter. 2. Lessons on the Book of Proverbs. 3. The Young Christian Encouraged. 4. Henry Langdon; or, What Was I Made For? 5. The Guiding Star; or, The Bible God's Message; a Sequel to Henry Langdon. 6. The Silent Comforter; a Companion for the Sick-room. A Compilation. * * * * * E. The following is the rhapsody referred to by Mr. Butler: (The words to be used were _Mosquito, Brigadier, Moon, Cathedral, Locomotive, Piano, Mountain, Candle, Lemon, Worsted, Charity_, and _Success_). A wounded soldier on the ground in helpless languor lay, Unheeding in his weariness the tumult of the day; In vain a pert _mosquito_ buzzed madly in his ear, His thoughts were far away from earth--its sounds he could not hear; Nor noted he the kindly glance with which his _brigadier_ Looked down upon his manly form when chance had brought him near. It was a glorious autumn night on which the _moon_ looked down, Calmly she looked and her fair face had neither grief nor frown. Just as she gazed in other lands on some _cathedral_ dim, Whose aisles resounded to the strains of dirges or of hymn. But now with _locomotive_ speed the soldier's thoughts took wing: Back to his home they bore him, and he heard his sisters sing-- Heard the softest-toned _piano_ touched by hands he used to love. Was it home or was it heaven? Was that music from above? Oh, for one place or the other! In his mountain air to die, Once more upon his mother's breast, as in infancy, to lie! The scene has changed. Where is he now? Not on the cold, damp ground. Whence came this couch? and who are they who smiling stand around? What friendly hands have borne him to his own free _mountain_ air? And father, mother, sisters--every one of them is there. Now gentle ministries of love may soothe him in his pain; Water to cool his fevered lips he need not ask in vain. His mother shades the _candle_ when she steals across the room; A face like hers would radiant make a very desert's gloom. The fragrant _lemon_ cools his thirst, pressed by his sister's hand-- Not one can do enough for him, the hero of their band. Oh, happy, convalescing days! How full of pleasant pain! How pleasant to take up the old, the dear old life again! Now, sitting on the wooden bench before the cottage door, How many times they make him tell the same old story o'er! How he fought and how he fell; how he longed again to fight; And how he would die fighting yet for the triumph of the right. His good old mother sits all day so fondly by his side; How can she give him up again--her first-born son, her pride? His sisters with their _worsted_ his stockings fashion too, In patriotic colors--the red, the white, the blue. If he should never wear them, a _charity_ 'twill be To give them to some soldier-lad as brave and good as he. They're dreadful homely stockings; one can not well say less, But whosoever wears 'em--why, may he have _success_! Here are samples of the charades referred to by Miss Morse: ON RETURNING A LOST GLOVE TO A FRIEND. MARCH, 1873. A hand I am not, yet have fingers five; Alive I am not, yet was once alive. Am found in every house and by the dozen, And am of flesh and blood a sort of cousin. Now cut my head off. See what I become! No longer am I lifeless, dead, and dumb. I am the very sweetest thing on earth; Royal in power and of royal birth. I in the palace reign and in the cot-- There is no place where man is and I'm not. I am too costly to be bought and sold; I can not be enticed by piles of gold. And yet I am so lowly that a smile Can woo and win me--and so free from guile, That I look forth from many a gentle face In tenderness and truthfulness and grace. Say, do you know me? Have you known my reign? My joy, my rapture, and my silent pain? Beneath your pillow have I roses placed-- Your heart's glad festival have I not graced? Ah me! To mother, lover, husband, wife I am the oil and I the wine of life. With you, my dear, I have been hand and _glove_. Shall I return the first and keep the _Love_? CHARADE. My _first_ was born to rule; before him stand The potentates and nobles of the land. He loves his grandeur--hopes to be more grand. My second you will find in every lass-- Both in the highest and the lowest class, And even in a simple blade of grass. But add it to my _first_, and straightway he Becomes my _whole_--loses identity; Parts with his manhood and becomes a _She_. (Prince, _ss.,_ Princess). * * * * * F. Here is another extract from the same letter: J'ai peine à me mettre à l'oraison, et quelquefois quand j'y suis il me tarde d'en sortir. Je n'y fais, ce me semble, presque rien. Je me trouve même dans une certaine tiédeur et une tâcheté pour toutes sortes de biens. Je n'ai aucune peine considérable ni dans mon intérieur, ni dans mon extérieur, ainsi je ne saurois dire que je passe par aucune épreuve. Il me semble que c'est un songe, ou que je me moque quand je cherche mon état tant je me trouve hors de tout état spirituel, dans la voie commune des gens tiedes qui vivent à leur aise. Cependant cette languor universelle jointe à l'abandon qui me fait acceptes tout et qui m'empêche de rien rechercher, ne laisse pas de m'abattre, et je sens que j'ai quelquefois besoin de donner à mes sens quelque amusement pour m'égayer. Aussi le fais--je simplement, mais bien mieux quand je suis seul que quand je suis avec mes meilleurs amis. Quand je suis seul, je joue quelquefois comme un petit enfant, etc., etc. The letter may be found in Vol. V., pp. 411-12, of Madame Guyon's LETTRES CHRÉTIENNES ET SPIRITUELLES _sur divers Sujets qui regardent La Vie Intérieure, ou L'esprit du vrai Christianisme_--enrichie de la Correspondance secrette de MR. DE FENELON avec l'Auteur. London, 1768. The whole work is extremely interesting. * * * * * G. [From The Evangelist of May 27, 1875.] IN MEMORIAM. Died in Paris, France, May 8, 1875, VIRGINIA S. OSBORN, only daughter of William H. and Virginia S. Osborn, of this city, and granddaughter of the late Jonathan Sturges. The sudden death of this gifted young girl has overwhelmed with grief a large social and domestic circle. Last February, in perfect health and full of the brightest anticipations, she set out, in company with her parents and a young friend, on a brief foreign tour. After passing several weeks at Rome and visiting other famous cities of Italy, she had just reached Paris on the way home when a violent fever seized upon her brain, and, in defiance of the tenderest parental care and the best medical skill, hurried her into the unseen world. And yet it is hardly possible to realise that this brilliant young life has forever vanished away from earth, for she seemed formed alike by nature and Providence for length of days. Already her character gave the fairest promise of a perfect woman. It possessed a strength and maturity beyond her years. Although not yet twenty-one, her varied mental culture and her knowledge of almost every branch of English literature, history, poetry, fiction, even physical science, were quite remarkable; nor was she ignorant of some of the best French and German, not to speak of Latin, authors. We have never known one of her age whose intellectual tastes were of a higher order. She seemed to feel equally at home in reading Shakespeare and Goethe; Prescott, Motley, and Froude; Mrs. Austin, Scott, and Dickens; Taine, Huxley, and Tyndall; or the popular biographies and fictions of the day. And yet her studious habits and devotion to books did not render her any the less the unaffected, attractive, and whole-hearted girl. Her friends, both old and young, greatly admired her, but they loved her still more. As was natural in one of so much character, she was very decided in her ways; but she was also perfectly frank, truthful, and conscientious--resembling in this respect, as she did in some other excellent traits, her honored grandfather, Mr. Sturges. Several years before her death she was enrolled among the disciples of Jesus. How vividly the writer recalls her earnest look and tones of voice when she declared to him her desire publicly to confess her Saviour and to remember Him at His table! When from beneath the deep sea the news that she was dangerously ill and then soon after that she was dead stole upon her friends here like a thief in the night, almost stunning them with grief; their first feeling was one of tender sympathy for the desolate, sorely-smitten parents, and of prayer that God would be pleased to comfort and uphold them in their affliction. From many hearts, we are sure, that prayer has been offered up oftentimes since. If it were not for the relief which comes of faith and prayer, what a cloud of hopeless gloom would enshroud such an event! Blessed be God for this exceeding great and precious relief. The dark cloud is not indeed dispersed even by faith and prayer, but with what a silver lining they are able to invest it! If we really believed that such tragical events are solely the effects of chance or mere natural law--if we did not believe that the hand of infinite wisdom and love is also in them, surely the grass would turn black beneath our feet. _The Lord gave; the Lord hath taken away; and blessed be the name of the Lord._ G. L. P. * * * * * H. _Extracts front Dr. Vincent's Memorial Discourse._ The men and women who know how to comfort human sorrow, and to teach their fellows to turn it to its highest uses, are among God's best gifts to the world. The office and the name of Comforter have the highest and purest associations. It is the Holy Spirit of God who calls Himself by that name, and to be a true comforter is to be indeed a co-worker with God. But even as the _word_ "comfort" goes deeper than those pitying commonplaces which even nature teaches us to utter to those who are in any trouble, so the _office_ of a true comforter requires other qualifications than mere natural tenderness of heart, or even the experience of suffering. One must know how to _interpret_ as well as how to _feel_ sorrow; must know its _lessons_ as well as its _smart_. Hence it is that God makes His comforters by processes of His own; by hard masters ofttimes, and by lessons not to be found in books. It is in illustration of this truth that I bring to you to-day some memorials of the experience, character, and life-work of one widely known, deeply beloved, and greatly honored by God as an instrument of Christian instruction and of Christian comfort. It would, indeed, be possible to strike some other keynote. A character presenting so many points of interest might be studied from more than one of those points with both pleasure and profit; but, on the whole, it seems to me that the thought of a _Christian comforter_ best concentrates the lessons of her life, and best represents her mission to society; so that we might aptly choose for our motto those beautiful words of the Apostle: "Blessed be God, even the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies, and the God of all comfort, who comforteth us in all our tribulation, that we may be able to comfort them which are in any trouble by the comfort wherewith we ourselves are comforted of God." In endeavoring to depict a life which was largely shaped by sorrow, I am not going to open the record of a sorrowful life, but rather of a joyful one; not of a starved and meager life, but of a very rich one, both in itself and in its fruits; yet it may be profitable for us to see through what kind of discipline that life became so rich, and to strike some of the springs where arose the waters which refreshed so many of the children of pain and care. The daughter of Edward Payson might justly have appropriated her father's words: "Thanks to the fervent, effectual prayers of my righteous parents, and the tender mercies of my God upon me, I have reason to hope that the pious wishes breathed over my infant head are in some measure fulfilled." She might have said with Cowper: "My boast is not that I deduce my birth From loins enthroned and rulers of the earth; But higher far my proud pretensions rise; The child of parents passed into the skies." The life and work of that devoted minister of Jesus Christ have passed into the religious history of New England--not to say of our whole country--and no student of that history is unfamiliar with that character so tried, yet so exalted by suffering; with that ministry so faithful, so unselfish, marked by such yearning for souls, and with such persistence, tact, and success in leading them to Christ; with that intellect so richly endowed and so well trained; that devotional spirit so rapt, that conscience so acutely sensitive; with that life so fruitful and that death so triumphant.... * * * * * In the summer of 1869 she found a lovely and peaceful retreat among the hills of Vermont. There arose that tasteful home with which, perhaps more than any other spot, memory loves to associate her. There, for ten happy summers, she enjoyed the communion with Nature's "visible forms," and heard her "various language," and felt her healing touch on the wearied brain and overstrung nerves; there, as I think she would have wished, she took leave of earth amid the pomp and flush of the late summer, and gladly ascended to the eternal sunshine of heaven; and there, in the shadow of the giant hills which "brought peace" to her, and the changing moods of which she so loved to study, her ashes await the morning of the Resurrection. In reviewing this life of nearly sixty years, we find its keynote, as was said at the outset, in the thought of the Christian comforter. We see in her one whom God commissioned, so far as we can judge, to bring light and comfort to multitudes, and whom He prepared for that blessed work by peculiar and severe discipline. There is nothing in which ordinary minds are more commonly mistaken than in their estimate of _suffering._ They seem often unable to conceive it except in its association with appreciable tragedies, in those grosser forms in which it waits upon visible calamity. Such do not know that the heart is often the scene of tragedies which can not be written, and that there are sufferings more subtle and more acute than any which torture the nerve or wring the brow. Take a character like this with which we are dealing; combine the nature to which love was a necessity of being with those high and pure ideals of character which culled cautiously the objects of affection; add the intense sensitiveness without the self- esteem which so often serves as a rock of refuge to the most sensitive; add the sharply-cut individuality which could only see and do and express in its own way, and which, therefore, so frequently exposed its subject to the misunderstanding of strangers or of unappreciative souls; crown all with the stern conscientiousness which would not compromise the truth even for love's sake, and the exquisite selfreverence, if you will allow the expression, which held the region of religious emotion as holy ground, and which regarded the attempt to open or to penetrate the inner shrines of Christian feeling as something akin to sacrilege--and blend all these in a delicate, highly-strung, nervous organization, and you have the elements of a fearful capacity for suffering. Besides this _capacity_ for suffering, Mrs. Prentiss had a very clear cognition of the sacred _office_ of suffering, and of its relation to perfection of character. There were two ideas which pervaded her whole theory of religious experience. The one was that whenever God has special work for His children to do, He always fits them for it by suffering. She had the most intense conviction of any one I ever knew of the necessity of suffering to perfection of character or of work. Doubtless there have been others who have learned as well as she its value as a purifying and exalting power, but very few, I think, who have so early and so uncompromisingly taken that truth into their theory of Christian education. She quoted with approval the words of Madame Guyon, that "God rarely, if ever, makes the educating process a painless one when He wants remarkable results." Such must drink of Christ's cup and be baptized with His baptism. Along with this went another and a complementary thought, viz., that as God prepares His workmen for great work by suffering, so there is another class of His children whom He does not find competent to this preparation; who escape much of the conflict and suffering, but never attain the highest enjoyments or fight the decisive battles of time.... In a volume of Fenelon's Christian Counsel, which was one of her favorite closet companions, this passage is scored: God "attacks all the subtle resources of self-love within, especially in those souls who have generously and without reserve delivered themselves up to the operations of His grace. The more He would purify them, the more He exercises them interiorly." And she has added a special note at the foot of the page: "He never forces Himself on ungenerous souls for this work." Along with this went the thought that God's discipline was intended to make not only _models_, but _ministers_; that one who had passed through the furnace with Christ was to emerge from the fiery baptism not merely to be _gazed_ at, but to go down to his brethren telling with power the story of the "form of the Fourth." This is the sentiment of some lines addressed by her to an afflicted friend: "O that this heart with grief so well acquainted Might be a fountain, rich and sweet and full, For all the weary that have fallen and fainted In life's parched desert--thirsty, sorrowful. "Thou Man of Sorrows, teach my lips that often Have told the sacred story of my woe, To speak of Thee till stony griefs I soften-- Till those that know Thee not, learn Thee to know." At a comparatively early period of her Christian experience, the theme of her prayer was: "I beseech Thee, show me Thy glory"; for in the answer to that prayer there seemed, as she said, to be summed up everything that she needed or could desire. In a paper in which she recorded some of her aspirations, she wrote: "Let my life be an all-day looking to Jesus. Let my love to God be so deep, earnest, and all-pervading, that I can not have even the passing emotion of rebellion to suppress. There is such a thing as an implicit faith in, and consequent submission to, Christ. Let me never rest till they are fully mine." I do not know the precise date, but I think it could not have been very late when she received a mighty answer to the prayer to behold God's glory. New views of Christian privilege and of the relation of Christ to believing souls came with prayerful searching of the Scriptures. She entered, to use her own words, upon "a life of incessant peace and serenity--notwithstanding it became, by degrees, one of perpetual self- denial and effort." The consciousness of God never left her. The whole world seemed holy ground. Prayer became a perpetual delight. The pride and turbulence of nature grew quiet under these gentle influences, and anything from God's hand seemed just right and quite good. The secret of her peace and of her usefulness lay very largely in the prayerfulness of her life. From her early years, prayer was her delight. In describing the comforts of her chamber in the school at Richmond, she noted as its crowning charm the daily presence of the Eternal King, who condescended to make it His dwelling-place. With the deeper experiences of which we have spoken came a fresh delight in prayer. "It was very delightful," she says, "to pray all the time; all day long; not only for myself, but for the whole world--particularly for all those who loved Christ." Her views of prayer were Scriptural, and, therefore, discriminating. She fully accepted Paul's statement that "we know not what we should pray for as we ought" without the help of the Spirit; and, therefore, she always spoke of prayer as something to be _learned_. If she believed that a Christian "learns to pray when first he lives," she believed also that the prayer of the infant Christian life was like the feeble breath of infancy. She understood by prayer something far more and higher than the mere preferring of petitions. It was _communion_; God's Spirit responding harmoniously to our own. With Coleridge she held, that the act of praying with the total concentration of the faculties is the very highest energy of which the human heart is capable. Hence she was accustomed to speak of _learning_ the mysterious art of prayer by an apprenticeship at the throne of grace. She somewhere wrote: "I think many of the difficulties attending the subject of prayer would disappear if it could be regarded in early life as an art that must be acquired through daily, persistent habits with which nothing shall be allowed to interfere." She saw that prayer is not to be made dependent on the various emotive states in which one comes to God. "The question," she said, "is not one of mere delight." The Roman Catholic poet accurately expressed her thought on this point: "Prayer was not meant for luxury, Nor selfish pastime sweet; It is the prostrate creature's place At the Creator's feet." She illustrated in her own quaint way the truth that moods have nothing to do with the duty of prayer. When one of your little brothers asks you to lend him your knife, do you inquire first what is the state of his mind? If you do, what reply can he make but this: "The state of my mind is, I want your knife." With her natural temperament and inherited tendencies she might, perhaps, under other influences have been drawn too far over to the emotional, or at least to the contemplative side of religious life. But she saw and avoided the danger. She discerned the harmony and just balance between the contemplative and the active Christian life, and felt that they ought to co-exist in every genuine experience. She attached as little meaning to a life of mere raptures as to one of bare, loveless duty. "Christian life," she wrote, "is not all contemplation and prayer; it is not all muscle and sinew. It is a perfect, practicable union of the two. I believe in your joyful emotions if they result in self-denying, patient work for Christ--I believe in your work if it is winged by faith and prayer." She had scored this passage in her copy of Fenelon: "To be constantly in a state of enjoyment that takes away the feeling of the cross, and to live in a fervor of devotion that continually keeps Paradise open--this is not dying upon the cross and becoming nothing." Such experience and such views were behind the active side of her life, as represented by her personal ministries and by the work of her pen. The one book in which she endeavored to embody _formally_ her views of Christian doctrine and experience did not, as might have been expected, find the same reception or the same response which were accorded to other productions. It was a book which appealed to a smaller and higher class of readers. But, when she wrought these same truths into pictures of living men and women--when she illustrated them at the points where they touched the drudgery and commonplace of thousands of lives--when she opened outlooks for hundreds of discouraged souls upon the roads where hundreds more were bearing the very same burdens, and yet stepping heavenward under their pressure--when she, who had walked in the fire herself, went to her sisters in the same old furnace and told them of her vision of the form of the Fourth--when she went down to the many who were sadly working out the mistakes of ill-judged alliances, and lifted the veil from sorrows which separate their subject from human sympathy because they must be borne in silence--when she told such how heaven might come even into their life--when she, with her hands yet bleeding from the grasp of her own cross, came to other sufferers, not to mock them by the show of an unattainable beauty and an impossible peace, but to _offer_ them _divine_ peace and the beauty of the Lord in the name of her Saviour--then she spoke with a power which multitudes felt and confessed. I am sure that hers is, in an eminent degree, the blessing of them that were ready to perish. Weary, overtaxed mothers; misunderstood and unappreciated wives, servants, pale seamstresses, delicate women forced to live in an atmosphere of drunkenness and coarse brutality, widows and orphans in the bitterness of their bereavement, mothers with their tears dropping over empty cradles--to thousands of such she was a messenger from heaven. Of all her seventeen or eighteen published volumes, "Stepping Heavenward" is the one which best represents her and her life-work--not that she produced nothing else of value, nor that many of her other books were not widely read, greatly enjoyed, and truly useful; but "Stepping Heavenward" seemed to meet so many real, deep, inarticulate cravings in such a multitude of hearts, that the response to it was instant and general.... She wrote for readers of all ages. Not the least fruitful work of her pen was bestowed upon the little ones; and in the number of copies circulated, the Susy Books stand next to Stepping Heavenward. Through those little half allegories she initiated the children into the rudiments of self-control, discipline and consecration, and taught eyes and hands and tongue and feet the noble uses of the kingdom of God. Even from these children's stories the thought of the discipline of suffering was not absent, and _Mr. Pain_, as many mothers will remember, figures among Little Susy's Six Teachers. With the same pure and wholesome lessons, and with the same easy vivacity she appealed to youth through "The Flower of the Family," "The Percys," and "Nidworth," and it would be hard to say by readers of what age was monopolised the interest in "Aunt Jane's Hero," "Fred and Maria and Me," and those two little gems--"The Story Lizzie Told," and "Gentleman Jim." While all her writings were _religious_ in the best sense, they were in nothing more so than in their _cheerfulness_. They were not only happy and hopeful in their general tone, but sparkled with her delicate and sprightly humor. The children of her books were not religious puppets, moving in time to the measured wisdom of their elders, but real children of flesh and blood, acting and talking out their impish conceits, and in nowise conspicuous by their precocious goodness. I think that those who knew her best in her literary relations, will agree with me that no better type of a consecrated literary talent can be found in the lists of authors. She received enough evidences of popular appreciation to have turned the heads of many writers. Over 200,000 bound volumes of her books have been sold in this country alone, to say nothing of the circulation in England, France, and Germany. She was not displeased at success, as I suppose no one is--but success to her meant doing good. She did not write for popularity, and her aversion to having her own literary work mentioned to her was so well known by her friends, that even those who wished to express to her their gratitude for the good they had received from her books were constrained to be silent. "While," says her publisher, "she was very sensitive to any criticism based on a misconception or a perversion of her purpose, never, in all my intercourse with her, did I discover the slightest evidence of a spirit of literary pique, or pride, or ambition." In attempting to sum up the characteristics of her writings, time will suffer me only to state the more prominent features without enlarging upon details. First, and most prominent, was their _purpose_. Her pen moved always and only under a sense of _duty_. She held her talent as a gift from God, and consecrated it sacredly to the enforcement and diffusion of His truth. If I may quote once more the words of her publisher in his tribute to her memory--"her great desire and determination to educate in the highest and best schools was never overlooked or forgotten. She never, like many writers of religious fiction, caught the spirit of sensationalism that is in the air, or sought for effects in unhealthy portraiture, corrupt style, or unnatural combinations." Second, she was _unconventional_. Her writings were not religious in any stereotyped, popular sense. Her characters were not stenciled. The holiest of them were strongly and often amusingly individualized. She did not try to make automatons to repeat religious commonplaces, but actual men and women, through whose very peculiarities the Holy Spirit revealed His presence and work. Third, I have already referred to her _sprightliness_. She had naturally a keen sense of humor which overflowed both in her conversation and in her books. She saw nothing in the nature of the faith she professed which bade her lay violent hands on this propensity; and she once said that if her religion could not stand her saying a funny thing now and then it was not worth much. But, whatever she might say or write of this character, one never felt that it betrayed any irreverent lightness of spirit. The undertone of her life was so deeply reverential, so thoroughly pervaded with adoring love for Christ, that it made itself felt through all her lighter moods, like the ground-swell of the sea through the sparkling ripples on the surface. Fourth, her style was easy, colloquial, never stilted or affected, marked at times by an energy and incisiveness which betrayed earnest thought and intense feeling. She aimed to impress the truth, not her style, and therefore aimed at plainness and directness. Her hard common sense, of which her books reveal a goodly share, was offset by her vivid fancy which made even the region of fable tributary to the service of truth. Fifth, her books were intensely _personal_; expressions, I mean, of her own experience. Many of her characters and scenes are simple transcripts of fact, and much of what she taught in song, was a repetition of what she had learned in suffering. To go back once more to her office of consoler. She exercised this not only through her books, but also through her personal ministries in those large and widening circles which centred in her literary and pastoral life. Those who were favored with her friendship in times of sorrow found her a comforter indeed. Her letters, of which, at such times, she was prodigal, were to many sore hearts as leaves from the tree of life. She did not expect too much of a sufferer. She recognized human weakness as well as divine strength. But in all her attempts at consolation, side by side with her deep and true sympathy, went the _lesson_ of the _harvest_ of sorrow. She was always pointing the mourner _past_ the floods, to the high place above them--teaching him to sing even amid the waves and billows--"the Lord will command His loving-kindness"; "I shall yet praise Him for the help of His countenance." "I knew," she wrote to a bereaved friend, "that God would never afflict you so, if He had not something beautiful and blissful to give in place of what He took." The insight which her writings revealed into many and subtle aspects of sorrow, made her the recipient of hosts of letters from strangers, opening to her their griefs, and asking her counsel; and to all she gave freely and joyfully as far as her strength and time and judgment would allow. There was a tonic vein mingling with her comforts. Her touch was firm as well as tender. She knew the shoals of morbid sentimentality which skirt the deeps of trouble, and sought to pilot the sorrowing past the shoals to the shore. And now, having thus spoken of her preparation for God's work, the work itself, and its fruits, how can we gather up and depict the many personal traits and associations which crowd upon the memory? Of such things how many are incapable of reproduction, their fine flavor vanishing with the moment. How often that which most commends them to remembrance lies in the glance of an eye, an inflection of the voice, an expression of the face, which neither pen nor pencil can put on record. How many such recollections, for example, group themselves round that beautiful home among the hills. How it bore her mark and was pervaded with her presence, and seemed, more than any other spot, the appropriate setting of her life. Now she was at her chamber window studying the ever shifting lights and shadows on the hills; now rambling over the fields and through the woods and returning with her hands laden with flowers and grasses; now busy with her ferns in her garden; again beguiling the hours with her pencil, or stealing away to develop some happy fancy or fresh thought on which her mind had been working for days. And how pleasant her talk. How she would dart off sometimes from the line of the gravest theme into some quaint, mirth-provoking conceit. How many odd things she had seen; of how many strange adventures she had partaken, and how graphically and charmingly she told them. With what relish she would bring forth some good thing saved up to tell to one who would appreciate it; yet, on the other hand, how earnestly, how intelligently, with what simplicity, with what eager delight would she pursue the discussion of the deep things of God. Nor was her home merely a place of rest and retirement. Its doors were ever wide open to congenial spirits, and also to some of Christ's poor, to whom the healing breath of the mountains and the rare sights and sounds of country life were as gifts from heaven. In that little community she was not content to be a mere summer idler. There, too, she pursued her ministry of comfort and of instruction. Eternity alone will reveal the fruitage of the seeds she sowed in her weekly Bible-reading, to which the women came for miles over the mountain roads, through storm and through sunshine. And here the end came. Death, if a surprise at all to her, could only be a pleasant surprise. In one of her stories an old family servant says of her departed mistress: "Often's the time I've heard her talk about dying, and I mind a time when she thought she was going, and there was a light in her eye, and it was just as she looked when she said, 'Mary, I'm going to be married.'" It was a leaf out of her own life. She had marked in one of her books of devotion a passage which, I imagine, summed up her view of the whole matter: "A true Christian is neither fond of life nor weary of it." She had no sentimental disgust with life, but her overmastering desire was to see and be like her Lord, and death was the entrance gate to that perfect vision. Only the opening of that portal could bring the full answer to her prayer of years, "I beseech Thee, show me Thy glory." In this attitude the messenger found her. I will not dwell on the closing scenes.... It is pleasanter to turn from that long, weary Sabbath, when nature in its perfect beauty and repose seemed to mock the bitter agony of the death-chamber, to the hour when, with the first full brightness of the morning, the silver cord was loosed, and she was present with the Lord. Surely it was something more than an accidental coincidence that, in the little "Daily Food," which for nearly forty years had been her closet companion, the passage for the 13th of August was: "I heard a voice from heaven saying unto me, Write, blessed are the dead which die in the Lord from henceforth: yea, saith the Spirit, that they may rest from their labors; and their works do follow them." That summer afternoon when she was laid to rest had a brightness which was not all of the glories of the setting sun, as he burst forth from the encircling clouds, and touched with his parting splendor the gates of the grave. Nature, with its fulness of summer life, was set in the key of the resurrection by the assurance of her victory over death, and it was with a new and mighty sense of their truth that we spoke over her ashes the words of the Apostle: "It is sown in corruption, it is raised in incorruption; it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power; it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body. O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?" So now, as then, _more_ even than then, since these months have given us time to study the lesson of that life and the sources of its power, we give thanks to God through Jesus Christ our Lord; thanks for the divine processes which moulded a daughter of consolation; thanks for the fountains of comfort opened by her along life's highways and which continue to flow while she sleeps in Jesus; thanks for a good and fruitful life ended "in the communion of the Holy Catholic Church, in the confidence of a certain faith, in the comfort of a reasonable, religious, and holy hope, in charity with all mankind, and in peace with God." * * * * * I. A List of Mrs. Prentiss' Writings, with notices of some of them and the dates of their publication: 1. _Little Susy's Six Birthdays._ 1853. 2. _Only a Dandelion, and other Stories._ 1854. The first piece, from which the little book takes its name, was written at the time, and is not excelled by anything of the kind written by Mrs. Prentiss. Spring Breeze is as fresh and delicate as a May flower. The other stories are mostly a selection from her early contributions to The Youth's Companion. 3. _Henry and Bessie; or, What they did in the Country._ 1855. 4. _Little Susy's Six Teachers._ 1856. 5. _Little Susy's Little Servants._ 1856. The three Little Susy books were republished in England, where they seem to have been as popular among the children as at home. Not far from 50,000 copies have been sold in this country. 6. _The Flower of the Family._ A Book for Girls. 1856. This work has had a wide circulation at home and abroad. Some 19,000 copies have been sold here. The following is the title-page of one of the French editions: * * * * * Le Fleur de La Famille ou Simple Histoire pour Les Jeunes Filles. Ouvrage Americain. Cinquième édition. Toulouse, Société des Livres Religieux. 1877. * * * * * Die Perle der Familie is the German title. Here are a few sentences from a highly laudatory notice in the well-known "Neue Preuss. Zeitung": In ausserordentlicher lieblicher und sinniger Weise wird uns ein häusliches, schlichtes, von edlem Christlichen Sinn getragenes Familien- leben forgeführt, das durch seine treffliche Characterschilderung unser lebhaftestes Interesse flir jedes Glied des kinderreichen Hauses in Anspruch nimmt. Es ist im eigentlichsten Sinne ein Buch für die Familie. _The Flower of the Family_ was translated into German,--as were also _Stepping Heavenward, The Percys, Fred and Maria and Me_,--by Miss Marie Morgenstern, of Göttingen. Some omissions in the version of _Stepping Heavenward_ mar a little the vivacity of the book; but otherwise her work seems to have been very carefully and well done, and to have met with the warm approval of the German public. 7. _Peterchen and Gretchen; or, Tales of Early Childhood._ 1860. This is a translation from the German. 8. _The Little Preacher._ 1867. One of the most striking of her smaller works. It has throughout the flavor of German peasant life and of the Black Forest. But it seems never to have found its way across the sea. 9. _Little Threads; or, Tangle Thread, Silver Thread, and Golden Thread._ 1868. The aim of _Little Threads_ is happily indicated in its closing sentences: If you find that you like to have your own way a good deal better than you like your mamma to have hers; if you pout and cry when you can not do as you please; if you never own that you are in the wrong, and are sorry for it; never, in short, try with all your might to be docile and gentle, then your name is Tangle Thread, and you may depend you cost your mamma many sorrowful hours and many tears. And the best thing you can do is to go away by yourself and pray to Jesus to make you see how naughty you are, and to make you humble and sorry. Then the old and soiled thread that can be seen in your mother's life will disappear, and in its place there will come first a silver, and by and by, with time and patience, and God's loving help, a sparkling and beautiful golden one. And do you know of anything in this world you should rather be than Somebody's Golden Thread?--especially the Golden Thread of your dear mamma, who has loved you so many years, who has prayed for you so many years, and who longs so to see you gentle and docile like Him of whom it was said: "Behold the _Lamb_ of God!" _Little Threads_ is based upon a very keen observation of both the dark and the bright side of childhood. The allegory, in which its lessons are wrought, is, perhaps, less simple and attractive than that of _Little Susy's Six Teachers_, or that of _Little Susy's Little Servants_; but the lessons themselves are full of the sweetest wisdom, pathos, and beauty. 10. _Little Lou's Sayings and Doings_. 1868. Among the papers of her sister, Mrs. Prentiss found a journal containing numerous little incidents in the early life of her only child, together with more or less of his boyish sayings. Much of the material found in this journal was used in the composition of _Little Lou_; and that is one thing that gives it such an air of perfect reality. 11. _Fred and Maria and Me._ 1868. 12. _The Old Brown Pitcher._ 1868. This is a temperance tale. It was written at the request of the National Temperance Society and issued for their press. _13. Stepping Heavenward. 1869._ Some interesting details respecting this work have been given already. Its circulation has been very large, both at home and abroad; far greater than that of any other of Mrs. Prentiss' books. More than 67,000 copies of it have been sold in this country; while in England it was issued by several houses, and tens of thousands of copies have been sold there, in Canada, in Australia, and in other parts of the British dominions. Among the English houses that republished _Stepping Heavenward_, were James Nisbet & Co.; Ward, Lock & Co.; Frederick Warne & Co.; Thomas Nelson & Sons, London and Edinburgh; Milner & Co.; Weldon & Co. An edition by the last-named house, neatly printed and intended specially for circulation in Canada and Australia, as well as at home, was sold at fivepence, so that the very poorest could buy it. No accurate estimate can be formed of the number of copies circulated in Great Britain and its dependencies, but it must have been enormous. It was also issued at Leipsic, by Tauchnitz, in his famous "Collection of British Authors." The German translation has already passed into a fourth edition--a remarkable proof of its popularity. In the preface to this edition Miss Morgenstern, the translator, says: "So möge sie denn hinausziehen in die Welt, diese vierte Auflage, möge wiederum aufklopfen an die Stuben und Herzenthüren, der deutschen Lesewelt, und nachdem ihr aufgethan, hineintragen in die Stuben und Herzen, was ihre Vorgängerinnen hineintrugen;--Freude und Rath und Trost." Nowhere has the work won higher, or more discriminating, praise than in Germany. The following extract from one of the critical notices of it may serve as an instance: In Form von Tagebuch--Aufzeichnungen, somit Selbstbekenntnissen, wird uns das Leben einer Frau erzält, welche--ohne andere _äussere_ Schickungen freudiger und trüber Art, als sie in _jedem_ Leben vorzukommen pflegen--aus einem zwar gutartigen und wohlbegabten aber Susserst reizbaren und leidenshaftlich erregten Müdchen zu einer geläuterten Jüngerin des Herrn heranreift. Was aber dies Buch zu einem wahren Kleinod macht, das ish nicht die überaus wahre und tiefe Analyse jener menschlichen Sünde, Sündenschwachheit und Eitelkeit, die sich auch in die frömmsten Regungen einuschleichen sucht, sondern die Angabe des wahren Heilmittels. Der goldne Faden nämlich, der sich durch das ganze Buch zieht, ist die Wahrheit; Nicht _unser_ Rennen und Lanfen, sondern _Sein_ Erbarmen! Nicht _wir_ haben _Ihn_ geliebt, sondern _Er_ hat _uns_ geliebt, und daran haben _wir_ kindlich zu _glauben_. Sich _Ihm_ an _Sein_ Herz werfen mit all unsern Schwächen, all unser Armuth--das _wirkt_--ja das _ist_ Heilung.... Das Ganze ist im höchsten Grade fesselnd. Man lebt sich unwillkürlich in dies christliche Hauswesen mit ein, und glaubt in vielen Zügen einen Spiegel des eigenen zu erkennen. [14] The title-page of the French translation is as follows: * * * * * MARCHANT VERS LE CIEL. par E. PRENTISS. Auteur de _La Fleur de la Famille_, etc. Traduit de L'Anglais avec L'Autorization de L'Auteur. Lausanne: Georges Bridel, Editeur. * * * * * The following extract from a letter of Madame de Fressensé, dated Paris, July 18, 1882, will show what impression the work made not only upon the gifted and accomplished writer, but upon many other of the most cultivated Christian women of France and Switzerland: C'est un livre qui fait aimer celle qui y a mis son âme, une étude du coeur humain bien vraie et bien délicate. L'amour de Dieu déborde dans ses pages charmantes, dont la lecture réchauffe le coeur. Je crois qu'il a été fort apprécié dans nos pays de langue française. Une personne dont toute la vie est un service de ceux qui souffrent me disait l'autre jour: "C'est _mon_ livre, il m'a fait beaucoup de bien." Le nombre d'editions qu'a atteint la traduction française teémoigne qu'il a eu du succès, et je suis sûre que beaucoup de personnes ont préféré, avec raison, le lire dans l'original. Je suis heureuse que vous m'avez donné l'occasion de le relire, et d'en éprouver de nouveau la bienfaisante influence.... Ce serait un vrai privilége de pouvoir faire connaítre à notre public français cette femme aussi distinguée par le coeur que par l'esprit, que nous aimons tous. 14. _Nidworth, and his three Magic Wands._ 1869. The three Magic Wands are: Riches, Knowledge, and Love; and in depicting their peculiar and wonderful virtues Mrs. Prentiss has wrought into the story with much skill her own theory of a happy life. She wrote the book with intense delight, and its strange, weird-like scenes and characters--the home in the forest; Dolman, the poor woodcutter; Cinda, his tall and strong-minded wife; Nidworth, their first-born; wandering Hidda, boding ill-luck; the hermit; these and all the rest--seemed to her, for a while, almost as real as if she had copied them from life. Its publishers (Roberts Brothers) pronounced _Nidworth_ "a gem" and were not a little surprised at its failure to strike the popular fancy. It certainly contains some of the author's brightest pictures of life and character. 15. _The Percys._ 1870. This work was translated into French and German, and won warm praise in both languages. It is full of spirit, depicts real boys and girls and a loving Christian mother with equal skill, and abounds in the best lessons of domestic peace. 16. _The Story Lizzie Told._ 1870. 17. _Six Little Princesses and what they turned into._ 1871. No one of Mrs. Prentiss' lesser works betrays a keener insight into character or a finer touch than this. Its aim is to illustrate the truth that all girls are endowed with their own individual talents; and to enforce the twofold lesson, that the diligent use of these talents, on the one hand, can furnish innocent pleasures beyond the reach of any outward position, however brilliant; and, on the other, is the best preparation for the day of adversity. The closing sentences of the story will give an inkling of its aim and quality: "I see how it is," said the Countess. "You must live together. Each feels herself incomplete without the others. Novella needs somebody to take care of her and somebody to love. In return, she will give love and endless entertainment. Reima, too, needs looking after, and some one will watch with a friendly eye the growth of her paintings. Our two musicians must not become one-sided by thinking only of melody and song. They must enjoy being clothed by Moina's kind hands, listening to Novella's poems, and discussing Reima's works. And you must train all your ears to appreciate the talents of these two marvellous creatures who sing and play with such rare, such exquisite harmony." "And what shall I do?" cried Delicieuse. "You shall do a little of everything, dear child. You shall help Moina to guide the house, and Reima to mix the colors. You shall take care that the piano is never out of tune, or Novella at a loss for pens and paper. In a word, you shall be what you always have been, always ready with the oil of gladness, wherever you see friction, the sweetest, the most lovable creature in the world." Delicieuse smiled, and ran to embrace all her sisters, hardly knowing which she loved best. It was not long before those royal maidens, royal only in their virtues and their talents, found themselves in a home in a vine-clad land, where each could live as Nature had designed she should live. Moina, whose practical skill was not confined to her needle, kept the house with such exquisite care and neatness, that her sisters preferred it to a palace. She found happiness in forgetting herself, in her pride in them, and in the freedom from petty cares from which she shielded them. Her calm, serene character was a continual repose to the varying moods of Reima and Novella; a balance-wheel to works that, running fast, often ran irregularly. Reima studied the old masters with no need for further travel, for her home lay among their works. Mosella and Papeta composed music, made Delicieuse listen to and admire it when other hearers were wanting, and were satisfied with her criticisms. Novella wrote books, and had her frenzies. She had her gentle and her gay moods, also, and made laughter ring through the house at her will. Not one of these four was conscious of her powers, or asked for fame. Nor did their aristocratic breeding make them ashamed to work for their bread. They even fancied that bread thus won, needed less butter to help it down, than that of charity. As to Delicieuse, she was the bright, the golden link that bound the household together in peace and harmony. Her smiles, her caresses, the love that flowed forth from her as from a living fountain, made their home glad with perpetual sunshine. Thank God for the gifts of genius He has scattered abroad with a bountiful hand; but thank Him also that, without such gifts, one may become a joy and a benediction! 18. _Aunt Jane's Hero_. 1871. This work was at once republished in England and appeared also in a French version. 19. _Golden Hours: Hymns and Songs of the Christian Life_. 1873. Several of the pieces in this volume had already appeared; among them "More Love to Thee, O Christ." This hymn has passed into most of the later collections. It was translated into Arabic, and is sung in the land once trodden by the blessed feet of Him whose name it adores, and throughout the East. 20. _Urbane and His Friends_. 1874. This work was reprinted in England. 21. _Griselda: A Dramatic Poem in Five Acts_. Translated from the German of Friedrich Halm (Baron Münch-Bellinghausen). 1876. Mrs. Prentiss supposed that hers was the first English version of this poem. But there is a translation by Sir R. A. Anstruther, which appeared in London as early as 1840 and in a new edition four years later. All attempts to obtain a copy of this translation in New York, or from London, have proved futile. 22. _The Home at Greylock_. 1876. The following extract from a letter of the author of the French translation to Mrs. Prentiss deserves a place here: MADAME,--Vous savez sans doute que, sans votre autorisation, une plume, bien hardie peut-être, mais pleine de zèle et de respect pour vous, s'est mise à traduire un de vos ouvrages, "The Home at Greylock." Sans votre autorisation! Etait-ce bien? était-ce mal? Je me le suis demandé plus d'une fois et je vous l'aurais demandé, Madame, si j'avais su votre adresse assez tôt. L'éditeur m'a mis la conscience à l'aise en m'assurant que le droit était le même pour tous, et que les auteurs américains ne pouvaient concéder de privilége à qui que ce fût. Forte de cette assurance, je me mis à l'oeuvre, mais j'avoue que j'eus besoin d'encouragements réitérés pour mener mon travail à bonne fin. Encore un mot d'explication, si vous le permittez, Madame. Je ne suis pas mére, mais je suis tante; j'ai vu naître mes neveux et niéces, je les ai bercés dans mes bras, j'ai veillé sur leurs premiers pas, j'ai observé le développement graduel de leur coeur et de leur intelligence, j'ai senti à fond combien l'oeuvre de l'éducation est sérieuse et combien il importe d'étre discipliné soi-même par le Seigneur pour discipliner les petits confiés à nos soins. Il n'est done pas étonnant que votre livre m'ait vivement intéressée et que j'aie voulu le mettre à la portée d'un grand nombre. Cela eût été fait tût ou tard par d'autres, je ne l'ignore point; mais j'avais envie d'essayer mes forces, et.... l'occasion a fait le larron. Ne seriez-vous pas ma complice, Madame?... M'appuyant sur votre bienveillame et sur la fraternité qui unit les âmes dans le Seigneur, je vous prie, Madame, de ne pas me considérer comme une étrangère et d'agréer l'expression de mon estime et mes voeux en Christ. 23. _Pemaquid; a Story of Old Times in New England._ 1877. 24. _Gentleman Jim_. 1878. This little story was the last production of her pen and appeared a few days only after her death. 25. _Avis Benson; or, Mine and Thine, with other Sketches_. 1879. This is a collection of pieces that had already appeared in the Chicago Advance and in the New York Observer. It met with a cordial welcome and has had a large circulation. Some of the readers of Mrs. Prentiss' books may be glad to see a specimen of her handwriting. The following is a fac-simile of the closing part of a letter to her cousin, Miss Shipman, written at Dorset in 1867: [Illustration: Handwriting Sample] [1] B. J. Lossing, L.L.D., in the Christian Union of Oct. 15, 1879. [2] B. J. Lossing in The Christian Union. [3] Mr. Nathaniel Willis, then in his 76th year. He died at Boston, May 26, 1870, in the 90th year of his age. [4] Sickness: its Trials and Blessings. A very wise and comforting book. She bequeathed it back to Mrs. Prentiss at her death. [5] To aid in defending it against the "Border-Ruffians." [6] Mrs. Prentiss was on her way to Europe. Before sailing she went to Williamstown to say good-bye to her sister, but the latter was too ill to see her. They never met again on earth. [7] Referring to the family of Rev. Wm. James, D.D., of Albany. [8] Sent from Genevrier. [9] N. P. Willis. [10] The Boston Recorder and The Youth's Companion. [11] The late George Ripley, the eminent scholar and critic, is referred to. In a letter, dated New York, Nov. 20, 1879, Mr. Ripley writes: "I beg you to accept, dear Dr. Prentiss, my most cordial thanks for your kindness in sending me the extract from Miss Payson's journal. I remember perfectly the visits of the young German enthusiast to my house in Boston and the great pleasure they always gave to my wife and myself. My acquaintance with her, I think, was through Mr. Tappan's family, of which your former parishioner and my dear friend and classmate, Thomas Denny, afterward became a member. With my infatuation for New England people and New England biography and genealogy and literary endeavor, it would give me great delight to be permitted to see Miss Payson's journal." The journal was sent to Dr. Ripley and read by him with great pleasure. The incident led to the renewal of an old acquaintance and to repeated visits at his residence--one shortly before his death--which left upon the writer a strong impression of his deep interest in theological and religious truth, as well as of his genial temper and remarkable literary accomplishments. [12] The late Rev. John Adams Albro, D.D., of Cambridge. [13] Leonard Woods, Jr., D.D., then President of Bowdoin College. [14] Allgemeiner literarischer Anzeiger für das evangelische Deutschland, Jan., 1873. [Illustration: Dorset Mountains.] [Illustration: A View of Chateau d'Oex.] [Illustration: La Maison des Bains.] [Illustration: The Old Mill and Pond.] 
41368	----	Transcriber's Note: Inconsistent hyphenation and spelling in the original document have been preserved. Obvious typographical errors have been corrected. Italic text is denoted by _underscores_. On page 130, "we sate long" should possibly be "we sat long". LOVE LETTERS OF NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE LOVE LETTERS OF NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE PRIVATELY PRINTED THE SOCIETY OF THE DOFOBS CHICAGO 1907 Copyright, 1907, by WILLIAM K. BIXBY LETTERS TO MISS PEABODY _Oak Hill_, April 13th, 1841 _Ownest love_, Here is thy poor husband in a polar Paradise! I know not how to interpret this aspect of Nature--whether it be of good or evil omen to our enterprise. But I reflect that the Plymouth pilgrims arrived in the midst of storm and stept ashore upon mountain snow-drifts; and nevertheless they prospered, and became a great people--and doubtless it will be the same with us. I laud my stars, however, that thou wilt not have thy first impressions of our future home from such a day as this. Thou wouldst shiver all thy life afterwards, and never realise that there could be bright skies, and green hills and meadows, and trees heavy with foliage, when now the whole scene is a great snow-bank, and the sky full of snow likewise. Through faith, I persist in believing that spring and summer will come in their due season; but the unregenerated man shivers within me, and suggests a doubt whether I may not have wandered within the precincts of the Arctic circle, and chosen my heritage among everlasting snows. Dearest, provide thyself with a good stock of furs; and if thou canst obtain the skin of a polar bear, thou wilt find it a very suitable summer dress for this region. Thou must not hope ever to walk abroad, except upon snow-shoes, nor to find any warmth, save in thy husband's heart. Belovedest, I have not yet taken my first lesson in agriculture, as thou mayst well suppose--except that I went to see our cows foddered, yesterday afternoon. We have eight of our own; and the number is now increased by a transcendental heifer, belonging to Miss Margaret Fuller. She is very fractious, I believe, and apt to kick over the milk pail. Thou knowest best, whether in these traits of character, she resembles her mistress. Thy husband intends to convert himself into a milk-maid, this evening; but I pray heaven that Mr. Ripley may be moved to assign him the kindliest cow in the herd--otherwise he will perform his duty with fear and trembling. Ownest wife, I like my brethren in affliction very well; and couldst thou see us sitting round our table, at meal-times, before the great kitchen-fire, thou wouldst call it a cheerful sight. Mrs. Parker is a most comfortable woman to behold; she looks as if her ample person were stuffed full of tenderness--indeed, as if she were all one great, kind heart. Wert thou here, I should ask for nothing more--not even for sunshine and summer weather; for thou wouldst be both, to thy husband. And how is that cough of thine, my belovedest? Hast thou thought of me, in my perils and wanderings? I trust that thou dost muse upon me with hope and joy; not with repining. Think that I am gone before, to prepare a home for my Dove, and will return for her, all in good time. Thy husband has the best chamber in the house, I believe; and though not quite so good as the apartment I have left, it will do very well. I have hung up thy two pictures; and they give me a glimpse of summer and of thee. The vase I intended to have brought in my arms, but could not very conveniently do it yesterday; so that it still remains at Mrs. Hillards's, together with my carpet. I shall bring them [at] the next opportunity. Now farewell, for the present, most beloved. I have been writing this in my chamber; but the fire is getting low, and the house is old and cold; so that the warmth of my whole person has retreated to my heart, which burns with love for thee. I must run down to the kitchen or parlor hearth, when thy image shall sit beside me--yea, be pressed to my breast. At bed-time, thou shalt have a few lines more. Now I think of it, dearest, wilt thou give Mrs. Ripley a copy of Grandfather's Chair and Liberty Tree; she wants them for some boys here. I have several copies of Famous Old People. April 14th. 10 A.M. Sweetest, I did not milk the cows last night, because Mr. Ripley was afraid to trust them to my hands, or me to their horns--I know not which. But this morning, I have done wonders. Before breakfast, I went out to the barn, and began to chop hay for the cattle; and with such "righteous vehemence" (as Mr. Ripley says) did I labor, that in the space of ten minutes, I broke the machine. Then I brought wood and replenished the fires; and finally sat down to breakfast and ate up a huge mound of buckwheat cakes. After breakfast, Mr. Ripley put a four-pronged instrument into my hands, which he gave me to understand was called a pitch-fork; and he and Mr. Farley being armed with similar weapons, we all then commenced a gallant attack upon a heap of manure. This office being concluded, and thy husband having purified himself, he sits down to finish this letter to his most beloved wife. Dearest, I will never consent that thou come within half a mile of me, after such an encounter as that of this morning. Pray Heaven that his letter retain none of the fragrance with which the writer was imbued. As for thy husband himself, he is peculiarly partial to the odor; but that whimsical little nose of thine might chance to quarrel with it. Belovedest, Miss Fuller's cow hooks the other cows, and has made herself ruler of the herd, and behaves in a very tyrannical manner. Sweetest, I know not when I shall see thee; but I trust it will not be longer than the end of next week. I love thee! I love thee! I wouldst thou wert with me; for then would my labor be joyful--and even now it is not sorrowful. Dearest, I shall make an excellent husbandman. I feel the original Adam reviving within me. Miss Sophia A. Peabody, 13 West street, Boston. TO MISS PEABODY _Oak Hill_, April 16th, ½ past 6 A.M. [1841] Most beloved, I have a few moments to spare before breakfast; and perhaps thou wilt let me spend them in talking to thee. Thy two letters blessed me yesterday, having been brought by some private messenger of Mrs. Ripley's. Very joyful was I to hear from my Dove, and my heart gave a mighty heave and swell. That cough of thine--I do wish it would take its departure, for I cannot bear to think of thy tender little frame being shaken with it all night long. Dearest, since I last wrote thee, there has been an addition to our community of four gentlemen in sables, who promise to be among our most useful and respectable members. They arrived yesterday, about noon. Mr. Ripley had proposed to them to join us, no longer ago than that very morning. I had some conversation with them in the afternoon, and was glad to hear them express much satisfaction with their new abode, and all the arrangements. They do not appear to be very communicative, however--or perhaps it may be merely an external reserve, like that of thy husband, to shield their delicacy. Several of their prominent characteristics, as well as their black attire, lead me to believe that they are members of the clerical profession; but I have not yet ascertained from their own lips, what has been the nature of their past lives. I trust to have much pleasure in their society, and, sooner or later, that we shall all of us derive great strength from our intercourse with them. I cannot too highly applaud the readiness with which these four gentlemen in black have thrown aside all the fopperies and flummeries, which have their origin in a false state of society. When I last saw them, they looked as heroically regardless of the stains and soils incident to our profession, as thy husband did when he emerged from the gold mine. Ownest wife, thy husband has milked a cow!!! Belovedest, the herd have rebelled against the usurpation of Miss Fuller's cow; and whenever they are turned out of the barn, she is compelled to take refuge under our protection. So much did she impede thy husband's labors, by keeping close to him, that he found it necessary to give her two or three gentle pats with a shovel; but still she preferred to trust herself to my tender mercies, rather than venture among the horns of the herd. She is not an amiable cow; but she has a very intelligent face, and seems to be of a reflective cast of character. I doubt not that she will soon perceive the expediency of being on good terms with the rest of the sisterhood. I have not been twenty yards from our house and barn; but I begin to perceive that this is a beautiful place. The scenery is of a mild and placid character, with nothing bold in its character; but I think its beauties will grow upon us, and make us love it the more, the longer we live here. There is a brook, so near the house that we shall [be] able to hear it ripple, in the summer evenings; but, for agricultural purposes, it has been made to flow in a straight and rectangular fashion, which does it infinite damage, as a picturesque object. Naughtiest, it was a moment or two before I could think whom thou didst mean by Mr. Dismal View. Why, he is one of the best of the brotherhood, so far as cheerfulness goes; for, if he do not laugh himself, he makes the rest of us laugh continually. He is the quaintest and queerest personage thou didst ever see--full of dry jokes, the humor of which is so incorporated with the strange twistifications of his physiognomy, that his sayings ought to be written down, accompanied with illustrations by Cruikshank. Then he keeps quoting innumerable scraps of Latin, and makes classical allusions, while we are turning over the gold mine; and the contrast between the nature of his employment and the character of his thoughts is irresistibly ludicrous. Sweetest, I have written this epistle in the parlor, while Farmer Ripley, and Farmer Farley, and Farmer Dismal View, are talking about their agricultural concerns, around the fire. So thou wilt not wonder if it is not a classical piece of composition, either in point of thought or expression. I shall have just time before breakfast is ready--the boy has just come to call us now--but still I will tell thee that I love thee infinitely; and that I long for thee unspeakably, but yet with a happy longing. The rest of them have gone into the breakfast room;... (Portion of letter missing) Miss Sophia A. Peabody, 13 West street, Boston. TO MISS PEABODY _Brook Farm_, April 28th, 1841--7 A.M. Mine ownest, what a beautiful bright morning is this! I do trust that thou hast not suffered so much from the late tremendous weather, as to be unable now to go abroad in the sunshine. I tremble, almost, to think how thy tender frame has been shaken by that continual cough, which cannot but have grown more inveterate throughout these interminable ages of east wind. At times, dearest, it has seemed an absolute necessity for me to see thee and find out for a certain truth whether thou wert well or ill. Even hadst thou been here, thou wouldst have been penetrated to the core with the chill blast. Then how must thou have been afflicted, where it comes directly from the sea. Belovedest, thy husband was caught by a cold, during his visit to Boston. It has not affected his whole frame, but took entire possession of his head, as being the weakest and most vulnerable part. Never didst thou hear anybody sneeze with such vehemence and frequency; and his poor brain has been in a thick fog--or rather, it seemed as if his head were stuffed with coarse wool. I know not when I have been so pestered before; and sometimes I wanted to wrench off my head, and give it a great kick, like a foot-ball. This annoyance has made me endure the bad weather with even less than ordinary patience; and my faith was so far exhausted, that, when they told me yesterday that the sun was setting clear, I would not even turn my eyes towards the west. But, this morning, I am made all over anew; and have no greater remnant of my cold, than will serve as an excuse for doing no work to-day. Dearest, do not let Mrs. Ripley frighten thee with apocryphal accounts of my indisposition. I have told thee the whole truth. I do believe that she delights to disquiet people with doubts and fears about their closest friends; for, once or twice, she has made thy cough a bugbear to thy husband. Nevertheless, I will not judge too harshly of the good lady, because I like her very well, in many respects. The family has been dismal and dolorous, throughout the storm. The night before last, William Allen was stung by a wasp, on the eyelid; whereupon, the whole side of his face swelled to an enormous magnitude; so that, at the breakfast table, one half of him looked like a blind giant (the eye being closed) and the other half had such a sorrowful and ludicrous aspect, that thy husband was constrained to laugh, out of sheer pity. The same day, a colony of wasps was discovered in thy husband's chamber, where they had remained throughout the winter, and were now just bestirring themselves, doubtless with the intention of stinging me from head to foot. Thou wilt readily believe, that not one of the accursed crew escaped my righteous vengeance. A similar discovery was made in Mr. Farley's room. In short, we seem to have taken up our abode in a wasps' nest. Thus thou seest, belovedest, that a rural life is not one of unbroken quiet and serenity. If the middle of the day prove warm and pleasant, thy husband promises himself to take a walk, in every step of which thou shalt be his companion. Oh, how I long for thee to stay with me; in reality, among the hills, and dales, and woods, of our home. I have taken one walk, with Mr. Farley; and I could not have believed that there was such seclusion, at so short a distance from a great city. Many spots seem hardly to have been visited for ages--not since John Eliot preached to the Indians here. If we were to travel a thousand miles, we could not escape the world more completely than we can here. Sweetest, I long unspeakably to see thee--it is only the thought of thee that draws my spirit out of this solitude. Otherwise, I care nothing for the world nor its affairs. I read no newspapers, and hardly remember who is President; and feel as if I had no more concern with what other people trouble themselves about, than if I dwelt in another planet. But, still, thou drawest me to thee continually; and so I can realise how a departed spirit feels, while looking back from another world to the beloved ones of this. All other interests appear like shadows and trifles; but love is a reality, which makes the spirit still an inhabitant of the world which it has quitted. Ownest wife, if Mr. Ripley comes into Boston on Sunday, it is my purpose to accompany him. Otherwise, thou mayst look for me some time during the ensuing week. Be happy, dearest; and above all, do shake off that tremendous cough. Take great care of thyself, and never venture out when there is the least breath of east-wind; but spread thy wings in the sunshine, and be joyous as itself. God bless thee. THINE OWNEST. Will thy father have the goodness to leave the letter for Colonel Hall at the Post Office? Miss Sophia A. Peabody, 13 West street, Boston. TO MISS PEABODY _Brook Farm_, May 4th, 1841. ½ past 1 P.M. Belovedest, as Mr. Ripley is going to the city this afternoon, I cannot but write a letter to thee, though I have but little time; for the corn field will need me very soon. My cold no longer troubles me; and all this morning, I have been at work under the clear blue sky, on a hill side. Sometimes it almost seemed as if I were at work in the sky itself; though the material in which I wrought was the ore from our gold mine. Nevertheless, there is nothing so unseemly and disagreeable in this sort of toil, as thou wouldst think. It defiles the hands, indeed, but not the soul. This gold ore is a pure and wholesome substance; else our Mother Nature would not devour it so readily, and derive so much nourishment from it, and return such a rich abundance of good grain and roots in requital of it. The farm is growing very beautiful now--not that we yet see anything of the pease or potatoes, which we have planted; but the grass blushes green on the slopes and hollows. I wrote that word blush almost unconsciously; so we will let it go as an inspired utterance. When I go forth afield, I think of my Dove, and look beneath the stone walls, where the verdure is richest, in hopes that a little company of violets, or some solitary bud, prophetic of the summer, may be there; to which I should award the blissful fate of being treasured for a time in thy bosom; for I doubt not, dearest, that thou wouldst admit any flowers of thy husband's gathering into that sweetest place. But not a wild flower have I yet found. One of the boys gathered some yellow cowslips, last Sunday; but I am well content not to have found them; for they are not precisely what I should like to send my Dove, though they deserve honor and praise, because they come to us when no others will. We have our parlor here dressed in evergreen, as at Christmas. That beautifullest little flower vase of thine stands on Mr. Ripley's study table, at which I am now writing. It contains some daffodils and some willow blossoms. I brought it here, rather than kept it in my chamber, because I never sit there, and it gives me many pleasant emotions to look round and be surprised (for it is often a surprise, though I well know that it is there) by something which is connected with the idea of thee. Most dear wife, I cannot hope that thou art yet entirely recovered from that terrible influenza; but if thou art not almost well, I know not how thy husband will endure it. And that cough too. It is the only one of thy utterances, so far as I have heard them, which I do not love. Wilt thou not be very well, and very lightsome, at our next meeting. I promise myself to be with thee next Thursday, the day after tomorrow. It is an eternity since we met; and I can nowise account for my enduring this lengthened absence so well. I do not believe that I could suffer it, if I were not engaged in a righteous and heaven-blessed way of life. When I was in the Custom-House, and then at Salem, I was not half so patient; though my love of thee has grown infinitely since then. We had some tableaux last evening, the principal characters being sustained by Mr. Farley and Miss Ellen Slade. They went off very well. I would like to see a tableaux arranged by my Dove. Dearest, I fear it is time for thy clod-compelling husband to take the field again. Good bye. Miss Sophia A. Peabody, 13 West street, Boston. TO MISS PEABODY _Brook Farm_, June 1st, 1841--nearly 6 A.M. _Very dearest_, I have been too busy to write thee a long letter by this opportunity; for I think this present life of mine gives me an antipathy to pen and ink, even more than my Custom-House experience did. I could not live without the idea of thee, nor without spiritual communion with thee; but, in the midst of toil, or after a hard day's work in the gold mine, my soul obstinately refuses to be poured out on paper. That abominable gold mine! Thank God, we anticipate getting rid of its treasures, in the course of two or three days. Of all hateful places, that is the worst; and I shall never comfort myself for having spent so many days of blessed sunshine there. It is my opinion, dearest, that a man's soul may be buried and perish under a dung-heap or in a furrow of the field, just as well as under a pile of money. Well; that giant, Mr. George Bradford, will probably be here to-day; so there will be no danger of thy husband being under the necessity of laboring more than he likes, hereafter. Meantime, my health is perfect, and my spirits buoyant, even in the gold mine. And how art thou, belovedest? Two or three centuries have passed since I saw thee; and then thou wast pale and languid. Thou didst comfort me in that little note of thine; but still I cannot help longing to be informed of thy present welfare. Thou art not a prudent little Dove, and wast naughty to come on such a day as thou didst; and it seems to me that Mrs. Ripley does not know how to take care of thee at all. Art thou quite well now? Dearest wife, I intend to come and see thee either on Thursday or Friday--perhaps my visit may be deferred till Saturday, if the gold mine should hold out so long. I yearn for thee unspeakably. Good bye now; for the breakfast horn has sounded, some time since. God bless thee, ownest. THY LOVINGEST HUSBAND. Miss Sophia A. Peabody, 13 West street, Boston. TO MISS PEABODY _Brook Farm_, Friday, July 9th, ½ past 5 P.M. [1841] Oh, unutterably ownest wife, no pen can write how I have longed for thee, or for any the slightest word from thee; for thy Sunday's letter did not reach me till noon of this very day! Never was such a thirst of the spirit as I have felt. I began to wonder whether my Dove did really exist, or was only a vision; and canst thou imagine what a desolate feeling that was. Oh, I need thee, my wife, every day, and every hour, and every minute, and every minutest particle of forever and forever. Belovedest, the robe reached me in due season, and on Sabbath day, I put it on; and truly it imparted such a noble and stately aspect to thy husband, that thou couldst not possibly have known him. He did really look tolerably personable! and, moreover, he felt as if thou wert embracing him, all the time that he was wrapt in the folds of this precious robe. Hast thou made it of such immortal stuff as the robes of Bunyan's Pilgrim were made of? else it would grieve my very heart to subject it to the wear and tear of the world. Belovedest, when dost thou mean to come home? It is a whole eternity since I saw thee. If thou art at home on a Sunday, I must and will spend it with my ownest wife. Oh, how my heart leaps at the thought. God bless thee, thou belovedest woman-angel! I cannot write a single word more; for I have stolen the time to write this from the labors of the field. I ought to be raking hay, like my brethren, who will have to labor the longer and later, on account of these few moments which I have given to thee. Now that we are in the midst of haying, we return to our toil, after an early supper. I think I never felt so vigorous as now; but, oh, I cannot be well without thee. Farewell, THINE OWNEST. Miss Sophia A. Peabody. TO MISS PEABODY _Brook Farm_, Aug. 13th, 1841 Dearest unutterably, Mrs. Ripley is going to Boston this morning, to Miss Slade's wedding; so I sit down to write a word to thee, not knowing whither to direct it. My heart searches for thee, but wanders about vaguely, and is strangely dissatisfied. Where art thou? I fear that thou didst spend yesterday in the unmitigated east wind of the seacoast. Perhaps thou art shivering, at this moment. Dearest, I would that I were with thee. It seems as if all evil things had more power over thee, when I am away. Then thou art exposed to noxious winds, and to pestilence, and to death-like weariness; and, moreover, nobody knows how to take care of thee but thy husband. Everybody else thinks it of importance that thou shouldst paint and sculpture; but it would be no trouble to me, if thou shouldst never touch clay or canvas again. It is not what thou dost, but what thou art, that I concern myself about. And if thy mighty works are to be wrought only by the anguish of thy head, and weariness of thy frame, and sinking of thy heart, then do I never desire to see another. And this should be the feeling of all thy friends. Especially ought it to be thine, for thy husband's sake. Belovedest, I am very well, and not at all weary; for yesterday's rain gave us a holyday; and moreover the labors of the farm are not as pressing as they have been. And--joyful thought!--in a little more than a fortnight, thy husband will be free from his bondage--free to think of his Dove--free to enjoy Nature--free to think and feel! I do think that a greater weight will then be removed from me, than when Christian's burthen fell off at the foot of the cross. Even my Custom-House experience was not such a thraldom and weariness; my mind and heart were freer. Oh, belovedest, labor is the curse of the world, and nobody can meddle with it, without becoming proportionably brutified. Dost thou think it a praiseworthy matter, that I have spent five golden months in providing food for cows and horses? Dearest, it is not so. Thank God, my soul is not utterly buried under a dung-heap. I shall yet retain it, somewhat defiled, to be sure, but not utterly unsusceptible of purification. Farewell now, truest wife. It is time that this letter were sealed. Love me; for I love thee infinitely, and pray for thee, and rejoice in thee, and am troubled for thee--for I know not where thou art, nor how thou dost. THINE OWNEST. Miss Sophia A. Peabody, Care of Mr. Daniel Newhall, Lynn, Mass. TO MISS PEABODY _Brook Farm_, 18th Aug. 1841. ½ 12 P.M. Belovedest, Mrs. Ripley met me at the door, as I came home from work, and told me that Mary was at Mrs. Park's, and that I might have an opportunity to send a message to thee. Whether thou hast written I do not know. At all events, Mrs. Ripley has not yet given me the letter; nor have I had a chance to ask her what she has heard about thee; such a number of troublesome and intrusive people are there in this thronged household of ours. Dearest, if thou hast not written, thou art very sick--one or the other is certain. That wretched and foolish woman! Why could not she have put the letter on my table, so that I might have been greeted by it immediately on entering my room? She is not fit to live. Dearest, I am very well; only somewhat tired with walking half a dozen miles immediately after breakfast, and raking hay ever since. We shall quite finish haying this week; and then there will be no more very hard or constant labor, during the one other week that I shall remain a slave. Most beloved, I received thy Lynn letter on Saturday, and thy Boston letter yesterday. Then thou didst aver that thou wast very well--but thou didst not call thyself magnificent. Why art thou not magnificent? In thy former letter, thou sayest that thou hast not been so well for two months past. Naughtiest wife, hast thou been unwell for two months? Ownest, since writing the above, I have been to dinner; and still Mrs. Ripley has given no sign of having a letter for me; nor was it possible for me to ask her--nor do I know when I can see her alone, to inquire about thee. Surely thou canst not have let Mary come without a letter. And if thou art sick, why did she come at all? Belovedest, the best way is always to send thy letters by the mail; and then I shall know where to find them. Aug. 17th--After breakfast.--Dearest, thou didst not write--that seems very evident. I have not, even yet, had an opportunity to ask Mrs. Ripley about thee; for she was gone out last evening; and when she came back, Miss Ripley and another lady were with her. She mentioned, however, that thy sister Mary looked very bright and happy; so I suppose thou couldst not be very intensely and dangerously sick. I might have asked Mrs. Ripley how thou didst, even in the presence of those two women; but I have an inexpressible and unconquerable reluctance to speak of thee to almost anybody. It seems a sin. Well; I do not feel so apprehensive about thy health as I did yesterday; but, sweetest, if thou hadst sent some distinct message, even though not a letter, it would have saved thy husband some disquietude. Now farewell for the present. I do long to see thee, but know not how to get to thee. Dost thou love me at all? It is a great while since thou hast told me so. Ownest wife, I meant to have finished this letter this afternoon, and to have sent it by William Allen in the morning; but I have just learnt that Mr. Ripley is about to start for Boston; so I conclude suddenly. God bless thee, and make thee magnificent, and keep thee so forever and ever. I love thee. I love thee. Thine Ownest. Do not write to me, if thou art not well. Miss Sophia A. Peabody, Boston, Mass. [blank page] TO MISS PEABODY _Brook Farm_, Aug. 22nd, 1841 Most dear wife, it seems a long time since I have written to thee. Dost thou love me at all? I should have been reprehensible in not writing, the last time Mr. and Mrs. Ripley went to town; but I had an indispensable engagement in the bean-field--whither, indeed, I was glad to betake myself, in order to escape a parting scene with poor Mr. Farley. He was quite out of his wits, the night before, and thy husband sat up with him till long past midnight. The farm is pleasanter now that he is gone; for his unappeasable wretchedness threw a gloom over everything. Since I last wrote to thee, we have done haying; and the remainder of my bondage will probably be light. It will be a long time, however, before I shall know how to make a good use of leisure, either as regards enjoyment or literary occupation. When am I to see thee again? The first of September comes a week from Tuesday next; but I think I shall ante-date the month, and compel it to begin on Sunday. Wilt thou consent? Then, on Saturday afternoon, (for I will pray Mr. Ripley to give me up so much time, for the sake of my past diligence) I will come to thee, dearest wife, and remain in the city till Monday evening. Thence I shall go to Salem, and spend a week there, longer or shorter according to the intensity of the occasion for my presence. I do long to see our mother and sisters; and I should not wonder if they felt some slight desire to see me. I received a letter from Louisa, a week or two since, scolding me most pathetically for my long absence. Indeed, I have been rather naughty in this respect; but I knew that it would be unsatisfactory to them and myself, if I came only for a single day--and that has been the longest space that I could command. Dearest wife, it is extremely doubtful whether Mr. Ripley will succeed in locating his community on this farm. He can bring Mr. Ellis to no terms; and the more they talk about the matter, the farther they appear to be from a settlement. Thou and I must form other plans for ourselves; for I can see few or no signs that Providence purposes to give us a home here. I am weary, weary, thrice weary of waiting so many ages. Yet what can be done? Whatever may be thy husband's gifts, he has not hitherto shown a single one that may avail to gather gold. I confess that I have strong hopes of good from this arrangement with Munroe; but when I look at the scanty avails of my past literary efforts, I do not feel authorized to expect much from the future. Well; we shall see. Other persons have bought large estates and built splendid mansions with such little books as I mean to write; so perhaps it is not unreasonable to hope that mine may enable me to build a little cottage--or, at least, to buy or hire one. But I am becoming more and more convinced, that we must not lean upon the community. Whatever is to be done, must be done by thy husband's own individual strength. Most beloved, I shall not remain here through the winter, unless with an absolute certainty that there will be a home ready for us in the spring. Otherwise I shall return to Boston,--still, however, considering myself an associate of the community; so that we may take advantage of any more favorable aspect of affairs. Dearest, how much depends on these little books! Methinks, if anything could draw out my whole strength, it should be the motives that now press upon me. Yet, after all, I must keep these considerations out of my mind, because an external purpose always disturbs, instead of assisting me. Dearest, I have written the above in not so good spirits as sometimes; but now that I have so ungenerously thrown my despondency on thee, my heart begins to throb more lightly. I doubt not that God has great good in store for us; for He would not have given us so much, unless He were preparing to give a great deal more. I love thee! Thou lovest me! What present bliss! What sure and certain hope! THINE OWNEST HUSBAND. Miss Sophia A. Peabody, 13 West-street, Boston. TO MISS PEABODY _Salem_, Sept. 3d, 1841--4 o'clock P.M. Most beloved,--Thou dost not expect a letter from thy husband; and yet, perhaps, thou wilt not be absolutely displeased should one come to thee tomorrow. At all events, I feel moved to write; though the haze and sleepiness, which always settles upon me here, will certainly be perceptible in every line. But what a letter didst thou write to me! Thou lovest like a celestial being, (as truly thou art,) and dost express thy love in heavenly language;--it is like one angel writing to another angel; but alas! the letter has miscarried, and has been delivered to a most unworthy mortal. Now wilt thou exclaim against thy husband's naughtiness! And truly he is very naughty. Well then; the letter was meant for him, and could not possibly belong to any other being, mortal or immortal. I will trust that thy idea of me is truer than my own consciousness of myself. Dearest, I have been out only once, in the day time, since my arrival. How immediately and irrecoverably (if thou didst not keep me out of the abyss) should I relapse into the way of life in which I spent my youth! If it were not for my Dove, this present world would see no more of me forever. The sunshine would never fall on me, no more than on a ghost. Once in a while, people might discern my figure gliding stealthily through the dim evening--that would be all. I should be only a shadow of the night; it is thou that givest me reality, and makest all things real for me. If, in the interval since I quitted this lonely old chamber, I had found no woman (and thou wast the only possible one) to impart reality and significance to life, I should have come back hither ere now, with the feeling that all was a dream and a mockery. Dost thou rejoice that thou hast saved me from such a fate? Yes; it is a miracle worthy even of thee, to have converted a life of shadows into the deepest truth, by thy magic touch. Belovedest, I have not yet made acquaintance with Miss Polly Metis. Mr. Foote was not in his office when I called there; so that my introduction to the erudite Polly was unavoidably deferred. I went to the Athenaeum this forenoon, and turned over a good many dusty books. When we dwell together, I intend that my Dove shall do all the reading that may be necessary, in the concoction of my various histories; and she shall repeat the substance of her researches to me. Thus will knowledge fall upon me like heavenly dew. Sweetest, it seems very long already since I saw thee; but thou hast been all the time in my thoughts; so that my being has been continuous. Therefore, in one sense, it does not seem as if we had parted at all. But really I should judge it to be twenty years since I left Brook Farm; and I take this to be one proof that my life there was an unnatural and unsuitable, and therefore an unreal one. It already looks like a dream behind me. The real Me was never an associate of the community; there has been a spectral Appearance there, sounding the horn at day-break, and milking the cows, and hoeing potatoes, and raking hay, toiling and sweating in the sun, and doing me the honor to assume my name. But be thou not deceived, Dove, of my heart. This Spectre was not thy husband. Nevertheless, it is somewhat remarkable that thy husband's hands have, during the past summer, grown very brown and rough; insomuch that many people persist in believing that he, after all, was the aforesaid spectral horn-sounder, cow-milker, potatoe-hoer, and hay-raker. But such people do not know a reality from a shadow. Enough of nonsense. Belovedest, I know not exactly how soon I shall return to the Farm. Perhaps not sooner than a fortnight from tomorrow; but, in that case. I shall pay thee an intermediate visit of one day. Wilt thou expect me on Friday or Saturday next, from ten to twelve o'clock on each day,--not earlier nor later. Miss Sophia A. Peabody, Care of Dr. N. Peabody, Boston, Mass. TO MISS PEABODY _Salem_, Septr. 9th, 1841--A.M. _Ownest love,_ In my last letter, I left it uncertain whether I should come Friday or Saturday, because I deemed it good to allow myself the freedom of choosing the day that should be most vacant from all earthly care and inconvenience, so that thou mightest be sure to meet the whole of me; and, likewise, I desired to have a brightest and sunniest day, because our meetings have so often been in clouds and drizzle. Also, I thought it well that thy expectation of seeing thy husband should be diffused over two days, so that the disappointment might be lessened, if it were impossible for me to come on the very day appointed. But these reasons are of no moment, since thou so earnestly desirest to know the day and hour. Unless the sky fall, belovedest, I will come tomorrow. I know of no obstacle; and if there were a million, it would be no matter. When once we are together, our own world is round about us, and all things else cease to exist. Belovedest, thy letter of a week from Thursday reached me not till Tuesday! It had got into the hands of the penny-post. Farewell, ownest. I love thee with infinite intensity, and think of thee continually. THINE OWNEST HUSBAND. Miss Sophia A. Peabody, Care of Dr. N. Peabody, Boston, Mass. TO MISS PEABODY _Salem_, Septr. 10th, 1841--A.M. Most dear wife, thou canst not imagine how strange it seems to me that thou shouldst ever suffer any bodily harm. I cannot conceive of it--the idea will not take the aspect of reality. Thou art to me a spirit gliding about our familiar paths; and I always feel as if thou wert beyond the reach of mortal accident--nor am I convinced to the contrary even by thy continual gashings of thy dearest fingers and sprainings of thy ancle. I love thee into the next state of existence, and therefore do not realise that thou art here as subject to corporeal harm as is thy husband himself--nay, ten times more so, because thy earthly manifestation is refined almost into spirit. But, dearest, thy accident did make thy husband's heart flutter very riotously. I wanted to hold thee in mine arms; for I had a foolish notion that thou wouldst be much better--perhaps quite well! I cannot tell thee all I felt; and still I had not the horrible feelings that I should expect, because there was a shadowiness interposed between me and the fact, so that it did not strike my heart, as the beam did thy head. Let me not speak of it any more, lest it become too real. Sweetest, thou dost please me much by criticising thy husband's stories, and finding fault with them. I do not very well recollect Monsieur de Miroir; but as to Mrs. Bullfrog, I give her up to thy severest reprehension. The story was written as a mere experiment in that style; it did not come from am depth within me--neither my heart nor mind had anything to do with it. I recollect that the Man of Adamant seemed a fine idea to me, when I looked at it prophetically; but I failed in giving shape and substance to the vision which I saw. I don't think it can be very good. Ownest wife, I cannot believe all these stories about Munroe, because such an abominable rascal never would be sustained and countenanced by respectable men. I take him to be neither better nor worse than the average of his tribe. However, I intend to have all my copy-rights taken out in my own name; and if he cheats me once, I will have nothing more to do with him, but will straightway be cheated by some other publisher--that being, of course, the only alternative. Dearest, what dost thou think of taking Governor Shirley's young French wife as the subject of one of the cuts. Thou shouldst represent her in the great chair, perhaps with a dressing glass before her, and arrayed in all manner of fantastic finery, and with an outre French air; while the old Governor is leaning fondly over her, and a Puritan counsellor or two are manifesting their disgust, in the background. A negro footman and French waiting maid might be in attendance. Do not think that I expect thee to adopt my foolish fancies about these things. Whatever thou mayst do, it will be better than I can think. In Liberty Tree, thou mightest have a vignette, representing the chair in a very battered, shattered, and forlorn condition, after it had been ejected from Hutchinson's house. This would serve to impress the reader with the woeful vicissitudes of sublunary things. Many other subjects would thy husband suggest, but he is terribly afraid that thou wouldst take one of them, instead of working out thine own inspirations. Belovedest, I long to see thee. Do be magnificently well by Saturday--yet not on my account, but thine own. Meantime, take care of thy dearest head. Thou art not fit to be trusted away from thy husband's guidance, one moment. Dear little wife, didst thou ever behold such an awful scribble as thy husband writes, since he became a farmer? His chirography always was abominable; but now it is outrageous. God bless thee, dearest and may His hand be continually outstretched over thy head. Expect me on Saturday afternoon. THINE OWNEST HUSBAND. Miss Sophia A. Peabody, Care of Dr. N. Peabody, Boston, Mass. TO MISS PEABODY _Salem_, September 14th, 1841--A.M. Ownest beloved, I know not whether thou dost expect a letter from thy husband; but I have a comfortable faith that it will not be altogether unwelcome; so I boldly sit down to scribble. I love thee transcendently; and nothing makes me more sensible of the fact, than that I write thee voluntary letters, without any external necessity. It is as if intense love should make a dumb man speak. (Alas! I hear a knocking at the door, and suspect that some untimely person is about to call me away from my Dove.) Afternoon.--Dearest, it was even as I suspected. How sad it is, that we cannot be sure of one moment's uninterrupted communication, even when we are talking together in that same old chamber, where I have spent so many quiet years! Well; thou must be content to lose some very sweet outpourings wherewith my heart would probably have covered the first, and perhaps the second page of this sheet. The amount of all would have been, that I am somewhat partial to thee--and thou hast a suspicion of that fact, already. Belovedest, Master Cheever is a very good subject for a sketch--especially if thou dost portray him in the very act of executing judgment on an evil-doer. The little urchin may be laid across his knee, and his arms and legs (and whole person, indeed) should be flying all abroad, in an agony of nervous excitement and corporeal smart. The Master, on the other hand, must be calm, rigid, without anger or pity, the very personification of that unmitigable law, whereby suffering follows sin. Meantime, the lion's head should have a sort of sly twist of one side of its mouth, and wink of one eye, in order to give the impression, that, after all, the crime and the punishment are neither of them the most serious things in the world. I would draw this sketch myself, if I had but the use of thy magic fingers. Why dost thou--being one and the same person with thy husband--unjustly keep those delicate little instruments (thy fingers, to wit) all to thyself? Then, dearest, the Acadians will do very well for the second sketch. Wilt thou represent them as just landing on the wharf?--or as presenting themselves before Governor Shirley, seated in the great chair? Another subject (if this do not altogether suit thee) might be old Cotton Mather, venerable in a three cornered hat and other antique attire, walking the streets of Boston, and lifting up his hands to bless the people, while they all revile him. An old dame should be seen flinging or emptying some vials of medicine on his head, from the latticed window of an old-fashioned house; and all around must be tokens of pestilence and mourning--as a coffin borne along, a woman or children weeping on a door-step. Canst thou paint the tolling of the old South bell? If thou likest not this subject, thou canst take the military council, holden at Boston by the Earl of Loudoun, and other captains and governors--his lordship in the great chair, an old-fashioned military figure, with a star on his breast. Some of Louis XV's commanders will give thee the costume. On the table and scattered about the room must be symbols of warfare, swords, pistols, plumed hats, a drum, trumpet, and rolled up banner, in one heap. It were not amiss that thou introduce the armed figure of an Indian chief, as taking part in the council--or standing apart from the English, erect and stern. Now for Liberty tree--there is an engraving of that famous vegetable in Snow's History of Boston; but thou wilt draw a better one out of thine own head. If thou dost represent it, I see not what scene can be beneath it, save poor Mr. Oliver taking the oath. Thou must represent him with a bag wig, ruffled sleeves, embroidered coat, and all such ornaments, because he is the representative of aristocracy and artificial system. The people may be as rough and wild as thy sweetest fancy can make them;--nevertheless, there must be one or two grave, puritanical figures in the midst. Such an one might sit in the great chair, and be an emblem of that stern spirit, which brought about the revolution. But thou wilt find this is a hard subject. But what a dolt is thy husband, thus to obtrude his counsel in the place of thine own inspiration! Belovedest, I want soon to tell thee how I love thee. Thou must not expect me till Saturday afternoon. I yearn infinitely to see thee. Heaven bless thee forever and forever. THINE OWNEST. Miss Sophia A. Peabody, Care of Dr. N. Peabody, Boston, Mass. TO MISS PEABODY _Brook Farm_, Sept. 22d, 1841--P.M. Dearest love, here is thy husband again, slowly adapting himself to the life of this queer community, whence he seems to have been absent half a life time--so utterly has he grown apart from the spirit and manners of the place. Thou knowest not how much I wanted thee, to give me a home-feeling in the spot--to keep a feeling of coldness and strangeness from creeping into my heart and making me shiver. Nevertheless, I was most kindly received; and the fields and woods looked very pleasant, in the bright sunshine of the day before yesterday. I had a friendlier disposition towards the farm, now that I am no longer obliged to toil in its stubborn furrows. Yesterday and to-day, however, the weather has been intolerable--cold, chill, sullen, so that it is impossible to be on kindly terms with Mother Nature. Would I were with thee, mine own warmest and truest-hearted wife! Belovedest, I doubt whether I shall succeed in writing another volume of Grandfather's Library, while I remain at the farm. I have not the sense of perfect seclusion, which has always been essential to my power of producing anything. It is true, nobody intrudes into my room; but still I cannot be quiet. Nothing here is settled--everything is but beginning to arrange itself--and though thy husband would seem to have little to do with aught beside his own thoughts, still he cannot but partake of the ferment around him. My mind will not be abstracted. I must observe, and think, and feel, and content myself with catching glimpses of things which may be wrought out hereafter. Perhaps it will be quite as well that I find myself unable to set seriously about literary occupation for the present. It will be good to have a longer interval between my labor of the body and that of the mind. I shall work to the better purpose, after the beginning of November. Meantime, I shall see these people and their enterprise under a new point of view, and perhaps be able to determine whether thou and I have any call to cast in our lot among them. Sweetest, our letters have not yet been brought from the Post Office; so that I have known nothing of thee since our parting. Surely we were very happy--and never had I so much peace and joy as in brooding over thine image, as thou wast revealed to me in our last interview. I love thee with all the heart I have--and more. Now farewell, most dear. Mrs. Ripley is to be the bearer of this letter; and I reserve the last page for tomorrow morning. Perhaps I shall have a blessed word from thee, ere then. Septr. 23d--Before breakfast.--Sweetest wife, thou hast not written to me. Nevertheless, I do not conclude thee to be sick, but will believe that thou hast been busy in creating Laura Bridgman. What a faithful and attentive husband thou hast! For once he has anticipated thee in writing. Belovedest, I do wish the weather would put off this sulky mood. Had it not been for the warmth and brightness of Monday, when I arrived here, I should have supposed that all sunshine had left Brook Farm forever. I have no disposition to take long walks, in such a state of the sky; nor have I any buoyancy of spirit. Thy husband is a very dull person, just at this time. I suspect he wants thee. It is his purpose, I believe, either to walk or ride to Boston, about the end of next week, and give thee a kiss--after which he will return quietly and contentedly to the farm. Oh, what joy, when he will again see thee every day! We had some tableaux last night. They were very stupid, (as, indeed, was the case with all I have ever seen) but do not thou tell Mrs. Ripley so. She is a good woman, and I like her better than I did--her husband keeps his old place in my judgment. Farewell, thou gentlest Dove--thou perfectest woman-- THINE OWNEST HUSBAND. Miss Sophia A. Peabody, Boston, Mass. TO MISS PEABODY _Brook Farm_, Septr. 25th, 1841--½ past 7 A.M. Ownest Dove, it was but just now that I thought of sending thee a few lines by Mr. Ripley; for this penning of epistles is but a wretched resource. What shall I do? What shall I do? To talk to thee in this way does not bring thee nearer; it only compels me to separate myself from thee, and put thee at a distance. Of all humbugs, pretending to alleviate mortal woes, writing is the greatest. Yet, thy two letters were a great comfort to me--so great, that they could not possibly have been dispensed with. Dearest, I did not write thee what Mr. and Mrs. Ripley said to me, because they have said nothing which I did not know before. The ground, upon which I must judge of the expediency of our abiding here, is not what they may say, but what actually is, or is likely to be; and of this I doubt whether either of them is capable of forming a correct opinion. Would that thou couldst he here--or could have been here all summer--in order to help me think what is to be done. But one thing is certain--I cannot and will not spend the winter here. The time would be absolutely thrown away, so far as regards any literary labor to be performed,--and then to suffer this famished yearning for thee, all winter long! It is impossible. Dearest, do not thou wear thyself out with working upon that bust. If it cause thee so much as a single head-ache, I shall wish that Laura Bridgman were at Jericho. Even if thou shouldst not feel thyself wearied at the time, I fear that the whole burthen of toil will fall upon thee when all is accomplished. It is no matter if Laura should go home without being sculptured--no matter if she goes to her grave without it. I dread to have thee feel an outward necessity for such a task; for this intrusion of an outward necessity into labors of the imagination and intellect is, to me, very painful. Oh, what weather! It seems to me as if every place were sunny, save Brook Farm. Nevertheless, I had rather a pleasant walk to a distant meadow, a day or two ago; and we found white and purple grapes, in great abundance, ripe, and gushing with rich juice when the hand pressed their clusters. Didst thou know what treasures of wild grapes there are in this land. If we dwell here, we will make our own wine--of which, I know, my Dove will want a great quantity. Good bye, sweetest. If thou canst contrive to send me a glimpse of sunshine, I will be the gratefullest husband on earth. I love thee inextinguishably. Thou hast no place to put all the love which I feel for thee. THINE OWNEST HUSBAND. Miss Sophia A. Peabody, Boston, Mass. TO MISS PEABODY _Brook Farm_, Septr. 27th, 1841. 7½ A.M. _Dearest love,_ Thy two letters of business came both together, Saturday evening! What an acute and energetic personage is my little Dove! I say it not in jest (though with a smile) but in good earnest, and with a comfortable purpose to commit all my business transactions to thee, when we dwell together. And why dost thou seem to apprehend that thou mayst possibly offend me. Thou canst do so never, but only make me love thee more and more. Now as to this affair with Munroe. I fully confide in thy opinion that he intends to make an unequal bargain with thy poor simple and innocent husband--never having doubted this, myself. But how is he to accomplish it? I am not, nor shall be, in the least degree in his power; whereas, he is, to a certain extent, in mine. He might announce his projected library, with me for the editor, in all the newspapers in the universe; but still I could not be bound to become the editor, unless by my own act; nor should I have the slightest scruple in refusing to be so, at the last moment, if he persisted in treating me with injustice. Then, as for his printing Grandfather's Chair, I have the copy-right in my own hands, and could and would prevent the sale, or make him account to me for the profits, in case of need. Meantime, he is making arrangements for publishing this library, contracting with other booksellers, and with printers and engravers, and, with every step, making it more difficult for himself to draw back. I, on the other hand, do nothing which I should not do, if the affair with Munroe were at an end; for if I write a book, it will be just as available for some other publisher as for him. My dearest, instead of getting me within his power by this delay, he has trusted to my ignorance and simplicity, and has put _himself_ in _my_ power. Show the contrary, if thou canst. He is not insensible of this. At our last interview, he himself introduced the subject of our bargain, and appeared desirous to close it. But thy husband was not prepared, among other reasons, because I do not yet see what materials I shall have for the republications in the library; the works that he has shown me being all ill-adapted for that purpose; and I wish first to see some French and German books, which he has sent for to New York. And, belovedest, before concluding the bargain, I have promised George Hillard to consult him and let him do the business. Is not this consummate discretion? And is not thy husband perfectly safe? Then why does my Dove put herself into a fever? Rather, let her look at the matter with the same perfect composure that I do, who see all around my own position, and know that it is impregnable. Most sweet wife, I cannot write thee any more at present, as Mr. Ripley is going away instantaneously; but we will talk at length on Saturday, when God means to send me to thee. I love thee infinitely, and admire thee beyond measure, and trust thee in all things, and will never transact any business without consulting thee--though on some rare occasions, it may happen that I will have my own way, after all. I feel inclined to break off this engagement with Munroe; as thou advisest, though not for precisely the reasons thou urgest; but of this hereafter. THY MOST OWN HUSBAND. Miss Sophia A. Peabody, Care of Dr. N. Peabody, Boston, Mass. TO MISS PEABODY _Brook Farm_, Septr. 29th, 1841.--A.M. Ownest wife, I love thee most exceedingly--never so much before; though I am sure I have loved thee through a past eternity. How dost thou do? Dost thou remember that, the day after tomorrow, thou art to meet thy husband? Does thy heart thrill at the thought? Dearest love, thy husband was elected to two high offices, last night--viz., to be a Trustee of the Brook Farm estate, and Chairman of the Committee of Finance!!!! Now dost thou not blush to have formed so much lower an opinion of my business talents, than is entertained by other discerning people? From the nature of my office, I shall have the chief direction of all the money affairs of the community--the making of bargains--the supervision of receipts and expenditures &c. &c. &c. Thou didst not think of this, when thou didst pronounce me unfit to make a bargain with that petty knave of a publisher. A prophet has no honor among those of his own kindred, nor a financier in the judgment of his wife. Belovedest, my accession to these august offices does not at all decide the question of my remaining here permanently. I told Mr. Ripley, that I could not spend the winter at the farm, and that it was quite uncertain whether I returned in the spring. Now, farewell, most dear and sweet wife. Of course, thou canst not expect that a man in eminent public station will have much time to devote to correspondence with a Dove. I will remember thee in the intervals of business, and love thee in all my leisure moments. Will not this satisfy thee? God bless thee, mine ownest--my treasure--thou gold and diamond of my soul!--my possession forever--my enough and to spare, yet never, never, to be spared! Sweetest, if it should be very stormy on Saturday, expect me not--but the first fair day thereafter. I put all my love into one kiss, and have twice as much left as before. THY TRUEST HUSBAND. Miss Sophia A. Peabody, Care of Dr. N. Peabody, Boston, Mass. TO MISS PEABODY _Brook Farm_, Octr. 9th--Before Breakfast [1841] _Most dear,_ Here is thy husband trying to write to thee, while it is so dark that he can hardly see his own scribble--not that it is very early; for the sun is up long ago, and ought to be shining into my window. But this dismal gloom! I positively cannot submit to have this precious month all darkened with cloud and sullied with drizzle. Dearest, I return the manuscript tale. It is pretty enough; but I doubt whether it be particularly suited to the American public; and, if intended for publication, I trust it will undergo a very severe revision. It will need it. I speak frankly about this matter; but I should do the same (only more frankly still) if the translation were my Dove's own. I wonder whether Munroe has yet returned Grandfather's Chair to Elizabeth. I send back his books to-day. Belovedest, I think thou wilt see me in the latter half of next week. Thou needest not to give up any visit to South Boston on this account; for I cannot get to thee before twelve o'clock. It will be but an hour or so's visit. Thine with deepest and keenest love, THEODORE DE L'AUBEPINE. Miss Sophia A. Peabody, Care of Dr. N. Peabody, Boston, Mass. TO MISS PEABODY _Brook Farm_, October 18th, Saturday [1841] Most dear wife, I received thy letter and note, last night, and was much gladdened by them; for never has my soul so yearned for thee as now. But, belovedest, my spirit is moved to talk to thee to day about these magnetic miracles, and to beseech thee to take no part in them. I am unwilling that a power should be exercised on thee, of which we know neither the origin nor the consequence, and the phenomena of which seem rather calculated to bewilder us, than to teach us any truths about the present or future state of being. If I possessed such a power over thee, I should not dare to exercise it; nor can I consent to its being exercised by another. Supposing that this power arises from the transfusion of one spirit into another, it seems to me that the sacredness of an individual is violated by it; there would be an intrusion into thy holy of holies--and the intruder would not be thy husband! Canst thou think, without a shrinking of thy soul, of any human being coming into closer communion with thee than I may?--than either nature or my own sense of right would permit me? I cannot. And, dearest, thou must remember, too, that thou art now a part of me, and that, by surrendering thyself to the influence of this magnetic lady, thou surrenderest more than thine own moral and spiritual being--allowing that the influence _is_ a moral and spiritual one. And, sweetest, I really do not like the idea of being brought, through thy medium, into such an intimate relation with Mrs. Park! Now, ownest wife, I have no faith whatever that people are raised to the seventh heaven, or to any heaven at all, or that they gain any insight into the mysteries of life beyond death, by means of this strange science. Without distrusting that the phenomena which thou tellest me of, and others as remarkable, have really occurred, I think that they are to be accounted for as the result of a physical and material, not of a spiritual, influence. _Opium_ has produced many a brighter vision of heaven (and just as susceptible of proof) than those which thou recountest. They are dreams, my love--and such dreams as thy sweetest fancy, either waking or sleeping, could vastly improve upon. And what delusion can be more lamentable and mischievous, than to mistake the physical and material for the spiritual? What so miserable as to lose the soul's true, though hidden, knowledge and consciousness of heaven, in the mist of an earth-born vision? Thou shalt not do this. If thou wouldst know what heaven is, before thou comest thither hand in hand with thy husband, then retire into the depths of thine own spirit, and thou wilt find it there among holy thoughts and feelings; but do not degrade high Heaven and its inhabitants into any such symbols and forms as those which Miss Larned describes--do not let an earthly effluence from Mrs. Park's corporeal system bewilder thee, and perhaps contaminate something spiritual and sacred. I should as soon think of seeking revelations of the future state in the rottenness of the grave--where so many do seek it. Belovedest wife, I am sensible that these arguments of mine may appear to have little real weight; indeed, what I write does no sort of justice to what I think. But I care the less for this, because I know that my deep and earnest feeling upon the subject will weigh more with thee than all the arguments in the world. And thou wilt know that the view which I take of this matter is caused by no want of faith in mysteries, but from a deep reverence of the soul, and of the mysteries which it knows within itself, but never transmits to the earthly eye or ear. Keep thy imagination sane--that is one of the truest conditions of communion with Heaven. Dearest, after these grave considerations, it seems hardly worth while to submit a merely external one; but as it occurs to me, I will write it. I cannot think, without invincible repugnance, of thy holy name being bruited abroad in connection with these magnetic phenomena. Some (horrible thought!) would pronounce my Dove an impostor; the great majority would deem thee crazed; and even the few believers would feel a sort of interest in thee, which it would be anything but pleasant to excite. And what adequate motive can there be for exposing thyself to all this misconception? Thou wilt say, perhaps, that thy visions and experiences would never be known. But Miss Larned's are known to all who choose to listen. October 19th. Monday.--Most beloved, what a preachment have I made to thee! I love thee, I love thee, I love thee, most infinitely. Love is the true magnetism. What carest thou for any other? Belovedest, it is probable that thou wilt see thy husband tomorrow. Art thou magnificent? God bless thee. What a bright day is here; but the woods are fading now. It is time I were in the city, for the winter. THINE OWNEST. Miss Sophia A. Peabody, Care of Dr. N. Peabody, Boston, Mass. TO MISS PEABODY _Brook Farm_, October 21st, 1841--Noon Ownest beloved, I know thou dost not care in the least about receiving a word from thy husband--thou lovest me not--in fact thou hast quite forgotten that such a person exists. I do love thee so much, that I really think that all the love is on my side;--there is no room for any more in the whole universe. Sweetest, I have nothing at all to say to thee--nothing, I mean, that regards this external world; and as to matters of the heart and soul, they are not to be written about. What atrocious weather! In all this month, we have not had a single truly October day; it has been a real November month, and of the most disagreeable kind. I came to this place in one snowstorm, and shall probably leave it in another; so that my reminiscences of Brook Farm are like to be the coldest and dreariest imaginable. But next month, thou, belovedest, will be my sunshine and my summer. No matter what weather it may be then. Dearest, good bye. Dost thou love me after all? Art thou magnificently well? God bless thee. Thou didst make me infinitely happiest, at our last meeting. Was it a pleasant season likewise to thee? Thine ownest, THEODORE DE L'AUBEPINE. Miss Sophia A. Peabody, Care of Dr. N. Peabody, Boston, Mass. TO MISS PEABODY _Salem_, Novr. 27th, 1841 _Dearest Soul,_ I know not whether thou wilt have premonitions of a letter from thy husband; but I feel absolutely constrained to write thee a few lines this morning, before I go up in town. I love thee--I love thee--and I have no real existence but in thee. Never before did my bosom so yearn for the want of thee--so thrill at the thought of thee. Thou art a mighty enchantress, my little Dove, and hast quite subdued a strong man, who deemed himself independent of all the world. I am a captive under thy little foot, and look to thee for life. Stoop down and kiss me--or I die! Dearest, I am intolerably weary of this old town; and I would that my visits might not be oftener than once in ten years, instead of a fortnight. Dost thou not think it really the most hateful place in all the world? My mind becomes heavy and nerveless, the moment I set my foot within its precincts. Nothing makes me wonder more than that I found it possible to write all my tales in this same region of sleepy-head and stupidity. But I suppose the characteristics of the place are reproduced in the tales; and that accounts for the overpowering disposition to slumber which so many people experience, in reading thy husband's productions. Belovedest, according to thy instructions, I have been very careful in respect to mince-pies and other Thanksgiving dainties; and so have passed pretty well through the perils of the carnival season. Thou art a dearest little wife, and I would live on bread and water, to please thee, even if such temperate regimen should produce no other good. But truly thou art very wise in thy dietetic rules; and it is well that I have such a wife to take care of me; inasmuch as I am accustomed to eat whatever is given me, with an appetite as indiscriminate, though not quite so enormous, as that of an ostrich. Setting aside fat pork, I refuse no other Christian meat. Dearest, I write of nothing; for I had nothing to write when I began, save to make thee aware that I loved thee infinitely; and now that thou knowest it, there is no need of saying a word more. On Monday evening, please God, I shall see thee. How would I have borne it, if thy visit to Ida Russel were to commence before my return to thine arms? God bless thee, mine ownest. THY TRUEST HUSBAND. Miss Sophia A. Peabody, Care of Dr. N. Peabody, Boston, Mass. TO MISS PEABODY 54 Pinckney St., Jany. 1st, [1842] _Very dearest,_ I would gladly go to Salem immediately if I could, but I am detained here by some ceremonies, which are needful to be gone through, previous to my final deliverance from the Custom-House. As Mr. Bancroft is not expected back from Washington for some days, I shall probably remain till nearly the close of next week. Meantime, I must be near at hand, because my presence may be required at any moment. Naughtiest, thou shouldst not put thy little white hands into cold clay. Canst thou not use warm water? How canst thou hope for any warmth of conception and execution, when thou art working with material as cold as ice? As to the proof-sheets, I think we need not trouble.... (Remainder of letter missing) TO MISS PEABODY _Salem_, Jany. 20th, 1842--11 o'clock A.M. _Truest Heart,_ Here is thy husband in his old chamber, where he produced those stupendous works of fiction, which have since impressed the Universe with wonderment and awe! To this chamber, doubtless, in all succeeding ages, pilgrims will come to pay their tribute of reverence;--they will put off their shoes at the threshold, for fear of desecrating the tattered old carpet. "There," they will exclaim, "is the very bed in which he slumbered, and where he was visited by those ethereal visions, which he afterward fixed forever in glowing words! There is the wash-stand, at which this exalted personage cleansed himself from the stains of earth, and rendered his outward man a fitting exponent of the pure soul within. There, in its mahogany frame, is the dressing-glass, which reflected that noble brow, those hyacinthine locks, that mouth, bright with smiles, or tremulous with feeling, that flashing or melting eye, that--in short, every item of the magnanimous phiz of this unexampled man! There is the pine table--there the old flag-bottomed chair--in which he sat, and at which he scribbled, during his agonies of inspiration! There is the old chest of drawers, in which he kept what shirts a poor author may be supposed to have possessed! There is the closet, in which was reposited his threadbare suit of black! There is the worn-out shoe-brush with which this polished writer polished his boots. There is--" but I believe this will be pretty much all;--so here I close the catalogue. Most dear, I love thee beyond all limits, and write to thee because I cannot help it;--nevertheless, writing grows more and more an inadequate and unsatisfactory mode of revealing myself to thee. I no longer think of saying anything deep, because I feel that the deepest and truest must remain unsaid. We have left expression--at least, such expression as can be achieved with pen and ink--far behind us. Even the spoken word has long been inadequate. Looks are a better language; but, bye-and-bye, our spirits will demand some more adequate expression even than these. And thus it will go on; until we shall be divested of these earthly forms, which are at once our medium of expression, and the impediments to full communion. Then we shall melt into [one] another, and all be expressed, once and continually, without a word--without an effort. Belovedest, my cold is very comfortable now. Mrs. Hillard gave me some homo--I don't know how to spell it--homeopathic medicine, of which I took a dose last night; and shall not need another. Art thou likewise well? Didst thou weary thy poor little self to death, yesterday? I do not think that I could possibly undergo the fatigue and distraction of mind which thou dost. Thou art ten times as powerful as I, because thou art so much more ethereal. Sweetest, thy husband has recently been both lectured about and preached about, here in his native city. The preacher was Rev. Mr. Fox of Newburyport; but how he contrived to hook me into a sermon, I know not. I trust he took for his text that which was spoken of my namesake of old--"Behold an Israelite indeed, in whom there is no guile." Belovedest, if ever thou shouldst happen to hear me lauded on any public occasion, I shall expect thee to rise, and make thine own and my acknowledgments, in a neat and appropriate speech. Wilt thou not? Surely thou wilt--inasmuch as I care little for applause, save as it shall please thee; so it is rather thy concern than mine. Mine ownest, it is by no means comfortable to be separated from thee three whole days at a time. It is too great a gap in life. There is no sunshine in the days in which thou dost not shine on me. And speaking of sunshine, what a beautifullest day (to the outward eye, I mean) was yesterday; and to-day seems equally bright and gladsome, although I have not yet tasted the fresh air. I trust that thou has flown abroad, and soared upward to the seventh heaven. But do not stay there, sweetest Dove! Come back for me; for I shall never get there, unless by the aid of thy wings. Now God bless thee, and make thee happy and joyful, until Saturday evening, when thou must needs bear the infliction of THINE OWNEST HUSBAND. Miss Sophia A. Peabody, Care of Dr. N. Peabody, Boston, Mass. TO MISS PEABODY _Salem_, Feby. 27th, 1842--Forenoon _Thou dearest Heart,_ As it is uncertain whether I shall return to Boston tomorrow, I write thee a letter; for I need to commune with thee; and even if I should bring the scroll of my thoughts and feelings with me, perhaps thou wilt not refuse to receive it. It is awful, almost (and yet I would not have it otherwise, for the world) to feel how necessary thou hast become to my well-being, and how my spirit is disturbed at a separation from thee, and stretches itself out through the dimness and distance to embrace its other self. Thou art my quiet and satisfaction--not only my chiefest joy, but the condition of all other enjoyments. When thou art away, vague fears and misgivings sometimes steal upon me; there are heart-quakes and spirit-sinkings for no real cause, and which never trouble me when thou art with me. Belovedest, I have thought much of thy parting injunction to tell my mother and sisters that thou art her daughter and their sister. I do not think that thou canst estimate what a difficult task thou didst propose to me--not that any awful and tremendous effect would be produced by the disclosure; but because of the strange reserve, in regard to matters of feeling, that has always existed among us. We are conscious of one another's feelings, always; but there seems to be a tacit law, that our deepest heart-concernments are not to be spoken of. I cannot gush out in their presence--I cannot take my heart in my hand, and show it to them. There is a feeling within me (though I know it is a foolish one) as if it would be as indecorous to do so, as to display to them the naked breast. And they are in the same state as myself. None, I think, but delicate and sensitive persons could have got into such a position; but doubtless this incapacity of free communion, in the hour of especial need, is meant by Providence as a retribution for something wrong in our early intercourse. Then it is so hard to speak of thee--_really_ of thee--to anybody! I doubt whether I ever have _really_ spoken of thee to any person. I have spoken the name of Sophia, it is true; but the idea in my mind was apart from thee--it embraced nothing of thine inner and essential self; it was an outward and faintly-traced shadow that I summoned up, to perform thy part, and which I placed in the midst of thy circumstances; so that thy sister Mary, or Mrs. Ripley, or even Margaret, were deceived, and fancied that I was talking about thee. But there didst thou lie, thy real self, in my deepest, deepest heart, while far above, at the surface, this distant image of thee was the subject of talk. And it was not without an effort which few are capable of making, that I could ever do so much; and even then I felt as if it were profane. Yet I spoke to persons from whom, if from any, I might expect true sympathy in regard to thee. I tell thee these things, in order that my Dove, into whose infinite depths the sunshine falls continually, may perceive what a cloudy veil stretches over the abyss of my nature. Thou wilt not think that it is caprice or stubbornness that has made me hitherto resist thy wishes. Neither. I think, is it a love of secrecy and darkness. I am glad to think that God sees through my heart; and if any angel has power to penetrate into it, he is welcome to know everything that is there. Yes; and so may any mortal, who is capable of full sympathy, and therefore worthy to come into my depths. But he must find his own way there. I can neither guide him nor enlighten him. It is this involuntary reserve, I suppose, that has given the objectivity to my writings. And when people think that I am pouring myself out in a tale or essay, I am merely telling what is common to human nature, not what is peculiar to myself. I sympathise with them--not they with me. Feb. 28th--Forenoon.--Sweetest, thou shalt have this letter instead of thy husband, to-night. Dost thou love me? I shall not find any letter from thee at the Post Office, because thou dost expect to hear my footsteps on thy staircase, at six o'clock this evening. Oh, but another day will quickly pass; and then this yearning of the soul will be appeased, for a little while at least. I wonder, I wonder, I wonder, where on earth we are to set up our tabernacle. God knows;--but I want to know too. Dearest love, I am very well, and comfortable as I desire to be, in thy absence. After all, it is a happiness to need thee, to sigh for thee, to feel the nothingness of all things without thee. But do not thou think so--thou must be happy always, not independently of thy husband, but with a bliss equally pervading presence and absence. Belovedest, I have employed most of my time here in collecting curiosities, and have so many on my hands that I begin to fear it will require a volume to contain the catalogue. I would we had such a museum in reality. And now good-bye, most true Heart. Methinks this is the longest letter that I have written thee for a great while. Shalt thou expect me to write during my journey to New York?--or, were it not better to allow thee to forget me entirely, during that interval of a week? God bless thee, thou unforgettablest and unforgettingest, THINE OWNEST HUSBAND. Miss Sophia A. Peabody, Care of Dr. N. Peabody, 13 West-street, Boston, Mass. TO MISS PEABODY _New York_, March 4th, 1842 Dearest, I can find only this torn sheet of paper, on which to scribble thee a bulletin. We are arrived safely; but I am very homesick for thee--otherwise well and in good spirits. I love thee infinitely much. Belovedest, I know not whether the Colonel and I will leave this city on Monday or Tuesday, but if thou hast not already written, it will be to[o] late to direct a letter hither. In that case, best wife, write to Albany--whence I shall write to thee. The steam-engine kept me awake last night; but I cared not, for I was thinking about thee. I am exceedingly well. Dost thou love me? Thine ownest HUSBAND. Miss Sophia A. Peabody, Care of Dr. N. Peabody, Boston, Mass. TO MISS PEABODY _Albany_, March 10th, 1842 Mine own Heart, I arrived here early this morning, by the steamboat; and thou mayst be well assured that I lost no time in going to the Post Office; and never did even a letter from thee so thrill my heart as this. There is no expressing what I feel; and so I will not try--especially now when I am compelled to write in a bar-room with people talking and drinking around me. But I love thee a thousand infinities more than ever. Most dear, I have come hither to see Mr. O'Sullivan, with whom I have relations of business as well as friendship, all which thou shalt know, if thou thinkest them worth enquiring about. The good colonel is with me; but is going about a hundred miles into the interior, tomorrow. In the meantime I shall remain here; but thou wilt see me again on Tuesday evening. How is it possible to wait so long? It is not possible--yet I have much to talk of with O'Sullivan; and this will be the longest absence that we shall be compelled to endure, before the time when thou shalt be the companion of all my journeys. Truest wife, it is possible that the cars may not arrive in Boston till late in the evening; but I have good hope to be with thee by six o'clock, or a little after, on Tuesday. God bless us. THINE OWNEST. Miss Sophia A. Peabody, Care of Dr. N. Peabody, Boston, Mass. _Salem_, Wednesday, April 5th, 1842 _My Dear,_ It was thy husband's intention to spend all his leisure time, here at home, in sketching out a tale; but my spirit demands communion with thine so earnestly, that I must needs write to thee, if all the affairs in the world were pressing on me at once. My breast is full of thee; thou art throbbing throughout all my veins. Never, it seems to me, did I know what love was, before. And yet I am not satisfied to let that sentence pass; for it would do wrong to the blissful and holy time that we have already enjoyed together. But our hearts are new-created for one another daily, and they enter upon existence with such up-springing rapture as if nothing had ever existed before--as if, at this very _now_, the physical and spiritual world were but first discovered, and by ourselves only. This is Eternity--thus will every moment of forever-and-ever be the first moment of life, and no weariness can gather upon us from the past. It is a bliss which I never wish to enjoy, when I can attain that of thy presence; but it is nevertheless a fact, that there is a bliss even in being absent from thee. This yearning that disturbs my very breath--this earnest stretching out of my soul towards thee--this voice of my heart, calling for thee out of its depths, and complaining that thou art not instantly given to it--all these are a joy; for they make me know how entirely our beings have blended into one another. After all, these pangs are but symptoms of the completeness of our spiritual union--the effort of the outward to respond to the inward. Dearest, I do not express myself clearly on this matter; but what need?--wilt not thou know better what I mean than words could tell thee? Dost not thou too rejoice in everything that gives thee a more vivid consciousness that we are one?--even if it have something like pain in it. The desire of my soul is to know thee continually, and to know that thou art mine; and absence, as well as presence, gives me this knowledge--and as long as I have it, I live. It is, indeed, impossible for us ever to be really absent from one another; the only absence, for those who love, is estrangement or forgetfulness--and we can never know what those words mean. Oh, dear me, my mind writes nonsense, because it is an insufficient interpreter for my heart. ... Most beloved, I am thinking at this moment of thy dearest nose! Thou canst not know how infinitely better I know and love Sophie Hawthorne, since she has yielded up that fortress. And, in requital, I yield my whole self up to her, and kiss her beloved foot, and acknowledge her for my queen and liege-lady forever more. Come into my heart, dearest; for I am about to close my letter. Hitherto, I have kept thee at arms' length; because the very act of writing necessarily supposes that thou art apart from me; but now I throw down the pen, in order that thou mayst be the closer to me. Thine ownest Husband, NATH. HAWTHORNE. Miss Sophia A. Peabody, Care of Dr. N. Peabody, Boston, Mass. TO MISS PEABODY 54 Pinckney St., Monday, 11 o'clock A.M. [1842] _Most dear love,_ I have been caught by a personage who has been in search of me for two or three days, and shall be compelled to devote this unfortunate evening to him, instead of to my Dove. Dost thou regret it?--so does thy poor husband, who loves thee infinitely, and needs thee continually. Art thou well to-day very dearest? How naughty was I, last night, to contend against thy magnetic influence, and turn it against thyself! I will not do so again. My head has been in pain for thine--at least my heart has. Thou wast very sweet and lovely, last night--so art thou always. Belovedest, thou knowest not how I yearn for thee--how I long and pray for the time when we may be together without disturbance--when absence shall be a rare exception to our daily life. My heart will blossom like a rose, when it can be always under thy daily influence--when the dew of thy love will be falling upon it, every moment. Most sweet, lest I should not be able to avoid another engagement for tomorrow evening, I think it best for me to come in the afternoon--shortly after two o'clock, on Tuesday. Canst thou devote so much of thy precious day to my unworthiness? Unless I hear from thee, I shall come. I love thee. I love thee. Dearest, I kiss thee with my whole spirit. Thy husband, THEODORE DE L'AUBEPINE. Miss Sophia A. Peabody, Care of Dr. N. Peabody, Boston, Mass. TO MISS PEABODY 54 Pinckney St., May 19th [1842] _My Ownest_, Mr. Hillard, this morning, put into my hands the enclosed paragraph from the Philadelphia Saturday Courier. It is to be hoped that the penny papers of this city will copy an item of so much public importance. Canst thou tell me whether the "Miss Peabody" here mentioned, is Miss Mary or Miss Elizabeth Peabody? THINE OWNEST. P.S. Please to present my congratulations to the "accomplished Miss Peabody." But I shall call, this evening, and present them in person. Miss Sophia A. Peabody, 13 West-street, Boston. TO MISS PEABODY 54 Pinckney St., May 27th, 1842 _Dearest Heart_, Thy letter to my sisters was most beautiful--sweet, gentle, and magnanimous; such as no angel save my Dove, could have written. If they do not love thee, it will be because they have no hearts to love with;--and even if this were the case, I should not despair of thy planting the seeds of hearts in their bosoms. They will love thee, all in good time, dearest; and we will be very happy. I am so at this moment, while my breast heaves with the consciousness of what a treasure God has given me--in whom I see more to worship, and admire, and love, every day of my life; and shall see more and more as long as I live; else, it will be because my own nature retrogrades, instead of advancing. But thou wilt make me better and better, till I am even worthy to be thy husband. Oh, truest wife, what a long widowhood is this! Three evenings without a glimpse of thee! And I know not whether I am to come at six or seven o'clock tomorrow evening--or scarcely, indeed, whether I am to come at all. But, unless thou orderest me to the contrary, I shall come at seven o'clock. I met Mr. Emerson at the Athenaeum yesterday. He tells me that our garden, &c., makes fine progress. Would that we were there. God bless us. THINE OWNEST. Miss Sophia A. Peabody, No. 13 West-street, Boston. TO MISS PEABODY _Salem_, June 9th, 1842--Afternoon _Dearest wife_, I love thee beyond all hope of expression--so do thou measure it by thine own love for me, if indeed thou canst continue to love me, after our parting. But never did I love thee better than then; and I am even glad that this vapor of tobacco smoke did, for once, roll thus darkly and densely between us, because it helps me to hate the practice forevermore. Thou wast very sweet not to scold me fiercely, for allowing myself to be so impregnated. Sweetest, scarcely had I arrived here, when our mother came out of her chamber, looking better and more cheerful than I have seen her this some time, and enquired about the health and well-being of my Dove! Very kindly too. Then was thy husband's heart much lightened; for I knew that almost every agitating circumstance of her life had hitherto cost her a fit of sickness; and I knew not but it might be so now. Foolish me, to doubt that my mother's love would be wise, like all other genuine love! And foolish again, to have doubted my Dove's instinct--whom, henceforth--(if never before)--I take for my unerring guide and counsellor in all matters of the heart and soul. Yet if, sometimes, I should perversely follow mine own follies, do not thou be discouraged. I shall always acknowledge thy superior wisdom in the end; and, I trust, not too late for it to exert its good influence. Now I am very happy--happier than my naughtiness deserves. It seems that our mother had seen how things were, a long time ago. At first, her heart was troubled, because she knew that much of outward as well as inward fitness was requisite to secure thy foolish husband's peace; but, gradually and quietly, God has taught her that all is good; and so, thou dearest wife, we shall have her fullest blessing and concurrence. My sisters, too, begin to sympathise as they ought; and all is well. God be praised! I thank Him on my knees, and pray him to make me worthy of thee, and of the happiness thou bringest me. Mine ownest, I long for thee, yet bear our separation patiently, because time and space, and all other finite obstructions, are so fast flitting away from between us. We can already measure the interval by days and hours. What bliss!--and what awe is intermingled with it!--no fear nor doubt, but a holy awe, as when an immortal spirit is drawing near to the gate of Heaven. I cannot tell what I feel; but thou knowest it all. Sweetest, it is my purpose to remain here till Friday, when, unless thou forbiddest me, I shall be with thee at seven o'clock. God bless thee! I have no more words, but a heart full of love. THINE OWNEST HUSBAND. Miss Sophia A. Peabody, Care of Dr. N. Peabody, Boston, Mass. TO MISS PEABODY _Salem_, June 20th, 1842--A.M. 11 o'clock _True and Honorable Wife_, Thou hast not been out of mind a moment since I saw thee last,--and never wilt thou be, so long as we exist. Canst thou say as much? Dearest, dost thou know that there are but ten days more in this blessed month of June? And dost thou remember what is to happen within those ten days? Poor little Dove! Now dost thou tremble, and shrink back, and beginnest to fear that thou hast acted too rashly in this matter. Now dost thou say to thyself--"Oh, that I could prevail upon this wretched person to allow me a month or two longer to make up my mind; for, after all, he is but an acquaintance of yesterday; and unwise am I, to give up father, mother, and sisters, for the sake of such a questionable stranger!" Ah, foolish virgin! It is too late; nothing can part us now; for God Himself hath ordained that we shall be one. So nothing remains, but to reconcile thyself to thy destiny. Year by year, thou must come closer and closer to me; and a thousand ages hence, we shall be only in the honeymoon of our marriage. Poor little Dove! Sweetest wife, I cannot write to thee. The time for that species of communion is past. Hereafter, I cannot write my feelings, but only external things, business, facts, details, matters which do not relate to the heart and soul, but merely to our earthly condition. I have long had such a feeling, whenever I took up my pen--and now more than ever. Would that I knew when the priest is to thrust himself between us! Dearest, the last day of the month, if I mistake not, is Thursday, of next week. Unless thou desirest my presence sooner, I shall return to Boston probably on Sunday evening. Then will the days lag heavily, till we can flee away and be at rest. And, I pray thee, let our flight be in the morning; for it would be strange and wearisome to live half a day of ordinary life at such an epoch. I should be like a body walking about the city without a soul--being therein the reverse of good old Dr. Harris, whose soul walks about without the body. And this reminds me, that he has not made himself visible of late. Foolish me, not to have accosted him; for perhaps he wished to give us some good advice on our entrance into connubial life--or possibly, he intended to disclose the hiding-place of some ancient hoard of gold, which would have freed us forever from all pecuniary cares. I think we shall not need his counsel on the former point; but on the latter, it would have been peculiarly acceptable. Ownest, would there be anything amiss in exchanging that copy of Southey's Poems for some other book? We should still have Campbell's English Poets as an immediate keepsake from Miss Burley; and whatever book we might procure would be none the less a gift from her. My copy of Southey went to the Manse with my furniture; else I should have brought it hither and given it to Elizabeth--who, however, does not especially admire Southey. Now good bye, dearest love. I fear thou wilt make thyself sick with much care and toil. God bless thee! Our mother and sisters would send their love, if they knew that I am writing to thee. They love thee, and link us together in their thoughts. God bless them, and us, and everybody. Dost thou perceive how love widens my heart? THINE OWNEST HUSBAND. Miss Sophia A. Peabody, Care of Dr. N. Peabody, Boston, Mass. TO MISS PEABODY _Boston_, June 24th.--past 8 o'clock P.M. [1842] _Mine ownest_, I have just received thy letter, and rejoice unspeakably at the news which thou tellest me. Dearest, thou knowest not how I have yearned for thee during thy absence; and yet thou didst seem so well and happy there, that I sent thee a letter, yesterday morning, submitting it to thy wisdom whether thou hadst not better stay another week. But thou hast done more wisely to come; for my heart is faint with hunger for thee. I have been quite sad and dolorous at thy absence. And oh, what joy to think that henceforth there shall be no long separations for us. It has taken me so by surprise that I know not what to say upon the subject; but my heart throbs mightily. Dearest, thou canst not have a long letter to-night, because thy husband is weary, and moreover he wants to think about thee, and embrace thee a thousand million times deep within himself. Art thou quite well? Most beloved, I beseech [thee] not to agitate thyself in this removal of the household gods. I shall come on Saturday, but perhaps not till late. God bless and keep thee. Thine ownest, lovingest husband, DE L'AUBEPINE. Miss Sophia A. Peabody, Care of Dr. N. Peabody, Salem, Mass. TO MISS PEABODY 54 Pinckney St., June 27th. --7 o'clock P.M. [1842] _Most Dear_, I have just arrived from Salem, and find thy note, in which thou tellest me of thy illness. Oh, my poor little Dove, thou dost need a husband with a strong will to take care of thee; and when I have the charge of thee, thou wilt find thyself under much stricter discipline than ever before. How couldst thou be so imprudent? Yet I will not scold thee till thou art quite well. Then thou must look for scoldings and chastisement too. Belovedest, I shall not say a single word to induce thee to go through the ceremony on Monday;--nay I do not know that I will consent to its taking place then. This we will determine upon tomorrow evening. If thou art not very well indeed, I shall be afraid to take thee from under thy mother's care. And, belovedest, do not fear but that I will bear patiently any necessary delay--and I know that thou wilt recover as soon as possible, for my sake. Dearest, God bless thee. Keep thy heart quiet; and tomorrow evening we will meet in hope and joy. THY LOVINGEST HUSBAND. Miss Sophia A. Peabody, 13 West-street, Boston. TO MISS PEABODY 54 Pinckney St.--June 30th.--morning [1842] _Dearest Love_, Thy sister Mary, after I left thee, told me that it was her opinion that we should not be married for a week longer. I had hoped, as thou knowest, for an earlier day; but I cannot help feeling that Mary is on the safe and reasonable side. Shouldst thou feel that this postponement is advisable, thou wilt find me patient beyond what thou thinkest me capable of. I will even be happy, if thou wilt only keep thy mind and heart in peace. Belovedest, didst thou sleep well, last night? My pillow was haunted with ghastly dreams, the details whereof have flitted away like vapors, but a strong impression remains about thy being magnetised. God save me from any more such! I awoke in an absolute quake. Dearest, I cannot oppose thy submitting to so much of this influence as will relieve thy headache; but, as thou lovest me, do not suffer thyself to be put to sleep. My feeling on this point is so strong, that it would be wronging us both to conceal it from thee. My ownest, if it will at all reconcile thee to the ceremony, I will go to Concord, tomorrow or next day, and see about our affairs there. I would even go there and live alone, if thou didst bid me though I shall be much happier in lingering here, and visiting thy couch every evening, and hearing thee say that thou art better than the night before. What a sweet morning is this; it makes me feel bright and hopeful, after the troubles of the night. THINE OWNEST HUSBAND. P.S. I enclose an order for a case of mine, which is to be given to the baggage-wagoner, when he comes for the furniture. He can present it, and receive the case. P.S. 2d. I love thee! I love thee! I love thee. P.S. 3d. Dost thou love me at all? Miss Sophia A. Peabody, 13 West-street, Boston. TO MRS. HAWTHORNE _Salem_, March 12th (Saturday), 1843 Own wifie, how dost thou do? I have been in some anxiety about thy little head, and indeed about the whole of thy little person. Art thou ill at ease in any mode whatever? I trust that thy dearest soul will not be quite worn out of thee, with the activity and bustle of thy present whereabout, so different from the intense quiet of our home. That poor home! How desolate it is now! Last night, being awake, my thoughts travelled back to the lonely old house; and it seemed as if I was wandering up stairs and down stairs all by myself. My fancy was almost afraid to be there, alone. I could see every object in a sort of dim, gray light--our bed-chamber--the study, all in confusion--the parlor, with the fragments of that abortive breakfast on the table, and the precious silver-forks, and the old bronze image keeping its solitary stand upon the mantel-piece. Then, methought, the wretched Pigwigger came and jumped upon the window-sill, and clung there with her forepaws, mewing dismally for admittance, which I could not grant her, being there myself only in the spirit. And then came the ghost of the old Doctor stalking through the gallery, and down the staircase, and peeping into the parlor; and though I was wide awake, and conscious of being so many miles from the spot, still it was quite awful to think of the ghost having sole possession of our home; for I could not quite separate myself from it, after all. Somehow, the Doctor and I seemed to be there tete-a-tete, and I wanted thee to protect me. Why wast not thou there in thought, at the same moment; and then we should have been conscious of one another, and have had no fear, and no desolate feeling. I believe I did not have any fantasies about the ghostly kitchen-maid; but I trust Mary left the flat-irons within her reach; so that she may do all the ironing while we are away, and never disturb us more at midnight. I suppose she comes thither to iron her shroud, and perhaps, likewise, to smooth the doctor's band. Probably, during her lifetime, she allowed the poor old gentleman to go to some ordination or other grand clerical celebration with rumpled linen, and ever since, and throughout all earthly futurity (at least, so long us the house shall stand) she is doomed to exercise a nightly toil, with spiritual flat-irons. Poor sinner--and doubtless Satan heats the irons for her. What nonsense is all this!--but really, it does make me shiver to think of that poor house of ours. Glad am I that thou art not there without thy husband. I found our mother tolerably well; and Louisa, I think, in especial good condition for her, and Elizabeth comfortable, only not quite thawed. They speak of thee and me with an evident sense that we are very happy indeed, and I can see that they are convinced of my having found the very little wife that God meant for me. I obey thy injunctions, as well as I can, in my deportment towards them; and though mild and amiable manners are foreign to my nature, still I get along pretty well for a new beginner. In short, they seem content with thy husband, and I am very certain of their respect and affection for his wife. Take care of thy little self, I tell thee! I praise heaven for this snow and "slosh," because it will prevent thee from scampering all about the city, as otherwise thou wouldst infallibly have done. Lie abed late--sleep during the day--go to bed seasonably--refuse to see thy best friend, if either flesh or spirit be sensible of the slightest repugnance--drive all trouble out of thy mind--and above all things, think continually what an admirable husband thou hast! So shalt thou have quiet sleep and happy awaking; and when I fold thee to my bosom again, thou wilt be such a round, rosy, smiling little dove, that I shall feel as if I had grasped all cheerfulness and sunshine within the span of thy waist. Mrs. Sophia A. Hawthorne, Care of Dr. N. Peabody, Boston, Mass. TO MRS. HAWTHORNE _Salem_, March 15th, 1843 Dearest wife, Thy letters have all been received; and I know not that I could have kept myself alive without them; for never was my heart so hungry and tired as it is now. I need thee continually wherever I am, and nothing else makes any approach towards satisfying me. Thou hast the easier part--being drawn out of thyself by society; but with me there is an ever-present yearning, which nothing outward seems to have any influence upon. Four whole days must still intervene before we meet--it is too long--too long--we have not so much time to spare out of eternity. As for this Mr. Billings, I wish he would not be so troublesome. I put a note for him into the Boston Post-Office, directed according to his own request. His scheme is well enough, and might possibly become popular; but it has no peculiar advantages with reference to myself; nor do the subjects of his proposed books particularly suit my fancy, as themes to write upon. Somebody else will answer his purpose just as well; and I would rather write books of my own imagining than be hired to develope the ideas of an engraver; especially as the pecuniary prospect is not better, nor so good, as it might be elsewhere. I intend to adhere to my former plan, of writing one or two mythological story books, to be published under O'Sullivan's auspices in New York--which is the only place where books can be published, with a chance of profit. As a matter of courtesy, I may perhaps call on Mr. Billings, if I have time; but I do not intend to be connected with this affair. It is queer news that thou tellest me about the Pioneer. I expected it to fail in due season, but not quite so soon. Shouldst there be an opportunity within a day or two, I wish thou wouldst send for any letters that may be in the Post-Office there; but not unless some person is going thither, with intent to return before Wednesday next. If thou receive any, keep them till we meet in Boston. I dreamed the other night that our house was broken open, and all our silver stolen. No matter though it be:--we have steel forks and German silver spoons in plenty, and I only wish that we were to eat our dinner with them to-day. But we shall have gained nothing on the score of snow, and slosh, and mud, by our absence; for the bad walking will be at its very _ne plus ultra_, next week. Wouldst thou not like to stay just one little fortnight longer in Boston, where the sidewalks afford dry passage to thy little feet? It will be mid-May, at least, ere thou wilt find even tolerable walking in Concord. So if thou wishest to walk while thou canst, we will put off our return a week longer. Naughty husband that I am! I know by my own heart that thou pinest for our home, and for the bosom where thou belongest. A week longer! It is a horrible thought. We cannot very well afford to buy a surplus stock of paper, just now. By and by, I should like some, and I suppose there will always be opportunities to get it cheap at auction. I do wonder--and always shall wonder, until the matter be reformed--why Providence keeps us so short of cash. Our earnings are miserably scanty at best; yet, if we could but get even that pittance, I should continue to be thankful, though certainly for small favors. The world deserves to come to a speedy end, if it were for nothing else save to break down the abominable system of credit--of keeping possession of other people's property--which renders it impossible for a man to be just and honest, even if so inclined. It is almost a pity that the comet is retrograding from the earth; it might do away with all our perversities at one smash. And thou, my little dove, and thy husband for thy sake, might be pretty certain of a removal to some sphere where we should have all our present happiness, and none of these earthly inconveniences. Ah, but, for the present, I like this earth better than Paradise itself. I love thee, thou dearest. It is only when away from thee, that the chill winds of the world make me shiver. Thou always keepest me warm, and always wilt; and without thee, I should shiver in Heaven. Dearest, I think I prefer to write thy name "Mrs. Sophia A. Hawthorne," rather than "Mrs. Nathaniel Hawthorne";--the latter gives me an image of myself in petticoats, knitting a stocking. I feel so sensibly that thou art my chastest, holiest wife--a _woman_ and an angel. But thou dost not love to blush in the midst of people. Ownest, expect me next Tuesday in the forenoon; and do not look for another letter. I pray heaven that I may find thee well, and not tired quite to death. Even shouldst thou be so, however, I will restore thee on Wednesday. Mrs. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Care of Dr. N. Peabody, Boston, Mass. TO MRS. HAWTHORNE _Salem_, Decr. 2d, 1844 _Ownest Phoebe_, Thy letter came this morning--much needed; for I was feeling desolate and fragmentary. Thou shouldst not ask me to come to Boston, because I can hardly resist setting off this minute--and I have no right to spend money for such luxuries. I think I shall stay here until Bridge reaches Boston; for he wishes to see me then; and, if he could meet thee, and baby, and me, it would save him and us the trouble and perplexity of a visit at Concord. He will probably be in Boston in not much more or less than a week; and I have written to him to call at 13, West St. When he arrives, let him be told to send for me forthwith, or do thou write thyself; and I will immediately make my appearance. Sweetest wife, it goes against my conscience to add another inhabitant to the immense multitude in thy mother's caravanserai; nevertheless, methinks I may come there for one night, and, if I stay longer, remove thence to George Hillard's. But I don't know. I should like to spend two or three days in Boston, if it could be done without any derangement of other people or myself; but I should not feel easy in the caravanserai. Perhaps it would be better to go at once to George Hillard's. After we get home, we will rest one another from all toils. I am very well, dearest, and it seems to me that I am recovering some of the flesh that I lost, during our long Lent. I do not eat quite enough to satisfy mother and Louisa; but thou wouldst be perfectly satisfied, and so am I. My spirits are pretty equable, though there is a great vacuity caused by thy absence out of my daily life--a bottomless abyss, into which all minor contentments might be flung without filling it up. Still, I feel as if our separation were only apparent--at all events, we are at less than an hour's distance from one another, and therefore may find it easier to spend a week apart. The good that I get by remaining here, is a temporary freedom from that vile burthen which had irked and chafed me so long--that consciousness of debt, and pecuniary botheration, and the difficulty of providing even for the day's wants. This trouble does not pursue me here; and even when we go back, I hope not to feel it nearly so much as before. Polk's election has certainly brightened our prospects; and we have a right to expect that our difficulties will vanish, in the course of a few months. I long to see our little Una; but she is not yet a vital portion of my being. I find that her idea merges in thine. I wish for thee; and our daughter is included in that wish, without being particularly expressed. She has quite conquered the heart of our mother and sisters; and I am glad of it, for now they can transfer their interest from their own sombre lives to her happy one; and so be blest through her. To confess the truth, she is a dear little thing. Sweetest Phoebe: I don't intend to stay here more than a week, even if Bridge should not arrive;--and should there be any reason for our returning to Concord sooner, thou canst let me know. Otherwise, I purpose to come to Boston in a week from to-day or tomorrow,--to spend two or three days there--and then go back to the old Abbey; of which there is a very dismal picture at present in my imagination, cold, lonely, and desolate, with untrodden snow along the avenue, and on the doorsteps. But its heart will be warm, when we are within. If thou shalt want me sooner, write,--if not so soon, write. God bless thee, mine ownest. I must close the letter now, because it is dinner-time; and I shall take it to the Post-Office immediately after dinner. I spend almost all my afternoons at the Athenaeum. Kiss our child for me--one kiss for thyself and me together. I love her, and live in thee. THY HUSBAND. Mrs. Sophia A. Hawthorne, Care of Dr. N. Peabody, Boston, Mass. TO MRS. HAWTHORNE [December, 1844] _Darlingest Phoebe_, I knew that a letter must come to-day; and it cheered and satisfied me, as mine did thee. How we love one another! Blessed we! What a blot I have made of that word "blessed"! But the consciousness of bliss is as clear as crystal in my heart, though now and then, in great stress of earthly perplexities, a mist bedims its surface. Belovedest, it will not be anywise necessary for thee to see Bridge at all, before I come,--nor then either, if thou preferrest meeting him in Concord. If I find him resolved to go to Concord, at any rate, I shall not bring him to see thee in Boston; because, as a lady ought, thou appearest to best advantage in thine own house. I merely asked him to call at 13 West-street to learn my whereabout--not to be introduced to thee. Indeed; I should prefer thy not seeing him till I come. It was his purpose to be in Boston before this time; but probably he has remained in Washington to see the opening of Congress, and perhaps to try whether he can help forward our official enterprises. Unless he arrive sooner, I purpose to remain here till Wednesday, and to leave on the evening of that day. I have not yet called on the Pickmen or the Feet, but solemnly purpose so to do, before I leave Salem. Mr. Upham, it is said, has resigned his pastorship. When he returned from Concord, he told the most pitiable stories about our poverty and misery; so as almost to make it appear that we were suffering for food. Everybody that speaks to me seems tacitly to take it for granted that we are in a very desperate condition, and that a government office is the only alternative of the almshouse. I care not for the reputation of being wealthier than I am; but we never have been quite paupers, and need not have been represented as such. Now good-bye, mine ownest little wife! I thank God above all things that thou art my wife--next that Una is our child. I shall come back to thee with tenfold as much love as ever I felt before. Nobody but we ever knew what it is to be married. We alone know the bliss and the mystery; if other people knew it, this dull old earth would have a perpetual glow round about it. Mrs. Sophia A. Hawthorne, Care of Dr. N. Peabody, Boston, Mass. TO MRS. HAWTHORNE _Salem_, December 20th (Friday morning), 1844 _Sweetest Phoebe_, It will be a week tomorrow since I left thee; and in all that time, I have heard nothing of thee, nor thou of me. Nevertheless, I am not anxious, because I know thou wouldst write to me at once, were anything amiss. But truly my heart is not a little hungry and thirsty for thee; so, of my own accord, or rather of my own necessity, I sit down to write thee a word or two. First of all, I love thee. Also, I love our little Una--and, I think, with a much more adequate comprehension of her loveliness, than before we left Concord. She is partly worthy of being thy daughter;--if not wholly to, it must be her father's fault. Mine own, I know not what to say to thee. I feel now as when we clasp one another in our arms, and are silent. Our mother and sisters were rejoiced to see me, and not altogether surprised; for they seem to have had a kind of presentiment of my return. Mother had wished Louisa to write for us both to come back; but I think it would not be wise to bring Una here again, till warm weather. I am not without apprehensions that she will have grown too tender to bear the atmosphere of our cold and windy old Abbey in Concord, after becoming acclimated to the milder temperature of thy father's house. However, we will trust to Providence, and likewise to a good fire in our guest-chamber. Thou wilt write to me when all things are propitious for our return. They wish me to stay here till after Christmas;--which I think is next Wednesday--but I care little about festivals. My only festival is when I have thee. But I suppose we shall not get home before the last of next week;--it will not do to delay our return much longer than that, else we shall be said to have run away from our creditors. If I had not known it before, I should have been taught by this long separation, that the only real life is to be with thee--to be thy husband--thy intimatest, thy lovingest, thy belovedest--and to share all things, good or evil, with thee. The days and weeks that I have spent away from thee are unsubstantial--there is nothing in them--and yet they have done me good, in making me more conscious of this truth. Now that I stand a little apart from our Concord life, the troubles and incommodities look slighter--our happiness more vast and inestimable. I trust Heaven will not permit us to be greatly pinched by poverty, during the remainder of our stay there. It would be a pity to have our recollection of this first home darkened by such associations,--the home where our love first assumed human life in the form of our darling child. I hear nothing yet from O'Sullivan--nor from Bridge. I am afraid the latter gentleman must be ill; else, methinks, he would certainly have written; for he has always been a punctual correspondent, when there was anything to write about. Ownest Dove, I think I shall not go back to Hillard's. I shall be ready to go back to Concord whenever thou art; but, not having the opportunity to consult thee, I now propose that we settle our return for Saturday, a week from tomorrow. Should anything prevent thee from going then (for instance, the want of a girl) I may go and pay our debts, as far as in my power, and then return. But this need not be anticipated. There is no absolute necessity--(except in our hearts, which cannot endure to be away from one another much longer)--for our being at home before the first of January; but if all things are convenient, we will not delay longer than Saturday. Oh, what sweet, sweet times we will have. Give Una a kiss, and her father's blessing. She is very famous here in Salem. THY HUSBAND. Mrs. Sophia A. Hawthorne, Care of Dr. N. Peabody, Boston, Mass. TO MRS. HAWTHORNE _Salem_, April 14th (Sunday), 1844 _Ownest Phoebe_, Thy letter reached me yesterday forenoon, and made me truly happy--happier than I can tell. I do not think that I am the more conscious of the baby, by standing aloof from her. She has not yet sufficiently realised herself in my soul; it seems like a dream, therefore, which needs such assurances as thy letter, to convince me that it is more than a dream. Well; I cannot write about her--nor about thee, belovedest, for whom I have at this moment an unutterable yearning. Methinks my hand was never so out of keeping with my heart. I called at the book room in Boston, and saw there thy mother, thy brother Nat, and Elizabeth!!--besides two or three ladies. It was the most awkward place in the world to talk about Una and other kindred subjects; so I made my escape as soon as possible, promising to return to dine if convenient, and resolving that it should be as inconvenient as possible. I wish thy mother could be so inhospitable as never to ask me--but at all events, I need never go, except when thou art there. I went to George Hillard's office, and he spoke with unmitigable resolution of the necessity of my going to dine with Longfellow before returning to Concord; but I have an almost miraculous power of escaping from necessities of this kind. Destiny itself has often been worsted in the attempt to get me out to dinner. Possibly, however, I may go. Afterwards I called on Colonel Hall, who held me long in talk about politics and other sweetmeats. Here, likewise, I refused one or two invitations to dinner. Then I stept into a book-auction, not to buy, but merely to observe; and after a few moments, who should come in, with a smile as sweet as sugar (though savoring rather of molasses) but, to my horror and petrifaction, Mr. Watterson! I anticipated a great deal of bore and botheration; but, through Heaven's mercy, he merely spoke a few words, and then left me. This is so unlike his deportment in times past, that I suspect the Celestial Railroad must have given him a pique; and if so, I shall feel as if Providence had sufficiently rewarded me for that pious labor. In the course of the forenoon, I encountered Mr. Howes in the street. He looked most exceedingly depressed, and pressing my hand with peculiar emphasis, said that he was in great affliction, having just had news of his son George's death in Cuba. He seemed encompassed and overwhelmed by the misfortune, and walked the street as in a heavy cloud of his own grief, forth from which he extended his hand to meet my grasp. I expressed my sympathy, which I told him I was now the more capable of feeling in a father's suffering, as being myself the father of a little girl--and, indeed, the being a parent does give one the freedom of a wider range of sorrow as well as happiness. He again pressed my hand, and left me. Well, dove, when I got to Salem, there was great joy, as you may suppose. Our mother and sisters take as much interest in little Una as can possibly be desired. They think the lock of hair very beautiful, and deny that it has the faintest tinge of red. Mother hinted an apprehension that poor baby would be spoilt--whereupon I irreverently observed, that having spoilt her own three children, it was natural for her to suppose that all other parents would do the same; when she knocked me into a cocked hat, by averring that it was impossible to spoil such children as Elizabeth and me, because she had never been able to do anything with us. This I believe to be very true. There was too much gentleness in her nature for such a task. She remonstrates, by the by, against Una's being carried about in anybody's arms, and says that it will soon be impossible to keep her quiet in any other way. This was the case with Elizabeth; and mother never allowed her other children to become habituated to it. I could scarcely convince them that Una has begun to smile so soon. It surprised even mother; though her own children appear to have been bright specimens of babyhood. Elizabeth could walk and talk at nine months old. I do not understand that thy husband was quite such a miracle of precocity, but should think it not improbable, inasmuch as precocious boys are said to make stupid men. Ownest wife, I long so much to get back to thee, that it is a mockery to try to say how much. Yet I think I shall be benefitted by the absence, though it be truly an unpalatable medicine. I hope thy father will be able to stay till Friday. It is just possible, if I go out to see Longfellow, that I may not come till Saturday night; but this will depend partly on what day the steamer comes. I shall consult thy mother about the necessity of thy father's presence in Boston earlier than that. Mrs. Sophia A. Hawthorne, Concord, Massachusetts. TO MRS. HAWTHORNE _Concord_, May 27th, 1844 _Dearest Phoebe_, I cannot let the day pass without speaking a little word to thee, to tell thee how strange the old Abbey seems without thy presence, and how strange this life, when thou art away. Nevertheless, I truly rejoice in thy absence, as hoping it will do good to thy dearest brain, which has been over-wrought, as well as thy physical frame. And how does our belovedest little Una? whom I love more than I ever told thee, though not more than thou knowest--for is she not thine and mine, the symbol of the one true union in the world, and of our love in Paradise. Dearest, my cook does his office admirably. He prepared what I must acknowledge to be the best dish of fried fish and potatoes for dinner to-day, that I ever tasted in this house. I scarcely recognized the fish of our own river. I make him get all the dinners while I confine myself to the much lighter labors of breakfast and tea. He also takes his turn at washing the dishes. Ellery Channing came to see me this morning, and was very gracious and sociable; and we went a fishing together. He says his little girl weighed seven pounds at her birth, and is doing very well. Miss Prescott is now there. We had a very pleasant dinner at Longfellow's; and I liked Mrs. Longlady (as thou naughtily nicknamest her) quite much. The dinner was late, and we sate long; so that Conolly and I did not get here till half-past nine o'clock--and truly the old house seemed somewhat dark and desolate. The next morning came George Prescott with Una's lion, who greeted me very affectionately, but whined and moaned as if he missed somebody who should have been here. I am not quite as strict as I should be in keeping him out of the house; but I commiserate him and myself--for are we not both of us bereaved. Still I am happy, and more quiet than when thou wast here; because I feel it to be good for thee to be there. Dearest, keep thyself at peace, and do not let persons nor things trouble thee; and let other people take all the care of Una that is possible; and do not fear to go out occasionally; and think sometimes of thy husband, who loves thee unspeakably; and because he cannot tell its immensity, he may as well stop here, especially as Conolly (whom I can no more keep from smoking than I could the kitchen chimney) has just come into the study with a cigar, which might perfume this letter, and make thee think it came from thy husband's own enormity. I love thee. I love thee. THINE OWNEST. Mrs. Sophia A. Hawthorne, Care of Dr. N. Peabody, Boston, Massachusetts. TO MRS. HAWTHORNE _Concord_, May 29th, 1844 _Ownest Wife_, Conolly is leaving me, to my unspeakable relief; for he has had a bad cold, which caused him to be much more troublesome, and less amusing, than might otherwise have been the case. Thy husband is in perfect health; and as happy in the prospect of being alone, as he would be in anything, except to be reunited to thee. I suppose I must invite Mr. Farley to come by-and-by; but not quite yet--Oh, not quite yet--it is so sweet to be alone. I want to draw a little free breath. Ah, why canst not thou be with me here--and no Mary--no nobody else! But our little Una! Should not she be of the party? Yes; we have linked a third spirit forever to our own; and there is no existing without her. Dearest Phoebe, I do trust thou art well and at ease. Thou absolutely knowest not how I love thee. God bless thee, mine ownest--God bless our daughter--God bless thy husband--God bless us altogether, and the whole world too. I write in the greatest hurry. THINE OWNEST HUSBAND. Have no apprehensions on my account. I shall write to Farley at the end of the week--and till then shall bathe myself in solitude. Mrs. Sophia A. Hawthorne, Care of Dr. N. Peabody, 13 West-street, Boston, Mass. TO MRS. HAWTHORNE _Concord_, May 31st, 1844 _Ownest Phoebe_, Thy two dearest letters have been received, and gave me infinite comfort. Oh, keep thyself quiet, best wife, and do not think of coming home till thou art quite cured, even though Una should grow to be quite a large girl in the interim. As for me, I get along admirably, and am at this moment superintending the corned beef, which has been on the fire, as it appears to me, ever since the beginning of time, and shows no symptom of being done before the crack of doom. Mrs. Hale says it must boil till it becomes tender; and so it shall, if I can find wood to keep the fire a-going. Meantime, I keep my station in the dining-room, and read or write as composedly as in my own study. Just now, there came a very important rap to the front door; and I threw down a smoked herring which I had begun to eat (as there is no hope of the corned beef to-day) and went to admit the visitor. Who should it be but Ben, with a very peculiar and mysterious grin upon his face! He put into my hands a missive directed to "Mr. and Mrs. Hawthorne"; it contained a little hit of card signifying that "Dr. Lemuel Fuller and Miss Catherine Barrett receive their friends Thursday Eve, June 6th, at 8 o'clock." I am afraid I shall be too busy washing my dishes, to pay many visits during thy absence. This washing of dishes does seem to me the most absurd and unsatisfactory business that I ever undertook. If, when once washed, they would remain clean forever and ever, (which they ought in all reason to do, considering how much trouble it is,) there would be less occasion to grumble; but no sooner is it done, than it requires to be done again. On the whole I have come to the resolution not to use more than one dish at each meal. However, I moralise deeply on this and other matters, and have discovered that all the trouble and affliction in the world arises from the necessity of cleansing away our earthly pollutions. I ate the last morsel of bread, yesterday, and congratulated myself on being now reduced to the fag-end of necessity. Nothing worse can happen (according to ordinary modes of thinking) than to want bread; but, like most afflictions, it is worse in prospect than reality. I found one cracker in the tureen, and exulted over it as if it had been so much gold. However, I have sent a petition to Mrs. Prescott, stating my destitute condition, and imploring her succor; and till it arrives, I shall keep myself alive on smoked herrings and apples, together with part of a pint of milk, which I share with Leo. He is my great trouble now, though an excellent companion too. But it is not easy to find food for him, unless I give him what is fit for Christians--though, for that matter, he appears to be as good a Christian as most laymen, or even as some of the clergy. I fried some pouts and eels, yesterday, on purpose for him; for he does not like raw fish. They were very good; but I should hardly have taken the trouble on my own account. George Prescott has just come to say, that Mrs. Prescott has no bread at present, and is gone away this afternoon, but that she will send me some tomorrow. I mean to have a regular supply from the same source--which thou shalt repay after thy return. I go to bed at dusk, now-a-days, out of a tender consideration for the oil-can, which does not possess the peculiar virtues of the Widow Cruse's. [sic] Oh, dear little wife! Dost thou even think of me? I think of thee continually, and of our darling Una, and long to see both thee and her, yet not with an impatient and importunate longing. I am too sure of my treasures not to be able to bear a little separation of them, when it is for thine own good. Thou needest be under no uneasiness for my sake. Everything goes on well, and I enjoy my solitude, next to thy society. I suppose I shall write to Mr. Farley tomorrow, but it would content me well to be quite alone till thy return. Thou canst not imagine how much the presence of Leo relieves the feeling of perfect loneliness. He insists upon being in the room with me all the time, (except at night, when he sleeps in the shed) and I do not find myself severe enough to drive him out. He accompanies me, likewise, on all my walks, to the village and elsewhere; and, in short, keeps at my heels all the time, except when I go down cellar. Then he stands at the head of the stairs and howls, as if he never expected to see me again. He is evidently impressed with the present solitude of our old Abbey, both on his own account and mine, and feels that he may assume a greater degree of intimacy than would be otherwise allowable. He will easily be brought within the old regulations, after thy return. Ownest, I have written to-day, because I thought thou wouldst be anxious to know what sort of a life I lead, now that my guest has departed. Thou wilt see that I am fit to be trusted in my own keeping. No ghost has haunted me, and no living thing has harmed me. God bless thee and our little Una. I say to myself, when I feel lonely, "I am a husband!--I am a father!"--and it makes me so happy! THINE OWNEST. P.S.--Three o'clock.--The beef is done!!! Mrs. Sophia A. Hawthorne, Care of Dr. N. Peabody, Boston, Massachusetts. TO MRS. HAWTHORNE _Concord_, June 2d, 1844. 12 o'clock _Mine ownest_, Thy letter was brought this morning by one of the Fullers--which, I know not--but it was the young man who called on us last winter; and he promises to call and take this. Sweetest, if it troubles thee to write, thou must not make the attempt. Perhaps it is not good for thy head; and thy mother can just say a word or two, to let me know that all is going on well. Oh, keep thyself quiet, dearest wife, and let not thy brain be whirled round in the vortex of thy present whereabout; else I must have thee back again as soon as possible. But if it be for thy good, I can spare thee at least a month longer; indeed, thou must not come till the Doctor has both found out thy disorder and cured it. Everything goes on well with thy husband. Thou knowest, at the time of writing my last letter, I was without bread. Well, just at supper time came Mrs. Brown with a large covered dish, which proved to contain a quantity of special good slap jacks, piping hot, prepared, I suppose, by the fair hands of Miss Martha or Miss Abby; for Mrs. Prescott was not at home. They served me both for supper and breakfast; and I thanked Providence and the young ladies, and compared myself to the prophet fed by ravens--though the simile does rather more than justice to myself, and not enough to the generous donors of the slap jacks. The next morning, Mrs. Prescott herself brought two big loaves of bread, which will last me a week, unless I have some guests to provide for. I have likewise found a hoard of crackers in one of the covered dishes; so that the old castle is sufficiently provisioned to stand a long siege. The cornbeef is exquisitely done, and as tender as a young lady's heart, all owing to my skilful cookery; for I consulted Mrs. Hale at every step; and precisely followed her directions. To say the truth, I look upon it as such a masterpiece in its way, that it seems irreverential to eat it; so perhaps thou wilt find it almost entire at thy return. Things on which so much thought and labor are bestowed should surely be immortal. Ellery Channing intends to make a tour presently. Wm. Fuller says he is at variance with Miss Prescott--or at least is uncomfortable in the house with her. What a gump! I have had some idea of inviting him to stay here till thy return; but really, on better consideration, the experiment would be too hazardous. If he cannot keep from quarrelling with his wife's nurse, he would surely quarrel with me, alone in an empty house; and perhaps the result might be a permanent breach. On the whole, he is but little better than an idiot. He should have been whipt often and soundly in his boyhood; and as he escaped such wholesome discipline then, it might be well to bestow it now. But somebody else may take him in hand; it is none of my business. Leo and I attended divine services, this morning, in a temple not made with hands. We went to the farthest extremity of Peter's path, and there lay together under an oak, on the verge of the broad meadow. Dearest Phoebe, thou shouldst have been there. Thy head would have been quite restored by the delicious air, which was too good and pure for anybody but thee to breathe. Shouldst thou not walk out, every day, round the common, at least, if not further? Thou must not fear to leave Una occasionally. I shall not love her, if she imprisons thee when thy health requires thee to be abroad. Do not people offer to take thee to ride? I doubt whether Mr. Bradford could be comfortable here, unless there were womankind in the house to keep it in better order than it suits my convenience to do. A man of his nice conscience would be shocked, I suppose, if the whole house were not swept, every day, from top to bottom, or if the dishes of several meals were suffered to accumulate, in order to save trouble by a general cleansing. Now such enormities do not at all disturb my composure. Besides, I find myself such good company, and the hours flit so rapidly away, that I have no time to bestow on anybody else. Talk is but a waste of time. When I cannot be with thee, mine ownest--my true life--then let me be alone. I wrote to Mr. Farley, yesterday; and am sorry for it, since I received thy letter. But I presume there is no prospect of his coming; and should he do so, I shall not hesitate to advise him to go away, if our mode of life here should seem unsuitable to his condition. Darlingest wife, when thou writest next, tell me if thou canst see the termination of thy absence; but do not think it in the least necessary to hurry on my account. I find I have shirts enough for a fortnight or three weeks longer; and can get somebody to wash them, at the end of that time. Do not hurry thyself--do not be uneasy. I had rather come and see thee in Boston, than that thou shouldst return too soon. Give my blessing to our daughter. THY LOVINGEST HUSBAND. Mrs. Sophia A. Hawthorne, Care of Dr. N. Peabody, 13 West-street, Boston. By Mr. Fuller. TO MRS. HAWTHORNE _Concord_, June 6th, 1844 Mine ownest, ownest love, dost thou not want to hear from thy husband? There is no telling nor thinking how much I love thee; so we will leave all that matter without another word. Dearest, Mr. Farley arrived yesterday, and appeared to be in most excellent health, and as happy as the sunshine. Almost the first thing he did was to wash the dishes; and he is really indefatigable in the kitchen; so that thy husband is quite a gentleman of leisure. Previous to his coming, I had kindled no fire for four entire days, and had lived all that time on the corned beef--except one day, when Ellery and I went down the river on a fishing excursion. Yesterday we boiled some lamb, which we shall have cold for dinner to-day. This morning, Mr. Farley fried a sumptuous dish of eels for breakfast, and he avows his determination to make me look fat before thy return. Mrs. Prescott continues to be the instrument of Providence, and yesterday sent us a very nice plum-pudding. Thou seest, therefore, that domestic matters are going on admirably. I have told Mr. Farley that I shall be engaged in the forenoons, and he is to arrange his own occupations and amusements during that time. Thus, as everything is so comfortably regulated, thou canst stay in Boston without the slightest solicitude about my welfare, as long as there is any object in being near Dr. Wesselhoeft. But how our hearts will rush together, when we meet again! Oh, how I love thee! Not much has happened of late. Leo, I regret to say, has fallen under suspicion of a very grave crime--nothing less than murder--a fowl crime it may well be called--for it is the slaughter of one of Mr. Hayward's hens. He has been seen to chase the hens, several times, and the other day one of them was found dead. Possibly he may be innocent; and as there is nothing but circumstantial evidence, it must be left with his own conscience. Meantime, Mr. Hayward or somebody else seems to have given him such a whipping, that he is absolutely stiff, and walks about like a rheumatic old gentleman. I am afraid, too, that he is an incorrigible thief. Ellery Channing says he saw him coming up the avenue with a whole calf's head in his mouth. How he came by it, is best known to Leo himself. If he were a dog of fair character, it would be no more than charity to conclude that he had either bought it or had it given to him; but, with the other charges against him, it inclines me to great distrust of his moral principles. Be that as it may, he managed his stock of provisions very thriftily--burying it in the earth, and eating a portion of it whenever he felt an appetite. If he insists upon living by highway robbery, dost thou not think it would be well to make him share his booty with us? Our butcher's bill might thus be considerably lessened. Miss Barret came a day or two ago to enquire whether I thought my wife would be willing to lend our astral lamp for the great occasion of this evening. Thou seest, she has a very proper idea of the authority of the wife, and cannot imagine that I should venture to lend any article without reference to thy wishes. As she pledged herself, if there were any damages, to "make it good," I took the liberty to put the lamp into her hands. Thou knowest its trick of going out in the middle of the evening; and it will be a truly laughable and melancholy mishap, if it should suddenly leave them in darkness, at the most critical moment. Methinks it would be no favorable omen for the prosperity of the marriage. Miss Catherine regrets very much that thou art not to be here, this evening. I wonder thou dost not come on purpose. By the by, it was not our old broken astral lamp, but the solar lamp that I lent her. Ownest wife, am I really a father?--the father of thy child! Sometimes the thought comes to me with such a mighty wonder that I cannot take it in. I love our little Una a great deal better than when I saw her last; and all the love that grows within me for her, is so much added to the infinite store of my love for thee. Ah, dost thou think of me?--dost thou yearn for me?--does thy breast heave and thy heart quake with love for thy husband?--... (portion of letter missing) I can hardly breathe for loving thee so much. Dearest, Mr. Farley is to carry this letter to the Post-Office this morning, and perhaps he will find a line or two from thee. If so, I shall be happy; and if not, then too I shall be glad that thou hast not tasked thy dearest little head to do any pen-work. THY BELOVEDEST HUSBAND. Mrs. Sophia A. Hawthorne, Care of Dr. N. Peabody, Boston, Mass. TO MRS. HAWTHORNE _Concord_, June 10th, 1844 _Only Belovedest_, Thy letter came yesterday; and I suppose thou didst get mine about the same time. Dearest, I take it for granted that thou hast concluded to await the arrival of the money from O'Sullivan; so that I shall not expect thee till Friday or Saturday. I think it is an excellent plan to have thy mother come with thee; so pray ask her immediately, if thou hast not done it already. I shall not be able to send away Mr. Farley before thou comest; but he will go on Monday. Mr. Farley is in perfect health, and absolutely in the seventh Heaven; and he talks, and talks, and talks, and talks; and I listen, and listen, and listen, with a patience for which (in spite of all my sins) I firmly expect to be admitted to the mansions of the blessed. And there is really a contentment in being able to make the poor, world-worn, hopeless, half-crazy man so entirely comfortable as he seems to be here. He is an admirable cook. We had some roast veal and a baked rice pudding on Sunday--really a fine dinner, and cooked in better style than Mary can equal; and George Curtis came to dine with us. Like all male cooks, he is rather expensive, and has a tendency to the consumption of eggs in his various concoctions, which thou wouldst be apt to oppose. However, we consume so much fish of our own catching, that there is no great violation of economy upon the whole. I have had my dreams of splendor, but never expected to arrive at the dignity of keeping a man-cook. At first, we had three meals a day, but now only two. We dined at Mr. Emerson's the other day, in company with Mr. Hedge. Mr. Bradford has been to see us two or three times. And, speaking of him, do thou be most careful never to say a word in depreciation of Sarah Stearns, in his presence. Both of us (horrible to say!) have fallen into this misfortune, on former occasions. Mr. Farley has given me most unlooked for intelligence in regard to him and her. He looks thinner than ever--judge, then, how thin he must be--his face is so thin, and his nose is so sharp, that he might make a pen with it; and I wish he would make me a better one than I am now writing with. He is particularly melancholy, and last Saturday, when we were alone on the river together, seemed half-inclined to tell me the why and wherefore. But I desire no such secrets. Keep this to thy little self. I love thee, I love thee! Thou lovest me, thou lovest me! Oh, I shiver again to think how much I love thee--how much we love, and that thou art soon, soon, coming back to thine own home--to thine ownest husband; and with our beloved baby in thine arms. Shall I know little Una, dost thou think? Now good bye, sweetest wife. It will be no more than decent for me to go down and offer my assistance to Mr. Farley in some of the minor preparations of dinner. Thy mother must put her skill in exercise; else he will find a sad falling-off in our living, after thy return. I shall look for thee partly on Friday, but shall not be disappointed if thou comest not till Saturday. God bless thee, thou belovedest. THINE OWN HUSBAND. Mrs. Sophia A. Hawthorne, Care of Dr. N. Peabody, Boston, Mass. TO MRS. HAWTHORNE _Boston_, May 23d, 1845 _Ownest Dearest_, I write this little note in order to warn thee in due season that I shall not be at home till Monday. Hillard has made an engagement for me with Longfellow for Sunday; so that, without disappointing both of those worthies exceedingly, I cannot come away sooner. Belovedest, I love thee a million times as much every hour that I stay away from thee; and my heart swells toward thee like a mighty flood. Also, I have a yearning for our little Una; and whenever I go, and with whomsoever I am talking, the thought of thee and her is ever present with me. God bless thee! What a happy home we have. That is the knowledge that I gain by staying away from thee. I saw thy mother this forenoon. She told me that Elizabeth had gone to Concord this morning. Remember me to "Our Boarder." In utmost haste, THINE OWNEST HUSBAND. Mrs. Sophia A. Hawthorne, Concord, Mass. TO MRS. HAWTHORNE _Salem_, August 25th, 1845 _Dearest Phoebe Hawthorne_, Already an age has elapsed since I parted from thee, mine own life; although, according to human measurement, it is but about twenty-seven hours. How I love thee, wife of my bosom! There is no telling; so judge it by what is in thine own deepest and widest little heart. Sweetest, what became of that letter? Whose fault was it, that it was left behind? I was almost afraid to present myself before thy mother without it. Nevertheless, the Count and I made it our first business to call at 13 West-street, where we found Madame Peabody (I will call her so to please my Dove) in the book room alone. She seemed quite as well as usual, and regretted, I believe, that she had not gone to Concord--and so did thy husband; but thou needest not say so to the good old gentleman who sits looking at the outside of this letter, while thou art reading the inside. I gave her all the information I could about thy condition--being somewhat restrained, however, by the presence of O'Sullivan. Taking leave of thy mother, I went with the Count to Mr. Bancroft's door, and then parted with him, with some partial expectation of meeting him again at dinner. Then I looked in at the Athenaeum reading-room, and next went to George Hillard's office. Who should I find here but Longfellow, and with him Mr. Green, the Roman consul, whom, as thou knowest, it was Bridge's plan to eject from office for thy husband's benefit. He has returned to this country on a visit. Never didst thou see such an insignificant looking personage (or person rather;) and it surprised me so much the more, for I had formed a high idea of his intellectual incarnation from a bust by Crawford, at Longfellow's rooms. Longfellow himself seems to have bloomed forth and found solidity and substance since his marriage;--never did I behold a man of happier aspect; although I know one of happier fortunes incomparably. But Longfellow appears perfectly satisfied, and to be no more conscious of any earthly or spiritual trouble than a sunflower is--of which lovely blossom he, I know not why, reminded me. Hillard looked better than I have ever before seen him, and was in high spirits on account of the success of his oration. It seems to have had truly triumphant success--superior to that of any Phi Beta Kappa oration ever delivered. It gladdened me most to see this melancholy shadow of a man for once bathed and even pervaded with a sunshine; and I must doubt whether any literary success of my own ever gave me so much pleasure. Outward triumphs are necessary to him; to thy husband they are anything but essential. From Hillard's I went to see Colonel Hall, and had a talk about politics and official matters; and the good Colonel invited me to dinner; and I concluded to accept, inasmuch as, by dining with the Count, I should have been forced to encounter Brownson--from whom the Lord deliver us. These are the main incidents of the day; but I did not leave Boston till half past five, by which time I was quite wearied with the clatter and confusion of the city, so unlike our quiet brooding life at home. Oh, dear little Dove, thou shouldst have been with me; and then all the quiet would have been with me likewise. Great was the surprise and joy of Louisa when she found me at the door. I found them all pretty well; but our poor mother seems to have grown older and thinner since I saw her at last. They all inquired for thee with loving kindness. Louisa intended to come and visit us in about a week; and I shall not thwart her purpose, if it still continue. She thinks she may be ready in a week from to-day. And, dearest little wife, I fear that thy husband will have to defer his return to thy blessed arms till the same day. Longfellow wants me to dine with him on Friday; and my mother will not be content to give me up before Thursday; and indeed it is not altogether unreasonable that she should have me this long; because she will not see me again. But, sweetest Phoebe, thou knowest not how I yearn for thee. Never hadst thou such love, as now. Oh, dearest wife, take utmost care of thyself; for if any harm should come to thee during my absence, I should always impute blame to myself. Do watch over my Dove, now that I am away. And should my presence be needful before Saturday, I will fly to thee at a moment's warning. If all continue well, I shall proceed to Boston on Thursday, visit Longfellow on Friday, and come home (Oh, happiest thought!) on Saturday night, with Louisa, if she finds it possible to come. If anything should detain her, it will be our mother's health. God bless thee. Amen. Afternoon.--What a scrawl is the foregoing! I wrote fast because I loved fervently. I shall write once more before my return. Take care of thy dearest little self and do not get weary. THY BEST OF HUSBANDS. Mrs. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Concord, Massachusetts. TO MRS. HAWTHORNE _Salem_, Novr. 10th, 1845 _Ownest_, It was revealed to me that thou didst write on Saturday, and so, at nightfall, I went to the Post-Office, but found no letter. This morning, it has arrived, with the postmark of to-day. It gladdens me to hear of Una's joy, and of thy being with people whom thou knowest well, and who know thee well, and with whom thou canst have real intercourse and sympathy. As for us in Castle Dismal, we miss thee greatly, all of us, and dwell in a deeper shadow for lack of thee, and that streak of living sunshine with which thou hast illuminated the earth. Whom do I mean by this brilliant simile? Can it be that little redheaded personage? Louisa complains of the silence of the house; and not all their innumerable cats avail to comfort them in the least. Thy husband thinks of thee when he ought to be scribbling nonsense--and very empty and worthless is his daily life, without thee. Nevertheless, if thou art at ease, do not come home in less than a week. I feel as if it were good for thee to be there, and good for Una too. Louisa told me, yesterday, with some alarm in her manner, that Dr. Moss (thy medical friend) says that the illness from vaccination does not come on, or does not reach its crisis, till the ninth day. Can this be so? And will it be necessary to wait so long? That would postpone thy return till the middle of next week--a term to which I cannot yet reconcile myself. I read Una's note, addressed to "Madame Hawthorne," then sealed it up and threw it downstairs. Doubtless, they find it a most interesting communication; and I feel a little shamefaced about meeting them. I hear nothing from Washington as yet; nor, indeed, is it yet time to expect any definite intelligence. Meanwhile Pike and thy friend David are planning to buy us an estate, and build a house, and have even gone so far as to mark out the ground-plot of the house, in chalk, on David's hearth. I fear it will prove a castle in the air; and yet, a moderate smile of Providence would cause it to spring out of the earth, on that beautiful hillside, like a flower in the summer time. With a cottage of our own, and the surveyorship, how happy we might be!--happier than in Concord, on many accounts. The Surveyorship I think we shall have; but the cottage implies an extra thousand or fifteen hundred dollars. I have heard of Mr. Atherton's being in Boston since thy departure;--whether Mrs. Atherton is with him I know not. Governor Fairfield, I understand, starts for Washington to-day. God bless thee, dearest!--and blessed be our daughter, whom I love next to thee! Again, if thou feelest it good for thee, on any account, to stay longer in Boston, do not hasten home;--but whenever thou comest, my heart will open to take thee in. THY LOVINGEST HUSBAND. TO MRS. HAWTHORNE _Castle Dismal_, Novr. 13th, 1845 _Intimatest Friend_, I cannot settle down to work this forenoon, or do anything but write to thee--nor even that, I fear, with any good effect; for I am just as much dissatisfied with this mode of intercourse as always hitherto. It is a wretched mockery. But then it _is_ a semblance of communication, and, thus far, better than nothing. I got thy letter of Tuesday the same evening, while it was still warm out of thy heart; and it seemed to fill the air round about me with Nona's prattle. I do love her--that is the truth,--and almost feel it a pity to lose a single day of her development;--only thou wilt tell me, by letter or by mouth, all the pretty things that she says or does, and more over find a beauty in them which would escape my grosser perception. Thus, on the whole, I shall be a gainer by our occasional separations. Thee I miss, and without any recompense. I marvel how it is that some husbands spend years and years away from their wives, and then come home with perhaps a bag or two of gold, earned by the sacrifice of all that life. Even poverty is better--and in saying that, thou knowest how much I say. Nothing has happened here since I wrote thee last. I suspect the intelligence of thy meditated baby is very pleasant to the grandmother and aunts; for Louisa met me at dinner, that day, with unusual cheerfulness, and observed that Thanksgiving was at hand, and that we must think of preparing. [As] for me, I already love the future little personage; and yet, somehow or other, I feel a jealousy of him or her, on Una's account, and should not choose to have the new baby better than the old one. So take care what thou dost, Phoebe Hawthorne! And now I think of it, do not thou venture into that tremendous press and squeeze, which always takes place on landing from the ferry-boat at the East Boston depot. Thou art not to be trusted in such a tumult; it will be far better to wait behind, and compel the conductor to find thee a seat. There is always the densest squeeze on Saturdays. But I shall not expect thee back on Saturday. According to Dr. Wesselhoeft's dictum, and supposing the vaccination to have taken, that will be precisely the critical day;--if Dr. Moss be correct, the crisis comes on Monday. In either case, I hope thou wilt wait a little. There is the greatest satisfaction to me in thinking how comfortably situated thou art, with thy sister at thy elbow, and thy mother at arms' length, and thy Aesculapius within a five minutes' summons. If I (and thou too, thou lovingest one) could endure it, I should be glad that thou mightest spend the winter there; but that is too heart-chilling to think of--so thou must even come back, in a few days more, to old Castle Dismal! But I shall never feel at home here with thee. I went, the other afternoon, to look at the hill where Pike and the Chancellor have built a castle in the air for our reception. Thou hast no idea what capacities it has. (Portion of letter missing) TO MRS. HAWTHORNE _Salem_, Jany. 19th, 1846.--Tuesday _Ownest Phoebe_, The shoe arrived last evening; but on what evidence thou dost so confidently accuse me of putting it into the trunk, I cannot imagine. Thou positively didst put it there thyself. I saw thee! Dearest, if any money comes from New York by to-day's mail, I will come to Boston on Thursday morning, to escort thee home. Otherwise, I really do not think I ought. Heaven knows, I desire it; but as it is not necessary for thy safety, and as we are so miserably poor, methinks the dollar should be reserved for indispensables. I did hope the New York money would have come to hand before now. Providence must take our matters in hand very speedily. I hope, Phoebe, thou hast not engaged to pay Winifred's passage, either to or from Boston. She told Mrs. Dromedary that she should not have gone with thee, only that her passage would be paid. She has a cousin living at the Essex House in this city; and the Dromedary thinks she is partly engaged to go there herself. This is the secret of her willingness to remain in Salem. Dotish as she appeared, she has wit enough to be fair and false, like all her countryfolk. It will be well to investigate this matter before thou returnest; and, if she really means to leave us, perhaps thou hadst better engage a new girl in Boston forthwith. Poor little Una's back--my heart bleeds for it. Do not come back till it is well, nor till thou thyself hast undergone thorough repairs, even though thou shouldst be compelled to hire a lodging. Ownest, be careful not to slip down. Thou art prudent in behalf of other people, but hast little caution on thine own account. In going to the cars do not get entangled in that great rush of people who throng out of the ferry-boat. Remain behind, and Heaven will find thee a seat. Would thou wast safe home again, eating thy potatoes, and glancing sideways at me with thy look of patient resignation. Never did I miss thee so much as during this separation. But for the idea of thee, my existence would be as cold and wintry as the weather is now, and with a cloudy gloom besides, instead of the dazzling sunshine. I was driven to play cards with Louisa, last evening! God bless thee! I have nothing more to say, that can be said. THINE OWNEST HUSBAND. Mrs. Sophia A. Hawthorne, Care of Dr. N. Peabody, Boston, Massachusetts. TO MRS. HAWTHORNE _Salem_, April 24th, 1846.--6 P.M. _Ownest dearest_, I have this moment received the packet and thy letter, and cannot tolerate that thou shouldst not have a word from thy husband tomorrow morning. Truly, Castle Dismal has seemed darker than ever, since I returned to it;--and not only to me, but to its other inmates. Louisa spoke of the awful stillness of the house, and said she could not bear to give Una's old shoes to that little Lines child, and was going to keep them herself. I rejoiced her much, by telling her of Una's home-sickness. Fees were tolerably good, yesterday and to-day; and I doubt we shall have enough to live on, during thy continuance in Boston--for which let us be thankful. Bridge came to see me this afternoon, and says Mary Pray has consented to come to thee; and by this time, I hope, thou hast her. Thou canst not think what a peace I enjoy in the consideration that thou art within reach of Dr. Wesselhoeft. It is by my feelings as to thee and Una, more than on my own account, that I find I am a true believer in homeopathy. Ownest, I love thee. I love little Una dearly too. Tell her so, and show her the place, and give her a kiss for me. THINE OWNEST HUSBAND. Mrs. Sophia A. Hawthorne, Care of Dr. N. Peabody, Boston, Massachusetts. TO MRS. HAWTHORNE [_Salem_, March 15th, 1847] _Ownest Phoebe_, Above is the note. I will not say how much beyond all money I feel indebted to Mr. Shaw for his kindness. It relieves my spirits from a great burthen, and now I feel calm and very happy. I love thee infinitely, and need thee constantly. I long to hear Una's voice. I find that I even love Bundlebreech!!! Ellery and I have a very pleasant time, and take immense walks every afternoon, and sit up talking till midnight. He eats like an Anaconda. Thou didst never see such an appetite. Thou dost not tell me when thou wilt turn thy face homeward. Shouldst thou stay till next week, I will come and escort thee home. Ellery, I suppose, will go as soon as Saturday. (I shall need some money to come with. Couldst thou send me ten dollars?) In haste, in depths of love. THY HUSBAND. Mrs. Sophia A. Hawthorne, Care of Dr. N. Peabody, Boston, Massachusetts. TO MRS. HAWTHORNE _Salem_, March 20th, 1847.--Saturday _Ownest Wife_, Thy letter of Thursday did not reach me till this morning. Ellery goes to-day--much to my satisfaction, though we have had a good time. Thou dost not know how much I long to see thee and our children. I never felt anything like it before--it is too much to write about. I do not think I can come on Monday before 10 ½, arriving in Boston at about 11. It is no matter about the session at Johnson's; and if thou choosest to give him notice, so be it. Now that the days are so long, would it not do to leave Boston, on our return, at ½ past 4? Kiss Una for me--likewise Bundlebreech. THY HUSBAND. P.S. Of course, my coming on Monday must be contingent on reasonably pleasant weather. I shall probably go to Johnson's immediately after my arrival--before coming to West-street. I hope he will be otherwise engaged. Mrs. Sophia A. Hawthorne, Care of Dr. N. Peabody, Boston, Massachusetts. TO MRS. HAWTHORNE _Salem_, July 13th, 1847 _Ownest Phoebe_, Greatly needed by me were thy two letters; for thou hadst never before been away from me so long without writing. And thou art still busy, every moment! I was in hopes thou wouldst have a little quiet now, with Dora to take care of the children;--but that seems fated never more to be thine. As for me, I sink down into bottomless depths of quiet:--never was such a quiet life as mine is, in this voiceless house. Thank God, there are echoes of voices in my heart, else I should die of this marble silence. Yet I am happy, and, dearest Phoebe, I wish that thou, likewise, couldst now and then stand apart from thy lot, in the same manner, and behold how fair it is. I think we are very happy--a truth that is not always so evident to me, until I step aside from our daily life. How I love thee!--how I love our children! Can it be that we are really parents!--that two beautiful lives have gushed out of our life! I am now most sensible of the wonder, and the mystery, and the happiness. Sweetest wife, I have nothing to tell thee. My life goes on as regularly as our kitchen clock. It has no events, and therefore can have no history. Well; when our children--these two, and three or four more are grown up, and married off, thou wilt have a little leisure, and mayst paint that Grecian picture that used to haunt thy fancy. But then our grandchildren--Una's children, and Bundlebreech's,--will be coming upon the stage. In short, after a woman has become a mother, she may find rest in Heaven, but nowhere else. This pen is so horrible that it impedes my thought. I cannot write any more with it. Dearest, stay as long as it is good for the children and thyself. I have great joy in thinking how good it has been for Una to have this change. When thou comest back to me, it will be as the coming of an angel, and with a cherub in each hand. Indeed, it does not require absence and distance to make an angel of thee; but the divine qualities of the children do become somewhat more apparent, by occasionally getting beyond the reach of their clamor. I think I had better not come on Saturday; but if thou wilt tell me the day of thy return, I will come in the afternoon, and escort thee back. Poor little Una! How will she bear to be caged up here again. Give her a kiss for me, and tell her I want to see her _very much_. I have been much affected by a little shoe of hers, which I found on the floor. Does Bundlebreech walk yet? THINEST HUSBAND. Mrs. Sophia A. Hawthorne, Care of Dr. N. Peabody, Boston, Massachusetts. TO MRS. HAWTHORNE _Salem_, Oct. 7th, 1847 _Ownest Phoebe_, Thy letter has just come. I knew the day would not pass over without one. Would that my love could transform this ugly east wind into the sweet south-west--then wouldst thou be full of pleasant air and sunshine. I want to be near thee, and rest thee. Dearest, the things all arrived safe--not having suffered even the dollar's worth of damage to which the man restricted himself. The carpet shall not be put down till thou comest. There is no need of it, except to save thee the trouble. We are in hopes of getting an elderly woman (Hannah Lord, whom I think thou hast heard of) for a handmaiden, but this is not so certain as I could wish. Our mother and Louisa repugn at the idea of an Irish girl; and there are scarcely any others to be heard of. I should not wonder, after all, if we had to seek one in Boston. The usual price here is $1.25. I trust we shall be provided by the time thou art ready to come; but if otherwise, Mrs. Campbell is now well, and can officiate for a few days. Duyckinck writes me that the African Cruise has come to a second edition. It is also to be published in a cheaper style, as one of the numbers of a District School Library. The weather is so bad that I hope thou wilt not have gone to Horn pond to-day. How different these east winds are from anything that we felt in Concord. Nevertheless, I feel relieved at having left that place of many anxieties, and believe that we shall pass a happy winter here. All that I need is to have shelter, and clothes, and daily bread, for thee and Una, without the anguish of debt pressing upon me continually;--and then I would not change places with the most fortunate person in the world. What a foolish sentence that is! As if I would change places, in our worst estate, either with man or angel. Phoebe, I think I had better not come for thee till Monday, as the weather is so unpropitious for thy visits. If that be too soon, tell me; for thou hadst better calculate on not seeing Boston again for some months; and, that being the case, it will be advisable to act as if thou wast going to make a voyage to Europe. I find I shall love thee as thou never wast loved before. God bless our little Una. She is our daughter! What a miracle! I love mother and child so much that I can put nothing into words. I think I shall be diligent with my pen, in this old chamber whence so many foolish stories have gone forth to the world. I have already begun to scribble something for Wiley & Putnam. THINE OWNEST OWN HUSBAND. Mrs. Sophia A. Hawthorne, Care of Dr. N. Peabody, Boston, Mass. TO MRS. HAWTHORNE Surveyor's Office, _Salem_, May 5th, 1848 _Ownest Phoebe_, I am altogether in favor of getting the six chairs; as to the glass, I know not what to think. In fact, I must leave all other articles to thy judgment, and shall be satisfied, whatever thou dost. We can dispense with the glass better than with anything else. I rather covet the large marble-top table; but perhaps the repairs would make it otherwise than cheap. Una behaves (as thou wouldst affirm) like an angel. We rode out to Lynn, yesterday afternoon, and had a long walk--much to her delight. I bathed her this morning; and I believe she has not shown the slightest wilfulness or waywardness, since thy departure. We have very loving times together. I had a great mind to come to Boston, yesterday, with Una, instead of alighting at Lynn. I felt thy magnetism drawing me thither. THINE OWNEST. If thou canst get me a book or two, I shall be glad. Kiss old Bundlebreech, and ask him if he remembers me. If thou art very desirous of it, thou mayst stay till Monday--or, indeed, a week or two longer--or ten years, if thou thinkest proper. I seem already to have been solitary at least so long. Mrs. Sophia A. Hawthorne, Care of Dr. N. Peabody, Boston, Mass. TO MRS. HAWTHORNE Surveyor's Office, [_Salem_,] June 19th, 1848 _Only Belovedest_, I received thy letter on Saturday evening, and was more refreshed by it than if it had been a draft of ice-water--a rather inapt comparison, by the way. Thou canst have no imagination how lonely our house is. The rooms seem twice as large as before--and so awfully quiet! I wish, sometime or other, thou wouldst let me take the two children and go away for a few days, and thou remain behind. Otherwise, thou canst have no idea of what it is. I really am half afraid to be alone, and feel shy about looking across the dimly moon-lighted chamber. I expend a great deal of sentiment as often as I chance to see any garment of thine, in my rambles about the house, or any of the children's playthings. And after all, there is a strange bliss in being made sensible of the happiness of my customary life, by this blank interval. Tell my little daughter Una that her dolly, since her departure, has been blooming like a rose--such an intense bloom, indeed, that I rather suspected her of making free with the brandy-bottle. On taxing her with it, however, she showed no signs of guilt or confusion; and I trust it was owing merely to the hot weather. The color has now subsided into quite a moderate tint, and she looks splendidly at a proper distance; though, on too close inspection, her skin appears rather coarse--not altogether unlike that of thy good Aunt B. She has contracted an unfortunate habit of squinting; and her mouth, I am sorry to say, is somewhat askew. I shall take her to task on these matters, and hope to produce a reformation. Should I fail, thou must take her in hand. Give Una a kiss, and tell her I love her dearly. The same to little Bundlebreech, who has probably forgot "faver" by this time. Dora complains terribly of lonesomeness, and so does Aunty N. In short, we are pretty forlorn. Nevertheless, I have much joy in your all being in the country, and hope thou wilt stay as long as thou feelest it to be for the best. How I love the children!--how I love thee, best of wives!--and how I shall make thee feel it, when thou comest home! Dost thou love me? THINE OWNEST HUSBAND. Mrs. Sophia A. Hawthorne, Newton, Mass. TO MRS. HAWTHORNE _Salem_, June 27th, 1848 Dearest Phoebe, when I saw thy thick letter, last night, I could not imagine what might be its contents, unless thou hadst sent a large package of the precious roses, which I should have kissed with great reverence and devotion. Thou wast naughty not to do it. But the letter truly refreshed my heart's thirst; and Una's also were very delightful. What a queer epistle was that which she dictated! It seemed as if she were writing from Paradise to comfort me on earth. Dearest, I long for thee as thou dost for me. My love has increased infinitely since the last time we were separated. I can hardly bear to think of thy staying away yet weeks longer. I think of thee all the time. The other night, I dreamed that I was at Newton, in a room with thee, and with several other people; and thou tookst occasion to announce, that thou hadst now ceased to be my wife, and hadst taken another husband. Thou madest this intelligence known with such perfect composure and _sang froid_--not particularly addressing me, but the company generally--that it benumbed my thoughts and feelings, so that I had nothing to say. Thou wast perfectly decided, and I had only to submit without a word. But, hereupon, thy sister Elizabeth, who was likewise present, informed the company, that, in this state of affairs, having ceased to be thy husband, I of course became hers; and turning to me, very coolly inquired whether she or I should write to inform my mother of the new arrangement! How the children were to be divided, I know not. I only know that my heart suddenly broke loose, and I began to expostulate with thee in an infinite agony, in the midst of which I awoke; but the sense of unspeakable injury and outrage hung about me for a long time--and even yet it has not quite departed. Thou shouldst not behave so, when thou comest to me in dreams. I had a letter from Bridge, yesterday, dated in the latter part of April. He seems to be having a very pleasant time with his wife; but I do not understand that she is, as the Germans say, "of good hope." In the beginning of the letter, he says that Mrs. Bridge will return to America this summer. In another part, he says that the ship in which he is will probably return late in the autumn; but he rather wishes that it may [be] delayed till Spring, because Mrs. Bridge desires to spend the winter in Italy. Oh, Phoebe, I want thee much. My bosom needs thy head upon it,--thou alone art essential. Thou art the only person in the world that ever was necessary to me. Other people have occasionally been more or less agreeable; but I think I was always more at ease alone than in anybody's company, till I knew thee. And now I am only myself when thou art within my reach. Thou art an unspeakably beloved woman. How couldst thou inflict such frozen agony upon me, in that dream! Thou shouldst have caressed me and embraced me. But do not think, much as I want thee, that I wish thee to come as long as thou judgest it good for the children to be away, and as long as thou thinkest we can afford the expense. We have a pervading happiness, that goes on whether we are present or absent in the body. Their happiness depends upon time and place; and the difference to them between town and country must be almost that of a cage or the free air, to the birds. And then it is so much better for their health. Hast thou remembered to ask Mrs. Mann whether little Pick Mann was named out of pure gratitude and respect for the old refugee Colonel, or whether there was not a little earthly alloy--an idea of gilding an ugly name with a rich legacy? Ownest, if I write any more, it would be only to try to express more lovings, and longings--and as they are impossible to express, I may as well close. My only belovedest, THY BEST BELOVED. Mrs. Sophia A. Hawthorne, West Newton. TO MRS. HAWTHORNE _Salem_, July 1st, 1848 Ownest, How long is it since I heard from thee--and what an eternity since thou didst go away! It seems at least as long as the whole time that we have been married. My heart calls for thee, very loudly, and thou comest not. And I want to hear our children's voices;--it would be pleasant, even, to see little Tornado in one of her tantrums. She is a noble child. Kiss her and Bundlebreech for me, and talk to them about me, lest I be entirely forgotten. If this had been a pleasant day, I should probably have gone to New York on Custom-House business; but it being thick and dismal, I shall give up the expedition, although it would have been a very favorable opportunity. I should have been back here on Wednesday morning; and as one of the intervening days is Sunday, and another the Fourth of July, only a single day of attendance at my office would have been lost. Best of all, it would have cost nothing. Dora has a great deal of work to do; but she neglects nothing appertaining to my comfort. Aunty 'Ouisa has favored me with one cup of coffee, since thou wentest away, and with an occasional doughnut; but I think thy lectures on diet and regimen have produced a considerable effect. Dearest, is thy absence so nearly over that we can now see light glimmering at the end of it? Is it half over? If not, I really do not see how I am to bear it. A month of non-existence is the utmost limit---- I am continually interrupted as I write, this being pay-day, and a very busy time. I don't know exactly what will be the amount of our fees; but I should think it would be about as good a month as the last. Thirty-five dollars, however, have already been drawn for our quarter's rent. If thou wantest any more money, as probably thou dost, write me how much, and I will send it. How much must I reserve to pay Rebecca's wages? Any surplus, I intend to apply in lessening Millet's bill. Here comes somebody else. Ownest wife, I am the best, and truest, and lovingest husband that ever was, because thy goodness makes me so. Mrs. Sophia A. Hawthorne, West Newton, Mass. TO MRS. HAWTHORNE _Surveyor's Office_, July 5th, 1848 Unspeakably belovedest, thy letter has just been handed me, and I snatch a moment from much press of business to say a word to thee. It has made my heart heave like the sea, it is so tender and sweet. Ah, thou hast my whole soul. There is no thinking how much I love thee; and how blessed thy love makes me. I wonder how thou canst love me. Thy letter was also most comfortable to me, because it gives such a picture of thy life there with the children. It seemed as if I could see the whole family of my heart before my eyes, and could hear you all talking together. I began to be quite uneasy about little Bundlebreech's indisposition, until thy latest intelligence reassured me. Yet I shall be anxious to hear again. Dora could not come to Boston yesterday, to meet Rebecca, because she has an infinity of work, and moreover, yesterday morning, she had to go to bed with the tooth-ache. I went to Boston to see the fireworks, and got home between 11 & 12 o'clock, last evening. I went into the little room to put on my linen coat; and, on my return into the sitting room, behold! a stranger there--whom dost thou think it might be?--it was Elizabeth! I did not wish to risk frightening her away by anything like an exhibition of wonder; and so we greeted one another kindly and cordially, but with no more _empressement_ than if we were constantly in the habit of meeting. It being so late, and I so tired, we did not have much talk then; but she said she meant to go to walk this afternoon, and asked me to go with her--which I promised to do. Perhaps she will now make it her habit to come down and see us occasionally in the evening. Oh, my love, my heart calls for thee so, that I know not how to wait weeks longer for thee. Yet I would not that thou shouldst deprive the children of the beautiful country on that account. All will be repaid us in the first hour of meeting. Own wife, the coat does not crock the shirtsleeve in the least--so thy labor in lining it would have been thrown away. I gave the vest to Louisa soon after thou wentest away, and have seen nothing of it since. I wish Una, and Julian too, would write a letter to Aunty 'Ouisa. I know it would give her as much pleasure as anything can. With infinite love, I am THINE OWNEST. Naughtiest, I do not leave thy letter about. I would just as soon leave my own heart on the "walking side," as Una calls it. Mrs. Sophia A. Hawthorne, West Newton. TO MRS. HAWTHORNE _Salem_, July 7th, 1848 Ownest, when thy letters come, I always feel as if I could not have done without them a moment longer. Thou must have received one from me since the date of thine, but I hope it will not weary thee to receive this brief scribblement. If my hand would only answer to my heart, what letters I should write thee! It is wonderful--the growth of our love! Six years ago, it seemed infinite; yet what was the love of that epoch to the present! Thou badest me burn two pages of thy last letter; but I cannot do it, and will not; for never was a wife's deep, warm, chaste love so well expressed, and it is as holy to me as the Bible. Oh, I cannot begin to tell how I love thee. Dearest, I should not forgive myself if I were to deprive the children of the country. Thou must keep them there as long as thou canst. When thou hast paid thy visit to Sarah Clark, I must come and see thee in Boston, and if possible (and if I shall be welcome) will spend a Sunday there with thee. There is no news. Miss Derby has finished her picture, and it is now being publicly exhibited. I have not yet seen it, but mean to go. Mr. Pike is going to dine with me to-day, on green peas. Oh, for one kiss! THY LOVINGEST HUSBAND. Did Julian have a tooth?--or what was the matter? Why did all the children have fever-fits? Why was Horace jumped in a wet sheet? Mrs. Sophia A. Hawthorne. TO MRS. HAWTHORNE _Salem_, July 12th, 1848 Dearest Phoebe, I enclose an advertisement of silks. Aunty 'Ouisa would like to have you get some patterns of those which she has marked with a pencil. A letter from Mrs. F. Shaw came for thee to-day; and I opened and read it. It contains nothing that requires thy immediate perusal; and as it is rather bulky, I do not send it. She is well, and so is Caroline Sturgis. I hear great accounts of the canary birds, now exhibiting in Boston; and it seems to me thou mightest please Una very much by taking her to see them. I need thee very much indeed, and shall heartily thank God when thou comest back to thine own home--and thine ownest husband. What a wretched time thou art having on that infernal mattress----Truly do I pity thee, cooped up in that hot and dusty house, such a day as this. Were it not for Dr. Wesselhoeft, I should think it best for thee to get away immediately. Did Una remember me, when she waked up?--and has little Bundlebreech wanted me?--and dost thou thyself think of me with moderate kindness? Oh, Phoebe, it is too great a sacrifice--this whole blank month in our wedded life. I want thee always. THY LOVINGEST SPOUSE. Mrs. Sophia A. Hawthorne, Care of Dr. N. Peabody, Boston, Massachusetts. TO MRS. HAWTHORNE _Salem_, July 18th, 1848 Belovedest, thy letter came yesterday, and caused my heart to heave like an ocean. Thou writest with a pen of celestial fire;--none ever wrote such letters but thou--none is worthy to read them but I--and I only because thou purifiest and exaltest me by thy love. Angels, I doubt not, are well pleased to look over thy shoulder as thou writest. I verily believe that no mortals, save ourselves, have ever known what enjoyment was. How wonderful that to the pure in spirit all earthly bliss is given in a measure which the voluptuary never can have dreamed of. Soon--soon--thou wilt be at home. What joy! I count the days, and almost the hours, already. There is one good in our separation--that it has enabled us to estimate whereabouts we are, and what vast progress we have made into the ever-extending infinite of love. Wherefore, this will not be a blank space, but a bright one, in our recollection. Dearest, I told Louisa of thy wish that she should come on Saturday; and it seemed that the proposal found favor in her eyes. If not, she will perhaps commission thee to buy her a gown. Elizabeth came down to see me last evening, and we confabulated till eleven o'clock. Dora is dying to see thee and the children. The fortune teller has foretold that she is not to marry poor Mr. Hooper, nor anybody else that has been hitherto in question; but a young man, who, Dora says, lives in Boston. She has thorough faith in the prediction. I forgot to take those two volumes of Cooper's Miles Wallingford; and when I was last in Boston, I looked for them on the shelf in vain. If they may conveniently be had, when thou comest home, wilt thou please to give thyself the trouble of taking them. Kiss our beloved children for me. Thou art coming home!--Thou art coming home! THINE OWNEST HUSBAND. Mrs. Sophia A. Hawthorne, Care of Dr. N. Peabody, Boston, Massachusetts. TO MRS. HAWTHORNE _Castle Dismal_, Novr. 18th, 1848 _Ownest Phoebe_, Thy letter did not come till to-day; and I know not that I was ever more disappointed and impatient--for I was sure that it ought to have come yesterday, and went to the Post Office three times after it. Now I have nothing to tell thee, belovedest wife, but write thee just a word, because I must. Thou growest more and more absolutely essential to me, every day we live. I never knew how thou art intertwined with my being, till this absence. Darlingest, thou hast mentioned Horace's sickness two or three times, and I have speculated somewhat thereupon. Thou hast removed to West-street, likewise, and reservest the reasons till we meet. I wonder whether there be any connection between these two matters. But I do not feel anxious. If I am not of a hopeful nature, at least my imagination is not suggestive of evil. If Una were to have the hooping-cough, I should be glad thou wast within Dr. Wesselhoeft's sphere. What a shadowy day is this! While this weather lasts, thou canst not come. THY BELOVEDEST HUSBAND. Do not hasten home on my account--stay as long as thou deemest good. I well know how thy heart is tugging thee hitherward. Mrs. Sophia A. Hawthorne, Care of Dr. N. Peabody, Boston, Massachusetts. TO MRS. HAWTHORNE 14 Mull street, Monday, [_Salem_,] 16th April, 1849 _Ownest wife_, I suppose thou wilt not expect (nor wish for) a letter from me; but it is so desolate and lonesome here that I needs must write. This is a miserable time. Thy and the children's absence; and this dreary bluster of the wind, which at once exasperates and depresses me to the very last degree; and finally, a breakfast (the repetition of yesterday's) of pease and Indian pudding!! It is a strange miscellany of grievances; but it does my business--it makes me curse my day. This matter of the breakfast is the most intolerable, just at this moment; because the taste of it is still in my mouth, and the nausea and disgust overwhelms me like the consciousness of sin. Hell is nothing else but eating pease and baked Indian pudding! If thou lovest me, never let me see either of them again. Keep such things for thy and my worst enemies. Give thy husband bread, or cold potatoes; and he never will complain--but pease and Indian pudding! God forgive me for ever having burthened my conscience with such abominations. They are the Unpardonable Sin and the Intolerable Punishment, in one and the same accursed spoonfull! I think I hardly ever had such a dismal time as yesterday. I cannot bear the loneliness of the house. I need the sunshine of the children; even their little quarrels and naughtinesses would be a blessing to me. I need thee, above all, and find myself, at every absence, so much the less able to endure it. Come home come home! Where dost thou think I was on Saturday afternoon? Thou wilt never guess. In haste; for it is almost Custom House time. THY HUSBAND. Mrs. Sophia A. Hawthorne, Care of Dr. N. Peabody, 13 West Street, Boston, Mass. TO MRS. HAWTHORNE _Salem_, May 9th, 1849 _Dearest_, Thy letter was received last night. What a time thou hast!--and I not there to help thee! I almost feel as if I ought to come every day; but then I should do so little good--arriving at 4 o'clock; and the children going to bed at six or seven; and the expense is so considerable. If thou canst hold out till Friday, I shall endeavor to come in the afternoon and stay till Monday. But this must depend on arrangements hereafter to be made; so do not absolutely expect me before Saturday. Oh that Providence would bring all of you home, before then! This is a miserable time for me; more so than for thee, with all thy toil, and watchfulness and weariness. These sunless days are as sunless within as without. Thou hast no conception how melancholy our house can be. It absolutely chills my heart. If it is necessary for me to come sooner, write by express. Give my love to Una and Julian, and tell them how much I miss them. God bless thee and them. THINE OWNEST. Mrs. Sophia A. Hawthorne, Care of Dr. N. Peabody, 13 West-street, Boston. TO MRS. HAWTHORNE _Navy Yard_, April 26th, 1850 _Ownest wife_, Thy letter (dated 22d, but postmarked this very day) has just arrived, and perplexed me exceedingly with its strange aspect. Thy poor dear thumb! I am afraid it puts thee to unspeakable pain and trouble, and I feel as if I ought to be with thee; especially as Una is not well. What is the matter?--anything except her mouth? I almost wish thou hadst told me to come back. It rained so continually on the day of my departure that I was not able to get over to the Navy Yard, but had to put up at the Rockingham House. Being recognized there, I was immediately lugged into society, whether I would or no; taking tea at one place, and spending the evening at another. I have since dined out, and been invited to a party--but escaped this latter infliction. Bridge's house, however, is the quietest place imaginable, and I only wish thou couldst be here, until our Lenox home is ready. I long to see thee, and am sad for want of thee. And thou too so comfortless in all that turmoil and confusion! I have been waiting for thee to write; else I should have written before, though with nothing to say to thee--save the unimportant fact that I love thee better than ever before, and that I cannot be at peace away from thee. Why has not Dr. Wesselhoeft cured thy thumb? Thou never must hereafter do any work whatever; thou wast not made strong, and always sufferest tenfold the value of thy activities. Thou didst much amiss, to marry a husband who cannot keep thee like a lady, as Bridge does his wife, and as I should so delight to keep thee, doing only beautiful things, and reposing in luxurious chairs, and with servants to go and to come. Thou hast a hard lot in life; and so have I that witness it, and can do little or nothing to help thee. Again I wish that thou hadst told me to come back; or, at least, whether I should come or no. Four days more will bring us to the first of May, which is next Wednesday; and it was my purpose to return then. Thou wilt get this letter, I suppose, tomorrow morning, and, if desirable, might send to me by express the same day; and I could leave here on Monday morning. On looking at the Pathfinder Guide, I find that a train leaves Portsmouth for Boston at 5 o'clock P.M. Shouldst thou send me a message by the 11 o'clock train, I might return and be with thee tomorrow (Saturday) evening, before 8 o'clock. I should come without being recalled; only that it seems a sin to add another human being to the multitudinous chaos of that house. I cannot write. Thou hast our home and all our interests about thee, and away from thee there is only emptiness--so what have I to write about? THINE OWNEST HUSBAND. P.S. If thou sendest for me to-morrow, and I do not come, thou must conclude that the express did not reach me. Mrs. Sophia A. Hawthorne, Care of Dr. Nathl. Peabody, Boston, Massachusetts. TO MRS. HAWTHORNE _Lenox_, July 30th, 1851 _Dearest Phoebe_, We are getting along perfectly well, and without a single event that could make a figure in a letter. I keep a regular chronicle of all our doings; and you may read it on your return. Julian seems perfectly happy, but sometimes talks in rather a sentimental style about his mother. I do hope thou camest safely to West Newton, and meetest with no great incommodities there. Julian is now out in the garden; this being the first time since thou wentest away, almost, (except when he was in bed) that he has left me for five minutes together. I find him really quite a tolerable little man! Kiss Una for me, and believe me, Thy affectionate husband, N. H. Mrs. Sophia A. Hawthorne, West Newton. TO MRS. HAWTHORNE _Lenox_, August 1st, Friday [1851] _Dearest Phoebe_, I send the tools, which I found in one of the cupboards. Thy two letters arrived together, this morning. I was at the P. O. on Wednesday, and greatly disappointed to find nothing. Julian and I get along together in great harmony, & as happy as we can be severed from thee. It grieves me that thou findest nobody to help thee there. If this state of things is to continue, thou must abridge thy stay, and return before thou art quite worn out. I wrote a few lines on Tuesday (I think) which I suppose thou hast received. I more than ever abhor letter-writing; but thou partly knowest that I am Thy lovingest HUSBAND. Mrs. Sophia A. Hawthorne, West Newton. TO MRS. HAWTHORNE _Lenox_, August 7th, 1851.--Thursday _Ownest Phoebe_, I rec'd thy letter yesterday. I will be in Pittsfield on _Thursday_ next (a week from to-day) and will escort thee home. I have written quite a small volume of Julian's daily life and mine; so that, on thy return, thou wilt know everything that we have done and suffered;--as to enjoyment, I don't remember to have had any, during thy absence. It has been all doing and suffering. Thou sayest nothing whatever of Una. Unless I receive further notice from thee I shall consider Thursday the day. I shall go at any rate, I think, rain or shine; but of course, thou wilt not start in a settled rain. In that case, I shall come again to Pittsfield, the next day. But, if fair weather, I hope nothing will detain thee; or if it necessarily must, and thou has[t] previous knowledge of it, thou canst write me. Julian is perfectly well. We both, according to our respective capacities, long for thee. Thinest, N. H. TO MRS. HAWTHORNE _Lenox_, August 8th, 1851 _Ownest Phoebe_, I wrote thee a note yesterday, and sent it to the village by Cornelius; but as he may have neglected to put it in, I write again. If thou wilt start from West Newton on _Thursday_ next, I will meet thee at Pittsfield, which will answer the same purpose as if I came all the way. Mrs. Tappan requests that thou wilt bring ten pounds of ground rice for her; or a less quantity, if thou hast not room for so much. Julian is very well, and keeps himself happy from morning till night. I hope Una does the same. Give my love to her. I shall be most gladdest to see thee. Thine, N. H. August 9th.--Saturday.--I recd. yesterday thy note, in which thou speakest of deferring thy return some days longer. Stay by all means as long as may be needful. Julian gets along perfectly well; and I am eager for thy coming only because it is unpleasant to remain torn asunder. Thou wilt write to tell me finally what day thou decidest upon;--but unless I hear from thee, I shall go to Pittsfield on _Saturday_, a week from to-day. But if thou seest reason for staying longer do so, that nothing may be left at loose ends. Julian and I had a fine ride yesterday with Herman Melville and two other gentlemen. Mrs. Peters is perfectly angelic. Thinest, N. H. TO MRS. HAWTHORNE _West Newton_, Septr. 19th, 1851 _Dearest Phoebe_, Here I am as thou seest; and if not here, I know not where I could be; for Boston is so full that the Mayor has issued proclamation for the inhabitants to throw open their doors. The President is there. They all appear to be well here; and thy mother, if Horace and Georgia say truly, walked three miles yesterday. I went with Mary to see her, last evening, and found her much better than I ever hoped. Talking with Mary, last night, I explained our troubles to her, and our wish to get away from Lenox, and she renewed the old proposition about our taking this house for the winter. The great objection to it, when first talked of, was, that we, or I, did not wish to have the care and responsibility of your father and mother. That is now removed. It strikes me as one of those unexpected, but easy and natural solutions wherewith Providence occasionally unknots a seemingly inextricable difficulty. If you agree with me, you had better notify Mr. or Mrs. Sedgwick that we shall not want the Kemble house. We can remain in the red house till we come here. We shall pay a rent, but I know not as yet precisely what. But we shall probably only remain half the time Mr. and Mrs. Mann are in Washington. Mary will write. I shall probably go to Salem on Saturday. Kiss and spank the children. Thine ownest in haste, N. H. Mrs. Sophia A. Hawthorne, Lenox, Massachusetts. TO MRS. HAWTHORNE _Salem_, Sept. 23d, 1851 _Dearest_, I have just received thy two letters; they having been forwarded hither by Ticknor & Co. I wish thou hadst not had the head-ache; it gives me the heart-ache. In regard to the rent, it is much to pay; but thou art to remember that we take the house only till we can get another; and that we shall not probably have to pay more than half, at most, of the $350. It does seem to me better to go; for we shall never be comfortable in Lenox again. Ticknor & Co. promise the most liberal advances of money, should we need it, towards buying the house. I will tell thee my adventures when I come. I am to return to Boston to-night, and fully intend to be in Lenox by Saturday night. In hugest haste, THINE OWNEST. Mrs. Sophia A. Hawthorne, Lenox, Massachusetts. TO MRS. HAWTHORNE _Portsmouth_, Sept. 3d, 1852 _Ownest Phoebe_, I left Brunswick Wednesday night, and arrived here yesterday, with Pierce. My adventures thou shalt know when I return, and how I was celebrated by orators and poets--and how, by the grace of Divine Providence, I was not present, to be put to the blush. All my contemporaries have grown the funniest old men in the world. Am I a funny old man? I am going to cross over to the Isle of Shoals, this forenoon, and intend to spend several days there, until I get saturated with sea-breezes. I love thee very much-est;--likewise, the children are very pleasant to think of. Kiss Una--Kiss Julian--Kiss Rosebud--for me! Kiss thyself, if thou canst--and I wish thou wouldst kiss me. A boat passes between Portsmouth and the Isle of Shoals, every forenoon; and a letter, I presume, would reach me in case of necessity. I long to see thee. It is breakfast time. Thine ownest N. HAWTHORNE. Mrs. Sophia A. Hawthorne, Concord, Massachusetts. TO MRS. HAWTHORNE _New York_, Sunday morng., April 17th, 1853 _Dearest_, I arrived here in good condition Thursday night at ½ past 12. Every moment of my time has been so taken up with calls and engagements that I really could not put pen to paper until now, when I am writing before going down to breakfast. It is almost as difficult to see O'Sullivan here as if he were a hundred miles off. I rode three miles to his home on Friday, and found him not at home. However, he came yesterday, and we talked together until other people came between. I do wish I could be let alone, to follow my own ideas of what is agreeable. To-day, I am to dine with a college-professor of mathematics, to meet Miss Lynch!! Why did I ever leave thee, my own dearest wife? Now, thou seest, I am to be lynched. We have an ugly storm here to-day. I intend to leave New York for Philadelphia tomorrow, and shall probably reach Washington on Wednesday. I am homesick for thee. The children, too, seem very good and beautiful. I hope Una will be very kind and sweet. As for Julian, let Ellen make him a pandowdy. Does Rosebud still remember me? It seems an age since I left home. No words can tell how I love thee. I will write again as soon as possible. THINE OWNEST HUSBAND. TO MRS. HAWTHORNE _Philadelphia_, Tuesday 19th, 1853 _Ownest_, We left New York yesterday at 3 o'clock, and arrived safely here, where we have spent the day. We leave for Washington tomorrow morning, and I shall mail this scribble there, so that thou wilt know that I have arrived in good condition. Thou canst not imagine the difficulty of finding time and place to write a word. I enjoy the journey and seeing new places, but need thee beyond all possibility of telling. I feel as if I had just begun to know that there is nothing else for me but thou. The children, too, I know how to love, at last. Kiss them all for me. In greatest haste (and in a public room), Thine ownest, N. H. Baltimore, Wednesday, 5 o'clock.--Thus far in safety. I shall mail the letter immediately on reaching Washington, where we expect to be at ½ past 9. With love a thousand times more than ever, Thinest, N. H. Washington, Thursday.--Before Breakfast. --Dearest, I arrived so late and tired, last night, that I quite forgot to mail the letter. I found about a dozen letters awaiting me at the hotel, from other people, but none from thee. My heart is weary with longing for thee. I want thee in my arms. I shall go to the President at nine o'clock this morning--shall spend three or four days here--and mean to be back early next week. THINE OWNEST. TO MRS. HAWTHORNE _Washington_, April 28th, Thursday. 1853 _Dearest_, The President has asked me to remain in the city a few days longer, for particular reasons; but I think I shall be free to leave by Saturday. It is very queer how much I have done for other people and myself since my arrival here. Colonel Miller is to be here to-night. Ticknor stands by me manfully, and will not quit me until we see Boston again. I went to Mount Vernon yesterday with the ladies of the President's family. Thou never sawst such a beautiful and blossoming Spring as we have here. Expect me early in next week. How I long to be in thy arms is impossible to tell. Tell the children I love them all. THINEST. TO MRS. HAWTHORNE _Liverpool_, July 26th, '54 _Dearest Wife_, We had the pleasantest passage, yesterday, that can be conceived of. How strange, that the best weather I have ever known should have come to us on these English coasts! I enclose some letters from the O'Sullivan's, whereby you will see that they have come to a true appreciation of Mr. Cecil's merits. They say nothing of his departure; but I shall live in daily terror of his arrival. I hardly think it worth while for me to return to the island, this summer;--that is, unless you conclude to stay longer than a week from this time. Do so, by all means, if you think the residence will benefit either yourself or the children. Or it would be easy to return thither, should it seem desirable--or to go somewhere else. Tell me what day you fix upon for leaving; and I will either await you in person at the landing-place, or send Henry. Do not start, unless the weather promises to be favorable, even though you should be all ready to go on board. I think you should give something to the servants--those of them, at least, who have taken any particular pains with you. Michael asked me for something, but I told him that I should probably be back again;--so you must pay him my debts and your own too. It is very lonesome at Rock Ferry, and I long to have you all back again. Give my love to the children. THINE OWNEST. TO MRS. HAWTHORNE _Liverpool_, Sept. 12th, 1854 _Dearest_, We arrived safe at Rock Ferry at about ten. Emily had gone to bed, but came down in her night-clothes--the queerest figure I ever saw. I enclose a letter from thy brother N. It contains one piece of intelligence very interesting to the parties concerned. Mr. O'Sullivan is going to London, this afternoon. I wish thou wast at home, for the house is very cheerless in its solitude. But it will be only a few days before I see thee again; and in the meantime thou must go to all accessible places, and enjoy thyself for both of us. The barometer goes backward to-day, and indicates a proximate change of weather. What wilt thou do in a rain-storm? I am weighed down and disheartened by the usual immense pile of American newspapers. What a miserable country! Kiss all the old people for me--Julian, as well as the others. Thine ownest, N. H. TO MRS. HAWTHORNE _Liverpool_, July 30th, 1855 _Dearest_, I slept at Lancaster, last night, where I arrived at 10 o'clock; and leaving at ½ past nine, this morning, got here at twelve. Since leaving you, I have been thinking that we have skimmed the cream of the lakes, and perhaps may as well go somewhere else, now. What if you should come to Liverpool (that is, to Rock Ferry Hotel) and spend a day or two, for the sake of variety, and then go to Matlock or Malvern, or wherever we may think best? Should you conclude to do this, I think you had better take a phaeton & pair from Grasmere to Windermere, and there you can get on the rail. If you wish to stay longer at the lakes, however, I shall be quite happy to come back. Mr. Wildeys says that lodgings may be had reasonable (and some at farmers' houses) in the vicinity of Bourness; but he does not know of any in particular. Weigh these matters, and decide for yourself. I have an impression, I hardly know why, that we have done with the lakes for this year; but I should not regret to have you stay longer. I send the halves of a £10 & of a £5. There would be no difficulty in your coming here without a male attendant. Do not think that I wish you to come, contrary to your opinion. If you and the children are comfortable & happy, I am quite content to take another draught of the lakes. Kiss them all. THINE N. Mr. Bradford and Miss Ripley sailed a fortnight ago. Mr. Bright was in this morning. TO MRS. HAWTHORNE _Liverpool_, Novr. 3d, 1855 _Dearest wife_, I received your letter a week ago, telling me of your woeful passage and safe arrival. If I had thought how much you were to suffer on the voyage, I never could have consented to thy departure; but I hope thou art now flourishing in the southern sunshine, and I am sure it would have been a dreadful matter for thee to remain in such weather as we have lately had. But I do so long to see thee! If it were not for Julian, I do not think I could bear it at all. He is really a great comfort and joy to me, and rather unexpectedly so; for I must confess I wished to keep him here on his own account and thine, much more than on my own. We live together in great love and harmony, the best friends in the world. He has begun to go to dancing-school; and I have heard of a drawing-master for him, but do not yet let him take lessons, because they might interfere with his day-school, should we conclude to send him thither. His health and spirits seem now to be perfectly good; and I think he is benefitted by a greater regularity of eating than when at home. He never has anything between meals, and seems not to want anything. Mrs. Blodgett, Miss Williams, and their niece, all take motherly care of him, combing his wool, and seeing that he looks clean and gentlemanly as a Consul's son ought to do. Since the war-cloud has begun to darken over us, he insists on buckling on his sword the moment he is dressed, and never lays it aside till he is ready to go to bed--after drawing it, and making blows and thrusts at Miss Williams's tom-cat, for lack of a better antagonist. I trust England and America will have fought out their warfare before his worship's beard begins to sprout; else he will pester us by going forth to battle. I crossed over to Rock Ferry, a few days ago; and thou canst not imagine the disgust and horror with which I greeted that abominable old pier. The atmosphere of the river absolutely sawed me asunder. If we had been wise enough to avoid the river, I believe thou wouldst have found the climate of England quite another thing; for though we have had very bad weather for weeks past, the air of the town has nothing like the malevolence of that of the river. Mrs. Hantress is quite well, and inquires very affectionately about thee, and the children, and Fanny. Mrs. Watson crossed in the same boat with me. She has taken a house at Cloughton, and was now going over to deliver up the keys of the Rock Ferry house. I forgot to inquire about Miss Sheppard, and do not know whether she has succeeded in letting our house. I dined at Mr. Bright's on Thursday evening. Of course, there were the usual expressions of interest in thy welfare; and Annie desired to be remembered to Una. Mr. Channing called on me, a few days since. He has just brought his family from Southport, where they have been spending several weeks. Our conversation was chiefly on the subject of the approaching war; for there has suddenly come up a mysterious rumor and ominous disturbance of all men's spirits, as black and awful as a thunder-gust. So far as I can ascertain, Mr. Buchanan considers the aspect of affairs very serious indeed; and a letter, said to be written with his privity, was communicated to the Americans here, telling of the breach of treaties, and a determination on the part of the British Government to force us into war. It will need no great force, however, if the Yankees are half so patriotic at home, as we on this side of the water. We hold the fate of England in our hands, and it is time we crushed her--blind, ridiculous, old lump of beef, sodden in strong beer, that she is; not but what she has still vitality enough to do us a good deal of mischief, before we quite annihilate her. At Mr. Bright's table, for the first time, I heard the expression of a fear that the French alliance was going to be ruinous to England, and that Louis Napoleon was getting his arm too closely about the neck of Britannia, insomuch that the old lady will soon find herself short of breath. I think so indeed! He is at the bottom of these present commotions. One good effect of a war would be, that I should speedily be warned out of England, and should betake myself to Lisbon. But how are we to get home? Luckily, I don't care much about getting home at all; and we will be cosmopolites, and pitch our tent in any peaceable and pleasant spot we can find, and perhaps get back to Concord by the time our larch-trees have ten years' growth. Dost thou like this prospect? What a beautiful letter was thine! I do think nobody else ever wrote such letters, so magically descriptive and narrative. I have read it over and over and over to myself, and aloud to Julian, whose face shone as he listened. By-the-by, I meant that he should have written a letter to accompany this; but this is his dancing-school day, and I did not bring him to the Consulate. One packet of letters, intended for Lisbon, has mysteriously vanished; and I cannot imagine what has become of it, unless it were slipt by mistake into Ticknor's letter-bag, and so went to America by the last steamer. It contained a letter from thy sister Elizabeth, one from Julian, and myself, and, I believe, one from Mr. Dixon. Did you pay a bill (of between one or two pounds) of Frisbie, Dyke & Co.? I inquired in my last about Mr. Weston's bill for coals. Do not stint thyself on the score of expenses, but live and dress and spend like a lady of station. It is entirely reasonable and necessary that thou shouldst. Send Una to whatever schools, and let her take whatever lessons, thou deemest good. Kiss Una; kiss naughty little Rosebud. Give my individual love to everybody. THINE OWN, OWNEST, OWNESTEST. P.S. Since writing the above, Mr. Channing has been in, and thou wouldst be (as I am) at once confounded and delighted to hear the warlike tone in which he talks. He thinks that the Government of England is trying to force us into a war, and he says, in so many words, "LET IT COME!!!" He is already considering how he is to get home, and says that he feels ready to enlist; and he breathes blood and vengeance against whomsoever shall molest our shores. Huzza! Huzza! I begin to feel warlike, too. There was a rumor yesterday, that our minister had demanded his passports; and I am mistaken in Frank Pierce if Mr. Crampton has not already been ejected from Washington. No doubt O'Sullivan's despatches will enable him to give thee more authentic intelligence than I possess as to the real prospects. N. H. TO MRS. HAWTHORNE _Liverpool_, February 7th, 1856 Thy letter, my own most beloved, (dated Jany. 31st) arrived yesterday, and revived me at once out of a state of half-torpor, half misery--just as much of each as could co-exist with the other. Do not think that I am always in that state; but one thing, dearest, I have been most thoroughly taught by this separation--that is, the absolute necessity of expression. I must tell thee I love thee. I must be told that thou lovest me. It must be said in words and symbolized with caresses; or else, at last, imprisoned Love will go frantic, and tear all to pieces the heart that holds it. And the only other alternative is to be torpid. I just manage to hold out from one letter of thine to another; and then comes life and joy again. Thou canst not conceive what an effect yesterday's letter had on me. It renewed my youth, and made my step lighter; it absolutely gave me an appetite; and I went to bed joyfully to think of it. Oh, my wife, why did God give thee to poor unworthy me! Art thou sure that He made thee for me? Ah, thy intuition must have been well-founded on this point; because, otherwise, all through eternity, thou wouldst carry my stain upon thee; and how could thine own angel ever need thee then! Thou art mine!--Thou _shalt_ be mine! Thou hast given thyself to me irredeemably. Thou hast grown to me. Thou canst never get away. Oh, my love, it is a desperate thing that I cannot see thee this very instant. Dost thou ever feel, at one and the same moment, the impossibility of doing without me, and also the impossibility of having me? I know not how it is that my strong wishes do not bring thee here bodily, while I am writing these words. One of the two impossibilities must needs be overcome; and it seems the strongest impossibility that thou shouldst be anywhere else, when I need thee so insufferably. Well, my own wife, I have a little wreaked myself now, and will go on more quietly with what I have further to say. As regards O'Sullivan--(how funny that thou shouldst put quotation marks to this name, as if astonished at my calling him so! Did we not entirely agree in thinking "John" an undue and undesirable familiarity? But thou mayst call him "John," or "Jack" either, as best suits thee.)--as regards O'Sullivan, then, my present opinion of him is precisely what thou thyself didst leave upon my mind, in our discussions of his character. I have often had a similar experience before, resulting from thy criticism upon any views of mine. Thou insensibly convertest me to thy own opinion, and art afterwards surprised to find it so; in fact, I seldom am aware of the change in my own mind, until the subject chances to come up for further discussion, and I find myself on what was thy side. But I will try to give my true idea of his character. I know that he has most vivid affections--a quick, womanly sensibility--a light and tender grace, which, in happy circumstances, would make all his deeds and demonstrations beautiful. In respect to companionship, beyond all doubt, he has never been in such fortunate circumstances as during his present intercourse with thee; and I am willing to allow that thou bringest out his angelic part, and therefore canst not be expected to see anything but an angel in him. It has sometimes seemed to me that the lustre of his angel-plumage has been a little dimmed--his heavenly garments a little soiled and bedraggled--by the foul ways through which it has been his fate to tread, and the foul companions with whom necessity and politics have brought him acquainted. But I had rather thou shouldst take _him_ for a friend than any other man I ever knew (unless, perhaps, George Bradford, who can hardly be reckoned a man at all,) because I think the Devil has a smaller share in O'Sullivan than in other bipeds who wear breeches. To do him justice, he is miraculously pure and true, considering what his outward life has been. Now, dearest, I have a genuine affection for him, and a confidence in his honor; and as respects his defects in everything that concerns pecuniary matters, I believe him to have kept his integrity intact to a degree that is really wonderful, in spite of the embarrassments of a lifetime. If we had his whole life mapped out before us, I should probably forgive him some things which thy severer sense of right would condemn. Thou talkest of his high principle; but that does not appear to me to be his kind of moral endowment. Perhaps he may have the material that principles are manufactured from. My beloved, he is not the man in whom I see my ideal of a friend; not for his lack of principle, not for any ill-deeds or practical shortcomings which I know of or suspect; not but what he is amiable, loveable, fully capable of self-sacrifice, utterly incapable of selfishness. The only reason, that I can put into words, is, that he never stirs me to any depth beneath my surface; I like him, and enjoy his society, and he calls up, I think, whatever small part of me is elegant and agreeable; but neither of my best nor of my worst has he ever, or could he ever, have a glimpse. I should wish my friend of friends to be a sterner and grimmer man than he; and it is my opinion, sweetest wife, that the truest manly delicacy is to be found in those stern, grim natures--a little alpine flower, of tenderest texture, and loveliest hue, and delicious fragrance, springing out of a rocky soil in a high, breezy, mountain atmosphere. O'Sullivan's quick, genial soil produces an abundant growth of flowers, but not just this precious little flower. He is too much like a woman, without being a woman; and between the two characters, he misses the quintessential delicacy of both. There are some tests of thorough refinement which, perhaps, he could not stand. And yet I shall not dispute that for refinement and delicacy he is one out of a thousand; and we might spend a lifetime together without putting him to a test too severe. As for his sympathies, he would be always ready to pour them out (not exactly like Niagara, but like a copious garden-fountain) for those he loved. If thou thinkest I have done him great injustice in the foregoing sketch, it is very probable that thou wilt bring me over to thy way of thinking; and perhaps balance matters by passing over to mine. Dearest, I do hope I shall next hear of thee from Madeira; for this suspense is hard to bear. Thou must not mind what I say to thee, in my impatient agonies, about coming back. Whatever can be borne, I shall find myself able to bear, for the sake of restoring thee to health. I have now groped so far through the thick darkness that [a] little glimmer of light begins to appear at the other end of the passage; it will grow clearer and brighter continually, and at last it will show me my dearest wife. I do hope thou wilt find thy husband wiser and better than he has been hitherto; wiser, in knowing the more adequately what a treasure he has in thee; and better, because I feel it such a shame to be loved by thee without deserving it. Dost thou love me? Give my love to Una, to whom I cannot write now, without doubling the postage. Do not let little Rosebud forget me. Remember me to Fanny, and present my regards to Madame O'Sullivan, and Mrs. Susan, and Miss Rodgers. So all is said very properly. Thou toldest me not to write to Madeira before hearing from thee there; but I shall send this to the care of the American Consul, to whom I wrote by the last Lisbon steamer, sending the letter to O'Sullivan's care. Thine own-ownest. Julian is perfectly well. TO MRS. HAWTHORNE _Liverpool_, March 18th, 1856 In a little while longer, ownest wife, we must think about thy return to England. The thought is a happiness greater than I can crowd into my mind. Wilt thou think it best to go back to Lisbon? This must depend, I suppose, on the length of stay of the O'Sullivans in Madeira. If they return to Lisbon before June, thou wilt have to go with them; if they stay so late as the first of June, I should think it best for thee to come direct to Southampton; but I leave it to thy decision, as thou canst weigh all the circumstances. I somewhat dread thy returning to this miserable island at all; for I fear, even if Madeira quite rids thee of thy cough, England will at once give it back. But Elizabeth has sent thee a certain article which is vouched for, by numerous certificates, as a certain cure for all coughs and affections of the lungs. So far as I can ascertain its structure, it consists of some layers of quilted flannel, covered with an oilcloth; and the whole thing is not more than three inches square. It is worn on the breast, next the skin, and, being so small, it would not be perceptible under the thinnest dress. In order to make it efficacious, it is to be moistened with some liquor from a bottle which accompanied it; and it keeps the person comfortably warm, and appears to operate like a charm, and makes a little Madeira of its own about the wearer. If thou wast not so very naughty--if thou wouldst consent to be benefitted by anything but homeopathy--here in this little box is health and joy for us!--yes, the possibility of sitting down together in a mud-puddle, or in the foggiest hole in England, and being perfectly well and happy. Oh, mine ownest love, I shall clap this little flannel talisman upon thy dearest bosom, the moment thou dost touch English soil. Every instant it shall be shielded by the flannel. I have drawn the size and thickness of it, above. We are plodding on here, Julian and I, in the same dull way. The old boy, however, is happy enough; and I must not forget to tell thee that Mary W. has taken him into her good graces, and has quite thrown off another boy, who, Julian says, has heretofore been her "adorer." I told Julian that he must expect to be cast aside in favor of somebody else, by-and-bye. "Then I shall tell her that I am very much ashamed of her," said he. "No," I answered; "you must bear it with a good grace and not let her know that you are mortified." "But why shouldn't I let her know it, if I _am_ mortified?" asked he; and really, on consideration, I thought there was more dignity and self-respect in his view of the case, than in mine; so I told him to act as he thought right. But I don't think he will be much hurt or mortified; for his feelings are marvellously little interested, after all, and he sees her character and criticises her with a shrewdness that quite astonishes me. He is a wonderfully observant boy; nothing escapes his notice; nothing, hardly, deceives his judgment. His intellect is certainly very remarkable, and it is almost a miracle to see it combined with so warm and true and simple a heart. But his heart admits very few persons into it, large though it be. He is not, I think, of a diffusive, but of a concentrative tendency, both as regards mind and affections. In Grace Greenwood's last "Little Pilgrim," there is a description of her new baby!!! in response to numerous inquiries which, she says, have been received from her subscribers. I wonder she did not think it necessary to be brought to bed in public, or, at least, in presence of a committee of the subscribers. My dearest, I cannot enough thank God, that, with a higher and deeper intellect than any other woman, thou hast never--forgive me the base idea!--never prostituted thyself to the public, as that woman has, and as a thousand others do. It does seem to me to deprive women of all delicacy. Women are too good for authorship, and that is the reason it spoils them so. The Queen of England is said to be going to Lisbon, this summer; so perhaps thou wouldst rather stay there and be introduced to her, than come hither and be embraced by me--The O'Sullivans would not miss seeing her, I suppose, for all the husbands on earth. Dearest, I do not like those three women very much; and, indeed, they cannot be good and amiable, nor wise, since, after living with thee for months, they have not made thee feel that they value thee above all things else. Neither am I satisfied with Mr. Welsh's turning thee out of his house. Mr. Dallas, our new Ambassador, arrived at Liverpool a few days ago; and I had to be civil to him and his son, and to at least five ladies whom he brought with him. He seems to be a good old gentleman enough, and of venerable aspect; but as regards ability, I should judge Mr. Buchanan to be worth twenty of him. Dost thou know that we are going to have a war? It is now quite certain; and I hope I shall be ordered out of the country in season to meet thee at Madeira. Dost thou not believe me? March 19th.--Ownest beloved, this morning came thy letter of the 9th, by the African steamer. I knew it could not be much longer delayed, for my heart was getting intolerably hungry. Oh, my wife, thou hast been so ill! And thou art blown about the world, in the midst of rain and whirlwind! It was a most foolish project of O'Sullivan's (as all his projects are) to lead thee from his comfortable fireside, to that comfortless Madeira. And thou sayest, or Una says, that the rainy season is just commencing there, and that this month and the next are the two worst months of the year! Thou _never_ again shalt go away anywhere without me. My two arms shall be thy tropics, and my breast thy equator; and from henceforth forever I will keep thee a great deal too warm, so that thou shalt cry out--"Do let me breathe the cool outward air for a moment!" But I will not. As regards teaching Julian French, I wish I had found a master for him when we first left thee; but there seemed to be so many difficulties in making him really and seriously study, without companions, and without constant supervision, that I let it alone, thinking that, on the continent, all lost time would quickly be made up. And now it will be so little while before thy return, that I doubt whether much would be accomplished in the meantime. It is very difficult to get him really interested in any solitary study; and as he could not take more than two lessons in a week, and would have nobody to practise pronounciation with, in the intervals, I think, the result would be only an ineffectual commencement. I have not myself the slightest tact or ability in making him study, or in compelling him to do anything that he is not inclined to do of his own accord; and to tell thee the truth, he has pretty much his own way in everything. At least, such is my impression; but thou hast so often told me of the strength of my will (of which I am not in the least conscious) that it is very possible I may have been ruling him with a rod of iron, all the time. It is true, I have a sort of inert and negative power, with which I should strongly interpose to keep him out of mischief; but I am always inclined to let him wander around at his own sweet will, as long as the path is a safe one. Thou hast incomparably greater faculty of command than I have. I think he must remain untaught till thou comest back to take the helm. Thou wilt find him a good and honest boy, healthy in mind, and healthier in heart than when he left thee; ready to begin his effectual education as soon as circumstances will permit. Let this suffice. In body, too, he never was better in his life than now; and he is a real little rampant devil for physical strength. I find it an arduous business, now-a-days, to take him across my knee and spank him; and unless I give up the attempt betimes, he will soon be the spanker, and his poor father the spankee. I am going to dine at Mr. Bright's, this evening. He has often besought me that Julian might come and spend a few days at Sandheys; and I think I shall let him go, and take the opportunity to run up to London. What vicissitudes of country and climate thou hast run through, while I have never once stirred out of this mud and fog of Liverpool! After returning from London, and as Spring advances, I mean to make little excursions of a day or two with Julian. Oh, dearest, dearest, interminably and infinitely dearest--I don't know how to end that ejaculation. The use of kisses and caresses is, that they supersede language, and express what there are no words for. I need them at this moment--need to give them, & to receive them. THINE OWNEST. TO MRS. HAWTHORNE 32, St. Anne's Place, _London_, April 7th, 1856 Best wife in the world, here I am in London; for I found it quite impossible to draw any more breath in that abominable Liverpool without allowing myself a momentary escape into better air. I could not take Julian with me; and so I disposed of him, much to his own satisfaction, first with the Brights, then with the Channings; and I have now been here more than a week, and shall remain till Thursday. The old boy writes to me in the best of spirits; and I rather think he can do without me better than I can without him; for I really find I love him _a little_, and that his society is one of my necessities, including, as he does, thyself and everything else that I love. Nevertheless, my time has been so much occupied in London, that I have not been able to brood over the miseries of heart-solitudes. They have found me out, these London people, and I believe I should have engagements for every day, and two or three a day, if I staid here through the season. They thicken upon me, the longer I remain. To-night, I am to dine with the Lord Mayor, and shall have to make a speech!! Good Heavens! I wish I might have been spared this. Tomorrow night, I shall dine in the House of Commons, with a member of Parliament, in order to hear a debate. In short, I have been lionized, and am still being lionized; and this one experience will be quite sufficient for me. I find it something between a botheration and a satisfaction. Oh, my dearest, I feel that my heart will be very heavy, as soon as I get back to Liverpool; for thy cough is not getting better, and our dear little Rosebud has been ill! And I was not there! And I do not know--and shall not know for many days--what may have since happened to her and thee! This is very hard to bear. We ought never, never, to have separated. It is most unnatural. It cannot be borne. How strange that it _must_ be borne! Most beloved, I have sent down to Liverpool for Elizabeth's talisman and medicine-bottles; for Mr. Marsh is now in London, and perhaps he will be able to take them to thee. I fear, however, that they will not reach me in time to be delivered to him, and I shall be afraid to trust them to any but a private conveyance. If they come, I hope thou wilt give them a fair trial, at least, if the weather still continues cold and wet. What a wretched world we live in! Not one little nook or corner where thou canst draw a wholesome breath! In all our separation, I have never once felt so utterly desperate as at this moment. I _cannot_ bear it. Everybody inquires about thee. I spent yesterday (Sunday) at Mrs. S. C. Hall's country-seat, and she was very affectionate in her inquiries, and gave me this very sheet of paper on which I am now writing--also some violets, which I have lost, though I promised faithfully to send them to Madeira. Dear me, I wish I had a little bit of sentiment! Didst thou ever read any of her books? She is a very good and kind person, and so is her husband, though he besmeared me with such sweetness of laudation, that I feel all over bestuck, as after handling sweetmeats or molasses-candy. There is a limit of decorum which ought not to be over-stept. I met Miss Cushman, on Saturday, in the Strand, and she asked me to dinner, but I could not go, being already engaged to meet another actress! I have a strange run of luck as regards actresses, having made friends with the three most prominent ones since I came to London, and I find them all excellent people; and they all inquire for thee!! Mrs. Bennoch, too, wishes to see thee very much. Unless thou comest back in very vigorous health, it will never do for us to take lodgings in London for any considerable time, because it would be impossible to keep quiet. Neither shall I dare to have thee come back to Liverpool, accursed place that it is! We will settle ourselves in the South of England, until the autumn, and then (unless Elizabeth's talisman works miracles) we must be gone. The trip to Scotland, I fear, must be quite given up. I suppose, as regards climate, Scotland is only a more intensely disagreeable England. Oh, my wife, I do want thee so intolerably. Nothing else is real, except the bond between thee and me. The people around me are but shadows. I am myself but a shadow, till thou takest me in thy arms, and convertest me into substance. Till thou comest back, I do but walk in a dream. I think a great deal about poor little Rosebud, and find that I loved her about ten million times as much as I had any idea of. Really, dearest wife, I have a heart, although, heretofore, thou hast had great reason to doubt it. But it yearns, and throbs, and burns with a hot fire, for thee, and for the children that have grown out of our loves. Una, too! I long unutterably to see her, and cannot bear to think that she has been growing out of her childhood, all the time, without my witnessing each day's change. But the first moment, when we meet again, will set everything right. Oh, blessed moment! Well, dearest, I must close now, and go in search of Mr. Marsh, whom I have not yet been able to see. God bless thee! I cannot see why He has permitted so much rain, and such cold winds, where thou art. THINE OWNEST, OWNEST. I have no time to read over the above, and know not what I have said, nor left unsaid. TO MRS. HAWTHORNE _Liverpool_, Novr. 24th, 1858 _Dearest Wife_, Your letter by the steamer of the 19th has come, and has given me delight far beyond what I can tell thee. There never were such letters in the world as thine; but this, no doubt, I have already told thee over and over. What pleasantly surprises me is, that the beauty of thy hand-writing has all come back, in these Lisbon letters, and they seem precisely the same, in that respect, that my little virgin Dove used to write me. Before this reaches thee, thou wilt have received the trunks by the Cintra, and also, the sad news of the death of O'Sullivan's brother. I shall wait with the utmost anxiety for thy next letter. Do not thou sympathise too much. Thou art wholly mine, and must not overburthen thyself with anybody's grief--not even that of thy dearest friend next to me. I wish I could be with thee. I am impatient for thee to be well. Thou shouldst not trust wholly to the climate, but must take medical advice--in Lisbon, if it is to be had--otherwise, Dr. Wilkinson's. _Do_ take cod-liver oil. It is the only thing I ever really had any faith in; and thou wilt not take it. Thou dost confess to growing thin. Take cod-liver oil, and, at all events, grow fat. I suppose this calamity of the O'Sullivans will quite shut them up from the world, at present. Julian thrives, as usual. He has lately been out to dine with a boy of about his own age, in the neighborhood. His greatest daily grievance is, that he is not allowed to have his dinner at 5½, with the rest of the family, but dines at one, and sups alone at our dinner time. He never has anything between meals, unless it be apples. I believe I told thee, in my last, that I had give up the thought of sending him to school, for the present. It would be so great and hazardous a change, in the whole system of his life, that I do not like to risk it as long as he continues to do well. The intercourse which he holds with the people of Mrs. Blodgett's seems to me of a healthy kind. They make a playmate of him, to a certain extent, but do him no mischief; whereas, the best set of boys in the world would infallibly bring him harm as well as good. His manners improve, and I do not at all despair of seeing him grow up a gentleman. It is singular how completely all his affections of the head have disappeared;--and that, too, without any prescriptions from Dr. Dryasdust. I encourage him to make complaints of his health, rather than the contrary; but he always declares himself quite well. The difficulty heretofore has been, I think, that he had grown morbid for want of a wider sphere. Miss Williams is very unwell, and, for the last two or three days, has had several visits from the Doctor;--being confined to her bed, and in great pain. I don't know what her disorder is; but she is excessively nervous, and is made ill by anything that agitates her. The rumor of war with America confined her for several days. Give my most affectionate regards to the O'Sullivans. I never felt half so grateful to anybody, as I do to them, for the care they take of thee. It would make a summer climate of Nova Zembla, to say nothing of Lisbon. THINE OWNEST. P.S. I enclose the gold dollar. TO MRS. HAWTHORNE _Liverpool_, Decr. 11th, 1858 _Dearest_, This despatch for O'Sullivan has just reached me; and I do not know whether there will be time to send it by the steamer that sails to-day. Your letters, written immediately after the receipt of the sad news, did not reach me till yesterday; while those by the Southampton steamer, written afterwards, arrived here days ago. Those Liverpool steamers are not nearly such safe mediums as those by Southampton; and no letters of importance ought to be trusted to them. Mrs. Blodgett will buy the articles required by Mrs. O'Sullivan, and likewise the soap for you, and have them in readiness for the next Liverpool steamer. We are quite well (Julian and I) and as contented as we can expect to be, among strangers, and in a continual cold fog. I have heard no private news from America, since I wrote last. I have not a moment's time to write Una; but kiss her for me, and Rosebud too. Neither can I tell thee, in this little moment, how infinitely I love thee. THINEST. P.S. Tell O'Sullivan that Mr. Miller (Despatch Agent) will allow the postage of this package in his account with Government. TO MRS. HAWTHORNE _Liverpool_, Decr. 13th, 1858 _Dearest_, I wrote thee a brief note by a steamer from this port on the 11th, with O'Sullivan's despatches. Nothing noteworthy has happened since; and nothing can happen in this dawdling[A] life of ours. The best thing about our Liverpool days is, that they are very short; it is hardly morning, before night comes again. Una says that the weather in Lisbon is very cold. So it is here--that searching, spiteful cold that creeps all through one's miserable flesh; and if I had to cross the river, as last winter, I do believe I should drown myself in despair. Nevertheless, Julian and I are in excellent condition, though the old boy often grumbles--"It is very cold, papa!"--as he takes his morning bath. [A] On reading over my letter, I cannot make out this word.] The other day, speaking of his first advent into this world, Julian said, "I don't remember how I came down from Heaven; but I'm very glad I happened to tumble into so good a family!" He was serious in this; and it is certainly very queer, that, at nearly ten years old, he should still accept literally our first explanation of how he came to be among us. Thy friend John O'Hara still vagabondises about the street; at least, I met him, some time since, with a basket of apples on his arm, very comfortably clad and looking taller than of yore. I gave him an eleemosynary sixpence, as he told me he was getting on pretty well. Yesterday, his abominable mother laid siege to my office during the greater part of the day, pretending to have business with me. I refused to see her; and she then told Mr. Wilding that her husband was gone to Ireland, and that John was staying at Rock Ferry with Mrs. Woodward, or whatever the lady's name may be, and that she herself had no means of support. But I remained as obdurate as a paving-stone, knowing that, if I yielded this once, she would expect me to supply her with the means of keeping drunk as long as I stay in Liverpool. She hung about the office till dusk, but finally raised the siege. Julian looks like a real boy now; for Mrs. Blodgett has his hair cut at intervals of a month or so, and though I thought his aspect very absurd, at first, yet I have come to approve it rather than otherwise. The good lady does what she can to keep his hands clean, and his nails in proper condition--for which he is not as grateful as he should be. There is to be a ball at his dancing-school, next week, at which the boys are to wear jackets and white pantaloons; and I have commissioned Miss Maria to get our old gentleman equipped in a proper manner. It is funny how he gives his mighty mind to this business of dancing, and even dreams, as he assured me, about quadrilles. His master has praised him a good deal, and advanced him to a place among his elder scholars. When the time comes for Julian to study in good earnest, I perceive that this feeling of emulation will raise his steam to a prodigious height. In drawing (having no competitors) he does not apply himself so earnestly as to the Terpsichorean science; yet he succeeds so well that, last night, I mistook a sketch of his for one of his master's. Mrs. Blodgett and the ladies think his progress quite wonderful; the master says, rather coolly, that he has a very tolerable eye for form. Una seems to be taking rapid strides towards womanhood. I shall not see her a child again; that stage has passed like a dream--a dream merging into another dream. If Providence had not done it, as thou sayest, I should deeply regret her having been present at this recent grief-time of the O'Sullivans. It did not seem to me that she needed experiences of that kind; for life has never been light and joyous to her. Her letters make me smile, and sigh, too; they are such letters as a girl of fifteen would write, with a vein of sentiment continually cropping up, as the geologists say, through the surface. Then the religious tone startles me a little. Would it be well--(perhaps it would, I really don't know)--for religion to be intimately connected, in her mind, with forms and ceremonials, and sanctified places of worship? Shall the whole sky be the dome of her cathedral?--or must she compress the Deity into a narrow space, for the purpose of getting at him more readily? Wouldst thou like to have her follow Aunt Lou and Miss Rodgers into that musty old Church of England? This looks very probable to me; but thou wilt know best how it is, and likewise whether it had better be so, or not. If it is natural for Una to remain within those tenets, she will be happiest there; but if her moral and intellectual development should compel her hereafter to break from them, it would be with the more painful wrench for having once accepted them. December 14th.--Friday.--O'Sullivan desires me to send American newspapers. I shall send some with the parcel by the Liverpool steamer of the 21st; and likewise through John Miller, whenever I have any late ones; but the English Post Office does not recognize American newspapers as being newspapers at all, and will not forward them except for letter postage. This would be ruinous, considering that the rate for single letters, between here and Lisbon, is a shilling and sixpence; and a bundle of newspapers, at a similar rate, would cost several pounds. I _won't_ do it. Miss Williams has not yet left her chamber. Her illness was very serious, and Mrs. Blodgett was greatly alarmed about her; but I believe she is now hopefully convalescent. Julian is outgrowing all the clothes he has, and is tightening terribly in best sack, and absolutely bursting through his trousers. No doubt thou wouldst blaspheme at his appearance; but all boys are the awkwardest and unbeautifullest creatures whom God has made. I don't know that he looks any worse than the rest. I have given Mrs. Blodgett the fullest liberty to get him whatever she thinks best. He ought to look like a gentleman's son, for the ladies of our family like to have him with them as their cavalier and protector, when they go a-shopping. It amazes me to see the unabashed front with which he goes into society. I have done my best, in the foregoing scribble, to put thee in possession of the outward circumstances of our position. It is a very dull life; but I live it hopefully, because thou (my true life) will be restored to me by-and-by. If I had known what thou wouldst have to suffer, through thy sympathies, I would not for the world have sent thee to Lisbon; but we were in a strait, and I knew no other way. Take care of thyself for my sake. Remember me affectionately to the O'Sullivans. THINEST. TO MRS. HAWTHORNE 31, Hertford St., _London_, May 17th, Thursday [1859] _Dearest_, Una must be tired of the monotony of receiving letters from me; and perhaps thou wilt be willing to relieve her, just for once. Her letter, and Julian's, and Rosebud's, all three gave me great pleasure; and I was particularly astonished at the old boy's learned epistle--so learned, indeed, that it cost me some study to comprehend it. He is certainly a promising lad, and I wish I could answer his letter in Hebrew. Affairs succeed each other so fast, that I have really forgotten what I did yesterday. I remember seeing Henry Bright, and listening to a stream of babble from his lips, as we strolled in the Park and along the Strand. Today, I have breakfasted with Fields, and met, among other people, Mr. Field Talfourd, who promises to send thee a photograph of his portrait of Mr. Browning. He was very agreeable, and seemed delighted to see me again. At lunch, we had Lady Dufferin, Mrs. Norton, and Mrs. Sterling, author of the Cloister Life of Charles V., with whom we are to dine on Sunday. Thou wouldst be stricken dumb to see how quietly I accept a whole string of invitations, and, what is more, perform my engagements without a murmur. A little German artist has come to me with a letter of introduction, and a request that I will sit to him for a portrait in bas-relief. To this, likewise, I have consented!!!--Subject to the condition that I shall have my leisure. Mr. Fields has given me, for thee, The Idylls of the King--not the American, but the English edition. I have had time to see Bennoch only once. If I go to Canterbury at all, it must be after my visit to Cambridge; and in that case, I shall have to defer my return till the 31st of May. I cannot yet tell how it will be. The stir of this London life, somehow or other, has done me a wonderful deal of good, and I feel better than for months past. This is queer, for, if I had my choice, I should leave undone almost all the things I do. I have bought a large Alpaca umbrella, costing nine shillings. Probably I shall mislay it before my return. I trust thou dost not burthen thyself with cares. Do drive about, and see Bath, and make thyself jolly with thy glass of wine. Remembrances to Fanny, and love to great and small. Thine, NATH' HAWTHORNE. TO MRS. HAWTHORNE _Pride's Crossing_, Thursday, Aug. 8th, '61 _Dearest wife_, This is a very ugly morning, and, I am afraid, will keep Julian and me at home. The old gentleman had planned a fishing expedition and will probably insist upon it pretty strenuously, in spite of the imminent danger of rain. He seems insatiable in his love of the sea, and regrets that we have but a day or two more to stay, as much as I rejoice of it. Thou dost insist too strongly upon the inconveniences and discomforts of our present abode. I rather need to have the good side of our condition presented to me than the bad one--being sufficiently prompt in discovering the latter for myself; and this is true in almost all cases. I first look at matters in their darkest aspect, and having satisfied myself with that, I begin gradually to be consoled, to take into account the advantages of the case, and thus trudge on, in my heavy way, but with the light brightening around me. Now, while this process is going on, methinks it would be more advisable to assist the benigner influence than to range thyself on the side of the sinister demon, and assure me that I am suffering a thousand inconveniences, of which I am beginning to be unconscious. I doubt whether I could have been more comfortable anywhere else than here. The people of the house are very worthy souls, both of them, entirely unobtrusive, doing everything they can for us, and evidently anxious to give us the worth of our money--and kindly disposed, moreover, beyond money's worth. We live better than I care about living, and so well that Julian dreads the return to the simple fare of the Wayside. The vicinity is very beautiful--insomuch that if I had seen it sooner, I doubt whether I should have built my tower in Concord--but somewhere among these noble woods of white pine and near these rocks and beaches. In fact, were it not for the neighborhood of the railway, the site of this little black house would be an excellent one; for the wood is within half a minute's walk, and the shore may be reached in ten minutes. Well;--our sleeping accommodations are poor;--that is not to [be] denied, but leaving out that matter, we have nothing to complain of--except the heat, which would have pervaded any abode, unless it were an Italian palace. Mrs. Dana (the elder poet's wife, I believe) called here in a barouche the other day, while Julian and I were out, to see Una, whom she sup[posed] to be stopping here? She had two or three young ladies with her, and would probably have asked Una to make a visit at their villa. Elizabeth came to see us, Tuesday afternoon, and brought some more books. I proposed that she should take advantage of our escort to Concord; but she says she cannot be ready before the first week of September. It is time we were gone from hence; for everybody seems to have found us out, and Julian says the boys shout at him from the cliffs, crying "Mr. Hawthorne! Mr. Hawthorne!!" I don't know whether they mistake him for his father, or pay him these courteous attentions on his own account. You may await tea for us on Saturday--unless the old people chance to be very hungry. With utmost love, N. H. TO MRS. HAWTHORNE (Letter 50--written by Julian Hawthorne, and continued by N. H.; no date or superscription.) Willy has been making a topmast for his ship, but by the way I have forgot about his ship. He made it and it is 29 inches long, and about three tuns. He has made a beautiful solid balance for it and he says it looks just like a real ship he has made or is going to make _Dearest Wife_, Julian did not finish his letter; but I suppose thou wilt be glad to receive it, such as it is. It rains again most horribly to-day; so that I have been obliged to leave him at home, where he finds society enough and the greatest kindness. I believe I told you, in one of my former letters, that he has quite left off hunching his shoulders. He has complained of the headache, now and then, but not often; and Dr. Dryasdust has promised to take him in hand, and entirely refit him--that is, if he prove to be out of repair. Do not forget to tell me whether Mr. Westen's coal-bill was paid. I hoped to have received letters from thee by the Cintra, which arrived here day before yesterday, having left Lisbon on the 15th. She reports the Madrid as having arrived on the Friday after sailing. I long to know whether thy cough yet begins to be benefitted by the sunshine, and whether thou findest again the elasticity of frame and spirit, which thou leftest behind in America. Since thou hast departed, I sometimes feel a strange yearning for the Wayside, and wish that our wanderings were over, and all of us happy together in that wretched old house. THINE OWN OWNEST. TO MRS. HAWTHORNE Continental Hotel, _Philadelphia_, March 9th, '62 _Dearest Wife_, Wishing to spend a little while in New York, we did not leave there till 2 o'clock, yesterday, and so are not yet in Washington. I had a pleasant time in New York, and went on Friday evening, by invitation, to the Century Club, where I met various artists and literary people. The next forenoon, Ticknor strolled round among his acquaintances, taking me with him. Nothing remarkable happened, save that my poor old bedevilled phizmahogany was seized upon and photographed for a stereoscope; and as far as I could judge from the negative, it threatens to be fearfully like. The weather here is very warm and pleasant; there are no traces of snow and it seems like the latter end of April. I feel perfectly well, and have a great appetite. The farther we go, the deeper grows the rumble and grumble of the coming storm, and I think the two armies are only waiting our arrival to begin. We expect to leave Philadelphia at 8¼ tomorrow morning, and shall reach Washington at 6 o'clock P.M. It I have an opportunity, I shall send off Una's note the same evening, but cannot tell how. TO MRS. HAWTHORNE [9th May, 1863, _Concord_] _Dearest Wife_, I have been particularly well yesterday and to-day. You must particularly thank Mr. Fields for the two volumes of the magazine. The article about Lichfield and Uttoxeter is done; and I shall set about the remaining article for the magazine in a day or two, and probably get it finished by the end of the month, since it will not be necessary to hurry. I shall call it "Civic Banquets," and I suppose it will be the concluding article of the volume. I want a new hat, my present one being too shabby to wear anywhere but at home; and as Mr. Fields is all made up of kindness, I thought he might be kind enough to get me one at his hatter's. I have measured my old hat round outside of the hatband, and it is about 24 inches; inside, it measures 7 inches one way, and a little more than 8 the other, and is hardly large enough. Get the largest hat possible; color black, a broad brimmed slouch. Thank Rose for her kind letter. YOUR SPOUSE. (On the reverse side of the foregoing letter appears the following, written by Una) All Rose's side of the hawthorn is covered with buds, and my wild violets are rampant. I water your hawthorn branches every morning, and as yet they have showed no signs of fading, though Papa, with his usual hopefulness, declares they will. We found today on the hill a lonely violet, the first of that sisterhood. Julian appears well and jolly, but yesterday we were all killed by eating newly-dug horse-radish, which was as pungent as a constellation of stars. Papa stamped and kicked, and melted into tears, and said he enjoyed it intensely, and I bore equal tortures more quietly; the impregnable Julian being entirely unaffected by it, laughed immoderately at us both. Papa wants me to leave a place for him, so good-bye. Your loving daughter, UNA HAWTHORNE. TO MRS. HAWTHORNE _Dearest wife._ I have nothing to say except that a hen has vouchsafed to lay two eggs in our barn, and I have directed that one shall be left as a nest egg; so that you can have a fresh dropt egg every morning for breakfast, after your return. Una has considerably improved our table; and I like this new cook much better than poor Ann. Do not mind what Una says about staying away longer, but come whenever you like; though I think you have hardly been away long enough to want to see us again. Thine N. H. TO MRS. HAWTHORNE _Boston_, July 3d, 3½ o'clock _Dearest Wife_, Mr. Fields tells me that a proof sheet was sent to Concord to-day, and he wishes it to be sent to him in Boston, so that I may look over it on Monday. You must put two one-cent postage stamps. This has been a terrifically hot day. I shall leave for Concord (N. H.) at five o'clock, and shall mail this scribble there, so that you may know that I have arrived safely. With love to the old people, Thine, N. H. TO MRS. HAWTHORNE _The Wayside_, Sunday morng., Sept. 29th _Dearest_, We were disappointed in not receiving a letter last night, but doubt not all is going on well with you;--only that miserable headache. Why was this world created? And thy throat too--which thou wilt never be at the trouble of curing. We get on bravely here, in great quiet and harmony; and except that life is suspended (with me, at least) till thou comest back again, I do not see how things could go better. We tried hard to be wretched on Fast Day, in compliance with thy advice; but I think it did not succeed very well with the two young people; nor could I perceive that anybody really fasted, except myself, who dined on potatoes and squash, as usual. I did purpose indulging myself in a plate of hot soup; but thy exhortations were so earnest that I gave up the idea, and am doubtless the better for my abstinence--though I do not as yet see that the country has profited thereby. Mr. Wetherbie came to see me with his bill; but I informed him of thy orders not to pay it without some subtraction, and told him he must await thy return--which he seemed not unwilling to do. He is going to the wars!--as a dragoon!!--for he says he has all his life been fond of military service, and the captain of his troop is an "old military associate." Thou wouldst have thought, to hear him talk, that this gallant Wetherbie was a veteran of at least twenty campaigns; but I believe the real motive of his valiant impulses consists in his having nothing else to do, and in his being dazzled by the sight of $200 in gold, which W. brought home--where he could have got it (unless by robbing the dead) I can't imagine; for his wages for three months would not have been more than $40. But really, dearest, the spirit of the people must be flagging terribly, when a sick old man like Wetherbie is accepted as a bold dragoon! It shows that good soldiers cannot be had. Julian has had his hair cut according to his own notions; so thou must expect to see a scarecrow. Do not thou come home on Wednesday, if it can do any good either to thyself or Bab to stay longer. But thou hast still another expedition to make, and the cold weather will soon be upon us. Kiss Bab for me and believe me THY OWN OWNEST. 
6982	----	HAWTHORNE AND HIS CIRCLE By Julian Hawthorne ILLUSTRATED [IMAGE: NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE (From a crayon drawing by Samuel Rowse)] CONTENTS INTRODUCTION Inheritance of friendships--Gracious giants--My own good fortune--My father the central figure--What did his gift to me cost him?--A revelation in Colorado--Privileges make difficulties--Lights and shadows of memory--An informal narrative--Contrast between my father's life and mine I Value of dates--My aunt Lizzie's efforts--My father's decapitation--My mother's strong-box--The spirit of The Scarlet Letter--The strain of imaginative composition--My grandmother Hawthorne's death--Infantile indifference to calamity--The children's plays and books--The house on Mall Street--Scarlet fever--The study on the third floor--The haunted mahogany writing-desk--The secret drawers--The upright Egyptian--Mr. Pickwick--My father in 1850--The flowered writing-gown, and the ink butterfly--Driving the quill pen--The occupants of the second floor--Aunt Louisa and Aunt Ebe--The dowager Mrs. Hawthorne--I kick my aunt Lizzie--The kittens and the great mystery--The greatest book of the age II Horatio Bridge's "I-told-you-so"--What a house by the sea might have done--Unknown Lenox--The restlessness of youth--The Unpardonable Sin and the Death--less Man--The little red house--Materials of culture--Our best playmates--The mystery of Mrs. Peter's dough--Our intellectual hen-fishing for poultry--Yacht-building--Swimming with one foot on the ground--Shipwreck--Our playfellow the brook--Tanglewood--Nuts--Giants and enchanters--Coasting--Wet noses, dark eyes, ambrosial breath-My first horseback ride--Herman Melville's stories--Another kind of James--The thunder-storm--Yearning ladies and melancholy-sinners--Hindlegs--Probable murder--"I abominate the sight of it!"--The peril of Tanglewood--The truth of fiction--An eighteen-months' work--We leave five cats behind III Chariots of delight--West Newton--Raw American life--Baby's fingers--Our cousin Benjamin's untoward head--Our uncle Horace--His vacuum--A reformer's bristles--Grace Greenwood's first tears--The heralding of Kossuth--The decorated engine--The chief incident of the reception--Blithedale and Brook Farm--Notes from real life--Rough draughts--Paths of composition--The struggle with the Pensioner--Hawthorne's method--The invitation of Concord--Four wooden walls and a roof--Mr. Alcott's aesthetic carpentering--Appurtenances of "The Wayside"--Franklin Pierce for President--"The most homeless people in the world" IV A transfigured cattle-pen--Emerson the hub of Concord--His incorrigible modesty--Grocery-store sages--To make common men feel more like Emerson than he did--His personal appearance--His favorite gesture--A glance like the reveille of a trumpet--The creaking boots--"The muses are in the woods"--Emerson could not read Hawthorne--Typical versus individual--Benefit from child-prattle--Concord-grape Bull--Sounds of distant battle--Politics, sociology, and grape-culture--The great white fence--Richard Henry Stoddard--A country youth of genius--Whipple's Attic salt--An unwritten romance--The consulship retires literature--Louisa's tragedy--Hard hit--The spiritual sphere of good men--Nearer than in the world--The return of the pilgrim V A paddle-wheel ocean-liner--The hens, the cow, and the carpenter--W. D. Ticknor--Our first Englishman--An aristocratic acrobat--Speech that beggars eulogy--The boots of great travellers--Complimentary cannon--The last infirmity of noble republican minds--The golden promise: the spiritual fulfilment--Fatuous serenity--Past and future--The coquetry of chalk cliffs--Two kinds of imagination--The thirsty island--Gloomy English comforts--Systematic geniality--A standing puzzle--The respirator--Scamps, fools, mendicants, and desperadoes--The wrongs of sailor-men--"Is this myself?"--"Profoundly akin"--Henry Bright--Charm of insular prejudice--No stooping to compromise--The battle against dinner--"I'm glad you liked it!"--An English-, Irish-, and Scotchman--An Englishman owns his country--A contradiction in Englishmen--A hospitable gateway--Years of memorable trifles VI Patricians and plebeians--The discomforts of democracy--Varieties of equality--Social rights of beggars--The coming peril--Being dragged to the rich--Frankness of vulgarity and hopelessness of destitution--Villages rooted in the landscape--Evanescence of the spiritual and survival of the material--"Of Bebbington the holy peak"--The Old Yew of Eastham--Malice--prepense interest--History and afternoon tea--An East--Indian Englishman--The merchantman sticks in the mud--A poetical man of the world--Likeness to Longfellow--Real breakfasts--Heads and stomachs--A poet-pugilist--Clean-cut, cold, gentle, dry--A respectable female atheist--The tragedy of the red ants--Voluptuous struggles--A psalm of praise VII Life in Rock Park--Inconvenient independence of lodgings--The average man--"How many gardeners have you got?"--Shielded by rose-leaves of culture and refinement--The English middle class--Prejudice, complacency, and Burke's Peerage--Never heard of Tennyson or Browning--Satisfaction in the solid earth--A bond of fellowship--A damp, winding, verdurous street--The parent of stucco villas--Inactivity of individual conscience--A plateau and a cliff--dwelling--"The Campbells are Coming!"--Sortes Virgilianae--A division in the family--Precaution against famine--English praying and card-playing--Exercise for mind and body--Knight-errantry--Sentimentality and mawkishness--The policeman and the cobbler--A profound truth--Fireworks by lamplight--Mr. Squarey and Mrs. Roundey--Sandford and Merton--The ball of jolly VIII Cataclysmic adventures--On the trail of dazzling fortunes--"Lovely, but reprehensible Madham"--The throne saves the artist--English robin redbreast--A sad and weary old man--"Most indelicate woman I've ever known"--Perfectly chaste--Something human stirred dimly--"She loves me; she loves me!"--The Prince of Wales and half-a-crown--Portentous and thundering title--Honest English simplicity--"The spirit lacking"--Abelard, Isaac Newton, and Ruskin--A famous and charming woman of genius--Deep and wide well of human sympathy--The whooping-cough IX Two New England consciences--Inexhaustible faith and energy--Deep and abiding love of England--"'How the Water Comes Down at Lodore"--"He took an' he let go"--Naked mountains--The unsentimental little quadruped--The human element in things sticks--The coasts of England--A string of sleepy donkeys--Unutterable boy-thoughts--Grins and chuckles like an ogress---Hideous maternal parody---The adorable inverted bell-glass--Strange things happen in the world--An ominous clouding of the water--Something the world has never known--Overweening security--An admonition not to climb too high--How vice may become virtue by repetition--Corporal Blair's chest--Black-Bottle Cardigan--Called to Lisbon X If there were boarding-houses in paradise--Blodgett, the delight of mankind--Solomon foresaw her--A withering retort--A modest, puny poise about her--Hidden thoughts derived from Mother Eve and Grecian Helen--The feminine council that ruled the Yankee captains--Bonds of fraternity, double-riveted and copper-fastened--Through the looking-glass--Men only of the manliest sort--The lady-paramount--Hands which were true works of art--Retained his dignity without putting it on--Sighed heavily over my efforts--Unctuous M. Huguenin--"From dawn to eve I fell"--The multum-in-parvo machine--"Beauty and the Beast"--Frank Channing--"Blood-and water!"--A lapful of Irish stew XI Bennoch and Bright like young housekeepers--"What did you marry that woman for?"--"Mrs. Caudle's Curtain Lectures"--"The worst book anybody ever wrote"--"Most magnificent eye I ever saw"--A great deal of the feminine in Reade--Fire, pathos, fun, and dramatic animation--A philosophical library in itself--Amusing appanage of his own book--Oily and voluble sanctimoniousness--Self-worship of the _os-rotundas_ sort--Inflamed rather than abated by years--"Every word of it true; but--"--Better, or happier, because we had lived--Appropriated somebody else's adventure--Filtering remarks through the mind of a third person--A delightful Irishman--Unparalleled audacity--An unregenerate opinion--The whole line of Guelphs in it--"Oh, that somebody would invent a new sin!"--"The Angel in the House"--Very well dressed--Indomitable figure, aggressively American--Too much of the elixir of life--A little strangeness between us--Sunshine will always rest on it XII Talked familiarly with kings and queens--Half-witted girl who giggled all the time--It gnawed me terribly--A Scotch terrier named Towsey--A sentiment of diplomatic etiquette--London as a physical entity--Ladies in low-necked dresses--An elderly man like a garden-spider--Into the bowels of the earth--The inner luminousness of genius--Isolated and tragic situation--"Ate ever man such a morsel before!"--The great, wild, mysterious Borrow--Her skeleton, huddled, dry, and awful--"Ma'am, you expose yourself!"--Plane, spokeshave, gouge, and chisel--"I-passed-the-Lightning"--Parallel-O-grams--A graduate of Antioch--"Continual cursing"--A catastrophe--"Troubles are a sociable sisterhood"--"In truth I was very sorry"--He had dreamed wide-awake of these things--A friend of Emerson and Henry James--Embarked at Folkestone for France XIII Old-Homesickness--The Ideal and the Real--A beautiful but perilous woman with a past--The Garden of Eden a Montreal ice-palace--Confused mountain of family luggage--Poplars for lances--Miraculous crimson comforters--Rivers of human gore--Curling mustachios and nothing to do--Odd behavior of grown people--Venus, the populace, and the MacDaniels--The happiness to die in Paris--Lived alone with her constellations--"O'Brien's Belt"--A hotel of peregrinations--Sitting up late--Attempted assassination--My murderer--An old passion reawakened--Italian shells and mediaeval sea-anemones--If you were in the Garden of Eden--An umbrella full of napoleons--Was Byron an Esquimau? XIV Our unpalatial palace--"Cephas Giovanni"--She and George Combe turned out to be right--A rousing temper--Bright Titian hair--"All that's left of him"--The pyramidal man of destiny--The thoughts of a boy are long, long thoughts--Clausilia Bubigunia--Jabez Hogg and the microscope--A stupendous surprise--A lifetime in fourteen months--My father's jeremiades--"Thank Heaven, there is such a thing as whitewash!"--"Terrible lack of variety in the old masters"--"The brazen trollop that she is!"--Several distinct phases of feeling--Springs of creative imagination roused--The Roman fever--A sad book--Effects of the death-blow--The rest is silence XV The Roman carnival in three moods--Apples of Sodom--Poor, battered, wilted, stained hearts--A living protest and scourge--Dulce est desipere in loco--A rollicking world of happy fools--Endless sunshine of some sort--Greenwich Fair was worth a hundred of it--They thundered past, never drawing rein--"Senza moccolo!"--Nothing more charming and strange could be imagined--Girls surprised in the midst of dressing themselves--A Unitarian clergyman with his fat wife--Apparent license under courteous restraint--He laughed and pelted and was pelted--William Story, as vivid as when I saw him last--A too facile power--A deadly shadow gliding close behind--Set afire by his own sallies--"Thy face is like thy mother's, my fair child!"--Cleopatra in the clay--"Wer nie sein Brod mit thranen ass." XVI Drilled in Roman history--Lovely figures made of light and morning--What superb figures!--The breath and strength of immeasurable antiquity--Treasures coming direct from dead hands into mine--A pleasant sound of coolness and refreshment--Receptacles of death now dedicated to life--The Borghese is a forest of Ardennes--Profound and important communings--A smiling deceiver--Of an early-rising habit--Hauling in on my slack--A miniature cabinet magically made Titanic--"If I had a murder on my conscience"--None can tell the secret origin of his thoughts--A singularly beautiful young woman--She actually ripped the man open--No leagues of chivalry needed in Rome--A resident army--Five foot six--Corsets and padding--She was wounded in the house of her friends XVII Miss Lander makes a bust--The twang of his native place--Wholly unlike anybody else--Wise, humorous Sarah Clarke--Back to the Gods and the Fleas--Horace Mann's statue--Miss Bremer and the Tarpeian Rock--"I was in a state of some little tremor"--Mrs. Jameson and Ruskin--Most thorough-going of the classic tragedies--A well-grown calf--An adventure in Monte Testaccio--A vision of death--A fantastic and saturnine genius--A pitch-black place--Illuminations and fireworks--The Faun--Enjoying Rome--First impressions--Lalla's curses XVIII In Othello's predicament--Gaetano--Crystals and snail-shells--Broad, flagstone pavements--Fishing-rods and blow-pipes--Ghostly yarns--Conservative effects of genius--An ideal bust and a living one--The enigma of spiritualism--A difficult combination to overthrow--The dream-child and the Philistine--Dashing and plunging this way and that--Teresa screamed for mercy--Grapes and figs and ghostly voices--My father would have settled there--Kirkup the necromancer--A miraculous birth--A four-year-old medium--The mysterious touch--An indescribable horror--Not even a bone of her was left--Providence takes very long views XIX Burnt Sienna--The Aquila Nera--A grand, noble, gentle creature--The most beautiful woman in the world--Better friends than ever--A shadow brooded--Boys are whole-souled creatures--Franklin Pierce--Miriam, Hilda, Kenyon, Donatello--The historian of the Netherlands--When New England makes a man--The spell of Trevi--An accession of mishaps--My father's mustache--Three steps of stone, the fourth, death--Havre, Redcar, Bath, London, Liverpool ILLUSTRATIONS NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE (From a crayon drawing by Samuel Rowse) BIRTHPLACE OF NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE AT SALEM, MASSACHUSETTS HERMAN MELVILLE JAMES T. FIELDS THE WAYSIDE (Showing Nathaniel Hawthorne and his wife) EDWIN P. WHIPPLE JAMES T. FIELDS, NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, AND WILLIAM D. TICKNOR RICHARD MONCKTON MILNES ROBERT BROWNING FRANCIS BANNOCH REV. WILLIAM HENRY CHANNING, 1855 MARIA MITCHELL WILLIAM WETMORE STORY PENCIL SKETCHES IN ITALY, BY MRS. NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE THE MARBLE FAUN HIRAM POWERS INTRODUCTION Inheritance of friendships--Gracious giants--My own good fortune--My father the central figure--What did his gift to me cost him?--A revelation in Colorado--Privileges make difficulties--Lights and shadows of memory--An informal narrative--Contrast between my father's life and mine. The best use we can make of good fortune is to share it with our fellows. Those to whom good things come by way of inheritance, however, are often among the latest to comprehend their own advantage; they suppose it to be the common condition. And no doubt I had nearly arrived at man's estate before it occurred to me that the lines of few fishers of men were cast in places so pleasant as mine. I was the son of a man of high desert, who had such friends as he deserved; and these companions and admirers of his gave to me in the beginning of my days a kindly welcome and encouragement generated from their affection and reverence for him. Without doing a stroke of work for it, I found myself early in the enjoyment of a principality of good will and fellowship--a species of freemasonry, I might call it, though the secret was patent enough--for the rights in which, unaided, I might have contended my lifetime long in vain. Men and women whose names are consecrated apart in the dearest thoughts of thousands were familiars and playmates of my childhood; they supported my youth and bade my manhood godspeed. But to me, for a long while, the favor of these gracious giants of mind and character seemed agreeable indeed, but nothing out of the ordinary; my tacit presumption was that other children as well as I could if they would walk hand in hand with Emerson along the village street, seek in the meadows for arrow-heads with Thoreau, watch Powers thump the brown clay of the "Greek Slave," or listen to the voice of Charlotte Cushman, which could sway assembled thousands, modulate itself to tell stories to the urchin who leaned, rapt, against her knees. Were human felicity so omnipresent as a happy child imagines it, what a world would this be! In time, my misapprehension was corrected, rather, I think, through the application to it of cold logic than by any rude awakening. I learned of my riches not by losing them--the giants did not withdraw their graciousness--but by comparing the lot of others with my own. And yet, to tell the truth--perhaps I might better leave it untold; only in these chapters, especially, I will not begin with reserves--to say truth, then, my world, during my father's lifetime, and afterwards for I will not say how long, was divided into two natural parts, my father being one of them, and everybody else the other. Hence I was led to regard the parties of the latter part, rich or poor, giants or pygmies, as being, after all, of much the same stature and value. The brightness (in the boy's estimation) of the paternal figure rendered distinctions between other brightnesses unimportant. The upshot was, in short, that I inclined to the opinion that while compassion was unquestionably due to other children for not having a father like mine, yet in other respects my condition was not egregiously superior to theirs. They might not know the Brownings or the Julia Ward Howes; but then, very likely, the Smiths and the Joneses, whom they did know, were nearly as good. After fifty years, of course, such prepossessions yield to experience. My father was the best friend I ever had, and he will always stand in my estimation distinct from all other friends and persons; but I can now recognize that in addition to the immeasurable debt I owe him for being to me what he was in his own person, he bestowed upon me a privilege also immeasurable in the hospitality of these shining ones who were his intimates. Did the gift cost him nothing? Nothing, in one sense. But, again, what does it cost a man to walk upright and cleanly during the years of his pilgrimage: to deal justly with all, and charitably: diligently to cultivate and develop every natural endowment: always to seek truth, tell it, and vindicate it: to discharge to the utmost of his ability every duty that was intrusted to him: to rest content, in the line of his calling, with no work inferior to his best: to say no word and do no act which, were they known, might weaken the struggle against temptation of any fellow-creature? These qualities were the price at which Hawthorne bought his friends; and in receiving those friends from him, his children could not but feel that the bequest represented his unfaltering grasp upon whatever is pure, lofty, and generous in human life. Yes, whatever it may cost a man of genius to be all his life a good man, and to use and develop his genius to the noblest ends only, that my father's friends cost him, and in that amount am I his debtor; and the longer I myself live, and the more I see of other men, the higher and rarer do I esteem the obligation. Moreover, in speaking of his friends, I was thinking of those who personally knew him; but the world is full to-day of friends of his who never saw him, to whom his name is my best and surest introduction. Once, only three years since, in the remote heart of the Colorado mountains, I chanced to enter the hut of an aged miner; he sat in a corner of the little family room; on the wall near his hand was fixed a small bookshelf, filled with a dozen dog-eared volumes. The man had for years been paralyzed; he could do little more than to raise to that book-shelf his trembling hand, and take from it one or other of the volumes. When this helpless veteran learned my name, he uttered a strange cry, and his face worked with eager emotion; the wife of his broad-shouldered son brought me to him in his corner; his old eyes glowed as they perused me. I could not gather the meaning of his broken, trembling speech; the young woman interpreted for me. Was I related to the great Hawthorne? "Yes; I am his son." "His son!" Seldom have I met a gaze harder to sustain than that which the paralytic bent upon me. Would I might have worn, for the time being, the countenance of an archangel, so to fill out the lineaments, drawn during so many lonely years by his imagination and his reverence, of his ideal writer! "The son of Hawthorne!" He said no more, save by the strengthless pressure of his hands upon my own; the woman told me how all the books on the little shelf were my father's books, and for fifteen years the old man had read no others. Helpless tears of joy, of gratitude, of wonder ran down the furrows of his cheeks into his white beard. And how could I at whom he so gazed help being moved: on that desolate, unknown mountain-side, far from the world, the name which I had inherited was loved and honored! One does not get one's privileges for nothing. My father gave me power to make my way, and cast sunshine on the path; but he made the path arduous, too! Be that as it may, I now ask who will to look in my mirror, and see reflected there some of the figures and the scenes that have made my life worth living. As I peer into the dark abysm of things gone by, many places that seemed at first indistinct, grow clearer; but many more must remain impenetrable. Upon the whole, however, I am surprised to find how much is still discernible. Nearly a score of years ago I published, in the shape of a formal biography of Hawthorne and his wife, the consecutive facts of their lives, and numerous passages from their journals and correspondence. My aim is different now; I wish to indite an informal narrative from my own point of view, as child, youth, and man. There will be gaps in it--involuntary ones; and others occasioned by the obligation to retain those pictures only that seem likely to arouse a catholic interest. Yet there will be a certain intimacy in the story; and some matters which history would omit as trivial will be here adduced, for the sake of such color and character as they may contain. I shall not stalk on stilts, or mouth phrases, but converse comfortably and trustfully as between friends. If a writing of this kind be not flexible, unpretending, discursive, it has no right to be at all. Art is not in question, save the minor art that lives from line to line. Gossip about men, women, and things--it can amount to little more than that. In the earlier chapters the dramatis personae and the incidents must naturally group themselves about the figure of my father; for it was thus that I saw them. To his boy he was the fountain of love, honor, and energy; and to the boy he seemed the animating or organizing principle of other persons and events. With his death, in my eighteenth year, the world appeared disordered for a season; then, gradually, I learned to do my own orientation. I was destined to an experience superficially much more active and varied than his had been; and it was a world superficially very different from his in which I moved and dealt There must follow a corresponding modification in the character of the narrative; yet that, after all is superficial, too. For the memory of my father has always been with me, and has doubtless influenced me more than I am myself aware. And certainly but for him this book would never have been attempted. I Value of dates--My aunt Lizzie's efforts--My father's decapitation--My mother's strong-box--The spirit of The Scarlet Letter--The strain of imaginative composition--My grandmother Hawthorne's death--Infantile indifference to calamity--The children's plays and books--The house on Mall Street--Scarlet fever--The study on the third floor--The haunted mahogany writing-desk--The secret drawers--The upright Egyptian--Mr. Pickwick--My father in 1850--The flowered writing-gown, and the ink butterfly--Driving the quill pen--The occupants of the second floor--Aunt Louisa and Aunt Ebe--The dowager Mrs. Hawthorne--I kick my aunt Lizzie--The kittens and the great mystery--The greatest book of the age. My maternal aunt, Miss Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, was a very learned woman, and a great student of history, and teacher of it; and by the aid of huge, colored charts, done by my uncle Nat Peabody and hung on the walls of our sitting-room, she labored during some years to teach me all the leading dates of human history--the charts being designed according to a novel and ingenious plan to fix those facts in childish memory. But as a pupil I was always most inapt and grievous, in dates and in matters mathematical especially; so that I gave her inexhaustible patience many a sad hour. To this day I cannot tell in what year was fought the battle of Marathon, or when John signed Magna Charta; though the battle itself, and the scene of the barons with menacing brows gathered about John, stood clearly pictured in my imagination. Dates were arbitrary, and to my memory nothing arbitrary would stick. Nevertheless, when I am myself constructing a narrative, whether it be true or fictitious, I am wedded to dates, and cannot be divorced from them. It must be set down precisely when the events took place, in what years the dramatis personae were born, and how old they were when each juncture of their fortunes came to pass. I can no more dispense with dates than I can talk without consonants; they carry form, order, and credibility. Or they are like the skeleton which gives recognizable shape to men and animals. Nothing mortal can get on without them.. Whether this addiction be in the nature of a reaction from my childish perversity, giving my erudite and beloved aunt Lizzie (as I called her) her revenge so long after our lessons are over; or how else to explain it, I know not; but it leads me to affirm here that the nadir of my father's material fortunes was reached about the year 1849. At that time his age was five-and-forty, and I was three. The causes of this financial depression were several. One morning he awoke to find himself deprived, by political chicanery, of the income of a custom-house surveyorship which for some while past had served to support his small family. Now, some men could have gone on writing stories in the intervals between surveying customs, and have thus placed an anchor to windward against the time when the political storm should set in; but Nathaniel Hawthorne was devoid of that useful ability. Nor had he been able to spend less than he earned; so, suddenly, there he was on his beam-ends. Leisure to write, certainly, was now abundant enough; but he never was a rapid composer, and even had he been so, the market for the kind of things he wrote was, in the middle of the past century, in New England, neither large nor eager. The emoluments were meagre to match; twenty dollars for four pages of the Democratic Review was about the figure; and to produce a short tale or sketch of that length would take him a month at least. How were a husband and wife and their two children to live for a month on the mere expectation of twenty dollars from the Democratic Review--which was, into the bargain, terribly slow pay? Such was the problem which confronted the dark-haired and grave-visaged gentleman as he closed his desk in the Salem custom-house for the last time, and put on his hat to walk home. Thanks, however, to some divine foresight on my mother's part, aided by a wonderful talent for practical economy, she had secretly contrived to save, out of her weekly stipends, small sums which in the aggregate bulked large enough to make an important difference in the situation. So when her husband disclosed his bad news, she opened her private drawer and disclosed her banknotes, with such a smile in her eyes as I can easily picture to myself. Stimulated by the miracle, he remembered that the inchoate elements of a story, in which was to figure prominently a letter A, cut out of red cloth, or embroidered in scarlet thread, and affixed to a woman's bosom, had been for months past rumbling round in his mind; now was the time of times to shape it forth. Yonder upon the table by the window stood the old mahogany writing-desk so long unused; here were his flowered dressing-gown and slippers down-at-heel. He ought to be able to finish the story before the miraculous savings gave out; and then all he would have to do would be to write others. And, after all, to be rid of the surveyorship was a relief. But matters were not to be run off quite so easily as this. The Scarlet Letter, upon coming to close quarters with it, turned out to be not a story of such moderate caliber as Hawthorne had hitherto been used to write, but an affair likely to extend over two or three hundred pages, which, instead of a month or so, might not be completed in a year; yet it was too late to substitute something more manageable for it--in the first place, because nothing else happened to be at his disposal, and secondly, because The Scarlet Letter took such intimate hold upon the vitals of his heart and mind that he was by no means able to free himself from it until all had been fulfilled. Only men of creative genius know in what glorious and harrowing thraldom their creations hold them. Having once been fairly begun, The Scarlet Letter must inevitably finish itself for good or ill, come what might to the writer of it. [IMAGE: BIRTHPLACE OF NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE AT SALEM, MASSACHUSETTS] This is a story of people and events, not a study in literary criticism; but the writing of The Scarlet Letter was an event of no trifling importance in the story of its author's life. To read the book is an experience which its readers cannot forget; what its writing must have been to a man organized as my father was is hardly to be conveyed in words. Hester, Dimmesdale, and Chillingworth--he must live through each one of them, feel their passion, remorse, hatred, terror, love; and he must enter into the soul of the mysterious nature of Pearl. Such things cannot with impunity be done by any one; the mere physical strain, all conditions being favorable, would be almost past bearing. But my father, though uniformly his bodily health was all his life sound, was never what I would call a robust man; he was exquisitely balanced. At the time he began his book he was jaded from years of office drudgery, and he was in some anxiety as to the issue of his predicament. The house in which he dwelt, small and ill-placed in a narrow side-street, with no possibility of shutting out the noise of traffic and of domestic alarms, could not but make the work tell more heavily upon him. But in addition to this there were fortuitous occasions of emotional stress, all of which I shall not mention; but among them were the distasteful turmoil aroused by his political mishap; and, far more poignant, the critical illness of his mother. Circumstances led to her being housed under his roof; there she lingered long at death's door, and there at last she died. He profoundly loved her; but deep-rooted, too, in both of them was that strange, New England shyness, masking in visible ice the underlying emotion. Not since his boyhood had their mutual affection found free, natural expression; and now, in this final hour, that bondage of habit caused the words of tenderness to stumble on their lips. The awful majesty of approaching death, prompting them to "catch up the whole of love and utter it" ere it be too late, wrought this involuntary self-repression into silent agony. She died; his own health was shaken to its foundations; his children fell ill, his wife underwent acute suffering; and through all this, and more, The Scarlet Letter must be written. No wonder that, when he came to read the story in manuscript to his wife, his voice faltered and broke; and she slipped to her knees and hid her face on her arms in the chair. "I had been suffering," he commentated, long afterwards, "from a great diversity and severity of emotion." Great works of art--things with the veritable spirit of enduring life in them--are destined to be born in sore travail and pain. Those who give them birth yield up their own life to them. It was at this period--say, about 1850--that my own personal recollections, in a shadowy and incoherent way, begin. The shadows are exclusively of time's making; they were not of the heart. All through the trials of my parents I retained a jocund equanimity (save for some trifling childish ailments) and esteemed this world a friendly and agreeable place. The Scarlet Letter dashed my spirits not a whit; I knew not of its existence, by personal evidence, till full a dozen years later; and even the death of my grandmother left me light of heart, for the passing of the spirit from the body can but awaken the transient curiosity of a child of four. For the rest, my physical environment, in itself amusing and interesting enough to me, had its chief importance from the material it afforded on which to construct the imaginary scenes and characters of my play. My sister Una and myself were forever enacting something or somebody not ourselves: childish egoism oddly decking itself in the non-ego. We believed in fairies, in magic, in angels, in transformations; Hans Christian Andersen, Grimm, The Black Aunt (oh, delectable, lost volume) were our sober history-books, and Robinson Crusoe was our autobiography. But I did occasionally take note of concrete appearances, too; and some of them I remember. The house--the third which we had inhabited since my father became surveyor--was on Mall Street, and was three stories in height, with a yard behind and at one end; this yard, which was of importance to my sister and myself, had access to the street by a swinging gate. There were three or four trees in it, and space for play. The house was but one room deep, and lying as it did about north and south, the rooms were open to both the morning and the afternoon sunshine. They opened one into the other in a series; and when my father was safe up-stairs in his study, my mother would open all the doors of the suite on the lower floor, and allow the children to career triumphantly to and fro. No noise that we could make ever troubled her nerves, unless it was the noise of conflict; the shriek of joy, however shrill, passed by her harmless; but the lowest mutter of wrath or discontent distressed her; for of such are the mothers of the kingdom of heaven! And so zealous was our regard for her just and gentle law that I really think we gave way as little as most children to the latter. Of course, whenever the weather permitted, we were out in the yard, or even promenaded for short distances up and down the street. And once--"How are you?" inquired a friend of the family, as he drove by in his wagon. "Oh, we've got the scarlet fever!" we proudly replied, stepping out gallantly along the sidewalk. For we were treated by a homoeopathic doctor of the old school, who was a high-dilutionist, and mortal ills could never get a firm grip on us. In winter we rejoiced in the snow; and my father's story of the Snow Image got most of its local color from our gambols in this fascinating substance, which he could observe from the window of his study. The study was on the third floor of the house, secluded from the turmoil of earth, so far as anything could be in a city street. No one was supposed to intrude upon him there; but such suppositions are ineffectual against children. From time to time the adamantine gates fell ajar, and in we slipped. It seemed a heavenly place, tenanted by a being possessed of every attribute that our imaginations could ascribe to an angel. The room and its tenant glimmer before me as I write, luminous with the sunshine of more than fifty years ago. Both were equipped for business rather than for beauty; furniture and garments were simple in those Salem days. A homely old paper covered the walls, a brownish old carpet the floor. There was an old rocking-chair, its black paint much worn and defaced; another chair was drawn up to the table, which stood to the left of the eastern window; and on the table was a mahogany desk, concerning which I must enter into some particulars. It was then, and for years afterwards, an object of my most earnest scrutiny. Such desks are not made nowadays. When closed, it was an oblong mahogany box, two feet long by half that width, and perhaps nine inches high. It had brass corners, and a brass plate on the top, inscribed with the name, "N. Hawthorne." At one end was a drawer, with a brass handle playing on a hinge and fitting into a groove or socket when down; there was a corresponding handle at the other end, but that was for symmetry only; the one drawer went clear through the desk. I often mused over the ethics of this deception. Being opened, the desk presented a sloping surface two feet square, covered with black velvet, which had been cut here and there and pasted down again, and was stiffened with many ink-spatterings. This writing surface consisted of two lids, hinged at their junction in the centre; lifting them, you discovered two receptacles to hold writing-paper and other desk furniture. They were of about equal capacity; for although the upper half of the desk was the more capacious, you must not forget that two inches of it, at the bottom, was taken up by the long drawer already mentioned. But there was, also, a more interesting curtailment of this interior space. Along the very top of the desk, as it lay open, was a narrow channel, perhaps a couple of inches wide and deep, divided into three sections; two square ones, at the opposite ends, held the ink-bottle and the sand-bottle; the long central one was for quill pens. These, in the aggregate, appeared to the superficial eye to account for all that remained of the cubic contents of the structure; but the supreme mystery and charm of the affair was that they did not! No; there was an esoteric secret still in reserve; and for years it remained a secret to me. The bottle-sockets and pen-tray did not reach down to the level of the long drawer by nearly an inch. Measurement would prove that; but you would have said that the interval must be solid wood; for nothing but a smooth panel met the eye when you pulled aside the sheets of writing-paper in their receptacle to investigate. But the lesson of this world, and of the desk as a part of it, is that appearances are not to be trusted. The guile of those old desk-makers passes belief. I will expose it. In the pen-tray lay a sort of brass nail, as long as your little finger, and blunt at the end. Now take the sand-bottle from its hole. In one corner of the bottom thereof you will see a minute aperture, just big enough to admit the seemingly useless brass nail. Stick it in and press hard. With an abrupt noise that makes you jump, if you are four or five years old, that smooth, unsuspected strip of panel starts violently forward (propelled by a released spring) and reveals--what? Nothing less than the fronts of two minute drawers. They fit in underneath the pen-tray, and might remain undiscovered for a hundred years unless you had the superhuman wit to divine the purpose of the brass nail. The drawers contain diamonds, probably, or some closely folded document making you the heir to a vast estate. As a matter of fact, I don't know what they contained; the surprise of the drawers themselves was enough for me. I need not add that I did not guess the riddle myself; but nothing that I can call to mind impressed me more than when, one day, my father solved it for me with his little brass wand. At intervals, afterwards, I was allowed to work the miracle myself, always with the same thrill of mysterious delight. The desk was human to me; it was alive. There were little square covers for the ink and sand-bottles; and on the under sides of these were painted a pair of faces; very ruddy in the cheeks they were, with staring eyes and smiling mouths; and one of them wore a pair of black side-whiskers. They were done by my father, with oil--colors filched from my mother's paint-box. They seemed to me portraits of the people who lived in the desk; evidently they enjoyed their existence hugely. And when I considered that the desk was also somehow instrumental in the production of stories--such as the Snow Image--of a delectable and magical character, the importance to my mind of the whole contrivance may be conceived. When I grew beyond child's estate, I learned that it had also assisted at the composition of The Scarlet Letter. If ever there were a haunted writing-desk, this should have been it; but the ghosts have long since carried it away, whither I know not. On the table were two ornaments; one, the finely moulded figure of an Egyptian in bronze, the wide Egyptian head-dress falling on the shoulders, the arms lying rigidly at the sides, with fists clinched. Generations of handling had made it almost black, but the amiable expression of the little countenance--the figure was about seven inches tall--greatly endeared it to me. Its feet were pressed close together on a small round stand; but one day somebody set it down on a hot stove, where it remained without flinching till the feet were melted off. After some years my mother had an ebony stump affixed to it, preserving the proportions of the figure and setting it once more erect. He was of greater endurance and of finer physical if not of moral development than the Tin Soldier of Hans Christian Andersen. The other ornament, less than half the Egyptian's size, and also made of bronze, was a warrior in mediaeval armor, whose head lifted off, showing a sharp-pointed rod the sheath of which was the body. Its use was to pick the wicks of the oil-lamps of that epoch, and its name was Mr. Pickwick. When afterwards I became acquainted with the world's Mr. Pickwick, I supposed his creator had adopted the name from our bronze warrior; but the world's Pickwick was made of stuff more enduring than bronze; he remains, but our little warrior has vanished. I come now to the human occupant of this chamber of marvels. I see a tall, strong man, whose wide-domed head was covered with wavy black hair, bushing out at the sides. It thinned somewhat over the lofty crown and brow; the forehead was hollowed at the temple and rounded out above, after the Moorish style of architecture. Under heavy, dark eyebrows were eyes deep-set and full of light, marvellous in range of expression, with black eyelashes. All seemed well with me when I met their look. The straight, rather salient nose had a perceptible cleft at the tip, which, I was told, was a sign of good lineage; muddy-mettled rascals lacked it; so that I was much distressed by the smooth, plebeian bluntness, at that time, of my own little snub. The mouth, then unshaded by a mustache, had a slight upward turn at the corners, indicative of vitality and good-humor; the chin rounded out sharply convex from the lip. The round, strong column of the neck well supported the head; my mother compared it with that of the Apollo Belvedere, a bust of which stood in the corner of our sitting-room. The head was deep--a great distance between the base of the ear and the wing of the nostril--and was well filled out behind. Above the blue of the shaven beard the complexion showed clear white and red, announcing a strong heart and good digestion. My father shaved himself daily; I was not permitted to see the operation, but I knew he lathered, and wondered why. He was naturally athletic; broad-shouldered and deep in the chest, lean about the loins, weighing never over one hundred and eighty pounds; his height was five feet ten and three-quarter inches; his legs and feet were slender and graceful, his gait long and springy, and he could stand and leap as high as his shoulder. In the house he wore slippers, which seemed always old and down-at-heel. In the house, also, he wore a writing-gown, made for him some years before by my mother; it reached nearly to his heels, and had been a gorgeous affair, though now much defaced. The groundwork was purple, covered all over with conventional palm-leaf in old-gold color; the lining was red. This lining, under the left-hand skirt of the gown, was blackened with ink over a space as large as your hand; for the author was in the habit of wiping his pen thereon; but my mother finally parried this attack by sewing in the centre of the place a penwiper in the shape of a butterfly. While story-writing, the door of the study was locked against all the world; but after noon he became approachable, except during The Scarlet Letter period, when he wrote till evening. He did not mind my seeing him write letters; he would sit with his right shoulder and head inclined towards the desk; the quill squeaked softly over the smooth paper, with frequent quick dips into the ink-bottle; a few words would be written swiftly; then a pause, with suspended pen, while the next sentence was forming in the writer's mind. When he miswrote, instead of crossing out the word, he would smear it out with his finger, and rewrite over the smear; so that his page had a mottled appearance. The writing was accompanied by intermittent nods of the head, as one would say, "Sic cogito!" So far as he is concerned, the shadows close in on me here. But I have said that the house was of three stories, and I have accounted for two of them only. The second was occupied by my grandmother Hawthorne and her two daughters, Aunt Louisa and Aunt Ebe (the latter appellation being an infantile version of her name invented by my father, who was her junior, and used by us to distinguish between her and that other Elizabeth who was Aunt Lizzie Peabody). Of my grandmother Hawthorne I have no personal recollection at all; she was a Manning, a beautiful old lady, whom her son resembled. She had been a recluse from society for forty years; it was held to be good form, in that age and place, to observe such Hindoo rites after the death of a husband; hers had died in his thirty-fourth year in Surinam. But she had also insensibly fallen into the habit of isolating herself in some degree from her own family; they were all of them addicted to solitude of the body, though kindly enough disposed in the abstract. When we went to live in the Mall Street house, the old lady and her daughters uprooted themselves from their home of many years in Herbert Street and dwelt with us; and that quaint crystallization of their habits was in a measure broken up. But the dowager Mrs. Hawthorne, it soon appeared, had come there to die; she was more than seventy years old. My aunt Louisa I seem dimly to recall as a tall, fragile, pale, amiable figure, not very effective. My aunt Ebe I afterwards came to know well, and shall defer mention of her. So I was encompassed by kindly petticoats, and was very happy, but might have been better for a stout playmate of my own sex. I had a hobby-horse, which I rode constantly to fairy-land in quest of treasure to bestow upon my friends. I swung with Una on the gate, and looked out upon the wonder of the passing world. The tragedy of my grandmother's death, which, as I have said, interrupted the birth of The Scarlet Letter, passed me by unknowing, or rather without leaving a trace upon my memory. On the other hand, I can reconstitute vividly two absurd incidents, destitute of historical value. After my grandmother Hawthorne's death I fell ill; but the night before the disease declared itself, I was standing in a chair at the nursery window, looking out at the street-lamp on the corner, and my aunt Lizzie Peabody, who had just come on from Boston, was standing behind me, lest I should fall off. Now, I was normally the most sweet-tempered little urchin imaginable; yet suddenly, without the faintest warning or provocation, I turned round and dealt my loving aunt a fierce kick in the stomach. It deprived her of breath for a space; but her saintly nature is illustrated by the fact that the very first use she made of her recovered faculties was to gasp out, "Sophie, the child must be ill!" Fortunately for my reputation, the illness was not long in arriving. The other episode must have happened at about the same period, and is likewise concerned with Aunt Lizzie. We had a cat, and the cat had had kittens a day or two before. Aunt Lizzie came into the nursery, where Una and I were building houses of blocks, and sat down in the big easy-chair. The cat was in the room, and she immediately came up to my aunt and began to mew and to pluck at her dress with her claws. Such attentions were rare on pussy's part, and my aunt noticed them with pleasure, and caressed the animal, which still continued to devote its entire attention to her. But there was something odd in the sound of her mewing and in the intent regard of her yellow eyes. "Can anything be the matter with pussy?" speculated my aunt. At that moment my father entered the room, and my aunt rose to greet him. Then the massacre was revealed, for she had been sitting upon the kittens. Their poor mother pounced upon them with a yowl, but it was too late. My dear aunt was rather a heavy woman, and she had been sitting there fifteen minutes. We all stood appalled in the presence of the great mystery. One day a big man, with a brown beard and shining brown eyes, who bubbled over with enthusiasm and fun, made his appearance and talked volubly about something, and went away again, and my father and mother smiled at each other. The Scarlet Letter had been written, and James T. Fields had read it, and declared it the greatest book of the age. So that was the last of Salem. II Horatio Bridge's "I-told-you-so"--What a house by the sea might have done--Unknown Lenox--The restlessness of youth-- The Unpardonable Sin and the Deathless Man--The little red house--Materials of culture--Our best playmates--The mystery of Mrs. Peter's dough--Our intellectual hen--Fishing for poultry--Yacht-building--Swimming with one foot on the ground--Shipwreck--Our playfellow the brook--Tanglewood-- Nuts--Giants and enchanters--Coasting--Wet noses, dark eyes, ambrosial breath--My first horseback ride--Herman Melville's stories--Another kind of James--The thunder-storm--Yearning ladies and melancholy sinners--Hindlegs--Probable murder--"I abominate the sight of it!"--The peril of Tanglewood--The truth of fiction--An eighteen-months' work--We leave five cats behind. Horatio Bridge, my father's college friend, was a purser in the navy and lived in Augusta, Maine, his official residence being at Portsmouth. He had kept in closer touch with the romancer than any of his other friends had since their graduating days, and he had been from the first a believer in his coming literary renown. So, when The Scarlet Letter shone eminent in the firmament of book-land, it was his triumphant "I-told-you-so" that was among the earliest to be heard. And when my father cast about for a more congenial place than Salem to live in, it was to Bridge that he applied for suggestions. He stipulated that the place should be somewhere along the New England sea-coast. Had this wish of his been fulfilled it might have made great differences. Hawthorne had always dwelt within sight and sound of the Atlantic, on which his forefathers had sailed so often between the Indies and Salem port, and Atlantic breezes were necessary to his complete well-being. At this juncture physical health had for the first time become an object to him; he was run down by a year of suffering and hard work, and needed nature's kindest offices. A suitable house of his own by the sea-side would probably have brought him up to his best physical condition to begin with, and kept him so; and it would so have endeared itself to him that when, two or three years later, Pierce had offered him a foreign appointment he might have been moved to decline it, and have gone on writing American romances to the end--to the advantage of American letters. Concord had its own attractions; but it never held him as the sea would have done, nor nourished his health, nor stimulated his genius. A house of his own beside the Atlantic might well have added twenty years to his life. But it was not upon the knees of the gods. Bridge's zealous efforts failed to find a place available, and after an uneasy interval, during which his friend wandered uncomfortably about Boston and the neighborhood (incidentally noting down some side-scenes afterwards to be incorporated in The Blithedale Romance), a cottage in the Berkshire Hills was spoken of, and upon examination seemed practicable. Lenox, at that time, was as little known as Mount Desert; it was not until long afterwards that fashion found them out and made them uninhabitable to any but fashionable folks. Moreover, my father had seen something of Lenox a dozen years before. A dozen years before he was not yet betrothed to Sophia Peabody; he already loved her and she him; but her health seemed an insuperable barrier between them. This and certain other matters were weighing heavily upon his soul, and his future seemed dark and uncertain. He thought of taking a voyage round the world; he thought of getting into politics; he even thought--as young men full of life sometimes will--of death. What he finally did, with native good sense, was to make a two-months' trip in the mountainous region to the westward, to change the scene and his state of mind, and to get what artists call a fresh eye. He chose North Adams as his headquarters, and forayed thence in various directions over a radius of twenty miles. He was then beginning to revolve one of the two great romance themes that preoccupied his whole after-life, neither of which was he destined to write. This was the idea of the Unpardonable Sin; the other was the conception of the Deathless Man. The only essay we have towards the embodiment of the first vision is the short fragment published in Mosses from an Old Manse, called "Ethan Brand." The other was attempted in various forms, of which Septimius, Dr. Grimshawe's Secret, and The Dolliver Romance, all posthumously published, are the most important. But Stockbridge, Pittsfield, and Lenox had been included among his haunts during the break-away above mentioned, and he remembered that the scenery was beautiful, the situation remote, and the air noble. Next to the sea it seemed an ideal place to recuperate and write in. Thither, at all events, he resolved to go, and early in the summer of 1850 we arrived at the little red house above the shores of Stockbridge Bowl, with bag and baggage. Little though the house was, the bag and baggage were none too much to find easy accommodation in it. A fair-sized city drawing-room of these sumptuous contemporary days could stow away in a corner the entire structure which then became our habitation, and retain space enough outside it for the exploitation of social functions. Nevertheless, by the simple expedient of making the interior divisions small enough, this liliputian edifice managed to contain eight rooms on its two floors (including the kitchen). One of the rooms was, in fact, the entrance-hall; you stepped into it across the threshold of the outer door, and the staircase ascended from it. It was used as an extension of the drawing-room, which opened out of it. The drawing-room adjoined the dining-room, with windows facing the west, with a view of the mountains across the lake, and the dining-room communicated with the kitchen. One of the western-looking up-stairs rooms served as my father's study; my sister Una had her chamber, I mine (which was employed as the guest-chamber upon occasion), and our parents the other. What more could be asked? for when Rose was born, her crib stood beside her mother's bedstead. When we were not asleep--that is, during twelve hours out of the twenty-four--Una's existence and mine were passed mainly in the outer sitting-room and in the dining-room. There was plenty to entertain us. I had my rocking-horse, which I bestrode with perfect fearlessness; my porcelain lion, which still survives unscathed after the cataclysms of half a century; my toy sloop, made for me by Uncle Nat; and a jack-knife, all but the edge and point, which had been removed out of deference to my youth. Una had a doll, a miniature mahogany centre-table and bureau, and other things in which I felt no interest. In common, we possessed the box of wooden bricks, and the big portfolio containing tracings by my mother, exquisitely done, of Flaxman's "Outlines of the Iliad and Odyssey" and other classic subjects. We knew by heart the story of all these mythological personages, and they formed a large part of our life. They also served the important use of suggesting to my father his Wonder-Book and Tanglewood Tales stories, and, together with the figures of Gothic fairy-lore, they were the only playmates, with the exception of our father and mother, that we had or desired. But our father and mother were, of course, the main thing, after all. She was with us all day long; he, from the time he stopped writing, early in the afternoon, till our bed-time. They answered all our questions about things animate and inanimate, physical and metaphysical; and that must have taken time, for our curiosity was magnificent; and "The Old Boy," my father records, "asked me today what were sensible questions--I suppose with a view to asking me some." They superintended our projections of creation on the black-board--a great, old-fashioned black-board, the like of which I have not since beheld; they read to us and told us stories. Many of these stories were of incidents of their own child-life; and there was also the narrative of our mother's voyage to Cuba and back, and residence there when she was about eighteen or twenty--a fascinating chronicle. Meal-times were delectable festivals, not only because the bread-and-milk, the boiled rice and tapioca pudding, and eggs and fruit tasted so good, but by reason of the broad outlook out of window over the field, the wood, the lake, and the mountains; supper-time, with the declining sun pouring light into the little room and making the landscape glorious, was especially exhilarating. Ambrosial was the bread baked by Mrs. Peters, the taciturn and serious religious person of color who attended to our cooking; the prize morsels were the ends, golden brown in hue, crunching so crisply between our teeth. I used to wonder how a being with hands so dark as those of Mrs. Peters managed to turn out dough so immaculate. She would plunge them right into the ivory-hued substance, yet it became only whiter than before. But the life of life was, of course, out-doors. There was a barn containing a hay-mow and a large hen-coop, soon populous with hens and chickens, with an heroic snow-white rooster to keep them in order. Hens are the most audacious and presuming of pets, and they have strong individuality. One of our brood was more intellectual and enterprising than the others; she found a way of getting out of the coop, no matter how tightly it was shut up; and she would jump in our laps as we sat eating a piece of bread in the barn doorway and snatch it away from us; but I think we sometimes sat there with the bread on purpose to have her do it. Once or twice--until I was detected and stopped--I enjoyed the poignant delight of fishing for hens out of the barn loft; my tackle consisted of a bent pin at the end of a string tied to a stick. It was baited with a grain of corn, or a bit of rag would do as well, for hens have no hereditary suspicion of anglers, and are much more readily entrapped than fishes. Pulling them up, squawking and fluttering, was thrilling, but, of course, it was wrong, like other thrilling things, and had to be foregone. A less unregenerate experiment was fastening two grains of corn to the ends of a long bit of thread; two hens would seize each a grain and begin swallowing thread until they interfered, with each other, when a disgorgement would take place. It was an economical sport--the one bit of thread and the two corn-grains would last all day--and, in view of the joy afforded to the spectators, did not seem too unkind. My father had mechanical talent, and with an old door-knob and some strips of shingle he would make a figure of a man with a saw; you fixed it to the edge of a table, set the door-knob swinging, and the creature would saw with the most absurd diligence. From the same shingle he would construct a pugilist, who, being set up where the wind played upon him, would swing his arms interminably. It was yacht-building, however, that afforded us most entertainment. A shingle was whittled to a point at one end; a stick with a square paper slipped on it was stuck up in the middle, and a rudder made fast to the stern; such a boat would sail boldly out upon the vastness of the lake, till the eye could no longer follow the diminishing white speck. These days beside the lake were full of good things. The water was clear, with a white sand bottom; we were given swimming-lessons in the hot summer weather; having waded in up to our middles, we faced towards the shore, where sat our father with a long fishing-pole, the end of which he kept within our reach, and bade us lean forward on the water and kick up our feet. But, for my part, I kept one foot on the bottom. It was not till years afterwards that I mustered courage to take it off, and that was in a lake three thousand miles from Stockbridge Bowl, with the towers of the castle of Chillon reflected in its calm surface. We also made limited use of a leaky old punt, which one day capsized and emptied its whole crew into the water, luckily close to shore. We fished for gold carp for hours together, and during our two summers we caught a couple of them; there were thousands of them swimming about; but a bent pin with the bait washed off is not a good lure. In winter, the lake had five feet of ice on it, which lasted far into the spring, and once or twice we got aboard this great raft and tracked across it, with as much awe and enthusiasm as ever Kane had felt in his arctic explorations. In all, we became intimate friends with the lake idea, new to us then, but never to grow stale; and our good fortune favored us during after-life with many lovely lakes and ponds, including such gems as Rydal, Walden, and Geneva. Water, in another enchanting guise, dashed and gurgled for us in the brook that penetrated like a happy dream the slumber of the forest that bordered on the lake. The wooded declivity through which it went was just enough to keep it ever vocal and animated. Gazing down upon it, it was clear brown, with glancing gleams of interior green, and sparkles diamond white; tiny fishes switched themselves against the current with quivering tails; the shaggy margins were flecked with sunshine, and beautiful with columbines, violets, arbutus, and houstonias. Fragments of rock and large pebbles interrupted its flow and deepened its mellow song; above it brooded the twilight of the tall pines and walnuts, responding to its merriment with solemn murmurings. What playfellow is more inexhaustible than such a brook, so full of life, of motion, of sound and color, of variety and constancy. A child welcomes it as an answer to its own soul, with its mystery and transparency, its bounded lawlessness, its love of earth and its echoes of the sky. In winter our brook had a new charm: it ran beneath a roof of ice, often mounded with snow; its voice sounding cheerful as ever in those inscrutable caverns, as if it discoursed secret wonders of fairy-land, and carried treasures of the elves and gnomes. Zero, with his utmost rigors, could not still its speech for a day or fix his grip upon those elastic limbs. Indeed, the frosty god conspired with it for our delight; building crystal bridges, with tracery of lace delicater than Valenciennes, and spangled string-pieces, and fretted vaultings, whimsical sierras, stalactite and stalagmite. An icicle is one of those careless toys of nature which the decorative art of man imitates in vain. They are among the myriad decorations of children's palaces. To Tanglewood, as we called it, at all seasons of the year, came Hawthorne and his wife and children. In spring there was the issuing forth of the new life from beneath the winter coverlid; the first discovery of sociable houstonias, and the exquisite tints and fragrance of the mayflower on its dark, bearded stalk. When June became perfect, and afterwards till nuts were ripe, my father loved to lie at full length upon the mossy and leaf-strewn floor, looking up at the green roof, the lofty whispering-gallery of vaulted boughs, with its azure lattices and descending sunlight-shafts; wrapped in imaginings some of which were afterwards to delight the world; but many more of them, no doubt, were fated to join the glorious company of untold tales. Beside him sat our mother, on a throne which we had fashioned for her from the upright stump of a tree; round about them played the little girl and boy. They brought all the treasures which this wonderfully affluent world afforded: flowers in all seasons; strawberries, small but of potent flavor, which the little boy would gather with earnest diligence, and fetch to the persons he loved, mashed into premature jam in his small fist; exciting turtles with variegated carapaces, and heads and feet that went in and out; occasional newts from the plashy places; and in autumn, hatfuls of walnuts. There were chestnuts, too, upon whose prickly hulls the preoccupied children would sometimes inadvertently plump themselves. Our father was a great tree-climber, and he was also fond of playing the role of magician. "Hide your eyes!" he would say, and the next moment, from being there beside us on the moss, we would hear his voice descending from the sky, and behold! he swung among the topmost branches, showering down upon us a hail-storm of nuts. There was a big cavern behind the kitchen chimney, which gradually became filled with these harvests, and on winter evenings they were brought forth and cracked with a hammer on the hearth-stone. The wide field, or croft, which sloped from the house to the wood was thickly grown with mullein-stalks, against which I waged war with an upper section of one of my father's old broken canes, for I took them for giants, and stubborn, evil-minded enchanters. I slew them by scores; but I could make no way against the grasshoppers, which jumped against my bare legs and pricked them. There were wasps, too; one of them stung Una on the lower lip as she was climbing over a rail-fence. Her lip at once assumed a Bourbon contour, and I reached the conclusion, by some tacit syllogism of infancy, that the rail-fence was at least half to blame for the catastrophe, and always carefully avoided it. I likewise avoided the wasps; a certain trick they have of giving a hitch to their after-parts as they walk along always struck me as being obviously diabolical. When the snows came, two and three feet deep, we got out the family sled from its summer lodging in the barn and went forth, muffled in interminable knit tippets and other woollen armor, to coast down the long slope. Our father sat in front with the reins in his hands and his feet thrust out to steer, and away we went clinging fast behind him. Sometimes we swept triumphantly to the bottom; at other times we would collide with some hidden obstacle, and describe each a separate trajectory into the snow-banks. We made enormous snow-balls by beginning with a small one and rolling it over and over in the soft snow till it waxed too vast for our strength; two or three of these piled one on another would be sculptured by the author of The Scarlet Letter into a snow-man, who would stand stanch for weeks. Snow-storms in Lenox began early and lasted till far into April. The little red house had all it could do, sometimes, to lift its upper windows above them. In the front yard there was a symmetrical balsam fir-tree, tapering like a Chinese pagoda. One winter morning we found upon one of its lower boughs a little brown sparrow frozen stiff. We put it in a card-board coffin, and dug out a grave for it beneath the fir, with a shingle head-stone. The funeral ceremonies had for the two mourners a solemnity such as is not always felt at such functions in later life. Of the regular daily routine was the journey to Luther Butler's, quarter of a mile up the road, for milk and butter. I generally accompanied my father, and saw placid Luther's cows, placid as himself, with their broad, wet noses, amiable dark eyes, questionable horns, and ambrosial breath. Mr. Tappan, our landlord, had horses, and once he mounted me on the bare back of one of the largest of these quadrupeds, which, to the stupefaction of everybody, instantly set off at full gallop. Down the road we thundered, the rider, with his legs sticking out at right angles, screaming with joy, for this transcended any rocking-horse experiences. A hundred yards away there was a bend in the road. Just at that point there was a manure-pile, which had long bided its time. I had hold of a strand of the horse's mane; but when he swerved at the bend I had to let go, and after a short flight in air, the manure-pile received me in its soft embrace. Looking up the road, I saw Mr. Tappan, with dilated eyes and a countenance expressing keen emotion, coming towards me at a wonderful pace, and my father and mother following him at a short distance. I did not myself mind the smell of manure, and the others were glad to put up with it in consideration of my having escaped broken bones. We did not keep a dog, but Herman Melville, who often came over from Pittsfield, had a large Newfoundland which he sometimes brought with, him, and Mr. G. P. R. James, a novelist of the Walter Scott school, had another, and I was permitted to bestride both of them; they were safe enough, but they would turn back their heads and lay their cold noses on my leg; I preferred the now-forbidden horse. But Melville himself made up for everything by the tremendous stories he used to tell about the South Sea Islands and the whale fishery. Normally he was not a man of noticeable appearance; but when the narrative inspiration was on him, he looked like all the things he was describing--savages, sea-captains, the lovely Fayaway in her canoe, or the terrible Moby Dick himself. There was vivid genius in this man, and he was the strangest being that ever came into our circle. Through all his wild and reckless adventures, of which a small part only got into his fascinating books, he had been unable to rid himself of a Puritan conscience; he afterwards tried to loosen its grip by studying German metaphysics, but in vain. He was restless and disposed to dark hours, and there is reason to suspect that there was in him a vein of insanity. His later writings were incomprehensible. When we were living in England, he passed through the midst of us on one of his aimless, mysterious journeys round the world; and when I was in New York, in 1884, I met him, looking pale, sombre, nervous, but little touched by age. He died a few years later. He conceived the highest admiration for my father's genius, and a deep affection for him personally; but he told me, during our talk, that he was convinced that there was some secret in my father's life which had never been revealed, and which accounted for the gloomy passages in his books. It was characteristic in him to imagine so; there were many secrets untold in his own career. But there were few honester or more lovable men than Herman Melville. [IMAGE: HERMAN MELVILLE] James (no relation of our distinguished contemporary) was a commonplace, meritorious person, with much blameless and intelligent conversation; but the only thing that recalls him personally to my memory is the fact of his being associated with a furious thunder-storm. My father and I were alone in the house at the time; my mother had gone to West Newton on a three weeks' visit. In the midst of the thunder and lightning, the downpour and the hurricane, the crash of matter and the wreck of worlds, our door burst open, and behold! of all persons in the world to be heralded by such circumstances, G. P. R. James! Not he only, but close upon his heels his entire family, numerous, orthodox, admirable, and infinitely undesirable to two secluded gentlemen without a wife and mother to help them out. But it was a choice between murder and hospitality, and come in they must. Never before or after did our liliputian drawing-room harbor so large an assemblage. They dripped on the carpet, they were conventional and courteous; we made conversation between us; but whenever the thunder rolled, Mrs. James became ghastly pale. Mr. James explained that this was his birthday, and that they were on a pleasure excursion. He conciliated me by anecdotes of a pet magpie or raven who stole spoons. At last, the thunder-storm and the G. P. R. Jameses passed off together. There were many other visitors, not only old friends, but persons attracted thither out of the void by the fame of the book "along whose burning leaves," as Oliver Wendell Holmes sang of it, "his scarlet web our wild romancer weaves." It was a novel experience for the man who had become accustomed to regarding himself as the obscurest man of letters in America. Lonely, yearning ladies came; enthusiastic young men; melancholy sinners. The little red house was not a literary Mecca only, but a moral one. The dark-browed, kindly smiling author received them all courteously; he was invariably courteous. "I would not have a drunken man politer than I," he once answered me, when I asked him why he had returned the salutation of a toper. What counsel he gave to those who came to him as to a father confessor of course I know not; but later, when I used to sit in his office in the Liverpool consulate, I sometimes heard him speak plain truths to the waifs and strays who drifted in there; and truth more plain, yet bestowed with more humanity and brotherly purpose, I have never heard since. It made them tremble, but it did them good. Such things made him suffer, but he never flinched from the occasion by a hair's-breadth. He must have loved his fellow-creatures. Somebody gave me a rabbit, which I named Hind-legs. I was deeply interested in him for a while, especially when I learned that he could not drink water; but he lasted only two weeks, and I am under the impression that I killed him. Not that I loved him less; but children are prone to experiment with this singular thing called life when it is in their power. They do not believe that death can be other than a transient phenomenon; the lifeless body may puzzle, but it does not convince them. I was certainly not a cruel urchin, and I can recall none but cordial sentiments towards Hindlegs on my part. I remember no details of the murder, if murder were done; but I do remember feeling no surprise when, one morning, Hindlegs was found dead. After so many years, I will not bring against the owner of Hindlegs a verdict of positive guilt; but I suspect him. Hindlegs, at all events, achieved an immortality which can belong to few of his brethren; for my father, after pooh-poohing the imbecile little bundle of fur for a day or two, conceived an involuntary affection for him, and reported his character and habits in his journal in a manner which is likely to keep his memory alive long after the hand that (perhaps) slew him is dust. In default of dogs and Hindlegs, we had abundant cats. My father was always fond of these mysterious deities of ancient Egypt, and they were never turned away from our doors; but how so many of them happened to find us out in this remote region I cannot explain. It seems as if goodwill towards cats spontaneously generated them. They appeared, one after another, to the number of five; but when the time came for us to leave the red house forever, the cats would not and could not be packed up, and they were left behind. In my mind's eye I still see them, squatting abreast, silhouetted against the sky, on the brow of the hill as we drove down the road; for they had scampered after our carry-all when we drove away. Cats teach Americans what they are slow to learn--the sanctity and permanence of home. But Lenox could not be a home for us. It was, indeed, a paradise for the children; but the children's father was never well there. He had a succession of colds--as those affections are called; it was ascribed to the variations of temperature during the summers; but the temperature would not have troubled him had he not been hard hit before he went to Berkshire. He got out of patience with the climate, and was wont to anathematize it with humorous extravagance, as his way was: "It is horrible. One knows not for ten minutes together whether he is too cool or too warm. I detest it! I hate Berkshire with my whole soul. Here, where I had hoped for perfect health, I have for the first time been made sensible that I cannot with impunity encounter nature in all her moods." It was the summers that disagreed with him. "Upon the whole," he said, "I think that the best time for living in the country is the winter." It was during the winter that he did most of his writing. The House of the Seven Gables was written between September of 1850 and January or February of 1851. But composition took more out of him than formerly. He admitted to his sister Louisa that he was "a little worn down with constant work," and added that he could not afford any idle time now, being evidently of the opinion that his popularity would be short-lived, and that it behooved him, therefore, to make the most of it. But "the pen is so constantly in my fingers that I abominate the sight of it!" he exclaimed. This was after he had transgressed his custom of never writing in the hot months. He began in June and finished in forty days the whole volume of The Wonder-Book. He also read the tales to his domestic audience as fast as they were written, and benefited, perhaps, by the expert criticism of the small people. Many passages in the intercalated chapters, describing the adventures of Eustace Bright and the Tangle-wood children, are based on facts well known to his own two youngsters. And when Eustace tells his hearers that if the dark-haired man dwelling in the cottage yonder were simply to put some sheets of writing-paper in the fire, all of them and Tangle-wood itself would turn into cinders and vanish in smoke up the chimney--even the present chronicler saw the point; though, at the same time, he somehow could not help believing in the reality of Primrose, Buttercup, Dandelion, Squash-blossom, and the rest. Thus early did he begin to grasp the philosophy of the truth of fiction. The House of the Seven Gables and The Wonder-Book were a fair eighteen-months' work, and in addition to them Hawthorne had, before leaving Lenox, planned out the story of The Blithedale Romance; so that after we got to West Newton--our half-way station on the road to Concord--he was prepared to sit down and write it. Long before we left Concord for England he had published Tangle-wood Tales, not to mention the biography of Franklin Pierce. Una and her brother knew nothing about the romances; they knew and approved the fairy tales; but their feeling about all their father's writings was, that he was being wasted in his study, when he might be with them, and there could be nothing in any books, whether his own or other authors', that could for a moment bear comparison with his actual companionship. What he set down upon the page was but a less free and rich version of the things that came from his living mouth in our heedless playtimes. "If only papa wouldn't write, how nice it would be!" And, indeed, a book is but a poor substitute for the mind and heart of a man, and it exists only as one of the numberless sorry makeshifts to which time constrains us, while we are waiting for eternity and full communion. It was a dreary day in the beginning of the second winter that we set out on our eastward journey; but Hawthorne's face was brighter than the weather warranted, for it was turned once more towards the sea. We were destined, ere we turned back, to go much farther towards the rising sun than any of us then suspected. We took with us one who had not been present at our coming--a little auburn-haired baby, born in May. Which are the happiest years of a man's life? Those in which he is too much occupied with present felicity to look either forward or backward--to hope or to remember. There are no such years; but such moments there may be, and perhaps there were as many such moments awaiting Hawthorne as had already passed. His greatest work was done before he left his native land, and within a year or two of his death he wrote to Richard Stoddard: "I have been a happy man, and yet I cannot remember any moment of such happy conspiring circumstances that I would have rung a joy-bell at it." III Chariots of delight--West Newton--Raw American life--Baby's fingers--Our cousin Benjamin's untoward head--Our uncle Horace--His vacuum--A reformer's bristles--Grace Greenwood's first tears--The heralding of Kossuth--The decorated engine-- The chief incident of the reception--Blithedale and Brook Farm--Notes from real life--Rough draughts--Paths of composition--The struggle with the Pensioner--Hawthorne's method--The invitation of Concord--Four wooden walls and a roof--Mr. Alcott's aesthetic carpentering--Appurtenances of "The Wayside"--Franklin Pierce for President"--The most homeless people in the world." The sky that overhung Hawthorne's departure from Lenox was gray with impending snow, and the flakes had begun to fall ere the vehicle in which his family was ensconced had reached the railway station in Pittsfield. Travel had few amenities in those days. The cars were all plain cars, with nothing to recommend them except that they went tolerably fast--from twenty to thirty miles an hour. They were chariots of delight to the children, who were especially happy in occupying the last car of the train, from the rear windows of which they could look down upon the tracks, which seemed to slide miraculously away from beneath them. The conductor collected the tickets--a mysterious rite. The gradually whitening landscape fled past, becoming ever more level as we proceeded; by-and-by there was a welcome unpacking of the luncheon-basket, and all the while there were the endless questions to be asked and faithfully answered. It was already dark by the time we were bundled out at the grimy shed which was called the depot, at West Newton, where we were met by the Horace Manns, and somehow the transit to the latter's house, which we were to occupy for the winter, was made. The scene was gloomy and unpleasant; the change from the mountains of the west depressing; and, for my part, I cannot remember anything agreeable in this raw little suburb. American life half a century ago had a great deal of rawness about it, and its external aspect was ugly beyond present belief. We may be a less virtuous nation now than we were then, but we are indescribably more good to look at. And the West Newton of to-day, as compared with that of 1851, will serve for an illustration of this truth. Horace Mann's house was a small frame dwelling, painted white, with green blinds, and furnished with a furnace stiflingly hot. One of the first things the baby did was to crawl under the sofa in the sitting-room and lay her small fingers against the radiator or register, or whatever it is called, through which the heat came. She withdrew them with a bitter outcry, and on the tip of each was a blister as big as the tip itself. We had no glorious out-door playground in West Newton; it was a matter of back yards and sullen streets. The snow kept piling up, week after week; but there was no opportunity to put it to its proper use of coasting. The only redeeming feature of the physical situation that I recall is the momentous fact of a first pair of red-topped boots. They were very uncomfortable, and always either wet or stiff as iron from over-dryness; but they made their wearer as happy as they have made all other boys since boots began. A boy of six with high boots is bigger than most men. But if the outward life was on the whole unprepossessing, inward succulence was not lacking. We had the Manns, to begin with, and the first real acquaintance between the two sets of children opened here. Mary Peabody, my mother's elder sister, had married Horace Mann, whose name is honorably identified with the development in this country of common-school education. They had three children, of about our age, all boys. A statue in bronze of Horace Mann stands in front of the State-house in Boston, and the memory of the strenuous reformer well merits the distinction. He took things seriously and rather grimly, and was always emphatically in earnest. He was a friend of George Combe, the phrenologist, after whom his second boy was named; and he was himself so ardent a believer in the new science that when his younger son, Benjamin, was submitted to him for criticism at a very early age he declared, after a strict phrenological examination, that he was not worth bringing up. But children's heads sometimes undergo strange transformations as they grow up, and Benjamin lived to refute abundantly his father's too hasty conclusion in his case. He became eminent as an entomologist; George followed the example of his father on educational lines. Horace, who died comparatively early, was an enthusiastic naturalist, who received the unstinted praise and confidence of the great Agassiz. My uncle Horace, as I remember him, was a very tall man, of somewhat meagre build, a chronic sufferer from headaches and dyspepsia. His hair was sandy, straight, rather long, and very thick; it hung down uncompromisingly round his head. His face was a long square, with a mouth and chin large and immitigably firm. His eyes were reinforced by a glistening pair of gold-bowed spectacles. He always wore a long-skirted black coat. His aspect was a little intimidating to small people; but there were lovely qualities in his nature, his character was touchingly noble and generous, and the world knows the worth of his intellect. He was anxious, exacting, and dogmatic, and was not always able to concede that persons who differed from him in opinion could be morally normal. This was especially noticeable when the topic of abolition happened to come up for discussion; Horace Mann was ready to out-Garrison Garrison; he thought Uncle Tom's Cabin a somewhat milk-and-water tract. He was convinced that Tophet was the future home of all slave-holders, and really too good for them, and he practically worshipped the negro. Had he occupied a seat in Congress at that juncture, it is likely that the civil war might have been started a decade sooner than it was. My father and mother were much more moderate in their view of the situation, and my mother used to say that if slavery was really so evil and demoralizing a thing as the abolitionists asserted, it was singular that they should canonize all the subjects of the institution. But, as a rule, all controversy with the indignant zeal of our relative was avoided; in his eyes any approach to a philosophical attitude on the burning question was a crime. Nor were his convictions less pronounced on the subject of total abstinence from liquor and tobacco. Now, my father smoked an occasional cigar, and it once came about that he was led to mention the fact in Horace Mann's hearing. The reformer's bristles were set in a moment. "Do I understand you to say, Mr. Hawthorne, that you actually use tobacco?" "Yes, I smoke a cigar once in a while," replied my father, comfortably. Horace Mann could not keep his seat; he started up and paced the room menacingly. He had a high admiration for my father's genius, and a deep affection for him as a man, and this infidelity to the true faith seemed to him the more appalling. But he would be true to his colors at all costs, and after a few moments he planted himself, tall and tragic, before his interlocutor, and spoke, in a husky voice, to this effect: "Then, Mr. Hawthorne, it is my duty to tell you that I no longer have the same respect for you that I have had." Then he turned and strode from the room, leaving the excommunicated one to his reflections. Faithful are the wounds of a friend, and my father was as much touched as he was amused by this example of my uncle's candor. Of course, there was a great vacuum in the place where my uncle's sense of humor might have been; but there are a time and place for such men as he, and more than once the men without sense of humor have moved the world. In addition to the Manns, there were visitors--the succession of whom, indeed, was henceforth to continue till the end of my father's earthly pilgrimage. Among the earliest to arrive was Grace Greenwood, wading energetically to our door through the December snow. She was one of the first, if not the first, of the tribe of women correspondents; she had lately returned, I think, from England, and the volume of her letters from that strange country was in everybody's hands. She was then a young woman, large and handsome, with dark hair and complexion, and large, expressive eyes, harmonious, aquiline features, and a picturesque appearance. She wore her hair in abundant curls; she exhaled an atmosphere of romance, of graceful and ardent emotions, and of almost overpowering sentiment. In fact, she had a genuine gift for expression and description, and she made an impression in contemporary letters. We might smile now--and, in truth, we sometimes did then--over some of her pages; but much of her work would still be called good, if resuscitated from the dusty book-shelves of the past. I remember one passage in her English Letters which was often quoted in our family circle as a typical illustration of the intensity of the period: "The first tears," wrote Grace, "that I had shed since leaving my dear native land fell fast into the red heart of an English rose!" Nothing could be better than that; but the volume was full of similar felicities. You were swimming in radiant tides of enthusiastic appreciation, quotations from the poets and poetical rhapsodies; incidents of travel, humorous, pathetic, and graphic; swirling eddies of word-painting, of moral and ethical and historical reflection; withal, an immense, amiable, innocent, sprawling temperament. And as was her book, so was Grace herself; indeed, if any one could outdo the book in personal conversation, Grace was that happy individual. What she accomplished when she embarked, full-sailed, upon the topic of The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables may be pictured to themselves by persons endowed with the rudiments of imagination; I must not attempt to adorn this sober page with an attempted reproduction of the scene. Mortal language reeled and cracked under the strain of giving form to her admiration; but it was so honest and well meant that it could not but give pleasure even in the midst of bewilderment. My father bowed his head with a painful smile; but I dare say it did him good when the ordeal was over. At this time the reverberations of the European revolutionary year, 1848, were still breaking upon our shores. President Polk had given mortal offence to Austria by sending over a special commissioner to determine whether the seceding state of Hungary might be recognized as a belligerent. In 1850 the Austrian representative, Baron Huelsmann, had entered upon a correspondence with our own Daniel Webster. The baron remonstrated, and Daniel mounted upon the national bird and soared in the patriotic empyrean. The eloquence of the Secretary of State perhaps aroused unwarranted expectations in the breasts of the struggling revolutionists, and the Hungarian man of eloquence set out for the United States to take the occasion by the forelock. Not since the visit of Lafayette had any foreigner been received here with such testimonials of public enthusiasm, or listened to by such applausive audiences: certainly none had ever been sent home again with less wool to show for so much cry. In 1851, the name of Kossuth was the most popular in the country, and when it was learned that he had accepted an invitation to speak in our little West Newton, we felt as if we were almost embarked upon a campaign--upon an altruistic campaign of emancipation against the Hapsburg oppressor. The excitement was not confined to persons of mature age and understanding; it raged among the smaller fry, and every boy was a champion of Kossuth. The train conveying the hero from New York to Boston (whence he was to return to West Newton after the reception there) was timed to pass through our midst at three o 'clock in the afternoon, and our entire population was at the track-side to see it go by. After one or two false alarms it came in sight round the curve, the smokestack of the engine swathed in voluminous folds of Old Glory. The smoke-stacks of those days were not like our scientific present-day ones; they were huge, inverted cones, affording ample surface for decoration. The train did not stop at our station; but Kossuth no doubt looked out of the window as he flew past and bowed his acknowledgments of our cheers. He was to return to us the next day, and, meanwhile, the town-hall, or the church, or whatever building it was that was to be the scene of his West Newton triumph was put in order for his reception. The person who writes these words, whose ears had eagerly devoured the story of the Hungarian revolt, wished to give the august visitor some personal assurance of his distinguished consideration, and it was finally agreed by his indulgent parents that he should print upon a card the legend, "GOD BLESS YOU, KOSSUTH," and be afforded an opportunity personally to present it to the guest of the nation. Many cards had been used and cast aside before the scribe, his fingers tremulous with emotion, had produced something which the Hungarian might be reasonably expected to find legible. Then, supported by his father and mother, and with his uncles, aunts, and cousins doubtless not far off, he proceeded proudly but falteringly to the scene of the presentation. He dimly recalls a large interior space, profusely decorated with stars and stripes, and also the colors of Hungary. At the head of the room was a great placard with "WELCOME, KOSSUTH" inscribed upon it. There was a great throng and press of men and women, a subdued, omnipresent roar of talk, and a setting of the tide towards the place where the patriot stood to receive our personal greetings. The scribe whom I have mentioned, being as yet brief of stature, was unable to see anything except coat-tails and petticoats, until of a sudden there was a breaking away of these obstacles and he found himself in close proximity to a gentleman of medium height, strongly built, with a mop of dark hair framing a handsome, pale, smiling face, the lower parts of which were concealed by a thick brown beard. It was Kossuth, and there was that in his countenance and expression which satisfied all the dreams of his admirer. He was chatting and shaking hands with the elder persons; and in a minute we were moving on again, and the printed card, for which the whole function had been created, had not been presented. At the last moment, in an agony of apprehension, the boy pulled at his mother's skirt and whispered piteously, "But my card!" She heard and remembered; but need was for haste; we had already passed the vantage-point. She snatched it from the tightly gripping fingers of the bearer, handed it to Kossuth, and at the same moment, with a gesture, directed his attention to her small companion. The Hungarian read the inscription at a glance, looked me in the eyes with a quick smile of comprehension, and, stepping towards me, laid his hand upon my head. It was a great moment for me; but as I went away I suddenly dissolved in tears, whether from the reaction of emotion, or because I had not myself succeeded in delivering my gift, I cannot now determine. But Kossuth thereby became, and for years he continued to be, the most superb figure in my political horizon. All this while The Blithedale Romance was being written. Inasmuch as it was finished on the last day of April, 1852, it could not have occupied the writer more than five months in the composition. Winter was his best time for literary work, and there was winter enough that year in West Newton. In the middle of April came the heaviest snowstorm of the season. Brook Farm (modified in certain respects to suit the conditions) was the scene of the story, and Brook Farm was within a fair walk of West Newton. I visited the place some thirty years later, and found the general topographical features substantially as described in the book. In 1852 it was ten years since Hawthorne had lived there, and though he might have renewed his acquaintance with it while the writing was going on, there is no record of his having done so; and considering the unfavorable weather, and the fact that the imaginative atmosphere which writers seek is enhanced by distance in time, just as the physical effect of a landscape is improved by distance of space, makes it improbable that he availed himself of the opportunity. His note-books contain but few comments upon the routine of life of the community; his letters to his wife (then Sophia Peabody) are somewhat fuller; one can trace several of these passages, artistically metamorphosed, in the romance. The episode of the masquerade picnic is based on fact, and the scene of the recovery of Zenobia's body from the river is a tolerably close reproduction of an event in Concord, in which, several years before, Hawthorne had been an actor. The portrayal in the story of city life from the back windows of the hotel, is derived from notes made just before we went to Lenox; there are the enigmatic drawing-room windows, the kitchen, the stable, the spectral cat, and the emblematic dove; the rain-storm; the glimpse of the woman sewing in one of the windows. There is also a passage containing a sketch of the personage who served as the groundwork for Old Moody. "An elderly ragamuffin, in a dingy and battered hat, an old surtout, and a more than shabby general aspect; a thin face and a red nose, a patch over one eye, and the other half drowned in moisture. He leans in a slightly stooping posture on a stick, forlorn and silent, addressing nobody but fixing his one moist eye on you with a certain intentness. He is a man who has been in decent circumstances at some former period of his life, but, falling into decay, he now haunts about the place, as a ghost haunts the spot where he was murdered. The word ragamuffin," he adds, with characteristic determination to be exact, "does not accurately express the man, because there is a sort of shadow or delusion of respectability about him, and a sobriety, too, and a kind of dignity in his groggy and red-nosed destitution." Out of this subtle correction of his own description arose the conception of making Old Moody the later state of the once wealthy and magnificent Fauntleroy. But one of the most striking and imaginative touches in the passage, likening the old waif to a ghost haunting the spot (Parker's liquor-bar) where he was murdered, is omitted in the book, because, striking though it was, it was a little too strong to be in keeping with the rest of the fictitious portrait. How many writers, having hit upon such a simile, would have had conscience and self-denial enough, not to mention fine enough artistic sense, to delete it! The craftsman's workmanship may occasionally be traced in this way; but, as a rule, it is difficult to catch a glimpse of him in his creative moments. If he made rough draughts of his stories, he must have destroyed them after the stories themselves were completed; for none such, in the case of his finished products, was left. I have seen the manuscripts of all his tales except The Scarlet Letter, which was destroyed by James T. Fields's printers--Fields having at that time no notion of the fame the romance was to achieve, or of the value that would attach to every scrap of Hawthorne's writing. All the extant manuscripts are singularly free from erasures and interlineations; page after page is clear as a page of print. He would seem to have taught himself so thoroughly how to write that, by the time the series of his longer romances began, he was able to say what he wished to say at a first attempt. He had the habit, undoubtedly, of planning out the work of each day on the day previous, generally while walking in solitude either out-of-doors or, if that were impracticable, up and down the floor of his study. It was this habit which created the pathway along the summit of the ridge of the hill at Wayside, in Concord; it was a deeply trodden path, in the hard, root-inwoven soil, hardly nine inches wide and about two hundred and fifty yards in length. The monotonous movement of walking seemed to put his mind in the receptive state favorable for hearing the voices of imagination. The external faculties were quiescent, the veil of matter was lifted, and he was able to peruse the vision beyond. [MAGE: JAMES T. FIELDS] But there is an important exception to this rule to be noted in the matter of his fictitious narratives which were posthumously published. These, as I have elsewhere said, are all concerned with a single theme--the never-dying man. There are two complete versions of Septimius, of about equal length, and many passages in the two are identical. There is a short sketch on somewhat different lines, called (by the editor) The Bloody Footstep; and there is still another, and a much more elaborate attempt to embody the idea in the volume which I have entitled Doctor Grimshawe's Secret. All these, in short, are studies of one subject, and they were all unsatisfactory to the author. The true vein of which he had been in search was finally discovered in The Dolliver Romance, but the author's death prevented its completion. In this series of posthumous manuscripts there is a unique opportunity for making a study of the esoteric qualities of my father's style and methods, and on a future occasion I hope to present the result of my investigations in this direction. There is, furthermore, in connection with them, a mass of material of a yet more interesting and interior character. While writing the Grimshawe, he was deeply perplexed by certain details of the plot; the meaning of the Pensioner, and his proper function in the story, was one of these stumbling-blocks. But the prosperity of the tale depended directly upon the solution of this problem. Constantly, therefore, in the midst of the composition, he would break off and enter upon a wrestling-match with the difficulty. These wrestling-matches are of an absorbing significance; they reveal to us the very inmost movements of the author's mind. He tries, and tries again, to get at the idea that continues to elude him; he forms innumerable hypotheses; he sets forth on the widest excursions; he gets out of patience with himself and with his Pensioner, and often damns the latter in good set terms; but he will not give up the struggle; his resolve to conquer is adamantine, and the conflict is always renewed. And there it all stands in black and white; one of the most instructive chapters in literary criticism in the world--the battle of a great writer with himself. The final issue, after all, was hardly decisive, for although a tolerable modus vivendi was reached and a truce declared, it is evident that Hawthorne regarded the entire scheme of the story as a mistake, and it is concluded in a perfunctory and indifferent manner. But it may be doubted whether anything of this sort ever took place in the making of any of the other stories. These depend but in a subordinate degree upon what is called technically plot interest. The author's method was to take a natural, even a familiar incident, and to transmute it into immortal gold by simply elucidating its inner spiritual significance. The Scarlet Letter is a mere plain story of love and jealousy; there is no serious attempt to hide the identity of Roger Chillingworth or the guilt of the minister. The only surprise in The House of the Seven Gables consists in the revelation of the fact that Maule reappears after several generations in the person of his modern descendant. The structure of The Blithedale Romance appears more complicated; but that is mainly because, in a masterly manner, the author keeps the structural lines out of sight and concentrates attention upon the interplay of character. The scaffolding upon which are hung the splendid draperies of The Marble Faun is, again, of the simplest formation, though the nature of the materials is unfamiliar. This is a digression; the present volume, as I have already stated, is not designed to include--except incidentally-anything in the way of literary criticism. Blithedale having been finished and published, the question of where to settle down permanently once more came up for an answer. Of course, our sojourn at Mr. Mann's house had been a temporary expedient only; and for that matter, the Manns, following the example of most Americans before and since, had rented the place merely as a stepping-stone to something else. My father's eyes again turned with longing towards the sea-shore; but the fitting nook for him there still failed to offer itself. People are naturally disposed to return to places in which they have formerly lived, and Concord could not but suggest itself to one who had passed some of the happiest years of his life among its serene pastures and piney forests. This suggestion, moreover, was supplemented by the urgent invitations of his old friends there, and Mr. Emerson, who was a practical man as well as a philosopher, substantiated his arguments by throwing into the scale a concrete dwelling. It was an edifice which not even the most imaginative and optimistic of house-agents would have found it easy to picture as a sumptuous country-seat; it was just four wooden walls and a roof, and they had been standing for a hundred years at least. The occupants of this house had seen the British march past from Boston on the 19th of April, 1775, and a few hours later they had seen them return along the same dusty highway at a greatly accelerated pace and under annoying circumstances. There was a legend that a man had once lived there who had announced that death was not an indispensable detail of life, and that he for his part intended never to die; but after many years he had grown weary of the monotony of his success, or had realized that it would take too long a time to prove himself in the right, and rather than see the thing through he allowed himself to depart. The old structure, in its original state, consisted of a big, brick chimney surrounded by four rooms and an attic, with a kitchen tacked on at the rear. It stood almost flush with the side-path along the highway; behind it rose a steep hill-side to a height of about one hundred feet; in front, on the other side of the road, stretched broad meadows with a brook flowing through the midst of them. Such conditions would not seem altogether to favor a man wedded to seclusion. But the thing was not at this juncture quite so bad as it had been. Mr. Alcott, whose unselfish devotion to the welfare of the human race made it incumbent upon his friends to supply him with the means of earthly subsistence, had been recently domiciled in the house by Mr. Emerson (how the latter came into possession of it I have forgotten, if ever I knew), and he had at once proceeded to wreak upon it his unique architectural talent. At any rate, either he himself or somebody in his behalf had set up a small gable in the midst of the front, thrown out a double bow-window, and added a room on the west side. This interrupted the deadly, four-square uniformity, and suggested further improvements. Mr. Alcott certainly built the summer-house on the hill-side, and terraced the hill, which was also planted with apple-trees. Another summer-house arose in the meadow opposite, which went with the property, and rustic fences separated the domain from the road. The dwelling was now fully as commodious as the red house at Lenox, though it had no Monument Mountain and Stockbridge Bowl to look out upon. [IMAGE: THE WAYSIDE (Showing Nathaniel Hawthorne and his wife)] The estate, comprising, I think, forty-two acres, all told, including upward of twenty acres of second-growth woodland above the hill, perfectly useless except for kindling-wood and for the sea-music which the pine-trees made, was offered to my father at a reasonable enough figure, to be his own and his heirs' forever. He came over and looked at the place, thought "The Wayside" would be a good name for it, and was perhaps helped to decide upon taking it by the felicity of this appellation. It was close upon the highway, undeniably; but then the highway was so little travelled that it might almost as well not have been there. One might, also, plant a high hedge in place of the fence and make shift to hide behind it. One could enlarge the house as need demanded; an affluent vegetable garden could be laid out in the meadow, and fruit and ornamental trees could be added to the slopes of the hill-side. The village was removed to a distance of a trifle over a mile, so that the roar of its traffic would not invade this retreat; and Mr. Emerson sat radiating peace and wisdom between the village and "The Wayside"; while Mr. Alcott shone with ancillary lustre only a stone's-throw away. Thoreau and Ellery Channing were tramping about in the neighborhood, and Judge Hoar and his beautiful sister dispensed sweetness and light in the village itself. Walden Pond, still secluded as when only the Indians had seen the sky and the trees reflected in it, was within a two-mile walk, and the silent Musketaquid stole on its level way beyond the hill on the other side. Surely, a man might travel far and not find a spot better suited for work and meditation and discreet society than Concord was. But, of course, the necessity of settling down somewhere was a main consideration. Concord, was inviting in itself, but it was also recommended by the argument of exclusion; no other place so desirable and at the same time so easy of attainment happened to present itself. It did not lie within sound and sight of the ocean; but that was the worst that could be urged against it. A man must choose, and Concord was, finally, Hawthorne's choice. At this epoch he had not contemplated, save in day-dreams, the possibility of visiting the Old World. His friend, Franklin Pierce, had just become President-elect, but that fact had not suggested to his mind the change in his own fortunes which it was destined to bring about. He was too modest a critic of his own abilities to think that his work would ever bring him money enough for foreign travel, and, therefore, in accepting Concord as his home, he believed that he was fixing the boundaries of his future earthly experience. It was not his ideal; no imaginative man can ever hope to find that; but as soon as we have called a place our Home, it acquires a charm that has nothing to do with material conditions. The best-known song in American poesy has impressed that truth upon Americans--who are the most homeless people in the world. IV A transfigured cattle-pen--Emerson the hub of Concord--His incorrigible modesty--Grocery-store sages--To make common men feel more like Emerson than he did--His personal appearance--His favorite gesture--A glance like the reveille of a trumpet--The creaking boots--"The muses are in the woods"--Emerson could not read Hawthorne--Typical versus individual--Benefit from child-prattle--Concord-grape Bull-- Sounds of distant battle--Politics, sociology, and grape- culture--The great white fence--Richard Henry Stoddard--A country youth of genius--Whipple's Attic salt--An unwritten romance--The consulship retires literature--Louisa's tragedy--Hard hit--The spiritual sphere of good men--Nearer than in the world--The return of the pilgrim. My father's first look at "The Wayside" had been while snow was still on the ground, and he had reported to his wife that it resembled a cattle-pen. But the family advent was effected in June, and although a heavy rain had fallen while the domestic impedimenta were in transit, wetting the mattresses and other exposed furniture, yet when the summer sun came out things began to mend. My mother and Una came a day ahead of the others, and with the help of carpenters and upholsterers, and a neighboring Irishman and his wife for cleaning and moving purposes, they soon got human order into the place of savage chaos. The new carpet was down in the study, the walls had been already papered and the wood-work grained, the pictures were hung in their places, and the books placed on their shelves. By the time the father, the boy, the baby, and the nurse drove up in the hot afternoon a home had been created for their reception. Mr. Emerson was, and he always remained, the hub round which the wheel of Concord's fortunes slowly and contentedly revolved. He was at this time between forty-five and fifty years old, in the prime of his beneficent powers. He had fulfilled the promise of his unique youth--obeyed the voice at eve, obeyed at prime. The sweet austerity of his nature had been mellowed by human sorrows--the loss of his brothers and of his eldest son; he had the breadth and poise that are given by knowledge of foreign lands, and friendships with the best men in them; he had the unstained and indomitable independence of a man who has always avowed his belief, and never failed to be true to each occasion for truth; he had the tranquillity of faith and insight, and he was alert with that immortal curiosity for noble knowledge the fruit of which enriches his writings. Upon his modestly deprecating brows was already set the wreath of a world-wide fame, and yet every village farmer and store-keeper, and every child, found in his conversation the wisdom and companionship suited to his needs, and was made to feel that his own companionship was a valued gift. Emerson becomes more extraordinary the further we get away from him in years; illustrating the truth which Landor puts into the mouth of Barrow in one of his Imaginary Conversations, that "No very great man ever reached the standard of his greatness in the crowd of his contemporaries: this hath always been reserved for the secondary." The wealth contained in his essays has only begun to be put in general circulation, and the harvest of his poetry is still more remote; while the sincere humility of the man himself, who was the best incarnate example of many of his ideals, still puzzles those critics who believe every one must needs be inferior to his professions. "Though I am fond of writing and of public speaking," said Emerson, "I am a very poor talker, and for the most part prefer silence"; and he went on to compare himself in this respect with Alcott, "the prince of conversers." Alcott was undoubtedly the prince of fluency, and Emerson rarely, in private dialogue, ventured to string together many consecutive sentences; but the things he did say, on small occasion or great, always hit the gold. On being appealed to, or when his turn came, he would hang a moment in the wind, and then pay off before the breeze of thought with an accuracy and force that gave delight with enlightenment. The form was often epigrammatic, but the air with which it was said beautifully disclaimed any epigrammatic consciousness or intention. It was, rather, "I am little qualified to speak adequately, but this, at least, does seem to me to be true." In the end, therefore, as the interlocutor thought it all over, he was perhaps surprised to discover that, little in quantity as Emerson may have said during the talk, he had yet said more than any one else in substance. But it may be admitted that he was even better in listening than in speech; his look, averted but attentive, with a smile which seemed to postpone full development to the moment when his companion should have uttered the expected apple of gold in the picture of silver, was subtly stimulating to the latter's intellect, and prompted him to outdo himself. His questions were often revelations, discovering truth which the other only then perceived, and thus beguiling him into admiration of his own supposed intelligence. In this, as in other things, he acted upon the precept that it is more blessed to give than to receive gratification; he never seemed to need any other happiness than that of imparting it. And so selflessly and insensibly were the riches of his mind and nature communicated to the community that innocent little Concord could not quite help believing that its wealth and renown were somehow a creation of its own. The loafers in Walcott & Holden's grocery store were, in their own estimation, of heroic stature, because of the unegoistic citizen who dwelt over yonder among the pines. Emerson was a great man, no doubt; but then he was no more than their own confessed equal, or inferior! This will and power to secularize himself is perhaps Emerson's unique attribute. It is comparatively easy to stand on mountain-tops and to ride Pegasus; but how many of those competent to such feats could at the same time sit cheek by jowl with hucksters and teamsters without a trace of condescension, and while rubbing shoulders with the rabble of the street in town-meeting, speak without arrogance the illuminating and deciding word? This, at last, is the true democracy that levels up instead of down. An Emerson who can make common men feel more like Emerson than he himself did is the kind of man we need to bring America up to her ideals. Emerson was ungainly in build, with narrow, sloping shoulders, large feet and hands, and a projecting carriage of the head, which enhanced the eagle-like expression of his glance and features. His head was small; it was covered (in 1852) with light brown hair, fine and straight; he was cleanshaven save for a short whisker; the peaked ends of an uncomfortable collar appeared above the folds of a high, black silk stock. His long-skirted black coat was commonly buttoned up; he wore, on different occasions, a soft felt hat or a high silk one, the latter, from use, having become in a manner humanized. On the street he kept his face up as he walked along, and perceived the approach of an acquaintance afar off, and the wise, slow smile gleamed about his mouth as he drew near. "How do you do?" was sometimes his greeting; but more often, "Good-bye!" or "Good-night!"--an original and more sensible greeting. Though ungainly in formation, he was not ungraceful in bearing and action; there was a fitness and harmony in his manifestations even on the physical plan. On the lecture platform he stood erect and unadorned, his hands hanging folded in front, save when he changed the leaf of his manuscript, or emphasized his words with a gesture: his customary one, simple but effective, was to clinch his right fist, knuckles upward, the arm bent at the elbow, then a downward blow of the forearm, full of power bridled. It was accompanied by such a glance of the eyes as no one ever saw except from Emerson: a glance like the reveille of a trumpet. Yet his eyes were not noticeably large, and their color was greenish-gray; but they were well set and outlined in his head, and, more than is the case with most men, they were the windows of his soul. Wendell Phillips had an eloquent and intrepid eye, but it possessed nothing approaching the eloquence and spiritual influence of Emerson's. In every Lyceum course in Concord, Emerson lectured once or twice, and the hall was always filled. One night he had the misfortune to wear a pair of abominably creaking boots; every slightest change of posture would be followed by an outcry from the sole-leather, and the audience soon became nervously preoccupied in expecting them. The sublimest thoughts were mingled with these base material accompaniments. But there was nothing to be done, unless the lecturer would finish his lecture in his stocking-feet, and we were fain to derive a fortuitous inspiration from observing the unfaltering meekness with which our philosopher accepted the predicament. I have forgotten the subject of the lecture on that occasion, but the voice of the boots will always sound in my memory. In his own house Emerson shone with essential hospitality, and yet he wonderfully effaced himself; any one but he might hold the centre of the stage. You felt him everywhere, but if you would see him, you must search the wings. He sat in his chair, bending forward, one leg crossed over the other, his elbows often supported on his knee; his legs were rather long and slender, and he had a way, after crossing his leg, of hitching the instep of that foot under the calf of the other leg, so that he seemed braided up. He seldom stood in a room, or paced to and fro, as my father was fond of doing. But the two men were almost equally addicted to outdoor walking, and both preferred to walk alone. Emerson formed the habit of betaking himself to Walden woods, which extended to within a mile or so of his door; thence would he return with an exalted look, saying, "The muses are in the woods to-day"; and no one who has read his Woodnotes can doubt that he found them there. Occasionally Channing, Thoreau, or my father would be his companion; Alcott preferred to busy himself about his rustic fences and summer-houses, or to sit the centre of a circle and converse, as he called it; meaning to soliloquize, looking round from face to face with unalterable faith and complacency. My father read Emerson with enjoyment; though more and more, as he advanced in life, he was disposed to question the expediency of stating truth in a disembodied form; he preferred it incarnate, as it appears in life and in story. But he could not talk to Emerson; his pleasure in his society did not express itself in that form. Emerson, on the other hand, assiduously cultivated my father's company, and, contrary to his general habit, talked to him continuously; but he could not read his romances; he admitted that he had never been able to finish one of them. He loved to observe him; to watch his silence, which was full of a kind of speech which he was able to appreciate; "Hawthorne rides well his horse of the night!" My father was Gothic; Emerson was Roman and Greek. But each was profoundly original and independent. My father was the shyer and more solitary of the two, and yet persons in need of human sympathy were able to reach a more interior region in him than they could in Emerson. For the latter's thought was concerned with types and classes, while the former had the individual touch. He distrusted rules, but had faith in exceptions and idiosyncrasies. Emerson was nobly and magnanimously public; my father, exquisitely and inevitably private; together they met the needs of nearly all that is worthy in human nature. Emerson rose upon us frequently during our early struggles with our new abode, like a milder sun; the children of the two families became acquainted, the surviving son, Edward, two years my elder, falling to my share. But Emerson himself also became my companion, with a humanity which to-day fills me with grateful wonder. I remember once being taken by him on a long walk through the sacred pine woods, and on another occasion he laid aside the poem or the essay he was writing to entertain Una in his study, whither she had gone alone and of her own initiative to make him a call! It is easy to compliment a friend upon his children, but how many of us will allow themselves to be caught and utilized by them in this fashion? But Emerson's mind was so catholic, so humble, and so deep that I doubt not he derived benefit even from child-prattle. His wife rivalled him in hospitality, though her frail health disabled her from entering into the physical part of social functions with the same fortitude; in these first months we were invited to a party where we were fellow-guests with all the other children of Concord. There they were, their mothers with them, and everything in sight that a child at a party could require. My new friend Edward mounted me on his pony, and his father was at hand to catch me when I fell off. Such things sound incredible, but they are true. A great man is great at all times, and all over. Thoreau, Channing, and Alcott were also visible to us at this time, but of none of them do I find any trace in my memory; though I know, as a matter of fact, that Channing and my father once permitted me to accompany them on a walk round the country roads, which inadvertently prolonged itself to ten miles, and I knew what it was to feel foot-weary. But another neighbor of ours, hardly less known to fame, though in a widely different line of usefulness, makes a very distinct picture in my mind; this was Ephraim Wales Bull, the inventor of the Concord grape. He was as eccentric as his name; but he was a genuine and substantive man, and my father took a great liking to him, which was reciprocated. He was short and powerful, with long arms, and a big head covered with bushy hair and a jungle beard, from which looked out a pair of eyes singularly brilliant and penetrating. He had brains to think with, as well as strong and skilful hands to work with; he personally did three-fourths of the labor on his vineyard, and every grape-vine had his separate care. He was married and had three children, amiable but less interesting than himself. He had, also, a tremendous temper, evidenced by his heavy and high-arched eyebrows, and once in a while he let slip upon his helpers in the vineyard this formidable wrath, which could easily be heard in our peaceful precincts, like sounds of distant battle. He often came over and sat with my father in the summer-house on the hill, and there talked about politics, sociology (though under some other name, probably), morals, and human nature, with an occasional lecture on grape-culture. He permitted my sister and me to climb the fence and eat all the grapes we could hold; it seems to me he could hardly have realized our capacity. During our second summer he built a most elaborate fence along the road-front of his estate; it must have been three hundred yards long and it was as high as a man could reach; the palings, instead of being upright, were criss-crossed over one another, leaving small diamond-shaped interstices. The whole was painted brilliant white, to match the liliputian cottage in which the Bull family contrived (I know not how) to ensconce itself. When the fence was built, Mr. Bull would every day come forth and pace slowly up and down the road, contemplating it with the pride of a parent; indeed, it was no puny achievement, and when I revisited Concord, thirty years later, the great white fence was still there, with a few gaps in it, but still effective. But the builder, and the grapes--where were they? Where are Cheops, and the hanging gardens of Babylon? Among many visitors came Richard Henry Stoddard, already a poet, but anxious to supplement the income from his verses by a regular stipend from the big pocket of Uncle Sam. His first coming was in summer, and he and my father went up on the hill and sat in the summer-house there, looking out upon the wide prospect of green meadows and distant woods, but probably seeing nothing of them, their attention being withdrawn to scenes yet fairer in the land of imagination and memory. Stoddard was then, as always, a handsome man, strong and stanch, black-haired and black-bearded, with strong eyes that could look both fierce and tender. He was masculine, sensitive, frank, and humorous; his chuckle had infinite merriment in it; but, as his mood shifted, there might be tears in his eyes the next moment. He was at that time little more than five-and-twenty years old, and he looked hardly that; he was a New England country youth of genius. Nature had kindled a fire in him which has never gone out. Like my father, he was affiliated with the sea, and had its freshness and daring, though combined with great modesty, and he felt honored by the affection with which he inspired the author of The Scarlet Letter. It was not until his second visit, in the winter, that the subject of a custom-house appointment for him came up; for my father, being known as a close friend of the President, whose biography he had written for the campaign, became the object of pilgrimages other than literary ones. He received sound advice, and introductions, which aided him in getting the appointment, and he held it for nearly twenty years--more to the benefit of the custom-house than of poetry, no doubt, though he never let poetry escape him, and he is to-day a mine of knowledge and wisdom on literary subjects. There is an immense human ardor, power, and pathos in Stoddard; better than any other American poet does he realize the conception of his great English brother--the love of love, the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn. The world has proved impotent to corrupt his heroic simplicity; he loved fame much, but truth more. He is a boy in his heart still, and he has sung songs which touch whatever is sweetest, tenderest, and manliest in the soul of man. [IMAGE: EDWIN P. WHIFFLE] E. P. Whipple, essentially a man of letters, and famous in his day as a critic of literature, appeared often in "The Wayside." His verdict on a book carried weight; it was an era when literary criticism was regarded seriously, and volumes devoted to critical studies had something more than, a perfunctory vogue. He had written penetrating and cordial things about my father's books, and foretold the high place which he would ultimately occupy in our Pantheon. He was rich in the kind of Attic salt which, was characteristic of Boston in the middle century; the product of an almost excessive culture erected on sound, native brains. He had abounding wit; not only wit of the sort that begets mirth, but that larger and graver wit which Macaulay notices in Bacon's writings--a pure, irradiating, intellectual light. It had often the effect of an actual physical illumination cast upon the topic. He was magnificent as a dinner-table companion. He was rather a short, thick-shouldered man, with a big head on a short neck, a broad, projecting forehead, prominent eyes, defended by shiny spectacles, and bushy whiskers. He is not remembered now, probably because he never produced any organic work commensurate with his huge talent. Analyses of the work of others, however just, useful, and creative, do not endure unless they are associated with writing of the independent sort. Whipple, with all his ability and insight, never entered the imaginative field on his own account, and in the press of wits he falls behind and is forgotten. My father had come to Concord with the idea of a new romance in his mind; he designed it to be of a character more cheerful than the foregoing ones. It was never written, and but the slightest traces of what it might have been are extant. Herman Melville had spent a day with us at Concord, and he had suggested a story to Hawthorne; but the latter, after turning it over in his mind, came to the conclusion that Melville could treat the subject better than he could; but Melville finally relinquished it also. It seems likely, however, that this projected tale was not the one which Hawthorne had originally been meditating. At all events, it was postponed in favor of a new book of wonder-stories from Greek mythology--the first one having had immediate popularity, and by the time this was finished, the occasion had arrived which led to the writing of Pierce's biography. This, in turn, was followed by the offer by the President to his friend of the Liverpool consulate, then the most lucrative appointment in the gift of the administration; and Hawthorne's acceptance of it caused all literary projects to be indefinitely abandoned. But even had there been time for the writing of another book, the death of Hawthorne's sister Louisa would doubtless have unfitted him for a while from undertaking it. This was the most painful episode connected with his life; Louisa was a passenger on a Hudson River steamboat which was burned. She was a gentle, rather fragile woman, with a playful humor and a lovable nature; she had not the intellectual force either of her brother or of her sister Elizabeth; but her social inclinations were stronger than theirs. She was a delightful person to have in the house, and her nephew and niece were ardently in love with her. She was on her way to "The Wayside" when the calamity occurred, and we were actually expecting her on the day she perished. Standing on the blazing deck, with the panic and the death-scenes around her, the gentle woman had to make the terrible choice between the river and the fire. She was alone; there was none to advise or help her or be her companion in inevitable death. Her thoughts must have gone to her brother, with his strength and courage, his skill as a swimmer; but he was far away, unconscious of her desperate extremity. She had to choose, and the river was her choice. With that tragic conception of the drowning of Zenobia fresh in his mind, the realization of his sister's fate must have gained additional poignancy in my father's imagination. He was hard hit, and the traces of the blow were manifest on him. After about a month, he made a journey to the Isles of Shoals with Franklin Pierce, and in that breezy outpost of the land he spent some weeks, much to his advantage. This was in the autumn of 1852, and I recall well enough the gap in things which his long absence made for me, and my perfect joy when the whistle of the train at the distant railway station signalled his return. Twenty minutes had to elapse before the railroad carriage could bring him to our door; they were long and they were brief, after the manner of minutes in such circumstances. He came, and there was a moment of indescribable glory while he leaped from the carriage and faced the situation on the doorstep of his home. His countenance was glowing with health and the happiness of home-coming. I thought him, as I always did, the most beautiful of human beings, by which I do not mean beautiful in feature, for of that I was not competent to hold an opinion; but beautiful in the feelings which he aroused in me beholding him. He was beautiful to be with, to hear, touch, and experience. Such is the effect of the spiritual sphere of good men, in whom nature and character are harmonious. My father got his appointment from Washington in the following March, 1853. His wife had but one solicitude in leaving America; her mother was aged and in delicate health, and their parting might be forever in this world. But a month before the appointment was confirmed, her mother quietly and painlessly died. It was as if she had wished not to be separated from her beloved daughter, and had entered into the spiritual state in the expectation of being nearer to her there than she could be in the world. My mother always affirmed that she was conscious of her mother's presence with her on momentous occasions during the remainder of her own life. June came; the farewells were said, we were railroaded to Boston, embarked on the Cunard steamship Niagara, Captain Leitch, and steamed out of Boston Harbor on a day of cloudlessness and calm. Incoming vessels, drifting in the smoothness, saluted us with their flags, and the idle seamen stared at us, leaning over their bulwarks. The last of the low headlands grew dim and vanished in the golden haze of the afternoon. "Go away, tiresome old land!" sang out my sister and myself; but my father, standing beside us, gazing westward with a serious look, bade us be silent. Two hundred and twenty years had passed since our first ancestor had sought freedom on those disappearing shores, and our father was the first of his descendants to visit the Old Home whence he came. What was to be the outcome? But the children only felt that the ocean was pleasant and strange, and they longed to explore it. The future and the past did not concern them. V A paddle-wheel ocean-liner--The hens, the cow, and the carpenter--W. D. Ticknor--Our first Englishman--An aristocratic acrobat--Speech that beggars eulogy--The boots of great travellers--Complimentary cannon--The last infirmity of noble republican minds--The golden promise: the spiritual fulfilment--Fatuous serenity--Past and future--The coquetry of chalk cliffs--Two kinds of imagination--The thirsty island--Gloomy English comforts--Systematic geniality--A standing puzzle--The respirator--Scamps, fools, mendicants, and desperadoes--The wrongs of sailor-men--"Is this myself?"--"Profoundly akin"--Henry Bright--Charm of insular prejudice--No stooping to compromise--The battle against dinner--"I'm glad you liked it!"--An English-, Irish-, and Scotchman--An Englishman owns his country--A contradiction in Englishmen--A hospitable gateway--Years of memorable trifles. The steamship Niagara was, in 1853, a favorable specimen of nautical architecture; the Cunard Company had then been in existence rather less than a score of years, and had already established its reputation for safety and convenience. But, with the exception of the red smoke-stack with the black ring round the top, there was little similarity between the boat that took us to England and the mammoths that do that service for travellers now adays. The Niagara was about two hundred and fifty feet long, and was propelled by paddle-wheels, upon the summits of whose curving altitudes we were permitted to climb in calm weather. The interior decorations were neat and pretty, but had nothing of the palatial and aesthetic gorgeousness which educates us in these later ages. The company of passengers was so small that a single cow, housed in a pen on deck, sufficed for their needs in the way of milk, and there were still left alive and pecking contentedly about their coop a number of fowls, after we had eaten all we could of their brethren at the ten dinners that were served during the voyage. The crew, from the captain down, were all able seamen, friendly and companionable, and not so numerous but that it was easy to make their individual acquaintance. The most engaging friend of the small people was the carpenter, who had his shop on deck, and from whom I acquired that passion for the profession which every normal boy ought to have, and from the practice of which I derived deep enjoyment and many bloody thumbs and fingers for ten years afterwards. But we had companionship historically at least more edifying. William D. Ticknor, the senior partner of my father's publishers, was the only figure familiar at the outset. He was one of the most amiable of men, with thick whiskers all round his face and spectacles shining over his kindly eyes; a sturdy, thick-set personage, active in movement and genial in conversation. It was James T. Fields who usually made the trips to England; but on this occasion Fields got no farther than the wharf, where the last object visible was his comely and smiling countenance as he waved his adieux. Conspicuous among the group on the after-deck, as we glided out of the smooth harbor of Boston, was an urbane and dignified gentleman of perhaps sixty years of age, with a clean-shaven mouth and chin, finely moulded, and with what Tennyson would call an educated whisker, short and gray, defining the region in front of and below his ears. He spoke deliberately, and in language carefully and yet easily chosen, with intonations singularly distinct and agreeable, giving its full value to every word. This was our first native Englishman; no less a personage than Mr. Crampton, in fact, the British Minister, who was on his way to Halifax. He had fine, calm, quietly observant eyes, which were pleasantly employed in contemplating the beauty of that summer seascape--an opalescent ocean, and islands slumbering in the July haze. Near him stood a light-built, tall, athletic individual, also obviously English, but thirty years younger; full, also, of artistic appreciation; this was Field Talfourd, who was an artist, and many things besides; a man proficient in all forms of culture. His features were high and refined, and, without being handsome, irresistibly attractive. He turned out to be a delightful playmate for the children, and astonished them and the rest of the company by surprising gymnastic feats in the rigging. The speech of these two Britishers gave the untravelled American a new appreciation of the beauty and significance of the English language. Not all Englishmen speak good English, but when they do, they beggar eulogy. [IMAGE: JAMES T. FIELDS, NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, AND WILLIAM D. TICKNOR] George Silsbee was likewise of our party; he was an American of the Brahman type, a child of Cambridge and Boston, a man of means, and an indefatigable traveller. He had the delicate health and physique of the American student of those days, when out-door life and games made no part of our scholastic curricula. He may have been forty years old, slight and frail, with a thin, clean-shaven face and pallid complexion, but full of mind and sensibility. We do not heed travellers now, and I am inclined to think they are less worth heeding than they used to be. It is so easy to see the world in these latter days that few persons see it to any purpose even when they go through the motions of doing so. But to hear George Bradford or Silsbee talk of England, France, and Italy, in the fifties, was a liberal education, and I used sometimes to stare fascinated at the boots of these wayfarers, admiring them for the wondrous places in which they had trodden. Silsbee travelled with his artistic and historic consciousness all on board, and had so much to say that he never was able to say it all. But to my father himself were accorded the honors of the captain's table, and for him were fired the salutes of cannon which thundered us out of Boston Harbor and into Halifax. These compliments, however, were paid to him not as a man of letters, but as a political representative of his country, and, let a man be as renowned as he will on his personal account, he will still find it convenient, in order to secure smooth and agreeable conditions on his way through the world, to supplement that distinction with recommendations from the State Department. Respect for rank is the last infirmity even of noble republican minds, and it oils the wheels of the progress of those who possess it. An American widow of my later acquaintance, a lady of two marriageable daughters and small social pretensions in her own country, toured Europe with success and distinction, getting all the best accommodations and profoundest obeisances by the simple device of placing the word "Lady" before her modest signature in the hotel registers. She was a lady, of course, and had a right so to style herself, and if snobbish persons chose to read into the word more than it literally meant, that was not Mrs. Green's affair. American commerce still existed in 1853, and the Liverpool consulate was supposed to have more money in it than any other office in the gift of the administration. As a matter of fact, several of my father's predecessors had retired from their tenure of office with something handsome (pecuniarily speaking) to their credit; whether the means by which it had been acquired were as handsome is another question. Be that as it may, Congress, soon after my father's accession, passed a law cutting down the profits about three-fourths, and he was obliged to practise the strictest economy during his residence abroad in order to come home with a few thousand dollars in his pocket. Nevertheless, the dignity, in the official sense, of this consular post was considerable, and it brought him, in combination with his literary fame, a good deal more attention in England than he well knew what to do with. But, in one way or another, he also made friends there who remained to the end among the dearest of his life and more than countervailed all the time and energy wasted on the Philistines. The Atlantic, all the way across, with the exception of one brief emotional disturbance between lunch and dinner-time, wore a smile of fatuous serenity. The sun shone; the vast pond-surface oilily undulated, or lay in absolute flatness, or at most defiled under our eyes in endless squadrons of low-riding crests. My mother, whose last experience of sea-ways had been the voyage to Cuba, in which the ship was all but lost in a series of hurricanes, was captivated by this soft behavior, and enjoyed the whole of it as much, almost, as her husband, who expanded and drank in delight like a plant in the rain. But, in truth, these must have been blessed hours for them both. Behind them lay nearly eleven years of married life, spent in narrow outward circumstances, lightened only towards the last by the promise of some relaxation from strain, during which they had found their happiness in each other, and in the wise and tender care of their children, and in the converse of chosen friends. They had filled their minds with knowledge concerning the beauties and interests of foreign lands, with but a slender expectation of ever beholding them with bodily sight, but none the less well prepared to understand and appreciate them should the opportunity arrive. And now, suddenly, it had arrived, and they were on the way to the regions of their dreams, with the prospect of comparative affluence added. They had nearly twelve years of earthly sojourn together before them, the afternoon sunshine to be clouded a little near the close by the husband's failing health, but glorified more and more by mutual love, and enriched with memories of all that had before been unfulfilled imaginings. This voyage eastward was the space of contemplation between the two periods, and the balm of its tranquillity well symbolized the peace of soul and mind with which they awaited what the horizons were to disclose. The right way to approach England for the first time is not by the west coast, but by the south, as Julius Caesar did, beckoned on by the ghostly, pallid cliffs that seem to lift themselves like battlements against the invader. It is historically open to question whether there would have been any Roman occupation, or any Saxon or Norman one either, for that matter, but for the coquetry of those chalk cliffs. An adventurer, sighting the low and marshy shores of Lancashire, and muddying his prows in the yellow waters of the Mersey, would be apt to think that such a land were a good place to avoid. But the race of adventurers has long since died out, and their place is occupied by the wide-flying cormorants of commerce, to whom mud flats and rock deserts present elysian beauties, provided only there be profit in them. One kind of imagination has been superseded by another, and both are necessary to the full exploitation of this remarkable globe that we inhabit. But even the level capes of Lancashire were alluring to eyes that saw England, our venerable mother, loom behind them, with her thousand years' pageantry of warfare and civilization. The egregious little island is a thirsty place; the land drinks rain as assiduously as do its inhabitants beer and other liquors. Heavy mists and clouds enveloped it as we drew near, and ushered us up the Mersey into a brown omnipresence of rain. The broad, clear sunshine of the Atlantic was left behind, and we stood on wet decks and were transported to sloppy wharfs by means of a rain-sodden and abominably smoking little tug-boat--as the way was fifty years ago. Liverpool was a gray-stone labyrinth open to the deluge, and its inhabitants went to and fro with umbrellas over their heads and black respirators over their mouths, looking as if such were their normal plight--as, indeed, it was. Much of this was not needed to quench the enthusiasm of the children. The Waterloo Hotel, to which, by advice of friends, we were driven, seemed by its very name to carry out the idea of saturation, which the activities of nature so insistently conveyed. It was intensely discomfortable, and though the inside of the hotel was well supplied with gloomy English comforts, and the solemn meals were administered with a ceremonious gravity that suggested their being preliminaries to funerals, yet it was hard to be light-hearted. The open-grate coal fires were the most welcome feature of this summer season, and no doubt the wine list offered the best available substitute for sunlight; but we had not been trained to avail ourselves of it. We drank water, which certainly appeared an idle proceeding in such a climate. In Liverpool, however, or in its suburbs, we were to live for the better part of four years, and we must make the best of it. And there is in English people, when rightly approached, a steady and systematic geniality that not only makes handsome amends for their weather, but also accounts for the otherwise singular fact that the country is inhabited at all. A people with a smaller fund of interior warmth could not have endured it. The French talk about conquering England, but they could not hold it if they did, and it is one of the standing puzzles of history how the Romans, an Italian race, were able to maintain themselves under these skies during four centuries. It may be objected that the present English population is not indigenous to the island; but they are the survival of the fittest and toughest selected from many aspirants. Nor can it be doubted that the British hunger for empire in all parts of the world is due to nothing so much as to their anxiety to have a plausible pretext for living elsewhere than at home. My father took the rain, as he took everything that could not be helped, philosophically, and it seemed to do him no harm; indeed, his health was uniformly good all through his English residence. It did not suit so well my mother, who was constitutionally delicate in the lungs; she was soon obliged to adopt the English respirator, and finally was driven to take refuge for the greater part of a year in Lisbon and Madeira, returning only a little before the departure of the family for Italy in 1858. But there must have been in him an ancestral power of resistance still effective after more than two centuries of transplantation; he grew ruddy and robust while facing the mist and mirk, and inhaling the smoky moisture that did service for air. Nor was his health impaired by the long hours in the daily consulate--a grimy little room barely five paces from end to end, with its dusty windows so hemmed in by taller buildings that even had there been any sunshine to make the attempt, it could never have succeeded in effecting an entrance through them. Here, from ten in the morning until four in the afternoon, he dealt with all varieties of scamps and mendicants, fools and desperadoes, and all the tribe of piratical cutthroats which in those days constituted a large part of the merchant marine. Calamity, imbecility, and rascality were his constant companions in that dingy little den; and the gloomy and sooty skies without but faintly pictured the moral atmosphere which they exhaled; he entered deeply into all their affairs, projects, and complaints, feeling their troubles, probably, at least as keenly as they did themselves, and yet he came out of it all with clear eyes and a sound digestion. I presume the fact may have been that he unconsciously regarded the whole affair somewhat as we do a drama in a theatre; it works upon our sensibilities, and yet we do not believe that it is real. There was nothing in the experience germane to his proper life; it could not become a part of him, and therefore its posture towards him remained inveterately objective. The only feature of it that quickened a responsive chord in him was the revelation of the intolerable condition of the sailors in many of our ships, and upon these abuses he enlarged in his communications to Washington. Improvements were made in consequence of his remonstrances; but the American merchant service had already begun its downward career, and it is only very lately, owing to causes which are too novel and peculiar to be intelligently discussed as yet, that our flag is once more promising to compete against that of England. It would be misleading to say, however, that my father was not interested in his consulate work; there was a practical side in him which took hold of the business in man-fashion, and transacted it so efficiently as to leave no room for criticism, and nobody can produce voluntary effects without feeling in himself a reaction from them. He had occasion to look into the privacy of many human hearts, to pity them and advise them, and from such services and insights he no doubt obtained a residue of wisdom which might be applied to his own ulterior uses. These were indirect and incidental issues; but from the consulate qua consulate Hawthorne was radically alien, and when he quitted it, he carried away with him no taint or trace of it. As he says in his remarks upon the subject, he soon came to doubt whether it were actually himself who had been the incumbent of the office at all. But Providence does not deny manna to man in his extremity, and to my father it came in the shape of a few English friends, and in occasional escapes from the office into the outside England where, after the centuries of separation, he found so much with which he could still feel profoundly akin. His most constant friendly visitor was Henry A. Bright, a university man, the son of a wealthy local merchant, who sent ships to Australia, and was related (as most agreeable Englishmen are--though there are shining exceptions) to the aristocratic class. Bright, at this time, could not have been over thirty years of age; he was intensely English, though his slender figure and mental vivacity might make him seem near to the conventional American type. But through him, as through an open window, Hawthorne was enabled to see far into the very heart of England. Bright not merely knew England; he was England, and England at its best, and therefore also at its most insular and prejudiced. It was unspeakably satisfying and agreeable to encounter a man at once so uncompromising and so amiable, so wrong-headed (from the American point of view) and so right-hearted. He was drawn to my father as iron is drawn to the magnet; on every outward point they fought each other like the knight errants of old, while agreeing inwardly, beneath the surface of things, as few friends are able to agree. Each admired the other's onslaughts and his prowess, and, by way of testifying his admiration, strove to excel himself in his counter attacks. The debate was always beginning, and in the nature of things it could never end; the effect of their blows was only to hammer each the other more firmly into his previous convictions. Probably all the things that are English and all the things that are American never before or since received such full and trenchant exposition as was given them by Hawthorne and by Bright. The whole subject of monarchy and aristocracy as against republicanism and democracy was threshed out to the last kernel by champions each of whom was thoroughly qualified to vindicate his cause. Each, constrained by the stress of battle to analyze and expound his beliefs more punctually than ever before, thereby convinced himself while leaving his adversary undaunted; and, of course, both were right. For this world is so constituted that two things incompatible in outward manifestation may in their roots be one and the same, and equally appeal to the suffrages of honest men. England and America are healthy and vigorous in proportion as they differ from each other, and a morbid and vicious tendency in either is noticeable the moment either begins to take a leaf from the other's book. My father and Bright could not have been the lifelong friends that they were had either of them yielded his point or stooped to compromise. Apart from political matters, and such social themes as were nearly allied to them, the two friends had many points of agreement and sympathy. Bright had from the first been an ardent and intelligent admirer of the romancer's writings, and though they might often differ in their estimates of individual works, they were in hearty accord as to the principles which underlie all literature and art. Upon matters relating to society, my father was more apt to accept theories which Bright might propound than to permit of their being illustrated in his own person; he would admit, for example, that a consul ought to mingle socially with the people to whom he was accredited; but when it came to getting him out to dinner, in evening dress and with a speech in prospect, obstacles started up like the armed progeny of the Dragon's Teeth. For, though no one enjoyed real society more than he did, he was ardently averse from conversing as an official with persons between whom and himself as a man there could be little sympathy. Almost as much, too, did he dislike to meet the polite world merely on the basis of the books that he had written, which his entertainers were bound to praise whether or not they had read or comprehended them, and to whose well-meant but inexpert eulogies he must constantly respond with the threadbare and pathetic phrase, "I'm glad you liked it." Bright, of course, insisted that fame and position carried obligations which must be met, and he was constantly laying plots to inveigle or surprise his friend into compliance. He often succeeded, but he failed quite as frequently, so that, as a Mrs. Malaprop might have said, Hawthorne as a social lion was a rara avis, from first to last. The foible of artificial, as distinguished from spontaneous, society is that it so seldom achieves simple human relations. Another chief friend of his was Francis Bennoch. England would never have seemed "our old home" to my father, without the presence and companionship of these two men. Both had literary leanings, both were genial, true, and faithful; but in other respects they were widely dissimilar. Bright was of the pure Saxon type; Bennoch represented Great Britain at large; there were mingled in him English, Irish, and Scotch ancestry. In himself he was a superb specimen of a human being; broad-shouldered, straight, and vigorous, massive but active, with a mellow, joyful voice, an inimitable brogue, sparkling black eyes full of hearty sunshine and kindness, a broad and high forehead over bushy brows, and black, wavy hair. He bubbled over with high spirits, humor, and poetry, being, indeed, a poet in achievement, with a printed and bound volume to show for it--songs, lyrics, and narrative poems, composed in the spirit of Burns and Scott. He was at this time one of the handsomest men in England, with a great heart, warmer than any summer England ever knew, and a soul of ardor and courage, which sent through his face continual flashes of sympathy and fellowship. One naturally thought and spoke of him in superlatives; he was the kindest, jolliest, most hospitable, most generous and chivalrous of men, and his affection and admiration for my father were also of the superlative kind. He had made a fortune in the wool business, and had an office in Wood Street, London; but his affairs permitted him to make frequent excursions to Liverpool, and to act as his American friend's guide and cicerone to many places in England which would otherwise have been unknown to him. My father enjoyed these trips immensely; Bennoch's companionship gave the right keynote and atmosphere to the sights they saw. A real Englishman owns his country, and does the honors of it to a visitor as if it were his private estate. Discussions of politics and of the principles of government never arose between these two, as they did between my father and Bright; for Bennoch, though one of the most loyal and enthusiastic of her Majesty's subjects, and full of traditional respect for the British nobility, was by nature broadly democratic, and met every man as an equal and a brother. One often finds this contradiction in Englishmen; but it is such logically only. A man born to the traditions of monarchy and aristocracy accepts them as the natural background of his ideas, just as the English landscape is the setting of his house and park; he will vindicate them if assailed; but ordinarily they do not consciously affect his mental activities, and he will talk good republicanism without being aware of it. The monarchy is a decoration, a sentiment, a habit; as a matter of fact, England is more democratic in many essentials than we have as yet learned how to be. Bennoch was not a university man, and lacked the historical consciousness that Bright so assiduously cultivated; he lived by feeling and intuition more than by deliberate intellectual judgments. He was emotional; tears would start to his eyes at a touch of pathos or pity, as readily as the laughter of a moment before. So lovable, gallant, honest, boyish a man is seldom born into this modern world-boyish as only the manliest men can be. He died thirty years after the time I write of, the same fresh and ardent character as ever, and loving and serving Hawthorne's children for Hawthorne's sake. I shall have occasion to mention him hereafter; but I have dwelt upon him here, both because he made it forever impossible for any one who knew him well to do other than love the land which could breed such a man, and because, for the American Hawthorne, he was as a hospitable gate-way through which the England of his dreams and imaginings was entered upon as a concrete and delightful reality. With Bright and Bennoch on his right hand and on his left, then, my father began his English experience. The two are frequently mentioned in his English journals, and Bennoch figures as one of the subordinate characters in the posthumous romance called Doctor Grimshawe's Secret. It is but a sketch of him, however, and considerably modified from the brilliant and energetic reality. Meanwhile the consul began to accustom himself to the routine of the consulate, and his family, leaving the sombre respectability of the Waterloo Hotel, moved, first, to the hospitable boarding-house of Mrs. Blodgett, and afterwards to a private dwelling in Rock Park, Rock Ferry, on the opposite side of the Mersey, where we were destined to dwell for several years. They were years full of events very trifling in themselves, but so utterly different from everything American as to stamp themselves upon the attention and the memory. It is the trifling things that tell, and give character to nations; extraordinary things may occur anywhere, and possess little national flavor. In another chapter I will attempt some portrayal of this English life of fifty years since. VI Patricians and plebeians--The discomforts of democracy-- Varieties of equality--Social rights of beggars--The coming peril--Being dragged to the rich--Frankness of vulgarity and hopelessness of destitution--Villages rooted in the landscape--Evanescence of the spiritual and survival of the material--"Of Bebbington the holy peak"--The Old Yew of Eastham--Malice--prepense interest--History and afternoon tea--An East-Indian Englishman--The merchantman sticks in the mud--A poetical man of the world--Likeness to Longfellow--Real breakfasts--Heads and stomachs--A poet- pugilist--Clean-cut, cold, gentle, dry--A respectable female atheist--The tragedy of the red ants--Voluptuous struggles-- A psalm of praise. In a country whose ruling principle is caste, it might be expected that the line of cleavage between the upper and the lower grades would be punctually observed. It is assumed that democracy levels and aristocracy distinguishes and separates. My father was not long in remarking, however, that there was a freedom of intercourse between the patrician and the plebeian--between people of all orders--such as did not exist in America. And the fact, once perceived, was not difficult of explanation. In a monarchy of a thousand years' standing, every individual knows his place in the social scale and never thinks of leaving it. He represents a fixed function or element in the general organism, and holds to it as a matter of course, just as, in the human body, the body does not aspire to be the head, nor the liver or heart to take the place of lungs or stomach. The laborer looks back upon an ancestry of laborers; the shopkeeper has been a shopkeeper for unnumbered generations; the artisan on the bench to-day does the same work that his father and grandfathers did before him; the noble inherits his acres as inevitably as the sun rises, and sits in the House of Lords by immemorial usage and privilege. Social position all along the line being thus anchored in the nature of things, as it were, there is no anxiety on any one's part as to maintaining his status. He is secure where he is, and nothing and nobody can change him. There is no individual striving to rise nor fear to fall. Consequently there can and must be entire freedom of mutual conversation; the marquis with a revenue of half a million a year meets as an equal his gardener who gets ten pounds a month, and the tailor in his measuring-room offers a glass of sherry to his noble patron who comes to him for a new coat. Each is at his ease, conscious that he performs a use and fills a place which no one else can fill or perform, and that nothing else matters. The population is a vast mutual-benefit association, without envy on the one side or contempt on the other. And social existence moves as smoothly as a well-oiled and adjusted machine. This agreeable condition is impossible in a democracy--at all events, in a democracy like ours, which is based upon the assumption that all men are equal. Nevertheless, we are on the right track, and the English are on the wrong one; for the agreeable English system obstructs the insensible infiltration of fresh material into old forms, which is essential to the continued health of the latter; while the democracy, on the other hand, will gradually learn that it is just as honorable and desirable to be a good shoemaker, for example, as a good millionaire; that human life, in short, is a complex of countless different uses, each one of which is as important on its own plane as any of the others. But the intermediate period is undeniably irksome. So my father noticed, not without a certain satisfaction, that even beggars, in England, are not looked down upon, and that their rights, such as they are, are recognized. In the steamboat waiting-room at Rock Ferry, and in the boats themselves, he saw tramps and mendicants take the best place at the fire or on the companion-way without rebuke and without consciousness of presumption, and he saw the landlord of a hotel, with a fortune of six hundred thousand pounds, wait at table as deferentially as any footman in his employ. He was struck by the contentment with which, in winter, women went barefoot in the streets, and by the unpretentious composure with which the common herd, on holidays, disported themselves in public, not seeking to disguise their native vulgarity and shabbiness. At the same time, he could not help a misgiving that the portentous inequality between rich and poor must finally breed disaster; the secluded luxury of the rich was too strongly contrasted with the desperate needs of the poor. This contrast was very marked in England fifty years ago, and was comparatively unknown in our own country--though to-day we can hardly lay to our souls the nattering unction of such a difference. The rage for wealth has done for us in a generation what caste did for England in a thousand years. My father, when opportunity offered, was always finding himself among the poor and their dwellings; he had to be dragged to the rich, though among them, too, he found, when brought in contact with them, many interesting points of dissimilarity from ourselves. His office as consul naturally took him often to the police courts, where magistrates passed upon the squalid cases cited before them, and in the consulate itself he saw specimens enough of human crime and misery. He visited the poor-house and the insane asylum, he was approached by swindlers of all types, and often he went to fairs and other resorts of public out-door amusement and watched the unwashed populace at its play. Beggars followed him on the streets, awaited him in their chosen coigns of vantage on the corners, or haunted him on the ferry-boat that took him each day from his home to his office. Wherever he encountered the forsaken of fortune, he found food for sympathy, and, in spite of assurances that he was only encouraging mendicancy, he often gave them money. It was hard for him to believe that there could be abject poverty where there was work for all, and the appeal of man in want to man in plenty was too strong for him easily to resist it. He liked the very frankness of vulgarity and hopeless destitution of these people, and was appalled by the simplicity with which they accepted things as they were. There was no restlessness, as in America--no protest against fate. It was harrowing enough to see conditions so miserable; it was intolerable to see them acquiesced in by the victims as inevitable. He learned, after a while, to harden himself somewhat against manifest imposition; but the refusal to give cost him quite as much in discomfort as giving did in purse. The country villages and cottages, however, afforded him compensating pleasure. In the neighborhood of Rock Ferry, on the shore of the Mersey opposite from Liverpool, there were two or three ancient little settlements which he loved to visit. The thatched and whitewashed cottages, with their tiny gardens of hollyhocks and marigolds, seemed like parts of the framework of the land; the passage of centuries only served to weld them more firmly in their places. The villages were massed together, each in a small space, instead of being dispread loosely over a township, as in his native New England, and enduring stone and plaster took the place of timber and shingles. But the churches, small and fabulously ancient, affected him most. He placed his hand on stones which had been set in place before William the Conqueror landed in England, and this physical survival seemed to bring into his actual presence the long succession of all the intervening ages. These structures, still so solid and serviceable, had witnessed the passing of the entire procession of English history; all the mighty men and events of her career had come and gone while they remained unscathed. Under his feet were the graves of the unknown dead; within the narrow precincts he inhaled that strange, antique odor of mortality that made him feel as if he were breathing the air of long-dead centuries. This apparent evanescence of the spiritual attested by the survival of the material is one of the most singular and impressive of sensations; it takes history out of the realm of the mind, and brings it into sensible manifestation. It is almost as affecting as if the very figures of departed actors of former ages were to reappear and rub shoulders with us of today, and cast their shadows in the contemporary sunshine. On most of these walks in the neighborhood of Rock Ferry I was my father's companion, but, though my legs could march beside his, my mental-equipment could not participate in his meditations. He would occasionally make some half-playful, imaginative remark, calculated to help me realize the situation that was so vividly present to himself. His thoughts, however deep, were always ready to break into playfulness outwardly. We often walked through the village of Bebbington, whose church had a high stone steeple, nearly to the summit of which the ancient ivy had clambered. And as it came in view he would always say, in a sort of recitative, perhaps reminiscent of Scott's narrative poems, which he was at that time reading aloud to us, "There is of Bebbington the holy peak!" To which I would as constantly rejoin, "'Of Bebbington the holy spire,' father!"--being offended by his use of a word so unmusical as peak. He would only smile and trudge onward. He was somewhat solicitous, I suspect, to check in his son any tendency towards mere poetical sentiment; his own imaginative faculty was rooted in common-sense, and he knew the value of the latter in curbing undue excursions into the fanciful and transcendental. In Eastham, on the village green, stood an old yew-tree which, six centuries before, had been traditionally called The Old Yew of Eastham, and was probably at least coeval with the village itself, which was one of the oldest in England. It was of enormous girth, and was still in leaf; but nothing but the bark was left of the great trunk; all the wood had decayed away so long ago that the memory of man held no record of it. There was a great conical gap in one side, like an open door, and it was my custom--as it had doubtless been that of innumerable children of ages gone--to enter this door and "play house" in the spacious interior. Meanwhile my father would seat himself on the twisted roots without, and let his thoughts drift back to the time when this huge hulk had first cast a slender shadow over the greensward of primitive, Saxon England. It was a massive tree before the Domesday Book was begun; Chaucer would not be heard of for four hundred years to come; and where was Shakespeare? What was suspected of America? Yet here was this venerable vegetable, still with life enough left in it, perhaps, to see the end of English monarchy. The yew was a fact; but the ghosts were the reality, after all. These obscure village antiquities, which had no special history attaching to them, were in a way more impressive than the great ruins of England, which had formed the scene and background of famous events. The latter had become conventional sights, which the tourist felt bound to inspect under the voluble and exasperating guidance of a professional showman; and this malice-prepense sort of interest and picturesqueness always tried Hawthorne's patience and sympathy a little. It is the unknown past that is most fascinating, that comes home closest to the heart. The things told of in history books are hackneyed, and they partake of the unreality inherent in the descriptions of the writers. But the unrecorded things are virgin, and enter into our most private sympathies and realization. My father viewed and duly admired the great castles, palaces, and cathedrals of England; but he loved the old villages and their appurtenances, and could dream dreams more moving under the shadow of Eastham Yew than in Westminster Abbey itself. The historic houses and country-seats which were still inhabited were still more difficult to get in touch with from the historic point of view; the present dazzled the past out of sight. One was told who built this facade, who added that wing, who was imprisoned in yonder tower; where Queen Elizabeth slept, and the foot of what martyr imprinted the Bloody Footstep on the threshold. But you listened to these tales over a cup of tea in the drawing-room, or between the soup and the roast beef at the dinner-table, and they were not convincing. How were these ruddy-cheeked, full-bodied, hospitable personages who sat about you to be held compatible with the romantic periods and characters that they described? The duck and the green pease, the plum-pudding and the port, the white neck-cloths and the bare necks were too immediate and potent. In many cases, too, the denizens of the ancient houses were not lineal descendants of the original founders; they were interlopers, by purchase or otherwise. In themselves they were kind and agreeable, their manners were excellent, they helped one to comprehend the England of the passing moment; but they only clipped the wings of imagination and retrospect. It was only after an interval of some years that Hawthorne was able so far to recover from the effect of their obtrusive existence as to be able to see through them and beyond them to the splendid and gloomy vistas in front of which they were grouped. Yet England, past and present, rich and poor, real and ideal, did somehow enter into him and become a part of his permanent consciousness, and he liked it better than anything else he had known. Even the social life, though he came to it under some compulsion, rewarded him in the long run. One of the first personal invitations was to the country-seat of the Brights, where he met the family and relatives of his friend Henry Bright. Bright's father was a remarkable figure; he resembled an East-Indian more than an Englishman. He was dark, slender, courteous, and vivid; in long after-years I saw Brahmins like him in India. I would liken him to a rajah, except that rajahs of his age are commonly become gross and heavy from indulgence, whereas he had an almost ascetic aspect. His manners were singularly soft and caressing; he courted his wife, when he returned each day from business, as if they were still in their honeymoon, and his conduct towards all who surrounded him was similarly polished. He did not in the least resemble his Saxon son; and for my part, looking at him from the primitive boy stand-point, I never suspected that he was related to my father's young friend. He had made a fortune in colonial trade, and may possibly have been born in India. At this juncture the dealings of his firm were chiefly with Australia, and the largest merchant steamship then in the world had just been built for them, and Hawthorne was invited to the launching. For a British merchant prince such an occasion could not but be of supreme importance and pride. Mr. Bright's Oriental visage was radiant; his white hair seemed to shine with an added lustre; the reserve of the Englishman was forgotten, and he showed the excitement and emotion that he felt. There was a distinguished company on the great deck to witness his triumph and congratulate him upon it. All went well; at the appointed signal the retaining obstructions were cut away, and the mighty vessel began its descent into the waiting river. A lady of his family smashed a bottle of wine over the graceful bows. For a few moments there was a majestic, sweeping movement downward; then, of a sudden, it was checked. It was as if a great life had been quenched at the instant when its heart first began to throb. A murmur of dismay ran through the assemblage; but it was in the face of Mr. Bright that the full tragedy of the disaster was displayed. Never was seen a swifter change from the highest exultation to the depths of consternation. The color left his cheeks; heavy lines appeared about his handsome mouth; his eyes became fixed, and seemed to sink into his head; his erect figure drooped like that of one who has received a mortal blow. It was only that the ship had stuck in the deep mud of the river bottom; but all ship-owners are superstitious, and the old man foreboded the worst. The ship was floated again some days later; but the omens were fulfilled; she was lost on her first voyage. I do not remember seeing Mr. Bright after this event, but I know he never again was the same man as before. Richard Monckton Milnes, who was afterwards Lord Houghton, was greatly attracted towards my father, who liked him; but circumstances prevented their seeing much of each other. Milnes was then forty-five years old; he was a Cambridge man, and intimate with Tennyson, Hallam, and other men of literary mark, and he was himself a minor poet, and warm in the cause of literature. During his parliamentary career, in 1837, he was instrumental in passing the copyright act. He had travelled in Greece and Italy in his twenties; was fond of society, and society of him. A more urbane and attractive English gentleman did not exist; everything that a civilized man could care for was at his disposal, and he made the most of his opportunities. His manners were quiet and cordial, with a touch of romance and poetry mingling with the man-of-the-world tone in his conversation, and he was quite an emotional man. I have more than once seen tears in his eyes and heard a sob in his voice when matters that touched his heart or imagination were discussed. There was, indeed, a vein of sadness and pessimism in Milnes, though only his intimates were aware of it; it was the pessimism of a man who has too much leisure for intellectual analysis and not enough actual work to do to keep him occupied. It lent a fine flavor of irony to some of his conversation. He was liberal in politics and liberal in his attitude towards life in general; but there was not force enough in him, or, at any rate, not stimulus enough, to lift him to distinction. Some of his poems, however, betrayed a deep and radical vein of thought. He was of middle height, well made, light built, with a large and well-formed head and wavy, dark hair. His likeness to Longfellow was marked, though he was hardly so handsome a man; but the type of head and face was the same--the forehead and brain well developed, the lower parts of the countenance small and refined, though sensuous. His eyes were dark, brilliant, and expressive. He, like the old poet Rogers, made a feature of giving breakfasts to chosen friends, and as he had the whole social world to choose from, and unfailing good taste, his breakfasts were well worth attending. They were real breakfasts--so far as the hour was concerned--not lunches or early dinners in masquerade; but wine was served at them, and Milnes was very hospitable and had an Anacreontic or Omar touch in him. To breakfast with him, therefore, meant--unless you were singularly abstemious and strong-minded--to discount the remaining meals of the day. But the amount of good cheer that an Englishman can carry and seem not obscured by it surprises an American. A bottle or so of hock of a morning will make most Americans feel that business, for the rest of that day, is an iridescent dream; but an Englishman does not seem to be burdened by it--at any rate, he did not fifty years ago. [IMAGE: RICHARD MONCKTON MILNES] Another hearty companion was Bryan Waller Procter, who, for literary uses, anagrammed his name into Barry Cornwall, and made it famous, fifty years ago, as that of the best song-writer in contemporary England. But he had made a literary reputation before the epoch of his songs; there were four or five dramatic and narrative poems to his credit published during the first quarter of the last century. Procter was, indeed, already a veteran in 1854, having been born in 1787, and bred to the bar, to which he was admitted in 1831. But he spent the active thirty years of his life in the discharge of that function which seems often sought by respectable Englishmen-commissioner of lunacy. He sent my father a small volume containing the Songs, and some fragments; they fully deserved their reputation. The fragments were mostly scraps of dramatic dialogue, of which one at least sticks in my memory: "She was a princess; but she fell; and now Her shame goes blushing down a line of kings." As I recollect him, he may have looked like a commissioner of lunacy, but he did not look like a poet; he was rather undersized, with a compact head and a solemn face, and the quietest, most unobtrusive bearing imaginable. He was a well-made little man, and he lived to a great age, dying some time in the seventies, at the age of eighty-seven. He told my father that after leaving Harrow School he was distinguished in athletics, and for a time sparred in public with some professional bruiser. He had been a school-mate of Byron and Sir Robert Peel, and had known Lamb, Kean, and the other lights of that generation. He was a most likeable and remunerative companion. His wife, who survived him (living, I think, to be over ninety), was a woman of intellect and charm, and she retained her attractiveness to the end of her life. There are poets who are consumed early by their own fires, and others who are gently warmed by them beyond the common span of human existence, and Barry Cornwall was one of these, and transmitted his faculty, through sympathetic affection, to his wife. Of renown not less than the song-writer's was the metaphysical theologian, James Martineau, then in the Liverpool epoch of his career. He was a clean-cut, cold, gentle, dry character, with a somewhat Emersonian cast of countenance, but with the Emersonian humanity and humility left out. Like Emerson, he had ascended a Unitarian pulpit, but, unlike Emerson, he stayed there long after what he was pleased to regard as his convictions had ceased to possess even a Unitarian degree of religious quality. He was always apostolic in his manner, and his utterances were ex cathedra, and yet his whole long life was a story of changing views on the subjects he had chosen to be the theme of his career. He was the great opponent of orthodoxy in his day, yet he led his followers to no goal more explicit than might be surmised from a study of Kant and Hegel. He was, however, sincere in his devotion to the will-o'-the-wisp that he conceived to be the truth, and he was courageous enough to admit that he never satisfied himself. There was chilly and austere attraction about the man; he was so elevated and superior that one could hardly help believing that he must know something of value, and this illusion was the easier because he did know so much in the way of scholarly learning. My father felt respect for his character, but was bored by his metaphysics--a form of intellectual athletics which he had exhausted while still a young man. James's sister Harriet was also of the company. She was so deaf as to be obliged to use an ear-trumpet, and she was as positive in her views (which had become avowedly atheistic) as her brother, and whenever any one began to utter anything with which she disagreed, she silenced him by the simple expedient of dropping the ear-trumpet. In herself, she was an agreeable old lady; but she seldom let her opinions rest long enough for one to get at her on the merely human side, and she cultivated a retired life, partly on account of her deafness, partly because her opinions made society shy of her, and partly because she did not think society worth her time and attention. She was a good woman, with a mind of exceptional caliber, but the world admired more than it desired her. As a relief from the consideration of these exalted personages, I am disposed to relate a tragic anecdote about our friend Henry Bright. Early in our Rock Ferry residence he came to dine with us--or I rather think it was to supper. At any rate, it was an informal occasion, and the children were admitted to table. My mother had in the cupboard a jar of excellent raspberry jam, and she brought it forth for the delectation of our guest. He partook of it liberally, and said he had never eaten any jam so good; it had a particular tang to it, he declared, which outdid his best recollections of all previous raspberry jam from his boyhood up. While he was in the midst of these rhapsodies, and still consuming their subject with enthusiasm, my mother, who had taken some of the jam on her own plate, suddenly made a ghastly discovery. The jam-pot had been for several days standing in the cupboard with its top off, or ajar, and an innumerable colony of almost microscopic red ants had discovered it, and launched themselves fervently upon it and into it; it had held them fast in its sweet but fatal embrace, and other myriads had followed their fellows into the same delicious and destructive abyss. What the precise color of the ants may have been before they became incorporate with the jam is not known; but as the case was, they could be distinguished from it only by their voluptuous struggles in its controlling stickiness. Only the keenest eye could discern them, and the eyes of Henry Bright were among the most near-sighted in England. Besides, according to his custom, he was talking with the utmost volubility all the time. What was to be done? My father and mother stealthily exchanged an awful look, and the question was settled. It was too late to recall the ants which our friend had devoured by tens of thousands. It seemed not probable that, were he kept in ignorance of his predicament, they would do him any serious bodily injury; whereas, were he enlightened, imagination might get in her fatal work. Accordingly, a rigorous silence upon the subject was maintained, and the dear innocent actually devoured nearly that whole potful of red ants, accompanying the meal with a continual psalm of praise of their exquisite flavor; and never till the day of his death did he suspect what the secret of that flavor was. I believe the Chinese eat ants and regard them as a luxury. Very likely they are right; but at that period of my boyhood I had not heard of this, and then and often afterwards did I meditate with misgivings upon the predicament of Henry Bright's stomach after his banquet. VII Life in Rock Park--Inconvenient independence of lodgings-- The average man--"How many gardeners have you got?"-- Shielded by rose-leaves of culture and refinement--The English middle class--Prejudice, complacency, and Burke's Peerage--Never heard of Tennyson or Browning--Satisfaction in the solid earth--A bond of fellowship--A damp, winding, verdurous street--The parent of stucco villas--Inactivity of individual conscience--A plateau and a cliff-dwelling--"The Campbells are Coming!"--Sortes Virgiliance--A division in the family--Precaution against famine--English praying and card-playing--Exercise for mind and body--Knight-errantry-- Sentimentality and mawkishness--The policeman and the cobbler--A profound truth--Fireworks by lamplight--Mr. Squarey and Mrs. Roundey--Sandford and Merton--The ball of jolly. That life at Rock Park had in it more unadulterated English quality than any other with which we became conversant while in England. With the exception of a short sojourn in Leamington, it was the only experience vouchsafed us of renting a house. All the rest of the time we lived in lodging or boarding houses, or in hotels. The boarding-houses of England are like other boarding-houses; the hotels, or inns, in the middle of the last century, were for the most part plain and homely compared with what we have latterly been used to; but the English lodging-house system had peculiarities. You enjoyed independence, but you paid for it with inconveniences. The owner of the house furnished you with nothing except the house, with its dingy beds, chairs, tables, and carpets. Everything else necessary to existence you got for yourself. You made your own contracts with butcher, baker, and grocer. You did your own firing and lighting. Your sole conversation with the owner was over the weekly bill for the rooms. You might cater to yourself to the tune of the prince or of the pauper, as your means or your inclination suggested, but you must do it upon the background of the same dingy rooms. Dingy or not so dingy, the rooms, of course, never fitted you; they were a Procrustes bed, always incompatible, in one way or in another, with the proportions which nature had bestowed upon you. You wondered, in your misanthropic moments, whether there ever was or could be any one whom English lodgings would exactly fit. Probably they were designed for the average man, a person, as we all know, who exists only in the imagination of statisticians. And if the environment shows the man, one cannot help rejoicing that there is so little likelihood of one's forming the average man's acquaintance. There was nothing peculiar about rented houses in England beyond the innate peculiarities attaching to them as English. If the house were unfurnished, and you had leisure to pick and choose, you might suit yourself tolerably well, always with the proviso that things English could be suitable to the foreigner. And certainly, in the 1850's, the English commanded living conditions more desirable, on the whole, than Americans did. They understood comfort, as distinct from luxury--a pitch of civilization to which we are even now but just attaining. There was not then, and until the millennium there will probably never be, anything else in the world which so ministered to physical ease and general satisfaction as did the conditions of life among the English upper classes. Kublai Khan, in Xanadu, never devised a pleasure-dome so alluring to mere human nature-especially the English variety of it--as was afforded by an English nobleman's country-seat. Tennyson's Palace of Art is very good in poetry, but in real life the most imaginative and energetic real-estate dealer could not have got so good a price for it as would gladly have been paid for the dwelling of, for example, the Duke of Westminster. "How many gardeners have you got?" asked an American Minister of the duke of the period, after meeting a fresh gardener, during a long afternoon stroll through the grounds, at each new turn of the path. "Oh, I don't know--I fancy about forty," replied the duke, somewhat taken aback by this demand for precise information concerning the facts of his own establishment, which, until that moment, he probably supposed had been attended to by Providence. And really, the machinery of life in such a place is so hidden, it is so nearly automatic, that one might easily believe it to be operated according to some law of nature. The servants are (or were) so well trained, they did their jobs so well, that you were conscious only of their being done; you never saw them a-doing. The thought happened to cross your mind, of a morning, that you would like to take a drive at eleven o'clock; you were not aware that you had mentioned the matter; but at eleven o'clock the carriage was, somehow, at the door. At dinner, the dishes appeared and disappeared, the courses succeeded one another, invisibly, or as if by mere fiat of the will; you must be very wide-awake to catch a footman or butler meddling with the matter. You went up to the bedroom to change your dress; you came down with it changed; but only by an effort could you recall the fact that a viewless but supremely efficient valet had been concerned in the transaction. The coal fire in the grate needed poking; you glanced away for a moment; when you looked at the fire again it had been poked--had, to all appearance, poked itself. And so in all relations; to desire was to get; to picture a condition was to realize it. You were shielded on every side by rose-leaves of culture and refinement; all you had to do was to allow your mind to lapse from one conception to another, and then, lifting your languorous eyelids, behold! there you were--as Mr. James would say. But I set out to tell not of noblemen's country-seats, but of Rock Park. Rock Park was one of the typical abodes of the English respectable middle-class, and the English middle-class, respectable, or not altogether respectable, is the substance of England. Not until you have felt and smelt and tasted that do you know what England really is. Fifty years ago, the people in question were dull, ignorant, material, selfish, prejudiced, conventional; they were hospitable, on conventional lines; they were affable and even social, so long as you did not awaken their prejudices; they were confidential and communicative, if you conceded at the outset that England was the best of all countries and the English the leading nation of the world. They read a newspaper resembling in every particular themselves; usually several of them united in a subscription to a single copy, which passed solemnly from hand to hand. They were slow and methodical, never taking short-cuts across lots; but they were punctual; they knew their own business and business associates, their circle of relatives, their dwelling and social place, and Burke's Peerage; but they knew nothing else. In a group of intelligent persons of this degree, question was raised, once upon a time, of two English poets; but not one of the group had heard of either; the poets were Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning. This may seem merely absurd or apocryphal; but consider the terrible power of concentration which it implies! And consider the effect which the impact against such a clay wall must make upon a man and an American like my father! Well, the very surprise and novelty of the adventure amused and interested him, and even won a good deal upon his sympathies. He loved the solid earth as well as the sky above it, and he was glad of the assurance that this people existed, though he might be devoutly thankful that two hundred years of America had opened so impassable a gulf between him and them. Indeed, the very fact of that impassability may have made his intercourse with them the easier--at any rate, on his side. On their side, they regarded him with a dim but always self-complacent curiosity; had he not been a consul, they would probably not have regarded him at all. Of course they--the Rock Park sort of people--had never read his books; literary cultivation was not to be found in England lower down than the gentleman class. My father, therefore, was never obliged to say, "I'm glad you liked it" to them. And that relief, of itself, must have served as a substantial bond of fellowship. Rock Park, as I remember it, was a damp, winding, verdurous street, protected at each end by a small granite lodge, and studded throughout its length with stuccoed villas. The villas were mended-on to each other (as one of the children expressed it) two and two; they had front yards filled with ornamental shrubbery, and gardens at the back, an acre or two in extent; they were fenced in with iron pickets, and there were gates to the driveways, on which the children swung. Every normal child supposes that gates are made for no other purpose. The trees were not large, but there were many of them, and they were thick with leaves. There was a damp, arboreal smell everywhere, mingled with the finer perfume of flowers and of the hawthorns and yellow laburnums. Flowers, especially purple English violets, grew profusely in the gardens, and gooseberry-bushes, bearing immense gooseberries such as our climate does not nourish. There were also armies of garden--snails, handsome gasteropods, which were of great interest to me; for I was entering, at this period, upon a passionate pursuit of natural history. For many years I supposed that the odor of the violets proceeded from snails, and to this day I always associate snails with violets, or vice versa. Una, Rose, and I were given each a section of a garden-bed for our own; I cultivated mine so assiduously that it became quite a deep hole; but I do not recall that anything ever grew in it. The soil was a very rich loam, and ceaseless diligence must have been required in me to keep it barren. Gray skies, frequent showers, a cool or semi-chilly mildness, varied every little while by the intrusion of a yellow fog from Liverpool, over the river--such was the climate of Rock Park. There were occasional passages of sunshine; but never, that I recollect, an entire day of it. The stucco of the villas was streaked with green dampness, and peeling off here and there. I suspect that the fashion of castellated, stuccoed villas may have been set in the eighteenth century by Horace Walpole when he built that marvellous edifice known as Strawberry Hill. I first saw that achievement twenty years after the time of which I now write, and recognized in it, as I thought, the parent of my former Rock Park home and of innumerable of the latter's kindred. Strawberry Hill is sprawling and vast, the progeny are liliputian, but the family likeness is striking. The idea is to build something which shall seem to be all that it is not. The gray-white stucco pretends to be stone, and the lines of the stone courses are carefully painted on the roughened surface; but nobody, since Horace's time, could ever have been deceived by them. The castellated additions and ornamentation are all bogus, of the cheapest and vulgarest sort. It is singular that a people so sincere and solid as the English are supposed to be should adopt this fashion for their dwellings. But then they are used to follow conventions and adopt fashions set them by those whom they esteem to be their betters, without thought, or activity of individual conscience. It is rather matter for wonder, remembering what rascals and humbugs many of their "betters" have been, that middle-class England is not more of a whited sepulchre than it is. I do not mean to cast any reflections upon the admirable and beguiling Horace; but he was a highly civilized person, and had a brother named Robert, and perhaps solid sincerity should not be expected from such a combination. Our villa, within, was close and comfortable enough, for its era and degree; but the furniture was ponderous and ugly to the point of nightmare. The chairs, tables, and sofas wore the semblance of solid mahogany, twisted and tortured in a futile struggle to achieve elegance; the carvings, or mouldings, were screwed or glued on, and the lines of structure, intended to charm the eye, accomplished only the discomfort of the body. The dining-table was like a plateau; the sideboard resembled a cliff-dwelling. The carpets were of the Brussels ilk: acanthus-leaves and roses and dahlias wreathed in inextricable convolutions, glowing with the brightest and most uncompromising hues. The lace curtains were imitation lace; the damask curtains were imitation damask. The bedsteads.... But this is not a History of England. After all, we were snug and comfortable. On the walls were portraits of the family whose house this was; by name, Campbell; the house-painter, or wood-grainer, one would suppose, had a leaning towards this branch of art. I never saw the originals of these portraits, but, upon the assumption that they had been faithfully interpreted by the artist, I used to think, in my childish folly, that the refrain of the old song, "The Campbells are Coming," was meant as a phrase or threat to frighten people. Who would not have run upon such an announcement? As I have already made one confession in these pages not reflecting credit upon myself, I may as well make another now. Just thirty years after the events I am describing, somebody wrote to me from Rock Park, stating that the local inhabitants were desirous of putting up on the house which Hawthorne had occupied there a marble or bronze slab, recording the fact for the benefit of pilgrims. The committee, however, did not know which of three or four houses was the right one, and the writer enclosed photographs of them all, and requested me to put a cross over our former habitation. Now, all the houses in Rock Park had been turned out of the same mould, and I knew no more than my interrogator which was which. But I reflected that the committee had been put to trouble and expense for photographs, postage-stamps, and what not, and that all that was really wanted was something to be sentimental over. So, rather than disappoint them, I resorted to a kind of sortes Virgillana; I shut my eyes, turned round thrice, and made a mark at hazard on the line of photographs. The chances against my having hit it right were only four to one; the committee were satisfied, the pilgrims have been made happy, and it is difficult to see where harm has been done. Nevertheless, the matter has weighed somewhat on my conscience ever since, and I am glad to have thus lightened myself of it. What would one better do in such circumstances? Is history written in this way? The custom of our family in America had been to take all our meals together; but in England the elders take lunch at noon, tea at four or five, and dinner at seven or eight, while the children dine at noon and sup at six. This arrangement was adopted in Rock Park. My father used to leave home for the consulate at nine, and return--unless kept away by an official or social engagement--at five or six. There was appointed for us children a nurse or governess, to oversee and administer our supplies; our father and mother dining, with such guests as might happen to be present, late in the evening. We were sometimes allowed to come in at dessert, to eat a few nuts and raisins and exhibit our infantile good manners. This domestic separation was a matter of much speculation and curiosity to our immature minds; we used to haunt the hall through which the servants carried the dishes, smoking and fragrant, from the kitchen to the dining-room, and once in a while the too-indulgent creatures would allow us to steal something. How ravishingly delicious things thus acquired taste! And we, fancying, of course, that they must be not less delicious for the folks at table, used to marvel how they could ever bear to leave off eating. The dinners were certainly rather elaborate compared with the archaic repasts of Salem or of Concord; but they were as far inferior in grandeur and interminableness to the astonishing banquets at which, in some great houses, our father and mother were present. Consider, for example, this dinner, in no way remarkable among such functions, at the Hollands's, about this time. There were twelve persons at table. The service was of solid silver; two enormous covers were on the table before the soup was served; being removed, they revealed turbot and fried fish. Then followed boiled turkey and roast goose, and between them innumerable smaller dishes, including chicken-pies, ragouts, cutlets, fricasees, tongue, and ham, all being placed in their silver receptacles on the table; on the sideboard was a vast round of boiled beef, as a precaution against famine. With the sweets were served grouse and pheasants; there were five kinds of wine, not including the champagne, which was consumed as a collateral all the way along. The pudding which followed these trifles was an heroic compound, which Gargantua might have flinched from; then came the nuts and raisins, then the coffee, then the whiskey and brandy. There were people in England, half a century ago, who ate this sort of dinners six or seven times a week, and thought nothing of it. They actually ate and drank them--did not merely glance at them and shake their heads. The ancient Scandinavians, Gauls, Saxons, and Normans, of whom they were descendants, could not have done more. One cannot help respecting such prodigious trencher-men and women, or wonder that the poverty-stricken class were ill-fed. Dinner in England had become a very different thing when I lived there twenty years later, and though port and Madeira were generally on the table, the only man whom I saw habitually drink them was Robert Browning! Possibly this is the reason the British got such a thrashing in South Africa the other day. After dinner at Rock Park--or, if it were to be a late affair, before--we would have family prayers, in which the servants joined. This was in deference to English custom; not that we were irreligious, but we had not before been accustomed to express our religious feelings in just that manner. All being grouped in a semicircle, my father would open the Bible and read a chapter; then he would take a prayer-book containing thirty or forty well-considered addresses to the Almighty, and everybody would kneel down and cover their eyes with their hands. The "Amen" having been reached, and echoed by every one, all would rise to their former positions, and the servants would file out of the room. It must have been somewhat of an effort for my father to go through this ceremony; but I think he did it, not only for the reason above mentioned, but also because he thought it right that his children should have the opportunity of gaining whatever religious sentiment such proceedings might inculcate. But I do not think that he had much faith in the practice as an English institution. Indeed, he has somewhere written that the English "bring themselves no nearer to God when they pray than when they play cards." [IMAGE: ROBERT BROWNING] I understood long afterwards, as I did not at the time, how closely my father and mother studied in all things the welfare and cultivation of their children. They were not formal or oppressive about it; all went pleasantly and with seeming spontaneity, as if in accordance with our own desire; but we were wisely and needfully guided. We were never sent to school during our seven years in Europe; but either we were taught our lessons by our parents at home or by governesses. In addition to the constant walks which I took with my father, he encouraged me to join a cricket club in the Park, and sent me to Huguenin's gymnasium in Liverpool, to the Cornwallis swimming-baths, and to a dancing-academy kept by a highly ornamental Frenchman, and he bought me an enormous steel hoop, and set me racing after it at headlong speed. Nor did he neglect to stimulate us in the imaginative and aesthetic side. From the date of our settlement in England to the end of his life, he read aloud to us in the evenings many of the classics of literature. Spenser's The Faerie Queene, the Don Quixote of Cervantes, the poems and novels of Scott, Grimm's and Andersen's Fairy Tales, much of Defoe and Swift, Goldsmith's Vicar of Wake field, Coleridge's Ancient Mariner (he himself was very fond of that poem), and many other things, and I cannot overestimate the good they did me. His talks to me during our walks gave me, under the guise of pleasantry, not so much specific information concerning things (though that was not wanting), but--character; that is, the questions he put to me, the remarks and comments he made, the stories he told, were all calculated to give me a high idea of human duties and aspirations; to encourage generosity, charity, courage, patriotism, and independence. From the reading of The Faerie Queene and of Don Quixote I conceived a vehement infatuation for mediaeval chivalry and knight-errantry; I adopted the motto of the order, "Be faithful, brave, and true in deed and word"; and I indulged in waking dreams of heroic adventures in quest of fair renown, and to succor the oppressed. All this he encouraged and abetted, though always, too, with a sort of twinkle of the eye, lest I should take myself too seriously and wax priggish. He permitted me to have a breastplate and a helmet with a golden dragon crest (made by our nurse out of pasteboard covered with tinsel-paper), and he bought me a real steel sword with a brass hilt wrought in open-work; I used to spend hours polishing it, and picturing to myself the giants and ogres I would slay with it. Finally--with that humorous arching of the eyebrow of his--he bade me kneel down, and with my sword smote me on the shoulder, and dubbed me knight, saying, "Rise up, Sir Julian!" It was worth many set moral homilies to me. He knew the advantage of leading a boy to regard the practice of boyish and manly virtues not as a burden but as a privilege and boon, and of making the boy's own conscience his judge. His handling of the matter was, of course, modified so as to reach the inner springs of my particular nature and temperament, which he thoroughly understood. Withal, he never failed to hold up to ridicule anything showing a tendency to the sentimental; he would test me on this point in various ways, and always betrayed pleasure when he found me quick to detect the sentimental or mawkish taint in literature or life. I breathed a manly, robust, and bracing atmosphere in his company, and when I reflect upon what were my proclivities to folly during this impressionable period, I thank my stars for such a father. There was abundant quiet and seclusion in Rock Park, and had my father been able to do any writing, he could hardly have found a retreat more suitable. The tradesmen called early at the houses in the Park, their wagon-wheels making no sound upon the unpaved street, and the two policemen, who lived in the stone lodges, kept the place free from beggars and peddlers. These policemen, pacing slowly along in their uniforms, rigid and dignified, had quite an imposing aspect, and it was some time before we children discovered that they were only men, after all. Each had a wife and children, who filled to overflowing the tiny habitations; when their blue coats and steel-framed hats were off, they were quite humble persons; one of them eked out his official salary by mending shoes. After following with awe the progress along the sidewalk of the officer of public order, stalking with solemn and measured gait, and touching his hat, with a hand encased in a snow-white cotton glove, to such of the denizens of the Park as he might encounter, it was quite like a fairy-tale transformation to see him squatting in soiled shirt-sleeves on his cobbler's bench, drawing waxed thread through holes in a boot-sole. I once saw one of them, of a Sunday afternoon, standing at ease in the doorway of his lodge, clad in an old sack-coat which I recognized as having been my father's. I am constitutionally reverent of law and order; but the revelation of the domestic lives of these policemen gave me an insight, which I have never since lost, into the profound truth that the man and the officer are twain. There were perhaps twenty families living in the Park, of whom we became acquainted with two only; the people who lived next door to us (whose name I have forgotten), and Mr. and Mrs. Squarey, who dwelt higher up the street. The people next door had two boys of about my own age, with whom I played cricket, and it was from the back windows of their house that I saw for the first time an exhibition of fireworks in their garden; I remember that when, just before the show began, they put out the lamp in the room, I asked to have it relighted, in order that I might see the as yet unexperienced wonder. There are folks who go hunting for the sun with a lantern. Mr. Squarey was tall and stiff of figure, with a singularly square countenance, with a short whisker on each side of it; but spiritually he was most affable and obliging; so was his wife; but as she was short and globular, my father was wont to refer to her, in the privacy of domestic intercourse, as Mrs. Roundey. They were profuse in invitations to go with us to places--to Chester, to the Welsh show-places, and so forth; and although I think my father and mother would rather have gone alone, they felt constrained to accept these suggestions. It was in their company, at all events, that I first saw Chester "Rows"; and also, from some coign of vantage on those delightful old walls, an English horse-race, with jockeys in silk caps and jackets tinted like the rainbow. Mr. Squarey's demeanor towards my sisters and myself was like that of the benevolent tutor in Sandford and Merton, with which excellent work we were very conversant at that time; as, likewise, with Edgeworth's Parents' Assistant, and with still another engaging volume called, I think, the Budget of something; at any rate, it had two or three little boys and girls in it, who were anxious to acquire useful and curious information on many subjects, which was afforded them in generous measure by their highly cultivated elders. Such flower-garlanded instruction was the best specifically juvenile literature which those primitive ages afforded. "Pray, mamma, why does the sun rise in the east instead of in the west?" "Pray, papa, why was King Alfred called 'The Good'?" Mrs. Markham's History of England was constructed upon the same artless principle. What a distance we have travelled since then! But it was a good and happy life in Rock Park, and I think our father and mother enjoyed it almost as much as we children did. They were meeting people many of whom were delightful--I shall try to paint the portraits of some of them in the next chapter--and they were seeing towns and castles and places of historic and picturesque interest; and my father was earning more money than ever before, though less than a quarter as much as he would have earned had not Congress, soon after his accession to office, cut down the emoluments. This was England; the Old Home, and the Old World, for the understanding of which they had prepared themselves all their lives previous. My father once said, "If England were all the world, it would still have been worth while for the Creator to have made it." The children were radiantly content with their lot; and it is on record that the little boy once remarked, "I don't remember when I came down from heaven; but I'm glad I happened to tumble into so good a family." The same individual, rolling on the floor in excess of mirth over some childish comicality, panted out, "Oh, mamma, my ball of jolly is so big I can't breathe!" The ball of jolly became a household word for years thereafter. It was well nourished in those days. VIII Cataclysmic adventures--On the trail of dazzling fortunes-- "Lovely, but reprehensible Madham"--The throne saves the artist--English robin redbreast--A sad and weary old man-- "Most indelicate woman I've ever known"--Perfectly chaste-- Something human stirred dimly--"She loves me; she loves me!"--The Prince of Wales and half-a-crown--Portentous and thundering title--Honest English simplicity--"The spirit lacking"--Abelard, Isaac Newton, and Ruskin--A famous and charming woman of genius--Deep and wide well of human sympathy--The whooping-cough. In the spring of 1854 we were visited by John O'Sullivan, his wife and mother, and a young relative of theirs, Miss Ella Rogers. O'Sullivan had been appointed Minister to the Court of Portugal, and was on his way thither. He was a Democrat of old standing; had edited the Democratic Review in 1837, and had made my father's acquaintance at that time through soliciting contributions from him; later they became close friends, and when my sister Una was born, he sent her a silver cup, and was ever after called "Uncle John" in the family, and, also, occasionally, "the Count"--a title which, I believe, had some warrant in his ancestry. For, although an American, Uncle John was born at sea off the coast of Spain, of an Irish father and a mother of aristocratic connections or extraction (I am a little uncertain, I find, on this point); I think her parents were Italian. Uncle John had all the charming qualities of the nations mentioned, and none of their objectionable ones; though this is not to say that he was devoid of tender faults, which were, if anything, more lovable than his virtues. Beneath a tranquil, comely, and gentle exterior burned all the fire and romance of the Celt; his faith and enthusiasm in "projects" knew no bounds; he might be deceived and bankrupted a hundred times, and would toe the mark the next time with undiminished confidence. He was continually, and in the quietest way, having the most astonishing and cataclysmic adventures; he would be blown up, as it were, by a dynamite explosion, and presently would return from the sky undisturbed, with only a slight additional sparkle in his soft eyes, and with the lock of hair that fell gracefully over his forehead only a trifle disordered. The most courteous and affectionate of men, with the most yielding and self-effacing manners, he had the spirit of a paladin, and was afraid of nothing. He would empty his pockets--or if, as too often happened, they were already empty, he would pledge his credit to help a friend out of a hole; and, on the other hand, he was always hot upon the trail of a dazzling fortune, which, like Emerson's Forerunners, never was overtaken. It would not long have availed him, had it been otherwise, for never was there a Monte Cristo who lavished wealth as O'Sullivan habitually did in anticipation, and would undoubtedly have done in fact had the opportunity been afforded him. He was gifted with a low, melodious, exquisitely modulated voice, and a most engaging and winning manner, and when he set out to picture the simple and easy methods whereby he proposed to make millions, it was next to impossible to resist him. He was like a beautiful, innocent, brilliant child, grown up, endowed with an enchanter's wand, which was forever promising all the kingdoms of the earth to him, but never (as our modern phrase is) delivered the goods. He regarded my father as a king of men, and he had, times without number, been on the very edge of making him, as well as himself, a multifold millionaire. However, President Pierce did what he could for him by giving him the Portuguese mission (after first offering it to my father), and O'Sullivan did excellent work there. But he became interested--abstractly--in some copper-mines in Spain, which, as he clearly demonstrated, could be bought for a song, and would pay a thousand per cent, from the start. Partly to gratify him, and partly with the hope of at least getting his money back, my father finally, in 1858 or 1859, advanced him ten thousand dollars to finance the scheme. I saw the dear old gentleman, a generation later, in New York; he had the same clear, untroubled, tranquil face as of old; his hair, though gray, was as thick and graceful as ever; his manner was as sweet and attractive; but though, in addition to his other accomplishments, he had become an advanced spiritualist, he had not yet coined into bullion his golden imagination. He had forgotten the Spanish copper-mines, and I took care not to remind him of them. Peace to his generous, ardent, and loving soul! Uncle John's wife was a good mate for him, in her own way as brilliant and fascinating as he and with an unalterable belief in her husband's destiny. She was a tall, slender woman, with kindling eyes, a lovely smile, and a wonderful richness and vivacity of conversation; nor have I ever since known so truly witty a woman. But she lacked the delightful mellowness and tenderness for which Uncle John was so remarkable. The mother, Madame O'Sullivan, as she was called, was a type of the finegrained, gently bred aristocrat, every outline softened and made gracious by the long lapse of years through which she had lived. She sat like a picture of reverend but still animated age, with white, delicate lace about her pale cheeks and dark, kindly, weary eyes, and making a frost-work over her silvery hair. As for Miss Ella Rogers, it is with some embarrassment that I refer to her; inasmuch as I fell violently in love with her at first sight, and I have reason to think that she never fully appreciated or adequately responded to my passion, though, at the time, I was nearly one-third of her age--she being five-and-twenty. She was a dark and lively beauty, thoroughly self-possessed, and versed in social accomplishments, and gifted with dramatic talent. She afterwards made a great impression in the court of the Portuguese monarch, and more than once the King himself chose her as his partner in the ball. Reports of these gayeties came to my ears; and I found the other day part of a letter which I addressed to her, remonstrating against these royal flirtations. It is written in pencil, upon the blue office-paper of the consulate, and I can recall distinctly the small, indignant boy and knight-errant, sitting at the desk opposite his hugely diverted father, and beginning his epistle thus: "Lovely, but reprehensible Madham!" I suspect that I consulted my father as to the spelling of the second adjective, for it shows signs of having been overhauled; but after that my feelings became too strong for me, and the remainder of the letter is orthographically so eccentric that it was probably cast aside and a copy made of it. But the rough draught, by some inconceivable chance, was kept, and turns up now, after half a century, with a strange thread of pathos woven by time into the texture of its absurdity. Poor, little, lovely reprehensible Madham! Her after-career was not a happy one. These agreeable persons filled our stuccoed villa full, and gave poignant addition to the quiet, gray beauty of that English spring. A year or so later, when my mother's health compelled her to escape to a warmer climate from fog-ridden Liverpool, she went with my sisters to Lisbon, where the O'Sullivans were by that time established, and spent several months with them, and saw all the splendors of the naive but brilliant little court of Dom Pedro V. She brought home a portfolio of etchings presented to her, and done by his youthful Majesty; which indicate that his throne, little as he cared for it, preserved him from the mortification of failing as an artist. Early in the winter of the following year (1855), Mr. James Buchanan, appointed Minister to the Court of St. James, found his way to my father's retreat in Rock Park. The English winter was a mild affair compared with our recent experiences of the arctic snows of Lenox; there was no coasting, and not much snow-balling; but we had the pleasure of making friends with the English robin-redbreast, a most lovable little creature, who, every morning, hopped confidingly on our window-sill and took bread-crumbs almost from our hands. The old American diplomatist and President that was to be (though he vehemently disclaimed any such possibility) distracted our attention from robin for a day or two. He had the aspect, perhaps cultivated for political and democratic purposes, of a Pennsylvania farmer; he was, I believe, born on a farm in Franklin County, in that State, at the beginning of the last decade of the eighteenth century. He was tall and ungainly in figure, though he bore himself with a certain security and dignity; his head was high and thinly covered with gray hair; he carried it oddly, a little on one side; it was said at the time that this was due to his having once attempted suicide by cutting his throat. His visage--heavy, long, and noticeable--had the typical traits of the American politician of that epoch; his eyes were small, shrewd, and twinkling; there was a sort of professional candor in his bearing, but he looked like a sad and weary old man. He talked somewhat volubly to my father, who kept him going by a question now and then, as his way generally was with visitors. There was a flavor of rusticity in his speech; he was not a man of culture or polish, though unquestionably of great experience of the world. He was dressed in a wide-skirted coat of black broadcloth, and wore a white choker put on a little askew. The English, who were prone to be critical of our representatives, made a good deal of fun of Mr. Buchanan, and told anecdotes about him which were probably exaggerated or apocryphal. It was alleged, for example, that, speaking of the indisposition of a female relative of his, he had observed that it was due to the severity of the English climate. "She never enjoyed delicate health at home," he had declared; "in fact, she was always one of the most indelicate women I've ever known." And it was asserted that he had been admonished by the Lord High Chamberlain, or by the Gold Stick-in-Waiting, for expectorating upon the floor of her Majesty's palace at a levee. Such ribaldries used to be popular in English mouths concerning American visitors before the war; they were all of similar tenor. Mrs. Abbott Lawrence was described as having bought a handsome shawl at a shop on Lord Street, in Liverpool, and to have walked down that populous thoroughfare with her new purchase on her shoulders, ignorant that it bore the legend, inscribed on a white card, which the salesman had neglected to remove, "Perfectly chaste." The same lady was reported as saying, in asking an invitation to a ball on behalf of Mrs. Augustus Peabody, of Boston, "I assure you, on our side of the water, Mrs. Peabody is much more accustomed to grant favors than to ask them." Such anecdotes seem to bear upon them the stamp of the British manufacturer. There would not seem to be much harm in them, yet it is such things that sometimes interfere most acutely with the entente cordials between nations. We had another glimpse of Mr. Buchanan, in London, about a year later, and he then remarked to my mother, indirectly referring to such reports, that the Queen had treated him very kindly. For the present, he faded from the Rock Park horizon, and we returned to the robin; nor have I been able to understand how it happened that he made so distinct an impression upon my memory. But a child's memory is unaccountable, both in what it loses and in what it retains. One Sunday forenoon, when it was not too cold for the young folks to be swinging on that gate which has been mentioned, and the elders were in-doors, enjoying the holiday in their own way, we descried an old gentleman approaching up the winding street. As he drew nearer he presented rather a shabby, or, at least, rusty appearance. His felt hat was not so black as it had been; his coat was creased and soiled; his boots needed a blacking. He swung a cane as he stumped along, and there was a sort of faded smartness in his bearing and a knowingness in his grim old visage, indicating some incongruous familiarity with the manners of the great world. He came to a halt in front of the house, and, after quizzing it for a moment, went up the steps and beat a fashionable tattoo with the knocker. Summoned in-doors soon afterwards, we found this questionable personage sitting in the drawing-room. His voice was husky, but modulated to the inflections of polite breeding; he used a good many small gestures, and grinned often, revealing the yellow remains of his ancient teeth; he laughed, too, with a hoarse sound in his throat. There was about him an air of determined cheerfulness and affability, though between the efforts the light died down in his wrinkled old eyes and the lines of his face sagged and deepened. He offered to kiss my sisters, but they drew back; he took my hand in his own large, dry one with its ragged nails and swollen joints. At length he inveigled my younger sister to his knee, where she sat gazing unflinchingly and solemnly into him with that persistence which characterizes little girls of four or five who are not quite sure of their ground. Her smooth, pink-and-white cheeks and unwinking eyes contrasted vividly with his seamed yellowness and blinking grin; for a long time he coquetted at her, and played peep-bo, without disturbing her gravity, making humorous side comments to the on-lookers meanwhile. There was a ragged and disorderly mop of gray hair on his head, which showed very dingy beside the clear auburn of the child's. One felt a repulsion from him, and yet, as he chatted and smirked and acted, there was a sort of fascination in him, too. Some original force and fire of nature still glowed and flickered in his old carcass; something human stirred dimly under the crust of self-consciousness and artificiality. Rose's adamantine seriousness finally relaxed in a faint smile, upon which he threw up his hands, emitted a hoarse cackle of triumph, and exclaimed, "There--there it is! I knew I'd get it; she loves me--she loves me!" He then permitted her to slip down from his knee and withdraw to her mother, and resumed the talk which our entrance had interrupted. It was chiefly about people of whom we youngsters knew nothing--though our ignorance only argued ourselves unknown, for he named persons all famous in their day. He had seen George IV., Napoleon, Talleyrand, Wellington; he had been intimate with Coleridge, De Quincey, Wordsworth, Lamb, Monk Lewis; he was a sort of elder brother or deputy uncle to Tennyson, Browning, Dickens; he had quaffed mountain-dew with Walter Scott and had tramped the moors shoulder to shoulder with Kit North; the courts of Europe were his familiar stamping-grounds; he had the nobility and gentry at his finger-ends; he was privileged, petted, and sought after everywhere; if there were any august door we wished to enter, any high-placed personage we desired to approach, any difficult service we wanted rendered, he was the man to help us to our object. Who, then, was he? He has long been utterly forgotten; but he was well known, or notorious, during the first half of the last century; he was such a character as could flourish only in England. His name was William Jerdan; he was born in 1785, and was now, therefore, about seventy years old. He had started in life poor, with no family distinction, but with some more or less useful connections either on the father's or the mother's side. He had somehow got an English education, and he had pursued his career on the basis of his native wits, his indomitable effrontery and persistence, his faculty of familiarity, his indifference to rebuffs, his lack of shame, conscience, and morality. How he found the means to live nobody could tell, but he uniformly lived well and had enjoyed the good things of the world. After maintaining his ground during the first twenty or thirty years, it had probably been easier for him to forge along afterwards, for he could impose upon the new generation with his stories of success in the former one. Uncouth and ugly though he was by nature, the external polish and trick of good form which he had acquired, and, no doubt, some inner force of social genius in him, had influenced men to tolerate and often to like him, and had given him extraordinary good-fortune with women. He had not only been twice married, and had many children born in wedlock, but his intrigues and liaisons had been innumerable, and they had by no means been confined to the lower ranks of society. That he was a practised liar there can be no doubt, but he had the long memory which the proverb recommends to liars, and he was so circumspect that few of his claims and pretensions lacked solid basis enough to make them pass current in a hurrying and heedless world. Now, however, in his age, he was wellnigh at the end of his tether; what we should call his "pull" was losing its efficiency; he was lapsing to the condition where he would offer to introduce a man to the Prince of Wales or to Baron Rothschild, and then ask him for the loan of five pounds--or half a crown, as the case might be. He was a character for Thackeray. He haunted my father for a year or two more, and then vanished I know not where. Poor, dingy old Jerdan purported to be himself a literary man, though the only thing of his that I ever heard of was a work in four pretentious volumes of "wretched twaddle"--as my father called them--which he published under the title of My Autobiography. It contained a long array of renowned names, with passages appended of perfectly empty and conventional comment. But other men crossed our path who had much sounder claims to renown in literature; among them Samuel Warren, author of half a dozen books, two of which are still sometimes heard of--_The Diary of a Late Physician_ and _Ten Thousand a Year_. He lived upon the reputation which these brought him, though they were published, the first as long ago as 1830 and the other only ten years later. Like many other authors, he fancied himself capable of things far better than belonged to his true metier; and among the books in my father's library is one called _The Moral and Intellectual Development of the Present Age_--a thin volume, despite its portentous and thundering title--it carries the gloss, in Warren's handwriting, "the fruit of many a long year's reflection." So does every light comedian imagine that he can play Hamlet. Of Warren himself I barely recall a slight, light figure with a sharp nose and a manner lacking in repose; indeed, he was very much like a light comedian in light comedy, eager to hold the centre of the stage, full of small movements and remarks, and--which more interested us children--with a gift for turning himself into other people by slight contortions of countenance and alterations of voice. The histrionic abilities of Dickens probably affected the social antics of many writers at this epoch. Warren also told stories in a vivacious and engaging manner, though, as they were about things and people out of the sphere of his younger auditors, I remember only the way of the telling, not what was told. I recalled, later, his anecdotes of Kit North, who was a friend of his, on account of the contrast between the stalwart proportions of that old worthy and the diminutive physique of the novelist; they must have looked, together, like a bear and a monkey. Warren was born in Wales, though whether of Welsh ancestry I know not. When we saw him he was only a trifle over five-and-forty years of age, so his famous books must have been written when he was hardly more than a boy. As for Layard, eminent in his time for his work in Nineveh and Babylon, and afterwards as a statesman, he did not, I think, come to Rock Park, nor am I sure that I ever saw him. And yet it seems to me that I have the picture in my mind of a vigorous, frank, agreeable personage who was he; not a large man, still less a handsome one, but full of life, manliness, and honest English simplicity. He was at this time, like so many of his countrymen, very anxious concerning the Crimean War, then in its first stages, and vehemently opposed to the policy which had brought it about, for, up to that time, England and Russia had been on friendly terms, and Layard could see no promising or useful future for the Turk. My father shared his views, and he wrote the following passage in commenting upon the general European situation of that day and the prospects for England. It has never been printed, because it stood only for the sentiment of the moment, but may be opportunely quoted now that the aspect of European politics shows symptoms of soon undergoing vital changes. "The truth is," wrote my father, "there is a spirit lacking in England which we in America do not lack; and for the want of it she will have to resign a foremost position among the nations, even if there were not enough other circumstances to compel her to do so. Her good qualities are getting out of date; at all events, there should be something added to them in the present stage of the world." England has a good deal changed since those words were written, and the changes have probably been mainly for the better, though all the important ones have caused our old mother discomfort and embarrassment. The medicine of a new age, the subtle infiltration of anti-insular ideas, the slow emergence of the democracy have given her many qualms, but they are wholesome ones. Her best and most cultivated minds are now on the side of progress, instead of holding by the past, and, should the pinch come, these may avail to save her better than martinet generals or unwieldy fleets. The "spirit lacking" in her in 1855 may, perhaps, be found in them. Whether the spirit in question be as conspicuous with us as it used to be is another matter. Henry Bright was still our most frequent visitor, and he brought us the news and gossip of the world. It was in 1855 that Millais married the lady who had been Mrs. Ruskin. English society was much fluttered by this event, and many of Ruskin's friends cut him for a time in consequence of it. Ruskin was a man of a rare type, not readily understood in England, where a man is expected, in the fundamental qualities of his nature at least, to be like everybody else. There are two noted characters in history with whom, in some respects, he might be compared, Isaac Newton being one and Abelard the other. All three were men in whom, owing to causes either natural or accidental, the intellect was able to absorb all the energies of the nature. The intellect thus acquired extraordinary power and brilliance, and appropriated to itself, in a sort of image, as it were, the qualities which no longer possessed manifestation on the material plane. Nothing out of the way would, therefore, be noticed, unless or until some combination of circumstances should bring the exceptional condition into every-day light. This happened with Ruskin, and he was, of course, unable to regard the matter in the same light as his critics did. He viewed his wife's disinclination towards him by the light of mere cold logic; and the reason his friends were alienated from him was, not that her grounds of objection to him were justifiable, but that Ruskin (according to the common report of the time, as quoted by Mr. Bright) did not see why he and she and Millais should discontinue their life in common as before. Neither Millais nor Mrs. Ruskin would, of course, accede to this proposition, and the divorce was accordingly obtained. Ruskin intended simply to show magnanimity, and in the course of years this was recognized and he was forgiven, just as we forgive a person for being color-blind. In our present stage of civilization we must, in certain matters, follow strict convention on peril of ostracism, and nothing is less readily condoned in a man's conduct than any suspicion of complaisance. I did not see either Ruskin or Millais until 1879 or 1880, of which beholding I will speak when the time comes. But we had with us for a short time a famous and charming woman of genius, who made me for a season forget my infatuation for the beautiful Ella Rogers. This was Charlotte Cushman. The acquaintance then begun was renewed in Italy, and maintained till the end of her life. Such is the power of the spiritual in nature and character to dominate and even render invisible the physical, that I was astonished, in after years, to hear Charlotte referred to as a woman of plain or unattractive features. To me, won from the first by the expression, the voice, the sphere, the warmth, strength, and nobility of her presence, she had always seemed one of the handsomest as well as most delightful of women. She was in her fortieth year, but she had already announced her purpose of retiring from the stage. Some of her best work was done in the following twenty years. Critics might call her face plain, or ugly, if they chose, but there was no doubt that its range of expression was vast and poignant, that it could reflect with immense energy the thoughts of the mind, and could radiate the very soul of tragedy. Her figure was tall and superb and her carriage stately without any stiffness, and appalling though she was as Lady Macbeth or Meg Merrilies, in our little drawing-room she was only simple, sincere, gentle, and winning. Born actress though she was, her horizon was by no means restricted to things histrionic; she talked well on many subjects, and was at no loss for means to entertain even so small and inexperienced a person as myself. I had never seen a theatre, and did not know what an actress was, but I loved her, and she was good to me. It was not the interest of the stories she told me, so much as the personal influence that went with them, that entranced me. I was sensible of her kindness, and of the hearty good-will with which she bent her great and gracious self to the task of making me happy. That wonderful array of tiny charms on her watch-chain was beautiful and absorbing, owing less to anything intrinsic in themselves than to some sparkling and lovable communication from their wearer. If a woman be only large enough and vigorous enough to begin with, the stage seems to develop her as nothing else could--to bring out the best in her. It was perhaps the deep and wide well of human sympathy in Charlotte Cushman that was at the bottom of her success in her profession, though, of course, she was greatly aided by her mental and physical gifts. I suppose there may be women now capable of being actresses as great as she was, but the audience to call forth their latent powers and ambition seems, just at present, to be lacking. Our social diversions at Rock Park were interrupted, at about this period, by the whooping-cough, which seized upon all of us together, and I well remember my father almost climbing up the wall of the room in some of his paroxysms; but he treated it all as a joke, and was always ready to laugh as soon as he got through coughing. It left no ill effects except upon my mother, who had bronchial trouble which, as I have intimated, finally led to the breaking-up of our household. She was not made for England. IX Two New England consciences--Inexhaustible faith and energy-- Deep and abiding love of England--"How the Water Comes Down at Lodore"--"He took an' he let go"--Naked mountains--The unsentimental little quadruped--The human element in things sticks--The coasts of England--A string of sleepy donkeys-- Unutterable boy-thoughts--Grins and chuckles like an ogress-- Hideous maternal parody--The adorable inverted bell-glass-- Strange things happen in the world--An ominous clouding of the water--Something the world has never known--Overweening security--An admonition not to climb too high--How vice may become virtue by repetition--Corporal Blair's chest--Black- Bottle Cardigan--Called to Lisbon. Emerson, as a matter of principle, was rather averse from travel, though he made the trip to England twice; but he fortified his theory by his practice of searching out great men rather than historic or picturesque places. Ruskin's Modern Painters had not been written when Emerson first left home, and I doubt if he read it at any time. He found his mountain scenery in Carlyle and his lakes and vales elsewhere among agreeable people. My father's conscience worked in a different way; he thought himself under obligations to see whatever in the way of towns, ruins, cathedrals, and scenery was accounted worthy a foreigner's attention; but I think he would have enjoyed seeing them much more had that feeling of obligation not been imposed upon him. Set sights, as he often remarked, wearied him, just because they were set; things that he happened upon unpremeditatedly, especially if they were not described in guide-books, pleased him more and tired him less. It can hardly be affirmed, however, that he would have missed the set sights if he could have done so, and no doubt he was glad, after the job was done, that he had done it. And he was greatly helped along by the inexhaustible faith and energy in such matters of his wife; she shrank from no enterprise, and seemed always in precisely the right mood to appreciate whatever she beheld. She could go day after day to a picture-gallery, and stay all day long; she would make herself as familiar with churches, castles, and cathedrals as she was with her own house; she would wander interminably and delightedly about old towns and cities, or gaze with never-waning joy upon lakes and mountains, and my father, accompanying her, was, in a measure, recuperated and strengthened by her enthusiasm. In the end, as is evidenced by Our Old Home and The Marble Faun, he got a good deal out of Europe. On the other hand, he seemed to think himself justified in avoiding persons as much as he decently might, even the most distinguished; and if he had not been a consul, and a writer of books that had been read, I doubt if he would have formed any acquaintances during his foreign residence, and he would thereby have missed one of the greatest and most enduring pleasures of memory that he took back with him. For no one cared more for a friend, or was more stimulated and emancipated by one, than he. It may have been that he had passed the age of youthful buoyancy, of appetite for novelties; that he had begun to lack initiative. "I have seen many specimens of mankind," he wrote down, in a mood of depression, in one of his note-books, "but come to the conclusion that there is little variety among them all." That was scarcely a full thought, and he would never have let it pass in one of his considered books. He made and published many other remarks on similar subjects of quite an opposite tenor, and these more truly represented his true feeling. But he did flag a little, once in a while, and the deep and abiding love of England which was his final sentiment had somewhat the appearance of having been forced upon him against his inclination. We may surmise that he feared disappointment more than he craved gratification. [IMAGE: FRANCIS BANNOCH] From Liverpool we explored the strangeness of the land in all directions. Bennoch or Bright sometimes took off my father alone; sometimes my father and mother would go with me, leaving my sisters at home with the governess. Once in a while we all went together, as, for example, to the Isle of Man or to Rhyl. So far as practicable, we children were made acquainted with the literature of places we were to visit before going there. Thus, before journeying to the Lakes and Scotland, I had by heart a good deal of Wordsworth, Southey, Burns, and Walter Scott, and was able, standing amid the lovely uproar of Lodore, to shout out the story of how the water comes down there; and, again, on the shores of Loch Katrine, at sunset, after spending a long hour on the little white beach opposite Ellen's Isle, I ran along the road in advance of my parents, and, climbing a cliff, saw the breadth of the lake below me, golden under the sunset clouds, and very aptly recited, as they came up, Sir Walter's descriptive verse: "One burnished sheet of living gold, Loch Katrine lay, beneath him rolled!" But I was not always so well attuned to the environment. I had got hold of a hook and line at some hotel on the Lakes, and the old passion for fishing, which had remained latent since Lenox days for lack of opportunity, returned upon me with great virulence. So, one day, when we had set out in a row-boat to visit Rob Roy's cave, I requested, on arriving there, to be permitted to stay in the boat, moored at the foot of the cliff, while the others climbed up into the cave, and, as soon as they had disappeared, I pulled out my line, with a dried-up worm on the hook, and cast it over the side. I wanted to see the cave, but I wanted to catch a fish more. Up to that time, I think, I had caught nothing in all our pilgrimages. If ever Providence is going to give me success (I said to myself, devoutly), let it be now! Accordingly, just before the others came back, I felt a strong pull on my line and hauled in amain. In a moment the fish, which may have been nine inches long, but which seemed to me leviathan himself, broke the surface, wriggling this way and that vigorously; but that was the extent to which my prayer was granted, for, in the words of a rustic fisherman who related his own experience to me long afterwards, "Just as I was a-goin' to land 'im, sir, he took an' he let go!" My fish not only took and let go, but he carried off the hook with him. I remember wandering with my father through a grassy old church-yard in search of Wordsworth's grave, which we found at last, looking quite as simple as his own most severely unadorned pastoral; but I had not attained as yet to the region of sentiment which makes such things impressive. The bare mountains, the blue lakes, and the gray ruins filled me with riotous intoxication. The North of England and Scotch mountains were much more effective in their nakedness than the wooded hills I had seen in Berkshire of Massachusetts, and their contours were more sharply modelled and various. They were just large enough to make their ascent seem easy until you undertook it, then those seemingly moderate slopes lengthened out unaccountably. The day we reached the hotel at the base of Helvellyn, I started, nothing doubting, to climb to its summit before supper; the weather was clear, the top looked close at hand, and I felt great surprise that the young gentleman mentioned in Scott's poem ("I climbed the dark brow of the mighty Helvellyn," etc.) should have allowed himself to be lost. But after a breathless struggle of fifteen or twenty minutes, finding myself apparently no nearer my goal than at first, I thought differently. Mr. Bright told my father, by-the-way, that the legend of the fidelity of the dead adventurer's little dog, "who scared the hill-fox and the raven away," was far from being in accordance with the prosaic facts. This unsentimental little quadruped had, in truth, eaten up a large part of her master by the time his remains were discovered, and had, furthermore, brought into the world a litter of pups. Well, nothing can deprive us of the poem; but it is wholesome to face realities once in a while. Unless one have a vein of Ruskin in him, one does not recollect scenery, however enchanting, with the same particularity as persons. It is the human element in things that sticks to us. Scenes are more punctually recalled in proportion as they are steeped in historic or personal interest. The thatched cottages of Burns and of Shakespeare stand clear in my memory; I recall our ramble over the battlements of Carlisle, where imprisoned Queen Mary had walked three centuries before; I remember the dark stain on the floor of the dark room in which one of her lovers was slain; I can see the gray towers of Warwick rising above the green trees and reflected in the still water; and, entering the keep of the castle, I behold myself again trying on the ponderous helmet of the gigantic Guy, and climbing into his monstrous porridge-pot. But vain would be the attempt to marshal before my mind's eye the glorious pageantry of the Trosachs, though, at the time of its actual revelation, it certainly seemed to make a far more vivid impression. The delight and exhilaration which such magnificence inspired are easily summoned back, but not the incarnate features of them. Wild nature takes us out of ourselves and refreshes us; but she does not reveal her secret to us, or ally herself with anything in us less deep than the abstract soul--which also is beyond our reach. I am not sure that my father did not like the seaside sojourns as well as anything else, apart from the historical connections; for the spirits of many seafaring forefathers murmured in his heart. But he did not so much care for the soft, yielding, brown sands on which the sea-waves broke. The coasts to which he had been used in his youth were either rocky or firm as a macadamized road. Nor was he beguiled into forgetting the tedium of walking over them, as his companion was, by the fascination of the shells and sea curiosities to be picked up on them. Many a mile have I trotted along beside him or behind him, gathering these treasures, while he strode forward, abstracted, with his gaze fixed towards the long ridge of the horizon. The sands at Rhyl, near which Milton's friend was said to have been lost, were like a rolling prairie; at low tide the white fringe of the surf could scarcely be descried at their outermost verge, yet within a few hours it would come tumbling back, flowing in between the higher levels, flooding and brimming and overcoming, till it broke at our feet once more. Behind us rose the tumultuous curves and peaks of the Welsh hills; before us, but invisible across the Irish Channel, the black coast of rainy Ireland. One night, during a gale, a ship came ashore, so far out that it still seemed, in the morning, to be at sea, except for its motionlessness, and the drenched and draggled crew came straggling in--or some of them. At Southport the beach was narrower and the little sea-side settlement larger and livelier; a string of sleepy donkeys always waited there, with the rout of ragged and naughty little boys with sticks to thrash them into a perfunctory and reluctant gallop for their riders. There was always one boy, larger and also naughtier than the rest, who thrashed the thrashers and took their pennies away from them. The prevailing occupation of the children at these places, as on all civilized shores, apparently, was the building of sand-mountains and the digging of pits with their little wooden spades. One day an elderly gentleman, with a square, ruddy face, edged with gray whiskers, who had stood observing my labors in this kind for a long time, stepped up to me as I paused, and said, with a sort of amused seriousness, "You'll do something when you grow up, my little lad; your hill is bigger than any of the others'." He nodded kindly to me and walked off, and I sat down beside my mountain and watched the tide come up and level it, thinking unutterable boy-thoughts. The only approach to sea-side cliffs that we saw was at Whitby, on the Yorkshire coast, where the abbey of St. Hilda stood, after whom the American maiden in The Marble Faun was named. But the German Ocean was bleak and cold, and my experiences in it were even more harrowing than elsewhere; I can imagine nothing more dispiriting to a small boy than to be dragged down over a harsh beach in an old-fashioned British bathing-machine, its damp floor covered with gritty sand, with a tiny window too high up for him to look out of; undressing in the cold draughtiness and trying to hang up his clothes on pegs too high for him to reach; being tossed from side to side, and forward and backward, meanwhile, by the irregular jerking and swaying of the dismal contrivance, drawn by the amphibious horses of the region; until at last he hears the waves begin to dash against it, and it comes to a pause in a depth which he feels must be fathomless. Then comes a thumping at the door, and he knows that the bathing-woman is hungrily awaiting his issuing forth. Nothing else is so terrible in the world--nothing even in Alice in Wonderland--to a small, naked, shivering boy as the British bathing-woman. There she stands, waist-deep in the swelling brine; she grins and chuckles like an ogress; her red, grasping hands stretch forth like the tentacles of an octopus; she seizes her victim in an irresistible embrace, and with horrid glee plunges him head-under the advancing wave. Ere he can fetch his breath to scream, down again he goes, and yet again. The frigid, heavy water stings his cowering body; he has swallowed quarts of it; his foot has come in contact with a crab or a starfish; before him rolls the tumultuous expanse of desolation, surging forward to take his life; behind him are the rickety steps of the bathing-machine, which, but now a chamber of torture, has become his sole haven of refuge. Buffeted by the billows, he makes shift at last frantically to clamber back into it; he snatches the small, damp towels, and attempts to dry his shivering limbs; his clothes have fallen on the wet floor; he cannot force his blue toes into his oozy socks. At the moment he is attempting to wriggle himself into his trousers the horse is hitched-to again, and the jerky and jolty journey back up the beach begins. If the hair of a boy of ten could turn white in a single morning, there would be many a hoary-headed youngster in British watering-places. John Leech, in Punch, used to make pictures of the experiences I have outlined, and I studied them with deep attention and sympathy. The artist, too, must have suffered from the sea-ogresses in his youth, else he could not have portrayed the outrage so vividly. The mock-cheerfulness and hideous maternal parody of their "Come, my little man!" has no parallel in life or fiction. Nevertheless, such is the fortunate recuperative faculty of boyhood that day after day I would forget the horrors of that hour, and be happy in climbing over the decayed chalk acclivities of Whitby, picking up the fossil shells that nestle there. Yonder on my table, as I write, lies a coiled ammonite found there; it had been there ten thousand years or ages before I detached it from its bed, and, for aught I know, my remotest posterity may use it, as I have done, for a paper-weight. Thanks to eternal justice, the bathing-machines and the bathing-women will have gone to their place long ere then! My father had given me a book called The Aquarium, written by Philip Henry Gosse (father of the present poet, essayist, and critic), illustrated with pictures of sea-anemones and other marine creatures done from his own drawings in color, and so well done that nothing which has been done since in the way of color-reproductions surpasses them. It was delightfully written, and I absorbed it into my very soul, and my dreams by night and longings by day were for an aquarium of my own. At last--I think this was at Southport--a glass jar was given me; it was an inverted bell-glass, mounted on a wooden stand, and it cost ten shillings. I wonder if men often love their wives or children with the adoring tenderness that I lavished upon that bell-glass and its contents! I got sand and covered the bottom; I found two jagged stones and leaned them against each other on the sand; I gathered fronds of ulva latissima; I persuaded a boatman to bring me a bucket of salt-water from beyond the line of breakers, and I poured it carefully into the jar. During the next twenty-four hours I waited impatiently for the water to settle and clear; then I began to introduce the living inmates. I collected prawns and crabs and sea-snails, and a tiny sole or two, a couple of inches long, and by good chance I found a small sepiola, or cuttle-fish, as big as a beetle, which burrowed in the sand and changed color magically from dark brown to faintest buff. I also had a pair of soldier-crabs, which fought each other continually. When the sunlight fell on my aquarium, I saw the silver bubbles of oxygen form on the green fronds of the sea-weed; the little snails crawled along the sides of the glass, sweeping out their tiny, scythelike tongues at every step; the prawns hovered in the shade of the stones or darted back and forward light as thoughts; the soles scuffled over the surface of the sand or hid themselves in it from the stalking, felonious crabs. But I had no sea-anemones; they are not found on sandy coasts, and without sea-anemones my felicity could not be complete. But strange things happen in this world occasionally, good as well as bad. There came up a heavy storm, and the next morning, walking with my father on the beach, strewn with deep-sea flotsam and jetsam, we came upon the mast of a ship, water-logged till it had the weight of iron; it might have been, as my father remarked, a relic of the Spanish Armada. And it was covered from end to end with the rarest and most beautiful species of sea-anemones! This was fairy-land come true. I chipped off a handkerchiefful of the best specimens, wishing I could take them all, and carried them to my aquarium. I deposited them, each in a coign of vantage, and in the course of an hour or two they had swelled out their tinted bodies and expanded their lovely tentacles, and the cup of my joy was full. This prosperity continued for near a week, during which I remained with my nose against the glass, as the street boys of Liverpool held theirs against the windows of pastry-cooks' shops. At length I noticed an ominous clouding of the water, which, as Mr. Gosse had forewarned me, signified disaster of some sort, and, searching for the cause, I finally discovered the body of the little sepiola, which had died without being missed, and was contaminating with his decay the purity of the aquarium. The water must be changed at once. I sent out the servant for a fresh bucketful from the sea, while I poured the polluted liquid from the jar. Presently the bucket of water was brought in. It was unusually clear. I filled the jar with it, and then, as bedtime was near, I left the aquarium to settle down to business again. The next morning I hastened to it in my night-gown, and was confronted by a ghastly spectacle. The crabs lay dead on the bottom, stomachs upward; the prawns hung lifeless and white from the rocks; the soldier-crabs were motionless, half out of their shells; the sea-anemones had contracted themselves into buttons, and most of them had dropped from their perches. Death had been rampant during the night; but what could be the cause? A sudden suspicion caused me to put a finger in the water and apply it to my tongue. It was not salt-water at all, but had been taken fresh from the cistern. That traitress servant-girl, to save her indolence a few steps, had destroyed my aquarium! I was too heart-broken to think of killing her; but she had killed something in me which does not readily grow again. My trust in my fellow-creatures was as shrunken and inanimate as the sea-anemones. We left Southport soon after, and that was my last aquarium. Let us turn to lighter matters. I accompanied my father and mother on that pilgrimage to Old Boston which is described in Our Old Home. The world does not know that it is to my presence on the little steamer on the trip down the level river, through the Lincolnshire fens, with nothing but the three-hundred-foot tower of St. Botolph's Church, in the extreme distance, to relieve the tedium of a twenty-four-mile journey made at the rate of never more than six miles per hour--it is not known, I say, that to that circumstance is due my father's description of the only incident which enlivened the way--the tragedy, namely, of the duck family. For it was that tragedy which stood out clearest in my memory, and when I learned, in Concord, that my father was preparing his paper about Old Boston for the Atlantic Monthly, I besought him to insert an account of the episode. The duck and her five ducklings had probably seen the steamer many times before, and had acquired a contempt for its rate of progression, imagining that it would always be easy to escape from it. But, somehow, in their overweening security, they lingered on this occasion a little too long, and we succeeded in running them down. Even then, as my father notes, it was only one of them that was carried under; but the shock to the nerves of the other youngsters must have stunted their growth, and the old bird cannot but have suffered tortures from anxiety and remorse. The sadness caused by this event, added to the chilliness of the sea-wind which blew against us all the way down the river, rendered my first impressions of the ancient town, which had given its name to the one I was born in, somewhat gloomy. But the next morning it brightened up, and our own spirits were correspondingly improved; insomuch that I struck my head a violent blow against the stone roof of the topmost pinnacle of St. Botolph's tower, such was the zeal of my ascent into it. All this happened two years after the aquarium, in 1857, when I was older and wiser, but had not yet outgrown the ambition to climb to the top of all high places; this bump may have been an admonition not to climb too high. We went down and strayed into Mr. Porter's little book-shop, and he transformed himself into a new and more genial proprietor of a virtuoso's collection, and showed us treasures, some of which his predecessor in Mosses from an Old Manse might not have despised. I have never since then heard of his portrait in crayon of the youthful Sterne; it would be worth a good deal to any latter-day publisher of his works in a de luxe edition. As for the green tassel from the bed of Queen Mary, in Holyrood House, there is a passage in my father's description of it in his journal which, out of regard, doubtless, for the feelings of Mr. Porter, he forbore to quote in his published article; but as the good old gentleman (unless he has lived to be more than one hundred and twenty years old) must have gone to the place where treasures are indestructible, I will reproduce it now. "This tassel," says my father, "Mr. Porter told us (with a quiet chuckle and humorous self-gratulation), he had personally stolen, and really, for my part, though I hope I would not have done it myself, I thought it no sin in him--such valuables being attracted by a natural magnetism towards such a man. He obeys, in stealing them, a higher law than he breaks. I should like to know precisely what portion of his rich and rare collection he has obtained in a similar manner. But far be it from me to speak unkindly or sneeringly of the good man; for he showed us great kindness, and obliged us so much the more by being greatly and evidently pleased with the trouble that he took on our behalf." It may be added that each new stealing enhances the value of all the previous ones, and therefore creates an obligation to steal yet more. Thus does an act which would, standing by itself, be criminal, become a virtue if often enough repeated. I am not arranging this narrative in chronological sequence; but I think it was in this year that we went to Manchester to see the exposition. The town itself was unlovely; but, as we had Italy in prospect, it was deemed expedient to accustom ourselves in some measure to the companionship of works of art, and the exhibition professed to contain an exceptionally fine and catholic collection of them. My father made a thorough study of them, going to learn and not to judge, and he learned much, though not quite to believe in Turner or to like the old masters. For my own part, when not taken on these expeditions, I busied myself with the building of a kite six feet high, of engineer's cambric, with a face painted on it, and used to go out and fly it on a vacant lot in the rear of our lodgings, accompanied by a large portion of the unoccupied population of Manchester. The kite broke its string one day, and I saw it descend over the roofs of a remote slum region towards the south, and I never recaptured it. But my chief energies were devoted to acquiring the art of fencing with the small-sword from one Corporal Blair, of the Fourth Dragoon Guards--a regiment which had distinguished itself in the Crimean War. The corporal was a magnificent-looking creature, and he was as admirable inwardly as outwardly--the model of an English non-commissioned officer. He used to come to our lodgings in his short scarlet jacket and black trousers, and my father once asked him, remarking the extraordinary prominence of his chest, what kind of padding was used to produce so impressive a contour. "There's nothing here but my linen, sir," answered the corporal, modestly, and blushing a good deal; a fact which I, having often taken my lessons at the barracks, in the private quarters of the corporal, where he permitted himself to appear in his shirt-sleeves, already knew. My experience of the British army not being so large as that of some other persons, I am unable to say whether there were many other soldiers in it fit to be compared with Blair; but my acquaintance with mankind in general would lead me to infer that there could not have been then, and that there are still less of such to-day. An army of six--footers like him, with his intelligence, instincts of discipline, capacity and expertness, physical strength and activity, and personal courage, would easily account for more than all of England's warlike renown and success; the puzzle is, how to account for anything but disaster without them--though, to be sure, other armies might be equally lacking in Blairs. He was well educated, modest, and moral; he was a married man, with a wife who was the model of a soldier's consort, and two or three little sons, all of them experts with the foils and the broadsword. It was against the regulations of the service for privates or non-commissioned officers to have families, and, when Blair's connubial condition became known to the authorities, he was degraded in rank from sergeant to corporal, though he wore the Balaklava medal; for he had taken part in that immortal charge, and I only wish I could recall the story of it as he told it to me. His regiment had been under the command of Lord Cardigan--"Black-Bottle Cardigan," as he was nicknamed in the army, on account of the well-known (real or apocryphal) incident. It was my good--fortune, by-the-way, once to see this eminent captain. I was taking my lesson at the barracks, when Blair told me that his lordship was expected to visit them that afternoon. The hour appointed was three o'clock. Punctually at three o'clock a carriage drove rapidly through the gates of the barracks, and the guard turned out on the run and lined up to salute the noble occupant. But, much to their disgust, the occupant turned out to be some one else, not meriting a salute. The men returned to the guard-room feeling as men do when they have been betrayed into exertion and enthusiasm for nothing. However, in about ten minutes more, another carriage drove up, and out came the guard again and ranged themselves smartly, to please the eye of their martinet commander, when lo! they had again been deceived. Again they retired with dark looks, not being at all in a mood to recognize the humor of the situation. This same thing actually occurred twice more, by which time it was near four o'clock, and the men were wellnigh mutinous, and it became evident that, for some reason, Cardigan had been prevented from coming. Such being the case, the approach of still another carriage attracted no attention whatever, until it came to a half-pause, and I saw, thrust out of the window, a stern, dark, warlike, soldierly face, full of surprise and indignation--and this was Cardigan himself. The unhappy guard tumbled over themselves in vain efforts to get into form; it was too late, and the haughty and hot-tempered commander drove on without his salute. Blair, not being on guard duty, had no part in this catastrophe, but I well remember his unaffected sorrow over it. He was a grave man, though of an equable and cheerful temper, and he felt his comrades' misfortune as his own. But I never heard that any casualties occurred in consequence of the mishap. I have left two years of our English sojourn unaccounted for. In the summer of 1855, my father nearly made up his mind to resign his consulship (since it had become hardly worth keeping from the money point of view), and, after making a visit to Italy, going back to Concord. This plan seemed the more advisable, because my mother's lungs could not endure the English climate. But while he was weighing the matter, John O'Sullivan wrote from Lisbon, urgently inviting my mother and sisters to come out and spend a few months with him and his family there. The Lisbon climate was a specific for bronchial disease; my father could complete his term, and we could go to Italy the following year. There was only one objection to this--it involved the parting of my father from my mother, a thing which had never before happened. But it did not take him long to decide that it would be a good thing for her, and, therefore, in the long run, for him. Each loved the other unselfishly, and had the courage of such love. Liverpool without my mother would be a dismal trial for him to face; Lisbon without my father would be tenfold an exile for her. But they made up their minds, each for the other's sake, to undergo the separation, and accordingly, in the autumn of the year, she and my sisters sailed from Southampton, and my father and I went back to Liverpool. How we fared there shall be told in the next chapter. X If there were boarding-houses in paradise--Blodgett, the delight of mankind--Solomon foresaw her--A withering retort-- A modest, puny poise about her--Hidden thoughts derived from Mother Eve and Grecian Helen--The feminine council that ruled the Yankee captains--Bonds of fraternity, double- riveted and copper-fastened--Through the looking-glass--Men only of the manliest sort--The lady-paramount--Hands which were true works of art--Retained his dignity without putting it on--Sighed heavily over my efforts--Unctuous M. Huguenin-- "From dawn to eve I fell"--The multum-in-parvo machine-- "Beauty and the Beast"--Frank Channing--"Blood-and water!"-- A lapful of Irish stew. It was observed a little way back that English boarding-houses were much like other boarding-houses in the civilized world. The rule is proved by the exception of Mrs. Blodgett's establishment. There never was such another; there never will be; it was unique. It has vanished from earth long since; but if there were boarding-houses in paradise, I should certainly expect it to be found again there. Who was Mrs. Blodgett? Save that she was a widow of the British middle class, I doubt if any one of her boarders knew. She had once been rich, and had lived at Gibraltar. I have often meditated with fruitless longing about what manner of man Mr. Blodgett could have been. He must have been, like the Emperor Titus, the delight of mankind in his day. He was a man, we must surmise, whose charms and virtues were such that his wife, having felt the bliss and privilege of knowing and living with him, registered a vow over his bier that she would devote her future career to the attempt to make others as happy as he had made her; that she would serve others as faithfully and generously as she had served him. It was a lofty and beautiful conception, for she must have perceived that only in that way could she keep his blessed spirit near her; that the little heaven she would make in Duke Street, Liverpool, would attract him from the kindred heaven above; that he would choose to hover, invisible, above her plenteous table, inhaling the grateful aromas that arose from it as from a savory sacrifice, basking in the smiles and sympathizing in the satisfaction of the fortunate guests, triumphing in their recognition of his beloved consort as a queen among women. One might almost fancy that the steam arising from the portly soup-tureen assumed as it arose something suggesting a human form; that from its airy and fragrant mistiness a shadowy countenance beamed down upon the good lady in black, with the white cap, who ladled out the delicious compound to her waiting devotees. The murmur of the tea-urn would seem to fashion itself into airy accents, syllabling, "Mary, thy Blodgett is here!" His genial spirit would preside over her labors in the kitchen, suggesting ever more delightsome dishes and delicate desserts. He would warn her against undesirable inmates and intractable servants, and would inspire her tradesmen to serve her with the choicest comestibles and to temper their bills to the unprotected widow. At night he would bless her lonely pillow with peace, and would gently rouse her in the morning to a new day of beneficences. Mrs. Blodgett was about five feet four inches high, and may have weighed twelve stone; into such limits were her virtues packed. She was perhaps in the neighborhood of her fiftieth year; her dark hair was threaded with honorable gray. Her countenance was rotund and ruddy; it was the flower of kindness and hospitality in full bloom; but there was also power in the thick eyebrows and in the massy substance of the chin--of the chins, indeed, for here, as in other gifts, nature had been generous with her. There was shrewdness and discernment in the good-nature of her eyes; she knew human nature, although no one judged it with more charity than she. Her old men were her brothers, her young men were her sons, all children were her children. Solomon foresaw her in the most engaging of his Proverbs. Her maid-servants arose at six in the morning and called her blessed, for though her rule was strict it was just and loving. She was at once the mistress and the friend of her household; no Yankee captain so audacious that he ventured to oppose her law; no cynic so cold as not to be melted by her tenderness. She was clad always in black, with a white cap and ribbons, always spotless amid the grime of Liverpool; in her more active moments--though she was always active--she added a white apron to her attire. She was ever anywhere where she was needed; she was never anywhere where she could be dispensed with. Wherever she went she brought comfort and a cheerful but not restless animation. Her boarders were busy men, but it was always with an effort that they wrenched themselves from her breakfast-table, and they sat down to dinner as one man. She made them happy, but she would not spoil them. "You're a pretty young man!" she said, severely, to complacent Mr. Crane, when, one morning, he came late to breakfast. "I always knew that," returned he, reaching self-satisfiedly for the toast-rack. "Well, I'm sure your glass never told you so!" was the withering retort. Mr. Crane did not lift his neck so high after that. The grin that went round the table was too crushingly unanimous. Mrs. Blodgett was helped in her duties by her niece, Miss Maria, and by her sister, Miss Williams. Miss Maria was a little wisp of a woman; I do not know her age then, but I think, were she alive today, she would confess to about eighty-three. She wore ringlets, after the fashion of the early nineteenth-century books of beauty. Her face was thin and narrow, and ordinarily pale; but when Miss Maria had been a little while in conversation with one or more of the gallant Yankee captains you might see in the upper corner of each cheek a slight touch of red. For though I would not call the little lady coquettish--that is too coarse and obvious a word--yet there was in her that inalienable consciousness of maidenhood, that sentiment, at once of attraction and of recoil, towards creatures of the opposite sex, that gentle hope of pleasing man, that secret emotion of being pleased by him, that tremor at the idea of being desired, and that flush at the thought of being desirable, which, I suppose, may animate the mystic sensibilities of spinsterhood. She was anything but aggressive and confident, yet there was a modest, puny poise about her; she was like a plant that has always lived in a narrow, city flower-pot, at a window too seldom visited by the sun, which has never known the freedom of the rain, but has been skimpingly watered out of a toy watering-pot; which has never so much as conceived of the daring and voluptuous charms of its remote sisters of the forest and garden, but has cherished its rudimentary perfume and its incipient tints in a light reflected from brick walls and in the thin, stale atmosphere of rear sitting-rooms. Yet it knows that it is a flower, and that it might, somehow, fulfil its destiny and be beautiful. So Miss Maria had, no doubt, hidden thoughts remotely derived from Mother Eve and from Grecian Helen; she was aware of the potentiality in herself of all virgin privileges and powers, and assumed thereupon her own little dignity. Never but once did I see a masculine arm round Miss Maria's trig, stiff little waist, and that was at Christmas-time, when there were sprigs of mistletoe over every doorway; but, mistletoe or not, the owner of that arm, if he did succeed in ravishing a kiss, got his ears smartly boxed the next moment. I don't know precisely what was Miss Maria's function in the economy of the household; I can fancy her setting the table, and adding touches of neatness and prettiness; dusting the ornaments and fine china on the shelves of the whatnot; straightening the frames of the pictures on the walls; and, in her less romantic moments, hemming towels or sheets, or putting up preserved fruits. I know she was always amiable and obliging and that everybody loved her. Miss Williams was a good deal the elder of her sister, and was of a clear white pallor and an aged delicacy and shyness that were very captivating. She had judgment and a clear, dispassionate brain, and I presume she acted the part in the little firm of a sort of court of appeals and final adviser and referee. She talked little and had little to do with outward affairs, but she sat observant and penetrating and formed conclusions in her mind. There had been no brother of The Blodgett to induce her to change her maidenly state, but I think there must have been a quiet, touching romance somewhere hidden in the shadows of the previous forty or fifty years. She admired and delighted in her energetic, practical sister as much as the latter adored her for her serenity and wisdom. There was between them an intimacy, confidence, and mutual understanding that were charming to behold. When the blessed Blodgett had died, one can imagine the vital support and consolation which Miss Williams had been able to afford to her afflicted sister. Each of them seemed, in some way, to explain and enlarge one's conception of the other. Widely different as they appeared outwardly, there was a true sisterly likeness deep down in them. Such was the feminine council that ruled the destinies of the Yankee captains and of their consul. These captains and this consul formed nine-tenths of the population of the house, and such other denizens as it had were at least Americans. I never learned the cause of this predilection for representatives of the great republic and for the seafaring variety of them in particular. Be that as it might (and it is an interesting inquiry in itself), it can be readily understood that it worked out well as a business idea. There were no quarrels or heart-burnings among the jolly occupants of Mrs. Blodgett's table; first, because they were all Americans in the country of their hereditary enemies, and, secondly, because they were all men of the same calling, and that calling the sea. The bonds of fraternity between them were double-riveted and copper-fastened. Thus all who had experienced the Blodgett regime proclaimed its excellence far and wide, and the number of applicants always exceeded the accommodations; in fact, during this year 1855-56, our hostess was compelled to buy the house adjoining her own, and I had the rare delight of watching every stroke of work done by the carpenters and bricklayers who had the job of cutting a doorway through the wall from the old house to the new one. There was something magical and adventurous in stepping through that opening for the first time--crossing a boundary which had maintained itself so long. Probably the sensation resembled that which Alice afterwards experienced when she stepped through the looking-glass into the room on the other side. The additional accommodations were speedily filled; but after the first fascination had worn off nobody regarded the new house as comparable with the old one, and the people who roomed in it were looked down upon by their associates of the original dwelling. They were, I believe, as much alike as two houses could be, and that is saying much in this age, but the feeling was different, and the feeling is everything if you have a soul. If the Blodgett house, or houses, were unique, so were the Yankee boarders. The race of our merchant-marine captains disappeared with their ships, and they will return no more. The loss is irretrievable, for in many respects they held the ideal of patriotic and energetic Americanism higher than it is likely to go again. When at sea, in command of and responsible for their ships and cargoes, they were, no doubt, upon occasion, despots and slave-drivers; but their crews were often recruited from among the dregs of men of all nations, who would interpret kindness as timidity and take an ell where you gave them an inch. No doubt, too, there were incarnate devils among these captains--actual monomaniacs of cruelty and viciousness--though none of these were known at Mrs. Blodgett's. Round her board sat men only of the manliest sort. They had the handiness and versatility of the sailor, wide and various knowledge of all quarters of the globe and of types of mankind, though, to be sure, their investigations did not proceed far beyond their ports, and you were sometimes more astonished at what they did not know than at what they did. They had the self-poise and self-confidence of men who day by day and month by month hold their lives in their hands, and are practised in finding a way out of danger and difficulty. They had a code of good manners and polite behavior which was not highly refined, but contained the sound, essential elements of courtesy; not expressed in fancy, but honest and solid. They had great shrewdness, and were capable of really fine diplomacy, for the school they attended demanded such proficiency. They had a dry, chuckling humor; a homely philosophy, often mingled with the queerest superstitions; a racy wit, smacking somewhat, of course, of the quarter-deck, or even of the forecastle; a seemingly incongruous sensibility, so that tears easily sprang to their eyes if the right chord of pathos were touched; a disposition to wear a high-colored necktie and a broad, gold watch-chain, and to observe a certain smartness in their boots and their general shore rigging; a good appetite for good food, and not a little discernment of what was good; a great and boylike enjoyment of primitive pleasures; a love of practical jokes and a hearty roar of laughter for hearty fun; a self-respecting naturalness, which made them gentlemen in substance if not in all technical details; a pungent contempt for humbug and artifice, though they might not mind a good, swaggering lie upon occasion; a robust sense of honor in all matters which were trusted to their honorable feeling; and, to make an end of this long catalogue, a practical command of language regarded as a means of expressing and communicating the essential core of thoughts, though the words might not always be discoverable in Johnson's dictionary or the grammatical constructions such as would be warranted by Lindley Murray. They were, upon the average, good-looking, active, able men, and most of them were on the sunny side of forty. They were ready to converse on any subject, but if left to themselves they would choose topics proper to their calling-ships and shipwrecks, maritime usages of various countries, of laws of insurance, of sea-rights, of feats of seamanship, of luck and ill luck, and here and there a little politics of the old-fashioned, elementary sort. They boasted themselves and their country not a little, and criticised everybody else, and John Bull especially, very severely often, but almost always very acutely, too. They would play euchre and smoke cigars from nine o'clock till eleven, and would then go to bed and sleep till the breakfast-bell. Altogether, they were fine company, and they did me much good. Such were the captains of our merchant marine about the middle of the last century. Some of them would bring their wives with them for the voyage; uniformly rather pretty women, a trifle dressy, somewhat fragile in appearance, but really sound enough; naive, simple, good souls, loving their husbands and magnifying them, and taking a vicarious pride in their ships and sea-craft. The lady-paramount of these, in my estimation, was the wife of old Captain Howes, the inventor of Howes' patent rig, which he was at that time perfecting. He would sometimes invite me up to his room to see the exquisitely finished model which he had made with his own hands. He was the commodore of the captains, the oldest, wisest, and most impressive of them; a handsome, massive, Jovelike old gentleman, with the gentlest and most indulgent manners, and a straightforward, simple mariner withal. He had ceased to make voyages, and was settled, for the time being, in Liverpool. Mrs. Howes seemed, to my boyish apprehension, to be a sort of princess of exquisite and gracious refinement; I could imagine nothing in feminine shape more delicate, of more languid grace, of finer patrician elegance. She was certainly immensely good-natured and indulgent towards me, and, in the absence of my mother, tried to teach me to be less of an Orson; she had hands which were true works of art, flexible, fine-grained, taper-fingered, and lily-white; these she used very effectively, and would fain have induced me to attempt the regeneration of my own dirty and ragged little fists. She would beseech me, also, to part my hair straight, to forbear to soil my jacket, and even to get my shoes blacked. I was thankful for these attentions, though I was unable to profit by them. Sometimes, at table, I would glance up to find her eyes dwelling with mild reproach upon me; doubtless I was continually perpetrating terrible enormities. Had she herself been less perfect and immaculate, I might have felt more hopes of my own amendment; but I felt that I was not in her class at all, and I gave up at the start. She was a wonderful human ornament, the despair, I thought, of all pursuit, not to mention rivalry. Beside the heroic figure of her captain, she looked like a lily mated with an oak; but they were as happy a pair, and as well mated, as one could hope to see. I was, perhaps, more in my proper element among the captains down in the smoking-room, which was at the back of the house, at the end of the hallway, on the left. My father sat there foot to foot with them, played euchre with them, listened to their yarns, laughed at their jokes, and felt, probably, the spirit of his own old sea-captain ancestors stirring within him. Some of them were a little shy of his official position at first, and indeed he was occasionally constrained to adopt towards one or another of them, in the consulate, a bearing very different from the easy comradeship of the Blodgett evenings; but in process of time they came to understand him, and accepted him, on the human basis, as a friend and brother. My father had the rare faculty of retaining his dignity without putting it on. No one ever took liberties with him, and he took none with anybody; yet there was no trace in his intercourse of stiffness or pose; there did not need to be, since there was behind his eye that potentiality of self--protection which renders superfluous all outward demonstration of personal sanctity. On the other hand, he obviously elevated the tone of our little society; the stout captains, who feared nothing else, feared their worser selves in his presence. None of them knew or cared a straw for his literary genius and its productions; but they were aware of something in him which they respected as well as liked, and there was no member of the company who was more popular or influential. Without letting me feel that I was the object of special solicitude or watchfulness, my father knew all that I did, and saw to it that my time was decently occupied. In addition to the dancing-lessons already mentioned (in which I became brilliantly proficient, and achieved such feats in the way of polkas, mazurkas, hornpipes, and Scotch reels as filled my instructor and myself with pride)--in addition to this, I was closeted twice a week with a very serious and earnest drawing-master, who taught me with infinite conscientiousness, and sighed heavily over the efforts which I submitted to him. The captains, who were my champions and abettors in all things, might take in their large hands a drawing of mine and the copy by the master which had been my model, and say, one to the other, "Well, now, I couldn't tell which was which--could you?" But the master could tell, and the certainty of it steeped his soul in constant gloom. I doubt if he recovered from the pangs I gave him. The fact was, I thought an hour of dancing with lovely Mary Warren was worth all the art in the world. Another instructor to whom I brought honor was thick-shouldered, portly, unctuous M. Huguenin, a Swiss, proprietor of the once-famous gymnasium which bore his name. He so anointed me with praise that I waxed indiscreet, and one day, as I was swinging on the rings, and he was pointing out to some prospective patrons my extraordinary merits, my grasp relaxed at the wrong moment and I came sailing earthward from on high. It seemed to me that, like Milton's Lucifer, "from dawn to eve I fell," M. Huguenin sprinting to intercept my fall; but I landed on a mat and was little the worse for it. I fear the prospective patrons were not persuaded, by my performance, of the expediency of gymnastic training. On the other hand, M. Huguenin managed to dispose to my father of one of his multum-in-parvo exercising-machines, on the understanding that it was to be taken back at half-price on the expiration of our stay in Liverpool; but, when that time came, M. Huguenin failed to remember having been a party to any such understanding; so the big framework was boxed up, and finally was resurrected in Concord, where I labored with it for seven or eight years more during my home-comings from Harvard. In the intervals of my other pursuits, I was, at this period, sent into society. The society at Mrs. Blodgett's was, indeed, all that I desired; but it was doubtless perceived that it was not all that my polite development required; my Orsonism was too much indulged. I was sent alone to Sandheys, the Brights' and Heywoods' place, where I was moderately ill at ease; and also to the house of a lady in town, who received a good deal of company, and there I was, at first, acutely miserable. The formalities of the drawing-room and the elegant conversation overwhelmed me with the kind of torture which Swedenborg ascribes to those spirits of the lower orders who are admitted temporarily into the upper heavens. Unlike these unfortunates, however, I presently got acclimated; other boys of my age appeared, and numbers of little girls (Mary Warren among them), and now society occupied all my thoughts. The lady of the house got up private theatricals--"Beauty and the Beast" was the play. I was cast for the parts of the Second Sister and of the Beast; Mary Warren was the Beauty. I got by heart not only my own lines, but those of all the other performers and the stage directions. The play was received with applause, and after it was done the actors were feted; my father was not present, but he appeared greatly diverted by my account of the proceedings. He was probably testing me in various ways to see what I was made of, and whether anything could be made of me. He encouraged my predilection for natural history by getting me books on conchology and taking me to museums to study the specimens and make pencil drawings of them. In these avocations I was also companioned by Frank Channing, whose specialty was ornithology, and who was making a series of colored portraits of the birds in the museum, very cleverly done. [IMAGE: WILLIAM HENRY CHANNING, 1855] Frank was the son of the Rev. William Henry Channing, who was pastor of a Unitarian church in Liverpool; he had brought his family to England at about the same time that we came. He was a nephew, I believe, of the William Ellery Channing who was one of the founders of American Unitarianism, and the brother, therefore, of the Ellery Channing of Concord. Frank inherited much of the talent of his family. He was afterwards sent to Oxford, where he took the highest honors. All intellectual operations came easy to him. He also showed a strong proclivity to art, and he was wonderfully clever in all kinds of fine handwork. He was at this time a tall and very handsome boy, about two years my senior. He was, like myself, fanatically patriotic, an American of Americans, and this brought us together in a foreign land; but, aside from that, I have seldom met a more fascinating companion. I followed him about with joy and admiration. He used to make for me tiny little three-masted ships, about six inches long, with all the rigging complete; they were named after the famous American clippers of the day, and he painted microscopic American flags to hoist over the taff-rail. He tried to teach me how to paint in water-colors, but I responded better to his eloquence regarding the future of our country. He proved to me by a mathematical demonstration, which I accepted without in the least understanding it, that in fifty years New York would be larger and more populous than London at the end of the same period. This brilliant boy seemed fitted for the highest career in his native country; his father did not contemplate a permanent stay in England, and in after years I used to look for his name in our Senate, or among the occupants of the Supreme Bench. But, as it turned out, he never revisited America, except for short periods. His father was induced to remain abroad by the success of his preaching, and Frank, after his career at Oxford, was overpowered by the subtle attractions of English culture, and could not separate himself from the old country. I saw him once while I was at Harvard. He was an Englishman in all outward respects, and seemed to be so inwardly likewise. The other day I heard of a Frank Channing in Parliament; probably the same man. But either the effect upon him of his voluntary expatriation--his failure to obey at eve the voice obeyed at prime--or some other cause, has prevented him from ever doing anything to attract attention, or to appear commensurate with his radiant promise. Henry James is the only American I know who has not suffered from adopting England; and even he might have risen higher than he has done had he overcome his distaste to the external discomforts of the democracy and cast in his lot with ours. Frank's father was a tall, intellectual, slender Yankee, endowed with splendid natural gifts, which he had improved by assiduous cultivation. In the pulpit he rose to an almost divine eloquence and passion, and a light would shine over his face as if reflected from the Holy Spirit itself. My father took a pew in his church, and sent me to sit in it every Sunday; he never went himself. He was resolved, I suppose, if there was any religion in me, to afford it an opportunity to come out. Now, I had a religious reverence for divine things, but no understanding whatever of dogma of any sort. I never learned to repeat a creed, far less to comprehend its significance. I was moved and charmed by Mr. Channing's discourses, but I did not like to sit in the pew; I did not like "church." I remember nothing of the purport of any of those sermons; but, oddly enough, I do recall one preached by a gentleman who united the profession of preacher with that of medicine; he occupied Channing's pulpit on a certain occasion, and preached on the text in John xix., 34: "But one of the soldiers with a spear pierced his side, and forthwith came thereout blood and water." The good doctor, drawing on his physiological erudition, demonstrated at great length how it was possible that blood should be mingled with the water, and showed at what precise point in Christ's body the spear must have entered. I seem to hear again his mellifluous voice, repeating at the close of each passage of his argument, "And forthwith came thereout blood-AND WATER!" I did not approve of this sermon; I was not carried to heaven in the spirit by it, as by Channing's; but somehow it has stuck in my memory all these forty-eight years. Often I stayed for a few days at a time at Channing's house; his wife was a handsome, delicate, very nervous woman; his daughter Fanny was a beauty, and became still more beautiful in after years; she was married, when past her first youth, to Edwin Arnold, author of "The Light of Asia," and of many rhetorical leading articles in the London Telegraph. She died a few years ago. They were, all of them, kind to me. I did the best I could to be a good little boy there; but I recollect Mrs. Channing's face of sorrow and distress when, one day at dinner, I upset into my lap my plate, which she had just filled with Irish stew--one of my best-loved dishes. "Frank never does that," she murmured, as she wiped me up; "never-never!" Nobody looked cheerful, and I never got over that mortification. XI Bennoch and Bright like young housekeepers--"What did you marry that woman for?"--"Mrs. Caudle's Curtain Lectures"-- "The worst book anybody ever wrote"--"Most magnificent eye I ever saw"--A great deal of the feminine in Reade--Fire, pathos, fun, and dramatic animation--A philosophical library in itself--Amusing appanage of his own book--Oily and voluble sanctimoniousness--Self-worship of the os-rotundus sort--Inflamed rather than abated by years--"Every word of it true; but--"--Better, or happier, because we had lived-- Appropriated somebody else's adventure--Filtering remarks through the mind of a third person--A delightful Irishman-- Unparalleled audacity--An unregenerate opinion--The whole line of Guelphs in it--"Oh, that somebody would invent a new sin!"--"The Angel in the House"--Very well dressed-- Indomitable figure, aggressively American--Too much of the elixir of life--A little strangeness between us--Sunshine will always rest on it. The central event of 1856 was the return from Lisbon and Madeira of my mother and sisters. Measuring time, as boys do (very sensibly), not by the regulated pace of minutes, but by the vast spaces covered by desire, it appeared to me, for some decades, that they had been absent in those regions for years--two years at least; and I was astonished and almost incredulous when dates seemed to prove that the interval had been six or eight months only. It was long enough. In the course of the previous spring my father made two or three little excursions of a few days or a week or so in various directions, commonly convoyed by Bright or Bennoch, who were most enterprising on his behalf, feeling much the same sort of ambition to show him all possible of England and leading English folk that a young housekeeper feels to show her visiting school-friend her connubial dwelling and its arrangements, and to take her up in the nursery and exhibit the children. Had my father improved all his opportunities he would have seen a great deal, but the consulate would have been administered by the clerks. He took trips through Scotland and the north of England, and south to London and the environs; dined at the Milton Club and elsewhere, visited the Houses of Parliament, spent a day with Martin Farquhar Tupper, author of Proverbial Philosophy, and still was not remarkably absent from the dingy little office down by the docks, or from the euchre games in Mrs. Blodgett's smoking-room. For the most part, I did not accompany him on these excursions, being occupied in Liverpool with my pursuit of universal culture; yet not so much occupied as to prevent me from feeling insolvent while he was away, and rich as Aladdin when he got back. For his part, he struggled with low spirits caused by anxiety lest the next mail from Portugal should bring ill news of the beloved invalid there (instead of the cheerful news which always did come); his real life was suspended until she should return. Partings between persons who love each other seem to be absolute loss of being; but that being revives, with a new spiritual strength, when all partings are over. Of the people whom he met on these sallies, I saw some, either then or later: Disraeli, Douglas Jerrold, Charles Reade, Tom Taylor, Bailey, the author of that once-famous philosophic poem, "Festus"; Samuel Carter Hall, and a few more. Disraeli, in 1856, had already been chancellor of the exchequer and leader of the house, and was to hold the same offices again two years later. He had written all but two of his novels, and had married the excellent but not outwardly attractive lady who did so much to sustain him in his career. At a dinner of persons eminent in political life, about this juncture, Mr. and Mrs. Disraeli were present, and also Bernal Osborne, a personage more remarkable for cleverness and aggressiveness, in the things of statesmanship, than for political loyalty or for a sense of his obligations to his associates. This gentleman had drunk a good deal of wine at dinner, and had sat next to Mrs. Disraeli; when the ladies had left the table he burst out, with that British brutality which often passes for wit, "I say, Disraeli, what on earth did you marry that woman for?" All talk was hushed by this astounding query, and everybody looked at the sallow and grim figure to whom it was addressed. Disraeli for some moments played with his wineglass, apparently unmoved; then he slowly lifted his extraordinary black, glittering eyes to those of his questioner. "Partly for a reason," he said, measuring his words in the silence, "which you will never be capable of understanding--gratitude!" The answer meant much for both of them; it was never forgotten, and it extinguished the clever and aggressive personage. It was ill crossing swords with Disraeli. Douglas Jerrold was at the height of his fame and success in this year; he died, I think, the year following, at the age of fifty-four. He was very popular during his later lifetime, but he seems to have just missed those qualities of the humorist which insure immortality; he is little more than a name to this generation. He was the son of an actor, and had himself been on the stage; indeed, he had tried several things, including a short service as midshipman in his Majesty's navy. He wrote some two-score plays, and was a contributor to Punch from its outset; there are several books to his credit; and he edited Lloyd's Weekly Newspaper, which was first called by his own name. But people who have read or heard of nothing else of his, have heard of or read "Mrs. Caudle's Curtain Lectures." Douglas Jerrold, however, is by no means fully pictured by anything which he wrote; his charm and qualities came out in personal intercourse. Nor does the mere quotation of his brightnesses do him justice; you had to hear and see him say them in order to understand them or him. He was rather a short man, with a short neck and thick shoulders, much bent, and thick, black hair, turning gray. His features were striking and pleasing; he had large, clear, prominent, expressive black eyes, and in these eyes, and in his whimsical, sensitive mouth, he lived and uttered himself. They took all the bitterness and sting out of whatever he might say. When he was about to launch one of his witticisms, he fixed his eyes intently on his interlocutor, as if to call his attention to the good thing coming, and to ask his enjoyment of it, quite apart from such application to himself as it might have. It was impossible to meet this look and to resent whatever might go with it. Thus a friend of his, who wished to write telling books but could not quite do it, came to him in haste one day and exclaimed, aggrievedly, "Look here, Douglas, is this true that was told me--that you said my last book was the worst I'd ever written?" Douglas gazed earnestly into the flushed and troubled face, and said, in his softest tones, "Oh no, my dear fellow, that isn't what I said at all; what I did say was that it was the worst book anybody ever wrote." Such a retort, so delivered, could not but placate even an outraged author. Of Charles Reade my father saw little, and was not impressed by what he saw; but Reade, writing of him to my sister Una, five-and-twenty years after, said, "Your father had the most magnificent eye that I ever saw in a human head." Reade was just past forty at the time he met my father, and had just published _It Is Never Too Late to Mend_--the first of his great series of reform novels. Christie Johnstone and Peg Woffington were very clever, and written with immense vigor and keenness, but did not give the measure of the man. I doubt if my father had as yet read any of them; but later he was very fond of Reade's writings. Certainly he could not but have been moved by The Cloister and the Hearth, the greatest and most beautiful of all historical novels. He saw in him only a tall, athletic, light-haired man with blue eyes. I was more fortunate. I not only came to know Reade in 1879, but also knew several persons who knew him intimately and loved and admired him prodigiously; they were all in one story about him. He was then still tall and athletic, but his wavy hair and beard were gray; his face was one of the most sensitive men's faces I ever saw, and his forehead was straight and fine, full of observation and humor; his eyes were by turns tender and sparkling. There was a great deal of the feminine in Reade, together with his robust and aggressive masculinity. The fault of his head was its lack of depth; there was not much distance from the ear to the nostril, and the backhead was deficient. It was high above. There was a discord or incongruity in his nature, which made his life not what could be called a happy one. He had the impulses of the radical and reformer, but not the iron or the impassivity which would have enabled him to endure unmoved the attacks of conservatism and ignorance. He kicked against the pricks and suffered for it. He was passionate, impatient, and extreme; but what a lovely, irresistible genius! He was never a society figure, and withdrew more and more from personal contact with people; but he kept up to the last the ardor of his attack upon the abuses of civilization--or what he deemed to be such. He fell into some errors, but they were as nothing to the good he effected even in external conditions; and the happiness and benefit he brought to tens of thousands of readers by the fire, pathos, fun, sweetness, and--dramatic animation of his stories, and by the nobility and lovableness of many of the characters drawn in them, are immeasurable, and will touch us and abide with us again when the welter of the present transition state has passed. His devotion to the drama injured his style as a novelist, and also led him to adopt a sort of staccato manner of construction and statement which sometimes makes us smile. But upon the ground proper to his genius Reade had no rival. A true and full biography of him, by a man bold enough and broad enough to write it, would be a stirring book. Bailey, the amiable mystical poet, whom my father mildly liked, was another man my glimpses of whom came at a date much later than this. He was a small, placid, gently beaming little philosopher, with a large beard and an oval brow, and though he wrote several things besides "Festus," they never detached themselves in the public mind from the general theme of that production. Bailey himself seemed finally to have recognized this, and he spent his later years (he lived to a great age) in issuing continually fresh editions of his book, with expansions and later thoughts, until it got to be a sort of philosophical library in itself. He appeared in society in order to give his admirers opportunity to offer up their grateful homage, and to settle for them all questions relative to the meaning of man and of religion. No misgivings troubled him; his smile was as an unintermittent summer noonday. He was accompanied by his wife, with whom he seemed to be, as Tennyson says, "twinned, like horse's ear and eye." She relieved him from the embarrassing necessity of saying illuminative and eulogistic things about himself and his great work. The book, upon its first publication, was really read by appreciable numbers of persons; later, I think, "Festus Bailey" came to be, to the general mind, an amusing kind of appanage of his own work, which was now taken as read, but ceased to have readers. How happy a little imperviousness may make a good man! Tom Taylor, the dramatist, Punch contributor, and society wit, I remember only as a pale face and a black beard. His wit had something of a professional tang. There are many like him in club-land and hanging about the stage; they catch up and remember all the satirical sayings, the comicalities, and quips that they hear, and they maintain a sort of factory for the production of puns. Their repartee explodes like an American boy's string of toy crackers, and involves, to set it going, no greater intellectual effort. They are not, in their first state, less intelligent than the common run of men--rather the contrary; but as soon as they have gone so far as to acquire a reputation for wit, their output begins to betray that sad, perfunctory quality which we find in wound-up music-boxes, and that mechanical rattle makes us forget that they ever had brains. However, Tom Taylor, with his century of plays and adaptations--among them "Our American Cousin," which the genius of an actor, if not its own merit, made memorable--should not be deemed unworthy of the reputation which, in his time and place, he won. He was at his best when, stimulated by applause and a good dinner, he portrayed persons and things with a kind of laughable extravagance, in the mode introduced by Dickens. Men of his ilk grow more easily in our soil than in the English, and are much less regarded. Henry Stevens--"the man of libraries," as my father calls him--was a New-Englander, born in Vermont; he took betimes to books, came abroad, and was employed by the British Museum in getting together Americana, and by various collectors as an agent to procure books, and in these innocent pursuits his amiable life was passed. He had a pleasing gift of drollery, which made his companionship acceptable at stag-parties and in the smoking-room of the clubs, and he had also a fund of special information on literary subjects which was often of value. I met him in after-life--twenty-five years after--and age had not altered him, though, perhaps, custom had somewhat staled his variety. He was of medium stature, dark haired and bearded. With him was often seen the egregious Mr. Pecksniff (as Samuel Carter Hall was commonly known to his acquaintances since the publication of Martin Chuzzlewit ten years before). Hall was a genuine comedy figure. Such oily and voluble sanctimoniousness needed no modification to be fitted to appear before the footlights in satirical drama. He might be called an ingenuous hypocrite, an artless humbug, a veracious liar, so obviously were the traits indicated innate and organic in him rather than acquired. Dickens, after all, missed some of the finer shades of the character; there can be little doubt that Hall was in his own private contemplation as shining an object of moral perfection as he portrayed himself before others. His perversity was of the spirit, not of the letter, and thus escaped his own recognition. His indecency and falsehood were in his soul, but not in his consciousness; so that he paraded them at the very moment that he was claiming for himself all that was their opposite. No one who knew him took him seriously, but admired the ability of his performance, and so well was he understood that he did little or no harm beyond the venting of a spite here and there and the boring of his auditors after the absurdity of him became tedious. Self-worshippers of the _os-rotundus_ sort are seldom otherwise mischievous. He may be sufficiently illustrated by two anecdotes. They both occurred at a dinner where I was a guest, and Bennoch sat at the head of the table. Hall sat at Bennoch's left hand, and my place was next to Hall's. The old gentleman--he was at this period panoplied in the dignity of a full suit of snow-white hair, and that unctuous solemnity and simpering self-complacency of visage and demeanor which were inflamed rather than abated by years--began the evening by telling in sesquipedalian language a long tale of an alleged adventure of his with my father, which, inasmuch as there was no point to it, need not be rehearsed here; but I noticed that Bennoch was for some reason hugely diverted by it, and found difficulty in keeping his hilarity within due bounds of decorum, Hall's tone being all the while of the most earnest gravity. Later I took occasion to ask Bennoch the secret of his mirth; was the tale a fiction? "Not a bit of it," Bennoch replied; "it's every word of it true; but what tickled me was that it was myself and not Hall who was in the adventure with your father; but Hall has been telling it this way for twenty years past, and has long since come to believe that his lie is the truth." So ended the first lesson. The second was administered shortly before the company dispersed. Mr. Hall again got the floor to deliver one of his more formal moral homilies. "And, my dear friends--my very dear friends," he went on, resting his finger-ends upon the table, and inclining his body affectionately towards his auditors, "may I, as an old man--I think the oldest of any of you here present--conclude by asking your indulgence for an illustration from the personal experience and custom of one who may, I think--who at least has ever striven to be, a humble Christian gentleman--may I, my dear friends, cite this simple example of what I have been attempting to inculcate from my own personal practice, and that of my very dear and valued wife, Mrs. Hall? It has for very many years been our constant habit, before seeking rest at night, to kneel down together at our bedside, and to implore, together, the Divine blessing upon the efforts and labors of the foregoing day. And before offering up that petition to the Throne of Grace, my friends "--here the orator's voice vibrated a little with emotion--"we have ever been sedulous to ask each other, and to question our own hearts, as to whether, during that day, some human fellow-creature had been made better, or happier, because we had lived. And very seldom has it happened--very seldom, indeed, my dear friends, has it happened--that we were unable to say to ourselves, and to each other, that, during that day, some fellow-creature, if not more than one, had had cause for thankfulness because we had lived. And now I will beg of you, my dear friends," added Mr. Hall, producing his large, white pocket-handkerchief and patting his eyes with it, "to pardon a personal allusion, made in fulness of heart and brotherly feeling, and if there be found in it anything calculated to assist any of you towards a right comprehension of our Christian responsibilities towards our fellow-man, I entreat that you take it into your hearts and bosoms, and may it be sanctified unto you. I have done." This report may be relied upon as substantially accurate, for the reporter made a note of the apologue and exhortation soon afterwards. Mrs. Hall, like her husband, was of Irish birth, and an agreeable and clever woman. They were both born in 1800, and died, she in her eighty-second, he in his ninetieth year. He remained the same Hall to the very end of his long chapter, and really, if no one was the better because he had lived, I don't know that any one was the worse, in the long run, either; and there have been Pecksniffs of whom as much could hardly be affirmed. There is, however, an anecdote of Hall which my father tells, and seems to have credited; if it be true, it would appear that once at least in his life he could hardly have implored the Throne of Grace for a blessing on the deeds of the day. "He told me," writes my father, "(laughing at the folly of the affair, but, nevertheless, fully appreciating his own chivalry) how he and Charles Lever, about ten years since, had been on the point of fighting a duel. The quarrel was made up, however, and they parted good friends, Lever returning to Ireland, whence Mr. Hall's challenge had summoned him." I suspect good Mr. Hall must have once more appropriated somebody else's adventure; it was not in the heat of youth that the bloody-minded and unchristian episode is supposed to have occurred, but when Mr. Hall was in his forty-seventh year. Durham, the sculptor, was a lifelong friend of Bennoch's, and was often in my father's company, and he manifested a friendly feeling towards my father's son long afterwards. He was a man of medium height, compactly built, with slightly curling hair, and a sympathetic, abstracted expression of countenance. He was at this time making a bust of Queen Victoria, and he told us that it was contrary to court etiquette for her Majesty, during these sittings, to address herself directly to him, or, of course, for him directly to address her; they must communicate through the medium of the lady-in-waiting. The Queen, however, said Durham, sometimes broke through this rule, and so did the sculptor, the democracy of art, it would seem, enabling them to surmount the obligation to filter through the mind of a third person all such remarks as they might wish to make to each other. Durham also said that when the bust was nearly finished the Queen proposed that a considerable thickness of the clay should be removed from the model, which was done. The bust, as an ideal work, was thereby much improved, but the likeness to her Majesty was correspondingly diminished. Years afterwards I was talking with W. G. Wills, the painter and dramatist, a delightful Irishman of the most incorrigibly republican and bohemian type. He had, a little while before, been giving lessons in painting to the Princess Louise, who married the Marquis of Lorne, and who was, herself, exceptionally emancipated for a royal personage. One day, said Wills (telling the story quite innocently), the Princess was prevented from coming as usual to his studio, and he received a message from Windsor Castle, where the Princess and the Queen were staying, from the Queen's secretary, commanding his presence there to give the Princess her lesson, and to spend the night. This would be regarded by the ordinary British subject not only as an order to be instantly and unhesitatingly obeyed, but as a high honor and distinction. "But the fact is," said Wills, with his easy smile, "I'd promised to be at my friend Corkran's reception that evening, and, of course, I couldn't think of disappointing him; there was no time to write, so I just sent a telegram to the castle saying I was engaged." Probably English society history does not contain a parallel to this piece of audacity, and one would have liked to see the face of the private secretary of her Majesty when he opened the telegram. But Wills could not be made to recognize anything singular in the affair. Commenting in one of his private note-books, at this time, upon the subject of modern sculpture in general, my father utters one of his unregenerate opinions. "It seems to me," he says, "time to leave off sculpturing men and women naked; such statues mean nothing, and might as well bear one name as another; they belong to the same category as the ideal portraits in books of beauty or in the windows of print-shops. The art does not naturally belong to this age, and the exercise of it, I think, had better be confined to manufacture of marble fireplaces." As we shall see, he modified this radical view before he left Italy; but there is some ground of truth in it, nevertheless. Here is another bit of art criticism. He has been giving a detailed description of the sitting-room in one of our lodgings, and of the objects contained in it, evidently as a part of his general practice to record the minor facts of English life, to serve as a background for the English romance he hoped to write afterwards. "On the mantle-piece," he writes, "are two little glass vases, and over it a looking-glass (not flattering to the beholder), and above hangs a colored view of some lake or seashore, and on each side a cheap colored print of Prince Albert and one of Queen Victoria. And, really, I have seen no picture, bust, or statue of her Majesty which I feel to be so good a likeness as this cheap print. You see the whole line of Guelphs in it--fair, blue-eyed, shallow-brained, commonplace, yet with a simple kind of heartiness and truth that make one somewhat good-natured towards them." "I must see Dickens before I leave England," he wrote, commenting upon the various tales he heard of him from henchmen and critics; but he never did see him, nor Thackeray either, whom he perhaps wished still more to meet. Thackeray visited America while we were abroad; and when Dickens came to Boston to read, my father was dead. Nor did he see Bulwer, an apostrophe by whom he quotes: "Oh, that somebody would invent a new sin, that I might go in for it!" Tennyson he saw, but did not speak with him. He sat at table, on one occasion, with Macaulay, and remarked upon the superiority over his portraits of his actual appearance. He made the acquaintance, which ripened into friendship, in Italy, of Robert Browning and his wife, and of Coventry Patmore, the author of "The Angel in the House," a poem which he greatly liked. But, upon the whole, he came in contact with the higher class of literary men in England less than with others, whom he was less likely to find sympathetic. One afternoon, when I had accompanied him to the consulate, there entered a tall, active man, very well dressed, with black, thick-curling hair and keen, blue eyes. He seemed under thirty years of age, but had the self-confident manner of a man of the world, and a great briskness of demeanor and speech. He sat down and began to tell of his experiences; he had been all over the world, and knew everything about the world's affairs, even the secrets of courts and the coming movements of international politics. He was a striking, handsome, indomitable figure, and aggressively American. When he went away, he left with my father a book which he had written, with an engraved portrait of the author for frontispiece. This volume, faded and shelf-worn, but apparently unread, bound in the execrable taste of a generation and a half ago, I recently found among my father's volumes. It bore on the title-page the dashing signature of George Francis Train. Train saw things in the large--in their cosmic relations; from us he was going forth to make a fortune compared with which that of Monte Cristo would be a trifle. He did make fortunes, I believe; but there seems to have been in his blood a little too much of the elixir of life--more than he could thoroughly digest. His development was arrested, or was continued on lines which carried him away from practical contact with that world which he believed he held in the hollow of his hand. My father suspected his soundness; but in 1856 there seemed to be no height to which he might not rise. The spiritual steam-engine in him, however, somehow got uncoupled from the mass of the machinery of human affairs, and has been plying in vacua, so to say, ever since. On the 9th of June came a telegram from Southampton; my mother and sisters had arrived from Madeira. My father and I left Liverpool the next day, feeling that our troubles were over. In the afternoon we alighted at the little seaport and took a cab to the Castle Hotel, close to the water. My father, with a face full of light, sprang up-stairs to the room in which my mother awaited him; I found myself with my sisters and Fannie Wrigley, the faithful nurse and companion who had accompanied them on their travels. How tall and mature Una was! What a big girl baby Rose had become! There was a little strangeness between us, but great good-will; we felt that there were a great many explanations to be made. In a few minutes I was called up-stairs to my mother. At the first glance she seemed smaller than formerly; her face appeared a little different from my memory of it; I was overcome by an odd shyness. She smiled and held out her arms; then I saw my beloved mother, and a great passion of affection poured through me and swept me to her. I was whole again, and indescribably happy. There was never such another heavenly room as that parlor in the Castle Hotel; never another hotel so delightful, or another town to be compared with Southampton. I was united to all I loved there, and in my thoughts sunshine will always rest on it. XII Talked familiarly with kings and queens--Half-witted girl who giggled all the time--It gnawed me terribly--A Scotch terrier named Towsey--A sentiment of diplomatic etiquette-- London as a physical entity--Ladies in low-necked dresses-- An elderly man like a garden-spider--Into the bowels of the earth--The inner luminousness of genius--Isolated and tragic situation--"Ate ever man such a morsel before!"--The great, wild, mysterious Borrow--Her skeleton, huddled, dry, and awful--"Ma'am, you expose yourself!"--Plane, spokeshave, gouge, and chisel--"I-passed-the-Lightning"--Parallel-O- grams-A graduate of Antioch--"Continual cursing"--A catastrophe--"Troubles are a sociable sisterhood"--"In truth I was very sorry"--He had dreamed wide--awake of these things--A friend of Emerson and Henry James--Embarked at Folkestone for France. We spent our first reunited week at the Castle Hotel, which was founded on an ancient castle wall, or part of it; traces of it were shown to guests. The harbor lapped the sea-wall in front; the Isle of Wight, white-ramparted, gleamed through the haze in the offing. I suppose, during that week, we were enough employed in telling one another our histories during our separation; and naturally that of my mother and sisters filled the larger space. They had brought home words and phrases in a foreign tongue, which made me feel very ignorant; they had talked familiarly with kings and queens; they had had exciting experiences in Madeira; they brought with them photographs and colored prints of people and places, unlike anything that I had seen. My mother, who was an unsurpassed narrator of events, gave us wonderful and vivid accounts of all they had seen and done, which I so completely assimilated that to this day I could repeat a great deal of them; my father listened with eyes like stars (as my mother would have said), and with a smile in the corners of his mouth. It was glorious weather all the time, or so it seems to have been to me. My sisters and I renewed our acquaintance, and found one another none the worse. Nobody called on us except a Mrs. Hume, with whom a stay of a fortnight was projected; she kept a girls' school, and, this being vacation, she would take us as boarders. We were starved there, as only a pinching, English, thin-bread-and-butter housekeeper can starve people; and my sisters and I had for our playmate a half-witted girl who was staying over the vacation, and who giggled all the time. Mrs. Hume had aroused my enthusiasm by telling me that there were endless sea-anemones along the coast; but Providence seemed hostile to my sea-anemone proclivities; for it turned out that what Mrs. Hume understood by sea-anemones was a small, white-flowering weed that grew on the low bluff beside the water. I never told her my disappointment, imagining that it would distress her; but it gnawed me terribly, and she did not merit such forbearance. We would much better have stayed at the hotel, only that they charged us fourteen dollars a day, which was considered exorbitant in those days. There were seven of us, including Fanny, the nurse. What an age, when two dollars a head was exorbitant! What Mrs. Hume charged us I know not, but it is only just to admit that it must have been a good deal less than one hundred dollars a week; though, again, it must not be forgotten that translucent bread-and-butter is not expensive. We were sent there, I suppose, in order to remind us that this was still the world that we were living in, after all, and not yet Paradise. We came out from her sobered and chastened, but cheerful still; and meanwhile we visited Stonehenge and other local things of beauty or interest. Then Mr. Bennoch (who, to tell the truth, had introduced Mrs. Hume to us) invited us to spend a month at his house in Blackheath, while he and his wife were making a little tour in Germany, and we arrived at this agreeable refuge during the first half of July. My father records that he was as happy there as he had ever been since leaving his native land. It was a pleasant little house, in a semi-countrified spot, and it contained, besides the usual furniture proper to an English gentleman and his wife of moderate fortune, a little Scotch terrier named Towsey, who commanded much of the attention of us children, and one day inadvertently bit my thumb; and I carry the scar, for remembrance, to this day. Many well-known persons passed across our stage here; and London, with all its wonders, was at our doors, the wide expanse of its smoke-piercing towers visible in our distance. All the while my father kept the official part of himself at Liverpool, where his consular duties still claimed his attention; he went and came between Mrs. Blodgett's and Black-heath. The popularity of the incomparable boarding-house in Duke Street had continued to increase, and he was obliged to bestow himself in a small room at the back of the building, which was reputed to be haunted by the spirit of one of his predecessors in office, who had not only died in it, but had often experienced there the terrors of delirium tremens; but the ghost, perhaps from a sentiment of diplomatic etiquette, never showed itself to my father. Or it may have been that the real self of him being in Blackheath, what remained was not sufficient to be conscious of a spiritual presence. He came and went, like sunlight on a partly cloudy day. I recollect taking a walk over the Heath at evening with him and the doctor who was attending my mother; Mr. Bennoch was with us; it must have been just before he and his wife went to the Continent. After walking some distance (the gentlemen chatting together, and I gambolling on ahead) we came to the summit of a low rise, from which we beheld London, flung out, all its gloomy length, before us; and in all my thoughts of London as a physical entity the impression then received of it returns to me. It lay vast, low, and obscure in front of the dull red of the sunset, with dim lights twinkling dispersedly throughout it, and the dome of St. Paul's doubtfully defining itself above the level. There is no other general view of London to be compared with this, seen under those conditions. Soon after, we came to some ridges and mounds, which, said Bennoch, marked the place where were buried the heaps of the slain of some great prehistoric battle--one, at least, which must have taken place while the Romans yet ruled Britain. It was a noble scene for such an antique conflict, when man met man, foot to foot and hand to hand, with sword and spear. My mind was full of King Arthur and his Round-Table knights of the Pendragonship, and I doubted not that their mightiest fight had been fought here. There were many walks in London itself. One day, going west along the Strand, we found ourselves drawn into the midst of a vast crowd near Charing Cross; some royal function was in progress. Threading our way slowly through the press, we saw a troop of horsemen in steel breastplates, with nodding plumes on their helmets, and drawn swords carried upright on their thighs--the famous Horse Guards; and farther on we began to see carriages with highly ornamental coachmen and footmen passing in dilatory procession; within them were glimpses of ladies in low-necked dresses, feathers in their hair, and their necks sparkling with jewels. At length we turned off towards the north, and by-and-by were entering a huge building of gray stone, with tall pillars in front of it, which my father told me was the British Museum. What a place for a boy! Endless halls of statues; enormous saloons filled with glass-cases of shells; cases of innumerable birds; acres of butterflies and other insects; strange objects which I did not understand--magic globes of shining crystal, enormous masses of iron which were said to have fallen from the sky; vases and jewels; and finally, at the farther end of a corridor, a small door, softly opening, disclosed a circular room of stupendous proportions, domed above, the curving walls filled with myriads of books. In the centre was a circular arrangement of desks, and in the midst of these an elderly man, like a garden-spider in his web; but it was his duty to feed, not devour, the human flies who sat or walked to and fro with literary meat gathered from all over the world. It was my first vision of a great library. Another time we went--all of us, I think--to the Tower of London. I vibrated with joy at the spectacle of the array of figures in armor, and picked out, a score of times, the suit I would most gladly choose to put on. Here were St. George, King Arthur, Sir Scudamour, Sir Lancelot--all but their living faces and their knightly deeds! Then I found myself immured in dungeons with walls twenty feet thick, darksome and low-browed, with tiny windows, and some of them bearing on their stones strange inscriptions, cut there by captives who were nevermore to issue thence, save to the block. Here the great Raleigh had been confined; here, the lovable, rash-tempered Essex; here, the noble Sir Henry Vane, who had once trod the rocky coast of my own New England. Everywhere stood on the watch or paced about the Beef-eaters in their brilliant fifteenth-century motley. I have never since then passed the portals of the Tower, nor seen again the incomparable gleam of the Koh-i-noor--if it were, indeed, the Koh-i-noor that I saw, and not a glass model foisted on my innocence. Again, I followed my father down many flights of steps, into the bowels of the earth; but there were lights there, and presently we passed through a sort of turnstile, and saw lengthening out before us two endless open tubes, of diameter twice or thrice the height of a man, with people walking in them, and disappearing in their interminable perspective. We, too, entered and began to traverse them, and after we had proceeded about half-way my father told me that the river Thames was flowing over our heads, with its ships on its surface, and its fishes, and its bottom of mud and gravel--under all these this illuminated corridor, with ourselves breathing and seeing and walking therein. Would we ever again behold the upper world and the sky? The atmosphere was not pleasant, and I was glad to find myself climbing up another flight of stairs and emerging on the other side of the river, which we had crossed on foot, dry-shod. Of the famous personages of this epoch I did not see much; only I remember that a woman who seemed taller than common, dressed in a dark silk gown, and moving with a certain air of composure, as if she knew she was right, and yet meant to be considerate of others; whose features were plain, and whose voice had a resonance and modulation unlike other voices, was spoken of in my hearing as bearing a name which I had heard often, and which had a glamour for my boyish imagination--Jenny Lind. There also rises before me the dark, courteous visage and urbane figure of Monckton Milnes; but there was something more and better than mere courtesy and urbanity about him; the inner luminousness, I suppose, of what was nearly genius, and would have been altogether that but for the swaddling-clothes of rank and society which hampered it. My father thought him like Longfellow; but there was an English materialism about Milnes from which the American poet was free. Henry James told me long afterwards a comical tale of how, being left to browse in Mimes's library one afternoon, he strayed into an alcove of pretty and inviting volumes, in sweet bindings, mellowed by age, and was presently terrified by the discovery that he was enmeshed in the toils of what bibliophiles term, I think, "Facetiae"--of which Milnes had a collection unmatched among private book-owners. Milnes's social method was The Breakfast, which he employed constantly, and nothing could be more agreeable--in England; we cannot acclimate it here, because we work in the afternoon. Of Miss Bacon, of the Bacon-wrote-Shakespeare theory, I saw nothing, but heard much, for a time, in our family circle; my father seemed to have little doubt of her insanity, and absolute certainty of the despotic attitude she adopted towards her supporters, which was far more intolerable than the rancor which she visited on those who disregarded her monomaniacal convictions. My mother, out of pure compassion, I believe, for the isolated and tragic situation in which the poor woman had placed herself, tried with all her might to read the book and believe the theory; she would take up the mass of manuscript night after night, and wade through it with that truly saintlike self-abnegation which characterized her, occasionally, too, reading out a passage which struck her. The result was that she could not bring herself to disbelieve in Shakespeare, but she conceived a higher admiration than ever of Bacon; and that, too, was characteristic of her. We made several incursions into the surrounding country. One was to Newstead, where, from the talkative landlady of the hotel, we heard endless stories about Byron and his wife; this was before Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe published her well-intended but preposterous volume about the poet. Then we visited Oxford, and were shown about by the mayor of the town, and by Mr. S. C. Hall, and were at one moment bathed in the light emanating from Lady Waldegrave, of which interview my father, in his private note-book, speaks thus: "Lady Waldegrave appeared; whereupon Mr. Speirs (the mayor) instantly was transfigured and transformed--like the English snob he is, worthy man--and looked humbler than he does in the presence of his Maker, and so respectful and so blest that it was pleasant to behold him. Nevertheless, she is but a brummagem kind of countess, after all, being the daughter of Braham, the famous singer, and married first to an illegitimate son of an Earl Waldegrave--not to the legitimate son and possessor of the title (who was her first love)--and after the death of these two to the present old Mr. Harcourt. She is still in her summer, even if it be waning, a lady of fresh complexion and light hair, a Jewish nose (to which her descent entitles her), a kind and generous expression of face, but an officer-like figure and bearing. There seems to be a peculiarity of manner, a lack of simplicity, a self-consciousness, which I suspect would not have been seen in a lady born to the rank which she has attained. But, anyhow, she was kind to all of us, and complimentary to me, and she showed us some curious things which had formerly made part of Horace Walpole's collection at Twickenham--a missal, for instance, splendidly bound and beset with jewels, but of such value as no setting could increase, for it was exquisitely illuminated by the own hand of Raphael himself! I held the precious volume in my grasp, though I fancy (and so does my wife) that the countess scarcely thought it safe out of her own hands. In truth, I suppose any virtuoso would steal it if he could; and Lady Waldegrave has reason to look to the safe-keeping of her treasures, as she exemplified by telling us a story while exhibiting a little silver case. This once contained a portion of the heart of Louis XII. (how the devil it was got I know not), and she was showing it one day to Strickland, Dean of Westminster, when, to her horror and astonishment, she saw him open the case and swallow the royal heart! Ate ever man such a morsel before! It was a symptom of insanity in the dean, and I believe he is since dead, insane." It was after this interview with the countess that we visited Old Boston, and when my parents told old Mr. Porter about the missal his jolly eyes took on a far-away expression, as if he saw himself in the delightful act of purloining it, "in obedience to a higher law than that which he broke." The man who, of all writing men, was nearest to my heart in those years, and long after, was George Borrow, whose book, Lavengro, I had already begun to read. The publication of this work had made him famous, though he had written two or three volumes before that, and was at this very time bringing out its sequel, Romany Rye. But Borrow was never a hanger-on of British society, and we never saw him. One day, however, Mr. Martineau turned up, and, the conversation chancing to turn on Borrow, he said that he and George had been school-mates, and that the latter's gypsy proclivities had given him a singular influence over other boys. Finally, he had persuaded half a dozen of them to run away from the school and lead a life of freedom and adventure on the roads and lanes of England. To this part of Mr. Martineau's tale I lent an eager and sympathetic ear; but the narrator was lowered in my estimation by the confession that he himself had not been a member of Borrow's party. He went on to say that the fugitives had been pursued and captured and brought back to bondage; and upon Borrow's admitting that he had been the instigator of the adventure, he was sentenced to be flogged, and that it was on the back of this very Martineau that he had been "horsed" to undergo the punishment! Imagine the great, wild, mysterious Borrow mounted upon the ascetic and precise cleric that was to be, and the pedagogue laying on! My father asked concerning the accuracy of some of Borrow's statements in his books, to which Martineau replied that he could not be entirely depended on; not that he meant to mislead or misrepresent, but his imagination, or some eccentricity in his mental equipment, caused him occasionally to depart from literal fact. Very possibly; but Borrow's imagination brought him much nearer to essential truth than adherence to what they supposed to be literal facts could bring most men. One of the most interesting expeditions of this epoch--though I cannot fix the exact date--was to an old English country-seat, built in the time of Henry VIII., or earlier, and added to from age to age since then, until now it presented an irregularity and incongruousness of plan which rendered it an interminable maze of delight to us children wandering through it. We were taken in charge by the children of the family, of whom there were no fewer than fourteen, all boys, with only twelve years between the eldest and the youngest (some of them being twins). Hide-and-seek at once suggested itself as the proper game for the circumstances, but no set game was needed; the house itself was Hide-and-seek House; you could not go twenty feet without getting lost, and the walls of many of the rooms had sliding panels, and passages through the thickness of them, and even staircases, so that when one of us went into a room there was no predicting where he would come out. Finally they brought us to a black, oaken door with a great, black lock on it, and bolts at the top and bottom; it was near the end of a corridor, in the oldest wing of the building. The door, in addition to its native massiveness, was studded with great nails, and there were bands of iron or steel crossing it horizontally. When we proposed to enter, our friends informed us that this door had been closed one hundred and eighty years before and had never been opened since then, and that it had shut in a young woman who, for some reason, had become very objectionable or dangerous to other persons concerned. The windows of the room, they added, had been walled up at the same time; so there this unhappy creature slowly starved to death in pitch darkness. There, doubtless, within a few feet of where we stood, lay her skeleton, huddled, dry, and awful in the garments she wore in life. Sometimes, too, by listening long at the key-hole, you could hear a faint sound, like a human groan; but it was probably merely the sigh of the draught through the aperture. This story so horrified me and froze my young blood that the fancies of Mrs. Radcliffe and Edgar Allan Poe seemed like frivolous chatter beside it. About the middle of September the Bennochs returned from the Continent, and we made ready to transfer ourselves to the lodgings in Southport which had been prepared for us. Bennoch, who was soon to meet with the crucial calamity of his career, was in abounding spirits, and he told my father an anecdote of our friend Grace Greenwood, which is recorded in one of the private note-books. "Grace, Bennoch says," he writes, "was invited to a private reading of Shakespeare by Charles Kemble, and she thought it behooved her to manifest her good taste and depth of feeling by going into hysterics and finally fainting away upon the floor. Hereupon Charles Kemble looked up from his book and addressed himself to her sternly and severely. 'Ma'am,' said he, 'this won't do! Ma'am, you disturb the company! Ma'am, you expose yourself!'" This last hit had the desired effect, for poor Grace probably thought that her drapery had not adjusted itself as it ought, and that perhaps she was really exposing more of her charms than were good to be imparted to a mixed company. So she came to herself in a hurry, and, after a few flutterings, subsided into a decorous listener. Bennoch says he had this story from an eye-witness, and that he fully believes it; and I think it not impossible that, betwixt downright humbug and a morbid exaggeration of her own emotions, Grace may have been betrayed into this awful fix. I wonder how she survived it! At Southport we remained from the middle of September to the following July, 1857. In addition to my aquarium, I was deeply involved in the ship-building industry, and, the more efficiently to carry out my designs, was apprenticed to a carpenter, an elderly, shirt-sleeved, gray-bearded man, who under a stern aspect concealed a warm and companionable heart. There were boys at the beach who had little models of cutters and yachts, and I conceived the project of making a sail-boat for myself. My father seems to have thought that some practical acquaintance with the use of carpenter's tools would do me no harm--by adding a knowledge of a handicraft to my other culture--so he arranged with Mr. Chubbuck that I should attend his work-shop for instruction. Mr. Chubbuck, accordingly, gave me thorough lessons in the mysteries of the plane, the spokeshave, the gouge, and the chisel, and finally presented me with a block of white pine eighteen inches long and nine wide, and I set to work on my sloop. He oversaw my labors, but conscientiously abstained from taking a hand in them himself; the model gradually took shape, and there began to appear a bluff-bowed, broad-beamed craft, a good deal resembling the French fishing-boats which I afterwards saw off the harbors of Calais and Havre. The outside form being done, I entered upon the delightful and exciting work of hollowing it out with the gouge, narrowly avoiding, more than once, piercing through from the hold into the outer world. But the little ship became more buoyant every day, and finally stood ready for her deck. This I prepared by planing down a bit of plank to the proper thickness--or thinness--and carefully fitted it into its place, with companionways fore and aft, covered with hatches made to slide in grooves. Next, with chisel, spoke-shave, and sand-paper, I prepared the mast and fitted a top-mast to it, and secured it in its place with shrouds and stays of fine, waxed fishing-line. The boom and gaff were then put in place, and Fanny Wrigley (who had aforetime made my pasteboard armor and helmet) now made me a main-sail, top-sail, and jib out of the most delicate linen, beautifully hemmed, and a tiny American flag to hoist to the peak. It only remained to paint her; I was provided with three delectable cans of oil-paint, and I gave her a bright-green under-body, a black upper-body, and white port-holes with a narrow red line running underneath them. Thus decorated, and with her sails set, she was a splendid object, and the boys with bought models were depressed with envy, especially when I called their attention to the stars and stripes. This boat-building mania of mine had originated while we were at Mrs. Blodgett's, where the captain of one of the clippers gave me a beautiful model of his own ship, fully rigged, and perfect in every detail; only it would not sail, being solid. Concerning his clipper, by-the-way, I once overheard a bit of dialogue in Mrs. Blodgett's smoking-room between my captain and another. "Do you mean to say," demanded the latter, "that you passed the Lightning?" To which my captain replied, in measured and impressive tones, "I-passed-the-Lightning!" The Lightning, it may be remarked, was at that time considered the queen of the Atlantic passage; she had made the trip between Boston and Liverpool in ten days. But my captain had once shown her his heels, nevertheless. I wanted to christen my sloop The Sea Eagle, but my father laughed so much at this name that I gave it up; he suggested The Chub, The Mud-Pout, and other ignoble titles, which I indignantly rejected, and what her name finally was I have forgotten. She afforded me immense happiness. At Southport we had a queer little governess, Miss Brown, who came to us highly recommended both as to her personal character and for ability to instruct us in arithmetic and geometry, geography, English composition, and the rudiments of French. She was barely five feet in height, and as thin and dry as an insect; and although her personal character came up to any eulogium that could be pronounced upon it, her ignorance of the "branches" specified was, if possible, greater than our own. She was particularly perplexed by geometry; she aroused our hilarity by always calling a parallelogram a parallel-O-gram, with a strong emphasis on the penultimate syllable; and she spent several days repeating over to herself, with a mystified countenance, the famous words, "The square of the hypothenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the two legs." What were legs of a triangle, and how, if there were any, could they be square? She never solved this enigma; and although we liked little Miss Brown very much, she speedily lost all shadow of control over us; we treated her as a sort of inferior sister, and would never be serious. "English governess" became for us a synonym for an amiable little nonentity who knew nothing; and I was surprised to learn, later, from the early works of Miss Rhoda Broughton, that they could be beautiful and intelligent. Miss Brown did not outlast our residence in Southport. From Southport we removed to Manchester, and thence, after exhausting the exposition, to Leamington, where we spent September and October of 1857. We expected to proceed direct from Leamington to France and Italy, but we were destined to be delayed in London till January of 1858. It was in Leamington that we were joined by Ada Shepard. She was a graduate of Antioch, a men-and-women's college in Ohio, renowned in its day, when all manner of improvements in the human race were anticipated from educating the sexes together. Miss Shepard had got a very thorough education there, so that she knew as much as a professor, including--what would be of especial service to us--a knowledge of most of the modern European languages. What seemed, no doubt, of even more importance to her was her betrothal to her classmate, Henry Clay Badger; they were to be married on her return to America. Meanwhile, as a matter of mutual convenience (which rapidly became mutual pleasure), she was to act as governess of us children and accompany our travels. Ada (as my father and mother presently called her) was then about twenty-two years old; she had injured her constitution--never robust--by addiction to learning, and had incidentally imbibed from the atmosphere of Antioch all the women's-rights fads and other advanced opinions of the day. These, however, affected mainly the region of her intellect; in her nature she was a simple, affectionate, straightforward American maiden, with the little weaknesses and foibles appertaining to that estate; and it was curious to observe the frequent conflicts between these spontaneous characteristics and her determination to live up to her acquired views. But she was fresh-hearted and happy then, full of interest in the wonders and beauties of the Old World; she wrote, weekly, long, criss-crossed letters, in a running hand, home to "Clay," the king of men; and periodically received, with an illuminated countenance, thick letters with an American foreign postage-stamp on them, which she would shut herself into her chamber to devour in secret. She was a little over the medium height, with a blue-eyed face, not beautiful, but gentle and expressive, and wearing her flaxen hair in long curls on each side of her pale cheeks. She entered upon her duties as governess with energy and good-will, and we soon found that an American governess was a very different thing from an English one (barring the Rhoda Broughton sort). Her special aim at present was to bring us forward in the French and Italian languages. We had already, in Manchester, made some acquaintance with the books of the celebrated Ollendorff; and my father, who knew Latin well, had taught me something of Latin grammar, which aided me in my Italian studies. I liked Latin, particularly as he taught it to me, and it probably amused him, though it must also often have tried his patience to teach me. I had a certain aptitude for the spirit of the language, but was much too prone to leap at conclusions in my translations. I did not like to look out words in the lexicon, and the result was sometimes queer. Thus, there was a sentence in some Latin author describing the manner in which the Scythians were wont to perform their journeys; relays of fresh horses would be provided at fixed intervals, and thus they were enabled to traverse immense distances at full speed. The words used were, I think, as follows: "Itaque conficiunt iter continuo cursu." When I translated these, "So they came to the end of their journey with continual cursing," I was astonished to see my father burst into inextinguishable laughter, falling back in his chair and throwing up his feet in the ebullience of his mirth. I heard a good deal of that "continual cursing" for some years after, and I believe the incident prompted me to pay stricter attention to the dictionary than I might otherwise have done. However, what with Ollendorff and Miss Shepard, we regarded ourselves, by the time we were ready to set out for the Continent, as being in fair condition to ask about trains and to order dinner. My mother, indeed, had from her youth spoken French and Spanish fluently, but not Italian; my father, though he read these languages easily enough, never attained any proficiency in talking them. After he had wound up his consular affairs, about the first week in October, we left Leamington and took the train for a few days in London, stopping at lodgings in Great Russell Street, close to the British Museum. We were first delayed by friendly concern for the catastrophe which at this moment befell Mr. Bennoch. He was a wholesale silk merchant, but his literary and social tendencies had probably led him to trust too much to the judgment and ability of his partners; at all events, on his return from Germany he had found the affairs of his establishment much involved, and he was now gazetted a bankrupt. In the England of those days bankruptcy was no joke, still less the avenue to fortune which it is sometimes thought to be in other countries; and a man who had built up his business during twenty years by conscientious and honorable work, and who was sensitively proud of his commercial honor, was for a time almost overwhelmed by the disaster. My father felt the most tender sympathy and grief for him, and we were additionally depressed by a report, circumstantially detailed (but which proved to be unfounded), that Mrs. Bennoch had died in childbirth--they had never had children. "Troubles," commented my father "(as I myself have experienced, and many others before me), are a sociable sisterhood; they love to come hand-in-hand, or sometimes, even, to come side by side, with long-looked-for and hoped-for good-fortune." He was doubtless thinking of that dark and bright period when his mother lay dying in his house in Salem and The Scarlet Letter was waiting to be born. A few days later he went by appointment to Bennoch's office in Wood Street, Cheapside, and I will quote the account of that interview for the light it casts on the characters of the two friends: "When I inquired for Bennoch, in the warehouse where two or three clerks seemed to be taking account of stock, a boy asked me to write my name on a slip of paper, and took it into his peculiar office. Then appeared Mr. Riggs, the junior partner, looking haggard and anxious, poor man. He is somewhat low of stature, and slightly deformed, and I fancied that he felt the disgrace and trouble more on that account. But he greeted me in a friendly way, though rather awkwardly, and asked me to sit down a little while in his own apartment, where he left me. I sat a good while, reading an old number of Blackwood's Magazine, a pile of which I found on the desk, together with some well-worn ledgers and papers, that looked as if they had been pulled out of drawers and pigeon-holes and dusty corners, and were not there in the regular course of business. By-and-by Mr. Riggs reappeared, and, telling me that I must lunch with them, conducted me up-stairs, and through entries and passages where I had been more than once before, but could not have found my way again through those extensive premises; and everywhere the packages of silk were piled up and ranged on shelves, in paper boxes, and otherwise--a rich stock, but which had brought ruin with it. At last we came to that pleasant drawing-room, hung with a picture or two, where I remember enjoying the hospitality of the firm, with their clerks all at the table, and thinking that this was a genuine scene of the old life of London City, when the master used to feed his 'prentices at a patriarchal board. After all, the room still looked cheerful enough; and there was a good fire, and the table was laid for four. In two or three minutes Bennoch came in--not with that broad, warm, lustrous presence that used to gladden me in our past encounters--not with all that presence, at least--though still he was not less than a very genial man, partially be-dimmed. He looked paler, it seemed to me, thinner, and rather smaller, but nevertheless he smiled at greeting me, more brightly, I suspect, than I smiled back at him, for in truth I was very sorry. Mr. Twentyman, the middle partner, now came in, and appeared as much or more depressed than his fellows in misfortune, and to bear it with a greater degree of English incommunicativeness and reserve. But he, too, met me hospitably, and I and these three poor ruined men sat down to dinner--a good dinner enough, by-the-bye, and such as ruined men need not be ashamed to eat, since they must needs eat something. It was roast beef, and a boiled apple-pudding, and--which I was glad to see, my heart being heavy--a decanter of sherry and another of port, remnants of a stock which, I suppose, will not be replenished. They ate pretty fairly, but scarcely like Englishmen, and drank a reasonable quantity, but not as if their hearts were in it, or as if the liquor went to their hearts and gladdened them. I gathered from them a strong idea of what commercial failure means to English merchants--utter ruin, present and prospective, and obliterating all the successful past; how little chance they have of ever getting up again; how they feel that they must plod heavily onward under a burden of disgrace--poor men and hopeless men and men forever ashamed. I doubt whether any future prosperity (which is unlikely enough to come to them) could ever compensate them for this misfortune, or make them, to their own consciousness, the men they were. They will be like a woman who has once lost her chastity: no after-life of virtue will take out the stain. It is not so in America, nor ought it to be so here; but they said themselves they would never again have put unreserved confidence in a man who had been bankrupt, and they could not but apply the same severe rule to their own case. I was touched by nothing more than by their sorrowful patience, without any fierceness against Providence or against mankind, or disposition to find fault with anything but their own imprudence; and there was a simple dignity, too, in their not assuming the aspect of stoicism. I could really have shed tears for them, to see how like men and Christians they let the tears come to their own eyes. This is the true way to do; a man ought not to be too proud to let his eyes be moistened in the presence of God and of a friend. They talked of some little annoyances, half laughingly. Bennoch has been dunned for his gas-bill at Blackheath (only a pound or two) and has paid it. Mr. Twentyman seems to have received an insulting message from some creditor. Mr. Riggs spoke of wanting a little money to pay for some boots. It was very sad, indeed, to see these men of uncommon energy and ability, all now so helpless, and, from managing great enterprises, involving vast expenditures, reduced almost to reckon the silver in their pockets. Bennoch and I sat by the fireside a little while after his partners had left the room, and then he told me that he blamed himself, as holding the principal position in the firm, for not having exercised a stronger controlling influence over their operations. The two other men had recently gone into speculations, of the extent of which he had not been fully aware, and he found the liabilities of the firm very much greater than he had expected. He said this without bitterness, and said it not to the world, but only to a friend. I am exceedingly sorry for him; it is such a changed life that he must lead hereafter, and with none of the objects before him which he might heretofore have hoped to grasp. No doubt he was ambitious of civic, and even of broader public distinction; and not unreasonably so, having the gift of ready and impressive speech, and a behavior among men that wins them, and a tact in the management of affairs, and many-sided and never-tiring activity. To be a member of Parliament--to be lord mayor--whatever an eminent merchant of the world's metropolis may be--beyond question he had dreamed wide-awake of these things. And now fate itself could hardly accomplish them, if ever so favorably inclined. He has to begin life over again, as he began it twenty-five years ago, only under infinite disadvantages, and with so much of his working-day gone forever. "At parting, I spoke of his going to America; but he appeared to think that there would be little hope for him there. Indeed, I should be loath to see him transplanted thither myself, away from the warm, cheerful, juicy English life into our drier and less genial sphere; he is a good guest among us, but might not do well to live with us." Bennoch was never lord mayor or member of Parliament; I do not know that he cared to be either; but he lived to repay all his creditors with interest, and to become once more a man in easy circumstances, honored and trusted as well as loved by all who knew him, and active and happy in all good works to the end of his days. There could be no keeping down such a man, even in England; and when I knew him, in after years, he was the Bennoch of yore, grown mellow and wise. We were now ready for the Continent, when symptoms of some malady began to manifest themselves among the younger persons of the family, which presently culminated in an attack of the measles. It was six weeks before we were in condition to take the road again. Meanwhile we were professionally attended by Dr. J. J. Garth Wilkinson, a homoeopathist, a friend of Emerson and of Henry James the elder, a student of Swedenborg, and, at this particular juncture, interested in spiritualism. In a biography of my father and mother, which I published in 1884, I alluded to this latter circumstance, and some time afterwards I received from his wife a letter which I take this opportunity to print: "4 FINCHLEY ROAD, N. W., June 19, 1885. "DEAR SIR,--May I beg of you in any future edition of the Life of your father to leave out your passage upon my husband and spiritualism? He is utterly opposed to it now. On Mr. Home's first appearance in England very remarkable things did occur; but from the first I was a most decided opponent, and by my firmness I have kept all I know and love from having anything to do with it for at least thirty-five years. You may imagine, therefore, I feel hurt at seeing so spiritually minded a man as my husband really is to be mixed up with so evil a thing as spiritism. You will pardon a faithful wife her just appreciation of his character. One other author took the liberty of using his name in a similar way, and I wrote to him also. Believe me, "Yours faithfully, "E. A. WILKINSON." The good doctor and his wife are now, I believe, both of them in the world where good spirits go, and no doubt they have long ere this found out all about the rights and wrongs of spiritism and other matters, but there is no doubt that at the time of my father's acquaintance with him the doctor was a very earnest supporter of the cult. He was a man of mark and of brains and of most lovable personal quality; he wrote books well worth deep study; Emerson speaks of "the long Atlantic roll" of their style. Henry James named his third son after him--the gentle and brave "Wilkie" James, who was my school-mate at Sanborn's school in Concord after our return to America, and who was wounded in the fight at Fort Fisher while leading his negro soldiers to the assault. But for the present, Dr. Wilkinson, so far as we children knew him, was a delightful and impressive physician, who helped us through our measles in masterly style, under all the disadvantages of a foggy London winter. On the 5th of January, 1858--we were ready to start the next day--Bennoch came to take tea with us and bid us farewell. "He keeps up a manly front," writes my father, "and an aspect of cheerfulness, though it is easy to see that he is a very different man from the joyous one whom I knew a few months since; and whatever may be his future fortune, he will never get all the sunshine back again. There is a more determinate shadow on him now, I think, than immediately after his misfortunes; the old, equable truth weighs down upon him, and makes him sensible that the good days of his life have probably all been enjoyed, and that the rest is likely to be endurance, not enjoyment. His temper is still sweet and warm, yet, I half fancy, not wholly unacidulated by his troubles--but now I have written it, I decide that it is not so, and blame myself for surmising it. But it seems most unnatural that so buoyant and expansive a character should have fallen into the helplessness of commercial misfortune; it is most grievous to hear his manly and cheerful allusions to it, and even his jokes upon it; as, for example, when we suggested how pleasant it would be to have him accompany us to Paris, and he jestingly spoke of the personal restraint under which he now lived. On his departure, Julian and I walked a good way down Oxford Street and Holborn with him, and I took leave of him with the truest wishes for his welfare." The next day we embarked at Folkestone for France, and our new life began. XIII Old-Homesickness--The Ideal and the Real--A beautiful but perilous woman with a past--The Garden of Eden a Montreal ice-palace--Confused mountain of family luggage--Poplars for lances--Miraculous crimson comforters--Rivers of human gore-- Curling mustachios and nothing to do--Odd behavior of grown people--Venus, the populace, and the MacDaniels--The happiness to die in Paris--Lived alone with her constellations--"O'Brien's Belt"--A hotel of peregrinations-- Sitting up late--Attempted assassination--My murderer--An old passion reawakened--Italian shells and mediaeval sea- anemones--If you were in the Garden of Eden--An umbrella full of napoleons--Was Byron an Esquimau? No doubt my father had grown fond of England during his four years' residence there. Except for its profits he had not, indeed, liked the consular work; but even that had given zest to his several excursions from it, which were in themselves edifying and enjoyable. The glamour of tradition, too, had wrought upon him, and he had made friends and formed associations. Such influences, outwardly gentle and unexacting, take deeper hold of the soul than we are at the time aware. They show their strength only when we test them by removing ourselves from their physical sphere. Accordingly, though he looked forward with pleasure to leaving England for the Continent, he was no sooner on the farther side of the narrow seas than he began to be conscious of discomfort, which was only partly bodily or sensible. An unacknowledged homesickness afflicted him--an Old-Homesickness, rather than a yearning for America. He may have imagined that it was America that he wanted, but, when at last we returned there, he still looked back towards England. As an ideal, America was still, and always, foremost in his heart; and his death was hastened partly by his misgiving, caused by the civil war, lest her best days were past. But something there was in England that touched a deep, kindred chord in him which responded to nothing else. America might be his ideal home, but his real home was England, and thus he found himself, in the end, with no home at all outside of the boundaries of his domestic circle. A subconscious perception of this predicament, combined with his gradually failing health, led him to say, in a moment of frank self-communion, "Since this earthly life is to come to an end, I do not try to be contented, but weary of it while it lasts." It is true that Rome, vehemently as at first he rebelled against it, came at last to hold a power over him. Rome, if you give it opportunity, subtly fastens its grasp upon both brain and heart, and claims sympathies which are as undeniable as our human nature itself. Yet there is something morbid in our love for the mystic city, like a passion for some beautiful but perilous woman with a past--such as Miriam in The Marble Faun, for example. Only an exceptionally vigorous and healthy constitution can risk it without danger. Had my father visited Rome in his young manhood, he might have both cared for it less and in a sense have enjoyed it more than he did during these latter years of his life. But from the time we left London, and, indeed, a little before that, he was never quite himself physically. Our departure was made at the most inclement moment of a winter season of unusual inclemency; they said (as they always do) that no weather to be compared with it had been known for twenty years. We got up before dawn in London, and after a dismal ride in the train to Folkestone, where the bitter waves of the English Channel left edgings of ice on the shingle beach where I went to pick up shells, we were frost-bitten all our two-hours passage across to Boulogne, where it became cold in dead earnest, and so continued all through Paris, Lyons, and Marseilles, and down the Mediterranean to Genoa and Civita Vecchia, and thence up the long, lonely, bandit-haunted road to Rome, and in Rome, with exasperating aggravations, right up to April, or later. My own first recollection of St. Peter's is that I slid on the ice near one of the fountains in the piazza of that famous edifice; and my father did the same, with a savage satisfaction, no doubt, at thus proving that everything was what it ought not to be. Either in London, or at some intermediate point between that and Paris, he caught one of the heaviest colds that ever he had; and its feverish and debilitating effects were still perceptible in May. "And this is sunny Italy--and this is genial Rome!" he wrathfully exclaims. It was like looking forward to the Garden of Eden all one's life, and going to vast trouble and expense to get there, and, on arriving, finding the renowned spot to be a sort of Montreal ice-palace. The palaces of Rome are not naturally fitted to be ice-palaces, and the cold feels all the colder in them by consequence. But I am going too fast. The first thing my father did, after getting on board the little Channel steamer, was to go down in the cabin and drink a glass of brandy-and-water, hot, with sugar; and he afterwards remarked that "this sea-passage was the only enjoyable part of the day." But the wind cut like a scimitar, and he came on deck occasionally only--as when I came plunging down the companion-way to tell him, with the pride of a discoverer, that France was broad in sight, and the sun was shining on it. "Oh!" exclaimed my mother, looking up from her, pale discomfortableness on a sofa, with that radiant smile of hers, and addressing poor Miss Shepard, who was still further under the sinister influence of those historic alpine fluctuations which have upset so many. "Oh, Ada, Julian says the sun is shining on France!" Ada never stirred. She was the most amiable and philosophic of young ladies; but if thought could visit her reeling brain at that moment, she probably wondered why Providence had been so inconsiderate as to sever Britain from its Gallic base in those old geologic periods before man was yet born to sea-sickness. Sunshine on the pale, smooth acclivities of France, and half a dozen bluff-bowed fishing-boats, pitching to the swell, were all that was notable on our trip across; and of Boulogne I remember nothing, except the confused mountain of the family luggage on the pier, and afterwards of its being fed into the baggage-car of the train. Ollendorff abandoned me thus early in my travels; nor was my father much better off. But Miss Shepard, now restored to life, made amends for her late incompetence by discoursing with excited French officials with what seemed to me preternatural intelligence; indeed, I half doubted whether there were not some conspiracy to deceive in that torrent of outlandish sounds which she and they were so rapidly pouring forth to one another. However, all turned out well, and there we were, in a compartment of a French railway-train, smelling of stale tobacco, with ineffective zinc foot-warmers, and an increasing veil of white frost on the window-panes, which my sisters and myself spent our time in trying to rub off that France might become visible. But the white web was spun again as fast as we dissipated it, and nothing was to be seen, at all events, but long processions of poplars, which interested me only because I imagined myself using them as lances in some romantic Spenserian adventure of knight-errantry--for the spell of that chivalric dream still hung about me. So we came to Amiens, a pallid, clean, chilly town, with high-shouldered houses and a tall cathedral, and thence went on to Paris at five o'clock. It was already dusk, and our transit to the Hotel de Louvre in crowded cabs, through streets much unlike London, is the sum of my first impressions of the wonderful city. Then, marshalled by princely yet deferential personages in rich costumes, we proceeded up staircases and along gilded corridors to a suite of sumptuous apartments, with many wax candles in candelabra, which were immediately lighted by an attendant, and their lustre was reflected from tall mirrors which panelled the rooms. The furniture thus revealed was costly and elegant, but hardly comfortable to an English-bred sense; the ceilings were painted, the floor rich with glowing carpets. But the glow of color was not answered by a glow of any other sort; a deadly chill pervaded this palatial place, which fires, as big as one's fist, kindled in fireplaces as large as hall bedrooms, did nothing to dissipate. Hereupon our elders had compassion on us, and, taking from the tall, awful bedsteads certain crimson comforters, they placed each of us in an easy-chair and tucked the comforters in over us. These comforters, covered with crimson silk, were of great thickness, but also of extraordinary lightness, and for a few minutes we had no confidence in their power to thaw us. But they were filled with swan's-down; and presently a novel and delightful sensation--that of warmth--began to steal upon us. It steadily increased, until in quarter of an hour there might be seen upon our foreheads and noses, which were the only parts of us open to view, the beads of perspiration. It was a marvellous experience. The memory of the crimson comforters has remained with me through life; light as sunset clouds, they accomplished the miracle of importing tropic warmth into the circle of the frozen arctic. I think we must have been undressed and night-gowned before this treatment; at any rate, I have forgotten how we got to bed, but to bed we somehow got, and slept the blessed sleep of childhood. The next morning my father, apparently as an accompaniment of his cold, was visited by a severe nosebleed; no importance was attached to it, beyond its preventing him from going forth to superintend the examination of our luggage at the custom-house--the mountain having been registered through from London. This duty was, therefore, done by Miss Shepard and my mother. The next day, at dinner, the nosebleeding began again. "And thus," observed my father, "my blood must be reckoned among the rivers of human gore which have been shed in Paris, and especially in the Place de la Concorde, where the guillotines used to stand"--and where our restaurant was. But these bleedings, which came upon him at several junctures during his lifetime, and were uniformly severe and prolonged, probably had a significance more serious than was supposed. The last one occurred not many weeks before his death, and it lasted twenty-four hours; he was never the same afterwards. He joked about it then, as now, but there was the forewarning of death in it. But that day lies still unsuspected in the future, six years away. For the present, we were in splendid Paris, with Napoleon III. in the Tuileries, and Baron Haussmann regnant in the stately streets. For a week we went to and fro, admiring and--despite the cold, the occasional icy rains, and once even a dark fog--delighted. In spirit and in substance, nothing could be more different from London. For my part, I enjoyed it without reservation; the cold, which depressed my sick father, exhilarated me. For Notre Dame, the Tuileries, the Louvre, the Madeleine, the pictures, and the statues, I cared little or nothing; I hardly even heeded the column of the Place Vendome or the mighty mass of the Arc de Triomphe. But the Frenchiness of it all captivated me. The throngs in the streets were kaleidoscopic in costume and character: priests, soldiers, gendarmes, strange figures with turbans and other Oriental accoutrements; women gayly dressed and wearing their dresses with an air; men with curling mustachios, and with nothing to do, apparently, but amuse themselves; romantic artists with soft felt hats and eccentric beards; grotesque figures of poverty in rags and with ominous visages, such as are never seen in London; martial music, marching regiments, with gorgeous generals on horseback, with shining swords; church processions; wedding pageants crowding in and out of superb churches; newspapers, shop-signs, and chatter, all in French, even down to the babble of the small children. And the background of this parade was always the pleasant, light-hued buildings, the majority of them large and of a certain uniformity of aspect, as if they had been made in co-operation, and to look pretty, instead of independently and incongruously, as in England. These people seemed to be all playing and prattling; nobody worked; even the shopkeepers held holiday in their shops. Such was my boyish idea of Paris. Napoleon had been emperor only five or six years; he had been married to Eugenie only four or five; and, so far as one could judge who knew nothing of political coups d'etat and crimes, he was the right man in the right place. Moreover, the French bread was a revelation; it tasted better than cake, and was made in loaves six feet long; and the gingerbread, for sale on innumerable out-door stalls, was better yet, with quite a new flavor. I ate it as I walked about with my father. He once took a piece himself, and, said he, "I desired never to taste any more." How odd is, sometimes, the behavior of grown-up people! But even my father enjoyed the French cookery, though he was in some doubt whether it were not a snare of the evil one to lure men to indulgence. We dined in the banquet-hall of our hotel once or twice only; in general we went to neighboring restaurants, where the food was just as good, but cost less. I was always hungry, but hungrier than ever in Paris. "I really think," wrote my father, "that Julian would eat a whole sheep." In his debilitated state he had little appetite either for dinners or for works of art; he looked even upon the Venus of Milo with coldness. "It seemed," wrote he, speaking of the weather one morning, "as if a cold, bitter, sullen agony were interposed between each separate atom of our bodies. In all my experience of bad atmospheres, methinks I never knew anything so atrocious as this. England has nothing to compare with it." The "grip" was a disease unnamed at that epoch, but I should suppose that it was very vividly described in the above sentence. He had the grip, and for nearly six months he saw everything through its medium. Besides the Venus and the populace, we saw various particular persons. I went with my father to the bank, and saw a clerk give him a long roll of bright gold coins, done up in blue paper; and we visited, or were visited by, a Miss MacDaniel and her mother, two Salem women, "of plain, New England manners and appearance," wrote my father, "and they have been living here for nearly two years. The daughter was formerly at Brook Farm. The mother suffered so much from seasickness on the passage that she is afraid to return to America, and so the daughter is kept here against her will, and without enjoyment, and, as I judge, in narrow circumstances. It is a singular misfortune. She told me that she had been to the Louvre but twice since her arrival, and did not know Paris at all." This looks like a good theme for Mr. Henry James. We called on the American minister to Paris, Judge John Young Mason, a simple and amiable personage. He was rubicund and stolid, and talked like a man with a grievance; but, as my father afterwards remarked, it was really Uncle Sam who was the aggrieved party, in being mulcted of seventeen thousand dollars a year in order that the good old judge should sleep after dinner in a French armchair. The judge was anticipating being superseded in his post, but, as it turned out, was not driven to seek second-rate employment to support himself in his old age; he had the happiness to die in Paris the very next year. But the most agreeable of our meetings was with Miss Maria Mitchell, the astronomer, who, like ourselves, was stopping a few days in Paris on her way to Rome. She desired the protection of our company on the journey, though, as my father remarked, she looked well able to take care of herself. She was at this time about forty years old; born in Nantucket; the plainest, simplest, heartiest of women, with a face browned by the sun, of which she evidently was accustomed to see as much as of the other stars in the heavens. Her mouth was resolute and full of expression; but her remarkable feature was her eyes, which were dark and powerful, and had the kindest and most magnetic look of comradeship in them. Her dark hair was a little grizzled. She was dressed in plain gray, and was active and energetic in her movements. She was, as the world knows, a woman of unusual intellect and character; but she had lived alone with her constellations, having little contact with the world or practical knowledge of it, so that in many respects she was still as much a child as I was, and I immediately knew her for my friend and playmate and loved her with all my heart. There was a charming quaintness and innocence about her, and an immense, healthy curiosity about this new old world and its contents. She had a great flow of native, spontaneous humor, and could say nothing that was not juicy and poignant. She was old-fashioned, yet full of modern impulses and tendencies; warmhearted and impulsive, but rich in homely common-sense. Though bold as a lion, she was, nevertheless, beset with the funniest feminine timidities and misgivings, due mainly, I suppose, to her unfamiliarity with the ways of the world. There was already a friendship of long standing between her and Miss Shepard, and they did much of their sightseeing during the coming year together, and debated between themselves over the statues and pictures. Her talk with us children was of the fine, countrified, racy quality which we could not resist; and in the evenings, as we journeyed along, she told us tales of the stars and gave us their names. On the steamer going to Genoa, one night, she pointed out to me the constellation Orion, then riding high aloft in glittering beauty, and I kindly communicated to my parents the information that the three mighty stars were known to men as O'Brien's Belt. This was added to the ball of jolly as a household word. [IMAGE: MARIA MITCHELL] Miss Mitchell's trunk was contributed to our mountain, when we set out anew on our pilgrimage, with a result at first deplorable, for the number of our own pieces of luggage being known and registered in the official documents, it turned out, at our first stopping-place, that the trunk of our new companion had been substituted for one of our own, which, of course, was left behind. It was ultimately recovered, I believe, but it seemed as if the entire world of French officialdom had to be upheaved from its foundations in order to accomplish it. Our route lay through Lyons to Marseilles. At Lyons I remember only the enormous hotel where we slept the first night, with corridors wandering like interminable streets, up-stairs and down, turning corners, extending into vistas, clean-swept, echoing, obscure, lit only by the glimmering candle borne by our guide. We seemed to be hours on our journey through these labyrinths; and when at last we reached our rooms, they were so cold and so unwarmable that we were fain to journey back again, up and down, along and athwart, marching and countermarching past regiments of closed doors, until at length we attained the region of the hotel dining-saloon, where it was at least two or three degrees less cold than elsewhere. After dinner we had to undertake a third peregrination to bed, and a fourth the next morning to get our train. The rooms of the hotel were on a scale suited to the length of the connecting thoroughfares, and the hotel itself stood hard by a great, empty square with a statue in the middle of it. But the meals were not of a corresponding amplitude. And I think it was at the railway station of this town that the loss of the trunk was discovered. The region from Lyons to Marseilles, along the valley of the Rhone, with the lower ranges of the Alps on our left hand, was much more picturesque than anything France had shown us hitherto. Ancient castles crowned many of the lower acclivities; there were villages in the vales, and presently vineyards and olive groves. The Rhone, blue and swift as its traditions demanded, kept us close company much of the way; the whole range of country was made for summer, and the wintry conditions under which we saw it seemed all the more improper. It must have been near midnight when our train rolled into the station at Marseilles, and my pleasure in "sitting up late" had long become stale. The sun shone the next morning, and, being now in the latitude of Florence and such places, it could not help being hot, though the shaded sides of the streets were still icy cold; and most of the streets were so narrow that there was a great deal of shade. The whole population seemed to be out-of-doors and collecting in the sun, like flies, a very animated and voluble population and of a democratic complexion; the proportion of poor folks was noticeable, and the number of women, who seemed to camp out in the squares and market-places, and there gossip and do their knitting, as other women might at their firesides; but here the sun is the only fire. But a good deal of the bustle this morning was occasioned by the news from Paris that an attempt to assassinate Napoleon III. had been made the day before; had we remained one day longer in Paris we might have assisted at the spectacle. The Marseilles people seemed to take it comfortably; nobody was very sorry that the attempt had been made, nor very glad that it had not succeeded. It was something to talk about. It was ten years more before the French got thoroughly used to the nephew of his uncle and decided that he was, upon the whole, a good thing; and soon after they lost him. And for a decade after Sedan, chatting with the boulevardiers in Paris, they would commonly tell me that they wished they had the empire back again. Perhaps they will have it, some day. There was a great deal of filth in Marseilles streets and along her wharves and in the corners of her many public squares; and even our hotel, the "Angleterre," was anything but clean; it was a tall, old rookery, from the windows of our rooms in which I looked down into an open space between the strange, old buildings, and saw a juggler do his marvels on a bit of carpet spread on the pavement, while a woman handed him the implements of magic out of a very much travelled and soiled deal-box. Later in the day, when the place was deserted, I heedlessly flung out of the window the contents of a glass of water, and, looking after it in its long descent, I was horrified to see approaching a man of very savage and piratical aspect, with a terrible black beard and a slouch hat. As luck would have it, the water struck him full on the side of the face, probably the first time in many a year that he had felt the impact of the liquid there. I withdrew my head from the window in alarm, mingled with the natural joy that a boy cannot help feeling at such a catastrophe; and by-and-by, when I felt certain that he must have passed on, I peeped out again, but what were my emotions at beholding him planted terribly right under the window where he had been baptized, and staring upward with a blood-thirsty expression. I immediately drew back again, but too late--our eyes had met, and he had made a threatening gesture at me. I now felt that a very serious thing had happened, and that if I ventured out upon the streets again I should assuredly be assassinated; that it would be no mere attempt, as in the case of the Emperor, but a pronounced success. I did not tell my fears to any of my family--I had not, to say the truth, informed any of them of the incident which had imperilled my life, but I no longer felt any curiosity to see more of Marseilles, and was sincerely thankful when I found myself, betimes next morning, on board the Calabrese, bound for Genoa. I never saw my murderer again, but I could make a fair likeness of him, I believe, to-day. The trip to Genoa, and onward to Civita Vecchia, lasted two or three days, the steamer generally pursuing her course by night and laying up by day. The first morning, soon after sunrise, found us approaching the bay of Genoa, with the sun rising over the Mediterranean on our right and throwing its light upon the curving acclivity on which the city stands. The water had a beautiful blue-green color and was wonderfully clear, so that, looking down through it over the ship's side, as we glided slowly to our moorings, I saw sea-weeds and blocks of marble and other marine curiosities which reawakened my old passion for aquariums. Indeed, to be candid with the reader--as is my study throughout this narrative--nothing in Genoa the Superb itself has, I find, remained with me so distinctly as that glimpse of the floor of the bay through the clear sea-water. I did not care to go up into the town and see the palaces and churches; I wanted to stay on the beach and hunt for shells--Italian shells--and classical or mediaeval sea-anemones. Of course, I had to go up into the town; and I saw, no doubt, the churches and the palaces, with their rooms radiant with the mellow brilliance of precious marbles and painted ceilings, and statues and pictures, under the personal conduct of no less an individual than Salvator Rosa himself--for that was the name of our guide--and for years afterwards I never doubted that he was the creator of the paintings which, in Rome and elsewhere, bore his signature. I say I must have seen these things, but in memory I cannot disentangle them from the innumerable similar objects which I beheld, later, in other Italian cities; their soft splendor and beautiful art could not hold their own for me beside that cool translucence of the Mediterranean inlet, with its natural marvels dimly descried as'I bent over the boat's side. It was for that, and not for the other, that my heart yearned, and that became a part of me, all the more, no doubt, that it was denied me. Our aim in the world is beauty and happiness; but we are late in learning that they exist in the will and imagination, and not in this or that accredited and venerable thing or circumstance that is mechanically obtruded on our unready attention. If you were put down in the Garden of Eden, and told that you might stay there an hour and no more, what would you do? How would you "improve" your time? Would you run to and fro, and visit the spot where Adam first stood erect, and the place where he sat when he named the animals, and the thymey bank on which he slept while Eve was taking form from his rib, and the tree on which grew the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, and the precise scene of the temptation and the fall, and the spot on which stood the altars on which Cain and Abel offered their sacrifices, and where, presently, wrathful Cain rose up against his brother and slew him? Would you make sure of all these set sights in order that you might reply satisfactorily to the cloud of interviewers awaiting you outside the Garden? Or would you simply throw yourself down on the grass wherever the angel happened to leave you, and try to see or to realize or to recall nothing, but passively permit your soul to feel and experience and grow what way it would, prompted by the inner voice and guided by the inner light, heedless of what the interviewers were expecting and of what duty and obligation and the unique opportunity demanded? It is worth thinking about. It may be conceded that there is some risk to run. I next find myself in a coach, with four horses harnessed to it, trundling along the road from Civita Vecchia to Rome; for of Monaco I recall nothing, nor of Leghorn; and though we passed within sight of Elba, I saw only a lonely island on our starboard beam. As for the coach, it was a necessity, if we would continue our journey, for the railroad was still in the future in 1858. The coach-road was not only as rugged and uneasy as it had been any time during the past three hundred years, but it was outrageously infested by banditti; and, indeed, a robbery had taken place on it only a week or two before. For miles and miles on end it was totally destitute of dwellings, and those that we saw might well have been the harboring-places of iniquity. Moreover, we were so long delayed in making our start that it was already afternoon before we were under way, and finally one of our horses gave out ere we were many miles advanced, compelling us to hobble along for the remainder of the trip at reduced speed. As the shades of evening began to fall, we saw at intervals sundry persons lurking along the roadway, clad in long cloaks and conical hats, with the suggestion of the barrel of a musket about them, and it is probable that we were preserved from a tragic fate only by the fortunate accident that we were just behind the mail-coach and might theoretically have hailed it for help had we been attacked. Meanwhile, my father, with ostensible pleasantry, suggested that we should hide our gold coin (of which we carried a considerable store) in various queer, out-of-the-way receptacles. I remember that an umbrella was filled with a handful or two of the shining pieces, and stuck with studied carelessness through the straps in the roof of the vehicle. This was regarded by us children as excellent sport, though I think there was a lingering feeling of apprehension in the bottom of my soul. My father kept a moderate sum in napoleons in his pockets, so that, should the worst happen, the bandits might fancy it was our all. But then there was our mountain of luggage, incredibly strapped on the top of the conveyance, and behind it, and no reasonable bandits, one would suppose, could have failed to be satiated with that. However, it was written that we were to reach Rome unscathed, albeit long after dark, and though we did not get past the Porta del Popolo without suffering legalized robbery on the part of the custom-house officials. But by that time we were so weary, downcast, and chilled that depredation and outrage could not rouse or kindle us. We ended, at last, in one of those refrigerator hotels to which our travels had made us accustomed, in one of the hollow, dull, untoward caverns of which I was presently put to bed and to sleep. "Oh, Rome, my country, City of the Soul!" Oh, Byron, were you an Esquimau? XIV Our unpalatial palace--"Cephas Giovanni"--She and George Combe turned out to be right--A rousing temper--Bright Titian hair--"All that's left of him"--The pyramidal man of destiny--The thoughts of a boy are long, long thoughts-- Clausilia Bubigunia--Jabez Hogg and the microscope--A stupendous surprise--A lifetime in fourteen months--My father's jeremiades--"Thank Heaven, there is such a thing as whitewash!"--"Terrible lack of variety in the old masters"-- "The brazen trollop that she is!"--Several distinct phases of feeling--Springs of creative imagination roused--The Roman fever--A sad book--Effects of the death-blow--The rest is silence. We arrived in Rome on the 17th of January, 1858, at eleven o'clock at night. After a day or two at Spillman's Hotel, we moved into lodgings in the Via Porta Pinciana, the Palazzo Larazani. The street extended just below the ridge of the Pincian Hill, and was not far from the broad flight of steps mounting upward from the Piazza d' Espagna, on the left as you go up. In spite of its resounding name, our new dwelling had not a palatial aspect. It was of no commanding height or architectural pretensions; a stuccoed edifice, attached on both sides to other edifices. The street, like other Roman streets, was narrow; it was dirty like them, and, like them, was paved with cobble-stones. The place had been secured for us by (I think) our friends the Thompsons; Mr. Thompson--the same man who had painted my father's portrait in 1853--had a studio hard by. The Thompsons had been living in Rome for five years or more, and knew the Roman ropes. They were very comfortable people to know; indeed, Rome to me would have been a very different and less delightful place without them, as will hereafter appear. The family consisted of Cephas Giovanni Thompson, the father and artist; his wife and his two sons and one daughter. "Cephas Giovanni," being interpreted, means plain Peter John; and it was said (though, I believe, unjustifiably) that Peter John had been the names originally given to Thompson by his parents at the baptismal-font, but that his wife, who was a notable little woman, a sister of Anna Cora Mowatt, the actress, well known in America and England seventy years ago, had persuaded him to translate them into Greek and Italian, as more suitable to the romantic career of an artist of the beautiful. I fancy the story arose from the fact that Mrs. Thompson was a woman who, it was felt, might imaginably conceive so ambitious a project. She was small, active, entertaining, clever, and "spunky," as the New-Englanders would have said; indeed, she had a rousing temper, on occasion. Her husband, on the other hand, had the mildest, wisely smiling, philosophic air, with a low, slow voice, and a beard of patriarchal fashion and size, though as yet it was a rich brown, with scarcely a thread of silver in it. Brown and abundant, also, was his hair; he had steady, bright, brown eyes, and was rather under the average height of Anglo-Saxon man. But for all this mild-shining aspect of his, his dark eyebrows were sharply arched, or gabled rather; and my mother, who had absorbed from her former friend, George Combe, a faith in the betrayals of phrenology, expressed her private persuasion that good Mr. Thompson had a temper, too. She and George Combe turned out to be right in this instance, though I am not going to tell the tale of how we happened to be made acquainted with the fact. Little thunder-storms once in a while occur in human skies as well as in the meteorological ones; and the atmosphere is afterwards all the sweeter and softer. No people could be more good, honest, and kind than the Thompsons. There was no other artist in Rome who could paint as well as Mr. Thompson. That portrait of my father, to which reference has been made, which now hangs in my house, looks even better, as a painting, to-day than it did when it was fresh from his easel. Rubens could not have laid on the colors with more solidity and with truer feeling for the hues of life. But the trouble with Thompson was that he had never learned how to draw correctly; and this defect appeared to some extent in his portraits as well as in his figures. The latter were graceful, significant, full of feeling and character; but they betrayed a weakness of anatomical knowledge and of perspective. They had not the conventional incorrectness of the old masters preceding Raphael, but an incorrectness belonging personally to Thompson; it was not excessive or conspicuous to any one, and certainly not to Thompson himself. But his color redeemed all and made his pictures permanently valuable. He was at this time painting a picture of Saint Peter being visited by an angel, which was rich and beautiful; and he had some sketches of a series based on Shakespeare's Tempest; and standing on one side in the studio was a glowing figure of a woman in Oriental costume, an odalisque, or some such matter, which showed that his sympathy with life was not a restricted one. Later in our acquaintance he fell in love with the bright Titian hair of my sister Rose, and made a little portrait of her, which was one of his best likenesses, apart from its admirable color; it even showed the tears in the child's eyes, gathering there by reason of her antipathy to posing. Cora Thompson, the daughter, was the most good-natured and sunny-tempered of girls; she may have been fifteen at this time; she inherited neither the handsomeness of her father nor the sharp-edged cleverness of her mother; but she was lovable. Of the two boys, the younger was named Hubert; he was about ten years old, small of his age, and not robust in make or constitution. He was, however, a smart, rather witty youth, a little precocious, perhaps, and able to take care of himself. Some five and twenty years after the date of which I am now writing I was at a large political dinner in New York and was there introduced to a Mr. Thompson, who was the commissioner of public works, and a party boss of no small caliber and power. He was an immense personage, physically likewise, weighing fully three hundred pounds, and, though not apparently advanced in years, a thorough man of the world and of municipal politics. After we had conversed for a few minutes, I was struck by a certain expression about my interlocutor's eyebrows that recalled long-forgotten days and things. I remembered that his name was Thompson, and had an impression that his initials were H. O. "Are you little Hubert Thompson?" I suddenly demanded. "Why, of course I am--all that's left of him!" he replied, with a laugh. So this was the boy whom, a quarter of a century before, I could have held out at arm's-length. We talked over the old days when we played together about the Roman streets and ruins. Nothing more reveals the essential strangeness of human life than this meeting after many years with persons we have formerly known intimately, who are now so much changed in outward guise. We feel the changes to be unreal, and yet, there they are! Grover Cleveland was being groomed for his first Presidential term then; Hubert was one of his supporters in New York, and he presented me to the pyramidal man of destiny. Poor Hubert died, lamentably, not long after. He was a good and affectionate son. He was perhaps too kind-hearted and loyal for the political role which he enacted. The elder Thompson boy was called Edmund, or, in my vernacular, Eddy. There were in his nature a gravity, depth, and sweetness which won my heart and respect, and we became friends in that intimate and complete way that seems possible only to boys in their early teens. For that matter, neither of us was yet over twelve; I think Eddy was part of a year my junior. But you must search the annals of antiquity to find anything so solid and unalterable as was our friendship. He was the most absolutely good boy I ever knew, but by no means goody-goody; he had high principles, noble ambitions, strong affections, the sweetest of tempers; his seriousness formed a healthy foil to my own more impetuous and hazardous character. "The thoughts of a boy are long, long thoughts"; and not in many long lifetimes could a tithe of the splendid projects we resolved upon have been carried out. We were together from morning till night, month after month; we walked interminably about Rome and frequented its ruins, and wandered far out over the Campagna and along the shores of famous Tiber. We picked up precious antique marbles, coins, and ancient curiosities of all sorts; we hunted for shells and butterflies and lizards; our hearts were uplifted by the martial music of the French army bands, which were continually resounding throughout Rome; and we admired the gleaming swords of the officers and the sharp, punctual drill and marching of the red-legged rank and file. We haunted the lovely Villa Borghese, the Pincian Hill, the Villa Pamphili Doria; we knew every nook and cranny of the Palace of the Csesars, the Baths of Caracalla, the Roman Forum, the Coliseum, the Egerian Grove; we were familiar with every gate that entered Rome; we drank at every fountain; we lingered through the galleries of the Vatican and of the Capitol; we made St. Peter's Church our refuge in inclement weather; we threaded every street and by-way of the city; we were on friendly and confidential terms with the custode of every treasure. And all the time we talked about what we thought, what we felt, what we would do; there is no looking backward in boys' confidences; they live in the instant present and in the infinite future. Eddy and I arranged to spend one lifetime in Central Africa, in emulation of the exploits of David Livingstone; there, freed from all civilized burdens, we would live, and we would run, catch the wild goat by the hair, and hurl our lances in the sun. At another epoch of our endless lives we would enter the army and distinguish ourselves in heroic war; we would have swords like sunbeams and ride steeds like Bucephalus. Then, and interleaved with all this, as it were, there was an immense life of natural history; we would have a private museum to rival the famous ones of nations. Eddy was especially drawn towards insects, while my own predilection was still for conchology; and both of us spent hours every week in classifying and arranging our respective collections, not to speak of the time we devoted to hunting for specimens. Eddy had a green net at the end of a stick, and became very skilful in making his captures; and how we triumphed over a "swallow-tail," so difficult to catch, or an unfamiliar species! Eddy had his pins and his strips of cork, and paper boxes; and his collections certainly were fairer to look upon, to the ordinary view, than mine; moreover, his was the more scientific mind and the nicer sense of order. For the display of my snail-shells I used bits of card-board and plenty of gum-arabic; and I was affluent in "duplicates," my plan being to get a large card and then cover it with specimens of the shell, in serried ranks. I also called literature to my aid, and produced several little books containing labored descriptions of my collection, couched, so far as possible, in the stilted and formal phraseology of the conchological works to which I had access, but with occasional outbursts after a style of my own. Here is a chapter from one of them; a pen-and-ink portrait of the shell is prefixed to the original essay: "CLAUSILIA BUBIGUNIA "This handsome and elegant little shell is found in mossy places, or in old ruins, such as the Coliseum--where it is found in immense numbers--or the Palace of the Caesars. But in Italy it is common in any mossy ruin, in the small, moss-covered holes, where it is seen at the farthest extremity. After a rain they always crawl out of their places of concealment in such numbers that one would think it had been raining clausilias. The shell, in large and fine specimens, is five-eighths of an inch in length. The young are very small and look like the top part of the spire of the adults. This shell is also largest in the middle, shaped something like a grain of wheat. It has nine whorls, marked by small white lines, which look like fine white threads of sewing-cotton; and just below them are marks which look like very fine and very small stitches of white cotton. The color of the shell, down to next to the last whorl, is a brown color, but the very last whorl is a little lighter. The shell is covered all over with fine lines, but they need to be looked at through a magnifying-glass, they are so fine. The lip is turning out, and very thin; inside there are three ridges, two on the top part of the mouth, and the other, which is very small, is below. The shell, when the animal is out of it, is semi-transparent, and the little colomella, or pillar, can be indistinctly seen through." There follows a detailed and loving description of the animal inhabiting the shell, which I must reserve for a future edition. Of another species of snail, Helix strigata, our learned author observes that "This shell is, when dead, one of those which is found on the banks of the Tiber. It is a strange circumstance that, although it is a land shell, it should be found more on the banks of a river than anywhere else, and also only on the banks of the Tiber, for it is not found on the banks of any other river. Any one would think that dead shells were gifted with the power of walking about, for certainly it is an inexplicable wonder how they got there." Of Helix muralis we are informed that "The Romans eat these snails, not the whole of them, but only their feet. In ancient times the most wealthy people used to eat snails, and perhaps they ate the very ones which the poorest people eat nowadays. It is most probable, for there are a great many different kinds of snails round Rome, and the Romans would probably select the best." I may perhaps be permitted to remark that the correct orthography of this writer fills me with astonishment, inasmuch as in later life I have reason to know that he often went astray in this respect. Of the uniform maturity of the literary style, I have no need to speak. Eddy's father was in the habit of giving him an income of two or three pauls a week, dependent on his good behavior and punctual preparation of his lessons; and since Eddy was always well behaved and faithful in his studies, the income came in pretty regularly. Eddy saved up this revenue with a view to buying himself a microscope, for the better prosecution of his zoological labors; being, also, stimulated thereto by the fact that I already possessed one of these instruments, given me by my father a year or two before. Mine cost ten shillings, but Eddy meant to get one even more expensive. I had, too, a large volume of six hundred pages on The Microscope, Its History, Construction, and Uses, by Jabez Hogg, the contents of which I had long since learned by heart, and which I gladly communicated to my friend. At length Eddy's economies had proceeded so far that he was able to calculate that on his twelfth birthday he would possess a fortune of five scudi, and he decided that he would buy a microscope at that figure; it is needless to add that the microscope had long since been selected in the shop, and was decidedly superior to mine. We could hardly contain our impatience to enter upon the marvellous world whereof this instrument was the key; that twelfth birthday seemed long in coming, but at last it came. I was to go with my friend to the shop to see him make the purchase; and I was at his house betimes in the morning. But what a stupendous surprise awaited me! Eddy was too much excited to say anything; with a face beaming with emotion, he led me into the sitting-room, and there, upon the table, was a microscope. But such a microscope! It was of such unheard-of magnificence and elaborateness that it took my breath away, and we both stood gazing at it in voiceless rapture. It was tall and elegant, shining with its polished brass and mirrors, and its magnifying powers were such as to disclose to us the very heart of nature's mystery. It was quiet Mr. Thompson's birthday present to his son. That gentleman sat smiling in his armchair by the window, and presently he said, with a delightful archness, "Well, Eddy, I suppose you are ready to give me back all that money you've been collecting?" Eddy grinned radiantly. He spent his savings for microscope-slides and other appurtenances, and for weeks thereafter he could hardly take his eye away from the object-lens. He was luminous with happiness, and I reflected his splendor from my sympathetic heart. Dear old Eddy! In after years he entered West Point and became a soldier, and he died early; I never saw him after parting from him in Italy in 1859. But he is still my first friend, and there has been no other more dear. I am not aware that Rome has ever been described from the point of view of a twelve-year-old boy, and it might be worth doing; but I have delayed attempting it somewhat too long; the moving pictures in my mind have become too faded and confused. And yet I am surprised at the minuteness of some of my recollections; they have, no doubt, been kept alive by the numerous photographs of Rome which one carries about, and also by the occasional perusal of The Marble Faun and other Roman literature. But much is also due to the wonderful separateness which Rome retains in the mind. It is like nothing else, and the spirit of it is immortal. It seems as if I must have lived a lifetime there; and yet I cannot make out that our total residence in the city extended over fourteen months. Certainly no other passage of my boyhood time looms so large or is rooted so deep. But the passion for Rome (unless one be a Byron) is not a plant of sudden growth, and I dare say that, during those first frigid weeks, I may have shared my father's whimsical aversion to the city. He has described, in his journals, how all things seemed to be what they should not; and he was terribly disgusted with the filth that defiled the ruins and the street corners. He was impressed by the ruins, but deplored their nakedness. "The marble of them grows black or brown, it is true," says he, "and shows its age in that way; but it remains hard and sharp, and does not become again a part of nature, as stone walls do in England; some dry and dusty grass sprouts along the ledges of a ruin, as in the Coliseum; but there is no green mantle of ivy spreading itself over the gray dilapidation." We stumbled upon the Fountain of Trevi in one of our early rambles, not knowing what it was. "One of these fountains," writes my father, referring to it, "occupies the whole side of a great edifice, and represents Neptune and his steeds, who seem to be sliding down with a cataract that tumbles over a ledge of rocks into a marble-bordered lake, the whole--except the fall of water itself--making up an exceedingly cumbrous and ridiculous affair." He goes to St. Peter's, and "it disappointed me terribly by its want of effect, and the little justice it does to its real magnitude externally; as to the interior, I am not sure that it would not be even more grand and majestic if it were less magnificent, though I should be sorry to see the experiment tried. I had expected something dim and vast, like the great English cathedrals, only more vast and dim and gray; but there is as much difference as between noonday and twilight." The pictures, too, were apt in these first days to go against the grain with him. Contemplating a fresco representing scenes in purgatory, he broke forth: "I cannot speak as to the truth of the representation, but, at all events, it was purgatory to look at this poor, faded rubbish. Thank Heaven, there is such a thing as whitewash; and I shall always be glad to hear of its application to old frescoes, even at the sacrifice of remnants of real excellence!" Such growlings torture the soul of the connoisseur; but the unregenerate man, hearing them, leaps up and shouts for joy. He found the old masters, in their sacred subjects, lacking in originality and initiative; and when they would represent mythology, they engendered an apotheosis of nakedness. His conclusion was that "there is something forced, if not feigned, in our taste for pictures of the old Italian school." Of the profane subjects, he instances the Fornarina, "with a deep bright glow on her face, naked below the waist, and well pleased to be so, for the sake of your admiration--ready for any extent of nudity, for love or money--the brazen trollop that she is! Raphael must have been capable of great sensuality to have painted this picture of his own accord, and lovingly." These are the iconoclasms of the Goth and Vandal at their first advent to Rome. They remained to alter their mood, and extol what they had before assaulted; and so did my father, as we shall see presently. But at first he was sick and cold and uncomfortable; and he consoled himself by hitting out at everything, in the secret privacy of his diary, since opened to the world. With warmer weather came equanimity and kinder judgments; but there is a refreshing touch of truth and justice even in these mutterings of exasperation. It was not so much, I suppose, that Rome was cold as that my father had expected it to be otherwise. When one is in a place where tradition and association invite the soul forth to be warmed and soothed and rejoiced, and the body, venturing out, finds nothing but chill winds and frigid temperature and discomfort, the shock is much greater and more disagreeable than if one had been in some northern Canada or Spitzbergen, where such conditions are normal. Ice in the arctic circle is all right and exhilarating, but in the Piazza of St. Peter's it is an outrage, and affects the mind and heart even more than the flesh. Circumstances caused my father to pass through several distinct phases of feeling while he was in Rome. First, his own indisposition and the inclement weather depressed and exasperated him. Time, in due course, brought relief in these respects, and he began to enjoy himself and his surroundings. Anon, the springs of creative imagination, long dormant in him, were roused to activity by thoughts connected with the Faun of Praxiteles in the Capitol. He now became happy in the way of his genius and immediately took a new interest in all things, looking at them from the point of view of possible backgrounds or incidents for the romance which had begun to take form in his mind. He describes what he saw con amore, and all manner of harmonious ideas bloom through his thoughts, like anemones and other flowers in the Villa Pamphili and the Borghese. This desirable mood continued until, after our return to Rome from the Florentine visit, my sister caught the Roman fever. She lay for weeks in danger of death; and her father's anxiety about her not only destroyed in him all thoughts of literary production and care for it, but made even keeping his journal no longer possible for him. That strain, so long continued, broke him down, and he never recovered from it so as to be what he had been before. Nevertheless, when she became convalescent, the reaction from his dark misgivings made him, for a time, as light-hearted as a boy; and, the carnival happening to be coincident with her recovery, he entered into the fun of it with a zest and enjoyment that surprised himself. But, again, it presently became evident that her recovery was not complete, and probably never would be so; the injury to her health was permanent, and she was liable to recurrences of disease. His spirits sank again, not so low as before, but, on the other hand, they never again rose to their normal level. It was in this saddened mood that he once more took up the Roman romance and finished it; it is a sad book, and when there is a ray of sunshine across the page, it has a melancholy gleam. After we returned to Concord, his apprehensions concerning Una's unsound condition were confirmed; and, in addition, the bitter cleavage between North and South inspired in him the gloomiest forebodings. A wasting away of his whole physical substance ensued; and he died, almost suddenly, while in years he might be considered hardly past the prime of his life. A sensitive eye can trace the effects of the death-blow all through The Marble Faun, and still more in Septimius and Grimshawe, published after his death. In The Dolliver Romance fragment, which was the last thing he wrote, there is visible once more some reminiscence of the old sunshine of humor that was so often apparent in his time of youth and vigor; but it, too, has a sad touch in it, such as belongs to the last rays of the star of day before it sinks below the horizon forever. Night follows, and the rest is silence. XV The Roman carnival in three moods--Apples of Sodom--Poor, battered, wilted, stained hearts--A living protest and scourge--Dulce est desipere in loco--A rollicking world of happy fools--Endless sunshine of some sort--Greenwich Fair was worth a hundred of it--They thundered past, never drawing rein--"Senza moccolo!"--Nothing more charming and strange could be imagined--Girls surprised in the midst of dressing themselves--A Unitarian clergyman with his fat wife--Apparent license under courteous restraint--He laughed and pelted and was pelted--William Story, as vivid as when I saw him last--A too facile power--A deadly shadow gliding close behind--Set afire by his own sallies--"Thy face is like thy mother's, my fair child!"--Cleopatra in the clay-- "War nie sein Brod mit thranen ass." THE Roman carnival opened about a month after our arrival in Rome. The weather was bad nearly all the time, and my father's point of view was correspondingly unsympathetic. The contrast between his mood now and a year later, when he was not only stimulated by his daughter's recovery from illness, but, also, was looking at everything rather as the romancer than as the man, is worth bringing out. My father likewise describes the carnival in the romance; there we see it in a third phase--as art. But the passages in the note-books are written from the realistic stand-point. In her transcriptions of the journals for the press my mother was always careful to omit from the former everything that had been "used" in the book; the principle, no doubt, was sound, but it might be edifying for once, in a way, to do just the opposite, in order to mark, if we choose to take the trouble, what kind of changes or modifications Hawthorne the romancer would make in the work of my father the observer of nature. Take your Marble Faun and turn to two of the latter chapters and compare them with the corresponding pages in my excerpts from the journals in the Biography. In the latter you will find him always in a critical and carping humor; seeing everything with abundant keenness, but recognizing nothing worth while in it. The bouquets, he noticed, for example, were often picked up out of the street and used again and again; "and," he adds, "I suppose they aptly enough symbolized the poor, battered, wilted, stained hearts that had flown from one hand to another along the muddy pathway of life, instead of being treasured up in one faithful bosom. Really, it was great nonsense." It is true--such uncongenial interpretation--if you feel that way about it. And I remember, in my rambles along the famous thoroughfare, seeing a saturnine old fellow in a dingy black coat and slouch hat, with a sour snarl on his unprepossessing features, who made it his business, all day, to cuff and kick the little boys whom he caught throwing confetti, or picking up the fallen bouquets, and to shove the latter down into the sewer which ran beneath the street, through the apertures opening underneath the curb. He seemed to have stationed himself there as a living protest and scourge against and of the whole spirit of the carnival; to hate it just because the rest of the world enjoyed it, and to wish that he might make everybody else as miserable and uncharitable as he was. He was like a wicked and ugly Mrs. Partington, trying to sweep back the Atlantic of holiday merriment with his dirty mop. But this crabbed humor of his, while it made him conspicuous against the broad background of gayety, of course had no effect on the gayety itself. The flood of laughter, jocundity, and semi-boisterous frolic continued to roll up and down the Corso all day long, never attempting to be anything but pure nonsense, indeed, but achieving, nevertheless, the wise end of nonsense in the right time and place--that of refreshing and lightening the mind and heart. Dulce est desipere in loco--that old saw might have been made precisely to serve as the motto of the Roman carnival; and very likely it was actually suggested to its renowned author by some similar sport belonging to the old Roman days, before Christianity was thought of. The young fellows--English, American, or of whatever other nationality--would stride up and down the overflowing street hour after hour, clad in linen dust-coats down to their heels, with a bag of confetti slung on one side and another full of bouquets on the other; and they would plunge a warlike hand into the former and hurl ammunition at their rivals; or they would, pick out a bunch of flowers from the latter for a pretty girl--not that the flowers were worth anything intrinsically, nor was that their fault--but just to show the fitting sentiment. There was only one rule, the unwritten one that everybody was to take everything that came with a smile or a laugh, and never get angry at anything; and this universal good-humor lifted the whole affair into a wholesome and profitable sphere. Then there was the double row of carriages forever moving in opposite directions, and passing within easy arm's-reach of each other; and the jolly battle was waged between their occupants, with side conflicts with the foot-farers at the same time. And as the same carriages would repass one another every forty minutes or so, the persons in them would soon get to recognize one another; and, if they were of the sterner sex, they would be prepared to renew desperate battle; or if there was a pretty girl or two in one of them, she would be the recipient of a deluge of flowers or of really pretty bonbons. It was all play, all laughter, all a new, rollicking world of happy fools, of comic chivalry, of humorous gallantry. For my part, I thought it was the world which I had been born to live in; and I was too happy in it to imagine even that anybody could be less happy than I was. My sole grief was when my supply of confetti had given out, and I had no money to buy more. I used to look at those great baskets at the street-corners, filled with the white agglomeration, with longing eyes, and wish I had it all in my pockets. I picked up the fallen bouquets, muddy or not, with no misgiving, and flung them at the girls with the unquestioning faith of boyhood. I looked up at the people in the windows and on the draped balconies with romantic emotions, and exchanged smiles and beckonings with them. The February days were never long enough for me; I only wished that the whole year was made up of those days; if it rained, or was cold, I never knew it. There was an endless sunshine of some sort which sufficed for me. But my father, at this epoch, could catch not a glimpse of it. "I never in my life knew a shallower joke than the carnival at Rome; such a rainy and muddy day, too; Greenwich Fair (at the very last of which I assisted) was worth a hundred of it." The masking day, and the ensuing night of the moccolo, were the culminating features of the carnival; and it was on the afternoon of this day, I think, that the horse-race, with bare-backed horses, took place. The backs of these horses, though bare of riders, had attached to them by strings little balls with sharp points in them, which, as the horses ran, bobbed up and down, and did the office of spurs. The race was preceded by a thundering gallop of cavalry down the whole length of the Corso (the street having been cleared of carriages beforehand), ostensibly to prevent anybody from being run over by the race-horses; but, as a matter of fact, if any one were killed, it was much more likely to be by the ruthless riding of these helmeted dragoons than by the riderless steeds. They thundered past, never drawing rein, no matter what stood or ran in their way; and then, after an interval, during which the long crowds, packed back on the opposite sidewalks, craned forward as far as they dared to see them, came the eight or ten racers at a furious pace. They were come and gone in a breath; and finally, after the body of them were passed, came a laggard, who had been left at the post, and was trying to make up for lost time. I believe it was this horse who actually killed somebody on the course. The race over, back into the street thronged the crowd, filling it from wall to wall; then there was a gradual thinning away, as the people went home for supper; and finally came the night and the moccoli, with the biggest crowd of all. I was there with my twist of moccolo and a box of matches; except the moccoli, there was no other illumination along the length of the Corso. But their soft lights were there by myriads, and made a lovely sight, to my eyes at least. "Senza moccolo!" was the universal cry; young knights-errant, singly or in groups, pressed their way up and down, shouting the battle-cry, and quenching all lights within reach, while striving to maintain the flame of their own; using now the whisk of a handkerchief, now a puff of breath, now the fillip of a finger; contriving to extinguish a fair lady's taper with the same effusion of vain words wherewith they told her of their passion. Most of the ladies thus assailed sat in the lower balconies, elevated only a foot or two above the level of the sidewalk; but those in the higher retreats made war upon one another, and upon their own cavaliers; none was immune from peril. The cry, uttered at once by such innumerable voices far and near, made a singular murmur up and down the Corso; and the soft twinkling of the lights, winking in and out as they were put out or relighted, gave a singular fire-fly effect to the whole illumination. It seemed to me then, and it still seems in the retrospect, that nothing more charming and strange could be imagined; and through it all was the constant blossoming of laughter, more inextinguishable than the moccoletti themselves. The colors of the tapestries and stuffs dependent from the windows and balconies glowed out in light, or were dimmed by shadow; and the faces of the thousandfold crowd of festival-makers glimmered forth and were lost again on the background of the night, like the features of spirits in the glimpses of a dream. How long it all lasted I know not; but it had its term, like other mortal things, even in this fairyland of carnival; and when the last light was out the carnival was no more, and Lent, unawares, had softly settled down upon us with the darkness. But let us now listen to my father when, for the second time, he made proof of the carnival in the year following our return from Florence, and after Una had left her sick-room and could be at his side. "The weather has been splendid," he writes, "and the merriment far more free and riotous than as I remember it in the preceding year. Tokens of the festival were seen in flowers on street-stands, or borne aloft on people's heads, while bushels of confetti were displayed, looking like veritable sugarplums, so that a stranger might have thought that the whole commerce and business of stern old Rome lay in flowers and sweets. One wonders, however, that the scene should not be even more rich and various when there has been so long a time (the immemorial existence of the carnival) to prepare it, and adorn it with shapes of gayety and humor. There was an infinite number of clowns and particolored harlequins; a host of white dominoes; a multitude of masks, set in eternal grins, or with monstrous noses, or made in the guise of monkeys, bears, dogs, or whatever beast the wearer chooses to be akin to; a great many men in petticoats, and almost as many girls and women, no doubt, in breeches; figures, too, with huge, bulbous heads and all manner of such easy monstrosities and exaggerations.. It is strange how the whole humor of the thing, and the separate humor of each individual character, vanishes the moment I try to grasp it and describe it; and yet there really was fun in the spectacle as it flitted by--for instance, in the long line of carriages a company of young men in flesh-colored tights and chemises, representing a party of girls surprised in the midst of dressing themselves, while an old nurse in the midst of them expressed ludicrous horror at their predicament. Then the embarrassment of gentlemen who, while quietly looking at the scene, are surrounded by groups of maskers, grimacing at them, squeaking in their ears, hugging them, dancing round them, till they snatch an opportunity to escape into some doorway; or when a poor man in a black coat and cylinder hat is whitened all over with a half-bushel of confetti and lime-dust; the mock sympathy with which his case is investigated by a company of maskers, who poke their stupid, pasteboard faces close to his, still with the unchangeable grin; or when a gigantic female figure singles out some shy, harmless personage, and makes appeals to his heart, avowing her passionate love in dumb show, and presenting him with her bouquet; and a hundred other nonsensicalities, among which the rudest and simplest are not the least effective. A resounding thump on the back with a harlequin's sword, or a rattling blow with a bladder half full of dried pease or corn, answers a very good purpose. There was a good deal of absurdity one day in a figure in a crinoline petticoat, riding on an ass and almost filling the Corso with the circumference of crinoline from side to side. Some figures are dressed in old-fashioned garbs, perhaps of the last century, or, even more ridiculous, of thirty years ago, or in the stately Elizabethan (as we should call them) trunk hose, tunics, and cloaks of three centuries since. I do not know anything that I have seen queerer than a Unitarian clergyman (Mr. Mountford), who drives through the Corso daily with his fat wife in a one-horse chaise, with a wreath of withered flowers and oak leaves round his hat, the rest of his dress remaining unchanged, except that it is well powdered with the dust of confetti. That withered wreath is the absurdest thing he could wear (though, perhaps, he may not mean it to be so), and so, of course, the best. I can think of no other masks just now, but will go this afternoon and try to catch some more." You see, he has that romance in view again. "Clowns, or zanies," he resumes, after fresh inspection, "appear in great troupes, dancing extravagantly and scampering wildly; everybody seems to do whatever folly comes into his head; and yet, if you consider the matter, you see that all this apparent license is kept under courteous restraint. There is no rudeness, except the authorized pelting with confetti or blows of harlequins' swords, which, moreover, are within a law of their own. But nobody takes rough hold of another, or meddles with his mask, or does him any unmannerly violence. At first sight you would think that the whole world had gone mad, but at the end you wonder how people can let loose all their mirthful propensities without unchaining the mischievous ones. It could not be so in America or in England; in either of those countries the whole street would go mad in earnest and come to blows and bloodshed were the populace to let themselves loose to the extent we see here. All this restraint is self-imposed and quite apart from the presence of the soldiery." This mood, we see, is far more gentle and sympathetic than the former one; there is sunshine within as well as without; and, indeed, I remember with what glee my father took part in the frolic, as well as looked on at it; he laughed and pelted and was pelted; he walked down the Corso and back again; he drove to and fro in a carriage; he mounted to Mr. Motley's balcony and took long shots at the crowd below. The sombre spirit of criticism had ceased, for a time, to haunt him. [IMAGE: WILLIAM WETMORE STORY] We went quite often to the studio of William Story, whom my father had slightly known in Salem before he became a voluntary exile from America. Mr. Story was at this time a small, wiry, nervous personage, smiling easily, but as much through nervousness as from any inner source or outward provocation of mirth, and as he smiled he would stroke his cheeks, which were covered with a short, brown beard, with the fingers and thumb of his right hand, while wrinkles would appear round his bright, brown eyes. "He looks thin and worn already," wrote my father; "a little bald and a very little gray, but as vivid as when I saw him last; he cannot, methinks, be over thirty-seven." He was thirty-nine in 1858. "The great difficulty with him, I think, is a too facile power," my father goes on; "he would do better things if it were more difficult for him to do merely good ones. Then, too, his sensibility is too quick; being easily touched by his own thoughts, he cannot estimate what is required to touch a colder and duller person, and so stops short of the adequate expression." He commented on the vein of melancholy beneath the sparkle of his surface, as if, in the midst of prosperity, he was conscious of a "deadly shadow gliding close behind." Boys of twelve are not troubled with insight, unless of that unconscious, intuitive kind that tells them that a person is likeable, or the reverse, no matter what the person may do or say. I liked Mr. Story, and thought him as light of spirit as he seemed; not that he was not often earnest enough in his talks with my father, to whom he was wont to apply himself with a sort of intensity, suggesting ideas, and watching, with his nervous smile, my father's reception of them; plunging into deep matters, beyond my comprehension, dwelling there a few minutes, and then emerging again with a sparkle of wit; he was certainly very witty, and the wit was native and original, not memorized. When he got into the current of drollery, he would, as it were, set himself afire by his own sallies, and soar to astonishing heights, which had an irresistible contagion for the hearers; and he would sometimes, sitting at a table with pen and paper at hand, illustrate his whimsicalities with lightning sketches of immense cleverness, considering their impromptu character. I have preserved a sheet of letter-paper covered with such drawings. The conversation had got upon Byron, whom Mr. Story chose to ridicule; as he talked, he drew a head of "Byron as he thought he was," followed by one of "Byron as he was," and by another of "Byron as he might have been," showing a very pronounced negro type. Then he made a portrait of "Ada, sole daughter of my house and heart," and wrote under it, "Thy face was like thy mother's, my fair child!" a hideous, simpering miss, with a snub nose and a wooden mouth--"A poet's dream!" He also showed the appearance of the Falls of Terni, "as described by Byron," and added studies of infant phenomena, mother's darlings, a Presidential candidate, and other absurdities, accompanying it all with a running comment and imaginative improvisations which had the charm of genius in them, and made us ache with laughter, young and old alike. Such a man, nervous, high-strung, of fine perceptions and sensibilities, must inevitably pass through rapid and extreme alternations of feeling; and, no doubt, an hour after that laughing seance of ours, Mr. Story was plunged deep in melancholy. Yet surely his premonitions of evil were unfulfilled; Story lived long and was never other than fortunate. Perhaps he was unable to produce works commensurate with his conceptions; but unhappiness from such a cause is of a noble sort, and better than most ordinary felicities. I remember very well the statue of Cleopatra while yet in the clay. There she sat in the centre of the large, empty studio, pondering on Augustus and on the asp. The hue of the clay added a charm to the figure which even the pure marble has not quite maintained. Story said that he never was present while the cast of one of his statues was being made; he could not endure the sight of the workmen throwing the handfuls of plaster at the delicate clay. Cleopatra was substantially finished, but Story was unwilling to let her go, and had no end of doubts as to the handling of minor details. The hand that rests on her knee--should the forefinger and thumb meet or be separated? If they were separated, it meant the relaxation of despair; if they met, she was still meditating defiance or revenge. After canvassing the question at great length with my father, he decided that they should meet; but when I saw the marble statue in the Metropolitan Museum the other day I noticed that they were separated. In the end the artist had preferred despair. Such things indicate the man's character, and, perhaps, explain his failure to reach the great heights of art. He could not trust a great idea to manage itself, but sought subtler expression through small touches, and thus, finally, lost the feeling of the larger inspiration. A little more of the calm, Greek spirit would have done him good. He had many projects for other statues, which he would build up in fancy before my father and discuss with him. His words and gestures made the ideas he described seem actual and present, but he seldom got them into marble; he probably found, upon trial, that they did not belong to sculpture. He had the ambition to make marble speak not its own language merely, but those of painting and of poetry likewise; and when this proved impossible he was unhappy and out of conceit with himself, On the other hand, he did good work in poetry and in prose; but neither did these content him. After all, my father's observation hit the mark; things came too easy to him. Goethe speaks the word for him: "Wer nie sein Brod mit thranen ass, Er kennt euch nicht, ihr ewige Machte!" XVI Drilled in Roman history--Lovely figures made of light and morning--What superb figures!--The breath and strength of immeasurable antiquity--Treasures coming direct from dead hands into mine--A pleasant sound of coolness and refreshment--Receptacles of death now dedicated to life--The Borghese is a forest of Ardennes--Profound and important communings--A smiling deceiver--Of an early-rising habit-- Hauling in on my slack--A miniature cabinet magically made Titanic--"If I had a murder on my conscience"--None can tell the secret origin of his thoughts--A singularly beautiful young woman--She actually ripped the man open--No leagues of chivalry needed in Rome--A resident army--Five foot six-- Corsets and padding--She was wounded in the house of her friends. We children had been drilled in Roman history, from Romulus to Caesar, and we could, and frequently did, repeat by heart the Lays of Ancient Rome by Macaulay, which were at that period better known, perhaps, than they are now. Consequently, everything in Rome had a certain degree of meaning for us, and gave us a pleasure in addition to the intrinsic beauty or charm that belonged thereto. Our imagination thronged the Capitol with senators; saw in the Roman Forum the contentions of the tribunes and the patricians; heard the populus Romanus roar in the Coliseum; beheld the splendid processions of victory wind cityward through the Arch of Titus; saw Caesar lie bleeding at the base of Pompey's statue; pondered over the fatal precipice of the Tarpeian Rock; luxuriated in the hollow spaces of the Baths of Caracalla; lost ourselves in gorgeous reveries in the palace of the Caesars, and haunted the yellow stream of Tiber, beneath which lay hidden precious treasures and forgotten secrets. And we were no less captivated by the galleries and churches, which contained the preserved relics of the great old times, and were in themselves so beautiful. My taste for blackened old pictures and faded frescoes was, indeed, even more undeveloped than my father's; but I liked the brilliant reproductions in mosaic at St. Peter's and certain individual works in various places. I formed a romantic attachment for the alleged Beatrice Cenci of Guido, or of some other artist, and was very sorry that she should be so unhappy, though, of course, I was ignorant of the occasion of her low spirits. But I liked much better Guide's large design of Aurora, partly because I had long been familiar with it on the head-board of my mother's bedstead. Before her marriage she had bought a set of bedroom furniture, and had painted it a dull gold color, and on this surface she had drawn in fine black lines the outlines of several classical subjects, most of them from Flaxman; but in the space mentioned she had executed an outline of this glorious work of the Italian artist. I knew every line of the composition thoroughly; and, by-the-way, I doubt if a truer, more inspired copy of the picture was ever produced by anybody. But the color had to be supplied by the observer's imagination; now, for the first time, I saw the hues as laid on by the original painter. In spite of time, they were pure and exquisite beyond description; these lovely figures seemed made of light and morning. Another favorite picture of mine was the same artist's "Michael Overcoming the Evil One," and I even had the sense to like the painting better than the mosaic copy. Raphael's "Transfiguration" I also knew well from the old engraving of it that used to hang on our parlor wall from my earliest recollections; it still hangs yonder. But I never cared for this picture; it was too complicated and ingenious--it needed too much co-operation from the observer's mind. Besides, I had never seen a boy with anything approaching the muscular development of the epileptic youth in the centre. The thing in the picture that I most approved of was the end of the log in the little pool, in the foreground; it looked true to life. But my delight in the statues was endless. It seems to me that I knew personally every statue and group in the Vatican and in the Capitol. Again and again, either with my parents, or with Eddy, or even alone, I would pass the warders at the doors and enter those interminable galleries, and look and look at those quiet, stained-marble effigies. My early studies of Flaxman had, in a measure, educated me towards appreciation of them. I never tired of them, as I did of the Cleopatras and the Greek Slaves. What superb figures! What power and grace and fleetness and athletic loins! The divine, severe Minerva, musing under the shadow of her awful helmet; the athlete with the strigil, resting so lightly on his tireless feet; the royal Apollo, disdaining his own victory; the Venus, half shrinking from the exquisiteness of her own beauty; the swaying poise of the Discobulus, caught forever as he drew his breath for the throw; the smooth-limbed, brooding Antinous; the terrible Laocoon, which fascinated me, though it always repelled me, too; the austere simplicity of the Dying Gladiator's stoop to death--the most human of all the great statues; the heads of heroic Miltiades, of Antony, of solitary Caesar, of indifferent Augustus; the tranquil indolence of mighty Nile, clambered over by his many children--these, and a hundred others, spoke to me out of their immortal silence. I can conceive of no finer discipline for a boy; I emulated while I adored them. Power, repose, beauty, nobility, were in their message: "Do you, too, possess limbs and shoulders like ours!" they said to me; "such a bearing, such a spirit within!" I cannot overestimate even the physical good they did me; it was from them that I gained the inspiration for bodily development and for all athletic exercise which has, since then, helped me over many a rough passage in the path of life. But they also awoke higher ambitions and conferred finer benefits. From these excursions into the ideal I would return to out-of-doors with another inexhaustible zest. That ardent, blue Roman sky and penetrating, soft sunshine filled me with life and joy. The breath and strength of immeasurable antiquity emanated from those massive ruins, which time could deface but never conquer. Emerald lizards basked on the hot walls; flowers grew in the old crevices; butterflies floated round them; they were haunted by spirits of heroes. There is nothing else to be compared with the private, intimate, human, yet sublimated affection which these antique monuments wrought in me. They were my mighty brothers, condescending to my boyish thoughts and fancies, smiling upon me, welcoming me, conscious of my love for them. Each ruin had its separate individuality for me, so that to-day I must play with the Coliseum, to-morrow with the Forum, or the far-ranging arches of the Aqueduct, or the Temple of Vesta. Always, too, my eyes were alert for treasures in the old Roman soil, coming, as it seemed, direct from the dead hands of the vanished people into mine. I valued the scraps that I picked up thus more than anything to be bought in shops or seen in museums. These bits of tinted marble had felt the touch of real Romans; their feet had trodden on them, on them their arms had rested, their hands had grasped them. Two thousand years had dulled the polish of their surfaces; I took them to the stone-workers, who made them glow and bloom again--yellow, red, black, green, white. They were good-natured but careless men, those marble-polishers, and would sometimes lose my precious relics, and when I called for them would say, every day, "Domane--domane," or try to put me off with some substitute--as if a boy could be deceived in such a matter! I once found in the neighborhood of a recent excavation a semi-transparent tourmaline of a cool green hue when held to the light; it had once been set in the ring of some Roman beauty. It had, from long abiding in the earth, that wonderful iridescent surface which ancient glass acquires. Rose, my sister, picked up out of a rubbish heap a little bronze statuette, hardly three inches high, but, as experts said, of the best artistic period. Such things made our Roman history books seem like a tale of yesterday, or they transported us back across the centuries, so that we trod in the footsteps of those who had been but a moment before us. In those warm days, after our walks and explorations, Eddy and I, and little Hubert, who sometimes was permitted to accompany us, though we deemed him hardly in our class, would greatly solace ourselves with the clear and gurgling fountains which everywhere in Rome flow forth into their marble and moss-grown basins with a pleasant sound of coolness and refreshment. Rome without her fountains would not be Rome; every memory of her includes them. In the streets, in the piazzas, in the wide pleasaunces and gardens, the fountains allure us onward, and comfort us for our weariness. In the Piazza d' Espagna, at the foot of the famous steps, was that great, boat-shaped fountain whose affluent waters cool the air which broods over the wide, white stairway; and not far away is the mighty Trevi, with its turmoil of obstreperous figures swarming round bragging Neptune, and its cataract of innumerable rills welling forth and plunging downward by devious ways to meet at last in the great basin, forever agitated with baby waves lapping against the margins. These, and many similar elaborate structures, are for the delight of the eye; but there are scores of modest fountains, at the corners of the ways, in shady or in sunny places, formed of an ancient sarcophagus receiving the everlasting tribute of two open-mouthed lion-heads, or other devices, whose arching outgush splashes into the receptacle made to hold death, but now immortally dedicated to the refreshment of life. It was at these minor fountains that we quenched our boyish thirst, each drinking at the mouth of a spout; and when we discovered that by stopping up one spout with our thumb the other would discharge with double force, we played roguish tricks on each other, deluging each other at unawares with unmanageable gushes of water, till we were forced to declare a mutual truce of honor. But what delicious draughts did we suck in from those lion-mouths into our own; never elsewhere did water seem so sweet and revivifying. And then we would peer into the transparent depths of the old sarcophagus, with its fringes of green, silky moss waving slightly with the movement of the water, and fish out tiny-spired water-shells; or dip in them the bits of ancient marbles we had collected on our walk, to see the hues revive to their former splendor. Many-fountained Rome ought to be a cure for wine-bibbers; yet I never saw an Italian drink at these springs; they would rather quaff the thin red and white wines that are sold for a few baiocchi at the inns. The Pincian Hill and the adjoining grounds of the Borghese Palace came at length to be our favorite haunts. The Borghese is a delectable spot, as my father remarks in one of those passages in his diary which was afterwards expanded into the art-picture of his romance. "Broad carriageways," he says, "and wood-paths wander beneath long vistas of sheltering boughs; there are ilex-trees, ancient and sombre, which, in the long peace of their lifetime, have assumed attitudes of indolent repose; and stone-pines that look like green islands in the air, so high above earth are they, and connected with it by such a slender length of stem; and cypresses, resembling dark flames of huge, funereal candles. These wooded lawns are more beautiful than English park scenery; all the more beautiful for the air of neglect about them, as if not much care of men were bestowed upon them, though enough to keep wildness from growing into deformity, and to make the whole scene like nature idealized--the woodland scenes the poet dreamed of--a forest of Ardennes, for instance. These lawns and gentle valleys are beautiful, moreover, with fountains flashing into marble basins, or gushing like natural cascades from rough rocks; with bits of architecture, as pillared porticos, arches, columns, of marble or granite, with a touch of artful ruin on them; and, indeed, the pillars and fragments seem to be remnants of antiquity, though put together anew, hundreds of years old, perhaps, even in their present form, for weeds and flowers grow out of the chinks and cluster on the tops of arches and porticos. There are altars, too, with old Roman inscriptions on them. Statues stand here and there among the trees, in solitude, or in a long range, lifted high on pedestals, moss-grown, some of them shattered, all grown gray with the corrosion of the atmosphere. In the midst of these sunny and shadowy tracts rises the stately front of the villa, adorned with statues in niches, with busts, and ornamented architecture blossoming in stone-work. Take away the malaria, and it might be a very happy place." [IMAGE: PENCIL SKETCHES IN ITALY, BY MRS. NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE] Here was a playground for boys of imaginative but not too destructive proclivities, such as the world hardly furnishes elsewhere. But much of my enjoyment of it I ascribe to my friend Eddy. My conversation with no person since then has rivalled the profundity and importance of my communings with his sympathetic soul. We not only discussed our future destinies and philosophical convictions, but we located in these delicious retreats the various worlds which we purposed to explore and inhabit during the next few hundred years. Here we passed through by anticipation all our future experiences. Sometimes we were accompanied by other boys; but then our visits lost their distinction; we merely had good times in the ordinary way of boys; we were robber barons, intrenched in our strongholds, and attacked by other robbers; or we ran races, or held other trials of strength and activity, or we set snares for the bright-colored fishes which lurked in some of the fountains. The grounds were occasionally invaded by gangs of Italian boys, between whom and ourselves existed an irreconcilable feud. We could easily thrash them in the Anglo-Saxon manner, with nature's weapons; but they would ambush us and assail us with stones; and once one of them struck at me with a knife, which was prevented from entering my side only by the stout leather belt which I chanced to wear. We denounced these assassins to the smiling custode of the grounds, and he promised, smilingly, to bar the entrance to them thenceforth; but he was a smiling deceiver; our enemies came just the same. After all, we would have regretted their absence; they added the touch of peril to our chronic romance which made it perfect. It is forty-four years since then. Are there any other Borghese Gardens to come for me in the future, I wonder? There was a rough pathway along the banks of the Tiber, extending up the stream for two or three miles, as far as the Ponte Molle, where the corktrees grew, and farther, for aught I know. This was a favorite walk of mine, because of the fragments of antique marbles to be found there, and also the shells which so mysteriously abounded along the margin, as shown by the learned conchological author hereinbefore cited. And, being of an early rising habit, it was my wont to get up long before breakfast and tramp up and down along the river for an hour or two, thinking, I suppose, as I gazed upon the turbulent flood, of brave Horatius disdainfully escaping from the serried hosts of Lars Porsena and false Sextus, or of Caesar and Cassius buffeting the torrent on a "dare," and with lusty sinews flinging it aside. There were also lovely effects of dawn upon the dome of St. Peter's, and the redoubtable mass of St. Angelo, with its sword-sheathing angel. Moreover, sunrise, at twelve years of age, is an exhilarating and congenial phenomenon. And I painted my experiences in colors so attractive that our Ada Shepard was inflamed with the idea of accompanying me on my rambles. She was a child in heart, though so mature in intellect, and her spirit was valiant, though her flesh was comparatively infirm. It was my custom to set out about five o'clock in the morning, and Miss Shepard promised to be ready at that hour. But after keeping awake most of the night in order not to fail of the appointment, she fell asleep and dreamed only of getting up; and, after waiting for her for near an hour, I went without her. She was much mortified at her failure, and suggested a plan to insure her punctuality, in which I readily agreed to collaborate. When she went to bed she attached a piece of string to one of her toes, the other end of the filament being carried underneath doors and along passages to my own room. I was instructed to haul in on my slack at the proper hour; and this I accordingly did, with good-will, and was at once made conscious that I had caught something, not only by the resistance which my efforts encountered, but by the sound of cries of feminine distress and supplication, heard in the distance. However, my companion appeared in due season, and we took our walk, which, she declared, fulfilled all the anticipations which my reports had led her to form. Nevertheless, I cannot remember that we ever again made the expedition together; it is a mistake to try to repeat a perfect joy. It seems to me that I must have been a pretty constant visitor at St. Peter's. The stiff, heavy, leathern curtain which protects the entrance having been strenuously pushed aside (always with remembrance of Corinne's impossible act of grace and courtesy in holding it aside with one hand for Lord Neville), the glorious interior expanded, mildly radiant, before me. As has been the case with so many other observers, the real magnitude of the spectacle did not at first affect me; the character of the decoration and detail prevented the impression of greatness; it was only after many times traversing that illimitable pavement, and after frequent comparisons with ordinary human measurements of the aerial heights of those arches and that dome, that one conies to understand, by a sort of logical compulsion, how immense it all is. It is a miniature cabinet magically made titanic; but the magic which could transform inches into roods could not correspondingly enlarge the innate character of the ornament; so that, instead of making the miniature appear truly vast, it only makes us seem unnaturally small. Still, after all criticisms, St. Peter's remains one of the most delightful places in the world; its sweet sumptuousness and imperial harmonies seem somehow to enter into us and make us harmonious, rich, and sweet. The air that we inhale is just touched with the spirit of incense, and mellowed as with the still memories of the summers of five hundred years ago. The glistening surfaces of the colored marbles, dimmed with faint, fragrant mists, and glorified with long slants of brooding sunshine, soothe the eye like materialized music; and the soft twinkle of the candles on the altars, seen in daylight, has a jewel-like charm. As I look back upon it, however, and contrast it with the cathedrals of England, the total influence upon the mind of St. Peter's seems to me voluptuous rather than religious. It is a human palace of art more than a shrine of the Almighty. A prince might make love to a princess there without feeling guilty of profanation. St. Peter himself, sitting there in his chair, with his highly polished toe advanced, is a doll for us to play with. On one occasion I was in the church with my father, and the great nave was thronged with people and lined with soldiers, and down the midst went slowly a gorgeous procession, with Pope Pio Nono borne aloft, swayingly, the triple crown upon his head. He blessed the crowd, as he passed along, with outstretched hand. One can never forget such a spectacle; but I was not nearly so much impressed in a religious sense as when, forty years later, I stood in the portals of a Mohammedan mosque in Central India and saw a thousand turbaned Moslems prostrate themselves with their foreheads in the dust before a voice which proclaimed the presence of the awful, unseen God. My father enjoyed the church more after each visit to it. But it was the confessionals and their significance that most interested him. "What an institution the confessional is! Man needs it so, that it seems as if God must have ordained it." And he dwells upon the idea with remarkable elaboration and persistence. Those who have followed the painful wanderings of heart-oppressed Hilda to the carven confessional in the great church, where she found peace, will recognize the amply unfolded flower of this seed. What I supposed to be my notion of St. Peter's looking like the enlargement of some liliputian edifice is also there, though I had forgotten it till I myself reread the pages. In this book of my memories, which is also the book of my forgettings, I must walk to and fro freely, if I am to walk at all. None can tell the secret origin of his thoughts. Besides the monumental and artistic features of Rome, the human side of it appealed to me. There was something congenial in the Romans, and, indeed, in the Italians generally, so that I seemed to be renewing my acquaintance with people whom I had partly forgotten. I picked up the conversational language with unusual ease, perhaps owing to the drilling in Latin which my father had given me; and I liked the easy, objectless ways of the people, and the smiles which so readily took the place of the sallow gravity which their faces wore in repose. But it was the Transteverini women who chiefly attracted me; they wore an antique costume familiar enough in paintings, and they claimed to be descendants of the ancient race; they had the noble features and bearing which one would have looked for in such descendants, at all events. Looking in their dark, haughty eyes, one seemed to pass back through the terrible picturesqueness of mediaeval Italy, with its Borgias and Bella Donnas, its Lorenzos and Fornarinas, to the Rome of Nero, Augustus, Scipio, and Tarquin. Eddy and I would sometimes make excursions across the river to Transtevere, and stroll up and down those narrow streets, imagining all manner of suitable adventures and histories for the inhabitants, stalking there in their black and scarlet and yellow habiliments, and glancing imperially from under the black brows of their dark countenances. One afternoon during the carnival I was in a dense crowd in the piazza, towards the lower end of the Corso, and found myself pushed into the neighborhood of a singularly beautiful young woman of this class, dressed in the height of her fashion, who was slowly making her way in my direction through the press. All at once a man, smartly clad in the garb of recent civilization, stepped in front of her and said something to her; what it was I knew not. She drew herself back, as from something poisonous or revolting, and the expression of her face became terrible. At the same time her right hand went swiftly to the masses of her sable hair, and as swiftly back again, armed with the small, narrow dagger which these women wear by way of hair-pin. Before the unhappy creature who had accosted her knew what was happening, she thrust the dagger, with a powerful movement--while her white teeth showed, set edge to edge, through her drawn lips--deep into his body. As he collapsed forward she drew the weapon upward, putting the whole strength of her body into the effort, and actually ripped the man open. Down he fell at her feet. There was a score or more of Roman citizens within arm's-reach of her at the moment; no one spoke, still less attempted to restrain her. On the contrary, as she turned they respectfully opened a way for her through the midst of them, and none made an offer to assist the dying wretch who lay writhing and faintly coughing on the cobble-stone pavement of the piazza. I was soon elbowed quietly away from the spot where he lay; I caught a glimpse of the crimson head-dress of his slayer passing away afar amid the crowd; presently the cocked hat of a gendarme appeared from another direction, advancing slowly against manifest obstructions; everybody seemed to get in his way, without appearing to intend it. Such was the attitude towards assassination of the Roman people in those days. I have often thought over the incident since then. Their sympathy is with private vengeance, never with ordained statute law. They love to use the poniard and to see it used, and will do their best to shield the users. Pity for the victim they have none; they assume that he has his deserts. For that matter, my own sympathies, filled though I was with horror at the spectacle of actual murder done before my eyes, were wholly with the savage beauty, and not with the fatuous creature who had probably insulted her. It is needless to say that the women of Transtevere were not so often called upon to resent insults as are the ladies of New York and other American cities. They did not wait for policemen or for "leagues of chivalry" to avenge them. Towards the French soldiers I was cordially disposed. Their dark-blue tunics and baggy, red peg-tops were never out of sight, and though I had seen troops in England, and had once observed the march of a British regiment in Liverpool going to embark for the Crimea (whence, I believe, very few of this particular regiment returned), yet the conception of a resident army first came to me in Rome. About the French army of those days still hovered the lustre bestowed upon it by the deeds of the great Napoleon, which their recent exploits in the Crimea had not diminished. There were among them regiments of fierce and romantic looking zouaves, with Oriental complexions and semi-barbaric attire, marching with a long swing, and appearing savage and impetuous enough to annihilate anything; and there was also a brigade, the special designation of which I have forgotten, every man of which was a trained athlete, and whose drill was something marvellous to witness. But the average French soldier was simply a first-class soldier, good-natured, light-hearted, active, trim, and efficient; in height averaging not more than five foot six; carrying muskets which seemed out of proportion large, though they handled them lightly enough, and wearing at their sides a short sword, like the sword of ancient Rome, which was also used as a bayonet. There was always a drill or a march in progress somewhere, and sentinels paced up and down before the palaces. The officers were immensely impressive; the young ones had wasp waists, surpassing those of the most remorseless belles of fashion; and the old ones were, en revanche, immensely stout in that region, as if outraged nature were resolved to assert herself at last. But, young or old, their swords were sun-bright and lovely to behold--I used to polish my own little weapon in vain in the attempt to emulate them. Hopelessly envious was I, too, of the heroic chests of these warriors (not knowing them to be padded, as the waists were corseted), and I would swell out my own little pectoral region to its utmost extent as I walked along the streets, thereby, though I knew it not, greatly benefiting my physical organism. Of course I had no personal commerce with the officers, but the rank and file fraternized with me and my companions readily; there was always a number of them strolling about Rome and its environs on leave, in pairs or groups, and they were just as much boys as we were. They would let me heft their short, strong swords, and when they understood that I was gathering shells they would climb lightly about the ruins, and bring me specimens displayed in their broad, open palms. Our conversation was restricted to few words and many grunts and gestures, but we understood one another and were on terms of gay camaraderie. A dozen years afterwards, when there was war between France and Germany, my sympathies were ardently with the former, and great were my astonishment and regret at the issue of the conflict. Man for man, and rightly led and managed, I still believe that Gaul could wipe up the ground with the Teuton, without half trying. But there were other forces than those of Moltke and Bismarck fighting against poor France in that fatal campaign. She was wounded in the house of her friends. XVII Miss Lander makes a bust--The twang of his native place-- Wholly unlike anybody else--Wise, humorous Sarah Clarke-- Back to the Gods and the Fleas--Horace Mann's statue--Miss Bremer and the Tarpeian Rock--"I was in a state of some little tremor"--Mrs. Jameson and Ruskin--Most thorough-going of the classic tragedies--A well-grown calf--An adventure in Monte Testaccio--A vision of death--A fantastic and saturnine genius--A pitch-black place--Illuminations and fireworks--The Faun-Enjoying Rome--First impressions-- Lalla's curses. While my father was conscientiously making acquaintance with the achievements of old-time art, modern artists were trying to practise their skill on him; he had already sat to Cephas Giovanni Thompson, and he was now asked to contribute his head to the studio of a certain Miss Lander, late of Salem, Massachusetts, now settled, as she intended, permanently in Rome. "When I dream of home," she told him, "it is merely of paying a short visit and coming back here before my trunk is unpacked." Miss Lander was not a painter, but a sculptor, and, in spite of what my father had said against the nude in sculpture, I think he liked clay and marble as a vehicle of art better than paint and canvas. At all events, he consented to give her sittings. He was interested in the independence of her mode of life, and they got on very comfortably together; the results of his observation of her appear in the references to Hilda's and Miriam's unhampered ways of life in The Marble Faun. She had, as I recall her, a narrow, sallow face, sharp eyes, and a long chin. She might have been thirty years old. Unlike Miss Harriet Hosmer, who lived not far away, Miss Lander had no attractiveness for us children. I have reason to think, too, that my father's final opinion of her was not so favorable as his first one. Except photographs, no really good likeness of my father was ever taken; the portrait painted in Washington, in 1862, by Leutze, was the least successful of them all. The best, in my opinion, was an exquisitely wrought miniature of him at the age of thirty, which I kept for a long time, till it was stolen by a friend in London in 1880. Paul Akers, a Maine Yankee, with the twang of his native place still strong in him after ten years in Rome, was another sculptor of our acquaintance; he was very voluble, and escorted us about Rome, and entertained us at his own studio, where he was modelling his best group, "The Drowned Fisher-boy," as he called it. The figure is supposed to be lying at the bottom of the sea, face upward, with a fragment of rock supporting on its sharp ridge the small of the back--a most painful and uncomfortable attitude, suggesting that even in death there could be no rest for the poor youth. Mr. Akers was rather sharply critical of his more famous brother-artists, such as Greenough and Gibson, and was accused by them, apparently not wholly without justification, of yielding too much to the influence of other geniuses in the designing of his groups. But he was a sensible and obliging little personage, and introduced us to the studios of several of his fellow-artists in Rome, some of which were more interesting than his own. Bright little Miss Harriet Hosmer, with her hands in her jacket-pockets, and her short hair curling up round her velvet cap, struts cheerfully forth out of the obscurity of the past in my memory; her studio, I think, adjoined that of Gibson, of whom I remember nothing whatever. Her most notable production at that time was a Puck sitting on a toadstool, with a conical shell of the limpet species by way of a cap; he somehow resembled his animated and clever creator. Miss Hosmer's face, expressions, gestures, dress, and her manifestations in general were perfectly in keeping with one another; there never was a more succinct and distinct individuality; she was wholly unlike anybody else, without being in the least unnatural or affected. Her social manner was of a persistent jollity; but no doubt she had her grave moments or hours, a good and strong brain, and a susceptibility to tragic conceptions, as is shown by the noble figure of her Zenobia. This figure I saw in clay in her studio during our second season in Rome. Miss Hosmer's talk was quick, witty, and pointed; her big eyes redeemed her round, small-featured face from triviality; her warm heart glowed through all she said and did. Her studio was a contrast to the classicality of Gibson's, whose influence, though she had studied under him during her six years' residence in Rome, had affected her technique only, not her conceptions or aims in art. We all liked her much. She was made known to us, I believe, through the medium of grave, wise, humorous Sarah Clarke, the sister of the James Freeman Clarke who married my mother to my father, and who, twenty-two years later, read over my father the burial service. Sarah Clarke was often abroad; she was herself an admirable artist in water-color, and was always a dear friend of my mother's. After we had returned to Concord, in 1860, Miss Hosmer wrote to us, and one of her letters has been preserved; I quote it, because it is like her: "MY DEAR MRS. HAWTHORNE,--It is not unlikely that you may be somewhat surprised to hear from me; but after you have received the four dozen letters which, sooner or later, I intend writing you, you will cease to be so. I begin at the present moment with the first of the forty-eight, partly for business and partly for pleasure. Reversing, then, the order of things which some unknown but well-regulated-minded individual considered to be correct, I will go in for pleasure first, under which head I seek information respecting the health and well-being of all members of your family. It seems cruel that you should go off to the glorious Republic when there are other places in Rome besides the Piazza Poli. Now that you are safely out of it, I must try to persuade you that it was the most unhealthy place in the whole city, not only because I really believe it to be so, but that malaria may not be mingled and cherished with every remembrance of this delicious, artistic, fleay, malarious paradise. But I suppose little short of a miracle would transport you here again, not only because Una is probably becoming the size of Daniel Lambert, in her native air, but because Julian is probably weaving a future President's chair out of the rattans he is getting at school. However that may be, the result is the same, I fear, as to your getting back to the Gods and the Fleas; and I must look forward to a meeting in America. Well, as that carries me over the ocean, in my mind's eye, Mrs. Hawthorne, the business clause of my epistle is suggested--and it is this: I have just had a letter from my best of friends, Mr. Crow, of St. Louis [she had studied anatomy in St. Louis before coming to Rome], who has been passing the summer in New York and Boston, and he writes: 'They are talking in Boston of a monument to the memory of Mr. Horace Mann, and I have said to one of the active men engaged in it that if you could have the commission I would subscribe handsomely towards it.' Now, it occurred to me that perhaps you or yours might have an opportunity of saying a good word for me, in which case I would have you know how pleased and grateful I should be. You may not have the occasion offered you, but if it chances, I commend myself to you distintamente, and trust to your good-nature not to consider me pushing for having suggested it. I send this through our well-beloved Sarah Clarke, and hope it will arrive before 1861. When you have nothing better to do, pray give me a line, always in care of Pakenham & Hooker. Good-bye, dear Mrs. Hawthorne--my best love to Mr. Hawthorne and the chicks--and the best wish I can make is that you are all as fat as yours always affectionately, "HARRIET HOSMER." All the influence which my father and mother possessed was given to Miss Hosmer's cause, but some other person got the commission. I remember, too, that my mother, at Mrs. Mann's request, was at great pains to make drawings for the face of the statue which now confronts from the slopes of Beacon Hill the culture and intelligence of Boston, which Horace Mann did so much to promote. But he was not a subject which accommodated itself readily to the requirements of plastic art. There is a glimpse of Miss Hosmer in one of my father's diaries, which I will reproduce, for the sake of indicating his amused and benevolent attitude towards her. "She had on," says he, "a neat little jacket, a man's shirt-bosom, and a cravat with a brooch in it; her hair is cut short, and curls jauntily round her bright and smart little physiognomy; and, sitting opposite me at table, I never should have imagined that she terminated in a petticoat any more than in a fish's tail. However, I do not mean to speak disrespectfully of Miss Hosmer, of whom I think very favorably; but, it seems to me, her reform of the female dress begins with its least objectionable part, and is no real improvement." One evening we visited Miss Bremer, the novelist, of Sweden, who was then near the end of her foreign travels, which had begun with her visit to America in 1849. She had met my father in Lenox, and had written of him in the book of her travels. She was a small woman, with a big heart and broad mind, packed full of sense, sentiment, and philanthropy. She had an immense nose, designed, evidently, for some much larger person; her conversation in English, though probably correct, was so oddly accented that it was difficult to follow her. She was a very lovable little creature, then nearing her sixtieth year. Most of her voluminous literary work was done. Her house in Rome was near the Capitol and the Tarpeian Rock; and after we had forgathered with her there for a while, she accompanied us forth--the moon being up--to see the famous precipice. It was to this incident that we owe the scene in The Marble Faun, the most visibly tragic in my father's writings. "The court-yard," he writes in his notes, "is bordered by a parapet, leaning over which we saw a sheer precipice of the Tarpeian Rock, about the height of a four-story house; not that the precipice was a bare face of rock, but it appeared to be cased in some sort of cement, or ancient stone-work, through which the primeval rock, here and there, looked grimly and doubtfully. Bright as the Roman moonlight was, it would not show the front of the wall, or rock, so well as I should have liked to see it, but left it pretty much in the same degree of dubiety and half-knowledge in which the antiquarians leave most of the Roman ruins. Perhaps this precipice may have been the Traitor's Leap; perhaps it was the one on which Miss Bremer's garden verges; perhaps neither of the two. At any rate, it was a good idea of the stern old Romans to fling political criminals down from the very height of the Capitoline Hill on which stood the temples and public edifices, symbols of the institutions which they sought to violate." But there was no tragic suggestion in our little party, conducted about by the prattling, simple, affectionate little woman, so homely, tender, and charitable. "At parting," wrote my father, "she kissed my wife most affectionately on each cheek, 'because,' she said, 'you look so sweetly'; and then she turned towards myself. I was in a state of some little tremor, not knowing what might be about to befall me, but she merely pressed my hand, and we parted, probably never to meet again. God bless her good heart, and every inch of her little body, not forgetting her red nose, big as it is in proportion to the rest of her! She is a most amiable little woman, worthy to be the maiden aunt of the whole human race!" Venerable Mrs. Jameson, author of a little library of writings on Italian art, was likewise of our company occasionally; and she evinced a marked liking for my father, which was remarkable, inasmuch as he was able to keep no sort of pace with her in her didactic homilies, which were delivered with a tranquil, ex-cathedra manner, befitting one who was the authority on her subject; one would no more have thought of questioning her verdicts than those of Ruskin; but I should have liked to see the latter and her together, with a difference between them. Her legs were less active than her mind, and most of our expeditions with her were made in carriages, from which she dispensed her wisdom placidly as we went along, laying the dust of our ignorance with the droppings of her erudition, like a watering-cart. However, she so far condescended from her altitudes as to speak very cordially of my father's books, for which he expressed proper acknowledgment; and she had a motherly way of holding his hand in hers when he took leave of her, and looking maternally in his face, which made him somewhat uneasy. "Were we to meet often," he remarked, "I should be a little afraid of her embracing me outright--a thing to be grateful for, but by no means to be glad of!" We drove one day to some excavations which had just been opened near the tomb of Cecilia Metella, outside the walls of Rome. Both Christian and Roman graves had been found, and they had been so recently discovered that, as my father observed, there could have been very little intervention of persons (though much of time) between the departure of the friends of the dead and our own visit. The large, excavated chambers were filled with sarcophagi, beautifully sculptured, and their walls were ornamented with free-hand decoration done in wet plaster, a marvellous testimony to the rapid skill of the artists. The sarcophagi were filled with the bones and the dust of the ancient people who had once, in the imperial prime of Rome, walked about her streets, prayed to her gods, and feasted at her banquets. My father remarked on the fact that many of the sarcophagi were sculptured with figures that seemed anything but mournful in their demeanor; but Mrs. Jameson said that there was almost always, in the subject chosen, some allusion to death, instancing the story of Meleager, an Argonaut, who, I think, slew the Calydonian boar, and afterwards his two uncles, who had tried to get the boar's hide away from Meleager's beloved Atalanta; whereupon the young hero was brought to death by his mother, who in turn killed herself. It is one of the most thoroughgoing of the classic tragedies, and was a favorite theme for the sculptors of sarcophagi. Certainly, in the sarcophagi of the Vatican the bas-reliefs are often scenes of battle, the rush of men and horses, and the ground strewn with dead; and in others, a dying person seems to be represented, with his friends weeping along the sides of the sarcophagus; but often, too, the allusion to death, if it exists at all, is very remote. The old Romans, like ourselves, had individual ways of regarding the great change; according to their mood and faith, they were hopeful or despairing. But death is death, think of it how we will. I think it was on a previous occasion that I went with my father, afoot, along this same mighty Appian Way, beside which rise so many rounded structures, vast as fortresses, containing the remains of the dead of long ago, and culminating in the huge mass of the Cecilia Metella tomb, with the mediaeval battlements on its summit. And it was on that walk that we met the calf of The Marble Faun: "A well-grown calf," my father says in his notes, "who seemed frolicsome, shy, and sociable all at the same time; for he capered and leaped to one side, and shook his head, as I passed him, but soon came galloping behind me, and again started aside when I looked round." How little I suspected then (or the bull-calf either, for that matter) that he was to frolic his way into literature, and go gambolling down the ages to distract the anxious soul of the lover of Hilda! Another walk of ours was to the huge, green mound of the Monte Testaccio; it was, at that period, pierced by numerous cavities, in the dark coolness of which stores of native wines were kept; and they were sold to customers at the rude wooden tables in front of the excavations, in flasks shaped like large drops of water, protected with plaited straw. When, nowadays, in New York or other cities here, I go to an Italian restaurant, I always call for one of these flasks, and think, as I drink its contents, of that afternoon with my father. It was the first time I had been permitted to taste a fermented liquor. I liked it very much, and got two glasses of it; and when we rose to depart I was greatly perplexed, and my father was vastly tickled, to discover a lack of coherence between my legs and my intentions. It speedily passed off, for the wines are of the lightest and airiest description; but when, a little later on in life, I came to read that Horatian verse describing how, turning from barbaric splendors such as the Persians affect, he binds his brows with simple myrtle, and sips, beneath the shadow of his garden bower, the pure vintage of the native grape, I better appreciated the poetry of the theme from having enjoyed that Testaccionesque experience. It was in Rome, too, that I first came in contact with death. It aroused my liveliest curiosity, but, as I remember, no alarm; partly, I suspect, because I was unable to believe that there was anything real in the spectacle. The scene has been woven into the texture of the Italian romance; it is there described almost as it actually presented itself to the author's observation. A dead monk of the Capuchin order lay on a bier in the nave of their church, and while we looked at him a stream of blood flowed from his nostrils. We went down afterwards, I recollect, into the vaults, and saw the fine, Oriental loam in which the body was to lie; and it seems to me there were arches and other architectural features composed of skulls and bones of long-dead brothers of the order. He must have been a fantastic and saturnine genius who first suggested this idea. Another subterranean expedition of ours was to the Catacombs, the midnight passages of which seemed to be made of bones, and niches containing the dust of unknown mortality, which were duskily revealed in the glimmer of our moccoli as we passed along in single file. Sometimes we came to chambers, one of which had in it a bier covered with glass, in which was a body which still preserved some semblance of the human form. There were occasional openings in the vaulted roof of the corridors, but for the most part the darkness was Egyptian, and for a few moments a thrill of anxiety was caused by the disappearance either of my sister Una or of Ada Shepard; I forget which. They were soon found, but the guide read us a homily upon the awful peril of lifelong entombment which encompassed us. But the air was dry and cool, and the whole adventure, from my point of view, enjoyable. Again, we went down a long flight of steps somewhere near the Forum, till we reached a pitch-black place, where we waited till a guide came up from still lower depths, down into which we followed him--each with a moccolo--till we felt level earth or stone beneath our feet, and stood in what I suppose is as lightless a hole as can exist in nature. It was wet, too, and the smell of it was deadly and dismal. This, however, was the prison in which the old Romans used to confine important prisoners, such as Jugurtha and the Apostle Peter; and here they were strangled to death or left to starve. It was the Mamertine Prison. I did not like it. I also recall the opening of an oubliette in the castle of San Angelo, which affected me like a nightmare. Before leaving Concord, in 1853, I had once tumbled through a rotten board into a well, dug by the side of the road ages before, and had barely saved myself from dropping to the bottom, sixty feet below, by grabbing the weeds which grew on the margin of the hole. I was not much scared at the moment; but the next day, taking my father to the scene of the accident, he remarked that had I fallen in I never could have got out again; upon which I conceived a horror of the well which haunts me in my dreams even to this day. Only a tuft of grass between me and such a fate! I was, therefore, far from comfortable beside the oubliette, and was glad to emerge again into the Roman sunshine. One night we climbed the Pincian Hill, and saw, far out across Rome, the outlines of St. Peter's dome in silver light. While we were thinking that nothing could be more beautiful, all of a sudden the delicate silver bloomed out into a golden glory, which made everybody say, "Oh!" Was it more beautiful or not? Theoretically, I prefer the silver illumination; but, as a matter of fact, I must confess that I liked the golden illumination better. We were told that the wonder was performed by convicts, who lay along the dome and applied their matches to the lamps at the word of command, and that, inasmuch as the service was apt to prove fatal to the operators, these convicts were allowed certain alleviations of their condition for doing it. I suppose it is done by electricity now, and the convicts neither are killed nor obtain any concessions. Such are the helps and hindrances of civilization! Shortly after this, on a cool and cloudy night, I was down in the Piazza, del Popolo and saw the fireworks, the only other pyrotechnic exhibition I had witnessed having been a private one in Rock Park, which, I think, I have described. This Roman one was very different, and I do not believe I have ever since seen another so fine. The whole front of the Pincian was covered with fiery designs, and in the air overhead wonderful fiery serpents and other devices skimmed, arched, wriggled, shot aloft, and detonated. A boy accepts appearances as realities; and these fireworks doubtless enlarged my conceptions of the possibilities of nature, and substantiated the fables of the enchanters. [IMAGE: THE MARBLE FAUN] The Faun of Praxiteles, as the world knows, attracted my father, though he could not have visited it often; for both in his notes and in his romance he makes the same mistake as to the pose of the figure: "He has a pipe," he says in the former, "or some such instrument of music in the hand which rests upon the tree, and the other, I think, hangs carelessly by his side." Of course, the left arm, the one referred to, is held akimbo on his left hip. That my father's eyes were, however, already awake to the literary and moral possibilities of the Faun is shown by his further observations, which are much the same as those which appear in the book. "The whole person," he says, "conveys the idea of an amiable and sensual nature, easy, mirthful, apt for jollity, yet not incapable of being touched by pathos. The Faun has no principle, nor could comprehend it, yet is true and honest by virtue of his simplicity; very capable, too, of affection. He might be refined through his feelings, so that the coarser, animal part of his nature would be thrown into the background, though liable to assert itself at any time. Praxiteles has only expressed the animal part of the nature by one (or, rather, two) definite signs--the two ears, which go up in a little peak, not likely to be discovered on slight inspection, and, I suppose, they are covered with downy fur. A tail is probably hidden under the garment. Only a sculptor of the finest imagination, most delicate taste, and sweetest feeling would have dreamed of representing a faun under this guise; and, if you brood over it long enough, all the pleasantness of sylvan life, and all the genial and happy characteristics of the brute creation, seem to be mixed in him with humanity--trees, grass, flowers, cattle, deer, and unsophisticated man." This passage shows how much my father was wont to trust to first impressions, and even more on the moral than on the material side. He recognized a truth in the first touch--the first thought--which he was wary of meddling with afterwards, contenting himself with slightly developing it now and then, and smoothing a little the form and manner of its presentation. The finest art is nearest to the most veritable nature--to such as have the eye to see the latter aright. Rome, like other ancient cities which have fallen from the positive activity of their original estate, has one great advantage over other places which one wishes to see (like London, for instance), that the whole business of whoever goes there, who has any business whatever, is to see it; and when the duty-sights have been duly done, the sight-seer then first begins to live his true life in independence and happiness, going where he lists, staying no longer than he pleases, and never knowing, when he sallies forth in the morning, what, or how many, or how few things he will have accomplished by nightfall. The duty to see is indeed the death of real vision; the official cicerone leads you anywhere but to the place or thing that you are in the mood to behold or understand. But with his disappearance the fun and the pageant begin; one's eyes are at last opened, and beauty and significance flow in through every pore of the senses. It is in this better phase of his Roman sojourn that I picture my father; he trudges tranquilly and happily to and fro, with no programme and no obligations, absorbing all things with that quiet, omnivorous glance of his; pausing whenever he takes the fancy, and contemplating for moments or minutes whatever strikes his fancy; often turning aside from egregious spectacles and giving his attention to apparent trifles, to the mere passing show; pondering on the tuft of flowers in a cranny of the Coliseum wall, on the azure silhouette of the Alban Mountains, on the moss collected on the pavement beneath the aperture in the roof of the Pantheon, on the picturesque deformity of old, begging Beppo on the steps of the Piazza, d' Espagna. I am trudging joyously beside him, hanging on to his left hand (the other being occupied with his hook-headed cane), asking him innumerable questions, to which he comfortably, or abstractedly, or with humorous impatience, replies; or I run on before him, or lag behind, busy with my endless occupation of picking up things to me curious and valuable, and filling with them my much-enduring pockets; in this way drinking in Rome in my own way, also, and to my boyish advantage. He tells me tales of old Rome, always apposite to the occasion; draws from me, sometimes, my private views as to persons, places, and scenes, and criticises those views in his own terse, arch, pregnant way, the force and pertinency whereof are revealed to me only in my later meditations upon them. It is only after one has begun to deal in this way with Rome that its magic and spell begin to work upon one; and they are never to be shaken off. Anxiety and pain may be mingled with them, as was the case with my father before we said our final farewell to the mighty city; but it is thereby only the more endeared to one. Rome is one of the few central facts of the world, because it is so much more than a fact. Byron is right--it is the city of the soul. On one of the last evenings of our first season we went to the Thompsons', and were there shown, among other things, a portfolio of sketches. There is in The Marble Faun a chapter called "Miriam's Studio," in which occurs a reference to a portfolio of sketches by Miriam herself; the hint for it may have been taken from the portfolio of Mr. Thompson, though the sketches themselves were of a very different quality and character. The latter collection pleased me, because I was just beginning to fill an album of my own with such lopsided attempts to represent real objects, and yet more preposterous imaginative sallies as my age and nature suggested. My father was interested in them on account of the spiritual vigor which belongs to the artist's first vision of his subject. In their case, as well as in his own, he felt that it was impossible, as Browning put it, to "recapture that first, fine, careless rapture." But the man of letters has an advantage over the man of paint and canvas in the matter of being able to preserve the original spirit in the later, finished design. Towards the close of this first season in Rome the Bryants came to town, and the old poet, old in aspect even then, called on us; but he was not a childly man, and we youngsters stood aloof and contemplated with awe his white, Merlin beard and tranquil but chilly eyes. Near the end of May William Story invited us to breakfast with him; the Bryants and Miss Hosmer and some English people were there; and I understood nothing of what passed except the breakfast, which was good, until, at the end of the session, my father and Story began to talk about the superstition as to Friday, and they agreed that, of course, it was nonsense, but that, nevertheless, it did have an influence on both of them. It probably has an influence on everybody who has ever heard of it. Many of us protest indignantly that we don't believe in it, but the protest itself implies something not unlike believing. Finally, on the 24th of May, we left our Pincian palace, and got into and on the huge _vettura_ which was to carry us to Florence, a week's journey. It was to be one of the most delightful and blessed of our foreign experiences; my father often said that he had enjoyed nothing else so much, the vetturino (who happened to be one of the honestest and sweetest-tempered old fellows in Italy) taking upon himself the entire management of everything, down to ordering the meals and paying the tolls, thus leaving us wholly unembarrassed and free from responsibility while traversing a route always historically and generally scenically charming. But we were destined, on the threshold of the adventure, to undergo one of those evil quarters of an hour which often usher in a period of special sunshine; for we were forced into a desperate conflict with our servant-girl, Lalla, and her mother over a question of wages. The girl had done chores for us during our residence at the Palazzo Larazani, and had seemed to be a very amiable little personage; she was small, slim, and smiling, and, though dirty and inefficient, was no worse, so far as we could discover, than any other Roman servant-girl. When we had fixed on the date of our departure, Lalla had been asked how much warning she wanted; she replied, a fortnight; which, accordingly, was given her, with a few days thrown in for good measure. But when the day arrived she claimed a week's more pay, and her old mother had a bill of her own for fetching water. According to my observation, travelling Americans have little or no conscience; to avoid trouble they will submit to imposition, not to mention their habit of spoiling tradesmen, waiters, and other foreign attendants by excessive tips and payments. But my father and mother, though apt enough to make liberal bargains, were absolutely incorruptible and immovable when anything like barefaced robbery was attempted upon them; and they refused to present Lalla and her mother with a single baioccho more than was their due. Moreover, the patrone, or proprietor, of the Palazzo had mulcted them some six scudi for Lalla's profuse breakages of glass and crockery during our stay. It was early morning when we set out, and only the faithful Thompsons were there to bid us farewell. Lalla and her tribe, however, were on hand, and violently demanded the satisfaction of their iniquitous claims. "No!" said my father, and "No!" said my mother, like the judges of the Medes and Persians. Thereupon the whole House of Lalla, but Lalla and her mother especially, gave us an example of what an Italian can do in the way of cursing an enemy. Ancient forms of malediction, which had been current in the days of the early Roman kings, were mingled with every damning invention that had been devised during the Middle Ages, and ever since then; and they were all hurled at us in shrill, screaming tones, accompanied by fell and ominous gestures and inarticulate yells of superheated frenzy. Nothing could surpass the volubility of this cursing, unless it were the animosity which prompted it; no crime that anybody, since Cain slew Abel, had or could have committed deserved a tenth part of the calamities and evil haps which this preposterous family called down upon our heads, who had committed no crime at all, but quite the contrary. When, in after-years, I heard Booth, as Richelieu, threaten "the curse of Rome" upon his opponents, I shuddered, wondering whether he had any notion what the threat meant. Through it all my mother's ordinarily lovely and peaceful countenance expressed a sad but unalterable determination; and my father kept smiling in a certain dangerous way that he sometimes had in moments of great peril or stress, but said nothing; while Mr. Thompson indignantly called upon the cursers to cease and to beware, and my dear friend Eddy looked distressed to the verge of tears. He squeezed my hand as I got into the _vettura_, and told me not to mind--the Lalla people were wicked, and their ill-wishes would return upon their own heads. A handful of ten-cent pieces, or their Roman equivalent, would have stopped the whole outcry and changed it into blessings; but I think my father would not have yielded had the salvation of Rome and of all Italy depended upon it. His eyes gleamed, as I have seen them do on one or two other occasions only, as we drove away, with the screams pursuing us, and that smile still hovered about his mouth. But we drove on; Gaetano cracked his long whip, our four steeds picked up their feet and rattled our vehicle over the Roman cobble-stones; we passed the Porta del Popolo, and were stretching along, under the summer sunshine, upon the white road that led to Florence. It was a divine morning; the turmoil and the strife were soon forgotten, and for a week thenceforward there was only unalloyed felicity before us. Poor, evil-invoking Lalla had passed forever out of our sphere. XVIII In Othello's predicament--Gaetano--Crystals and snail- shells--Broad, flagstone pavements--Fishing-rods and blow- pipes--Ghostly yarns--Conservative effects of genius--An ideal bust and a living one--The enigma of spiritualism--A difficult combination to overthrow--The dream-child and the Philistine--Dashing and plunging this way and that--Teresa screamed for mercy--Grapes and figs and ghostly voices--My father would have settled there--Kirkup the necromancer--A miraculous birth--A four-year-old medium--The mysterious touch--An indescribable horror--Not even a bone of her was left--Providence takes very long views. The railroad which now unites Rome with Florence defrauds travellers of some of the most agreeable scenery in Italy, and one of the most time-honored experiences; and as for the beggars who infested the route, they must long since have perished of inanition--not that they needed what travellers gave them in the way of alms, but that, like Othello, their occupation being gone, they must cease to exist. Never again could they look forward to pestering a tourist; never exhibit a withered arm or an artistic ulcer; never mutter anathemas against the obdurate, or call down blessings upon the profuse. What was left them in life? And what has become of the wayside inns, and what of the vetturinos? A man like Gaetano, by himself, was enough to modify radically one's conception of the possibilities of the Italian character. In appearance he was a strong-bodied Yankee farmer, with the sun-burned, homely, kindly, shrewd visage, the blue jumper, the slow, canny ways, the silent perception and enjoyment of humorous things, the infrequent but timely speech. It was astonishing to hear him speaking Italian out of a mouth which seemed formed only to emit a Down-East drawl and to chew tobacco. In disposition and character this son of old Rome was, so far as we, during our week of constant and intimate association with him, could judge, absolutely without fault; he was mild, incorruptible, and placid, as careful of us as a father of his children, and he grew as fond of us as we were of him, so that the final parting, after the journey was done, was really a moving scene. I have found the tribe of cabbies, in all countries, to be, as a rule, somewhat cantankerous and sinister; but Gaetano compensated for all his horse-driving brethren. To be sure, _vettura_ driving is not like cabbing, and Gaetano was in the habit of getting out often and walking up the hills, thus exercising his liver. But he must have been born with a strong predisposition to goodness, which he never outgrew. Save for a few showers, it was fine weather all the way, and a good part of the way was covered on foot by my father and me; for the hills were many, and the winding ascents long, and we would alight and leave the slow-moving vehicle, with its ponderous freight, behind us, to be overtaken perhaps an hour or two later on the levels or declivities. Gaetano was a consummate whip, and he carried his team down the descents and round the exciting turns at a thrilling pace, while the yards of whiplash cracked and detonated overhead like a liliputian thunder-storm. On the mountain-tops were romantic villages, surrounding rock-built castles which had been robber strongholds centuries before, and we traversed peaceful plains which had been the scenes of famous Roman battles, and whose brooks had run red with blood before England's history began. We paused a day in Perugia, and received the Bronze Pontiff's benediction; the silent voices of history were everywhere speaking to the spiritual ear. Meanwhile I regarded the trip as being, primarily, an opportunity to collect unusual snail-shells; and we passed through a region full of natural crystals, some of them of such size as to prompt my father to forbid their being added to our luggage. I could not understand his insensibility. Could I have had my way, I would have loaded a wain with them. I liked the villages and castles, too, and the good dinners at the inns, and the sound sleeps in mediaeval beds at night; but the crystals and the snail-shells were the true aim and sustenance of my life. My mother and sister sketched continually, and Miss Shepard was always ready to tell us the story of the historical features which we encountered; it astounded me to note how much she knew about things which she had never before seen. One afternoon we drove down from surrounding heights to Florence, which lay in a golden haze characteristic of Italian Junes in this latitude. Powers, the sculptor, had promised to engage lodgings for us, but he had not expected us so soon, and meanwhile we put up at a hotel near by, and walked out a little in the long evening, admiring the broad, flagstone pavements and all the minor features which made Florence so unlike Rome. The next day began our acquaintance with the Powers family, who, with the Brownings, constituted most of the social element of our sojourn. Powers had an agreeable wife, two lovely daughters, and a tall son, a few years older than I, and a pleasant companion, though he could not take the place of Eddy Thompson in my heart. He was clever with his hands, and soon began to make fishing-rods for me, having learned of my predilection for the sport. There were no opportunities to fish in Florence; but the rods which Bob Powers produced were works of art, straight and tapering, and made in lengths, which fitted into one another--a refinement which was new to me, who had hitherto imagined nothing better than a bamboo pole. Bob finally confided to me that he straightened his rods by softening the wood in steam; but I found that they did not long retain their straightness; and, there being no use for them, except the delight of the eye, I presently lost interest in them. Then Bob showed me how to make blow-pipes by pushing out the pith from the stems of some species of bushy shrub that grew outside the walls. He made pellets of clay from his father's studio; and I was deeply affected by the long range and accuracy of these weapons. We used to ensconce ourselves behind the blinds of the front windows of Powers's house, and practise through the slats at the passers-by in the street. They would feel a smart hit and look here and there, indignant; but, after a while, seeing nothing but the innocent fronts of sleepy houses, would resume their way. Bob inherited his handiness from his father, who seemed a master of all crafts, a true Yankee genius. He might have made his fortune as an inventor had he not happened to turn the main stream of his energy in the direction of sculpture. I believe that the literary art was the only one in which he did not claim proficiency, and that was a pity, because Powers's autobiography would have been a book of books. He was a Swedenborgian by faith, but he also dabbled somewhat in spiritualism, which was having a vogue at that time, owing partly to the exploits of the American medium Home. Marvellous, indeed, were the ghostly yarns Powers used to spin, and they lost nothing by the physical appearance of the narrator, with his tall figure, square brow, great, black eyes, and impressive gestures; his voice, too, was deep and flexible, and could sink into the most blood-curdling tones. My recollection is that Powers was always clad in a long, linen pinafore, reaching from his chin to his feet, and daubed with clay, and on his head a cap made either of paper, like a baker's, or, for dress occasions, of black velvet. His homely ways and speech, which smacked of the Vermont farm as strongly as if he had just come thence, whereas in truth he had lived in Florence, at this time, about twenty years, and had won high fame as a sculptor, tempted one to suspect him of affectation--of a pose; and there is no doubt that Powers was aware of the contrast between his physical presentment and his artistic reputation, and felt a sort of dramatic pleasure in it. Nevertheless, it would be unjust to call him affected; he was a big man, in all senses of the term, and his instinct of independence led him to repudiate all external polish and ear-marks of social culture, and to say, as it were, "You see, a plain Vermont countryman can live half a lifetime in the centre of artificial refinement and rival by the works of his native genius the foremost living artists, and yet remain the same simple, honest old sixpence that he was at home!" It was certainly a more manly and wholesome attitude than that of the ordinary American foreign resident, who makes a point of forgetting his native ways and point of view, and aping the habits and traits of his alien associates. And, besides, Powers had such an immense temperament and individuality that very likely he could not have modified them successfully even had he been disposed to do so. [IMAGE: HIRAM POWERS] His daughters, as I have said, were lovely creatures. Powers was at this time modelling an ideal bust of a woman, and one day I went into his studio expecting to find Bob there, but the studio was empty but for the bust, which I now had an opportunity to contemplate at my ease for the first time. I thought it very beautiful, and there was something about the face which reminded me of somebody, I could not decide who. Just then a portiere in the doorway parted, and in came a living bust, a reality in warm flesh and blood, compared with which the ideal seemed second-rate. It belonged to one of Powers's daughters, who had come for a sitting; she was serving as her father's model. Upon seeing the unexpected boy, fixed there in speechless admiration, the young lady uttered a scream and vanished. I now knew whom the face of the clay effigy reminded me of, and afterwards when I saw beautiful statues I thought of her, and shook my head. My father and Powers took a strong fancy to each other, and met and talked a great deal. As I just said now, spiritualism was a fad at that time, and Powers was pregnant with marvels which he had either seen or heard of, and which he was always ready to attempt to explain on philosophical grounds. My father would listen to it all, and both believe it and not believe it. He felt, I suppose, that Powers was telling the truth, but he was not persuaded that all the truth was in Powers's possession, or in any one else's. Powers also had a great deal to say concerning the exoteric and esoteric truths of sculpture; his racy individuality marked it all. He would not admit that there was any limit to what might be done with marble; and when my father asked him one day whether he could model a blush on a woman's cheek, he said, stoutly, that the thing was possible. My father, as his manner was with people, went with the sculptor as far as he chose to carry him, accepting all his opinions and judgments, and becoming Powers, so far as he might, for the time being, in order the better to get to the root of his position. And then, afterwards, he would return to his own self, and quietly examine Powers's assertions and theories in the dry light. My father was two men, one sympathetic and intuitional, the other critical and logical; together they formed a combination which could not be thrown off its feet. We had already met the Brownings in London; but at this period they belonged in Italy more than anywhere else, and Florence formed the best setting for the authors both of Aurora Leigh and of Sordello. They lived in a villa called Casa Guidi, and with them was their son, a boy younger than myself, whom they called Pennini, though his real name was something much less fastidious. Penni, I believe, used to be an assistant of Raphael early in the sixteenth century, and Pennini may have been nicknamed after him. His mother, who was an extravagant woman on the emotional and spiritual plane, made the poor little boy wear his hair curled in long ringlets down his back, and clad him in a fancy costume of black velvet, with knickerbockers and black silk stockings; he was homely of face, and looked "soft," as normal boys would say. But his parents were determined to make an ideal dream-child of him, and, of course, he had to submit. I had the contempt for him which a philistine boy feels for a creature whom he knows he can lick with one hand tied behind his back, and I had nothing whatever to say to him. But Pennini was not such a mollycoddle and ass as he looked, and when he grew up he gave evidence enough of having a mind and a way of his own. My mother took him at his mother's valuation, and both she and my father have expressed admiration of the whole Browning tribe in their published journals. Mrs. Browning seemed to me a sort of miniature monstrosity; there was no body to her, only a mass of dark curls and queer, dark eyes, and an enormous mouth with thick lips; no portrait of her has dared to show the half of it. Her hand was like a bird's claw. Browning was a lusty, active, energetic person, dashing and plunging this way and that with wonderful impetus and suddenness; he was never still a moment, and he talked with extraordinary velocity and zeal. There was a mass of wild hair on his head, and he wore bushy whiskers. He appeared very different twenty years later, when I met him in London, after his wife's death; he was quiet and sedate, with close-cut silvery hair and pointed beard, and the rather stout, well-dressed figure of a British gentleman of the sober middle class. It is difficult to harmonize either of these outsides with the poet within--that remarkable imagination, intellect, and analytical faculty which have made him one of the men of the century. There was a genial charm in Browning, emphasized, in this earlier time, with a bewildering vivacity and an affluence of courtesy. In his mature phase he was still courteous and agreeable when he chose to be so, but was also occasionally supercilious and repellent, and assiduously cultivated smart society. I once asked him, in 1879, why he made his poetry so often obscure, and he replied, frankly, that he did so because he couldn't help it; the inability to put his thoughts in clear phrases had always been a grief to him. This statement was, to me, unexpected, and it has a certain importance. After a few weeks in Casa Bella, opposite Powers's house, Florence grew so hot that we were glad of an opportunity to rent the Villa Montauto, up on the hill of Bellosguardo, less than a mile beyond the city gate. The villa, with two stories and an attic, must have been nearly two hundred feet long, and was two or three rooms deep; at the hither end rose a tower evidently much older than the house attached to it. Near the foot of the tower grew an ancient tree, on a projecting branch of which we soon had a swing suspended, and all of us children did some very tall swinging. There was a little girl of ten belonging to the estate, named Teresa, an amiable, brown-haired, homely little personage. We admitted her to our intimacy, and swung her in the swing till she screamed for mercy. The road from Florence, after passing our big iron gate on the east, continued on westward, beneath the tower and the parapet of the grounds; beyond extended the wide valley of the Arno, with mountains hemming it in, and to the left of the mountains, every evening, Donati's comet shone, with a golden sweep of tail subtending twenty degrees along the horizon. The peasant folk regarded it with foreboding; and I remember seeing in the book-shops of Rome, before we left, pamphlets in both Italian and English, with such titles as "Will the great comet, now rapidly approaching, strike the earth?" It did not strike the earth, but it afforded us a magnificent spectacle during our stay in Montauto, and the next year it was followed by war between Austria and France and the evacuation of Venice. The elevation of Bellosguardo sloped from the villa north and east, and this declivity was occupied by a podere of some dozen acres, on which grew grape-vines, olive and fig trees. Every morning, about ten o'clock, the peasants on the estate would come in loaded with grapes, which they piled up on a large table in the reception-hall on the ground floor. We ate them by handfuls, but were never able to finish them. Between times we would go out among the fruit trees and devour fresh figs, luscious with purple pulp. I had three or four rooms to myself at the western extremity of the house; they were always cool on the hottest days. There I was wont to retire to pursue my literary labors; I was still writing works on conchology. My sister Una had rooms on the ground floor, adjoining the chapel. They were haunted by the ghost of a nun, and several times the candle which she took in there at night was moved by invisible hands from its place and set down elsewhere. Ghostly voices called to us, and various unaccountable noises were heard now and then, both within and without the house; but we children did not mind them, not having been bred in the fear of spirits. Indeed, at the instance of Mrs. Browning, who was often with us, we held spirit seances, Miss Shepard being the medium, though she mildly protested. Long communications were written down, but the sceptics were not converted, nor were the believers discouraged. "I discern in the alleged communications from my wife's mother," wrote my father, "much of her own beautiful fancy and many of her preconceived ideas, although thinner and weaker than at first hand. They are the echoes of her own voice, returning out of the lovely chambers of her heart, and mistaken by her for the tones of her mother." Almost every day some of us made an incursion into Florence. The town itself seemed to me more agreeable than Rome; but the Boboli Gardens could not rival the Borghese, and the Pitti and Uffizi galleries were not so captivating as the Vatican and the Capitol. However, the Cascine and the Lung' Arno were delightful, and the Arno, shallow and placid, flowing through the midst of the city, was a fairer object than the muddy and turbulent Tiber. Men and boys bathed along the banks in the afternoons and evenings; and the Ponte Vecchio, crowded with grotesque little houses, was a favorite promenade of mine. There was also a large marketplace, where the peasant women sold the produce of their farms. My insatiable appetite for such things prompted me often to go thither and eat everything I had money to buy. One day I consumed so many fresh tomatoes that I had a giddiness in the back of my head, and ate no more tomatoes for some years. But the place I best liked was the great open square of the Palazzo Vecchio, with the statues of David and of Perseus under the Loggia dei Lanzi, a retreat from sun and rain; and the Duomo and Giotto's Campanile, hard by. The pavements of Florence, smooth as the surface of stone canals, were most soothing and comfortable after the relentless, sharp cobble-stones of Rome; the low houses that bordered them seemed to slumber in the hot, still sunshine. What a sunshine was that! Not fierce and feverish, as in the tropics, but soft and intense and white. Who would not live in Florence if he could? I think my father would have settled there but for his children, to whom he wished to give an American education. The thought was often in his mind; and he perhaps cherished some hope of returning thither later in life, and letting old age steal gently upon him and his wife in the delicious city. But the Celestial City was nearer to him than he suspected. There was a magical old man in Florence named Kirkup, an Englishman, though he had dwelt abroad so many years that he seemed more Florentine than the Florentines themselves. He had known, in his youth, Byron, Shelley, Hunt, and Edward Trelawney. After that famous group was disparted, Kirkup, having an income sufficient for his needs, came to Florence and settled there. He took to antiquarianism, which is a sort of philtre, driving its votaries mildly insane, and filling them with emotions which, on the whole, are probably more often happy than grievous. But Kirkup, in the course of his researches into the past, came upon the books of the necromancers, and bought and studied them, and began to practise their spells and conjurations; and by-and-by, being a great admirer and student of Dante, that poet manifested himself to him in his lonely vigils and told him many unknown facts about his career on earth, and incidentally revealed to him the whereabouts of the now-familiar fresco of Dante on the wall of the Bargello Chapel, where it had been hidden for ages beneath a coat of whitewash. In these occult researches, Kirkup, of course, had need of a medium, and he found among the Florentine peasants a young girl, radiantly beautiful, who possessed an extraordinary susceptibility to spiritual influences. Through her means he conversed with the renowned dead men of the past times. But one day Regina (such was the girl's name), much to the old man's surprise, gave birth to a child. She herself died, in Kirkup's house, soon after, and on her death-bed she swore a solemn oath on the crucifix that the baby's father was none other than Kirkup himself. The poor old gentleman had grown so accustomed to believing in miracles that he made little ado about accepting this one also; he received the child as his daughter, and made provision for her in his will. No one had the heart or thought it worth while to enlighten him as to certain facts which might have altered his attitude; but it was well known that Regina had a lover, a handsome young Italian peasant, much more capable of begetting children than of taking care of them afterwards. These interesting circumstances I did not learn until long after Florence had receded into the distance in my memory. But one afternoon, with my father and mother, I entered the door of a queer old house close to the Ponte Vecchio; I was told that it had formerly been a palace of the Knights Templars. We ascended a very darksome flight of stairs, and a door was opened by a strange little man. He may have been, at that time, some seventy years my senior, but he was little above my height; he had long, soft, white hair and a flowing white beard; his features bore a resemblance to those of Bulwer Lytton, only Bulwer never lived to anything like Mr. Kirkup's age. Old as he was, our host was very brisk and polite, and did the honors of his suite of large rooms with much grace and fantastic hospitality. Dancing about him, and making friends freely with us all meanwhile, was the little girl, Imogen by name, who was accredited as the octogenarian's offspring. She was some four or five years of age, but intellectually precocious, though a complete child, too. Mr. Kirkup said that she, like her beautiful mother, was a powerful medium, and that he often used to communicate through her with her mother, who would seem to have kept her secret even after death. The house was stuffed full of curiosities, but was very dirty and cobwebby; the pictures and the books looked much in need of a caretaker. The little child frolicked and flitted about the dusky apartments, or seated herself like a butterfly on the great tomes of magic that were piled in corners. Nothing could be stronger or stranger than the contrast between her and this environment. My father wrote it all down in his journal, and it evidently impressed his imagination; and she and Kirkup himself--_mutatis mutandis_--appear in Dr. Grimshawe's Secret, and again, in a somewhat different form, in The Dolliver Romance. There was even a Persian kitten, too, to bear little Imogen company. But no fiction could surpass the singularity of this withered old magician living with the pale, tiny sprite of a child of mysterious birth in the ghost-haunted rooms of the ancient palace. It seemed as if the world of the occult were making a determined attack upon us during this Florentine sojourn; whichever way we turned we came in contact with something mysterious. In one of my father's unpublished diaries he writes, in reference to the stories with which he was being regaled by Powers, the Brownings, and others, that he was reminded "of an incident that took place at the old manse, in the first summer of our marriage. One night, about eleven o'clock, before either my wife or I had fallen asleep (we had been talking together just before), she suddenly asked me why I had touched her shoulder? The next instant she had a sense that the touch was not mine, but that of some third presence in the chamber. She clung to me in great affright, but I got out of bed and searched the chamber and adjacent entry, and, finding nothing, concluded that the touch was a fancied one. My wife, however, has never varied in her belief that the incident was supernatural and connected with the apparition of old Dr. Harris, who used to show himself to me daily in the reading-room of the Boston Athenaeum. I am still incredulous both as to the doctor's identity and as to the reality of the mysterious touch. That same summer of our honeymoon, too, George Hillard and his wife were sitting with us in our parlor, when a rustling as of a silken robe passed from corner to corner of the room, right among my wife and the two guests, and was heard, I think, by all three. Mrs. Hillard, I remember, was greatly startled. As for myself, I was reclining on the sofa at a little distance, and neither heard the rustle nor believed it." Nevertheless, such things affect one in a degree. Here is a straw to show which way the wind of doctrine was blowing with my father: We were in Siena immediately after the date of our Florentine residence, and he and I, leaving the rest of the family at our hotel, sallied forth in quest of adventures. "We went to the cathedral," he writes, "and while standing near the entrance, or about midway in the nave, we saw a female figure approaching through the dimness and distance, far away in the region of the high altar; as it drew nearer its air reminded me of Una, whom we had left at home. Finally, it came close to us, and proved to be Una herself; she had come, immediately after we left the hotel, with Miss Shepard, and was looking for objects to sketch. It is an empty thing to write down, but the surprise made the incident stand out very vividly." Una was to pass near the gates of the next world a little while later, and doubtless my father often during that dark period pictured her to himself as a spirit. To make an end of this subject, I will quote here my father's account of a story told him by Mrs. Story when we were living in Rome for the second time. The incident of the woman's face at the carriage window reappears in The Marble Faun. "She told it," he says, "on the authority of Mrs. Gaskell, to whom the personages were known. A lady, recently married, was observed to be in a melancholy frame of mind, and fell into a bad state of health. She told her husband that she was haunted with the constant vision of a certain face, which affected her with an indescribable horror, and was the cause of her melancholy and illness. The physician prescribed travel, and they went first to Paris, where the lady's spirits grew somewhat better, and the vision haunted her less constantly. They purposed going to Italy, and before their departure from Paris a letter of introduction was given them by a friend, directed to a person in Rome. On their arrival in Rome the letter was delivered; the person called, and in his face the lady recognized the precise reality of her vision. By-the-bye, I think the lady saw this face in the streets of Rome before the introduction took place. The end of the story is that the husband was almost immediately recalled to England by an urgent summons; the wife disappeared that very night, and was recognized driving out of Rome, in a carriage, in tears, and accompanied by the visionary unknown. It is a very foolish story, but told as truth. Mrs. Story also said that in an Etruscan tomb, on the Barberini estate, the form and impression, in dust, of a female figure were discovered. Not even a bone of her was left; but where her neck had been there lay a magnificent necklace, all of gold and of the richest workmanship. The necklace, just as it was found (except, I suppose, for a little furbishing), is now worn by the Princess Barberini as her richest adornment. Mrs. Story herself had on a bracelet composed, I think, of seven ancient Etruscan scorabei in carnelian, every one of which has been taken from a separate tomb, and on one side of each was engraved the signet of the person to whom it had belonged and who had carried it to the grave with him. This bracelet would make a good connecting link for a series of Etruscan tales, the more fantastic the better!" On the first day of October, 1859, we left Florence by railway for Siena on our way back to Rome. There had been no drawbacks to our enjoyment of the city and of our villa and of the people we had met. We departed with regret; had we stayed on there, instead, and not again attempted the fatal air of the Seven Hills, our after chronicles might have been very different. But we walk over precipices with our eyes open, or pass safely along their verge in the dark, and only the Power who made us knows why. Providence takes very long views. XIX Burnt Sienna--The Aquila Nera--A grand, noble, gentle creature--The most beautiful woman in the world--Better friends than ever--A shadow brooded--Boys are whole-souled creatures--Franklin Pierce--Miriam, Hilda, Kenyon, Donatello--The historian of the Netherlands--When New England makes a man--The spell of Trevi--An accession of mishaps--My father's mustache--Three steps of stone, the fourth, death--Havre, Redcar, Bath, London, Liverpool. Siena is distant from Florence, in a direct line, not more than fifty miles, but the railway turns the western flank of the mountains, and kept us full three hours on the trip. I had long been familiar with a paint in my color-box called Burnt Sienna, and was now much interested to learn that it was made of the yellow clay on which the city of Siena stands; and when I discovered for myself that this clay, having formed the bed of some antediluvian ocean, was full of fossil shells, I thought that Siena was a place where I would do well to spend one of my lifetimes. The odd, parti-colored architecture of the town did not so much appeal to me, and certainly the streets and squares were less attractive in themselves than either the Roman or the Florentine ones. The shells were personally ugly, but they were shells, and fossils into the bargain, and they sufficed for my happiness. The Storys had a villa in Siena, and my father certainly had in the back part of his mind an idea of settling there, or elsewhere in Italy, now or later; but after ten days we were on our travels again. There were no ruins to be seen, that I remember, but many churches and frescoes and old oil-paintings, which I regarded with indifference. Mediaeval remains did not attract me like classic ones. It was here that Story drew the caricatures which I have already spoken of, and from the windows of the room, as the twilight fell, we could see the great comet, then in its apogee of brilliance. Where will the world be when it comes again? We had rooms at the Aquila Nera, looking out on the venerable, gray Palazzo Tolomei. The narrow streets were full of people; the steepness and irregularity of the thoroughfares of the city produced a feeling of energy and activity in the midst of the ancient historic peace. Siena is, I believe, built about the crater of an extinct volcano. The old brick wall of the city was still extant, running up hill and down, and confining the rusty heaps of houses within its belt. There were projecting balconies, crumbling with age, and irregular arcades, resembling tunnels hewn out of the solid rock. From the windows of our sitting-room in the hotel we commanded the piazza, in front of the Palazzo Tolomei, with a pillar in the midst of it, on which was a group of Romulus and Remus suckled by the wolf, the tradition of the city being that it was founded during the epoch of the Roman kings. My mother made a sketch of this monument in her little sketch-book, and my father, according to a common custom of his, sat for an hour at the window one day and made a note of every person who passed through the little square, thus getting an idea of the character of the local population not otherwise obtainable. I can imagine that, were one born in Siena, one might conceive an ardent affection for it; but, in spite of its picturesqueness, it never touched my heart like Rome or Florence, or even London or Paris. I left it without regret, but with specimens of its fossils in my pockets. It often happens with miracles that they occur in doubles or trebles, in order, I suppose, to suggest to us that they may be simply instances of an undiscovered law. Gaetano was a miracle, and he was followed by Constantino, who, though of an altogether different human type, was of no less sweet and shining a nature than the other. He was a grand, noble, gentle creature, and my mother soon dubbed him "The Emperor," though it may be doubted whether the original emperor of that name was as good a man as ours; he was certainly not nearly so good-looking. He was only the driver of our _vettura_ from Siena to Rome, but there was a princely munificence in his treatment of us that made us feel his debtors in an indefinitely greater sum than that which technically discharged our obligations. He was massive, quiescent, oxlike, with great, slow-moving, black eyes. He had the air of extending to us the hospitalities of Italy, and our journey assumed the character of a royal progress. He was especially devoted to my small sister Rose, and often, going up the hills, he would have her beside him on foot, one of his great hands clasping hers, while with the other he wielded the long whip that encouraged the horses. His garments were of the humblest fashion, but he so wore them as to make them seem imperial robes. My mother caught an excellent likeness of him as he sat before her on the driver's seat. The second trip was as enjoyable as the first, though it was two or three days shorter. The route was west of our former one, passing through Radicofani, incrusted round its hill-top; and Bolsena, climbing backward from the poisonous shore of its beautiful lake; and Viterbo, ugly and beggar-ridden, though famous forever on account of the war for Galiana waged between Viterbo and Rome. In the front of an old church in the town I saw the carved side of her sarcophagus, incorporate with the wall. She was the most beautiful woman in the world in her day, and in the fight for the possession of her her townsmen overcame the Romans, but the latter were permitted, as a salve for their defeat, to have one final glimpse of Galiana as they marched homeward without her. From a window in a tower of one of the gates of the city, therefore, her heavenly face looked forth and shed a farewell gleam over the dusty, defeated ranks of Rome as they filed past, up-looking. The tale is as old as the incident itself, but I always love to recall it; there is in it something that touches the soul more inwardly than even the legend of Grecian Helen. By the middle of October we were back again in Rome, and though we were now in new lodgings, the feeling was that of getting home after travels. The weather was fine, and we revisited the familiar ruins and gardens, and renewed our acquaintance with our favorite statues and pictures with fresh enjoyment. Eddy Thompson and I found each other better friends than ever--we had written each other laborious but sincerely affectionate letters during our separation--and he and I, with one or more favored companions sometimes, perambulated Rome incessantly, and felt that the world had begun again. But by the 1st of November there came to pass an untoward change, and our rejoicing was changed to lamentation. First, my father himself had a touch of malaria, which clouded his view of all outward things; and then my sister Una, disregarding the law which provides that all persons must be in-doors in Rome by six o'clock in the evening, caught the veritable Roman fever, and during four months thereafter a shadow brooded over our snug little lodgings in the Piazza, Poli. "It is not a severe attack," my father wrote at the beginning, "yet it is attended by fits of exceeding discomfort, occasional comatoseness, and even delirium to the extent of making the poor child talk in rhythmic measure, like a tragic heroine--as if the fever lifted her feet off the earth; the fever being seldom dangerous, but is liable to recur on slight occasion hereafter." But, as it turned out, Una's attack was of the worst kind, and she sank and sank, till it seemed at last as if she must vanish from us altogether. Eddy and I held melancholy consultations together, for Eddy, besides being my special crony and confidant, had allowed himself to conceive a heroic and transcendental passion for my sister--one of the antique, Spenserian sort--and his concern for her condition was only less than mine. So we went about with solemn faces, comforting each other as best we might. I remember, when the crisis of the fever was reached, taking him into a room and closing the door, and there imparting to him the news that Una might not recover. We stared drearily into each other's faces, and felt that the world would never again be bright for us. Boys are whole-souled creatures; they feel one thing at a time, and feel it with their might. However, Una safely passed her crisis, thanks mainly to the wonderful nursing of her mother, and by carnival-time was able to be out again and to get her share of sugar-plums and flowers. But my mother was exhausted by her ceaseless vigils in the sick-room, and my father, as I have before intimated, never recovered from the long-drawn fear; it sapped his energies at the root, and the continued infirmity of Una's health prevented what chance there might have been of his recuperation. Yet for the moment he could find fun and pleasure in the carnival, and he felt as never before the searching beauty of the Borghese, the Pincian, and the galleries. He was also comforted by the companionship of his friend Franklin Pierce, who, his Presidential term over, had come to Europe to get the scent of Washington out of his garments. There was a winning, irresistible magnetism in the presence of this man. Except my father, there was no man in whose company I liked to be so much as in his. I had little to say to him, and demanded nothing more than a silent recognition from him; but his voice, his look, his gestures, his gait, the spiritual sphere of him, were delightful to me; and I suspect that his rise to the highest office in our nation was due quite as much to this power or quality in him as to any intellectual or even executive ability that he may have possessed. He was a good, conscientious, patriotic, strong man, and gentle and tender as a woman. He had the old-fashioned ways, the courtesy, and the personal dignity which are not often seen nowadays. His physical frame was immensely powerful and athletic; but life used him hard, and he was far from considerate of himself, and he died at sixty-five, when he might, under more favorable conditions, have rounded out his century. My father had written nothing, not even his journal, during the period of Una's illness; but he began to work again now, being moved thereto not only as a man whose nature is spontaneously impelled to express itself on the imaginative side, but also in order to recoup himself for some part of the loss of the ten thousand dollars which he had loaned to John O'Sullivan, which, it was now evident, could never be repaid. His first conception of the story of The Marble Faun had been as a novelette; but he now decided to expand it so as to contain a large amount of descriptive matter; and although the strict rules of artistic construction may have been somewhat relaxed in order to admit these passages, there is no doubt that the book gained thereby in value as a permanent addition to literature, the plot, powerful though it is, being of importance secondary to the creation of an atmosphere which should soften the outlines and remove the whole theme into a suitable remoteness from the domain of matter-of-fact. The Eternal City is, after all, as vital a portion of the story as are the adventures of Miriam, Hilda, Kenyon, and Donatello. They could not have existed and played their parts in any other city of the world. In selecting local habitations for the creatures of his imagination, he strolled into the Via Portoghese, and there found the "Virgin's Shrine," which, with minor modifications, was to become the home of Hilda. I quote from his journal the description of the actual place as he saw it. "The tower in the Via Portoghese," he says, "has battlements and machicolations, and the upper half of it is covered with gray, ancient-looking stucco. On the summit, at one corner, is the shrine of the Virgin, rising quite above the battlements, and with its lamp before it. Beneath the machicolations is a window, probably belonging to the upper chamber; and there seems to be a level space on the top of the tower. Close at hand is the facade of a church, the highest pinnacle of which appears to be at about the same level as the battlements of the tower, and there are two or more stone figures (either angels or allegorical) ornamenting the top of the facade, and, I think, blowing trumpets. These personages are the nearest neighbors of any person inhabiting the upper story of the tower, and the sound of their angelic trumpets must needs be very loud in that close vicinity: The lower story of the palace extends out and round the lower part of the tower, and is surrounded by a stone balustrade. The entrance from the street is through a long, arched doorway and passage, giving admittance into a small, enclosed court; and deep within the passage there is a very broad staircase, which branches off, apparently, on one side, and leads to the height of the tower. At the base of the tower, and along the front of the palace, the street widens, so as to form something like a small piazza, in which there are two or three bakers' shops, one or two shoe-shops, a lottery-office, and, at one corner, the stand of a woman who sells, I think, vegetables; a little further, a stand of oranges. Not so many doors from the palace entrance there is a station of French soldiers and a sentinel on duty. The palace, judging from the broad staircase, the balustraded platform, the tower itself, and other tokens, may have been a grand one centuries ago; but the locality is now a poor one, and the edifice itself seems to have fallen to unaristocratic occupants. A man was cleaning a carriage in the enclosed court-yard, but I rather conceive it was a cab for hire, and not the equipage of a dweller in the palace." John Lothrop Motley, the historian of the Netherlands, had come to Rome this winter and brought his family with him. I believe my father had met Motley in America; at all events, we saw a good deal of him now. He was an exceedingly handsome man, not only on account of the beauty of physical features which marked him, but in the sensitiveness and vividness of expression which constantly illuminated them. He was at this time about five-and-forty years of age, and lacked a couple of inches of six feet in height. His hair, a dark, chestnut brown, had the hyacinthine wave through it, and was slightly streaked with gray; his beard, which was full and rather short, was likewise wavy; he was quietly and harmoniously dressed, but the artistic temperament declared itself in a touch of color in his cravat. His voice was melodious and finely modulated; his bearing gravely cheerful and very courteous. No type of man finer than Motley's has existed in modern times; all the elements of the best and purest society were illustrated in him. He had the depth of the scholar, the breadth and self-poise of the man of the world, the genial warmth of the human fellow-creature, and, over all, the harmonizing, individualizing charm of the artist. When New England gathers her resources to make a man she achieves a result hardly to be surpassed. The Storys were also in Rome during these last months of our stay, and Miss Mitchell, I think, still lingered in her little lodgings in the Via Bocca di Leone. Miss Cushman likewise reappeared for a time, with all her former greatness and fascination, and many other friends, new and old, made that spring season memorable. As the moment for our departure drew near, the magical allurement of Rome laid upon us a grasp more than ever potent; it was impossible to realize that we were leaving it forever. On the last evening we walked in the moonlight to the fountain of Trevi, near our lodgings, and drank of the water--a ceremony which, according to tradition, insures the return of the drinker. It was the 25th of May, forty-four years ago. None of us has gone back since then, and, of the five who drank, three have passed to the country whence no traveller returns. For my own part, as a patriotic American nearly thirteen years old, I had no wish ever again to see Rome, and declared myself glad to turn my back upon it, not that I had any fault to find with it--I had always had a good time there--but my imagination was full of my native land, with which nothing else could be comparable. I did not learn of the fabled spell of Trevi until afterwards; then I scoffed at and defied it, and possibly Rome may have decided that it could do without me. The railway to Civita Vecchia had just been completed, and we passed swiftly over the route which had been so full of dangers and discomforts eighteen months before. Embarking on the steamer for Marseilles, we kept on thence to Avignon, where we spent about a week. This venerable town had few attractions for me; I did not much care for the fourteenth-century popes, nor for the eighteenth-century silks, nor even for Petrarch and Laura; and the architecture of the palace, after I had tried to sketch it, ceased to exhilarate me. My father was in no mood for sight-seeing, either, but he went through it all conscientiously. My mother, of course, enjoyed herself, but she met with an accident. While sketching some figures of saints and monsters that adorned the arch of the northern portal of the palace, she made an incautious movement and sprained her ankle. The pain was excessive for the moment, but it soon passed off, so as to enable her to limp back to our hotel. But the next day the pain was worse; my father had a headache, a rare affliction with him; I had caught a bad cold from swimming in the arrowy Rhone, and Una and Miss Shepard were both in a state of exhaustion from sight-seeing; and in this condition the journey to Geneva had to be made. We had intended to remain there but a day, but we stayed longer, breathing the pure air from the Alps, and feeling better as we breathed. I stood on a bridge and looked down at that wonderful azure water rushing into the lovely lake; I looked up and beheld those glorious mountains soaring into the sky, and I forgot Rome and Florence, and almost America, in my joy. Everything that life needs for life seemed present there. We got into a little steamer and made the trip up the lake, the mountains all about us. Up to this time I had imagined that the acclivities in the north of England and in Scotland were mountains. We sat on deck, in the stern of the steamer, my father gazing out and up from beneath the rim of his soft felt hat, with his dark cloak over his shoulders. He looked revived and vigorous again. Shortly before we left Rome he had ceased to shave his upper lip, for what reason I know not; I think it was simply indisposition to take that trouble any longer. My mother had at first gently protested; she did not want his upper lip and mouth to be hidden. But as the brown mustache, thick and soldier-like, appeared, she became reconciled, and he wore it to the end of his life. "Field-Marshal Hawthorne" James T. Fields used to call him after we got home. Owing to the preponderance of expression of the upper part of his head, the addition did not change his look as much as might have been expected; we soon got used to it, and, inasmuch as all his photographs were taken after the mustache was established, the world does not know him otherwise. The view became more and more enchanting as we penetrated farther into the depths of the embrace of the mountains, and at last, at its most ravishing point, the lake ceased, and the lonely little pile of dingy white masonry, which is Chillon, appeared. Few works of man have a more romantic interest than this castle; but, seen from the lake, its environment was too much for it. Had it plunged downward into the smooth waters and vanished, its absence would not have been marked in that stupendous landscape. But it improved greatly upon closer acquaintance; and when we stood in its vaults, and saw the pillar to which the prisoner was chained, and the hole in the floor, with its three steps of stone, and the fourth of death, we felt that Chillon was not unequal to its reputation. After leaving Chillon and Geneva our faces were turned homeward, and we hastened our steps. My father wrote to England to engage our passage for the first of August. We were now at midsummer. We returned to Paris, and after a few days there proceeded to Havre, in order to see Ada Shepard safe on board her steamer for home; her Wanderjahre was over, and she was now to be married to Henry Clay Badger. We were sorry to say good-bye to her; she had been a faithful and valuable element in our household, and she had become a dear friend and comrade. She stood waving her handkerchief to us as her steamer slipped away down the harbor. She, too, was sorry for the parting. She once had said to me: "I think your father is the wisest man I ever knew; he does not seem ever to say much, but what he does say is always the truest and best thing that could be said." From Havre we crossed the Channel to Southampton, and were soon in London. Boston and Concord were only six weeks distant. Such, at any rate, had been the original design. But after we reached London the subject of the English copyright of The Marble Faun came up for discussion. Henry Bright introduced Mr. Smith, of the firm of Smith, Elder & Company, who made such proposals for the English publication of the book as were not to be disregarded; but, in order to make them available, it was necessary that the manuscript should be completed in England. Nothing but the short sketch of it was as yet in existence; it could not be written in much less than a year; either the English offer must be rejected, or we must stay out that year in her Majesty's dominions. My father decided, not altogether unwillingly, perhaps, to stay. He had written in his journal a few weeks before: "Bennoch and Henry Bright are the only two men in England to whom I shall be much grieved to say farewell; but to the island itself I cannot bear to say that word as a finality. I shall dreamily hope to come back again at some indefinite time, rather foolishly, perhaps, for it will tend to take the substance out of my life in my own land. But this, I suspect, is apt to be the penalty of those who stay abroad and stay too long." But my father could not write in London, and, casting about for a fitting spot, he finally fixed upon the remote hamlet of Redcar, far up on the bleak coast of Redcar, in Yorkshire. It was not far from Whitby, where we had been two or three years before. The gray German Ocean tumbled in there upon the desolate sands, and the contrast of the scene with those which we had been of late familiar with made the latter, no doubt, start forward intensely in the romancer's imagination. So there he wrote and wrote; and he walked far along the sands, with his boy dogging his steps and stopping for shells and crabs; and at a certain point of the beach, where the waves ran over a bar and formed a lake a few feet in depth, he would seat himself on a tussock of sand-grass, and I would undress and run into the cold water and continue my swimming-lessons, which had been begun in Stockbridge Bowl, continued in Lake Leman, and were now brought to a satisfactory conclusion. Both my feet were finally off the bottom, and I felt the wonderful sensation of the first cousin to flying. While I floundered there my father looked off towards the gray horizon, and saw the visions of Hilda, Miriam, Kenyon, and Donatello which the world of readers was presently to behold through his eyes. As we walked home in the twilight, the dull-red glow of the sunset would throw the outlines of the town into dark shadows, and shed a faint light on the surf roaming in from the east. I found, in my old album, the black silhouette of the scene which I made one day. The arms of an old mill are flung appealingly upward, the highest object of the landscape, above the irregular sky-line of the clustering houses. There is also, on the next page, a water-color drawing of a sailor in a blue jersey and a sou'wester, standing, with his hands in his pockets, on the beach beside one of the boats of the region--a slender, clipper-built craft, painted yellow below and black above, good for oars or sail. Her bow rests on a shaft connecting two wheels, for convenience of running her down into the water. There was a dozen or more of these boats always ready on the beach in front of our lodgings. These lodgings were just back of the esplanade, which, during our sojourn, was treated to a coat of tar from end to end--a delightful entertainment for us children--and I have loved the smell of tar ever since. There is little else that I remember about Redcar, except that, in the winter, there was skating on a part of the beach; but it was "salt ice," and not to be compared with the skating I was to enjoy a year or two later in Concord, which I shall describe if ever I come to that epoch in my narrative. From Redcar, with the romance more than half done, we went south to our old Leamington, which seemed half like home; and there the loveliness of an English spring at its best came to greet us, and there the book was finished, and sent to the printer. We spent a month or two at Bath, and found it very pleasant; my father rested from his labors, except the proof-reading; and I was instructed in the use of the broadsword by an old Peninsular officer, Major Johnstone, who had fought at Waterloo, and had the bearing of such majors as Thackeray puts into Vanity Fair. I once asked him whether he had ever killed a man; it was on the day when he first allowed me to use a real broadsword in our lesson. "Well," replied the major, hesitatingly, "I was riding in a charge, and there came a fellow at me, with his sword up, and made a swing for my head. I dodged, and his blade just grazed me; but I let him have it, downright, at the same moment, and I caught him where the neck joins the shoulder, and he went down, and I went on, and what became of him I don't know; I hope nothing serious!" The major sighed and looked serious himself. "And was this the sword?" I demanded, balancing the heavy weapon in my hand. "No--no--it wasn't that one," said the major, hastily. "I've never used the other since! Now, then, sir, if you please, on guard!" We went to London, and there were our old friends Bright and Bennoch, and the Motleys appeared from Italy, and a book called (by the publishers) Transformation came out in three volumes, being the latest romance by the author of The Scarlet Letter. The title was not bestowed with my father's consent. He had, at the publishers' request, sent them a list of several titles, beginning with The Marble Faun, and among others on the list was "The Faun's Transformation." The publishers took the "Transformation," and left out "The Faun." My father laughed, but let it go. The book was to come out under its proper title in America, and he was indifferent as to what they called it in England. The end of our tarrying in the Old World was now at hand. Seven years had we lived there, and we were eager and yet loath to go. My father's friends gathered about him, men who had hardly so much as heard his name a little while ago, but who now loved him as a brother. For a few days Mrs. Blodgett's hospitable face glowed upon us once more, and pale Miss Williams, and trig little Miss Maria, and many of the old captains whom we had known. It was the middle of June, and the sun shone even in Liverpool. Our red-funnelled steamer lay at her moorings in the yellow Mersey, with her steam up. It was not The Niagara, but on her bridge stood our handsome little Captain Leitch, with his black whiskers, smiling at us in friendly greeting. How much had passed since we had seen him last! How much were we changed! What experiences lay behind us! What memories would abide with us always! My father leaned on the rail and looked across the river at the dingy, brick building, near the wharves, where he had spent four wearisome but pregnant years. The big, black steamer, with her little, puffing tug, slipped her moorings, and slid slowly down the stream. After a few miles the hue of the water became less turbid, the engines worked more rapidly and regularly. Liverpool was now a smoky mass off our starboard quarter. It sank and dwindled, till the smoke alone was left; the blue channel spread around us; we were at sea, and home lay yonder, across three thousand miles of tumbling waves. But my father still leaned on the rail, and looked backward towards the old home that he loved and would never see again. It was the hour for good-bye; there would come another hour for the other home and for welcome. THE END 
35706	----	All the Days of My Life: An Autobiography The Red Leaves of a Human Heart By Amelia E. Barr ILLUSTRATED NEW YORK AND LONDON D. APPLETON AND COMPANY MCMXIII COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY D. APPLETON AND COMPANY Printed in the United States of America TO MY FRIENDS DR. CARLOS H. STONE AND MRS. STONE I INSCRIBE WITH AFFECTIONATE ESTEEM THIS STORY OF MY LIFE Cherry Croft A.D. 1913 [Illustration: MRS. BARR AT 80] CONFIDENCES This is to be a book about myself but, even before I begin it, I am painfully aware of the egotistical atmosphere which the unavoidable use of the personal pronouns creates. I have hitherto declared that I would not write an autobiography, but a consideration of circumstances convinces me that an autobiography is the only form any personal relation can now take. For the press has so widely and so frequently exploited certain events of my life--impossible to omit--that disguise is far out of the question. Fiction could not hide me, nor an assumed name, nor even no name at all. Why, then, write the book? First, because serious errors have constantly been published, and these I wish to correct; second, there has been a long-continued request for it, and third, there are business considerations not to be neglected. Yet none, nor all of these three reasons, would have been sufficient to induce me to truck my most sacred memories through the market-place for a little money, had I not been conscious of a motive that would amply justify the book. The book itself must reveal that reason, or it will never be known. I am sure, however, that many will find it out, and to these souls I shall speak, and they will keep my memory green, and listen to my words of strength and comfort long after the woman called Amelia Huddleston Barr has disappeared forever. Again, if I am to write of things so close and intimate as my feelings and experiences, I must claim a large liberty. Many topics usually dilated on, I shall pass by silently, or with slight notice; and, if I write fully and truly, as I intend to do, I must show many changes of opinion on a variety of subjects. This is only the natural growth of the mental and spiritual faculties. For the woman within, if she be of noble strain, is never content with what she has attained; she unceasingly presses forward, in lively hope of some better way, or some more tangible truth. If any woman at eighty years of age was the same woman, spiritually and mentally, she was at twenty, or even fifty, she would be little worthy of our respect. Also, there are supreme tragedies and calamities in my life that it would be impossible for me to write down. It would be treason against both the living and the dead. But such calamities always came from the hand of man. I never had a sorrow from the hand of God that I could not tell to any good man or woman; for the end of God-sent sorrow is some spiritual gain or happiness. We hurt each other terribly in this world, but it is in ways that only the power which tormented the perfect man of Uz would incite. I write mainly for the kindly race of women. I am their sister, and in no way exempt from their sorrowful lot. I have drank the cup of their limitations to the dregs, and if my experience can help any sad or doubtful woman to outleap her own shadow, and to stand bravely out in the sunshine to meet her destiny, whatever it may be, I shall have done well; I shall not have written this book in vain. It will be its own excuse, and justify its appeal. AMELIA BARR CONTENTS PAGE I. The Border Land of Life 1 II. At Shipley, Yorkshire 11 III. Where Druids and Giants Dwelt 25 IV. At Ripon and the Isle of Man 47 V. Sorrow and Change 60 VI. In Norfolk 69 VII. Over the Border 81 VIII. Love Is Destiny 91 IX. The Home Made Desolate 106 X. Passengers for New York 126 XI. From Chicago to Texas 146 XII. A Pleasant Journey 177 XIII. In Arcadia 195 XIV. The Beginning of Strife 214 XV. The Break-up of the Confederacy 235 XVI. The Terror by Night and by Day 259 XVII. The Never-Coming-Back Called Death 278 XVIII. I Go to New York 300 XIX. The Beginnings of a New Life 319 XX. The Family Life 335 XXI. Thus Runs the World Away 354 XXII. The Latest Gospel: Know Thy Work and Do It 374 XXIII. The Gods Sell Us All Good Things for Labor 405 XXIV. Busy, Happy Days 426 XXV. Dreaming and Working 446 XXVI. The Verdict of Life 466 Appendix I. Huddleston Lords of Millom 481 Appendix II. Books Published by Dodd, Mead and Company 488 Appendix III. Books Published by Other Publishers 490 Appendix IV. Poems 492 Appendix V. Letters 499 Index 513 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE Mrs. Barr at 80 Frontispiece Mrs. Barr's Birthplace 8 Rev. William Henry Huddleston 52 Mrs. Barr at 18 98 Mr. Robert Barr 204 Miss Lilly Barr 288 Mrs. Barr November, 1880 364 Miss Mary Barr (Mrs. Kirk Munroe) 378 "Cherry Croft," Cornwall-on-Hudson 428 Miss Alice Barr 456 CHAPTER I THE BORDER LAND OF LIFE "Date not God's mercy from thy nativity, look beyond to the Everlasting Love." * * * * * "Ask me not, for I may not speak of it--I saw it."--TENNYSON. I entered this incarnation on March the twenty-ninth, A.D. 1831, at the ancient town of Ulverston, Lancashire, England. My soul came with me. This is not always the case. Every observing mother of a large family knows that the period of spiritual possession varies. For days, even weeks, the child may be entirely of the flesh, and then suddenly, in the twinkling of an eye, the mystery of the indwelling spirit is accomplished. This miracle comes not by observation; no mother ever saw it take place. She only knows that at one moment her child was ignorant of her; that at the next moment it was consciously smiling into her face, and that then, with an instinctive gladness, she called to the whole household, "the baby has begun to notice." I brought my soul with me--an eager soul, impatient for the loves and joys, the struggles and triumphs of the dear, unforgotten world. No doubt it had been aware of the earthly tabernacle which was being prepared for its home, and its helper in the new onward effort; and was waiting for the moment which would make them companions. The beautifully fashioned little body was already dear, and the wise soul would not suffer it to run the risks of a house left empty and unguarded. Some accident might mar its beauty, or cripple its powers, or still more baneful, some alien soul might usurp the tenement, and therefore never be able effectually to control, or righteously use it. I was a very fortunate child, for I was "possessed by a good spirit, yea rather being good, my spirit came into a body undefiled and perfect" (Wisdom of Solomon, 8:20). Also, my environments were fair and favorable; for my parents, though not rich, were in the possession of an income sufficient for the modest comforts and refinements they desired. My father was the son of Captain John Henry Huddleston, who was lost on some unknown sea, with all who sailed in his company. His brother, Captain Thomas Henry Huddleston, had a similar fate. His ship, _The Great Harry_, carrying home troops from America, was dashed to pieces on the Scarlet Rocks, just outside Castletown, the capital of the Isle of Man. When the storm had subsided the bodies of the Captain and his son Henry were found clasped in each other's arms, and they were buried together in Kirk Malew churchyard. During the years 1843 and 1844 I was living in Castletown, and frequently visited the large grave with its upright stone, on which was carved the story of the tragedy. Fifteen years ago my sister Alethia went purposely to Castletown to have the lettering on this stone cleared, and made readable; and I suppose that it stands there today, near the wall of the inclosure, on the left-hand side, not far from the main entrance. When my grandmother, Amelia Huddleston, was left a widow she had two sons, John Henry and William Henry, both under twelve years of age. But she seems to have had sufficient money to care well for them, to attend to their education, and to go with them during the summer months to St. Ann's-by-the-Sea for a holiday; a luxury then by no means common. She inspired her sons with a great affection; my father always kept the anniversary of her death in solitude. Yet, he never spoke of her to me but once. It was on my eleventh birthday. Then he took my face between his hands, and said: "Amelia, you have the name of a good woman, loved of God and man; see that you honor it." After the death of their mother, I believe both boys went to their uncle, Thomas Henry Huddleston, collector of the port of Dublin. He had one son, the late Sir John Walter Huddleston, Q. C., a celebrated jurist, who died in 1891 at London, England. I was living then at East Orange, New Jersey. Yet, suddenly, the sunny room in which I was standing was thrilled through and through by an indubitable boding token, the presage of his death--a presage unquestionable, and not to be misunderstood by any of his family. Sir John Walter was the only Millom Huddleston I ever knew who had not "Henry" included in his name. This fact was so fixed in my mind that, when I was introduced to the _one_ Huddleston in the city of New York, a well-known surgeon and physician, I was not the least astonished to see on his card "Dr. John Henry Huddleston." Again, one day not two years ago, I lifted a newspaper, and my eyes fell on the words "Henry Huddleston." I saw that it was the baptismal name of a well-known New Yorker, and that he was seriously ill. Every morning until his death I watched anxiously for the report of his condition; for something in me responded to that singular repetition, and, though I never heard any tradition concerning it, undoubtedly there is one. Millom Castle and lands passed from the Huddleston family to the Earls of Lonsdale, who hold them with the promise that they are not to be sold except to some one bearing the name of Huddleston. Not more than ten years ago, the present Earl admitted and reiterated the old agreement. One part of the castle is a ruin covered with ivy, the rest is inhabited by a tenant of the Earl. My sister stayed with this family a few days about twelve years ago. Soon afterwards Dr. John Henry Huddleston, accompanied by his wife, visited Millom and brought me back some interesting photos of the church and the Huddleston monuments. The Millom Huddlestons have always been great ecclesiastics. There lies upon my table, as I write, a beautifully preserved Bible of the date A.D. 1626. It has been used by their preachers constantly, and bears many annotations on the margins of its pages. It is the most precious relic of the family, and was given to me by my father on my wedding-day. Their spiritual influence has been remarkable. One tradition asserts that an Abbot Huddleston carried the Host before King Edward the Confessor, and it is an historical fact that Priest Huddleston, a Benedictine monk, found his way up the back stairs of Windsor Castle to King Charles the Second's bedroom, and gave the dying monarch the last comforting rites of his church. When they were not priests they were daring seamen and explorers. In the seventeenth century India was governed by its native princes, and was a land of romance, a land of obscure peril and malignant spells. An enchanted veil hung like a mist over its sacred towns on the upper Ganges, and the whole country, with its barbaric splendors and amazing wealth, had a luring charm, remote and unsubstantial as an ancient fable. In that century, there was likely always to be some Captain Huddleston rounding the Cape, in a big, unwieldy Indiaman. That the voyage occupied a year or two was no deterrent. Their real home was the sea, their Millom home only a resting-place. By such men the empire of England was builded. They gave their lives cheerfully to make wide her boundaries, and to strengthen her power. My father and his brother both chose theology, and they were suitably educated for the profession. John Henry, on receiving orders, sailed for Sierra Leone as one of the first, if not the first missionary of the English Church to the rescued slaves of that colony. My father finally allied himself with the Methodist Church, a decision for which I never heard any reason assigned. But the reason must have been evident to any one who considered the character and movements of William Henry Huddleston. In that day the English Church, whatever she may do now, did not permit her service to be read, in any place not sanctified by a bishop with the proper ceremonies. My father found in half a dozen shepherds on the bare fells a congregation and a church he willingly served. To a few fishers mending their nets on the shingly seashore, he preached as fine a sermon as he would have preached in a cathedral. It was his way to stroll down among the tired sailormen, smoking and resting on the quiet pier in the gloaming, and, standing among them, to tell again the irresistible story of Christ and Him Crucified. He was indeed a born Evangelist, and if he had been a contemporary of General Booth would certainly have enrolled himself among the earliest recruits of his evangelizing army. In the Methodist Church this tendency was rather encouraged than hindered, and that circumstance alone would be reason most sufficient and convincing to a man, who believed himself in season and out of season in charge of souls. In this decision I am sure there was no financial question; he had money enough then to give his conscience all the elbow-room it wanted. Soon after this change my father married Mary Singleton-- "A perfect woman, nobly planned, To trust, to comfort, and command." Physically she was small and delicately formed, but she possessed a great spirit, a heart tender and loving as a child's, and the most joyous temper I ever met. Every fret of life was conquered by her cheerfulness. Song was always in her heart, and very often on her lips. She brooded over her children like a bird over its nest, and was exceedingly proud of her clever husband, serving and obeying him, with that touching patience and fidelity which was the distinguishing quality of English wives of that period. And it was to this happy couple, living in the little stone house by the old chapel in Ulverston, I came that blessed morning in March, A.D. 1831. Yes, I will positively let the adjective stand. It was a "blessed" morning. Though I have drunk the dregs of every cup of sorrow, "My days still keep the dew of morn, And what I have I give; Being right glad that I was born, And thankful that I live." I came to them with hands full of gifts, and among them the faculty of recollection. To this hour I wear the key of memory, and can open every door in the house of my life, even to its first exquisite beginnings. The thrills of joy and wonder, of pleasure and terror I felt in those earliest years, I can still recapture; only that dim, mysterious memory of some previous existence, where the sandy shores were longer and the hills far higher, has become fainter, and less frequent. I do not need it now. Faith has taken the place of memory, and faith is "the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." Childhood is fed on dreams--dreams waking, and dreams sleeping. My first sharp, clear, positive recollection is a dream--a sacred, secret dream, which I have never been able to speak of. When it came to me, I had not the words necessary to translate the vision into speech, and, as the years went on, I found myself more and more reluctant to name it. It was a vision dim and great, that could not be fitted into clumsy words, but it was clearer and surer to me, than the ground on which I trod. It is nearly seventy-eight years since I awoke that morning, trembling and thrilling in every sense with the wonder and majesty of what I had seen, but the vision is not dim, nor any part of it forgotten. It is my first recollection. Beyond--is the abyss. That it has eluded speech is no evidence of incompleteness, for God's communion with man does not require the faculties of our mortal nature. It rather dispenses with them. When I was between three and four years old I went with my mother to visit a friend, who I think was my godmother. I have forgotten her name, but she gave me a silver cup, and my first doll--a finely gowned wax effigy--that I never cared for. I had no interest at all in dolls. I did not like them; their speechlessness irritated me, and I could not make-believe they were real babies. I have often been aware of the same perverse fretful kind of feeling at the baffling silence of infants. Why do they not talk? They have the use of their eyes and ears; they can feel and taste and touch, why can they not speak? Is there something they must not tell? Will they not learn to talk, until they have forgotten it? For I know "Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting The soul that rises with us, our Life's Star, Hath had elsewhere its setting; And cometh from afar. Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter darkness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come From God, who is our home." At this house, overlooking the valley of the Duddon, I needed nothing to play with. Every room in it was full of wonders, so also was the garden, with its dark walls shaded by yews, and pines, and glistening holly, the latter cut into all kinds of fantastic shapes. The house had a large entrance hall, and, rising sheer from it, was the steep, spiral stairway leading to the upper rooms. The stairs were highly polished and slippery, but they were the Alps of my baby ambition. Having surmounted them, there was in the corridor to which they led, queer, dark closets to be passed swiftly and warily, and closed guest rooms--obscure, indistinct, and shrouded in white linen. It gave me a singular pleasure to brave these unknown terrors, and after such adventures I returned to my mother with a proud sense of victory achieved; though I neither understood the feeling, nor asked any questions about it. Now I can accurately determine its why and its wherefore, but I am no happier for the knowledge. The joy, of having conquered a difficulty, and the elation of victory because of that conquest had then a tang and a savor beyond the power of later triumphs to give me. I know too much now. I calculate probabilities and attempt nothing that lacks strong likelihoods of success. Deservedly, then, I miss that exulting sense of accomplishment, which is the reward of those who never calculate, but who, when an attempt is to be made, dare and do, and most likely win. There was also a closed room downstairs, and I spent much time there when the weather was wet, and I could not get into the garden. It had once been a handsome room, and the scene of much gaiety, but the passage of the Reform Bill had compelled English farmers to adopt a much more modest style of living; and the singing of lovers, and the feet of dancing youths and maidens was heard no more in its splendid space. But it was yet full of things strange and mysterious--things that ministered both to the heaven and hell of my imagination; beautiful images of girls carrying flowers and of children playing; empty shells of resplendent colors that had voices in them, mournful, despairing voices, that filled me with fear and pity; dreadful little heathen gods, monstrous, frightful! with more arms and hands and feet than they ought to have; a large white marble clock that was dead, and could neither tick nor strike; butterflies and birds motionless, silent, and shut up in glass cases; and what I believed to be a golden harp, with strings slack or broken, yet crying out plaintively if I touched them. One afternoon I went to sleep in this room, and, as my mother was out, I was not disturbed; indeed when I opened my eyes it was nearly dark. Then the occult world, which we all carry about with us, was suddenly wide awake, also; the place was full of whispers; I heard the passing of unseen feet, and phantom-like men and women slipped softly about in the mysterious light. My heart beat wildly to the visions I created, but who can tell from what eternity of experiences, the mind-stuff necessary for these visions floated to me? Who can tell? It was, however, the long, long nights, far more than the wonderful days, which impregnated my future--the dark, still nights full of hints and fine transitions, shadowy terrors, fleeting visions and marvelous dreams. I shall remember as long as I live, nights that I would not wish to dream through again, neither would I wish to have been spared the dreams that came to me in them. The impression they made was perhaps only possible on the plastic nature of a child soul, but, though long years lay between the dream and the event typified, the dream was unforgotten, and the event dominated by its warning. All education has this provisional quality. In school, as well as in dreams, we learn in childhood a great deal that finds no immediate use or expression. For many years we may scarcely remember the lesson, then comes the occasion for it, and the information needed is suddenly restored. [Illustration: MRS. BARR'S BIRTHPLACE Born in the parsonage next to the chapel] There is then no wonder that, in the full ripeness of my mental growth, I look back with wondering gratitude to these first apparently uneventful years on the border land of being. In them I learned much anteceding any reasoning whatever. There is nothing incredible in this. Heaven yet lies around infancy, and we are eternally related to heavenly intelligences "a little lower" that is all. Thus, in an especial manner, "Our simple childhood sits, Our simple childhood sits upon a throne, That hath more power than all the elements." For it is always the simple that produces the marvelous, and these fleeting shadowy visions and intimations of our earliest years, are far from being profitless; not only because they are kindred to our purest mind and intellect, but much rather because the soul "Remembering how she felt, but what she felt Remembering not; retains an obscure sense Of possible sublimity." I have a kind of religious reluctance to inquire too closely into these almost sacred years. Yet when I consider the material education of the children of this period, I feel that I have not said enough. For a boy educated entirely on a material basis, is not prepared to achieve success, even financial success. The work of understanding must be enlightened by the emotions, or he will surely sink to the level of the hewers of wood and drawers of water. The very best material education will not save a child who has no imagination. Therefore do not deprive childhood of fairy tales, of tales of stirring adventure and courage, and of the wondrous stories of the old Hebrew world. On such food the imagination produces grand ideals and wide horizons. It is true we live in a very present and very real world, and many are only too ready to believe that the spiritual world is far-off and shadowy. On the contrary, the spiritual world is _here_ and _now_ and indisputably and preëminently real. It is the material world that is the realm of shadows. I doubt if any child is born without some measure of that vision and faculty divine which apprehends the supernatural. This is "the light within which lighteth every man that cometh into the world." If that light be neglected, and left to smoulder and die out, how great is the darkness it leaves behind! Precious beyond price are the shadowy recollections of a God-haunted childhood, "Which be they what they may, Are yet the fountain light of all our day; Are yet the master light of all our seeing." A child is a deep mystery. It has a life of its own, which it reveals to no one unless it meets with sympathy. Snub its first halting confidences concerning the inner life, or laugh at them, or be cross or indifferent, and you close the door against yourself forever. Now there is no faculty given us that the soul can spare. If we destroy in childhood the faculty of apprehending the spiritual or supernatural, as detrimental to this life, if there be left "... no Power Divine within us, How can God's divineness win us?" CHAPTER II AT SHIPLEY, YORKSHIRE "Sweet childish days that were as long As twenty days are now." * * * * * "A child to whom was given So much of earth, so much of heaven." Before I was three years old my father removed to Yorkshire, to Shipley, in the West Riding. I never can write or speak those two last words, "West Riding," without a sensible rise of temperature, and an intense longing to be in England. For the West Riding is the heart of England, and, whatever is distinctively English, is also distinctively West Riding. Its men and women are so full of life, so spontaneously cheerful, so sure of themselves, so upright and downright in speech and action, that no one can for a moment misunderstand either their liking or disliking. Their opinions hold no element of change or dissent. They are as hearty and sincere in their religion, as their business, and if they form a friendship with a family, it will likely be one to the third and fourth generation. I correspond today with people whom I never saw, but whose friendship for my family dates back to a mutual rejoicing over the victory of Waterloo. Of course I was not able to make any such observations on West Riding humanity when I first went there, but I _felt_ the goodness of the people then, and in later years I both observed and experienced it. And it was well for me in my early childhood to live a while among such a strong, happy people. They impressed upon my plastic mind their confidant cheerfulness, and their sureness that life was a very good thing. Shipley was then a pretty country town, though it is now a great manufacturing city, not far behind Bradford and Leeds. I was three years there and during those years gradually dropped all remains of infancy, and became a child, a child eager for work and for play, and half-afraid the world might not last until I found out all about it. At first I went to a dame's school. She did not take children over five years of age, and to these babies she taught only reading and needlework and knitting. We sat on very low benches in a room opening into a garden, and we spent a good deal of time in the garden. But she taught me to hem, and to seam, to fell and to gather, to stroke and to backstitch, and when I left her I could read any of the penny chap books I could buy. Most of them contained an abbreviated adventure from the "Arabian Nights" collection. Soon after we removed to Shipley a woman came into our lives, called Ann Oddy, and my sister and I were told to be respectful to her and to obey her orders. She was a clever housekeeper, a superior cook, and had many domestic virtues; but she was authoritative, tyrannical, and quite determined to have things her own way. Fortunately I won her favor early, and for two simple reasons: first, my hair was easy to curl, and Sister Jane's had to be carefully put in papers, and then did not "keep in." Second, because she thought Jane was always ready to go "neighboring" with Mother, and then was so secret as to where she had been, and so "know nothing" of what was said; but I was better pleased to stay in the children's room with a book and herself for company. Indeed I liked Ann's society. She had a grewsome assortment of stories, chiefly about bad fellows and their young women, but sometimes concerning bad children who had come to grief for disobeying their good parents, or for breaking the Sabbath Day. There was generally, however, an enthralling climax, relating to a handsome young man, whom she _saw_ hanged at York Castle for murdering his sweetheart. At this narration I usually laid down my book, and listened with trembling interest to the awful fate of this faithless lover, and Ann's warnings against men of all kinds who wanted helpless women to marry them. In those days I felt sure Ann Oddy had the true wisdom, and was quite resolved to look upon all handsome young men as probable murderers. The three years I spent at Shipley were happy years. I enjoyed every hour of them, though the days were twenty times as long as days are now. There was a great deal of visiting, and visiting meant privileges of all kinds. We were frequently asked out to tea with our parents, especially if there were children in the house to which we were going, and there were children's parties nearly every week at somebody's house. It was a good thing, then, that our usual fare was very plain, and not even the quantity left to our own desire or discretion. Breakfast was always a bowl of bread and milk boiled, and a rather thick slice of bread and butter after it. Fresh meat was sparingly given us at dinner, but we had plenty of broth, vegetables, and Yorkshire pudding. Our evening meal was bread and milk, rice or tapioca pudding, and a thick slice of sweet loaf--that is, bread made with currants, and caraway seeds, and a little sugar. But when we went out for dinner or tea, we had our share of the good things going; and, if the company was at our house, Ann Oddy usually put a couple of Christ Church tarts, or cheesecakes, among our plain bread. She always pretended to wonder where they came from; and, if I said pleadingly, "Don't take them away, Ann," she would answer in a kind of musing manner, "I'll be bound the Missis put them there. Some people will meddle." Then Jane would help herself, and I did the same, and we both knew that Ann had put the tarts there, and that she intended us to eat them. Yet this same little pretense of surprise was kept up for many years, and I grew to enjoy the making of it more perfect, and the changing of the words a little. The house at which I liked best of all to visit was that of Jonathan Greenwood. He had a pretty place--with a fine strawberry bed--at Baildon Green. He was then a handsome bachelor of about forty years of age, and I considered him quite an old man. I knew also that he was Miss Crabtree's sweetheart, and Ann's look of disapproval, and the suspicious shake of her head made me anxious about both of them. What if Miss Crabtree should have another sweetheart! And what if Jonathan killed her because she had deceived him! Then there might be the York tragedy over again. These thoughts troubled me so much that I ventured to suggest their probability to Ann. She laughed my fears to scorn. "Martha Crabtree have another sweetheart! Nay, never my little lass! It will be the priest, not the hangman, that will tie Jonathan up." "Tie Jonathan up, Ann!" I ejaculated. "To be sure," she answered. "Stop talking." "But, Ann----" "Do as I bid you." Then I resolved to ask Jonathan that afternoon. It was Thursday, and he would be sure to call for a cup of tea as he came from Leeds market. I did not do so, because he asked permission for me to go to Baildon Green with him, and stay until after the fair, and during the visit I knew I should find many better opportunities for the question. To go to Baildon Green, was the best holiday that came to me, unless it was to go to Mr. Samuel Wilson's, at the village of Baildon. He had a much finer house, and a large shop in which there were raisins and Jordan almonds, and he had also a handsome little son of my own age, with whom I loved to play. But one visit generally included the other, and both were very agreeable to all my desires. At Baildon Green I had many pleasures. I liked to be petted and praised and to hear the women say, "What a pretty child it is! God bless it!" and I liked to hang around them, and listen to their conversation as they made nice little dinners. I liked in the evening to look at the _Penny Magazine_, and to have Mr. Greenwood explain the pictures to me, and I certainly liked to go with him in his gig to Leeds on Leeds market day. Sometimes he took me with him into the Cloth Hall; sometimes also men would say, "Why, Jonathan, whose little lass is that?" And he would answer, "It is Mr. Huddleston's little lass." "_Never!_" would be the ejaculation, but I knew the word was not intended for dissent, but somehow for approval. When I was at Baildon Green Saturday was the great day. Very early in the morning the weavers began to arrive with the web of cloth they had woven during the week. In those days there were no mills--all the cloth was made in the weavers' homes. Baildon Green was a weaving village. In every cottage there was a loom and a big spinning wheel. The men worked at the loom, the women and children at the wheel. At daybreak I could hear the shuttles flying, and the rattle of the unwieldy looms in every house. On Saturday they brought their webs to Jonathan Greenwood. He examined each web carefully, measured its length, and paid the weaver whatever was its value. Then, giving him the woolen yarn necessary for next week's web, he was ready to call another weaver. There were perhaps twenty to thirty men present, and, during these examinations many little disputes arose. I enjoyed them. The men called the master "Jonathan," and talked to him in language as plain, or plainer, than he gave them. Sometimes, after a deal of threaping, the master would lose his temper, then I noticed he always got the best of the argument. In the room where this business took place there was a big pair of scales, and I usually sat in them, swinging gently to and fro, and listening. These weavers were all big men, the master bigger than any of them; and they all wore blue-checked linen pinafores covering them from neck to feet. Underneath this pinafore the master wore fine broadcloth and high shoes with silver latchets. I do not know what kind of cloth the men wore, but it was very probably corduroy, as that was then the usual material for workingmen's clothes, and on their feet were heavy clogs clasped with brass, a footgear capable of giving a very ugly and even dangerous kick. I have never seen a prouder or more independent class of men than these home weavers; and just at this time they had been made anxious and irritable by the constant reports of coming mills and weaving by machinery. But their religion kept them hopeful and confident, for they were all Methodists, made for Methodists, and Methodism made for them. And it was a great sight on a Sabbath morning to see them gathering in their chapel, full of that incompatible spiritual joy which no one understands but those who have it, and which I at that time, took for simple good temper. But I know now that if I was a preacher of the Word, I would not ask to be sent to an analyzing, argumentative, cold Scotch kirk; nor to a complacent, satisfied English church; nor even to a meditative, tranquil Quaker meeting-house; I would say, "Send me to an inspiring, joyful, West Riding Methodist chapel." This visit to Baildon Green was the last of my Shipley experiences. During it Mr. Greenwood told me that he would have "a handsome wife" when I came again, and that she would take me about a bit. I was not much pleased at the prospect. Men were always kinder to me than women, and not so fussy about my hair being in curl, and my frock clean. So I did not speak, and he asked, "Are you not pleased, Milly?" "No," I answered bluntly. "But why?" he continued. "Because I like you--all to myself." Then he laughed and was much pleased, and I learned that day that you may wisely speak the truth, if it is complimentary. The event of this visit was Baildon Feast, a great public rejoicing on the anniversary of the summer solstice. It had been observed beyond the memory of man, beyond historical notice, beyond even the traditions of the locality. There was no particular reason for its observance that I could ever learn; it was just Baildon Feast, and that was all anybody knew about it. I was awakened very early on the first day of the feast by the bands "playing the sun up," and before we had finished breakfast the procession was forming. Now Baildon Green is flat and grassy as a meadow, and when I was six years old it had a pond in the center, while from the northwest there rose high hills. Only a narrow winding path led to the top of these hills, and about half way up, there was a cave which tradition averred had been one of Robin Hood's retreats--a very probable circumstance, as this whole country-side was doubtless pretty well covered with oak forests. A numerous deputation from the village of Baildon, situated on the top of the hill, joined the procession which started from Baildon Green at an early hour. The sun was shining brightly, and I had on a clean white frock, pretty white sandals, a new blue sash, and a gypsy hat trimmed with blue ribbons. When the music approached it put a spirit into my feet and my heart kept time to the exciting melody. I had never walked to music before, and it was an enchanting experience. The procession appeared to my childish apprehension a very great one. I think now it may have consisted of five hundred people, perhaps less, but the great point of interest was two fine young heifers garlanded with flowers, and ornamented with streaming ribbons of every color. Up the winding path they went, the cattle lowing, the bands playing, the people singing and shouting up to the high places on which the village of Baildon stood. There at a particular spot, hallowed by tradition, the cattle garlanded for sacrifice were slain. I do not know whether any particular method or forms were used. I was not permitted to see the ceremony attending their death, and I confess I was much disappointed. "It isn't fit for a little lass to see," said my friend Jonathan, "and I promised thy father and mother I wouldn't let thee see it, so there now! Nay, nay, I wouldn't whimper about such a thing as that. Never!" I said I wasn't whimpering, and that I didn't care at all about seeing the animals killed, but I did care, and Baildon Fair without its tragedy no longer interested me, yet I stayed to see the flesh distributed among all who asked for it. There was an understanding, however, that those who received a festival roast should entertain any stranger claiming their hospitality. This ancient rite over, the people gave themselves up to sports of all kinds. But their Methodism kept them within the bounds of decency, for there were favorite preachers invited from all the towns around, and if the men and boys were busy in the cricket fields all day, they were sure to be in the chapel at night. There was also a chapel tea party the last afternoon of the feast, and after it a great missionary meeting at which Bishop Heber's hymn, "From Greenland's Icy Mountains," was sung with such mighty fervor as made me thrill and tremble with an emotion I can yet recall. That night I solemnly determined to be a missionary. I would go to the darkest of all heathen lands, and be the first to tell the story of Jesus. I went home in a state of beatific surrender, and whenever I think of that night, I am aware of a Presence, and the face I wore when I was a little child turns to me. And I am troubled and silent before that little ghost with its eager eyes and loving enthusiasms, for I have done none of the things I promised to do, and an intangible clutch of memory gives me a spell of sadness keen and regretful. This Baildon experience was one of those instances of learning in childhood things of no immediate use. I was hardly six years old then; I was seventy-six when it struck me, that I had perhaps taken part in a non-intentional sacrifice to the God Baal. For four years ago I was much interested in discovering that the Shetlanders, even to the close of the nineteenth century, kept the same feast at the summer solstice, and also made their children in some of the lonely islands pass through the Beltane fires, in fact paying the old God Bel or Baal the same services as the Hebrew prophets so often reproached the Israelites with performing. But I believe that wherever Druidical remains are found, relics of this worship may be traced either in names, superstitions, signs or traditions. In a letter I received from a Bradford lady dated September twenty-seventh, A.D. 1911, she says, "It was rather strange but we had a man at our house from Thornton the other day, and he was telling us how they paraded the cattle they were going to kill at the feast through the streets, and I thought of you, and what you remembered of it in Baildon." These details may seem to the reader trivial and futile; on the contrary, they were the very material from which life was building character. For all that surrounds a child, all that it sees, hears, feels or touches, helps to create its moral and intellectual nature. See then how fortunate were my first six years. My physical being was well cared for by loving parents in a sweet orderly home, and my mental life well fed by books stimulating the imagination. Through the "Arabian Nights" tales I touched the domestic life of the wonderful East, China, India, Persia and Arabia; and at the missionary meetings, and at my home, I met men who had been to these far away places, and brought back with them curious and beautiful things, even the very gods they worshipped. There had been hitherto in other respects a good deal of judicious neglect in my education. Books had never been anything but a source of wonder and delight to me. I had never heard of a grammar and an arithmetic, and had never been deprived of a visit or a holiday because if I did not go to school, I would miss a mark, or lose my place in a class. Fortunately this desultory education was marbled all through with keen spiritual incidents and issues. For the spiritual sight of children turns more sharply upon the world within the breast, than they show, or that anyone imagines. They hold in their memories imperishable days which all others have forgotten, visions beautiful and fearful, dreams without name or meaning, and they have an undefined impression of the awful _oldness_ of things. They see the world through doors very little ajar, and they know the walking of God through their dreaming sleep. The happy and prosperous children are those, who had before all else the education that comes by reverence. This education is beyond all doubt the highest, the deepest, the widest and the most perfect of all the forms of education ever given to man. A child that has not been taught to reverence God, and all that represents God to man--honor, honesty, justice, mercy, truth, love, courage, self-sacrifice, is sent into the world like a boat sent out to sea, without rudder, ballast, compass or captain. But the education by reverence must begin early. Children of very tender years may be taught to wander through those early ages of faith, when God took Enoch, and no one was astonished; when Abraham talked with God as friend with friend; when the marvelous ladder was let down by Jacob's pillow; when Hagar carrying her dying child in the desert saw without surprise the angel of the Lord coming to help her. Nor is there any danger in permitting them to enter that dimmer world lying about childhood, to which _Robinson Crusoe_ and _Scheherazade_ hold the keys. The multiplication table can wait, until the child has been taught to reverence all that is holy, wise and good, and the imagination received its first impulse. So I do not call such events as I have chronicled trifling; indeed, I know that in the formation of my character, they had a wide and lasting influence. A few days after the fair, Jonathan Greenwood was going to Bradford so he left me at my home as he passed there, and as soon as I came in sight of our house, I saw my sister running to the gate to meet me. "I have a little brother!" she cried. "I have a little brother, Amelia." "Mine, too," I asserted; and she answered, "Yes, I dare say." "Is he nice?" I asked. "Middling nice. You should see how everyone goes on about him." "My word!" cried Jonathan, "you girls will be nobodies now. But, I shall stick by you, Milly." "Yes," I answered dubiously, for I had learned already that little girls were of much less importance than little boys. So I shook my head, and gave Jonathan's promise a doubtful "yes." "Tell Ann Oddy," he said, "that I will be in for a cup of tea at five o'clock." Then he drove away, and Jane and I walked slowly up the garden path together. "Father called him John Henry, first thing," said Jane, "and Mother is proud of him, as never was." "I want to see him," I answered. "Let us go to the children's room." "He is in Mother's room, and Mother is sick in bed, and Ann is so busy with the boy, she forgot my breakfast, so I had breakfast with Father." "Breakfast with Father! Never!" "Yes, indeed, and dinner, too, for three days now. Perhaps as you have come home, Ann will remember that girls need something for breakfast. Father wasn't pleased at her forgetting me." "What did she say?" She said, "Mr. Huddleston, I cannot remember everything, and the Mistress and the little lad _do_ come first, I should say." "Was Father angry?" I asked. "He said something about Mrs. Peacock." "What is Mrs. Peacock doing here?" "She is hired to help, but I think she never leaves her chair. Ann sniffed, and told Father, Mrs. Peacock had all she could do to take care of Mrs. Peacock. Then Father walked away, and Ann talked to herself, as she always does, when she is angry." This conversation and much that followed I remember well, not all of it, perhaps, but its spirit and the very words used. It occurred in the garden which was in gorgeous August bloom, full of splendid dahlias and holly-hocks, and August lilies. I have never seen such holly-hocks since. We called them rose-mallows then which is I think a prettier name. The house door stood open, and the rooms were all so still and empty. There was a bee buzzing outside, and the girl Agnes singing a Methodist hymn in the kitchen, but the sounds seemed far away, and our little shoes sounded very noisy on the stairway. I soon had my head on my mother's breast, and felt her kisses on my cheek. She asked me if I had a happy visit, but she did not take as much interest in my relations as I expected; she was so anxious to show me the new baby, and to tell me it was a boy, and called after his father's brother. I was jealous and unhappy, but Mother looked so proud and pleased I did not like to say anything disagreeable, so I kissed Mother and the boy again, and then went to the children's room and had a good cry in Ann Oddy's arms. "Ann," I said, "girls are of no account;" and she answered, "No, honey, and women don't signify much either. It is a pity for us both. I have been fit to drop with work ever since you went away, Amelia, and who cares? If any man had done what I have done, there would be two men holding him up by this time." "Ann, why do men get so much more praise than women, and why are they so much more thought of?" "God only knows child," she answered. "Men have made out, that only they can run the world. It's in about as bad a state as it well can be, but they are proud of their work. What I say is, that a race of good women would have done something with the old concern by this time. Men are a poor lot. I should think thou would want something to eat." I told her I was "as hungry as could be," but that Jonathan was coming to tea at five o'clock. "Then he'll make it for himsel'," she said. "Mr. Huddleston has gone to Windhill to some sort of meeting. Mrs. Huddleston can't get out of bed. I have the baby on my hands, and Mrs. Peacock makes her own tea at five o'clock--precisely." "Then Ann let me make Jonathan's tea. I am sure I can do it, Ann. Will you let me?" "I'll warrant thee." Then she told me exactly what to do, and when Jonathan Greenwood came, he found a good pot of tea and hot muffins ready, and he had given Agnes some Bradford sausage, with their fine flavoring of herbs, to fry, and Agnes remembered a couple of Kendal wigs[1] that were in the house and she brought them in for a finishing dish. I sat in my mother's chair, and poured out tea; but I sent for Jane when all was ready, and she gave me a look, still unforgotten, though she made no remark to disturb a meal so much to her liking. Later, however, when we were undressing for bed, and had said our prayers, she reminded me that she was the eldest, and that I had taken her place in making tea for Mr. Greenwood. Many a time I had been forced to receive this reproof silently, but now I was able to say: "You are not the oldest any longer, Jane. John is the oldest now. Girls don't count." In my childhood this eldest business was a sore subject, and indeed to this day the younger children in English families express themselves very decidedly about the usurpation of primogenital privileges, and the undue consideration given to boys. A few weeks after the advent of my brother, John Henry, we removed to Penrith in Cumberland, and the night before leaving, a circumstance happened which made a great impression on me. There was a circle of shrubs in the garden, and a chair among them on which I frequently sat to read. This night I went to meet Mother at the garden gate, and as we came up the flagged walk, I saw a man sitting on the chair. "Let us go quickly to the house," said Mother; but a faint cry of "_Mary!_" made her hesitate, and when the cry was repeated, and the man rose to his feet, my mother walked rapidly towards him crying out, "O Will! Will! O my brother! Have you come home at last?" "I have come home to die, Mary," he said. "Lean on me, Will," she replied. "Come into the house. We leave for Penrith to-morrow, and you can travel with us. Then we shall see you safely home." "What will your husband say?" the man asked. "Only kind words to a dying man. Are you really so ill, Will?" And the man answered, "I may live three months. I may go much sooner. It depends----" Then my mother said, "This is your uncle, Dr. Singleton, Milly;" and I was very sorry for a man so near death, and I went and took his hand, but he did not seem to care about me. He only glanced in my face, and then remarked to Mother, "She seems a nice child." I felt slighted, but I could not be angry at a man so sick. When I went upstairs I told Ann that my uncle had come, and that he said he was going home to Kendal to die. "He will travel with us to-morrow as far as Kendal; Mother asked him to do so," I added. "I dare say. It was just like her." "Don't you like my uncle, Ann? I thought he was a very fine gentleman." "Maybe he is. Be off to your bed now. You must be up by strike-of-day to-morrow;" and there was something in Ann's look and voice, I did not care to disobey. Indeed Ann had every one up long before it was necessary. We had breakfast an hour before the proper time; but after all, it was well, for the house and garden was soon full of people come to bid us "good-bye." Some had brought lunches, and some flowers and fruits, and there was a wonderful hour of excitement, before the coach came driving furiously up to the gate. It had four fine horses, and the driver and the guard were in splendid livery, and the sound of the horn, and the clatter of the horses' feet, and the cries of the crowd stirred my heart and my imagination, and I believe I was the happiest girl in the world that hour. I enjoyed also the drive through the town, and the sight of the people waving their handkerchiefs to Father and Mother from open doors and windows. I do not think I have ever since had such a sense of elation and importance; for Father and I had relinquished our seats inside the coach to Uncle Will Singleton, and I was seated between the driver and Father, seeing well and also being well seen. Never since that morning have I been more keenly alive in every sense and more ready for every event that might come; the first of which was the meeting and passing of three great wains loaded high with wheat, and going to a squire's manor, whose name I have forgotten. There were some very piquant words passed between the drivers about the coach going a bit to the wrong side. On the top of the three wagons about a dozen men were lying at their ease singing the prettiest harvest song I ever heard, but I only caught three lines of it. They went to a joyful melody thus: "Blest be the day Christ was born! We've gotten in the Squire's corn, Well bound, and better shorn. Hip! Hip! Hurrah!" But as they sang the dispute between the drivers was growing less and less friendly, and the driver of the coach whipped up his horses, and took all the road he wanted, and went onward at such a rattling pace as soon left Shipley forever behind me. CHAPTER III WHERE DRUIDS AND GIANTS DWELT "... upon the silent shore Of memory, we find images and precious thoughts, That shall not die, and cannot be destroyed." I was greatly delighted with Penrith. It was such a complete change from Shipley, and youth is always sure that change must mean something better. In the first place the town was beautiful, and generally built of the new red sandstone on which it stands; but our house was white, being I think of a rough stucco, and it stood on one of the pleasantest streets in the town, the one leading up to the Beacon. Its rooms appeared very large to me then; perhaps I might not think so highly of them now. Its door opened directly into the living-room, and it was always such a joy to open it, and step out of the snow or rain into a room full of love and comfort. Since those days I have liked well the old English houses where the front door opens directly into the living-room. Ten or twelve years ago a lady built in Cornwall-on-Hudson a handsome house having this peculiarity, and I often went to see her, enjoying every time that one step from all out doors, into the sweet home influence beyond it. The sound of the loom and the shuttle were never heard in the broad still streets of Penrith. Business was a thing rather pushed into a corner, for Penrith was aristocratic, and always had been. The great earls of Lonsdale lent it their prestige, and circling it were some of the castles and seats of the most famous nobility. It had been often sacked, and had many royal associations. Richard the Third had dwelt in its castle when the Duke of Gloucester, and Henry the Eighth's last wife, Catherine Parr, came from Kendal. The castle itself had been built by Edward the Third, and destroyed by Cromwell. All these and many more such incidents I heard the first day of my residence in the town from a young girl we had hired for the kitchen, and she mingled with these facts the Fairy Cup of Eden Hall, and the great Lord Brougham, Long Meg and her daughters, and the giant's grave in Penrith churchyard; and I felt as if I had stepped into some enchanted city. Up to this time I had never been to what I called a proper school. The dame's school at Shipley I had far outstepped, and I was so eager to learn, that I wished to begin every study at once. There were two good schools in Penrith, one kept by a Miss Pearson, and the other by a man whose name I have forgotten. I wanted to go to Miss Pearson. She had the most select and expensive school. The man's school was said to be more strict and thorough, and much less expensive; but there was a positive prejudice against boys and girls being taught together. I could tell from the chatter of the girl in the kitchen, that it was looked down upon, and considered vulgar by the best people. I was anxious about the result. Jane and I whispered our fears to each other, but we did not dare to express any opinion to our parents. At last I talked feelingly to Ann Oddy about the situation, and was glad to find her most decidedly on our side. "I am for the woman," she said straight out, "and I shall tell the Master so plainly. What does that man know about trembling shy little girls?" she asked indignantly, "and I've heard," she continued, "that he uses the leather strap on their little hands--even when they are trying to do the best they know how. His own children look as if they got plenty of 'strap.' I've told your mother what I think of him." "What did Mother say, Ann?" we eagerly asked. "She said such a man as that would never do. So I went on--'Mrs. Huddleston, our society wouldn't like it. He teaches girls to write a big, round man's hand. You may see it yourself, Mrs. Huddleston, if you'll lift his letter to you--good enough for keeping count of what money is owing you, but for young ladies, I say it isn't right--and his manners! if he has any, won't be fit to be seen, and you know, Mrs. Huddleston, how men talk, he won't be fit to be heard at times; at any rate that is the case with most men--except Mr. Huddleston.'" With such words Ann reasoned, and if I remembered the very words used it would be only natural, for I heard them morning, noon and night, until Mother went to see Miss Pearson, and came home charmed with her fine manners and method of teaching. Then our dress had to be prepared, and I shall never forget it; for girls did not get so many dresses then as they do now, and I was delighted with the blue Saxony cloth that was my first school dress. Dresses were all of one piece then, and were made low with short baby sleeves, but a pelerine was made with the dress, which was really an over-waist with two little capes over the shoulders. My shoes were low and black, and had very pretty steel buckles; my bonnet, a cottage one of coarse Dunstable straw. It had a dark blue ribbon crossed over it, and a blue silk curtain behind, and some blue silk ribbon plaited just within the brim, a _Red Riding Hood_ cloak and French pattens for wet weather completed my school costume, and I was very proud of it. Yet it is a miracle to me at this day, how the children of that time lived through the desperate weather, deep snows and bitter cold, in such insufficient clothing. I suppose it was the survival of the fittest. My first school day was one of the greatest importance to me. I have not forgotten one incident in all its happy hours. I fell in love with Miss Pearson as soon as I saw her; yes, I really loved the woman, and I love her yet. She was tall and handsome, and had her abundant black hair dressed in a real bow knot on the top of her head; and falling in thick soft curls on her temples, and partly down her cheeks. An exceedingly large shell comb kept it in place. Her dress was dark, and she wore a large falling collar finely embroidered and trimmed with deep lace, and round her neck a long gold chain. She came smiling to meet us, and as soon as the whole school was gathered in front of the large table at which she sat, she rose and said, "Young ladies, you have two new companions. I ask for them your kindness--Jane and Amelia Huddleston. Rise." Then the whole school rose and curtsied to us, and as well as we were able, we returned the compliment. As soon as we were seated again, Miss Pearson produced a large book, and as she unclasped it, said, "Miss Huddleston will come here." Every eye was turned on Jane, who, however, rose at once and went to Miss Pearson's table. Then Miss Pearson read aloud something like the following words, for I have forgotten the exact form, though the promises contained in it have never been forgotten. "I promise to be kind and helpful to all my schoolmates. "I promise to speak the truth always. "I promise to be honorable about the learning and repeating of my lessons. "I promise to tell no malicious tales of any one. "I promise to be ladylike in my speech and manners. "I promise to treat all my teachers with respect and obedience." These obligations were read aloud to Jane and she was asked if she agreed to keep them. Jane said she would keep them all, and she was then required to sign her name to the formula in the book, which she did very badly. When my turn came, I asked Miss Pearson to sign it for me. She did so, and then called up two girls as witnesses. This formality made a great impression on me, the more so, as Miss Pearson in a steady positive voice said, as she emphatically closed the book, "The first breaking of any of these promises may perhaps be forgiven, for the second fault there is no excuse--the girl will be dismissed from the school." I was in this school three years and never saw one dismissed. The promise with the little formalities attending it had a powerful effect on my mind, and doubtless it influenced every girl in the same way. After my examination it was decided that writing was the study to be first attended to. I was glad of this decision, for I longed to write, but I was a little dashed when I was taken to a long table running across the whole width of the room. This table was covered with the finest sea sand, there was a roller at one end, and the teacher ran it down the whole length of the table. It left behind it beautifully straight lines, between which were straight strokes, pothooks, and the letter _o_. Then a brass stylus was given me, and I was told to copy what I saw, and it was on this table of sand, with a pencil of brass, I took my first lessons in writing. When I could make all my letters, simple and capital, and knew how to join, dot, and cross them properly, I was promoted to a slate and slate pencil. In about half a year I was permitted to use paper and a wad pencil, but as wad, or lead, was then scarce and dear, we were taught at once how to sharpen and use them in the most economical manner. While I was using a wad pencil I was practicing the art of making a pen out of a goose quill. Some children learned the lesson easily. I found it difficult, and spoiled many a bunch of quills in acquiring it. I remember a clumsy pen in my father's desk almost as early as I remember anything. It was a metal tube, fastened to an ivory handle, and originated just before I was born. I never saw my father use it; he wrote with a quill all his life. In 1832, the year after my birth, thirty-three million, one hundred thousand quills were imported into England, and I am sure that at the present date, not all the geese in all the world would meet the demand for pens in the United States alone. Penny postage produced the steel pen. It belonged to an age of machinery, and could have belonged to no other age; for the great problem to be solved in the steel pen, was to convert iron into a substance as thin as the quill of a dove's wing, yet as strong as the strongest quill of an eagle's wing. When I was a girl not much over seven years old, children made their own pens; the steam engine now makes them. A short time before Christmas my mother received the letter from Uncle Will Singleton she had been expecting. It came one Saturday morning when the snow lay deep, and the cold was intense. Jane and I were in the living-room with Mother. She had just cut a sheet down the middle, where it was turning thin, and I had to seam the two selvedge edges together, thus turning the strong parts of the sheet into the center. This seam required to be very neatly made, and the sides were to be hemmed just as neatly. I disliked this piece of work with all my heart, but with the help of pins I divided it into different places, for the pins represented the cities, and I made up the adventures to them as I sewed. Jane, who was a better needlewoman than I, had some cambric to hem for ruffling, but the hem was not laid, it had to be rolled as it was sewn between the thumb and first finger of the left hand. Jane was always conceited about her skill in this kind of hemming, and as I write I can see her fair, still face with its smile of self-satisfaction, as her small fingers deftly and rapidly made the tiny roll, she was to sew with almost invisible needle and thread. Mother was singing a song by Felicia Hemans, and Father was in the little parlor across the hall reading a book called "Elijah, the Tishbite;" for he had just been in the room to point out to Mother how grandly it opened. "Now Elijah the Tishbite," without any weakening explanations of who or what _Elijah_ was, and Mother had said in a disconcerting voice, "Isn't that the way it opens in the Bible, William?" There was a blazing fire above the snow-white hearth, and shining brass fender, and a pleasant smell of turpentine and beeswax, for Ann Oddy was giving the furniture a little rubbing. Suddenly there was a knock at the door, and Ann rose from her knees and went to open it. The next moment there was evident disputing, and Ann Oddy called sharply, "Mr. Huddleston, please to come here, sir." When Father appeared, Mother also went to the door, and Jane and I stopped sewing in order to watch and to listen. It was the postman and he had charged a shilling for a letter, that only ought to be eight pence and while Ann was pointing out this mistake, my mother took the letter from her hand and looked at it. "William," she said, "it is a death message, do not dispute about that toll." So Father gave the postman the shilling, and the door was shut, and Mother went to the fireside and stood there. Father quickly joined her. "Well, Mary," he said, "is it from your brother? What does he say?" "Only eight words, William," Mother answered; and she read them aloud, "Come to me, Mary. The end is near." Father was almost angry. He said she could not go over Shap Fells in such weather, and that snow was lying deep all the way to Kendal. He talked as though he was preaching. I thought Mother would not dare to speak any more about going to Kendal. But when Father stopped talking, Mother said in a strange, strong way, "I shall certainly go to my brother. I shall try to get a seat in the coach that passes through here at ten o'clock to-night." I had never seen Mother look and talk as she did then, and I was astonished. So was Father. He watched her leave the room in silence, and for a few minutes seemed irresolute. Then Ann came in and lifted the beeswax, and was going away when Father said, "Where is your mistress, Ann?" "In her room, Mr. Huddleston." "What is she doing?" "Packing her little trunk. She says she is going to Kendal." "She ought not to go to Kendal. She must not go." "She's right enough in going, Mr. Huddleston, and she is sure to go." "I never heard anything like this!" cried Father. He really was amazed. It was household rebellion. "Ann," he continued, "go upstairs and remind your mistress that John Henry has been sickly for two weeks. I have myself noticed the child looking far from well." "Yes, sir, the child is sickly, but her brother is dying." "Do you think the child should be left?" "It would be worse if the brother died alone. I will look after John, Mr. Huddleston." Then Father went upstairs, and Mother went by the night mail, and we did not see her again for nearly three weeks. I do not apologize for relating a scene so common, for these simple intimacies and daily events, these meetings and partings, these sorrows and joys of the hearth and the family, are really the great events of our life. They are our personal sacred history. When we have forgotten all our labors, and even all our successes, we shall remember them. Mother was the heart and hinge of all our home and happiness, and while she was away, I used to lie awake at nights in my dark, cold room and think of death entering our family. In his strange language he whispered many things to my soul that I have forgotten, but one thing I am sure of--I had no fear of death. My earliest consciousness had been a strong and sure persuasion of God's goodness to men. And I had no enmity towards God; though a dozen catechisms told me so, I would not admit the statement. I loved God with all my child heart. He was truly to me "my Father who art in heaven." Well then, death whom He sent to every one, even to little babies, must be something good and not evil. Also, I thought, if the dead are unhappy, their faces would show it, and I had never seen a dead face without being struck by its strange quiet. The easiest way to my school lay through the graveyard, and though it was in the midst of the town, I knew no quiet like the quiet of the dead men in that churchyard. I have felt it like an actual pressure on my ear drum. In the day I talked to my sister of the changes Uncle's death would make in our lives. When Christmas came, father would not permit us to go to any parties, and Jane was sure we would have to wear mourning, a kind of clothing I hated, I reminded her that the Pennants had not worn black when Mary Pennant died, and Jane reminded me that the Pennants were Quakers, and that when Frances and Eliza Pennant came back to school wearing their brown dresses, it was all the girls could manage, not to scorn them. Of course we talked at school of our uncle, Dr. Singleton, and his expected death, and I do not understand how this circumstance imparted to us a kind of superiority, but it did. Jane put on airs, and was always on the point of crying, and I heard Laura Patterson correct the biggest pupil in the school for "speaking cross to a girl whose uncle was dying." I dare say I had my own plan for collecting sympathy, for some of my classmates asked to walk home with me, others offered to help me with my grammer, and Adelaide Bond gave me the half of her weekly allowance of Everton toffy. At last Mother returned home and, oh, how glad we were to see her! She came into the lighted room just as we were sitting down to supper, and an angel from heaven would not have been as welcome. My father was somewhere in the Patterdale country, where he went for a week or two at regular intervals; and, oh, how good, how glorious a thing it was, to have Mother home again! The first thing Mother did the following day was to send for black stuff and the dressmaker. I pleaded in vain, though Mother, being of Quaker descent, was as averse to mourning dresses as I was, but she was sure Father would insist on them, because of what the Society, and people in general would say. Jane made no objections. She was very fair, and had that soft pearly complexion which is rendered more lovely by black. As for Ann, she could only look at the wastefulness of putting new dresses away in camphor for a year. She said, "Girls will grow long and lanky, and in a year the skirts will be short and narrow, and the waists too small, and the armholes too tight, and the whole business out of fashion and likelihood." In a few days Father came home. The girl was pipeclaying the hearth and building up the fire for the evening, and Ann laying the table for Mother's tea as he entered. He was so delighted to find Mother at home that he said to her, "Let the girls stay and have a cup of tea with us tonight." Then when he had set down by the fire, Jane drew her stool close to him, and I slipped on to his knee, and whispered something in his ear I shall never tell to any one. Such a happy meal followed, but little was said about Uncle Singleton. Father asked if all was well with him? Mother answered almost joyfully, "All is well!" "Poor fellow," continued Father. "His life was defeat from its beginning to its end." "No, William," cried Mother, "at the end it was victory!" and she lifted her radiant face, and her eyes rained gladness, as she said the word "victory" with that telling upward inflection on the last syllable, common in the North Country. I can never forget either the words or the look with which they were uttered. I thought to myself, "How beautiful she is!" I waited after tea, hoping that Mother would tell us more about Uncle's death, but she talked of our black dresses and the bad weather, and then some neighbors came in, and I went upstairs to Ann. She had one of those high peaked sugar loaves before her, and was removing the thick dark purple paper in which they were always wrapped. The big sugar nippers were at her side, and I knew she was going to nip sugar for the next day's use. It was, however, a kind of work it was pleasant to loiter over, and after talking awhile Ann said, "What did Mrs. Huddleston say about her brother?" Then I repeated what Mother said, and involuntarily tried to imitate her look and the tones of her voice. Ann asked if that was all, and I answered, "Yes." Then I said, "Was he a bad man, Ann, or a good man, tell me;" and she said, "He was bad and good, like the rest of men. Don't ask me any questions. Your mother will tell you all about him when the right time comes." And the right time did not come until eleven years afterwards. In a week our dresses were ready, and we went back to school. We met with great sympathy. Jane looked beautiful, and received the attentions shown her with graceful resignation. I looked unlike myself, and felt as if I had somebody's else frock on. But I had a happy heart, ready to make the best of any trouble, beside I knew I was unreasonable, since Ann, who was generally on my side, told me that I ought to be thankful I had any dress at all to wear, and so many nicer little girls than myself without one to put on their backs. And as for color, one color was just as good as another. That was not true in my case, but I knew that it was no use telling Ann that story. Yet it is a fact, that I am, and have always been powerfully affected both by color and smell--the latter's influence having a psychical or spiritual tendency. But how could I explain so complex a feeling to Ann, when I could not even understand it myself? Queen Victoria ascended the throne of England a few weeks before I went to Penrith, but she was not crowned until a year afterwards. I remember the very June day so bright and exquisite it was! The royal and loyal town of Penrith was garlanded with roses, flags were waving from every vantage point, and the musical bells of the ancient church rang without ceasing from dawn until the long summer gloaming was lost in the mid-summer night. Yet child as I was, I noticed and partly understood, the gloom and care on the faces of so many who had no heart to rejoice, and no reason to do so. Without much explanation the story of ordinary English life at this period would be incredible to us, and I shall only revert to it at points where it touched my own life and character. Is it not all written in Knight's and many other histories at every one's hand? But I _saw_ the slough of despair, of poverty and ignorance, in which the working class struggled for their morsel of bread. And the root of all their trouble was ignorance. For instance, the wealthy town of Penrith had not, when I first saw it, one National or Lancastrian school, nor yet one free school of any kind, but the little Sunday school held in the Methodist chapel two hours on Sunday afternoons. Fortunately it was the kind of Sunday school Raikes intended. There were no daintily dressed children, and fashionably attired teachers in it--not one. The pupils were semi-starved, semi-clothed, hopeless, joyless little creatures; their teachers were hard working men and women, who took from their Sabbath rest a few hours for Christ's sake. For how could such little ones come unto Him, if there were none to show the way? There was even at this date, 1838, villages in England without either church or school, though Methodism had swept through the land like a Pentecostal fire half a century before; and at this same time, the big cities of London, Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, Bristol had not one ragged school in them. A parliamentary investigation two years afterward found plenty of villages such as Dunkirk with one hundred and thirteen children, of whom only ten could read and write; and Boughton with one hundred and nineteen children, where only seven went to a school that taught writing, and thirty-two to a Sunday school. Learning and literature were not in fashion then, especially for women. Yes, indeed, it is true that I knew in my youth, many women of wealth, beautiful women who managed their large houses with splendid hospitality and were keenly alive to public affairs, who looked on books as something rather demoralizing, and likely to encroach in some way upon works more in the way of their duty. I was very often reproved for "wasting my time over a book" so that my reading had a good deal of that charm which makes forbidden fruit "so good for food, so pleasant to the eyes, so much to be desired to make one wise." And in Penrith I began a new set of books which charmed me quite as much as "Robinson Crusoe" and the "Arabian Nights" had done. On my seventh birthday my father gave me Cook's "Voyages Round the World," and this volume was followed by Anson's "Voyage," by Mungo Park's "Travels in Africa," and Bruce's "Travels in Abyssinia." Twenty-two years ago I stood one afternoon at the grave of Bruce in a lonely kirk yard a few miles outside Glasgow. It was a neglected mound with the stone slanting down above it. I remembered then, as I do now, how severely his book had been criticized and even discredited. But later travellers substantiated all that Bruce had said and added to his recital still more unlikely stories. There was also another book which at this time thrilled and charmed me beyond expression. I doubt if there is a single copy of it in America, and not many in England, such as remain I dare say being hid away in the old libraries of ancient farm or manor houses. It was called "News From the Invisible World," by John Wesley. It was really a book of ghostly visitations and wonderful visions. My father took it out of my hands twice and then put it, as he supposed, out of my reach; but by putting a stool upon a chair, and climbing upon the chair and then upon the stool I managed to reach it. I can see myself today in a little gingham frock, and a white pinafore performing this rather dangerous feat. We were dressed very early in the morning, but never so early as not to find a good fire in the study; and the coal used in the north of England, is that blessed soft material, which gives in its bright manifold blazes, the light of half a dozen candles. Lying face downward upon the hearthrug, I could read with the greatest ease, and often spent an hour in "the invisible world" very much to my liking before the day really began. One morning while thus engaged, Ann Oddy came in and I asked her to put the book back in its place. She looked at me suspiciously, and said, "Who put it up there?" "My father," I answered. "What for?" she continued. "Because it is about ghosts, Ann, and such stories as you often tell me. Put it up or Father will be cross with me." "Well, Amelia," she said in a kind of dreamy way, "your father ought to know, but he isn't a bit well lately, so I won't bother him at this time." Then I promised to tell her the stories, and added, "They are all true, Ann, for John Wesley wrote them." "True!" she ejaculated. "Well, well, I _am_ astonished at Mr. Huddleston's putting anything John Wesley wrote out of the way. I am that." About A.D. 1890 I asked a learned doctor connected with the Methodist Book Concern, if they had a copy of it, and he answered very sharply, "I never heard of the book." Yet I know it existed in my childhood, and that during my seventh and eighth years, I read it frequently. The first year of my life in Penrith went happily onward in the regularity of its duties and pleasures. At home I remember but few changes. Soon after the Queen's coronation, I had another brother, who was called William Henry, and when he was about two months old, my father went to Manchester, and brought back with him the greatest of household comforts of that day--a dozen boxes of Congreve or Lucifer matches. Only those who have stood shivering over the old tinder box on a bitter winter night, trying to get a spark while the baby screamed in the darkness, can form any estimate of the pleasure which these few boxes of matches made in our house. My father took us all into a dark room, and then permitted each person to strike a light. Laughter and exclamations of wonder and pleasure greeted every fresh match as it burst into instantaneous flame, even Ann was enthusiastic. "This time," she admitted, "Mr. Huddleston has brought home something sensible and good for everybody"--a covert slur upon Father's gifts, which usually took the form of books, or a bit of spar for the parlor chimney piece, or perhaps a likeness of Mr. Wordsworth, or a view of Derwentwater. We had both read and heard wonderful things of these matches for nearly three years, but the first put upon the market were intended only for the rich; for they were in more or less costly caskets, the cheapest of which was sold for a guinea. In a short time a phial full of matches were sold for five shillings, and when my father bought our first "light boxes" they were a shilling each. Then came the practical chemist and the factory system, and the penny box of matches was in every home. Yet I have no doubt that in many a home in England the empty five shilling box is affectionately preserved; for during their vogue, they were sensible and highly prized wedding gifts, among a large class of respectable people of limited means. At the beginning of my second school year, I was promoted to a copy book. I could write pretty well with wad, and did not very often spoil a goose quill. That first copy book! Never shall I forget it. Its cover was canary color, and on the front was a picture of a negro. He was loaded with chains and hoeing cotton, while a white man stood over him using an impossible whip, and there were four lines by Cowper underneath the two figures: "I would not have a slave to till my ground, To carry me, to fan me while I sleep, And tremble when I wake, for all the wealth That sinews bought and sold, have ever earned." At that time I had never seen a negro, and my sense of amazement, fright and repugnance was so great, that I feel sure I had not even seen the picture of one. The tremendous excitement attending the enfranchisement of the slaves belonging to England was over before I was two years old, and after it, I think the nation must have repented their extravagant sympathy, for I am sure that at this time I had never heard either my father or any one else allude to the event. Miss Pearson laid the book on my desk with evident pleasure, and I looked at the picture, covered my eyes with my hands, and burst into tears. I was never a crying child, and my teacher was astonished, and asked me rather sternly, "What is the matter with you, Amelia? Are you sick?" "No," I whispered. "I am afraid. Take it away." "Afraid?" "I have not been bad," I continued. "I do not like that picture. Please take it away." Then she sat down by my side and told me a story about the black man, and what England had just done for him. I hardly heard or understood her, until she said, "I shall leave the book with you. You must look at the picture every day until you at least feel pity for the slave. See, this is your copy for today. Let me see how cleanly, and well you can do it." I had ceased crying. I was ashamed of my own emotion, and I went courageously to work with a quill pen of my own cutting; but as soon as I returned home, I went to my mother and told her all. She soothed and petted me, but advised me to make no remarks about the picture. "There has been a deal of hard feeling about the negro, Milly, and we find it best to let that subject alone. No one talks of it now. Lucy Lowthian was here this morning. She is going to have a party on Saturday afternoon." "Are we going to it, Mother?" "Yes," she answered cheerily. "Look at this lace and white satin ribbon. I am going to trim your dresses with it." I instantly turned to the more personal and interesting subject, but I could not forget, nor yet have I ever forgotten that picture on my first copy book. Undoubtedly it was an exaggeration of even the Congo type, but why did I cry at the sight of it? I was neither a fearful nor a crying child. Why did I cry? It puzzled me then, but I know now, that there was undoubtedly some sudden soul shock, some prophetic apprehension, which my inner woman trembled before, and which my physical woman could only interpret by tears. In my studies I was progressing well, even my musical efforts were beginning to make a little show. I had distinctly told my teacher that I wished to learn "tunes" and "songs" and without regarding my wishes, she had compelled me to make an astonishing study of what she called _the gamut_. To the study of the gamut was added an hour's practice of the scales daily, and as the necessary noise would have been distracting to my father, I went to my teacher's home to make it. This practicing often stood in the way of pleasures, and Jane, who had urgently entreated _not_ to learn music, had many self-complacent little observations to make on her own prudence. For while I was studying scales, major and minor, she went with Mother to shop, or to make calls. And she had a nice ladylike way of comparing things, that was very discouraging. Yet I had not the slightest intention of stopping my music lessons, and indeed I feel sure Father would not have permitted me to do so, except for some good reason. Once only I made a remark tending in that direction, and he answered, "I allowed you to learn music, Milly, at your own eager request. Are you going to give it up because it is difficult? I should feel ashamed of you!" and he spoke with such scorn that I hastened to assure him, "I would not give up music for anything." My third year in Penrith remains very clearly in my memory. It was an anxious year to all, for Chartism was keeping the country in constant rioting and turmoil. I can remember well, the terror and hatred which the very name "Chartist" called forth; for the scenes of the French Revolution were yet red and flaming in the memories of men and women. The very day Victoria was crowned, the military were compelled to put down the rebellion led by John Thom, who claimed to be the Messiah, and if the numbers who followed him had been larger and better educated, the worst scenes of the French Days of Terror might have been repeated.[2] For ten years after the coronation Chartism was a living, constant anxiety to the government and the people. Yet in the midst of this general fear, and the decay of business which it entailed, there occurred a serious quarrel agitating the whole country, about the Ladies of the Queen's Bedchamber. The Melbourne government having lost the confidence of both Houses, a new Administration was to be formed, and Sir Robert Peel was entrusted with the duty. In performing it, Sir Robert removed the Ladies who had been long in attendance on Her Majesty, and gave their high positions, with the large emoluments accruing therefrom, to the wives of the nobles who had assisted him in forming the new government. The Queen was indignant and refused to part with her old friends. Sir Robert visited her, and declared a government could not be formed unless the high offices in her household were filled by ladies of the ruling party. Her Majesty in a firm, but polite letter told Sir Robert she could not agree to a course so repugnant to her feelings. The discussions in and out of Parliament on this question, were long and violent. Every man and woman, every boy and girl in England, took part in them. The women were largely in favor of the Queen, and a great number of men, remembering her youth, thought she ought to be humored in a matter so personal. But in political and administrative circles, she was severely blamed, and that very often in unkind and even disrespectful and disloyal terms. For some reason my father strongly disapproved her conduct. He said she was a child, and ought to be obedient to the advice given her by the active heads of the government; and over and over he declared there were far more important things to be attended to than the Ladies of her Bedchamber. I heard him telling my mother that the planters in the West Indies were ruined and asking relief from Parliament, the freed negroes having absolutely refused to work; and then in a voice full of anger he demanded why twenty millions of pounds had been spent to give the negro a complete life of laziness, while clever English mechanics were working twelve hours every day for a mouthful of bread--starving as they worked. And Mother would shake her head and answer, "It does seem hard, William." "Mary," he would continue, almost in a whisper, "Mary! Mary! only think of what twenty millions of pounds could have done for our own poor men, and their starving, ignorant children! We had no right to give it. It was not our duty, until we had done our duty to the needy and oppressed of our own people." And I wonder today, if Father knew that he was talking Chartism. At any rate, it was the only time, and only way, I ever heard him name the Great Emancipation of 1833. None of these arguments moved my mother's loyalty; she was a warm--my father called her a most unreasonable--advocate for the Queen's rights. Ann was equally loyal, and greatly elated when Mother ranged herself on the Queen's side. "It is more than I expected," she said, "for Missis do always say 'Amen' to whatever Mr. Huddleston says. But the Queen is right!" she added. "That I will declare and maintain;" and Ann, who was rolling pastry struck the table a mighty blow with the rolling pin, which if it intimated her way of "maintaining" would certainly be effective. In our school the quarrel was a very simple one. There were only three girls in it who were for Sir Robert Peel, and the father of one was in the post office, the father of the other a supervisor in the excise, and the third girl was called "Peel," and was, or thought she was, a connection of the Peel family. Miss Pearson expressed no opinion on the subject, except, that it was not to be named in school hours; but as we walked to-and-from school, we talked only of the Queen, and of any fresh news that might have come to us. By "news" I mean solely the effects of this quarrel in the schools of Penrith, for in the man's school, it had full swing. The boys had constant fisticuff fights, and the master enjoyed and encouraged them. He said they were making good soldiers for Her Majesty and that they ought to be proud of their swollen eyes, and bruises. So the quarrel went on, making a grim sort of amusement in days of great public anxiety and alarm; until finally a specially called meeting of the Cabinet, decided in a kind of half-and-half way, in favor of the Queen retaining the Ladies of her Bedchamber, there being a precedent in the case of Queen Anne, who retained the Ladies of her Bedchamber a year and a half after their husbands had been dismissed from office. Father was then satisfied. _There was a precedent._ It was then and there I learned the word "precedent," and its meaning. I wondered then, and I wonder yet at the power vested in these three syllables. It seems to settle constantly and satisfactorily difficult questions in law, and other departments of social affairs. In some way probably, every generation has associated it with, "A land of settled government, A land of just and old renown, Where freedom broadens slowly down From precedent to precedent." After the Cabinet decided the Bedchamber question, a dull quiet settled over Penrith, and I suppose also over the whole country; for even a little domestic dispute has usually this convalescent period of silence. And as the holidays were on, and we were leaving Penrith in August, Jane and I were set free from school for a short time. There was some talk of a visit to Ambleside and Ulverston, but my brother William was ill and suddenly became alarmingly worse, and after an interval of great suffering he went away from us forever. The child had died at midnight, but when I awoke in the morning I was quite sensible of the change that had taken place. The presence of death was felt all through the house, and not only in that dim chamber veiled in white, where the dead boy lay. As I went down stairs, I opened very softly the door of this room. My father was kneeling by the little crib praying. His words fell wet with tears at God's feet, as in low agonizing tones, he poured out his love and his grief. I stole noiselessly away, feeling shocked and unhappy, lest I had unlawfully witnessed a soul pleading with God. A little later, I went with Mother to look at my dead brother. In a simple little night gown he lay in his usual crib but, oh, how grandly tranquil, how distant, how far, far different, he was! He was buried in Penrith churchyard, and his funeral was after the manner then prevalent in the North Country. A little table covered with a white cloth, and holding salt, and sprigs of boxwood was placed just within the open door. This was to notify all passers-by of the presence of death in the house, and also to assure them, of the faith of the living in the resurrection, and in eternal life. On the third day after his death, the funeral took place, the coffin being carried by six boys of about ten years of age, by means of white linen scarfs passed through brass rings on the sides of the coffin, which was uncovered, but strewn with pansies. As they went through the town, the child-bearers sang a hymn very sweetly. Father and Mother, Jane and I, and a large company of friends walked behind. Willie's small grave was not far from the famous Grant's grave, and I think I could find my way there without hesitation. A little grave was all the child of ten months old asked, a little grave that we could step across, but it separated him from us, further than all the starry space. After this event I knew that I had done with Penrith. School opened in July, but I did not go back to it, and I had a childish feeling of offence because Miss Pearson did not ask me to do so. I thought it was because she had many new pupils, and I had a heartache about it. Yes, there are plenty of school girls who will understand me. A child's love for a teacher is a very strong and pure love, and even a fancied slight can hurt like a wound. Only two months since, I had a letter from a little girl whom I taught fifty-six years ago. She was then about nine or ten years old, she is now a very handsome woman, white-haired but full of hope and pleasure, and large social interests in the beautiful city of Los Angeles. And she loves me still, and has never forgotten me. I think such a love as that is well worth the winning. I spent the next few weeks in wandering about the adjacent country, with Father. We went first to Eden Hall, and got a sight of its wonderful fairy cup, which carries the luck of the Musgraves; for if it "breek or fall, Farewell to the luck of Eden Hall." One never to be forgotten day I spent at Lowther Castle. The magnificence of its furnishings amazed me, but after all I was more interested in the three large caves near the castle, cut out of the red sandstone, and said to have been the residence of Owen Cæsarius, the giant whose grave is in Penrith churchyard. He was according to tradition a man of colossal size, who ruled Cumberland before Saxon times, when "there were giants in the land," and no giant killer had appeared. I had seen Long Meg and her daughters twice, but I begged Father to take me once more to Little Salkeld near which she keeps her long, long vigil. I cannot tell why these old Druid temples fascinate me, why I both fear and like them, nor yet say to what feeling their charm finds response in me. Long Meg is, however, one of the most important Druid temples in England. Meg is a square column of red sandstone eighteen feet high and fifteen feet in circumference, with no sign of a tool having been used on it. Her daughters are sixty-seven in number, some of them ten feet high, and they stand in a circle three hundred and fifty yards in circumference. Wordsworth wrote a poem about these stones, and Father taught me a few lines of it, all of which I have long forgotten, except his questioning, "At whose behest arose on British ground That sisterhood in hieroglyphic round; Forth-shadowing the infinite, the inviolable God?" Long and earnestly I looked at these, "stones of power, By Druids raised in magic hour," for I knew I should never see them again. Will any one tell me what is the influence they exert over many and widely different personalities? No, it is a thing to be felt, and not explained. Two days after the visit to Long Meg we left Penrith for Ripon, one of the three great religious centres of Yorkshire, the other two being York and Beverly. I was glad to leave Penrith, and yet no town in which I have ever sojourned, has left on my memory such a clear and beautiful picture. In its calm retirement all the charm of its storied past, and its picturesque present were so appealing, for any day and every day its streets were made notable by the people likely to be met on them--the Earl of Lonsdale, the great Chancellor, Lord Brougham, the fortunate Musgrave of Eden Hall, or the lordly Howards from their Castle of Greystoke standing in a park of five thousand acres. Other famous men of a different kind were also to be met there. Wordsworth was frequently in Penrith, for he married his cousin a Miss Hutchinson of Penrith. So were Coleridge, Southey, and other writers of that period. Wordsworth in my time was a very old man, and I thought also a very disagreeable one. Young as I was, I noticed also the difference with which the two sets of notables were regarded by the public. If the Earl, or Lord Brougham appeared, every hat was lifted, every face was full of interest, and many women curtsied if they had to pass them. For the men of the land were easily recognized by their splendid equipages, and other insignia of their rank. The men of the pen walked without notice, along the streets until they settled in some book store. And entirely apart from this living and present source of interest, there was that sense of the occult world brooding over the town, which I feel sure, few people staying long there, could escape. The old Druid priests were not dead; unseen and afar, they could still influence, and they who doubted this, had only to go and sit silent and attent in one of their deserted temples. I know, that while I was certainly impressed by Lonsdale and Brougham, I was far more so by the "stones of power" in old sacrificial, holy places, and by the three giant caves, close to Lowther Castle, wherein the giant Owen Cæsarius had dwelt. He represented to me the mighty men of Old Britain, for there _were_ "giants" in the land in his day. Mythical! No, he is no more mythical than Julius Cæsarius. Have I not sat, and talked, and played around his grave in Penrith churchyard? CHAPTER IV AT RIPON AND THE ISLE OF MAN "My Memory is the frame of a thousand pictures." * * * * * "The blithe April weather of a child's life." As soon as I saw Ripon, I disliked the place. There were no hills to which I could lift up my eyes, it was a little town squatting among fat green meadows, and by the still waters of three rivers, the Laver, the Ure, and the Skell. The houses were generally small, and roofed with red tiles, and the atmosphere of the place self-satisfied, and decently prosperous. The theological element was distinctly ascendent and I, though a daughter of Levi, did not like it. There were also at that time many ancient customs prevailing, and the queer little place only wanted a few monks strolling about the quiet streets, to make one wonder if they had stepped back into the twelfth century. The modern spirit touching so vividly the West Riding and other parts of England, had not reached Ripon. It retained a monastic air, though there was neither a monastery nor a monk in it. Still the people looked as if they were always going to church, and indeed they did go to church a great deal. I found out later that the whole history of Ripon was blended with churchism, though its one famous manufacture was spurs. "As true steel as Ripon rowels," is a proverb still applied to men of mettle, trusty and faithful. When I was there it appeared to me that all the craftsmen were saddle-makers. The dominant power in Ripon was not, however, the bishop; it was the Earl of Grey and Ripon, a man of immense wealth and of great political influence. I saw him frequently, but somehow he lacked the romance that fixed Lonsdale in my memory. I forgot him for nearly fifty years, and then this thing happened. In 1891 I wrote to London for a full set of the _Saturday Review_, stipulating that it should be second-hand and in good condition. When it arrived at Cherry Croft, I opened the boxes that contained the books eagerly, and lifted one out to examine it. The set was fine and perfect, and contained a most elaborate and beautiful book plate of the Earl of Grey and Ripon. Nearly the whole sixty volumes were ornamented with the Earl's plate, though in some it was more ornate, than in others. But by what chance these volumes had been cast out of the magnificent library of Studley Royal, the grandest residence in England, and found their way to my little cottage on Storm King, New York, I do not know. Their once lordly owner I had forgotten for fifty years, but now I often remember the handsome, aristocratic George, Frederick, Samuel, Earl of Grey and Ripon. But withal it was a comfortable well-to-do place and Mother put away cheerfully all fault-finding. Yet our house was not well situated and was much too small. My father looked around dubiously. Ann Oddy wondered if Ripon chapel people knew that Mr. Huddleston had three children, and Jane cast her eyes down on the tesselated brick floor of the living-room, and remarked in a general manner, "The floor is made of brick." "This will never do, Mary," Father said. "Oh, yes, William!" Mother answered. "I will carpet the floor, and the woman who was here waiting to receive us, pointed out the brick floor and called it 'beautiful.' She said they are favorite floors in Ripon. I shall make all pretty and comfortable in a few days." Mother kept her promise. In a few days the little house was a pretty place, and even Ann could find nothing against it, but its small size. "There are three children," she said, "and God willing there may be four, and where are we to sleep them all?" "Plenty of room, Ann," answered Mother. "Mr. Huddleston is going to make the parlor his study. His books will furnish the four bare walls handsomely." "And what about company, ma'am?" asked Ann. "There will be lots of trouble, if they are put in the parlor, and the Master writing his sermon." "When Mr. Huddleston is writing a sermon, we will bring them in here, Ann." "And suppose we are just ready for dinner or tea? What then, ma'am?" "Then Ann, we will ask them to join us," and Mother laughed pleasantly, and added, "Your cooking, Ann, would be a great treat to them." In a fortnight the house being settled, the question was schools. There was no choice on this subject, there being only one ladies' school. It was kept by the Misses Johnston, three very handsome women who were daughters of one of the old hunting, racing, drinking squires, called "fine old English gentlemen." At his death, there was nothing left for his daughters, and they opened a school. Jane and I were entered as pupils there, but I did not find in any of the three, another Miss Pearson. They were unfitted for teachers and appeared to dislike the office, and though I learned the lessons set me, I made no particular progress in anything but music. In this study my teacher was a French emigrant, and I learned rapidly under his tuition. We had not been half a year in this school, when a momentous question arose. A girl called Mary Levine came one day, and she was entered for all the senior classes, as well as for music, dancing, drawing and French. We all concluded that her father must be very rich, but Miss Grey, the daughter of one of the Canons of the Cathedral, said she had never heard of the Levines, and she did not believe they were anybody at all. For a few days suppositions as to Miss Levine's social standing were rife. Then it was discovered that she was the daughter of Daniel Levine, a Jewish jeweler and money lender. Instantly every one drew away from the girl, and she was shocked and amazed at the scorn and animosity shown towards her. I saw her tearfully talking to Miss Johnston one evening as the dismissed school was leaving the room, and when I reached home I told Mother what I had heard and seen. Mother advised us not to name the subject in my father's presence, but this advice was rendered nugatory by events which had to be met and decided on; for Mr. Downes, the banker, the Reverend Mr. Eamont, Canon Grey and several others removed their daughters the next day from school, pending Miss Johnston's decision as to opening her school to Jewish children. Every day there were more defections, and the distracted ladies sent a messenger to each patron of the school, asking them to answer by "yes" or "no" the following question: "Do you object to your daughters associating with the Jewess, Mary Levine, in the classes of our school? "The Misses Johnston." The long roll of patron's names came to Father among the last, and Mother noticed that the answer in every case had been a positive "yes." Father took the roll, and without consulting any one, wrote hurriedly but decidedly, "Yes, I object." I do not believe there was one reply favorable to the Jewish girl, and yet I could see no fault in her, nor any reason for her dismissal; and the school was much thinned by the circumstances, and I disliked it more than ever. Nor did her ejection from the school restore confidence. Several of the older pupils went to a celebrated boarding school at York, and others to Harrogate, and an air of dissatisfaction pervaded the class rooms. As the spring opened I was sick. Father said, "No wonder!" He himself felt the change "from the clear, mountain air of Penrith, to the damp heavy atmosphere of Ripon." The doctor said I had some kind of an ague, and gave me Jesuit's bark. I had never been sick in all my life, and the feeling of inertia, and the abominable Jesuit's bark, made me miserable. I was taken from school, and told to "amuse myself." But books had become uninteresting. I had a headache, and it hurt me to read, and the Jesuit's bark made every day a sickening terror. We call Jesuit's bark quinine now, and have it in little white capsules, and are not conscious of its taste; but any one needing quinine in those days had to take a decoction of the bark of the tree--a whole tumbler full of the black, nauseous liquid three times a day. Jane had no ague, and was quite happy at school; for she was fond of embroidery, and was working a petticoat for Mother in a new kind of that art--the same kind that has been fashionable for the last three or four years, which is accomplished by cutting holes in the cloth and then seaming them around. One day in early June, I was lying on a sofa which stood in the parlor-study, and Father was writing. I can listen now as I write, and hear the scratching of his quill pen upon the paper. Suddenly a gentleman came riding rapidly to our door, and asked for Mr. Huddleston. My father lifted his head at the sound of the voice, listened a moment, threw down his pen and rose to go out of the room, but before he could do so the stranger entered, and then it was "William!" "Thomas!" and they clasped hands and sat down together. I had no mind to go away, unless sent, and I closed my eyes and lay still as if asleep. Their conversation soon became animated and argumentative, though it was about people and places I had no knowledge of; but finally reached a subject then interesting all clever and thoughtful minds--the Tractarian or High Church Movement. As I had read to Father several small pamphlets "Tracts for the Times" I was familiar with the names they constantly quoted--Newman, Keble, Froude, et cetera, but it was Newman they disputed over. The stranger seemed to dislike Newman. He said he was no better than a Calvinist, and had been brought up by his Calvinistic mother on Watts and Romaine and such teachers, that he was pale and thin, had a poor presence, and was more like a Wesleyan preacher than a pillar of the Church. Father spoke hotly, and said he never thought of Newman's appearance, his influence was something like magic, and that you could not be fifteen minutes in his company, and not feel yourself invited to take an onward step. I liked the stranger for not liking Newman, for Newman's writing was the hardest and least interesting reading I did for Father. I was enjoying the dispute, when Ann Oddy tapped at the door, and told father he was wanted a few minutes. Then I stepped off the sofa, and went to the stranger. "Well now!" he cried, "who are you, my little maid?" I said I was Mr. Huddleston's daughter, and my name was Amelia. "And you were on the sofa all the time?" he continued. "Yes," I replied, "I am sick." "Nonsense!" he ejaculated, but I assured him the doctor said I had an ague, and I had been obliged to take Jesuit's bark. "Jesuit's bark! That is enough to make any one sick. Come with me to Richmond farm, and I will give you new milk in place of it. You can get up early, and go with the dawn maids and see the big Durhams milked. I will have a pony saddled for you, and you can ride all over the farm at my side. And the red Morella cherries are just ripe, and the strawberries coming on, and the raspberries not a month behind. And there are hundreds of hens, and you could go with Tabitha, the hen-wife, and see her clear the nests, and feed the chickens--such a lot of them! And I have the prettiest and kindest of house-keepers; she is called Mary, and she will be good and kind to you. Will you come to Richmond farm with me?" I told him that I would like it better than anything else in the world, and then I asked, "Would you like me to come?" "That I would!" he answered heartily, and as he did so, my father re-entered the room with Mother on his arm. Mother had put on her new muslin gown; it was a white muslin, with a tiny pink rosebud in it, and her black hair was beautifully dressed in that Madonna style introduced by Queen Victoria. "I have the prettiest mother in all the world," I thought, and I went to her side, and clasped her hand. So the stranger, whom I heard introduced to my mother as Mr. Thomas Richmond ate dinner with us, and this proposal to take me for a few weeks to Richmond farm, was gladly accepted. [Illustration: REV. WILLIAM HENRY HUDDLESTON] I was to stay a few weeks, but I stayed most of my time at this farm for two years and a half, and if to be innocently joyful and busy and perfectly free from all care and anxiety is to be happy, then surely these years were the happiest years of my life. A child in Paradise may be as happy, but no earth child could have been more fortunate than I was. Everything was so much better than I expected; yes, I can see the widespreading house amid its trees and gardens as I write, and when I go to Heaven, I would like my angel to pass it on the road, and let me look once more into its sunny rooms. I soon learned to manage my pony, and I usually rode into Ripon with Mr. Richmond on market days, took my music lesson, and then went home until I was called for. The housekeeper Mary taught me all about milk, cream and butter. I pulled cherries, ate cherries, and made cherry pies, and I knew every hen and chicken on the place. I was very friendly with the gardener, and from him I learned all about vegetables, fruits and flowers. If there was a superstition or story about any flower, he knew it; and he told it to me, generally with the flower in my hand. Thus a lady to whose house I often went to practice my music, gave me one day a pot of myrtle, and I took it at once to the old man. I said, "I want it planted." "Well then, Missie, you must plant it yourself," he replied; "for when myrtle is planted, you must spread out your skirt, and look as proud as you can. I say put it in your window, for myrtle is the luckiest plant for the window, and water it morning and night, looking as proud as you can while doing so. Myrtle is a proud plant, and it loves proud people." On another day, I was going into the house with a branch of flowering white hawthorn. "Nay! nay!" he cried to me, "you mustn't carry white hawthorn into the house. You might go to sleep where it is, and then would come great misfortune." He looked very differently on a handful of rosemary. "That is all right, is all right," he said. "Rosemary stands for success in everything." In the very centre of the garden he had a little bed of grass, and he would not suffer tool of any kind to touch it. He called it "good man's croft," and told me that in order "to bring luck, we must always leave a bit of land unplanted for the fairies." After I had been about a month at the farm, Mr. Richmond said to me one wet day, "Milly, I have had all my grandfather's books taken into the library. I want you to sort and shelve them for me. Would you like to do that?" I knew of nothing I would like half as much, for, as soon as I was well, the thought of books was again a joy to me. We went to the library together, and men were unpacking large boxes of books, and bringing a long table on which to sort them, and a set of library steps, pens, ink, pencils, paper, and so forth. I promised only to sort the books in the afternoon, or when too wet to take my usual morning ride with him about the farm. Then he gave me the key of the room, and left me among a thousand books. I was so happy! I was so happy! So peacefully, innocently happy! I read more than I sorted; I found so many wonderful books, that it was impossible to pass over. I met _Ivanhoe_ first in that room, and _Little Nell_, and _Pamela_, and the _Scottish Chiefs_, and in a pile of unbound _Family Heralds_ I made acquaintance with the short love story. Never shall I forget what thrilling hours I spent in that room with the "Children of the Abbey." A year or two ago a lady to whom I named this book, said she had a copy, and would send it to me. I sat down, full of expectation, but alas! though the book was there, I could not summon back the child heart to read it. The tale that stole my heart away when I was eleven years old had nothing to say to me when I was seventy-seven. Yet I touched it tenderly as I whispered, "It charmed me once--I will not spoil that memory," and so closed it forever. I thank God that ere any change came over days so beautiful and blessed, they ceased. The library was scarce finished, when I had to leave it; the farm life was just as happy and desirable, when I tearfully bade it good-bye forever. The pretty, clever Mary loved me well, and I had become a real companion to my affectionate friend, who liked me to call him "Uncle Thomas." It was well to part ere any desire for parting came. Mr. Richmond said he would come for me the following summer, but I knew he would not. I felt sure he would marry Mary, and other interests would occupy him. I said good-bye to Richmond Farm in a fortunate hour. Its memory has sweetened my long, long life, and what I learned in its pleasant rooms, its hay fields, and wheat fields, and cool, sweet dairy, has helped me in many a stress of life, that I then never dreamed of. The inevitable has always found me ready and hopeful, and I was glad we were going to the Isle of Man. I had never consciously seen the sea, but its tides were surely in my blood. I was much excited at the prospect, and Father was as eager and restless as a boy. It called him now, as it had called his fathers before him, and he was impatient of delay. We went in a little steamer called _The King Orry_, sailing from Liverpool. And, as I walked with him about the deck, we were both silent with emotion. But I felt quite at home. The motion of the boat was natural, and, when I walked to the wheel, I could scarcely keep my hands off it. I knew I could manage it. The salt breeze, and the smell of the sea, went to my head like wine. "Oh, Father!" I cried. "I wish that I might live always on the tide-top." "The tide-top!" he echoed. "Who taught you those words, Milly?" "Nobody," I answered. "They just came to me. Are they not right words, Father?" "Yes," he answered slowly. "Your grandfather used them frequently. The last words he said to my mother were, 'Fear not, Milly! I shall try to keep my ship on the tide-top.'" "But he did not, Father." "No--no! He found a sailor's grave. I will go and bring John here." In a few minutes he returned with an armful of pillows, and then he carried my brother in his arms to the deck. I have never seen since such a transfiguration of Joy. The boy clapped his thin, white hands, and cried out, "_The Sea! The Sea! The Sea!_" His face glowed and shone, and he took deep breaths of the salt air. So he sat all day, feeding his heart on the sight of the blue, tossing waves, and some wild pageant of memories far far off, and hardly to be caught, as they threw the accumulated past upon his consciousness, very much as that last vision clangs and flashes for a drowning man. A never-to-be-forgotten, quiet, thoughtful day, and in the autumn gloaming we landed at Douglas, and the next morning took a carriage for the ten-mile ride, which would take us to Castletown, then the capital of Man, and the place of our destination. With a lavish hand Nature has beautified this wonderful little island, thirty-three miles long, by thirteen miles wide, with the most exquisite scenes of sylvan loveliness, while the Gulf Stream laves all its rocky shores, giving it a climate such as we may have in Paradise. In the hottest month of the year the temperature is a little below sixty degrees, in the coldest month it is a little above forty-one. Our ride to Castletown was an enchanting one. It was on a day at the end of August, sunny and pleasantly warm. Such wealth of flowers! such multitudes of singing birds! I had never before seen or heard. And the sea was on every side of us! As we approached the capital we saw first the noble old fortress of the Lords of Man, lifting its huge bulk in the very centre of the town. It was but a small place, built of gray stone, in narrow winding streets, and so old that its very origin is lost in the mists of antiquity. Certainly it is one of the oldest, if not the oldest, town in Great Britain. It looked to me as if it had _always_ existed. As we passed through the square of which the castle forms one side, we saw a fine regiment of Highlanders, in their picturesque costume, drilling, and a few ladies and some old gentlemen were sauntering along, stopping occasionally to watch some manoeuver that interested them. An air of the utmost serenity pervaded the place, as we turned into a long crooked street called Malew Street, and stopped finally at a house whose door stood open to receive us. It was a large-roomed, sunny house, of three stories, and had a fine garden at the back, stretching almost to the river side. The rooms were comfortably furnished, and full of peace, and I caught and answered my mother's look of pleasure and satisfaction. In a few days all was in order, and we settled down to what promised to be three years of delightful life. For two years all our hopes were amply satisfied. I was at a good school: I was in the fishers' cottages. I was in a boat with John and my father, or I was off with Father to the preachings at Ballasalla, or Ballabeg. I had many friends, and among them was Chrisna, the daughter of the master of Rushen Castle. With her I wandered about the wonderful old palace, learning its history in the very rooms wherein that history was made. The whole huge fabric was an historical romance written in stone. Chrisna was a Manx girl, of long Manx descent, and she knew all the traditions and superstitions of her people. She believed in fairies as firmly as she believed in the Gospels, and indeed I never met either a Manx man or a Manx woman who did not believe in fairies. Chrisna told me with perfect honesty that she had seen them often, and heard their music, and she quite convinced me that she had. Seventy years ago the Isle of Man was little more than a name to the average Briton. It had its own government, its own laws, and its own House of Parliament, which was called the "House of Keys." There were no Custom Houses, and no duties. There were no Poor Laws. When I was there those in need were empowered to knock at the door of every householder, once a week, and receive what could be given. There was no stipulated sum, but a penny and a few groceries, or a little clothing, was cheerfully spared. The number of such callers were few, and they were kindly treated. The small sum it cost then to live in the Isle of Man was a great temptation to retired army and naval officers, and Castletown was full of these interesting gentry. They gave to the place an air of refinement, which was still further increased by the professors and students of King William's College. I saw this college burned to the ground on the second of January, A.D. 1844, and I remember well that I had no wrap on, and the night was so warm I did not miss it. Yet January is the coldest month in the mild Manx winter. We went to Castletown in the autumn, and the following spring two events happened affecting our household. My mother had another daughter, whom Father christened Alethia Mona. Alethia being, with Jane or Joan, and Isabel, the three prominent names of the Huddleston women, just as William, John, Thomas, and Henry are the family names of the men. Mona was added, because it was the ancient name of the island of her birth. Soon after this event Ann Oddy left us. I am rather ashamed to say that we were all privately very glad. She had become a kind of household tyrant, whom we had to constantly conciliate, and we had long ago discovered that the old family servant was just as serious a problem as the modern monthly one. Our emancipation from Ann's rule came very unexpectedly. She entered the parlor one afternoon, with a letter in her hand, and, with great excitement, said: "Mrs. Huddleston, I am sorry, but I must go back to England at once." Mother told her she was not out of England, and asked why she must go in such a hurry, and Ann answered: "You see, ma'am, Adam Bradley wants me. We were to have been wed ten years ago, but one night Adam he walked home from chapel with Sarah Sykes, and I had words with him about Sarah, so he married Sarah to spite me. But she's dead now, and Adam wants me. I think it is best to go to him, Mrs. Huddleston." So Ann went. We hardly said to each other how glad we were, and we all pressed any gift we could spare on her. Mother even gave her one of her silk gowns, which I am pretty sure she missed a little later. But, until we knew Ann was safely away in the Douglas coach, we did not talk about her; then I shall never forget Mother's smile, and sigh of relief, and Jane's neatly expressed opinion, that "the Irish Sea was always rough with the wind in the present direction." Jane had never liked Ann; and she knew Ann was both sick and terrified, when at the mercy of wind and waves. A middle-aged Manx woman was easily found to take Ann's place, and Jane, who was now well grown and womanly, took charge of many things relating to the household. It was about this time I began to seriously try to write. I commenced a tragedy which I called "Seneca." I do not remember anything about the work, except that it was laid in ancient Rome, and that Seneca was a philosopher and a senator. I showed the first act to Father, and he gave it back to me with a smile, and the opinion that "it might have been worse." I used to take pencil and paper and go out to Scarlet Stack, and there alone, with the sun and the wind and the sea and the sky, try to reconstruct the men and women and life of ancient Rome. It was a presumptuous effort, but perhaps the gain to myself was in the effort; for I had become very ambitious. I had abandoned the missionary idea, and longed to write books, and to travel and to see the great cities and the strange peoples I had read about. We had fully expected to remain at Castletown for three years, but, at the end of the second year, my Father was removed to the Whitehaven Circuit. I shall never forget the morning the news came to us. Mother was making sandwiches for Father, John and I were going to row as far as Ballasalla, then land, and go to the Silverburn River for trout. But Father was so shocked, he put off the trip. I wondered that he should do so, and said: "Whitehaven is your birthplace, Father; it will surely please you to go there." "I would rather go to the most desolate spot on the earth," he answered with a passion that silenced me. "It is a much larger circuit, William," said Mother, "and your income will be larger, and you will have an assistant--a very popular young man, your letter says." "I have heard of him, Mary. Popular young men are not always nice young men. He is a nephew of Sir William Morley, and his name is William Morley Punshon." Then I took an instant dislike to the popular young man called Punshon. "Such a name!" I ejaculated. That afternoon Father called Mother in a strange, thick voice of alarm, and she found him looking ill and terrified. "I have had a singular sensation all down my right side, Mary," he said. "It frightens me." And my brave little mother said, "Nonsense, William! As we grow old, we have such sensations. I have them myself now and then; my father had them often. Come down and talk with me and the girls," and she laughed softly and took his arm. But I am sure she knew that this "sensation" was the first touch of a hand that would finally prevail. As for me, I threw off the thought of trouble by a conscious effort, just as I would throw off my clothes; for I was yet an easy-hearted child, who could say to sorrow, "Let it go." CHAPTER V SORROW AND CHANGE "The Leaves of Memory seem to make a mournful rustling in the dark." * * * * * "We try in the darkness of Sorrow the wings that shall bear us out of it." We took leave of the Isle of Man with heavy hearts, and sailed direct from Douglas to Whitehaven, landing there in the evening of a wet August day. The town was finely situated, and the wide haven filled with ships of all kinds. There was even a man-of-war lying at the long new pier. But the scene was not cheerful; how could it be, after a steady, soft rain from morning to night? Two officers of the church met us, and, in a few minutes, we were at the dwelling which was to be our home for the next three years. It was a handsome-looking house, and stood midway in a block of similar ones. There was a table laid for supper in the living-room, but the room itself was a dreary one. I do not know why, unless it was the want of fire on the hearth, and the dark-green moreen curtaining. A gray-haired woman served tea, and said she was ready to stay with us, if so be Mr. and Mrs. Huddleston were agreeable. So in a few days the house was in order, and Mother professed to be much pleased with our new quarters. She pointed out the large size and number of the rooms, and the quiet of the locality, and, with a pleasant laugh, said she supposed we were among the aristocrats of Whitehaven. "My cousin's curate lives two doors below us," Father said, and then, for the first time, he spoke of his cousin, Dr. Andrew Huddleston, who was at that time rector of the parish of Whitehaven, and also had the living of another parish a few miles distant, both being the presentation of the Earl of Lonsdale. He said he was a bachelor, of about fifty years of age, and was seldom in England; his curates performed his duties for him. But he was in Whitehaven when we arrived there, for I saw him walking up Duke Street with Father, two or three days after our arrival. There was a singular resemblance between them, though Dr. Andrew Huddleston was portly and robust, and dressed in extreme clerical fashion, while my Father was tall and thin, and ascetic in appearance, with the slight stoop forward of one used to looking into things invisible. But the tie was felt and acknowledged; I knew it by the way they stood with clasped hands a moment or two at our open door. There were many other Huddleston families in Whitehaven, all of them sailors, excepting one fine young man whom the Earl was educating, and who was painting a portrait of Lonsdale the first time I saw him. It happened that my father and mother received an invitation to dine at Captain Thomas Huddleston's. Father said the thing was impossible, that the company and the conversation alike, would be antagonistic to his office, and his personal feelings; and the kindness which was intended, would be turned into offence. So I was sent with a note of regrets, and orders to make myself as agreeable as possible. The latter injunction was easy to obey. I found that Captain Huddleston's family consisted of his mother, and sister, and the youth I have mentioned, who was the grandson of Captain Huddleston. Their house was a large one, in a queer court close to the waters of the harbor, and the big low rooms looked like museums; for it seemed as if every rare and lovely thing from strange lands and strange seas were there; and the footstool of the old lady was a living tortoise of great size, which had an inscription on its shell, showing it to be nearly ninety years old. The old lady was dressed in a gown of gay colors, open very low in front, and filled in with clear-starched muslin. Her apron was of black silk, trimmed with black Spanish lace, and she had a cap of white Spanish lace on her plentiful white hair, and a very long gold chain around her neck. Her knitting lay on the table beside her, but she was adding up a bill as I entered the room, and though she looked at me, she did not speak until the total was satisfactorily reached. With this family I became familiar, and I wish I had space to say more about them. I spent much time in their company, and liked nothing better; especially when young Tom Huddleston, a midshipman on _The Royal George_, came home. This handsome young sailor was my first dream of a lover. I cried when he went away, and was not comforted by his promise to bring me "lots of lace from Malta." Poor lad! He never came home, but died in the West Indies of yellow fever. There was really a little sailor settlement around Captain Tom's home, and I was soon welcome in it, a strange, happy-go-lucky company, full of sharp transitions; for in their lives they knew not what a day or an hour might bring forth. However unexpectedly my visits were made, I was sure to find some gathering rejoicing over the return of a husband or son, or perhaps mourning over his detention or death. And among people so affectionate and emotional it was easy for me to rejoice with those who did rejoice, and to weep with those who wept. They did not attract Jane; they were too extravagant and reckless, and Jane liked everything done decently and in order. Perhaps this sailor society prevented me from making as high an estimate of the Reverend William Morley Punshon as I ought to have done. He came a great deal to our home, and used to recite for our entertainment fine examples of prose and poetry from the great writers. As long as John was able to bear it, he frequently read aloud, and I considered him an extraordinarily clever man. And, if one looked only at his fine eyes and forehead, he was also a very handsome man. I am sure all the religious young women in Whitehaven thought so, and he was much praised and courted, the chapel being crowded whenever he preached. Young ladies wore white veils then, and I used to watch them from the organ loft coming into the chapel, and compare them to an army with white banners; for I played the organ, which was immediately behind the pulpit, so that everything was before my vision. During the Christmas holidays of this year, 1844, my brother Henry was born. We welcomed him as a gift and a compensation, and the shadow of suffering and death passed gradually away. After the holidays I went to a fashionable school kept by Miss Penelope Flinders. I only remained there three months, and, as far as study was concerned, they were of little service to me; for Miss Flinders had a lawsuit in progress at this time, and she made me her confidant, and discussed endlessly the pros and cons with me. I was very sorry for her, and feverishly anxious that she might succeed. She told me that her lover had been prevented from marrying her by the bitter opposition of his mother; that he had left England in consequence, and, when dying in India had made a will, leaving every shilling of his wealth to her. The mother was fighting the carrying out of this will, and Miss Flinders could not sleep or eat, and how, then, could she teach pending the court's verdict? One morning I went to school a little late, and found the class rooms empty. The school had been dismissed forever. She had won her case. I sat and talked with her a long time, and she told me she would never teach another hour, for she had now five thousand pounds a year to be happy with. I went to no other school, but I read a great deal, and kept up the practice of my music and drawing. There was a good public library, and there was my father's library, and the public one suited me best now; for I wanted Scott, Dickens and Thackeray, and I also read many novels by Mrs. Gore, a writer nearly forgotten, but whose pictures of the lives led by the highest society of that day were interesting and instructive. One day Mr. Punshon was sitting in our parlor when I came in with my hands full of books. He looked at them and asked, "Does your father know, Amelia?" I answered, "No, but Mother does. She says it is right. We do not trouble Father about little things. He is not very well lately." "Amelia," he continued, "I want some books out of the library, but I do not like to go for them." "Novels?" I asked. "Yes," he answered. "I will get them for you. I am sorry for people who want novels, and do not feel able to ask for them." He said something about his position, and my father not liking him to go to a public library for novels, and I understood the situation. I wonder now why I did not fall in love with him. He could be so charming, and I certainly thought his recitations marvelous, and his own poetry full of genius. But I liked Tom Huddleston in his open collar, and sailor jacket, with a sailor's song on his lips, far better. Once I wondered about it to Jane, and she looked at me incredulously, if not scornfully, as she answered, "The idea of being in love with Mr. Punshon!" "Why not?" I demanded. "For one thing, Milly, he does not wear straps." Gentlemen at that time wore their trousers strapped down under their feet. "His trousers are sloppy, and he looks quite common." "He is handsome," I returned, "and he has fine eyes, and beautiful brown hair; it is curly, too." "I dare say he puts it in papers every night. Miss Annie Townley thinks so. But if he was ten times as handsome, I would not marry him. He is a Wesleyan preacher, and could never give his wife a home of her own. I hate living in a Chapel House." Under conditions and surroundings like these, our lives went on. John was dying daily, and Mother was very anxious about Father, who seemed possessed by a never ceasing passion for preaching. It appeared to her, that he worked and preached as if he feared he would not have time to say all he wanted to say. The "sensations" of which he had complained at intervals, grew more frequent, and in the autumn of our second year in Whitehaven, he partially lost the use of his right hand. Then I wrote his letters and sermons as he dictated them to me. But, oh, how it pained him! I could not bear to see the sorrow in his eyes, and what was coming he knew not; for the doom that walks by our side from the cradle to the grave, never warns us. At this time of my life my thoughts turn to his memory with a great tenderness. His heart was then given to all humanity, his soul was all God's, and his life but a flesh and blood conductor of eternal spirit. At the close of the second year, John died after great suffering, and he was laid among his kindred in a small cemetery in Charles Street. As a burial ground it was no longer used, except by the families who had originated it more than one hundred years previously. It was a neglected enclosure, over-grown with tall grasses and rank weeds, and surrounded by the decaying untidy houses of poverty. A more dreary, ghastly place I never saw, and my heart ached for the little lad laid there. I was thankful my mother was too ill to go to the mournful service, but Father was consoled by the fact, that he was among his kindred; and it seemed to me, there was no one but Huddlestons buried there. Every stone I read was in memoriam of a Huddleston, and always that same persistence of the name "Henry." Not more than a month afterwards, our baby Henry was laid beside his brother in the desolate place. I have no heart to write of his death. He was taken in the midst of health, and went laughing to seize the bowl of boiling milk, from which he drank a cruel death. It is better to be silent about such calamities; at the time we were all dumb with grief. Yet it was an accident, and accident is always God's part in any event; so to this knowledge we bowed our hearts in submission. There is a difference, however, in silence. Mother's quiet was full of heavenly hope and trust; Father's speechless, tearless grief, was almost despair, and many times afterward, I heard Mother rejoice over a trouble treading close upon Henry's death, because it roused the physical man to wrath, and broke up the spiritual torpor into which Father had fallen. This trouble came in a letter, which was handed into the parlor where we were together one afternoon three weeks after Henry's death. Mother and Jane were sewing. I was copying music--a song of Balfe's, I believe, and father was walking up and down--up and down the room. All was so still I could hear the ashes dropping from the grate to the hearth. Then came the postman's knock, and the delivery of the letter to Father. He read it without a word, growing every moment grayer and more angry. As he finished, he slowly tore the paper into fragments, his passion growing with every movement of his hands, and stamping on them, gave way to an inconceivable rage, accompanied by words that shocked and terrified us. It was not Father, it was some madman who had taken possession of him. Mother went to him, put her hands on his shoulders, and said softly, "William! William!" "Mary! Forgive me!" he cried. "You see now, what I have to struggle against. Every day I have this temper to fight; it will conquer me some time, and then I shall be lost--but this trouble is my own fault. You have warned me, and I would not listen to you. Yes, I have been warned twice by dreams I understood, but would not obey. If I could suffer alone! If I could suffer alone, I would not care. It is my great punishment. You and the children must suffer with me." "What punishment? What has happened, William?" asked Mother. "I have lost every shilling. That scoundrel Philip Blackpool has gone to Australia with my money, a month ago." "My dear, we can live without it." "We cannot live without it, Mary," he answered. "What is the good of talking nonsense?" Then Mother was silent. She sat down and lifted her work, Jane followed her example, and I went on copying my song, while from the next room came the faint sounds of Alethia and Mary playing. Before our silence and assumed indifference his anger waned; he said again, "Forgive me, Mary! I will go to my study now, and come down when I am better. Disturb me for nothing." Mother was wretched. She put down her work, and I went to her. "What does Father mean?" I asked. "He means that we shall now be poor, Milly. This money stolen from him was the best part of our living. I do not know how much it was, for he never told me the amount, and often I have advised him to put it in some reputable bank. But Philip Blackpool was his friend, at least he supposed so. I have always doubted it. We must send away one servant to-morrow; we shall have to do with much less new clothing, and many good things that we have thought necessary, we must learn to do without. Great changes will have to be made; my dear girls, let us make them cheerfully." Then I spoke to Mother about turning my education into money, and she was pleased with my readiness. "Father is ill," she said, "and I fear he will not be able to preach much longer. I have thought of these things often," she continued, "and wondered how we were to live, when he had only his retiring income, and this idea has come to me--that if we knew how to conduct a small ladies' boarding-school, it might suffice. Jane and I could look after the house and children, and you, Milly, could, with the help of teachers, conduct the school. Of course you would have to be trained for such a task." We were all pleased with this idea, and discussed it over our tea, in which Father did not join us. Then it appeared that this school project was an old thought with Mother. She asked us if we remembered a certain Miss Sarah Berners who stayed a week with us when we were in Penrith, adding, "She was my friend through all the years in which I was at school, and we used to talk of starting a school together, and being independent of our stepmothers; for we both had stepmothers, and not very kind ones--but I married, you know." "Yes," said Jane, "and what did Miss Berners do?" "She opened a school at Downham Market, Norfolk, fifteen years ago, and has done well. Suppose, Milly, you went to her for a year, and learned how to manage a school." I answered, "I would like to do so, Mother. I would like it very much." So Mother wrote to Miss Berners, and received a glad consent to her wish. I was to go as second teacher, and assist in the music, drawing and English classes; and she promised to give me twenty-five pounds a year with my board and lodging, and the opportunity to study the French language if I wished, as I would room with Miss Stromberg, a Russian, who spoke it, and nearly every other European language, perfectly. When this news came, Father was told of our plans. There was some opposition, but not much, and I began with a hopeful heart to prepare for the change before me. This event appeared to break up the storm of sorrow and ill fortune which had assailed us. We had feared Father's next appointment lest it should be some large manufacturing city, demanding more strength than he had to give, but when it came, it was to Kendal. Nothing could have been better. It was my mother's birthplace; she had many friends there, and my father was a great favorite with Kendal Methodists; and there was a pleasant preacher's house in a pretty garden, surrounded by poplar trees. It was a joyful removal. We bid farewell to the little graves we had to leave behind us, and then turned our faces, as it were, homeward. And as I was not wanted in Norfolk, until early in September, I went to Kendal with my family, and helped to settle them in their new home. I was very happy in my own prospects. I had no fears, and I had a great many hopes and pleasant expectations. My life was yet to me like a book of uncut leaves. I had finished the preface, and the first chapter was to open in Norfolk. I put behind me all past sorrows, and was just an eager girl leaning over the narrow rim of my small world, and gladly anticipating the wide, wide world into which I was going. And I was made strangely happy, because on the night before I left home, when I lifted the little red Bible that lay upon my dressing-table, my eyes lighted on this verse, "Fear not: for I have redeemed thee, I have called thee by thy name; thou art mine." (Isaiah, 43:1.) CHAPTER VI IN NORFOLK "No one knows what capacities they have for doing and suffering till the occasion comes. When water is ice, we have no idea what latent heat is in it." * * * * * "Life--all things here are but beginnings." I was sixteen years and five months old, when I left home to go to Downham Market, and take my place among the workers of the world. The thought pleased me. I was tired of being a mere looker-on at life's great game, and wanted my share in it. It was on the fourth of September, A.D. 1847, and my father was to go as far as Hull with me. There he would see me on board a little steamer sailing down the Wash to Lynn Regis, from which place a carriage would carry me the few miles inland to Downham Market. I had put on long dresses that morning, and coiled my hair in a knot under my bonnet, and looked quite eighteen; and I think Father was proud of me. I certainly was very proud of Father's company; not entirely because of his beautiful countenance, I valued far more, that air of distinction which never left him, and to which every one deferred. We had a pleasant journey to Hull, where we arrived soon after noon. I had wondered why this way to Downham Market had been chosen for me, but as soon as we reached Hull, I knew why. It was a large seaport, excepting London and Liverpool, the largest in England; and Father wanted me to see the ancient town, and its wonderful docks. We went to an hotel and had lunch, and then to the Queen's and Humber docks, and I got my first glimpse of what a great commercial city must be on its water side. I heard all the languages of Northern Europe on those great walls. I saw woolpacks from Germany; hides, hemp and tallow from Russia; corn from Dantzic, and other Baltic ports; and strange _thin_ bars of iron from Sweden. Father told me this metal would all go to Sheffield to be made into steel. On the Humber dock I saw great bales of cotton and woolen cloth from Manchester and the West Riding of Yorkshire; and other bales of lace and net, from Nottingham. They were going to France and Germany, and all over Northern Europe. After the docks, we went to the famous Trinity House, a very rich and powerful guild, that supports disabled seamen of the merchant service and their widows, and has been doing this good work for nearly five hundred years. For it is not only wealthy in bequeathed property, but receives a shilling a month from the wages of all seamen leaving the port. We went through the wonderful old place, and were told there were nearly one hundred inmates, and nearly one thousand outside pensioners. The whole place was as clean and neat as the decks of a man-of-war and every apartment, even the council room, was strewn with fresh green rushes, after the fashion of the days of its erection. I noticed in the entrance hall a Greenland kayak hung from the ceiling. It was picked up at sea with a man in it in A.D. 1613. The man refused to eat, and died in a few days; but the figure in the kayak wears his clothes, et cetera. I made some remark to Father afterwards about Hull sailors being in such a latitude at that date, and he said "they were commonly there then, and indeed were famous whalers as early as A.D. 1590." "Are they whalers now?" I asked. "They are not extinct as whalers even now, though they are fast passing away. Why, Milly," he added, "it was the whaler _Isabella_, Captain Humphries, from the port of Hull, that found and saved Sir John Ross and his company of Arctic explorers, after they had been shut up in the ice for four years. He brought them home with him to Hull, and Hull gave them a grand triumph, opened their hearts and homes to them, and the whole nation went into rejoicing. You were only two years old then, Milly, and do not remember, but I do. They had won nothing; they had lost every thing, but they had _endured cheerfully_ till their deliverance came; and _endurance_ is _victory_. Don't forget that, Milly." We visited the Charter House next, and saw many curious things, but I have forgotten them. I saw too much, and Hull remains in my memory like an amazing dream of masts a-rake, intertangled rigging, black barges, ponderous black hulls floating silently past, as if they had no weight. Influences from times long past, and places far off, found their way unerringly to me. The streets and the gray afternoon seemed unreal--like a dream all floated away. I have a far clearer memory of the dinner we had on our return to the hotel. In my long life, I am sure there are not a dozen dinners I recollect as accurately as this one. Yet it was a very simple meal--just hare soup, and roast duck, and green peas. My father also had celery and cheese, and a glass of port wine, and I had two small raspberry tartlets. But I have that dinner over again today as I write, have it in the same little dingy parlor, with its two open windows. I hear the noise of the streets; I see the picture of Victoria above the chimney piece, and the colored, fancifully cut tissue papers, screening the empty grate; I am sitting at the neatly set table, with its daisy pattern damask cloth and napkins, its old-fashioned knives and forks, and queer-shaped drinking-glasses, and cruet stand. I have never happened to taste hare soup since that day, but I can taste it now. It was a well-cooked meal, eaten with smiles and pleasant conversation and little happy glances at each other. It is dinner number one in my book of memory, though there were neither flowers nor finger bowls on the table. Indeed I do not remember having ever seen a finger bowl at this time and I am not sure, but what I should have considered them as an unpleasant, unmannerly introduction. Presently we heard a church clock strike, and Father took out his watch and looked at me. "It is time we were going, Milly," he said cheerfully and I rose and put on my bonnet and gloves. At the wharf we found all in confusion, and _The Queen of the Wash_ ready to sail. There was only time for Father to see me safely on board; then with a few cheerful words and a smiling face he put me in God's care, and bid me good-bye. I watched him as long as I could see his tall, straight figure among the moving crowd, but he never looked back. I should have been astonished if he had. It was always onward and upward and forward with Father; there was no looking back in his nature, and his physical attitude generally illustrated the feelings and desires of the inner man. I went at once to my cabin, and being thoroughly weary with my day's travel and sightseeing I fell asleep, and did not awaken until a woman roused me with the information, that we were near Lynn Regis. It was barely light when I stepped on to the pier, and the ancient place seemed to be fast asleep. No one was in sight, and I asked the captain to send a boy to bring me a carriage. He did so, and I was shortly at The Cross Keys, a hotel standing in the Tuesday Market Place; but feeling still tired and only half-awake I asked for a bedroom, and slept until ten o'clock. This day I had a sense of the most absolute freedom. I could do as I liked; there was no one to obey, and no one to please but myself, and sleep appeared to me at that hour, the most desirable of luxuries. But when I awoke at ten, I was satisfied and fully refreshed, and I dressed myself prettily, and went down stairs and ordered breakfast. After it, I made inquiries about reaching Downham Market, and found there was a kind of stage running between Lynn Regis and Downham Market. The next would leave at noon, which would hurry me, and the last one at three o'clock, and this I resolved to take. For it seemed a great waste of opportunity, not to see something of the old town, when I had the day at my disposal. I was tired of ships and of water, and wandered up the High Street looking at the shops, and when I came upon a church in Black Goose Street with the door standing open, I went inside. It contained nothing attractive and I was about to leave the building, when an old gentleman led me back to make me notice its three aisles, and the rich and peculiar tracery of the windows and clerestory, and many other things of that kind. But I was not much interested, until he showed me a slab in the pavement, "In memoriam of Thomas Hollingsworth, an eminent bookseller, a man of strictest integrity in his dealings, and much esteemed by gentlemen of taste, for the neatness and elegance of his bindings." At this point I remember asking my guide if that inscription was good grammar, adding it does not sound right to me, but then I do not understand grammar. "Do you know what it means?" he asked sharply. "Oh, yes!" I answered. "Then it's good grammar," he said decisively. This remark about grammar, however, brought on me a little lecture concerning a Dominican friar called Galfridus Grammaticus, who lived in Lynn Regis, and compiled and printed the first English and Latin dictionary; and this learned monk introduced another, who may have a rather general interest at this date--Nicholas of Lynn, a Carmelite monk, who in A.D. 1330 sailed to the most northern land in the world--the first Polar expedition on record. Friar Nicholas says, that at the Pole he discovered four indraughts of the ocean, from the four opposite quarters of the world; and I have had good reason during the last three years to retell this story of the first Polar visitor, and to point out that he discovered more than the two latest visitors, and that his narrative is better authenticated. After leaving St. Nicholas' Church I sauntered up a street leading me back to the hotel and in doing so passed a jeweler's shop. My eyes fell upon a bracelet--an old-fashioned bracelet very wide and illuminated by a large stone. I had never possessed a piece of jewelry in all my life, but now I had some money, and I longed for this bracelet. Many times I left the tempting window, but always returned, and finally I went into the shop and asked its price. It was five shillings, and I had twenty shillings. Why not buy it? I hesitated, but at last paid the five shillings and went proudly out of the shop, with the bauble in my pocket. When I reached the hotel, I put it on my arm and felt just a little disappointed at the result. However, I fancied myself wearing it with my silk dress, and thought it would give me an air of great gentility. Then the stage was ready, and I and my silly bracelet went together to Downham Market. It was perhaps well, that I saw nothing but St. Nicholas' Church for the mental notes I made there were so few, and so individual, that they settled themselves persistently in my memory. Also, as I had adopted the profession of a teacher, it was creditable to know who made our first dictionary. The Polar expedition lay dormant in my remembrance, until the disputing of the last three years made me recall the information given me so many years ago. Then I came to the conclusion, that any one of the three claims would be just as good as the other, so that if England should stand by her monk's discovery, it would be hard to disprove her claim; but-- "The fault of the English is the fault of the Dutch, They never know when they are claiming too much." It was about half-past four when I reached Downham Market. The ride was interesting, for the country was quite different from any that I had ever seen. Such green, such deep, living green of the pastures! Such tall strong trees, garlanded at this time of the year with hop vines, twining from branch to branch, and dropping down from their tips, so that the hand could reach them. I saw two fine old manor houses and many lovely cottages. A small, sweet, purple grape climbed over the front, and over the thatched roofs of most of them, and this astonished me, for I had never before known that grapes would grow in the open air in any part of England. When we approached Miss Berners', I knew the place. I had dreamed of it when I was a child--a large double-Georgian house, standing amid lawns and trees, and surrounded by a hedge higher than a man. As we came closer I saw from my point of vantage on the top of the coach, about twenty girls of varying ages, scattered about the grounds; some were playing battledore and shuttlecock, others reading, others walking about in pairs, and a couple of nearly grown girls, were taking riding lessons in a paddock, at the side of the house. It was a pretty scene, and the whole party struck me as freely and genuinely happy. I felt a little nervous at the prospect of walking through this bevy of scrutinizing girls, but I saw Miss Berners come to the front door, and I went forward with as much confidence as I could assume; and as soon as I clasped her hand, and looked into her smiling face, I was quite at ease. After a cup of tea I was taken to my room. My trunk was already there, and Miss Stromberg, my room-mate, was sitting at the open window darning her stockings. She was an odd-looking woman, small and very thin, with slant black eyes, and a great quantity of very coarse black hair. Her face had a flat look, but was full of fire; and her complexion was bad and dark beyond belief. But if one notices the circumstances, people of nearly the same age readily fraternize with each other. Two old men will sit down in a car and in a few minutes open a conversation, but an old man and young man sitting together, have no courtesies or conversation for each other. It is much the same with women; two mothers will talk of their children, two girls of their lovers, two old women of their past, but an old woman and a young girl sit far apart, no matter how close they may be together. So when Miss Berners left Miss Stromberg and I alone, we had plenty to say to each other. I asked her if she liked the school and she answered, "I have been here one week, but that is long enough for an opinion. Yes, I like it." "What is it that you teach?" I continued. "I teach the elegant French language to these slow, stupid English girls. It is incredible, but it is the truth, that they can not understand that French is to be spoken with the eyes, the shoulders, and the hands, as well as the tongue. One impertinent little girl as fat as an ox, told me it was not decent to talk in such a way, and that people would call her a mountebank, if she did so. I wish to swear a little, when I think of such stupidity." "French!" I ejaculated. "Is that all?" "That is all. Many other things I could teach, but I keep quiet about them. I have seen that it is wise _to do_, but a very great folly to _overdo_. Maria Stromberg has learned many things since she began to teach. Will you not dress a little for the evening? Put on a white dress if you have one. White is your color." "Will you not dress first?" I asked. "In this small room, two cannot dress together." "Dress, while I finish my stockings. I wish that the Strombergs of Riga and Uleaborg could take notice that their daughter is compelled to darn her stockings. Is there any more plebeian occupation? And my feet abhor a darned stocking. They will pinch me all the time I wear them." As I dressed we chattered, yet when I had finished my toilet, I was rather pleased with the result. But Miss Stromberg rose impetuously, threw down her darning, and pushing me into a chair, uncoiled the hair I had so carefully arranged. "_Mon Dieu!_" she cried. "It is impossible. Look here!" and in a few minutes she had it raised in puffs, and knots, that added two inches or more to my height, and imparted to me an air of great intellectuality. "How can it be?" I cried. "I do not look like the same girl." "No, but you look as you ought to look. You were masquerading in a madonna front, and a Grecian knot at the nape of your neck. Do you not know that throwing back the hair from the brow, reveals whatever is good in you?" Then I lifted my bracelet and asked her to fasten it. An expression of pity, or contempt, flashed over her face, but she said kindly, "Ah! but you can not wear it here. Jewelry is forbidden. Put it at the bottom of your trunk; it will be safe there." She did not resume her darning, but slipped into a silver gray dress of lustrous silk. A pair of gray slippers stood on a table, and I was sure no full grown human foot could get its toes into them, but she stepped into them with the greatest ease. Then we went down stairs, and Miss Berners introduced me to the girls, and after tea we had a pleasant evening together. I shall not detain my readers with any account of this school. It was the usual boarding school of its date, under very delightful surroundings and conditions. I remained until the following June in Downham Market, working hard, but willingly, and forming many agreeable acquaintances, but not one among them, that had any influence or bearing upon my future life. I remember their names, and their personalities, and can go all through their simple or splendid homes, but that is all. Doubtless we were merely introduced to each other for our next reincarnation. Then we may have a more fortunate meeting. I liked all the people I was brought into constant contact with, but if I had not liked them, Miss Stromberg would have been sufficient. I really loved the clever little woman. She spoke five languages; she played with the magical tang and touch of a gypsy with a violin; she danced like a fairy; and when she sang her North Russian songs, you wept with pity for the lonely souls, on the great snow plains, who out of their own deep sadness, caused their very music to weep. She made all her dresses, and we envied their cut and style, and she knew perfectly all the feminine arts of the toilet. It was not her fault that I did not become a creditable French scholar. She did her best with me but I had no aptitude for languages; and like the other "stupid English girls" I found it silly to talk with four of my members at once; my eyes at that time had not learned speech, my shoulders I had been told from my childhood, to keep down and well back, and my hands had a hundred duties of their own. But for many, many other things, I thank her even to this day. I kissed her good-bye in June. I was sure we would meet in September, but I never saw her again--never, never, even heard from her. But I remember yet, how patiently she rubbed off the crudities of my insular education, and how day by day her kind tactful ways, led me to a far lower estimate of my own attainments; for measuring myself by Maria Stromberg, I could not but see how little I knew, how unpolished I really was, and especially how far behind the mark in that control of temper and sweetness of thought and intention, that made all Maria Stromberg said and did, agreeable and welcome. I have never forgotten her; I wonder if she still lives! Wherever in God's universe she now dwells, I hope she is happy, and still remembers me. On the last evening of my stay in Downham Market, Miss Berners asked me to walk with her in the garden, and while doing so, she told me she intended to remove her school to some London suburb. She thought probably to Richmond. I was glad to hear this. The thought of London was an enchantment, and I promised to come to her as soon as I could in any way help the settlement of the new home. We parted mutually pleased and hopeful, and the next morning I took a train for London, and from thence one direct to Kendal. I had twenty pounds in my pocket book, and I felt that my ten months' faithful work had given me a right to turn homeward, and then as soon as I did so, I was impatient of any delay. I found the whole family at tea, and how happily I joined the party, any one can imagine. I had so much to tell about the school, and was so proud that we were going to remove it to London. Downham Market had become almost contemptible, and I spoke of it as a dull, country village, where nothing ever happened but a horse or a cattle fair. After tea, Father went to his study, and I followed and laid the twenty sovereigns beside him. "They are yours, dear Father," I said. "I do not need them, and they will help Mary's and Alethia's school bills." He looked at them, and at me, and his eyes filled. "Milly! Milly!" he answered, "you are a good child, and I thank God for you, but you must keep your money; Father does not need it. You know about your Uncle Bell, do you not?" "I know nothing of Uncle Bell, Father. I wrote to him once, but he never answered my letter." "Then I must tell you, that on the fifth of last February, your mother's birthday, he called on Mother and gave her the row of cottages standing on Tenter Fell. Now, Milly, the income from there, just about balances the loss I made through that villain, Blackpool. So, my dear, we have enough, and even a little to spare; what more does a child of God want?" and as he spoke, he gently pushed the sovereigns towards me. "No one told me about Uncle Bell," I said. "I wish I had known." "I remember, we thought it best not to name it. You would not have saved twenty pounds if you had known of the gift, and you might have missed some fine lessons, that only a sense of poverty teaches." I soon went back to Mother. I found her sitting quiet in the gloaming. I told her about the twenty pounds, and said, "Dear Mother, you and I will divide it. Will you take half?" "I will take it gladly," she answered. "There are so many little things a woman wants, that I do not like to ask Father for." "I know that, Mother," I answered. "Have I not seen you alter the dressing of your hair, because you broke one of your side combs, and did not wish to trouble Father about a new pair. I can recall twenty things, that were a distress to you to want, and which you did without rather than----" "Milly, that ten pounds puts all right. I shall get what I want out of it." "Did not Uncle Bell leave you some money, Mother?" "Did Father tell you so?" "Yes, he said it covered the loss he made. Now you will have a small income, Mother. Will it begin soon?" "It began at once. The cottages were a gift. Father went the next morning and drew February's rents." "How much did they amount to, Mother?" "I do not know, Milly. He never told me. He has drawn them now for five months, but I have never seen a farthing of the money. I have felt sometimes, as if it would be pleasant--just to see it, and have it in my hands," and the tears welled slowly into her soft brown eyes. "But I do not understand," I continued. "Father would not touch my money, yet he takes all of yours without leave or license. What does it mean?" "It means that I am a wife. All I had, or might have, became your father's as soon as I was his wife. You are yet a spinster, and have some rights in your own earnings." "But suppose you have no legal rights, all the more Father ought to give your every right. It is unkind, unjust, utterly contemptible!" I cried in something of a passion. "I am ashamed of Father!" "No! No! All men do as he does, and many do a great deal worse. Father has never seen, or heard of wives treated any differently. If he _knew_ better, he would do better." "Then, Mother," I said, "he ought to know better for he will not escape punishment on the plea of ignorance. I have often wondered why John Bunyan makes _Ignorance_ go into hell by the back door. He is right. Such ignorance as you make an excuse for Father is a sneaking sin. It suits back doors. I would rather be a brazen thief, and go in swearing by the main entrance. Father ought to be told the truth, and you ought to ask for your money." "It is too late, Milly. Say no more. I have got so far through life without money. Until I was married, I had to go to my father for every shilling--since then, I have gone to your father. But I have ten pounds now. I never had as much money before, to spend as I liked. I feel quite rich." This conversation sunk into my soul. A great pity for this sweet, patient, penniless mother, suffering so unnoticed and uncomplaining the need of many womanly trifles, made me childishly angry. The next day I went to Father with "Pilgrim's Progress" in my hand, and asked him what Bunyan meant "by putting _Ignorance_ into hell in such an ignominious manner?" I followed this question with others, which made him look at me with a queer, thoughtful expression, and then relapse into a silence so marked, as to be virtually a dismissal. It is a joy to me this day to remember that on this visit, I was able to do many little things for Mother which made life pleasanter to her; for Father was certainly much worse, and it appeared almost wrong to permit him to preach. Yet I could see that in the pulpit the spiritual man had not lost control; for the same lucid, telling sentences followed each other with a fiery eloquence, as in the past years. "Mr. Huddleston isn't sick in the pulpit," people would say as they walked thoughtfully home, from one of those last passionate exhortations. CHAPTER VII OVER THE BORDER "The latest Gospel is, know thy work, and do it." Late in August I had a letter from Miss Berners saying, she was now at home in Richmond, and wished me to come to her, as soon as I could. This summons to duty was pleasant, although I left home with a heavy heart. A presentiment of sorrow was on me, and I could not help following my soul back and forward, in endless ways of reminiscence and foreboding. About my father especially, I had a sort of sacred terror. And if any of my readers think that I was too much bound to my family, let me remind them that _our families are the chief thing_, except in societies like Lacedæmon, which went in for "efficiency" and righteously perished from the face of the earth. Father! Mother! Child! Is there any holier Trinity than this? I arrived in Richmond after a hard day's travel, late in the evening. It was almost dark when my cabman found the house in a rather out-of-the-way suburb. It did not jump to my eyes pleasantly, as did the house in Downham Market. It was a lonely place, and there was no sign of light or habitation about it. But Miss Berners welcomed me gladly, and as I drank a cup of tea beside her, she spoke to me of her prospects. They were far from hopeful, for only three of her old pupils were coming to Richmond. "Miss Stokes has opened a school in my old home," she said mournfully, "and the girls have just gone back there." "She was their principal teacher when you were there," I answered. "I know. It was very clever of her to step into my shoes, but I fear it will ruin me." "It is a wonder you did not anticipate this move," I ventured. "It was so natural." "It was very unkind and dishonorable, if that is natural," she answered, nor was she able to see the matter in any other light. It was an uncomfortable settling to work. The furniture of the old home did not look as if it belonged to this mournful relic of a once splendid mansion, and there ought to have been many things bought, which Miss Berners would not spend money for, while the result of her speculation was uncertain. For the new scholars came in so slowly, that I took on myself all the teaching there was to do, excepting French. The busy school, the public recitals and receptions, we had been promised, were very far off; and the days were set to notes of constant disappointment. The work was hard, for I taught individually; the school hours were lengthened, and music lessons were to be given when their work was over. I was not happy, but I had a letter to deliver, which I believed would bring me a little change and pleasure; and on the second Sunday afternoon after the service in the Wesleyan Chapel was over, I waited for the preacher, who was the famous Dr. Farrar, and gave him the following note from my father: DEAR BROTHER FARRAR, My daughter Amelia is likely to be teaching in Richmond this winter. I know you will give her counsel, and show her kindness, if needed. Your brother in Christ, WILLIAM HENRY HUDDLESTON. Dr. Farrar read the note with a pleasant countenance, and then smiled at me. "So you are Amelia?" he asked, and I answered, "Yes, sir." Then he called three ladies who were standing a little apart, and said, "Esther, this is Amelia Huddleston. You remember my correspondence with her father, I am sure." "Oh, yes, about that weary Tractarian Movement. I remember it very well," she answered, and then turning to me continued, "I am glad to see you, Amelia. Come home with us, and spend the evening with my girls." This was the beginning of a friendship that enabled me to endure cheerfully the weariness and monotony of my duties. For amid many outside annoyances I built silently on my trust in God, and I did my day's work loyally. Richmond was then, and may be yet, the seat of a great Wesleyan college for the preparation of young men for the ministry; and of this college Dr. Farrar was the principal. His family consisted of his wife and two lovely daughters, the eldest being just my own age. We were friends at once, our mutual knowledge of Mr. Punshon, forming an excellent basis for our intimacy. And after this introduction, I spent all my spare hours at Dr. Farrar's, where I was always made freely welcome. Joyful or sorrowful the days go by, and at the end of October we had eight pupils, but only three of these eight were boarders, and the great empty house that should have been full of youth and happiness, was a lonely anxious place. And it was at this time I heard that the sorrow so long expected had arrived. My father after preaching to a crowded chapel had hurried home, and fallen across the threshold in a strong, and not to be disputed epileptic fit. Then with heart-breaking reluctance, he had signed his resignation from the active ministry, and had seen another take his place. In great anguish he had prayed that this cup might pass from him; but, no, he had to drink it to the very dregs. Yet Mother wrote me, that he had not missed the vision of the comforting angel; for _vision_ is the cup of strength only given in some great calamity. I felt severely the grief that I knew filled every room in my home, but God had sent it, and He knew what was best. This trust was not a mere formula of words; it was a veritable and active faith with me. I trusted God. I leaned my child heart upon the everlasting Love of "our Father in heaven" and the days went on, and I did my work, and believed that all would come right. Miss Berners' affairs, however, grew every week worse and worse, and just before Christmas, I went into her room one morning, and found her lying on the bed weeping bitterly. She opened her eyes, and looked sadly at me and I asked, "Is it worth while continuing the fight? You are growing thin and gray, and you have not gained a step." "O Amelia!" she answered, "I have made a great mistake." "Every day is making it worse. Why not stop it?" "My expenses are double my income." "Then it is robbery to continue them." "What would you do? Tell me truly, Amelia." "I would close the school this very hour," I answered. "I would tell those three Downham Market girls to pack their trunks, and send them home by the noon train. At nine o'clock I would send those five unhappy-looking day scholars home also. Give all you have to your creditors, and go home yourself, and rest awhile. Then you can doubtless retrieve this great mistake." "And what will you do, Amelia?" she asked. "I do not know yet," I answered. "I must think." After the Downham Market girls had been sent home, I went to my room and began to consider my own affairs. I remembered first, the loss in my father's income. That was an irreparable loss. I thought of all the expenses incident to constant sickness in a house, of the education of Mary and Alethia, of the necessity of Jane's presence to assist Mother and I said to myself, "You, Amelia, are the one person _not_ needful, and you must in some way provide for yourself." I opened my purse, and found I had fourteen shillings. How was I to provide for myself? I was a stranger in Richmond. I knew no one but the Farrars. Perhaps Mr. Farrar might--and then I tried to imagine what Mr. Farrar might do for me. I thought until my head burned, but thank God! there was no fear in my thoughts. That paltering, faltering element, was not among my natural enemies. Far from it, I found something magnetic in extremities. If I was ever indifferent to events, it was because they were only moderate. To possess my soul in patience was a difficulty; to possess it in _resistance_ and _struggle_ was more natural, and more agreeable. I bathed my hot head and face, and then did what I ought to have done at first--I went to my Father in heaven, and told Him all my sorrow and perplexity. And as I talked with Him, tears like a soft rain fell upon my prayer, and I rose up full of strength and comfort, whispering as I dressed myself for the street, "Why art thou cast down, O my soul, and why art thou disquieted within me? The Lord is thy refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms." I went quickly to Dr. Farrar, and I found him at home; then without hesitation I told him all that troubled me. He answered, "You are right, Amelia, and I can find work for you, if you are not too proud to take it." "Pride has nothing to do with my duty," I replied. "Then listen," he continued. "You must have noticed that during the last ten years there has been a tremendous output of national energy and wealth for the education of the lower classes. National schools, and Bell and Lancaster schools, are going up all over England; and we Wesleyans, could not sit still when all other churches were working. Indeed we are going to build a school in all towns where the chapel membership is able to support one." "I believe there is such a school in Kendal," I said. "Our wisest men have decided, that a certain form of teaching called the Stowe method, will be best for the class of children we wish to reach; and this method is taught in the Normal School at Glasgow, where we have now nearly forty young men and women studying it. Now, Amelia, if you will go to Glasgow to learn this method, I will promise you a good school, and a good salary, and you could bring your father and mother to wherever you are located, and make your homes together." Then with the daring decision of young fresh faculties, I cried out, "O Dr. Farrar! I should like that better than anything else." "The children may be mostly poor children," he added. "I used to long to be a missionary. I can call it a mission work. Oh, I should enjoy it! But--" and I looked doubtfully at him--"but this course of instruction, will it cost much money?" I asked. "Our Board of Education will look after that," he answered. "They pay the Normal School so much for every pupil, and they will also give you one pound every week for your rooms and food. You can live on that, I should say?" "Very well indeed." "The Board will also allow you five pounds for traveling expenses, but----" "Yes, Dr. Farrar, but what?" "When you have won your diploma, and have been appointed to a school, the Board will expect you to gradually pay back what it spends for your education." "That is right," I answered. "I should like to pay it back, but if I should die, would my father have to pay it for me?" "No, no, child! Death pays all debts. You are more likely to marry, than to die." "And what then, Doctor?" "If you marry well, the Board will not count its loss in your gain." We talked over this subject thoroughly, and I assured him of my perfect satisfaction, and even pleasure, in the proposition. "If that is so," he said, "go and pack your trunk, take it in the morning to the Easton Square Railway Station, and leave it in the baggage room; then come to me at this address," and he wrote a few lines for my direction. "The Board meets there to-morrow at ten o'clock to examine applicants, and you will be questioned a little, no doubt, but I think they will not puzzle you." "Not unless they are grammarians, and ask me to parse a sentence." As I was leaving he asked, "Have you money enough to take you to London?" "I have fourteen shillings," I said. "Miss Berners can give me nothing." "Fourteen shillings is enough. The rest of your traveling expenses will be provided." So I went back to the defunct school, and packed my clothes, and helped Miss Berners to pack all her personal belongings. We talked very little. The past was done with, the future uncertain, but she promised to send the money due me to my mother as soon as she saw her friends in Reading. "Will you remain in Reading?" I asked. "No!" she answered. "I will take passage on a good ship, that intends to be at sea for a year, or more. I wish to be where I can never get a bill, or a dunning letter, or hear the postman's knock." We rose early in the morning, and had a hurried cup of coffee and then said good-bye. It was an uneasy and uncomfortable parting, and I was astonished that I could not feel any regret in it. There was only a sense of something finished and done with, and I believe Miss Berners forgot me, as soon as my cab was out of sight. But within a week she sent the money owing me, and said she was going to Louisiana. At that time Louisiana was as little known to the average Englishman or woman, as Timbuctoo. We asked a young man who had been shooting game in Canada, "Where is Louisiana?" and he answered, "It is one of the West Indian Islands, belonging to France." Then I reflected that Miss Berners spoke French pretty well, and could probably take care of herself. I left my luggage as directed by Dr. Farrar, and went to the Wesleyan Board of Education. It had begun to rain by this time, and the place looked mean and unhappy. But there was a good fire in the small waiting-room, and three young men, and one young woman already there. For a moment I had a sickening terror of what I was doing, but I quickly put my foot upon it. "Why art thou cast down, O my soul?" I asked almost angrily, and my soul knew better than to shirk, or shrink before that question. All was more favorable than I expected. Dr. Farrar had evidently spoken to the Board, which consisted of six or eight nice, clerical old gentlemen. Probably all of them had daughters of their own, for they were very kind, and before considering my case, spoke in the most sympathetic manner of my father's affliction. Every one had some pleasant memory of him, or some particular message to send. And they were so cheerful, that I looked into the faces of my inquisitors with confiding smiles. Upon the whole, the examination was an easy one, and nobody named grammar. I came off with flying colors, and I really think the Board believed themselves to have secured an unusually bright and clever teacher. There was nothing more to do, except sign a paper enrolling myself among the Wesleyan pupils at the Glasgow Normal School, which paper also contained the Board's obligation to pay me one pound weekly. My traveling expenses were given to me in hand, and then I bid all good morning, feeling truly in my heart the sweetest and strongest gratitude, for their kindness towards me. I got a train for Kendal about one o'clock, but did not arrive there until late. The door had been locked, and Mother unlocked it with such a joyful cry of "Milly! Milly! Milly!" as brought every one to meet me. I shall never forget that home-coming. Father came down stairs again, the fire was rebuilt, and a nice little meal prepared, while Jane, Mary and Alethia hung round me as if I had been lost and found again. The best part of that happy meeting was the pleasure it gave Father to hear of the sympathy and praise, that had followed the mention of his name to the Board of Education. I repeated every pleasant word twice over. He did not ask me to do so, but I knew the friendly messages were the sweetest music in his ears. And when I finally told them I was going to Glasgow, Father said, "It is a Providence, Milly! I had a letter not a month ago from my old friend John Humphreys, who is now Collector of Excise for the port of Glasgow. Either he, or Mrs. Humphreys, will look for proper rooms for you. They will know just what you want." The letter to the Humphreys asking this favor was written at once, and in four days we received something like the following answer to it: DEAR WILLIAM, We have rented your daughter a parlor and bedroom with the sister of my grocer. His shop is in Sauchiehall Street, and they live above it. They are most respectable people, and have no other boarders. It is also near the school. She will be very comfortable there. Let us know exactly when she is coming, and either Mrs. Humphreys or I will meet her train, and see her safely housed. Your true friend, JOHN HUMPHREYS. Then it was decided I should go to Glasgow on the third of January, 1849, by the ten o'clock morning train, which would allow me to reach my destination before it was dark. Until that day I rested myself body and soul in the sweetest influences of love and home, and when the third of January came, I was full of new strength and new hope, and ready for whatever had been appointed to happen unto me. My dear mother went with me as far as Penrith. She intended to visit my brother Willie's grave, and perhaps spend a night with her friend, Mrs. Lowther. Fortunately we had the railway carriage to ourselves and, oh, how sweet were the confidences that made that two hours' drive ever memorable to me! At Penrith we parted. Penrith is a mile or more from the Caledonian Line, but there were vehicles there to meet the train, and I watched Mother pass from my sight with smiles, and the pleasant flutter of her handkerchief. Then by a real physical effort I cast off the influences I had indulged for a week, and began to allow my nature to imbibe the strength of the hills through which I was passing--hills beyond hills, from blue to gray--hills sweeping round the horizon like a great host at rest. Down their sides the living waters came dancing and glancing, and, oh, but the lift of His hills, and the waft of His wings, filled my heart with joy and strength. Now and then we passed a small stone house, rude and simple, with a moorland air, and I felt that the pretty English cottages with their thatched roofs and blooming gardens, would have been out of place in the silent spaces of these mountain solitudes. It grew very cold as we neared Carlisle. Every one I saw was buttoned-up and great-coated, and I was sensible of as great a change in humanity as in nature. I had missed all the way from Kendal the workingman's paper cap, the distinctive badge of labor in those days. If there were workingmen around Carlisle they did not wear it. All the men I saw wore large caps of heavy blue flannel, sometimes bordered with red--an ugly head-gear, but apparently just the thing wanted by the big, bony men who had adopted it. I saw a crowd of them at Gretna Green, where a woman got into the train, and rode with me as far as Ecclefechan. She was not a pleasant woman, but I asked her about this big blue cap, and with a look of contempt for my ignorance, she answered, "They are just the lad's bonnets. Every one wears them. Where do _you_ come from?" "London," I replied with an "air." "Ay, I thought so. You're a queer one, not to know a blue bonnet, when you see it." Then I had the clue to a dashing, stirring song which had always puzzled me a little, "All the Blue Bonnets are over the Border." It meant, that these blue-bonneted giants, were over the English border, raiding and harrying the shepherds and farmers of the northern counties. And I smiled to myself, as I remembered the kind of welcome always waiting for them, whenever the slogan passed from fell to fell: "Cumberland hot, Westmoreland hot, Prod the Scot! For all the blue bonnets are over the Border!" CHAPTER VIII LOVE IS DESTINY "Love is the secret of life. Love redeemeth. Love lifts up. Love enlightens. Love advances the soul. Love hath everlasting remembrance. Love is a ransom, and the tears thereof are a prayer. Oh, little Soul, if rich in Love thou art mighty. "Love is Destiny. The heart is its own fate." In the cold, hard light of the winter afternoon, we reached Glasgow; entering the city by the Buchanan Street Station. I stepped quickly out of the carriage, and saw Mr. Humphreys looking for me. He was about fifty-six years old, tall, and rather stout, with a pleasant face, and snow-white hair. I walked towards him, and the moment he saw me, he smiled, and nodded his head. "I was looking in the first-class carriages," he said. "I was in the second-class," I answered. "I could not waste money on the first, just for a short ride." Then he laughed, and, clasping my hand, asked, "How many trunks have you?" "One," I answered. "Any parcels, valises, or bandboxes?" "Nothing of the sort." "I never heard the like. What kind of a girl are you? Stand right here until I bring a carriage; then I will take both you, and your one trunk, to Miss Pollock's." In a few minutes he came with a carriage, and we were driven rapidly up Sauchiehall Street, until we came to an Arcade. Here we stopped, and, as there was a large grocer's shop there, I knew it was at the end of my journey. "Pollock," said Mr. Humphreys, "let a couple of your big lads carry Miss Huddleston's trunk upstairs;" and then I was introduced, and told Miss Pollock had been looking for me, and my rooms were ready and comfortable. I thought I would go through the shop, but no, Mr. Humphreys took me to a stone stairway in the Arcade--a stairway pipe-clayed white as snow--and, after climbing three flights, I saw an open front door and a nice-looking woman, about forty years old, waiting to receive me. Mr. Humphreys would not go into the house, but told me to be dressed at five o'clock the next day. "Mrs. Humphreys wishes you to dine with us," he said, "and we shall also have a few friends, so you must make yourself smart. Five o'clock!" Then I heard him going rapidly down the stairway, and I turned to Miss Pollock with a smile. She took me into a little parlor, plainly furnished, but clean and neat. There was a bright fire in the grate, and a small, round table, set for one person, before it. She brought me tea and lamb chops, and some orange marmalade, and delicious rolls, and I thoroughly enjoyed myself. The next morning I unpacked my trunk, put my clothing in convenient places, and took my books into the parlor. I had a silver lamp that Miss Berners gave me, and many pretty little knick-knacks, and I was delighted with my sitting-room, when I had arranged these ornaments. At four o'clock I had a cup of tea, and then dressed myself in readiness for Mr. Humphreys' call. I was a little at a loss to know how to dress, but white could not be out of place on a girl, so I put on a white lustrous alpaca, trimmed with narrow bands of white satin. My hair was well and becomingly arranged, and I had my satin slippers, and long, white, lace mitts, in a bag over my arm. I thought I looked very pretty, and Mr. Humphreys said so, as he gave me a fresh camilla to pin in front of my dress. As I entered the Humphreys' house Mrs. Humphreys gave me a hearty welcome, and, as soon as I was ready, introduced me to a number of middle-aged ladies and gentlemen, who were sitting or walking about in the large parlors. I wondered at seeing no young people, but every one was so kind, I never thought of disappointment. I was particularly attracted by a Mrs. Semple, a tall, dark woman, with unmistakable signs of having been a great beauty. The moment I was introduced to her, she said, "You can leave the lassie wi' me, Mistress Humphreys. I'll make her as wise as mysel' anent the notables in the room. I'm feared there's few to brag about, but there's nae use in letting strangers ken we're just common folk." In pursuance of this intention, she said, as I was seated beside her, "Look at Peter McIntosh. Do you see the man?" "I do not know him," I answered. "Then I'll make you acquaint. Peter is a good man to know, and his wife is weel worthy o' him. Peter is a notable shoemaker. He makes shoes by the thousands, and sends them to America for sale." "Really?" "Yes. His factory is in the Goose Dubs. He'll take you to see it willingly. Ship loads o' his shoes go to the Yankees, but they are getting on to his ways, and he had better make shoes while he can, for they'll beat him at his own game soon. The little body in violet silk is his wife; she is aye trotting after him. How long have you known John Humphreys?" "A few hours, but he is an old friend of my father's." "Weel, that's a fine beginning. John is another Glasgow notable. He's only an exciseman, if you come dawn to facts, but they ca' him a Supervisor. It's a grand place for John, and he fills it wi' great credit to himsel'. The big man he is talking to is called Sage. His wife hasna' ta'en her e'en off you since you came into the room. She'll be telling hersel' that you will make a braw wife for her son Alick. Alick will be here anon. Tak' care, or you'll lose your heart to him. Thanks be! there's the dinner bell at the last, but it is three minutes past ordered time. Annie Humphreys ought to be reprimanded--only her husband daurna do it," and she lifted her long velvet train, and took Mr. Sage's arm as she expressed this opinion. I never was at such a dinner before, and I never saw such dinners outside of Scotland. I do not remember a thing we had to eat, except ice cream, and, as it was the first time I ever saw, or tasted ice cream, there is no wonder it has a place in my memory. It was a lingering pleasure of food eaten with constant merriment that charmed me. Then, when there was nothing on the shining mahogany but the nuts and fruits and the big toddy bowl, then, indeed, if it was not the feast of reason, it was the flow of soul. Song followed song, and story followed story. At first the songs were comic, such as the "Laird o' Cockpen," or "O Johnnie Cope, Are You Waking Yet?", but, as the music opened their hearts, these easily passed into the most passionate national songs; and, in an hour, there were only sentimental Scotchmen present. Every one was then tearful about Prince Charlie. Two generations previously, the dinner would have been broken up as a Jacobite meeting. But, oh, how I enjoyed it! A little later I said so to Mrs. Semple, and she answered, "Dinna delude yoursel' anent thae men wiping their eyes, as they sing, they are only specimens of the after-dinner Scot." "They are full of patriotic feeling," I said. "To be sure, after dark, and over the toddy, but they have been in Union Street, and Buchanan Street, Virginia Street, and the Cowcaddens all day long, doing what? Getting their shilling's worth for their shilling, ay, their farthing's worth for their farthing. Where was their patriotism then? Wait till the Sawbath Day, and I'll show you the Scot who is a Son of the Covenant, and who wouldn't lose his soul--on that occasion--for the whole world." Just as she said these words, she rose hurriedly to her feet, crying pleasantly, "There's my Willie! We'll hae the dancing now," and immediately a bevy of girls and young men pushed aside the portières, and curtsied to the company. Then the elder men and women went into the out-of-the-way corners, and played "Catch the Ten" or "Bagatelle," though some men of fifty years old, or even more, danced with great spirit in the national reels and strathspeys. I danced once with Mr. Humphreys, and was stepping a pretty measure with Mrs. Semple's Willie, when Mrs. Sage's son, Alick, entered. Immediately I caught his look of pleasure and admiration, and something I knew not what, passed between us, so that, when he was introduced to me, we both felt it to be a supernumerary ceremony. I have been a little diffuse concerning this dinner, because it represented fairly the household hospitality of that time. I dare say that they have a more stylish mode now, but I doubt if, with the elegant restraint of later days, they have preserved the old delightful flow of song and story, and that intense national spirit, which made one involuntarily listen for the bagpipes, though the music was all in the imagination. Many such entertainments I went to that winter; always on Saturday nights to the McIntoshes', where there was sure to be a boiled turkey stuffed with oysters and served with oyster sauce. In another house, to which I went frequently, they had roast turkey stuffed with plum pudding, and an old negro cook in Texas told me his old master always had his turkeys stuffed in the latter way. If any one thinks it could not be good, I advise them just to try the recipe. The two following days being Saturday and Sunday I rested, looked over my clothing, and wrote long letters home. I also wrote Dr. Farrar, and told him how comfortably all had been arranged for me. I was a little nervous about my entry into the Normal School, but when Monday morning came, I was ready for what it demanded, and more curious than frightened. It was a foggy morning, and the big building amid the small, poor buildings around it, loomed up gray and forbidding in its bare black yard, where a lot of children were trying to be playful, in the most discouraging surroundings. The janitor took me to the recitation hall, opened the door, and left me. There were groups of men and groups of women standing about, talking in an unconstrained way; others sat alone on the benches of the great gallery, which rose, bench above bench, nearly to the ceiling. No one spoke to me, and I sat down and looked curiously at the women, who could be guilty of such unkindness. I am sure many of them wished to speak, but did not know how to take the initiative. If they would only have trusted their hearts, and said a word of welcome, they need not have feared they were breaking any social law. Kindness is always fashionable, and always welcome. In a few minutes an exceedingly tall, fair, thin man slowly entered, and every one went instantly to their places. I presented to him Dr. Farrar's letter of introduction, and he threw it on a small table, and said irritably, "Third row, left corner." Somehow I walked straight to the place indicated. I am not going to describe this school, or the method of teaching used there. I have but an imperfect remembrance of all concerning it, and the system is likely superseded long ago by something better. Yet, I was much interested in the hall recitations and exercises; and the teaching of men and women together, on the basis of perfect mental equality, was then a great novelty, and far from being universally approved. My own impression was that in every department the women excelled the male students. Certainly Professor Hyslop appeared to think so, and to please himself hugely and frequently, by illustrations of the fact. During my first hour in that room, I saw him call a young man to the blackboard, and give him an algebraic problem to solve. He failed completely. Another young man was called, and also failed. Then the Professor said, with an air of assurance, "Miss Grace Laing," and a girl of about eighteen stepped lightly forward, made a few figures, and, to me, cabalistic signs. The Professor's face brightened, and he said decidedly, "correct," and Miss Grace Laing walked back to her place. The men, however, were not ungenerous, for a half-audible murmur of admiration followed the Professor's verdict of "correct." The theological lessons were exceedingly interesting, for theology touches the average Scot on both his weakest and strongest side, and a barely veiled dispute was always lingering between the Calvinistic and Arminian students. Every lesson, however, in that school turned to argument; the system provoked it, and was intended to do so. I liked the life at the school, but very early felt within myself that it was only a stepping-stone to my real destiny; and the remembrance we give to stepping-stones, is washed out by every other tide. But I did all my duty and enjoyed doing it, so the days were full of pleasant work, the evenings of pleasant company, and the time went swiftly by, though it left none of those sharp, indelible etchings on memory which direct personality gives. I was in a crowd there, and all my recollections of the place are evasive and uncertain. With the advent of June I began to look forward to home and home influences; then I received an invitation to join an excursion party, going with Captain Scott on his own steamer to "Fife and all the lands about it," north as far as St. Andrews, and then further north, even to the Orkneys and Shetland Islands. I could not bear to think of missing such an opportunity, and I wrote Dr. Farrar and asked him to obtain liberty for me to accept the invitation. He sent me a kind permission to do so, saying he had no doubt many would afterward see the places I visited through my eyes. And, as I have written "Jan Vedder's Wife," "A Daughter of Fife," "Prisoners of Conscience," "Paul and Christina," "Thyra Varrick," "Sheila Vedder," "The Heart of Jessie Laurie," and so forth, from material and impressions gathered on this voyage, Dr. Farrar's estimate has brought forth fruit a thousand-fold. I need not enter into details here: the above books will amply reveal to their readers the noble men and women of "the ancient kingdom," and of the Ultima Thule of the Shetlands. When the trip was over I did not return to Glasgow; we landed at Leith, and from Edinburgh I got a train direct to Kendal, where I arrived about tea time. I found all better than I expected. My father had assumed the duty of visiting the poor and the sick in their affliction, of comforting the broken in heart, and of going as far as a mortal man may go with the dying. Mother thought he was happy in his self-imposed charge, but he must have had terrible hours among the books he no longer used; for he was only fifty-five years old at this time, and still retained much physical strength and beauty. I had two weeks of perfect peace and happiness, and then, just as I was thinking of returning to Glasgow, I received a letter from Mrs. Humphreys, telling me that the government had removed Mr. Humphreys to Liverpool, and that they were on the point of leaving for that city. She said further, that she had had a conversation with Mrs. Semple about me, and that Mrs. Semple was anxious I should stay with her; she pointed out the advantages of living in such respectable care and surroundings, and urged me to accept Mrs. Semple's offer. Here was another stepping-stone towards destiny: where would it lead me? Mrs. Semple had a large circle of friends, and entertained and went out frequently. I should meet at her house a different class of people; traders, perhaps, but traders with gentry behind them; ministers, lawyers, and men who had to do with books and literature, and doubtless women who might be more stylish, and perhaps less kind, than Mrs. Humphreys or Mrs. McIntosh. It looked pleasant enough in prospect, and, I may as well say, it proved pleasant enough in reality. I found, on my return to Glasgow, that Miss Pollock and her brother were on their way to Australia; then, my course being quite clear, I went to Mrs. Semple. She received me joyfully, and at first would not hear of my paying a farthing for my board; but I soon convinced her that she would have to take the sum it had cost me to live with Miss Pollock. Of course, even then, I had greatly the best of the bargain--handsome rooms to dwell in, an excellent table, and ready sympathy in all my perplexities, likes and dislikes. In a way I made the balance more even by giving to my hostess those little helps and personal attentions I would have given to my mother, if in her place, and we were mutually pleased and satisfied. When I returned to the school, Professor Hyslop looked glumly at me, and hoped I had "enough of stravaging," and was ready to attend to my duty. I assured him I was glad to do so, but I was not glad in my heart. A kind of dissatisfaction lurked in all my plans. I wanted, I knew not what. I worked steadily, but with a kind of eager looking forward to something beyond the work. One morning Mrs. Semple and I were eating a luxurious little breakfast. The sunshine and the fresh air came in through the open window, and some working men were going up West Regent Street, whistling delightfully. I was happy, but thoughtful, and Mrs. Semple said, "You're thinking lessons, and that isna in our bargain--lovers would be mair wise-like. What did you dream last night?" "Why," I answered, "I had a singular dream. I was thinking about it, when you said lessons." "Tell me, then." [Illustration: MRS. BARR AT 18] "I dreamed of going into a large warehouse, full to the roof of bundles of gray and white wool. Many men were at desks writing, but no one spoke, and I walked forward, until I came to a door covered with green baize, and pushed it open. Then a young man, who sat writing at a handsome desk, turned and looked at me, saying in a pleasant, authoritative way, 'Come in, Milly. I have been waiting for you.' The dream passed away as he spoke." "What kind of a young man? Handsome?" "Yes, very handsome. He was dressed in a suit of shepherd tartan." "That is likely enough. Every other man you meet, is wearing shepherd tartan. It is precious few that look decent in it." "My dream-man looked well in it." "A red or green necktie with it, of course." "No, a black one." "Wonderful! It is either red or green wi' most men. My Willie would have naething but white. He thinks he looks ministerial in the black and white, and he is trying to behave accordingly. You must have noticed him?" "Yes, I have. Perhaps Willie's dress gave me my queer dream." "Reason the dream awa', of course. That's what fools do wi' a dream. I think you dreamed of the man who will be your husband." "Then," I said, "my husband is not among the men I know. I never saw the young man of my dream before." "There's few people in town yet," explained Mrs. Semple. "They are at Arran, or Bute, or somewhere down the water. It will be September ere they get back to Glasgow." At these words she lifted the morning paper, but in a few moments threw it down in great excitement, crying, "Milly! Milly! the Queen, and Prince Albert, and the Prince o' Wales are coming to Glasgow; every blessed wife, and mother, and maid, will be here to see the Royalties. We, also, we must see them! We must hae a window; some one must get one for us!" "Do you know any one who can?" "Yes. When you come back from school, we will go and ask him." "Need I go?" "I'll not go a step wanting you." So I came home without delay, put on a clean white frock, and went with Mrs. Semple to a street called Virginia Street. The warehouse we entered was so old that the stone steps at its entrance were nearly worn away. A kind of porter stood at the door, and Mrs. Semple told him she wished to see his master. He led us through a long room piled to the ceiling with bundles of wool, and through a green baize door into a handsome office, where the young man of my dream sat writing. He turned as we entered, and Mrs. Semple said, "Weel, Robert, how's a' with you?" For a moment he did not answer. He was looking at me--perhaps expecting an introduction, but his smiling face appeared to be saying, just the words I heard in my sleep, "Come in, Milly! I have been waiting for you." Really what he said was an effusive welcome to Mrs. Semple, and a polite offer of his chair to me. It was a large office chair, but I took it; after a little while he asked me if I was comfortable, and then laughing lowly added, "Now I shall forever dream dreams in that chair." "Weel," answered Mrs. Semple, "maybe the dreams will come true." Then she explained the reason for our call, magnifying very much my desire to see the Queen. And Mr. Barr assured her there would be tickets for a good window at her house before nine o'clock that night, if it was possible to get them. It was a pleasant call, a fateful call, for I knew I had met the man whose fate--good or bad--I must share. A feeling of deep sadness overcame me. I said I was sick, lay down on my bed, and fell into a deep sleep. Before nine o'clock Mr. Barr brought the tickets, and, on the day appointed, went with us to see what there was to see. It was not much. Her Majesty disappointed me. Prince Albert was not as handsome as his pictures represented him to be, and the Prince of Wales was in a bad temper, and showed it as plainly as a boy nine years old could do. The Queen wore a royal Stuart tartan shawl; it was heavy and cumbersome, and she looked ungraceful in it. But this bit of sightseeing was the beginning of a new order of things. My life took a turn then and there, and, as I look back, I could weep at the memory of that fateful royal visit; but through the years that hour had been fixed, and the dormant love in my soul needed but a look to awaken it. Until the New Year Mr. Barr was all the most devoted lover could be, then there was a pause in his attentions. It would be folly to say I did not care. I did care. I went about my duties with a heavy heart. "It is his mother," said Mrs. Semple. "She is a hard, old soul, and she wouldna be willing for Robert to marry an angel from heaven, if she hadna plenty o' siller. Forbye, you are English and an Arminian, when you should be a Calvinist, and, worse than that, you are over-educated." "I thought the Scotch believed in education." "They do--for men--not for women. They prefer them to watch cheese parings and candle-ends. It doesna need an educated woman to sweep, and darn, and cook, and save a farthing, wherever it can be saved." One evening in February Mr. Barr called. He said he had been "on a long business journey through the West Riding," and those two words softened my heart, and we began to talk of some mutual acquaintance there. Then, before he knew it, without his will or effort, love broke into audible words. It was the healing love, the comforting love, and one little word, and one long kiss, made all things fast and sure. But that night I knew the old troubler and heartache of the world had me in his power, and would have, until life with all its troubles and heartaches was over. * * * * * I had told Robert that the first thing was to get my father's and my mother's consent to our marriage, and he went to Kendal the following day for this purpose, arriving there about four in the afternoon. Father was out visiting the sick, Mary and Alethia were at school, and Jane had been recently married, and had gone to live in Manchester. Mother was making some school pinafores for Alethia, and Robert's knock did not interest her at all. Lots of people in those days came after Mr. Huddleston, and she thought it was some case of sickness or trouble. But when the girl opened the parlor door and Robert entered she was astonished. However, my name and the letter he brought from me put him at once in Mother's favor, and in a few minutes he was telling her how dear I was to him, and that I had promised to be his wife in July, if my father and mother approved it. He stayed to tea with my parents, and had a long conversation with them, and they were thoroughly satisfied that I had chosen well and wisely. As if I had had any choice in the matter! The event had been destined, even when I was born, and Robert Barr only a lad of seven years old. In my mother's letter to me on the subject, she said, "I will tell you something, Milly, that I suspect neither Mr. Barr nor your father will tell you, yet you will be glad to know it, and you ought to know it. It is this. Your father told Mr. Barr about your indebtedness to the school board, and Mr. Barr asked how much it was. When Father said he thought about seventy pounds, Mr. Barr laughed, and answered, 'Suppose, Father, we sent a donation of two hundred pounds to the school board. Won't that be best?' Then Father laughed, and Mr. Barr took from his valise a small book, and wrote a check for two hundred pounds, asking Father to send it the next day, which Father did." In this letter I was urged to come home at once, and so I went next day to the school to remove my name from the list of Wesleyan students. Professor Hyslop looked angrily at me. "You will get no diploma," he said. "I am going to be married, sir," I answered. "I have heard--I have heard!" he continued, "and I think a marriage certificate will be the best diploma for you--Reverend Dr. Barr's son, is it not?" "Yes, sir." "Then, Miss, where will your Arminianism be? You will become a Calvinist!" And, with this Parthian fling, he left the room so quickly I had no opportunity for a denial. After this event I returned home, and the days went by in a dream of happiness. Robert came every Friday or Saturday to Kendal, and we rode over to Windermere, if it was fine weather, and strolled about its laurel woods, whispering to each other those words which lovers have always said, and always will say, even till time shall be no more--unless, the march of what is called "progress and efficiency" put love out of the question altogether. It was a wooing that fitted wonderfully into my happy girlhood, blending itself with my childhood's memories, with the wind and the sun, and the mountains and lakes I loved. And I took with a grateful heart the joy sent me--a joy glorified by all the enchanting glamours and extravagant hopes of youth and love. It was always the old antiphony of love: "I love you, sweet, how can you ever learn How much I love you?" "You I love even so, And so I learn it." "Sweet, you cannot know How fair you are." "If fair enough to earn Your love, so much is all my love's concern." "My love grows hourly sweet." "Mine, too, doth grow, Yet love seemed full so many hours ago." Thus lovers speak.--ROSSETTI. If the weather was wet we discussed damasks and cretons and books about furniture, which Robert brought with him every week--the colors to be dominant in various rooms--and every trifle of housekeeping; and were as happy as birds building their first nest. Or, I showed any new addition to my wardrobe, about which I had been very fortunate. For it happened that thirty years previously my mother's uncle had spent four years in Glasgow, and had been very happy there; so he was pleased I was going to marry a Glasgow man. When he met Robert he liked him, and he liked me "for choosing so fine a fellow," and as a reward gave me a hundred pounds to buy things for the wedding. I went to Bradford for a couple of weeks, had my wedding frock made there, and brought home with me alpacas and mozambiques, baréges and chantilly muslins, and lots of other pretty things. But what pleased me more than anything were the full sets of ready-made underclothing which Mrs. Humphreys sent. I had never even heard of ready-made clothing, and I was delighted with the beautifully trimmed slips and gowns, and so forth, which far exceeded anything I had ever seen. Indeed they were talked about so much that many Kendal ladies asked to look at them. My sister Jane had married quietly, almost secretly, only my father and sisters and a friend of the groom being present; but Robert would hear of no such privacy. He wished the whole town to witness his happiness, and I was not averse to his desire. So the dawn of our wedding-day, the eleventh of July, 1850, was ushered in by the beautiful chimes of Kendal church, and the ringers, being well paid, marked, every hour of the day by a carillon until night covered the earth. The ceremony was nine o'clock in the morning, but the church was full, and the sidewalks full, and every one had a smile and a good wish for us. Robert looked exceedingly handsome, and his sister and brother-in-lave, David Colville, the great iron and steel manufacturer of Glasgow, were at his side. I had only one bridesmaid, a lovely Yorkshire girl, who had been my playmate in childhood. Robert had one attendant also, a young Scot, called James Sinclair. I wore the usual white satin dress consecrated to brides, but it was not made as bridal dresses are made now. It was of ordinary length, and had three deep ruffles of lace on the skirt. A small polka jacket--they were just coming in then--made of white lace, and trimmed with white satin, covered my neck and arms, and a very small bonnet of white lace, trimmed with orange flowers, was on my head. My sandals were of white satin, and my gloves of white kid, but I had no veil. I walked to the altar on my father's arm; I left it leaning on my husband's. That seems but a small change, but it typified the wrench of life and destiny. For that hour had broken the continuity of life. I could never! never! go back to where I stood before it. There was a pretty wedding breakfast at my father's house, where everything was profusely adorned with large white pansies; for, in Kendal there was, and likely yet is, a miraculous profusion and perfection of this exquisite flower in July and August. My father blessed the breakfast, which was happily and leisurely taken, then Robert glanced at me, and I went upstairs to put on a pale blue dress, a white silk India shawl, and a little bonnet trimmed with blue flowers. The shawl was of wonderful beauty and of great value, but what girl of nineteen would now wear a shawl? Yet, it was far from unbecoming, and it shared my fortunes in a remarkable manner. It was considered proper and elegant in those days for brides to show great emotion, and even to weep as they left their home and father and mother. I could not do so. I loved my home and my kindred with a deep and strong attachment, but I knew from that moment when I first saw the man who was now my husband that, among the souls allied to mine, he was of "... nearer kindred than life hinted of; Born with me somewhere that men forget, And though in years of sight and sound unmet, Known for my soul's birth-partner well enough." CHAPTER IX THE HOME MADE DESOLATE "There is a warm impression, an instinctive sagacity, by which we anticipate future events." * * * * * "Life is filled with issues." With renunciation life begins. For nineteen years I had been a receiver: I was now to learn the grace of surrender, and of giving up. I was to drink the cup of pain, and to go through the valley of humiliation. As far as my home and kindred were concerned, we had counted the price together, and accepted the inevitable toll of marriage, understanding well, that marriage, as well as death, makes barren our lives. This fact was soon illustrated by the attitude assumed by my old friends in Glasgow. I thought I should be treated even with additional _éclat_, and they had apparently cut me out of their lives. I met Mrs. Sage one morning, soon after my return from my wedding journey, and greeted her with glad excitement. She was polite, but restrained, and when I asked her to call on me, regretted she had no time. The girls were going off to school, and her son Alick was going to Australia as representative of the Western Bank of Scotland. She gave me this information with a great deal of pride, and just a tone of resentment, then said, "Good morning," and virtually passed out of my life. I was much troubled by her behavior for a week, then I went one morning to Campbell's for some muslin, and there I saw Mrs. McIntosh. She was such a good-hearted, sweet-tempered soul, I never doubted her kindness; but she, also, was changed. Civil, of course, but she never once spoke of their Saturday evenings, or asked, "When are you coming to see us?" I told Robert of these meetings, and he smiled and said that the behavior of my friends was quite natural. I was no longer available for young parties. I was out of the race, as it were, and my presence among the youths and girls was restraining and unpleasant to them. "You will have to be contented with the married women, now, Milly, and I think the girls are glad of your absence." That was all his comment, and he did not seem to think it a matter of any importance. Now I had always held my own with the girls--with the married women it was different. I thought them cold and critical, and, unfortunately, I gave them plenty of opportunities for criticism. I was ignorant of many things that were only to be learned by years of social experience, unless one was to the manner born. My dress, though handsome and becoming, was not like unto theirs, and I was innocently, but constantly, offending some national feeling or tradition. Thus, when I went to Campbleton to pay a week's visit to my sister-in-law, I wore at a special entertainment a satin gown of the Royal Stuart tartan. I thought I was paying Scotland a compliment, but I could hardly have done anything more offensive to every Campbell in Campbleton. They could not believe any one was so densely ignorant, as not to know that the Campbells hated the Stuarts. To the local dominie I was an ignoramus, because I was not familiar with the smallest fact regarding the Great Disruption, and the founding of the Free Kirk. He wondered where I had been born, "not to have heard of Chalmers and Guthrie and the Highland Host they led to a great spiritual victory." Yet, honestly, never even in Dr. Farrar's, where embryo clergy congregated, had I heard of the Scottish Disruption. And this ignorance was astounding to them, if it was real, and impertinence, if it was only pretended. I dislike to make the acknowledgment, but even Mrs. Semple was changed. She was offended because she was not asked to be present at our wedding. I explained to her the circumstances making her visit impossible--the smallness of my father's house, and the likelihood of sickness at any hour, and she appeared quite satisfied at the time; but, when Robert brought his sister and brother-in-law to Kendal, she thought she ought to have been included in his party. I think she ought, and I would have been glad of her presence. There was somehow a mistake, and the fault was said to be mine; and I saw that Robert would be annoyed if I made a question about it, so I accepted the wrong and the blame. Three months after my marriage I should have been quite disheartened but for the kindness of two admirable women, who had the intelligence to divine the whole situation. They were Marion, the wife of Walter Blackie, and her sister, Isabel Brodie. John Blackie, the father of Walter Blackie, had been the guardian of my husband, and the publishers of my husband's father's books, consequently there was an old tie of friendship between the families. But, in spite of this, Marion Blackie warmly and openly stood my friend. She advised me in private, and defended me in public. Indeed, she told my critics that they and herself, also, must appear as peculiar to me as I did to them. "Of course," she continued, "the Barr women don't like her. She has not a feeling in common with them, and how can she defend herself against innuendoes? I only hope they will not sneer and shrug her husband's love away." Only these two women remain in my memory to sweeten the story of my three years' residence in Glasgow, as a wife and mother. These were the social conditions in which I found myself, and I did not long struggle against them. Those who should have been kind to me were irreconcilable enemies; and they were old leaders of public opinion, and understood thoroughly the people with whom they lived. I felt that my case was hopeless, because victory in it might bring defeat in a nearer and dearer relation; for Robert would have certainly stood by me, if my attitude demanded his support; but I was sure I could not prevent a sense of anger and injury, if his interference was called for. It was not worth while provoking such a danger; I resolved to retire and make myself happy in other ways. I had a very handsome home to care for, and in it there was a library of about two hundred of the latest books in fiction, poetry, and travel. I began to use my needle, and grew expert in embroidery. I ran down to Kendal now and then for a day, and Father paid me one visit, and Mother several. In two or three months I had forgotten society, and it held its regular sessions without remembering me. But the time passed happily--long sweet days in which I thought as I sewed, or read, or sang, or sometimes took a walk up to the old cathedral, or even through the busy thoroughfares of Argyle and Buchanan Streets. In the evenings I read aloud to Robert, or he taught me how to sing the Scotch songs he loved. We had a copy of Hamilton's large edition of them, and I began with the initial lyric of "Braw Braw Lads of Gala Water," and then went straight through the book, which took us about a month. Then we began it over again, and I do not remember wearying, at least not of the older songs, for they were never written: they sprung from the heart and went direct to the heart. Sometimes we walked quietly to Glover's Theatre, especially if there was a play like "Rob Roy," with the great Mackay in the title rôle. I shall never forget the night I saw this play. The theatre was decorated with Rob Roy tartan, and every woman wore conspicuously some ornament of Rob Roy ribbon--a large bow, long streamers from her fan, or a handsome satin scarf of the red and black checks, and I think there was not a man present without a Rob Roy rosette on the lapel of his coat. If there was, he must have been some benighted Englishman who had no acquaintance with Walter Scott and his famous robber hero. The human stir and enthusiasm was wonderful; the players moved and spoke as if they were enchanted, and they carried every soul in the theatre with them. It was good to feel, if only for a couple of hours, something of the intense emotion of which the soul is capable. No wonder the Scotch are so Scotch; they nurse their patriotism continually, feed it with song and story, music and dancing, and the drama, and they regard the Sabbath Day as peculiarly a Scottish institution. Surely all this was better than exchanging suspicious courtesies with critical acquaintances. As the days lengthened and grew warmer, we went at the week ends to Bute, or Arran, or Stirling, and very often to Edinburgh; for, at the latter place, we always heard a fine sermon at the old Greyfriar's Kirk. The first anniversary of our marriage we spent in Kendal and Windermere, and somehow, after that event, there was a shadow I could feel, but could not see or define. Things appeared to go on as usual, but a singular sense of uncertainty troubled them; and, though I have said, "things went on as usual," they did not quite do so. There was one change--it was in Robert's movements. A few months previously he had gone into partnership with a man in Huddersfield, who had large woolen mills, and he left his business in Glasgow for two days every two weeks to go to Huddersfield. At first he always returned buoyant, and apparently well contented. I supposed, therefore, the woolen mill was doing well; but, true to his Scotch instincts, natural and educated, he had never explained anything about the transaction to me. It was, of course, necessary to say _why_ he took this regular journey to England, but, beyond that information, the subject was not named, and I do not know unto this day, what kind of woolen goods were made in the Huddersfield mills. This reticence about their business, is, I think, a Scotch trait of the most pronounced kind. It is scarcely an exaggeration to say, that no Scotchman ever tells his wife the truth, and the whole truth, about his affairs. Robert in this respect only followed out his strongest inherited instincts, the example set before him on every hand, and the precepts inculcated by parents and guardians. When we were first married, I tried to win his confidence and share his hopes and plans, and I was kindly but decisively made to understand that I was going beyond my sphere. And, as I write, and remember the position occupied by English and Scotch wives of sixty years ago, my heart burns with indignation, and I wonder not at _any_ means they now take to emancipate themselves. I knew women at this time who spent weeks and months in fears and anxieties, that could have been dispelled by one word plainly and honestly spoken. But, when a husband says only, "Yesterday I was rich, today I am poor; you must do as well as you can," his silence about his position has been not only cruel, but humiliating. He might make just such a speech to an affectionate and faithful dog. This is a digression, but it will not be lost, if it makes one man reflect, or one woman resolve. As for myself, I was not destitute of rebellious thoughts. Once Robert had brought his Huddersfield partner home with him to dinner, and I had carefully scrutinized the man, and his speech, and manner. After he had left, Robert, in a kind of incidental way, as if it was a matter of no consequence, asked me what I thought of Mr. P. "Do you wish me to tell you the truth, Robert," I answered, "or shall I only say pleasant words?" "Tell the truth, Milly, by all means," he replied, "though I suppose you are going to say unpleasant words." "I am, but they are true words, be sure of that, Robert. I think Mr. P. is a rascal, from his beard to his boots. Nature has set his eyes crooked; she has put her mark on the man, and said plainly, 'Beware of him!' His voice is false. I watched his feet, he turned them out too much, and he had trod his shoes down at the sides. 'He could not tread his shoes straight,' is a Yorkshire proverb for a rogue. I would not trust him with a penny piece, further than I could see him." "You saw all this, Milly, while he was here a short hour or two?" And Robert laughed and drew me to his side. So the subject dropped, but I could see that my suspicions had allied themselves to similar ones in his own mind. One incident of this year I must not forget--the meeting with Mrs. Stowe and Mr. Beecher. I saw them first on the platform of the City Hall, where I had a seat with some friends on the invitation committee. I was not attracted by Mrs. Stowe, who was quiet, and apparently bored or tired; but Mr. Beecher won every heart. Afterwards, at a reception, I had a long talk with him about America. Once more I saw him, and the conversation was renewed, and finally Mr. Beecher said, "I think you will come to America. If you come to New York, hunt me up; I shall not be hard to find. You will want help in seeing New York, and I will do anything I can for you." Seventeen years afterwards I reminded Mr. Beecher of this promise, and he cheerfully and helpfully redeemed it. So the time went on, and I was happy, for the pleasure of "use and wont" of things tried and confidential was mine. I found myself constantly singing, for I was busy about a very diminutive wardrobe. I delighted in making some of the tiny articles with my own hands, sewing into them prayers and hopes and blessings for the child who was to wear them, and whose advent was expected about the New Year. In these days I thought a great deal about my own infancy. I recalled its first exquisite beginnings, its wonder and joy in the mere fact of living. I thought of the dream I had, when I was too young to find words to tell it, and blessed God I was not too young for Him to think of me. Even the dark November days, with their thick yellow fogs, and muffled melancholy sounds, could not sadden me. Nor was I much depressed by that haunting fear, which all women--however often they are mothers--are subject to before the birth of a child. I might die; many mothers did. What then? I answered my heart fearlessly, "I shall have had a perfect life, a happy childhood, a true love, a blessed marriage. The finite over, the infinite will begin. I shall be satisfied." And I am sure I could then have trod the common road into the great darkness, without fear and with much hope. But one day in this November I awoke both fearful and sad. It was with difficulty I preserved the cheerful morning face, that I had been taught from early childhood was the first duty of every day and, as soon as Robert left for his office, and I knew I should be alone until evening, I lay down upon my bed and wept with an unreasonable passion. I knew not why I wept, but my soul knew. She heard what was coming from afar, and knew that I was now to leave the walled garden of my happiness, and to take my share in those great sorrows, which are needed to give life its true meaning. I had noticed, when at breakfast, that Robert was unusually silent, and I had not felt able to rise above the atmosphere of gloom and worry; but in the afternoon it struck me, that perhaps I only was to blame, and I resolved to dress prettily and be ready to carry the evening through with songs and smiles. So I rose and put on a gown that Robert liked to see me wearing, a handsomer garment than I usually wore, but I told myself that if trouble should be coming, I would meet it dressed like one who meant to conquer. And I remember that all the time I was brushing out my hair, I was saying over and over a few lines that came ready to my lips, though I knew not when, or where, I had learned them: "Empire o'er the land and main, Heaven who gave, can take again; But a mind that's truly brave, Stands despising, Storms arising, And defies the wind and wave." I had forgotten the last line, but my mind involuntarily supplied it. And at that moment I felt able to defy sorrow, and to shut the door against it. But alas! how poorly we love those whom we love most. Our love sinks below our earthly cares, and we bruise ourselves against the limitations of our own love, as well as against the limitations of others. I was sitting very still, thinking these things out, and talking reproachfully to my soul--who has always been a talkative soul, fond of giving me from the little chest wherein she dwells, reproofs and admonitions more than I like--when I heard Robert put his latch-key in the lock, and enter the house. He was an hour before his time, and I wondered at the circumstance. Generally he came to me in the parlor first, and then went to dress for dinner, but this night he went straight to his room. I stood up and considered. Fear tormented me with cruel expectations, and I would not give place to that enemy, so I went quickly down the passage, singing as I went, and at the door asked cheerfully, "Are you there, Robert?" "Yes," he answered; "come in, Milly." Then I entered smiling, and he looked at me with all his soul in his eyes, and, without speaking, covered his face with his hands. "Robert!" I cried. "Dear Robert, are you sick?" "No, no!" he answered. "Sit down here at my side, and I will tell you. Milly, I have lost nearly all I possess. The Huddersfield mills have failed." "Never mind them," I said; "your business here is sufficient, and you can pay it more attention." "It has today been sequestered by the English creditors." "What is 'sequestered'?" I asked. I had never heard the word before. "It means that I cannot have any use of my business here, until the court decides, whether it can be made to pay the debts of the Huddersfield concern. O my dear, dear Milly, forgive me!" "My love, you have done me no wrong." "I have. I have taken risks that I ought not to have taken. You thought you were marrying a rich man, Milly." "I married you, yourself, Robert. Rich or poor, you are dearer than all to me. I do not count money in the same breath with you." "You love me, dear?" "Better tonight, than ever before." "I am sick with anxiety." "Let me share it. That is all I ask. And you must be brave, Robert. Things are never as bad as you think they are. You are only twenty-seven years old; you have health and friends. We can half the expenses. Let the English place go. You will get your business here back soon, will you not?" "I hope so. I cannot tell. I must leave you, and go to England tomorrow and you ought not to be alone now." "Nothing will harm me. Go, and find out the worst, then you know what you have to fight. Dinner is ready. You need a good meal; you will feel better after it." "How can I? I fear that I am ruined." "Now, Robert," I said, "that depends on _yourself_. No man was ever ruined from _without_; the final ruin comes from _within_, when you turn hopeless and lose courage. I have heard my father tell young men that, many times." I suppose that most American husbands and wives would have spent the evening in talking over this trouble, and considering what steps were wisest to take. Robert did not speak of it again. During the meal, when the girl was coming in and out with the various dishes, he talked of a big fire in the High Street, and the appearance of Harrison in "The Bohemian Girl," saying he was sorry I could not hear him sing "I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls." When dinner was over, he asked me to go on with the book I was reading to him. It was "The Newcomes," and I lifted it, and he lay down on the sofa with his cigar. But I did not know what I was reading. The lights seemed dim, my voice sounded far away, there was a tumult in my senses that was prelusive of fainting. "I am not well, Robert," I murmured, "I must stop," and I laid "The Newcomes" down, and have never touched a book of Thackeray's since. Robert rose immediately. "I must leave for England very early in the morning," he said. "I will try and get some sleep first." The next morning he went away before daylight, and I had to bear the uncertainty and suspense as well as I could; and these journeys continued until the twentieth of December, when all court business stopped until after the twelfth day in January. I did not write home about this trouble. Father had been ill, and Mother was coming to me, on the second or third day of the New Year; and I hoped afresh every morning, that some good news would come to brighten the sad story. But all I heard was that professional accountants were going over the books of both the Glasgow and the Huddersfield business, and that it was tedious work, and required Robert's presence constantly to explain transactions. This appeared sensible and necessary, and I made the best of the week ends, when Robert usually hurried home, traveling all night, so as to reach me early Saturday morning. So Christmas came and went, the saddest Christmas I ever spent in all my life; but Christmas was not Christmas in Scotland, at that date. It had too strong a likeness to Episcopacy, yes, even to Popery, for the Calvinistic Scot; and savored of monkish festivals, and idolatrous symbols. I never saw a nativity pie in Glasgow, but those I made; and I really think they caused Robert a twinge of conscience to have them on the table. He certainly never tasted them. But the New Year was a modest kind of saturnalia, kept very much as the Calvinistic Dutch settlers of New York kept it in the days of the Dutch governors. It was a quiet day with us, and I could not help contrasting it with the previous New Year's when we had our minister, and the Blackies and Brodies, and a few others to dinner, and all drank the New Year in, standing with full glasses. At the moment we did so, my conscience smote me. I was cold and trembled as the clock slowly struck twelve, for I had always been used to solemnly keep the Watch Night, and, if not on my knees in the chapel, I was certain to be praying in my own room. "The ill year comes in swimming," says an old proverb, and I have proved its truth. On the third day of the New Year, Robert's mother called in the afternoon. Robert had gone to Stirling, and I was alone and much astonished to see her; but I said, as cheerfully as possible, "Good afternoon, Mother, and a Happy New Year to you." Then, noticing that she was much agitated, I grew frightened about Robert, and said anxiously, "You look troubled, Mother; is anything wrong with Robert?" "Is there anything right with the man now? I got this letter from him on New Year's Day--a nice-like greeting it was to send me." I looked at her inquiringly, but did not speak, and she asked, "Do you know what is in it?" "No; Robert did not tell me he had written to you at all." "Of course, he didn't! Mother may be heartbroken with shame and sorrow, but you! You must not have your precious feelings hurt." "Robert," I answered, "would not willingly hurt a hair of your head, Mother. I know that. If he has told you of more trouble, I wish to share it with you." "You shall," she replied. "He writes me that he fears the creditors--sorrow take them!--are trying to attach the furniture of this house, and he asks me, if they do, to buy it for him, at their valuation. That is a modest request to make, on the first of the year!" "Mother, no one can touch this furniture. It is mine. It was given to me before my marriage, made legally over to me in my antenuptial contract. The furniture, silver, napery, books, and every item in the house is especially and carefully named, as the property of Amelia Huddleston." "Where is the contract?" "With John Forbes, the writer. Go and see it." "I am thinking that the English law makes all that was yours, on your marriage day, become Robert's, and all that is Robert's belongs to his creditors, until the creatures are satisfied. But I came on a kind errand, if you will take it so. I came to tell you that, though you have been the ruin of my son, I will not see you put on the street. I will buy the furniture and rent it to you." "I would not rent it from any one. It is mine. If I am robbed of it, I will not countenance the robbery, by renting it." "What will you do with yourself?" "I shall come to no harm." "You can maybe find a boarding-house?" "I shall not need one." "And there is your own home." "I shall not go there." "I think Robert might have told you of this sore strait." Then, in a sudden passion of anger, I cried out, "I think so, too. He treats me as if I was a doll or a dog. He tells me nothing. I have the cruelest part of every sorrow to bear--the part not sure. It is a shame! It is a great wrong! My heart is sick with anxiety that does no good. At the last, he has to tell. I cannot bear it!" "All the women have it to bear." "Then shame to the men who lay on them such a useless burden." "We have a saying that women's counsel is ill luck." "It is the want of it that is ill luck. I never saw that Huddersfield man but once, yet I told Robert to beware of him." "People say that you have been a gey, extravagant wife, Amelia." "People lie!" I answered hotly. "I have saved two hundred and eight pounds in eighteen months, out of the money given me for housekeeping expenses." "Then Robert has been extravagant, and given you too much money." "He gave me exactly what he gave you, for the same purpose. He told me so." "And you have saved two hundred and eight pounds! Well, well! Where is it?" "In my bank." She looked at me not unkindly, and I said, "Mother! Mother! If you and Jessy would have only directed me, I would gladly have obeyed your desires. If you would have only stood by me, no one would have seen any faults in my way of dressing, and doing things. Amelia Barr is no different from Amelia Huddleston, and under that name every one loved and praised me." "Well, well, married women are little thought of--except by the one man--and not always much thought of by him." "Try to like me, Mother. I could so easily love you, and I will do all as you wish it," and, as I spoke, I went to her side and lifted her hand. "Please God," she answered, "there is plenty of time to put wrong right. Will you give me a cup of tea now?" "Forgive me, I forgot." "That is just it," she answered. "You forget. You should have offered it to me, when I first came in." Then I did all I could to redeem the forgetting, and she said, "Take a cup yourself; it will do you good, and tomorrow send for John Forbes." "I do not trust John Forbes." "Neither do I," she answered quickly, "it is little he knows of the English law about any matter. What will you do then?" "Go to a Councillor, who never yet deceived me." "I understand, but I'm not sure if that is right, Amelia. Going to God about chairs and tables, and the like of such things is not at all respectful." "We are told to pray about our bread and clothing, because 'God knows we have need of such things.'" "Your own way, be it. Tell Robert I am willing to help--if needs be." "There will be no need, Mother." "You're a queer woman." She rose as she spoke, and said it would soon be dark, and she must hurry, for lots of drunken men and women would be on the streets seeing it was the New Year. Then I fastened her cloak and furs, and said, "Kiss me, Mother." A look of the uttermost discomfiture and confusion came into her face. She hesitated, and fingered her bonnet strings, but finally bent her head slightly, and allowed me to kiss her. Then suddenly I recollected that the family kiss was a thing practically unknown in Scotch households, and that Robert had more than once told me that he never remembered his mother kissing him, in all his life. But the momentary disconcertion passed, and I believed I had won a step in the old lady's favor, and I was glad of it, for she had some excellencies, and her faults were the faults of race, education, and life-long habit and experiences. Within an hour after her departure, my own dear mother came to me, and two days later, my daughter Mary was born, "a bonnie wee lassie, world-like, and wise-like," said the old nurse pleasantly. She kept her sixtieth birthday a week ago, and may God spare her to keep her eightieth as well, and as joyfully. After the birth of Mary, her father's affairs began to settle, and it was not necessary for him to travel so constantly between Glasgow and Huddersfield. And the furniture question gave me neither trouble nor anxiety. I took it to the Highest Court, and the Best Councillor known to man, and I never heard of it again. Robert did not speak of it to me, and I asked him no questions. There are times in life when it is wisest to let sleeping dogs lie, and I thought this subject was one of such occasions. About May Robert received his certificate of just and lawful bankruptcy, and was free to reopen his warehouse and recommence his business. But I could see it was hard and discouraging work. An American can hardly estimate how cruel an English bankruptcy is. On its business side, I could only form opinions from Robert's depression and remarks; but I could see, and feel, and hear on every hand, the social ostracism it entails. The kindest heart quickly drops the friend who has failed. The man is never forgiven by his family. Years cannot efface the stain, nor future success give back his former social position, or ever dispel the uncertainty of his business reputation. Now bankruptcy is not the unpardonable sin in the United States that it is--or was--in England and Scotland, and one of the things which struck me most forcibly, when I came to America, was the indifference with which men spoke of "being broke," or having failed here or there, or in this, or that line of business, taking misfortune as cheerily as good fortune, and beginning again and again until they at last succeeded. With small economies, small anxieties, and one man's ceaseless struggle against misfortune, the next year passed away. Hitherto, I had always felt a contempt for struggling men; I had told myself, that their opportunities were so many, there was no excuse for the strife. If one thing, or one place was unfavorable, they could go elsewhere; the whole world was a market-place for their hands, or their brains. But during this year I discovered my mistake. Robert was tied by invisible bonds, and he had not the strength--perhaps not the will--to burst them asunder. As for myself, I was busy with my house, and my child, my music, and books, my needle, and my correspondence with my home, and I could have been quite content with these sources of pleasure, if Robert had been in any measure satisfied and successful. But he could not hide from me the anxiety which was making his life a burden hard to bear. It was then the idea of exile, of a new country, new surroundings, and an entirely new effort, unhampered by the débris of an old failure, took possession of my mind; for this one year's dismaying results satisfied me that nothing but the most radical changes would be of any use. But I was daily expecting the birth of my second child, and I told myself that nothing could be done for another month. I was, however, mistaken. Robert came home one night in such evident distress, that I was sure it arose from some social slight, and I asked, "Whatever has vexed you so much today, Robert?" "Why, Milly," he said, "three things: My old Sunday school teacher, to whom I am much attached, passed me without a word, and then turned back and said angrily, 'Man Robert! I'm disappointed in you. I'm sair disappointed! I thought you were going to be a rich man, and a pillar o' the Kirk.' I said, 'It is not my fault, Deacon.' 'It is your fault,' he continued, 'whatna for, did you buy Alexander Hastie's business, if you didna ken how to run it? Hastie is now our member to Parliament, and you hae disgraced the whole city o' Glasgow, by letting a business so weel kent in his name, go to the dogs. I wonder me, what your good father would say to the disgrace you hae brought on his name, and I am sorry, _Dod_! I'm heart sorry for your poor mother.'" "O Robert! How cruel! How unjust!" "I cannot live down such prejudice, Milly. It is impossible. He had scarcely left me, when I saw Mrs. Semple coming towards me. She hesitated a moment, then went into a small jeweler's shop to avoid the meeting. This afternoon Mother came to my office, and we had some very hard words, about a piece of property that is solely and entirely my own." "Have you anything left, that is your own?" "This piece of property is. Once, when I had plenty of money, I helped Donald McLeod to save it, and when he died, three months ago, he left it to me." "Hold to it fast, Robert," I said. "I beg you not to touch it for anything." "Donald told me he had left it for an 'emergency,' and I am keeping it till that time arrives." "That time is now here, dear Robert. As soon as my trouble is past, let us go far away from Scotland, and begin a new life. You are not twenty-nine years old, and I am only twenty-two. Shall we give up our lives to a ceaseless, contemptible struggle, that brings us neither money nor respect? Somewhere in the world, there is peace and good fortune for us. We will go and find it." "Are you really willing to leave Scotland, Milly?" "I will go to the end of the earth with you, Robert." Then he leaped to his feet, and his face was shining, and he kissed me tenderly, "Where shall we go?" he asked. "Canada? India? Australia?" "What do you say to the United States?" I answered. "Tomorrow I will send to the library for books on all these countries. We will read and consider, and try to be ready to leave Scotland, about the middle of August." "At the middle of August? Why that date?" "Because, about any new movement, it is good to have some one point decided. That is a foundation. We are going to seek good fortune about the middle of August. Let us regard that date as positive, Robert. It is our first step." He was by this time in an enthusiasm of fresh hope, and we sat talking till nearly three in the morning, and, if any acquaintance met him that day, they must have thought "Robert Barr has had some good luck. He was like his old self today." Indeed the prospect of this new life brought back again the old cheerful Robert. Every day he came home with some fresh idea on the subject, or told me of something done to forward our plans. Among other incidental arrangements, he insisted on keeping our intention from the knowledge of his family. He feared his mother's influence and interference. John Blackie had been urging his release from any further care of the Barr estate, and Robert's name would be necessary to many papers in connection with this change, and unavoidable delays result. It also gave an air of romance to the flitting, which took it out of the rôle of ordinary emigration. And I will be truthful, and confess, that it pleased me to think of his mother's and sister's futile dismay, when they discovered we had escaped forever the shadows and petty humiliations of a conventional Scotch life. On the twenty-second of May, 1853, my daughter Eliza was born, a bright, beautiful girl, who certainly brought her soul with her--a girl who all her life has been the good genius of extremities--never quailing before any calamity, but always sure there was a road over the mountains of difficulty, which we could find, as soon as we reached them. And, I may add, she always found the road. I recovered rapidly, for I was fed daily on fresh hopes, and, in spite of the uncertainty surrounding these hopes, I was happy, for I believed in my dreams. Then there came a letter from Father, asking in his modest, unselfish way, for the return of Mother. It was enough to alarm us, for we knew well he had felt the necessity, though he voiced it with so little urgency; and, as this letter is the only scrap of my Father's writing that has survived the constant chances and changes of nearly half a century, I will transcribe it: MY DEAR AMELIA, I can assure you the very sight of your letter afforded us unspeakable delight. Yes, we do feel grateful to that Divine and attentive Providence, which has been with you the last few weeks. We may, and do, attribute much to means, but what are all means without His sanction, and His blessing? To Him be all the praise! I hope, my dear, if spared, you will evince your gratitude by a devotion of all to Him. Give yourself, give your dear little ones to Him. You know well what is meant by that. God bless you! God bless the little stranger! She has come into a cold world; still she has friends who love and pray for her. Kiss her for me. As to Mother, I am sure she has done all in her power, and she would do it so differently to any one else. I can assure you, at the time she left me, it was no small trial; but it was _for Amelia_, and only on this ground could I have been induced to make the sacrifice. Now, that you are so far improved, do not detain her. I fear another painful visitation. Think of Father. He has thought of Amelia. Give my love to dear Mother. The little girls are going to school, and send their love to you, and to dear Mr. Barr. Amelia, I am what I ever was to you, FATHER. O Father! Father! If, in the stress of my labors and sorrows, I have forgotten your lovely, patient, helpful life, forgive me this day. Let my tears wash away my fault, and be still to me, what you ever were, Father! * * * * * As soon as it was possible for me to do so, I faithfully read all I could read about Australia, India, Canada, and the United States, and very early came to the conclusion, that we must sail westward. I held in reserve a possible Canadian settlement, but I was sure that we must first go to New York. Australia, I had no hesitation in putting out of consideration; its climate, its strange natural conditions, and its doubtful early population, as well as its great distance from England, were definitely against it. But India to me was a land of romance. There were inconceivable possibilities in India. Anything wonderful could happen in those rich cities of the upper Ganges. The Huddleston ships had been early fond of Indian voyages, and Robert had several friends in Calcutta and Benares, who were making fortunes rapidly. We could not put India summarily out of our desires and calculations. My notes about it lay side by side with those of the United States, and for some time neither Robert nor I could honestly say "I prefer this or that, before the other." One night we had swiveled a great deal between New York and Calcutta as points of landing, Robert having had that day a letter from Andrew Blair, an old school friend, who was doing well in Delhi, and I went to sleep thinking that the children would require nothing in the way of an outfit but some white muslin. Then I dreamed a dream, and when I awakened from it I said softly, "Are you sleeping, Robert?" And he answered at once. "No. I heard you cry out in your sleep, and I was going to speak to you, if you cried again. What frightened you?" "I thought we were in Calcutta, and we stood alone on a silent street, knowing not where to go. The sky was black as pitch, the air hot and heavy, and red as blood, and a great cry, like a woman's cry, rang through it, and seemed to be taken up by the whole earth. Then a voice at my side said, 'Look!' and I saw that Calcutta was built entirely of great blocks of coal, and that, in the center of each block, there was a fierce fire burning. I must then have cried out, and awakened myself." For a few moments Robert did not speak, then he said in a hushed voice, "We cannot go to India. Blair told me in his letter that the whole country was restless, and the army mutinous, and that he felt a little uneasy. But that is such an old complaint, I did not heed it, and did not think it wise to trouble your decision by just a say-so." "Well, then, Robert," I said, "you got the word, both for you and yours, and, as you did not heed it, another messenger was sent. I wonder if putting our own judgment first of all, and not delivering the entire message, will be counted as answering 'No' to the heavenly command." "Don't say unpleasant things, Milly," was Robert's reply, and I was silent until he added, "We cannot go to India now, I suppose?" "I would not go, for the whole wide world." "Then it must be America." "Yes, somewhere in America." In a very positive voice, Robert said, "It must be Canada. I am not going to give up my English citizenship for anything." "That is right," I answered. "You can keep it anywhere. It is fine in you to guard your English citizenship. I have none to guard. It makes no difference to me where I live." "My citizenship is yours." "Oh, no! I do not exercise any of your citizenship rights, and they do not protect me." "I exercise them for you." "Well and good, but I am glad you do not eat, and drink, and sleep for me, and I would not like you to dream for me. You would not likely tell me the whole dream." "Now you are cross, Milly, and I will go to sleep." But I lay long awake, and felt anew, all through the silent hours, the horror and terror of that prophetic dream. For I need hardly remind my readers, that it was awfully verified in the unspeakable atrocities of the Sepoy rebellion, barely two years afterwards. And I do not believe Robert slept, but he could not endure allusions to the wrongs of women--a subject then beginning to find a voice here and there, among English women "who dared." CHAPTER X PASSENGERS FOR NEW YORK "The bud comes back to summer, And the blossom to the bee, But I'll win back--O never, To my ain countree! "But I am leal to heaven, Where soon I hope to be, And there I'll meet the loved, From my ain countree!" Events that are predestined require but little management. They manage themselves. They slip into place while we sleep, and suddenly we are aware that the thing we fear to attempt, is already accomplished. It was somewhat in this way, all our preparations for America were finished. We did not speak of our intentions to any one, neither did we try to conceal them, excepting in the case already mentioned. But somehow they went forward, and that with all the certainty of appointed things. A month after Mother left us, Robert brought home one day the tickets for our passage from Liverpool to New York, in the steamship _Atlantic_, then the finest boat sailing between the two ports. "You have now, Milly," he said, "nearly four weeks to prepare for our new life. We shall sail on the twentieth of August"; and his face was glad, and his voice full of pleasure. "And what of your preparations, Robert?" I asked. "They go well with me. I have today made an arrangement for the closing up of my business on the twenty-second of August. And that day Forbes takes possession. He will sell my stock, and pay all I owe, which, thank God, is not much! Mother and Jessy will be in Arran; we shall be on the Atlantic. I shall have all I love and all I possess with me, and I will cast these last miserable two years out of my memory forever." "But, Robert," I asked timidly, "have you money enough for such a change?" "Quite sufficient. Donald's legacy has turned out much better than I dared to hope. A syndicate has bought the land for building purposes. I expected three thousand pounds for it; they have paid me five thousand, and I have already transmitted it to the Bank of New York. Next," he continued, "I will sell this furniture, and we will take the proceeds with us." "But we must get rid of Kitty first," I answered. "If Kitty saw an article leave the house, she would write to your mother, and she, with David and Jessy, would be here by the next boat." "Listen!" he replied, with a confident smile. "On Monday, the fifteenth, you will tell Kitty that you and the children are going to Kendal. Let her help you pack your trunk, give her a sovereign, and bid her take a month's holiday. She will be glad enough to get away. On Tuesday morning let her go to the Kendal train with you, bid her good-bye there, and advise her to take the next train for Greenock, from which place she can easily get passage to Campbeltown. She will not hurry out of Greenock, if she has money, and it may be two weeks before she sees Mother." "I shall reach Kendal on Tuesday afternoon, and you, Robert, when?" "I will come for you on Thursday. On Friday we will go to Manchester, stay all night there, as you wish to see your sister, and early on Saturday morning take the train for Liverpool. The _Atlantic_ sails about four in the afternoon; do you understand?" "Yes, I understand what I am to do. What are your own plans?" "As soon as you have left on Tuesday morning, I will bring home the large packing cases already ordered. These I will fill with our personal belongings, which you must quietly place in your own wardrobe, and the drawers and presses in the spare room. The boxes are very large, and you need not deny yourself anything that is comfortable, or dear to you." "I know the boxes; I have seen them." "Impossible! They are not yet made." "I saw them last night. They were of rough, unpainted wood, and very large, and, as I looked, a man came in and soldered thin iron bands around them." "Upon my soul, Amelia, what do you mean!" "What I say. They were standing in this room." "You dreamed this?" "Yes. Then I saw you, and the children, and we were on a ship sailing up a wide river, and we passed an island with many drooping willow trees close by the water side, and southward there were the outlines of a great city before me, and I knew the city was New York." "It is no wonder you dream of New York. You think and read and talk of it so much. But the packing cases, and the man soldering on the thin iron bands! That puzzles me. I never told you anything about them." "No, you never told me, but Some One who knew all about them, showed them to me. After you have packed the boxes on Tuesday, what then?" "I shall go with them to Liverpool. A steamer leaving here on Tuesday night is in Liverpool Wednesday morning. A dray will take them to the _Atlantic's_ pier, and put them with her freight, after which duty done, I will start at once for Kendal. I may be there on Wednesday night, but allow something for detentions, and say some time Thursday." Robert's plans appeared to be well considered and not difficult to carry out, and I began that day to go through my girlhood's treasures, choosing some and leaving others. And, when Kitty was out marketing or walking with Mary I placed them ready for the big packing cases, that I knew were coming for them. Was I happy while thus busy? No. I knew that I was on the road appointed me to travel, but it was a new road, and a far distant one from the father and mother and sisters I loved so sincerely. Nor was I a woman who liked change and adventure. My strongest instincts were for home, and home pleasures, and the tearing to pieces of the beautiful home given me with so much love was a great trial. But to have shown this feeling might have saddened and discouraged Robert. In those days I was learning some of the hardest lessons wives have to become acquainted with, notably, to affect pleasure and satisfaction, when they are not pleased and satisfied; to hold up another's heart, while their own heart faints within them; to give so lavishly of their vitality, hope, and confidence that they themselves are left prostrate; and yet, to smilingly say, "It is only a little headache," and to make no complaint of their individual loves and losses, lest they should dash the courage or cool the enthusiasm of the one who, at all costs, must be encouraged and supported. For I did not forget that all Robert's energies at this time were required for one end and object, and that the smaller asides of individual feelings must not be allowed to interfere with that purpose. So I made no remark about the sale of my furniture. It was my contribution to our new life, and I resolved to give it cheerfully. Robert had told me I had four weeks, but, in reality, I had only three, for I was to leave on Tuesday, the sixteenth of August, for Kendal, and the fifteenth was to be spent in packing. But the three weeks felt too long. What I had to do, I did quickly; and then there was the weary waiting on others. Life became agitated and exigent, and the atmosphere of the house restless and expectant. Every room was full of _Presence_, evidently the wraiths of the departed were interested in what was going on; for, "All houses wherein men have lived and died Are haunted houses. Through the open doors The harmless phantoms on their errands glide, With feet that make no sound upon the floor." During the whole three weeks of preparation I was singularly prescient both by day and night, but only once did I mention this condition to Robert. I had lain down on my bed in the afternoon, weary with thought and feeling, and had fallen fast asleep. Then I heard a commotion in the house, the moving of furniture, the voices of men calling to each other, and, above all, I heard one strident voice of command, accompanied by a kind of stamp upon the floor. Presently my room door was opened, and a remarkable man entered. He was tall and rather stout, his face was large and white, his dress clerical, his whole manner intensely authoritative. He walked round my room, and stood a moment and looked at me. It was an inquisitive look, quite without interest or kindness. Then he began to give orders, and I awoke. To Robert I said that night, "I saw your father this afternoon," and I described the man who was directing the moving of the furniture; laying particular stress upon the stamp in his walk. Robert looked at me with amazement, then told me that the peculiarity in the walk was caused by his father having a false leg. "He received an injury to his knee while playing golf," he said, "and his walk with the artificial limb, was of the character you observed. But I never told you of it." "No, you never told me, Robert, but there are tiding bringers whom we do not summon. 'God also speaks to his children in dreams, and by the oracles that dwell in darkness.' We do not realize it, yet there is no doubt that our daily life is the care of angels, and the theme of their conversation. Are they not all ministering spirits, sent forth to minister to those who are the heirs of salvation?" "Then what of those who are not heirs of salvation?" "There are no such unfortunates. God is 'not willing that _any_ should perish, but that _all_ should come to repentance.' Once I heard my father quote that verse in the pulpit, and after a moment's pause he cried out, 'a great _all_ that,' and a very old man spoke out loudly, 'Glory be to God! A great _all_. It covers every soul.' Then Father quoted the words again, and there was a wonderful happiness, and the dull old chapel seemed to glow, and the faces of the people were lifted heavenward." And Robert called me a dear little Methodist, and drew me close to his side, and kissed me. "No wonder!" he continued, "my father felt no interest in you--but that was a strange dream, Milly." "Dreams are large possessions, Robert," I answered; "they are an expansion of life, an enlightenment, and a discipline. I thank God for my dream life; my daily life would be far poorer, if it wanted the second sight of dreams. The dreams I have had during this movement of ours have kept me serene and satisfied. They have shown me what is appointed, and things appointed come to pass." "In three weeks we shall see if your dreams come to pass." "Yes, but three weeks is a long time." Indeed I felt it to be almost a cruel lengthening of suspense; for I did not understand at the time I was learning one of the most difficult lessons the soul has to master--that of "waiting patiently for the Lord." It is easy to ask, but to wait patiently for the answer, is a far more difficult duty. However, when I had carefully arranged in the places indicated our household treasures of napery, clothing, silver, and so forth, I wished I could go to Kendal. But I saw Robert's face change as soon as I mentioned Kendal. "We made a plan for our movements, Milly," he said, "and I do not wish a single point altered. It might disarrange all I have been working for." Then I declared I was quite content, but I was not always content. In spite of my undoubted confidence in the wisdom of the change we were making, I had days of utter weariness. My life, with all its orderly habits and duties, seemed to be the same; but I knew that its foundation was destroyed; reading had ceased to interest me; I had no more sewing to do; my soul often sank back upon itself, and sometimes even retired from sympathy and affection. All have had such hours, and know what they mean. As for me, when this dark mental and spiritual inertia attacked me, and I could not pray, I just told God so, and waited until some blessed wind of Heaven unlocked the mood, which bound me like a chain. One afternoon, about a week before I was to go to Kendal, Robert's mother called, and the moment she entered the room, a look of amazement and anger came over her face. "Amelia!" she cried, "Amelia, what are you doing? Do stop that foolishness at once. It is fairly sinful, and nothing less." What I was doing, was spinning some half-crowns on the polished table for the amusement of Mary, who was sitting in her high chair and laughing with delight. I looked up at Mother, and explained how I had given Kitty a sovereign for some marketing, and she had brought the change in silver pieces, so I was just showing Mary how prettily the crowns and half-crowns could dance. "Don't you see that you are teaching the child, before she is two years old, that money is a _thing to play with_? And, what is more, suppose she puts one of those shilling bits in her mouth, and it gets into her throat; nothing could save her. And it would be your fault, and not God's will, at all." "Thank you, Mother," I said, as I rapidly gathered up the coins. "It was very thoughtless of me; I will never do the like again. Will you have a cup of tea, and will you stay all night?" "No," she answered, "I just came to see if Robert was at home. It is not possible to find him in his office lately, and I want a few words with him." "I have not seen him since early this morning," I said; and I ordered her tea, and tried to introduce a more pleasant conversation. But the incident of the coins mortified me, and I could see Mother anxiously glancing at them, as they lay on the chimney-piece; so I carried them to my desk, locked the desk, and put the key in my pocket. As I was doing this, I was thinking that it might be the last time I should see her, and was trying to find some homely, sympathetic subject, that would bring us, at least for this hour, closer together. But it was not a pleasant visit, and Robert was troubled and silent for a long time, after I told him about it. Then I was troubled, for I knew so little of Robert's family affairs, that I was like a woman walking in the dark any step might be a false one; any moment I might stumble. But often, I had heard my father say, "When you do not know what to do, then stand still." So I was still, and appeared to be puzzling over a new pattern of crochet work. For I was determined that Robert should take the initiative, and after a little while he did so. "Milly," he said, "I have been trying to discover what makes Mother and you always at swords' points. If you do not quarrel, you come so near it, that you might as well, perhaps better, do so. You do not quarrel with any one else, why cannot you two agree?" "The disagreement is probably behind, and beyond us, Robert," I answered. "We are not responsible for it. You have heard me speak of Ann Oddy?" "Yes." "Well, then, Ann would say, that your mother's angel and my angel did not agree. I think Mother's angel is probably a wise, stern spirit, who has made Mother look well after her own interests, and despise frivolities; and I am sure my angel is one easily entreated, and anxious to give me everything I want--when she can--but she cannot always manage it." Robert laughed and said, "Then I suppose your angel and mine are good friends." "Yes," I answered; "they both approved our marriage, and did all they could to forward it." "Suppose they had not approved it?" "Then your mother's angel would have had her way, and we should have been separated." "If you hold such opinions, Milly, you must also believe that angels still retain human feelings?" "Why not?" I answered. "They are not perfect. They are still going forward, even as we are." "Then they cannot be equal." "Far from it. Some are in authority, some under authority. Some are tidings bringers, others are invisible helpers of all kinds. Some minister to little children, others to men fainting in the van of a hard life, and many console the dying. I have heard it said that 'we come into the world alone, and we die alone.' We do neither. No, indeed!" "You little preacher! Where do you get such ideas?" asked Robert. "Ideas do not float about in the air, so then some intelligent being sends them to me. They are the fruits of some soul. A good message will always find a messenger." "Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth, Unseen, both when we wake and when we sleep." Every one knows that in times of great anxiety, conversation is sure to turn either on some trivial occurrence, or else on some speculative subject. It was so with Robert and myself. We did not talk more than was necessary about our own affairs; as long as they were in uncertainty and transition, they were at the mercy of contingencies, which we could neither alter nor hurry. A few words every evening informed me of any progress made and then I knew it was wise to turn the conversation upon some irrelevant subject, that would provoke argument. But joyful or sorrowful time goes by, and at last it was the fifteenth of August. I saw the dawn breaking, and I whispered to myself, "_Awake, Amelia! There is a charge for your shield today!_" and with this cheerful exhortation I rose. After breakfast, I called Kitty, and she helped me to pack the trunk that was to go with me, wherever my destiny led. Kitty thought Kendal was its limit, and she made a remark about the quantity of the children's clothing, and the small number and plainness of my own gowns. I made no explanation, but said, "Now, Kitty, look after your own things. You must be ready to leave the house with me by ten o'clock tomorrow morning. After my train has left, you can then take the carriage direct to the Greenock Station for your own journey." There was very little more for me to do, and the day threatened to be sixty hours long. So about noon I resolved to take a walk up Argyle Street, go through the Arcade to Buchanan, and get my luncheon at McLaren's. It was to be a kind of farewell walk over the well known pavements and I thought if I saw a pretty brooch or bracelet made of Scotch pebbles, I would buy it as a memorial of the happy days, I had spent in Glasgow. The unhappy ones, I was determined to forget. I went into a jeweler's on Buchanan Street, and turned over a lot of those queer ornaments made of various colored agates set in silver. They were all heavy and ungraceful, but I paid a pound for a pair of bracelets, and I wonder even today what made me do it. I have no love for what is called jewelry, it always looks barbaric to me, and this Scotch jewelry is neither pretty nor rare, nor had I ever before thought of buying it. We do queer things in those hours of anxious suspense, that can find no natural outlet or relief. As I came out of the jeweler's with my purchase in my hand, I met Mrs. McIntosh face to face. She smiled, and put out her hand, and I could have cried with pleasure: "Oh, how glad, how glad I am to see you!" I exclaimed. "Let us go into McLaren's, and have a hot pie and a cup of tea, and talk about old times." So we did, and I told her how I had fretted over their desertion, and how pleasantly I remembered the dances with both old and young Peter, and that I never, never, had such happy evenings in any other house in Glasgow. We laughed, talked, recalled this and that, and ate our pies and drank our tea to delightful memories, that neither of us had forgotten. More than thirty-five years after this happy lunch, I was in Glasgow again, and I had a call from Mrs. McIntosh's grandson, and an invitation from his family to come down to their seaside home to spend a few days with them. For an unavoidable reason I could not accept the invitation, but I was glad to think they had remembered me so long, because they were still young and fresh in my memory, and never will be old. My meeting with Mrs. McIntosh made me very happy, and the day got over better than I expected, although Robert was half an hour later than usual. Every wife knows what that unusual half-hour means. It is as long as half a dozen hours; it is filled with fears and shadows of fears, about accidents possible and impossible. For it is not the troubles we are fighting, that weary and depress us; it is the ills we fear, and that never come, that give us our worst hours--the ills that have no message for us, that are passing by our dwelling even while we wait for them. I doubt if there lives a man or a woman who cannot say, "Oh, the anxious hours I've spent, For ills that never came!" Indeed when Robert did come he was more cheerful than I expected, and after dinner he told me that he had sold the furniture just as it stood to the man who made it, adding, "he will not remove it until Monday, the twenty-second." I smiled faintly, but could not speak, and there was a little silence. Then Robert said, "Sing us a song, Milly." "I can not sing tonight, Robert." "Try 'The Kail Brose of Old Scotland.'" "No," I answered, "there is only one song that fits tonight--'Lochaber No More.'" "Sing it then." I shook my head, saying, "It's overwhelming sadness, would be intolerable. You must be happy, if you dare to sing 'Lochaber No More.' If you are not, its broken-hearted melody will haunt you for weeks." Then we were silent again, until I suddenly looked up, and found Robert regarding me with eyes so full of love and pity, that I dropped my crochet and covered my face with my hands. I could not bear it. He tenderly took my hands in his, and with kisses and affectionate words, told me that he was not insensible to the generous manner with which I had surrendered all his gifts to me. "Let the gifts go," I answered; "I have you." "My darling!" he said, "let us take a last walk through the rooms, and bid them farewell. We will fix every item in our memories, and I promise you an American home far more beautiful than this." I believed him. Without doubt he would keep his word. So I was comforted; and we went together into every room, recalling how we had decided on the creton and papering for one room in the Windermere woods, and for another, sitting on the grassy slope of Kendal Castle. There was some incident of our love, or home, connected with every picture, with every bronze, with every chair and table. We smiled and wept together. Yes, we both wept, and I am not ashamed of the fact. Of course it was intensely sentimental, but in that quality lay our salvation. If we could have gone through those rooms at this farewell hour, without tears and reminiscent smiles, ours would have been a hopeless case; for it is the men and women who are steeped in sentiment and religion, that _do_ things. They are the high-hearted and hopeful, they can face every emergency, and conquer every situation. It is the materialist and the atheist, who flinch and fail, and who never succeed, because they have lost the Great Companion who alone could give permanence and value to whatever they have done. The next morning we were up with the dawn, and after a leisurely breakfast reached the Caledonian Line in good time. Here we dismissed Kitty, and Robert stayed with me, until the train was ready to start. "You need not be anxious about your trunk, Milly," he said. "I will speak to the guard about it, and also about your dinner at Carlisle." Very soon I saw him talking to that official, as if they were old friends, and the two men came to the carriage door together. Then Robert bid me good-bye, and with a bright smile promised to see me in Kendal Wednesday or Thursday. The next moment the door was locked, and the comfortable English guard cry, "_All's Right!_" ran along the line until it reached the engineer, who answered it at once by starting the train. The journey was an easy and pleasant one. I was well cared for, the children were quiet and sleepy, and I found Mother and Alethia waiting for me. About this my last visit to my home, I shall say little. A multitude of words could not reach the heart of it, and indeed we were all less disposed to talk than usual. I was exceedingly anxious. I had a fear of Robert's mother, and while I was taking a walk the next day with Father, I told him a good deal about her. I thought he did not listen with his usual sympathy, and I asked "if he thought we had done wrong to come away without her knowledge?" "Was it your doing, Milly?" he asked. "Partly," I answered. "Yes, Father, it was mainly my doing." "I don't approve it, Milly," he said. "A mother is a sacred relation. It is a kind of sacrilege to wound her feelings. You would need good reasons to excuse it." "We had good reasons, Father. Ask Robert when he comes tomorrow." "Yes, I will." Then he gave me some personal advice, not necessary to write here, but which I hold in everlasting remembrance. That night when all the house was asleep, and I was sitting with Mother, I told her Father's opinion about our deceiving Robert's mother. She was quietly angry. "Do not mind what he said on that subject, Milly," she said. "Your father thinks a deal more of mothers than he does of wives. Ever since we were married, he has gone into mourning about his mother on certain days, and he wanted the whole house to mourn and fast with him. I would not hear of such nonsense. We none of us knew the woman. Ann Oddy flatly refused; she was well aware I would stand by her. As for you children, I told your father plainly, you would, if you lived, have plenty of live troubles to fret you without mourning for a dead one, you knew nothing about. But all the same he never forgets certain days--you remember?" "Yes, Mother, I remember very well." "I hope none of you will keep my birthday, or death day, in any such sorrowful way. Try to make happiness out of it, and if you can not, let it be forgotten." As we sat talking very softly at the open window of the dark room there was a knock at the door. I hoped it was Robert, and I waited breathlessly for his voice and step. But it was not Robert. "It is a man from The King's Arms. He has brought a letter. I think it is for you, Milly," said Mother. She was striking a light as she spoke, and I took the letter from her hand. "It is from Robert," I said. "He is at the King's Arms. He would not disturb us so late tonight, but he will be with us after breakfast tomorrow morning." "That was thoughtful and kind all round," answered Mother, and she continued, "we had better try to sleep, Milly. There are three hard days before you." Then she suddenly turned to me, and said in a little eager way, "O Milly, I do want to go to Liverpool with you! I do want to go so much! Do you think Father will spare me?" "Mother, dear Mother! He must spare you! I will ask him in the morning." In the morning Robert came in like sunshine, just as we were finishing breakfast, and in the pleasant stir of his advent, I asked Father for Mother's company to Liverpool. "We shall be off before noon, Saturday," I said, "and she can return to Manchester, stay with Jane over Sunday, and go to Kendal on Monday. Let her go with us, Father." Father was easily entreated, and then Mother was as excited as a little child. She wanted new strings to her best bonnet, fresh laces for her gray bombazine dress, and there was a button off her best gloves. So in these and kindred duties for the children, the day passed. We smiled and made believe we were pleasantly occupied, but Father knew, and I knew, it was the last day we should ever spend together. The heart-breaking pathos of those three words--_the last day_, lay underneath all our pleasant words and smiles. We were really dying to each other every hour of that last day. In after years when the fire of life has cooled down, we wonder why we felt so keenly, and how we endured it! Fortunately the strain was in a measure lifted early the next morning. We were to leave at nine o'clock and every one was busy dressing or breakfasting. When the carriage was at the door, and I had kissed my sisters, I looked around for Father. "He is in his room," said Alethia, and as she spoke, I heard him walking about. I went to him, and when he saw me enter, he knew the parting moment had come. He stood still and stretched out his arms, and I clung to him whispering "Father! My Father! I must go!" Tenderly he stooped and kissed me, saying, "Dear, my dear! My Milly! I know not where you are going, and Robert could not tell me. But this I know, wherever your lot may be cast, '_your bread shall be given, and your water sure_.'" Then Mother called us, and we went down together. Mother and the children were in the carriage. Robert was waiting for me. Without a word Father kissed us both, and the carriage went hurriedly away but I watched as far as I could, the white lifted head, and eager eyes of the dear soul I was never to see again in this world. He lived about nine years after our parting, and died as he wished to die--"on a Sabbath morning, when the bells are ringing for church." Perhaps he had some primitive idea of the glory of the Church Celestial, and some hope that he might serve in it. Only to be a doorkeeper in His House, would be heaven to his adoring love. "O Strong Soul, by what shore Tarriest thou now? In some far shining sphere, Conscious or not of the past, Still thou performest the Word Of the Spirit, in whom thou didst live." * * * * * We reached Manchester in the afternoon, and Robert went to see some old business friends to bid them good-bye, while Mother, I, and the children were thankful to lie down and sleep a little for we expected Jane to dinner, and I was anxious to have a pleasant evening with her. I had not seen her since her marriage, and I wondered what change it had made. She was the same quiet, authoritative woman I remembered so well, and it being a warm evening she was dressed in a lilac muslin, which was very becoming to her. Her plentiful pale brown hair was neatly arranged; I am sure there was not one hair out of its proper place. I was glad she was not changed; above all I relished the rather advisory manner of "eldest sister" which she still retained. I would have been disappointed if Jane had not found something to counsel, or censure, or warn me about. She looked into my face with the kindest blue eyes, and remarked, "You are still very pretty, Amelia, and quite young in appearance, too; almost too girlish for a married woman." I laughed a little and asked, "Did you expect marriage to make me ugly and old, Jane?" "I have known it to do so." "Not in your case, any more than in mine," I answered. "You are handsomer than I ever saw you." "Yes, I dare say that is so. I was worn out when I married. Poor Father's affliction is most trying on those who have to witness it, and assist him." "Alas!" I said, "Mother feels it much. She will not live long, unless she has some help." "Father will have no one but Mother near him. Men are selfish always, and particularly selfish when they are sick. Their wives have to be Providence to them. I pity you, Amelia." "What for, Jane?" "Of course it is to please your husband you are going to America. You never would have thought of such a piece of folly." "When I was six years old, I thought of going to India and China and many other places." "As a missionary. That makes all the difference. If I understood Mother, you and Mr. Barr are going to America, in order to make more money; leaving a Christian land, to live among pagans for a little money. I do not think that is a justifiable cause, Amelia." "But Jane, we are not going among pagans. The United States is a Christian country, and----" "Oh, I have read the missionary reports! In the big cities, like New York, I suppose the people are Christianized, but on what they call the frontier, I am told there are few churches. Will you go to the frontier?" "I think so." "Well, dear, do not lose your _assurance_. Among Indians, negroes, cowboys, and atheists of all kinds, hold fast your _assurance_. Let all see that you are a child of God." "You need not fear for me, Jane. I will be good, or at least try to be so." Then Mother and Robert came into the parlor together, and a servant followed them with dinner. Robert was in high spirits. He had spent three or four happy hours among old business friends. Jane looked at him with evident pleasure and he drew her out in her best vein, which was a kind of humorous criticism; she gave him personally its first clever shafts. We had a cheerful meal, and I wondered how Mother and I could laugh, when these were probably--and as time proved--our last hours together. Ah! I have learned since then, how often women laugh when care or poverty or cruel pain, fiercer than the Spartan fox, is gnawing their trembling, suffering hearts. I do not remember whether Jane's husband or any of her three children were with her. If they were, I have totally forgotten them, which under the circumstances is very likely. When it was time for her to go, I went with her to the dressing-room, and as she was tying her bonnet, she said approvingly, "I like your husband, Amelia, but I fear he is just a little 'gay.' Is he not?" "Yes," I answered, "he is a little gay, but I like it. Jane are you going to Liverpool to see us off. If so, you could bring Mother back with you." "I asked Mother about the time of sailing," she replied. "Mother said it would be about noon. That renders it impossible. I have so many duties at home, and I am a late riser. I think it is a great folly to make a parting that is a grief to both of us, hours longer than it need be." "You are right, Jane," I answered. "We will say good-bye here," and I kissed her fondly; for I loved her. We had a thousand memories in common, and she was inextricably bound up with my happy early life. I did not see her again for nearly forty years, and I have sometimes wished I had not seen her then; for the long slow years had brought her many sorrows, and had dealt hardly with the beautiful Jane of my youthful memories. But it was evident to me that she lived among things unseen, as well as things seen, and that the mystical appetite for religious service, which she possessed in her youth, had grown steadily. She valued things at their eternal, not their temporal worth. I was then in the first flush of my literary success, but I felt humbled before her. She was still my eldest sister. After Jane had gone, we talked the midnight away but I was very weary and fell fast asleep in my chair, Mother's low, soft monotone in my ears. For the last time, she had charmed me to sleep. I slept that night until the daylight woke me. Then there was a little hurry, and we only reached the _Atlantic_ half an hour before she sailed. We were all cheerful; Mother had set that tone for our last hours together. "I shall not shed a tear," she said. "Robert has promised me that you shall come to visit us in two years, and he always keeps his word." Like a little child she accepted a promise; she never thought of its being broken. She was delighted with our cabin, and delighted with the ship, and was talking comfortably to me about the quickness with which two years would pass, when there was the ringing of a bell and an officer politely reminded her, that the call was for those going on shore. She started to her feet with a little cry--a cry like that of a wounded animal--I shall never forget it, and then sobbed, "Milly! Milly! Two years, dear!" I could not speak. I cannot write it. They led her away. In a few moments we were parted forever in this world. I stumbled down to my cabin, and found Robert with the children. There were tears in his eyes, but none in mine. I bowed down heavily as one that mourneth for his mother, but I did not find tears till I was alone with God, and had my baby at my breast. For Fate or Force seemed closing around me, and but one way stood before me--the way this man I had chosen for my husband, should choose to go. He had already taken me from my father, my mother, my sisters, and my home; the friends of my youth, the land of my birth, what, and where next? Then I glanced at the babe in my arms, and she smiled at me, and with that love and hope counseled me, for in my soul I knew: "'Twould all be well, no need to care, Though how it would, and when, and where, I could not see, nor yet declare. In spite of dreams, in spite of thought, 'Tis not in vain, and not for naught, The good wind blows, the good ship goes, Though where it takes me, no one knows." Very soon Robert, who had carried Mary to the deck with him, returned and I was able to meet him with a smile. "It will be lunch time in ten minutes, Milly," he said. "I will not go to lunch today," I answered. "They will bring me something for Mary and myself, and after lunch we shall try to sleep. So, Robert, do not disturb us till four o'clock." However, after lunch I was far from sleep, though the children were good enough to let it take care of them. Then I sent for the stewardess and asked her to hire me a woman from among the steerage passengers, who could assist me in nursing and caring for them. She said, "That can be quickly done;" then she pointed out a siding for the sofa, which slipped easily into places prepared for it, and so made a safe cot for Mary to sleep in. In two or three hours I had a proper nurse, had put the cabin into comfortable order, and had made all other necessary arrangements for as regular a life as was possible on shipboard. Then I was tired, too tired to dress for dinner, but when the gloaming came I went to the deck with Robert. The blessed sea breeze, full of the potent magic savors of ozone and iodine, soon lifted up my weary body, and my soul and my flesh caught hope and courage, and I talked bravely with Robert of the new life before us. An hour later I saw a little company gathering near us, and as they turned their faces to the vanishing land, a clear vibrant voice full of pathos started Thomas Haynes Bayly's unforgettable song, "Isle of Beauty, Fare Thee Well." They sang it with wonderful feeling, and drew a silent crowd of listeners around them. And as they sang my sorrow seemed to escape on the sweet, sad melody, to vanish, to flutter away, and I went back to our cabin, saying softly as I went: "Land where all my loved ones dwell, Isle of Beauty, fare thee well!" I found Mary sleeping, but the baby was awake, and I thought it would then be well to carry out an intention I had cherished for some time. I sent away the nurse, and asked Robert to unfasten the small trunk which we had with us. As soon as this was done I said, "I want some night clothing out, Robert; will you hold _Lilly_ for a few minutes?" He looked at me inquiringly, and said, "_Lilly!_ Is it to be that? She was baptized Eliza." "I know," I answered, "but think a moment, Robert. That name would soon become a trial. It is too full of unhappy memories. The child might suffer in more ways than one from being linked with it, and your mother will never know." "Perhaps you are right. We might love her too much, or go to the other extreme. But why Lilly?" "Because Lilly is the Scotch abbreviation for both Elizabeth and Eliza. So she will retain her baptismal name." "Very well," he replied, "that is a good reason for Lilly." So from that hour to this, my second daughter has been called Lilly. CHAPTER XI FROM CHICAGO TO TEXAS "Our Happiness foundered by one evil Soul." * * * * * "God accomplishes that which is beyond expectation." "Whatever we gain through suffering is good; we have bought it; we have paid the price." One voyage across the ocean is very much like another, and the majority of my readers have doubtless taken several. Some may even remember the old steamship _Atlantic_, for I think she was making her regular trips when the war of 1860 began. The great difference between voyages rests not with the ships, but with the people you meet on them. We met good and evil fortune on the Atlantic, and Robert perversely chose the latter. The good fortune came in a Mr. and Mrs. Curtis of Boston. They had been to Geneva, Switzerland, to place their sons in some famous school there, and were returning home. It is fifty-nine years since we traveled together, but I have the clearest and pleasantest remembrance of them. Mr. Curtis and Robert were much together, and Mrs. Curtis sat a great deal with me and my children, helping me to take care of them, and telling me about Boston housekeeping and social life. I was charmed with her descriptions, and longed to settle in Boston beside her. Our evil fortune was represented by a man of about sixty years of age whose name I will not write. He had a military title and reputation, had been Governor of his state, was very rich, and had great political influence. He sat opposite to us at the dining-table, and I noticed him the first meal that I ate in the saloon. For he watched Robert with eyes like those the evil angels may look out with, and Robert appeared quite unconscious of the hatred in their glances. But I said nothing about my observations, for within the past few days I had discovered that there was one phase of life, in which my husband was a stranger to me. I had known him hitherto in a very narrow domestic and social circle. I saw him now among business men, lawyers, financiers, and men of the world and fashion. I was astonished. I wondered how I had dared to contradict and advise, and even snub a man whom every one appeared to court and admire; for I can truly say, he held the crowd in his open hand. For several days his enemy watched him, then I saw them frequently together and apparently on the most friendly terms. One afternoon when I was on deck and watching them in eager conversation, Mrs. Curtis sat down at my side. She looked at them, and then at me, and asked, "Do you like that acquaintanceship?" "No," I answered. "He is a bad man." "The Governor?" "Yes." "Perhaps you should not say that--you may not be right." "I am right," I replied. "I think he knows every sin that has a name." "I wish," she continued, "that Mr. Barr did not listen so eagerly to him. We were in hopes of your coming to Boston, but now that he has caught the Western fever, nothing will cure him but an experience of the West. Mr. Curtis thinks you are both unfit for Chicago." "I know we are." "Poor child!" she exclaimed. "I intended to have taken such good care of you." Then tears sprang to my eyes. I leaned my head against her breast, and if she had been an Englishwoman, she would have kissed me. It was, alas, quite true that Robert had fallen completely under the spell of his enemy. His lure had been the wonderful West, which Robert was now determined to visit, before we definitely settled, "We will go as far as Buffalo, Milly," he said to me, "see Niagara, and cross into Canada. We may find just what we like in Canada. If so, we shall still be under the British flag. If we do not like Canada, then we will go westward to Chicago." I pleaded for a trial of Boston, but Robert would not listen to me. "Every one on the ship says, 'Go west,'" he replied. "Let us see with our own eyes, and judge for ourselves." I was grieved and offended at the time, but I can understand now the influence primarily working against Boston. He longed for rest and travel and change. All his life he had been kept strictly to his lessons, and his business. He had never had a holiday, unless his mother and sister and her children were with him, and this going where he liked, seeing what he liked, doing what he liked, and resting whenever he wished to rest, possessed irresistible charms. He could not deny himself. He could not go to Boston and settle at once to business of some kind. I do not blame him. He had had no youth. He was naturally poetic and romantic, but "Even his childhood knew nothing better, Than bills of creditor and debtor----" while the modern spirit of travel and recreation was just beginning to make both age and youth restless and expectant. Yet at that time I could not reason thus, and the refusal of the kind offers made us by Mr. and Mrs. Curtis, appeared to me a wilful flinging away of good fortune. Also, I apprehended nothing but danger and sorrow from any step taken on the advice of a man, whom nothing could make me trust. Alas! an apprehended danger can not always be a defended one. I believed firmly that heaven chalked the line that brought us to New York. I saw no white road leading us to Chicago. I felt that in turning away from Boston we had lost opportunity's golden tide. On the fifth of September, A.D. 1853, we landed in New York. The _Atlantic's_ dock was on the East River, and we went to a large hotel some where in the lower part of the city. I think just below Trinity Church. Robert was like a boy out on a holiday. Everything delighted him. We rode about seeing what there was to see, and among other things the Crystal Palace; but as we had spent three weeks at the original in London in 1851, we were disappointed. However, I was greatly pleased with the dry goods stores and astonished to find dresses ready made, more so when I discovered I could slip comfortably into them, and that they looked as if they had been expressly made for me. It was always such a labor to have a dress made in England, that I laughed with delight at this sensible convenience, and bought many more than I needed. I was afraid I might never have such another opportunity. As I call to remembrance the events of those few days in New York of 1853, I smile and sigh over our ignorance and our happiness. For instance when driving about the city one day, I saw exposed for sale what appeared to me some wonderfully large plums. I asked Robert to buy some, and he did so but when I tasted them, I was astonished and disappointed. They did not taste like plums; they did not taste nice at all. In fact they were tomatoes, and I was about to throw them away when the Irishman who was driving us asked for them, saying, "They would be fine with his supper's beefsteak." Then I laughed, for I remembered _Mr. Pickwick_ and what came of his beefsteak and tomato sauce. But I had really never before seen a tomato, for in the North of England they could not ripen, and I think it is only under glass they ripen in the southern counties. At this day they are plentiful in all parts of England, but they are imported from the Channel Islands and the Continent. Such small blunders were common enough, and gave us much amusement; for seeing that I could not alter Robert's arrangements, I entered into all that interested him with that simplicity of heart, which accepts the inevitable and enjoys it. Besides, I was then only twenty-two years old, and twenty-two has hopeful eyes, and sees things on their best side. But in less than a week, we had exhausted the New York of 1853, and we went to Buffalo. I remember our ride up the banks of the Hudson very well, but no kind angel whispered me then, that I should, after thirty-five years had come and gone, make my home there. I was delighted with Buffalo, especially with the picturesque beauty of its frame residences. A house made of wood was a wonder to me, and their balconies and piazzas, their little towers and pinnacles, and their green outside blinds, made me long for such a home. But we only remained two days in Buffalo, and then went to Niagara, which disappointed me at first, though the roar of its waters remained in my ears for many days. The change into Canada was remarkable. I know that in England the crossing of the Tweed, makes you immediately sensible that you are in Scotland; but this sensation of passing rapidly from one country to another, was much stronger in stepping from the United States into Canada, and the Scottish atmosphere was intensified as soon as you entered a house or spoke to any one. "Well, Robert," I said, "we did not cross the Atlantic for this kind of thing. Let us go back to New York." "This kind of thing, seems very comfortable and respectable," answered Robert, a little piqued, "but as you do not like it, we will go on to Chicago. You know, Milly, we have come into an unknown world, and we must take it as we find it." It would be tedious to follow our wanderings from place to place for the next six weeks, but at last I rebelled against any more travel. "I am tired to death, Robert," I said. And he smiled and told me, that I never looked better. "And the children are too tired to sleep; Mary is crying to stop," I added. That was a thing to be looked after. For to an English and Scotch husband--and for anything I know to the contrary, to all kinds of husbands, the children are sacred objects, and of far greater importance than the wife. The children are his; they are flesh of his flesh, and blood of his blood. They represent his family, and if they were lost, there is no positive certainty of there being more. But wives are only relatives by marriage, and wives are certain and plentiful. At least I never saw a man, however old and ugly, that did not consider himself eligible for any woman he fancied. So when Robert heard the children were weary, he blamed himself--and me, at once. "We have been very thoughtless," he said. "We ought to have considered their youth. Of course they could not endure the travel we enjoyed. What do you think? Shall we stay in Chicago? It appears to me as likely a place as any I have seen." "Very well," I answered. "Only, dear Robert, let us have a home, one of those dear little wooden cottages. Four or five rooms to begin with, will do." He laughed at what he called my "primitive ideas" and went to look for a cottage, while we stayed in the Sherman House. But for two days he found nothing "fit to live in" and on the third day, said he was going to the North Side. "They tell me," he added, "it is the aristocratic part of the city, and I suppose rents will be high." "Well," I replied, "we have a saying in England, that we should choose a house beyond our means, dress up to our means, and live below our means." About noon he came home satisfied. He had found exactly what he liked--"a new house, just finished, the only brick house on the North Side." "Brick!" I exclaimed. "Yes. So comfortable. Mr. Wadsworth's big house is just a little nearer the lake, General Butterfield's directly opposite, and the Ogdens' not far away. You will like it, Milly." "Have you decided to rent it, Robert?" "I have rented it. After lunch, leave the children with Nora, and let us go to buy the furniture." In going through this house, I saw that it was large enough for a family of fourteen, and I proposed that we only furnish at present the rooms we were going to use. Reluctantly Robert agreed to this proposal, and reluctantly also, he submitted to my "primitive ideas" regarding the furnishing. But in two or three days, we had at last a comfortable home, though the little wood cottage had not materialized. Then Robert rented a small office on Lake Street, and advertised himself as an accountant, and soon appeared to be very busy and very happy. Every night when we were sitting together, he told me wonderful stories about the big fortunes made so rapidly in Chicago, and was so excited over them, I could not help an anxious look at his shining eyes and flushed face. Generally I discredited these reports, and answered, "There is no easy way to wealth, Robert. Don't believe in impossibilities." "They happen every day in Chicago," he would reply. "I wish that I had come here ten years ago. I should have been a rich man now." It was in this exaggerated spirit he met his new life, and there was no Mr. Curtis near to check his impetuosities. I wonder whether I was happy at this time. I have no doubt I appeared so, but I must have been very lonely. It was different with Robert. Every day he made fresh friends and he began to join societies for this and that purpose, and seemed to be in constant request. But it was Thanksgiving Day when I received my first caller, a Miss Dagget, the sister of the principal grocer in Chicago. She lived so close to me, that we could stand at our doors and converse without raising our voices. From her conversation, however, I learned that I had been thoroughly discussed. Mrs. Nicholson had thought from our taking such a large house, that I might be going to keep boarders, and Mrs. Ogden had said she had heard, I was very well educated, and what a charity to the North Side it would be, if I opened a school and saved the children, the danger of crossing the dreadful draw-bridge. I said nothing at the time about Mrs. Ogden's idea, but it took possession of me, and the result was that I opened a ladies' school on the second of January, 1854. I limited the number of pupils to four boarders, and twelve day scholars, and made the terms prohibitive to all but the class, whose patronage I desired. They were indeed the cause of much conversation, but those paying them were proud of the circumstance, and liked to make it known by their complaints. It was their privilege, and did me more good, than harm. A week before school opened, my number was complete, the spare rooms were furnished for the four boarders, and I had written to a New York Agency to send me a resident teacher who could speak French and teach music. My first pupil was one of the boarders, a Miss Sarah Morgan, a lovely affectionate girl about fifteen years old. I have not thought of her for many a year, but as soon as I began this sentence, she came smiling into my memory, and I see her childish face with its apple bloom complexion, and her fair brown hair, just as I saw her the first day she came to me. After the opening of my school there was no lack of callers and social invitations, but as it was impossible to accept all, I declined all; yet in many other ways, I received constant tokens of appreciation and good will. I began to be really happy. My children, my house, and my pupils kept every moment busy; and when the session closed early in June, the school had proved itself a financial success, and there were few women on the North Side more popular than myself. Of course I enjoyed it. Work was always a necessity to me and it is my belief, that when people work hard, they like to do it. One afternoon during the vacation a brother of one of my pupils passed, and asked me if I had "read today's paper;" I said, "I have not;" and he replied, "Then I will leave you mine." After he had gone, I opened it without interest, but instantly saw Robert's name in large type. It was above an account of a Know Nothing meeting; he had been speaking against the society, and the man I feared, in favor of it. The speeches did not concern me, it was the fact that this man was in Chicago, and associated with Robert, that filled my whole consciousness. I looked backward a few weeks, put this and that together, and was then sure he had been in Chicago a long time. Robert's silence troubled my very soul. Confused intuitions, obscure presentiments, took possession of me. My mind reached backward and forward, and began to foresee and foretell, and I had a cold shudder at my own thoughts. Then I went into the house, for my anxiety usually runs into motion. If I sit still and bear it, I have become stupefied, while motion calls up whatever comfort or strength I can lay hold of. But during the last busy half-year, I had lost something of my general spiritual aptitude, at least the stream of that life ran deeper and darker, and I could remember nothing that had any message for me. For I had not then read, or I should not have forgotten John Milton's fine advice against an unhappy looking forward to doubtful or questionable misfortunes: "Be not o'er exquisite To cast the fashion of uncertain evils, For grant they be so, while they rest unknown, Why need a man forestall his day of grief, And run to meet what he would most avoid?" I said nothing to Robert until after supper, then when he was placidly smoking, I told him what I had read. Was it true, I asked. "Yes, Milly, it was true," he replied. "Then that man is here? In Chicago?" "Yes." "Has he been here long, Robert?" "About three months." "And you never told me?" "You hate him so bitterly. Why should I annoy you by speaking of him?" "But, Robert, if talking about him, was also talking about yourself?" "I did not say it was." "Have you anything to do with him? Tell me truly, Robert." "Yes, I have unavoidably found myself compelled to have a great deal to do with him." "How?" I persisted. "You have read 'how' in one way, Milly. He himself asked me to answer his speech. He thought that I, being an alien, would make a proper opponent. I am a fair speaker, and I think I have learned a little about American politics." "Robert!" I said, "you have no more knowledge of American politics, than a Hindoo has of skating." He did not contradict me; he never did that, but he changed the conversation, and I had hard work to keep my temper under control. Perhaps I did not succeed very well; for when he bid me good night he said, "Milly, we will not be cross about nothing. I do not interfere with your scholars, and you must give me the same freedom. I have to transact business with men I do not personally like, and the man you hate so unnecessarily, has never done me any harm." "Robert!" I answered, "listen to me this once, and I will say no more. Remember what Peter Grey told you. He said, 'I have escaped from him, as a bird from the fowler'--furthermore, that he hated young men, and found his pleasure in their destruction--that he stalked them as a Highland Chief stalks stags for his amusement. Such a man must either be insane, or have a fiendish disposition. Are you going to be his next victim?" "My dear Milly," he answered, "you let your imaginations and superstitions rule you too much. I have often heard you say, that we only meet the people in this world, we are meant to meet." Then he kissed me, and I felt that I had done more harm than good. I had promised not to speak on this subject again, so I had virtually released him from any similar confidence. In the dark I went over and over our conversation, and wrung my hands miserably at the mistake I had made. Yet perhaps it was a fatality. Perhaps I was too imaginative and superstitious. Well then, there was nothing to be had, and nothing to be saved by interfering with destiny. I tried to dismiss the subject, and to take my life day by day and be happy. In September the school opened with a full roll, and the session was a remarkably pleasant one. On the following Christmas Day I had a third daughter whom we called Edith. After this event, all went well until the extreme heat compelled the closing of the school a few days before the usual time. Both I and my children felt it severely and Edith was very ill. She never quite recovered, but slowly withered away like a plucked flower. In August a terrible fear came into my heart, and on August the twentieth, while my dear mother was watching every mail for some word of my promised visit, I was watching my dying daughter. But much as I suffered, Robert suffered more. He was devotedly attached to this child, for she showed from her earliest consciousness a singular love for him. She was never quite happy but in his arms. She wept whenever he left her. How ever sick or sleepy she was if he entered the room she entreated him with smiles and little happy cries to take her in his arms; and when all was nearly over, at the last moment, she opened her eyes, looked at him, and with a smile passed away forever. We were broken-hearted. I know not how I endured the next few days. It was a new sorrow. I would hear of no comfort. Robert bore his grief trustfully and manfully, but I would not listen to anything he could say. I could not pray. I could only think of the little soul struggling through the nameless woe with the angel of the river, and of the multitude of little children at the same hour passing with her, "... as a stream across the stream, Or as visions across a dream, For as clouds of doves to their windows fly, The clouds of souls unto God flit by." She was such a tender little soul, if she stumbled in the river who would care for her? Numberless mothers must have had such fears, and the sweetest and tenderest of singers, answered them a few years ago: "Day and night Christ standeth, Scanning each soul as it landeth; Over the floods He bendeth, With a face that hath once been dead. * * * * * "And when the children come To pass through the dreary River, Christ stretcheth forth His hand, A gentle piercèd hand, And draws them safe to Land." To those who know nothing of this loss, my grief may seem unreasonable; but the fathers and mothers who have turned away from an open grave, blind with tears, and with heart and flesh failing them, _they_ will understand. Yet I had not been left without intelligence of the coming sorrow. Three nights before her death, at the midnight, as I lay thinking with the child asleep in my arms, the warning notice came. I knew then, that some of my family were called, and my thoughts went at once to my father. I either did not, or would not associate it with my child, until the symptoms of her dissolution were at hand. If it was an inimical Presence that predicted such relentless, inexorable doom, who would carry my little child safe through the river of death, and up to the celestial city? And as I mused on these things, a sweet Spanish tradition read years before came into my memory--that an angel sat outside the gate of heaven with shoes for the barefooted babies, who came there unshod--and I remembered that Edith had been laid to rest unshod, and had a passionate fit of weeping. But comfort was at hand. The thought of the _gate of heaven_ made me remember that heaven had twelve gates, and that they were _always open_. So then, when God took from us our beloved, He did not shut them up in the heavenly city. Its twelve gates stand open, and the angels ascend and descend; and go in and out on their heavenly messages. Jacob saw them; weeping mothers and good and suffering souls have seen them. No doubt, the child would be safely carried home. And I blessed God for the smile with which she went. Surely "The Shepherd from His Fold, Had smiled and drawn her unto Him." It was this thought which enabled me to dry my eyes, and to set my hands to the duty they had to perform. For the school was to meet late in September, and I had not done anything, as yet, towards the welfare of the next session. Yet I knew that if it was to be successful, I must set the key-note of enthusiasm and delight in the work, or all would be done with the left hand only; knew that if I went into the school room alert, and smiling, and with the air of a teacher expecting great things, I would have cheerful, busy, ardent girls around me; while if I showed depression and indifference, my attitude would have the same effect upon their spirits and ardor, that the putting down of the soft pedal has on the tones of a piano. For it is not what a teacher does, it is what _she makes her scholars do_, that is of lasting value. Knowing these things well, because taught by experience, I tried to give myself to my duties with all my heart, and "So nigh is grandeur to our dust, So near is God to man, When Duty whispers low, '_Thou must_,' The Soul replies, '_I can_.'" The school opened well, so well, that the proprietor of the house we rented, asked me if I would like him to build a larger house with suitable school room attached. And this question revealed to me my innermost and as yet unacknowledged feeling--_that we should not remain much longer in Chicago_. I told myself that the climate was too cruel, the summer heat and the winter cold were alike dangerous. Croup lurked in the nursery all the time; I never went to bed without its remedies at hand; and again the school had unavoidably out-stripped its limits. At present it was too large; its demands exhausted even my young, fresh faculties, and physical strength. If I increased it, I should require more room and more assistance. I told myself these were my reasons for desiring a change, but down in my soul I knew they were only the reasons I should assign to the world at large--the deep, underlying motive beyond all others, and above all others, was Robert's evident and constant anxiety. He came home every night mentally exhausted. It was not his grief for Edith's loss; no, he sought me in that trouble, and we comforted each other. It was no God-sent trouble of any kind, or he would have done the same thing and I thought, and feared, but knew nothing certain. One day about the middle of November, he returned home in such evident distress, that I could no longer keep silence. "Are you ill, dear Robert?" I asked. "No, Milly," he replied. "I am as well as a man can be, who is worried to death nearly." He was lying on the sofa, and I went close to him, and with kisses and sweet words begged to share his worry. "Is it business?" I asked. "Yes, and no. I could manage the business end, if it was not for that man. You know who I mean?" "Yes, I know. What is the matter now? Tell me, dear." "I must. You will have to know, for in that quarter it is now kill, or be killed. He has made life too intolerable--and I struck him today. He promised me full payment, and he is able to keep his promise." "Then you must go away. He provoked that blow, _because his revenge is ready_. You must go at once--tonight--do not wait for the morning." "I have no money. I cannot go. I will not be driven away by him." "You do not want that creature to spill your life in the dust of Chicago! You do not want to commit murder! That part of the subject is settled. Where then will you go? You must have thought of this necessity as certain." "I have. I will say I am going to Kansas City, and go a little way in that direction--then cross to a line by which I can reach Cairo, and at Cairo take a boat down the Mississippi to some southern town. There I will wait for you, and we will go forward to Texas." "Wait at Memphis," I said. "Why Memphis?" "I do not know, Robert. The word came inadvertently to my lips. It is therefore a word from Intelligence beyond mine. Say Memphis, Robert." "Very well." "Go tomorrow night," I urged, "at the latest." "I will try. I must see Peter Grey in the morning, and leave my affairs with him." "Do you trust him?" "Not much. As for money----" "I have one thousand dollars saved, Robert. Take half of it. With the rest I will close up the house and school affairs, and come to you. Be ready for Texas when I come." "God be thanked for you, Milly! You have given me a new life!" he said lovingly. We talked the matter over in every light, found out the best trains, and I promised to have a small valise packed for him. He was to come home to get it and the five hundred dollars at six in the evening. All day I went about like a woman in a dream. When the clock struck six, every stroke was on my heart. Then I waited for the turn of the key in the lock, and the sound of footsteps. All was strangely silent. I was sick with fear. Seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven o'clock struck, but Robert did not come--did not even send any message. I could wait no longer. Something must be done, but what? Whom must I go to now, that it was near midnight? My own household was fast asleep. Peter Grey was not now at his office. I did not know where he lived. There were no telephones in those days. I watched and watched for a policeman, but none came to this quiet corner of the North Side; and I could not leave a house full of girls, and my own children alone. I slept none all night. I was on the alert for any call that might come. It was bitterly cold. I went down stairs and brought up coal, and sitting down by the fire, suddenly found my dress, which was of silk, burning. I put the fire out, and then saw it was six o'clock. The servants began to move about; I went to my room. Oh, if the daylight would come! And I had to go to the breakfast table, and give the orders for the day's work. I do not know how I did it. I was dressing to go to Peter Grey's office when he called. The thing that I feared had come to me. Robert was in the power of his enemy, and there followed an interval of ten days of supreme agony and suspense; then Robert was triumphantly justified in the sight of all men. But I will not, can not, enter into details. The men are both dead--dying almost at the same moment, though Robert was in Texas, and the other one in a far northwestern state; but I have no doubt whatever, that Robert's soul in passing called his soul, for he told him he would do so. I will go into no details of this tragedy, for there is no good to be gained by compelling myself to live over again those terrible ten days and nights. Time cancels, and I have forgiven. But if anything could make me do this thing, it would be solely and entirely, that I might glorify the wonderful way, in which the Great and Holy One wrought out our salvation, and that by means so insignificant, that even the hatred of hell had overlooked them. "We were brought low, and He helped us." He raised up also a host of unknown friends, and the way that had seemed impossible was made clear and easy. I did things at that time that appear incredible to me now, and all I did prospered. In those days I did not think of tears, but it was then I learned to pray, to take heaven by assault, to press forward and upward, bent on prevailing. Such prayer is the gift of God, and when He gives it, He gives all it asks with it. This was one of those chasms of life, for which we must have wings--the wings of prayer. The day after our victory was Thanksgiving Day. The scholars had all gone home, and Robert and I were sitting still and almost speechless in our parlor with the children playing quietly beside us. We were both weary, and looked very much like two strong swimmers who had just--and only just--escaped the treacherous under-current carrying them to destruction. I was hardly able to open my eyes, and too tired to lift the hands that hung by my side. Robert was more restless. Finally he rose and walked about, saying softly, and in a kind of rapture, "A wonderful Thanksgiving! We won a great victory, Milly--by God's help!" "Yes, God won it for us. A great victory, Robert, but after a victory, the new situation will bring the new struggle. We must be ready for it. What will you do now?" "We must remain here for the present." Just as he said these words, his assumed friend Peter Grey entered. He had come to congratulate Robert in the first instance, but when he had spoken of the enthusiastic partizanship of every one, he asked, "How soon can you get away, Robert, for your life is not worth a cent here." "I have made up my mind to stay here, Grey." "Let me tell you something--in fact, I came here specially to tell you; better get away tonight. Tomorrow there will be an attempt to arrest you for debt." "Debt?" "Yes, if that does not work, you will go out some day, and never come back." "I will go armed." "A pistol will not help you. Some rough in the crush of the North River Bridge, will push you into the black Illinois River, and you will not be seen again till the ice breaks up. Then it will be an accident. Such accidents happen too frequently to be all accidents, and there are plenty of men--among our low aliens, who would give you 'the push' for a dollar. If you stay here, you must not leave the house." Grey only voiced my own fears, and I seconded his advice as urgently as I could. Robert was unusually calm and answered, "It may be as you say, Grey, and I will go tomorrow night." "West, I suppose?" "I think of Kansas City." "That is a good place." When he went away, I looked steadily at Robert and asked, "Will you wait until tomorrow?" "No, love, I will go tonight. There will be no crush on the bridge tonight. It will be as empty as it is on Sunday." "Why did you tell him tomorrow?" "It is a case of life and death. I will trust no one." "Oh!" "He is a black Highland Celt. He would sell his brother for a bawbee. I believe he is a spy for my enemies. Take care of him--talk as you do _not_ mean before him." Then we went upstairs together, and I repacked his valise, and showed him the one thousand dollars I had saved. "I call it my emergency fund," I said, and I counted out five hundred dollars. He quietly pushed four hundred dollars back to me. "One hundred is sufficient for me," he said. "It will take me to Memphis, and there I shall find work and friends." It was then five o'clock, and I had tea brought to the parlor fireside, and saw that Robert had a good meal. There was no necessity for hurrying it, and without tears, and with sad little efforts to be hopeful and cheerful, we ate what might be our last meal together. As we finished it, the children came in to say good night and I turned away until that loving ceremony was over. Then I brought him his hat and coat, and we were both silent as he put them on. Indeed there was no room for words. All had been said. And equally it was no time for tears. We looked at each other and parted. Until his strong, swift steps were no longer audible on the wooden pavements, I stood at the open door. When I could neither see nor hear him, I went in, called a servant, and had the children's cots removed to my room and when the fire had been rebuilt, and plenty of wood brought, I locked myself in. That night I went to bed without prayer. I only told God, as I undressed, that I was too tired and too sorrowful. And God knew, knew all about it, and gave me the sweetest night's sleep I ever remember. For while I had sunk even below the tide of dreams, some power removed all the miserable débris of the late calamity, swept away seemingly insurmountable obstacles, and made the way before me clear and straight. When I opened my eyes, the old cheerful morning call of my girlhood came pealing through my memory, "_Awake, Amelia! There is a charge for thy shield today!_" And I knew instantly that all my old fearlessness had come back to me. In that deep tide of unconscious sleep I had renewed myself. I looked young and cheerful, and felt able to manage all I had to do. The first thing was to write to every pupil, thank them for their sympathy and support, and bid them a final farewell. It was not likely I should meet any of them again, and I never have; though from time to time in later years, I have had many refreshing words from dear old ladies, once my pupils. I wrote to each girl and enclosed a bill for the sum due me for two months' teaching et cetera. I had small hopes of these bills being honored in time for me to receive them, but I was pleasantly surprised to find them, with but one exception, immediately and generously answered. Five out of the number sent me the price of the whole session. Three offered pecuniary assistance, if I needed it, and every remittance was accompanied by affectionate wishes and remembrances. The one letter of refusal, ran as nearly as I can remember thus: MISSISS BARR, As you have not kept your bargains about your teaching, I shall not keep my bargains about paying for same. The things to be taken, and the things to be left, was my next consideration, and I went out and bought two large trunks for the household and personal belongings, that were to go with us to Texas. My great perplexity was to get something small enough for one person to carry, and yet large enough to hold such clothing for myself and children as would be necessary while traveling. The miraculous contrivances for women's comfort in such circumstances, common enough today, were then unknown; and I found myself left to a choice between carpet bags, tin band boxes, and small trunks. Considering that I would in any case be obliged to hire a man to carry either bag, box or trunk, I chose the latter, buying also a small bag I could hang over my arm, to carry medicines, comb and brush, and such trifles as it might be necessary to reach quickly, or to use frequently. Then I went through the house, room by room, selecting what was worth while, leaving everything not likely to be of practical value in the making of a new home. Many a heartache this task gave me; and after the trunks had been packed, I pushed into odd corners all kinds of pretty mementoes; one I specially remember--a tortoise shell box, mounted and trimmed elaborately with silver. It had been given me by my bridesmaid, and she was now dead. Somehow, I could not let her gift go into the hands of strangers. When the packing was finished, I began to look for a letter from Robert. It came long before I expected it, for he had found when he reached Cairo, that there was no boat going South for two days, and so had taken a train for Memphis. We had not thought of this contingency, but I was glad of it, for I immediately dispatched the two large trunks to Memphis by train, notifying Robert to look out for their arrival. In his letter, a very cheerful hopeful letter, he said that he was delighted with Memphis, and was busy opening a new set of books for the great cotton house of Calvin Fackler and Company. I was now happy and busy, but there was much yet to be done; much that was very difficult and hard for me to face. One thing was the little chest of silver. It would be out of all place in our new home, and the money it would bring more useful. I had also some jewelry I should hardly care to wear on the frontier. It also could be turned into money. I did not care to ask Peter Grey, or any one I knew to sell these things for me. So I wrote to the best jeweler and silversmith in Chicago, told him what I had for sale, and asked him to come and see the goods. He answered my letter in person, looked at the silver and made me an offer which I accepted. Then he asked for the jewelry, and I showed him what I possessed. It was beautiful, but not very valuable, the best pieces being a set of white cameos, necklace, bracelets, and brooch. Robert gave them to me the day before our marriage, and I had to bite my under lip as I laid them beside the silver. I had not worn them a dozen times, and as jewelry I did not care for them, yet--well, it was only sentiment, gold would be better. All my pretty trifles of rings and brooches and bracelets went without much regret. I reserved nothing but the diamond hoop guarding my wedding ring, and those Scotch agate bracelets, which I considered valueless and threw into a corner of my trunk. That was the end of these things for me. I wonder who wears the white cameos today, and I hope the silver brightens the family table of some happy and prosperous home. This was the hardest duty I had to do; after it, all went easily to its appointed end. I was afraid I should have to tolerate a public auction of my furniture, but the house was suddenly rented, and the new comers were glad to buy all I wished to sell, and to settle at once in a home unknowingly prepared for them. I was by this time nearly ready to shake the dust of Chicago from my feet, and I gave place to the new tenants cheerfully and went to the Richmond House for a couple of days. It was on Christmas Day, 1856, that I began my new exodus, a bitterly cold gray day. The train left at two o'clock, and the streets were quiet and almost deserted, save for a few pedestrians hurrying to their homes or friends. My thoughts were full of the child I was leaving behind me in that desolate, sandy place of graves, outside the city, where I had suffered and lost so much. Travel was travail then. There were no Pullman cars, and few conveniences, and even something to eat was not always to be counted on for long distances. But I was young and full of life and spirit, and everybody was eager to help me. The first night I got the porter to bring me pillows and I laid my children on the sofa at the end of the car, and then sat down opposite to watch them. I could hardly keep my eyes open; indeed I think I was dropping asleep, when a kindly-looking man said, "Let me watch your children. I am used to waking all night, and sleeping all day. I will take good care of them." So I left them in his care, and slept as soundly as the children did. All the way to Cairo he looked after food, and fresh food, and fresh milk, and anything needed for our comfort. I do not remember how long we were in reaching Cairo. I think two days and two nights, but it might be nearly three days, for it was dusk when we came to the place. At that time it was not much of a place, and Dickens' description of it, under the name of _Eden_ in "Martin Chuzzlewit" was not, I dare say, much, if in any way, an exaggeration. It stood at the junction of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers down in the mud of their overflowing waters. My friend looked troubled as we approached the place. "You have a hard bit to get over here," he said. "I will help you as far as possible, but we must hire a couple of negroes to help us." There were plenty of negroes loafing about the little station, and he called a big black man and said, "Uncle, give this lady your arm, and be sure to keep her on her feet." Another negro was called to carry the trunk. Then I asked anxiously, "The children?" "I will take care of the children," he said; "now follow me." It was the hardest feat I ever performed. The road was down a steep hill, ankle deep in liquid mud of the stickiest description. The steamer lay at the foot of this hill, and the flaming pine knot lights, the shouts of the negro stevedores, and the swearing, quarreling teamsters, the screams of men and women fast in the mud, and the escaping steam and ominous ringing of a bell, were but items in the hellish confusion. Almost fainting, and wanting one shoe, I reached the boat at last, and sat down with a feeling of slipping away. But the children were all right, and the trunk was there, too, and the man who had helped me so bravely and kindly smiled, and said, "Now you will be comfortable, and I must go, or I shall miss my train." I have always had a fear that I thanked him very badly, but so good a man would forgive me for being frightened and unable to find the best words. I never asked his name, and I do not remember that he asked mine, but if we meet in any other life, I shall know him by the kindness in his eyes, and the gentleness of his voice and manner. In a few minutes the purser gave me a nice roomy cabin, and a kind helpful old negro woman took me and the children to its comfortable seclusion. She knew just what I needed, and just what to do for me; and after I had put on clean clothing, she brought us a delicious dinner in our cabin. It was one of the dinners I remember in my life. I think I never tasted food so delicately and tastefully cooked, and the children thought so with me. We ate and laughed and talked about the journey, until we were satisfied and sleepy; then I just whispered the last verse of the fourth Psalm, and lay down and slept until bright sunshine was flooding every corner of our little chamber. I was thoroughly refreshed and arose with all the vivid senses of a new life. The children also rose full of excitement and expectation, and after I had dressed them prettily, we went to the saloon and had a wonderful breakfast, and then to the deck of the steamer. One of the dreams of my childhood had come true. I was afloat on the Mississippi, "The Father of Waters," as I was politely informed at least half-a-dozen times within the first hour of my voyage. But what a misnomer! Rolling on amid virgin forests, and young cities just emerging from primeval mud, I silently wondered what such venerable streams as the Euphrates and Scamander would say to this assumption of paternity. Of the Mississippi River itself, I brought away no idea except a dream of interminable woods, clothed in solemn gray moss, scrambling cities perched on red or yellow bluffs, and miles of flat dreary land baking in the blazing sunshine. I was, however, repeatedly assured that the land was amazingly fertile, and my faith being naturally strong, I believed it in spite of appearances. But if nature was monotonous and uninteresting, I was surrounded by humanity offering abundance of material for delightful speculation. I never before saw such handsome, courtly men, such lovely, languorous, beautifully dressed women. I never before saw women treated as if they were angels and children as if they were cherubims, and what could I think of men who appeared to serve every woman upon their knees. It was not only the young and beautiful who were thus adored. There were several aged women present, and they received the same attentions, affectionately mingled with a respect that was almost veneration. It bewildered me. I longed for all the Scotchmen and Englishmen I ever knew to be on the Mississippi with me. I took great pains when I wrote my next letter home to enlarge on this peculiarity of Southern gentlemen, and to give it all the praise it merited. The journey lasted more than a week I think, but in its pleasant monotony I have forgotten the exact number of days. We reached Memphis during the night and cast anchor in the river, landing early in the morning. Robert was watching and waiting for us, and looking younger and better than I had seen him for a long time; as it was a charming morning, we walked with him to our new home, a little cottage pretty and comfortable, which he had rented furnished from a couple who were going to New York for four months. Memphis seemed familiar to me. Surely I must have dreamed of that brick city, and of those large white houses set in such roomy gardens, even then beautiful with snowdrops and many colored crocus flowers. But the thing that perplexed my memory was the great number of peacocks. They seemed everywhere present--perching in every big tree, trailing their resplendent feathers over the lawns, and spreading them out by the big gates open to the highway, as if to arouse the envy and admiration of the featherless creatures passing. Where had I seen this kind of exhibition before? Never in England, never in Scotland, never in Chicago. Well, then, I must have dreamed it. We did not intend to remain in Memphis, and I was quite pleased with the furnished cottage for a resting place. For I needed rest of body, mind, and feeling, and it was a luxury to lie in the sweet warm air, and be conscious of a daily renewing of flesh and spirit. I was happy to see Robert so happy and free of care, so satisfied with the work he was doing, so at one with Calvin Fackler, his employer. And as the spring came, Memphis grew more and more lovely; it was a city of flowers and blossoming shrubs, swaying willow trees, and gorgeous peacocks. The inhabitants darkly handsome, gentle in manner, and never in a hurry, seemed born for such a soft luxurious home. Only one dark spot was in this charming city, and Robert strictly charged me not to approach it. Of course I promised to obey him, and of course as soon as I had done so, I began to look for some excuse to enable me to break my promise. Every time I passed that forbidden street the desire to go through it became stronger, and finally I began to find pretexts for passing it, when I had no occasion to do so. One day as I sauntered by the forbidden place, I saw two women go down it; instantly I resolved to follow them, for they appeared to be of the highest respectability. I had not gone far, before I understood why the restriction had been laid on me. The forbidden street led directly into a kind of dull, open place, surrounded by small dark houses. There was a slight elevation about the center made of wood, and on this sort of table a negro woman was standing. I knew instinctively that I was in the slave market. There was no need to go further. I stood still and looked around. On the doorstep of most of the cabins, women were sitting silent and apathetic. They were not talking or singing or even sewing. Their hands lay idle or were clasped together. They paid no attention to me, asked no favor, and appeared to be in most cases stolidly indifferent. They were women who had lost all hope, and I said fearfully to myself, "Just so, women will sit in hell when they have lost their souls." And I was ashamed and repentant for the curiosity that had led me into such a piteous place. I resolved to confess my fault to Robert that night, but I did not do so; something made the confession undesirable at the time, and the longer I put it off, the less inclined I felt to be sorry about it; the result being that I never found a convenient season for an acknowledgment of my fault. A confession to God is so easy--you have nothing to explain. He understands all. He accepts your contrition, and forgives you freely. But, if we confess to man, we must be questioned and make explanations, and very likely be led to prevaricate, to make things better or worse, as suits the case, and so the confession becomes as bad or worse than the fault. In March, the dearest wish of my heart was granted me. We brought from that desolate place of graves in Chicago, to the garden-like cemetery in Memphis, the small coffin holding the remains of our dead child, and laid them under a shadowy elm tree. Blue-birds were singing on its branches as we planted the roses above her, and the sunshine fell with a softened glory over this flowery city of the dead. After this event the days came and went in an easy, happy way that has left few memories; but in May, and the first days of June the heat became unbearable, a damp, sunless heat prostrating beyond expression. I noticed that dwelling-houses were closed rapidly, and heard every day of some acquaintance going to the mountains, but the real cause of this movement was not named to me until early in June. Then one morning Robert came home an hour after leaving it, and his face was white and grave, and he spoke too seriously to be doubted, or argued with. "Milly, we must leave here at sunset. Cholera has broken out in the little town north of us, and is said to be already epidemic; here, in Memphis, there are at least a dozen known cases of yellow fever. Last summer there was a dreadful epidemic of it, and this summer its recurrence seems certain." "In Memphis, Robert?" I asked. "Yes, here in Memphis. Mr. Fackler says we are not safe twenty-four hours, and he told me to come home and prepare to leave by tonight's boat. He has had the fever, and is, he thinks, immune, but he takes his family to the mountains tomorrow. Is there much to pack, Milly?" "Very little," I answered. "One trunk has never been opened, and from the other I have only taken a little clothing." Indeed, before one o'clock all we possessed, except what would go with us, was on its way to the pier, where the goods for the _Natchez_ were lying. Then I told Cinda, the negress who had served us ever since our arrival, the state of the case, and gave her permission, after cooking our dinner, to pack all the groceries left, for her own use, taking her promise to go home the next morning. So, after our meal, there was nothing to do but to put the house in order, turn the key in the door, and give it to my neighbor. Before five o'clock we were ready to leave Memphis forever, and I could not help turning my face towards the spot where we had laid the dust of our dear Edith. In this silent farewell I was inadvertently joined by Robert. Our eyes met, but for a few moments we were silent. Then Robert said, "_She_ is not there!" and I bent my head, and turned to the living. Cinda was carrying Lilly, and Mary walked with us, holding her father's hand. In twenty minutes we were on board the _Natchez_. I did not like her. She was not a nice boat, and there was an atmosphere that I resented, though I knew not _why_ I should do so. She seemed to have very few passengers, and I only saw three women among them. There was a lack of the usual stir in her leaving. I missed the negro songs and shouts and laughter. All was too still. I missed the crowds usually on the bluff or pier, when a boat was going to sail. Why were they not present? We had a large, comfortable cabin, but it did not please me. I said to Robert the sheets and pillow cases were not clean, but he would not let me ask for different ones. And the heat was terrible. We had a fairly good meal, just as the sun sunk, and, while eating it, I heard great confusion, and the noise of many people coming on board. They were not accompanied by any of the pleasant sounds usual on such an event--no merry good-byes, no loving messages, no eager calls for recognition. On the contrary, there was sobbing and crying, and one long-drawn wail, inexpressibly mournful and savage, from a number of voices together. I looked at the purser, who sat at the head of the table; he seemed unconscious of the disturbance; none of the passengers appeared to be astonished, and Robert kept his eyes on his plate and would not look at me. After supper I went on deck. A few men were scattered about; the captain and officers appeared to be busy and watchful; there was an air of constraint; and oh, the heat! The damp, foggy, suffocating heat! There was no comfort outside, and I went in and undressed the children. As I was doing so, Robert looked into the cabin, and said, "I am going to the upper deck to smoke." "Robert," I asked, "what kind of a ship is this? On the lower deck I saw quite a crowd of people." "What kind of people?" "How could I tell? All was dark. I just saw that the crowd consisted of men and women--mostly women." "Well, dear, the boat is, I am sorry to say, a slaver; that is, it carries the negroes collected in the states of Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky down to the New Orleans slave market for sale." "Why? There is a market in Memphis." "It pays to send them to New Orleans. Mr. Fackler told me it was a slaver, but advised us to take it, rather than to wait for the next boat, which, under the circumstances, might be delayed. We are fleeing for our lives, Milly, do not forget that, and we cannot be too particular, lest we lose them." I said only, "_Oh!_" but Robert understood my dissatisfaction, and went to the deck unhappy. I was too cross to care. Never in all my life, before or since, have I been so long and so willingly ill-tempered. I asked myself for no reason; I never tried to make an excuse for the mood. I just gave way to the feeling, and rather enjoyed my wickedness. Mary looked at me with strange questions in her gray eyes. Lilly crept into my arms, or clung to my skirts. I petted them when Robert was not present; when he was, it pleased me to speak sharply, or not answer their questions at all. Evidently, then, it was Robert who had offended me. Poor fellow! He tried being cheerful and bringing me little bits of ship gossip. I perfectly scorned to see there was anything in life worth smiling at. Then he tried being a little aloof, and only looked at me with hasty glances, and I was troubled. I could not gaze into his sorrowful eyes, and not see in them "Love's philtred euphrasy." But one day pitiful love, nay loving pity, bid the tides of memory cast on my soul a little spray of tears. It happened thus: I had dressed the children, gone to the deck with them, and been compelled to come back to the cabin immediately. The air quivered with heat; the river, rolling rapidly onward, was like a river of death; there was no whirr of bird's wings over it, no sound of a bird's song on its banks, and vegetation there was apparently withered. The blacks on the lower deck were absolutely silent and motionless, except for a woman's long drawn wail, always quickly stopped by a man's passionate command. The captain spoke to no one; the officers passed constantly to and fro, always bent on some duty; in fact, even my short observations convinced me, that every man on the ship was watching the lower deck. I said to Mary, "Let us go to our room, dear," and she answered, "Please, Mamma, and put on my nightgown; these things"--pointing to her dress and shoes and stockings--"they hurt Mary so much." I was granting the child her request, when Robert looked into the cabin. "I heard you and the children were on deck," he said. "I was glad you were taking a little change. Why did you come in?" "I could not endure the sight of the river." "It is a grand river, Milly; you should not speak ill of it." "It is like the river of sorrows--' Acheron sad and black and deep.' I hate it with my whole soul," and I spoke with passionate force, throwing down Mary's coral necklace to emphasize my words, and scattering its scarlet and gold beads on the floor. The child uttered a cry, and Robert said, "Hush, Mary! Papa will pick them up for you." "The Acheron, Milly?" he queried, as he gathered the scattered beads; "I have heard of it, but I cannot place it. Where is it?" "In hell," I answered. I said no more, for Robert dropped the beads he had gathered into Mary's pinafore, and then went to the door. As he stood with it open in his hand, he said, "Forgive me, Milly. I have brought you much sorrow, an Acheron of it! Poor child! I meant to make you happier than all our dreams. God help us both!" As he spoke I lifted my eyes to his face, and an instantaneous penetrating sense of my sin made my soul tremble. For it was a handsome, loving face, though it looked, after all, as one made for suffering; half-pleading and half-defiant--the face of a man I could hurt, but could not move. "_Robert!_" I said, and I knew that my voice had its old loving tones. "Milly!" And he closed the door, opened his arms, and I buried my contrition in his tender words and kisses. It was he, and not me, who made excuses for my behavior; then he told me, that we should be in New Orleans the next day, and would take as long a rest as possible at the St. Charles Hotel. At that time I wondered, and was ashamed and sorry for the temper I had not been able to control, but I was far from understanding its cause, and perhaps blamed myself a little more than I deserved. For I am sure now, that my mind was infected by the anger, grief, and misery with which I was traveling; that my soul had retired from her surroundings, and so left me to the tyranny of physical emotions. The mind, as well as the body, is subject to malignant diseases, and, in some fretful moment, when I had surrendered myself to disaffection, deposed will, and given all power to feeling, I had caught the mental malady so rife a few yards away from me. Mental, or spiritual crowding, is just as injurious as physical crowding--perhaps more so; and, as people are made ill, or money-mad in a great city by breathing sickly, cast-off commercial atoms, so I was made angry, moody, sullen or passionate, by the cast-off thoughts of the wrathful, miserable crowd of sufferers almost at my elbow. Had I known then, what I know now, I would have called constantly for the help of Him who was able to say to such spiritual invasions, "_Retro me, Sathana_," "Get thee behind me, Satan," and drawn from the simple exercise of this power, the love that is omnipotent against all evil. And, if this excuse does not seem rational to my readers, let all who have never been cross under the suffering caused by excessive heat or cold, or the strain of things known and unknown, reprove me. The number of such accusers will be few, and their words mildly uncertain. Two days after this explanation we were resting in the cool shadowy rooms of the St. Charles Hotel, New Orleans. I saw nothing of this city. Fever was present in many quarters, and Robert was anxiously looking for some ship ready to leave the port. He found a fine bark bound for New York, and also a small steamer going to Galveston, early on our third day in New Orleans. "Which shall it be, Milly?" he asked. "Have you any doubt, Robert?" I replied. "A little. It seems I made a great mistake in not going to Boston. Is it too late now?" "Yes, dear. Fortune does not stand twice on a man's threshold. New York was our point of turning, and we turned to the West, instead of the North." "Mr. Curtis would not renew his offer, I suppose?" "If he did, you would have to tell him all that has taken place." "That would be foolish." "It would be honorable." "Milly, I have seen all my life, that it is very near as bad to be accused as it is to be guilty. In a few words, a man is accused of some cruel or dishonorable deed--four or five words will do that wrong--but the accused, however innocent, cannot go about with the proofs of his innocence in his pocket, and expect people to take an interest in them. That unspeakable man knew this; he calculated on its influence, even if his plot failed." "Do not let us speak of him. His very name is malign on our lips. Robert, we have been traveling thousands of miles towards Texas. Shall we turn back now? Or shall we go on?" "To go to New York, Milly----" "Is to turn back." "Then we had better go forward to Texas." "It seems the only road open to us." So Robert took passage for us on _The Lone Star_, bound for Galveston, and I had a singular failure of heart and hope. I had longed so to go to Boston, but that prayer had fallen from out my prayers and had come to nothing. Chicago had been our first station on a wrong road; all it promised had turned to failure, and it had taken the hand of God to lift us out of the ruth and ruin we met in places to which we were not sent. Yellow fever and cholera had driven us down that dreary, steaming, terrible river. Would Texas indeed give a future to our mistaken past? Then my eyes fell upon my children playing with such careless sweet content in the cool, dusky room. They had no fear as to where their father and I were going to take them. They believed in our love and wisdom. Would God be less kind to us than we were to them? Impossible! Then why not give Him the same child-like confidence and affection? For, if I did not know where we were going, I did know "We could not drift, Beyond God's love and care." That surely was sufficient. CHAPTER XII A PLEASANT JOURNEY "... all that is most beauteous imaged there In happier beauty; more pellucid streams In ampler ether, a diviner air, And fields invested with purpureal gleams." We left New Orleans that evening, and, on the second morning thereafter, we were far out on the Gulf of Mexico. The blessed north wind was gently rocking _The Lone Star_. I could smell the sea, and hear the beating of its great heart, as deep called unto deep. Then, raising myself in my berth, I could see the white horses chasing each other over the blue waters. The port hole being open, I had been drinking oxygen all night, and I was a new woman, fit for anything, and afraid of nothing that could come to me. I dressed myself and the children as quickly as possible, and we went to the saloon for breakfast. Then I sent for Robert to join us, but he had breakfasted with the captain; so we ate the good meal leisurely, and then went on deck. Oh, what a joy it was! How the children ran and played in the cool, fresh breeze! How happy, and how well Robert looked! And how heavenly it was, just to lie on the mattress the captain had placed for me in a snug corner, and shut my eyes, and let the wind, and the sea, and the sun revivify and remake me. I could hear my soul laugh low within me, and, when I was a little more rested, I knew it would break into song. In the meantime, I slept, and slept, and the wind and the waves sung me some lullaby of my fathers--some ancient song of love and courage, such as I used to hear Tom Huddleston sing in the Huddleston quarter in Whitehaven. It seemed years and years ago; though, when I tried to count them, I could only make out that it might be six or seven, since I heard the gay sailor lad singing to me, "Round the world and home again, That is the sailor's way." _The Lone Star_ was a slow ship, and the wind was a little contrary, but we were not troubled by delay. For a short space it was good to be out of the world, and away from all its cares and obligations; we were growing younger and stronger with every hour's respite. The passengers were few in number, and consisted mainly of a respectable party of German emigrants bound for the beautiful colony of New Braunfels. They kept to themselves, but, in the still moonlit evenings, sung the folk songs of their native land in the most delightful manner. This pleasant journeying soon came to an end. One morning when I awoke, the ship was as still as "a painted ship upon a painted ocean." We were lying at anchor off Galveston bar, and, after breakfast, the captain told us if we wished to land at Galveston we had better get all our trunks ready. I was in favor of our landing at Galveston. From the sea the city had a tropical and most attractive appearance. "It is a city in a garden," I said to Robert, and he was equally pleased with its pretty white houses, and flowery beauty, for the perfume of its gardens was distinctly felt on the ship. It was nearly noon ere our captain's signal received any attention, then a small boat arrived, and every man in it was dressed in white linen. They held a very serious conversation with our captain, and I was sure, from his air of annoyance and perplexity, that there was some trouble to be met; and, in a few minutes, we were made aware of its nature. "Gentlemen," he said, to a little group of passengers, of which Robert and I were a part, "gentlemen, we are in an almighty fix. There is yellow fever in Galveston--plenty of it, already--and likely to be much more, and that's a fact. So none of us will be allowed to land there, unless we have homes in the city, and have been made immune by a previous attack." The gentlemen in white then examined the passengers, and only four were permitted to land. Our case was hopeless: we were Europeans, and particularly liable to become infected, as were also the body of emigrants on board. What were we to do? There were two alternatives. We could return to New Orleans on _The Lone Star_ for the chance of some ship going to New York, or we could continue our journey into the interior of Texas. "How can the journey be continued?" asked Robert. "A small steamer will be sent this afternoon," was the answer. "It will convey all wishing to go inland up the Buffalo Bayou to Harrisburg. The leader of the German emigrants tells me they will be met at Harrisburg with vehicles to carry them and their baggage to New Braunfels." "But we are traveling alone," continued Robert, "and how can we proceed?" "Where are you going to?" "To Austin." "Well, then, the railway goes some distance beyond Harrisburg--a few miles--and it may yet be in service. If so, you will take it to its terminus. There the mail coach for Austin and San Antonio will call for mail, and no doubt it will have room for you. Travel is not very lively at present." "Do you know the days and hours when the mail coach is due at this terminus?" Robert asked. "No, indeed!" was the smiling reply. "Bud Terry makes his own hours. But he's sure to come along sooner or later. I did hear that Bud was down, but I don't take any stock in that report. There's a deal of business just now between Washington and Austin, and Bud knows his duty, and, gen'rally speaking, does it." All this was very uncertain consolation, and Robert looked at me in bewildered anxiety. I had a singular satisfaction in the affair. It had been taken out of our hands. We were shut up to one road, and, unless we were willing to go back, and gaze after our life and work and will sailed by, we must take it. If we refused, I did not dare to search through what hopeless, desultory ways our path might lie; for so it happeneth to those who fear to follow the one road open to them. "You see, Robert," I said with a smile, "there is nothing left for us to do, but to go to Harrisburg. Have we sufficient money to return to New York?" "No." "Is it safe to return to New Orleans?" "No; and the captain says he will not go back to New Orleans. He is going to Pensacola." "Where is that?" "In Florida, I think." I did not then know where Florida was, but knew that it was an aggravating thing to question an anxious, undecided man about trifles, not relevant, so I checked my desire for information and remarked cheerfully, "Then, dear, it is Harrisburg. That far is certain. When we reach Harrisburg, the way will open, that also is certain. One of the German women emigrants told me, that there would be a number of wagons waiting for them at Harrisburg. If we can do no better, they will let us travel with them." So we waited for the boat to take us to Harrisburg. It did not arrive until late in the afternoon. Then, with a little effort to be merry over our adventures, we were transferred to the small, very narrow steamer, that was to take us up the Buffalo Bayou. And, as soon as I was on her deck, I threw off all care and responsibility. I felt that we were in charge of some power, who knew all about our affairs, and who was quite able to manage them--especially as we were not. That sail up the Buffalo Bayou was well worth while. No one taking it in those early days can ever forget it. Certainly it is part of my everlasting remembrances. We reached the Bayou shortly before dark, at least it was light enough to see the famous plain of San Jacinto, on which Houston and his eight hundred gentlemen, wiped out the Spanish army under Santa Anna, and gave to the American settlers in Texas that religious and civic liberty which was their right. I noticed that the captain bared his head as he passed it, and, during the evening, he told me the gallant, stirring story, which I have retold in my novel, "Remember the Alamo." It made a wonderful impression on me, and I thought how grand it would be to live among men who had at least once in their lives scorned the mean god Mammon, and, for the faith of their fathers, and the civil liberty without which life was of no value, offered themselves willingly for their God and their country. "We are going to live among heroes," I said; "and, O Robert, after a life among weavers and traders, will not that be a great experience?" Robert, who had been listening to the same story, answered, "I suppose it may, Milly, but there are heroes at the loom and at the counter both. I have known them." Then we were actually in the dense shadows of the Buffalo Bayou, and no one felt like talking. It was a narrow, very narrow, still, black water. A thick growth of trees on both banks of it met above our heads, and shut out all light, but that from the pine flambeaus, burning not only on board, but at intervals along the shore, showing us, with lurid, smoky lights, that we were forging our way through a water full of alligators. Their ugly black eyes dotted it, and they lay along the banks of the stream, barking at us, as we passed. It was the most unearthly sail the imagination can picture, in no way made more human by the half-clothed negroes managing the flaming torches, and the hot, heavy atmosphere, sickly with the scent of magnolias. Landing at Harrisburg, we found there was fever in every house. Under the very roof which sheltered us from the poisonous night air, a man was dying of the vomìto. Though he was at the other end of the long building, we could only too distinctly hear the awful struggle of the suffering soul to escape from its tortured body. I know not how it was, but I had not then the slightest fear of the sickness. The children slept soundly, and Robert and I sat by them, talking in whispers, and praying silently for the poor soul crying out in its piteous extremity. Soon after midnight a dreadful silence stole through the house, and we fell asleep. For I knew, and was sure, that the agony of the strong man was over; that "Pale from the Passion of Death, Cold from the cold, dark River, Staggering blind with Death, With trembling steps yet fleet, Over the stones of darkness, He had stumbled to _His feet_. For day and night Christ standeth, Scanning each soul as it landeth, With a face that hath once been dead, With a mouth which once did cry From that River in agony,-- 'The waters go over my head.'" In the morning we were awakened by a pale, sorrowful woman, barefooted, and in the simplest garment, bringing us fresh water, some biscuits just out of the oven and a cup of tea. But she brought us neither milk or butter. "They hev been in the way of it all night," she said; "they're full of death. Sure!" She had wept till she had no tears left, and the worst was over. "He is gone," she added. "Jim, he's gone! Eat a mouthful and get away. It isn't safe here--and you be strangers, too." We did as she advised, and found a queer little empty train ready to start for a terminus some twenty miles further inland. Here there was a rude shanty of unpainted wood, the last station of a line only just being built; but, to our great delight, we found a large coach drawn by four horses waiting for us. It was driven by a Mexican, beautifully dressed in black velvet, adorned with silver lace and silver buttons. Moreover, he had the manners of a Spanish grandee, and his way of addressing us as _Señor_ and _Señorita_, and the nonchalant skill with which he managed those four wild mustangs, were things to see and to never forget. He asked me to take the box seat beside him, but Robert insisted on my going inside with the children. He did not believe in the safety of our charioteer. But never again in this life, never, never again, shall I have such a glorious ride. For to one coming from the old world at that time, Texas was a new world. That afternoon, after mounting a steep hill, and then thundering down it at lightning speed, the horses were allowed to rest and draw breath for ten minutes. Then I got out of the coach, and was transported by the wonderful beauty and majesty of the scene before me. The flowery prairie rolled away magnificently to the far-off horizon, here and there jumping into hills, over which marched myriads of red cattle. Masses of wild honeysuckle scented the air for miles and miles, and a fresh odor of earth and clover, mixed with the perfume of wild flowers, was the joy we breathed. But, best of all was the clear, sweet atmosphere. It went to the heart like wine. It made us laugh, it made us sing, and I never heard on any other spot of earth such melodious fluting as the winds of Texas made all around us. Surely it was the giants of the unflooded world, who cleared off and leveled these boundless plains as a dwelling place for liberty. Looking back to that charmed drive over them, I thank God, even as I write, that I was then permitted to see earth as it may be, when He shall make "His tabernacle with men." And I remember this hour that, when I could find no words fit to express the delight with which my heart was filled, that wonderful Old Book that is the interpreter of all human feeling came to my help, and I touched Robert's arm, as we stood together, and said, "How beautiful is this place! This is none other but the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven." I have no doubt it is much changed now, settled and improved; but it lives in my memory green and sweet as the fields of Paradise, with the fresh wild winds gurgling melodiously through all its lovely spaces. The moon was full that night, and we took advantage of the light and the cool breezes to go as far as the horses were able. I think it must have been eight o'clock, when we stopped at a planter's house standing on the edge of a creek or bayou. The moonlight sifted down on its white walls, its slender pillars, and flowering vines, and there was a little company of men and women sitting on a broad piazza. Late as it was, we were served with a good meal, and a large, cool bedroom. I went to rest with the children, as soon as I had eaten, but Robert sat till midnight with the men, smoking and talking on the moonlit piazza. The children were soon asleep; then I lifted the window shade and looked out. I saw before me a long avenue of sweet gum and chinquâpin, magnolia, and tulip trees, and all through them were the whitewashed cabins of the negro slaves. Some of the women were sewing, though, for the most part, men and women were huddled in little ebony squads, around the doors of their quarters. They were talking softly in their abbreviated patois, or humming their sad minor melodies, while the moon far up in the zenith--calm, bright, worshipful--cast a softened radiance which gave sufficient light for young eyes either to sew, or to read. The living picture filled me with melancholy, and I went in dreams to some lonely desolate place, where all was sand and silence. We were off early in the morning, and our road lay through pine woods; a very primitive road, as yet, and a very hard one on both travelers and horses; however, horses are not expected to be particular about roads in Texas. At one o'clock we stopped, and spread the lunch brought with us on the ground; some negroes, who were cutting down trees, brought us fresh water and attended to our horses. One of these negroes, a young black Hercules, whose soul Nature had forgotten to make bond, took me a few yards into the wood to show me the fairest picture--a little natural clearing with a pretty piece of water in the center, and, standing all round it, motionless as statues, a flock of white cranes! Speaking of the circumstance afterwards, a passenger who had joined us that morning, and who was also going to Austin, told me, that the home of the crane is on the Texas prairies. He said nothing could traverse the prairies without being challenged by their tocsin shout of _Kewrrook! Kewrrook! Kewrrook!_ which he likened to a pistol shot in the rare air. Furthermore, that the Comanche and Apache hated the note, which gave both man and beast warning that they were on the murder path. Strange sights and sounds these guardians of the prairies must see and hear, as with slow and stately tread, they pace their rounds, as much a part of the prairie as the ostrich is of the desert; for when the deer have fled to the timber, and the buffalo gone west, and the wolves are on their trail, the cranes still flock on the prairies. We were among the pines all afternoon, and in the gloaming came to a much larger settlement than I had hitherto seen. If I remember rightly, it was called Bastrop. With a great rush and clatter we drove to a large house or hotel, and found good food and comfortable rooms, and many signs of drawing near to civilization. One of these signs was a release from the continuous meal of bacon. Throughout our journey there had been myriads of cattle around us, but nothing except bacon to eat--hundreds of thousands of milk cows, but rarely, indeed, either milk, butter, or cheese on the table. Here we found a fine roast of beef, and some venison steaks, both deliciously cooked; also young corn ears and early squash. I returned thanks for these things with all my heart, for a good meal and a good book deserve not only a blessing, but a thanksgiving. After we had eaten I went with the children to the room assigned us, and was hearing their evening prayers when a woman softly entered. She respected the duty that engaged me, and sat down almost noiselessly. "I'm kind of lonesome," she said, when I turned to her. "Mollie is away, and I wanted to see your little girls. They are mighty pretty, well-behaved young ones, and they do mind what you say to them! Sure!" I was pleased with her remarks, and I put Lilly in her out-stretched arms, and, though the child was very weary, she behaved beautifully, and fell asleep in them. "My children were sot on their own way from the jump," she continued, "so contrary-minded that their hair grew upward, instead o' downward. That's a fact! Look at my Jack's hair in the morning, and you'll see it stands straight up. And babies are hard to raise in Texas; you don't like to put them out o' their way, it might be the death o' them, for you can never call your child your own in Texas, until it has passed its second year." "And by that time they have got used to having their own way," I commented. "So they have, and they will scream you blind and deaf, until they get it. But you are feared to lose them. I've lost five outen my seven. That is so. I've only Jack and Mollie left, but they keep me considering day and night. They are not bad; they are real good, only they are sot on havin' what is not good for them. And, nat'rally, I know what is best, or else the Great Master above us has made a mistake in sending them to me. That's how I look at it." By the time this sentence was finished, Lilly was so fast asleep that I lifted her from my visitor's arms, and laid her upon the bed beside her sister. Then we continued the conversation about the natural inclination of all children to have their own way, until I was quite convinced the children of my companion had kept up a guerrilla fight with her, from their birth until the present hour. "There's Mollie," she continued, "smart and pert as a cricket, and nothing would do her but a New York school. Her father was alive, then, and I asked him to interfere; what he said was, 'Let her go to New York. I don't see from the samples of New York women sent us, that they are a picayune cleverer than ours are, but, if Mollie wants to go, she's going. I can back her with all the gold she needs.' That's the way her father interfered. He just let her go to aggravate and contradict me. His hair stood straight up. I have told Mollie ever since she put shoes on never to marry a man whose hair grows up, but I'll just bet she does that same thing, even if she goes all the way to New York to find him." "Then she went to New York, I suppose?" "Yes, she went, and she stayed more than two years, and got what they call a diploma. Mollie is always drawing people's attention to it, but it kind o' shames me. It looks like there was somebody better than Mollie that thought they could give her a character, or a certif'cate that she had done about right while at school. Now Mollie is as good a girl as breathes, and as smart as girls can be made, and there's nobody better than Mollie on this planet, and I just can't bear this certif'cate business. How would you like it?" I made this matter clearer to her, and she said, "I wish you had come here 'fore Jake died. This same thing bothered him above a bit, and he used to say if any man thought his Mollie needed a certif'cate of doing well, he would tell him Mollie was the best woman God ever made, and, if he contradicted, he'd bore a few holes into him. I reckon he would have done it! Sure! But he took ill and died suddent one night, just after Mollie came home. I miss Jake whiles, though he left me well-to-do, and a full sorrow is easier borne than an empty one." "What do you call well-to-do?" I asked. "Jake had twelve thousand horned cattle, and a herd of eight hundred horses, land enough for horses and cattle to get lost in, and a very comfortable lump of spizerinctum in New Orleans Bank." "_Spizerinctum!_" I ejaculated. She nodded, and explained in one better known word, "specie." "Then Mollie is rich?" "Richer than rights be, for Jake left her half of all he had, and the other half he left to me." "And Jack?" I asked. "He left Jack nothing. Jack and his father were not comfortable together. They never had the same notion about anything. They had contradicted each other for twenty years, and in course they could not agree concerning money. I have heard them toss a dime between them for an hour, and then fling it to the devil; that is, where no man could find it. But Jack is real good. He is, sure! As I say, he will contradict, but he's as straight a man as lives, between here and anywhere; and he would not let a mortal touch a hair of my head, if it was to wrong me. No, ma'am, he would make any man forever silent, who said _no_ to his Mammy's _yes_. Come, and I will show you my parlor." I did not like to refuse the invitation, and I did not like to leave the children, but, after being assured of their perfect safety, I felt some curiosity about a Texan parlor. So I went with her through an adjoining room, where a number of men were sitting at a table playing cards--very tall, wiry men, with prominent features, long hair, and a fierce, determined expression on their thin, sallow faces. They did not even glance at us as we walked past them, but I saw the gleam of ornamented knife handles in their belts, and was pretty certain that revolvers kept them company and that derringers lay handy, either in breast or hip pockets. Yet they sat still and speechless, holding some little bits of paper in their long, strong hands. There were two candles on the table, but the rest of the room was in semi-darkness, and the strange gathering in that patch of gloomy light made a picture I have never forgotten. If it had been a painted picture, its gloom and its suggestions of quarrel and bloodshed, might have labeled it, "A Scene in Hades." Out of this room we went into the parlor. The first object I saw was a handsome grand square piano. "It is Mollie's!" said Mollie's mother, "and she can make it talk, you may just bet on that." The walls were adorned with pictures of Mollie's drawing, and the upholstered chairs and sofa shielded by crochet lace of Mollie's handiwork. I was expected to be astonished at this display of wealth and culture, and I tried to make good this expectation. Indeed I really felt a great respect for the girl who had lifted herself so far above her surroundings. I asked where she was, and said I should like to see her, and was told she was in New Orleans, and that her brother Jack was going in a few days to bring her home. "Jack's powerful fond of his sister," she continued; "he thinks all creation of Mollie. I am feared he will never find a man good enough to marry her. He has run two young fellows off the place, who he thought were sneaking 'round after her. He is going to Orleans in a few days. I wish she had been home. She would have fancied you." I said I was sorry she was in New Orleans, but I did not mention yellow fever's presence in that city. All nature and all humanity hates the carrier of bad news. It is the feet of those that bring glad tidings that are blessed and beautiful upon the mountains. The next morning we were called early, but found quite a number of people at the plentiful breakfast-table--some were going with us to Austin, others were boarders belonging to the place. My kind hostess had saved seats beside herself for us, and I noticed that Robert nodded and spoke familiarly to a handsome youth assisting her to serve the meal. Of course it was Jack. I knew instinctively it was Jack, though he was amiable looking, and wore his pale yellow hair parted down the middle of his head. At first I thought his mother had been romancing about his "sot, determined ways, and quarrelsome temper," but, towards the end of the meal, I noticed him lift his steel-gray eyes, and look at a man who was noisily relating one of his own adventures. Nothing more was necessary, not only to confirm all his mother had said, but to rouse the imagination concerning the likelihoods and probabilities a man with such passionate eyes could summon. For, if the eyes are the windows of the soul, I saw a soul of tremendous will and temper looking through them. However, he was polite, and even kind to us, and I left a message with him for his sister Mollie; then Mollie's mother put into my hands something good for luncheon, because, she said, there was no nooning place, and it would be four o'clock, as like as not, before we reached Austin. "And I hope that is the end of your journeying," she added, "for to go further is to fare worse. You keep that fact in your mind. Maybe I'll be up to see you some day. I want Jack in the legislature. He is the very man to get on there, considering the way it is put up at present." As we talked we were standing just within the store door, waiting for the coach, and though it was so early a number of sallow, long-haired, fiercely whiskered men were stalking up and down, the tinkle of their great bell spurs, the ring of coins on the counter, and the kindly tones of my companion's voice chiming softly together. Even at this moment I seem to be trying to disentangle them, until the whole is lost in the clatter of the coach, and the beating of the horses' feet upon the hard road. So we left the hospitable lady with many kind words and wishes. At last she kissed the children, and I, remembering my own mother, kissed her; for about a good woman, who has taken the sacrament of maternity, there is the odor and sense of sacrifice. We may touch her lips, and do her honor, and be sure that we are honoring ourselves in the homely rite. At noon we stopped on the banks of a great river. There were large troughs here, full of water, and a couple of negroes sitting on the grass and playing cards. Evidently they were waiting for our arrival, for, as the coach approached them, they stepped quickly to the heads of the horses, unharnessed, fed, and watered them, while we had the hour to eat our lunch and rest. I looked around, but saw no house; yet there was a very large one, belonging to a sugar planter, hidden away among the trees; and, just as we were preparing to go forward, I saw a negro lad running with frantic speed towards a closed gate near the troughs. I walked towards this gate and watched his approach. He was spent of breath, and could hardly speak, but, after a mouthful of water, he gasped out, "How--long--'fore Chris'mas, Missis?" I told him, and then asked, "Why do you want to know?" "I'se gwine home at Chris'mas!" he cried. "I ain't 'long to dese people--I'se only hired to them." These last remarks he uttered with all the childish scorn and dislike imaginable, and then sobbed out once more, "I'se gwine home at Chris'mas!" "Where is your home?" I asked. "In Austin," he answered. "There's people in Austin--there's Mammy and Mass'r Tom, and Miss Mary, in Austin. I want to go home. I don't 'long here!" "Whom do you belong to?" I asked. He told me, and then I had to hurry away, but I carried with me the piteous face of that unhappy child, peering through the gate palings, with no hope in his heart but Christmas, and Christmas five months away. The last twenty miles of our drive gave no indications that we were approaching the capital of the state. On the banks of the creeks there were sheep and cattle ranches, and here and there rough farm houses, but the country was uncultivated, open prairie, or cedar covered hills. People now going to Austin will reach the beautiful city by the railway, and I have no doubt it has chosen the ugliest entrance it could find. But we had almost an idyllic introduction to what was then one of the loveliest dwelling-places of men in the whole world. It was about four o'clock in the afternoon that we came to the Colorado River, and our horses walked leisurely across its clear, limpid waters. Then we mounted a hill, and a scene of unwritable beauty was before us on every side. Other portions of Texas are lovely as Paradise, but nowhere had I ever seen such exquisite and picturesque arrangement of wood and mountains, grassy stretches, and silvery waters, and crowned hills. From every mouth, there was an instant and spontaneous cry of delight. The city was built on hills, surrounded by a rampart of higher hills, crowned with the evergreen cedar, and the shining waters of the Colorado wound in and out among these hills, and then swept grandly round the southern part of the city. For a minute or two Señor Tomas--as if compelled by his own innate love of what was picturesque--drew reins on the top of the hill on which there stood a little church. It was painted a pale pink color, and did not look inconsistent. It must have been full of the perfume of the China berry trees, and it stood at the gate of the town like a visible prayer. I have no doubt it has been replaced by a much grander structure, but there must be many living yet, who remember, with me, those happy Sabbaths when we went up together to the little pink church on the hill, and served the Lord with gladness, and came before His presence with a song. For that short pause I must always thank Señor Tomas Sandobel, though it may have been neither prayer nor a sense of beauty that was his compelling motive. For I noticed, that as soon as the horses were full breathed he gathered up the reins tightly, and, with a peculiarly exciting cry, began his descent at the highest possible speed to the main avenue. Fortunately it was but a transient trial. In a few minutes we stopped at the Smith Hotel, a rather large wooden building standing on Congress Avenue and Pecan Street, I think. Under the wooden awning in front of the building there were a number of men sitting in tilted-up chairs, and, as Señor Tomas stopped the coach, a pleasant-looking gentleman was opening the door. He lifted Mary and Lilly out in his arms, and then, removing his hat with his left hand, offered me his right hand to assist in my descent. It was just such a kind, respectful greeting as an English landlord of that time would have given his coming guests, and it went straight to my heart. Robert asked him if we could have rooms, and he said he would show us the best he had in a few minutes. He had a pleasant word for every passenger, and a few directions to give, then he lifted Lilly in his arms, and we followed him to a large, low room, directly above the entrance. It was spotlessly clean, and, though the floors were bare, they were scrubbed until they looked like ivory. The chairs were of unpainted wood, and their seats of rawhide--not at all handsome--but very comfortable; and the large bed looked so white and cool it made me drowsy. "This room is delightful, Robert," I said. "I hope Mr. Smith can spare it." Then a sudden thought came to me, and I continued, "The children! We must have a room for them that opens into our room." Mr. Smith smiled benignly. "We can do better for you than that, Madame," he said; "there is a trundle bed, you know." "A trundle bed!" I repeated. "What is that?" Then he stooped and drew from under the bed a very low bedstead, and showed me that it had a good spring and mattress, and clean, soft linen; and I was astonished and delighted. I thought I had never seen any contrivance equal to it for convenience and comfort, and I told Robert that I must have trundle beds under all our large beds when we furnished. And both men smiled broadly at my enthusiasm. So we took the room, and my little trunk was brought to me, and I began to bathe and dress and make ready for dinner, which I was told would be at six promptly. A Chinese gong summoned us to the meal--a gong in the hands of a negro boy, whose face shone with delight in the noise he was making. But his grinning and gesticulating brought a laughing company into the dining-room. There was nothing in this room but what was absolutely necessary. The floor was bare but clean, the chairs of a plain wooden variety, and the china, glass, and damask very suitable to the room. The only extravagance about the service was an arrangement like an East India _punka_ above the whole length of the table--a movable wood frame, hung with clean towels, and kept in motion by two negro boys. It certainly made the room cool, and prevented the intrusion of a single fly. The dinner itself was excellent, though the courses were left to every one's taste and capacity. There was roast beef, and chicken pie, bear meat, and antelope steaks, and I noticed that some old men who ate bear meat ate honey with it, so I resolved to try the luxury some day when I was quite alone. I did so, and found it very good, but an old Texan told me, that the most aristocratic dainty of the Spanish Texan was bear's paws preserved in Madeira wine, and a little brandy. The paws then look like walnuts, but are said to excel any tidbit known to epicures. I am sorry that I never had an opportunity of verifying this statement by personal experience. The dessert to our dinner is not worth naming; it was a pudding of some kind, but the majority left it alone, and seemed very well contented with the bowl of delicious clabber and fresh milk. There were no liquors of any kind on the table, but plenty of tea and coffee, and I do not think any one ate their dinner without drinking their tea at the same time. I took kindly to the custom, and have never quite resigned it, except under medical advice, which I follow with that desultory reluctance usually given to ordinances with which we are not quite satisfied. After dinner the children were eager to go to the trundle bed, and their delight with it would have made any looker-on believe the little ungrateful ones had never had a decent bed in all their lives before. It was so "nice," so "soft," so "easy to get into," so "cool," so "sleepy." I felt almost angry at their unreasonable pleasure in this very ordinary convenience, and was quite "short" with the offenders before they found the "sleepy" part of their new bed. Then I sat down at the open window and began to think. Very quickly I discovered that I had been guilty in the same kind. Had I not been lauding this bit of Texas as an outskirt of Paradise all afternoon? No one could have supposed I had lived in Kendal, and Penrith, wandered in the laurel woods of Windermere, and walked the storied streets of Edinburgh. I smiled contemptuously at my raw enthusiasm, and felt as if my native land had been wronged by it. * * * * * So I began to write a poem to Mother England, and had got the three first lines to my satisfaction, when Robert entered the room. He was smoking a huge cigar, and the odor of it was strange and unpleasant. But he was as pleased about his cigar as the children about their trundle bed, and I listened rather coolly to his praises of the men he had been talking with. "A new kind of humanity, Milly," he said. "I never saw men like them. I think I will go and talk to them an hour or two longer." And, when I looked into his buoyant, happy face, and remembered that he would have to live and work with this new kind of humanity, I understood at once the necessity of sympathy and agreement. I told him that I felt inclined to write poetry, and would doubtless go to sleep about the sixth line, "so go, and talk, and enjoy yourself, Robert, dear," I added. "I am glad you have such good company." "Better company there could not be, Milly," and, with these words, he kissed me, and ran lightly down stairs. Did I write any more poetry? No, I went to sleep. But I have not yet forgotten two lines of the poem to Mother England I began that night, and have never yet finished, My heart is like a weaning child, That never can be weaned: I did not dream at that date of a time when Robert Bonner would pay me ten dollars every week for a poem, and that for a period of nearly fifteen years. When that time arrived, I had outgrown the longing and the need--I had been adopted by New York. CHAPTER XIII IN ARCADIA "'Tis not for nothing that we Life pursue. It pays our hopes with something still that's new; Each day's a gift we ne'er enjoyed before, Like travelers, we're pleased with seeing more." There are no little events in life, those we think of no consequence may be full of fate, and it is at our own risk if we neglect the acquaintances and opportunities that seem to be casually offered, and of small importance. And, as for what we call "accidents," they are God's part in every occurrence so called. I am led to this reflection by a circumstance that happened just at this time. When the coach which brought us to Austin was on the point of leaving Bastrop, a man rode rapidly up to it, and, flinging his bridle to a bystander, made a leap to the outside seats, and landed close to Robert. Robert smilingly made room for him, saying as he did so, "That was a clever jump. It is a jump you mustn't make a miss of--if you try it." This introduction preceded a day of pleasant conversation together, and, when the coach stopped at Smith's Hotel, the Honorable William Bentley stopped there, and at the dinner table we found him again at Robert's side. The big cigar Robert was smoking when he came to tell me he was going to sit and talk an hour or two, was made from tobacco grown on the Bentley plantation; and, in the course of that evening's conversation, he told Robert he was the member for his county, and had come to Austin to take his seat in the legislative hall. "When I got religion," he continued, "the folks began to talk of sending me to Austin. I was not onto the thing at first, but got sort of dragged into it and at last I gave up, as any Christian might do, specially one new to the business. Now I like it, and there's no one more ready to devote himself to his country than William Bentley. I want you to know that. So come to the Capitol with me in the morning, and you will see and hear something worth while. If you don't you may call me short stock, even if I am six feet three in my stockings." Robert repeated this speech to me with certain Texan interjections I need not insert, and I asked, "Will you go with him?" "Certainly, Milly. I expect to enjoy it very much. He says he will show me legislators who are alive, and not a lot of respectable graven images, like they have in Washington. He told me, that young Terry was going to speak for the Rangers, and that the men who did not like plain truths would have to get up and squander, for they would be sure to have the _bleeding frontier_ served up to them, in every heartbreaking style, Terry could manage; and they say he can tell Indian tales that make men shiver, and shout, '_Shut up, Terry!_' Milly, I have had one of the pleasantest days that I have known in all my life. Is it not strange, dear?" "Not at all, Robert," I answered. "The land is so lovely, and the people so friendly, that any good thing seems possible." In the morning I watched him, as he dressed with more than usual care, though he was always particular on this subject, more so than I could patiently endure when "hurry" was the order, and I had the children to dress as well as myself, and yet was always kept waiting for some trifling adjustment that seemed to me unnecessary. Comparing notes on this subject with numberless other women, I have come to a fixed and solid conviction that vanity and love of dress is a male, and not a female, foible, and I think, moreover, that Nature in all her departments supports this theory. I am at least quite sure that any woman still young and beautiful would have prepared herself for a possible interview with a Texan legislator, in much less time than my young and still handsome husband found necessary. But the result was perhaps worth the labor, and I watched the Honorable William Bentley and Robert walking up the avenue together, with smiles of satisfaction. Robert had the English air of reserve, and of entire complacency with his apparel and appearance. His high silk hat typified the quality and fashion of all the garments beneath it, and I have no doubt that he was the only man in Austin wearing gloves that day. His honorable companion was at least a picturesque contrast. He was tall, and thin, and aquiline, loosely and carelessly dressed in a white flannel shirt, dark tweed trousers, and a broad leather belt _without furnishings_. Gentlemen then wore Wellington boots--no amount of vanity could have made women put on such affairs--but the Honorable Bentley wore very low-cut shoes, and I hardly think his hands had ever dreamed of gloves. However, he wore on his head a handsome black sombrero, with a silver cord and tassel round it. Looking at the two figures, as they slowly trailed up the avenue, I was forcibly impressed with the fitness of the Texan dress for the Texan climate, and I decided that it would be proper for Robert to adopt as much of it as was suitable to him. I thought he would be pleased to do so. I was as much mistaken when I named the subject. I found Robert wedded to his waistcoat, ashamed to go to the street without a proper coat, and quite sure he would not feel respectable without his suspenders. As for a belt taking their place, that idea was out of the question. Occupied with such thoughts, I sat sewing at the open window, unconsciously inhaling the sweet air, and bathing myself in the warm, brilliant sunshine. The children were playing with Mrs. Smith's little daughter in a shady yard at the back of the hotel, and I was alone and full of thought and speculation. The small white dress I was making, I had begun on that morning when Robert returned home with the news that drove us from Memphis so hastily. I had thrown it and my sewing materials into the trunk that was going with me, thinking I should certainly find many hours in which I could finish the garment. But on that dreadful sail down the Mississippi I could not have touched a needle, and ever since the travel had been so continuous, and so unrestful, that sewing had been impossible. But now! now, I should be at rest, and, as soon as the wagons with the emigrants for New Braunfels reached Austin, we should receive our trunks, for they had taken charge of them at Harrisburg, and could then rent a house and make a new home. Of course, this idea at once recalled our first home in Glasgow, then my mind went reluctantly to Chicago and the pitiful home-breaking there, then to Memphis and the "flee-for-your-lives" hurry with which we had abandoned the home made there. But I was still hopeful. This place was so different. The people were so different. Life itself was different. No one was in a hurry, and I had already caught the spirit of the place, for my needle was taking its time, and going leisurely down a seam it would have once run rapidly over. "I am going to be happy at last!" I whispered, and then I perversely added, "_Perhaps_." Have we not all of us, at some time in our lives, said ill-omened words, which we would gladly have recalled, if it had been possible? The Greeks prayed Demeter not to permit them to use such words, and I instantly prayed to be forgiven the doubting syllables, while within me I heard distinctly the sorrowful spirit's reproach, "O thou of little faith." So I dropped my work, and sat silent as a chidden child, a little sorry, a little afraid, and beneath all some hot anger at whatever influence prompted the ill-boding expression. As I sat I heard the gong announcing lunch, and I wondered why Robert had not returned in time for the meal. He did not come at all, and I went to my room cross and disappointed. I told myself, that however much Robert had been interested, he ought to have remembered the difficulty I had in attending to both children during a meal. He knew how anxious I was, and also how lonely. There was always the little company of men on the sidewalk for him to join, but there was no similar provision for women in the house. Oh, I had a score of small grievances to complain of, and, I am sorry to admit, that I took the hour after lunch to interview every one of them. Then Mrs. Smith came to my room, and she had a letter in her hand, "It is for you," she said pleasantly, "and, what do you think? It was brought by one of the House messengers." "The House messengers!" I repeated. "Yes; by one of the boys who wait upon the members. I hope Mr. Barr is all right." I had opened the letter, as she was speaking, and I answered cheerfully, "All is well. He says he will be here before five o'clock." Then we had a little conversation, and, when she was going, I asked her to send the children to me, in order that I might dress them for the afternoon. Then I read my letter over and over again. It contained only two or three lines, but Oh, how good they were! MILLY, DARLING, Do not expect me until near five o'clock. I have met the most extraordinary good fortune. Be happy, dear. All is well. ROBERT. I stood with this blessed piece of paper in my hands a few minutes, speechless, my heart brimming over. Then I spread it open on my bed, and kneeling down beside it, I let my tears of contrition and gratitude wet the happy message. The gift of prayer is not always in our power, and at that hour it was far from me, but I thanked God with repentant tears, and then rising with a glad spirit, I put under my feet every doubtful complaining thought. About five o'clock I heard Robert's footsteps on the pavement, and also his voice answering those who spoke to him, and his steps were light and firm, and his voice had those happy inflections that only hope realized can utter--sweet and thrilling and full of promise. I was at the door of our room to meet him, and he took me in his arms and whispered, "Dearest, I am so happy to bring you good news." "Tell me, Robert. Tell me all about it," I said, and we sat down together, and he continued, "You know, Milly. I went away with Bentley this morning soon after nine, and we had walked barely two blocks when he said, 'We will shake up Lawyer Scot for half-an-hour. I want his advice, and you might find his acquaintance a mighty good thing.' So we entered a small building and were evidently in the lawyer's office, though no one was visible. Bentley told me to 'have off my hat and take a chair,' and he would hunt up Scot. There was a New York paper lying on the table, and also a copy of the _Scotchman_. I lifted the latter and Bentley went into another room, where I soon heard him talking with great emphasis. In twenty minutes he came back to me accompanied by a man about forty years of age, a man so visibly and plainly Scotch that I could not help smiling when he looked at me." "Did he return the smile?" I asked. "He walked to the table, poured out a glass of water, and gave it to me, then filling one for himself, he touched my glass and said, '_Here's to the men o' Glasgo!_' Then I touched his glass and answered, '_Fife and all the lands about it!_'" "Was he Fife, Robert? What did he say?" "He said, 'O man, you're right! You're right! I am Fife! Bone and blood, nerve and brain, I am Fife!'" "Then, Robert?" "I offered my hand, and he clasped it between his two large brown hands, and said, 'Sit a few minutes. I want a word with you.' So he asked my name and what I was in Texas for. I told him that we had been driven from Memphis by fever and the threat of cholera, and had not escaped the terror either in New Orleans, Galveston or Harrisburg. He readily understood the position, and inquired next if we intended to return to Memphis, as soon as it was safe to do so? I told him we intended to remain in Austin if I could find any way in which it would be possible to make a living. "'How did you make it in Memphis?' he asked and I answered, 'As a professional accountant.' "'Accountant!' he cried, leaping to his feet. 'Great Scot, you are the very man now wanted! Come, Bentley. I must go to the House with this news. And I must see Raymond before he goes to his office.' "He was so impetuous, that it was impossible to question him, and in such a hurry that I had hardly time to put my hat on properly; so in a few minutes we were mounting the long flight of steps leading to the Capitol entrance. Here we met Mr. Raymond, who is state treasurer, and Mr. Scot almost shouted, 'Here's your accountant, Raymond! Here's a leal Scot from the city o' Glasgo, and later from the city o' Memphis! Here's the very man you and your legislators are wanting!'" "And then what, Robert?" "Then Bentley laughed heartily, and introduced me to Mr. Raymond, and while Scot and Bentley sat down on the top step, and fanned themselves with their Panama hats, I had a talk with Mr. Raymond, the result of which was that he took me to a committee room, and showed me its long table piled high and higher with bills and papers. "'We have had three men here,' said Mr. Raymond, 'and all of them have thrown up the job. Will you try it?' I told him I would gladly do so, and then he hoped I would manage it; and I answered, I had never yet seen the tangle of figures I could not manage. "'I believe you will clear up this mess,' he said, 'and if you do the House will be grateful. In the meantime we will pay you five dollars a day--hours from ten to four including an hour for lunch. Will that be satisfactory?' I said it would, and he replied, 'Then do get to work at once.' I then asked permission to remove my coat while working, and he laughed like a boy and said, 'Sure! I shall wonder if you don't take off your waistcoat, and your necktie, also.' Then I was left to study the laws governing my work and explaining what I had to do." "Can you explain it to me, Robert?" I asked. "I think perhaps you might understand it, if----" "Of course I can understand it; that is not what I mean. Is it interesting? Is it worth while? Or is it all dollars and cents?" "It is all dollars and cents--commissions paid to certain men for buying goods for the military board, advances made by different houses, et cetera. You see, Milly," he continued, "the Republic of Texas has just been bought by the United States. Some of her debts the United States assumes, some she must pay, or has paid herself; and there are agreements covering a score of points of this kind. It is a very intricate piece of business, I assure you." "But you can do it, Robert?" I asked. "Quite easily, when I get the agreements clearly in my mind. I shall do that in a few days, and I like such work. I like it, Milly, as other men like sport, or scientific experiments. Now, Milly, you can look for a house; the trunks will surely be here in a week or ten days, and then we will make another home." If I have made friends with my readers by this time they will not need to be told how happy I was, how grateful in my heart of hearts to God, the Giver of all good things, how sure I felt that this wonderful stepping into a fine position was only His doing. I recalled Mr. Bentley's jump to the roof of the coach, and the little scornful feeling with which I regarded it as a bit of "show off." I recalled my own shyness at all his kind advances during the "nooning" and my petty, angry wonder that Robert should find him so entertaining. Yet the Honorable Mr. Bentley had been the road to Lawyer Scot, Councillor to the House, and Scot the road to State Treasurer Raymond; and quite independent of my approval the way prepared had been strictly followed to the end proposed, and with that rapidity of events which can only spring from intelligence and power beyond human foresight. Nothing in all my life has so irresistibly convinced me, that the steps of a good man are ordered of the Lord, and that He delighteth in His ways, as this wonderful preparation made ready for us, when we arrived at the place appointed. No intimation of it had been given us, which was fortunate, for if we had been expecting something of the kind, we might have worried and interfered, and tied the hands, or delayed in some way those beyond who were arranging our affairs. For this reason the big events of life are rarely announced beforehand, but when least looked for, the thing we have vainly sought, steals quietly into our possession. In ten days we heard that the trunks were at Bastrop, and I immediately began to look for a small house. Empty houses, however, were not plentiful, almost everybody owned their own home, and such as were to rent, were few and far between. All of them were in the hands of Lawyer Scot, and I called on him one morning to ask about a little place that seemed suitable. Because he had taken so kindly to Robert, I tried to look as pretty as possible. I put on a clean white frock, with blue satin belt and bows, and a very pretty white sunbonnet. For the white sunbonnets of the Texan girl were things of beauty, and as they were removed on entering a room, I soon learned that the very act of removal communicated a pleasant surprise and a revelation of unsuspected charm. I was wishful to win the good will of one who had been so readily a friend to us. I succeeded very well. He looked up a little glumly as I entered, but when I lifted my sunbonnet, made him a curtsey, and said with a smile, "I am Robert Barr's wife," he was delighted. He offered me his chair, and his fan, he had fresh drinking water drawn, he put up windows, he pulled down shades, he was all smiles and graciousness. And I permitted his attentions. I knew that every one made him like me better, and I wished that he might praise me to Robert, for it does the best of husbands good to be reminded by other men, that they have somehow managed to win a paragon. Then I told him about the house and he said, "It was not good enough." He told me to remember I would have many calls from the ladies connected with the Administration; and I answered I did not want a house that lady callers might approve, but one suitable for a home for Robert and my children. This sentiment agreed with his natural, primitive ideas of wifehood, and he heartily approved my views, but still he would not hear of the cottage I had selected. Finally he admitted that its water supply was poor, and that the house itself had not a good name. "People who mind freets," he continued, "talk about it being unlucky, and point out that every one that lives in it, comes to grief of some kind." But he was willing to warrant that I was above noticing things of that kind. "Indeed, Mr. Scot," I answered, "you would lose your warranty. I notice them very much. The atmosphere of a house tells me plainly, what kind of people live in it." "Of an empty house?" he asked. "There are very few empty houses," I answered, "very few indeed. I knew of one on the busiest corner of a busy street in Chicago. It looked empty. It looked _dead_. You felt sure neither mortals, nor the bodiless were in its vacant rooms." We continued this conversation until the lawyer appeared to remember with a shock, that we were talking of things startlingly foreign to a lawyer's office, and he ended his next sentence with the information that he had the McArthur place to rent--"a clean, nice house in good company, and without an ugly past to reckon with. I will go with Robert," he added, "and we will look it over together." Robert subsequently took the house. He said I could make any shelter look homelike, and though small, I also saw that it possessed some possibilities. It was a wood building of two stories. There was one large room into which we entered at once, a thing so English that it won my instant approval. It was well lighted by four large windows, and had a little stoop at the front door with a balcony above it. The roof of this room was unplastered, but the want was partly hidden by a ceiling of strong domestic. The walls were covered with the same material, and then papered. On one side there was a wide fireplace, and a door leading into a room beyond. This room was smaller and no attempt had been made in it to hide the boarding and shingling, except that they had been whitewashed, and of course that decoration could be again applied. An unpainted stairway in this room led to two large rooms above, and a door opened into a yard containing the kitchen, and a small stable. Robert saw all the inconveniences in their unvarnished literalness. I saw them as picturesque irregularities to be accepted with the rest of their environment. Indeed when our trunks arrived, and I stood once more on my own hearth, I liked the idea of bringing a pretty home out of such apparently incongruous materials. I knew that I could do it. With great and repeated suffering I had bought this knowledge. I had paid the price. Good! What we buy, and pay for, is part of ourselves. [Illustration: MR. ROBERT BARR] Chairs and tables and such things were to be purchased and I chose the home made articles. Among them was a high four-poster bedstead, that reminded me of the century-old bedsteads in English farmhouses. But I liked it because it could be draped with white netting to exclude flies and mosquitoes. But I did not get a trundle bed to roll under it. My enthusiasm concerning trundle beds had cooled, and Mary and Lilly had their individual cots in the room going out of mine. I remember the three weeks in which I was making a pretty home out of these four rooms of boarding and shingles as one of the happiest periods of my life. I had plenty of fine bedding, and table damask, china and plate, some favorite books, and bits of bric-a-brac, a few pictures and rugs, and a good deal of Berlin wool work, and fancy needlework. At night when we had had dinner, and talked over Robert's experiences at the Capitol, Robert put up shelves here and there for me, hung mosquito nets and shades, and with paint and brush beautified many rough and soiled corners. Never before had I been so proud of my handsome, clever husband, and I am sure that with elbows bare, and an apron on, I was more charming to him, than I had ever been before. On looking back I find one sure evidence of our perfect love at this time--we hung a number of pictures, and did not have one frown, or cross word about the work. Now if anything will make two people certain of each other's want of taste, or incorrect eyesight, it is hanging pictures; and if any two doubt this, I advise them to spend an afternoon together in the employment. Robert and I, in these perfect days, never had a doubtful word about any picture, unless his request that a water color portrait of himself, might be turned to the wall when he was in the house, may be taken as coming from some dissatisfaction. It is only necessary to say, I pretended not to hear his request, and that the cherubic boy in a short jacket and square cap disappeared in a way beyond my finding out. Some weeks of pure happiness followed our settlement, calm-hearted weeks, full of rich content. I made a great many acquaintances, and a few intimate friends. In such a community as the Austin of that date, this result was unavoidable. For _color_ not money was the dividing line, and the consequence was a real democracy. Every good white man was the social equal of every other good white man, but one drop of negro blood put its owner far below social recognition. And women are never democrats. There is always in their societies an exclusive set. This set in Austin was not as I expected composed mainly of the families connected with the Administration. It was a much more mixed affair. Its leaders were Mrs. Tom Green, and Mrs. George Durham. Mrs. Green was young, clever, and intimately and decidedly Texan. She was witty and sarcastic, and many were afraid of her criticisms. She dressed well, and entertained delightfully, in Texan fashion, the ladies she chose to honor. Mrs. Durham was the wife of George Durham, an Englishman from my own North Country, and an attaché of the comptroller's office. Robert was his associate, and they were excellent friends. I saw little of him, but he frequently sent me birds, venison, and other spoils of his rifle. For he was a fine sportsman, and spent his hours of recreation hunting on the prairie, "shooting for glory" as Texans say of a man, who hunts not for food, but for amusement. The Durhams lived in a small log house on the road to the ferry. Every one coming into town, and every one going out of town passed Mrs. Durham's. Her sitting-room was as entertaining as the local news in the weekly paper. There was no restraint in Mrs. Durham's company; people could be themselves without fear of criticism. She was not pretty, not stylish, not clever, not in the least fashionable, but she was the favorite of women, who were all of these things. There were no carpets on her floors, and there was a bed in the room wherein her friends congregated. She did not go to entertainments, and I never saw a cup of tea served in her house, yet she was the most popular woman in Austin, and not to be free of Mrs. Durham's primitive log house, was to be without the hall mark of the inner circle. Taking all things together, the life lived by the women of Austin at that date was a joyous, genial existence. All had plenty of servants, and they could not then give notice, nor yet pack their little parcel and go without notice so then houses once comfortably ordered, remained so for lengthy periods. Their chief employment appeared to be an endless tucking of fine muslin, and inserting lace in the same. Very little but white swiss or mull was worn, and morning and evening dresses were known by the amount of tucking and lace which adorned them. Some of the women chewed snuff without cessation, and such women, neither "tucked," nor "inserted." They simply rocked to-and-fro, and put in a word occasionally. It must be remembered, that the majority of women who "dipped" had likely formed the habit, when it was their only physical tranquilizer, through days and nights of terror, and pain, and watchfulness; and that the habit once formed is difficult to break, even if they desired to break it, which was not a common attitude. In 1856, I knew of only two pianos in the city of Austin, one was in the Governor's mansion, the other belonged to a rich Jewish family called Henricks. I think there were certainly more scattered in the large lonely planter's houses outside the city, but in the city itself, I remember only these two. There was no book store in the city, and books were not obvious in private houses; and if there had been any literary want felt, there was wealth enough to have satisfied it. How did the women amuse themselves? I often asked myself this question. There was no theatre, no hall for lectures or concerts, no public library, no public entertainments of any kind, except an occasional ball during the sitting of the legislature. Yet for all this, and all this, I reiterate my statement that the women of Austin fifty-six years ago lived a joyous and genial life. It was their pleasant and constant custom to send word to some chosen lady, that they, with Mrs. A. and Mrs. B. were coming to spend the following day with her. If the day was hot, they arrived soon after nine o'clock, got quickly into loose garments and slippers, took out their tucking, and palm leaf fans, and subsided into rocking-chairs. They could all talk well, and by noon were all ready for the delicious dinner sure to be prepared. It consisted usually of young chicken fried in butter, venison roasted with sweet herbs, or the broiled breasts of quails, which cost them about ten cents a dozen, or, if later in the season, a pot-pie of wild turkey. Strong coffee always accompanied the meal, and if any lady could by good luck, or good management, secure milk or cream for a tapioca pudding, or a dish of cup custard, the occasion was memorable. About four o'clock they began to dress, and the carryall arrived; because after half-past-four the invasion of the male might be expected, and it was a point of honor to throw a little mystery around these meetings. Robert once asked me how we had passed the time. "In different ways," I answered. "You talk of course?" he continued. "Yes, we talk." "What about?" "Many things." "Can you not tell me some of them?" "It is not worth while, Robert." "You do not wish to tell me?" "Perhaps." "It might be, that you are afraid to tell." "It might be." "Tell me, Milly. Don't be provoking." "You never tell me, Robert, what George Durham, and Mr. Simcox, and Wash Hill, and the rest of your companions talk about. You always say, if I ask you, 'It is not worth telling.'" But when the evening shadows fell, and we sat outside under the great planets shining above us--and apparently twice the size they appear in more northern latitudes--the sweet influences of the Pleiades were too powerful to resist, and I generally then confided to Robert any touching or amusing incident, that had been talked over by us. But sometimes Orion was in the ascendant, and his binding virtues helped me to keep silence, and to be provoking. It must have been Orion at these times, for there is naturally nothing secretive about me. Our topics were nearly always strictly local, and men dearly love local topics, for instance there was a very pretty old lady frequently present, no matter where the meeting was held. She was a Mrs. R----, aged about sixty-five, the wife of an old Texan Major who had been in every scrimmage that had occurred between the Trinity and the Rio Grande. He was a hale, handsome man far in his eighties, and had virtually lived with his rifle in his hand--on the whole a rather unmanageable human quantity, except in the hands of his pretty little wife. Being near neighbors she was in my house nearly every day, and perhaps the most welcome visitor we had. She was a Highland Scotch woman, from the city of Perth, still beautiful, and always dressed with piquant suggestion of her native land. Robert paid her great attention, and she sent Robert, three or four days every week, a basin of the Scotch broth he loved so naturally, and to which I had never been able to impart the national flavor. One day when there was a small gathering in my parlor she joined it. Every one immediately noticed that the pretty pink color of her cheeks had vanished, and that she looked jaded and half-angry. For a moment I thought she was going to cry. Not at all! She flushed pinker than ever, and in an hysterical voice, blended of anger and pity, and the faintest suggestion of laughter, said, "Ladies, I'm picking my steps over an unkent road. I will not believe that anybody has traveled it afore me." "It is the Major, of course!" sighed Mrs. Tannin, shaking her head sadly. "Yes, Mrs. Tannin, it's the Major. The man is in perfect agony. He has been raving about his room for three days and nights, and Dr. Alexander says the trouble is like to go on for weeks, or even months." "Whatever is the matter, Mrs. R----?" I asked. "That Comanche arrow, I reckon," said Mrs. Smith. "Perhaps it is the dengue fever," suggested Mrs. East. The little woman shook her head. "It is neither one, nor the other," she answered. "It is nothing natural, or ordinary. I'm sorry for the man. 'Deed am I, but I cannot for the life of me, help a quiet snicker when not seen. Ladies, the Major is cutting a whole set of new teeth." "Impossible!" "'Deed it is the very truth. The doctor lanced his gums this morning, as if he was a baby, and I saw the teeth all ready to be born, as it were. The Major was swearing and groaning, and the doctor, who is very religious, telling him 'to be quiet,' and me trembling with fear, and begging Ben for his pistol." "Did he give it to you?" "Finally he threw it down on the table, and told me to 'hobble the thing,' which I did by locking it up in my own drawer, and putting the key in my pocket," and she tapped her pocket significantly, to intimate that it was still there. "Was it Dr. Litten," I asked, "who operated?" "No," she answered. "It was Dr. Alexander, and he was very irritating, calling Ben an old baby, who made more fuss about cutting teeth than the whole twenty-two babies in Austin, whom he knew, that day, were sucking their mother's milk and cutting their teeth. I thought then the Major would strike him--sure! And again when he was wiping his lance, and said, very kind like, 'Major, I do pity you,' my man answered furiously, 'Be off with your pity, and don't come here again with it.'" Some one remarked that it was a dreadful situation, and then the little wife declared, "It wasn't like Ben to make a fuss about pain. He had come home one day," she said, "with a Comanche feather sticking out of his back, and had suffered everything but death, and been as meek and mild as any Christian could be. And yet _now_!" she continued, "he is raging around like a mad bull; he is smashing my china vases, and flinging his broth out of the window, and swearing at the new teeth till he hasn't another word left--forbye, he vows he will have the first and the last of them pulled out, as sure and quick as they come. O ladies, it is dreadful! Dreadful!" And then she looked at us with such a comical, lugubrious expression, that further restraint was out of the question. For Mrs. R---- was between laughing and crying, and I am afraid we all laughed a little with her. But the incident, though so unusual, was, however, a fact, though how it came to pass, let the doctors tell. We could do nothing but sympathize and offer to make all sorts of nice, soft, mushy dishes for the Major's sore gums. When Robert came home I did not try to keep the Major's condition from him, and I felt sure he was contemplating the effect the news would make in his office the next morning; for undoubtedly men love gossip, though they usually call it politics. I do not know how far this pleasant, homely visiting was imitated by the women living on the outlying ranches and plantations, but I think it likely something of the same kind exists in all tropic countries, where the dwellings of friends are far apart. It was, however, only a superficial quality of the real Texan woman, who was, when I knew her, more than half a century ago, brave and resourceful, especially when her environment was anxious and dangerous. They were then nearly without exception fine riders and crack shots, and quite able, when the men of the household were away, to manage their ranches or plantations, and keep such faithful guard over their families and household, that I never once in ten years, heard of any Indian, or other tragedy occurring. I have dwelt a little on the character of the Texan woman, because she was in superficial matters and in all her environments a new creation to me. No one knows better than I do, that woman, in all essential characteristics, is the same yesterday, today, and forever, yet the readiness with which she lends herself to the variations of race, climate, caste, creed, nationality, and conditions of every kind, is the greatest charm of her feminality. Thus, in detailing the scene with Mrs. R----, I was instinctively led to picture a group of Scotchwomen, sitting socially together and listening to a similar story. I could see them, not in comfortable lounging gowns, but corseted, collared, cuffed, and belted to the last point of endurance and sewing, of course, for a Ladies' Aid, or Dorcas Society. If, into the midst of such a group was flung the news of a man near ninety years old cutting a new set of teeth, I know it would be received with looks of frigid disapproval. If assured that it was not an unseemly joke, but an undoubted fact, they would still disapprove such a departure from the decorum of old age. Perhaps some one might suggest there was a mistake, "it being a circumstance clean beyond the bounds of probability"; then, if told the medical man had seen the new teeth, the question would be, what medical man? And, if he was not one attending their family, his skill would be as certainly doubted, as would be the orthodoxy of any minister, they did not "sit under." If, finally, the incident got a tardy, grudging admission, some one would "suppose the fact--if it was a fact--ought to be reported to the Royal Society of Surgeons and Physicians in London"; and some one else would be certain to answer, "The Royal Society is already well acquainted with the like of such cases. It has published accounts of them more often than you think. My mother has read the same--whiles." This assertion, not being deniable, would elicit the reflection that there was then nothing beyond the ordinary in the circumstance, except that such a thing should happen to the Major, "who had always been the most proper of men, a member of St. Jude's Kirk, and of the very best society"; and this reflection would probably end the matter. There would be no sympathetic words, and no offers of nice, soft, mushy things to eat for a man nearly ninety, who could so flagrantly violate the ordinary Scotch traditions with regard to teething. How women of other nationalities would receive such a piece of news, I leave my readers to decide. One thing is certain, no two groups of different race and environments, creed or education, would take even such a simple household matter in quite the same spirit and manner. Let men be thankful for the variableness of women. It provides them continually with something to admire, or to wonder over. Among such scenes and people as I have been describing I spent nearly ten years; and the first three or four of these ten were, in some respects, the happiest years of my life. Their very memory is a blessing unto this day, for often, when I am heart and brain weary, it steals upon me, swift and sweet and sure as a vision. I smell the China trees and the pine. I hear the fluting of the wind, and the tinkling of guitars. I see the white-robed girls waltzing in the moonshine down the broad sidewalks of the avenue, and the men, some in full evening dress, and others in all kinds of picturesque frontier fashion, strolling leisurely down its royally wide highway. I am sitting in the little wood house, with its whitewashed ceilings and unpainted stairway and one sits at my side, who left me forty-five years ago. Oh, believe me! He who raised the shade of Helen, had no greater gift than mine! About the middle of October Robert finished the work intrusted to him by the Ways and Means Committee of the Session of 1856, and finished it so well, and so completely, that Senator J. W. Throckmorton, Chairman of the Senate Committee, and the Honorable C. W. Buckley, Chairman of the House Committee, entered in their report to the House, the following acknowledgment: The balance sheet will show the exact pecuniary condition of the affairs of the Board in every point, and it is unnecessary to say more upon the subject, than to invite an inspection of it. The Committee were extremely fortunate in procuring the services of a gentleman to act as their Secretary, so well qualified to perform the duties, and so thoroughly versed in book-keeping as Mr. Barr. His qualifications have lightened their labors, and an inspection of the exhibit prepared by him, is only necessary to prove how fortunate we have been in procuring his services. I was exceedingly proud of this notice, and it was very fortunate for Robert, for Mr. Shaw, the comptroller, immediately offered him the second desk in his office, so that he had his friend, George Durham, for his confrère. I had not even an hour's time to be anxious, for Robert went at once from the committee room to the comptroller's office, and in all probability the future was settled for many years. That was what I thought, and I put out of my memory all the sorrowful past, and counted the present as its compensation. CHAPTER XIV THE BEGINNING OF STRIFE "Pride in their port, Defiance in their eye, I see the lords of humankind pass by." I had written home many times since we left Memphis, and had fully described all that we had seen and heard, as well as all that had happened to us, and I had received several letters in reply to mine. But all had made me a little anxious about my mother's health, and I knew that she was fretting about our being so far from England. "Death cannot so completely separate us, Milly," she wrote; "indeed, when I am dead, I shall often be close to you." She was right. Time and distance are two sharp swords. Distance cuts apart, and time teaches forgetfulness. Now trouble of all kinds is voluble, and has plenty of words, but happiness was never written down. Happiness is like religion; it is a mystery, and should not be explained or reasoned about. I find it difficult to put into words the pictures of the life full of all things good, which God gave me for the next four years, and I am glad that it had the little shadows necessary for its full flavor and strength. For it is a poor, weak happiness that is devoid of small worries and disagreeables; these things being the tonic bitters without which we should weary even of our pleasures. So I had differences of opinion with my hired slaves. I did not understand the negro woman then, any better than I understand the Finnish or Irish woman now. I thought right was always right, and that all women, of whatever race, ought to do right; and Robert's advice about "making allowances" was not agreeable. Robert himself did not always deserve, or, at least obtain, my approval; and my friends did and said things I thought they ought not to do and say. The children would play down at the creek, soil and tear their dresses, and then be sure to show themselves when they were not fit to be seen. Sometimes the dinner was a failure, sometimes the weather was all wrong for my purposes, sometimes I did not get the letter I was expecting. For my twenty-sixth birthday Robert had bought me a piano, and it did not arrive in Austin until two weeks after it was due. I had not touched a piano for more than a year, and my fingers ached for the ivory keys. Those two weeks were hard to bear. I forgot all my other blessings. I knew that if hope brightened life, patience strengthened it, but I did not want to exercise patience at this time, and I worried all the pleasure out of the gift before I received it. I was sorry enough afterwards, but I could not undo the wrong. I had spoiled the gift by those self-inflicted wounds, which are always lost griefs. The piano has gone, I know not where, but the memory of my fretful unreasonableness is still with me, and can still cause me moments of keen sorrow and chagrin. On July the second, A.D. 1857, I had a son, and all other joys were forgotten in the delight of this event. Early in the morning I had sent Mary and Lilly to the hotel to spend the day with Jenny Smith, and neither Robert nor I remembered them, till the negro woman, at eight o'clock at night, reminded us of their absence. Then I laughed and looked at the boy lying at my side, and Robert laughed and said that he had "forgotten"; my thoughts flew back to the birth of my eldest brother at Shipley, and to my jealousy of the attentions he received. It was my mother then. Now it was I. I looked again at the boy, but I resolved to be particularly affectionate to the two girls when they reached home, which they did about nine o'clock, weary and sleepy, and wondering why they had been neglected so long. Nor were they any more impressed with their first brother, than my sister Jane and I had been with ours. Mary asked what he was called; and when I answered, "His name is to be Calvin," she said, "Oh!" and Lilly said, "What a queer name!" Then I asked if they did not remember Calvin Fackler, their father's friend in Memphis, and they went sleepily to their bed, without any further notice of their new brother. Soon after this event I received my first copy of _Harper's Weekly_. It had no illustrations then, but I have never forgotten a story I read in its pages, called "The White Cat." A few numbers later the illustrations began--the clever but terrible ones relating to the Sepoy rebellion. These illustrations were reproduced from a prominent London paper, and I had no intimation then of a coming day when the arrival of the regular pictures from London papers at Harper Brothers, would mean to me a respectable part of my income. These first pictured scenes of the mutiny had, however, to Robert and myself a powerful personal interest. Often we recalled the dream which had prevented us from going to Calcutta, and sent us westward to New York instead. For, when we cannot be guided by the ordinary course of events, the bars of the body are unlocked at dark, sleep falleth on the sensitive soul, and it is warned, or taught by dreams, which are the walking of God through sleep. After Calvin's birth I began to be very uneasy about my mother's health. She no longer spoke of our meeting again; she wrote shorter and shorter letters, and her clear, fine writing was shaken and changed. It had always had one marked peculiarity--a frequent disconnection of letters that should have been united--a signal and exclusive sign, occultists say, of a spiritual nature ever ready to detach itself from the material, and endowed with high psychic powers. This diagnosis would be very true in my mother's case: she lived in the visible, but was always ready for the invisible. Such tendencies, however, were in her day unrecognized, and those who possessed them were shy of admitting the fact. The church universally considered all phenomena it did not promulgate as a new kind of sin. Even John Wesley's psychic intelligence was regarded as a lapse of his usual wisdom, and his book embodying it carefully consigned to oblivion. So Mother told me visions and warnings she never named to Father and rarely to my sister Jane, who was not mystical in any form. If a vision or dream was in the Bible, Father and Jane believed it firmly, if it was not in the Bible, they had serious doubts. And I have always felt that this want of spiritual confidence between my father and mother was a great wrong to their love. It wounded it in its noblest attributes; it denied it expansion in its purest aspirations; it ignored too often the spiritual bond between them, which, if given its due regard, is far, far stronger than any tie mere flesh and blood can form. But we cannot cross a stile till we come to it, and the world is even now only just beginning to seek after that sixth sense, lost in the abyss of some great moral fall. At this time Mother was not fifty-two years old, and an Englishwoman of that age should be in the plentitude of her beauty and vigor. But she had worn life away in an unbroken service of love, for which she was physically most unfit; for, in those days there were no trained nurses, no anodyne to ease severe pain, except laudanum; no alleviations, either for the sick, or for those whose affection bound them to help and comfort the sick. She was not fifty-two and dying, and she knew it. But many afflictions and one Love had made strong her faith, and she said in her last letter to me, "I am no longer anxious about your dear father. The everlasting arms are his support and refuge. My watch is nearly over, your little sisters must take my place. They know _who_ will help them. We shall meet again, Milly, but not in this world, darling, not in this world." With the Holy Name on her lips, she went away simply and solemnly, as if fulfilling some religious rite. I received the news of her departure one day when the house was full of company. I put the letter in my breast and said no word about it, for it was only to God I could speak of this sorrow; the common words of sympathy the news would have evoked, could not have comforted me. Even when Robert's tears mingled with mine, for he loved her dearly, I was not consoled. For a long time, daily life felt thin and haggard. I had no mother to write to, and my heart was troubled because I knew that I might have written to her oftener. I might have given her hopes that would have made death easier. Oh, why had I not done these things? For it is not the flowers on the coffin, but the flowers we strew on the daily life of our dear ones that show the true affection. And it was too late! O daughters of good mothers, give while God permits you, the kind words, the smiles of understanding affection, the little attentions and gifts, that will brighten your mother's last days. I do not know why I should have written "daughters of _good_ mothers." God makes no exceptions in his positive command to "Honor thy Father and thy Mother." I might have done more! that was the bitter refrain that for a long time made all my memories of the sweetest, tenderest mother sorrowful. But she has forgiven me long ago, and the vast breadth and depth of the river of death is now constantly bridged by our thoughts of each other. We walk far apart, but when I think of her, I know that she is thinking of me, and I wave my hand in greeting to her. Does she see the lifted hand? I believe she does. Why do I believe it? Because the soul is a diviner, and the things it knows best are the things it was never told. Whatever it divines, is revealed truth. Whatever it is told, may either be doubted or received. For nearly a year after the birth of Calvin, there was not much change in the domestic life of Austin. The days slipped into weeks and months, and were, as the waves of the ocean, all alike, and yet all different. But early in 1859 changes so great were present, that it was impossible any longer to ignore them. There were bitter disputes wherever men were congregated, and domestic quarrels on every hearthstone, while feminine friendships melted away in the heat of passionate arguments so well seasoned with personalities. There were now three distinct parties: one for remaining in the Union; a second which demanded a Southern Confederacy, and a third which wished Texas to resume her independence and to fly the _Lone Star_ flag again. It was a quarrel with three sides, and the women universally entered into it, with so much temper, that I could not help thinking they had all exercised too much long suffering in the past, and were now glad of a lawful opportunity to be a little ill-natured. It may be strange, but it is the truth, that I seldom heard slavery named as a reason for secession. The average Texan had but a slight security for his slaves. The journey to the Rio Grande was not long or difficult for a man bent on freedom, who was sure to be succored and helped by every party of Indians or Mexicans he met. Arriving at the river, he had only to walk across some one of its shallow fords, and touch land on the other side a free man. The number of slaves who freed themselves by this way was considerable every year, and I heard many slave owners say that they would be well satisfied to give their slaves freedom on such terms as the English slave owners obtained. What really excited them was the question of state rights. They were furious with the United States Government's interference in their state's social and domestic arrangements. They would not admit its right to do so, and were mad as their own prairie bulls, when compulsion was named. I heard arguments like these, both from men and women constantly; they talked of nothing else, and the last social gathering at my house was like a political arena. So I was not sorry when on April the sixteenth, my daughter Alice was born, and I could retire for a few weeks into comparative solitude, and peace. Robert brought me the news from the Capitol every day, and it was as uncertain and changeable as the wind. One day war was inevitable, and Houston was coming from Washington to lead the Unionist party; and perhaps the next day it was the pen, and not the sword, that would settle the matter. I began to grow indifferent. "The quarrel is all bluster," I said to Robert, "and their talk of war will fizzle out, some way or other, into a question of dollars and cents." And I was vexed because Robert shook his head at my opinion, and replied, "Well, Milly, I heard George Durham say something like that this morning, and an old Texan in the crowd told him he was all wrong. 'We are against seceding just now,' he said, 'but we shall be drug into it, and then we'll be so all-fired mad, we'll fight like a lobos wolf, who, the longer he fights, the better he fights.'" "You always look at the dark side, Robert," I complained; and he sighed and answered wearily, "It is generally the right side, Milly." One night, after a long, anxious day, I was conscious of that peculiar disturbance of heart and body, which warns of latent enmity or coming danger. My flagging soul felt "As if it were a body in a body, And not a mounting essence of fire." and though Robert was near me, I thought myself the most forlorn of women. All the sorrow of the world seemed to surround me, unseen, yet full of motion, and the terror of the dark grew, and my soul trembled in all her senses. Then I fell asleep--the dreary sleep of an unhappy, fearful woman. I was on a vast plain, dark and lonely, with the black clouds low over it, and the rain falling in a heavy, sullen downpour; and, as I stood with clasped hands, but without the power to pray, a great white arch grew out of the darkness. It seemed high as heaven, and wide as the horizon, and I wondered at its beauty and majesty. But, as I looked, I saw a black line down the center of it grow to a visible break, and this break grow wider and wider, until one-half of the arch fell to the ground, amid groans and cries, far off, but terrible. At the same moment I saw a _Presence_ of great height, dim and shadowy, standing beside the ruined arch, and he cried for the _birds of prey_ in a voice that filled all space. Turning north, and south, and east, and west, he cried, "_Come! and I will give you flesh to eat!_" From this dream I awoke in a maze of awe and wonder. I rose and went to the open door, and stood leaning against its lintel, carefully thinking over every detail of what I had seen and heard. It was hardly dawn, and that most pathetic of all objects, the waning moon, was sinking low to the horizon, and the whole world was wrapped in a gray mystery. For a few moments I saw Nature in those ineffable moments when she was asleep--so still, so cool, so soft and vapory in all her tints--her very face shrouded in a mist-like veil. I turned to Robert; he also was asleep, but I felt that I must tell him the message given me, while the spirit of it was still on me. I awakened him, and he listened in silence to what I had to say; but when I ceased speaking, he sighed and answered, "It is war, then, Milly, and may God help us!" "It is war, long and cruel war, Robert. What shall we do? Will you return to England? You know Sister Mary told us in her last letter, that your mother wished you to come home, and would do all she could to help you." "Nothing could induce me to go back to Scotland," he answered positively. "Then where shall we go?" I asked. "Let us remain here, in Austin. I like the people, and I like the country. I am willing to share its fortune, war or peace--if you will share it with me." "Robert!" I said fervently, "your country is my country, and your friends are my friends." "Well, then, dear, we have been warned, and we must not neglect the warning. We must make all the preparation possible." "You must have a good deal of money saved, Robert?" I asked. "No, Milly, I have not. I have invested all the extra money I made in land," he answered. "I was working for our own little plantation some day." Then I asked if, in the changes likely to occur, he would be in danger of losing his position in the comptroller's office, and he said, "It is possible. The United States Government has been kind and generous to me," he added, "and I have no intention of taking any oath against it." "But if Texas should become a republic again?" "She will not. Her enormous wealth is yet undeveloped. She has no money to carry on a government. I know that positively." We sat talking of probabilities until the dawn grew to sun-rising, and then we rode out to Mr. Illingworth's place, and had our cup of coffee with him and his wife. And one of the first things he said was, "I tell you, Barr, there will be a turning up and out in the government offices when Houston comes home." "He is coming, then?" asked Robert. "Yes. You will see him some morning soon, sitting in front of Tong's grocery, looking like a lion, and wearing a Serape Saltillero[3] like a royal mantle. I can't help admiring the man, though I do not like him. In a far-off way he reminds me of Oliver Cromwell." "Where is he now?" "In some small room in a Washington hotel, faithfully attending every session of the Senate, and every meeting of the Baptist church, and unceasingly whittling hearts and anchors, and other such toys out of a bit of pine wood." "Whittling in church, and the Senate House?" "In both places, in every place, and you will see him soon whittling in front of Tong's grocery." We did not see him until the fall, when he ran for the governorship of Texas against his old enemy, Governor Runnels, whom he quickly talked out of political existence, and then seated himself in the Governor's chair. I do not intend to trouble my readers with the political events of that date, excepting as they affected my own life; and, although General Houston is the grandest and most picturesque figure in American history, I shall refrain myself from magnifying either his exploits, character, or personality. Are they not written in the books of the historians, and in my own novel, "Remember the Alamo"? However, for a short space it will be necessary to note the conditions of affairs in Austin; for it was then the background of my story, but I shall do this without prejudice, and without unnecessary length of words. An immense crowd came into Austin to witness Houston's inauguration, and for long it did not altogether leave the city. The sweet, quiet, flower-scented streets were no longer haunted on moonlight nights by white-robed girls, and lovers singing "Juanita" to their tinkling guitars. They were full of rangers and frontiersmen, of deserting United States soldiers, waiting to join the Confederate army, and of little squads of Lipan or Tonkaway Indians, who were the spies and scouts of the United States army in their constant warfare against the cruel and hostile Comanche and Apache tribes. Yet a very handsome party of Apaches, under the watchful eyes of an Indian agent, visited Houston; for, over all Indians, Houston had an extraordinary influence. I do not remember being told that they had come with offers of peace and alliance, but I think they would not have been permitted to enter Austin under any other pretext. For there was speaking, and often quarreling at every gathering point, and not unfrequently the warning sound of a rifle or pistol shot. And, if a real scrimmage had arisen among the white men of the three parties, it would have been an enjoyable circumstance to either Apache or Comanche. So I also kept quietly at home, teaching my two eldest girls and a few others, for about three hours daily. I did not in any respect keep a school as I did in Chicago, but I had always about four or five girls whose education I looked a little after. I did this first, for the sake of teaching, which was then, as it is to this day, a delight to me, provided I have a bright, eager scholar. Secondly, I retained my friends of all parties through their daughters. Thirdly, I loved then, as I do yet, the company of girls. I was their confidant and friend, as well as their teacher. They brought me intelligence from all quarters, and they told me their sweet, little personal secrets. I have never forgotten some of these girls, and they have never forgotten me. Thus I passed three or four hours every day in a manner I particularly liked, and for the rest it went in looking after my dear children's physical necessities, in humoring and pleasing Robert, and seeing that his special comforts were attended to, and in bearing, as well as human nature could do, the laziness, ignorance, and cunning diableries of the negroes in the kitchen. There was little visiting, the proud, retiring nature of the Southern woman showing itself as soon as strangers and crowds became common in Austin. In these days the pretty young girls in their white frocks and white sunbonnets vanished from the streets; and the men who strutted about them, or loafed on chairs a-tilt under the trees, moving round with the shadow all day, showed plainly the daily deterioration of masculine humanity left to its own devices and desires. Houston's complete defeat of Runnels was considered a great triumph for the Unionist party, and his influence undoubtedly put off secession for another year. This was the year 1860, during the whole of which there was the same restless looking forward to the war, every one felt was inevitable, if Mr. Lincoln was elected President. I kept quietly at home. Robert brought me the news and not infrequently a visitor whom he thought would interest me. One afternoon he wrote, saying, "The Indian agent and three of the chiefs in town will take supper with us," and I was asked to set a plentiful table. In this visit I took the greatest possible interest. I brought out my best damask, and the richly gilded china that Robert's mother had given me for a wedding present. She regarded it as almost too splendid to use, and I could not help a little laugh, when I imagined her sensations, if she could see these half-clothed savages drinking tea out of them. Then I regretfully sighed, "Poor Mother!" For my heart had turned a little towards her, since she had wished Robert to come home. I adorned the table with flowers, and saw that chicken in every form was prepared, and cakes, and pies in profusion. The party arrived promptly, and I was introduced to the members who composed it. The agent was a charming young man, full of all kinds of information, but in the Indians I was much disappointed. They were uncivil, self-centered, and could speak no English. And they did not know how to eat the good things provided for them, for they ate and drank every item of the meal _by itself_--vegetables alone, meat alone, bread alone, and the only dish that appeared to please them, was some cream and white of egg savored with vanilla and whipped as stiff as possible. They laughed over this delicacy, exchanged grunts of satisfaction, and handed me their glasses to be refilled. After supper I played and sang for them. They watched me curiously, but without pleasure, and were more interested in finding out where the music came from than in the music itself. So Robert opened the instrument, let them inspect the interior to see how the hammers struck the wires, and they watched with fear and wonder, and exchanged looks and interjections that expressed these emotions. To me there was something pathetic, and yet obscene, in this shameless exhibition of big, strong men clad like warriors, showing the fear and wonder of little children. I told Robert to bring no more friendly savages to see me, and that night I prayed with all my heart for any white woman who might fall into their power. During the summer of this year, 1860, there was a sudden lull in events, but it was only the lull of warriors breathlessly watching. On the election of Mr. Lincoln to the Presidency, they sprang as one man to arms. Secession was now certain, and Houston found himself compelled to summon a general convention, which met in Austin on the twenty-seventh of January, 1861. It submitted secession to a popular vote, and adjourned. I was present at this decision, and wondered at the crowd of excited men submitting to the delay. "We are _laggards_! _Laggards_ in duty!" cried an old frontiersman; and Houston replied with calm dignity, "Sir, we are acting as trustees for posterity. It becomes us to do all things decently, and in order." A loud, confused rattle of side arms was the only audible reply. It might have been an assent to Houston's opinion, but it was more likely to be a promise, that the duty would be fully redeemed. I did not wonder at the old man calling Texans "laggards," for, immediately after the election of Mr. Lincoln, South Carolina seceded; Mississippi followed her in three weeks; Florida went out on January the tenth, 1861; Alabama, on January the eleventh; Georgia, on January the nineteenth; Louisiana, on January the twenty-fifth; so that, when Houston called the Texas convention, six states had already made preparations for meeting on February the fourth, at Montgomery, Alabama, to organize a provisional Congress of Confederate States. Robert told me that, in a conversation in the Governor's office, some one spoke scornfully of this meeting, and Houston replied, "Sir, it is an unlawful meeting, but it cannot be a contemptible one, with such men as ex-President Tyler, Roger A. Pryor, and our own Wigfall leading it." "Is that all, Robert?" I asked, for I was always delighted to hear anything about Houston. "Very nearly. Some one added, 'There is Jefferson Davis, also.'" "Oh! What did Houston say?" "He said, 'I know Jefferson Davis, and I did not mention him, because I know him. He is proud as Lucifer and cold as a lizard.'" Then I had one of those unreasonable certainties, that are all-convincing to the people who have them, and sheer foolishness to all ignorant of their irresistible testimony; and I said, "Houston is right; my lips shiver if they utter his name. He will bring ill-luck to any cause." On the eighteenth of February, General Twiggs, the United States commandant, surrendered to Houston all the national forces in Texas--twenty-five hundred men, and national property valued at $1,200,000. Five days afterwards, the vote on secession was taken. There were forty thousand for secession and fourteen thousand against it. These were anxious, eager days, and it was impossible to avoid catching the popular fever. The convention met again on the second of March, and on the fifth it at once adopted measures for entering the Southern Confederacy, to which new government all state officers were commanded to take the oath of allegiance on the fourteenth of March. With two friends I went to the Capitol to witness the ceremony, and, as we had seats in the front of the gallery, we looked down directly upon a desk just below us, on which the Ordinance of Secession was spread out. One of my companions was a most passionate Unionist, and she pointed out the document with an unspeakable scorn and contempt. The House was crowded; it was really electrified with the fiery radiations of men tingling with passion, and glowing and burning with the anticipation of revengeful battle. And the air was full of the stirring clamor of a multitude of voices--angry, triumphant, scornful, with an occasional oath or epithet of contempt. But when Houston appeared there was a sudden silence. It was the homage involuntarily paid to the man himself, not to his office. Firmly and clearly, he refused to take the oath of allegiance to the Confederate States; but the Lieutenant-Governor, a certain Edward Clarke, was eager to do so. He was an insignificant creature, whose airy conceit was a direct insult to Houston's sad countenance and dignified manner; and I remember well how contemptible he appeared, as spry and pert, he stepped up to the bar of the House to take the oath. Just as he reached the desk, on which the Ordinance of Secession lay, my Unionist friend, a bright, clever girl, of about sixteen years old, leaned forward and spit directly on the centre of it. There was a little soft laughter from the women sympathizers who saw the action, and Clarke's handkerchief lay for a moment on the historical parchment, but there was no remark, and the incident caused not the slightest interruption. "Why did you do that, Lucille?" I asked. "To express my opinion. Did you see Clarke's handkerchief?" "Yes." "Then I suppose he got what I sent. And it is in Clarke's handkerchief! In Clarke's pocket! Poor spittle! _What an ignominy!_" Two days afterwards Clarke was made Governor in place of Houston. Changes in all the government offices were likely to follow, and I could not help feeling anxious concerning Robert's position. About certain things he could be so stubborn. Men are made that way. They have prejudices, and they call them principles, and then--sink or swim, they stick to them. Now an unreasonable detestation of slavery was one of Robert's prejudices or principles. He would not allow that under any circumstance it could be right, and all his sympathies were with the slave. The majority of our small matrimonial frets were on this subject. If he had been compelled to tew with, and to bear every hour of the day the thieving, lying, and laziness of the three in our kitchen, his pity for their condition would have been much modified. I used to tell him this whenever the subject came up, but I could not make him understand my position, because he lifted his argument out of the personalities in our kitchen, and laid all their sins on the condition of slavery. If he had been an unmarried man, I am sure he would have gone to the Union army, but, being caught by circumstances in a southern city, where he had been generously and kindly treated, he felt, I think, much like Naaman, the Syrian, when he begged God's pardon because circumstances compelled him to bow down in the house of Rimmon. But, if the question of slavery became a test question, there was no telling what might happen, especially if it became a case of conscience, for Scotchmen have an historical record for enjoying "persecution for righteousness' sake." Then there was his English citizenship. He had always refused to give it up, and how could he expect a new government to pass by his allegiance, for the sake of his financial knowledge. These questions troubled me much, as I sat sewing through the long, sweet spring days. One morning I walked to Henrick's store very early. They were just opening it, and I sat down and waited. Suddenly through the clear, cool air came the sound of military music, and the tramp of marching men. It was the Second Texas, mustering for their march to the seat of war. What a sight it was! Not one man in it weighed under one hundred and eighty pounds, and the majority made the scale beam kick at two hundred pounds. They were all very tall, wiry men, with not one ounce of superfluous flesh on their big frames--straight as their own gun barrels, with up-head carriage and full of that kind of spirit we call "mettle" in a horse. My eyes filled with tears, and involuntarily I prayed for the men as they passed. Alas, the Second Texas has a record unsurpassed for bravery and misfortune! Its fine young captain was killed at Corinth, and not a single man ever returned to Texas. Some years after all of this splendid band of men had passed from life and almost from memory, I had an opportunity of reading a letter which contained the following passage, "On the second night of the fight at Gettysburg, I was roused from my sleep to help a friend look for his missing comrade. We went to the battlefield and stepping among the shattered wrecks of humanity, we turned up the dead faces to the moonlight. Suddenly we heard a broken voice muttering, '_Second Texas! Second Texas!_' It was the man we wanted. A cruel minie ball had ploughed out both his eyes, and he was otherwise fatally wounded. He was almost dead, and among the last of the gallant company, that I had watched march so proudly and joyfully to meet their fate." I came home from Henrick's store much depressed. The brooding calamities of the Second Texas had affected me. I felt the doom that hung over them, though I would not entertain it. Near home I met two girls whom I knew. Their brothers were in the company; they had driven them into it, and they were now crying because they had succeeded in doing so. "What unreasonable creatures women are!" I thought. However, in a great many cases, it was the women of a family who compelled the men to enlist as soldiers, by a course of moral suasion no man with any feeling could endure. They would not eat with them, speak to them, or listen if spoken to. They ignored all their personal necessities, or met them with constant tears and voiceless reproaches, and what man could bear his family weeping over him, as if he was already dead to their love and respect? The middle-aged, and the old men needed no such treatment; they were generally hot and ready to fight for their ideas. The young fellows wanted a tangible fact, and the saving of their slaves did not tempt them easily to risk their own lives. On April the fifteenth, 1861, my daughter Ethel was born. She was the loveliest babe I ever saw, and I was so proud of her beauty, I could hardly bear her out of my sight. Before she was two months old, she showed every sign of a loving and joyous disposition. If I came into the room she stretched out her arms to me; if I took her to my breast she reached up her hand to my mouth to be kissed. She smiled and loved every hour away, and the whole household delighted in her. Robert could refuse her nothing; no matter how busy he was, if she sought his attention, he left all and took her in his arms. I forgot the war, I forgot all my anxieties, I let the negroes take their own way, I was content for many weeks to nurse my lovely child, and dream of the grand future she was sure to have. Yet during this apparently peaceful pause in my life, the changes I feared were taking place. The new Governor was dismissing as far as he could all Houston's friends, and Robert had been advised to resign before his sentiments concerning slavery, state rights, and his own citizenship came to question. "As things stand," Mr. Durham said to him, "your good will is taken for granted. You have been prudent, and no one has been curious enough to make inquiries. Better retire for a while; you will be wanted when things are more settled." So Robert "retired," but he did not tell me so, until Ethel was two months old and I was in more radiant health and spirits than I had been for some months. Of course I was shocked at first, but easily convinced all had been done for the best, especially as Robert had all the private accounting business he could do, and he had never yet failed me. In all the changes I had seen, I had never wanted anything necessary for comfort. So I said cheerfully to myself, "God and Robert are a multitude," and my bread will be given, and my water sure. The summer came on hot and early, and was accompanied by a great drought. Pitiful tales came into town of the suffering for water at outlying farms, the creeks having dried up, and even the larger rivers showing great depletion. Then the cattle and game began to die of thirst, and of some awful disease called "black tongue." Thousands lay dead upon the prairies, which were full of deep and wide fissures, made by the cracking and parting of the hot, dry earth. The suffering so close at hand made me indifferent to what was going on at a distance, and also all through that long, terrible summer, I was aware that Robert was practicing a very strict personal economy. So I was sure that he was not making as much money as he expected to make, and when he asked me, one day, if I could manage with two servants, I was prepared to answer, "Dear, I can do with one, if it is necessary." And I was troubled when he thankfully accepted my offer. To be poor! That was a condition I had never considered, so I thought it over. We could never want food in Texas, unless the enemy should drive his cannon wheels over our prairies, and make our old pine woods wink with bayonets. Then, indeed, the corn and the wheat and the cattle might be insufficient for us and for them, but this event seemed far off, and unlikely. Our clothing was in far less plentiful case. My own once abundant wardrobe was considerably worn and lessened. Robert's had suffered the same change, and the children's garments wanted a constant replacing. But then, every one was in the same condition; we should be no poorer than others. A poverty that is universal may be cheerfully borne; it is an individual poverty that is painful and humiliating. Slowly, so slowly, the hot blistering summer passed away. It was all I could do, to look a little after my five children. I dressed myself and them in the coolest manner, and the younger ones refused anything like shoes and stockings; but that was a common fashion for Texan children in hot weather. I have seen them step from handsome carriages barefooted, and envied them. People must live day after day where the thermometer basks anywhere between 105 degrees and 115 degrees, to know what a luxury naked feet are--nay, what a necessity for a large part of the time. Not a drop of rain had fallen for many weeks, and, when the drought was broken, it was by a violent storm. It came up unexpectedly one clear, hot afternoon, when all the world seemed to stand still. The children could not play. I had laid Ethel in her cot, and was sitting motionless beside her. The negroes in the kitchen were sleeping instead of quarreling, and, though Robert and I exchanged a weary smile occasionally, it was far too hot to talk. Suddenly, the sky changed from blue to red, to slate color, and then to a dense blackness, even to the zenith. The heavens seemed about to plunge down upon the earth, and the air became so tenuous, that we sighed as men do, on the top of a high mountain. Then on the horizon there appeared a narrow, brassy zone, and it widened and widened, as it grew upward, and with it came the fierce rush and moan of mighty winds, slinging hail-stones and great rain-drops, from far heights--swaying, pelting, rushing masses of rain fell, seeming to displace the very atmosphere. But, Oh, the joy we felt! I cried for pure thankfulness, and Robert went to a shaded corner of the piazza, and let the rain pour down upon him. When the storm was over, there was a new world--a fresh, cool, rejoicing world. It looked as happy as if just made, and the children were eager to get out and play in the little ponds. Robert and I soon rallied. The drop in the temperature was all Robert needed, and I had in those days a wonderful power--not yet quite exhausted--of recuperation. If a trouble was lifted ever so little, I threw it from me; if a sickness took but a right turn, I went surely on to recovery. So as soon as the breathless heat was broken, I began to think of my house and my duties. The children's lessons had been long neglected, and my work basket was full to overflowing with garments to make and to mend. Very quickly I was so busy that I had no time for public affairs, and then the war dragged on so long, that my enthusiasm was a little cooled. Also I was troubled somewhat by Robert's continued lack of employment. Food and clothing was dearer, and money scarcer than I had ever before known them, and Robert had become impatient and was entertaining a quite impossible idea--he wanted to rent a farm and get away from the fret and friction of the times. I pointed out the fact that neither of us knew anything about farming, and that Texas farming was _special_ in every department. But in those days it was generally supposed that any man could naturally farm, just as it was expected that every girl naturally knew how to cook and to keep house. At any rate, the idea had taken possession of him, and not even the probability of prowling savages was alarming. "All that come near the settlements are friendly," he said, "or if not they are too much afraid of the Rangers to misbehave themselves." "But, Robert," I answered, "very few of them think killing white women and children 'misbehavior.'" There is however no use in talking to a Scotchman who has made up his mind. God Almighty alone can change it, so I took to praying. Perhaps it was not very loyal to pray against my husband's plans, but circumstances alter cases, and this farming scheme was a case that had to be altered. Events which no one had foreseen put a stop to this discussion at least for a time. In the soft, hazy days of a beautiful November, a single word was whispered which sent terror to every heart. It was a new word--the designation of what was then thought to be a new disease, which had been ravaging portions of the Old World, and had finally appeared in the New. I had seen it described in _Harper's Weekly_, and other New York papers, and I was afraid as soon as I heard of it. Robert came home one day and told me Mrs. Carron's eldest daughter was dead, and her other daughter dying. Every hour its victims seemed to increase, and by December all of my friends had lost one or more of their families. I remained closely at home, and kept my children near me. Though they did not know it, I watched them day and night. On the eighth of December near midnight, I noticed that Ethel had difficulty in nursing and appeared in great distress, and I sent for the doctor with fear and trembling. "_Diphtheria!_" he said; and the awful word pierced my ears like a dart, and my spirit quailed and trembled within me. For no cure and no alleviations had then been found for the terrible malady, and indeed many people in Austin contended that the epidemic from which we suffered, was not diphtheria, but the same throat disease which had slain the deer and cattle by thousands during the summer. In the chill gray dawn of the ninth, as the suffering babe lay apparently unconscious on my knees, the Angel of Death passed by, and gave me the sign I feared but expected--a warning not unkind but inexorable. The next twenty-four hours are indescribable by any words in any language. A little before they ended, the doctor led me into another room. Then I fell on my face at the feet of the Merciful One, and with passionate tears and outcry pleaded for her release--only that the cruel agony might cease--only that--dear, and lovely, and loving as she was, I gave her freely back. I asked now only for her death. I asked Christ to remember his own passion and pity her. I asked all the holy angels who heard me praying to pray with me. If a mortal can take the kingdom of heaven by storm, surely my will to do so at that hour stood for the deed. Breathless, tearless, speechless, I lay at last at His Mercy. And it faileth not! In a few minutes Robert entered. He looked as men look who come out of the Valley of the Shadow of Death. I thought he also was dying. I stood up and looked anxiously into his face, and he drew me to his heart, and said softly, "All is over, Milly. She has gone." What I suffered for many weeks only God knows, but at last he took pity on my grief, and comforted me. One night Robert had gone to some public meeting, the children were asleep, and I was walking up and down the parlor floor, whispering to my heart my dead baby's name. There was a lamp on a small marble table which I had pushed aside, in order to get the full length of the room for my restless feet. On this table there were a few books, and one small one was lying open, face down upon the marble. Without thought I lifted it, and finding a leaf crumpled, I mechanically began to straighten it. In doing so, my eyes fell on two lines; from the rest of the page they stood out as if illumined, and this was the message they brought me, "Weep not for her, she is an angel now, And treads the sapphire floors of Paradise." I saw nothing but these two lines. I wanted nothing more. They held a strange and heavenly comfort for me. I kissed them reverently and put the book in my bosom. Later I saw that they were part of a poem by a prominent writer for _Blackwood's Magazine_, called Moir, a name well known in the early part of the nineteenth century, and always dear to my memory. I never learned the whole poem; I just took with a grateful heart the two lines given me. CHAPTER XV THE BREAK-UP OF THE CONFEDERACY "The little feet that never trod Earth, never strayed in fields or street, What hand leads upward back to God The little feet?" My readers must now be familiar with my surroundings, and after a lot of consideration I have decided to relate much of my future experience from the diaries I wrote in the very atmosphere of the times I am depicting. Day by day the notes were made, short because I only wanted them to stimulate memory and gratitude in the future. They have no pretense whatever to being literature, even of the simplest kind, for I never imagined that it could be possible, I should let any one but God and myself see them. They are commonplace, but they are truth itself. They are about household things, and the war is but transiently mentioned, but they are human documents, and there are the history books for those who want to know about the war. I thought at first I would not copy the religious sentiments so constantly interwoven, but when I tried to omit them, it felt like putting God out of my life and book, and I could not do that, no, not for the whole world. My first thought was that in this era of godless youth, and material age, these spiritual aspirations and regrets mingling with common daily life would provoke laughter. My second thought refuted this opinion; there are plenty of good men and women yet, I concluded, and to such a sincere religious sentiment, whether expressed by mouth or pen, is respected. It may not always be acceptable, but it is never ridiculous. NOTES FROM MY DIARY OF 1862 _Jan. 1st._ Sat up to see the New Year in, and earnestly asked the love and blessing of God on it. Mary poorly, and I sat by her making a sacque for Lilly, and a little slip dress for Alice. Then I read an hour to the children in "Nicholas Nickleby." Dr. and Jenny Alexander called at night. Robert bought a hog, and had it cut up--must be salted tomorrow. _Jan. 10th._ A month ago today dear Ethel entered into rest. Robert and I walked out to her grave, and strewed it with mignonette. When we came back, Robert dug some potatoes out of the garden, and in the evening I read "Nicholas Nickleby" to the children. _Jan. 12th._ Sunday again. Ah, how little like Sundays that are past! I feel no interest in church. I am afraid this is wrong. I went out to Ethel's grave, and while there saw Mrs. Walker's baby buried. Died of throat trouble. Lucy Goodrich walked home with me. _Jan. 21st._ Robert had a conversation about changing this house for a farm with a man I did not like. I have left this matter with God. I was sewing and hearing children's lessons all day. In the evening I read to them "Darius the Great." _Jan. 27th._ Could not sleep, and got up soon after one o'clock and sewed for two hours. Very high south wind, which always makes me uncomfortable. All day long I was nervous and cross and alas! I may say it was a lost day, for I neither made myself nor any one else happy. _Jan. 31st._ Teaching and sewing. Read "Cyrus" to Robert at night, children at Mrs. Palm's for a candy pulling. _Feb. 1st._ Teaching and sewing; Robert looking anxiously for a home in the country. I do not say anything against it to him, but I have my daily talks with God about it. _Feb. 26th._ Bad political news. Fort Donelson and Nashville taken. It has made us very low and anxious. Still, though much discouraged, I am not hopeless. In some way or other, God always provides. _Mar. 3rd._ Borrowed Mrs. Henrick's carriage, and drove out to see the Bishop and Mrs. Gregg. Called on Mrs. Gillette coming back. Jenny Alexander spent the evening with us. _Mar. 13th._ Nashville and Columbus evacuated. Robert trying to sell our house, and working for Palm balancing books. We went in the evening to Ethel's grave, and planted jessamine and roses. Jenny Alexander came out to us. _Mar. 16th._ Sewing and hearing children's lessons, and at night reading to them and Robert "Fortunes of Nigel." About eleven o'clock we were awakened by the shouts of the Pony Post; Robert said they meant good news, and he began to dress himself. Then all the bells in town started ringing, and there was the greatest excitement. The children were all awake, and I threw on my double gown and we went on to the piazza to watch and listen until Robert came home. It was such a lovely night, the mocking birds were singing rapturously, and I think every dog in town was barking. When Robert came home, he said Price and McCulloch had whipped the enemy in Missouri, and taken thirty thousand prisoners, and Beauregard had taken fourteen regiments in Tennessee. Texas may well rejoice, if it be so, but the Lord of Hosts only knows. _Mar. 29th._ I was doing some fine ironing all day; the negro in the kitchen too sulky to trust. Jenny Alexander came in and helped me. Bishop Gregg called in the afternoon, and I had a pleasant talk with him. This is my thirty-first birthday. My birthday wish is, that I may daily grow in grace. Robert was sad because he could give me no gift. Poor fellow, I told him I would remember all the dear old ones, and I asked God to bless me, and to direct all my way. _Mar. 30th._ Thomas bought our house, and signed all the papers relative to the sale. _Mar. 31st._ A very unhappy day. I was in a bad temper, Robert was miserable, and the children wondered at me. Dear God, forgive me! _Apr. 9th._ Sewing and teaching; made a delicious beefsteak pie for dinner. Went to see Mrs. Henrick's in the afternoon; in the evening to Mrs. Durham's. Poor little Sally, whom I suckled for nearly two months when her mother had fever, just dead of diphtheria! _Apr. 10th._ Went to see Sally for the last time. It was Ben McCulloch's funeral, also. The cemetery was crowded. When we got back from Sally's funeral, her sister Leanore was dying. She breathed her last at five o'clock. _Apr. 19th._ A Mr. Stockton and his wife came to close with Robert for their farm. I was glad the wife came. Women are so much harder to please than men when they are buying. Everything went to pieces. I knew it would from the woman's face. I wonder how it is that men like women--at least, some women. Dear Robert tried to comfort me; he thought I was disappointed, and I honestly tried to comfort him, for he was very much disappointed. He smiled at my brave words, and said of course all was for the best. I wonder if he really thought so--for it has been a very hard, anxious week. _Apr. 24th._ Made a shirt for Robert, and heard children's lessons. Robert far from well, and hope sometimes dies within me. Dear God, forget not that it is in Thee, in Thee only, I hope and trust. _Apr. 28th._ Robert has gone with a Mr. Spenser to see his place on the Brushy. I know it is all useless expense, but I dare not say so to Robert. He seems to have no hope but in this direction, and I must not take his last hope from him. Despondent men have bad temptations. He must have his dream until he gets work. Make no tarrying, O my God! David knew all about "waiting on God." He durst even ask God to hurry. That is the way I feel this morning. _May 3rd._ Gun boats at New Orleans; all gloom here in consequence. Robert still looking for a farm. I asked him today what kind of farm he wanted, and he said, a dairy farm, and then told me what Thaxton made every week from his butter alone, and all gold. Butter! That makes me still more set against farming. Who is to make the butter? _May 4th._ Very, very anxious. I have hardly spirit left to attend to the children. For many months I have been fighting this weary bug-a-boo of a farm. I think a change of trouble would be a little relief. This day I am "out" with life. _May 5th._ I am so happy! God is so good! I knew He would be good. Robert is to go back to his desk in the comptroller's office. Mr. Durham called today and told him so. He has forgotten all about farming. He went this afternoon and rented the Cook place, and tomorrow we remove there. I have been singing all afternoon. God has visited me with a blessing in both hands, for not only has Robert got back his old desk, but I have been given the very desire of my heart. Ever since I came to Austin, I have longed to live in the Cook place, but never until now has it been to rent. It was a big rambling log house on the top of a hill. The town, the capitol and state offices were below it, and the river and the mountains surround it. It stood in an enclosure full of forest trees in front, and behind there was a yard shaded with mulberry trees, ending in a meadow running down to a beautiful creek, and beside this creek there was a stable. The main part of the house was built of immense square cut logs in old Texan fashion, opposite doors to every room, and no windows. It had cupboards and pantries to my heart's content, and a little roofed passage way connected it with the kitchen and servant's quarter. The parlor and one other room were of modern construction, and I made the public welcome to them. I chose for myself a large log room, with a fireplace one could burn a cord of cedar in. It was always delightfully cool in the hottest weather; it was always warm and cheerful in winter. If I had the money I would build me a log house today. I would cover it with vines, and among the leaves put gourds for the martins to build in, and I would say to the swifts, "Sister swallows, you are welcome to my chimney." For eighteen months I lived in this beautiful place, the life of a completely happy woman. Time went back for me, and I grew young again and joyous and hopeful as my own children. Robert made sufficient for our necessities, and now that we had a stable he bought a couple of mustang ponies. They were beautiful creatures, fine pacers, and cost ten dollars in "specie" each. Robert and I rode out before breakfast nearly every morning to Billingsley's garden, and bought cantaloupes and tomatoes for the day, and Mary and Lilly soon became clever horsewomen. Mary rode swiftly and gracefully; Lilly was very daring, and took wood or water or anything that came in her way. I followed my usual duties, attending first of all to my children's lessons--then sewing, knitting, reading aloud to them, and to Robert, cooking special dishes et cetera. My diary shows that I had an extraordinary amount of company, and that, some way or other, I found time to call upon a large number of friends, and moreover that for days and weeks together, I helped Robert with the tax rolls of the different counties. The following are a few illustrating notes: _June 23rd._ Rode before breakfast with Robert to Billingsley's, afterwards attended to the children. They went riding, and I was checking rolls for Robert all day. Heard that Memphis had fallen. Called on the Durhams in the evening. _July 2nd._ Calvin's birthday. He is five years old. God bless the boy. I thank God for him. Mary Gregg spent the day with us. I gave the children a holiday, and was sewing, and tatting, and listening to Mrs. Illingworth's troubles. After supper, Robert and I had a walk, and then I played and sang an hour for him. _July 11th._ This is my wedding anniversary. Twelve years ago Robert and I were married. That was a happy day, this is twelve times happier. Mr. Durham sent me a basket of grapes, and a pair of ducks for dinner. Robert and I had a walk in the evening, and he said many good and tender words to me. Oh, what a happy woman I am! _July 18th._ Rode out to Illingworth's, and brought Mollie in to spend the day. When I got home found Mollie Beadles, Mollie Peck, and Betty Elgin were waiting. They brought the news of McClellan's defeat, and surrender. The town seemed drunk with excitement. There was shouting and bell ringing, and the continual cracking of firearms. I managed to find dinner enough for everybody, and we had a merry meal. In the evening Robert and I walked to Ethel's grave. Truly it is better to go to the House of Mourning, than to the House of Mirth. _Aug. 20th._ Have been working hard on the tax rolls every day for a week, and a Mr. Bell worked till after midnight with Robert on his roll. Robert has made a deal of money this month, but somehow it has not been as happy as it should have been. _Sept. 21st._ A pleasant day for Robert was at home, but I am not happy. I have been drifting away from God, while I have been so busy. I went to Ethel's grave in the afternoon, but felt no better. No swift word of prayer or love leaped from my heart. There was no call for me, and no word, or even thought for me. I was cold and lonely. The Great Companion had left me. Well, I deserved it. I have neglected my private reading and prayer for some weeks. I had no time. I made a few dollars, and have lost what no money can buy. Dear Christ, forgive me. _Sept. 29th._ All day making over my hoop. _Sept. 30th._ Heard lessons, and then went to Mrs. Millican's to learn how to turn the heel of a stocking properly. Helping Robert at night till very late. _Nov. 3rd._ Sewing and knitting all day. Read to Robert at night from Porte Crayon's work on Virginia. _Nov. 7th._ Wrote long letters home, having an opportunity to send them by a Mr. Ruthven. _Nov. 15th._ My usual duties; baking cake, and went to sit with Mrs. Durham an hour or two. Took Robert's sock I am knitting with me. _Dec. 25th._ Christmas Day. My darling Edith would enter her ninth year to-day if she had lived. The children were delighted with such presents as we could get them. Most of their toys were of Robert's making. We had a good breakfast all together. Plenty of chicken and sausage and coffee for everybody, even for Crazy Billy,[4] who came as usual to say "Merry Christmas!" _Dec. 31st._ Had a severe cold but knit all day. We are all out of stockings. Let Mary and Lilly sit up till ten o'clock, then they had pecan nuts and home made wine; but Robert and I wanted to watch the New Year in. I am going to be a better woman next year. I have promised, and with God's help I will keep my promise. Amen. For another year I was permitted to rest body and soul in this pleasant home, and everything in the main events of life kept a very even tenor. I taught my children, sewed, knit, read aloud to them, and helped Robert with the tax rolls; went to see my friends, and generally had one or more of them in my company. Yet no life is without an almost daily variation; there was plenty of change to keep me watchful, and sometimes a little anxiety, for the future had never looked so dark and so uncertain. On the thirteenth of March, I had another son, a fine boy whom we called Alexander Gregg after the Bishop. We were very proud and happy in his birth, and his brother Calvin took him to his child heart with a passionate affection. From the first hour of his life he watched over him. His care lasted a little over four years, and then in death, they were not divided. After Alexander's birth, any soul at all prescient might feel the end of many things approaching. The stores of all kinds were nearly empty, and I noticed that no stocks were renewed: I could not get an inch of flannel for the new born child, and Mr. Illingworth sent me three of his fine English undershirts to make barrow coats for him. With this gentleman and his wife and children, we had been on the most familiar terms for two years. He was the youngest son of an English family of old and noble lineage, and had run away from college in his twenty-second year. In some way he reached the Creek Indians, and incorporated himself with the tribe, remaining seventeen years with them. On his return to civilization he married a beautiful girl, and had three children. His knowledge of Indian affairs made him of great value to the government, and his desk in the Capitol was close to Robert's. Soon after Alexander's birth, an English lawyer came to Austin seeking Mr. Illingworth. His father was dead, and there was a large fortune waiting his identification. That night he and the lawyer took supper with us, and we talked about England, until I went to bed with a pain in my heart. At this time Mr. Illingworth was separated from his wife, but in the morning I rode to her house, about two miles away, and told her what had happened, advising her, for her children's sake, to make up her quarrel with her husband. I was sorry that I had been her confidant in the matter, for no one has any business to say a word this way, or that way, between a man and his wife. The confidence however had been forced on me, and I thought then, and I think yet, that she was not much to blame. Given an Englishman inheriting all the authoritative, stubborn qualities and prejudices of an aristocratic family, the same carefully cultivated by the traditional education of his class, and superinduced upon it the education of an American Indian Chief, and you have a variety of the animal called man, any woman might fail to please. I saw him on his return from England, and he was, in spite of his quarter of a century in America, the most English of all the Englishmen I had ever seen. What the cradle rocks, the spade buries. But he was excellent company, and among other things he related the following bit of conversation between himself and Lady C---- at a dinner given to him by his mother's family, the high, well-born Carews. "Are you married yet, Mr. Illingworth?" "I am, Lady C----. "To an American?" "Yes, to an American." "Is she _very_ dark?" This question illustrates well the amount of knowledge the noble Englishwoman had of American woman, half a century ago. Very soon I began to really feel the pinch of war. It seemed an incredible thing not to be able to buy a little domestic or print, when I had money to do so, but I could not. Many people were without shoes, moccasins were commonly worn in the house. Pins and needles were extraordinarily scarce, some were compelled to use mesquite thorns for pins. I once gave a lady three needles number six, number eight, and number ten, and she was so grateful she sent me a fine ham, and two pounds of coffee; _real_ coffee that her husband had brought from Mexico. Alas, there was no more real coffee in Austin, and a majority of people were using the dried leaves of the beautiful Yupon tree instead of real tea. Somehow or other, I cannot tell how, I never wanted either tea or coffee; the Bishop sent me some, and also about twenty pounds of rice. Mr. Durham sent me a little box of English Breakfast tea, and I was just out of that, when Dr. Bacon of the United States Sixth Cavalry sent me a fresh supply. And upon my honor, I do not think there is anything that so firmly and pleasantly cements friendship, as little courtesies of something good to eat. Though I am in my eighty-first year now, I remember how delighted I was with these things, and to go back no further than last Christmas, though I had many gifts of many kinds, the one that gave me the most pleasure of all, was a plum pudding and a dish of Nativity tarts, that an aged Yorkshire lady visiting in Cornwall made for me with her own hands. One of the symptoms speaking badly for the Confederate cause, was the fact that the government was out of materials for the use of its officers, which it could not manage to supply. Thus the printed and ruled tax rolls were all used. There was paper of a kind, but it needed a certain form of ruling, and Mr. Durham asked Robert if he could rule it. Robert said he had not the time, but that I would do it as well as anybody. So paper and rulers and pencils came to me, and from henceforward until the break up, I ruled the sheets for the assessors. Soon after the envelopes of three necessary sizes gave out, and I made the envelopes. And Mr. Durham laughed when I sent in my bill for "specie" payment. "Barr," he said, "you would have taken Blue Williams,[5] but the Confederacy can't fool women with them. I don't know a woman who has done anything for it, that has not sent her modest little bill for 'specie.'" These employments broke in upon my regular life very much, but the "specie" was our domestic salvation. In the household also we were obliged to help ourselves. No candles were to be bought, and we made our own candles. We were as badly off for soap also, that is the soap for washing clothes and kitchen use. I had yet a few boxes of Old Brown Windsor which I had brought with me from England, and also perhaps half a dozen of those semi-transparent balls made, I think, by Pears. Among other utilities I painted a very respectable pack of playing cards. I had bought, with my Newman's box of water colors, a dozen large sheets of bristol board, which was just the proper thickness. Robert with a sharp shoemaker's knife cut them even, and exact, and then I painted them. I was quite pleased with this achievement and sent word to Pat O'Gorman and Mr. Simcox, we could have our game of whist once more. I have forgotten what became of this pack, but I think one of these gentlemen took it as a memorial of the evenings in the old log house. Thus nearly every day there was a makeshift of some kind to devise, and we found out, often with real happiness, that "necessity is the mother of invention." Robert said it was like living in a Texas log house the island life of the Swiss Family Robinson. One day when the year was drawing close to Christmas, Robert came home early. As soon as I saw him, I knew there was trouble, and I said, "What is it, Robert?" "Why, Milly, dear, this house has been sold, and we must leave it before the first. Oh, my dear, I am so sorry!" I was giving the Sally Lunns their second kneading, and I let the dough fall to the floor. The tears sprang to my eyes, but I tried to bear the loss as well as I could. Indeed I had been half afraid of this very thing, for three nights previously I had dreamed of seeing my furniture on a wagon. I sat down. Robert put his arm round me, and whispered a few hopeful words, and I answered, "It is all right, dear. We have had a fine rest here. We shall never forget it. Do you know where we can rent anything as comfortable?" "Not yet. Allen tells me, General Haney's place, just beyond the Capitol will be for rent very soon, but there is nothing at present but the Cartmel place, and if that will not do, we must store our things, and go to the hotel." "Then the Cartmel place must do. How can we go into two or three rooms with five little children? Gracious Robert! It was not at all pleasant with two. Where is the Cartmel place?" "Just above Mrs. Green's." "Not that little house with a Spanish dagger in the strip of ground before it?" "Yes." "O Robert! It stands in a hole, down on the flat, too. I never could bear living in a valley. I look unto the hills always. From the hills cometh my strength, soul and body strength. And there is no stable to it, and what about the ponies?" "We must sell them, of course. There is a large corn field with the house. It grew a famous crop this year." "But what is the use of growing corn, when we cannot have horses?" "No. Well, dear, I thought you had better know at once. Mr. Durham advised me to come home and to help you pack. If we must go, the sooner the better." "You are right, we will begin this hour." So we did, but there were delays about one thing or another that we had not anticipated, and the twenty-ninth of December found us just ready to move, in the very teeth of one of the most dreadful northers I had ever experienced. But Robert had had negroes in the Cartmel place for a week, cleaning and keeping the big fires night and day. So with Alice and Alexander wrapped in blankets, we moved down there, the people who had bought the log house, having invaded it with six children, a dozen negroes, and all kinds of baggage, three days before their legal tenure began. Well, like all other troubles, the flitting came to an end, and things were not as uncomfortable as I had expected. The ponies had to go, but there was a shed close to the kitchen for a cow, and Robert said he would try to get one as soon as he could. That put all right. To have a cow and lots of milk and cream and butter! We could turn her into the field and there was the shed to milk her in. I could hardly wait for the creature. Next day a man called Abner Blair called to see Robert about his taxes, and I was repacking a trunk with trifles, I did not wish to use in so small a house. He watched me, and lifted some of the books and tartan things. His fingers clung to them, and I could see that he was in a great mental tumult. "Are you Scotch, Mr. Blair?" I asked. "Scotch!" he cried. "I'm nothing else. Highland Scotch, from Aberdeen way! Scotch for a thousand years! Scotch from the creation itself! My wife is Scotch, and my children are Scotch, and there's nothing in Blair house that isn't Scotch." "Then," I said, "if you are from Aberdeen way, you will know what this is;" and I held up the Scotch pebble bracelet I had bought on that last walk I took up Buchanan Street, Glasgow. He looked for a moment at the ornament, then he touched it, and asked, "What will you take for it, I have a little lassie that would go crazy to wear it. She will be twenty-one on Sunday next. Sell me the pretty thing. My certie! I used to go gathering the stones--I did that--I wanted them to pay my way through St. Andrews. What will you take for it?" "I will give it to you for your daughter's birthday," I answered. "I'll give it to her with all kinds of good wishes." "I take you at your word," he said in a perfect enthusiasm of pleasure. "And I'll tell you what! I'll give you the best milch cow on Abner Blair's ranch, and I'll bring her in to you on Saturday." "Come back in half an hour," I said, "and I will clean the silver settings and make them bright." He came back and went off with the bawble proud and happy, and on Thursday brought me a milk cow which justified all his promises. But as I rubbed bright the silver setting, and very often since, I have wondered what power had prompted me in 1853, to buy a bracelet which I did not want, which I was rather ashamed of buying, in order that it might get me and my children plenty of milk and butter in 1863, when such things were scarce and dear, and under ordinary circumstances beyond procuring. My life in the Cartmel place was only a variation and accentuation of what it had been in the Cook place. I did more and more work for the government, and at the end of the year I confessed, that it had been money in the purse, and not so well for me in other ways. The children's lessons had been much neglected, and the half-hour I had given daily to private prayer, ever since I was twelve years old, had been put aside for ruling tax papers, or something else that seemed more important. But this putting aside was neither happiness nor true prosperity. It implied a trust in myself, rather than in God; and I do believe at this day, as I did really then, that if I had gone on doing my own duties, God would have sent the necessary money in some easier and better way. I notice in my diary, that soon after the New Year, Robert was often on guard most of the night. There was at this time a great terror of negro insurrections, and often I put the children to bed fully dressed, in case there was a necessity to flee for life. We had all our plans made for this emergency, the first and most surely safe one being, a quick retreat to the grave yard, for no negro would venture within its ghostly precinct. The nights Robert was on guard, I always had company, very often a Miss Sophia Richardson, the daughter of the editor of the _Austin Gazette_. She was a beautiful woman, well read, witty and yet good-natured, and a singer of great power and sweetness. She married after I left Austin the editor of the _New Orleans Picayune_, and if this remembrance ever reaches her eyes, I want her to think of me, as she knew me when we used to be happy together in the old log house on the hill. It stood next to her own home. Here are two notes on this life: _Feb. 18th._ Sewing and hearing lessons, then ruling for Mr. Durham. But I am weary and sleepy. Alexander is teething, and he does not let me sleep an hour at a time. Sophy Richardson all day with me. _Feb. 19th._ Had a bad night with Alexander, got up early and made hot rolls for breakfast. Made sweet bread afterwards, also a chicken pie for dinner. Heard lessons, sewing and knitting. Sophy Richardson came in. Glad to see her. Betty Elgin called to borrow a book. Robert home early, going on guard. There is a guard of well-armed citizens set every night now. Robert told me it was necessary, for a devilish negro plot had been discovered. Plots and rumors of plots kept every one unhappy, and as we entered the last year of the war, the air was full of miserable reports. It was a brave heart that kept any hope now for the Confederate cause. The weary ruling of paper, and making envelopes ceased. The Governor, the Comptroller and George Durham all knew well, there would be no need of them. On the eve of my thirty-fifth birthday I wrote: _Mar. 28th, 1865._ None but the good God knows the history of the coming year, but it is in His loving hands. I have had many cares and sorrows, many pains and deprivations this past year, but not one too many, because all is for the best. Every one is gloomy, for every one is anticipating invasion. We have no money, and very little clothing in the house--neither have I anything ready, either for myself or the child I am expecting; but God is sufficient, and He will be sure to provide. _May 14th._ Robert went early up town. Heard of Lee and Johnson's surrender. Jeff Davis said to be flying to the Trans-Mississippi. Many say the Confederate cause is lost. _May 25th._ The dream is over. No Southern independence now. Robert thinks it will be Southern slavery. I have been ironing hard all day, and sewing, but I heard no lessons. I was too troubled and anxious, for Confederate soldiers, without officers or order, are coming in every hour, and there is nothing but plunder and sack going on--and the citizens are as bad as the soldiers. _May 26th._ I had a very bad night, and feel headachey and sleepy. Had to iron; the negro won't work; indeed Robert says both men and women have deserted their homes, and are hanging about the streets, watching the white men plundering, but too much afraid of the white man, to take a hand in the work. I heard no lessons, but did a little sewing, and all the housework that the negroes ought to do. In the evening Robert went to a public meeting about protecting the town. _May 27th._ Very anxious and unsettled. The town and all the adjacent country is in a dreadful condition. From a man going north, Robert bought seven bushels of meal, thirty-six pounds of salt, and fifty pounds of sugar. Thankful to God for it, for in these days we know not what may happen from hour to hour. Tried to sew in the afternoon, but impossible; there is too much looting and quarreling going on. It seems as if every one had a claim against the Confederacy, and were paying themselves. _June 2nd._ Everything in confusion. Everyone suspicious and watchful, and there is no law. Governor Lubbock and the state officers have fled to Mexico. _June 11th._ The Rio Grande soldiers reached Austin today. I could not help crying as they passed my door, and Robert lifted his hat to honor them. These men were victors, though their cause was lost. Through every deprivation and suffering, through hunger and thirst, through heat and cold, weary, ragged, weather-beaten and battle-scarred, they had carried aloft their flag with the single star. And they carried it proudly that day through the streets of Austin. No one dared to forbid it. Robert told me he saw many men weep as it passed them, and turn away, but it floated fitly enough above the heads of those who had given up everything for the ideals it typified. They went straight to the Capitol, and demanded payment either in gold or government property for their long service. And as no one had a right to pay them, they paid themselves. The scene was indescribable, and Robert slipped away and came home. _June 14th._ Today the soldiers are looting the government stables. They are dividing the mules and horses and saddlery among themselves. The noise and tumult is indescribable. I was sewing, and ironing, and cooking all day, and sewing again until midnight, for I must work hard now, in order to have all comfortable for the children and Robert, while I am sick. We keep quietly in doors, and are as happy as we can be under the circumstances; but the poor country! My heart aches for Texas, subjugated and all lost, even honor. _June 15th._ Hot windy weather, but feel pressed to work, for I have still much to do. But how thankful I ought to be for the health and strength given me. God be near me for Christ's sake. My negro servant comes home to eat, then she runs into the city again. I have all her work to do, but she is waiting for her _freedom_. I cannot blame her. _June 23rd._ The Emancipation Proclamation arrived. Robert said he was glad of it, because the negroes knew they were free, and were impatient for its public acknowledgment. _June 24th._ The sheriff read the Emancipation Proclamation. He read it with no more ceremony than if he was giving notice of a forced sale of land, or a new city ordinance about negro passes, or any other every day occurrence. He was surrounded by white men, who listened without interest or remark, and the negroes were shocked and dismayed. They had been sure that the news of their freedom would come with the calling of trumpets, the firing of cannon, and the triumphant entry of a victorious army. Robert said they were sick and silent with disappointment, and vanished from the streets. I went into the kitchen to tell Harriet. She was leaning against the open door, looking intently eastward. Freedom was to come from the east, and she was always listening and watching for its approach. Her child, a girl about a year old, was sitting on the floor playing with some empty spools. I had always thought her indifferent to it. "Harriet," I said, and she turned her eyes upon me but did not speak, "you are free, Harriet! From this hour as free as I am. You can stay here, or go; you can work or sleep; you are your own mistress, now, and forever." She stepped forward as I spoke, and was looking at me intently, "Say dem words again, Miss Milly!" she cried, "say dem again." I repeated what I had told her, making the fact still more emphatic; and as I did so, her sullen black face brightened, she darted to her child, and throwing it shoulder high, shrieked hysterically, "_Tamar, you'se free! You'se free, Tamar!_" She did not at that supreme moment think of herself. Freedom was for her child; she looked in its face, at its hands, at its feet. It was a new baby to her--a free baby. Actually the mother love in her face had humanized its dull, brutish expression. I said again, "You are also free, Harriet. You are your own mistress now. Will you hire yourself to me?" I asked. "When dem Yankees coming, Miss Milly?" "Nobody knows." "How I free then?" "They sent word." "Mighty poor way to set folks free." "Will you hire yourself to me, Harriet? I will give you six dollars a month." "Six dollars too little, Miss Milly." "It is what I paid your master." "Thank de Lord, I'se got no master now. I 'long to myself now. I want eight dollars now. When a nigger free, they worth more." So I agreed with the freed negro for eight dollars, but I noticed three days later, I had a fresh free nigger at one dollar fifty cents a day. Harriet had gone forever. In this uncertain condition of affairs, it was perhaps astonishing they worked at all. In fact it was only the women who made any pretense of doing so, but they were generally mothers, and old master was the only sure provider for the children until the Yankees came. The men loafed about the streets, or made little camps in the corn fields, for the young ears were then ripe and milky and good to eat. But all were alike watching with weary impatience for the arrival of the military. _July 17th._ This was Robert's last day's work for the Confederacy. He was working on his balance sheet. He has been three years, two months, and twelve days in the employ of the late Confederate government--days of goodness and mercy, every one of them. And I am not going to worry about the future. God's arm is not shortened; it is as able to save and to provide as it ever was. There was nearly two months due Robert, which was of course paid in "specie." I shall use every cent carefully, and more is sure to come, for God carries the purse for a wise spender. _July 20th._ Robert working for the Military Board. I suffer constantly night and day trying to keep up my regular duties. Robert helps all he can, but he is the best part of his day at the Military Board. The weather is hot and very exhausting, even the children get cross in it. _July 25th._ About two hundred soldiers came into town. They hoisted the Stars and Stripes on the Capitol, and went to work to prepare tents, stabling, et cetera, for the troops to follow. They hardly noticed the negroes, and showed no disposition whatever to affiliate with them. On the contrary they were friendly with the white men, took drinks with them, and passed around their tobacco bags, tobacco being one thing our men were suffering for. _July 27th._ About three thousand soldiers came in today. I was able to iron a little, though I did not sleep an hour last night. _July 28th._ Wagons and soldiers pouring into the town. Some of the earliest troops raised the flag at the corner of Hancock's store. The children went to see the ceremony. After it was raised, the troops saluted it, and Judge Hancock called for cheers. The children said there were a few weak little cheers, and the Judge was angry, and the men walked away. Tried to iron and to bake; after Robert came home, finished a pair of socks for him. _Aug. 7th._ My dear Archibald was born at half past six this morning. Robert stayed with me all day. Mrs. Carlton and Mrs. Green and Jenny Alexander came and sat with me a little. I was very proud and happy with my new son, and very grateful to God for all the love that surrounded me. There is old Aunt Patsy in the kitchen; Mary, Lilly and Calvin do all they can, and what they cannot do, Robert somehow manages. The daily record of my life at this time is chiefly remarkable for the wonderful way in which it represents men of all ages, and all sorts and conditions, taking hold of the heavy housework, thrown upon the hands of the women by the refusal of negroes to work. They accepted it with a kind of pride, and refused to feel any shame in relieving their wives of labor beyond their strength. I went into a friend's house one day and found her husband, with board and bathbrick, cleaning the table knives. I knew men who "fired" all the food, for the cooking was then done in skillets on the hearth, with hot coals underneath, and upon the lid. I knew others who turned the mattresses and made the beds, and though I was seldom quite without help, Robert found plenty of housework to do, which he would not permit either Mary, or Lilly, or myself to attempt. As illustrating the time, I insert here two records, taken without option or choice, but reflecting the life of the period so well, that I will not change them: _Oct. 27th._ Been up and down all night with Archie, who is teething and very restless. Robert had kindled the fire, and I made coffee and muffins, and fried some bacon. After breakfast I attended to children, then baked six loaves of light bread, cooked steak and mashed potatoes for dinner. Mary and Lilly set the table very nicely. After dinner I cleaned up, and when Robert came home about four o'clock, he parched some coffee, and then helped me make candles. We had a pleasant supper, and after the little ones were in bed, I read "Ivanhoe" to Robert until bedtime. _Nov. 1st._ Got up dull and tired, and made breakfast, then washed up, and tidied the house. Robert gone up town to see what he can do about a house. We must leave this place, and I would be glad to do so, if we could find another. Robert hopes Major Pierce will pay him today, I put no confidence in the man. I heard Mary and Calvin read, examined them in other studies. Lilly is sick in bed yet. Robert came home disappointed about both house and money. Well, God has both in store. We must pay for them with faith and patience, and in the meantime, the good Father sets my table, and provides for all my wants. _Nov. 27th._ Robert rented the Morris place, just back of the Capitol. I am delighted. I hated the house we are in, as soon as I heard of it; and we have had nothing but trouble, while living under its roof. Perhaps our moving may make a break in the long roll of anxious days and nights, just as a nightmare is gone, the moment we stir under it. The Morris place, to which I made all haste to remove, was almost in the center of the camp of the Sixth Cavalry, and their tents were all round our enclosure. A little behind them were the wigwams of the Tonkaway and Lipan guides, but I had no fear of either white men or Indians. And we soon found that we had come among the most courteous and friendly people. A little offering of cream and new milk opened the way for much mutual kindness; the officers came familiarly to our house. Colonel Morris had the use of our stable, and the girls had the use of horses when they wanted them. I must notice here, that this kind treatment of "rebels" was not specially for our case. Almost as soon as the Sixth Cavalry arrived in Austin, its officers gave a Reconciliation Ball, and to their regular afternoon promenade and concert, there was a hearty welcome for all who chose to come. It was a great pleasure once more to feel myself surrounded by happy, hopeful people; the atmosphere round the camp was lighter and brighter than what I had been breathing for years, and my nature responded gladly to its stimulus. Nevertheless, the half year following this removal was full to the brim of every sorrow that humanity can suffer. We were hardly settled when Lilly fell very sick with camp measles, and one after the other the whole family followed her. What we should have done without Dr. Bacon of the Sixth Cavalry at this time, I cannot imagine. He watched over every sick child with a care and tenderness that probably saved their lives. There were but few ladies in the camp, but those present were kind and sympathetic and Mrs. Madden, the wife of Captain Madden, helped me nurse through many critical nights. During these hard weeks of suffering and utter weariness, there was always the haunting fear of poverty. At first, after the break-up Robert was not anxious. The three richest men in Austin, Mr. Swenson, Mr. Swisher and Mr. Raymond were intending to open a bank as soon as affairs would warrant the project. They had engaged Robert as cashier, and in the meantime he was putting the affairs of the Military Board in order for Major Pierce. But the Military Board work was now finished, and there was no prospect as yet for a bank in Austin. Moreover, word had just come that Mr. Swenson had gone into the banking business in New York. So we were anxious and uncertain, for with six children it would not be as easy to move, as when we came to Austin with two. But money trials are not the hardest, and somehow or other, they are always overcome. I have been constantly amazed in reading my diary for this year, to see how wonderfully, and from what strange and unlooked-for sources our purse was kept adequate to our wants. It was my intention to burn this diary as soon as I had taken from its pages the story it has so many years preserved, but after reading the record of these sad weeks, I can never do it. As long as I live, it shall be a witness between God and myself that in every trial and in every sorrow He was sufficient. The stones of Bethel were not more sacred, than this little book wet with my tears, and holding my prayers. For over and over it acknowledges, "Thou drewest near in the day that I called upon thee: thou saidst, Fear not!" (Lamentations, 3:57.) Robert had just made up his mind to go to San Antonio to see what business opportunities were there, when Archie was taken sick. He was only a child of ten months old, but he had crept close into all our hearts. I sent for Dr. Bacon, and his attitude from the first was one of anxiety. The next day he told Robert he had better not leave home. "The child is very sick," he said, "and his illness has taken a turn that is nearly always fatal." Three nights after this advice, Robert lay down to sleep and rest a little, for he had been holding the child all day. It was then near midnight, and Archie appeared to be sleeping. I sat down beside his cot, and was knitting a stocking, and watching his every movement. Suddenly a large picture of Lake Windermere, heavily framed, which was hanging over the chimney piece crashed to the floor. No one moved, no one heard the crash, and I went and looked at the picture. Nothing about it was in any way injured. Then I bowed my head, and clasped my hands. There was One present, and I saluted him. The words I expected came. From that hour Archie grew steadily worse and when Dr. Bacon called the following afternoon, I said, "He is very ill, Doctor?" "Very." "Dying?" "Yes. Look at his small hands. See how firmly he has clasped his four fingers over his thumbs. That is a very sure sign of death. Why do they do it? Who can tell?" Soon after midnight Archie died. It was a glorious night, and after I had washed and dressed the dear child for his grave, I went out and cut handfuls of white altheas, and strewed them over the little form. All that day he lay thus, and his brothers and sisters came and kissed him, and he was yet one of the household. The next morning the little coffin was ready, I laid him in it, and then Robert gathered the children and read the burial service over it. Colonel Morris had loaned us the officer's carryall, and there was plenty of room in it, not only for the whole family, but also for the little coffin. It was in this way, we went to the graveyard, and laid him beside his sister Ethel. God accomplishes that which is beyond expectation. The next morning Robert got an offer from a large cotton house in Galveston, which he accepted. Of course this meant, that he must leave me and the children in Austin until October; before that, there might be some danger from yellow fever. But we both knew, that in the United States camp, there was every security, and that the kindness already given would not be withdrawn. After a few days' preparation Robert went away one morning. We watched him until he mounted the last step, leading over the Capitol wall. There he stood a moment, and waved his hat, and we turned quickly into the house because it is not lucky to watch the traveler out of sight. And as I entered the sitting-room, the pendulum of the clock fell to the floor, and I picked it up and said, "It is ten minutes past eleven. We shall see that something will happen at that time." I was not worried about the circumstance. I merely thought it prefigured some unusual event. The three months that followed were very happy ones. Colonel Morris sent the bandmaster to sleep in the house, and to watch the Indians, and I threw off all care, and gave myself and the children a holiday. All lessons were dropped, and the girls rode every day to their heart's content. I wrote cheerful, loving letters to Robert, and had cheerful, loving letters in return. And the weeks went quickly away, until the last one came. Then having sold all our furniture, and also the good cow bought with the Scotch pebble bracelet, I was ready to depart. Ten years previously I had come to Austin, and thought it a city in fairy land. I had seen every charm vanish away. It was a dead city that I was leaving. The dead houses and dead streets might live again, but nothing could restore unto them the glory of the past. I was not sorry to leave them. _Sept. 24th._ This is my last entry in Austin. Went with Mary to the graveyard and planted some more shrubs on the two little graves. Then I knelt down and bid them farewell forever. Came home and had some ironing and packing to do; old Anna was doing the last cleaning. In the afternoon had a house full of callers, the Reverend Mr. Rogers, Mrs. Henricks, the Beadles, et cetera; in the evening Lieutenant Kramer, and Major Starr, and Mr. Blackwell. It has been a restless, heart-achey day, and Galveston does not call me pleasantly, but "Manifold are the changes, Which Providence may bring; Many unlooked-for things, God's power hath brought about. What seemeth likely happeneth not, And for unlikely things, God findeth out a way." O little book, I shut up in you many sacred sorrows! But where on this earth shall the mortal be found, who is free of all trouble? Even the happy have secret griefs, they never utter: "But anywhere, or everywhere, If I fulfil God's will, And do my Life's work bravely, I shall be happy still." CHAPTER XVI THE TERROR BY NIGHT AND BY DAY "A place Before his eyes appeared, sick, noisome, dark, A Lazar house it seemed, wherein were laid Numbers of those diseased; Dire was the tossing, deep the groans, despair Tended the sick, busy from couch to couch; And over them triumphant Death, his dart Shook."--MILTON. All changes are more or less tinged with melancholy, for what we are leaving behind is part of ourselves. The last night I spent in Austin was full of fears and sorrowful memories. The Sixth Cavalry had left the week previous, and I was in terror of the negroes who hungry and angry were going to-and-fro in the darkness, seeking whom they could injure or rob. I dared not sleep. But about two o'clock a severe thunder storm came on and relieved me from any fear of negroes; for I knew that they were terrified by thunder and lightning, and, moreover, that they seriously objected to getting wet. The storm troubled me, because I dreaded detention. If we were to leave, then the sooner the better. I did not like plans to be delayed, they always seemed to lose something in the interval, and to come to the point at last but half-heartedly. So I wandered about the house, or sat musing in spirit by the two little graves in that lonely suburb of the dead, which I should never, in this life, see again. When the dawn began to break I fell asleep, and on awakening found that it was an exquisite morning, cool and bright, with a refreshing little wind stirring the tree tops. We had a pleasant breakfast, and then made our last preparations. I had sold the furniture, but it was in some confusion, and had such a hopeless look of hurry and dispersion, that I felt angry at the senseless things. I did not expect the coach until eleven o'clock, but I knew there would be many callers, and I wished to be able to give them my whole time. And at this hour of parting all differences were forgotten and forgiven; acquaintances I had not spoken to for five or six years came to bid me farewell, girls I had helped and taught, men and women of later acquaintance, all alike came with farewell gifts and good wishes. So the house was full until the coach was driven up to the door; then I ran into the living-room to stop the clock. I did not wish to leave "my time" for I knew not whom, and as I touched the pendulum, I remembered its fall, and glanced at the dial plate. It was ten minutes past eleven. So I smiled and said to Mary, "We are leaving exactly at the hour your father left." And she answered, "You know, Mamma, every one who goes by this coach will go about the same hour." I nodded my head to this remark, and taking Alice by the hand, we made our final adieus and started. Somehow, I seemed to have suddenly lost a foothold, my spirits were dashed, and I was relieved when the house was out of sight, and we were driving down the avenue. And yet I was soon sorry, that we had taken that way of exit from the city, for my heart ached when I remembered the beautiful highway, as I saw it, the day I first entered Austin--bathed in spring sunshine, redolent with the perfume of the China trees, gay with white-robed women and picturesque men, with busy stores, and little rambling hints of music from negroes picking their banjos, while waiting for their masters or watching their horses. It was so charming, so happy, so full of calm content and evident prosperity. Now! Ah! Now it was a desolate place. Only two or three stores were open, the rest were closed, and had an air of desertion. I did not see a dozen white men on the sidewalks, and just two white women were visible, and they were robed in deepest black, and their faces closely covered by long black veils. There was no sound or sight of business of any kind, the doors of the hotel were shut, and not even an empty chair stood under its shady verandah. All the signs of life present were black signs--squads of ragged negro men, and with every squad negro women equally ragged; while squatting near them, there was usually some black hairless Mexican dogs--all else, despondency and loneliness. I was glad when we were beyond any sight or sound of Austin, and now I confess that I remember only the Austin I saw and loved in 1856. I had to call peremptorily on memory to restore me my last view of it, in 1866. The latter was but a passing condition. I know now that splendid natural avenue is bright and busy, and wonderfully built up and adorned with all that marks commercial prosperity. I do not want to see it in its modern splendor. I prefer to keep my memory of it in A.D. 1856. It was then, I think, the brightest, happiest, most romantic street in the whole world. We left Austin on the twenty-fifth of September, A.D. 1866, at ten minutes past eleven A.M., and we arrived at Bastrop at ten o'clock P.M., having stopped at a place called Nash's for supper. Then all night we were in the stage, not reaching a village called La Grange till near noon next day. At La Grange we had a good meal, and then took a stage for Allington, where we arrived between seven and eight o'clock that night. Here we stayed at a small hotel, and never before in all my life had beds been so welcome. The children were worn out, and I had a bad nervous headache but a long night's sleep put us all right. When I awoke, I found that Mary and Lilly had dressed the younger children, and were dressing themselves, and by hurrying a little, I was able to go with them when the gong called us to breakfast. Calvin and Alexander were missing, but were soon found in speechless worship and wonder before the railway engine. Calvin was a natural mechanic, and the engine attracted him as nothing in all his short life had ever done. He held his little brother by the hand, and was explaining it to him in his childlike manner. After breakfast we took the train for Galveston, but did not arrive there until it was nearly dark. We had all left Allington in high spirits, but as the day went on a great depression fell upon every one of us. The boys appeared to feel its influence most, and they became silent and even sad. I thought it was only physical weariness, for I was conscious also of a great melancholy. A little while before we reached Galveston, we had to cross a very long bridge or viaduct, connecting the main land with the island of Galveston. Over this viaduct the train moved very slowly. I looked at Alexander who was sitting on my knees, for I expected him to be full of interest and chatter, and I saw that his eyes had the most remarkable appearance. He seemed to be looking through his eyeballs, as through a window, seeing something at an infinite, incalculable distance. He was evidently unconscious, and _I_ could neither speak nor move. Calvin was in the same trance. Mary and Lilly were gazing at the boy, but neither of them moved nor spoke. Suddenly Alexander shuddered, and with a deep sigh was conscious, but he made no remark. At the same moment Calvin awoke to life, in the same manner, and none of us uttered a word. The boys were exceedingly sad, but neither of them asked a question, or made any allusion to their experience. The strangest, most sorrowful atmosphere pervaded the car, and I could scarcely move under the somber, silent inertia; but I expected the train to stop at any moment, and Robert would be waiting. This nameless, causeless, speechless dejection would be too cruel. It would never do, it must be conquered. I made a great effort, and got the children to answer me in an absent-minded way, but when the train stopped, and Robert stepped forward happy and smiling, and stretching out his arms for Alice, we could hardly speak to him. For weeks and months we had all been joyfully anticipating this very hour, and when it came, none of us appeared to be even decently pleased. Robert was astonished but very good-natured, and pitied us because we were too weary for anything but sleep. But when I told him, a little later, about the kind of trance into which both boys had fallen at the same time, he was much troubled. "Was it a trance, Robert?" I asked. "It was _vision_," he answered sadly. "The same experience came to Ethel, the day before her death." "And what is _vision_?" "The cup of strength, given only to those who will need its comfort." Then we were both silent, and for some time both unhappy, though we did not again name the circumstance. We stayed in a boarding-house while furnishing our new home, and this occupied over two weeks, for Robert could not spare much time to assist me, though he had seen to it, that the house itself was spotlessly clean and in good order. The rest had to be mainly my work. Now, how is it, that the very same circumstances are not always equally pleasant? I could not but remember our happy furnishing in Austin ten years previously. What a joyous time it was! And there was nothing to prevent, in some measure, a renewal of this experience; there were even one or two things favorable towards making it a still more delightful one; for instance, we had more money to spend, and more certain prospects. But it was quite different. Robert went about the matter generously and helpfully, and the result was a pretty, comfortable home, with which we were both pleased; but its making had not been the same delightful event that our Austin home represented. There had been no disagreement, no disappointment, not one untoward circumstance of any kind, _but it was not the same_! Why? We loved each other better than ever before; what had caused the change? _Ten years?_ When I was alone, I could not help a few regretful tears, but alas! "No tears can make the grass to grow On the trampled meadows of long ago." Ah, if we had known that it was our last home making! The very last time we should talk together about chairs and tables, curtaining and china, how almost sacred these common household things would have become. I have not an article left of this furnishing, but a pretty Queen Anne cream pitcher. On leaving Galveston forever, I gave this pitcher to Mrs. Lee of that city, as a memorial of her great kindness to me in the most terrible hours of my life. Twenty years afterwards, she sent it with a loving message back to me, knowing that it would be a relic beyond price. Surely the veil God draws between us and the future is a veil of mercy. If Robert and I had known it, how heart-breaking that furnishing would have been! We took possession of our new home on the sixteenth of October. It was then in perfect order, and we made a gala meal of our first supper, at which all the children were present. Then there followed half-a-year of days sweet as the droppings from the honeycomb. Lilly and Calvin were at good schools, Mary was studying music, and learning how to dance, and I was busy enough with my house, with the sewing for the whole family, and with giving Alexander his first lessons. Alice though near seven years old was yet too weak to be troubled. She had been born during the excitement and terror of the beginning of the war, and she brought with her--not the fervid spirit of the time--but its exhaustion and weakness. During the worry and trouble following the Emancipation, Robert had received a letter from my sister Mary, telling him of my father's death, but advising that I should not be informed of it, while I had so many every day troubles and anxieties. Robert thought well of this request, and so he did not tell me until we were happily settled in our Galveston home. I could weep no sorrowful tears for my father's release. For a long time earth had lain at his feet like a cast-off sandal. He had longed to depart, and to be with Christ and the loved ones waiting for him; and Mary said he went away smiling, like one who goes on a pleasant journey. During his last days he frequently expressed a wish that he might go on a Sabbath morning, while the bells were ringing for service. Very wise people will doubtless think that was a childish wish, but the kindly angel of his release granted it. On a Sabbath morning, while the bells of Baildon church were ringing a joyful peal, and filling the air with the gladdest music that can ever be between heaven and earth, he went away with the air and the smile of one, "To whom glad news is sent, From the far country of his home, After long banishment." No I could not weep for my father's release. I could sit and recall his fine face, his gracious manner, his blameless life, his wonderful sermons and our long pleasant walks together, but though my tears were dropping upon my sewing, they were not sorrowful tears. I could wipe them away with thanksgiving. For half a year everything went on in the happiest manner. We had very pleasant neighbors; the markets were cheap and plentiful. A few old Austin friends had gathered round us, and we had many new ones. Life seemed to me in those days like a busy, happy story. True, every day was much alike; yet every day was different--a fresh visitor, a new book, the children's school gossip, the household and city happenings made changes that were sufficient. And in the evenings, if we had no company, I played and sang and read to Robert and the three eldest children, or we took a walk to the beach, which was scarce a quarter of a mile away. Thus one day slipped into another, and I find no complaints in my diary against anything, or anyone, but _myself_. To its pages I am constantly lamenting my too vivid enjoyment of earthly happiness, and my forgetfulness of past sorrows and trials. Yet if this small book tells the truth, as I am sure it does, I must have loved God through these happy days very sincerely. I wish with all my soul that I loved him now, as I did then, with a conscience sensitive as a nerve, and a heart that acknowledged no truer love, or dearer loyalty. Yes, in my eighty-first year, I am ashamed before the memory of that woman in the prime of her life, who could write such passionate longings for God's love, and such sorrowful regrets for her small lapses of duty or temper. Surely _He_ cannot have forgotten. It was not until late in April that the first whisper of calamity came. We lived in a cottage belonging to Judge Wheeler, and standing next to his own house, and one evening he came over to smoke his pipe with Robert on our verandah. "Barr," he said, "I hear a good deal of talk about yellow fever, and I dare say people will be advising you to leave this house, because there is a meat market not far away, which will be sure to attract the fever. Don't you believe them. Sit still. You are as safe here as anywhere. We do not intend to move, nor do the Dalzells, who have the next house to us." During the following month the terror grew daily, and as the hot weather came on, we were sensibly aware of our too close proximity to the meat market, Robert was sure we ought to remove, and he came home one day delighted with an empty house which he had found. It was near the sea, and it had unusually large rooms, all of which had just been renovated, papered and painted. It is not great things, but trivial ones, which generally produce the most important and tragic consequences; and it was the fresh papering and painting that made me willing to go through another removal. Yet I did not inspect the house before moving into it; if I had, I am sure I should have hesitated about doing so, but the weather was hot and humid, and the road between it and the Wheeler cottage deep with sand. My feeling about the change was really one of assent, rather than desire. The place, however, appeared to be all that had been represented--roomy and clean, freshly papered and painted, and so near to the Gulf that we could hear the waves breaking on the shore. But as I walked through the rooms, an indefinable repugnance took possession of me, and I asked Robert if he knew who had been living in it? "I do not," he said a little tartly. "I never thought of asking such a question. Does it matter, Milly?" "Yes," I answered, "it does matter a great deal. In spite of the fresh paper and paint, the air of these rooms is not clean. Wicked people must have lived in them." Then he laughed, and said, "You are too fanciful. No one has lived in the house," he continued, "for a great many years. It was almost a ruin, when old Durr bought it. We are its first tenants since its restoration to a respectable dwelling." I said nothing further at the time, but I noticed that when the two large lamps were lit in the parlor, they did not light the room. It remained dull and gloomy, and full of shadows, and an eerie feeling of fear and unconquerable depression dashed all desire to talk over our arrangement of the furniture; deny it as he would, Robert and the children were affected in the same way. But the change was made, and the wisest plan was to accept it hopefully. I put up the white curtains, and white mosquito draperies as soon as possible, not only because they were necessary to our comfort, but because I hoped the profusion of white would relieve the gloom. I filled the rooms with flowers, I hung no pictures but such as were of light coloring and cheerful subjects, and when I had finished my work, I felt more satisfied with the place. Then life settled to its usual routine, yet hardly so, for I was counseled against allowing the children to study during the hot months in which they were acclimating; and I felt little inclination myself for any duty that was not an imperative necessity. I sat drowsily within the open door hardly thinking. Life gradually became inertia. I laid down my book and needle, and the children played without spirit, or lay sleeping in any cool place they could find. In Austin the thermometer had often stood ten or twelve degrees higher, and not affected our work or spirits, but as soon as it passed ninety degrees in Galveston it became intolerable. And at this time the average heat, if I remember rightly, was one hundred degrees and upward. Still I am glad now to recall we kept up as far as possible all our household ways and traditions. No matter how hot the morning or night, we never missed the usual family worship, and only in case of sickness, did I permit either myself or the children, to neglect dressing to meet their father for supper. I did not read so much aloud to them, for we were all too listless and anxious to care about imaginary sorrows, with so much real danger and suffering around. Sometimes, however, I took a little stroll with Robert to the beach, and sometimes even I went downtown with him as far as our grocer's. He was a Glasgow man called Shaw, and Robert had formed a warm friendship with him. As the days and weeks went on, we could not escape the certain knowledge that the fever was steadily gaining ground. During the latter part of June the corporation were keeping large fires of tar burning all through the city, and the gutters had a horrible odor of disinfectants. Far and wide the lurid smoke of these fires darkened the hot humid atmosphere, and at night their dark fantastic shadows, and the singular forms they took, seemed to prefigure and presage the fate of the doomed city. Here and there stores were closed, and frequently dwellings full of human beings were marked with the dreaded yellow cross. At this time I had no great fear of the fateful sickness. However, towards the middle of July affairs were coming to a frightful crisis. The fever had at last reached the military camp of the United States soldiers, which was but a block or two behind our house. There were a thousand men in it, and every morning I saw long lines of carts filled with rude boxes and tarred canvas pass the house. They were carrying the dead to the long trenches made for them. In August the colonel of this regiment died of the fever, and not thirty of the men were alive to bury him. There was nothing for the custom's house and post office to do, their doors were shut; the Strand, which was the principal business street of the city, was rank with waving grass. Its large warehouses, shops, wharves and public buildings were closed. There were half a dozen little places scattered about, that were still open, mainly for the sale of bread and drugs, but they had an air of hopeless silence and abandonment. A dreadful haze hung over the city, and the sea--a haze that appeared to be filled with the very odors of despair and death. I was glad when the corporation gave up all efforts at prevention. The fever was now far beyond it, and Galveston was strictly isolated from the living world. It had become a city of dreadful death. Day after day and week after week the weather was of the same distressing character--an hour or two of pouring, beating, tropical rain, and then an hour or two of such awful heat and baleful sunshine, as the language happily has no words to describe. These two conditions alternated continually, and the consequence was streets full of grass--this grass being literally alive with tiny frogs, frogs not bigger than a bean, but in such enormous quantities that pedestrians crushed hundreds under their feet with every step they took. I do not exaggerate this sickening plethora of life; it is impossible to do so. One evening towards the end of August I told Robert we were out of certain household necessities, and asked if he knew how they could be procured. He answered, "Yes, Shaw told me if we wanted anything to knock at his house door, and he would give me what was required. I will go and see him after supper." Then I pleaded, "Let me go with you, Robert. I want a walk so much." He entreated me not to go, but I was resolved to see with my own eyes whether things were as bad as reported, and after some demur he consented. So I walked down into the city with him. A walk through hell could hardly have been more dreadful. The beds of the dying were drawn to the open windows, and there was hardly a dwelling wanting a dying bed. The faces of the sufferers were white and awful, their heads covered with crushed ice. They were raving, moaning, shrieking, or choking with the appalling vomito. I covered my eyes, and clung to Robert, and finally asked him to turn back. "We are nearly at Shaw's," he answered, "and you had better rest there half an hour. It will then be darker." So he knocked at the door for admission, and one of Mr. Shaw's clerks opened to us. Robert asked for Mr. Shaw, and the young man replied, "He is in bed, very ill with the fever." I knew it the moment the door was opened. A strong sickly odor, like nothing ever felt before, told me so. I said to myself on the instant, "It is the smell of yellow fever." And no one, I think, would have failed to give it its own dreadful name--that is, if they were in a situation where the fever was probable. There is no odor on earth to which it is comparable. The soul loathes, and sickens, and trembles in its presence; for there is no straighter or surer avenue to the soul than the sense of smell. I went home thoroughly frightened, and Robert I think was not sorry. He had often told me I was too indifferent--not to the discomfort of the situation--but to its danger. We found on reaching home that Calvin and Alexander had not gone to bed, and then both boys cried in our arms and said they dared not go to their rooms upstairs. "There are evil spirits there, Papa," sobbed Calvin, "and they walk about and stand and look at us. They emptied my drawers last night. They pulled the clothes off our bed. Oh, they are so wicked, and so dreadful! Save us from them, Papa! We cannot go upstairs tonight." We were astounded, the more so as Mary and Lilly had a similar story to tell. The dear children had been consulting in our absence, whether we must be told, or whether they should try to bear it a little longer--_until Mamma felt better_. Those four words smote me like a whip. Of course we comforted them, and gave the boys a room downstairs beside us. Then I went to the kitchen to make some inquiries of the servant, who also slept upstairs. She was a sensible middle-aged Dutch woman, as little likely to be psychic, or even imaginative, as was the bed upon which she slept. I found that she had gone home to sleep, but would be back early in the morning. When she came in the morning, I said to her, "Why did you go home last night, Gertrude?" "Because it is impossible to sleep here, Madame," she answered. "There are such strange noises, and I see dreadful men going up and down stairs all night. I am afraid of them." I told Robert what she said, and he answered in a sad, slow voice, "I hear such things wherever I turn Milly. It is astonishing what some men have told me. I could almost fear we were all in hell and did not know it. During the great cholera year in Glasgow, 1847-8, people told the same things, but the spiritual terror is far, far greater here, and now, than it was there, and then." "Do you think such a calamity as this is the work of evil spirits, Robert?" "It may be. But if so, they are only the agents of a wise and merciful God who permits them so far, and no further. There is the case of Job, and when Daniel prayed for help, the help, though sent by the Archangel Michael, was delayed twenty-one days; for Michael had to fight the Evil Ones, who opposed him." Then we were silent and thoughtful, and I had suddenly a childish fear, that it was not well to talk of the Evil Ones. They could perhaps hear what we said. I will try to write as little as possible about the spiritual terror of this time, but ignoring a subject does not annihilate it, and this subject was one of general concern and absorbing interest. There were few people--men and women both--who had not some strange or terrible experience to relate. Nor were these experiences confined to the vulgar, the ignorant, the superstitious or the irreligious; they affected every class, without any distinction of social standing, age or culture. We must remember that every one for three months dwelt at the mouth of the grave. The terror by night, the pestilence that walked in darkness, the destruction that wasted at noonday was their companion and their conversation. The invisible world drew strangely near to the visible; every one talked with bated breath of things supernatural. It was an atmosphere in which the solemn and thoughtful grew spiritual, but which offended and angered natures of clayey mold. Those who have visited old churches and cathedrals where men have prayed and poured out spiritual emotions for centuries know how powerfully they are moved by this unseen force of righteousness; how softly they tread! How lowly they speak! How readily their souls respond to the reverent thoughts that spring voluntarily to their consideration! Such places are really sacred. God has visited them, angels have rested in their solemn aisles, mortals seeking heavenly mercy have found it there. Now the power of evil association with places is quite as great--perhaps greater; for evil clings passionately to whatever is of the earth. There are many places today filled with the strong vibrations of tragedies long since enacted there. Go and stand, even at bright noonday, amid the ruins of some old Druidical temple, and you will be chilled by the supernal horror that yet lingers there. Every city has its own mental atmosphere, and it affects persons moving to it. In a lesser degree every tabernacle built by man, and used by man, becomes imbued with his personality, physical and spiritual. I knew dwellings in England where the same family had lived for centuries, that had actually the aura of the family, and in their arrangement and atmosphere, almost its personality. Indeed, every habitation reveals in some degree the nature of the people who dwell in it. So I wondered constantly as to who had built and lived in the old house we had unfortunately taken possession of. I was sure that their wraiths were still in it, and that our presence annoyed them. But we told ourselves that their malignity could have no power over us. Whatever came, though it were the fever, we were determined to take it as from God's will. One night in August, Robert brought home with him a Mr. Hall, an old Austin friend. They had some business to talk over, and when I saw their conversation was finished, I had supper brought in, and as we sat down to the table, Mr. Hall glanced round the parlor and remarked, "The old pirate's nest has quite a Barr-y look already." "Pirate's nest!" I ejaculated. "What do you mean, Mr. Hall?" "Well," he answered, "if devils haunt the places they made hells upon earth, Lafitte and his men must be here. It is said that Durr's house was standing in the days when Galveston was called Campeachy, and was a haunt and home of the vilest men, pirates and murderers from the scum of all nations, ruled by the infamous Lafitte. By the way, Barr," he continued, "Lafitte was a great slave trader, and he had a very convenient way of selling negroes; a dollar a pound for them, old or young. If this should have been Lafitte's house, as I have heard some suppose, it was originally painted blood-red, and----" "Mr. Hall," interrupted Robert, "I think you ought not to mention such things in Madame's presence." "I beg Madame's pardon," he answered, "but I felt sure she had already heard many incomprehensible things. To me they are hardly so, for I know what fiends once made Galveston Island their home. Do you think they have forgotten the place of their sins and cruelties? No, Furies of ancient crimes are here, revengeful souls full of unsatisfied hatreds. Perhaps they have been given a strange enlargement for some reason, and that reason must be within the permission and mercy of God." Robert made a motion of dissent. "I do not believe," he said, "that God would select for the execution of any of his purposes, foul spirits who gloat in cruelties." "We know nothing more surely of God, than that he is love and mercy. I am one of those who believe even in the repentance and forgiveness of that great Archangel who fell, and drew after him a third part of heaven." "Now, Hall----" "Yes, I believe in the full and final triumph of good. Why else should Christ have descended into hell to preach to the spirits in prison there? He had surely some hope or promise to give, or He would not have gone. I hope I may at least have the same divine charity which is expressed in one of the most ancient Persian hymns." "Do you know the hymn, Mr. Hall?" I asked. "I know the lines I refer to." "Will you repeat them?" "In the translation I possess, they read thus: 'Ormuzd grant me the grace, the joy of seeing Him who makes the Evil, be brought to comprehend The purity of the Heart. Grant that I may see the Great Chief of the Evil Ones, loving nothing but holiness; And forever speaking the Word, among the Converted demons.'" "Thank you," I answered, and Mr. Hall continued, "Take your Bible. Between cover and cover, there is not any doctrine more constantly taught and exemplified, than the one teaching angelic and demoniacal agency. What says Madame?" "I believe in it," I answered, "just as I believe in the resurrection of the dead and the communion of saints. They are articles of the same creed. I cannot doubt one, without doubting the other; and I hope I have a share of that divine charity which inspired the Persian worshipper. David believed that even if he made his bed in hell, God would care for him, and Ezekiel tells us that Pharaoh shall be comforted in hell." (Ezekiel, 32:31.) "Do you remember in what chapter?" asked Mr. Hall. "No," I answered, "but we will look for it after supper." Then I changed the conversation for Robert looked as much like a Sadducee as any dweller in ancient Jewry could have done. That night we were both very sad and quiet, and after Mr. Hall had left, Robert sat down by his two sons and talked softly to them for a long time. I sat at the open door, listening to the great voice of the sea lamenting and creeping up through the darkness. At that hour my faith was weak, and I could not help remembering how, when I first crossed this unhappy threshold, my heart sighed heavily, and my very steps were reluctant and prelusive of sorrow. But in a little while Robert came to comfort me, and he spoke so bravely of God's omnipotent power, and of his goodness to us in every emergency, that I soon found no difficulty in carrying my fearful heart from this unhappy house, safe to the hidden house of God's abiding. That night I had a dream. It is as clear to my inward vision this hour as when I awoke from it. I was by the side of a river, a river black and motionless. Great trees overshadowed it, and all its banks were hidden in a lush growth of rushes and long grasses. It was a horror of marshy earth and dead water. And among the long rushes and dead water, a human figure lay, a man unnaturally thin and tall, with a yellowish, deathlike face, surrounded by long straight black hair. He lay prone as if asleep, but slowly raised himself, and looked at me. Then with a languid air, but a voice of fate, he said, "_One shall be taken, and the other left_." I awoke, and my heart was sick, for I had seen the likeness of yellow fever. And from that hour I knew, that either I must leave my dear ones, or they would have to leave me. For come how it may, dreams _do_ read the future. Then why should we despise their teaching? How can we tell what subtle lines run between spirit and spirit? Fifty years ago we would have thought it a thing incredible, if told that a man in New York could talk with a man in Chicago. Can it not be as easy for the dear ones who have left us, to send a warning dream, as it is for our scientists by means of spectrum analysis, to examine a ray of light from Sirius, Capella or any distant star, and tell us what are the elements of their composition. And from the dream there soon followed reality. I went softly. I hung around my husband and children with a wistful tenderness. I asked God to prepare me for whatever He sent, and all my prayer was, "Let us fall into Thy Hands." I can make no apology for being now compelled to refer to a life not this life. It would indeed be a miserable one-sided biography of any human being, that was only a biography of their physical life. We are soul as well as body. It is not that we _have_ a soul, we _are_ a soul; and this higher part is in no one quiescent. The men who think of nothing outside their physical senses, have often souls of a far more pronounced type than their physical man; the type may be evil, but even while they ignore its agency, they are ruled by it. I had been _in touch with myself_ all my life long; by night and day the other Amelia was familiar to my apprehension, and an incommunicable sense of another world never far away. Hitherto, I had been astonished that while others saw and heard so much from this other world, I had been singularly free from spiritual influences. The dream I have just related, was the first intimation I received of a personal share in the general calamity. I did not speak of it to Robert, but as I have said, I went prayerfully about my house, and all my pleasant work fell from my listless hands. Sometime after midnight on the twentieth of August I rose from my bed. I could not sleep; I was too restless and unhappy, but all whom I loved appeared to be sleeping well. So I sat down in a rocking-chair facing an open window which looked towards the sea. This open window was however screened by the ordinary green blinds, made of thin slats of wood. All was quiet but the dull roar of the sea, troubling the sad heart of the night with a sound of vague anger and menace; and the stillness of earth and sky was ghostly and melancholy. I heard a faint stir among the leaves of the Japonica hedge that surrounded the place, and I stopped rocking and sat motionless listening. Then there fell upon the closed blinds--on which my eyes were fixed--a blow so tremendous, that I was sure they must be shattered; but ere I could rise, another blow of less intensity followed, and then a third not quite as crashing as the second. I never for a moment thought the blows were given by any instrument. I was sure they were made by hand. I went to Robert's side. He was fast asleep. The children also were sleeping. Then I understood. I prayed for God's mercy, but God seemed far from me. Until the dim gray dawn I sat in troubled thought, but when I heard Robert stir I told him what had happened, and begged him to come to the window with me. I had been afraid to go near it; I had turned my back upon it, but I was sure the blinds were shattered. There was not a slat broken. But the thin strips of wood were indented and showed plainly the full shape of a hand twice as large as any human hand. Why were the blinds not broken to pieces by three blows from a hand like that? And how could the thin strips of wood be made to bend and to take that impression? This evidence of physical force, made by some spiritual entity remained for every one to see, as long as I lived in the house. As to what came after, I know not. I never again went within sight of the place. That day I noticed that the leaves of the Japonica hedge had turned black, and were covered with a loathsome sweat or moisture, and Robert told me he had been with Scotch Brown to the camp to do something for a Scotchman ill there, and that they were shown the body of a calf killed one hour previously, and it was as black as a piece of coal. "I would not let the children go outside, Milly," he said, "the very atmosphere has the fever." That night Alexander was taken ill, and before midnight he was delirious. The next day Lilly was sick, and the following day Mary. There was then no institution like the present trained nurses, but the Scotchmen of Galveston had formed themselves into a society for nursing each other, if attacked by fever; and Robert and Scotch Brown had been busily engaged in this work for some weeks. Now Scotch Brown came to our assistance. He went into the kitchen, and could cook a suitable meal if necessary. He kept the negro hired help at their duties, and no woman could have been more tender, more watchful, more ready to help and to comfort. Lilly had not a very bad attack, but Mary came perilously near to the fatal end. But carefully watched and nursed, they passed the crisis, and began to recover. The recovery from yellow fever is very rapid, but if a relapse should take place, the case is hopeless. On Sunday, the sixth of September, Alexander, Lilly and Mary were apparently getting well as satisfactorily as we could expect. Mary looked white and frail; Alexander lay mostly on the sofa; Lilly, in spite of yellow fever, had her usual bright smile and cheerful voice; but, Oh, how happy we were to be able to gather at the dinner table! Very sparing was the food of the invalids, but they enjoyed it, and we had a pleasant meal. It was a very happy day, I remember every hour of it. It was the last day I was to spend with my husband and sons, but I knew it not. Surely, I thought, God has heard my prayers, and we shall all be spared to thank Him. We did so together, as soon as supper was over, and the children with kisses and loving words went early to rest. Robert and I sat until late; Robert was very quiet, but I leaned my head against his shoulder, and we spoke tenderly and hopefully to each other of things past, and of things likely to come. And as I brushed out my hair, and coiled it for the night, I said cheerfully to him, "God doth not leave His Own. The night of weeping for a time may last, Then tears all past, His going forth shall as the morning shine. The sunrise of His favor shall be thine and mine, God doth not leave His Own." CHAPTER XVII THE NEVER-COMING-BACK CALLED DEATH "Calamity is a delicate goddess, and her feet are tender. Her feet are soft. She treads not on the ground. She takes her path upon the hearts of men." The next day was the worst we had yet seen. It poured incessantly, and when the rain ceased at nightfall, it was followed by a fog so dense that it seemed palpable. Every room in the house was full of it, lights would hardly burn, and breathing was not easy. Robert and the children went early to bed, but I wandered about the different rooms, watching the sleepers. I did not feel very well, and was nervous and full of fears. When the clock struck twelve I was worse, and I concluded it would be well for me to try to sleep. But before putting down the lamp, I opened the Bible, for my father had often told me, to take a verse to bed with me to meditate upon, if I happened to be wakeful. It was a common, almost a nightly custom, and I followed it at that hour more as a habit than a conscious intent. So opening the Bible, as my fingers touched the screw of the lamp, my eyes fell upon these words, "_Leave thy fatherless children, I will preserve them alive; and let your widows trust in me_." (Jeremiah, 49:11.) My first emotion was anger. I closed the Book hastily but did not put out the light. I told myself, that I would not go to bed with that strange verse pealing in my ears. And I wondered at my opening on the Book of Jeremiah; it was one book that we never read, either personally or in the family. Its pages indeed were fresh and white, while the Psalms and Gospels were well worn and discolored. All that splendid faith, which is exactly to the inner woman what courage is to the physical woman, had slipped away from me. Why was God so hard to me? I wanted so much a little verse of comfort, and I had been given an evil prediction. I cried very much as a sensitive child would cry, who thought its dearly loved father had been unkind, or indifferent to its distress. I had said, I would not go to bed with that verse pealing in my ears, but the pain in every limb of my body grew constantly worse. I put my fingers upon my wrist, and found there that peculiar "bound" that says at every throb, _yellow fever_! I knew at last, that I was smitten with the fever. Then I called Robert, and was quickly in such physical anguish that I forgot all else; also a feeling of sheer despair took possession of me, and during the ensuing week I was only conscious of the agony of a thirst, which could not be satisfied but at the risk of the vomito. Robert put bits of crushed ice between my lips frequently, but they did not assuage the cruel longing for water. I was in an unconscious state wandering in "a desolate land, where the pains of hell get hold on me--a land of deserts and pits, a land of drought and of the shadow of death, that no man passed through, and where no man dwelt;" and into which neither husband nor child could follow me; tossing, muttering, slowly parching and burning up, I lived on from day to day. But He that "turneth man to destruction" says also, "Return ye children of men;" and on Friday, the eleventh, I became conscious of Robert at my side, and of the children passing through the room and coming to me. I could feel their soft kisses on my hands and face, and I finally found strength to ask Mary, "How are Calvin and Alice?" "Calvin is sick, Mamma," she answered. "Papa put him in my room; he wanted to be near you." "Very sick?" I asked. "Not as bad as I was." "Alice?" "She has the fever very slightly. She is nearly well. Alexander, also, but you, dear Mamma?" "All is right." The next day I was much worse. I could not move, and was hardly able to whisper a word or two, and towards midnight Alexander had a relapse. Wringing his hands, and full of a strange reluctance, Robert went out into the dreadful night to try to find a doctor. What happened on that fateful walk, I may not write, but he brought back the doctor, who looked at the child, and then turning to Robert said, "You will be wanted soon, lie down and sleep. Oh, you must! You must! I will stay here until you awake." I know not how long Robert slept. He threw himself on a sofa within sight of my bed, and appeared to fall into a deep sleep as soon as his head touched the pillow. Alexander begged to come to me, and the doctor laid him at my feet, and I felt with an indescribable thrill of love and anguish, his little hand clasp my ankle. The clock had just struck three, when I heard Robert start suddenly to his feet and cry, "_Yes, sir!_" Then smiting his hands together as if in distress, he cried out still loudly, "_Yes, sir! I am coming!_" The doctor rose and went to him. "Barr," he asked, "what is the matter?" for Robert was weeping as men seldom weep--long moaning sobs, that were the very language of heart-breaking despair. "What is the trouble, my friend?" the doctor asked again, and Robert answered, "My father called me twice, and I--I answered him. He has been dead thirty-two years." "Well then, your father would only come for your relief and help." "He came for _me_, Doctor; the summons was inexorable, and sure." "Let us go to the child. He is very ill." I heard these words, and I felt at the same moment a tighter clasp of the small hand round my ankle, and Robert's kiss upon my cheek. Then the hours went slowly and cruelly by, and in the afternoon the beginning of the end commenced. But just before it, the child had another attack similar to the one he and his brother had shared on the train coming in to Galveston. He was quite unconscious, even of his physical agony, his eyes firmly fixed their vision far, far beyond any earthly horizon. His father sat like a stone gazing at him, and I could not have moved a finger, or spoken a word, no, not to have saved his life. The trance lasted only a few minutes, but he came out of it sighing, and then asked in a voice of awe and wonder, "_Who is that man waiting for me, Papa?_" He was assured there was no one waiting, but he replied, "_Yes, there is a man waiting for me. He is in the next room_." Then his father noticed that his eyes had a new, deep look in them, as if some veil had been rent, and he with open face had beheld things wonderful and secret. About seven o'clock they took him away from me into the next room. He clung to my feet, and begged to stay with me, and I--Oh, I strove as mortals strive with the impossible to speak, to plead, that he might remain! But it could not be. His father lifted him in his arms, and through the next five awful hours he held him there. No! no! It is not writable, unless one could write with blood and tears. At midnight it was over. But as his father laid down the little boy, Mrs. Lee went to him, and said, "Calvin is very ill. Go and speak to him, while you can." He went at once and put his arm under the sweet child, and spoke to him. And the first words the dying boy uttered were, "Papa, what is the matter with my brother?" "He is very ill, Calvin." "Is he dying?" "Yes." "Tell him to wait for me. I am dying, too, Papa! I cannot see you! I am blind! Kiss me, Papa." These were his last words. He died two hours after his brother, and I do not doubt they went together; and they had "a Man" with them, who knew his way through the constellations. They would go straight to Him whom their souls loved. I was not permitted to see either of them, and on Tuesday afternoon they were buried. I heard them carry out the coffins; I heard their father's bitter grief, and I was dumb and tearless. After they were buried, Robert came straight to me. "They are laid side by side, Milly, darling," he said. "Now _I also_ must leave you. Forgive Robert all that he has ever done to grieve you." I tried to tell him I had nothing to forgive, that he was always good to me, but he shook his head sadly, and continued, "O Milly, my love, my wife, farewell! I must go, dearest! I must go! O my dear, dear wife, farewell!" and I could only answer with low sharp cries. I had not a word for this moment. At the open door our eyes met in a long parting gaze, and then I remember nothing more, till it was dark and late, and I heard the sounds of men busy in the next room. I never saw my husband again. On Wednesday he died. Thank God, he died as Calvin did, of general congestion. Death mounted from his dead feet to his heart, and head, with a swift sure pace, but he was really dying all the last three days that he was nursing his dying sons. He fell on guard, and Death came as a friend to relieve him: "And so he passed to joy, through bitter woe, As some great galleon through dark may go, Where no star glimmers, and the storm wind wails Until the rose of Morning touch her sails." Mrs. Lee stayed at his side until the last moment, and when all was finished, she came to me. "He has gone!" she said. "I know," I answered. "He passed me as he went. There was _One_ with him. I thank God! What time did he go?" "It was just ten minutes past eleven." Then I remembered the pendulum of the clock falling at ten minutes past eleven. And the memory gave me a sudden sense of comfort. Some wiser Intelligence than ourselves, had known even then, what was before us; had known when Robert left his home, that he was faring into the shadows in which his grave was hid. His death was not a blind hap-hazard calamity. It was a foreseen event, an end pre-determined by Infinite Wisdom and Love. O mystery of life! From what unexpected sources, spring thy lessons and thy comforts! Whatever life was left in me was quickened by this blow. I felt it to the foundation of being, and though I could not speak to those around me, I could to the _Divine Other_ who was closer to me than breathing, and nearer than hands or feet. Instantly I found myself urging that almighty help. "I cannot die now," I pleaded. "Oh, I cannot die and leave those three little girls alone--in a strange land, without money, without relative or friend to care for them! Oh, help me to live! Help me to live for their sakes! Not for thy sake, for thou can never see death! not for my sake, I am but as a dead woman now; but for my children's sake, help me to recover my strength! Help me, and I shall live." In this manner I silently prayed, with all the fervor of which my soul was capable. And in that central tract of emotion where life and death meet, there are paths of spiritual experience remote and obscure, until some great crisis finds them out--experiences not to be unfolded save to that _one_ Soul, and for which words--however wise--are impotent things. I feel this truth as I write, for I cannot find a way to explain the sure and certain influx of life, that came to me, even as I entreated for it. It came from no drug, no physician, no human help of any kind, but direct from the _Thee in Me_ who works behind the veil, the _More of Life_ in whom we live and move and have our Being. I do not say that my prayer changed God's will or purpose concerning me. Oh, no! but God directed my prayer. He put my petition into my heart. The prayer was granted ere I made it. For if we do right, it is God which teaches us both to will and to do, so that every soul that cries out to the Eternal, finds the Eternal; I care not when, or where. God is not far from any one of us, and in every case he seeks us, before we have the desire to seek Him. I had a full and ready answer to my soul's petition. I recovered rapidly, and in ten days was able to leave my room, and gather the salvage of my wrecked home around me. No doubt most of my readers have a keen and personal knowledge of that weight of grief, which hangs like lead in the rooms, and on the stairs, where the footsteps of the loved dead have sounded. They know what it is to come back from the grave of their love, and see his hat lying where he threw it down forever, and his slippers at the foot of the bed he died on. And, oh, what a multitude of mothers that no man could number, know what it means to put away the empty clothing that still keeps a heartbreaking look of the little form that moulded it--or the small worn shoes and stockings, the toys and books, that will never more be needed. Alas it is too common an experience to require words! This grief has but to be named, and at any hour thousands of heavy hearts can fill in all its sad details. After the month of September the fever, for the very want of victims, began to decline, and about the middle of October there was a storm which shook Galveston Island to its foundation. The waters of the Gulf of Mexico and the Bay of Galveston met, and mingled, in the center of the city. There was a hurtling, roaring tempest around it, and a tremendous battle in the firmament above it. It was "a day of desolation, a day of darkness, of clouds and of thick darkness;" and throughout the hours the storm gathered strength. All night the inhabitants sat still in terror, while the sea beat at their doors, and their homes rocked in the terrific wind. After midnight, when the roaring and crashing and fury of the elements were at their height, it was easy to call to remembrance the magnificent description of just such a storm in Habakkuk, 3:5-12, and as the children drew closer and closer to me, I repeated what I could of it: "Before him went the pestilence, and burning coals went forth at his feet ... and the everlasting mountains were scattered, the perpetual hills did bow.... I saw the tents of Cushan in affliction.... Was thy wrath against the sea, that thou didst ride upon thine horses and thy chariots of salvation?... The overflowing of the water passed by: the deep uttered his voice, and lifted up his hands on high. The sun and the moon stood still in their habitation.... Thou wentest forth for the salvation of thy people." At the dawning, the tempest lulled off with mighty, sobbing winds; sullenly but surely it went, and with it departed entirely the dreadful pestilence. There was not another case known. The Lord had indeed arisen for the salvation of the city, and His angels had driven away the powers of darkness that had been permitted there for a season. Oh, then if our eyes had been opened! If we could have seen the battle in the firmament above us! If we could have seen "the Man Gabriel," or Michael "the great prince which standeth for the children of God's people against the evil ones," then, no doubt, we should have said with Elisha, "Fear not: for they that be with us are more than they that be with them." After the hurricane the inhabitants arose as one man, to build up and to repair, and to put out of sight and memory all traces of their great calamity. At this time, and for long after, my diary is a record of the most extraordinary kindness shown me, both by acquaintances and friends. Scotch Brown seemed to consider us under his special care, and this self-imposed trust he filled with such delicacy and generosity, that I feel angry at myself today, when I find such meagre acknowledgment of it. I must have been truly selfish, or gratitude would have caused me to write less concerning my own suffering, and more about Scotch Brown's thoughtfulness in supplying the little comforts of life, that no one else considered. Thus he saw that I had my newspaper and my mail, or if the servant left, he found us another. His help was always practical help. It had few words, and I do not seem to have realized its wonderful faithfulness and unselfishness. Many a time afterwards I longed for a friendship like his, but I have never found it, and in the face of my own words, I say, "It serves me right." Mrs. Lee visited me once a day, sometimes twice; Mayor Williams looked after any business that came up, and took the children nearly every day for a drive on the beach. He was Alice's godfather, and he acted the part of a godfather to each of the three girls. A great many people are named in this part of my diary, whom I have quite forgotten, but they were distinctly Robert's friends--men whom he had nursed through the fever, or had had business relations with, mostly Glasgow men, or at least Scotchmen, but it did me good to talk with them about him. On the fifth of December my son Andrew was born at four o'clock A.M. I was so happy that the child was a boy, that I cried with thankfulness and delight. He appeared to be a fine strong infant, but he soon showed signs of yellow fever, contracted before his birth, and died when he was five days old at ten minutes to eleven P.M. The next morning he was laid beside his father and two elder brothers. The cycle of the birthplace and the grave fulfilled his doom of earth. So far I had endured the will of God, but I was not resigned. It was so hard to make my heart believe in its great loss. Often as I sat sewing I would say, "Oh, I must be dreaming! I must wake up! I must go to the gate! He may be coming now!" and I would rise to go to the gate, and look and listen, and sometimes I heard the quick strong steps for which I waited and listened. For the ear has its own memory, and listens for an accustomed sound, and the imagination does not always suffer it to be disappointed. This delusion lasted for many months, and I have no doubt the majority of widows have experienced it. Some one of them, I wish I knew her name, has expressed it for all, in the following lines: "Half-unbelieving doth my heart remain of its great woe, I waken, and a dull, dead sense of pain, is all I know; Then dimly in the darkness, my mind I feel about, To know what 'tis that troubles me, and find my sorrow out. And hardly with long pains, my heart I bring its loss to own, It seemeth yet impossible, that thou art gone. That whatsoever else of good, for me in store remain. This lieth out of hope, my Love, to see thy face again." As the year drew to a close, I had fully recovered my strength, indeed I had not been in such fine general health for many years, and with this feeling of physical well-being, there came an urgent sense of the necessity of work. My money, though used with great economy, was decreasing fast, and I had no source for supplying this loss, except by an application to Robert's mother, which I did not wish to make. So I was troubled and anxious and very unhappy. One Sabbath morning about a week before Christmas I was alone in the house, the children had gone to church, the girl in the kitchen to High Mass. I sat thinking of my position, and wondering what I must do. Naturally, I thought also of the One, who had hitherto taken from my shoulders all the burden and the care of life. Then a great illumination came to me. I saw events as I had never seen them before. I had always considered myself as one of the most loving and careful of wives and mothers. If any one had told me that I was not, I should have been indignant. But the dead open the eyes of the living. I saw myself that hour, as a character that amazed me and almost broke my heart. Every unreasonable mood, every ungracious and unkind look, every cross word came back to my memory to torture me! Oh, how I had wounded and disappointed those whom I loved best! What a selfish woman I had been! I was so shocked at the accusations my conscience made against me, that I was silent even from prayer. I had been unkind to the souls of those nearest and dearest to me, and I had no way of redressing the wrong. Why then think about it? Because we cannot say to the heart, "Thou shalt not remember." And if we could forget, it would be a great moral forfeiture, a treason against our own souls. So I let conscience accuse me until I had remembered, and speechlessly acknowledged all my failures. Then I laid my sorrowful heart, with all its love and contrition at His feet. All my slighted duties, cold retirements, and small returns for love unselfish even unto death, I cast into the abyss of His mercy. There were some moments of terrible lucidity, but when my grief subsided, it was followed by a wonderful peace. The feeling of the Infinite around me grew solemnly sweet and distinct, and my soul turned to it. "My God! My God!" I whispered; and though there were only four words given me, I had a joy past utterance. Trouble was lighter than a grasshopper and, oh, what words can describe that felicity of repose which the ebbing of the spiritual tide left behind it! I am writing of nothing supernatural. My experience is not uncommon, and it might be universal. I wish to God it was! I can only speak for myself, but of myself I have a right to speak. "What I know, I know; And where I find place for my foot, I plant it firmly there." So I bring my religious experiences to the common stock of religious facts, because I believe it would be a good thing for the world if more people spoke to it of their knowledge of unseen realities. What I have heard in the silence is not for me alone. I must tell my message in the open place for all I reach, to hear and consider. I know everything that science and creeds and set forms can say against such experiences. Science, which affects to dote on the material, is everywhere brought up short by impalpable but adamantine gates of which God alone holds the key. It is as inscrutable and mysterious as any spiritual occurrence or event. What scientist can yet disclose, how the green bud becomes the rose? As to outward rites and ceremonies at set times, they are useful to many, but we "... may not hope from outward forms to win, The glory of the Life whose fountains are within." * * * * * "... Councils, doctors, priests, Are but the signs that point us to the spring Whence flow thy living waters. From thyself, direct, The secret comes to all worthy to find it." Very light was my soul that happy morning, and I might well be happy. Such moments as I had spent alone with God are both sacrificial and sacramental. They are strong with absolution, and the soul comes out of them justified, and full of hope. The following day I called Mary and Lilly to me, and told them that our stock of money was getting low, and that as I was now quite well I must find something to do which would make us a living. "Have you thought of this necessity, my dears?" I asked. Both answered they had thought a great deal about it. Then I said, "Mary, what in your opinion is the best thing to try?" [Illustration: MISS LILLY BARR] "A first class school for girls," was her ready reply. "You like to teach big girls, Mamma, and I can take charge of the little ones." I saw dissent on Lilly's face, and I asked, "Is that your opinion also, Lilly?" "No, indeed!" she answered promptly. "I have often asked Mary, what good there would be in opening a school, when there were no scholars. The school I went to before the fever has not re-opened, nor has the school Calvin went to. There are no scholars for either of them, because there is no money to pay the teachers. And there is no money either to buy school dresses, and shoes and books and such things. I was talking to Lulu Jordan a few days since, and she told me, she could not go to school because she had only one decent suit, and she had to save that for church." "Well, then, Lilly, have you any idea as to what we can do?" "Yes, Mamma. I would rent a proper room, very near the great shops, and fit it up to sell books, papers, fine stationery for girls' love letters, pretty ribbons, tarlatans of all colors for dancing dresses, cheap laces--oh, everything that girls and women want, and especially embroidery silks and threads and patterns. I would buy the best tea you can get, and give ladies a cup of tea, and an Albert biscuit, and charge them fifteen cents for it. Don't laugh, Mamma; yes, _do_ laugh, Mamma. It is so good to hear you laugh again. You know I could attend to the tea department. I'd like to do it." I can see her bright eager face as I write these words, and also Mary's calm dissenting smile, which was both critical and disapproving. "What do you say, Mary, to this plan?" I asked. "A plan that you should keep a shop, Mamma? It is absurd. Grandmother would never speak to us again." "I don't think she fatigues herself with speaking to us now," said Lilly; "and when she does send us a letter, it generally spoils two or three whole days." "No shop of any kind would make our living," continued Mary. "Mamma could not make any shop pay. Mamma does not have the qualities that make a shopkeeper." I listened with interest to this conversation. Evidently my daughters had not a high opinion of my commercial ability, and I may as well admit here, that their estimate was a just one. I had no business tact. I could calculate neither profit nor loss. I had no power to judge of probabilities. Certainly I had intuitions, often singularly wise ones, but I had no more experience than the two girls who were discussing me. I was, however, a little piqued at Mary's assertion that, "Mamma could not make any shop pay," and I asked her why she made such a statement. "Because, dear Mamma," she answered, "you would be cheated both in your buying and your selling. I have heard Papa say often, that you paid too much for all you bought, and you know when we were in Cook's house and had such quantities of eggs and chickens, that you sold some, and every one paid you less than market price, or mostly paid you nothing at all." This question with its asides and amendments kept us talking all day; for a norther had sprung up, and it was too cold for any of us to venture outside. Just as the dim came on, and Lilly rose to light the candles, and I to throw some cedar logs on the fire, there was a knock at the door, and Mayor Williams came in. Mary helped him off with his coat, and he sat down before the blazing fire, and took Alice upon his knee. "Mrs. Barr," he said, "I want to have a little talk with you and the girls, so if you will ask me to a cup of tea, we can discuss what I have come to say over it." "In ten minutes," I said, "supper will be ready;" and I went to the dining-room to hurry forward its service. I knew whatever business he wished to discuss must in his opinion be important, or he would not have come to the house in a norther. As soon therefore as we were seated at the table, I said, "We have been talking all day, Mr. Williams, of work and business, and of how we are to make money." "And I," he answered, "have been talking to General Waul about your position, and I think he has shown me a way that you can follow." "General Waul!" I ejaculated. "I do not know him at all. Who is General Waul?" "He would feel much hurt at your asking such a question. He was the Commander of Waul's Legion, and a man of mark during the war." "Is he a soldier now?" "No. He is now the most prominent lawyer in Galveston. His estate is on the main land, but he wishes to get board and lodging for himself and Mrs. Waul in a family where there are no lodgers. I told him about your position, and it came to this: He says he will pay you one hundred dollars a month for their board and lodging. He says also, that he can bring with him four or five other lawyers, and I think I can assure you of two of my friends, and there is Scotch Brown, Barton, East, Sutherland, Miller, Thomas, and others whom Mr. Barr nursed through the fever, and who will be glad to return in this way the kindness he showed them." "O Mr. Williams!" I answered. "I am most grateful to you. I may not at first manage as well as I should like, but I will do my best." "And we will help you, all we can, Mamma," said Mary and Lilly. So without having once thought of such a thing, I felt myself committed to running a boarding-house for the Lawyer's Mess, and such other gentlemen as seemed advisable. My first question regarded the house. "Shall I have to move?" I asked. "Or will this dwelling be suitable?" "You will have to move at once," was the answer. "This place is too far from the business part of the town; it never had a pleasant name; and its fatal record during the fever would terrify guests. I have just the house proper for your purpose in my mind. It was empty during the fever, and there is no one in it now, but there will be tenants, if you do not take it, tomorrow." "Where is it?" "In the pleasantest part of Tremont Street, next door to your friend Dr. Estabrook. If you do not mind the cold, meet me at the doctor's tomorrow at twelve o'clock, and I will go with you to the owner, and see that no advantage is taken of you." I could not help a smile. My business incompetency must indeed be flagrantly palpable, to make my business friend think it necessary to leave his official duties to protect me. Then I told him what my daughters' opinion of it was, and so gave myself up to their management and advice. And there was a happy, hopeful feeling in every heart at our simple table. The way, and the work shown me, was not the way and the work I would have chosen; but we talked ourselves into a kind of enthusiasm concerning it. I made little of the cold or the labor of the removal, and was only anxious for the morning, that I might begin to get away from the house in which I had suffered such loss and sorrow. I turned my thoughts persistently to the new house, to the new work, and the new life; and my heart thrilled, as in years gone by, to the warm, bright hope that had been given it. It was so naturally easy for me to hope when things came to me unexpectedly, with all the sanguine air of godsends. To this day, I have the same disposition, and find it hard to consider my good hope baseless. _A seed must have been on the spot where a flower blooms._ In a week we were settled in the house on Tremont Street, and soon after General and Mrs. Waul took possession of its best room. I had had some fears about Mrs. Waul, who I was told had been a great beauty and a social leader in Washington and New Orleans. I found her in many respects a delightful woman, thoroughly good-natured, freely frank, in manner witty, clever in conversation, and still beautiful. She was also easily pleased, and whatever she asked was generally as advantageous to myself as to her. Thus a few days after she came to live with us, she said to me, as we were sitting together in the parlor, "This is a very pleasant room." I assented, and she continued, "and it would be much more pleasant if differently arranged." "How would you arrange it?" I asked. She stood up and looked carefully around. "Why, my dear," she answered in her pretty, patronizing manner, "in arranging a room, you must follow the same rule as in dressing a woman. A woman makes all she can of her strong points, brings them into notice, puts them forward, and so on. Don't you think so?" "Yes," I answered, "but there is no harm in that." "Just so, and a room ought to have its strong points considered in the same way; that is, the handsomest or prettiest piece of furniture should be opposite the door, so that it may be the first thing that catches the visitor's notice. Suppose we try it?" I said, "I should like to do so;" and calling the table boy, I told him to get some one to help him move furniture, and come to the parlor. Then Mrs. Waul took the management of affairs, and in fifteen minutes the room had changed its character. It had been a quiet, orderly parlor, not often visited by any one; she gave it that air of ease and languor, so conducive to social intimacy. I do not know how she managed it, but the result she anticipated quickly followed. That evening after dinner, the piano was standing open opposite the parlor door, and Doctor Burnet sauntered into the room, and sat down before it. Moved perhaps by love's tender phantasy, he struck a few chords and began to sing "Lorene." Mrs. Waul and Major Hume and several others came in to listen, and then lingered there. By and by, some one started "There's Life in the Old Land Yet," a young gentleman from Baltimore thrilled the house with the magical strains of "My Maryland," and was followed by a captain of a late Texas regiment, declaring in melodious numbers, his everlasting devotion to "The Bonnie Blue Flag that bears the Single Star." Every one seemed to enjoy that hour of song and conversation after dinner, and it had actually been induced by nothing more personal than the movement of a few chairs and tables, and the cheerful face of an open piano. For a couple of months all appeared to be going well. I had twelve boarders, and my income from them was about a hundred dollars a week. That sum appeared to me a large amount for household expenses, and I was sure I must be making money. But one day something happened which caused me to make an investigation, and to my dismay, I found I had been exceeding my income every week. Without going into details, which would interest no one, I utterly failed to check this tendency to excess in the wrong direction and I was seriously unhappy and anxious. Towards the end of May, Mrs. Waul and the General went to their own home, the heat grew oppressive, there were whispers of fever, and the rest of the boarders began to scatter. Some went north, some to Austin or San Antonio; here and there they went, most of them leaving part or whole of their bills "until their return." By the first of June we were nearly alone, but I found it was an ordinary experience, and I faced it as cheerfully as I could. In my heart I was glad. I was sick for solitude. I had been living among people until I did not know myself. I said to my soul, "Now we will have a few days of quiet and peace, then I will look after money again." And I really did throw off all care. I would not think of what I was owing, or of what people owed me. I let the children do as they wished, and I reveled in long hours of silence. And solitude is such a potential thing. We hear voices in solitude, we never hear in the hurry and turmoil of life; we receive counsels and comforts, we get under no other condition, "For to be alone with Silence, Is to be alone with God." So I let the world and all its cares "go" for three days, and at the end of them, I was ready to look my perplexities in the face. "Children," I said, "we shall have no boarders until October; very well, we will clear the house of all servants but little Polly. We will live as quietly as possible, and spend no money that can be helped." But I could not easily carry out this intention. I had three boarders, and they did not wish to change, and promised to bring me enough transient guests to carry the house through the summer. In a way, they kept this promise, and I managed to get through the next four months not uncomfortably. For I was sure, that when my old boarders returned to Galveston, they would return to my house and table. I was reckoning without my host. Late in September I had a letter from Mrs. Waul, saying that the General was going to New Orleans to conduct an important law case, and as he would be detained all winter she intended to go with him. This was a great disappointment in many respects. They had given a certain very respectable tone to the house, they had been kind to my daughters, and the simple presence of the General was a protection we should miss. Nearly all of my old boarders owed me money, and I thought this fact alone would bring them back, but it did not. One had married and gone to housekeeping. Others found my rates too high, they were obliged to economize after their summer's trip, et cetera; they had all a sufficient excuse for leaving, but that did not help the situation, as far as I was concerned. On the first of November I closed the house. My money was gone. I could not collect what was owing me, but I was not a dollar in debt; and I was determined to keep clear of that terror. Many tried to persuade me to hold on, but on the threshold of hope I had already lost many days; and I knew in my soul, that this phase of my life was over. What was to come next, I knew not, but this at least was over. I had learned the lessons it had to teach me, and though my future was unknown and uncertain, I had seen that in life, we have constantly to take some leap in the dark. I gave myself a few days rest with my children, and waited. I was glad that this serving of tables, and mingling with people to whom I was quite indifferent was over. Both duties had been disagreeable, and it was only my left hand I had given to the work. I had taken no pride or pleasure in it, even when it was apparently very successful, and I felt no special regret when compelled to give it up. Yet in the sum of character it had been of great gain to me. I learned two lessons under its discipline that have made all my life since easier than it would have been. To what school was I to go next? There seemed to be so few outlets to our life that I was troubled by the way any movement appeared to be hedged in. We could return to Austin, which Mary thought the best thing to do. "People mostly live on the government in Austin," she said, "and so they have ready money." Lilly opposed the return to Austin very warmly. "I think it will be foolish to go back to Austin," she answered. "Without dear Papa, we shall find everything very different. Let us go to a new place, where we are not tied and hampered by the past. Even San Antonio would be better than Austin." I remember this discussion so well. It was on a dark, cold November morning. There was a blazing fire of cedar logs on the hearth, but the wind roared down the wide chimney, and the rain smote the window panes in passionate gusts. Mary was braiding a flannel sacque, Lilly was sitting beside Alice, who was lying on the sofa sick with a cold, and I was walking slowly about the room, inwardly trembling at the sound of doors opening into the future. I was glad of the storm. Often I had felt the crushing sense of bright sunshine when in trouble; the wind and the rain and the gloom were in sympathy with my mood; sunshine would have given me a sense of mockery, or at least of indifference. Suddenly Lilly said, "Mamma! What about Memphis? Papa had good friends there. Mr. Fackler----" I heard no more. A voice clear and imperative said, "GO TO NEW YORK!" The command was peremptory, and from some deeper region there came with it, an indisputable convincingness. Of some things I might be uncertain, _but not of this_. Without a moment's hesitation I obeyed the command given me. I turned with a cheerful smile, and an alert manner to my children, and said, "My dears, we will go to New York." "O Mamma, how glad I am!" cried Lilly. "We shall be half-way to England, when we are in New York." Then I told them of the order I had just received, and as I spoke I felt my heart burn, and my face flush, and my voice set itself to its old strong, happy tone, and the girls caught its cheerful influence, and we were soon discussing what was to be done, with the greatest interest and pleasure. For I knew the voice that had spoken--it was one, that had never yet deceived me. I had nothing except my furniture, and old furniture sold for very little, but I knew God would not send me a journey, without providing the means; so I began there and then to prepare for it. I sold my piano to a friend at private sale, and I got a lawyer, who was in my debt, to collect what money was still due me from old boarders. He was quite successful and I hoped the proceeds of the auction added to these would raise my fund to five hundred dollars. "God and five hundred dollars will be sufficient," I said to my children; and they smiled and nodded, and were as confident and hopeful as myself. On the night of the sixth of November, while I was talking to the auctioneer about the sale, a letter was given me. I saw the postmark was Austin, and I laid it carelessly down on the chimney piece, and went on with the conversation. After the auctioneer had gone, we had a cup of tea and some oysters, and I forgot all about the letter, until I was closing the house for the night. Then I lifted it carelessly, and took it upstairs with me. Lilly noticed it in my hand, and asked where it was from? "Austin," I answered. "Read it, Mamma." As I opened it, a slip of paper fluttered to the floor. It was a check from the auctioneer, with whom I had left the furniture of my Austin home for sale. When I reached Galveston, I told Robert the agreement made with them, left the affairs in his hands, and had ever since forgotten all about it. Indeed if I had remembered it, I would have been sure Robert had collected the proceeds long ago. But here was a check made out to myself, for one hundred and eighty dollars, being the last payment due on the goods they had sold. They sent it with sympathetic words, and nothing that ever came to me had so much the air of a "godsend." We were so happy and excited, that we sat talking until nearly three o'clock, and it was at this time, Lilly made a proposition, which at first appeared foolish and distressing. "Mamma," she said, "now that you have got some more money, let me go to Glasgow. I will try to make a friend of grandmother, and perhaps for Papa's sake she will send me to school for two years. By that time you would be settled in some way." At first I would not listen to such a thing, but gradually the girls persuaded me, that I ought to give up Lilly for Lilly's own sake. And I comforted myself with the thought of her natural bravery and self-sufficiency. Every one liked her, and surely her own kindred would be won by her kind heart, and sunny cheerful disposition. I finally acceded to the plan, and then all conversation afterward made the Glasgow arrangement more firm and certain. But that morning I fell asleep with a fresh, keen pain in my heart; for Lilly, ever since her father's death, had been my great reliance in many ways. On the ninth we were preparing for the sale, which was to take place in the house, and on the tenth we ate breakfast and had prayers together and then went to the Palmetto House to stay until the _Ariadne_ sailed for New York, which was expected to be on the twelfth; but owing to contrary winds, she did not get over the bar until the following day. During these three days at the hotel, we made our last arrangements and received unlimited kindness both from friends I knew well, and also from many others who had no reason for their attentions, excepting their loving remembrance of my husband. Among the many who called on us for the latter reason, was a large dry goods merchant called Willis, and he gave me a letter of introduction to a gentleman in New York, who he thought might be able to help me to find suitable employment. I speak of this letter, because it influenced my life for nearly two years. As we could not get away on the twelfth, I took Alice and went once more to those four graves I should never see again. We covered them with flowers and sweet shrubs, and the child wept passionately. I had no tears left. I was almost stupefied with grief and anxiety. Four tines in seventeen years, I had broken up my home, and gone to a place I knew not of, to make another; but this removal was the hardest of all. Yet I am ungrateful to say so. From friends known and unknown I received help and comfort. Difficulties vanished as soon as I met them. Whatever was necessary came to me. My way was cleared before me in the most remarkable manner. Even Mr. Lidstone, the auctioneer, refused to take any payment for selling the furniture, and I was so pleased and grateful at this mark of kindness from a stranger, that I have kept his name green in my memory ever since. It is true that at this time the hearts of all were open to those who had suffered in the great calamity, but more than a year had passed since Robert died, and he was yet unforgotten, for much of the sympathy and attention we received was for his sake. CHAPTER XVIII I GO TO NEW YORK "We have not wings, we cannot soar, But we have feet to scale and climb; By slow degrees, by more and more, The cloudy Summits of our time." * * * * * "The intellectual aroma of the building, its subtle Library essence, and redolence of Morocco leather, printer's ink and paper, all blended and mellowed with the learned dust of Time."--ASTOR LIBRARY. On the thirteenth of November, 1868, we went on board the _Ariadne_. The ship lay at the bar, but there were hopes that a change of wind would give us water sufficient to get over it; but the wind did not change for four days, and it was on the seventeenth, just at sunset that we took our last look at Galveston. Just at the same hour, twelve years before, Robert and I stood together taking a last look at Galveston, before going up the Buffalo Bayou. I gazed on the white houses in their lonely setting of bare shrubs and sea water, until they were only a gray blur on the surrounding gray. I do not speak of what was going on in the heart, it cannot be told, neither can it ever be forgotten. When I turned my back on Galveston, I faced the future; and there and then, I mentally put a blank into God's hand by faith, and begged Him to fill it in, as He saw best for His children. For they were His. He had told me to leave my fatherless children to Him, and I took Him on His own word. This promise was guaranteed to me by the veracity of God. I sat down between Mary and Lilly, and took Alice on my knee, and said, "Now, dear ones, we shall be yet ten days at sea. It is a holiday for us. We will forget every care, and every sorrow, until we see New York. Be as happy as you can be, for there is nothing we can _do_ on the ship. So let us rest, in the rest given us." "And you, Mamma?" asked Mary. "Will you rest?" "I promise you, I will." I did not mean, that I would drift like a dismantled ship without hope or purpose. No believer in God ever does that. I meant, that I would cast all my cares and sorrows on Him, who I was sure cared for me. This may seem like presumption to some, and like foolishness to others. It was not presumption. I had been invited, even urged by God's own word to do so. It was by no means "foolishness" to me. I knew in whom I trusted. God was then, as He is now, a personality to me. He was not "vortices of atoms," or "streams of tendency," or "Force" or "Nature." Many years afterwards, when I had carefully considered these, and other similarly false ideas, I knelt and prayed with a still deeper conviction--"_Our Father!_" On the twenty-first we stopped at Key West nearly the whole day. We rambled about the quiet, lovely place and a lady, who saw us looking curiously at her cocoanut trees, came out and talked with us, and sent a dozen to the ship for our refreshment. We bought here a few lovely pieces of snow-white coral for Lilly to take with her to Scotland, and at nightfall left the pretty place with very agreeable memories. I believe it is now entirely altered, is crowded and noisy, and full of business relating to the navy, and the manufacture of tobacco. So I keep my own memory of the beautiful Key. We had a five days pleasant sail after leaving Key West, and on the twenty-sixth of November we were almost in sight of New York. It was Thanksgiving Day, and was observed with the usual ceremonious dinner. During my long stay in the South I had forgotten the institution, for it was never kept, or even alluded to; but on this twenty-sixth of November we observed the day heartily, and have never omitted it since. On November twenty-sixth, 1884, being also Thanksgiving Day, I received from Dodd, Mead and Company their first letter to me accepting "Jan Vedder's Wife," just sixteen years after our Thanksgiving upon the ship _Ariadne_. Early in the morning of the twenty-seventh of November, 1868, we landed in New York. This was already a memorable date to me, being the day on which God wrought so great a salvation for Robert, in Chicago. I had it in my memory as I stepped on shore, and went with several of the passengers on the _Ariadne_ to a hotel in Fulton Street near Broadway. It was called the Belmont, but I think it was discontinued many years ago. I took it for a good omen, that we should have landed on this date, for I have always been an observer of times and seasons, and in my life there are many days of remembrance--all good ones. "The Scotch always count from an ill date," says the proverb; but my ill dates, except for some special purpose of recollection, are but as dead days taken out of my life and buried. The next week was mostly spent in securing a good berth for Lilly, and in getting her the proper clothing for the change of climate she was going to make. And in these days I found out how much harder it is to part from the living, than from the dead. Hard enough it is, to lift the little dead child for the last time, and lay it in its coffin; but it is harder to unloose the clinging arms of the living child, to kiss away its parting tears, and mingle loving farewells, while hearts seem breaking. Never had Lilly been so dear and so affectionate. I kept her at my side and held her hand these last days, while I gave her the advice I thought might help her in the difficult position to which she was going. At that time a voyage across the Atlantic was a far more serious undertaking than it is now, and I knew the climate of Scotland, and feared it for a child reared in the semi-tropical heat and sunshine of Texas. I knew also the people among whom her lot would be cast, and I feared that the outspoken girl, so sensitive to injustice of every kind, would not be able at all times to possess her soul in patience. On the fifth of December I left her on the _Iowa_. The captain promised me to be very kind to her, and he amply fulfilled that promise. It was snowing heavily, but I did not see, or feel it. Blinded with tears, and faint with grief, I found my way back to the hotel, I don't know how. Through the crowded wharf, and the crowded streets I went; I remember some one stepping between me and some horses, pulling me roughly to the sidewalk, and then saying not unkindly, "You must be more careful. Do you know where you are going?" Somehow or other I got back to the hotel, and being wet through and exhausted, I went to bed. There I fell into that deep sleep which is God's gift to those who have sorrow greater than they can bear. The next day being the Sabbath I remained in the hotel, but on Monday morning I was ready for duty. To obey necessity is the part of wisdom, but I trusted in God and myself, and I had faith in humanity. On Monday and Tuesday I saw the principals of three ladies' schools, and from two received promise of employment "after the holidays." I had not thought of this contingency, yet it was a very reasonable one, as far as the schools were concerned; but I did not see, how I was to wait with idle hands for a month, on a mere promise. On Tuesday night I had exhausted hope in this direction and as I sat talking with Mary, she said to me, "Dear Mamma, why do you not send a note to Mr. Beecher? I am sure he could help you. He has a great deal of power." "O Mary," I answered, "I know all about the promises of clergymen. Your grandfather was a good man, but he saw so many people, and made so many promises, he never could have remembered either. It is nearly twenty years since I met Mr. Beecher. I dare say he has forgotten even my name." But I will be truthful in this matter. It was really a foolish pride, perhaps even a little vanity, which made me put off seeing Mr. Beecher. I was saving this opening as a last resort, for I shrank from meeting a man whom I had only seen in all the flush and glory of my bridal happiness. At that time I had a beautiful home, a loving and wealthy husband, and I was clothed in white satin and lace. I had a heart full of good hopes, and my countenance was radiant with the light of their promise. All was now so different, and my plain, sombre dress typified the change. Would he remember? Would he care? I thought not, but I said, "There is yet the letter given me by Mr. Willis. I will take it in the morning. Perhaps it may bring us good fortune. If it does not succeed, I will remind Mr. Beecher of his promise." About ten o'clock next morning, being the ninth of December, I called upon Mr. Libbey. I suppose I ought to have sent a letter asking an interview, and waited for his reply, but I think the very neglect of this ceremony induced Mr. Libbey to see me. He was a man of marvelous powers of observation, and of drawing the truth out of what he saw, and later when I mentioned this neglect of social form, he smiled and said that he had at once suspected I was childlike and inexperienced--or else extremely clever in disguising my real character. His curiosity was aroused, and he gave me an audience in five minutes after my request for it. During that five minutes I was wondering what Mr. Willis could mean by sending me to such a place. It was the A. T. Stewart building at the corner of Broadway and Chambers Street, and when I saw the immense floor, the numerous tables piled high with webs of cloth of every kind, and the crowd of young men selling them to an equal crowd of buyers, I was quite sure there could be no place for me there. I suppose I ought to have felt nervous; on the contrary, I had a serenity and self-sufficiency, of which at the time I was unconscious. In this mood I entered Mr. Libbey's presence. He bowed slightly, and directed an office boy to place a chair for me. It was placed as editors and publishers generally have a visitor's chair placed--that is, the visitor sits with the light falling full on her face, but the receiver has his back to the light, and his face is in shadow. I did not know this at the time, it took me some years to find it out. But the position must have a business value, for it is now an exceedingly common arrangement. It gave me no concern. I had nothing to conceal. I was going to tell the truth, and I did not suspect Mr. Libbey of suspecting me. He was a tall, fair, aristocratic looking man, but the aristocratic element was not that which comes through centuries of noble descent; it was the aristocracy of deserved success. It clothed his tall, erect figure with a nobility quite different, and a great deal more interesting. He had a large head full of cool, shrewd brains, and his eyes, though small, were wonderful. They gave strangers one quick, searching glance and _knew them_. Yet in hours of pleasant conversation, they had that delightful twinkle of the iris, which inspires such a confiding sense of comradeship. It did not take me many days to discover, that he had a fine literary taste, and an ear for religious discourse, as distinct as an ear for music. He was a true friend to me. I honor his memory. And I believe, that as the news of my success finds him, wherever in God's universe he may be doing God's will, he is made glad by it, and is pleased to remember that I asked his help on that ninth of December, 1868, and that he willingly gave it. For the rest he was free from arrogance and familiarity, and like all superior men, courteous to every one. I took the chair placed for me, and he began the interview by tapping Mr. Willis's letter slightly, and saying, "Mrs. Barr, my friend Mr. Willis thinks I may be able to help you to some suitable employment. What can you do?" "I love music, and I can teach it." "What else?" "I can teach drawing in pencil, crayon, or water colors, well enough for beginners. I have had a fine English education, and a good deal of experience in teaching." "Anything else?" "I am expert with my needle." "Very good," he answered. "My three sons desire some knowledge of music and drawing, and Mrs. Libbey will be glad of your help with the needle. I think also, you could get a school large enough in Ridgewood to support you for a year or two; that would give you time to find your feet, and learn something of life as it is in New York. For you see," he added, "if we live in New York, we must live as New Yorkers live. Mr. Willis says you have three daughters; how old are they?" I told him that Mary was seventeen, Alice seven, and that Lilly, who was fifteen, had gone to her grandmother in Glasgow. This statement brought out mention of the Reverend John Barr, and of my own father, and I could see that the ecclesiastic relationships pleased him. I thought at the time, and I think so yet, that he felt glad to succor the grandchildren of two good and great preachers. "I will speak to Mrs. Libbey tonight," he continued, "and send you some word early tomorrow. And if all is satisfactory, and you desire to come to Ridgewood, you will bring your two daughters with you. Until you decide about opening a school, they are my guests." I was so amazed at his words, and his cordial manner, that I could hardly answer, but my reply came from my heart, and he knew it. And I told myself that God had spoken some secret word to him, and that he was a good man whose soul knew the Divine Voice, and was ready and eager to obey it. The next morning a young man called soon after nine o'clock. He brought me a note saying that Mr. and Mrs. Libbey would be glad to see me on Friday afternoon at their home in Ridgewood. He was further instructed to tell me, that he would call at two o'clock Friday, if convenient, look after my trunks, and go with me to Ridgewood. I shall not detain my readers long with my New Jersey experiences. I was in Ridgewood nineteen weary months, but to the last Mr. Libbey's kindness failed me not. I found his three sons nice boys; the eldest, Will, was very like his father, courteous and kind-hearted, very bright and clever, as all the world knows at this day. He has never lost sight of me, nor have I of him. I was a few weeks in Mr. Libbey's home, and if I transcribe two days from my diary, they may stand for the whole: _Dec. 14th._ Gave the boys music lessons early in the morning; afterwards I was arranging and indexing Mr. Libbey's library. Mr. Libbey does not come home except on Saturday evenings. I gave music lessons again, when the boys had finished their studies with Mr. Wall. In the evening I sat sewing with Mrs. Libbey until late. We were talking of the South and the war. Mrs. Libbey is a southern woman. _Dec. 20th._ We have family worship on Sundays, and I afterwards went with Mr. Libbey to church. In the afternoon we had an interesting talk on the second coming of Christ, then I played some sacred music which all appeared to enjoy; indeed the hymn "Communion" made such an impression that Mr. Libbey will send to Edinburgh for a Psalmody like mine, which contains it. Alice was croupy, and I went upstairs to her as early as I could. Dear God have pity on me! This hymn "Communion" is used generally in Scotch kirks just before the breaking of bread at the communion service: "'Twas on that night when doomed to know The eager rage of every foe, The night on which He was betrayed, The Savior of the world took bread." The words are pathetic and this sentiment is greatly intensified by their union with the most heart-breaking minor music in the psalm called "St. Mary's." I do not know how any one can hear it sung by a congregation on their knees with the minister holding out the broken bread, and not weep. The Scotch are far from a demonstrative race, but their love, pity and devotion at the sacramental hour need neither words nor song to translate it. _It can be felt._ During my stay in Mr. Libbey's house I did some work I had never before done. I patched three quilts. The circumstance came about thus: Mrs. Libbey showed me one day an amazing quantity of satin and silk samples. They were about the length and breadth of a brick, and of every imaginable color and pattern; having been sent to the house of A. T. Stewart as samples from the great silk factories of London, Lyons, Venice, et cetera, I exclaimed with delight, and Mrs. Libbey asked, "What would you do with them?" "I would make each of the boys a handsome bed quilt! I would make Afghans, cushions, tidies, oh, lots of beautiful things!" I replied. She answered, "I have often thought of some such ways of using them. How would you like to realize your idea?" And I said, "It would give me great pleasure." So I received a large basket full, and immediately went to patching a quilt for Will Libbey, my favorite pupil. On my last visit to Professor William Libbey at Princeton, this quilt covered the bed given me. I did not sleep much that night. I had forgotten the quilt patching until this one wrapped me around, and awakened a thousand recollections. I touched and smoothed its soft satins, and thought of the long, sad hours in which my needle went swiftly to memories of past days, or to my hopes and plans for future ones. And this quilt talked to me, as my hands touched the sensitized satin, and I breathed again the perfume of the courage and faith that hallowed the work. For I thank God I had been able by that time to take all my sorrow "As a plain fact, whose right or wrong I questioned not; confiding still, It would not last one hour too long." In a few weeks I rented a cottage from Mr. Libbey, and opened a school. I had only six scholars to begin with, but the number was variable. Sometimes it rose to ten or twelve, and then fell to six or eight. I think seven or eight would be a fair average. The income from this school would hardly have supported life, but it was helped very considerably by the tuition fees Mr. Libbey paid me for his three sons. Perhaps it was a wise indulgence of heaven, that at this time gave me with a sparing hand, just enough. I had frequently letters from Lilly, and as she seemed at least contented, I was glad that she was in a position where she could see and learn many things, not possible if she was at my side. And Mary continued her music and English, and looked after the house and her little sister Alice. Truly the days were long and hard, but when they were over, and I came home to my children, and my cup of tea, I had a few hours of cheerful happiness, and could sometimes tell myself, that perhaps things were not going as badly with me as I thought they were. It was a slow, monotonous, dreary life to which there seemed no outlet. The house was in a very ugly lane, and I had no neighbors but a Dutch family, who only knew me when I was paying them money; and a negro family, who were useful in the way of washing and ironing and cleaning. On the Sabbath, I generally went to Mr. Libbey's for dinner, and that was my only mental recreation. One Sunday after I had been in this condition for nearly a year and a half, Mr. Libbey sent me word that a countryman of mine, a Mr. Fox of Manchester, was with them and would like to see me. He was sitting with Mr. Libbey when I opened the parlor door, and we just looked at each other and smiled. Mr. Fox was so patently, so unmistakably Lancashire, and I told him so, and he answered, "To be sure I am! So are you, Mrs. Barr! I know you by your Lancashire eyes, and your Lancashire color, and the up-head way you carry yourself." "No, sir," I answered, "the up-head way I learned in Texas. It is a up-heart way, also. The up-head helps the heart, when the heart is dashed and down." I have seldom spent a more delightful evening. Mr. Fox wanted to know all about the South, and cotton growing, for he was a great cotton manufacturer; then we fell upon the war, and I told him a great deal concerning it, and especially the incidents of the break-up, as I witnessed them. As I bid him good-bye our hands clasped warmly, and I said, "Mr. Fox, as soon as your feet touch Lancashire soil, bless the dear land for me." And he answered, "I will not forget. And you?" he added, "remember to keep your up-head and your up-heart like a Lancashire lass ought to do." This pleasant evening brought forth its fruit a little later. About April Lilly wrote me that she was coming home. She said the Reverend Joseph Brown, the famous minister of the Kent Road Church--which was attended by all the Colville family, had advised her to do so; and that her uncle had bought her a passage, and would himself see her safely on board. "It is all right for me to come home, Mamma," she continued. "I know now, that I never ought to have left you. Mary would have been better here, than I could ever be. She is more Scotch, and I am so English, that the very word 'England' tastes sweet on my lips, if I only speak it. Mary would have considered her words and ways, and her P's and Q's, and I have no doubt, would have won both the old lady, and the half-dozen or more young ones. The four boys understood me better than any one, but after all, my visit to grandmother is a broad failure. Uncle David is all right, and I don't mind people not loving me, if they are only _just_. But I am coming home to you, Mamma, and I know you will say, 'Lilly, dear, you did right.'" Three days after we received this letter, Mary went to New York, to the office of the _New York Democrat_ to see Mr. Sykes, the publisher, and Brick Pomeroy, its clever editor; for I had written, mainly during sleepless nights, a novel, and I thought perhaps, from what I had read and heard of these gentlemen, they would take it. She had a long talk with Mr. Sykes, and the final result was a lunch with Mr. and Mrs. Sykes, and her engagement as governess to their two children. Mary was delighted; she longed for a more vivid and useful life, and she loved the city, and hated the country. "You see, Mamma," she said, "Mrs. Sykes wants me very much, and I like her. She is so pretty, and so beautifully dressed, and so fond of amusements. I shall see everything with her, and Mr. Sykes will pay my board, and give me twenty dollars a month. And you know Lilly may be here any day, and you do not need both of us." So in April Mary went to Mrs. Sykes, and Lilly came home a few days after she had left me, and when she had told me her pitiful little story, I considered her determination to return to America quite justifiable. That Dr. Joseph Brown and his family had been her warm friends was sufficient for me; also she took particular pains to make me understand that her uncle's attitude to her, from first to last, had been supremely just. That of course, justice, was the rock on which David Colville stood; he would not have been unjust to his worst enemy. The school closed in June, and I could see on Lilly's face an invincible determination that it should not re-open. Whether she would have succeeded in inducing me to give it up, I know not, but one Sunday Mr. Libbey and his sons called, and in the course of conversation Mr. Libbey said to me, "Mrs. Barr, the boys are going in September to Princeton to continue their education there. I do not think your school here will then support you. What do you think of doing?" "I do not know," I answered. "I must consider." "I have heard you say that you knew Mr. Beecher." "Yes, in a way, not very well. I met him in Glasgow many years ago. I dare say he has quite forgotten me." "I do not think so. Write him a letter. He may be able to assist you." "I know not. I cannot think yet." "Write to him; and also, I want you to write out the story of the break-up in Texas. Write it just as you told it to Mr. Fox. Send it to me. I will see that it goes to some one, whose criticism will be severe enough and fair enough, to prove whether you have the ability to write. If you can write, you can live." "O Mr. Libbey!" I cried gratefully, "you are so kind. I thank you! I thank you! I do believe I can write. I will write the paper you ask me for tonight. You will see." I did so, and put it into his hand as he was getting into his carriage in the morning. He smiled at my promptness and said, "It will be attended to." And I was perfectly content, for I knew if Mr. Libbey said so, it would be done. In two weeks Mr. Libbey brought me a check from Daniel Appleton and Company for thirty dollars. I was astonished and delighted, but after a few moments I laughed joyously and cried, "Why I can write three or four of those things every week! O Mr. Libbey, how happy you have made me! Is my work really going to be printed? Can I write? Do you think I can write?" "It will appear very soon," he answered, "and Mr. Bunce, the editor of the magazine, spoke very highly of your work; further, he said he would like you to write them a story. Will you try one?" "Indeed, I will! I have lots of stories in my mind. I will put them on paper, at once." There is a song which says, "Joy's the shyest bird, Mortal ever heard; Listen rapt and silent when he sings. Do not seek to see, Lest the vision be, But a flutter of departing wings." I had no fear of such a fleeting joy. I _knew_ that my vocation was found. I had received the call, and having done so, I was sure my work would be assigned me. Of some things we feel quite certain. Inside there is a click, a kind of bell that strikes, when the hands of our destiny meet at the meridian hour. I cannot make it plainer, those who have experienced it, will know. I only hope that every new writer may enter the gates of the literary life, as happily and hopefully as I did. It was near midnight when we went to bed. Our little affairs were so full of interest to us. This thirty dollars would remove us into the city, but though we were both very anxious to go at once, we decided that it would be better to remain in the country until September brought cooler weather. Alice was exceedingly frail, and she was the first consideration. Also, I would have to go to New York to find the proper place to live in and rent unfurnished rooms there; and this looked to me a rather formidable undertaking. I had never heard of real estate offices, and whether they existed at this date, or not, I do not know. But we read the advertisements in the _Herald_, and I made a note of several locations. As to the healthiness, or respectability of these locations, the rents and half a dozen other important questions, we knew absolutely nothing. I smile to myself yet, at the childlike confidence, with which I essayed this plunge into the unknown. And as we talked, full of gratitude and hope, I was able to give up cheerfully my last fort of pride or vanity, and I promised myself to write immediately to Mr. Beecher. It was my proper share of the obligation attending this new move in life. In the midst of conversation on this topic, the clock struck twelve, and Lilly said, "Mamma, you ate no supper. You are hungry, or you ought to be. I am going to bring something to eat upstairs." "I will go downstairs with you, Lilly." "No, no, Mamma! You will get cold, and Alice will wake up. Then Alice will come down, and she will get cold. I will bring up a tray in five minutes." Until she came back with the tray, I walked up and down the small room. My heart was singing within me. At that hour it had forgotten all its sorrow and its deprivations; it knew that the bare poverty of the last few months was over--the poverty that is without books, without all the comfortable things, that make sufficient food and clothing still poverty. For some long weary months, it had been beating itself against gates for which it could find no keys. Now, they had been set wide open. It would have been an unpardonable waste of God-given happiness to sleep, as long as the physical woman could keep awake. We remained six weeks longer in the country, but they were weeks brightened with hope and cheerful expectations. I began at once a story for Appleton's called "Margaret Sinclair's Silent Money," and among the simple Norse fishers of the Shetland Islands, forgot for hours together that I was yet in New Jersey. In October I went to the city to look for rooms, and as soon as I spoke to Mr. Sykes, he sent a youth with me to a real estate office. He also advised me as to the proper section of the city, and told me not to go far away from that quarter, because it contained the city's three finest libraries, and he was sure I would find them indispensable in literary work. I was as happy as if I was on a holiday, and before noon had settled on some unfurnished rooms in a large brick house on Amity Street. I was told that Poe had once occupied them, but I did not know anything about Poe in those days; and I was not influenced in my choice by this association. What decided me was first, the fact that they were large, lofty, old-fashioned apartments, with open grates, and a pleasant look-out for Alice. Second, that I had the Astor and Mercantile Libraries within five minutes walk, and the Historical Library on Second Avenue, not much further away. Mr. Sykes said I had made an excellent selection of rooms, and I went back to Ridgewood satisfied with the home they promised. The next day I wrote Mr. Beecher a long letter. I told him all that had happened me, and asked if he could help me to find literary work. Almost by return mail, I received his answer. In it he told me that he had just become largely interested in the _Christian Union_, and was sure if I could write something for that paper, as vivid or pathetic as my letter to him, my services would be welcome to the _Christian Union_. "Come into the city," he said, "and we shall be able to keep your pen busy." Three days after the receipt of this encouraging letter, I stood in the rooms on Amity Street, with my daughters and my few household goods. I had five dollars and eighteen cents in my purse. I had no knowledge of the ways of life in a large city, and was quite as ignorant of the business of buying and selling. I had no relatives in America, no one I felt at liberty to ask assistance from. I stood absolutely alone in the battle of life, but I was confident, that God and Amelia Barr were a multitude. In the old-fashioned grate of the room, I intended for our sitting-and dining-room, there was soon a good fire, and in less than an hour, the kettle was boiling, the lamb chops broiled, and the tea infusing. And never since my dear husband died, had I sat down to a meal I enjoyed so much. We were as happy as three children. Before the evening of the next day, the rooms had quite a homey look. I had still some beautiful bed clothing, and table damask, and a few books; and books and an open fire are the best furniture any room can have. They look at every one that enters them with a smile and a welcome. And on that open fire, it was wonderful what excellent meals Lilly cooked us--nice little lamb stews, and broiled meats, and always the good cup of tea or of Java coffee. And we laughed at our small discomforts, and said we were "only tenting, until everything right and proper should arrive." As soon as the house affairs were arranged, I went down to the _Christian Union_ office. I took with me a paper called "The Epiphany in the West Riding." There was a Mr. Kennedy then in the working editor's chair, and he read it at once and was delighted with it. He said such generous words of encouragement and praise, that I have yet the kindest memory of him. He was the first editor of the _Christian Union_, I believe, but he left the paper very soon, and I have never heard his name since. Mr. George Merriam followed him, and he was the kindest and wisest editor I ever wrote for. He kept me rigorously up to my best work, but did so with such consideration and valuable advice, that I always felt it a great pleasure, to see how much better I could make everything I wrote for him. He did me many favors, and among them he gave me my first introduction to the dear old Astor Library. In this library I worked from morning to night. Mr. Saunders the head librarian was an Englishman, a most wonderful general scholar, particularly intimate with English literature. We soon became good friends, and he gave me the use of one of the largest and sunniest alcoves in the Hall I frequented. For fifteen years I used this alcove with its comfortably large table, its silence and sunshine, and delightful atmosphere of books and scholars. A plan of the Astor alcoves that Mr. Saunders made for me, hangs at my right hand in my study. My alcove was the Fine Arts alcove in the South Hall, and Mr. Saunders--when I went no more to the Astor--feared I might forget it. As if I could! Though it exists no longer, I see it as plainly, _as I saw it before it existed at all_. For when I was living in Penrith, a child of seven or eight years old, I began to dream of this city of books. I wandered about its pleasant alcoves, and climbed its long spiral stairs of wrought iron, and stood speechless and wondering before the white marble busts of ancient gods, and godlike men, in its entrance hall. And the building did not then exist. It is doubtful if it had ever taken form in Mr. Astor's mind. How then could I see it in my dreams? And why did I see it? I have asked myself these questions for more than forty years, for always I saw the building full of light, though my dream came in the dark midnight, when there was neither sun, nor moon, nor candlelight for physical eyes to use. Where does the light of dreams come from? And why was it shown to me when as yet it was not? The only solution I can find is, that my angel not only foresaw the grand old library, but also that she understood the necessity and advantage of my future intimate association with it. Therefore she made me familiar with the place in my dream life, so that when in my physical life, I came to this special hostelry of mind and body, I might know that I was in the path appointed for me, and be satisfied. For I do not believe in chance. The life God guides, is not ruled by accidental events; the future is constantly shaped out of the past and all its happenings are but links in a chain. To me it was a most astonishing experience. I walked up the white marble stairway, and into the sunny South Hall with the strangest most exulting feeling of proprietorship; and for all the purposes of study and use, this splendid library was for fifteen years really my own. Before presenting Mr. Merriam's letter to the chief librarian, Mr. Saunders, I sat down and looked around me. Yes! It was my dream library! There was no doubt of it. I was lost in wonder and joy, and I said to my soul, "We came not to this place by accident. It is the very place God meant for us." And this decision was so comforting, that I at once fully accepted it. The Astor Library was at that date a very heaven on earth to the student. I have never seen in all my life, a student's library comparable with it. It wanted none of the great treasures of literature, and yet it was not too large to become familiar with. In the halls I frequented, I soon knew where every book dwelt, and if my eyes saw a vacant place on a shelf, I knew instantly what book was from home. Of the great reviews and magazines, I gradually made an index of all their papers, likely to be of use to me; so that if an up-to-date article on any subject, commodity, or event was needed, I had, at my finger ends, a list of all the papers that had been written concerning it. Nor did I let the evident trade, or literary side of the subject satisfy me. I hunted up in such queer repositories of knowledge as _Southey's Doctor_, _Hones' Year Book_, _Table Book_, and _Every Day Book_, et cetera, all the bits of folklore, historical, poetical, and social traditions, proverbs and prophecies allied to it; and in such research I found a never-ending delight. Many writers of that day said with a variety of emphasis, "What luck Mrs. Barr has!" Once a despondent young man sitting in my alcove made this very remark to me, and as it was spoken in no unkind spirit, I answered it by showing him the indexes and notes which I had made for this very work. I pointed out that the illustration for which I was then preparing the text, had been received an hour ago, and must be turned into the paper for which it was intended early on the following morning; and I asked him--if he could find the material necessary, and have it at the office by nine o'clock? He looked gloomily at the picture. It represented an old farmer examining the almanac for the New Year. "Now what can a fellow know about almanacs?" he asked. "What is there to know about them anyhow? I suppose I could find something in Poole----" "Look here!" I answered. "This is my list of informing articles on the subject of almanacs: _British Quarterly Review_, vol. 28. _Saturday Review_, vol. 14. "Medieval Almanacs," _Quarterly Review_, vol. 71. _Southey's Doctor_, vol. 3. _Foreign Quarterly_, vol. 32. _London Magazine_, vol. 2. _Eclectic Magazine_, vol. 1, 1844. _Eclectic Magazine_, vol. 9. _Retrospective Review_, vol. 2. _Bow Bell's Magazine_, vol. 1. _All the Year Round Magazine_, vol. 6." "Do you mean to go through all those articles?" he asked incredulously. "It is now ten o'clock," I replied. "Before four, I shall have gleaned all I want from every one of them. I shall perhaps also find time to go through some poetical indexes, and find a few good verses on almanacs, either to finish off--or to begin with. And this," I continued, "this is the kind of luck Mrs. Barr has. You, or any other writer, can have the same." Any one can understand, how work of this kind pursued with loving and ungrudging industry for over fifteen years, educated the mind and formed the taste. It kept me in touch with the finest European essayists, and I learned something from every book I opened. Perhaps it was not just what I was looking for, but it was worth making a note of--a note that often came into use for song or story years afterwards; and it was all conducive to that preparation I was unconsciously making for the sixty or more books it has been my privilege and pleasure to write. CHAPTER XIX THE BEGINNINGS OF A NEW LIFE "I heard the letters talking, saw thought forming, felt the syllables writing as my hands wandered over the sensitized paper, smelling the perfume of dead men's thoughts." I was nearly thirty-nine years old when I became a student at the Astor and began a life so different from the lives I had lived in Glasgow, Chicago, Austin and Galveston, that I might have been born again for it. Virtually, I was reborn. In that great and terrible alembic of pestilence and death through which I was passed in Galveston, all the small delights and frivolities of my life vanished; and I came out of its fires, holding firmly to one adequate virtue in their place--henceforward to be through all the days of my life, an all competent motive, and an all sufficient reward--the homely virtue of duty. And I have never regretted this exchange though at first I found, as all the servants of duty must do, "That they who follow her commands, Must on with heart, and knees, and hands, Through the long gorge, the upper light to win. But still the path is upward, and once The toppling crags of Duty scaled, the soul Stands clear upon the shining table lands, To which our God himself is moon and star." For moral and spiritual gifts are bought, and not given. We pay for them in some manner, or we go empty away. It is _every day duty_ that tells on life. Spiritual favors are not always to be looked for, and not always to be relied on. After the glory of Mt. Tabor, the disciples were not willing to go to Calvary with Christ. They forsook him and fled. In my little home of three rooms, things were not uncomfortable; we made the best of what we had, and we found out how few are the real necessities of life, and how much we could do without, and yet be happy enough. For if the heart is young, nothing is too hard; and when these meagre days were over, we often talked of the good time we had had in them. For if love be of your company, I declare poverty to be an exquisite experience. We found out then the heart of love, and of many other things; she taught us economy and self-denial, for we would all have wanted rather than have let Alice miss any of her small desires. She did her best to give us some knowledge of life, but with myself she did not succeed very well. I was so hopeful, that I would not foresee evil, and as yet I fully trusted humanity. Moreover, I had so often been wonderfully helped in great anxieties, that I could not believe the time would ever come when the hard eye of misfortune "... would not know it vain, To empty what heaven brimmed again." Soon after we were fairly settled, just as we were sitting down to supper one night, Mary opened the door. With a cry of pleasure I made a place for her chair between myself and Alice, and as I did so, I got a glimpse of my daughter, that I have never forgotten, nor ever shall forget. She was then in her nineteenth year, a tall graceful girl in a long dark costume, and a soft gray beaver hat. Her hands were out-stretched, her face shining with love, and I had a sudden great pride and pleasure in her beauty and affection. She is now sixty years old, and of course changed in every way, but nothing can deprive me of this soul photograph of her, while the dew of youth, and the glory of family affection transfigured her. I know this, because I have been thrice since to the very shoal of Time, and turning back to life again, have brought that picture back with me. If I had not turned back, it would have gone with me. In a moment she was sitting at my side, and Lilly had brought her a cup and plate, and was serving her with smiles and exclamations of pleasure. But at that moment Mary cared little for food. She had Alice within her arm, and was kissing her small lifted face with the tenderest affection. Then she turned to me. "Mamma!" she cried, "let me come home! I want to come home! While you were fifty miles away, I could bear it; but now that you are almost in the next street, I cannot endure to be away from you." "I would like you to be at home, Mary," I answered. "It would be a great joy to all of us. But the Sykes' have been very kind to you, and you cannot treat them badly." "Dear Mamma! I would not do so for any reason. But they are going on a trip out West, and railway traveling makes me ill. Mrs. Sykes knows this, and she says she hopes Lilly will go to help her with the children." "I would like to go!" Lilly cried with enthusiasm. "I would like nothing better." The discussion of this subject made the evening very interesting; and it was finally decided that Lilly should go with the Sykes family, and Mary remain at home. And I may add here, that the glamour of the Great West so infatuated the child, that she has been haunted by its vastness and its promises to this very day. To go West, far far West, has been the dream of her life--a dream that has never come true. But if it had come true, what then? Who can tell? I have always found that the things I planned, desired, and worked for, if they came at all, brought with them disappointment and regret; while those that came to me unsought and unexpected proved to be the very things I needed most of all. Before Christmas Lilly was home again, but by this time I had made up my mind that I could not be parted from my children any more. We must stay together. God could care for us in one family, as well as in two. How faithless I had been to doubt this! So after Lilly had partially exhausted her delightful enthusiasm about her journey, and I saw that the clock was traveling up-hill to midnight, I told them so. "Dear ones!" I said, "we will not separate any more. I will work a little harder, and there is plenty in the home here, for you both to do. Lilly will keep house, and look after our meals, and Mary----" "O Mamma!" Mary interrupted, "there is all the winter sewing yet to do. Rent a sewing-machine, and Mary will make warm dresses for us all." "Can you, dear?" I asked. "I could make a dress pretty well, when I went to Mrs. Sykes. I learned a great deal while I was there. She frequently had a dressmaker in the house, and then I helped her, and so learned a great deal. I can make our dresses as well as any ordinary modiste." "That will be a great help to us," I said, "and one, or the other of you, will find time every fine day to give Alice a walk, and when she is able, to hear her read." Both girls eagerly accepted their duty to their sick sister, and Mary said, with an excitement not very common with her, "I vote, Mamma, that we stay together, and fight the battle of life out on that line." "And you, Lilly, what do you say?" "Let us stay together, even if we live on bread and water." I was the proudest and happiest mother in the world at that moment, and I answered joyfully, "You are right, dears, we will fight the battle out on this line." "What a game it will be!" cried Lilly. "All of us for Mamma, and Mamma for all of us! We shall win! No doubt of it!" And that night as I lay silently happy and thoughtful, with the children sleeping at my side, the grand old rallying cry of a famous English school wherever gathered for honorable strife, suddenly rung in my ears, "_Play up! play up! and play the game!_" For more than twenty years I had not heard it, but at that moment it pealed and pealed, and pealed through my consciousness, as if all the bells of Kendal Church were ringing it. Over and over I heard it. My heart beat to its shrill music, my fingers tattooed it on the bed cover, I could hardly lie still. Why had it come to me at this hour? I had forgotten it for so long--so long. Doubtless its memory had been evoked by Lilly's cheerful resolute exclamation, "What a game it will be!" For it was easy for me to unconsciously think of this brave child, playing up any good or honorable game of life, to the last moment of that great game, when "Death holds the odds, Of his unequal fray." And "if a woman is game as she is mild, and mild as she is game," a late great writer says, "that should satisfy any of us." Many and many a time since that happy hour, in straits of all kinds, I have been encouraged and strengthened by this plucky rallying cry of English schoolboys, and I have said to my failing spirit, "Now, Amelia, the game is hard, and the odds are against you, but you cannot sneak out because of that. '_Play up! play up! and play the game!_'" About six weeks ago, I felt as if I really must give up. I had been writing for five years without even a day's rest, and my present task of recalling, and _feeling_ the past all over, had thoroughly exhausted me. "I can do no more," I said, and with old, tired eyes, full of unshed tears--for old eyes dare not weep--and a sad heart, scarcely beating, I fell upon my bed, and was at once in a deep sleep. I was awakened by a crowd of schoolboys from Professor Stone's school which is just above my house. They were singing or chanting all together some school slogan. I know not what, but it awoke in my soul, the old battle cry of the classes on their English playground, "_Play up! play up! and play the game!_" And the cheerful, resolute noise was like old wine to my heart. I rose confidently, and went to my study and wrote for nearly three hours without any feeling of weariness. In that time, I got over the hard bit of road, that had so discouraged me, and the next morning I could sit down cheerfully at my desk, and repeat my usual grace before writing: "_I say to my Maker, Thanks! for the day's work, That my Lord gives me._"[6] Not a week after this event, one of those strange coincidences of which life is full, if we only noticed them, occurred. Lilly sent me a stirring little song on this very subject, written by Henry Newbolt, a well known lawyer of London, and I will transcribe its two last verses, because they so well illustrate what I have said about the influence of this ancient school cry, "The sand of the desert is sodden red, Red with the wreck of a square that broke-- The Gattling's jammed, and the Colonel dead, And the regiment blind with dust and smoke. The River of Death has brimmed his banks, And England's far, and Honour's a name, But the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks, '_Play up! play up! and play the game!_' "This is the word that year by year, While in her place the school is set, Every one of her sons must hear, And none that hears it, dare forget. This, they all with a joyful mind, Bear through life like a torch aflame, And falling fling to the host behind-- '_Play up! play up! and play the game!_'" The agreement made between my daughters and myself to play the game together, and not apart, was faithfully kept through many changeful years. It would seem that literature in the shape I followed it then, might be a rather monotonous life. We found it full of interest and variety. There was always something to tell, or some plan to talk over, when we gathered for our evening meal. For one event leads to another, and that often in the most unforeseen manner. Thus, in the present agreement, Mary had decided to take care of the family sewing, but she quickly pointed out to me, that material for winter garments must be bought immediately, and I promised to try and go with her in the afternoon. I had thought of this necessity during the night, and had come then to a conclusion, I had once thought nothing would ever make me accept. I had a valuable ring, a diamond guard to my wedding ring. I had not worn it since we left Galveston, and its disappearance had not been named. I could not bear to speak of it, and I dare say the children thought I had sold it for some necessity. But I felt that I must now part with it, and I experienced real, palpable pain, when I came to this conclusion; my heart ached just as my head might have ached, and I hope none of my readers will ever have to thole such suffering. It does not seem worth while for any of them to be sorry for a woman, who had a heartache about the loss of a diamond ring. Well, it was not the diamonds; it was the memories hidden in their shining depths. One Sunday afternoon while I was strolling with my lover in the laurel woods round the Salutation Inn at Lake Windermere, Robert gave it to me. It was then just three months before our marriage, and ever after, it had been associated with some of the sweetest episodes of our happy life together. Three or four times since my widowhood, I had been in such extremity, that I had resolved to turn it into gold, but every time something happened which saved my amulet. For I was superstitious about it. To me it was an amulet. I believed that while I wore it in my breast, Robert would remember me, and in times of perplexity and trouble, help and counsel. Every one has some superstition. I say "every one" with consideration, and from a rather extensive knowledge of personal superstitions. The richest, shrewdest, most truly religious man I ever knew, had two or three apparently very silly ones; yet they ruled his life, and in some measure his enormous business, and he told me he had never defied them, but to his sorrow or loss. So I must not be too much blamed for having a very tender superstition about my ring, and a strong reluctance to part with it. I waited all night for the premonition that something would happen this time also to save the ring, but no whisper of comfort, no sign of salvation came, and when I awoke in the morning, it was with the conviction that I must now part with this very last memento of a life forever gone from me. With tears I took it out of the little pocket, which I had made for it in the bosom of my dress, and dropped it into my purse. Then I went to the breakfast table, and found the children so happy over their new plans, that I could not bear to dash their hopes and enthusiasms by any mention of the sad duty before me. We talked for an hour about the kind of dresses wanted, and neither Mary nor Lilly were extravagant in their desires. Lilly only stipulated that she would like a dark blue cloth, because that color suited her, and Mary said, with a comical little laugh, "I don't care so much about color, Mamma, but do not dress us alike. I don't want to hear people say, 'They are the two Miss Barrs, illustrated by Black Watch tartan dresses;' for you know, Mamma, dear, you have an unquenchable taste for Black Watch tartan." I could not help laughing at the accusation, for I acknowledge that to this day, the sombre, handsome tints of the Black Watch regiment attract me. "You see, Mamma," she added, "we are not going to live in Scotland, and in New York I have noticed dark sage green with pale blue trimmings is in favor. I should like to be in the fashion. I don't care about color. Any color suits me." So with laughter and happy voices in my ears, and a little tremor in my heart, I turned into Broadway. My fear was now, that I should not be able to sell my ring, and so bring disappointment and waiting to those whose happiness was my first concern. I had no clear idea where to go, but I thought on Broadway I would be likely to find the best jewelry stores, and I considered myself very clever, when I cunningly resolved, not to take the first offer made me, but to ask at least in three different places. About Fourteenth Street I met a policeman, a fat, rosy, good-natured-looking man, and I asked where the best jewelry store could be found. He walked a few steps with me, and then pointed out Tiffany's in Union Square. "They are clean gentlemen there," he said, "and they'll neither charge you too much--nor give you too little." So I went to Tiffany's, and a very pleasant gentleman asked me what I wished. I took my ring out of my purse, and showing it to him, said, "I have to sell this ring. Will you buy it?" He looked at the ring, and then at me, and said, "It is a beautiful ring. I am sorry you have to part with it." "Will you buy it?" I asked again, and I was aware that my voice trembled. "We cannot," he answered. "Our house does nothing in that way of business, but I can send you to a gentleman who will buy it, and who will be certain to treat you fairly, and to give you its value." And I could not help believing him, for his face and voice were full of sympathy, as I answered, "Thank you, sir. That is all I want." Then he took a card from his pocket book, wrote a few lines on it, and enclosing it in an envelope, addressed the message, whatever it was, to Mr. John Henry Johnston, Bowery and Grand Street. I knew nothing of these localities, but when I reached the friendly policeman at Fourteenth Street again, he told me exactly how to find the place. And the unaffected kindness of these two men in some strange way drew all the sorrow out of my heart, and I walked down the Bowery full of interest in all the strange shops and sights I saw there; for it appeared to be full of people, in every kind of dress the continent of Europe could supply. In fact it was full of emigrants in their national costumes, waiting for the evening emigrant train, and in the meantime, seeing what they could of the city of New York. At length I came to Grand Street, and saw the store I wanted. It was a large handsome store, and I walked into it, and asked for Mr. Johnston. His appearance rather astonished me. He looked to be about thirty-seven years old, but his hair was snow white. He had a pleasant, intelligent, kind face, and his manner was most prepossessing. He read the card sent him, and said politely, "Come into my office, Madame." I told him my name, then he looked at my ring, and said, "The stones are good, and it is of English make, I think. I may say, I am sure." "It was bought in Glasgow, from the firm of Alexander McDonald--but for all that, may be of English make," I answered. He spent a little time in examining the ring, then sent for another gentleman, and asked him to appraise its value; while this was being done, he asked me if I was the Amelia Barr who wrote for the _Christian Union_. In a short time, the second gentleman having finished his examination, Mr. Johnston told me what he would give me for the ring, and I was amazed. I had not expected half as much, and I joyfully accepted his offer. Then and there, we finished the transaction, and my ring was gone from me forever. But when he put it in the safe, and the iron door shut heavily upon it, I could have shrieked. It hurt me so! It hurt me so! If it had not been for the three dear girls waiting for the money, I should even then have said, "Give it back to me. I cannot, cannot part with it!" As it was, I did not speak, but as I rose to go away, Mr. Johnston asked me to sit awhile, and being excited and trembling, I thought it well to do so. Thus began a very sincere friendship between Mr. Johnston's family and my own. Mrs. Johnston was called Amelia, and this simple circumstance made our first meeting a very pleasant one. For several years the Johnstons were true friends, but Mrs. Johnston died early, and in later years I have lost sight of Mr. Johnston. He did me many favors, but there is one above all others, which I can never forget. It was in connection with my ring, and it gives me yet a warmth at my heart to remember it. About three weeks after it had passed from my possession, a small parcel came to me, and when I opened it I saw the little box in which I had always kept my treasure. With trembling fingers I opened it, and there lay my ring, changed indeed, but still my ring. The stones had been removed, and over the vacancy caused by their removal, had been placed a scroll of gold, inscribed in black enamel with the word "_Faith_." Fortunately, I was alone in my home, and I went to my room and falling on my knees, I laid the changed ring in my open palm before God. What I said, He knows, and there are many of my readers who will understand without my explanation. I thought God would see, and be sorry for me. Was I not happy? Yes, at first very happy, but gradually my feelings changed. The beloved amulet, denuded of its splendor and value, was such an evident symbol of myself, and my fortune, that I could not help a kind of sorrowful astonishment, followed by a gush of passionate weeping. "O Robert! Robert!" I cried, and then both words and tears failed, and I laid my head on the bed, and was dumb; because my loss was so irreparable, that even God could not restore "The weeping hopes, the memories beyond tears, The many, many, blessed, unforgotten years." At that hour my heart was empty of all but grief. Very soon, however, I heard my children's voices on the stairs. They were talking softly but happily, and I rose and bathed my face, and to their eager call of "Mamma! Mamma!" I went to meet them. Then I showed them the changed ring, and I am sure that wherever Mr. Johnston was at that hour, his heart must have glowed with the warmth of the good wishes sent to him. I also tried to be pleased and happy, for I told myself, that if there had been any real reason for the grief I had just indulged, God would have spoken a word of comfort to me, yet when I showed Him the changed ring, He did not. My tears had been useless, for there is no deliverance through tears, unless God wipes them away. So I placed the ring on my finger, and wore it that night, and when the mystery of sleep wrapped me like a garment, I found out that God had not been indifferent to my tears, and that He had royal compassion for the sorrowful and broken-hearted who had not dared to expect anything. For a little while, I wore it constantly, thinking I could accustom myself to its company, but it had been too long a part of myself and my life. A sudden glimpse of it could sometimes destroy a day's work, and if I purposely looked at it, the heart overruled the head, and I was not able to write at all. It depressed me, and put down the soft pedal on all thought and mental expression. So I finally laid it away among the sacred things of my affections, my father's, mother's, and husband's last letters, the lock of Robert's dark hair just tinged with gray, the golden curls from my children's brows, the flowers that had bloomed on their graves. Among such treasures it found its place--the last memento of a love and a life, dead, and gone forever. Some of my readers will very likely say that I was foolishly superstitious regarding this ring, and evidently considered it as an amulet or charm. I will answer them in the words of a very learned man, who wrote on this subject, and then leave them to argue the question as it seems to appeal most powerfully to their experience, or their prejudices. "As to Charms, a coin, a pebble, any trifle long carried on the person, becomes imbued with the personality. Sometimes they have such strange ways of remaining with one, that we cannot help suspecting they have a will of their own. Who has not been amazed at the persistency with which a coin, a key, a button, a pebble picked up and put in the pocket, stays there? Or how some card will lurk in our pocketbook, till it is plain it is there of its own intention. In a little time, we can't help feeling as if these things know a great deal that we do not know; and we treat them with liking and respect, and even care." Let those who say they never do "such silly things," deny; the wise, who dare affirm or acknowledge the foible, will be a large majority. By whatever power or influence my ring held me, its putting away was an advantageous thing. Since Robert's death my life had been, to my own apprehension, two-fold: a sharply defined life above consciousness, and a vague, haunting, dreamlike life below consciousness. The latter had troubled most of my hours of rest and solitude; and living in it, either waking or sleeping, I was sad with regrets and self-accusations. A night spent in its gloom robbed the next day of vitality and active mentality. I was depressed, and work of any kind is not done as well as it could be, if gone to with cheerfulness, yes, even with gladness. But with the removal of the ring from my person, the last link between the past and the present life was broken. I know not how it came about, but gradually I was able to dismiss "Memory's rapturous pain." "For when I drank of that divinest anguish, How could I taste the empty world again?" Yes, I began to forget. At first I could not believe it, and I struggled against the fact. I told my heart to remember, but it was only telling love to do what love had once done of itself. I found it useless, as all have done, and will do to struggle against the deepest nature of things. For God has appointed time to console affliction, and living loves and inexorable wants and duties, compel us to accept the present as compensation for all that has been taken away, and so for a while, "... we do not quite forget, Nor quite remember, till the past days seem, The waving memory of a lovely dream." Every event has two or three causes, and probably quite as many issues, and Mr. Johnston's friendship carried Lilly back to mission work. She went with him and a Mr. Swartout to the Five Points Mission one Sunday afternoon, and at this time the Five Points Mission was the pet philanthropy of New York. There was always a great number of visitors there on the Sabbath, but it was the number of poor children that attracted Lilly. She had a singular aptitude for interesting and managing them, and this faculty had been trained and exercised by her famous pastor, Dr. Joseph Brown of the Kent Road Church, Glasgow, especially in the poor children's dinners supplied by the city and private charity. So this Sunday afternoon decided her life for the next two years or more, and also had a helpful influence on our own home. For the attention of the Reverend George Mingens, Superintendent of New York's city missions, was soon drawn to her fine voluntary work, and he asked her to join his missionary helpers. But I was extremely averse to her even visiting the Five Points district, though I acknowledged to myself the native and natural quality of her evangelism. My father delighted in his home missions, and my Uncle John died at Sierra Leone after seven years missionary labor there. A picture of his lonely grave in the African desert hung in my father's study, and was one of the first things I heard a story about. It was only a poor woodcut taken from a _Churchman Magazine_, but as I grew older my imagination easily supplied the lions on the horizon, and the negro kneeling beside it. Also I had a most disquieting memory of a little girl about eight years old, after a missionary meeting in Penrith Chapel, declaring that as soon as she was grown up, she was going to the heathen at the ends of the earth. She was going to tell them about their good brother Jesus, who stretched out his arms to them, even from the Cross. And I was ashamed before this ghost of a child from the past, and then remembered how Lilly had even neglected her school and her lessons to go to serve at the poor children's dinners in Glasgow, finding in this service a consolation for a life lonely and not happy. So there was no reason at all to wonder at her enthusiasm for mission work. It was an inherited tendency, strengthened by the experience of three generations. The next time Mr. Mingens called he made a proposal I had neither heart, nor argument to oppose. He said he had taken dinner the previous evening with Mr. and Mrs. William E. Dodge, and that during a conversation about city missions, Mrs. Dodge had expressed a desire that Miss Barr would act as her private missionary. He told us that Mrs. Dodge was very rich and charitable, and had letters every day asking her help in a variety of troubles, and that she thought Miss Barr would be the very person to investigate the real condition of the writers, and if their cases were worthy of help, to see that they obtained it. The offer greatly pleased Lilly, and after she had an interview with Mrs. Dodge, she was taken captive by that lady's spiritual and personal charms and was very happy in the work assigned her. The salary she received for it brightened all our lives, for it enabled us to rent and make the comfortable home we all longed to possess. For there was but one purse in the family. I carried it, but it belonged alike to all; and I never once remember Lilly asking for a dollar of her salary, for her private use or pleasure. In the meantime my reputation grew imperceptibly as a tree grows. In a little more than a year after I began writing for the _Christian Union_ I had a great deal to do for Dr. Stephen Tyng, a notable young clergyman of that day. My first literary work for him was to write twenty little stories about Olivet Chapel and its mission. They were to be about seven or eight hundred words long, and though all on the same subject, to be varied as much as possible. I found no difficulty in doing what he wished. It was only to make men of different creeds and nationalities, age and temperament, wealth and poverty, discuss the mission. To me it proved a pleasant mental exercise, and Dr. Tyng was more than satisfied, and paid me one hundred dollars. I thought the cars would never get me home. I was in such a hurry to tell the children, I must have taken two steps at once. That day remains in my memory as a perfectly happy day, for Dr. Tyng paid me with such cordiality and unstinted praise, that my pleasure was doubled. Subsequently when Dr. Tyng and Dr. Hepworth began to publish a weekly newspaper, called the _Working Church_, they associated me with them in its preparation. This paper published the first novel I ever wrote, as simple a story as "Jan Vedder's Wife," but laid among the Cumberland Fells and in the city of Glasgow. At that time I knew nothing about book rights, and English rights, and I suppose Dr. Tyng never imagined a writer could be ignorant about such personal points, for he did not speak to me on the subject. So when Dr. Tyng had paid me for its publication in the _Working Church_ I believed I had no further right in it. It was put away and forgotten, until about half a year ago, when I found it in a box full of old diaries, papers, et cetera. Its name was "Eunice Leslie" and if any one has early copies of the _Working Church_ they will find it there, and I should be glad to hear of it. Among my duties on this paper was the preparation of the columns of church news, and general news, and Dr. Lyman Abbott in writing to Dr. Tyng about the newspaper said, "They were well done," and asked, "Who prepared them?" And as Dr. Abbott knew I was responsible for their accuracy and brightness, it was very kind of him to make the inquiry. It was a small kindness; it was done forty years ago, and Dr. Abbott has doubtless forgotten it, but I still remember how much it pleased me. As for Dr. Abbott, he may count it, as Wordsworth says, in "That best portion of a good man's life-- His little, nameless, unremembered acts Of kindness, and of love." Dr. Tyng showed me Dr. Abbott's question, and his compliment to the general character of the _Working Church_ as a popular religious weekly, and with a gay little laugh commented thus, "I am glad the doctor did not spell 'Weekly' with an 'a.'" Then his countenance beamed with pleasure, and I can see him this moment, as I saw him then, standing with the note in his hand, as fine a type of a highly-cultured good-hearted gentleman as I ever met. CHAPTER XX THE FAMILY LIFE "The Family Life is romantic because it is uncertain. Every member of it likes different work and different play. These differences make the household bracing. Those who want to get out of family life will go into a much narrower world." Our home at this time was in the pretty row of flats opposite the Dominican Church on Lexington Avenue. They were light, sunny apartments and had a satisfactory share of what we call, modern conveniences. Every one knows how New York looks now, between Lexington Avenue and the old entrance to Central Park at the Arsenal. Then, it was a clear, open space. I remember just one cottage standing at the southeast corner opposite to the park entrance; and I remember this cottage, because its garden was full of old-fashioned English flowers--columbines, sops-in-wine, calamuth, kingspear, crown imperials, Michaelmas daisies, and the only auriculas I have seen in America, the aristocrat of the primrose family, dressed in royal purple, and powdered as daintily as any court lady. AURICULAS "Grave grandees from pageant olden, Purple, crimson, primrose, golden, Yellow-hearted, tawny-tuckered, Velvet-robed, and flounced and puckered, Golden-eyed and garnet-breasted, Cherry-rimmed and velvet-vested, Silver-powdered, golden-dusted, Damson-dyed or orange-rusted, Pencilled, painted, grained and graded, Frilled and broidered and brocaded, Ye should move in gilded coaches, While some gorgeous Prince approaches; Let the Polyanthi then, Run as dapper liverymen! Till your dames on polished floors, Sail like splendid Pompadours." Our dining-room faced this pleasant outlook, and it was a favorite family gathering place; for Mary had her sewing machine at one of its windows, and there she sat sewing and singing nearly every morning. The parlor looked on to Lexington Avenue, and was exactly opposite the Dominican Church entrance, and on Sunday mornings I found at its windows never-ceasing food for thought and observation. Early as six o'clock, there was a reverent praying congregation there, and soon after nine the congregation had overflowed its capacity, and men and women were kneeling on its steps, and broad sidewalk. They were indifferent to passers-by, and with their rosaries in their hands, made publicly their confession of sin, and their prayer for pardon. I never wearied of this Sabbath spectacle, and I never dreamed of smiling at it. I could not imagine myself praying on the sidewalk, or even on the church steps, but sincere religion always commands respect. It is never ridiculous or contemptible. The parlor, like the rest of the house, was plainly furnished. There were white curtains at the windows, and white matting on the floor, and a very good cottage piano, which we rented when we were in the Amity Street rooms, and had to deny ourselves in other matters, in order to pay the eight dollars a month it called for. But Mary had acquired a certain proficiency in music that must not be lost, and at this time she was taking singing lessons from Errani, and they needed steady, regular practice, which was given while I was at the Astor Library. Through my reviewing for the _Christian Union_ and other papers, we had collected a number of good books, but we had no pictures excepting two fine crayon portraits of my eldest daughters, which had been presented to me by a young artist, who came frequently to our house. And there was always plenty of flowers, for New Yorkers then, as now, delighted in them; and our visitors brought them freely. I suppose, excluding the piano and the two portraits, the whole house was furnished at the cost of three or four hundred dollars; but for all that, it made a cheerful pleasant impression on all who entered it; its atmosphere was so homelike, so comfortable, and happy. Undoubtedly we were very happy there, though I worked ten hours or more, daily, including the unpleasant ride to the Astor Library, and often as far as Park Row or its vicinity; for I had to be a worker, as well as a dreamer, and my thoughts needed hands and feet, as well as wings in order to turn them into money. Generally I was far too busy, or too tired, to join the pleasant company usually brightening the parlor in the evenings; but everyone came into the dining-room, where I did my daily overflow of copying, for there was no blessed typewriter then, and had a few kind words with me--and I heard Mary singing or playing, or the murmur of joyous conversation, or the echo of light laughter, and I was as happy as the rest: "For this it was that made me move As light as carrier birds in air; I loved the weight I had to bear, Because it needed help of Love." And also, I was often conscious of a strength, not physical, lying under the tired sinews and muscles. These evening meetings were of the most informal character. There never was any special invitation to them, and the visitors wore their ordinary street costumes, and were mostly literary men and women; though not altogether so. Mr. Isaac Bloom of Galveston, who had been my husband's friend, often came to New York, and when he did so, always came to visit us; bringing with him, some young Jewish gentleman of his acquaintance. Socially, I never met finer gentlemen. They were well educated, and their reverence for religion, for their parents and family, and for all that is lovely and of good report, made their friendship most pleasant and desirable. This may not be a popular opinion, but it is the truth concerning all the Jews I have known socially, and their number is neither small nor unimportant. My Galveston friend is dead, and I have gradually lost sight of the Franks, and the two Blumenthals, the cultured Noemagen, Julius Sterne and others; but I have not forgotten their good nature, and exquisite courtesy, and I am sure if I met them at this day, they would give _my age_ an even deeper respect, than they gave me forty years ago. Then also, Mary had made many friends while with Mrs. Sykes, and they drifted now and then into our circle; while not infrequently S. S. Conant, the editor of _Harper's Weekly_, passed an hour in it before going to his club; or Mr. Mengins called to talk to Lilly about her mission work, readily falling into conversation, and changing opinions with all present; or telling them Scotch stories, with all the rich emphatic idioms, of the Land o' Cakes. Always I was well content to sit copying my day's work in the dining-room, within sound of the happiness, that I could share at any moment; but I grew restless at once, if I heard the voice of a young man called Cochran. He was one of the librarians of the Astor Library when I first met him, but very soon went to where he naturally belonged--the daily press. A man so vivid, so clever, so brimful of intellect, I had never before met. He was like a flash of flame. The first thing he always did, was to walk through the dining-room, and ask me if he was welcome. Being assured of our pleasure in his company he would answer, "Then I shall make my tea"; and immediately proceeded to make himself a cup of tea. Having drank it, he poured out a second cup, and with this in his hand went back to the parlor, taking if possible his seat on the piano stool. Then he saluted the company, and as he sipped his tea, began a conversation that no one could describe. It was gay and grotesque, thoughtful, and often serious, constantly witty and idiomatic. Oh, it was a dish of all kinds! but all good. Thus he would sit drinking one cup of tea after another, and clinching every discussion with a few trenchant words, driven home as a nail is driven into a sure place, with a few strong blows. It is impossible for words to give any adequate example of this man's conversation; because it was so vividly illuminated by his personality, the inflections of his voice, his expressive gestures, and the large gray eyes, that beamed or flashed in sympathy with all he said. On one occasion a minister and his wife from Glasgow and a close friend of my mother-in-law and of all my Scotch connections was present. They had sent me a note from the Metropolitan Hotel saying they would like to call, if it was convenient; and had been invited to take tea, and spend the following evening with us. I confess that I was pleased to have such credible witnesses assure my mother-in-law that I had not done badly for the grandchildren she had neglected; and moreover I did arrange everything as American as possible, and I did pretend to have forgotten all about Glasgow, whereas there was not a street of the murky city, or a day of my life in it, which was not clear and fresh in my memory. And I did dress myself in the finest gown of white mull and lace, with which Southern extravagance in that direction before the war had provided me, and I did go to unnecessary expense in cut flowers and jellies and confectionery, not from the best of motives, not out of respect to the minister and his wife, but just because I suspected them of coming as spies, and I did not wish them to take back an evil report. Before they left New York I was ashamed of my suspicions, but that night I enjoyed myself in them. And all went exactly as I desired. My visitors were astonished and much pleased with their reception, my daughters had never looked better. Mary sang very well, and Lilly interested the minister with her stories of the Five Points Mission so much, that he wished to go there, and she agreed to go with him on the following day. About eight o'clock Mr. Cochran and Albert Webster came in, and we had an intellectual feast of good things until midnight. During this evening there was a conversation concerning women which may indicate how much their character has changed during the last thirty years. Mr. Webster related a social anecdote about Mrs. Astor, and her unanswerable way of snubbing rivals aspiring to social prominence; and I asked Mr. Cochran what he thought of Mrs. Astor's behavior. "I think the things women bear from each other are amazing," he answered. "Men would not stand them. Men would not attempt them." "Then why do women attempt them?" "First, because they don't respect each other; second, because they have no fear of consequences." "Consequences!" I exclaimed. "Yes. They cannot knock each other down, and it is not ladylike to call names." "Well then, if a woman is insulted by a woman, what can she do?" "Repay in kind, and to give women justice, they generally do so." "How?" "A stare, a shrug, a toss of the head, conveys their infinite disdain; and answers the end perfectly." Conversation then drifted to Susan B. Anthony, and Mr. Cochran said, "I respect her, but she will not succeed." "Why not?" asked Albert Webster. "Because, though women are gregarious in fashions and follies, they cannot combine. They will not support their weak sisters, and they shrink from their strong ones. Generally speaking, they have a radical contempt for each other's intellects, and have no class solidarity. Because of the latter want, men have always had the upper hand, and will always keep it."[7] The minister approved these opinions, and also kindly looked over, or forgave, any lapses from the strict formalities of a Glasgow evening, by a kindly allowance for our grievous want of a Scotch education. Twelve years afterwards, I paid my mother-in-law a visit at her summer residence in the Isle of Arran. She had forgotten nothing the minister and his wife had told her concerning their visit, but they had told only the things I wished her to hear. Even Mr. Cochran making his own tea, and drinking eight cups or more, had not been reported. I am sensible that I have been smiling as I wrote the last two pages, and I shall not try to justify myself. Sometimes we act naturally, and sometimes we have a grace beyond nature, and that night I dispensed with "the grace beyond," but I enjoyed the dispensation, and I hope it was not very wrong, because I am not yet sorry for it. The Albert Webster named here was a fiction writer of a very high order. His work was done principally for _Appleton's Magazine_. He was a grave, thoughtful young man, with a charming presence, a high opinion of women, and a passionate love for one of Nathaniel Hawthorne's daughters; but he was perilously delicate and unfit for the struggle of life. In about two years the work, and the struggle was over. They whom the gods love, die young. The brilliant Cochran followed Webster in a short time, and the rest of the clever, kindly group whom we called friends are scattered far and wide. Max Freelander went to the African diamond mines. S. S. Conant's sudden disappearance is still a mystery. The Reverend Mr. Mengins is dead. My Jewish friends are immersed in business. They doubtless remember me, as I do them, but I am on Storm King Mountain, and they are in New York's busiest thoroughfare, sixty-five miles away. Death and distance make barren our lives. About this time the brilliant scholar Moses Coit Tyler was editor of the _Christian Union_. He was a great man in every respect. If he only entered a room, it appeared to become lighter; and in no other man have I ever noticed the radiation of the body so pronounced. He made me believe in the aureoles of the saints. Reverent to sacred things, he was still very much of an every day man. He fearlessly spoke his mind, fearlessly opposed what he disapproved; and was not, I suspected, an admirer of Mr. Beecher. I remember thinking that if the two men came to an active dispute, I should like to be present. Professor Tyler soon left the newspaper world, and went to his place in Michigan University. Many years afterwards he wrote me some hearty letters, praising the work I had done, and telling me, he knew I would do still better. Not long after he left the _Christian Union_ Mary and I took a passage on an Anchor Line steamer for Glasgow. I had various reasons for this journey, partly relating to the family, and partly to business. Also, I was exceedingly weary both physically and mentally, and my physician is ever the sea and the air of my native land, if by any means I can secure their help. Having fainted three times within a month, it was not considered prudent for me to go alone, and we hoped Mary might please her relatives better than Lilly had been able to do. So Mary went with me. In one or two respects the voyage was a success. Ten days on the Atlantic perfectly restored me to health, and I landed at Glasgow fit for anything I ought to do. We went to a private hotel, and I sent my mother-in-law word of our arrival. Towards evening Mrs. Colville and her daughter Jessy came to visit us, bringing me a letter from Mother, desiring us to leave the hotel, and stay with them. So we went to their residence in Bath Street, and were entertained there with great kindness. And I was glad of it. I could not forget that I was with Robert's mother, sister, and kindred, and I tried for his sake to offend in nothing. The morning after I arrived I was sitting in a parlor by myself, writing letters, when a gentleman entered. I looked up and as I did not recognize him rose. Then he came eagerly forward crying softly, "_Amelia! O Amelia!_" The sound of my baptismal name went poignantly to my consciousness; no man since Robert's death had ever called me by it. As the speaker came closer to me, I saw that it was Alick Sage, my old lover. He had just returned from Australia, a widower with one daughter. I did not know whether I was pleased to see him, or not. He had grown as far away from me, as I from him, and there was not one plank of tenderness in my heart to bridge the chasm. I wanted no lovers; my affections were well satisfied with my daughters, and my work. He was persistent, and his persistency annoyed me, and I left Mary with her aunt, and went down to Yorkshire to see my sisters, who were then living in Leeds. After spending two days with them, I went on to London, where I collected money enough to pay the expenses of our trip, and also made arrangements for three American stories. Returning to Glasgow I sailed two days afterwards for New York, but Mary remained in Scotland until near Christmas. In the gloaming of the day before leaving I made two memorable visits, the first was to the house in which I had lived and loved with such passionate earnestness, as I could never know again. It looked as if I had never left it, and a constable walking the broad pavement in front of it, told me that "a real bein, nice couple" lived there, that the wife was "gey bonnie," and her man had "a fine job in the custom house." I asked if they had any children. "Aye," he answered, "a braw lad o' five, or thereabouts, and a genty wee lassie, just toddling around." I looked up at the windows, silently blessed the home, and all within it, and giving the man a shilling took leave of it forever. Another inquiry might not have been so happily answered. When a thing is well enough, let it alone. The other visit was to my husband's warehouse in Virginia Street. It had been closed for the day, and being entirely a business street was absolutely empty. I stood upon the stone door steps, worn away in the center to a mere flag, and I looked at the row of windows covered with dust and cobwebs, just as Robert and his predecessors had kept them, as emblematical of a large, steady business, not requiring blazoning of any kind. And though my heart was full, I could not help a faint smile at the superstition--which still prevailed--and I made a promise to myself to go down to the big offices in lower New York to see whether New York merchants cleaned their windows, or let them accumulate the dust in which the lucky cobwebs dwell. This promise to myself, I have not yet fulfilled. When I went to the steamer the next morning I found Mr. Sage there. It troubled me, and made my last talk with Mary conventional, instead of confidential; and yet when he turned away saying, "Farewell, Milly!" I felt unhappy. Indeed for some days I was angry at myself. I had denied and passed by a loving soul without caring. Alas! the pain of reunion is often greater than the pain of parting. Some secret disappointment enters into all meetings after long separation. We feel that it is easier to accept the loss, than to adapt ourselves to this person not expected. Soon after my return home, I was engaged by Fords, Howard and Hulbert to write a history of the condition and treatment of women in all civilized and semi-civilized countries. Grace Greenwood was to assist me in this work, but I never saw her but once, and that only for about an hour. I have the impression that she lived near Boston, but she took little interest in the book, and when she saw the list of volumes laid out at the Astor Library for reference and information, she shook her head in a kind of laughing despair, and said, "Your plan is excellent, go on and complete it. The firm do not expect me to do any writing. I am to advise with you." Then she laughed pleasantly again, and our interview was practically over. She was a pretty woman, bright and agreeable, and doubtless was paid only for the use of her name on the title page, and having satisfied herself that it was safe in my care and ability, she passed out of my life with a pleasant smile and a compliment. Yet I could not help thinking of what Mr. Cochran said, "Women have a radical contempt for each other's intellects, and they can not combine." But she was kind to me in one important respect; she advised me in a peculiarly marked manner to "insist on some weekly payment" for my work. I followed her advice, and was glad I did so, for Mr. Beecher's church officials after a lengthy examination, found no wrong in their pastor; and then Mr. Tilton took his quarrel to the civil courts. It was a ruinous step to Fords, Howard and Hulbert, the publishers of the _Christian Union_; but I did not dream of it affecting their publishing business. So I had a shock one Saturday afternoon, when I entered Mr. Ford's office with my week's Mss for the book about women. The usually busy place was still and empty. I glanced at Mr. Jack Howard's desk, and he was not in his place. The elder Ford had always been a conspicuous figure but he, too, was absent. I saw no one I knew but the cashier. He called me kindly to his office, and gave me my check. "It is the last I shall pay here," he said. "I was waiting for you. Mr. Howard told me to do so." He spoke so sympathetically, that I felt my eyes fill with tears. "Thank Mr. Howard for me," I said, "and you?" He shook his head at my question. I knew he was feeling the closing up, as much as I did, for he had a clever, handsome wife and several little children. We shook hands and parted silently. He was full of anxiety, so was I, for in any worker's life, the loss of steady employment is often a greater tragedy than any Sophocles or Shakespeare ever wrote. I did not hurry home. I walked slowly for some distance full of thought. But it was not long ere invincible hope began to say words of reason and consolation. Then I made haste and told my children what had happened, and we talked cheerfully over what we must do in order to make our reduced income meet our output, until good days came again. "Everybody has ups and downs, Mamma," said Mary, "and I think a thorough change would do us all good. Lilly has not quite recovered from her illness. Alice is quieter than usual, and you look fagged out, Mamma. Let us go to the country. We could at once save half the rent. Let us go to Rutherford Park. When I was there with Mrs. Sykes, I saw such pretty cottages for twenty dollars a month." "O Mamma!" cried Lilly, "think of a cottage all to ourselves! Perhaps a garden--and there might be a chicken house. I could raise chickens and turkeys. I raised hundreds and hundreds in Austin, and we might hire a cow--if we could not at first buy one. I could milk her. Old Mammy Green taught me to milk, and I can make butter, too. What a good time we should have! Say yes, Mamma. Do say yes." Of course an hour's conversation in this mood, decided the question. The next day Mary went to Rutherford Park and took a cottage, and Lilly in high spirits spent the day in packing. "You see, Mamma," she said, as she triumphantly turned the key in an overflowing trunk, "you see, we ought to have made a change before this. When things begin to go wrong, that is the time to make a change. Sam Houston said that, and I reckon he knew all about things going wrong and changes." Then after another tug with the straps she looked up, her face aglow and asked, "Things don't _stay_ wrong, do they? It is good and bad with them, always good and bad, and good again. You know that, don't you, Mamma?" I smiled and answered promptly as she wished, for indeed no one knew better than I did, that "The Sea of Fortune doth not ever flow, She draws her favors to the lowest ebb, Her tides have equal times to come and go, Her loom doth weave the finest and the coarsest web. No joy so great, but runneth to an end, No hap so hard, but will in time amend." The ready acceptance of a simpler life by Mary and Lilly greatly relieved me for the fear that it would be a trial to them to leave New York had been the pinch of the trouble. Alice was happy anywhere if we were with her, for her life and conversation was not of this world. Born in the stress and terror of the war time, when I lived and moved only in the mercy and care of God, she came into this world more psychically than physically developed. She has never yet comprehended the meaning of care or want. God is her Father, therefore she can "lack nothing." Her wants are few and simple, and she asks God for them, and I would sell the wedding ring from my finger, rather than she should fear God had failed her. If she notices that I am anxious, and I say, "I am a little troubled," she asks if I have "told God about the trouble?" and when I answer, "Yes, darling, I have told Him all about it," she adds with a confident air, "Then it is all right. God will make it so." Her mentality in some points is superior to my own, thus she is naturally far more shrewd. I am deceived so easily; she is never deceived. She is exquisitely neat and orderly, and as careful and economical as any of her Scotch ancestry. The servants all obey her cheerfully, and I wish they obeyed me half as well, and as cheerfully. She dislikes extravagance in every shape, and yet money is useless to her, for the sense of numbers is wanting. She cannot learn to count, and though she may know the denomination of coins, she has no idea of their relative worth. Nor can she understand space or distance. She knows she must go a long way to reach England, for she has been there several times, but if the distance is told her in miles, it would give her no idea of it. Of course these wants totally unfit her for a world in which numbers and space and distance are constantly present factors. She speaks little, but she sees and knows more than she can tell. Outward things are an hindrance to her. Yet she is perfectly happy. Her days pass in sweet and innocent regularity. Of her own accord she has assumed certain small household duties, which would otherwise be mine; she spends her first hours of the day in "talking with God," which is her definition of prayer; then she embroiders or reads, or improvises on her organ, which at times is done with a wonderful touch and sense of purest harmony. Her voice in accompaniment is very sweet but quite childlike. At four o'clock every day, we have a short service of psalms or collects, the Lord's Prayer, and a hymn, and she is the innocent God-loving priest, who offers our thanksgiving. Oh, she is the most blessed child that ever a mother nursed! She has never given me one moment's sorrow, except for her condition, and for this she is in no way responsible. Indeed I feel it to be a great honor to call such a lovely soul "my child." Yet her perfectly helpless condition shadows all my days and nights for I know that until the end she will remain one of those sweet souls who, "... 'mid the trampling throng, With their first beauty bloom at evensong; Hearts for whom God has judged it best to know Only by hearsay, sin and want and woe, Bright to come hither, and to travel hence, Bright as they came, and wise in innocence." And the one prayer I make for her constantly, especially at midnight--for the midnight prayer God loves best of all--is, that she may "travel hence" before I do, or that He mercifully grant "we may travel hence together." For it is her hand, that will open to me the gate of the celestial city. In a week we were settled in the Rutherford Park cottage. I had been only half-hearted about the movement, for it appeared to put the Astor Library too far from me. But the children were delighted with the change, and the human heart is a loving thing, and has reasons that reason does not understand. And I had not then learned that a little misgiving in the beginning of things, means much regret in the end of them. The first change necessary in our lives was that Mary or Lilly should do the office work. One of them went to the city with me nearly every morning. On reaching New York I took the street cars direct to the library, arriving there about nine o'clock and working until four. If there was writing to be done, or writing to be altered, it was brought to the library, and we usually made our arrangements to so fit each other, that we returned home together. Then there was the happy supper table, and the exchange of city and village news. This was the year 1876--the great celebration of the Independence of the Colonies at Philadelphia--and we had many visitors from the South. Among them was a very interesting gentleman from Tennessee called Thomas Barr. He stayed some weeks in Rutherford Park, and was very popular; for he had a handsome person, a fine manner, and was possessed of considerable wealth. There was an engagement between him and my daughter Mary, but it died a very easy, natural death; and as they were unsuited to each other, I congratulated both of them, for correcting a mistake, before it was made. The last four words are a contradiction, but they state the case plainly enough. Rutherford Park was then a charming suburb of New York. There were a great many New Yorkers living there, and the society of the place was delightful. But society in Rutherford Park, meant exactly what it meant in New York. There were the same extravagances of dressing and entertaining and we soon found out that economy is an inherent virtue, and not dependent on environment--a charmed word, however, at that time; ethical and social teachers being quite confident, that every one physically or morally sick, could be made healthy and good, by giving them the _proper environment_. I myself had been advised by the Reverend Mr. Ruston, as true a friend as we ever had, to go to the country and to learn among simple villagers the happiness of a simple life. There were not many simple villagers in Rutherford Park, and they appeared to absolutely separate themselves from what they called "the Yorkers." So we did not learn anything from our environment. We spent as much living in a cottage, whose rent was twenty dollars a month, as we spent in a New York apartment at fifty dollars a month, for the small cottage did not alter our ideas about the superfluities, that have become the necessities. But blue glass and environment, which were at that time the great cures for personal and moral ailments, did not in the least affect us. We saw every one bringing home a square of blue glass to sit under and be cured of their bodily sickness, and we heard everywhere the great word "environment" as the true specific for original sin. Even yet, "good environments and good associations," are the shibboleth of philanthropists. I want to remind them, that Nature prevails enormously over nurture; for instance the cuckoo has been laying her eggs in the respectable nests of the dove and the titlark ever since the creation, but never a cuckoo yet imbibed, or even imitated the virtues of their foster parents. I know that poets sing beautifully of the cuckoo bird, "Breaking the silence of the seas, Among the furthest Hebrides." But Moses forbade the Jews to incorporate their vices by eating them, and Milton centuries later classed them with "owls, apes and dogs." Three centuries have passed since Milton, and the cuckoo is just as bad as he was at the beginning. He has had, say six thousand years of the respectable environment and excellent moral associations of doves and titlarks, and he has not been cured of a single fault. So much for environment and good associations! I find I have written a little lecture but if it teaches one philanthropist, that all moral improvement must be from the inside outward, it will not be in vain. If the heart of even a bad child is not changed, all outside moralities will be useless; he will become a bad man. Our real life in Rutherford Park was just what it had been in New York. I wrote constantly, but not as comfortably as in the city. The train wearied me, and also there were always people in it, who talked to me all the time. If they were women and going up town to shop, they talked until I left them at Astor Place. Coming to my work from Seventy-seventh Street in the horse cars was different. There I was among strangers. I could sit still and think, and possess myself in reflection. Socially things were different enough. We had been very kindly received, and soon had numerous acquaintances and callers, and we had found it quite possible to go to church, which had been a serious query in New York. This may seem a peculiar statement. I will explain it. One Sunday I went to hear a minister whom I had read a good deal about. I liked his sermon, and I liked the music, and I felt that I would be happy to join its congregation. I wrote a few lines to this minister, telling him with what churches I had been connected, referring him to Mr. Beecher and Dr. Tyng, and asking what preliminaries were necessary. Some time passed and then one day an officer of this church called on me. I happened to be at home very busy copying. Mary was sewing beside me; Alice was coloring a picture; Lilly opened the door for him, and as he wished "to see Mrs. Barr" she brought him into the dining-room, where I was at work. She thought he was a very respectable editor. I thought the same, and I rose to greet him. I have no doubt he was a millionaire, but he was courteous and gentlemanly, and after a few minutes quite kindly. He said, he had come in response to my letter, sent to Dr. C. I smiled and he continued, "Dr. C---- would like to know the name of your banker." "My banker!" I replied in amazement. "I have no banker." "You see," he continued, "ours is a very extravagant church--I mean in good works--and our members must be looked to for large subscriptions. Dr. C---- is acquainted with your name--and thinks highly of you--but he is afraid you would not be able to give as--as liberally--as liberally as our church expenses--demanded." He spoke with difficulty, and as I continued to look at him, and remained silent, he was confused and said hastily, "I am afraid you do not understand the situation." I said I did not, and he tried to explain, but he was much embarrassed and I shook my head and said, "You had better make no more explanations, sir. I understand that only the rich can be members of Dr. C----'s church. The Lord Christ, also, is therefore ineligible. I will remain outside with Him. I had an old-fashioned idea, that every Church was a House of God, I have no desire to intrude on premises belonging to Dr. C----." The official sat a while, talked of other things, and went away I think not very happy. If he is still in life, and this relation should meet his eyes, he will remember. He did his best to make the refusal as inoffensive as possible but he had to present a case utterly destitute of every gracious element. But even when we were living in the rooms in Amity Street, we found out that the church in New York had a social side, that could not be intruded upon. We went then regularly to a Methodist church in our neighborhood, a large well-appointed building, with a very excellent preacher. His manner even in his service was so really "brotherly" and "sisterly," that I was in no way astonished when he made us a pastoral call. We found him socially a delightful man, responding gladly to intellectual and spiritual conversation. He remained talking with me over my life, and especially over my work on the religious press for at least two hours. When he rose to go he said, he would like to bring Mrs. D---- to see us, and would surely do so, as soon as we moved "_into a more fashionable street_." He meant nothing unkind by this proviso, and in future years I did a great deal of work for him, and he visited me at Cherry Croft. But the remark made us think, and then laugh a little--perhaps, not a happy laugh. Hitherto I had not troubled myself as to whether the street was fashionable or not. Mr. Sykes had approved the locality, and it suited my library wants perfectly, but now I asked Mary, if she thought we ought to see about a change? "Not for the honor of Mrs. D----'s call," she answered. Then I looked at Lilly and she laughed and said, "You ought to have told Mr. D----, Mamma, that we were not lonely nor likely to be so. We are not fashionable people; why should we go to a fashionable street?" In direct opposition to this exclusiveness Dr. Tyng offered me a pew for myself and family in the new church he had just built on Madison Avenue and Forty-second Street, without money and without price. But at that time I had worked a great deal with, and for ministers of more than one denomination, and I confess my ideas of the sacred office were turned topsy-turvey. The clergy I knew in England and Scotland were so exclusively "Ministers of The Word." Their church and pastoral work completely absorbed them. They were really "reverend" and entitled to that respect mingled with fear and affection which they received. I have gone out of my way many and many a time, so that I might meet a minister, and have him smile at me, and say "God bless you, child!" Much of this sentiment remained with me when I came to New York, but it was soon killed--for a minister in the market place, bargaining for stories and editorials, is not as "reverend" as the man who goes up to the Holy Place and opens with prayer and praise a solemn service to the Eternal One. In Rutherford we had an excellent minister--a Mr. Walcott, a good man full of the Evangel he loved to proclaim. He and Mrs. Walcott welcomed us gladly, and the church welcomed us, and we had in Rutherford all the spiritual privileges hungry souls could wish. I was conscious, however, of a great change. I had acquired, I knew not how, a self-sufficiency in spiritual things that needed nothing from human sympathy or numbers. There are experiences in life, after which we cannot go on in the old way; can never be what we were before. I had gone through several such experiences. I had lost many of the convictions and illusions of my youth. I had gained much knowledge of men and of things, that I had not yet either accepted or refused. But I clung with passionate fervor to my trust in God's love and care, and in spite of the frequent dropping of cold words of doubt in my presence, I still had an almost awful prepossession in favor of the Bible. I read it alone with my daughters, and we talked of its promises, and as we four knelt together in earnest prayer, or holy silence, there was some times the blessed consciousness of _Another_ with us. Christ had promised to be with such worshippers. Christ will keep His promise even to the end of the world. So we passed out of the splendid church, into the little upper chamber, but we did not pass out of God's love and presence. CHAPTER XXI THUS RUNS THE WORLD AWAY "I must tell all. I cannot be unfaithful to my past. If I cut it away, I am but half myself. I wish also faith in the years to come, and those lofty delights which defy the tomb." In the meantime my work went steadily on, and I wrote a good deal for a Mr. Marks, who very soon removed to London. But in the interval he supplied the place of the _Christian Union_ which in the years 1876 to 1877 was at such a low ebb, that no one but Dr. Lyman Abbott, who then took it in charge, could have guided it over the sea of its difficulties, into the safe harbor of its present influence and success. In looking over my diaries for these years, I am astonished at the amount of money I made from short stories, poems, and articles. We lived comfortably on it, and wanted no good things. And I think my readers must be so familiar now with my regular life, that I will only specify the incidents which varied and changed it somewhat, until I reach the period when I gave up newspaper and magazine work for the purpose of writing books. The first event of moment was our leaving Rutherford, and going to Denver, Colorado. To this day, I wonder at the circumstance. I was certainly ill, no, not ill, but completely tired out body and mind, so that even my ever upspringing soul was inert and indifferent. A change was imperative, but the sea, and a week or two of my native air, would have put me all right. Let no one smile at my prescription. In cases of lost vitality and extreme weariness, one's native air is the finest tonic and builder up that can be taken. Drugs have nothing to compare with it. I am very weary now, but I know that if I could sit on Ulverston fells, and breathe the potent mixture of her sea and land ozone, I would be in a week ten years younger. I do not say this on my own experience or authority. English specialists insist on its virtue, and I know one of the greatest surgeons of New York, who takes this tonic every summer, if possible, and comes home a new man. Well, I went to Denver. It was the most foolish thing I ever did, and I can not tell why I did it. There was a vague idea in my mind, that if I could not write any more, I might open in this new, growing town, such a school, as I had had in Chicago; and then my children had been talked into an enthusiasm about the West, and youth is always sure that change _must_ be for the better. I gave way with a supineness that astonishes me to remember. A letter to Mr. Abbott, the passenger agent of the Erie line, settled the matter. He offered me a compartment for four at half-price if I would write an article for a pamphlet they would publish, and speak otherwise favorably of the line as I had opportunity. The girls were delighted, and I tried to feel some of their enthusiasm. The great trouble to me, was the breaking up of the home and the sale of the furniture I had worked so hard to obtain. But there was no alternative. If there were storage houses then, we knew nothing about them, and Lilly, who always looked at the bright side, said, "It would be well to be rid of it. We didn't know how, or where to buy furniture, Mamma, when we bought this heavy stuff. I know now where far prettier and cheaper can be had. Just let this go, Mamma. We can't drag it to Denver, and if we do come back, we will buy things far more suitable." I made no further dissent. I only reflected how many of my homes I had seen torn to pieces, and scattered wide, and I wondered why this experience seemed obligatory. Then it struck me, that there might be a psychic side to the circumstance--that to break up my dwelling place, and send me on some far off journey was perhaps the best, the only thing my angel could do, in order to save me and my children from "Him that followeth after." For I know well, that the breaking up of existing conditions, is often the only salvation; that we are sent long, unexpected, and often unpleasant journeys because it is the best way to defeat disaster; that we are often prevented from taking journeys we have planned and prepared for, because they would be fatal; yea, that we are often stripped as Job was stripped, in order to make possible the two-fold blessing of Job. I felt the long, dirty, monotonous journey to Denver very much. But the children were happy. They made friends with an United States General and his charming wife and daughter, and were half sorry not to accept their invitation to go on with them to the frontier station which was their home. We arrived in Denver on the twenty-first of July, 1878, after five days' travel; and the next day we rented a small furnished house belonging to Miss Sargent, a writer of that day whose stories were much liked both in England and America. We made the place pretty and comfortable, and then took time to consider what we had done. I felt painfully the extreme rarity of the atmosphere. It affected my ears, and gave me a peculiar headache; but it is not fair to describe the Denver of that date, for it was the point to which all consumptives past hope were then sent. It was full of the sick and the dying, yet withal a busy town; but I saw at once that we should never like it, and my heart turned to New York with a home-sickness impossible to describe. However, the great total eclipse of the sun was to be noted there in perfection on the twenty-ninth of the month, and we were glad to have an opportunity to witness what we should never see again in this incarnation. The day was clear, unnaturally still, and tenuous; and there was a sense of something supernatural about to occur. As the sun was gradually darkened, and the earth lay passive in that unearthly gloom, a dead silence prevailed, but the moment of totality, or the moment after it, was saluted with the shouts and huzzas of the crowd watching the marvelous event. It was no doubt the most sincere way in which the unlearned thousands could express their feelings, but it was not the awful wonder and worship that seemed fitting. My old pupil, Mr. William Libbey, called afterwards. He with many other young men and students from the different universities had come purposely to observe the eclipse, and Mrs. Jackson, the beloved H. H. of the literary world, quickly found us out. But no kindness could reconcile us to a life full of strange conditions. Mary went back to New York with some returning friends in a month; I, as soon as I could bear the journey, and Lilly and Alice as quickly as the bitter cold of winter was over, and it was safe for Alice to cross the plains. Thankfully I close this chapter with our happy reunion in some pleasant rooms in the St. Stephens, a very quiet respectable hotel on Eleventh Street and University Place. Many of my Rutherford friends stayed there when in town for a few days, and it was also the resort of at least three ministers whom I knew well. We lived there a long time, for among its many advantages was its proximity to the Astor and the Mercantile Libraries. The day after my return to New York I went back to my sunny quiet alcove in the Astor, and found the paper and pencils I had left on its table untouched. I lifted them with affection, and tears sprang to my eyes as I looked around the hall, and from far and near received a smile and a nod of welcome. For I was the familiar of most of the alcove students, and always ready to give them the help of my own index in finding the material they wanted. All day long, I had little visits and pleasant words, and at the lunch hour Dr. Strasneky, the superintendent, came and chatted with me about my journey. He said he was glad to see me in my place again. "Every one missed you," he continued, "we all liked to look up and see you sitting here, as happy and busy as if writing was the most blessed work in the world." "So it is, Doctor," I answered. "If we write good words, and write them well, it is the work God gives to His beloved." "You talk mystically," he said, "but you write plain enough. Don't go away again." As he left me, a tall, pale young man brought his lunch in his hand, and sat down to eat it beside me. It was Wolcott Balestier, the brother of the young lady whom Rudyard Kipling married, and no mean writer of fiction. He was employed in the Patent Department, and he never told me he was writing. He liked to eat his lunch beside me, and discuss the people around, and what they were doing. Sometimes he gave me some of his marshmallows, and I gave him half of my apple. We always had a happy moment over these exchanges, and he used to banter me for being so extravagant as to buy apples, when they were five cents each. Well, when I first came to New York, I had sometimes hesitated between the apple and the ride home. If I got my apple, I had to walk up to Eighteenth Street, if I could do without my apple I could afford the cars home. Always the apple won, for I told myself, "I ought to walk home after sitting so long. It is really a question of health, and not of apples." I wonder how it would have affected me, if I had been then made sure, that the day was coming when I would have apple trees of many kinds, that were all my own, and apples without stint to eat, and to sell, and to give away. Would it have been good for me to know this? No. It would not. Every one's experience will teach them that much. Above all other visitors in my alcove, I liked Frank Norton. He also was in the Patent Department, but I never saw a man so far out of his place. It was hard enough for young Balestier to be working over some old mechanical patent, when he was dreaming of love and ladies and great adventures; but the darkly handsome Professor N---- dwelt constantly among the stars, and believed himself to be spiritually related to them. He came into my alcove one day, and began talking about our earth having once been part of the sun, and he declared that her day and night, her tides and seasons, and simplest phenomena, would be unintelligible without taking into account her heavenly companions. He then attempted to prove to me how these extra-telluric influences, have also dominion over the phenomena of mind, because man, being a product not only of the earth but of the universe, is influenced by the stars as well as the earth. I confess that his wisdom was mostly beyond me, but I was greatly delighted with the word "telluric" and when he talked of "extra-telluric influences" I was eager and anxious to know what the word might mean. As soon therefore as he left me, I went to a dictionary and found out. I might have asked him, and saved some stair-climbing and research, but I knew if I compelled myself to look for the meaning, I would never forget it. Ever since the word has had a charm for my ear, and I have wanted to use it in the books I have written; but this is the first opportunity I have found. Professor N---- was then a young, handsome man, enthusiastically full of dreams, and of an extra-telluric nature; yet apparently under very good telluric influences, for he was always happy, always well dressed, and always had the air of a man well supplied with money. I wonder where he is today, and I hope sincerely that the stars and all other extra-telluric powers, have been very kind and generous to him. And on the evening of the day on which this conversation with Professor N---- occurred, after thinking it over, I said to myself, "This earth, with its days and nights, its change of seasons, its tides and earthquakes, and magnetic storms, may be under extra-telluric influences; but the phenomena of the soul, is beyond all such control. By some mysterious exercise of its own powers, it moves on from phase to phase, from gloom to sunshine, from doubt to faith, from repose to activity, and natural laws are of no importance to it. What telluric, or extra-telluric influence, _can govern thought_?" * * * * * Lilly had always been the manager of our home affairs, and now that this employment was taken away, her mind reverted to mission work; and she went on a journey for the American Missionary Society that promised her a great deal of the kind of adventure she liked. She was to go to the southern states where schools and home missions had been established to report on the work they were doing, and the success or failure that had attended it. I do not remember how long she was thus occupied, but it was not long, for she was soon busy in her own way "among southern cabins;" for in Charleston she met Mr. Tourgee, and he advised her to go to John's Island, which lay some miles off the coast of South Carolina and was famous for its long staple cotton. Here, he told her, she would find negroes far different from the usual type, and natural surroundings of great beauty and interest. On this island there was a fine old manor house called "Headquarters," then owned by a Mr. and Mrs. Peck, and she went there to see it. Every brick in this house had been brought from England by Lord Fenwick its builder, and its noble entrance hall, leaded library windows, and magnificent cypress paneling were still in beautiful preservation. It received its name from having been headquarters during the war of the Revolution, the war of A.D. 1812, and twice during the war of A.D. 1860. A very sincere friendship grew up between its owners and Lilly, and she stayed at "Headquarters" more than a year, writing charming papers about its woods and lagoons, its birds and reptiles, and its picturesque and exceedingly interesting negro life and character. These papers were all bought by the _Independent_ and _Harper's Weekly_. Immediately after her settlement at "Headquarters," she began to dream of, or to see in a kind of vision, an old lady and gentleman who appeared to be much interested in her. Their dress was that prevalent among the nobles and gentry during the reign of Queen Anne, or the early Georges, and they impressed her with a strong persuasion of their constant care and guardianship. She was sure that it was not only interest, but love that prompted them. Phantoms, of course! Yes, but phantoms of remarkable clearness and evidence, and all the time she was at "Headquarters" she saw, or she dreamed of them. Now the singular point in this experience, was not known until this summer, when I received officially from the county clerk a list of all the references to my family, the Huddlestons of Millom, to be found in the county histories of the shires of Cumberland and Westmoreland. It will be remembered that I have just stated, that this fine old mansion was built by Lord Fenwick, and in the historical list just referred to, I find the following record: "John Huddleston, son of the above-named Richard, who succeeded his father in 1337, married a daughter of Henry Fenwick, Lord of Fenwick, county of Northumberland." These few lines gave me food for some very pleasant thoughts, which I followed further than I can do here, but it was evident that these early Fenwicks who built "Headquarters," still remembered that their family and the Huddlestons were kindred. After more than five hundred years had elapsed, as we count them, they remembered it, and knew that the alliance still influenced the Huddleston strain. Well, then the dead do not forget in the next life what happened in this life. Also, the affections of the dead remain in the same channel as when they were on earth. Far off from the original strain as Lilly was, they knew her, and they felt an interest in her welfare and safety. My readers can of themselves follow out these trains of thoughts; they may find comfort and explanations in so doing. And I think those of our families who are in another world like us to remember them. Truly Lilly needed some protection, for she was surrounded by many dangers; the climate was dangerous, the reptile life was dangerous, and the negro element was tremendously in the ascendant; there being only forty white families on the whole island, while the negroes probably numbered four thousand, more or less. And Lilly knew not the word fear; she stood an hour in the hot swamp one day, and watched the long battle between a very large rattlesnake and an equally large black snake, watched them at close quarters until the black snake tore the skin off his antagonist, and left him flayed from head to tail in the burning sun. It never struck her that there was any danger to herself. "The snakes," she said, "paid no attention to me. They were too busy with themselves. I was in no danger whatever." And at that time, in that lonely island, the white man and woman had no fear of the black man; nor did Lilly see while she was there any ill will of the black man to the whites. They still regarded with liking and respect the white families to which they had belonged, as the following incident will exemplify. One woman had worked four years after her freedom for her master, and he had never paid her any wage. Lilly asked "Why do you not sue him, Mary? The law would give you your wage, for he is able to pay it." "O Miss Lill," was the answer, with a positive shake of the head, "we couldn't hab a suit in the fambly." So much trust was there then in the old servants, that Lilly accompanied by Mrs. Peck, often went to Charleston in the long boat, rowed by four black men. Their leader was a gigantic negro called Binyard, and to his impromptu songs and recitatives the oars kept time all the sixteen miles. Thus when Binyard saw a steamer approaching, his stentorian voice hailed it thus: "Git out ob de way, you steamboat! Binyard's on de ribber! Binyard's on de ribber, steamboat, Git out ob Binyard's way!" Then when the steamer swept across their bow and left them rocking in its wash he continued, "Go on dis time, little steamer, I let you pass dis time, Dere's white ladies on Binyard's boat, So he let you pass dis time-- "But keep out ob de way, steamboat, When no white ladies wid him; He sink you sure, little steamboat; He sink you wid his oar!" As soon as they cleared Ashley River, and got fairly around the bend and into Stono River, they met many boats coming from John, James, and Edisto Islands, and then invariably the singing began, the leading boat flinging out the challenge, "Gwine to hang up de sword in Zion?" and the rest answering, "Yes, Lord! 'Tis a great camp meeting In de Promised Land!" And this spiritual was followed by others, until they went singing into "Headquarters" landing. It is all changed now. The negro has been to the university and got "eddicated" and the white man no longer trusts him, and the white woman fears him. In the evening hours while Mary was out at various houses, or entertainments I wrote a novel, one of the very best I ever wrote. It was called "The Last of the McAllisters." I sent it to Henry Holt, being moved to do so by a feeling I could not resist, and cannot explain. He returned it with a letter saying, "If you will write me an American novel as clever and interesting, I will gladly publish it." This letter, so kind and wise, set me thinking of the possibilities of American history for fiction, and was in fact the seed thought of "The Bow of Orange Ribbon," and consequently of the series of American historical tales which followed it. The origin of novels is often very interesting, and far to seek. Early in November, 1880, I had an almost fatal attack of inflammation of the brain, followed before I recovered consciousness, by double pneumonia. At the crisis of the sickness, I was for five days neither _here_ nor _there_. Where was I? I was in a land where all was of fine shifting sand, a land of such awful silence, that I could _feel_ the deadly stillness. And I wanted to pray, and could not pray. I was conscious of no pain, and no desire, but this terrible, urgent longing to pray, and yet not being able to cry to God for help. To want God, and to have no power to call Him, or to go to Him, was an agony there are no words to express. At last, as I stood helpless and hopeless among mountains of sand, there was a whisper, and the pang of unpermitted prayer was taken away. Then I cried out, "Spare me, Lord, that I may recover strength, before I go hence and be no more forever." Instantly I was conscious. I knew that I was on earth, in my own room, and I spoke one word, "_Mary!_" Mary was kneeling beside me, kissing my almost clay hands and face, and moistening my lips with drops of water. And I knew that I was saved. I knew that God had really given me a new life--a new physical and mental power. Physicians had said, I would never be mentally well again. I was dictating poems and other work to Mary, before I was permitted to have any light in my room--when I lay in my bed, while Mary stood at the open door, writing down my words. My convalescence was rapid and sure. I was in the Astor Library on the twenty-first of March, making notes for an article on "Nollekins, the Sculptor," for _Harper's Monthly_. The next week I went again for notes on "Beating the Bounds" for Mr. Munroe, the editor of _Harper's Young People_. I had been four months in my room. I felt now an urgent necessity to be at work again. I have a list beside me of the work I did in this month of March, and of the work done in the nine months following. It may interest some of my friends to read the list for March, because I was then scarcely out of the shadow of the grave. It includes twelve poems, four for _Harper's Weekly_ and eight for the _Ledger_, as follows: "An old Man's Valentine." "'Tis God's World After All." "Blue and Gray Together." "John's Wife." "The Fortune Teller." "The Best I Can." "The Lover that Comes in the Morning." "No Room for Me." "When To Drop the Bridle." "We've Always Been Provided For." "When Mother and I Were Married." Beside these twelve poems, I went to the library and procured the material for the Nollekins article, a lengthy one which depicted the Georgian life and celebrities; wrote two articles for _Lippincott's_, and the school paper called "Beating the Bounds," for the editor of _Harper's Young People_. For the year following, I have a list which shows one hundred and thirty-one poems, eight stories, two of which were long enough to be called novelettes, and twenty-five articles referring mostly to remarkable people, places or events. [Illustration: MRS. BARR, November, 1880] But when the home is broken up the family scatters. I felt this painfully, for I missed Lilly constantly, and Mary was a great deal with friends, or away, so that Alice and I were really much alone. I had most of the office work to do, and was obliged to leave her when about it, though I took her with me to the library, if the weather was favorable. Under these conditions it was as easy for me to go to England as to remain in New York during the summer, and in May, 1882, having just finished and sold to Appleton, my book on the "Children of Shakespeare's Dramas," I took Alice and went first to Glasgow and afterwards to Yorkshire; remaining away until Christmas was approaching. During that summer vacation, so-called, I sent back to New York eighty-one poems, stories, and descriptive articles, and this number does not include poems and stories written for English papers and magazines during the same period, but of which I have kept no list. These eighty-one poems and stories were sent to Mary, who managed their sale so well, that all were placed and mostly paid for, when I returned home. This voyage is memorable to me because of a great salvation. On May the third, 1882, I dreamed that a Presence whose enmity I felt, stood by my bedside and said, "You are going to be lost! You are going to be lost! You are going to be ship-wrecked!" And I answered, even as I slept, "I do not believe you. God is able and willing to keep me in all my ways, and my soul trusteth in Him forever." Then I awoke, and I said consciously over and over, the words I had said in my dream, and so fell asleep again, fighting the fear in my heart with trust and faith. And again I dreamed a Presence stood by my side, a holy loving Presence, and it said confidently "Go, and the Lord be with thee" (1st Samuel, 17:37). And I opened my eyes full of happiness, and there was no shadow of fear in my heart, and three days afterwards Alice and I sailed in the _Devonia_ for Glasgow. We were, as before said, in Scotland and Yorkshire all summer; but took passage for New York again on the eleventh of November. I held fast to the promise given me, and in pleading it for our return voyage, I was suddenly affected in a remarkable way, by the wording of the promise. For the first time I noticed the word "_be_" in it. It seemed to stand out more plainly than any other word. Then I understood. God had promised not only to go with me, but to _be_ with me. That was sufficient. There were very few saloon passengers. I remember only two ladies beside Alice and myself, an actress, and a Mrs. Orr of Cornwall-on-Hudson. No one comes into your life for nothing, and the next year being advised to go to the mountains for a month or two, I remembered what this lady had said about Cornwall, and I wrote and asked her if she knew of a house I could rent. She advised me to come and see Cornwall. I did so, took a house for six months, and have been here twenty-eight years. Our first three days at sea were fine, and the wind favorable; the next day the sea was rough, and I was thrown against the brass pipe of the saloon stove, and my right hand painfully burned. On the eighteenth of November, at eleven o'clock at night, we broke our machinery, and in the morning, when I went on deck, I was appalled by the sight of the deck covered with pieces of iron, and wreckage of every kind; and my heart for a moment failed me. For nine days we drifted helplessly about the Atlantic, but all the time, day and night, men were working steadily to repair our engine. Captain Young, a devout man and a fine sailor, was speechlessly anxious, but he clung to Alice whenever he saw her, for she had told him the ship would reach New York safely; and he believed her. On the night of the twenty-seventh, after dinner, he asked Alice and me to pray for the ship. "At eight bells," he said, "listen and pray! We are then going to try the engine. If she works, we may, if God wills, reach our harbor in safety----" "And if not, Captain?" "We shall still be in God's hands." With these words he turned away, and Alice and I watched faithfully with the anxious man. At eight bells we were on our knees, and as the bells began to strike, _the thud of the engine began with them_. "I told you all would be right," said Alice, and I kissed her, and both our cheeks were wet. A few days later in the afternoon, Alice sitting quite alone in the saloon saw smoke coming from a place where smoke had no business. She instantly found an officer, and he ran for the captain. For a few hours there was an unusual commotion, but the subject was not named, and I understood from the captain's reticence, that danger was over, and that silence was wise, and even imperative. For our long detention at sea, had made both water and provisions very scarce, and there was actual mutiny among the emigrant passengers, whose number was unusually large. It happened, however, that there was a big consignment of nuts on board, and they were given to the angry crowd, who were thus pacified. Two days afterwards we reached our pier in New York harbor, so grateful and happy, that we hardly felt the blustering wind, and snow and cold. We had been threatened with fire, and shipwreck, and mutiny, but all had failed to really injure. Nothing of us had suffered; for He had given His angels charge concerning us. My readers, I hope, remember what I wrote about charms. They were not my words, but I endorsed them from my experience. Well I confess that this wonderful verse, 1st Samuel, 17:37, has assumed something of the character of a sacred amulet. When I first read it, I wrote the words of the covenant God had given me on a piece of paper, folded the paper with a prayer, and put it into a little pocket of my purse. It remained there for many, many years. Other documents placed beside it became invalid, useless, or outworn, and were destroyed. But the golden promise of God's constant care remained. On certain occasions, I took it out and reminded God, that it read He would _be_ with me. Finally the writing became so nearly illegible, and the paper so frail I solemnly renewed both, putting this renewal in the same purse pocket, where it remains unto this moment. It will go to the grave with me, for I will never give up that promise. God made it. God will keep it. Whether I deserve it, or not, He will keep it. Yea, if I did not deserve one letter of it, all the more I would plead, "Because I seek Thee not, Oh, seek Thou me, Because my lips are dumb, oh, hear the cry I do not utter as Thou passest by! Because content I perish far from Thee, Oh, seize and snatch me from my fate; draw nigh, And let me blinded, Thy Salvation see. "If I were pouring at thy feet my tears, If I were clamoring to see Thy face, I should not need Thee, Lord, as _now_ I need, Because my dumb, dead soul knows neither hopes nor fears, Nor dreads the outer darkness of this place, Because I seek not, pray not, _give Thou heed_!" For, alas! there have been times in the years gone by when I was even in such case, when I went wandering after strange Gods, and New Thought, and my dear, closed Bible reproached me. But of this interlude I will write in its proper place. I name it here, only that I may have the opportunity of thanking God as frequently as I possibly can, for the blessed, eternal possibility of repentance. For well I know, that God is merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and plenteous in mercy, and that "... our place is kept, and it will wait Ready for us to fill, soon or late; No star is ever lost we once have seen, We always may be, what we might have been." In March and April of 1883 I wrote one of the most interesting of all my Scotch novels. I began it on March twenty-fifth, and finished it on the thirtieth of April. I worked on it nine hours every day excepting four days when I only wrote eight hours. During this same time I wrote the following for Robert Bonner and _Harper's_: _Mar. 25th._ Finished my long paper on famous Irish women and began my novel, "Cluny MacPherson." _Mar. 26th._ At home all day writing on "Cluny MacPherson." _Mar. 27th._ Ditto. _Mar. 28th._ Writing on "Cluny" all morning. Went down to several offices in afternoon. Did nothing in the evening. Had a bad headache. _Mar. 29th._ Very sick headache, but wrote "Cato's Song." _Mar. 30th._ At the last hour wrote "Two Workers" for Bonner, and he praised it very much, a great thing for him to do. _Mar. 31st._ Very sick. Went to the dentist's but could not have anything done. _April 1st._ Wrote an "April Wedding" and worked on "Cluny." _April 2nd._ Still sick but on "Cluny," and wrote "The Reconciliation." _April 3rd._ All day on "Cluny;" in the evening wrote "Lending a Hand." _April 4th._ All day on "Cluny." _April 5th._ All day on "Cluny." _April 6th._ All day on "Cluny," but am feeling tired. _April 7th._ On "Cluny," very tired. A wet day and Peter Cooper's funeral. _April 8th._ On "Cluny," and wrote a poem called "O Mollie, How I Love You!" _April 9th._ On my novel nine hours. _April 10th._ On my novel eight hours. _April 11th._ On my novel eight hours. _April 12th._ On my novel eight hours, and wrote "Two Ships." _April 13th._ On my novel nine hours. _April 14th._ On my novel eight hours. _April 15th, 16th, 17th._ Nine hours each. _April 18th._ Very sick. _April 19th._ Wrote "My Pretty Canary" and "The Little Evangel." _April 20th._ Wrote nine hours on "Cluny." _April 21st to 28th._ I wrote all day long on "Cluny," but managed to write for _Harper's_ a poem called, "A Tap at the Door." _April 29th._ On "Cluny," and wrote for Bonner a poem called, "Take Care." _April 30th._ Wrote "A Birthday," finished "Cluny" and took it to Mr. Rand, of the Tract House. Eleven days afterwards I saw Mr. Rand, and he told me they were reading proof, and much pleased with the book, and on February seventeenth, A.D. 1884, I received a letter from _the_ Cluny MacPherson, chief of the clan MacPherson, thanking me for such a good picture of the clan life. The letter was dated from Castle Cluny, but the chief himself filled some important office in the Queen's Household. Just about the time that I finished "Cluny MacPherson," Lilly returned home at my urgent request, and we went to housekeeping in some furnished rooms at 128 East Tenth Street. Then I made a short visit to England, leaving Alice at home with her sisters, as she was very averse to taking another ocean voyage. My visit to Glasgow this year contained one scene, which made a great impression on me, and the recent death of General Booth brings it back so vividly, that I think my readers will be interested in the picture of this early salvation service. At that time I had thought little of the movement. What I had seen of its noisy, moblike parades, with their deafening clang of cymbals and drums, and their shouting, jumping excitement, was not calculated to enlist the sympathy of intelligent persons. But then it was not such persons Mr. Booth wished to reach. "I have been sent into the world, to do the Lord's gutter work," was his own definition of his mission; and certainly at that day, his methods could only appeal to those on the lowest plane of humanity. Well, one Saturday night in June, I had been dining with an old friend living beyond Rutherglen Bridge on the east side of the city, and in returning to my hotel, I had to pass through that portion of the old town, where Hamilton Street, High Street, the Saltmarket, and the Trongate pour their night crowd into the open place around the old Cross. The rain was falling in a black, steady downpour. The ragged crowd was swaying to and fro to the sounds of drums and cornets, and above all, I heard the shrill continuous scream of a woman's voice. I put down the window of the carriage, and saw the woman. She was marching, with an open Bible in her hands, at the head of a noisy crowd, and reading, or rather reciting, verses from the Gospels. Her face showed deathly white from under her black hood, her voice cut the yellow dismal fog in sharp screaming octaves, her whole appearance was that of one inspired or insane, and the rain poured down on the barefooted women, with ragged kilted petticoats, and wretched little babies hanging over their shoulders, who followed her. I shut the window, and shut my eyes in a kind of horror. I had a feeling, that somewhere, centuries ago, I had seen such a nightmare of black houses, and black rain, and such a heaving and tossing flood of miserable humanity, and somehow it comforted me to hope, that through the tumult, the fierce sorrowful laughter, and drunken jibes, some poor breaking heart must have heard, and understood, that woman's shrill intensity as she called out, "_Come unto Me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest_." I had another experience of the Salvation Army, so perfectly Scotch and so characteristic, that I think my friends will be pleased to hear it. I was coming down the old Shorehead of Arbroath, and I met a band of men and women carrying flags and singing hymns. In Glasgow I had become familiar with these parades, and had been astonished at the toleration with which they were regarded. But the men and women of Arbroath, were of a different spirit and the tumult, and abusive storm of language became so great, that I stepped inside a little shop for shelter. The proprietor, a very dry rusk of a Scotchman, in a green duffle apron, and a red Kilmarnock night cap, was standing at the open door. "The Salvation Army?" I said inquiringly. "Ye arena far wrang." "What do you think of them?" "I'm thinking it is better for men to meddle wi' the things o' God, which they canna change, than wi' those o' the government wi' which they can wark a' kinds o' mischief and mischance. Thae Irish kirns now!" Then his face flushed, angrily, and fixing his eyes on a lad who was in the procession he cried, "If there isna my Jock wi' thae loons! Certie, the words arena to seek, that I'll gie him, when he wins home again!" "Then you don't approve of the movement?" I asked. "What way would I do that?" "Have you read or heard anything of Mr. Booth?" "Ow, ay, he is just a parfect Goliath o' conceit, but he isna the man to hold the deil, for a' his talk." "Is there a deil to hold? You know some ministers have given up the idea of personal devil," I said; and I quite anticipated _the look_ I got in reply, "Have they? Ay weel, getting rid o' the Wicked One, hasna got us rid o' the wicked. Good day to _you_, ma'am. I'll be requiring to go ben." These scenes were in the early days of the Salvation Army. A short time afterward, I saw Glasgow ministers of the strictest sect of the Calvinistic Pharisees, with their congregations at their heels, following the music of the Moody and Sankey evangelical movement, and I met their leaders as guests in the most exclusive religious families. After my return home Dr. Talmage, then editor of the _Christian At Work_, asked me to tell him frankly, which side the paper ought to take. "The popular side," I answered. "Is that for, or against them?" "For them, decidedly. Sankey's voice draws the crowd, and then they listen to Moody's speaking, and so the singing may lead to prayer." "You think it will be a success?" "It _is_ a success," I answered, "and is going to a very great one." Then Dr. Talmage turning to Mr. B---- the active editor said, "_The Christian At Work_, will stand with Moody and Sankey, Mr. B----. It is the proper thing to do, I suppose?" "Yes," I answered, and he then asked if I had "seen anything of General Booth." "I have seen him several times," I replied. "What kind of a man is Booth?" Dr. Talmage asked. "A big man, every way. He is the Cromwell of Dissent." I heard that he was a passionate little Chartist when he was thirteen years old. I will tell you something, a good name is a good fortune, and the name of the Salvation Army was a kind of inspiration. One day a secretary drawing up a paper wrote, "We are a Volunteer Army," and Mr. Booth took the pen from his hand, crossed out the word "Volunteer" and wrote in its place "_Salvation_." He saw in a moment the splendid capabilities of the word, it fitted itself to the work, as promptly as the stuttering out of the word "tee-to-tal" inaugurated the grand successes of the temperance cause. They are burying William Booth today, and no one can deny that he has fought a good fight; for he, and only he and his army, reach down to that strata of humanity which has fallen below the churches; and which are emphatically "ready to perish." And if the Salvation Army only succeeds in facing a man around, or in making him take one step upward, instead of downward, there is hope for his next reincarnation. CHAPTER XXII THE LATEST GOSPEL: KNOW THY WORK AND DO IT "What is our Life? A strange mixture of good and evil; of ill-assorted fates and pathetic acquiescences; and of the overpowering certainty of daily needs, against the world of thoughts, and Shadows." * * * * * "The object of Life is to gain wisdom through experience, even one life forces us to this conclusion." In this year, 1883, I went to England alone, staying most of the time with Mr. Sam Wilson, who had been my friend and playmate when I was six years old. He was then a very tall fine-looking man of fifty-two years of age, with a beautiful and clever wife, and a son studying medicine in Edinburgh University. His handsome residence, with its wealth of flowers, was in the suburbs of Bradford, Yorkshire, and I remained there for many happy weeks; paying a short visit to London in the interval, and loitering some time around Glasgow, from which port I sailed to New York. But I had a heartache all the time I was away about Mary, who I feared was going to marry, and I did not wish her to do so. I could not find one objection to the young man she intended to espouse. They had been friends for three years, and were truly attached to each other. He was a clever writer, especially for boys, and the first editor of _Harper's Young People_. He was fine-looking, gentlemanly, and quite sufficiently good-hearted for the world he was living in, fond of outdoor sports of all kinds, both on land and water, and a traveler who loved ways unknown and adventurous. I believe he was the first white man who penetrated the recesses of the Everglades. Incidentally it may be noticed, that he was a great friend of the Seminole Indians, who lived in the Everglades, and that to this day, he is regarded by them as their true comrade. So what chance had I against a lover of such manifold attractions? I knew I must lose, and I thought I could bear it better at a distance. In the middle of the Atlantic one night, I dreamed that Robert came to me and said, "This morning, Mary was married to Kirk Munroe." He said other things, but they were entirely personal, and may not be repeated; but when I awoke I was consoled and reconciled. And it has always been my way to accept the inevitable as cheerfully as possible, so I told myself "I will now forget." If Mary was happier with a stranger, than with the mother who had cherished and loved her, and worked for her for thirty-three years, well I must be content to shave my own pleasure to increase hers. Had I not done it all the years of her life? It was no new sacrifice. But I said all such things with a swelling heart, and eyes full of unshed tears. Yet the marriage has been a singularly happy and sympathetic one, and though her home is in southern Florida, she comes every year to spend a month with me. And I am now content in her happiness. With the main events of my business life, Mary's marriage made no difference. I wrote constantly, and spent my days mostly in the Astor Library and Lilly or I attended to the office work, as was most convenient. The year 1884 found me writing a story called "Sandiland's Siller" which I finished on the sixteenth of January, noting in my diary, that I was tired, having composed the last six pages, and copied the last thirty-five pages that day. On the following day I took "Sandiland's" to Dr. Stevenson of the _Illustrated Christian Weekly_. I mailed a poem called "He That Is Washed" to Mr. Mabie of the _Christian Union_, "Three Wishes" to _The Advance_, two little verses to _Puck_, and wrote "The Household Thrush" for Mr. Bonner. The first three poems had been written at intervals, while I was working on "Sandiland's Siller;" "The Household Thrush," only, was written on the seventeenth. About this latter poem the following incident occurred. It contained five verses, the length Mr. Bonner preferred, and the first three verses referred to the thrush. Mr. Bonner read it, and then turning to Lilly said, "Too much bird, before you come to the girl." "Take some of the bird away, Mr. Bonner," answered Lilly; and he smiled, cut out one verse, and handed her ten dollars. There were things about Mr. Bonner writers did not like, but all appreciated his clever criticisms, and his prompt payment. When Lilly came home and laughingly told me this story I was much amused. We had a merry little lunch together, and then I made three pencil drawings to illustrate an article called "The Fishers of Fife" which I intended to begin the following day. The list of work done by me from this time to the twenty-sixth of May is hardly credible. On that day I fell from the library steps while sitting on them reading, and hurt my foot and my neck very much. The next day I had a high fever, and was suffering severely from nervous shock. For nine days I was unable to do anything, and by that time the swollen condition of my throat was alarming, and I sent for Dr. Fleuhrer, a very clever surgeon. For fourteen more days I was under his care, then I began to improve, so that on _June 24th._ I began an article on the Scotch Highlands for Mr. Mabie. _June 25th._ I was writing on the same. Still in bed but mending slowly. _June 26th._ Finished and copied the Highland article. _June 27th._ I began "Jan Vedder's Wife," and on this day also received fifty-five pounds from London for work done for _The Leisure Hour_ and the _Sunday Magazine_. Lilly was down at Bonner's when the checks came, but as soon as I showed them to her, she said, "Mamma, we have now plenty of money to furnish comfortably. Don't you want your own home, Mamma?" "O Lilly!" I cried, "there is nothing on earth I want so much. Dear, dear child, go and look for what will suit us. Go tomorrow! Go this afternoon!" So that afternoon Lilly went home hunting, and I wrote happily on "Jan Vedder's Wife" and Alice sat sewing beside me, touching my hand every now and then and smiling. On the twenty-eighth the flat suitable was found, and on the thirtieth I managed to get into a cab and go _home_. All was in confusion, but such happy confusion, that we did not think of sleeping until midnight. In a week the new home was in perfect order, and I was able to be on the sofa, and to write "Jan Vedder's Wife" more swiftly and comfortably. So sweet was home! So good was home, that I now felt all things possible, and really I had not been as happy, since Robert and I went into the wood cottage with its domestic ceilings, in Austin, and turned it into the prettiest and happiest of dwellings. Lilly and Alice furnished the rooms as they desired, and I was quite pleased and full of content. And it was a great joy when the eleventh of July came round to find that my wedding anniversary was not now to be forgotten. In hotels it had seemed out of place to keep it. I do not know why, but it had always slipped past with a kiss and a word or two. But on this happy day, Lilly set a fine dinner, and Mary sent a wedding cake; we had a bottle of sparkling Moselle, and drank silently but lovingly to the memory of those of our household dwelling in the City Celestial; and our tears of love and hope made the wine sacramental--a pledge and token of our remembrance and our thanksgiving. There does not seem much to write about in the life of a woman lame and sick, and confined to a flat in an upper Park Avenue. But our existence is always a story, for the fruit of life is experience, not happiness. And every experience that helps us in our ultimate aim of becoming a Spiritual Being, though it be as trite as suffering, is worthy of being considered. Chesterton calls Christ's counsel to "take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed?" an amazing command. To the majority it is an amazing command, but writers who love their work understand it. I was busy on "Jan Vedder's Wife," and so interested in the story that I forgot I was sick, and the processes of convalescence went right on without my regarding them. When the story was finished I read it to Lilly. It was then complete in four chapters, and she listened to them with critical interest, and when I laid down the manuscript said, "It is too good for a short story, Mamma; make it into a novel. You have sufficient material and characters, and if the latter are more fully drawn out, the material will be better." "But," I asked, "can we afford it? I shall get one hundred and fifty for it from the _Christian Union_ just as it is, and we need the money." "No, we do not," she replied, "and if we did, I would still say, write it over, Mamma. It is a shame not to write it fully, just because we might want five dollars;" and she pushed my paper and pencils towards me with an encouraging smile. Then I began it all over, and added nearly two hundred pages. When all were corrected and copied I sent it by Lilly to Mr. Bonner. For once this reticent man broke his usual custom, and commented on the work in "the straight-flung words and few," which reflected him. "It is a good story, a fine story," he said. "Take it to Dodd, Mead and Company. It will suit them. It is too good for the _Ledger_." And when Lilly came home, and told me what Mr. Bonner had said, there flashed across my mind a dream I had had a week previously, in which Robert had given me the same advice. Christ said, that if one rose from the dead to inform, or direct us, we would not believe their message, and evidently I had not believed the dead, until they spoke through a mortal whose business capacities I trusted. I have often reproached myself on this score, but--Oh, there is no "but." I have no excuse for my want of faith. [Illustration: MISS MARY BARR (Mrs. Kirk Munroe)] I had finished the novel of "Jan Vedder's Wife" on the sixteenth of September, 1884, the seventeenth anniversary of Robert's death, and on October, the twelfth, I gave up the regular use of crutches, though my foot was extremely weak and painful, and I had nearly constant headaches. But on this date, I began a story called "Janet McFarlane," which I finished on the twenty-first and sent to the _Advance_. On the twenty-sixth I began a story called "Paul and Christina," which was published in the _Christian Union_ and afterwards enlarged to book size and published by Dodd, Mead and Company. On the twenty-eighth, I note that "Mary and Kirk Munroe took tea with us," so I had by that time conquered my dislike to her marriage; for I do not ask people to eat with me, if I have any ill will toward them. Those who do not understand me, will perhaps live to do so, for "... soon or late the fact grows plain, To all through sorrow's test, The only folks who give us pain, Are those we love the best." On the first of November I was at the Astor Library again, but did not dare to go upstairs to my alcove. On the second of November I was finishing "Paul and Christina" began on the twenty-sixth of October. On the second, third and fourth of November I was at the library, and on the fifth so ill, I had to summon Dr. Fleuhrer's help again. I was sick for a week then reviewed and corrected "Paul and Christina" and took it in the afternoon to the _Christian Union_. On the same day the Sisters from a Religious Order, living near us, began to teach Alice. I say "Sisters" because they were not allowed to go anywhere alone, so one came to teach, and the other came, for what purpose I know not. On the nineteenth I wrote "Going to Church Together," a poem for Bonner, and a New Year's article for the _Illustrated Christian Weekly_; Kirk came to tea. Mary was in Boston with his father and mother. The following day I was at the library and wrote "Lacordaire Dying." On the twenty-third I wrote "Mary," a Christmas poem, and Kirk came to tea; we had a pleasant evening, and I wrote in my diary, "He is a nice fellow, after all." On the twenty-fifth I arranged with the _Christian Union_ for the first study of "Paul and Christina." They gave me one hundred and twenty dollars, and on the twenty-seventh of November, A.D. 1884, I _received a letter from Dodd, Mead and Company accepting "Jan Vedder's Wife."_ It happened to be Thanksgiving Day, and this letter made it a memorable one, for it altered the whole course of my life. I had this letter framed, and it hangs now before me in my study as I write. Time has faded the four lines it contained, but they are graven on memory's tablet, and the yellow paper and nearly colorless ink cannot hide from me the words of Promise it contained. On the twenty-eighth I saw Mr. Frank Dodd, and arranged with him for the publication of "Jan Vedder's Wife." He gave me three hundred dollars for the book, promising to add to this sum if it sold well, and I may mention here, that he subsequently sent me five hundred dollars more. He sent it of his own free will. I made neither claim nor request for it. Lilly was very proud of this sale, because, as I have related, the book was written at her request. I had not been so far as fortunate with my publishers, as with my editors. Mr. B---- of Appleton's, with whom I transacted the business relating to my volume on the "Children of Shakespeare's Dramas," was an unhappy, unpleasant man to deal with; but he is dead, and I think the Scotch reluctance to speak ill of the dead is at least a wise observance. The publisher of "Cluny MacPherson," and a volume of "Scottish Tales" was hard and dry as a brush. He had some selfish ideas about the society he represented, but he had no feelings. He had ceased to live with his heart. Mr. Jack Howard was just unfortunate. He was the publisher of the _Christian Union_ and my book, "Romances and Realities," came out just before the house failed, so that I never received a dollar for it. But that was not Mr. Howard's fault. He was always courteous and generous about any work I did for him. Lilly was very proud and happy because, as I have related, the book was written by her advice. "And what do you think of Mr. Dodd, Mamma?" she asked, as we eat drinking tea together. "Is he pleasant? Will you like to write for him?" "Yes," I answered. "He is pliant, yet resistant. I dare say he keeps his heart within his head, and so makes an even balance between business keenness and moral emotions." "I do not see that, Mamma." "It is plain enough, Lilly. The human brain is a machine for coming to conclusions. So is the heart. We may often trust the latter most safely. I do. Mr. Dodd would consult both." "Is he a religious man?" "How can I tell? I think so, but I am quite sure he is a straight, clean-living man." "Is he nice looking?" "Quite as nice as there is any necessity to be. The spirit of his face is attractive--that is enough." "Is he anything like A----?" "Walking majestically, and radiating awe and temper. No, Lilly, not in the least." "Or like B----?" "Self-conscious to the finger tips. No, not in the least." "Then like F----?" "A Philistine, proud of his class, and cheerfully living in Ascalon. No, you are far wrong yet." "Then like Dr. D----?" "When his conscience is taking its usual six days' sleep. No, you have not guessed at any resemblance. Publishers are as distinct a type of manhood as schoolmasters. They are even different from press men and editors. The latter are often compelled by their duties to waste their moral strength in politics, and their intellect in party journalism. Publishers can mind their own business, and are in no way injured by doing so." Thus we talked, as we eat and drank, but without any ill-nature. With the kindly race of editors I had, and have, the strongest sympathies. All that I have known have been kind and helpful to me, and if at times they showed a trifle of the petty unreasonableness of men dressed in a little brief authority, it did not hurt me. I said to myself--how true and striking that phrase is--I said to myself, "It is not you that offends, Amelia. It is something at his home, or down in the office--an unpleasant breakfast, or a disagreeable letter." So I bore no rancor, and at the next interview all was right. God was very kind and thoughtful for me, when he set me my work among such a kindly, clever, gentlemanly class of workers as editors. And I confess that I like people with tidal fluctuations of mood and temper. They are full of surprises; you always feel an interest in them. You think about them, and talk of them, and feel that they are as human as yourself. They are far more pleasant than men always cold, businesslike, reticent, polite. These latter are the men you desire to see in bronze, or marble, or even in encyclopedias, rather than in editorial chairs. Even if they are religiously perfect, they are unpleasant in a newspaper sanctum. For it is a trial to our faith in creeds, to find that in business matters, the justified are as selfish and unlovely as the reprobate. So though it is quite correct, that two and two make four, I have a liking for the man with whom the sum of two and two is variable. It is often five and six with me, and it may be ten or twenty, but when it is so, I trust humanity and love God best of all. If I now copy the closing entry in my diary for the year 1884, it most truly describes my condition at that time. _Dec. 31st._ A day of great suffering. I am still very far from well. I have been seven months ill. How my heart would have quailed at the _prospect_ but God has been sufficient. My throat is very bad, my foot, also, and I am generally weary and worn out--and very feeble. Only, thank God, my mind never fails, nor my heart--often. I know in Whom I have trusted for fifty-three years, and I can trust Him for all the rest. I have been copying the "Preacher's Daughter," but twenty-four pages wearied me. Mary is in Florida. All the rest as usual. God of my Fathers, accept my gratitude for all Thy great mercies to me. AMELIA E. BARR. 1507 PARK AVENUE, N.Y. I open 1885 with the following lines: Commit Thy ways unto the Lord. Thy Bread shall be given, and thy water sure. Let thy widows trust in me. The first and the last of these directions, were given to me in answer to prayer; the center one was my father's promise to me, when I bid him farewell forever in this life. I notice, nevertheless, that I am anxious about money matters, that I have six hundred dollars owing me, and cannot collect a dollar, and that I fear the _Ledger_ is not in good circumstances; nothing has been said, I write, and all appears the same, but I _feel_ a change of some kind. I was copying the "Preacher's Daughter," but was weak, and it was hard work. On the fifth of January I note that Dodd, Mead and Company paid me three hundred dollars for "Jan Vedder's Wife," and that I had a letter from London promising me money for my work soon, and that I also received a small check from _The Advance_. So once more I found out how good it is to commit my way unto the Lord, and that He brings things to pass, I cannot move. On the eleventh I see that Lilly was out all day among the shanties with Father B----, a Catholic priest "in the world," a man of great mercy and piety, with an intellect keen and well cultivated. There were many shanties on the rocks in our vicinity, and Lilly's missionary spirit had led her to make friends in all of them. She found them Roman Catholics in theory, but altogether negligent in practice. So she took Father B---- to stir up their faith, which he did with an authority they feared and obeyed. I was ill and nervous at the time, and it did not please me. I asked her what her Grandmother Barr would say, and I assured her she would never leave her a shilling. "I don't care either for her shillings or her pounds," Lilly answered. "I don't want them. If I have helped one soul back to its faith in God, or even to its faith in good angels to help it to God, that is better than all the gold in Scotland." "Angels!" I said. "Do you call Father B---- an angel? and what kind of a way will he lead them?" "A good way. The way of prayer. And also he will see that they take it. Now that he has found these few sheep in the wilderness, they will have to go back to the fold. That will be good for them everyway." "Well, Lilly, I hope you will not take his way." "Mamma, dear, we are all going to God, and some like the Roman Catholic way. My own forefathers for eight hundred years did so. They could not all be wrong--abbotts and priors and priests and nuns, all of them. They could not all be wrong." "Nor right." "Well none of us can deny that while the Huddlestons were of the old profession, they were famous and prosperous. They turned Protestant when that little German body that couldn't speak a word of English, came to govern us. The idea!" "Are you going to turn Catholic after all?" "I am going to be just what my Bible makes me." For I may as well state here that Lilly, though born in the very citadel of Calvinism, was a natural Catholic. She loved its ritual, and frequently went to confession. At one time it took all my pleading and influence, and all Dr. Tyng's eloquence to keep her out of a convent, and I had a year or two of constant fear and watchfulness. This was the year we lived on Lexington Avenue opposite the Dominican Church. There was at that time a priest there called Father McKenna, a holy man entirely separate from the world, night and day either before the altar, or among the most miserable of the living and the dying; and I think he was her inspiration. For long centuries Lilly's ancestors had been priests in the old profession, and Furness Abbey is full of their memorial stones as Abbotts of that rich and powerful brotherhood. Catholicism was in her heart and her blood, and she was animated by all the passionate missionary spirit of the old faith. I had much suffering and long months of miserable anxiety on this subject, and doubtless Lilly was just as unhappy, but this is one of those domestic tragedies not for the public ear, and I do not know how I came to write so much about it. I will, however, let it stand, for I would not be astonished if she yet went back to the Roman Church. Her soul has evidently belonged to it in all its incarnations, and I know that whenever she is in trouble or perplexity she goes to a Catholic priest for advice. One day I asked her, "Why?" "Because," she answered, "they never snub or ask me 'whose daughter art thou.' They know immediately that I am a Protestant, but they never turn me away. Kindly, and without prejudice they give me the best advice. It never comes out wrong." "But why not go to God for advice?" "Mamma, there are things, like love letters, for instance. Would you go to God with them?" "Yes," I replied. "Love letters may be very important things. At any rate, your mother might be better than a priest." "Mamma, dear, you know that you have a fixed conviction that love affairs should only occur in books. Now Frank is not a 'character,' he is a real, living, very delightful man." Then I said no more, for Frank Morgan was then a very sore subject of conversation, and I really was not sure in my own mind what I had against the young man. His parents were wealthy, and he was their only son. He was the captain of his company, handsome, gentlemanly, and particularly respectful and attentive to myself. It was hard to think wrong of him, and yet I did; and it was no use my deciding not to do so, for I invariably went back to my first impressions. This feeling made me patient, and perhaps less watchful and inquisitive than I should have been. But during the first half of 1885 I was very weak, and seldom out of pain, and on the eighteenth of January I went to see Dr. Fleuhrer, who made me very anxious. He said work and company were killing me, and I must go to the mountains and live more in solitude. When I went home I found Mrs. Van Duzen there, and after dinner Nat Urner and his wife came to spend the evening. The next morning I went to the Methodist Book Concern and wrote a preface for "The Hallam Succession," a novel written at Dr. Vincent's request on purely Methodist lines. I wanted to do my very best on this book; for I liked Dr. Vincent, and I liked to write of Methodism, but I did not please myself at all. I was really too sick to write well, and I ought not to have attempted it. On the twenty-sixth Lilly was at Harper's and found Miss Van Dyne removed from her place as editress of _Young People_, and Mr. Conant's office empty. She said there was general silence and distress; no one would talk, and she came away full of a sense of great trouble. Two days afterwards I went to the _Illustrated Christian Weekly_, and was shocked to see on the bulletin boards of all the newspapers "_S. S. Conant Still Missing_." I did not stop to read what followed. I was sick at heart, trembling, and glad to get safely into an empty Third Avenue horse-car, and lean for support against its upper-end corner. All the way uptown I was like a woman in a dream, for I was indeed living over a dream I had had a few days previously. This dream had troubled me much at the time, and when I related it to Lilly she listened silently, and made no remark but the following: "It was an evil dream, and I hope S. S. C. is not going to be ill." We seldom called Mr. Conant by his full name. When speaking of him we used his initials, as indeed he generally did himself. S. S. C. stood in every writer's mind for S. S. Conant. Well, I had dreamed three nights previously of standing in Park Row and looking up to an angry cloud-tossed sky. On this sky I saw the initials _S. S. C._ blazoned in immense black letters, and, as I watched, great masses of vengeful storm clouds came swiftly toward them, and drove them with a wild passion over the firmament, and out of sight. The dream made a profound impression on me, and when Lilly told me S. S. C. was lost, I answered, "He will not be found." "O Mamma, do not say that," she cried. "When he left the office, he said he was going to the Grand Central Railway Station. How can a man be lost between Harper's building and the Grand Central--unless he killed himself." "He did not do that," I answered, and then we were silent. Indeed, to me the great wonder of the mysterious disappearance was the dislike of any one to speak of it. The man passed away like a dream that is told. But I was anxious and unhappy. For years Mr. Conant had bought a large part of my work, and I looked upon him as a sure reliance. Who would take his place? I knew not, but I felt there had been one door closed forever. Then, I bid myself remember, "that as one door shuts, another opens; and that all the keys of the country did not hang from the Harper's belt." Still the little poem I wrote for Bonner that night shows the loneliness and longing I had for the love and protection once mine, which I had taken as I had taken hitherto my wonderful health and strength, and the daily bread that had never failed me: LOVED TOO LATE Year after year with glad content In and out of our home he went, In and out; Ever for us the skies were clear, His heart carried the care and fear, The care and doubt. Our hands held with a careless hold, All that he won of honor and gold, In toil and pain; O dear hands, that our burdens bore! Hands that shall toil for us no more, Never again! Oh, it was hard to learn our loss, Bearing daily the heavy cross, The cross he bore; To say with an aching heart and head, Would to God that the Love now dead Were here once more! For when the Love we held too light, Was gone away from our speech and sight, No bitter tears, No passionate words of fond regret, No yearning grief could pay the debt, Of thankless years. Oh, now while the sweet Love lingers near, Grudge not the tender words of cheer, Leave none unsaid; For the heart can have no sadder fate, Than some day to awake--too late-- And find Love dead. Mr. Conant's disappearance precipitated events. I felt it so much that I could not but understand how far below my usual health I had fallen. I was sitting thinking of various places to which I might retire, and yet keep in touch with my business, when Mrs. Orr of Cornwall-on-Hudson called. When we were together on the _Devonia_ she had often spoken of Cornwall, and the mountains and river which made it such a beautiful and healthful resort; and when I told her of my desire to come to the country, she offered me a house called Overlook, near their own. The next day Lilly went to see the place, found it roomy and comfortable, and standing on the top of a hill, and she rented it for the following six months. It seemed on the road to nowhere, but it would give me solitude and fine mountain air, and these things, with less work, were all that was required to restore my usual splendid health and spirits. Dr. Fleuhrer stipulated with me to stay six months in Cornwall, and I intended to do so; but I did not intend to stay the twenty-seven years which I have done. The clear, pure air and the quiet began its restorative work at once, and it was at this time I commenced a custom which I have observed ever since--that is, I went to my room at nine o'clock, no matter who, or how many were present, and I am sure I owe much of my good health and "staying power" to this custom. I do not sleep from nine to six, but I lie at rest in loose garments, and in the rebuilding darkness. Most of my mental work is prepared in this seclusion, my plots are laid, my characters conceived, and my background and motif determined. We removed to Cornwall on the second of March, 1885, and on the twenty-sixth I received my first copy of "Jan Vedder's Wife." It had been on the market more than a week, but in my seclusion I had not heard of it. It was Dr. Lyman Abbott who gave me the first news that the book had brought me instant favor and recognition. Lilly was on the train going to the _Ledger_ office one Friday, which was the only day Mr. Bonner received contributions, and Dr. Abbott came to her and said, "Tell your mother 'Jan Vedder' has made her famous. Everyone is reading it, and everyone is praising it." Then Lilly had to pass Dodd, Mead and Company's store, then on Broadway and Ninth Street, and she saw their windows full of large placards bearing the words "Jan Vedder's Wife" in large letters; at the _Ledger's_ office she met Mr. Munkitterick, who gave her one of his delightful exaggerations about the beauty of the tale, and its great success. I often wonder where Munkitterick has gone to. No one could write such poems as he could. Mr. Bonner bought all he could get, and they were the gems of the _Ledger_. So clever, so witty, so good-hearted, what has become of such a rare man? I hope that he has all his desires, wherever he may be. The record of March is a very happy one in regard to my work, and on the twenty-ninth, my fifty-fourth birthday, I wrote, "All is white and deep with snow, but I feel so much better. I thank God for the mercies of the past year. Over and over He has saved my life, and He has abundantly supplied my wants. My dear God, go forward with me, for I cannot direct my own steps, but with Thee, I am always safe and happy." During April I was steadily and rapidly improving, and very content and peaceful, so much so, that eight lines chronicles this month, and these lines refer mainly to the letters from Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, and John Habberton, who was then on the staff of the _New York Herald_, both of them in praise of "Jan." I said once, happiness is not written down. That is the truth. It is the unhappy, anxious months whose records cover pages; this happy April needed only eight lines. Much the same conditions with regard to my work continued, and in health and strength I gained steadily. On the sixteenth of May I had a letter from Mr. Libbey, which I prized very highly. He told me that he had watched with great pleasure my steady progress, that he had never lost sight of my brave struggle, and was glad that he had been given the opportunity of helping me when I needed help. If Queen Victoria had written me the words of praise he did, I should not have been half so proud and pleased. I had to put aside my work that day; I was too happy to sit still and write. Mr. Libbey was my first friend in New York. He took me at my own word, and I thank God I had been able to more than make it good. I was purely and sincerely delighted. All the world seemed beautiful that day, and I went to my room and, kneeling down, not only thanked God, but told Robert all about the joy in my heart. I thought God would permit him to share it, and I believe He did. Some time ago I had sent the novel called "The Last of the McAllisters," which Mr. Henry Holt had praised but refused, to a London magazine, and in June they published it. I ought, of course, to have secured its sale in the United States, but I was yet ignorant of my right to sell both in England and America, and when Harper Brothers pirated it, and sent me what they called an _honorarium_ of fifty dollars I thought it was very kind of them. I had no suspicion that I had been politely robbed, though I did notice a singular expression cross Mr. Mead's face when I told him of the circumstance. Subsequently Dodd, Mead and Company paid me one hundred dollars to make over to them the American rights in the book. During all this time I kept up my regular contributions to the papers for which I had so long written, for my books did not bring me enough to warrant my giving up my time to novel writing. At the same time I was writing another, and a better, story for the Methodist Book Concern, called "The Lost Silver of Briffault," which I finished on the nineteenth of July. I was able by this time to take in the manuscript myself, and after leaving it with Dr. Hunt, I went to the Astor Library and worked there, until the twenty-eighth, making notes and reading for the New York story I had been so long contemplating. The first morning I went to the library I found my alcove, table and chair, had been taken possession of by a man who looked intelligent, but who was common and ill-mannered. He did not speak to me, or even look at me, when I entered with a boy carrying his arms full of books. If he had done either, I know I should have said, "Sit still, sir, you will not incommode me, and I hope I shall not annoy you." But he just glared, and dropped his eyes, and so, with a slight apology for displacing some paper--my paper, which he was freely using--I sat down at the other end of the table, which was large, even for two writers. I could have forgotten he was there, if he would have sat still, but he fidgeted and sighed, and showed such signs of annoyance, that I was not a bit sorry when Professor Valentine came in with a joyful "welcome back" to me; and then launched into his usual enthusiasm, concerning Central America and its buried cities. Mr. Saunders followed, and, with his courtly English civilities about my health and my work, easily passed ten minutes. Then a scholarly clergyman connected with the _Churchman_, had something to ask me, and he was quickly joined by Professor Norton--not my starry friend--but an old editor of one department in the _Christian Union_; and we three found something to talk about for nearly half an hour. Every now and then some press writer came to ask help from my index, and though I myself was vexed at the interruptions, I was mean enough to be consoled, because the man at the other end of my table was as much disturbed as a man could be. The next day I was sorry, and I intended to make him welcome, but he had gone as far from me as he could get, and all I could do was to make an apology, which he received in an injured, sulky temper, that astonished me; for I have always found real scholars, the best and easiest tempered men in the world. Afterwards, I asked Mr. Saunders who the man was, and he told me he was a teacher, writing a mathematical text-book. Then I fully excused him. The work was accountable for the temper. For though mathematics may teach a man how to build a bridge, it is what the Scotch Universities call _the humanities_, that teach him to be civil and sweet-tempered. In August I wrote to Holland for some directions about the Dutch forms of speech, for one of the Astor librarians who spoke the Dutch language, told me always to remember that the Dutch of the period I wish to write of, thought in Dutch, even if they spoke in English. Thus, he instanced, an Englishman would say, "Spring will soon be here," but a Dutchman would say, "We come near to the Spring." So then a knowledge of Dutch forms was necessary, and he told me what books to write for. When I had sent off this letter, I considered that my preparations for writing "The Bow of Orange Ribbon" were complete. They had extended over nearly two years. An historical novel was a new venture, and as I had leisure I had been making myself familiar with the history of the time, and the ways of colonial dressing and housekeeping. Indeed, I had perhaps an exaggerated idea of the necessity of a truthful background, and I have never got over that impression. I am sure that I may fairly claim, that my historical tales of New York are faithful pictures of whatever epoch I am using. But, though I had done all I could do until the writing of the book should gradually reveal whatever was yet lacking, I did not begin it. I was waiting for the books from Amsterdam; and I commenced meanwhile, on the first of September, a tale of the fishers of Fife, for that particular humanity and locality was perfectly familiar to me. But by my visit to the library I had brought on a return of the trouble in my foot, and I was writing in bed all September, often twelve hours a day, so that I had finished "A Daughter of Fife" on the third of October. Then I went over it, corrected all errors, and sent it to Dodd, Mead on the ninth. I will insert here an amusing letter from one of Fife's daughters--one of a great many; for the story was a favorite, especially among the Scotch. MRS. AMELIA BARR: I have just read "A Daughter of Fife" and I want to say to you, that however well you have portrayed the characteristics of the women of Fife, you have done remarkably well in representing some of the traits of a daughter of Fife; and that is myself. When I was the age of Maggie, I would have sent Aunt Janet back to her home, or thrashed her, or made my own exit in a great deal quicker time than Maggie did, I assure you. The trust and confidence in the Lord is much the same. The independence is somewhat more pronounced in my case--quoting a phrase--people tell me, if I should fall in the river, I would float up stream. My mother read the book first, and noted the resemblance. I just write this to tell you, how amusingly near to life, and near to home, your story is. I am respectfully, LYDEY FIFE. BASCOM, OHIO, February 22, 1904. I then employed myself in writing a short story for the _Illustrated Christian Weekly_ called "Bread Upon the Waters," and I also wrote a number of poems to keep the columns of the _Ledger_ and other papers open to me. On the fifteenth of October I had a letter from Mr. Clark of the _Christian World_, London, asking me for another novel, and I immediately began "Between Two Loves," which I finished on Thanksgiving Day, the twenty-sixth of November, and, after reviewing and correcting it, sent it to London, on the second of December. Then there was Christmas and New Year's work to be done, and I did not really begin "The Bow of Orange Ribbon" until the twenty-eighth of December. On the last day of this year I was working on "The Bow." It had been a wonderful year full of great mercies and strange sorrows. During it "Jan Vedder's Wife," "The Hallam Succession," and "The Lost Silver of Briffault" had been published; and "The Last of the McAllisters," pirated. I had regained my health, and my foot only asked to be used with some mercy and discretion. Though I had lived very simply, I had been comfortable, and had had no care about money matters. As to what went on in my soul, I shall say nothing here. I ought to have been a happy woman, but I was unhappy in my domestic life. I was sure that Lilly was resolved to marry Captain Morgan. He came to see her constantly, and wrote to her once, frequently twice, a day. His influence pervaded the house, darkened my life, and made my success of no consequence. Hitherto my desire or advice had been sufficient for Lilly, but now they were nothing against a sheet of paper. Only a sheet of paper, written over in a bold, much frescoed style, and there was nothing I could say that could stand against it. The sunlight had gone from my days, and life felt haggard and thin without Lilly's sympathy. I did not blame her much. My position appeared to her unreasonable. I knew nothing wrong of Captain Morgan, and I had been shown a letter which proved him a favorite with his company. "Why will you think wrong of Frank, Mamma?" she asked one day. "Nobody says wrong of him." "But I have an undeniable intuition that something is wrong," I said. "Intuition!" she cried. "That is not fair, Mamma. I am willing to listen to reason, but intuition, no." "Yet, Lilly," I answered, "reason is only human perplexity. If we know, and are sure of a thing, we don't reason about it. Intuition is far above reason. It is absolute knowledge. It comes from the spiritual region of our nature, and makes the mind knowing, and the object known, one. It never deceives." "Then I say, it ought to be more precise. It tells you to beware of Frank, it ought also to tell you _why_." "If there is a finger-post on the sea sands with the word 'danger' on it, is it necessary to say what kind of danger? If you value your life, you just give it a wide berth." Such conversations were frequent, but I knew well that they were useless. I only succeeded in delaying, what was sure to come. And Lilly never succeeded in changing in the least my opinion of her lover. Now, "Who forged that other influence? That heat of inward evidence, By which I doubted against sense." The first part of 1886 I was busy on "The Bow of Orange Ribbon," and various poems and articles for the _Ledger_, _Advance_, and _Independent_. On February, the second, I note that I added four verses to "The Beggars of the Sea," a poem in the early part of the book. On the ninth I notice a great labor riot in London with the comment "the beginning--plenty more to follow." I did not say this from intuition, but from a dream I had recently had. In this dream, I saw the flags of all nations strung across the firmament, and they were blown hither and thither in the midst of flame and thunders and lightnings, and great multitudes fighting below. And I thought the date was set, but not yet. On the twenty-fifth of February, I had written two hundred pages of "The Bow." On the first of March I had two hundred and thirty pages composed and had been copying all day. On the third I only wrote seven pages, having a blinding headache. On this day I got "The Last of the McAllisters" in Harper's Handy Series, and I was rather pleased, not yet knowing how unfair and unjust was their possession of it. On March thirteenth I had finished two hundred and ninety-three pages of "The Bow." _March 14th._ I was writing all day; had a sore throat. _15th._ Writing all day. Throat very bad. _16th._ Ditto. Mrs. Orr to tea. _17th._ Writing all day on "The Bow." _18th._ Ditto. Finished 325 pages. _19th._ Very sick but wrote seventeen pages. _20th._ Finished 343 pages. Still sick. _21st._ Wrote all day. _22nd._ Finished 373 pages. _23rd._ Working on "The Bow" all day. _24th._ Finished "The Bow of Orange Ribbon," 404 pages. _29th._ My fifty-fifth birthday. I was sick and tired and uncertain. I sat still all day, not realizing until the book was done, and out of my hands, how weary I was. But I was not unhappy. Lilly still ordered my home, and I caught her brave, happy look every time I asked it with my smile. And I thought over all the work I had done the past year, and stretched out my right hand to God, for He knew I had done it faithfully, and could say with McAndrews, "I ha' lived an' I ha' worked, All thanks to Thee Most High, An' I ha' done, what I ha' done--judge Thou, if ill or well-- Always Thy Grace preventin' me." On the fourteenth of April, I went to Dodd, Mead's about "The Bow." They had many doubts and disparagements. Such a Dutchman as _Joris_ was not natural, and was I sure that _Lady Godon_ and her set spoke English as I had represented them? Now I had spent many weeks in studying the court English of the time, and had collected all my forms from Horace Walpole's and Lord Chesterfield's letters, et cetera, because it was in correspondence and familiar writing I expected to find the social forms most prevalent. I do not now remember the other criticisms, because I tried to forget them, feeling sure that the book, when published and reviewed, would justify me. I kept a stiff upper lip until I got home, then I broke down. I suppose if I had been a man, I should have said some bad words, being a woman I cried bitterly. I had expected praise, and had received only doubts and hesitations, but it must be remembered, that it was an entirely new kind of novel, and that Irving's caricatures of Dutchmen, had formed the popular idea of the early settlers of New Amsterdam. But among these settlers, there were many wealthy men, sons of old Leyden University, and many women who had grown to their rosy grace and refinement in exquisitely ordered homes, wherein the fear of God, and family affection was the law of their lives. I did not go again about "The Bow" until the fourteenth of May, when Dodd, Mead offered me six hundred dollars for it, promising to pay me more if the book sold well. I have never received any more. In the meantime I had begun, on the twenty-sixth of April, a novel called "The Squire of Sandalside," and I finished it in July. Then I went to England very unexpectedly, being led to do so by the following incident: A prominent editor and literary man of New York, sent me a letter asking me to call on him. I thought he wanted a novel, and I went to see him. His object was very different. He asked me to tell him how much money I had received from Mr. Clark of the _Christian World_ for the English rights of my novels. I told him, of course, that Mr. Clark had paid me nothing. Then he explained the subject fully to me, and advised me to go to see Mr. Clark at once. Finally, he asked me to promise, that in speaking of the subject I would never, never name him as my informer. He was so particular about this, that I made the promise, and have faithfully kept it. He said he had told me, because he pitied my ignorance, and I felt no gratitude to the man; for I distrusted him, and had a reason for doing so, that he was far from suspecting. I found myself worried, and even cross, when I got home, and Lilly said, "You ought to have gone to Mr. Dodd with this story, Mamma." "No," I answered, "it might annoy him without reason. He probably knows nothing about it." Then we spoke of Dodd, Mead paying me five hundred dollars more on "Jan Vedder's Wife," because the book sold well; five hundred that I never claimed, or asked for. Three days afterwards I went to England, but it was no pleasure trip. I had a heartache about the business, and I did not like to leave Lilly and Alice in such a lonely place without friends, or even acquaintances. But the sea air made me strong, and though the business was hateful to me, I got through it better than I expected. Mr. Clark listened silently to my story, though I was quite aware of his sympathy. In reply he said, the money unfortunately was lost to me. He had paid others in good faith, supposing they were acting for me, but that in future he would deal directly with myself. He then and there made an arrangement with me for my next novel, which was called "Paul and Christina," the study for which story had already appeared in the _Christian Union_. He asked me to his house to stay over Sunday, and I went; for I had a curiosity to see how English publishers lived. And I was greatly impressed with his home, its surroundings and furnishings. It was a perfect example of the breadth, solidity, and the last-for-ever kind of chairs, tables, et cetera, which are found in the best English residences. There was a kind of sumptuousness about it, that was never vulgar, nothing in any room screamed, and the effect was very reposeful. I have tried to recall some examples, more particularly, but I can remember nothing but the dinner knives, which were of the finest Indian steel, wonderfully polished, and having exquisite onyx handles. That is a little thing to have remembered, but it typifies the whole. Mr. Clark was a pleasant English gentleman, with just a trace of the schoolmaster in his manner. And he was one of the finest scholars in English literature I ever met. Indeed I think he was the finest. Under my father's care I had become thoroughly acquainted with English authors of an early date, especially those of Cromwell's and Anne's time, and during the past fifteen years' study in the Astor Library, I had read carefully those of later date; but I could not quote a line from any writer, that he did not instantly place, and likely give also the preceding and following lines. He was a good man, too, I am sure; one that feared God, and dealt fairly with his fellows. I did not remain long in England. Something always drew me northward and, without staying in Edinburgh, I went to the pretty watering place of Burntisland. They are "cannie Scots" that live in Burntisland, and always have been. Even when besieged by Oliver Cromwell, they did not lose sight of their own interests for Prince Charles' sake; for they offered to open their gates to Cromwell, if he would pave their streets, and improve their harbor. And Cromwell kept his part of the obligation so well, that the harbor, with some modern additions, is yet one of the best on the east of Scotland. From there I went to Kirkcaldy, and once more walked up the High Street to look at the house in which Adam Smith wrote his "Wealth of Nations." I don't know why I did it. I never opened the "Wealth of Nations," and I cared nothing about Adam Smith. In fact, I gave up looking at his house with impatience, and went to the old Tower of Balwearie, where Michael Scott, the famous wizard, lived. For I knew if I sat still long enough in its eerie shadows, I should find the wizard beside me. But I suddenly wearied altogether of my solitary travel, and took the first train back to Edinburgh. The idea of home and Lilly and Alice haunted me. They ruled over me by attraction, as others often do by their antipathy; for the moral atmosphere, like the physical, becomes impregnated with certain feelings. And it so happened, that at my hotel I got the very same parlor that Robert and I had occupied on our wedding tour. What were all the royal palaces, and ancient castles, and wizard towers to me? There was a little wood cottage in Cornwall inexpressibly dearer. I resolved to turn homeward the next day. From the windows of this parlor I had a fine view of the castle, and the old town lying around it. I had sat in my bridal finery with Robert on the same spot, at the same window thirty-six years ago, on just such a lovely summer night; and though I did not wish it, thoughts of the past came through memory, as the stars wore through the dark. A light like dreamland was over everything, and the fragrance of the summer roses in the gardens bordering Prince's Street, filled the air. It was a melancholy fragrance, it made me sad, for I thought of the lovely flowers pulsing their souls away, and wondered where they went to. Was a fragrance so rich and rare wasted? If not, for whom were these scented airs, in the glimmering of the summer twilight? Men and women took little heed of them, surely then, they were for the angels all around us, since "... Thousands at His bidding speed, And post o'er land and ocean without rest." I sat dreaming until midnight, and then I knew that old doors in palace and castle would be opened, and forth would come the ghosts of ancient sorrows and splendors. So I slowly, very slowly, prepared myself to lie down and sleep, remembering as I did so, Alexander Smith's almost forgotten description of Edinburgh, left unfinished because death took the pencil out of his fingers: "Towered, templed Metropolitan, Waited upon by hills, River, and wide-spread ocean; tinged By April's light, or draped and fringed As April's vapor wills, Thou hangest like a Cyclop's dream, High in the shifting weather gleam." Next morning I took the Caledonian Line as far as Kendal. There was a literary syndicate there, called the Northern Newspaper Syndicate; they bought a good deal of writing from me, and were at the time owing me a few pounds. I should not have called there on that account, but a reminiscent spell was over me, and I was glad of an excuse to indulge it. The money was as safe as if it was in my purse, for the syndicate was directed by Quakers, who certainly made close bargains, but who paid, without demur or delay, whatever they promised to pay. I went to the ancient hostelry called The King's Arms. It has a long, strange history, and I have been frequently told there are some apartments in it, once occupied by King John, but closed up for centuries as unsafe. I had no desire to look into them. I wanted to see my mother's house, also the preacher's house and chapel, standing among its band of whispering poplar trees. After a good supper of tea, fresh cockles, and haver cake I felt in the proper Kendal humor. And if any of my readers ever go to Kendal, and will sup on fresh cockles and haver cake, they will remember me pleasantly as long as they live. The cockles will be fresh from Morcambe Bay, or Sandside, and if one has never eaten haver cake with the delicious butter that is plentiful there, he has a gastronomical luxury to become acquainted with. Haver cake is, however, so common in Kendal, that the hotels do not serve it, unless asked for; but it is worth asking for, and even paying for. It is made of oatmeal, as fine as the finest wheat flour, and the cake itself is thin as a wafer, and delightfully crisp. And really one does not know how good cheese is, until he has eaten it with Kendal haver cake. As time goes by, I shall no doubt have many letters of thanks for this information, and I shall be glad of them; for there are few things in life, that awaken such kindly memories as something good to eat. The bedroom given me was the queerest, most old-fashioned place imaginable. I am sure it had been furnished about A.D. 1650. And the parlor I occupied had the same _past_ look. All was so strange, and yet so familiar, and I could not help feeling, that in every old chair there was either a ghost, or a dream. The next day was Sunday, and I was awakened by the grandest caroling of the church chimes. No other music between heaven and earth is so touching and elevating, as the pealing chimes from church towers. At intervals all day long, they reminded us that it was the Sabbath, until "As evening shades descended, Low, and loud, they sweetly blended; Low at times, and loud at times, Rang the beautiful old chimes." And as I sat listening to them, I could not help thinking how much, and how constantly, bells intermeddled with all the feelings and fortunes of humanity. In the dawn of time, they made a pleasant tinkling among the sons of Asher and Baal. The war horses of Sesostris jangled them on the first battlefields of the world; the priests of Israel wore them upon the hems of their most sacred vestments. They delivered oracles at Dodona, and shook a noisy challenge from the shields of Greek heroes. They have tolled out warnings on lonely coasts for the salvation of human life; they have given the signal for such awful massacres as St. Bartholomew and the Sicilian Vespers. They have rang in tyranny, and rang out tyrants; while on the wide ocean, they are given a new dignity, and are made the interpreters of the sun. No place has been so high and so holy, that there they have not been heard; yet the fool has shaken them on his bauble, and the infant on its rattle. In America at the present day what a wonderful power has been the bell. Inside our homes, from street-cars and railways, from banks and offices, schools and factories, carts and counters, comes constantly the well-known sound of bell metal; and there is nothing inanimate that has so meddled with the joys and sorrows, and business of mankind. Indeed, to write the history of small bells would be to write the social history of nearly forty centuries. That was a labor to think of, so I reminded myself of Tennyson's invocation to the bells to ring out old shapes of all evil, and ring in the Christ that is to be; and with this divine vision of the time when God "shall make his tabernacle with men, and wipe all tears from their eyes," I fell happily asleep, and dreamed a strange dream. I thought I was in a beautiful garden, shady and sweet with many shelves of bee skeps, under some large plane trees, and as I looked I saw a woman knocking at the door of each skep, with the big key of the house door, and telling the bees that the master had just died. That was a ceremony always observed in the North of England, when the master died, but what made me dream of it that night? And what strange link was there between the room in which I slept, and the man who died? Had the master died in that room? on that bed? and was I in the old garden, when I heard the news of his death? I mean, was the dream a reminiscence--a reminiscence possible because the room, and the garden, and the master's death had been in some anterior life, a part of my experience? I cannot tell. I only know I woke with a strange feeling of pity or grief for the dead master; and the humming of the bees in their hives, talking of the sad news was in my ears. Still if I ever should go to Kendal again, I would ask for that ancient bedroom, and bespeak another dream from the pillows that must be full of them. I am stating only a wandering thought, believing that many others must have had a like experience. For a few years ago, in a large hotel in Atlantic City, I had for seven nights the same dream upon the same pillow, but when I sent the pillow away, the dream went with it. Early in October I was at work again, this time on a Roman Catholic story, called "The Beads of Tasmar." There is a most romantic corner of Scotland on the shores of Ross, where the people have always been Catholics. It is Catholic Kintail. Fifty years ago if you landed at Bundalloch, where the great buttresses of Kintail come sheer down to the beach, you were among a people who have lived unchanged by all the revolts and revolutions of the world around them. Among these desolate hills you found the ancient Christian life in all its beauty and simplicity. To their thatched clachans they welcomed you with gentle, mannerly ways, very unlike the glower and greed of the lowlander; and handed you always a bowl of fresh milk, and an oaten cake. It appealed to me strongly as the background for an unusual Scotch tale, and I think "The Beads of Tasmar" is one of the prettiest romances I ever wrote. Dodd, Mead paid me five hundred dollars for it, and I enjoyed the work so much, that I felt well paid. Dodd, Mead were pleased with it, and it was printed and ready to put on the market when one of the members of the firm read it, and refused to give it to the public. He was perfectly conscientious in this decision, and as I had been paid for it, the loss was not mine. He really believed that its publication would injure the reputation, both of the firm, and myself. So "The Beads of Tasmar" was laid aside, and I began the well beloved "Border Shepherdess," a tale as opposite to "The Beads of Tasmar" as if it related to another planet. For the characters were all of them of the strictest sect of Cameronian Calvinists, the sea was not present, and the men and women were of the intense quality of Border Scots. It was, however, a great favorite, and with few exceptions I have had the most letters about it. The fall of the year after my return home was very still and happy. Two personal events that interested me broke the monotony--a lovely letter of congratulation from Mr. Stedman, with an invitation to a literary reception at his house, and a long letter from Martin F. Tupper. Just about the time I was married, every one was reading and praising Martin F. Tupper. I thought he was a wonderful writer. I learned whole pages of his philosophy and I am a perfect Philistine with regard to my idols. Mr. Tupper had been mutilated and slashed by later critics, till he was in as bad a case as the god Dagon, but to me he was just as wonderful as ever. I was so proud of his letter, full of praises and good wishes, that I wrote no more that day. Yet I could not help noticing the sad note of refrain, that comes with every joy, for I found myself saying frequently, as I walked about the room with his letter in my hand, "Oh, if my father had lived to see this letter, how happy he would have been! How happy I should be!" "Never quite satisfied, Mamma," said Lilly with a sigh; and I was ashamed, and read aloud to her Mr. Stedman's letter, which had come with the same mail as Mr. Tupper's, and then began to talk of the dress I must wear. I feared "nothing I had was quite good enough." "That is nonsense, Mamma," answered Lilly, I thought a little coldly. "Literary people do not meet to show their dresses. It is supposed at least, they meet to exchange great ideas. Your silk gown was bought and made in London, and you have some lovely English lace, what can you want more?" And then she salved the slight tone of reproof, by adding, "I am sure you look beautiful in them." Lilly's opinions always satisfied me, and I found she was right, at least in one point. I was quite sufficiently dressed, but somehow I did not find any exchange of great ideas. There was, however, a famous Japanese noble, and his two servants, most picturesquely dressed, made and handed around the tea. I never tasted tea before that night; I am never never apt to taste it again. Once afterwards, Mr. Matthieson, a neighbor, was in the Chinese tea fields, and he brought me home a present of a small chest of tea bought on the field where it was grown, and it came nearest to the tea I had at Mr. Stedman's, the difference, I suppose, having been in the making of it. But no matter how full of great ideas the conversation at Mr. Stedman's had been, I should have let all other memories slip away, and recollected only the ethereal delicacy, and far too fugitive aroma of that delicious tea. Surely such tea plants will grow for all of us in Paradise. CHAPTER XXIII THE GODS SELL US ALL GOOD THINGS FOR LABOR "All that is bitter, all that is sweet comes from God. It is our daily bread." "The mysterious conditions of our everyday life give a gravity to all our work, and all our pleasure." In this year 1887, I finished "The Border Shepherdess" and "The Master of His Fate" with my usual accompaniment of poems and articles for the papers. On April twenty-fourth I note that I copied "Cherry Ripe," a poem for _Harper's Weekly_, "A Strawberry Idyl" for the _Illustrated Weekly_, "The Romance of the Salad Bowl" for the _Christian Union_, and "The Two Talifers" for _Leslie's_. These with Bonner's usual poem were the papers on which I mainly relied and whose columns I felt must be kept open, no matter how interesting the novel on hand might be. But early in May my hands began to trouble me. I had the right thumb in a splint, and no finger I possessed could lift a pin. The tips of my fingers seemed to have lost feeling. I could not use pen and ink, but if the pencil was placed in my hand, I could write as long as the pencil would mark; but I could not pick it up, if I dropped it. I was very unhappy about this condition, and then the relief came from a source most unexpected. I had met on my last voyage from England, a Professor McAfee and his wife. Mr. McAfee was a professor in a college at a place called Claverick I think. He was a most charming man, widely and well cultivated, and I formed a pleasant friendship with him and Mrs. McAfee. While my fingers were troubling me so much, they came to pay me a short visit, and he induced me to get a typewriter. I do not know how long they had been on the market, certainly not very long, for I had never seen one in any of the newspaper offices I visited. Mine came the day before he left, and he showed me all its peculiarities. In less than a week I could use it very well; in a month I considered myself an expert. The typewriter was an instant and immense relief; for the copying of all my work had doubled my labor, because it was not as interesting to copy, as to compose; and as it was necessary to write the press copy very clearly and particularly, the copying occupied more time than the composing. The kindly, clever professor who came to me in the hour of my need is dead. No. He could not die. What we call death was to him only emigration, and I care not where he now tarries. He is doing God's will, and more alive than ever he was on earth. Mrs. McAfee, just before Christmas, sent me a lovely oil painting of poppies and wheat, done for me by girls in the college. Then I wrote the following poem in memory of it, which was published in _Harper's Weekly_ and I hoped it pleased them. POPPIES AND WHEAT Poppies have loved the golden wheat Many a thousand years, And still they lift a glowing face Up to the bending ears, Wherever the yellow wheat doth grow, Scarlet poppies will surely go. Bind the sheaves in the East or West, Take seed where man ne'er trod, And when the corn bends to the breeze, The poppy there will nod. No time, no distance, hath the power To change the love of grain and flower. See how the silky petals stir Like banners in still air; See how the rich ripe ears sway down To flowers so idly fair. O sweet wind of the harvest day! Tell me what do these lovers say. Do they remember Nilus yet? Ham's daughters dusky fair? Greek girls with mingled wreaths of wheat And poppies in their hair? Or fair Judean maids at morn Gleaning among the yellow corn? Does grain of wheat, or seed of flower, Hold still a memory Of happy English harvest homes On many a pleasant lea? And youths and maids amid the sheaves, Testing their love with poppy leaves. If so, then winds of harvest haste Carry a greeting sweet, No heed where corn and poppies grow, Kin are poppies and wheat, Grain and flower of every strand, Came from the fields of Edenland. I had never permitted Alice to go to any school, but had always had a governess for two or three hours daily, as she could bear it. During the many years she was thus instructed, she had many teachers of all kinds; but at this period a Mrs. Jones, the daughter of the Episcopal minister, came to her. And she loved Mrs. Jones, who was a beautiful and lovable woman, and I think of her often because I was always so happy when anything happened that made Alice specially happy. For the rest, the year went quietly on. I wrote a story for Mrs. Dodge, editor of _St. Nicholas_, the only woman I ever liked to write for. She put on no editorial airs, and if you brought her a good story, she made you feel that you had conferred a favor on her, and her magazine. Ah, Mrs. Dodge showed that her soul had been to fine schools, before she came into this life! Her courtesy was native to her--her fine manners the fruit of her good heart. After I had finished Mrs. Dodge's story, called "Michael and Theodora", I was obliged to give up using my hands until October, then I began "Remember the Alamo" but had to stop early in November, to help Mr. Freund who wished me to write with him a play from "The Bow of Orange Ribbon." It was the first of at least twenty, I think I may say fifty, attempts that have been made to dramatize this novel. Mr. Charles Frohman got the famous August Thomas to try it with me, but when I sent him the two first acts he said it was "a beautiful piece of literary work, but not playable." After the elopement, the original proposition is closed, and the play really ends there; but ending there, it is only half long enough. Some day, however, the difficulty will be conquered, and it will pay for all its previous failures. I was busy with Mr. J. C. Freund until the day before Christmas. Then I began a Scotch story for Clarke called "The Household of McNeil," and at the end of the year had finished nearly two chapters; I make the following entry which says all that is necessary: _December 31st, 1887._ This last week has been full of work. Mary came to see me before starting for Florida, and I am very unhappy about Lilly and Captain Morgan. But I trust for the best. O God, my times are in Thy Hands, and how glad I am to leave them there! Unto Thee I look, for "Thy compassions fail not." The first three months of 1888 were occupied with "The Household of McNeil," and my regular fugitive newspaper work. Alice still had her good teacher, and Lilly did not speak about her unfortunate love affair. I knew she was very unhappy, but she tried to be cheerful, and to share my pleasures and my anxieties, as she had always done; and I thought her reticence wise, though I was ready at any moment she wished to advise or to console her. My right thumb was almost useless. I held the pencil mostly between the first and second finger, and the outside of the little finger was so sensitive, that I wrapped it in cotton wool to prevent it feeling the movement on the paper. But on my birthday, March twenty-ninth, I was finishing the fourteenth chapter of "Remember the Alamo" and enjoying the writing of the book very much indeed. Sometimes General Houston seemed actually visible to me, and we had some happy hours together. General Sherman was positive that the men martyred at Goliad and San Antonio fought with the eight hundred gentlemen, who led by Houston captured the whole Spanish army, and gave the Empire State of Texas to the United States. The dead can, and do help the living, and I believe General Houston helped me to write the truth, and the whole truth, and nothing but the truth concerning that glorious episode, far too little valued and understood. If General Houston had been an Englishman, and had given the English Crown such a magnificent principality, he would have been ennobled and enriched. This great, ungrateful nation let him die wanting the comforts, yes, the necessaries of life. I have said more about this book than I intended, but I love it and "The Lion's Whelp" better than I can express. Their characters are living people to me. I have known them, either in this life, or some other life. This sense of companionship in many, indeed in most, of my books has made them easy and delightful to write. Sometimes it has been so vital that I have found it impossible to shut my study door. It seemed like shutting them out of my life, and I really loved these invisible, intangible friends, and often whispered their names, and bid them good night before going to sleep. To say that I shall never see them, or speak with them in another life, is an incredible thing. I expect General Sam Houston, and the great protector of England, Oliver Cromwell, to praise me, and thank me, for what I have done; and I shall not be disappointed. As far as General Houston is concerned, I have already the thanks of the son he loved so devotedly, in the following letter: GALVESTON, TEXAS, Oct. 22, 1888. MY DEAR MADAM: Returning to this city a short time since, I found awaiting me your latest very interesting book, "Remember the Alamo." Please accept my thanks, and as well, my assurances of due appreciation of the honor conferred. The general reader I am sure cannot fail to find the style in which the work is written in the highest degree entertaining. To one bound by ties of birth and blood to Texan history and traditions, it naturally possesses a peculiar interest, an interest which throughout does not flag. Of the rather numerous productions based on the same theme, few, if any, read so much like actual history, and I think I can safely say, none show that intimate acquaintance with the peculiar social elements which composed the Texas of the days of the Republic, manifest in the valued work I now have the honor to acknowledge the receipt of. While I have derived much pleasure from a perusal of "Remember the Alamo," as a production of merit, I could not be insensible to the tribute paid my revered father's memory; that the wreath is from the hand of woman lends it a grateful perfume. I cannot but regret I am denied the honor of the personal acquaintance of one, who through her pen has made me so much her debtor for enjoyment of the most enduring kind. I am, dear madam, with abiding sentiments of esteem, Yours sincerely, WILLIAM R. HOUSTON. Often I have believed that my heroine was a real personality, that she had once lived in the very scenes I depicted. This was particularly the case with the book "Bernicia." It is many years since I told the story of that fascinating creature, but she is as real to me today, as if she had spent the summer with me. Sometimes these phantom heroines are very masterful. In "Friend Olivia," _Anastasia_ made me throw away many pages, but I always discovered as the book progressed, that they did not belong to it. Until April of this year, I was more or less troubled with Mr. Freund and the proposed play. I say "troubled" because I felt all the time that the work I had to do, was useless, that the thing someway was not right, and I know now, that neither Mr. Freund--clever actor and manager as he was--nor I, could build a play, any more than we could build a house. On April tenth, 1888, we moved into a little cottage on Storm King Mountain, for the house we were in was sold, and the buyer wished to occupy it. I remember so well the afternoon I first drove up the mountain. It was a lovely April day, Nature was making a new world, and there was no sound of hammer, or axe, or smoke of furnace. Only an inscrutable, irresistible force at work, a power so mighty, that the hard trodden sod under our feet was moved aside by a slender needle-like shaft of grass, or plant, which the faintest breeze could blow and bend. A miracle! Yes, a miracle before which science is mute. The birds were singing as if they never would grow old, and the winds streamed out of the hills as cool as living waters. The grass was climbing the mountains until it met the snow, and the mountains rose like battlements, with piny slopes furrowed by one or two steep paths. The house I came to see was a mere cottage of five rooms, but it stood in a pleasant croft, full of fruit trees, mingled with pines and a few maples. My heart went into the place without opening gate or door, and I said to myself, "I will buy this little house, and make it a home, if God wills so; and as for it being small, there is only three of us, and we can enlarge it, if it is necessary." The view from it was enchanting--a long stretch of the Hudson River, with mountains and valleys on every side of it. But I remembered the English dictum about buying a house, namely, "to summer and winter it first;" so I refrained the words on my lips, and instead of buying it, I offered to rent it for a year, promising to buy it then, if I still liked the place. Lilly's brows knit ominously, when I told her what I had done. "You will not like it, Mamma," she said. "Why not? And you, Lilly, have always loved country solitudes." "Yes, in books, Mamma. In real life, they are damp and rheumatic, and most hated by those who live in them, and know them best." "O Lilly!" I cried, "I do want to go up the mountain so much. I am sure I can write well and easily there. I know I should be so happy, and I believe my hands would get strong." "Then, dearest, we will go at once. So let us talk over what is to be done." This was on April, the sixth, and on the tenth we moved into the mountain cottage. We had barely got our household goods into its shelter, when there commenced one of the heaviest rain storms I ever remember, and we ate our first meal, a very good one of broiled Virginia ham, poached eggs, coffee, and orange marmalade, to its pattering and rattling on the roof and against the windows. "Grandmother Barr said, it was the luckiest thing to move in a rain storm," cried Lilly, with one of her old cheerful laughs; "she did not know she was prophesying luck for us, but she was, Mamma. I hope she knew how it was pouring as they carried in the last load." "Is that a Scotch superstition?" I asked. "Certainly, Scotch wisdom is the only kind of wisdom Grandmother quotes, or believes in. She believed also in carrying the house cat with you. Aunt Jessy once left her cat behind in moving, and left all her luck to the people who came after her, and they happened to be people Grandmother didn't like." And I laughed, and talked about the Cumberland superstitions, sitting by the kitchen fire in one of the best parlor chairs, while Lilly deftly broiled the ham and poached the eggs, and Anne Hughes, our small Irish servant, set the table in her own remarkable way, and Alice wiped all the dishes after her with a clean napkin. I have eaten few happier meals than that first one in Cherry Croft, and then we made up the beds in the dining-room for that night; and I fancied my bed had never been as soft and comfortable before. With happy wishes for good dreams, we all slept soundly, and sweetly, until Annie Hughes woke us with the information, that it was past seven, and a man was at the door with milk, and a big handful of flowers. It was Thomas Kirkpatrick, of course. Any one who knew Thomas would suspect it. He worked for me on and off in some way for twenty years, and there was always that fine streak in his nature, typified by his love of flowers. In that twenty years, I had few birthdays that Thomas Kirkpatrick did not honor with a bunch of wild flowers at the dawning. The house had been thoroughly cleaned, and was in good condition, for it had been built for the well known artist Theyer, who with his wife had occupied it one or two years; and he had been followed by a New York family whose name was Appleton, who only lived in it for a short time, so that it was nearly new, and quite free from all the wraiths and influences of prior inhabitants. I shall never feel again in this life as joyous as I felt for the first few months in this house, though, thank God, I keep my child heart yet, and I am pleased with little things. My right hand got well rapidly; my headaches were much better. I slept like a baby; I woke up singing, a thing I had not done since Robert died. I was so happy in my little five-roomed cottage. I loved every foot of the pretty croft, in which it stood, and one morning when its fourteen cherry trees were all pink and white with blossom, I called it Cherry Croft. And now the name of Cherry Croft is known all over the English speaking world, and I not infrequently have letters directed to me "Cherry Croft, New York, United States of America," and they come direct to me without question or delay. On the first of June, Dodd, Mead paid me a thousand dollars for "Remember the Alamo," but Mr. Mead wished the name changed. It was published in England under the name of "Woven of Love and Glory" but Mr. Mead desired it to be called, "Remember the Alamo." I could not have written it to that name, but the book being finished, it did not make so much matter. I suppose it sold better under the latter name, for I was told this year by a famous Texan, that few Texan families are without a copy of it. "The Alamo" was a phrase full of tragedy to every Texan, but not so distinctive to other people; it being a Spanish word given to a number of places. On this day I received a copy of "Jan Vedder's Wife" in French. I do not know French, but was frequently told that it was an excellent translation. It appeared first as a serial in the best of the French reviews, but I never received a cent for its use, either as a serial or in book form. Well, I had the pleasure of writing it. That could not be taken from me. On the third of June I began a Manx story called "Feet of Clay." The Isle of Man I have described in an early chapter of my life, and it was an easy background for me full of romantic possibilities, and vivid and ready-made romance. This story had a foundation of truth, and I remember that Mr. Gilder, while praising the literary workmanship of the tale, objected to the reformation of the hero, who had an inherited tendency towards forgery. With the tender pity natural to his rare character, he said that forgery was in his opinion and observation an unconquerable weakness; that a man who committed the crime once, would do the same thing again, whenever the temptation came to him. But I was still a Methodist, and I thought the love of Christ in the heart sufficient to prevent, as well as to forgive sin. Besides I have always found myself unable to make evil triumphant. Truly in real life it is apparently so, but if fiction does not show us a better life than reality, what is the good of it? _Aufidius_ was successful in his villainy, but are we not all glad to know that _Coriolanus_ had time to call him to his face "a measureless liar!" I confess that I like to reward the virtuous, and punish the guilty, and make those who would fain be loved, happy. On the twenty-third of June I went to England on the _Circassia_. I was a favorite with her captain, and I sat at his right hand; the Reverend Mr. Meredith and Mrs. Meredith being opposite me. I have had few pleasanter voyages than this one. Captain Campbell was a good talker, so was the minister, and he gave us the following Sunday the best sermon I ever heard on a steamer. This journey was a purely business one, though after being in Kendal a day, I could not resist the something that urged me to go on to Glasgow. I intended to remain there a couple of days, and to do a little shopping, that could be better and more economically done in Glasgow, than anywhere else. I thought I was perfectly sure of my incognito, but the next morning my arrival was in the newspapers, and I had several very early callers, and many invitations to "go down the water" for the week end. One of these invitations was in the shape of an exceedingly friendly letter from Dr. Donald McLeod, at that time editing _Good Words Magazine_. I had one from the McIntosh family by the same mail, and my heart went out to the McIntoshes, though I had the highest respect for Dr. McLeod, and knew that a Sabbath spent with him would be a wonderful one in many respects. Yet there was in me a perverse spirit that morning. I did not want to go anywhere. I did not want to dress, and to take my food and sleep and pleasure, as other people gave it to me. I wrote the proper apologies, and slipped back to Bradford that afternoon. The following night I went to an intense Methodist service, and heard a thousand Yorkshire men and women sing "There is a Land of pure delight," and "Lo, He comes with clouds descending!" as I shall never again hear them in this life. In fact I was singing myself as heartily as any one, and if I did not quite agree with the sermon, I felt sure it was the only kind of sermon likely to influence the wonderfully vitalized flesh and blood by which I was surrounded. There were no hesitations in it, no doubts, or even suppositions; it was an emphatic positive declaration, that if they did right they would go to heaven, and a still more emphatic one that if they did wrong they would go to hell. And he had no doubts about the hell. He saw it spiritually, and described it in black and lurid terms, that made women sob, and the biggest men present have "a concern for their souls." I would not have missed that service for any company on earth. I know Dr. McLeod would have talked like the Apostle John, and there would have been a still peaceful Scotch Sabbath full of spiritual good things; but I felt all alive, soul and body, from head to foot, in that Methodist Chapel; so much so that I put a larger coin in the collection box than I could well afford, and never once regretted doing it. I would go to church every Sunday gladly, if I could hear a minister talk in such dead earnest, and be moved by a spiritual influence so vitally miraculous. The very building felt as if it was on fire, and for an hour at least, everybody in it _knew they had a soul_. They felt it longing and pleading for that enlargement, only the Love and Actual Presence of God could give it. I do not believe I should hear the same kind of a sermon in that chapel today. There is doubtless an organ and a choir now, and the preacher will have been to a Theological Institute, and perhaps be not only "Reverend" but have some mystic letters after his name, and the congregation will be more polished, and the precepts of gentility will now be a religious obligation. And I am afraid it is not genteel now, to be anxious about your soul--especially in public. But I thank God that I spent that Sunday in Yorkshire instead of Scotland; for spiritually I have never forgotten it, and physically, it was an actual influx of life from the source of life. I was twenty years younger. And I believe that if it were possible for men and women to live constantly so close to the spirit in which they live, move, and have their being, they might live forever. The next day I went to Shipley Glen, to see Ben Preston, a poor man yet, but a fine writer both in prose and verse, especially in his native dialect. He had not much education, but there was a vigorous native growth of intelligence. I spoke to him of the sermon I had heard the previous night, and he answered, "Ay, you'll hear the truth in a Methodist Chapel--here and there--even yet; but a Yorkshire man nowadays reads his newspaper, instead of his Testament, so when a man comes out with ideas gathered from the Gospel of Jesus Christ, he's sure to be considered an original writer, whose crazy notions would turn the world upside down." There was a man from a Bradford newspaper sitting with him, and he spoke of Dilke and Chamberlain, and Preston answered, "They may be able to do something for us, but the biggest reforms of all will have to begin and be carried out by wersens." The press man spoke of some local grandee whom he called "a self-made man" and Preston answered slowly, as he whittled a bit of stick, "I admire self-made men, if I'm sure they're owt like 'John Halifax, Gentleman;' but lots o' them owe their elevation, not to their talents, but to a dead conscience and a kest-iron heart. Of such men, if they're rich enough, the world is ready to say 'they hev risen from the ranks.' It 'ud be nearer t' truth to say, 'they hev fallen from the ranks.' Yes, sir, fallen from t' ranks of honest, hard-working men, and taen to warse ways." Of a certain marriage that he was told of, he said it was "a staid, sowber, weel-considered affair, a marriage wi' all t' advantages of a good bargain." I was much struck with his ready wit, his good sense, and his clever way of putting any remark he made. He was greatly and deservedly loved and respected, but his best work had a local flavor, which I dare say narrowed both his fame, and his income. On the twenty-second of July I was still in Bradford, for I went to lunch with Mrs. Byles. She was a woman, whom if you once saw, you could never forget. Her husband was the clever editor of the _Bradford Observer_ and I think she had been made purposely for him--brains to her finger tips, full of vivid life, a brilliant talker, a perfect hostess, not beautiful but remarkably fascinating--so fascinating that you thought her beautiful. I never saw her but on that one occasion, but she made on me such an impression that if I met her on Broadway today, I should have no hesitation in saying, "I am glad to see you, Mrs. Byles." At this luncheon, I met also the daughter-in-law of Sir Titus Salt, the discoverer and first maker of alpaca. On the twenty-fifth of July, I sailed from Liverpool, on the _City of Rome_, and on the second of August landed at New York. I love England with all my soul, but when I saw the Stars and Stripes flying off Sandy Hook, my eyes filled with happy, grateful tears, for "East or West, Home is Best;" and the land where your home is built, is another native land. Mary met me at the pier, went out to Cornwall with me, and remained with us until the eleventh of September, when she left for Florida. The rest of the month I was busy on "Feet of Clay" which I finished on the tenth of October. Then I had my apples gathered, got in some large stoves, put up heavy curtains, and prepared the house for winter. On the twenty-seventh, I had a letter from General Sam Houston's son, in praise of what I had done for his father's memory, and on the twenty-eighth of October I began making notes for my story of Quakerism called "Friend Olivia." I was at the Astor Library every day until the twenty-fifth of November when I felt my way clear enough to begin "Friend Olivia." It was a bright lovely Sabbath, and I had a pious enthusiasm about the work, for my mother's family were among the earliest of George Fox's converts, and had suffered many things for the faith that was in them. I worked slowly at first, and did not finish my first chapter until the twelfth of December, nor my second until Christmas Day, when I copied it. After this I became aware of the character I called _Anastasia_, and every thing relating to her came easily enough, and I had a fancy she was not a bit sorry for her dislike of _Olivia_ and her efforts to injure her. But the year closed with me happily at work on "Olivia," and seeing my way clearly from the beginning to the end. The first three months of 1889 I was nearly broken-hearted about Lilly's affairs. I was writing "Friend Olivia" and found my only relief in losing myself in it. Yet I had some pleasant events in my work. Oscar Fay Adams wrote a fine criticism of my books in the _Andover Review_. Mr. Clark sent me seven hundred six dollars for "Feet of Clay." I wrote special articles for the _Book News_ and the _Youth's Companion_ and the latter offered me five hundred dollars for a story of one hundred pages. Their pages were large, and I could not afford to accept their terms, which were burdened also with several limitations and forbidden topics. It was very unlikely that I should ever have touched these topics, unless forbidden to do so. That temptation might have made me wish to show the censors how innocently, and indeed profitably, they might be touched. On my fifty-eighth birthday, I had finished thirteen chapters of "Friend Olivia," but I received on April, the first, a letter from the _North American Review_, asking me for an article, and I left my novel to write it. While I was thus engaged, I was requested by a minister with whom I had crossed the Atlantic once, to write for him on a certain subject, which I have not noted, and am not quite certain about. It was the request that astonished, and also pleased me, for I feared that my plain criticism on a certain occasion had deeply offended him. It happened that we had walked and talked together at intervals during the week, and that on the following Sabbath morning he preached in the saloon, and I was present. Leaning over the taffrail, that evening he came to me and asked how I liked his sermon? "The sermon was a good sermon," I said, "but spoiled in the delivery." "Why! How? What do you mean, Mrs. Barr?" he asked. "Your sermon," I answered, "was a series of solemn declarations and avowals of faith and belief, and after stating each with remarkable clearness, you invariably concluded with this reflection, 'It seems to me that no logically sane mind can refuse this truth.'" "Well," he said, "that was right." "No," I answered, "it was wrong. Those four words, '_it seems to me_,' destroyed the whole effect of your argument. You left us at liberty to dispute it, and debate it. What seemed to you true, might not seem so to any one else, if they began to look for reasons." "What would you have said, if in my place?" "If I believed, as you do, I would have said, 'Friends, I have told you the truth. There is no other truth on this subject. If you believe it, and live up to it, you will be saved. If you do not believe it, and live up to it, there is no salvation for you.'" "A minister can but give his opinion." "He ought to give God's opinion, that is what he stands up to do, and there is no 'seems to me' in that. Excuse me," I said, "I am a daughter of Levi, and have been used to talking as I feel to ministers all my life. I meant no harm. I was only sorry you took all the salt and strength out of a really good sermon." "I thank you!" he said, but he was quiet afterwards, and I soon went away, fearing I had everlastingly offended him. But here was the kindest of letters, with a request that I would write him a short article for a paper in which he was interested. I did so cheerfully, but I put my price on it; for I had discovered by this time, that newspapers value articles according to what they have to pay for them. I may mention that among the trials of this spring, my big English mastiff was so ill, that we had to send him away for treatment. It was almost like sending one of the family away. He was a noble, loving creature with far more intelligence than is credible. On the twenty-second of May, I finished all the creative work on "Friend Olivia," and on the twenty-fourth, having gone carefully over it, I took it to Dodd, Mead and Company, and they sent it to the Century Company, thinking it might suit Mr. Gilder for a serial. Until the third of June I rested, for my eyes and right hand were weary and aching, then I wrote an article for the _Book News_ for which I received thirty dollars. Until the second of July, I wrote articles for the _Advance_, _North American Review_, et cetera, and copied some short stories for the Kendal Syndicate, and the _Christian World_. On the second of July, I began a story of the Cheviot Hills but on the ninth received a letter from Dodd, Mead saying Mr. Gilder liked "Friend Olivia" very much, and wished to see me. The following day I went to see Mr. Gilder, and agreed to rewrite the story suitably for a serial for three thousand dollars; and from this time forward until the sixteenth of September, I was going over "Friend Olivia," and while arranging it suitably for a serial, was also trying how much richer and better I could make it. I was abundantly repaid by the following letter from Mr. Gilder, under date of September, 1889. EDITORIAL DEPARTMENT, THE CENTURY MAGAZINE. MY DEAR MRS. BARR: I have finished the story. It closes like music, beautifully. There might be some points that I could wish different, but I do not press them, the whole story is so charming. In this revisal of "Friend Olivia," I followed in all matters Mr. Gilder's advice and suggestions, and so learned much of the best technicalities of fiction. I could not have had a finer teacher. I could not have had a more kind, just and generous one. He rejoiced in good work, and gave it unstinted praise, no matter who was its author. To a soul who had been hardly used by the world in general, it was a kind of salvation to meet such a man. I owed a great deal of my success with the _Century_, to Mrs. Grover Cleveland's praise of "Friend Olivia." She read the story in manuscript, and spoke so highly of it to Mr. Gilder, that he was induced by her report to read it himself. So one of the first printed copies of the novel was sent to Mrs. Cleveland, who wrote me the following note: December 2nd. DEAR MRS. BARR: Pray do not think that my long delay in replying to your note indicates any lack of appreciation of its kind words, or your thoughtfulness in sending me "Friend Olivia." I feel a peculiar attachment to the book, because I knew the story when it was so very young. I liked it, and surely need not tell you that your sending it to me yourself, gives me very great pleasure. I have been away from home ever since your letter came to me, or I should have told you this before. Pray do not over estimate the effect my interest in "Friend Olivia" has had. The story itself brought you, as you say, "the recognition and success you had patiently worked and waited for during twenty years," and as I say, which you richly deserved. May I assure you that I never forget my young friend who loves my picture, and that her mother is often in my thoughts. Very sincerely, FRANCES F. CLEVELAND. I will only give the letter received from Moses Coit Tyler, regarding "Friend Olivia." Others of interest will be found in the Appendix if any desire to read them. CORNELL UNIVERSITY, ITHACA, NEW YORK. Feb. 21, 1891. MY DEAR MRS. BARR: I was much touched by your kind remembrance of me in causing your novel, "Friend Olivia," to be sent to me; and as my days here are heavily burdened with work, and my reading is almost exclusively on certain professional lines, it was only lately that I have had the opportunity of reading the book as I wanted to do it. We read it aloud in the family evenings, as the leisure came to me, my wife, my daughter, and myself. We were charmed and held from the beginning, but it was not till we had gone through perhaps the first seventy-five pages, that the story grasped us with enthralling power. After that, it was a nightly trial to us all, that I had to cut short the reading, when we were all so absorbed in the story, and the development of the characters; and I want to give you my thanks for the great pleasure, nay for the good cheer, the strong spiritual refreshment and stimulation which the book gave us. I could say much of the power with which the several characters are delineated, of the vivid truth, of the historic elements of the story, and of the masterly handling of the plot. Better than any satisfaction in mere literary success, must be the privilege of portraying, in a fascinating form like that, the beauty, the mighty helpfulness, the calming and sweet power of faith in God, and in the spiritual life. That book of yours will go on helping and cheering people, long after you have passed from this world. If all your literary labors had resulted only in that piece of work, your life would have been lived not in vain. The reading of this book has given me a new desire to meet you again, and to talk over persons and things with you, and perhaps some day when I have a few hours or days in New York, I may be able to find you with half-an-hour to spare for a chat. With deep gratitude for your book, and a thousand good wishes for the continuance of your literary successes, I remain Faithfully yours, MOSES COIT TYLER. For nearly a month after finishing my second copy of "Friend Olivia" I was too tired to do much. Mr. Mead had urged on me the Arcadian background and I saw at once its possibilities, if I might make it historically true. But this would be in direct opposition to what Longfellow and others had done. However as I had the fiction in my own control, I thought it would be possible to make the background, and general atmosphere inoffensive. I made great preparations for this work. I was in New York at the library most of October, and was in communication with the Officer's Club at Halifax who sent me a great deal of material, also with a Miss Caldwell of Louisiana, whose home was on the great Bayou, where the Arcadians settled after leaving Canada; and she sent me the true history of Longfellow's "Evangeline," and much interesting material as to the country, and the descendants of the Arcadians. But not all the work I did, nor yet all the help I received, could create in me the slightest enthusiasm about the story. The people disgusted me. They were so double-tongued and false-hearted, I could have turned their bigotry into intense faith, as I had often done with Calvinism; but their cowardice and unreliability I could not handle, unless I was to show it rightfully punished. And to tell the last truth, I did not see anything romantic in a girl, traipsing the length of the United States seeking her lover. If I could have shown the lover in all sorts of adventures seeking _Evangeline_, that would have been all right; but the fact was he had speedily married, and was comfortably bringing up a family in the Teche country. I could not bear to think of making a beautiful and innocent girl die for so unworthy a lover, and I did not really pity the woman who could and did deliberately die for him. Her grave at the Poste des Attakapas could not impress me. She ought to have thrown off her false unworthy lover, and if she could love no good man, she could at least have lived to comfort and help the old woman, who had taken her when a friendless babe, and cherished her as her own daughter. As late as the sixteenth of November, I note being in New York at the library getting the proper patois for Arcadia, and add with an emphasis of under-crossing, "I hate the story." Until the eleventh of January, 1890, I was writing an article on divorce for the _North American Review_, in favor of it under proper conditions. Bishop Potter wrote the one on the absolute inviolability of the marriage tie. I think they were in the same number but have forgotten surely. I wrote also many other articles suitable for Christmas and New Year's. During December, Clark paid me two hundred pounds for "Friend Olivia," and seventy-five pounds for the book rights of "The Last of the McAllisters." I also wrote a short story for the McClure Syndicate, being busy on it from the twenty-second to the twenty-eighth of December. I liked to write for McClure's Syndicate; he always both paid, and praised me well. I can say the same of the Bacheller Syndicate, and though I never see either Mr. McClure, or Irving Bacheller now, I remember them both with the utmost kindness. On the eleventh of January, 1890, I notice that I threw all the Arcadia matter into a drawer in my study, where it would be out of sight and memory, adding, "I can't _feel_ that story, so I can't, and won't write it!" This neglected, despised Arcadian matter is still occupying the drawer, and I have not looked at it since I put it away, until this morning, when I took from the pile "the true story of _Evangeline_," to be sure of the name of the country, to which the Arcadians went after leaving Canada. It was on the Teche Bayou they settled, and _Evangeline's_ real name was Emmeline Labiche, and her body rests, as I have already said, at the Poste des Attakapas. Probably the Poste is now a town or city, though the Arcadians were by no means an energetic or progressive people. As soon as I put the Arcadian matter in that drawer, I began a New York story called "She Loved a Sailor." It contained a vivid picture of New York city life in General Jackson's time, and is probably the last of the New York series of tales. I have had fewer letters about it, than I usually have about a New York novel, and I wondered at that, because it is within the memories and traditions of many living families. So I have taken it for granted that its localities and data are correct, for if I had made an error some one would have told me of it. While I was writing this book, on the eleventh of February, Mr. and Mrs. Van Siclen gave me a "Bow of Orange Ribbon" dinner at the Lawyer's Club. It was a very fine affair, and I kept its artistic menu and bow of ribbon for many years. The guests were mostly Dutch, but I had the great honor and pleasure of having Henry Van Dyke at my right hand. Two things I remember about this dinner. I tasted crabs à la Newburgh for the first time; and then while I was as happy as I could be talking to Dr. Van Dyke, Mr. Van Siclen shocked me by asserting, "Mrs. Barr will now make us a little speech, and tell us how she came to write 'The Bow of Orange Ribbon.'" I do not believe I had ever heard of a woman speaking at a dinner table before. I had an idea it was absolutely a man's function. It would then have been as easy to imagine myself doing my athletics in public, as making a speech at a dinner table. I turned to Dr. Van Dyke in a kind of stupefaction, and said only one word "_Please!_" and he understood, and rose immediately, and made a speech for me that charmed and delighted every one present. Indeed I am inclined to think it was the best speech he ever made. It was so spontaneous that it was not Henry Van Dyke's speech, it was Henry Van Dyke his very self. After I had finished "She Loved a Sailor" I took Alice and went to England, leaving in the _Bothenia_ July the second, and returning about September in the _Aurania_. And after I had finished my business, I gave myself entirely to Alice. She learns best through her eyes, and I took her to everything I thought would interest her. We were fortunate enough to hear Handel's fine oratorio of "Samson" at the Crystal Palace, with a thousand male and female voices in the chorus; and Sims Reeves in the solos. Ada Rehan was playing "As You Like It" and she went three times to see her, before she was tired. But I think the service at St. Paul's Cathedral pleased her most of all. Dr. Vaughan preached from "There remaineth a rest," an eloquent sermon, and the music was heavenly. She was curiously pleased also with the little rush chairs, she thought it seemed "more like sitting with God, than if you were shut up in a pew." We had a happy happy time. It is the only holiday I have had since Robert died. I gave it to Alice, and she gave it back to me a hundred-fold. It seems like a dream of heaven to remember it. CHAPTER XXIV BUSY, HAPPY DAYS "Days of happy work amid the silence of the everlasting hills, days like drops that fall from the honeycomb." * * * * * "Slow, sweet busy hours that brought me all things good." After my return we had to consider the winter. During the previous winter we had suffered much from the severe cold, it being impossible to warm the house, when the thermometer sank to twenty, or to even thirty below zero. After some efforts to find suitable winter quarters in the neighborhood we closed the house, and went for a week or two to the Fifth Avenue Hotel. I had a business contract pending with Mr. Edwin Bonner, and we knew that a suitable house somewhere near New York would be the best for me. There was one great trouble connected with this arrangement: we had to send our English mastiff to the kennels, and Sultan was really a very much beloved member of the family. He had been given to me by my friend Dr. Bermingham when we first went up the mountain. "It is a lonely place," said the good doctor, "and you ladies will need a protector." He was sent from the kennels with a pedigree as long as an English duke's, and he was positively described as a Saint Bernard. I knew he was an English mastiff of pure breed, as soon as I saw him, and I loved him all the better for it. Everyone's dog does wonderfully, but Sultan excelled them all. He could nearly speak, and in the last agonies of death, he did really call "Lilly" as plainly as I could have done. He came to every meal with us, and had his plate and napkin laid next to Lilly, for between Lilly and himself there was the strongest affection. He permitted no other dog on the place, but he talked to all the dogs from far and near through the gate, and they brought him all the news of the mountain. Sometimes he brought it to us, and we always listened and answered, "Is that possible, Sultan?" and he would give a little bark of assent, and lie down to consider it. He liked me to be prettily dressed, and always showed his satisfaction in some unmistakable way. He was most polite to company, met them at the gate, and conducted them to the parlor, invariably lying down at the feet of the prettiest and best dressed person in the company. If I was in England he watched for the mail with Lilly, and listened attentively while she read my letter to him. When she came to the words, "Mamma and Alice send their love to Sultan," he always answered the message with a little bark of pleasure. Oh, indeed, I could tell still more wonderful things of this affectionate creature, but they would raise a doubt. No one could believe them, unless they had lived with the splendid fellow, and known him as we did. So it was hard to part with him, even for a week or two, but he was large as a mastiff of pure blood can be, and the proprietors of the Fifth Avenue Hotel would not hear of him as a guest. We went to the hotel on October, the seventeenth, and between that date and the twenty-seventh I made a contract with Mr. Bonner for four serials. I was to deliver two each year, and he was to pay me twenty-five hundred dollars for each, in all, ten thousand dollars. In the meantime Lilly had found a house in East Orange, which was thoroughly warmed, and we moved into it on October the twenty-fifth, and brought Sultan home with us. We were soon comfortably settled, and on the first of January I had finished the ninth chapter of my first serial for Mr. Edwin Bonner, called "A Sister to Esau." On the eighth of February it was finished. But the press of business, and the proposals of various publishers, seems to have really made me very unhappy. In a note on the twenty-third of February, when I had had a great deal of business to attend to, I wrote at night, "I am sad and weary with the day, and feel terribly unfit for the considerations I have to face. I have a sense of being politely bullied, and of having suffered a loss of some kind--spiritual, mental or financial--perhaps something in all respects." I was much interrupted by callers in East Orange, a great many of whom brought manuscripts, which they were sure I would like to read, and could easily place for them. I had a heartache for the peace and solitude of the little cottage on the mountain. Now the dream of every English man and woman is a home of their own, and I saw this to be a possibility now; and I could think of no place but Cherry Croft. I wanted it for my own. Then I could put in a proper furnace and make it habitable all the year round. I had finished Mr. Bonner's serial on the eighth of February; on the fifteenth of February, I began for _Lippincott's_ "A Rose of A Hundred Leaves." Its heroine, _Aspatria_, was one of my favorites. She dwelt among the Fells in one of those large, comfortable farm or manor houses, occupied for centuries by the Sheep Lords of the North Country. I always knew what she was going to do. Sometimes I have wondered, if Amelia had once been _Aspatria_. Her brothers seemed so near and real to me, and she lived in just such a home, as I have had glimpses of, whenever the Past comes back to me. I finished the book on the fifteenth of March, and Mr. Mead praised the story, which pleased me, because it was the first time he had ever expressed satisfaction with my work. On the twentieth I went to Cornwall, and bought Cherry Croft, paying for it six thousand dollars in cash. Some told me I had paid too much, others too little, but I was satisfied. The house was not worth much, but there was nearly four acres of land full of fruit and forest trees. And there were the mountains, and the river, and the wide valley view, and that general peace and quiet, that has in it a kind of sacramental efficacy. [Illustration: "CHERRY CROFT," CORNWALL-ON-HUDSON] I had at this time a great deal of trouble with English houses printing my work, without either payment or permission, and a laughable but provoking incident occurred with the proof-reading of "A Sister to Esau." In this story, my chief character is a Scotch gentleman, of the most perfervid Calvinism, and the period of the story was the glorious ecclesiastical "departure" of the Free Kirk. Now Mr. Bonner's proofreader happened to be a strict, strait Methodist, and he altered all the Calvinism to Methodism, which was sheer nonsense in the mouth of a Scotch Chief, and a seceding Free Kirker. However as soon as I explained the circumstances to Mr. Bonner he had the text restored as written, with many apologies for his Methodist proofreader's conscience. The whole summer was spent in writing Mr. Bonner's second serial, "Love for an Hour Is Love Forever;" and in attending to the alterations going on in my home. Every room that was papered and painted afresh, was a new pleasure; and I had a fine garden, and began to plant vines, and to make an asparagus bed. Also, I made preparations for the winter's comfort by putting in a hot water furnace, and then I began a novelette called "Femmetia's Experience" for Mr. Bonner. It was a reincarnation story, and had a large sale, though at the time, the doctrine was but looming up on my spiritual horizon. The main facts of this story had been told me by an old lady when I lived in Boroughbridge, and was only twelve years old. Dr. Deems came to see us just as I had finished the story, and I spoke of its tendency and he said he had a strong leaning to the old heresy, that it had never died out of the heart and imaginations of men, and was steadily gaining a new growth. I ought to have had a very happy summer, for I had my own home, good health, and all the work that I could do; but how often below this calm idyllic surface of life, there is some fateful, domestic sorrow! It is likely met with the heroism and devoted affection of the old Greek tragedy, but there it is! and it has to be borne as best it may. I found in love and work the strength and consolation, the heavy-hearted of the Greek world never knew. It brings tears to my eyes yet, to read the short, pitiful entries of that cruel November. Yet I finished "Femmetia's Experience" and wrote also a novelette for Bonner called "The Mate of the Easter Bell," and other short articles. For in mental grief, mental work is a great salvation. I worked hard, though I was often compelled to lay down my pencil to seek the strength and comfort found only by "fleeing to the Rock that is higher than I." At the last, all was well. The gay handsome Captain M---- passed out of our lives, and Lilly bore the breaking of the tie better than I expected. I must not forget that in the midst of this trouble one of the dearest friends I still possess came into my life. It was Rutger Bleecker Jewett, the son of the learned Professor Jewett, of the General Theological Seminary. Through the December cold and deep snow, he climbed Storm King, one afternoon, and stepped into the light and warmth of Cherry Croft, like an incarnation of splendid youth and hope. He brought his welcome with him. With open hearts, and both hands we all met him, and he was free of my home from that hour. His father and mother were my friends, but I had never met Rutger before. Yet in a recent letter he writes, "I have always felt that we were old friends from the first--never strangers. It was as though we had met again, after an absence, not as though we were meeting for the first time. I also cherish vivid memories of you later in our old graystone house in Chelsea Square. The old house with its deep windows, big old-fashioned rooms, and vine-covered walls, has been replaced by a modern building, no more comfortable, and nowhere so picturesque as the house we knew. It is more than twenty years since I first came to Cherry Croft--twenty years of unbroken trust and friendship--a very rich possession to me." And to me also. As opportunity offered, I have often sought his advice or help, and he has never failed me. On January tenth I began "A Singer from the Sea," Mr. Bonner's third serial. On the twenty-second I was at the Astor Library all day, and at Rossiter Johnson's at a reception in the evening; Mr. Jewett went with me. On the twenty-third Mr. McClure and Mr. Ballistier took lunch with me at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, and Mr. McClure would have been very generous to me for some stories, but my engagement with Mr. Bonner prevented any business. I was at Mrs. Dodge's in the afternoon, and among the numerous visitors picked out Edith Thomas at once. I took dinner at Dr. Jewett's and watched with delight Mrs. Jewett dancing with her sons and daughters. On March fifteenth I finished "A Singer from the Sea" and then began "Michael and Theodora" for Mrs. Dodge, which I did not finish until June; and in July I began "Girls of a Feather," Mr. Bonner's last serial, which I finished in October. I was busy all summer in having a fence put round Cherry Croft, and a hedge planted within the fence. During October I wrote an article for the _North American Review_ called "Flirting Wives;" I had my little green house filled with bulbs and flowers, and planted with my own hands, and many tender memories, some laburnum trees. They were my mother's favorite, and I can see them dropping golden flowers all around our pretty garden in the Isle of Man. On November sixth I began the "Flower of Gala Water" which Bonner published after its serialization in the new _Godey's Magazine_, and on the eleventh we were honored and delighted with a visit from Dr. William Hayes Ward, who spent the week end with us. A little event of this visit remains like a picture on my memory. There was some question about a text in the Epistles, and Dr. Ward took from his vest pocket a small Testament. He said he had carried it there for many years. "Then it is not a revised Testament?" I asked. And he looked at the little book affectionately, and answered, "No." Yet the doctor had been on the committee of revision. But I understood. For me there is no version but the King James Version, and nothing could make me give it up. I have only one copy of the revised edition, and that Dr. Talmage inscribed to me with such extravagant encomiums, that I leave it lying on my parlor table, as a kind of certificate of moral health. During 1892 I had written "The Singer from the Sea" and "Girls of a Feather," "The Flower of Gala Water" and "The Preacher's Daughter," "Michael and Theodora" and several articles. My eyes were very tired, and I did not do so much during January, 1893. On the twenty-third, I began an article for Mr. Bok called "Why Literary Women Do Not Marry" and on the twenty-ninth, I began my novel called "Prisoners of Conscience." It was then a short story, and was published in the _Century Magazine_, but was later enlarged to book size, and published by the Century Company. During the month I also wrote another article for Mr. Bok called "Women's Weapons." In March, I wrote "The Lone House." A study of this story had appeared in the _Christian Union_. It was a good book, but Rutger told me the young people said it was "too religious," and they wished I would go back to my love stories. So I began "Bernicia," a love story among people of the first condition. But on my sixty-fourth birthday I became very ill with ulcerated sore throat, and on the fourth of April was in such a dangerous condition, that I sent for a New York specialist. I came near to death, but recovered slowly, and on June sixth I took Alice and went to England. It was not until the beginning of 1895, that I was able to take up "Bernicia," but during the same interval, I had written a story and several articles for the Bacheller Syndicate. From the eighteenth to the twenty-first of January I was in New York paying a visit to Mrs. Goldschmidt. The first afternoon we went together to a large studio reception. There were all sorts of professional people there, but I remember no one but Mrs. Frank Leslie. She was then Mrs. Wilde, I believe. The next day Mrs. Goldschmidt gave a dinner, and I sat next to General Collis, but liked Mr. John Wise and his beautiful wife best of all. I believe they were Virginians. The day following there was a crowded reception, and a supper party, and I sat next to Moncure Conway and Mrs. Frank Leslie. For the next night there was a theatre party, and a supper at the Waldorf. More weary than if I had written a book, I went home in the morning. I was grateful for the kindness shown me but very sorry indeed for the people who called it "life" and lived it. On my sixty-fifth birthday I was still on "Bernicia," but I had been very sick, and had a great deal of trouble of a heartaching quality, but though I complain a little to my diary, I add, "Truly I am old and weary, but with Thy help, O God, I am young, and strong, and ready to mount up as on eagles' wings. Thy loving kindness faileth not!" I finished "Bernicia" on the twentieth of April, and found a couplet from the Sufi poets, which pleased me so much, I will copy it here: "The Writer of our Destiny is a fair writer; Never wrote He that which would wrong us." I was very ill with nervous dyspepsia during June, but on July second accepted the proposal of the _New York Herald_, to run for one of the three judges of the ten thousand dollars prize offered by that paper for the best novel submitted to it. My vote was so large, that it was at this time the _Herald_ said I must be "the best beloved woman in the country." Mr. George Parsons Lathrop and Mr. Hazeltine were my colleagues. After this I wrote "The Knight of the Nets" for the _Herald_. "Discontented Women" for the _North American Review_--for which article Mr. Rideing the editor wrote me a letter of thanks, a story for the _Home Queen_, and other small items. On the twenty-sixth of September Lilly married Mr. Edward A. Munro, a Canadian whose business was in Brooklyn. It was an overwhelming trial to me, for Lilly had been my right hand in all affairs since her father's death. It is true that ten words by telegraph never yet failed to bring her to my side by the next possible train, but the house was empty and forlorn without her; and both Alice and I were desolate. However life is a constant learning "to do without" until that wonderful, "never-coming-back," we call death, restores to us all that we have lost. On December twenty-second, our dear Sultan died. We buried him in Cherry Croft, and were all heart-broken. Alas! "There's sorrow enough in the natural way, From men and women to fill our day: But when we are certain of sorrow in store, Why do we always arrange for more? Brothers and sisters, I bid you beware, Of giving your heart to a dog to tear."--KIPLING. January twelfth, 1896, Mrs. Goldschmidt had opened her house in Cornwall and Mr. Wilcox, and Ella Wheeler Wilcox, the artist Arter and Mrs. Arter and others were staying there. I took dinner with them, and that evening made up my mind that large parties were a mistake. A man's family is never too many, because perfect freedom and unanimity of interest make them one. But with strangers there should be no more guests than the host can personally entertain. The Ettrick Shepherd's "Rule of Three" is a good one, both as regards the guests and the courses. Every one has been to crowded and extravagant dinners, where they played the hypocrite for three or four hours, and said a fervent "Thank God!" when it was over. Two days after this dinner I was in New York to attend Edward Bok's reception--I think at the Waldorf Astoria. I should call it a mob, and not a reception. I had with me Dr. Lysander Dickerman, but even his splendid physical bulk, could not make a way for me through the crowd. The next day he came to Cornwall with me, and with Dr. and Mrs. Stone, who called to see him, we had a delightful evening. I wish I had space to say more of Dr. Dickerman, but there must be many living yet who remember his piety, his vast stores of learning, his attractive personality and fine conversational powers. The next morning Mr. Paul, a London editor, came in and brought me his last book. On the twenty-seventh of this January, 1896, I made an arrangement with Mr. Dodd to enlarge "The Knight of the Nets" for a book, for which they agreed to pay eight hundred dollars on January, 1897. Then I went out to spend the weekend with Irving Bacheller at his home in Port Chester. He had a beautiful place there, and a lovely wife, and I enjoyed my holiday very much. Mr. Bacheller was a good performer on the organ, which astonished me, and yet it need not have done so, for men seem to play with little or no effort. He was a fine driver also, and I saw the villages of Greenwich and Belle Haven. Professor Gaines dined one evening with us, and my visit to Mr. and Mrs. Bacheller is full of pleasant memories. I returned to New York on Monday morning, Mr. Bacheller coming with me. I intended spending the day in the Astor Library, but when we reached Astor Place, Mr. Bacheller said suddenly, "I am going to see Louis Klopsch, and I want you to go with me." "Who is Louis Klopsch?" I asked. "The proprietor of the _Christian Herald_." "Oh!" I replied. "Do you think he will care to see me?" "He will be glad to see you, and I dare promise, that you will be the better for seeing him." So I went to see Louis Klopsch, and it was one of the happiest and the most profitable things I ever did. We found him in his private office, and the room was in itself remarkable. It had an ornate, Eastern look; the windows were shaded with tinted glass, and there was an oil painting of "The Descent from the Cross" covering a large space of the western wall, while other Biblical pictures and models were everywhere to be seen; giving it the Oriental look of which I have spoken. And I had never seen such handsome furniture and appointments in any editor's or even publisher's office. I thought of the rather large closets, with their plain wooden chairs and simple desks, in which Harper's editors sat; of the slips in which George Merriam, and Moses Coit Tyler wrote and read; the poverty of all the editorial offices I had ever seen flashed across my memory, as I sat amid the color, beauty and luxury of the office of the _Christian Herald_. Dr. Klopsch rose as we entered, and with smiles came to meet us. Mr. Bacheller hastened away, I stayed nearly two hours, and they went like ten minutes. At the end of our interview, I was astonished at my first estimate of his countenance. I had then thought it remarkable, but not handsome; but I soon understood that it was the only face, that could have expressed his complex inner man, as well as properly manifest his slight, graceful personality. He had charming manners, and walked with a kind of alert grace. I have been particular about Dr. Klopsch's appearance, for I came to know him well, both in a business and a social way, and I suspect he could appear very different, to people with whom he was not in sympathy. I went home on the first of February, and found so many letters I could do nothing on the second but answer them. Among the writers were Mrs. Libbey, and Mr. Rideing; the latter sent me a check for seventy-five dollars in payment for "Discontented Women." On the eleventh, I went to Princeton, and remained with the Libbeys until the fourteenth, when I returned to New York, and dined with the Rideings. I liked to go to the Rideings; there was always such a sweet, old English air and influence about their home and dinners. I think they spent their summers in England, and never quite lost its atmosphere. On the sixteenth I began to rewrite "The Knight of the Nets" for Mr. Dodd; and on the twenty-first I signed a contract with Dr. Klopsch to write him a serial for the _Christian Herald_ for twenty-five hundred dollars. I also saw Mr. Booth King about a short story of four chapters for his paper called _Fashion_ and promised to write it for five hundred dollars. Then I worked on "The Knight of the Nets" all the rest of February. On the fourth of March I was again in New York attending a play and supper at Colonel Robert Ingersoll's. Mr. Jewett went with me. I remember nothing about the play, but I shall never forget Robert Ingersoll. I know all that has been said against him. It does not alter my fixed opinion that in practice he was one of the best Christians I ever knew. He has gone to the Mercy of the Merciful One, and I can only remember his wonderful intelligence, and personal charm. On March nineteenth the Sorosis Club gave me a breakfast at the Waldorf, at which I met Mrs. Helmuth, Jennie June (Mrs. Croly) and many other notable women. I returned home after the affair, and the next day went to work on Mr. King's story called, "I Will Marry My Own First Love." I did not finish it until the thirty-first, for though I had contracted for twelve thousand words, I wrote twenty-one thousand, because I could not properly develop the story with less work. March, the twenty-ninth, was my sixty-fifth birthday. I was writing all day on the story for Mr. King. "In the evening I sat with Lilly and Alice in the firelight, and talked of God's wonderful care over us. Alice said many comforting things. So sweet and good is the dear One! We used the new blue dinner service for the first time." (Diary, 1896.) I was on "The Knight of the Nets" again until the twentieth of April, when I got a letter from Mr. Charles Frohman, about "The Bow of Orange Ribbon." On the twenty-first I made a contract with him to dramatize it, _if I could_, about which fact I was doubtful. I had already realized that a play was not to write, but to build. Mr. Frohman gave me a box for that night's performance of "The Prisoner of Zenda" and Mr. Edward Dodd and Mr. Bacheller occupied it with me. Before trying the play, I finished "The Knight of the Nets" so often delayed and put aside. This was not until the eleventh of May. I gave nearly two weeks to the play, but felt it was not technically right, and Mr. Frohman in a kindly and gentlemanly manner told me so. And I was sorry at my failure to do what he wished. It made me nervous and sick, and I went to stay a few days at Elwyn, with Dr. Martin Barr. This clever, delightful physician is not, I regret to say, any relative of mine, but we are the best of friends, and I always resort to him for advice when sick, and other physicians fail me. Only three months ago I did so with the usual success. He is the head of the Elwyn State Institution for Insanity in many forms, and an exceedingly clever physician and social scientist. As the Elwyn Institution is very near to Swartmoor College I visited Professor De Gama, its principal at that time, and was delighted with him, and his large body of male and female students. He took me through the building, until we came to a door leading into a separate wing of the house. He told me he could not pass this door, as it led to the quarter sacred to the women students. "But," he added, "go down the corridor, and you will find plenty of friends." I did so, and seeing a door open, and a room full of girls, I stood and looked at them. There was an instant pause, and then a little joyful cry of "_Amelia Barr! Amelia Barr!_" Afterwards I had as happy an hour as any woman could have, and standing among that joyous, handsome crowd of young, lovely girls, and hearing their sweet voices call me, "Friend Amelia," I felt young again. And my thoughts flew instantly to the fair streets of Kendal, on First Day morning, full of beautiful, richly-gowned Quaker girls, going to meeting, while the magical chimes of Kendal Church filled the still air above them with heavenly melody. And every morning, as long as I remained at Elwyn, I found on my breakfast table a bouquet from the girls of Elwyn College. May God bless every one of them, wherever they now dwell! On the first of June, I began a story for Dr. Klopsch called "The King's Highway." It is a good story, but would have been better, if I had not received so many instructions from the editors of the _Christian Herald_. It had an unique acknowledgment from Mr. Thomas E. Clarke of Minneapolis, who sent me a copy of a story called "The King's Highway" in the Dakota language. On the twenty-second of June, I was at a dinner party given to Julian Hawthorne on his fiftieth birthday, and had the pleasure of sitting between Mr. Hawthorne and Mr. Hazeltine. I know there was a very fine dinner, but as to the feast of reason and the flow of soul, if it was remarkable I have quite forgotten all about it. Yet with Hawthorne and Hazeltine present, many clever things must have been said. The two items that impressed me, was the beautiful gown of Mrs. Richard Stoddard, and the wreath of laurel that crowned the chair in which Julian Hawthorne sat. On the ninth of July I was so tired, that I took my work to Nantasket and stayed there two weeks. It was then a quiet seaside resort, I believe it is now a kind of Coney Island. But I met pleasant people, and saw the New Englander on his native soil, and liked him so much, that I wrote the following poem to express my admiration of his character: They intended to go to Virginia, But God at the wheel said, "No! The hundred that I have chosen, To the cold, white North shall go. I will temper them there as by fire, I will try them a hundred fold, I will shake them with all its tempests, I will steady them with its cold." So these men from the English meadows By the pitiless Plymouth Bay, Learned well the worth of their Freedom, By the price they had to pay. But out of the fires of affliction, The tumult and struggle of wars, They brought forth her glorious banner, Its azure all shining with stars. The Hundred has grown to a nation, The wilderness blooms like the rose, And all through the South and the West Go the men of the ice and the snows. But wherever they go, they carry The strength of their forefather's fight-- The courage and moral uprightness, Of men who prefer to do right. On July thirty-first, I had a letter from my sister Alethia who was staying a few weeks at Castletown in the Isle of Man. In this letter she told me she had been with a marble cutter to Kirk Malew churchyard and had had Captain Thomas Huddleston's grave stone cleaned and all the moss and lichen removed from the lettering. My readers may remember that he was captain of the _Great Harry_ and was bringing home troops from America, when his ship was wrecked on Scarlet Rocks, every one on board perishing. And she told me, that when the stone was cleaned, she noticed that this tragedy occurred on the twenty-ninth of March, so that Captain Thomas Henry Huddleston and his son Henry died on the day that I was born. Early in August I finished "The King's Highway" and began to try to dramatize "The Bow of Orange Ribbon." I did not stop for anything except to visit Mr. Hearst's Children's Republic near Haverstraw, and to write an article about it. I finished the play in September, and Mr. Frohman was so far pleased with it that he promised to find a playwright who understood stage business to work with me. On the twenty-fourth, he introduced me to Mr. August Thomas, who agreed to direct the work as soon as I came to the city for the winter. October was a very busy month. I wrote half a dozen articles for Dr. Klopsch, and on the twentieth I went to Princeton to attend a great anniversary. I stayed with my old pupil, Professor William Libbey, and Professor Wheeler of the California University, the author of a fascinating "Life of Alexander the Great," was there with me. Professor Jacobus and Mrs. Jacobus were also there, and at night I went to a college concert with Mrs. Libbey. On the twenty-first I went to Alexander Hall with Mrs. Libbey and heard Henry Van Dyke deliver a splendid poem written by himself called "The Builders." After it, I was unable to decide whether he was greater as an orator, or a poet. On the twenty-second I saw the degrees given, heard Mr. Cleveland speak, and then went to a reception at President Patton's. On the third of the following March, I had a letter from Moses Coit Tyler in which he says: MY DEAR MRS. BARR: I had from my colleague Wheeler a faithful account of his talk with you at Princeton last fall, and of your kind message to me. I'm sorry that I can't send you a portrait of the literary editor of the _Christian Union_ as he looked twenty-four years ago, when he was that great man. So I must ask you to accept this his latest portrait, which may tell you that these years which have crowned you with laurels, have crowned him with gray hairs. All the same he is Yours faithfully, MOSES COIT TYLER. March 30, 1897. On the twenty-fourth I was at home and wrote an article for Dr. Klopsch on the Armenian question, and on the twenty-sixth I went to a great meeting in Carnegie Hall, called to sympathize with the persecuted Armenian Christians. This meeting was chiefly memorable to me, because I met there Dr. Burrell. He made the great speech of the occasion, and as I sat beside him on the platform I heard and enjoyed every word of it. As an orator, I do not think he has many equals, and his voice is very fine and resonant, and his gestures expressive and pleasing. During all the month I had been working as I found opportunity on the "Prisoners of Conscience" enlarging it for the Century Company, but I also wrote an article for the _Advance_ on the "Four Champions of Justification by Faith"--Paul, St. Augustine, Luther and John Wesley. At the close of October I saw Mr. Frohman again, and he told me Mr. Thomas wanted one thousand dollars to go over the play, and he would not give it. He was most kind and gentlemanly, but I think this disappointment wearied him. I knew how he felt, because I also was weary of work that wouldn't be manageable, and I laid it aside without any regret, and returned gladly to "Prisoners of Conscience." On the twelfth of November I was in New York, and going into Mr. Dodd's store then on Fifth Avenue about Twenty-second Street, I met there Barrie and Mrs. Barrie, and Robertson Nicoll, a distinguished editor and publisher of London. I thought Mrs. Barrie a lovely and most attractive woman, and I was proud to take the hand of the famous Scotch novelist. On the twenty-third of November I went to New York for the winter. I had not finished "Prisoners of Conscience," but Alice was so exceedingly psychic, I thought it best to take her away from the solitude of Cherry Croft to the material stir of the city. We went to the Fifth Avenue Hotel, the proprietors of which house always made such favorable terms for me, that it was a point of economy in the winter to go there. On the twenty-seventh, Mr. Frank Dodd asked me to a reception given to Ian McLaren, and on the same day Mr. Sankey gave me a pass to the Moody and Sankey meetings. I did not like Ian McLaren much, but I did like the stir of human feeling in the other invitation, and Mr. Sankey's singing pleased me, for my taste had not been either trained, or spoiled, by too much classical music; and Sankey's singing had in it, not only a fine lyrical cry, but also that "touch of Nature, which makes all men kin." On the twelfth of this December, Mrs. Klopsch called on me, and then and there began the sweetest friendship that has come into my life. I love beauty, and she was, and still is, very beautiful; and her kind, cheerful disposition made her ten times more so. From that hour I have loved her dearly, nay, but I think I must have loved her somewhere long before that hour, for our attachment was always full grown. And I count her love among the best blessings that God has given me. On the seventeenth, Mrs. Libbey called and brought me the Professor's photo in cap and gown. He looked very grave and handsome, and I could not help thinking of the days, in which I had given him music lessons, and cut many a slice of bread and jelly for him, when he came into my cottage, after a morning on the ice. Mr. Jewett took dinner with me and I finished "Prisoners of Conscience." On Christmas morning Mr. Jewett entered my parlor with armsful of laurel and mistletoe, and dressed it beautifully; and Lilly and her husband came over from Brooklyn to dine with me. I believe in good dinners. In some way or other domestic happiness has a fundamental dependence on them, they are conducive to amiable understandings. They are a festal sacrifice to household love, and sacred friendship, and intellectual recreation; and they are necessary to every kind of success. Only the Scotsman "who is fit for anything when he is half-starved" may neglect his dinner, and not injure his fortune. The year 1897 has a record similar to the one just described. I spent the first three months at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, and then returned joyfully to Cherry Croft, and remained there until near the close of the year. It will be sufficient, if I now note the days containing distinctive events; for instance, on the seventh of January I addressed the men at the Bowery Mission, and on the fifteenth began a story for the Bacheller Syndicate, called "The Price She Paid." Lilly was sick with grippe, and I missed her daily visit very much. On the twenty-ninth Mr. Thomas called again about the play, and I returned to it, but with little heart, though working under his direction. On the seventeenth of February I wrote "still working hard, but hopelessly on my play. I have finished the second act, and Mr. Thomas professes to be satisfied, even pleased; but then he is a very courteous gentleman." On the twenty-sixth and twenty-seventh I was at the Astor Library, and had a long comforting talk with Mr. Beauregard on reincarnation and other spiritual subjects. On the fourth of March, Mr. Thomas came and appeared well satisfied with what I had done, and on the ninth Mr. Frank Dodd called and contracted for my next two stories. On the eleventh Mr. Beauregard dined with me, and afterwards lectured in my parlor on occultism. The rooms were crowded, and every one much interested. On the thirteenth I made tea at the Author's Club, having General Sickles at my left hand. I took a dislike to him, perhaps unjustly, but the Southern gallantry I had admired forty years ago, seemed out of place in a man so old, and a company calm and intellectual. The following day I was at Mr. Robert Underwood Johnson's to dinner. His now famous son was present, a dark handsome youth, with the quiet thoughtful eyes of dreaming genius. I spent the evening of the twenty-first at Mr. Dana's, and saw all his wonderful collection of pottery. Very carefully he unlocked for me the box that held the famous Peach Blow jar, and I will tell the truth, and acknowledge that I was insensible to its beauty. I thought I had seen far lovelier vases. Rutger Jewett was with me, and on the twenty-fifth I was at Dr. Jewett's to tea. On the twenty-sixth Dr. Klopsch asked me to go to India with the ship load of corn and wheat which American women had given to the famine sufferers. He wished me to go as the representative of these American women. My children would not allow me to accept the offer, which I regretted. The twenty-ninth was my sixty-sixth birthday, and all my rooms were full of flowers, but Lilly had gone to Cornwall, and could not come, so there was a little shadow on it. I spent the afternoon of the thirty-first at Colonel Ingersoll's and met there Andrew White, our Minister to Berlin, a most interesting man. He was just publishing a book and promised to send me a copy. On the first of April I came back to Cherry Croft. Lilly had gone there three days previously, and the house was warm, everything in order, and a loving smiling welcome waiting me. I was very happy to be home again. On the third, Mr. Frohman wrote me that he was disappointed in the play. So was I. I had wasted a deal of time and strength on it, and I felt I was doing so, all the time I was working on it. All the first week in May was spent in trying to see my way clear to go with Dr. Klopsch to India, about which he was urgent. But Alice was mentally very sick, and Mary and Lilly would not hear of the journey, the cholera being at that time very bad there. On June the thirteenth, the Reverend Mr. Boyd of Chicago preached a sermon against the "Prisoners of Conscience" which the Century Company had just issued in book form. On the twenty-second, the _Chicago Times Herald_ published my defence; and Dr. Boyd's sermon was only a splendid advertisement for the story. In July, I was busy finishing my new novel "I, Thou and the Other" but in August, I left it a week to write a story for the Bacheller Syndicate, called "Judith of Keyes Grif." On the twenty-sixth of September I was writing a story for _Leslie's_ called "The Lost I. O. U." and on the twenty-eighth I had a letter from Dodd, Mead and Company saying they liked "I, Thou and the Other" very much. There was nothing out of the usual course of events in October, but a dinner which I gave, and which, quite unintentionally on my part, consisted only of three clergymen. One day the Reverend Mr. Snedeker, the Methodist preacher at Newburgh, told me many interesting things about Father McGlyn, his offence against the Church, and his summons to appear before some spiritual court at Rome. I said, "I should like to see any man, who had been brave enough to offend the powerful prelates of Rome;" and Mr. Snedeker answered, "He wishes to meet you." "Then come to-morrow," I replied, "come to dinner, and there is a fine moon to light you home." He gladly accepted the invitation, and the next morning I sent and asked Mr. Page, our Episcopal minister, to dine with them. It was a remarkable meeting. Father McGlyn told us all about his visit to Rome, and his interview with the Pope; then he went to Alice's room, and blessed her, and blessed her altar, and prayed with her. For he had quickly discerned the spirit within her, and with a beautiful humility said it was greater and purer than his own. I shall never forget Father McGlyn. As a social man he was a failure, as a priest of God he was worthy of all honor. On October the fifteenth, Professor and Mrs. Libbey sent for me to hear the Earl of Aberdeen and President Cleveland speak, but I did not go. A month afterwards I went to the Fifth Avenue Hotel for the winter at the same favorable terms. I noticed that there was a great crowd at dinner but I had a long, pleasant talk in the green parlor after it with Mr. and Mrs. Tom Platt. I liked both thoroughly. Mrs. Platt worked me a most exquisite center piece, and Mr. Platt wrote his name in the corner. This autograph I embroidered, and the beautiful square lies to this day over the green velvet cover of my dining-room table. The next day I took lunch with the Mount Holyoke Alumnæ, and made an address on "The Neighbor at Our Gate," a most important person, for we may choose our friends, but we cannot choose our neighbor. We have to take him as he is, and make the best of him. On December the second, Miss Jewett, Mrs. Platt, and Mrs. Lockhart of Pittsburgh, and Mr. and Mrs. Saltus spent the evening with me, and I received an invitation to address the Congregational Club on January twenty-eighth, 1898; which I promised to do conditionally. On the seventh, Edward Bok called and I promised to write some short things for him. But I was really too tired to do anything, and was compelled to stay away from Mr. Rideing's reception on that day, and even Rutger's happy presence was almost more than I could respond to. CHAPTER XXV DREAMING AND WORKING "Came the whisper, came the vision, Came the Power with the need." * * * * * "This is the scene of combat, not of rest, Man's is laborious happiness at best; On this side death his labors never cease, His joys are joys of conquest, not of peace." Following my physician's advice, I slipped away to Old Point Comfort on December the twenty-third. I fell into a sound sleep as soon as I was on the boat, and practically slept all the way there. I had a letter of introduction to the proprietor of the hotel from Mr. Hitchcock, the proprietor of the Fifth Avenue Hotel, and was given rooms almost over the sea, and treated with unbounded kindness and respect. Lilly went down with us, and made my rooms comfortable, and ate Christmas dinner with us. We had a delightful surprise at this meal, for we were at the same table with Dr. Peck, one of my neighbors on Storm King Mountain, Cornwall, a most intelligent and delightful companion. I was not really sick; I was only tired, so tired, however, that I could hardly lift my heavy, aching eyes, and my brain absolutely refused to follow a thought out, and I suffered much from a relaxed, nervous throat. I slept nearly night and day for a week, and the sea winds breathed fresh life into me. Then Lilly felt that she might leave me to their healing influence and the renewing power of sleep and rest. On January the twentieth, I note, "I am much better. I feel nearly well." Dr. Frissel of the Hampton School called to see me. Reverend Father Hall, Judge Parker's son-in-law, sent me violets, and I had a strange but interesting letter from Lilly, who said she had been at a crystal party in M----'s studio rooms, and had heard a lecture by a Hindoo occultist. The guests were invited to ask him any question they wished him to answer, and Lilly asked how her mother was. He said, "She is at sea, or very near the sea. She will be quite well in February, and some good thing will happen at the end of the month. Her good fortune is at a standstill until then." And I add with emphatic undercrossing, "How does he know anything about me? My times are in God's hands." I will also add, that nothing he said was true. In February I was able to see a few visitors, and I had a great deal of attention from the officers of the regiment stationed there. Colonel Morris and Mrs. Morris called several times, and Lieutenant Allan and Mrs. Allan did all they could to make me happy. On the eleventh, they gave me at their house a delightful reception, and on the nineteenth I was entertained at the Officer's Club, and had all the privileges of the club presented to me. This honor was the more remarkable, as I was the only woman who had ever received it. After this callers were so numerous, I thought it best to go home, for I was still very weak and nervous, and I feared to lose what I had gained. My eyes also were far from rested, and it was difficult for me to write. I was sorry to go, because Alice had been so happy, but it was "for Mamma's sake," and she went gladly. No, I cannot write of the next few months. They were filled with sorrow of the most heart-breaking kind, and for the first time in my life, I could not go unto Him who promised to give rest to the sorrowful and heavy laden. Grief, with me, runs into motion, and I walked my room day and night, until exhaustion forced me to sit down. I got the first help from a book Mr. Van Wagenen gave me. I had to go to Dodd, Mead and Company and all of the firm happened to be out but Mr. Van Wagenen, and he gave me a book, telling me to read it, and it would do me good. I do not know _why_ he did so. I tried to smile and look happy, but he may have seen the sorrow in my eyes, for its shadow is still there. This was on April twenty-first and on April twenty-fifth, I write, "I have taken courage, and am going on in God's strength. I can do nothing without God. I can do everything with God to help me. I will not fret, and I will not worry. I will cease from being hurt and angry. I will go back to my work, and trust in God to give me the sight and strength to do it." It was during these months of such anguish as only mothers can know that the great comforting truth of reincarnation was fully revealed to me. And I count the sorrow, even if it had killed me, but a small payment for it. Slowly, but surely it dawned upon my soul, that the suffering which I had not deserved, by either thought, word or deed in this life, must have been earned in some previous existence, and this conviction enabled me not only to accept, but to forgive. Then I read upon my knees the Fifth-first Psalm and prayed, "Forgive me, for it is against Thee, and Thee only, I have sinned." I had paid my debt, and I was comforted; for we must all go up our own Calvary. The just cannot die for the unjust, the purehearted for the sinner, the merciful for the cruel. "It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishment the scroll, I am the master of my fate I am the captain of my soul." We all pay our just debts, we all reap then our just rewards. And my soul rose up to God's expectation, yielded "... itself to the Power constraining, With a ready and full surrender; Trusting God in the roughest whirlwind, In a cloud of the thickest night, While I watched and hoped in silence, For the dawn of a richer splendor; Musing what new gifts await me-- What of Knowledge, or Love, or Light!" In July Professor Libbey and Mrs. Libbey spent two days at Cherry Croft, and at the end of the month I had a visit from the Countess de Brémont. She brought a letter from Mr. Paul of London, and I found her an interesting woman. She had just come from Africa, where she had lived for several months in Paul Kruger's home. Her descriptions of it, and of the Boer President and his family, were of the most unsavory even disgusting character; but I listened to them with a kind of satisfaction. I had no respect for the Boers, and I was heart-sick at their early successes; so much so, that my doctor had forbidden me to read anything respecting the war until my daughter gave me permission. In August I managed to locate the story of "The Maid of Maiden Lane." I had begun it half-a-dozen times, but always found myself running across "The Bow of Orange Ribbon;" and I was about to give it up, when I awoke one morning about four o'clock, with the whole story clear in my mind. I made a note of the plot as given me, and then with a good heart finished off "Trinity Bells" for Mrs. Dodge. On the third of September I was at work again on "The Maid of Maiden Lane," and on the eighth I took tea at Dr. Henry Van Dyke's, who was then occupying the beautiful Club House on Storm King as a summer home. The fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth of September, I kept as I have always done in memory of my dear husband's and sons' deaths, and I wrote, "It is thirty-two years ago, but I have forgotten nothing of God's mercy, and of their love. 'Faithful, indeed, the spirit that remembers, After such years of change and suffering.' I am more alone than ever, but God is sufficient." _Sept. 30th._ I made bread, tidied drawers and closets, filled all the vases with fresh flowers, and walked for two hours and half. _Oct. 1st._ Writing in the morning on "The Maid of Maiden Lane," and in the afternoon watching the gathering of the apples, and the digging of the potatoes. In November I finished "The Maid of Maiden Lane" and made an arrangement with Mr. Dodd to write "The Lion's Whelp." For these two books, I was to receive three thousand dollars each. In December I suffered a great loss. I had as cook a Mrs. Kirkpatrick, the wife of that Thomas Kirkpatrick, whom I have named as my first caller at Cherry Croft, and who was at this very time my gardener. She had both my trust and my affection, for she was faithful and kind to me, and had fine spiritual instincts, which I delighted to inform and to direct. On Sunday, the eleventh of December, she appeared to be in as perfect health as a woman in the prime of life could be, yet when I awoke out of deep sleep, soon after midnight, I knew that something was going to happen; for I could not move a finger, nor could I open my eyes. I lay motionless waiting and listening. Then I heard steps mounting the stairs--steps, no human foot could make--the strong swift steps of a Messenger whom nothing could delay. At the head of the stairs was a corridor on which my room, my study, a guest room and Alice's two rooms opened. At the end of the corridor there was a door, _always locked at night_, then two steps leading down to a small hall, on which Mrs. Kirkpatrick's room, and another room opened. Into which of these rooms was He going? I listened awestruck and breathless. Past my door, my study, and the guest room He went; past the open door leading into Alice's rooms, and then I heard the same fateful tread going down the two steps into the outer hall, after which there was dead silence. In a few minutes I was able to move, and I sat up and considered. I was certain that I had locked the door between the corridor and the small hall. Yet there had been no delay at the door, nor any sound of a lock turning. I struck a light and went to the door. _It was locked._ It had been no impediment unto Him who passed through it, shut and locked. Alice was in a deep sleep; Mrs. Kirkpatrick, also. I went back to my room and sat down. And that night I slept no more. In the morning Mrs. Kirkpatrick told me she was sick. "I will go home," she said, "and send my daughter to do my work. I shall be well in a day or two." I held her hand as she spoke, and looked into her kind face, where I saw written what no mortal could either write, or blot out. As she passed through the gate, I called Alice, to "come and take a last look at Mrs. Kirkpatrick;" and we both watched her hurrying up the hill, until she was out of sight. Seven days after she died of pneumonia. That night as I sat quite alone by the parlor fire, praying for the passing soul, Lilly came to me. And I cried with joy, while together we sought "Him that ... turneth the shadow of death into the morning" (Amos, 5:8). She spent two days in packing and preparing the house for the winter, and on the third day, I went with Alice to the Fifth Avenue Hotel in New York, leaving Thomas Kirkpatrick, the sorrowful husband, in charge of the house. I do not like to write much about 1899. The first three months my doctor forbid me to write, and I amused myself by reading everything I could find on the new cults and "isms" then clamoring for recognition. Theosophy for a few weeks fascinated me, but Christian Science, never for one hour made any impression. I thought it, only a huge misunderstanding of the Bible. Spiritualism I had examined many years previously, and discarded its pretensions at once. Truly God speaks to men, but when he so favors any soul, He asks no dollar fee, and needs no darkened room, veiled cabinet, nor yet any hired medium to interpret His message. He can make Himself heard in the stir and traffic of Broadway, and in the sunshine of midday, as well as in the darkness of midnight. And when I had satisfied my foolish curiosity, I was sorry and ashamed, and with deep contrition asked only to be permitted to say once more "_Our Father!_" Going back to my Bible, was like going back home, after being lost in a land of darkness and despair. This three months' reading, often by electric light, made havoc with my sight, and I was obliged to spend six weeks in a darkened room after it. Lilly spent them with me, and I was greatly consoled by this proof of her affection for me. I was very anxious about money matters, for though I could not write, the expenses of the house went on. But God did not forget His Promise to me. Towards the end of March Mr. Stone of Chicago wrote to me for a novel, and I sold him "Was It Right to Forgive?" for twelve hundred dollars; soon after Mr. Jewett came up to Cherry Croft, told me he had gone into the publishing business with his friend Taylor, and bought the book rights of "Trinity Bells," for two thousand dollars. These two events, both most unexpected, made my mind easy; and I improved so rapidly, that in May I began to write a little. Then Dr. Klopsch ordered twenty short articles, and these gave me just the work I could do, because I could leave it, and take it up, whenever it was prudent to do so. I spent the winter of 1900 at Atlantic City, and on the sixth of February, the novelist, Robert Barr of London, came to visit me. He was delighted with Atlantic City, and stayed more than a week. At this time I had a remarkable dream. I thought I stood on the piazza at Cherry Croft, and was looking upward at an immense black African bull, that rose and fell between the sky and the earth. Sometimes he was very high, sometimes he came near to the ground, but as I watched he fell to the earth, and his head came off, and rolled out of sight. And the grass was high, and I called Kirkpatrick and said, "The grass is ready, you will cut it to-morrow." After that dream I read all the newspapers I wanted to read. I knew the Boers would fail, and fall, and the English flag float over their conquered states. On the twenty-eighth of February I read of Cronjes' defeat, and on the fifteenth of March, a few days after my return home, Mr. Henry Hunter of Cornwall, sent his son through a great storm, late at night, up to Cherry Croft to tell me that the English had possession of the capital of the Orange Free State. The next morning I walked to the end of the piazza, and noticing the grass high, I called to Kirkpatrick and said, "Kirk, the grass is too high, cut it down tomorrow." Then my dream flashed across my mind, and I thanked God and was happy. The eleventh of July was the fiftieth anniversary of my wedding day. Alice was with Lilly in Brooklyn, and I was quite alone, neither had I any letters referring to it. All my world had forgotten it, so I made it memorable to myself, by commencing my Cromwell novel, which I that day named "The Lion's Whelp." In the afternoon I sat in the sunshine, and thought over the incidents of my fifty wedding days. It was a little story for my own pleasure and I shall never write it down. On that day also, I resolved to give up all social visiting, and devote myself entirely to my work. I worked steadily afterwards on "The Lion's Whelp" but did not finish it until April second, 1901. Then I note in my diary, "I finished my dear Cromwell novel today, five hundred fifty pages. I leave it now with God and Mr. Dodd." It was hard to leave it. For some days I could not bring myself to finish the last few sentences, and my eyes were full of tears when I wrote "_Vale Cromwell!_" I had the same reluctance to close "Remember the Alamo." In both cases, I was bidding farewell to characters with whom I had spent some of the happiest hours of my life. After finishing "The Lion's Whelp," I collected a volume of my short stories for Dr. Klopsch, and on July fourth I began a novel for Mr. Jewett called "Thyra Varrick." The scene was laid in the Orkney Isles, and the wind of the great North Sea blew all through it, while it had the brilliant blundering of Prince Charles Stuart for a background. It was a great favorite, for it was the initial story of the _Delineator_, and I received the following letter from Charles Dwyer, the editor, after it was published: DEAR MRS. BARR: I take leave of "Thyra Varrick" in the May number, with the greatest regret. It seems like parting with an old friend, and one who has conferred many favors on you. It is the first serial that has appeared in the magazine, and I consider myself very fortunate in being able to present such a story. A copy of the book has come in from the publishers, and is now in the hands of the reviewer. When it comes back to me, I shall take the liberty of sending it to you for an autograph. With every good wish for a pleasant summer, and that we may be again in association, I am Very faithfully yours, CHARLES DWYER. On May the third, my sister Alethia died of apoplexy, and I am now the last of a family that had been more than a century _at home_ when Edward the Confessor reigned. A very ancient prophecy regarding the family said, "It will go out with a lass." So it will. I stand at the end of a long, long roll of priests and heroes, but though I am only a woman, I have fought a good fight, my hands are clean, my honor unstained, and I have never written a line that I would wish to blot, if I was dying. I am not afraid to meet any of my ancestors, and I shall be glad to look my dear father in the face. He was a great scholar, but he was too busy preaching to write a book. And when I tell him I have written over sixty books, I shall add, "But that is because I am your daughter." On June the sixteenth, I had the following letter, and among the hundreds I have received, not one has given me more soul pleasure: WAR DEPARTMENT. UNITED STATES ENGINEER'S OFFICE. MOBILE, ALA. MRS. AMELIA E. BARR. DEAR MADAM: Allow me to thank you for Chapter Seven, "Souls Of Passage." I am on a higher plane since reading it, and thoughts, heretofore merely in solution in my mind, have flashed into beautiful and permanent crystallization. I do not apologize for addressing you, for I feel that it must please you to know, that your soul in its passage, has helped another. Very respectfully, WILLIAM STODDARD MCNEILL. From the middle of August unto the end of the year, Alice was very ill, and I could not leave her night or day, unless Lilly was with her. So I went early to the city this year. I finished "Thyra Varrick" on December nineteenth, and then rested until the New Year. On the second of January, 1902, I was in the Historical Library, then on Second Avenue, where I worked all day, and then bought from the library a large and very valuable book on the Loyalists of New York City during its captivity to the English. It is written by one of the De Lancey family, and is a monumental book that ought to be better known. Alice was in a most unhappy condition all month, and I write sorrowfully on February first: "I am heartbroken about Alice. I can get no hopeful response spiritually from her. She is always conscious of some inimical Presence, whom she cannot pray against, and she is miserably depressed, and will not go out." On the fifteenth I had a letter from a small town in Turkey-in-Asia, asking permission to translate my articles in _Success_ into Greek, and thus I discovered that _Success_ had been using my work without my knowledge, or permission, for I never wrote for the paper except one article for the opening number. The success founded on such methods had in it no lasting elements, and the paper has disappeared. On the twenty-eighth Alice begged me to take her home, and on the third of March I did so. Kirkpatrick had the house beautifully warm, and Lilly went up to Cherry Croft with us, and put all in order. On March twenty-ninth, my seventy-second birthday, I had had a night of prayer and watching, but I fell asleep at dawn, and woke up wonderfully refreshed; and to my happy amazement, Alice gave me a kiss and a blessing, when I went to her room. "Dear God!" I prayed, "add Thy Blessing to it." The mail brought me a present of violet pins from Lilly, and all my soiled lace done up with her own hands, and looking like new. Her husband sent me a very handsome scrap-book for my newspaper clippings. I had one hundred seventy-five dollars from Rutger, royalty money, and Mary had made and sent me a pretty kimono. I was very happy indeed; for, thank God, I still keep my child heart, and "little things" make me happy. On April second I began "The Song of a Single Note." It carried on the story of "The Bow of Orange Ribbon," and a month later I wrote, "Alice is well and happy; our days go on calm and sweetly, and I am enjoying my work." On May the twenty-first, Mrs. Harry Lee called to see me for the first time. I liked her at once. She is now one of the two women I really love. There is no set time for _her_ calls, she can come morning, noon or night, and be welcome. She is loving and intellectual, and never gets bored or has a train to meet, if our conversation slips into grave, or even religious subjects. From a good tree, we expect good fruit, and she is the eldest daughter of the late well-beloved E. P. Roe. Her love for me also runs into physical and material grooves, which are very enjoyable; many a time she has walked over the fields to my house, with a basket of fine fruit, or a dish of whipped cream, or some other delicacy. And as she is a fashionable woman in the social world, I think such little attentions show a sweet and homely affection, that I value highly. On May thirty-first I made a note that causes me to smile as I read it--"a kind of dictatorial letter, from a firm who want me to write a novel for them--_they are both young!_" I also, rejoice, because I have got the grip of the story I am writing, and now it will be easy work. On June the twelfth, I had a remarkable experience, one I shall never forget. I heard the clock strike three, and thought I had a letter in my hand from my mother. It was written on the old-fashioned large, square letter paper, and contained two sheets, the last one not quite full; folded as we folded letters before envelopes had been thought of, and closed with a seal which I carefully broke. In this letter she told me of all that she had suffered, and how she had prayed to God, and I buried my face in the letter and wept bitterly. Yes, I felt the tears, and I said, "O dear, dear Mother, you had to die, and I had to grow old, to know how much I love you!" A strange thing was, I saw plainly her address, and she had signed herself "Mary Singleton," _her maiden name_, "Kingdom of Heaven." There were two other lines in the address, which I have forgotten, but I knew they were the names of city and street. I was wonderfully comforted by this letter, and its enthralling, heavenly perfume lingered about me for many days.[8] [Illustration: MISS ALICE BARR] On June thirtieth Charles Francis Adams sent me a copy of his oration about Cromwell's having a statue in the New England Colonies. He deserved it. If England had not so urgently needed him, he would have accompanied his friend, Long John Wentworth, to Massachusetts. If Mr. Adams had only told the New Englanders, that Cromwell was the best ball player in England, and that Wentworth was the only man who could match him, they would doubtless have taken the statue into serious consideration. At the end of August I finished "A Song of a Single Note" and Mary and Kirk fortunately came from Florida, to pay me a visit. My days of remembrance, the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth of September, I spent reading Professor James's "Varieties of Religious Experience," a wonderful, wonderful book, which none who read thoughtfully can ever forget. I have read it through many times; it always makes a good time for me, spiritually. On October, the twenty-sixth, Mr. Hearst gave me fifty dollars for permission to copy my article on "Divorce" from the _North American Review_ into his paper; and on the sixth of December I went to the Marlborough House in Atlantic City. Alice and I spent Christmas alone; she was very sweet and reflective, and talked to me long of the Christmases gone forever. "So fair! So sad!" I said; and she answered with a smile, "They are with God." On February fifteenth, I was again settled at Cherry Croft, and began "The Black Shilling," but on the twenty-sixth I tore up all I had written, and began it over again. On the twenty-ninth of March, my seventy-third year of travail through this life, I write gratefully, "I have good health, a good home, good daughters, good servants, many friends, and one hundred three pages of 'The Black Shilling' written to my satisfaction. Lilly was here, and Alice is quite well, and Rutger remembered my birthday and sent me one hundred thirty dollars royalty." I finished "The Black Shilling" on the twenty-ninth of July; and my eyes were so tired, I went into a darkened room for three weeks, and on the thirtieth of October I went to New York in order to be under the care of Dr. Hunter, a fine oculist, and no alarmist. He told me there was not the slightest evidence of any disease, they only wanted rest; and the relief his verdict gave me was unspeakable, and in itself curative. From the fourteenth to the nineteenth of December I went to Princeton to stay with the Libbeys. I had sent out no cards this winter, and I saw no one but Dr. and Mrs. Klopsch, and Rutger Jewett. On the whole 1903 was a hard year, and my eyes were so troublesome that I only wrote "The Black Shilling," and a few little articles for the daily press. "_Jan. 1st, 1904._ When I opened my Bible this morning my eyes fell upon this cheering verse, 'Having obtained help of God, I continue unto this day.' (Acts, 26:22.)" Three days afterwards I went back to Cornwall, and on the sixteenth I had a visit from Mr. Platt of the _Smart Set_, about writing for him. He was an English gentleman of a fine type, but I am sure he understood at once, that I could not write for a set I knew nothing about. Nevertheless I enjoyed his visit. I read all January for "The Belle of Bowling Green," which I began on February, the eighth, and finished on June, the twenty-seventh. All August, I was writing for Mr. Rideing and Dr. Klopsch; but on September, the eighteenth, I began "Cecilia's Lovers," which I finished on February eighth, 1905. All April, May and June I was writing articles for the _Globe_ on social subjects, such as slang, bored husbands, colossal fortunes, et cetera. On November fifteenth, I had an invitation to a dinner given to Mark Twain on his seventieth birthday. I did not go to the dinner, but I sent Mr. Clemens the wish that Dr. Stone wrote to me on my seventieth birthday. "The days of our life are three score years and ten, and if by reason of strength it be four score years, yet is it labor and sorrow. _May you have the labor without the sorrow._" On November, the twenty-fourth, I made a contract with Mr. Lovell to write him a novel for five thousand dollars. I wrote him one called "The Man Between," and it was finished and paid for on March thirty-first, 1906. In April of 1906, I began "The Heart of Jessy Laurie," which was sold to Mr. Dodd on September the seventeenth. In November I began a book that is a great favorite, and whose writing gave me constant pleasure, "The Strawberry Handkerchief." I began 1907 in the Fifth Avenue Hotel, and on the fifteenth had finished the first chapter of "The Strawberry Handkerchief," but on the thirtieth I took pneumonia, and was very near to death. With God's blessing on the skill of Dr. Charles Nammack, and Lilly's faithful care, my life was saved. Her husband gave me an equally loving service. Every afternoon he came to the hotel, read and answered my letters, and sat with Alice, while Lilly had a long, sound sleep. Then he went for medicines, and if likely to be needed, remained all night. My own son could have done no more for me, nor done it any more lovingly. On the twenty-third of February, I had one of the most wonderful spiritual experiences of my life. Lilly had gone home, and taken Alice with her, and I was quite alone. The room which they occupied, while in the hotel, opened into my room; but it was now empty, and the proprietors had promised to put no one into it, unless obliged by stress of business; for it had been very convenient, for changing the air in my room. I awoke from sleep about three A.M. and found my room distressingly hot. I rose, put on wool slippers, stopped at the table, ate a few grapes, and drank a glass of milk, and then thought I would open the door between the two rooms. I was very weak, but I reached the door, and had my hand on the key. Then Some One in the adjoining room thrust quickly a heavy bolt across the other side of the door. I concluded the room had become occupied while I was asleep, was a little annoyed at not being informed, but thought no more of the circumstance, until the chambermaid came to me in the morning. "Do you know," she said, "I left both the windows in the next room open, and it has been the coldest night of the winter. The room was like an ice box this morning; for the heat was turned off and the wind blowing, and freezing as it blew." "But the room was occupied," I answered. "No, indeed!" she continued. "I went in an hour ago, and shut the windows and put on the heat, and I will take you there while I make this room comfortable." She did so, and I was lying wrapped in a blanket upon a sofa, when I remembered the almost angry drawing of the bolt, and turned my head to look at the door. _There was no bolt there._ There was nothing but a little brass screw in the lintel, that a child's finger could turn noiselessly. Yet the bolt I heard was one of the large iron bolts, used in the farm and manor houses of Westmoreland, and the North Country. They crossed the whole door, and fell into the socket provided, with a great noise--the noise I had heard early that morning. _Who_ had been watching me through the long night hours? One step into that freezing room would have chilled the spark of life in me. _Who_ had prevented it, and that in such a manner as should convince me that it was no mortal hand, and no mortal bolt that saved me? That day, I could do nothing but pray and wonder, and then pray again. I thought I was alone, and I was not alone. Some angel had charge over me, and I remembered that there was just a touch of impatience in the driving of the bolt, as if the watcher had the feeling of a mother, vexed at her child's imprudence. I have had many spiritual experiences but few that affected me more than this one. About the eighteenth of March I resolved to go home, and Lilly's husband went to Cornwall, had the water put on, and the fires lighted; and on the twentieth Lilly and Alice followed, taking a servant with them. I waited as patiently as I could for Lilly to send me word the house was warm and comfortable; then Mr. Munro came and packed my trunks, and on the twenty-sixth my captivity ended. God let me go home, and I found Love and every comfort waiting for me. On March, the twenty-ninth, I wrote: "I am getting well. This is a new birthday. A happy day." I had written two chapters of "The Strawberry Handkerchief" when I was taken ill, but I was not able to return to it until May, the nineteenth, and I did not finish it until January, the seventh, A.D. 1908, when we were staying at Bretton Hall Hotel, for the three cold months. On January, the thirty-first, Mr. and Mrs. Dodd gave me a "Bow of Orange Ribbon" dinner. All decorations were in the dominant color, and it was a very pretty affair. Mrs. Dodd is a charming hostess, and Mr. Dodd knows the exact tone at which a company of happy, sensible people should be kept. He sets it, and he keeps it, and every one follows his lead, as naturally in pleasure, as they do in business. On February, the twenty-ninth, I was guest of honor at the Press Club Reception, held at the Waldorf Astoria. I enjoyed this occasion thoroughly, for I like the men and women of the press. I sat beside Mr. Pollock, a man of extraordinary genius. I had a very sore throat that day, but his speech made me forget I had anything but a heart and a brain. Bishop Potter sat near me. I had a pen and ink acquaintance with him, but had never before met him personally. As a man, he was delightful; as a bishop, he fell below my ideal. But then my ideal had been formed on the English Spiritual Lords, and I thought of Carpenter, and others, and wondered if they ever forgot their office so far as to tell a great public assemblage funny stories. The stories were excellent, and quite in keeping with what one of them called "his job," but somehow they fell below the office he filled in the church. Yet everyone enjoyed them, and my quibble may be laid to my English superstitions about sacred things. I had a little reception after the meeting, and never in all my life had I been so petted and praised. The young women crowded round me and kissed my hands, and my cheeks, and I wished they were all my daughters. Mrs. Klopsch had sent me an immense bouquet of violets, and I gave every flower away to them. If ever fame tasted sweet to me, it was during that half hour among the lovely women of the New York press. On March, the first, I went back to Cornwall, and on the fifteenth I began a novel called "The Hands of Compulsion," which I finished on June, the twenty-seventh. It is one of the best of my Scotch stories. All July I was reading for "The House on Cherry Street," which I began on August, the second. I was busy on it all summer, for it was a very difficult period to make interesting, the fight for freedom of the press. The winter came on early, and I went to the city on the first of November, as I needed the Historical Library for my work. On November, the eighteenth, I took dinner at Mr. Dodd's and among the guests were Mr. George McCutcheon, and Mr. Maurice of the _Bookman_, a handsome, interesting young man, whom I should like to know better. On November twenty-seventh, I went to Dr. Klopsch's to dine with the Honorable Lyman Gage, one of the most widely cultivated men I ever met. I supposed he would not talk of anything but finance or politics. These subjects were never named. During dinner we were talking of evolution and Orlando Smith's great book on eternalism; after dinner Mr. Gage read aloud some passages from Plato with wonderful beauty and expression; notably the death of Socrates. This began a conversation lasting until midnight concerning death and reincarnation. I shall never forget this evening, which was duplicated on December fourth, with the addition to our company of the Reverend Dr. Chamberlin. On December, the sixth, I dined with my friend and physician, Dr. Charles Nammack, and his family. Mrs. Nammack and I had long been friends, for they occupied the cottage next to my place on Storm King for two summers. On December, the fifteenth, I went with Dr. and Mrs. Klopsch to the theatre to see "The Servant in the House." After these compliances for the sake of friendship, I went out no more, for I was busy writing "The House on Cherry Street" until my return home on the eleventh of February. On the twentieth of February, A.D. 1909, the house was in most comfortable order, and Lilly had gone home the previous day. I was writing well all morning, and was called to dinner as the clock struck twelve. I went into Alice's rooms to summon her, and we left them hand-in-hand, happily telling each other, how glad we were to be home again. We took one step of the long stairway together, and then in some inscrutable way, I lost my footing, and fell headlong to the bottom. I remember one thought as I fell, "So this is the end of all!" I was insensible, when I reached the lower floor, and knew nothing until I found myself in bed. Alice had run to our nearest neighbor and brought help, and they had telephoned to Lilly to come at once. Dr. Winter, my own physician, did not arrive for three hours, but I was quite conscious by that time. I had not broken a bone, nor received any internal injury, and he looked at me incredulously. It appeared miraculous, but it was the truth. My right side, however, was severely bruised, and my right shoulder, arm and hand, so much so, as to be practically useless for many months. For neuritis took possession of the bruised member, and I suffered with it, and the nervous consequences of the shock, more than I can express. And there was my work! How was I to finish it? And it must be finished. I needed the money it would bring. As soon as the pain subsided a little, I began to practice writing with my left hand--tracing letters on the bedspread, and by the time I was able to sit up a little, I was ready to take a pencil and pad. The result was, that I finally wrote very plainly with the left hand, and through sleepless, painful nights and days, I finished the manuscript of "The House on Cherry Street," on July the twenty-fifth. And by that time, I was able to superintend the typewriter, and to see that it was copied faithfully. On my seventy-ninth birthday I wrote, "I do not sleep two hours any night. I am racked with pain in my right shoulder, arm and hand. Weak and trembling and unfit to work, but trying to do as well as I can. My left hand stands faithfully by me." It was a hard summer in every way. Mr. Munro was in the hospital for a dangerous operation, and Lilly broke down with care and nursing. But through it all, Dr. Winter stood by me, full of hope and encouragement, and promises of final recovery. Mrs. Klopsch sent me constantly pretty hampers of fresh fruits, my friends in Cornwall did all they could to evince their sympathy, and I had almost a wicked joy in my success in training my left hand. Some malign influence had found a moment in which to injure me, but I was hourly getting the better of it. Every page I wrote was a triumph, and Dr. Winter reminded me, also, that the enforced idleness was resting my eyesight, which it sorely needed, and that as I would mind neither physician nor oculist, there was nothing for it, but a fall down stairs, to make me give my eyes a chance. He thought upon the whole it had been a very merciful and necessary fall. So I made the best of it. On August, the twenty-third, I began "The Reconstructed Marriage," which I finished on the sixteenth of December. It was a very cold winter, and Alice and I went to the Garden City Hotel, and I felt its healthy influence at once, but I could not escape company, which in my weakened condition was very fatiguing. So I bought a larger furnace, and then my home was warm enough to return to. I only received one thousand dollars for "The Reconstructed Marriage," but Mr. Dodd had many reasons for cutting my price--the advance in wages, and the price of paper, et cetera, all just reasons, no doubt, but they pressed hard on me, for my long sickness asked for more, instead of less. On March first, 1910, I heard of Dr. Klopsch's death. I put away all work that day. He was my best friend! My truest friend! The friend on whom I relied for advice or help in every emergency. I think there were few that knew Dr. Klopsch. He was a man of the widest charity, if you take that word in its noblest sense. And my heart ached for Mrs. Klopsch, whom I love with a strong and true affection, for I knew the lonely suffering she was passing through. On March, the twelfth, I began "Sheila Vedder." It was really a continuation of "Jan Vedder's Wife." I wrote it at the request of Mrs. Frank Dodd, who said she wanted "to know something more about the Vedders." The writing of this book was a great pleasure to me, therefore I know that it has given pleasure to others; for if the writer is not interested, the public will not be interested, that is sure. On April, the sixteenth, I make the short pitiful note, and it brings tears to my eyes yet, "My sweet Alice's birthday. I could not afford to give her any gift. I asked God to give it for me." I finished "Sheila Vedder" on August twenty-fourth, and began making notes for my Stuyvesant novel on August, the twenty-eighth. I was three months in getting the material I wanted, and in fixing it clearly in my mind, but I began this book on the fifteenth of December. This year, A.D. 1910, I was too poor to keep Christmas. I was not without money, but taxes, insurance, servants' wages, and a ton of coal every six days, with food, clothing, doctors and medicines, took all the money I could make. And Christmas was not a necessity, though I had always thought it one, and had never missed keeping it for seventy-nine years. While writing this Stuyvesant novel--which Dodd Mead called "A Maid of Old New York"--a name I do not like, my own choice being "Peter Stuyvesant's Ward," I became persistently aware of a familiarity, that would not be dismissed; in fact I recognized in Theodore Roosevelt, a reincarnation of Peter Stuyvesant, Roosevelt having all the fiery radiations of Peter's character, modified in some cases by the spirit of a more refined age, and intensified in others, by its wider knowledge. I sent this book to Colonel Roosevelt myself and received the following reply to my letter: November 8, 1911. MY DEAR MRS. BARR: Any book of yours I am sure to read. I look forward to reading the volume just sent me, which of course has a peculiar interest to me, as a descendant of some of old Peter Stuyvesant's contemporaries. It would be a pleasure if I could see you some time. With warm regards, and all good wishes and thanks, I am Sincerely yours, THEODORE ROOSEVELT. The thing that delights me in this pleasant note, is that all the kind words, good wishes and thanks, are written by his own hand, interpolated as it were. I prize it very highly. I would not part with it for anything. This March twenty-ninth was my eightieth birthday, and I had one hundred and thirty letters and cards full of good wishes, from men and women whom I have never seen, and who were scattered in many states and far distant places. I finished the Stuyvesant novel on August, the first, 1911, and on September, the eighth, 1911, I began to write this story of my life, which is now drawing rapidly to its conclusion on October twenty-eighth, A.D. 1912. It has been a grand lesson to me. I have recalled all God's goodness, remembered all His mercies, lived over again the years in which I have seen so much sorrow and labor, and I say gratefully, yes, joyfully, they were all good days, for always God has been what He promised me--"_Sufficient!_" CHAPTER XXVI THE VERDICT OF LIFE "Lord, mend, or make us--one creation Will not suffice our turn; Except Thou make us daily, we shall spurn Our own salvation." Old age is the verdict of life. I am now an old woman. Many people tell me so, and there is the indisputable evidence of my eighty-second birthday, the twenty-ninth of next March. But truly I am unconscious of being old. My life here is so simple, that I have never as yet met either business or social demands I was not able to fulfil without any sense of effort. My day's work is as long as it was twenty years ago, and I have quite as much pleasure in it now, as I had then. I have rarely a headache now. I was rarely without one then. I enjoy my food, especially my breakfast, and the eminent physician Brudenel of London told me that an enjoyment of breakfast was an excellent sign of general well being. I sleep seven hours every night, neither more nor less, except under some unusual circumstances; but I never fail to be ten hours in the restful and recuperative freedom of the night's silence and darkness. I have made my living for forty-two years in a stooping posture, but I am yet perfectly erect, and I ascend the stairs as rapidly as I ever did. I am more free from pain than I have been for many years. A touch now and then of rheumatism reminds me that I am a subject to mortality, and a gray hair here and there foretells the hand that shall finally prevail. But life is still sweet and busy, and my children talk of what I am going to do in the future, as if I was immortal. Also my long true friends on the daily press do the same thing. They tell of what I am writing or planning to write, far more than of what I have done in the past. And I hope and pray, when the Master comes, He will find me at my desk, writing such words as it will please Him to see. For to literature, humanly speaking, I am indebted not only for my living, but also for every blessing I enjoy--health of body, activity of mind, cheerfulness, contentment, and continual employment, therefore continual happiness. Happiness? Yes, I will certainly let the word stand. My old age is very like this fine October day; calm, restful and fair in its own beauty. Indeed both in body and mind, "I have put on an Autumn glow, A richer red after the rainy weather, I mourn not for the Spring, for the lost long ago, But clothe my cliffs with purple-honeyed heather." I feel strongly that these last years of life must not be a time of repose, but rather a time of beginning again; of learning afresh how best to make ready for the new world before me. I wish to master the fine art of dying well, as great a lesson as the fine art of living, about which every one is so busy; for I want to take into the Great Unknown before me, a supple, joyous spirit ready for it. Eighty-two years ago I was not. Then I was. I have had my day. I have warmed both hands at the fire of life. I have drank every cup, joyful or sorrowful, life could give me; but neither my soul nor my heart is old. Time has laid his hand gently on me, just as a harper lays his open palm upon his harp, to deaden its vibrations--that is all. The sunrise has never yet melted for me into the light of common day. The air, far from being emptied of wonder, is thrilled with its new travelers for peace and war. Still I can listen to Greene and Putnam, and Sam Houston, shouting in the trenches of freedom, and hear the palaces of tyrants crumbling, and see the dungeons of cruelty flame to heaven. Nobody has watched the daily papers of the last few months with more eager and passionate interest than I have done. I have followed the great colonel with all my youthful enthusiasms, and listened at the street corners to the noble band of women pleading for their just rights. Such a pitiful sight! How can the noble American male bear to see it? Why does he not stand up in her place, and speak for her. Any decent Christian will speak for a dumb man, and women have been dumb for unknown centuries. They are only learning now to talk, only learning to ask for what they want. "Then I am for Women's Suffrage?" I am for the enfranchisement of every slave. I am for justice, even to women. Any one who lived in England during the early half of the nineteenth century would be a suffragist; for then the most highly cultured wife was constantly treated by her husband, as Tennyson says, "Something better than his dog, a little dearer than his horse." Men ought to remember that they have had a mother, as well as a father, and that in most cases she has been, in every way, the better parent of the two. All my life long I have been sensible of the injustice constantly done to women. Since I have had to fight the world single-handed, there has not been one day I have not smarted under the wrongs I have had to bear, because I was not only a woman, but a woman doing a man's work, without any man, husband, son, brother or friend, to stand at my side, and to see some semblance of justice done me. I cannot forget, for injustice is a sixth sense, and rouses all the others. If it was not for the constant inflowing of God into human affairs, the condition of women would today have been almost as insufferable, as was the condition of the negro in 1860. However, the movement for the enfranchisement of women will go forward, and not backward, and I have not one fear as to the consequences it will bring about. I have lived, I have loved, I have worked, and at eighty-two I only ask that the love and the work continue while I live. What I must do, I will love to do. It is a noble chemistry, that turns necessity into pleasure. About my daily life I have been as frank and truthful as it was possible to be; but I have not found the opportunity of saying anything about my dream life. Yet how poor my daily life would have been without it. All day long we are in the world, and occupied with its material things, but the night celebrates the resurrection of the soul. Then, while the body lies dormant and incapable of motion, the soul is free to wander far off, and to meddle with events that the body is unconscious of. What is the lesson we learn night after night from this condition? It proves to us the separate existence of the soul. We are asleep one-third of our life. Is the soul as inert and dead as the body appears to be? No! No! Who has not suffered and rejoiced in dreams, with an intensity impossible to their waking hours? Who has not then striven with things impossible and accomplished them without any feeling of surprise? Ah, dreams reveal to us powers of the soul, which we shall never realize until this mortal puts on immortality! The shadowy land of dreams rests upon the terra-firma of revelation, for the dream literature of the Bible comprises some of its most delightful and important passages. God did not the less fulfil all his promises to Jacob, because they were made in a dream; nay but in a second dream, he encourages Jacob, by reminding him of this first dream. All through the historical part of the Bible its dream world presses continually on its humanity; and the sublime beauty of the prophecies is nowhere more remarkable than in the dreams of these spiritual sentinels of the people. In all the realm of poetry, where can there be found anything to equal that dream of the millennium peace, which Zachariah saw--the angel standing among the myrtle trees, and the angelic horsemen walking to-and-fro in the happy earth reporting, "Behold all the earth sitteth still, and is at rest." There is little need to speak of the dream life in the New Testament. Every one is familiar with it. "God speaketh once, yea twice, yet man perceiveth it not; in a dream, in a vision of the night, when deep sleep falleth upon man in slumberings upon the bed." This was Job's testimony. Dare any one declare that God has ceased to speak to man? Every man and woman has exigencies and sorrows of which only God knows, and only God can counsel and comfort. I solemnly declare, that I have known this truth all my life long: "Whoso has felt the Spirit of the Highest, Cannot confound, nor doubt Him, nor deny; Yea, with one voice, O World, though thou deniest, Stand thou on that side, for on this, am I." There has always been a distinction between dreams and visions. Visions imply the agency of an angel. Christ did not dream of an angel comforting him in Gethsemane; "there appeared an angel unto Him from heaven strengthening him." Visions are much rarer than dreams. I have had divine and prophesying dreams of many kinds, but never have had a vision. My spiritual ear was pre-attuned to heavenly voices, when I came into this reincarnation, but my sight has not yet been opened. Yet I am intensely sensitive to Spiritual Presence, and though I cannot discern it, it is as real to me as my own person. Never in all eternity can I forget the Angel Presence who came to me when I was a child twelve years old. I was praying with all my child heart, that God would love me, and teach me how to please Him, and suddenly, even as I prayed, there was _some one there_, and I heard a voice, clear and sweet, say to me, "Arise and shine, for thy light has come." And I was so happy, I thought I was in heaven. If all the events I have written in this book should vanish from memory, this one would remain bright and imperishable, though the waves of centuries washed over it. Yet I did not see. I am not yet ready for vision. But it will come, for we have a natural body, and we have a spiritual body--not we are going to have--we already possess it, and as we develop our spiritual faculties, they will be ours. No doctrine is taught more authoritatively and constantly in the Bible than that of Angel Ministry. Whenever we read of angels it is as helpers and comforters. They rejoice over our repentance, they minister continually to our sorrows. The broken in heart, the eyes washed and cleared by consecrating tears, the feet that have been to the border land, _they know_. However there never was in Christendom an age when there were so many creeds and so little faith. People are proud of being practical and material. They forget that our spiritual life is beyond all scientific laws, and rests entirely on one spiritual and miraculous book, and one spiritual and miraculous life. On the twenty-third of September, that is about a month ago, a most interesting thing happened. I received by mail a newspaper in English, printed and published in the City of Jerusalem, Palestine; a large sheet of four pages, and the lower half of every page was occupied by the article I had written for the _American_ of New York, on the subject of spiritual revelations, and the sublime destiny of man through the means of reincarnations. It delighted me that this article should appear in a paper named _The Truth_ and this especially, because the subject of reincarnation was well known in ancient Jerusalem; was indeed a recognized faith in all Judea in the time of Christ. With the exception of the class called Sadducees, the Jew believed in his own immortality. He knew that whatever had its beginning in time, must end in time; but he looked backward, as well as forward, to an eternity of God's love. Solomon says for all his race, the indisputable words of faith found in Proverbs, 8:22-31. What does reincarnation demand of us? Only that we should by a series of human lives, attain to the condition of celestial beings, worthy to be called the sons and daughters of The Most High. Some through love, obedience and self denial--which last is the highest form of soul culture--will reach this end sooner than others, but I believe _all_ will eventually do so; for it is not the will of God that _any_ should perish, but that _all_ should come to repentance, and consequently to an era of effort, which will finally prevail. Every new existence is paid for by the old age and death of a body worn out, which though it has perished, contained the indestructible seed out of which the new life has arisen. And why should we not come back as often as we are capable of acquiring fresh knowledge and experience? Do we carry away so much from one life, that there is nothing left to repay us for coming back? A constant objection against reincarnation is the nearly universal absence of any recollection of a previous life. _It is a great mercy that we do not remember._ In some cases, memories might be so full of sin, error, and even crime, that the details carried forward, would fill the soul with despair at the outset. Few indeed remember anything of the first two years of their present life, at seventy most people have forgotten nine out of ten incidents of their past days. They know that they are the result of all that they have come through, that their identity is the same with that of the infant, the schoolboy and girl, the over-confident young man or woman, the wiser ones of middle life, and the tranquil saddened ones of old age, but their memory has only linked results, not incidents. They are the creation of their past, and the nature they have evolved, is its memory. And if we could remember our former lives it would seriously hinder the present one. The soul knowing the significance of the trials reserved for it, would become hardened and careless, and perhaps paralyzed by the hopelessness of mastering them. The struggle must be free, voluntary, and safe from past influences. The field of combat must seem new. It would be bad for a soul to know it had failed before, much harder for it to pluck up its courage, and to try again; beside the backward-looking soul, would dwell in the past, instead of the present, and so miss the best uses of life. Others object to reincarnation because they assert it is unjust for us to suffer in this life, for acts done in past ones and forgotten. But does the forgetting of any sinful act, absolve us from its consequences? Under this strange ethical law, a murderer might be hypnotized into forgetfulness, become unconscious of his crime, and absolved from all its moral and legal consequences. And there is this great alleviation, that even while suffering the effects of the sins of our past lives, the effect changes into a new cause, according to our attitude towards it. For by a courageous, patient fortitude in the bearing of our just punishment, we can "rise on the stepping-stones of our dead selves to higher things." It is objected also, that reincarnation will separate us forever from those we loved in life. Nothing is further from the truth. Like every phenomenon in Nature, reincarnation proceeds under the law of cause and effect. We ourselves set up the causes which will affect our re-birth. These causes originate in the acts and feelings, which relate us to those with whom we have daily associations, and who are the objects of our thoughts and acts, whether of love or of hatred. We cannot set up causes which will bind our lives with people, whom we have never met; we are bound to those only, with whom we have been closely connected by bonds of love or of hatred. Yes, hatred; for attraction and repulsion are but opposite poles of the same force, and are of equal strength. This fact explains the hatred that sometimes exists between parents and children, and other ties of close relationship. It also explains "the black sheep" in the family. It has been drawn thither by antecedent hatred, and has none of the family's traditions, tastes or moralities. So powerful is this attraction, that it can draw souls to, or from existence. How often do husband and wife follow each other quickly to the grave! How often does the newborn babe pine away after its mother's death, and the nurses declare she is "drawing it to her." The association of a family is likely to continue as long as there is any attraction or repulsion between the souls that composed it, and is a far wiser provision for human happiness, than the mere ties of fleshly relationship; for soul attraction brings to each soul its own, and we daily see its superior power evinced in this life. The youth leaves father and mother for the wife of his choice; the girl leaves her family, and her home, and goes happily far away, with some stranger whom her soul loves. We may also claim for reincarnation, the great law which causes all things in Nature, to take the path of least resistance. Every soul will be actuated in a greater or less degree by this law, and the path of least resistance would naturally be towards its own kindred. I have my pedigree to five generations before the Conquest, and I feel as if I had always incarnated among my kindred, scattered through the beautiful Valley of the Duddon, and the mountains of the western part of the Lake Country. This is the corner of England I love the best. I feel it is my home country. I am a daughter of its soil, and may have been so for a thousand years. The doctrine of inherited sin and its consequences unto the third and fourth generation, is a hard lesson to learn; but no one can complain if the disposition and endowments which he has inherited from his _former self_, are the source of his troubles and punishments. We reap what we sow. The seeds of sin and sorrow spring from some old sowing of our own. There is no use to blame Adam and Eve. We alone are responsible, and the character with which we leave this life, is inevitably the one with which we shall begin a new life. We can only begin with what we have. "The tissue of the life to be, We weave with colors all our own; And in the field of Destiny, We reap as we have sown." I have now named the principal objections to reincarnation, let me speak of its great hope and blessing. It is this--_we can always remedy the errors of the past_. We can say, this evil is of my making, I can therefore unmake it. This hatred sprang from my injustice. It shall not trouble my next life. I will put the wrong right while it is called _to-day_. In this way, we can truly bury the evil past. I have heard from believers in reincarnation some remarkable reminiscences, but in all of the flashes of past existence that have come to me, my chief interest appears to be in household matters, except in one sharp vision, when I was a man, and the captain of a great ship. This ship was quite familiar to me, and here I mark an interesting thing. I have written in a number of romances, scenes which were on ships, and on the sea. I never studied anything about ships, or nautical terms. When I was writing the proper words came without effort. Yet Captain Young of the _Devonia_ and the _City of Rome_ told me, that there was not a nautical error in them. This can only be accounted for, as a sub-conscious remembrance of what I learned in this incarnation, when I sailed the sea. Socrates declared that "all that we called learning, was recollection." My last recollection of this life is a vivid and terrible one. It comes always in a swift flash of consciousness, with every detail clear as noonday. I find myself on the ship standing by the main mast. We are in the midst of a mighty typhoon. The skies are riven with lightning. Black clouds are tossed upon an horizon, where there is a pale livid glow. The waves thunder, and there is a roaring howl of wind in my ears. The sailors are lying face downward on the deck. I alone stand upright. There is nothing more. I do not see the death of the ship, but I know that she went to the bottom with every soul on her. With this exception any fleeting vision I have had from the past refers to household matters, and ordinary events. The image of one man is the most persistent. He always flings the door open violently, looks steadily at me, and appears to be approaching my chair. Then I tremble and turn sick, and the whole vanishes; but I know the man was once my husband. I know it because I fear him so much. That was a common attitude of English wives in the past centuries, and was far from being extinct at the beginning of this century. I will not here speak of the teachers of reincarnation. They comprise the greatest men of every epoch. It will be enough to name some of our own day whom all remember. Among the clergy Henry Ward Beecher and Phillips Brooks dared to preach it. James Freeman Clarke warmly espoused its justice and its hope. Professor William Knight, the Scotch metaphysician of St. Andrew, and Professor Francis Brown of Harvard University, clearly show their belief in our pre-existence. Orlando Smith in his wonderful book called "Eternalism" advances arguments impossible to answer, in favor of the soul's existence from all eternity; and Dr. Edward Beecher in his works called "The Conflict of Ages" and "The Concord of Ages" casts the seed of our pre-existence through a large portion of the clergy, and of the thoughtful readers of this country. I have two beautiful letters on this subject from the Reverend Charles Beecher, one of which I transcribe. WYSOX, PA. February 6, 1891. MRS. AMELIA BARR: DEAR MADAM: I have been a diligent reader of your works, reading them aloud to my family, which is our custom. I have noticed in several of them intimations of a belief in a former life before this pilgrimage of earth life. Such ideas have ever possessed a peculiar charm for me, and I have wondered that they have not often been used in fiction. In some of the Erkmann-Chatrian novels there are indications of it; also in the writings of Lucy Larcom, and some others. In the hymns of the common people, such allusions are very frequent, and often very beautiful. It is not merely a poetical fancy, the idea that we have seen better days, and that heaven is fatherland and home--though it is poetical, the very heart and soul of all poetry--but it is more than a fancy or dream; it is a grand and glorious truth, and lights up the Valley of the Shadow, through which we are all passing. I thank God for the work he is enabling you to do. May it long continue. Sincerely your friend, CHARLES BEECHER. Reincarnation is like the message of the stars, there is no speech or language where its voice is not heard. There is indeed at the present time an universal, though unsuspected, prevalence of this ancient knowledge; shed by flower-like souls of all past ages, and blossoming again firmly and finely in all our poetry, fiction, religious and philosophical writings. It has taken possession of men's most secret thoughts, for it has its own way of convincing them. It is a good sign. For heaven no longer allures and hell no longer terrifies; but if a man can be persuaded that he has a soul, and that he must save his soul alive, because it is possible to lose it, he is brought face to face with a reality he cannot ignore. I have talked with a very large number of young men on this subject, and in every case, their souls rose up courageously to meet its obligations. "It will be a fight to your last day," I tell them, "but be men, and fight for your soul's life. For Christ says it can be lost, even while you go to church every Sunday morning, and are diligent in business all the week. It can be lost. If you should lose your money, what a lamentation there would be; but a _soul can be lost without noise, without observation_." What reincarnation has to say on this subject, I do not fully accept. My early Methodism clings to me, and I believe firmly that God is not willing, that _any_ soul should be lost, but that all should find the safety of his Great Father Love. The future is not a torture chamber nor a condemned cell nor a reformatory. Even if we do make our bed in hell, God is there, and light, and truth, and love are there; and effort shall follow effort, and goal succeed goal, until we reach the colossal wisdom and goodness of spiritual beings. "Yet," and reincarnation has a yet, though many like myself are loth to entertain it; but this "yet" is better expressed in the following verses than I can frame it. No one can be the worse for considering the possibility they infer: "If thou art base and earthly, then despair; Thou art but mortal, as the brute that falls. Birds weave their nests, the lion finds a lair, Man builds his halls, "These are but coverts from earth's war and storm; Homes where our lesser lives take shape and breath. _But if no heavenly man has grown, what form Clothes thee at death?_ "And when thy meed of penalty is o'er And fire has burned the dross where gold is none, Shall separate life but wasted heretofore, Still linger on? "God fills all space--whatever doth offend From His unbounded Presence shall be spurned; Or deem'st thou, He should garner tares, whose end Is to be burned. "If thou wouldst see the Power that round thee sways, In whom all motion, thought, and life are cast, Know that the pure who travel heavenward ways, See God at last." Further I press upon the young, not to be ashamed of their disposition to be sentimental or religious. It is the sentimental young men who conquer; it is the men steeped in religious thought and aspiration, who _do_ things. Whatever the scientists may say, if we take the supernatural out of life, we leave only the unnatural. But science is the magical word of the day, and scientists too often profess to doubt, whether we have a soul for one life, not to speak of a multitude of lives. "There is no proof!" they cry. "No proof! No proof of the soul's existence." Neither is there any proof of the existence of the mind. But the mind bores tunnels, and builds bridges and conceived aviation. And the soul can re-create a creature of clay, and of the most animal instincts, until he reaches the colossal manhood of a Son of God. Religion is life, not science. It is now the twenty-seventh of October, 1912, and a calm, lovely Sabbath. I have been quite alone for three weeks, and have finished this record in unbroken solitude and peace. Mary is in Florida, and Alice is in New York with her sister Lilly. Sitting still in the long autumn evenings, I have drawn the past from the eternity into which it had fallen, to look at it again, and to talk to myself very intimately about it; and I confess, that though it is the nature of the soul to adore what it has lost, that I prefer what I possess. Though youth and beauty have departed, the well springs of love and imagination are, in my nature, too deep to be touched by the frost of age. Nourished by the dews of the heart and the intellect they will grow sweeter and deeper and more refreshing to the end of my life; for the things of the soul and the heart are eternal. I have lived among "things unseen" as well as seen, always nursing in my heart that sweet promise of the times of restitution. Neither is the fire of youth dead, it glows within, rather than flames without--that is all. And there is a freshness, all its own, reserved for the aged who have _come uphill all the way_, and at last found the clearer air, and serener solitudes of those heights, beyond the fret and stir of the restless earth. I have told my story just as I lived it; told it with the utmost candor and truthfulness. I have exaggerated nothing, far from it. This is especially true as regards all spiritual experiences. I hold them far too sacred to be added to, or taken from. My life has been a drama of sorrow and loss, of change and labor, but God wrote it, and I would not change anything He ordained. "I would not miss one sigh or tear, Heart pang, or throbbing brow. Sweet was the chastisement severe, And sweet its memory now." For as my day, so has my strength been; not once, but always. There was an hour, forty-five years ago, when all the waves and billows of the sea of sorrow went over my head. Then He said to me, "Am I not sufficient?" And I answered, "Yes, Lord." Has He failed me ever since? Not once. Always, the power, has come with the need. Farewell, my friends! You that will follow me through the travail and labor of eighty years, farewell! I shall see very few of you face to face in this life, but somewhere--perhaps--somewhere, we may meet and _know each other on sight_. And if you find in these red leaves of a human heart, a word of strength, or hope, or comfort, that is my great reward. Again farewell! Be of good cheer. Fear not. (2 Esdras, 6:33.) There is hope and promise in the years to come. I will now let the curtain fall over my past, with a grateful acknowledgment that every sorrow has found its place in my life, and I should have been a loser without it. Even chance acquaintances have had their meaning, and done their work, and the web of life could not have been better woven of love alone. God has not spoken His last word to me, though I am nearly eighty-one years old. When I have rested my eyes, I am ready for the work, ready for me. And I do not feel it too late, to offer daily the great prayer of Moses for consolation, "Comfort us again, for the years wherein we have seen evil." As for the cares and exigencies of daily life, I commit them to Him, who has never yet failed me, and "If I should let all other comfort go, And every other promise be forgot, My soul would sit and sing, because I know He faileth not! "He faileth not! What winds of God may blow, What safe or perilous ways may be my lot, Gives but little care; for this I know, He faileth not!" Sustained by this confidence, I can face without fear the limitations of age, and the transition we call death. I have love and friendship around me; I give help and sympathy whenever I can, and I do my day's work gladly. The rest is with God. APPENDICES APPENDIX I HUDDLESTON LORDS OF MILLOM If I followed my own desire, instead of the general custom, I should place the genealogical history of the Huddlestons of Millom before my own story and not after it. For to the noble men and women who passed on the name to me, I owe everything that has made my life useful to others, and happy to myself. They conserved for me, upon the wide seas of the world and the mountains and fells of Cumberland, that splendid vitality, which still at eighty-two years of age enables me to do continuously eight and nine hours of steady mental work without sense of fatigue, which keeps me young in heart and brain and body. They transmitted to me their noble traditions of faith in God, and of passionate love for their country. From them I received that eternal hope which treads disaster under its feet, that courage which never fails, because God never can fail, and that natural religious trust which is the abiding foundation of a life that has continually turned sorrow into joy and apparent failure into certain success. I honor all my predecessors as I honor my father and my mother, and I have had the promise added to that commandment. "My days have been long in the land which the Lord, my God, has given me." These few natal notes are all I now know of them, but I have a sure faith that in some future the bare facts will grow into the living romances they only now hint of. I shall know them all and all of them will know me; and we shall talk together of the different experiences we met on our widely different roads to the same continuing home--a home not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. A. E. B. HUDDLESTON LORDS OF MILLOM The pedigree of this very ancient family is traced back to five generations before the Conquest. The first, however, of the name who was lord of Millom was, SIR JOHN HUDDLESTON, KNIGHT, who was the son of Adam, son of John, son of Richard, son of Reginald, son of Nigel, son of Richard, son of another Richard, son of John, son of Adam, son of Adam de Hodleston in co. York. The five last named according to the York _MS_ were before the Conquest. SIR JOHN DE HODLESTON, KNIGHT, in the year 1270 was witness to a deed in the Abbey of St. Mary in Furness. By his marriage with the Lady Joan, Sir John became lord of Anneys in Millom. In the 20th Edward I, 1292, he proved before Hugh Cressingham, justice itinerant, that he possessed JURA REGALIA within the lordship of Millom. In the 25th, 1297, he was appointed by the king warder or governor of Galloway in Scotland. In the 27th, 1299, he was summoned as baron of the realm, to do military service; in the next year, 1300, he was present at the siege of Carlaverock. In the 29th, 1301, though we have no proof that he was summoned, he attended the Parliament in Lincoln, and subscribed as a baron the celebrated letter to the Pope, by the title of lord of Anneys. He was still alive in the 4th of Edward IV, 1311. Sir John had three sons--John who died early, and Richard and Adam. The Hudlestons of Hutton--John--were descended from a younger branch of the family at Millom, as were the Hudlestons of Swaston co., Cambridge, who settled there temp. Henry VIII, in consequence of a marriage with one of the co-heiresses of the Marquis Montague. RICHARD HUDLESTON, son and heir, succeeded his father. Both he and his brother Adam are noticed in the later writs of Edward I. They were both of the faction of the Earl of Lancaster, and obtained in the 7th Edward II, 1313, a pardon for their participation with him in the death of the king's favorite, Gaveston. Adam was taken prisoner with the earl in the Battle of Boroughbridge in 1322, where he bore for arms gules fretted with silver, with a label of azure. Richard was not at that battle and in the 19th of the king, 1326, when Edward II summoned the Knights of every county to the Parliament at Westminster, was returned the first among the Knights of Cumberland. He married Alice, daughter of Richard Troughton in the 13th, Edward II, 1319-1320, and had issue. JOHN HUDLESTON, son of the above named Richard, who succeeded his father in 1337, and married a daughter of Henry Fenwick, lord of Fenwick, co. of Northumberland. RICHARD HUDLESTON, son of John. SIR RICHARD HUDLESTON, KNIGHT, served as a banneret at the Battle of Agincourt, 1415. He married Anne, sister of Sir William Harrington K. G., and served in the wars in France, in the retinue of that knight. SIR JOHN HUDLESTON, KNIGHT, son of Richard, was appointed to treat with the Scottish commissioners on border matters in the 4th Edward IV, 1464; was knight of the shire in the 7th, 1467; appointed one of the conservators of the peace on the borders in the 20th, 1480; and again in the 2nd of Richard, 1484; and died on the 6th of November in the 9th of Henry VII, 1494. He married Joan, one of the co-heirs of Sir Miles Stapleton of Ingham in Yorkshire. He was made bailiff and keeper of the king's woods and chases in Barnoldwick, in the county of York; sheriff of the county of Cumberland, by the Duke of Gloucester for his life steward of Penrith, and warden of the west marches. He had three sons---- 1. Sir Richard K. B., who died in the lifetime of his father, 1st Richard III. He married Margaret, natural daughter of Richard Nevill, earl of Warwick, and had one son and two daughters, viz: Richard married Elizabeth, daughter of Lady Mabel Dacre, and died without issue, when the estates being entailed passed to the heir male, the descendant of his Uncle John. Johan married to Hugh Fleming, Esq., of Rydal. Margaret married to Launcelot Salkeld, Esq., of Whitehall. 2. Sir John. 3. Sir William. SIR JOHN HUDLESTON, second son of Sir John and Joan his wife, married Joan, daughter of Lord Fitz Hugh, and dying the 5th Henry VIII, 1513-1514, was succeeded by his son. SIR JOHN HUDLESTON K. B., espoused firstly the Lady Jane Clifford, youngest daughter of Henry, earl of Cumberland, by whom he had no issue. He married secondly Joan, sister of Sir John Seymour, Kn't, and aunt of Jane Seymour, queen consort of Henry VIII, and by her he had issue---- ANTHONY his heir. ANDREW, who married Mary, sister and co-heiress of Thomas Hutton, Esq., of Hutton--John, from whom descended the branch at that mansion. A daughter who married Sir Hugh Askew, Kn't, yeoman of the cellar to Henry VIII, and Ann, married to Ralph Latus, Esq., of the Beck. Sir John, died 38th, Henry VIII, 1546-7. ANTHONY HUDLESTON, ESQ., son and heir, married Mary, daughter of Sir William Barrington, Knight, and was succeeded by his son WILLIAM HUDLESTON, ESQ., knight of the shire in the 43rd Elizabeth, who married Mary, daughter of Bridges, Esq., of Gloucestershire. FERDINANDO HUDLESTON, son and heir, was also knight of the shire in the 21st James I. He married Jane, daughter of Sir Ralph Grey, knight of Chillingham, and had issue nine sons--WILLIAM, JOHN, FERDINANDO, RICHARD, RALPH, INGLEBY, EDWARD, ROBERT, and JOSEPH; all of whom were officers in the service of Charles I. He was succeeded by his eldest son. SIR WILLIAM HUDLESTON, a zealous and devoted royalist, who raised a regiment of horse for his sovereign, and also a regiment of foot; the latter he maintained at his own expense during the whole of the war. For his good services and his personal bravery at the battle of Edgehill, where he retook the royal standard, he was made a knight banneret by Charles I on the field. He married Bridget, daughter of Joseph Pennington, Esq., of Muncaster. He had issue, besides his successor, a daughter, Isabel, who married Richard Kirkby, Esq., of Furness, and was succeeded by his son. FERDINAND HUDLESTON, ESQ., who married Dorothy, daughter of Peter Hunley, merchant of London, and left a sole daughter and heiress Mary, who married Charles West, Lord Delawar, and died without issue. At his decease the representation of his family reverted to RICHARD HUDLESTON, ESQ., son of Colonel John Hudleston, Esq., second son of Ferdinando Hudleston, and Jane Grey his wife. This gentleman married Isabel, daughter of Thomas Hudleston, Esq., of Bainton, co. York, and was succeeded by his son, FERDINANDO HUDLESTON, ESQ., who married Elizabeth, daughter of Lyon Falconer, Esq., co. Rutland, by whom he had issue, WILLIAM HUDLESTON, ESQ. This gentleman married Gertrude, daughter of Sir William Meredith, Bart., by whom he had issue, two daughters, Elizabeth and Isabella. Elizabeth, the elder, married Sir Hedworth Williamson, Bart., who in 1774 sold the estate for little more than 20,000 pounds to Sir James Lowther, Bart.--by whom it was devised to his successor, the Earl of Lonsdale. Millom Castle, considerable remains of which are still in existence, is pleasantly situated in the township of Millom Below, near the mouth of the Duddon. It was fortified and embattled in 1335 by Sir John Hudleston, who obtained a license from the King for that purpose. In ancient times it was surrounded by a fine park. Here for many centuries the lords of Millom held their feudal pomp and state undisturbed by war's tempestuous breath, from which the more northerly parts of the country suffered so severely, and so often; and we do not hear that the Castle was ever attacked previous to the wars of the Parliament, when it appears to have been invested, though no particulars respecting the occurrence have been recorded. It is at this period that the old vicarage house, which was in the neighborhood of the Castle, was pulled down, lest the rebels should take refuge therein. Mr. Thomas Denton tells us, that in 1688 the castle was much in want of repair. He also informs us that the gallows where the lords of Millom exercised their power of punishing criminals with death stood on a hill near the castle, and that felons had suffered there shortly before the time at which he was writing. He describes the park as having within twenty years abounded with oak, which to the value of 4,000 pounds had been cut down to serve as fuel at the iron forges. When John Denton wrote the castle appears to have been in a partly ruinous state, although the lords still continued to reside there occasionally. In 1739 the old fortress appears to have been in much the same condition as it is in our own times. In 1774 when Nicholson and Burn published their history, the park was well stocked with deer, and this state of things continued till the year 1802, when it was disparked by the earl of Lonsdale. The old feudal stronghold of the Boyvilles and Hudlestons now serves as a farmhouse, the principal part remaining is a large square tower, formerly embattled, but at present terminated by a plain parapet. The chief entrance appears to have been in the east front by a lofty flight of steps. In a wall of the garden are the arms of Hudleston, as also in the wall of an outhouse. On the south and west sides traces of the moat are still visible. The lordship of Millom still retains its own coroner. After the sale of Millom to the Earl of Lonsdale, which occurred only twenty-five years before the birth of my father, many of the Huddleston family emigrated to Newfoundland and to the American colonies. There were Huddlestons settled in Texas who had fought with General Sam Houston. They were large land owners and had patriarchal wealth in cattle and horses. I know this, for I wrote their assessments during the last two years of the Civil War. A California editor told me three years ago that there were Huddlestons among the rich miners of that state; and there is a notable branch of the family descended from Valentine Huddleston who came to the Plymouth colony in A.D. 1622. This gentleman is among the list of the proprietors of Dartmouth. He had two sons the eldest of whom bore the family name of _Henry_. Nothing can be more clear and straight than the pedigree of this branch; and its direct descendant is at the present day one of New York's most esteemed and influential citizens. THE LORDS OF MILLOM From Bulmer & Co.'s "History and Directory of Westmoreland," Millom Parish, page 154. The Boyvilles held the seigniory in heir male issue from the reign of Henry I to the reign of Henry III, a space of one hundred years, when the name and family ended in a daughter, Joan de Millom, by her marriage with Sir John Huddleston (No. 5, FOOT-PRINTS), conveyed the inheritance to that family, with whom it remained for about five hundred years. The Huddlestons were an ancient and honorable family who could trace their pedigree back five generations before the Conquest. The lords of Millom frequently played important parts in the civil and military history of the country. Richard and Adam (Nos. 6 and 7, FOOT-PRINTS), reign of Edward II, were implicated in the murder of Gaveston, the king's favorite, and the latter was taken prisoner at the battle of Borough Bridge in 1322. Sir Richard Huddleston (No. 12, FOOT-PRINTS) served as a banneret at the battle of Agincourt in 1415. Sir John Huddleston was appointed one of the conservators of the peace on the borders in 1480, high sheriff of Yorkshire, steward of Neurith, and warden of the West Marches. Sir William Huddleston (No. 17, FOOT-PRINTS), a zealous and devoted royalist, raised a regiment of horsemen for the service of the sovereign, as also a regiment of footmen, and the latter he maintained at his own expense. At the battle of Edge Hill he retook the standard from the Cromwellians, and for this act of personal valor he was made a knight banneret by the king on the field. William Huddleston (not No. 17, FOOT-PRINTS), the twenty-first of his family who held Millom, left two daughters, Elizabeth and Isabella. The former of whom married Sir Hedworth Williamson, Bart., who in 1774 sold the estate for a little more than £20,000 to Sir James Lowther, Bart., from whom it has descended to the present Earl of Lonsdale. Millom Castle, of which considerable remains are still in existence, is pleasantly situated near the church. It was for many centuries the feudal residence of the lords of Millom, and though its venerable ruins have been neglected, still they point out its former strength and importance. It was fortified and embattled in 1335 by Sir John Huddleston in pursuance of a license received from the king. It was anciently surrounded by a park well stocked with deer, and adorned with noble oaks, which were cut down in 1690 by Ferdinando Huddleston to supply timber for the building of a ship and fuel for his smelting furnace. The principal part of the castle now remaining is a large square tower formerly embattled but now terminated by a plain parapet. Mr. John Denton tells us the Castle in his time (the middle of the 15th century) was partly in a ruined state though the lords continued to reside there occasionally. Before the year 1774 the park was well stocked with deer and continued so until 1802 when Lord Lonsdale disparked it and 207 deer were killed and the venison sold from 2d. to 4d. per lb. The feudal hall of the Boyvilles and the Huddlestons where the lords of Millom lived in almost royal state is now the domicil of a farmer. _Sic transit gloria mundi._ The moat is still visible in one or two places and in a wall and also in the garden may be seen the arms of the Huddlestons. The castle is now undergoing reparation; some new windows are being inserted and additional buildings are being erected. (We are indebted to Miss Alethia M. Huddleston, of Lancashire, England, for the copy of the foregoing valuable account of Millom.) APPENDIX II BOOKS PUBLISHED BY DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY Jan Vedder's Wife, 1885 A Daughter of Fife, 1886 The Bow of Orange Ribbon, 1886 The Squire of Sandal Side, 1886 The Household of McNeil, 1886 The Border Shepherdess, 1887 Paul and Christina, 1887 Christopher, 1887 Master of His Fate, 1888 Remember the Alamo, 1888 Between Two Loves, 1889 Feet of Clay, 1889 The Last of McAllisters, 1889 Friend Olivia, 1889 She Loved a Sailor, 1890 Sister to Esau, 1891 The Beads of Tasmer, 1891 Love for an Hour, 1891 Rose of a Hundred Leaves, 1891 The Singer from the Sea, 1893 Bernicia, 1895 A Knight of the Nets, 1896 The King's Highway, 1897 Lone House, 1897 Maids, Wives and Bachelors, 1898 I, Thou and the Other One, 1899 The Maid of Maiden Lane, 1900 Souls of Passage, 1901 The Lion's Whelp, 1901 Master of His Fate, 1901 The Song of a Single Note, 1902 The Black Shilling, 1903 The Belle of Bowling Green, 1904 Trinity Bells, 1905 Cecilia's Lovers, 1905 The Heart of Jessy Laurie, 1907 The Strawberry Handkerchief, 1908 Hands of Compulsion, 1909 The House on Cherry Street, 1909 The Reconstructed Marriage, 1910 Sheila Vedder, 1911 A Maid of Old New York, 1911 APPENDIX III BOOKS PUBLISHED BY OTHER PUBLISHERS Romances and Realities, FORD HOWARD & CO. Young People of Shakespeare's Dramas, D. APPLETON & CO. Cluny McPherson, TRACT HOUSE Scottish Tales, TRACT HOUSE Prisoners of Conscience, CENTURY COMPANY The Hallam Succession, METHODIST BOOK CONCERN Lost Silver of Briffault, METHODIST BOOK CONCERN Flower of Gala Water, ROBERT BONNER'S SONS Femmetia, ROBERT BONNER'S SONS Three Volumes of Short Stories, ROBERT BONNER'S SONS The Mate of the Easter Bell, ROBERT BONNER'S SONS Reaping the Whirlwind, JAMES CLARK, LONDON The Preacher's Daughter, JAMES CLARK, LONDON Thyra Varrick, TAYLOR & COMPANY Was it Right to Forgive?, STONE, CHICAGO The Man Between, LOVELL Winter Evening Tales. Two Volumes, _Christian Herald_ Micheal and Theodora, BRADLEY AND WOODWARD Eunice Leslie, STEPHEN TYNG This list includes none of the short stories written every week for Robert Bonner's _Ledger_; none written very constantly in the early years of my work for the _Christian Union_, the _Illustrated Christian Weekly_, _Harper's Weekly_, _Harper's Bazaar_, _Frank Leslie's Magazine_, the _Advance_ and various other papers. Nor yet does it include any of the English papers or syndicates for which I wrote; nor yet the poem written every week for fifteen years for the _Ledger_; nor the poems written very frequently for the _Christian Union_, the _Independent_, the _Advance_, daily papers, and so forth. Nor can I even pretend to remember the very numerous essays, and social and domestic papers which were almost constantly contributed; I have forgotten the very names of this vast collection of work and I never kept any record of it. Indeed, only some chance copy has escaped the oblivion to which I gave up the rest. They kept money in my purse; that was all I asked of them. I do not even possess a full set of the sixty novels I have written. I may have twenty or thirty, not more certainly. From among the hundreds of poems I have written during forty years I have saved enough to make a small volume which some day I may publish. But I never considered myself a poetess in any true sense of the word. "The vision and faculty divine" was not mine; but I had the most extraordinary command of the English language and I could easily versify a good thought, and tune it to the Common Chord--the C Major of this life. Women sang my songs about their houses, and men at their daily work and some of them went all around the world in the newspapers. "The Tree God Plants, No Wind Can Hurt," I got in a Bombay paper; and "Get the Spindle and Distaff Ready, and God Will Send the Flax," came back to me in a little Australian weekly. And for fifteen years I made an income of a thousand dollars, or more, every year from them. So, if they were not poetry they evidently "_got there!_" From among the few saved I will print half a dozen. They will show what "the people" liked, and called poetry. I must here notice, that I used two pen names as well as my own. I never could have sold all the work I did under one name. But to my editors, the secret was an open one; and until the necessity for it was long past, not one of them ever named the subterfuge to me. That was a very delicate kindness and it pleases me to acknowledge it. Some of my very best work was done under fictitious names. Truly I got no credit for it, but I got the money, and the money meant all kinds of happiness. APPENDIX IV POEMS THE OLD PIANO How still and dusky is the long closed room! What lingering shadows and what sweet perfume Of Eastern treasures; sandal-wood and scent, With nard and cassia, and with roses blent: Let in the sunshine. Quaint cabinets are here, boxes and fans, And hoarded letters full of hopes and plans: I pass them by--I come once more to see The old piano, dear to memory; In past days mine. Of all sad voices from forgotten years, It is the saddest. See what tender tears Drop on the yellow keys! as soft and slow I play some melody of long ago. How strange it seems! The thin, weak notes that once were rich and strong Give only now, the shadow of a song; The dying echo of the fuller strain, That I shall never, never hear again: Unless in dreams. What hands have touched it! fingers small and white, Since cold and weary with life's toil and strife Dear clinging hands, that long have been at rest Folded serenely on a quiet breast. Only to think O white sad notes, of all the pleasant days, The happy songs, the hymns of holy praise, The dreams of love and youth, that round you cling! Do they not make each sighing, trembling string A mighty link? All its musicians gone beyond recall! The beautiful, the loved, where are they all? Each told their secret, touched the keys and wires To thoughts of many colors and desires, With whispering fingers: All now are silent, their last farewells said, Their last songs sung, their last tears sadly shed; Yet Love has given it many dreams to keep In this lone room, where only shadows creep, And silence lingers. The old piano answers to my call, And from my fingers lets the last notes fall. O Soul that I have loved! With heavenly birth Wilt thou not keep the memory of earth, Its smiles and sighs, Shall wood, and metal, and white ivory, Answer the touch of love and melody, And Thou forget? Dear One, not so! I move thee yet, though how I may not know, Beyond the skies. AT THE LAST Now, poor tired hands, be still, Toil-stained through Death's white hue; No need now for your skill, No further task to do. Folded across the breast, Take calmest rest: Dead hands no work shall soil-- 'Tis living hands that toil. Now, weary eyes, go sleep; You shall see no more wrong, Nor anxious watches keep For Love that tarries long; Shall shed no more sad tears Through all the years. Fold down your lids and sleep-- 'Tis living eyes that weep. Poor beating heart, now rest; Sorrow or pain no more Shall make thee sore distrest; Thy restless care is o'er. Go still sweet session keep Of blissful sleep, And no more throb and ache-- 'Tis living hearts that break. HELP My hands have often been weary hands, Too tired to do their daily task; And just to fold them forevermore Has seemed the boon that was best to ask. My feet have often been weary feet, Too tired to walk another day; And I've thought, "To sit and calmly wait Is better far than the onward way." My eyes with tears have been so dim That I have said, "I can not mark The work I do or the way I take, For every where it is dark--so dark!" But, oh, thank God! There never has come That hour that makes the bravest quail: No matter how weary my feet and hands, God never has suffered my _heart_ to fail. So the folded hands take up their work, And the weary feet pursue their way; And all is clear when the good heart cries, "Be brave!--to-morrow's another day." YELLOW JASMINE Do angels come as flowers, O golden stars! That I can hold within my small white palm? Or were you dropped from o'er the crystal bars, Filled with the perfume of celestial psalms? Why did you come? For fear I should forget? Nay, but sweet flowers, you would not judge me so. Are there not memories between us set, No later love, no future days can know? Cool bosky woodlands that were jasmine bowers, With misty haze of bluebells up the glade Then, had I met an angel pulling flowers, I had not been astonished or afraid. Beautiful children, innocent and bright, O Golden Jasmine! for Love kissing you I see them yet, with hair like braided light, And eyes like purple pansies, wet with dew. Could I have known, could I have but foreseen How near the pearly gates their feet had won, How had I clasped those hands my hands between-- Those tiny hands, whose little work is done. Calm graves, lapped in sweet grasses, cool and deep, Where soft winds sing and whisper through all hours: O starry flowers, for me Love's vigil keep, With scent and shadow and sweet-dropping flowers. MY LITTLE BROWN PIPE I have a little comforter I carry in my pocket; It is not any woman's face Set in a golden locket; It is not any kind of purse, It is not book or letter, But yet at times, I really think, That it is something better. Oh! my pipe! My little brown pipe! How oft at morning early, When vexed with thoughts of coming toil And just a little surly, I sit with thee till things get clear, And all my plans grow steady, And I can face the strife of life With all my senses ready. No matter if my temper stands At stormy, fair, or clearing, My pipe has not for any mood A word of angry sneering. I always find it just the same In care, or joy, or sorrow, And what it is to-day, I know It's sure to be to-morrow. It helps me through the stress of life, It balances my losses; It adds a charm to household joys, And lightens household crosses. For through its wreathing, misty veil Joy has a softer splendor, And life grows sweetly possible, And love more truly tender. Oh! I have many richer joys! I do not underrate them, And every man knows what I mean, I do not need to state them. But this I say: I'd rather miss A deal of what's called pleasure, Than lose my little comforter, My little smoky treasure! THE FARMER The king may rule o'er land and sea, The lord may live right royally, The soldier ride in pomp and pride, The sailor roam o'er ocean wide; But this or that, whate'er befall, The farmer he must feed them all. The writer thinks, the poet sings, The craftsmen fashion wondrous things, The doctor heals, the lawyer pleads, The miner follows the precious leads; But this or that, whate'er befall, The farmer he must feed them all. The merchant he may buy and sell, The teacher do his duty well; But men may toil through busy days, Or men may stroll through pleasant ways; From king to beggar, whate'er befall, The farmer he must feed them all. The farmer's trade is one of worth; He's partner with the sky and earth, He's partner with the sun and rain, And no man loses for his gain; And men may rise, or men may fall, But the farmer he must feed them all. God bless the man who sows the wheat, Who finds us milk and fruit and meat; May his purse be heavy, his heart be light, His cattle and corn and all go right; God bless the seeds his hands let fall, For the farmer he must feed us all. COMRADES There's a blacksmith works not far away, He is brawny and strong and tall; He's at his forge when the shadows lift, And he's there till the shadows fall. Just when I leave the land of dreams, I can hear his hammer bang, As he beats the red hot iron bar, With a cling, clang, clang; cling, clang. His smithy is dirty and dark enough, And he is dirty and glum; When a man is beating iron bars, What can he be but dumb? And there you may find him hard at work If the weather be hot or cold; He says, "There's some satisfaction, Ma'am, In beating iron to gold." Now, I am a mite of womankind, I am neither tall nor strong; I can only read, and dream, and think, And put my thought into song. But I smile at the mighty giant Beating his iron so bold; And think of a slender little pen Turning my thought into gold. I sit in my room so bright and warm, And my tiny tool I lift, "The battle is not unto the strong, Nor the race unto the swift." But the hammer shall never cease to beat, And the song shall never fail, Be busy, O pen! And blacksmith brave, Beat rivet, and shoe, and nail. The world has need of us both I trow: The giant so strong and tall And the woman who only has a thought They are comrades after all. So, brother, be busy, I would hear Thy hammering all day long; The world is glad for the anvil's ring, And glad for the Singer's song. APPENDIX V LETTERS The following letters are a few taken from a great number as evidence of the faithfulness with which my work has been done, but more especially interesting as showing the marked individuality of the different writers. It is in the latter respect I offer them to a public already well acquainted with most of their names and work. NEW HAVEN, December 24, 1889. MRS. AMELIA E. BARR, Dear Madam: Many thanks for your kind note. My criticisms of "Friend Olivia" addressed themselves only to minute points of historical accuracy, and I fear that some of them may have seemed to you, what the Germans call _spitz-findig_. This you will pardon, however, when you consider that my duty was to pick all the small holes that I could. As regards historical accuracy in a larger and far more important sense, I think that you have succeeded admirably in catching the atmosphere of feeling of the period, and especially the spirit of the Friends. It must be hard to think back into a past century in this way. In any case, I am sure that you have made a very charming story, and one which I shall re-read with much greater pleasure, when I no longer have to read it pencil in hand, in search of microscopic slips in the chronology, etc. Very respectfully, HENRY S. BEERS. * * * * * KELP ROCK, NEW CASTLE, N.H., Oct. 14th, 1887. MY DEAR MRS. BARR: Mrs. Stedman has written our appreciation of your charming remembrance of us, but I must have a word of my own. My wife said to me, that "she loved you at first sight," but she was too Saxon to write this to you, and being Saxon, it was a most unusual thing for her to feel, or say. As for me, I have not forgotten the evening you made so pleasant for us, in which your instant suggestions for my Christmas poem, explained to me the rapid and ceaseless inventiveness, displayed in your succession of books. Another one is out, as I see by the papers, so I have another pleasure in store. You might not soon see a review of your "Border Shepherdess" which came out in Wednesday's _Boston Advertiser_; so I enclose it to you. Competitive criticism usually stings somebody; in this case, your neighbor Mr. Roe suffers; and he really seems one of the most unselfish and agreeable members of our Authors' Club in N.Y. I presume you have seen the other notice from the _Tribune_, whose literary editors are justly proud of your tales. Of course, I shall see you in town this winter. Very sincerely yours, E. C. STEDMAN. * * * * * MONTCLAIR, N.J., Oct. 2, 1896. A beautiful story, dear Mrs. Barr, is "Prisoners of Conscience." I have just finished it, and am moved to say "thank you." Noble characters, rich in human and divine love, yet frozen into poverty of life, by that awful logic with which saintly fools shut out the sunlight of God's heart, and shut in men's souls to despair. It is a sad tale but made well worth your strong, fine telling of it, by the illumination of David's life, when God's truth has set him free. Such a tale is worth unnumbered barrels of sermons, and whole libraries of theologic disputation. What a wide range you are getting! It is a far cry from the dainty romance of "The Bow of Orange Ribbon" to "Prisoners of Conscience," but all fresh, unhackneyed, in fields of your own finding out. I have not read all your books, but I never read one, without vowing to get at the others. They are instinct with life, one feels them true, however distant and unfamiliar the scene, however strange the types of characters. And they are so full of joyous sympathy with youth and love and brightness, so tender and understanding of trouble and grief, and stress of soul, so large and noble in the interpretation of spiritual aspiration, that they must be twice blessed--to us your readers, and to you the bountiful giver. Well pardon this little outburst! Since the early _Christian Union_ days I have always felt a peculiar interest and pleasure in your growing success, and have regretted that circumstances should have carried me into lines of work, that did not give me the pleasure of an association with it, which I should have so greatly enjoyed. But your well built ships have been skillfully piloted, and I wish you ever fair seas, and many a happy voyage. Sincerely your friend, J. R. HOWARD. * * * * * CHRISTIAN HERALD 91 to 102 Bible House May 6, 1897. MRS. AMELIA E. BARR, CORNWALL-ON-HUDSON, N.Y. DEAR MRS. BARR: From present prospects we will have five or six vessels sailing for India laden with corn, and I still think it would be a grand thing if you could see your way clear to join us on our India expedition; and be among those, who at Calcutta, will represent Christian America, and transfer this enormous contribution into the hands of those who will gladly and honestly administer it; so that it may do the greatest good to the greatest number, but I presume the heat deters you from going. A three days' journey through the Suez Canal and Red Sea, is not one of the most delightful excursions, but what there is beyond, will more than compensate for the discomforts endured. Should you change your mind do please let me know at once, that I may arrange for your trip. With kindest regards, and best wishes, I am Very cordially yours, L. KLOPSCH. * * * * * PRINCETON, N.J. Nov. 11, '09. MY DEAR MRS BARR: I can not tell you how touched I was in receiving just now your new book with its tender dedication.[9] I shall have to confess it brought the moisture to my eyes, and I really appreciate it all so deeply. Now come to us, and let us both show you how much we think of you. I know that Alice can be happy here for a little while at least, and you would make us very happy; you describe those forty years beautifully, let us celebrate the anniversary. It is needless to say that I shall read the volume with pleasure. I always do enjoy your stories, and they are about the only stories I ever read. Give our love to Alice, and believe us both to be your loving and admiring friends. Yours very truly, WILLIAM LIBBEY. * * * * * INGLESIDE, NEWBURYPORT, MASS. March 14, 1890. MY DEAR FRIEND, AMELIA E. BARR: I cannot approach thee with the formality of a stranger, for my enjoyment of thy "Friend Olivia" has been such, that I have many times almost had pen in hand to express my thanks, and now that my cousin, John G. Whittier, has kindly allowed me to read thy letter of 9th inst., and I find that our past generations were akin in the Quaker faith, I hesitate no longer to give thee a cordial heart greeting. While following thy charming story from month to month in the pages of the _Century Magazine_, we have admired what seemed to us a true portrayal of the Christian spirit in which Friends met their various trials, amid the stormy times of the 17th century. Thy early associations at Ulverstone, Swarthmore and Kendal, so rich as that region must be in Quaker tradition, were doubtless as thou remarkest of great service in preparing thee for this work, and I rejoice that George Fox and his coadjutors have thus been so nobly and beautifully defended. Hoping thou may sometime visit New England, and give thy many friends here opportunity to thank thee in person, for the pleasure thou hast given them, I am Gratefully thine, GERTRUDE W. CORTLAND. * * * * * POINT LOMA, Nov. 29, 1911. MY DEAR MRS BARR: I am most honored and pleased to receive your kind letter in which you give me an inside view as to certain resemblances between the historic character Peter Stuyvesant, and his modern replica--Theodore. I am reading the book with unusual interest, because of your thought in this particular. The story ought, and no doubt will have a wide reading, especially from New Yorkers, who hark back to the olden days when the metropolis had its beginning. More welcome to me, however, than is the story, is the token your letter furnishes, that I still remain in your kindly remembrance. It is a pleasure to think of you so strong, and vital in mind, in the full ripeness of your years. When you come into my thought, our friends Mr. and Mrs. Klopsch come in your company, and the pleasant evening hours spent with you in their home, delightfully repeat themselves. Should we come to New York again, I shall spare no effort to see you. Mrs. Gage desires much to meet you, and it would be a joy to entertain you, if we could, in our California home. With best wishes for you and yours, in which my wife begs to join, I am Your friend, LYMAN GAGE. * * * * * THE CHASE NATIONAL BANK _A. Barton Hepburn, President._ June 23, 1910. MRS. AMELIA E. BARR, CORNWALL-ON-HUDSON, N.Y. MY DEAR MADAME: They say all "Scotch" is better for being diluted. That indicates one claim to goodness which I possess, but the answer to the question you submit can better be supplied, I am sure, by an "undiluted" Scotchman. I am therefore sending your letter to the Secretary of our Society, Mr. William M. MacLean, with the request that he furnish data to enable me to reply, or reply direct. You will hear further presently. Trusting he may be able to discover the information you desire, I am Very truly yours, A. B. HEPBURN, _President, St. Andrew's Society_. * * * * * A. BARTON HEPBURN Eighty-three Cedar Street, New York November 23, 1912. MRS. AMELIA E. BARR, CORNWALL-ON-HUDSON, N.Y. MY DEAR MRS BARR: I received from your publishers yesterday, "A Maid of Old New York," and shall employ my first leisure in reading the same. I thank you very much for your courtesy and also for your letter. I shall note the reincarnation of Peter Stuyvesant with interest. I always enjoyed the three Dutch Governors--Wouter Van Twiller was rather a favorite of mine. I remember Washington Irving's description of him as a man who conceived his ideas upon such a magnificent scale, that he did not have room in his mind to turn them over, and therefore, saw but one side of a question. Again thanking you, Very truly yours, A. B. HEPBURN. * * * * * DEAR MRS. BARR: It hardly seems to me possible that I have let a month go by without writing to thank you for your kind thought in sending me yourself a copy of "The Lion's Whelp." Mr. Cleveland has been ill most of that time, and that accounts for many of my shortcomings. I want to thank you now, and to tell you, how much pleasure the reading of the book gave Mr. Cleveland while he was still in bed. I have not had time to read it yet myself, but I have the pleasure of possession, direct from your hand--and the other pleasure of reading still in store. With many thanks and all good wishes for the New Year and Christmas time, Very sincerely, FRANCES F. CLEVELAND. * * * * * 13, Dec., 1901. WESTLAND, PRINCETON. MY DEAR MRS BARR: Even in this time of great sorrow, I can not forbear to thank you for your book--"Prisoners of Conscience." I have wandered in the Shetland and Orkneys, and crossed the Pentland Firth, and know the bleakness of the islands, and the wildness of the seas that moan around them. I have journeyed too through the desolate creed of Calvinism, and fought with its despairs in my soul, standing by many a death bed, and beside many an open grave, until God gave me victory over the cruel logics of men, that belied His loving heart. Years ago, as you know, freedom came to my soul through the truth as it is in Jesus, and I have been trying to preach it ever since. I am grateful to you, for the power, the depth of feeling, the intense earnestness, with which you have told this truth in your noble story--God and Little Children--you know my creed. And I will preach it in the Presbyterian church as long as I am permitted, because that church needs it most. And now it comes to me with a new meaning, for my own dear little Bernard is with God in His Heaven, which is full of happy children. Faithfully yours, HENRY VAN DYKE. * * * * * 220 MADISON AVENUE, July 28, '97. MY DEAR MRS BARR: Jewett brought the book--the novel and I read every word with pleasure, in spite of the grief and sorrow, the pain and anguish that came to the hearts of the brave and good. Every thing in the book is consistent, harmonious. The religion of the people, the cruel creed, the poor and stingy soil--the bleak skies, the sad and stormy sea, the wailing winds, the narrow lives and the poverty, the fierce hatred and the unchanging loves of the fanatic fisher folk, are all the natural parents, and the natural children. They belong together. You have painted these sad pictures with great skill. You have given the extremes, from the old woman who like the God of Calvin lived only for revenge, to the dear widow who refused to marry again, fearing that her babes might be fuel for hell. The story is terribly sad and frightfully true. But it is true to Nature--Nature that produces and destroys without intention, and without regret--Nature, the mother and murderer of us all. You have written a great book, and you are a great woman, and with all my heart I wish you long life, and all the happiness your heart can hold. Yours always, R. G. INGERSOLL. * * * * * The recent death of Robert Barr will give interest to the following letter: HILLHEAD, WOLDINGHAM, SURREY, Aug. 10, 1901. DEAR MRS. BARR: I was very glad indeed to receive a letter from you. I hope you are all well on your hilltop. I have not been in America since I saw you at Atlantic City. I intended to go this summer, but I am off tomorrow to Switzerland instead. I spent all last winter on the Island of Capri in the Bay of Naples. Your remark about loving your neighbors, but keeping up the fence between, is awfully good, quite the best thing I've heard in a year. Our neighbors on the side next you are Scotch people, who own a tea plantation in India, and we like them very much, but there is a fine thick English hawthorn hedge between. My ten acres of Surrey is hedged all round, except the front which faces the ancient Pilgrim's Way, and there I have built a park fence of oak, which is said to last as long as a brick wall. It is six feet high, and can neither be seen through, nor jumped over. Mary L. Bisland has been staying in Norfolk. She was in London last week, and I invited her out here, but her married sister, and her sister's husband were with her, and she couldn't come. She is coming in October. I met her on the street quite unexpectedly last Wednesday. London is so large, that it always seems strange to me that anybody ever meets anybody one knows. Mary was certainly looking extremely well, but she says her nerves are wrong. She suffers from too much New York apparently. Your books are the most popular in the land. I see them everywhere. There was a struggle in this neighborhood for your autograph, when it got abroad that I had a letter from you. I refused to give up this letter, but the envelope was reft from me by a charming young lady, daughter of a Scotch doctor of London, whose country residence is out here. I hope you are well, and that all your daughters are well, more especially the young lady I met at Atlantic City. I trust she has not forgotten me. Yours most sincerely, ROBERT BARR. * * * * * THE CONGREGATIONAL HOME MISSIONARY SOCIETY Bible House, Astor Place, New York. May 13th, 1897. DEAR MRS. BARR: What shall I say of your book? That I read it through in one night, which proves my interest--that I have read parts of it--the last three chapters--more than once, and that I envy the hand that can strike such a blow at the cruelest caricature of God, the Father, ever invented by man, the child. Thank you for many happy hours. Please go right on, smashing idols, letting light into superstitions, and emancipating consciences until the Millennium; which will dawn about the time when you have finished the job. Sincerely yours, JOSEPH B. CLARK. Oh, let me say the style was a feast of Saxon to one who loves the language of the people, as I do. * * * * * THE CENTURY 7 West Forty-Third Street. MY DEAR MRS BARR: I should have written long since to thank you for your "Bernicia," but the month of April was a very busy one, and the composition and delivering of a very long course of lectures at Yale University, left no time for correspondence, however attractive. But the journeys to and from New Haven, made a pleasant opportunity to follow in imagination the pictures of your charming heroine, and I found much delight in your fresh and simple story, told with the same skill, which appears in all your work. I am greatly obliged to you for giving me this pleasure. Believe me, dear Mrs. Barr, Very cordially yours, HENRY VAN DYKE. May 19, 1896. * * * * * CORNELL UNIVERSITY DEPARTMENT OF AMERICAN HISTORY ITHACA, N.Y. MY DEAR MRS. BARR: I am delighted to have from your own hand your new novel "Bernicia," and am sure that I shall greatly enjoy it myself, and take pleasure in suggesting to others the same source of enjoyment. How well do I remember you, as I used to meet you at the Astor Library more than twenty years ago; and your steady and triumphant march toward literary success since then, it has been a real delight to witness. With sincere congratulations, Yours faithfully, MOSES COIT TYLER. 26, Oct., 1895. * * * * * THE INDEPENDENT 114 Nassau Street, _New York_. Aug. 12, 1892. MY DEAR MRS. BARR: I return to you by mail "The Beads of Tasmer" which I have read through with great interest; in fact nearly all before I reached New York, after my delightful visit at your home. It is a capital story. After my return I called on my Newark neighbor, Reverend Dr. Waters, a Scotchman, and I found that he knew the book well, and said it was a good Scotch, and he has read nearly all your stories with great pleasure. I had a delightful time in your pleasant home. Give my love to the two daughters, and perhaps I ought to say especially, to the one who enjoyed my story of the man who died, and went to Hell, but got out of it again. But you are all in Heaven. Ever sincerely yours, WILLIAM HAYES WARD. * * * * * CRESCENT HILL, SPRINGFIELD, MASSACHUSETTS, Nov. 13, 1909. MY DEAR MRS. BARR: I saw your friendly expressions of me in your letter to the G. & C. Merriam Co. And I was pleased to receive the _Bookman_ with the excellent portrait of you. Be sure that I cordially reciprocate your sentiments of regard. Your always welcome visits to the _Christian Union_ office are fresh in my memory so that I well remember the thorough, patient, workmanlike beginnings of your literary career. Then before long you found your wings, and began that course of admirable imaginative fiction, in which you have had so long and enviable success. It is a great thing to have carried entertainment, stimulus, hope to thousands upon thousands, as you have done. I am sure that in the essential things, life has dealt kindly by you, or I should perhaps say rather, that you and life have met in the right way; but I hope in the externals and incidentals your path has been pleasant to the feet. With kind remembrances and best wishes, Yours sincerely, GEORGE MERRIAM. * * * * * THE MARBLE COLLEGIATE CHURCH 5th Avenue and 29th Street November 26, 1901. MY DEAR MRS. BARR: I have been prevented by sickness in my family from getting at "The Lion's Whelp" until now, and I am in the middle of things. I love a good book, and I love Cromwell, so I am twice blessed in your gift. Everything you do with your pen is well done. I wish all writers were like you. With thanks and sincere regards, I am yours, DAVID J. T. BURRELL. * * * * * AVALON, PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY. MY DEAR MRS. BARR: Thank you for your very kind and cordial letter, and for the gift of "The Lion's Whelp"; which I shall read with great pleasure. We have already put something about Cromwell's Time into the Historic Scenes. I was anxious to get a bit about Dutch New York, and for this reason am particularly glad at the prospect of having a scene from "The Bow of Orange Ribbon." I read "Jan Vedder's Wife" over again last summer, and enjoyed it more than ever. It is straight, strong work. Faithfully yours, HENRY VAN DYKE. Oct. 30, 1901. * * * * * CORNELL UNIVERSITY, ITHACA, NEW YORK. MY DEAR MRS. BARR: I greatly enjoyed your lovely letter of about a month ago, and likewise even the winsome book of your story of Shetland; for as to the latter, the pleasure of reading, will have to remain among the joys of the next summer vacation. You see it is term time, and I am usually driven by its tasks as well as by some outside affairs just now. You are right about our Professor Wheeler; he has a very attractive personality, and the charm of brilliant gifts and attainments. Nor do I wonder at the impression you formed of President White, although it might be modified by better acquaintance. His bodily strength is not exuberant, he holds himself in reserve; he is also a little deaf, and he does not come out so easily as does Wheeler. After so many years, there is a risk in asking about dear ones, but I well remember your two daughters, and should be glad to hear their history. Sincerely, M. COIT TYLER. 1, May, 1897. * * * * * MRS. AMELIA E. BARR. DEAR MADAM: Pardon this intrusion from one who has just finished reading with intense enjoyment "A Maid of Old New York" and who has been fascinated with its deeper meanings--its words of wisdom, written between the printed lines. On reading to my wife your post word, we both felt that you surely intended us to recognize, as you have, Colonel Theodore Roosevelt as the present name of the courageous and dominating soul, known to the day of which you write, as Peter Stuyvesant. I cannot think we are mistaken in this. We were also keenly interested in a sketch which appeared recently in the Hearst papers, of an autobiography shortly to appear from your pen, giving your beliefs and knowledge as to reincarnation and spiritualistic phenomena. We are very desirous of reading this crowning synopsis of your life's rich experience and unfoldment, and will be very grateful if we may know when it is off the press and from what publisher to obtain it. Let me close by thanking you personally and heartily for the pleasure and the profit this book has brought to my wife and myself. Very sincerely yours, CHARLES STACEY DUNNING. _The Los Angeles Evening Express_, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA. July 14th, 1912. * * * * * 540 WASHINGTON AVENUE, BROOKLYN, N.Y. MY DEAR MRS. BARR: Perhaps you do not recall me, as I was but a mite in your busy life, and among so many friends and strangers--Mrs. Terry. I used to call upon you at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, and you perhaps remember my daughter and son-in-law, Colonel Allen, whom you met at Fort Monroe. You surely remember you were made an honorary member of the Officer's Club at the Fort; the _only woman ever so honored_. I have just finished reading your latest--"Sheila Vedder," having long ago read "Jan Vedder's Wife." With much love for you, and your stories, Your admirer, FRANCES A. M. TERRY. June eleventh, 1911. * * * * * DEVORE, CALIFORNIA, June 26th, 1912. MY DEAR LADY: Because I must, I am taking this liberty of writing you; and because I am a woman of sixty, I am not stopping to choose words, nor to apologize. I have been reading of some strange supernatural experiences of yours. I, too, have been favored in that way, also with the gift of prophecy--involuntarily exercised. The story of the terrific impact of the great hand on the wooden shutter in your home in Galveston, was almost exactly paralleled in my experience. If your acquaintance with other people has brought you in contact with many who have similar stories to tell, of course you will not be especially interested in mine, but judging from my own life-long investigations, these manifestations are comparatively rare. Last year before an aviation meet fifty miles away in which a considerable number of entries were made, I announced the name of one who was to fall to his death. I had never seen him, heard no more of him than of any one of the others, but knew he was to die. I even wrote his mother of whom I knew nothing whatever, begging her not to consent to his flight. And at the moment of his fall to death, I fell with him, and told all the particulars to my family, long before the news came over the wire--but I am not trying to convince any one--against his will. Yours, EMMA J. C. DAVIS. FOOTNOTES [1] Kendal wig, a very fine tea cake raised with yeast. It is baked and allowed to cool, then cut apart, toasted and buttered. [2] Judging Chartists by their own words we should not now think they merited exile, hard labor, and life imprisonment. I do not suppose I ever understood their claims, but I have looked up their record and I find they were fighting for five not very wicked points: first, universal suffrage, excluding women, which was the great mistake of Chartism; second, the division of England into equal electoral districts; third, votes by ballot; fourth, annual Parliaments and no property qualifications for members; fifth, payments to every member for his legislative services. For advocating these demands, I saw in 1843, at Liverpool Railway Station, a long row of these Chartists chained together on their way to a convict ship which was to carry them to Botany Bay, or Norfolk Island. [3] A Serape Saltillero, is an exceedingly fine blanket in which is interwoven gold or silver threads. It is so soft and fine that it can be carried in the coat pocket. It has an aperture in the centre which goes over the head. Made only in Saltillero, Mexico. [4] An English gentleman who lost his reason on spiritual matters. He lived alone, no one knew just how; but he always came to us for Christmas breakfast. [5] Blue Williams, Confederate paper money. [6] Beowulf, A.D. 600. [7] Mr. Cochran's opinion has been overwhelmingly refuted by the vast number of Women's Clubs scattered all over the civilized and semi-civilized world; and more especially so by the suffragist movement of the present day. In this effort for their enfranchisement, the cultured woman and the ignorant woman, the nobly born, and the lowly born, the wealthy woman, clothed in purple, and the poor girl in her clean cotton waist, stand shoulder to shoulder, and plan and work together. Neither are they indifferent to their weak sisters, or afraid of their strong ones. The very clubs for helping the weak, the sick, the poor, and the ignorant, are numberless. Tired mothers are succored by them, deficient and neglected children are their care. The strong ones are demanding clean cities, and healthy food, and are looking after defiled waterways, and the savagely abused forests of the country. Indeed if Mr. Cochran could revisit earth at this day the thing that would amaze him more than all other changes would be the condition of women--their work, their aims, their already vast success, embodying as it does the sure fulfilment of the promise that she should "bruise the serpent's head" which will be done when woman has put down drunkenness, and cleansed the Augean stables of civil government of its vile methods of bribery, graft, and injustice. [8] It is worth noting that the Manx, a very primitive religious people, restore to a wife as soon as she dies her maiden name. Death instantly absolves her from her thraldom to her husband. She regains her individuality, and with it her birth name, which is put both upon her coffin and her tombstone. It is likely that this custom has its source in the words of Christ--Luke, 20:27, Mark, 12:13, and Matthew, 22:23. [9] To William Libbey, Senior, My First Friend in New York. Mr. Libbey, Senior, was then dead, but _he knew_. INDEX Abbott, Dr. Lyman, 334, 354, 388 Aberdeen, 247 Aberdeen, Earl of, 445 Adams, Charles Francis, 456 Adams, Oscar Fay, 418 _Advance_, the, 375, 378, 383, 394, 420, 441, 490 Alabama, secession of, 225 Albert, Prince, of England, 99, 100 Alexander, Dr., 210, 236, 237 Alexander, Jenny, 236, 237, 253 Allan, Lieutenant, of Fort Monroe, 447, 511 Allington, 261, 262 Ambleside, 43 American Missionary Society, 359 Amsterdam, 392 _Andover Review_, the, 418 Anne, Queen of England, 43, 360, 398 Anthony, Susan B., 340 Appleton, D., and Company, 311, 313, 365, 380, 490 _Appleton's Magazine_, 341 "April Wedding, An," 369 Arcadians, the, 422-424 _Ariadne_, the, 298, 300, 302 Armenian Christian question, the, article on, 440 Arminianism, 101-102 Arran, the Isle of, 341 Arter, Mr., 433 Astor, Mrs., 339 Astor Library, the, 313, 315-318, 336-338, 344, 348, 364, 375, 379, 390, 391, 398, 417, 430, 432, 434, 442, 508 "At the Last," 493 _Atlantic_, the, 126, 128, 142, 146, 148 Atlantic City, 402, 452, 457 _Aurania_, the, 425 Austin, 267, 294-297, 319, 346, 377 life 179-259 occupation of, by the Union forces, 251-253 desolation in, 260-263 _Austin Gazette_, the, 248 Australia, 121, 123 Authors' Club, the, 443, 500 Bacheller, Irving, 424, 434, 435, 437 Bacheller Syndicate, the, 423, 432, 442, 444 Bacon, Dr., of the U.S. Sixth Cavalry, 244 Baildon Church, 264 Baildon Green, 13-18 Baildon Green Feast, 16-18 Ballistier, Mr., 430 Balwearie, the Tower of, 398 Barr, Alexander Gregg, birth of, 242 death of, 280 Barr, Alice, birth of, 219 Barr, Amelia, birth of, 1-5 early impressions of, 5-10, 18-19 in Shipley, 13-24 in Penrith, 22-46 at Miss Pearson's school, 26-28, 38, 44 in Ripon, 47-54 at the Misses Johnston's school, 49 on the Isle of Man, 55-59 in Whitehaven, 59-64 at Miss Flinder's school, 63 in Norfolk, 69-80 in Glasgow, 91-137 marriage of, 104 first trip of, to America, 143-148 in Chicago, 151-165 in Memphis, 169-171 in New Orleans, 175-177 in Austin, 179-259 illness of, with yellow fever, 279-283 in Galveston, 263-299 beginning of life of, in New York, 302 in Ridgewood, as teacher, 305-314 first literary work of, 311 in Rutherford Park, 345-354 in Denver, 354 removal of, to Cornwall, 388 in East Orange, N.J., 427-428 purchases Cherry Croft, 428 the works of, 488-498 Barr, Andrew, birth and death of, 285 Barr, Archibald, birth of, 253 death of, 257 Barr, Calvin, birth of, 215 death of, 281 Barr, Edith, birth of, 155 death of, 156 Barr, Eliza (Lilly), birth of, 122 marriage of, to Edward A. Munro, 433 Barr, Ethel, birth of, 229 death of, 233 Barr, Mrs. John, 116-119, 383, 412 Barr, Reverend John, 305 Barr, Dr. Martin, 437 Barr, Mary, birth of, 119 marriage of, 375 Barr, Robert, novelist, 452, 506 Barr, Robert, meeting of, with Amelia Huddleston, 100 bankruptcy of, 120 death of, 282 Barr, Thomas, of Tennessee, 348 Barrie, James M., 441 Bascom, Ohio, 392 Bastrop, 184, 195, 202, 261 Beadles, Mollie, of Austin, 240 "Beads of Tasmar, The," 402, 403, 488, 508 "Beating the Bounds," 364 Beauregard, General, 237 Beauregard, Mr., lecture of, on occultism, 443 Beecher, Reverend Charles, 475 Beecher, Dr. Edward, 475 Beecher, Henry Ward, 111, 303, 304, 311, 313, 342, 345, 350, 475 Beers, Henry S., 499 "Beggars of the Sea, The," 394 "Belle of Bowling Green, The," 458, 488 Belle Haven, 434 Benares, 124 Bentley, William, 195, 196, 197, 199, 200, 201, 202 Bermingham, Dr., 426 Berners, Miss, 67, 74-78, 81-87, 92 "Bernicia," 410, 432, 488, 507, 508 "Best I Can, The," 364 "Between Two Loves," 393, 488 Beverly in Yorkshire, 45 Birmingham, 35 Birth of Mrs. Barr, 1, 5 "Birthday, A," 369 "Black Shilling, The," 457, 458, 488 Blackies, the, 116 John, 108, 122 Marion, 108 Walter, 108 Blackpool, Philip, 66, 78 Blackwell, Mr., of Austin, 258 _Blackwood's Magazine_, 234 Blair, Abner, 247 Blair, Andrew, 124 Bloom, Isaac, of Galveston, 337 "Blue and Gray Together," 364 "Blue Williams," 244 Boers, the, 449, 452 Bok, Edward, 431, 432, 434, 445 Bonner's Sons, Robert, 368, 375, 376, 378, 379, 386, 388, 389, 405, 426, 431, 490 _Book News_, the, 418, 420 _Bookman_, the, 461, 508 Books, author's, list of, 488-498 Booth, General William, 4, 370-373 "Border Shepherdess, The," 403, 405, 488, 500 Boroughbridge, 429 Boston, 146-148, 175, 176, 344 _Boston Advertiser_, the, 500 _Bothenia_, the, 425 Boughton, 35 "Bow of Orange Ribbon, The," 363, 391, 393-396, 408, 437, 439, 449, 455 dinner at the Lawyers' Club, 424 dinner given by Mrs. Dodd, 460, 488, 500, 509 Bowery Mission, The, 442 Boyd, the Reverend Mr., of Chicago, 444 Bradford, in Yorkshire, 11, 20, 103, 374, 415, 416, 417 _Bradford Observer_, the, 417 Bradley and Woodward, 490 "Bread upon the Waters," 392 Brémont, Countess de, 448 Bristol, 35 Brodie, Isabel, 108, 116 Brooks, Phillips, 475 Brougham, Lord, 46 Brown, Professor Francis, 475 Brown, Dr. Joseph, 309, 310, 331 Brown, Scotch, of Galveston, 276, 285, 291 Brudenel, Dr., of London, 466 Buckley, Hon. C. W., 213 Buffalo, 147, 149 Buffalo Bayou, the, 180-181, 300, 422 Bunce, Mr., 311 Bundalloch, 402 Burnet, Dr., of Galveston, 293 Burntisland, 398 Burrell, David J. T., of the Marble Collegiate Church, 440, 509 Butterfield, General, 151 Byles, Mrs., of Bradford, 417 Cairo, 159, 164, 166 Calcutta, 124, 216 Caldwell, Miss, of Louisiana, 422 Calvinism, 51, 101, 102, 384, 403, 423, 428, 429, 505 Campbell, Captain, of the _Circassia_, 414 Campbeltown, 107, 127 Canada, 125, 147, 148, 150, 422, 424 Carlisle, 90 Carlton, Mrs., 253 Castletown on the Isle of Man, 2, 56, 439 Catholic Kintail, 402 "Cato's Song," 368 "Cecilia's Lovers," 458, 489 Central America, 390 Century Company, the, 420, 440, 444, 490 _Century Magazine_, the, 420, 431, 502, 507 Chamberlain, Dr., 416, 462 Charles II, King of England, 4 Charleston, 359, 361 Charms, discussion of, 330 Charter House, 71 Chartism, 40-42, 372 Cherry Croft, 352, 412, 413, 428, 430, 431, 433, 441, 442, 443, 448, 450, 452, 455, 457 "Cherry Ripe," 405 Chesterfield, Lord, 395 Chesterton, 377 Cheviot Hills, 420 Chicago, 147, 148, 170, 176, 198, 204, 302, 319, 355 home of author in, 151-165 _Chicago Times Herald_, the, 444 "Children of Shakespeare's Dramas," 365, 380 Christ Church tarts, 13 _Christian at Work_, the, 372 _Christian Herald_, the, 435, 436, 438, 490, 501 Christian Science, 451 _Christian Union_, the, 314, 328, 333, 336, 342, 345, 354, 375, 377-380, 391, 397, 405, 432, 440, 490, 500, 508 _Christian World_, the, 393, 396, 420 "Christopher," 488 _Churchman Magazine_, the, 332, 391 _Circassia_, the, 414 _City of Rome_, the, 417, 474 Clark, Mr., of the London _Christian World_, 393, 396, 397, 398, 408, 418, 423 Clark, James, of London, 490 Clark, Joseph B., of the Congregational Home Missionary Society, 507 Clarke, Edward, of Texas, 226, 227, 229 Clarke, James Freeman, 475 Clarke, Thomas E., of Minneapolis, 438 Claverick, 405 Clemens, Samuel (Mark Twain), 458 Cleveland, Frances F. (Mrs. Grover), 420, 421, 504 Cleveland, Grover, 440, 445, 504 "Cluny MacPherson," 368, 369, 370, 380, 490 Cochran, Mr., 338-341, 344 Coleridge, 46 Collis, General, 432 Columbus, evacuation of, 237 Colville, David, 104, 126, 127, 309-310 Colville, Jessy, 126, 127, 342, 412 "Comrades," 497 Conant, S. S., 338, 341, 385-387 Confederacy, the, 218, 222, 225, 226 last days of, 249-251 Congregational Club, the, 445 Conway, Moncure, 432 Cooper, Peter, funeral of, 369 Corinth, 228 Cornwall-on-Hudson, 25, 366, 388, 398, 417, 428, 433, 434, 443, 446, 452, 458, 460, 461, 463 Cortland, Gertrude W., 502 Crabtree, Martha, 13 Cromwell, Oliver, 26, 222, 398, 409, 452, 453, 457, 509 Cronjes, 452 Cross Keys, the, 72 Crystal Palace, the, 149, 425 Cumberland, 333, 360, 412 Curtis, Mr. and Mrs., of Boston, 146-147, 176 Dakota, 438 Dana, Charles A., 443 "Daughter of Fife, A," 97, 392, 488 Davis, Emma J. C., 512 Davis, Jefferson, 225, 249 De Gama, Professor, 437 Delhi, 124 _Delineator_, the, 453 Denver, 356 _Devonia_, the, 365, 366, 388, 474 Dickerman, Dr. Lysander, 434 Dilke, 416 "Discontented Women," 433, 436 Divorce, article on, 423, 457 Dodd, Edward, 437 Dodd, Frank, 380, 381, 397, 434, 436, 441, 443, 449, 453, 458, 460, 461, 464 Dodd, Mead and Company, 301, 378, 379, 383, 388, 390, 392, 395-397, 402, 413, 420, 444, 447, 449, 464 books of the author published by, 488-489 Dodge, Mrs., 333, 407, 430, 431, 449 Dodge, William E., 332 Dominican Church, the, 335, 336, 384 Douglas, 55 Downham Market in Norfolk, 68, 72-74, 77, 78 Dreams, 98-99, 124, 128, 130, 220, 274, 360, 365, 375, 378, 386, 401-402, 452, 456 Druids, the, 18, 45, 46, 271 Duddon, the Valley of, 6, 473 Dunkirk, 35 Dunning, Charles Stacey, 511 Durham, George, 208, 213, 219, 229, 239-241, 244, 246, 248, 249 Durham, Mrs. George, 206, 237, 241 Dwyer, Charles, 453 East Orange, N.J., 3, 427, 428 Ecclefechan, 90 Eden Hall, 44 Edinburgh, 97, 109, 193, 307, 374, 398, 399 Edward, the Confessor, 3, 454 Edward III, King of England, 26 Elgin, Betty, of Austin, 240, 248 Elwyn College, 437, 438 Emancipation of 1833 in England, 42 Emancipation Proclamation, 251, 264 "Epiphany in the West Riding, The," 314 Erkmann-Chatrian, 475 Errani, 336 Estabrook, Dr., 291 "Eunice Leslie," 334, 490 "Evangeline," 423, 424 Everglades, the, 374 Fackler, Calvin, 165, 169, 171, 172, 215 "Farmer, The," 496 Farrar, Dr., 82-85, 95, 97, 107 _Fashion_, 436 "Feet of Clay," 413, 417, 418, 488 "Femmentia's Experience," 429, 490 Fenwick, Lord, 360 Fife, 392 Fife, Lydey, letter from, 392 Fifth Avenue Hotel, 441, 442, 445, 446, 451, 459, 511 "Fishers of Fife, The," 376 Five Points Mission, 331, 332, 339 Fleuhrer, Dr., 376, 379, 385, 388 Flinders, Penelope, school of, 63 "Flirting Wives," 431 Florida, 225, 375, 382, 408, 417, 457 "Flower of Gala Water, The," 431, 490 Ford, Howard and Hulbert, 344, 345, 490 Fort Donelson, 236 "Fortune Teller, The," 364 "Four Champions of Justification by Faith," 441 Fox, Mr., of Manchester, 309, 311 Fox, George, 417 Free Kirk, founding of the, 107 Freelander, Max, 341 French Revolution, 40 Freund, J. C., 408, 410 "Friend Olivia," 410, 417, 418, 420-422, 423, 488, 499, 502 Frissel, Dr., 446 Frohman, Charles, 408, 441, 443, 437, 439 "From Greenland's Icy Mountains," 17 Froude, 51 Furness Abbey, 384 Gage, Lyman, 461, 462, 503 Gaines, Professor, 434 Galveston, 175-178, 200, 257, 261, 262, 319, 325, 409 life of the Barrs in, 263-300 Garden City, 463 General Theological Seminary, 430 Georgia, 225 Gettysburg, battle of, 228 Gilder, Richard Watson, 414, 420, 421 Gillette, Mrs., 237 "Girls of a Feather," 431 Glasgow, 36, 88, 89, 91, 103, 104, 106, 198, 200, 247, 270, 285, 297, 298, 305, 319, 328, 332, 333, 339, 341-343, 370, 371, 374, 414 Glasgow Normal School, author's attendance at, 88-102 _Globe_, the, 458 Gloucester, the Duke of, 25 Glover's Theatre in Glasgow, 109 _Godey's Magazine_, 431 "Going to Church Together," 379 Goldschmidt, Mrs., 432, 433 Goliad, 409 _Good Words Magazine_, 414 Goodrich, Lucy, 236 Goose Dubs, 93 Grammaticus, Galfridus, story of, 73 Grand Central Station, 386 _Great Harry_, the, 2, 439 Great North Sea, 453 Green, Mrs., 253 Green, Mrs. Tom, of Austin, 206 Greenock, 127 Greenwich, 434 Greenwood, Grace, 344 Greenwood, Jonathan, 13-17 20, 22 Gregg, Bishop, 237, 244 Gregg, Mary, 240 Grey, Peter, 155, 160-162, 165 Grey and Ripon, Earl of, 47, 48 Greyfriar's Kirk, 109 Habberton, John, 389 Halifax, 422 Hall, Mr., of Austin, 272-274 Hall, Reverend Father, 446 "Hallam Succession, The," 385, 393, 490 Hampton School, 446 "Hands of Compulsion, The," 461, 488 Harper Brothers, 216, 390, 394 _Harper's Bazaar_, 490 _Harper's Monthly_, 364, 368, 369, 385, 386, 435 _Harper's Weekly_, 216, 233, 338, 360, 405, 406, 490 _Harper's Young People_, 364, 374, 385 Harrisburg, 179, 180, 181, 198, 200 Harrison in "The Bohemian Girl," 114 Harrogate, 50 Harvard University, 475 Haverstraw, 439 Hawthorne, Julian, 438 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 341 Hazeltine, Mr., 433, 438 "He That Is Washed," 375 "Headquarters," 359, 360, 362 Hearst, William R., 439, 457, 510 Hearst's Children's Republic, 439 "Heart of Jessie Laurie, The," 97, 458, 489 Heber, Bishop, 17 Helmuth, Mr. and Mrs., 436 "Help," 494 Henricks, Mrs., of Austin, 236, 258 Henry VIII, King of England, 25 Hepburn, A. Barton, 503, 504 Hepworth, Dr., 333 _Herald_, the, 312 Hill, Wash, of Austin, 208 Historical Library, the, 313, 454, 461 Hitchcock, Mr., 446 Holland, 391 Holt, Henry, 363, 390 _Home Queen_, the, 433 "House on Cherry Street, The," 461-463, 488 "Household of McNeil, The," 408, 488 "Household Thrush, The," 375 Houston, General Sam, 180, 219, 221-227, 229, 346, 408, 409, 417, 467 Houston, William R., 409-410 Howard, Mr. Jack, 345, 380, 501 Howards, the, of Castle Greystoke, 46 Huddersfield, mills at, 110, 113 Huddleston, Alethia Mona, birth of, 57 death of, 453 Huddleston, Amelia, grandmother of the author, 2 Huddleston, Dr. Andrew, 60, 61 Huddleston, Henry, birth of, 62 death of, 65 Huddleston, Jane, 12 Huddleston, John Henry, 2-4, 332 Huddleston, John Henry, Jr., birth of, 20 death of, 64 Huddleston, Captain John Henry, 2 Huddleston, Dr. John Henry, 3 Huddleston, Sir John Walter, 2 Huddleston, Thomas, Jr., 62, 64, 177 Huddleston, Captain Thomas, of Whitehaven, 61, 62 Huddleston, Thomas Henry of Dublin, 2 Huddleston, Captain Thomas Henry, 2, 439 Huddleston, William Henry, 2, 4 financial failure of, 66 illness of, 59, 64 death of, 264 Huddleston, Mrs. William Henry, death of, 217 Huddleston, William Henry, Jr., birth of, 37 death of, 43 Huddlestons, the, of Millom, 3, 4, 61, 360, 361, 384 genealogical history of, 481-487 Hull, 69, 70 Humber dock, 69, 70 Humphreys, John, 88, 89, 91-94, 97 Humphreys, Mrs. John, 88, 92, 93, 97, 98, 103 Humphries, Captain, 70 Hunt, Dr., 390 Hunter, Dr., 457 Hunter, Henry, 452 Hutchinson, Miss, of Penrith, 46 Hyslop, Professor, 96, 98, 102 "I, Thou and the Other One," 444, 488 "I Will Marry My Own First Love," 436 Illingworth, Mr., of Austin, 221, 242 Illingworth, Mrs., 240, 243 _Illustrated Christian Weekly_, the, 375, 379, 385, 392, 405, 490 _Independent_, the, 360, 394, 490, 508 India, 4, 124, 125, 141, 443, 444, 501 Indians, 254 Apache, 184, 222, 223 Comanche, 184, 209, 210, 222, 223 Lipan, 222, 254 Seminole, 374 Tonkaway, 222, 254 Ingersoll, Colonel Robert, 436, 443, 505 _Iowa_, the, 302 Irving, Washington, 396, 504 Isle of Man, 2, 55-59, 413, 431, 439 Jackson, General, 424 Jackson, Helen Hunt, 357 Jacobus, Professor, 440 James, Professor, 457 "Jan Vedder's Wife," 97, 301, 333, 376-380, 383, 388, 393, 397, 464, 488, 509, 511 French translation of, 413 "Janet McFarlane," 378 Jerusalem, Palestine, 470, 471 Jewett, Dr., 430, 443 Jewett, Miss, 445 Jewett, Rutger Bleecker, 430, 432, 436, 442, 443, 445, 452, 453, 455, 457, 458, 505 John, King of England, 400 John's Island, 359 "John's Wife," 364 Johnson, General, surrender of, 249 Johnson, Robert Underwood, 443 Johnson, Rossiter, 430 Johnston, John Henry, 327-329, 331 "Judith of Keyes Grif," 444 June, Jennie (Mrs. Croly), 436 Kansas City, 159, 162 Keble, 51 Kendal, 23, 25, 31, 67, 68, 78, 85, 88, 89, 97, 101, 107, 108, 109, 127, 129, 131, 134, 136, 137, 139, 193, 322, 399-402, 414, 437, 438, 502 Kendal haver cake, 400 Kendal Syndicate, the, 420 Kendal wigs, 22 Kennedy, Mr., of the _Christian Union_, 314 Kentucky, 172 Key West, 301 King, Dr. Booth, 436 King William's College in the Isle of Man, 57 "King's Highway, The," 438, 439, 488 Kipling, 433 Kirk Malew, the churchyard at, 2, 439 Kirkcaldy, 398 Kirkpatrick, Thomas, 412, 451, 452, 455 Kirkpatrick, Mrs. Thomas, death of, 450, 451 Klopsch, Dr. Louis, 435, 436, 438, 440, 443, 444, 452, 453, 458, 461, 462, 501, 503 death of, 464 Klopsch, Mrs. Louis, 441, 458, 461-464, 503 Knight, Professor William, 475 "Knight of the Nets, The," 433, 434, 436, 437, 488 Know Nothings, the, 153 Kramer, Lieutenant, of Austin, 258 Kruger, Paul, 449 La Grange, 261 "Lacordaire Dying," 378 Lancashire, 309 Larcom, Lucy, 475 "Last of the McAllisters, The," 363, 390, 393, 394, 423, 488 Lathrop, Mr. George Parsons, 433 Lawyer's Club, 424 _Ledger_, the, 364, 378, 382, 388, 389, 393, 394, 490 Lee, Mrs., of Galveston, 263, 281, 282, 285 Lee, Mrs. Harry, 455 Lee, General Robert E., 249 Leeds, 11, 14, 343 _Leisure Hour_, the, 376 Leith, 97 "Lending a Hand," 369 Leslie, Mrs. Frank, 432 _Leslie's Magazine_, 405, 444, 490 Letters, 499-511 Leyden University, 396 Libbey, William, 304-311, 389, 501 Libbey, Professor William, 306, 307, 308, 356, 440, 445, 448, 458, 502 Libbey, Mrs. William, 436, 442, 445, 448, 458 Lidstone, Mr., of Galveston, 298 Lincoln, Abraham, 223 election of, to the Presidency, 225 "Lion's Whelp, The," 409, 449, 452, 453, 488, 504, 509 _Lippincott's Magazine_, 364, 428 Litten, Dr., 210 "Little Evangel, The," 369 Liverpool, 35, 55, 69, 126-128, 138, 139, 417 Lockhart, Mrs., 445 London, 3, 35, 69, 149, 307, 343, 374, 376, 390, 393, 394, 403, 434 "Lone House, The," 432, 488 _Lone Star_, the, 176, 177, 179 Longfellow, Henry W., 422 Lonsdale, Earls of, 3, 25, 46, 47, 60 _Los Angeles Evening Express_, the, 511 "Lost I. O. U., The," 444 "Lost Silver of Briffault, The," 390, 393, 490 Louisiana, 87, 225 "Love for an Hour Is Love Forever," 429, 488 "Loved Too Late," 387 Lovell, Mr., 458, 490 "Lover That Comes in the Morning, The," 364 Lowther Castle, 45, 46 Lubbock, General, 250 Lynn Regis, 69, 72 Lyons, 307 Mabie, Mr., 375, 376 Mackay in "Rob Roy," 109 Madden, Mrs., 255 "Maid of Maiden Lane, The," 449, 488 "Maid of Old New York, A," 464, 489, 504, 510 "Maids, Wives and Bachelors," 488 "Man Between, The," 458, 490 Manchester, 35, 37, 70, 127, 140 Manx, the, 456 "Margaret Sinclair's Silent Money," 313 Marks, Mr., 354 "Master of His Fate, The," 405, 488 "Mate of the Master Bell, The," 429, 490 Matthieson, Mr., 404 Maurice, Mr., 461 McAfee, Professor, 405, 406 McClellan, General, defeat of, 240 McClure, S. S., 424, 430 McClure Syndicate, the, 423 McCulloch, Ben, 237 funeral of, 238 McCutcheon, George, 461 McGlyn, Father, 444 McIntosh, Peter, 93, 414, 415 McIntosh, Mrs. Peter, 95, 98, 106, 135 McKenna, Father, 484 McLaren, Ian, 441 McLeod, Dr. Donald, 121, 414 McNeill, William Stoddard, 454 Mead, Mr., 390, 413, 422, 428 Memphis, 159, 164-171, 197, 198, 201, 214, 215, 240, 296 Mengins, the Reverend Mr., 332, 338, 341 Mercantile Library, the, 313 Meredith, Reverend Mr., 414 Merriam, George, 315, 316, 435, 509 Methodism, 4, 5, 15-17, 35, 68, 351, 385, 414-416, 429, 444, 476 Methodist Book Concern, the, 37, 385, 390, 490 "Michael and Theodora," 407, 431, 490 Michigan University, 342 Millican, Mrs., of Austin, 241 Millom Castle, 3 Mississippi, state of, 225 Mississippi River, the, author's first trip on, 167-168 Moir, Mr., of _Blackwood's_, 234 Moody and Sankey, the evangelical movement of, 372, 441 Morcambe Bay, 400 Morgan, Captain Frank, 385, 393-394, 408, 430 Morgan, Miss Sarah, 152 Morley, Sir William, 59 Morris, Colonel, 255, 257, 447 "Mother England," poem on, 193 Mount Holyoke Alumnæ, 445 Munkitterick, Mr., 388, 389 Munro, Edward A., 433, 459, 460, 463 Munroe, Kirk, 364, 374, 378, 379, 457 marriage of, to Mary Barr, 375 Musgrave of Eden Hall, 44, 46 "My Little Brown Pipe," 495 "My Pretty Canary," 369 Nammack, Dr. Charles, 459, 462 Nammack, Mrs. Charles, 462 Nantasket, 438 Nashville, 236, 237 _Natchez_, the, 171 "Neighbor at Our Gate, The," 445 New Amsterdam, 396 New Braunfels, 178, 179, 197 New Orleans, 172, 174-177, 179-180, 187-188, 200, 238 _New Orleans Picayune_, the, 248 New York, arrival of Barrs in, 148 beginning of Mrs. Barr's life in, 302 _New York American_, the, 470 _New York Democrat_, the, 310 _New York Herald_, the, 389, 433 Newbolt, Henry, 324 Newburgh, 444 Newman, Cardinal John Henry, 51 Niagara, 147, 150 Nicoll, Robertson, 441 "No Room for Me," 364 Noemagen, Mr., 338 "Nollekins, the Sculptor," 364 Norfolk, 69-80 _North American Review_, the, 418, 420, 423, 431, 433, 457 Northern Newspaper Syndicate, the, 399 Norton, Professor, 391 "O Mollie, How I Love You," 369 Occultism, 443, 447 Oddy, Ann, 12-58 Officers' Club, the, in Halifax, 422 at Old Point Comfort, 447, 511 O'Gorman, Pat, of Austin, 245 "Old Man's Valentine, An," 364 "Old Piano, The," 492 Old Point Comfort, 446 Olivet Chapel, 333 Orange Free State, the, 452 Orkney Isles, the, 97, 453, 505 Orr, Mrs., of Cornwall-on-Hudson, 366, 388, 395 Page, the Reverend Mr., 444 Parker, Judge, 446 Parr, Catherine, 25 Patton, President, of Princeton, 440 Paul, Mr., of London, 434, 449 "Paul and Christina," 97, 378, 379, 397, 488 Pearson, Miss, school of, 26-28, 38, 42 Peck, Dr., 446 Peck, Mrs., of "Headquarters," 359, 361 Peck, Mollie, 240 Peel, Sir Robert, 41, 42 _Penny Magazine_, the, 14 Penrith in Cumberland, life at, 22-46, 89, 193, 315, 332 Pensacola, Florida, 180 Perth, city of, 209 Pittsburgh, 445 Platt, Mr., of the _Smart Set_, 458 Platt, Mr. and Mrs. Tom, 445 Poe, Edgar Allan, 313 Poems, 492-498 Pollock, Mr., 461 Pomeroy, Brick, 310 "Poppies and Wheat," 406 Port Chester, 434 Poste des Attakapas, 423, 424 Potter, Bishop, 423, 461 "Preacher's Daughter, The," 382, 431, 490 Press Club Reception, February, 1908, 461 Preston, Ben, 416 Price, victory of, in Missouri, 237 "Price She Paid, The," 442 Princeton, 436, 440, 458 "Prisoner of Zenda, The," 437 "Prisoners of Conscience," 97, 431, 441-443, 490, 500, 504 Protestantism, 384 Pryor, Roger A., 225 _Puck_, 375 Punshon, William Morley, 59, 62, 83 Quakerism, 400, 417, 502 _Queen of the Wash_, the, 71 Queen's dock, 69, 70 Raikes, 35 Rand, Mr., of the Tract House, 369 Raymond, Mr., of Austin, 200, 201, 255 "Reaping the Whirlwind," 490 "Reconciliation, The," 369 "Reconstructed Marriage, The," 463, 464, 489 Reeves, Sims, 425 Reform Bill, 7 Rehan, Ada, in "As You Like It," 425 Reincarnation, 1, 429, 443, 448, 465, 471-477 "Remember the Alamo," 180, 222, 408, 409, 413, 453, 488 Richard III, King of England, 25 Richardson, Miss Sophia, 248 Richmond, Thomas, 52-54 Rideing, Mr., 433, 436, 445, 458 Ridgewood, N.J., life in, 305-314 Ripon in Yorkshire, 45 life at, 47-54 Roe, E. P., 456, 500 Rogers, the Reverend Mr., of Austin, 258 Romaine, 51 Roman Catholicism, 383, 384, 402 "Romance of the Salad Bowl, The," 405 "Romances and Realities," 380, 490 Roosevelt, Theodore, 465, 467, 503, 510 "Rose of a Hundred Leaves, A," 428, 488 Ross, Sir John, 70 _Royal George_, the, 62 Runnels, Governor, of Texas, 222, 223 Rushen Castle, 57 Ruston, the Reverend Mr., 349 Rutherford Park, 345, 346, 348-354 Sage, Alick, 93, 106, 343, 344 Salt, Sir Titus, 417 Saltillero, Mexico, 221 Saltus, Mr. and Mrs., 445 Salvation Army, 371-373 San Antonio, 256, 294, 296, 409 San Jacinto, 180 "Sandiland's Siller," 375 Sandside, 400 Santa Anna, 180 Sargent, Miss, 356 _Saturday Review_, the, 48 Saunders, Mr., of the Astor Library, 315, 316, 390, 391 Scarlet Rocks, 2, 439 Scot, Lawyer, of Austin, 199, 200, 201-202 Scotch Highlands, the, 376 Scotch Universities, 391 _Scotchman_, the, 200 Scott, Captain, 97 Scott, Michael, 398 Scottish Disruption, the Great, 107 "Scottish Tales," 380, 390 Secession, 223-226 Semple, Mrs., 92, 94, 97, 98, 107, 121 Semple, Willie, 94 "Seneca," 58 Sepoy Rebellion, 125, 216 "Servant in the House, The," 462 Shap Fells, 31 Shaw, Mr., of Galveston, 267, 269 "She Loved a Sailor," 424, 425, 488 Sheffield, 70 "Sheila Vedder," 97, 464, 489 Sherman, General, 409 Shetland Islands, 18, 97, 313, 505, 510 Shipley, Yorkshire, 11, 12, 13-24, 215 Shipley Glen, 416 Sickles, General, 443 Sierra Leone, 4, 332 Simcox, Mr., of Austin, 208, 245 Sinclair, James, 104 "Singer from the Sea, A," 430, 431, 488 Singleton, Mary, 456 marriage of, to William Henry Huddleston, 5 death of, 217 Singleton, Dr. Will, 23, 29-31 "Sister to Esau, A," 427, 428, 488 Slave market, in Memphis, 169 _Smart Set_, the, 458 Smith, Adam, 398 Smith, Alexander, 399 Smith, Orlando, 462, 475 Snedeker, the Reverend Mr., 444 "Song of a Single Note, A," 455, 457, 488 Sorosis Club, 436 "Souls of Passage," 488 South Carolina, 225 Southey, 46 Spiritualism, 451 "Squire of Sandalside, The," 396, 488 St. Andrews, 97, 475 St. Ann's-by-the-Sea, 2 _St. Nicholas_, 407 St. Nicholas' Church in Lynn Regis, 73, 74 St. Paul's Cathedral, 425 Starr, Major, of Austin, 258 Stedman, Mr., 403, 404 Stedman, E. C., 500 Sterne, Julius, 338 Stevenson, Dr., 375 Stewart, A. T., 304, 307 Stoddard, Mrs. Richard, 438 Stone, Dr., of Cornwall, 323, 434, 458 Stone, Messrs., of Chicago, 451, 490 Storm King Mountain, 341, 410-412, 430, 446, 449, 461 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 111, 389 "Strawberry Handkerchief, The," 458-460, 489 "Strawberry Idyl, A," 405 Stromberg, Maria, 67, 75, 76 Stuart, Prince Charles, 94, 398, 453 Studley Royal, 48 Stuyvesant, Peter, 464, 465, 503, 504, 510 _Success_, 455 Suffrage, woman, 467, 468 Sultan, the dog, 426-427, 433 _Sunday Magazine_, the, of London, 376 Swartmoor College, 437 Swartout, Mr., 331 Swenson, Mr., of Austin, 255 Swisher, Mr., 255 Sykes, Mr., publisher of the _New York Democrat_, 310, 313, 321, 338, 345, 352 "Take Care," 369 Talmage, Dr., 372, 431 "Tap at the Door, A," 369 Taylor and Company, 452, 490 Teche Bayou, the, 424 Tennessee, 172, 237 Tennyson, 401, 468 Tenter Fell, 78 Terry, Frances A. M., 511 Texas, 95, 159, 164, 176, 180, 409 Mrs. Barr's trip through, 182-185 purchase of, by the United States, 201 state's rights controversy in, 218-219 entrance of, into the Confederacy, 226 General Houston in, 219-229 Texas Cavalry, the Sixth, 244, 254, 255, 259 Texas Company, the, 228, 229 Theosophy, 451 Theyer, 412 Thom, John, 40 Thomas, August, 408, 439, 441-443 Thomas, Edith, 430 "Three Wishes," 375 Throckmorton, Senator J. W., 213 "Thyra Varrick," 97, 453, 454, 490 Tiffany's in Union Square, 327 Tilton, Theodore, 345 "'Tis God's World After All," 364 Tourgee, Mr., of Charleston, 359 Tract House, 490 Tractarian Movement, the, 51, 82 _Tribune_, the, 500 "Trinity Bells," 449, 452, 489 Trinity Church, 148 Trinity House, 70 _Truth_, the, 470 Tupper, Martin F., 403 Turkey-in-Asia, 455 Twain, Mark, 458 Twiggs, General, 226 "Two Ships," 369 "Two Talifers, the," 405 "Two Workers," 368 Tyler, ex-President, 225 Tyler, Moses Coit, 341, 342, 421-422, 435, 440, 508, 510 Tyng, Dr. Stephen, 333, 334, 350, 352, 384, 490 Ulverston in Lancashire, 1, 5, 43, 354, 502 Unionist Party, the, 218, 223 Urner, Nat, 385 Valentine, Professor, 390 Van Duzen, Mrs., 385 Van Dyke, Dr. Henry, 424-425, 440, 449, 505, 507, 509 Van Dyne, Miss, of _Harper's_, 385 Van Siclen, Mr., 424 Van Wagenen, Mr., of Dodd, Mead and Co., 447 Vaughan, Dr., 425 Venice, 307 Victoria, Queen of England, 34, 40-43, 52, 71, 99-100, 389 Vincent, Dr., 385 Virginia, 172 Walcott, the Reverend Mr., 353 Wales, Prince of, 99, 100 Walpole, Horace, 395 War, the Civil, 228-257 Ward, Dr. William Hayes, 431, 508 "Was It Right to Forgive?" 452, 490 Wash, the, 69 Watts, 51 Waul, General, 290-295 Webster, Albert, 339-341 Wedding of author, 104 Wentworth, Long John, 457 Wesley, John, 36, 37, 216 Wesleyan Chapel, 82, 87 West Indies, the, 41 West Riding, the, 11, 16, 47, 70, 101 Westmoreland, 360, 460 "We've Always Been Provided For," 364 Wheeler, Professor, of California University, 440, 510 "When Mother and I Were Married," 364 "When to Drop the Bridle," 364 White, Andrew, Minister to Berlin, 443 Whitehaven, 59-64, 177 "Why Literary Women Do Not Marry," 431 Wilcox, Ella Wheeler, 433 Wilde, Mrs., 432 Williams, Mayor, of Galveston, 285, 290 Willis, Mr., of Galveston, 298, 303, 305 Wilson, Samuel, 14, 374 Windermere, 102, 103, 109, 136, 193, 256, 325 Winter, Dr., 463 "Winter Evening Tales," 490 Wise, Mr. John, 432 "Women's Weapons," 432 Wordsworth, 37, 45, 46, 334 _Working Church_, the, 333, 334 "Woven of Love and Glory," 413 Yellow fever, epidemic of, in Galveston, 178, 266-284 "Yellow Jasmine," 494 Yorkshire, 11, 45, 50, 343, 416 Young, Captain, of the Devonia, 366, 474, 490 _Youth's Companion_, the, 418 
8530	----	A STUDY OF HAWTHORNE BY GEORGE PARSONS LATHROP. [Illustration] CONTENTS. I. POINT OF VIEW II. SALEM III. BOYHOOD.--COLLEGE DAYS.--FANSHAWE IV. TWILIGHT OF THE TWICE-TOLD TALES V. AT BOSTON AND BROOK FARM VI. THE OLD MANSE VII. THE SCARLET LETTER. VIII. LENOX AND CONCORD: PRODUCTIVE PERIOD IX. ENGLAND AND ITALY X. THE LAST ROMANCE XI. PERSONALITY XII. POE, IRVING, HAWTHORNE XIII. THE Loss AND THE GAIN APPENDIX I. APPENDIX II. APPENDIX III. INDEX A STUDY OF HAWTHORNE. I. POINT OF VIEW. This book was not designed as a biography, but is rather a portrait. And, to speak more carefully still, it is not so much this, as my conception of what a portrait of Hawthorne should be. For I cannot write with the authority of one who had known him and had been formally intrusted with the task of describing his life. On the other hand, I do not enter upon this attempt as a mere literary performance, but have been assisted in it by an inward impulse, a consciousness of sympathy with the subject, which I may perhaps consider a sort of inspiration. My guide has been intuition, confirmed and seldom confuted by research. Perhaps it is even a favoring fact that I should never have seen Mr. Hawthorne; a personality so elusive as his may possibly yield its traits more readily to one who can never obtrude actual intercourse between himself and the mind he is meditating upon. An honest report upon personal contact always has a value denied to the reviews of after-comers, yet the best criticism and biography is not always that of contemporaries. Our first studies will have a biographical scope, because a certain grouping of facts is essential, to give point to the view which I am endeavoring to present; and as Hawthorne's early life has hitherto been but little explored, much of the material used in the earlier chapters is now for the first time made public. The latter portion of the career may be treated more sketchily, being already better known; though passages will be found throughout the essay which have been developed with some fulness, in order to maintain a correct atmosphere, compensating any errors which mere opinions might lead to. Special emphasis, then, must not be held to show neglect of points which my space and scope prevent my commenting on. But the first outline requiring our attention involves a distant retrospect. The history of Hawthorne's genius is in some sense a summary of all New England history. From amid a simple, practical, energetic community, remarkable for its activity in affairs of state and religion, but by no means given to dreaming, this fair flower of American genius rose up unexpectedly enough, breaking the cold New England sod for the emission of a light and fragrance as pure and pensive as that of the arbutus in our woods, in spring. The flower, however, sprang from seed that rooted in the old colonial life of the sternly imaginative pilgrims and Puritans. Thrusting itself up into view through the drift of a later day, it must not be confounded with other growths nourished only by that more recent deposit; though the surface-drift had of course its own weighty influence in the nourishment of it. The artistic results of a period of action must sometimes be looked for at a point of time long subsequent, and this was especially sure to be so in the first phases of New England civilization. The settlers in this region, in addition to the burdens and obstacles proper to pioneers, had to deal with the cares of forming a model state and of laying out for posterity a straight and solid path in which it might walk with due rectitude. All this was in itself an ample enough subject to occupy their powerful imaginations. They were enacting a kind of sacred epic, the dangers and the dignity and exaltation of which they felt most fervently. The Bible, the Bay Psalm Book, Bunyan, and Milton, the poems of George Wither, Baxter's Saint's Rest, and some controversial pamphlets, would suffice to appease whatever yearnings the immense experiment of their lives failed to satisfy. Gradually, of course, the native press and new-comers from England multiplied books in a community which held letters in unusual reverence. But the continuous work of subduing a new country, the dependence upon the mother-land for general literature, and finally the excitements of the Revolutionary period, deferred the opportunity for any aesthetic expression of the forces that had been at work here ever since Winthrop stepped from the Arbella on to the shore of the New World, with noble manliness and sturdy statesmanship enough in him to uphold the whole future of a great people. When Hawthorne came, therefore, his utterance was a culmination of the two preceding centuries. An entire side of the richly endowed human nature to which we owe the high qualities of New England,--a nature which is often so easily disposed of as meagre, cold, narrow, and austere,--this side, long suppressed and thrown into shade by the more active front, found expression at last in these pages so curiously compounded of various elements, answering to those traits of the past which Hawthorne's genius revived. The sensuous substance of the early New England character had piously surrendered to the severe maxims which religion and prudence imposed; and so complete was its suppression, that all this part of Puritan nature missed recording itself, except by chance glimpses through the history of the times. For this voluntary oblivion it has been rarely compensated in the immortality it meets with through Hawthorne. Not that he set himself with forethought to the illustration of it; but, in studying as poet and dramatist the past from which he himself had issued, he sought, naturally, to light it up from the interior, to possess himself of the very fire which burned in men's breasts and set their minds in movement at that epoch. In his own person and his own blood the same elements, the same capabilities still existed, however modified or differently ordered. The records of Massachusetts Bay are full of suggestive incongruities between the ideal, single-souled life which its founders hoped to lead, and the jealousies, the opposing opinions, or the intervolved passions of individuals and of parties, which sometimes unwittingly cloaked themselves in religious tenets. Placing himself in the position of these beings, then, and conscious of all the strong and various potencies of emotion which his own nature, inherited from them, held in curb, it was natural that Hawthorne should give weight to this contrast between the intense, prisoned life of shut sensibilities and the formal outward appearance to which it was moulded. This, indeed, is the source of motive in much of his writing; notably so in "The Scarlet Letter." It is thus that his figures get their tremendous and often terrible relief. They are seen as close as we see our faces in a glass, and brought so intimately into our consciousness that the throbbing of their passions sounds like the mysterious, internal beating of our own hearts in our own ears. And even when he is not dealing directly with themes or situations closely related to that life, there may be felt in his style, I think,--particularly in that of the "Twice-Told Tales,"--a union of vigorous freedom, and graceful, shy restraint, a mingling of guardedness which verges on severity with a quick and delicately thrilled sensibility for all that is rich and beautiful and generous, which is his by right of inheritance from the race of Non-conformist colonizers. How subtile and various this sympathy is, between himself and the past of his people, we shall see more clearly as we go on. Salem was, in fact, Hawthorne's native soil, in all senses; as intimately and perfectly so as Florence was the only soil in which Dante and Michael Angelo could have had their growth. It is endlessly suggestive, this way that historic cities have of expressing themselves for all time in the persons of one or two men. Silently and with mysterious precision, the genius comes to birth and ripens--sometimes despite all sorts of discouragement--into a full bloom which we afterward see could not have reached its maturity at any other time, and would surely have missed its most peculiar and cherished qualities if reared in any other place. The Ionian intellect of Athens culminates in Plato; Florence runs into the mould of Dante's verse, like fluid bronze; Paris secures remembrance of her wide curiosity in Voltaire's settled expression; and Samuel Johnson holds fast for us that London of the eighteenth century which has passed out of sight, in giving place to the capital of the Anglo-Saxon race today. In like manner the sober little New England town which has played a so much more obscure, though in its way hardly less significant part, sits quietly enshrined and preserved in Hawthorne's singularly imperishable prose. Of course, Salem is not to be compared with Florence otherwise than remotely or partially. Florence was naturally the City of Flowers, in a figurative sense as well as in the common meaning. Its splendid, various, and full-pulsed life found spontaneous issue in magnificent works of art, in architecture, painting, poetry, and sculpture,--things in which New England was quite sterile. Salem evolved the artistic spirit indirectly, and embodied itself in Hawthorne by the force of contrast: the weariness of unadorned life which must have oppressed many a silent soul before him at last gathered force for a revolt in his person, and the very dearth which had previously reigned was made to contribute to the beauty of his achievement. The unique and delicate perfume of surprise with which his genius issued from its crevice still haunts his romances. A quality of homeliness dwells in their very strangeness and rarity which endears them to us unspeakably, and captivates the foreign sense as well; so that one of Hawthorne's chief and most enduring charms is in a measure due to that very barrenness of his native earth which would at first seem to offer only denial to his development. It is in this direction that we catch sight of the analogy between his intellectual unfolding and that of the great Florentines. It consists in his drawing up into himself the nourishment furnished by the ground upon which he was born, and making the more and the less productive elements reach a climax of characteristic beauty. One marked difference, however, is that there was no abundant and inspiriting municipal life of his own time which could enter into his genius: it was the consciousness of the past of the place that affected him. He himself has expressed as much: "This old town of Salem--my native place, though I have dwelt much away from it, both in boyhood and maturer years--possesses, or did possess, a hold on my affections, the force of which I have never realized during my seasons of actual residence here.... And yet, though invariably happiest elsewhere, there is within me a feeling for old Salem, which, in lack of a better phrase, I must be content to call affection.... But the sentiment has likewise its moral quality. The figure of that first ancestor, invested by family tradition with a dim and dusky grandeur, was present to my boyish imagination as far back as I can remember. It still haunts me, and induces a kind of home-feeling with the past, which I scarcely claim in reference to the present phase of the town." It is by briefly reviewing that past, then trying to reproduce in imagination the immediate atmosphere of Hawthorne's youth, and comparing the two, that we shall best arrive at the completion of our proposed portrait. We have first to study the dim perspective and the suggestive coloring of that historic background from which the author emerges, and then to define clearly his own individual traits as they appear in his published works and Note-Books. The eagerness which admirers of such a genius show, to learn all permissible details of his personal history, is, when freed from the vulgar and imbecile curiosity which often mars it, a sort of homage that it is right to satisfy. It is a respect apt to be paid only to men whose winning personal qualities have reached through their writing, and touched a number of grateful and appreciative hearts. But two objections may be urged against giving such details here: one is, that Hawthorne especially disapproved the writing of a Life of himself; the other, that the history of Salem and the works of Hawthorne are easily accessible to any one, without intervention. Of the first it may frankly be said, indeed, that Hawthorne alone could have adequately portrayed his life for us; though in the same breath it should be added that the idea of his undertaking to do it is almost preposterous. To such a spirit as his, the plan would have had an exquisite absurdity about it, that might even have savored of imposition. The mass of trivial details essential to the accurate and consecutive account of an entire life could never have gained his serious attention: his modesty would have made as little of them as of boyish slate-scribblings, full of significance, fun, and character to observers, but subjected to the sponge without a pang by their producer. There is something natural and fine in this. I confess that to me the spectacle presented by Goethe when dwelling on the minutest incidents of his childhood with senile vanity and persistence, and fashioning with avaricious care the silver shrine and crystal case in which--like a very different sort of Saint Charles Borromeo--he hopes to have the reverent ages view him, is one which increases my sense of his defective though splendid personality. And yet I cannot suppress the opposite feeling, that the man of note who lets his riches of reminiscence be buried with him inflicts a loss on the world which it is hard to take resignedly. In the Note-Books of Hawthorne this want is to a large extent made good. His shrinking sensitiveness in regard to the embalming process of biography is in these somewhat abated, so that they have been of incalculable use in assisting the popular eye to see him as he really was. Other material for illustration of his daily life is somewhat meagre; and yet, on one account, this is perhaps a cause for rejoicing. There is a halo about every man of large poetic genius which it is difficult for the world to wholly miss seeing, while he is alive. Afterward, when the biographer comes, we find the actual dimensions, the physical outline, more insisted upon. That is the biographer's business; and it is not altogether his fault, though partly so, that the public regard is thus turned away from the peculiar but impalpable sign that floats above the poet's actual stature. But, under this subtile influence, forgetting that old, luminous hallucination (if it be one), we suddenly feel the want of it, are dissatisfied; and, not perceiving that the cause lies largely with us, we fall to detracting from the subject. Thus it is fortunate that we have no regular biography of Shakespere authoritative enough to fade our own private conceptions of him; and it is not an unmixed ill that some degree of similar mystery should soften and give tone to the life of Hawthorne. Not that Hawthorne could ever be seriously disadvantaged by a complete record; for behind the greatness of the writer, in this case, there stands a person eminent for strength and loveliness as few men are eminent in their private lives. But it is with dead authors somewhat as it proved with those Etruscan warriors, who, seen through an eyehole lying in perfect state within their tombs, crumbled to a powder when the sepulchres were opened. The contact of life and death is too unsympathetic. Whatever stuff the writer be made of, it seems inevitable that he should suffer injury from exposure to the busy and prying light of subsequent life, after his so deep repose in death. "Would you have me a damned author?" exclaims Oberon, in "The Devil in Manuscript," [Footnote: See the Snow Image, and other Twice-Told Tales.] "to undergo sneers, taunts, abuse, and cold neglect, and faint praise bestowed against the giver's conscience!... An outlaw from the protection of the grave,--one whose ashes every careless foot might spurn, unhonored in life, and remembered scornfully in death!" This, to be sure, is a heated statement, in the mouth of a young author who is about to cast his unpublished works into the fire; but the dread expressed here is by no means unfounded. Even the publication of Hawthorne's Note-Books has put it in the power of various writers of the day to assume an omniscience not altogether just, and far from acceptable. Why, then, should further risk of this be incurred, by issuing the present work? It is precisely to put a limit to misconstructions, as well as to meet--however imperfectly--the desire of genuine appreciators, that it has been written. If this study for a portrait fulfils its aim, it will at least furnish an outline, fix a definite shape, within which whatever is observed by others may find its place with a truer effect and more fitting relation. The mistakes that have been made, indeed, are in no wise alarming ones; and it would be difficult to find any author who has been more carefully considered, on the whole, or with such generally fair conclusions, as Hawthorne. Still, if one sees even minor distortions current, it can do no harm to correct them. Besides, there has as yet been no thorough attempt at a consistent synthetic portraiture; and the differences of different critics' estimates need some common ground to meet and be harmonized upon. If this can be supplied, there will be less waste of time in future studies of the same subject. It will be seen, therefore, that my book makes no pretension to the character of a Life. The wish of Hawthorne on this point would alone be enough, to prevent that. If such a work is to be undertaken, it should be by another hand, in which the right to set aside this wish is much more certainly vested than in mine. But I have thought that an earnest sympathy with the subject might sanction the present essay. Sympathy, after all, is the talisman which may preserve even the formal biographer from giving that injury to his theme just spoken of. And if the insight which guides me has any worth, it will present whatever material has already been made public with a selection and shaping which all researchers might not have time to bestow. Still, I am quite alive to the difficulties of my task; and I am conscious that the work may to some appear supererogatory. Stricture and praise are, it will perhaps be said, equally impertinent to a fame so well established. Neither have I any rash hope of adding a single ray to the light of Hawthorne's high standing. But I do not fear the charge of presumption. Time, if not the present reader, will supply the right perspective and proportion. On the ground of critical duty there is surely defence enough for such an attempt as the one now offered; the relative rank of Hawthorne, and other distinctions touching him, seem to call for a fuller discussion than has been given them. I hope to prove, however, that my aim is in no wise a partisan one. Criticism is appreciative estimation. It is inevitable that the judgments of competent and cultivated persons should flatly contradict each other, as well as those of incompetent persons; and this whether they are coeval or of different dates. At the last, it is in many respects matter of simple individual impression; and there will always be persons of high intelligence whom it will be impossible to make coincide with us entirely, touching even a single author. So that the best we can do is to set about giving rational explanation of our diverse admirations. Others will explain theirs; and in this way, everything good having a fit showing, taste finds it easier to become catholic. Whoever reverences something has a meaning. Shall he not record it? But there are two ways in which he may express himself,--through speech and through silence,--both of them sacred alike. Which of these we will use on any given occasion is a question much too subtle, too surely fraught with intuitions that cannot be formulated, to admit of arbitrary prescription. In preferring, here, the form of speech, I feel that I have adopted only another kind of silence. [Illustration] II. SALEM. Let us now look more closely at the local setting. To understand Hawthorne's youth and his following development, we must at once transport ourselves into another period, and imagine a very different kind of life from the one we know best. It hardly occurs to readers, that an effort should be made to imagine the influences surrounding a man who has so recently passed away as Hawthorne. It was in 1864 that he died,--little more than a decade since. But he was born sixty years before, which places his boyhood and early youth in the first quarter of the century. The lapse since then has been a long one in its effects; almost portentously so. The alterations in manners, relations, opportunities, have been great. Restless and rapid in their action, these changes have multiplied the mystery of distance a hundred-fold between us and that earlier time; so that there is really a considerable space to be traversed before we can stand in thought where Hawthorne then stood in fact. Goldsmith says, in that passage of the Life of Parnell which Irving so aptly quotes in his biography of the writer: "A poet while living is seldom an object sufficiently great to attract much attention.... When his fame is increased by time, it is then too late to investigate the peculiarities of his disposition; the dews of morning are past, and we vainly try to continue the chase by the meridian splendor." The bustle of American life certainly does away with "the dews of morning" very promptly; and it is not quite a simple matter to reproduce the first growth of a life which began almost with the century. But there are resources for doing so. To begin with, we shall view Salem as it is. Vigorous and thriving still, the place has fortunately not drifted so far from its moorings of seventy years since as to take us out of our bearings, in considering its present aspect. Pace its quiet, thoroughfares awhile, and you will find them leading softly and easily into the past. You arrive in the ordinary way, by railroad, and at first the place wears a disappointingly commonplace aspect. It does not seem impressively venerable; hacks and horse-cars rattle and tinkle along the streets, people go about their affairs in the usual way, without any due understanding that they ought to be picturesque and should devote themselves to falling into effective groups posed in vistas of historic events. Is antiquity, then, afraid to assert itself, even here in this stronghold, so far as to appear upon the street? No. But one must approach these old towns with reverence, to get at their secrets. They will not yield inspiration or meaning save to an imaginative effort. Under the influence of that, the faded past, traced in sympathetic ink, as it were, revives and starts into distinctness. Passing down Essex Street, or striking off from its modest bustle a little way, we come upon shy, ungainly relics of other times. Gray gambrel-roofed houses stand out here and there, with thick-throated chimneys that seem to hold the whole together. Again you pass buildings of a statelier cast, with carved pilasters on the front and arched doorways bordered with some simple, dainty line of carving; old plaster-covered urns, perhaps, stand on the brick garden-wall, and the plaster is peeling off in flakes that hang long and reluctant before falling to the ground. There are quaint gardens everywhere, with sometimes an entrance arched with iron gracefully wrought by some forgotten colonial Quentin Matsys, and always with their paths bordered by prim and fragrant box, and grass that keeps rich and green in an Old World way, by virtue of some secret of growth caught from fresher centuries than ours. If your steps have the right magic in them, you will encounter presently one of the ancient pumps like to the Town Pump from which Hawthorne drew that clear and sparkling little stream of revery and picture which has flowed into so many and such distant nooks, though the pump itself has now disappeared, having been directly in the line of the railroad. But, best of all, by ascending Witch Hill you may get a good historic outlook over the past and the present of the place. Looking down from here you behold the ancient city spread before you, rich in chimneys and overshadowed by soft elms. At one point a dark, strong steeple lifts itself like a huge gravestone above the surrounding houses, terminating in a square top or a blunt dome; and yonder is another, more ideal in its look, rising slight and fine, and with many ascents and alternating pauses, to reach a delicate pinnacle at great height in the air. It is lighted at intervals with many-paned and glittering windows, and wears a probable aspect of being the one which the young dreamer would have chosen for the standpoint of his "Sights from a Steeple"; and the two kinds of spire seem to typify well the Puritan gloom and the Puritan aspiration that alike found expression on this soil. Off beyond the gray and sober-tinted town is the sea, which in this perspective seems to rise above it and to dominate the place with its dim, half-threatening blue; as indeed it has always ruled its destinies in great measure, bringing first the persecuted hither and then inviting so many successive generations forth to warlike expedition, or Revolutionary privateering or distant commercial enterprise. With the sea, too, Hawthorne's name again is connected, as we shall presently notice. Then, quitting the brimming blue, our eyes return over the "flat, unvaried surface covered chiefly with wooden houses, few or none of which pretend to architectural beauty," with its "irregularity which is neither picturesque nor quaint, but only tame"; and retracing the line upon which Hawthorne has crowded the whole history of Salem, in "Main Street," [Footnote: See The Snow Image, and other Twice-Told Tales.] we fall to pondering upon the deeds that gave this hill its name. At its foot a number of tanneries and mills are grouped, from which there are exhalations of smoke and steam. The mists of superstition that once overhung the spot seem at last to have taken on that form. Behind it the land opens out and falls away in a barren tract known from the earliest period as the Great Pastures, where a solitude reigns almost as complete as that of the primitive settlement, and where, swinging cabalistic webs from one to another of the arbor-vitae and dwarf-pine trees that grow upon it, spiders enough still abide to furnish familiars for a world full of witches. But here on the hill there is no special suggestion of the dark memory that broods upon it when seen in history. An obliging Irish population has relieved the descendants of both the witches and their exterminators from an awkward task, by covering with their own barren little dwellings the three sides of the height facing the town. Still, they have not ventured beyond a certain line. One small area at the summit is wholly unencroached upon. Whether or not through fear of some evil influence resting upon the spot, no house as yet disturbs this space, though the thin turf has been somewhat picked away by desultory sod-diggers. There is nothing save this squalid, lonely desolation to commemorate the fact that such unhappy and needless deaths were here endured. It is enough. Mere human sympathy takes us back with awful vividness to that time when the poor victims looked their last from this, upon the bleak boundary-hills of the inland horizon and that hopeless semicircle of the sea on the other side. A terrible and fitting place for execution, indeed! It looms up visible for many miles of lower country around; and as you stand upon the top, earth seems to fall away with such a fatal ease around it! The stranger is naturally drawn hence to the Court House, where, by calling a clerk from his routine in a room fairly lined and stuccoed with bundles of legal papers, he may get a glimpse of the famous "witch-pins." These are the identical little instruments which the afflicted children drew from different parts of their dress, in the trial-room, declaring that some one of the accused had just caused them to be sharply inserted into their persons. The pins are kept in a small glass bottle, and are thin and rudely made; and as one looks at the curious, homely little relics, it is hard to know whether to laugh at the absurdly insignificant sight, or shudder at the thought of what deadly harm they worked in the hands of the bewitched. So, while one is hesitating, one gives the bottle back to the clerk, who locks it up speedily, and at the next instant is absorbed in the drawing up of some document; leaving the intruder free to pursue his search for antiquities elsewhere. But the monuments and remains of the past are nowhere large enough, in our American towns, to furnish the pilgrim a complete shelter and make an atmosphere of their own. The old Curwin Mansion, or "Witch House," to be sure, with its jutting upper story, and its dark and grimy room where witch-trials are rumored to have been held, is a solid scrap of antique gloom; but an ephemeral druggist's shop has been fastened on to a corner of the old building, and clings there like a wasp's nest,--as subversive, too, of quiet contemplation. The descendants of the first settlers have with pious care preserved the remains of the First Church of Salem, and the plain little temple may still be seen, though hidden away in the rear of the solid, brick-built Essex Institute. Yet, after all, it is only the skeleton of the thing, the original framework set into a modern covering for protection,--the whole church being about as large as a small drawing-room only. Into this little space a few dumb and shrinking witnesses of the past have been huddled: the old communion-table, two ancient harpsichords, a single pew-door, a wooden samp-mortar, and a huge, half-ruinous loom; and some engraved portraits of ancient ministers hang upon the walls. When I visited the place, a party of young men and women were there, who hopelessly scattered any slight dust of revery that might have settled on me from the ancient beams, and sent the ghosts fleeing before their light laughter. The young women fingered the old harpsichords, and incontinently thrummed upon them; and one cried, "Play a waltz!" She was a pretty creature; and, as her gay tone mingled with the rattle of protesting strings in the worn-out instrument, one might easily have divined how dire a fate would have been hers, in the days when men not only believed in bewitchment, but made it punishable. Then a young man who had clung for guidance amid her spells to the little printed pamphlet that describes the church, read aloud from its pages, seriously: "'Nowhere else in this land may one find so ancient and worshipful a shrine. Within these walls, silent with the remembered presence of Endicott, Skelton, Higginson, Roger Williams, and their grave compeers, the very day seems haunted, and the sunshine falls but soberly in.'" "O don't!" besought the siren, again. "We're not in a solemn state." And, whether it was the spell of her voice or not, I confess the sunshine did not seem to me either haunted or sober. Thus, all through Salem, you encounter a perverse fate which will not let you be alone with the elusive spirit of the past. Yet, on reflection, why should it? This perverse fate is simply the life of to-day, which has certainly an equal right to the soil with that of our dreams and memories. And before long the conflict of past and present thus occasioned leads to a discovery. In the first place, it transpires that the atmosphere is more favorable than at first appears for backward-reaching revery. The town holds its history in reverence, and a good many slight traces of antiquity, with the quiet respect maintained for them in the minds of the inhabitants, finally make a strong cumulative attack on the imagination. The very meagreness and minuteness of the physical witnesses to a former condition of things cease to discourage, and actually become an incitement more effective than bulkier relics might impart. The delicacy of suggestion lends a zest to your dream; and the sober streets open out before you into vistas of austere reminiscence. The first night that I passed in Salem, I heard a church-bell ringing loudly, and asked what it was. It was the nine-o'clock bell; and it had been appointed to ring thus every night, a hundred years ago or more. How it reverberated through my mind, till every brain-cell seemed like the empty chamber of a vanished year! Then, in the room where I slept, there was rich and ponderous furniture of the fashion of eld; the bed was draped and canopied with hangings that seemed full of spells and dreamery; and there was a mirror, tall, and swung between stately mahogany posts spreading their feet out on the floor, which recalled that fancy of Hawthorne's, in the tale of "Old Esther Dudley," [Footnote: See also American Note-Books, Vol. I.; and the first chapter of The House of the Seven Gables.] about perished dames and grandees made to sweep in procession through "the inner world" of a glass. Such small matters as these engage the fancy, and lead it back through a systematic review of local history with unlooked-for nimbleness. Gradually the mind gets to roving among scenes imaged as if by memory, and bearing some strangely intimate relation to the actual scenes before one. The drift of clouds, the sifting of sudden light from the sky, acquire the import of historic changes of adversity and prosperity. The spires of Salem, seen one day through a semi-shrouding rain, appeared to loom up through the mist of centuries; and the real antiquity of sunlight shone out upon me, at other times, with cunning quietude, from the weather-worn wood of old, unpainted houses. Every hour was full of yesterdays. Something of primitive strangeness and adventure seemed to settle into my mood, and the air teemed with anticipation of a startling event; as if the deeds of the past were continually on the eve of returning. With all this, too, a certain gray shadow of unreality stole over everything. Then one becomes aware that this frame of mind, produced by actual contact with Salem, is subtly akin to the mood from which so many of Hawthorne's visions were projected. A flickering semblance, perhaps, of what to him must have been a constant though subdued and dreamy flame summoning him to potent incantation over the abyss of time; but from this it was easy to conceive it deepened and intensified in him a hundred-fold. Moreover, in his youth and growing-time, the influence itself was stronger, the suggestive aspect of the town more salient. If you read even now, on the ground itself, the story of the settlement and the first century's life of Salem and the surrounding places, a delicate suffusion of the marvellous will insensibly steal over the severe facts of the record, giving them a half-legendary color. This arises partly from the imaginative and symbolic way of looking at things of the founders themselves. John White, the English Puritan divine, who, with the "Dorchester Adventurers," established the first colony at Cape Ann, was moved to this by the wish to establish in Massachusetts Bay a resting-place for the fishermen who came over from Dorchester in England, so that they might be kept under religious influences. This was the origin of Salem; for the emigrants moved, three years later, to this spot, then called Naumkeag. In the Indian name they afterward found a proof, as they supposed, that the Indians were an offshoot of the Jews, because it "proves to be perfect Hebrew, being called Nahum Keike; by interpretation, the bosom of consolation." Later, they named it Salem, "for the peace," as Cotton Mather says, "which they had and hoped in it"; and when Hugh Peters on one occasion preached at Great Pond, now Wenham, he took as his text, "At Enon, near to Salim, because there was much water there." This playing with names is a mere surface indication of the ever-present scriptural analogy which these men were constantly tracing in all their acts. Cut off by their intellectual asceticism from any exertion of the imagination in literature, and denying themselves all that side of life which at once develops and rhythmically restrains the sense of earthly beauty, they compensated themselves by running parallels between their own mission and that of the apostles,--a likeness which was interchangeable at pleasure with the fancied resemblance of their condition to that of the Israelites. When one considers the remoteness of the field from their native shores, the enormous energy needful to collect the proper elements for a population, and to provide artificers with the means of work; the almost impassable wildness of the woods; the repeated leagues of hostile Indians; the depletions by sickness; and the internal dissensions with which they had to struggle,--one cannot wonder that they invested their own unsurpassed fortitude, and their genius for government and war, with the quality of a special Providence. But their faith was inwoven in the most singular way with a treacherous strand of credulity and superstition. Sometimes one is impressed with a sense that the prodigious force by which they subdued the knotty and forest-fettered land, and overcame so many other more dangerous difficulties, was the ecstasy of men made morbidly strong by excessive gloom and indifference to the present life. "When we are in our graves," wrote Higginson, "it will be all one whether we have lived in plenty or penury, whether we have died in a bed of downe or lockes of straw." And Hawthorne speaks of the Puritan temperament as "accomplishing so much, precisely because it imagined and hoped so little." Yet, though they were not, as Winthrop says, "of those that dreame of perfection in this world," they surely had vast hopes at heart, and the fire of repressed imagination played around them and before them as a vital and guiding gleam, of untold value to them, and using a mysterious power in their affairs. They were something morbid in their imaginings, but that this morbid habit was a chief source of their power is a mistaken theory. It is true that their errors of imagination were so closely knit up with real insight, that they could not themselves distinguish between the two. Their religious faith, their outlook into another life, though tinged by unhealthy terrorism, was a solid, energetic act of imagination; but when it had to deal with intricate tangles of mind and heart, it became credulity. That lurking unhealthiness spread from the centre, and soon overcame their judgment entirely. The bodeful glare of the witchcraft delusion makes this fearfully clear. Mr. Upham, in his "Salem Witchcraft,"--one of the most vigorous, true, and thorough of American histories, without which no one can possess himself of the subject it treats,--has shown conclusively the admirable character of the community in which that delusion broke out, its energy, common-sense, and varied activity; but he points out for us also the perilous state of the Puritan imagination in a matter where religion, physiology, and affairs touched each other so closely as in the witchcraft episode. The persecution at Salem did not come from such deep degeneration as has been assumed for its source, and it was not at the time at all a result of uncommon bigotry. In the persecution in England in 1645-46, Matthew Hopkins, the "witch-finder-general," procured the death, "in one year and in one county, of more than three times as many as suffered in Salem during the whole delusion"; several persons were tried by water ordeal, and drowned, in Suffolk, Essex, and Cambridgeshire, at the same time with the Salem executions; and capital punishments took place there some years after the end of the trouble here. It is well known, also, that persons were put to death for witchcraft in two other American colonies. The excess in Salem was heightened by a well-planned imposture, but found quick sustenance because "the imagination, called necessarily into extraordinary action in the absence of scientific certainty, was ... exercised in vain attempts to discover, unassisted by observation and experiment, the elements and first principles of nature," [Footnote: Upham, I. 382] and "had reached a monstrous growth," nourished by a copious literature of magic and demonology, and by the opinions of the most eminent and humane preachers and poets. The imagination which makes beauty out of evil, and that which accumulates from it the utmost intensity of terror, are well exemplified in Milton and Bunyan. Doubtless Milton's richly cultured faith, clothed in lustrous language as in princely silks that overhang his chain-mail of ample learning and argument, was as intense as the unlettered belief of Bunyan; and perhaps he shared the prevalent opinions about witchcraft; yet when he touches upon the superstitious element, the material used is so transfused with the pictorial and poetic quality which Milton has distilled from the common belief, and then poured into this _image_ of the common belief, that I am not sure he cared for any other quality in it. "Nor uglier follow the night-hag, when, call'd In secret, riding through the air she comes, Lured by the smell of infant blood, to dance With Lapland witches, while the laboring moon Ellipses at their charms." _Paradise Lost_, II. 662. Again, in Comus:-- "Some say, no evil thing that walks by night, Blue meagre hag, or stubborn, unlaid ghost That breaks his magic chains at curfew time, No goblin, or swart faery of the mine, Hath hurtful power o'er true virginity." How near these passages come to Shakespere, where he touches the same string! And is it not clear that both poets exulted so in the _beauty_ born among dark, earthy depths of fear, that they would have rejected any and every horror which failed to contribute something to the beautiful? Indeed, it may easily be that such high spirits accept awful traditions and cruel theologies, merely because they possess a transmuting touch which gives these things a secret and relative value not intrinsically theirs; because they find here something to satisfy an inward demand for immense expansions of thought, a desire for all sorts of proportioned and balanced extremes. This is no superficial suggestion, though it may seem so. But in such cases it is not the positive horror and its direct effect which attract the poet: a deeper symbolism and an effect both aesthetic and moral recommend the element to him. With Milton, however, there follows a curious result. He produces his manufactured myth of Sin and Death and his ludicrous Limbo of Vanity with a gravity and earnestness as convincing as those which urge home any part of his theme; yet we are aware that he is only making poetic pretence of belief; so that a certain distrust of his sincerity throughout creeps in, as we read. How much, we ask, is allegory in the poet's own estimation, and how much real belief? Now in Bunyan there is nothing of this doubt. Though the author declares his narrative to be the relation of a dream, the figment becomes absolute fact to us; and the homely realism of Giant Despair gives him a firmer hold upon me as an actual existence, than all the splendid characterization of Milton's Beelzebub can gain. Even Apollyon is more real. Milton assumes the historic air of the epic poet, Bunyan admits that he is giving an allegory; yet of the two the humble recorder of Christian's progress seems the more worthy of credit. Something of this effect is doubtless due to art: the "Pilgrim's Progress" is more adequately couched in a single and consistent strain than the "Paradise Lost." Milton, by implying veracity and then vaporing off into allegory, challenges dispute; but Bunyan, in humbly confessing himself a dreamer, disarms his reader and traps him into entire assent. Certainly Bunyan was not the greater artist: that supposition will not even bear a moment's contemplation; but, as it happened, his weakness was his strength. He had but one chance. His work would have been nothing without allegory, and the simple device of the dream--which is the refuge of a man unskilled in composition, who feels that his figures cannot quite stand as self-sufficient entities--happens to be as valuable to him as it was necessary; for the plea of unreality brings out, in the strong light of surprise, a contrast between the sincere substance of the story and its assumed insubstantiality. Milton had many chances, many resources of power to rely on; but by grasping boldly at the effect of authenticity he loses that one among the several prizes within his reach. I do not know that I am right, but all this seems to me to argue a certain dividing and weakening influence exerted by the imagination which uses religious or superstitious dread for the purposes of beauty; while that which discourses confidently of the passage from this to another life, with all the several stages clearly marked, and floods the whole scene with a vivid and inartificial light from "the powers and terrors of what is yet unseen," affects the mind with every atom of energy economized and concentred. Leaving the literary question, we may bring this conclusion to bear upon the Puritans and Salem, as their history affected Hawthorne. I have said that a gradual suffusion of the marvellous overspreads the comparatively arid annals of the town, if one reviews them amid the proper influences; and I have touched upon the two phases of imagination which, playing over the facts, give them this atmosphere. Now if what I guess from the contrast between Milton and Bunyan be true, the lower kind of imagination--that is, imagination deformed to credulity--would be likely to be the more impressive. This uncanny quality of superstition, then, is the one which insensibly exudes from the pages of New England's and perhaps especially of Salem's colonial history, as Hawthorne turns them. This is the dank effluence that, mingling with the sweeter and freer air of his own reveries, has made so many people shudder on entering the great romancer's shadowy but serene domain. And just here it is advisable to triangulate our ground, by bringing Milton, Bunyan, and Hawthorne together in a simultaneous view. Wide apart as the first two stand, they seem to effect a kind of union in this modern genius; or, rather, their influence here conjoins, as the rays from two far-separated stars meet in the eye of him who watches the heavens for inspiration. Something of the peculiar virtue of each of these Puritan writers seems to have given tone to Hawthorne's no less individual nature. In Bunyan, who very early laid his hand on Hawthorne's intellectual history, we find a very fountain-head of allegory. His impulse, of course, was supremely didactic, only so much of mere narrative interest mixing itself with his work as was inseparable from his native relish for the matter of fact; while in Milton's poetry the clear aesthetic pleasure held at least an exact balance with the moral inspiration, and, as we have just seen, perhaps outweighed it at times. The same powerful, unrelaxing grasp of allegory is found in the American genius as in Bunyan, and there likewise comes to light in his mind the same delight in art for art's sake that added such a grace to Milton's sinewy and large-limbed port. In special cases the allegorical motive has distinctly got the upper hand, in Hawthorne's work; yet even in those the artistic integument, that marvellous verbal style, those exquisite fancies, are not absent: on the contrary, in the very instances where Hawthorne has most constantly and clearly held to the illustration of a single idea, and made his fiction fit itself most absolutely to the jewelled truth it holds,--in these very causes, I say, the command of his genius over literary resources is generally shown by an unusual splendor of means applied to the ideal end in view. It is here that, while resembling Bunyan, he is so unlike him. But more commonly we find in Hawthorne the two moods, the ethical and the aesthetic, exerted in full force simultaneously; and the result seems to be a perfection of unity. The opposing forces, like centripetal and centrifugal attractions, produce a finished sphere. And in this, again, though recalling Milton, he differs from him also. In Milton's epic the tendency is to alternate these moods; and one works against the other. In short, the two elder writers undergo a good deal of refinement and proportioning, before mixing their qualities in Hawthorne's veins. However great a controversialist Milton may be held, too, the very fact of his engaging in the particular discussions and in the manner he chose, while never to be deplored, may have something to do with the want of fusion of the different qualities present in his poetry. We may say, and doubtless it is so, that Hawthorne could never have written such magnificent pamphlets as the "Eikonoklastes," the "Apology," the "Tetrachordon": I grant that his refinement, though bringing him something which Milton did not have, has cost him something else which Milton possessed. But, for all that, the more deep-lying and inclusive truths which he constantly entertained, and which barred him from the temporary exertion of controversy, formed the sources of his completer harmony. There is a kind of analogy, too, between the omnipresence of Milton in his work, and that of Hawthorne in his. The great Puritan singer cannot create persons: his Satan is Milton himself in singing-robes, assuming for mere argument's and epic's sake that side of a debate which he does not believe, yet carrying it out in the most masterly way; his angels and archangels are discriminated, but still they are not divested of his informing quality; and "Comus" and "Samson Agonistes," howsoever diverse, are illustrations of the athletic prime and the autumnal strength of the poet himself, rather than anywise dramatic evolutions of his themes. Bunyan, with much less faculty for any subtle discrimination of characters, also fails to give his persons individuality, though they stand very distinctly for a variety of traits: it is with Bunyan as if he had taken an average human being, and, separating his impulses, good and evil, had tried to make a new man or woman out of each; so that there is hardly life-blood enough to go round among them. Milton's creatures are in a certain way more vital, though less real. Bunyan's characters being traits, the other's are moods. Yet both groups seem to have been cast in a large, elemental mould. Now, Hawthorne is vastly more an adept than either Milton or Bunyan in keeping the creatures of his spirit separate, while maintaining amongst them the bond of a common nature; but besides this bond they are joined by another, by something which continually brings us back to the author himself. It is like a family resemblance between widely separated relatives, which suggests in the most opposite quarters the original type of feature of some strong, far-back progenitor. These characters, with far more vivid presence and clear definition than those of the other two writers, are at the same time based on large and elementary forces, like theirs. They are for the most part embodied moods, or emotions expanded to the stature of an entire human being, and made to endure unchanged for years together. Thus, while Hawthorne, as we shall see more fully further on, is essentially a dramatic genius, Bunyan a simple allegorist, and Milton an odic poet of unparalleled strength,--who, taking dramatic and epic subjects and failing to fill them, makes us blame not _his_ size and shape, but the too minute intricacies of the theme,--there is still a sort of underground connection between all three. It is curious to note, further, the relation of Milton's majestic and multitudinous speech, the chancellor-like stateliness of his wit, in prose, to Hawthorne's resonant periods, and dignity that is never weakened though admirably modified by humor. Altogether, if one could compound Bunyan and Milton, combine the realistic imagination of the one with the other's passion for ideas, pour the ebullient undulating prose style of the poet into the veins of the allegorist's firm, leather-jerkined English, and make a modern man and author of the whole, the result would not be alien to Hawthorne. Yet that native love of historic murkiness and mossy tradition which we have been learning to associate with Salem would have to be present in this compound being, to make the likeness complete. And this, with the trains of revery and the cast of imagination which it must naturally breed, would be the one thing not easily supplied, for it is the predisposition which gives to all encircling qualities in Hawthorne their peculiar coloring and charm. That predisposition did not find its sustenance only in the atmosphere of sadness and mystery that hangs over the story of Salem; bygone generations have left in the town a whole legacy of legend and shudder-rousing passages of family tradition, with many well-supported tales of supernatural hauntings; and it is worth while to notice how frequent and forcible a use Hawthorne makes of this enginery of local gossip and traditional horror, in preparing the way for some catastrophe that is to come, or in overshooting the mark with some exaggerated rumor which, by pretending to disbelieve it, he causes to have just the right effect upon the reader's mind. Some of the old houses that stand endwise to the street, looking askant at the passer,--especially if he is a stranger in town,--might be veritable treasuries of this sort of material. Gray, close-shuttered, and retiring, they have not so much the look of death; it is more that they are poor, widowed homes that have mournfully long outlived their lords. One would not have them perish; and yet there is something drearily sad about them. One almost feels that the present tenants must be in danger of being crowded out by ghosts, or at least that they must encounter strange obstacles to living there. Are not their windows darkened by the light of other days? An old mansion of brick or stone has more character of its own, and is less easily overshadowed by its own antiquity; but these impressible wooden abiding-places, that have managed to cling to the soil through so many generations, seem rife with the inspirations of mortality. They have a depressing influence, and must often mould the occupants and leave a peculiar impress on them. We are all odd enough in our way, whatever our origin or habitation; but is it not possible that in a town of given size, placed under specified conditions, there should be a greater proportion of oddities produced than in another differently circumstanced? Certainly, if this be so, it has its advantages as well as its drawbacks; a stability of surrounding and of association, which perhaps affects individuals in the extreme, is still a source of continuity in town character. And Salem is certainly remarkable for strong, persistent, and yet unexhausted individuality, as a town, no less than for a peculiar dignity of character which has become a pronounced trait in many of its children. But, on the other hand, it is fecund of eccentricities. Though many absorb the atmosphere of age to their great advantage, there must be other temperaments among the descendants of so unique and so impressionable a body of men as the early settlers of this region, which would succumb to the awesome and depressing influences that also lurk in the air; and these may easily pass from piquant personality into mere errant grotesqueness. Whether from instinctive recognition of this or not, it has never seemed to me remarkable that people here should see apparitions of themselves, and die within the year; it did not strike me as strange when I was told of persons who had gone mad with no other cause than that of inherited insanity,--as if, having tried every species of sane activity for two or three hundred years, a family should take to madness from sheer disgust with the monotony of being healthy; nor could any case of warped idiosyncrasy, or any account of half-maniacal genius be instanced that seemed at all out of keeping. One day I passed a house where a crazy man, of harmless temper, habitually amused himself with sitting at a window near the ground, and entering into talk, from between the half-closed shutters, with any one on the sidewalk who would listen to him. Such a thing, to be sure, might easily be met with in twenty other places; but here it seemed natural and fitting. It was not a preposterous thought, that any number of other men in the neighborhood might quietly drop into a similar vein of decrepitude, and also attempt to palm off their disjointed fancies upon the orderly foot-passengers. I do not by this mean to insinuate any excessive leaning toward mental derangement on the part of the inhabitants; but it is as if the town, having lived long enough according to ordinary rules to be justified in sinking into superannuation, and yet not availing itself of the privilege, but on the contrary maintaining a life of great activity, had compensated itself in the persons of a few individuals. But when one has reached this mood, one remembers that it is all embodied in "The House of the Seven Gables." Though Hawthorne, in the Preface to that romance, takes precautions against injuring local sentiment, by the assurance that he has not meant "to describe local manners, nor in any way to meddle with the characteristics of a community for whom he cherishes a proper respect and a natural regard," the book is not the less a genuine outgrowth of Salem. Perhaps the aspect under which Salem presents itself to me is tinged with fancy, though Hawthorne in the same story has called it "a town noted for its frugal, discreet, well-ordered, and home-loving inhabitants, ... but in which, be it said, there are odder individuals, and now and then stranger occurrences, than one meets with almost anywhere else." But it is certain that poor Hepzibah Pyncheon, and the pathetic Clifford, and quaint Uncle Venner, are types which inevitably present themselves as belonging pre-eminently to this place. Not less subtle is the connection with it of the old wizard Maule, and the manner of his death at the witchcraft epoch; for it is hinted in the romance that old Colonel Pyncheon joined in denouncing the poor man, urged by designs on a piece of land owned by Maule; and Mr. Upham's careful research has shown that various private piques were undoubtedly mixed up in the witchcraft excitement, and swelled the list of accusations. Young Holgrave, the photographer, also, represents in a characteristic way the young life of the place, the germ that keeps it fresh, and even dreams at times of throwing off entirely the visible remains of the past. It may be mentioned, at this point, as a coincidence, even if not showing how Hawthorne insensibly drew together from a hundred nooks and crannies, and formulated and embodied his impressions of this his native place in "The House of the Seven Gables," that the name of Thomas Maule (the builder of the house, and son of the Matthew brought to his death by Colonel Pyncheon) appears in Felt's "Annals of Salem" as that of a sympathizer with the Quakers. He was also author of a book called "Truth Held Forth," published in 1695; and of a later one, the title of which, "The Mauler Mauled," shows that he had humor in him as well as pluck. He seems to have led a long career of independent opinion, not altogether in comfort, however, for in 1669 he was ordered to be whipped for saying that Mr. Higginson preached lies, and that his instruction was "the doctrine of devils"; and his book of "Truth Held Forth," which contained severe reflections on the government for its treatment of the Quakers, was seized and suppressed. It is not improbable that at some time Hawthorne may have read of this person. At all events, he serves as a plausible suggestion of the Maule who so early in the romance utters his prophecy of ill against Colonel Pyncheon, that he "shall have blood to drink." Another minor coincidence, and yet proper to be noted, is that of the laboring-man Dixey, who appears in the opening of the story with some comments upon Aunt Hepzibah's scheme of the cent-shop, and only comes in once afterward, at the close, to touch upon the subject in a different strain. At first, unseen, but overheard by Miss Pyncheon, he prophesies to a companion, "in a tone as if he were shaking his head," that the cent-shop will fail; and when Clifford and Hepzibah drive off in their carriage, at the end, he remarks sagaciously, "Good business,--good business." It certainly is odd that this subordinate in the romance should find a counterpart in one William Dixy, appointed ensign of the Salem military company which John Hawthorne commanded, in 1645. The name Pyncheon, also, on which the imaginary Colonel and Judge cast such a doubtful light, was a well-known name in old New England, and became the source of some annoyance to Hawthorne, after he had written the "Seven Gables"; but of this we shall hear more, further on. It is enough, now, to recall these coincidences. I do not suppose that he searched the names out and founded his use of them upon some suggestion already connected with them; indeed, he expressly declared, when remonstrated with on his use of the Pyncheons, that he did not know of any person of that title connected with Salem history of that time; but the circumstance of his using the other names is interesting as showing that many minute facts must have gone to make up the atmosphere of that half-historic and half-imaginative area whereon so many of his short tales and two of the romances were enacted. Maule and Dixey were very likely absorbed into his mind and forgotten; but suddenly when he chanced to need these characters for the "Seven Gables," they revived and took shape with something of the historic impress still upon them. That their very names should have been reproduced finds explanation in the statement once made by Hawthorne to a friend, that the most vexatious detail of romance-writing, to him, was the finding of suitable names for the _dramatis personae._ Balzac used to look long among the shop-signs of Paris for the precise name needed by a preconceived character, and the absolute invention of such titles is doubtless very rare; few fictionists are gifted with Dickens's fertility in the discovering of names bearing the most forcible and occult relations to the fleshless owners of them. And it is interesting to find that Hawthorne--somewhat as Scott drew from the local repertory of his countrymen's nomenclature--found many of his surnames among those of the settlers of New England. Hooper, Prynne, Felton, Dolliver, Hunnewell, and others belong specially to these and to their descendants. Roger Chillingworth, by the by, recalls the celebrated English divine and controversialist, William; and Bishop Miles Coverdale's name has been transferred, in "Blithedale," from the reign of Edward VI. to the experimental era of Brook Farm. It has been urged as a singular deficiency of Hawthorne's, that he could not glorify the moral strength and the sweeter qualities of the Puritans and of their lives. But there was nothing in the direction of his genius that called him to this. As well urge against him that he did not write philanthropic pamphlets, or give himself to the inditing of biographies of benevolent men, or compose fictions on the plan of Sir Charles Grandison, devoted to the illumination of praiseworthy characters. It is the same criticism which condemns Dickens for ridiculing certain preachers, and neglecting to provide the antidote in form of a model apostle, contrasted in the same book. This is the criticism which would reduce all fiction to the pattern of the religious tract. Certain men have certain things before them to do; they cannot devote a lifetime to proving in their published works that they appreciate the excellence of other things which they have no time and no supreme command to do. Nothing, then, is more unsafe, than to imply from their silence that they are deficient in particular phases of sympathy. The exposition of the merits of the New England founders has been steadily in progress from their own time to the present; and they have found a worthy monument in the profound and detailed history of Palfrey. All the more reason, why the only man yet born who could fill the darker spaces of our early history with palpitating light of that wide-eyed truth and eternal human consciousness which cast their deep blaze through Hawthorne's books, should not forego his immortal privilege! The eulogy is the least many-sided and perpetual of literary forms, and unless Hawthorne had made himself the eulogist of the Puritans, he would still have had to turn to our gaze the wrongs that, for good or ill, were worked into the tissue of their infant state. But as it is, he has been able to suggest a profounder view than is permitted either to the race of historians or that of philosophers. It does not profess to be a satisfactory statement of the whole, nor is there the least ground for assuming that it does so. Its very absorption in certain phases constitutes its value,--a value unspeakably greater than that of any other presentation of the Puritan life, because it rests upon the insight of a poet who has sounded the darkest depths of human nature. Had Hawthorne passed mutely through life, these gloomy-grounded pictures of Puritanism might have faded from the air like the spectres of things seen in dazzling light, which flit vividly before the eye for a time, then vanish forever. But in order to his distinctive coloring, no distortion had to be practised; and I do not see why Hawthorne should be reckoned to have had no sight for that which he did not record. With his unique and penetrating touch he marked certain salient and solemn features which had sunk deep into his sensitive imagination, and then filled in the surface with his own profound dramatic emanations. But in his subtle and strong moral insight, his insatiable passion for truth, he surely represented his Puritan ancestry in the most worthy and obviously sympathetic way. No New-Englander, moreover, with any depth of feeling in him, can be entirely wanting in reverence for the nobler traits of his stern forefathers, or in some sort of love for the whole body of which his own progenitors formed a group. Partly for his romantic purposes, and merely as an expedient of art, Hawthorne chose to treat this life at its most picturesque points; and to heighten the elements of terror which he found there was an aesthetic obligation with him. But there is even a subtler cause at work toward this end. The touches of assumed repugnance toward his Puritan forefathers, which appear here and there in his writings, are not only related to his ingrained shyness, which would be cautious of betraying his deeper and truer sentiment about them, but are the ensigns of a proper modesty in discoursing of his own race, his own family, as it were. He shields an actual veneration and a sort of personal attachment for those brave earlier generations under a harmless pretence that he does not think at all too tenderly of them. It is a device frequently and freely practised, and so characteristically American, and especially Hawthornesque, that it should not have been overlooked for even a moment. By these means, too, he takes the attitude of admitting the ancestral errors, and throws himself into an understanding with those who look at New England and the Puritans merely from the outside. Here is a profound resort of art, to prepare a better reception for what he is about to present, by not seeming to insist on an open recognition from his readers of the reigning dignity and the noble qualities in the Puritan colony, which he himself, nevertheless, is always quietly conscious of. And in this way he really secures a broader truth, while reserving the pride of locality and race intact; a broader truth, because to the world at large the most pronounced feature of the Puritans is their austerity. But if other reason were wanted to account for his dwelling on the shadows and severities of the Puritans so intently, it might be found in his family history and its aspects to his brooding mind. His own genealogy was the gate which most nearly conducted him into the still and haunted fields of time which those brave but stern religious exiles peopled. The head of the American branch of the Hathorne, or Hawthorne family, was Major William Hathorne, of Wigcastle, Wilton, Wiltshire, [Footnote: This name appears in the American Note-Books (August 22, 1837) as Wigcastle, Wigton. I cannot find any but the Scotch Wigton, and have substituted the Wilton of Wiltshire as being more probable. Memorials of the family exist in the adjoining county of Somerset. (_A. N. B._, October, 1836.)] in England, a younger son, who came to America with Winthrop and his company, by the Arbella, arriving in Salem Bay June 12, 1630. He probably went first to Dorchester, having grants of land there, and was made a freeman about 1634, and representative, or one of "the ten men," in 1635. Although a man of note, his name is not affixed to the address sent by Governor Winthrop and several others from Yarmouth, before sailing, to their brethren in the English Church; but this is easily accounted for by the fact that Hathorne was a determined Separatist, while the major part of his fellow-pilgrims still clung to Episcopacy. In 1636, Salem tendered him grants of land if he would remove hither, considering that "it was a public benefit that he should become an inhabitant of that town." He removed accordingly, and, in 1638, he had additional lands granted to him "in consideration of his many employments for towne and countrie." Some of these lands were situated on a pleasant rising ground by the South River, then held to be the most desirable part of the town; and a street running through that portion bears the name of Hathorne to this day. In 1645, he petitioned the General Court that he might be allowed, with others, to form a "company of adventurers" for trading among the French; and in the same year he was appointed captain of a military company, the first regular troop organized in Salem to "advance the military art." From 1636 to 1643 he had been a representative of the people, from Dorchester and Salem; and from 1662 to 1679 he filled the higher office of an assistant. It was in 1667 that he was empowered to receive for the town a tax of twenty pounds of powder per ton for every foreign vessel over twenty tons trading to Salem and Marblehead, thus forestalling his famous descendant in sitting at the receipt of customs. Besides these various activities, he officiated frequently as an attorney at law; and in the Indian campaign of 1676, in Maine, he left no doubt of his efficiency as a military commander. He led a portion of the army of twelve hundred men which the colony had raised, and in September of this year he surprised four hundred Indians at Cocheco. Two hundred of these "were found to have been perfidious," and were sent to Boston, to be sold as slaves, after seven or eight had been put to death. A couple of weeks later, Captain Hathorne sent a despatch: "We catched an Indian Sagamore of Pegwackick and the gun of another; we found him in many lies, and so ordered him to be put to death, and the Cocheco Indians to be his executioners." There was some reason for this severity, for in crossing a river the English had been ambuscaded by the savages. The captain adds: "We have no bread these three days." This early ancestor was always prominent. He had been one of a committee in 1661, who reported concerning the "patent, laws, and privileges and duties to his Majesty" of the colonists, opposing all appeals to the crown as inconsistent with their charter, and maintained the right of their government to defend itself against all attempts at overthrow. Two years later he was charged by Charles's commissioners with seditious words, and apologized for certain "unadvised" expressions; but the committee of 1661 reported at a critical time, and it needed a good deal of stout-heartedness to make the declarations which it did; and on the whole William Hathorne may stand as a sturdy member of the community. He is perhaps the only man of the time who has left a special reputation for eloquence. Eliot speaks of him as "the most eloquent man of the Assembly, a friend of Winthrop, but often opposed to Endicott, who glided with the popular stream; as reputable for his piety as for his political integrity." And Johnson, in his "Wonder-Working Providence," naming the chief props of the state, says: "Yet through the Lord's mercy we still retain among our Democracy the godly Captaine William Hathorn, whom the Lord hath indued with a quick apprehension, strong memory, and Rhetorick, volubility of speech, which hath caused the people to make use of him often in Publick Service, especially when they have had to do with any foreign government." It is instructive to find what ground he took during the Quaker persecutions of 1657 to 1662. Endicott was a forward figure in that long-sustained horror; and if Hathorne naturally gravitated to the other extreme from Endicott, he would be likely, one supposes, to have sympathized with the persecuted. The state was divided in sentiment during those years; but James Cudworth wrote that "he that will not whip and lash, persecute, and punish men that differ in matters of religion, must not sit on the bench nor sustain any office in the commonwealth." Cudworth himself was deposed; and it happens that Hathorne's terms of service, as recorded, seem at first to leave a gap barely wide enough to include this troublesome period. But, in fact, he resumed power as a magistrate just in time to add at least one to the copious list of bloody and distinguishing atrocities that so disfigure New England history. Sewel relates [Footnote: History of the Quakers, I. 411, 412.] that "Anne Coleman and four of her friends were whipped through Salem, Boston, and Dedham by order of Wm. Hawthorn, who before he was a magistrate had opposed compulsion for conscience; and when under the government of Cromwell it was proposed to make a law that none shall preach without license, he publicly said at Salem that if ever such a law took place in New England he should look upon it as one of the most abominable actions that were ever committed there, and that it would be as eminent a Token of God's having forsaken New England, as any could be." His famous descendant, alluding to this passage, [Footnote: See "The Custom House," introductory to "The Scarlet Letter."] says that the account of this incident "will last longer, it is to be feared, than any record of his better deeds, though these were many." Yet it should not be overlooked that Hathorne is the only one among the New England persecutors whom Sewel presents to us with any qualifying remark as to a previous more humane temper. Sole, too, in escaping the doom of sudden death which the historian solemnly records in the cases of the rest. So that even if we had not the eminent example of Marcus Aurelius and Sir Thomas More, we might still infer from this that it is no less possible for the man of enlightened ability and culture, than for the ignorant bigot, to find himself, almost of necessity, a chief instrument of religious coercion. Doubtless this energetic Puritan denouncer of persecution never conceived of a fanaticism like that of the Friends, which should so systematically outrage all his deepest sense of decency, order, and piety, and--not content with banishment--should lead its subjects to return and force their deaths, as it were, on the commonwealth; as if a neighbor, under some mistaken zeal, were to repeatedly mix poison with our porridge, until his arrest and death should seem our only defence against murder. Perhaps he was even on the dissenting side, for a time, though there is no record of his saying, like one Edward Wharton of Salem, that the blood of the Quakers was too heavy upon him, and he could not bear it. Wharton received twenty lashes for his sensitiveness, and was fined twenty pounds, and subjected to more torture afterward. But, whatever Hathorne's first feeling, after five years of disturbance, exasperation was added to the responsibility of taking office, and he persecuted. It is easy to see his various justifications, now; yet one cannot wonder that his descendant was oppressed by the act. That he was so cannot be regretted, if only because of the authentic fact that his reading of Sewel inspired one of his most exquisite tales, "The Gentle Boy." William Hathorne, however,--whatever his taste in persecution,--makes his will peacefully and piously in 1679-80: "_Imprimis_, I give my soul into the hands of Jesus Christ, in whom I hope to bind forevermore my body to the earth in hope of a glorious resurrection with him, whom this vile body shall be made like unto his glorious body; and for the estate God hath given me in this world.... I do dispose of as followeth." Then he bequeaths various sums of money to divers persons, followed by "all my housing and land, orchard and appurtenances lying in Salem," to his son John. Among other items, there is one devising his "farm at Groton" to "Gervice Holwyse my gr. ch. [grandchild] if he can come over and enjoy it." Here, by the way, is another bit of coincidence for the curious. _Gervase Helwyse_ is the name of the young man who appears in "Lady Eleanor's Mantle," [Footnote: Twice-Told Tales, Vol. II.] bereft of reason by his love for the proud and fatal heroine of that tale. [Footnote: In the English Note-Books, May 20, 1854, will be found some facts connected with this name, unearthed by Mr. Hawthorne himself. He there tells of the marriage of one _Gervase Elwes_, son of Sir Gervase Elwes, Baronet of Stoke, in Suffolk. This Gervase died before his father; his son died without issue; and thus John Maggott Twining, grandson of the second Gervase through a daughter, came into the baronetcy. This Twining assumed the name of Elwes. "He was the famous miser, and must have had Hawthorne blood in him," says Mr. Hawthorne, "through his grandfather Gervase, whose mother was a Hawthorne." He then refers to William's devise, and says: "My ancestor calls him his _nephew_." The will says, "gr. ch."; and I suppose the mistake occurred through Mr. Hawthorne's not having that document at hand, for reference.] Captain Hathorne must have been well advanced in years when he led his troops against the Indians at Cocheco in 1676; for it was only five years later that he disappeared from history and from this life forever. His son John inherited, together with housing and land, a good deal of the first Hathorne's various energy and eminence. He was a freeman in 1677, representative from 1683 to 1686, and assistant or counsellor, from 1684 to 1712, except the years of Andros's government. After the deposition of Andros, he was called to join Bradstreet's Council of Safety pending the accession of William of Orange; a magistrate for some years; quartermaster of the Essex companies at first, and afterward, in 1696, the commander of Church's troops, whom he led against St. John. He attacked the enemy's fort there, but, finding his force too weak, drew off, and embarked for Boston. As his father's captaincy had somehow developed into the dignity of major, so John found himself a colonel in 1711. But in 1717 he, too, died. And now there came a change in the fortunes of the Hathorne line. Colonel John, during his magistracy, had presided at the witchcraft trials, and had shown himself severe, bigoted, and unrelenting in his spirit toward the accused persons. Something of this may be seen in Upham's volumes. One woman was brought before him, whose husband has left a pathetic record of her suffering. "She was forced to stand with her arms stretched out. I requested that I might hold one of her hands, but it was declined me; then she desired me to wipe the tears from her eyes, and the sweat from her face, which I did; then she desired that she might lean herself on me, saying she should faint. Justice Hathorne replied she had strength enough to torment these persons, and she should have strength enough to stand. I repeating something against their cruel proceedings, they commanded me to be silent, or else I should be turned out of the room." [Footnote: Chandler's American Criminal Trials, I. p. 85.] It is not strange that this husband should have exclaimed, that God would take revenge upon his wife's persecutors; and perhaps he was the very man whose curse was said to have fallen upon the justice's posterity. From this time, at all events, the family lost its commanding position in Salem affairs. Justice Hathorne's son Joseph subsided into the quiet of farm-life. The only notable association with his name is, that he married Sarah Bowditch, a sister of the grandfather of the distinguished mathematician, Nathaniel Bowditch. But it is in the beginning of the eighteenth century that the Hathornes begin to appear as mariners. In the very year of the justice's death, one Captain Ebenezer Hathorne earned the gloomy celebrity attendant on bringing small-pox to Salem, in his brig just arrived from the Barbadoes. Possibly, Justice John may have died from this very infection; and if so, the curse would seem to have worked with a peculiarly malign appropriateness, by making a member of his own family the unwilling instrument of his end. By and by a Captain Benjamin Hathorne is cast away and drowned on the coast, with four other men. Perhaps it was his son, another Benjamin, who, in 1782, being one of the crew of an American privateer, "The Chase," captured by the British, escaped from a prison-ship in the harbor of Charleston, S. C., with six comrades, one of whom was drowned. Thus, gradually, originated the traditional career of the men of this family,--"a gray-headed shipmaster in each generation," as the often-quoted passage puts it, "retiring from the quarter-deck to the homestead, while a boy of fourteen took the hereditary place before the mast." But the most eminent among these hardy skippers is Daniel, the son of farmer Joseph, and grandfather of the author. Daniel Hathorne lived to be eighty-five, and expired only on April 18, 1796, eight years and a little more before his famous grandson came into the world. Something of the old prowess revived in him, and being a stout seafarer, and by inheritance a lover of independence, he became commander of a privateer during our Revolution; indeed, it is said he commanded several. His guns have made no great noise in history, but their reverberation has left in the air a general tradition of his bravery. The only actual account of his achievements which I have met with is the following ballad, written by the surgeon of his ship, who was perhaps better able than any one else to gauge the valor of his countryman and commander, by the amount of bloodshed on his piratical craft:-- BRIG "FAIR AMERICAN": DANIEL HATHORNE, COMMANDER. The twenty-second of August, before the close of day, All hands on board our privateer, we got her under weigh. We kept the Eastern shore on board for forty leagues or more, When our departure took for sea, from the Isle of Monhegan shore. Bold Hathorne was commander, a man of real worth, Old England's cruel tyranny induced him to go forth; She with relentless fury was plundering all the coast, And thought because her strength was great, our glorious cause was lost. Now farewell to America,--farewell our friends and wives, We trust in Heaven's peculiar care, for to protect their lives, To prosper our intended cruise upon the raging main, And to preserve our dearest friends till we return again. The wind it being leading and bore us on our way, As far unto the Eastward as the Gulf of Florida, When we fell in with a British ship hound homeward from the main; We gave her two bow-chasers, and she returned the same. We hauled up our courses and prepared for fight; The contest held four glasses,[*] until the dusk of night; Then having sprung our mainmast, and had so large a sea, We dropped astern, and left our chase till the returning day. [* The time consumed in the emptying of a half-hour glass four times,--two hours.] Next day we fished our mainmast, the ship still being nigh, All hands was for engaging, our chance once more to try; But wind and sea being boisterous, our cannon would not bear; We thought it quite imprudent, and so we left her there. We cruised to the Eastward, near the coast of Portuigale: In longitude of twenty-seven we saw a lofty sail. We gave her chase, and soon perceived she was a British scow Standing for fair America with troops for General Howe. Our captain did inspect her with glasses, and he said:-- "My boys, she means to fight us, but be you not afraid; All hands repair to quarters, see everything is clear; We'll give him a broadside, my boys, as soon as she comes near." She was prepared with nettings, and her men were well secured, And bore directly for us, and put us close on board, When the cannons roared like thunder, and the muskets fired amain; But soon we were alongside, and grappled to her chain. And now the scene is altered,--the cannon ceased to roar; We fought with swords and boarding-pikes one glass and something more; The British pride and glory no longer dared to stay, But cut the Yankee grappling, and quickly bore away. Our case was not so desperate, as plainly might appear, Yet sudden death did enter on board our privateer; Mahany, Clew, and Clemmans, the valiant and the brave, Fell glorious in the contest, and met a watery grave! Ten other men were wounded, among our warlike crew, With them our noble captain, to whom all praise is due. To him and all our officers let's give a hearty cheer! Success to fair America and our good privateer! This ballad is as long as the cruise, and the rhythm of it seems to show that the writer had not quite got his sea-legs on, in boarding the poetic craft. Especially is he to be commiserated on that unhappy necessity to which the length of the verse compels him, of keeping "the Eastern shore on board for forty leagues," in the first stanza; but it was due to its historic and associative value to give it entire. Perhaps, after all, it was a shrewd insight that caused the Hathornes to take to the sea. Salem's greatest glory was destined for a term to lie in that direction. Many of these old New England seaports have magnificent recollections of a commercial grandeur hardly to be guessed from their aspect to-day. Castine, Portsmouth, Wiscasset, Newburyport, and the rest,--they controlled the carrying of vast regions, and fortune's wheel whirled amid their wharves and warehouses with a merry and reassuring sound. Each town had its special trade, and kept the monopoly. Portsmouth and Newburyport ruled the trade with Martinique, Guadaloupe, and Porto Rico, sending out fish and bringing back sugar; Gloucester bargained with the West Indies for rum, and brought coffee and dye-stuffs from Surinam; Marblehead had the Bilboa business; and Salem, most opulent of all, usurped the Sumatra, African, East Indian, Brazilian, and Cayenne commerce. By these new avenues over the ocean many men brought home wealth that literally made princes of them, and has left permanent traces in the solid and stately homes they built, still crowded with precious heirlooms, as well as in the refinement nurtured therein, and the thrifty yet generous character they gave to the town. Among these successful merchants was Simon Forrester, who married Nathaniel Hawthorne's great-aunt Rachel, and died in 1817, leaving an immense property. Him Hawthorne speaks of in "The Custom House"; alluding to "old King Derby, old Billy Gray, old Simon Forrester, and many another magnate of his day; whose powdered head, however, was scarcely in the tomb, before his mountain-pile of wealth began to dwindle." But Nathaniel's family neither helped to undermine the heap, nor accumulated a rival one. However good the forecast that his immediate ancestors had made, as to the quickest and broadest road to wealth, they travelled long in the wake of success without ever winning it, themselves. The malediction that fell on Justice Hathorne's head might with some reason have been thought to still hang over his race, as Hawthorne suggests that its "dreary and unprosperous condition ... for many a long year back" would show. Indeed, the tradition of such a curse was kept alive in his family, and perhaps it had its share in developing that sadness and reticence which seem to have belonged to his father. It is plain from these circumstances how the idea of "The House of the Seven Gables" evolved itself from the history of his own family, with important differences. The person who is cursed, in the romance, uses a special spite toward a single victim, in order to get hold of a property which he bequeaths to his own heirs. Thus a double and treble wrong is done, and the notion of a curse working upon successive generations is subordinate to the conception of the injury which a man entails to his own descendants by forcing on them a stately house founded upon a sin. The parallel of the Hathorne decline in fortune is carried out; but it must be observed that the peculiar separateness and shyness, which doubtless came to be in some degree a trait of all the Hathornes, is transferred in the book from the family of the accursed to that of Maule, the utterer of the evil prophecy. "As for Matthew Maule's posterity," says the romancer, "to all appearance they were a quiet, honest, well-meaning race of people"; but "they were generally poverty-stricken; always plebeian and obscure; working with unsuccessful diligence at handicrafts; laboring on the wharves, or following the sea as sailors before the mast"; and "so long as any of the race were to be found, they had been marked out from other men--not strikingly, nor as with a sharp line, but with an effect that was felt, rather than spoken of--by an hereditary character of reserve. Their companions, or those who endeavored to become such, grew conscious of a circle round about the Maules, within the sanctity or the spell of which, in spite of an exterior of sufficient frankness and good-fellowship, it was impossible for any man to step." The points of resemblance here may be easily distinguished. In the "American Note-Books" occurs an anecdote which recalls the climax of the romance. It concerns Philip English, who had been tried for witchcraft by John Hathorne, and became his bitter enemy. On his death-bed, he consented to forgive him; "But if I get well," said he, "I'll be damned if I forgive him!" One of English's daughters (he had no sons) afterward married a son of John Hathorne. How masterly is the touch of the artist's crayon in this imaginative creation, based upon the mental and moral anatomy of actual beings! It is a delicate study of the true creative art to follow out this romantic shape, and contrast it with the real creatures and incidents to which it has a sort of likeness. With perfect choice, the artist selects, probably not consciously, but through association, whatever he likes from the real, and deviates from it precisely where he feels this to be fitting; adds a trait here, and transfers another there; and thus completes something having a unity and inspiration of its own, neither a simple reproduction nor an unmixed invention, the most subtile and harmonious product of the creative power. It is in this way that "The House of the Seven Gables" comes to be not merely fancifully a romance typical of Salem, but in the most essentially true way representative of it. Surely no one could have better right to thus embody the characteristics of the town than Hawthorne, whose early ancestors had helped to magnify it and defend it, and whose nearer progenitors had in their fallen fortunes almost foreshadowed the mercantile decline of the long-lived capital. Surely no one can be less open to criticism for illustrating various phases of his townsmen's character and exposing in this book, as elsewhere, though always mildly, the gloomier traits of the founders, than this deep-eyed and gentle man, whose forefathers notably possessed "all the Puritanic traits, both good and evil," and who uses what is as much to the disadvantage of his own blood as to that of others, with such absolute, admirable impartiality. [Illustration] III. BOYHOOD.--COLLEGE DAYS.--FANSHAWE. 1804-1828. With such antecedents behind him, and such associations awaiting him, Nathaniel Hawthorne was born, July 4, 1804. His father, the captain of a trading-vessel, was one of three sons of the privateersman Daniel, and was born in 1776; so that both father and son, it happens, are associated by time of birth with the year and the day that American independence has made honorable and immemorial. The elder Nathaniel wore his surname in one of several fashions that his predecessors had provided,--for they had some eight different ways of writing, though presumably but one of pronouncing it,--and called himself Hathorne. It was not long after the birth of his only boy, second of his three children, however, that he left the name to this male successor, with whom it underwent a restoration to the more picturesque and flowered form of Hawthorne. Nathaniel, the son of Daniel, died in Surinam, in the spring of 1808, of a fever, it is thought, and left his widow stricken with a lifelong grief, his family suddenly overwhelmed with sorrow and solitude. I think I cannot convey the sadness of this more fully than by simply saying it. Yet sombre as the event is, it seems a fit overture to the opening life of this spirit so nobly sad whom we are about to study. The tradition seems to have become established that Captain Nathaniel was inclined to melancholy, and very reticent; also, that though he was an admirable shipmaster, he had a vigorous appetite for reading, and carried many books with him on his long voyages. Those who know the inheritances that come with the Puritan blood will easily understand the sort of dark, underlying deposit of unutterable sadness that often reminds such persons of their austere ancestry; but, in addition to this, the Hathornes had now firmly imbibed the belief that their family was under a retributive ban for its share in the awful severities of the Quaker and the witchcraft periods. It was not to them the symbolic and picturesque thing that it is to us, but a real overhanging, intermittent oppressiveness, that must often have struck across their actions in a chilling and disastrous way. Their ingrained reticence was in itself, when contrasted with Major Hathorne's fame in oratory, a sort of corroboration of the idea that fate was making reprisals upon them. The captain's children felt this; and the son, when grown to manhood, was said to greatly resemble his father in appearance, as well. Of the Endicotts, who also figured largely in the maritime history of Salem, it is told that in the West Indies the name grew so familiar as being that of the captain of a vessel, that it became generic; and when a new ship arrived, the natives would ask, "Who is the Endicott?" Very likely the Hathornes had as fixed a fame in the ports where they traded. At all events, some forty years after the captain's death at Surinam, a sailor one day stopped Mr. Surveyor Hawthorne on the steps of the Salem Custom House, and asked him if he had not once a relative--an uncle or a father--who died in Surinam at the date given above. He had recognized him by his likeness to the father, of whom Nathaniel probably had no memory at all. But he inherited much from his mother, too. She has been described by a gentleman who saw her in Maine, as very reserved, "a very pious woman, and a very minute observer of religious festivals," of "feasts, fasts, new moons, and Sabbaths," and perhaps a little inclined to superstition. Such an influence as hers would inevitably foster in the son that strain of reverence, and that especial purity and holiness of thought, which pervade all that he has written. Those who knew her have said also, that the luminous, gray, magnificent eyes that so impressed people in Hawthorne were like hers. She had been Miss Elizabeth Clarke Manning, the daughter of Richard Manning, whose ancestors came to New England about 1680, and sister of Richard and of Robert Manning, a well-known pomologist of the same place. After the death of her husband, this brother Robert came to her assistance, Captain Hathorne having left but little property: he was only thirty-two when he died. Nathaniel had been born in a solid, old-fashioned little house on Union Street, which very appropriately faced the old shipyard of the town in 1760; and it appears that in the year before his birth, the Custom House of that time had been removed to a spot "opposite the long brick building owned by W. S. Gray, and Benjamin H. Hathorne,"--as if the future Surveyor's association with the revenue were already drawing nearer to him. The widow now moved with her little family to the house of her father, in Herbert Street, the next one eastward from Union. The land belonging to this ran through to Union Street, adjoining the house they had left; and from his top-floor study here, in later years, Hawthorne could look down on the less lofty roof under which he was born. The Herbert Street house, however, was spoken of as being on Union Street, and it is that one which is meant in a passage of the "American Note-Books" (October 25, 1838), which says, "In this dismal chamber FAME was won," as likewise in the longer revery in the same volume, dated October 4, 1840. "Certainly," the sister of Hawthorne writes to me of him, "no man ever needed less a formal biography." But the earlier portion of his life, of which so little record has been made public, must needs bear so interesting a relation to his later career, that I shall examine it with as much care as I may. Very few details of his early boyhood have been preserved; but these go to show that his individuality soon appeared. "He was a pleasant child, quite handsome, with golden curls," is almost the first news we have of him; but his mastering sense of beauty soon made itself known. While quite a little fellow, he is reported to have said of a woman who was trying to be kind to him, "Take her away! She is ugly and fat, and has a loud voice!" When still a very young school-boy, he was fond of taking long walks entirely by himself; was seldom or never known to have a companion; and in especial, haunted Legg's Hill, a place some miles from his home. The impression of his mother's loss and loneliness must have taken deep and irremovable hold upon his heart; the wide, bleak, uncomprehended fact that his father would never return, that he should never see him, seems to have sunk into his childish reveries like a cabalistic spell, turning thought and feeling and imagination toward mournful and mysterious things. Before he had passed from his mother's care to that of the schoolmaster, it is known that he would break out from the midst of childish broodings, and exclaim, "There, mother! I is going away to sea, some time"; then, with an ominous shaking of the head, "and I'll never come back again!" The same refrain lurked in his mind when, a little older, he would tell his sisters fantastic tales, and give them imaginary accounts of long journeys, which he should take in future, in the course of which he flew at will through the air; on these occasions he always ended with the same hopeless prophecy of his failing to return. No doubt, also, there was a little spice of boyish mischief in this; and something of the fictionist, for it enabled him to make a strong impression on his audience. He brought out the _dénouement_ in such a way as to seem--so one of those who heard him has written--to enjoin upon them "the advice to value him the more while he stayed with" them. This choice of the lugubrious, however, seems to have been native to him; for almost before he could speak distinctly he is reported to have caught up certain lines of "Richard III." which he had heard read; and his favorite among them, always declaimed on the most unexpected occasions and in his loudest tone, was,-- "Stand back, my Lord, and let the coffin pass!" Though he has nowhere made allusion to the distant and sudden death of his father, Hawthorne has mentioned an uncle lost at sea, in the "English Notes," [Footnote: June 30, 1854]--a startling passage. "If it is not known how and when a man dies," he says "it makes a ghost of him for many years thereafter, perhaps for centuries. King Arthur is an example; also the Emperor Frederic [Barbarossa] and other famous men who were thought to be alive ages after their disappearance. So with private individuals. I had an uncle John, who went a voyage to sea about the beginning of the War of 1812, and has never returned to this hour. But as long as his mother lived, as many as twenty years, she never gave up the hope of his return, and was constantly hearing stories of persons whose descriptions answered to his. Some people actually affirmed that they had seen him in various parts of the world. Thus, so far as her belief was concerned, he still walked the earth. And even to this day I never see his name, which is no very uncommon one, without thinking that this may be the lost uncle." At the time of that loss Hawthorne was but eight years old; he wrote this memorandum at fifty; and all that time the early impression had remained intact, and the old semi-hallucination about the uncle's being still alive hung about his mind through forty years. When we change the case, and replace the uncle in whom he had no very distinct interest with the father whose decease had so overclouded his mother's life, and thwarted the deep yearnings of his own young heart, we may begin to guess the depth and persistence of the emotions which must have been awakened in him by this awful silence and absence of death, so early thrown across the track of his childish life. I conceive those lonely school-boy walks, overblown by shadow-freighting murmurs of the pine and accompanied by the far-off, muffled roll of the sea, to have been full of questionings too deep for words, too sacred for other companionship than that of uninquisitive Nature;--questionings not even shaped and articulated to his own inner sense. Yet, whatever half-created, formless world of profound and tender speculations and sad reflections the boy was moulding within himself, this did not master him. The seed, as time went on, came to miraculous issue; but as yet the boy remained, healthily and for the most part happily, a boy still. A lady who, as a child, lived in a house which looked upon the garden of the widow's new abiding-place, used to see him at play there with his sisters, a graceful but sturdy little figure; and a little incident of his school-days, at the same time that it shows how soon he began to take a philosophical view of things, gives a hint of his physical powers. He was put to study under Dr. J. E. Worcester, the famous lexicographer, (who, on graduating at Yale, in 1811, had come to Salem and taken a school there for a few years;) and it is told of him at this time, on the best authority, that he frequently came home with accounts of having fought with a comrade named John Knights. "But why do you fight with him so often?" asked one of his sisters. "I can't help it," he said. "John Knights is a boy of very quarrelsome disposition." Something in the judicial, reproving tone of the reply seems to hint that Hawthorne had taken the measure of his rival, physically as well as mentally, and had found himself more than a match for the poor fellow. All that is known of his bodily strength in maturer boyhood and at college weighs on this side; and Horatio Bridge, [Footnote: See Prefatory Note to The Snow Image.] his classmate and most intimate friend at Bowdoin College, tells me that, though remarkably calm-tempered, any suspicion of disrespect roused him into readiness to give the sort of punishment that his athletic frame warranted. But one of the most powerful influences acting on this healthy, unsuspected, un-self-suspecting genius must have been that of books. The house in Herbert Street was well provided with them, and he was allowed to make free choice. His selection was seldom, if ever, questioned; and this was well, for he thus drew to himself the mysterious aliment on which his genius throve. Shakespere, Milton, Pope, and Thomson are mentioned among the first authors with whom he made acquaintance on first beginning to read; and "The Castle of Indolence" seems to have been one of his favorite poems while a boy. He is also known to have read, before fourteen, more or less of Rousseau's works, and to have gone through, with great diligence, the whole of "The Newgate Calendar," which latter selection excited a good deal of comment among his family and relatives, but no decisive opposition. A remark of his has come down from that time, that he cared "very little for the history of the world before the fourteenth century"; and he had a judicious shyness of what was considered useful reading. Of the four poets there is of course but little trace in his works; Rousseau, with his love of nature and impressive abundance of emotion, seems to stand more directly related to the future author's development, and "The Newgate Calendar" must have supplied him with the most weighty suggestions for those deep ponderings on sin and crime which almost from the first tinged the pellucid current of his imagination. There is another book, however, early and familiarly known to him, which indisputably affected the bent of his genius in an important degree. This is Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress." Being a healthy boy, with strong out-of-door instincts planted in him by inheritance from his seafaring sire, it might have been that he would not have been brought so early to an intimacy with books, but for an accident similar to that which played a part in the boyhoods of Scott and Dickens. When he was nine years old he was struck on the foot by a ball, and made seriously lame. The earliest fragment of his writing now extant is a letter to his uncle Robert Manning, at that time in Raymond, Maine, written from Salem, December 9, 1813. It announces that his foot is no better, and that a new doctor is to be sent for. "May be," the boy writes, "he will do me some good, for Dr. B---- has not, and I don't know as Dr. K---- will." He adds that it is now four weeks since he has been to school, "and I don't know but it will be four weeks longer." This weighing of possibilities, and this sense of the uncertain future, already quaintly show the disposition of the man he is to grow into; though the writing is as characterless as extreme youth, exaggerated distinctness, and copy-books could make it. The little invalid has not yet quite succumbed, however, for the same letter details that he has hopped out into the street once since his lameness began, and been "out in the office and had four cakes." But the trouble was destined to last much longer than even the young seer had projected his gaze. There was some threat of deformity, and it was not until he was nearly twelve that he became quite well. Meantime, his kind schoolmaster, Dr. Worcester (at whose sessions it may have been that Hawthorne read Enfield's "Speaker," the name of which had "a classical sound in his ears," long, long afterward, when he saw the author's tombstone in Liverpool), came to hear him his lessons at home. The good pedagogue does not figure after this in Hawthorne's boyish history; but a copy of Worcester's Dictionary still exists and is in present use, which bears in a tremulous writing on the fly-leaf the legend: "Nathaniel Hawthorne, Esq., with the respects of J. E. Worcester." For a long time, in the worst of his lameness, the gentle boy was forced to lie prostrate, and choosing the floor for his couch, he would read there all day long. He was extremely fond of cats,--a taste which he kept through life; and during this illness, forced to odd resorts for amusement, he knitted a pair of stockings for the cat who reigned in the household at the time. When tired of reading, he diverted himself with constructing houses of books for the same feline pet, building walls for her to leap, and perhaps erecting triumphal arches for her to pass under. In this period he must have taken a considerable range in literature, for his age; and one would almost say that Nature, seeing so rare a spirit in a sound body that kept him sporting and away from reading, had devised a seemingly harsh plan of luring him into his proper element. It was more likely after this episode than before, that Bunyan took that hold upon him so fraught with consequences. He went every Sunday to his grandmother Hathorne's, and every Sunday he would lay hands upon the book; then, going to a particular three-cornered chair in a particular corner of the room, "he would read it by the hour, without once speaking." I have already suggested the relations of the three minds, Milton, Bunyan, and Hawthorne. The more obvious effect of this reading is the allegorical turn which it gave the boy's thoughts, manifest in many of his shorter productions while a young man; the most curious and complete issue being that of "The Celestial Railroad," in the "Mosses," where Christian's pilgrimage is so deftly parodied in a railroad route to the heavenly goal. Full of keen satire, it does not, as it might at first seem, tend to diminish Bunyan's dignity, but inspires one with a novel sense of it, as one is made to gradually pierce the shams of certain modern cant. But a more profound consequence was the direction of Hawthorne's expanding thought toward sin and its various and occult manifestations. Imagine the impression upon a mind so fine, so exquisitely responsive, and so well prepared for grave revery as Hawthorne's, which a passage like the following would make. In his discourse with Talkative, Faithful says: "A man may cry out against sin, of policy; but he cannot abhor it but by virtue of a godly antipathy. I have heard many cry out against sin in the pulpit, who can abide it well enough in the heart, house, and conversation." Here is almost the motive and the moral of "The Scarlet Letter." But Hawthorne refined upon it unspeakably, and probed many fathoms deeper, when he perceived that there might be motives far more complex than that of policy, a condition much more subtly counterfeiting the mien of goodness and spirituality. Talkative replies, "You lie at a catch, I perceive,"--meaning that he is sophistical. "No, not I," says Faithful; "I am only for setting things right." Did not this desire of setting things right stir ever afterward in Hawthorne's consciousness? It is not a little singular to trace in Bunyan two or three much more direct links with some of Hawthorne's work. When Christiana at the Palace Beautiful is shown one of the apples that Eve ate of, and Jacob's ladder with some angels ascending upon it, it incites one to turn to that marvellously complete "Virtuoso's Collection," [Footnote: Mosses from an Old Manse, Vol. II.] where Hawthorne has preserved Shelley's skylark and the steed Rosinante, with Hebe's cup and many another impalpable marvel, in the warden-ship of the Wandering Jew. So, too, when we read Great-Heart's analysis of Mr. Fearing, this expression, "He had, I think, a Slough of Despond in his mind, a slough that he carried everywhere with him," we can detect the root of symbolical conceptions like that of "The Bosom Serpent." [Footnote: Mosses from an Old Manse, Vol. II.] I cannot refrain from copying here some passages from this same portion which recall in an exceptional way some of the traits of Hawthorne, enough, at least, to have given them a partially prophetic power over his character. Mr. Great-Heart says of Mr. Fearing: "He desired much to be alone; yet he always loved good talk, and often would get behind the screen to hear it." (So Hawthorne screened himself behind his genial reserve.) "He also loved much to see ancient things, and to be pondering them in his mind." What follows is not so strictly analogous throughout. Mr. Honest asks Great-Heart why so good a man as Fearing "should be all his days so much in the dark." And he answers, "There are two sorts of reasons for it. One is, the wise God will have it so: some must pipe, and some must weep.... And for my part, I care not at all for that profession which begins not in heaviness of mind. The first string that the musician usually touches is the bass, when he intends to put all in tune. God also plays upon this string first, when he sets the soul in tune for himself. Only there was the imperfection of Mr. Fearing; he could play upon no other music but this, till towards his latter end." Let the reader by no means imagine a moral comparison between Hawthorne and Bunyan's Mr. Fearing. The latter, as his creator says, "was a good man, though much down in spirit"; and Hawthorne, eminent in uprightness, was also overcast by a behest to look for the most part at the darker phases of human thinking and feeling; yet there could not have been the slightest real similarity between him and the excellent but weak-kneed Mr. Fearing, whose life is made heavy by the doubt of his inheritance in the next world. Still, though the causes differ, it could be said of Hawthorne, as of Master Fearing, "Difficulties, lions, or Vanity Fair, he feared not at all; it was only sin, death, and hell that were to him a terror." I mean merely that Hawthorne may have found in this character-sketch--Bunyan's most elaborate one, for the typical subject of which he shows an evident fondness and leniency--something peculiarly fascinating, which may not have been without its shaping influence for him. But the intimate, affectionate, and lasting relation between Bunyan's allegory and our romancer is something to be perfectly assured of. The affinity at once suggests itself, and there are allusions in the "Note-Books" and the works of Hawthorne which recall and sustain it. So late as 1854, he notes that "an American would never understand the passage in Bunyan about Christian and Hopeful going astray along a by-path into the grounds of Giant Despair, from there being no stiles and by-paths in our country." Rarely, too, as Hawthorne quotes from or alludes to other authors, there is a reference to Bunyan in "The Blithedale Romance," and several are found in "The Scarlet Letter": it is in that romance that the most powerful suggestion of kinship between the two imaginations occurs. After Mr. Dimmesdale's interview with Hester, in the wood, he suffers the most freakish temptations to various blasphemy on returning to the town: he meets a deacon, and desires to utter evil suggestions concerning the communion-supper; then a pious and exemplary old dame, fortunately deaf, into whose ear a mad impulse urges him to whisper what then seemed to him an "unanswerable argument against the immortality of the soul," and after muttering some incoherent words, he sees "an expression of divine gratitude and ecstasy that seemed like the _shine of the celestial city_ on her face." Then comes the most frightful temptation of all, as he sees approaching him a maiden newly won into his flock. "She was fair and pure as a lily that had bloomed in Paradise. The minister knew well that he himself was enshrined within the stainless sanctity of her heart, which hung its snowy curtains about his image, imparting to religion the warmth of love, and to love a religious purity. Satan, that afternoon, had surely led the poor young girl away from her mother's side, and thrown her into the pathway of this sorely tempted, or--shall we not rather say?--this lost and desperate man. As she drew nigh, the arch-fiend whispered to him to condense into small compass and drop into her tender bosom a germ of evil that would be sure to blossom darkly soon, and bear black fruit betimes." Now, in the Valley of the Shadow of Death, "poor Christian was so confounded, that he did not know his own voice.... Just when he was come over against the mouth of the burning pit, one of the wicked ones got behind him and stepped up softly to him, and, whisperingly, suggested many grievous blasphemies to him, which he verily thought had proceeded from his own mind." I need not enlarge upon the similar drift of these two extracts; still less mark the matured, detailed, and vividly human and dramatic superiority of Hawthorne's use of the element common to both. For other reading in early boyhood he had Spenser (it is said that the first book which he bought with his own money was "The Faery Queen," for which he kept a fondness all his life), Froissart's "Chronicles," and Clarendon's "History of the Rebellion." The incident of Dr. Johnson's penance in Uttoxeter Market dwelt so intimately in Hawthorne's mind (he has treated it in the "True Stories," and touches very tenderly upon it in "Our Old Home," where he says that he "has always been profoundly impressed" by it), that I fancy a childish impression must have endeared it to him; and Boswell may have been one of his acquisitions at this time. Perhaps Dr. Worcester made the book known to him; and he would not be at a loss to find endless entertainment there. It was in November, 1813, that the accident at ball disabled him. In June of the same year an event had taken place which must have entered strongly into his heart, as into that of many another Salem boy. Young Lawrence, of the American navy,--who had won honors for himself at Tripoli and in the then prevailing war with Great Britain,--had just been promoted, for gallant achievements off the coast of Brazil, to a captaincy, and put in command of the frigate "Chesapeake," at Boston. A British frigate, the "Shannon," had been cruising for some time in the neighborhood, seeking an encounter with the "Chesapeake," and the valiant Lawrence felt compelled to go out and meet her, though he had only just assumed command, had had no time to discipline his crew (some of whom were disaffected), and was without the proper complement of commissioned officers. Americans know the result; how the "Chesapeake" was shattered and taken in a fifteen minutes' fight off Marblehead, and how Lawrence fell with a mortal wound, uttering those unforgotten words, "Don't give up the ship." The battle was watched by crowds of people from Salem, who swarmed upon the hillsides to get a glimpse of the result. When the details at last reached the town, many days afterward, Captain George Crowninshield fitted out a flag of truce, sailed for Halifax with ten shipmasters on board, and obtained the bodies of Lawrence and his lieutenant, Ludlow. Late in August they returned, and the city gave itself to solemnities in honor of the lost heroes, with the martial dignity of processions and the sorrowing sound of dirges. Cannon reverberated around them, and flags drooped above them at half-mast, shorn of their splendor. Joseph Story delivered an eloquent oration over them, and there was mourning in the hearts of every one, mixed with that spiritualized sense of national grandeur and human worth that comes at hours like this. Among the throngs upon the streets that day must have stood the boy Nathaniel Hawthorne; not too young to understand, and imbibing from this spectacle, as from many other sources, that profound love of country, that ingrained, ineradicable American quality, which marked his whole maturity. I have not found any distinct corroboration of the report that Nathaniel again lost the use of his limbs, before going to Maine to live. In another brief, boyish letter dated "Salem, Monday, July 21, 1818" (all these documents are short, and allude to the writer's inability to find anything more to say), he speaks of wanting to "go to dancing-school a little longer" before removing with his mother to the house which his uncle is building at Raymond. He has also, he says, been to Nahant, which he likes, because "fish are very thick there"; both items seeming to show a proper degree of activity. There has been a tendency among persons who have found nothing to obstruct the play of their fancies, to establish a notion of almost ill-balanced mental precocity in this powerful young genius, who seems to have advanced as well in muscular as in intellectual development. It was in October, 1818, that Mrs. Hathorne carried her family to Raymond, to occupy the new house, a dwelling so ambitious, gauged by the primitive community thereabouts, that it gained the title of "Manning's Folly." Raymond is in Cumberland County, a little east of Sebago Lake, and the house, which is still standing, mossy and dismantled, is near what has since been called Radoux's Mills. Though built by Robert Manning, it was purchased afterward by his brother Richard, whose widow married Mr. Radoux, the owner of these mills. Richard Manning's will provided for the establishing of a meeting-house in the neighborhood, and his widow transformed the Folly into a Tabernacle; but, the community ceasing to use it after a few years, it has remained untenanted and decaying ever since, enjoying now the fame of being haunted. Lonely as was the region then, it perhaps had a more lively aspect than at present: A clearing probably gave the inmates of the Folly a clear sweep of vision to the lake; and to the northwest, beyond the open fields that still lie there, frown dark pine slopes, ranging and rising away into "forest-crowned hills; while in the far distance every hue of rock and tree, of field and grove, melts into the soft blue of Mount Washington." This weird and woodsy ground of Cumberland became the nurturing soil of Hawthorne for some years. He stayed only one twelvemonth at Sebago Lake, returning to Salem after that for college preparation. But Brunswick, where his academic years were passed, lies less than thirty miles from the home in the woods, and within the same county: doubtless, also, he spent some of his summer vacations at Raymond. The brooding spell of his mother's sorrow was perhaps even deepened in this favorable solitude. I know not whether the faith of women's hearts really finds an easier avenue to such consecration as this of Mrs. Hathorne's, in Salem, than elsewhere. I happen lately to have heard of a widow in that same neighborhood who has remained bereaved and uncomforted for more than seventeen years. With pathetic energy she spends the long days of summer, in long, incessant walks, sorrow-pursued, away from the dwellings of men. But, however this be, I think this divine and pure devotion to a first love, though it may have impregnated Hawthorne's mind too keenly with the mournfulness of mortality, was yet one of the most cogent means of entirely clarifying the fine spirit which he inherited, and that he in part owes to this exquisite example his marvellous, unsurpassed spirituality. A woman thus true to her highest experience and her purest memories, by living in a sacred communion with the dead, annihilates time and is already set in an atmosphere of eternity. Ah, strong and simple soul that knew not how to hide your grief under specious self-comfortings and maxims of convenience, and so bowed in lifelong prostration before the knowledge of your first, unsullied love, be sure the world will sooner or later know how much it owes to such as you! More than once has Nathaniel Hawthorne touched the delicate fibres of the heart that thrill again in this memorial grief of his mother's; and, incongruous as is the connection of the following passage out of one of the Twice-Told Tales, it is not hard to trace the origin of the sensibility and insight which prompted it: "It is more probably the fact," so it runs, "that while men are able to reflect upon their lost companions as remembrances apart from themselves, women, on the other hand, are _conscious that a portion of their being has gone with the departed, whithersoever he has gone_" [Footnote: "drippings with a Chisel," in Vol. II. of the Twice-Told Tales.] But the most perfect example of his sympathy with this sorrow of widowhood is that brief, concentrated, and seemingly slight tale, "The Wives of the Dead," [Footnote: See The Snow Image, and other Twice-Told Tales.] than which I know of nothing more touching and true, more exquisitely proportioned and dramatically wrought out among all English tales of the same scope and length. It pictures the emotions of "two young and comely women," the "recent brides of two brothers, a sailor and a landsman; and two successive days had brought tidings of the death of each, by the chances of Canadian warfare and the tempestuous Atlantic." The action occupies the night after the news, and turns upon the fact that each sister is roused, unknown to the other, at different hours, to be told that the report about her husband is false. One cannot give its beauty without the whole, more than one can separate the dewdrop from the morning-glory without losing the effect they make together. It is a complete presentment, in little, of all that dwells in widowhood. One sentence I may remind the reader of, nevertheless: "Her face was turned partly inward to the pillow, and had been hidden there to weep; but a look of motionless contentment was now visible upon it, as if her heart, like a deep lake, had grown calm because its dead had sunk down so far within it." Even as his widowed mother's face looked, to the true-souled boy, when they dwelt there together in the forest of pines, beside the placid lake! Yet clear and searching as must then have been his perceptions, he had not always formulated them or made them his chief concern. On May 16, 1819 (the first spring after coming to the new abode), he writes to his uncle Robert that "we are all very well"; and "the grass and some of the trees look very green, the roads are very good, there is no snow on Lymington mountains. The fences are all finished, and the garden is laid out and planted.... I have shot a partridge and a henhawk, and caught eighteen large trout out of our brooke. I am sorry you intend to send me to school again." Happy boy! he thinks he has found his vocation: it is, to shoot henhawks and catch trout. But his uncle, fortunately, is otherwise minded, though Nathaniel writes, in the same note: "Mother says she can hardly spare me." The sway of outdoor life must have been very strong over this stalwart boy's temperament. One who saw a great deal of him has related how in the very last year of his life Hawthorne reverted with fondness, perhaps with something of a sick and sinking man's longing for youthful scenes, to these early days at Sebago Lake; "Though it was there," he confessed, "I first got my cursed habits of solitude." "I lived in Maine," he said, "like a bird of the air, so perfect was the freedom I enjoyed." During the moonlight nights of winter he would skate until midnight all alone upon Sebago Lake, with the deep shadows of the icy hills on either hand. When he found himself far away from his home and weary with the exercise of skating, he would sometimes take refuge in a log-cabin, where half a tree would be burning on the broad hearth. He would sit in the ample chimney, and look at the stars through the great aperture through which the flames went roaring up. "Ah," he said, "how well I recall the summer days, also, when with my gun I roamed at will through the woods of Maine!... Everything is beautiful in youth, for all things are allowed to it then!" The same writer mentions the author's passion for the sea, telling how, on the return from England in 1860, Hawthorne was constantly saying in his quiet, earnest way: "I should like to sail on and on forever, and never touch the shore again." I have it from his sister that he used to declare that, had he not been sent to college, he should have become a mariner, like his predecessors. Indeed, he had the fresh air and the salt spray in his blood. Still it is difficult to believe that by any chance he could have missed carrying out his inborn disposition toward literature. After we have explained all the fostering influences and formative forces that surround and stamp a genius of this sort, we come at last to the inexplicable mystery of that interior impulse which, if it does not find the right influences at first, presses forth, breaks out to right and left and keeps on pushing, until it feels itself at ease. It cannot wholly _make_ its own influences, but it fights to the death before it will give up the effort to lay itself open to these; that is, to get into a proper surrounding. The surrounding may be as far as possible from what we should prescribe as the fit one; but the being in whom perception and receptivity exist in that active state which we call genius will adapt itself, and will instinctively discern whether the conditions of life around it can yield a bare nourishment, or whether it must seek other and more fertile conditions. Hawthorne had an ancestry behind him connected with a singular and impressive history, had remarkable parents, and especially a mother pure and lofty in spirit; lived in a suggestive atmosphere of private sorrow and amid a community of much quaintness; he was also enabled to know books at an early age; yet these things only helped, and not produced, his genius. Sometimes they helped by repression, for there was much that was uncongenial in his early life; yet the clairvoyance, the unconscious wisdom, of that interior quality, _genius_, made him feel that the adjustment of his outer and his inner life was such as to give him a chance of unfolding. Had he gone to sea, his awaking power would have come violently into contact with the hostile conditions of sailor-life: he would have revolted against them, and have made his way into literature against head-wind or reluctant tiller-rope alike. It may, of course, be said that this prediction is too easy. But there are evidences of the mastering bent of Hawthorne's mind, which show that it would have ruled in any case. As we have seen, he returned to Salem in 1819, to school; and on March 7, 1820, he wrote thus to his mother:-- "I have left school, and have begun to fit for College under Benjm. L. Oliver, Lawyer. So you are in great danger of having one learned man in your family. Mr. Oliver thought I could enter College next commencement, but Uncle Robert is afraid I should have to study too hard. I get my lessons at home, and recite them to him [Mr. Oliver] at 7 o'clock in the morning.... Shall you want me to be a Minister, Doctor, or Lawyer? A minister I will not be." This is the first dawn of the question of a career, apparently. Yet he still has a yearning to escape the solution. "I am extremely homesick," he says, in one part of the letter; and at the close he gives way to the sentiment entirely: "O how I wish I was again with you, with nothing to do but to go a gunning. But the happiest days of my life are gone.... After I have got through college, I will come down to learn E---- Latin and Greek." (Is it too fanciful to note that at this stage of the epistle "college" is no longer spelt with a large C?) The signature to this letter shows the boy so amiably that I append it. "I remain," he says, "Your Affectionate and Dutiful son, and Most Obedient and Most Humble Servant, and Most Respectful and Most Hearty Well-wisher, NATHANIEL HATHORNE." A jesting device this, which the writer, were he now living, would perhaps think too trivial to make known; yet why should we not recall with pleasure the fact that in his boyish days he could make this harmless little play, to throw an unexpected ray of humor and gladness into the lonely heart of his mother, far away in the Maine woods? And with this pleasure, let there be something of honor and reverence for his pure young heart. In another letter of this period [Footnote: This letter, long in the possession of Miss E. P. Peabody, Mr. Hawthorne's sister-in-law, unfortunately does not exist any longer. The date has thus been forgotten, but the passage is clear in Miss Peabody's recollection.] he had made a long stride towards the final choice, as witness this extract:-- "I do not want to be a doctor and live by men's diseases, nor a minister to live by their sins, nor a lawyer and live by their quarrels. So, I don't see that there is anything left for me but to be an author. How would you like some day to see a whole shelf full of books, written by your son, with 'Hawthorne's Works' printed on their backs?" But, before going further, it will be well to look at certain "Early Notes," purporting to be Hawthorne's, and published in the Portland "Transcript" at different times in 1871 and 1873. A mystery overhangs them; [Footnote: See Appendix I.] and it has been impossible, up to this time, to procure proof of their genuineness. Most of the persons named in them have, nevertheless, been identified by residents of Cumberland County, who knew them in boyhood, and the internal evidence of authorship seems to make at least some of them Hawthorne's. On the first leaf of the manuscript book, said to contain them, was written (as reported by the discoverer) an inscription, to the effect that the book had been given to Nathaniel Hawthorne by his uncle Richard Manning, "with the advice that he write out his thoughts, some every day, in as good words as he can, upon any and all subjects, as it is one of the best means of his securing for mature years command of thought and language"; and this was dated at Raymond, June 1, 1816. This account, if true, puts the book into the boy's hands at the age of twelve. He did not go to Raymond to live until two years later, but had certainly been there, before, and his Uncle Richard was already living there in 1816. So that the entries may have begun soon after June, of that year, though their mature character makes this improbable. In this case, they must cover more than a year's time. The dates were not given by the furnisher of the extracts, and only one item can be definitely provided with a date. This must have been penned in or after 1819; and yet it seems also probable that the whole series was written before the author's college days. If genuine, then, they hint the scope and quality of Hawthorne's perceptions during a few years antecedent to his college-course, and--whether his own work or not--they picture the sort of life which he must have seen at Raymond. "Two kingbirds have built their nest between our house and the mill-pond. The male is more courageous than any creature that I know about. He seems to have taken possession of the territory from the great pond to the small one, and goes out to war with every fish-hawk that flies from one to the other, over his dominion. The fish-hawks must be miserable cowards, to be driven by such a speck of a bird. I have not yet seen one turn to defend himself. "Swapped pocket knives with Robinson Cook yesterday. Jacob Dingley says that he cheated me, but I think not, for I cut a fishing pole this morning, and did it well; besides, he is a Quaker, and they never cheat." Richard Manning had married Susan Dingley; this Jacob was probably her nephew. In this allusion to Quakers one might fancy a germ of tolerance which ripened into "The Gentle Boy." "Captain Britton from Otisfield was at Uncle Richard's today. Not long ago, uncle brought here from Salem a new kind of potatoes called 'Long Reds.' Captain Britton had some for seed, and uncle asked how he liked them. He answered, 'They yield well, grow very long,--one end is very poor, and the other good for nothing.' I laughed about it after he was gone, but uncle looked sour and said there was no wit in his answer, and that the saying was 'stale.' It was new to me, and his way of saying it very funny. Perhaps uncle did not like to hear his favorite potato spoken of in that way, and that if the captain had praised it he would have been called witty." "Captain Britton promised to bring 'Gulliver's Travels' for me to read, the next time he comes this way, which is every time he goes to Portland. Uncle Richard has not the book in his library. "This morning the bucket got off the chain, and dropped back into the well. I wanted to go down on the stones and get it. Mother would not consent, for fear the wall might cave in, but hired Samuel Shane to go down. In the goodness of her heart, she thought the son of old Mrs. Shane not quite so valuable as the son of the Widow Hawthorne. God bless her for all her love for me, though it may be some selfish. We are to have a pump in the well, after this mishap. "Washington Longley has been taking lessons of a drumming master. He was in the grist-mill to day, and practised with two sticks on the half-bushel. I was astonished at the great number of strokes in a second, and if I had not seen that he had but two sticks, should have supposed that he was drumming with twenty." "Major Berry went past our house with a large drove of sheep yesterday. One, a last spring's lamb, gave out; could go no farther. I saw him down near the bridge. The poor dumb creature looked into my eyes, and I thought I knew just what he would say if he could speak, and so asked Mr. Berry what he would sell him for. 'Just the price of his pelt, and that will bring sixty-five cents,' was the answer. I ran and petitioned mother for the money, which she soon gave me, saying with a smile that she tried to make severe, but could not, that I was 'a great spendthrift.' The lamb is in our orchard now, and he made a bow (without taking off his hat) and thanked me this morning for saving him from the butcher. "Went yesterday in a sail-boat on the Great Pond, with Mr. Peter White of Windham. He sailed up here from White's Bridge to see Captain Dingley, and invited Joseph Dingley and Mr. Ring to take a boat-ride out to the Dingley Islands and to the Images. He was also kind enough to say that I might go (with my mother's consent), which she gave after much coaxing. Since the loss of my father she dreads to have any one belonging to her go upon the water. It is strange that this beautiful body of water is called a 'Pond.' The geography tells of many in Scotland and Ireland not near so large that are called 'Lakes.' It is not respectful to speak of so noble, deep, and broad a collection of clear water as a 'Pond'; it makes a stranger think of geese, and then of goose-pond. Mr. White, who knows all this region, told us that the streams from thirty-five ponds, large and small, flow into this, and he calls it Great Basin. We landed on one of the small islands that Captain Dingley cleared for a sheep pasture when he first came to Raymond. Mr. Ring said that he had to do it to keep his sheep from the bears and wolves. A growth of trees has started on the island, and makes a grove so fine and pleasant, that I wish almost that our house was there. On the way from the island to the Images Mr. Ring caught a black spotted trout that was almost a whale, and weighed before it was cut open, after we got back to Uncle Richard's store, eighteen and a half pounds. The men said that if it had been weighed as soon as it came out of the water it would have been nineteen pounds. This trout had a droll-looking hooked nose, and they tried to make me believe, that if the line had been in my hands, that I should have been obliged to let go, or have been pulled out of the boat. They were men, and had a right to say so. I am a boy, and have a right to think differently. We landed at the Images, when I crept into the cave and got a drink of cool water. In coming home we sailed over a place, not far from the Images, where Mr. White has, at some time, let down a line four hundred feet without finding bottom. This seems strange, for he told us, too, that his boat, as it floated, was only two hundred and fifty feet higher than the boats in Portland Harbor, and that if the Great Pond was pumped dry, a man standing on its bottom, just under where we then were, would be more than one hundred and fifty feet lower than the surface of the water at the Portland wharves. Coming up the Dingley Bay, had a good view of Rattlesnake Mountain, and it seemed to me wonderfully beautiful as the almost setting sun threw over its western crags streams of fiery light. If the Indians were very fond of this part of the country, it is easy to see why; beavers, otters, and the finest fish were abundant, and the hills and streams furnished constant variety. I should have made a good Indian, if I had been born in a wigwam. To talk like sailors, we made the old hemlock-stub at the mouth of the Dingley Mill Brook just before sunset, and sent a _boy_ ashore with a hawser, and was soon safely moored to a bunch of alders. After we got ashore Mr. White allowed me to fire his long gun at a mark. I did not hit the mark, and am not sure that I saw it at the time the gun went off, but believe, rather, that I was watching for the noise that I was about to make. Mr. Ring said that with practice I could be a gunner, and that now, with a very heavy charge, he thought I could kill a horse at eight paces. Mr. White went to Uncle Richard's for the night, and I went home and amused my mother with telling how pleasantly the day had passed. When I told her what Mr. Ring said about my killing a horse, she said he was making fun of me. I had found that out before. "Mr. March Gay killed a rattlesnake yesterday not far from his house, that was more than six feet long and had twelve rattles. This morning Mr. Jacob Mitchell killed another near the same place, almost as long. It is supposed that they were a pair, and that the second one was on the track of its mate. If every rattle counts a year, the first one was twelve years old. Eliak Maxfield came down to mill to-day and told me about the snakes. "Mr. Henry Turner of Otisfield took his axe and went out between Saturday and Moose ponds to look at some pine-trees. A rain had just taken off enough of the snow to lay bare the roots of a part of the trees. Under a large root there seemed to be a cavity, and on examining closely something was exposed very much like long black hair. He cut off the root, saw the nose of a bear, and killed him, pulled out the body; saw another, killed that, and dragged out its carcass, when he found that there was a third one in the den, and that he was thoroughly awake, too; but as soon as the head came in sight it was split open with the axe, so that Mr. Turner, alone with only an axe, killed three bears in less than half an hour, the youngest being a good-sized one, and what hunters call a yearling. This is a pretty great bear story, but probably true, and happened only a few weeks ago; for John Patch, who was here with his father Captain Levi Patch, who lives within two miles of the Saturday Pond, told me so yesterday. "A young man named Henry Jackson, Jr., was drowned two days ago, up in Crooked River. He and one of his friends were trying which could swim the faster. Jackson was behind but gaining; his friend kicked at him in fun, thinking to hit his shoulder and push him back, but missed, and hit his chin, which caused him to take in water and strangle, and before his friend could help or get help, poor Jackson was (Elder Leach says) beyond the reach of mercy. I read one of the Psalms to my mother this morning, and it plainly declares twenty-six times that 'God's mercy endureth forever.' I never saw Henry Jackson; he was a young man just married. Mother is sad, says that she shall not consent to my swimming any more in the mill-pond with the boys, fearing that in sport my mouth might get kicked open, and then sorrow for a dead son be added to that for a dead father, which she says would break her heart. I love to swim, but I shall not disobey my mother. * * * * * "Fishing from the bridge to-day, I caught an eel two thirds as long as myself. Mr. Watkins tried to make me believe that he thought it a water moccasin snake. Old Mr. Shane said that it was a 'young sea-sarpint sure.' Mr. Ficket, the blacksmith, begged it to take home for its skin, as he said for buskin-strings and flail-strings. So ends my day's fishing. * * * * * "Went over to-day to see Watkins make bricks. I have always thought there was some mystery about it, but I can make them myself. Why did the Israelites complain so much at having to make bricks without straw? I should not use straw if I was a brick-maker; besides, when they are burned in the kiln, the straw will burn out and leave the bricks full of holes. * * * * * "I can, from my chamber window, look across into Aunt Manning's garden, this morning, and see little Betty Tarbox, flitting among the rose-bushes, and in and out of the arbor, like a tiny witch. She will never realize the calamity that came upon her brothers and sisters that terrible night when her father and mother lay within a few rods of each other, in the snow, freezing to death. I love the elf, because of her loss; and still my aunt is much more to her than her own mother, in her poverty, could have been." * * * * * This little girl was the child of some poor people of the neighborhood who were frozen to death one March night, in 1819. In a letter to his uncle Robert, March 24, 1819, Nathaniel says: "I suppose you have not heard of the death of Mr. Tarbox and his wife, who were froze to death last Wednesday. They were brought out from the Cape on Saturday, and buried from Captain Dingley's on Sunday." This determines the time of writing the last-quoted extract from the journal. * * * * * "This morning I saw at the grist-mill a solemn-faced old horse, hitched to the trough. He had brought for his owner some bags of corn to be ground, who, after carrying them into the mill, walked up to Uncle Richard's store, leaving his half-starved animal in the cold wind with nothing to eat, while the corn was being turned to meal. I felt sorry, and nobody being near, thought it best to have a talk with the old nag, and said, 'Good morning, Mr. Horse, how are you to-day?' 'Good morning, youngster,' said he, just as plain as a horse can speak, and then said, 'I am almost dead, and I wish I was quite. I am hungry, have had no breakfast, and must stand here tied by the head while they are grinding the corn, and until master drinks two or three glasses of rum at the store, then drag him and the meal up the Ben Ham Hill, and home, and am now so weak that I can hardly stand. O dear, I am in a bad way'; and the old creature cried. I almost cried myself. Just then the miller went down stairs to the meal-trough; I heard his feet on the steps, and not thinking much what I was doing, ran into the mill, and taking the four-quart toll-dish nearly full of corn out of the hopper, carried it out and poured it into the trough before the horse, and placed the dish back before the miller came up from below. When I got out, the horse was laughing, but he had to eat slowly, because the bits were in his mouth. I told him that I was sorry, but did not know how to take them out, and should not dare to if I did, for his master might come out and see what I was about. 'Thank you,' said he, 'a luncheon of corn with the bits in is much better than none. The worst of it is, I have to munch so slowly, that master may come before I finish it, and thrash me for eating his corn, and you for the kindness.' I sat down on a stone out of the wind, and waited in trouble, for fear that the miller and the owner of the corn would come and find out what I had done. At last the horse winked and stuck out his upper lip ever so far, and then said, 'The last kernel is gone'; then he laughed a little, then shook one ear, then the other, then shut his eyes as if to take a nap. I jumped up and said: 'How do you feel, old fellow; any better?' He opened his eyes, and looking at me kindly, answered 'very much,' and then blew his nose exceedingly loud, but he did not wipe it. Perhaps he had no wiper. I then asked if his master whipped him much. He opened his eyes, and looking at me kindly, answered, 'Not much lately; he used to till my hide got hardened, but now he has a white-oak goad-stick with an iron brad in its end, with which he jabs my hind quarters and hurts me awfully.' I asked him why he did not kick up, and knock his tormentor out of the wagon. 'I did try once,' said he, 'but am old and was weak, and could only get my heels high enough to break the whiffletree, and besides lost my balance and fell down flat. Master then jumped down, and getting a cudgel struck me over the head, and I thought my troubles were over. This happened just before Mr. Ben Ham's house, and I should have been finished and ready for the crows, if he had not stepped out and told master not to strike again, if he did he would shake his liver out. That saved my life, but I was sorry, though Mr. Ham meant good.' The goad with the iron brad was in the wagon, and snatching it out I struck the end against a stone, and the stabber flew into the mill-pond. 'There,' says I, 'old colt,' as I threw the goad back into the wagon, 'he won't harpoon you again with _that_ iron.' The poor old brute knew well enough what I said, for I looked him in the eye and spoke horse language. At that moment the brute that owned the horse came out of the store, and down the hill towards us. I slipped behind a pile of slabs. The meal was put in the wagon, the horse unhitched, the wagon mounted, the goad picked up and a thrust made, but dobbin was in no hurry. Looking at the end of the stick, the man bawled, 'What little devil has had my goad?' and then began striking with all his strength; but his steed only walked, shaking his head as he went across the bridge; and I thought I heard the ancient Equus say as he went, 'Thrash as much as you please, for once you cannot stab.' I went home a little uneasy, not feeling sure that the feeding the man's corn to his horse was not stealing, and thinking that if the miller found it out, he would have me taken down before Squire Longley. * * * * * "Polly Maxfield came riding to mill to-day on horseback. She rode as gracefully as a Trooper. I wish with all my heart that I was as daring a rider, or half so graceful. * * * * * "This morning walked down to the Pulpit Rock Hill, and climbed up into the pulpit. It looks like a rough place to preach from, and does not seem so much like a pulpit when one is in it, as when viewing it from the road below. It is a wild place, and really a curiosity. I brought a book and sat in the rocky recess, and read for nearly an hour. This is a point on the road known to all teamsters. They have a string of names for reference by which they tell each other where they met fellow-teamsters and where their loads got stuck, and I have learned them from those who stop for drinks at the store. One meets another near our house, and says, 'Where did you meet Bill?' 'Just this side of Small's Brook,' or 'At the top of Gray's Pinch,' 'At the Dry Mill-Pond,' 'Just the other side of Lemmy Jones's,' 'On the long causeway,' 'At Jeems Gowen's,' 'Coming down the Pulpit Rock Hill,' 'Coming down Tarkill Hill.' I have heard these answers till I have them by heart, without having any idea where any of the places are, excepting the one I have seen to-day. While on the bridge near the Pulpit, Mr. West, who lives not far away, came along and asked where I had been. On my telling him, he said that no money would hire him to go up to that pulpit; that the Devil used to preach from it long and long ago; that on a time when hundreds of them were listening to one of his sermons, a great chief laughed in the Devil's face, upon which he stamped his foot, and the ground to the southwest, where they were standing, sunk fifty feet, and every Indian went down out of sight, leaving a swamp to this day. He declared that he once stuck a pole in there, which went down easily several feet, but then struck the skull-bone of an Indian, when instantly all the hassocks and flags began to shake; he heard a yell as from fifty overgrown Pequots; that he left the pole and ran for life. Mr. West also said that no Indian had ever been known to go near that swamp since, but that whenever one came that way, he turned out of the road near the house of Mr. West, and went straight to Thomas Pond, keeping to the eastward of Pulpit Rock, giving it a wide berth. Mr. West talked as though he believed what he said. * * * * * "A pedler named Dominicus Jordan was to-day in Uncle Richard's store, telling a ghost-story. I listened intently, but tried not to seem interested. The story was of a house, the owner of which was suddenly killed. Since his death the west garret-window cannot be kept closed; though the shutters be hasped and nailed at night, they are invariably found open the next morning, and no one can tell when or how the nails were drawn. There is also on the farm an apple-tree, the fruit of which the owner was particularly fond of, but since his death no one has been able to get one of the apples. The tree hangs full nearly every year, but whenever any individual tries to get one, stones come in all directions as if from some secret infernal battery, or hidden catapult, and more than once have those making the attempts been struck. What is more strange, the tree stands in an open field, there being no shelter near from which tricks can be played without exposure. Jordan says that it seems odd to strangers to see that tree loaded with apples when the snow is four feet deep; and, what is a mystery, there are no apples in the spring; no one ever sees the wind blow one off, none are seen on the snow, nor even the vestige of one on the grass under the tree; and that children may play on the grass under and around it while it is in the blossom, and until the fruit is large enough to tempt them, with perfect safety; but the moment one of the apples is sought for, the air is full of flying stones. He further says, that late one starlight night he was passing the house, and looking up saw the phantom walk out of the garret window with cane in hand, making all the motions as if walking on _terra firma_, although what appeared to be his feet were at least six yards from the ground; and so he went walking away on nothing, and when nearly out of sight there was a great flash and an explosion as of twenty field-pieces, then--nothing. This story was told with seeming earnestness, and listened to as though it was believed. How strange it is that almost all persons, old or young, are fond of hearing about the supernatural, though it produces nervousness and fear! I should not be willing to sleep in that garret, though I do not believe a word of the story. * * * * * "The lumbermen from Saccarappa are getting their logs across the Great Pond. Yesterday a strong northwest wind blew a great raft of many thousands over almost to the mouth of the Dingley Brook. Their anchor dragged for more than a mile, but when the boom was within twenty or thirty rods of the shore, it brought up, and held, as I heard some men say who are familiar with such business. All the men and boys went from the mill down to the pond to see the great raft, and I among them. They have a string of logs fastened end to end and surrounding the great body, which keeps them from scattering, and the string is called a boom. A small, strong raft, it may be forty feet square, with an upright windlass in its centre, called a capstan, is fastened to some part of the boom. The small raft is called 'Head Works,' and from it in a yawl-boat is carried the anchor, to which is attached a strong rope half a mile long. The boat is rowed out the whole length of the rope, the anchor thrown over, and the men on the headworks wind up the capstan and so draw along the acres of logs. After we went down to the shore, several of the men came out on the boom nearest to us, and, striking a single log, pushed it under and outside; then one man with a gallon jug slung to his back, taking a pickpole, pushed himself ashore on the small single log,--a feat that seemed almost miraculous to me. This man's name was Reuben Murch, and he seemed to be in no fear of getting soused. This masterly kind of navigation he calls 'cuffing the rigging'; nobody could tell me why he gave it that name. Murch went up to the store, had the jug filled with rum (the supply having run out on the headworks), and made the voyage back the way he came. His comrades received him with cheers, and after sinking the log and drawing it back under the boom, proceeded to try the contents of the jug, seeming to be well satisfied with the result of his expedition. It turned out that Murch only rode the single log ashore to show his adroitness, for the yawl-boat came round from the headworks, and brought near a dozen men in red shirts to where we were. I was interested listening to their conversation mixed with sharp jokes. Nearly every man had a nickname. Murch was called 'Captain Snarl'; a tall, fierce-looking man, who just filled my idea of a Spanish freebooter, was 'Dr. Coddle.' I think his real name was Wood. The rum seems to make them crazy, for one, who was called 'Rub-a-dub,' pitched 'Dr. Coddle' head and heels into the water. A gentlemanly man named Thompson, who acted as master of ceremonies, or Grand Turk, interfered and put a stop to what was becoming something like a fight. Mr. Thompson said that the wind would go down with the sun, and that they must get ready to start. This morning I went down to look for them, and the raft was almost to Frye's Island. * * * * * "I have read 'Gulliver's Travels,' but do not agree with Captain Britton that it is a witty and uncommonly interesting book; the wit is obscene, and the _lies_ too _false_." * * * * * The next and last piece of this note-book was printed two years later than the preceding items, and after the death of the person who professed to own the manuscript, but still with the same degree of mystery, except in the matter of date. "Day before yesterday Mr. Thomas Little from Windham, Mr. M. P. Sawyer of Portland, Mr. Thomas A. Deblois, a lawyer, Mr. Hanson of Windham, and Enoch White, a boy of about my own age, from White's Bridge, came up to the Dingley Brook in a sail-boat. They were on the way to Muddy River Bog, for a day's sport, fishing, and shooting ducks. Enoch proposed that I should go with them. I needed no urging, but knew how unwillingly my mother would consent. They could wait but a few minutes, and Uncle Richard kindly wrote a note, asking her to be willing to gratify me _this_ time. "She said, 'Yes,' but I was almost sorry, knowing that my day's pleasure would cost _her_ one of anxiety. However, I gathered up hooks and lines, with some white salted pork for bait, and with a fabulous number of biscuit, split in the middle, the insides well buttered, then skilfully put together again, and all stowed in sister's large work-bag, and slung over my shoulder. I started, making a wager with Enoch White, as we walked down to the boat, as to which would catch the largest number of fish. "The air was clear, with just breeze enough to shoot us along pleasantly, without making rough waves. The wind was not exactly after us, though we made but two tacks to reach the mouth of Muddy River. The men praised the grand view, after we got into the Great Bay. We could see the White Hills to the northwest, though Mr. Little said they were eighty miles from us; and grand old Rattlesnake, to the northeast, in its immense jacket of green oak, looked more inviting than I had ever seen it; while Frye's Island, with its close growth of great trees, growing to the very edge of the water, looked like a monstrous green raft, floating to the southeastward. Whichever way the eye turned, something charming appeared. Mr. Little seems to be familiar with every book that has ever been written, and must have a great memory. Among other things, he said:-- "'Gentlemen, do you know that this should be called the sea, instead of the Great Pond; that ships should be built here and navigate this water? The surface of the Sea of Galilee, of which we hear so much in the New Testament, was just about equal to the surface of our sea to-day.' "And then he went on to give a geographical description of the country about the Sea of Galilee, and draw parallels between places named in the Testament and points in sight. His talk stole my attention until we were fairly at Muddy River mouth. "Muddy River Bog is quite a curiosity. The river empties into the pond between two small sandy capes or points, only a short distance apart; but after running up a little between them we found the bog to widen to fifty or sixty rods in some places, and to be between two or three miles long. People say that it has no bottom, and that the longest poles that ever grew may be run down into the mud and then pushed down with another a little longer, and this may be repeated until the long poles are all gone. "Coarse, tall water-grass grows up from the mud over every part, with the exception of a place five or six rods wide, running its whole length, and nearly in the middle, which is called the Channel. One can tell at first sight that it is the place for pickerel and water-snakes. "Mr. Deblois stated something that I never heard before as a fact in natural history, that the pickerel wages war upon all fish, except the trout, who is too active for him; that he is a piscatorial cannibal; but that under all circumstances and in all places, he lives on good terms with the water-snake. "We saw a great many ducks, but they seemed to know that Mr. Sawyer had a gun, and flew on slight notice. At last, as four were flying and seemed to be entirely out of gunshot, he fired, saying he would frighten them, if no more; when, to our surprise, he brought one down. The gun was loaded with ball, and Mr. Deblois told him he could not do it again in a million shots. Mr. Sawyer laughed, saying that he had always been a votary of Chance, and that, as a general thing, she had treated him handsomely. "We sailed more than a mile up the bog, fishing and trolling for pickerel; and though we saw a great many, not one offered to be caught, but horned pouts were willing, and we caught them till it was no sport. We found a man there who had taken nearly two bushels of pouts. He was on a raft, and had walked from near the foot of Long Pond, in Otisfield. Mr. Little knew him, and, intending to have some fun, said, 'The next time you come to Portland I want half a dozen of your best jewsharps; leave them at my store at Windham Hill. I need them very badly.' "The man deliberately took from the hook a large pout that he had just pulled up, and, laying his fishing-pole down, began solemnly to explore in his pockets, and brought out six quaint jewsharps carefully tied to pieces of corn-cobs; then he tossed them into our boat to Mr. Little, saying, 'There they are, Tom, and they are as good ones as I ever made; I shall charge you fifty cents for them.' Mr. Little had the worst of the joke; but as the other men began to rally him, he took out the silver and paid the half-dollar; but they laughed at him till he told them, if they would say no more about it, he would give them all the brandy they could drink when they got home. "Mr. Deblois said he would not be bribed; that he must tell Peter White when he got to Windham Hill. "Mr. Little said he would not have Peter White know it for a yoke of steers. "After fishing till all were tired, we landed on a small dry knoll that made out into the bog, to take our luncheon. The men had a variety of eatables, and several bottles that held no eatables. The question was started whether Enoch and I should be invited to drink, and they concluded not to urge us, as we were boys, and under their care. So Mr. Deblois said, 'Boys, anything to eat that is in our baskets is as much yours as ours; help yourselves; but we shall not invite you to drink spirits.' "We thanked them, and said that we had plenty of our own to eat, and had no relish for spirits, but were very thirsty for water. Mr. Little had been there before, and directed us to a spring of the best of water, that boiled up like a pot from the ground, just at the margin of the bog. "Before starting to return, the bet between Enoeh and myself had to be settled. By its conditions, the one who caught the largest number of fish was to have all the hooks and lines of the other. I counted my string and found twenty-five. Enoch made twenty-six on his; so I was about turning over the spoils, when Mr. Sawyer said that my string was the largest, and that there was a mistake. So he counted, and made twenty-six on mine, and twenty-five on Enoch's. We counted again, and found it was as he said, and Enoch prepared to pay the bet, when Mr. Sawyer again interfered, saying that Enoch's string was certainly larger than mine, and proposed to count again. This time I had but twenty-four, and Enoch twenty-seven. All the men counted them several times over, until we could not tell which was which, and they never came out twice alike. "At length Mr. Deblois said solemnly, 'Stop this, Sawyer, you have turned these fish into a pack of cards, and are fooling us all.' The men laughed heartily, and so should I if I had known what the point of the joke was. "Mr. Deblois said the decision as to our bet would have to go over to the next term. After starting for home, while running down the bog, Mr. Sawyer killed three noble black ducks at one shot, but the gun was not loaded this time with ball. Mr. Hanson struck with his fishing-pole, and killed a monstrous water-snake. Mr. Little measured a stick with his hands, and using it as a rule, declared him to be five feet long. If I thought any such snakes ever went over to Dingley Bay, I never would go into the water there again. "When we got out of the bog into the open water, we found a lively breeze from the northwest, and they landed me at the Dingley Brook in less than an hour, and then kept on like a great white bird down towards the Cape, and for the outlet. I stood and watched the boat until it was nearly half-way to Frye's Island, loath to lose sight of what had helped me to enjoy the day so much. Taking my fish I walked home, and greeted mother just as the sun went out of sight behind the hills in Baldwin. The fish were worthless, but I thought I must have something to show for the day spent. After exhibiting them to mother and sister, and hearing the comments as to their ugliness, and much speculation as to what their horns were for, I gave them to Mr. Lambard, who said that pouts were the best of fish after they were skinned. "I have made this account of the expedition to please Uncle Richard, who is an invalid and cannot get out to enjoy such sport, and wished me to describe everything just as it had happened, whether witty or silly, and give my own impressions. He has read my diary, and says that it interested him, which is all the reward I desire. And now I add these lines to keep in remembrance the peculiar satisfaction I received in hearing the conversation, especially of Mr. Deblois and Mr. Little. August, 1818, Raymond." * * * * * These extracts from the Raymond Journal, if they be genuine, as in most respects I believe they must be, will furnish a clew, otherwise wanting, to the distinct turn which the boy's mind took toward authorship after his return to Salem, and on passing the propylon of classical culture. We can also see in them, I think, the beginning of that painstaking accumulation of fact, the effort to be first of all accurate, which is a characteristic of his maturer and authenticated note-books; very significant, too, is the dash of the supernatural and his tone concerning it. A habit of thus preserving impressions, and of communing with himself through the pen, so constant and assiduous as we know it to have been in his later years,--even when mind and time were preoccupied,--must have been formed early, to retain so strong a hold upon him. But there is another reason for supposing that he had begun to compose with care before coming from Raymond to Salem; and this is found in the fact that, in 1820, he began issuing (probably to a very small and intimate circle of subscribers) a neat little weekly paper printed with the pen on sheets of a much-curtailed note size, and written in an excellent style. The first number, dated Monday, August 21, 1820, opens with the Editor's Address:-- "Our feelings upon sending into the world the first number of the Spectator may be compared to those of a fond Parent, when he beholds a beloved child about to embark on the troubled Ocean of public Life. Perhaps the iron hand of Criticism may crush our humble undertaking, ere it is strengthened by time. Or it may pine in obscurity neglected and forgotten by those, with whose assistance it might become the Pride and Ornament of our Country.... We beg leave farther to remark that in order to carry on any enterprise with spirit MONEY is absolutely necessary. Money, although it is the root of all evil, is also the foundation of everything great and good, and therefore our Subscribers ... will please carefully to remember that the terms are two cents per month." A little further on there is this allusion to the Scriptural proverb cited above: "We have been informed that this expression is incorrect, and that it is the love of Money which is the 'Root of all Evil.' But money is certainly the cause of the love of Money. Therefore, Money is the deepest 'Root of Evil.'" (Observe, here, the young student's pride of reason, and the consciousness of a gift for casuistry!) Under the head of "Domestic News" occur some remarks on the sea-serpent, the deduction from various rumors about the monster being that "he seems to possess a strange and we think rather unusual faculty of appearing in different shapes to different eyes, so that where one person sees a shark, another beholds a nameless dragon." (Here, too, is the humorously veiled distrust that always lurked beneath his dealings with the marvellous.) In the next columns there is found an advertisement of the Pin Society, which "will commence lending pins to any creditable person, on Wednesday, the 23d instant. No numbers except ten, twenty, and thirty will be lent"; and the rate of interest is to be one pin on every ten per day. This bold financial scheme is also carried on by the editor in person,--a combination which in these days would lay him open to suspicions of unfair dealing. I have seen a little manuscript book containing the remarkable constitution and by-laws of this society, in which there were but two members; and it is really a curious study of whimsical intricacy, the work of a mind perfectly accustomed to solitude and fertile in resources for making monotony various and delightful. It does not surprise one to meet with the characteristic announcement from this editor that he has "concluded not to insert deaths and marriages (except of very distinguished persons) in the Spectator. We can see but little use in thus giving to the world the names of the crowd who are tying the marriage knot, and going down to the silent tomb." There is some poetry at the end of the paper, excellent for a boy, but without the easy inspiration of the really witty prose. It would seem that this weekly once made a beginning, which was also an end, before nourishing up into the series of which I have synopsized the first issue; for there is another Number One without date, but apparently earlier. This contains some exemplary sentiments "On Solitude," with a touch of what was real profundity in so inexperienced a writer. "Man is naturally a sociable being," he says; "and apart from the world there are no incitements to the pursuit of excellence; there are no rivals to contend with; and therefore there is no improvement.... The heart may be more pure and uncorrupted in solitude than when exposed to the influences of the depravity of the world; but the benefit of virtuous examples is equal to the detriment of vicious ones, and both are equally lost." The "Domestic Intelligence" of this number is as follows: "The lady of Dr. Winthrop Brown, a son and Heir. Mrs. Hathorne's cat, Seven Kittens. We hear that both of the above ladies are in a state of convalescence." Also, "Intentions of Marriage. The beautiful and accomplished Miss Keziah Dingley will shortly be united to Dominicus Jordan Esq." (The young author appears to have allowed himself in this paragraph the stimulus of a little fiction respecting real persons. Dominicus Jordan is the pedler of the Raymond notes. Who Miss Keziah was I do not know, but from the name I guess her to have been a relative, by appellation at least, through Richard Manning's wife. If Hawthorne did not himself call Miss Dingley aunt, he may very likely have heard her commonly spoken of by that title. Did the old, boyish association perhaps unconsciously supply him with a name for the Indian aunt of "Septimius Felton"?) The next item is "DEATHS. We are sorry to be under the necessity of informing our readers that no deaths of importance have taken place, except that of the publisher of this Paper, who died of Starvation, owing to the slenderness of his patronage." Notwithstanding this discouraging incident, one of the advertisements declares that "Employment will be given to any number of indigent Poets and Authors at this office." But shortly afterward is inserted the announcement that "Nathaniel Hathorne proposes to publish by subscription a new edition of the Miseries of Authors, to which will be added a sequel, containing Facts and Remarks drawn from his own experience." In Number Two of the new series, the editor speaks of a discourse by Dr. Stoughton, "on Tuesday evening.... With the amount of the contribution which was taken up ... we are unacquainted, as, having no money in our pockets, we departed before it commenced." This issue takes a despondent view of the difficulties that beset editors. There is a clever paragraph of "Domestic News" again. "As we know of no News," it says, "we hope our readers will excuse us for not inserting any. The law which prohibits paying debts when a person has no money will apply in this case." Next we have a very arch dissertation "On Industry": "It has somewhere been remarked that an Author does not write the worse for knowing little or nothing of his subject. We hope the truth of this saying will be manifest in the present article. With the benefits of Industry we are not personally acquainted." The desperate editor winds up his week's budget with a warning to all persons who may be displeased by observations in the Spectator, that he is going to take fencing lessons and practise shooting at a mark. "We also," he adds, "think it advisable to procure a stout oaken cudgel to be the constant companion of our peregrinations." The assumption of idleness in the essay on Industry, just quoted, breaks down entirely in a later number, when the editor--in apologizing for inaccuracies in the printing of his paper--enumerates his different occupations: "In the first place we study Latin and Greek. Secondly we write in the employment of William Manning Esq., [at that time proprietor of an extensive line of stagecoaches]. Thirdly, we are Secretary, Treasurer, and Manager of the 'Pin Society'; Fourthly, we are editor of the Spectator; fifthly, sixthly, and lastly, our own Printers, Printing Press and Types." But the young journalist carried on his labors unabatedly, for the term of some five weeks, and managed to make himself very entertaining. I take from an essay "On Benevolence" a fragment which has a touch of poetry out of his own life. Benevolence, he says, is "to protect the fatherless, and to make the Widow's heart sing for joy." One of the most cherishable effusions is that "On Wealth," in which the venerable writer drops into a charmingly confidential and reminiscent vein. "All men," he begins, "from the highest to the lowest, desire to pursue wealth.... In process of time if we obtain possession" of a sum at first fixed as the ultimatum, "we generally find ourselves as far from being contented as at first.... When I was a boy, I one day made an inroad into a closet, to the secret recesses of which I had often wished to penetrate. I there discovered a quantity of very fine apples. At first I determined to take only one, which I put in my pocket. But those which remained were so very inviting that it was against my conscience to leave them, and I filled my pockets and departed, wishing that they would hold more. But alas! an apple which was unable to find space enough among its companions bounced down upon the floor before all the Family. I was immediately searched, and forced, very unwillingly, to deliver up all my booty." In the same number which contains this composition appears the token of what was doubtless Hawthorne's first recognition in literature. It is a "Communication," of tenor following:-- "Mr. Editor: I have observed in some of your last papers, Essays on Various subjects, and am very much pleased with them, and wish you to continue them. If you will do this, you will oblige "MARIA LOUISA HATHORNE." "We hail the above communication," writes the editor with exaggerated gratitude, "as the dawn of a happy day for us." In his next and final issue, though (September, 18, 1820), he satirically evinces his dissatisfaction at the want of a literary fraternity in his native land, through this "Request":-- "As it is part of the plan of the Spectator to criticise home-manufactured publications, we most earnestly desire some of our benevolent Readers to write a book for our special benefit. At present we feel as we were wont to do in the days of our Boyhood, when we possessed a Hatchet, without anything to exercise it upon. We engage to execute the Printing and Binding, and to procure the Paper for the Work, free of all expense to the Author. If this request should be denied us, we must infallibly turn our arms against our own writings, which, as they will not stand the test of criticism, we feel very unwilling to do. We do not wish that the proposed work should be too perfect; the Author will please to make a few blunders for us to exercise our Talents upon." In these quotations one sees very clearly the increased maturity (though it be only by a year or two) of the lad, since the engrossing of his records at Raymond. We get in these his entire mood, catch gleams of a steady fire of ambition under the light, self-possessed air of assumed indifference, and see how easily already his humor began to play, with that clear and sweet ripeness that warms some of his more famous pages, like late sunshine striking through clusters of mellow and translucent grapes. Yet our grasp of his mental situation at this point would not be complete, without recognition of the graver emotions that sometimes throbbed beneath the surface. The doubt, the hesitancy that sometimes must have weighed upon his lonely, self-reliant spirit with weary movelessness, and all the pain of awakening ambition and departing boyhood, seem to find a symbol in this stanza from the fourth "Spectator":-- "Days of my youth, ye fleet away, As fades the bright sun's cheering ray, And scarce my infant hours are gone, Ere manhood's troubled step comes on. My infant hours return no more, And all their happiness is o'er; The stormy sea of life appears, A scene of tumult and of tears." Of the vexations of unfledged manhood the boy of sixteen did not speak without knowledge. Various sorts of pressure from uncongenial sources were now and then brought to bear upon him; there was present always the galling consciousness of depending on others for support, and of being less self-sustaining than approaching manhood made him wish to be. Allusion has been made to his doing writing for his uncle William. "I still continue," he says in a letter of October, 1820, to his mother at Raymond, "to write for Uncle William, and find my salary quite convenient for many purposes." This, to be sure, was a first approach to self-support, and flattering to his sense of proper dignity. But Hawthorne, in character as in genius, had a passion for maturity. An outpouring of his thoughts on this and other matters, directed to his sister, accompanies the letter just cited. Let us read it here as he wrote it more than a half-century ago:-- DEAR SISTER:--I am very angry with you for not sending me some of your poetry, which I consider a great piece of ingratitude. You will not see one line of mine until you return the confidence which I have placed in you. I have bought the 'Lord of the Isles,' and intend either to send or to bring it to you. I like it as well as any of Scott's other poems. I have read Hogg's "Tales," "Caleb Williams," "St. Lean," and "Mandeville." I admire Godwin's novels, and intend to read them all. I shall read the "Abbot," by the author of "Waverley," as soon as I can hire it. I have read all Scott's novels except that. I wish I had not, that I might have the pleasure of reading them again. Next to these I like "Caleb Williams." I have almost given up writing poetry. No man can be a Poet and a book-keeper at the same time. I do find this place most "dismal," and have taken to chewing tobacco with all my might, which, I think, raises my spirits. Say nothing of it in your letters, nor of the "Lord of the Isles." ... I do not think I shall ever go to college. I can scarcely bear the thought of living upon Uncle Robert for four years longer. How happy I should be to be able to say, "I am Lord of myself!" You may cut off this part of my letter, and show the other to Uncle Richard. Do write me some letters in skimmed milk. [The shy spirit finds it thus hard, even thus early, to be under possible surveillance in his epistolary musings, and wants to write invisibly.] I must conclude, as I am in a "monstrous hurry!" Your affectionate brother, NATH. HATHORNE. P. S. The most beautiful poetry I think I ever saw begins:-- "She's gone to dwell in Heaven, my lassie, She's gone to dwell in Heaven: Ye're ow're pure quo' a voice aboon For dwalling out of Heaven." It is not the words, but the thoughts. I hope you have read it, as I know you would admire it. As to the allusion to college, it is but a single ray let into the obscurity of a season when the sensitive, sturdy, proud young heart must have borne many a vigil of vexatious and bitter revery. And this must not be left out in reckoning the grains and scruples that were compounding themselves into his inner consciousness. But at last he struck a balance, wisely, among his doubts; and in the fall of 1821 he went to Bowdoin to become one of the famous class with Longfellow and Cheever, the memory of which has been enwreathed with the gentle verse of "Morituri Salutamus,"--a fadeless garland. In "Fanshawe," an anonymous work of his youth, Hawthorne has pictured some aspects of the college at Brunswick, under a very slight veil of fiction. "From the exterior of the collegians," he says, "an accurate observer might pretty safely judge how long they had been inmates of those classic walls. The brown cheeks and the rustic dress of some would inform him that they had but recently left the plough, to labor in a not less toilsome field. The grave look and the intermingling of garments of a more classic cut would distinguish those who had begun to acquire the polish of their new residence; and the air of superiority, the paler cheek, the less robust form, the spectacles of green, and the dress in general of threadbare black, would designate the highest class, who were understood to have acquired nearly all the science their Alma Mater could bestow, and to be on the point of assuming their stations in the world. There were, it is true, exceptions to this general description. A few young men had found their way hither from the distant seaports; and these were the models of fashion to their rustic companions, over whom they asserted a superiority in exterior accomplishments, which the fresh, though unpolished intellect of the sons of the forest denied them in their literary competitions. A third class, differing widely from both the former, consisted of a few young descendants of the aborigines, to whom an impracticable philanthropy was endeavoring to impart the benefits of civilization. "If this institution did not offer all the advantages of elder and prouder seminaries, its deficiencies were compensated to its students by the inculcation of regular habits, and of a deep and awful sense of religion, which seldom deserted them in their course through life. The mild and gentle rule ... was more destructive to vice than a sterner sway; and though youth is never without its follies, they have seldom been more harmless than they were here. The students, indeed, ignorant of their own bliss, sometimes wished to hasten the time of their entrance on the business of life; but they found, in after years, that many of their happiest remembrances, many of the scenes which they would with least reluctance live over again, referred to the seat of their early studies." * * * * * He here divides the honors pleasantly between the forest-bred and city-trained youth, having, from his own experience, an interest in each class. Yet I think he must have sided, in fact, with the country boys. Horatio Bridge, his classmate, and throughout life a more confidential friend than Pierce, was brought up on his father's estate at Bridgton, north of Sebago Lake; and Franklin Pierce, in the class above him, his only other frequent companion, was a native of the New Hampshire hill-lands. He himself, in his outward bearing, perhaps gathered to his person something the look of both the seaport lads and the sturdy mountaineers and woodsmen. He was large and strong (in a letter to his uncle Robert, just before entering college, he gives the measure of his foot, for some new shoes that are to be sent; it is ten inches), but an interior and ruling grace removed all suspicion of heaviness. Being a sea-captain's son, he would naturally make his connections at college with men who had the out-of-doors glow about them; the simple and severe life at Raymond, too, had put him in sympathy with the people rather than with the patricians (although I see that the reminiscences of some of the old dwellers near Raymond describe the widow and her brother Richard as being exclusive and what was there thought "aristocratic"). Hawthorne, Pierce, and Bridge came together in the Athenaean Society, the newer club of the two college literary unions, and the more democratic; and the trio preserved their cordial relations intact for forty years, sometimes amid confusions and misconstructions, or between cross-fires of troublous counter-considerations, with a rare fidelity. Hawthorne held eminent scholarship easily within his grasp, but he and his two cronies seem to have taken their curriculum very easily, though they all came off well in the graduation. Hawthorne was a good Latinist. The venerable Professor Packard has said that his Latin compositions, even in the Freshman year, were remarkable; and Mr. Longfellow tells me that he recalls the graceful and poetic translations which his classmate used to give from the Roman authors. He got no celebrity in Greek, I believe, but he always kept up his liking for the Latin writers. Some years since a Latin theme of his was found, which had been delivered at an exhibition of the Athenaean Society, in December, 1823. [Footnote: See Appendix II.] It shows some niceties of selection, and the style is neat; I even fancy something individual in the choice of the words _sanctior nec beatior_, as applied to the republic, and a distinctly Hawthornesque distinction in the _fulgor tantum fuit sine fervore_; though a relic of this kind should not be examined too closely, and claims the same exemption that one gives to Shelley's school-compelled verses, _In Horologium_. His English compositions also excited notice. Professor Newman gave them high commendation, and Mr. Bridge speaks of their superiority. But none of them have survived; whether owing to the author's vigilant suppression, or to the accidents of time. It was Hawthorne's habit as a young man to destroy all of his own letters that he could find, on returning home after an absence; and few records of his college life remain. Here is a brief note, however. BRUNSWICK, August 12, 1823. MY DEAR UNCLE:--I received your letter in due time, and should have answered it in due season, if I had not been prevented, as L---- conjectures, by laziness. The money was very acceptable to me, and will last me till the end of the term, which is three weeks from next Wednesday. I shall then have finished one half of my college life.... I suppose your farm prospers, and I hope you will have abundance of fruit, and that I shall come home time enough to eat some of it, which I should prefer to all the pleasure of cultivating it. I have heard that there is a steamboat which runs twice a week between Portland and Boston. If this be the case I should like to come home that way, if mother has no apprehension of the boiler's bursting. I really have had a great deal to do this term, as, in addition to the usual exercises, we have to write a theme or essay of three or four pages, every fortnight, which employs nearly all my time, so that I hope you will not impute my neglect of writing wholly to laziness.... Your affectionate nephew, NATH. HATHORNE. This letter, as well as the others here given, shows how much of boyish simplicity surrounded and protected the rare and distinct personality already unfolded in this youth of eighteen. The mixture makes the charm of Hawthorne's youth, as the union of genius and common-sense kept his maturity alive with a steady and wholesome light. I fancy that obligatory culture irked him then, as always, and that he chose his own green lanes toward the advancement of learning. His later writings vouchsafe only two slight glimpses of the college days. In his Life of Franklin Pierce, he recalls Pierce's chairmanship of the Athenaean Society, on the committee of which he himself held a place. "I remember, likewise," he says, "that the only military service of my life was as a private soldier in a college company, of which Pierce was one of the officers. He entered into this latter business, or pastime, with an earnestness with which I could not pretend to compete, and at which, perhaps, he would now be inclined to smile." But much more intimate and delightful is the reminiscence which, in the dedicatory preface of "The Snow Image," addressed to his friend Bridge, he thus calls up. "If anybody is responsible for my being at this day an author, it is yourself. I know not whence your faith came: but, while we were lads together at a country college, gathering blueberries in study hours under those tall academic pines; or watching the great logs as they tumbled along the current of the Androscoggin; or shooting pigeons and gray squirrels in the woods; or bat-fowling in the summer twilight; or catching treats in that shadowy little stream, which, I suppose, is still wandering riverward through the forest,--though you and I will never cast a line in it again,--two idle lads, in short (as we need not fear to acknowledge now), doing a hundred things that the Faculty never heard of, or else it had been the worse for us,--still it was your prognostic of your friend's destiny, that he was to be a writer of fiction." I have asked Mr. Bridge what gave him this impression of Hawthorne, and he tells me that it was an indescribable conviction, aroused by the whole drift of his friend's mind as he saw it. Exquisite indeed must have been that first fleeting aroma of genius; and I would that it might have been then and there imprisoned and perpetuated for our delight. But we must be satisfied with the quick and sympathetic insight with which Hawthorne's friend discovered his true bent. The world owes more, probably, to this early encouragement from a college companion than it can ever estimate. Nothing in human intercourse, I think, has a more peculiar and unchanging value than the mutual impressions of young men at college: they meet at a moment when the full meaning of life just begins to unfold itself to them, and their fresh imaginations build upon two or three traits the whole character of a comrade, where a maturer man weighs and waits, doubts and trusts, and ends after all with a like or dislike that is only lukewarm. Far on toward the close of life, Hawthorne, in speaking of something told him by an English gentleman respecting a former classmate of the latter's, wrote: "It seemed to be one of those early impressions which a collegian gets of his fellow-students, and which he never gets rid of, whatever the character of the person may turn out to be in after years. I have judged several persons in this way, and still judge them so, though the world has come to very different opinions. Which is right,--the world, which has the man's whole mature life on its side; or his early companion, who has nothing for it but some idle passages of his youth?" The world, doubtless, measures more accurately the intrinsic worth of the man's mature actions; but his essential characteristics, creditable or otherwise, are very likely to be better understood by his classmates. In this, then, we perceive one of the formative effects on Hawthorne's mind of his stay at Brunswick. Those four years of student life gave him a thousand eyes for observing and analyzing character. He learned then, also, to choose men on principles of his own. Always afterward he was singularly independent in selecting friends; often finding them even in unpopular and out-of-the-way persons. The affinity between himself and Bridge was ratified by forty years of close confidence; and Hawthorne never swerved from his early loyalty to Pierce, though his faithfulness gave him severe trials, both public and private, afterward. I am not of those who explain this steadfastness by a theory of early prepossession on Hawthorne's part, blinding him to Pierce's errors or defects. There is ample proof in the correspondence between Bridge and himself, which I have seen, that he constantly and closely scanned his distinguished friend the President's character with his impartial and searching eye for human character, whatsoever its relations to himself. I believe if he had ever found that the original nucleus of honor and of a certain candor which had charmed him in Pierce was gone, he would, provided it seemed his duty, have rejected the friendship. As it was, he saw his old friend and comrade undergoing changes which he himself thought hazardous, saw him criticised in a post where no one ever escaped the severest criticism, and beheld him return to private life amid unpopularity, founded, as he thought, upon misinterpretation of what was perhaps error, but not dishonesty. Meanwhile he felt that the old "Frank," his brother through Alma Mater, dwelt still within the person of the public man; and though to claim that brotherhood exposed Hawthorne, under the circumstances, to cruel and vulgar insinuations, he saw that duty led him to the side of his friend, not to that of the harsh multitude. Perhaps his very earliest contribution to light literature was an apocryphal article which he is said to have written when about eighteen or nineteen. Just then there came into notice a voracious insect, gifted with peculiar powers against pear-trees. Knowing that his uncle was especially concerned in fruit culture, Hawthorne wrote, and sent from college to a Boston paper, a careful description of the new destroyer, his habits, and the proper mode of combating him, all drawn from his own imagination. It was printed, so the tale runs; and a package of the papers containing it arrived in Salem just as the author reached there for a brief vacation. Mr. Manning is said to have accepted in good faith the knowledge which the article supplied, but Hawthorne's amusement was not unmixed with consternation at the success of his first essay. In the two or three letters from him at college which still survive, there is no open avowal of the inner life, which was then the supplier of events for his outwardly monotonous days; not a breath of that strain of revery and fancy which impressed Bridge's mind! One allusion shows that he systematically omitted declamation; and an old term bill of 1824 (the last year of his course) charges him with a fine of twenty cents for neglect of theme! Spur to authorship:--the Faculty surely did its best to develop his genius, and cannot be blamed for any shortcomings. [Footnote: The amount of this bill, for the term ending May 21, 1824, is but $19.62, of which $2.36 is made up of fines. The figures give a backward glimpse at the epoch of cheap living, but show that the disinclination of students to comply with college rules was even then expensive. The "average of damages" is only thirty-three cents, from which I infer that the class was not a destructive one.] Logically, these tendencies away from essay and oratory are alien to minds destined to produce literature; but empirically, they are otherwise. Meantime, we get a sudden light on some of the solid points of character, apart from genius, in this note from the college president, and the student's parallel epistles. May 29, 1822. MRS. ELIZABETH C. HATHORNE. MADAM:----By note of the Executive Government of this college, it is made my duty to request your co-operation with us in the attempt to induce your son faithfully to observe the laws of this institution. He was this day fined fifty cents for playing cards for money, last term. He played at different times. Perhaps he might not have gained, were it not for the influence of a student whom we have dismissed from college. It does not appear that your son has very recently played cards; yet your advice may be beneficial to him. I am, madam, Very respectfully, Your obedient, humble servant, WILLIAM ALLEN, _President_. The next day after this note was written (on May 30, 1822) the subject of it wrote thus:-- "MY DEAR MOTHER:--I hope you have safely arrived in Salem. I have nothing particular to inform you of, except that all the card-players in college have been found out, and my unfortunate self among the number. One has been dismissed from college, two suspended, and the rest, with myself, have been fined fifty cents each. I believe the President intends to write to the friends of all the delinquents. Should that be the case, you must show the letter to nobody. If I am again detected, I shall have the honor of being suspended; when the President asked what we played for, I thought it proper to inform him it was fifty cents, although it happened to be a quart of wine; but if I had told him of that, he would probably have fined me for having a blow. [It appears that the mild dissipation of wine-drinking in vogue at Bowdoin at that time was called having a "blow;" probably an abbreviation for the common term "blow-out," applied to entertainments.] There was no untruth in the case, as the wine cost fifty cents. I have not played at all this term. I have not drank any kind of spirits or wine this term, and shall not till the last week." But in a letter to one of his sisters (dated August 5, 1822) a few months afterward, he touches the matter much more vigorously:-- "To quiet your suspicions, I can assure you that I am neither 'dead, absconded, or anything worse.' [The allusion is to some reproach for a long silence on his part.] I have involved myself in no 'foolish scrape,' as you say all my friends suppose; but ever since my misfortune I have been as steady as a sign-post, and as sober as a deacon, have been in no 'blows' this term, nor drank any kind of 'wine or strong drink.' So that your comparison of me to the 'prodigious son' will hold good in nothing, except that I shall probably return penniless, for I have had no money this six weeks.... The President's message is not so severe as I expected. I perceive that he thinks I have been led away by the wicked ones, in which, however, he is greatly mistaken. I was full as willing to play as the person he suspects of having enticed me, and would have been influenced by no one. I have a great mind to commence playing again, merely to show him that I scorn to be seduced by another into anything wrong." I cannot but emphasize with my own words the manly, clear-headed attitude of the young student in these remarks. He has evidently made up his mind to test the value of card-playing for wine, and thinks himself--as his will be the injury, if any--the best judge of the wisdom of that experiment. A weaker spirit, too, a person who knew himself less thoroughly, would have taken shelter under the President's charitable theory with thanksgiving; but Hawthorne's perfectly simple moral sense and ingrained manhood would not let him forget that self-respect lives by truth alone. In this same letter he touches lesser affairs:-- "I have not read the two novels you mention. I began some time ago to read Hume's 'History of England,' but found it so abominably dull that I have given up the undertaking until some future time. I can procure books of all sorts from the library of the Athenaean Society, of which I am a member. The library consists of about eight hundred volumes, among which is Rees's Cyclopaedia [this work was completed in 1819], and many other valuable works.... Our class will be examined on Tuesday for admittance to our Sophomore year. If any of us are found deficient, we shall be degraded to the Freshman class again; from which misfortune may Heaven defend me." But the young Freshman's trepidation, if he really felt any, was soon soothed; he passed on successfully through his course. Not only did he graduate well, but he had also, as we shall see, begun to prepare himself for his career. Here is a letter which gives, in a fragmentary way, his mood at graduation:-- "BRUNSWICK, July 14, 1825. "MY DEAR SISTER:--.... I am not very well pleased with Mr. Dike's report of me. The family had before conceived much too high an opinion of my talents, and had probably formed expectations which I shall never realize. I have thought much upon the subject, and have finally come to the conclusion that I shall never make a distinguished figure in the world, and all I hope or wish is to plod along with the multitude. I do not say this for the purpose of drawing any flattery from you, but merely to set mother and the rest of you right upon a point where your partiality has led you astray. I did hope that Uncle Robert's opinion of me was nearer to the truth, as his deportment toward me never expressed a very high estimation of my abilities." Mr. Dike was a relative, who had probably gone back to Salem, after seeing the young man at Brunswick, with a eulogy on his lips. Hawthorne's modesty held too delicate a poise to bear a hint of praise, before he had yet been put to the test or accomplished anything decisive. In some ways this modesty and shyness may have postponed his success as an author; yet it was this same delicate admixture which precipitated and made perfect the mysterious solution in which his genius lay. The wish "to plod along with the multitude," seemingly unambitious, is only a veil. The hearts that burn most undyingly with hope of achievement in art, often throw off this vapor of discontent; they feel a prophetic thrill of that nameless suffering through which every seeker of truth must pass, and they long beforehand for rest, for the sweet obscurity of the ungifted. Another part of this letter shows the writer's standing at college:-- "Did the President write to you about my part? He called me to his study, and informed me that, though my rank in the class entitled me to a part, yet it was contrary to the law to give me one, on account of my neglect of declamation. As he inquired mother's name and residence, I suppose that he intended to write to her on the subject. If so, you will send me a copy of the letter. I am perfectly satisfied with this arrangement, as it is a sufficient testimonial to my scholarship, while it saves me the mortification of making my appearance in public at Commencement. Perhaps the family may not be so much pleased by it. Tell me what are their sentiments on the subject. "I shall return home in three weeks from next Wednesday." Here the dim record of his collegiate days ceases, leaving him on the threshold of the world, a fair scholar, a budding genius, strong, young, and true, yet hesitant; halting for years, as if gathering all his shy-souled courage, before entering that arena that was to echo such long applause of him. Yet doubt not that the purpose to do some great thing was already a part of his life, together with that longing for recognition which every young poet, in the sweet uncertain certainty of beginning, feels that he must some day deserve. Were not these words, which I find in "Fanshawe," drawn from the author's knowledge of his own heart? "He called up the years that, even at his early age, he had spent in solitary study,--in conversation with the dead,--while he had scorned to mingle with the living world, or to be actuated by any of its motives. Fanshawe had hitherto deemed himself unconnected with the world, unconcerned in its feelings, and uninfluenced by it in any of his pursuits. In this respect he probably deceived himself. If his inmost heart could have been laid open, there would have been discovered that dream of undying fame, which, dream as it is, is more powerful than a thousand realities." Already, while at Bowdoin, Hawthorne had begun to write verses, and perhaps to print some of them anonymously in the newspapers. From some forgotten poem of his on the sea, a single stanza has drifted down to us, like a bit of beach-wood, the relic of a bark too frail to last. It is this:-- "The ocean hath its silent caves, Deep, quiet, and alone; Though there be fury on the waves, Beneath them there is none." If one lets the lines ring in his ears a little, the true Hawthornesque murmur and half-mournful cadence become clear. I am told, by the way, that when the Atlantic cable was to be laid, some one quoted this to a near relative of the writer's, not remembering the name of the author, but thinking it conclusive proof that the ocean depths would receive the cable securely. Another piece is preserved complete, and much more nearly does the writer justice:-- "MOONLIGHT. "We are beneath the dark blue sky, And the moon is shining bright; O, what can lift the soul so high As the glow of a summer night; When all the gay are hushed to sleep And they that mourn forget to weep, Beneath that gentle light! "Is there no holier, happier land Among those distant spheres, Where we may meet that shadow band, The dead of other years? Where all the day the moonbeams rest, And where at length the souls are blest Of those who dwell in tears? "O, if the happy ever leave The bowers of bliss on high, To cheer the hearts of those that grieve, And wipe the tear-drop dry; It is when moonlight sheds its ray, More pure and beautiful than day, And earth is like the sky." At a time when the taste and manner of Pope in poetry still held such strong rule over readers as it did in the first quarter of the century, these simple stanzas would not have been unworthy of praise for a certain independence; but there is something besides in the refined touch and the plaintive undertone that belong to Hawthorne's individuality. This gentle and musical poem, it is curious to remember, was written at the very period when Longfellow was singing his first fresh carols, full of a vigorous pleasure in the beauty and inspiration of nature, with a rising and a dying fall for April and Autumn, and the Winter Woods. One can easily fancy that in these two lines from "Sunrise on the Hills":-- "Where, answering to the sudden shot, thin smoke Through thick-leaved branches from the dingle broke," it was the fire of Hawthorne's fowling-piece in the woods that attracted the young poet, from his lookout above. But Longfellow had felt in the rhythm of these earliest poems the tide-flow of his future, and Hawthorne had as yet hardly found his appropriate element. In 1828, however, three years after graduating, he published an anonymous prose romance called "Fanshawe," much more nearly approaching a novel than his later books. It was issued at Boston, by Marsh and Capen; but so successful was Hawthorne in his attempt to exterminate the edition, that not half a dozen copies are now known to be extant. We have seen that he read and admired Godwin and Scott, as a boy. "Kenilworth," "The Pirate," "The Fortunes of Nigel," "Peveril of the Peak," "Quentin Durward," and others of Scott's novel; had appeared while Hawthorne was at Bowdoin; and the author of "Waverley" had become the autocrat of fiction. In addition to this, there is an inbred analogy between New England and Scotland. In the history and character of the people of each country are seen the influence of Calvin, and of a common-school system. Popular education was ingrafted upon the policy of both states at about the same period, and in both it has had the same result, making of the farming-class a body of energetic, thrifty, intelligent, and aspiring people. Scotland and New England alike owe some of their best as well as their least attractive traits to bitter climate and a parsimonious soil; and the rural population of either is pushed into emigration by the scanty harvests at home. It is not a little singular that the Yankee and the canny Scot should each stand as a butt for the wit of his neighbors, while each has a shrewdness all his own. The Scotch, it is true, are said to be unusually impervious to a joke, while our Down-Easters are perhaps the most recondite and many-sided of American humorists. And, though many of the conditions of the two regions are alike, the temperaments of the two races are of course largely dissimilar. The most salient distinction, perhaps, is that of the Scotch being a musical and dancing nation; something from which the New-Englanders are fatally far removed. As if to link him with his Puritan ancestry and stamp him beyond mistake as a Pilgrim and not a Covenanter, Hawthorne was by nature formed with little ear for music. It seems strange that a man who could inform the verses on "Moonlight," just quoted, with so delicate a melody, and never admitted an ill-timed strain or jarring cadence into his pure, symphonious prose, should scarcely be able to distinguish one tune from another. Yet such was the case. But this was owing merely to the absence of the _musical_ instinct. He would listen with rapture to the unaccompanied voice; and I have been always much touched by a little incident recorded in the "English Note-Books": "There is a woman who has several times passed through this Hanover Street in which we live, stopping occasionally to sing songs under the windows; and last evening ... she came and sang 'Kathleen O'Moore' richly and sweetly. Her voice rose up out of the dim, chill street, and made our hearts throb in unison with it as we sat in our comfortable drawing-room. I never heard a voice that touched me more deeply. Somebody told her to go away, and she stopped like a nightingale suddenly shot." Hawthorne goes on to speak with wonder of the waste of such a voice, "making even an unsusceptible heart vibrate like a harp-string"; and it is pleasant to know that Mrs. Hawthorne had the woman called within, from the street. So that his soul was open to sound. But the unmusicalness of New England, less marked now than formerly, is only a symbol, perhaps,--grievous that it should be so!--of the superior temperance of our race. For, by one of those strange oversights that human nature is guilty of, Scotland, in opening the door for song and dance and all the merry crew of mirth, seems to admit quite freely two vagabonds that have no business there, Squalor and Drunkenness. Yet notwithstanding this grave unlikeness between the two peoples, Hawthorne seems to have found a connecting clew, albeit unwittingly, when he remarked, as he did, on his first visit to Glasgow, that in spite of the poorer classes there excelling even those of Liverpool in filth and drunkenness, "they are a better looking people than the English (and this is true of all classes), more intelligent of aspect, with more regular, features." There is certainly one quality linking the two nations together which has not yet been commented on, in relation to Hawthorne; and this is the natural growth of the weird in the popular mind, both here and in Scotland. It is not needful to enter into this at all at length. In the chapter on Salem I have suggested some of the immediate factors of the weird element in Hawthorne's fiction; but it deserves remark that only Scott and Hawthorne, besides George Sand, among modern novelists, have used the supernatural with real skill and force; and Hawthorne has certainly infused it into his work by a more subtle and sympathetic gift than even the magic-loving Scotch romancer owned. After this digressive prelude, the reader will be ready to hear me announce that "Fanshawe" was a faint reflection from the young Salem recluse's mind of certain rays thrown across the Atlantic from Abbotsford. But this needs qualification. Hawthorne indeed admired Scott, when a youth; and after he had returned from abroad, in 1860, he fulfilled a tender purpose, formed on a visit to Abbotsford, of re-reading all the Waverley novels. Yet he had long before arrived at a ripe, unprejudiced judgment concerning him. The exact impression of his feeling appears in that delightfully humorous whimsey, "P.'s Correspondence," which contains the essence of the best criticism. [Footnote: See Mosses from an Old Manse, Vol. II.] In allusion to Abbotsford, Scott, he says, "whether in verse, prose, or architecture, could achieve but one thing, although that one in infinite variety." And he adds: "For my part, I can hardly regret that Sir Walter Scott had lost his consciousness of outward things before his works went out of vogue. It was good that he should forget his fame, rather than that fame should first have forgotten him. Were he still a writer, and as brilliant a one as ever, he could no longer maintain anything like the same position in literature. The world, nowadays, requires a more earnest purpose, a deeper moral, and a closer and homelier truth than he was qualified to supply it with. Yet who can be to the present generation even what Scott has been to the past?" Now, in "Fanshawe" there is something that reminds one of Sir Walter; but the very resemblance makes the essential unlikeness more apparent. The scene of the tale is laid at Harley College, "in an ancient, though not very populous settlement in a retired corner of one of the New England States." This, no doubt, is a reproduction of Bowdoin. Mr. Longfellow tells me that the descriptions of the seminary and of the country around it strongly suggest the Brunswick College. The President of Harley is a Dr. Melmoth, an amiable and simple old delver in learning, in a general way recalling Dominie Sampson, whose vigorous spouse rules him somewhat severely: their little bickerings supply a strain of farce indigenous to Scott's fictions, but quite unlike anything in Hawthorne's later work. A young lady, named Ellen Langton, daughter of an old friend of Dr. Melmoth's, is sent to Harley, to stay under his guardianship. Ellen is somewhat vaguely sketched, in the style of Scott's heroines; but this sentence ends with a trace of the young writer's quality: "If pen could give an adequate idea of Ellen Langton's beauty, it would achieve what pencil ... never could; for though the dark eyes might be painted, the pure and pleasant thoughts that peeped through them could only be seen and felt." This maiden the doctor once took into his study, to begin a course of modern languages with her; but she "having discovered an old romance among his heavy folios, contrived by the sweet charm of her voice to engage his attention," and quite beguiled him from severer studies. Naturally, she inthralls two young students at the college: one of whom is Edward Wolcott, a wealthy, handsome, generous, healthy young fellow from one of the seaport towns; and the other, Fanshawe, the hero, who is a poor but ambitious recluse, already passing into a decline through overmuch devotion to books and meditation. Fanshawe, though the deeper nature of the two, and intensely moved by his new passion, perceiving that a union between himself and Ellen could not be a happy one, resigns the hope of it from the beginning. But circumstances bring him into intimate relation with her. The real action of the book, after the preliminaries, takes up only some three days, and turns upon the attempt of a man named Butler to entice Ellen away under his protection, then marry her, and secure the fortune to which she is heiress. This scheme is partly frustrated by circumstances, and Butler's purpose towards Ellen then becomes a much more sinister one. From this she is rescued by Fanshawe; and, knowing that he loves her, but is concealing his passion, she gives him the opportunity and the right to claim her hand. For a moment, the rush of desire and hope is so great that he hesitates; then he refuses to take advantage of her generosity, and parts with her for the last time. Ellen becomes engaged to Wolcott, who had won her heart from the first; and Fanshawe, sinking into rapid consumption, dies before his class graduates. It is easy to see how the sources of emotion thus opened attracted Hawthorne. The noble and refined nature of Fanshawe, and the mingled craftiness, remorse, and ferocity of Butler, are crude embodiments of the same characteristics which he afterward treated in modified forms. They are the two poles, the extremes,--both of them remote and chilly,--of good and evil, from which the writer withdrew, after exploring them, into more temperate regions. The movement of these persons is visionary, and their personality faint. But I have marked a few characteristic portions of the book which suggest its tone. When the young lady's flight with the stranger actually takes place, young Wolcott and President Melmoth ride together in the pursuit, and at this point there occurs a dialogue which is certainly as laughable and is better condensed than most similar passages in Scott, whom it strongly recalls. A hint of Cervantes appears in it, too, which makes it not out of place to mention that Hawthorne studied "Don Quixote" in the original, soon after leaving college. * * * * * "'Alas, youth! these are strange times,' observed the President, 'when a doctor of divinity and an undergraduate set forth like a knight-errant and his squire, in search of a stray damsel. Methinks I am an epitome of the church militant, or a new species of polemical divinity. Pray Heaven, however, there be no encounter in store for us; for I utterly forgot to provide myself with weapons.' "'I took some thought for that matter, reverend knight,' replied Edward, whose imagination was highly tickled by Dr. Melmoth's chivalrous comparison. "'Ay, I see that you have girded on a sword,' said the divine. 'But wherewith shall I defend myself?--my hand being empty except of this golden-headed staff, the gift of Mr. Langton.' "'One of those, if you will accept it,' answered Edward, exhibiting a brace of pistols, 'will serve to begin the conflict, before you join the battle hand to hand.' "'Nay, I shall find little safety in meddling with that deadly instrument, since I know not accurately from which end proceeds the bullet,' said Dr. Melmoth. 'But were it not better, seeing we are so well provided with artillery, to betake ourselves, in the event of an encounter, to some stone-wall or other place of strength?' "'If I may presume to advise,' said the squire, 'you, as being most valiant and experienced, should ride forward, lance in hand (your long staff serving for a lance), while I annoy the enemy from afar.' "'Like Teucer behind the shield of Ajax,' interrupted Dr. Melmoth, 'or David with his stone and sling. No, no, young man; I have left unfinished in my study a learned treatise, important not only to the present age, but to posterity, for whose sakes I must take heed to my safety. But lo! who rides yonder?'" * * * * * In one place only does the author give full rein to his tragic power; but this is a vigorous burst, and remarkable also for its sure and trenchant analysis. During his escape with Ellen, Butler is moved to stop at a lonely hut inhabited by his mother, where he finds her dying; and, torn by the sight of her suffering while she raves and yearns for his presence, he makes himself known to her. * * * * * "At that unforgotten voice, the darkness burst away at once from her soul. She arose in bed, her eyes and her whole countenance beaming with joy, and threw her arms about his neck. A multitude of words seem struggling for utterance; but they gave place to a low moaning sound, and then to the silence of death. The one moment of happiness, that recompensed years of sorrow, had been her last.... As he [Butler] looked, the expression of enthusiastic joy that parting life had left upon the features faded gradually away, and the countenance, though no longer wild, assumed the sadness which it had worn through a long course of grief and pain. On beholding this natural consequence of death, the thought perhaps occurred to him that her soul, no longer dependent on the imperfect means of intercourse possessed by mortals, had communed with his own, and become acquainted with all its guilt and misery. He started from the bedside and covered his face with his hands, as if to hide it from those dead eyes.... But his deep repentance for the misery he had brought upon his parent did not produce in him a resolution to do wrong no more. The sudden consciousness of accumulated guilt made him desperate. He felt as if no one had thenceforth a claim to justice or compassion at his hands, when his neglect and cruelty had poisoned his mother's life, and hastened her death." * * * * * What separates this story from the rest of Hawthorne's works is an intricate plot, with passages of open humor, and a rather melodramatic tone in the conclusion. These are the result in part of the prevalent fashion of romance, and in part of a desire to produce effects not quite consonant with his native bent. The choice of the title, "Fanshawe," too, seems to show a deference to the then prevalent taste for brief and quaint-sounding names; and the motto, "Wilt thou go on with me?" from Southey, placed on his title-page, together with quotations at the heads of chapters, belongs to a past fashion. Fanshawe and Butler are powerful conceptions, but they are so purely embodiments of passion as to assume an air of unreality. Butler is like an evil wraith, and Fanshawe is as evanescent as a sad cloud in the sky, touched with the first pale light of morning. Fanshawe, with his pure heart and high resolves, represents that constant aspiration toward lofty moral truth which marked Hawthorne's own mind, and Butler is a crude example of the sinful spirit which he afterward analyzed under many forms. The verbal style has few marks of the maturer mould afterward impressed on it, except that there is the preference always noticeable in Hawthorne for Latin wording. Two or three phrases, however, show all the limpidness and ease for which he gained fame subsequently. For instance, when Fanshawe is first surprised by his love for Ellen, he returns to his room to study: "The books were around him which had hitherto been to him like those fabled volumes of magic, from which the reader could not turn away his eye, till death were the consequence of his studies." This, too, is a pretty description of Ellen: "Terror had at first blanched her as white as a lily.... Shame next bore sway; and her blushing countenance, covered by her slender white fingers, might fantastically be compared to a variegated rose, with its alternate stripes of white and red." Its restraint is perhaps the most remarkable trait of the novel; for though this comes of timidity, it shows that Hawthorne, whether this be to his advantage or not, was not of the order of young genius which begins with tumid and excessive exhibition of power. His early acquaintance with books, breeding a respect for literary form, his shy, considerate modes of dealing with any intellectual problem or question requiring judgment, and the formal taste of the period in letters, probably conspired to this end. IV. TWILIGHT OF THE TWICE-TOLD TALES. 1828-1838. We have now reached the point where the concealed foundations of Hawthorne's life terminate, and the final structure begins to appear above the surface, like the topmost portion of a coral island slowly rising from the depths of a solitary ocean. When he left college, his friends Cilley and Pierce entered into law, the gateway to politics; Bridge returned to his father's estate at Bridgton, to engage later in a large enterprise there; and other classmates took up various activities in the midst of other men; but for Hawthorne no very clear path presented itself. Literature had not yet attained, in the United States, the rank of a distinct and powerful profession. Fifteen years before, Brockden Brown had died prematurely after a hapless struggle, worn out with overwork,--the first man who had undertaken to live by writing in this country since its colonization. "The North American Review," indeed, in Boston, was laying the corner-stone of a vigorous periodical literature; and in this year of 1825 William Cullen Bryant had gone to New York to edit "The New York Review," after publishing at Cambridge his first volume of poetry, "The Ages." Irving was an author of recent but established fame, who was drawing chiefly from the rich supplies of European manners, legend, and history; while Cooper, in his pleasant Pioneer-land beside Otsego Lake, had begun to make clear his claim to a wide domain of native and national fiction. But to a young man of reserved temper, having few or no friends directly connected with publication, and living in a sombre, old-fashioned town, isolated as all like towns were before the era of railroads, the avenue to publicity and a definite literary career was dark and devious enough. I suppose it was after his venture of "Fanshawe," that he set about the composition of some shorter stories which he called "Seven Tales of my Native Land." [Footnote: The motto prefixed to these was, "We are seven."] His sister, to whom he read these, has told me that they were very beautiful, but no definite recollection of them remains to her, except that some of them related to witchcraft, and some to the sea, being stories of pirates and privateers. In one of these latter were certain verses, beginning,-- "The pirates of the sea, they were a fearful race." Hawthorne has described in "The Devil in Manuscript," while depicting a young author about to destroy his manuscript, his own vexations in trying to find a publisher for these attempts. "They have been offered to some seventeen booksellers. It would make you stare to read their answers.... One man publishes nothing but school-books; another has five novels already under examination; ... another gentleman is just giving up business on purpose, I verily believe, to escape publishing my book.... In short, of all the seventeen booksellers, only one has vouchsafed even to read my tales; and he--a literary dabbler himself, I should judge--has the impertinence to criticise them, proposing what he calls vast improvements, and concluding ... that he will not be concerned on any terms.... But there does seem to be one honest man among these seventeen unrighteous ones; and he tells me fairly that no American publisher will meddle with an American work, seldom if by a known writer, and never if by a new one, unless at the writer's risk." He indeed had the most discouraging sort of search for a publisher; but at last a young printer of Salem promised to undertake the work. His name was Ferdinand Andrews; and he was at one time half-owner with Caleb Cushing of an establishment from which they issued "The Salem Gazette," in 1822, the same journal in which Hawthorne published various papers at a later date, when Mr. Caleb Foote was its editor. Andrews was ambitious, and evidently appreciative of his young townsman's genius; but he delayed issuing the "Seven Tales" so long that the author, exasperated, recalled the manuscript. Andrews, waiting only for better business prospects, was loath to let them go; but Hawthorne insisted, and at last the publisher sent word, "Mr. Hawthorne's manuscript awaits his orders." The writer received it and burned it, to the chagrin of Andrews, who had hoped to bring out many works by the same hand. This, at the time, must have been an incident of incalculable and depressing importance to Hawthorne, and the intense emotion it caused may be guessed from the utterances of the young writer in the sketch just alluded to, though he has there veiled the affair in a light film of sarcasm. The hero of that scene is called Oberon, one of the feigned names which Hawthorne himself used at times in contributing to periodicals. "'What is more potent than fire!' said he, in his gloomiest tone. 'Even thought, invisible and incorporeal as it is, cannot escape it.... All that I had accomplished, all that I planned for future years, has perished by one common ruin, and left only this heap of embers! The deed has been my fate. And what remains? A weary and aimless life; a long repentance of this hour; and at last an obscure grave, where they will bury and forget me!'" There is also an allusion to the tales founded on witchcraft: "I could believe, if I chose," says Oberon, "that there is a devil in this pile of blotted papers. You have read them, and know what I mean,--that conception in which I endeavored to embody the character of a fiend, as represented in our traditions and the written records of witchcraft. O, I have a horror of what was created in my own brain, and shudder at the manuscripts in which I gave that dark idea a sort of material existence!' You remember how the hellish thing used to suck away the happiness of those who ... subjected themselves to his power." This is curious, as showing the point from which Hawthorne had resolved to treat the theme. He had instinctively perceived that the only way to make the witchcraft delusion available in fiction was to accept the witch as a fact, an actual being, and expend his art upon developing the abnormal character; while other writers, who have attempted to use the subject for romantic ends, have uniformly taken the historical view, and sought to extract their pathos from the effect of the delusion on innocent persons. The historical view is that of intelligent criticism; but Hawthorne's effort was the harbinger and token of an original imagination. After the publication of "Fanshawe" and the destruction of his "Seven Tales," Hawthorne found himself advanced not so much as by a single footstep on the road to fame. "Fame!" he exclaims, in meditation; "some very humble persons in a town may be said to possess it,--as the penny-post, the town-crier, the constable,--and they are known to everybody; while many richer, more intellectual, worthier persons are unknown by the majority of their fellow-citizens." But the fame that he desired was, I think, only that which is the recognition by the public that a man is on the way to truth. An outside acknowledgment of this is invaluable even to the least vain of authors, because it assures him that, in following his own inner impulse through every doubt and discouragement, he has not been pursuing a chimera, and gives him new heart for the highest enterprises of which he is capable. To attain this, amid the peculiar surroundings of his life, was difficult enough. At that time, Salem society was more peculiarly constituted than it has been in later years. A strong circle of wealthy families maintained rigorously the distinctions of class; their entertainments were splendid, their manners magnificent, and the fame of the beautiful women born amongst them has been confirmed by a long succession reaching into the present day. They prescribed certain fashions, customs, punctilios, to disregard which was social exile for the offending party; and they were divided even among themselves, I am told, by the most inveterate jealousies. It is said that certain people would almost have endured the thumb-screw rather than meet and speak to others. There seems to be good authority for believing that Hawthorne could have entered this circle, had he so chosen. He had relatives who took an active part within it; and it appears that there was a disposition among some of the fashionable coterie to show him particular favor, and that advances were made by them with the wish to draw him out. But one can conceive that it would not be acceptable to him to meet them on any but terms of entire equality. The want of ample supplies of money, which was one of the results of the fallen fortunes of his family, made this impossible; those who held sway were of older date in the place than some of the Hawthornes, and, like many another long-established stock, they had a conviction that, whatever their outward circumstances might be, a certain intrinsic superiority remained theirs. They were, like the lady of Hawthorne blood mentioned in the "American Note-Books," "proud of being proud." The Hawthornes, it was said, were as unlike other people as the Jews were to Gentiles; and the deep-rooted reserve which enveloped Hawthorne himself was a distinct family trait. So that, feeling himself to be in an unfair position, he doubtless found in these facts enough to cause him acute irritation of that sort which only very young or very proud and shrinking men can know. Besides this, the altered circumstances of his line, and his years in Maine, had brought him acquainted with humbler phases of life, and had doubtless developed in him a sympathy with simpler and less lofty people than these magnates. His father had been a Democrat, and loyalty to his memory, as well as the very pride just spoken of, conspired to lead him to that unpopular side. This set up another barrier between himself and the rich and powerful Whigs, for political feeling was almost inconceivably more bitter then than now. Thus there arose within him an unquiet, ill-defined, comfortless antipathy that must have tortured him with wearisome distress; and certainly shut him out from the sympathy and appreciation which, if all the conditions had been different, might have been given him by sincere and competent admirers. So little known among his own townsfolk, it is not to be wondered at that no encouraging answer reached him from more distant communities. In his own home there was the faith which only love can give, but outside of it a chill drove his hopes and ardors back upon himself and turned them into despairs. His relatives, having seen him educated by the aid of his uncle, and now arrived at maturity, expected him to take his share in practical affairs. But the very means adopted to train him for a career had settled his choice of one in a direction perhaps not wholly expected; all cares and gains of ordinary traffic seemed sordid and alien to him. Yet a young man just beginning his career, with no solid proof of his own ability acquired, cannot but be sensitive to criticism from those who have gained a right to comment by their own special successes. As he watched these slow and dreary years pass by, from his graduation in 1825 to the time when he first came fully before the public in 1837, he must often have been dragged down by terrible fears that perhaps the fairest period of life was being wasted, losing forever the chance of fruition. "I sat down by the wayside of life," he wrote, long after, "like a man under enchantment, and a shrubbery sprang up around me, and the bushes grew to be saplings, and the saplings became trees, until no exit appeared possible, through the entangling depths of my obscurity." Judge in what a silence and solitary self-communing the time must have passed, to leave a thought like this: "To think, as the sun goes down, what events have happened in the course of the day,--events of ordinary occurrence; as, the clocks have struck, the dead have been buried." Or this: "A recluse like myself, or a prisoner, to measure time by the progress of sunshine through his chamber." His Note-Books show how the sense of unreality vexed and pursued him; and how the sadness and solemnity of life returned upon him again and again; and how he clothed these dark visitants of his brain with the colors of imagination, and turned them away from him in the guise of miraculous fantasies. He talks with himself of writing "the journal of a human heart for a single day, in ordinary circumstances. The lights and shadows that flit across it, its internal vicissitudes." But this is almost precisely what his printed Note-Books have revealed to us. Only now and then do we get precisely the thought that is passing through his mind at the moment; it more often throws upon the page a reflected image,--some strange and subtle hint for a story, the germs of delicate fabrics long afterward matured, some merry or sad conceit, some tender yet piercing inference,--like the shadows of clouds passing quickly across a clear sky, and casting momentary glooms, and glances of light, on the ground below. These journals do not begin until a date seven years after "Fanshawe" was published; but it is safe to assume that they mirror pretty closely the general complexion of the intervening years. His mode of life during this period was fitted to nurture his imagination, but must have put the endurance of his nerves to the severest test. The statement that for several years "he never saw the sun," is entirely an error; but it is true that he seldom chose to walk in the town except at night, and it is said that he was extremely fond of going to fires if they occurred after dark. In summer he was up shortly after sunrise, and would go down to bathe in the sea. The morning was chiefly given to study, the afternoon to writing, and in the evening he would take long walks, exploring the coast from Gloucester to Marblehead and Lynn,--a range of many miles. Or perhaps he would pace the streets of the town, unseen but observing, gathering material for something in the vein of his delicious "Night Sketches." "After a time," he writes, "the visions vanish, and will not appear again at my bidding. Then, it being nightfall, a gloomy sense of unreality depresses my spirits, and impels me to venture out before the clock shall strike bedtime, to satisfy myself that the world is not made of such shadowy materials as have busied me throughout the day. A dreamer may dwell so long among fantasies, that the things without him will seem as unreal as those within." Or, if he chose a later hour, he might go abroad to people the deserted thoroughfares with wilder phantoms. Sometimes he took the day for his rambles, wandering perhaps over Endicott's ancient Orchard Farm and among the antique houses and grassy cellars of old Salem village, the witchcraft ground; or losing himself among the pines of Montserrat and in the silence of the Great Pastures, or strolling along the beaches to talk with old sailors and fishermen. His tramps along the Manchester and Beverly shores or from Marblehead to Nahant were productive of such delicate tracings as "Footprints by the Sea-shore," or the dream-autobiography of "The Village Uncle." "Grudge me not the day," he says, in the former sketch, "that has been spent in seclusion, which yet was not solitude, since the great sea has been my companion, and the little sea-birds my friends, and the wind has told me his secrets, and airy shapes have flitted around my hermitage. Such companionship works an effect upon a man's character, as if he had been admitted to the society of creatures that are not mortal." This touches the inmost secret of those lonely, youthful years, which moulded the pure-hearted muser with ethereal, unsuspected fingers. Elsewhere, Hawthorne has given another glimpse into his interior life at this time: "This scene came into my fancy as I walked along a hilly road, on a starlight October evening; in the pure and bracing air I became all soul, and felt as if I could climb the sky, and run a race along the Milky Way. Here is another tale in which I wrapped myself during a dark and dreary night-ride in the month of March, till the rattling of the wheels and the voices of my companions seemed like faint sounds of a dream, and my visions a bright reality. That scribbled page describes shadows which I summoned to my bedside at midnight; they would not depart when I bade them; the gray dawn came, and found me wide awake and feverish, the victim of my own enchantments!" Susan, the imaginary wife in "The Village Uncle," is said to have had a prototype in the daughter of a Salem fisherman, whose wit and charm gave Hawthorne frequent amusement; and I suppose that not seldom he reaped delightful suggestions from his meetings with frank, unconscious, and individual people of tastes and life unlike his own. I have heard it told with a polite, self-satisfied scorn, that he was in the habit of visiting now and then a tavern patronized by 'longshore-men and nautical veterans, to listen to their talk. I can well believe it, for it is this sort of intercourse that a person of manly genius, with a republican fellow-feeling for the unrenowned, most covets. How well he gives the tone of these old sea-dogs, when he writes: "The blast will put in its word among their hoarse voices, and be understood by all of them!" It was this constant searching among the common types of men, and his ready sympathy with them, refined as it was hearty, that stored his mind with a variety of accurate impressions which afterward surprised observers, in a man of habits so retired. His uncles, the Mannings, were connected with extensive stage-coach lines at this time, and Hawthorne seems to have used these as antennae to bring himself in contact with new and nutritive regions and people. A letter, probably written in 1830, which I do not feel at liberty to quote entire, tells something of a trip that he took with Samuel Manning through a part of Connecticut and the Connecticut valley. The extracts that follow give a glimpse of the fresh and alert interest he felt about everything; and I regard them as very important in showing the obverse of that impression of unhealthy solitude which has been so generally received from accounts of Hawthorne hitherto published. "We did not leave New Haven till last Saturday ... and we were forced to halt for the night at Cheshire, a village about fifteen miles from New Haven. The next day being Sunday, we made a Sabbath day's journey of seventeen miles, and put up at Farmington. As we were wearied with rapid travelling, we found it impossible to attend divine service, which was (of course) very grievous to us both. In the evening, however, I went to a Bible class with a very polite and agreeable gentleman, whom I afterward discovered to be a strolling tailor of very questionable habits.... We are now at Deerfield (though I believe my letter is dated Greenfield) ... with our faces northward; nor shall I marvel much if your Uncle Sam pushes on to Canada, unless we should meet with two or three bad taverns in succession.... "I meet with many marvellous adventures. At New Haven I observed a gentleman staring at me with great earnestness, after which he went into the bar-room, I suppose to inquire who I might be. Finally, he came up to me and said that as I bore a striking resemblance to a family of Stanburys, he was induced to inquire if I was connected with them. I was sorry to be obliged to answer in the negative. At another place they took me for a lawyer in search of a place to settle, and strongly recommended their own village. Moreover, I heard some of the students at Yale College conjecturing that I was an Englishman, and to-day, as I was standing without my coat at the door of a tavern, a man came up to me, and asked me for some oats for his horse." It was during this trip, I have small doubt, that he found the scenery, and perhaps the persons, for that pretty interlude, "The Seven Vagabonds." The story is placed not far from Stamford, and the conjurer in it says, "I am taking a trip northward, this warm weather, across the Connecticut first, and then up through Vermont, and may be into Canada before the fall." The narrator himself queries by what right he came among these wanderers, and furnishes himself an answer which suggests that side of his nature most apt to appear in these journeys: "The free mind that preferred its own folly to another's wisdom; the open spirit that found companions everywhere; above all, the restless impulse that had so often made me wretched in the midst of enjoyments: these were my claims to be of their society." "If there be a faculty," he also writes, "which I possess more perfectly than most men, it is that of throwing myself mentally into situations foreign to my own, and detecting with a cheerful eye the desirableness of each." There is also one letter of 1831, sent back during an expedition in New Hampshire, which supplies the genesis of another Twice-Told Tale, "The Canterbury Pilgrims." "I walked to the Shaker village yesterday [he says], and was shown over the establishment, and dined there with a squire and a doctor, also of the world's people. On my arrival, the first thing I saw was a jolly old Shaker carrying an immense decanter of their superb cider; and as soon as I told him my business, he turned out a tumblerful and gave me. It was as much as a common head could clearly carry. Our dining-room was well furnished, the dinner excellent, and the table attended by a middle-aged Shaker lady, good looking and cheerful.... This establishment is immensely rich. Their land extends two or three miles along the road, and there are streets of great houses painted yellow and tipt with red.... On the whole, they lead a good and comfortable life, and, if it were not for their ridiculous ceremonies, a man could not do a wiser thing than to join them. Those whom I conversed with were intelligent, and appeared happy. I spoke to them about becoming a member of their society, but have come to no decision on that point. "We have had a pleasant journey enough.... I make innumerable acquaintances, and sit down on the doorsteps with judges, generals, and all the potentates of the land, discoursing about the Salem murder [that of Mr. White], the cow-skinning of Isaac Hill, the price of hay, and the value of horse-flesh. The country is very uneven, and your Uncle Sam groans bitterly whenever we come to the foot of a low hill; though this ought to make me groan rather than him, as I have to get out and trudge every one of them." The "Clippings with a Chisel" point to some further wanderings, to Martha's Vineyard; and an uncollected sketch reveals the fact that he had been to Niagara. It was probably then that he visited Ticonderoga; [Footnote: A brief sketch of the fortress is included in The Snow Image volume of the Works.] but not till some years later that he saw New York. With these exceptions, and a trip to Washington before going to Liverpool in 1853, every day of his life up to that date was passed within New England. In "The Toll-Gatherer's Day" one sees the young observer at work upon the details of an ordinary scene near home. The "small square edifice which stands between shore and shore in the midst of a long bridge," spanning an arm of the sea, refers undoubtedly to the bridge from Salem to Beverly. But how lightly his spirit hovers over the stream of actual life, scarcely touching it before springing up again, like a sea-bird on the crest of a wave! Nothing could be more accurate and polished than his descriptions and his presentation of the actual facts; but his fancy rises resilient from these to some dreamy, far-seeing perception or gentle moral inference. The visible human pageant is only of value to him as it suggests the viewless host of heavenly shapes that hang above it like an idealizing mirage. His attitude at this time recalls a suggestion of his own in "Sights from a Steeple": "The most desirable mode of existence might be that of a spiritualized Paul Pry, hovering invisible round man and woman, witnessing their deeds, searching into their hearts, borrowing brightness from their felicity, and shade from their sorrow, and retaining no emotion peculiar to himself." He had the longing which every creative mind must feel, to mix with other beings and share to the utmost the possibilities of human weal or woe, suppressing his own experience so far as to make himself a transparent medium for the emotions of mankind; but he still lacked a definite connection with the multifarious drama of human fellowship; he could not catch his cue and play his answering part, and therefore gave voice to a constantly murmurous, moralizing "aside." He delights to let the current of action flow around him and beside him; he warms his heart in it; but when he again withdraws by himself, it is with him as with the old toll-gatherer at close of day, "mingling reveries of Heaven with remembrances of earth, the whole procession of mortal travellers, all the dusty pilgrimage which he has witnessed, seems like a flitting show of phantoms for his thoughtful soul to muse upon." "What would a man do," he asks himself, in his journal, "if he were compelled to live always in the sultry heat of society, and could never bathe himself in cool solitude?" As yet, this bracing influence of quietude, so essential to his well-being, fascinates him, and he cannot shake off its influence so far as to enter actively and for personal interests into any of the common pursuits even of the man who makes a business of literature. Yet nothing impresses him more than the fact that every one carries a solitude with him, wherever he goes, like a shadow. Twice, with an interval of three years between, this idea recurs in the form of a hint for romance. "Two lovers or other persons, on the most private business, to appoint a meeting in what they supposed to be a place of the utmost solitude, and to find it thronged with people." The idea implied is, that this would in fact be the completest privacy they could have wished. "The situation of a man in the midst of a crowd, yet as completely in the power of another, life and all, as if they two were in the deepest solitude." This contradiction between the _apparent_ openness that must rule one's conduct among men, and the real secrecy that may coexist with it, even when one is most exposed to the gaze of others, excites in his mind a whole train of thought based on the falsity of appearances. If a man can be outwardly open and inwardly reserved in a good sense, he can be so in a bad sense; so, too, he may have the external air of great excellence and purity, while internally he is foul and unfaithful. This discovery strikes our perfectly sincere and true-hearted recluse with intense and endless horror. He tests it, by turning it innumerable ways, and imagining all sorts of situations in which such contradictions of appearance and reality might be illustrated. At one time, he conceives of a friend who should be true by day, and false at night. At another he suggests: "Our body to be possessed by two different spirits, so that half the visage shall express one mood, and the other half another." "A man living a wicked life in one place and simultaneously a virtuous and religious one in another." Then he perceives that this same uncertainty and contradiction affects the lightest and seemingly most harmless things in the world. "The world is so sad and solemn," he muses, "that things meant in jest are liable, by an overpowering influence, to become dreadful earnest." And then he applies this, as in the following: "A virtuous but giddy girl to attempt to play a trick on a man. He sees what she is about, and contrives matters so that she throws herself completely into his power, and is ruined,--all in jest." Likewise, the most desirable things, by this same law of contradiction, often prove the least satisfactory. Thus: "A person or family long desires some particular good. At last it comes in such profusion as to be the great pest of their lives." And this is equally true, he finds, whether the desired thing be sought in order to gratify a pure instinct or a wrong and revengeful one. "As an instance, merely, suppose a woman sues her lover for breach of promise, and gets the money by instalments, through a long series of years. At last, when the miserable victim were utterly trodden down, the triumpher would have become a very devil of evil passions,--they having overgrown his whole nature; so that a far greater evil would have come upon himself than on his victim." This theme of self-punished revenge, as we know, was afterward thoroughly wrought out in "The Scarlet Letter." Another form in which the thought of this pervading falsehood in earthly affairs comes to him is the frightful fancy of people being poisoned by communion-wine. Thus does the insincerity and corruption of man, the lie that is hidden in nearly every life and almost every act, rise and thrust itself before him, whichever way he turns, like a serpent in his path. He is in the position of the father confessor of whom he at one time thinks, and of "his reflections on character, and the contrast of the inward man with the outward, as he looks around his congregation, all whose secret sins are known to him." But Hawthorne does not let this hissing serpent either rout him or poison him. He is determined to visit the ways of life, to find the exit of the maze, and so tries every opening, unalarmed. The serpent is in all: it proves to be a deathless, large-coiled hydra, encircling the young explorer's virgin soul, as it does that of every pure aspirer, and trying to drive him back on himself, with a sting in his heart that shall curse him with a life-long venom. It does, indeed, force him to recoil, but not with any mortal wound. He retires in profound sorrow, acknowledging that earth holds nothing perfect, that his dream of ideal beings leading an ideal life, which, in spite of the knowledge of evil, he has been cherishing for so many years, is a dream to be fulfilled in the hereafter alone. He confesses to himself that "there is evil in every human heart, which may remain latent, perhaps, through the whole of life; but circumstances may rouse it to activity." It is not a new discovery; but from the force with which it strikes him, we may guess the strength of his aspiration, the fine temper of his faith in the good and the beautiful. To be driven to this dismal conclusion is for him a source of inexpressible dismay, because he had trusted so deeply in the possibility of reaching some brighter truth. No; not a new discovery;--but one who approaches it with so much sensibility _feels_ it to be new, with all the fervor which the most absolute novelty could rouse. This is the deepest and the true originality, to possess such intensity of feeling that the oldest truth, when approached by our own methods, shall be full of a primitive impressiveness. But, in the midst of the depression born of his immense sorrow over sin, Hawthorne found compensations. First, in the query which he puts so briefly: "The good deeds in an evil life,--the generous, noble, and excellent actions done by people habitually wicked,--to ask what is to become of them." This is the motive which has furnished novelists for the last half-century with their most stirring and pathetic effects. It is a sort of escape, a safety-valve for the hot fire of controversy on the soul's fate, and offers in its pertinent indefiniteness a vast solace to those who are trying to balance the bewildering account of virtue with sin. Hawthorne found that here was a partial solution of the problem, and he enlarged upon it, toward the end of his life, in "The Marble Faun." But it was a second and deeper thought that furnished him the chief compensation. In one of the "Twice-Told Tales," "Fancy's Show-Box," he deals with the question, how far the mere thought of sin, the incipient desire to commit it, may injure the soul. After first strongly picturing the reality of certain sinful impulses in a man's mind, which had never been carried out,--"A scheme of guilt," he argues, taking up the other side, "till it be put in execution, greatly resembles a train of incidents in a projected tale.... Thus a novel-writer, or a dramatist, in creating the villain of romance, and fitting him with evil deeds, and the villain of actual life in projecting crimes that will be perpetrated, may almost meet each other half-way between reality and fancy. It is not until the crime is accomplished that guilt clinches its gripe upon the heart, and claims it for its own. Then, and not before, sin is actually felt and acknowledged, and, if unaccompanied by repentance, grows a thousand-fold more virulent by its self-consciousness. Be it considered, also, that men often overestimate their capacity for evil. At a distance, while its attendant circumstances do not press upon their notice, its results are dimly seen, they can bear to contemplate it.... In truth, there is no such thing in man's nature as a settled and full resolve, either for good or evil, except at the very moment of execution. Let us hope, therefore, that all the dreadful consequences of sin will not be incurred, unless the act have set its seal upon the thought. Yet ... _man must not disclaim his brotherhood, even with the guiltiest_, since, though his hand be clean, his heart has surely been polluted by the flitting phantoms of iniquity." That is, purity is too spotless a thing to exist in absolute perfection in a human being, who must often feel at least the dark flush of passionate thoughts falling upon him, however blameless of life he may be. From this lofty conception of purity comes that equally noble humility of always feeling "his brotherhood, even with the guiltiest." What more logical issue from the Christian idea, what more exquisitely tender rendering of it than this? "Let the whole world be cleansed, or not a man or woman of us can be clean!" was his exclamation, many years later, in that English workhouse which he describes in a heart-rending chapter of "Our Old Home" called "Outside Glimpses of English Poverty." And it was then that he revealed the vast depth and the reality of his human sympathy toward the wretched and loathsome little foundling child that silently sued to him for kindness, till he took it up and caressed it as tenderly as if he had been its father. Armed with these two perceptions, of the good that still persists in evil persons, and the deep charity which every one must feel towards even the most abject fellow-being, Hawthorne moves forth again to trace the maze; and lo, the serpent drops down, cowering. He has found a charm that robs sin and crime of their deadly hurt, and can handle them without danger. It is said by some that Hawthorne treats wrong and corruption too shrinkingly, and his mood of never-lessened and acute sensibility touching them is contrasted with that of "virile" writers like Balzac and George Sand. But these incline to make a menagerie of life, thrusting their heads into the very lion's mouth, or boldly embracing the snake of sin. They are indeed superior in strong dramatic and realistic effects; but, unvicious as may be their aim, they are not filled with a robust morality: they deliberately choose unclean elements to heighten the interest,--albeit using such elements with magnificent strength and skill. Let us be grateful that Hawthorne does not so covet the applause of the clever club-man or of the unconscious vulgarian, as to junket about in caravan, carrying the passions with him in gaudy cages, and feeding them with raw flesh; grateful that he never loses the archangelic light of pure, divine, dispassionate wrath, in piercing the dragon! We see now how, in this early term of probation, he was finding a philosophy and an unsectarian religiousness, which ever stirred below the clear surface of his language like the bubbling spring at bottom of a forest pool. It has been thought that Hawthorne developed late. But the most striking thing about the "Twice-Told Tales" and the first entries in the "American Note-Books" is their evidence of a calm and mellow maturity. These stories are like the simple but well-devised theme which a musician prepares as the basis of a whole composition: they show the several tendencies which underlie all the subsequent works. First, there are the scenes from New England history,--"Endicott and the Red Cross," "The Maypole of Merry Mount," "The Gray Champion," the "Tales of the Province House." Then we have the psychological vein, in "The Prophetic Pictures," "The Minister's Black Veil," "Dr. Heidegger," "Fancy's Show-Box"; and along with this the current of delicate essay-writing, as in "The Haunted Mind," and "Sunday at Home." "Little Annie's Ramble," again, foreshadows his charming children's tales. It is rather remarkable that he should thus have sounded, though faintly, the whole diapason in his first works. Moreover, he had already at this time attained a style at once flowing and large in its outline, and masterly in its minuteness. But this maturity was not won without deep suffering and long-deferred hope. If actual contact with men resulted in such grave and sorrowful reflection as we have traced, how drearily trying must have been the climaxes of solitary thought after a long session of seclusion! And much the larger portion of his time was consumed amid an absolute silence, a privacy unbroken by intimate confidences and rife with exhausting and depressing reactions from intense imagination and other severe intellectual exercise. Not only must the repression of this period have amounted at times to positive anguish, but there was also the perplexing perception that his life's fairest possibilities were still barren. "Every individual has a place in the world, and is important to it in some respects, whether he chooses to be so or not." So runs one of the extracts from the "American Note-Books"; and now and then we get from the same source a glimpse of the haunting sense that he is missing his fit relation to the rest of the race, the question whether his pursuit was not in some way futile like all the human pursuits he had noticed,--whether it was not to be nipped by the same perversity and contradiction that seemed to affect all things mundane. Here is one of his proposed plots, which turns an inner light upon his own frame of mind: "Various good and desirable things to be presented to a young man, and offered to his acceptance,--as a friend, a wife, a fortune; but he to refuse them all, suspecting that it is merely a delusion. Yet all to be real, and he to be told so when too late." Is this not, in brief, what he conceives may yet be the story of his own career? Another occurs, in the same relation: "A man tries to be happy in love; he cannot sincerely give his heart, and the affair seems all a dream. In domestic life the same; in politics, a seeming patriot: but still he is sincere, and all seems like a theatre." These items are the merest indicia of a whole history of complex emotions, which made this epoch one of continuous though silent and unseen struggle. In a Preface prefixed to the tales, in 1851, the author wrote: "They are the memorials of very tranquil and not unhappy years." Tranquil they of course were; and to the happy and successful man of forty-seven, the vexing moods and dragging loneliness of that earlier period would seem "not unhappy," because he could then see all the good it had contained. I cannot agree with Edwin Whipple, who says of them, "There was audible to the delicate ear a faint and muffled growl of personal discontent, which showed they were not mere exercises of penetrating imaginative analysis, but had in them the morbid vitality of a despondent mood." For this applies to only one of the number, "The Ambitious Guest." Nor do I find in them the "misanthropy" which he defines at some length. On the contrary, they are, as the author says, "his attempts to open an intercourse with the world," incited by an eager sympathy, but also restrained by a stern perception of right and wrong. Yet I am inclined to adhere to the grave view of his inner life just sketched. When his friend Miss Peabody first penetrated his retirement, his pent-up sympathies flowed forth in a way that showed how they had longed for relief. He returned constantly to the discussion of his peculiar mode of living, as if there could be no understanding between himself and another, until this had been cleared up and set aside. Among other things, he spoke of a dream by which he was beset, that he was walking abroad, and that all the houses were mirrors which reflected him a thousand times and overwhelmed him with mortification. This gives a peculiar insight into his sensitive condition. The noiseless, uneventful weeks slipped by, each day disguising itself in exact semblance of its fellow, like a file of mischievous maskers. Hawthorne sat in his little room under the eaves reading, studying, voicelessly communing with himself through his own journal, or--mastered by some wild suggestion or mysterious speculation--feeling his way through the twilight of dreams, into the dusky chambers of that house of thought whose haunted interior none but himself ever visited. He had little communication with even the members of his family. Frequently his meals were brought and left at his locked door, and it was not often that the four inmates of the old Herbert Street mansion met in family circle. He never read his stories aloud to his mother and sisters, as might be imagined from the picture which Mr. Fields draws of the young author reciting his new productions to his listening family; though, when they met, he sometimes read older literature to them. It was the custom in this household for the several members to remain very much by themselves; the three ladies were perhaps nearly as rigorous recluses as himself; and, speaking of the isolation which reigned among them, Hawthorne once said, "We do not even _live_ at our house!" But still the presence of this near and gentle feminine element is not to be underrated as forming a very great compensation in the cold and difficult morning of Hawthorne's life. If the week-day could not lure him from his sad retreat, neither could the Sunday. He had the right to a pew in the First Church, which his family had held since 1640, but he seldom went to service there after coming from college. His religion was supplied from sources not always opened to the common scrutiny, and it never chanced that he found it essential to join any church. The chief resource against disappointment, the offset to the pain of so much lonely living and dark-veined meditation was, of course, the writing of tales. Never was a man's mind more truly a kingdom to him. This was the fascination that carried him through the weary waiting-time. Yet even that pleasure had a reverse side, to which the fictitious Oberon has no doubt given voice in these words: "You cannot conceive what an effect the composition of these tales has had upon me. I have become ambitious of a bubble, and careless of solid reputation. I am surrounding myself with shadows, which bewilder me by aping the realities of life. They have drawn me aside from the beaten path of the world, and led me into a strange sort of solitude ... where nobody wished for what I do, nor thinks or feels as I do." Alluding to this season of early obscurity to a friend who had done much to break it up, he once said, "I was like a person talking to himself in a dark room." To make his own reflection in a mirror the subject of a story was one of his projects then formed, which he carried out in the "Mosses." With that image of the dark room, and this suggested reflection in the mirror, we can rehabilitate the scene of which the broken lights and trembling shadows are strewn through the "Twice-Told Tales." Sober and weighty the penumbrous atmosphere in which the young creator sits; but how calm, thoughtful, and beautiful the dim vision of his face, lit by the sheltered radiance of ethereal fancies! Behind his own form we catch the movement of mysterious shapes,--men and women wearing aspects of joy or anger, calm or passionate, gentle and pitiable, or stern, splendid, and forbidding. It is not quite a natural twilight in which we behold these things; rather the awesome shadowiness of a partial eclipse; but gleams of the healthiest sunshine withal mingle in the prevailing tint, bringing reassurance, and receiving again a rarer value from the contrast. There are but few among the stories of this series afterward brought together by the author which are open to the charge of morbidness. In "The White Old Maid" an indefinable horror, giving the tale a certain shapelessness, crowds out the compensating brightness which in most cases is not wanting; perhaps, too, "The Ambitious Guest" leaves one with too hopeless a downfall at the end; and "The Wedding Knell" cannot escape a suspicion of disagreeable gloom. But these extremes are not frequent. The wonder is that Hawthorne's mind could so often and so airily soar above the shadows that at this time hung about him; that he should nearly always suggest a philosophy so complete, so gently wholesome, and so penetrating as that which he mixes with even the bitterest distillations of his dreams. Nor is the sadness of his tone disordered or destructive, more than it is selfish; he does not inculcate despair, nor protest against life and fate, nor indulge in gloomy or weak self-pity. The only direct exposition of his own case is contained in a sketch, "The Journal of a Solitary Man," not reprinted during his life. One extract from this I will make, because it sums up, though more plaintively than was his wont, Hawthorne's view of his own life at this epoch:-- "It is hard to die without one's happiness; to none more so than myself, whose early resolution it had been to partake largely of the joys of life, but never to be burdened with its cares. Vain philosophy! The very hardships of the poorest laborer, whose whole existence seems one long toil, has something preferable to my best pleasures. Merely skimming the surface of life, I know nothing by my own experience of its deep and warm realities, ... so that few mortals, even the humblest and weakest, have been such ineffectual shadows in the world, or die so utterly as I must. Even a young man's bliss has not been mine. With a thousand vagrant fantasies, I have never truly loved, and perhaps shall be doomed to loneliness throughout the eternal future, because, here on earth, my soul has never married itself to the soul of woman." The touch about avoiding the cares of life is no doubt merely metaphorical; but the self-imposed doom of eternal loneliness reveals the excess of sombreness in which he clothed his condition to his own perception. One may say that the adverse factors in his problem at this time were purely imaginary; that a little resolution and determined activity would have shaken off the incubus: but this is to lose sight of the gist of the matter. The situation in itself,--the indeterminateness and repression of it, and the denial of any satisfaction to his warm and various sympathies, and his capacity for affection and responsibility,--must be allowed to have been intensely wearing. Hawthorne believed himself to possess a strongly social nature, which was cramped, chilled, and to some extent permanently restrained by this long seclusion at the beginning of his career. This alone might furnish just cause for bitterness against the fate that chained him. It was not a matter of option; for he knew that his battle must be fought through as he had begun it, and until 1836 no slightest loophole of escape into action presented itself. It lay before him to act out the tragedy of isolation which is the lot of every artist in America still, though greatly mitigated by the devotion of our first generation of national writers. If he had quitted his post sooner, and had tried by force to mould his genius according to theory, he might have utterly distorted or stunted its growth. All that he could as yet do for himself was to preserve a certain repose and harmony in the midst of uncertainty and delay; and for this he formed four wise precepts: "To break off customs; to shake off spirits ill disposed; to meditate on youth; to do nothing against one's genius." [Footnote: American Note-Books, Vol. I.] Thus he kept himself fresh and flexible, hopeful, ready for emergency. But that I have not exaggerated the severity and import of his long vigil, let this revery of his show, written at Liverpool, in 1855: "I think I have been happier this Christmas than ever before,--by my own fireside, and with my wife and children about me; more content to enjoy what I have, less anxious for anything beyond it in this life. My early life was perhaps a good preparation for the declining half of life; it having been such a blank that any thereafter would compare favorably with it. For a long, long while I have been occasionally visited with a singular dream; and I have an impression that I have dreamed it ever since I have been in England. It is, that I am still at college,--or, sometimes, even at school,--and there is a sense that I have been there unconscionably long, and have quite failed to make such progress as my contemporaries have done; and I seem to meet some of them with a feeling of shame and depression that broods over me as I think of it, even when awake. This dream, recurring all through these twenty or thirty years, must be one of the effects of that heavy seclusion in which I shut myself up for twelve years after leaving college, when everybody moved onward, and left me behind." Experiences which leave effects like this must bite their way into the heart and soul with a fearful energy! This precursive solitude had tinged his very life-blood, and woven itself into the secret tissues of his brain. Yet, patiently absorbing it, he wrote late in life to a friend: "I am disposed to thank God for the gloom and chill of my early life, in the hope that my share of adversity came then, when I bore it alone." It was under such a guise that the test of his genius and character came to him. Every great mind meets once in life with a huge opposition that must somehow be made to succumb, before its own energies can know their full strength, gain a settled footing, and make a roadway to move forward upon. Often these obstacles are viewless to others, and the combat is unsuspected; the site of many a Penuel remains untraced; but none the less these are the pivots on which entire personal histories turn. Hawthorne's comparatively passive endurance was of infinitely greater worth than any active irruption into the outer world would have been. It is obvious that we owe to the innumerable devious wanderings and obscure sufferings of his mind, under the influences just reviewed, something of his sure and subtle touch in feeling out the details of morbid moods; for though his mind remained perfectly healthy, it had acquired acute sympathy with all hidden tragedies of heart and brain. But another and larger purpose was not less well served by this probation. The ability of American life to produce a genius in some sense exactly responding to its most distinctive qualities had yet to be demonstrated; and this could only be done by some one who would stake life and success on the issue, for it needed that a soul and brain of the highest endowment should be set apart solely for the experiment, even to the ruin of it if required, before the truth could be ascertained. Hawthorne, the slowly produced and complex result of a line of New-Englanders who carried American history in their very limbs, seemed providentially offered for the trial. It was well that temperament and circumstance drew him into a charmed circle of reserve from the first; well, also, that he was further matured at a simple and rural college pervaded by a homely American tone; still more fortunate was it that nothing called him away to connect him with European culture, on graduating. To interpret this was the honorable office of his classmate Longfellow, who, with as much ease as dignity and charm, has filled the gap between the two half-worlds. The experiment to be tried was, simply, whether with books and men at his command, and isolated from the immediate influence of Europe, this American could evolve any new quality for the enrichment of literature. The conditions were strictly carried out; even after he began to come in contact with men, in the intervals of his retirement, he saw only pure American types. A foreigner must have been a rare bird in Salem, in those days; for the maritime element which might have brought him was still American. Hawthorne, as we have seen, and as his Note-Books show, pushed through the farming regions and made acquaintance with the men of the soil; and probably the first alien of whom he got at all a close view was the Monsieur S---- whom he found at Bridge's, on his visit to the latter, in 1837, described at length in the Note-Books. So much did Hawthorne study from these types, and so closely, that he might, had his genius directed, have written the most homely and realistic novels of New England life from the material which he picked up quite by the way. But though he did not translate his observations thus, the originality which he was continuously ripening amid such influences was radically affected by them. They established a broad, irrepressible republican sentiment in his mind; they assisted his natural, manly independence and simplicity to assert themselves unaffectedly in letters; and they had not a little to do, I suspect, with fostering his strong turn for examining with perfect freedom and a certain refined shrewdness into everything that came before him, without accepting prescribed opinions. The most characteristic way, perhaps, in which this American nurture acted was by contrast; for the universal matter-of-fact tone which he found among his fellow-citizens was an incessant spur to him to maintain a counteracting idealism. Thus, singularly enough, the most salient feature of the new American product was its apparent denial of the national trait of practical sagacity. It is not to be supposed that Hawthorne adhered consciously to the aim of asserting the American nature in fiction. These things can be done only half consciously, at the most. Perhaps it is well that the mind on which so much depends should not be burdened with all the added anxiety of knowing how much is expected from it by the ages. Therefore, we owe the triumphant assertion of the American quality in this novel genius to Hawthorne's quiet, unfaltering, brave endurance of the weight that was laid upon him, unassisted by the certainty with which we now perceive that a great end was being served by it. But, although unaware of this end at the time, he afterward saw some of the significance of his youth. Writing in 1840, he speaks thus of his old room in Union Street:-- "This claims to be called a haunted chamber, for thousands upon thousands of visions have appeared to me in it; and some few of them have become visible to the world. If ever I should have a biographer, he ought to make great mention of this chamber in my memoirs, because so much of my lonely youth was wasted here, and _here my mind and character were formed_; and here I have been glad and hopeful, and here I have been despondent.... And now I begin to understand why I was imprisoned so many years in this lonely chamber, and why I could never break through the viewless bolts and bars; for if I had sooner made my escape into the world, I should have grown hard and rough, and my heart might have become callous by rude encounters with the multitude.... But living in solitude till the fulness of time, I still kept the dew of my youth and the freshness of my heart." Yes, and more than this, Hawthorne! It was a young nation's faith in its future which--unsuspected by any then, but always to be remembered henceforth--had found a worthy answer and after-type in this faithful and hopeful heart of yours! Thus was it that the young poet who, in the sense we have observed, stood for old New England, absorbed into himself also the atmosphere of the United States. The plant that rooted in the past had put forth a flower which drew color and perfume from to-day. In such wise did Hawthorne prove to be the unique American in fiction. I have examined the librarian's books at the Salem Athenaeum, which indicate a part of the reading that the writer of the "Twice-Told Tales" went through. The lists from the beginning of 1830 to 1838 include nearly four hundred volumes taken out by him, besides a quantity of bound magazines. This gives no account of his dealings with books in the previous five years, when he was not a shareholder in the Athenaeum, nor does it, of course, let us know anything of what he obtained from other sources. When Miss E. P. Peabody made his acquaintance, in 1836-37, he had, for example, read all of Balzac that had then appeared; and there is no record of this in the library lists. These lists alone, then, giving four hundred volumes in seven years, supply him with one volume a week,--not, on the whole, a meagre rate, when we consider the volumes of magazines, the possible sources outside of the library, and the numberless hours required for literary experiment. I do not fancy that he plodded through books; but rather that he read with the easy energy of a vigorous, original mind, though he also knew the taste of severe study. "Bees," he observes in one place, "are sometimes drowned (or suffocated) in the honey which they collect. So some writers are lost in their collected learning." He did not find it necessary to mount upon a pyramid of all learning previous to his epoch, in order to get the highest standpoint for his own survey of mankind. Neither was he "a man of parts," precisely; being in himself a distinct whole. His choice of reading was ruled by a fastidious need. He was fond of travels for a rainy day, and knew Mandeville; but at other times he took up books which seem to lie quite aside from his known purposes. [Footnote: See Appendix III.] Voltaire appears to have attracted him constantly; he read him in the original, together with Rousseau. At one time he examined Pascal, at another he read something of Corneille and a part of Racine. Of the English dramatists, he seems at this time to have tried only Massinger; "Inchbald's Theatre" also occurs. The local American histories took his attention pretty often, and he perused a variety of biography,--"Lives of the Philosophers," "Plutarch's Lives," biographies of Mohammed, Pitt, Jefferson, Goldsmith, Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats, Baxter, Heber, Sir William Temple, and others. Brewster's "Natural Magic" and Sir Walter Scott's essay on "Demonology and Witchcraft" are books that one would naturally expect him to read; and he had already begun to make acquaintance with the English State Trials, for which he always had a great liking. "Colquhoun on the Police" would seem not entirely foreign to one who mentally pursued so many malefactors; but it is a little surprising that he should have found himself interested in "Babbage on the Economy of Machinery." He dipped, also, into botany and zoölogy; turned over several volumes of Bayle's "Critical Dictionary," read Mrs. Jameson, and the "London Encyclopaedia of Architecture"; and was entertained by Dunlap's "History of the Arts of Design in America." It was from this last that he drew the plot of "The Prophetic Pictures," in the "Twice-Told Tales." Some Boston newspapers of the years 1739 to 1783 evidently furnished the material for an article called "Old News," reprinted in "The Snow Image." Hawthorne seems never to have talked much about reading: 'tis imaginable that he was as shy in his choice of books and his discussion of them, as in his intercourse with men; and there is no more ground for believing that he did not like books, than that he cared nothing for men and women. Life is made up, for such a mind, of men, women, and books; Hawthorne accepted all three estates. Gradually, from the midst of the young author's obscurity, there issued an attraction which made the world wish to know more of him. One by one, the quiet essays and mournful-seeming stories came forth, like drops from a slow-distilling spring. The public knew nothing of the internal movement which had opened this slight fountain, nor suspected the dark concamerations through which the current made its way to the surface. The smallest mountain rill often has a thunder-storm at its back; but the average reader of that day thought he had done quite enough, when he guessed that the new writer was a timid young man fabling under a feigned name, excellent in his limited way, who would be a great deal better if he could come out of seclusion and make himself more like other people. The first contributions were made to the "Salem Gazette" and the "New England Magazine"; then his attempts extended to the "Boston Token and Atlantic Souvenir," edited by S. G. Goodrich; and later, to other periodicals. Mr. Goodrich wrote to his young contributor (October, 1831): "I am gratified to find that all whose opinion I have heard agree with me as to the merit of the various pieces from your pen." But for none of these early performances did Hawthorne receive any considerable sum of money. And though his writings began at once to attract an audience, he had slight knowledge of it. Three young ladies--of whom his future sister-in-law, Miss Peabody, was one--were among the first admirers; and though Hawthorne baffled his readers and perhaps retarded his own notoriety by assuming different names in print, [Footnote: Among these were "Oberon" and "Ashley Allen Royce," or "The Rev. A. A. Royce." The latter was used by him in the Democratic Review, so late as March, 1840.] they traced his contributions assiduously, cut them out of magazines, and preserved them. But they could not discover his personal identity. One of them who lived in Salem used constantly to wonder, in driving about town, whether the author of her favorite tales could be living in this or in that house; for it was known that he was a Salem resident. Miss Peabody, who had in girlhood known something of the Hathorne family (the name was still written either way, I am told), was misled by the new spelling, and by the prevalent idea that Nathaniel Hawthorne was an assumed name. This trio were especially moved by "The Gentle Boy" when it appeared, and Miss Peabody was on the point of addressing "The Author of 'The Gentle Boy,'" at Salem, to tell him of the pleasure he had given. When afterward told of this, Hawthorne said, "I wish you had! It would have been an era in my life." Soon after, the Peabodys returned to Salem, and she learned from some one that the new romancer was the son of the Widow Hathorne. Now it so chanced that her family had long ago occupied a house on Union Street, looking off into the garden of the old Manning family mansion; and she remembered no son, though a vague image came back to her of a strong and graceful boy's form dancing across the garden, at play, years before. Her mind therefore fastened upon one of the sisters, who, she knew, had shown great facility in writing: indeed, Hawthorne used at one time to say that it was she who should have been the follower of literature. Full of this conception, she went to carry her burden of gratitude to the author, and after delays and difficulties, made her way into the retired and little-visited mansion. It was the other sister into whose presence she came, and to her she began pouring out the reason of her intrusion, delivering at once her praises of the elder Miss Hathorne's fictions. "My brother's, you mean," was the response. "It _is_ your brother, then." And Miss Peabody added: "If your brother can write like that, he has no right to be idle." "My brother never is idle," answered Miss Louisa, quietly. Thus began an acquaintance which helped to free Hawthorne from the spell of solitude, and led directly to the richest experiences of his life. Old habits, however, were not immediately to be broken, and months passed without any response being made to the first call. Then at last came a copy of the "Twice-Told Tales," fresh from the press. But it was not until the establishment of the "Democratic Review," a year or two later, that occasion offered for a renewal of relations. Hawthorne was too shy to act upon the first invitation. Miss Peabody, finally, addressing him by letter, to inquire concerning the new periodical, for which he had been engaged as a contributor, asked him to come with both his sisters on the evening of the same day. Entirely to her surprise, they came. She herself opened the door, and there before her, between his sisters, stood a splendidly handsome youth, tall and strong, with no appearance whatever of timidity, but, instead, an almost fierce determination making his face stern. This was his resource for carrying off the extreme inward tremor which he really felt. His hostess brought out Plaxmau's designs for Dante, just received from Professor Felton of Harvard, [Footnote: The book may have been Felton's Homer with Flaxman's drawings, issued in 1833.] and the party made an evening's entertainment out of them. The news of this triumph, imparted to a friend of Miss Peabody's, led to an immediate invitation of Hawthorne to dinner at another house, for the next day. He accepted this, also, and on returning homeward, stopped at the "Salem Gazette" office, full of the excitement of his new experiences, announcing to Mr. Foote, the editor, that he was getting dissipated. He told of the evening with Miss Peabody, where he said he had had a delightful time, and of the dinner just achieved. "And I've had a delightful time there, too!" he added. Mr. Foote, perceiving an emergency, at once asked the young writer to come to his own house for an evening. Hawthorne, thoroughly aroused, consented. When the evening came, several ladies who had been invited assembled before the author arrived; and among them Miss Peabody. When he reached the place he stopped short at the drawing-room threshold, startled by the presence of strangers, and stood perfectly motionless, but with the look of a sylvan creature on the point of fleeing away. His assumed brusquerie no longer availed him; he was stricken with dismay; his face lost color, and took on a warm paleness. All this was in a moment; but the daughter of the house moved forward, and he was drawn within. Even then, though he assumed a calm demeanor, his agitation was very great: he stood by a table, and, taking up some small object that lay upon it, he found his hand trembling so that he was forced to put it down again. While friends were slowly penetrating his reserve in this way, he was approached in another by Mr. Goodrich, who induced him to go to Boston, there to edit the "American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge." This work, which only continued from 1834 to September, 1837, was managed by several gentlemen under the name of the Bewick Company. One of these was Bowen, of Charlestown, an engraver; another was Goodrich, who also, I think, had some connection with the American Stationers' Company. The Bewick Company took its name from Thomas Bewick, the English restorer of the art of wood-engraving, and the magazine was to do his memory honor by its admirable illustrations. But, in fact, it never did any one honor, nor brought any one profit. It was a penny popular affair, containing condensed information about innumerable subjects, no fiction, and little poetry. The woodcuts were of the crudest and most frightful sort. It passed through the hands of several editors and several publishers. Hawthorne was engaged at a salary of five hundred dollars a year; but it appears that he got next to nothing, and that he did not stay in the position long. There is little in its pages to recall the identity of the editor; but in one place he quotes as follows from Lord Bacon: "The ointment which witches use is made of the fat of children digged from their graves, and of the juices of smallage, cinquefoil, and wolf's-bane, mingled with the meal of fine wheat," and hopes that none of his readers will try to compound it. In the tale of "Young Goodman Brown," when Goody Cloyse says, "I was all anointed with the juice of small-age and cinquefoil and wolf's-bane," and the Devil continues, "'Mingled with fine wheat and the fat of a new-born babe,'--'Ah, your worship knows the recipe,' cried the old lady, cackling aloud." A few scraps of correspondence, mostly undated, which I have looked over, give one a new view of him in the bustle and vexation of this brief editorial experience. He sends off frequent and hurried missives to one of his sisters, who did some of the condensing and compiling which was a part of the business. "I make nothing," he says, in one, "of writing a history or biography before dinner." At another time, he is in haste for a Life of Jefferson, but warns his correspondent to "see that it contains nothing heterodox." At the end of one of the briefest messages, he finds time to speak of the cat at home. Perhaps with a memory of the days when he built book-houses, he had taken two names of the deepest dye from Milton and Bunyan for two of his favorite cats, whom he called Beelzebub and Apollyon. "Pull Beelzebub's tail for me," he writes. But the following from Boston, February 15, 1836, gives the more serious side of the situation:-- "I came here trusting to Goodrich's positive promise to pay me forty-five dollars as soon as I arrived; and he has kept promising from one day to another, till I do not see that he means to pay at all. I have now broke off all intercourse with him, and never think of going near him ... I don't feel at all obliged to him about the editorship, for he is a stockholder and director in the Bewick Company; ... and I defy them to get another to do for a thousand dollars what I do for five hundred." Goodrich afterward sent his editor a small sum; and the relations between them were resumed.. A letter of May 5, in the same year, contains these allusions:-- "I saw Mr. Goodrich yesterday.... He wants me to undertake a Universal History, to contain about as much as fifty or sixty pages of the magazine. [These were large pages.] If you are willing to write any part of it, ... I shall agree to do it. If necessary I will come home by and by, and concoct the plan of it with you. It need not be superior in profundity and polish to the middling magazine articles.... I shall have nearly a dozen articles in The Token,--mostly quite short." The historical project is, of course, that which resulted in the famous "Peter Parley" work. "Our pay as historians of the universe," says a letter written six days later, "will be about one hundred dollars, the whole of which you may have. It is a poor compensation, but better than the Token; because the writing is so much less difficult." He afterward carried out the design, or a large part of it, and the book has since sold by millions, for the benefit of others. There are various little particulars in this ingenious abridgment which recall Hawthorne, especially if one is familiar with his "Grandfather's Chair" and "True Stories" for children; though the book has probably undergone some changes in successive editions. This passage about George IV. is, however, remembered as being his: "Even when he was quite an old man, this king cared as much about dress as any young coxcomb. He had a great deal of taste in such matters, and it is a pity that he was a king, for he might otherwise have been an excellent tailor." Up to this time (May 12) he had received only twenty dollars for four months' editorial labor. "And, as you may well suppose," he says, "I have undergone very grievous vexations. Unless they pay me the whole amount shortly, I shall return to Salem, and stay there till they do." It seems a currish fate that puts such men into the grasp of paltry and sordid cares like these! But there is something deeper to be felt than dissatisfaction at the author-publisher's feeble though annoying scheme of harnessing in this rare poet to be his unpaid yet paying hack. This deeper something is the pathos of such possibilities, and the spectacle of so renowned and strong-winged a genius consenting thus to take his share of worldly struggle; perfectly conscious that it is wholly beneath his plane, but accepting it as a proper part of the mortal lot; scornful, but industrious and enduring. You who have conceived of Hawthorne as a soft-marrowed dweller in the dusk, fostering his own shyness and fearing to take the rubs of common men, pray look well at all this. And you, also, who discourse about the conditions essential to the development of genius, about the _milieu_ and the _moment_, and try to prove America a vacuum which the Muse abhors, will do well to consider the phenomenon. "It is a poor compensation, yet better than the Token"; so he wrote, knowing that his unmatched tales were being coined for even a less reward than mere daily bread. He took the conditions that were about him, and gave them a dignity by his own fine perseverance. It is this inspired industry, this calm facing of the worst and making it the best, which has formed the history of all art. You talk of the ages, and choose this or that era as the only fit one. You long for a cosey niche in the past; but genius crowds time and eternity into the present, and says to you, "Make your own century!" Meanwhile, if he received no solid gain from his exertions, Hawthorne was winning a reputation. In January he had written home: "My worshipful self is a very famous man in London, the 'Athenaeum' having noticed all my articles in the last Token, with long extracts." This refers to the 'Athenaeum' for November 7, 1835, which mentioned "The Wedding Knell" and "The Minister's Black Veil" as being stories "each of which has singularity enough to recommend it to the reader," and gave three columns to a long extract from "The Maypole of Merry Mount"; the notice being no doubt the work of the critic Chorley, who afterward met Hawthorne in England. Thus encouraged, he thought of collecting his tales and publishing them in volume form, connected by the conception of a travelling story-teller, whose shiftings of fortune were to form the interludes and links between the separate stories. A portion of this, prefatory to "Dr. Heidegger's Experiment," has been published in the "Mosses," with the heading of "Passages from a Relinquished Work." Goodrich was not disposed to lavish upon his young beneficiary the expense of bringing out a book for him, and the plan of reprinting the tales with this framework around them was given up. The next year Bridge came to Goodrich and insisted on having a simple collection issued, himself taking the pecuniary risk. In this way the "Twice-Told Tales" were first brought collectively before the world; and for the second time this faithful comrade of Hawthorne laid posterity under obligation to himself. It was not till long afterward, however, that Hawthorne knew of his friend's interposition in the affair. Mr. Bridge had not then entered the navy, and was engaged in a great enterprise on the Androscoggin; nothing less than an attempt to dam up that river and apply the water-power to some mills. In July of 1837, Hawthorne went to visit him at Bridgton, and has described his impressions fully in the Note-Books. It was probably his longest absence from Salem since graduating at Bowdoin. "My circumstances cannot long continue as they are," he writes; "and Bridge, too, stands between high prosperity and utter ruin." The change in his own circumstances which Hawthorne looked for did not come through his book. It sold some six or seven hundred copies in a short time, but was received quietly, [Footnote: Some of the sketches were reprinted in England; and "A Rill from the Town Pump" was circulated in pamphlet form by a London bookseller, without the author's name, as a temperance tract.] though Longfellow, then lately established in his Harvard professorship, and known as the author of "Outre-Mer," greeted it with enthusiasm in the "North American Review," which wielded a great influence in literary affairs. On March 7, 1837, Hawthorne sent this note to his former classmate, to announce the new volume. "The agent of the American Stationer's Company will send you a copy of a book entitled 'Twice-Told Tales,'--of which, as a classmate, I venture to request your acceptance. We were not, it is true, so well acquainted at college, that I can plead an absolute right to inflict my 'twice-told' tediousness upon you; but I have often regretted that we were not better known to each other, and have been glad of your success in literature and in more important matters." Returning to the tales, he adds: "I should like to flatter myself that they would repay you some part of the pleasure which I have derived from your own 'Outre-Mer.' "Your obedient servant, "NATH. HAWTHORNE." Longfellow replied warmly, and in June Hawthorne wrote again, a long letter picturing his mood with a fulness that shows how keenly he had felt the honest sympathy of the poet. "Not to burden you with my correspondence," he said, "I have delayed a rejoinder to your very kind and cordial letter, until now. It gratifies me that you have occasionally felt an interest in my situation; but your quotation from Jean Paul about the 'lark's nest' makes me smile. You would have been much nearer the truth if you had pictured me as dwelling in an owl's nest; for mine is about as dismal, and like the owl I seldom venture abroad till after dusk. By some witchcraft or other--for I really cannot assign any reasonable why and wherefore--I have been carried apart from the main current of life, and find it impossible to get back again. Since we last met, which you remember was in Sawtell's room, where you read a farewell poem to the relics of the class,--ever since that time I have secluded myself from society; and yet I never meant any such thing, nor dreamed what sort of life I was going to lead. I have made a captive of myself, and put me into a dungeon, and now I cannot find the key to let myself out,--and if the door were open, I should be almost afraid to come out. You tell me that you have met with troubles and changes. I know not what these may have been, but I can assure you that trouble is the next best thing to enjoyment, and that there is no fate in this world so horrible as to have no share in either its joys or sorrows. For the last ten years, I have not lived, but only dreamed of living. It may be true that there have been some unsubstantial pleasures here in the shade, which I might have missed in the sunshine, but you cannot conceive how utterly devoid of satisfaction all my retrospects are. I have laid up no treasure of pleasant remembrances against old age; but there is some comfort in thinking that future years can hardly fail to be more varied and therefore more tolerable than the past. "You give me more credit than I deserve, in supposing that I have led a studious life. I have indeed turned over a good many books, but in so desultory a way that it cannot be called study, nor has it left me the fruits of study. As to my literary efforts, I do not think much of them, neither is it worth while to be ashamed of them. They would have been better, I trust, if written under more favorable circumstances. I have had no external excitement,--no consciousness that the public would like what I wrote, nor much hope nor a passionate desire that they should do so. Nevertheless, having nothing else to be ambitious of, I have been considerably interested in literature; and if my writings had made any decided impression, I should have been stimulated to greater exertions; but there has been no warmth of approbation, so that I have always written with benumbed fingers. I have another great difficulty in the lack of materials; for I have seen so little of the world that I have nothing but thin air to concoct my stories of, and it is not easy to give a lifelike semblance to such shadowy stuff. Sometimes through a peep-hole I have caught a glimpse of the real world, and the two or three articles in which I have portrayed these glimpses please me better than the others. "I have now, or shall soon have, a sharper spur to exertion, which I lacked at an earlier period; for I see little prospect but that I shall have to scribble for a living. But this troubles me much less than you would suppose. I can turn my pen to all sorts of drudgery, such as children's books, etc., and by and by I shall get some editorship that will answer my purpose. Frank Pierce, who was with us at college, offered me his influence to obtain an office in the Exploring Expedition [Commodore Wilkes's]; but I believe that he was mistaken in supposing that a vacancy existed. If such a post were attainable, I should certainly accept it; for, though fixed so long to one spot, I have always had a desire to run round the world.... I intend in a week or two to come out of my owl's nest, and not return till late in the summer,--employing the interval in making a tour somewhere in New England. You who have the dust of distant countries on your 'sandal-shoon' cannot imagine how much enjoyment I shall have in this little excursion.... "Yours sincerely, "NATH. HAWTHORNE." A few days later the quarterly, containing Longfellow's review of the book, appeared; and the note of thanks which Hawthorne sent is full of an exultation strongly in contrast with the pensive tone of the letter just given. SALEM, June 19th, 1837. DEAR LONGFELLOW:--I have to-day received, and read with huge delight, your review of 'Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales.' I frankly own that I was not without hopes that you would do this kind office for the book; though I could not have anticipated how very kindly it would be done. Whether or no the public will agree to the praise which you bestow on me, there are at least five persons who think you the most sagacious critic on earth, viz., my mother and two sisters, my old maiden aunt, and finally the strongest believer of the whole five, my own self. If I doubt the sincerity and correctness of any of my critics, it shall be of those who censure me. Hard would be the lot of a poor scribbler, if he may not have this privilege.... Very sincerely yours, NATH. HAWTHORNE. That "Evangeline" was written upon a theme suggested to Hawthorne (by a friend who had heard it from a French Canadian [Footnote: See American Note-Books, October 24,1839]) and by him made over to the poet, has already been made public. Hawthorne wrote, on its appearance:---- "I have read 'Evangeline' with more pleasure than it would be decorous to express. It cannot fail, I think, to prove the most triumphant of all your successes." Nevertheless, he gave vent to some of his admiration in a notice of the work which he wrote for "The Salem Advertiser," a Democratic paper. "The story of Evangeline and her lover," he there says, "is as poetical as the fable of the Odyssey, besides that it comes to the heart as a fact that has actually taken place in human life." He speaks of "its pathos all illuminated with beauty,----so that the impression of the poem is nowhere dismal nor despondent, and glows with the purest sunshine where we might the least expect it, on the pauper's death-bed.... The story is told with the simplicity of high and exquisite art, which causes it to flow onward as naturally as the current of a stream. Evangeline's wanderings give occasion to many pictures both of northern and southern scenery and life: but these do not appear as if brought in designedly, to adorn the tale; they seem to throw their beauty inevitably into the calm mirror of its bosom as it flows past them.... By this work of his maturity he has placed himself on a higher eminence than he had yet attained, and beyond the reach of envy. Let him stand, then, at the head of our list of native poets, until some one else shall break up the rude soil of our American life, as he has done, and produce from it a lovelier and nobler flower than this poem of Evangeline!" Longfellow's characteristic kindly reply was as follows:---- "MY DEAR HAWTHORNE:----I have been waiting and waiting in the hope of seeing you in Cambridge.... I have been meditating upon your letter, and pondering with friendly admiration your review of 'Evangeline,' in connection with the subject of which, that is to say, the Acadians, a literary project arises in my mind for you to execute. Perhaps I can pay you back in part your own generous gift, by giving you a theme for story, in return for a theme for song. It is neither more nor less than the history of the Acadians, _after_ their expulsion as well as before. Felton has been making some researches in the State archives, and offers to resign the documents into your hands. "Pray come and see me about it without delay. Come so as to pass a night with us, if possible, this week; if not a day and night. "Ever sincerely yours, "HENRY W. LONGFELLOW." There is nothing in our literary annals more unique and delightful than this history of Longfellow's warm recognition of his old classmate, and the mutual courtesies to which it led. One is reminded by it of the William Tell episode between Goethe and Schiller, though it was in this case only the theme and nothing of material that was transferred. An author now almost forgotten, Charles Fenno Hoffman, also published in "The American Monthly Magazine," [Footnote: For March, 1838.] which he was editing, a kindly review, which, however, underestimated the strength of the new genius, as it was at first the general habit to do. "Minds like Hawthorne's," he said, "seem to be the only ones suited to an American climate.... Never can a nation be impregnated with the literary spirit by minor authors alone.... Yet men like Hawthorne are not without their use.".... In this same number of the magazine, by the way, was printed Hawthorne's "Threefold Destiny," under the pseudonyme of Ashley Allen Royce; and the song of Faith Egerton, afterward omitted, is thus given:---- "O, man can seek the downward glance, And each kind word,----affection's spell,---- Eye, voice, its value can enhance; For eye may speak, and tongue can tell. "But woman's love, it waits the while To echo to another's tone; To linger on another's smile, Ere dare to answer with its own." These versicles, though they might easily be passed over as commonplace, hold a peculiar inner radiance that perhaps issued from the dawn of a lifelong happiness for Hawthorne at this period. V. AT BOSTON AND BROOK FARM. 1838-1842. Hawthorne's mood at this time was one of profound dissatisfaction at his elimination from the active life of the world. "I am tired of being an ornament," he said, with great emphasis, to a friend. "I want a little piece of land that I can call my own, big enough to stand upon, big enough to be buried in. I want to have something to do with this material world." And, striking his hand vigorously on a table that stood by: "If I could only make tables," he declared, "I should feel myself more of a man." He was now thirty-four, and the long restraint and aloofness of the last thirteen years, with the gathering consciousness that he labored under unjust reproach of inaction, and the sense of loss in being denied his share in affairs, had become intolerable. It was now, also, that a new phase of being was opened to him. He had become engaged to Miss Sophia Peabody, a sister of his friend. President Van Buren had been two years in office, and Mr. Bancroft, the historian, was Collector of the port of Boston. One evening the latter was speaking, in a circle of Whig friends, of the splendid things which the Democratic administration was doing for literary men. "But there's Hawthorne," suggested a lady who was present. "You've done nothing for him." "He won't take anything," was the answer: "he has been offered places." In fact, Hawthorne's friends in political life had urged him to enter politics, and he had at one time been tendered a post of some sort in the West Indies, but refused it because he would not live in a slaveholding community. "I happen to know," said the lady, "that he would be very glad of employment." The result was that a commission for a small post in the Boston Custom House came, soon after, to the young author. On going down from Salem to inquire further about it, he received another and a better appointment as weigher and gauger, with a salary, I think, of twelve hundred a year. Just before entering the Collector's office, he noticed a man leaving it who wore a very dejected air; and, connecting this with the change in his own appointment, he imagined this person to be the just-ejected weigher. Speaking of this afterward, he said: "I don't believe in rotation in office. It is not good for the human being." But he took his place, writing to Longfellow (January 12, 1839): "I have no reason to doubt my capacity to fulfil the duties; for I don't know what they are. They tell me that a considerable portion of my time will be unoccupied, the which I mean to employ in sketches of my new experience, under some such titles as follows: 'Scenes in Dock,' 'Voyages at Anchor,' 'Nibblings of a Wharf Rat,' 'Trials of a Tide-Waiter,' 'Romance of the Revenue Service,' together with an ethical work in two volumes, on the subject of Duties, the first volume to treat of moral and religious duties, and the second of duties imposed by the Revenue Laws, which I begin to consider the most important class." Two years later, when Harrison and Tyler carried the election for the Whigs, he suffered the fate of his predecessor. And here I may offer an opinion as to Hawthorne's connection with the Democratic party. When asked why he belonged to it, he answered that he lived in a democratic country. "But we are all republicans alike," was the objection to his defence. "Well," he said, "I don't understand history till it's a hundred years old, and meantime it's safe to belong to the Democratic party." Still, Hawthorne was, so far as it comported with his less transient aims, a careful observer of public affairs; and mere badinage, like that just quoted, must not be taken as really covering the ground of his choice in politics. A man of such deep insight, accustomed to bring it to bear upon everything impartially, was not to be influenced by any blind and accidental preference in these questions; albeit his actual performance of political duties was slight. I think he recognized the human strength of the Democratic, as opposed to the theorizing and intellectual force of the Republican party. It is a curious fact, that with us the party of culture should be the radical party, upholding ideas even at the expense of personal liberty; and the party of ignorance that of order, the conservating force, careful of personal liberty even to a fault! Hawthorne, feeling perhaps that ideas work too rapidly here, ranged himself on the side that offered the greater resistance to them. This term of service in Boston was of course irksome to Hawthorne, and entirely suspended literary endeavors for the time. Yet "my life only is a burden," he writes, "in the same way that it is to every toilsome man.... But from henceforth forever I shall be entitled to call the sons of toil my brethren, and shall know how to sympathize with them, seeing that I likewise have risen at the dawn, and borne the fervor of the midday sun, nor turned my heavy footsteps homeward till eventide." He need not always have made the employment so severe, but the wages of the wharf laborers depended on the number of hours they worked in a day, and Hawthorne used to make it a point in all weathers, to get to the wharf at the earliest possible hour, solely for their benefit. For the rest, he felt a vast benefit from his new intercourse with men; there could not have been a better maturing agency for him at this time; and the interval served as an apt introduction to the Brook Farm episode. That this least gregarious of men should have been drawn into a socialistic community, seems at first inexplicable enough; but in reality it was the most logical step he could have taken. He had thoroughly tried seclusion, and had met and conquered by himself the first realization of what the world actually is. Next, he entered into the performance of definite duties and the receipt of gain, and watched the operation of these two conditions on himself and those about him; an experiment that taught him the evils of the system, and the necessity of burying his better energies so long as he took part in affairs. This raised doubts, of course, as to how he was to fit himself into the frame of things; and while he mused upon some more generous arrangement of society, and its conflicting interests, a scheme was started which plainly proposed to settle the problem. Fourier had only just passed away; the spread of his ideas was in its highest momentum. On the other hand, the study of German philosophy, and the new dissent of Emerson, had carried men's thoughts to the very central springs of intellectual law, while in Boston the writing and preaching of Channing roused a practical radicalism, and called for a better application of Christianity to affairs. The era of the Transcendentalists had come. The Chardon Street meetings--assemblages of ardent theorists and "come-outers" of every type, who, while their sessions lasted, held society in their hands and moulded it like clay--were a rude manifestation of the same deep current. In the midst of these influences, Mr. Ripley, an enthusiastic student of philosophy, received an inspiration to establish a modified socialistic community on our own soil. The Industrial Association which he proposed at West Roxbury was wisely planned with direct reference to the emergencies of American life; it had no affinity with the erratic views of Enfantin and the Saint Simonists, nor did it in the least tend toward the mistakes of Robert Owen regarding the relation of the sexes; though it agreed with Fourier and Owen both, as I understand, in respect of labor. In a better and freer sense than has usually been the case with such attempts, the design sprang out of one man's mind and fell properly under his control. His simple object was to distribute labor in such a way as to give all men time for culture, and to free their minds from the debasing influence of a merely selfish competition. It was a practical, orderly, noble effort to apply Christianity directly to human customs and institutions. "A few men and women of like views and feelings," one of his sympathizers has said, "grouped themselves around him, not as their master, but as their friend and brother, and the community at Brook Farm was instituted." At various times Charles Dana, Pratt, the young Brownson, Horace Sumner (a younger brother of Charles), George William Curtis, and his brother Burrill Curtis were there. The place was a kind of granary of true grit. People who found their own honesty too heavy a burden to carry successfully through the rough jostlings of society, flocked thither. "They were mostly individuals" says Hawthorne, "who had gone through such an experience as to disgust them with ordinary pursuits, but who were not yet so old, nor had suffered so deeply, as to lose their faith in the better time to come." To men like Hawthorne, however little they may noise the fact abroad, the rotten but tenacious timbers of the social order shake beneath the lightest tread. But he knew that the only wise method is to begin repairing within the edifice, keeping the old associations, and losing nothing of value while gaining everything new that is desirable. Because Brook Farm seemed to adopt this principle, he went there. Some of the meetings of the associators were held at Miss E. P. Peabody's, in Boston, and the proceedings were related to him. Mr. Ripley did not at first know who was the "distinguished literary gentleman" announced as willing to join the company; and when told that it was Hawthorne, he felt as if a miracle had befallen, or "as if," he tells me, "the heavens would presently be filled with angels, and we should see Jacob's ladder before us. But we never came any nearer to having _that_, than our old ladder in the barn, from floor to hayloft." For his personal benefit, Hawthorne had two ends in view, connected with Brook Farm: one, to find a suitable and economical home after marriage; the other, to secure a mode of life thoroughly balanced and healthy, which should successfully distribute the sum of his life's labor between body and brain. He hoped to secure leisure for writing by perhaps six hours of daily service; but he found nearly sixteen needful. "He worked like a dragon," says Mr. Ripley. The productive industry of the association was agriculture; the leading aim, teaching; and in some cases there were classes made up of men, women, children, whom ignorance put on the same plane. Several buildings accommodated the members: the largest, in which the public table was spread and the cooking done, being called The Hive; another, The Pilgrim House; a smaller one, The Nest; and still another was known as The Cottage. In The Eyrie, Mr. and Mrs. Ripley lived, and here a great part of the associators would gather in the evenings. Of a summer night, when the moon was full, they lit no lamps, but sat grouped in the light and shadow, while sundry of the younger men sang old ballads, or joined Tom Moore's songs to operatic airs. On other nights, there would be an original essay or poem read aloud, or else a play of Shakespere, with the parts distributed to different members; and, these amusements failing, some interesting discussion was likely to take their place. Occasionally, in the dramatic season, large delegations from the farm would drive into Boston in carriages and wagons to the opera or the play. Sometimes, too, the young women sang as they washed the dishes, in The Hive; and the youthful yeomen of the society came in and helped them with their work. The men wore blouses of a checked or plaided stuff, belted at the waist, with a broad collar folding down about the throat, and rough straw hats; the women, usually, simple calico gowns, and hats,--which were then an innovation in feminine attire. In the season of wood-wanderings, they would trim their hats with wreaths of barberry or hop-vine, ground-pine, or whatever offered,--a suggestion of the future Priscilla of "Blithedale." Some families and students came to the farm as boarders, paying for their provision in household or field labor, or by teaching; a method which added nothing to the funds of the establishment, and in this way rather embarrassed it. A great deal of individual liberty was allowed. People could eat in private or public; and it has been said by those who were there that the unconventional life permitted absolute privacy at any time. Every one was quite unfettered, too, in the sphere of religious worship. When a member wished to be absent, another would generally contrive to take his work for the interval; and a general good-will seems to have prevailed. Still, I imagine there must have been a temporary and uncertain air about the enterprise, much of the time; and the more intimate unions of some among the members who were congenial, gave rise to intermittent jealousies in those who found no special circle. "In this way it was very much like any small town of the same number of inhabitants," says one of my informants. Indeed, though every one who shared in the Brook Farm attempt seems grateful for what it taught of the dignity and the real fellowship of labor, I find a general belief in such persons that it could not long have continued at its best. The system of compensating all kinds of service, skilled or otherwise, according to the time used, excited--as some have thought--much dissatisfaction even among the generous and enlightened people who made up the society. "I thought I could see some incipient difficulties working in the system," writes a lady who was there in 1841. "Questions already arose as to how much individual freedom could be allowed, if it conflicted with the best interests of the whole. Those who came there were the results of another system of things which still gave a salutary cheek to the more radical tendencies; but the second generation there could hardly have shown equal, certainly not the same, character." A confirmation of this augury is the fact that the cast of the community became decidedly more Fourieristic before it disbanded; and it is not impossible that another generation might have decolorized and seriously deformed human existence among them. Theories and opinions were very openly talked over, and practical details as well; and though this must have had its charm, yet it would also touch uncomfortably on a given temperament, or jar upon a peculiar mood. In such enterprises there must always be a slight inclination to establish a conformity to certain freedoms which really become oppressions. Shyness was not held essential to a regenerated state of things, and was perhaps too much disregarded; as also was illness, an emergency not clearly provided for, which had to be met by individual effort and self-sacrifice, after the selfish and old-established fashion of the world. How this atmosphere affected Hawthorne he has hinted in his romance founded on some aspects of community life: "Though fond of society, I was so constituted as to need these occasional retirements, even in a life like that of Blithedale, which was itself characterized by a remoteness from the world. Unless renewed by a yet further withdrawal towards the inner circle of self-communion, I lost the better part of my individuality. My thoughts became of little worth, and my sensibilities grew as arid as a tuft of moss ... crumbling in the sunshine, after long expectance of a shower." A fellow-toiler came upon him suddenly, one day, lying in a green hollow some distance from the farm, with his hands under his head and his face shaded by his hat. "How came you out here?" asked his friend. "Too much of a party up there," was his answer, as he pointed toward the community buildings. It has also been told that at leisure times he would sit silently, hour after hour, in the broad old-fashioned hall of The Hive, where he "could listen almost unseen to the chat and merriment of the young people," himself almost always holding a book before him, but seldom turning the leaves. One sees in his letters of this time [Footnote: American Note-Books, Vol. I.] how the life wore upon him; and his journal apparently ceased during the whole bucolic experience. How joyously his mind begins to disport itself again with fancies, the moment he leaves the association, even temporarily! And in 1842, as soon as he is fairly quit of it, the old darkling or waywardly gleaming stream of thought and imagination flows freshly, untamably forward. Hawthorne remained with the Brook Farm community nearly a twelvemonth, a small part of which time was spent in Boston. Some of the letters which his sisters wrote him show a delightful solicitude reigning at home, during the period of his experiment. "What is the use," says one, "of burning your brains out in the sun, if you can do anything better with them?... I am bent upon coming to see you, this summer. Do not you remember how we used to go a-fishing together in Raymond? Your mention of wild flowers and pickerel has given me a longing for the woods and waters again." Then, in August, "C---- A----," writes his sister Louisa, "told me the other day that he heard you were to do the travelling in Europe for the community." This design, if it existed, might well have found a place in the Dialogues of the Unborn which Hawthorne once meant to write; for this was his only summer at Brook Farm. "A summer of toil, of interest, of something that was not pleasure, but which went deep into my heart, and there became a rich experience," he writes, in "Blithedale." "I found myself looking forward to years, if not to a lifetime, to be spent on the same system." This was, in fact, his attitude; for, after passing the winter at the farm as a boarder, and then absenting himself a little while, he returned in the spring to look over the ground and perhaps select a house-site, just before his marriage, but came to an adverse decision. This no doubt accorded with perceptions which he was not called upon to make public; but because he was a writer of fiction there seems to have arisen a tacit agreement, in some quarters, to call him insincere in his connection with this socialistic enterprise. He had not much to gain by leaving the community; for he had put into its treasury a thousand dollars, about the whole of his savings from the custom-house stipend, and had next to nothing to establish a home with elsewhere, while a niche in the temple of the reformers would have cost him nothing but labor. The length of his stay was by no means uncommonly short, for there was always a transient contingent at Brook Farm, many of whom remained but a few weeks. A devoted but not a wealthy disciple, who had given six thousand dollars for the building of the Pilgrim House, and hoped to end his days within it, retired forever after a very short sojourn, not dissuaded from the theory, but convinced that the practical application was foredoomed to disaster. And, in truth, though a manful effort was made, with good pecuniary success for a time, ten years brought the final hour of failure to this millennial plan. Very few people who were at Brook Farm seem to have known or even to have seen Hawthorne there, though he was elected chairman of the Finance Committee just before leaving, and I am told that his handsome presence, his quiet sympathy, his literary reputation, and his hearty participation in labor commanded a kind of reverence from some of the members. Next to his friend George P. Bradford, one of the workers and teachers in the community, his most frequent associates were a certain Rev. Warren Burton, author of a curious little book called "Scenery-Shower," designed to develop a proper taste for landscape; and one Frank Farley, who had been a pioneer in the West, a man of singular experiences and of an original turn, who was subject to mental derangement at times. The latter visited him at the Old Manse, afterward, when Hawthorne was alone there, and entered actively into his makeshift housekeeping. President Pierce, on one occasion, speaking to an acquaintance about Hawthorne, said: "He is enthusiastic when he speaks of the aims and self-sacrifice of some of the Brook Farm people; but when I questioned him whether he would like to live and die in a community like that, he confessed he was not suited to it, but said he had learned a great deal from it. 'What, for instance?' 'Why, marketing, for one thing. I didn't know anything about it practically, and I rode into Boston once or twice with the men who took in things to sell, and saw how it was done.'" The things of deepest moment which he learned were not to be stated fully in conversation; but I suppose readers would draw the same inference from this whimsical climax of Hawthorne's as that which has been found in "The Blithedale Romance"; namely, that he looked on his socialistic life as the merest jesting matter. Such, I think, is the general opinion; and a socialistic writer, Mr. Noyes, of the Oneida Community, has indignantly cried out against the book, as a "poetico-sneering romance." This study of human character, which would keep its value in any state of society that preserved its reflective faculty intact and sane, to be belittled to the record of a brief experiment! Hawthorne indeed, speaking in the prefatory third person of his own aim, says: "His whole treatment of the affair is altogether incidental to the main purpose of the romance; nor does he put forward the slightest pretensions to illustrate a theory, or elicit a conclusion, favorable or otherwise, in respect to socialism." And though he has told the story autobiographically, it is through a character whom we ought by no means to identify with Hawthorne in his whole mood. I have taken the liberty of applying to Hawthorne's own experience two passages from Coverdale's account, because they picture something known to be the case; and a careful sympathy will find no difficulty in distinguishing how much is real and how much assumed. Coverdale, being merely the medium for impressions of the other characters, is necessarily light and diaphanous, and Hawthorne, finding it more convenient, and an advantage to the lifelikeness of the story, does not attempt to hold him up in the air all the time, but lets him down now and then, and assumes the part himself. The allusions to the community scheme are few, and most of them are in the deepest way sympathetic. Precisely because the hopes of the socialists were so unduly high, he values them and still is glad of them, though they have fallen to ruin. "In my own behalf, I rejoice that I could once think better of the world than it deserved. It is a mistake into which men seldom fall twice in a lifetime; or, if so, the rarer and higher is the nature that can thus magnanimously persist in error." Where is the sneer concealed in this serious and comprehensive utterance? There is a class of two-pronged minds, which seize a pair of facts eagerly, and let the truth drop out of sight between them. For these it is enough that Hawthorne made some use of his Brook Farm memories in a romance, and then wrote that romance in the first person, with a few dashes of humor. Another critic, acting on a conventional idea as to Hawthorne's "cold, self-removed observation," quotes to his disadvantage this paragraph in a letter from Brook Farm: "Nothing here is settled.... My mind will not be abstracted. I must observe and think and feel, and content myself with catching glimpses of things which may be wrought out hereafter. Perhaps it will be quite as well that I find myself unable to set seriously about literary occupation for the present." This is offered as showing that Hawthorne went to the community--unconsciously, admits our critic, but still in obedience to some curious, chilly "dictate of his nature"--for the simple purpose of getting fresh impressions, to work up into fiction. But no one joined the society expecting to give up his entire individuality, and it was a special part of the design that each should take such share of the labor as was for his own and the general good, and follow his own tastes entirely as to ideal pursuits. A singular prerogative this, which every one who writes about Hawthorne lays claim to, that he may be construed as a man who, at bottom, had no other motive in life than to make himself uneasy by withdrawing from hearty communion with people, in order to pry upon them intellectually! He speaks of "that quality of the intellect and the heart which impelled me (often against my own will, and to the detriment of my own comfort) to live in other lives, and to endeavor--_by generous sympathies, by delicate intuitions_, by taking note of things too slight for record, and by bringing my human spirit into manifold accordance with the companions God had assigned me--to learn the secret which was hidden even from themselves"; and this is cited as evidence of "his cold inquisitiveness, his incredulity, his determination to worm out the inmost secrets of all associated with him." Such distortion is amazing. The few poets who search constantly for truth are certainly impelled to get at the inmost of everything. But what, in Heaven's name, is the motive? Does any one seriously suppose it to be for the amusement of making stories out of it? The holding up to one's self the stern and secret realities of life is no such pleasing pursuit. These men are driven to it by the divine impulse which has made them seers and recorders. As for Hawthorne, he hoped and loved and planned with the same rich human faith that fills the heart of every manly genius; and if discouraging truth made him suffer, it was all the more because his ideals--and at first his trust in their realization--were so generous and so high. Two of his observations as to Brook Farm, transferred to the "The Blithedale Romance," show the wisdom on which his withdrawal was based. The first relates to himself: "No sagacious man will long retain his sagacity, if he live exclusively among reformers and progressive people, without periodically returning to the settled system of things, to correct himself by a new observation from that old standpoint." He had too much imagination to feel safe in giving free rein to it, in a special direction of theoretic conduct; he also remembered that, as the old system of things was full of error, it was possible that a new one might become so in new ways, unless watched. The second observation touches the real weakness of the Brook Farm institution: "It struck me as rather odd, that one of the first questions raised, after our separation from the greedy, struggling, self-seeking world, should relate to the possibility of getting the advantage over the outside barbarians in their own field of labor. But to own the truth, I very soon became sensible that, _as regarded society at large, we stood in a position of new hostility rather than new brotherhood._" And, in fact, the real good which Mr. Ripley's attempt did, was to implant the co-operative idea in the minds of men who have gone out into the world to effect its gradual application on a grander scale. It is by introducing it into one branch of social energy after another that the regenerative agency of to-day can alone be made effectual. The leaders of that community have been broad-minded, and recognize this truth. None of them, however, have ever taken the trouble to formulate it as Hawthorne did, on perceiving it some years in advance. The jocose tone, it maybe added, seems to have been a characteristic part of the Brook Farm experiment, despite the sober earnest and rapt enthusiasm that accompanied it. The members had their laughing allusions, and talked--in a strain of self-ridicule precisely similar to Coverdale's--of having bands of music to play for the field-laborers, who should plough in tune. This merely proves that they were people who kept their wits whole, and had the humor that comes with refinement; while it illustrates by the way the naturalness of the tone Hawthorne has given to Coverdale. The Priscilla of Blithedale was evidently founded upon the little seamstress whom he describes in the Note-Books as coming out to the farm, and Old Moodie's spectre can be discerned in a brief memorandum of a man seen (at Parker's old bar-room in Court Square) in 1850. It has been thought that Zenobia was drawn from Margaret Fuller, or from a lady at Brook Farm, or perhaps from both: a gentleman who was there says that he traces in her a partial likeness to several women. It is as well to remember that Hawthorne distinctly negatived the idea that he wrote with any one that he knew before his mind; and he illustrated it, to one of his most intimate friends, by saying that sometimes in the course of composition it would suddenly occur to him, that the character he was describing resembled in some point one or more persons of his acquaintance. Thus, I suppose that when the character of Priscilla had developed itself in his imagination, he found he could give her a greater reality by associating her with the seamstress alluded to; and that the plaintive old man at Parker's offered himself as a good figure to prop up the web-work of pure invention which was the history of Zenobia's and Priscilla's father. There is a conviction in the minds of all readers, dearer to them than truth, that novelists simply sit down and describe their own acquaintances, using a few clumsy disguises to make the thing tolerable. When they do take a hint from real persons the character becomes quite a different thing to them from the actual prototype. It was not even so definite as this with Hawthorne. Yet no doubt, his own atmosphere being peculiar, the contrast between that and the atmosphere of those he met stimulated his imagination; so that, without his actually seeing a given trait in another person, the meeting might have the effect of _suggesting_ it. Then he would brood over this suggestion till it became a reality, a person, to his mind; and thus his characters were conceived independently in a region somewhere between himself and the people who had awakened speculation in his mind. He had a very sure instinct as to when a piece of reality might be transferred to his fiction with advantage. Mr. Curtis has told the story of a young woman of Concord, a farmer's daughter, who had had her aspirations roused by education until the conflict between these and the hard and barren life she was born to, made her thoroughly miserable and morbid; and one summer's evening she sought relief in the quiet, homely stream that flowed by the Old Manse, and found the end of earthly troubles in its oozy depths. Hawthorne was roused by Curtis himself coming beneath his window (precisely as Coverdale comes to summon Hollingsworth), and with one other they went out on the river, to find the poor girl's body. "The man," writes his friend, "whom the villagers had only seen at morning as a musing spectre in the garden, now appeared among them at night to devote his strong arm and steady heart to their service." By this dark memory is the powerful climax of "The Blithedale Romance" bound to the sphere of a reality as dread. VI. THE OLD MANSE. 1842-1846. There is a Providence in the lives of men who act sincerely, which makes each step lead, with the best result, to the next phase of their careers. By his participation in the excellent endeavor at Brook Farm, Hawthorne had prepared himself to enjoy to the full his idyllic retirement at the Old Manse, in Concord. "For now, being happy," he says, "I felt as if there were no question to be put." Hawthorne was married in July, 1842, and went at once to this his first home. Just before going to Brook Farm he had written "Grandfather's Chair," the first part of a series of sketches of New England history for children, which was published by Miss Peabody in Boston, and Wiley and Putnam in New York; but the continuation was interrupted by his stay at the farm. In 1842 he wrote a second portion, and also some biographical stories, all of which gained an immediate success. He also resumed his contributions to the "Democratic Review," the most brilliant periodical of the time, in which Whittier, Longfellow, Lowell, Poe, and other noted authors made their appearance. It was published at Washington, and afterward at New York, and made considerable pretensions to a national character. Hawthorne had been engaged as a contributor, at a fair rate, in 1838, and his articles had his name appended (not always Hie practice at that time) in a way that shows the high estimation into which he had already grown. "John Inglefield's Thanksgiving," "The Celestial Railroad," "The Procession of Life," "Fire Worship," "Buds and Bird Voices," and "Roger Malvin's Burial," all appeared in the "Democratic" in 1843. "Rappaccini's Daughter" and other tales followed in the next year; and in 1845 the second volume of "Twice-Told Tales" was brought out at Boston. During the same year Hawthorne edited the "African Journals" of his friend Bridge, then an officer in the navy, who had just completed a cruise. The editor's name evidently carried great weight, even then. "The mere announcement, 'edited by Nathaniel Hawthorne,'" said one of the critics, "is enough to entitle this book to a place among the American classics." I dwell upon this, because an attempt has been made to spread the idea that Hawthorne up to the time of writing "The Scarlet Letter" was still obscure and discouraged, and that only then, by a timely burst of appreciation in certain quarters, was he rescued from oblivion. The truth is, that he had won himself an excellent position, was popular, and was himself aware by this time of the honor in which he was held. Even when he found that the small profits of literature were forcing him into office again, he wrote to Bridge: "It is rather singular that I should need an office: for nobody's scribblings seem to be more acceptable than mine." The explanation of this lies in the wretchedly dependent state of native authorship at that time. The law of copyright had not then attained to even the refined injustice which it has now reached. "I continue," he wrote, in 1844, "to scribble tales with good success so far as regards empty praise, some notes of which, pleasant enough to my ears, have come from across the Atlantic. But the pamphlet and piratical system has so broken up all regular literature, that I am forced to work hard for small gains." Besides the labors already enumerated, he edited for the "Democratic" some "Papers of an old Dartmoor Prisoner" (probably some one of his "sea-dog" acquaintance in Salem). He was in demand among the publishers. A letter from Evert Duyckinck (New York, October 2, 1845), who was then in the employ of Wiley and Putnam, publishers of the "African Cruiser," says of that book: "The English notices are bounteous in praise. No American book in a long time has been so well noticed." The same firm were now eager to bring out his recent tales, and were also, as appears in the following from Duyckinck, urging the prosecution of another scheme: "I hope you will not think me a troublesome fellow," he writes, "if I drop you another line with the vociferous cry, MSS.! MSS.! Mr. Wiley's American series is athirst for the volumes of tales; and how stands the prospect for the History of Witchcraft, I whilom spoke of?" The History Hawthorne wisely eschewed; but early in 1846 the "Mosses from an Old Manse" was issued at New York, in two volumes. This attracted at once a great deal of praise, and it certainly shows a wider range and fuller maturity than the first book of "Twice-Told Tales"; yet I doubt whether the stories of this group have taken such intimate hold of any body of readers as those, although recommending themselves to a larger audience. Hawthorne's life at the Old Manse was assuredly one of the brightest epochs of his career: an unalloyed happiness had come to him, he was full of the delight of first possession in his home, a new and ample companionship was his, and the quiet course of the days, with their openings into healthful outdoor exercise, made a perfect balance between creation and recreation. The house in which he dwelt was itself a little island of the past, standing intact above the flood of events; all around was a mild, cultivated country, broken into gentle variety of "hills to live with," and touched with just enough wildness to keep him from tiring of it: the stream that flowed by his orchard was for him an enchanted river. He renewed the pleasant sports of boyhood with it, fishing and boating in summer, and in winter whistling over its clear, black ice, on rapid skates. In the more genial months, the garden gave him pleasant employment; and in his journal-musings, the thought gratifies him that he has come into a primitive relation with nature, and that the two occupants of the Manse are in good faith a new Adam and Eve, so far as the happiness of that immemorial pair remained unbroken. The charm of these experiences has all been distilled into the descriptive chapter which prefaces the "Mosses"; and such more personal aspects of it as could not be mixed in that vintage have been gathered, like forgotten clusters of the harvest, into the Note-Books. It remains to comment, here, on the contrast between the peaceful character of these first years at Concord and the increased sombreness of some of the visions there recorded. The reason of this is, that Hawthorne's genius had now waxed to a stature which made its emanations less immediately dependent on his actual mood. I am far from assuming an exact autobiographical value for the "Twice-Told Tales"; a theory which the writer himself condemned. But they, as he has also said, require "to be read in the clear brown twilight atmosphere in which they were written"; while the "Mosses" are the work of a man who has learned to know the world, and the atmosphere in which they were composed seems almost dissonant with the tone of some of them. "The Birthmark," "The Bosom Serpent," "Rappaccini's Daughter," and that terrible and lurid parable of "Young Goodman Brown," are made up of such horror as Hawthorne has seldom expressed elsewhere. "The Procession of Life" is a fainter vibration of the same chord of awfulness. Such concentration of frightful truth do these most graceful and exquisitely wrought creations contain, that the intensity becomes almost poisonous. What is the meaning of this added revelation of evil? The genius of Hawthorne was one which used without stint that costliest of all elements in production,--time; the brooding propensity was indispensable to him; and, accordingly, as some of these conceptions had occurred to him a good while before the carrying out, they received great and almost excessive elaboration. The reality of sin, the pervasiveness of evil, had been but slightly insisted upon in the earlier tales: in this series, the idea bursts up like a long-buried fire, with earth-shaking strength, and the pits of Hell seem yawning beneath us. Dismal, too, is the story of "Roger Malvin's Burial," and dreary "The Christmas Banquet," with its assembly of the supremely wretched. In "Earth's Holocaust" we get the first result of Hawthorne's insight into the demonianism of reformatory schemers who forget that the centre of every true reform is the heart. And, incidentally, this marks out the way to "The Scarlet Letter" on the one hand, and "The Blithedale Romance" on the other, in which the same theme assumes two widely different phases. Thus we find the poet seeking more and more certainly the central fountain of moral suggestion from which he drew his best inspirations. The least pleasing quality of the work is, I think, its overcharged allegorical burden. Some of the most perfect of all his tales are here, but their very perfection makes one recoil the more at the supremacy of their purely intellectual interest. One feels a certain chagrin, too, on finishing them, as if the completeness of embodiment had given the central idea a shade of too great obviousness. Hawthorne is most enjoyable and most true to himself when he offers us the chalice of poetry filled to the very brim with the clear liquid of moral truth. But, at first, there seems to have been a conflict between his aesthetic and his ethical impulse. Coleridge distinguishes the symbolical from the allegorical, by calling it a part of some whole which it represents. "Allegory cannot be other than spoken consciously; whereas in the symbol it is very possible that the general truth represented may be working unconsciously in the writer's mind.... The advantage of symbolical writing over allegory is that it presumes no disjunction of faculties, but simple predominance." Now in the "Allegories of the Heart," collected in the "Mosses," there is sometimes an extreme consciousness of the idea to be illustrated; and though the ideas are in a measure symbolical, yet they are on the whole too disintegrating in their effect to leave the artistic result quite generous and satisfying. Allegory itself, as an echo of one's thought, is often agreeable, and pleases through surprise; yet it is apt to be confusing, and smothers the poetic harmony. In his romances, Hawthorne escapes into a hugely significant, symbolic sphere which relieves the reader of this partial vexation. "The Celestial Railroad," of course, must be excepted from censure, being the sober parody of a famous work, and in itself a masterly satirical allegory. And in two cases, "Drowne's Wooden Image," and "The Artist of the Beautiful," we find the most perfect imaginable symbolism. In one, the story of Pygmalion compressed and Yankeefied, yet rendered additionally lovely by its homeliness; and the essence of all artistic life, in the other, presented in a form that cannot be surpassed. "Mrs. Bullfrog" is a sketch which is ludicrously puzzling, until one recalls Hawthorne's explanation: "The story was written as a mere experiment in that style; it did not come from any depth within me,--neither my heart nor mind had anything to do with it." [Footnote: American Note-Books, Vol. II.] It is valuable, in this light, as a distinct boundary-mark in one direction. But the essay vein which had produced some of the clearest watered gems in the "Twice-Told Tales," begins in the "Mosses" to yield increase of brilliance and beauty; and we here find, with the gathering strength of imagination,--the enlarged power for bringing the most unreal things quite into the circle of realities,--a compensating richness in describing the simply natural, as in "Buds and Bird Voices," "Fire Worship," "The Old Apple-Dealer." Everything in these two volumes illustrates forcibly the brevity, the absolutely right proportion of language to idea, which from the first had marked Hawthorne with one trait, at least, quite unlike any displayed by the writers with whom he was compared, and entirely foreign to the mood of the present century. This _sense of form_, the highest and last attribute of a creative writer, provided it comes as the result of a deep necessity of his genius, and not as a mere acquirement of art, is a quality that has not been enough noticed in him; doubtless because it is not enough looked for anywhere by the majority of critics and readers, in these days of adulteration and of rapid manufacture out of shoddy and short-fibred stuffs. We demand a given measure of reading, good or bad, and producers of it are in great part paid for length: so that with much using of thin and shapeless literature, we have forgotten how good is that which is solid and has form. But, having attained this perfection in the short story, Hawthorne thereafter abandoned it for a larger mould. The "Mosses," as I have said, gained him many admirers. In them he for the first time touched somewhat upon the tendencies of the current epoch, and took an entirely independent stand among the philosophers of New England. Yet, for a while, there was the oddest misconception of his attitude by those at a distance. A Whig magazine, pleased by his manly and open conservatism, felt convinced that he must be a Whig, though he was, at the moment of the announcement, taking office under a Democratic President. On the other hand, a writer in "The Church Review" of New Haven, whom we shall presently see more of, was incited to a tilt against him as a rabid New England theorist, the outcome, of phalansteries, a subverter of marriage and of all other holy things. In like manner, while Hawthorne was casting now and then a keen dart at the Transcendentalists, and falling asleep over "The Dial" (as his journals betray), Edgar Poe, a literary _Erinaceus_, wellnigh exhausted his supply of quills upon the author, as belonging to a school toward which he felt peculiar acerbity. "Let him mend his pen," cried Poe, in his most high-pitched strain of personal abuse, "get a bottle of visible ink, hang (if possible) the editor of 'The Dial,' cut Mr. Alcott, and throw out of the window to the pigs all his odd numbers of the 'North American Review.'" This paper of Poe's is a laughable and pathetic case of his professedly punctilious analysis covering the most bitter attacks, with traces of what looks like envy, and others of a resistless impulse to sympathize with a literary brother as against the average mind. He begins with a discussion of originality and peculiarity: "In one sense, to be peculiar is to be original," he says, but the true originality is "not the uniform but the continuous peculiarity, ... giving its own hue to everything it touches," and touching everything. From this flimsy and very uncertain principle, which seems to make two different things out of the same thing, he goes on to conclude that, "the fact is, if Mr. Hawthorne were really original, he could not fail of making himself felt by the public. But the fact is, he is _not_ original in any sense." He then attempts to show that Hawthorne's peculiarity is derivative, and selects Tieck as the source of this idiosyncrasy. Perhaps his insinuation may be the origin of Hawthorne's effort to read some of the German author, while at the Old Manse,--an attempt given up in great fatigue. Presently, the unhappy critic brings up his favorite charge of plagiarism; and it happens, as usual, that the writer borrowed from is Poe himself! The similarity which he discovers is between "Howe's Masquerade" and "William Wilson," and is based upon fancied resemblances of situation, which have not the least foundation in the facts, and upon the occurrence in both stories of the phrase, "Villain, unmuffle yourself!" In the latter half of his review, written a little later, Mr. Poe takes quite another tack:-- "Of Mr. Hawthorne's tales we would say emphatically that they belong to the highest region of art,--an art subservient to genius of a very lofty order. We had supposed, with good reason for so supposing, that he had been thrust into his present position by one of the impudent _cliques_ who beset our literature; ... but we have been most agreeably mistaken.... Mr. Hawthorne's distinctive trait is invention, creation, imagination, originality,--a trait which, in the literature of fiction, is positively worth all the rest. But the nature of the originality ... is but imperfectly understood.... The inventive or original mind as frequently displays itself in novelty of _tone_ as in novelty of matter. Mr. Hawthorne is original in _all_ points." This, certainly, is making generous amends; but before he leaves the subject, the assertion is repeated, that "he is peculiar, and _not_ original." Though an extravagant instance, this tourney of Poe's represents pretty well the want of understanding with which Hawthorne was still received by many readers. His point of view once seized upon, nothing could be more clear and simple than his own exposition of refined and evasive truths; but the keen edge of his perception remained quite invisible to some. Of the "Twice-Told Tales" Hawthorne himself wrote:-- "The sketches are not, it is hardly necessary to say, profound; but it is rather more remarkable that they so seldom, if ever, show any design on the writer's part to make them so.... Every sentence, so far as it embodies thought or sensibility, may be understood and felt by anybody who will give himself the trouble to read it, and will take up the book in a proper mood." But it was hard for people to find that mood, because in fact the Tales _were_ profound. Their language was clear as crystal; but all the more dazzlingly shone through the crystal that new light of Hawthorne's gaze. After nearly four years, Hawthorne's tenancy of the Manse came to an end, and he returned to Salem, with some prospect of an office there from the new Democratic government of Polk. It is said that President Tyler had at one time actually appointed him to the Salem post-office, but was induced to withdraw his name. There were local factions that kept the matter in abeyance. The choice, in any case, lay between the Naval Office and the surveyorship, and Bridge urged Hawthorne's appointment to the latter. "Whichever it be," wrote Hawthorne, "it is to you that I shall owe it, among so many other solid kindnesses. I have as true friends as any man has, but you have been the friend in need and the friend indeed." At this time he was seriously in want of some profitable employment, for he had received almost nothing from the magazine. It was the period of credit, and debts were hard to collect. His journal at the Old Manse refers to the same trouble. I have been told that, besides losing the value of many of his contributions to the "Democratic," through the failure of the magazine, he had advanced money to the publishers, which was never repaid; but this has not been corroborated, and as he had lost nearly everything at Brook Farm, it is a little doubtful. At length, he was installed as surveyor in the Salem Custom-House, where he hoped soon to begin writing at ease. VII. THE SCARLET LETTER. 1846-1850. The literary result of the four years which Hawthorne now, after long absence, spent in his native town, was the first romance which gave him world-wide fame. But the intention of beginning to write soon was not easy of fulfilment in the new surroundings. "Literature, its exertions and objects, were now of little moment in my regard," he says, in "The Custom-House." "I cared not at this period for books; they were apart from me.... A gift, a faculty, if it had not departed, was suspended and inanimate within me." Readers of that charming sketch will remember the account of the author's finding a veritable Puritan scarlet letter in an unfinished upper room of the public building in which he labored at this time, and how he was urged by the ghost of a former surveyor, who had written an account of the badge and its wearer, to make the matter public. The discovery of these materials is narrated with such reassuring accuracy, that probably a large number of people still suppose this to have been the origin of "The Scarlet Letter." But there is no knowledge among those immediately connected with Hawthorne of any actual relic having been found; nor, of course, is it likely that anything besides the manuscript memorandum should have been preserved. But I do not know that he saw even this. The papers of Mr. Poe were probably a pure invention of the author's. A strange coincidence came to light the year after the publication of the romance. A letter from Leutze, the painter, was printed in the Art Union Bulletin, running thus:-- "I was struck, when some years ago in the Schwarzwald (in an old castle), with one picture in the portrait-gallery; it has haunted me ever since. It was not the beauty or finish that charmed me; it was something strange in the figures, the immense contrast between the child and what was supposed to be her gouvernante in the garb of some severe order; the child, a girl, was said to be the ancestress of the family, a princess of some foreign land. No sooner had I read 'The Scarlet Letter' than it burst clearly upon me that the picture could represent no one else than Hester Prynne and little Pearl. I hurried to see it again, and found my suppositions corroborated, for the formerly inexplicable embroidery on the breast of the woman, which I supposed was the token of her order, assumed the form of the letter; and though partially hidden by the locks of the girl and the flowers in her hair, I set to work upon it at once, and made as close a copy of it, with all its quaintness, as was possible to me, which I shall send you soon. How Hester Prynne ever came to be painted, I can't imagine; it must certainly have been a freak of little Pearl. Strange enough, the castle is named Perlenburg, the Castle of Pearls, or Pearl Castle, as you please." A more extraordinary incident in its way than this discovery, if it be trustworthy, could hardly be conceived; but I am not aware that it has been verified. The germ of the story in Hawthorne's mind is given below. The name Pearl, it will be remembered, occurs in the Note-Books, as an original and isolated suggestion "for a girl, in a story." In "Endicott and the Red Cross," one of the twice-told series printed many years before, there is a description of "a young woman, with no mean share of beauty, whose doom it was to wear the letter A on the breast of her gown, in the eyes of all the world and her own children. Sporting with her infamy, the lost and desperate creature had embroidered the fatal token in scarlet cloth, with golden thread and the nicest art of needlework." A friend asked Hawthorne if he had documentary evidence for this particular punishment, and he replied that he had actually seen it mentioned in the town records of Boston, though with no attendant details. [Footnote: I may here transcribe, as a further authority, which Hawthorne may or may not have seen, one of the laws of Plymouth Colony, enacted in 1658, about the period in which the events of "The Scarlet Letter" are placed. "It is enacted by the Court and the Authoritie thereof that whosoeuer shall committ Adultery shal bee seuerly Punished by whipping two seueral times viz: once whiles the Court is in being att which they are convicted of the fact, and the second time as the Court shall order, and likewise to were two Capitall letters viz: A D cut cut in Cloth and sewed on their vpermost garments on their arme or backe; and if at any time they shal bee taken without said letters, whiles they are in the Gou'ment soe worne, to be forthwith Taken and publicly whipt."] This friend said to another at the time: "We shall hear of that letter again, for it evidently has made a profound impression on Hawthorne's mind." Returning to Salem, where his historical stories and sketches had mainly been written, he reverted naturally to the old themes; and this one doubtless took possession of him soon after his entrance on his customs duties. But these disabled him from following it out at once. When the indefatigable Whigs got hold of the government again, Hawthorne's literary faculty came into power also, for he was turned out of office. In the winter of 1849, therefore, he got to work on his first regular romance. In his Preface to the "Mosses" he had formally renounced the short story; but "The Scarlet Letter" proved so highly wrought a tragedy that he had fears of its effect upon the public, if presented alone. "In the present case I have some doubts about the expediency, [he wrote to Mr. Fields, the junior partner of his new publisher, Ticknor,] because, if the book is made up entirely of 'The Scarlet Letter,' it will be too sombre. I found it impossible to relieve the shadows of the story with so much light as I would gladly have thrown in. Keeping so close to its point as the tale does, and diversified no otherwise than by turning different sides of the same dark idea to the reader's eye, it will weary very many people, and disgust some. Is it safe, then, to stake the book entirely on this one chance?" His plan was to add some of the pieces afterward printed with the "The Snow Image," and entitle the whole "Old Time Legends, together with Sketches Experimental and Ideal." But this was abandoned. On the 4th of February, 1850, he writes to Bridge:-- "I finished my book only yesterday: one end being in the press at Boston, while the other was in my head here at Salem; so that, as you see, the story is at least fourteen miles long.... "My book, the publisher tells me, will not be out before April. He speaks of it in tremendous terms of approbation; so does Mrs. Hawthorne, to whom I read the conclusion last night. [Footnote: This recalls an allusion in the English Note-Books (September 14, 1855): "Speaking of Thackeray, I cannot but wonder at his coolness in respect to his own pathos, and compare it with my emotions when I read the last scene of The Scarlet Letter to my wife just after writing it,--tried to read it, rather, for my voice swelled and heaved, as if I were tossed up and down on an ocean as it subsides after a storm. But I was in a very nervous state, then, having gone through a great diversity of emotion while writing it, for many months."] It broke her heart, and sent her to bed with a grievous headache,--which I look upon as a triumphant success. Judging from its effect on her and the publisher, I may calculate on what bowlers calls a 'ten-strike.' But I do not make any such calculation." Now that the author had strongly taken hold of one of the most tangible and terrible of subjects, the public no longer held back. "The Scarlet Letter" met with instant acceptance, and the first edition of five thousand copies was exhausted in ten days. On the old ground of Salem and in the region of New England history where he had won his first triumphs, Hawthorne, no longer the centre of a small public, received the applause of a widespread audience throughout this country, and speedily in Europe too. His old friend, "The London Athenaeum," received "The Scarlet Letter" with very high, though careful praise. But at the same time with this new and wide recognition, an assault was made on the author which it is quite worth while to record here. This was an article in "The Church Review" (an Episcopal quarterly published at New Haven), [Footnote: In the number for January, 1851.] written, I am told, by a then young man who has since reached a high place in the ecclesiastical body to which he belongs. The reviewer, in this case, had in a previous article discussed the question of literary schools in America. Speaking of the origin of the term "Lake School," he pronounced the epithet _Lakers_ "the mere blunder of superficial wit and raillery." But that did not prevent him from creating the absurd title of "Bay writers," which he applied to all the writers about Boston, baptizing them in the profane waters of Massachusetts Bay. "The Church Review" was in the habit of devoting a good deal of its attention to criticism of the Puritan movement which founded New England. Accordingly, "It is time," announced this logician, in opening his batteries on Hawthorne, "that the literary world should learn that Churchmen are, in a very large proportion, their readers and book-buyers, and that the tastes and principles of Churchmen have as good a right to be respected as those of Puritans and Socialists." Yet, inconsistently enough, he declared that Bay writers could not have grown to the stature of authors at all, unless they had first shaken off the Puritan religion, and adopted "a religion of indifference and unbelief." Thus, though attacking them as Puritans and Socialists (this phrase was aimed at Brook Farm), he denied that they were Puritans at all. Clear understanding of anything from a writer with so much of the boomerang in his mind was not to be expected. But neither would one easily guess the revolting vulgarity with which he was about to view "The Scarlet Letter." He could discover in it nothing but a deliberate attempt to attract readers by pandering to the basest taste. He imagines that Hawthorne "selects the intrigue of an adulterous minister, as the groundwork of his ideal" of Puritan times, and asks, "Is the French era actually begun in our literature?" Yet, being in some points, or professing to be, an admirer of the author, "We are glad," he says, "that 'The Scarlet Letter' is, after all, little more than an experiment, and need not be regarded as a step necessarily fatal." And in order to save Mr. Hawthorne, and stem the tide of corruption, he is willing to point out his error. Nevertheless, he is somewhat at a loss to know where to puncture the heart of the offence, for "there is a provoking concealment of the author's motive," he confesses, "from the beginning to the end of the story. We wonder what he would be at: whether he is making fun of all religion, or only giving a fair hint of the essential sensualism of enthusiasm. But, in short, we are astonished at the kind of incident he has selected for romance." The phraseology, he finds, is not offensive: but this is eminently diabolical, for "the romance never hints the shocking words that belong to its things, but, like Mephistopheles, hints that the arch-fiend himself is a very tolerable sort of person, if nobody would call him Mr. Devil." Where, within the covers of the book, could the deluded man have found this doctrine urged? Only once, faintly, and then in the words of one of the chief sinners. "Shelley himself," says the austere critic, airing his literature, "never imagined a more dissolute conversation than that in which the polluted minister comforts himself with the thought, that the revenge of the injured husband is worse than his own sin in instigating it. 'Thou and I never did so, Hester,' he suggests; and she responds, 'Never, never! What we did had a consecration of its own.'" And these wretched and distorted consolations of two erring and condemned souls, the righteous Churchman, with not very commendable taste, seizes upon as the moral of the book, leaving aside the terrible retribution which overtakes and blasts them so soon after their vain plan of flight and happiness. Not for a moment does Hawthorne defend their excuses for themselves. Of Hester:-- "Shame, Despair, Solitude! These [he says] had been her teachers,--stern and wild ones,--and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss." And what she urges on behalf of herself and Dimmesdale must, of course, by any pure-minded reader, be included among the errors thus taken into her mind. "The minister, on the other hand, had never gone through an experience calculated to lead him beyond the scope of generally received laws; although, in a single instance, he had so fearfully transgressed one of the most sacred of them.... Were such a man once more to fall, what plea could be urged in extenuation of his crime? _None_; unless it avail him somewhat, that he was broken down by long and exquisite suffering; that his mind was darkened and confused by the very remorse which harrowed it." But that these partial excuses are futile, the writer goes on to show, in this solemn declaration:-- "And be the stern and sad truth spoken, that the breach which guilt has once made into the human soul is never, in this mortal state, repaired. It may be watched and guarded.... But there is still the ruined wall, and near it the stealthy tread of the foe that would win over again his unforgotten triumph." How Mr. Dimmesdale yielded to this stealthy foe is then described; but it is also shown how Roger Chillingworth, the personified retribution of the two sinners, fastens himself to them in all their movements, and will be with them in any flight, however distant. "'Hadst thou sought the whole earth over,' said he, looking darkly at the clergyman, 'there was no one place so secret, no high place nor lowly place, where thou couldst have escaped me.'" And it was precisely because Hawthorne would leave no specious turn of the hypocrisy of sin unrevealed, that he carried us through this delusive mutual consolation of the guilty pair, and showed us their empty hope, founded on wrong-doing, powdered to dust at the moment of fulfilment. But the reverend critic, by some dark and prurient affinity of his imagination, saw nothing of the awful truths so clearly though briefly expressed, and finally came to the conclusion that the moral of the whole fiction was "that the Gospel has not set the relations of man and woman where they should be, and that a new gospel is needed to supersede the Seventh Commandment, and the bond of matrimony." "The lady's frailty, [writes the reviewer,] is philosophized into a natural and necessary result of the Scriptural law of marriage, which by holding her irrevocably to her vows, as plighted to a dried-up old book-worm, ... is viewed as making her heart an easy victim.... The sin of her seducer, too, seems to be considered as lying, not so much in the deed itself, as in his long concealment of it; and in fact the whole moral of the tale is given in the words, 'Be true, he true!' as if sincerity in sin were a virtue, and as if 'Be clean, he clean!' were not the more fitting conclusion." But this moral of cleanliness was one so obvious that Hawthorne probably never dreamed of any one's requiring it to be emphasized. In fact, it is the starting-point, the very foundation, of the tragedy. The tale is a massive argument for repentance, which is the flinging aside of concealment, and the open and truthful acknowledgment of sin. In the Puritan mode of dealing with sin, Hawthorne found the whole problem of repentance and confession presented in the most drastic, concentrated, and startling form; for the Puritans carried out in the severest style a practical illustration of the consequences of moral offence. Since men and women would not voluntarily continue in active remorse and public admission of wrong-doing, these governors and priests determined to try the effect of visible symbols in keeping the conscience alive. People were set before the public gaze, in the stocks, whipped in public at the whipping-post, and imprisoned in the pillory. Malefactors had their ears cropped; scolding women had to wear a forked twig on the tongue; other criminals to carry a halter constantly around the neck. But that this was only a hellish device, after all; that the inflictors of such punishment were arrogating too much to themselves, and shared the office of the fiend; that, moreover, this compulsion of a dumb outward truthfulness would never build up the real inner truth of the soul;--all this Hawthorne perceived and endeavored to portray in a form which should be as a parable, applying its morality to the men and women of to-day, all the more persuasively because of its indirectness. As a study of a system of social discipline never before so expounded, it claimed the deepest attention. And never was the capacity of sinning men and women for self-delusion more wonderfully illustrated than in this romance. The only avenue of escape from such delusion was shown to be self-analysis; that is, the conscientious view of one's self which keeps the right or wrong of one's conduct always clearly visible. Hester was on the whole the truest of the three persons in the drama, and the advantages of this comparative trueness are constantly made manifest. She in a measure conquers evil and partly atones for her wrong, by the good which she is able to do among her fellow-beings,--as much compensation as can rightfully be hoped for a woman who has once been so essentially corrupted as she. Dimmesdale, too, retains so much of native truth that he never allows his conscience to slumber for a moment, and plies the scourge of remorse upon himself continually. To this extent he is better than Chillingworth, who, in order to take into his own hands the retribution that belongs to Heaven, deliberately adopts falsity for his guide, and becomes a monster of deceit, taking a wicked joy in that which ought to have awakened an endless, piteous horror in him instead, and have led to new contemplation and study of virtue. But Dimmesdale, though not coolly and maliciously false, stops short of open confession, and in this submits himself to the most occult and corrosive influence of his own sin. For him, the single righteousness possible consisted in abject acknowledgment. Once announcing that he had fallen, and was unworthy, he might have taken his place on the lower moral plane; and, equally resigning the hope of public honor and of happiness with Hester, he could have lent his crippled energies to the doing of some limited good. The shock to the general belief in probity would have been great; but the discovery that the worst had been made known, that the minister was strong enough to condemn himself, and descend from the place he no longer was fit for, would have restored the public mind again, by showing it that a deeper probity possible than that which it wanted to see sustained. This is the lesson of the tragedy, that nothing is so destructive as the morality of mere appearances. Not that sincerity in sin is a virtue, but that it is better than sin and falsehood combined. And if anything were wanting, at first, to make this clear, there certainly is not a particle of obscurity left by the glare of the catastrophe, when the clergyman rejects Hester's hope that he and she may meet after death, and spend their immortal life together, and says that God has proved his mercy most of all by the afflictions he has laid upon him. As to the new truth which Hester hoped would be revealed, it could have been no other than that ultimate lifting up of the race into a plane of the utmost human truthfulness, which every one who believes in the working of all things for good, looks forward to with vague longing, but with most certain faith. How far the Puritan organization was from this state of applied truth, the romance shows. Nearly every note in the range of Puritan sympathies is touched by the poet, as he goes on. The still unspoiled tenderness of the young matron who cannot but feel something of mercifulness toward Hester is overruled by the harsh exultation of other women in her open shame. We have the noble and spotless character of Winthrop dimly suggested by the mention of his death on the night of Dimmesdale's vigil at the pillory; but much more distinct appears the mild and saintly Wilson, who, nevertheless, is utterly incompetent to deal with the problem of a woman's lost morality. Governor Bellingham is the stern, unflinching, manly upholder of the state and its ferocious sanctions; yet in the very house with him dwells Mistress Hibbins, the witch-lady, revelling in the secret knowledge of widespread sin. Thus we are led to a fuller comprehension of Chillingworth's attitude as an exponent of the whole Puritan idea of spiritual government; and in his diabolical absorption and gloating interest in sin, we behold an exaggerated--but logically exaggerated--spectre of the Puritan attempt to precipitate and personally supervise the punishments of eternity on this side of death. Dr. George B. Loring, of Salem, wrote at the time an excellent reply to this article in "The Church Review," though he recognized, as all readers of general intelligence must, that the author of it did not by any means represent the real enlightenment of the clergy and laity for whom he undertook to be a mouthpiece. Considered as a work of art, "The Scarlet Letter" is perhaps not so excellent as the author's subsequent books. It may not unjustly be called a novel without a plot, so far as this touches the adroit succession of incidents and the interdependence of parts, which we call "plot." Passion and motive and character, having been brought together in given relations, begin to work toward a logical issue; but the individual chapters stand before us rather as isolated pictures, with intervals between, than as the closely conjoined links of a drama gathering momentum as it grows. There is succession and acceleration, indeed, in the movement of the story, but this is not quite so evident as is the hand which checks each portion and holds it perfectly still, long enough to describe it completely. The author does not, like a playwright, reflect the action swiftly while it passes, but rather arrests it and studies it, then lets it go by. It may be that this is simply the distinction between the dramatist's and the novelist's method; but probably we must allow it to be something more than that, and must attribute it to the peculiar leisure which qualifies all Hawthorne's fictions, at times enhancing their effect, but also protracting the impression a little too much, at times. Yet the general conception, and the mode of drawing out the story and of illustrating the characters, is dramatic in a high degree. The author's exegesis of the moods of his persons is brief, suggestive, restrained; and, notwithstanding the weight of moral meaning which the whole work carries, it is impossible to determine how much the movement of events is affected by his own will, or by that imperious perception of the necessary outcome of certain passions and temperaments, which influences novelists of the higher order. As a demonstration of power, it seems to me that this first extended romance was not outdone by its successors; yet there is a harshness in its tone, a want of mitigation, which causes it to strike crudely on the aesthetic sense by comparison with those mellower productions. This was no doubt fortunate for its immediate success. Hawthorne's faith in pure beauty was so absolute as to erect at first a barrier between himself and the less devout reading public. If in his earlier tales he had not so transfused tragedy with the suave repleteness of his sense of beauty, he might have snatched a speedier popular recognition. It is curious to speculate what might have been the result, had he written "The House of the Seven Gables" before "The Scarlet Letter." Deep as is the tragic element in the former, it seems quite likely that its greater gentleness of incident and happier tone would have kept the world from discovering the writer's real measure, for a while longer. But "The Scarlet Letter" burst with such force close to its ears, that the indolent public awoke in good earnest, and never forgot, though it speedily forgave the shock. There was another smaller but attendant explosion. Hawthorne's prefatory chapter on the Custom-House incensed some of his fellow-citizens of Salem, terribly. There seems to have been a general civic clamor against him, on account of it, though it would be hard to find any rational justification therefor. In reference to the affair, Hawthorne wrote at the time:-- "As to the Salem people, I really thought I had been exceedingly good-natured in my treatment of them. They certainly do not deserve good usage at my hands, after permitting me ... to be deliberately lied down, not merely once, but at two separate attacks, and on two false indictments, without hardly a voice being raised on my behalf." This refers to political machinations of the party opposed to Hawthorne as an official: they had pledged themselves, it was understood, not to ask for his ejection, and afterward set to work to oust him without cause. There is reason to believe that Hawthorne felt acute exasperation at these unpleasant episodes for a time. But the annoyance came upon him when he was worn out with the excitement of composing "The Scarlet Letter"; and this ebullition of local hostility must moreover have been especially offensive at a moment when the public everywhere else was receiving him with acclaim as a person whose genius entitled him to enthusiastic recognition. Hawthorne had generous admirers and sincere friends in Salem, and his feeling was, I suppose, in great measure the culmination of that smouldering disagreement which had harassed him in earlier years, and had lurked in his heart in spite of the constant mild affection which he maintained toward the town. But the connection between Hawthorne and Salem was now to be finally broken off. He longed for change, for the country, and for the recreation that the Old Manse garden had given him. "I should not long stand such a life of bodily inactivity and mental exertion as I have led for the last few months," he wrote to Bridge. "Here I hardly go out once a week." On this account, and because of his difficulty in writing while in office, he did not so much regret losing his place. One of the plans proposed at this time was that he should rent or buy the Sparhawk house, a famous old colonial mansion on Goose Creek, at Kittery, in Maine, which was then to be disposed of in some way. Hawthorne, I think, would have found much that was suggestive and agreeable in the neighborhood. After his return from abroad, he made a visit to the quaint and stately little city of Portsmouth, and dined at one of the most beautiful old houses in New England, the ancient residence of Governor Langdon, then occupied by the Rev. Dr. Burroughs. A memorial of that visit remains, in this bright note from his host:-- PORTSMOUTH, September, 1860. MR. HAWTHORNE. MY DEAR SIR:--There are no Mosses on our "Old Manse," there is no Romance at our Blithedale; and this is no "Scarlet Letter." But you can give us a "Twice-Told Tale," if you will for the second time be our guest to-morrow at dinner, at half past two o'clock. Very truly yours, CHARLES BURROUGHS. But, at present, Hawthorne's decision led him to Berkshire. VIII. LENOX AND CONCORD: PRODUCTIVE PERIOD. 1850-1853. In the early summer, after the publication of "The Scarlet Letter," Hawthorne removed from Salem to Lenox, in Berkshire, where himself and his family were ensconced in a small red house near the Stockbridge Bowl. It was far from a comfortable residence; but he had no means of obtaining a better one. Meantime, he could do what he was sent into the world to do, so long as he had the mere wherewithal to live. He was much interested in Herman Melville, at this time living in Pittsfield. There was even talk of their writing something together, as I judge from some correspondence; though this was abandoned. Between this summer of 1850 and June, 1853, Hawthorne wrote "The House of the Seven Gables," "The Blithedale Romance," "The Wonder-Book for Boys and Girls," and "Tanglewood Tales," besides the story of "The Snow Image" in the volume to which this supplies the title; and his short "Life of Franklin Pierce." The previous paucity of encouragements to literature, and the deterring effect of official duties and of the Brook Farm attempt, were now removed, and his pen showed that it could pour a full current if only left free to do so. The industry and energy of this period are the more remarkable because he could seldom accomplish anything in the way of composition during the warm months. "The House of the Seven Gables" was under way by September, 1850. "I shan't have the new story ready," he writes to his publisher on the 1st of October, "by November, for I am never good for anything in the literary way till after the first autumnal frost, which has somewhat such an effect on my imagination that it does on the foliage here about me,--multiplying and brightening its hues; though they are likely to be sober and shabby enough after all." The strain of reflection upon the work in hand which he indulged one month later is so important as to merit dwelling upon. "I write diligently, but not so rapidly as I had hoped. I find the book requires more care and thought than 'The Scarlet Letter'; also I have to wait oftener for a mood. 'The Scarlet Letter' being all in one tone, I had only to get my pitch, and could then go on interminably. Many passages of this book ought to be finished with the minuteness of a Dutch picture, in order to give them their proper effect. Sometimes, when tired of it, it strikes me that the whole is an absurdity, from beginning to end; but the fact is, in writing a romance, a man is always, or always ought to be, careering on, the utmost verge of a precipitous absurdity, and the skill lies in coming as close as possible, without actually tumbling over. My prevailing idea is, that the book ought to succeed better than 'The Scarlet Letter,' though I have no idea that it will." By the 12th of January, 1851, he was able to write: "My 'House of the Seven Gables' is, so to speak, finished; only I am hammering away a little at the roof, and doing up a few odd jobs that were left incomplete"; and at the end of that month, he despatched the manuscript to Boston, still retaining his preference for it over the preceding work. "It has met with extraordinary success from that portion of the public to whose judgment it has been submitted, viz. from my wife. I likewise prefer it to 'The Scarlet Letter'; but an author's opinion of his book just after completing it is worth little or nothing, he being then in the hot or cold fit of a fever, and certain to rate it too high or too low. "It has undoubtedly one disadvantage, in being brought so close to the present time; whereby its romantic improbabilities become more glaring." He also wrote to Bridge, in July, after listening to the critics, and giving his own opinion time to mature:-- "I think it a work more characteristic of my mind, and more proper and natural for me to write, than 'The Scarlet Letter,'--but, for that very reason, less likely to interest the public. Nevertheless, it appears to have sold better than the former, and I think is move sure of retaining the ground that it acquires. Mrs. Kemble writes that both works are popular in England, and advises me to take out my copyright there." His opinion of the superiority of the fresh production to his first great romance is no doubt one that critics will coincide with as regards artistic completeness; though his fear that it would not succeed so well was not confirmed, because, as I have suggested, he had begun to acquire that momentum of public favor which sets in after its first immense inertia has once been overcome. Acting on the reports from England, he made a suggestion to his publisher; and though this at first met with discouragement, ten months later £200 were received from a London house for "The Blithedale Romance." English editions of his works had already become numerous. But Hawthorne began now to receive a more ethereal and not less welcome kind of tribute from abroad, that of praise from the makers and markers of literature. The critics welcomed him to a high place; authors wrote to him, urging him to cross the sea; and Miss Mitford--of whom he said, "Her sketches, long ago as I read them, are as sweet in my memory as the scent of new hay"--sent special messages expressive of her pleasure. When the "Blithedale Romance" had come out, Mr. Hawthorne sent Miss Mitford a copy, and she wrote in reply this cordial and delightful note:-- SWALLOWFIELD, August 6,1852. At the risk of troubling you, dear Mr. Hawthorne, I write again to tell you how much I thank you for the precious volume enriched by your handwriting, which, for its own sake and for yours, I shall treasure carefully so long as I live. The story has your mark upon it,--the fine tragic construction unmatched amongst living authors, the passion of the concluding scenes, the subtle analysis of jealousy, the exquisite finish of style. I must tell you what one of the cleverest men whom I have ever known, an Irish barrister, the juvenile correspondent of Miss Edgeworth, says of your style: "His English is the richest and most intense essence of the language I know of; his words conveying not only a meaning, but more than they appear to mean. They point onward or upward or downward, as the case may be, and we cannot help following them with the eyes of imagination, sometimes smiling, sometimes weeping, sometimes shuddering, as if we were victims of the mesmeric influence he is so fond of bringing to bear upon his characters. Three of the most perfect Englishmen of our day are Americans,--Irving, Prescott, and this great new writer, Mr. Hawthorne." So far my friend Mr. Hockey. I forget, dear Mr. Hawthorne, whether I told you that the writer of whose works you remind me, not by imitation, but by resemblance, is the great French novelist, Balzac. Do you know his books? He is untranslated and untranslatable, and it requires the greatest familiarity with French literature to relish him thoroughly.... I doubt if he be much known amongst you; at least I have never seen him alluded to in American literature. He has, of course, the low morality of a Frenchman, but, being what he is, Mrs. Browning and I used to discuss his personages like living people, and regarded his death as a great personal calamity to both. I am expecting Mrs. Browning here in a few days, not being well enough to meet her in London.... How I wish, dear Mr. Hawthorne, that you were here to meet them! The day will come, I hope. It would be good for your books to look at Europe, and all of Europe that knows our tongue would rejoice to look at you. Ever your obliged and affectionate friend, M. R. MITFORD. I must transcribe here, too, part of a letter from Herman Melville, who, in the midst of his epistle, suddenly assumes the tone of a reviewer, and discourses as follows, under the heading, "_The House of the Seven Gables: A Romance. By Nathaniel Hawthorne_. 16_mo. pp._ 344." "The contents of this book do not belie its clustering romantic title. With great enjoyment we spent almost an hour in each separate gable. This book is like a fine old chamber, abundantly but still judiciously furnished with precisely that sort of furniture best fitted to furnish it. There are rich hangings, whereon are braided scenes from tragedies. There is old china with rare devices, set about on the carved beaufet; there are long and indolent lounges to throw yourself upon; there is an admirable sideboard, plentifully stored with good viands; there is a smell of old wine in the pantry; and finally, in one corner, there is a dark little black-letter volume in golden clasps, entitled _Hawthorne: A Problem_.... "We think the book for pleasantness of running interest surpasses the other work of the author. The curtains are now drawn; the sun comes in more; genialities peep out more. Were we to particularize what has most struck us in the deeper passages, we should point out the scene where Clifford, for a minute, would fain throw himself from the window, to join the procession; or the scene where the Judge is left seated in his ancestral chair. "Clifford is full of an awful truth throughout. He is conceived in the finest, truest spirit. He is no caricature. He is Clifford. And here we would say, that did the circumstances permit, we should like nothing better than to devote an elaborate and careful paper to the full consideration and analysis of the purpose and significance of what so strongly characterizes all of this author's writing. There is a certain tragic phase of humanity, which, in our opinion, was never more powerfully embodied than by Hawthorne: we mean the tragicalness of human thought in its own unbiased, native, and profound workings. We think that into no recorded mind has the intense feeling of the whole truth ever entered more deeply than into this man's. By whole truth, we mean the apprehension of the absolute condition of present things as they strike the eye of the man who fears them not, though they do their worst to him." This really profound analysis, Mr. Mellville professes to extract from the "Pittsfield Secret Review," of which I wish further numbers could be found. But chief among the prizes of this season were letters from his friends Lowell and Holmes. The latter's I insert, because it admirably illustrates the cordial relation which has always distinguished the famous writers of New England,--no pleasant illusion of distance, but a notable and praiseworthy reality. BOSTON, April 9, 1851. MY DEAR SIR:--I have been confined to my chamber and almost to my bed, for some days since I received your note; and in the mean time I have received what was even more welcome, the new Romance "from the Author." While I was too ill to read, my wife read it to me, so that you have been playing physician to my heartaches and headaches at once, with the magnetism of your imagination. I think we have no romancer but yourself, nor have had any for this long time. I had become so set in this feeling, that but for your last two stories I should have given up hoping, and believed that all we were to look for in the way of spontaneous growth were such languid, lifeless, sexless creations as in the view of certain people constitute the chief triumphs of a sister art as manifested among us. But there is rich red blood in Hester, and the flavor of the sweet-fern and the bayberry are not truer to the soil than the native sweetness of our little Phoebe! The Yankee mind has for the most part budded and flowered in pots of English earth, but you have fairly raised yours as a seedling in the natural soil. My criticism has to stop here; the moment a fresh mind takes in the elements of the common life about us and transfigures them, I am contented to enjoy and admire, and let others analyze. Otherwise I should be tempted to display my appreciating sagacity in pointing out a hundred touches, transcriptions of nature, of character, of sentiment, true as the daguerreotype, free as crayon sketching, which arrested me even in the midst of the palpitating story. Only one word, then, this: that the solid reality and homely truthfulness of the actual and present part of the story are blended with its weird and ghostly shadows with consummate skill and effect; this was perhaps the special difficulty of the story. I don't want to refuse anything you ask me to do. I shall come up, I trust, about the 1st of June. I would look over the MS. in question, as a duty, with as much pleasure as many other duties afford. To say the truth, I have as great a dread of the _Homo Caudatus_ Linn., Anglicé, the Being with a Tale, male or female, as any can have. "If foes they write, if friends they read me dead," said poor Hepzibah's old exploded poet. Still, if it must be, I will stipulate to read a quantity not exceeding fifty-six pounds avoirdupois by weight or eighteen reams by measure or "tale,"--provided there is no locomotion in the case. The idea of visiting Albany does not enter into my intentions. I do not know who would serve as a third or a second member of the committee; Miss Sedgwick, if the Salic law does not prevail in Berkshire, is the most natural person to do it. But the real truth is, the little Albaneses want to see the author of "The Scarlet Letter," and don't care a sixpence who else is on the committee. That is what they are up to. So if you want two dummies, on the classical condition _not to leave the country except in case of invasion_, absentees, voters by proxy, potential but not personally present bottle-holders, I will add my name to those of Latimer, Ridley, and Co. as a Martyr in the cause of Human Progress. Believe me, my dear sir, Yours very sincerely, O. W. Holmes. Hawthorne's interest in Dr. Holmes's works was also very great, and one of the last books which he read at all was "Elsie Venner," which he had taken up for a second time shortly before his death. Amid all the variety of thoughtful and thoughtless praise, or of other comment on the new romance, he began to feel that necessity for abstracting his attention entirely from what was said of his work in current publications, which forces itself upon every creative mind attempting to secure some centre of repose in a chattering and unprivate age like the present. This feeling he imparted to Bridge, and it also appears in one or two published letters. At the same time, it must be remembered how careful a consideration he gave to criticism; and he wrote of Edwin Whipple's reviewing of the "Seven Gables":-- "Whipple's notices have done more than pleased me, for they have helped me to see my book. Much of the censure I recognize as just; I wish I could feel the praise to be so fully deserved. Being better (which I insist it is) than 'The Scarlet Letter,' I have never expected it to be so popular." In this same letter occurs the following:-- "---- ----, Esq., of Boston, has written to me, complaining that I have made his grandfather infamous! It seems there was actually a Pyncheon (or Pynchon, as he spells it) family resident in Salem, and that their representative, at the period of the Revolution, was a certain Judge Pynchon, a Tory and a refugee. This was Mr. ----'s grandfather, and (at least, so he dutifully describes him) the most exemplary old gentleman in the world. There are several touches in my account of the Pyncheons which, he says, make it probable that I had this actual family in my eye, and he considers himself infinitely wronged and aggrieved, and thinks it monstrous that the 'virtuous dead' cannot be suffered to rest quietly in their graves." The matter here alluded to threatened to give Hawthorne almost as much inconvenience as the tribulation which followed the appearance of "The Custom-House." One of the complainants in this case, though objecting to the use of the name Pyncheon, "respectfully suggests," with an ill-timed passion for accuracy, that it should in future editions be printed with the _e_ left out, because this was the proper mode in use by the family. There has been some slight controversy as to the original of the visionary mansion described in this romance. Mr. Hawthorne himself said distinctly that he had no particular house in mind, and it is also a fact that none is recalled which fulfils all the conditions of that of the "Seven Gables." Nevertheless, one party has maintained that the old Philip English house, pulled down many years since, was the veritable model; and others support the Ingersoll house, which still stands. The Curwin, called the "Witch House," appears, by an antique painting from which photographs have been made, to have had the requisite number of peaks at a remote date; but one side of the structure being perforce left out of the picture, there is room for a doubt. [Footnote: It is from one of these photographs that the cut in the new edition of Hawthorne's Works has been developed.] In "The House of the Seven Gables" Hawthorne attained a connection of parts and a masterly gradation of tones which did not belong, in the same fulness, to "The Scarlet Letter." There is, besides, a larger range of character, in this second work, and a much more nicely detailed and reticulated portrayal of the individuals. Hepzibah is a painting on ivory, yet with all the warmth of a real being. Very noticeable is the delicate veneration and tenderness for her with which the author seems to inspire us, notwithstanding the fact that he has almost nothing definite to say of her except what tends to throw a light ridicule. She is continually contrasted with the exquisite freshness, ready grace, and beauty of Phoebe, and subjected to unfavorable comparisons in the mind of Clifford, whose half-obliterated but still exact aesthetic perception casts silent reproach upon her. Yet, in spite of this, she becomes in a measure endeared to us. In the grace, and agreeableness too, with which Hawthorne manages to surround this ungifted spinster, we find a unit of measure for the beauty with which he has invested the more frightful and tragic elements of the story. It is this triumph of beauty without destroying the unbeautiful, that gives the romance its peculiar artistic virtue. Judge Pyncheon is an almost unqualified discomfort to the reader, yet he is entirely held within bounds by the prevailing charm of the author's style, and by the ingenious manner in which the pleasanter elements of the other characters are applied. At times the strong emphasis given to his evil nature makes one suspect that the villain is too deeply dyed; but the question of equity here involved is one of the most intricate with which novelists have to deal at all. The well-defined opposition between good and bad forces has always been a necessity to man, in myths, religions, and drama. Heal life furnishes the most absolute extremes of possession by the angel or the fiend; and Shakespere has not scrupled to use one of these ultimate possibilities in the person of Iago. Yet Hawthorne was too acutely conscious of the downward bent in every heart, to let the Judge's pronounced iniquity stand without giving a glimpse of incipient evil in another quarter. This occurs in the temptation which besets Holgrave, when he finds that he possesses the same mesmeric sway over Phoebe, the latest Pyncheon offshoot, as that which his ancestor Matthew Maule exercised over Alice Pyncheon. The momentary mood which brings before him the absolute power which might be his over this fair girl, opens a whole new vista of wrong, in which the retribution would have been transferred from the shoulders of the Pyncheons to those of the Maules. Had Holgrave yielded then, he might have damned his own posterity, as Colonel Pyncheon had _his_. Thus, even in the hero of the piece, we are made aware of possibilities as malicious and destructive as those hereditary faults grown to such rank maturity in the Judge; and this may be said to offer a middle ground between the side of justice and attractiveness, and the side of injustice and repulsiveness, on which the personages are respectively ranged. The conception of a misdeed operating through several generations, and righted at last solely by the over-toppling of unrestrained malevolence on the one hand, and on the other by the force of upright character in the wronged family, was a novel one at the time; this graphic depicture of the past at work upon the present has anticipated a great deal of the history and criticism of the following twenty-five years, in its close conjunction of antecedent influences and cumulative effects. As a discovery of native sources of picturesque fiction, this second romance was not less remarkable than the one which preceded it. The theme furnished by the imaginary Pyncheon family ranges from the tragic in the Judge, through the picturesquely pathetic in Clifford, to a grotesque cast of pathos and humor in Hepzibah. Thence we are led to another vein of simple, fun-breeding characterization in Uncle Venner and Ned Higgins. The exquisite perception which draws old Uncle Venner in such wholesome colors, tones him up to just one degree of sunniness above the dubious light in which Hepzibah stands, so that he may soften the contrast of broad humor presented by little Ned Higgins, the "First Customer." I cannot but regret that Hawthorne did not give freer scope to his delicious faculty for the humorous, exemplified in the "Seven Gables." If he had let his genius career as forcibly in this direction as it does in another, when burdened with the black weight of the dead Judge Pyncheon, he might have secured as wide an acceptance for the book as Dickens, with so much more melodrama and so much less art, could gain for less perfect works. Hawthorne's concentration upon the tragic element, and comparative neglect of the other, was in one sense an advantage; but if in the case under discussion he had given more bulk and saliency to the humorous quality, he might also have been more likely to avoid a fault which creeps in, immediately after that marvellous chapter chanted like an unholy requiem over the lifeless Judge. This is the sudden culmination of the passion of Holgrave for Phoebe, just at the moment when he has admitted her to the house where Death and himself were keeping vigil. The revulsion, here, is too violent, and seems to throw a dank and deathly exhalation into the midst of the sweetness which the mutual disclosure of love should have spread around itself. There is need of an enharmonic change, at this point; and it might have been effected, perhaps, by a slower passage from gloom to gladness just here, and a more frequent play of the brighter mood throughout the book. But the tragic predilection seems ultimately to gain the day over the comic, in every great creative mind, and it was so strong with Hawthorne, that instead of giving greater play to humor in later fictions, it curtailed it more and more, from the production of the "Seven Gables" onward. Mr. Curtis has shown me a letter written soon after the publication of the new book, which, as it gives another instance of the writer's keen enjoyment of other men's work, and ends with a glimpse of the life at Lenox, I will copy at length:-- LENOX, April 29,1851. MY DEAR HOWADJI:--I ought to be ashamed (and so I really am) of not having sooner responded to your note of more than a month ago, accompanied as it was by the admirable "Nile Notes." The fact is, I have been waiting to find myself in an eminently epistolary mood, so that I might pay my thanks and compliments in a style not unworthy of the occasion. But the moment has not yet come, and doubtless never will; and now I have delayed so long, that America and England seem to have anticipated me in their congratulations. I read the book aloud to my wife, and both she and I have felt that we never knew anything of the Nile before. There is something beyond descriptive power in it. You make me feel almost as if we had been there ourselves. And then you are such a luxurious traveller.... The fragrance of your chibonque was a marvellous blessing to me. It cannot be concealed that I felt a little alarm, as I penetrated the depths of those chapters about the dancing-girls, lest they might result in something not altogether accordant with our New England morality; and even now I hardly know whether we escaped the peril, or were utterly overwhelmed by it. But at any rate, those passages are gorgeous in the utmost degree. However, I suppose you are weary of praise; and as I have nothing else to inflict, I may as well stop here. S---- and the children and I are plodding onward in good health, and in a fair medium state of prosperity; and on the whole, we are quite the happiest family to be found anywhere. We live in the ugliest little old red farm-house you ever saw.... What shall you write next? For of course you are an author forever. I am glad, for the sake of the public, but not particularly so for your own. Very soon after the issue of the "Seven Gables," another lighter literary project was put into execution. "I mean [he had announced on the 23d of May] to write within six weeks or two months next ensuing, a book of stories made up of classical myths. The subjects are: The Story of Midas, with his Golden Touch; Pandora's Box; The Adventure of Hercules in Quest of the Golden Apples; Bellerophon and the Chimera; Baucis and Philemon; Perseus and Medusa." The "Wonder-Book" was begun on the first of June, and finished by the middle of July; so that the intention of writing it within six weeks was strictly carried out: certainly a rapid achievement, considering the excellent proportion and finish bestowed upon the book. It is a minor work, but a remarkable one; not its least important trait being the perfect simplicity of its style and scope, which, nevertheless, omits nothing essential, and preserves a thorough elegance. Its peculiar excellences come out still more distinctly when contrasted with Charles Kingsley's "The Heroes; or, Greek Fairy Tales," published in England five years after the appearance of the "Wonder-Book" here. The fresher play of Hawthorne's mind with those old subjects is seen in nothing more agreeably than in the graceful Introduction and interludes which he has thrown around the mythological tales, like the tendrils of a vine curling over a sculptured capital. This midsummer task--it was very uncommon for him to write in the hot season--perhaps had something to do with further unsettling Hawthorne's health, which at this time was not good. The somewhat sluggish atmosphere of the far inland valley did not suit his sea-braced temperament; and so, instead of renting Mrs. Kemble's country place, as he had thought of doing, he decided to leave Berkshire with the birds; but not to go southward. Moving to West Newton, near Boston, he remained there for the winter, writing "Blithedale," which was put forth in 1852. The special characteristic of "The Blithedale Romance" seems to me to be its appearance of unlabored ease, and a consequent breeziness of effect distinguishing its atmosphere from that of any of the other romances. The style is admirably finished, and yet there is no part of the book that gives the same impression of almost unnecessary polish which occasionally intervenes between one's admiration and the "Seven Gables." On this score, "Blithedale" is certainly the most consummate of the four completed romances. And as Hawthorne has nowhere given us more robust and splendid characterization than that of Zenobia and Hollingsworth, the work also takes high rank on this ground. The shadows, which seemed partly dispersed in the "Seven Gables," gather again in this succeeding story; but, on the other hand, it is not so jarringly terrible as "The Scarlet Letter." From this it is saved partly by the sylvan surrounding and the pleasant changes of scene. In comparing it with the other works, I find that it lets itself be best defined as a mean between extremes; so that it ought to have the credit of being the most evenly attempered of all. The theme is certainly as deep as that of the earlier ones, and more tangible to the general reader than that of "The Marble Faun"; it is also more novel than that of "The Scarlet Letter" or even the "Seven Gables," and has an attractive air of growing simply and naturally out of a phenomenon extremely common in New England, namely, the man who is dominated and blinded by a theory. And the way in which Hollingsworth, through this very prepossession and absorption, is brought to the ruin of his own scheme, and has to concentrate his charity for criminals upon himself as the first criminal needing reformation, is very masterly. Yet, in discussing the relative positions of these four works. I am not sure that we can reach any decision more stable than that of mere preference. There is a train of thought suggested in "Blithedale" which receives only partial illustration in that story, touching the possible identity of love and hate. It had evidently engaged Hawthorne from a very early period, and would have made rich material for an entire romance, or for several treating different phases of it. Perhaps he would have followed out the suggestion, but for the intervention of so many years of unproductiveness in the height of his powers, and his subsequent too early death. It was while at West Newton, just before coming to the Wayside, that he wrote a note in response to an invitation to attend the memorial meeting at New York, in honor of the novelist, Cooper, which should be read for its cordial admiration of a literary brother, and for the tender thought of the closing sentence. _To Rev. R. W. Griswold._ February 20,1852. Dear Sir:--I greatly regret that circumstances render it impossible for me to be present on the occasion of Mr. Bryant's discourse in honor of James Fenimore Cooper. No man has a better right to be present than myself, if many years of most sincere and unwavering admiration of Mr. Cooper's writings can establish a claim. It is gratifying to observe the earnestness with which the literary men of our country unite in paying honor to the deceased; and it may not be too much to hope that, in the eyes of the public at large, American literature may henceforth acquire a weight and value which have not heretofore been conceded to it: time and death have begun to hallow it. Very respectfully yours, Nathaniel Hawthorne. Early in the summer of 1852 he went to Concord again, where he had bought a small house, there to establish his permanent home. Mr. Curtis was at this time writing some chapters for a book on "The Homes of American Authors," among which was to be included the new abode of Hawthorne. The project called forth from the romancer this letter:-- CONCORD, July 14, 1852. MY HEAR HOWADJI:--I think (and am glad to think) that you will find it necessary to come hither in order to write your Concord Sketches; and as for my old house, you will understand it better after spending a day or two in it. Before Mr. Alcott took it in hand, it was a mean-looking affair, with two peaked gables; no suggestiveness about it and no venerableness, although from the style of its construction it seems to have survived beyond its first century. He added a porch in front, and a central peak, and a piazza at each end, and painted it a rusty olive hue, and invested the whole with a modest picturesqueness; all which improvements, together with its situation at the foot of a wooded hill, make it a place that one notices and remembers for a few moments after passing it. Mr. Alcott expended a good deal of taste and some money (to no great purpose) in forming the hillside behind the house into terraces, and building arbors and summer-houses of rough stems and branches and trees, on a system of his own. They must have been very pretty in their day, and are so still, although much decayed, and shattered more and more by every breeze that blows. The hillside is covered chiefly with locust-trees, which come into luxuriant blossom in the month of June, and look and smell very sweetly, intermixed with a few young elms and some white-pines and infant oaks,--the whole forming rather a thicket than a wood. Nevertheless, there is some very good shade to be found there. I spend delectable hours there in the hottest part of the day, stretched out at my lazy length, with a book in my hand or an unwritten book in my thoughts. There is almost always a breeze stirring along the sides or brow of the hill. From the hill-top there is a good view along the extensive level surfaces and gentle, hilly outlines, covered with wood, that characterize the scenery of Concord. We have not so much as a gleam of lake or river in the prospect; if there were, it would add greatly to the value of the place in my estimation. The house stands within ten or fifteen feet of the old Boston road (along which the British marched and retreated), divided from it by a fence, and some trees and shrubbery of Mr. Alcott's setting out. Whereupon I have called it "The Wayside," which I think a better name and more morally suggestive than that which, as Mr. Alcott has since told me, he bestowed on it,--"The Hillside." In front of the house, on the opposite side of the road, I have eight acres of land,--the only valuable portion of the place in a farmer's eye, and which are capable of being made very fertile. On the hither side, my territory extends some little distance over the brow of the hill, and is absolutely good for nothing, in a productive point of view, though very good for many other purposes. I know nothing of the history of the house, except Thoreau's telling me that it was inhabited a generation or two ago by a man who believed he should never die. [Footnote: This is the first intimation of the story of Septimius Felton, so far as local setting is concerned. The scenery of that romance was obviously taken from the Wayside and its hill.] I believe, however, he is dead; at least, I hope so; else he may probably appear and dispute my title to his residence.... I asked Ticknor to send a copy of "The Blithedale Romance" to you. Do not read it as if it had anything to do with Brook Farm (which essentially it has not), but merely for its own story and character. Truly yours, NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. The Wayside was, perhaps, so named in remembrance of the time when its owner had "sat down by the wayside like a man under enchantment." It characterized well, too, his mental attitude in maturity; though the spell that held him now was charged with happiness. The house itself was small, but the proprietor might have carved on his lintel the legend over Ariosto's door, _Parva, sed apta mihi_. In October, 1852, he wrote to Bridge that he intended to begin a new romance within a day or two, which he should make "more genial" than the last. What design this was cannot now be even conjectured. Hawthorne had written, in the preceding year, "I find that my facility of labor increases with the demand for it"; and he always felt that an unlimited reserve of invention and imagination awaited his drafts upon it, so that he could produce as many books as he might have time for writing. But circumstances again called him away from ideal occupations. Just as he was preparing to write the "Tanglewood Tales," as a sequel to the "Wonder-Book," General Pierce, the Democratic nominee for President, urged him to write his biography, as a "campaign" measure. "I have consented to do so," wrote Hawthorne, to his publisher; "somewhat reluctantly, however, for Pierce has now reached that altitude where a man careful of his personal dignity will begin to think of cutting his acquaintance. But I seek nothing from him, and therefore need not be ashamed to tell the truth of an old friend." To Bridge, after the book was out, he wrote much more confidentially and strongly. "I tried to persuade Pierce that I could not perform it as well as many others; but he thought differently, and of course, after a friendship of thirty years, it was impossible to refuse my best efforts in his behalf, at the great pinch of his life." In this letter, also, he states that before undertaking the work, he resolved to "accept no office" from Pierce; though he raises the query whether this be not "rather folly than heroism." In discussing this point, he says, touching Pierce:-- "He certainly owes me something; for the biography has cost me hundreds of friends here at the North, who had a purer regard for me than Frank Pierce or any other politician ever gained, and who drop off from me like autumn leaves, in consequence of what I say on the slavery question. But they were my real sentiments, and I do not now regret that they are on record." These have to do with Hawthorne's attitude during the war. Speaking of Pierce's indorsement of the Compromise, both as it bore hard on Northern views and exacted concessions from the South thought by it to be more than reciprocal, he says:-- "It was impossible for him not to take his stand as the unshaken advocate of Union, and of the mutual steps of compromise which that great object unquestionably demanded. The fiercest, the least scrupulous, and the most consistent of those who battle against slavery recognize the same fact that he does. They see that merely human wisdom and human efforts cannot subvert it, except by tearing to pieces the Constitution, breaking the pledges which it sanctions, and severing into distracted fragments that common country which Providence brought into one nation, through a continued miracle of almost two hundred years, from the first settlement of the American wilderness until the Revolution." He predicted, too, the evils of forcible abolition being certain, and the good only a contingency, that the negroes would suffer aggravated injuries from the very process designed to better their state. It is useless here to enter into the question of degrees of right and wrong on either side, in the struggle which had already become formidable before Pierce's election; but one can see how sincerely, and with what generous motives, a man like Hawthorne would feel that the Union must be maintained peacefully. Without questioning the undoubted grandeur of achievement which we sanely fell upon through the insane fit of civil war, we may recognize a deep patriotism consistent with humanity which forced itself to dissent from the noble action of the fighters, because it could not share in any triumph, however glorious, that rested on the shedding of brothers' blood. It was this kind of humanity that found shelter in the heart of Hawthorne. Unwelcome as was the task, he wrote the biography of Pierce, in friendship, but in good faith also, even seeing the elements of greatness in his old classmate, which might yet lead him to a career. [Footnote: As a literary performance, the book is of course but slightly characteristic; and being distasteful to the author, it is even dry. Yet there is a great deal of simple dignity about it. The Whig journals belabored it manfully, and exhausted the resources of those formidable weapons, italics and small capitals, in the attempt to throw a ridiculous light on the facts most creditable to Pierce. Hawthorne came in for a share of the abuse too. One newspaper called the book his "new romance"; another made him out a worthy disciple of Simonides, who was the first poet to write for money. The other party, of course, took quite another view of the work. A letter to Hawthorne from his elder sister bears well upon his fidelity. "Mr. D---- has bought your Life of Pierce, but he will not be convinced that you have told the precise truth. I assure him that it is just what I have always heard you say."] He had not much hope of his friend's election, but when that occurred, the question of office, which he had already mooted, was definitely brought before him. When Pierce learned that he positively would not take an office, because to do so now might compromise him, he was extremely troubled. He had looked forward to giving Hawthorne some one of the prizes in his hand, if he should be elected. But the service he had exacted from his friend threatened to deprive Hawthorne of the very benefit which Pierce had been most anxious he should receive. At last, Mr. Ticknor, Hawthorne's publisher, was made the agent of Pierce's arguments, and to them he added personal considerations which were certainly not without weight. Literature gave but a bare subsistence, and Hawthorne was no longer young, having passed his forty-ninth year. His books were not likely, it seemed, to fill the breach that would be made in the fortunes of his family, were he to be suddenly removed. This, Mr. Ticknor urged, in addition to the friendly obligation which Pierce ought to be allowed to repay. Hawthorne, as we have seen, had always wished to travel, and the prospect of some years in Europe was an alluring one: the decision was made, to take the Liverpool consulship. The appointment was well received, though many persons professed surprise that Hawthorne could accept it. One gentleman in public life, however, who knew how unjust current judgments may often be, was not of this number, as appears from his note below.-- SENATE CHAMBER, March 26, 1853. MY DEAR HAWTHORNE:--"Good! good!" I exclaimed aloud on the floor of the Senate as your nomination was announced. "Good! good!" I now write to you, on its confirmation. Nothing could be more grateful to me. Before you go, I hope to see you. Ever yours, CHARLES SUMNER. IX. ENGLAND AND ITALY. 1853-1860. It is very instructive to trace the contact of Hawthorne's mind with Europe, as exhibited in his "English Note-Books" and "French and Italian Note-Books." But in these records three things are especially observable. He goes to Europe as unperturbed, with an individual mood as easily sustained, as he would enter Boston or New York. He carries no preconception of what may be the most admirable way of looking at it. There has never been a more complete and charming presentment of a multitude of ingenuous impressions common to many travellers of widely differing endowment than here, at the same time that you have always before you the finished writer and the possible romancer, who suddenly and without warning flashes over his pages of quiet description a far, fleeting light of delicious imagination. It is as if two brothers, one a dreamer, and one a well-developed, intellectual, but slightly stoical and even shrewd American, dealing exclusively in common-sense, had gone abroad together, agreeing to write their opinions in the same book and in a style of perfect homogeneity. Sometimes one has the blank sheet to himself, sometimes the other; and occasionally they con each other's paragraphs, and the second modifies the ideas of the first. It is interesting to note their twofold inspection of Westminster Hall, for example. The understanding twin examines it methodically, finding its length to be eighty paces, and its effect "the ideal of an immense barn." The reasoning and imagining one interposes to this, "be it not irreverently spoken"; and also conjures up this splendid vision: "I wonder it does not occur to modern ingenuity to make a scenic representation, in this very hall, of the ancient trials for life or death, pomps, feasts, coronations, and every great historic incident ... that has occurred here. The whole world cannot show another hall such as this, so tapestried with recollections." But in any case it is always apparent that the thought is colored by a New World nurture. From this freshness of view there proceeded one result, the searching, unembarrassed, yet sympathetic and, as we may say, cordial criticism of England in "Our Old Home." But it also gave rise to the second notable quality, that exquisite apprehension of the real meaning of things European, both institutions and popular manners and the varied products of art. At times, Hawthorne seems to have been born for the one end of adding this final grace of definition which he so deftly attaches to the monuments of that older civilization. He brings a perception so keen and an innate sympathy so true for everything beautiful or significant, that the mere flowing out of this fine intellectual atmosphere upon the objects before him invests them with a quality which we feel to be theirs, even while we know that it could not have become _ours_ without his aid. A breath of New England air touches the cathedral windows of the Old World, and--I had almost said--bedims them with a film of evanescent frost-work; yet, as that lingers, we suddenly discern through the veil a charm, a legendary fascination in their deep-gemmed gorgeousness, which, although we have felt it and read of it before, we never seized till now. I speak, of course, from the American point of view; though in a great measure the effect upon foreign readers may be similar. But I fancy a special appropriateness for us in the peculiar mixture of estimation and enthusiasm which forms the medium through which Hawthorne looks at the spectacle of transatlantic life and its surroundings. He visits the British Museum, and encounters only disappointment at the mutilated sculptures of the Parthenon; but out of this confession, which is truth, slowly arises the higher truth of that airy yet profound response with which he greets the multiform mute company of marble or painted shapes that form the real population of Rome. Even there, he has much dissent to make, still; and we may not find it at all essential or beneficial to follow each of his deviations ourselves. But however we may differ with him, it is impossible not to feel sure that within this circle of contradictions, of preference for new frames and of his friend Thompson's pictures to all but a very few of the old masters', somewhere within there is a perfectly trustworthy aesthetic sensibility which grasps the "unwritten rules of taste," the inmost truth of all art. This inmost secret is, however we may turn it, a matter of paradox, and the moment it professes to be explained, that moment are the gates of the penetralia shut upon us. The evasiveness and the protest, then, with which Hawthorne discourses to himself as he wanders through the galleries of Europe, are the trembling of the needle, perfectly steadfast to the polar opposites of truth, yet quivering as with a fear that it may be unsettled by some artificial influence from its deep office of inner constancy. And as if, in this singular world, all truth must turn to paradox at the touch of an index finger, that almost faulty abstention from assuming the European tone which has made Hawthorne the traveller appear to certain readers a little crude,--that very air of being the uncritical and slightly puzzled American is precisely the source of his most delightful accuracies of interpretation. The third greatest distinction of his foreign observation is its entire freedom from specialism. Perhaps this cannot be made to appear more clearly than in the contrast presented by his "English Note-Books" and "Our Old Home" to Emerson's "English Traits," and Taine's "Notes on England." The latter writer is an acute, alert, industrious, and picturesque comparer of his own and a neighboring country, and is accompanied by a light battery of literary and pictorial criticism, detached from his heavier home armament. Emerson, on the other hand, gives us probably the most masterly and startling analysis of a people which has ever been offered in the same slight bulk, unsurpassed, too, in brilliancy and penetration of statement. But the "English Traits" is as clear, fixed, and accurate as a machinist's plan, and perhaps a little too rigidly defined. Hawthorne's review of England, though not comparable to Emerson's work for analysis, has this advantage, that its outline is more flexible and leaves room for many individual discriminations to which it supplies an easily harmonized groundwork. Emerson and Taine give us their impressions of a foreign land: Hawthorne causes us to inhale its very atmosphere, and makes the country ours for the time being, rather than an alien area which we scrutinize in passing. Yet here and there he partakes of the very qualities that are dominant with Emerson and Taine. "Every Englishman runs to 'The Times' with his little grievance, as a child runs to his mother," is as epigrammatic as anything in "English Traits"; [Footnote: No one, I think, has so well defined our relation to the English as Hawthorne, in a casual phrase from one of his printed letters: "We stand in the light of posterity to them, and have the privileges of posterity." This, on London, ought to become proverbial: "London is like the grave in one respect,--any man can make himself at home there; and whenever a man finds himself homeless elsewhere, he had better die, or go to London."] and there is a tendency in his pages to present the national character in a concrete form, as the French writer gives it. But, in addition, Hawthorne is an artist and a man of humor; and renders human character with a force and fineness which give it its true value as being, after all, far weightier and dearer to us than the most important or famous of congealed _results_ of character. Withal a wide and keen observer and a hospitable entertainer of opinions, he does not force these upon us as final. Coming and going at ease, they leave a mysterious sense of greater wisdom with us, an indefinable residue of refined truth. It is a natural question, why did not Hawthorne write an English romance, as well, or rather than an Italian one? More than half his stay abroad was north of the Channel, and one would infer that there could have been no lack of suggestion there. "My ancestor left England," he wrote, "in 1630. I return in 1853. I sometimes feel as if I myself had been absent these two hundred and twenty-three years, leaving England just emerging from the feudal system, and finding it, on my return, on the verge of republicanism." Herein lay a source of romantic possibilities from which he certainly meant to derive a story. But the greater part of his four years in England was spent in Liverpool, where his consular duties suppressed fiction-making. [Footnote: And it was not till he reached the villa of Montauto at Florence that he could write:-- "It is pleasant to feel at last that I am really away from America,--a satisfaction that I never enjoyed as long as I stayed in Liverpool, where it seemed to me that the quintessence of nasal and hand-shaking Yankee-dom was continually filtered and sublimated through my consulate, on the way outward and homeward. I first got acquainted with my own countrymen there. At Rome, too, it was not much better. But here in Florence, and in the summer-time, and in this secluded villa, I have escaped out of all my old tracks, and am really remote."] Hawthorne's genius was extremely susceptible to every influence about it. One might liken its quality to that of a violin which owes its fine properties to the tempering of time and atmosphere, and transmits through its strings the very thrill of sunshine that has sunk into its wood. His utterances are modulated by the very changes of the air. In one of his letters from Florence he wrote:-- "Speaking of romances, I have planned two, one or both of which I could have ready for the press in a few months if I were either in England or America. But I find this Italian atmosphere not favorable to the close toil of composition, although it is a very good air to dream in. I must breathe the fogs of old England or the east-winds of Massachusetts, in order to put me into working trim." But though England might be his workshop for books dreamed of in Italy, yet the aspect of English life seems much more fittingly represented by his less excursively imaginative side, as in "Our Old Home," than in a romance. Perhaps this is too ingenious a consolation; but I believe we may much better spare the possible English romance, than we could have foregone the actual Italian one. In "The Marble Faun" Hawthorne's genius took a more daring and impressive range than ever before, and showed conclusively--what, without this testimony, would most likely have been questioned, or even by some denied--that his previous works had given the arc of a circle which no English or American writer of prose fiction besides himself has even begun to span. It is not alone that he plucks from a prehistoric time--"a period when man's affinity with nature was more strict, and his fellowship with every living thing more intimate and dear"--this conception of Donatello, the fresh, free, sylvan man untouched by sin or crime. Donatello must rank with a class of poetic creations which has nearly become extinct among modern writers: he belongs to the world of Caliban, Puck, and Ariel. But besides this unique creation, the book reveals regions of thought wide, ruin-scarred, and verdurously fair as the Campagna itself, winning the mind back through history to the primitive purity of man and of Christianity. I recoil from any attempt at adequate analysis of this marvellous production, for it is one of those works of art which are also works of nature, and will present to each thoughtful reader a new set of meanings, according to his individuality, insight, or experience. The most obvious part of the theme is that which is represented in the title, the study of the Faun's nature; and this embraces the whole question of sin and crime, their origin and distinction. But it is not the case, as has been assumed, that in this study the author takes the position of advocate to a theory that sin was requisite to the development of soul in man. For, though he shows that remorse developed in Donatello "a more definite and nobler individuality," he also reminds us that "sometimes the instruction comes without the sorrow, and oftener the sorrow teaches no lesson that abides with us"; and he illustrates this in the exquisite height of spirituality to which Hilda has attained through sinlessness. He is not, I say, the advocate of a theory: this charge has been made by self-confident critics, who saw only the one idea,--that of a Beneficence which has so handled sin, that, instead of destroying man, "it has really become an instrument most effective in the education of intellect and soul." This idea is several times urged by Miriam and Kenyon, but quickly rejected each time; first by Kenyon, and then by Hilda; so that, while it is suggested, it is also shown to be one which human nature cannot trust itself to dwell upon. But the real function of the author is that of a profound religious teacher. The "Romance of Monte Beni" is, as Miriam plainly says, the story of the fall of man repeated. It takes us with fearless originality to the source of all religious problems, affirming,--as one interpreter [Footnote: See an unsigned article, "The Genius of Hawthorne," in the Atlantic Monthly for September, 1868.] has said,--"the inherent freedom of man," and illustrating how he may choose the good or the evil. Donatello is the ideal of the childlike nature on the threshold of history who has lived without choosing either, up to the time when his love and defence of Miriam involve him in crime. Father Antonio, "the spectre of the catacombs," and Miriam's persecutor, is the outcome of a continual choice of evil and of utter degradation. These two extremes, more widely asunder than Prospero and Caliban, Hawthorne has linked together in his immense grasp of the inmost laws of life, and with a miraculous nicety of artistic skill. Then comes Donatello's fall, illustrating the genesis of sin from crime, in accordance with the Biblical story of Cain; and this precipitates an examination, not only of the result upon Donatello himself, but of the degree in which others, even the most guiltless, are involved. There is first the reaction upon and inculpation of Miriam, whose glance had confirmed Donatello's murderous intent; only a glance, yet enough to involve her in the doom of change and separation--of sin in short--which falls upon the Faun. And in Hilda's case, it is the simple consciousness of another's guilt, which is "almost the same as if she had participated" in it. The mutual relations of these persons, who are made to represent the whole of society, afford matter for infinite meditation, the artistic and moral abstract of which the author has given. But with this main theme is joined a very marvellous and intricate study of the psychology of Beatrice Cenci's story, in a new form. Miriam is a different woman placed in the same circumstances which made the Cenci tragedy. In the "French and Italian Note-Books," Hawthorne describes the look he caught sight of in Guido's picture,--that "of a being unhumanized by some terrible fate, and gazing out of a remote and inaccessible region, where she was frightened to be alone, but where no human sympathy could reach her." It was of this single insight that both Miriam and Hilda were born to his mind. He reproduces this description, slightly modified, in the romance (Vol. I. Chap. XXIII.): "It was the intimate consciousness of her father's guilt that threw its shadow over her, and frightened her into" this region. Now, in the chapter called "Beatrice," quite early in the story, he brings out between Miriam and Hilda a discussion of Beatrice and her history. It is evident, from the emphasis given by the chapter-title, that this subject is very deeply related to the theme of the romance; and no theory can explain Miriam's passionate utterances about the copy of Guido's portrait, except that which supposes her own situation to be that of Beatrice. This chapter is full of the strongest hints of the fact. Miriam's sudden resemblance to the picture, at the instant when she so yearns to grasp the secret of Beatrice's view of her own guilt or innocence; her ardent defence of Beatrice's course, as "the best virtue possible under the circumstances," when Hilda condemns it; her suggestion that, after all, only a woman could have painted the poor girl's thoughts upon her face, and that _she herself_ has "a great mind to undertake a copy," giving it "what it lacks";--all these things point clearly. But there is a mass of inferential evidence, besides; many veiled allusions and approaches to a revelation, as well as that very marked description of the sketches in which Miriam has portrayed in various moods a "woman acting the part of a revengeful mischief towards man," and the hint, in the description of her portrait of herself, that "she might ripen to be what Judith was, when she vanquished Holofernes with her beauty, and slew him for too much adoring it." There is no need to pursue the proof further: readers will easily find it on re-examining the book. But what is most interesting, is to observe how Hawthorne has imagined two women of natures so widely opposed as Hilda and Miriam under a similar pressure of questionable blood-guiltiness. With Miriam, it is a guilt which has for excuse that it was the only resort against an unnatural depravity in Father Antonio. But as if to emphasize the indelibleness of blood-stains, however justly inflicted, we have as a foil to Miriam the white sensitiveness of Hilda's conscience, which makes her--though perfectly free from even the indirect responsibility of Miriam--believe herself actually infected. In both cases, it is the shadow of crime which weighs upon the soul; but Miriam, in exactly the position of Beatrice Cenci, is a more complex and deep-colored nature than she; and Hilda, differently affected by the same question of conscience, is a vastly spiritualized image of the historic sufferer. Miriam, after the avenging of her nameless wrong, doubts, as Beatrice must have done, whether there be any guilt in such avengement; but being of so different a temperament, and having before her eyes the effect of this murder upon the hitherto sinless Faun, the reality of her responsibility is brought home to her. The clear conscience of Hilda confirms it. Thus by taking two extremes on either side of Beatrice,--one, a woman less simply and ethereally organized, and the other one who is only indirectly connected with wrong or crime,--Hawthorne seems to extract from the problem of Beatrice all its most subtle significance. He does not coldly condemn Beatrice; but by re-combining the elements of her case, he succeeds in magnifying into startling distinctness the whole awful knot of crime and its consequence, which lies inextricably tangled up within it. How different from Shelley's use of the theme! There is certainly nothing in the "Marble Faun" to equal the impassioned expression of wrong, and the piercing outcry against the shallow but awful errors of human justice, which uplift Shelley's drama. But Shelley stops, on the one side, with this climax:-- "O plead With famine or wind-walking pestilence, Blind lightning or the deaf sea, not with man!" And on the side of the moral question, he leaves us with Beatrice's characterization of the parricide, "Which is, or is not, what men call a crime." Hawthorne, on the contrary, starts from this latter doubt. "The foremost result of a broken law," he says, "is ever an ecstatic freedom." But instead of pausing to give this his whole weight, as Shelley does, he distinctly pronounces the murder of Miriam's degraded father to be crime, and proceeds to inquire how Miriam and Donatello may work out their purification. So that if the first part of the romance is the Fall of Man repeated, the second part is the proem to a new Paradise Regained; and the seclusion of the sculptor and the Faun, and their journey together to Perugia, seasoned with Kenyon's noble and pure-hearted advice, compose a sort of seven-times-refined Pilgrim's Progress. Apt culmination of a genius whose relations to Milton and Bunyan we found to be so suggestive! The chief means which Kenyon offers for regeneration is that Miriam and the Faun shall abandon any hope of mutual joy, and consecrate themselves to the alleviation of misery in the world. Having by violence and crime thrust one evil out of life, they are now by patience and benevolence to endeavor to exorcise others. At the same time, remarking that Providence has infinitely varied ways of dealing with any deed, Hawthorne leaves a possibility of happiness for the two penitents, which may become theirs as "a wayside flower, springing along a path that leads to higher ends." But he also shows, in Donatello's final delivering of himself up to justice, the wisdom of some definite judgment and perhaps punishment bestowed by society. Thus, avenues of thought are opened to us on every side, which we are at liberty to follow out; but we are not forced, as a mere theorist would compel us, to pursue any particular one to the exclusion of the others. In all we may find our way to some mystic monument of eternal law, or pluck garlands from some new-budded bough of moral truth. The romance is like a portal of ebony inlaid with ivory,--another gate of dreams,--swinging softly open into regions of illimitable wisdom. But some pause on the threshold, unused to such large liberty; and these cry out, in the words of a well-known critic, "It begins in mystery, and ends in mist." Though the book was very successful, few readers grasped the profounder portions. It is a vast exemplar of the author's consummate charm as a simple storyteller, however, that he exercised a brilliant fascination over all readers, notwithstanding the heavy burden of uncomprehended truths which they were obliged to carry with them. Some critics complain of the extent to which Roman scenery and the artistic life in Rome have been introduced; but, to my mind, there is scarcely a word wasted in the two volumes. The "vague sense of ponderous remembrances" pressing down and crowding out the present moment till "our individual affairs are but half as real here as elsewhere," is essential to the perspective of the whole; and nothing but this rich picturesqueness and variety could avail to balance the depth of tragedy which has to be encountered; so that the nicety of art is unquestionable. It is strange, indeed, that this great modern religious romance should thus have become also the ideal representative of ruined Rome--the home of ruined religions--in its aesthetic aspects. But one instance of appreciation must be recorded here, as giving the highest pitch of that delightful literary fellowship which Hawthorne seems constantly to have enjoyed in England. His friend John Lothrop Motley, the historian, wrote thus of "The Marble Faun," from Walton-on-Thames, March 29, 1860:-- "Everything that you have ever written, I believe, I have read many times, and I am particularly vain of having admired 'Sights from a Steeple,' when I first read it in the Boston 'Token,' several hundred years ago, when we were both younger than we are now; of having detected and cherished, at a later day, an old Apple-Dealer, whom, I believe, you have unhandsomely thrust out of your presence, now that you are grown so great. But the 'Romance of Monte Beni' has the additional charm for me, that it is the first book of yours that I have read since I had the privilege of making your personal acquaintance. My memory goes back at once to those walks (alas, not too frequent) we used to take along the Tiber, or in the Campagna; ... and it is delightful to get hold of the book now, and know that it is impossible for you any longer, after waving your wand as you occasionally did then, indicating where the treasure was hidden, to sink it again beyond plummet's sound. "I admire the book exceedingly.... It is one which, for the first reading, at least, I didn't like to hear aloud.... If I were composing an article for a review, of course, I should feel obliged to show cause for my admiration; but I am only obeying an impulse. Permit me to say, however, that your style seems, if possible, more perfect than ever. Where, O where is the godmother who gave you to talk pearls and diamonds?... Believe me, I don't say to you half what I say behind your back; and I have said a dozen times that nobody can write English but you. With regard to the story, which has been somewhat criticised, I can only say that to me it is quite satisfactory. I like those shadowy, weird, fantastic, Hawthornesque shapes flitting through the golden gloom, which is the atmosphere of the book. I like the misty way in which the story is indicated rather than revealed; the outlines are quite definite enough from the beginning to the end to those who have imagination enough to follow you in your airy flights; and to those who complain, I suppose that nothing less than an illustrated edition, with a large gallows on the last page, with Donatello in the most pensile of attitudes,--his ears revealed through a white nightcap,--would be satisfactory. I beg your pardon for such profanation, but it really moves my spleen that people should wish to bring down the volatile figures of your romance to the level of an every-day romance.... The way in which the two victims dance through the Carnival on the last day is very striking. It is like a Greek tragedy in its effect, without being in the least Greek." To this Hawthorne replied from Bath (April 1, 1860); and Mr. Motley has kindly sent me a copy of the letter. MY DEAR MOTLEY:--You are certainly that Gentle Reader for whom all my books were exclusively written. Nobody else (my wife excepted, who speaks so near me that I cannot tell her voice from my own) has ever said exactly what I loved to hear. It is most satisfactory to be hit upon the raw, to be shot straight through the heart. It is not the quantity of your praise that I care so much about (though I gather it all up most carefully, lavish as you are of it), but the kind, for you take the book precisely as I meant it; and if your note had come a few days sooner, I believe I would have printed it in a postscript which I have added to the second edition, because it explains better than I found possible to do the way in which my romance ought to be taken.... Now don't suppose that I fancy the book to be a tenth part as good as you say it is. You work out my imperfect efforts, and half make the book with your warm imagination; and see what I myself saw, but could only hint at. Well, the romance is a success, even if it never finds another reader. We spent the winter in Leamington, whither we had come from the sea-coast in October. I am sorry to say that it was another winter of sorrow and anxiety.... [The allusion here is to illness in the family, of which there had also been a protracted case in Rome]. I have engaged our passages for June 16th.... Mrs. Hawthorne and the children will probably remain in Bath till the eve of our departure; but I intend to pay one more visit of a week or two to London, and shall certainly come and see you. I wonder at your lack of recognition of my social propensities. I take so much delight in my friends, that a little intercourse goes a great way, and illuminates my life before and after.... Your friend, NATH. HAWTHORNE. These seven years in Europe formed, outwardly, the most opulently happy part of Hawthorne's life. Before he left America, although he had been writing--with several interruptions--for twenty-four years, he had only just reached a meagre prosperity. I have touched upon the petty clamor which his Custom-House pictures aroused, and the offensive political attacks following the Life of Pierce. These disagreeables, scattered along the way, added to the weary delay that had attended his first efforts, made the enthusiastic personal welcome with which he everywhere met in England, and the charm of highly organized society, with its powerful artistic classes centred upon great capitals there and in Italy, a very captivating contrast. Still there were drawbacks. The most serious one was the change in the consular service made during his term at Liverpool. The consulate there was considered the most lucrative post in the President's gift, at the time of his appointment. But, to begin with, Pierce allowed the previous incumbent to resign prospectively, so that Hawthorne lost entirely the first five months of his tenure. These were very valuable months, and after the new consul came into office the dull season set in, reducing his fees materially. Business continued bad so long, that even up to 1855 little more than a living could be made in the consulate. In February of that year a bill was passed by Congress, remodelling the diplomatic and consular system, and fixing the salary of the Liverpool consul at $7,500,--less than half the amount of the best annual income from it before that time. The position was one of importance, and involved an expensive mode of life; so that even before this bill went into operation, though practising "as stern an economy," he wrote home, "as ever I did in my life," Hawthorne could save but little; and the effect of it would have been not only to prevent his accomplishing what he took the office for, but even to have imposed loss upon him. For, in addition to social demands, the mere necessary office expenses (including the pay of three clerks) were very large, amounting to some thousands yearly; and the needs of unfortunate fellow-citizens, to whom Hawthorne could not bring himself to be indifferent, carried off a good portion of his income. As he says, "If the government chooses to starve the consul, a good many will starve with him." The most irritating thing about the new law was that it merely cut down the consular fees, without bringing the government anything; for the fees came from business that a notary-public could perform, and the consul would naturally decline to take it upon himself when his interest in it was removed. Fortunately, the President was given some discretion about the date of reappointment, and allowed the old commission to continue for a time. Meanwhile, Hawthorne was obliged, in anticipation of the new rule, to alter his mode of life materially. He now planned to give up the place in the autumn of 1855, and go to Italy; but this was not carried out till two years later. Italy charmed him wholly, and he longed to make it his home. There had not been want of unjust criticism of him in America, while at Liverpool. When some shipwrecked steamer passengers were thrown upon his hands, for whom he provided extra-officially, on Mr. Buchanan's (then minister) refusing to have anything to do with the matter, a newspaper rumor was started at home that Mr. Hawthorne would do nothing for them until ordered to by Mr. Buchanan. "It sickens me," he wrote at that time, "to look back to America. I am sick to death of the continual fuss and tumult and excitement and bad blood which we keep up about political topics. If it were not for my children, I should probably never return." And on the eve of sailing, he wrote to another friend:-- "I shall go home, I fear, with a heavy heart, not expecting to be very well contented there." But his sense of duty, stronger than that of many Americans under similar circumstances, was rigorously obeyed. We shall see what sort of reward this fidelity to country won from public opinion at home. X. THE LAST ROMANCE. 1860-1863. There are in the "English Note-Books" several dismal and pathetic records of tragic cases of brutality or murder on shipboard, which it was Hawthorne's duty as consul to investigate. These things, as one might have divined they would, made a very strong and deep impression upon him; and he tried strenuously to interest the United States government in bettering the state of the marine by new laws. But though this evil was and is still quite as monstrous as that of slavery, there was no means of mixing up prejudice and jealousy with the reform, to help it along, and he could effect nothing. He resolved, on returning home, to write some articles--perhaps a volume--exposing the horrors so calmly overlooked; but the slavery agitation, absorbing everybody, perhaps discouraged him: the scheme was never carried out. It is a pity; for, aside from the weight which so eminent a name might have given to a good cause, the work would have clearly proven the quick, responsive, practical nature of his humanity--a quality which some persons have seen fit to deny him--in a case where no question of conflicting rights divided his sense of duty. He came to America in June, 1860. For several years the mutterings of rising war between the States had been growing louder. In June of 1856 he had written to Bridge, expressing great hope that all would yet turn out well. But so rapidly did the horizon blacken, that later in the same year he declared that "an actual fissure" seemed to him to be opening between the two sections of the country. In January, 1857:-- "I regret that you think so doubtfully of the prospects of the Union; for I should like well enough to hold on to the old thing. And yet I must confess that I sympathize to a large extent with the Northern feeling, and think it is about time for us to make a stand. If compelled to choose, I go for the North. New England is quite as large a lump of earth as my heart can really take in.... However, I have no kindred with nor leaning toward the Abolitionists." He felt, no doubt, that the vital principle of The Union from the beginning had been compromise, mutual concession, and if it was to be severed, preferred that it should be peacefully. Still, his moods and wishes varied as did those of many careful watchers at that time; and he saw too clearly the arguments on either side to hold fixedly to one course. In the December after his return, secession began; and for more than a year following he could not fix his attention upon literary matters. He wrote little, not even his journal, as Mrs. Hawthorne has told us, until 1862. Accustomed to respond accurately to every influence about him, with that sensitized exterior of receptive imagination which overlay the fixed substance of personal character,--so that, as we have seen, even a change of climate left its impress on his productions,--it was not strange that the emotions of horror and pain, the passion of hate, the splendid heroism which charged the whole atmosphere about him, now, should absorb his whole sensibility, and paralyze his imagination. It was no time for quiet observation or creative revery. A new era had broken upon us, ushered by the wild din of trumpet and cannon, and battle-cry; an era which was to form new men, and shape a new generation. He must pause and listen to the agonies of this birth, striving vainly to absorb the commotion into himself and to let it subside into clear visions of the future. No hope! He could not pierce the war-smoke to any horizon of better things. He who had schooled himself so unceasingly to feel with utmost intensity the responsibility of each soul for any violence or crime of others, could not cancel the fact of multitudinous murder by any hypothesis of prospective benefit. Thus, in the midst of that magnificent turbulence, he was like the central quiet of a whirlpool: all the fierce currents met there, and seemed to pause,--but only seemed. Full of sympathy as he was for his fellows, and agitated at times by the same warlike impulses, he could not give himself rein as they did, nor dared to raise any encouraging strain in his writing, as others felt that they might freely do. His Puritan sense of justice, refined by descent and wedded to mercy, compelled him to weigh all carefully, to debate long and compassionately. But meantime the popular sense of justice--that same New England sentiment, of which his own was a development--cared nothing for these fine considerations, and Hawthorne was generally condemned by it as being warped by his old Democratic alliances into what was called treason. Nevertheless, he was glad to be in his native land, and suffer bitter criticism here,--if that were all that could be granted,--rather than to remain an unmolested exile. An article which he contributed to the "Atlantic Monthly" in July, 1862, gives a faint inkling of his state of mind at this time; but nothing illustrates more clearly, either, the reserve which he always claimed lay behind his seemingly most frank expressions in print. For he there gives the idea of something like coldness in his attitude touching the whole great tragedy. But those who saw him daily, and knew his real mood, have remembered how deeply his heart was shaken by it. Fortunately, there are one or two epistolary proofs of the degree in which his sympathy with his own side of the struggle sometimes mastered him. He used to say that he only regretted that his son was too young and himself too old to admit of either of them entering the army; and just after the first battle of Bull Run he wrote to Mr. Lowell, at Cambridge, declining an invitation:-- THE WAYSIDE, CONCORD, July 23, 1861. DEAR LOWELL:--I am to start, in two or three days, on an excursion with----, who has something the matter with him, and seems to need sea-air and change. If I alone were concerned, ... I would most gladly put off my trip till after your dinner; but, as the case stands, I am compelled to decline. Speaking of dinner, last evening's news will dull the edge of many a Northern appetite; but if it puts all of us into the same grim and bloody humor that it does me, the South had better have suffered ten defeats than won this victory. Sincerely yours, NATH. HAWTHORNE. And to another friend, in October:-- "For my part, I don't hope (nor, indeed, wish) to see the Union restored as it was; amputation seems to me much the better plan.... I would fight to the death for the Northern slave States, and let the rest go.... I have not found it possible to occupy my mind with its usual trash and nonsense during these anxious times; but as the autumn advances, I find myself sitting down at my desk and blotting successive sheets of paper as of yore." He had now begun, I suppose, the "Romance of Immortality," or "Septimius Felton," which has been posthumously printed, but had been abandoned by him for another treatment of the same theme, called "The Dolliver Romance." This last, of which two chapters appeared, was left unfinished at his death. Of "Septimius" I shall not attempt an analysis: it contains several related and concentric circles of meaning, to survey which would require too much space. The subject had been one of the earliest themes of meditation with Hawthorne, and he wrote as with a fountain-pen in which was locked the fluid thought of a lifetime. One of the less obvious aspects of the book is the typification in Septimius's case of that endless struggle which is the lot of every man inspired by an ideal aim. The poet and the painter are, equally with Septimius, seekers after immortality, though of a more ethereal kind; and his morbidness and exaggeration serve to excite in us a tenderness and pity over him, assisting the reception of truth. These relate mainly to the temptation of the artist to effect a severance of ordinary, active human relations. (Sad to think what bitter cause the author had to brood upon this, the fault attributed to himself!) The poet, the creator in whatever art, must maintain his own circle of serene air, shutting out from it the flat reverberations of common life; but if he fail to live generously toward his fellows,--if he cannot make the light of every day supply the nimbus in which he hopes to appear shining to posterity,--then he will fall into the treacherous pit of selfishness where Septimius's soul lies smothered. But this set of meanings runs imperceptibly into others, for the book is much like the cabalistic manuscript described in its pages: now it is blurred over with deceptive sameness, and again it brims with multifarious beauties like those that swim within the golden depth of Tieck's enchanted goblet. The ultimate and most insistent moral is perhaps that which brings it into comparison with Goethe's "Faust"; this, namely, that, in order to defraud Nature of her dues, we must enter into compact with the Devil. Both Faust and Septimius study magic in their separate ways, with the hope of securing results denied to their kind by a common destiny; but Faust proves infinitely the meaner of the two, since he desires only to restore his youth, that he may engage in the mere mad joy of a lusty existence for a few years, while Septimius seeks some mode, however austere and cheerless, of prolonging his life through centuries of world-wide beneficence. Yet the satanically refined egoism which lays hold of Septimius is the same spirit incarnated in Goethe's Mephistopheles,--_der Geist der stets verneint_. To Faust he denies the existence of good in anything, primarily the good of that universal knowledge to the acquisition of which he has devoted his life, but through this scepticism mining his faith in all besides. To Septimius he denies the worth of so brief a life as ours, and the good of living to whatever end seems for the hour most needful and noble. Septimius might perhaps be described as Faust at an earlier stage of development than that in which Goethe represents him. [Footnote: Indeed, these words, applied by Mephistopheles to Faust, suit Septimius equally well:-- "Ihm hat das Schicksal einen Geist gegeben Der ungebändigt immer vorwarts dringt Und dessen übereiltes Streben Der Erde Freuden überspringt."] As a further point of resemblance between the two cases, it may be noticed that the false dreams of both are dispelled by the exorcising touch of a woman. Both have fallen into error through perceiving only half of the truth which has hovered glimmering before them; these errors originate in the exclusively masculine mood, the asceticism, which has prevailed in their minds. It will be observed that, in the first relation of Rose to Septimius, Hawthorne takes pains to contrast with this mood, delicately but strongly, the woman's gentle conservatism and wisely practical tendency to be satisfied with life, which make her influence so admirable a poising force to man. The subsequent alteration of the situation, by which he makes her the half-sister of his hero, is owing, as Mr. Higginson has pointed out, to the fact "that a heroine must be supplied who corresponds to the idea in the lover's soul; like Helena in the second part of Faust." [Footnote: A phase of character rich in interest, but which I can only mention, in passing, is presented in the person of Sybil Dacy, who here occupies very much the same place, in some regards, as Roger Chillingworth in "The Scarlet Letter." The movement of the story largely depends on a subtle scheme of revenge undertaken by her, as that of "The Scarlet Letter" hangs upon the mode of retribution sought by the physician; but her malice is directed, characteristically, against the slayer of the young officer who had despoiled her of her honor, and, again characteristically, she is unable to consummate her plan, from the very tenderness of her feminine heart, which leads her first to half sympathize with his dreams, then pity him for the deceit she practised on him, and at last to rather love than hate him.] But there is a suitable difference between the working of the womanly element in "Faust" and in Hawthorne's romance. In the former instance it is through the gratification of his infernal desire that the hero is awakened from his trance of error and restored to remorse; while Septimius's failure to accomplish his intended destiny appears to be owing to the inability of his aspiring nature to accommodate itself to that code of "moral dietetics" which is to assist his strange project. "Kiss no woman if her lips be red; look not upon her if she be very fair," is the maxim taught him. "If thou love her, all is over, and thy whole past and remaining labor and pains will be in vain." How pathetic a situation this, how much more terrible than that of Faust, when he has reached the turning-point in his career! A nature which could accept an earthly immortality on these terms, for the sake of his fellows, must indeed have been a hard and chilly one. But there is still too much of the heart in it, to admit of being satisfied with so cruel an abstraction. On the verge of success, as he supposes, with the long-sought drink standing ready for his lips, Septimius nevertheless seeks a companion. Half unawares, he has fallen in love with Sybil, and thenceforth, though in a way he had not anticipated, "all is over." Yet, saved from death by the poison in which he had hoped to find the spring of endless life, his fate appears admirably fitting. There is no picture of Mephisto hurrying him off to an apparently irrevocable doom. The wrongs he has committed against himself, his friends, humanity,--these, indeed, remain, and are remembered. He has undoubtedly fallen from his first purity and earnestness, and must hereafter be content to live a life of mere conventional comfort, full of mere conventional goodness, conventional charities, in that substantial English home of his. Could anything be more perfectly compensatory? Nothing is more noticeable than the way in which, while so many symbolisms spring up out of the story, the hero's half-crazed and bewildered atmosphere is the one which we really accept, until the reading is ended. By this means we are enabled to live through the whole immortal future which he projects for himself, though he never in reality achieves any of it. This forcing of the infinite into the finite, we are again indebted to Mr. Higginson for emphasizing as "one of the very greatest triumphs in all literature." "A hundred separate tragedies," he says, "would be easier to depict than this which combines so many in one." But notice the growth of the romance in Hawthorne's mind. "Dr. Heidegger's Experiment," in which several people are restored to youth for an hour by a life-elixir, was published before 1837. In 1840 we have this entry in the journal: "If a man were sure of living forever here, he would not care about his offspring." A few years afterward, in "A Virtuoso's Collection," the elixir vitae is introduced, "in an antique sepulchral urn," but the narrator refuses to quaff it. "'No; I desire not an earthly immortality,' said I. 'Were man to live longer on the earth, the spiritual would die out of him.... There is a celestial something within us, that requires, after a certain time, the atmosphere of heaven to preserve it from ruin.'" But the revolt against death, and then the reactionary meditation upon it, and final reverence for it, must, from the circumstances of his youngest years, have been very early familiar to Hawthorne; and in the course of these meditations, the conception of deathlessness must often have floated before him. The tradition as to the former owner of the Wayside, who had thought he should never die (alluded to in the letter to Curtis, in 1852 [Footnote: See ante, p. 244.]), brought it definitely home to him. He had in 1837 thought of this: "A person to spend all his life and splendid talents, in trying to achieve something totally impossible,--as, to make a conquest over nature"; but the knowledge of an actual person who had expected to live forever gave the scattered elements coherence. The way in which other suggestions came into the plan is exceedingly curious. The idea of a bloody footstep appears in the Note-Books in 1850: "The print in blood of a naked foot to be traced through the street of a town." By a singular corroboration, he encountered five years afterward in England an actual bloody footprint, or a mark held to be such, at Smithell's Hall in Lancashire. ("English Note-Books," Vol. I. April 7, and August 25, 1855.) The parting request of his hostess there was that he "should write a ghost-story for her house," and he observes that "the legend is a good one." Only five days after first hearing it he makes a note thus: "In my Romance, the original emigrant to America may have carried away with him a family secret, by which it was in his power, had he so chosen, to have brought about the ruin of the family. This secret he transmitted to his American progeny, by whom it is inherited throughout all the intermediate generations. At last the hero of my Romance comes to England, and finds that, by means of this secret, he still has it in his power to procure the downfall of the family." This clearly refers to something already rapidly taking shape in his mind, and recalls at once the antique chest containing family papers, and the estate in England waiting for an heir, of "Septimius." Could he have already connected the two things, the bloody footstep and this Anglo-American interest? The next piece of history comes in the shape of a manuscript book in journal form, written in 1858, after Hawthorne had left the consulate, and containing what must have been the earliest sketch of the story, as he then conceived it. It begins abruptly, and proceeds uncertainly, at the rate of a few pages each day, for about a month. Detached passages of narration alternate with abstracts of the proposed plot, and analysis of the characters. The chief interest seems to lie in the project which a young American has formed, during a visit to England, of tracing out and proving his inherited right to an old manor-house formerly the property of his ancestors. This old hall possesses the peculiarity of the bloody footstep, and with this some mystery is connected, which the writer himself does not yet seem to have discovered. He takes a characteristic pleasure in waiting for this suggestive footstep to track the lurking interest of his story to its lair, and lingers on the threshold of the tale, gazing upon it, indulging himself with that tantalizing pleasure of vague anticipation in which he hopes to envelop the good reader. The perusal of this singular journal, in which the transactions recorded are but day-dreams, is absorbing beyond description. But though at times he seems to be rapidly approaching the heart of the story, yet at every point the subtle darkness and coming terror of the theme seem to baffle the author, and he retires, to await a more favorable moment. At its conclusion, though he appears now to have formed a clear picture enough of what his persons are to do, there is still wanting the underlying thought, which he at moments dimly feels but cannot bring to light, and without which he is unable to fuse the materials into readiness for the mould. Our only information as to the course of the story between April, 1858, and the time of writing "Septimius," must be gathered from a sketch found among the author's papers, the date of which it is not possible to determine with precision, though both its matter and form indicate that it must have been written subsequently to the journal above mentioned. Herein are curiously mingled certain features of both "Septimius" and the "Dolliver Romance." So far as is consistent with the essential privacy of the manuscript, I shall give a general outline of its contents. It consists of two sections, in the second of which a lapse of some years is implied. In the first of these chapters, for they hardly exceed that limit, the most prominent figure is that of a singular, morose old man, who inhabits a house overlooking a New England graveyard. But though his situation resembles in this particular that of Grandsir Dolliver, his characteristics resemble more those of Dr. Portsoaken. He is constantly accompanied, too, by brandy-and-water and a cloud-compelling pipe; and his study, like the doctor's chamber in "Septimius," is tapestried with spider-webs; a particularly virulent spider which dangles over his head, as he sits at his writing-desk, being made to assume the aspect of a devilish familiar. On the other hand, his is a far richer and less debased nature than that of Portsoaken. Hawthorne appears subsequently to have divided him, straining off from the rank sediments which settle into the character of Dr. Portsoaken the clear sweetness of good Grandsir Dolliver. This "grim doctor," as he is almost invariably styled in the manuscript, seems to have originated in Hawthorne's knowledge of a Mr. Kirkup, painter, spiritualist and antiquarian, of Florence, [Footnote: French and Italian Note-Books, Vol. II.] who also probably stood as a model for Grandsir Dolliver. Not that either of these personages is copied from Mr. Kirkup; but the personality and surroundings of this quaint old gentleman had some sort of affinity with the author's idea, which led him to maintain a certain likeness between him and his own fictitious persons. As in the case of the Florentine antiquary, a little girl dwells in the house of the doctor, her chief playmate being, like that of Mr. Kirkup's adopted daughter, a very beautiful Persian kitten. There is much about her like Pansie, of the "Dolliver" fragment, but she is still only dimly brought out. The boy is described as of superior nature, but strangely addicted to revery. Though his traits are but slightly indicated, he suggests in general the character of Septimius, and may very easily have grown into him, at a later period. At first he is much neglected by the doctor, but afterwards, by resolute and manly behavior in questioning his mysterious guardian as to his own origin, and the connection subsisting between them, he secures greater consideration. The doctor gradually hints to him the fact of his descent from an old English family, and frequent mention is made of the ancestral hall, the threshold of which is stained by the imprint of a bloody footstep marking the scene of some dark tragedy, which, in the superstitious haze thrown over it by time, assumes various and uncertain forms. At different times two strangers are introduced, who appear to have some obscure knowledge of, and connection with, the ghastly footstep; and, finally, a headstone is discovered in the neighboring cemetery, marking the spot where an old man had been buried many years since, and engraved with the likeness of a foot. The grave has been recently opened to admit a new occupant, and the children, in playing about it, discover a little silver key, which the doctor, so soon as it is shown him, pockets, with the declaration that it is of no value. After this, the boy's education is taken in hand by his being sent to school; but presently the doctor sickens of life, and characteristically resolving to abandon brandy-drinking, and die, does so accordingly. Mention has previously been made of certain papers which he had kept in a secret place, and these the youth now secures. The second part describes his advent into England. He soon makes his way to the old hall, but just as his connection with it and its inmates begins, the manuscript terminates. It will be noticed that in this fragment the scene is at first laid in New England, whereas the journalized sketch opened the drama in England. From this I infer that the former was written after the return to this country. "The Marble Faun" appropriated the author's attention, after the sketch of 1858; and in this, which was probably written just before the commencement of the war, he had not yet clearly struck the key-note of the story. When he recurred to it, in the autumn of 1861, on beginning to "blot successive sheets as of yore," it was at last with the definite design of uniting the legend of the deathless man with the legend of Smithell's Hall. It is as if, having left England, he could no longer write an English romance, but must give the book mainly an American coloring again. There is a pathetic interest, too, in his thus wavering between the two countries, which now so nearly equally divided his affections, and striving to unite the Wayside with the far-off English manor. Under the new design, everything began to fall into place. The deathless man was made the hero; the English inheritance became an inferior motive-power, on which, however, the romantic action depends; the family papers and the silver key came well to hand for the elucidation of the plot; the bloody footstep gained a new and deep significance; and a "purple everlasting flower," presented in 1854 to Mrs. Hawthorne by the gardener of Eaton Hall, blossomed out, with supernatural splendor, as a central point in the design. The scene being in Concord, and the time of writing that of war, the Revolutionary association was natural. But the public phase of that epoch could not assume an important place: it was sunk into the background, forming merely a lurid field on which the figures of this most solemn and terrific of all Hawthorne's works stand out in portentous relief. One singular result of the historic location, however, is the use that was now made of that tradition which Lowell had told him at the Old Manse, concerning a boy who was chopping wood on the April morning of the famous fight, and found a wounded British soldier on the field, whom he killed with his axe. "Oftentimes, as an intellectual and moral exercise, I have sought to follow that poor youth through his subsequent career, and observe how his soul was tortured by the blood-stain.... This one circumstance has borne more fruit for me than all that history tells us of the fight." Thus had he written, fourteen years before; and now that sombre study furnished him with the psychology of the death-scene in the beginning of "Septimius." But the romance, even in this form, was again abandoned, as we learn from the prefatory note to Pierce in "Our Old Home," written in July, 1863. He there speaks of it as an "abortive project, utterly thrown aside," which "will never now be accomplished." In November of that year, "The Dolliver Romance" was announced for serial publication; and in the first page of the isolated opening scene, published in July, 1864, occurs the mention of a certain potent cordial, from which the good doctor had received great invigoration, and which we may well suppose was destined to tincture the whole story. Another point from which a connection with "Septimius Felton" may perhaps be traced is the passing mention of Grandsir Dolliver's grandson Cornelius, by whom this cordial had been compounded, he having displayed a great efficiency with powerful drugs. Recalling that the author describes many nostrums as having been attributed to Septimius, which he had perhaps chanced upon in his unsuccessful attempts to distil the elixir of life, we may fairly conjecture this posthumous character of Cornelius, this mere memory, to be the remains of Septimius, who, it would seem, was to have been buried by the author under the splendid monument of a still more highly wrought and more aspiring form of the romance. The only remaining portions of this latest form have been printed, and are lull of a silvery and resonant promise. Unquestionably it was to have been as much a "Romance of Immortality" as "Septimius"; and the exquisite contrast of the child Pansie--who promised to be the author's most captivating feminine creation--with the aged man, would no doubt have given us a theme of celestial loveliness, as compared with the forbidding and remorseless mournfulness of the preliminary work. In the manuscript sketch for "Septimius" there is a note referring to a description in the "English Note-Books" of two pine-trees at Lowood, on Windermere, "quite dead and dry, although they have the aspect of dark, rich life. But this is caused by the verdure of two great ivy-vines which have twisted round them like gigantic snakes, ... throttling the life out of them, ... and one feels that they have _stolen the life_ that belonged to the pines." This does not seem to have been used; but the necessity of some life being stolen in order to add to any other life more than its share, is an idea that very clearly appears in the romance. In "Dolliver" the same strain of feeling would probably have reappeared; but it would there perhaps have been beautified, softened, expiated by the mutual love of Pansie and the grandsire; each wishing to live forever, for the other. Even in "Septimius" we can discern Hawthorne standing upon the wayside hill-top, and, through the turbid medium of the unhappy hero, tenderly diffusing the essence of his own concluding thoughts on art and existence. Like Mozart, writing what he felt to be a requiem for his own death, like Mozart, too, throwing down the pen in midmost of the melody, leaving the strain unfinished, he labors on, prescient of the overhanging doom. Genial and tender at times, amidst their sadness, his reveries are nevertheless darkened by the shadow of coming death; and it is not until the opening of "The Dolliver Romance" that the darkness breaks away. Then, indeed, we feel once more the dewy freshness of the long-past prime, with a radiance unearthly fair, besides, of some new, undreamed-of morning. He who has gone down into the dark valley appears for a brief space with the light of the heavenly city on his countenance. Ah, prophet, who spoke but now so sadly, what is this new message that we see brightening on your lips? Will it solve the riddle of sin and beauty, at last? We listen intently; we seem to lean out a little way from earth. Only an eddying silence! And yet the air seems even now alive with his last words. XI. PERSONALITY. What has thus far been developed in this essay, concerning Hawthorne's personality, though incidental, has, I hope, served the end in view,--that of suggesting a large, healthy nature, capable of the most profound thought and the most graceful and humorous mental play. The details of his early life already given show how soon the inborn honor of his nature began to shine. The small irregularities in his college course have seemed to me to bring him nearer and to endear him, without in any way impairing the dignity and beauty of character which prevailed in him from the beginning. It is good to know that he shared the average human history in these harmless peccadilloes; for they never hurt his integrity, and they are reminders of that old but welcome truth, that the greatest men do not need a constant diet of great circumstances. He had many difficulties to deal with, as unpicturesque and harassing as any we have to encounter in our daily courses,--a thing which people are curiously prone to forget in the case of eminent authors. The way in which he dealt with these throws back light on himself. We discover how well the high qualities of genius were matched by those of character. Fragmentary anecdotes have a value, but so relative that to attempt to construct the subject's character out of them is hazardous. Conceptions of a man derived only from such matter remind one of Charles Lamb's ghosts, formed of the particles which, every seven years, are replaced throughout the body by new ones. Likewise, the grossest errors have been committed through the assumption that particular passages in Hawthorne's writings apply directly and unqualifiedly to himself. There is so much imagination interfused with them, that only a reverent and careful imagination can apply them aright. Nor are private letters to be interpreted in any other way than as the talk of the hour, very inadequately representative, and often--unless read in many lights--positively untrue, to the writer. It gives an entirely false notion, for example, to accept as a trait of character this modest covering up of a noble sentiment, which occurs in a letter refusing to withdraw the dedication of "Our Old Home" to Pierce, in the time of the latter's unpopularity:-- "Nevertheless, I have no fancy for making myself a martyr when it is honorably and conscientiously possible to avoid it; and I always measure out my heroism very accurately according to the exigencies of the occasion, and should be the last man in the world to throw away a bit of it needlessly." Such a passage ought never to have been printed without some modifying word; for it has been execrably misused. "I have often felt," Hawthorne says, "that words may be a thick and darksome veil of mystery between the soul and the truth which it seeks." What injustice, then, that he should be judged by a literal construction of words quickly chosen for the transient embodiment of a mood! The first and most common opinion about the man Hawthorne is, that he must have been extremely gloomy, because his mind nourished so many grave thoughts and solemn fancies. But this merely proves that, as he himself says, when people think he is pouring himself out in a tale or an essay, he is merely telling what is common to human nature, not what is peculiar to himself. "I sympathize with them, not they with me." He sympathizes in the special direction of our darker side. A creative mind of the higher order holds the thread which guides it surely through life's labyrinths; but all the more on this account its attention is called to the erratic movement of other travellers around it. The genius who has the clew begins, therefore, to study these errors and to describe them for our behoof. It is a great mistake to suppose that the abnormal or preposterous phases which he describes are the fruit of _self_-study,--personal traits disguised in fiction; yet this is what has often been affirmed of Hawthorne. We don't think of attributing to Dickens the multiform oddities which he pictures with such power, it being manifestly absurd to do so. As Dickens raises the laugh against them, we at once perceive that they are outside of himself. Hawthorne is so serious, that we are absorbed in the sober earnest of the thing, and forget to apply the rule in his case. Dickens's distinct aim is to excite us with something uncommon; Hawthorne's, to show us that the elements of all tragedies lie within our individual natures; therefore we begin to attribute in undue measure to _his_ individual nature all the abnormal conditions that he has shown to be potential in any of us. But in truth he was a perfectly healthy person. "You are, intellectually speaking, quite a puzzle to me," his friend George Hillard wrote to him, once. "How comes it that, with so thoroughly healthy an organization as you have, you have such a taste for the morbid anatomy of the human heart, and such a knowledge of it, too? I should fancy, from your books, that you were burdened with some secret sorrow, that you had some blue chamber in your soul, into which you hardly dared to enter yourself; but when I see you, you give me the impression of a man as healthy as Adam in Paradise." This very healthiness was his qualification for his office. By virtue of his mental integrity and absolute moral purity, he was able to handle unhurt all disintegrated and sinful forms of character; and when souls in trouble, persons with moral doubts to solve and criminals wrote to him for counsel, they recognized the healing touch of one whose pitying immaculateness could make them well. She who knew best his habitual tone through a sympathy such as has rarely been given to any man, who lived with him a life so exquisitely fair and high, that to speak of it publicly is almost irreverent, has written:-- "He had the inevitable pensiveness and gravity of a person who possessed what a friend has called his 'awful power of insight'; but his mood was always cheerful and equal, and his mind peculiarly healthful, and the airy splendor of his wit and humor was the light of his home. He saw too far to be despondent, though his vivid sympathies and shaping imagination often made him sad in behalf of others. He also perceived morbidness wherever it existed instantly, as if by the illumination of his own steady cheer." His closest friends, too, speak with delight of his genial warmth and ease in converse with them. He could seldom talk freely with more than two or three, however, on account of his constitutional shyness, and perhaps of a peculiarly concentrative cast of mind; though he possessed a ready adaptability. "I talk with everybody: to Mrs. T---- good sense; to Mary, good sense, with a mixture of fun; to Mrs. G----, sentiment, romance, and nonsense." [Footnote: American Note-Books, 1837.] A gentleman who was with him at Brook farm, and knew him well, tells me that his presence was very attractive, and that he inspired great esteem among all at the farm by his personal qualities. On a walking trip to Wachusett, which they once made together, Hawthorne showed a great interest in sitting in the bar-rooms of country taverns, to listen to the talk of the attendant farmers and villagers. The manner in which he was approached had a great deal to do with his response. If treated simply and wisely, he would answer cordially; but he was entirely dismayed, as a rule, by those who made demonstrations of admiration or awe. "Why do they treat me so?" he asked a friend, in one case of this sort. "Why, they're afraid of you." "But I tremble at _them_," he said. "They think," she explained, "that you're imagining all sorts of terrible things." "Heavens!" he answered; "if they only knew what I _do_ think about." At one time, when he was visiting this same friend, he was obliged to return some calls, and his companion in the midst of conversation left him to continue it. He had previously asked his hostess, in assumed terror, what he should talk about, and she advised "climate." Accordingly, he turned to the naval officer whom he was calling upon, and asked him if he had ever been to the Sandwich Islands. "The man started," he said, on returning, "as if he had been struck. He had evidently been there and committed some terrible crime, which my allusion recalled. I had made a frightful mess of it. B---- led me away to the door." This woful account was, of course, an imaginary and symbolical representation of the terrors which enforced conversation caused him; the good officer's surprise at the abrupt introduction of a new subject had supplied him with the ludicrous suggestion. Mr. Curtis has given an account of his demeanor on another occasion:-- "I had driven up with some friends to an aesthetic tea at Mr. Emerson's. It was in the winter, and a great wood-fire blazed upon the hospitable hearth. There were various men and women of note assembled; and I, who listened attentively to all the fine things that were said, was for some time scarcely aware of a man who sat upon the edge of the circle, a little withdrawn, his head slightly thrown forward upon his breast, and his black eyes ['black' is an error] clearly burning under his black brow. As I drifted down the stream of talk, this person, who sat silent as a shadow, looked to me as Webster might have looked had he been a poet,--a kind of poetic Webster. He rose and walked to the window, and stood there quietly for a long time, watching the dead-white landscape. No appeal was made to him, nobody looked after him; the conversation flowed steadily on, as if every one understood that his silence was to be respected. It was the same thing at table. In vain the silent man imbibed aesthetic tea. Whatever fancies it inspired did not flower at his lips. But there was a light in his eye which assured me nothing was lost. So supreme was his silence, that it presently engrossed me, to the exclusion of everything else. There was very brilliant discourse, but this silence was much more poetic and fascinating. Fine things were said by the philosophers, but much finer things were implied by the dumbness of this gentleman with heavy brows and black hair. When he presently rose and went, Emerson, with the 'slow, wise smile' that breaks over his face like day over the sky, said, 'Hawthorne rides well his horse of the night.'" He was not a lover of argumentation. "His principle seemed to be, if a man cannot understand without talking to him, it is useless to talk, because it is immaterial whether such a man understands or not." And the same writer says:---- "His own sympathy was so broad and sure, that, although nothing had been said for hours, his companion knew that not a thing had escaped his eye, nor a single pulse of beauty in the day, or scene, or society, failed to thrill his heart. In this way his silence was most social. Everything seemed to have been said." I am told that in his own home, though he was often silent, it was never with sadness except in seasons of great illness in the house, the prevailing effect of his manner being usually that of a cheerful and almost humorous calm. Mr. Curtis gives perhaps one of the best descriptions of his aspect, when he speaks of his "glimmering smile"; and of his atmosphere, when he says that at Emerson's house it seemed always morning, but at Hawthorne's you passed into "A land in which it seemed always afternoon." Hawthorne's personal appearance is said by those who knew him to have been always very impressive. He was tall and strongly built, with beautiful and lustrous gray-blue eyes, and luxuriant dark brown hair of great softness, which grew far back from his forehead, as in the early engraved portrait of him. His skin had a peculiar fineness and delicacy, giving unusual softness to his complexion. After his Italian sojourn he altered much, his hair having begun to whiten, and a thick dark mustache being permitted to grow, so that a wit described him as looking like a "boned pirate." When it became imperative to shake off his reticence, he seems to have had the power of impressing as much by speech as he had before done by silence. It was the same abundant, ardent, but self-contained and perfectly balanced nature that informed either phase. How commanding was this nature may be judged from the fact related of him by an acquaintance, that rude people jostling him in a crowd would give way at once "at the sound of his low and almost irresolute voice." The occasions on which he gave full vent to his indignation at anything were very rare; but when these came, he manifested a strength of sway only to be described as regal. Without the least violence, he brought a searching sternness to bear that was utterly overwhelming, carrying as it did the weight of perfect self-control. Something even of the eloquent gift of old Colonel Hathorne seemed to be locked within him, like a precious heirloom rarely shown; for in England, where his position called for speech-making, he acquitted himself with brilliant honor. But the effort which this compelled was no doubt quite commensurate with the success. He never shrank, notwithstanding, from effort, when obligation to others put in a plea. A member of his family has told me that, when talking to any one not congenial to him, the effect of the contact was so strong as to cause an almost physical contraction of his whole stalwart frame, though so slight as to be perceptible only to eyes that knew his habitual and informal aspects; yet he would have sunk through the floor rather than betray his sensations to the person causing them. Mr. Curtis, too, records the amusement with which he watched Hawthorne paddling on the Concord River with a friend whose want of skill caused the boat continually to veer the wrong way, and the silent generosity with which he put forth his whole strength to neutralize the error, rather than mortify his companion by an explanation. His considerateness was always delicate and alert, and has left in his family a reverence for qualities that have certainly never been surpassed and not often equalled in sweetness. He was simple in his habits, and fond of being out of doors, but not--after his college days--as a sportsman. While living beside the Concord, he rowed frequently, with a dreamy devotion to the pastime, and was fond of fishing; swimming, too, he enjoyed. But his chief exercise was walking; he had a vast capacity for it, and was, I think, never even seen upon horseback. At Brook Farm he "belabored the rugged furrows" with a will; and at the Old Manse he presided over his garden in a paradisiacal sort of way. Books in every form he was always eager for, sometimes, as has been reported, satisfying himself with an old almanac or newspaper, over which he would brood as deeply as over richly stored volumes of classic literature. At other times he was fastidious in his choice, and threw aside many books before he found the right one for the hour. [Footnote: He would attach himself to a book or a poem apparently by some law perceptible only to himself, perhaps often giving an interest by his own genius. A poem On Solitude, in Dryden's Miscellany, was at one time a special favorite with him. It begins:-- "O Solitude, my sweetest choice, Places devoted to the Night, Remote from Tumult and from Noise, How you my restless thoughts delight!" And the last stanza has these lines:-- "O, how I solitude adore, That element of noblest wit, Where I have learned Apollo's lore, Without the pains to study it."] An impression has been set afloat that he cared nothing for books in themselves, but this is incorrect. He never had the means to accumulate a library of any size, but he had a passion for books. "There yet lingers with me a superstitious reverence for literature of all kinds," he writes in "The Old Manse." "A bound volume has a charm in my eyes similar to what scraps of manuscript possess for the good Mussulman; ... every new book or antique one may contain the 'open sesame,'--the spell to disclose treasures hidden in some unsuspected cave of Truth." When he lived at the Wayside, and would occasionally bring home a small package of books from Boston, these furnished him fresh pleasure for many days. He would carry some favorite of them with him everywhere, from room to room or to his hill-top. He was, as we have seen, a cordial admirer of other writers, seldom vexing himself with a critical review of their merits and defects, but applying to them instead the test of his own catholic capacity for enjoyment. The deliberate tone in which he judges his own works, in his letters, shows how little his mind was impressed by the greatness of their fame and of the genius found in them. There could not have been a more modest author, though he did not weakly underrate his work. "Recognition," he once said to Mr. Howells, "makes a man very modest." An attempt has also been made to show that he had little interest in animals, partly based, ludicrous as it may seem, on his bringing them into only one of his books. In his American journals, however, there is abundant evidence of his acute sympathy in this direction; at the Old Manse he fried fish for his dog Leo, when he says he should not have done it for himself; and in the Trosachs he finds a moment for pitying some little lambs startled by the approach of his party. [Footnote: English Note-Books (May, 1856).] I have already mentioned his fondness for cats. It has further been said that he did not enjoy wild nature, because in the "English Note-Books" there is no outgushing of ecstatic description. But in fact he had the keenest enjoyment of it. He could not enter into the spectacle when hurrying through strange regions. Among the English lakes he writes:-- "To say the truth, I was weary of fine scenery, and it seemed to me that I had eaten a score of mountains and quaffed as many lakes, all in the space of two or three days, and the natural consequence was a surfeit. "I doubt if anybody ever does really see a mountain, who goes for the set and sole purpose of seeing it. Nature will not let herself be seen in such cases. You must patiently bide her time; and by and by, at some unforeseen moment, she will quietly and suddenly unveil herself and for a brief space allow you to look right into the heart of her mystery. But if you call out to her peremptorily, 'Nature! unveil yourself this very moment!' she only draws her veil the closer; and you may look with all your eyes, and imagine that you see all that she can show, and yet see nothing." But this was because his sensibility was so great that he drew from little things a larger pleasure than many feel when excited by grand ones; and knowing this deeper phase, he could not be content with the hasty admiration on which tourists flatter themselves. The beauty of a scene which he could absorb in peace was never lost upon him. Every year the recurrent changes of season filled him with untold pleasure; and in the spring, Mrs. Hawthorne has been heard to say, he would walk with her in continuous silence, his heart full of the awe and delight with which the miracle of buds and new verdure inspired him. Nothing could be more accurate or sensitive than the brief descriptions of nature in his works. But there is nothing sentimental about them; partly owing to the Anglo-Saxon instinct which caused him to seek precise and detailed statement first of all, and partly because of a certain classic, awe-inspired reserve, like that of Horace and Virgil. There was a commendable indolence in his character. It was not a constitutional weakness, overcoming will, but the instinctive precaution of a man whose errand it was to rise to great emergencies of exertion. He always waited for an adequate mood, before writing. But these intervals, of course, were richly productive of revery which afterward entered into the creative moments. He would sometimes become deeply abstracted in imagination; and while he was writing "The Scarlet Letter" it is related by a trustworthy person that, sitting in the room where his wife was doing some sewing, he unconsciously took up a part of the work and cut it into minute fragments with the scissors, without being aware that he had done so. At some previous time, he had in the same way gradually chipped off with a knife portions of a table, until the entire folding-leaf was worn away by the process. The opinion was sometimes advanced by him that without a certain mixture of uncongenial labor he might not have done so much with the pen; but in this he perhaps underestimated the leisure in his blood, which was one of the elements of his power. Men of smaller calibre are hollowed out by the fire of ideas, and decay too quickly; but this trait preserved him from such a fate. Combined with his far-reaching foresight, it may have had something to do with his comparative withdrawal from practical affairs other than those which necessity connected him with. Of Holgrave he writes:-- "His error lay in supposing that this age more than any past or future one is destined to see the garments of antiquity exchanged for a new suit, instead of gradually renewing themselves by patchwork; ... and more than all, in fancying that it mattered anything to the great end in view whether he himself should contend for it or against it." The implied opinion of the author, here, is not that of a fatalist, but of an optimist (if we must connect him with any "ism") who has a very profound faith in Providence; not in any "special providence," but in that operation of divine laws through unexpected agencies and conflicting events, which is very gradually approximating human affairs to a state of truthfulness. Hawthorne was one of the great believers of his generation; but his faith expressed itself in the negative way of showing how fragile are the ordinary objects of reverence in the world, how subject the best of us are to the undermining influence of very great sin; and, on the other hand, how many traits of good there are, by consequence, even in the worst of us. This, however, is a mere skeleton statement: the noblest element in his mood is that he believes with his heart. A good interpreter has said that he _feels_ with his _brain_, and _thinks_ with his _heart_, to show the completeness with which he mingled the two elements in his meditations on existence. A warm, pure, living sympathy pervaded all his analysis of mankind, without which that analysis would have taken no hold upon us. It is a crude view which reckons him to have been wanting in moral enthusiasm: he had not that kind which can crush out sympathy with suffering, for the sake of carrying out an idea. Perhaps in some cases this was a fault; but one cannot dwell on the mistaken side of such a phase, when it possesses another side so full of beneficent aid to humanity. And it must be remembered that with all this susceptibility, he was not a suffering poet, like Shelley, but distinctly an endurer. His moral enthusiasm was deeper than that of any scheme or system. His distaste for society has been declared to proceed from the fact that, when he once became interested in people, he could no longer chemically resolve them into material for romance. But this assumption is also erroneous; for Hawthorne, if he felt it needful, could bring to bear upon his best friends the same qualitative measuring skill that he exercised on any one. I do not doubt that he knew where to place his friends and acquaintance in the scale of relative excellence. All of us who have not an equal analytic power with his own can at least reverence his discretion so far as to believe that he had stand-points not open to every one, from which he took views often more essentially just than if he had assumed a more sweeping estimate. In other cases, where he bestowed more friendship and confidence than the object of them especially deserved, he no doubt sought the simple pleasure of accepting what circumstances offered him. He was not a suspicious person; although, in fear of being fooled by his fancy, he cultivated what he often spoke of to a friend as "morose common-sense," deeming it a desirable alloy. There was even, in many relations, an unquestioning trust on his part; for he might well be called "As the greatest only are, In his simplicity sublime." The connection between Pierce and himself involved too many considerations to make it possible to pass them with indifference; and he perhaps condemned certain public acts of the President, while feeling it to be utter disloyalty to an old friend to discuss these mistakes with any one. As to other slighter connections, it is very likely he did not take the trouble that might have saved him from being imposed upon. But it is impossible to define Hawthorne's personality precisely. A poet's whole effort is to indirectly express this, by expressing the effect of things upon him; and we may read much of Hawthorne in his books, if we have the skill. But it is very clear that he put only a part of himself into them; that part which best served the inexorable law of his genius for treating life in a given light. For the rest, his two chapters on "The Custom-House" and "The Old Manse" show us something of his mode of taking daily affairs. But his real and inmost character was a mystery even to himself, and this, because he felt so profoundly the impossibility of sounding to the bottom any human heart. "A cloudy veil stretches over the abyss of my nature," he writes, at one time. "I have, however, no love of secrecy or darkness." At another time: "Lights and shadows are continually flitting across my inward sky, and I know neither whence they come nor whither they go; nor do I look too closely into them." A mind so conscious as his of the slight reality of appearances would be dissatisfied with the few tangible qualities which are all of himself that a man can discern: at the same time he would hesitate to probe the deeper self assiduously, for fear of turning his searching gaze too intently within, and thus becoming morbid. In other persons, however, he could perceive a contour, and pursue his study of investigation from without inward,--a more healthy method. His _instinctive_ knowledge of himself, being brought into play, would of course aid him. Incidentally, then, something of himself comes to light in his investigation of others. And it is perhaps this inability to define their own natures, except by a roundabout method, which is the creative impulse of all great novelists and dramatists. I doubt whether many of the famous delineators of character could give us a very distinct account of their own individualities; and if they did, it would probably make them out the most uninteresting of beings. It would certainly be divested of the special charm of their other writing. Imagine Dickens clearly accounting for himself and his peculiar traits: would he be able to excite even a smile? How much of his own delicious personality could Thackeray have described without losing the zest of his other portraitures? Hawthorne has given a kind of picture of himself in Coverdale, and was sometimes called after that character by his friends; but I suspect he has adroitly constructed Coverdale out of the _appearance_ which he knew himself to make in the eyes of associates. I do not mean that Hawthorne had not a very decisive personality; for indeed he had. But the essence of the person cannot be compressed into a few brief paragraphs, and must be slowly drawn in as a pervasive elixir from his works, his letters, his note-books. In the latter he has given as much definition of his interior self as we are likely to get, for no one else can continue the broken jottings that he has left, and extend them into outlines. We shall not greatly err if we treat the hidden depths of his spirit with as much reverence as he himself used in scrutinizing them. Curiously enough, many of those who have studied this most careful and delicate of definers have embraced the madness of attempting to bind him down in unhesitating, absolute statements. He who mastered words so completely that he learned to despise their obscurity, has been made the victim of easy epithets and a few conventional phrases. But none can ever be said to know Hawthorne who do not leave large allowances for the unknowable. XII. POE, IRVING, HAWTHORNE. The names of Poe, Irving, and Hawthorne have been so often connected without due discrimination, that it is imperative to consider here the actual relation between the three men. Inquiry might naturally be roused by the circumstance that, although Hawthorne has freely been likened to Irving in some quarters, and in others to Poe, the latter two are never supposed to hold anything in common. Indeed, they might aptly be cited in illustration of the widely opposed tendencies already developed in our brief national literature. Two things equal to the same thing are equal to each other; and if Poe and Irving were each equal to Hawthorne, there would be some similarity between them. But it is evident that they are not like quantities; and we must conclude that they have been unconsciously used by critics, in trying to find a unit of measure to gauge the greatest of the triad with. Undoubtedly there are resemblances in Hawthorne to both Poe and Irving. Hawthorne and Irving represent a dignity and roundedness of diction which is one of the old-fashioned merits in English writing; and because they especially, among eminent authors of the century, have stood for this quality, they have been supposed to stand close together. But Irving's speech is not so much an organic part of his genius as a preconceived method of expression which has a considerable share in modifying his thought. It is rather a manner than a style. On the other hand, it would be hard to find a style growing so naturally and strongly out of elemental attributes as Hawthorne's, so deftly waiting upon the slightest movement of idea, at once disclosing and lightly veiling the informing thought,--like the most delicate sculptured marble drapery. The radical differences of the two men were also obscured in the beginning by the fact that Hawthorne did not for some time exhibit that massive power of hewing out individual character which afterward had full swing in his romances, and by a certain kinship of fancy in his lighter efforts, with Irving's. "The Art of Book-Making" and "The Mutability of Literature" are not far removed from some of Hawthorne's conceits. And "The Vision of the Fountain" and "The Village Uncle" might have issued in their soft meditativeness from Geoffrey Crayon's own repertory, except that they are moulded with a so much more subtile art than his, and with an instinct of proportion so much more sure. But even in the earlier tales, taken all together, Hawthorne ranks higher than Irving in the heraldry of genius: he has more quarterings in his shield. Not only does he excel the other in brief essay, depending only on endogenous forces, whereas Irving is always adorning his paragraphs with that herb-o'-grace, quotation, but he also greatly surpasses him in the construction of his stories; and finally, his psychological analysis and symbolic imagination place him beyond rivalry. It is a brilliant instance of the more ideal mind asserting its commanding power, by admirable achievements in the inferior styles,--so that even in those he was at once ranked with the most famous practiser of them,--and then quietly reaching out and grasping a higher order of truths, which no one had even thought of competing for. I suppose it is not assumed for a moment that "Wolfert's Roost," the "Tales of a Traveller," the story of "Rip Van Winkle," the "Legend of Sleepy Hollow," and the picturesque but evanescent tales of "The Alhambra" can be brought into discussion on the same terms with Hawthorne's romances, as works of art; and they assuredly cannot be as studies of character, for of this they have next to nothing. The only phases of character which Irving has any success in dealing with are those of credulity and prejudice. The legendary tendency of the two men has perhaps confused some readers. Both were lovers of association, and turned naturally to the past for materials: the New-Yorker found delightful sources of tradition or of ludicrous invention in the past of that city, where his family held a long-established and estimable footing; and the New-Englander, as we have seen, drew also through the channel of descent from the dark tarn of Puritan experience. But Irving turned his back upon everything else when he entered the tapestried chamber of the past, while Hawthorne sought that vantage-ground only to secure a more impressive view of humanity. There is one gift of Irving's which won him an easier as well as a wider triumph than that which awaited Hawthorne; and this is his ability to take the simple story-teller's tone, devoid of double meanings. Poe, also, had the passion for narrative in and for itself, but in him it was disturbed by a diseased mind, and resulted in a horrid fascination instead of cheerful attraction. Hawthorne, to be sure, possessed the gift of the _raconteur_; but in general he was at once seer and teller, and the higher exertions of his imagination were always in the peculiarly symbolic atmosphere we are wont to associate with him. Irving's contented disposition in this regard is certainly very charming; there are often moods in which it is a great relief to turn to it; and he has in so far the advantage over the other two. He pitches for us the tone of average cultured minds in his time and locality; and in reading him we have a comfortable sense of reality, than which nothing in fiction is more reassuring. This is almost entirely absent from the spell with which Hawthorne holds us; and here, indeed, we touch the latter's most decided limitation as a writer of fiction; for although his magnificently portrayed characters do not want reality, an atmosphere of ghostliness surrounds them, warning us that we must not look to find life there as we see it elsewhere. There is a Northern legend of a man who lay down to sleep, and a thin smoke was seen to issue from his nostrils, traverse the ground, cross a rivulet, and journey on, finally returning to the place whence it came. When he awoke, he described an imaginary excursion of his own, following exactly the course which the smoke had taken. This indirect contact might furnish a partially true type of Hawthorne's mysterious intercourse with the world through his books. It would be a mistake, however, to attribute this difference to the greater strength of Irving's humor,--a trait, always much lauded in him. It is without doubt a good quality. This mild, sweet radiance of an uncontaminated and well-bred spirit is not a common thing in literature. But I cannot fall in with the judgment that calls it "freer and far more joyous" than Addison's. Both in style and in humor Irving has caught something of the grace of "The Spectator"; but as in the style he frequently falls short, writing feeble or jarring sentences, so in humor I cannot see how he is to be brought at all on a level with Addison, who is primarily a grave, stately, scholarly mind, but all the deeper on that account in the lustre of his humorous displays. Addison, too, had somewhat of the poet in him, and was capable of tragedy as well as of neat satire and compact characterization. But if we looked for a pithy embodiment of the difference between Irving and Hawthorne, we might call the former a "polite writer," and the latter a profound poet: as, indeed, I have called him in this essay, though with no intent to confuse the term with that given to poets who speak in verse. Pathos is the great touchstone of humor, and Irving's pathos is always a lamentable failure. Is it not very significant, that he should have made so little of the story of Rip Van Winkle? In his sketch, which has won so wide a fame and given a lasting association to the Kaatskills, there is not a suspicion of the immense pathos which the skill of an industrious playwright and the genius of that rare actor, Mr. Jefferson, have since developed from the tale. The Dame Van Winkle that we now know is the creation of Mr. Boucicault; to him it is we owe that vigorous character,--a scold, a tyrant to her husband, but nevertheless full of relentful womanliness, and by the justice of her cause exciting our sympathy almost as much as Rip himself does. In the story, she wears an aspect of singular causelessness, and Rip's devotion to the drinking-can is barely hinted: the marvellous tenderness, too, and joyful sorrow of his return after the twenty years' sleep, are apparently not even suspected by the writer. It is the simple wonder and picturesqueness of the situation that charm him; and while in the drama we are moved to the bottom of our hearts by the humorous tragicalness it casts over the spectacle of conflicting passions, the only outcome of the written tale is a passing reflection on the woe of being henpecked. "And it is a common wish of all henpecked husbands in the neighborhood, when life hangs heavy on their hands, that they might have a quieting draught out of Rip Van Winkle's flagon." To be sure, there is a hidden moral here, of the folly of driving men to drunkenness; but it is so much obscured as to suggest that this was of small moment in the writer's mind. Such a moral, in any case, must necessarily have been very delicately advanced, in order not to becloud the artistic atmosphere; but a person of searching dramatic genius would have found means to emphasize it without injury to art, just as it has been done on the stage. Imagine what divine vibrations of emotion Hawthorne would have smitten out of this theme, had he been the originator of it. Certainly we should, as the case stands, have missed the whole immortal figment, had not Irving given it to us in germ; the fact that our playwright and our master comedian have made it so much greater and more beautiful does not annul that primary service; but, looking at the matter historically, we must admit that Irving's share in the credit is that of the first projector of a scientific improvement, and the latter sort of person always has to forego a great part of his fame in favor of the one who consummates the discovery. I am willing to believe that there was a peculiar advantage in Irving's treatment; namely, that he secured for his story a quicker and more general acceptance than might have been granted to something more profound; but this does not alter the critical judgment that we have to pass upon it. If Irving had grasped the tragic sphere at all, he would have shone more splendidly in the comic. But the literary part of him, at least, never passed into the shade: it somehow contrived to be always on that side of the earth which was towards the sun. Observe, now, the vital office of humor in Hawthorne's thought. It gleams out upon us from behind many of the gravest of his conceptions, like the silver side of a dark leaf turning in the wind. Wherever the concretion of guilt is most adamantine, there he lets his fine slender jet of humor play like a lambent fire, until the dark mass crumbles, and the choragos of the tragedy begins his mournful yet hopeful chant among the ruins. This may be verified in the "Seven Gables," "Blithedale," and "The Marble Faun"; not in "The Scarlet Letter," for that does not present Hawthorne's genius in its widest action. In one place he speaks of "the tragic power of laughter,"--a discrimination which involves the whole deep originality of his mind. It is not irrelevant here to remark that at the most affecting portions of the play "Rip Van Winkle," the majority of the audience always laugh; this, though irritating to a thoughtful listener, is really an involuntary tribute to the marvellous wisdom and perfection with which Jefferson mingles pathos and humor. Again Hawthorne: "Human destinies look _ominous_ without some perceptible intermixture of the sable or the gray." And, elsewhere: "There is _something more awful in happiness than in sorrow_, the latter being earthly and finite, the former composed of the substance and texture of eternity, so that spirits still embodied may well tremble at it." These thoughts could never have occurred to Irving with the same intensity. Now, from all this we gather inference as to the deep sources of Hawthorne's humor. I sometimes think that Thalia was the daughter, and not the sister, of Melpomene. As to actual exhibition of humor, Hawthorne's is made a diffusive medium to temper the rays of tragedy with, and never appears in such unmixed form as that of Irving. So that even though we must confess a smaller mental calibre in the latter, we may gladly grant him a superiority in his special mood of fun. An excellent English critic, Leslie Stephen, lately wrote: "Poe is a kind of Hawthorne and _delirium tremens_." This announcement, however, betrays a singular misapprehension. When Hawthorne's tales first appeared, they were almost invariably taken to bear an intimate and direct relation to the author's own moods; while Poe's were supposed to be daring flights of pure imagination, or ingenious attempts to prove theories held by the writer, but were not charged directly to his own experience. Time has shown that the converse was the case. The psychical conditions described by Hawthorne had only the remotest connection with any mood of his own; they were mainly translations, into the language of genius, of certain impressions and observations drawn from the world around him. After his death, the Note-Books caused a general rustle of surprise, revealing as they did the simple, wholesome nature of this strange imaginer; yet though he there speaks--surely without prejudice, because without the least knowledge that the world would ever hear him--of "the objectivity" of his fictions, critics have not yet wholly learned how far apart from himself these creations were. The observation of some mental habit in men, or law of intercourse between human beings, would strongly present itself to him; and in order to get a concise embodiment, his genius planned some powerful situation to illustrate it with; or, at another time it might be that a strange incident, like that of Mr. Moody, suggesting "The Minister's Black Veil," or a singular physiological fact like that on which "The Bosom Serpent" is based, would call out his imagination to run a race with reality and outstrip it in touching the goal of truth. But, the conception once formed, the whole fictitious fabric would become entirely removed from _himself_, except so far as it touched him very incidentally; and this expulsion of the idea from himself, so that it acquires a life and movement of its own, and can be contemplated by the artist from the outside, is the very distinction between deeply creative and merely inventive genius. Poe's was of the latter sort. He possessed a wild, arbitrary imagination, that sometimes leaped frantically high; but his impressiveness is always that of a nightmare, always completely morbid. What we know of Poe's life leads inevitably to the conclusion that this quality, if it did not spring from disease, was at least largely owing to it. For a time, it was the fashion to make a moral question of Poe's unfortunate obliquities; but a more humane tendency reduces it to a scientific problem. Poe suffered great disaster at the hands of his unjust biographer; yet he was a worse enemy to himself than any one else could be. The fine enamel of his genius is all corroded by the deadly acid of his passions. The imperfections of his temperament have pierced his poetry and prose, shattered their structure, and blurred their beauty. Only four or five of his poems--"The Raven," "Ligeia," the earlier of the two addressed "To Helen," and the sonnet to his wife--escape being flawed by some fit of haste, some ungovernable error of taste, some hopeless, unaccountable break in their beauty. In criticism, Poe initiated a fearless and agile movement; he had an acute instinct in questions of literary form, amounting to a passion, as all his instincts and perceptions did; he had also the knack of finding clever reasons, good or bad, for all his opinions. These things are essential to a critic's equipment, and it was good service in Poe to exemplify them. Yet here, too, the undermining processes of his thoroughly unsound mind subverted the better qualities, vitiated his judgments with incredible jealousies and conflicting impulses, and withered the most that he wrote in this direction into something very like rubbish. We have seen, for example, how his attempt to dispassionately examine Hawthorne resulted. Sooner or later, too, he ran his own pen full against his rigid criteria for others. It is suggestive to find that the holder of such exacting doctrine about beauty, the man also of whom pre-eminently it may be said, as Baudelaire wrote of him, "Chance and the incomprehensible were his two great enemies," should so completely fail to reach even the unmoral perfection which he assigned as the highest attainable. Professing himself the special apostle of the beautiful in art, he nevertheless forces upon us continually the most loathsome hideousness and the most debasing and unbeautiful horror. This passionate, unhelmed, errant search for beauty was in fact not so much a normal and intelligent desire, as an attempt to escape from interior discord; and it was the discord which found expression, accordingly, instead of the sense of beauty,--except (as has been said) in fragments. Whatever the cause, his brain had a rift of ruin in it, from the start, and though his delicate touch often stole a new grace from classic antiquity, it was the frangibility, the quick decay, the fall of all lovely and noble things, that excited and engaged him. "I have imbibed the shadows of fallen columns," he says in one of his tales, "at Balbec, and Tadmor, and Persepolis, until my very soul has become a ruin." Always beauty and grace are with him most poetic in their overthrow, and it is the shadow of ruined grandeur that he receives, instead of the still living light so fair upon them, or the green growth clinging around them. Hawthorne, too, wandered much amid human ruin, but it was not with delight in the mere fact of decay; rather with grieving over it, and the hope to learn how much of life was still left in the wreck, and how future structures might be made stronger by studying the sources of failure. One of the least thoughtful remarks which I have heard touching Hawthorne was this, that his books could not live because they dealt with the "sick side" of human nature. As if great poets ever refrained from dealing with it! The tenure of fame depends on whether the writer has himself become infected with sickness. With Hawthorne this is most certainly not the case, for the morbid phases which he studied were entirely outside of himself. Poe, on the other hand, pictured his own half-maniacal moods and diseased fancies. There is absolutely no study of character in his stories, no dramatic separateness of being. He looks only for fixed and inert human quantities, with which he may juggle at will. He did not possess insight; and the analytic quality of which he was so proud was merely a sort of mathematical ingenuity of calculation, in which, however, he was extraordinarily keen. As a mere potency, dissociated from qualities, Poe must be rated almost highest among American poets, and high among prosaists; no one else offers so much pungency, such impetuous and frightful energy crowded into such small compartments. Yet it would be difficult to find a poetic fury less allied to sane human life than that which informs his tales. It is not the _representation_ of semi-insanity that he gives: he himself is its _representative_. Instead of commanding it, and bringing it into some sort of healthy relation with us, he is swayed and carried away by it. His genius flourished upon him like a destructive flame, and the ashes that it left, are like a deadly powdered poison. Clifford Pyncheon in the "Seven Gables" is Poe himself, deprived of the ability to act: in both are found the same consummate fastidiousness, the same abnormal egotism. And it is worth attention that when Clifford is aroused to sudden action by Judge Pyncheon's death, the coruscating play of his intellect is almost precisely that brilliant but defective kind of ratiocination which Poe so delights to display. It is crazy wildness, with a surface appearance of accurate and refined logic. In this fact, that Hawthorne--the calm, ardent, healthy master of imagination--is able to create the disordered type that Poe _is_, we shall find by how much the former is greater than the latter. A recent writer has raised distinctly the medical question as to Poe. He calls him "the mad man of letters _par excellence_," and by an ingenious investigation seems to establish it as probable that Poe was the victim of a form of epilepsy. But in demonstrating this, he attempts to make it part of a theory that all men of genius are more or less given over to this same "veiled epilepsy." And here he goes beyond the necessities of the case, and takes up an untenable position. There is a morbid and shattering susceptibility connected with some genius; but that tremulous, constantly readjusted sensitiveness which indicates the perfect equilibrium of health in other minds must not be confounded with it. Such is the condition of the highest genius alone; of men like Shakespere and Hawthorne, who, however dissimilar their temperaments, grasp the two spheres of mind and character, the sane and the insane, and hold them perfectly reconciled by their gentle yet unsparing insight. A case like Poe's, where actual mental decay exists in so advanced a stage and gives to his productions a sharper and more dazzling effect than would have been theirs without it, is probably more unique, but it is certainly less admirable, less original in the true sense, than an instance of healthier endowment like Hawthorne. On the side of art, it is impossible to bring Poe into any competition with Hawthorne: although we have ranked him high in poetry and prose, regarded simply as a dynamic substance, it must be confessed that his prose has nothing which can be called style, nor even a manner like Irving's very agreeable one. His feeling for form manifests itself in various ways, yet he constantly violates proportion for the sake of getting off one of his pseudo-philosophical disquisitions; and, notwithstanding many successful hits in expression, and a specious but misleading assumption of fervid accuracy in phraseology, his language is loose, promiscuous, and altogether tiresome. Poe, Irving, and Hawthorne have one marked literary condition in common: each shows a double side. With Poe the antithesis is between poetry and criticism; Irving, having been brought up by Fiction as a foster-mother, is eventually turned over to his rightful guardian, History; and Hawthorne rests his hand from ideal design, in elaborating quiet pictures of reality. In each case there is more or less seeming irreconcilement between the two phases found in combination; but the opposition is rather more distinct in Hawthorne, and the grasp with which it is controlled by him is stronger than that of either Poe or Irving,--again a result pronouncing him the master. There is still another issue on which comparison must be made. The question of nationality will for some time to come be an interesting one in any discussion of American authors. The American character is so relative, that it is only by a long series of contrasts, a careful study of the registering-plate of literature, that we shall come to the point of defining it. American quality in literature is not like Greek, German, French, English quality: those are each unified, and their component elements stoutly enough welded together to make what may be called a positive impression; but _our_ distinctions are relative. The nearest and most important means that we have for measuring them is that of comparison with England; and anything strikingly original in American genius is found to be permanent in proportion as it maintains a certain relation to English literature, not quite easy to define. It is not one of hostility, for the best American minds thus far have had the sincerest kindliness toward the mother country; it involves, however, the claiming of separate standards of judgment. The primary division, both in the case of the New England Pilgrims and in that of our Revolutionary patriots, was based on clearer perceptions of certain truths on the part of the cisatlantic English; and this claiming of separate standards in literature is a continuation of that historic attitude. We are making a perpetual minority report on the rest of the world, sure that in time our voice will be an authoritative one. The attitude being a relative and not very positively predicable one, a singular integrity of judgment is required in sustaining it. Of this Poe exhibits nothing. It was a part of the ingrained rebellion in him, that he revolted against the moneyed mediocracy of this country,--a position in which he deserves much sympathy,--and perhaps this underlies his want of deep literary identification with the national character in general. But more probably his genius was a detonating agent which could have been convulsed into its meet activity anywhere, and had nothing to do with a soil. It is significant that he was taken up by a group of men in Paris, headed by Baudelaire and assisted by Théophile Gautier, as a sort of private demigod of art; and I believe he stands in high esteem with the Rossetti-Morris family of English poets. Irving, on the other hand, comes directly upon the ground of difference between the American and the English genius, but it is with the colors of a neutral. Irving's position was peculiar. He went to Europe young, and ripened his genius under other suns than those that imbrowned the hills of his native Hudson. He had won success enough through "Salmagundi" and "Knickerbocker's History" to give him the importance of an accredited literary ambassador from the Republic, in treating with a foreign audience; and he really did us excellent service abroad. This alone secures him an important place in our literary history. Particularly wise and dignified is the tone of his short chapter called "English Writers on America"; and this sentence from it might long have served in our days of fairer fame as a popular motto: "We have but to live on, and every day we live a whole volume of refutation." His friendship with Scott, also, was a delightful addition to the amenities of literature, and shall remain a goodly and refreshing memory to us always. Yet what he accomplished in this way for American literature at large, Irving compensated for with some loss of his own dignity. It cannot be denied that the success of "The Sketch-Book" led to an overdoing of his part in "Bracebridge Hall." "Salmagundi" was the first step in the path of palpable imitation of Addison's "Spectator"; in "The Sketch-Book," though taking some charming departures, the writer made a more refined attempt to produce the same order of effects so perfectly attained by the suave Queen Anne master; and in "Bracebridge Hall" the recollection of the Sir Roger de Coverley papers becomes positively annoying. It is not that the style of Addison is precisely reproduced, of course, but the general resemblance in manner is as close as it could well have been without direct and conscious copying, the memory of Addisonian methods is too apparent. Irving's real genius, which occasionally in his other writings emits delicious flashes, does not often assert itself in this work; and though he has the knack of using the dry point of Addison's humor, he doesn't achieve what etchers call "the burr" that ought to result from its use. Addison, too, stings his lines in with true aquafortis precision, and Irving's sketches are to his as pen-and-ink drawing to the real etching. But it was not only this lack of literary independence that belittled Irving's dignity. He had become so well satisfied with his post of mediator between the writers of the two nations, that it became paramount with him to preserve the good-will he had won in England, and this appears in the cautious and _almost_ obsequious mien of "Bracebridge." One may trace it also, with amused pain, in his correspondence with Paulding,--honest, pathetic Paulding, a rabid miso-Briton who burned to write something truly American, and couldn't; whom Drake laughingly hails as "The bard of the backwoods, The poet of cabbages, log-huts, and gin." Irving was vexedly concerned at the violent outbreaks of his old coadjutor, directed against the British; yet, though they were foolish, they showed real pluck. But if we need other proof of the attitude which Irving was distinctly recognized to have taken up, we may turn to a page on which "The Edinburgh Review," unusually amiable toward him at first, thus vented its tyrannical displeasure at his excessive complaisance: "He gasped for British popularity [it said]: he came, and found it. He was received, caressed, applauded, made giddy: natural politeness owed him some return, for he imitated, admired, deferred to us.... It was plain he thought of nothing else, and was ready to sacrifice everything to obtain a smile or a look of approbation." In a less savage fashion we, too, may admit the not very pleasant truth here enunciated with such unjust extremeness. An interval of nearly forty years lies between the date of the "Sketch-Book" and "Bracebridge" and that of "Our Old Home"; the difference in tone fully corresponds to the lapse of time. In the use of native material, of course, Irving was a pioneer, along with Cooper, and was in this quite different from Poe, who had no aptitude in that way. "Knickerbocker's History of New York" is too farcical to take a high position on this score, though it undoubtedly had a beneficial effect in stirring up pride and interest in local antiquities; but "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" were valuable acquisitions so far as they went. Would that they had been wrought out with a more masterly touch; and would that Irving had penetrated further in this direction! But, though these Hudson legends will long keep his fame renewed, it will perhaps be chiefly as a historian that he will be prized. His pleasant compilation on Goldsmith, his "Mahomet," "Columbus," and "Conquest of Granada," though not too profound, fill an enviable niche in popular esteem; and his mellow and stately narrative of Washington's life is a work of enduring excellence. But these lie outside of our present discussion. Nor need we compare his achievements in native fiction with Hawthorne's, after the review we have been making of the latter's relation to New England. Poe and Irving and Hawthorne have all met with acceptance in other countries, and their works have been translated into several languages. Irving has exercised no perceptible influence on literature at home or abroad; Poe has entered more or less into the workings of a school in England and a group in France. Hawthorne's position on the Continent has perhaps not been so much one of conquest as of receiving an abstract admiration; but he has taken much stronger hold of the Anglo-Saxon mind than either of the others, and it is probable that his share in inspiring noble literature in America will--as it has already begun to show itself an important one--become vastly greater in future. It is impossible, as we have seen, to fix an absolute ratio between these writers. Irving has a more human quality than Poe, but Poe is beyond dispute the more original of the two. Each, again, has something which Hawthorne does not possess. But, if we must attempt at all to reduce so intricate a problem to exact terms, the mutual position of the three may be stated in the equation, Poe _plus_ Irving _plus_ an unknown quantity equals Hawthorne. XIII. THE LOSS AND THE GAIN. The suddenness with which Hawthorne faded away and died, when at the zenith of his fame, is no less strange and sad and visionary now than it was a poignant anguish then. He returned from Europe somewhat lingeringly, as we have seen, knowing too well the difference between the regions he was quitting and the thinner, sharper, and more wasting atmosphere of a country where every one who has anything to give is constantly drawn upon from every side, and has less resource for intellectual replenishment than in other lands. His seven years in England and Italy had, on the whole, been a period of high prosperity, of warm and gratifying recognition, of varied and delightful literary encounter, in addition to the pleasure of sojourning among so many new and suggestive scenes. And when he found himself once more on the old ground, with the old struggle for subsistence staring him steadily in the face again, it is not difficult to conceive how a certain degree of depression would follow. Just as this reaction had set in, the breaking out of civil war threw upon Hawthorne, before he had time to brace himself for the shock, an immense burden of sorrowing sympathy. The conflict of feelings which it excited on the public side has been sketched; and that alone should have been enough to make the years of strife a time of continuous gloom and anxiety to him; but it would be losing sight of a very large element in his distress, not to add that he mourned over the multitude of private griefs which were the harvest of battle as acutely as if they had all been his own losses. His intense imagination burned them too deeply into his heart. How can we call this weakness, which involved such strength of manly tenderness and sympathy? "Hawthorne's life was shortened by the war," Mr. Lowell says. Expressing this view once, to a friend, who had served long in the Union army, I was met with entire understanding. He told me that his own father, a stanch Unionist, though not in military service, was as certainly brought to his death by the war as any of the thousands who fell in battle. In how wide and touchingly humane a sense may one apply to Hawthorne Marvell's line on Cromwell's death,-- "To Love and Grief the fatal writ was signed!" His decline was gradual, and semi-conscious, as if from the first he foresaw that he could not outlive these trials. In April, 1862, he visited Washington, and wrote the article "Chiefly about War Matters" already alluded to. He has left this glimpse of himself at that time:-- "I stay here only while Leutze finishes a portrait, which I think will be the best ever painted of the same unworthy subject. One charm it must needs have,--an aspect of immortal jollity and well-to-do-ness; for Leutze, when the sitting begins, gives me a first-rate cigar, and when he sees me getting tired, he brings out a bottle of splendid champagne; and we quaffed and smoked yesterday, in a blessed state of mutual good-will, for three hours and a half, during which the picture made a really miraculous progress. Leutze is the best of fellows." The trip was taken to benefit his health, which had already begun to give way; and though he wrote thus cheerily, he was by no means well. In another published note there is this postscript:-- "My hair really is not so white as this photograph, which I enclose, makes me. The sun seems to take an infernal pleasure in making me venerable,--as if I were as old as himself." He had already, as we know, begun to meditate upon "The Dolliver Romance," trudging to and fro upon his hill-top, which was called, at home, "the mount of vision." But before proceeding with that, he began the series of essays composing "Our Old Home," not yet feeling strong enough for the more trying exertion of fiction. But the preparation of these, charming as they are, brought no exhilaration to his mind. "I am delighted," he writes to his publisher, "at what you tell me about the kind appreciation of my articles, for I feel rather gloomy about them myself.... I cannot come to Boston to spend more than a day, just at present. It would suit me better to come for a visit when the spring of next year is a little advanced, and if you renew your hospitable proposition then, I shall probably be glad to accept it; though I have now been a hermit so long, that the thought affects me somewhat as it would to invite a lobster or a crab to step out of his shell." His whole tone with regard to "Our Old Home" seems to have been one of fatigue and discouragement. He had, besides, to deal with the harassing question of the dedication to Franklin Pierce, which he solved in this manly and admirable letter to his publisher:-- "I thank you for your note of the 15th instant, and have delayed my reply thus long in order to ponder deeply on your advice, smoke cigars over it, and see what it might be possible for me to do towards taking it. I find that it would be a piece of poltroonery in me to withdraw either the dedication or the dedicatory letter. My long and intimate personal relations with Pierce render the dedication altogether proper, especially as regards this book, which would have had no existence without his kindness; and if he is so exceedingly unpopular that his name is enough to sink the volume, there is so much the more need that an old friend should stand by him. I cannot, merely on account of pecuniary profit or literary reputation, go back from what I have deliberately felt and thought it right to do; and if I were to tear out the dedication, I should never look at the volume again without remorse and shame. As for the literary public, it must accept my book precisely as I think fit to give it, or let it alone." By this time, the energy requisite for carrying on the Romance had sunk still lower, so that he wrote:-- "I can't tell you when to expect an instalment of the Romance, if ever. There is something preternatural in my reluctance to begin. I linger at the threshold, and have a perception of very disagreeable phantasms to be encountered if I enter. I wish God had given me the faculty of writing a sunshiny book." And, a little later:-- "I don't see much probability of my having the first chapter of the Romance ready so soon as you want it. There are two or three chapters ready to be written, but I am not yet robust enough to begin, and I feel as if I should never carry it through." His inability to work has been illustrated in the numerous bulletins of this period published by Mr. Fields: they show him at times despondent, as in the extracts above, then again in a state of semi-resolution. At another time there is mixed presentiment and humor in his report. "I am not quite up to writing yet, but shall make an effort as soon as I see any hope of success. You ought to be thankful that (like most other broken-down authors) I do not pester you with decrepit pages, and insist upon your accepting them as full of the old spirit and vigor. That trouble, perhaps, still awaits you, after I shall have reached a further stage of decay. Seriously, my mind has, for the present, lost its temper and its fine edge, and I have an instinct that I had better kept quiet. Perhaps I shall have a new spirit of vigor, if I wait quietly for it; perhaps not." But over all these last notes there hangs a melancholy shadow that makes the flickering humor even sadder than the awesome conviction that he has done with writing. How singular the mingled mood of that last letter, in which he grimly jests upon the breaking-down of his literary faculty! Here he announces, finally: "I hardly know what to say to the public about this abortive Romance, though I know pretty well what the case will be. I shall never finish it." Yet the cause was not so much the loss of literary power, as the physical exhaustion that had already worn him away beyond recovery. He longed for England; and possibly if he could have gone thither, the voyage, the milder climate, and the sense of rest that he would have felt there, might have restored him. He had friends in this country, however, who made attempts to break up the disastrous condition into which he had so unexpectedly come. In May of 1863, when "Our Old Home" was printing, he received from his friend Mr. Lowell this most charming invitation to come to Cambridge:-- MY DEAR HAWTHORNE:--I hope you have not forgotten that during "anniversary week" you were to make me a little anniversary by a visit? I have been looking forward to it _ever_ so long. My plan is that you come on Friday, so as to attend the election-meeting of our club, and then stay over Sunday, and Monday, and Tuesday, which is the last day of my holidays. How will that do? I am glad to hear your book is going through the press, and you will be nearer your proof-sheets here. I have pencils of all colors for correcting in all moods of mind,--red for sanguine moments when one thinks there is some use in writing at all, blue for a modest depression, and black for times when one is satisfied there is no longer an intelligent public nor one reader of taste left in the world. You shall have a room to yourself, nearly as high and quite as easy of access as your tower, and I pledge myself that my crows, cat-birds, orioles, chimbley-swallows, and squirrels shall present you with the freedom of their city in a hollow walnut, so soon as you arrive. Now will you write and say when you are to be expected? I assure you I have looked forward to your coming as one of my chiefest spring pleasures, ranking it with the advent of the birds. Always cordially yours, J. R. LOWELL. "I have smoked a cigar over your kind invitation," wrote Hawthorne, in answer, "and mean to come. There is a little bit of business weighing upon me (literary business of course, an article for the magazine and for my volume, which I ought to have begun and finished long ago), but I hope to smash it in a day or two, and will meet you at the club on Saturday. I shall have very great pleasure in the visit." But, at the last moment, he was obliged to give it up, being detained by a cold. And there seemed indeed a fatality which interfered with all attempts to thwart the coming evil. At the beginning of April, 1864, completely broken down, yet without apparent cause, he set out southward with Mr. William Ticknor. On arriving at Philadelphia he began to improve; but Mr. Ticknor's sudden death overthrew the little he had gained, and caused him to sink still more. It is not my purpose here to dwell upon the sad and unbeautiful details of a last illness: these things would make but a harsh closing chord in the strain of meditation on Hawthorne's life which we have been following out,--a life so beautiful and noble that to surround its ending with the remembrance of mere mortal ailment has in it something of coarseness. But it was needful to show in what way this great spirit bowed beneath the weight of its own sympathy with a national woe. Even when Dr. Holmes saw him in Boston, though "his aspect, medically considered, was very unfavorable," and though "he spoke as if his work were done, and he should write no more," still "there was no failing noticeable in his conversational powers." "There was nothing in Mr. Hawthorne's aspect," wrote Dr. Holmes, "that gave warning of so sudden an end as that which startled us all." He passed on into the shadow as if of his own will; feeling that his country lay in ruins, that the human lot carried with it more hate and horror and sorrow than he could longer bear to look at; welcoming--except as those dear to him were concerned--the prospect of that death which he alone knew to be so near. It was on the 19th of May, 1864, that the news came from Plymouth, in New Hampshire,--whither he had gone with Ex-President Pierce,--that Hawthorne was dead. Afterward, it was recalled with a kind of awe that through many years of his life Hawthorne had been in the habit, when trying a pen or idly scribbling at any time, of writing the number sixty-four; as if the foreknowledge of his death, which he showed in the final days, had already begun to manifest itself in this indirect way long before. Indeed, he had himself felt that the number was connected with his life in some fatal way. Five days later he was carried to Sleepy Hollow, the beautiful cemetery where he had been wont to walk among the pines, where once when living at the Manse he had lain upon the grass talking to Margaret Fuller, when Mr. Emerson came upon them, and smiled, and said the Muses were in the woods that day. A simple stone, with the single word "Hawthorne" cut upon it, was placed above him. He had wished that there should be no monument. He liked Wordsworth's grave at Grasmere, and had written, "It is pleasant to think and know that he did not care for a stately monument." Longfellow and Lowell and Holmes, Emerson and Louis Agassiz, and his friends Pierce, and Hillard, with Ellery Channing, and other famous men, assembled on that peaceful morning to take their places in the funeral train. Some who had not known him in life came long distances to see him, now, and ever afterward bore about with them the memory of his aspect, strong and beautiful, in his last repose. The orchards were blossoming; the roadside-banks were blue with violets, and the lilies of the valley, which were Hawthorne's favorites among the flowers, had come forth in quiet companies, to look their last on his face, so white and quiet too. So, while the batteries that had murdered him roared sullenly in the distant South, the rites of burial were fulfilled over the dead poet. Like a clear voice beside the grave, as we look back and listen, Longfellow's simple, penetrating chant returns upon the ear. In vain to sum up, here, the loss unspeakable suffered in Hawthorne's death; and no less vain the attempt to fix in a few words the incalculable gain his life has left with us. When one remembers the power that was unexhausted in him still, one is ready to impeach cold Time and Fate for their treason to the fair prospect that lay before us all, in the continuance of his career. We look upon these few great works, that may be numbered on the fingers of a hand, and wonder what good end was served by the silent shutting of those rich pages that had just begun to open. We remember the tardy recognition that kept the fountain of his spirit so long half concealed, and the necessities that forced him to give ten of his best years to the sterile industry of official duties. But there are great compensations. Without the youthful period of hopes deferred, Hawthorne, as we have seen, would not have been the unique force, the high, untrammelled thinker that he became through that fortunate isolation; wanting the uncongenial contact of his terms at Boston and Salem and Liverpool, it may be that he could not have developed his genius with such balance of strength as it now shows; and, finally, without the return to his native land, the national fibre in him would have missed its crowning grace of conscientiousness. He might in that case have written more books, but the very loss of these, implying as it does his pure love of country, is an acquisition much more positively valuable. There is a fitness, too, in the abrupt breaking off of his activity, in so far as it gives emphasis to that incompleteness of any verbal statement of truth, which he was continually insisting upon with his readers. Hawthorne, it is true, expanded so constantly, that however many works he might have produced, it seems unlikely that any one of them would have failed to record some large movement in his growth; and therefore it is perhaps to be regretted that his life could not have been made to solely serve his genius, so that we might have had the whole sweep of his imagination clearly exposed. As it is, he has not given us a large variety of characters; and Hester, Zenobia, and Miriam bear a certain general likeness one to another. Phoebe, however, is quite at the opposite pole of womanhood; Hilda is as unlike any of them as it is easy to conceive of her being; and Priscilla, again, is a feminine nature of unique calibre, as weird but not so warm as Goethe's Mignon, and at the same time a distinctly American type, in her nervous yet captivating fragility. In Priscilla and Phoebe are embodied two widely opposed classes of New England women. The male characters, with the exception of Donatello and Hollingsworth, are not so remarkable as the feminine ones: Coverdale and Kenyon come very close together, both being artistic and both reflectors for the persons that surround them; and Dimmesdale is to some extent the same character,--with the artistic escape closed upon his passions, so that they turn within and ravage his heart,--arrested and altered by Puritan influences. Chillingworth is perhaps too devilish a shape of revenge to be discussed as a human individual. Septimius, again, is distinct; and the characterization of Westervelt, in "Blithedale," slight as it is, is very stimulating. Perhaps, after all, what leads us to pronounce upon the whole fictitious company a stricture of homogeneity is the fact that the author, though presenting us each time with a set of persons sufficiently separate from his previous ones, does not emphasize their differences with the same amount of external description that we habitually depend upon from a novelist. The similarity is more in the author's mode of presentation than in the creations themselves. This monotone in which all the personages of his dramas share is nearly related with some special distinctions of his genius. He is so fastidious in his desire for perfection, that he can scarcely permit his actors to speak loosely or ungrammatically: though retaining their essential individuality, they are endowed with the author's own delightful power of expression. This outward phasis of his work separates it at once from that of the simple novelist, and leads us to consider the special applicability to it of the term "romance." He had not the realistic tendency, as we usually understand that, but he possessed the power to create a new species of fiction. For the kind of romance that he has left us differs from all compositions previously so called. It is not romance in the sense of D'Urfé's or Scudéri's; it is very far from coming within the scope of Fielding's "romances"; and it is entirely unconnected with the tales of the German Romantic school. It is not the romance of sentiment; nor that of incident, adventure, and character viewed under a worldly coloring: it has not the mystic and melodramatic bent belonging to Tieck and Novalis and Fouqué. There are two things which radically isolate it from all these. The first is its quality of revived belief. Hawthorne, as has been urged already, is a great believer, a man who has faith; his belief goes out toward what is most beautiful, and this he finds only in moral truth. With him, poetry and moral insight are sacredly and indivisibly wedded, and their progeny is perfect beauty. This unsparingly conscientious pursuit of the highest truth, this metaphysical instinct, found in conjunction with a varied and tender appreciation of all forms of human or other life, is what makes him so decidedly the representative of a wholly new order of novelists. Belief, however, is, not what he has usually been credited with, so much as incredulity. But the appearance of doubt is superficial, and arises from his fondness for illuminating fine but only half-perceptible traces of truth with the torch of superstition. Speaking of the supernatural, he says in his English journal: "It is remarkable that Scott should have felt interested in such subjects, being such a worldly and earthly man as he was; but then, indeed, almost all forms of popular superstition do clothe the ethereal with earthly attributes, and so make it grossly perceptible." This observation has a still greater value when applied to Hawthorne himself. And out of this questioning belief and transmutation of superstition into truth--for such is more exactly his method--proceeds also that quality of value and rarity and awe-enriched significance, with which he irradiates real life until it is sublimed to a delicate cloud-image of the eternal verities. If these things are limitations, they are also foundations of a vast originality. Every greatness must have an outline. So that, although he is removed from the list of novelists proper, although his spiritual inspiration scares away a large class of sympathies, and although his strictly New England atmosphere seems to chill and restrain his dramatic fervor, sometimes to his disadvantage, these facts, on the other hand, are so many trenches dug around him, fortifying his fair eminence. Isolation and a certain degree of limitation, in some such sense as this, belong peculiarly to American originality. But Hawthorne is the embodiment of the youth of this country; and though he will doubtless furnish inspiration to a long line of poets and novelists, it must be hoped that they, likewise, will stand for other phases of its development, to be illustrated in other ways. No tribute to Hawthorne is less in accord with the biddings of his genius than that which would merely make a school of followers. It is too early to say what position Hawthorne will take in the literature of the world; but as his influence gains the ascendant in America, by prompting new and _un_-Hawthornesque originalities, it is likely also that it will be made manifest in England, according to some unspecifiable ratio. Not that any period is to be distinctly colored by the peculiar dye in which his own pages are dipped; but the renewed tradition of a highly organized yet simple style, and still more the masculine tenderness and delicacy of thought and the fine adjustment of aesthetic and ethical obligations, the omnipresent truthfulness which he carries with him, may be expected to become a constituent part of very many minds widely opposed among themselves. I believe there is no fictionist who penetrates so far into individual consciences as Hawthorne; that many persons will be found who derive a profoundly religious aid from his unobtrusive but commanding sympathy. In the same way, his sway over the literary mind is destined to be one of no secondary degree. "Deeds are the offspring of words," says Heine; "Goethe's pretty words are childless." Not so with Hawthorne's. Hawthorne's repose is the acme of motion; and though turning on an axis of conservatism, the radicalism of his mind is irresistible; he is one of the most powerful because most unsuspected revolutionists of the world. Therefore, not only is he an incalculable factor in private character, but in addition his unnoticed leverage for the thought of the age is prodigious. These great abilities, subsisting with a temper so modest and unaffected, and never unhumanized by the abstract enthusiasm for art, place him on a plane between Shakespere and Goethe. With the universality of the first only just budding within his mind, he has not so clear a response to all the varying tones of lusty human life, and the individuality in his utterance amounts, at particular instants, to constraint. With less erudition than Goethe, but also less of the freezing pride of art, he is infinitely more humane, sympathetic, holy. His creations are statuesquely moulded like Goethe's, but they have the same quick music of heart-throbs that Shakespere's have. Hawthorne is at the same moment ancient and modern, plastic and picturesque. Another generation will see more of him than we do; different interpreters will reveal other sides. As a powerful blow suddenly descending may leave the surface it touches unmarked, and stamp its impress on the substance beneath, so his presence will more distinctly appear among those farther removed from him than we. A single mind may concentrate your vision upon him in a particular way; but the covers of any book must perforce shut out something of the whole, as the trees in a vista narrow the landscape. Look well at these leaves I lay before you; but having read them throw the volume away, and contemplate the man himself. APPENDIX I. In May, 1870, an article was published in the "Portland Transcript," giving some of the facts connected with Hawthorne's sojourn in Maine, as a boy. This called out a letter from Alexandria, Va., signed "W. S.," and purporting to come from a person who had lived at Raymond, in boyhood, and had been a companion of Hawthorne's. He gave some little reminiscences of that time, recalling the fact that Hawthorne had read him some poetry founded on the Tarbox disaster, already mentioned. [Footnote: See _ante_, p. 89.] Himself he described as having gone to sea at twenty, and having been a wanderer ever since. In. speaking of the date of the poetry, "We could not have been more than ten years old," he said. This, of course, is a mistake, the accident having happened in 1819, when Hawthorne was fourteen. And it is tolerably certain that he did not even visit Raymond until he was twelve. The letter called out some reminiscences from Mr. Robinson Cook, of Bolster's Mills, in Maine, who had also known Hawthorne as a boy; some poetry on the Tarbox tragedy was also found, and printed, which afterward proved to have been written by another person; and one or two other letters were published, not especially relevant to Hawthorne, but concerning the Tarbox affair. After this, "W. S." wrote again from Alexandria (November 23, 1870), revealing the fact that he had come into possession, several years before, of the manuscript book from which he afterward sent extracts. The book, he explained, was found by a man named Small, who had assisted in moving a lot of furniture, among it a "large mahogany bookcase" full of old books, from the old Manning House. This was several years before the civil war, and "W. S." met Small in the army, in Virginia. He reported that the book--"originally a bound blank one not ruled," and "gnawed by mice or eaten by moths on the edges"--contained about two hundred and fifty pages, and was written throughout, "the first part in a boyish hand though legibly, and showing in its progress a marked improvement in penmanship." The passages reprinted in the present volume were sent by him, over the signature "W. Sims," to the "Transcript," and published at different dates (February 11, 1871; April 22, 1871). Their appearance called out various communications, all tending to establish their genuineness; but, beyond the identification of localities and persons, and the approximate establishing of dates, no decisive proof was forthcoming. Sims himself, however, was recalled by former residents near Raymond; and there seemed at least much inferential proof in favor of the notes. A long silence ensued upon the printing of the second portion; and at the end of 1871 it was made known that Sims had died at Pensacola, Florida. The third and last supposed extract from Hawthorne's note-book was sent from Virginia again, in 1873 (published June 21 of that year), by a person professing to have charge of Sims's papers. This person was written to by the editors of the "Transcript," but no reply has ever been received. A relative of Hawthorne in Salem also wrote to the Pensacola journal in which Sims's death was announced, making inquiry as to its knowledge of him and as to the source of the mortuary notice. No reply was ever received from this quarter, either. Sims, it is said, had been in the secret service under Colonel Baker, of dreaded fame in war-days; and it may be that, having enemies, he feared the notoriety to which his contributions to journalism might expose him, and decided to die,--at least so far as printer's ink could kill him. All these circumstances are unfortunate, because they make the solution of doubts concerning the early notes quite impossible, for the present. The fabrication of the journal by a person possessed of some literary skill and familiar with the localities mentioned, at dates so long ago as 1816 to 1819, might not be an impossible feat, but it is an extremely improbable one. It is not likely that an ordinary impostor would hit upon the sort of incident selected for mention in these extracts. Even if he drew upon circumstances of his own boyhood, transferring them to Hawthorne's, he must possess a singularly clear memory, to recall matters of this sort; and to invent them would require a nice imaginative faculty. One of the first passages, touching the "son of old Mrs. Shane" and the "son of the Widow Hawthorne," is of a sort to entirely evade the mind of an impostor. The whole method of observation, too, seems very characteristic. If the portion descriptive of a raft and of the manners of the lumbermen be compared with certain memoranda in the "American Note-Books" (July 13 and 15, 1837), derived from somewhat similar scenes, a general resemblance in the way of seizing characteristics will be observed. Of course, if the early notes are fabrications, it may be that the author of them drew carefully after passages of the maturer journal, and this among others. But the resemblance is crossed by a greater youthfulness in the early notes, it seems to me, which it would be hard to produce artificially. The cool and collected style of the early journal is not improbable in a boy like Hawthorne, who had read many books and lived much in the companionship of older persons. Indeed, it is very much like the style of "The Spectator" of 1820. A noticeable coincidence is, that the pedler, Dominicus Jordan, should be mentioned in both the journal and "The Spectator." The circumstance that the dates should all have been said to be missing from the manuscript book is suspicious. Yet the last extract has the month and year appended, August, 1819. What is more important is, that the date of the initial inscription is given as 1816; and at the time when this was announced it had not been ascertained even by Hawthorne's own family and relatives that he had been at Raymond so early. But since the publications in the "Transcript," some letters have come to light of which I have made use; and one of these, bearing date July 21, 1818, to which I have alluded in another connection, speaks of Raymond from actual recollection. "Does the Pond look the same as when I was there? It is almost as pleasant at Nahant as at Raymond. I thought there was no place that I should say so much of." The furnisher of the notes, if he was disingenuous, might indeed have remembered that Hawthorne was in Maine about 1816; he may also have relied on a statement in the "Transcript's" editorial, to the effect that Hawthorne was taken to Raymond in 1814. In that editorial, it is also observed: "Hawthorne was then a lad of ten years." I have already said that Sims refers to the period of the verses on the Tarboxes as being a time when he and Hawthorne were "not more than ten years old." This, at first, would seem to suggest that he was relying still further upon the editorial. But if he had been taking the editorial statement as a basis for fabrication, it is not likely that he would have failed to ascertain exactly the date of the freezing of Mr. and Mrs. Tarbox, which was 1819. The careless way in which he alludes to this may have been the inadvertence of an impostor trying to make his account agree with one already published; but it is more likely that the sender of the notes did not remember the precise year in which the accident occurred, and was confused by the statement of the "Transcript." An impostor must have taken more pains, one would think. It must also be noticed that "the Widow _Haw_thorne" is spoken of in the notes. Sims, however, in his preliminary letter, refers to the fact that "the universal pronunciation of the name in Raymond was Hathorn,--the first syllable exactly as the word 'hearth' was pronounced at that time"; and the explanation of the spelling in the notes doubtless is that Sims, or whoever transcribed the passage, changed it as being out of keeping with the now historic form of the name. It is possible that further changes were also made by the transcriber; and a theory which has some color is, that the object in keeping the original manuscript out of the way may have been, to make it available for expansions and embellishments, using the actual record as a nucleus. II. The theme referred to in Chapter III. is given in full below. After the earlier portion of the present essay had been stereotyped, an article by Professor G. T. Packard, on Bowdoin College, was published in "Scribner's Monthly," which contains this mention of Hawthorne:-- "The author's college life was prophetic of the after years, when he so dwelt apart from the mass of men, and yet stirred so deeply the world's sensibilities and delighted its fancy. His themes were written in the sustained, finished style that gives to his mature productions an inimitable charm. The late Professor Newman, his instructor in rhetoric, was so impressed with Hawthorne's powers as a writer, that he not infrequently summoned the family circle to share in the enjoyment of reading his compositions. The recollection is very distinct of Hawthorne's reluctant step and averted look, when he presented himself at the Professor's study, and with girlish diffidence submitted a composition which no man in his class could equal.... When the class was graduated, Hawthorne could not be persuaded to join them in having their profiles cut in paper, the only class picture of the time; nor did he take part in the Commencement exercises. His classmates understood that he intended to be a writer of romance, but none anticipated his remarkable development and enduring fame. It seems strange that among his admirers no one has offered him a fitting tribute by founding the Hawthorne Professorship of English Literature in the college where, under the tutelage of the accomplished and appreciative Professor Newman, he was stimulated to cultivate his native gift." DE PATRIS CONSCRIPTIS ROMANORUM. Senatum Romanorum jam primum institutum, simplicem siniul atquo praestantissimuni fuisse sentiant onmes. Imperium fint, quod populo aec avaritis nee luxuria vitiato optimum videretar. Lecti fuerunt senatores, non qui ambitiose potestatem eupiere, sesl qui senectute, qui sapientia, qui virtute bellica vel privata insigues, in republica plurimam pollebant. Hominum consiliis virtute tam singulari praeditorum paruit populus libenter atque senatores at patres civilius venerati. Studium illis paternum adhibuere. Nulla unquam respublica, quam turn Romana, nec sanctior nec beatior t'uit; iis temporibus etenim solum in publicum commodum principes administrabant; fidemque principibus populi habetant. Sed virtute prisca reipublierc perdita, inimicitus mutuis patres plebesque flagrare coeperunt, alienaque prosequi. Senatus in populum tyrannice saeviit, atque hostem se monstravit potiue quam custodem reipubliere. Concitatur vulgus studio libertatis repetendre, alque per multa secula patrum plebisque contentiones historia Romana memorat; patribus pristinam auctoriratem servare conatis, liccentiaque plebis omnia jura spernante. Hoc modo usque ad Panieum bellum, res se habebant. Tun pericula externa discordiam domesticam superabant, reipublicaeque studium priscam patribus sapientiam, priscam populis reverentiam redundit. Hae aetate omnibus virtutibus cnituit Roma. Senatus, jure omnium consensu facto, opes suas prope ad inopiam plebis aequavit; patriaeque solum amore gloria quaesita, pecunia niluii habita est. Sed quuam Carthaginem reformidavit non diutius Roma, rediit respublica ad vitia pristina. Patres luxuria solum populis praestiterunt, et vestigia eorum populi secuti sunt. Senatus auctoritatem, ex illo ipso tempore, annus unusquisque diminuit, donce in aerate Angasti interitus nobilium humiliumque delectus omnino fere dignitatem conficerunt. Augustus equidem antiquam magnificentiam patribus reddidit, sed fulgor tantum liut sine fervore. Nunquam in republica senatoribus potestates recuperatae. Postremum species etiam amissa est. HATHORNE. THE ROMAN SENATE. Every one perceives that the Roman Senate, as it was originally constituted, was a no less simple than illustrious body. It was a sovereignty which appeared most desirable to a populace vitiated neither by avarice nor luxury. The senators were chosen, not from those who were ambitious of power, but those who wielded the largest influence in the Republic through wisdom and warlike valor or private virtue. The citizens bowed willingly to the counsels of men endowed with such singular worth, and venerated the senators as fathers. The latter exercised a paternal care. No republic ever was holier or more blessed than that of Rome at this time; for in those days the rulers administered for the public convenience alone, and the people had faith in their rulers. But, the pristine virtue of the Republic lost, the fathers and the commonalty began to blaze forth with mutual hostilities, and to seek after the possessions of others. The Senate vented its wrath savagely upon the people, and showed itself rather the enemy than the guardian of the Republic. The multitude was aroused by the desire of recovering liberty, and through a very long period Roman history recounts the contentions of the fathers and the commonalty; the fathers attempting to preserve their old authority, and the license of the commons scorning every law. Affairs remained in this condition until the Punic War. Then foreign perils prevailed over domestic discord, and love of the Republic restored to the fathers their early wisdom, to the people their reverence. At this period, Rome shone with every virtue. The Senate, through the rightfully obtained consent of all parties, nearly equalized its power with the powerlessness of the commonalty; and glory being sought solely through love of the fatherland, wealth was regarded as of no account. But when Rome no longer dreaded Carthage, the commonwealth returned to its former vices. The fathers were superior to the populace only in luxury, and the populace followed in their footsteps. From that very time, every year diminished the authority of the Senate, until in the age of Augustus the death of the nobles and the selection of insignificant men almost wholly destroyed its dignity. Augustus, to be sure, restored to the fathers their ancient magnificence, but, great as was the fire (so to speak), it was without real heat. Never was the power of the senators recovered. At last even the appearance of it vanished. III. The lists of books referred to in Chapter IV. were recorded by different hands, or in different ways at various dates, so that they have not been made out quite satisfactorily. Some of the authors named below were taken out a great many times, but the number of the volume is given in only a few cases. It would seem, for example, that Voltaire's complete works were examined by Hawthorne, if we judge by his frequent application for some part of them, and the considerable number of volumes actually mentioned. In this and in other cases, the same volume is sometimes called for more than once. To make the matter clearer here, I have reduced the entries to a simple list of the authors read, without attempting to show how often a particular one was taken up. Few or none of them were read consecutively, and the magazines placed together at the end of my list were taken out at short intervals throughout the different years. 1830. Oeuvres de Voltaire. Mémoire de Litérature. Liancourt. Oeuvres de Rousseau. Mass. Historical Collections. Trial and Triumph of Faith. Oeuvres de Pascal. Varenius' Geography. Mickle's Lucian. Dictionnaire des Sciences. Pamela. (Vols. I., II.) Life of Baxter. Tournefort's Voyage. Swift's Works. Hitt on Fruit-Trees. Bibliotheca Americana. Ames's Antiquities. Hamilton's Works. Gifford's Juvenal. Allen's Biographical Dictionary. Fénélon. Académie Royale des Inscriptions. Mather's Apology. Vertol's History of Sweden. Taylor's Sermons. Life of Luckington. L'an 2440. Montague's Letters. English Botany. (3 vols.) Gay's Poems. Inchbald's Theatre. Sowerby's English Botany. Crabbe's Borough. Crabbe's Bibliographical Dictionary. Collection of Voyages (Hakluyt's?). Lives of the Admirals. British Zoölogy. 1831 Los Eruditos. Connoisseur. Camilla. Gifford's Persius. Bartram's Travels. Humphrey's Works. Voltaire. Pennant's British Zoology. Mandeville's Travels. Rehearsal Transposed. Gay's Poems. Pompey the Little. Shaw's General Zoology. Philip's Poems. Sowerby's English Botany. Racine. Corneille. Wilkinson's Memoirs and Atlas. History of the Shakers. The Confessional. Calamy's Life of Baxter. Académie Royale des Inscripts. Essais de Montaigne. (Vols. I., II., III., IV.) Cadell's Journey through Italy and Carniola. Cobbet's Rule in France. Temple's Works. (Vols. I., II., III.) Asiatic Researches. Cochran's Tour in Siberia. Chardin's Travels. Brandt's History of the Reformation. Russell's Natural History. Aleppo. (Vol. I.) Answer to the Fable of the Bees. Hanway's Travels. Memoirs of C. J. Fox. Bayle's Critical Dictionary. (Vols. II., V., VI.) State Trials. (Vols. I., II., IV., V., VI.) Tales of a Traveller. Dictionnaire des Sciences. (Vol. XVII.) Bacon's Works. (Vol. II.) Gordon's Tacitus. Colquhoun on the Police. Cheyne on Health. Pope's Homer. (Vol I.) Letters: De Maintenon. (Vol. IX.) Reichard's Germany. Oeuvres de Rousseau. Notes on the West Indies by Prichard. Crishull's Travels in Turkey. 1832-33. Clarendon's Tracts. History of England. Prose Works of Walter Scott. (Vols. III., V., VI.) Feltham's Resolves. Roscoe's Sovereigns. Histoire de l'Académie. South America. Savages of New Zealand. Stackhouse's History of the Bible. Dryden's Poems. Tucker's Light of Nature. History of South Carolina. Poinsett's Notes on Mexico. Brace's Travels. Browne's Jamaica. Collins's New South Wales. Broughton's Dictionary. Seminole War. Shaw's Zoology. Reverie. Gifford's Pitt. Curiosities of Literature. Massinger. Literary Recollections. Coleridge's Aids to Reflection. Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats. Paris and Fonblanque. Elia. Gardens and Menagerie. Medical Jurisprudence. History of Paris. Scott's Prose Works. Kittell's Specimens American Poetry. Lister's Journey. Annals of Salem. Library of Old English Prose Writers. Memoirs of Canning. Miscellaneous Works of Scott. Jefferson's Writings. History of Andover. Good's Book of Nature. History of Haverhill. Madden's Travels. (Vols. I., II.) Riedesel's Memoirs. Boston Newspapers (1736, 1739, 1754, 1762, 1771, 1783). Drake's Mornings in Spring. Drake's Evenings in Autumn. Anecdotes of Bowyer. Gouverneur Morris. (Vols. I., II.) Bryan Walton's Memoirs. Moses Mendelssohn. Collingwood. Felt's Annals. Strutt's Sports and Pastimes. Schiller. Mrs. Jameson. (2 vols.) Thatcher's Medical Biography. History of Plymouth. Crabbe's Universal Dictionary. Lewis's History of Lynn. A Year in Spain, by a Young American. (Vols. I., II.) Croker's Boswell. Deane's History of Scituate. Diplomatic Correspondence. (Vols. I., II.) Temple's Travels. (Vol. II.) Fuller's Holy State. Remarkables of Increase Mather. History of Portland. (Vols. I., II.) Practical Tourist. Elements of Technology. Heber's Life, by Taylor. Ductor Substantium. Heber's Travels in India. (Vols. I., II.) Byron's Works. Travels in Brazil and Buenos Ayres. History of Spain. Franklin's Works. Mental Cultivation. 1835. Life of Gouverneur Morris. Hamilton's Progress of Society. Twiner's Sacred History. Encyclopaedia. Life of Arthur Lee. Life of Sir Humphry Davy. Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats. Prior's Poems. (Vol. I.) Jefferson's Writings. (Vols. I., II.) Memoirs of the Tower of London. History of King's Chapel. Memoirs of Dr. Burney. Hone's Every Day Book. (Vols. I, II., III.) Life of Livingstone. 1836. Life of Hamilton. (Vol. I.) Debates in Parliament. (Vol. I.) Curiosities of Literature (Vol. I.) Combe on the Constitution of Man. Babbage on Economy of Machinery. Eulogies on Jefferson and Adams. Hone's Every Day Book. (Vols. I., III.) Dunlap's History of the Arts of Design. (Vols. I., II.) Mende's Guide to Observation of Nature. Cobbett's Cottage Economy. Douglas's Summary. (Vol. I.) Practical Tourist. (Vols. I., II.) Dick on Improvement of Society. Bush's Life of Mohammed. Temple's Travels in Peru. (Vol. I.) Gay's Poems. Pliny's Natural History. Coleridge's Table-Talk. Letters from Constantinople. (Vols. I., II.) Reynolds's Voyages. Adventures on Columbia River, by Ross Cox. Baine's History of Cotton Manufacture. History of Nantucket. Travels in South America. Müller's Universal History. Antar. A Bedoueen Romance. Lives of the Philosophers. (Vols. I., II.) Description of Trades. Colman's Visit to England. Ludolph's History of Ethiopia. Griffin's Remains. McCree's Life of Knox. Walker's Sufferings of the Clergy. Voyage de la mer du Sud an Nord. Biographia Literaria. The Stranger in America. Raumer's England in 1835. Random Recollections of the House of Lords. The German Student. Sparks's American Biography. Brewster's Natural Magic. Prior's Life of Goldsmith. Sparks's Washington. Walter Scott's Demonology and Witchcraft. Scott's Life of Bonaparte. (3 vols.) 1837. Washington's Writings. Martineau's Miscellany. Wraxall's Memoirs. Bancroft's United States History. Rush, on the Human Voice. Drake's Indian Biography. Wordsworth's Poetical Works. Clarendon's History of the Rebellion. Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. Bayle's Historical Memoirs of Plymouth County. Life of Jefferson, by Tucker. Random Recollections of the House of Commons. Specimens of American Poetry. 1838. Life of Jefferson. Brown's Novels. Parr's Works. Select Comedies. Froissart's Ancient Chronology. Byron's Works. Plutarch's Lives. London Encyclopedia of Architecture. Gentleman's Magazine. Monthly Magazine. Monthly Review. European Magazine. Christian Examiner. Edinburgh Magazine. Annual Register. Quarterly Review. Southern Review. Worcester's Magazine. North American Review. United States Service Journal. Court Magazine. Museum of Literature and Science. Westminster Review. London Monthly Magazine. Eclectic Review. Foreign Quarterly Review. Blackwood's Magazine. Metropolitan Magazine. New England Magazine. British Critic. American Encyclopaedia. Rees's Cyclopaedia. Gifford's Juvenal. INDEX. Addison, Joseph Allegory and symbolism Ambitious Guest, The America, Hawthorne's sentiment about returning to American Magazine American Note-Books, record of youth in American nurture of Hawthorne's genius American quality in literature Andrews, Ferdinand Apollyon, name of cat Artist of the Beautiful, The Atmosphere, Hawthorne's susceptibility to Autobiographies Balzac's method of dealing with sin Bancroft, George Baudelaire Bay writers, nickname given by Church Review Beelzebub, Hawthorne's cat Belief, Hawthorne's Bewick Company Biography, Hawthorne's feeling about Birth-mark, The Blithedale Romance its relation to Brook Farm real incident applied in when written remarks on Bloody Footstep Boston Custom-House Boston Token, The Bowdoin College passage from "Fanshawe" descriptive of Bridge, Horatio prognostic of, concerning Hawthorne Brig Fair American, Ballad of Brook Farm, origin of Hawthorne's aim in going to length of stay there trenchant remark upon, in Blithedale Brown, Brockden Buchanan, James Buds and Bird-Voices Bunyan, compared with Milton with Hawthorne Burroughs, Rev. Dr. Charles, note from, to Hawthorne Bryant, William Cullen Celestial Railroad, The Characters of Hawthorne Chippings with a Chisel Chorley, H. F. Christmas Banquet, The Church Review attack of, on The Scarlet Letter Cilley, Jonathan Clarendon's History Coleridge, S. T. Conception of Character, Hawthorne's method of Contact of life and death Contradictions of critics Cooper, J. Fenimore Cooper Memorial letter of Hawthorne Coverdale, Miles, origin of name character of, how related to Hawthorne Curtis, George William letters from Hawthorne to Curwin Mansion Cushing, Caleb Custom-House, prefatory chapter on the excitement over it in Salem Democratic Review Devil in Manuscript, The Dickens Dixey, William, name in Seven Gables Doctor Heidegger's Experiment Dolliver Romance, The Drake, J. R. Dramatic quality in Hawthorne Drowne's Wooden Image D'Urfé Early Notes, discovery of passages from Earth's Holocaust Eccentricity in Salem Edinburgh Review, stricture of, upon Irving Emerson's English Traits Endicott and The Red Cross passage from, bearing on Scarlet Letter Endicotts, anecdote of English Note-Books, characteristics of Evangeline, origin of Hawthorne's review of Fame, in what way desirable Fancy's Show-Box Faust "Fanshawe" abstract of passages from Fearing, Master, and Hawthorne Fielding, Henry Fields, J. T., mistake of Fine Art, Hawthorne's way of looking at Fire worship First Church of Salem First publication by Hawthorne Foote, Caleb Fouqué French and Italian Note-Books Froissart Gautier, Theophile Goethe Godwin, William Goldsmith Goodrich, S. G. employs Hawthorne as editor difficulties with Grandfather's Chair publication of Gray Champion, The Hathorne, Elizabeth C. Manning, mother of Nathaniel Hawthorne, piety of, her inconsolableness at loss of her husband Hathorne, John, judge in witchcraft trials Hathorne, Joseph, Benjamin, Daniel Hathorne, Nathaniel, father of Nathaniel, death of; Hawthorne's resemblance to Hathorne, William; his persecution of Quakers; his will Haunted Mind, The HAWTHORNE, NATHANIEL, birth of changes spelling of name birthplace of; childhood of; lameness in boyhood; fondness for cats; scholarship of, at college; English compositions of; Latin theme of, (in full, Appendix); reading of; love of books; first printed article of; college associations of; literary struggles of; pecuniary difficulties of; Democratic sympathies of; his inability to distinguish tunes; social nature of; error as to long obscurity of; anecdotes of; value of these in general; his love of solitude; healthiness of; shyness; considerateness for others; personal appearance; G. W. Curtis's reminiscence of; his simplicity of habits; love of books; abstraction; moral enthusiasm of, characterized; unsuspiciousness of; introspection of, how exaggerated; distaste for society, how explainable; in what greater than Irving; ghostly atmosphere of; humor of; American quality of; effect of civil war upon; death of; his grave; burial; literary and intellectual influence of Heine, Heinrich Helwyse, Gervase Hillard, George S. Hoffman, Charles Fenno Hogg's Tales Holmes, Oliver Wendell; letter from, to Hawthorne Horace House of the Seven Gables, The; Hathorne history; composition of; originals for the house; survey of Howells, W. D., Hawthorne's remark to Invisible struggles of genius Irving, Washington; comparison with Hawthorne; humor of; attitude of, in England; his use of native material; his histories; style of John Ingefield's Thanksgiving Johnson, Samuel Journal of an African Cruiser Journal of a Solitary Man Kingsley's Greek Fairy-Tales Latin Theme of Hawthorne; in full, Appendix Lawrence, Lieutenant, killed off Marblehead Lenox, removal to Letters of Hawthorne, in boyhood, from college; from Connecticut and New Hampshire; to Longfellow; to Bridge; to Curtis; to Motley; to Lowell Leutze Limitations of Hawthorne Liverpool consulate; reduction in receipts of; unjust criticism of Hawthorne in Longfellow, Henry W.; review of Twice-Told Tales; letter to Hawthorne Loring, Dr. G. B. Lowell, James Russell; letter from Maine, Hawthorne's sojourn in, in boyhood Manning, Elizabeth Clarke, Hawthorne's mother Manning's Folly Manning, Richard Manning, Robert Manning, Samuel Manuscript sketch for Septimius Marble Faun, The; examination of Marine outrages, Hawthorne's wish to redress Marvell, Andrew Maturity in Hawthorne, earliness of Maule, Thomas Maypole of Merry Mount, The Melville, Herman; private review of Seven Gables by Michael Angelo Milton compared with Bunyan and Hawthorne Minister's Black Veil, The Mitford, Miss, Letter from, to Hawthorne Mosses from an Old Manse; first issue of; criticism of Motley, John Lothrop, letter of, to Hawthorne Mozart Mrs. Bullfrog New England civilization; early character Newman, Professor Nomenclature of fiction Novalis Oberon Objectivity of Hawthorne Old Apple-Dealer, The Oliver, B. L. Our Old Home Packard, Professor G. T.; Appendix Papers of an old Dartmoor prisoner Paulding, J. K. Peabody, Miss E. P., acquaintance with Hawthorne Peabody, Miss Sophia Peter Parley's History, written by Hawthorne Pierce, Franklin; Hawthorne's Life of; (sentiments in, touching slavery; resulting abuse of Hawthorne;) dedication of Our Old Home to Pilgrim's Progress, Hawthorne's reading of; allusions to, in his works Plato Plymouth Colony enactment against adultery, foot-note Poe's criticism on Hawthorne; similarities of, to Hawthorne; effectiveness of; subjectivity of; doubtful sanity of; his ratiocination; foreign influence of Pope, Alexander Procession of Life, The Prophetic Pictures, The Pseudonymes of Hawthorne (foot-note) Puritan imagination Puritans, Hawthorne's view of Pyncheon, Clifford, how resembling Poe Pynchons, complaints of the, against Seven Gables Rappaccini's Daughter Raymond, Maine, removal to Ripley, George Roger Malvin's Burial Rossetti-Morris school Rousseau Salem, as a native soil; Hawthorne's sentiment for; aspects of; origin of name; trade Salem Custom-House Sand, George Sanity of highest genius Scarlet Letter; origin of; publication of; Leutze's coincidence; passage compared with Bunyan; theme of revenge in; analysis of the romance; as a work of art Scotland and New England Scott, Sir Walter; Hawthorne's estimate of Scudéri; Madeleine de Sebago Lake Sense of form in Hawthorne; in Poe Septimius Felton; symbolism of; origin of "Seven Tales of my Native Land." Shakespere Shelley's Latin verses; The Cenci, compared with Marble Faun Sights from a Steeple Sims, William, finder of supposed Early Notes, Appendix Sin, consciousness of, in Hawthorne; how conducive to originality Slavery, Hawthorne's sentiments concerning Snow Image Sparhawk House, Kittery "Spectator," The; extracts from Spenser St. John's, John Hathorne's attack on Story, Joseph Sumner, Charles, note of, to Hawthorne Sunday at Home Supernatural, Hawthorne's use of Surroundings of genius assist but do not produce it Taine's Notes on England Tales of the Province House Tanglewood Tales Term-Bill at College Thackeray Thomson, James Thoreau's Legend of the Wayside Tieck Toll-Gatherer's Day Tragedy of isolation True Stones Twice-Told Tales; temperament in style of; first collection of; second Union of the States, Hawthorne's feeling about Union Street Upham's "Salem Witchcraft." Verses by Hawthorne, at college Virgil Virtuoso's Collection Voltaire Wayside, The, purchase of Wedding Knell, The Weird, The, in Scotland and New England West Newton, removal to Whipple, Edwin, objection to remark of; Hawthorne's pleasure in reviews written by White, John, Rev. White Old Maid, The Widowhood, sentiment of, expressed by Hawthorne Winthiop, John Witchcraft Witch-ointment Witch-pins Wonder-Book Worcester, Dr. J. E. Young Goodman Brown. Youth of Hawthorne, habits in; valuable formative results of 
7880	----	PASSAGES FROM HAWTHORNE'S NOTE-BOOKS IN FRANCE AND ITALY. FLORENCE (Continued). June 8th.--I went this morning to the Uffizi gallery. The entrance is from the great court of the palace, which communicates with Lung' Arno at one end, and with the Grand Ducal Piazza at the other. The gallery is in the upper story of the palace, and in the vestibule are some busts of the princes and cardinals of the Medici family,--none of them beautiful, one or two so ugly as to be ludicrous, especially one who is all but buried in his own wig. I at first travelled slowly through the whole extent of this long, long gallery, which occupies the entire length of the palace on both sides of the court, and is full of sculpture and pictures. The latter, being opposite to the light, are not seen to the best advantage; but it is the most perfect collection, in a chronological series, that I have seen, comprehending specimens of all the masters since painting began to be an art. Here are Giotto, and Cimabue, and Botticelli, and Fra Angelico, and Filippo Lippi, and a hundred others, who have haunted me in churches and galleries ever since I have been in Italy, and who ought to interest me a great deal more than they do. Occasionally to-day I was sensible of a certain degree of emotion in looking at an old picture; as, for example, by a large, dark, ugly picture of Christ hearing the cross and sinking beneath it, when, somehow or other, a sense of his agony, and the fearful wrong that mankind did (and does) its Redeemer, and the scorn of his enemies, and the sorrow of those who loved him, came knocking at any heart and got entrance there. Once more I deem it a pity that Protestantism should have entirely laid aside this mode of appealing to the religious sentiment. I chiefly paid attention to the sculpture, and was interested in a long series of busts of the emperors and the members of their families, and some of the great men of Rome. There is a bust of Pompey the Great, bearing not the slightest resemblance to that vulgar and unintellectual one in the gallery of the Capitol, altogether a different cast of countenance. I could not judge whether it resembled the face of the statue, having seen the latter so imperfectly in the duskiness of the hall of the Spada Palace. These, I presume, are the busts which Mr. Powers condemns, from internal evidence, as unreliable and conventional. He may be right,--and is far more likely, of course, to be right than I am,--yet there certainly seems to be character in these marble faces, and they differ as much among themselves as the same number of living faces might. The bust of Caracalla, however, which Powers excepted from his censure, certainly does give stronger assurance of its being an individual and faithful portrait than any other in the series. All the busts of Caracalla--of which I have seen many--give the same evidence of their truth; and I should like to know what it was in this abominable emperor that made him insist upon having his actual likeness perpetuated, with all the ugliness of its animal and moral character. I rather respect him for it, and still more the sculptor, whose hand, methinks, must have trembled as he wrought the bust. Generally these wicked old fellows, and their wicked wives and daughters, are not so hideous as we might expect. Messalina, for instance, has small and pretty features, though with rather a sensual development of the lower part of the face. The busts, it seemed to me, are usually superior as works of art to those in the Capitol, and either better preserved or more thoroughly restored. The bust of Nero might almost be called handsome here, though bearing his likeness unmistakably. I wish some competent person would undertake to analyze and develop his character, and how and by what necessity--with all his elegant tastes, his love of the beautiful, his artist nature--he grew to be such a monster. Nero has never yet had justice done him, nor have any of the wicked emperors; not that I suppose them to have been any less monstrous than history represents them; but there must surely have been something in their position and circumstances to render the terrible moral disease which seized upon them so generally almost inevitable. A wise and profound man, tender and reverent of the human soul, and capable of appreciating it in its height and depth, has a great field here for the exercise of his powers. It has struck me, in reading the history of the Italian republics, that many of the tyrants, who sprung up after the destruction of their liberties, resembled the worst of the Roman emperors. The subject of Nero and his brethren has often perplexed me with vain desires to come at the truth. There were many beautiful specimens of antique, ideal sculpture all along the gallery,--Apollos, Bacchuses, Venuses, Mercurys, Fauns,--with the general character of all of which I was familiar enough to recognize them at a glance. The mystery and wonder of the gallery, however, the Venus de' Medici, I could nowhere see, and indeed was almost afraid to see it; for I somewhat apprehended the extinction of another of those lights that shine along a man's pathway, and go out in a snuff the instant he comes within eyeshot of the fulfilment of his hopes. My European experience has extinguished many such. I was pretty well contented, therefore, not to find the famous statue in the whole of my long journey from end to end of the gallery, which terminates on the opposite side of the court from that where it commences. The ceiling, by the by, through the entire length, is covered with frescos, and the floor paved with a composition of stone smooth and polished like marble. The final piece of sculpture, at the end of the gallery, is a copy of the Laocoon, considered very fine. I know not why, but it did not impress me with the sense of mighty and terrible repose--a repose growing out of the infinitude of trouble-- that I had felt in the original. Parallel with the gallery, on both sides of the palace-court, there runs a series of rooms devoted chiefly to pictures, although statues and bas-reliefs are likewise contained in some of them. I remember an unfinished bas-relief by Michael Angelo of a Holy Family, which I touched with my finger, because it seemed as if he might have been at work upon it only an hour ago. The pictures I did little more than glance at, till I had almost completed again the circuit of the gallery, through this series of parallel rooms, and then I came upon a collection of French and Dutch and Flemish masters, all of which interested me more than the Italian generally. There was a beautiful picture by Claude, almost as good as those in the British National Gallery, and very like in subject; the sun near the horizon, of course, and throwing its line of light over the ripple of water, with ships at the strand, and one or two palaces of stately architecture on the shore. Landscapes by Rembrandt; fat Graces and other plump nudities by Rubens; brass pans and earthen pots and herrings by Terriers and other Dutchmen; none by Gerard Douw, I think, but several by Mieris; all of which were like bread and beef and ale, after having been fed too long on made dishes. This is really a wonderful collection of pictures; and from first, to last--from Giotto to the men of yesterday--they are in admirable condition, and may be appreciated for all the merit that they ever possessed. I could not quite believe that I was not to find the Venus de' Medici; and still, as I passed from one room to another, my breath rose and fell a little, with the half-hope, half-fear, that she might stand before me. Really, I did not know that I cared so much about Venus, or any possible woman of marble. At last, when I had come from among the Dutchmen, I believe, and was looking at some works of Italian artists, chiefly Florentines, I caught a glimpse of her through the door of the next room. It is the best room of the series, octagonal in shape, and hung with red damask, and the light comes down from a row of windows, passing quite round, beneath an octagonal dome. The Venus stands somewhat aside from the centre of the room, and is surrounded by an iron railing, a pace or two from her pedestal in front, and less behind. I think she might safely be left to the reverence her womanhood would win, without any other protection. She is very beautiful, very satisfactory; and has a fresh and new charm about her unreached by any cast or copy. The line of the marble is just so much mellowed by time, as to do for her all that Gibson tries, or ought to try to do for his statues by color, softening her, warming her almost imperceptibly, making her an inmate of the heart, as well as a spiritual existence. I felt a kind of tenderness for her; an affection, not as if she were one woman, but all womanhood in one. Her modest attitude, which, before I saw her I had not liked, deeming that it might be an artificial shame, is partly what unmakes her as the heathen goddess, and softens her into woman. There is a slight degree of alarm, too, in her face; not that she really thinks anybody is looking at her, yet the idea has flitted through her mind, and startled her a little. Her face is so beautiful and intellectual, that it is not dazzled out of sight by her form. Methinks this was a triumph for the sculptor to achieve. I may as well stop here. It is of no use to throw heaps of words upon her; for they all fall away, and leave her standing in chaste and naked grace, as untouched as when I began. She has suffered terribly by the mishaps of her long existence in the marble. Each of her legs has been broken into two or three fragments, her arms have been severed, her body has been broken quite across at the waist, her head has been snapped off at the neck. Furthermore, there have been grievous wounds and losses of substance in various tender parts of her person. But on account of the skill with which the statue has been restored, and also because the idea is perfect and indestructible, all these injuries do not in the least impair the effect, even when you see where the dissevered fragments have been reunited. She is just as whole as when she left the hands of the sculptor. I am glad to have seen this Venus, and to have found her so tender and so chaste. On the wall of the room, and to be taken in at the same glance, is a painted Venus by Titian, reclining on a couch, naked and lustful. The room of the Venus seems to be the treasure-place of the whole Uffizi Palace, containing more pictures by famous masters than are to be found in all the rest of the gallery. There were several by Raphael, and the room was crowded with the easels of artists. I did not look half enough at anything, but merely took a preliminary taste, as a prophecy of enjoyment to come. As we were at dinner to-day, at half past three, there was a ring at the door, and a minute after our servant brought a card. It was Mr. Robert Browning's, and on it was written in pencil an invitation for us to go to see them this evening. He had left the card and gone away; but very soon the bell rang again, and he had come back, having forgotten to give his address. This time he came in; and he shook hands with all of us, children and grown people, and was very vivacious and agreeable. He looked younger and even handsomer than when I saw him in London, two years ago, and his gray hairs seemed fewer than those that had then strayed into his youthful head. He talked a wonderful quantity in a little time, and told us--among other things that we should never have dreamed of--that Italian people will not cheat you, if you construe them generously, and put them upon their honor. Mr. Browning was very kind and warm in his expressions of pleasure at seeing us; and, on our part, we were all very glad to meet him. He must be an exceedingly likable man. . . . They are to leave Florence very soon, and are going to Normandy, I think he said, for the rest of the summer. The Venus de' Medici has a dimple in her chin. June 9th.--We went last evening, at eight o'clock, to see the Brownings; and, after some search and inquiry, we found the Casa Guidi, which is a palace in a street not very far from our own. It being dusk, I could not see the exterior, which, if I remember, Browning has celebrated in song; at all events, Mrs. Browning has called one of her poems "Casa Guidi Windows." The street is a narrow one; but on entering the palace, we found a spacious staircase and ample accommodations of vestibule and hall, the latter opening on a balcony, where we could hear the chanting of priests in a church close by. Browning told us that this was the first church where an oratorio had ever been performed. He came into the anteroom to greet us, as did his little boy, Robert, whom they call Pennini for fondness. The latter cognomen is a diminutive of Apennino, which was bestowed upon him at his first advent into the world because he was so very small, there being a statue in Florence of colossal size called Apennino. I never saw such a boy as this before; so slender, fragile, and spirit-like,--not as if he were actually in ill health, but as if he had little or nothing to do with human flesh and blood. His face is very pretty and most intelligent, and exceedingly like his mother's. He is nine years old, and seems at once less childlike and less manly than would befit that age. I should not quite like to be the father of such a boy, and should fear to stake so much interest and affection on him as he cannot fail to inspire. I wonder what is to become of him,--whether he will ever grow to be a man,--whether it is desirable that he should. His parents ought to turn their whole attention to making him robust and earthly, and to giving him a thicker scabbard to sheathe his spirit in. He was born in Florence, and prides himself on being a Florentine, and is indeed as un-English a production as if he were native of another planet. Mrs. Browning met us at the door of the drawing-room, and greeted us most kindly,--a pale, small person, scarcely embodied at all; at any rate, only substantial enough to put forth her slender fingers to be grasped, and to speak with a shrill, yet sweet, tenuity of voice. Really, I do not see how Mr. Browning can suppose that he has an earthly wife any more than an earthly child; both are of the elfin race, and will flit away from him some day when he least thinks of it. She is a good and kind fairy, however, and sweetly disposed towards the human race, although only remotely akin to it. It is wonderful to see how small she is, how pale her cheek, how bright and dark her eyes. There is not such another figure in the world; and her black ringlets cluster down into her neck, and make her face look the whiter by their sable profusion. I could not form any judgment about her age; it may range anywhere within the limits of human life or elfin life. When I met her in London at Lord Houghton's breakfast-table, she did not impress me so singularly; for the morning light is more prosaic than the dim illumination of their great tapestried drawing-room; and besides, sitting next to her, she did not have occasion to raise her voice in speaking, and I was not sensible what a slender voice she has. It is marvellous to me how so extraordinary, so acute, so sensitive a creature can impress us, as she does, with the certainty of her benevolence. It seems to me there were a million chances to one that she would have been a miracle of acidity and bitterness. We were not the only guests. Mr. and Mrs. E------, Americans, recently from the East, and on intimate terms with the Brownings, arrived after us; also Miss F. H------, an English literary lady, whom I have met several times in Liverpool; and lastly came the white head and palmer-like beard of Mr. ------ with his daughter. Mr. Browning was very efficient in keeping up conversation with everybody, and seemed to be in all parts of the room and in every group at the same moment; a most vivid and quick-thoughted person, logical and common-sensible, as, I presume, poets generally are in their daily talk. Mr. ------, as usual, was homely and plain of manner, with an old-fashioned dignity, nevertheless, and a remarkable deference and gentleness of tone in addressing Mrs. Browning. I doubt, however, whether he has any high appreciation either of her poetry or her husband's, and it is my impression that they care as little about his. We had some tea and some strawberries, and passed a pleasant evening. There was no very noteworthy conversation; the most interesting topic being that disagreeable and now wearisome one of spiritual communications, as regards which Mrs. Browning is a believer, and her husband an infidel. Mr. ------ appeared not to have made up his mind on the matter, but told a story of a successful communication between Cooper the novelist and his sister, who had been dead fifty years. Browning and his wife had both been present at a spiritual session held by Mr. Hume, and had seen and felt the unearthly hands, one of which had placed a laurel wreath on Mrs. Browning's head. Browning, however, avowed his belief that these hands were affixed to the feet of Mr. Hume, who lay extended in his chair, with his legs stretched far under the table. The marvellousness of the fact, as I have read of it, and heard it from other eye-witnesses, melted strangely away in his hearty gripe, and at the sharp touch of his logic; while his wife, ever and anon, put in a little gentle word of expostulation. I am rather surprised that Browning's conversation should be so clear, and so much to the purpose at the moment, since his poetry can seldom proceed far without running into the high grass of latent meanings and obscure allusions. Mrs. Browning's health does not permit late hours, so we began to take heave at about ten o'clock. I heard her ask Mr. ------ if he did not mean to revisit Europe, and heard him answer, not uncheerfully, taking hold of his white hair, "It is getting rather too late in the evening now." If any old age can be cheerful, I should think his might be; so good a man, so cool, so calm, so bright, too, we may say. His life has been like the days that end in pleasant sunsets. He has a great loss, however, or what ought to be a great loss,--soon to be encountered in the death of his wife, who, I think, can hardly live to reach America. He is not eminently an affectionate man. I take him to be one who cannot get closely home to his sorrow, nor feel it so sensibly as he gladly would; and, in consequence of that deficiency, the world lacks substance to him. It is partly the result, perhaps, of his not having sufficiently cultivated his emotional nature. His poetry shows it, and his personal intercourse, though kindly, does not stir one's blood in the least. Little Pennini, during the evening, sometimes helped the guests to cake and strawberries; joined in the conversation, when he had anything to say, or sat down upon a couch to enjoy his own meditations. He has long curling hair, and has not yet emerged from his frock and short hose. It is funny to think of putting him into trousers. His likeness to his mother is strange to behold. June 10th.--My wife and I went to the Pitti Palace to-day; and first entered a court where, yesterday, she had seen a carpet of flowers, arranged for some great ceremony. It must have been a most beautiful sight, the pavement of the court being entirely covered by them, in a regular pattern of brilliant lines, so as really to be a living mosaic. This morning, however, the court had nothing but its usual stones, and the show of yesterday seemed so much the more inestimable as having been so evanescent. Around the walls of the court there were still some pieces of splendid tapestry which had made part of yesterday's magnificence. We went up the staircase, of regally broad and easy ascent, and made application to be admitted to see the grand-ducal apartments. An attendant accordingly took the keys, and ushered us first into a great hall with a vaulted ceiling, and then through a series of noble rooms, with rich frescos above and mosaic floors, hung with damask, adorned with gilded chandeliers, and glowing, in short, with more gorgeousness than I could have imagined beforehand, or can now remember. In many of the rooms were those superb antique cabinets which I admire more than any other furniture ever invented; only these were of unexampled art and glory, inlaid with precious stones, and with beautiful Florentine mosaics, both of flowers and landscapes,--each cabinet worth a lifetime's toil to make it, and the cost a whole palace to pay for it. Many of the rooms were covered with arras, of landscapes, hunting-scenes, mythological subjects, or historical scenes, equal to pictures in truth of representation, and possessing an indescribable richness that makes them preferable as a mere adornment of princely halls and chambers. Some of the rooms, as I have said, were laid in mosaic of stone and marble, otherwise in lovely patterns of various woods; others were covered with carpets, delightful to tread upon, and glowing like the living floor of flowers which my wife saw yesterday. There were tables, too, of Florentine mosaic, the mere materials of which--lapis lazuli, malachite, pearl, and a hundred other precious things--were worth a fortune, and made a thousand times more valuable by the artistic skill of the manufacturer. I toss together brilliant words by the handful, and make a rude sort of patchwork, but can record no adequate idea of what I saw in this suite of rooms; and the taste, the subdued splendor, so that it did not shine too high, but was all tempered into an effect at once grand and soft,--this was quite as remarkable as the gorgeous material. I have seen a very dazzling effect produced in the principal cabin of an American clipper-ship quite opposed to this in taste. After making the circuit of the grand-ducal apartments, we went into a door in the left wing of the palace, and ascended a narrow flight of stairs,--several tortuous flights indeed,--to the picture-gallery. It fills a great many stately halls, which themselves are well worth a visit for the architecture and frescos; only these matters become commonplace after travelling through a mile or two of them. The collection of pictures--as well for their number as for the celebrity and excellence of many of them--is the most interesting that I have seen, and I do not yet feel in a condition, nor perhaps ever shall, to speak of a single one. It gladdened my very heart to find that they were not darkened out of sight, nor apparently at all injured by time, but were well kept and varnished, brilliantly framed, and, no doubt, restored by skilful touches if any of them needed it. The artists and amateurs may say what they like; for my part, I know no drearier feeling than that inspired by a ruined picture,--ruined, that is, by time, damp, or rough treatment,--and I would a thousand times rather an artist should do his best towards reviving it, than have it left in such a condition. I do not believe, however, that these pictures have been sacrilegiously interfered with; at all events, I saw in the masterpieces no touch but what seemed worthy of the master-hand. The most beautiful picture in the world, I am convinced, is Raphael's "Madonna della Seggiola." I was familiar with it in a hundred engravings and copies, and therefore it shone upon one as with a familiar beauty, though infinitely more divine than I had ever seen it before. An artist was copying it, and producing certainly something very like a fac-simile, yet leaving out, as a matter of course, that mysterious something that renders the picture a miracle. It is my present opinion that the pictorial art is capable of something more like magic, more wonderful and inscrutable in its methods, than poetry or any other mode of developing the beautiful. But how does this accord with what I have been saying only a minute ago? How then can the decayed picture of a great master ever be restored by the touches of an inferior hand? Doubtless it never can be restored; but let some devoted worshipper do his utmost, and the whole inherent spirit of the divine picture may pervade his restorations likewise. I saw the "Three Fates" of Michael Angelo, which were also being copied, as were many other of the best pictures. Miss Fanny Howorth, whom I met in the gallery, told me that to copy the "Madonna della Seggiola," application must be made five years beforehand, so many are the artists who aspire to copy it. Michael Angelo's Fates are three very grim and pitiless old women, who respectively spin, hold, and cut the thread of human destiny, all in a mood of sombre gloom, but with no more sympathy than if they had nothing to do with us. I remember seeing an etching of this when I was a child, and being struck, even then, with the terrible, stern, passionless severity, neither loving us nor hating us, that characterizes these ugly old women. If they were angry, or had the least spite against human kind, it would render them the more tolerable. They are a great work, containing and representing the very idea that makes a belief in fate such a cold torture to the human soul. God give me the sure belief in his Providence! In a year's time, with the advantage of access to this magnificent gallery, I think I might come to have some little knowledge of pictures. At present I still know nothing; but am glad to find myself capable, at least, of loving one picture better than another. I cannot always "keep the heights I gain," however, and after admiring and being moved by a picture one day, it is within my experience to look at it the next as little moved as if it were a tavern-sign. It is pretty much the same with statuary; the same, too, with those pictured windows of the Duomo, which I described so rapturously a few days ago. I looked at them again the next morning, and thought they would have been hardly worthy of my eulogium, even had all the separate windows of the cathedral combined their narrow lights into one grand, resplendent, many-colored arch at the eastern end. It is a pity they are so narrow. England has many a great chancel-window that, though dimmer in its hues, dusty, and perhaps made up of heterogeneous fragments, eclipses these by its spacious breadth. From the gallery, I went into the Boboli Gardens, which are contiguous to the palace; but found them too sunny for enjoyment. They seem to consist partly of a wilderness; but the portion into which I strayed was laid out with straight walks, lined with high box-hedges, along which there was only a narrow margin of shade. I saw an amphitheatre, with a wide sweep of marble seat around it, enclosing a grassy space, where, doubtless, the Medici may have witnessed splendid spectacles. June 11th.--I paid another visit to the Uffizi gallery this morning, and found that the Venus is one of the things the charm of which does not diminish on better acquaintance. The world has not grown weary of her in all these ages; and mortal man may look on her with new delight from infancy to old age, and keep the memory of her, I should imagine, as one of the treasures of spiritual existence hereafter. Surely, it makes me more ready to believe in the high destinies of the human race, to think that this beautiful form is but nature's plan for all womankind, and that the nearer the actual woman approaches it, the more natural she is. I do not, and cannot think of her as a senseless image, but as a being that lives to gladden the world, incapable of decay and death; as young and fair to-day as she was three thousand years ago, and still to be young and fair as long as a beautiful thought shall require physical embodiment. I wonder how any sculptor has had the impertinence to aim at any other presentation of female beauty. I mean no disrespect to Gibson or Powers, or a hundred other men who people the world with nudities, all of which are abortions as compared with her; but I think the world would be all the richer if their Venuses, their Greek Slaves, their Eves, were burnt into quicklime, leaving us only this statue as our image of the beautiful. I observed to-day that the eyes of the statue are slightly hollowed out, in a peculiar way, so as to give them a look of depth and intelligence. She is a miracle. The sculptor must have wrought religiously, and have felt that something far beyond his own skill was working through his hands. I mean to leave off speaking of the Venus hereafter, in utter despair of saying what I wish; especially as the contemplation of the statue will refine and elevate my taste, and make it continually more difficult to express my sense of its excellence, as the perception of it grows upon one. If at any time I become less sensible of it, it will be my deterioration, not any defect in the statue. I looked at many of the pictures, and found myself in a favorable mood for enjoying them. It seems to me that a work of art is entitled to credit for all that it makes us feel in our best moments; and we must judge of its merits by the impression it then makes, and not by the coldness and insensibility of our less genial moods. After leaving the Uffizi Palace, . . . . I went into the Museum of Natural History, near the Pitti Palace. It is a very good collection of almost everything that Nature has made,--or exquisite copies of what she has made,--stones, shells, vegetables, insects, fishes, animals, man; the greatest wonders of the museum being some models in wax of all parts of the human frame. It is good to have the wholeness and summed-up beauty of woman in the memory, when looking at the details of her system as here displayed; for these last, to the natural eye, are by no means beautiful. But they are what belong only to our mortality. The beauty that makes them invisible is our immortal type, which we shall take away with us. Under glass cases, there were some singular and horribly truthful representations, in small wax figures, of a time of pestilence; the hasty burial, or tossing into one common sepulchre, of discolored corpses,--a very ugly piece of work, indeed. I think Murray says that these things were made for the Grand Duke Cosmo; and if so, they do him no credit, indicating something dark and morbid in his character. June 13th.--We called at the Powers's yesterday morning to leave R----- there for an hour or two to play with the children; and it being not yet quite time for the Pitti Palace, we stopped into the studio. Soon Mr. Powers made his appearance, in his dressing-gown and slippers and sculptor's cap, smoking a cigar. . . . He was very cordial and pleasant, as I have always found him, and began immediately to be communicative about his own works, or any other subject that came up. There were two casts of the Venus de' Medici in the rooms, which he said were valuable in a commercial point of view, being genuine casts from the mould taken from the statue. He then gave us a quite unexpected but most interesting lecture on the Venus, demonstrating it, as he proceeded, by reference to the points which he criticised. The figure, he seemed to allow, was admirable, though I think he hardly classes it so high as his own Greek Slave or Eva; but the face, he began with saying, was that of an idiot. Then, leaning on the pedestal of the cast, he continued, "It is rather a bold thing to say, isn't it, that the sculptor of the Venus de' Medici did not know what he was about?" Truly, it appeared to me so; but Powers went on remorselessly, and showed, in the first place, that the eye was not like any eye that Nature ever made; and, indeed, being examined closely, and abstracted from the rest of the face, it has a very queer look,--less like a human eye than a half-worn buttonhole! Then he attacked the ear, which, he affirmed and demonstrated, was placed a good deal too low on the head, thereby giving an artificial and monstrous height to the portion of the head above it. The forehead met with no better treatment in his hands, and as to the mouth, it was altogether wrong, as well in its general make as in such niceties as the junction of the skin of the lips to the common skin around them. In a word, the poor face was battered all to pieces and utterly demolished; nor was it possible to doubt or question that it fell by its own demerits. All that could be urged in its defence--and even that I did not urge--being that this very face had affected me, only the day before, with a sense of higher beauty and intelligence than I had ever then received from sculpture, and that its expression seemed to accord with that of the whole figure, as if it were the sweetest note of the same music. There must be something in this; the sculptor disregarded technicalities, and the imitation of actual nature, the better to produce the effect which he really does produce, in somewhat the same way as a painter works his magical illusions by touches that have no relation to the truth if looked at from the wrong point of view. But Powers considers it certain that the antique sculptor had bestowed all his care on the study of the human figure, and really did not know how to make a face. I myself used to think that the face was a much less important thing with the Greeks, among whom the entire beauty of the form was familiarly seen, than with ourselves, who allow no other nudity. After annihilating the poor visage, Powers showed us his two busts of Proserpine and Psyche, and continued his lecture by showing the truth to nature with which these are modelled. I freely acknowledge the fact; there is no sort of comparison to be made between the beauty, intelligence, feeling, and accuracy of representation in these two faces and in that of the Venus de' Medici. A light--the light of a soul proper to each individual character--seems to shine from the interior of the marble, and beam forth from the features, chiefly from the eyes. Still insisting upon the eye, and hitting the poor Venus another and another and still another blow on that unhappy feature, Mr. Powers turned up and turned inward and turned outward his own Titanic orb,--the biggest, by far, that ever I saw in mortal head,--and made us see and confess that there was nothing right in the Venus and everything right in Psyche and Proserpine. To say the truth, their marble eyes have life, and, placing yourself in the proper position towards them, you can meet their glances, and feel them mingle with your own. Powers is a great man, and also a tender and delicate one, massive and rude of surface as he looks; and it is rather absurd to feel how he impressed his auditor, for the time being, with his own evident idea that nobody else is worthy to touch marble. Mr. B------ told me that Powers has had many difficulties on professional grounds, as I understood him, and with his brother artists. No wonder! He has said enough in my hearing to put him at swords' points with sculptors of every epoch and every degree between the two inclusive extremes of Phidias and Clark Mills. He has a bust of the reigning Grand Duchess of Tuscany, who sat to him for it. The bust is that of a noble-looking lady; and Powers remarked that royal personages have a certain look that distinguishes them from other people, and is seen in individuals of no lower rank. They all have it; the Queen of England and Prince Albert have it; and so likewise has every other Royalty, although the possession of this kingly look implies nothing whatever as respects kingly and commanding qualities. He said that none of our public men, whatever authority they may have held, or for whatever length of time, possess this look, but he added afterwards that Washington had it. Commanders of armies sometimes have it, but not in the degree that royal personages do. It is, as well as I could make out Powers's idea, a certain coldness of demeanor, and especially of eye, that surrounds them with an atmosphere through which the electricity of human brotherhood cannot pass. From their youth upward they are taught to feel themselves apart from the rest of mankind, and this manner becomes a second nature to them in consequence, and as a safeguard to their conventional dignity. They put themselves under glass, as it were (the illustration is my own), so that, though you see them, and see them looking no more noble and dignified than other mortals, nor so much so as many, still they keep themselves within a sort of sanctity, and repel you by an invisible barrier. Even if they invite you with a show of warmth and hospitality, you cannot get through. I, too, recognize this look in the portraits of Washington; in him, a mild, benevolent coldness and apartness, but indicating that formality which seems to have been deeper in him than in any other mortal, and which built up an actual fortification between himself and human sympathy. I wish, for once, Washington could come out of his envelopment and show us what his real dimensions were. Among other models of statues heretofore made, Powers showed us one of Melancholy, or rather of Contemplation, from Milton's "Penseroso"; a female figure with uplifted face and rapt look, "communing with the skies." It is very fine, and goes deeply into Milton's thought; but, as far as the outward form and action are concerned, I remember seeing a rude engraving in my childhood that probably suggested the idea. It was prefixed to a cheap American edition of Milton's poems, and was probably as familiar to Powers as to myself. It is very remarkable how difficult it seems to be to strike out a new attitude in sculpture; a new group, or a new single figure. One piece of sculpture Powers exhibited, however, which was very exquisite, and such as I never saw before. Opening a desk, he took out something carefully enclosed between two layers of cotton-wool, on removing which there appeared a little baby's hand most delicately represented in the whitest marble; all the dimples where the knuckles were to be, all the creases in the plump flesh, every infantine wrinkle of the soft skin being lovingly recorded. "The critics condemn minute representation," said Powers; "but you may look at this through a microscope and see if it injures the general effect." Nature herself never made a prettier or truer little hand. It was the hand of his daughter,--"Luly's hand," Powers called it,--the same that gave my own such a frank and friendly grasp when I first met "Luly." The sculptor made it only for himself and his wife, but so many people, he said, had insisted on having a copy, that there are now forty scattered about the world. At sixty years, Luly ought to have her hand sculptured again, and give it to her grandchildren with the baby's hand of five months old. The baby-hand that had done nothing, and felt only its mother's kiss; the old lady's hand that had exchanged the love-pressure, worn the marriage-ring, closed dead eyes,--done a lifetime's work, in short. The sentiment is rather obvious, but true nevertheless. Before we went away, Powers took us into a room apart--apparently the secretest room he had--and showed us some tools and machinery, all of his own contrivance and invention. "You see I am a bit of a Yankee," he observed. This machinery is chiefly to facilitate the process of modelling his works, for--except in portrait-busts--he makes no clay model as other sculptors do, but models directly in the plaster; so that instead of being crumbled, like clay, the original model remains a permanent possession. He has also invented a certain open file, which is of great use in finishing the surface of the marble; and likewise a machine for making these files and for punching holes through iron, and he demonstrated its efficiency by punching a hole through an iron bar, with a force equivalent to ten thousand pounds, by the mere application of a part of his own weight. These inventions, he says, are his amusement, and the bent of his nature towards sculpture must indeed have been strong, to counteract, in an American, such a capacity for the contrivance of steam-engines. . . . I had no idea of filling so many pages of this journal with the sayings and characteristics of Mr. Powers, but the man and his talk are fresh, original, and full of bone and muscle, and I enjoy him much. We now proceeded to the Pitti Palace, and spent several hours pleasantly in its saloons of pictures. I never enjoyed pictures anywhere else as I do in Florence. There is an admirable Judith in this gallery by Allori; a face of great beauty and depth, and her hand clutches the head of Holofernes by the hair in a way that startles the spectator. There are two peasant Madonnas by Murillo; simple women, yet with a thoughtful sense of some high mystery connected with the baby in their arms. Raphael grows upon me; several other famous painters--Guido, for instance--are fading out of my mind. Salvator Rosa has two really wonderful landscapes, looking from the shore seaward; and Rubens too, likewise on a large scale, of mountain and plain. It is very idle and foolish to talk of pictures; yet, after poring over them and into them, it seems a pity to let all the thought excited by them pass into nothingness. The copyists of pictures are very numerous, both in the Pitti and Uffizi galleries; and, unlike sculptors, they appear to be on the best of terms with one another, chatting sociably, exchanging friendly criticism, and giving their opinions as to the best mode of attaining the desired effects. Perhaps, as mere copyists, they escape the jealousy that might spring up between rival painters attempting to develop original ideas. Miss Howorth says that the business of copying pictures, especially those of Raphael, is a regular profession, and she thinks it exceedingly obstructive to the progress or existence of a modern school of painting, there being a regular demand and sure sale for all copies of the old masters, at prices proportioned to their merit; whereas the effort to be original insures nothing, except long neglect, at the beginning of a career, and probably ultimate failure, and the necessity of becoming a copyist at last. Some artists employ themselves from youth to age in nothing else but the copying of one single and selfsame picture by Raphael, and grow at last to be perfectly mechanical, making, I suppose, the same identical stroke of the brush in fifty successive pictures. The weather is very hot now,--hotter in the sunshine, I think, than a midsummer day usually is in America, but with rather a greater possibility of being comfortable in the shade. The nights, too, are warm, and the bats fly forth at dusk, and the fireflies quite light up the green depths of our little garden. The atmosphere, or something else, causes a sort of alacrity in my mind and an affluence of ideas, such as they are; but it does not thereby make me the happier. I feel an impulse to be at work, but am kept idle by the sense of being unsettled with removals to be gone through, over and over again, before I can shut myself into a quiet room of my own, and turn the key. I need monotony too, an eventless exterior life, before I can live in the world within. June 15th.--Yesterday we went to the Uffizi gallery, and, of course, I took the opportunity to look again at the Venus de' Medici after Powers's attack upon her face. Some of the defects he attributed to her I could not see in the statue; for instance, the ear appeared to be in accordance with his own rule, the lowest part of it being about in a straight line with the upper lip. The eyes must be given up, as not, when closely viewed, having the shape, the curve outwards, the formation of the lids, that eyes ought to have; but still, at a proper distance, they seemed to have intelligence in them beneath the shadow cast by the brow. I cannot help thinking that the sculptor intentionally made every feature what it is, and calculated them all with a view to the desired effect. Whatever rules may be transgressed, it is a noble and beautiful face,--more so, perhaps, than if all rules had been obeyed. I wish Powers would do his best to fit the Venus's figure (which he does not deny to be admirable) with a face which he would deem equally admirable and in accordance with the sentiment of the form. We looked pretty thoroughly through the gallery, and I saw many pictures that impressed me; but among such a multitude, with only one poor mind to take note of them, the stamp of each new impression helps to obliterate a former one. I am sensible, however, that a process is going on, and has been ever since I came to Italy, that puts me in a state to see pictures with less toil, and more pleasure, and makes me more fastidious, yet more sensible of beauty where I saw none before. It is the sign, I presume, of a taste still very defective, that I take singular pleasure in the elaborate imitations of Van Mieris, Gerard Douw, and other old Dutch wizards, who painted such brass pots that you can see your face in them, and such earthen pots that they will surely hold water; and who spent weeks and months in turning a foot or two of canvas into a perfect microscopic illusion of some homely scene. For my part, I wish Raphael had painted the "Transfiguration" in this style, at the same time preserving his breadth and grandeur of design; nor do I believe that there is any real impediment to the combination of the two styles, except that no possible space of human life could suffice to cover a quarter part of the canvas of the "Transfiguration" with such touches as Gerard Douw's. But one feels the vast scope of this wonderful art, when we think of two excellences so far apart as that of this last painter and Raphael. I pause a good while, too, before the Dutch paintings of fruit and flowers, where tulips and roses acquire an immortal bloom, and grapes have kept the freshest juice in them for two or three hundred years. Often, in these pictures, there is a bird's-nest, every straw perfectly represented, and the stray feather, or the down that the mother-bird plucked from her bosom, with the three or four small speckled eggs, that seem as if they might be yet warm. These pretty miracles have their use in assuring us that painters really can do something that takes hold of us in our most matter-of-fact moods; whereas, the merits of the grander style of art may be beyond our ordinary appreciation, and leave us in doubt whether we have not befooled ourselves with a false admiration. Until we learn to appreciate the cherubs and angels that Raphael scatters through the blessed air, in a picture of the "Nativity," it is not amiss to look at, a Dutch fly settling on a peach, or a bumblebee burying himself in a flower. It is another token of imperfect taste, no doubt, that queer pictures and absurd pictures remain in my memory, when better ones pass away by the score. There is a picture of Venus, combing her son Cupid's head with a small-tooth comb, and looking with maternal care among his curls; this I shall not forget. Likewise, a picture of a broad, rubicund Judith by Bardone,--a widow of fifty, of an easy, lymphatic, cheerful temperament, who has just killed Holofernes, and is as self-complacent as if she had been carving a goose. What could possibly have stirred up this pudding of a woman (unless it were a pudding-stick) to do such a deed! I looked with much pleasure at an ugly, old, fat, jolly Bacchus, astride on a barrel, by Rubens; the most natural and lifelike representation of a tipsy rotundity of flesh that it is possible to imagine. And sometimes, amid these sensual images, I caught the divine pensiveness of a Madonna's face, by Raphael, or the glory and majesty of the babe Jesus in her arm, with his Father shining through him. This is a sort of revelation, whenever it comes. This morning, immediately after breakfast, I walked into the city, meaning to make myself better acquainted with its appearance, and to go into its various churches; but it soon grew so hot, that I turned homeward again. The interior of the Duomo was deliciously cool, to be sure,--cool and dim, after the white-hot sunshine; but an old woman began to persecute me, so that I came away. A male beggar drove me out of another church; and I took refuge in the street, where the beggar and I would have been two cinders together, if we had stood long enough on the sunny sidewalk. After my five summers' experience of England, I may have forgotten what hot weather is; but it does appear to me that an American summer is not so fervent as this. Besides the direct rays, the white pavement throws a furnace-heat up into one's face; the shady margin of the street is barely tolerable; but it is like going through the ordeal of fire to cross the broad bright glare of an open piazza. The narrow streets prove themselves a blessing at this season, except when the sun looks directly into them; the broad eaves of the houses, too, make a selvage of shade, almost always. I do not know what becomes of the street-merchants at the noontide of these hot days. They form a numerous class in Florence, displaying their wares--linen or cotton cloth, threads, combs, and all manner of haberdashery--on movable counters that are borne about on wheels. In the shady morning, you see a whole side of a street in a piazza occupied by them, all offering their merchandise at full cry. They dodge as they can from shade to shade; but at last the sunshine floods the whole space, and they seem to have melted away, leaving not a rag of themselves or what they dealt in. Cherries are very abundant now, and have been so ever since we came here, in the markets and all about the streets. They are of various kinds, some exceedingly large, insomuch that it is almost necessary to disregard the old proverb about making two bites of a cherry. Fresh figs are already spoken of, though I have seen none; but I saw some peaches this morning, looking as if they might be ripe. June 16th.--Mr. and Mrs. Powers called to see us last evening. Mr. Powers, as usual, was full of talk, and gave utterance to a good many instructive and entertaining ideas. As one instance of the little influence the religion of the Italians has upon their morals, he told a story of one of his servants, who desired leave to set up a small shrine of the Virgin in their room--a cheap print, or bas-relief, or image, such as are sold everywhere at the shops --and to burn a lamp before it; she engaging, of course, to supply the oil at her own expense. By and by, her oil-flask appeared to possess a miraculous property of replenishing itself, and Mr. Powers took measures to ascertain where the oil came from. It turned out that the servant had all the time been stealing the oil from them, and keeping up her daily sacrifice and worship to the Virgin by this constant theft. His talk soon turned upon sculpture, and he spoke once more of the difficulty imposed upon an artist by the necessity of clothing portrait statues in the modern costume. I find that he does not approve either of nudity or of the Roman toga for a modern statue; neither does he think it right to shirk the difficulty--as Chantrey did in the case of Washington --by enveloping him in a cloak; but acknowledges the propriety of taking the actual costume of the age and doing his best with it. He himself did so with his own Washington, and also with a statue that he made of Daniel Webster. I suggested that though this costume might not appear ridiculous to us now, yet, two or three centuries hence, it would create, to the people of that day, an impossibility of seeing the real man through the absurdity of his envelopment, after it shall have entirely grown out of fashion and remembrance; and Webster would seem as absurd to them then as he would to us now in the masquerade of some bygone day. It might be well, therefore, to adopt some conventional costume, never actual, but always graceful and noble. Besides, Webster, for example, had other costumes than that which he wore in public, and perhaps it was in those that he lived his most real life; his dressing-gown, his drapery of the night, the dress that he wore on his fishing-excursions; in these other costumes he spent three fourths of his time, and most probably was thus arrayed when he conceived the great thoughts that afterwards, in some formal and outside mood, he gave forth to the public. I scarcely think I was right, but am not sure of the contrary. At any rate, I know that I should have felt much more sure that I knew the real Webster, if I had seen him in any of the above-mentioned dresses, than either in his swallow-tailed coat or frock. Talking of a taste for painting and sculpture, Powers observed that it was something very different and quite apart from the moral sense, and that it was often, perhaps generally, possessed by unprincipled men of ability and cultivation. I have had this perception myself. A genuine love of painting and sculpture, and perhaps of music, seems often to have distinguished men capable of every social crime, and to have formed a fine and hard enamel over their characters. Perhaps it is because such tastes are artificial, the product of cultivation, and, when highly developed, imply a great remove from natural simplicity. This morning I went with U---- to the Uffizi gallery, and again looked with more or less attention at almost every picture and statue. I saw a little picture of the golden age, by Zucchero, in which the charms of youths and virgins are depicted with a freedom that this iron age can hardly bear to look at. The cabinet of gems happened to be open for the admission of a privileged party, and we likewise went in and saw a brilliant collection of goldsmiths' work, among which, no doubt, were specimens from such hands as Benvenuto Cellini. Little busts with diamond eyes; boxes of gems; cups carved out of precious material; crystal vases, beautifully chased and engraved, and sparkling with jewels; great pearls, in the midst of rubies; opals, rich with all manner of lovely lights. I remember Benvenuto Cellini, in his memoirs, speaks of manufacturing such playthings as these. I observed another characteristic of the summer streets of Florence to-day; tables, movable to and fro, on wheels, and set out with cool iced drinks and cordials. June 17th.--My wife and I went, this morning, to the Academy of Fine Arts, and, on our way thither, went into the Duomo, where we found a deliciously cool twilight, through which shone the mild gleam of the painted windows. I cannot but think it a pity that St. Peter's is not lighted by such windows as these, although I by no means saw the glory in them now that I have spoken of in a record of my former visit. We found out the monument of Giotto, a tablet, and portrait in bas-relief, on the wall, near the entrance of the cathedral, on the right hand; also a representation, in fresco, of a knight on horseback, the memorial of one John Rawkwood, close by the door, to the left. The priests were chanting a service of some kind or other in the choir, terribly inharmonious, and out of tune. . . . On reaching the Academy, the soldier or policeman at the entrance directed us into the large hall, the walls of which were covered on both sides with pictures, arranged as nearly as possible in a progressive series, with reference to the date of the painters; so that here the origin and procession of the art may be traced through the course of, at least, two hundred years. Giotto, Cimabue, and others of unfamiliar names to me, are among the earliest; and, except as curiosities, I should never desire to look once at them, nor think of looking twice. They seem to have been executed with great care and conscientiousness, and the heads are often wrought out with minuteness and fidelity, and have so much expression that they tell their own story clearly enough; but it seems not to have been the painter's aim to effect a lifelike illusion, the background and accessories being conventional. The trees are no more like real trees than the feather of a pen, and there is no perspective, the figure of the picture being shadowed forth on a surface of burnished gold. The effect, when these pictures, some of them very large, were new and freshly gilded, must have been exceedingly brilliant, and much resembling, on an immensely larger scale, the rich illuminations in an old monkish missal. In fact, we have not now, in pictorial ornament, anything at all comparable to what their splendor must have been. I was most struck with a picture, by Fabriana Gentile, of the Adoration of the Magi, where the faces and figures have a great deal of life and action, and even grace, and where the jewelled crowns, the rich embroidered robes, and cloth of gold, and all the magnificence of the three kings, are represented with the vividness of the real thing: a gold sword-hilt, for instance, or a pair of gold spurs, being actually embossed on the picture. The effect is very powerful, and though produced in what modern painters would pronounce an unjustifiable way, there is yet pictorial art enough to reconcile it to the spectator's mind. Certainly, the people of the Middle Ages knew better than ourselves what is magnificence, and how to produce it; and what a glorious work must that have been, both in its mere sheen of burnished gold, and in its illuminating art, which shines thus through the gloom of perhaps four centuries. Fra Angelico is a man much admired by those who have a taste for Pre-Raphaelite painters; and, though I take little or no pleasure in his works, I can see that there is great delicacy of execution in his heads, and that generally he produces such a Christ, and such a Virgin, and such saints, as he could not have foreseen, except in a pure and holy imagination, nor have wrought out without saying a prayer between every two touches of his brush. I might come to like him, in time, if I thought it worth while; but it is enough to have an outside perception of his kind and degree of merit, and so to let him pass into the garret of oblivion, where many things as good, or better, are piled away, that our own age may not stumble over them. Perugino is the first painter whose works seem really worth preserving for the genuine merit that is in them, apart from any quaintness and curiosity of an ancient and new-born art. Probably his religion was more genuine than Raphael's, and therefore the Virgin often revealed herself to him in a loftier and sweeter face of divine womanhood than all the genius of Raphael could produce. There is a Crucifixion by him in this gallery, which made me partly feel as if I were a far-off spectator,--no, I did not mean a Crucifixion, but a picture of Christ dead, lying, with a calm, sweet face, on his mother's knees ["a Pieta"]. The most inadequate and utterly absurd picture here, or in any other gallery, is a head of the Eternal Father, by Carlo Dolce; it looks like a feeble saint, on the eve of martyrdom, and very doubtful how he shall be able to bear it; very finely and prettily painted, nevertheless. After getting through the principal gallery we went into a smaller room, in which are contained a great many small specimens of the old Tuscan artists, among whom Fra Angelico makes the principal figure. These pictures are all on wood, and seem to have been taken from the shrines and altars of ancient churches; they are predellas and triptychs, or pictures on three folding tablets, shaped quaintly, in Gothic peaks or arches, and still gleaming with backgrounds of antique gold. The wood is much worm-eaten, and the colors have often faded or changed from what the old artists meant then to be; a bright angel darkening into what looks quite as much like the Devil. In one of Fra Angelico's pictures,--a representation of the Last Judgment,--he has tried his saintly hand at making devils indeed, and showing them busily at work, tormenting the poor, damned souls in fifty ghastly ways. Above sits Jesus, with the throng of blessed saints around him, and a flow of tender and powerful love in his own face, that ought to suffice to redeem all the damned, and convert the very fiends, and quench the fires of hell. At any rate, Fra Angelico had a higher conception of his Saviour than Michael Angelo. June 19th.--This forenoon we have been to the Church of St. Lorenzo, which stands on the site of an ancient basilica, and was itself built more than four centuries ago. The facade is still an ugly height of rough brickwork, as is the case with the Duomo, and, I think, some other churches in Florence; the design of giving them an elaborate and beautiful finish having been delayed from cycle to cycle, till at length the day for spending mines of wealth on churches is gone by. The interior had a nave with a flat roof, divided from the side aisles by Corinthian pillars, and, at the farther end, a raised space around the high altar. The pavement is a mosaic of squares of black and white marble, the squares meeting one another cornerwise; the pillars, pilasters, and other architectural material is dark brown or grayish stone; and the general effect is very sombre, especially as the church is somewhat dimly lighted, and as the shrines along the aisles, and the statues, and the monuments of whatever kind, look dingy with time and neglect. The nave is thickly set with wooden seats, brown and worn. What pictures there are, in the shrines and chapels, are dark and faded. On the whole, the edifice has a shabby aspect. On each side of the high altar, elevated on four pillars of beautiful marble, is what looks like a great sarcophagus of bronze. They are, in fact, pulpits, and are ornamented with mediaeval bas-reliefs, representing scenes in the life of our Saviour. Murray says that the resting-place of the first Cosmo de' Medici, the old banker, who so managed his wealth as to get the posthumous title of "father of his country," and to make his posterity its reigning princes,--is in front of the high altar, marked by red and green porphyry and marble, inlaid into the pavement. We looked, but could not see it there. There were worshippers at some of the shrines, and persons sitting here and there along the nave, and in the aisles, rapt in devotional thought, doubtless, and sheltering themselves here from the white sunshine of the piazzas. In the vicinity of the choir and the high altar, workmen were busy repairing the church, or perhaps only making arrangements for celebrating the great festival of St. John. On the left hand of the choir is what is called the old sacristy, with the peculiarities or notabilities of which I am not acquainted. On the right hand is the new sacristy, otherwise called the Capella dei Depositi, or Chapel of the Buried, built by Michael Angelo, to contain two monuments of the Medici family. The interior is of somewhat severe and classic architecture, the walls and pilasters being of dark stone, and surmounted by a dome, beneath which is a row of windows, quite round the building, throwing their light down far beneath, upon niches of white marble. These niches are ranged entirely around the chapel, and might have sufficed to contain more than all the Medici monuments that the world would ever care to have. Only two of these niches are filled, however. In one of them sits Giuliano de' Medici, sculptured by Michael Angelo,--a figure of dignity, which would perhaps be very striking in any other presence than that of the statue which occupies the corresponding niche. At the feet of Giuliano recline two allegorical statues, Day and Night, whose meaning there I do not know, and perhaps Michael Angelo knew as little. As the great sculptor's statues are apt to do, they fling their limbs abroad with adventurous freedom. Below the corresponding niche, on the opposite side of the chapel, recline two similar statues, representing Morning and Evening, sufficiently like Day and Night to be their brother and sister; all, in truth, having sprung from the same father. . . . But the statue that sits above these two latter allegories, Morning and Evening, is like no other that ever came from a sculptor's hand. It is the one work worthy of Michael Angelo's reputation, and grand enough to vindicate for him all the genius that the world gave him credit for. And yet it seems a simple thing enough to think of or to execute; merely a sitting figure, the face partly overshadowed by a helmet, one hand supporting the chin, the other resting on the thigh. But after looking at it a little while the spectator ceases to think of it as a marble statue; it comes to life, and you see that the princely figure is brooding over some great design, which, when he has arranged in his own mind, the world will be fain to execute for him. No such grandeur and majesty has elsewhere been put into human shape. It is all a miracle; the deep repose, and the deep life within it. It is as much a miracle to have achieved this as to make a statue that would rise up and walk. The face, when one gazes earnestly into it, beneath the shadow of its helmet, is seen to be calmly sombre; a mood which, I think, is generally that of the rulers of mankind, except in moments of vivid action. This statue is one of the things which I look at with highest enjoyment, but also with grief and impatience, because I feel that I do not come at all which it involves, and that by and by I must go away and leave it forever. How wonderful! To take a block of marble, and convert it wholly into thought, and to do it through all the obstructions and impediments of drapery; for there is nothing nude in this statue but the face and hands. The vest is the costume of Michael Angelo's century. This is what I always thought a sculptor of true genius should be able to do,--to show the man of whatever epoch, nobly and heroically, through the costume which he might actually have worn. The statue sits within a square niche of white marble, and completely fills it. It seems to me a pity that it should be thus confined. At the Crystal Palace, if I remember, the effect is improved by a free surrounding space. Its naturalness is as if it came out of the marble of its own accord, with all its grandeur hanging heavily about it, and sat down there beneath its weight. I cannot describe it. It is like trying to stop the ghost of Hamlet's father, by crossing spears before it. Communicating with the sacristy is the Medicean Chapel, which was built more than two centuries ago, for the reception of the Holy Sepulchre; arrangements having been made about that time to steal this most sacred relic from the Turks. The design failing, the chapel was converted by Cosmo II. into a place of sepulture for the princes of his family. It is a very grand and solemn edifice, octagonal in shape, with a lofty dome, within which is a series of brilliant frescos, painted not more than thirty years ago. These pictures are the only portion of the adornment of the chapel which interferes with the sombre beauty of the general effect; for though the walls are incrusted, from pavement to dome, with marbles of inestimable cost, and it is a Florentine mosaic on a grander scale than was ever executed elsewhere, the result is not gaudy, as in many of the Roman chapels, but a dark and melancholy richness. The architecture strikes me as extremely fine; each alternate side of the octagon being an arch, rising as high as the cornice of the lofty dome, and forming the frame of a vast niche. All the dead princes, no doubt, according to the general design, were to have been honored with statues within this stately mausoleum; but only two--those of Ferdinand I. and Cosmo II.--seem to have been placed here. They were a bad breed, and few of them deserved any better monument than a dunghill; and yet they have this grand chapel for the family at large, and yonder grand statue for one of its most worthless members. I am glad of it; and as for the statue, Michael Angelo wrought it through the efficacy of a kingly idea, which had no reference to the individual whose name it bears. In the piazza adjoining the church is a statue of the first Cosmo, the old banker, in Roman costume, seated, and looking like a man fit to hold authority. No, I mistake; the statue is of John de' Medici, the father of Cosmo, and himself no banker, but a soldier. June 21st.--Yesterday, after dinner, we went, with the two eldest children, to the Boboli Gardens. . . . We entered by a gate, nearer to our house than that by the Pitti Palace, and found ourselves almost immediately among embowered walks of box and shrubbery, and little wildernesses of trees, with here and there a seat under an arbor, and a marble statue, gray with ancient weather-stains. The site of the garden is a very uneven surface, and the paths go upward and downward, and ascend, at their ultimate point, to a base of what appears to be a fortress, commanding the city. A good many of the Florentines were rambling about the gardens, like ourselves: little parties of school-boys; fathers and mothers, with their youthful progeny; young men in couples, looking closely into every female face; lovers, with a maid or two attendant on the young lady. All appeared to enjoy themselves, especially the children, dancing on the esplanades, or rolling down the slopes of the hills; and the loving pairs, whom it was rather embarrassing to come upon unexpectedly, sitting together on the stone seat of an arbor, with clasped hands, a passionate solemnity in the young man's face, and a downcast pleasure in the lady's. Policemen, in cocked hats and epaulets, cross-belts, and swords, were scattered about the grounds, but interfered with nobody, though they seemed to keep an eye on all. A sentinel stood in the hot sunshine, looking down over the garden from the ramparts of the fortress. For my part, in this foreign country, I have no objection to policemen or any other minister of authority; though I remember, in America, I had an innate antipathy to constables, and always sided with the mob against law. This was very wrong and foolish, considering that I was one of the sovereigns; but a sovereign, or any number of sovereigns, or the twenty-millionth part of a sovereign, does not love to find himself, as an American must, included within the delegated authority of his own servants. There is a sheet of water somewhere in the Boboli Gardens, inhabited by swans; but this we did not see. We found a smaller pond, however, set in marble, and surrounded by a parapet, and alive with a multitude of fish. There were minnows by the thousand, and a good many gold-fish; and J-----, who had brought some bread to feed the swans, threw in handfuls of crumbs for the benefit of these finny people. They seemed to be accustomed to such courtesies on the part of visitors; and immediately the surface of the water was blackened, at the spot where each crumb fell, with shoals of minnows, thrusting one another even above the surface in their eagerness to snatch it. Within the depths of the pond, the yellowish-green water--its hue being precisely that of the Arno-- would be reddened duskily with the larger bulk of two or three gold-fishes, who finally poked their great snouts up among the minnows, but generally missed the crumb. Beneath the circular margin of the pond, there are little arches, into the shelter of which the fish retire, when the noonday sun burns straight down into their dark waters. We went on through the garden-paths, shadowed quite across by the high walls of box, and reached an esplanade, whence we had a good view of Florence, with the bare brown ridges on the northern side of the Arno, and glimpses of the river itself, flowing like a street, between two rows of palaces. A great way off, too, we saw some of the cloud-like peaks of the Apennines, and, above them, the clouds into which the sun was descending, looking quite as substantial as the distant mountains. The city did not present a particularly splendid aspect, though its great Duomo was seen in the middle distance, sitting in its circle of little domes, with the tall campanile close by, and within one or two hundred yards of it, the high, cumbrous bulk of the Palazzo Vecchio, with its lofty, machicolated, and battlemented tower, very picturesque, yet looking exceedingly like a martin-box, on a pole. There were other domes and towers and spires, and here and there the distinct shape of an edifice; but the general picture was of a contiguity of red earthen roofs, filling a not very broad or extensive valley, among dry and ridgy hills, with a river-gleam lightening up the landscape a little. U---- took out her pencil and tablets, and began to sketch the tower of the Palazzo Vecchio; in doing which, she immediately became an object of curiosity to some little boys and larger people, who failed not, under such pretences as taking a grasshopper off her dress, or no pretence at all, to come and look over her shoulder. There is a kind of familiarity among these Florentines, which is not meant to be discourteous, and ought to be taken in good part. We continued to ramble through the gardens, in quest of a good spot from which to see the sunset, and at length found a stone bench, on the slope of a hill, whence the entire cloud and sun scenery was fully presented to us. At the foot of the hill were statues, and among them a Pegasus, with wings outspread; and, a little beyond, the garden-front of the Pitti Palace, which looks a little less like a state-prison here, than as it fronts the street. Girls and children, and young men and old, were taking their pleasure in our neighborhood; and, just before us, a lady stood talking with her maid. By and by, we discovered her to be Miss Howorth. There was a misty light, streaming down on the hither side of the ridge of hills, that was rather peculiar; but the most remarkable thing was the shape into which the clouds gathered themselves, after the disappearance of the sun. It was like a tree, with a broad and heavy mass of foliage, spreading high upward on the sky, and a dark and well-defined trunk, which rooted itself on the verge of the horizon. This morning we went to the Pitti Palace. The air was very sultry, and the pavements, already heated with the sun, made the space between the buildings seem like a close room. The earth, I think, is too much stoned out of the streets of an Italian city,--paved, like those of Florence, quite across, with broad flagstones, to the line where the stones of the houses on each side are piled up. Thunder rumbled over our heads, however, and the clouds were so dark that we scarcely hoped to reach the palace without feeling the first drops of the shower. The air still darkened and darkened, so that by the time we arrived at the suite of picture-rooms the pictures seemed all to be changed to Rembrandts; the shadows as black as midnight, with only some highly illuminated portions gleaming out. The obscurity of the atmosphere made us sensible how splendid is the adornment of these saloons. For the gilded cornices shone out, as did the gilding of the arches and wreathed circles that divide the ceiling into compartments, within which the frescos are painted, and whence the figures looked dimly down, like gods out of a mysterious sky. The white marble sculptures also gleamed from their height, where winged cupids or cherubs gambolled aloft in bas-reliefs; or allegoric shapes reclined along the cornices, hardly noticed, when the daylight comes brightly into the window. On the walls, all the rich picture-frames glimmered in gold, as did the framework of the chairs, and the heavy gilded pedestals of the marble, alabaster, and mosaic tables. These are very magnificent saloons; and since I have begun to speak of their splendor, I may as well add that the doors are framed in polished, richly veined marble, and the walls hung with scarlet damask. It was useless to try to see the pictures. All the artists engaged in copying laid aside their brushes; and we looked out into the square before the palace, where a mighty wind sprang up, and quickly raised a prodigious cloud of dust. It hid the opposite side of the street, and was carried, in a great dusky whirl, higher than the roofs of the houses, higher than the top of the Pitti Palace itself. The thunder muttered and grumbled, the lightning now and then flashed, and a few rain-drops pattered against the windows; but, for a long time, the shower held off. At last it came down in a stream, and lightened the air to such a degree that we could see some of the pictures, especially those of Rubens, and the illuminated parts of Salvator Rosa's, and, best of all, Titian's "Magdalen," the one with golden hair clustering round her naked body. The golden hair, indeed, seemed to throw out a glory of its own. This Magdalen is very coarse and sensual, with only an impudent assumption of penitence and religious sentiment, scarcely so deep as the eyelids; but it is a splendid picture, nevertheless, with those naked, lifelike arms, and the hands that press the rich locks about her, and so carefully permit those voluptuous breasts to be seen. She a penitent! She would shake off all pretence to it as easily as she would shake aside that clustering hair. . . . Titian must have been a very good-for-nothing old man. I looked again at Michael Angelo's Fates to-day; but cannot satisfactorily make out what he meant by them. One of them--she who holds the distaff--has her mouth open, as if uttering a cry, and might be fancied to look somewhat irate. The second, who holds the thread, has a pensive air, but is still, I think, pitiless at heart. The third sister looks closely and coldly into the eyes of the second, meanwhile cutting the thread with a pair of shears. Michael Angelo, if I may presume to say so, wished to vary the expression of these three sisters, and give each a different one, but did not see precisely how, inasmuch as all the fatal Three are united, heart and soul, in one purpose. It is a very impressive group. But, as regards the interpretation of this, or of any other profound picture, there are likely to be as many interpretations as there are spectators. It is very curious to read criticisms upon pictures, and upon the same face in a picture, and by men of taste and feeling, and to find what different conclusions they arrive at. Each man interprets the hieroglyphic in his own way; and the painter, perhaps, had a meaning which none of them have reached; or possibly he put forth a riddle, without himself knowing the solution. There is such a necessity, at all events, of helping the painter out with the spectator's own resources of feeling and imagination, that you can never be sure how much of the picture you have yourself made. There is no doubt that the public is, to a certain extent, right and sure of its ground, when it declares, through a series of ages, that a certain picture is a great work. It is so; a great symbol, proceeding out of a great mind; but if it means one thing, it seems to mean a thousand, and, often, opposite things. June 27th.--I have had a heavy cold and fever almost throughout the past week, and have thereby lost the great Florentine festivity, the Feast of St. John, which took place on Thursday last, with the fireworks and illuminations the evening before, and the races and court ceremonies on the day itself. However, unless it were more characteristic and peculiar than the Carnival, I have not missed anything very valuable. Mr. Powers called to see me one evening, and poured out, as usual, a stream of talk, both racy and oracular in its character. Speaking of human eyes, he observed that they did not depend for their expression upon color, nor upon any light of the soul beaming through them, nor any glow of the eyeball, nor upon anything but the form and action of the surrounding muscles. He illustrates it by saying, that if the eye of a wolf, or of whatever fiercest animal, could be placed in another setting, it would be found capable of the utmost gentleness of expression. "You yourself," said he, "have a very bright and sharp look sometimes; but it is not in the eye itself." His own eyes, as I could have sworn, were glowing all the time he spoke; and, remembering how many times I have seemed to see eyes glow, and blaze, and flash, and sparkle, and melt, and soften; and how all poetry is illuminated with the light of ladies' eyes; and how many people have been smitten by the lightning of an eye, whether in love or anger, it was difficult to allow that all this subtlest and keenest fire is illusive, not even phosphorescent, and that any other jelly in the same socket would serve as well as the brightest eye. Nevertheless, he must be right; of course he must, and I am rather ashamed ever to have thought otherwise. Where should the light come from? Has a man a flame inside of his head? Does his spirit manifest itself in the semblance of flame? The moment we think of it, the absurdity becomes evident. I am not quite sure, however, that the outer surface of the eye may not reflect more light in some states of feeling than in others; the state of the health, certainly, has an influence of this kind. I asked Powers what he thought of Michael Angelo's statue of Lorenzo de' Medici. He allowed that its effect was very grand and mysterious; but added that it owed this to a trick,--the effect being produced by the arrangement of the hood, as he called it, or helmet, which throws the upper part of the face into shadow. The niche in which it sits has, I suppose, its part to perform in throwing a still deeper shadow. It is very possible that Michael Angelo may have calculated upon this effect of sombre shadow, and legitimately, I think; but it really is not worthy of Mr. Powers to say that the whole effect of this mighty statue depends, not on the positive efforts of Michael Angelo's chisel, but on the absence of light in a space of a few inches. He wrought the whole statue in harmony with that small part of it which he leaves to the spectator's imagination, and if he had erred at any point, the miracle would have been a failure; so that, working in marble, he has positively reached a degree of excellence above the capability of marble, sculpturing his highest touches upon air and duskiness. Mr. Powers gave some amusing anecdotes of his early life, when he was a clerk in a store in Cincinnati. There was a museum opposite, the proprietor of which had a peculiar physiognomy that struck Powers, insomuch that he felt impelled to make continual caricatures of it. He used to draw them upon the door of the museum, and became so familiar with the face, that he could draw them in the dark; so that, every morning, here was this absurd profile of himself, greeting the museum-man when he came to open his establishment. Often, too, it would reappear within an hour after it was rubbed out. The man was infinitely annoyed, and made all possible efforts to discover the unknown artist, but in vain; and finally concluded, I suppose, that the likeness broke out upon the door of its own accord, like the nettle-rash. Some years afterwards, the proprietor of the museum engaged Powers himself as an assistant; and one day Powers asked him if he remembered this mysterious profile. "Yes," said he, "did you know who drew them?" Powers took a piece of chalk, and touched off the very profile again, before the man's eyes. "Ah," said he, "if I had known it at the time, I would have broken every bone in your body!" Before he began to work in marble, Powers had greater practice and success in making wax figures, and he produced a work of this kind called "The Infernal Regions," which he seemed to imply had been very famous. He said he once wrought a face in wax which was life itself, having made the eyes on purpose for it, and put in every hair in the eyebrows individually, and finished the whole with similar minuteness; so that, within the distance of a foot or two, it was impossible to tell that the face did not live. I have hardly ever before felt an impulse to write down a man's conversation as I do that of Mr. Powers. The chief reason is, probably, that it is so possible to do it, his ideas being square, solid, and tangible, and therefore readily grasped and retained. He is a very instructive man, and sweeps one's empty and dead notions out of the way with exceeding vigor; but when you have his ultimate thought and perception, you feel inclined to think and see a little further for yourself. He sees too clearly what is within his range to be aware of any region of mystery beyond. Probably, however, this latter remark does him injustice. I like the man, and am always glad to encounter the mill-stream of his talk. . . . Yesterday he met me in the street (dressed in his linen blouse and slippers, with a little bit of a sculptor's cap on the side of his head), and gave utterance to a theory of colds, and a dissertation on the bad effects of draughts, whether of cold air or hot, and the dangers of transfusing blood from the veins of one living subject to those of another. On the last topic, he remarked that, if a single particle of air found its way into the veins, along with the transfused blood, it caused convulsions and inevitable death; otherwise the process might be of excellent effect. Last evening, we went to pass the evening with Miss Blagden, who inhabits a villa at Bellosguardo, about a mile outside of the walls. The situation is very lofty, and there are good views from every window of the house, and an especially fine one of Florence and the hills beyond, from the balcony of the drawing-room. By and by came Mr. Browning, Mr. Trollope, Mr. Boott and his young daughter, and two or three other gentlemen. . . . Browning was very genial and full of life, as usual, but his conversation has the effervescent aroma which you cannot catch, even if you get the very words that seem to be imbued with it. He spoke most rapturously of a portrait of Mrs. Browning, which an Italian artist is painting for the wife of an American gentleman, as a present from her husband. The success was already perfect, although there had been only two sittings as yet, and both on the same day; and in this relation, Mr. Browning remarked that P------, the American artist, had had no less than seventy-three sittings of him for a portrait. In the result, every hair and speck of him was represented; yet, as I inferred from what he did not say, this accumulation of minute truths did not, after all, amount to the true whole. I do not remember much else that Browning said, except a playful abuse of a little King Charles spaniel, named Frolic, Miss Blagden's lap-dog, whose venerable age (he is eleven years old) ought to have pleaded in his behalf. Browning's nonsense is of very genuine and excellent quality, the true babble and effervescence of a bright and powerful mind; and he lets it play among his friends with the faith and simplicity of a child. He must be an amiable man. I should like him much, and should make him like me, if opportunities were favorable. I conversed principally with Mr. Trollope, the son, I believe, of the Mrs. Trollope to whom America owes more for her shrewd criticisms than we are ever likely to repay. Mr. Trollope is a very sensible and cultivated man, and, I suspect, an author: at least, there is a literary man of repute of this name, though I have never read his works. He has resided in Italy eighteen years. It seems a pity to do this. It needs the native air to give life a reality; a truth which I do not fail to take home regretfully to myself, though without feeling much inclination to go back to the realities of my own. We had a pleasant cup of tea, and took a moonlight view of Florence from the balcony. . . . June 28th.--Yesterday afternoon, J----- and I went to a horse-race, which took place in the Corso and contiguous line of streets, in further celebration of the Feast of St. John. A crowd of people was already collected, all along the line of the proposed race, as early as six o'clock; and there were a great many carriages driving amid the throng, open barouches mostly, in which the beauty and gentility of Florence were freely displayed. It was a repetition of the scene in the Corso at Rome, at Carnival time, without the masks, the fun, and the confetti. The Grand Duke and Duchess and the Court likewise made their appearance in as many as seven or eight coaches-and-six, each with a coachman, three footmen, and a postilion in the royal livery, and attended by a troop of horsemen in scarlet coats and cocked hats. I did not particularly notice the Grand Duke himself; but, in the carriage behind him, there sat only a lady, who favored the people along the street with a constant succession of bows, repeated at such short intervals, and so quickly, as to be little more than nods; therefore not particularly graceful or majestic. Having the good fortune, to be favored with one of these nods, I lifted my hat in response, and may therefore claim a bowing acquaintance with the Grand Duchess. She is a Bourbon of the Naples family, and was a pale, handsome woman, of princely aspect enough. The crowd evinced no enthusiasm, nor the slightest feeling of any kind, in acknowledgment of the presence of their rulers; and, indeed, I think I never saw a crowd so well behaved; that is, with so few salient points, so little ebullition, so absolutely tame, as the Florentine one. After all, and much contrary to my expectations, an American crowd has incomparably more life than any other; and, meeting on any casual occasion, it will talk, laugh, roar, and be diversified with a thousand characteristic incidents and gleams and shadows, that you see nothing of here. The people seems to have no part even in its own gatherings. It comes together merely as a mass of spectators, and must not so much as amuse itself by any activity of mind. The race, which was the attraction that drew us all together, turned out a very pitiful affair. When we had waited till nearly dusk, the street being thronged quite across, insomuch that it seemed impossible that it should be cleared as a race-course, there came suddenly from every throat a quick, sharp exclamation, combining into a general shout. Immediately the crowd pressed back on each side of the street; a moment afterwards, there was a rapid pattering of hoofs over the earth with which the pavement was strewn, and I saw the head and back of a horse rushing past. A few seconds more, and another horse followed; and at another little interval, a third. This was all that we had waited for; all that I saw, or anybody else, except those who stood on the utmost verge of the course, at the risk of being trampled down and killed. Two men were killed in this way on Thursday, and certainly human life was never spent for a poorer object. The spectators at the windows, to be sure, having the horses in sight for a longer time, might get a little more enjoyment out of the affair. By the by, the most picturesque aspect of the scene was the life given to it by the many faces, some of them fair ones, that looked out from window and balcony, all along the curving line of lofty palaces and edifices, between which the race-course lay; and from nearly every window, and over every balcony, was flung a silken texture, or cloth of brilliant line, or piece of tapestry or carpet, or whatever adornment of the kind could be had, so as to dress up the street in gala attire. But, the Feast of St. John, like the Carnival, is but a meagre semblance of festivity, kept alive factitiously, and dying a lingering death of centuries. It takes the exuberant mind and heart of a people to keep its holidays alive. I do not know whether there be any populace in Florence, but I saw none that I recognized as such, on this occasion. All the people were respectably dressed and perfectly well behaved; and soldiers and priests were scattered abundantly among the throng. On my way home, I saw the Teatro Goldoni, which is in our own street, lighted up for a representation this Sunday evening. It shocked my New England prejudices a little. Thus forenoon, my wife and I went to the Church of Santa Croce, the great monumental deposit of Florentine worthies. The piazza before it is a wide, gravelled square, where the liberty of Florence, if it really ever had any genuine liberty, came into existence some hundreds of years ago, by the people's taking its own rights into its hands, and putting its own immediate will in execution. The piazza has not much appearance of antiquity, except that the facade of one of the houses is quite covered with ancient frescos, a good deal faded and obliterated, yet with traces enough of old glory to show that the colors must have been well laid on. The front of the church, the foundation of which was laid six centuries ago, is still waiting for its casing of marbles, and I suppose will wait forever, though a carpenter's staging is now erected before it, as if with the purpose of doing something. The interior is spacious, the length of the church being between four and five hundred feet. There is a nave, roofed with wooden cross-beams, lighted by a clere-story and supported on each side by seven great pointed arches, which rest upon octagonal pillars. The octagon seems to be a favorite shape in Florence. These pillars were clad in yellow and scarlet damask, in honor of the Feast of St. John. The aisles, on each side of the nave, are lighted with high and somewhat narrow windows of painted glass, the effect of which, however, is much diminished by the flood of common daylight that comes in through the windows of the clere-story. It is like admitting too much of the light of reason and worldly intelligence into the mind, instead of illuminating it wholly through a religious medium. The many-hued saints and angels lose their mysterious effulgence, when we get white light enough, and find we see all the better without their help. The main pavement of the church is brickwork; but it is inlaid with many sepulchral slabs of marble, on some of which knightly or priestly figures are sculptured in bas-relief. In both of the side aisles there are saintly shrines, alternating with mural monuments, some of which record names as illustrious as any in the world. As you enter, the first monument, on your right is that of Michael Angelo, occupying the ancient burial-site of his family. The general design is a heavy sarcophagus of colored marble, with the figures of Sculpture, Painting, and Architecture as mourners, and Michael Angelo's bust above, the whole assuming a pyramidal form. You pass a shrine, within its framework of marble pillars and a pediment, and come next to Dante's monument, a modern work, with likewise its sarcophagus, and some huge, cold images weeping and sprawling over it, and an unimpressive statue of Dante sitting above. Another shrine intervenes, and next you see the tomb of Alfieri, erected to his memory by the Countess of Albany, who pays, out of a woman's love, the honor which his country owed him. Her own monument is in one of the chapels of the transept. Passing the next shrine you see the tomb of Macchiavelli, which, I think, was constructed not many years after his death. The rest of the monuments, on this side of the church, commemorate people of less than world-wide fame; and though the opposite side has likewise a monument alternating with each shrine, I remember only the names of Raphael Morghen and of Galileo. The tomb of the latter is over against that of Michael Angelo, being the first large tomb on the left-hand wall as you enter the church. It has the usual heavy sarcophagus, surmounted by a bust of Galileo, in the habit of his time, and is, of course, duly provided with mourners in the shape of Science or Astronomy, or some such cold-hearted people. I wish every sculptor might be at once imprisoned for life who shall hereafter chisel an allegoric figure; and as for those who have sculptured them heretofore, let them be kept in purgatory till the marble shall have crumbled away. It is especially absurd to assign to this frozen sisterhood of the allegoric family the office of weeping for the dead, inasmuch as they have incomparably less feeling than a lump of ice, which might contrive to shed a tear if the sun shone on it. But they seem to let themselves out, like the hired mourners of an English funeral, for the very reason that, having no interest in the dead person, nor any affections or emotions whatever, it costs them no wear and tear of heart. All round both transepts of the church there is a series of chapels, into most of which we went, and generally found an inscrutably dark picture over the altar, and often a marble bust or two, or perhaps a mediaeval statue of a saint or a modern monumental bas-relief in marble, as white as new-fallen snow. A chapel of the Bonapartes is here, containing memorials of two female members of the family. In several chapels, moreover, there were some of those distressing frescos, by Giotto, Cimabue, or their compeers, which, whenever I see them,--poor, faded relics, looking as if the Devil had been rubbing and scrubbing them for centuries, in spite against the saints,--my heart sinks and my stomach sickens. There is no other despondency like this; it is a new shade of human misery, akin to the physical disease that comes from dryrot in a wall. These frescos are to a church what dreary, old remembrances are to a mind; the drearier because they were once bright: Hope fading into Disappointment, Joy into Grief, and festal splendor passing into funereal duskiness, and saddening you all the more by the grim identity that you find to exist between gay things and sorrowful ones. Only wait long enough, and they turn out to be the very same. All the time we were in the church some great religious ceremony had been going forward; the organ playing and the white-robed priests bowing, gesticulating, and making Latin prayers at the high altar, where at least a hundred wax tapers were burning in constellations. Everybody knelt, except ourselves, yet seemed not to be troubled by the echoes of our passing footsteps, nor to require that we should pray along with them. They consider us already lost irrevocably, no doubt, and therefore right enough in taking no heed of their devotions; not but what we took so much heed, however, as to give the smallest possible disturbance. By and by we sat down in the nave of the church till the ceremony should be concluded; and then my wife left me to go in quest of yet another chapel, where either Cimabue or Giotto, or both, have left some of their now ghastly decorations. While she was gone I threw my eyes about the church, and came to the conclusion that, in spite of its antiquity, its size, its architecture, its painted windows, its tombs of great men, and all the reverence and interest that broods over them, it is not an impressive edifice. Any little Norman church in England would impress me as much, and more. There is something, I do not know what, but it is in the region of the heart, rather than in the intellect, that Italian architecture, of whatever age or style, never seems to reach. Leaving the Santa Croce, we went next in quest of the Riccardi Palace. On our way, in the rear of the Grand Ducal Piazza, we passed by the Bargello, formerly the palace of the Podesta of Florence, and now converted into a prison. It is an immense square edifice of dark stone, with a tall, lank tower rising high above it at one corner. Two stone lions, symbols of the city, lash their tails and glare at the passers-by; and all over the front of the building windows are scattered irregularly, and grated with rusty iron bars; also there are many square holes, which probably admit a little light and a breath or two of air into prisoners' cells. It is a very ugly edifice, but looks antique, and as if a vast deal of history might have been transacted within it, or have beaten, like fierce blasts, against its dark, massive walls, since the thirteenth century. When I first saw the city it struck me that there were few marks of antiquity in Florence; but I am now inclined to think otherwise, although the bright Italian atmosphere, and the general squareness and monotony of the Italian architecture, have their effect in apparently modernizing everything. But everywhere we see the ponderous Tuscan basements that never can decay, and which will look, five hundred years hence, as they look now; and one often passes beneath an abbreviated remnant of what was once a lofty tower, perhaps three hundred feet high, such as used to be numerous in Florence when each noble of the city had his own warfare to wage; and there are patches of sculpture that look old on houses, the modern stucco of which causes them to look almost new. Here and there an unmistakable antiquity stands in its own impressive shadow; the Church of Or San Michele, for instance, once a market, but which grew to be a church by some inherent fitness and inevitable consecration. It has not the least the aspect of a church, being high and square, like a mediaeval palace; but deep and high niches are let into its walls, within which stand great statues of saints, masterpieces of Donatello, and other sculptors of that age, before sculpture began to be congealed by the influence of Greek art. The Riccardi Palace is at the corner of the Via Larga. It was built by the first Cosmo de' Medici, the old banker, more than four centuries ago, and was long the home of the ignoble race of princes which he left behind him. It looks fit to be still the home of a princely race, being nowise dilapidated nor decayed externally, nor likely to be so, its high Tuscan basement being as solid as a ledge of rock, and its upper portion not much less so, though smoothed into another order of stately architecture. Entering its court from the Via Larga, we found ourselves beneath a pillared arcade, passing round the court like a cloister; and on the walls of the palace, under this succession of arches, were statues, bas-reliefs, and sarcophagi, in which, first, dead Pagans had slept, and then dead Christians, before the sculptured coffins were brought hither to adorn the palace of the Medici. In the most prominent place was a Latin inscription of great length and breadth, chiefly in praise of old Cosino and his deeds and wisdom. This mansion gives the visitor a stately notion of the life of a commercial man in the days when merchants were princes; not that it seems to be so wonderfully extensive, nor so very grand, for I suppose there are a dozen Roman palaces that excel it in both these particulars. Still, we cannot but be conscious that it must have been, in some sense, a great man who thought of founding a homestead like this, and was capable of filling it with his personality, as the hand fills a glove. It has been found spacious enough, since Cosmo's time, for an emperor and a pope and a king, all of whom have been guests in this house. After being the family mansion of the Medici for nearly two centuries, it was sold to the Riccardis, but was subsequently bought of then by the government, and it is now occupied by public offices and societies. After sufficiently examining the court and its antiquities, we ascended a noble staircase that passes, by broad flights and square turns, to the region above the basement. Here the palace is cut up and portioned off into little rooms and passages, and everywhere there were desks, inkstands, and men, with pens in their fingers or behind their ears. We were shown into a little antique chapel, quite covered with frescos in the Giotto style, but painted by a certain Gozzoli. They were in pretty good preservation, and, in fact, I am wrong in comparing them to Giotto's works, inasmuch as there must have been nearly two hundred years between the two artists. The chapel was furnished with curiously carved old chairs, and looked surprisingly venerable within its little precinct. We were next guided into the grand gallery, a hall of respectable size, with a frescoed ceiling, on which is represented the blue sky, and various members of the Medici family ascending through it by the help of angelic personages, who seem only to have waited for their society to be perfectly happy. At least, this was the meaning, so far as I could make it out. Along one side of the gallery were oil-pictures on looking-glasses, rather good than otherwise; but Rome, with her palaces and villas, takes the splendor out of all this sort of thing elsewhere. On our way home, and on our own side of the Ponte Vecchio, we passed the Palazzo Guicciardini, the ancient residence of the historian of Italy, who was a politic statesman of his day, and probably as cruel and unprincipled as any of those whose deeds he has recorded. Opposite, across the narrow way, stands the house of Macchiavelli, who was his friend, and, I should judge, an honester man than he. The house is distinguished by a marble tablet, let into the wall, commemorative of Macchiavelli, but has nothing antique or picturesque about it, being in a continuous line with other smooth-faced and stuccoed edifices. June 30th.--Yesterday, at three o'clock P. M., I went to see the final horse-race of the Feast of St. John, or rather to see the concourse of people and grandees whom it brought together. I took my stand in the vicinity of the spot whence the Grand Duke and his courtiers view the race, and from this point the scene was rather better worth looking at than from the street-corners whence I saw it before. The vista of the street, stretching far adown between two rows of lofty edifices, was really gay and gorgeous with the silks, damasks, and tapestries of all bright hues, that flaunted from windows and balconies, whence ladies looked forth and looked down, themselves making the liveliest part of the show. The whole capacity of the street swarmed with moving heads, leaving scarce room enough for the carriages, which, as on Sunday, passed up and down, until the signal for the race was given. Equipages, too, were constantly arriving at the door of the building which communicates with the open loggia, where the Grand Ducal party sit to see and to be seen. Two sentinels were standing at the door, and presented arms as each courtier or ambassador, or whatever dignity it might be, alighted. Most of them had on gold-embroidered court-dresses; some of them had military uniforms, and medals in abundance at the breast; and ladies also came, looking like heaps of lace and gauze in the carriages, but lightly shaking themselves into shape as they went up the steps. By and by a trumpet sounded, a drum beat, and again appeared a succession of half a dozen royal equipages, each with its six horses, its postilion, coachman, and three footmen, grand with cocked hats and embroidery; and the gray-headed, bowing Grand Duke and his nodding Grand Duchess as before. The Noble Guard ranged themselves on horseback opposite the loggia; but there was no irksome and impertinent show of ceremony and restraint upon the people. The play-guard of volunteer soldiers, who escort the President of the United States in his Northern progresses, keep back their fellow-citizens much more sternly and immitigably than the Florentine guard kept back the populace from its despotic sovereign. This morning J----- and I have been to the Uffizi gallery. It was his first visit there, and he passed a sweeping condemnation upon everything he saw, except a fly, a snail-shell, a caterpillar, a lemon, a piece of bread, and a wineglass, in some of the Dutch pictures. The Venus de' Medici met with no sort of favor. His feeling of utter distaste reacted upon me, and I was sensible of the same weary lack of appreciation that used to chill me through, in my earlier visits to picture-galleries; the same doubt, moreover, whether we do not bamboozle ourselves in the greater part of the admiration which we learn to bestow. I looked with some pleasure at one of Correggio's Madonnas in the Tribune,--no divine and deep-thoughted mother of the Saviour, but a young woman playing with her first child, as gay and thoughtless as itself. I looked at Michael Angelo's Madonna, in which William Ware saw such prophetic depth of feeling; but I suspect it was one of the many instances in which the spectator sees more than the painter ever dreamed of. Straying through the city, after leaving the gallery, we went into the Church of Or San Michele, and saw in its architecture the traces of its transformation from a market into a church. In its pristine state it consisted of a double row of three great open arches, with the wind blowing through them, and the sunshine falling aslantwise into them, while the bustle of the market, the sale of fish, flesh, or fruit went on within, or brimmed over into the streets that enclosed them on every side. But, four or five hundred years ago, the broad arches were built up with stone-work; windows were pierced through and filled with painted glass; a high altar, in a rich style of pointed Gothic, was raised; shrines and confessionals were set up; and here it is, a solemn and antique church, where a man may buy his salvation instead of his dinner. At any rate, the Catholic priests will insure it to him, and take the price. The sculpture within the beautifully decorated niches, on the outside of the church, is very curious and interesting. The statues of those old saints seem to have that charm of earnestness which so attracts the admirers of the Pre-Raphaelite painters. It appears that a picture of the Virgin used to hang against one of the pillars of the market-place while it was still a market, and in the year 1291 several miracles were wrought by it, insomuch that a chapel was consecrated for it. So many worshippers came to the shrine that the business of the market was impeded, and ultimately the Virgin and St. Michael won the whole space for themselves. The upper part of the edifice was at that time a granary, and is still used for other than religious purposes. This church was one spot to which the inhabitants betook themselves much for refuge and divine assistance during the great plague described by Boccaccio. July 2d.--We set out yesterday morning to visit the Palazzo Buonarotti, Michael Angelo's ancestral home. . . . It is in the Via Ghibellina, an ordinary-looking, three-story house, with broad-brimmed eaves, a stuccoed front, and two or three windows painted in fresco, besides the real ones. Adown the street, there is a glimpse of the hills outside of Florence. The sun shining heavily directly upon the front, we rang the door-bell, and then drew back into the shadow that fell from the opposite side of the street. After we had waited some time a man looked out from an upper window, and a woman from a lower one, and informed us that we could not be admitted now, nor for two or three months to come, the house being under repairs. It is a pity, for I wished to see Michael Angelo's sword and walking-stick and old slippers, and whatever other of his closest personalities are to be shown. . . . We passed into the Piazza of the Grand Duke, and looked into the court of the Palazzo Vecchio, with its beautifully embossed pillars; and, seeing just beyond the court a staircase of broad and easy steps, we ascended it at a venture. Upward and upward we went, flight after flight of stairs, and through passages, till at last we found an official who ushered us into a large saloon. It was the Hall of Audience. Its heavily embossed ceiling, rich with tarnished gold, was a feature of antique magnificence, and the only one that it retained, the floor being paved with tiles and the furniture scanty or none. There were, however, three cabinets standing against the walls, two of which contained very curious and exquisite carvings and cuttings in ivory; some of them in the Chinese style of hollow, concentric balls; others, really beautiful works of art: little crucifixes, statues, saintly and knightly, and cups enriched with delicate bas-reliefs. The custode pointed to a small figure of St. Sebastian, and also to a vase around which the reliefs seemed to assume life. Both these specimens, he said, were by Benvenuto Cellini, and there were many others that might well have been wrought by his famous hand. The third cabinet contained a great number and variety of crucifixes, chalices, and whatever other vessels are needed in altar service, exquisitely carved out of amber. They belong to the chapel of the palace, and into this holy closet we were now conducted. It is large enough to accommodate comfortably perhaps thirty worshippers, and is quite covered with frescos by Ghirlandaio in good preservation, and with remnants enough of gilding and bright color to show how splendid the chapel must have been when the Medicean Grand Dukes used to pray here. The altar is still ready for service, and I am not sure that some of the wax tapers were not burning; but Lorenzo the Magnificent was nowhere to be seen. The custode now led us back through the Hall of Audience into a smaller room, hung with pictures chiefly of the Medici and their connections, among whom was one Carolina, an intelligent and pretty child, and Bianca Capella. There was nothing else to show us, except a very noble and most spacious saloon, lighted by two large windows at each end, coming down level with the floor, and by a row of windows on one side just beneath the cornice. A gilded framework divides the ceiling into squares, circles, and octagons, the compartments of which are filled with pictures in oil; and the walls are covered with immense frescos, representing various battles and triumphs of the Florentines. Statues by Michael Angelo, John of Bologna, and Bandinello, as well historic as ideal, stand round the hall, and it is really a fit theatre for the historic scenes of a country to be acted in. It was built, moreover, with the idea of its being the council-hall of a free people; but our own little Faneuil, which was meant, in all simplicity, to be merely a spot where the townspeople should meet to choose their selectmen, has served the world better in that respect. I wish I had more room to speak of this vast, dusky, historic hall. [This volume of journal closes here.] July 4th 1858.--Yesterday forenoon we went to see the Church of Santa Maria Novella. We found the piazza, on one side of which the church stands, encumbered with the amphitheatrical ranges of wooden seats that had been erected to accommodate the spectators of the chariot-races, at the recent Feast of St. John. The front of the church is composed of black and white marble, which, in the course of the five centuries that it has been built, has turned brown and yellow. On the right hand, as you approach, is a long colonnade of arches, extending on a line with the facade, and having a tomb beneath every arch. This colonnade forms one of the enclosing walls of a cloister. We found none of the front entrances open, but on our left, in a wall at right angles with the church, there was an open gateway, approaching which, we saw, within the four-sided colonnade, an enclosed green space of a cloister. This is what is called the Chiostro Verde, so named from the prevailing color of the frescos with which the walls beneath the arches are adorned. This cloister is the reality of what I used to imagine when I saw the half-ruinous colonnades connected with English cathedrals, or endeavored to trace out the lines along the broken wall of some old abbey. Not that this extant cloister, still perfect and in daily use for its original purposes, is nearly so beautiful as the crumbling ruin which has ceased to be trodden by monkish feet for more than three centuries. The cloister of Santa Maria has not the seclusion that is desirable, being open, by its gateway, to the public square; and several of the neighbors, women as well as men, were loitering within its precincts. The convent, however, has another and larger cloister, which I suppose is kept free from interlopers. The Chiostro Verde is a walk round the four sides of a square, beneath an arched and groined roof. One side of the walk looks upon an enclosed green space with a fountain or a tomb (I forget which) in the centre; the other side is ornamented all along with a succession of ancient frescos, representing subjects of Scripture history. In the days when the designs were more distinct than now, it must have been a very effective way for a monk to read Bible history, to see its personages and events thus passing visibly beside him in his morning and evening walks. Beneath the frescos on one side of the cloistered walk, and along the low stone parapet that separates it from the grass-plat on the other, are inscriptions to the memory of the dead who are buried underneath the pavement. The most of these were modern, and recorded the names of persons of no particular note. Other monumental slabs were inlaid with the pavement itself. Two or three Dominican monks, belonging to the convent, passed in and out, while we were there, in their white habits. After going round three sides, we came to the fourth, formed by the wall of the church, and heard the voice of a priest behind a curtain that fell down before a door. Lifting it aside, we went in, and found ourselves in the ancient chapter-house, a large interior formed by two great pointed arches crossing one another in a groined roof. The broad spaces of the walls were entirely covered with frescos that are rich even now, and must have glowed with an inexpressible splendor, when fresh from the artists' hands, five hundred years ago. There is a long period, during which frescos illuminate a church or a hall in a way that no other adornment can; when this epoch of brightness is past, they become the dreariest ghosts of perished magnificence. . . . This chapter-house is the only part of the church that is now used for the purposes of public worship. There are several confessionals, and two chapels or shrines, each with its lighted tapers. A priest performed mass while we were there, and several persons, as usual, stepped in to do a little devotion, either praying on their own account, or uniting with the ceremony that was going forward. One man was followed by two little dogs, and in the midst of his prayers, as one of the dogs was inclined to stray about the church, he kept snapping his fingers to call him back. The cool, dusky refreshment of these holy places, affording such a refuge from the hot noon of the streets and piazzas, probably suggests devotional ideas to the people, and it may be, when they are praying, they feel a breath of Paradise fanning them. If we could only see any good effects in their daily life, we might deem it an excellent thing to be able to find incense and a prayer always ascending, to which every individual may join his own. I really wonder that the Catholics are not better men and women. When we had looked at the old frescos, . . . . we emerged into the cloister again, and thence ventured into a passage which would have led us to the Chiostro Grande, where strangers, and especially ladies, have no right to go. It was a secluded corridor, very neatly kept, bordered with sepulchral monuments, and at the end appeared a vista of cypress-trees, which indeed were but an illusory perspective, being painted in fresco. While we loitered along the sacristan appeared and offered to show us the church, and led us into the transept on the right of the high altar, and ushered us into the sacristy, where we found two artists copying some of Fra Angelico's pictures. These were painted on the three wooden leaves of a triptych, and, as usual, were glorified with a great deal of gilding, so that they seemed to float in the brightness of a heavenly element. Solomon speaks of "apples of gold in pictures of silver." The pictures of Fra Angelico, and other artists of that age, are really pictures of gold; and it is wonderful to see how rich the effect, and how much delicate beauty is attained (by Fra Angelico at least) along with it. His miniature-heads appear to me much more successful than his larger ones. In a monkish point of view, however, the chief value of the triptych of which I am speaking does not lie in the pictures, for they merely serve as the framework of some relics, which are set all round the edges of the three leaves. They consist of little bits and fragments of bones, and of packages carefully tied up in silk, the contents of which are signified in Gothic letters appended to each parcel. The sacred vessels of the church are likewise kept in the sacristy. . . . Re-entering the transept, our guide showed us the chapel of the Strozzi family, which is accessible by a flight of steps from the floor of the church. The walls of this chapel are covered with frescos by Orcagna, representing around the altar the Last Judgment, and on one of the walls heaven and the assembly of the blessed, and on the other, of course, hell. I cannot speak as to the truth of the representation; but, at all events, it was purgatory to look at it. . . . We next passed into the choir, which occupies the extreme end of the church behind the great square mass of the high altar, and is surrounded with a double row of ancient oaken seats of venerable shape and carving. The choir is illuminated by a threefold Gothic window, full of richly painted glass, worth all the frescos that ever stained a wall or ceiling; but these walls, nevertheless, are adorned with frescos by Ghirlandaio, and it is easy to see must once have made a magnificent appearance. I really was sensible of a sad and ghostly beauty in many of the figures; but all the bloom, the magic of the painter's touch, his topmost art, have long ago been rubbed off, the white plaster showing through the colors in spots, and even in large spaces. Any other sort of ruin acquires a beauty proper to its decay, and often superior to that of its pristine state; but the ruin of a picture, especially of a fresco, is wholly unredeemed; and, moreover, it dies so slowly that many generations are likely to be saddened by it. We next saw the famous picture of the Virgin by Cimabue, which was deemed a miracle in its day, . . . . and still brightens the sombre walls with the lustre of its gold ground. As to its artistic merits, it seems to me that the babe Jesus has a certain air of state and dignity; but I could see no charm whatever in the broad-faced Virgin, and it would relieve my mind and rejoice my spirit if the picture were borne out of the church in another triumphal procession (like the one which brought it there), and reverently burnt. This should be the final honor paid to all human works that have served a good office in their day, for when their day is over, if still galvanized into false life, they do harm instead of good. . . . . The interior of Santa Maria Novella is spacious and in the Gothic style, though differing from English churches of that order of architecture. It is not now kept open to the public, nor were any of the shrines and chapels, nor even the high altar itself, adorned and lighted for worship. The pictures that decorated the shrines along the side aisles have been removed, leaving bare, blank spaces of brickwork, very dreary and desolate to behold. This is almost worse than a black oil-painting or a faded fresco. The church was much injured by the French, and afterwards by the Austrians, both powers having quartered their troops within the holy precincts. Its old walls, however, are yet stalwart enough to outlast another set of frescos, and to see the beginning and the end of a new school of painting as long-lived as Cimabue's. I should be sorry to have the church go to decay, because it was here that Boccaccio's dames and cavaliers encountered one another, and formed their plan of retreating into the country during the plague. . . . At the door we bought a string of beads, with a small crucifix appended, in memory of the place. The beads seem to be of a grayish, pear-shaped seed, and the seller assured us that they were the tears of St. Job. They were cheap, probably because Job shed so many tears in his lifetime. It being still early in the day, we went to the Uffizi gallery, and after loitering a good while among the pictures, were so fortunate as to find the room of the bronzes open. The first object that attracted us was John of Bologna's Mercury, poising himself on tiptoe, and looking not merely buoyant enough to float, but as if he possessed more than the eagle's power of lofty flight. It seems a wonder that he did not absolutely fling himself into the air when the artist gave him the last touch. No bolder work was ever achieved; nothing so full of life has been done since. I was much interested, too, in the original little wax model, two feet high, of Benvenuto Cellini's Perseus. The wax seems to be laid over a wooden framework, and is but roughly finished off. . . . In an adjoining room are innumerable specimens of Roman and Etruscan bronzes, great and small. A bronze Chimera did not strike me as very ingeniously conceived, the goat's head being merely an adjunct, growing out of the back of the monster, without possessing any original and substantive share in its nature. The snake's head is at the end of the tail. The object most really interesting was a Roman eagle, the standard of the Twenty-fourth Legion, about the size of a blackbird. July 8th.--On the 6th we went to the Church of the Annunziata, which stands in the piazza of the same name. On the corner of the Via dei Servi is the palace which I suppose to be the one that Browning makes the scene of his poem, "The Statue and the Bust," and the statue of Duke Ferdinand sits stately on horseback, with his face turned towards the window, where the lady ought to appear. Neither she nor the bust, however, was visible, at least not to my eyes. The church occupies one side of the piazza, and in front of it, as likewise on the two adjoining sides of the square, there are pillared arcades, constructed by Brunelleschi or his scholars. After passing through these arches, and still before entering the church itself, you come to an ancient cloister, which is now quite enclosed in glass as a means of preserving some frescos of Andrea del Sarto and others, which are considered valuable. Passing the threshold of the church, we were quite dazzled by the splendor that shone upon us from the ceiling of the nave, the great parallelograms of which, viewed from one end, look as if richly embossed all over with gold. The whole interior, indeed, has an effect of brightness and magnificence, the walls being covered mostly with light-colored marble, into which are inlaid compartments of rarer and richer marbles. The pillars and pilasters, too, are of variegated marbles, with Corinthian capitals, that shine just as brightly as if they were of solid gold, so faithfully have they been gilded and burnished. The pavement is formed of squares of black and white marble. There are no side aisles, but ranges of chapels, with communication from one to another, stand round the whole extent of the nave and choir; all of marble, all decorated with pictures, statues, busts, and mural monuments; all worth, separately, a day's inspection. The high altar is of great beauty and richness, . . . . and also the tomb of John of Bologna in a chapel at the remotest extremity of the church. In this chapel there are some bas-reliefs by him, and also a large crucifix, with a marble Christ upon it. I think there has been no better sculptor since the days of Phidias. . . . The church was founded by seven gentlemen of Florence, who formed themselves into a religious order called "Servants of Mary." Many miraculous cures were wrought here; and the church, in consequence, was so thickly hung with votive offerings of legs, arms, and other things in wax, that they used to tumble upon people's heads, so that finally they were all cleared out as rubbish. The church is still, I should imagine, looked upon as a place of peculiar sanctity; for while we were there it had an unusual number of kneeling worshippers, and persons were passing from shrine to shrine all round the nave and choir, praying awhile at each, and thus performing a pilgrimage at little cost of time and labor. One old gentleman, I observed, carried a cushion or pad, just big enough for one knee, on which he carefully adjusted his genuflexions before each altar. An old woman in the choir prayed alternately to us and to the saints, with most success, I hope, in her petitions to the latter, though certainly her prayers to ourselves seemed the more fervent of the two. When we had gone entirely round the church, we came at last to the chapel of the Annunziata, which stands on the floor of the nave, on the left hand as we enter. It is a very beautiful piece of architecture,--a sort of canopy of marble, supported upon pillars; and its magnificence within, in marble and silver, and all manner of holy decoration, is quite indescribable. It was built four hundred years ago, by Pietro de' Medici, and has probably been growing richer ever since. The altar is entirely of silver, richly embossed. As many people were kneeling on the steps before it as could find room, and most of them, when they finished their prayers, ascended the steps, kissed over and over again the margin of the silver altar, laid their foreheads upon it, and then deposited an offering in a box placed upon the altar's top. From the dulness of the chink in the only case when I heard it, I judged it to be a small copper coin. In the inner part of this chapel is preserved a miraculous picture of the "Santissima Annunziata," painted by angels, and held in such holy repute that forty thousand dollars have lately been expended in providing a new crown for the sacred personage represented. The picture is now veiled behind a curtain; and as it is a fresco, and is not considered to do much credit to the angelic artists, I was well contented not to see it. We found a side door of the church admitting us into the great cloister, which has a walk of intersecting arches round its four sides, paved with flat tombstones, and broad enough for six people to walk abreast. On the walls, in the semicircles of each successive arch, are frescos representing incidents in the lives of the seven founders of the church, and all the lower part of the wall is incrusted with marble inscriptions to the memory of the dead, and mostly of persons who have died not very long ago. The space enclosed by the cloistered walk, usually made cheerful by green grass, has a pavement of tombstones laid in regular ranges. In the centre is a stone octagonal structure, which at first I supposed to be the tomb of some deceased mediaeval personage; but, on approaching, I found it a well, with its bucket hanging within the curb, and looking as if it were in constant use. The surface of the water lay deep beneath the deepest dust of the dead people, and thence threw up its picture of the sky; but I think it would not be a moderate thirst that would induce me to drink of that well. On leaving the church we bought a little gilt crucifix. . . . On Sunday evening I paid a short visit to Mr. Powers, and, as usual, was entertained and instructed with his conversation. It did not, indeed, turn upon artistical subjects; but the artistic is only one side of his character, and, I think, not the principal side. He might have achieved valuable success as an engineer and mechanician. He gave a dissertation on flying-machines, evidently from his own experience, and came to the conclusion that it is impossible to fly by means of steam or any other motive-power now known to man. No force hitherto attained would suffice to lift the engine which generated it. He appeared to anticipate that flying will be a future mode of locomotion, but not till the moral condition of mankind is so improved as to obviate the bad uses to which the power might be applied. Another topic discussed was a cure for complaints of the chest by the inhalation of nitric acid; and he produced his own apparatus for that purpose, being merely a tube inserted into a bottle containing a small quantity of the acid, just enough to produce the gas for inhalation. He told me, too, a remedy for burns accidentally discovered by himself; viz., to wear wash-leather, or something equivalent, over the burn, and keep it constantly wet. It prevents all pain, and cures by the exclusion of the air. He evidently has a great tendency to empirical remedies, and would have made a natural doctor of mighty potency, possessing the shrewd sense, inventive faculty, and self-reliance that such persons require. It is very singular that there should be an ideal vein in a man of this character. This morning he called to see me, with intelligence of the failure of the new attempt to lay the electric cable between England and America; and here, too, it appears the misfortune might have been avoided if a plan of his own for laying the cable had been adopted. He explained his process, and made it seem as practicable as to put up a bell-wire. I do not remember how or why (but appositely) he repeated some verses, from a pretty little ballad about fairies, that had struck his fancy, and he wound up his talk with some acute observations on the characters of General Jackson and other public men. He told an anecdote, illustrating the old general's small acquaintance with astronomical science, and his force of will in compelling a whole dinner-party of better instructed people than himself to succumb to him in an argument about eclipses and the planetary system generally. Powers witnessed the scene himself. He thinks that General Jackson was a man of the keenest and surest intuitions, in respect to men and measures, but with no power of reasoning out his own conclusions, or of imparting them intellectually to other persons. Men who have known Jackson intimately, and in great affairs, would not agree as to this intellectual and argumentative deficiency, though they would fully allow the intuitive faculty. I have heard General Pierce tell a striking instance of Jackson's power of presenting his own view of a subject with irresistible force to the mind of the auditor. President Buchanan has likewise expressed to me as high admiration of Jackson as I ever heard one man award to another. Surely he was a great man, and his native strength, as well of intellect as character, compelled every man to be his tool that came within his reach; and the more cunning the individual might be, it served only to make him the sharper tool. Speaking of Jackson, and remembering Raphael's picture of Pope Julius II., the best portrait in the whole world, and excellent in all its repetitions, I wish it had been possible for Raphael to paint General Jackson! Referring again to General Jackson's intuitions, and to Powers's idea that he was unable to render a reason to himself or others for what he chose to do, I should have thought that this very probably might have been the case, were there not such strong evidence to the contrary. The highest, or perhaps any high administrative ability is intuitive, and precedes argument, and rises above it. It is a revelation of the very thing to be done, and its propriety and necessity are felt so strongly that very likely it cannot be talked about; if the doer can likewise talk, it is an additional and gratuitous faculty, as little to be expected as that a poet should be able to write an explanatory criticism on his own poem. The English overlook this in their scheme of government, which requires that the members of the national executive should be orators, and the readiest and most fluent orators that can be found. The very fact (on which they are selected) that they are men of words makes it improbable that they are likewise men of deeds. And it is only tradition and old custom, founded on an obsolete state of things, that assigns any value to parliamentary oratory. The world has done with it, except as an intellectual pastime. The speeches have no effect till they are converted into newspaper paragraphs; and they had better be composed as such, in the first place, and oratory reserved for churches, courts of law, and public dinner-tables. July 10th.--My wife and I went yesterday forenoon to see the Church of San Marco, with which is connected a convent of Dominicans. . . . The interior is not less than three or four hundred years old, and is in the classic style, with a flat ceiling, gilded, and a lofty arch, supported by pillars, between the nave and choir. There are no side aisles, but ranges of shrines on both sides of the nave, each beneath its own pair of pillars and pediments. The pavement is of brick, with here and there a marble tombstone inlaid. It is not a magnificent church; but looks dingy with time and apparent neglect, though rendered sufficiently interesting by statues of mediaeval date by John of Bologna and other old sculptors, and by monumental busts and bas-reliefs: also, there is a wooden crucifix by Giotto, with ancient gilding on it; and a painting of Christ, which was considered a wonderful work in its day. Each shrine, or most of them, at any rate, had its dark old picture, and there is a very old and hideous mosaic of the Virgin and two saints, which I looked at very slightly, with the purpose of immediately forgetting it. Savonarola, the reforming monk, was a brother of this convent, and was torn from its shelter, to be subsequently hanged and burnt in the Grand Ducal Piazza. A large chapel in the left transept is of the Salviati family, dedicated to St. Anthony, and decorated with several statues of saints, and with some old frescos. When we had more than sufficiently examined these, the custode proposed to show us some frescos of Fra Angelico, and conducted us into a large cloister, under the arches of which, and beneath a covering of glass, he pointed to a picture of St. Dominic kneeling at the Cross. There are two or three others by the angelic friar in different parts of the cloister, and a regular series, filling up all the arches, by various artists. Its four-sided, cloistered walk surrounds a square, open to the sky as usual, and paved with gray stones that have no inscriptions, but probably are laid over graves. Its walls, however, are incrusted, and the walk itself is paved with monumental inscriptions on marble, none of which, so far as I observed, were of ancient date. Either the fashion of thus commemorating the dead is not ancient in Florence, or the old tombstones have been removed to make room for new ones. I do not know where the monks themselves have their burial-place; perhaps in an inner cloister, which we did not see. All the inscriptions here, I believe, were in memory of persons not connected with the convent. A door in the wall of the cloister admitted us into the chapter-house, its interior moderately spacious, with a roof formed by intersecting arches. Three sides of the walls were covered with blessed whitewash; but on the fourth side, opposite to the entrance, was a great fresco of the Crucifixion, by Fra Angelico, surrounded with a border or pictured framework, in which are represented the heads of saints, prophets, and sibyls, as large as life. The cross of the Saviour and those of the thieves were painted against a dark red sky; the figures upon them were lean and attenuated, evidently the vague conceptions of a man who had never seen a naked figure. Beneath, was a multitude of people, most of whom were saints who had lived and been martyred long after the Crucifixion; and some of these had wounds from which gilded rays shone forth, as if the inner glory and blessedness of the holy men blazed through them. It is a very ugly picture, and its ugliness is not that of strength and vigor, but of weakness and incompetency. Fra Angelico should have confined himself to miniature heads, in which his delicacy of touch and minute labor often produce an excellent effect. The custode informed us that there were more frescos of this pious artist in the interior of the convent, into which I might be allowed admittance, but not my wife. I declined seeing them, and heartily thanked heaven for my escape. Returning through the church, we stopped to look at a shrine on the right of the entrance, where several wax candles were lighted, and the steps of which were crowded with worshippers. It was evidently a spot of special sanctity, and, approaching the steps, we saw, behind a gilded framework of stars and protected by glass, a wooden image of the Saviour, naked, covered with spots of blood, crowned with thorns, and expressing all the human wretchedness that the carver's skill could represent. The whole shrine, within the glass, was hung with offerings, as well of silver and gold as of tinsel and trumpery, and the body of Christ glistened with gold chains and ornaments, and with watches of silver and gold, some of which appeared to be of very old manufacture, and others might be new. Amid all this glitter the face of pain and grief looked forth, not a whit comforted. While we stood there, a woman, who had been praying, arose from her knees and laid an offering of a single flower upon the shrine. The corresponding arch, on the opposite side of the entrance, contained a wax-work within a large glass case, representing the Nativity. I do not remember how the Blessed Infant looked, but the Virgin was gorgeously dressed in silks, satins, and gauzes, with spangles and ornaments of all kinds, and, I believe, brooches of real diamonds on her bosom. Her attire, judging from its freshness and newness of glitter, might have been put on that very morning. July 13th.--We went for the second time, this morning, to the Academy of Fine Arts, and I looked pretty thoroughly at the Pre-Raphaelite pictures, few of which are really worth looking at nowadays. Cimabue and Giotto might certainly be dismissed, henceforth and forever, without any detriment to the cause of good art. There is what seems to me a better picture than either of these has produced, by Bonamico Buffalmacco, an artist of about their date or not long after. The first real picture in the series is the "Adoration of the Magi," by Gentile da Fabriano, a really splendid work in all senses, with noble and beautiful figures in it, and a crowd of personages, managed with great skill. Three pictures by Perugino are the only other ones I cared to look at. In one of these, the face of the Virgin who holds the dead Christ on her knees has a deeper expression of woe than can ever have been painted since. After Perugino the pictures cease to be interesting; the art came forward with rapid strides, but the painters and their productions do not take nearly so much hold of the spectator as before. They all paint better than Giotto and Cimabue,--in some respects better than Perugino; but they paint in vain, probably because they were not nearly so much in earnest, and meant far less, though possessing the dexterity to express far more. Andrea del Sarto appears to have been a good painter, yet I always turn away readily from his pictures. I looked again, and for a good while, at Carlo Dolce's portrait of the Eternal Father, for it is a miracle and masterpiece of absurdity, and almost equally a miracle of pictorial art. It is the All-powerless, a fair-haired, soft, consumptive deity, with a mouth that has fallen open through very weakness. He holds one hand on his stomach, as if the wickedness and wretchedness of mankind made him qualmish; and he is looking down out of Heaven with an expression of pitiable appeal, or as if seeking somewhere for assistance in his heavy task of ruling the universe. You might fancy such a being falling on his knees before a strong-willed man, and beseeching him to take the reins of omnipotence out of his hands. No wonder that wrong gets the better of right, and that good and ill are confounded, if the Supreme Head were as here depicted; for I never saw, and nobody else ever saw, so perfect a representation of a person burdened with a task infinitely above his strength. If Carlo Dolce had been wicked enough to know what he was doing, the picture would have been most blasphemous,--a satire, in the very person of the Almighty, against all incompetent rulers, and against the rickety machine and crazy action of the universe. Heaven forgive me for such thoughts as this picture has suggested! It must be added that the great original defect in the character as here represented is an easy good-nature. I wonder what Michael Angelo would have said to this painting. In the large, enclosed court connected with the Academy there are a number of statues, bas-reliefs, and casts, and what was especially interesting, the vague and rude commencement of a statue of St. Matthew by Michael Angelo. The conceptions of this great sculptor were so godlike that he seems to have been discontented at not likewise possessing the godlike attribute of creating and embodying them with an instantaneous thought, and therefore we often find sculptures from his hand left at the critical point of their struggle to get out of the marble. The statue of St. Matthew looks like the antediluvian fossil of a human being of an epoch when humanity was mightier and more majestic than now, long ago imprisoned in stone, and half uncovered again. July 16th.--We went yesterday forenoon to see the Bargello. I do not know anything more picturesque in Florence than the great interior court of this ancient Palace of the Podesta, with the lofty height of the edifice looking down into the enclosed space, dark and stern, and the armorial bearings of a long succession of magistrates carved in stone upon the walls, a garland, as it were, of these Gothic devices extending quite round the court. The best feature of the whole is the broad stone staircase, with its heavy balustrade, ascending externally from the court to the iron-grated door in the second story. We passed the sentinels under the lofty archway that communicates with the street, and went up the stairs without being questioned or impeded. At the iron-grated door, however, we were met by two officials in uniform, who courteously informed us that there was nothing to be exhibited in the Bargello except an old chapel containing some frescos by Giotto, and that these could only be seen by making a previous appointment with the custode, he not being constantly on hand. I was not sorry to escape the frescos, though one of them is a portrait of Dante. We next went to the Church of the Badia, which is built in the form of a Greek cross, with a flat roof embossed and once splendid with now tarnished gold. The pavement is of brick, and the walls of dark stone, similar to that of the interior of the cathedral (pietra serena), and there being, according to Florentine custom, but little light, the effect was sombre, though the cool gloomy dusk was refreshing after the hot turmoil and dazzle of the adjacent street. Here we found three or four Gothic tombs, with figures of the deceased persons stretched in marble slumber upon them. There were likewise a picture or two, which it was impossible to see; indeed, I have hardly ever met with a picture in a church that was not utterly wasted and thrown away in the deep shadows of the chapel it was meant to adorn. If there is the remotest chance of its being seen, the sacristan hangs a curtain before it for the sake of his fee for withdrawing it. In the chapel of the Bianco family we saw (if it could be called seeing) what is considered the finest oil-painting of Fra Filippo Lippi. It was evidently hung with reference to a lofty window on the other side of the church, whence sufficient light might fall upon it to show a picture so vividly painted as this is, and as most of Fra Filippo Lippi's are. The window was curtained, however, and the chapel so dusky that I could make out nothing. Several persons came in to say their prayers during the little time that we remained in the church, and as we came out we passed a good woman who sat knitting in the coolness of the vestibule, which was lined with mural tombstones. Probably she spends the day thus, keeping up the little industry of her fingers, slipping into the church to pray whenever a devotional impulse swells into her heart, and asking an alms as often as she sees a person of charitable aspect. From the church we went to the Uffizi gallery, and reinspected the greater part of it pretty faithfully. We had the good fortune, too, again to get admittance into the cabinet of bronzes, where we admired anew the wonderful airiness of John of Bologna's Mercury, which, as I now observed, rests on nothing substantial, but on the breath of a zephyr beneath him. We also saw a bronze bust of one of the Medici by Benvenuto Cellini, and a thousand other things the curiosity of which is overlaid by their multitude. The Roman eagle, which I have recorded to be about the size of a blackbird, I now saw to be as large as a pigeon. On our way towards the door of the gallery, at our departure, we saw the cabinet of gems open, and again feasted our eyes with its concentrated brilliancies and magnificences. Among them were two crystal cups, with engraved devices, and covers of enamelled gold, wrought by Benvenuto Cellini, and wonderfully beautiful. But it is idle to mention one or two things, when all are so beautiful and curious; idle, too, because language is not burnished gold, with here and there a brighter word flashing like a diamond; and therefore no amount of talk will give the slightest idea of one of these elaborate handiworks. July 27th.--I seldom go out nowadays, having already seen Florence tolerably well, and the streets being very hot, and myself having been engaged in sketching out a romance [The Marble Faun.--ED.], which whether it will ever come to anything is a point yet to be decided. At any rate, it leaves me little heart for journalizing and describing new things; and six months of uninterrupted monotony would be more valuable to me just now, than the most brilliant succession of novelties. Yesterday I spent a good deal of time in watching the setting out of a wedding party from our door; the bride being the daughter of an English lady, the Countess of ------. After all, there was nothing very characteristic. The bridegroom is a young man of English birth, son of the Countess of St. G------, who inhabits the third piano of this Casa del Bello. The very curious part of the spectacle was the swarm of beggars who haunted the street all day; the most wretched mob conceivable, chiefly women, with a few blind people, and some old men and boys. Among these the bridal party distributed their beneficence in the shape of some handfuls of copper, with here and there a half-paul intermixed; whereupon the whole wretched mob flung themselves in a heap upon the pavement, struggling, lighting, tumbling one over another, and then looking up to the windows with petitionary gestures for more and more, and still for more. Doubtless, they had need enough, for they looked thin, sickly, ill-fed, and the women ugly to the last degree. The wedding party had a breakfast above stairs, which lasted till four o'clock, and then the bridegroom took his bride in a barouche and pair, which was already crammed with his own luggage and hers. . . . He was a well-looking young man enough, in a uniform of French gray with silver epaulets; more agreeable in aspect than his bride, who, I think, will have the upper hand in their domestic life. I observed that, on getting into the barouche, he sat down on her dress, as he could not well help doing, and received a slight reprimand in consequence. After their departure, the wedding guests took their leave; the most noteworthy person being the Pope's Nuncio (the young man being son of the Pope's Chamberlain, and one of the Grand Duke's Noble Guard), an ecclesiastical personage in purple stockings, attended by two priests, all of whom got into a coach, the driver and footmen of which wore gold-laced cocked hats and other splendors. To-day I paid a short visit to the gallery of the Pitti Palace. I looked long at a Madonna of Raphael's, the one which is usually kept in the Grand Duke's private apartments, only brought into the public gallery for the purpose of being copied. It is the holiest of all Raphael's Madonnas, with a great reserve in the expression, a sense of being apart, and yet with the utmost tenderness and sweetness; although she drops her eyelids before her like a veil, as it were, and has a primness of eternal virginity about the mouth. It is one of Raphael's earlier works, when he mixed more religious sentiment with his paint than afterwards. Perugino's pictures give the impression of greater sincerity and earnestness than Raphael's, though the genius of Raphael often gave him miraculous vision. July 28th.--Last evening we went to the Powers's, and sat with them on the terrace, at the top of the house, till nearly ten o'clock. It was a delightful, calm, summer evening, and we were elevated far above all the adjacent roofs, and had a prospect of the greater part of Florence and its towers, and the surrounding hills, while directly beneath us rose the trees of a garden, and they hardly sent their summits higher than we sat. At a little distance, with only a house or two between, was a theatre in full action, the Teatro Goldoni, which is an open amphitheatre, in the ancient fashion, without any roof. We could see the upper part of the proscenium, and, had we been a little nearer, might have seen the whole performance, as did several boys who crept along the tops of the surrounding houses. As it was, we heard the music and the applause, and now and then an actor's stentorian tones, when we chose to listen. Mrs. P------ and my wife, U---- and Master Bob, sat in a group together, and chatted in one corner of our aerial drawing-room, while Mr. Powers and myself leaned against the parapet, and talked of innumerable things. When the clocks struck the hour, or the bells rang from the steeples, as they are continually doing, I spoke of the sweetness of the Florence bells, the tones of some of them being as if the bell were full of liquid melody, and shed it through the air on being upturned. I had supposed, in my lack of musical ear, that the bells of the Campanile were the sweetest; but Mr. Powers says that there is a defect in their tone, and that the bell of the Palazzo Vecchio is the most melodious he ever heard. Then he spoke of his having been a manufacturer of organs, or, at least, of reeds for organs, at one period of his life. I wonder what he has not been! He told me of an invention of his in the musical line, a jewsharp with two tongues; and by and by he produced it for my inspection. It was carefully kept in a little wooden case, and was very neatly and elaborately constructed, with screws to tighten it, and a silver centre-piece between the two tongues. Evidently a great deal of thought had been bestowed on this little harp; but Mr. Powers told me that it was an utter failure, because the tongues were apt to interfere and jar with one another, although the strain of music was very sweet and melodious-- as he proved, by playing on it a little--when everything went right. It was a youthful production, and he said that its failure had been a great disappointment to him at the time; whereupon I congratulated him that his failures had been in small matters, and his successes in great ones. We talked, furthermore, about instinct and reason, and whether the brute creation have souls, and, if they have none, how justice is to be done them for their sufferings here; and Mr. Powers came finally to the conclusion that brutes suffer only in appearance, and that God enjoys for them all that they seem to enjoy, and that man is the only intelligent and sentient being. We reasoned high about other states of being; and I suggested the possibility that there might be beings inhabiting this earth, contemporaneously with us, and close beside us, but of whose existence and whereabout we could have no perception, nor they of ours, because we are endowed with different sets of senses; for certainly it was in God's power to create beings who should communicate with nature by innumerable other senses than those few which we possess. Mr. Powers gave hospitable reception to this idea, and said that it had occurred to himself; and he has evidently thought much and earnestly about such matters; but is apt to let his idea crystallize into a theory, before he can have sufficient data for it. He is a Swedenborgian in faith. The moon had risen behind the trees, while we were talking, and Powers intimated his idea that beings analogous to men--men in everything except the modifications necessary to adapt them to their physical circumstances--inhabited the planets, and peopled them with beautiful shapes. Each planet, however, must have its own standard of the beautiful, I suppose; and probably his sculptor's eye would not see much to admire in the proportions of an inhabitant of Saturn. The atmosphere of Florence, at least when we ascend a little way into it, suggests planetary speculations. Galileo found it so, and Mr. Powers and I pervaded the whole universe; but finally crept down his garret-stairs, and parted, with a friendly pressure of the hand. VILLA MONTANTO. MONTE BENI. August 2d.--We had grown weary of the heat of Florence within the walls, . . . . there being little opportunity for air and exercise except within the precincts of our little garden, which, also, we feared might breed malaria, or something akin to it. We have therefore taken this suburban villa for the two next months, and, yesterday morning, we all came out hither. J----- had preceded us with B. P------. The villa is on a hill called Bellosguardo, about a mile beyond the Porta Romana. Less than half an hour's walk brought us, who were on foot, to the iron gate of our villa, which we found shut and locked. We shouted to be let in, and while waiting for somebody to appear, there was a good opportunity to contemplate the external aspect of the villa. After we had waited a few minutes, J----- came racing down to the gate, laughing heartily, and said that Bob and he had been in the house, but had come out, shutting the door behind them; and as the door closed with a springlock, they could not get in again. Now as the key of the outer gate as well as that of the house itself was in the pocket of J-----'s coat, left inside, we were shut out of our own castle, and compelled to carry on a siege against it, without much likelihood of taking it, although the garrison was willing to surrender. But B. P------ called in the assistance of the contadini who cultivate the ground, and live in the farm-house close by; and one of them got into a window by means of a ladder, so that the keys were got, the gates opened, and we finally admitted. Before examining any other part of the house, we climbed to the top of the tower, which, indeed, is not very high, in proportion to its massive square. Very probably, its original height was abbreviated, in compliance with the law that lowered so many of the fortified towers of noblemen within the walls of Florence. . . . The stairs were not of stone, built in with the original mass of the tower, as in English castles, but of now decayed wood, which shook beneath us, and grew more and more crazy as we ascended. It will not be many years before the height of the tower becomes unattainable. . . . Near at hand, in the vicinity of the city, we saw the convent of Monte Olivetto, and other structures that looked like convents, being built round an enclosed square; also numerous white villas, many of which had towers, like that we were standing upon, square and massive, some of them battlemented on the summit, and others apparently modernized for domestic purposes. Among them U---- pointed out Galileo's tower, whither she made an excursion the other day. It looked lower than our own, but seemed to stand on a higher elevation. We also saw the duke's villa, the Poggio, with a long avenue of cypresses leading from it, as if a funeral were going forth. And having wasted thus much of description on the landscape, I will finish with saying that it lacked only water to be a very fine one. It is strange what a difference the gleam of water makes, and how a scene awakens and comes to life wherever it is visible. The landscape, moreover, gives the beholder (at least, this beholder) a sense of oppressive sunshine and scanty shade, and does not incite a longing to wander through it on foot, as a really delightful landscape should. The vine, too, being cultivated in so trim a manner, does not suggest that idea of luxuriant fertility, which is the poetical notion of a vineyard. The olive-orchards have a pale and unlovely hue. An English view would have been incomparably richer in its never-fading green; and in my own country, the wooded hills would have been more delightful than these peaks and ridges of dreary and barren sunshine; and there would have been the bright eyes of half a dozen little lakes, looking heavenward, within an extent like that of the Val d' Arno. By and by mamma's carriage came along the dusty road, and passed through the iron gateway, which we had left open for her reception. We shouted down to her and R-----, and they waved their handkerchiefs upward to us; and, on my way down, I met R----- and the servant coming up through the ghostly rooms. The rest of the day we spent mostly in exploring the premises. The house itself is of almost bewildering extent, insomuch that we might each of us have a suite of rooms individually. I have established myself on the ground-floor, where I have a dressing-room, a large vaulted saloon, hung with yellow damask, and a square writing-study, the walls and ceilings of the two latter apartments being ornamented with angels and cherubs aloft in fresco, and with temples, statues, vases, broken columns, peacocks, parrots, vines, and sunflowers below. I know not how many more saloons, anterooms, and sleeping-chambers there are on this same basement story, besides an equal number over them, and a great subterranean establishment. I saw some immense jars there, which I suppose were intended to hold oil; and iron kettles, for what purpose I cannot tell. There is also a chapel in the house, but it is locked up, and we cannot yet with certainty find the door of it, nor even, in this great wilderness of a house, decide absolutely what space the holy precincts occupy. Adjoining U----'s chamber, which is in the tower, there is a little oratory, hung round with sacred prints of very ancient date, and with crucifixes, holy-water vases, and other consecrated things; and here, within a glass case, there is the representation of an undraped little boy in wax, very prettily modelled, and holding up a heart that looks like a bit of red sealing-wax. If I had found him anywhere else I should have taken him for Cupid; but, being in an oratory, I presume him to have some religious signification. In the servants' room a crucifix hung on one side of the bed, and a little vase for holy water, now overgrown with a cobweb, on the other; and, no doubt, all the other sleeping-apartments would have been equally well provided, only that their occupants were to be heretics. The lower floor of the house is tolerably furnished, and looks cheerful with its frescos, although the bare pavements in every room give an impression of discomfort. But carpets are universally taken up in Italy during summer-time. It must have been an immense family that could have ever filled such a house with life. We go on voyages of discovery, and when in quest of any particular point, are likely enough to fetch up at some other. This morning I had difficulty in finding my way again to the top of the tower. One of the most peculiar rooms is constructed close to the tower, under the roof of the main building, but with no external walls on two sides! It is thus left open to the air, I presume for the sake of coolness. A parapet runs round the exposed sides for the sake of security. Some of the palaces in Florence have such open loggias in their upper stories, and I saw others on our journey hither, after arriving in Tuscany. The grounds immediately around the house are laid out in gravel-walks, and ornamented with shrubbery, and with what ought to be a grassy lawn; but the Italian sun is quite as little favorable to beauty of that kind as our own. I have enjoyed the luxury, however, almost for the first time since I left my hill-top at the Wayside, of flinging myself at full length on the ground without any fear of catching cold. Moist England would punish a man soundly for taking such liberties with her greensward. A podere, or cultivated tract, comprising several acres, belongs to the villa, and seems to be fertile, like all the surrounding country. The possessions of different proprietors are not separated by fences, but only marked out by ditches; and it seems possible to walk miles and miles, along the intersecting paths, without obstruction. The rural laborers, so far as I have observed, go about in their shirt-sleeves, and look very much like tanned and sunburnt Yankees. Last night it was really a work of time and toil to go about making our defensive preparations for the night; first closing the iron gate, then the ponderous and complicated fastenings of the house door, then the separate barricadoes of each iron-barred window on the lower floor, with a somewhat slighter arrangement above. There are bolts and shutters, however, for every window in the house, and I suppose it would not be amiss to put them all in use. Our garrison is so small that we must depend more upon the strength of our fortifications than upon our own active efforts in case of an attack. In England, in an insulated country house, we should need all these bolts and bars, and Italy is not thought to be the safer country of the two. It deserves to be recorded that the Count Montanto, a nobleman, and seemingly a man of property, should deem it worth while to let his country seat, and reside during the hot months in his palace in the city, for the consideration of a comparatively small sum a month. He seems to contemplate returning hither for the autumn and winter, when the situation must be very windy and bleak, and the cold death-like in these great halls; and then, it is to be supposed, he will let his palace in town. The Count, through the agency of his son, bargained very stiffly for, and finally obtained, three dollars in addition to the sum which we at first offered him. This indicates that even a little money is still a matter of great moment in Italy. Signor del Bello, who, I believe, is also a nobleman, haggled with us about some cracked crockery at our late residence, and finally demanded and received fifty cents in compensation. But this poor gentleman has been a spendthrift, and now acts as the agent of another. August 3d.--Yesterday afternoon William Story called on me, he being on a day or two's excursion from Siena, where he is spending the summer with his family. He was very entertaining and conversative, as usual, and said, in reply to my question whether he were not anxious to return to Cleopatra, that he had already sketched out another subject for sculpture, which would employ him during next winter. He told me, what I was glad to hear, that his sketches of Italian life, intended for the "Atlantic Monthly," and supposed to be lost, have been recovered. Speaking of the superstitiousness of the Italians, he said that they universally believe in the influence of the evil eye. The evil influence is supposed not to be dependent on the will of the possessor of the evil eye; on the contrary, the persons to whom he wishes well are the very ones to suffer by it. It is oftener found in monks than in any other class of people; and on meeting a monk, and encountering his eye, an Italian usually makes a defensive sign by putting both hands behind him, with the forefingers and little fingers extended, although it is a controverted point whether it be not more efficacious to extend the hand with its outspread fingers towards the suspected person. It is considered an evil omen to meet a monk on first going out for the day. The evil eye may be classified with the phenomena of mesmerism. The Italians, especially the Neapolitans, very generally wear amulets. Pio Nono, perhaps as being the chief of all monks and other religious people, is supposed to have an evil eye of tenfold malignancy; and its effect has been seen in the ruin of all schemes for the public good so soon as they are favored by him. When the pillar in the Piazza de' Spagna, commemorative of his dogma of the Immaculate Conception, was to be erected, the people of Rome refused to be present, or to have anything to do with it, unless the pope promised to abstain from interference. His Holiness did promise, but so far broke his word as to be present one day while it was being erected, and on that day a man was killed. A little while ago there was a Lord Clifford, an English Catholic nobleman, residing in Italy, and, happening to come to Rome, he sent his compliments to Pio Nono, and requested the favor of an interview. The pope, as it happened, was indisposed, or for some reason could not see his lordship, but very kindly sent him his blessing. Those who knew of it shook their heads, and intimated that it would go ill with his lordship now that he had been blessed by Pio Nono, and the very next day poor Lord Clifford was dead! His Holiness had better construe the scriptural injunction literally, and take to blessing his enemies. I walked into town with J------ this morning, and, meeting a monk in the Via Furnace, I thought it no more than reasonable, as the good father fixed his eyes on me, to provide against the worst by putting both hands behind me, with the forefingers and little fingers stuck out. In speaking of the little oratory connected with U----'s chamber, I forgot to mention the most remarkable object in it. It is a skull, the size of life (or death). . . . This part of the house must be very old, probably coeval with the tower. The ceiling of U----'s apartment is vaulted with intersecting arches; and adjoining it is a very large saloon, likewise with a vaulted and groined ceiling, and having a cushioned divan running all round the walls. The windows of these rooms look out on the Val d' Arno. The apartment above this saloon is of the same size, and hung with engraved portraits, printed on large sheets by the score and hundred together, and enclosed in wooden frames. They comprise the whole series of Roman emperors, the succession of popes, the kings of Europe, the doges of Venice, and the sultans of Turkey. The engravings bear different dates between 1685 and thirty years later, and were executed at Rome. August 4th.--We ascended our tower yesterday afternoon to see the sunset. In my first sketch of the Val d' Arno I said that the Arno seemed to hold its course near the bases of the hills. I now observe that the line of trees which marks its current divides the valley into two pretty equal parts, and the river runs nearly east and west. . . . At last, when it was growing dark, we went down, groping our way over the shaky staircases, and peeping into each dark chamber as we passed. I gratified J----- exceedingly by hitting my nose against the wall. Reaching the bottom, I went into the great saloon, and stood at a window watching the lights twinkle forth, near and far, in the valley, and listening to the convent bells that sounded from Monte Olivetto, and more remotely still. The stars came out, and the constellation of the Dipper hung exactly over the Val d' Arno, pointing to the North Star above the hills on my right. August 12th.--We drove into town yesterday afternoon, with Miss Blagden, to call on Mr. Kirkup, an old Englishman who has resided a great many years in Florence. He is noted as an antiquarian, and has the reputation of being a necromancer, not undeservedly, as he is deeply interested in spirit-rappings, and holds converse, through a medium, with dead poets and emperors. He lives in an old house, formerly a residence of the Knights Templars, hanging over the Arno, just as you come upon the Ponte Vecchio; and, going up a dark staircase and knocking at a door on one side of the landing-place, we were received by Mr. Kirkup. He had had notice of our visit, and was prepared for it, being dressed in a blue frock-coat of rather an old fashion, with a velvet collar, and in a thin waistcoat and pantaloons fresh from the drawer; looking very sprucely, in short, and unlike his customary guise, for Miss Blagden hinted to us that the poor gentleman is generally so untidy that it is not quite pleasant to take him by the hand. He is rather low of stature, with a pale, shrivelled face, and hair and beard perfectly white, and the hair of a particularly soft and silken texture. He has a high, thin nose, of the English aristocratic type; his eyes have a queer, rather wild look, and the eyebrows are arched above them, so that he seems all the time to be seeing something that strikes him with surprise. I judged him to be a little crack-brained, chiefly on the strength of this expression. His whole make is delicate, his hands white and small, and his appearance and manners those of a gentleman, with rather more embroidery of courtesy than belongs to an Englishman. He appeared to be very nervous, tremulous, indeed, to his fingers' ends, without being in any degree disturbed or embarrassed by our presence. Finally, he is very deaf; an infirmity that quite took away my pleasure in the interview, because it is impossible to say anything worth while when one is compelled to raise one's voice above its ordinary level. He ushered us through two or three large rooms, dark, dusty, hung with antique-looking pictures, and lined with bookcases containing, I doubt not, a very curious library. Indeed, he directed my attention to one case, and said that he had collected those works, in former days, merely for the sake of laughing at them. They were books of magic and occult sciences. What he seemed really to value, however, were some manuscript copies of Dante, of which he showed us two: one, a folio on parchment, beautifully written in German text, the letters as clear and accurately cut as printed type; the other a small volume, fit, as Mr. Kirkup said, to be carried in a capacious mediaeval sleeve. This also was on vellum, and as elegantly executed as the larger one; but the larger had beautiful illuminations, the vermilion and gold of which looked as brilliant now as they did five centuries ago. Both of these books were written early in the fourteenth century. Mr. Kirkup has also a plaster cast of Dante's face, which he believes to be the original one taken from his face after death; and he has likewise his own accurate tracing from Giotto's fresco of Dante in the chapel of the Bargello. This fresco was discovered through Mr. Kirkup's means, and the tracing is particularly valuable, because the original has been almost destroyed by rough usage in drawing out a nail that had been driven into the eye. It represents the profile of a youthful but melancholy face, and has the general outline of Dante's features in other portraits. Dante has held frequent communications with Mr. Kirkup through a medium, the poet being described by the medium as wearing the same dress seen in the youthful portrait, but as hearing more resemblance to the cast taken from his dead face than to the picture from his youthful one. There was a very good picture of Savonarola in one of the rooms, and many other portraits, paintings, and drawings, some of them ancient, and others the work of Mr. Kirkup himself. He has the torn fragment of an exquisite drawing of a nude figure by Rubens, and a portfolio of other curious drawings. And besides books and works of art, he has no end of antique knick-knackeries, none of which we had any time to look at; among others some instruments with which nuns used to torture themselves in their convents by way of penance. But the greatest curiosity of all, and no antiquity, was a pale, large-eyed little girl, about four years old, who followed the conjurer's footsteps wherever he went. She was the brightest and merriest little thing in the world, and frisked through those shadowy old chambers, among the dead people's trumpery, as gayly as a butterfly flits among flowers and sunshine. The child's mother was a beautiful girl named Regina, whose portrait Mr. Kirkup showed us on the wall. I never saw a more beautiful and striking face claiming to be a real one. She was a Florentine, of low birth, and she lived with the old necromancer as his spiritual medium. He showed us a journal, kept during her lifetime, and read from it his notes of an interview with the Czar Alexander, when that potentate communicated to Mr. Kirkup that he had been poisoned. The necromancer set a great value upon Regina, . . . . and when she died he received her poor baby into his heart, and now considers it absolutely his own. At any rate, it is a happy belief for him, since he has nothing else in the world to love, and loves the child entirely, and enjoys all the bliss of fatherhood, though he must have lived as much as seventy years before he began to taste it. The child inherits her mother's gift of communication with the spiritual world, so that the conjurer can still talk with Regina through the baby which she left, and not only with her, but with Dante, and any other great spirit that may choose to visit him. It is a very strange story, and this child might be put at once into a romance, with all her history and environment; the ancient Knight Templar palace, with the Arno flowing under the iron-barred windows, and the Ponte Vecchio, covered with its jewellers' shops, close at hand; the dark, lofty chambers with faded frescos on the ceilings, black pictures hanging on the walls, old books on the shelves, and hundreds of musty antiquities, emitting an odor of past centuries; the shrivelled, white-bearded old man, thinking all the time of ghosts, and looking into the child's eyes to seek them; and the child herself, springing so freshly out of the soil, so pretty, so intelligent, so playful, with never a playmate save the conjurer and a kitten. It is a Persian kitten, and lay asleep in a window; but when I touched it, it started up at once in as gamesome a mood as the child herself. The child looks pale, and no wonder, seldom or never stirring out of that old palace, or away from the river atmosphere. Miss Blagden advised Mr. Kirkup to go with her to the seaside or into the country, and he did not deny that it might do her good, but seemed to be hampered by an old man's sluggishness and dislike of change. I think he will not live a great while, for he seems very frail. When he dies the little girl will inherit what property he may leave. A lady, Catharine Fleeting, an Englishwoman, and a friend of Mr. Kirkup, has engaged to take her in charge. She followed us merrily to the door, and so did the Persian kitten, and Mr. Kirkup shook hands with us, over and over again, with vivacious courtesy, his manner having been characterized by a great deal of briskness throughout the interview. He expressed himself delighted to have met one (whose books he had read), and said that the day would be a memorable one to him,--which I did not in the least believe. Mr. Kirkup is an intimate friend of Trelawny, author of "Adventures of a Younger Son," and, long ago, the latter promised him that, if he ever came into possession of the family estate, he would divide it with him. Trelawny did really succeed to the estate, and lost no time in forwarding to his friend the legal documents, entitling him to half of the property. But Mr. Kirkup declined the gift, as he himself was not destitute, and Trelawny had a brother. There were two pictures of Trelawny in the saloons, one a slight sketch on the wall, the other a half-length portrait in a Turkish dress; both handsome, but indicating no very amiable character. It is not easy to forgive Trelawny for uncovering dead Byron's limbs, and telling that terrible story about them,--equally disgraceful to himself, be it truth or a lie. It seems that Regina had a lover, and a sister who was very disreputable It rather adds than otherwise to the romance of the affair,--the idea that this pretty little elf has no right whatever to the asylum which she has found. Her name is Imogen. The small manuscript copy of Dante which he showed me was written by a Florentine gentleman of the fourteenth century, one of whose ancestors the poet had met and talked with in Paradise. August 19th.--Here is a good Italian incident, which I find in Valery. Andrea del Castagno was a painter in Florence in the fifteenth century; and he had a friend, likewise a painter, Domenico of Venice. The latter had the secret of painting in oils, and yielded to Castagno's entreaties to impart it to him. Desirous of being the sole possessor of this great secret, Castagno waited only the night to assassinate Domenico, who so little suspected his treachery, that he besought those who found him bleeding and dying to take him to his friend Castagno, that he might die in his arms. The murderer lived to be seventy-four years old, and his crime was never suspected till he himself revealed it on his death-bed. Domenico did actually die in Castagno's arms. The death scene would have been a good one for the latter to paint in oils. September 1st.--Few things journalizable have happened during the last month, because Florence and the neighborhood have lost their novelty; and furthermore, I usually spend the whole day at home, having been engaged in planning and sketching out a romance. I have now done with this for the present, and mean to employ the rest of the time we stay here chiefly in revisiting the galleries, and seeing what remains to be seen in Florence. Last Saturday, August 28th, we went to take tea at Miss Blagden's, who has a weekly reception on that evening. We found Mr. Powers there, and by and by Mr. Boott and Mr. Trollope came in. Miss ------ has lately been exercising her faculties as a spiritual writing-medium; and, the conversation turning on that subject, Mr. Powers related some things that he had witnessed through the agency of Mr. Home, who had held a session or two at his house. He described the apparition of two mysterious hands from beneath a table round which the party were seated. These hands purported to belong to the aunt of the Countess Cotterel, who was present, and were a pair of thin, delicate, aged, lady-like hands and arms, appearing at the edge of the table, and terminating at the elbow in a sort of white mist. One of the hands took up a fan and began to use it. The countess then said, "Fan yourself as you used to do, dear aunt"; and forthwith the hands waved the fan back and forth in a peculiar manner, which the countess recognized as the manner of her dead aunt. The spirit was then requested to fan each member of the party; and accordingly, each separate individual round the table was fanned in turn, and felt the breeze sensibly upon his face. Finally, the hands sank beneath the table, I believe Mr. Powers said; but I am not quite sure that they did not melt into the air. During this apparition, Mr. Home sat at the table, but not in such a position or within such distance that he could have put out or managed the spectral hands; and of this Mr. Powers satisfied himself by taking precisely the same position after the party had retired. Mr. Powers did not feel the hands at this time, but he afterwards felt the touch of infant hands, which were at the time invisible. He told of many of the wonders, which seem to have as much right to be set down as facts as anything else that depends on human testimony. For example, Mr. K------, one of the party, gave a sudden start and exclamation. He had felt on his knee a certain token, which could have been given him only by a friend, long ago in his grave. Mr. Powers inquired what was the last thing that had been given as a present to a deceased child; and suddenly both he and his wife felt a prick as of some sharp instrument, on their knees. The present had been a penknife. I have forgotten other incidents quite as striking as these; but, with the exception of the spirit-hands, they seemed to be akin to those that have been produced by mesmerism, returning the inquirer's thoughts and veiled recollections to himself, as answers to his queries. The hands are certainly an inexplicable phenomenon. Of course, they are not portions of a dead body, nor any other kind of substance; they are impressions on the two senses, sight and touch, but how produced I cannot tell. Even admitting their appearance,--and certainly I do admit it as freely and fully as if I had seen them myself,--there is no need of supposing them to come from the world of departed spirits. Powers seems to put entire faith in the verity of spiritual communications, while acknowledging the difficulty of identifying spirits as being what they pretend to be. He is a Swedenborgian, and so far prepared to put faith in many of these phenomena. As for Home, Powers gives a decided opinion that he is a knave, but thinks him so organized, nevertheless, as to be a particularly good medium for spiritual communications. Spirits, I suppose, like earthly people, are obliged to use such instruments as will answer their purposes; but rather than receive a message from a dead friend through the organism of a rogue or charlatan, methinks I would choose to wait till we meet. But what most astonishes me is the indifference with which I listen to these marvels. They throw old ghost stories quite into the shade; they bring the whole world of spirits down amongst us, visibly and audibly; they are absolutely proved to be sober facts by evidence that would satisfy us of any other alleged realities; and yet I cannot force my mind to interest myself in them. They are facts to my understanding, which, it might have been anticipated, would have been the last to acknowledge them; but they seem not to be facts to my intuitions and deeper perceptions. My inner soul does not in the least admit them; there is a mistake somewhere. So idle and empty do I feel these stories to be, that I hesitated long whether or no to give up a few pages of this not very important journal to the record of them. We have had written communications through Miss ------ with several spirits; my wife's father, mother, two brothers, and a sister, who died long ago, in infancy; a certain Mary Hall, who announces herself as the guardian spirit of Miss ------; and, queerest of all, a Mary Runnel, who seems to be a wandering spirit, having relations with nobody, but thrusts her finger into everybody's affairs. My wife's mother is the principal communicant; she expresses strong affection, and rejoices at the opportunity of conversing with her daughter. She often says very pretty things; for instance, in a dissertation upon heavenly music; but there is a lack of substance in her talk, a want of gripe, a delusive show, a sentimental surface, with no bottom beneath it. The same sort of thing has struck me in all the poetry and prose that I have read from spiritual sources. I should judge that these effusions emanated from earthly minds, but had undergone some process that had deprived them of solidity and warmth. In the communications between my wife and her mother, I cannot help thinking that (Miss ------ being unconsciously in a mesmeric state) all the responses are conveyed to her fingers from my wife's mind. . . . We have tried the spirits by various test questions, on every one of which they have failed egregiously. Here, however, the aforesaid Mary Runnel comes into play. The other spirits have told us that the veracity of this spirit is not to be depended upon; and so, whenever it is possible, poor Mary Runnel is thrust forward to bear the odium of every mistake or falsehood. They have avowed themselves responsible for all statements signed by themselves, and have thereby brought themselves into more than one inextricable dilemma; but it is very funny, where a response or a matter of fact has not been thus certified, how invariably Mary Runnel is made to assume the discredit of it, on its turning out to be false. It is the most ingenious arrangement that could possibly have been contrived; and somehow or other, the pranks of this lying spirit give a reality to the conversations which the more respectable ghosts quite fail in imparting. The whole matter seems to me a sort of dreaming awake. It resembles a dream, in that the whole material is, from the first, in the dreamer's mind, though concealed at various depths below the surface; the dead appear alive, as they always do in dreams; unexpected combinations occur, as continually in dreams; the mind speaks through the various persons of the drama, and sometimes astonishes itself with its own wit, wisdom, and eloquence, as often in dreams; but, in both cases, the intellectual manifestations are really of a very flimsy texture. Mary Runnel is the only personage who does not come evidently from dream-land; and she, I think, represents that lurking scepticism, that sense of unreality, of which we are often conscious, amid the most vivid phantasmagoria of a dream. I should be glad to believe in the genuineness of these spirits, if I could; but the above is the conclusion to which my soberest thoughts tend. There remains, of course, a great deal for which I cannot account, and I cannot sufficiently wonder at the pigheadedness both of metaphysicians and physiologists, in not accepting the phenomena, so far as to make them the subject of investigation. In writing the communications, Miss ------ holds the pencil rather loosely between her fingers; it moves rapidly, and with equal facility whether she fixes her eyes on the paper or not. The handwriting has far more freedom than her own. At the conclusion of a sentence, the pencil lays itself down. She sometimes has a perception of each word before it is written; at other times, she is quite unconscious what is to come next. Her integrity is absolutely indubitable, and she herself totally disbelieves in the spiritual authenticity of what is communicated through her medium. September 3d.--We walked into Florence yesterday, betimes after breakfast, it being comfortably cool, and a gray, English sky; though, indeed, the clouds had a tendency to mass themselves more than they do on an overcast English day. We found it warmer in Florence, but, not inconveniently so, even in the sunniest streets and squares. We went to the Uffizi gallery, the whole of which with its contents is now familiar to us, except the room containing drawings; and our to-day's visit was especially to them. The door giving admittance to them is the very last in the gallery; and the rooms, three in number, are, I should judge, over the Loggia de' Lanzi, looking on the Grand Ducal Piazza. The drawings hang on the walls, framed and glazed; and number, perhaps, from one to two hundred in each room; but this is only a small portion of the collection, which amounts, it is said, to twenty thousand, and is reposited in portfolios. The sketches on the walls are changed, from time to time, so as to exhibit all the most interesting ones in turn. Their whole charm is artistic, imaginative, and intellectual, and in no degree of the upholstery kind; their outward presentment being, in general, a design hastily shadowed out, by means of colored crayons, on tinted paper, or perhaps scratched rudely in pen and ink; or drawn in pencil or charcoal, and half rubbed out; very rough things, indeed, in many instances, and the more interesting on that account, because it seems as if the artist had bestirred himself to catch the first glimpse of an image that did but reveal itself and vanish. The sheets, or sometimes scraps of paper, on which they are drawn, are discolored with age, creased, soiled; but yet you are magnetized by the hand of Raphael, Michael Angelo, Leonardo, or whoever may have jotted down those rough-looking master-touches. They certainly possess a charm that is lost in the finished picture; and I was more sensible of forecasting thought, skill, and prophetic design, in these sketches than in the most consummate works that have been elaborated from them. There is something more divine in these; for I suppose the first idea of a picture is real inspiration, and all the subsequent elaboration of the master serves but to cover up the celestial germ with something that belongs to himself. At any rate, the first sketch is the more suggestive, and sets the spectator's imagination at work; whereas the picture, if a good one, leaves him nothing to do; if bad, it confuses, stupefies, disenchants, and disheartens him. First thoughts have an aroma and fragrance in them, that they do not lose in three hundred years; for so old, and a good deal more, are some of these sketches. None interested me more than some drawings, on separate pieces of paper, by Perugino, for his picture of the mother and friends of Jesus round his dead body, now at the Pitti Palace. The attendant figures are distinctly made out, as if the Virgin, and John, and Mary Magdalen had each favored the painter with a sitting; but the body of Jesus lies in the midst, dimly hinted with a few pencil-marks. There were several designs by Michael Angelo, none of which made much impression on me; the most striking was a very ugly demon, afterwards painted in the Sistine Chapel. Raphael shows several sketches of Madonnas,--one of which has flowered into the Grand Duke's especial Madonna at the Pitti Palace, but with a different face. His sketches were mostly very rough in execution; but there were two or three designs for frescos, I think, in the Vatican, very carefully executed; perhaps because these works were mainly to be done by other hands than his own. It seems to one that the Pre-Raphaelite artists made more careful drawings than the later ones; and it rather surprised me to see how much science they possessed. We looked at few other things in the gallery; and, indeed, it was not one of the days when works of art find me impressible. We stopped a little while in the Tribune, but the Venus de' Medici seemed to me to-day little more than any other piece of yellowish white marble. How strange that a goddess should stand before us absolutely unrecognized, even when we know by previous revelations that she is nothing short of divine! It is also strange that, unless when one feels the ideal charm of a statue, it becomes one of the most tedious and irksome things in the world. Either it must be a celestial thing or an old lump of stone, dusty and time-soiled, and tiring out your patience with eternally looking just the same. Once in a while you penetrate through the crust of the old sameness, and see the statue forever new and immortally young. Leaving the gallery we walked towards the Duomo, and on our way stopped to look at the beautiful Gothic niches hollowed into the exterior walls of the Church of San Michele. They are now in the process of being cleaned, and each niche is elaborately inlaid with precious marbles, and some of them magnificently gilded; and they are all surmounted with marble canopies as light and graceful as frost-work. Within stand statues, St. George, and many other saints, by Donatello and others, and all taking a hold upon one's sympathies, even if they be not beautiful. Classic statues escape you with their slippery beauty, as if they were made of ice. Rough and ugly things can be clutched. This is nonsense, and yet it means something. . . . The streets were thronged and vociferative with more life and outcry than usual. It must have been market-day in Florence, for the commerce of the streets was in great vigor, narrow tables being set out in them, and in the squares, burdened with all kinds of small merchandise, such as cheap jewelry, glistening as brightly as what we had just seen in the gem-room of the Uffizi; crockery ware; toys, books, Italian and French; silks; slippers; old iron; all advertised by the dealers with terribly loud and high voices, that reverberated harshly from side to side of the narrow streets. Italian street-cries go through the head; not that they are so very sharp, but exceedingly hard, like a blunt iron bar. We stood at the base of the Campanile, and looked at the bas-reliefs which wreathe it round; and, above them, a row of statues; and from bottom to top a marvellous minuteness of inlaid marbles, filling up the vast and beautiful design of this heaven-aspiring tower. Looking upward to its lofty summit,--where angels might alight, lapsing downward from heaven, and gaze curiously at the bustle of men below,--I could not but feel that there is a moral charm in this faithful minuteness of Gothic architecture, filling up its outline with a million of beauties that perhaps may never be studied out by a single spectator. It is the very process of nature, and no doubt produces an effect that we know not of. Classic architecture is nothing but an outline, and affords no little points, no interstices where human feelings may cling and overgrow it like ivy. The charm, as I said, seems to be moral rather than intellectual; for in the gem-room of the Uffizi you may see fifty designs, elaborated on a small scale, that have just as much merit as the design of the Campanile. If it were only five inches long, it might be a case for some article of toilet; being two hundred feet high, its prettiness develops into grandeur as well as beauty, and it becomes really one of the wonders of the world. The design of the Pantheon, on the contrary, would retain its sublimity on whatever scale it might be represented. Returning homewards, we crossed the Ponte Vecchio, and went to the Museum of Natural History, where we gained admittance into the rooms dedicated to Galileo. They consist of a vestibule, a saloon, and a semicircular tribune, covered with a frescoed dome, beneath which stands a colossal statue of Galileo, long-bearded, and clad in a student's gown, or some voluminous garb of that kind. Around the tribune, beside and behind the statue, are six niches,--in one of which is preserved a forefinger of Galileo, fixed on a little gilt pedestal, and pointing upward, under a glass cover. It is very much shrivelled and mummy-like, of the color of parchment, and is little more than a finger-bone, with the dry skin or flesh flaking away from it; on the whole, not a very delightful relic; but Galileo used to point heavenward with this finger, and I hope has gone whither he pointed. Another niche contains two telescopes, wherewith he made some of his discoveries; they are perhaps a yard long, and of very small calibre. Other astronomical instruments are displayed in the glass cases that line the rooms; but I did not understand their use any better than the monks, who wished to burn Galileo for his heterodoxy about the planetary system. . . . After dinner I climbed the tower. . . . Florence lay in the sunshine, level, compact, and small of compass. Above the tiled roofs rose the tower of the Palazzo Vecchio, the loftiest and the most picturesque, though built, I suppose, with no idea of making it so. But it attains, in a singular degree, the end of causing the imagination to fly upward and alight on its airy battlements. Near it I beheld the square mass of Or San Michele, and farther to the left the bulky Duomo and the Campanile close beside it, like a slender bride or daughter; the dome of San Lorenzo too. The Arno is nowhere visible. Beyond, and on all sides of the city, the hills pile themselves lazily upward in ridges, here and there developing into a peak; towards their bases white villas were strewn numerously, but the upper region was lonely and bare. As we passed under the arch of the Porta Romana this morning, on our way into the city, we saw a queer object. It was what we at first took for a living man, in a garb of light reddish or yellowish red color, of antique or priestly fashion, and with a cowl falling behind. His face was of the same hue, and seemed to have been powdered, as the faces of maskers sometimes are. He sat in a cart, which he seemed to be driving into the Deity with a load of earthen jars and pipkins, the color of which was precisely like his own. On closer inspection, this priestly figure proved to be likewise an image of earthenware, but his lifelikeness had a very strange and rather ghastly effect. Adam, perhaps, was made of just such red earth, and had the complexion of this figure. September 7th.--I walked into town yesterday morning, by way of the Porta San Frediano. The gate of a city might be a good locality for a chapter in a novel, or for a little sketch by itself, whether by painter or writer. The great arch of the gateway, piercing through the depth and height of the massive masonry beneath the battlemented summit; the shadow brooding below, in the immense thickness of the wall and beyond it, the vista of the street, sunny and swarming with life; outside of the gate, a throng of carts, laden with fruits, vegetables, small flat barrels of wine, waiting to be examined by the custom-house officers; carriages too, and foot-passengers entering, and others swarming outward. Under the shadowy arch are the offices of the police and customs, and probably the guard-room of the soldiers, all hollowed out in the mass of the gateway. Civil officers loll on chairs in the shade, perhaps with an awning over their heads. Where the sun falls aslantwise under the arch a sentinel, with musket and bayonet, paces to and fro in the entrance, and other soldiers lounge close by. The life of the city seems to be compressed and made more intense by this barrier; and on passing within it you do not breathe quite so freely, yet are sensible of an enjoyment in the close elbowing throng, the clamor of high voices from side to side of the street, and the million of petty sights, actions, traffics, and personalities, all so squeezed together as to become a great whole. The street by which I entered led me to the Carraja Bridge; crossing which, I kept straight onward till I came to the Church of Santa Maria Novella. Doubtless, it looks just the same as when Boccaccio's party stood in a cluster on its broad steps arranging their excursion to the villa. Thence I went to the Church of St. Lorenzo, which I entered by the side door, and found the organ sounding and a religious ceremony going forward. It is a church of sombre aspect, with its gray walls and pillars, but was decked out for some festivity with hangings of scarlet damask and gold. I sat awhile to rest myself, and then pursued my way to the Duomo. I entered, and looked at Sir John Hawkwood's painted effigy, and at several busts and statues, and at the windows of the chapel surrounding the dome, through which the sunshine glowed, white in the outer air, but a hundred-hued splendor within. I tried to bring up the scene of Lorenzo de' Medici's attempted assassination, but with no great success; and after listening a little while to the chanting of the priests and acolytes, I went to the Bank. It is in a palace of which Raphael was the architect, in the Piazza Gran Duca. I next went, as a matter of course, to the Uffizi gallery, and, in the first place, to the Tribune, where the Venus de' Medici deigned to reveal herself rather more satisfactorily than at my last visit. . . . I looked into all the rooms, bronzes, drawings, and gem-room; a volume might easily be written upon either subject. The contents of the gem-room especially require to be looked at separately in order to convince one's self of their minute magnificences; for, among so many, the eye slips from one to another with only a vague outward sense that here are whole shelves full of little miracles, both of nature's material and man's workmanship. Greater [larger] things can be reasonably well appreciated with a less scrupulous though broader attention; but in order to estimate the brilliancy of the diamond eyes of a little agate bust, for instance, you have to screw your mind down to them and nothing else. You must sharpen your faculties of observation to a point, and touch the object exactly on the right spot, or you do not appreciate it at all. It is a troublesome process when there are a thousand such objects to be seen. I stood at an open window in the transverse corridor, and looked down upon the Arno, and across at the range of edifices that impend over it on the opposite side. The river, I should judge, may be a hundred or a hundred and fifty yards wide in its course between the Ponte alle Grazie and the Ponte Vecchio; that is, the width between strand and strand is at least so much. The river, however, leaves a broad margin of mud and gravel on its right bank, on which water-weeds grow pretty abundantly, and creep even into the stream. On my first arrival in Florence I thought the goose-pond green of the water rather agreeable than otherwise; but its hue is now that of unadulterated mud, as yellow as the Tiber itself, yet not impressing me as being enriched with city sewerage like that other famous river. From the Ponte alle Grazie downward, half-way towards the Ponte Vecchio, there is an island of gravel, and the channel on each side is so shallow as to allow the passage of men and horses wading not overleg. I have seen fishermen wading the main channel from side to side, their feet sinking into the dark mud, and thus discoloring the yellow water with a black track visible, step by step, through its shallowness. But still the Arno is a mountain stream, and liable to be tetchy and turbulent like all its kindred, and no doubt it often finds its borders of hewn stone not too far apart for its convenience. Along the right shore, beneath the Uffizi and the adjacent buildings, there is a broad paved way, with a parapet; on the opposite shore the edifices are built directly upon the river's edge, and impend over the water, supported upon arches and machicolations, as I think that peculiar arrangement of buttressing arcades is called. The houses are picturesquely various in height, from two or three stories to seven; picturesque in hue likewise,--pea-green, yellow, white, and of aged discoloration,--but all with green blinds; picturesque also in the courts and galleries that look upon the river, and in the wide arches that open beneath, intended perhaps to afford a haven for the household boat. Nets were suspended before one or two of the houses, as if the inhabitants were in the habit of fishing out of window. As a general effect, the houses, though often palatial in size and height, have a shabby, neglected aspect, and are jumbled too closely together. Behind their range the city swells upward in a hillside, which rises to a great height above, forming, I believe, a part of the Boboli Gardens. I returned homewards over the Ponte Vecchio, which is a continuous street of ancient houses, except over the central arch, so that a stranger might easily cross the river without knowing it. In these small, old houses there is a community of goldsmiths, who set out their glass cases, and hang their windows with rings, bracelets, necklaces, strings of pearl, ornaments of malachite and coral, and especially with Florentine mosaics; watches, too, and snuff-boxes of old fashion or new; offerings for shrines also, such as silver hearts pierced with swords; an infinity of pretty things, the manufacture of which is continually going on in the little back-room of each little shop. This gewgaw business has been established on the Ponte Vecchio for centuries, although, long since, it was an art of far higher pretensions than now. Benvenuto Cellini had his workshop here, probably in one of these selfsame little nooks. It would have been a ticklish affair to be Benvenuto's fellow-workman within such narrow limits. Going out of the Porta Romana, I walked for some distance along the city wall, and then, turning to the left, toiled up the hill of Bellosguardo, through narrow zigzag lanes between high walls of stone or plastered brick, where the sun had the fairest chance to frizzle me. There were scattered villas and houses, here and there concentrating into a little bit of a street, paved with flag-stones from side to side, as in the city, and shadowed quite across its narrowness by the height of the houses. Mostly, however, the way was inhospitably sunny, and shut out by the high wall from every glimpse of a view, except in one spot, where Florence spread itself before my eyes, with every tower, dome, and spire which it contains. A little way farther on my own gray tower rose before me, the most welcome object that I had seen in the course of the day. September 10th.--I went into town again yesterday, by way of the Porta San Frediano, and observed that this gate (like the other gates of Florence, as far as I have observed) is a tall, square structure of stone or brick, or both, rising high above the adjacent wall, and having a range of open loggie in the upper story. The arch externally is about half the height of the structure. Inside, towards the town, it rises nearly to the roof. On each side of the arch there is much room for offices, apartments, storehouses, or whatever else. On the outside of the gate, along the base, are those iron rings and sockets for torches, which are said to be the distinguishing symbol of illustrious houses. As contrasted with the vista of the narrow, swarming street through the arch from without, the view from the inside might be presented with a glimpse of the free blue sky. I strolled a little about Florence, and went into two or three churches; into that of the Annunziata for one. I have already described this church, with its general magnificence, and it was more magnificent than ever to-day, being hung with scarlet silk and gold-embroidery. A great many people were at their devotions, thronging principally around the Virgin's shrine. I was struck now with the many bas-reliefs and busts in the costume of their respective ages, and seemingly with great accuracy of portraiture, in the passage leading from the front of the church into the cloisters. The marble was not at all abashed nor degraded by being made to assume the guise of the mediaeval furred robe, or the close-fitting tunic with elaborate ruff, or the breastplate and gorget, or the flowing wig, or whatever the actual costume might be; and one is sensible of a rectitude and reality in the affair, and respects the dead people for not putting themselves into an eternal masquerade. The dress of the present day will look equally respectable in one or two hundred years. The Fair is still going on, and one of its principal centres is before this church, in the Piazza of the Annunziata. Cloth is the chief commodity offered for sale, and none of the finest; coarse, unbleached linen and cotton prints for country-people's wear, together with yarn, stockings, and here and there an assortment of bright-colored ribbons. Playthings, of a very rude fashion, were also displayed; likewise books in Italian and French; and a great deal of iron-work. Both here and in Rome they have this odd custom of offering rusty iron implements for sale, spread out on the pavements. There was a good deal of tinware, too, glittering in the sunshine, especially around the pedestal of the bronze statue of Duke Ferdinand, who curbs his horse and looks down upon the bustling piazza in a very stately way. . . . The people attending the fair had mostly a rustic appearance; sunburnt faces, thin frames; no beauty, no bloom, no joyousness of young or old; an anxious aspect, as if life were no easy or holiday matter with them; but I should take them to be of a kindly nature, and reasonably honest. Except the broad-brimmed Tuscan hats of the women, there was no peculiarity of costume. At a careless glance I could very well have mistaken most of the men for Yankees; as for the women, there is very little resemblance between them and ours,--the old being absolutely hideous, and the young ones very seldom pretty. It was a very dull crowd. They do not generate any warmth among themselves by contiguity; they have no pervading sentiment, such as is continually breaking out in rough merriment from an American crowd; they have nothing to do with one another; they are not a crowd, considered as one mass, but a collection of individuals. A despotic government has perhaps destroyed their principle of cohesion, and crumbled them to atoms. Italian crowds are noted for their civility; possibly they deserve credit for native courtesy and gentleness; possibly, on the other hand, the crowd has not spirit and self-consciousness enough to be rampant. I wonder whether they will ever hold another parliament in the Piazza of Santa Croce! I paid a visit to the gallery of the Pitti Palace. There is too large an intermixture of Andrea del Sarto's pictures in this gallery; everywhere you see them, cold, proper, and uncriticisable, looking so much like first-rate excellence, that you inevitably quarrel with your own taste for not admiring them. . . . It was one of the days when my mind misgives me whether the pictorial art be not a humbug, and when the minute accuracy of a fly in a Dutch picture of fruit and flowers seems to me something more reliable than the master-touches of Raphael. The gallery was considerably thronged, and many of the visitors appeared to be from the country, and of a class intermediate between gentility and labor. Is there such a rural class in Italy? I saw a respectable-looking man feeling awkward and uncomfortable in a new and glossy pair of pantaloons not yet bent and creased to his natural movement. Nothing pleased me better to-day than some amber cups, in one of the cabinets of curiosities. They are richly wrought, and the material is as if the artist had compressed a great deal of sunshine together, and when sufficiently solidified had moulded these cups out of it and let them harden. This simile was suggested by ------. Leaving the palace, I entered the Boboli Gardens, and wandered up and down a good deal of its uneven surface, through broad, well-kept edges of box, sprouting loftily, trimmed smoothly, and strewn between with cleanly gravel; skirting along plantations of aged trees, throwing a deep shadow within their precincts; passing many statues, not of the finest art, yet approaching so near it, as to serve just as good a purpose for garden ornament; coming now and then to the borders of a fishpool, or a pond, where stately swans circumnavigated an island of flowers;--all very fine and very wearisome. I have never enjoyed this garden; perhaps because it suggests dress-coats, and such elegant formalities. September 11th.--We have heard a good deal of spirit matters of late, especially of wonderful incidents that attended Mr. Home's visit to Florence, two or three years ago. Mrs. Powers told a very marvellous thing; how that when Mr. Home was holding a seance in her house, and several persons present, a great scratching was heard in a neighboring closet. She addressed the spirit, and requested it not to disturb the company then, as they were busy with other affairs, promising to converse with it on a future occasion. On a subsequent night, accordingly, the scratching was renewed, with the utmost violence; and in reply to Mrs. Powers's questions, the spirit assured her that it was not one, but legion, being the ghosts of twenty-seven monks, who were miserable and without hope! The house now occupied by Powers was formerly a convent, and I suppose these were the spirits of all the wicked monks that had ever inhabited it; at least, I hope that there were not such a number of damnable sinners extant at any one time. These ghostly fathers must have been very improper persons in their lifetime, judging by the indecorousness of their behavior even after death, and in such dreadful circumstances; for they pulled Mrs. Powers's skirts so hard as to break the gathers. . . . It was not ascertained that they desired to have anything done for their eternal welfare, or that their situation was capable of amendment anyhow; but, being exhorted to refrain from further disturbance, they took their departure, after making the sign of the cross on the breast of each person present. This was very singular in such reprobates, who, by their own confession, had forfeited all claim to be benefited by that holy symbol: it curiously suggests that the forms of religion may still be kept up in purgatory and hell itself. The sign was made in a way that conveyed the sense of something devilish and spiteful; the perpendicular line of the cross being drawn gently enough, but the transverse one sharply and violently, so as to leave a painful impression. Perhaps the monks meant this to express their contempt and hatred for heretics; and how queer, that this antipathy should survive their own damnation! But I cannot help hoping that the case of these poor devils may not be so desperate as they think. They cannot be wholly lost, because their desire for communication with mortals shows that they need sympathy, therefore are not altogether hardened, therefore, with loving treatment, may be restored. A great many other wonders took place within the knowledge and experience of Mrs. P------. She saw, not one pair of hands only, but many. The head of one of her dead children, a little boy, was laid in her lap, not in ghastly fashion, as a head out of the coffin and the grave, but just as the living child might have laid it on his mother's knees. It was invisible, by the by, and she recognized it by the features and the character of the hair, through the sense of touch. Little hands grasped hers. In short, these soberly attested incredibilities are so numerous that I forget nine tenths of them, and judge the others too cheap to be written down. Christ spoke the truth surely, in saying that men would not believe, "though one rose from the dead." In my own case, the fact makes absolutely no impression. I regret such confirmation of truth as this. Within a mile of our villa stands the Villa Columbaria, a large house, built round a square court. Like Mr. Powers's residence, it was formerly a convent. It is inhabited by Major Gregorie, an old soldier of Waterloo and various other fights, and his family consists of Mrs. ------, the widow of one of the Major's friends, and her two daughters. We have become acquainted with the family, and Mrs. ------, the married daughter, has lent us a written statement of her experiences with a ghost, who has haunted the Villa Columbaria for many years back. He had made Mrs. ------ aware of his presence in her room by a sensation of extreme cold, as if a wintry breeze were blowing over her; also by a rustling of the bed-curtains; and, at such times, she had a certain consciousness, as she says, that she was not ALONE. Through Mr. Home's agency, the ghost was enabled to explain himself, and declared that he was a monk, named Giannane, who died a very long time ago in Mrs. ------'s present bedchamber. He was a murderer, and had been in a restless and miserable state ever since his death, wandering up and down the house, but especially haunting his own death-chamber and a staircase that communicated with the chapel of the villa. All the interviews with this lost spirit were attended with a sensation of severe cold, which was felt by every one present. He made his communications by means of table-rapping, and by the movements of chairs and other articles, which often assumed an angry character. The poor old fellow does not seem to have known exactly what he wanted with Mrs. ------, but promised to refrain from disturbing her any more, on condition that she would pray that he might find some repose. He had previously declined having any masses said for his soul. Rest, rest, rest, appears to be the continual craving of unhappy spirits; they do not venture to ask for positive bliss: perhaps, in their utter weariness, would rather forego the trouble of active enjoyment, but pray only for rest. The cold atmosphere around this monk suggests new ideas as to the climate of Hades. If all the afore-mentioned twenty-seven monks had a similar one, the combined temperature must have been that of a polar winter. Mrs. ------ saw, at one time, the fingers of her monk, long, yellow, and skinny; these fingers grasped the hands of individuals of the party, with a cold, clammy, and horrible touch. After the departure of this ghost other seances were held in her bedchamber, at which good and holy spirits manifested themselves, and behaved in a very comfortable and encouraging way. It was their benevolent purpose, apparently, to purify her apartments from all traces of the evil spirit, and to reconcile her to what had been so long the haunt of this miserable monk, by filling it with happy and sacred associations, in which, as Mrs. ------ intimates, they entirely succeeded. These stories remind me of an incident that took place at the old manse, in the first summer of our marriage. . . . September 17th.--We walked yesterday to Florence, and visited the church of St. Lorenzo, where we saw, for the second time, the famous Medici statues of Michael Angelo. I found myself not in a very appreciative state, and, being a stone myself, the statue of Lorenzo was at first little more to me than another stone; but it was beginning to assume life, and would have impressed me as it did before if I had gazed long enough. There was a better light upon the face, under the helmet, than at my former visit, although still the features were enough overshadowed to produce that mystery on which, according to Mr. Powers, the effect of the statue depends. I observe that the costume of the figure, instead of being mediaeval, as I believe I have stated, is Roman; but, be it what it may, the grand and simple character of the figure imbues the robes with its individual propriety. I still think it the greatest miracle ever wrought in marble. We crossed the church and entered a cloister on the opposite side, in quest of the Laurentian Library. Ascending a staircase we found an old man blowing the bellows of the organ, which was in full blast in the church; nevertheless he found time to direct us to the library door. We entered a lofty vestibule, of ancient aspect and stately architecture, and thence were admitted into the library itself; a long and wide gallery or hall, lighted by a row of windows on which were painted the arms of the Medici. The ceiling was inlaid with dark wood, in an elaborate pattern, which was exactly repeated in terra-cotta on the pavement beneath our feet. Long desks, much like the old-fashioned ones in schools, were ranged on each side of the mid aisle, in a series from end to end, with seats for the convenience of students; and on these desks were rare manuscripts, carefully preserved under glass; and books, fastened to the desks by iron chains, as the custom of studious antiquity used to be. Along the centre of the hall, between the two ranges of desks, were tables and chairs, at which two or three scholarly persons were seated, diligently consulting volumes in manuscript or old type. It was a very quiet place, imbued with a cloistered sanctity, and remote from all street-cries and rumble of the city,--odorous of old literature,--a spot where the commonest ideas ought not to be expressed in less than Latin. The librarian--or custode he ought rather to be termed, for he was a man not above the fee of a paul--now presented himself, and showed us some of the literary curiosities; a vellum manuscript of the Bible, with a splendid illumination by Ghirlandaio, covering two folio pages, and just as brilliant in its color as if finished yesterday. Other illuminated manuscripts--or at least separate pages of them, for the volumes were kept under glass, and not to be turned over--were shown us, very magnificent, but not to be compared with this of Ghirlandaio. Looking at such treasures I could almost say that we have left behind us more splendor than we have kept alive to our own age. We publish beautiful editions of books, to be sure, and thousands of people enjoy them; but in ancient times the expense that we spread thinly over a thousand volumes was all compressed into one, and it became a great jewel of a book, a heavy folio, worth its weight in gold. Then, what a spiritual charm it gives to a book to feel that every letter has been individually wrought, and the pictures glow for that individual page alone! Certainly the ancient reader had a luxury which the modern one lacks. I was surprised, moreover, to see the clearness and accuracy of the chirography. Print does not surpass it in these respects. The custode showed us an ancient manuscript of the Decameron; likewise, a volume containing the portraits of Petrarch and of Laura, each covering the whole of a vellum page, and very finely done. They are authentic portraits, no doubt, and Laura is depicted as a fair-haired beauty, with a very satisfactory amount of loveliness. We saw some choice old editions of books in a small separate room; but as these were all ranged in shut bookcases, and as each volume, moreover, was in a separate cover or modern binding, this exhibition did us very little good. By the by, there is a conceit struggling blindly in my mind about Petrarch and Laura, suggested by those two lifelike portraits, which have been sleeping cheek to cheek through all these centuries. But I cannot lay hold of it. September 21st.--Yesterday morning the Val d' Arno was entirely filled with a thick fog, which extended even up to our windows, and concealed objects within a very short distance. It began to dissipate itself betimes, however, and was the forerunner of an unusually bright and warm day. We set out after breakfast and walked into town, where we looked at mosaic brooches. These are very pretty little bits of manufacture; but there seems to have been no infusion of fresh fancy into the work, and the specimens present little variety. It is the characteristic commodity of the place; the central mart and manufacturing locality being on the Ponte Vecchio, from end to end of which they are displayed in cases; but there are other mosaic shops scattered about the town. The principal devices are roses,--pink, yellow, or white,--jasmines, lilies of the valley, forget-me-nots, orange blossoms, and others, single or in sprigs, or twined into wreaths; parrots, too, and other birds of gay plumage,-- often exquisitely done, and sometimes with precious materials, such as lapis lazuli, malachite, and still rarer gems. Bracelets, with several different, yet relative designs, are often very beautiful. We find, at different shops, a great inequality of prices for mosaics that seemed to be of much the same quality. We went to the Uffizi gallery, and found it much thronged with the middle and lower classes of Italians; and the English, too, seemed more numerous than I have lately seen them. Perhaps the tourists have just arrived here, starting at the close of the London season. We were amused with a pair of Englishmen who went through the gallery; one of them criticising the pictures and statues audibly, for the benefit of his companion. The critic I should take to be a country squire, and wholly untravelled; a tall, well-built, rather rough, but gentlemanly man enough; his friend, a small personage, exquisitely neat in dress, and of artificial deportment, every attitude and gesture appearing to have been practised before a glass. Being but a small pattern of a man, physically and intellectually, he had thought it worth while to finish himself off with the elaborateness of a Florentine mosaic; and the result was something like a dancing-master, though without the exuberant embroidery of such persons. Indeed, he was a very quiet little man, and, though so thoroughly made up, there was something particularly green, fresh, and simple in him. Both these Englishmen were elderly, and the smaller one had perfectly white hair, glossy and silken. It did not make him in the least venerable, however, but took his own character of neatness and prettiness. He carried his well-brushed and glossy hat in his hand in such a way as not to ruffle its surface; and I wish I could put into one word or one sentence the pettiness, the minikinfinical effect of this little man; his self-consciousness so lifelong, that, in some sort, he forgot himself even in the midst of it; his propriety, his cleanliness and unruffledness; his prettiness and nicety of manifestation, like a bird hopping daintily about. His companion, as I said, was of a completely different type; a tall, gray-haired man, with the rough English face, a little tinted with port wine; careless, natural manner, betokening a man of position in his own neighborhood; a loud voice, not vulgar, nor outraging the rules of society, but betraying a character incapable of much refinement. He talked continually in his progress through the gallery, and audibly enough for us to catch almost everything he said, at many yards' distance. His remarks and criticisms, addressed to his small friend, were so entertaining, that we strolled behind him for the sake of being benefited by them; and I think he soon became aware of this, and addressed himself to us as well as to his more immediate friend. Nobody but an Englishman, it seems to me, has just this kind of vanity,--a feeling mixed up with scorn and good-nature; self-complacency on his own merits, and as an Englishman; pride at being in foreign parts; contempt for everybody around him; a rough kindliness towards people in general. I liked the man, and should be glad to know him better. As for his criticism, I am sorry to remember only one. It was upon the picture of the Nativity, by Correggio, in the Tribune, where the mother is kneeling before the Child, and adoring it in an awful rapture, because she sees the eternal God in its baby face and figure. The Englishman was highly delighted with this picture, and began to gesticulate, as if dandling a baby, and to make a chirruping sound. It was to him merely a representation of a mother fondling her infant. He then said, "If I could have my choice of the pictures and statues in the Tribune, I would take this picture, and that one yonder" (it was a good enough Enthronement of the Virgin by Andrea del Sarto) "and the Dancing Faun, and let the rest go." A delightful man; I love that wholesome coarseness of mind and heart, which no education nor opportunity can polish out of the genuine Englishman; a coarseness without vulgarity. When a Yankee is coarse, he is pretty sure to be vulgar too. The two critics seemed to be considering whether it were practicable to go from the Uffizi to the Pitti gallery; but "it confuses one," remarked the little man, "to see more than one gallery in a day." (I should think so,--the Pitti Palace tumbling into his small receptacle on the top of the Uffizi.) "It does so," responded the big man, with heavy emphasis. September 23d.--The vintage has been going on in our podere for about a week, and I saw a part of the process of making wine, under one of our back windows. It was on a very small scale, the grapes being thrown into a barrel, and crushed with a sort of pestle; and as each estate seems to make its own wine, there are probably no very extensive and elaborate appliances in general use for the manufacture. The cider-making of New England is far more picturesque; the great heap of golden or rosy apples under the trees, and the cider-mill worked by a circumgyratory horse, and all agush with sweet juice. Indeed, nothing connected with the grape-culture and the vintage here has been picturesque, except the large inverted pyramids in which the clusters hang; those great bunches, white or purple, really satisfy my idea both as to aspect and taste. We can buy a large basketful for less than a paul; and they are the only things that one can never devour too much of--and there is no enough short of a little too much without subsequent repentance. It is a shame to turn such delicious juice into such sour wine as they make in Tuscany. I tasted a sip or two of a flask which the contadini sent us for trial,-- the rich result of the process I had witnessed in the barrel. It took me altogether by surprise; for I remembered the nectareousness of the new cider which I used to sip through a straw in my boyhood, and I never doubted that this would be as dulcet, but finer and more ethereal; as much more delectable, in short, as these grapes are better than puckery cider apples. Positively, I never tasted anything so detestable, such a sour and bitter juice, still lukewarm with fermentation; it was a wail of woe, squeezed out of the wine-press of tribulation, and the more a man drinks of such, the sorrier he will be. Besides grapes, we have had figs, and I have now learned to be very fond of them. When they first began to appear, two months ago, they had scarcely any sweetness, and tasted very like a decaying squash: this was an early variety, with purple skins. There are many kinds of figs, the best being green-skinned, growing yellower as they ripen; and the riper they are, the more the sweetness within them intensifies, till they resemble dried figs in everything, except that they retain the fresh fruit-flavor; rich, luscious, yet not palling. We have had pears, too, some of them very tolerable; and peaches, which look magnificently, as regards size and downy blush, but, have seldom much more taste than a cucumber. A succession of fruits has followed us, ever since our arrival in Florence:--first, and for a long time, abundance of cherries; then apricots, which lasted many weeks, till we were weary of them; then plums, pears, and finally figs, peaches, and grapes. Except the figs and grapes, a New England summer and autumn would give us better fruit than any we have found in Italy. Italy beats us I think in mosquitoes; they are horribly pungent little satanic particles. They possess strange intelligence, and exquisite acuteness of sight and smell,--prodigious audacity and courage to match it, insomuch that they venture on the most hazardous attacks, and get safe off. One of them flew into my mouth, the other night, and sting me far down in my throat; but luckily I coughed him up in halves. They are bigger than American mosquitoes; and if you crush them, after one of their feasts, it makes a terrific bloodspot. It is a sort of suicide--at least, a shedding of one's own blood--to kill them; but it gratifies the old Adam to do it. It shocks me to feel how revengeful I am; but it is impossible not to impute a certain malice and intellectual venom to these diabolical insects. I wonder whether our health, at this season of the year, requires that we should be kept in a state of irritation, and so the mosquitoes are Nature's prophetic remedy for some disease; or whether we are made for the mosquitoes, not they for us. It is possible, just possible, that the infinitesimal doses of poison which they infuse into us are a homoeopathic safeguard against pestilence; but medicine never was administered in a more disagreeable way. The moist atmosphere about the Arno, I suppose, produces these insects, and fills the broad, ten-mile valley with them; and as we are just on the brim of the basin, they overflow into our windows. September 25th.--U---- and I walked to town yesterday morning, and went to the Uffizi gallery. It is not a pleasant thought that we are so soon to give up this gallery, with little prospect (none, or hardly any, on my part) of ever seeing it again. It interests me and all of us far more than the gallery of the Pitti Palace, wherefore I know not, for the latter is the richer of the two in admirable pictures. Perhaps it is the picturesque variety of the Uffizi--the combination of painting, sculpture, gems, and bronzes--that makes the charm. The Tribune, too, is the richest room in all the world; a heart that draws all hearts to it. The Dutch pictures, moreover, give a homely, human interest to the Uffizi; and I really think that the frequency of Andrea del Santo's productions at the Pitti Palace--looking so very like masterpieces, yet lacking the soul of art and nature--have much to do with the weariness that comes from better acquaintance with the latter gallery. The splendor of the gilded and frescoed saloons is perhaps another bore; but, after all, my memory will often tread there as long as I live. What shall we do in America? Speaking of Dutch pictures, I was much struck yesterday, as frequently before, with a small picture by Teniers the elder. It seems to be a pawnbroker in the midst of his pledges; old earthen jugs, flasks, a brass kettle, old books, and a huge pile of worn-out and broken rubbish, which he is examining. These things are represented with vast fidelity, yet with bold and free touches, unlike the minute, microscopic work of other Dutch masters; and a wonderful picturesqueness is wrought out of these humble materials, and even the figure and head of the pawnbroker have a strange grandeur. We spent no very long time at the Uffizi, and afterwards crossed the Ponte alle Grazie, and went to the convent of San Miniato, which stands on a hill outside of the Porta San Gallo. A paved pathway, along which stand crosses marking stations at which pilgrims are to kneel and pray, goes steeply to the hill-top, where, in the first place, is a smaller church and convent than those of San Miniato. The latter are seen at a short distance to the right, the convent being a large, square battlemented mass, adjoining which is the church, showing a front of aged white marble, streaked with black, and having an old stone tower behind. I have seen no other convent or monastery that so well corresponds with my idea of what such structures were. The sacred precincts are enclosed by a high wall, gray, ancient, and luxuriously ivy-grown, and lofty and strong enough for the rampart of a fortress. We went through the gateway and entered the church, which we found in much disarray, and masons at work upon the pavement. The tribune is elevated considerably above the nave, and accessible by marble staircases; there are great arches and a chapel, with curious monuments in the Gothic style, and ancient carvings and mosaic works, and, in short, a dim, dusty, and venerable interior, well worth studying in detail. . . . The view of Florence from the church door is very fine, and seems to include every tower, dome, or whatever object emerges out of the general mass. September 28th.--I went to the Pitti Palace yesterday, and to the Uffizi to-day, paying them probably my last visit, yet cherishing an unreasonable doubt whether I may not see them again. At all events, I have seen them enough for the present, even what is best of them; and, at the same time, with a sad reluctance to bid them farewell forever, I experience an utter weariness of Raphael's old canvas, and of the time-yellowed marble of the Venus de' Medici. When the material embodiment presents itself outermost, and we perceive them only by the grosser sense, missing their ethereal spirit, there is nothing so heavily burdensome as masterpieces of painting and sculpture. I threw my farewell glance at the Venus de' Medici to-day with strange insensibility. The nights are wonderfully beautiful now. When the moon was at the full, a few nights ago, its light was an absolute glory, such as I seem only to have dreamed of heretofore, and that only in my younger days. At its rising I have fancied that the orb of the moon has a kind of purple brightness, and that this tinge is communicated to its radiance until it has climbed high aloft and sheds a flood of white over hill and valley. Now that the moon is on the wane, there is a gentler lustre, but still bright; and it makes the Val d' Arno with its surrounding hills, and its soft mist in the distance, as beautiful a scene as exists anywhere out of heaven. And the morning is quite as beautiful in its own way. This mist, of which I have so often spoken, sets it beyond the limits of actual sense and makes it ideal; it is as if you were dreaming about the valley,--as if the valley itself were dreaming, and met you half-way in your own dream. If the mist were to be withdrawn, I believe the whole beauty of the valley would go with it. Until pretty late in the morning, we have the comet streaming through the sky, and dragging its interminable tail among the stars. It keeps brightening from night to night, and I should think must blaze fiercely enough to cast a shadow by and by. I know not whether it be in the vicinity of Galileo's tower, and in the influence of his spirit, but I have hardly ever watched the stars with such interest as now. September 29th.--Last evening I met Mr. Powers at Miss Blagden's, and he talked about his treatment, by our government in reference, to an appropriation of twenty-five thousand dollars made by Congress for a statue by him. Its payment and the purchase of the statue were left at the option of the President, and he conceived himself wronged because the affair was never concluded. . . . As for the President, he knows nothing of art, and probably acted in the matter by the advice of the director of public works. No doubt a sculptor gets commissions as everybody gets public employment and emolument of whatever kind from our government, not by merit or fitness, but by political influence skilfully applied. As Powers himself observed, the ruins of our Capitol are not likely to afford sculptures equal to those which Lord Elgin took from the Parthenon, if this be the system under which they are produced. . . . I wish our great Republic had the spirit to do as much, according to its vast means, as Florence did for sculpture and architecture when it was a republic; but we have the meanest government and the shabbiest, and--if truly represented by it--we are the meanest and shabbiest people known in history. And yet the less we attempt to do for art the better, if our future attempts are to have no better result than such brazen troopers as the equestrian statue of General Jackson, or even such naked respectabilities as Greenough's Washington. There is something false and affected in our highest taste for art; and I suppose, furthermore, we are the only people who seek to decorate their public institutions, not by the highest taste among them, but by the average at best. There was also at Miss Blagden's, among other company, Mr. ------, an artist in Florence, and a sensible man. I talked with him about Home, the medium, whom he had many opportunities of observing when the latter was in these parts. Mr. ------ says that Home is unquestionably a knave, but that he himself is as much perplexed at his own preternatural performances as any other person; he is startled and affrighted at the phenomena which he produces. Nevertheless, when his spiritual powers fall short, he does his best to eke them out with imposture. This moral infirmity is a part of his nature, and I suggested that perhaps if he were of a firmer and healthier moral make, if his character were sufficiently sound and dense to be capable of steadfast principle, he would not have possessed the impressibility that fits him for the so-called spiritual influences. Mr. ------ says that Louis Napoleon is literally one of the most skilful jugglers in the world, and that probably the interest he has taken in Mr. Home was caused partly by a wish to acquire his art. This morning Mr. Powers invited me to go with him to the Grand Duke's new foundry, to see the bronze statue of Webster which has just been cast from his model. It is the second cast of the statue, the first having been shipped some months ago on board of a vessel which was lost; and, as Powers observed, the statue now lies at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean somewhere in the vicinity of the telegraphic cable. We were received with much courtesy and emphasis by the director of the foundry, and conducted into a large room walled with bare, new brick, where the statue was standing in front of the extinct furnace: a majestic Webster indeed, eight feet high, and looking even more colossal than that. The likeness seemed to me perfect, and, like a sensible man, Powers' has dressed him in his natural costume, such as I have seen Webster have on while making a speech in the open air at a mass meeting in Concord,--dress-coat buttoned pretty closely across the breast, pantaloons and boots,--everything finished even to a seam and a stitch. Not an inch of the statue but is Webster; even his coat-tails are imbued with the man, and this true artist has succeeded in showing him through the broadcloth as nature showed him. He has felt that a man's actual clothes are as much a part of him as his flesh, and I respect him for disdaining to shirk the difficulty by throwing the meanness of a cloak over it, and for recognizing the folly of masquerading our Yankee statesman in a Roman toga, and the indecorousness of presenting him as a brassy nudity. It would have been quite as unjustifiable to strip him to his skeleton as to his flesh. Webster is represented as holding in his right hand the written roll of the Constitution, with which he points to a bundle of fasces, which he keeps from falling by the grasp of his left, thus symbolizing him as the preserver of the Union. There is an expression of quiet, solid, massive strength in the whole figure; a deep, pervading energy, in which any exaggeration of gesture would lessen and lower the effect. He looks really like a pillar of the state. The face is very grand, very Webster stern and awful, because he is in the act of meeting a great crisis, and yet with the warmth of a great heart glowing through it. Happy is Webster to have been so truly and adequately sculptured; happy the sculptor in such a subject, which no idealization of a demigod could have supplied him with. Perhaps the statue at the bottom of the sea will be cast up in some future age, when the present race of man is forgotten, and if so, that far posterity will look up to us as a grander race than we find ourselves to be. Neither was Webster altogether the man he looked. His physique helped him out, even when he fell somewhat short of its promise; and if his eyes had not been in such deep caverns their fire would not have looked so bright. Powers made me observe how the surface of the statue was wrought to a sort of roughness instead of being smoothed, as is the practice of other artists. He said that this had cost him great pains, and certainly it has an excellent effect. The statue is to go to Boston, and I hope will be placed in the open air, for it is too mighty to be kept under any roof that now exists in America. . . . After seeing this, the director showed us some very curious and exquisite specimens of castings, such as baskets of flowers, in which the most delicate and fragile blossoms, the curl of a petal, the finest veins in a leaf, the lightest flower-spray that ever quivered in a breeze, were perfectly preserved; and the basket contained an abundant heap of such sprays. There were likewise a pair of hands, taken actually from life, clasped together as they were, and they looked like parts of a man who had been changed suddenly from flesh to brass. They were worn and rough and unhandsome hands, and so very real, with all their veins and the pores of the skin, that it was shocking to look at them. A bronze leaf, cast also from the life, was as curious and more beautiful. Taking leave of Powers, I went hither and thither about Florence, seeing for the last time things that I have seen many times before: the market, for instance, blocking up a line of narrow streets with fruit-stalls, and obstreperous dealers crying their peaches, their green lemons, their figs, their delicious grapes, their mushrooms, their pomegranates, their radishes, their lettuces. They use one vegetable here which I have not known so used elsewhere; that is, very young pumpkins or squashes, of the size of apples, and to be cooked by boiling. They are not to my taste, but the people here like unripe things,--unripe fruit, unripe chickens, unripe lamb. This market is the noisiest and swarmiest centre of noisy and swarming Florence, and I always like to pass through it on that account. I went also to Santa Croce, and it seemed to me to present a longer vista and broader space than almost any other church, perhaps because the pillars between the nave and aisles are not so massive as to obstruct the view. I looked into the Duomo, too, and was pretty well content to leave it. Then I came homeward, and lost my way, and wandered far off through the white sunshine, and the scanty shade of the vineyard walls, and the olive-trees that here and there branched over them. At last I saw our own gray battlements at a distance, on one side, quite out of the direction in which I was travelling, so was compelled to the grievous mortification of retracing a great many of my weary footsteps. It was a very hot day. This evening I have been on the towertop star-gazing, and looking at the comet, which waves along the sky like an immense feather of flame. Over Florence there was an illuminated atmosphere, caused by the lights of the city gleaming upward into the mists which sleep and dream above that portion of the valley, as well as the rest of it. I saw dimly, or fancied I saw, the hill of Fiesole on the other side of Florence, and remembered how ghostly lights were seen passing thence to the Duomo on the night when Lorenzo the Magnificent died. From time to time the sweet bells of Florence rang out, and I was loath to come down into the lower world, knowing that I shall never again look heavenward from an old tower-top in such a soft calm evening as this. Yet I am not loath to go away; impatient rather; for, taking no root, I soon weary of any soil in which I may be temporarily deposited. The same impatience I sometimes feel or conceive of as regards this earthly life. . . . I forgot to mention that Powers showed me, in his studio, the model of the statue of America, which he wished the government to buy. It has great merit, and embodies the ideal of youth, freedom, progress, and whatever we consider as distinctive of our country's character and destiny. It is a female figure, vigorous, beautiful, planting its foot lightly on a broken chain, and pointing upward. The face has a high look of intelligence and lofty feeling; the form, nude to the middle, has all the charms of womanhood, and is thus warmed and redeemed out of the cold allegoric sisterhood who have generally no merit in chastity, being really without sex. I somewhat question whether it is quite the thing, however, to make a genuine woman out of an allegory we ask, Who is to wed this lovely virgin? and we are not satisfied to banish her into the realm of chilly thought. But I liked the statue, and all the better for what I criticise, and was sorry to see the huge package in which the finished marble lies bundled up, ready to be sent to our country,--which does not call for it. Mr. Powers and his two daughters called to take leave of us, and at parting I expressed a hope of seeing him in America. He said that it would make him very unhappy to believe that he should never return thither; but it seems to me that he has no such definite purpose of return as would be certain to bring itself to pass. It makes a very unsatisfactory life, thus to spend the greater part of it in exile. In such a case we are always deferring the reality of life till a future moment, and, by and by, we have deferred it till there are no future moments; or, if we do go back, we find that life has shifted whatever of reality it had to the country where we deemed ourselves only living temporarily; and so between two stools we come to the ground, and make ourselves a part of one or the other country only by laying our bones in its soil. It is particularly a pity in Powers's case, because he is so very American in character, and the only convenience for him of his Italian residence is, that here he can supply himself with marble, and with workmen to chisel it according to his designs. SIENA. October 2d.--Yesterday morning, at six o'clock, we left our ancient tower, and threw a parting glance--and a rather sad one--over the misty Val d' Arno. This summer will look like a happy one in our children's retrospect, and also, no doubt, in the years that remain to ourselves; and, in truth, I have found it a peaceful and not uncheerful one. It was not a pleasant morning, and Monte Morello, looking down on Florence, had on its cap, betokening foul weather, according to the proverb. Crossing the suspension-bridge, we reached the Leopoldo railway without entering the city. By some mistake,--or perhaps because nobody ever travels by first-class carriages in Tuscany,--we found we had received second-class tickets, and were put into a long, crowded carriage, full of priests, military men, commercial travellers, and other respectable people, facing one another lengthwise along the carriage, and many of them smoking cigars. They were all perfectly civil, and I think I must own that the manners of this second-class would compare favorably with those of an American first-class one. At Empoli, about an hour after we started, we had to change carriages, the main train proceeding to Leghorn. . . . My observations along the road were very scanty: a hilly country, with several old towns seated on the most elevated hill-tops, as is common throughout Tuscany, or sometimes a fortress with a town on the plain at its base; or, once or twice, the towers and battlements of a mediaeval castle, commanding the pass below it. Near Florence the country was fertile in the vine and olive, and looked as unpicturesque as that sort of fertility usually makes it; not but what I have come to think better of the tint of the olive-leaf than when I first saw it. In the latter part of our journey I remember a wild stream, of a greenish hue, but transparent, rushing along over a rough bed, and before reaching Siena we rumbled into a long tunnel, and emerged from it near the city. . . . We drove up hill and down (for the surface of Siena seems to be nothing but an irregularity) through narrow old streets, and were set down at the Aquila Nera, a grim-looking albergo near the centre of the town. Mrs. S------ had already taken rooms for us there, and to these we were now ushered up the highway of a dingy stone staircase, and into a small, brick-paved parlor. The house seemed endlessly old, and all the glimpses that we caught of Siena out of window seemed more ancient still. Almost within arm's reach, across a narrow street, a tall palace of gray, time-worn stone clambered skyward, with arched windows, and square windows, and large windows and small, scattered up and down its side. It is the Palazzo Tolomei, and looks immensely venerable. From the windows of our bedrooms we looked into a broader street, though still not very wide, and into a small piazza, the most conspicuous object in which was a column, hearing on its top a bronze wolf suckling Romulus and Remus. This symbol is repeated in other parts of the city, and scours to indicate that the Sienese people pride themselves in a Roman origin. In another direction, over the tops of the houses, we saw a very high tower, with battlements projecting around its summit, so that it was a fortress in the air; and this I have since found to be the Palazzo Publico. It was pleasant, looking downward into the little old piazza and narrow streets, to see the swarm of life on the pavement, the life of to-day just as new as if it had never been lived before; the citizens, the priests, the soldiers, the mules and asses with their panniers, the diligence lumbering along, with a postilion in a faded crimson coat bobbing up and down on the off-horse. Such a bustling scene, vociferous, too, with various street-cries, is wonderfully set off by the gray antiquity of the town, and makes the town look older than if it were a solitude. Soon Mr. and Mrs. Story came, and accompanied us to look for lodgings. They also drove us about the city in their carriage, and showed us the outside of the Palazzo Publico, and of the cathedral and other remarkable edifices. The aspect of Siena is far more picturesque than that of any other town in Italy, so far as I know Italian towns; and yet, now that I have written it, I remember Perugia, and feel that the observation is a mistake. But at any rate Siena is remarkably picturesque, standing on such a site, on the verge and within the crater of an extinct volcano, and therefore being as uneven as the sea in a tempest; the streets so narrow, ascending between tall, ancient palaces, while the side streets rush headlong down, only to be threaded by sure-footed mules, such as climb Alpine heights; old stone balconies on the palace fronts; old arched doorways, and windows set in frames of Gothic architecture; arcades, resembling canopies of stone, with quaintly sculptured statues in the richly wrought Gothic niches of each pillar;--everything massive and lofty, yet minutely interesting when you look at it stone by stone. The Florentines, and the Romans too, have obliterated, as far as they could, all the interest of their mediaeval structures by covering them with stucco, so that they have quite lost their character, and affect the spectator with no reverential idea of age. Here the city is all overwritten with black-letter, and the glad Italian sun makes the effect so much the stronger. We took a lodging, and afterwards J----- and I rambled about, and went into the cathedral for a moment, and strayed also into the Piazza del Campo, the great public square of Siena. I am not in the mood for further description of public places now, so shall say a word or two about the old palace in which we have established ourselves. We have the second piano, and dwell amid faded grandeur, having for our saloon what seems to have been a ball-room. It is ornamented with a great fresco in the centre of the vaulted ceiling, and others covering the sides of the apartment, and surrounded with arabesque frameworks, where Cupids gambol and chase one another. The subjects of the frescos I cannot make out, not that they are faded like Giotto's, for they are as fresh as roses, and are done in an exceedingly workmanlike style; but they are allegories of Fame and Plenty and other matters, such as I could never understand. Our whole accommodation is in similar style,--spacious, magnificent, and mouldy. In the evening Miss S------ and I drove to the railway, and on the arrival of the train from Florence we watched with much eagerness the unlading of the luggage-van. At last the whole of our ten trunks and tin bandbox were produced, and finally my leather bag, in which was my journal and a manuscript book containing my sketch of a romance. It gladdened my very heart to see it, and I shall think the better of Tuscan promptitude and accuracy for so quickly bringing it back to me. (It was left behind, under one of the rail-carriage seats.) We find all the public officials, whether of railway, police, or custom-house, extremely courteous and pleasant to encounter; they seem willing to take trouble and reluctant to give it, and it is really a gratification to find that such civil people will sometimes oblige you by taking a paul or two aside. October 3d.--I took several strolls about the city yesterday, and find it scarcely extensive enough to get lost in; and if we go far from the centre we soon come to silent streets, with only here and there an individual; and the inhabitants stare from their doors and windows at the stranger, and turn round to look at him after he has passed. The interest of the old town would soon be exhausted for the traveller, but I can conceive that a thoughtful and shy man might settle down here with the view of making the place a home, and spend many years in a sombre kind of happiness. I should prefer it to Florence as a residence, but it would be terrible without an independent life in one's own mind. U---- and I walked out in the afternoon, and went into the Piazza del Campo, the principal place of the city, and a very noble and peculiar one. It is much in the form of an amphitheatre, and the surface of the ground seems to be slightly scooped out, so that it resembles the shallow basin of a shell. It is thus a much better site for an assemblage of the populace than if it were a perfect level. A semicircle or truncated ellipse of stately and ancient edifices surround the piazza, with arches opening beneath them, through which streets converge hitherward. One side of the piazza is a straight line, and is occupied by the Palazzo Publico, which is a most noble and impressive Gothic structure. It has not the mass of the Palazzo Vecchio at Florence, but is more striking. It has a long battlemented front, the central part of which rises eminent above the rest, in a great square bulk, which is likewise crowned with battlements. This is much more picturesque than the one great block of stone into which the Palazzo Vecchio is consolidated. At one extremity of this long front of the Palazzo Publico rises a tower, shooting up its shaft high, high into the air, and bulging out there into a battlemented fortress, within which the tower, slenderer than before, climbs to a still higher region. I do not know whether the summit of the tower is higher or so high as that of the Palazzo Vecchio; but the length of the shaft, free of the edifice, is much greater, and so produces the more elevating effect. The whole front of the Palazzo Publico is exceedingly venerable, with arched windows, Gothic carvings, and all the old-time ornaments that betoken it to have stood a great while, and the gray strength that will hold it up at least as much longer. At one end of the facade, beneath the shadow of the tower, is a grand and beautiful porch, supported on square pillars, within each of which is a niche containing a statue of mediaeval sculpture. The great Piazza del Campo is the market-place of Siena. In the morning it was thronged with booths and stalls, especially of fruit and vegetable dealers; but as in Florence, they melted away in the sunshine, gradually withdrawing themselves into the shadow thrown from the Palazzo Publico. On the side opposite the palace is an antique fountain of marble, ornamented with two statues and a series of bas-reliefs; and it was so much admired in its day that its sculptor received the name "Del Fonte." I am loath to leave the piazza and palace without finding some word or two to suggest their antique majesty, in the sunshine and the shadow; and how fit it seemed, notwithstanding their venerableness, that there should be a busy crowd filling up the great, hollow amphitheatre, and crying their fruit and little merchandises, so that all the curved line of stately old edifices helped to reverberate the noise. The life of to-day, within the shell of a time past, is wonderfully fascinating. Another point to which a stranger's footsteps are drawn by a kind of magnetism, so that he will be apt to find himself there as often as he strolls out of his hotel, is the cathedral. It stands in the highest part of the city, and almost every street runs into some other street which meanders hitherward. On our way thither, U---- and I came to a beautiful front of black and white marble, in somewhat the same style as the cathedral; in fact, it was the baptistery, and should have made a part of it, according to the original design, which contemplated a structure of vastly greater extent than this actual one. We entered the baptistery, and found the interior small, but very rich in its clustered columns and intersecting arches, and its frescos, pictures, statues, and ornaments. Moreover, a father and mother had brought their baby to be baptized, and the poor little thing, in its gay swaddling-clothes, looked just like what I have seen in old pictures, and a good deal like an Indian pappoose. It gave one little slender squeak when the priest put the water on its forehead, and then was quiet again. We now went round to the facade of the cathedral. . . . It is of black and white marble, with, I believe, an intermixture of red and other colors; but time has toned them down, so that white, black, and red do not contrast so strongly with one another as they may have done five hundred years ago. The architecture is generally of the pointed Gothic style, but there are likewise carved arches over the doors and windows, and a variety which does not produce the effect of confusion,--a magnificent eccentricity, an exuberant imagination flowering out in stone. On high, in the great peak of the front, and throwing its colored radiance into the nave within, there is a round window of immense circumference, the painted figures in which we can see dimly from the outside. But what I wish to express, and never can, is the multitudinous richness of the ornamentation of the front: the arches within arches, sculptured inch by inch, of the deep doorways; the statues of saints, some making a hermitage of a niche, others standing forth; the scores of busts, that look like faces of ancient people gazing down out of the cathedral; the projecting shapes of stone lions,--the thousand forms of Gothic fancy, which seemed to soften the marble and express whatever it liked, and allow it to harden again to last forever. But my description seems like knocking off the noses of some of the busts, the fingers and toes of the statues, the projecting points of the architecture, jumbling them all up together, and flinging them down upon the page. This gives no idea of the truth, nor, least of all, can it shadow forth that solemn whole, mightily combined out of all these minute particulars, and sanctifying the entire space of ground over which this cathedral-front flings its shadow, or on which it reflects the sun. A majesty and a minuteness, neither interfering with the other, each assisting the other; this is what I love in Gothic architecture. We went in and walked about; but I mean to go again before sketching the interior in my poor water-colors. October 4th.--On looking again at the Palazzo Publico, I see that the pillared portal which I have spoken of does not cover an entrance to the palace, but is a chapel, with an altar, and frescos above it. Bouquets of fresh flowers are on the altar, and a lamp burns, in all the daylight, before the crucifix. The chapel is quite unenclosed, except by an openwork balustrade of marble, on which the carving looks very ancient. Nothing could be more convenient for the devotions of the crowd in the piazza, and no doubt the daily prayers offered at the shrine might be numbered by the thousand,--brief, but I hope earnest,--like those glimpses I used to catch at the blue sky, revealing so much in an instant, while I was toiling at Brook Farm. Another picturesque thing about the Palazzo Publico is a great stone balcony quaintly wrought, about midway in the front and high aloft, with two arched windows opening into it. After another glimpse at the cathedral, too, I realize how utterly I have failed in conveying the idea of its elaborate ornament, its twisted and clustered pillars, and numberless devices of sculpture; nor did I mention the venerable statues that stand all round the summit of the edifice, relieved against the sky,--the highest of all being one of the Saviour, on the topmost peak of the front; nor the tall tower that ascends from one side of the building, and is built of layers of black and white marble piled one upon another in regular succession; nor the dome that swells upward close beside this tower. Had the cathedral been constructed on the plan and dimensions at first contemplated, it would have been incomparably majestic; the finished portion, grand as it is, being only what was intended for a transept. One of the walls of what was to have been the nave is still standing, and looks like a ruin, though, I believe, it has been turned to account as the wall of a palace, the space of the never-completed nave being now a court or street. The whole family of us were kindly taken out yesterday, to dine and spend the day at the Villa Belvedere with our friends Mr. and Mrs. Story. The vicinity of Siena is much more agreeable than that of Florence, being cooler, breezier, with more foliage and shrubbery both near at hand and in the distance; and the prospect, Mr. Story told us, embraces a diameter of about a hundred miles between hills north and south. The Villa Belvedere was built and owned by an Englishman now deceased, who has left it to his butler, and its lawns and shrubbery have something English in their character, and there was almost a dampness in the grass, which really pleased me in this parched Italy. Within the house the walls are hung with fine old-fashioned engravings from the pictures of Gainsborough, West, and other English painters. The Englishman, though he had chosen to live and die in Italy, had evidently brought his native tastes and peculiarities along with him. Mr. Story thinks of buying this villa: I do not know but I might be tempted to buy it myself if Siena were a practicable residence for the entire year; but the winter here, with the bleak mountain-winds of a hundred miles round about blustering against it, must be terribly disagreeable. We spent a very pleasant day, turning over books or talking on the lawn, whence we could behold scenes picturesque afar, and rich vineyard glimpses near at hand. Mr. Story is the most variously accomplished and brilliant person, the fullest of social life and fire, whom I ever met; and without seeming to make an effort, he kept us amused and entertained the whole day long; not wearisomely entertained neither, as we should have been if he had not let his fountain play naturally. Still, though he bubbled and brimmed over with fun, he left the impression on me that . . . . there is a pain and care, bred, it may be, out of the very richness of his gifts and abundance of his outward prosperity. Rich, in the prime of life, . . . . and children budding and blossoming around him as fairly as his heart could wish, with sparkling talents,--so many, that if he choose to neglect or fling away one, or two, or three, he would still have enough left to shine with,--who should be happy if not he? . . . . Towards sunset we all walked out into the podere, pausing a little while to look down into a well that stands on the verge of the lawn. Within the spacious circle of its stone curb was an abundant growth of maidenhair, forming a perfect wreath of thickly clustering leaves quite round, and trailing its tendrils downward to the water which gleamed beneath. It was a very pretty sight. Mr. Story bent over the well and uttered deep, musical tones, which were reverberated from the hollow depths with wonderful effect, as if a spirit dwelt within there, and (unlike the spirits that speak through mediums) sent him back responses even profounder and more melodious than the tones that awakened them. Such a responsive well as this might have been taken for an oracle in old days. We went along paths that led from one vineyard to another, and which might have led us for miles across the country. The grapes had been partly gathered, but still there were many purple or white clusters hanging heavily on the vines. We passed cottage doors, and saw groups of contadini and contadine in their festal attire, and they saluted us graciously; but it was observable that one of the men generally lingered on our track to see that no grapes were stolen, for there were a good many young people and children in our train, not only our own, but some from a neighboring villa. These Italian peasants are a kindly race, but, I doubt, not very hospitable of grape or fig. There was a beautiful sunset, and by the time we reached the house again the comet was already visible amid the unextinguished glow of daylight. A Mr. and Mrs. B------, Scotch people from the next villa, had come to see the Storys, and we sat till tea-time reading, talking, William Story drawing caricatures for his children's amusement and ours, and all of us sometimes getting up to look at the comet, which blazed brighter and brighter till it went down into the mists of the horizon. Among the caricatures was one of a Presidential candidate, evidently a man of very malleable principles, and likely to succeed. Late in the evening (too late for little Rosebud) we drove homeward. The streets of old Siena looked very grim at night, and it seemed like gazing into caverns to glimpse down some of the side streets as we passed, with a light burning dimly at the end of them. It was after ten when we reached home, and climbed up our gloomy staircase, lighted by the glimmer of some wax moccoli which I had in my pocket. October 5th.--I have been two or three times into the cathedral; . . . . the whole interior is of marble, in alternate lines of black and white, each layer being about eight inches in width and extending horizontally. It looks very curiously, and might remind the spectator of a stuff with horizontal stripes. Nevertheless, the effect is exceedingly rich, these alternate lines stretching away along the walls and round the clustered pillars, seen aloft, and through the arches; everywhere, this inlay of black and white. Every sort of ornament that could be thought of seems to have been crammed into the cathedral in one place or another: gilding, frescos, pictures; a roof of blue, spangled with golden stars; a magnificent wheel-window of old painted glass over the entrance, and another at the opposite end of the cathedral; statues, some of marble, others of gilded bronze; pulpits of carved marble; a gilded organ; a cornice of marble busts of the popes, extending round the entire church; a pavement, covered all over with a strange kind of mosaic work in various marbles, wrought into marble pictures of sacred subjects; immense clustered pillars supporting the round arches that divide the nave from the side aisles; a clere-story of windows within pointed arches;--it seemed as if the spectator were reading an antique volume written in black-letter of a small character, but conveying a high and solemn meaning. I can find no way of expressing its effect on me, so quaint and venerable as I feel this cathedral to be in its immensity of striped waistcoat, now dingy with five centuries of wear. I ought not to say anything that might detract from the grandeur and sanctity of the blessed edifice, for these attributes are really uninjured by any of the Gothic oddities which I have hinted at. We went this morning to the Institute of the Fine Arts, which is interesting as containing a series of the works of the Sienese painters from a date earlier than that of Cimabue. There is a dispute, I believe, between Florence and Siena as to which city may claim the credit of having originated the modern art of painting. The Florentines put forward Cimabue as the first artist, but as the Sienese produce a picture, by Guido da Siena, dated before the birth of Cimabue, the victory is decidedly with them. As to pictorial merit, to my taste there is none in either of these old painters, nor in any of their successors for a long time afterwards. At the Institute there are several rooms hung with early productions of the Sienese school, painted before the invention of oil-colors, on wood shaped into Gothic altar-pieces. The backgrounds still retain a bedimmed splendor of gilding. There is a plentiful use of red, and I can conceive that the pictures must have shed an illumination through the churches where they were displayed. There is often, too, a minute care bestowed on the faces in the pictures, and sometimes a very strong expression, stronger than modern artists get, and it is very strange how they attained this merit while they were so inconceivably rude in other respects. It is remarkable that all the early faces of the Madonna are especially stupid, and all of the same type, a sort of face such as one might carve on a pumpkin, representing a heavy, sulky, phlegmatic woman, with a long and low arch of the nose. This same dull face continues to be assigned to the Madonna, even when the countenances of the surrounding saints and angels are characterized with power and beauty, so that I think there must have been some portrait of this sacred personage reckoned authentic, which the early painters followed and religiously repeated. At last we came to a picture by Sodoma, the most illustrious representative of the Sienese school. It was a fresco; Christ bound to the pillar, after having been scourged. I do believe that painting has never done anything better, so far as expression is concerned, than this figure. In all these generations since it was painted it must have softened thousands of hearts, drawn down rivers of tears, been more effectual than a million of sermons. Really, it is a thing to stand and weep at. No other painter has done anything that can deserve to be compared to this. There are some other pictures by Sodoma, among them a Judith, very noble and admirable, and full of a profound sorrow for the deed which she has felt it her mission to do. Aquila Nera, October 7th.--Our lodgings in Siena had been taken only for five days, as they were already engaged after that period; so yesterday we returned to our old quarters at the Black Eagle. In the forenoon J----- and I went out of one of the gates (the road from it leads to Florence) and had a pleasant country walk. Our way wound downward, round the hill on which Siena stands, and gave us views of the Duomo and its campanile, seemingly pretty near, after we had walked long enough to be quite remote from them. Sitting awhile on the parapet of a bridge, I saw a laborer chopping the branches off a poplar-tree which he had felled; and, when it was trimmed, he took up the large trunk on one of his shoulders and carried it off, seemingly with ease. He did not look like a particularly robust man; but I have never seen such an herculean feat attempted by an Englishman or American. It has frequently struck me that the Italians are able to put forth a great deal of strength in such insulated efforts as this; but I have been told that they are less capable of continued endurance and hardship than our own race. I do not know why it should be so, except that I presume their food is less strong than ours. There was no other remarkable incident in our walk, which lay chiefly through gorges of the hills, winding beneath high cliffs of the brown Siena earth, with many pretty scenes of rural landscape; vineyards everywhere, and olive-trees; a mill on its little stream, over which there was an old stone bridge, with a graceful arch; farm-houses; a villa or two; subterranean passages, passing from the roadside through the high banks into the vineyards. At last we turned aside into a road which led us pretty directly to another gate of the city, and climbed steeply upward among tanneries, where the young men went about with their well-shaped legs bare, their trousers being tucked up till they were strictly breeches and nothing else. The campanile stood high above us; and by and by, and very soon, indeed, the steep ascent of the street brought us into the neighborhood of the Piazza del Campo, and of our own hotel. . . . From about twelve o'clock till one, I sat at my chamber window watching the specimens of human life as displayed in the Piazza Tolomei. [Here follow several pages of moving objects.] . . . . Of course, a multitude of other people passed by, but the curiousness of the catalogue is the prevalence of the martial and religious elements. The general costume of the inhabitants is frocks or sacks, loosely made, and rather shabby; often, shirt-sleeves; or the coat hung over one shoulder. They wear felt hats and straw. People of respectability seem to prefer cylinder hats, either black or drab, and broadcloth frock-coats in the French fashion; but, like the rest, they look a little shabby. Almost all the women wear shawls. Ladies in swelling petticoats, and with fans, some of which are highly gilded, appear. The people generally are not tall, but have a sufficient breadth of shoulder; in complexion, similar to Americans; bearded, universally. The vehicle used for driving is a little gig without a top; but these are seldom seen, and still less frequently a cab or other carriages. The gait of the people has not the energy of business or decided purpose. Everybody appears to lounge, and to have time for a moment's chat, and a disposition to rest, reason or none. After dinner I walked out of another gate of the city, and wandered among some pleasant country lanes, bordered with hedges, and wearing an English aspect; at least, I could fancy so. The vicinity of Siena is delightful to walk about in; there being a verdant outlook, a wide prospect of purple mountains, though no such level valley as the Val d' Arno; and the city stands so high that its towers and domes are seen more picturesquely from many points than those of Florence can be. Neither is the pedestrian so cruelly shut into narrow lanes, between high stone-walls, over which he cannot get a glimpse of landscape. As I walked by the hedges yesterday I could have fancied that the olive-trunks were those of apple-trees, and that I was in one or other of the two lands that I love better than Italy. But the great white villas and the farm-houses were unlike anything I have seen elsewhere, or that I should wish to see again, though proper enough to Italy. October 9th.--Thursday forenoon, 8th, we went to see the Palazzo Publico. There are some fine old halls and chapels, adorned with ancient frescos and pictures, of which I remember a picture of the Virgin by Sodoma, very beautiful, and other fine pictures by the same master. The architecture of these old rooms is grand, the roofs being supported by ponderous arches, which are covered with frescos, still magnificent, though faded, darkened, and defaced. We likewise saw an antique casket of wood, enriched with gilding, which had once contained an arm of John the Baptist,--so the custode told us. One of the halls was hung with the portraits of eight popes and nearly forty cardinals, who were natives of Siena. I have done hardly any other sight-seeing except a daily visit to the cathedral, which I admire and love the more the oftener I go thither. Its striped peculiarity ceases entirely to interfere with the grandeur and venerable beauty of its impression; and I am never weary of gazing through the vista of its arches, and noting continually something that I had not seen before in its exuberant adornment. The pavement alone is inexhaustible, being covered all over with figures of life-size or larger, which look like immense engravings of Gothic or Scriptural scenes. There is Absalom hanging by his hair, and Joab slaying him with a spear. There is Samson belaboring the Philistines with the jawbone of an ass. There are armed knights in the tumult of battle, all wrought with wonderful expression. The figures are in white marble, inlaid with darker stone, and the shading is effected by means of engraved lines in the marble, filled in with black. It would be possible, perhaps, to print impressions from some of these vast plates, for the process of cutting the lines was an exact anticipation of the modern art of engraving. However, the same thing was done--and I suppose at about the same period--on monumental brasses, and I have seen impressions or rubbings from those for sale in the old English churches. Yesterday morning, in the cathedral, I watched a woman at confession, being curious to see how long it would take her to tell her sins, the growth of a week perhaps. I know not how long she had been confessing when I first observed her, but nearly an hour passed before the priest came suddenly from the confessional, looking weary and moist with perspiration, and took his way out of the cathedral. The woman was left on her knees. This morning I watched another woman, and she too was very long about it, and I could see the face of the priest behind the curtain of the confessional, scarcely inclining his ear to the perforated tin through which the penitent communicated her outpourings. It must be very tedious to listen, day after day, to the minute and commonplace iniquities of the multitude of penitents, and it cannot be often that these are redeemed by the treasure-trove of a great sin. When her confession was over the woman came and sat down on the same bench with me, where her broad-brimmed straw hat was lying. She seemed to be a country woman, with a simple, matronly face, which was solemnized and softened with the comfort that she had obtained by disburdening herself of the soil of worldly frailties and receiving absolution. An old woman, who haunts the cathedral, whispered to her, and she went and knelt down where a procession of priests were to pass, and then the old lady begged a cruzia of me, and got a half-paul. It almost invariably happens, in church or cathedral, that beggars address their prayers to the heretic visitor, and probably with more unction than to the Virgin or saints. However, I have nothing to say against the sincerity of this people's devotion. They give all the proof of it that a mere spectator can estimate. Last evening we all went out to see the comet, which then reached its climax of lustre. It was like a lofty plume of fire, and grew very brilliant as the night darkened. October 10th.--This morning, too, we went to the cathedral, and sat long listening to the music of the organ and voices, and witnessing rites and ceremonies which are far older than even the ancient edifice where they were exhibited. A good many people were present, sitting, kneeling, or walking about,--a freedom that contrasts very agreeably with the grim formalities of English churches and our own meeting-houses. Many persons were in their best attire; but others came in, with unabashed simplicity, in their old garments of labor, sunburnt women from their toil among the vines and olives. One old peasant I noticed with his withered shanks in breeches and blue yarn stockings. The people of whatever class are wonderfully tolerant of heretics, never manifesting any displeasure or annoyance, though they must see that we are drawn thither by curiosity alone, and merely pry while they pray. I heartily wish the priests were better men, and that human nature, divinely influenced, could be depended upon for a constant supply and succession of good and pure ministers, their religion has so many admirable points. And then it is a sad pity that this noble and beautiful cathedral should be a mere fossil shell, out of which the life has died long ago. But for many a year yet to come the tapers will burn before the high altar, the Host will be elevated, the incense diffuse its fragrance, the confessionals be open to receive the penitents. I saw a father entering with two little bits of boys, just big enough to toddle along, holding his hand on either side. The father dipped his fingers into the marble font of holy water,--which, on its pedestals, was two or three times as high as those small Christians, --and wetted a hand of each, and taught them how to cross themselves. When they come to be men it will be impossible to convince those children that there is no efficacy in holy water, without plucking up all religious faith and sentiment by the roots. Generally, I suspect, when people throw off the faith they were born in, the best soil of their hearts is apt to cling to its roots. Raised several feet above the pavement, against every clustered pillar along the nave of the cathedral, is placed a statue of Gothic sculpture. In various places are sitting statues of popes of Sienese nativity, all of whom, I believe, have a hand raised in the act of blessing. Shrines and chapels, set in grand, heavy frames of pillared architecture, stand all along the aisles and transepts, and these seem in many instances to have been built and enriched by noble families, whose arms are sculptured on the pedestals of the pillars, sometimes with a cardinal's hat above to denote the rank of one of its members. How much pride, love, and reverence in the lapse of ages must have clung to the sharp points of all this sculpture and architecture! The cathedral is a religion in itself, --something worth dying for to those who have an hereditary interest in it. In the pavement, yesterday, I noticed the gravestone of a person who fell six centuries ago in the battle of Monte Aperto, and was buried here by public decree as a meed of valor. This afternoon I took a walk out of one of the city gates, and found the country about Siena as beautiful in this direction as in all others. I came to a little stream flowing over into a pebbly bed, and collecting itself into pools, with a scanty rivulet between. Its glen was deep, and was crossed by a bridge of several lofty and narrow arches like those of a Roman aqueduct. It is a modern structure, however. Farther on, as I wound round along the base of a hill which fell down upon the road by precipitous cliffs of brown earth, I saw a gray, ruined wall on the summit, surrounded with cypress-trees. This tree is very frequent about Siena, and the scenery is made soft and beautiful by a variety of other trees and shrubbery, without which these hills and gorges would have scarcely a charm. The road was thronged with country people, mostly women and children, who had been spending the feast-day in Siena; and parties of boys were chasing one another through the fields, pretty much as boys do in New England of a Sunday, but the Sienese lads had not the sense of Sabbath-breaking like our boys. Sunday with these people is like any other feast-day, and consecrated cheerful enjoyment. So much religious observance, as regards outward forms, is diffused through the whole week that they have no need to intensify the Sabbath except by making it gladden the other days. Returning through the same gate by which I had come out, I ascended into the city by a long and steep street, which was paved with bricks set edgewise. This pavement is common in many of the streets, which, being too steep for horses and carriages, are meant only to sustain the lighter tread of mules and asses. The more level streets are paved with broad, smooth flag-stones, like those of Florence,--a fashion which I heartily regret to change for the little penitential blocks of Rome. The walls of Siena in their present state, and so far as I have seen them, are chiefly brick; but there are intermingled fragments of ancient stone-work, and I wonder why the latter does not prevail more largely. The Romans, however,--and Siena had Roman characteristics,--always liked to build of brick, a taste that has made their ruins (now that the marble slabs are torn off) much less grand than they ought to have been. I am grateful to the old Sienese for having used stone so largely in their domestic architecture, and thereby rendered their city so grimly picturesque, with its black palaces frowning upon one another from arched windows, across narrow streets, to the height of six stories, like opposite ranks of tall men looking sternly into one another's eyes. October 11th.--Again I went to the cathedral this morning, and spent an hour listening to the music and looking through the orderly intricacies of the arches, where many vistas open away among the columns of the choir. There are five clustered columns on each side of the nave; then under the dome there are two more arches, not in a straight line, but forming the segment of a circle; and beyond the circle of the dome there are four more arches, extending to the extremity of the chancel. I should have said, instead of "clustered columns" as above, that there are five arches along the nave supported by columns. This cathedral has certainly bewitched me, to write about it so much, effecting nothing with my pains. I should judge the width of each arch to be about twenty feet, and the thickness of each clustered pillar is eight; or ten more, and the length of the entire building may be between two and three hundred feet; not very large, certainly, but it makes an impression of grandeur independent of size. . . . I never shall succeed even in reminding myself of the venerable magnificence of this minster, with its arches, its columns, its cornice of popes' heads, its great wheel windows, its manifold ornament, all combining in one vast effect, though many men have labored individually, and through a long course of time, to produce this multifarious handiwork and headwork. I now took a walk out of the city. A road turned immediately to the left as I emerged from the city, and soon proved to be a rustic lane leading past several villas and farm-houses. It was a very pleasant walk, with vineyards and olive-orchards on each side, and now and then glimpses of the towers and sombre heaped-up palaces of Siena, and now a rural seclusion again; for the hills rise and the valleys fall like the swell and subsidence of the sea after a gale, so that Siena may be quite hidden within a quarter of a mile of its wall, or may be visible, I doubt not, twenty miles away. It is a fine old town, with every promise of health and vigor in its atmosphere, and really, if I could take root anywhere, I know not but it could as well be here as in another place. It would only be a kind of despair, however, that would ever make me dream of finding a home in Italy; a sense that I had lost my country through absence or incongruity, and that earth is not an abiding-place. I wonder that we Americans love our country at all, it having no limits and no oneness; and when you try to make it a matter of the heart, everything falls away except one's native State; neither can you seize hold of that unless you tear it out of the Union, bleeding and quivering. Yet unquestionably, we do stand by our national flag as stoutly as any people in the world, and I myself have felt the heart throb at sight of it as sensibly as other men. I think the singularity of our form of government contributes to give us a kind of patriotism, by separating us from other nations more entirely. If other nations had similar institutions,--if England, especially, were a democracy,--we should as readily make ourselves at home in another country as now in a new State. October 12th.--And again we went to the cathedral this forenoon, and the whole family, except myself, sketched portions of it. Even Rosebud stood gravely sketching some of the inlaid figures of the pavement. As for me, I can but try to preserve some memorial of this beautiful edifice in ill-fitting words that never hit the mark. This morning visit was not my final one, for I went again after dinner and walked quite round the whole interior. I think I have not yet mentioned the rich carvings of the old oaken seats round the choir, and the curious mosaic of lighter and darker woods, by which figures and landscapes are skilfully represented on the backs of some of the stalls. The process seems to be the same as the inlaying and engraving of the pavement, the material in one case being marble, in the other wood. The only other thing that I particularly noticed was, that in the fonts of holy water at the front entrance, marble fish are sculptured in the depths of the basin, and eels and shellfish crawling round the brim. Have I spoken of the sumptuous carving of the capitals of the columns? At any rate I have left a thousand beauties without a word. Here I drop the subject. As I took my parting glance the cathedral had a gleam of golden sunshine in its far depths, and it seemed to widen and deepen itself, as if to convince me of my error in saying, yesterday, that it is not very large. I wonder how I could say it. After taking leave of the cathedral, I found my way out of another of the city gates, and soon turned aside into a green lane. . . . Soon the lane passed through a hamlet consisting of a few farm-houses, the shabbiest and dreariest that can be conceived, ancient, and ugly, and dilapidated, with iron-grated windows below, and heavy wooden shutters on the windows above,--high, ruinous walls shutting in the courts, and ponderous gates, one of which was off its hinges. The farm-yards were perfect pictures of disarray and slovenly administration of home affairs. Only one of these houses had a door opening on the road, and that was the meanest in the hamlet. A flight of narrow stone stairs ascended from the threshold to the second story. All these houses were specimens of a rude antiquity, built of brick and stone, with the marks of arched doors and windows where a subsequent generation had shut up the lights, or the accesses which the original builders had opened. Humble as these dwellings are,--though large and high compared with rural residences in other countries,--they may very probably date back to the times when Siena was a warlike republic, and when every house in its neighborhood had need to be a fortress. I suppose, however, prowling banditti were the only enemies against whom a defence would be attempted. What lives must now be lived there,--in beastly ignorance, mental sluggishness, hard toil for little profit, filth, and a horrible discomfort of fleas; for if the palaces of Italy are overrun with these pests, what must the country hovels be! . . . . We are now all ready for a start to-morrow. RADICOFANI. October 13th.--We arranged to begin our journey at six. . . . It was a chill, lowering morning, and the rain blew a little in our faces before we had gone far, but did not continue long. The country soon lost the pleasant aspect which it wears immediately about Siena, and grew very barren and dreary. Then it changed again for the better, the road leading us through a fertility of vines and olives, after which the dreary and barren hills came back again, and formed our prospect throughout most of the day. We stopped for our dejeuner a la fourchette at a little old town called San Quirico, which we entered through a ruined gateway, the town being entirely surrounded by its ancient wall. This wall is far more picturesque than that of Siena, being lofty and built of stone, with a machicolation of arches running quite round its top, like a cornice. It has little more than a single street, perhaps a quarter of a mile long, narrow, paved with flag-stones in the Florentine fashion, and lined with two rows of tall, rusty stone houses, without a gap between them from end to end. The cafes were numerous in relation to the size of the town, and there were two taverns,--our own, the Eagle, being doubtless the best, and having three arched entrances in its front. Of these, the middle one led to the guests' apartments, the one on the right to the barn, and that on the left to the stable, so that, as is usual in Italian inns, the whole establishment was under one roof. We were shown into a brick-paved room on the first floor, adorned with a funny fresco of Aurora on the ceiling, and with some colored prints, both religious and profane. . . . As we drove into the town we noticed a Gothic church with two doors of peculiar architecture, and while our dejeuner was being prepared we went to see it. The interior had little that was remarkable, for it had been repaired early in the last century, and spoilt of course; but an old triptych is still hanging in a chapel beside the high altar. It is painted on wood, and dates back beyond the invention of oil-painting, and represents the Virgin and some saints and angels. Neither is the exterior of the church particularly interesting, with the exception of the carving and ornaments of two of the doors. Both of them have round arches, deep and curiously wrought, and the pillars of one of the two are formed of a peculiar knot or twine in stone-work, such as I cannot well describe, but it is both ingenious and simple. These pillars rest on two nondescript animals, which look as much like walruses as anything else. The pillars of the other door consist of two figures supporting the capitals, and themselves standing on two handsomely carved lions. The work is curious, and evidently very ancient, and the material a red freestone. After lunch, J----- and I took a walk out of the gate of the town opposite to that of our entrance. There were no soldiers on guard, as at city gates of more importance; nor do I think that there is really any gate to shut, but the massive stone gateway still stands entire over the empty arch. Looking back after we had passed through, I observed that the lofty upper story is converted into a dove-cot, and that pumpkins were put to ripen in some open chambers at one side. We passed near the base of a tall, square tower, which is said to be of Roman origin. The little town is in the midst of a barren region, but its immediate neighborhood is fertile, and an olive-orchard, venerable of aspect, lay on the other side of the pleasant lane with its English hedges, and olive-trees grew likewise along the base of the city wall. The arched machicolations, which I have before mentioned, were here and there interrupted by a house which was built upon the old wall or incorporated into it; and from the windows of one of then I saw ears of Indian corn hung out to ripen in the sun, and somebody was winnowing grain at a little door that opened through the wall. It was very pleasant to see the ancient warlike rampart thus overcome with rustic peace. The ruined gateway is partly overgrown with ivy. Returning to our inn, along the street, we saw ------ sketching one of the doors of the Gothic church, in the midst of a crowd of the good people of San Quirico, who made no scruple to look over her shoulder, pressing so closely as hardly to allow her elbow-room. I must own that I was too cowardly to come forward and take my share of this public notice, so I turned away to the inn and there awaited her coming. Indeed, she has seldom attempted to sketch without finding herself the nucleus of a throng. VITERBO. The Black Eagle, October 14th.--Perhaps I had something more to say of San Quirico, but I shall merely add that there is a stately old palace of the Piccolomini close to the church above described. It is built in the style of the Roman palaces, and looked almost large enough to be one of them. Nevertheless, the basement story, or part of it, seems to be used as a barn and stable, for I saw a yoke of oxen in the entrance. I cannot but mention a most wretched team of vettura-horses which stopped at the door of our albergo: poor, lean, downcast creatures, with deep furrows between their ribs; nothing but skin and bone, in short, and not even so much skin as they should have had, for it was partially worn off from their backs. The harness was fastened with ropes, the traces and reins were ropes; the carriage was old and shabby, and out of this miserable equipage there alighted an ancient gentleman and lady, whom our waiter affirmed to be the Prefect of Florence and his wife. We left San Quirico at two o'clock, and followed an ascending road till we got into the region above the clouds; the landscape was very wide, but very dreary and barren, and grew more and more so till we began to climb the mountain of Radicofani, the peak of which had been blackening itself on the horizon almost the whole day. When we had come into a pretty high region we were assailed by a real mountain tempest of wind, rain, and hail, which pelted down upon us in good earnest, and cooled the air a little below comfort. As we toiled up the mountain its upper region presented a very striking aspect, looking as if a precipice had been smoothed and squared for the purpose of rendering the old castle on its summit more inaccessible than it was by nature. This is the castle of the robber-knight, Ghino di Tacco, whom Boccaccio introduces into the Decameron. A freebooter of those days must have set a higher value on such a rock as this than if it had been one mass of diamond, for no art of mediaeval warfare could endanger him in such a fortress. Drawing yet nearer, we found the hillside immediately above us strewn with thousands upon thousands of great fragments of stone. It looked as if some great ruin had taken place there, only it was too vast a ruin to have been the dismemberment and dissolution of anything made by man. We could now see the castle on the height pretty distinctly. It seemed to impend over the precipice; and close to the base of the latter we saw the street of a town on as strange and inconvenient a foundation as ever one was built upon. I suppose the inhabitants of the village were dependants of the old knight of the castle; his brotherhood of robbers, as they married and had families, settled there under the shelter of the eagle's nest. But the singularity is, how a community of people have contrived to live and perpetuate themselves so far out of the reach of the world's help, and seemingly with no means of assisting in the world's labor. I cannot imagine how they employ themselves except in begging, and even that branch of industry appears to be left to the old women and the children. No house was ever built in this immediate neighborhood for any such natural purpose as induces people to build them on other sites. Even our hotel, at which we now arrived, could not be said to be a natural growth of the soil; it had originally been a whim of one of the Grand Dukes of Tuscany,--a hunting-palace,--intended for habitation only during a few weeks of the year. Of all dreary hotels I ever alighted at, methinks this is the most so; but on first arriving I merely followed the waiter to look at our rooms, across stone-paved basement-halls dismal as Etruscan tombs; up dim staircases, and along shivering corridors, all of stone, stone, stone, nothing but cold stone. After glancing at these pleasant accommodations, my wife and I, with J-----, set out to ascend the hill and visit the town of Radicofani. It is not more than a quarter of a mile above our hotel, and is accessible by a good piece of road, though very steep. As we approached the town, we were assailed by some little beggars; but this is the case all through Italy, in city or solitude, and I think the mendicants of Radicofani are fewer than its proportion. We had not got far towards the village, when, looking back over the scene of many miles that lay stretched beneath us, we saw a heavy shower apparently travelling straight towards us over hill and dale. It seemed inevitable that it should soon be upon us, so I persuaded my wife to return to the hotel; but J----- and I kept onward, being determined to see Radicofani with or without a drenching. We soon entered the street; the blackest, ugliest, rudest old street, I do believe, that ever human life incrusted itself with. The first portion of it is the overbrimming of the town in generations subsequent to that in which it was surrounded by a wall; but after going a little way we came to a high, square tower planted right across the way, with an arched gateway in its basement story, so that it looked like a great short-legged giant striding over the street of Radicofani. Within the gateway is the proper and original town, though indeed the portion outside of the gate is as densely populated, as ugly, and as ancient, as that within. The street was very narrow, and paved with flag-stones not quite so smooth as those of Florence; the houses are tall enough to be stately, if they were not so inconceivably dingy and shabby; but, with their half-dozen stories, they make only the impression of hovel piled upon hovel,--squalor immortalized in undecaying stone. It was now getting far into the twilight, and I could not distinguish the particularities of the little town, except that there were shops, a cafe or two, and as many churches, all dusky with age, crowded closely together, inconvenient stifled too in spite of the breadth and freedom of the mountain atmosphere outside the scanty precincts of the street. It was a death-in-life little place, a fossilized place, and yet the street was thronged, and had all the bustle of a city; even more noise than a city's street, because everybody in Radicofani knows everybody, and probably gossips with everybody, being everybody's blood relation, as they cannot fail to have become after they and their forefathers have been shut up together within the narrow walls for many hundred years. They looked round briskly at J----- and me, but were courteous, as Italians always are, and made way for us to pass through the throng, as we kept on still ascending the steep street. It took us but a few minutes to reach the still steeper and winding pathway which climbs towards the old castle. After ascending above the village, the path, though still paved, becomes very rough, as if the hoofs of Ghino di Tacco's robber cavalry had displaced the stones and they had never been readjusted. On every side, too, except where the path just finds space enough, there is an enormous rubbish of huge stones, which seems to have fallen from the precipice above, or else to have rained down out of the sky. We kept on, and by and by reached what seemed to have been a lower outwork of the castle on the top; there was the massive old arch of a gateway, and a great deal of ruin of man's work, beside the large stones that here, as elsewhere, were scattered so abundantly. Within the wall and gateway just mentioned, however, there was a kind of farm-house, adapted, I suppose, out of the old ruin, and I noticed some ears of Indian corn hanging out of a window. There were also a few stacks of hay, but no signs of human or animal life; and it is utterly inexplicable to me, where these products of the soil could have come from, for certainly they never grew amid that barrenness. We had not yet reached Ghino's castle, and, being now beneath it, we had to bend our heads far backward to see it rising up against the clear sky while we were now in twilight. The path upward looked terribly steep and rough, and if we had climbed it we should probably have broken our necks in descending again into the lower obscurity. We therefore stopped here, much against J-----'s will, and went back as we came, still wondering at the strange situation of Radicofani; for its aspect is as if it had stepped off the top of the cliff and lodged at its base, though still in danger of sliding farther down the hillside. Emerging from the compact, grimy life of its street, we saw that the shower had swept by, or probably had expended itself in a region beneath us, for we were above the scope of many of the showery clouds that haunt a hill-country. There was a very bright star visible, I remember, and we saw the new moon, now a third towards the full, for the first time this evening. The air was cold and bracing. But I am excessively sleepy, so will not describe our great dreary hotel, where a blast howled in an interminable corridor all night. It did not seem to have anything to do with the wind out of doors, but to be a blast that had been casually shut in when the doors were closed behind the last Grand Duke who came hither and departed, and ever since it has been kept prisoner, and makes a melancholy wail along the corridor. The dreamy stupidity of this conceit proves how sleepy I am. SETTE VENE. October 15th.--We left Radicofani long before sunrise, and I saw that ceremony take place from the coupe of the vettura for the first time in a long while. A sunset is the better sight of the two. I have always suspected it, and have been strengthened in the idea whenever I have had an opportunity of comparison. Our departure from Radicofani was most dreary, except that we were very glad to get away; but, the cold discomfort of dressing in a chill bedroom by candlelight, and our uncertain wandering through the immense hotel with a dim taper in search of the breakfast-room, and our poor breakfast of eggs, Italian bread, and coffee,--all these things made me wish that people were created with roots like trees, so they could not befool themselves with wandering about. However, we had not long been on our way before the morning air blew away all our troubles, and we rumbled cheerfully onward, ready to encounter even the papal custom-house officers at Ponte Centino. Our road thither was a pretty steep descent. I remember the barren landscape of hills, with here and there a lonely farm-house, which there seemed to be no occasion for, where nothing grew. At Ponte Centino my passport was examined, and I was invited into an office where sat the papal custom-house officer, a thin, subtle-looking, keen-eyed, sallow personage, of aspect very suitable to be the agent of a government of priests. I communicated to him my wish to pass the custom-house without giving the officers the trouble of examining my luggage. He inquired whether I had any dutiable articles, and wrote for my signature a declaration in the negative; and then he lifted a sand-box, beneath which was a little heap of silver coins. On this delicate hint I asked what was the usual fee, and was told that fifteen pauls was the proper sum. I presume it was entirely an illegal charge, and that he had no right to pass any luggage without examination; but the thing is winked at by the authorities, and no money is better spent for the traveller's convenience than these fifteen pauls. There was a papal military officer in the room, and he, I believe, cheated me in the change of a Napoleon, as his share of the spoil. At the door a soldier met me with my passport, and looked as if he expected a fee for handing it to me; but in this he was disappointed. After I had resumed my seat in the coupe, the porter of the custom-house--a poor, sickly-looking creature, half dead with the malaria of the place--appeared, and demanded a fee for doing nothing to my luggage. He got three pauls, and looked but half contented. This whole set of men seem to be as corrupt as official people can possibly be; and yet I hardly know whether to stigmatize them as corrupt, because it is not their individual delinquency, but the operation of a regular system. Their superiors know what men they are, and calculate upon their getting a living by just these means. And, indeed, the custom-house and passport regulations, as they exist in Italy, would be intolerable if there were not this facility of evading them at little cost. Such laws are good for nothing but to be broken. We now began to ascend again, and the country grew fertile and picturesque. We passed many mules and donkeys, laden with a sort of deep firkin on each side of the saddle, and these were heaped up with grapes, both purple and white. We bought some, and got what we should have thought an abundance at small price, only we used to get twice as many at Montanto for the same money. However, a Roman paul bought us three or four pounds even here. We still ascended, and came soon to the gateway of the town of Acquapendente, which stands on a height that seems to descend by natural terraces to the valley below. . . . French soldiers, in their bluish-gray coats and scarlet trousers, were on duty at the gate, and one of them took my passport and the vetturino's, and we then drove into the town to wait till they should be vised. We saw but one street, narrow, with tall, rusty, aged houses, built of stone, evil smelling; in short, a kind of place that would be intolerably dismal in cloudy England, and cannot be called cheerful even under the sun of Italy. . . . Priests passed, and burly friars, one of whom was carrying a wine-barrel on his head. Little carts, laden with firkins of grapes, and donkeys with the same genial burden, brushed passed our vettura, finding scarce room enough in the narrow street. All the idlers of Acquapendente--and they were many--assembled to gaze at us, but not discourteously. Indeed, I never saw an idle curiosity exercised in such a pleasant way as by the country-people of Italy. It almost deserves to be called a kindly interest and sympathy, instead of a hard and cold curiosity, like that of our own people, and it is displayed with such simplicity that it is evident no offence is intended. By and by the vetturino brought his passport and my own, with the official vise, and we kept on our way, still ascending, passing through vineyards and olives, and meeting grape-laden donkeys, till we came to the town of San Lorenzo Nuovo, a place built by Pius VI. as the refuge for the people of a lower town which had been made uninhabitable by malaria. The new town, which I suppose is hundreds of years old, with all its novelty shows strikingly the difference between places that grow up and shape out their streets of their own accord, as it were, and one that is built on a settled plan of malice aforethought. This little rural village has gates of classic architecture, a spacious piazza, and a great breadth of straight and rectangular streets, with houses of uniform style, airy and wholesome looking to a degree seldom seen on the Continent. Nevertheless, I must say that the town looked hatefully dull and ridiculously prim, and, of the two, I had rather spend my life in Radicofani. We drove through it, from gate to gate, without stopping, and soon came to the brow of a hill, whence we beheld, right beneath us, the beautiful lake of Bolsena; not exactly at our feet, however, for a portion of level ground lay between, haunted by the pestilence which has depopulated all these shores, and made the lake and its neighborhood a solitude. It looked very beautiful, nevertheless, with a sheen of a silver mid a gray like that of steel as the wind blew and the sun shone over it; and, judging by my own feelings, I should really have thought that the breeze from its surface was bracing and healthy. Descending the hill, we passed the ruins of the old town of San Lorenzo, of which the prim village on the hill-top may be considered the daughter. There is certainly no resemblance between parent and child, the former being situated on a sort of precipitous bluff, where there could have been no room for piazzas and spacious streets, nor accessibility except by mules, donkeys, goats, and people of Alpine habits. There was an ivy-covered tower on the top of the bluff, and some arched cavern mouths that looked as if they opened into the great darkness. These were the entrances to Etruscan tombs, for the town on top had been originally Etruscan, and the inhabitants had buried themselves in the heart of the precipitous bluffs after spending their lives on its summit. Reaching the plain, we drove several miles along the shore of the lake, and found the soil fertile and generally well cultivated, especially with the vine, though there were tracks apparently too marshy to be put to any agricultural purpose. We met now and then a flock of sheep, watched by sallow-looking and spiritless men and boys, who, we took it for granted, would soon perish of malaria, though, I presume, they never spend their nights in the immediate vicinity of the lake. I should like to inquire whether animals suffer from the bad qualities of the air. The lake is not nearly so beautiful on a nearer view as it is from the hill above, there being no rocky margin, nor bright, sandy beach, but everywhere this interval of level ground, and often swampy marsh, betwixt the water and the hill. At a considerable distance from the shore we saw two islands, one of which is memorable as having been the scene of an empress's murder, but I cannot stop to fill my journal with historical reminiscences. We kept onward to the town of Bolsena, which stands nearly a mile from the lake, and on a site higher than the level margin, yet not so much so, I should apprehend, as to free it from danger of malaria. We stopped at an albergo outside of the wall of the town, and before dinner had time to see a good deal of the neighborhood. The first aspect of the town was very striking, with a vista into its street through the open gateway, and high above it an old, gray, square-built castle, with three towers visible at the angles, one of them battlemented, one taller than the rest, and one partially ruined. Outside of the town-gate there were some fragments of Etruscan ruin, capitals of pillars and altars with inscriptions; these we glanced at, and then made our entrance through the gate. There it was again,--the same narrow, dirty, time-darkened street of piled-up houses which we have so often seen; the same swarm of ill-to-do people, grape-laden donkeys, little stands or shops of roasted chestnuts, peaches, tomatoes, white and purple figs; the same evidence of a fertile land, and grimy poverty in the midst of abundance which nature tries to heap into their hands. It seems strange that they can never grasp it. We had gone but a little way along this street, when we saw a narrow lane that turned aside from it and went steeply upward. Its name was on the corner,--the Via di Castello,--and as the castle promised to be more interesting than anything else, we immediately began to ascend. The street--a strange name for such an avenue--clambered upward in the oddest fashion, passing under arches, scrambling up steps, so that it was more like a long irregular pair of stairs than anything that Christians call a street; and so large a part of it was under arches that we scarcely seemed to be out of doors. At last U----, who was in advance, emerged into the upper air, and cried out that we had ascended to an upper town, and a larger one than that beneath. It really seemed like coming up out of the earth into the midst of the town, when we found ourselves so unexpectedly in upper Bolsena. We were in a little nook, surrounded by old edifices, and called the Piazza del Orologio, on account of a clock that was apparent somewhere. The castle was close by, and from its platform there was a splendid view of the lake and all the near hill-country. The castle itself is still in good condition, and apparently as strong as ever it was as respects the exterior walls; but within there seemed to be neither floor nor chamber, nothing but the empty shell of the dateless old fortress. The stones at the base and lower part of the building were so massive that I should think the Etrurians must have laid them; and then perhaps the Romans built a little higher, and the mediaeval people raised the battlements and towers. But we did not look long at the castle, our attention being drawn to the singular aspect of the town itself, which--to speak first of its most prominent characteristic--is the very filthiest place, I do believe, that was ever inhabited by man. Defilement was everywhere; in the piazza, in nooks and corners, strewing the miserable lanes from side to side, the refuse of every day, and of accumulated ages. I wonder whether the ancient Romans were as dirty a people as we everywhere find those who have succeeded them; for there seems to have been something in the places that have been inhabited by Romans, or made famous in their history, and in the monuments of every kind that they have raised, that puts people in mind of their very earthliness, and incites them to defile therewith whatever temple, column, ruined palace, or triumphal arch may fall in their way. I think it must be an hereditary trait, probably weakened and robbed of a little of its horror by the influence of milder ages; and I am much afraid that Caesar trod narrower and fouler ways in his path to power than those of modern Rome, or even of this disgusting town of Bolsena. I cannot imagine anything worse than these, however. Rotten vegetables thrown everywhere about, musty straw, standing puddles, running rivulets of dissolved nastiness,--these matters were a relief amid viler objects. The town was full of great black hogs wallowing before every door, and they grunted at us with a kind of courtesy and affability as if the town were theirs, and it was their part to be hospitable to strangers. Many donkeys likewise accosted us with braying; children, growing more uncleanly every day they lived, pestered us with begging; men stared askance at us as they lounged in corners, and women endangered us with slops which they were flinging from doorways into the street. No decent words can describe, no admissible image can give an idea of this noisome place. And yet, I remember, the donkeys came up the height loaded with fruit, and with little flat-sided barrels of wine; the people had a good atmosphere--except as they polluted it themselves--on their high site, and there seemed to be no reason why they should not live a beautiful and jolly life. I did not mean to write such an ugly description as the above, but it is well, once for all, to have attempted conveying an idea of what disgusts the traveller, more or less, in all these Italian towns. Setting aside this grand characteristic, the upper town of Bolsena is a most curious and interesting place. It was originally an Etruscan city, the ancient Volsinii, and when taken and destroyed by the Romans was said to contain two thousand statues. Afterwards the Romans built a town upon the site, including, I suppose, the space occupied by the lower city, which looks as if it had brimmed over like Radicofani, and fallen from the precipitous height occupied by the upper. The latter is a strange confusion of black and ugly houses, piled massively out of the ruins of former ages, built rudely and without plan, as a pauper would build his hovel, and yet with here and there an arched gateway, a cornice, a pillar, that might have adorned a palace. . . . The streets are the narrowest I have seen anywhere,--of no more width, indeed, than may suffice for the passage of a donkey with his panniers. They wind in and out in strange confusion, and hardly look like streets at all, but, nevertheless, have names printed on the corners, just as if they were stately avenues. After looking about us awhile and drawing half-breaths so as to take in the less quantity of gaseous pollution, we went back to the castle, and descended by a path winding downward from it into the plain outside of the town-gate. It was now dinner-time, . . . . and we had, in the first place, some fish from the pestiferous lake; not, I am sorry to say, the famous stewed eels which, Dante says, killed Pope Martin, but some trout. . . . By the by, the meal was not dinner, but our midday colazione. After despatching it, we again wandered forth and strolled round the outside of the lower town, which, with the upper one, made as picturesque a combination as could be desired. The old wall that surrounds the lower town has been appropriated, long since, as the back wall of a range of houses; windows have been pierced through it; upper chambers and loggie have been built upon it; so that it looks something like a long row of rural dwellings with one continuous front or back, constructed in a strange style of massive strength, contrasting with the vines that here and there are trained over it, and with the wreaths of yellow corn that hang from the windows. But portions of the old battlements are interspersed with the line of homely chambers and tiled house-tops. Within the wall the town is very compact, and above its roofs rises a rock, the sheer, precipitous bluff on which stands the upper town, whose foundations impend over the highest roof in the lower. At one end is the old castle, with its towers rising above the square battlemented mass of the main fortress; and if we had not seen the dirt and squalor that dwells within this venerable outside, we should have carried away a picture of gray, grim dignity, presented by a long past age to the present one, to put its mean ways and modes to shame. ------ sat diligently sketching, and children came about her, exceedingly unfragrant, but very courteous and gentle, looking over her shoulders, and expressing delight as they saw each familiar edifice take its place in the sketch. They are a lovable people, these Italians, as I find from almost all with whom we come in contact; they have great and little faults, and no great virtues that I know of; but still are sweet, amiable, pleasant to encounter, save when they beg, or when you have to bargain with them. We left Bolsena and drove to Viterbo, passing the gate of the picturesque town of Montefiascone, over the wall of which I saw spires and towers, and the dome of a cathedral. I was sorry not to taste, in its own town, the celebrated est, which was the death-draught of the jolly prelate. At Viterbo, however, I called for some wine of Montefiascone, and had a little straw-covered flask, which the waiter assured us was the genuine est-wine. It was of golden color, and very delicate, somewhat resembling still champagne, but finer, and requiring a calmer pause to appreciate its subtle delight. Its good qualities, however, are so evanescent, that the finer flavor became almost imperceptible before we finished the flask. Viterbo is a large, disagreeable town, built at the foot of a mountain, the peak of which is seen through the vista of some of the narrow streets. There are more fountains in Viterbo than I have seen in any other city of its size, and many of them of very good design. Around most of them there were wine-hogsheads, waiting their turn to be cleansed and rinsed, before receiving the wine of the present vintage. Passing a doorway, J----- saw some men treading out the grapes in a great vat with their naked feet. Among the beggars here, the loudest and most vociferous was a crippled postilion, wearing his uniform jacket, green, faced with red; and he seemed to consider himself entitled still to get his living from travellers, as having been disabled in the way of his profession. I recognized his claim, and was rewarded with a courteous and grateful bow at our departure. . . . To beggars--after my much experience both in England and Italy--I give very little, though I am not certain that it would not often be real beneficence in the latter country. There being little or no provision for poverty and age, the poor must often suffer. Nothing can be more earnest than their entreaties for aid; nothing seemingly more genuine than their gratitude when they receive it. They return you the value of their alms in prayers, and say, "God will accompany you." Many of them have a professional whine, and a certain doleful twist of the neck and turn of the head, which hardens my heart against them at once. A painter might find numerous models among them, if canvas had not already been more than sufficiently covered with their style of the picturesque. There is a certain brick-dust colored cloak worn in Viterbo, not exclusively by beggars, which, when ragged enough, is exceedingly artistic. ROME. 68 Piazza Poli, October 17th.--We left Viterbo on the 15th, and proceeded, through Monterosi, to Sette Verse. There was nothing interesting at Sette Verse, except an old Roman bridge, of a single arch, which had kept its sweep, composed of one row of stones, unbroken for two or more thousand years, and looked just as strong as ever, though gray with age, and fringed with plants that found it hard to fix themselves in its close crevices. The next day we drove along the Cassian Way towards Rome. It was a most delightful morning, a genial atmosphere; the more so, I suppose, because this was the Campagna, the region of pestilence and death. I had a quiet, gentle, comfortable pleasure, as if, after many wanderings, I was drawing near Rome, for, now that I have known it once, Rome certainly does draw into itself my heart, as I think even London, or even little Concord itself, or old sleepy Salem, never did and never will. Besides, we are to stay here six months, and we had now a house all prepared to receive us; so that this present approach, in the noontide of a genial day, was most unlike our first one, when we crept towards Rome through the wintry midnight, benumbed with cold, ill, weary, and not knowing whither to betake ourselves. Ah! that was a dismal tine! One thing, however, that disturbed even my present equanimity a little was the necessity of meeting the custom-house at the Porta del Popolo; but my past experience warranted me in believing that even these ogres might be mollified by the magic touch of a scudo; and so it proved. We should have escaped any examination at all, the officer whispered me, if his superior had not happened to be present; but, as the case stood, they took down only one trunk from the top of the vettura, just lifted the lid, closed it again, and gave us permission to proceed. So we came to 68 Piazza Poli, and found ourselves at once at home, in such a comfortable, cosey little house, as I did not think existed in Rome. I ought to say a word about our vetturino, Constantino Bacci, an excellent and most favorable specimen of his class; for his magnificent conduct, his liberality, and all the good qualities that ought to be imperial, S----- called him the Emperor. He took us to good hotels, and feasted us with the best; he was kind to us all, and especially to little Rosebud, who used to run by his side, with her small white hand in his great brown one; he was cheerful in his deportment, and expressed his good spirits by the smack of his whip, which is the barometer of a vetturino's inward weather; he drove admirably, and would rumble up to the door of an albergo, and stop to a hair's-breadth just where it was most convenient for us to alight; he would hire postilions and horses, where other vetturini would take nothing better than sluggish oxen, to help us up the hilly roads, so that sometimes we had a team of seven; he did all that we could possibly require of him, and was content and more, with a buon mono of five scudi, in addition to the stipulated price. Finally, I think the tears had risen almost to his eyelids when we parted with him. Our friends, the Thompsons, through whose kindness we procured this house, called to see us soon after our arrival. In the afternoon, I walked with Rosebud to the Medici Gardens, and on our way thither, we espied our former servant, Lalla, who flung so many and such bitter curses after us, on our departure from Rome, sitting at her father's fruit-stall. Thank God, they have not taken effect. After going to the Medici, we went to the Pincian Gardens, and looked over into the Borghese grounds, which, methought, were more beautiful than ever. The same was true of the sky, and of every object beneath it; and as we came homeward along the Corso, I wondered at the stateliness and palatial magnificence of that noble street. Once, I remember, I thought it narrow, and far unworthy of its fame. In the way of costume, the men in goat-skin breeches, whom we met on the Campagna, were very striking, and looked like Satyrs. October 21st.--. . . . I have been twice to St. Peter's, and was impressed more than at any former visit by a sense of breadth and loftiness, and, as it were, a visionary splendor and magnificence. I also went to the Museum of the Capitol; and the statues seemed to me more beautiful than formerly, and I was not sensible of the cold despondency with which I have so often viewed them. Yesterday we went to the Corsini Palace, which we had not visited before. It stands in the Trastevere, in the Longara, and is a stately palace, with a grand staircase, leading to the first floor, where is situated the range of picture-rooms. There were a good many fine pictures, but none of them have made a memorable impression on my mind, except a portrait by Vandyke, of a man in point-lace, very grand and very real. The room in which this picture hung had many other portraits by Holbein, Titian, Rembrandt, Rubens, and other famous painters, and was wonderfully rich in this department. In another, there was a portrait of Pope Julius II., by Raphael, somewhat differing from those at the Pitti and the Uffizi galleries in Florence, and those I have seen in England and Paris; thinner, paler, perhaps older, more severely intellectual, but at least, as high a work of art as those. The palace has some handsome old furniture, and gilded chairs, covered with leather cases, possibly relics of Queen Christina's time, who died here. I know not but the most curious object was a curule chair of marble, sculptured all out of one piece, and adorned with bas-reliefs. It is supposed to be Etruscan. It has a circular back, sweeping round, so as to afford sufficient rests for the elbows; and, sitting down in it, I discovered that modern ingenuity has not made much real improvement on this chair of three or four thousand years ago. But some chairs are easier for the moment, yet soon betray you, and grow the more irksome. We strolled along Longara, and found the piazza of St. Peter's full of French soldiers at their drill. . . . We went quite round the interior of the church, and perceiving the pavement loose and broken near the altar where Guido's Archangel is placed, we picked up some bits of rosso antico and gray marble, to be set in brooches, as relics. We have the snuggest little set of apartments in Rome, seven rooms, including an antechamber; and though the stairs are exceedingly narrow, there is really a carpet on them,--a civilized comfort, of which the proudest palaces in the Eternal City cannot boast. The stairs are very steep, however, and I should not wonder if some of us broke our noses down them. Narrowness of space within doors strikes us all rather ludicrously, yet not unpleasantly, after being accustomed to the wastes and deserts of the Montanto Villa. It is well thus to be put in training for the over-snugness of our cottage in Concord. Our windows here look out on a small and rather quiet piazza, with an immense palace on the left hand, and a smaller yet statelier one on the right, and just round the corner of the street, leading out of our piazza, is the Fountain of Trevi, of which I can hear the plash in the evening, when other sounds are hushed. Looking over what I have said of Sodoma's "Christ Bound," at Sierra, I see that I have omitted to notice what seems to me one of its most striking characteristics,--its loneliness. You feel as if the Saviour were deserted, both in heaven and earth; the despair is in him which made him say, "My God, why hast thou forsaken me?" Even in this extremity, however, he is still Divine, and Sodoma almost seems to have reconciled the impossibilities of combining an omnipresent divinity with a suffering and outraged humanity. But this is one of the cases in which the spectator's imagination completes what the artist merely hints at. Mr. ------, the sculptor, called to see us, the other evening, and quite paid Powers off for all his trenchant criticisms on his brother artists. He will not allow Powers to be an artist at all, or to know anything of the laws of art, although acknowledging him to be a great bust-maker, and to have put together the Greek Slave and the Fisher-Boy very ingeniously. The latter, however (he says), is copied from the Apollino in the Tribune of the Uzi; and the former is made up of beauties that had no reference to one another; and he affirms that Powers is ready to sell, and has actually sold, the Greek Slave, limb by limb, dismembering it by reversing the process of putting it together,--a head to one purchaser, an arm or a foot to another, a hand to a third. Powers knows nothing scientifically of the human frame, and only succeeds in representing it as a natural bone-doctor succeeds in setting a dislocated limb by a happy accident or special providence. (The illustration was my own, and adopted by Mr. ------.) Yet Mr. ------ seems to acknowledge that he did succeed. I repeat these things only as another instance how invariably every sculptor uses his chisel and mallet to smash and deface the marble-work of every other. I never heard Powers speak of Mr. ------, but can partly imagine what he would have said. Mr. ------ spoke of Powers's disappointment about the twenty-five-thousand-dollar appropriation from Congress, and said that he was altogether to blame, inasmuch as he attempted to sell to the nation for that sum a statue which, to Mr. ------'s certain knowledge, he had already offered to private persons for a fifth part of it. I have not implicit faith in Mr. ------'s veracity, and doubt not Powers acted fairly in his own eyes. October 23d.--I am afraid I have caught one of the colds which the Roman air continually affected me with last winter; at any rate, a sirocco has taken the life out of me, and I have no spirit to do anything. This morning I took a walk, however, out of the Porta Maggiore, and looked at the tomb of the baker Eurysaces, just outside of the gate,--a very singular ruin covered with symbols of the man's trade in stone-work, and with bas-reliefs along the cornice, representing people at work, making bread. An inscription states that the ashes of his wife are likewise reposited there, in a bread-basket. The mausoleum is perhaps twenty feet long, in its largest extent, and of equal height; and if good bakers were as scarce in ancient Rome as in the modern city, I do not wonder that they were thought worthy of stately monuments. None of the modern ones deserve any better tomb than a pile of their own sour loaves. I walked onward a good distance beyond the gate alongside of the arches of the Claudian aqueduct, which, in this portion of it, seems to have had little repair, and to have needed little, since it was built. It looks like a long procession, striding across the Campagna towards the city, and entering the gate, over one of its arches, within the gate, I saw two or three slender jets of water spurting from the crevices; this aqueduct being still in use to bring the Acqua Felice into Rome. Returning within the walls, I walked along their inner base, to the Church of St. John Lateran, into which I went, and sat down to rest myself, being languid and weary, and hot with the sun, though afraid to trust the coolness of the shade. I hate the Roman atmosphere; indeed, all my pleasure in getting back--all my home-feeling--has already evaporated, and what now impresses me, as before, is the languor of Rome,--its weary pavements, its little life, pressed down by a weight of death. Quitting St. John Lateran, I went astray, as I do nine times out of ten in these Roman intricacies, and at last, seeing the Coliseum in the vista of a street, I betook myself thither to get a fresh start. Its round of stones looked vast and dreary, but not particularly impressive. The interior was quite deserted; except that a Roman, of respectable appearance, was making a pilgrimage at the altars, kneeling and saying a prayer at each one. Outside of the Coliseum, a neat-looking little boy came and begged of me; and I gave him a baiocco, rather because he seemed to need it so little than for any other reason. I observed that he immediately afterwards went and spoke to a well-dressed man, and supposed that the child was likewise begging of him. I watched the little boy, however, and saw that, in two or three other instances, after begging of other individuals, he still returned to this well-dressed man; the fact being, no doubt, that the latter was fishing for baiocci through the medium of his child,--throwing the poor little fellow out as a bait, while he himself retained his independent respectability. He had probably come out for a whole day's sport; for, by and by, he went between the arches of the Coliseum, followed by the child, and taking with him what looked like a bottle of wine, wrapped in a handkerchief. November 2d.--The weather lately would have suited one's ideal of an English November, except that there have been no fogs; but of ugly, hopeless clouds, chill, shivering winds, drizzle, and now and then pouring rain, much more than enough. An English coal-fire, if we could see its honest face within doors, would compensate for all the unamiableness of the outside atmosphere; but we might ask for the sunshine of the New Jerusalem, with as much hope of getting it. It is extremely spirit-crushing, this remorseless gray, with its icy heart; and the more to depress the whole family, U---- has taken what seems to be the Roman fever, by sitting down in the Palace of the Caesars, while Mrs. S----- sketched the ruins. . . . [During four months of the illness of his daughter, Mr. Hawthorne wrote no word of Journal.--ED.] February 27th, 1859.--For many days past, there have been tokens of the coming Carnival in the Corso and the adjacent streets; for example, in the shops, by the display of masks of wire, pasteboard, silk, or cloth, some of beautiful features, others hideous, fantastic, currish, asinine, huge-nosed, or otherwise monstrous; some intended to cover the whole face, others concealing only the upper part, also white dominos, or robes bedizened with gold-lace and theatric splendors, displayed at the windows of mercers or flaunting before the doors. Yesterday, U---- and I came along the Corso, between one and two o'clock, after a walk, and found all these symptoms of impending merriment multiplied and intensified; . . . . rows of chairs, set out along the sidewalks, elevated a foot or two by means of planks; great baskets, full of confetti, for sale in the nooks and recesses of the streets; bouquets of all qualities and prices. The Corso was becoming pretty well thronged with people; but, until two o'clock, nobody dared to fling as much as a rosebud or a handful of sugar-plums. There was a sort of holiday expression, however, on almost everybody's face, such as I have not hitherto seen in Rome, or in any part of Italy; a smile gleaming out, an aurora of mirth, which probably will not be very exuberant in its noontide. The day was so sunny and bright that it made this opening scene far more cheerful than any day of the last year's carnival. As we threaded our way through the Corso, U---- kept wishing she could plunge into the fun and uproar as J----- would, and for my own part, though I pretended to take no interest in the matter, I could have bandied confetti and nosegays as readily and as riotously as any urchin there. But my black hat and grave talma would have been too good a mark for the combatants, . . . . so we went home before a shot was fired. . . . March 7th.--I, as well as the rest of the family, have followed up the Carnival pretty faithfully, and enjoyed it as well, or rather better than could have been expected; principally in the street, as a more looker-on,--which does not let one into the mystery of the fun,--and twice from a balcony, where I threw confetti, and partly understood why the young people like it so much. Certainly, there cannot well be a more picturesque spectacle in human life, than that stately, palatial avenue of the Corso, the more picturesque because so narrow, all hung with carpets and Gobelin tapestry, and the whole palace-heights alive with faces; and all the capacity of the street thronged with the most fantastic figures that either the fancies of folks alive at this day are able to contrive, or that live traditionally from year to year. . . . The Prince of Wales has fought manfully through the Carnival with confetti and bouquets, and U---- received several bouquets from him, on Saturday, as her carriage moved along. March 8th.--I went with U---- to Mr. Motley's balcony, in the Corso, and saw the Carnival from it yesterday afternoon; but the spectacle is strangely like a dream, in respect to the difficulty of retaining it in the mind and solidifying it into a description. I enjoyed it a good deal, and assisted in so far as to pelt all the people in cylinder hats with handfuls of confetti. The scene opens with a long array of cavalry, who ride through the Corso, preceded by a large band, playing loudly on their brazen instruments. . . . There were some splendid dresses, particularly contadina costumes of scarlet and gold, which seem to be actually the festal attire of that class of people, and must needs be so expensive that one must serve for a lifetime, if indeed it be not an inheritance. . . . March 9th.--I was, yesterday, an hour or so among the people on the sidewalks of the Corso, just on the edges of the fun. They appeared to be in a decorous, good-natured mood, neither entering into the merriment, nor harshly repelling; and when groups of maskers overflowed among them, they received their jokes in good part. Many women of the lower class were in the crowd of bystanders; generally broad and sturdy figures, clad evidently in their best attire, and wearing a good many ornaments; such as gold or coral beads and necklaces, combs of silver or gold, heavy ear-rings, curiously wrought brooches, perhaps cameos or mosaics, though I think they prefer purely metallic work to these. One ornament very common among them is a large bodkin, which they stick through their hair. It is usually of silver, but sometimes it looks like steel, and is made in the shape of a sword,--a long Spanish thrusting sword, for example. Dr. Franco told us a story of a woman of Trastevere, who was addressed rudely at the Carnival by a gentleman; she warned him to desist, but as he still persisted, she drew the bodkin from her hair, and stabbed him to the heart. By and by I went to Mr. Motley's balcony, and looked down on the closing scenes of the Carnival. Methought the merry-makers labored harder to be mirthful, and yet were somewhat tired of their eight play-days; and their dresses looked a little shabby, rumpled, and draggled; but the lack of sunshine--which we have had on all the preceding days--may have produced this effect. The wheels of some of the carriages were wreathed round and spoked with green foliage, making a very pretty and fanciful appearance, as did likewise the harnesses of the horses, which were trimmed with roses. The pervading noise and uproar of human voices is one of the most effective points of the matter; but the scene is quite indescribable, and its effect not to be conceived without both witnessing and taking part in it. If you merely look at it, it depresses you; if you take even the slightest share in it, you become aware that it has a fascination, and you no longer wonder that the young people, at least, take such delight in plunging into this mad river of fun that goes roaring between the narrow limits of the Corso. As twilight came on, the moccoli commenced, and as it grew darker the whole street twinkled with lights, which would have been innumerable if every torch-bearer had not been surrounded by a host of enemies, who tried to extinguish his poor little twinkle. It was a pity to lose so much splendor as there might have been; but yet there was a kind of symbolism in the thought that every one of those thousands of twinkling lights was in charge of somebody, who was striving with all his might to keep it alive. Not merely the street-way, but all the balconies and hundreds of windows were lit up with these little torches; so that it seemed as if the stars had crumbled into glittering fragments, and rained down upon the Corso, some of them lodging upon the palace-fronts, some falling on the ground. Besides this, there were gas-lights burning with a white flame; but this illumination was not half so interesting as that of the torches, which indicated human struggle. All this time there were myriad voices shouting, "SENZA MOCCOLO!" and mingling into one long roar. We, in our balcony, carried on a civil war against one another's torches, as is the custom of human beings, within even the narrowest precincts; but after a while we grew tired, and so did the crowd, apparently; for the lights vanished, one after another, till the gas-lights--which at first were an unimportant part of the illumination--shone quietly out, overpowering the scattered twinkles of the moccoli. They were what the fixed stars are to the transitory splendors of human life. Mr. Motley tells me, that it was formerly the custom to have a mock funeral of harlequin, who was supposed to die at the close of the Carnival, during which he had reigned supreme, and all the people, or as many as chose, bore torches at his burial. But this being considered an indecorous mockery of Popish funereal customs, the present frolic of the moccoli was instituted,--in some sort, growing out of it. All last night, or as much of it as I was awake, there was a noise of song and of late revellers in the streets; but to-day we have waked up in the sad and sober season of Lent. It is worthy of remark, that all the jollity of the Carnival is a genuine ebullition of spirit, without the aid of wine or strong drink. March 11th.--Yesterday we went to the Catacomb of St. Calixtus, the entrance to which is alongside of the Appian Way, within sight of the tomb of Cecilia Metella. We descended not a very great way under ground, by a broad flight of stone steps, and, lighting some wax tapers, with which we had provided ourselves, we followed the guide through a great many intricate passages, which mostly were just wide enough for me to touch the wall on each side, while keeping my elbows close to my body; and as to height, they were from seven to ten feet, and sometimes a good deal higher It was rather picturesque, when we saw the long line of our tapers, for another large party had joined us, twinkling along the dark passage, and it was interesting to think of the former inhabitants of these caverns. . . . In one or two places there was the round mark in the stone or plaster, where a bottle had been deposited. This was said to have been the token of a martyr's burial-place, and to have contained his blood. After leaving the Catacomb, we drove onward to Cecilia Metella's tomb, which we entered and inspected. Within the immensely massive circular substance of the tomb was a round, vacant space, and this interior vacancy was open at the top, and had nothing but some fallen stones and a heap of earth at the bottom. On our way home we entered the Church of "Domine, quo vadis," and looked at the old fragment of the Appian Way, where our Saviour met St. Peter, and left the impression of his feet in one of the Roman paving-stones. The stone has been removed, and there is now only a fac-simile engraved in a block of marble, occupying the place where Jesus stood. It is a great pity they had not left the original stone; for then all its brother-stones in the pavement would have seemed to confirm the truth of the legend. While we were at dinner, a gentleman called and was shown into the parlor. We supposed it to be Mr. May; but soon his voice grew familiar, and my wife was sure it was General Pierce, so I left the table, and found it to be really he. I was rejoiced to see him, though a little saddened to see the marks of care and coming age, in many a whitening hair, and many a furrow, and, still more, in something that seemed to have passed away out of him, without leaving any trace. His voice, sometimes, sounded strange and old, though generally it was what it used to be. He was evidently glad to see me, glad to see my wife, glad to see the children, though there was something melancholy in his tone, when he remarked what a stout boy J----- had grown. Poor fellow! he has neither son nor daughter to keep his heart warm. This morning I have been with him to St. Peter's, and elsewhere about the city, and find him less changed than he seemed to be last night; not at all changed in heart and affections. We talked freely about all matters that came up; among the rest, about the project--recognizable by many tokens--for bringing him again forward as a candidate for the Presidency next year. He appears to be firmly resolved not again to present himself to the country, and is content to let his one administration stand, and to be judged by the public and posterity on the merits of that. No doubt he is perfectly sincere; no doubt, too, he would again be a candidate, if a pretty unanimous voice of the party should demand it. I retain all my faith in his administrative faculty, and should be glad, for his sake, to have it fully rccognized; but the probabilities, as far as I can see, do not indicate for him another Presidential term. March 15th.--This morning I went with my wife and Miss Hoar to Miss Hosmer's studio, to see her statue of Zenobia. We found her in her premises, springing about with a bird-like action. She has a lofty room, with a skylight window; it was pretty well warmed with a stove, and there was a small orange-tree in a pot, with the oranges growing on it, and two or three flower-shrubs in bloom. She herself looked prettily, with her jaunty little velvet cap on the side of her head, whence came clustering out, her short brown curls; her face full of pleasant life and quick expression; and though somewhat worn with thought and struggle, handsome and spirited. She told us that "her wig was growing as gray as a rat." There were but very few things in the room; two or three plaster busts, a headless cast of a plaster statue, and a cast of the Minerva Medica, which perhaps she had been studying as a help towards the design of her Zenobia; for, at any rate, I seemed to discern a resemblance or analogy between the two. Zenobia stood in the centre of the room, as yet unfinished in the clay, but a very noble and remarkable statue indeed, full of dignity and beauty. It is wonderful that so brisk a woman could have achieved a work so quietly impressive; and there is something in Zenobia's air that conveys the idea of music, uproar, and a great throng all about her; whilst she walks in the midst of it, self-sustained, and kept in a sort of sanctity by her native pride. The idea of motion is attained with great success; you not only perceive that she is walking, but know at just what tranquil pace she steps, amid the music of the triumph. The drapery is very fine and full; she is decked with ornaments; but the chains of her captivity hang from wrist to wrist; and her deportment--indicating a soul so much above her misfortune, yet not insensible to the weight of it--makes these chains a richer decoration than all her other jewels. I know not whether there be some magic in the present imperfect finish of the statue, or in the material of clay, as being a better medium of expression than even marble; but certainly I have seldom been more impressed by a piece of modern sculpture. Miss Hosmer showed us photographs of her Puck--which I have seen in the marble--and likewise of the Will-o'-the-Wisp, both very pretty and fanciful. It indicates much variety of power, that Zenobia should be the sister of these, which would seem the more natural offspring of her quick and vivid character. But Zenobia is a high, heroic ode. . . . . On my way up the Via Babuino, I met General Pierce. We have taken two or three walks together, and stray among the Roman ruins, and old scenes of history, talking of matters in which he is personally concerned, yet which are as historic as anything around us. He is singularly little changed; the more I see him, the more I get him back, just such as he was in our youth. This morning, his face, air, and smile were so wonderfully like himself of old, that at least thirty years are annihilated. Zenobia's manacles serve as bracelets; a very ingenious and suggestive idea. March 18th.--I went to the sculpture-gallery of the Capitol yesterday, and saw, among other things, the Venus in her secret cabinet. This was my second view of her: the first time, I greatly admired her; now, she made no very favorable impression. There are twenty Venuses whom I like as well, or better. On the whole, she is a heavy, clumsy, unintellectual, and commonplace figure; at all events, not in good looks to-day. Marble beauties seem to suffer the same occasional eclipses as those of flesh and blood. We looked at the Faun, the Dying Gladiator, and other famous sculptures; but nothing had a glory round it, perhaps because the sirocco was blowing. These halls of the Capitol have always had a dreary and depressing effect upon me, very different from those of the Vatican. I know not why, except that the rooms of the Capitol have a dingy, shabby, and neglected look, and that the statues are dusty, and all the arrangements less magnificent than at the Vatican. The corroded and discolored surfaces of the statues take away from the impression of immortal youth, and turn Apollo [The Lycian Apollo] himself into an old stone; unless at rare intervals, when he appears transfigured by a light gleaming from within. March 23d.--I am wearing away listlessly these last precious days of my abode in Rome. U----'s illness is disheartening, and by confining ------, it takes away the energy and enterprise that were the spring of all our movements. I am weary of Rome, without having seen and known it as I ought, and I shall be glad to get away from it, though no doubt there will be many yearnings to return hereafter, and many regrets that I did not make better use of the opportunities within my grasp. Still, I have been in Rome long enough to be imbued with its atmosphere, and this is the essential condition of knowing a place; for such knowledge does not consist in having seen every particular object it contains. In the state of mind in which I now stand towards Rome, there is very little advantage to be gained by staying here longer. And yet I had a pleasant stroll enough yesterday afternoon, all by myself, from the Corso down past the Church of St. Andrea della Valle,-- the site where Caesar was murdered,--and thence to the Farnese Palace, the noble court of which I entered; thence to the Piazza Cenci, where I looked at one or two ugly old palaces, and fixed on one of them as the residence of Beatrice's father; then past the Temple of Vesta, and skirting along the Tiler, and beneath the Aventine, till I somewhat unexpectedly came in sight of the gray pyramid of Caius Cestius. I went out of the city gate, and leaned on the parapet that encloses the pyramid, advancing its high, unbroken slope and peak, where the great blocks of marble still fit almost as closely to one another as when they were first laid; though, indeed, there are crevices just large enough for plants to root themselves, and flaunt and trail over the face of this great tomb; only a little verdure, however, over a vast space of marble, still white in spots, but pervadingly turned gray by two thousand years' action of the atmosphere. Thence I came home by the Caelian, and sat down on an ancient flight of steps under one of the arches of the Coliseum, into which the sunshine fell sidelong. It was a delightful afternoon, not precisely like any weather that I have known elsewhere; certainly never in America, where it is always too cold or too hot. It, resembles summer more than anything which we New-Englanders recognize in our idea of spring, but there was an indescribable something, sweet, fresh, gentle, that does not belong to summer, and that thrilled and tickled my heart with a feeling partly sensuous, partly spiritual. I go to the Bank and read Galignani and the American newspapers; thence I stroll to the Pincian or to the Medici Gardens; I see a good deal of General Pierce, and we talk over his Presidential life, which, I now really think, he has no latent desire nor purpose to renew. Yet he seems to have enjoyed it while it lasted, and certainly he was in his element as an administrative man; not far-seeing, not possessed of vast stores of political wisdom in advance of his occasions, but endowed with a miraculous intuition of what ought to be done just at the time for action. His judgment of things about him is wonderful, and his Cabinet recognized it as such; for though they were men of great ability, he was evidently the master-mind among them. None of them were particularly his personal friends when he selected them; they all loved him when they parted; and he showed me a letter, signed by all, in which they expressed their feelings of respect and attachment at the close of his administration. There was a noble frankness on his part, that kept the atmosphere always clear among them, and in reference to this characteristic Governor Marcy told him that the years during which he had been connected with his Cabinet had been the happiest of his life. Speaking of Caleb Cushing, he told me that the unreliability, the fickleness, which is usually attributed to him, is an actual characteristic, but that it is intellectual, not moral. He has such comprehensiveness, such mental variety and activity, that, if left to himself, he cannot keep fast hold of one view of things, and so cannot, without external help, be a consistent man. He needs the influence of a more single and stable judgment to keep him from divergency, and, on this condition, he is a most inestimable coadjutor. As regards learning and ability, he has no superior. Pierce spoke the other day of the idea among some of his friends that his life had been planned, from a very early period, with a view to the station which he ultimately reached. He smiled at the notion, said that it was inconsistent with his natural character, and that it implied foresight and dexterity beyond what any mortal is endowed with. I think so too; but nevertheless, I was long and long ago aware that he cherished a very high ambition, and that, though he might not anticipate the highest things, he cared very little about inferior objects. Then as to plans, I do not think that he had any definite ones; but there was in him a subtle faculty, a real instinct, that taught him what was good for him,--that is to say, promotive of his political success,--and made him inevitably do it. He had a magic touch, that arranged matters with a delicate potency, which he himself hardly recognized; and he wrought through other minds so that neither he nor they always knew when and how far they were under his influence. Before his nomination for the Presidency I had a sense that it was coming, and it never seemed to me an accident. He is a most singular character; so frank, so true, so immediate, so subtle, so simple, so complicated. I passed by the tower in the Via Portoghese to-day, and observed that the nearest shop appears to be for the sale of cotton or linen cloth. . . . The upper window of the tower was half open; of course, like all or almost all other Roman windows, it is divided vertically, and each half swings back on hinges. . . . Last week a fritter-establishment was opened in our piazza. It was a wooden booth erected in the open square, and covered with canvas painted red, which looked as if it had withstood much rain and sunshine. In front were three great boughs of laurel, not so much for shade, I think, as ornament. There were two men, and their apparatus for business was a sort of stove, or charcoal furnace, and a frying-pan to place over it; they had an armful or two of dry sticks, some flour, and I suppose oil, and this seemed to be all. It was Friday, and Lent besides, and possibly there was some other peculiar propriety in the consumption of fritters just then. At all events, their fire burned merrily from morning till night, and pretty late into the evening, and they had a fine run of custom; the commodity being simply dough, cut into squares or rhomboids, and thrown into the boiling oil, which quickly turned them to a light brown color. I sent J----- to buy some, and, tasting one, it resembled an unspeakably bad doughnut, without any sweetening. In fact, it was sour, for the Romans like their bread, and all their preparations of flour, in a state of acetous fermentation, which serves them instead of salt or other condiment. This fritter-shop had grown up in a night, like Aladdin's palace, and vanished as suddenly; for after standing through Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, it was gone on Monday morning, and a charcoal-strewn place on the pavement where the furnace had been was the only memorial of it. It was curious to observe how immediately it became a lounging-place for idle people, who stood and talked all day with the fritter-friers, just as they might at any old shop in the basement, of a palace, or between the half-buried pillars of the Temple of Minerva, which had been familiar to them and their remote grandfathers. April 14th.--Yesterday afternoon I drove with Mr. and Mrs. Story and Mr. Wilde to see a statue of Venus, which has just been discovered, outside of the Porta Portese, on the other side of the Tiber. A little distance beyond the gate we came to the entrance of a vineyard, with a wheel-track through the midst of it; and, following this, we soon came to a hillside, in which an excavation had been made with the purpose of building a grotto for keeping and storing wine. They had dug down into what seemed to be an ancient bathroom, or some structure of that kind, the excavation being square and cellar-like, and built round with old subterranean walls of brick and stone. Within this hollow space the statue had been found, and it was now standing against one of the walls, covered with a coarse cloth, or a canvas bag. This being removed, there appeared a headless marble figure, earth-stained, of course, and with a slightly corroded surface, but wonderfully delicate and beautiful, the shape, size, and attitude, apparently, of the Venus de' Medici, but, as we all thought, more beautiful than that. It is supposed to be the original, from which the Venus de' Medici was copied. Both arms were broken off, but the greater part of both, and nearly the whole of one hand, had been found, and these being adjusted to the figure, they took the well-known position before the bosom and the middle, as if the fragmentary woman retained her instinct of modesty to the last. There were the marks on the bosom and thigh where the fingers had touched; whereas in the Venus de' Medici, if I remember rightly, the fingers are sculptured quite free of the person. The man who showed the statue now lifted from a corner a round block of marble, which had been lying there among other fragments, and this he placed upon the shattered neck of the Venus; and behold, it was her head and face, perfect, all but the nose! Even in spite of this mutilation, it seemed immediately to light up and vivify the entire figure; and, whatever I may heretofore have written about the countenance of the Venus de' Medici, I here record my belief that that head has been wrongfully foisted upon the statue; at all events, it is unspeakably inferior to this newly discovered one. This face has a breadth and front which are strangely deficient in the other. The eyes are well opened, most unlike the buttonhole lids of the Venus de' Medici; the whole head is so much larger as to entirely obviate the criticism that has always been made on the diminutive head of the De' Medici statue. If it had but a nose! They ought to sift every handful of earth that has been thrown out of the excavation, for the nose and the missing hand and fingers must needs be there; and, if they were found, the effect would be like the reappearance of a divinity upon earth. Mutilated as we saw her, it was strangely interesting to be present at the moment, as it were, when she had just risen from her long burial, and was shedding the unquenchable lustre around her which no eye had seen for twenty or more centuries. The earth still clung about her; her beautiful lips were full of it, till Mr. Story took a thin chip of wood and cleared it away from between them. The proprietor of the vineyard stood by; a man with the most purple face and hugest and reddest nose that I ever beheld in my life. It must have taken innumerable hogsheads of his thin vintage to empurple his face in this manner. He chuckled much over the statue, and, I suppose, counts upon making his fortune by it. He is now awaiting a bid from the Papal government, which, I believe, has the right of pre-emption whenever any relics of ancient art are discovered. If the statue could but be smuggled out of Italy, it might command almost any price. There is not, I think, any name of a sculptor on the pedestal, as on that of the Venus de' Medici. A dolphin is sculptured on the pillar against which she leans. The statue is of Greek marble. It was first found about eight days ago, but has been offered for inspection only a day or two, and already the visitors come in throngs, and the beggars gather about the entrance of the vineyard. A wine shop, too, seems to have been opened on the premises for the accommodation of this great concourse, and we saw a row of German artists sitting at a long table in the open air, each with a glass of thin wine and something to eat before him; for the Germans refresh nature ten times to other persons once. How the whole world might be peopled with antique beauty if the Romans would only dig! April 19th.--General Pierce leaves Rome this morning for Venice, by way of Ancona, and taking the steamer thence to Trieste. I had hoped to make the journey along with him; but U----'s terrible illness has made it necessary for us to continue here another mouth, and we are thankful that this seems now to be the extent of our misfortune. Never having had any trouble before that pierced into my very vitals, I did not know what comfort there might be in the manly sympathy of a friend; but Pierce has undergone so great a sorrow of his own, and has so large and kindly a heart, and is so tender and so strong, that he really did the good, and I shall always love him the better for the recollection of his ministrations in these dark days. Thank God, the thing we dreaded did not come to pass. Pierce is wonderfully little changed. Indeed, now that he has won and enjoyed--if there were any enjoyment in it--the highest success that public life could give him, he seems more like what he was in his early youth than at any subsequent period. He is evidently happier than I have ever known him since our college days; satisfied with what he has been, and with the position in the country that remains to him, after filling such an office. Amid all his former successes,--early as they came, and great as they were,--I always perceived that something gnawed within him, and kept him forever restless and miserable. Nothing he won was worth the winning, except as a step gained toward the summit. I cannot tell how early he began to look towards the Presidency; but I believe he would have died an unhappy man without it. And yet what infinite chances there seemed to be against his attaining it! When I look at it in one way, it strikes me as absolutely miraculous; in another, it came like an event that I had all along expected. It was due to his wonderful tact, which is of so subtle a character that he himself is but partially sensible of it. I have found in him, here in Rome, the whole of my early friend, and even better than I used to know him; a heart as true and affectionate, a mind much widened and deepened by his experience of life. We hold just the same relation to each other as of yore, and we have passed all the turning-off places, and may hope to go on together still the same dear friends as long as we live. I do not love him one whit the less for having been President, nor for having done me the greatest good in his power; a fact that speaks eloquently in his favor, and perhaps says a little for myself. If he had been merely a benefactor, perhaps I might not have borne it so well; but each did his best for the other as friend for friend. May 15th.--Yesterday afternoon we went to the Barberini picture-gallery to take a farewell look at the Beatrice Cenci, which I have twice visited before since our return from Florence. I attempted a description of it at my first visit, more than a year ago, but the picture is quite indescribable and unaccountable in its effect, for if you attempt to analyze it you can never succeed in getting at the secret of its fascination. Its peculiar expression eludes a straightforward glance, and can only be caught by side glimpses, or when the eye falls upon it casually, as it were, and without thinking to discover anything, as if the picture had a life and consciousness of its own, and were resolved not to betray its secret of grief or guilt, though it wears the full expression of it when it imagines itself unseen. I think no other such magical effect can ever have been wrought by pencil. I looked close into its eyes, with a determination to see all that there was in them, and could see nothing that might not have been in any young girl's eyes; and yet, a moment afterwards, there was the expression--seen aside, and vanishing in a moment--of a being unhumanized by some terrible fate, and gazing at me out of a remote and inaccessible region, where she was frightened to be alone, but where no sympathy could reach her. The mouth is beyond measure touching; the lips apart, looking as innocent as a baby's after it has been crying. The picture never can be copied. Guido himself could not have done it over again. The copyists get all sorts of expression, gay, as well as grievous; some copies have a coquettish air, a half-backward glance, thrown alluring at the spectator, but nobody ever did catch, or ever will, the vanishing charm of that sorrow. I hated to leave the picture, and yet was glad when I had taken my last glimpse, because it so perplexed and troubled me not to be able to get hold of its secret. Thence we went to the Church of the Capuchins, and saw Guido's Archangel. I have been several times to this church, but never saw the picture before, though I am familiar with the mosaic copy at St. Peter's, and had supposed the latter to be an equivalent representation of the original. It is nearly or quite so as respects the general effect; but there is a beauty in the archangel's face that immeasurably surpasses the copy,--the expression of heavenly severity, and a degree of pain, trouble, or disgust, at being brought in contact with sin, even for the purpose of quelling and punishing it. There is something finical in the copy, which I do not find in the original. The sandalled feet are here those of an angel; in the mosaic they are those of a celestial coxcomb, treading daintily, as if he were afraid they would be soiled by the touch of Lucifer. After looking at the Archangel we went down under the church, guided by a fleshy monk, and saw the famous cemetery, where the dead monks of many centuries back have been laid to sleep in sacred earth from Jerusalem. . . . FRANCE. Hotel des Colonies, Marseilles, May 29th, Saturday.--Wednesday was the day fixed for our departure from Rome, and after breakfast I walked to the Pincian, and saw the garden and the city, and the Borghese grounds, and St. Peter's in an earlier sunlight than ever before. Methought they never looked so beautiful, nor the sky so bright and blue. I saw Soracte on the horizon, and I looked at everything as if for the last time; nor do I wish ever to see any of these objects again, though no place ever took so strong a hold of my being as Rome, nor ever seemed so close to me and so strangely familiar. I seem to know it better than my birthplace, and to have known it longer; and though I have been very miserable there, and languid with the effects of the atmosphere, and disgusted with a thousand things in its daily life, still I cannot say I hate it, perhaps might fairly own a love for it. But life being too short for such questionable and troublesome enjoyments, I desire never to set eyes on it again. . . . . . . . We traversed again that same weary and dreary tract of country which we passed over in a winter afternoon and night on our first arrival in Rome. It is as desolate a country as can well be imagined, but about midway of our journey we came to the sea-shore, and kept very near it during the rest of the way. The sight and fragrance of it were exceedingly refreshing after so long an interval, and U---- revived visibly as we rushed along, while J----- chuckled and contorted himself with ineffable delight. We reached Civita Vecchia in three or four hours, and were there subjected to various troubles. . . . All the while Miss S------ and I were bothering about the passport, the rest of the family sat in the sun on the quay, with all kinds of bustle and confusion around them; a very trying experience to U---- after the long seclusion and quiet of her sick-chamber. But she did not seem to suffer from it, and we finally reached the steamer in good condition and spirits. . . . I slept wretchedly in my short and narrow berth, more especially as there was an old gentleman who snored as if he were sounding a charge; it was terribly hot too, and I rose before four o'clock, and was on deck amply in time to watch the distant approach of sunrise. We arrived at Leghorn pretty early, and might have gone ashore and spent the day. Indeed, we had been recommended by Dr. Franco, and had fully purposed to spend a week or ten days there, in expectation of benefit to U----'s health from the sea air and sea bathing, because he thought her still too feeble to make the whole voyage to Marseilles at a stretch. But she showed herself so strong that we thought she would get as much good from our three days' voyage as from the days by the sea-shore. Moreover, . . . . we all of us still felt the languor of the Roman atmosphere, and dreaded the hubbub and crazy confusion of landing at an Italian port. . . . So we lay in the harbor all day without stirring from the steamer. . . . It would have been pleasant, however, to have gone to Pisa, fifteen miles off, and seen the leaning tower; but, for my part, I have arrived at that point where it is somewhat pleasanter to sit quietly in any spot whatever than to see whatever grandest or most beautiful thing. At least this was my mood in the harbor of Leghorn. From the deck of the steamer there were many things visible that might have been interesting to describe: the boats of peculiar rig, and covered with awning; the crowded shipping; the disembarkation of horses from the French cavalry, which were lowered from steamers into gondolas or lighters, and hung motionless, like the sign of the Golden Fleece, during the transit, only kicking a little when their feet happened to graze the vessel's side. One horse plunged overboard, and narrowly escaped drowning. There was likewise a disembarkation of French soldiers in a train of boats, which rowed shoreward with sound of trumpet. The French are concentrating a considerable number of troops at this point. Our steamer was detained by order of the French government to take on board despatches; so that, instead of sailing at dusk, as is customary, we lay in the harbor till seven of the next morning. A number of young Sardinian officers, in green uniform, came on board, and a pale and picturesque-looking Italian, and other worthies of less note,--English, American, and of all races,--among them a Turk with a little boy in Christian dress; also a Greek gentleman with his young bride. At the appointed time we weighed anchor for Genoa, and had a beautiful day on the Mediterranean, and for the first time in my life I saw the real dark blue of the sea. I do not remember noticing it on my outward voyage to Italy. It is the most beautiful hue that can be imagined, like a liquid sky; and it retains its lustrous blue directly under the side of the ship, where the water of the mid-Atlantic looks greenish. . . . We reached Genoa at seven in the afternoon. . . . Genoa looks most picturesquely from the sea, at the foot of a sheltering semicircle of lofty hills; and as we lay in the harbor we saw, among other interesting objects, the great Doria Palace, with its gardens, and the cathedral, and a heap and sweep of stately edifices, with the mountains looking down upon he city, and crowned with fortresses. The variety of hue in the houses, white, green, pink, and orange, was very remarkable. It would have been well to go ashore here for an hour or two and see the streets, --having already seen the palaces, churches, and public buildings at our former visit,--and buy a few specimens of Genoa goldsmiths' work; but I preferred the steamer's deck, so the evening passed pleasantly away; the two lighthouses at the entrance of the port kindled up their fires, and at nine o'clock the evening gun thundered from the fortress, and was reverberated from the heights. We sailed away at eleven, and I was roused from my first sleep by the snortings and hissings of the vessel as she got under way. At Genoa we took on board some more passengers, an English nobleman with his lady being of the number. These were Lord and Lady J------, and before the end of our voyage his lordship talked to me of a translation of Tasso in which he is engaged, and a stanza or two of which he repeated to me. I really liked the lines, and liked too the simplicity and frankness with which he spoke of it to me a stranger, and the way be seemed to separate his egotism from the idea which he evidently had that he is going to make an excellent translation. I sincerely hope it may be so. He began it without any idea of publishing it, or of ever bringing it to a conclusion, but merely as a solace and occupation while in great trouble during an illness of his wife, but he has gradually come to find it the most absorbing occupation he ever undertook; and as Mr. Gladstone and other high authorities give him warm encouragement, he now means to translate the entire poem, and to publish it with beautiful illustrations, and two years hence the world may expect to see it. I do not quite perceive how such a man as this--a man of frank, warm, simple, kindly nature, but surely not of a poetical temperament, or very refined, or highly cultivated--should make a good version of Tasso's poems; but perhaps the dead poet's soul may take possession of this healthy organization, and wholly turn him to its own purposes. The latter part of our voyage to-day lay close along the coast of France, which was hilly and picturesque, and as we approached Marseilles was very bold and striking. We steered among rocky islands, rising abruptly out of the sea, mere naked crags, without a trace of verdure upon them, and with the surf breaking at their feet. They were unusual specimens of what hills would look like without the soil, that is to them what flesh is to a skeleton. Their shapes were often wonderfully fine, and the great headlands thrust themselves out, and took such lines of light and shade that it seemed like sailing through a picture. In the course of the afternoon a squall came up and blackened the sky all over in a twinkling; our vessel pitched and tossed, and a brig a little way from us had her sails blown about in wild fashion. The blue of the sea turned as black as night, and soon the rain began to spatter down upon us, and continued to sprinkle and drizzle a considerable time after the wind had subsided. It was quite calm and pleasant when we entered the harbor of Marseilles, which lies at the foot of very fair hills, and is set among great cliffs of stone. I did not attend much to this, however, being in dread of the difficulty of landing and passing through the custom-house with our twelve or fourteen trunks and numberless carpet-bags. The trouble vanished into thin air, nevertheless, as we approached it, for not a single trunk or bag was opened, and, moreover, our luggage and ourselves were not only landed, but the greater part of it conveyed to the railway without any expense. Long live Louis Napoleon, say I. We established ourselves at the Hotel des Colonies, and then Mss S------, J-----, and I drove hither and thither about Marseilles, making arrangements for our journey to Avignon, where we mean to go to-day. We might have avoided a good deal of this annoyance; but travellers, like other people, are continually getting their experience just a little too late. It was after nine before we got back to the hotel and took our tea in peace. AVIGNON. Hotel de l'Europe, June 1st.--I remember nothing very special to record about Marseilles; though it was really like passing from death into life, to find ourselves in busy, cheerful, effervescing France, after living so long between asleep and awake in sluggish Italy. Marseilles is a very interesting and entertaining town, with its bold surrounding heights, its wide streets,--so they seemed to us after the Roman alleys,--its squares, shady with trees, its diversified population of sailors, citizens, Orientals, and what not; but I have no spirit for description any longer; being tired of seeing things, and still more of telling myself about them. Only a young traveller can have patience to write his travels. The newest things, nowadays, have a familiarity to my eyes; whereas in their lost sense of novelty lies the charm and power of description. On Monday (30th May), though it began with heavy rain, we set early about our preparations for departure, . . . . and, at about three, we left the Hotel des Colonies. It is a very comfortable hotel, though expensive. The Restaurant connected with it occupies the enclosed court-yard and the arcades around it; and it was a good amusement to look down from the surrounding gallery, communicating with our apartments, and see the fashion and manner of French eating, all the time going forward. In sunny weather a great awning is spread over the whole court, across from the upper stories of the house. There is a grass-plat in the middle, and a very spacious and airy dining-saloon is thus formed. Our railroad carriage was comfortable, and we found in it, besides two other Frenchwomen, two nuns. They were very devout, and sedulously read their little books of devotion, repeated prayers under their breath, kissed the crucifixes which hung at their girdles, and told a string of beads, which they passed from one to the other. So much were they occupied with these duties, that they scarcely looked at the scenery along the road, though, probably, it is very rare for them to see anything outside of their convent walls. They never failed to mutter a prayer and kiss the crucifix whenever we plunged into a tunnel. If they glanced at their fellow-passengers, it was shyly and askance, with their lips in motion all the time, like children afraid to let their eyes wander from their lesson-book. One of them, however, took occasion to pull down R-----'s dress, which, in her frisky movements about the carriage, had got out of place, too high for the nun's sense of decorum. Neither of them was at all pretty, nor was the black stuff dress and white muslin cap in the least becoming, neither were their features of an intelligent or high-bred stamp. Their manners, however, or such little glimpses as I could get of them, were unexceptionable; and when I drew a curtain to protect one of them from the sun, she made me a very courteous gesture of thanks. We had some very good views both of sea and hills; and a part of our way lay along the banks of the Rhone. . . . By the by, at the station at Marseilles I bought the two volumes of the "Livre des Merveilles," by a certain author of my acquaintance, translated into French, and printed and illustrated in very pretty style. Miss S------ also bought them, and, in answer to her inquiry for other works by the same author, the bookseller observed that "she did not think Monsieur Nathaniel had published anything else." The Christian name deems to be the most important one in France, and still more especially in Italy. We arrived at Avignon, Hotel de l'Europe, in the dusk of the evening. . . . The lassitude of Rome still clings to us, and I, at least, feel no spring of life or activity, whether at morn or eve. In the morning we found ourselves very pleasantly situated as regards lodgings. The gallery of our suite of rooms looks down as usual into an enclosed court, three sides of which are formed by the stone house and its two wings, and the third by a high wall, with a gateway of iron between two lofty stone pillars, which, for their capitals, have great stone vases, with grass growing in them, and hanging over the brim. There is a large plane-tree in one corner of the court, and creeping plants clamber up trellises; and there are pots of flowers and bird-cages, all of which give a very fresh and cheerful aspect to the enclosure. The court is paved with small round stones; the omnibus belonging to the hotel, and all the carriages of guests drive into it; and the wide arch of the stable-door opens under the central part of the house. Nevertheless, the scene is not in all respects that of a stable-yard; for gentlemen and ladies come from the salle a manger and other rooms, and stand talking in the court, or occupy chairs and seats there; children play about; the hostess or her daughter often appears and talks with her guests or servants; dogs lounge, and, in short, the court might well enough be taken for the one scene of a classic play. The hotel seems to be of the first class, though such would not be indicated, either in England or America, by thus mixing up the stable with the lodgings. I have taken two or three rambles about the town, and have climbed a high rock which dominates over it, and gives a most extensive view from the broad table-land of its summit. The old church of Avignon --as old as the times of its popes, and older--stands close beside this mighty and massive crag. We went into it, and found it a dark old place, with broad, interior arches, and a singularly shaped dome; a venerable Gothic and Grecian porch, with ancient frescos in its arched spaces; some dusky pictures within; an ancient chair of stone, formerly occupied by the popes, and much else that would have been exceedingly interesting before I went to Rome. But Rome takes the charm out of an inferior antiquity, as well as the life out of human beings. This forenoon J----- and I have crossed the Rhone by a bridge, just the other side of one of the city gates, which is near our hotel. We walked along the riverside, and saw the ruins of an ancient bridge, which ends abruptly in the midst of the stream; two or three arches still making tremendous strides across, while the others have long ago been crumbled away by the rush of the rapid river. The bridge was originally founded by St. Benezet, who received a Divine order to undertake the work, while yet a shepherd-boy, with only three sous in his pocket; and he proved the authenticity of the mission by taking an immense stone on his shoulder, and laying it for the foundation. There is still an ancient chapel midway on the bridge, and I believe St. Benezet lies buried there, in the midst of his dilapidated work. The bridge now used is considerably lower down the stream. It is a wooden suspension-bridge, broader than the ancient one, and doubtless more than supplies its place; else, unquestionably, St. Benezet would think it necessary to repair his own. The view from the inner side of this ruined structure, grass-grown and weedy, and leading to such a precipitous plunge into the swift river, is very picturesque, in connection with the gray town and above it, the great, massive bulk of the cliff, the towers of the church, and of a vast old edifice, shapeless, ugly, and venerable, which the popes built and occupied as their palace, many centuries ago. . . . After dinner we all set out on a walk, in the course of which we called at a bookseller's shop to show U---- an enormous cat, which I had already seen. It is of the Angora breed, of a mottled yellow color, and is really a wonder; as big and broad as a tolerably sized dog, very soft and silken, and apparently of the gentlest disposition. I never imagined the like, nor felt anything so deeply soft as this great beast. Its master seems very fond and proud of it; and, great favorite as the cat is, she does not take airs upon herself, but is gently shy and timid in her demonstrations. We ascended the great Rocher above the palace of the popes, and on our way looked into the old church, which was so dim in the decline of day that we could not see within the dusky arches, through which the chapels communicated with the nave. Thence we pursued our way up the farther ascent, and, standing on the edge of the precipice,--protected by a parapet of stone, and in other places by an iron railing,--we could look down upon the road that winds its dusky track far below, and at the river Rhone, which eddies close beside it. This is indeed a massive and lofty cliff, and it tumbles down so precipitously that I could readily have flung myself from the bank, and alighted on my head in the middle of the river. The Rhone passes so near its base that I threw stones a good way into its current. We talked with a man of Avignon, who leaned over the parapet near by, and he was very kind in explaining the points of view, and told us that the river, which winds and doubles upon itself so as to look like at least two rivers, is really the Rhone alone. The Durance joins with it within a few miles below Avignon, but is here invisible. Hotel de l'Europe, June 2d.--This morning we went again to the Duomo of the popes; and this time we allowed the custode, or sacristan, to show us the curiosities of it. He led us into a chapel apart, and showed us the old Gothic tomb of Pope John XXII., where the recumbent statue of the pope lies beneath one of those beautiful and venerable canopies of stone which look at once so light and so solemn. I know not how many hundred years old it is, but everything of Gothic origin has a faculty of conveying the idea of age; whereas classic forms seem to have nothing to do with time, and so lose the kind of impressiveness that arises from suggestions of decay and the past. In the sacristy the guide opened a cupboard that contained the jewels and sacred treasures of the church, and showed a most exquisite figure of Christ in ivory, represented as on a cross of ebony; and it was executed with wonderful truth and force of expression, and with great beauty likewise. I do not see what a full-length marble statue could have had that was lacking in this little ivory figure of hardly more than a foot high. It is about two centuries old, by an unknown artist. There is another famous ivory statuette in Avignon which seems to be more celebrated than this, but can hardly be superior. I shall gladly look at it if it comes in my way. Next to this, the prettiest thing the man showed us was a circle of emeralds, in one of the holy implements; and then he exhibited a little bit or a pope's skull; also a great old crozier, that looked as if made chiefly of silver, and partly gilt; but I saw where the plating of silver was worn away, and betrayed the copper of its actual substance. There were two or three pictures in the sacristy, by ancient and modern French artists, very unlike the productions of the Italian masters, but not without a beauty of their own. Leaving the sacristy, we returned into the church, where U---- and J----- began to draw the pope's old stone chair. There is a beast, or perhaps more than one, grotesquely sculptured upon it; the seat is high and square, the back low and pointed, and it offers no enticing promise to a weary man. The interior of the church is massively picturesque, with its vaulted roof, and a stone gallery, heavily ornamented, running along each side of the nave. Each arch of the nave gives admittance to a chapel, in all of which there are pictures, and sculptures in most of them. One of these chapels is of the time of Charlemagne, and has a vaulted roof of admirable architecture, covered with frescos of modern date and little merit. In an adjacent chapel is the stone monument of Pope Benedict, whose statue reposes on it, like many which I have seen in the cathedral of York and other old English churches. In another part we saw a monument, consisting of a plain slab supported on pillars; it is said to be of a Roman or very early Christian epoch. In another chapel was a figure of Christ in wax, I believe, and clothed in real drapery; a very ugly object. Also, a figure reposing under a slab, which strikes the spectator with the idea that it is really a dead person enveloped in a shroud. There are windows of painted glass in some of the chapels; and the gloom of the dimly lighted interior, especially beneath the broad, low arches, is very impressive. While we were there some women assembled at one of the altars, and went through their acts of devotion without the help of a priest; one and another of them alternately repeating prayers, to which the rest responded. The murmur of their voices took a musical tone, which was reverberated by the vaulted arches. U---- and I now came out; and, under the porch, we found an old woman selling rosaries, little religious books, and other holy things. We bought two little medals of the Immaculate Virgin, one purporting to be of silver, the other of gold; but as both together cost only two or three sous, the genuineness of the material may well be doubted. We sat down on the steps, of a crucifix which is placed in front of the church, and the children began to draw the porch, of which I hardly know whether to call the architecture classic or Gothic (as I said before); at all events it has a venerable aspect, and there are frescos within its arches by Simone Memmi. . . . The popes' palace is contiguous to the church, and just below it, on the hillside. It is now occupied as barracks by some regiments of soldiers, a number of whom were lounging before the entrance; but we passed the sentinel without being challenged, and addressed ourselves to the concierge, who readily assented to our request to be shown through the edifice. A French gentleman and lady, likewise, came with similar purpose, and went the rounds along with us. The palace is such a confused heap and conglomeration of buildings, that it is impossible to get within any sort of a regular description. It is a huge, shapeless mass of architecture; and if it ever had any pretence to a plan, it has lost it in the modern alterations. For instance, an immense and lofty chapel, or rather church, has had two floors, one above the other, laid at different stages of its height; and the upper one of these floors, which extends just where the arches of the vaulted root begin to spring from the pillars, is ranged round with the beds of one of the regiments of soldiers. They are small iron bedsteads, each with its narrow mattress, and covered with a dark blanket. On some of them lay or lounged a soldier; other soldiers were cleaning their accoutrements; elsewhere we saw parties of them playing cards. So it was wherever we went among those large, dingy, gloomy halls and chambers, which, no doubt, were once stately and sumptuous, with pictures, with tapestry, and all sorts of adornment that the Middle Ages knew how to use. The windows threw a sombre light through embrasures at least two feet thick. There were staircases of magnificent breadth. We were shown into two small chapels, in different parts of the building, both containing the remains of old frescos wofully defaced. In one of them was a light, spiral staircase of iron, built in the centre of the room as a means of contemplating the frescos, which were said to be the work of our old friend Giotto. . . . Finally, we climbed a long, long, narrow stair, built in the thickness of the wall, and thus gained access to the top of one of the towers, whence we saw the noblest landscapes, mountains, plains, and the Rhone, broad and bright, winding hither and thither, as if it had lost its way. Beneath our feet was the gray, ugly old palace, and its many courts, just as void of system and as inconceivable as when we were burrowing through its bewildering passages. No end of historical romances might be made out of this castle of the popes; and there ought to be a ghost in every room, and droves of them in some of the rooms; for there have been murders here in the gross and in detail, as well hundreds of years ago, as no longer back than the French Revolution, when there was a great massacre in one of the courts. Traces of this bloody business were visible in actual stains on the wall only a few years ago. Returning to the room of the concierge, who, being a little stiff with age, had sent an attendant round with us, instead of accompanying us in person, he showed us a picture of Rienzi, the last of the Roman tribunes, who was once a prisoner here. On a table, beneath the picture, stood a little vase of earthenware containing some silver coin. We took it as a hint, in the customary style of French elegance, that a fee should be deposited here, instead of being put into the hand of the concierge; so the French gentleman deposited half a franc, and I, in my magnificence, twice as much. Hotel de l'Europe, June 6th.--We are still here. . . . I have been daily to the Rocher des Dons, and have grown familiar with the old church on its declivity. I think I might become attached to it by seeing it often. A sombre old interior, with its heavy arches, and its roof vaulted like the top of a trunk; its stone gallery, with ponderous adornments, running round three sides. I observe that it is a daily custom of the old women to say their prayers in concert, sometimes making a pilgrimage, as it were, from chapel to chapel. The voice of one of them is heard running through the series of petitions, and at intervals the voices of the others join and swell into a chorus, so that it is like a river connecting a series of lakes; or, not to use so gigantic a simile, the one voice is like a thread, on which the beads of a rosary are strung. One day two priests came and sat down beside these prayerful women, and joined in their petitions. I am inclined to hope that there is something genuine in the devotion of these old women. The view from the top of the Rocker des Dons (a contraction of Dominis) grows upon me, and is truly magnificent; a vast mountain-girdled plain, illuminated by the far windings and reaches of the Rhone. The river is here almost as turbid as the Tiber itself; but, I remember, in the upper part of its course the waters are beautifully transparent. A powerful rush is indicated by the swirls and eddies of its broad surface. Yesterday was a race day at Avignon, and apparently almost the whole population and a great many strangers streamed out of the city gate nearest our hotel, on their way to the race-course. There were many noticeable figures that might come well into a French picture or description; but only one remains in my memory,--a young man with a wooden leg, setting off for the course--a walk of several miles, I believe--with prodigious courage and alacrity, flourishing his wooden leg with an air and grace that seemed to render it positively flexible. The crowd returned towards sunset, and almost all night long, the streets and the whole air of the old town were full of song and merriment. There was a ball in a temporary structure, covered with an awning, in the Place d'Horloge, and a showman has erected his tent and spread forth his great painted canvases, announcing an anaconda and a sea-tiger to be seen. J----- paid four sous for admittance, and found that the sea-tiger was nothing but a large seal, and the anaconda altogether a myth. I have rambled a good deal about the town. Its streets are crooked and perplexing, and paved with round pebbles for the most part, which afford more uncomfortable pedestrianism than the pavement of Rome itself. It is an ancient-looking place, with some large old mansions, but few that are individually impressive; though here and there one sees an antique entrance, a corner tower, or other bit of antiquity, that throws a venerable effect over the gray commonplace of past centuries. The town is not overclean, and often there is a kennel of unhappy odor. There appear to have been many more churches and devotional establishments under the ancient dominion of the popes than have been kept intact in subsequent ages; the tower and facade of a church, for instance, form the front of a carpenter's shop, or some such plebeian place. The church where Laura lay has quite disappeared, and her tomb along with it. The town reminds me of Chester, though it does not in the least resemble it, and is not nearly so picturesque. Like Chester, it is entirely surrounded by a wall; and that of Avignon--though it has no delightful promenade on its top, as the wall of Chester has--is the more perfectly preserved in its mediaeval form, and the more picturesque of the two. J----- and I have once or twice walked nearly round it, commencing from the gate of Ouelle, which is very near our hotel. From this point it stretches for a considerable distance along by the river, and here there is a broad promenade, with trees, and blocks of stone for seats; on one side "the arrowy Rhone," generally carrying a cooling breeze along with it; on the other, the gray wall, with its battlements and machicolations, impending over what was once the moat, but which is now full of careless and untrained shrubbery. At intervals there are round towers swelling out from the wall, and rising a little above it. After about half a mile along the river-side the wall turns at nearly right angles, and still there is a wide road, a shaded walk, a boulevard; and at short distances are cafes, with their little round tables before the door, or small shady nooks of shrubbery. So numerous are these retreats and pleasaunces that I do not see how the little old town can support them all, especially as there are a great many cafes within the walls. I do not remember seeing any soldiers on guard at the numerous city gates, but there is an office in the side of each gate for levying the octroi, and old women are sometimes on guard there. This morning, after breakfast, J----- and I crossed the suspension-bridge close by the gate nearest our hotel, and walked to the ancient town of Villeneuve, on the other side of the Rhone. The first bridge leads to an island, from the farther side of which another very long one, with a timber foundation, accomplishes the passage of the other branch of the Rhone. There was a good breeze on the river, but after crossing it we found the rest of the walk excessively hot. This town of Villeneuve is of very ancient origin, and owes its existence, it is said, to the famous holiness of a female saint, which gathered round her abode and burial-place a great many habitations of people who reverenced her. She was the daughter of the King of Saragossa, and I presume she chose this site because it was so rocky and desolate. Afterwards it had a long mediaeval history; and in the time of the Avignon popes, the cardinals, regretful of their abandoned Roman villas, built pleasure-houses here, so that the town was called Villa Nueva. After they had done their best, it must have seemed to these poor cardinals but a rude and sad exchange for the Borghese, the Albani, the Pamfili Doria, and those other perfectest results of man's luxurious art. And probably the tradition of the Roman villas had really been kept alive, and extant examples of them all the way downward from the times of the empire. But this Villeneuve is the stoniest, roughest town that can be imagined. There are a few large old houses, to be sure, but built on a line with shabby village dwellings and barns, and so presenting little but samples of magnificent shabbiness. Perhaps I might have found traces of old splendor if I had sought for them; but, not having the history of the place in my mind, I passed through its scrambling streets without imagining that Princes of the Church had once made their abode here. The inhabitants now are peasants, or chiefly such; though, for aught I know, some of the French noblesse may burrow in these palaces that look so like hovels. A large church, with a massive tower, stands near the centre of the town; and, of course, I did not fail to enter its arched door,--a pointed arch, with many frames and mouldings, one within another. An old woman was at her devotions, and several others came in and knelt during my stay there. It was quite an interesting interior; a long nave, with six pointed arches on each side, beneath which were as many chapels. The walls were rich with pictures, not only in the chapels, but up and down the nave, above the arches. There were gilded virgins, too, and much other quaint device that produced an effect that I rather liked than otherwise. At the end of the church, farthest from the high altar, there were four columns of exceedingly rich marble, and a good deal more of such precious material was wrought into the chapels and altars. There was an old stone seat, also, of some former pope or prelate. The church was dim enough to cause the lamps in the shrines to become points of vivid light, and, looking from end to end, it was a long, venerable, tarnished, Old World vista, not at all tampered with by modern taste. We now went on our way through the village, and, emerging from a gate, went clambering towards the castle of St. Andre, which stands, perhaps, a quarter of a mile beyond it. This castle was built by Philip le Bel, as a restraint to the people of Avignon in extending their power on this side of the Rhone. We happened not to take the most direct way, and so approached the castle on the farther side and were obliged to go nearly round the hill on which it stands, before striking into the path which leads to its gate. It crowns a very bold and difficult hill, directly above the Rhone, opposite to Avignon,--which is so far off that objects are not minutely distinguishable,--and looking down upon the long, straggling town of Villeneuve. It must have been a place of mighty strength, in its day. Its ramparts seem still almost entire, as looked upon from without, and when, at length, we climbed the rough, rocky pathway to the entrance, we found the two vast round towers, with their battlemented summits and arched gateway between them, just as perfect as they could have been five hundred or more years ago. Some external defences are now, however, in a state of ruin; and there are only the remains of a tower, that once arose between the two round towers, and was apparently much more elevated than they. A little in front of the gate was a monumental cross of stone; and in the arch, between the two round towers, were two little boys at play; and an old woman soon showed herself, but took no notice of us. Casting our eyes within the gateway, we saw what looked a rough village street, betwixt old houses built ponderously of stone, but having far more the aspect of huts than of castle-hails. They were evidently the dwellings of peasantry, and people engaged in rustic labor; and no doubt they have burrowed into the primitive structures of the castle, and, as they found convenient, have taken their crumbling materials to build barns and farm-houses. There was space and accommodation for a very considerable population; but the men were probably at work in the fields, and the only persons visible were the children aforesaid, and one or two old women bearing bundles of twigs on their backs. They showed no curiosity respecting us, and though the wide space included within the castle-rampart seemed almost full of habitations ruinous or otherwise, I never found such a solitude in any ruin before. It contrasts very favorably in this particular with English castles, where, though you do not find rustic villages within the warlike enclosure, there is always a padlocked gate, always a guide, and generally half a dozen idle tourists. But here was only antiquity, with merely the natural growth of fungous human life upon it. We went to the end of the castle court and sat down, for lack of other shade, among some inhospitable nettles that grew close to the wall. Close by us was a great gap in the ramparts,--it may have been a breach which was once stormed through; and it now afforded us an airy and sunny glimpse of distant hills. . . . J----- sketched part of the broken wall, which, by the by, did not seem to me nearly so thick as the walls of English castles. Then we returned through the gate, and I stopped, rather impatiently, under the hot sun, while J----- drew the outline of the two round towers. This done, we resumed our way homeward, after drinking from a very deep well close by the square tower of Philip le Bel. Thence we went melting through the sunshine, which beat upward as pitilessly from the white road as it blazed downwards from the sky. . . . GENEVA. Hotel d'Angleterre, June 11th.--We left Avignon on Tuesday, 7th, and took the rail to Valence, where we arrived between four and five, and put up at the Hotel de la Poste, an ancient house, with dirty floors and dirt generally, but otherwise comfortable enough. . . . Valence is a stately old town, full of tall houses and irregular streets. We found a cathedral there, not very large, but with a high and venerable interior, a nave supported by tall pillars, from the height of which spring arches. This loftiness is characteristic of French churches, as distinguished from those of Italy. . . . We likewise saw, close by the cathedral, a large monument with four arched entrances meeting beneath a vaulted roof; but, on inquiry of an old priest and other persons, we could get no account of it, except that it was a tomb, and of unknown antiquity. The architecture seemed classic, and yet it had some Gothic peculiarities, and it was a reverend and beautiful object. Had I written up my journal while the town was fresh in my remembrance, I might have found much to describe; but a succession of other objects have obliterated most of the impressions I have received here. Our railway ride to Valence was intolerably hot. I have felt nothing like it since leaving America, and that is so long ago that the terrible discomfort was just as good as new. . . . We left Valence at four, and came that afternoon to Lyons, still along the Rhone. Either the waters of this river assume a transparency in winter which they lose in summer, or I was mistaken in thinking them transparent on our former journey. They are now turbid; but the hue does not suggest the idea of a running mud-puddle, as the water of the Tiber does. No streams, however, are so beautiful in the quality of their waters as the clear, brown rivers of New England. The scenery along this part of the Rhone, as we have found all the way from Marseilles, is very fine and impressive; old villages, rocky cliffs, castellated steeps, quaint chateaux, and a thousand other interesting objects. We arrived at Lyons at five o'clock, and went to the Hotel de l'Univers, to which we had been recommended by our good hostess at Avignon. The day had become showery, but J----- and I strolled about a little before nightfall, and saw the general characteristics of the place. Lyons is a city of very stately aspect, hardly inferior to Paris; for it has regular streets of lofty houses, and immense squares planted with trees, and adorned with statues and fountains. New edifices of great splendor are in process of erection; and on the opposite side of the Rhone, where the site rises steep and high, there are structures of older date, that have an exceedingly picturesque effect, looking down upon the narrow town. The next morning I went out with J----- in quest of my bankers, and of the American Consul; and as I had forgotten the directions of the waiter of the hotel, I of course went astray, and saw a good deal more of Lyons than I intended. In my wanderings I crossed the Rhone, and found myself in a portion of the city evidently much older than that with which I had previously made acquaintance; narrow, crooked, irregular, and rudely paved streets, full of dingy business and bustle,--the city, in short, as it existed a century ago, and how much earlier I know not. Above rises that lofty elevation of ground which I before noticed; and the glimpses of its stately old buildings through the openings of the street were very picturesque. Unless it be Edinburgh, I have not seen any other city that has such striking features. Altogether unawares, immediately after crossing the bridge, we came upon the cathedral; and the grand, time-blackened Gothic front, with its deeply arched entrances, seemed to me as good as anything I ever saw,--unexpectedly more impressive than all the ruins of Rome. I could but merely glance at its interior; so that its noble height and venerable space, filled with the dim, consecrated light of pictured windows, recur to me as a vision. And it did me good to enjoy the awfulness and sanctity of Gothic architecture again, after so long shivering in classic porticos. . . . We now recrossed the river. . . . The Frank methods and arrangements in matters of business seem to be excellent, so far as effecting the proposed object is concerned; but there is such an inexorable succession of steel-wrought forms, that life is not long enough for so much accuracy. The stranger, too, goes blindfold through all these processes, not knowing what is to turn up next, till, when quite in despair, he suddenly finds his business mysteriously accomplished. . . . We left Lyons at four o'clock, taking the railway for Geneva. The scenery was very striking throughout the journey; but I allowed the hills, deep valleys, high impending cliffs, and whatever else I saw along the road, to pass from me without an ink-blot. We reached Geneva at nearly ten o'clock. . . . It is situated partly on low, flat ground, bordering the lake, and behind this level space it rises by steep, painfully paved streets, some of which can hardly be accessible by wheeled carriages. The prosperity of the town is indicated by a good many new and splendid edifices, for commercial and other purposes, in the vicinity of the lake; but intermixed with these there are many quaint buildings of a stern gray color, and in a style of architecture that I prefer a thousand times to the monotony of Italian streets. Immensely high, red roofs, with windows in them, produce an effect that delights me. They are as ugly, perhaps, as can well be conceived, but very striking and individual. At each corner of these ancient houses frequently is a tower, the roof of which rises in a square pyramidal form, or, if the tower be round, in a round pyramidal form. Arched passages, gloomy and grimy, pass from one street to another. The lower town creeps with busy life, and swarms like an ant-hill; but if you climb the half-precipitous streets, you find yourself among ancient and stately mansions, high roofed, with a strange aspect of grandeur about them, looking as if they might still be tenanted by such old magnates as dwelt in them centuries ago. There is also a cathedral, the older portion exceedingly fine; but it has been adorned at some modern epoch with a Grecian portico,--good in itself, but absurdly out of keeping with the edifice which it prefaces. This being a Protestant country, the doors were all shut,--an inhospitality that made me half a Catholic. It is funny enough that a stranger generally profits by all that is worst for the inhabitants of the country where he himself is merely a visitor. Despotism makes things all the pleasanter for the stranger. Catholicism lends itself admirably to his purposes. There are public gardens (one, at least) in Geneva. . . . Nothing struck me so much, I think, as the color of the Rhone, as it flows under the bridges in the lower town. It is absolutely miraculous, and, beautiful as it is, suggests the idea that the tubs of a thousand dyers have emptied their liquid indigo into the stream. When once you have conquered and thrust out this idea, it is an inexpressible delight to look down into this intense, brightly transparent blue, that hurries beneath you with the speed of a race-horse. The shops of Geneva are very tempting to a traveller, being full of such little knick-knacks as he would be glad to carry away in memory of the place: wonderful carvings in wood and ivory, done with exquisite taste and skill; jewelry that seems very cheap, but is doubtless dear enough, if you estimate it by the solid gold that goes into its manufacture; watches, above all things else, for a third or a quarter of the price that one pays in England, looking just as well, too, and probably performing the whole of a watch's duty as uncriticisably. The Swiss people are frugal and inexpensive in their own habits, I believe, plain and simple, and careless of ornament; but they seem to reckon on other people's spending a great deal of money for gewgaws. We bought some of their wooden trumpery, and likewise a watch for U----. . . . Next to watches, jewelry, and wood-carving, I should say that cigars were one of the principal articles of commerce in Geneva. Cigar-shops present themselves at every step or two, and at a reasonable rate, there being no duties, I believe, on imported goods. There was no examination of our trunks on arrival, nor any questions asked on that score. VILLENEUVE. Hotel de Byron, June 12th.--Yesterday afternoon we left Geneva by a steamer, starting from the quay at only a short distance from our hotel. The forenoon had been showery; but the suit now came out very pleasantly, although there were still clouds and mist enough to give infinite variety to the mountain scenery. At the commencement of our voyage the scenery of the lake was not incomparably superior to that of other lakes on which I have sailed, as Lake Windermere, for instance, or Loch Lomond, or our own Lake Champlain. It certainly grew more grand and beautiful, however, till at length I felt that I had never seen anything worthy to be put beside it. The southern shore has the grandest scenery; the great hills on that side appearing close to the water's edge, and after descending, with headlong slope, directly from their rocky and snow-streaked summits down into the blue water. Our course lay nearer to the northern shore, and all our stopping-places were on that side. The first was Coppet, where Madame de Stael or her father, or both, were either born or resided or died, I know not which, and care very little. It is a picturesque village, with an old church, and old, high-roofed, red-tiled houses, the whole looking as if nothing in it had been changed for many, many years. All these villages, at several of which we stopped momentarily, look delightfully unmodified by recent fashions. There is the church, with its tower crowned by a pyramidal roof, like an extinguisher; then the chateau of the former lord, half castle and half dwelling-house, with a round tower at each corner, pyramid topped; then, perhaps, the ancient town-house or Hotel de Ville, in an open paved square; and perhaps the largest mansion in the whole village will have been turned into a modern inn, but retaining all its venerable characteristics of high, steep sloping roof, and antiquated windows. Scatter a delightful shade of trees among the houses, throw in a time-worn monument of one kind or another, swell out the delicious blue of the lake in front, and the delicious green of the sunny hillside sloping up and around this closely congregated neighborhood of old, comfortable houses, and I do not know what more I can add to this sketch. Often there was an insulated house or cottage, embowered in shade, and each seeming like the one only spot in the wide world where two people that had good consciences and loved each other could spend a happy life. Half-ruined towers, old historic castles, these, too, we saw. And all the while, on the other side of the lake, were the high hills, sometimes dim, sometimes black, sometimes green, with gray precipices of stone, and often snow-patches, right above the warm sunny lake whereon we were sailing. We passed Lausanne, which stands upward, on the slope of the hill, the tower of its cathedral forming a conspicuous object. We mean to visit this to-morrow; so I may pretermit further mention of it here. We passed Vevay and Clarens, which, methought, was particularly picturesque; for now the hills had approached close to the water on the northern side also, and steep heights rose directly above the little gray church and village; and especially I remember a rocky cliff which ascends into a rounded pyramid, insulated from all other peaks and ridges. But if I could perform the absolute impossibility of getting one single outline of the scene into words, there would be all the color wanting, the light, the haze, which spiritualizes it, and moreover makes a thousand and a thousand scenes out of that single one. Clarens, however, has still another interest for me; for I found myself more affected by it, as the scene of the love of St. Preux and Julie, than I have often been by scenes of poetry and romance. I read Rousseau's romance with great sympathy, when I was hardly more than a boy; ten years ago, or thereabouts, I tried to read it again without success; but I think, from my feeling of yesterday, that it still retains its hold upon my imagination. Farther onward, we saw a white, ancient-looking group of towers, beneath a mountain, which was so high, and rushed so precipitately down upon this pile of building as quite to dwarf it; besides which, its dingy whiteness had not a very picturesque effect. Nevertheless, this was the Castle of Chillon. It appears to sit right upon the water, and does not rise very loftily above it. I was disappointed in its aspect, having imagined this famous castle as situated upon a rock, a hundred, or, for aught I know, a thousand feet above the surface of the lake; but it is quite as impressive a fact--supposing it to be true--that the water is eight hundred feet deep at its base. By this time, the mountains had taken the beautiful lake into their deepest heart; they girdled it quite round with their grandeur and beauty, and, being able to do no more for it, they here withheld it from extending any farther; and here our voyage came to an end. I have never beheld any scene so exquisite; nor do I ask of heaven to show me any lovelier or nobler one, but only to give me such depth and breadth of sympathy with nature, that I may worthily enjoy this. It is beauty more than enough for poor, perishable mortals. If this be earth, what must heaven be! It was nearly eight o'clock when we arrived; and then we had a walk of at least a mile to the Hotel Byron. . . . I forgot to mention that in the latter part of our voyage there was a shower in some part of the sky, and though none of it fell upon us, we had the benefit of those gentle tears in a rainbow, which arched itself across the lake from mountain to mountain, so that our track lay directly under this triumphal arch. We took it as a good omen, nor were we discouraged, though, after the rainbow had vanished, a few sprinkles of the shower came down. We found the Hotel Byron very grand indeed, and a good one too. There was a beautiful moonlight on the lake and hills, but we contented ourselves with looking out of our lofty window, whence, likewise, we had a sidelong glance at the white battlements of Chillon, not more than a mile off, on the water's edge. The castle is wofully in need of a pedestal. If its site were elevated to a height equal to its own, it would make a far better appearance. As it now is, it looks, to speak profanely of what poetry has consecrated, when seen from the water, or along the shore of the lake, very like an old whitewashed factory or mill. This morning I walked to the Castle of Chillon with J-----, who sketches everything he sees, from a wildflower or a carved chair to a castle or a range of mountains. The morning had sunshine thinly scattered through it; but, nevertheless, there was a continual sprinkle, sometimes scarcely perceptible, and then again amounting to a decided drizzle. The road, which is built along on a little elevation above the lake shore, led us past the Castle of Chillon; and we took a side-path, which passes still nearer the castle gate. The castle stands on an isthmus of gravel, permanently connecting it with the mainland. A wooden bridge, covered with a roof, passes from the shore to the arched entrance; and beneath this shelter, which has wooden walls as well as roof and floor, we saw a soldier or gendarme who seemed to act as warder. As it sprinkled rather more freely than at first, I thought of appealing to his hospitality for shelter from the rain, but concluded to pass on. The castle makes a far better appearance on a nearer view, and from the land, than when seen at a distance, and from the water. It is built of stone, and seems to have been anciently covered with plaster, which imparts the whiteness to which Byron does much more than justice, when he speaks of "Chillon's snow-white battlements." There is a lofty external wall, with a cluster of round towers about it, each crowned with its pyramidal roof of tiles, and from the central portion of the castle rises a square tower, also crowned with its own pyramid to a considerably greater height than the circumjacent ones. The whole are in a close cluster, and make a fine picture of ancient strength when seen at a proper proximity; for I do not think that distance adds anything to the effect. There are hardly any windows, or few, and very small ones, except the loopholes for arrows and for the garrison of the castle to peep from on the sides towards the water; indeed, there are larger windows at least in the upper apartments; but in that direction, no doubt, the castle was considered impregnable. Trees here and there on the land side grow up against the castle wall, on one part of which, moreover, there was a green curtain of ivy spreading from base to battlement. The walls retain their machicolations, and I should judge that nothing had been [altered], nor any more work been done upon the old fortress than to keep it in singularly good repair. It was formerly a castle of the Duke of Savoy, and since his sway over the country ceased (three hundred years at least), it has been in the hands of the Swiss government, who still keep some arms and ammunition there. We passed on, and found the view of it better, as we thought, from a farther point along the road. The raindrops began to spatter down faster, and we took shelter under an impending precipice, where the ledge of rock had been blasted and hewn away to form the road. Our refuge was not a very convenient and comfortable one, so we took advantage of the partial cessation of the shower to turn homeward, but had not gone far when we met mamma and all her train. As we were close by the castle entrance, we thought it advisable to seek admission, though rather doubtful whether the Swiss gendarme might not deem it a sin to let us into the castle on Sunday. But he very readily admitted us under his covered drawbridge, and called an old man from within the fortress to show us whatever was to be seen. This latter personage was a staid, rather grim, and Calvinistic-looking old worthy; but he received us without scruple, and forthwith proceeded to usher us into a range of most dismal dungeons, extending along the basement of the castle, on a level with the surface of the lake. First, if I remember aright, we came to what he said had been a chapel, and which, at all events, looked like an aisle of one, or rather such a crypt as I have seen beneath a cathedral, being a succession of massive pillars supporting groined arches,--a very admirable piece of gloomy Gothic architecture. Next, we came to a very dark compartment of the same dungeon range, where he pointed to a sort of bed, or what might serve for a bed, hewn in the solid rock, and this, our guide said, had been the last sleeping-place of condemned prisoners on the night before their execution. The next compartment was still duskier and dismaller than the last, and he bade us cast our eyes up into the obscurity and see a beam, where the condemned ones used to be hanged. I looked and looked, and closed my eyes so as to see the clearer in this horrible duskiness on opening them again. Finally, I thought I discerned the accursed beam, and the rest of the party were certain that they saw it. Next beyond this, I think, was a stone staircase, steep, rudely cut, and narrow, down which the condemned were brought to death; and beyond this, still on the same basement range of the castle, a low and narrow [corridor] through which we passed and saw a row of seven massive pillars, supporting two parallel series of groined arches, like those in the chapel which we first entered. This was Bonnivard's prison, and the scene of Byron's poem. The arches are dimly lighted by narrow loopholes, pierced through the immensely thick wall, but at such a height above the floor that we could catch no glimpse of land or water, or scarcely of the sky. The prisoner of Chillon could not possibly have seen the island to which Byron alludes, and which is a little way from the shore, exactly opposite the town of Villeneuve. There was light enough in this long, gray, vaulted room, to show us that all the pillars were inscribed with the names of visitors, among which I saw no interesting one, except that of Byron himself, which is cut, in letters an inch long or more, into one of the pillars next to that to which Bonnivard was chained. The letters are deep enough to remain in the pillar as long as the castle stands. Byron seems to have had a fancy for recording his name in this and similar ways; as witness the record which I saw on a tree of Newstead Abbey. In Bonnivard's pillar there still remains an iron ring, at the height of perhaps three feet from the ground. His chain was fastened to this ring, and his only freedom was to walk round this pillar, about which he is said to have worn a path in the stone pavement of the dungeon; but as the floor is now covered with earth or gravel, I could not satisfy myself whether this be true. Certainly six years, with nothing else to do in them save to walk round the pillar, might well suffice to wear away the rock, even with naked feet. This column, and all the columns, were cut and hewn in a good style of architecture, and the dungeon arches are not without a certain gloomy beauty. On Bonnivard's pillar, as well as on all the rest, were many names inscribed; but I thought better of Byron's delicacy and sensitiveness for not cutting his name into that very pillar. Perhaps, knowing nothing of Bonnivard's story, he did not know to which column he was chained. Emerging from the dungeon-vaults, our guide led us through other parts of the castle, showing us the Duke of Savoy's kitchen, with a fireplace at least twelve feet long; also the judgment-hall, or some such place, hung round with the coats of arms of some officers or other, and having at one end a wooden post, reaching from floor to ceiling, and having upon it the marks of fire. By means of this post, contumacious prisoners were put to a dreadful torture, being drawn up by cords and pulleys, while their limbs were scorched by a fire underneath. We also saw a chapel or two, one of which is still in good and sanctified condition, and was to be used this very day, our guide told us, for religious purposes. We saw, moreover, the Duke's private chamber, with a part of the bedstead on which he used to sleep, and be haunted with horrible dreams, no doubt, and the ghosts of wretches whom he had tortured and hanged; likewise the bedchamber of his duchess, that had in its window two stone seats, where, directly over the head of Bonnivard, the ducal pair might look out on the beautiful scene of lake and mountains, and feel the warmth of the blessed sun. Under this window, the guide said, the water of the lake is eight hundred feet in depth; an immense profundity, indeed, for an inland lake, but it is not very difficult to believe that the mountain at the foot of which Chillon stands may descend so far beneath the water. In other parts of the lake and not distant, more than nine hundred feet have been sounded. I looked out of the duchess's window, and could certainly see no appearance of a bottom in the light blue water. The last thing that the guide showed us was a trapdoor, or opening, beneath a crazy old floor. Looking down into this aperture we saw three stone steps, which we should have taken to be the beginning of a flight of stairs that descended into a dungeon, or series of dungeons, such as we had already seen. But inspecting them more closely, we saw that the third step terminated the flight, and beyond was a dark vacancy. Three steps a person would grope down, planting his uncertain foot on a dimly seen stone; the fourth step would be in the empty air. The guide told us that it used to be the practice to bring prisoners hither, under pretence of committing them to a dungeon, and make them go down the three steps and that fourth fatal one, and they would never more be heard of; but at the bottom of the pit there would be a dead body, and in due time a mouldy skeleton, which would rattle beneath the body of the next prisoner that fell. I do not believe that it was anything more than a secret dungeon for state prisoners whom it was out of the question either to set at liberty or bring to public trial. The depth of the pit was about forty-five feet. Gazing intently down, I saw a faint gleam of light at the bottom, apparently coming from some other aperture than the trap-door over which we were bending, so that it must have been contemplated to supply it with light and air in such degree as to support human life. U---- declared she saw a skeleton at the bottom; Miss S------ thought she saw a hand, but I saw only the dim gleam of light. There are two or three courts in the castle, but of no great size. We were now led across one of them, and dismissed out of the arched entrance by which we had come in. We found the gendarme still keeping watch on his roofed drawbridge, and as there was the same gentle shower that had been effusing itself all the morning, we availed ourselves of the shelter, more especially as there were some curiosities to examine. These consisted chiefly of wood-carvings,--such as little figures in the national costume, boxes with wreaths of foliage upon them, paper knives, the chamois goat, admirably well represented. We at first hesitated to make any advances towards trade with the gendarme because it was Sunday, and we fancied there might be a Calvinistic scruple on his part about turning a penny on the Sabbath; but from the little I know of the Swiss character, I suppose they would be as ready as any other men to sell, not only such matters, but even their own souls, or any smaller--or shall we say greater--thing on Sunday or at any other time. So we began to ask the prices of the articles, and met with no difficulty in purchasing a salad spoon and fork, with pretty bas-reliefs carved on the handles, and a napkin-ring. For Rosebud's and our amusement, the gendarme now set a musical-box a-going; and as it played a pasteboard figure of a dentist began to pull the tooth of a pasteboard patient, lifting the wretched simulacrum entirely from the ground, and keeping him in this horrible torture for half an hour. Meanwhile, mamma, Miss Shepard, U----, and J----- sat down all in a row on a bench and sketched the mountains; and as the shower did not cease, though the sun most of the time shone brightly, they were kept actual prisoners of Chillon much longer than we wished to stay. We took advantage of the first cessation,--though still the drops came dimpling into the water that rippled against the pebbles beneath the bridge,--of the first partial cessation of the shower, to escape, and returned towards the hotel, with this kindliest of summer rains falling upon us most of the way In the afternoon the rain entirely ceased, and the weather grew delightfully radiant, and warmer than could well be borne in the sunshine. U---- and I walked to the village of Villeneuve, --a mile from the hotel,--and found a very commonplace little old town of one or two streets, standing on a level, and as uninteresting as if there were not a hill within a hundred miles. It is strange what prosaic lines men thrust in amid the poetry of nature. . . . Hotel de l'Angleterre, Geneva, June 14th.--Yesterday morning was very fine, and we had a pretty early breakfast at Hotel Byron, preparatory to leaving it. This hotel is on a magnificent scale of height and breadth, its staircases and corridors being the most spacious I have seen; but there is a kind of meagreness in the life there, and a certain lack of heartiness, that prevented us from feeling at home. We were glad to get away, and took the steamer on our return voyage, in excellent spirits. Apparently it had been a cold night in the upper regions, for a great deal more snow was visible on some of the mountains than we had before observed; especially a mountain called "Diableries" presented a silver summit, and broad sheets and fields of snow. Nothing ever can have been more beautiful than those groups of mighty hills as we saw them then, with the gray rocks, the green slopes, the white snow-patches and crests, all to be seen at one glance, and the mists and fleecy clouds tumbling, rolling, hovering about their summits, filling their lofty valleys, and coming down far towards the lower world, making the skyey aspects so intimate with the earthly ones, that we hardly knew whether we were sojourning in the material or spiritual world. It was like sailing through the sky, moreover, to be borne along on such water as that of Lake Leman,--the bluest, brightest, and profoundest element, the most radiant eye that the dull earth ever opened to see heaven withal. I am writing nonsense, but it is because no sense within my mind will answer the purpose. Some of these mountains, that looked at no such mighty distance, were at least forty or fifty miles off, and appeared as if they were near neighbors and friends of other mountains, from which they were really still farther removed. The relations into which distant points are brought, in a view of mountain scenery, symbolize the truth which we can never judge within our partial scope of vision, of the relations which we bear to our fellow-creatures and human circumstances. These mighty mountains think that they have nothing to do with one another, each seems itself its own centre, and existing for itself alone; and yet to an eye that can take them all in, they are evidently portions of one grand and beautiful idea, which could not be consummated without the lowest and the loftiest of them. I do not express this satisfactorily, but have a genuine meaning in it nevertheless. We passed again by Chillon, and gazed at it as long as it was distinctly visible, though the water view does no justice to its real picturesqueness, there being no towers nor projections on the side towards the lake, nothing but a wall of dingy white, with an indentation that looks something like a gateway. About an hour and a half brought us to Ouchy, the point where passengers land to take the omnibus to Lausanne. The ascent from Ouchy to Lausanne is a mile and a half, which it took the omnibus nearly half an hour to accomplish. We left our shawls and carpet-bags in the salle a manger of the Hotel Faucon, and set forth to find the cathedral, the pinnacled tower of which is visible for a long distance up and down the lake. Prominent as it is, however, it is by no means very easy to find it while rambling through the intricate streets and declivities of the town itself, for Lausanne is the town, I should fancy, in all the world the most difficult to go directly from one point to another. It is built on the declivity of a hill, adown which run several valleys or ravines, and over these the contiguity of houses extends, so that the communication is kept up by means of steep streets and sometimes long weary stairs, which must be surmounted and descended again in accomplishing a very moderate distance. In some inscrutable way we at last arrived at the cathedral, which stands on a higher site than any other in Lausanne. It has a very venerable exterior, with all the Gothic grandeur which arched mullioned windows, deep portals, buttresses, towers, and pinnacles, gray with a thousand years, can give to architecture. After waiting awhile we obtained entrance by means of an old woman, who acted the part of sacristan, and was then showing the church to some other visitors. The interior disappointed us; not but what it was very beautiful, but I think the excellent repair that it was in, and the Puritanic neatness with which it is kept, does much towards effacing the majesty and mystery that belong to an old church. Every inch of every wall and column, and all the mouldings and tracery, and every scrap of grotesque carving, had been washed with a drab mixture. There were likewise seats all up and down the nave, made of pine wood, and looking very new and neat, just such seats as I shall see in a hundred meeting-houses (if ever I go into so many) in America. Whatever might be the reason, the stately nave, with its high-groined roof, the clustered columns and lofty pillars, the intersecting arches of the side-aisles, the choir, the armorial and knightly tombs that surround what was once the high altar, all produced far less effect than I could have thought beforehand. As it happened, we had more ample time and freedom to inspect this cathedral than any other that we have visited, for the old woman consented to go away and leave us there, locking the door behind her. The others, except Rosebud, sat down to sketch such portions as struck their fancy; and for myself, I looked at the monuments, of which some, being those of old knights, ladies, bishops, and a king, were curious from their antiquity; and others are interesting as bearing memorials of English people, who have died at Lausanne in comparatively recent years. Then I went up into the pulpit, and tried, without success, to get into the stone gallery that runs all round the nave; and I explored my way into various side apartments of the cathedral, which I found fitted up with seats for Sabbath schools, perhaps, or possibly for meetings of elders of the Church. I opened the great Bible of the church, and found it to be a French version, printed at Lille some fifty years ago. There was also a liturgy, adapted, probably, to the Lutheran form of worship. In one of the side apartments I found a strong box, heavily clamped with iron, and having a contrivance, like the hopper of a mill, by which money could be turned into the top, while a double lock prevented its being abstracted again. This was to receive the avails of contributions made in the church; and there were likewise boxes, stuck on the ends of long poles, wherewith the deacons could go round among the worshippers, conveniently extending the begging-box to the remotest curmudgeon among them all. From the arrangement of the seats in the nave, and the labels pasted or painted on them, I judged that the women sat on one side and the men on the other, and the seats for various orders of magistrates, and for ecclesiastical and collegiate people, were likewise marked out. I soon grew weary of these investigations, and so did Rosebud and J-----, who essayed to amuse themselves with running races together over the horizontal tombstones in the pavement of the choir, treading remorselessly over the noseless effigies of old dignitaries, who never expected to be so irreverently treated. I put a stop to their sport, and banished them to different parts of the cathedral; and by and by, the old woman appeared again, and released us from durance. . . . While waiting for our dejeuner, we saw the people dining at the regular table d'hote of the hotel, and the idea was strongly borne in upon me, that the professional mystery of a male waiter is a very unmanly one. It is so absurd to see the solemn attentiveness with which they stand behind the chairs, the earnestness of their watch for any crisis that may demand their interposition, the gravity of their manner in performing some little office that the guest might better do for himself, their decorous and soft steps; in short, as I sat and gazed at them, they seemed to me not real men, but creatures with a clerical aspect, engendered out of a very artificial state of society. When they are waiting on myself, they do not appear so absurd; it is necessary to stand apart in order to see them properly. We left Lausanne--which was to us a tedious and weary place--before four o'clock. I should have liked well enough to see the house of Gibbon, and the garden in which he walked, after finishing "The Decline and Fall"; but it could not be done without some trouble and inquiry, and as the house did not come to see me, I determined not to go and see the house. There was, indeed, a mansion of somewhat antique respectability, near our hotel, having a garden and a shaded terrace behind it, which would have answered accurately enough to the idea of Gibbon's residence. Perhaps it was so; far more probably not. Our former voyages had been taken in the Hirondelle; we now, after broiling for some time in the sunshine by the lakeside, got on board of the Aigle, No. 2. There were a good many passengers, the larger proportion of whom seemed to be English and American, and among the latter a large party of talkative ladies, old and young. The voyage was pleasant while we were protected from the sun by the awning overhead, but became scarcely agreeable when the sun had descended so low as to shine in our faces or on our backs. We looked earnestly for Mont Blanc, which ought to have been visible during a large part of our course; but the clouds gathered themselves hopelessly over the portion of the sky where the great mountain lifted his white peak; and we did not see it, and probably never shall. As to the meaner mountains, there were enough of them, and beautiful enough; but we were a little weary, and feverish with the heat. . . . I think I had a head-ache, though it is so unusual a complaint with me, that I hardly know it when it comes. We were none of us sorry, therefore, when the Eagle brought us to the quay of Geneva, only a short distance from our hotel. . . . To-day I wrote to Mr. Wilding, requesting him to secure passages for us from Liverpool on the 15th of next month, or 1st of August. It makes my heart thrill, half pleasantly, half otherwise; so much nearer does this step seem to bring that home whence I have now been absent six years, and which, when I see it again, may turn out to be not my home any longer. I likewise wrote to Bennoch, though I know not his present address; but I should deeply grieve to leave England without seeing him. He and Henry Bright are the only two men in England to whom I shall be much grieved to bid farewell; but to the island itself I cannot bear to say that word as a finality. I shall dreamily hope to come back again at some indefinite time; rather foolishly perhaps, for it will tend to take the substance out of my life in my own land. But this, I suspect, is apt to be the penalty of those who stay abroad and stay too long. HAVRE. Hotel Wheeler, June 22d.--We arrived at this hotel last evening from Paris, and find ourselves on the borders of the Petit Quay Notre Dame, with steamers and boats right under our windows, and all sorts of dock-business going on briskly. There are barrels, bales, and crates of goods; there are old iron cannon for posts; in short, all that belongs to the Wapping of a great seaport. . . . The American partialities of the guests [of this hotel] are consulted by the decorations of the parlor, in which hang two lithographs and colored views of New York, from Brooklyn and from Weehawken. The fashion of the house is a sort of nondescript mixture of Frank, English, and American, and is not disagreeable to us after our weary experience of Continental life. The abundance of the food is very acceptable in comparison with the meagreness of French and Italian meals; and last evening we supped nobly on cold roast beef and ham, set generously before us, in the mass, instead of being doled out in slices few and thin. The waiter has a kindly sort of manner, and resembles the steward of a vessel rather than a landsman; and, in short, everything here has undergone a change, which might admit of very effective description. I may now as well give up all attempts at journalizing. So I shall say nothing of our journey across France from Geneva. . . . To-night, we shall take our departure in a steamer for Southampton, whence we shall go to London; thence, in a week or two, to Liverpool; thence to Boston and Concord, there to enjoy--if enjoyment it prove--a little rest and a sense that we are at home. [More than four months were now taken up in writing "The Marble Faun," in great part at the seaside town of Redcar, Yorkshire, Mr. Hawthorne having concluded to remain another year in England, chiefly to accomplish that romance. In Redcar, where he remained till September or October, he wrote no journal, but only the book. He then went to Leamington, where he finished "The Marble Faun" in March, and there is a little journalizing soon after leaving Redcar.--ED.] ENGLAND. Leamington, November 14th, 1859.--J---- and I walked to Lillington the other day. Its little church was undergoing renovation when we were here two years ago, and now seems to be quite renewed, with the exception of its square, gray, battlemented tower, which has still the aspect of unadulterated antiquity. On Saturday J----- and I walked to Warwick by the old road, passing over the bridge of the Avon, within view of the castle. It is as fine a piece of English scenery as exists anywhere,-- the quiet little river, shadowed with drooping trees, and, in its vista, the gray towers and long line of windows of the lordly castle, with a picturesquely varied outline; ancient strength, a little softened by decay. . . . The town of Warwick, I think, has been considerably modernized since I first saw it. The whole of the central portion of the principal street now looks modern, with its stuccoed or brick fronts of houses, and, in many cases, handsome shop windows. Leicester Hospital and its adjoining chapel still look venerably antique; and so does a gateway that half bestrides the street. Beyond these two points on either side it has a much older aspect. The modern signs heighten the antique impression. February 5th, 1860.--Mr. and Mrs. Bennoch are staying for a little while at Mr. B------'s at Coventry, and Mr. B------ called upon us the other day, with Mr. Bennoch, and invited us to go and see the lions of Coventry; so yesterday U---- and I went. It was not my first visit, therefore I have little or nothing to record, unless it were to describe a ribbon-factory into which Mr. B------ took us. But I have no comprehension of machinery, and have only a confused recollection of an edifice of four or five stories, on each floor of which were rows of huge machines, all busy with their iron hands and joints in turning out delicate ribbons. It was very curious and unintelligible to me to observe how they caused different colored patterns to appear, and even flowers to blossom, on the plain surface of a ribbon. Some of the designs were pretty, and I was told that one manufacturer pays 500 pounds annually to French artists (or artisans, for I do not know whether they have a connection with higher art) merely for new patterns of ribbons. The English find it impossible to supply themselves with tasteful productions of this sort merely from the resources of English fancy. If an Englishman possessed the artistic faculty to the degree requisite to produce such things, he would doubtless think himself a great artist, and scorn to devote himself to these humble purposes. Every Frenchman is probably more of an artist than one Englishman in a thousand. We ascended to the very roof of the factory, and gazed thence over smoky Coventry, which is now a town of very considerable size, and rapidly on the increase. The three famous spires rise out of the midst, that of St. Michael being the tallest and very beautiful. Had the day been clear, we should have had a wide view on all sides; for Warwickshire is well laid out for distant prospects, if you can only gain a little elevation from which to see them. Descending from the roof, we next went to see Trinity Church, which has just come through an entire process of renovation, whereby much of its pristine beauty has doubtless been restored; but its venerable awfulness is greatly impaired. We went into three churches, and found that they had all been subjected to the same process. It would be nonsense to regret it, because the very existence of these old edifices is involved in their being renewed; but it certainly does deprive them of a great part of their charm, and puts one in mind of wigs, padding, and all such devices for giving decrepitude the aspect of youth. In the pavement of the nave and aisles there are worn tombstones, with defaced inscriptions, and discolored marbles affixed against the wall; monuments, too, where a mediaeval man and wife sleep side by side on a marble slab; and other tombs so old that the inscriptions are quite gone. Over an arch, in one of the churches, there was a fresco, so old, dark, faded, and blackened, that I found it impossible to make out a single figure or the slightest hint of the design. On the whole, after seeing the churches of Italy, I was not greatly impressed with these attempts to renew the ancient beauty of old English minsters; it would be better to preserve as sedulously as possible their aspect of decay, in which consists the principal charm. . . . On our way to Mr. B------'s house, we looked into the quadrangle of a charity-school and old men's hospital, and afterwards stepped into a large Roman Catholic church, erected within these few years past, and closely imitating the mediaeval architecture and arrangements. It is strange what a plaything, a trifle, an unserious affair, this imitative spirit makes of a huge, ponderous edifice, which if it had really been built five hundred years ago would have been worthy of all respect. I think the time must soon come when this sort of thing will be held in utmost scorn, until the lapse of time shall give it a claim to respect. But, methinks, we had better strike out any kind of architecture, so it be our own, however wretched, than thus tread back upon the past. Mr. B------ now conducted us to his residence, which stands a little beyond the outskirts of the city, on the declivity of a hill, and in so windy a spot that, as he assured me, the very plants are blown out of the ground. He pointed to two maimed trees whose tops were blown off by a gale two or three years since; but the foliage still covers their shortened summits in summer, so that he does not think it desirable to cut them down. In America, a man of Mr. B------'s property would take upon himself the state and dignity of a millionaire. It is a blessed thing in England, that money gives a man no pretensions to rank, and does not bring the responsibilities of a great position. We found three or four gentlemen to meet us at dinner,--a Mr. D------ and a Mr. B------, an author, having written a book called "The Philosophy of Necessity," and is acquainted with Emerson, who spent two or three days at his house when last in England. He was very kindly appreciative of my own productions, as was also his wife, next to whom I sat at dinner. She talked to me about the author of "Adam Bede," whom she has known intimately all her life. . . . Miss Evans (who wrote "Adam Bede") was the daughter of a steward, and gained her exact knowledge of English rural life by the connection with which this origin brought her with the farmers. She was entirely self-educated, and has made herself an admirable scholar in classical as well as in modern languages. Those who knew her had always recognized her wonderful endowments, and only watched to see in what way they would develop themselves. She is a person of the simplest manners and character, amiable and unpretending, and Mrs. B------ spoke of her with great affection and respect. . . . Mr. B------, our host, is an extremely sensible man; and it is remarkable how many sensible men there are in England,--men who have read and thought, and can develop very good ideas, not exactly original, yet so much the product of their own minds that they can fairly call them their own. February 18th.--. . . . This present month has been somewhat less dismal than the preceding ones; there have been some sunny and breezy days when there was life in the air, affording something like enjoyment in a walk, especially when the ground was frozen. It is agreeable to see the fields still green through a partial covering of snow; the trunks and branches of the leafless trees, moreover, have a verdant aspect, very unlike that of American trees in winter, for they are covered with a delicate green moss, which is not so observable in summer. Often, too, there is a twine of green ivy up and down the trunk. The other day, as J----- and I were walking to Whitnash, an elm was felled right across our path, and I was much struck by this verdant coating of moss over all its surface,--the moss plants too minute to be seen individually, but making the whole tree green. It has a pleasant effect here, where it is the natural aspect of trees in general; but in America a mossy tree-trunk is not a pleasant object, because it is associated with damp, low, unwholesome situations. The lack of foliage gives many new peeps and vistas, hereabouts, which I never saw in summer. March 17th.--J----- and I walked to Warwick yesterday forenoon, and went into St. Mary's Church, to see the Beauchamp chapel. . . . On one side of it were some worn steps ascending to a confessional, where the priest used to sit, while the penitent, in the body of the church, poured his sins through a perforated auricle into this unseen receptacle. The sexton showed us, too, a very old chest which had been found in the burial vault, with some ancient armor stored away in it. Three or four helmets of rusty iron, one of them barred, the last with visors, and all intolerably weighty, were ranged in a row. What heads those must have been that could bear such massiveness! On one of the helmets was a wooden crest--some bird or other--that of itself weighed several pounds. . . . April 23d.--We have been here several weeks. . . . Had I seen Bath earlier in my English life, I might have written many pages about it, for it is really a picturesque and interesting city. It is completely sheltered in the lap of hills, the sides of the valley rising steep and high from the level spot on which it stands, and through which runs the muddy little stream of the Avon. The older part of the town is on the level, and the more modern growth--the growth of more than a hundred years--climbs higher and higher up the hillside, till the upper streets are very airy and lofty. The houses are built almost entirely of Bath stone, which in time loses its original buff color, and is darkened by age and coal-smoke into a dusky gray; but still the city looks clean and pure as compared with most other English towns. In its architecture, it has somewhat of a Parisian aspect, the houses having roofs rising steep from their high fronts, which are often adorned with pillars, pilasters, and other good devices, so that you see it to be a town built with some general idea of beauty, and not for business. There are Circuses, Crescents, Terraces, Parades, and all such fine names as we have become familiar with at Leamington, and other watering-places. The declivity of most of the streets keeps them remarkably clean, and they are paved in a very comfortable way, with large blocks of stone, so that the middle of the street is generally practicable to walk upon, although the sidewalks leave no temptation so to do, being of generous width. In many alleys, and round about the abbey and other edifices, the pavement is of square flags, like those of Florence, and as smooth as a palace floor. On the whole, I suppose there is no place in England where a retired man, with a moderate income, could live so tolerably as at Bath; it being almost a city in size and social advantages; quite so, indeed, if eighty thousand people make a city,--and yet having no annoyance of business nor spirit of worldly struggle. All modes of enjoyment that English people like may be had here; and even the climate is said to be milder than elsewhere in England. How this may be, I know not; but we have rain or passing showers almost every day since we arrived, and I suspect the surrounding hills are just about of that inconvenient height, that keeps catching clouds, and compelling them to squeeze out their moisture upon the included valley. The air, however, certainly is preferable to that of Leamington. . . . There are no antiquities except the abbey, which has not the interest of many other English churches and cathedrals. In the midst of the old part of the town stands the house which was formerly Beau Nash's residence, but which is now part of the establishment of an ale-merchant. The edifice is a tall, but rather mean-looking, stone building, with the entrance from a little side court, which is so cumbered with empty beer-barrels as hardly to afford a passage. The doorway has some architectural pretensions, being pillared and with some sculptured devices--whether lions or winged heraldic monstrosities I forget--on the pediment. Within, there is a small entry, not large enough to be termed a hall, and a staircase, with carved balustrade, ascending by angular turns and square landing-places. For a long course of years, ending a little more than a century ago, princes, nobles, and all the great and beautiful people of old times, used to go up that staircase, to pay their respects to the King of Bath. On the side of the house there is a marble slab inserted, recording that here he resided, and that here he died in 1767, between eighty and ninety years of age. My first acquaintance with him was in Smollett's "Roderick Random," and I have met him in a hundred other novels. His marble statue is in a niche at one end of the great pump-room, in wig, square-skirted coat, flapped waistcoat, and all the queer costume of the period, still looking ghost-like upon the scene where he used to be an autocrat. Marble is not a good material for Beau Nash, however; or, if so, it requires color to set him off adequately. . . . It is usual in Bath to see the old sign of the checker-board on the doorposts of taverns. It was originally a token that the game might be played there, and is now merely a tavern-sign. LONDON. 31 Hertford Street, Mayfair, May 16th, 1860.--I came hither from Bath on the 14th, and am staying with my friends, Mr. and Mrs. Motley. I would gladly journalize some of my proceedings, and describe things and people; but I find the same coldness and stiffness in my pen as always since our return to England. I dined with the Motleys at Lord Dufferin's, on Monday evening, and there met, among a few other notable people, the Honorable Mrs. Norton, a dark, comely woman, who doubtless was once most charming, and still has charms, at above fifty years of age. In fact, I should not have taken her to be greatly above thirty, though she seems to use no art to make herself look younger, and talks about her time of life, without any squeamishness. Her voice is very agreeable, having a sort of muffled quality, which is excellent in woman. She is of a very cheerful temperament, and so has borne a great many troubles without being destroyed by them. But I can get no color into my sketch, so shall leave it here. London, May 17th. [From a letter.]--Affairs succeed each other so fast, that I have really forgotten what I did yesterday. I remember seeing my dear friend, Henry Bright, and listening to him, as we strolled in the Park, and along the Strand. To-day I met at breakfast Mr. Field Talfourd, who promises to send you the photograph of his portrait of Mr. Browning. He was very agreeable, and seemed delighted to see me again. At lunch, we had Lord Dufferin, the Honorable Mrs. Norton, and Mr. Sterling (author of the "Cloister Life of Charles V."), with whom we are to dine on Sunday. You would be stricken dumb, to see how quietly I accept a whole string of invitations, and what is more, perform my engagements without a murmur. A German artist has come to me with a letter of introduction, and a request that I will sit to him for a portrait in bas-relief. To this, likewise, I have assented! subject to the condition that I shall have my leisure. The stir of this London life, somehow or other, has done me a wonderful deal of good, and I feel better than for months past. This is strange, for if I had my choice, I should leave undone almost all the things I do. I have had time to see Bennoch only once. [This closes the European Journal. After Mr. Hawthorne's return to America, he published "Our Old Home," and began a new romance, of which two chapters appeared in the Atlantic Monthly. But the breaking out of the war stopped all imaginative work with him, and all journalizing, until 1862, when he went to Maine for a little excursion, and began another journal, from which I take one paragraph, giving a slight note of his state of mind at an interesting period of his country's history. --ED.] West Gouldsborough, August 15th, 1862.--It is a week ago, Saturday, since J----- and I reached this place, . . . . Mr. Barney S. Hill's. At Hallowell, and subsequently all along the route, the country was astir with volunteers, and the war is all that seems to be alive, and even that doubtfully so. Nevertheless, the country certainly shows a good spirit, the towns offering everywhere most liberal bounties, and every able-bodied man feels an immense pull and pressure upon him to go to the war. I doubt whether any people was ever actuated by a more genuine and disinterested public spirit; though, of course, it is not unalloyed with baser motives and tendencies. We met a train of cars with a regiment or two just starting for the South, and apparently in high spirits. Everywhere some insignia of soldiership were to be seen,-- bright buttons, a red stripe down the trousers, a military cap, and sometimes a round-shouldered bumpkin in the entire uniform. They require a great deal to give them the aspect of soldiers; indeed, it seems as if they needed to have a good deal taken away and added, like the rough clay of a sculptor as it grows to be a model. The whole talk of the bar-rooms and every other place of intercourse was about enlisting and the war, this being the very crisis of trial, when the voluntary system is drawing to an end, and the draft almost immediately to commence. END OF VOL. II. 
7170	----	THE LIFE AND GENIUS OF NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE By Frank Preston Stearns Author Of "The Real And Ideal In Literature," "Life Of Tintoretto," "Life Of Bismarck," "True Republicanism," "Cambridge Sketches," Etc. [Illustration: Nathaniel Hawthorne. The Frances Osborne Portrait: by permission of the Essex Institute.] INSCRIBED TO EMILIA MACIEL STEARNS "In the elder days of art Builders wrought with greatest care Each minute and unseen part,-- For the gods see everywhere." --_Longfellow_ "Oh, happy dreams of such a soul have I, And softly to myself of him I sing, Whose seraph pride all pride doth overwing; Who stoops to greatness, matches low with high, And as in grand equalities of sky, Stands level with the beggar and the king." --_Wasson_ PREFACE The simple events of Nathaniel Hawthorne's life have long been before the public. From 1835 onward they may easily be traced in the various Note-books, which have been edited from his diary, and previous to that time we are indebted for them chiefly to the recollections of his two faithful friends, Horatio Bridge and Elizabeth Peabody. These were first systematised and published by George P. Lathrop in 1872, but a more complete and authoritative biography was issued by Julian Hawthorne twelve years later, in which, however, the writer has modestly refrained from expressing an opinion as to the quality of his father's genius, or from attempting any critical examination of his father's literary work. It is in order to supply in some measure this deficiency, that the present volume has been written. At the same time, I trust to have given credit where it was due to my predecessors, in the good work of making known the true character of so rare a genius and so exceptional a personality. The publication of Horatio Bridge's memoirs and of Elizabeth Manning's account of the boyhood of Hawthorne have placed before the world much that is new and valuable concerning the earlier portion of Hawthorne's life, of which previous biographers could not very well reap the advantage. I have made thorough researches in regard to Hawthorne's American ancestry, but have been able to find no ground for the statements of Conway and Lathrop, that William Hathorne, their first ancestor on this side of the ocean, was directly connected with the Quaker persecution. Some other mistakes, like Hawthorne's supposed connection with the duel between Cilley and Graves, have also been corrected. F. P. S. CONTENTS CHAPTER I. SALEM AND THE HATHORNES: 1630-1800 II. BOYHOOD OF HAWTHORNE: 1804-1821 III. BOWDOIN COLLEGE: 1821-1825 IV. LITTLE MISERY: 1825-1835 V. EOS AND EROS: 1835-1839 VI. PEGASUS AT THE CART: 1839-1841 VII. HAWTHORNE AS A SOCIALIST: 1841-1842 VIII. CONCORD AND THE OLD MANSE: 1842-1845 IX. "MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE": 1845 X. FROM CONCORD TO LENOX: 1845-1849 XI. PEGASUS IS FREE: 1850-1852 XII. THE LIVERPOOL CONSULATE: 1852-1854 XIII. HAWTHORNE IN ENGLAND: 1854-1858 XIV. ITALY XV. HAWTHORNE AS ART CRITIC: 1858 XVI. "THE MARBLE FAUN": 1859-1860 XVII. HOMEWARD BOUND: 1860-1862 XVIII. IMMORTALITY PORTRAITS OF HAWTHORNE EDITIONS OF HAWTHORNE'S BOOKS PUBLISHED UNDER HIS OWN DIRECTION. MRS. EMERSON AND MRS. HAWTHORNE APPENDICES List of Illustrations PORTRAIT OF HAWTHORNE, BY FRANCES OSBORNE IN 1893 HAWTHORNE'S BIRTHPLACE HORATIO BRIDGE, FROM THE PORTRAIT BY EASTMAN JOHNSON HAWTHORNE, FROM THE PORTRAIT BY CHARLES OSGOOD IN 1840 THE OLD MANSE, RESIDENCE OF DR. RIPLEY THE CUSTOM HOUSE, SALEM, MASS THE WAYSIDE GUIDO RENI'S PORTRAIT OF BEATRICE CENCI STATUE OF PRAXITELES' RESTING FAUN TORRE MEDIAVALLE DELLA SCIMMIA (HILDA'S TOWER) IN ROME THE LIFE AND GENIUS OF NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE CHAPTER I SALEM AND THE HATHORNES: 1630-1800 The three earliest settlements on the New England coast were Plymouth, Boston, and Salem; but Boston soon proved its superior advantages to the two others, not only from its more capacious harbor, but also from the convenient waterway which the Charles River afforded to the interior of the Colony. We find that a number of English families, and among them the ancestors of Gen. Joseph Warren and Wendell Phillips, who crossed the ocean in 1640 in the "good ship Arbella," soon afterward migrated to Watertown on Charles River for the sake of the excellent farming lands which they found there. Salem, however, maintained its ascendency over Plymouth and other neighboring harbors on the coast, and soon grew to be the second city of importance in the Colony during the eighteenth century, when the only sources of wealth were fishing, shipbuilding, and commerce. Salem nourished remarkably. Its leading citizens became wealthy and developed a social aristocracy as cultivated, as well educated, and, it may also be added, as fastidious as that of Boston itself. In this respect it differed widely from the other small cities of New England, and the exclusiveness of its first families was more strongly marked on account of the limited size of the place. Thus it continued down to the middle of the last century, when railroads and the tendency to centralization began to draw away its financial prosperity, and left the city to small manufactures and its traditional respectability. The finest examples of American eighteenth century architecture are supposed to exist in and about the city of Salem, and they have the advantage, which American architecture lacks so painfully at the present time, of possessing a definite style and character--edifices which are not of a single type, like most of the houses in Fifth Avenue, but which, while differing in many respects, have a certain general resemblance, that places them all in the same category. The small old country churches of Essex County are not distinguished for fine carving or other ornamentation, and still less by the costliness of their material, for they are mostly built of white pine, but they have an indefinable air of pleasantness about them, as if they graced the ground they stand on, and their steeples seem to float in the air above us. If we enter them on a Sunday forenoon--for on week-days they are like a sheepfold without its occupants--we meet with much the same kind of pleasantness in the assemblage there. We do not find the deep religious twilight of past ages, or the noonday glare of a fashionable synagogue, but a neatly attired congregation of weather-beaten farmers and mariners, and their sensible looking wives, with something of the original Puritan hardness in their faces, much ameliorated by the liberalism and free thinking of the past fifty years. Among them too you will see some remarkably pretty young women; and young men like those who dug the trenches on Breed's Hill in the afternoon of June 16, 1775. There may be veterans in the audience who helped Grant to go to Richmond. Withal there is much of the spirit of the early Christians among them, and virtue enough to save their country in any emergency. These old churches have mostly disappeared from Salem city and have been replaced by more aristocratic edifices, whose square or octagonal towers are typical of their leading parishioners,--a dignified class, if somewhat haughty and reserved; but they too will soon belong to the past, drawn off to the great social centres in and about Boston. In the midst of Salem there is a triangular common, "with its never-failing elms," where the boys large and small formerly played cricket--married men too--as they do still on the village greens of good old England, and around this enclosure the successful merchants and navigators of the city built their mansion houses; not half houses like those in the larger cities, but with spacious halls and rooms on either side going up three stories. It is in the gracefully ornamented doorways and the delicate interior wood-work, the carving of wainscots, mantels and cornices, the skilful adaptations of classic forms to a soft and delicate material that the charm of this architecture chiefly consists,--especially in the staircases, with their carved spiral posts and slender railings, rising upward in the centre of the front hall, and turning right and left on the story above. It is said that after the year eighteen hundred the quality of this decoration sensibly declined; it was soon replaced by more prosaic forms, and now the tools no longer exist that can make it. Sir Christopher Wren and Inigo Jones would have admired it. America, excepting in New York City, escaped the false rococo taste of the eighteenth century. The Salem sea-captains of old times were among the boldest of our early navigators; sailing among the pirates of the Persian Gulf and trading with the cannibals of Polynesia, and the trophies which they brought home from those strange regions, savage implements of war and domestic use, clubs, spears, boomerangs, various cooking utensils, all carved with infinite pains from stone, ebony and iron-wood, cloth from the bark of the tapa tree, are now deposited in the Peabody Academy, where they form one of the largest collections of the kind extant. Even more interesting is the sword of a sword-fish, pierced through the oak planking of a Salem vessel for six inches or more. No human force could do that even with a spear of the sharpest steel. Was the sword-fish roused to anger when the ship came upon him sleeping in the water; or did he mistake it for a strange species of whale? There is a court-house on Federal Street, built in Webster's time, of hard cold granite in the Grecian fashion of the day, not of the white translucent marble with which the Greeks would have built it. Is it the court-house where Webster made his celebrated argument in the White murder case, or was that court-house torn down and a plough run through the ground where it stood, as Webster affirmed that it ought to be? Salem people were curiously reticent in regard to that trial, and fashionable society there did not like Webster the better for having the two Knapps convicted. Much more valuable than such associations is William Hunt's full-length portrait of Chief Justice Shaw, which hangs over the judge's bench in the front court-room. "When I look at your honor I see that you are homely, but when I think of you I know that you are great." it is this combination of an unprepossessing physique with rare dignity of character which Hunt has represented in what many consider the best of American portraits. It is perhaps too much in the sketchy style of Velasquez, but admirable for all that. Time has dealt kindly with Salem, in effacing all memorials of the witchcraft persecution, except a picturesque old house at the corner of North and Essex Streets, where there are said to have been preliminary examinations for witchcraft,--a matter which concerns us now but slightly. The youthful associations of a genius are valuable to us on account of the influence which they may be supposed to have had on his early life, but associations which have no determining consequences may as well be neglected. The hill where those poor martyrs to superstition were executed may be easily seen on the left of the city, as you roll in on the train from Boston. It is part of a ridge which rises between the Concord and Charles Rivers and extends to Cape Ann, where it dives into the ocean, to reappear again like a school of krakens, or other marine monsters, in the Isles of Shoals. New England has not the fertile soil of many sections of the United States, and its racking climate is proverbial, but it is blessed with the two decided advantages of pure water and fine scenery. There is no more beautiful section of its coast than that between Salem Harbor and Salisbury Beach, long stretches of smooth sand alternating with bold rocky promontories. A summer drive from Swampscott to Marblehead reminds one even of the Bay of Naples (without Vesuvius), and the wilder coast of Cape Ann, with its dark pines, red-roofed cottages, and sparkling surf, is quite as delightful. William Hunt went there in the last sad years of his life to paint "sunshine," as he said; and Whittier has given us poetic touches of the inland scenery in elevated verse: "Fleecy clouds casting their shadows Over uplands and meadows; And country roads winding as roads will, Here to a ferry, there to a mill." Poets arise where there is poetic nourishment, internal and external, for them to feed on; and it is not surprising that a Whittier and a Hawthorne should have been evolved from the environment in which they grew to manhood. It is a common saying with old Boston families that their ancestors came to America in the "Arbella" with Governor Winthrop, but as a matter of fact there were at least fifteen vessels that brought colonists to Massachusetts in 1630, and I cannot discover that any lists of their passengers have been preserved. The statement that certain persons came over at the same time with Governor Winthrop might soon become a tradition that they came in the same ship with him; but all that we know certainly is that Governor Winthrop landed about the middle of June, 1630, and that his son arrived two weeks later in the "Talbot," and was drowned July 2, while attempting to cross one of the tide rivers at Salem. Who arrived in the thirteen other vessels that year we know not. Ten years later Sir Richard Saltonstall emigrated to Boston with the Phillips and Warren families in the "Arbella" (or "Arabella"), and there is no telling how much longer she sailed the ocean. Hawthorne himself states that his ancestors came from Wig Castle in Wigton in Warwickshire, [Footnote: Diary, August 22, 1837.] but no such castle has been discovered, and the only Wigton in England appears to be located in Cumberland. [Footnote: Lathrop's "Study of Hawthorne," 46.] He does not tell us where he obtained this information, and it certainly could not have been from authentic documents,--more likely from conversation with an English traveller. Hawthorne never troubled himself much concerning his ancestry, English or American; while he was consul at Liverpool, he had exceptional advantages for investigating the subject, but whatever attempt he made there resulted in nothing. It is only recently that Mr. Henry F. Waters, who spent fifteen years in England searching out the records of old New England families, succeeded in discovering the connecting link between the first American Hawthornes and their relatives in the old country. It was a bill of exchange for one hundred pounds drawn by William Hathorne, of Salem, payable to Robert Hathorne in London, and dated October 19, 1651, which first gave Mr. Waters the clue to his discovery. Robert not only accepted his brother's draft, but wrote him this simple and business-like but truly affectionate epistle in return: "GOOD BROTHER: Remember my love to my sister, my brother John and sister, my brother Davenport and sister and the rest of our friends. "In haste I rest "Your loving brother, "From Bray this 1 April, 1653. "ROBERT HATHORNE." From this it appears that Major William Hathorne not only had a brother John, who established himself in Lynn, but a sister Elizabeth, who married Richard Davenport, of Salem. Concerning Robert Hathorne we only know further that he died in 1689; but in the probate records of Berkshire, England, there is a will proved May 2, 1651, of William Hathorne, of Binfield, who left all his lands, buildings and tenements in that county to his son Robert, on condition that Robert should pay to his father's eldest son, William, one hundred pounds, and to his son John twenty pounds sterling. He also left to another son, Edmund, thirty acres of land in Bray, and there are other legacies; but it cannot be doubted that the hundred pounds mentioned in this will is the same that Major William Hathorne drew for five months later, and that we have identified here the last English ancestor of Nathaniel Hawthorne. His wife's given name was Sarah, but her maiden name still remains unknown. The family resided chiefly at Binfield, on the borders of Windsor Park, and evidently were in comfortable circumstances at that time. From William Hathorne, senior, their genealogy has been traced back to John Hathorne (spelled at that time Hothorne), who died in 1520, but little is known of their affairs, or how they sustained themselves during the strenuous vicissitudes of the Reformation. [Footnote: "Hawthorne Centenary at Salem," 81.] Emmerton and Waters [Footnote: "English Records about New England Families."] state that William Hathorne came to Massachusetts Bay in 1630, and this is probable enough, though by no means certain, for they give no authority for it. We first hear of him definitely as a freeholder in the settlement of Dorchester in 1634, but his name is not on the list of the first twenty-four Dorchester citizens, dated October 19, 1630. All accounts agree that he moved to Salem in 1636, or the year following, and Nathaniel Hawthorne believed that he came to America at that time. Upham, the historian of Salem witchcraft, who has made the most thorough researches in the archives of old Salem families, says of William Hathorne: "William Hathorne appears on the church records as early as 1636. He died in June, 1681, seventy-four years of age. No one in our annals fills a larger space. As soldier, commanding important and difficult expeditions, as counsel in cases before the courts, as judge on the bench, and innumerable other positions requiring talent and intelligence, he was constantly called to serve the public. He was distinguished as a public speaker, and is the only person, I believe, of that period, whose reputation as an orator has come down to us. He was an Assistant, that is, in the upper branch of the Legislature, seventeen years. He was a deputy twenty years. When the deputies, who before sat with the assistants, were separated into a distinct body, and the House of Representatives thus came into existence, in 1644, Hathorne was their first Speaker. He occupied the chair, with intermediate services on the floor from time to time, until raised to the other House. He was an inhabitant of Salem Village, having his farm there, and a dwelling-house, in which he resided when his legislative, military, and other official duties permitted. His son John, who succeeded him in all his public honors, also lived on his own farm in the village a great part of the time." [Footnote: "Salem Witchcraft," i. 99.] Evidently he was the most important person in the colony, next to Governor Winthrop, and unequalled by any of his descendants, except Nathaniel Hawthorne, and by him in a wholly different manner; for it is in vain that we seek for traits similar to those of the great romance writer among his ancestors. We can only say that they both possessed exceptional mental ability, and there the comparison ends. The attempt has been made to connect William Hathorne with the persecution of the Quakers, [Footnote: Conway's "Life of Hawthorne," 15.] and it is true that he was a member of the Colonial Assembly during the period of the persecution; it is likely that his vote supported the measures in favor of it, but this is not absolutely certain. We do not learn that he acted at any time in the capacity of sheriff; the most diligent researches in the archives of the State House at Boston have failed to discover any direct connection on the part of William Hathorne with that movement; and the best authorities in regard to the events of that time make no mention of him. [Footnote: Sewel, Hallowell, Ellis.] It was the clergy who aroused public opinion and instigated the prosecutions against both the Quakers and the supposed witches of Salem, and the civil authorities were little more than passive instruments in their hands. Hathorne's work was essentially a legislative one,--a highly important work in that wild, unsettled country,--to adapt English statutes and legal procedures to new and strange conditions. He was twice Speaker of the House between 1660 and 1671, and as presiding officer he could exert less influence on measures of expediency than any other person present, as he could not argue either for or against them. And yet, after Charles II. had interfered in behalf of the Quakers, William Hathorne wrote an elaborate and rather circuitous letter to the British Ministry, arguing for non-intervention in the affairs of the colony, which might have possessed greater efficacy if he had not signed it with an assumed name. [Footnote: J. Hawthorne's "Nathaniel Hawthorne," i. 24.] However strong a Puritan he may have been, William Hathorne evidently had no intention of becoming a martyr to the cause of colonial independence. Yet it may be stated in his favor, and in that of the colonists generally, that the fault was not wholly on one side, for the Quakers evidently sought persecution, and would have it, cost what it might. [Footnote: Hallowell's "Quaker Invasion of New England."] Much the same may be affirmed of his son John, who had the singular misfortune to be judge in Salem at the time of the witchcraft epidemic. The belief in witchcraft has always had its stronghold among the fogs and gloomy fiords of the North. James I. brought it with him from Scotland to England, and in due course it was transplanted to America. Judge Hathorne appears to have been at the top of affairs at Salem in his time, and it is more than probable that another in his place would have found himself obliged to act as he did. Law is, after all, in exceptional cases little more than a reflex of public opinion. "The common law," said Webster, "is common-sense," which simply means the common opinion of the most influential people. Much more to blame than John Hathorne were those infatuated persons who deceived themselves into thinking that the pains of rheumatism, neuralgia, or some similar malady were caused by the malevolent influence of a neighbor against whom they had perhaps long harbored a grudge. _They_ were the true witches and goblins of that epoch, and the only ones, if any, who ought to have been hanged for it. What never has been reasoned up cannot be reasoned down. It seems incredible in this enlightened era, as the newspapers call it, that any woman should be at once so inhuman and so frivolous as to swear away the life of a fellow-creature upon an idle fancy; and yet, even in regard to this, there were slightly mitigating conditions. Consider only the position of that handful of Europeans in this vast wilderness, as it then was. The forests came down to the sea-shore, and brought with them all the weird fancies, terrors and awful forebodings which the human mind could conjure up. They feared the Indians, the wild beasts, and most of all one another, for society was not yet sufficiently organized to afford that repose and contentment of spirit which they had left behind in the Old World. They had come to America to escape despotism, but they had brought despotism in their own hearts. They could escape from the Stuarts, but there was no escape from human nature. It is likely that their immediate progenitors would not have carried the witchcraft craze to such an extreme. The emigrating Puritans were a fairly well-educated class of men and women, but their children did not enjoy equal opportunities. The new continent had to be subdued physically and reorganized before any mental growth could be raised there. Levelling the forest was a small matter beside clearing the land of stumps and stones. All hands were obliged to work hard, and there was little opportunity for intellectual development or social culture. As a logical consequence, an era ensued not unlike the dark ages of Europe. But this was essential to the evolution of a new type of man, and for the foundation of American nationality; and it was thus that the various nationalities of Europe arose out of the ruins of the Roman Empire. The scenes that took place in Judge Hathorne's court-room have never been equalled since in American jurisprudence. Powerful forces came into play there, and the reports that have been preserved read like scenes from Shakespeare. In the case of Rebecca Nurse, the Judge said to the defendant: "'You do know whether you are guilty, and have familiarity with the Devil; and now when you are here present to see such a thing as these testify,--and a black man whispering in your ear, and devils about you,--what do you say to it?'" To which she replied: "'It is all false. I am clear.' Whereupon Mrs. Pope, one of the witnesses, fell into a grievous fit." [Footnote: Upham's "Salem Witchcraft," ii. 64.] Alas, poor beleaguered soul! And one may well say, "What imaginations those women had!" Tituba, the West Indian Aztec who appears in this social-religious explosion as the chief and original incendiary,--verily the root of all evil,--gave the following testimony: "Q. 'Did you not pinch Elizabeth Hubbard this morning?' "A. 'The man brought her to me, and made me pinch her.' "Q. 'Why did you go to Thomas Putnam's last night and hurt his child?' "A. 'They pull and haul me, and make me go.' "Q. 'And what would they have you do?' "A. 'Kill her with a knife.' "(Lieutenant Fuller and others said at this time, when the child saw these persons, and was tormented by them, that she did complain of a knife,--that they would have her cut her head off with a knife.) "Q. 'How did you go?' "A. 'We ride upon sticks, and are there presently.' "Q. 'Do you go through the trees or over them?' "A. 'We see nothing, but are there presently.' "Q. 'Why did you not tell your master?' "A. 'I was afraid. They said they would cut off my head if I told.' "Q. 'Would you not have hurt others, if you could?' "A. 'They said they would hurt others, but they could not.' "Q. 'What attendants hath Sarah Good?' "A. 'A yellow-bird, and she would have given me one.' "Q. 'What meat did she give it?' "A. 'It did suck her between her fingers.'". This might serve as an epilogue to "Macbeth," and the wonder is that an unlettered Indian should have had the wit to make such apt and subtle replies. It is also noteworthy that these strange proceedings took place after the expulsion of the royal governor, and previous to the provincial government of William III. If Sir Edmund Andros had remained, the tragedy might have been changed into a farce. After all, it appears that John Hathorne was not a lawyer, for he describes himself in his last will, dated June 27, 1717, as a merchant, and it is quite possible that his legal education was no better than that of the average English squire in Fielding's time. It is evident, however, from the testimony given above, that he was a strong believer in the supernatural, and here if anywhere we find a relationship between him and his more celebrated descendant. Nathaniel Hawthorne was too clear-sighted to place confidence in the pretended revelations of trance mediums, and he was not in the least superstitious; but he was remarkably fond of reading ghost stories, and would have liked to believe them, if he could have done so in all sincerity. He sometimes felt as if he were a ghost himself, gliding noiselessly in the walks of men, and wondered that the sun should cast a shadow from him. However, we cannot imagine him as seated in jurisdiction at a criminal tribunal. His gentle nature would have recoiled from that, as it might from a serpent. In the Charter Street burial-ground there is a slate gravestone, artistically carved about its edges, with the name, "Col. John Hathorne Esq.," upon it. It is somewhat sunken into the earth, and leans forward as if wishing to hide the inscription upon it from the gaze of mankind. The grass about it and the moss upon the stone assist in doing this, although repeatedly cut and cleaned away. It seems as if Nature wished to draw a kind of veil over the memory of the witch's judge, himself the sorrowful victim of a theocratic oligarchy. The lesson we learn from his errors is, to trust our own hearts and not to believe too fixedly in the doctrines of Church and State. It must be a dull sensibility that can look on this old slate-stone without a feeling of pathos and a larger charity for the errors of human nature. It is said that one of the convicted witches cursed Judge Hathorne,--himself and his descendants forever; but it is more than likely that they all cursed him bitterly enough, and this curse took effect in a very natural and direct manner. Every extravagant political or social movement is followed by a corresponding reaction, even if the movement be on the whole a salutary one, and retribution is sure to fall in one shape or another on the leaders of it. After this time the Hathornes ceased to be conspicuous in Salem affairs. The family was not in favor, and the avenues of prosperity were closed to them, as commonly happens in such cases. Neither does the family appear to have multiplied and extended itself like most of the old New England families, who can now count from a dozen to twenty branches in various places. Of John Hathorne's three sons only one appears to have left children. The name has wholly disappeared from among Salem families, and thus in a manner has the witch's curse been fulfilled. Joseph Hathorne, the son of the Judge, was mostly a farmer, and that is all that we now know of him. His son Daniel, however, showed a more adventurous spirit, becoming a shipmaster quite early in life. It has also been intimated that he was something of a smuggler, which was no great discredit to him in a time when the unfair and even prohibitory measures of the British Parliament in regard to American commerce made smuggling a practical necessity. Even as the captain of a trading vessel, however, Daniel Hathorne was not likely to advance the social interests of his family. It is significant that he should have left the central portion of Salem, where his ancestors had lived, and have built a house for himself close to the city wharves,--a house well built and commodious enough, but not in a fashionable location. But Daniel Hathorne had the advantage over fashionable society in Salem, in being a thorough patriot. Boston and Salem were the two strongholds of Toryism during the war for Independence, which was natural enough, as their wealthy citizens were in close mercantile relations with English houses, and sent their children to England to be educated. Daniel Hathorne, however, as soon as hostilities had begun, fitted out his bark as a privateer, and spent the following six years in preying upon British merchantmen. How successful he was in this line of business we have not been informed, but he certainly did not grow rich by it; although he is credited with one engagement with the enemy, in which his ship came off with honor, though perhaps not with a decisive victory. This exploit was celebrated in a rude ballad of the time, which has been preserved in "Griswold's Curiosities of American Literature," and has at least the merit of plain unvarnished language. [Footnote: Also in Lathrop's "Hawthorne."] There is a miniature portrait of Daniel Hathorne, such as was common in Copley's time, still in the possession of the Hawthorne family, and it represents him as rather a bullet-headed man, with a bright, open, cheery face, a broad English chin and strongly marked brows,--an excellent physiognomy for a sea-captain. He appears besides to have had light brown or sandy hair, a ruddy complexion and bright blue eyes; but we cannot determine how truthful the miniature may be in respect to coloring. At all events, he was of a very different appearance from Nathaniel Hawthorne, and if he resembled his grandson in any external respect, it was in his large eyes and their overshadowing brows. He has not the look of a dare-devil. One might suppose that he was a person of rather an obstinate disposition, but it is always difficult to draw the line between obstinacy and determination. A similar miniature of his son Nathaniel, born in 1775, and who died at Surinam in his thirty-fourth year, gives us the impression of a person somewhat like his father, and also somewhat like his son Nathaniel. He has a long face instead of a round one, and his features are more delicate and refined than those of the bold Daniel. The expression is gentle, dreamy and pensive, and unless the portrait belies him, he could not have been the stern, domineering captain that he has been represented. He had rather a slender figure, and was probably much more like his mother, who was a Miss Phelps, than the race of Judge Hathorne. He may have been a reticent man, but never a bold one, and we find in him a new departure. His face is more amiable and attractive than his father's, but not so strong. In 1799 he was married to Miss Elizabeth Clarke Manning, the daughter of Richard Manning, and then only nineteen years of age. She appears to have been an exceptionally sensitive and rather shy young woman--such as would be likely to attract the attention of a chivalrous young mariner--but with fine traits of intellect and character. The maternal ancestry of a distinguished man is quite as important as the paternal, but in the present instance it is much more difficult to obtain information concerning it. The increasing fame of Hawthorne has been like a calcium-light, illuminating for the past fifty years everything to which that name attaches, and leaving the Manning family in a shadow so much the deeper. All we can learn of them now is, that they were descended from Richard Manning, of Dartmouth in Devonshire, England, whose son Thomas emigrated to Salem with his widowed mother in 1679, but afterwards removed to Ipswich, ten miles to the north, whence the family has since extended itself far and wide,--the Reverend Jacob M. Manning, of the Old South Church, the fearless champion of practical anti-slaveryism, having been among them. It appears that Thomas's grandson Richard started in life as a blacksmith, which was no strange thing in those primitive times; but, being a thrifty and enterprising man, he lived to establish a line of stage-coaches between Salem and Boston, and this continued in the possession of his family until it was superseded by the Eastern Railway. After this catastrophe, Robert Manning, the son of Richard and brother of Mrs. Nathaniel Hathorne, became noted as a fruit-grower (a business in which Essex County people have always taken an active interest), and was one of the founders of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society. The Mannings were always respected in Salem, although they never came to affluent circumstances, nor did they own a house about the city common. Robert Manning, Jr., was Secretary of the Horticultural Society in Boston for a long term of years, a pleasant, kindly man, with an aspect of general culture. Hawthorne's maternal grandmother was Miriam Lord, of Ipswich, and his paternal grandmother was Rachel Phelps, of Salem. His father was only thirty-three when he died at Surinam. In regard to the family name, there are at present Hawthornes and Hathornes in England, and although the two names may have been identical originally, they have long since become as distinct as Smith and Smythe. I have discovered only two instances in which the first William Hathorne wrote his own name, and in the various documents at the State House in which it appears written by others, it is variously spelled Hathorn, Hathorne, Hawthorn, Haythorne, and Harthorne,--from which we can only conclude that the a was pronounced broadly. It was not until the reign of Queen Anne, when books first became cheap and popular, that there was any decided spelling of either proper or common names. Then the printers took the matter into their own hands and made witch-work enough of it. The word "sovereign," for instance, which is derived from the old French _souvrain_, and which Milton spelled "sovran," they tortured into its present form,--much as the clerks of Massachusetts Colony tortured the name of William Hathorne. This, however, was spelled Hathorne oftener than in other ways, and it was so spelled in the two signatures above referred to, one of which was attached as witness to a deed for the settlement of the boundary between Lynn and Salem, [Footnote: Also in Lathrop's "Hawthorne."] and the other to a report of the commissioners for the investigation of the French vessels coming to Salem and Boston in 1651, the two other commissioners being Samuel Bradstreet and David Denison. [Footnote: Massachusetts Archives, x. 171.]The name was undoubtedly Hathorne, and so it continued with one or two slight variations during the eighteenth century down to the time of Nathaniel Hathorne, Jr., who entered and graduated at Bowdoin College under that name, but who soon afterward changed it to Hawthorne, for reasons that have never been explained. All cognomens would seem to have been derived originally from some personal peculiarity, although it is no longer possible to trace this back to its source, which probably lies far away in the Dark Ages,--the formative period of languages and of families. Sometimes, however, we meet with individuals whose peculiarities suggest the origin of their names: a tall, slender, long-necked man named Crane; or a timid, retiring student named Leverett; or an over-confident, supercilious person called Godkin In the name of Hawthorne also we may imagine a curious significance: "When the may is on the thorn," says Tennyson. The English country people call the flowering of the hawthorn "the may." It is a beautiful tree when in full bloom. How sweet-scented and delicately colored are its blossoms! But it seems to say to us, "Do not come too close to me." CHAPTER II BOYHOOD OF HAWTHORNE: 1804-1821 Salem treasures the memory of Hawthorne, and preserves everything tangible relating to him. The house in which he was born, No. 27 Union Street, is in much the same style and probably of the same age as the Old Manse at Concord, but somewhat smaller, with only a single window on either side of the doorway--five windows in all on the front, one large chimney in the centre, and the roof not exactly a gambrel, for the true gambrel has a curve first inward and then outward, but something like it. A modest, cosy and rather picturesque dwelling, which if placed on a green knoll with a few trees about it might become a subject for a sketching class. It did not belong to Hawthorne's father, after all, but to the widow of the bold Daniel, It was the cradle of genius, and is now a shrine for many pilgrims. Long may it survive, so that our grandchildren may gaze upon it. Here Nathaniel Hawthorne first saw daylight one hundred years ago [Footnote: 1804.] on the Fourth of July, as if to make a protest against Chauvinistic patriotism; here his mother sat at the window to see her husband's bark sail out of the harbor on his last voyage; and here she watched day after day for its return, only to bring a life-long sorrow with it. The life of a sea-captain's wife is always a half-widowhood, but Mrs. Hathorne was left at twenty-eight with three small children, including a daughter, Elizabeth, older than Nathaniel, and another, Louisa, the youngest. The shadow of a heavy misfortune had come upon them, and from this shadow they never wholly escaped. Lowell criticised a letter which John Brown wrote concerning his boyhood to Henry L. Stearns, as the finest bit of autobiography of the nineteenth century.[Footnote: _North American Review_, April 1860.] It is in fact almost the only literature of the kind that we possess. A frequent difficulty that parents find in dealing with their children is, that they have wholly forgotten the sensations and impressions of their own childhood. The instructor cannot place himself in the position of the pupil. A naturalist will spend years with a microscope studying the development of a plant from the seed, but no one has ever applied a similar process to the budding of genius or even of ordinary intellect. We have the autobiography of one of the greatest geniuses, written in the calm and stillness of old age, when youthful memories come back to us involuntarily; yet he barely lifts the veil from his own childhood, and has much more to say of external events and older people than of himself and his young companions. How valuable is the story of George Washington and his hatchet, hackneyed as it has become! What do we know of the boyhood of Franklin, Webster, Seward and Longfellow? Nothing, or next to nothing. [Illustration: WINDOW OF THIS CHAMBER] Goethe says that the admirable woman is she who, when her husband dies, becomes a father to his children; but in the case of Hawthorne's mother, this did not happen to be necessary. Her brother, Robert Manning, a thrifty and fairly prosperous young man, immediately took Mrs. Hathorne and her three children into his house on Herbert Street, and made it essentially a home for them afterward. To the fatherless boy he was more than his own father, away from home ten months of the year, ever could have been; and though young Nathaniel must have missed that tenderness of feeling which a man can only entertain toward his own child, there was no lack of kindness or consideration on Robert Manning's part, to either the boy or his sisters. It was Mrs. Hathorne who chiefly suffered from this change of domicile. She would seem to have been always on good terms with her brother's wife, and on the whole they formed a remarkably harmonious family,--at least we hear nothing to the contrary,--but she was no longer mistress of her own household. She had her daughters to instruct, and to train up in domestic ways, and she could be helpful in various matters, large and small; but the mental occupation which comes from the oversight and direction of household affairs, and which might have served to divert her mind from sorrowful memories, was now gone from her. Her widowhood separated her from the outside world and from all society, excepting a few devoted friends, [Footnote: _Wide Awake_, xxxiii. 502.] so that under these conditions it is not surprising that her life became continually more secluded and reserved. It is probable that her temperament was very similar to her son's; but the impression which has gone forth, that she indulged her melancholy to an excess, is by no means a just one. The circumstances of her case should be taken into consideration. Rebecca Manning says: "I remember aunt Hawthorne as busy about the house, attending to various matters. Her cooking was excellent, and she was noted for a certain kind of sauce, which nobody else knew how to make. We always enjoyed going to see her when we were children, for she took great pains to please us and to give us nice things to eat. Her daughter Elizabeth resembled her in that respect. In old letters and in the journal of another aunt, which has come into our possession, we read of her going about making visits, taking drives, and sometimes going on a journey. In later years she was not well, and I do not remember that she ever came here, but her friends always received a cordial welcome when they visited her." This refers to a late period of Madam Hathorne's life, and if she absented herself from the table, as Elizabeth Peabody states, [Footnote: Lathrop's "Study of Hawthorne."] there was good reason for it. Hawthorne himself has left no word concerning his mother, of favorable or unfavorable import, but it seems probable that he owed his genius to her, if he can be said to have owed it to any of his ancestors. In after life he affirmed that his sister Elizabeth, who appears to have been her mother over again, could have written as well as he did, and although we have no palpable evidence of this--and the letter which she wrote Elizabeth Peabody does not indicate it,--we are willing to take his word for it. With the shyness and proud reserve which he inherited from his mother, there also came that exquisite refinement and feminine grace of style which forms the chief charm of his writing. The same refinement of feeling is noticeable in the letters of other members of the Manning family. Where his imagination came from, it would be useless to speculate; but there is no good art without delicacy. Doctor Nathaniel Peabody lived near the house on Herbert Street, and his daughter Elizabeth (who afterward became a woman of prodigious learning) soon made acquaintance with the Hathorne children. She remembers the boy Nathaniel jumping about his uncle's yard, and this is the first picture that we have of him. When we consider what a beautiful boy he must have been, with his wavy brown hair, large wistful eyes and vigorous figure, without doubt he was a pleasure to look upon. We do not hear of him again until November 10, 1813, when he injured his foot in some unknown manner while at play, and was made lame by it more or less for the three years succeeding. After being laid up for a month, he wrote this pathetic little letter to his uncle, Robert Manning, then in Maine, which I have punctuated properly so that the excellence of its composition may appeal more plainly to the reader. "SALEM, Thursday, December, 1813. "DEAR UNCLE: "I hope you are well, and I hope Richard is too. My foot is no better. Louisa has got so well that she has begun to go to school, but she did not go this forenoon because it snowed. Mama is going to send for Doctor Kitridge to-day, when William Cross comes home at 12 o'clock, and maybe he will do some good, for Doctor Barstow has not, and I don't know as Doctor Kitridge will. It is about 4 weeks yesterday since I have been to school, and I don't know but it will be 4 weeks longer before I go again. I have been out of the office two or three times and have set down on the step of the door, and once I hopped out into the street. Yesterday I went out in the office and had 4 cakes. Hannah carried me out once, but not then. Elizabeth and Louisa send their love to you. I hope you will write to me soon, but I have nothing more to write; so good-bye, dear Uncle. "Your affectionate Nephew, "NATHANIEL HATHORNE." [Footnote: Elizabeth Manning in _Wide Awake_, Nov. 1891.] This is not so precocious as Mozart's musical compositions at the same age, but how could the boy Hawthorne have given a clearer account of himself and his situation at the time, without one word of complaint? It is worth noting also that his prediction in regard to Doctor Kitridge proved to be correct and even more. It is evident that neither of his doctors treated him in a physio-logical manner. Kitridge was a water-cure physician, and his method of treatment deserves to be recorded for its novelty. He directed Nathaniel to project his naked foot out of a sitting-room window, while he poured cold water on it from the story above. This, however, does not appear to have helped the case, and the infirmity continued so long that it was generally feared that his lameness would be permanent. Horatio Bridge considered this a fortunate accident for Nathaniel, since it prevented him from being spoiled by his female relatives, as there is always danger that an only son with two or more sisters will be spoiled. But it was an advantage to the boy in a different manner from this. He learned from it the lesson of suffering and endurance, which we all have to learn sooner or later; and it compelled him, perhaps too young, to seek the comfort of life from internal sources. There were excellent books in the house,--Shakespeare and Milton, of course, but also Pope's "Iliad," Thomson's "Seasons," the "Spectator," "Pilgrim's Progress," and the "Faerie Queene," and the time had now come when these would be serviceable to him. He was not the only boy that has enjoyed Shakespeare at the age of ten, but that he should have found interest in Spenser's "Faerie Queene" is somewhat exceptional. Even among professed _littérateurs_ there are few that read that long allegory, and still fewer who enjoy it; and yet Miss Manning assures us that Hawthorne would muse over it for hours. Its influence may be perceptible in some of his shorter stories, but "Pilgrim's Progress" evidently had an effect upon him; and so had Scott's novels, as we may judge from the first romance that he published. At the age of twelve years and seven months he composed a short poem, so perfect in form and mature in judgment that it is difficult to believe that so young a person could have written it. Not so poetic as it is philosophical, it is valuable as indicating that the boy had already formed a moral axis for himself,--a life principle from which he never afterward deviated; and it is given herewith: [Footnote: A facsimile of the original can be found in _Wide Awake_, November, 1891.] "MODERATE VIEWS. "With passions unruffled, untainted by pride, By reason my life let me square; The wants of my nature are cheaply supplied, And the rest are but folly and care. How vainly through infinite trouble and strife, The many their labours employ, Since all, that is truly delightful in life, Is what all if they please may enjoy. "NATHANIEL HATHORNE. "SALEM, February 13, 1817." He wrote this with the greatest nicety, framing it in broad black lines, and ornamenting the capitals in a manner that recalls the decoration of John Hathorne's gravestone. He composed a number of poems between his thirteenth and seventeenth years, quite as good as those of Longfellow at the same age; but after he entered Bowdoin College he dropped the practice altogether and never resumed it, although one would suppose that Longfellow's example would have stimulated him to better efforts. Neither does he appear to have tried his hand in writing tales, as boys who have no thought of literary distinction frequently do. During the years of his lameness he sometimes invented extemporaneous stories, which invariably commenced with a voyage to some foreign country, from which his hero never returned. This shows how continually his father's fate was in his mind, although he said nothing of it. Robert Manning's interest in the stage-company afforded the boy fine opportunities for free rides, and he probably also frequented the stables; although neither as youth nor as man did he take much interest in driving or riding. He was more fond of playing upon the wharves, a good healthy place,--and watching the great ships sailing forth to far-off lands, and returning with their strange cargoes,--enough to stimulate any boy's imagination, if he has it in him. It is likely that if Nathaniel's father had lived, he would also have followed a seafaring life, and would never have become useful to the world in the way that he did. Somewhere about the close of the eighteenth century, Richard Manning, the father of Mrs. Hathorne, purchased a large tract of land in Cumberland County, Maine, between Lake Sebago and the town of Casco; and in 1813 Robert Manning built a house near the lake, in the township of Raymond, and his brother Richard, who had become much of an invalid, went to live there, partly for his health and partly to keep an oversight on the property. In 1817 Mrs. Hathorne also went there, taking her children with her, and remaining, with some intermissions, until 1822. Meanwhile the Mannings sold some thousands of acres of land, although not, as we may suppose, at very good prices, and the name of Elizabeth Hathorne was repeatedly attached to the deeds of conveyance. The house that Robert built was the plainest sort of structure, of only two stories, and with no appearance of having been painted; but the farmers in the vicinity criticised it as "Manning's folly,"--exactly why, does not appear clearly, unless they foresaw what actually happened, that the house could be neither sold nor rented after the Mannings had left it. For many years, it served as a meeting-house,--one could not call it a church,--and now it has become a Hawthorne museum, the town of Raymond very laudably keeping it in repair. Although none of the events in the early life of Hawthorne ought to be considered positive misfortunes, as they all contributed to make him what he was, yet upon general principles it is much to be regretted that he should have passed the best years of his boyhood in this out-of-the-way place. His good uncle supplied him with a boat and a gun, and he enjoyed the small shooting, fishing, sailing and skating that the place afforded; but in later years he wrote to Bridge, "It was at Sebago that I learned my cursed habit of solitude," and this pursued him through life like an evil genius, placing him continually at a disadvantage with his fellow-men. It has been supposed that this mode of life assisted in developing his individuality, but quite as strong individualities have been developed in the midst of large cities. "Speech is more refreshing than light." When will parents learn wisdom in regard to their children? A conscientious, tender-hearted boy will be sent to a rough country school, to be scoffed at and maltreated there, before he is twelve years old; while another of a coarser and harder nature will be kept at home, to be petted and pampered until all the vigor and manliness are sapped out of him. Parents who prefer to live in a modest, humble manner, in order that their children may have better advantages, deserve the highest commendation, but in this respect good instruction is less important than favorable associations. From fourteen to twenty-one is the formative period of character, and the influences which may be brought to bear on the growing mind are of the highest importance. Lake Sebago served as an excellent gymnasium for young Hawthorne, and may have helped to develop his sense of the beautiful, but he found few companions there, and those not of the most suitable kind. He was exceedingly fond of skating--so much so that when the ice was smooth he sometimes remained on the lake far into the night. This we can envy him, for skating is the poetry of motion. The captain of the "Hawthorne," which plies back and forth across the lake in summer, regularly points out to his passengers the house where the Hathornes lived. It is easily seen from the steamer,--a severely plain, unpainted building, in appearance much like the Manning house on Herbert Street. Nearly in line with it a great cliff-like rock juts out from the centre of the lake, on which the Indians centuries ago etched and painted great warlike figures, whose significance is now known to no one. It is said that Hawthorne frequently sailed or rowed to Indian Rock, and to a sort of grotto there which was large enough for his boat to enter. Both the rock and the Manning house are now difficult of access. Longfellow wrote a pretty descriptive poem of a voyage on Sebago, and it is remarkable how he has made use of every feature of the landscape, every incident of the excursion, to fill his verses. The lake has much the shape of an hour-glass, the northern and southern portions being connected by a winding strait, so crooked that it requires the constant effort of the pilot to prevent the little steamer from running aground. There used to be fine fishing in it,--large perch, bass, and a species of fresh-water salmon often weighing from six to eight pounds. Strangely enough, one of Hawthorne's acquaintances on the shores of Sebago was a mulatto boy named William Symmes, the son of a Virginia slave, foisted by his father upon a Maine sea-captain named Britton, who lived in the half-wilderness around Raymond. Symmes afterwards became a sailor, and continued in that vocation until the Civil War, when he went to live in Alexandria, Va. In 1870 he published in the Portland _Transcript_ what pretended to be a series of extracts from a diary which young Hawthorne had kept while at Raymond, and which was found there, after the departure of the Manning family, by a man named Small, while moving a load of furniture which had been sold to another party. Small preserved it until 1864, and then made a present of it to Symmes. Doubts have been cast on the genuineness of this diary, as was natural enough under the circumstances; for the original manuscript was never produced by Symmes, who died the following year, and no one knows what has become of it. It may also be asked, why should Small have disposed so readily of this manuscript to Symmes after preserving it sedulously for more than forty years? Why did he not return it to its rightful owner; or, if he felt ashamed of his original abstraction, why did not Symmes restore it to the Hawthorne family after Hawthorne's death, when every newspaper in the country was celebrating Hawthorne's genius? It also might have occurred to one of them that such property would have a marketable value, and could be disposed of at a high price to some collector of literary curiosities; but Symmes did not even ask to be remunerated for the portion that he contributed to the Portland Transcript. Neither did he harbor the slightest ill feeling toward Hawthorne, whom he claimed to have met several times in the course of his wanderings,--once at Salem, and again at Liverpool,--and was always treated by him with exceptional kindness and civility. The only answer that can be made to these queries is, that men in Symmes's position in life do not act according to any method that can be previously calculated. In a case like the present, there could be no predicting it; and it is possible that this mulatto valued the diary above all price, as a souvenir of the one white man who had ever been kind and good to him. Who knows what a heart there may have been in William Symmes? The internal evidence of this diary is so strongly in its favor as to be almost conclusive. Lathrop, who made a special study of it, says: "The fabrication of the journal by a person possessed of some literary skill and familiar with the localities mentioned, at dates so long ago as 1816 to 1819, might not be an impossible feat, but it is an extremely improbable one." To which it might be added, that it could be only a Hawthorne that could accomplish such a fabrication. Few things in literature are more difficult than to make a boy talk _like_ a boy, and the tone of this Sebago journal is not only boyish, but sweet and pleasant to the ear, such as we might imagine the talk of the youthful Hawthorne. Not only this, but there is a gradated improvement of intelligence in the course of it,--rather too much so for entire credibility. It is quite possible that there is more of it than Hawthorne ever wrote, but that does not prevent us from having faith in the larger portion of it. The purity of its diction, the nice adaptation of each word to its purpose, and the accuracy of detail are much in its favor; besides which, the personal reflections in it are exactly like Hawthorne. The published portion of the diary in Mr. Pickard's book makes about fifty rather small pages, but no dates are given except at the close, and that is August, 1818; and as Hawthorne went to Sebago for the first time the preceding year, we may presume that this note-book represents a winter and summer vacation, during which he would seem to have enjoyed himself in a healthy boyish fashion. We have only space for a few extracts from this publication, which serve both to exemplify Hawthorne's mode of life at Raymond and to illustrate the preceding statement concerning the book. The first observation in the diary is quoted by Lathrop, and has a decidedly youthful tone. "Two kingbirds have built their nest between our house and the mill-pond. The male is more courageous than any creature that I know about. He seems to have taken possession of the territory from the great pond to the small one, and goes out to war with every fish-hawk that flies from one to the other over his dominion. The fish-hawks must be miserable cowards to be driven by such a speck of a bird. I have not yet seen one turn to defend himself." Kingbirds are the knights-errant of the feathered tribes. They never attack another bird unless it is three times their own size; but when a few years older, the boy Hawthorne would probably have noticed that the kingbirds' powers of flight are so superior that all other birds are practically at their mercy. This fixes the date of the entry in the early summer of 1817, for kingbirds are not belligerent except during the nesting season. Somewhat later in the year he writes: "Went yesterday in a sail-boat on the Great Pond with Mr. Peter White, of Windham. He sailed up here from White's Bridge to see Captain Dingley, and invited Joseph Dingley and Mr. Ring to take a boat-ride out to the Dingley Islands and to the Images. He was also kind enough to say that I might go, with my mother's consent, which she gave after much coaxing. Since the loss of my father, she dreads to have any one belonging to her go upon the water. It is strange that this beautiful body of water is called a 'pond.' The geography tells of many in Scotland and Ireland, not near so large, that are called 'Lakes.'" Notice his objection to bad nomenclature, and his school-boy argument against it. In his account of this excursion he says further: "After we got ashore, Mr. White allowed me to fire his long gun at a mark. I did not hit the mark, and am not sure that I saw it at the time the gun went off, but believe rather that I was watching for the noise that I was about to make. "Mr. Ring said that with practice I could be a gunner, and that now, with a very heavy charge, he thought I could kill a horse at eight paces!" Here or nowhere do we recognize the budding of Hawthorne's genius. This clear introspective analysis is the foundation of all true mental power, and Hawthorne might have become a Platonic philosopher, if he had not preferred to be a story-teller. These sports came to an end in the autumn when he was sent to study with the Reverend Caleb Bradley, a somewhat eccentric graduate of Harvard, who resided at Stroudwater, Maine, and with whom he remained during the winter. [Footnote: S. T. Pickard's "Hawthorne's First Diary."]He refers to this period of tuition in the short story of "The Vision of the Fountain," and whether or no any such vision appeared to him, we can fairly believe that the tale was suggested by some pretty school-girl who made an impression on him, only to disappear in a tantalizing manner. It is to be presumed that he returned to his mother at Raymond, for Christmas; and at that time he heard a story of how an Otisfield man named Henry Turner had killed three hibernating bears which he discovered in a cave near Moose Pond, not a difficult feat when one comes upon them in that torpid condition. This would place the killing of the bears at about the first of December, which would be probable enough, and the fact itself has been substantiated by Samuel Pickard. The next succeeding entry relates to the drowning of a boy while swimming, which could only have happened the following June. Mrs. Hathorne was greatly alarmed, and objected to Nathaniel's going in bathing with the other boys. He did not like the restriction, but writes that he shall obey his mother. There is a ghost story in the diary, quite original, and told with an air of excellent credibility; and also a short anthropomorphic romance concerning a badly treated horse, full of genuine pathos and kindly sympathy,--more sympathetic, in fact, than Hawthorne's later stories, in which he is sometimes almost too reserved and unemotional: "'Good morning, Mr. Horse, how are you to-day?' 'Good morning, youngster,' said he, just as plain as a horse can speak, and then said, 'I am almost dead, and I wish I was quite. I am hungry, have had no breakfast and stand here tied by the head while they are grinding the corn, and until master drinks two or three glasses of rum at the store, and then drag him and the meal up the Ben Ham hill, and home, and am now so weak that I can hardly stand. Oh, dear, I am in a bad way,' and the old creature cried,--I almost cried myself." The only difficulty in believing this diary to be genuine is the question: If Hawthorne could write with such perspicuity at fourteen, why are there no evidences of it during his college years? But it sometimes happens so. We cannot refrain from quoting one more extract from the last entry in the Sebago diary, so beautifully tender and considerate as it is of his mother's position toward her only son. He had been invited by a party of their neighbors to go on an all-day excursion, and though his mother grants his request to be allowed to join them, he feels the reluctance with which she does so and he writes: "She said 'Yes,' but I was almost sorry, knowing that my day's pleasure would cost _her_ one of anxiety. However, I gathered up my hooks and lines, with some white salted pork for bait, and with a fabulous number of biscuit, split in the middle, the insides well buttered, then skilfully put together again, and all stowed in sister's large work-bag, and slung over my shoulder, I started, making a wager with Enoch White, as we walked down to the boat, as to which could catch the largest number of fish." [Footnote: Appendix A.] This is the only entry that is dated (August, 1818), and as it was on this same occasion that the black ducks were shot, it must have been on one of the last days of August. We may presume that Nathaniel returned to his studies at Stroudwater the following month, for we do not hear of him again at Raymond--or in Salem, either--until March 24, when he writes to his uncle, Robert Manning, who has evidently just returned from Raymond to Salem, and speaks of expecting to go to Portland with a Mr. Linch for the day. On May 16, 1819, he writes to his uncle Robert again: "The grass and trees are green, the fences finished and the garden planted. Two of the goats are on the island and the other kept for the milk. I have shot a partridge and a hen-hawk and caught eighteen large trout [probably Sebago salmon]. I am sorry that my uncle intends sending me to school again, for my mother can hardly spare me." From which it is easy to infer that he had not attended school very regularly of late, and Uncle Robert would seem to have concluded that it would be better to have his fine nephew where he could personally supervise his goings and comings. Accordingly, on July 26 we find Nathaniel attending school in Salem,--a most unusual season for it,--and although his mother remained at Raymond two years longer, he was not permitted to return there again, except possibly for short periods. Emerson once pointed out to me on Sudbury Street, Boston, an extremely old man with long white locks and the face of a devoted scholar, advancing toward us with slow and cautious steps. "That," said he, "is Doctor Worcester, the lexicographer." Hawthorne's early education remains much of a mystery. In 1819 he complains in a letter to his mother that he has to go to a cheap school,--a good indication that he did not intend to trust to fortune for his future welfare; soon after this we hear that dictionary Worcester is his chief instructor. He could not have found a more amiable or painstaking pedagogue; nor is it likely that the fine qualities of his teacher were ever better appreciated. Hawthorne himself says nothing of this, for it was not his way to express admiration for man or woman, but we can believe that he felt the same affection for the doctor that well-behaved boys commonly do for their old masters. It was from Worcester that he derived his excellent knowledge of Latin, the single study of which he was fond; and it is his preference for words derived from the Latin which gives grace and flexibility to Hawthorne's style, as the force and severity of Emerson's style come from his partiality for Saxon words. During his last year at school, Hawthorne took private lessons of a Salem lawyer, Benjamin Oliver, and perhaps studied with him altogether at the finish. Hawthorne's life had been so irregular for years that it is creditable to him that he should have succeeded in entering college at all. We hear of him at Sebago in winter and at Salem in July. He writes to his Uncle Robert to look out for the shot-gun which he left in a closet at Sebago, and which has a rather heavy charge of powder in it. He appears to have found as little companionship in Salem as he did in that wilderness,--the natural effect of such a life. He may have been acquainted with half the boys in Salem, but he did not make any warm friends among them. His sister Louisa, who was a more vivacious person than Elizabeth, was his chief companion and comfort. Seated at the window with her on summer evenings, he elaborated the plan of an imaginary society, a club of two, called the "Pin Society," to which all fees, assessments and fines were paid in pins,--then made by hand and much more expensive than now. He constituted himself its secretary, and wrote imaginary reports of its proceedings, in which Louisa is frequently fined for absence from meetings. We do not hear of their going to parties or dances with other children. In August, 1820, he started an imaginary newspaper called the _Spectator_, which he wrote himself with some help from Louisa, and of which there was only one copy of each number. He continued this through five successive issues, and we trace in its pages the commencement of Hawthorne's peculiar humor,--too quiet and gentle to make us laugh, but with a penetrating tinge of pathos. Take for instance the following: "There is no situation in life more irksome than that of an editor who is obliged to find amusement for his Readers, from a head which is too often (as is the present predicament with our own) filled with emptiness. Since commencing this paper, we have received no communication of any kind, so that the whole weight of the business devolves upon our own shoulders, a load far too great for them to bear. We hope the Public will reflect on these grievances." This is true fiction, and Nathaniel was not the first or the last editor to whom the statement has applied. His difficulties are imaginary, but he realizes what they might be in reality. In another number he says: "We know of no news, either domestic or foreign, and we hope our readers will excuse our not inserting any. The law which prohibits paying debts when a person has no money will apply in this case." Then he makes this quiet hit against the people of Maine for having separated themselves and their territory from Massachusetts: "By a gentleman in the state of Maine, we learn that a famine is seriously apprehended owing to the want of rain. Potatoes could not be procured in some places. When children break their leading strings, and run away from their Parent, (as Maine has done) they may expect sometimes to suffer hunger." [Footnote: _Wide Awake_, xxxiii. 512.] Of his religious instruction we hear nothing; but church-going in New England during the first forty years of the nineteenth century was wellnigh universal, and it makes little difference now to which of the various forms of Calvinistic worship the Manning family subscribed. That young Hawthorne was seriously impressed in this way is evident from the following ode, which he may have composed as early as his fifteenth year: "Oh, I have roamed in rapture wild Where the majestic rocks are piled In lonely, stern, magnificence around The troubled ocean's steadfast bound; And I have seen the storms arise And darkness veil from mortal eyes The Heavens that shine so fair and bright, And all was solemn, silent night. Then I have seen the storm disperse, And Mercy hush the whirlwind fierce, And all my soul in transport owned There is a God, in Heaven enthroned." There is more of a rhetorical flourish than of serious religious feeling in this; but genuine piety is hardly to be expected, and not greatly to be desired, in a boy of that age. It represents the desire to be religious, and to express something, he knows not what. Nathaniel Hawthorne had already decided on his vocation in life before he entered Bowdoin College,--a decision which he afterwards adhered to with inflexible determination, in spite of the most discouraging obstacles. In a memorable letter to his mother, written March 13, 1821, he says: "I am quite reconciled to going to college, since I am to spend my vacations with you. Yet four years of the best part of my life is a great deal to throw away. I have not yet concluded what profession I shall have. The being a minister is of course out of the question. I shall not think that even you could desire me to choose so dull a way of life. Oh, no, mother, I was not born to vegetate forever in one place, and to live and die as tranquil as--a puddle of water. As to lawyers, there are so many of them already that one-half of them (upon a moderate calculation) are in a state of actual starvation. A physician, then, seems to be 'Hobson's choice'; but yet I should not like to live by the diseases and infirmities of my fellow-creatures. And it would weigh very hardly on my conscience, in the course of my practice, if I should chance to send any unlucky patient '_ad infernum_,' which, being interpreted, is 'to the realms below.' Oh that I was rich enough to live without profession! What do you think of my becoming an author, and relying for support upon my pen? Indeed, I think the illegibility of my hand is very author-like." [Footnote: Conway, 24.] Such were the Ides of March for Hawthorne. It was no boyish ambition for public distinction, nor a vain grasping at the laurel wreath, but a calmly considered and clear-sighted judgment. CHAPTER III BOWDOIN COLLEGE: 1821-1825. The life of man is not like a game of chess, in which the two players start upon equal terms and can deliberate sufficiently over every move; but more like whist, in which the cards we hold represent our fortunes at the beginning, but the result of the game depends also on the skill with which we play it. Life also resembles whist in this, that we are obliged to follow suit in a general way to those who happen to have the lead. Why Hawthorne should have entered Bowdoin College instead of Harvard has not been explained, nor is it easily explained. The standard of scholarship maintained at Harvard and Yale has always been higher than that at what Doctor Holmes designated as the "freshwater colleges," and this may have proved an unfavorable difference to the mind of a young man who was not greatly inclined to his studies; but Harvard College is only eighteen miles from Salem, and he could have returned to his home once a week if he had chosen to do so, and this is a decided moral and social advantage to a young man in those risky years. If Hawthorne had entered Harvard in the next class to Emerson, he could not well have escaped the latter's attention, and would have come in contact with other vigorous and stimulating minds; but it is of little use to speculate on what might have been. Boys are encouraged to study for college by accounts of the rare enjoyment of university life, but they commonly find the first term of Freshman year both dismal and discouraging. Their class is a medley of strangers, their studies are a dry routine, and if they are not hazed by the Sophomores, they are at least treated by them with haughtiness and contempt. It is still summer when they arrive, but the leaves soon fall from the trees, and their spirits fall with them. Hawthorne may have felt this more acutely than any other member of his class, and in addition to the prevailing sense of discomfort he was seized early in November with that disgusting malady, the measles, which boys usually go through with before they are old enough to realize how disagreeable it is. It appears to have been a light attack, however, and in three weeks he was able to attend recitations again. He made no complaint of it, only writing to his uncle for ten dollars with which to pay the doctor. He likes his chum, Mason, of Portsmouth, and does not find his studies so arduous as at Salem before entering. Neither are the college laws so strict as he anticipated. In the following May he received the present of his first watch, presumably from Uncle Robert, and he writes to his mother, who is still at Sebago, that he is mightily pleased with it, and that it enables him "to cut a great dash" at college. His letters to his relatives are not brilliant, but they indicate a healthful and contented mind. We will now consider some of the distinguished personages who were Hawthorne's friends and associates during these four years of his apprenticeship to actual life; and there were rare characters among them. In the same coach in which Hawthorne left Portland for Brunswick, in the summer of 1821, were Franklin Pierce and Jonathan Cilley. [Footnote: Bridge's Memoir of Hawthorne, 3.] Two men seated together in a modern railway-carriage will often become better acquainted in three hours than they might as next-door neighbors in three years; and this was still more likely to happen in the old days of coach journeys, when the very tedium of the occasion served as an inducement to frank and friendly conversation. Pierce was the right man to bring Hawthorne out of his hard shell of Sebago seclusion. He had already been one year at Bowdoin, and at that time there was not the same caste feeling between Sophomores and Freshmen--or at least very little of it--that has since arisen in American colleges. He was amiable and kindly, and possessed the rare gift of personal magnetism. Nature sometimes endows men and women with this quality in lieu of all other advantages, and such would seem to have been the case with Franklin Pierce. He was not much above the average in intellect, and, as Hawthorne afterward confessed, not particularly attractive in appearance; with a stiff military neck, features strong but small, and opaque gray eyes,--a rather unimpressive face, and one hardly capable of a decided expression. Yet with such abilities as he had, aided by personal magnetism and the lack of conspicuous faults, he became United States Senator at the age of thirty-five, and President fifteen years later. The best we can say of him is, that he was always Hawthorne's friend. From the first day that they met he became Hawthorne's patron and protector--so far as he may have required the latter. There must have been some fine quality in the man which is not easily discernible from his outward acts; a narrow-minded man, but of a refined nature. Jonathan Cilley was an abler man than Pierce, and a bold party-leader, but not so attractive personally. He always remained Hawthorne's friend, but the latter saw little of him and rarely heard from him after they had graduated. The one letter of his which has been published gives the impression of an impulsive, rough-and-tumble sort of person, always ready to take a hand in whatever might turn up. On the same day, Horatio Bridge, who lived at Augusta, was coming down the Kennebec River to Brunswick. Hawthorne did not make his acquaintance until some weeks later, but he proved to be the best friend of them all, and Hawthorne's most constant companion during the four years they remained together. Pierce, Cilley and Bridge were all born politicians, and it was this class of men with whom it would seem that Hawthorne naturally assimilated. On the same day, or the one previous, another boy set out from Portland for Brunswick, only fourteen years old, named Henry W. Longfellow,--a name that is now known to thousands who never heard of Franklin Pierce. Would it have made a difference in the warp and woof of Hawthorne's life, if he had happened to ride that day in the same coach with Longfellow? Who can tell? Was there any one in the breadth of the land with whom he might have felt an equal sympathy, with whom he could have matured a more enduring fellowship? It might have been a friendship like that of Beaumont and Fletcher, or, better still, like that of Goethe and Schiller,--but it was not written in the book of Fate. Longfellow also had tried his hand on the Sebago region, and was fond of the woods and of a gun; but he was too precocious to adapt himself easily to persons of his own age, or even somewhat older. He had no sooner arrived at Bowdoin than he became the associate and favorite of the professors. In this way he missed altogether the storm-and-stress period of youthful life, which is a useful experience of its kind; and if we notice in his poetry a certain lack, the absence of a close contact with reality,--as if he looked at his subject through a glass casement,--this may be assigned as the reason for it. [Illustration: HORATIO BRIDGE. FROM THE PORTRAIT BY EASTMAN JOHNSON] During the four years they went back and forth to their instruction together, Hawthorne and Longfellow never became cordially acquainted. They also belonged to rival societies. There were only two principal societies at Bowdoin, which continued through the college course--the Peucinian and the Athenæan, and the difference between them might be described by the words "citified" and "countrified," without taking either of those terms in an objectionable sense. Pierce was already a leading character in the Athenæan, and was soon followed by Cilley, Bridge and Hawthorne. The Peucinian suffered from the disadvantage of having members of the college faculty on its active list, and this must have given a rather constrained and academic character to its meetings. There was much more of the true college spirit and classmate feeling in the Athenæan. Horatio Bridge is our single authority in regard to Bowdoin College at this time, and his off-hand sketches of Hawthorne, Pierce and Longfellow are invaluable. Never has such a group of distinguished young men been gathered together at an American college. He says of Hawthorne: "Hawthorne was a slender lad, having a massive head, with dark, brilliant, and most expressive eyes, heavy eyebrows, and a profusion of dark hair. For his appearance at that time the inquirers must rely wholly upon the testimony of friends; for, I think, no portrait of him as a lad is extant. On one occasion, in our senior years, the class wished to have their profiles cut in silhouette by a wandering artist of the scissors, and interchanged by all the thirty-eight. Hawthorne disapproved the proposed plan, and steadily refused to go into the Class Golgotha, as he styled the dismal collection. I joined him in this freak, and so our places were left vacant. I now regret the whim, since even a moderately correct outline of his features as a youth would, at this day, be interesting. "Hawthorne's figure was somewhat singular, owing to his carrying his head a little on one side; but his walk was square and firm, and his manner self-respecting and reserved. A fashionable boy of the present day might have seen something to amuse him in the new student's appearance; but had he indicated this he would have rued it, for Hawthorne's clear appreciation of the social proprieties and his great physical courage would have made it as unsafe to treat him with discourtesy then as at any later time. "Though quiet and most amiable, he had great pluck and determination. I remember that in one of our convivial meetings we had the laugh upon him for some cause, an occurrence so rare that the bantering was carried too far. After bearing it awhile, Hawthorne singled out the one among us who had the reputation of being the best pugilist, and in a few words quietly told him that he would not permit the rallying to go farther. His bearing was so resolute, and there was so much of danger in his eye, that no one afterward alluded to the offensive subject in his presence." [Footnote: Horatio Bridge, 5.] Horatio Bridge is a veracious witness, but we have to consider that he was nearly ninety years of age at the time his memoirs were given to the public. It is difficult to imagine Hawthorne as a slender youth, for his whole figure was in keeping with the structure of his head. It is more likely that he had a spare figure. Persons of a lively imagination have always been apt to hold their heads on one side, but not commonly while they are walking. It is for this reason that phrenologists have supposed that the organ of ideality is located on the side of the head,--if there really is any such organ. Bridge says of Longfellow precisely what one might expect: "He had decided personal beauty and most attractive manners. He was frank, courteous, and affable, while morally he was proof against the temptations that beset lads on first leaving the salutary restraints of home. He was diligent, conscientious, and most attentive to all his college duties, whether in the recitation-room, the lecture-hall, or the chapel. The word 'student' best expresses his literary habit, and in his intercourse with all he was conspicuously the gentleman." In addition to those already mentioned, James W. Bradbury of Portland, afterwards United States Senator, and the Reverend Dr. George B. Cheever, the vigorous anti-slavery preacher, were members of this class. Three others, Cilley, Benson and Sawtelle, were afterward members of the United States House of Representatives. Surely there must have been quite a fermentation of youthful intellect at Bowdoin between 1821 and 1825. Franklin Pierce was so deeply interested in military affairs that it was a pity he should not have had a West Point cadetship. He was captain of the college militia company, in which Hawthorne and Bridge drilled and marched; a healthy and profitable exercise, and better than a gymnasium, if rather monotonous. Pierce was the popular hero and _magnus Apollo_ of his class, as distinguished foot-ball players are now; but just at this time he was neglecting his studies so badly that at the close of his second year he found himself at the very foot of the rank list. The fact became known through the college, and Pierce was so chagrined that he concluded to withdraw from Bowdoin altogether, and it was only by the urgent persuasion of his friends that he was induced to continue his course. "If I remain, however," he said, "you will witness a change in me." For months together he burned midnight oil in order to recover lost ground. During his last two years at college, he only missed two recitations, both for sufficient reasons. His conduct was unexceptionable, he incurred no deductions, and finally graduated third in his class. It is an uncommon character that can play fast-and-loose with itself in this manner. The boy Franklin had departed, and Pierce the man had taken his place. [Footnote: Professor Packard's "History of Bowdoin College."] Horatio Bridge gives a rather more idealized portrait of him than he does of Hawthorne. He says: "In person Pierce was slender, of medium height, with fair complexion and light hair, erect, with a military bearing, active, and always bright and cheerful. In character he was impulsive, not rash; generous, not lavish; chivalric, courteous, manly, and warm-hearted,--and he was one of the most popular students in the whole college." The instruction in American colleges during the first half of the nineteenth century was excellent for Greek, Latin and mathematics,--always the groundwork of a good education,--but the modern languages were indifferently taught by French and German exiles, and other subjects were treated still more indifferently. The two noble studies of history and philosophy were presented to the young aspiring soul in narrow, prejudiced text-books, which have long since been consigned to that bourn from which no literary work ever returns. As already stated, Hawthorne's best study was Latin, and in that he acquired good proficiency; but he was slow in mathematics, as artistic minds usually are, and in his other studies he only exerted himself sufficiently to pass his examinations in a creditable manner. We may presume that he took the juice and left the rind; which was the sensible thing to do. As might be expected, his themes and forensics were beautifully written, although the arguments in them were not always logical; but it is significant that he never could be prevailed upon to make a declamation. There have been sensitive men, like Sumner and George W. Curtis, who were not at all afraid of the platform, but they were not, like Hawthorne, bashful men. The college faculty would seem to have realized the true difficulty in his case, and treated him in a kindly and lenient manner. No doubt he suffered enough in his own mind on account of this deficiency, and it may have occurred to him what difficulties he might have to encounter in after-life by reason of it. If a student at college cannot bring himself to make a declamation, how can the mature man face an audience in a lecture-room, command a ship, or administer any important office? Such thoughts must have caused Hawthorne no slight anxiety, at that sensitive age. The out-door sports of the students did not attract Hawthorne greatly. He was a fast runner and a good leaper, but seemed to dislike violent exercise. He much preferred walking in the woods with a single companion, or by the banks of the great river on which Brunswick is situated. There were fine trout-brooks in the neighborhood, and formerly the woods of Maine were traversed by vast flocks of passenger pigeons, which with the large gray squirrels afforded excellent shooting. How skilful Hawthorne became with his fowling-piece we have not been informed, but it is evident from passages in "Fanshawe" that he learned something of trout-fishing; and on the whole he enjoyed advantages at Bowdoin which the present student at Harvard or Oxford might well envy, him. The fish we catch in the streams and lakes of Maine only represent a portion of our enjoyment there. Horatio Bridge says: "There was one favorite spot in a little ravine, where a copious spring of clear, cold water gushed out from the sandy bank, and joined the larger stream. This was the Paradise Spring, which deserves much more than its present celebrity for the absolute purity of its waters. Of late years the brook has been better known as a favorite haunt of the great romance writer, and it is now often called the Hawthorne Brook. "Another locality, above the bridge, afforded an occasional stroll through the fields and by the river. There, in spring, we used to linger for hours to watch the giant pine-logs (for there were giants in those days) from the far-off forests, floating by hundreds in the stream until they came to the falls; then, balancing for a moment on the brink, they plunged into the foamy pool below." At the lower end of the town there was an old weather-beaten cot, where the railroad track now runs, inhabited by a lone woman nearly as old and time-worn as the dwelling itself. She pretended to be a fortune-teller, and to her Hawthorne and Bridge sometimes had recourse, to lift the veil of their future prospects; which she always succeeded in doing to their good entertainment. The old crone knew her business well, especially the art of giving sufficient variety of detail to the same old story. For a nine-pence she would predict a beautiful blond wife for Hawthorne, and an equally handsome dark-complexioned one for Bridge. Riches were of course thrown in by the handful; and Bridge remarks that although these never came to pass they both happened to be blessed with excellent wives. It is not surprising that the handsome Hawthorne and his tall, elegant-looking companion should have stimulated the old woman's imagination in a favorable manner. The small coin they gave her may have been the least happiness that their visits brought into her life. Close by the college grounds there was a miserable little inn, which went by the name of Ward's Tavern, and thither the more uproarious class of students consorted at intervals for the purpose of keeping care at a distance, and singing, "Landlord, fill your flowing bowls." Strange to say, the reserved, thoughtful Hawthorne was often to be found among them. It does not seem quite consistent with the gravity of his customary demeanor, but youth has its period of reckless ebullition. Punch-bowl societies exist in all our colleges, and many who disapprove of them join them for the sake of popularity. Hawthorne may have been as grave and well-behaved on these occasions as he was customarily. We have Bridge's word for this; and the matter would hardly be worth mentioning if it had not led to more serious proceedings. May 29, 1822, President Allen wrote to Mrs. Hathorne at Salem that her son had been fined fifty cents for gaming at cards. [Footnote: In 1864 a Harvard student was fined three dollars for writing on the woodwork with a lead-pencil--erased with a sponge.] Certainly this was not very severe treatment; and if the Bowdoin faculty, being on the spot, concluded that young Hawthorne had only injured his moral nature fifty cents' worth, I think we shall do well to agree with their decision. At the same time Nathaniel wrote his mother the following manly letter: "BRUNSWICK, May 30th, 1822. "MY DEAR MOTHER:--I hope you have safely arrived in Salem. I have nothing particular to inform you of, except that all the card-players in college have been found out, and my unfortunate self among the number. One has been dismissed from college, two suspended, and the rest, with myself, have been fined fifty cents each. I believe the President intends to write to the friends of all the delinquents. Should that be the case, you must show the letter to nobody. If I am again detected, I shall have the honor of being suspended. When the President asked what we played for, I thought it proper to inform him it was fifty cents, although it happened to be a quart of wine; but if I had told him of that, he would probably have fined me for having a blow. There was no untruth in the case, as the wine cost fifty cents. I have not played at all this term. I have not drank any kind of spirits or wine this term, and shall not till the last week." [Footnote: Horatio Bridge, 118.] The clemency with which the college authorities treated Bridge and Hawthorne is a plain indication of the confidence which they felt in them, and speaks more highly for their respective characters than if they had been patterns of good behavior. Some of the others were not so fortunate. One young man, whose name is properly withheld from us, was expelled from the institution. He was supposed to have been the ringleader in this dubious business, but Hawthorne manfully resented the supposition that any one could have influenced him, or did influence him, in this matter. It is more likely that he was influenced by the spirit of investigation, and wished to know what the sensation was like from personal experience. "Letters home" from college are not commonly interesting to the general public, and those which Hawthorne wrote to his mother and sisters do not differ essentially from such as other young men write under similar conditions. At the age when it is so difficult to decide whether we have become men or are still boys, all our actions partake of a similar uncertainty, and the result of what we do and say is likely to be a rather confused impression. Though college students appear different enough to one another, they all seem alike to the outside world. University towns always contain more or less cultivated society, and young Hawthorne might have been welcome to the best of it if he had felt so inclined; but he was as shy of the fair sex as Goldsmith's bashful lover. M. D. Conway, who knew him, doubts if he ever became well acquainted with a young lady until his engagement to Miss Peabody. Considering this, it seems as if Jonathan Cilley made rather a hazardous wager with Hawthorne, before leaving Bowdoin,--a wager of a cask of Madeira, that Hawthorne would become a married man within the next twelve years. Papers to that effect were duly signed by the respective parties, sealed, and delivered for safe-keeping to Horatio Bridge, who preserved them faithfully until the appointed time arrived. Under ordinary conditions the chances of this bet were in Cilley's favor, for in those primitive days it was much easier for educated young men to obtain a start in life than it is at present, and early marriages were in consequence much more common.[Footnote: Horatio Bridge, 47. The contract was dated November 14, 1824.] The year 1824 was a serious one in American politics. The Republican-Democratic party, having become omnipotent, broke to pieces of its own weight. The eastern interest nominated John Quincy Adams for the Presidency; the western interest nominated Henry Clay; and the frontier interest nominated Andrew Jackson. Unfortunately the frontier interest included all the unsettled and continually shifting elements in the country, so that Jackson had nearly as strong a support in the East as in the West. Bridge says, "We were all enthusiastic supporters of old Hickory." It was evidently Pierce who led them into this, and although it proved in a material sense for Hawthorne's benefit, it separated him permanently from the class to which he properly belonged--the enlightened men of culture of his time; and Cilley's tragical fate can be directly traced to it. The Jackson movement was in its essence a revolt against _civility_,--and it seems as if Hawthorne and Bridge might have recognized this. Hawthorne was well liked in his class in spite of his reserved manners, but he held no class offices that we hear of, except a place on a committee of the Athenæan Society with Franklin Pierce. Class days and class suppers, so prolific of small honors, were not introduced at Bowdoin until some years later. He graduated eighteenth in a class of thirty-eight, but this was not sufficient to give him a part in the commencement exercises. [Footnote: The President informed him that his rank in the class would have entitled him to a part if it had not been for his neglect of declamations; and Hawthorne wrote to his mother that he was perfectly satisfied with this, for it saved him the mortification of appearing in public.] Accordingly Hawthorne, Bridge, and others who were in a like predicament, organized a mock Commencement celebration at Ward's Tavern, where they elected officers of a comical sort, such as boatswain and sea-cook, and concluded their celebration in a manner suitable to the occasion. Hawthorne was commonly known among his classmates, as "Hath," and his friends addressed him in this manner long after he had graduated. His degree was made out in the name of Nathaniel Hathorne, above which he subsequently wrote "Hawthorne," in bold letters. The question may well be raised here, how it happened that America produced so many men of remarkable intellect with such slight opportunities for education in former times, while our greatly improved universities have not graduated an orator like Webster, a poet like Longfellow, or a prose-writer equal to Hawthorne during the past forty years. There have been few enough who have risen above mediocrity. It is the same, more or less, all over the civilized world. We have entered into a mechanical age, which is natural enough considering the rapid advances of science and the numerous mechanical inventions, but which is decidedly unfavorable to the development of art and literature. Everything now goes by machinery, from Harvard University to Ohio politics and the gigantic United States Steel Company; and every man has to find his place in some machine or other, or he is thrown out of line. Individual effort, as well as independence of thought and action, is everywhere frowned upon; but without freedom of thought and action there can be no great individualities, which is the same as saying that there can be no poets like Longfellow, or writers like Hawthorne and Emerson. Spontaneity is the life of the true artist, and in a mechanical civilization there can be neither spontaneity nor the poetic material which is essential to artistic work of a high order. There can be no great orators, for masses of men are no longer influenced by oratory, but by newspapers. Genius is like a plant of slow growth, which requires sunshine and Mother Earth to nourish it, not chemicals and electric lights. CHAPTER IV LITTLE MISERY: 1825-1835 During the War of the American Revolution, the officers of the French fleet, which was stationed at Newport, invented a game of cards, called "Boston," of which one peculiarity was, that under certain conditions, whoever held the lowest hand would win the count. This was called "Little Misery," and this was the kind of hand which Nathaniel Hawthorne had to play for fifteen years after leaving Bowdoin College. Only his indomitable will could have carried him through it. A college graduate who lacks the means to study a profession, and who has no influential relative to make a place for him in the world, finds himself in a most discouraging position. The only thing that his education has fitted him to do is, to teach school, and he may not be adapted to this, on account of some personal peculiarity. There was, and I suppose is still, a prejudice among mercantile men against college graduates, as a class of proud, indolent, neglectful persons, very difficult to instruct. Undoubtedly there are many such, but the innocent have to suffer with the guilty. It is natural that a man who has not had a liberal education should object to employing a subordinate who knows Latin and Greek. Whether Hawthorne's Uncle Robert, who had thus far proved to be his guardian genius, would have educated him for a profession, we have no means of knowing. This would mean of course a partial support for years afterward, and it is quite possible that Mr. Manning considered his duties to his own children paramount to it. What he did for Nathaniel may have been the best he could, to give him the position of book-keeper for the stage-company. This was of course Pegasus in harness (or rather at the hitching-post), but it is excellent experience for every young man; although the compensation in Hawthorne's case was small and there could be no expectation of future advancement. In this dilemma he decided to do the one thing for which Nature intended him,--to become a writer of fiction,--and he held fast to this determination in the face of most discouraging obstacles. He composed a series of short stories,--echoes of his academic years,--which he proposed to publish under the title of Wordsworth's popular poem, "We Are Seven." One of these is said to have been based on the witchcraft delusion, and it is a pity that it should not have been preserved, but their feminine titles afford no indication of their character. He carried them to a publisher, who received him politely and promised to examine them, but one month passed after another without Hawthorne's hearing from him, so that he concluded at length to make inquiries. [Footnote: J. Hawthorne, i. 124.] The publisher confessed that he had not even undertaken to read them, and Nathaniel carried them back, with a sinking heart, to his little chamber in the house on Herbert Street,--where he may have had melancholy thoughts enough for the next few weeks. Youth, however, soon outgrows its chagrins. In less than two years Hawthorne was prepared to enter the literary lists, equipped with a novelette, called "Fanshawe"; but here again he was destined to meet with a rebuff. After tendering it to a number of publishers without encouragement, he concluded to take the risk of publishing it himself. This only cost him a few hundred dollars, but the result was unsatisfactory, and he afterward destroyed all the copies that he could regain possession of. Hawthorne's genius was of slow development. He was only twenty-four when he published this rather immature work, and it might have been better if he had waited longer. It was to him what the "Sorrows of Werther" was to Goethe, but while the "Sorrows of Werther" made Goethe famous in many countries, "Fanshawe" fell still-born. The latter was not more imitative of Scott than the "Sorrows of Werther" is of Rousseau, and now that we consider it in the cool critical light of the twentieth century, we cannot but wonder that the "Sorrows of Werther" ever produced such enthusiasm. It is quite as difficult to see why "Fanshawe" should not have proved a success. It lacks the grace and dignity of Hawthorne's mature style, but it has an ingenious plot, a lively action, and is written in sufficiently good English. One would suppose that its faults would have helped to make it popular, for portions of it are so exciting as to border closely on the sensational. It may be affirmed that when a novel becomes so exciting that we wish to turn over the pages and anticipate the conclusion, either the action of the story is too heated or its incidents are too highly colored. The introduction of pirates in a work of fiction is decidely sensational, from Walter Scott downward, and, though Hawthorne never fell into this error, he approaches closely to it in "Fanshawe." There is some dark secret between the two villains of the piece, which he leaves to the reader as an exercise for the imagination. This is a characteristic of all his longer stories. There is an unknown quantity, an insoluble point, in them, which tantalizes the reader. What we especially feel in "Fanshawe" is the author's lack of social experience. His heroine at times behaves in a truly feminine manner, and at others her performances make us shiver. Her leaving her guardian's house at midnight to go off with an unknown man, whom her maidenly instinct should have taught her to distrust, even if Fanshawe had not warned her against him, might have been characteristic of the Middle Ages, but is certainly not of modern life. Bowdoin College evidently served Hawthorne as a background to his plot, although removed some distance into the country, and it is likely that the portrait of the kindly professor might have been recognized there. Ward's Tavern serves for the public-house where the various characters congregate, and there is a high rocky ledge in the woods, or what used to be woods at Brunswick, where the students often tried their skill in climbing, and which Hawthorne has idealized into the cliff where the would-be abductor met his timely fate. The trout-brook where Bridge and Hawthorne used to fish is also introduced. Fanshawe himself seems like a house of which only two sides have been built. There are such persons, and it is no wonder if they prove to be short-lived. Yet the scene in which he makes his noble renunciation of the woman who is devoted to him, purely from a sense of gratitude, is finely and tenderly drawn, and worthy of Hawthorne in his best years. The story was republished after its author's death, and fully deserves its position in his works. It was about this time (1827) that Nathaniel Hathorne changed his name to Hawthorne. No reason has ever been assigned for his doing so, and he had no legal right to do it without an act of the Legislature, but he took a revolutionary right, and as his family and fellow-citizens acquiesced in this, it became an established fact. His living relatives in the Manning family are unable to explain his reason for it. It may have been for the sake of euphony, or he may have had a fanciful notion, that such a change would break the spell which seemed to be dragging his family down with him. Conway's theory that it was intended to serve him as an incognito is quite untenable. His name first appears with a _w_ in the Bowdoin Triennial Catalogue of 1828. There are very few data existing as to Hawthorne's life during his first ten years of manhood, but it must have been a hard, dreary period for him. The Manning children, Robert, Elizabeth and Rebecca, were now growing up, and must have been a source of entertainment in their way, and his sister Louisa was always a comfort; but Horatio Bridge, who made a number of flying visits to him, states that he never saw the elder sister, even at table,--a fact from which we may draw our own conclusions. Hawthorne had no friends at this time, except his college associates, and they were all at a distance,--Pierce and Cilley both flourishing young lawyers, one at Concord, New Hampshire, and the other at Thomaston, Maine,--while Longfellow was teaching modern languages at Bowdoin. He had no lady friends to brighten his evenings for him, and if he went into society, it was only to be stared at for his personal beauty, like a jaguar in a menagerie. He had no fund of the small conversation which serves like oil to make the social machinery run smoothly. Like all deep natures, he found it difficult to adapt himself to minds of a different calibre. Salem people noticed this, and his apparent lack of an object in life,--for he maintained a profound secrecy in regard to his literary efforts,--and concluded that he was an indolent young man without any faculty for business, and would never come to good in this world. No doubt elderly females admonished him for neglecting his opportunities, and small wits buzzed about him as they have about many another under similar conditions. It was Hans Andersen's story of the ugly duck that proved to be a swan. No wonder that Hawthorne betook himself to the solitude of his own chamber, and consoled himself like the philosopher who said, "When I am alone, then I am least alone." He had an internal life with which only his most intimate friends were acquainted, and he could people his room with forms from his own fancy, much more real to him than the palpable _ignota_ whom he passed in the street. Beautiful visions came to him, instead of sermonizing ladies, patronizing money-changers, aggressive upstarts, grimacing wiseacres, and that large class of amiable, well-meaning persons that makes up the bulk of society. We should not be surprised if angels sometimes came to hover round him, for to the pure in heart heaven descends upon earth. There is a passage in Hawthorne's diary under date of October 4, 1840, which has often been quoted; but it will have to be quoted again, for it cannot be read too often, and no biography of him would be adequate without it. He says: "Here I sit in my old accustomed chamber where I used to sit in days gone by....This claims to be called a haunted chamber, for thousands upon thousands of visions have appeared to me in it; and some few of them have become visible to the world. If ever I should have a biographer, he ought to make great mention of this chamber in my memoirs, because so much of my lonely youth was wasted here, and here my mind and character were formed; and here I have been glad and hopeful, and here I have been despondent. And here I sat a long, long time, waiting patiently for the world to know me, and sometimes wondering why it did not know me sooner, or whether it would ever know me at all,--at least, till I were in my grave. And sometimes it seemed as if I were already in the grave, with only life enough to be chilled and benumbed. But oftener I was happy,--at least as happy as I then knew how to be, or was aware of the possibility of being. By and by, the world found me out in my lonely chamber, and called me forth,--not indeed, with a loud roar of acclamation, but rather with a still, small voice,--and forth I went, but found nothing in the world that I thought preferable to my solitude till now ... and now I begin to understand why I was imprisoned so many years in this lonely chamber, and why I could never break through the viewless bolts and bars; for if I had sooner made my escape into the world, I should have grown hard and rough, and been covered with earthly dust, and my heart might have become callous by rude encounters with the multitude.... But living in solitude till the fulness of time was come, I still kept the dew of my youth, and the freshness of my heart." During these dismal years Horatio Bridge was Hawthorne's good genius. The letters that Hawthorne wrote to him have not been preserved, but we may judge of their character by Bridge's replies to him--always frank, manly, sympathetic and encouraging. Hawthorne evidently confided his troubles and difficulties to Bridge, as he would to an elder brother. Bridge finally destroyed Hawthorne's letters, not so much on account of their complaining tone as for the personalities they contained; [Footnote: Horatio Bridge, 69.] and this suggests to us that there was still another side to Hawthorne's life at this epoch concerning which we shall never be enlightened. A man could not have had a better friend than Horatio Bridge. He was to Hawthorne what Edward Irving was to Carlyle; and the world is more indebted to them both than it often realizes. There is in fact a decided similarity between the lives of Carlyle and Hawthorne, in spite of radical differences in their work and characters. Both started at the foot of the ladder, and met with a hard, long struggle for recognition; both found it equally difficult to earn their living by their pens; both were assisted by most devoted friends, and both finally achieved a reputation among the highest in their own time. If there is sometimes a melancholy tinge in their writings, may we wonder at it? Pericles said, "We need the theatre to chase away the sadness of life," and it might have benefited the whole Hawthorne family to have gone to the theatre once a fortnight; but there were few entertainments in Salem, except of the stiff conventional sort, or in the shape of public dances open to firemen and shop-girls. Long afterward, Elizabeth Hawthorne wrote of her brother: "His habits were as regular as possible. In the evening after tea he went out for about an hour, whatever the weather was; and in winter, after his return, he ate a pint bowl of thick chocolate--(not cocoa, but the old-fashioned chocolate) crumbed full of bread: eating never hurt him then, and he liked good things. In summer he ate something equivalent, finishing with fruit in the season of it. In the evening we discussed political affairs, upon which we differed in opinion; he being a Democrat, and I of the opposite party. In reality, his interest in such things was so slight that I think nothing would have kept it alive but my contentious spirit. Sometimes, when he had a book that he particularly liked, he would not talk. He read a great many novels." [Footnote: J. Hawthorne, i. 125.] If Elizabeth possessed the genius which her brother supposed, she certainly does not indicate it in this letter; but genius in the ore is very different from genius smelted and refined by effort and experience. The one important fact in her statement is that Hawthorne was in the habit of taking solitary rambles after dark,--an owlish practice, but very attractive to romantic minds. Human nature appears in a more pictorial guise by lamplight, after the day's work is over. The groups at the street corners, the glittering display in the watchmaker's windows, the carriages flashing by and disappearing in the darkness, the mysterious errands of foot-passengers, all served as object-lessons for this student of his own kind. Jonathan Cilley once said: "I love Hawthorne; I admire him; but I do not know him. He lives in a mysterious world of thought and imagination which he never permits me to enter." [Footnote: Packard's "Bowdoin College," 306.] Long-continued thinking is sure to take effect at last, either in words or in action, and Hawthorne's mind had to disburden itself in some manner. So, after the failure of "Fanshawe," he returned to his original plan of writing short stories, and this time with success. In January, 1830, the well-known tale of "The Gentle Boy" was accepted by S. G. Goodrich, the editor of a Boston publication called the _Token_, who was himself better known in those days under the _nom de plume_ of "Peter Parley." "The Wives of the Dead," "Roger Malvin's Burial," and "Major Molineaux" soon followed. In 1833 he published the "Seven Vagabonds," and some others. The New York _Knickerbocker_ published the "Fountain of Youth" and "Edward Fayne's Rosebud." After 1833 the _Token_ and the _New England Magazine_ [Footnote: J. Hawthorne, i. 175.] stood ready to accept all the short pieces that Hawthorne could give them, but they did not encourage him to write serial stories. However, it was not the custom then for writers to sign their names to magazine articles, so that Hawthorne gained nothing in reputation by this. Some of his earliest pieces were printed over the signature of "Oberon." An autumn expedition to the White Mountains, Lake Champlain and Lake Ontario, and Niagara Falls, in 1832, raised Hawthorne's spirits and stimulated his ambition. He wrote to his mother from Burlington, Vermont, September 16: "I have arrived in safety, having passed through the White Hills, stopping at Ethan Crawford's house, and climbing Mt. Washington. I have not decided as to my future course. I have no intention of going into Canada. I have heard that cholera is prevalent in Boston." It was something to have stood on the highest summit east of the Rocky Mountains, and to have seen all New England lying at his feet. A hard wind in the Crawford Notch, which he describes in his story of "The Ambitious Guest," must have been in his own experience, and as he passed the monument of the ill-fated Willey family he may have thought that he too might become celebrated after his death, even as they were from their poetic catastrophe. This expedition provided him with the materials for a number of small plots. The ice was now broken; but a new class of difficulties arose before him. American literature was then in the bud and promised a beautiful blossoming, but the public was not prepared for it. Monthly magazines had a precarious existence, and their uncertainty of remuneration reacted on the contributors. Hawthorne was poorly paid, often obliged to wait a long time for his pay, and occasionally lost it altogether. For his story of "The Gentle Boy," one of the gems of literature, which ought to be read aloud every year in the public schools, he received the paltry sum of thirty-five dollars. Evidently he could not earn even a modest maintenance on such terms, and his letters to Bridge became more despondent than ever. Goodrich, who was a writer of the Andrews Norton class, soon perceived that Hawthorne could make better sentences than his own, and engaged him to write historical abstracts for his pitiful Peter Parley books, paying him a hundred dollars for the whole work, and securing for himself all the credit that appertained to it. Everybody knew who Peter Parley was, but it has only recently been discovered that much of the literature which passed under his name was the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne. The editor of a New York magazine to which Hawthorne contributed a number of sketches repeatedly deferred the payment for them, and finally confessed his inability to make it,--which he probably knew or intended beforehand. Then, with true metropolitan assurance, he begged of Hawthorne the use of certain unpublished manuscripts, which he still had in his possession. Hawthorne with unlimited contempt told the fellow that he might keep them, and then wrote to Bridge: "Thus has this man, who would be considered a Mæcenas, taken from a penniless writer material incomparably better than any his own brain can supply." [Footnote: Horatio Bridge, 68, 69.] Whether this New York periodical was the _Knickerbocker_ or some other, we are not informed; neither do we know what Bridge replied to Hawthorne, who had closed his letter with a malediction, on the aforesaid editor, but elsewhere in his memoirs he remarks: "Hawthorne received but small compensation for any of this literary work, for he lacked the knowledge of business and the self-assertion necessary to obtain even the moderate remuneration vouchsafed to writers fifty years ago." [Footnote: Horatio Bridge, 77.] If Horatio Bridge had been an author himself, he would not have written this statement concerning his friend. Magazine editors are like men in other professions: some of them are honorable and others are less so; but an author who offers a manuscript to the editor of a magazine is wholly at his mercy, so far as that small piece of property is concerned. The author cannot make a bargain with the editor as he can with the publisher of his book, and is obliged to accept whatever the latter chooses to give him. Instances have been known where an editor has destroyed a valuable manuscript, without compensation or explanation of any kind. Hawthorne was doing the best that a human being could under the conditions that were given him. Above all things, he was true to himself; no man could be more so. Yet Bridge wrote to him on Christmas Day, 1836: "The bane of your life has been self-distrust. This has kept you back for many years; which, if you had improved by publishing, would long ago have given you what you must now wait a long time for. It may be for the best, but I doubt it." Nothing is more trying in misfortune than the ill-judged advice of well-meaning friends. There is no nettle that stings like it. To expect Hawthorne to become a literary genius, and at the same time to develop the peculiar faculties of a commercial traveller or a curb-stone broker, was unreasonable. In the phraseology of Sir William Hamilton, the two vocations are "non-compossible." Bridge himself was undertaking a grandly unpractical project about this time: nothing less than an attempt to dam the Androscoggin, a river liable to devastating floods; and in this enterprise he was obliged to trust to a class of men who were much more uncertain in their ways and methods than those with whom Hawthorne dealt. Horatio Bridge had not studied civil engineering, and the result was that before two years had elapsed the floods on the Androscoggin swept the dam away, and his fortune with it. In the same letter we also notice this paragraph concerning another Bowdoin friend: "And so Frank Pierce is elected Senator. There is an instance of what a man can do by trying. With no very remarkable talents, he at the age of thirty-four fills one of the highest stations in the nation. He is a good fellow, and I rejoice at his success." [Footnote: J. Hawthorne, i. 148.] Pierce certainly possessed the cap of Fortunatus, and it seems as if there must have been some magic faculty in the man, which enabled him to win high positions so easily; and he continued to do this, although he had not distinguished himself particularly as a member of Congress, and he appeared to still less advantage among the great party leaders in the United States Senate. He illustrated the faculty for "getting elected." In October, 1836, the time arrived for settling the matrimonial wager between Hawthorne and Jonathan Cilley, which they had made at college twelve years before. Bridge accordingly examined the documents which they had deposited with him, and notified Cilley that he was under obligation to provide Hawthorne with an octavo of Madeira. Cilley's letter to Hawthorne on this occasion does not impress one favorably. [Footnote: J. Hawthorne, i. 144.] It is familiar and jocose, without being either witty or friendly, and he gives no intimation in it of an intention to fulfil his promise. Hawthorne appears to have sent the letter to Bridge, who replied: "I doubt whether you ever get your wine from Cilley. His inquiring of you whether he had really lost the bet is suspicious; and he has written me in a manner inconsistent with an intention of paying promptly; and if a bet grows old it grows cold. He wished me to propose to you to have it paid at Brunswick next Commencement, and to have as many of our classmates as could be mustered to drink it. It may be Cilley's idea to pay over the balance after taking a strong pull at it; if so, it is well enough. But still it should be tendered within the month." In short, Cilley behaved in this matter much in the style of a tricky Van Buren politician, making a great bluster of words, and privately intending to do nothing. He was running for Congress at the time on the Van Buren ticket, and it is quite likely that the expenses of the campaign had exhausted his funds. That he should never have paid the bet was less to Hawthorne's disadvantage than his own. It was now that Horatio Bridge proved himself a true friend, and equally a man. In the spring of 1836 Goodrich had obtained for Hawthorne the editorship of the _American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge_, with a salary of five hundred dollars; [Footnote: Conway, 45.]but he soon discovered that he had embarked on a ship with a rotten hulk. He started off heroically, writing the whole of the first number with the help of his sister Elizabeth; but by midsummer the concern was bankrupt, and he retired to his lonely cell, more gloomy and despondent than before. There are few sadder spectacles then that of a man seeking work without being able to obtain it; and this applies to the man of genius as well as to the day laborer. Horatio Bridge now realized that the time had come for him to interfere. He recognized that Hawthorne was gradually lapsing into a hypochondria that might terminate fatally; that he was Goethe's oak planted in a flowerpot, and that unless the flower-pot could be broken, the oak would die. He also saw that Hawthorne would never receive the public recognition that was due to his ability, so long as he published magazine articles under an assumed name. He accordingly wrote to Goodrich--fortunately before his mill-dam gave way--suggesting the publication of a volume of Hawthorne's stories, and offered to guarantee the publisher against loss. This proposition was readily accepted, but Bridge might have made a much better bargain. What it amounted to was, the half-profit system without the half-profit. The necessary papers were exchanged and Hawthorne gladly acceded to Goodrich's terms. Bridge, however, had cautioned Goodrich not to inform Hawthorne of his share in the enterprise, and the consequence of this was that he shortly received a letter from Hawthorne, informing him of the good news--which he knew already--and praising Goodrich, to whom he proposed to dedicate his new volume. Bridge's generosity had come back to him, dried and salted,--as it has to many another. What could Bridge do, in the premises? Goodrich had written to Hawthorne that the publisher, Mr. Howes, was confident of making a favorable arrangement _with a man of capital who would edit the book_; but Bridge did not know this, and he suspected Goodrich of sailing into Hawthorne's favor under a false flag. He therefore wrote to Hawthorne, November 17, 1836: "I fear you will hurt yourself by puffing Goodrich _undeservedly_,--for there is no doubt in my mind of his selfishness in regard to your work and yourself. I am perfectly aware that he has taken a good deal of interest in you, but when did he ever do anything for you without a _quid pro quo_? The magazine was given to you for $100 less than it should have been. The _Token_ was saved by your writing. Unless you are already committed, do not mar the prospects of your _first_ book by hoisting Goodrich into favor." This prevented the dedication, for which Hawthorne was afterward thankful enough. The book, which was the first volume of "Twice Told Tales" came from the press the following spring, and proved an immediate success, although not a highly lucrative one for its author. With the help of Longfellow's cordial review of it in the _North American_ it established Hawthorne's reputation on a firm and irrefragable basis. All honor to Horatio. As if Hawthorne had not seen a sufficiently long "winter of discontent" already, his friends now proposed to obtain the position of secretary and chronicler for him on Commodore Jones's exploring expedition to the South Pole! Franklin Pierce was the first to think of this, but Bridge interceded with Cilley to give it his support, and there can be no doubt that they would have succeeded in obtaining the position for Hawthorne, but the expedition itself failed, for lack of a Congressional appropriation. The following year, 1838, the project was again brought forward by the administration, and Congress being in a more amiable frame of mind granted the requisite funds; but Hawthorne had now contracted new ties in his native city, bound, as it were, by an inseparable cord stronger than a Manila hawser, and Doctor Nathaniel Peabody's hospitable parlors were more attractive to him than anything the Antarctic regions could offer. We have now entered upon the period where Hawthorne's own diary commences, the autobiography of a pure-minded, closely observing man; an invaluable record, which began apparently in 1835, and was continued nearly until the close of his life; now published in a succession of American, English and Italian note-books. In it we find records of what he saw and thought; descriptive passages, afterward made serviceable in his works of fiction, and perhaps written with that object in view; fanciful notions, jotted down on the impulse of the moment; records of his social life; but little critical writing or personal confessions,--although the latter may have been reserved; from publication by his different editors. It is known that much of his diary has not yet been given to the public, and perhaps never will be. In July, 1837, Hawthorne went to Augusta, to spend a month with his friend Horatio Bridge; went fishing with him, for what they called white perch, probably the saibling; [Footnote: The American saibling, or golden trout, is only indigenous to Lake Sunapee, New Hampshire, and to a small lake near Augusta.] and was greatly entertained with the peculiarities of an idiomatic Frenchman, an itinerant teacher of that language, whom Bridge, in the kindness of his heart, had taken into his own house. The last of July, Cilley also made his appearance, but did not bring the Madeira with him, and Hawthorne has left this rather critical portrait of him in his diary: "Friday, July 28th.--Saw my classmate and formerly intimate friend, ----, for the first time since we graduated. He has met with good success in life, in spite of circumstances, having struggled upward against bitter opposition, by the force of his abilities, to be a member of Congress, after having been for some time the leader of his party in the State Legislature. We met like old friends, and conversed almost as freely as we used to do in college days, twelve years ago and more. He is a singular person, shrewd, crafty, insinuating, with wonderful tact, seizing on each man by his manageable point, and using him for his own purpose, often without the man's suspecting that he is made a tool of; and yet, artificial as his character would seem to be, his conversation, at least to myself, was full of natural feeling, the expression of which can hardly be mistaken, and his revelations with regard to himself had really a great deal of frankness. A man of the most open nature might well have been more reserved to a friend, after twelve years separation, than ---- was to me. Nevertheless, he is really a crafty man, concealing, like a murder-secret, anything that it is not good for him to have known. He by no means feigns the good feeling that he professes, nor is there anything affected in the frankness of his conversation; and it is this that makes him so fascinating. There is such a quantity of truth and kindliness and warm affections, that a man's heart opens to him, in spite of himself. He deceives by truth. And not only is he crafty, but, when occasion demands, bold and fierce like a tiger, determined, and even straightforward and undisguised in his measures,--a daring fellow as well as a sly one." This can be no other than Jonathan Cilley; like many of his class, a man of great good humor but not over-scrupulous, so far as the means he might make use of were concerned. He did not, however, prove to be as skilful a diplomat as Hawthorne seems to have supposed him. The duel between Cilley and Graves, of Kentucky, has been so variously misrepresented that the present occasion would seem a fitting opportunity to tell the plain truth concerning it. President Jackson was an honest man, in the customary sense of the term, and he would have scorned to take a dollar that was not his own; but he suffered greatly from parasites, who pilfered the nation's money,--the natural consequence of the spoils-of-office system. The exposure of these peculations gave the Whigs a decided advantage, and Cilley, who had quickly proved his ability in debate, attempted to set a back-fire by accusing Watson Webb, the editor of the _Courier and Enquirer_, of having been bribed to change the politics of his paper. The true facts of the case were, that the paper had been purchased by the Whigs, and Webb, of course, had a right to change his politics if he chose to; and the net result of Cilley's attack was a challenge to mortal combat, carried by Representative Graves, of Kentucky. Cilley, although a man of courage, declined this, on the ground that members of Congress ought not to be called to account outside of the Capitol, for words spoken in debate. "Then," said Graves, "you will at least admit that my friend is a gentleman." This was a fair offer toward conciliation, and if Cilley had been peaceably inclined he would certainly have accepted it; but he obstinately refused to acknowledge that General Webb was a gentleman, and in consequence of this he received a second challenge the next day from Graves, brought by Henry A. Wise, afterward Governor of Virginia. Cilley still objected to fighting, but members of his party urged him into it: the duel took place, and Cilley was killed. It may be said in favor of the "code of honor" that it discourages blackguardism and instructs a man to keep a civil tongue; but it is not always possible to prevent outbursts of temper, especially in hot climates, and a man's wife and children should also be considered. Andrew Jackson said at the close of his life, that there was nothing he regretted so much as having killed a human being in a duel. Man rises by humility, and angels fall from pride. Hawthorne wrote a kindly and regretful notice of the death of his old acquaintance, which was published in the _Democratic Review_, and which closed with this significant passage: "Alas, that over the grave of a dear friend, my sorrow for the bereavement must be mingled with another grief--that he threw away such a life in so miserable a cause! Why, as he was true to the Northern character in all things else, did he swerve from his Northern principles in this final scene?" [Footnote: Conway, 63.] It will be well to bear this in mind in connection with a somewhat similar incident, which we have now to consider. An anecdote has been repeated in all the books about Hawthorne published since 1880, which would do him little credit if it could be proved,--a story that he challenged one of his friends to a duel, at the instigation of a vulgar and unprincipled young woman. Horatio Bridge says in reference to it: "This characteristic was notably displayed several years later, when a lady incited him to quarrel with one of his best friends on account of a groundless pique of hers. He went to Washington for the purpose of challenging the gentleman, and it was only after ample explanation had been made, showing that his friend had behaved with entire honor, that Pierce and Cilley, who were his advisers, could persuade him to be satisfied without a fight." [Footnote: Bridge, 5.] How the good Horatio could have fallen into this pit is unimaginable, for a double contradiction is contained in his statement. "Some time after this," that is after leaving college, would give the impression that the affair took place about 1830, whereas Pierce and Cilley were not in Washington together till five or six years later--probably seven years later. Moreover, Hawthorne states in a letter to Pierce's friend O'Sullivan, on April 1, 1853, that he had never been in Washington up to that time. The Manning family and Mrs. Hawthorne's relatives never heard of the story previous to its publication. The internal evidence is equally strong against it. What New England girl would behave in the manner that Hawthorne's son represents this one to have done? What young gentleman would have listened to such a communication as he supposes, and especially the reserved and modest Hawthorne? One can even imagine the aspect of horror on his face at such an unlady-like proceeding. The story would be an ignominious one for Hawthorne, if it were credible, but there is no occasion for our believing it until some tangible evidence is adduced in its support. There was no element of Quixotism in his composition, and it is quite as impossible to locate the identity of the person whom Hawthorne is supposed to have challenged. CHAPTER V EOS AND EROS: 1835-1839 It was fortunate for Hawthorne that there was at this time a periodical in the United States, the _North American Review_, which was generally looked upon as an authority in literature, and which in most instances deserved the confidence that was placed in it, for its reviews were written by men of distinguished ability. It was the _North American Review_ which made the reputation of L. Maria Child, and which enrolled Hawthorne in the order of geniuses. There is not much literary criticism in Longfellow's review, and he does not "rise to the level of the accomplished essayist" of our own time, [Footnote: Who writes so correctly and says so little to the purpose.] but he goes to the main point with the single-mindness of the true poet. "A new star," he says, "has appeared in the skies"--a veritable prediction. "Others will gaze at it with telescopes, and decide whether it is in the constellation of Orion or the Great Bear. It is enough for us to gaze at it, to admire it, and welcome it." "Although Hawthorne writes in prose, he belongs among the poets. To every subject he touches he gives a poetic personality which emanates from the man himself. His sympathies extend to all things living, and even to the inanimates. Another characteristic is the exceeding beauty of his style. It is as clear as running waters are. Indeed he uses words as mere stepping-stones, upon which, with a free and youthful bound, his spirit crosses and re-crosses the bright and rushing stream of thought." Again he says: "A calm, thoughtful face seems to be looking at you from every page; with now a pleasant smile, and now a shade of sadness stealing over its features. Sometimes, though not often, it glares wildly at you, with a strange and painful expression, as, in the German romance, the bronze knocker of the Archivarius Lindhorst makes up faces at the Student Anselmus." Here we have a portrait of Hawthorne, by one who knew him, in a few simple words; and behind a calm thoughtful face there is that mysterious unknown quantity which puzzles Longfellow here, and always perplexed Hawthorne's friends. It may have been the nucleus or tap-root of his genius. Longfellow seems to have felt it as a dividing line between them. He probably felt so at college; and this brings us back to an old subject. Hawthorne's superiority to Longfellow as an artist consisted essentially in this, that he was never an optimist. Puritanism looked upon human nature with a hostile eye, and was inclined to see evil in it where none existed; and Doctor Channing, who inaugurated the great moral movement which swept Puritanism away in this country, tended, as all reformers do, to the opposite extreme,--to that scepticism of evil which, as George Brandes says, is greatly to the advantage of hypocrites and sharpers. This was justifiable in Doctor Channing, but among his followers it has often degenerated into an inverted or homoeopathic kind of Puritanism,--a habit of excusing the faults of others, or of themselves, on the score of good intentions--a habit of self-justification, and even to the perverse belief that, as everything is for the best, whatever we do in this world must be for good. To this class of sentimentalists the most serious evil is truth-seeing and truth-speaking. It is an excellent plan to look upon the bright side of things, but one should not do this to the extent of blinding oneself to facts. Doctor Johnson once said to Boswell, "Beware, my friend, of mixing up virtue and vice;" but there is something worse than that, and it is, to stigmatize a writer as a pessimist or a hypochondriac for refusing to take rainbow-colored views. This, however, would never apply to Longfellow. Hawthorne, with his eye ever on the mark, pursued a middle course. He separated himself from the Puritans without joining their opponents, and thus attained the most independent stand-point of any American writer of his time; and if this alienated him from the various humanitarian movements that were going forward, it was nevertheless a decided advantage for the work he was intended to do. In this respect he resembled Scott, Thackeray and George Eliot. What we call evil or sin is merely the negative of civilization,--a tendency to return to the original savage condition. In the light of history, there is always progress or improvement, but in individual cases there is often the reverse, and so far as the individual is concerned evil is no imaginary metaphor, but as real and absolute as what we call good. The Bulgarian massacres of 1877 were a historical necessity, and we console ourselves in thinking of them by the fact that they may have assisted the Bulgarians in obtaining their independence; but this was no consolation to the twenty or thirty thousand human beings who were ground to powder there. To them there was no comfort, no hope,--only the terrible reality. Neither can we cast the responsibility of such events on the mysterious ways of Providence. The ways of Providence are not so mysterious to those who have eyes to read with. Take for instance one of the most notable cases of depravity, that of Nero. If we consider the conditions under which he was born and brought up, the necessity of that form of government to hold a vast empire together, and the course of history for a hundred years previous, it is not difficult to trace the genesis of Nero's crimes to the greed of the Roman people (especially of its merchants) for conquest and plunder; and Nero was the price which they were finally called on to pay for this. Marcus Aurelius, a noble nature reared under favorable conditions for its development, became the Washington of his time. It is the same in private life. In many families there are evil tendencies, which if they are permitted to increase will take permanent hold, like a bad demon, of some weak individual, and make of him a terror and a torment to his relatives--fortunate if he is not in a position of authority. He may serve as a warning to the general public, but in the domestic circle he is an unmitigated evil,--he or she, though it is not so likely to be a woman. When a crime is committed within the precincts of good society, we are greatly shocked; but we do not often notice the debasement of character which leads down to it, and still more rarely notice the instances in which fear or some other motive arrests demoralization before the final step, and leaves the delinquent as it were in a condition of moral suspense. It was in such tragic situations that Hawthorne found the material which was best suited to the bent of his genius. In the two volumes, however, of "Twice Told Tales,"--the second published two years later,--the tragical element only appears as an undercurrent of pathos in such stories as "The Gentle Boy," "Wakefield," "The Maypole of Merry-mount," and "The Haunted Mind," but reaches a climax in "The Ambitious Guest" and "Lady Eleanor's Mantle." There are others, like "Lights from a Steeple," and "Little Annie's Ramble," that are of a more cheerful cast, but are also much less serious in their composition. "The Minister's Black Veil," "The Great Carbuncle," and "The Ambitious Guest," are Dantean allegories. We notice that each volume begins with a highly patriotic tale, the "Gray Champion," and "Howe's Masquerade," but the patriotism is genuine and almost fervid. When I first looked upon the house in which Hawthorne lived at Sebago, I was immediately reminded of these earlier studies in human nature, which are of so simple and quiet a diction, so wholly devoid of rhetoric, that Elizabeth Peabody thought they must be the work of his sister, and others supposed them to have been written by a Quaker. They resemble Dürer's wood-cuts,--gentle and tender in line, but unswerving in their fidelity. We sometimes wish that they were not so quiet and evenly composed, and then repent of our wish that anything so perfect should be different from what it is. His "Twice Told Tales" are a picture-gallery that may be owned in any house-hold. They stand alone in English, and there is not their like in any other language. Yet Hawthorne is not a word-painter like Browning and Carlyle, but obtains his pictorial effect by simple accuracy of description, a more difficult process than the other, but also more satisfactory. His eyes penetrate the masks and wrappings which cover human nature, as the Röntgen rays penetrate the human body. He sees a man's heart through the flesh and bones, and knows what is concealed in it. He ascends a church-steeple, and looking down from the belfry the whole life of the town is spread out before him. Men and women come and go--Hawthorne knows the errands they are on. He sees a militia company parading below, and they remind him from that elevation of the toy soldiers in a shop-window,--which they turned out to be, pretty much, at Bull Run. A fashionable young man comes along the street escorting two young ladies, and suddenly at a crossing encounters their father, who takes them away from him; but one of them gives him a sweet parting look, which amply compensates him in its presage of future opportunities. How plainly that consolatory look appears between our eyes and the printed page! Then Hawthorne describes the grand march of a thunder-storm,--as in Rembrandt's "Three Trees,"--with its rolling masses of dark vapor, preceded by a skirmish-line of white feathery clouds. The militia company is defeated at the first onset of this, its meteoric enemy, and driven under cover. The artillery of the skies booms and flashes about Hawthorne himself, until finally: "A little speck of azure has widened in the western heavens; the sunbeams find a passage and go rejoicing through the tempest, and on yonder darkest cloud, born like hallowed hopes of the glory of another world and the trouble and tears of this, brightens forth the rainbow." All this may have happened just as it is set down. "Lady Eleanor's Mantle" exemplifies the old proverb, "Pride goeth before destruction," in almost too severe a manner, but the tale is said to have a legendary foundation; and "The Minister's Black Veil" is an equally awful symbolism for that barrier between man and man, which we construct through suspicion and our lack of frankness in our dealings with one another. We all hide ourselves behind veils, and, as Emerson says, "Man crouches and blushes, absconds and conceals." "The Ambitious Guest" allegorizes a vain imagination, and is the most important of these three. A young man suffers from a craving for distinction, which he believes will only come to him after this life is ended. He is walking through the White Mountains, and stops overnight at the house of the ill-fated Willey family. He talks freely on the subject of his vain expectations, when Destiny, in the shape of an avalanche, suddenly overtakes him, and buries him so deeply that neither his body nor his name has ever been recovered. Hawthorne might have drawn another allegory from the same source, for if the Willey family had trusted to Providence, and remained in their house, instead of rushing out into the dark, they would not have lost their lives. In the _Democratic Review_ for 1834, Hawthorne published the account of a visit to Niagara Falls, one of the fruits of his expedition thither in September, 1832, by way of the White Mountains and Burlington, the journey from Salem to Niagara in those days being fully equal to going from New York to the cataracts of the Nile in our own time. "The Ambitious Guest" was published in the same volume with it, and "The Ontario Steamboat" first appeared in the _American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge_, in 1836. Hawthorne may have made other expeditions to the White Mountains, but we do not hear of them. In addition to the three studies already mentioned, Hawthorne drew from this source the two finest of his allegories, "The Great Carbuncle" and "The Great Stone Face." "The Great Carbuncle" is not only one of the most beautiful of Hawthorne's tales, but the most far-reaching in its significance. The idea of it must have originated in the Alpine glow, an effect of the rising or setting sun on the icy peaks of a mountain, which looks at a distance like a burning coal; an appearance only visible in the White Mountains during the winter, and there is no reason why Hawthorne should not have seen it at that season from Lake Sebago. At a distance of twenty miles or more it blazes wonderfully, but on a nearer approach it entirely disappears. Hawthorne could not have found a more fascinating subject, and he imagines it for us as a great carbuncle located in the upper recesses of the mountains. A number of explorers for this wonderful gem meet together at the foot of the mountain beyond the confines of civilization, and build a hut in which to pass the night. They are recognizable, from Hawthorne's description, as the man of one idea, who has spent his whole life seeking the gem; a scientific experimenter who wishes to grind it up for the benefit of his crucible; a cynical sceptic who has come to disprove the existence of the great gem; a greedy speculator who seeks the carbuncle as he would prospect for a silver-mine; an English lord who wishes to add it to his hereditary possessions; and finally a young married couple who want to obtain it for an ornament to their new cottage. The interest of the reader immediately centres on these last two, and we care much more concerning their fortunes and adventures than we do about the carbuncle. The conversation that evening between these ill-assorted companions is in Hawthorne's most subtle vein of irony, and would have delighted old Socrates himself. Meanwhile the young bride weaves a screen of twigs and leaves, to protect herself and her husband from the gaze of the curious. The following morning they all set out by different paths in search of the carbuncle; but our thoughts accompany the steps of the young bride, as she makes one toilsome ascent after another until she feels ready to sink to the ground with fatigue and discouragement. They have already decided to return, when the rosy light of the carbuncle bursts upon them from beneath the lifting clouds; but they now feel instinctively that it is too great a prize for their possession. The man of one idea also sees it, and his life goes out in the exultation over his final success. The skeptic appears, but cannot discover it, although his face is illumined by its light, until he takes off his large spectacles; whereupon, he instantly becomes blind. The English nobleman and the American speculator fail to discover it; the former returns to his ancestral halls, as wise as he was before; and the latter is captured by a party of Indians and obliged to pay a heavy ransom to regain freedom. The scientific pedant finds a rare specimen of primeval granite, which serves his purpose quite as well as the carbuncle; and the two young doves return to their cot, having learned the lesson of contentment. How fortunate was Hawthorne at the age of thirty thus to anatomize the chief illusions of life, which so many others follow until old age! It is an erroneous notion that Hawthorne found the chief material for his work in old New England traditions. There are some half-dozen sketches of this sort, but they are more formally written than the others, and remind one of those portraits by Titian which were painted from other portraits,--better than the originals, but not equal to those which he painted from Nature. In the "Sights from a Steeple" Hawthorne exposes his methods of study and betrays the active principle of his existence. He says: "The most desirable mode of existence might be that of a spiritualized Paul Pry hovering invisible round man and woman, witnessing their deeds, searching into their hearths, borrowing brightness from their felicity and shade from their sorrow, and retaining no emotion peculiar to himself." There are those who would dislike this busybody occupation, and others, such as Emerson perhaps, might not consider it justifiable; but Hawthorne is not to be censured for it, for his motive was an elevated one, and without this close scrutiny of human nature we should have had neither a Hawthorne nor a Shakespeare. There is no quality more conspicuous in "Twice Told Tales" than the calm, evenly balanced mental condition of the author, who seems to look down on human life not so much from a church steeple as from the blue firmament itself. Such was the _Eos_ or dawn of Hawthorne's literary art. Hawthorne returned thanks to Longfellow in a gracefully humorous letter, to which Longfellow replied with a cordial wish to see Hawthorne in Cambridge, and by advising him to dive into deeper water and write a history of the Acadians before and after their expulsion from Nova Scotia; but this was not practicable for minds like Hawthorne's, surcharged with poetic images, and the attempt might have proved a disturbing influence for him. He had already contributed the substance to Longfellow of "Evangeline," and he now wrote a eulogium on the poem for a Salem newspaper, which it must be confessed did not differ essentially from other reviews of the same order. He does not give us any clear idea of how the poem actually impressed him, which is after all the best that one can do in such cases. Poetry is not like a problem in mathematics, which can be marked right or wrong according to its solution. When a young man obtains a substantial footing in his profession or business, he looks about him for a wife--unless he happens to be already pledged in that particular; and Hawthorne was not an exception to this rule. He was not obliged to look very far, and yet the chance came to him in such an exceptional manner that it seems as if some special providence were connected with it. His position in this respect was a peculiar one. He does not appear to have been much acquainted in Salem even now; and the only son of a widow with two unmarried sisters may be said to have rather a slim chance for escaping from those strong ties which have grown up between them from childhood. Many a mother has prevented her son from getting married until it has become too late for him to change his bachelor habits. His mother and his sisters realize that he ought to be married, and that he has a right to a home of his own; but in their heart of hearts they combat the idea, and their opposition takes the form of an unsparing criticism of any young lady whom he follows with his eyes. This frequently happens also in a family of girls: they all remain unmarried because, if one of them shows an inclination in that direction, the others unite in a conspiracy against her. On the other hand, a family of four or five boys will marry early, if they can obtain the means of doing so, simply from the need of feminine cheer and sympathy. A devoted female friend will sometimes prevent a young woman from being married. Love affairs are soft earth for an intriguing and unprincipled woman to work in, but, fortunately, Mrs. Hawthorne did not belong in that category. It was stout, large-hearted Elizabeth Peabody who broke the spell of the enchanted castle in which Hawthorne was confined. The Peabodys were a cultivated family in Salem, who lived pretty much by themselves, as the Hawthornes and Mannings did. Doctor Nathaniel Peabody was a respectable practitioner, but he had not succeeded in curing the headaches of his daughter Sophia, which came upon her at the close of her girlhood and still continued intermittently until this time. The Graces had not been bountiful the Peabody family, so, to compensate for this, they all cultivated the Muses, in whose society they ascended no little distance on the way to Parnassus. Elizabeth Peabody was quite a feminine pundit. She learned French and German, and studied history and archaeology; she taught history on a large scale at Sanborn's Concord School and at many others; she had a method of painting dates on squares, which fixed them indelibly in the minds of her pupils; she talked at Margaret Fuller's transcendental club, and was an active member of the Radical or Chestnut Street Club, thirty years later; but her chief distinction was the introduction of Froebel's Kindergarten teaching, by which she well-nigh revolutionized primary instruction in America. She was a most self-forgetful person, and her scholars became devotedly attached to her. Her sister Mary was as much like Elizabeth mentally as she differed from her in figure and general appearance, but soon after this she was married to Horace Mann and her public activity became merged in that of her husband, who was the first educator of his time. Sophia Peabody read poetry and other fine writings, and acquired a fair proficiency in drawing and painting. They lived what was then called the "higher life," and it certainly led them to excellent results. Shortly before the publication of "Twice Told Tales," Elizabeth Peabody learned that the author of "The Gentle Boy," and other stories which she had enjoyed in the _Token_, lived in Salem, and that the name was Hawthorne. She immediately jumped to the conclusion that they were the work of Miss Elizabeth Hawthorne, whom she had known somewhat in earlier days, and she concluded to call upon her and offer her congratulations. When informed by Louisa Hawthorne, who came to her in the parlor, instead of the elder sister, that "The Gentle Boy" was written by Nathaniel, Miss Peabody made the significant remark, "If your brother can do work like that, he has no right to be idle" [Footnote: Lathrop, 168. Miss Peabody would seem to have narrated this to him.]--to which Miss Louisa retorted, it is to be hoped with some indignation, that her brother never was idle. It is only too evident from this that public opinion in Salem had already decided that Hawthorne was an idle fellow, who was living on his female relatives. That is the way the world judges--from external facts without any consideration of internal causes or conditions. It gratifies the vanity of those who are fortunate and prosperous, to believe that all men have an equal chance in the race of life. Emerson once blamed two young men for idleness, who were struggling against obstacles such as he could have had no conception of. Those who have been fortunate from the cradle never learn what life is really like. The spell, however, was broken and the friendliness of Elizabeth Peabody found a deeply sympathetic response in the Hawthorne household. Nathaniel at last found a person who expressed a genuine and heartfelt appreciation of his work, and it was like the return of the sun to the Arctic explorer after his long winter night. Rather to Miss Peabody's surprise he and his sisters soon returned her call, and visits between the two families thereafter became frequent. Sophia Peabody belonged to the class of young women for whom Shakespeare's Ophelia serves as a typical example. She was gentle, affectionate, refined, and amiable to a fault,--much too tender-hearted for this rough world, if her sister Elizabeth had not always stood like a barrier between her and it. How Hawthorne might have acted in Hamlet's place it is useless to surmise, but in his true nature he was quite the opposite of Hamlet,--slow and cautious, but driven onward by an inexorable will. If Hamlet had possessed half of Hawthorne's determination, he might have broken through the network of evil conditions which surrounded him, and lived to make Ophelia a happy woman. It was only necessary to come into Hawthorne's presence in order to recognize the force that was in him. Sophia Amelia Peabody was born September 21, 1811, so that at the time of which we are now writing she was twenty-five years of age. Hawthorne was then thirty-two, when a man is more attractive to the fair sex than at any other time of life, for then he unites the freshness and vigor of youth with sufficient maturity of judgment to inspire confidence and trust. Yet her sister Elizabeth found it difficult to persuade her to come into the parlor and meet the handsomest man in Salem. When she did come she evidently attracted Nathaniel Hawthorne's attention, for, although she said little, he looked at her repeatedly while conversing with her sister. It may not have been an instance of love at first sight,--which may happen to any young man at a dancing party, and be forgotten two days later,--but it was something more than a casual interest. On his second or third call she showed him a sketch she had made of "the gentle boy," according to her idea of him, and the subdued tone with which he received it plainly indicated that he was already somewhat under her influence. Julian Hawthorne writes of this: [Footnote: J. Hawthorne, i. 179.] "It may be remarked here, that Mrs. Hawthorne in telling her children, many years afterwards, of these first meetings with their father, used to say that his presence, from the very beginning, exercised so strong a magnetic attraction upon her, that instinctively, and in self-defence as it were, she drew back and repelled him. The power which she felt in him alarmed her; she did not understand what it meant, and was only able to feel that she must resist." Every true woman feels this reluctance at first toward a suitor for her hand, but a sensitive young lady might well have a sense of awe on finding that she had attracted to herself such a mundane force as Hawthorne, and it is no wonder that this first impression was recollected throughout her life. There are many who would have refused Hawthorne's suit, because they felt that he was too great and strong for them, and it is to the honor of Sophia Peabody that she was not only attracted by the magnetism of Hawthorne, but finally had the courage to unite herself to such an enigmatical person. We also obtain a glimpse of Hawthorne's side of this courtship from a letter which he wrote to Longfellow in June, 1837, and in which he says, "I have now, or shall soon have a sharper spur to exertion, which I lacked at an earlier period;" [Footnote: Conway, 75.] and this is all the information he has vouchsafed us on the subject. If there is anything more in his diary, it has not been given to the public, and probably never will be. A number of letters which he wrote to Miss Sophia from Boston, or Brook Farm, have been published by his son, but it would be neither right nor judicious to introduce them here. It is, however, evident from the above that Hawthorne was already engaged in June, 1837, but his engagement long remained a secret, for three excellent reasons; viz., his slender means of support, the delicate health of his betrothed, and the disturbance which it might create in the Hawthorne family. The last did not prove so serious a difficulty as he seems to have imagined; but his apprehensiveness on that point many another could justify from personal experience. [Footnote: J. Hawthorne, i. 196.] From this time also the health of Sophia Peabody steadily improved, nor is it necessary to account for it by any magical influence on the part of her lover. Her trouble was plainly some recondite difficulty of the circulation. The heart is supposed to be the seat of the affections because mental emotion stimulates the nervous system and acts upon the heart as the centre of all organic functions. A healthy natural excitement will cause the heart to vibrate more firmly and evenly; but an unhealthy excitement, like fear or anger, will cause it to beat in a rapid and uneven manner. Contrarily, despondency, or a lethargic state of mind, causes the movement of the blood to slacken. The happiness of love is thus the best of all stimulants and correctives for a torpid circulation, and it expands the whole being of a woman like the blossoming of a flower in the sunshine. From the time of her betrothal, Sophia Peabody's headaches became less and less frequent, until they ceased altogether. The true seat of the affections is in the mind. The first consideration proved to be a more serious matter. If Hawthorne had not succeeded in earning his own livelihood by literature so far, what prospect was there of supporting a wife and family in that manner? What should he do; whither should he turn? He continually turned the subject over in his mind, without, however, reaching any definite conclusion. Nor is this to be wondered at. If the ordinary avenues of human industry were not available to him as a college graduate, they were now permanently closed. A man in his predicament at the present time might obtain the position of librarian in one of our inland cities; but such places are few and the applications are many. Bronson Alcott once offered his services as teacher of a primary school, a position he might have filled better than most, for its one requisite is kindliness, but the Concord school committee would not hear of it. If Hawthorne had attempted to turn pedagogue he might have met with a similar experience. Conway remarks very justly that an American author could not be expected to earn his own living in a country where foreign books could be pirated as they were in the United States until 1890, and this was especially true during the popularity of Dickens and George Eliot. Dickens was the great humanitarian writer of the nineteenth century, but he was also a caricaturist and a bohemian. He did not represent life as it is, but with a certain comical oddity. As an author he is to Hawthorne what a peony is to a rose, or a garnet is to a ruby; but ten, persons would purchase a novel of Dickens when one would select the "Twice Told Tales." Scott and Tennyson are exceptional instances of a high order of literary work which also proved fairly remunerative; but they do not equal Hawthorne in grace of diction and in the rare quality of his thought,--whatever advantages they may possess in other respects. Thackeray earned his living by his pen, but it was only in England that he could have done this. CHAPTER VI PEGASUS AT THE CART: 1839-1841 Horatio Bridge's dam was washed away in the spring of 1837, by a sudden and unprecedented rising of the Androscoggin River. Bridge was financially ruined, but like a brave and generous young man he did not permit this stroke of evil fortune, severe as it was, to oppress him heavily, and Hawthorne seems to have felt no shadow of it during his visit to Augusta the following summer. He returned to Salem in August with pleasanter anticipations than ever before,--to enjoy the society of his _fiancée_, and to prepare the second volume of "Twice Told Tales." The course of Hawthorne's life during the next twenty months is mostly a blank to us. He would seem to have exerted himself to escape from the monotone in which he had been living so long, but of his efforts, disappointments, and struggles against the giant coils of Fate, there is no report. He wrote the four Province House tales as a send-off to his second volume, as well as "The Toll-Gatherer's Day," "Footprints on the Seashore," "Snow-Flakes," and "Chippings with a Chisel," which are to be found in it. [Footnote: J. Hawthorne, 176.] There is a long blank in Hawthorne's diary during the winter of 1837-38 which may be owing to his indifference to the outer world at that time, but more likely because its contents have not yet been revealed to us. It was the period of Cilley's duel, and what Hawthorne's reflections were on that subject, aside from the account which he wrote for the _Democratic Review_, would be highly interesting now, but the absence of any reference to it is significant, and there is no published entry in his diary between December 6, 1837, and May 11, 1838. Horatio Bridge obtained the position of paymaster on the United States warship "Cyane," which arrived at Boston early in June, and on the 16th of the month Hawthorne went to call on his friend in his new quarters, which he found to be pleasant enough in their narrow and limited way. Bridge returned with him to Boston, and they dined together at the Tremont House, drinking iced champagne and claret in pitchers,--which latter would seem to have been a fashion of the place. Hawthorne's description of the day is purely external, and he tells us nothing of his friend,--concerning whom we were anxious to hear,--or of the new life on which he had entered. On July 4, his thirty-fifth birthday, he wrote a microscopic account of the proceedings on Salem Common, which is interesting now, but will become more valuable as time goes on and the customs of the American people change with it. The object of these detailed pictorial studies, which not only remind one of Dürer's drawings but of Carlyle's local descriptions (when he uses simple English and does not fly off into recondite comparisons), is not clearly apparent; but the artist has instincts of his own, like a vine which swings in the wind and seizes upon the first tree that its tendrils come into contact with. We sometimes wish that, as in the case of Bridge and his warship, they were not so objective and external, and that, like Carlyle, he would throw more of himself into them. On July 27, Hawthorne started on an expedition to the Berkshire Hills, by way of Worcester, remaining there nearly till the first of September, and describing the scenery, the people he met by the way, and the commencement at Williams College, which then took place in the middle of August, in his customary accurate manner. He has given a full and connected account of his travels; so full that we wonder how he found time to write to Miss Sophia Peabody. He would seem to have been entirely alone, and to have travelled mainly by stage. On the route from Pittsfield to North Adams he notices the sunset, and describes it in these simple terms: [Footnote: American Note-book, 130.] "After or about sunset there was a heavy shower, the thunder rumbling round and round the mountain wall, and the clouds stretching from rampart to rampart. When it abated the clouds in all parts of the visible heavens were tinged with glory from the west; some that hung low being purple and gold, while the higher ones were gray. The slender curve of the new moon was also visible, brightening amidst the fading brightness of the sunny part of the sky." At North Adams he takes notice of one of the Select-men, and gives this account of him: [Footnote: American Note-book, 153.] "One of the most sensible men in this village is a plain, tall, elderly person, who is overseeing the mending of a road,--humorous, intelligent, with much thought about matters and things; and while at work he had a sort of dignity in handling the hoe or crow-bar, which shows him to be the chief. In the evening he sits under the stoop, silent and observant from under the brim of his hat; but, occasion suiting, he holds an argument about the benefit or otherwise of manufactories or other things. A simplicity characterizes him more than appertains to most Yankees." He did not return to Salem until September 24. A month later he was at the Tremont House in Boston, looking out of the windows toward Beacon Street, which may have served him for an idea in "The Blithedale Romance." After this there are no entries published from his diary till the following spring, so that the manner in which he occupied himself during the winter of 1838-39 will have to be left to the imagination. On April 27, 1839, he wrote a letter to Miss Sophia Peabody from Boston, in which he says: "I feel pretty secure against intruders, for the bad weather will defend me from foreign invasion; and as to Cousin Haley, he and I had a bitter political dispute last evening, at the close of which he went to bed in high dudgeon, and probably will not speak to me these three days. Thus you perceive that strife and wrangling, as well as east winds and rain, are the methods of a kind Providence to promote my comfort,--which would not have been so well secured in any other way. Six or seven hours of cheerful solitude! But I will not be alone. I invite your spirit to be with me,--at any hour and as many hours as you please, but especially at the twilight hour before I light my lamp. I bid you at that particular time, because I can see visions more vividly in the dusky glow of firelight than either by daylight or lamplight. Come, and let me renew my spell against headache and other direful effects of the east wind. How I wish I could give you a portion of my insensibility! and yet I should be almost afraid of some radical transformation, were I to produce a change in that respect. If you cannot grow plump and rosy and tough and vigorous without being changed into another nature, then I do think, for this short life, you had better remain just what you are. Yes; but you will be the same to me, because we have met in eternity, and there our intimacy was formed. So get well as soon as you possibly can." This statement deserves consideration under two headings; and the last shall be first, and the first shall be last. It will be noticed that the accounts in Hawthorne's diary are for the most part of a dispassionate objective character, as if he had come down from the moon to take an observation of mundane affairs. His letters to Miss Peabody were also dispassionate, but strongly subjective, and, like the one just quoted, mainly evolved from his imagination, like orchids living in the air. It was also about this time that Carlyle wrote to Emerson concerning the _Dial_ that it seemed "like an unborn human soul." The orchid imagination was an influence of the time, penetrating everywhere like an ether. In the opening sentences in this letter, Hawthorne comes within an inch of disclosing his political opinions, and yet provokingly fails to do so. There is nothing about the man concerning which we are so much in the dark, and which we should so much like to know, as this; and it is certain from this letter that he held very decided opinions on political subjects and could defend them with a good deal of energy. On one occasion when Hawthorne was asked why he was a Democrat, he replied, "Because I live in a democratic country," which was, of course, simply an evasion; and such were the answers which he commonly gave to all interrogatories. His proclivities were certainly not democratic; but the greater the tenacity with which a man holds his opinions, the less inclined he feels to discuss them with others. The Boston aristocracy now vote the Democratic ticket out of opposition to the dominant party in Massachusetts, and Hawthorne may have done so for a similar reason. Hawthorne was now a weigher and gauger in the Boston Custom House, one of the most laborious positions in the government service. The defalcation of Swartwout with over a million dollars from the New York customs' receipts had forced upon President Van Buren the importance of filling such posts with honorable men, instead of political shysters, and Bancroft, though a rather narrow historian, was a gentleman and a scholar. He was the right man to appreciate Hawthorne, but whether he bestowed this place upon him of his own accord, or through the ulterior agency of Franklin Pierce, we are not informed. It is quite possible that Elizabeth Peabody had a hand in the case, for she was always an indefatigable petitioner for the benefit of the needy, and had opportunities for meeting Bancroft in Boston society. His kindness to Hawthorne was at least some compensation for having originated the most ill-favored looking public building in the city. [Footnote: The present Boston Custom House. George S. Hillard called it an architectural monstrosity.] Hawthorne's salary was twelve hundred dollars a year,--fully equal to eighteen hundred at the present time,--and his position appears to have been what is now called a store-keeper. He fully earned his salary. He had charge and oversight of all the dutiable imports that came to Long Wharf, the most important in the city, and was obliged to keep an account of all dutiable articles which were received there. He had to superintend personally the unloading of vessels, and although in some instances this was not unpleasant, he was constantly receiving shiploads of soft coal,--Sidney or Pictou coal,--which is the dirtiest stuff in the world; it cannot be touched without raising a dusty vapor which settles in the eyes, nose, and mouth, and inside the shirt-collar. He counted every basketful that was brought ashore, and his position on such occasions was to be envied only by the sooty laborers who handled that commodity. We wonder what the frequenters of Long Wharf thought of this handsome, poetic-looking man occupied in such a business. Yet he appreciated the value of this Spartan discipline,--the inestimable value of being for once in his life brought down to hard-pan and the plain necessities of life. The juice of wormwood is bitter, but it is also strengthening. On July 3, 1839, he wrote: [Footnote: American Note-book.] "I do not mean to imply that I am unhappy or discontented, for this is not the case. My life only is a burden in the same way that it is to every toilsome man, and mine is a healthy weariness, such as needs only a night's sleep to remove it. But from henceforth forever I shall be entitled to call the sons of toil my brethren, and shall know how to sympathize with them, seeing that I likewise have risen at the dawn, and borne the fervor of the midday sun, nor turned my heavy footsteps homeward till eventide. Years hence, perhaps, the experience that my heart is acquiring now will flow out in truth and wisdom." This is one of the noblest passages in his writings. On August 27 he notices the intense heat in the centre of the city, although it is somewhat cooler on the wharves. At this time Emerson may have been composing his "Wood Notes" or "Threnody" in the cool pine groves of Concord. Such is the difference between inheriting twenty thousand dollars and two thousand. Hawthorne lived in Boston at such a boarding-place as Doctor Holmes describes in the "Autocrat of the Breakfast Table," and for all we know it may have been the same one. He lived economically, reading and writing to Miss Peabody in the evening, and rarely going to the theatre or other entertainments,--a life like that of a store clerk whose salary only suffices for his board and clothing. George Bancroft was kindly disposed toward him, and would have introduced Hawthorne into any society that he could have wished to enter; but Hawthorne, then and always, declined to be lionized. Hawthorne made but one friend in Boston during this time, and that one, George S. Hillard, a most faithful and serviceable friend,--not only to Hawthorne during his life, but afterwards as a trustee for his family, and equally kind and helpful to them in their bereavement, which is more than could be said of all his friends,--especially of Pierce. Hillard belonged to the brilliant coterie of Cambridge literary men, which included Longfellow, Sumner and Felton. He was a lawyer, politician, editor, orator and author; at this time, or shortly afterward, Sumner's law partner; one of the most kindly sympathetic men, with a keen appreciation of all that is finest in art and literature, but somewhat lacking in firmness and independence of character. His "Six Months in Italy," written in the purest English, long served as a standard work for American travellers in that ideal land, and his rather unsymmetrical figure only made the graces of his oratory more conspicuous. Hawthorne kept at his work through summer's heat and winter's cold. On February 11, 1840, he wrote to his fiancée: "I have been measuring coal all day, on board of a black little British schooner, in a dismal dock at the north end of the city. Most of the time I paced the deck to keep myself warm.... "... Sometimes I descended into the dirty little cabin of the schooner, and warmed myself by a red-hot stove among biscuit barrels, pots and kettles, sea chests, and innumerable lumber of all sorts,--my olfactories, meanwhile, being greatly refreshed by the odor of a pipe, which the captain or some of his crew was smoking." [Illustration: HAWTHORNE. FROM THE PORTRAIT BY CHARLES OSGOOD IN 1840. IN THE POSSESSION OF MRS. RICHARD C. MANNING, SALEM, MASS. FROM NEGATIVE IN POSSESSION OF AND OWNED BY FRANK COUSIN, SALEM] One would have to go to Dante's "Inferno" to realize a situation more thoroughly disagreeable; yet the very pathos of Hawthorne's employment served to inspire him with elevated thoughts and beautiful reflections. His letters are full of aërial fancies. He notices what a beautiful day it was on April 18, 1840, and regrets that he cannot "fling himself on a gentle breeze and be blown away into the country." April 30 is another beautiful day,--"a real happiness to live; if he had been a mere vegetable, a hawthorn bush, he would have felt its influence." He goes to a picture gallery in the Athenaeum, but only mentions seeing two paintings by Sarah Clarke. He returns to Salem in October, and writes in his own chamber the passage already quoted, in which he mourns the lonely years of his youth, and the long, long waiting for appreciation, "while he felt the life chilling in his veins and sometimes it seemed as if he were already in the grave;" but an early return to his post gives him brighter thoughts. He takes notice of the magnificent black and yellow butterflies that have strangely come to Long Wharf, as if seeking to sail to other climes since the last flower had faded. Mr. Bancroft has appointed him to suppress an insurrection among the government laborers, and he writes to Miss Sophia Peabody: "I was not at the end of Long Wharf to-day, but in a distant region,--my authority having been put in requisition to quell a rebellion of the captain and 'gang' of shovellers aboard a coal-vessel. I would you could have beheld the awful sternness of my visage and demeanor in the execution of this momentous duty. Well,--I have conquered the rebels, and proclaimed an amnesty; so to-morrow I shall return to that paradise of measurers, the end of Long Wharf,--not to my former salt-ship, she being now discharged, but to another, which will probably employ me well-nigh a fortnight longer." A month later we meet with this ominous remark in his diary: "I was invited to dine at Mr. Bancroft's yesterday with Miss Margaret Fuller; but Providence had given me some business to do, for which I was very thankful." Had Hawthorne already encountered this remarkable woman with the feminine heart and masculine mind, and had he already conceived that aversion for her which is almost painfully apparent in his Italian diary? Certainly in many respects they were antipodes. The Whig party came into power on March 4, 1841, with "Tippecanoe" for a figure-head and Daniel Webster as its conductor of the "grand orchestra." A month later Bancroft was removed, and Hawthorne went with him, not at all regretful to depart. In fact, he had come to feel that he could not endure the Custom House, or at least his particular share of it, any longer. One object he had in view in accepting the position was, to obtain practical experience, and this he certainly did in a rough and unpleasant manner. The experience of a routine office, however, is not like that of a broker who has goods to sell and who must dispose of them to the best advantage, in order to keep his reputation at high-water mark; nor is it like the experience of a young doctor or a lawyer struggling to obtain a practice. Those are the men who know what life actually is; and it is this thoroughness of experience which makes the chief difference between a Dante and a Tennyson. These reflections lead directly to Hawthorne's casual and oft-repeated commentary on American politicians. He wrote March 15: "I do detest all offices--all, at least, that are held on a political tenure. And I want nothing to do with politicians. Their hearts wither away, and die out of their bodies. Their consciences are turned to india-rubber, or to some substance as black as that, and which will stretch as much. One thing, if no more, I have gained by my custom-house experience,--to know a politician." [Footnote: American Notebook, i. 220.] This seems rather severe, but at the time when Hawthorne wrote it, American politics were on the lowest plane of demagogism. It was the inevitable result of the spoils-of-office system, and the meanest species of the class were the ward politicians who received small government offices in return for services in canvassing ignorant foreign voters. They were naturally coarse, hardened adventurers, and it was such that Hawthorne chiefly came in contact with in his official business. Cleon, the brawling tanner of Athens, has reappeared in every representative government since his time, and plays his clownish part with multifarious variations; but it is to little purpose that we deride the men who govern us, for they are what we and our institutions have made them. If we want better representatives, we must mend our own ways and especially purge ourselves of political cant and national vanity,--which is the food that ward politicians grow fat on. The profession of a politician is based on instability, and he cannot acquire, as matters now stand, the solidity of character that we look for in other professions. So far, however, was Hawthorne at this juncture from considering men and things critically, that he closes the account of his first government experience in this rather optimistic manner: "Old Father Time has gone onward somewhat less heavily than is his wont when I am imprisoned within the walls of the Custom-house. My breath had never belonged to anybody but me. It came fresh from the ocean.... "... It was exhilarating to see the vessels, how they bounded over the waves, while a sheet of foam broke out around them. I found a good deal of enjoyment, too, in the busy scene around me. It pleased me to think that I also had a part to act in the material and tangible business of this life, and that a portion of all this industry could not have gone on without my presence." [Footnote: American Note-book, i. 230.] When Hawthorne philosophizes it is not in old threadbare proverbs or Orphic generalities, but always specifically and to the point. CHAPTER VII HAWTHORNE AS A SOCIALIST: 1841-1842 Who can compute the amount of mischief that Fourier has done, and those well-meaning but inexperienced dreamers who have followed after him? A Fourth-of-July firecracker once consumed the half of a large city. The boy who exploded it had no evil intentions; neither did Fourier and other speculators in philanthropy contemplate what might be the effect of their doctrines on minds actuated by the lowest and most inevitable wants. Wendell Phillips, in the most brilliant of his orations, said: "The track of God's lightning is a straight line from justice to iniquity," and one might have said to Phillips, in his later years, that there is in the affairs of men a straight line from infatuation to destruction. In what degree Fourier was responsible for the effusion of blood in Paris in the spring of 1871 it is not possible to determine; but the relation of Rousseau to the first French revolution is not more certain. _Fate_ is the spoken word which cannot be recalled, and who can tell the good and evil consequences that lie hidden in it? The proper cure for socialism, in educated minds, would be a study of the law. There we discover what a wonderful mechanism is the present organization of society, and how difficult it would be to reconstruct this, if it once were overturned. As society is constituted at present, the honest and industrious are always more or less at the mercy of the vicious and indolent, and the only protection against this lies in the right of individual ownership. In a general community of goods, there might be some means of preventing or punishing flagrant misdemeanors, but what protection could there be against indolence? Those who were ready and willing to work would have to bear all the burdens of society. In order that an idea should take external or concrete form it has to be married, as it were, to some desire or tendency in the individual. Reverend George Ripley had become imbued with Fourierism through his studies of French philosophy, but he had also been brought up on a farm, and preferred the fresh air and vigorous exercise of that mode of life to city preaching. He was endowed with a strong constitution and possessed of an independent fortune, and his aristocratic wife, more devoted than women of that class are usually, sympathized with his plans, and was prepared to follow him to the ends of the earth. He not only felt great enthusiasm for the project but was capable of inspiring others with it. There were many socialistic experiments undertaken about that time, but George Ripley's was the only one that has acquired a historical value. It is much to his credit that he gave the scheme a thorough trial, and by carrying it out to a logical conclusion proved its radical impracticability. Such a failure is more valuable than the successes of a hundred men who merely make their own fortunes and leave no legacy of experience that can benefit the human race. It must have been Elizabeth Peabody who persuaded Hawthorne to enlist in the Brook Farm enterprise. She wrote a paper for the _Dial_ [Footnote: _Dial_, ii. 361.] on the subject, explaining the object of the West Roxbury community and holding forth the prospect of the "higher life" which could be enjoyed there. Hawthorne was in himself the very antipodes of socialism, and it was part of the irony of his life that he should have embarked in such an experiment; but he invested a thousand dollars in it, which he had saved from his Custom House salary, and was one of the first on the ground. What he really hoped for from it--as we learn by his letters to Miss Sophia Peabody--was a means of gaining his daily bread, with leisure to accomplish a fair amount of writing, and at the same time to enter into such society as might be congenial to his future consort. It seemed reasonable to presume this, and yet the result did not correspond to it. He went to West Roxbury on April 12, 1841, and as it happened in a driving northeast snowstorm,--an unpropitious beginning, of which he has given a graphic account in "The Blithedale Romance." At first he liked his work at the Farm. The novelty of it proved attractive to him. On May 3 he wrote a letter to his sister Louisa, which reflects the practical nature of his new surroundings; and it must be confessed that this is a refreshing change from the sublunary considerations at his Boston boarding-house. He has already "learned to plant potatoes, to milk cows, and to cut straw and hay for the cattle, and does various other mighty works." He has gained strength wonderfully, and can do a day's work without the slightest inconvenience; wears a tremendous pair of cowhide boots. He goes to bed at nine, and gets up at half-past four to sound the rising-horn,--much too early for a socialistic paradise, where human nature is supposed to find a pleasant as well as a salutary existence. George Ripley would seem to be driving the wedge in by the larger end. Hawthorne is delighted with the topographical aspect, and writes: "This is one of the most beautiful places I ever saw in my life, and as secluded as if it were a hundred miles from any city or village. There are woods, in which we can ramble all day without meeting anybody or scarcely seeing a house. Our house stands apart from the main road, so that we are not troubled even with passengers looking at us. Once in a while we have a transcendental visitor, such as Mr. Alcott; but generally we pass whole days without seeing a single face save those of the brethren. The whole fraternity eat together; and such a delectable way of life has never been seen on earth since the days of the early Christians." [Footnote: J. Hawthorne, i. 228.] From Louisa Hawthorne's reply, it may be surmised that his family did not altogether approve of the Brook Farm venture, perhaps because it withdrew him from his own home at a time when they had looked with fond expectation for his return; and here we have a glimpse into the beautiful soul of this younger sister, otherwise so little known to us. Elizabeth is skeptical of its ultimate success, but Louisa is fearful that he may work too hard and wants him to take good care of himself. She is delighted with the miniature of him, which they have lately received: "It has one advantage over the original,--I can make it go with me where I choose!" Louisa wrote another warm and beautiful letter on June 11, recalling the days when they used to go fishing together on Lake Sebago, and adds: "Elizabeth Cleveland says she saw Mr. George Bradford in Lowell last winter, and he told her he was going to be associated with you; but they say his mind misgave him terribly when the time came for him to go to Roxbury, and whether to make such a desperate step or not he could not tell." [Footnote: J. Hawthorne, i. 232.] George P. Bradford was the masculine complement to Elizabeth Peabody--flitting across the paths of Emerson and Hawthorne throughout their lives. His name appears continually in the biographies of that time, but future generations would never know the sort of man he was, but for Louisa's amiable commentary. He appeared at Brook Farm a few days later, and became one of George Ripley's strongest and most faithful adherents. He is the historian of the West Roxbury community, and late in life the editor of the _Century_ asked him to write a special account of it for that periodical. Bradford did so, and received one hundred dollars in return for his manuscript; but it never was published, presumably because it was too original for the editor's purpose. Is it possible that Hawthorne put on a good face for this letter to his sister, in order to keep up appearances; or was it like the common experience of music and drawing teachers that the first lessons are the best performed; or did he really have some disagreement with Ripley, like that which he represents in "The Blithedale Romance"? The last is the more probable, although we do not hear of it otherwise. Spring is the least agreeable season for farming, with its muddy soil, its dressing the ground, its weeds to be kept down and its insects to be kept off. After the first week of June, the work becomes much pleasanter; and the harvesting is delightful,--stacking the grain, picking the fruit,--with the cheery wood fires, so restful to mind and body. Yet we find on August 12 that Hawthorne had become thoroughly disenchanted with his Arcadian life, although he admits that the labors of the farm were not so pressing as they had been. Ten days later, he refers to having spent the better part of a night with one of his co-workers, "who was quite out of his wits" and left the community next day. He then continues in his diary: [Footnote: American Notebook, ii. 15.] "It is extremely doubtful whether Mr. Ripley will succeed in locating his community on the farm. He can bring Mr. E---- to no terms, and the more they talk about the matter, the further they appear to be from a settlement. We must form other plans for ourselves; for I can see few or no signs that Providence purposes to give us a home here. I am weary, weary, thrice weary, of waiting so many ages. Whatever may be my gifts, I have not hitherto shown a single one that may avail to gather gold." Here are already three disaffected personages, desirous of escaping from an earthly paradise. Mr. Ripley has by no means an easy row to hoe. Yet he keeps on ploughing steadily through his difficulties, as he did through the soil of his meadows. In September we find Hawthorne at Salem, and on the third he writes: [Footnote: American Notebook, ii. 16.] "But really I should judge it to be twenty years since I left Brook Farm; and I take this to be one proof that my life there was unnatural and unsuitable, and therefore an unreal one. It already looks like a dream behind me. The real Me was never an associate of the community: there has been a spectral appearance there, sounding the horn at daybreak, and milking the cows, and hoeing potatoes, and raking hay, toiling in the sun, and doing me the honor to assume my name. But this spectre was not myself." This idea of himself as a spectre seems to have accompanied him much in the way that the daemon did Socrates, and to have served in a similar manner as a warning to him. He left Brook Farm almost exactly as he describes himself doing, in "The Blithedale Romance," and he returned again on the twenty-second, but the brilliant woodland carnival which he describes, both in his "Note-book" and in "The Blithedale Romance," did not take place there until September 28. It was a masquerade in which Margaret Fuller and Emerson appeared as invited guests, and held a meeting of the Transcendental club "_sub tegmine fagi_." As Hawthorne remarks, "Much conversation followed,"--in which he evidently found little to interest him. Margaret Fuller also made a present of a heifer to the live-stock of the Farm, of whose unruly gambols Hawthorne seems to have taken more particular notice. He would seem in fact to have attributed the same characteristics to the animal and its owner. Having more time at his own disposal, he now attempted to write another volume of history for Peter Parley's library, but, although this was rather a childish affair, he found himself unequal to it. "I have not," he said, "the sense of perfect seclusion here, which has always been essential to my power of producing anything. It is true, nobody intrudes into my room; but still I cannot be quiet. Nothing here is settled; and my mind will not be abstracted." During the whole of October he went on long woodland walks, sometimes alone and at others with a single companion. He tried, like Emerson, courting Nature in her solitudes, and made the acquaintance of her denizens as if he were the original Adam taking an account of his animal kingdom. He picks up a terrapin, the _Emys picta_, which attempts to hide itself from him in a stone wall, and carries it considerately to a pond of water; but there is not much to be found in the woods, and one can travel a whole day in the forest primeval without coming across anything better than a few squirrels and small birds. In fact, two young sportsmen once rode on horseback with their guns from the Missouri River to the Pacific Ocean without meeting any larger game than prairie-chickens. It was all in vain. Hawthorne's nature was not like Emerson's, and what stimulated the latter mentally made comparatively little impression on the former. Hawthorne found, then as always, that in order to practice his art, he must devote himself to it, wholly and completely, leaving side issues to go astern. In order to create an ideal world of his own, he was obliged to separate himself from all existing conditions, as Beethoven did when composing his symphonies. Composition for Hawthorne meant a severe mental strain. Those sentences, pellucid as a mountain spring, were not clarified without an effort. The faculty on which Hawthorne depended for this, as every artist does, was his imagination, and imagination is as easily disturbed as the electric needle. There is no fine art without sensitiveness. We see it in the portrait of Leonardo da Vinci, a man who could bend horseshoes in his hands; and Bismarck, who was also an artist in his way, confessed to the same mental disturbance from noise and general conversation, which Hawthorne felt at Brook Farm. It was the mental sensitiveness of Carlyle and Bismarck which caused their insomnia, and much other suffering besides. George Ripley published an essay in the _Dial_, in which he heralded Fourier as the great man who was destined to regenerate society; but Fourier has passed away, and society continues in its old course. What he left out of his calculations, or perhaps did not understand, was the principle of population. If food and raiment were as common as air and water, mankind would double its numbers every twelve or fifteen years, and the tendency to do so produces a pressure on poor human nature, which is almost like the scourge of a whip, driving it into all kinds of ways and means in order to obtain sufficient sustenance. Most notable among the methods thus employed is, and always has been, the division of labor, and it will be readily seen that a community like Brook Farm, where skilled labor, properly speaking, was unknown, and all men were all things by turns, could never sustain so large a population relatively as a community where a strict division of industries existed. If a nation like France, for instance, where the population is nearly stationary, were to adopt Fourier's plan of social organization, it would prove a more severe restriction on human life than the wars of Napoleon. This is the reason why the attempt to plant a colony of Englishmen in Tennessee failed so badly. There was a kind of division of labor among them, but it was purely a local and a foreign division and not adapted to the region about them. Ripley's method of allowing work to be counted by the hour instead of by the day or half-day, was of itself sufficient to prevent the enterprise from being a financial success. Farming everywhere except on the Western prairies requires the closest thrift and economy, and all hands have to work hard. Neither could such an experiment prove a success from a moral point of view. Emerson said of it: "The women did not object so much to a common table as they did to a common nursery." In truth one might expect that a common nursery would finally result in a free fight. The tendency of all such institutions would be to destroy the sanctity of family life; and it would also include a tendency to the deterioration of manliness. One of the professed objects of the Brook Farm association was, to escape from the evils of the great world,--from the trickery of trade, the pedantry of colleges, the flunkyism of office, and the arrogant pretensions of wealth. Every honest man must feel a sympathy with this; there are times when we all feel that the struggle of life is an unequal conflict, from which it would be a permanent blessing to escape; yet he who turns his back upon it, is like a soldier who runs away from the battle-field. It is the conflict with evil in the great world, and in ourselves, that constitutes virtue and develops character. It is _good_ to learn the trickery of knaves and to expose it, to contend against pedantry and set a better example, to administer offices with a modest impartiality, and to treat the gilded fool with a dignified contempt. But if the wings of the archangel are torn and soiled in his conflict with sin, does it not add to the honor of the victory? The man who left his wife and children, because he found that he could not live with them without occasionally losing his temper, committed a grievous wrong; and it is equally true that hypocrisy, the meanest of vices, may sometimes become a virtue. George P. Bradford, and a few others, enjoyed the life at Brook Farm, and would have liked to remain there longer. John S. Dwight, the translator of Goethe's and Schiller's ballads, [Footnote: One of the most musical translations in any language.] said in his old age that if he were a young man, he would be only too glad to return there; and it is undeniable that such a place is suited to a certain class of persons, both men and women. It cannot be repeated too often, however, that the true object of life is not happiness, but development. It is our special business on this planet, to improve the human race as our progenitors improved it, and developed it out of we know not what. By doing this, we also improve ourselves and happiness comes to us incidentally; but if we pursue happiness directly, we soon become pleasure-seekers, and, like Faust, join company with Mephistopheles. Happiness comes to a philosopher, perhaps while he is picking berries; to a judge, watching the approach of a thunder-storm; to a merchant, teaching his boy to skate. It came to Napoleon listening to a prayer-bell, and to Hawthorne playing games with his children. [Footnote: Perhaps also in his kindliness to the terrapin.] Happiness flies when we seek it, and steals upon us unawares. George P. Bradford's account of Brook Farm in the "Memorial History of Boston" [Footnote: Vol. iv. 330.] is not so satisfactory as it might have been if he had given more specific details in regard to its management. The general supposition has been that there was an annual deficit in the accounts of the association, which could only be met by Mr. Ripley himself, who ultimately lost the larger portion of his investment. It is difficult to imagine how such an experiment could end otherwise, and the final conflagration of the principal building, or "The Hive," as it was called, served as a fitting consummation of the whole enterprise,--a truly dramatic climax. George Ripley went to New York to become literary editor of the _Tribune_, and was as distinguished there for the excellence of his reviews, and the elegance of his turnout in Central Park as he had been for the use of the spade and pitchfork at West Roxbury. Mr. Bradford returned to the instruction of young ladies in French and Latin; and John S. Dwight became one of the civilizing forces of his time, by editing the Boston _Journal of Music_. None of them were the worse for their agrarian experiment. Even if the West Roxbury _commune_ had proved a success for two or three generations, it would not have sufficed for a test of Fourier's theory for it would have been a republic within a republic, protected by the laws and government of the United States, without being subjected to the inconvenience of its own political machinery. The only fair trial for such a system would be to introduce it in some tract of country especially set apart and made independent for the purpose; but the chances are ten to one that a community organized in this manner would soon be driven into the same process of formation that other colonies have passed through under similar conditions. The true socialism is the present organization of society, and although it might be improved in detail, to revolutionize it would be dangerous. Yet the interest that has been aroused at various times by discussions of the Brook Farm project, shows how strong the undercurrent is setting against the present order of things; and this is my chief excuse for making such a long digression on the subject. During these last months of his bachelorhood, Hawthorne appears to us somewhat in the light of a hibernating bear; for we hear nothing of him at that season at all. Between the last of October, 1841, and July, 1842, there are a large number of odd fancies, themes for romances, and the like, published from his diary, but no entries of a personal character. We hear incidentally that he was at Brook Farm during a portion of the spring, which is not surprising in view of the fact that Doctor Nathaniel Peabody had removed from Salem to Boston in the mean time. One conclusion Hawthorne had evidently arrived at during the winter months, and it was that his engagement to Miss Sophia Peabody ought to be terminated in the way all such affairs should be; viz., by matrimony. Their prospects in life were not brilliant, but it was difficult to foresee any advantage in waiting longer, and there were decided disadvantages in doing so. It was accordingly agreed that they should be married at, or near, the summer solstice, the most suitable of all times for weddings--or engagements. On June 20, he wrote to his _fiancée_ from Salem, reminding her that within ten days they were to become man and wife, and added this significant reflection: "Nothing can part us now; for God himself hath ordained that we shall be one. So nothing remains but to reconcile yourself to your destiny. Year by year we shall grow closer to each other; and a thousand years hence, we shall be only in the honeymoon of our marriage." Yet we find him writing again the tenderest and most graceful of love-letters on June 30. [Footnote: J. Hawthorne, i. 241.] The wedding has evidently been postponed; but two days later he is in Boston, and finds a pleasant recreation watching the boys sail their toy boats on the Frog Pond. The ceremony finally was performed on July 9, and it was only the day previous that Hawthorne wrote the following letter, which is dated from 54 Pinckney Street: "MY DEAR SIR: "Though personally a stranger to you, I am about to request of you the greatest favor which I can receive from any man. I am to be married to Miss Sophia Peabody to-morrow, and it is our mutual desire that you should perform the ceremony. Unless it should be decidedly a rainy day, a carriage will call for you at half-past eleven o'clock in the forenoon. "Very respectfully yours, "NATH. HAWTHORNE. "REV. JAMES F. CLARKE, "Chestnut St." George S. Hillard lived on Pinckney Street, and Hawthorne may have been visiting him at the moment. The Peabodys attended service at Mr. Clarke's church in Indiana Place, where Hawthorne may also have gone with them. He could not have made a more judicious choice; but, singularly enough, although Mr. Clarke became Elizabeth Peabody's life-long friend, and even went to Concord to lecture, he and Hawthorne never met again after this occasion. The ceremony was performed at the house of Sophia Peabody's father, No. 13 West Street, a building of which not one stone now rests upon another. It was a quiet family wedding (such as oftenest leads to future happiness), and most deeply impressive to those concerned in it. What must it have been to Hawthorne, who had known so much loneliness, and had waited so long for the comfort and sympathy which only a devoted wife can give? Time has drawn a veil over Hawthorne's honeymoon, but exactly four weeks after the wedding, we find him and his wife installed in the house at Concord, owned by the descendants of Reverend Dr. Ripley. It will be remembered that Hawthorne had invested his only thousand dollars in the West Roxbury Utopia, whence it was no longer possible to recover it. He had, however, an unsubstantial Utopian sort of claim for it, against the Association, which he placed in the hands of George S. Hillard, and subsequent negotiation would seem to have resulted in giving Hawthorne a lease of the Ripley house, or "Old Manse," in return for it. It was already classic ground, for Emerson had occupied the house for a time and had written his first book there; and thither Hawthorne went to locate himself, determined to try once more if he could earn his living by his pen. [Illustration: THE OLD MANSE, RESIDENCE OF DR. RIPLEY] CHAPTER VIII CONCORD AND THE OLD MANSE: 1842-1845 The Ripley house dates back to the times of Captain Daniel Hathorne, or even before him, and at Concord Fight the British left wing must have extended close to it. Old and unpainted as it is, it gives a distinct impression of refinement and good taste. Alone, I believe, among the Concord houses of former times, it is set back far enough from the country-road to have an avenue leading to it, lined with balm of Gilead trees, and guarded at the entrance by two tall granite posts somewhat like obelisks. On the further side of the house, Dr. Ripley had planted an apple orchard, which included some rare varieties, especially the blue pearmain, a dark-red autumn apple with a purple bloom upon it like the bloom upon the rye. A high rounded hill on the northeast partially shelters the house from the storms in that direction; and on the opposite side the river sweeps by in a magnificent curve, with broad meadows and rugged hills, leading up to the pale-blue outline of Mount Wachusett on the western horizon. The Musketequid or Concord River has not been praised too highly. Its clear, gently flowing current, margined by bulrushes and grassy banks, produces an effect of mental peacefulness, very different from the rushing turbulent waters and rocky banks of Maine and New Hampshire rivers. From whatever point you approach the Old Manse, it becomes the central object in a charming country scene, and it does not require the peculiar effect of mouldering walls to make it picturesque. It has stood there long, and may it long remain. There was formerly an Indian encampment on the same ground,--a well-chosen position both strategically and for its southern exposure. Old Mrs. Ripley had a large collection of stone arrow-heads, corn-mortars, and other relics of the aborigines, which she used to show to the young people who came to call on her grandchildren; and there were among them pieces of a dark-bluish porphyry which she said was not to be found in Massachusetts, but must have been brought from northern New England. There was no reason why they should not have been. The Indians could go from Concord in their canoes to the White Mountains or the Maine lakes, and shoot the deer that came down to drink from the banks of the river; but the deer disappeared before the advance of the American farmer, and the Indians went with them. Now a grandson of Madam Ripley, in the bronze likeness of a minuteman of 1775, stands sentinel at "The Old North Bridge." Hawthorne ascended the hill opposite his house and wrote of the view from it: "The scenery of Concord, as I beheld it from the summit of the hill, has no very marked characteristics, but has a great deal of quiet beauty, in keeping with the river. There are broad and peaceful meadows, which, I think, are among the most satisfying objects in natural scenery. The heart reposes on them with a feeling that few things else can give, because almost all other objects are abrupt and clearly defined; but a meadow stretches out like a small infinity, yet with a secure homeliness which we do not find either in an expanse of water or air." The great cranberry meadows below the north bridge are sometimes a wonderful place in winter, when the river overflows its banks and they become a broad sheet of ice extending for miles. There one can have a little skating, an exercise of which Hawthorne was always fond. It was now, and not at Brook Farm, that he found his true Arcadia, and we have his wife's testimony that for the first eighteen months or more at the Old Manse, they were supremely happy. Every morning after breakfast he donned the blue frock, which he had worn at West Roxbury, and went to the woodshed to saw and split wood for the daily consumption. After that he ascended to his study in the second story, where he wrote and pondered until dinner-time. It appears also that he sometimes assisted in washing the dishes--like a helpful mate. After dinner he usually walked to the post-office and to a reading-room in the centre of the town, where he looked over the Boston _Post_ for half an hour. Later in the afternoon, he went rowing or fishing on the river, but his wife does not seem to have accompanied him in these excursions, for Judge Keyes, who often met him in his boat, does not mention seeing her with him. In the evenings he read Shakespeare with Mrs. Hawthorne, commencing with the first volume, and going straight through to the end, "Titus Andronicus" and all,--and this must have occupied them a large portion of the winter. How can a man fail to be happy in such a mode of life! Hawthorne also went swimming in the river when the weather suited--rather exceptional in Concord for a middle-aged gentleman; but there were two very attractive bathing places near the Old Manse, one, a little above on the opposite side of the river, and the other, afterwards known as Simmons's Landing, where there was a row of tall elms a short distance below the bridge. It is probable that Hawthorne frequented the latter place, as being more remote from human habitations. He did not take to his gun again, although he could see the wild ducks in autumn, flying past his house. There were grouse and quail in the woods, and woodcock were to be found along the brook which ran through Emerson's pasture; but perhaps Hawthorne had become too tenderhearted for field-sports. If Boston is the hub of the universe, Concord might be considered as the linchpin which holds it on. Its population was originally derived from Boston, and it must be admitted that it retains more Bostonian peculiarities than most other New England towns. It does not assimilate readily to the outside world. Nor is it surprising that few local visitors called upon the Hawthornes at the Old Manse. Emerson, always hospitable and public-spirited, went to call on them at once; and John Keyes, also a liberal-minded man, introduced Hawthorne at the reading-club. Margaret Fuller came and left a book for Hawthorne to read, which may have annoyed him more than anything she could have said. Elizabeth Hoar, a woman of exalted character, to whose judgment Emerson sometimes applied for a criticism of his verses, also came sometimes; but the Old Manse was nearly a mile away from Emerson's house, and also from what might be called the "court end" of the town. Hawthorne's nearest neighbor was a milk-farmer named George L. Prescott, afterward Colonel of the Thirty-second Massachusetts Volunteers. He not only brought them milk, but also occasionally a bouquet culled out of his own fine nature, as a tribute to genius. A slightly educated man, he was nevertheless one of Nature's gentlemen, and his death in Grant's advance on Richmond was a universal cause of mourning at a time when so many brave lives were lost. Hawthorne, as usual, was on the lookout for ghosts, and there could not have been a more suitable abode for those airy nothings, than the Old Manse. Mysterious sounds were heard in it repeatedly, especially in the nighttime, when the change of temperature produces a kind of settlement in the affairs of old woodwork. Under date of August 8 he writes in his diary: "We have seen no apparitions as yet,--but we hear strange noises, especially in the kitchen, and last night, while sitting in the parlor, we heard a thumping and pounding as of somebody at work in my study. Nay, if I mistake not (for I was half asleep), there was a sound as of some person crumpling paper in his hand in our very bedchamber. This must have been old Dr. Ripley with one of his sermons." Evidently he would have preferred seeing a ghost to receiving an honorary degree from Bowdoin College, and if the shade of Doctor Ripley had appeared to him in a dissolving light, like the Röntgen rays, Hawthorne would certainly have welcomed him as a kindred spirit and have expressed his pleasure at the manifestation. Another idiosyncrasy of his, which seems like the idiom in a language, was his total indifference to distinguished persons, simply as such. It was not that he considered all men on a level, for no one recognized more clearly the profound inequalities of human nature; but he was quite as likely to take an interest in a store clerk as in a famous writer. It is not necessary to suppose that a man is a parasite of fame because he goes to a President's reception, or wishes to meet a celebrated English lecturer. It is natural that we should desire to know how such people appear--their expression, their tone of voice, their general behavior; but Hawthorne did not care for this. At the time of which we write, Doctor Samuel G. Howe, the hero of Greek independence and the mental liberator of Laura Bridgman, was a more famous man than Emerson or Longfellow. He came to Concord with his brilliant wife, and they called at the Old Manse, where Mrs. Hawthorne received them very cordially, but they saw nothing of her husband, except a dark figure gliding through the entry with his hat over his eyes. One can only explain this by one of those fits of exceeding bashfulness that sometimes overtake supersensitive natures. School-girls just budding into womanhood often behave in a similar manner; and they are no more to be censured for it than Hawthorne,--to whom it may have caused moments of poignant self-reproach in his daily reflections. But Doctor Howe was the man of all men whom Hawthorne ought to have known, and half an hour's conversation might have made them friends for life. George William Curtis was a remarkably brilliant young man, and gave even better promise for the future than he afterwards fulfilled,--as the editor of a weekly newspaper. He was at Brook Farm with Hawthorne, and afterward followed him to Concord, but is only referred to by Hawthorne once, and then in the briefest manner. Neither has Hawthorne much to say of Emerson; but Thoreau and Ellery Channing evidently attracted his attention, for he refers to them repeatedly in his diary, and he has left the one life-like portrait of Thoreau--better than a photograph--that now exists. He surveys them both in rather a critical manner, and takes note that Thoreau is the more substantial and original of the two; and he is also rather sceptical as to Channing's poetry, which Emerson valued at a high rate; yet he narrowly missed making a friend of Channing, with whom he afterward corresponded in a desultory way. We should not have known of Hawthorne's skating at Concord, but for Mrs. Hawthorne's "Memoirs," from which we learn that he frequently skated on the overflowed meadows, where the Lowell railway station now stands. She writes: "Wrapped in his cloak, he moved like a self-impelled Greek statue, stately and grave." This is the manner in which we should imagine Hawthorne to have skated; but all others were a foil to her husband in the eyes of his wife. [Footnote: "Memories of Hawthorne," 52.] He was evidently a fine skater, gliding over the ice in long sweeping curves. Emerson was also a dignified skater, but with a shorter stroke, and stopping occasionally to take breath, or look about him, as he did in his lectures. Thoreau came sometimes and performed rare glacial exploits, interesting to watch, but rather in the line of the professional acrobat. What a transfiguration of Hawthorne, to think of him skating alone amid the reflections of a brilliant winter sunset! When winter came Emerson arranged a course of evening receptions at his house for the intellectual people of Concord, with apples and gingerbread for refreshments. Curtis attended these, and has told us how Hawthorne always sat apart with an expression on his face like a distant thunder-cloud, saying little, and not only listening to but watching the others. Curtis noticed a certain external and internal resemblance in him to Webster, who was at times a thunderous-looking person--denoting, I suppose, the electric concentration in his cranium. Emerson also watched Hawthorne, and the whole company felt his silent presence, and missed him greatly once or twice when he failed to come. Miss Elizabeth Hoar said: "The people about Emerson, Channing, Thoreau and the rest, echo his manner so much that it is a relief to him to meet a man like Hawthorne, on whom his own personality makes no impression." Neither did Mrs. Emerson echo her husband. The greater a man is, intellectually, the more distinct his difference from a general type and also from other men of genius. No two personalities could be more unlike than Hawthorne and Emerson. It would seem to be part of the irony of Fate that they should have lived on the same street, and, have been obliged to meet and speak with each other. One was like sunshine, the other shadow. Emerson was transparent, and wished to be so; he had nothing to conceal from friend or enemy. Hawthorne was simply impenetrable. Emerson was cordial and moderately sympathetic. Hawthorne was reserved, but his sympathies were as profound as the human soul itself. To study human nature as Hawthorne and Shakespeare did, and to make models of their acquaintances for works of fiction, Emerson would have considered a sin; while the evolution of sin and its effect on character was the principal study of Hawthorne's life. One was an optimist, and the other what is sometimes unjustly called a pessimist; that is, one who looks facts in the face and sees people as they are. [Footnote: "Sketches from Concord and Appledore."] While Emerson's mind was essentially analytic, Hawthorne's was synthetic, and, as Conway says, he did not receive the world into his intellect, but into his heart, or soul, where it was mirrored in a magical completeness. The notion that the artist requires merely an observing eye is a superficial delusion. Observation is worth little without reflection, and everything depends on the manner in which the observer deals with his facts. Emerson looked at life in order to penetrate it; Hawthorne, in order to comprehend it, and assimilate it to his own nature. The one talked heroism and the other lived it. Not but that Emerson's life was a stoical one, but Hawthorne's was still more so, and only his wife and children knew what a heart there was in him. The world will never know what these two great men thought of one another. Hawthorne has left some fragmentary sentences concerning Emerson, such as, "that everlasting rejecter of all that is, and seeker for he knows not what," and "Emerson the mystic, stretching his hand out of cloud-land in vain search for something real;" but he likes Emerson's ingenuous way of interrogating people, "as if every man had something to give him." However, he makes no attempt at a general estimate; although this expression should also be remembered: "Clergymen, whose creed had become like an iron band about their brows, came to Emerson to obtain relief,"--a sincere recognition of his spiritual influence. Several witnesses have testified that Emerson had no high opinion of Hawthorne's writing,--that he preferred Reade's "Christie Johnstone" to "The Scarlet Letter," but Emerson never manifested much interest in art, simply for its own sake. Like Bismarck, whom he also resembled in his enormous self-confidence, he cared little for anything that had not a practical value. He read Shakespeare and Goethe, not so much for the poetry as for the "fine thoughts" he found in them. George Bradford stated more than once that Emerson showed little interest in the pictorial art; and after walking through the sculpture-gallery of the Vatican, he remarked that the statues seemed to him like toys. His essay on Michel Angelo is little more than a catalogue of great achievements; he recognizes the moral impressiveness of the man, but not the value of his sublime conceptions. Music, neither he nor Hawthorne cared for, for it belongs to emotional natures. In his "Society and Solitude" Emerson has drawn a picture of Hawthorne as the lover of a hermitical life; a picture only representing that side of his character, and developed after Emerson's fashion to an artistic extreme. "Whilst he suffered at being seen where he was, he consoled himself with the delicious thought of the inconceivable number of places where he was not," and "He had a remorse running to despair, of his social _gaucheries_, and walked miles and miles to get the twitching out of his face, the starts and shrugs out of his shoulders." [Footnote: "Society and Solitude," 4, 5.] There is a touch of arrogance in this, and it merely marks the difference between the modest author of the "Essays," and the proud, censorious Emerson of 1870; but his love of absolute statements ofttimes led him into strange contradictions, and the injustice which results from judging our fellow-mortals by an inflexible standard was the final outcome of his optimism. Hawthorne was more charitable when he remarked that without Byron's faults we should not have had his virtues; but the truth lies between the two. There have been many instances of genius as sensitive as Hawthorne's in various branches of art: Shelley and Southey, Schubert and Chopin, Correggio and Corot. Southey not only blushed red but blushed blue--as if the life were going out of him; and in Chopin and Correggio at least we feel that they could not have been what they were without it. Napoleon, whose nerves were like steel wires, suffered nevertheless from a peculiar kind of physical sensitiveness. He could not take medicines like other men,--a small dose had a terrible effect on him,--and it was much the same with respect to changes of food, climate, and the like. What Hawthorne required was sympathetic company. Do not we all require it? The hypercritical morality of the Emersonians, especially in Concord, could not have been favorable to his mental ease and comfort. How could a man in a happily married condition feel anything but repugnance to Thoreau's idea of marriage as a necessary evil; or Alcott's theory that eating animal food tended directly to the commission of crime? On the first anniversary of Hawthorne's wedding, a tragical drama was enacted in Concord, in which he was called upon to perform a subordinate part. One Miss Hunt, a school-teacher and the daughter of a Concord farmer, drowned herself in the river nearly opposite the place where Hawthorne was accustomed to bathe. The cause of her suicide has never been adequately explained, but as she was a transcendentalist, or considered herself so, there were those who believed that in some occult way that was the occasion of it. However, as one of her sisters afterward followed her example, it would seem more likely to have come from the development of some family trait. She was seen walking upon the bank for a long time, before she took the final plunge; but the catastrophe was not discovered until near evening. Ellery Channing came with a man named Buttrick to borrow Hawthorne's boat for the search, and Hawthorne went with them. As it happened, they were the ones who found the corpse, and Hawthorne's account in his diary of its recovery is a terribly accurate description,--softened down and poetized in the rewritten statement of "The Blithedale Romance." There is in fact no description of a death in Homer or Shakespeare so appalling as this literal transcript of the veritable fact. [Footnote: J. Hawthorne, i. 300.] What concerns us here, however, are the comments he set down on the dolorous event. Concerning her appearance, he says: "If she could have foreseen while she stood, at five o'clock that morning on the bank of the river, how her maiden corpse would have looked eighteen hours afterwards, and how coarse men would strive with hand and foot to reduce it to a decent aspect, and all in vain,--it would surely have saved her from the deed." And again: "I suppose one friend would have saved her; but she died for want of sympathy--a severe penalty for having cultivated and refined herself out of the sphere of her natural connections." The first remark has often been misunderstood. It is not the vanity of women, which is after all only a reflection (or the reflective consequence) of the admiration of man, which Hawthorne intends, but that delicacy of feeling which Nature requires of woman for her own protection; and he may not have been far wrong in supposing that if Miss Hunt had foreseen the exact consequences of her fatal act she would not have committed it. Hawthorne's remark that her death was a consequence of having refined and cultivated herself beyond the reach of her relatives, seems a rather hard judgment. The latter often happens in American life, and although it commonly results in more or less family discord, are we to condemn it for that reason? If she died as Hawthorne imagines, from the lack of intellectual sympathy, we may well inquire if there was no one in Concord who might have given aid and encouragement to this young aspiring soul. "Take her up tenderly; Lift her with care, Fashioned so slenderly, Young and so fair." And one is also tempted to add: "Alas! for the rarity Of Christian charity." Hawthorne's earthly paradise only endured until the autumn of 1843. When cool weather arrived, want and care came also. On November 26 he wrote to George S. Hillard: "I wish at some leisure moment you would give yourself the trouble to call into Munroe's book-store and inquire about the state of my 'Twice-told Tales.' At the last accounts (now about a year since) the sales had not been enough to pay expenses; but it may be otherwise now--else I shall be forced to consider myself a writer for posterity; or at all events not for the present generation. Surely the book was puffed enough to meet with a sale." [Footnote: London Athenæum, August 10, 1889.] The interpretation of this is that Longfellow, Hillard and Bridge could appreciate Hawthorne's art, but the solid men of Boston (with some rare exceptions) could not. Even Webster preferred the grotesque art of Dickens to Hawthorne's "wells of English undefiled." Recently, one of the few surviving original copies of "Fanshawe" was sold at auction for six hundred dollars. Such is the difference between genius and celebrity. The trouble then and now is that wealthy Americans as a class feel no genuine interest in art or literature. They do not form a true aristocracy, but a plutocracy, and are for the most part very poorly educated. It was formerly the brag of the Winthrops and Otises that they could go through college and learn their lessons in the recitation-room. Now they go to row, and play foot-ball, and after they graduate, they leave the best portion of their lives behind them. Then if they have a talent for business they become absorbed in commercial affairs; or if not, they travel from one country to another, picking up a smattering of everything, but not resting long enough in any one place for their impressions to develop and bear good fruit. They are not like the aristocratic classes of England, France and Germany, who become cultivated men and women, and serve to maintain a high standard of art and literature in those countries. The captain of a Cunard steamship, who owned quite a library, said in 1869: "I have bought some very interesting books in New York, especially by a writer named Hawthorne, but the type and paper are so poor that they are not worth binding." The reason why American publishers do not bring out books in such good form as foreign publishers--is that there is no demand for a first-rate article. Thus do the fine arts languish. When rich young Americans take as much interest in painting and sculpture as they do in foot-ball and yachting, we shall have our Vandycks and Murillos,--if nothing better. Discouraged with the ill success of "Fanshawe," Hawthorne had limited himself since then to the writing of short sketches, such as would be acceptable to the magazine editors, and now that he had formed this habit, he found it difficult to escape from it. He informs us in the preface to "Mosses from an Old Manse" that he had hoped a more serious and extended plot would come to him on the banks of Concord River, but his imagination did not prove equal to the occasion. Most of the stories in "Mosses" must have been composed at Concord, but "Mrs. Bull-Frog'" and "Monsieur du Miroir" must have been written previously, for he refers to them in a letter at Brook Farm. A few were published in the _Democratic Review_, and others may have been elsewhere; but the proceeds he derived from them would not have supported a day-laborer, and toward the close of his second year at the Manse, Hawthorne found himself running in debt for the necessaries of life. He endured this with his usual stoical reticence, although there is nothing like debt to sicken a man's heart,--unless he be a decidedly light-minded man. Better fortune, however, was on its way to him in the shape of a political revolution. On March 3, 1844, a daughter was born to the Hawthornes, whom they named Una, in spite of Hillard's objection that the name was too poetic or too fanciful for the prosaic practicalities of real life. The name was an excellent one for a poet's daughter, and did not seem out of place in Arcadian Concord. Miss Una grew up into a graceful, fair and poetic young lady,--in all respects worthy of her name. She had an uncommonly fine figure, and, as often happens with first-born children, resembled her father much more than her mother. Her name also suggests the early influence of Spenser in her father's style and mode of thought. Soon after this fortunate event Hawthorne wrote a letter to Hillard, in which he said: "I find it a very sober and serious kind of happiness that springs from the birth of a child. It ought not come too early in a man's life--not till he has fully enjoyed his youth--for methinks the spirit can never be thoroughly gay and careless again, after this great event. We gain infinitely by the exchange; but we do give up something nevertheless. As for myself who have been a trifler preposterously long, I find it necessary to come out of my cloud-region, and allow myself to be woven into the sombre texture of humanity." It seems then that his conscience sometimes reproached him, but this only proves that his moral nature was in a healthy normal condition. There was a certain kind of indolence in him, a love of the _dolce far niente_, and an inclination to general inactivity which he may have inherited from his seafaring ancestors. Much better so, than to suffer from the nervous restlessness, which is the rule rather than the exception in New England life. In the same letter he mentions having forwarded a story to _Graham's Magazine_, which was accepted but not yet published after many months. He also anticipates an amelioration of his affairs from a Democratic victory in the fall elections. Meanwhile, Horatio Bridge had been traversing the high seas in the "Cyane," which was finally detailed to watch for slavers and to protect American commerce on the African coast. He had kept a journal of his various experiences and observations, which he sent to Hawthorne with a rather diffident interrogation as to whether it might be worth publishing. Hawthorne was decidedly of the opinion that it ought to be published,--in which we cordially agree with him,--and was well pleased to edit it for his friend; and, although it has now shared the fate of most of the books of its class, it is excellent reading for those who chance to find a copy of it. Bridge was a good observer, and a candid writer. The election of 1844 was the most momentous that had yet taken place in American history. It decided the annexation of Texas, and the acquisition of California, with a coast-line on the Pacific Ocean nearly equal to that on the Atlantic; but it also brought with it an unjust war of greed and spoliation, and other evil consequences of which we are only now begining to reach the end. The slaveholders and the Democratic leaders desired Texas in order to perpetuate their control of the government, and it was precisely through this measure that they lost it,--as happens so often in human affairs. It was the gold discoveries in California that upset their calculations. California would _not_ come into the Union as a slave state. Enraged at this failure, the Southern politicians made a desperate attempt to recover lost ground, by seizing on the fertile prairies in the Northwest; but there they came into conflict with the industrial classes of the North, who fought them on their own ground and abolished slavery. Never had public injustice been followed by so swift and terrible a retribution. In regard to the candidates of 1844, it was hardly possible to compare them. Polk possessed the ability to preside over the House of Representatives, but he did not rise above this; while Clay could be fairly compared on some points with Washington himself, and united with this a persuasive eloquence second only to Webster's. He was practically defeated by fifteen or twenty thousand abolitionists who preferred to throw away their votes rather than to cast them for a slave-holder. Hawthorne, in the quiet seclusion of his country home, did not realize this danger to the Republic. He only knew that his friends were victorious, and was happy in the expectation of escaping from his debts, and of providing more favorably for his little family. CHAPTER IX "MOSSES PROM AN OLD MANSE": 1845 There is no evidence in the Hawthorne documents or publications to show exactly when the first edition of "Mosses from an Old Manse" made its appearance, and copies of it are now exceedingly rare, but we find the Hawthorne family in Salem reading the book in the autumn of 1845, so that it was probably brought out at that time and helped to maintain its author during his last days at Concord. There must have been some magical influence in the Old Manse or in its surrounding scenery, to have stimulated both Emerson's and Hawthorne's love of Nature to such a degree. Emerson's eye dilates as he looks upon the sunshine gilding the trunks of the balm of Gilead trees on his avenue; and Hawthorne dwells with equal delight on the luxuriant squash vines which spread over his vegetable garden. Discoursing on this he says: "Speaking of summer squashes, I must say a word of their beautiful and varied forms. They presented an endless diversity of urns and vases, shallow or deep, scalloped or plain, molded in patterns which a sculptor would do well to copy, since art has never invented anything more graceful." And again: "A cabbage, too--especially the early Dutch cabbage, which swells to a monstrous circumference, until its ambitious heart often bursts asunder--is a matter to be proud of when we can claim a share with the earth and sky in producing it." It would seem as if no one before Hawthorne had rightly observed these common vegetables, whose external appearance is always before our eyes. He not only humanizes whatever attracts his attention, but he looks through a refining medium of his own personality. He has the gift of Midas to bring back the Golden Age for us. Who besides Homer has been able to describe a chariot-race, and who but Hawthorne could extract such poetry from a farmer's garden? If we compare this introductory chapter with such earlier sketches as "The Vision at the Fountain" and "The Toll-Gatherer's Day," we recognize the progress that Hawthorne has made since the first volume of "Twice Told Tales." We are no longer reminded of the plain unpainted house on Lake Sebago. His style is not only more graceful, but has acquired greater fulness of expression, and he is evidently working in a deeper and richer vein of thought. Purity of expression is still his polar star, and his writing is nowhere overloaded, but it has a warmer tone, a deeper perspective, and an atmospheric quality which painters call _chi-aroscuro_. He charms with pleasing fancies, while he penetrates to the soul. Hawthorne rarely repeats himself in details, and never in designs. Two of Dickens's most interesting novels, "Oliver Twist" and "David Copperfield," are constructed on the same theme, but each of the studies in this collection has a distinct individuality which appeals to the reader after a fashion of its own. Each has its moral, or rather central, idea to which all its component parts are related, and teaches a lesson of its own, so unobtrusively that we become possessed of it almost unawares. Some are intensely, even tragically, serious; others so light and airy that they seem as if woven out of gossamer. There are a few, however, that do not harmonize with the general tone and character of the rest,--especially "Mrs. Bull-Frog," which Hawthorne himself confessed to having been an experiment, and which strangely enough is much more in the style of his son Julian. "Monsieur du Miroir" and "Sketches from Memory" are relics of his earlier writings; perhaps also "Feather-Top" and "The Procession of Life." It would have been better perhaps if "Young Goodman Brown" had been used to light a fire at the Old Manse. "Monsieur du Miroir" is chiefly interesting as an example of Hawthorne's faculty for elaborating the most simple subject until every possible phase of it has been exhausted. It may also throw some light scientifically on the origin of consciousness. We see ourselves reflected not only in the mirror, but on the blade of a knife, or a puddle in the road; and, if we look sharply enough, in the eyes of other men--even in the expression of their faces. In such manner does Nature force upon us a recognition of our various personalities--the nucleus of self-knowledge, and self-respect. Whittier once spoke of "Young Goodman Brown" as indicating a mental peculiarity in Hawthorne, which like the cuttle-fish rarely rises to the surface. The plot is cynical, and largely enigmatical. The very name of it (in the way Hawthorne develops the story) is a fearful satire on human nature. He may have intended this for an exposure of the inconsistency, and consequent hypocrisy, of Puritanism; but the name of Goodman Brown's wife is Faith, and this suggests that Brown may have been himself intended for an incarnation of _doubt_, or _disbelief_ carried to a logical extreme. Whatever may have been Hawthorne's design, the effect is decidedly unpleasant. Emerson talked in proverbs, and Hawthorne in parables. The finest sketches in this collection are parables. "The Birth Mark," "Rappacini's Daughter," "A Select Party," "Egotism," and "The Artist of the Beautiful." "The Celestial Railroad" is an allegory, a variation on "Pilgrim's Progress." "The Birth Mark" and "Rappacini's Daughter" are like divergent lines, which originate at an single point; and that point is the radical viciousness of trying experiments on human beings. It is bad enough, although excusable, to vivisect dogs and rabbits; but why should we attempt the same course of procedure with those that are nearest and dearest to us? Such parables were not required in the time of Tiberius Cæsar and men and women grew up in a natural, vigorous manner; but now we have become so scientific that we continually attempt to improve on Nature,--like the artist who left the rainbow out of his picture of Niagara because its colors did not harmonize with the background. The line of divergence in "The Birth Mark" is indicated by its name. We all have our birth-marks,--traits of character, which may be temporarily suppressed, or relegated to the background, but which cannot be eradicated and are certain to reappear at unguarded moments, or on exceptional occasions. Education and culture can do much to soften and temper the disposition, but the original material remains the same. The father who attempts to force his son into a mode of life for which Nature did not intend him, or the mother who quarrels with her daughter's friends, commits an error similar to that of Hawthorne's alchemist, who endeavors to remove the birthmark from the otherwise beautiful face of his wife, but only succeeds in effecting this together with her death. The tragical termination of the alchemist's experiments, the pathetic yielding up of life by his sweet "Clytie," is described with an impressive tenderness. She sinks to her last sleep without a murmur of reproach. "Rappacini's Daughter" might serve as a protest against bringing up children in an exceptional and abnormal manner. I once knew an excellent lady, who, with the best possible intentions, brought up her daughter to be different from all other girls. As a consequence, she _was_ different,--could not assimilate herself to others. She had no admirers, or young friends of her own sex, for there were few points of contact between herself and general society. Her mother was her only friend. She aged rapidly and died early. Similarly, a boy brought up in a secluded condition of purity and ignorance, finally developed into one of the most vicious of men. Hawthorne has prefigured this by a bright colored flower which sparkles like a gem, very attractive at a distance, but exhaling a deadly perfume. He may not have been aware that the opium poppy has so brilliant a flower that it can be seen at a distance from which all other flowers are invisible. The scene of his story is placed in Italy,--the land of beauty, but also the country of poisoners. Rappacini, an old botanist and necromancer, has trained up his daughter in the solitary companionship of this flower, from which she has acquired its peculiar properties. A handsome young student is induced to enter the garden, partly from curiosity and partly through the legerdemain of Rappacini. The student soon falls under the daughter's influence and finds himself being gradually poisoned. A watchful apothecary, who has penetrated the necromancer's secret, provides the young man with an antidote which saves him, but deprives the maiden of life. She crosses the barrier which separated her from a healthy existence, and the poison reacts upon her system and kills her. The old apothecary looks out from his window, and cries, "O Rappacini! Is this the consummation of your experiment?" The underlying agreement between this story and "The Birth Mark" becomes apparent when we observe that the termination of one is simply a variation upon the last scene of the other. In one instance a beautiful daughter is sacrificed by her father, and in the other a lovely wife is victimized by her husband. There have been thousands, if not millions, of such cases. There is no other writer but Shakespeare who has portrayed the absolute devotion of a woman's love with such delicacy of feeling and depth of sympathy as Hawthorne. In the two stories we have just considered, and also in "The Bosom Serpent," this element serves, like the refrain of a Greek chorus, to give a sweet, penetrating undertone which reconciles us to much that would otherwise seem intolerable. The heroines in these pieces have such a close spiritual relationship that one suspects them of having been studied from the same model, and who could this have been so likely as Hawthorne's own wife. [Footnote: Notice also the similar character of Sophia in J. Hawthorne's "Bressant."] The theme of "The Bosom Serpent" is a husband's jealousy; and it is the self-forgetful devotion of his wife that finally cures his malady and relieves him of his unpleasant companion. The tale ends with one of those mystifying passages which Hawthorne weaves so skilfully, so that it is difficult to determine from the text whether there was a real serpent secreted under the man's clothing, or only an imaginary one,--although we presume the latter. Francis of Verulam says, "the best fortune for a husband is for his wife to consider him wise, which she will never do if she find him jealous"; and with good reason, for if he is unreasonably jealous, it shows a lack of confidence in her; but mutal confidence is the well-spring from which love flows, and if the well dries up, there is an end of it. "The Select Party" is quite a relief, after this tragical trilogy. It is easy to believe that Hawthorne imagined this dream of a summer evening, while watching the great cumulus clouds, tinted with rose and lavender like aerial snow-mountains, floating toward the horizon. Here were true castles in the air, which he could people with shapes according to his fancy; but he chose the most common abstract conceptions, such as, the Clerk of the Weather, the Beau Ideal, Mr. So-they-say, the Coming Man, and other ubiquitous personages, whom we continually hear of, but never see. The Man of Fancy invites these and many others to a banquet in his cloud-castle, where they all converse and behave according to their special characters. A ripple of delicate humor, like the ripple made by a light summer breeze upon the calm surface of a lake, runs through the piece from the first sentence to the last; and the scene is brought to a close by the approach of a thunder-storm, which spreads consternation among these unsubstantial guests, much like that which takes place at a picnic under similar circumstances; and Hawthorne, with his customary mystification, leaves us in doubt as to whether they ever reached _terra firma_ again. There is one proverbial character, however, whom Hawthorne has omitted from this account; namely, Mr. Everybody. "What Everybody says, must be true;" but unfortunately Everybody's information is none of the best, and his judgment does not rise above his information. His self-confidence, however, is enormous. He understands law better than the lawyer, and medicine better than the physicians. He is never tired of settling the affairs of the country, and of proposing constitutional amendments. Is it not perfectly natural that Everybody should understand Everybody's business as well as or better than his own? He is continually predicting future events, and if they fail to take place he predicts them again. He is omnipresent, but if you seek him he is nowhere to be found,--which we may presume to be the reason why he did not appear at the entertainment given by the Man of Fancy. That which gives the elevated character to Raphael's faces--as in the "Sistine Madonna" and other paintings--is not their drawing, though that is always refined, but the expression of the eyes, which are truly the windows of the soul. It was the same in Hawthorne's face, and may be observed in all good portraits of him. An immutable calmness overspread his features, but in and about his eyes there was a spring-like mirthfulness; while down in the shadowy depth of those luminous orbs was concealed the pathos that formed the undercurrent of his life. So it is that high comedy, as Plato long ago observed, lies very close to tragedy. A well-known French writer compares English humor, in a general way, to beer-drinking, and this is more particularly applicable to Dickens's characters. The very name of Mark Tapley suggests ale bottles. Thackeray's humor is of a more refined quality, but a trifle sharp and satirical. It is, however, pure and healthful and might be compared to Rhine-wine. Hawthorne's humor at its best is more refined than Thackeray's, as well as of a more amiable quality, and reminds one (on Taine's principle) of those delicate Italian wines which have very little body, but a delightful bouquet. As a humorist, however, Hawthorne varies in different times and places more than in any other respect. He adapts himself to his subject; is light and playful in "The Select Party"; takes on a more serious vein in "The Celestial Railroad"; in his resuscitation of Byron, in the letter from a lunatic called "P's Correspondence" he is simply sardonic; and "The Virtuoso's Collection" has all the effect, although he does not anywhere descend to low comedy, of a roaring farce. In "Mrs. Bull-Frog," as the title intimates, he approaches closely to the grotesque. In "The Virtuoso's Collection" we have the humor of impossibility. Nothing is more common than this, but Hawthorne gives it a peculiar value of his own. A procession of mythological objects, strange historical relics, and the odd creations of fiction passes before our eyes. The abruptness of their juxtaposition excites continuous laughter in us. It would be an extremely phlegmatic person who could read it with a serious face. Don Quixote's Rosinante, Doctor Johnson's cat, Shelley's skylark, a live phoenix, Prospero's magic wand, the hard-ridden Pegasus, the dove which brought the olive branch, and many others appear in such rapid succession that the reader has no time to take breath, or to consider what will turn up next. Like an accomplished showman, Hawthorne enlivens the performance here and there with original reflections on life, which are perfectly dignified, but become humorous from contrast with their surroundings. In spite of its comical effect, the piece has a very genteel air, for its material is taken from that general stock of information that passes current in cultivated families. The young man of fashion who had never heard of Elijah, or of Poe's "Raven," would not have understood it. In "The Hall of Fantasy," we catch some glimpses of Hawthorne's favorite authors: "The grand old countenance of Homer, the shrunken and decrepit form, but vivid face, of �sop, the dark presence of Dante, the wild Ariosto, Rabelais's smile of deep-wrought mirth, the profound, pathetic humor of Cervantes, the all glorious Shakespeare, Spenser, meet guest for an allegoric structure, the severe divinity of Milton and Bunyan, molded of the homeliest clay, but instinct with celestial fire--were those that chiefly attracted my eye. Fielding, Richardson, and Scott occupied conspicuous pedestals." He also adds Goethe and Swedenborg, and remarks of them: "Were ever two men of transcendent imagination more unlike?" It is evident that Byron was not a favorite with Hawthorne. In addition to his severe treatment of that poet, in "P's Correspondence," he says in "Earth's Holocaust," where he imagines the works of various authors to be consumed in a bonfire: "Speaking of the properties of flame, me-thought Shelley's poetry emitted a purer light than almost any other productions of his day, contrasting beautifully with the fitful and lurid gleams and gushes of black vapor that flashed and eddied from the volumes of Lord Byron." This seems like rather puritanical treatment. If there are false lines in Byron, there are quite as many weak lines in Shelley. If sincerity were to give out a pure flame, Byron would stand that test equal to any. His real fault is to be found in his somewhat glaring diction, like the _voix blanc_ in singing, and in an occasional stroke of _persiflage_. This increases his attractiveness to youthful minds, but to a nature like Hawthorne's anything of an exhibitory character must always be unpleasant. Emerson and Hawthorne only knew Goethe through the translations of Dwight, Carlyle and Margaret Fuller, and yet his poetry made a deeper impression on them than on Lowell and Longfellow, who read it in the original. Hawthorne appears to have taken lessons in German while at Brook Farm, for we find him studying a German book at the Old Manse, with a grammar and lexicon; but, as he confesses in his diary, without making satisfactory progress. "The Artist of the Beautiful" is a Dantean allegory, and a poetic gem. A young watchmaker, imbued with a spirit above his calling, neglects the profits of his business in order to construct an artificial butterfly,--at once the type of useless beauty and the symbol of immortality, and he perseveres in spite of the difficulties of the undertaking and the contemptuous opposition of his acquaintances. He finally succeeds in making one which seems to be almost endowed with life, but only to be informed that it is no better than a toy, and that he has wasted his time on a thing which has no practical value. A child (who represents the thoughtlessness of the great world) crushes the exquisite piece of workmanship in his little hand; but the watch-maker does not repine at this, for he realizes that after having achieved the beautiful, in his own spirit, the outward symbol of it has comparatively little value. The Artist of the Beautiful is Hawthorne himself; and in this exquisite fable he has not only unfolded the secret of all high art, but his own life-secret as well. HAWTHORNE AND TRANSCENDENTALISM The French and English scepticism of the eighteenth century, produced a reaction in the more contemplative German nature, which took the form of a strong assertion of spirit or mind as an entity in itself, and distinct from matter. This movement was more like a national impulse than the proselytism of a sect, but the individual in whom this spiritual impulse of the German people manifested itself at that time was Immanuel Kant. Without discrediting the revelations of Hebrew tradition, he taught the doctrine that instead of looking for evidence of a Supreme Being in the external world, we should seek him in our own hearts; that every man could find a revelation in his own conscience,--in the consciousness of good and evil, by which man improves his condition on earth; that the ideas of a Supreme Being, or of immortality and freedom of will, are inherent in the human mind, and are not to be acquired from experience; but that, as the finite mind cannot comprehend the infinite, we cannot know God in the same sense that we know our own earthly fathers, or as Goethe afterwards expressed it,--- "Who can say I know Him; Who can say, I know Him not;" and that it is in this aspiration for the unattainable, in this reverence for absolute purity, wisdom and love, that the spirit of true religion consists. The new philosophy was named "Transcendentalism" by Kant's followers, because it included ideas which were beyond the range of experience. It became popular in Germany, as Platonism, to which it is closely related, became popular in ancient Greece. It has never been accepted in France, where scepticism still predominates, though we hear of it in Taine and a few other writers; but in Great Britain, although the English universities repudiated it, Transcendentalism became so influential that Gladstone has spoken of it, in his Romanes lecture, as the dominant philosophy of the nineteenth century. Every notable English writer of that period, with the exception of Macaulay, Mill, and Spencer, became largely imbued with it. In America its influence did not extend much beyond New England, but in that section at least its proselytes were numbered by thousands, and it effected an intellectual revolution which has since influenced the whole country. The Concord group of transcendentalists did not accept the teaching of Kant in its original purity; but mixed with it a number of other imported products, that in no way appertain to it. Thoreau was an American _sansculotte_, a believer in the natural man; Ripley was mainly a socialist; Margaret Fuller was one of the earliest leaders in woman's rights; Alcott was a Neo-Platonist, a vegetarian, and a non-resistant; while Emerson sympathized largely with Thoreau, and from his poetic exaltation of Nature was looked upon as a pantheist by those who were not accustomed to nice discriminations. Thus it happened that Transcendentalism came to be associated in the public mind with any exceptional mode or theory of life. Its best representatives in America, like Professor Hedge of Harvard, Reverend David A. Wasson and Doctor William T. Harris (so long Chief of the National Bureau of Education), were much abler men than Emerson's followers, but did not attract so much attention, simply because they lived according to the customs of good society. Sleepy Hollow, before it was converted into a cemetery, was one of the most attractive sylvan resorts in the environs of Concord. It was a sort of natural amphitheatre, a small oval plane, more than half surrounded by a low wooded ridge; a sheltered and sequestered spot, cool in summer, but also warm and sunny in spring, where the wild flowers bloomed and the birds sang earlier than in other places. There, on August 22, 1842, a notable meeting took place, between Hawthorne, Emerson, and Margaret Fuller, who came that afternoon to enjoy the inspiration of the place, without preconcerted agreement. Margaret Fuller was first on the ground, and Hawthorne found her seated on the hill-side--his gravestone now overlooks the spot--reading a book with a peculiar name, which he "did not understand, and could not afterward recollect." Such a description could only apply to Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason," the original fountain-head and gospel of Transcendentalism. It does not appear that Nathaniel Hawthorne ever studied "The Critique of Pure Reason." His mind was wholly of the artistic order,--the most perfect type of an artist, one might say, living at that time,--and a scientific analysis of the mental faculties would have been as distasteful to him as the dissection of a human body. History, biography, fiction, did not appear to him as a logical chain of cause and effect, but as a succession of pictures illustrating an ideal determination of the human race. He could not even look at a group of turkeys without seeing a dramatic situation in them. In addition to this, as a true artist, he was possessed of a strong dislike for everything eccentric and abnormal; he wished for symmetry in all things, and above all in human actions; and those restless, unbalanced spirits, who attached themselves to the transcendental movement and the anti-slavery cause, were particularly objectionable to him. It has been rightly affirmed that no revolutionary movement could be carried through without the support of that ill-regulated class of persons who are always seeking they know not what, and they have their value in the community, like the rest of us; but Hawthorne was not a revolutionary character, and to his mind they appeared like so many obstacles to the peaceable enjoyment of life. His motto was, "Live and let live." There are passages in his Concord diary in which he refers to the itinerant transcendentalist in no very sympathetic manner. His experience at Brook Farm may have helped to deepen this feeling. There is no necessary connection between such an idyllic-socialistic experiment and a belief in the direct perception of a great First Clause; but Brook Farm was popularly supposed at that time to be an emanation of Transcendentalism, and is still largely so considered. He was wearied at Brook Farm by the philosophical discussions of George Ripley and his friends, and took to walking in the country lanes, where he could contemplate and philosophize in his own fashion,--which after all proved to be more fruitful than theirs. Having exchanged his interest in the West Roxbury Association for the Old Manse at Concord (truly a poetic bargain), he wrote the most keenly humorous of his shorter sketches, his "The Celestial Railroad," and in it represented the dismal cavern where Bunyan located the two great enemies of true religion, the Pope and the Pagan, as now occupied by a German giant, the Transcendentalist, who "makes it his business to seize upon honest travellers and fat them for his table with plentiful meals of smoke, mist, moonshine, raw potatoes, and sawdust." That Transcendentalism was largely associated in Hawthorne's mind with the unnecessary discomforts and hardships of his West Roxbury life is evident from a remark which he lets fall in "The Virtuoso's Collection." The Virtuoso calls his attention to the seven-league boots of childhood mythology, and Hawthorne replies, "I could show you quite as curious a pair of cowhide boots at the transcendental community of Brook Farm." Yet there could have been no malice in his satire, for Mrs. Hawthorne's two sisters, Mrs. Mann and Miss Peabody, were both transcendentalists; and so was Horace Mann himself, so far as we know definitely in regard to his metaphysical creed. Do not we all feel at times that the search for abstract truth is like a diet of sawdust or Scotch mist,--a "chimera buzzing in a vacuum"? James Russell Lowell similarly attacked Emerson in his Class Day poem, and afterward became converted to Emerson's views through the influence of Maria White. It is possible that a similar change took place in Hawthorne's consciousness; although his consciousness was so profound and his nature so reticent that what happened in the depths of it was never indicated by more than a few bubbles at the surface. He was emphatically an idealist, as every truly great artist must be, and Transcendentalism was the local costume which ideality wore in Hawthorne's time. He was a philosopher after a way of his own, and his reflections on life and manners often have the highest value. It was inevitable that he should feel and assimilate something from the wave of German thought which was sweeping over England and America, and if he did this unconsciously it was so much the better for the quality of his art. There are evidences of this even among his earliest sketches. In his account of "Sunday at Home" he says: "Time--where a man lives not--what is it but Eternity?" Does he not recognize in this condensed statement Kant's theorem that time is a mental condition, which only exists in man, and for man, and has no place in the external world? In fact, it only exists by divisions of time, and it is _man_ who makes the divisions. The rising of the sun does not constitute time; for the sun is always rising--somewhere. The positivists and Herbert Spencer deny this, and argue to prove that time is an external entity--independent of man--like electricity; but Hawthorne did not agree with them. He evidently trusted the validity of his consciousness. In that exquisite pastoral, "The Vision at the Fountain," he says: "We were aware of each other's presence, not by sight or sound or touch, but by an inward consciousness. Would it not be so among the dead?" You have probably heard of the German who attempted to evolve a camel out of his inner consciousness. That and similar jibes are common among those persons of whom the Scriptures tell us that they are in the habit of straining at gnats; but Hawthorne believed consciousness to be a trustworthy guide. Why should he not? It was the consciousness of _self_ that raised man above the level of the brute. This was the rock from which Moses struck forth the fountain of everlasting life. Again, in "Fancy's Show-Box" we meet with the following: "Or, while none but crimes perpetrated are cognizable before an earthly tribunal, will guilty thoughts,--of which guilty deeds are no more than shadows,--will these draw down the full weight of a condemning sentence in the supreme court of eternity?" Is this not an induction from or corollary to the preceding? If it is not Kantian philosophy, it is certainly Goethean. Margaret Fuller was the first American critic, if not the first of all critics, to point out that Goethe in writing "Elective Affinities" designed to show that an evil thought may have consequences as serious and irremediable as an evil action--in addition to the well-known homily that evil thoughts lead to evil actions. In his "Hall of Fantasy" Hawthorne mentions Goethe and Swedenborg as two literary idols of the present time who may be expected to endure through all time. Emerson makes the same prediction in one of his poems. In "Rappacini's Daughter" Hawthorne says: "There is something truer and more real than what we can see with the eyes and touch with the finger." And in "The Select Party" he remarks: "To such beholders it was unreal because they lacked the imaginative faith. Had they been worthy to pass within its portals, they would have recognized the truth that the dominions which the spirit conquers for itself among unrealities become a thousand times more real than the earth whereon they stamp their feet, saying, 'This is solid and substantial! This may be called a fact!'" The essence of Transcendentalism is the assertion of the indestructibility of spirit, that mind is more real than matter, and the unseen than the seen. "The visible has value only," says Carlyle, "when it is based on the invisible." No writer of the nineteenth century affirms this more persistently than Hawthorne, and in none of his romances is the principle so conspicuous as in "The House of the Seven Gables." It is a sister's love which, like a cord stronger than steel, binds together the various incidents of the story, while the avaricious Judge Pyncheon, "with his landed estate, public honors, offices of trust and other solid _un_realities," has after all only succeeded in building a card castle for himself, which may be dissipated by a single breath. Holgrave, the daguerreotypist, who serves as a contrast to the factitious judge, is a genuine character, and may stand for a type of the young New England liberal of 1850: a freethinker, and so much of a transcendentalist that we suspect Hawthorne's model for him to have been one of the younger associates of the Brook Farm experiment. He is evidently studied from life, and Hawthorne says of him: "Altogether, in his culture and want of culture, in his crude, wild, and misty philosophy, and the practical experience that counteracted some of its tendencies; in his magnanimous zeal for man's welfare, and his recklessness of whatever the ages had established in man's behalf; in his faith, and in his infidelity; in what he had, and in what he lacked, the artist might fitly enough stand forth as the representative of many compeers in his native land." This is a fairly sympathetic portrait, and it largely represents the class of young men who went to hear Emerson and supported Charles Sumner. In the story, Holgrave achieves the reward of a veracious nature by winning the heart of the purest and loveliest young woman in American fiction. If Hawthorne were still living he might object to the foregoing argument as a misrepresentation; nor could he be blamed for this, for Ripley, Thoreau, Alcott and other like visionary spirits have so vitiated the significance of Transcendentalism that it ought now to be classed among words of doubtful and uncertain meaning. Students of German philosophy are now chiefly known as Kantists or Hegelians, and outside of the universities they are commonly classed as Emersonians. CHAPTER X FROM CONCORD TO LENOX: 1845-1849 In May, 1845, Paymaster Bridge found himself again on the American coast. Meeting with Franklin Pierce in Boston, they agreed to go to Concord together, and look into Hawthorne's affairs. Soon after breakfast, Mrs. Hawthorne espied them coming through the gateway. She had never met Pierce, but she recognized Bridge's tall, elegant figure, when he waved his hat to her in the distance. Hawthorne himself was sawing and splitting in the wood-shed, and thither she directed his friends--to his no slight astonishment when they appeared before him. Pierce had his arm across Hawthorne's broad shoulders when they reappeared. There is one pleasure, indeed, which young people cannot know, and that is, the meeting of old friends. Mrs. Hawthorne was favorably impressed with Franklin Pierce's personality; while Horatio Bridge danced about and acted an impromptu pantomime, making up faces like an owl. They assured Hawthorne that something should be done to relieve his financial embarrassment.[Footnote: J. Hawthorne, 281.] All those whose attention Hawthorne attracted out of the rush and hurry of the world were sure to become interested in his welfare. O'Sullivan, the editor of the _Democratic Review_, had already exerted himself in Hawthorne's behalf; but President Polk evidently did not know who Hawthorne was, so that O'Sullivan was obliged to have a puff inserted in his review for the President's better information. George Bancroft was now in the Cabinet, and could easily have obtained a lucrative post for Hawthorne, but it is plain that Bancroft was not over-friendly to him and that Hawthorne was fully aware of this. Hawthorne had suggested the Salem postmastership, but when O'Sullivan mentioned this, Bancroft objected on the ground that the present incumbent was too good a man to be displaced, and proposed the consulates of Genoa and Marseilles, two deplorable positions and quite out of the question for Hawthorne, in the condition of his family at that time. Perhaps it would have been better for him in a material sense, if he had accepted the invitation to dine with Margaret Fuller. The summer wore away, but nothing was acomplished; and late in the autumn Hawthorne left the Old Manse to return to his Uncle Robert Manning's house in Salem, where he could always count on a warm welcome. There he spent the winter with his wife and child, until suddenly, in March, 1846, he was appointed Surveyor of the Port, or, as it is now more properly called, Collector of Customs. This was, in truth, worth waiting for. The salary was not large, but it was a dignified position and allowed Hawthorne sufficient leisure for other pursuits,--the leisure of the merchant or banker. Salem had already begun to lose its foreign trade, and for days together it sometimes happened that there was nothing to do. Hawthorne's chief business was to prevent the government from being cheated, either by the importers or by his own subordinates; and it required a pretty sharp eye to do this. All the appointments, even to his own clerks, were made by outside politicians, and when a reduction of employees was necessary, Hawthorne consulted with the local Democratic Committee, and followed their advice. Such a method was not to the advantage of the public service, but it saved Hawthorne from an annoying responsibility. His strictness and impartiality, however, soon brought him into conflict with his more self-important subordinates, who were by no means accustomed to exactness in their dealings, and this finally produced a good deal of official unpleasantness; and the unfavorable reports which were afterward circulated concerning Hawthorne's life during this period, probably originated in that quarter. [Illustration: THE CUSTOM HOUSE, SALEM, MASS., WHERE HAWTHORNE WAS EMPLOYED AS SURVEYOR OF THE FORT OF SALEM, AT THE TIME OF HIS WRITING "THE SCARLET LETTER"] All the poetry that Hawthorne could extract from his occupation at the Custom House is to be found in his preface to "The Scarlet Letter," but he withholds from us the prosaic side of it,--as he well might. At times he comes close to caricature, especially in his descriptions of "those venerable incumbents who hibernated during the winter season, and then crawled out during the warm days of spring to draw their pay and perform those pretended duties, for which they were engaged." There were formerly large numbers of moss-grown loafers in the government service, with whiskey-reddened noses and greasy old clothing, who would sun themselves on the door-steps, and tell anecdotes of General Jackson, Senator Benton, and other popular heroes, with whom they would intimate a good acquaintance at some remote period of their lives. If removed from office, they were quite as likely to turn up in a neighboring jail as in any other location. This is no satire, but serious truth; and instances of it can be given. Hawthorne's life during the next three years was essentially domestic. In June, 1846, his son Julian was born--a remarkably vigorous baby--at Doctor Peabody's house in West Street, Boston; Mrs. Hawthorne wisely preferring to be with her own mother during her confinement. [Footnote: At the age of thirty-five, Julian resembled his father so closely that Nathaniel Hawthorne's old friends were sometimes startled by him, as if they had seen an apparition. He was, however, of a stouter build, and his eyes were different.] With two small children on her hands, Mrs. Hawthorne had slight opportunity to enjoy general society, fashionable or otherwise. Rebecca Manning says, however: "Neither Hawthorne nor his wife could be said to be 'in society' in the technical sense. When the Peabody family lived in Salem, they were, I have been told, somewhat straitened pecuniarily. After Hawthorne's marriage, I think I remember hearing of his wife going to parties and dinners occasionally. Dr. Loring's wife was her cousin. Other friends were the Misses Howes, one of whom is now Mrs. Cabot of Boston. Mrs. Foote, who was a daughter of Judge White, was a friend, and I remember some Silsbees who were also her friends. Hawthorne's wife knew how to cultivate her friends and make the most of them far better than either Hawthorne or his sisters did. I have been told that when Hawthorne was a young man, before his marriage, if he had chosen to enter Salem's 'first circle' he would have been welcome there." During this last sojourn in his native city Hawthorne was chosen on the committee for the lyceum lecture course, and proved instrumental in bringing Webster to Salem,--where he had not been popular since the trial of the two Knapps,--to deliver an oration on the Constitution; of which Mrs. Hawthorne has given a graphic description in a letter to her mother on November 19, 1848: "The old Lion walked the stage with a sort of repressed rage, when he referred to those persons who cried out, 'Down with the Constitution!' 'Madmen! Or most wicked if not mad!' said he with a glare of fire." A pure piece of acting. The national Constitution was not even endangered by the Southern rebellion,--much less by the small band of original abolitionists; and Webster was too sensible not to be aware of this. While Hawthorne was at the Salem Custom House, he made at least two valuable friends: Doctor George B. Loring, who had married a cousin of Mrs. Hawthorne, and William B. Pike, who occupied a subordinate position in the Custom House, but whom Hawthorne valued for moral and intellectual qualities of which he would seem to have been the first discoverer. They were not friends who would be likely to affect Hawthorne's political views, except to encourage him in the direction to which he had always tended. Four years earlier, Doctor Loring had been on cordial terms with Longfellow and Sumner, being a refined and intellectual sort of man, but like Hillard, had withdrawn from them on account of political differences. He was an able public speaker, and became a Democratic politician, until 1862, when he went over to the Republicans; but after that he was looked upon with a good deal of suspicion by both parties. The governorship was supposed to have been the object of his ambition, but he never could obtain the nomination. Late in life he was appointed Commissioner of Agriculture, a post for which he was eminently fitted, and finally went to Portugal as United States Minister. William B. Pike either lacked the opportunity or the necessary concentration to develop his genius in the larger world, but Hawthorne continued to communicate with him irregularly until the close of his life. He invited him to Lenox when he resided there, and Mrs. Lathrop recollects seeing him at the Wayside in Concord, after Hawthorne's return from Europe. She discribes him as a "short, sturdy, phlegmatic and plebeian looking man," but with a gentle step and a finely modulated voice. It may have been as well for him that he never became distinguished. [Footnote: Mrs. Lathrop, "Memories of Hawthorne," 154.] The war with Mexico was now fairly afield, and Franklin Pierce, who left the United States Senate on account of his wife's health, was organizing a regiment of New Hampshire volunteers, as a "patriotic duty." Salem people thought differently, and party feeling there soon rose to the boiling-point. There is no other community where political excitement is so likely to become virulent as in a small city. In a country town, like Concord, every man feels the necessity for conciliating his neighbor, but the moneyed class in Salem was sufficient for its own purposes, and was opposed to the war in a solid body. The Whigs looked upon the invasion of Mexico as a piratical attempt of the Democratic leaders to secure the permanent ascendency of their party, and this was probably the true reason for Franklin Pierce's joining it. In their eyes, Hawthorne was the representative of a corrupt administration, and they would have been more than human if they had not wished him to feel this. The Salem gentry could not draw him into an argument very well, but they could look daggers at him on the street and exhibit their coldness toward him when they went on business to the Custom House. It is evident that he was made to suffer in some such manner, and to a tenderhearted man with a clear conscience, it must have seemed unkind and unjust. [Footnote: When the engagement between the "Chesapeake" and the "Shannon" took place off Salem harbor in August, 1813, and Captain Lawrence was killed in the action, the anti-war sentiment ran so high that it was difficult to find a respectable mansion where his funeral would be permitted.] In his Custom House preface, Hawthorne compares the Whigs rather unfavorably with the Democrats, and this is not to be wondered at; but he should have remembered that it was his own party which first introduced the spoils-of-office system. The first use that Hawthorne made of his government salary was to cancel his obligations to the Concord tradespeople, and the next was to provide a home for his wife and mother. They first moved to 18 Chestnut Street, in June, 1846; and thence to a larger house, 14 Mall Street, in September, 1847, in which "The Snow Image" was prepared for publication, and "The Scarlet Letter" was written. Hawthorne's study or workshop was the front room in the third story, an apartment of some width but with a ceiling in direct contradiction to the elevated thoughts of the writer. There is an ominous silence in the American Note-book between 1846 and 1850, which is rather increased than diminished by the publication from his diary of a number of extracts concerning the children. The babies of geniuses do not differ essentially from those of other people, and it is not supposable that Hawthorne's reflections during this period were wholly confined to his own family. It is to be hoped that fuller information will yet be given to the public concerning their affairs in Salem; for the truth deserves to be told. In January, 1846, Mrs. Hawthorne wrote to her mother: "No one, I think, has a right to break the will of a child, but God; and if the child is taught to submit to Him through love, all other submission will follow with heavenly effect upon the character. God never drives even the most desperate sinner, but only invites or suggests through the events of His providence." Nothing is more unfortunate than to break the will of a child, for all manliness and womanliness is grounded in the will; but it is often necessary to control the desires and humors of children for their self-preservation. Hawthorne himself was not troubled with such fancies. Alcott, who was his nearest neighbor at the Wayside, once remarked that there was only one will in the Hawthorne family, and that was Nathaniel's. His will was law and no one thought of disputing it. Yet what he writes concerning children is always sweet, tender, and beautiful, with the single exception of a criticism of his own daughter, which was published long after his death and could not have been intended for the public eye. The war with Mexico was wonderfully successful from a military point of view, but its political effects were equally confounding to the politicians who projected it. The American people resemble the French, quite as much perhaps as they do the English, and the admiration of military glory is one of their Gallic traits. It happened that the two highest positions in the army were both held by Whig generals, and the victory of Buena Vista carried Zachary Taylor into the White House, in spite of the opposition of Webster and Clay, as well as that of the Democrats and the Free Soilers. Polk, Bancroft, and Pierce had all contributed to the defeat of their own party. The war proved their political terminus to the two former; but, _mirabile dictu_, it became the cap of Fortunatus to Pierce and Hawthorne. This, however, could not have been foreseen at the time, and the election of Taylor in November, 1848, had a sufficiently chilling effect on the little family in Mall Street. Hawthorne entertained the hope that he might be spared in the general out-turning, as a distinguished writer and an inoffensive partisan, and this indicates how loath he was to relinquish his comfortable position. Let us place ourselves in his situation and we shall not wonder at it. He was now forty-five, with a wife and two children, and destitution was staring him in the face. For ten years he had struggled bravely, and this was the net result of all his endeavors. Never had the future looked so gloomy to him. The railroad had superseded his Uncle Manning's business, as it had that of half the mercantile class in the city, and his father-in-law was in a somewhat similar predicament. At this time Elizabeth Peabody was keeping a small foreign book-store in a room of her father's house on West Street. One has to realize these conditions, in order to appreciate the mood in which Hawthorne's Custom House preface was written. There is one passage in it, however, that is always likely to be misunderstood. It is where he says: "I thought my own prospects of retaining office, to be better than those of my Democratic brethren; but who can see an inch into futurity, beyond his nose? My own head was the first that fell!" It is clear that some kind of an effort was made to prevent his removal, presumably by George S. Hillard, who was a Whig in good favor; but the conclusion which one would naturally draw from the above, that Hawthorne was turned out of office in a summary and ungracious manner, is not justified by the evidence. He was not relieved from duty until June 14, 1849; that is, he was given a hundred days of grace, which is much more than officeholders commonly are favored with, in such cases. We may consider it morally certain that Hillard did what he could in Hawthorne's behalf. He was well acquainted with Webster, but unfortunately Webster had opposed the nomination of General Taylor, and was so imprudent as to characterize it as a nomination not fit to be made. This was echoed all over the country, and left Webster without influence at Washington. For the time being Seward was everything, and Webster was nothing. In a letter to Horace Mann, shortly after his removal, Hawthorne refers to two distinct calumnies which had been circulated concerning him in Salem, and only too widely credited. The most important of these--for it has seriously compromised a number of Salem gentlemen--was never explained until the publication of Mrs. Lathrop's "Memories of Hawthorne" in 1897; where we find a letter from Mrs. Hawthorne to her mother, dated June 10, 1849, and containing the following passage: "Here is a pretty business, discovered in an unexpected manner to Mr. Hawthorne by a friendly and honorable Whig. Perhaps you know that the President said before he took the chair that he should make no removals except for dishonesty and unfaithfulness. It is very plain that neither of these charges could be brought against Mr. Hawthorne. Therefore a most base and incredible falsehood has been told--written down and signed and sent to the Cabinet in secret. This infamous paper certifies among other things (of which we have not heard)--that Mr. Hawthorne has been in the habit of writing political articles in magazines and newspapers!" So it appears that the gutta-percha formula [Footnote: By which eighty-eight per cent, of the classified service were removed.] of President Cleveland in regard to "offensive partisanship" was really invented forty years before his time, and had as much value in one case as in the other. It is possible that such a document as Mrs. Hawthorne describes was circulated, signed, and sent to Washington, to make the way easy for President Taylor's advisers, and if so it was a highly contemptible proceeding; but the statement rests wholly on the affirmation of a single witness, whose name has always been withheld, and even if it were true that Hawthorne had written political articles for Democratic papers the fact would have in no wise been injurious to his reputation. The result must have been the same in any case. General Taylor was an honorable man, and no doubt intended to keep his word, as other Presidents have intended since; but what could even a brave general effect against the army of hungry office-seekers who were besieging the White House,--a more formidable army than the Mexicans whom he had defeated at Buena Vista? In all probability he knew nothing of Hawthorne and never heard of his case. The second calumny which Hawthorne refers to was decidedly second-rate, and closely resembles a servant's intrigue. The Department at Washington, in a temporary fit of economy, had requested him to discharge two of his supervisors. He did not like to take the men's bread away from them, and made a mild protest against the order. At the same time he consulted his chief clerk as to what it might be best to do, and they agreed upon suspending two of the supervisors who might suffer less from it than some others. As it happened, the Department considered Hawthorne's report favorably, and no suspension took place; but his clerk betrayed the secret to the two men concerned, who hated Hawthorne in consequence, and afterward circulated a report that he had threatened to discharge them unless they contributed to the Democratic campaign fund. This return of evil for good appears to have been a new experience for Hawthorne, but those who are much concerned in the affairs of the world soon become accustomed to it, and pay little attention to either the malice or the mendacity of mankind. Twenty years later one of Hawthorne's clerks, who had prudently shifted from the Democratic to the Republican ranks, held a small office in the Boston Navy Yard, and was much given to bragging of his intimacy with "Nat," and of the sprees they went on together; but the style and description of the man were sufficient to discredit his statements without further evidence. There were, however, several old shipmasters in the Salem Custom House who had seen Calcutta, Canton, and even a hurricane or two; men who had lived close to reality, with a vein of true heroism in them, moreover; and if Hawthorne preferred their conversation to that of the shipowners, who had spent their lives in calculating the profits of commercial adventures, there are many among the well educated who would agree with him. He refers particularly to one aged inspector of imports, whose remarkable adventures by flood and field were an almost daily recreation to him; and if the narratives of this ancient mariner were somewhat mixed with romance, assuredly Hawthorne should have been the last person to complain of them on that account. At first he was wholly unnerved by his dismissal. He returned to Mall Street and said to his wife: "I have lost my place. What shall we now do for bread?" But Mrs. Hawthorne replied: "Never fear. You will now have leisure to finish your novel. Meanwhile, I will earn bread for us with my pencil and paint-brush." [Footnote: Mrs. George S. Hillard.] Besides this, she brought forward two or three hundred dollars, which she had saved from his salary unbeknown to him; but who would not have been encouraged by such a brave wife? Fortunately her pencil and paint-brush were not put to the test; at least so far as we know. Already on June 8, her husband had written a long letter to Hillard, explaining the state of his affairs and containing this pathetic appeal: "If you could do anything in the way of procuring me some stated literary employment, in connection with a newspaper, or as corrector of the press to some printing establishment, etc., it could not come at a better time. Perhaps Epes Sargent, who is a friend of mine, would know of something. I shall not stand upon my dignity; that must take care of itself. Perhaps there may be some subordinate office connected with the Boston Athenæum (Literary). Do not think anything too humble to be mentioned to me." [Footnote: Conway, 113.] There have been many tragical episodes in the history of literature, but since "Paradise Lost" was sold for five pounds and a contingent interest, there has been nothing more simply pathetic than this,--that an immortal writer should feel obliged to apply for a subordinate position in a counting-room, a description of work which nobody likes too well, and which to Hawthorne would have been little less than a death in life. "Do not think anything too humble to be mentioned to me"! What Hillard attempted to do at this time is uncertain, but he was not the man to allow the shrine of genius to be converted into a gas-burner, if he could possibly prevent it. We may presume that he went to Salem and encouraged Hawthorne in his amiable, half-eloquent manner. But we do not hear of him again until the new year. Meanwhile Madam Hawthorne fell into her last illness and departed this life on July 31; a solemn event even to a hard-hearted son--how much more to such a man as she had brought into the world. Three days before her death, he writes in his diary of "her heart beating its funeral march," and diverts his mind from the awful _finale_ by an accurate description of his two children playing a serio-comic game of doctor and patient, in the adjoining room. It was under such tragical conditions, well suited to the subject, that he continued his work on "The Scarlet Letter," and his painfully contracted brow seemed to indicate that he suffered as much in imagination, as the characters in that romance are represented to have suffered. In addition he wrote "The Great Stone Pace," one of the most impressive of his shorter pieces (published, alas! in a Washington newspaper), and the sketch called "Main Street," both afterward included in the volume of "The Snow Image." On January 17, 1850, he was greatly surprised to receive a letter from George S. Hillard with a large check in it,--more than half-way to a thousand dollars,--which the writer with all possible delicacy begged him to accept from a few of his Boston admirers. It was only from such a good friend as Hillard that Hawthorne would have accepted assistance in this form; but he always considered it in the character of a loan, and afterward insisted on repaying it to the original subscribers,--Professor Ticknor, Judge Curtis, and others. Hillard also persuaded James T. Fields, the younger partner of Ticknor & Company, to take an interest in Hawthorne as an author who required to be encouraged, and perhaps coaxed a little, in order to bring out the best that was in him. Fields accordingly went to Salem soon afterward, and has given an account of his first interview with Hawthorne in "Yesterdays with Authors," which seems rather melodramatic: "found him cowering over a stove," and altogether in a woe-begone condition. The main point of discussion between them, however, was whether "The Scarlet Letter" should be published separately or in conjunction with other subjects. Hawthorne feared that such a serious plot, continued with so little diversity of motive, would not be likely to produce a favorable impression unless it were leavened with material of a different kind. Fields, on the contrary, thought it better that the work should stand by itself, in solitary grandeur, and feared that it would only be dwarfed by any additions of a different kind. He predicted a good sale for the book, and succeeded in disillusionizing Hawthorne from the notions he had acquired from the failure of "Fanshawe." As it was late in the season, Fields would not even wait for the romance to be finished, but sent it to the press at once; and on February 4, Hawthorne wrote to Horatio Bridge: "I finished my book only yesterday; one end being in the press at Boston, while the other was in my head here at Salem; so that, as you see, the story is at least fourteen miles long." The time of publication was a propitious one: the gold was flowing in from California, and every man and woman had a dollar to spend. The first edition of five thousand copies was taken up within a month, and after this Hawthorne suffered no more financial embarrassments. The succeeding twelve years of his life were as prosperous and cheerful as his friends and readers could desire for him; although the sombre past still seemed to cast a ghostly shadow across his way, which even the sunshine of Italy could not entirely dissipate. "THE SCARLET LETTER" The germ of this romance is to be found in the tale of "Endicott and the Red Cross," published in the _Token_ in 1838, so that it must have been at least ten years sprouting and developing in Hawthorne's mind. In that story he gives a tragically comic description of the Puritan penitentiary,--in the public square,--where, among others, a good-looking young woman was exposed with a red letter A on her breast, which she had embroidered herself, so elegantly that it seemed as if it was rather intended for a badge of distinction than as a mark of infamy. Hawthorne did not conjure this up wholly out of his imagination, for in 1704 the General Court of Massachusetts Bay passed the following law, which he was no doubt aware of: "Convicted before the Justice of Assize,--both Man and Woman to be set on the Gallows an Hour with a Rope about their Necks and the other end cast over the Gallowses. And in the way from thence to the common Gaol, to be Scourged not exceeding Forty Stripes. And forever after to wear a Capital A of two inches long, of a contrary colour to their cloathes, sewed on their upper Garments, on the Back or Arm, in open view. And as often as they appear without it, openly to be Scourged, not exceeding Fifteen Stripes." [Footnote: Boston, Timothy Green, 1704.] The most diligent investigation, however, has failed to discover an instance in which punishment was inflicted under this law, so that we must conclude that Hawthorne invented that portion of his statement. In fact, nothing that Hawthorne published himself is to be considered of historical or biographical value. It is all fiction. He sported with historical facts and traditions, as poets and painters always have done, and the manuscript which he pretends to have discovered in his office at the Custom House, written by one of his predecessors there, is a piece of pure imagination, which serves to give additional credibility to his narrative. He knew well enough how large a portion of what is called history is fiction after all, and the extent to which professed historians deal in romance. He felt that he was justified so long as he did not depart from the truth of human nature. We may thank him that he did not dispel the illusion of his poetic imagery by the introduction of well-known historical characters. This is permissible in a certain class of novels, but its effect is always more or less prosaic. Our Puritan ancestors evidently did not realize the evil effects of their law against faithless wives,--its glaring indelicacy, and brutalizing influence on the minds of the young; but it was of a piece with their exclusion of church-music and other amenities of civilization. Was it through a natural attraction for the primeval granite that they landed on the New England coast? Their severe self-discipline was certainly well adapted to their situation, but, while it built up their social edifice on an enduring foundation, its tendency was to crush out the gentler and more sympathetic qualities in human nature. In no other community would the story of Hester Prynne acquire an equal cogency and significance. A German might, perhaps, understand it; but a Frenchman or an Italian not at all. The same subject has been treated in its most venial form by Shakespeare in "Measure for Measure," and in its most condemnable form in Goethe's "Faust." "The Scarlet Letter" lies midway between these two. Hester Prynne has married a man of morose, vindictive disposition, such as no woman could be happy with. He is, moreover, much older than herself, and has gone off on a wild expedition in pursuit of objects which he evidently cares for, more than for his wife. She has not heard from him for over a year, and knows not whether he has deserted her, or if he is no longer living. She is alone in a strange wild country, and it is natural that she should seek counsel and encouragement from the young clergyman, who is worthy of her love, but, unfortunately, not a strong character. Lightning is not swifter than the transition in our minds from good to evil, and in an unguarded moment he brings ruin upon himself, and a life-long penance on Hester Prynne. Hawthorne tells this story with such purity and delicacy of feeling that a maiden of sixteen can read it without offence. "The Scarlet Letter" is at once the most poetic and the most powerful of Hawthorne's larger works, much more powerful than "The Vicar of Wakefield," which has been accepted as the type of a romance in all languages. Goldsmith's tale will always be more popular than "The Scarlet Letter," owing to its blithesome spirit, its amusing incidents and bright effects of light and shade; but "The Scarlet Letter" strikes a more penetrating chord in the human breast, and adheres more closely to the truth of life. There are certain highly improbable circumstances woven in the tissue of "The Vicar of Wakefield," which a prudent, reflective reader finds it difficult to surmount. It is rather surprising that the Vicar should not have discovered the true social position of his friend Mr. Burchell, which must have been known to every farmer in the vicinity; and still more so that Mr. Burchell should have permitted the father of a young woman in whom he was deeply interested, to be carried to prison for debt without making an inquiry into his case. "The Scarlet Letter" is, as Hawthorne noticed, a continual variation on a single theme, and that a decidedly solemn one; but its different incidents form a dynamic sequence, leading onward to the final catastrophe, and if its progress is slow--the narrative extends over a period of seven years--this is as inevitable as the march of Fate. From the first scene in the drama, we are lifted above ourselves, and sustained so by Hawthorne's genius, until the close. This sense of power arises from dealing with a subject which demanded the whole force and intensity of Hawthorne's nature. Hester Prynne herself is a strong character, and her errors are those of strength and independence rather than of weakness. She says to Mr. Dimmesdale that what they did "had a consecration of its own," and it is this belief which supports her under a weight of obloquy that would have crushed a more fragile spirit. She does not collapse into a pitiful nonentity, like Scott's Effie Deans, nor is she maddened to crime like George Eliot's "Hetty Sorrel"; [Footnote: A name apparently compounded from Hester Prynne and Schiller's Agnes Sorrel.] but from the outset she forms definite resolutions,--first to rehabilitate her own character, and next to protect the partner of her shame. This last may seem to be a mistaken devotion, and contrary to his true interest, for the first step in the regeneration from sin is to acknowledge manfully the responsibility of it; but to give the repentance even the appearance of sincerity, the confession must be a voluntary one, and not be forced upon the delinquent person by external pressure. We cannot withhold our admiration for Hester's unswerving fidelity to this twofold purpose. We may condemn her in our minds, but we cannot refuse her a measure of sympathy in our hearts. I believe this to be the explanation of her apparent inconsistency at the close of the book. Many of Hawthorne's commentators have been puzzled by the fact that Hester, after so many years of contrition, should advise Dimmesdale to fly to England, and even offered to accompany him. Women have not the same idea of law that men have. In their ideas of right and wrong they depend chiefly on their sense of purity; and it is very difficult to persuade a woman that she could be wrong in obeying the dictates of her heart. Hester perceives that her former lover is being tortured to death by the silent tyranny of Chillingworth; the tide of affection so long restrained flows back into her soul; and her own reputation is as nothing compared with the life of the man she hopes to save. There is no other passage in American fiction so pathetic as that woodland meeting, at which their mutual hopes of happiness blaze up like the momentary brightness of a dying flame. Hester's innocent child, however, representing the spirit of truthfulness, is suddenly seized with an aversion to her father and refuses to join their company,--an unfavorable omen and dark presage of the minister's doom. Pearl's behavior, on this occasion, may be supposed to represent the author's own judgment. How far shall we agree with him? The past generation witnessed one of the noblest of women uniting herself, for life and death, to a man whom she could not marry on account of purely legal objections. Whether Hester's position in the last act of this drama is comparable with that of Marian Evans every one must decide according to his or her conscience. Hawthorne certainly proves himself a good Puritan when he says, "And be the stern and sad truth spoken that the breach which guilt has once made into the human soul, is never in this mortal state repaired." The magnitude of the evil of course makes a difference; but do we not all live in a continual state of sinning, and self-correction? That is the road to self-improvement, and those who adhere most closely to inflexible rules of conduct discover at length that the rules themselves have become an evil. Mankind has not yet fully decided as to what things are evil, and what are good; and neither Hawthorne nor the Puritan lawmakers would seem to have remembered Christ's admonition on a similar occasion: "Let him who is without sin among you, cast the first stone." A writer in the _Andover Review_, some twenty years ago, criticised the impersonation of Pearl as a fable--"a golden wreck." He quoted Emerson to the effect that in all the ages that man has been upon the earth, no communication has been established between him and the lower animals, and he affirmed that we know quite as little of the thoughts and motives of our own children. Both conclusions are wide of the mark. There is much more communication between man and the domestic animals than between animals of the same species. The understanding between an Arab and his horse is almost perfect, and so is that between a sportsman and his setters. Even the sluggish ox knows the word of command. Then what shall we say of the sympathetic relation between a mother and her child? Who can describe it--that clairvoyant sensibility, intangible, too swift for words? Who has depicted it, except Hawthorne and Raphael? Pearl is like a pure spirit in "The Scarlet Letter," reconciling us to its gloomy scenes. She is like the sunshine in a dark forest, breaking through the tree-tops and dancing in our pathway. It is true that Hawthorne has carried her clairvoyant insight to its furthest limits, but this is in accordance with the ideal character of his work. She has no rival except Goethe's Mignon. Hawthorne's method of developing his stories resembled closely that of the historical painter; and it was only in this way that he could produce such vivid effects. He selected models for his principal characters and studied them as his work progressed. The original of Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale was quickly recognized in Salem as an amiable inoffensive person, of whom no one suspected any evil,--and that was, no doubt, the reason why Hawthorne selected him for his purpose. It was no discredit to the man himself, although tongues were not wanting to blame Hawthorne for it. Who Hester may have been still remains a mystery; but it was evidently some one with whom the author was well acquainted,--perhaps his younger sister. So Rubens painted his own wife at one time an angel, and at another in the likeness of Herodias. It is still more probable that Pearl is a picture of Hawthorne's own daughter, who was of the right age for such a study, and whose sprightly, fitful, and impulsive actions correspond to those of Hester's child. This would also explain why her father gave Una so much space in his Note-book. He may have noticed the antagonism between her and the Whig children of the neighborhood and have applied it to Pearl's case. It was also his custom, as appears from his last unfinished work, to leave blank spaces in his manuscript while in the heat of composition, which, like a painter's background, were afterwards filled in with descriptions of scenery or some subsidiary narrative. The models of the novelist cannot be hired for the purpose, like those used by the painter or sculptor, but have to be studied when and where they can be found, for the least self-consciousness spoils the effect. Hawthorne in this only followed the example of the best authors and dramatists; and those who think that good fiction or dramatic poetry can be written wholly out of a man's or a woman's imagination, would do well to make the experiment themselves. CHAPTER XI PEGASUS IS FREE: 1850-1852 Frederick W. Loring, that bright young poet who was so soon lost to us, once remarked: "Appreciation is to the artist what sunshine is to flowers. He cannot expand without it." The success of "The Scarlet Letter" proved that all Hawthorne's genius required was a little moderate encouragement,--not industry but opportunity. His pen, no longer slow and hesitating, moved freer and easier; the long pent-up flood of thoughts, emotions, and experiences had at length found an outlet; and the next three years were the most productive of his life. His first impulse, however, was to escape from Salem. Although his removal from office had been a foregone conclusion, Hawthorne felt a certain degree of chagrin connected with it, and also imagined a certain amount of animosity toward himself which made the place uncomfortable to him. He was informed that the old Sparhawk mansion, close to the Portsmouth Navy Yard, was for sale or to rent, and the first of May, Hawthorne went thither to consider whether it would serve him for a home. [Footnote: Lathrop, 225.] One would suppose that sedate old Portsmouth, with its courteous society and its dash of military life, would have suited Hawthorne even better than Concord; but he decided differently, and he returned to meet his family in Boston, where he made the acquaintance of Professor Ticknor, who introduced him at the Athenaeum Library. He saw Hildreth at the Athenæum working on his history of the United States; sat for his portrait to C. E. Thompson; went to the theatre; studied human nature in the smoking-room at Parker's; and relaxed himself generally. He must have stayed with his family at Doctor Peabody's on West Street, for he speaks of the incessant noise from Washington Street, and of looking out from the back windows on Temple Place. This locates the house very nearly. Two months later, July 5, 1850, he was at Lenox, in the Berkshire Mountains. Mrs. Caroline Sturgis Tappan, a brilliant Boston lady, equally poetic and sensible, owned a small red cottage there, which she was ready to lease to Hawthorne for a nominal rent. Lowell was going there on account of his wife, a delicate flower-like nature already beginning to droop. Doctor Holmes was going on account of Lowell, and perhaps with the expectation of seeing a rattlesnake; Fields was going on account of Lowell and Holmes. Mrs. Frances Kemble, already the most distinguished of Shakespearian readers, had a summer cottage there; and it was hoped that in such company Hawthorne would at last find the element to which he properly belonged. Unfortunately Hawthorne took to raising chickens, and that seems to have interested him more than anything else at Lenox. He fell in cordially with the plans of his friends; ascended Monument Mountain, and went on other excursions with them; but it may be more than suspected that Lowell and Holmes did most of the talking. He assimilated himself more to Holmes perhaps than to any of the others. His meeting with Mrs. Kemble must have been like a collision of the centrifugal and centripetal forces; and for once, Hawthorne may be said to have met his antipodes. They could sincerely admire one another as we all do, in their respective spheres; but such a chasm as yawned between them in difference of temperament, character, and mode of living, could not have been bridged over by Captain Eads. Fannie Kemble, as she was universally called, had by long and sympathetic reading of Shakespeare transformed herself into a woman of the Elizabethan era, and could barely be said to belong to the nineteenth century. Among other Elizabethan traits she had acquired an unconsciousness of self, together with an enormous self-confidence, and no idea of what people thought of her in polite society ever seems to have occurred to her. She had the heart of a woman, but mentally she was like a composite picture of Shakespeare's _dramatis personae_, and that Emerson should have spoken of her as "a great exaggerated creature" is not to be wondered at. In her own department she was marvellous. The severity of a mountain winter and the disagreeableness of its thawing out in spring, is atoned for by its summer,--that fine exhilarating ether, which seems to bring elevated thoughts, by virtue of its own nature. Hawthorne enjoyed this with his children and his chickens; and his wife enjoyed it with him. It is evident from her letters that she had not been so happy since their first year at the Old Manse. She had now an opportunity to indulge her love of artistic decoration, in adorning the walls of their little red cottage, which has since unfortunately been destroyed by fire. She even began to give her daughter, who was only six years old, some instruction in drawing. The following extract concerning her husband, from a letter written to her mother, is charmingly significant of her state of mind at this time. "Beauty and the love of it, in him, are the true culmination of the good and true, and there is no beauty to him without these bases. He has perfect dominion over himself in every respect, so that to do the highest, wisest, loveliest thing is not the least effort to him, any more than it is to a baby to be innocent. It is his spontaneous act, and a baby is not more unconscious in its innocence. I never knew such loftiness, so simply borne. I have never known him to stoop from it in the most trivial household matter, any more than in a larger or more public one." [Footnote: J. Hawthorne, i. 373.] Truly this gives us a beautiful insight into their home-life, and Hawthorne himself could not have written a more accurate eulogium. As intimated in the last chapter, we all make our way through life by correcting our daily trespasses, and Hawthorne was no exception to it; but as a mental analysis of this man at his best Mrs. Hawthorne's statement deserves a lasting recognition. "THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES" It was not until early frosts and shortening days drove Hawthorne within doors that he again took up his writing, but who can tell how long he had been dreaming over his subject? Within five months, or by the last week of January, "The House of the Seven Gables" was ready for the press. There is no such house in Salem, exactly as he describes it; but an odd, antiquated-looking structure at No. 54 Turner Street is supposed to have served him for the suggestion of it. The name is picturesque and well suited to introduce the reader to a homely suburban romance. The subject of the story goes back to the witchcraft period, and its active principle is a wizard's curse, which descends from one generation to another, until it is finally removed by the marriage of a descendant of the injured party to a descendant of the guilty one. Woven together with this, there is an exposition of mesmerism, or, as it is now called, Christian Science, with its good and evil features. Each of Hawthorne's larger romances has a distinct style and quality of its own, apart from the fine individualized style of the author. Lathrop makes an excellent remark in regard to "The House of the Seven Gables," that the perfection of its art seems to stand between the reader and his subject. It resembles in this respect those Dutch paintings whose enamelled surface seems like a barrier to prevent the spectator from entering the scenes which they represent. It would be a mistake to consider this a fault, but one cannot help noticing the accuracy with which the subordinate details of the plot are elaborated. Is it possible that this is connected in a way with the rarefied atmosphere of Lenox, in which distant objects appear so sharply defined? "The House of the Seven Gables" might be symbolized by two paintings, in the first of which Hepzibah Pyncheon stands as the central figure, her face turned upward in a silent prayer for justice, her brother Clifford, with his head bowed helplessly, at one side, and the judge, with his chronic smile of satisfaction, behind Clifford; on the other side the keen-eyed Holgrave would appear, sympathetically watching the progress of events, with Phoebe Pyncheon at his left hand. Old Uncle Banner and little Ned Higgins might fill in the background. In the second picture the stricken judge would be found in a large old-fashioned arm-chair, with Clifford and Hepzibah flying through a doorway to the right, while Phoebe and Holgrave, the one happy and the other startled, enter on the left. Hepzibah, not Phoebe, is the true heroine of the romance,--or at least its central figure. Nowhere do we look more deeply into Hawthorne's nature than through this sympathetic portrait of the cross-looking old maid, whose only inheritance is the House of the Seven Gables, in which she has lived many years, poor, solitary, friendless, with a disgrace upon her family, only sustained by the hope that she may yet be a help and comfort to her unfortunate brother. The jury before whom Clifford was tried believed him to be guilty, but his sister never would believe it. She lives for him and suffers with him. Hawthorne does not mitigate the unpleasantness of her appearance, but he instructs us that there is a divine spark glowing within. Very pitiful is her attempt to support the enfeebled brother by keeping a candy store; but noble and heroic is her resistance to the designs of her tyrannical cousin. It is her intrepidity that effects the crisis of the drama. Both Hepzibah and Clifford Pyncheon are examples of what fine portraiture Hawthorne could accomplish in exceptional or abnormal personalities, without ever descending to caricature. Judge Pyncheon has been criticised as being too much of a stage villain, but the same might be alleged of Shakespeare's (or Fletcher's) Richard III. What is he, in effect, but a Richard III. reduced to private life? Moreover, his habit of smiling is an individual trait which gives him a certain distinction of his own. Usually, Faces ever blandly smiling Are victims of their own beguiling. But Judge Pyncheon is a candidate for the governorship, and among the more mercenary class of politicians smiling often becomes a habit for the sake of popularity. Hawthorne might have added something to the judge's _personale_ by representing him with a droll wit, like James Fiske, Jr., or some others that we have known, and he might have exposed more of his internal reflections; but he serves as a fair example of the hard, grasping, hypocritical type of Yankee. We see only one side of him, but there are men, and women too, who only have one side to their characters. It has been affirmed that Hawthorne made use of the Honorable Mr. Upham, the excellent historian of Salem witchcraft, as a model for Judge Pyncheon, and that this was done in revenge for Mr. Upham's inimical influence in regard to the Salem surveyorship. It is impossible, at this date, to disentangle the snarl of Hawthorne's political relations in regard to that office, but Upham had been a member of Congress and was perhaps as influential a Whig as any in the city. If Hawthorne was removed through his instrumentality, he performed our author a service, which neither of them could have realized at the time. Hawthorne, however, had a strong precedent in his favor in this instance; namely, Shakespeare's caricature of Sir Thomas Luce, as Justice Shallow in "The Merry Wives of Windsor"; but there is no reason why we should think better or worse of Mr. Upham on this account. Phoebe Pyncheon is an ideal character, the type of youthful New England womanhood, and the most charming of all Hawthorne's feminine creations. Protected by the shield of her own innocence, she leaves her country home from the same undefined impulse by which birds fly north in spring, and accomplishes her destiny where she might have least expected to meet with it. She fills the whole book with her sunny brightness, and like many a young woman at her age she seems more like a spirit than a character. Her maidenly dignity repels analysis, and Hawthorne himself extends a wise deference to his own creation. The future of a great nation depends more on its young women than upon its laws or its statesmen. In regard to Holgrave, we have already said somewhat; but he is so lifelike that it seems as if he must have been studied from one of the younger members of the Brook Farm association; perhaps the one of whom Emerson tells us, [Footnote: Lecture on Brook Farm.] that he spent his leisure hours in playing with the children, but had "so subtle a mind" that he was always consulted whenever important business was on foot. He is visible to our mental perspective as a rather slender man, above medium height, with keen hazel eyes, a long nose, and long legs, and quick and lively in his movements. Phoebe has a more symmetrical figure, bluish-gray eyes, a complexion slightly browned from going without her hat, luxuriant chestnut-brown hair, always quiet and graceful. We have no doubt that Holgrave made a worthy husband for her, and that he occasionally took a hand in public affairs. Judge Pyncheon's duplicity is revealed to Holgrave by the medium of a daguerreotype. Men or women who are actors in real life should avoid being photographed, for the camera is pretty sure to penetrate their hypocrisy, and expose them to the world as they actually are. Every photograph album is to a certain extent a rogues' gallery, in which our faults, peculiarities, and perhaps vices are ruthlessly portrayed for the student of human nature. If a merchant were to have all his customers photographed, he would soon learn to distinguish those who were not much to be trusted. Notice also Hawthorne's eye for color. When Clifford, Hepzibah, and Phoebe are about to leave the seven-gabled house for the last time, "A plain, but handsome dark-green barouche" is drawn to the door. This is evidently his idea of a fine equipage; and it happens that the background of Raphael's "Pope Julius" is of this same half-invisible green, and harmonizes so well with the Pope's figure that few realize its coloring. The plot of this picturesque story is the most ingenious of Hawthorne's life, but sufficiently probable throughout to answer the purpose of a romance, and it is the only one of Hawthorne's larger works which ends happily. It was brought out by Ticknor & Company at Easter 1850,--less than ten weeks after it was finished; but we think of the House of the Seven Gables as standing empty, deserted and forlorn. In December Emerson had written to Hawthorne concerning a new magazine in which he and Lowell were interested, and if Hawthorne would only give it his support its success could not be questioned. What Hawthorne replied to this invitation has never been discovered, but he had seen too many such periodicals go to wreck to feel much confidence in this enterprise. [Footnote: J. Hawthorne, i. 381.] It is of more importance now that Emerson should have addressed him as "My dear Hawthorne," for such cordial friendliness was rare in "the poet of the pines." Mrs. Alcott once remarked that Emerson never spoke to her husband otherwise than as "Mr. Alcott," and it is far from likely that he ever spoke to Hawthorne differently from this. The conventionalities of letter-writing run back to a period when gentlemen addressed one another--and perhaps felt so too--in a more friendly manner than they do at present. Works of fiction and sentimental poetry stir up a class of readers which no other literature seems to reach, and Hawthorne was soon inundated with letters from unknown, and perhaps unknowable, admirers; but the most remarkable came from a man named Pyncheon, who asserted that his grandfather had been a judge in Salem, and who was highly indignant at the use which Hawthorne had made of his name. [Footnote: Conway, 135.] This shows how difficult it is for a writer of fiction or a biographer to escape giving offence. The lightning is sure to strike somewhere. "THE SNOW IMAGE" The question now was, what next? As it happened, the next important event in the Hawthorne family was the advent of their younger daughter, born like Agassiz, "in the lovely month of May," and amid scenery as beautiful as the Pays de Vaud. Her father named her Rose, in defiance of Hillard's objection to idyllic nomenclature; and as a child she seemed much like the spirit of that almost fabulous flower, the wild orange-rose. Ten years later, she was the most graceful girl in the Concord dancing-school, and resembled her elder sister so closely that they could not have been mistaken for anything but sisters. As she grew older she came more and more to resemble her mother. It was said that Hawthorne's "Wonder Book" originated in his telling free versions of the Greek myths to his children on winter evenings; and also that Horace Mann's boys, who were almost exactly of the same age as Una and Julian, participated in the entertainment. This may have happened the following winter at Newton, but could hardly have taken place at Lenox; and otherwise it is quite impossible to identify all the children with botanical names in Hawthorne's introduction. Julian once remarked, at school, that he believed that he was the original of Squash-blossom, and that is as near as we can get to it. Some of them may have been as imaginary as the ingenious Mr. Eustace Bright, and might serve as well to represent one group of children as another. The book was written very rapidly, at an average of ten pages a day, and it has Hawthorne's grace and purity of style, but it does not belong to the legitimate series of his works. It is an excellent book for the young, for they learn from it much that every one ought to know; but to mature minds the original fables, even in a translation, are more satisfactory than these Anglo-Saxon versions in the "Wonder Book." The collection of tales which passes by the name of "The Snow Image" is a much more serious work. "The Great Stone Face" and one or two others in the collection were prepared at Salem for the same volume as "The Scarlet Letter," but judiciously excluded by Mr. Fields. "The Snow Image" itself, however, is plainly derived from Hawthorne's own experience during the winter at Lenox. The common-sensible farmer and his poetic wife could not be mistaken for Mr. and Mrs. Hawthorne, but the two sportive children are easily identified as Una and Julian. They are not only of the same age, but the "slight graceful girl" and "chubby red-cheeked boy" describes them exactly. The idea has been derived from the fable of the Greek sculptor Pygmalion whose statue came to life. That seems far enough off to be pleasantly credible, but to have such a transubstantiation take place in the front yard of a white-fenced American residence, is rather startling. Yet Hawthorne, with the help of the twilight, carries us through on the broad wings of his imagination, even to the melting of the little snow-sister before an airtight stove in a close New England parlor. The moral that Hawthorne draws from this fable might be summed up in the old adage, "What is one man's meat is another man's poison"; but it has a deeper significance, which the author does not seem to have perceived. The key-note of the fable is the same as that in Goethe's celebrated ballad, "The Erl King"; namely, that those things which children imagine, are as real to them as the facts of the external world. Nor do we altogether escape from this so long as we live. The origin of "The Great Stone Face" is readily traced to the profile face in the Franconia Mountains,--which has not only a strangely human appearance, but a grave dignified expression, and, as a natural phenomenon, ranks next to Niagara Falls. The value of the fable, however, has perhaps been over-estimated. It is an old story in a modern garb, the saying so often repeated in the Book of Isaiah: "The last shall be first, and the first shall be last." The man Ernest, who is much in his ways like Hawthorne himself, spends his leisure in contemplating the Great Stone Face, and thus acquires a similar expression in his own. The wealthy merchant, the famous general, the great party leader, and the popular poet, all come upon the scene; but not one of them appears to advantage before the tranquil countenance of the Great Stone Face. Finally, Ernest in his old age carries off the laurel; and in this Hawthorne hits the mark, for it is only through earnestness that man becomes immortal. Yet, one would suppose that constantly gazing at a face of stone, would give one a rather stony expression; as sculptors are liable to become statuesque from their occupation. Another Dantean allegory, and fully equal in power to any Canto in Dante's "Inferno," is the story of "Ethan Brandt," or "The Unpardonable Sin." We have a clew to its origin in the statement that it was part of an unfinished romance; presumably commenced at Concord, but afterward discarded, owing to the author's dissatisfaction with his work--an illustration of Hawthorne's severe criticism of his own writing. The scene is laid at a limekiln in a dark and gloomy wood, where a lime-burner, far from human habitations, is watching his fires at night. To him Ethan Brandt appears, a strange personage, long known for his quest after the unpardonable sin, and the solitude echoes back the gloominess of their conversation. Finally, the lime-burner fixes his fires for the night, rolls himself up in his blanket, and goes to sleep. When he awakes in the morning, the stranger is gone, but, on ascending the kiln to look at his caldron, he finds there the skeleton of a man, and between its ribs a heart of white marble. This is the unpardonable sin, for which there is neither dispensation nor repentance. Ethan Brandt has committed suicide because life had become intolerable on such conditions. The summer of 1851 in Lenox was by no means brilliant. It had not yet become the tip end of fashion, and Hawthorne's chief entertainment seems to have been the congratulatory letters he received from distinguished people. Mrs. Frances Kemble wrote to him from England, announcing the success of his book there, and offering him the use of her cottage, a more palatial affair than Mrs. Tappan's, for the ensuing winter. Mrs. Hawthorne, however, felt the distance between herself and her relatives, and perhaps they both felt it. Mrs. Hawthorne's sister Mary, now Mrs. Horace Mann, was living in West Newton, and the last of June Mrs. Hawthorne went to her for a long summer visit, taking her two daughters with her and leaving Julian in charge of his father, with whom it may be affirmed he was sufficiently safe. It rarely happens that a father and son are so much together as these two were, and they must have become very strongly attached. For older company he had Hermann Melville, and G. P. R. James, whose society he may have found as interesting as that of more distinguished writers, and also Mr. Tappan, whom Hawthorne had learned to respect for his good sense and conciliatory disposition--a true peace-maker among men and women. Burill Curtis, the amateur brother of George W. Curtis, came to sketch the lake from Hawthorne's porch, and Doctor Holmes turned up once or twice. On July 24 Hawthorne wrote to his friend Pike at Salem: [Footnote: Mrs. Lathrop, 151.] "By the way, if I continue to prosper as heretofore in the literary line, I shall soon be in a condition to buy a place; and if you should hear of one, say worth from $1500 to $2000, I wish you would keep your eye on it for me. I should wish it to be on the seacoast, or at all events with easy access to the sea." The evident meaning of this is that the Hawthornes had no desire to spend a second winter in the Berkshire hills. The world was large, but he knew not where to rest his head. Mrs. Hawthorne solved the problem on her return to Lenox, and it was decided to remove to West Newton when cold weather came. Thither they went November 21 in a driving storm of snow and sleet,--a parting salute from old Berkshire,--and reached Horace Mann's house the same evening. Nobody knows where the Hawthornes lived in Newton. The oldest survivors of both families were only five years of age at that time. Mrs. Hawthorne's father also resided in Newton that winter, and it is more than likely that they made their residence with him. Julian Hawthorne has a distinct recollection of the long freight-trains with their clouds of black smoke blowing across his father's ground during the winter; so they could not have lived very far from the Worcester railroad. Horace Mann's house is still standing, opposite a school-house on the road from the station, where a by-way meets it at an acute angle. The freight-trains and their anthracite smoke must have had a disturbing influence on Hawthorne's sensibility. The long-extended town of Newton, which is now a populous city, has much the best situation of any of the Boston suburbs--on a moderately high range of hills, skirted by the Charles River, both healthful and picturesque. It is not as hot in summer nor so chilly at other seasons as Concord, and enjoys the advantage of a closer proximity to the city. Its society is, and always has been, more liberal and progressive than Salem society in Hawthorne's time. Its citizens, mainly professional and mercantile men, are active, intelligent, and sensible, without being too fastidious. It was a healthful change for Hawthorne, and we are not surprised to find that his literary work was affected by it. Mrs. L. Maria Child lived there at the time, and so did Celia Thaxter, although not yet known to fame. The sound, penetrating intelligence of Horace Mann may have also had its salutary effect. "THE BLITHEDALE ROMANCE" Hawthorne's "Wonder Book" and "The Snow Image" were expressed to Ticknor & Company before leaving Lenox, and "The Blithedale Romance" may also have been commenced before that change of base. We only know, from his diary, that it was finished on the last day of April, 1852, and that he received the first proof-sheets of it two weeks later--which shows what expedition publishers can make, when they feel inclined. The name itself is somewhat satirical, for Hawthorne did not find the life at Brook Farm very blithesome, and in the story, with the exception of the sylvan masquerade, there is much more rue than heart's-ease, as commonly happens in his stories. The tale ends tragically, and without the gleam of distant happiness which lights up the last scenes of "The Scarlet Letter." It commences with a severe April snowstorm, an unfavorable omen; the same in which Hawthorne set out to join the West Roxbury community. And yet the name is not without a serious meaning--a stern, sad moral significance. The earth is not naturally beautiful, for rank Nature ever runs to an excess. It is only beautiful when man controls and remodels it; but what man makes physically, he can unmake spiritually. We pass by a handsome estate, a grand arcade of elms over its avenue, spacious lawns, an elegant mansion, a luxurious flower-garden; but we are informed that happiness does not dwell there, that its owner is a misanthropic person, whose nature has been perverted by the selfishness of luxury; that there are no pleasant parties on the lawn, no happy wooing in that garden, no marriage festivals in those halls; and those possessions, which might have proved a blessing to generations yet unborn, are no better than a curse and a whited sepulchre. How many such instances could be named. It may have occurred to Hawthorne, that, if George Ripley, instead of following after a will-o'-the-wisp notion, which could only lead him into a bog, had used the means at his disposal to cultivate Brook Farm in a rational manner, and had made it a hospitable rendezvous for intellectual and progressive people,--an oasis of culture amid the wide waste of commercialism,--the place might well have been called Blithedale, and Mr. Ripley would have inaugurated a movement as rare as it was beneficial. It was only at a city like Boston, whose suburbs were pleasant and easily accessible, that such a plan could be carried out; and it was only a man of Mr. Ripley's scholarship and intellectual acumen who could have drawn together the requisite elements for it. It looks as if he missed an opportunity. We should avoid, however, confounding George Ripley with Hawthorne's Hollingsworth. It is quite possible that Hawthorne made use of certain traits in Ripley's character for this purpose, and also that he may have had some slight collision with him, such as he represents in "The Blithedale Romance;" but Ripley was an essentially veracious nature, who, as already remarked, carried out his experiment to its logical conclusion. Hollingsworth, on the contrary, proposes to pervert the trust confided to him, in order to establish at Blithedale an institution for the reformation of criminals, by which proceeding he would, after a fashion, become a criminal himself. At the same time, he plays fast and loose with the affections of Zenobia and Priscilla, who are both in love with him, designing to marry the one who would make the most favorable match for his purpose. It is through the junction of these two streams of evil that the catastrophe is brought about. Priscilla is evidently taken from the little seamstress whom Hawthorne mentions in his diary for October 9, 1841, and if she ever discovered this, she could hardly have been displeased, for she is one of his most lovable creations; not so much of an ideal as Phoebe Pyncheon, for she is older and has already seen hard fortune. Her quiet, almost submissive ways at first excite pity rather than admiration, but at length we discover that there is a spirit within her, which shines through its earthly envelope, like the twinkling of a star. Zenobia has a larger nature and a more gifted mind than Priscilla, but also a more mixed character. Her name suggests a queenly presence and she is fully conscious of this. She does not acquire an equal influence over the other sex, for she is evidently in love with herself. She is described as handsome and attractive, but no sooner had "Blithedale" been published than people said, "Margaret Fuller" [Footnote: the name of Zenobia is not very remotely significant of Margaret Fuller. Palmyra was the centre of Greek philosophy in Zenobia's time, and she also resembled Margaret in her tragical fate.]--although Margaret Fuller was rather plain looking, and never joined the Brook Farm association. If this surmise be correct, it leads to a curious consideration. After painting a portrait of Zenobia in Chapter VI of "Blithedale," quite worthy of Rubens or Titian, he remarks, through the incognito of Miles Coverdale, in the first part of Chapter VII, that Priscilla reminds him of Margaret Fuller, and says this to Priscilla herself. Now it proves in the sequel that Priscilla and Zenobia are half-sisters, but it would be as difficult to imagine this from anything that is said in the story about them, as it is to understand how the shy, undemonstrative Priscilla could have reminded Coverdale of the brilliant and aggressive leader of the Transcendentalists. The introduction of Margaret Fuller's name in that place comes abruptly on the reader, and momentarily dispels the illusion of the tale. Was Hawthorne conscious of the undercurrent of relationship, which he had already formulated in his mind, between Priscilla and Zenobia; or what is more likely, did he make the comparison in order to lead his readers away from any conceptions they might have formed in regard to the original of his heroine? If the latter supposition be true, he certainly was not very successful, for in either case it is evident that Margaret Fuller was prominent in his thoughts at the time he wrote those two chapters. Hawthorne's idea of her, however, should not be accepted as a finality. What Emerson and other friends have said concerning her should also be considered in order to obtain a just impression of a woman who combined more varied qualities than perhaps any other person of that time. Hawthorne says of Zenobia, that she was naturally a stump oratoress,--rather an awkward expression for him--and that "her mind was full of weeds." Margaret Fuller was a natural orator, and her mind was full of many subjects in which Hawthorne could take little interest. She was a revolutionary character, a sort of female Garibaldi, who attacked old Puritan traditions with a two-edged sword; she won victories for liberalism, but left confusion behind her. Like all such characters, she made friends and enemies wherever she went. She sometimes gave offence by hasty impulsive utterances, but more frequently by keenly penetrating arguments for the various causes which she espoused. Only a woman could deliver such telling shots. Lowell, who was fond of an argument himself, did not like her better than Hawthorne did. There may be some truth in what he says in "The Fable for Critics," that the expression of her face seemed to suggest a life-long familiarity with the "infinite soul"; but Margaret Fuller was sound at heart, and when she talked on those subjects which interested her, no one could be more self-forgetful or thoroughly in earnest. At times, she seemed like an inspired prophetess, and if she had lived two thousand years earlier, she might have been remembered as a sibyl. [Footnote: See Appendix B.] "The Blithedale Romance" is written with a freer pen and less carefully than "The House of the Seven Gables," and is so much the better; for the author's state of mind in which he is writing will always affect the reader more or less, and if the former feels under a slight constraint the latter will also. A writer cannot be too exact in ascertaining the truth,--Macaulay to the contrary,--but he can trouble himself too much as to the expression of it. At the same time, "The Blithedale Romance" is the least poetic of Hawthorne's more serious works (which is the same as saying that it is more like a novel), for the reason that Hawthorne in this instance was closer to his subject. It is also more of a personal reminiscence, and less an effort of the imagination. He has included in it a number of descriptive passages taken from his Brook Farm diary; most notably the account of that sylvan masquerade, in which Coverdale finds his former associates engaged on his return to Blithedale in the autumn. Perhaps this is the reason why the book has so pleasant a flavor--a mellow after-thought of old associations. An air of mystery adds an enchantment to a work of art, whether in poetry, painting, or sculpture,--perhaps also in music; but there is a difference in kind between mystery and uncertainty. We do not like to be left half in the dark, in regard to things which we think we ought to know. There is a break in Hawthorne's chain of evidence against Hollingsworth and Zenobia, which might possibly have been filled to advantage. He would certainly have been non-suited, if his case had been carried into court. We are permitted to suppose that Zenobia, in order to clear her path of a successful rival, assists the mountebank, Westervelt, to entrap Priscilla, over whom he possesses a kind hypnotic power, and to carry her off for the benefit of his mountebank exhibitions; but it remains a supposition and nothing more. We cannot but feel rejoiced, when Hollingsworth steps onto the platform and releases Priscilla from the psychological net-work in which she is involved, and from which she has not sufficient will-power to free herself. He certainly deserves her hand and fortune; but, as to his condemnatory charges against Zenobia, which led directly to her suicide,--what could they have been? Was there nothing more than the trick she had attempted upon Priscilla? And if he accused her of that only, why should he suffer perpetual remorse on account of her death? Surely there was need of further explanation here, for the catastrophe and its consequences are out of all proportion to the apparent cause. His account of the recovery of Zenobia's body is a close transcript of the search for that unfortunate school-mistress, who drowned herself in Concord River; and it is possible that, if Hawthorne had not been present on that occasion, the plot might have terminated in some other manner. The story closes without a ray of hope for Hollingsworth; but the reader can perceive one in the generous devotion of his single-minded wife, even if Hawthorne did not. CHAPTER XII THE LIVERPOOL CONSULATE: 1852-1854 Why Hawthorne returned to Concord in 1852 is more of a mystery than the suicide of Zenobia. Horace Mann also left Newton, to be President of Antioch College (and to die there in the cause of feminine education), in the autumn of that year; but this could hardly have been expected six months earlier. Hawthorne was not very favorably situated at Newton, being rather too near the railroad; but there was plenty of land on the top of the hill, where he might have built himself a house, and in the course of twelve years his property would have quadrupled in value. A poet will not be less of a poet, but more so, for understanding the practical affairs of life. Or he might have removed to Cambridge, where Longfellow, always foremost in kind offices, would have been like a guardian angel to him, and where he could have made friends like Felton and Agassiz, who would have been much more in harmony with his political views. Ellery Channing was the only friend he appears to have retained in Concord, and it was not altogether a favorable place to bring up his children; but the natural topography of Concord is unusually attractive, and it may be suspected that he was drawn thither more from the love of its pine solitudes and shimmering waters, than from any other motive. The house he purchased was nearly a mile from the centre of the town, and has ever since been known by the name of the Wayside. After Hawthorne's return from Europe in 1860, he remodelled it somewhat, so that it has a more dignified aspect than when he first took possession of it. Alcott, who occupied it for some years previously, had adorned it with that species of rustic architecture in which he was so skilful. The house was half surrounded by a group of locust trees, much in fashion seventy years ago, and had been set so close against the hill-side, that a thicket of stunted pines and other wild growth rose above the roof like a crest. Bronson Alcott was his next-door neighbor,--almost too strong a contrast to him,--and Emerson's house was half a mile away; so that these three families formed a group by themselves in that portion of Concord. Hawthorne wrote a letter to his sister Elizabeth, describing his new acquisition, and expressing satisfaction in it. It was the first house that he had ever owned; and it is no small comfort to a man to live under his own roof, even though it be a humble one. At this time, however, he did not remain at the Wayside but a single year. After that, the house stood empty until the untimely death of Horace Mann, August 2, 1859, when Mrs. Mann came to Concord with her three boys, and occupied it until Hawthorne's return from Europe. [Illustration: THE WAYSIDE] It may as well be noticed here, that, during the eight years which Hawthorne spent altogether in Concord, he accomplished little literary work, and none of any real importance. It is impossible to account for this, except upon those psychological conditions which sometimes affect delicately balanced minds. Whether the trouble was in the social atmosphere of the place, or in its climatic conditions, perhaps Hawthorne himself could not have decided; but there must have been a reason for it of some description. Julian Hawthorne states that his father had a plan at this time of writing another romance, of a more cheerful tone than "The Blithedale Romance," but the full current of his poetic activity was suddenly brought to a standstill by an event that nobody would have dreamed of. Hawthorne had hardly established himself in his new abode, when Franklin Pierce was nominated for the presidency by the Democratic party. The whole country was astonished, for no such nomination had ever been made before, and it is probable that Pierce himself shared largely in this. The New Hampshire delegation had presented his name to the convention, in order to procure him distinction in his own State, but without expectation that he would become a serious candidate. Like the nomination of Hayes in 1876, it resulted from the jealousy of the great party leaders,--always an unfortunate position for a public man to be placed in. Theodore Parker said, "Any one is now in danger of becoming President." Hawthorne evidently felt this, for he wrote to Bridge, "I do not consider Pierce the brightest man in the country, for there are twenty more so." It would have been a mild statement if he had said two hundred. Pierce wanted him, of course, to write a campaign biography, and communicated with him to that effect; but Hawthorne disliked meddling in such matters, and at first declined to do it, although it was expected to be highly remunerative. Pierce, however, insisted, for Hawthorne's reputation was now much beyond his own, and he felt that a biography by so distinguished a writer would confer upon him great dignity in the eyes of the world; and as Hawthorne felt already much indebted to Pierce, he finally consented,--although a cheap spread-eagle affair would have served the purpose of his party quite as well. The book had to be written in haste, and just at the time when Hawthorne wished to take a little leisure. There were so few salient points in Pierce's life, that it was almost like making a biography out of nothing, and as for describing him as a hero, that was quite impossible. It was fortunate that he knew so much of Pierce's early life, and also that Pierce had kept a diary during the Mexican War, which formed a considerable portion of the biography. The book is worth reading, although written in this prosaic manner. Hawthorne states in the preface, frankly and manfully, that he objected to writing it, and this ought to be an excuse sufficient for his doing so--if excuse be needed. He does not attempt to represent his friend as a great statesman, but rather as a patriotic country gentleman, who is interested in public affairs, and who rises from one honorable position to another through a well-deserved popularity. This would seem to have been the truth; and yet there was a decided inconsistency in Franklin Pierce's life, which Hawthorne represents plainly enough, although he makes no comment thereon. Franklin Pierce's father was captain of a militia company in 1798, when war was declared against the French Directory, for seizing and confiscating American merchant ships, contrary to the law of nations. There could not have been a more just occasion for war, but Captain Pierce resigned his commission, because he considered it wrong to fight against a republic; and Hawthorne approves of him for this. Franklin Pierce, however, resigned his seat in the Senate in 1842, on account of the interests of his family, alleging that "he would never enter public life again, unless the needs of his country imperatively demanded it," yet four years later he organized a regiment for the invasion of Mexico,--not only for making war upon a republic, but an unjust and indefensible war. General Grant's opinion ought to be conclusive on this latter point, for he belonged to the same political party as Pierce and Hawthorne. Certainly, Pierce's services were not required for the defence of his native land. To do Hawthorne justice, there can be no doubt that in his heart he disapproved of this; for in one of his sketches written at the Old Manse, he speaks censoriously of "those adventurous spirits who leave their homes to emigrate to Texas." He evidently foresaw that trouble would arise in that direction, and perhaps Ellery Channing assisted him in penetrating the true inwardness of the movement. It will be remembered that in Franklin Pierce's youth, he was exceptionally interested in military manoeuvres, and this may have been one of the inducements which led him into the Mexican War; but young men who are fond of holiday epaulets do not, for obvious reasons, make the best fighters. Pierce's military career was not a distinguished one; for, whether he was thrown from his horse in his first engagement, or, as the Whigs alleged, fell from it as soon as he came under fire, it is certain that he did not cover himself with glory, as the phrase was at that time. But we can believe Hawthorne, when he tells us that Pierce took good charge of the troops under his command, and that he was kind and considerate to sick and wounded soldiers. That was in accordance with his natural character. It was impossible at that time to avoid the slavery question in dealing with political subjects, and what Hawthorne said on this point, in the life of General Pierce, attracted more attention than the book itself. Like Webster he considered slavery an evil, but he believed it to be one of those evils which the human race outgrows, by progress in civilization,--like the human sacrifices of the Gauls perhaps,--and he greatly deprecated the anti-slavery agitation, which only served to inflame men's minds and make them unreasonable. There were many sensible persons in the Northern States at that time, like Hawthorne and Hillard, who sincerely believed in this doctrine, but they do not seem to have been aware that there was a pro-slavery agitation at the South which antedated Garrison's _Liberator_ and which was much more aggressive and vehement than the anti-slavery movement, because there were large pecuniary interests connected with it. The desperate grasping of the slave-holders for new territory, first in the Northwest and then in the Southwest, was not because they were in any need of land, but because new slave States increased their political power. Horatio Bridge says, relatively to this subject: "No Northern man had better means for knowing the dangers impending, previous to the outbreak of the war, than had General Pierce. Intimately associated--as he was--with the strong men of the South, in his Cabinet and in Congress, he saw that the Southerners were determined, at all hazards, to defend their peculiar institution of slavery, which was imperilled by the abolitionists." If Franklin Pierce was desirous of preserving the Union, why did he give Jefferson Davis a place in his Cabinet, and take him for his chief adviser? Davis was already a pronounced secessionist, and had been defeated in his own State on that issue. In subserviency to Southern interests, no other Northern man ever went so far as Franklin Pierce, nor did Garrison himself accomplish so much toward the dissolution of the Union. He was an instance in real life of Goldsmith's "good-natured man," and the same qualities which assisted him to the position of President prevented his administration from being a success. Presidents ought to be made of firmer and sterner material. Hawthorne had barely finished with the proofs of this volume, when he received the saddest, most harrowing news that ever came to him. After her mother's death, in 1849, Louisa Hawthorne had gone to live with her aunt, Mrs. John Dike; and in July, 1852, Mr. Dike went with her on an excursion to Saratoga and New York City. On the morning of July 27, they left Albany on the steamboat "Henry Clay," which, as is well known, never reached its destination. When nearing Yonkers, a fire broke out near the engines, where the wood-work was saturated with oil, and instantly the centre of the vessel was in a bright blaze. Mr. Dike happened to be on the forward deck at the moment, but Louisa Hawthorne was in the ladies' cabin, and it was impossible to reach her. The captain of the Henry Clay immediately ran the vessel on shore, so that Mr. Dike and those who were with him escaped to land, but Louisa and more than seventy others, who threw themselves into the water, were drowned. It would seem to have been impossible to save her. The death of Hawthorne's mother may be said to have come in the course of Nature, and his mind was prepared for it; but Louisa had been the playmate of his childhood, and her death seemed as unnecessary as it was sharp and sudden. It happened almost on the third anniversary of his mother's death, and these were the only two occasions in Hawthorne's life, when the Dark Angel hovered about his door. Rebecca Manning says: "Louisa Hawthorne was a most delightful, lovable, interesting woman--not at all 'commonplace,' as has been stated. Her death was a great sorrow to all her friends. Her name was Maria Louisa, and she was often called Maria by her mother and sister and aunts." Depressed and unnerved, in the most trying season of the year, Hawthorne went in the latter part of August to visit Franklin Pierce at Concord, New Hampshire; but there a severe torrid wave came on, so that Pierce advised him to go at once to the Isles of Shoals, promising to follow in a few days, if his numerous engagements would permit him. The Isles of Shoals have the finest summer climate on the Atlantic Ocean; an atmosphere at once quieting and strengthening, and always at its best when it is hottest on the main-land. Hawthorne found a pair of friends ready-made there, and prepared to receive him,--Levi Thaxter, afterwards widely known as the apostle of Browning in America, and his wife, Celia, a poetess in the bud, only sixteen, but very bright, original, and pleasant. They admired Hawthorne above all living men, and his sudden advent on their barren island seemed, as Thaxter afterward expressed it, like a supernatural presence. They became good companions in the next two weeks; climbing the rocks, rowing from one island to another,--bald pieces of rock, like the summits of mountains rising above the surface of the sea,--visiting the light-house, the monument to Captain John Smith, Betty Moody's Cave, the graves of the Spanish sailors, the trap dikes of ancient lava, and much else. Every day Hawthorne wrote a minute account in his diary of his various proceedings there, including the observation of a live shark, which came into the cove by the hotel, a rare spectacle on that coast. General Pierce did not make his appearance, however, and on September 15, Hawthorne returned to his own home. The election of Pierce to the presidency was as remarkable as his nomination. In 1848, General Taylor, the victor of a single battle, but a man of little education, was nominated for the presidency over the heads of the finest orators and ablest statesmen in America, and was enthusiastically elected. General Scott, Franklin Pierce's opponent, defeated the Mexicans in four decisive battles, captured the capital of the country, and conducted one of the most skilful military expeditions of the past century. He was a man of rare administrative ability, and there is no substantial argument against his character. We have Grant's testimony that it was pleasant to serve under him. Yet he was overwhelmingly defeated at the polls by a militia general without distinction, military or civil. Hawthorne was naturally delighted at the result of the election; unfortunate as it afterwards proved for his country. He derived a threefold satisfaction from it, in the success of his friend, in the defeat of the Whigs, and in the happy prospects which it opened for himself. He could now return to the Salem Custom House in triumph,--as the wisest man might be tempted to do,--but he looked forward to something that would be more advantageous to his family. He had already written on October 18 to Horatio Bridge: "Before undertaking it [the biography] I made an inward resolution, that I should accept no office from him; but, to say the truth, I doubt whether it would not be rather folly than heroism to adhere to this purpose, in case he should offer me anything particularly good. We shall see. A foreign mission I could not afford to take. The consulship at Liverpool, I might." [Footnote: Bridge 130] We may conclude from this, that Pierce had already intimated the Liverpool consulate, which at that time was supposed to be worth twenty-five thousand dollars a year in fees. It was an excellent plan for the President of the United States to have such a gift at his disposal, to reward some individual like Hawthorne, to whom the whole nation was indebted to an extent that could never be repaid; but it is a question whether it would not have been as well, in this particular case, for Hawthorne to have remained in his own country. If he could have written five or six romances more, this would have secured him a good competency, and would have assured a sufficient income for his family after his death. As it happened, the Liverpool consulate did not prove so profitable as was anticipated. With such "great expectations" before him, Hawthorne could do no serious work that winter, so he occupied himself leisurely enough, with writing a sequel to his "Wonder Book," which he called "Tanglewood Tales," apparently after the thicket which surmounted the hill above his residence. This was finished early in March, and given to Ticknor & Company to publish when they saw fit. As it is a book intended for children, the consideration of it need not detain us. Early in April, 1853, Hawthorne was appointed and confirmed to the Liverpool consulate, and on the 14th he went to Washington, as he tells us, for the first time, to thank the President in person. Otherwise he has divulged nothing concerning this journey, except that he was introduced to a larger number of persons than he could remember the names or faces of, and received ten times as many invitations as he could accept. If Charles V. honored himself with posterity by picking up the paint-brush which Titian had dropped on the floor, President Pierce might have done himself equal credit by making Hawthorne his guest at the White House; but if he did not go so far as this, it cannot be doubted that he treated Hawthorne handsomely. There were giants at Washington in those days. Webster and Clay were gone, but Seward was the Charles Fox and Sumner the Edmund Burke of America; Chase and Marcy were not much less in intellectual stature. Hawthorne must have met them, but we hear nothing of them from him. Hawthorne delayed his departure for England, until the most favorable season arrived, for his fragile wife and infant children to cross the "rolling forties." At length, on July 6, two days after his forty-ninth birthday, he sailed from Boston in the "Niagara," and with _placida onda prospero il vento_, in about twelve days they all arrived safely at their destination. The great stone docks of Liverpool, extending along its whole water-front, give one a strong impression of the power and solidity of England. Otherwise the city is almost devoid of interest, and travellers customarily pass through it, to take the next train for Oxford or London, without further observation, unless it be to give a look at the conventional statue of Prince Albert on an Arab horse. Liverpool is not so foggy a place as London, but it has a damper and less pleasant climate, without those varied attractions and substantial enjoyments which make London one of the most pleasant residences and most interesting of cities. London fog is composed of soft-coal smoke, which, ascending from innumerable chimneys, is filtered in the upper skies, and then, mixed with vapor, is cast back upon the city by every change of wind. It is not unpleasant to the taste, and seems to be rather healthful than otherwise; but all the vapors which sail down the Gulf Stream, and which are not condensed on the Irish coast in the form of rain, collect about the mouth of the Mersey, so that the adjacent country is the best watered portion of all England, Cornwall possibly excepted. There is plenty of wealth in Liverpool, and all kinds of private entertainments, but in no other city of its size are there so few public entertainments, and the only interesting occupation that a stranger might find there, would be to watch the strange and curious characters in the lower classes, faces and figures that cannot be caricatured, emerging from cellar-ways or disappearing through side-doors. Go into an alehouse in the evening and, beside the pretty barmaid, who deserves consideration as much for her good behavior as for her looks, you will see plainly enough where Dickens obtained his _dramatis personae_ for "Barnaby Rudge" and "The Old Curiosity Shop." Either in Liverpool or in London you can see more grotesque comedy characters in a day, than you could meet with in a year in America. These poor creatures are pressed down, and squeezed out into what they are, under the superincumbent weight of an enormous leisure class. Such was the environment in which Hawthorne was obliged to spend the ensuing four years. He soon, however, discovered a means to escape from the monotonous and labyrinthine streets of the city, by renting an imitation castle at Rock Ferry,--a very pretty place, much like Dobbs Ferry, on the Hudson, although the river is not so fine,--where his wife and children enjoyed fresh air, green grass, and all the sunshine attainable, and whence he could reach the consulate every morning by the Mersey boat. We find them located there before September 1. Of the consulate itself, Hawthorne has given a minute pictorial description in "Our Old Home," from which the following extract is especially pertinent to our present inquiry: "The Consulate of the United States in my day, was located in Washington Buildings (a shabby and smoke-stained edifice of four stories high, thus illustriously named in honor of our national establishment), at the lower corner of Brunswick Street, contiguous to the Goree Arcade, and in the neighborhood of some of the oldest docks. This was by no means a polite or elegant portion of England's great commercial city, nor were the apartments of the American official so splendid as to indicate the assumption of much consular pomp on his part. A narrow and ill-lighted staircase gave access to an equally narrow and ill-lighted passage-way on the first floor, at the extremity of which, surmounting a door frame, appeared an exceedingly stiff pictorial representation of the Goose and Gridiron, according to the English idea of those ever-to-be-honored symbols. The staircase and passage-way were often thronged of a morning, with a set of beggarly and piratical-looking scoundrels (I do no wrong to our countrymen in styling them so, for not one in twenty was a genuine American), purporting to belong to our mercantile marine, and chiefly composed of Liverpool Blackballers, and the scum of every maritime nation on earth; such being the seamen by whose assistance we then disputed the navigation of the world with England. These specimens of a most unfortunate class of people were shipwrecked crews in quest of bed, board, and clothing, invalids asking permits for the hospital, bruised and bloody wretches complaining of ill-treatment by their officers, drunkards, desperadoes, vagabonds, and cheats, perplexingly intermingled with an uncertain proportion of reasonably honest men. All of them (save here and there a poor devil of a kidnapped landsman in his shore-going rags) wore red flannel shirts, in which they had sweltered or shivered throughout the voyage, and all required consular assistance in one form or another." The position of an American consul in a large foreign seaport, especially at Liverpool, is anything but a sinecure, and in fact requires a continual exercise of judgment much beyond the average duties of a foreign minister. The difficulty also of being continually obliged to distinguish between true and false applications for charity, especially when the false are greatly in excess of the true, and among a class of persons notably given to mendacious tricks, is one of the most unpleasant conditions in which a tender-hearted man can find himself. As curious studies in low life, the rascality of these nautical mendicants may often have been interesting, and even amusing, to Hawthorne, but as a steady pull they must have worn hard on his nerves, even though his experienced clerk served as a breakwater to a considerable portion. It has already been noticed that Hawthorne was a conscientious office-holder, and he never trusted to others any duties which he was able to attend to in person. Moreover, although he was a man of reserved manners, there was an exceptionally tender, sympathetic heart behind this impenetrable exterior, and it may be suspected that he relieved many instances of actual distress, which could not be brought within the government regulations. He may have suffered like the ghost in Dickens's "Haunted Man," on account of those whom he could not assist. It is certain that he aged more, in appearance at least, during these four years, than at any similar period of his life. It is no wonder, therefore, that, after a visit to the English lakes, the following summer, Hawthorne wrote to his friend, Henry Bright, from Liverpool: "I have come back only for a day or two to this black and miserable hole. I do not mean to apply these two adjectives to my consulate, but to the whole of Liverpool." Yet it should be recollected that there were nearly a million of persons in Liverpool, who were obliged to spend their lives there, for good and evil fortune; and, as Emerson says, we can never think too lightly of our own difficulties. Neither did Hawthorne find the news from America particularly interesting. On March 30, 1854, he wrote to Bridge: "I like my office well enough, but my official duties and obligations are irksome to me beyond expression. Nevertheless, the emoluments will be a sufficient inducement to keep me here, though they are not above a quarter part what some people suppose them. "It sickens me to look back to America. I am sick to death of the continual fuss and tumult and excitement and bad blood which we keep up about political topics. If it were not for my children, I should probably never return, but--after quitting office--should go to Italy, and live and die there. If Mrs. Bridge and you would go too, we might form a little colony amongst ourselves, and see our children grow up together. But it will never do to deprive them of their native land, which I hope will be a more comfortable and happy residence in their day than it has been in ours." [Footnote: J. Hawthorne, ii. 65.] The last sentence in this ought to be printed in italics, for it is the essence of patriotism. The "fuss and tumult" in America were due, for the time being, to the apple of discord which Douglas had cast into the Senate, by his Kansas-Nebraska bill. Hawthorne was too far away to distinguish the full force and insidious character of that measure, but if he had been in Concord, we believe he would have recognized (as so many did who never had before) the imminent danger to the Union, from the repeated concessions to the slave power. After he had become disenthralled from his allegiance to party, we find him in his letters to Bridge, taking broad views on political subjects. An event was soon to happen, well calculated to disenthrall him. The Congress of 1854, after passing the Kansas-Nebraska bill, resolved, in order to prove its democratic spirit, to economize in the representation of our government to foreign powers. On April 14, the good-hearted, theoretical O'Sullivan arrived in Liverpool, on his way to be minister to Portugal, and warned Hawthorne that there was a bill before Congress to reduce the consulate there to a salaried position. This was a terrible damper on Hawthorne's great expectations, and on April 17 he wrote again to Bridge, protesting against the change: [Footnote: Bridge, 135, 136.] "I trust, in Heaven's mercy, that no change will be made as regards the emoluments of the Liverpool consulate--unless indeed a salary is to be given in addition to the fees, in which case I should receive it very thankfully. This, however, is not to be expected; and if Liverpool is touched at all, it will be to limit its emoluments by a fixed salary--which will render the office not worth any man's holding. It is impossible (especially for a man with a family and keeping any kind of an establishment) not to spend a vast deal of money here. The office, unfortunately, is regarded as one of great dignity, and puts the holder on a level with the highest society, and compels him to associate on equal terms with men who spend more than my whole income on the mere entertainments and other trimmings and embroidery of their lives. Then I feel bound to exercise some hospitality towards my own countrymen. I keep out of society as much as I decently can, and really practice as stern an economy as I ever did in my life; but, nevertheless, I have spent many thousands of dollars in the few months of my residence here, and cannot reasonably hope to spend less than six thousand per annum, even after all the expenditure of setting up an establishment is defrayed." In addition to this, he states that his predecessor in office, John J. Crittenden, never received above fifteen thousand dollars in fees, of which he saved less than half. We can trust this to be the plain truth in regard to the Liverpool consulate, and if twenty-five thousand a year was ever obtained from it, there must have been some kind of deviltry in the business. Congress proved inexorable,--as it might not have been, had Hawthorne possessed the influence of a prominent politician like Crittenden. It was a direct affront to the President from his own party, and Pierce did not dare to veto the bill. What O'Sullivan said to Hawthorne on other subjects may be readily inferred from Hawthorne's next letter to Bridge, in which he begs him to remain in Washington for Pierce's sake, and says: "I feel a sorrowful sympathy for the poor fellow (for God's sake don't show him this), and hate to have him left without one true friend, or one man, who will speak a single honest word to him." It is not very clear how Horatio Bridge could counteract the influence of Jefferson Davis and Caleb Cushing, but this shows that Franklin Pierce's weakness as an administrator was already painfully apparent to his friends, and that even Hawthorne could no longer disguise it to himself. CHAPTER XIII HAWTHORNE IN ENGLAND: 1854-1858 Hawthorne's life in England was too generally monotonous to afford many salient points to his biographer. It was monotonous in his official duties, in his pleasure-trips, and in his social experiences. He found one good friend in Liverpool, Mr. Henry Bright, to whom he had already been introduced in America, and he soon made another in Mr. Francis Bennoch, who lived near the same city. They were both excellent men, and belonged to that fine class of Englishmen who possess a comfortable income, but live moderately, and prefer cultivating their minds and the society of their friends, to clubs, yachting, horse-racing, and other forms of external show. They were not distinguished, and were too sensible to desire distinction. Henry Bright may have been the more highly favored in Hawthorne's esteem, but they both possessed that tact and delicacy of feeling which is rare among Englishmen, and by accepting Hawthorne simply as a man like themselves, instead of as a celebrity, they won that place in his confidence from which so many had been excluded. Otherwise, Hawthorne contracted no friendships among distinguished Englishmen of letters, like that between Emerson and Carlyle; and from first to last he saw little of them. He had no sooner landed than he was greeted with a number of epistles from sentimental ladies, or authors of a single publication, who claimed a spiritual kinship with him, because of their admiration for his writings. One of them even addressed him as "My dear brother." These he filed away with a mental reservation to give the writers as wide a circuit as he possibly could. He attended a respectable number of dinner parties in both Liverpool and London, at which he remained for the most part a silent and unobtrusive guest. He was not favored with an invitation to Holland House, although he met Lady Holland on one occasion, and has left a description of her, not more flattering than others that have been preserved for us. He also met Macaulay and the Brownings at Lord Houghton's; but for once Macaulay would not talk. Mrs. Browning evidently pleased Hawthorne very much. [Footnote: J. Hawthorne, ii. 129.] The great lights of English literature besides these,--Tennyson, Carlyle, Ruskin, Thackeray, Dickens,--he was never introduced to, although he saw Tennyson in a picture-gallery at Manchester, and has left a description of him, such as might endure to the end of time. Neither did he make the acquaintance of those three luminaries, Froude, Marian Evans, and Max Muller, who rose above the horizon, previous to his return to America. That he was not presented at Court was a matter of course. There was nothing which he could have cared for less. After his return he published a volume of English sketches, which he entitled "Our Old Home," but he seems to have felt actually less at home in England than in any other country that he visited. In that book, and also in his diary, the even tenor of his discourse is interrupted here and there by fits of irritability which disclose themselves in the use of epithets such as one would hardly expect from the pen of Hawthorne. If we apply to him the well-known proverb with respect to the Russians, we can imagine that under similar conditions an inherited sailor-like tendency in him came to the surface. We only remember one such instance in his American Note-book, that in which he speaks of Thoreau's having a face "as homely as sin." [Footnote: The general effect of Thoreau's face was by no means unpleasant.] Hawthorne did not carry with him to Europe that narrow provincialism, which asserts itself in either condemning or ridiculing everything that differs essentially from American ways and methods. On the contrary, when he compares the old country with the new,--for instance, the English scenery with that of New England,--Hawthorne is usually as fair, discriminating, and dispassionate as any one could wish, and perhaps more so than some would desire. His judgment cannot be questioned in preferring the American elm, with its wine-glass shape, to the rotund European species; but he admires the English lake country above anything that he has seen like it in his own land. "Centuries of cultivation have given the English oak a domestic character," while American trees are still to be classed with the wild flowers which bloom beneath their outstretched arms. Matthew Arnold spoke of his commentaries on England as the writing of a man chagrined; but what could have chagrined Hawthorne there? The socially ambitious man may become chagrined, if he finds that doors are closed to him, and so may an unappreciated would-be genius. But Hawthorne's position as an author was already more firmly established than Matthew Arnold's ever could be; and as for social ambition, no writer since Shakespeare has been so free from it. It seems more probable that the difficulty with Hawthorne in this respect was due to his old position on the slavery question, which now began to bear bitter fruit for him. All Englishmen at that time, with the exception of Carlyle, Froude, and the nobility, were very strongly anti-slavery,--the more so, as it cost them nothing to have other men's slaves liberated,--and the English are particularly blunt, not to say _gauche_, in introducing topics of conversation which are liable to become a matter of controversy. At the first dinner-party I attended in London some thirty-odd years ago, I had scarcely tasted the soup, before a gentleman opposite asked me: "What progress are you making in the United States toward free trade? Can you tell me, sir?" He might as well have asked me what progress we were making in the direction of monarchy. Fortunately for Hawthorne, his good taste prevented him from introducing the slavery question in his publications, excepting in the life of Pierce, but for this same reason his English acquaintances in various places were obliged to discover his opinions at first hand, nor is it very likely that they were slow to do this. Phillips and Garrison had been to England and through England, and their dignified speeches had made an excellent impression. Longfellow, Emerson, Lowell and Whittier had spoken with no uncertain sound, protesting against what they considered a great national evil. How did it happen that Hawthorne was an exception? Through his kind friend Mr. Bennoch, he fell in with a worthy whom it would have been just as well to have avoided--the proverbial-philosophy poet, Martin Farquhar Tupper; not a genuine poet, nor considered as such by trustworthy critics, but such a good imitation, that he persuaded himself and a large portion of the British public, including Queen Victoria, that he was one. Hawthorne has given an account of his visit to this man, [Footnote: J. Hawthorne, ii. 114.] second only in value to his description of Tennyson; for it is quite as important for us to recognize the deficiencies of the one, as it is to know the true appearance of the other. It is an unsparing study of human nature, but if a man places himself on a pedestal for all people to gaze at, it is just this and nothing more that he has to expect. Hawthorne represents him as a kindly, domestic, affectionate, bustling little man, who kept on bustling with his hands and tongue, even while he was seated--a man of no dignity of character or perception of his deficiency of it. This all does well enough, but when Hawthorne says, "I liked him, and laughed in my sleeve at him, and was utterly weary of him; for certainly he is the ass of asses," we feel that he has gone too far, and suspect that there was some unpleasantness connected with the occasion, of which we are not informed. The word "ass," as applied to a human being, is not current in good literature, unless low comedy be entitled to that position, and coming from Hawthorne, of all writers, it seems like an oath from the mouth of a woman. Tupper, who was quite proud of his philanthropy, was also much of an abolitionist, and he may have trodden on Hawthorne's metaphysical toes half a dozen times, without being aware of what he was doing. Altogether, it seems like rather an ill return for Tupper's hospitality; but Hawthorne himself did not intend it for publication, and on the whole one does not regret that it has been given to the public. We have been, however, anticipating the order of events. During the summer of 1854, the Hawthorne family made a number of unimportant expeditions, visiting mediaeval abbeys and ruinous castles,--especially one to Chester and Eton Hall, which was not quite worth the fees they paid to the janitors. An ancient walled city is much of a novelty to an American for the first time, but, having seen one, you have seen them all, and Chester Cathedral does not stand high in English architecture. On September 14, O'Sullivan appeared again, and they all went into the Welsh mountains, where they examined the old fortresses of Rhyl and Conway, which were built by Edward Longshanks to hold the Welshmen in check. Those relics of the feudal system are very impressive, not only on account of their solidity and the great human forces which they represent, but from a peculiar beauty of their own, which modern fortifications do not possess at all. They seem to belong to the ground they stand on, and the people who live about them look upon them as cherished landmarks. They are the monuments of an heroic age, and Hawthorne's interest in them was characteristic of his nature. O'Sullivan returned to Lisbon early in October, and on the 5th of that month, Hawthorne found himself obliged to make a speech at an entertainment on board a merchant vessel called the "James Barnes," which had been built in Boston for a Liverpool firm of ship-owners. He considered this the most serious portion of his official duty,--the necessity of making after-dinner speeches at the Mayor's or other public tables. He writes several pages on the subject in a humorously complainant tone, congratulating himself that on the present occasion he has succeeded admirably, for he has really said nothing, and that is precisely what he intended to do. After-dinner speeches are like soap-bubbles: they are made of nothing, signify nothing, float for a moment in the air, attract a momentary attention, and then disappear. But the difficulty is, to make an apparent something out of nothing, to say nothing that will offend anybody, and to say something that will be different from what others say. It is truly a hard situation in which to place even a very talented man, and, as Longfellow once remarked, those were most fortunate who made their speeches first, and could then enjoy their dinner, while their successors were writhing in agony. However, there are those who like it, and having practised it to perfection, can do it better than anything else. Hawthorne analyzes his sensations, after finishing his speech, with rare self-perception. "After sitting down, I was conscious of an enjoyment in speaking to a public assembly, and felt as if I should like to rise again. It is something like being under fire,--a sort of excitement, not exactly pleasure, but more piquant than most pleasures." Was it President Jackson, or Senator Benton, who said that fighting a duel was very much like making one's maiden speech? Mrs. Hawthorne thus describes the residence of the President of the Chamber of Commerce at Liverpool: [Footnote: Mrs. Lathrop, 238.] "We were ushered into the drawing-room, which looked more like a brilliant apartment in Versailles than what I had expected to see. The panels were richly gilt, with mirrors in the centre, and hangings of gilded paper; and the broad windows were hung with golden-colored damask; the furniture was all of the same hue; with a carpet of superb flowers; and vases of living flowers standing everywhere; and a chandelier of diamonds (as to indefatigable and vivid shining), and candlesticks of the same,--not the long prisms like those on Mary's astral, but a network of crystals diamond-cut." This was the coarse commercial taste of the time, previous to the reforms of Ruskin and Eastlake. The same might be said of Versailles. There is no true elegance in gilding and glass-work, including mirrors, unless they be sparingly used. The Hawthornes were equally overpowered by a dinner-party given by a millionaire and country squire of Liscard Vale; "two enormous silver dish-covers, with the gleam of Damascus blades, putting out all the rest of the light;" and after the fish, these were replaced by two other enormous dishes of equal brilliancy. The table was shortly covered with an array of silver dishes, reflecting the lights above in dazzling splendor. At one end of the table was a roast goose and at the other a boiled turkey; while "cutlets, fricassees, ragouts, tongue, chicken-pies," and much else, filled the intermediate spaces, and the sideboard groaned under a round of beef "like the dome of St. Peter's." It was fortunate that the American consul came to this Herculean repast with an excellent appetite. Henry Bright was their chief refuge from this flummery, as Hawthorne called it; "an extremely interesting, sincere, earnest, independent, warm and generous hearted man; not at all dogmatic; full of questions, and with ready answers. He is highly cultivated, and writes for the _Westminster_,"--a man who respected formalities and could preserve decorum in his own household, but liked a simple, unostentatious mode of living--in brief, he was a true English gentleman. Mrs. Hawthorne has drawn his portrait with only less skill than her husband: "His eyes are large, bright, and prominent, rather indicating great facility of language, which he has. He is an Oxford scholar, and has decided literary tastes. He is delicately strung, and is as transparent-minded and pure-hearted as a child, with great enthusiasm and earnestness of character; and, though a Liberal, very loyal to his Queen and very admiring of the aristocracy." He appears to have been engaged in the Australian carrying trade, and owned the largest sailing vessel afloat. Hawthorne went to an exhibition of English landscape paintings, and he remarked that Turner's seemed too ethereal to have been painted by mortal hands,--the finest compliment that Turner could have received, for in delicate effects of light and shade,--in painting the atmosphere itself,--he has no rival. In January, James Buchanan, who was then minister to England, came to visit Hawthorne, and talked with him about the presidency,--for which he considered himself altogether too old; but at the same time he did not suggest the renomination of Franklin Pierce. This, of course, disclosed his own ambition, and as Hawthorne's impartial pen-and-ink sketch of him may not be recognized by many readers, on account of the form in which it appears in the note-books, we append it here, with the regret that Hawthorne could not have treated his friend Pierce in an equally candid manner. "I like Mr.--. He cannot exactly be called gentlemanly in his manners, there being a sort of rusticity about him; moreover, he has a habit of squinting one eye, and an awkward carriage of his head; but, withal, a dignity in his large person, and a consciousness of high position and importance, which give him ease and freedom. Very simple and frank in his address, he may be as crafty as other diplomatists are said to be; but I see only good sense and plainness of speech,--appreciative, too, and genial enough to make himself conversable. He talked very freely of himself and of other public people, and of American and English affairs. He returns to America, he says, next October, and then retires forever from public life." A certain amount of rusticity would seem to have been essential to a presidential candidate during the middle of the past century. During this dismal winter Hawthorne was beset more than ever, by nautical mendicants of all countries,--Hungarians, Poles, Cubans, Spanish Americans, and French Republicans, who, unhappily for him, had discovered that the American consul was a tender-hearted man. He had, beside, to deal with a number of difficult cases of maltreated American sailors,--the more difficult, because both parties to the suits were greatly given to lying, even on occasions when it would have been more expedient for them to tell the truth. He has recorded one such in his diary, that deserves more than a superficial consideration. An American bark was on the point of sailing, when the captain cast ashore a bruised and battered-looking man, who made his way painfully to the consulate, and begged Hawthorne for a permit to be placed in the hospital. He called himself the son of a South Carolina farmer, and stated that he had gone on board this vessel with a load of farm products, but had been impressed by the captain for the voyage, and had been so maltreated, that he thought he would die,--and so he did, not long afterward, at the hospital. Letters were found upon him, substantiating the statement concerning his father, but it was discovered, from the same source, that he was a jail-bird, and the tattooed figures upon his arms showed that he had been a sailor of many years' standing, although he had denied this to the consul. Hawthorne speaks of him as an innocent man, the victim of criminal brutality little less than murder; it is certainly difficult to account for such severe ill-treatment, but the man was clearly a bad character, and it is also true that sea-captains do not interfere with their deck-hands without some kind of provocation. The man clung desperately to life up to the last moment, and the letters he carried with him indicated that he was more intelligent than the average of the nautical fraternity. In June, Hawthorne went with his family to Leamington, of which he afterward published an account in the _Atlantic Monthly_, criticised at the time for the manner in which he referred to English ladies, as "covering a large area of Nature's foot-stool"; but this element in Hawthorne's English writing has already been considered. From Leamington he went, early in July, to the English lakes, especially Windermere, and fortunately found time to thoroughly enjoy them. He enjoyed them not only for their scenery, which he preferred to that of New England, but also as illustrations to many descriptive passages in Wordsworth's poetry, which serves the same purpose in the guidebook of that region, as "Childe Harold" serves in the guidebooks for Italy and Greece. Hawthorne also was interested in such places for the sake of their associations. He describes Wordsworth's house, the grounds about it, and the cemetery where he lies, with the accuracy of a scientific report. He finds the grass growing too high about the head-stone of Wordsworth's grave, and plucks it away with his own hands, reflecting that it may have drawn its nourishment from his mortal remains. We may suppose that he preserved this grass, and it is only from such incidental circumstances that we discover who were Hawthorne's favorites among poets and other distinguished writers. He twice visited Wordsworth's grave. Their first two winters in Liverpool had not proved favorable to Mrs. Hawthorne's health She had contracted a disorder in her throat from the prevailing dampness, which threatened to become chronic, and her husband felt that it would not be prudent for her to remain there another winter. He thought of resigning and returning to America. Then he thought of exchanging his consulship for one in southern Europe, although the salaries of the more southern consulates were hardly sufficient to support a married man. Then he thought of exchanging places with O'Sullivan, but he hardly knew languages well enough for an ambassador. The doctors, however, had advised Mrs. Hawthorne to spend a winter at Madeira, and she courageously solved the problem by proposing to go there alone with her daughters, for which Lisbon and O'Sullivan would serve as a stepping-stone by the way. There are wives who would prefer such an expedition to spending a winter in England with their husbands, but Mrs. Hawthorne was not of that mould, and in her case it was a brave thing to do. Accordingly, on the second Monday in October, Mrs. Hawthorne and her two daughters sailed for Lisbon. She was presented at court there; concerning which occasion she wrote a lengthy and very interesting account to her husband, published in her son's biography. The King of Portugal held a long conversation with her and Minister O'Sullivan, and she describes him as dressed in a flamboyant manner,--a scarlet uniform, lavishly ornamented with diamonds. With how much better taste did the Empress of Austria receive the President of the French Republic,--in a simple robe of black velvet, fastened at her throat with a diamond brooch. One can envy Mrs. Hawthorne a winter at Madeira, for there is no place in Europe pleasanter for that purpose, unless it be Rome. Meanwhile, her husband spent the winter with his son (who was now old enough to be trusted safely about the streets), at a sea-captains' boarding-house in Liverpool. There, as in Salem, he felt himself most companionable in such company, as he had been accustomed to it from boyhood; and it appears that at this time he was in the habit of composing fables for the entertainment of Julian, not unlike the yarns which sailors often spin to beguile landsmen. [Footnote: J. Hawthorne, ii. 75.] Hawthorne found his third winter in Liverpool dismal enough without his wife and the two little girls, and this feeling was considerably increased by his dislike for the sea-captains' boarding-house keeper, [Footnote: English Note-book, November 28, 1855.]with whom he was living, and concerning whom he remarks, that a woman in England "is either decidedly a lady or decidedly not." She would not have annoyed him so much, had it not been for "her bustle, affectation, intensity, and pretension of literary taste." The race of landladies contains curious specimens, although we have met with some who were real ladies nevertheless. Thackeray's description of a French boarding-house keeper in "The Adventures of Philip" goes to every heart. Hawthorne writes much in his diary, at this juncture, of his friend Francis Bennoch, who clearly did the best he could, as a man and a brother, to make life cheerful for his American friend; a true, sturdy, warm-hearted Englishman. Christmas was celebrated at Mrs. Blodgett's, after the fashion of a second-rate English house of entertainment. The servants hung mistletoe about in various places, and woe to the unlucky wight that was caught under it. Hawthorne presents an amusing picture of his boy Julian, nine years old, struggling against the endearments of a chamber-maid, and believes that he himself was the only male person in the house that escaped. [Footnote: English Note-book, December, 1855.]If any man would be sure to escape that benediction, he would have been the one; for no one could be more averse to public demonstrations of affection. Hawthorne was witness to a curious strategic manoeuvre between President Pierce and Minister Buchanan, which, however, he was not sufficiently familiar with practical politics to perceive the full meaning of. On the way to Southampton with his wife in October, they called on Buchanan in London, and were not only civilly but kindly received. Mrs. Hawthorne wished to view the Houses of Parliament while they were in session, and the ambassador made a knot in his handkerchief, so as to be sure to remember his promise to her. He informed Hawthorne at that time of his desire to return to America, but stated that the President had just written to him, requesting him to remain until April, although he was determined not to do so. He excused himself on the plea of old age, and Hawthorne seems to have had a suspicion of the insincerity of this, but concluded on reflection not to harbor it. Pierce knew already that Buchanan was his most dangerous rival for renomination, and desired that he should remain as far off as possible; while Buchanan was aware that, if he intended to be on the ground, he must not return so late as to attract public attention. There were so many presidential aspirants that Pierce may have found it difficult to supply Buchanan's place, for the time being. Buchanan delayed a respectful length of time, and then handed in his resignation. His successor, George M. Dallas, arrived at Liverpool during the second week of March, and Hawthorne who does not mention him by name, called upon him at once, and gives us this valuable portrait of him. "The ambassador is a venerable old gentleman, with a full head of perfectly white hair, looking not unlike an old-fashioned wig; and this, together with his collarless white neckcloth and his brown coat, gave him precisely such an aspect as one would expect in a respectable person of pre-revolutionary days. There was a formal simplicity, too, in his manners, that might have belonged to the same era. He must have been a very handsome man in his youthful days, and is now comely, very erect, moderately tall, not overburdened with flesh; of benign and agreeable address, with a pleasant smile; but his eyes, which are not very large, impressed me as sharp and cold. He did not at all stamp himself upon me as a man of much intellectual or characteristic vigor. I found no such matter in his conversation, nor did I feel it in the indefinable way by which strength always makes itself acknowledged. Buchanan, though somehow plain and uncouth, yet vindicates himself as a large man of the world, able, experienced, fit to handle difficult circumstances of life, dignified, too, and able to hold his own in any society." [Footnote: English Note-book, March, 1856.] Morton McMichael, whose statue now stands in Fairmount Park, once related this incident concerning Dallas, at a meeting of the Philadelphia Hock Club. Somewhere about 1850 Dallas was invited to deliver a 4th of July oration at Harrisburg, where McMichael was also requested to read the Declaration of Independence. McMichael performed his part of the ceremony, and sat down; then Dallas arose and thanked the assembly for honoring him with such an invitation, but confessed to some difficulty in considering what he should say, for an occasion which had been celebrated by so many famous orators; but that a few nights since, while he was lying awake, it occurred to him what he should say to them. After this he proceeded to read his address from a newspaper printed in 1841, which the audience could not see, but which McMichael, from his position on the platform, could see perfectly well. Hawthorne's description suggests a man somewhat like this; but the opinion of the Hock Club was that Dallas was not greatly to blame; for how could any man make two distinct and original 4th of July orations? The 1st of April 1856, Hawthorne and Bennoch set off on a bachelor expedition of their own, first to visit Tupper at Albany, as has been already related, and then going to view a muster of British troops at Aldershot; thence to Battle Abbey, which Hawthorne greatly admired, and the field of Hastings, where England's greatness began in defeat. He does not mention the battle, however, in his diary, and it may be remarked that, generally, Hawthorne felt little interest in historical subjects. After this, they went to London, where Bennoch introduced Hawthorne at the Milton Club and the Reform Club. At the former, he again encountered Martin F. Tupper, and became acquainted with Tom Taylor, the editor of _Punch_, as well as other writers and editors, of whom he had not previously heard. The Club was by no means Miltonic, and one would suppose not exactly the place where Hawthorne would find himself much at home. Neither were the proceedings altogether in good taste. Bennoch opened the ball with a highly eulogistic speech about Hawthorne, and was followed by some fifty others in a similar strain, so that the unfortunate incumbent must have wished that the earth would open and let him down to the shades of night below. On such an occasion, even a feather weight becomes a burden. Oh, for a boy, with a tin horn! Neither did Hawthorne apparently find his peers at the Reform Club. Douglas Jerrold, who reminded him somewhat of Ellery Channing, was the most notable writer he met there. There was, however, very little speech-making, and plenty of good conversation. Unfortunately, he offended Jerrold, by using the word "acrid" as applied to his writing, instead of some other word, which he could not think of at the moment. The difficulty, however, was made up over a fresh bottle of Burgundy, and with the help of Hawthorne's unlimited good-will, so that they parted excellent friends, and much the better for having known each other. Either Jerrold or some other present told Hawthorne that the English aristocracy, for the most part hated, despised, and feared men of literary genius. Is it not much the same in America? After these two celebrations, and attending the Lord Mayor's banquet, where he admired the beautiful Jewess whom he has described as Miriam in "The Marble Faun," Hawthorne returned to Liverpool; and early in May took another recess, with a Mr. Bowman, to York, Edinburgh, the Trossachs, Abbotsford, and all the haunts of Scott and Burns; with his account of which a large portion of the second volume of English Note-books is filled; so that, if Scotland should sink into the sea, as a portion is already supposed to have done in antediluvian times, all those places could be reconstructed through Hawthorne's description of them. This expedition lasted nearly three weeks, and on June 12 Hawthorne received word that his wife, with Una and Rose, had already landed at Southampton. He hastened at once to meet them, greatly rejoiced to find Mrs. Hawthorne entirely restored to health. They had been separated for more than seven months. They first proceeded to Salisbury, to see the cathedral and Stonehenge,--the former, very impressive externally, but not so satisfactory within; and the latter, a work of man emerging out of Nature. Then they went to London, to enjoy the June season, and see the regular course of sights in that huge metropolis. They visited St. Paul's, the Tower, Guildhall, the National Gallery, the British Museum, Westminster Abbey, and the Houses of Parliament, apparently finding as much satisfaction in this conventional occupation as they did in the social entertainments of London. At the house of Mr. S. C. Hall, a noted entertainer of those days, Hawthorne became acquainted with the most celebrated singer of her time, or perhaps of all time; namely, Jenny Lind. No modern orator has held such a sway over the hearts of men and women, as that Swedish nightingale,--for the purity of her voice seemed no more than the emanation of her lofty nature. Hawthorne describes her as a frank, sincere person, rather tall,--certainly no beauty, but with sense and self-reliance in her aspect and manners. She immediately gave Hawthorne an illustration of her frankness by complaining of the unhealthy manner in which Americans, and especially American women, lived. This seems like a prosaic subject for such a person, but it was natural enough; for a concert singer has to live like a race-horse, and this would be what would constantly strike her attention in a foreign country. Hawthorne rallied to the support of his countrywomen, and believed that they were, on the whole, as healthy and long-lived as Europeans. This may be so now, but there has been great improvement in the American mode of living, during the past fifty years, and we can imagine that Jenny Lind often found it difficult to obtain such food as she required. That she should have requested an introduction to Hawthorne is significant of her interest in American literature, and suggests a taste as refined and elevated as her music. It was on Hawthorne's wedding-day this happened, and a few days later he was invited to a select company at Monckton Milnes's, which included Macaulay, the Brownings, and Professor Ticknor. He found both the Brownings exceedingly pleasant and accessible, but was somewhat startled to find that Mrs. Browning was a believer in spiritism--not such a sound and healthy intelligence as the author of "Middle-march," and he might have been still more so, if he had known that she and her husband were ardent admirers of Louis Napoleon. That was something which an American in those days could not quite understand. However, he found her an exceedingly pleasant companion. After dinner they looked over several volumes of autographs, in which Oliver Cromwell's was the only one that would to-day be more valuable than Hawthorne's own. A breakfast at Monckton Milnes's usually included the reading of a copy of verses of his own composition, but perhaps he had not yet reached that stage on the present occasion. Hawthorne heard such varied and conflicting accounts of Charles Dickens that he hardly knew whether he would like to meet him or not. He wanted to see Tennyson when he was at the Isle of Wight, but feared that his visit might be looked on as an intrusion, by a person who lived so retired a life,--judging perhaps from his own experience. While at Windermere he paused for a moment in front of Harriet Martineau's cottage, but on second thought he concluded to leave the good deaf lady in peace. Conway speaks of Hawthorne's social life in England as a failure; but failure suggests an effort in some direction or other, and Hawthorne made no social efforts. Being lionized was not his business. He had seen enough of it during the London season of 1856, and after that he retired into his domestic shell, cultivating the acquaintance of his wife and children more assiduously than ever, so that even his two faithful allies, Bright and Bennoch, found it difficult to withdraw him from it. Watching the development of a fine child is much more satisfactory than any course of fashionable entertainments--even than Lowell's twenty-nine dinner-parties in the month of June. Nothing becomes more tedious than long-continued pleasure-seeking, with post-prandial speeches and a constant effort to be agreeable. Hawthorne remained in England fully seventeen months after this, and made a number of excursions; especially one to Oxford, where he and his family were dined by a former mayor of the city, and where he greatly admired the broad verdant grounds and Gothic architecture of the colleges; and also a second journey to Edinburgh and the Trossachs, undertaken for the benefit of Mrs. Hawthorne and Una. But we hear no more of him in London society, and it only remains for us to chronicle his exceptional kindness to an unfortunate American woman. It seems strange that the first doubt in regard to the authorship of Shakespeare should have originated on this side of the Atlantic. If Dante was a self-educated poet, there seems no good reason why Shakespeare should not have been; and if the greatest of French writers earned his living as an actor, why should not the greatest of English writers have done the same? That would seem to be much more in harmony with the central idea of American life--the principle of self-helpfulness; but this is a skeptical epoch, and the tendency of our political institutions is toward skepticism of character and distrust of tradition. Hence we have Delia Bacon, Holmes, and Donnelly. Hawthorne has given future generations an account of Delia Bacon, which will endure as the portrait of a gifted and interesting woman, diverted from the normal channels of feminine activity by the force of a single idea; but he makes no mention of his efforts in her behalf. He found her in the lodgings of a London tradesman, and although she received him in a pleasant and lady-like manner, he quickly perceived that her mind was in an abnormal condition, and that it was positively dangerous to discuss her favorite topic in a rational manner. He had a feeling that the least opposition on his part to the Baconian theory would result in his expulsion from the room, yet he found her conversation interesting, and recognized that if her conclusions were erroneous she had nevertheless unearthed valuable historic material, which ought to be given to the world. He loaned her money, which he did not expect to be repaid, and exerted himself to find a publisher for her, recollecting perhaps the vows he had made to the gods in the days of his own obscurity. He mentions in his diary calling on the Rutledges for this purpose--where he saw Charles Reade, a tall, strong-looking man, just leaving the office. He also wrote to Ticknor & Fields, and finally did get Miss Bacon's volume brought out in London. The critics treated it in a contemptuous manner, as a desecration of Shakespeare's memory; and Hawthorne was prepared for this, but it opened a new era in English bibliography. Shortly after the publication of her book Miss Bacon became insane. To many this appeared like a Quixotic adventure, but now we can see that it was not, and that it was necessary in its way to prove the generosity of Hawthorne. We can readily infer from it what he might have done with ampler means, and what he must often have wished to do. To be sure, the truest kindness to Delia Bacon would have been to have purchased a ticket on a Cunard steamer for her, after her own funds had given out, and to have persuaded her to return to her own country; but those who have dealt with persons whose whole vitality is absorbed in a single idea, can testify how difficult, if not impossible, this would have been. It redounds the more to Hawthorne's credit that although Elizabeth Peabody was converted to Delia Bacon's theory, Hawthorne himself never entertained misgivings as to the reality of Shakespeare as a poet and a dramatist. He had doubts, however, and I felt the same in regard to the authenticity of the verses on Shakespeare's marble slab. It is fortunate that Miss Bacon's purpose of opening the tomb at Stratford was not carried out, but that is no reason why it should not be opened in a properly conducted manner, for scientific purposes--in order to discover all that is possible concerning so remarkable and mysterious a personality. Raphael's tomb has been opened, and why should not Shakespeare's be also? At the Democratic convention in 1856 the Southern delegates wished to renominate Franklin Pierce, but the Northern delegates refused their agreement to this, because they knew that in such a case they would be liable to defeat in their own districts. James Buchanan was accordingly nominated, and Pierce's fears in regard to him were fully realized. He was elected in November, and the following June appointed Beverly Tucker to succeed Hawthorne as consul at Liverpool. Hawthorne resigned his office on July 1, 1857, and went with his family on a long tour in Scotland. Two weeks earlier he had written a memorial to the Secretary of State concerning the maltreatment of a special class of seamen, which deserved more consideration than it received from the government at Washington. The gold discoveries in California had induced a large immigration to America from the British Isles, and many who went thither in hopes of bettering their fortunes became destitute from lack of employment, and attempted to work their passage back to Liverpool in American sailing vessels. It is likely that they often represented themselves as more experienced mariners than they actually were, and there were also a good many stowaways who might expect little mercy; but there was no court in England that could take cognizance of their wrongs,--in order to obtain justice they would have to return to America,--and it cannot be doubted that the more brutal sort of officers took advantage of this fact. The evil became so notorious that the British minister at Washington requested Pierce's administration to have legislation enacted that would cover this class of cases, but the President declined to interfere. This may have been prudent policy, but Hawthorne felt for the sufferers, and the memorial that he submitted to our government on their account has a dignity, a clearness and cogency of statement, worthy of Blackstone or Marshall. It is in marked contrast to the evasive reply of Secretary Cass, both for its fine English and for the directness of its logic. It is published at length in Julian Hawthorne's biography of his father, and is unique for the insight which it affords as to Hawthorne's mental ability in this direction. We may infer from it that if he had made a study of jurisprudence, he might have risen to the highest position as a writer on law. Hawthorne's English Note-books are the least interesting of that series, on account of the literal descriptions of castles, abbeys, scenery and palaces, with which they abound. The perfectly cultivated condition of England and Scotland, so far as he went in the latter country, is not stimulating to the imagination; for, as he says somewhere, even the trees seemed to be thoroughly domesticated. They are excellent reading for Americans who have never been to England, or for those who wish to renew their memories in regard to certain places there--perhaps better for the latter than for the former; and there are fine passages in them, especially his descriptions of the old abbeys and Gothic cathedrals, which seem to have delighted him more than the gardens at Blenheim and Eton, and to have brought to the surface a rare quality in his nature, or otherwise hidden in its depths,--his enthusiasm. Never before did words fail him until he attempted to describe the effect of a Gothic cathedral,--the time-honored mystery of its arches, the sober radiance of its stained windows, and the solemn aspiration of its lofty vault. As Schiller says, they are the monuments of a mighty civilization of which we know only too little. Hawthorne's object in writing these detailed accounts of his various expeditions becomes apparent from a passage in his Note-book, of the date of August 21, 1856, in which he says: "In my English romance, an American might bring a certain tradition from over the sea, and so discover the cross which had been long since forgotten." It may have been his intention from the first to write a romance based on English soil, but that soil was no longer productive of such intellectual fruit, except in the form in which Dickens dug it up, like peat, out of the lower classes. We find Francis Bennoch writing to Hawthorne after his return to America, [Footnote: Mrs. Lathrop, 310.] hoping to encourage him in this direction, but without apparent effect. Instead of a romance, he made a collection of essays from those portions of his diary which were most closely connected together, enlarging them and rounding them out, which he published after his return to America, in the volume we have often referred to as "Our Old Home." But as truthful studies of English life and manners Mrs. Hawthorne's letters, though not always sensible, are much more interesting than her husband's diary. When Doctor Johnson was inquired of by a lady why he defined "pastern" in his Dictionary as the knee of a horse, he replied, "Ignorance, madam, pure ignorance;" and if Hawthorne had been asked a year afterwards why he went to Scotland in the summer of 1857, instead of to the Rhine and Switzerland, he might have given a similar excuse. In this way he missed the grandest and some of the most beautiful scenery in Europe. He could not, however, have been ignorant of the attractions of Paris, and yet he lingered in England until the following January, and then went over to that metropolis of fashion at a most unseasonable time. He had, indeed, planned to leave England in October, [Footnote: English Note-book, December, 1857.] and does not explain why he remained longer. He made a last visit to London in November, where he became reconciled to his fellow-townsmen of Salem, in the person of Edward Silsbee, of whom he writes as "a man of great intelligence and true feeling, absolutely brimming over with ideas." Mr. Silsbee was an amateur art critic and connoisseur, who often made himself serviceable to American travellers in the way of a gentleman-cicerone. He went with the Hawthorne family to the Crystal Palace, where there were casts of all famous statues, models of architecture, and the like, and gave Hawthorne his first lesson in art criticism. Hawthorne indicated a preference for Michel Angelo's statue of Giuliano dé Medici, called "Il Pensero;" also for the "Perseus" of Cellini, and the Gates of the Florentine Baptistery by Lorenzo Ghiberti. If we except the other statues of Michel Angelo, these are the most distinguished works in sculpture of the modern world. CHAPTER XIV ITALY Hawthorne went to Italy as naturally as the salmon ascends the rivers in spring. His artistic instinct drew him thither as the original home of modern art and literature, and perhaps also his interest in the Latin language, the single study which he cared for in boyhood. Does not romance come originally from Roma,--as well as Romulus? He wished to stand where Cæsar stood, to behold the snowy Soracte of Horace, and to read Virgil's description of an Italian night on Italian ground. It is noticeable that he cared little or nothing for the splendors of Paris, the glittering peaks of Switzerland, medical-musical Vienna, or the grand scholarship and homely sweetness of old Germany. Of all the Anglo-Saxon writers who have celebrated Italy, Byron, Shelley, Rogers, Ruskin and the two Brownings, none were more admirably equipped for it than Hawthorne. We cannot read "The Romance of Monte Beni" without recognizing a decidedly Italian element in his composition,--not the light-hearted, subtle, elastic, fiery Italian, such as we are accustomed to think them, but the tenderly feeling, terribly earnest Tuscan, like Dante and Savonarola. The myrtle and the cypress are both emblematic of Italian character, and there was more of the latter than the former, though something of either, in Hawthorne's own make-up. The Hawthornes left London on January 6, and, reaching Paris the following day, they made themselves comfortable at the Hotel du Louvre. However, they only remained there one week, during which it was so cold that they saw little and enjoyed little. They went to Notre Dame, the Louvre, the Madeleine, and the Champs Elysees, but without being greatly impressed by what they beheld. Hawthorne does not mention a single painting or statue among the art treasures of the Louvre, which if rivalled elsewhere are certainly unsurpassed; but Hawthorne began his studies in this line by an examination of the drawings of the old masters, and confesses that he was afterward too much fatigued to appreciate their finished paintings. On January 19 they reached Marseilles, and two days later they embarked on that dreary winter voyage, so pleasant at an earlier season, for Civita Vecchia; and on the 20th they rolled into the Eternal City, with such sensations as one may imagine. On the 24th they located themselves for the season in the Palazzo Larazani, Via Porta Pinciana. [Footnote. Italian Note-book.] _Nemo similis Homeri_.--There is nothing like the charm of a first visit to Rome. The first sight of the Forum, with its single pathetic column, brings us back to our school-days, to the study of Cæsar and the reading of Plutarch; and the intervening period drops out of our lives, taking all our care and anxiety with it. In England, France, Germany, we feel the weight of the present, but in Rome the present is like a glass window through which we view the grand procession of past events. What _is_, becomes of less importance than what was, and for the first time we feel the true sense of our indebtedness to the ages that have gone before. We bathe deep in the spirit of classical antiquity, and we come out refreshed, enlarged and purified. We return to the actualities of to-day with a clearer understanding, and better prepared to act our part in them. Hawthorne did not feel this at first. He arrived in inclement weather, and it was some weeks before he became accustomed to the climatic conditions--so different from any northern atmosphere. He hated the filth of the much-neglected city, the squalor of its lower classes, the narrowness of its streets, and the peculiar pavement, which, as he says makes walking in Rome a penitential pilgrimage. He goes to the carnival, and his penetrating glance proves it to be a sham entertainment. But in due course he emerges from this mood; he rejoices in the atmospheric immensity of St. Peter's; he looks out from the Pincian hill, and sees _Nivea Soracte_ as Horace beheld it; and he is overawed (if Hawthorne could be) by the Forum of Trajan and the Column of Antoninus. He makes a great discovery, or rediscovery, that Phidias's colossal statues of Castor and Pollux on the Monte Cavallo are the finest figures in Rome. They are late Roman copies, but probably from Phidias,--not by Lysippus or Praxiteles; and he felt the presence of Michel Angelo in the Baths of Diocletian. It is not long before he goes to the Pincian in the afternoon to play at jack-stones with his youngest daughter. William W. Story, the American sculptor, would seem to have been a former acquaintance. His father, the famous law lecturer, lived in Salem during Hawthorne's youth, but afterward removed to Cambridge, where the younger Story was educated, and there married an intimate friend of Mrs. James Russell Lowell. This brought him into close relations with Lowell, Longfellow, and their most intimate friends. He was something of a poet, and more of a sculptor, but, inheriting an independent fortune and living in the Barberini Palace, he soon became more of an Englishman than an American, a tendency which was visibly increased by a patent of nobility bestowed on him by the King of Naples. Hawthorne soon renewed William Story's acquaintance, and found him modelling the statue of Cleopatra, of which Hawthorne has given a somewhat idealized description in "The Marble Faun." This may have interested him the more from the fact that he witnessed its development under the sculptor's hands, and saw that distinguished historical person emerge as it were out of the clay, like a second Eve; but he makes a mental reservation that it would be better if English and American sculptors would make a freer use of their chisels--of which more hereafter. Story was a light-hearted, discursive person, with a large amount of bric-à-brac information, who could appreciate Hawthorne either as a genius or as a celebrity. He soon became Hawthorne's chief companion and social mainstay in Rome, literally a _vade mecum_, and we may believe that he exercised more or less influence over Hawthorne's judgment in matters of art. Hawthorne listened to Story, and read Mrs. Jameson, although Edward Silsbee had warned him against her as an uncertain authority; but Hawthorne depended chiefly on his own investigations. He and his wife declined an invitation to Mrs. Story's masquerade, and lived very quietly during this first winter in Rome, making few acquaintances, but seeing a good deal of the city. They went together to all the principal churches and the princely galleries; and beside this Hawthorne traversed Rome from one end to the other, and across in every direction, sometimes alone, or in company with Julian, investigating everything from the Mamartine prison, in which Jugurtha was starved, to the catacombs of St. Calixtus and the buffaloes on the Campagna. The impression which Conway gives, that he went about sight-seeing and drinking sour wine with Story and Lothrop Motley, is not quite correct, for Motley did not come to Rome until the following December, and then only met Hawthorne a few times, according to his own confession. [Footnote: Mrs. Lathrop, 406.] We must not forget, however, that excellent lady and skilful astronomer, Miss Maria Mitchell, who joined the Hawthorne party in Paris, and became an indispensable accompaniment to them the rest of the winter. Hawthorne also became acquainted with Buchanan Read, who afterward painted that stirring picture of General Sheridan galloping to the battle of Cedar Run; and on March 12 Mr. Read gave a party, at his Roman dwelling, of painters and sculptors, which Hawthorne attended, and has entered in full, with the moonlight excursion afterward, in "The Marble Faun." There Hawthorne met Gibson, to whom he refers as the most distinguished sculptor of the time. So he was, in England, but there were much better sculptors in France and in Germany. Gibson's personality interested Hawthorne, as it well might, but he saw clearly that Gibson was merely a skilful imitator of the antique, or, as he calls him, a pagan idealist. He also made acquaintance with two American sculptors, a Yankee and a girlish young woman, whose names are prudently withheld; for he afterward visited their studios, and readily discovered that they had no real talent for their profession. If we feel inclined to quarrel with Hawthorne anywhere, it is in his disparagement of Crawford. There might be two opinions in regard to the slavery question, but there never has been but one as to the greatest of American artists. It was a pity that his friend Hillard could not have been with Hawthorne at this time to counteract the jealous influences to which he was exposed. He writes no word of regret at the untimely death of Crawford, but goes into his studio after that sad event and condemns his work. Only the _genre_ figure of a boy playing marbles, gives him any satisfaction there; although a plea of extenuation might be entered in Hawthorne's favor, for statues of heroic size could not be seen to greater disadvantage than when packed together in a studio. The immense buttons on the waistcoats of our revolutionary heroes seem to have startled him on his first entrance, and this may be accepted as an indication of the rest. Yet the tone of his criticism, both in the "Note-book" and in "The Marble Faun," is far from friendly to Crawford. He does not refer to the statue of Beethoven, which was Crawford's masterpiece, nor to the statue of Liberty, which now poses on the lantern of the Capitol at Washington,--much too beautiful, as Hartmann says, for its elevated position, and superior in every respect to the French statue of Liberty in New York harbor. Hawthorne had already come to the conclusion that there was a certain degree of poison in the Roman atmosphere, and in April he found the climate decidedly languid, but he had fallen in love with this pagan capital and he hated to leave it. Mrs. Anna Jameson arrived late in April; a sturdy, warm-hearted Englishwoman greatly devoted to art, for which her books served as elementary treatises and pioneers to the English and Americans of those days. She was so anxious to meet Hawthorne that she persuaded William Story to bring him and his wife to her lodgings when she was too ill to go forth. They had read each other's writings and could compliment each other in all sincerity, for Mrs. Jameson had also an excellent narrative style; but Hawthorne found her rather didactic, and although she professed to be able "to read a picture like a book," her conversation was by no means brilliant. She had contracted an unhappy marriage early in life, and found an escape from her sorrows and regrets in this elevated interest. It was just before leaving Rome that Hawthorne conceived the idea of a romance in which the "Faun" of Praxiteles should come to life, and play a characteristic part in the modern world; the catastrophe naturally resulting from his coming into conflict with a social organization for which he was unfitted. This portion of Hawthorne's diary is intensely interesting to those who have walked on classic ground. On May 24 Hawthorne commenced his journey to Florence with a _vetturino_ by easy stages, and one can cordially envy him this portion of his Italian sojourn; with his devoted wife and three happy children; travelling through some of the most beautiful scenery in the world,--nearly if not quite equal to the Rhineland--without even the smallest cloud of care and anxiety upon his sky, his mind stored with mighty memories, and looking forward with equal expectations to the prospect before him,--_bella Firenze_, the treasure-house of Italian cities; through sunny valleys, with their streams and hill-sides winding seaward; up the precipitous spurs of the Apennines, with their old baronial castles perched like vultures' nests on inaccessible crags; passing through gloomy, tortuous defiles, guarded by Roman strongholds; and then drawn up by white bullocks over Monte Somma, and to the mountain cities of Assisi and Perugia, older than Rome itself; by Lake Trasimenus, still ominous of the name of Hannibal; over hill-sides silver-gray with olive orchards; always a fresh view and a new panorama, bounded by the purple peaks on the horizon; and over all, the tender blue of the Italian sky. Hawthorne may have felt that his whole previous life, all he had struggled, lived and suffered for, was but a preparation for this one week of perfectly harmonious existence. Such vacations from earthly troubles come but rarely in the most fortunate lives, and are never of long duration. When they reached Florence, they found it, as Rose Hawthorne says, very hot--much too hot to enjoy the city as it should be enjoyed. Her reminiscences of their life at Florence, and especially of the Villa Manteüto, have a charming freshness and virginal simplicity, although written in a somewhat high-flown manner. She succeeds, in spite of her peculiar style, in giving a distinct impression of the old chateau, its surroundings, the life her family led there, and of the wonderful view from Bellosguardo. One feels that beneath the disguise of a fashionable dress there is an innocent, sympathetic, and pure-spirited nature. The Hawthornes arrived in Florence on the afternoon of June 3, and spent the first night at the Albergo della Fontano, and the next day obtained apartments in the Casa del Bello, opposite Hiram Powers' studio, and just outside of the Porta Romana. Hawthorne made Mr. Powers' acquaintance even before he entered the city, and Powers soon became to him what Story had been in Rome. The Brownings were already at Casa Guidi,--still noted in the annals of English poesy,--and called upon the Hawthornes at the first notice of their arrival. Alacrity or readiness would seem to have been one of Robert Browning's prominent characteristics. Elizabeth Browning's mind was as much occupied with spiritism as when Hawthorne met her two years previously at Monckton Milnes's breakfast; an unfortunate proclivity for a person of frail physique and delicate nerves. Neither did she live very long after this. Her husband and Hawthorne both cordially disapproved of these mesmeric practices; but Mrs. Browning could not be prevented from talking on the subject, and this evidently produced an ecstatic and febrile condition of mind in her, very wearing to a poetic temperament. Hawthorne heartily liked Browning himself, and always speaks well of him; but there must also have been an undercurrent of disagreement between him and so ardent an admirer of Louis Napoleon, and he recalls little or nothing of what Browning said to him. This continued till the last of June, when Robert and Elizabeth left Florence for cooler regions. Meanwhile Hawthorne occupied himself seriously with seeing Florence and studying art, like a man who intends to get at the root of the matter. Florence afforded better advantages than Rome for the study of art, not only from the superiority of its collections, but because there the development of mediaeval art can be traced to its fountain-source. He had no textbooks to guide him,--at least he does not refer to any,--and his investigations were consequently of rather an irregular kind, but it was evidently the subject which interested him most deeply at this time. His Note-book is full of it, and also of discussions on sculpture with Hiram Powers, in which Hawthorne has frequently the best of the argument. In fact Powers looked upon his art from much too literal a stand-point. He agreed with Hawthorne as to the fine expression of the face of Michel Angelo's "Giuliano dé Medici," [Footnote: As Hawthorne did not prepare his diary for publication, it would not be fair to hold him responsible for the many instances of bad Italian in the Note-book, which ought to have been edited by some one who knew the language.] but affirmed that it was owing to a trick of overshadowing the face by the projecting visor of Giuliano's helmet. Hawthorne did not see why such a device did not come within the range of legitimate art, the truth of the matter being that Michel Angelo left the face unfinished; but the expression of the statue is not in its face, but in the inclination of the head, the position of the arms, the heavy droop of the armor, and in fact in the whole figure. Powers' "Greek Slave," on the contrary, though finely modelled and sufficiently modern in type, has no definite expression whatever. Hawthorne found an exceptional interest in the "Venus dé Medici," now supposed to have been the work of one of the sons of Praxiteles, and its wonderful symmetry gives it a radiance like that of the sun behind a summer cloud; but Powers cooled down his enthusiasm by objecting to the position of the ears, the vacancy of the face, the misrepresentation of the inner surface of the lips, and by condemning particularly the structure of the eyes, which he declared were such as no human being could see with. [Footnote: Italian Note-book, June 13, 1858.] Hawthorne was somewhat puzzled by these subtleties of criticism, which he did not know very well how to answer, but he still held fast to the opinion that he was fundamentally right, and retaliated by criticising Powers' own statues in his diary. The Greeks, in the best period of their favorite art, never attempted a literal reproduction of the human figure. Certain features, like the nostrils, were merely indicated; others, like the eyelashes, often so expressive in woman, were omitted altogether; hair and drapery were treated in a schematic manner. In order to give an expression to the eyes, various devices were resorted to. The eyelids of the bust of Pericles on the Acropolis had bevelled edges, and the eyeballs of the "Apollo Belvedere" are exceptionally convex, to produce the effect of looking to a distance, although the human eye when gazing afar off becomes slightly contracted. The head of the "Venus dé Medici" is finely shaped, but small, and her features are pretty, rather than beautiful; but her eyes are exceptional among all feminine statues for their tenderness of expression--swimming, as it were, with love; and it is the manner in which this effect is produced that Powers mistook for bad sculpture. Hiram Powers' most exceptional proposition was to the effect that the busts of the Roman emperors were not characteristic portraits. Hawthorne strongly dissented from this; and he was in the right, for if the character of a man can be read from marble, it is from those old blocks. Hawthorne has some admirable remarks on this point. Such was Hawthorne's internal life during his first month at Florence. He was full of admiration for the cathedral, the equestrian statue of Cosmo dé Medici, the "David" of Michel Angelo, the Loggia dé Lanzi, Raphael's portrait of Julius II., the "Fates" of Michel Angelo, and many others; yet he confesses that the Dutch, French, and English paintings gave him a more simple, natural pleasure,--probably because their subjects came closer to his own experience. A strange figure of an old man, with "a Palmer-like beard," continually crossed Hawthorne's path, both in Rome and in Florence, where he dines with him at the Brownings'. His name is withheld, but Hawthorne informs us that he is an American editor, a poet; that he voted for Buchanan, and was rejoicing in the defeat of the Free-soilers,--"a man to whom the world lacks substance because he has not sufficiently cultivated his emotional nature;" and "his personal intercourse, though kindly, does not stir one's blood in the least." Yet Hawthorne finds him to be good-hearted, intelligent, and sensible. This can be no other than William Cullen Bryant. [Footnote: Italian Note-book, ii. 15.] In the evening of June 27 the Hawthornes went to call on a Miss Blagden, who occupied a villa on Bellosguardo, and where they met the Brownings, and a Mr. Trollope, a brother of the novelist. It could not have been the Villa Manteüto, which Miss Blagden rented, for we hear of her at Bellosguardo again in August, when Hawthorne was living there himself; and after this we do not hear of the Brownings again. Hawthorne's remark on Browning's poetry is one of the rare instances in which he criticises a contemporary author: "I am rather surprised that Browning's conversation should be so clear, and so much to the purpose at the moment, since his poetry can seldom proceed far, without running into the high grass of latent meanings and obscure allusions." It is precisely this which has prevented Browning from achieving the reputation that his genius deserves. We wish that Hawthorne could have favored us with as much literary criticism as he has given us of art criticism, and we almost lose patience with him for his repeated canonization of General Jackson--St. Hickory--united with a disparagement of Washington and Sumner; but although Hawthorne's insight into human nature was wonderful in its way, it would seem to have been confined within narrow boundaries. At least he seems to have possessed little insight into grand characters and magnanimous natures. He wishes now that Raphael could have painted Jackson's portrait. So, conversely, Shakespeare belittles Cæsar in order to suit the purpose of his play. Which of Shakespeare's male characters can be measured beside George Washington? There is not one of them, unless Kent in "King Lear." Strong, resolute natures, like Washington, Hamilton, Sumner, are not adapted to dramatic fiction, either in prose or in verse. A Florentine summer is about equal to one in South Carolina, and now, when Switzerland can be reached by rail in twenty-four hours, no American or Englishman thinks of spending July and August there; but in Hawthorne's time it was a long and expensive journey over the Pennine Alps; Hawthorne's physique was as well attempered to heat as to cold; and he continued to frequent the picture-galleries and museums after all others had ceased to do so; although he complains in his diary that he had never known it so hot before, and that the flagstones in the street reflect the sun's rays upon him like the open doors of a furnace. At length, in an entry of July 27, he says: "I seldom go out nowadays, having already seen Florence tolerably well, and the streets being very hot, and myself having been engaged in sketching out a romance, [Footnote: "The Marble Faun."] which whether it will ever come to anything is a point yet to be decided. At any rate, it leaves me little heart for journalizing, and describing new things; and six months of uninterrupted monotony would be more valuable to me just now, than the most brilliant succession of novelties." This is the second instance in which we hear of a romance based on the "Faun" of Praxiteles, and now at last he appears to be in earnest. It may be suspected that his entertaining friend, Hiram Powers, was the chief obstacle to the progress of his new plot, and it is rather amusing to believe that it was through the agency of Mr. Powers, who cared for nothing so much as Hawthorne's welfare, that this impediment was removed. Five days later, Hawthorne and his household gods, which were chiefly his wife and children, left the Casa del Bello for the Villa Manteüto where they remained in peaceful retirement until the first of October. On the tower of the Villa he could enjoy whatever enlivening breezes came across to Florence from the mountains to the north and east. When the _tramontana_ blew, he was comfortable enough. Thunder-storms also came frequently, with the roar of heaven's artillery reverberating from peak to peak, and enveloping Bellosguardo in a dense vapor, like the smoke from Napoleon's cannon; after which they would career down the valley of the Arno to Pisa, flashing and cannonading like a victorious army in pursuit of the enemy. The beauty of the summer nights at Florence amply compensates for the sultriness of the days,--especially if they be moonlight nights,--and the bright starlight of the Mediterranean is little less beautiful. Travellers who only see Italy in winter, know not what they miss. Hawthorne noticed that the Italian sky had a softer blue than that of England and America, and that there was a peculiar luminous quality in the atmosphere, as well as a more decided difference between sunshine and shadow, than in countries north of the Alps. The atmosphere of Italy, Spain, and Greece is not like any American air that I am acquainted with. During the summer season, all Italians whose occupation will permit them, sleep at noon,--the laborers in the shadows of the walls,--and sit up late at night, enjoying the fine air and the pleasant conversation which it inspires. Hawthorne found the atmosphere of Tuscany favorable for literary work, even in August. On the 4th of that month he looked out from his castle wall late at night and noticed the brilliancy of the stars,--also that the Great Dipper exactly overhung the valley of the Arno. At that same hour the astronomer Donati was sweeping the heavens with his telescope at the Florentine observatory, and it may have been ten days later that he discovered in the handle of the Dipper the great comet which will always bear his name,--the most magnificent comet of modern times, only excepting that of 1680, which could be seen at noonday. It first became visible to the naked eye during the last week of August, as a small star with a smaller tail, near the second star from the end of the handle of the Dipper; after which it grew apace until it extended nearly from the horizon to the zenith, with a tail millions of miles in length. This, however, did not take place until near the time of Hawthorne's departure from Florence. In his case it proved sorrowfully enough a harbinger of calamity. Hawthorne blocked out his sketch of "The Romance of Monte Beni" in a single month, and then returned to the churches and picture-galleries. He could not expect to revisit Italy in this life, and prudently concluded to make the most of it while the opportunity lasted. He notices the peculiar fatigue which sight-seeing causes in deep natures, and becomes unspeakably weary of it, yet returns to it again next day with an interest as fresh as before. Neither did he lack for society. William Story came over to see him from Siena, where he was spending the summer, exactly as Hawthorne describes the visit of Kenyon to Donatello in his romance. Mr. and Mrs. Powers came frequently up the hill in the cool of the evening, and Miss Blagden also proved an excellent neighbor. Early in September the "spirits" appeared again in great force. Mrs. Hawthorne discovered a medium in her English governess; table-rappings and table-tippings were the order of the evening; and some rather surprising results were obtained through Miss Shepard's fingers. [Footnote: J. Hawthorne, i. 31.] Powers related a still more surprising performance [Footnote: Italian Note-book.] that he had witnessed, which was conducted by D. D. Home, an American mountebank, who hoaxed more crowned heads, princes, princesses, and especially English duchesses than Cagliostro himself. Hawthorne felt the repugnance of the true artist to this uncanny business, and his thorough detestation of the subject commends itself to every sensible reader. He came to the conclusion that the supposed revelations of spirits were nothing more than the mental vagaries of persons in the same room, conveyed in some occult manner to the brain of the medium. The governess, Miss Shepard, agreed with him in this, but she could give no explanation as to the manner in which the response came to her. Twenty years of scientific investigations have added little or nothing to this diagnosis of Hawthorne's, nor are we any nearer to an explanation of the simple fact; which is wonderful enough in its way. Hawthorne compares the revelations of mediums to dreams, but they are not exactly like them, for they are at the same time more rational and less original or spontaneous than dreams. In my dreams my old friends often come back to me and speak in their characteristic manner,--more characteristic perhaps than I could represent them when awake,--but the responses of mediums are either evasive or too highly generalized to be of any particular value. The story of Mary Runnel, or Rondel, which Julian Hawthorne narrates, is an excellent case in point. Hawthorne had probably heard of that flirtation of his grandfather some time in his youth, and the fact was unconsciously latent in his mind; but nothing that Mary divulged at Bellosguardo was of real interest to him or to the others concerned. The practice of spiritism, hypnotism, or Christian Science opens a wide door for superstition and imposture to walk in and seat themselves by our firesides. About a year before this, Congress had given Hiram Powers a commission to model a colossal statue of _America_ for the Capitol at Washington. This he had done, and the committee in charge accepted his design,--Hawthorne also writes admiringly of it,--but it was also necessary to receive the approval of the President, and this Buchanan with his peculiar obstinacy refused to give. Powers was left without compensation for a whole year of arduous labor, and Hawthorne for once was thoroughly indignant. He wrote in his diary: "I wish our great Republic had the spirit to do as much, according to its vast means, as Florence did for sculpture and architecture when it was a republic.... And yet the less we attempt to do for art the better, if our future attempts are to have no better result than such brazen troopers as the equestrian statue of General Jackson, or even such naked respectabilities as Greeneough's Washington." Perhaps Powers' "America" was a fortunate escape, and yet it does not seem right that any enlightened government should set such a pitfall for honest men to stumble into. There certainly ought to be some compensation in such cases. The experience of history hitherto has been that, whereas painting and literature have nourished under all forms of government, sculpture has only attained its highest excellence in republics like Athens, Rhodes, Florence, and Nuremberg; so that upon this line of argument there is good hope for America in the future. CHAPTER XV HAWTHORNE AS ART CRITIC: 1858 Nearly one-third of the Italian Note-book is devoted to the criticisms or descriptions of paintings, statues, and architecture, for which we can be only too thankful as coming from such a bright, penetrating, and ingenious intelligence. It is much in their favor that Hawthorne had not previously undertaken a course of instruction in art; that he wrote for his own benefit, and not for publication; and that he was not biased by preconceived opinions. It cannot be doubted that he was sometimes influenced by the opinions of Story, Powers, and other artists with whom he came in contact; but this could have happened only in particular cases, and more especially in respect to modern works of art. When Hawthorne visited the galleries he usually went alone, or only accompanied by his wife. The only opportunities for the study of aesthetics or art criticism, fifty years ago, were to be found in German universities. Kugler's handbook of painting was the chief authority in use, rather academic, but correct enough in a general way. Ruskin, a more eloquent and discriminating writer, had devoted himself chiefly to celebrating the merits of Turner and Tintoretto, but was never quite just to Florentine art. Mrs. Jameson followed closely after Kugler, and was the only one of these that Hawthorne appears to have consulted. Winckelmann's history of Greek sculpture, which was not a history in the proper sense of the word, had been translated by Lodge, but Hawthorne does not mention it, and it would not have been much assistance to him if he had read it. Like Winckelmann and Lessing, however, he admired the "Laocoön,"--an admiration now somewhat out of fashion. There can be no final authority in art, for the most experienced critics still continue to differ in their estimates of the same painting or statue. More than this, it is safe to affirm that any one writer who makes a statement concerning a certain work of art at a given time, would have made a somewhat different statement at another time. In fact, this not unfrequently happens in actual practice; for all that any of us can do is, to reproduce the impression made on us at the moment, and this depends as much on our own state of mind, and on our peculiarities, as on the peculiarities of the picture or statue that we criticise. It is the same in art itself. If Raphael had not painted the "Sistine Madonna" at the time he did, he would have produced a different work. It was the concentration of that particular occasion, and if any accident had happened to prevent it, that pious and beautiful vision would have been lost to the world. It requires years of study and observation of the best masters to become a trustworthy art critic, and then everything depends of course upon the genius of the individual. It has happened more than once that a wealthy American, with a certain kind of enthusiasm for art, has prepared himself at a German university, has studied the science of connoisseurship, and has become associate member of a number of foreign societies, only to discover at length that he had no talent for the profession. Hawthorne enjoyed no such advantages, nor did he even think of becoming a connoisseur. His whole experience in the art of design might be included within twelve months, and his original basis was nothing better than his wife's water-color painting and the mediocre pictures in the Boston Athenaeum; but he brought to his subject an eye that was trained to the closest observation of Nature and a mind experienced beyond all others [Footnote: At least at that time.] in the mysteries of human life. He begins tentatively, and as might be expected makes a number of errors, but quite as often he hits the nail, where others have missed it. He learns by his mistakes, and steadily improves in critical faculty. Hawthorne's Italian Note-book is a unique record, in which the development of a highly organized mind has advanced from small beginnings to exceptional skill in a fresh department of activity. Hawthorne brought with him to Italy the Yankee preference for newness and nicety, which our forefathers themselves derived from their residence in Holland, and there is no city in Europe where this sentiment could have troubled him so much as in Rome. He disliked the dingy picture-frames, the uncleanly canvases, the earth-stains and broken noses of the antique statues, the smoked-up walls of the Sistine Chapel, and the cracks in Raphael's frescos. He condemns everything as rubbish which has not an external perfection; forgetting that, as in human nature, the most precious treasures are sometimes allied with an ungainly exterior. Yet in this he only echoes the impressions of thousands of others who have gone to the Vatican and returned disconsolate, because amid a perplexing multitude of objects they knew not where to look for consummate art. One can imagine if an experienced friend had accompanied Hawthorne to the Raphael stanza, and had pointed out the figures of the Pope, the cardinal, and the angelic boys in the "Mass at Bolsena," he would have admired them without limitation. He quickly discovered Raphael's "Transfiguration," and considered it the greatest painting that the world contains. The paintings in the princely collections in Rome are, with the exception of those in the Borghese gallery, far removed from princely. A large proportion of their best paintings had long since been sold to the royal collections of northern Europe, and had been replaced either by copies or by works of inferior masters. In the Barberini palace there are not more than three or four paintings such as might reasonably detain a traveller, and it is about the same in the Ludovisi gallery. There was not a grain of affectation in Hawthorne; he never pretended to admire what he did not like, nor did he strain himself into liking anything that his inner nature rebelled against. Hawthorne's taste in art was much in advance of his time. His quick appreciation of the colossal statues of Castor and Pollux on the Quirinal is the best proof of this. Ten years later it was the fashion in Rome to deride those statues, as a late work of the empire and greatly lacking in artistic style. Brunn, in his history of ancient sculpture, attributes them to the school of Lysippus, a contemporary of Alexander, which Brunn certainly would not have done if he had possessed a good eye for form. Vasari, on the contrary, a surer critic, considered them worthy to be placed beside Michel Angelo's "David"; but it remained for Furtwängler to restore them to their true position as a work of the Periclean age, although copied by Italian sculptors. They must have been the product of a single mind, [Footnote: On the base of one is _Opus Phidiae_, and on that of the other, _Opus Praxitelis._] either Phidias, Alcameres, or the elder Praxiteles--if there ever was such a person; and they have the finest figures of any statues in Rome (much finer than the dandified "Apollo Belvedere") and also the most spirited action. Hawthorne went to the Villa Ludovisi to see the much-vaunted bas-relief of Antinous, which fifty years ago was considered one of the art treasures of the city; but a more refined taste has since discovered that in spite of the rare technical skill, its hard glassy finish gives it a cold and conventional effect. Hawthorne returned from it disappointed, and wrote in his diary: "This Antinous is said to be the finest relic of antiquity next to the Apollo and the Laocoön; but I could not feel it to be so, partly, I suppose, because the features of Antinous do not seem to me beautiful in themselves; and that heavy, downward look is repeated till I am more weary of it than of anything else in sculpture." The Greek artist of Adrian's time attempted to give the face a pensive expression, but only succeeded in this heavy downward look. Hawthorne felt the same disappointment after his first visit to the sculpture-gallery of the Vatican. "I must confess," he wrote, "taking such transient glimpses as I did, I was more impressed with the extent of the Vatican, and the beautiful order in which it is kept and its great sunny, open courts, with fountains, grass, and shrubs ... than with the statuary." The Vatican collection has great archaeological value, but, with the exception of the "Laocoön," the "Meleager," the "Apollo," and a few others, little or no artistic value. The vast majority of the statues there are either late Roman works or cheap Roman copies of second-rate Hellenic statues. Some of them are positively bad and others are archaic, and Hawthorne was fully justified in his disatisfaction with them. He noticed, however, a decided difference between the original "Apollo" and the casts of it with which he was familiar. On a subsequent visit he fails to observe the numerous faults in Canova's "Perseus," and afterwards writes this original statement concerning the "Laocoön": "I felt the Laocoön very powerfully, though very quietly; an immortal agony with a strange calmness diffused through it, so that it resembles the vast age of the sea, calm on account of its immensity; as the tumult of Niagara, which does not seem to be tumult, because it keeps pouring on forever and ever." Professor E. A. Gardner and the more fastidious school of critics have recently decided that the action of the "Laocoön" is too violent to be contained within the proper boundaries of sculpture; but Hawthorne controverts this view in a single sentence. The action is violent, it is true, but the _impression_ which the statue makes on him is not a violent one; for the greatness of the art sublimates the motive. It is a tragedy in marble, and Pliny, who had seen the works of Phidias and Praxiteles, placed Agesander's "Laocoön" above them all. This, however, is a Roman view. What Hawthorne wrote in his diary should not always be taken literally. When he declares that he would like to have every artist that perpetrates an allegory put to death, he merely expresses the puzzling effects which such compositions frequently exercise on the weary-minded traveller; and when he wishes that all the frescos on Italian walls could be obliterated, he only repeats a sentiment of similar strain. Perhaps we should class in the same category Hawthorne's remark concerning the Elgin marbles in the British Museum, that "it would be well if they were converted into paving-stones." There are no grander monuments of ancient art than those battered and headless statues from the pediment of the Parthenon (the figures of the so-called "Three Fates" surpass the "Venus of Melos"), and archaeologists are still in dispute as to what they may have represented; but the significance of the subject before him was always the point in which Hawthorne was interested. Julian Hawthorne says of his father, in regard to a similar instance: "Of technicalities,--difficulties overcome, harmony of lines, and so forth,--he had no explicit knowledge; they produced their effect upon him of course, but without his recognizing the manner of it. All that concerned him was the sentiment which the artist had meant to express; the means and method were comparatively unimportant." [Footnote: J. Hawthorne, ii. 193.] The technicalities of art differ with every clime and every generation. They belong chiefly to the connoisseur, and have their value, but the less a critic thinks of them in making a general estimate of a painting or statue, the more likely he is to render an impartial judgment. Hawthorne's analysis of Praxiteles's "Faun," in his "Romance of Monte Beni," being a subject in which he was particularly interested, is almost without a rival in the literature of its kind; and this is the more remarkable since the copy of the "Faun" in the museum of the Capitol is not one of the best, at least it is inferior to the one in the Glyptothek at Munich. It seems as if Hawthorne had penetrated to the first conception of it in the mind of Praxiteles. The Sistine Chapel, like the Italian scenery, only unfolds its beauties on a bright day, and Hawthorne happened to go there when the sky was full of drifting clouds, a time when it is difficult to see any object as it really is. It may have been on this account that he entirely mistook the action of the Saviour in Michel Angelo's "Last Judgment." Christ has raised his arm above his head in order to display the mark where he was nailed to the cross, and Hawthorne presumed this, as many others have done, to be an angry threatening gesture of condemnation, which would not accord with his merciful spirit. He appreciated the symmetrical figure of Adam, and the majestic forms of the prophets and sibyls encircling the ceiling, and if he had seen the face of the Saviour in a fair light, he might have recognized that such divine calmness of expression could not coexist with a vindictive motive. This, however, can be seen to better advantage in a Braun photograph than in the painting itself. Hawthorne goes to the Church of San Pietro in Vincolo to see Michel Angelo's "Moses," but he does not moralize before it, like a certain Concord artist, on "the weakness of exaggeration;" nor does he consider, like Ruskin, that its conventional horns are a serious detriment. On the contrary he finds it "grand and sublime, with a beard flowing down like a cataract; a truly majestic figure, but not so benign as it were desirable that such strength should hold." An Englishman present remarked that the "Moses" had very fine features,--"a compliment," says Hawthorne, "for which the colossal Hebrew ought to have made the Englishman a bow." [Footnote: Italian Note-book, p. 164.] Perhaps the Englishman really meant that the face had a noble expression. The somewhat satyr-like features of the "Moses" would seem to have been unconsciously adopted, together with the horns, from a statue of the god Pan, which thus serves as an intermediate link between the "Moses" and the "Faun" of Praxiteles; but he who cannot appreciate Michel Angelo's "Moses" in spite of this, knows nothing of the Alpine heights of human nature. Of all the paintings that Hawthorne saw in Rome none impressed him so deeply as Guido's portrait of Beatrice Cenci, and none more justly. If the "Laocoön" is the type of an old Greek tragedy, a strong man strangled in the coils of Fate, the portrait of Beatrice represents the tragedy of mediaeval Italy, a beautiful woman crushed by the downfall of a splendid civilization. The fate of Joan of Arc or of Madame Roland was merciful compared to that of poor Beatrice. Religion is no consolation to her, for it is the Pope himself who signs her death-warrant. She is massacred to gratify the avarice of the Holy See. Yet in this last evening of her tragical life, she does find strength and consolation in her dignity as a woman. Never was art consecrated to a higher purpose; Guido rose above himself; and, as Hawthorne says, it seems as if mortal man could not have wrought such an effect. It has always been the most popular painting in Rome, but Hawthorne was the first to celebrate its unique superiority in writing, and his discourse upon it in various places leaves little for those that follow. It may have been long since discovered that Hawthorne's single weakness was a weakness for his friends; certainly an amiable weakness, but nevertheless that is the proper name for it. When Phocion was Archon of Athens, he said that a chief magistrate should know no friends; and the same should be true of an authoritative writer. Hawthorne has not gone so far in this direction as many others have who had less reason to speak with authority than he; but he has indicated his partiality for Franklin Pierce plainly enough, and his over-praise of Hiram Powers and William Story, as well as his under-praise of Crawford, will go down to future generations as something of an injustice to those three artists. [Illustration: GUIDO RENI'S PORTRAIT OF BEATRICE CENCI, PAINTED WHILE SHE WAS IN PRISON, WHICH SUGGESTED TO HAWTHORNE THE PLOT OF "THE MARBLE FAUN"] It is not necessary to repeat here what Hawthorne wrote concerning Powers' Webster. The statue stands in front of the State House at Boston, and serves as a good likeness of the famous orator, but more than that one cannot say for it. The face has no definable expression, and those who have looked for a central motive in the figure will be pleased to learn what it is by reading Hawthorne's description of it, as he saw it in Powers' studio at Florence. A sculptor of the present day can find no better study for his art than the attitudes and changes of countenance in an eloquent speaker; but which of them can be said to have taken advantage of this? Story made an attempt in his statue of Everett, but even his most indulgent friends did not consider it a success. His "George Peabody," opposite the Bank of England, could not perhaps have been altogether different from what it is. What chiefly interested Story in his profession seems to have been the modelling of unhappy women in various attitudes of reflection. He made a number of these, of which his "Cleopatra" is the only one known to fame, and in the expression of her face he has certainly achieved a high degree of excellence. Neither has Hawthorne valued it too highly,--the expression of worldly splendor incarnated in a beautiful woman on the tragical verge of an abyss. If she only were beautiful! Here the limitations of the statue commence. Hawthorne says, "The sculptor had not shunned to give the full, Nubian lips and other characteristics of the Egyptian physiognomy." Here he follows the sculptor himself, and it is remarkable that a college graduate like William Story should have made so transparent a mistake. Cleopatra was not an Egyptian at all. The Ptolemies were Greeks, and it is simply impossible to believe that they would have allied themselves with a subject and alien race. This kind of small pedantry has often led artists astray, and was peculiarly virulent during the middle of the past century. The whole figure of Story's "Cleopatra" suffers from it. Hawthorne says again, "She was draped from head to foot in a costume minutely and scrupulously studied from that of ancient Egypt." In fact, the body and limbs of the statue are so closely shrouded as to deprive the work of that sense of freedom of action and royal abandon which greets us in Shakespeare's and Plutarch's "Cleopatra." Story might have taken a lesson from Titian's matchless "Cleopatra" in the Cassel gallery, or from Marc Antonio's small woodcut of Raphael's "Cleopatra." Perhaps it is not too much to say of Crawford that he was the finest plastic genius of the Anglo-Saxon race. His technique may not have been equal to Flaxman's or St. Gaudens', but his designs have more of grandeur than the former, and he is more original than the latter. There are faults of modelling in his "Orpheus," and its attitude resembles that of the eldest son of Niobe in the Florentine gallery,--although the Niobe youth looks upward and Orpheus is peering into darkness,--its features are rather too pretty; but the statue has exactly what Powers' "Greek Slave" lacks, a definite motive,--that of an earnest seeker,--which pervades it from head to foot; and it is no imaginary pathos that we feel in its presence. There is, at least, no imitation of the antique in Crawford's "Beethoven," for its conception, the listening to internal harmonies, would never have occurred to a Greek or a Roman. Even Hawthorne admits Crawford's skill in the treatment of drapery; and this is very important, for it is in his drapery quite as much as in the nude that we recognize the superiority of Michel Angelo to Raphael; and the folds of Beethoven's mantle are as rhythmical as his own harmonies. The features lack something of firmness, but it is altogether a statue in the grand manner. Hawthorne is rather too exacting in his requirements of modern sculptors. Warrington Wood, who commenced life as a marble-worker, always employed Italian workmen to carve his statues, although he was perfectly able to do it himself, and always put on the finishing touches,--as I presume they all do. Bronze statues are finished with a file, and of course do not require any knowledge of the chisel. In regard to the imitation of antique attitudes, there has certainly been too much of it, as Hawthorne supposes; but the Greeks themselves were given to this form of plagiarism, and even Praxiteles sometimes adopted the motives of his predecessors; but Hawthorne praises Powers, Story, and Harriet Hosmer above their merits. The whole brotherhood of artists and their critical friends might rise up against me, if I were to support Hawthorne's condemnation of modern Venuses, and "the guilty glimpses stolen at hired models." They are not necessarily guilty glimpses. To an experienced artist the customary study from a naked figure, male or female, is little more than what a low-necked dress at a party would be to many others. Yet the instinct of the age shrinks from this exposure. We can make pretty good Venuses, but we cannot look at them through the same mental and moral atmosphere as the contemporaries of Scopas, or even with the same eyes that Michel Angelo saw them. We feel the difference between a modern Venus and an ancient one. There is a statue in the Vatican of a Roman emperor, of which every one says that it ought to wear clothes; and the reason is because the face has such a modern look. A raving Bacchante may be a good acquisition to an art museum, but it is out of place in a public library. A female statue requires more or less drapery to set off the outlines of the figure and to give it dignity. We feel this even in the finest Greek work--like the "Venus of Cnidos." In this matter Hawthorne certainly exposes his Puritanic education, and he also places too high a value on the carving of button-holes and shoestrings by Italian workmen. Such things are the fag-ends of statuary. His judgment, however, is clear and convincing in regard to the tinted Eves and Venuses of Gibson. Whatever may have been the ancient practice in this respect, Gibson's experiment proved a failure. Nobody likes those statues; and no other sculptor has since followed Gibson's example. The tinting of statues by the Greeks did not commence until the time of Aristotle, and does not seem to have been very general. Their object evidently was, not so much to imitate flesh as to tone down the crystalline glare of the new marble. Pausanias speaks of a statue in Arcadia, the drapery of which was painted with vermilion, "so as to look very gay." This was of course the consequence of a late and degraded taste. That traces of paint should have been discovered on Greek temples is no evidence that the marble was painted when they were first built. It may be suspected that Hawthorne was one of the very few who have seen the "Venus dé Medici" and recognized the true significance of the statue. The vast majority of visitors to the Uffizi only see in it the type of a perfectly symmetrical woman bashfully posing for her likeness in marble, but Hawthorne's perception in it went much beyond that, and the fact that he attempts no explanation of its motive is in accordance with the present theory. He also noticed that statues had sometimes exercised a potent spell over him, and at others a very slight influence. Froude says that a man's modesty is the best part of him. Notice that, ye strugglers for preferment, and how beautifully modest Hawthorne is, when he writes in his Florentine diary: "In a year's time, with the advantage of access to this magnificent gallery, I think I might come to have some little knowledge of pictures. At present I still know nothing; but am glad to find myself capable, at least, of loving one picture better than another. I am sensible, however, that a process is going on, and has been ever since I came to Italy, that puts me in a state to see pictures with less toil, and more pleasure, and makes me more fastidious, yet more sensible of beauty where I saw none before." Hawthorne belongs to the same class of amateur critics as Shelley and Goethe, who, even if their opinions cannot always be accepted as final, illuminate the subject with the radiance of genius and have an equal value with the most experienced connoisseurs. * * * * * The return of the Hawthornes to Rome through Tuscany was even more interesting than their journey to Florence in the spring, and they enjoyed the inestimable advantage of a _vetturino_ who would seem to have been the Sir Philip Sidney of his profession, a compendium of human excellences. There are such men, though rarely met with, and we may trust Hawthorne's word that Constantino Bacci was one of them; not only a skilful driver, but a generous provider, honest, courteous, kindly, and agreeable. They went first to Siena, where they were entertained for a week or more by the versatile Mr. Story, and where Hawthorne wrote an eloquent description of the cathedral; then over the mountain pass where Radicofani nestles among the iron-browed crags above the clouds; past the malarious Lake of Bolsena, scene of the miracle which Raphael has commemorated in the Vatican; through Viterbo and _Sette Vene_; and finally, on October 16, into Rome, through the Porta' del Popolo, designed by Michel Angelo in his massive style,--Donati's comet flaming before them every night. Thompson, the portrait painter, had already secured a furnished house, No. 68 Piazza Poli, for the Hawthornes, to which they went immediately. Since the death of Julius Cæsar, comets have always been looked upon as the forerunners of pestilence and war, but wars are sometimes blessings, and Donati's discovery proved a harbinger of good to Italy,--but to the Hawthornes, a prediction of evil. Continually in Hawthorne's Italian journal we meet with references to the Roman malaria, as if it were a subject that occupied his thoughts, and nowhere is this more common than during the return-journey from Florence. Did it occur to him that the lightning might strike in his own house? No sensible American now would take his children to Rome unless for a very brief visit; and yet William Story brought up his family there with excellent success, so far as health was concerned. We can believe that Hawthorne took every possible precaution, so far as he knew, but in spite of that on November 1 his eldest daughter was seized with Roman fever, and for six weeks thereafter lay trembling between life and death, so that it seemed as if a feather might turn the balance. She does not appear to have been imprudent. Her father believed that the "old hag" breathed upon her while she was with her mother, who was sketching in the Palace of the Cæsars; but the Palatine Hill is on high ground, with a foundation of solid masonry, and was guarded by French soldiers, and it would have been difficult to find a more cleanly spot in the city. A German count, who lived in a villa on the Cælian Hill, close by, considered his residence one of the most healthful in Rome. Miss Una had a passionate attachment for the capital of the ancient world; and it seems as if the evil spirit of the place had seized upon her, as the Ice Maiden is supposed to entrap chamois hunters in the Alps. One of the evils attendant on sickness in a foreign country is, the uncertainty in regard to a doctor, and this naturally leads to a distrust and suspicion of the one that is employed. Even so shrewd a man as Bismarck fell into the hands of a charlatan at St. Petersburg and suffered severely in consequence. Hawthorne either had a similar experience, or, what came to the same thing, believed that he did. He considered himself obliged to change doctors for his daughter, and this added to his care and anxiety. During the next four months he wrote not a word in his journal (or elsewhere, so far as we know), and he visibly aged before his wife's eyes. He went to walk on occasion with Story or Thompson, but it was merely for the preservation of his own health. His thoughts were always in his daughter's chamber, and this was so strongly marked upon his face that any one could read it. Toward the Ides of March, Miss Una was sufficiently improved to take a short look at the carnival, but it was two months later before she was in a condition to travel, and neither she nor her father ever wholly recovered from the effects of this sad experience. CHAPTER XVI "THE MARBLE FAUN": 1859-1860 What the Roman carnival was a hundred and fifty years ago, when the Italian princes poured out their wealth upon it, and when it served as a medium for the communication of lovers as well as for social and political intrigue, which sometimes resulted in conflicts like those of the Montagues and Capulets, can only be imagined. Goethe witnessed it from a balcony in the Corso, and his carnival in the second part of "Faust" was worked up from notes taken on that occasion; but it is so highly poetized that little can be determined from it, except as a portion of the drama. By Hawthorne's time the aristocratic Italians had long since given up their favorite holiday to English and American travellers,--crowded out, as it were, by the superiority of money; and since the advent of Victor Emmanuel, the carnival has become so democratic that you are more likely to encounter your landlady's daughter there than any more distinguished person. Hawthorne's description of it in "The Marble Faun" is not overdrawn, and is one of the happiest passages in the book. The carnival of 1859 was an exceptionally brilliant one. The Prince of Wales attended it with a suite of young English nobles, who, always decorous and polite on public occasions, nevertheless infused great spirit into the proceedings. Sumner and Motley were there, and Motley rented a balcony in a palace, to which the Hawthornes received general and repeated invitations. On March 7, Miss Una was driven through the Corso in a barouche, and the Prince of Wales threw her a bouquet, probably recognizing her father, who was with her; and to prove his good intentions he threw her another, when her carriage returned from the Piazza, del Popolo. The present English sovereign has always been noted for a sort of journalistic interest in prominent men of letters, science, and public affairs, and it is likely that he was better informed in regard to the Hawthornes than they imagined. Hawthorne himself was too much subdued by his recent trial to enter into the spirit of the carnival, even with a heart much relieved from anxiety, but he sometimes appeared in the Motleys' balcony, and sometimes went along the narrow sidewalk of the Corso, "for an hour or so among the people, just on the edges of the fun." Sumner invited Mrs. Hawthorne to take a stroll and see pictures with him, from which she returned delighted with his criticisms and erudition. A few days later Franklin Pierce suddenly appeared at No. 68 Piazza Poli, with that shadow on his face which was never wholly to leave it. The man who fears God and keeps his commandments will never feel quite alone in the world; but for the man who lives on popularity, what will there be left when that forsakes him? Hawthorne was almost shocked at the change in his friend's appearance; not only at his gray hair and wrinkled brow, but at the change in his voice, and at a certain lack of substance in him, as if the personal magnetism had gone out of him. Hawthorne went to walk with him, and tried to encourage him by suggesting another term of the presidency, but this did not help much, for even Pierce's own State had deserted him,--a fact of which Hawthorne may not have been aware. The companionship of his old friend, however, and the manifold novelty of Rome itself, somewhat revived the ex-President, as may be imagined; and a month later he left for Venice, in better spirits than he came. They celebrated the Ides of March by going to see Harriet Hosmer's statue of Zenobia, which was afterward exhibited in America. Hawthorne immediately detected its resemblance to the antique,--the figure was in fact a pure plagiarism from the smaller statue of Ceres in the Vatican,--but Miss Hosmer succeeded in giving the face an expression of injured and sorrowing majesty, which Hawthorne was equally ready to appreciate. On this second visit to Rome he became acquainted with a sculptor, whose name is not given, but who criticised Hiram Powers with a rather suspicious severity. He would not allow Powers "to be an artist at all, or to know anything of the laws of art," although acknowledging him to be a great bust-maker, and to have put together the "Greek Slave" and the "Fisher-Boy" very ingeniously. "The latter, however (he says), is copied from the Spinario in the _Tribune_ of the Uffizi; and the former made up of beauties that had no reference to one another; and he affirms that Powers is ready to sell, and has actually sold, the 'Greek Slave,' limb by limb, dismembering it by reversing the process of putting it together. Powers knows nothing scientifically of the human frame, and only succeeds in representing it, as a natural bone-doctor succeeds in setting a dislocated limb, by a happy accident or special providence." [Footnote: Italian Note-book, 483.] We may judge, from "the style, the matter, and the drift" of this discourse, that it emanated from the same sculptor who is mentioned, in "Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife," as having traduced Margaret Fuller and her husband Count Ossoli. As Tennyson says, "A lie that is half a truth is ever the blackest of lies," and this fellow would seem to have been an adept in unveracious exaggeration. It is remarkable that Hawthorne should have given serious attention to such a man; but an English critic said in regard to this same incident that if Hawthorne had been a more communicative person, if he had talked freely to a larger number of people, he would not have been so easily prejudiced by those few with whom he was chiefly intimate. To which it could be added, that he might also have taken broader views in regard to public affairs. Hawthorne was fortunate to have been present at the discovery of the St. Petersburg "Venus," the twin sister of the "Venus dé Medici," which was dug up in a vineyard outside the Porta Portese. The proprietor of the vineyard, who made his fortune at a stroke by the discovery, happened to select the site for a new building over the buried ruins of an ancient villa, and the "Venus" was discovered in what appeared to Hawthorne as an old Roman bath-room. The statue was in more perfect preservation than the "Venus dé Medici," both of whose arms have been restored, and Hawthorne noticed that the head was larger and the face more characteristic, with wide-open eyes and a more confident expression. He was one of the very few who saw it before it was transported to St. Petersburg, and a thorough artistic analysis of it is still one of the _desiderata_. The difference in expression, however, would seem to be in favor of the "Venus dé Medici," as more in accordance with the ruling motive of the figure. Miss Una Hawthorne had not sufficiently recovered to travel until the last of May, when they all set forth northward by way of Genoa and Marseilles, in which latter place we find them on the 28th, enjoying the comfort and elegance of a good French hotel. Thence they proceeded to Avignon, but did not find much to admire there except the Rhone; so they continued to Geneva, the most pleasant, homelike resting place in Europe, but quite deficient in other attractions. It seems as if Hawthorne's Roman friends were somewhat remiss in not giving him better advice in regard to European travelling. At Geneva he was within a stone's throw of Chamounix, and hardly more than that of Strasburg Cathedral, and yet he visited neither. Why did he go out of his way to see so little and to miss so much? He went across the lake to visit Lausanne and the Castle of Chillon, and he was more than astonished at the view of the Pennine Alps from the deck of the steamer. He had never imagined anything like it; and he might have said the same if he had visited Cologne Cathedral. Instead of that, however, he hurried through France again, with the intention of sailing for America the middle of July; but after reaching London he concluded to remain another year in England, to write his "Romance of Monte Beni," and obtain an English copyright for it. He left Geneva on June 15, and as he turned his face northward, he felt that Henry Bright and Francis Bennoch were his only real friends in Great Britain. There could hardly have been a stronger contrast than these two. Bright was tall, slender, rather pale for an Englishman, grave and philosophical. Bennoch was short, plump, lively and jovial, with a ready fund of humor much in the style of Dickens, with whom he was personally acquainted. Yet Hawthorne recognized that Bright and Bennoch liked him for what he was, in and of himself, and not for his celebrity alone. Bright was in London when Hawthorne reached there, and proposed that they should go together to call on Sumner, [Footnote: J. Hawthorne, ii. 223.] who had been cured from the effects of Brooks's assault by an equally heroic treatment; but Hawthorne objected that as neither of them was Lord Chancellor, Sumner would not be likely to pay them much attention; to which Bright replied, that Sumner had been very kind to him in America, and they accordingly went. Sumner was kind to thousands,--the kindest as well as the most upright man of his time,--and no one in America, except Longfellow, appreciated Hawthorne so well; but he was the champion of the anti-slavery movement and the inveterate opponent of President Pierce. I suppose a man's mind cannot help being colored somewhat by such conditions and influences. Hawthorne wished for a quiet, healthful place, where he could write his romance without the disturbances that are incident to celebrity, and his friends recommended Redcar, on the eastern coast of Yorkshire, a town that otherwise Americans would not have heard of. He went there about the middle of July, remaining until the 5th of October, but of his life there we know nothing except that he must have worked assiduously, for in that space of time he nearly finished a book containing almost twice as many pages as "The Scarlet Letter." Meanwhile Mrs. Hawthorne entertained the children and kept them from interfering with their father (in his small cottage), by making a collection of sea-mosses, which Una and Julian gathered at low tides, and which their mother afterward dried and preserved on paper. On October 4th Una Hawthorne wrote to her aunt, Elizabeth Peabody: "Our last day in Redcar, and a most lovely one it is. The sea seems to reproach us for leaving it. But I am glad we are going, for I feel so homesick that I want constant change to divert my thoughts. How troublesome feelings and affections are." [Footnote: Mrs. Lathrop, 35 a.] One can see that it was a pleasant place even after the days had begun to shorten, which they do very rapidly in northern England. From Redcar, Hawthorne went to Leamington, where he finished his romance about the first of December, and remained until some time in March, living quietly and making occasional pedestrian tours to neighboring towns. He was particularly fond of the walk to Warwick Castle, and of standing on the bridge which crosses the Avon, and gazing at the walls of the Castle, as they rise above the trees--"as fine a piece of English scenery as exists anywhere; the gray towers and long line of windows of the lordly castle, with a picturesquely varied outline; ancient strength, a little softened by decay." It is a view that has often been sketched, painted and engraved. The romance was written, but had to be revised, the least pleasant portion of an author's duties,--unless he chooses to make the index himself. This required five or six weeks longer, after which Hawthorne went to London and arranged for its publication with Smith & Elder, who agreed to bring it out in three volumes--although two would have been quite sufficient; but according to English ideas, the length of a work of fiction adds to its importance. Unfortunately, Smith & Elder also desired to cater to the more prosaic class of readers by changing the name of the romance from "The Marble Faun" to "Transformation," and they appear to have done this without consulting Hawthorne's wishes in the matter. It was simply squeezing the title dry of all poetic suggestions; and it would have been quite as appropriate to change the name of "The Scarlet Letter" to "The Clergyman's Penance," or to call "The Blithedale Romance" "The Suicide of a Jilt." If Smith & Elder considered "The Marble Faun" too recondite a title for the English public, what better name could they have hit upon than "The Romance of Monte Beni"? Would not the Count of Monte Beni be a cousin Italian, as it were, to the Count of Monte Cristo? We are thankful to observe that when Hawthorne published the book in America, he had his own way in regard to this point. It was now that a new star was rising in the literary firmament, not of the "shooting" or transitory species, and the genius of Marian Evans (George Eliot) was casting its genial penetrating radiance over Great Britain and the United States. She was as difficult a person to meet with as Hawthorne himself, and they never saw one another; but a friend of Mr. Bennoch, who lived at Coventry, invited the Hawthornes there in the first week of February to meet Bennoch and others, and Marian Evans would seem to have been the chief subject of conversation at the table that evening. What Hawthorne gathered concerning her on that occasion he has preserved in this compact and discriminating statement: "Miss Evans (who wrote 'Adam Bede') was the daughter of a steward, and gained her exact knowledge of English rural life by the connection with which this origin brought her with the farmers. She was entirely self-educated, and has made herself an admirable scholar in classical as well as in modern languages. Those who knew her had always recognized her wonderful endowments, and only watched to see in what way they would develop themselves. She is a person of the simplest manners and character, amiable and unpretending, and Mrs. B---- spoke of her with great affection and respect." There is actually more of the real George Eliot in this summary than in the three volumes of her biography by Mr. Cross. Thorwaldsen's well-known simile in regard to the three stages of sculpture, the life, the death and the resurrection, also has its application to literature. The manuscript is the birth of an author's work, and its revision always seems like taking the life out of it; but when the proof comes, it is like a new birth, and he sees his design for the first time in its true proportions. Then he goes over it as the sculptor does his newly-cast bronze, smoothing the rough places and giving it those final touches which serve to make its expression clearer. Hawthorne was never more to be envied than while correcting the proof of "The Marble Faun" at Leamington. The book was given to the public at Easter-time; and there seems to have been only one person in England that appreciated it, even as a work of art--John Lothrop Motley. The most distinguished reviewers wholly failed to catch the significance of it; and even Henry Bright, while warmly admiring the story, expressed a dissatisfaction at the conclusion of it,--although he could have found a notable precedent for that in Goethe's "Wilhelm Meister." The _Saturday Review_, a publication similar in tone to the New York _Nation_, said of "Transformation:" [Footnote: J. Hawthorne, ii. 250.] "A mystery is set before us to unriddle; at the end the author turns round and asks us what is the good of solving it. That the impression of emptiness and un-meaningness thus produced is in itself a blemish to the work no one can deny. Mr. Hawthorne really trades upon the honesty of other writers. We feel a sort of interest in the story, slightly and sketchily as it is told, because our experience of other novels leads us to assume that, when an author pretends to have a plot, he has one." The _Art Journal_ said of it: [Footnote: J. Hawthorne, ii. 249.] "We are not to accept this book as a story; in that respect it is grievously deficient. The characters are utterly untrue to nature and to fact; they speak, all and always, the sentiments of the author; their words also are his; there is no one of them for which the world has furnished a model." And the London _Athenaeum_ said: [Footnote: Ibid., ii. 244.] "To Mr. Hawthorne truth always seems to arrive through the medium of the imagination.... His hero, the Count of Monte Beni, would never have lived had not the Faun of Praxiteles stirred the author's admiration.... The other characters, Mr. Hawthorne must bear to be told, are not new to a tale of his. Miriam, the mysterious, with her hideous tormentor, was indicated in the Zenobia of 'The Blithedale Romance.' Hilda, the pure and innocent, is own cousin to Phoebe in 'The House of the Seven Gables'." If the reviewer is to be reviewed, it is not too much to designate these criticisms as miserable failures. They are not even well written. Henry Bright seemed to be thankful that they were no worse, for he wrote to Hawthorne: "I am glad that sulky _Athenaeum_ was so civil; for they are equally powerful and unprincipled." The writer in the _Athenaeum_ evidently belonged to that class of domineering critics who have no literary standing, but who, like bankers' clerks, arrogate to themselves all the importance of the establishment with which they are connected. Fortunately, there are few such in America. No keen-witted reader would ever confound the active, rosy, domestic Phoebe Pyncheon with the dreamy, sensitive, and strongly subjective Hilda of "The Marble Faun;" and Hawthorne might have sent a communication to the _Athenaeum_ to refresh the reviewer's memory, for it was not Zenobia in "The Blithedale Romance" who was dogged by a mysterious persecutor, but her half-sister--Priscilla. Shakespeare's Beatrice and his Rosalind are more alike (for Brandes supposes them to have been taken from the same model) than Zenobia and Miriam; and the difference between the persecutors of Priscilla and Miriam, as well as their respective methods, is world-wide; but there are none so blind as those who are enveloped in the turbid medium of their self-conceit. The pure-hearted, chivalrous Motley read these reviews, and wrote to Hawthorne a vindication of his work, which must have seemed to him like a broad belt of New England sunshine in the midst of the London fog. In reference to its disparagement by so-called authorities, Motley said: [Footnote: Mrs. Lathrop, 408.] "I have said a dozen times that nobody can write English but you. With regard to the story which has been slightingly criticised, I can only say that to me it is quite satisfactory. I like those shadowy, weird, fantastic, Hawthornesque shapes flitting through the golden gloom which is the atmosphere of the book. I like the misty way in which the story is indicated rather than revealed. The outlines are quite definite enough, from the beginning to the end, to those who have imagination enough to follow you in your airy flights; and to those who complain--- "I beg your pardon for such profanation, but it really moves my spleen that people should wish to bring down the volatile figures of your romance to the level of an everyday novel. It is exactly the romantic atmosphere of the book in which I revel." The calm face of Motley, with his classic features, rises before us as we read this, illumined as it were by "the mild radiance of a hidden sun." He also had known what it was to be disparaged by English periodicals; and if it had not been for Froude's spirited assertion in his behalf, his history of the Dutch Republic might not have met with the celebrity it deserved. He was aware of the difference between a Hawthorne and a Reade or a Trollope, and knew how unfair it would be to judge Hawthorne even by the same standard as Thackeray. He does not touch in this letter on the philosophical character of the work, although that must have been evident to him, for he had said enough without it; but one could wish that he had printed the above statement over his own name, in some English journal. American reviewers were equally puzzled by "The Marble Faun," and, although it was generally praised here, the literary critics treated it in rather a cautious manner, as if it contained material of a dangerous nature. The _North American_, which should have devoted five or six pages to it, gave it less than one; praising it in a conventional and rather unsympathetic tone. Longfellow read it, and wrote in his diary, "A wonderful book; but with the old, dull pain in it that runs through all Hawthorne's writings." There was always something of this dull pain in the expression of Hawthorne's face. ANALYSIS OF "THE MARBLE FAUN" It is like a picture, or a succession of pictures, painted in what the Italians call the _sfumato_, or "smoky" manner. The book is pervaded with the spirit of a dreamy pathos, such as constitutes the mental atmosphere of modern Rome; not unlike the haze of an Indian summer day, which we only half enjoy from a foreboding of the approach of winter. All outlines are softened and partially blurred in it, as time and decay have softened the outlines of the old Roman ruins. We recognize the same style with which we are familiar in "The Scarlet Letter," but influenced by a change in Hawthorne's external impressions. It is a rare opportunity when the work of a great writer can be traced back to its first nebulous conception, as we trace the design of a pictorial artist to the first drawing that he made for his subject. Although we cannot witness the development of the plot of this romance in Hawthorne's mind, it is much to see in what manner the different elements of which it is composed, first presented themselves to him, and how he adapted them to his purpose. The first of these in order of time was the beautiful Jewess, whom he met at the Lord Mayor's banquet in London; who attracted him by her _tout ensemble_, but at the same time repelled him by an indefinable impression, a mysterious something, that he could not analyze. There would seem, however, to have been another Jewess connected with the character of Miriam; for I once heard Mrs. Hawthorne narrating a story in which she stated that she and her husband were driving through London in a cab, and passing close to the sidewalk in a crowded street they saw a beautiful woman, with black hair and a ruddy complexion, walking with the most ill-favored and disagreeable looking Jew that could be imagined; and on the woman's face there was an expression of such deep-seated unhappiness that Hawthorne and his wife turned to each other, and he said, "I think that woman's face will always haunt me." I did not hear the beginning of Mrs. Hawthorne's tale, but I always supposed that it related to "The Marble Faun," and it would seem as if the character of Miriam was a composite of these two daughters of Israel, uniting the enigmatical quality of one with the unfortunate companionship of the other, and the beauty of both. As previously noticed, the portrait of Beatrice Cenci excited a deeply penetrating interest in Hawthorne, and his reflections on it day after day would naturally lead him to a similar design in regard to the romance which he was contemplating. The attribution of a catastrophe like Beatrice's to either of the two Jewesses, would of course be adventitious, and should be considered in the light of an artistic privilege. The "Faun" of Praxiteles in the museum of the Capitol next attracted his attention. This is but a poor copy of the original; but he penetrated the motive of the sculptor with those deep-seeing eyes of his, and there is no analysis of an ancient statue by Brunn or Furtwängler that equals Hawthorne's description of this one. It seems as if he must have looked backward across the centuries into the very mind of Praxiteles, and he was, in fact, the first critic to appreciate its high value. The perfect ease and simple beauty of the figure belong to a higher grade of art than the Apollo Belvedere, and Hawthorne discovered what Winckelmann had overlooked. He immediately conceived the idea of bringing the faun to life, and seeing how he would behave and comport himself in the modern world--in brief, to use the design of Praxiteles as the mainspring of a romance. In the evening of April 22, 1858, he wrote in his journal: [Illustration: STATUE OF PRAXITELES' RESTING FAUN, WHICH HAWTHORNE HAS DESCRIBED AND BROUGHT TO LIFE IN THE CHARACTER OF DONATELLO] "I looked at the Faun of Praxiteles, and was sensible of a peculiar charm in it; a sylvan beauty and homeliness, friendly and wild at once. It seems to me that a story, with all sorts of fun and pathos in it, might be contrived on the idea of their species having become intermingled with the human race; a family with the faun blood in them, having prolonged itself from the classic era till our own days. The tail might have disappeared, by dint of constant intermarriages with ordinary mortals; but the pretty hairy ears should occasionally reappear in members of the family; and the moral instincts and intellectual characteristics of the faun might be most picturesquely brought out, without detriment to the human interest of the story." This statue served to concentrate the various speculative objects which had been hovering before Hawthorne's imagination during the past winter, and when he reached Florence six weeks later, the chief details of the plot were already developed in his mind. Hilda and Kenyon are, of course, subordinate characters, like the first walking lady and the first walking gentleman on the stage. They are the sympathetic friends who watch the progress of the drama, continually hoping to be of service, but still finding themselves powerless to prevent the catastrophe. It was perhaps their unselfish interest in their mutual friends that at length taught them to know each other's worth, so that they finally became more than friends to one another. True love, to be firmly based, requires such a mutual interest or common ground on which the parties can meet,--something in addition to the usual attraction of the sexes. Mrs. Hawthorne has been supposed by some to have been the original of Hilda; and by others her daughter Una. Conway holds an exceptional opinion, that Hilda was the feminine counterpart of Hawthorne himself; but Hilda is only too transparent a character, while Hawthorne always was, and still remains, impenetrable; and there was enough of her father in Miss Una, to render the same objection applicable in her case. Hilda seems to me very much like Mrs. Hawthorne, as one may imagine her in her younger days; like her in her mental purity, her conscientiousness, her devotion to her art,--which we trust afterwards was transformed into a devotion to her husband,--her tendency to self-seclusion, her sensitiveness and her lack of decisive resolution. She is essentially what they call on the stage an _ingenue_ character; that is, one that remains inexperienced in the midst of experience; and it is in this character that she contributes to the catastrophe of the drama. If Hawthorne appears anywhere in his own fiction, it is not in "The Blithedale Romance," but in the rôle of Kenyon. Although Kenyon's profession is that of a sculptor, he is not to be confounded with the gay and versatile Story. Neither is he statuesque, as the English reviewer criticised him. He is rather a shadowy character, as Hawthorne himself was shadowy, and as an author always must be shadowy to his readers; but Kenyon is to Hawthorne what Prospero is to Shakespeare, and if he does not make use of magic arts, it is because they no longer serve their purpose in human affairs. He is a wise, all-seeing, sympathetic mind, and his active influence in the play is less conspicuous because it is always so quiet, and so correct. It will be noticed that the first chapter and the last chapter of this romance have the same title: "Miriam, Hilda, Kenyon, Donatello." This is according to their respective ages and sexes; but it is also the terms of a proportion,--as Miriam is to Hilda, so is Kenyon to Donatello. As the experienced woman is to the inexperienced woman, so is the experienced man to the inexperienced man. This seems simple enough, but it has momentous consequences in the story. Donatello, who is a type of natural but untried virtue, falls in love with Miriam, not only for her beauty, but because she has acquired that worldly experience which he lacks. Hilda, suddenly aroused to a sense of her danger in the isolated life she is leading, accepts Kenyon as a protector. The means in this proportion come together and unite, because they are the mean terms, and pursue a medium course. The extremes fly apart and are separated, simply because they are extremes. But there is a spiritual bond between them, invisible, but stronger than steel, which will bring them together again--at the Day of Judgment, if not sooner. All tragedy is an investigation or exemplification of that form of human error which we call sin; a catastrophe of nature or a simple error of judgment may be tragical, but will not constitute a tragedy without the moral or poetic element. In "The Scarlet Letter," we have the sin of concealment and its consequences. The first step toward reformation is confession, and without that, repentance is little more than a good intention. In "The House of the Seven Gables," Hawthorne has treated the sin of hypocrisy--a smiling politician who courts popularity and pretends to be everybody's friend, and agrees with everybody,--only with a slight reservation. There may be occasions on which hypocrisy is a virtue; but the habit of hypocrisy for personal ends is like a dry rot in the heart of man. In "The Blithedale Romance," we find the sin of moral affectation. Neither Hollingsworth nor Zenobia is really what they pretend themselves to be. Their morality is a hollow shell, and gives way to the first effective temptation. Zenobia betrays Priscilla; and is betrayed in turn by Hollingsworth,--as well as the interests of the association which had been committed to his charge. The kernel of "The Marble Faun" is _original sin_. It is a story of the fall of man, told again in the light of modern science. It is a wonderful coincidence that almost in the same months that Hawthorne was writing this romance, Charles Darwin was also finishing his work on the "Origin of Species;" for one is the moral counterpart of the other. Hawthorne did not read scientific and philosophical books, but he may have heard something of Darwin's undertaking in England, as well as Napoleon's prophetic statement at St. Helena, that all the animals form an ascending series, leading up to man. [Footnote: Dr. O'Meara's "A Voice from St. Helena."] The skeleton of a prehistoric man discovered in the Neanderthal cave, which was supposed to have proved the Darwinian theory, does not suggest a figure similar to the "Faun" of Praxiteles, but the followers of Darwin have frequently adverted to the Hellenic traditions of fauns and satyrs in support of their theory. Hawthorne, however, has made a long stride beyond Darwin, for he has endeavored to reconcile this view of creation with the Mosaic cosmogony; and it must be admitted that he has been fairly successful. The lesson that Hawthorne teaches is, that evil does not reside in error, but in neglecting to be instructed by our errors. It is this which makes the difference between a St. Paul and a Nero. The fall of man was only apparent; it was really a rise in life. The Garden of Eden prefigures the childhood of the human race. Do we not all go through this idyllic moral condition in childhood, learning through our errors that the only true happiness consists in self-control? Do not all judicious parents protect their children from a knowledge of the world's wickedness, so long as it is possible to prevent it,--and yet not too long, for then they would become unfitted for their struggle with the world, and in order to avoid the pitfalls of mature life they must know where the pitfalls are. It is no longer essential for the individual to pass through the Cain and Abel experience--that has been accomplished by the race as a whole; but it is quite possible to imagine an incipient condition of society in which the distinction of justifiable homicide in self-defence (which is really the justification of war between nations) has not yet obtained. Hawthorne's Donatello is supposed to belong, in theory at least, to that primitive era; but it is not necessary to go back further than the feudal period to look for a man who never has known a will above his own. Donatello seizes Miriam's tormentor and casts him down the Tarpeian Rock,--from the same instinct, or clairvoyant perception, that a hound springs at the throat of his master's enemy. When the deed is done he recognizes that the punishment is out of all proportion to the offence,--which is in itself the primary recognition of a penal code,--and more especially that the judgment of man is against him. He realizes for the first time the fearful possibilities of his nature, and begins to reflect. He is a changed person; and if not changed for the better yet with a possibility of great improvement in the future. His act was at least an unselfish one, and it might serve as the argument for a debate, whether Donatello did not do society a service in ridding the earth of such a human monstrosity. Hawthorne has adjusted the moral balance of his case so nicely, that a single scruple would turn the scales. The tradition among the Greeks and Romans, of a Golden Age, corresponds in a manner to the Garden of Eden of Semitic belief. There may be some truth in it. Captain Speke, while exploring the sources of the Nile, discovered in central Africa a negro tribe uncontaminated by European traders, and as innocent of guile as the antelopes upon their own plains; and this suggests to us that all families and races of men may have passed through the Donatello stage of existence. Hawthorne's master-stroke in the romance is his description or analysis of the effect produced by this homicide on the different members of the group to which he has introduced us. The experienced and worldly-wise Kenyon is not informed of the deed until his engagement to Hilda, but he has sufficient reason to suspect something of the kind from the simultaneous disappearance of Donatello and the model, as well as from the sudden change in Miriam's behavior. Yet he does not treat Donatello with any lack of confidence. He visits him at his castle of Monte Beni, which is simply the Villa Manteuto somewhat idealized and removed into the recesses of the Apennines; he consoles him in his melancholy humor; tries to divert him from gloomy thoughts; and meanwhile watches with a keen eye and friendly solicitude for the _denouement_ of this mysterious drama. If he had seen what Hilda saw, he would probably have left Rome as quickly as possible, never to return; and Donatello's fate might have been different. The effect on the sensitive and inexperienced Hilda was like a horrible nightmare. She cannot believe her senses, and yet she has to believe them. It seems to her as if the fiery pit has yawned between her and the rest of the human race. Her position is much like that of Hamlet, and the effect on her is somewhat similar. She thrusts Miriam from her with bitterness; yet forms no definite resolutions, and does she knows not what; until, overburdened by the consciousness of her fatal secret, she discloses the affair to an unknown priest in the church of St. Peter. Neither does she seem to be aware at any time of the serious consequences of this action. Miriam, more experienced even than Kenyon, is not affected by the death of her tormentor so much directly as she is by its influence on Donatello. Hitherto she had been indifferently pleased by his admiration for her; now the tables are turned and she conceives the very strongest attachment for him. She follows him to his castle in disguise, dogs his footsteps on the excursion which he and Kenyon make together, shadows his presence again in Rome, and is with him at the moment of his arrest. This is all that we know of her from the time of her last unhappy interview with Hilda. Her crime consisted merely in a look,--the expression of her eyes,--and the whole world is free to her; but her heart is imprisoned in the same cell with Donatello. There is not a more powerful ethical effect in Dante or Sophocles. A certain French writer [Footnote: Name forgotten, but the fact is indelible.] blames Hilda severely for her betrayal of Miriam (who was at least her best friend in Rome), and furthermore designates her as an immoral character. This, we may suppose, is intended for a hit at New England Puritanism; and from the French stand-point, it is not unfair. Hilda represents Puritanism in its weakness and in its strength. It is true, what Hamlet says, that "conscience makes cowards of us all," but only true under conditions like those of Hamlet,--desperate emergencies, which require exceptional expedients. On the contrary, in carrying out a great reform like the abolition of slavery, the education of the blind, or the foundation of national unity, a man's conscience becomes a tower of strength to him. As already intimated, what Hilda ought to have done was, to leave Rome at once, and forever; but she is no more capable of forming such a resolution, than Hamlet was of organizing a conspiracy against his usurping uncle. When, however, the priest steps out from the confessional-box and attempts to make a convert of Hilda,--for which indeed she has given him a fair opening,--she asserts herself and her New England training, with true feminine dignity, and in fact has decidedly the best of the argument. It is a trying situation, in which she develops unexpected resources. Hawthorne's genius never shone forth more brilliantly than in this scene at St. Peter's. It is Shakespearian. Much dissatisfaction was expressed when "The Marble Faun" was first published, at the general vagueness of its conclusion. Hawthorne's admirers wished especially for some clearer explanation of Miriam's earlier life, and of her relation to the strange apparition of the catacombs. He answered these interrogatories in a supplementary chapter which practically left the subject where it was before--an additional piece of mystification. In a letter to Henry Bright he admitted that he had no very definite scheme in his mind in regard to Miriam's previous history, and this is probably the reason why his readers feel this vague sense of dissatisfaction with the plot. I have myself often tried to think out a prelude to the story, but without any definite result. Miriam's persecuting model was evidently a husband who had been forced upon her by her parents, and would not that be sufficient to account for her moods of gloom and despondency? Yet Hawthorne repeatedly intimates that there was something more than this. Let us not think of it. If the tale was not framed in mystery, Donatello would not seem so real to us. Do not the characters in "Don Quixote" and "Wilhelm Meister" spring up as it were out of the ground? They come we know not whence, and they go we know not whither. It is with these that "The Marble Faun" should be classed and compared, and not with "Middle-march," "Henry Esmond," or "The Heart of Midlothian." [Illustration: TORRE MEDIAVALLE DELLA SCIMMIA (HILDA'S TOWER), OF THE VIA PORTOGHESE AT ROME, WHERE HAWTHORNE REPRESENTS HILDA TO HAVE LIVED AND TENDED THE LAMP AT THE VIRGIN'S SHRINE ON THE TOP OF THE TOWER] Goethe said, while looking at the group of the "Laocoön," "I think that young fellow on the right will escape the serpents." This was not according to the story Virgil tells, but it is true to natural history. Similarly, it is pleasant to think that the Pope's mercy may ultimately have been extended to Donatello. We can imagine an aged couple living a serious, retired life in the castle of Monte Beni, childless, and to a certain extent joyless, but taking comfort in their mutual affection, and in acts of kindness to their fellow-mortals. In order to see Hilda's tower in Rome, go straight down from the Spanish Steps to the Corso, turn to the right, and you will soon come to the Via Portoghese (on the opposite side), where you will easily recognize the tower on the right hand. The tower is five stories in height, set in the front of the palace, and would seem to be older than the building about it; the relic, perhaps, of some distinguished mediaeval structure. The odd little shrine to the Virgin, a toy-like affair, still surmounts it; but its lamp is no longer burning. It was fine imagination to place Hilda in this lofty abode. CHAPTER XVII HOMEWARD BOUND: 1860-1862 There is no portion of Hawthorne's life concerning which we know less than the four years after his return from England to his native land. He was so celebrated that every eye was upon him; boys stopped their games to see him pass by, and farmers stood still in the road to stare at him. He was Hawthorne the famous, and every movement he made was remembered, every word spoken by him was recorded or related, and yet altogether it amounts to little enough. Letters have been preserved in number,--many of his own and others from his English friends, and those from his wife to her relatives; but they do not add much to the picture we have already formed in our minds of the man. As he said somewhere, fame had come too late to be a satisfaction to him, but on the contrary more of an annoyance. Hawthorne left Leamington the last of March, and transferred his family to Bath, which he soon discovered to be the pleasantest English city he had lived in yet,--symmetrically laid out, like a Continental city, and built for the most part of a yellowish sandstone; not unlike in appearance the travertine of which St. Peter's at Rome is built. The older portion of the city lies in a hollow among the hills, like an amphitheatre, and the more recent additions rise upon the hill-sides above it to a considerable height. This is the last note of enthusiasm in his writings; and in the next entry in his diary, which was written at Lothrop Motley's house, Hertford Street, London, May 16, he makes this ominous confession: "I would gladly journalize some of my proceedings, and describe things and people, but I find the same coldness and stiffness in my pen as always since our return to England." It is only too evident that from this time literary composition, which had been the chief recreation of his youth, and in which he had always found satisfaction until now, was no longer a pleasure to him. It is the last entry in his journal, at least for more than two years, and whatever writing he accomplished in the mean time was done for the sake of his wife and children. Dickens had a similar experience the last year of his life. Clearly, Hawthorne's nervous force was waning. On May 15, Hawthorne and Motley were invited to dine by Earl Dufferin, that admirable diplomat and one of the pleasantest of men. In fact, if there was a person living who could make Hawthorne feel perfectly at his ease, it was Dufferin. Motley provided some entertainment or other for his guest every day, and Hawthorne confessed that the stir and activity of London life were doing him "a wonderful deal of good." What he seems to have needed at this time was a vigorous, objective employment that would give his circulation a start in the right direction; but how was he to obtain that? He enjoyed one last stroll with Henry Bright through Hyde Park and along the Strand, and found time to say a long farewell to Francis Bennoch: the last time he was to meet either of them on this side of eternity. He returned to Bath the 1st of June, and ten days later they all embarked for Boston,--as it happened, by a pleasant coincidence, with the same captain with whom they had left America seven years before. Mrs. Hawthorne's sister, Mrs. Horace Mann, prepared their house at Concord for their reception, and there they arrived at the summer solstice. The good people of Concord had been mightily stirred up that spring, by an attempt to arrest Frank B. Sanborn and carry him forcibly to Washington,--contrary to law, as the Supreme Court of the State decided the following day. The marshal who arrested him certainly proceeded more after the manner of a burglar than of a civil officer, hiding himself with his _posse comitatus_ in a barn close to Sanborn's school-house, watching his proceedings through the cracks in the boards, and finally arresting him at night, just as he was going to bed; but the alarm was quickly sounded, and the whole male population of the place, including Emerson, turned out like a swarm of angry hornets, and the marshal and his posse were soon thankful to escape with their bones in a normal condition. A few nights later, the barn, which was owned by a prominent official in the Boston Custom House, was burned to the ground (the fire-company assisting), as a sacrifice on the altar of personal liberty. The excitement of this event had not yet subsided when the arrival of the Hawthorne family produced a milder and more amiable, but no less profound, sensation in the old settlement; and this was considerably increased by the fact that for the first month nothing was seen of them, except a sturdy-looking boy fishing from a rock in Concord River, opposite the spot where his father and Channing had discovered the unfortunate school-mistress. Old friends made their calls and were cordially received, but Hawthorne himself did not appear in public places; and it was soon noticed that he did not take the long walks which formerly carried him to the outer limits of the town. He was sometimes met on the way to Walden Pond, either alone or in company with his son; but Bronson Alcott more frequently noticed him gliding along in a ghost-like manner by the rustic fence which separated their two estates, or on the way to Sleepy Hollow. When the weather became cooler he formed a habit of walking back and forth on the hill-side above his house, where the bank descends sharply like a railroad-cut, with dwarf pines and shrub oaks on the further side of it. He wore a path there, which is described in "Septimius Felton," and it is quite possible that the first inception of that story entered his mind while looking down upon the Lexington road beneath him, and imagining how it appeared while filled with marching British soldiers. About July 10, 1860, the scholars of Mr. Sanborn's school, male and female, gave an entertainment in the Town Hall, not unlike Harvard Class Day. Mrs. Hawthorne and her eldest daughter appeared among the guests, and attracted much attention from the quiet grace and dignity of their manners; but there was an expression of weariness on Miss Una's face, which contrasted strangely with the happy, blithesome looks of the school-girls. Some idea of the occasion may be derived from a passing remark of Mrs. Hawthorne to a Harvard student present: "My daughter will be happy to dance with you, sir, if I can only find her." In September Hawthorne wrote to James T. Fields: [Footnote: Mrs. J. T. Fields, 118.] "We are in great trouble on account of our poor Una, in whom the bitter dregs of that Roman fever are still rankling, and have now developed themselves in a way which the physicians foreboded. I do not like to write about it, but will tell you when we meet. Say nothing." Miss Una was evidently far from well, and her father's anxiety for her sensibly affected his mental tone. He was invited at once to join the Saturday Club, popularly known at that time as the Atlantic Club, because its most conspicuous members were contributors to that periodical. Hawthorne did not return in season to take part in the Club's expedition to the Adirondack Mountains, concerning which Doctor Holmes remarked that, considering the number of rifles they carried, it was fortunate that they all returned alive. The meetings of the Club came but once a month, and as the last train to Concord was not a very late one, Judge Hoar had his carryall taken down to Waltham on such occasions, and thence he, with Hawthorne and Emerson, drove back to Concord through the woods in the darkness or moonlight; and Hawthorne may have enjoyed this as much as any portion of the entertainment. A club whose membership is based upon celebrity reminds one rather of a congregation of stags, all with antlers of seven tines. There was every shade of opinion, political, philosophical and religious, represented in the Saturday Club, and if they never fought over such subjects it was certainly much to their credit. Very little has been divulged of what took place at their meetings; but it is generally known that in the winter of 1861 Longfellow was obliged to warn his associates that if they persisted in abusing Sumner he should be obliged to leave their company; Sumner being looked upon by the Democrats and more timid Republicans as the chief obstacle to pacification; as if any one man could prop a house up when it was about to fall. After the War began, this naturally came to an end, and Sumner was afterwards invited to join the Club, with what satisfaction to Hoar, Lowell, and Holmes it might be considering rather curiously to inquire. We can at least feel confident that Hawthorne had no share in this. He did not believe in fighting shadows, and he at least respected Sumner for his frankness and disinterestedness. Such differences of opinion, however, are not conducive to freedom of discussion. Henry James, Sr., lifts the veil for a moment in a letter to Emerson, written about this time, [Footnote: Memoir of Bronson Alcott; also the "Hawthorne Centenary."] and affords us a picture of Hawthorne at the Saturday Club, which might bear the designation of a highly-flavored caricature. According to Mr. James, John M. Forbes, the Canton millionaire, preserved the balance at one end of the table, while Hawthorne, an oasis in a desert, served as the nearest approach to a human being, at the other. "How he buried his eyes in his plate and ate with such a voracity! that no one should dare to ask him a question." We do not realize the caricaturist in Henry James, Jr., so readily, on account of his elastic power of expression; but the relationship is plain and apparent. Both father and son ought to have been baptized in the Castalian Fount. There are those who have been at table with both Hawthorne and the elder James, and without the slightest reflection on Mr. James, have confessed their preference for the quiet composure and simple dignity of Hawthorne. In truth Hawthorne's manners were above those of the polished courtier or the accomplished man of fashion: they were poetic manners, and in this respect Longfellow most nearly resembled him of all members of the Club; although Emerson also had admirable manners and they were largely the cause of his success. It would have done no harm if Emerson had burned this letter after its first perusal, but since it is out of the bag we must even consider it as it deserves. Hawthorne must have enjoyed the meetings of the Club or he would not have attended them so regularly. He wrote an account of the first occasion on which he was present, giving an accurate description of the dinner itself and enclosing a diagram of the manner in which the guests were seated, but without any commentary on the proceedings of the day. It was, after all, one of the nerve-centres of the great world, and an agreeable change from the domestic monotony of the Wayside. Thackeray would have descried rich material for his pen in it, but Hawthorne's studies lay in another direction. Great men were not his line in literature. Meanwhile Mrs. Hawthorne and her daughter were transforming their Concord home into a small repository of the fine arts. Without much that would pass by the title of elegance, they succeeded in giving it an unpretentious air of refinement, and one could not enter it without realizing that the materials of a world-wide culture had been brought together there. Hawthorne soon found the dimensions of the house too narrow for the enlarged views which he had brought with him from abroad, and he designed a tower to be constructed at one corner of it, similar to, if not so lofty as that of the Villa Manteuto. This occupied him and the dilatory Concord carpenter for nearly half a year; and meanwhile chaos and confusion reigned supreme. There was no one whose ears could be more severely offended by the music of the carpenter's box and the mason's trowel than Hawthorne, and he knew not whether to fly his home or remain in it. Not until all this was over could he think seriously of a new romance. He made his study in the upper room of the tower; a room exactly twenty feet square, with a square vaulted ceiling and five windows,--too many, one would suppose, to produce a pleasant effect of light,--and walls papered light yellow. There he could be as quiet and retired as in the attic of his Uncle Robert Manning's house in Salem. Conway states that he wrote at a high desk, like Longfellow, and walked back and forth in the room while thinking out what he was going to say. The view from his windows extended across the meadows to Walden woods and the Fitchburg railroad track, and it also commanded the Alcott house and the road to Concord village. It was in this work-shop that he prepared "Our Old Home" for the press and wrote the greater part of "Septimius Felton" and "The Dolliver Romance." The War was a new source of distraction. It broke out before the tower was finished, stimulating Hawthorne's nerves, but disturbing that delicate mental equilibrium upon which satisfactory procedure of his writing depended. On May 26, 1861, he wrote to Horatio Bridge: "The war, strange to say, has had a beneficial effect upon my spirits, which were flagging wofully before it broke out. But it was delightful to share in the heroic sentiment of the time, and to feel that I had a country,--a consciousness which seemed to make me young again. One thing as regards this matter I regret, and one thing I am glad of. The regrettable thing is that I am too old to shoulder a musket myself, and the joyful thing is that Julian is too young." [Footnote: J. Hawthorne, ii. 276.] Hawthorne's patriotism was genuine and deep-seated. He was not the only American whom the bombardment of Fort Sumter had awakened to the fact that he had a country. What we have always enjoyed, we do not think of until there is danger of losing it. In the same letter, he confesses that he does not quite understand "what we are fighting for, or what definite result can be expected. If we pummel the South ever so hard, they will love us none the better for it; and even if we subjugate them, our next step should be to cut them adrift." There were many in those times who thought and felt as Hawthorne did. Douglas said in the Senate, "Even if you coerce the Southern States and bring them back by force, it will not be the same Union." A _people_ does not necessarily mean a _nation_; for the idea of nationality is of slow growth, and is in a manner opposed to the idea of democracy; for if the right of government depends on the consent of the governed, the primary right of the governed must be to abrogate that government whenever they choose to do so. Hawthorne was simply a consistent democrat; but time has proved the fallacy of Douglas's statement, and that a forcible restoration of the Union was entirely compatible with friendliness and mutal good-will between the different sections of the country,--after slavery, which was the real obstacle to this, had been eliminated. If the States east of the Alleghanies should attempt to separate from the rest of the nation, it would inevitably produce a war similar to that of 1861. Hawthorne even went to the length at this time of proposing to arm the negroes, and preparing them "for future citizenship by allowing them to fight for their own liberties, and educating them through heroic influences." [Footnote: The "Hawthorne Centenary," 197.] When George L. Stearns was organizing the colored regiments in Tennessee in 1863 he wrote concerning his work, in almost exactly these terms; and the inference is plain that Hawthorne might have been more of a humanitarian if his early associations had been different. Such an original character as Bronson Alcott for a next-door neighbor could not long escape Hawthorne's penetrating glance. Alcott was an interesting personality, perfectly genuine, frank, kindly and imperturbably good-humored. He had a benevolent aspect, and in general appearance so much resembled the portraits of Benjamin Franklin that his ingenious daughters made use of him in charades and theatricals for that purpose. Hawthorne had known him many years earlier, and had spoken very pleasantly of him in his first publication of "The Hall of Fantasy." He even said, "So calm and gentle was he, so quiet in the utterance of what his soul brooded upon, that one might readily conceive his Orphic Sayings to well up from a fountain in his breast, which communicated with the infinite abyss of thought,"--rather an optimistic view for Hawthorne. Alcott's philosophy had the decided merit, which Herbert Spencer's has not, of a strong affirmation of a Great First Cause, and our direct responsibility thereto: but it was chiefly the philosophy of Plotinus; and his constant reiteration of a "lapse" in human nature from divine perfection (which was simply the Donatello phase expressed in logic), with the various corollaries deduced from it, finally became as wearisome as the harp with a single string. Whether he troubled Hawthorne in that way, is rather doubtful, for even as a hobby-rider, Alcott was a man of Yankee shrewdness and considerable tact. Rose Hawthorne says that "he once brought a particularly long poem to read, aloud to my mother and father; a seemingly harmless thing from which they never recovered." What poem this could have been I have no idea, but in his later years Alcott wrote some excellent poetry, and those who ought to know do not think that he bored Hawthorne very severely. They frequently went to walk together, taking Julian for a make-weight, and Hawthorne could easily have avoided this if he had chosen. There are times for all of us when our next-door neighbors prove a burden; and it cannot be doubted that in most instances this is reciprocal. [Footnote: Rose Hawthorne, however, writes charmingly of the Alcotts. Take this swift sketch, among others: "I imagine his slightly stooping, yet tall and well-grown figure, clothed in black, and with a picturesque straw hat, twining itself in and out of forest aisles, or craftily returning home with gargoyle-like stems over his shoulders."] Alcott was a romance character of exceptional value, and Hawthorne recognized this, but did not succeed in inventing a plot that would suit the subject. The only one of Hawthorne's preparatory sketches given to the public--in which we see his genius in the "midmost heat of composition"--supposes a household in which an old man keeps a crab-spider for a pet, a deadly poisonous creature; and in the same family there is a boy whose fortunes will be mysteriously affected in some manner by this dangerous insect. He did not proceed sufficiently to indicate for us how this would turn out, but he closes the sketch with the significant remark, "In person and figure Mr. Alcott"; from which it may be inferred that the crab-spider was intended to symbolize Alcott's philosophy, and the catastrophe of the romance would naturally result from the unhealthy mental atmosphere in which the boy grew up,--a catastrophe which in Alcott's family was averted by the practical sagacity of his daughters. The idea, however, became modified in its application. It is with regret that we do not allot a larger space to this important sketch, for it is clearly an original study (like an artist's drawing) of the unfinished romance which was published in 1883 under the title of "Doctor Grimshawe's Secret." Long lost sight of in the mass of Hawthorne's manuscripts, this last of his posthumous works was reviewed by the critics with some incredulity, and Lathrop had the hardihood to publicly assert that no such romance by Hawthorne's pen existed, thereby casting a gratuitous slander on his own brother-in-law. We may have our doubts in regard to the authorship of Shakespeare's plays, for we have no absolute standard by which to judge of Shakespeare's style, but the "style, the matter, and the drift" of "Doctor Grimshawe's Secret" are so essentially Hawthornish that a person experienced in judging of such matters should not hesitate long in deciding that it belongs in the same category with "Fanshawe" and "The Dolliver Romance." It is even possible to determine, from certain peculiarities in its style, the exact period at which it was written; which must have been shortly after Hawthorne's return from Europe. In addition to this, if further evidence were required, its close relationship to the aforementioned sketch is a fact which no sophistry can reason away. [Footnote: This sketch was published in the _Century_, January, 1883.] The bloody footstep suggested to Hawthorne by the antediluvian print in the stone step at Smithell's Hall, in Lancashire, serves as the key-note of this romance; but the eccentric recluse, the big crab-spider, the orphaned grandchild, and even Bronson Alcott also appear in it. Alcott, however,--and his identity cannot be mistaken,--does not play the leading part in the piece, but comes in at the fifth chapter, only to disappear mysteriously in the eighth; the orphan boy is companioned by a girl of equal age, and these two bright spirits, mutually sustaining each other, cast a radiance over the old Doctor in his dusty, frowsy, cobwebby study, which brings out the external appearance and internal peculiarities of the man, in the most vivid manner. The dispositions and appearances of the two children are also contrasted, as Raphael might have drawn and contrasted them, if he had painted a picture on a similar subject. The crab-spider is one of the most horrible of Nature's creations. Hawthorne saw one in the British Museum and it seems to have haunted his imagination ever afterward. Why the creature should have been introduced into this romance is not very clear, for it plays no part in the development of the plot. The spider hangs suspended over the old Doctor's head like the sword of Damocles, and one would expect it to descend at the proper moment in the narrative, and make an end of him with its nippers; but Doctor Grimshawe dies a comparatively natural death, and the desiccated body of the spider is found still clinging to the web above him. The man and the insect were too closely akin in the modes and purposes of their lives for either to outlast the other. There is nothing abnormal in the fact of Doctor Grimshawe's possessing this dangerous pet; for all kinds of poisonous creatures have a well-known fascination for the medical profession. Doctor Holmes amused himself with a rattlesnake. In spite of its unpleasant associations with spiders and blood-stains, "Doctor Grimshawe's Secret" is one of the most interesting of Hawthorne's works, containing much of his finest thought and most characteristic description. The portrait of the grouty old Doctor himself has a solidity of impast like Shakespeare's Falstaff, and the grave-digger, who has survived from colonial times, carries us back involuntarily to the burial scene in "Hamlet." Alcott, whose name is changed to Colcord, is not treated realistically, but rather idealized in such kindly sympathetic manner as might prevent all possibility of offence at the artistic theft of his personality. The plot, too, is a most ingenious one, turning and winding like a hare, and even diving out of sight for a time; but only to reappear again, as the school-master Colcord does, with a full and satisfactory explanation of its mysterious course. To judge from the appearance of the manuscript, this romance was written very rapidly, and there are places in the text which intimate this; but it vies in power with "The Scarlet Letter," and why Hawthorne should have become dissatisfied with it,--why he should have failed to complete, revise, and publish it--can only be accounted for by the mental or nervous depression which was now fastening itself upon him. It is noticeable, however, that where the plot is transferred to English ground Hawthorne's writing has much the same tone and quality that we find in "Our Old Home." External appearances seem to impede his insight there; but this is additional proof of the authenticity of the work. [Footnote: There are many other evidences; such as, "after-dinner speeches on the necessity of friendly relations between England and the United States," and "the whistling of the railway train, _two_ or _three_ times a day."] Shortly after the battle of Bull Run Hawthorne went with his boy to recuperate at Beverly Farms, leaving his wife and daughters at the Wayside, and the letters which passed between these two divisions of the family, during his absence, give some very pretty glimpses of their idyllic summer life. Mrs. Hawthorne "cultivated her garden," and gave drawing lessons to the neighbors' children, while her husband, forty miles away, was fishing and bathing. The Beverly shore has not a stimulating climate, but is very attractive in summer to those who do not mind a few sultry nights from land breezes. It was near enough to Salem for Hawthorne to revive the reminiscences of his youth (which become more and more precious after the age of fifty), without obtruding himself on the gaze of his former townsmen or of the young lady "who wished she could poison him." [Footnote: W. D. Howells' Memoirs.] It is to be hoped that he saw something of his sister Elizabeth again, the last remnant of his mother's household, who for some inscrutable reason had never visited him at Concord. We note here a curious circumstance; namely, that Hawthorne appears to have lost the art of writing short sketches. It will be recollected that twenty years earlier he did not feel equal to anything beyond this, and that it cost him a strenuous effort to escape from the habit. Now when he would have liked to return to that class of composition he could not do so. Fields would have welcomed anything from his pen (so severe a critic he was of himself), but his name does not appear in the _Atlantic Monthly_ from July, 1861, to June, 1862, and it cannot be doubted that with the education of his son before him, the remuneration would have been welcome. It was not until nearly a year later that he conceived the idea of cutting his English Note-book into sections, and publishing them as magazine articles. From this time forth, one discouragement followed another. In the autumn of 1861 the illness of his daughter, which he had expected and predicted, came to pass in a violent form. The old Roman virus, kept under in her blood, for a time, by continual changes of air and climate, at last gained the mastery, and brought her once more in danger of her life. She had to be removed to the house of her aunt, Mrs. Mann, who lived in the centre of the town, on account of her father's nerves, so that the Concord doctor could attend her at night when necessary. It was the severest and most protracted case of fever that the physician had ever known to be followed by a recovery. Miss Una did recover, but the mental strain upon her father was even more exhausting than that which her previous illness had caused, and he was not in an equal condition to bear it. "Septimius Felton" may have been written about this time (perhaps during his daughter's convalescence), but his family knew nothing of it, until they discovered the manuscript after his death. When it was published ten years later, the poet Whittier spoke of it as a failure, and Hawthorne would seem to have considered it so; for he left it in an unfinished condition, and immediately began a different story on the same theme,--the elixir of life. It has no connection with the sketch already mentioned, in which Alcott's personality becomes the mainspring, but with another abortive romance, called "The Ancestral Footstep," which Hawthorne commenced while he was in England. It is invaluable for the light it throws on his method of working. Descriptive passages are mentioned in it "to be inserted" at a later time, meanwhile concentrating his energy on more important portions of the narrative. Half way through the story he changed his original plan, transforming the young woman who previously had been Septimius's sweetheart to Septimius's sister; and it may have been the difficulty of adjusting this change to the portion previously written, that discouraged Hawthorne from completing the romance. But the work suffers also from a tendency to exaggeration. The name of Hagburn is unpleasantly realistic, and Doctor Portsoaken, with his canopy of spider-webs hanging in noisome festoons above his head, is closely akin to the repulsive. The amateur critic who averred that he could not read Hawthorne without feeling a sensation as if cobwebs were drawn across his face, must have had "Septimius Felton" in mind. Yet there are refreshing passages in it, and the youthful English officer who kisses Septimius's sweetheart before his eyes, and afterward fights an impromptu duel with him, dying as cheerfully as he had lived, is an original and charming character. The scene of the story has a peculiar interest, from the fact that it is laid at Hawthorne's own door; the Feltons are supposed to have lived at the Wayside and the Hagburns in the Alcott house. The firm of Ticknor & Fields now began to feel anxious on Hawthorne's account, and the last of the winter the senior partner proposed a journey to Washington, which was accordingly accomplished in the second week of March. Horatio Bridge was now chief of a bureau in the Navy Department, and was well qualified to obtain for his veteran friend an inside position for whatever happened to be going on. In the midst of the turmoil and excitement of war, Hawthorne attracted as much attention as the arrival of a new ambassador from Great Britain. Secretary Stanton appointed him on a civil commission to report concerning the condition of the Army of the Potomac. He was introduced to President Lincoln, and made excursions to Harper's Ferry and Fortress Monroe. Concerning General McClellan, he wrote to his daughter on March 16: "The outcry opened against Gen. McClellan, since the enemy's retreat from Manassas, is really terrible, and almost universal; because it is found that we might have taken their fortifications with perfect ease six months ago, they being defended chiefly by wooden guns. Unless he achieves something wonderful within a week, he will be removed from command, at least I hope so; I never did more than half believe in him. By a message from the State Department, I have reason to think that there is money enough due me from the government to pay the expenses of my journey. I think the public buildings are as fine, if not finer, than anything we saw in Europe." [Footnote: J. Hawthorne, ii. 309.] General McClellan was not a great man, and Hawthorne's opinion of him is more significant from the fact that at that time McClellan was expected to be the Joshua who would lead the Democratic party out of its wilderness. On his return to Concord, Hawthorne prepared a commentary on what he had seen and heard at the seat of war, and sent it to the _Atlantic Monthly_; but, although patriotic enough, his melancholy humor was prominent in it, and Fields particularly protested against his referring to President Lincoln as "Old Abe," although the President was almost universally called so in Washington; and the consequence of this was that Hawthorne eliminated everything that he had written about Lincoln in his account,--which might be called "dehamletizing" the subject. In addition to this he wrote a number of foot-notes purporting to come from the editor, but really intended to counteract the unpopularity of certain statements in the text. This was not done with any intention to deceive, but, with the exception of Emerson and a few others who could always recognize Hawthorne's style, the readers of the _Atlantic_ supposed that these foot-notes were written by either James T. Fields or James Russell Lowell, who had been until recently the editor of the Magazine,--a practical joke which Hawthorne enjoyed immensely when it was discovered to him. This contribution, essay, or whatever it may be called, had only a temporary value, but it contained a prediction, which has been often recollected in Hawthorne's favor; namely, that after the war was over "one bullet-headed general after another would succeed to the presidential chair." In fact, five generals, whether bullet-headed or not, followed after Lincoln and Johnson; and then the sequence came to an end apparently because the supply of politician generals was exhausted. Certainly the Anglo-Saxon race yields to no other in admiration for military glory. Fields afterward published Hawthorne's monograph on President Lincoln, and, although it is rather an unsympathetic statement of the man, it remains the only authentic pen-and-ink sketch that we have of him. Most important is his recognition of Lincoln as "essentially a Yankee" in appearance and character; for it has only recently been discovered that Lincoln was descended from an old New England family, and that his ancestors first emigrated to Virginia and afterward to Kentucky. [Footnote: Essay on Lincoln in "True Republicanism."] Hawthorne says of him: "If put to guess his calling and livelihood, I should have taken him for a country schoolmaster as soon as anything else. [Footnote: The country school-master of that time.--Ed.] He was dressed in a rusty black frock-coat and pantaloons, unbrushed, and worn so faithfully that the suit had adapted itself to the curves and angularities of his figure, and had grown to be the outer skin of the man. He had shabby slippers on his feet. His hair was black, still unmixed with gray, stiff, somewhat bushy, and had apparently been acquainted with neither brush nor comb that morning, after the disarrangement of the pillow; and as to a nightcap, Uncle Abe probably knows nothing of such effeminacies. His complexion is dark and sallow, betokening, I fear, an insalubrious atmosphere around the White House; he has thick black eyebrows and impending brow; his nose is large, and the lines about his mouth are very strongly denned. "The whole physiognomy is as coarse a one as you would meet anywhere in the length and breadth of the States; but, withal, it is redeemed, illuminated, softened, and brightened by a kindly though serious look out of his eyes, and an expression of homely sagacity, that seems weighted with rich results of village experience. A great deal of native sense; no bookish cultivation, no refinement; honest at heart, and thoroughly so, and yet, in some sort, sly,--at least, endowed with a sort of tact and wisdom that are akin to craft.... But on the whole, I liked this sallow, queer, sagacious visage, with the homely human sympathies that warmed it; and, for my small share in the matter, would as lief have Uncle Abe for a ruler as any man whom it would have been practicable to put in his place." [Footnote: "Yesterdays with Authors," 99.] This is not a flattered portrait, like those by Lincoln's political biographers; neither is it an idealized likeness, such as we may imagine him delivering his Gettysburg Address. It is rather an external description of the man, but it is, after all, Lincoln as he appeared in the White House to the innumerable visitors, who, as sovereign American citizens, believed they had a right to an interview with the people's distinguished servant. Hawthorne's European letter-bag in 1862 is chiefly interesting for Henry Bright's statement that the English people might have more sympathy with the Union cause in the War if they could understand clearly what the national government was fighting for; and that Lord Houghton and Thomas Hughes were the only two men he had met who heartily supported the Northern side. Perhaps Mr. Bright would have found it equally as difficult to explain why the British Government should have made war upon Napoleon for twelve consecutive years. Henry Bright, moreover, seemed to be quite as much interested in a new American poet, named J. G. Holland, and his poem called "Bitter-Sweet." Lord Houghton agreed with him that it was a very remarkable poem, and they wished to know what Hawthorne could tell them about its author. As Holland was not recognized as a poet by the Saturday Club, Hawthorne's answer on this point would be very valuable if we could only obtain a sight of it. Holland was in certain respects the counterpart of Martin F. Tupper. In the summer of this year Hawthorne went to West Goldsboro', Maine, an unimportant place opposite Mount Desert Island, taking Julian with him; a place with a stimulating climate but a rather foggy atmosphere. He must have gone there for his health, and it is pathetic to see how the change of climate braced him up at first, so that he even made the commencement of a new diary, and then, as always happens in such cases, it let him down again to where he was before. He did not complain, but he felt that something was wrong with him and he could not tell what it was. Wherever he went in passing through the civilized portion of Maine, he found the country astir with recruits who had volunteered for the war, so that it seemed as if that were the only subject which occupied men's minds. He says of this in his journal: "I doubt whether any people was ever actuated by a more genuine and disinterested public spirit; though, of course, it is not unalloyed with baser motives and tendencies. We met a train of cars with a regiment or two just starting for the South, and apparently in high spirits. Everywhere some insignia of soldiership were to be seen,--bright buttons, a red stripe down the trousers, a military cap, and sometimes a round-shouldered bumpkin in the entire uniform. They require a great deal to give them the aspect of soldiers; indeed, it seems as if they needed to have a good deal taken away and added, like the rough clay of a sculptor as it grows to be a model." Such is the last entry in his journal. Hawthorne was not carried off his feet by the excitement of the time, but looked calmly on while others expended their patriotism in hurrahing for the Union. What he remarks concerning the volunteers was perfectly true Men cannot change their profession in a day, and soldiers are not to be made out of farmers' boys and store clerks simply by clothing them in uniform, no matter how much courage they may have. War is a profession like other professions, and requires the severest training of them all. CHAPTER XVIII IMMORTALITY In the autumn of 1862 there was great excitement in Massachusetts. President Lincoln had issued his premonitory proclamation of emancipation, and Harvard College was stirred to its academic depths. Professor Joel Parker, of the Law School, pronounced Lincoln's action unconstitutional, subversive of the rights of property, and a most dangerous precedent. With Charles Eliot Norton and other American Tories, Parker headed a movement for the organization of a People's Party, which had for its immediate object the defeat of Andrew for Governor and the relegation of Sumner to private life. The first they could hardly expect to accomplish, but it was hoped that a sufficient number of conservative representatives would be elected to the Legislature to replace Sumner by a Republican, who would be more to their own minds; and they would be willing to compromise on such a candidate as Honorable E. R. Hoar,--although Judge Hoar was innocent of this himself and was quite as strongly anti-slavery as Sumner. The movement came to nothing, as commonly happens with political movements that originate in universities, but for the time being it caused a great commotion and nowhere more so than in the town of Concord. Emerson was never more emphatic than in demanding the re-election of Andrew and Sumner. How Hawthorne felt about this and how he voted in November, can only be conjectured by certain indications, slight, it is true, but all pointing in one direction. As long since explained, he entertained no very friendly feeling toward the Cotton Whigs; his letter to his daughter concerning Gen. McClellan, who set himself against the proclamation and was removed in consequence, should be taken into consideration; and still more significant is the letter to Horatio Bridge, in which Hawthorne proposed the enlistment of negro soldiers. Doctor George B. Loring, of Salem, always a loyal friend to the Hawthorne family, came to Concord in September to deliver an address at the annual cattle-show, and visited at the Wayside. He had left the Democratic party and become a member of the Bird Club, which was then the centre of political influence in the State. As a matter of course he explained his new position to Hawthorne. He had long felt attracted to the Republican party, and but for his influential position among his fellow-Democrats, he would have joined it sooner. Parties were being reconstructed. Half the Democrats had become Republicans; and a considerable portion of the Whigs had joined the Democratic party. The interests of the Republic were in the hands of the Republican party and it ought to be supported. We can believe that Hawthorne listened to him with close attention. It was in the spring of 1862 that I first became well acquainted with the Hawthorne family, which seemed to exist in an atmosphere of purity and refinement derived from the man's own genius. Julian visited me at our house in Medford during the early summer, where he made great havoc among the small fruits of the season. We boxed, fenced, skated, played cricket and studied Cicero together. As my father was one of the most revolutionary of the Free-Soilers, this may have amused Hawthorne as an instance of the Montagues and Capulets; but I found much sympathy with my political notions in his household. When the first of January came there was a grand celebration of the Emancipation in Boston Music Hall. Mrs. Hawthorne and Una were very desirous to attend it, and I believe they both did so--Miss Una at all events. If Mrs. Hawthorne's opinions could be taken in any sense as a reflection of her husband's mind, he was certainly drifting away from his old associations. In October, 1862, Hawthorne published the first of a series of studies from English life and scenery, taken chiefly from his Note-book, and he continued this at intervals until the following summer, when Ticknor & Fields brought them out with some additions in book form as "Our Old Home;" a volume which has already been considered in these pages. It was not a favorable time for the publication of classic literature, for the whole population of the United States was in a ferment; and moreover the unfriendly attitude of the English educated classes toward the cause of the Union, was beginning to have its effect with us. In truth it seemed rather inconsistent that the philanthropic Gladstone, who had always professed himself the friend of freedom, should glorify Jefferson Davis as the founder of a new nation--a republic of slaveholders. In addition to this, Hawthorne insisted on dedicating the volume to President Pierce, and when his publishers protested that this would tend to make the book unpopular, he replied in a spirited manner, that if that was the case it was all the more reason why Pierce's friends should signify their continued confidence in him. This may have made little difference, however, for comparatively few readers notice the dedication of a book until after they have purchased it; and we like Hawthorne for his firmness in this instance. In England the book produced a sensation of the unfavorable sort. Hawthorne's attack on the rotundity of the English ladies, whatever may have been his reason for it, was, to speak reservedly, somewhat lacking in delicacy. It stirred up a swarm of newspaper enemies against him; and proved a severe strain to the attachment of his friends there. Henry Bright wrote to him: "It really was too bad, some of the things you say. You talk like a cannibal. Mrs. Heywood says to my mother, 'I really believe you and I were the only ladies he knew in Liverpool, and we are not like beefsteaks.' So all the ladies are furious." [Footnote: J. Hawthorne, ii. 280. Good Mrs. Alcott also objected stoutly to the reflections on her sex.] But Hawthorne was no longer what he had been, and allowance should be made for this. Hawthorne's chief interest at this time, however, lay in the preparation of his son for Harvard College. Julian was sixteen in August and, considering the itinerant life he had lived, well advanced in his studies. He was the best-behaved boy in Concord, in school or out, and an industrious though not ambitious scholar. He was strong, vigorous and manly; and his parents had sufficient reason to be proud of him. To expect him, however, to enter Harvard College at the age of seventeen was somewhat unreasonable. His father had entered Bowdoin at that age, but the requirements at Harvard were much more severe than at Bowdoin; enough to make a difference of at least one year in the age of the applicant. For a boy to enter college in a half-fitted condition is simply to make a false start in life, for he is only too likely to become discouraged, and either to drag along at the foot of the class or to lose his place in it altogether. Hawthorne may have felt that the end of earthly affairs was close upon him, and wished to see his son started on the right road before that came; but Emerson also had an interest in having Julian go to college at exactly this time; namely, to obtain him as a chum for his wife's nephew, with the advantage of a tutor's room thrown in as an extra inducement. He advised Hawthorne to place Julian in charge of a Harvard professor who was supposed to have a sleight-of-hand faculty for getting his pupils through the examinations. Julian worked bravely, and succeeded in entering Harvard the following July; but he was nine months (or a good school year), younger than the average of his class. Hawthorne did not leave home this summer (1863), and the only letter we have of his was the one to James T. Fields concerning the dedication of "Our Old Home," which was published in the autumn. Julian states that his father spent much of his time standing or walking in his narrow garden before the house, and looking wistfully across the meadows to Walden woods. His strength was evidently failing him, yet he could not explain why--nor has it ever been explained. One bright day in November two of us walked up from Cambridge with Julian and lunched at his father's. Mr. Hawthorne received us cordially, but in a tremulous manner that betrayed the weakness of his nerves. As soon as Julian had left the room, he said to us, "I suppose it would be of little use to ask you young gentlemen what sort of a scholar Julian is." H---- replied to this, that we were neither of us in the division with him, but that he had heard nothing unfavorable in regard to his recitations; and I told him that Julian went to the gymnasium with me every evening, and appeared to live a very regular kind of life. This seemed to please Mr. Hawthorne very much, and he soon produced a decanter of port, and, his son having entered the room again, he said, "I want to teach Julian the taste of good wine, so that he will learn to avoid those horrible punches, which I am told you have at Harvard." We all laughed greatly at this, which was afterward increased by Julian's saying that the only punches he had yet seen were those which the sophomores gave us in the foot-ball fight,--or some such statement. It was a bright occasion for all of us, and when Mrs. Hawthorne and her daughters entered the room, such a beautiful group as they all formed together! And Hawthorne himself seemed ten years younger than when he first greeted us. He was the most distinguished-looking man that I ever beheld, and no sensible person could meet him without instantly recognizing his superior mental endowment. His features were not only classic but grandly classic; and his eyes large, dark, luminous, unfathomable--looking into them was like looking into a deep well. His face seemed to give a pictorial reflection of whatever was taking place about him; and again became like a transparency through which one could see dim vistas of beautiful objects. The changes of expression on it were like the sunshine and clouds of a summer day--perhaps thunder clouds sometimes, with flashes of lightning, which his son may still remember; for where there is a great heart there will always be great heat. "THE DOLLIVER ROMANCE" According to James T. Fields, the ground-plan of this work was laid the preceding winter, but Hawthorne became dissatisfied with the way in which the subject developed itself and so set the manuscript aside until he could come to it again with fresh inspiration. With the more bracing weather of September he commenced on it again, and wrote during the next two months that portion which we now have. On December 1 he forwarded two chapters to Ticknor & Fields, requesting to have them set up so that he could see them in print and obtain a retrospective view of his work before he proceeded further. Yet on December 15 he wrote again, saying that he had not yet found courage to attack the proofs, and that all mental exertion had become hateful to him. [Footnote: "Yesterdays with Authors," 115.] He was evidently feeling badly, and for the first time Mrs. Hawthorne was seriously anxious for him. Four days later she wrote to Una, who was visiting in Beverly: "Papa is comfortable to-day, but very thin and pale and weak. I give him oysters now. Hitherto he has had only toasted crackers and lamb and beef tea. I am very impatient that he should see Dr. Vanderseude, but he wants to go to him himself, and he cannot go till it be good weather.... The splendor and pride of strength in him have succumbed; but they can be restored, I am sure. Meanwhile he is very nervous and delicate; he cannot bear anything, and he must be handled like the airiest Venetian glass." [Footnote: J. Hawthorne, ii. 333.] He divided his time between lying on a sofa and sitting in an arm-chair; and he did not seem very comfortable in either position. It was long since he had attended meetings of the Saturday Club. It is clear from this that Hawthorne had not recently consulted a doctor concerning his condition, and perhaps not at all. He may have been right enough in supposing that no common practitioner could give him help, but there was at that time one of the finest of physiologists in Boston, Dr. Edward H. Clark, who cured hundreds of sick people every year, as quietly and unostentatiously as Dame Nature herself. He was a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, and as such not generally looked upon with favor by the Boston medical profession, but when Agassiz's large brain gave way in 1868, Dr. Brown-Séquard telegraphed to him from Europe to consult Edward Clark, and Doctor Clark so improved his health that Agassiz afterward enjoyed a number of years of useful work. Perhaps he might have accomplished as much for Hawthorne; but how was Hawthorne in his retired and uncommunicative life to know of him? There are decided advantages in living in the great world, and in knowing what goes on there,--if one only can. It is doubtful if Hawthorne ever opened the proof of "The Dolliver Romance." In February he wrote to Fields that he could not possibly go on with it, and as it had already been advertised for the _Atlantic Monthly_, a notification had to be published concerning the matter, which startled Longfellow, Whittier and other old friends of Hawthorne, who were not in the way of knowing much about him. The fragment that we now have of it was printed in the _Atlantic_ many years after his death. It was the last expiring ember of Hawthorne's genius, blazing up fitfully and momentarily with the same brightness as of old, and then disappearing like Hawthorne himself into the unknown and the unknowable. It is a fragment, and yet it seems complete, for it is impossible to imagine how the story could have been continued beyond its present limits; and Hawthorne left no word from which we can conjecture his further intentions in regard to it. There was an old apothecary in Concord, named Reynolds, a similar man to, but not so aged as, Hawthorne's Doctor Dolliver; and he also had a son, a bright enterprising boy,--too bright and spirited to suit Boston commercialism,--who went westward in 1858 to seek his fortune, nor have I ever heard of his return. The child Pansie, frisking with her kitten--a more simple, ingenuous, and self-centred, but also less sympathetic nature than the Pearl of Hester Prynne--may have been studied from Hawthorne's daughter Rose. There also lived at Concord in Hawthorne's time a man with the title of Colonel, a pretentious, self-satisfied person, who corresponded fairly to his description of Colonel Dabney, in "The Dolliver Romance." Neither is it singular that the apothecary's garden should have bordered on a grave-yard, for there are two old cemeteries in Concord in the very centre of the town. I know of no such portrait of an old man as Doctor Dolliver in art or literature,--except perhaps Tintoretto's portrait of his aged self, in the Louvre. We not only see the customary marks of age upon him, but we feel them so that it seems as if we grew old and stiff and infirm as we read of him; and the internal life of old age is revealed to us, not by confessions of the man himself, but by every word he speaks and every act he does as if the writer were a skilful tragedian upon the stage. It seems as if Hawthorne must have felt all this himself during the last year of his life, to describe it so vividly; but he ascends by these infirm steps to loftier heights than ever before, and the scene in which he represents Doctor Dolliver seated at night before the fire in his chamber after Pansie had been put to bed, is the noblest passage in the whole cycle of Hawthorne's art; one of those rare passages written in moments of gifted insight, when it seems as if a higher power guided the writer's hand. It is given here entire, for to subtract a word from it would be an irreparable injury. "While that music lasted, the old man was alive and happy. And there were seasons, it might be, happier than even these, when Pansie had been kissed and put to bed, and Grandsir Dolliver sat by his fireside gazing in among the massive coals, and absorbing their glow into those cavernous abysses with which all men communicate. Hence come angels or fiends into our twilight musings, according as we may have peopled them in by-gone years. Over our friend's face, in the rosy flicker of the fire-gleam, stole an expression of repose and perfect trust that made him as beautiful to look at, in his high-backed chair, as the child Pansie on her pillow; and sometimes the spirits that were watching him beheld a calm surprise draw slowly over his features and brighten into joy, yet not so vividly as to break his evening quietude. The gate of heaven had been kindly left ajar, that this forlorn old creature might catch a glimpse within. All the night afterwards, he would be semi-conscious of an intangible bliss diffused through the fitful lapses of an old man's slumber, and would awake, at early dawn, with a faint thrilling of the heart-strings, as if there had been music just now wandering over them." So Jacob in the desert saw angels descending and ascending on a ladder from Heaven. Discouraged, depressed, the door closed upon his earthly hopes, not only for himself, but for those whom he loves much better than himself, so far as he could ever be a help and a providence to them, Hawthorne finds a purer joy and a higher hope in the depths of his own spirit. In the second chapter, or fragment, of this romance, Doctor Dolliver, followed by Pansie, goes out into the garden one frosty October morning, and while the apothecary is digging at his herbs, the imitative child, with an instinctive repulsion for everything strange and morbid, pulls up the fatal plant from which the elixir of life was distilled, and frightened at her grandfather's chiding, runs with it into the cemetery where it is lost among the graves and never seen again. This account stands by itself, having no direct connection with what precedes or follows; but the delineation is so vivid, the poetic element in it so strong, that it may be said to stand without assistance, and does not require the name of Hawthorne to give it value. In the conclusion, the elixir of life proves to be an elixir of death; extremes meet and are reconciled. As he says in "The Marble Faun," joy changes to sorrow and sorrow is laughed away; the experience of both being that which is really valuable. Doctor Dolliver and Pansie are figures for the end and the beginning of life; the Old Year and the New. Such is the sum of Hawthorne's philosophy--the ultimate goal of his thought. There could have been no more fitting consummation of his work. The cycle of his art is complete, and death binds the laurel round his brow. A HERO'S END After Hawthorne's letter of February 25, Fields felt that he ought to make an effort in his behalf. Fields's partner, W. D. Ticknor, was also ailing, and it was arranged that he and Hawthorne should go on a journey southward as soon as the weather permitted. Doctor Holmes was consulted, and the last of March Hawthorne came to Boston and met Holmes at Fields's house. Holmes made an examination, which was anything but satisfactory to his own mind; in fact, he was appalled at the condition in which he found his former companion of the Saturday Club. "He was very gentle," Holmes says; "very willing to answer questions, very docile to such counsel as I offered him, but evidently had no hope of recovering his health. He spoke as if his work were done, and he should write no more." [Footnote: _Atlantic Monthly_, July, 1864.] The doctor, however, must have been mistaken in supposing that Hawthorne was suffering from the same malady that carried off General Grant, for no human being could die in that manner without suffering greater pain than Hawthorne gave any indication of; and the sedatives which Holmes prescribed for him could only have resulted in a weakening of the nerves. He even warned Hawthorne against the use of alcoholic stimulants, to which for some time he had been more or less accustomed. Hawthorne and Ticknor went to New York, and two days later Ticknor was able to write to Mrs. Hawthorne that her husband appeared to be much improved. How cruelly disappointing to meet him at their own door four days later, haggard, weary and more dispirited than when he had left the Wayside on March 26! He had proceeded to Philadelphia with Ticknor, and there at the Continental Hotel Ticknor was suddenly seized with a mortal malady and died almost in Hawthorne's arms, before the latter could notify his family in Boston that he was ill. What a severe ordeal for a man who was strong and well, but to a person in Hawthorne's condition it was like a thunderbolt. Ticknor's son came to him at once, and together they performed the necessary duties of the occasion, and made their melancholy way homeward. Nothing, perhaps, except a death in his own family, could have had so unfavorable an effect upon Hawthorne's condition. Some good angel now notified Franklin Pierce of the serious posture of affairs, and he came at once to Concord to offer his services in Hawthorne's behalf. However, he could propose nothing more hopeful than a journey in the uplands of New Hampshire, and for this it would be necessary to wait for settled weather. So Hawthorne remained at home for the next month without his condition becoming apparently either better or worse. At length, on May 13, the ex-President returned and they went together the following day. We will not linger over that leave-taking on the porch of the Wayside; so pathetic, so full of tenderness, even of despair, and yet with a slender ray of hope beneath the leaden cloud of anxiety. To Hawthorne it must have seemed even more discouraging than to his wife and children, though none of them could have suspected that the end would be so soon. * * * * * On the morning of May 20, I had just returned from my first recitation when Julian Hawthorne appeared at my room in the Massachusetts dormitory, and said, like a man gasping for breath, "My father is dead, and I want you to come with me." Fields had sent him word through Professor Gurney, who knew how to deliver such a message in the kindliest manner. We went at once to Fields's house on Charles Street, where Mrs. Fields gave Julian the little information already known to them through a dispatch from Franklin Pierce,--that his father died during his sleep in the night of May 18, at the Pemmigewasset House, Plymouth, New Hampshire. After this we wandered about Boston, silent and aimless, until the afternoon train carried him to Concord. He greatly dreaded meeting the gaze of his fellow-townsmen, and confessed that he wanted to hide himself in the woods like a wounded deer. [Footnote: The passage in "A Fool of Nature," in which he describes Murgatroyd's discovery of his father's death, must have been a reminiscence of this time--a passage of the finest genius.] On Wednesday, May 18, Hawthorne and Pierce drove from Centre Harbor to Plymouth, a long and rather rough journey to be taken in a carriage. Hawthorne, however, did not make much complaint of this, nor did he seem to be unusually fatigued. He retired to his room soon after nine o'clock, and was sleeping comfortably an hour later. Pierce was evidently nervous about him, for he went in to look at him at two in the morning, and again at four; and the last time he discovered that life was extinct. Hawthorne had died in his sleep as quietly and peacefully as he had lived. There is the same mystery in his death that there was in his life, and it is difficult to assign either an immediate or a proximate cause for it. With such a physique, and his simple, regular habits of life, he ought to have reached the age of ninety. General Pierce believed that he died of paralysis, and that is the most probable explanation; but it was not like the usual cases of paralysis at Hawthorne's age; for, as we have seen, the process of disintegration and failure of his powers had been going on for years. Nor did this follow, as commonly happens, a protracted period of adversity, but it came upon him during the most prosperous portion of his life. The first ten years following upon his marriage were years of anxiety, self-denial and even hardship; but other men, Alcott, for example, have suffered as much and yet lived to a good old age. It may have been "the old dull pain" which Longfellow associated with him, filing perpetually on the vital cord. It was part of the enigmatic side of his nature. The last ceremonies of respect to the earthly remains of Hawthorne were performed at Concord on May 23, 1864, in the Unitarian Church, a commodious building, [Footnote: In 1899 this building was burned to the ground, and a new church has been erected on the same spot.] well adapted to the great concourse of mourners who gathered there on this occasion. Reverend James Freeman Clarke, who had united Hawthorne and Sophia Peabody in marriage twenty-two years before, was now called upon to preside over the last act in their married life. The simple eloquence of his address penetrated to the heart of every person present. "Hawthorne had achieved a twofold immortality,--and his immortality on earth would be a comforting presence to all who mourned him. The noblest men of the age had gathered there, to testify to his worth as a man as well as to his genius as a writer." Faces were to be seen in that assembly that were never beheld in Concord before. Among these was the soldierly figure and flashing eye of the poet Whittier. Longfellow, Emerson, Lowell, Agassiz, Alcott and Hillard were present; and ex-President Pierce shook hands with Judge Hoar over Hawthorne's bier. After the services the assembly of mourners proceeded to Sleepy Hollow cemetery, and there the mortal remains of Hawthorne were buried under the pine trees on the same hill-side where he and Emerson and Margaret Fuller conversed together on the summer afternoon twenty years before. He needs no monument, for he has found a place in the universal pantheon of art and literature. * * * * * It would seem advisable at this parting of the ways to say something of Hawthorne's religious convictions. He went as a boy with his mother and sisters to the East Church in Salem, a society of liberal tendencies and then on the verge of Unitarianism. All the Manning family attended service there, but at a later time Robert Manning separated from it and joined an orthodox society. Hawthorne's mother and his sister Louisa became Unitarians, and at Madam Hawthorne's death in 1848 the funeral services were conducted by Reverend Thomas T. Stone, of the First Salem Church. It is presumable that Nathaniel Hawthorne also became a Unitarian, so far as he can be considered a sectarian at all; but certain elements of the older faith still remained in his mental composition. It cannot be questioned that the strong optimism in Emerson's philosophy was derived from Doctor Channing's instruction, and it is equally certain that Hawthorne could never agree to this. Whatever might be the origin of evil or its abstract value, he found it too potent an element in human affairs to be quietly reasoned out of existence. Whatever might be the ultimate purpose of Divine Providence, the witchcraft prosecutions were an awful calamity to those who were concerned in them. In this respect he resembled David A. Wasson, one of the most devout religious minds, who left the church of Calvin (as it was in his time), without ever becoming a Unitarian or a radical. Miss Rebecca Manning says: "I never knew of Hawthorne's going to church at all, after I remember about him, and do not think he was ever in the habit of going. I think he may have gone sometimes when he was in England, but I do not know about it. Somewhere in Julian or Rose Hawthorne's reminiscences, there is mention made of his reading family prayers, when he was in England. He, as also his mother and sisters were people of deeply religious natures, though not always showing it by outward observances." A Concord judge and an old Free-Soil politician once attended a religious convention, and after the business of the day was over they went to walk together. The politician confessed to the judge that he had no very definite religious belief, for which the judge thought he did himself great injustice; but is not that the most advanced and intelligent condition of a man's religious faith? How can we possess clear and definite ideas of the grand mystery of Creation? Consider only this simple metaphysical fact, that space has no limit, and that we can neither conceive a beginning of time nor imagine time without a beginning. What is there outside of the universe? The brain reels as we think of it. The time has gone by when a man can say to himself definitely, I believe this or I believe that; but we know at least that we, "the creature of a day," cannot be the highest form of intelligence in this wonderful world. We thought that we lived in solid bodies, but electric rays have been discovered by which the skeletons inside of us become visible. The correlation and conservation of forces brings us very close to the origin of all force; and yet in another sense we are as far off as ever from the perception of it. This would seem to have been also Hawthorne's position in regard to religious faith. What do we know of the religious belief of Michel Angelo, of Shakespeare, or of Beethoven? We cannot doubt that they were sincerely and purely religious men; but neither of them made any confession of their faith. Vittoria Colonna may have known something of Michel Angelo's belief, but Vasari does not mention it; and Beethoven confessed it was a subject that he did not like to talk about. The deeper a man's sense of the awe and mystery which underlies Nature, the less he feels inclined to expose it to the public gaze. Hawthorne's own family did not know what his religious opinions were--only that he was religious. One may imagine that the reticent man would be more reticent on this subject than on any other; but we can feel confident that at least he was not a sceptic, for the confirmed sceptic inevitably becomes a chatterer. He walks to Walden Pond with Hillard and Emerson on Sunday, and confesses his doubts as to the utility of the Church (in its condition at that time), for spiritual enlightenment; but in regard to the great omnipresent fact of spirituality he has no doubt. In "The Snow Image" he makes a statue come to life, and says in conclusion that if a new miracle is ever wrought in this world it will be in some such simple manner as he has described. To the poetic mind, which is after all the highest form of intellect, the grand fact of existence is a sufficient miracle. The rising of the sun, the changes of the seasons, the blooming of flowers and the ripening of the grain, were all miracles to Hawthorne, and none the less so because they are continually being repeated. The scientists tell us that all these happen according to natural laws: perfectly true, but WHO was it that made those laws? WHO is it that keeps the universe running? Laws made for the regulation of human affairs by the wisest of men often prove ineffective, and inadequate to the purpose for which they were intended; but the laws of Nature work with unfailing accuracy. The boy solves his problem in algebra, finding out the unknown quantity by those values which are given him; and can we not also infer something of the _unknown_ from the great panorama that passes unceasingly before us? The one thing that Hawthorne could not have understood was, how gifted minds like Lucretius and Auguste Comte could recognize only the evidence of their senses, and deliberately blind themselves to the evidence of their intellects. He who denies the existence of mind as a reality resembles a person looking for his spectacles when they are on his nose; but it is the imagination of the poet that leads civilization onward to its goal. College life is rather generally followed by a period of scepticism, partly owing in former times to the enforced attendance at morning prayers, and still more perhaps to the study of Greek and Latin authors. During what might be called Hawthorne's period of despair, he could not very well have obtained consolation from the traditional forms of divine worship; at least, such has been the experience of all those who have passed through the Wertherian stage, so far as we know of them. It is a time when every man has to strike the fountain of spiritual life out of the hard rock of his own existence; and those are fortunate who, like Moses and Hawthorne, strike forcibly enough to accomplish this. It is the "new birth from above," in the light of which religious forms seem of least importance. One effect of matrimony is commonly a deepening of religious feeling, but it is not surprising that Hawthorne should not have attended church after his marriage. His wife had not been accustomed to church-going, on account of the uncertainty of her health; the Old Manse was a long distance from the Concord tabernacle; Hawthorne's associates in Concord, with the exception of Judge Keyes, were not in the habit of going to church; and the officiating minister, both at that time and during his later sojourn, was not a person who could have been intellectually attractive to him. Somewhat similar reasons may have interfered with his attendance after his return to Salem; and during the last fifteen years of his life, he was too much of a wanderer to take a serious interest in the local affairs of the various places he inhabited; but he was desirous that his children should go to church and should be brought up in honest Christian ways. Little more need to be said concerning Hawthorne's character as a man. It was not so perfect as Longfellow's, to whom all other American authors should bow the head in this respect--the Washington of poets; and yet it was a rare example of purity, refinement, and patient endurance. His faults were insignificant in comparison with his virtues, and the most conspicuous of them, his tendency to revenge himself for real or fancied injuries, is but a part of the natural instinct in us to return the blows we receive in self-defence. Wantonly, and of his own accord, he never injured human being. His domestic life was as pure and innocent as that which appeared before the world; and Mrs. Hawthorne once said of him in my presence that she did not believe he ever committed an act that could properly be considered wrong. It was like his writing, and his "wells of English undefiled" were but as a synonym for the clear current of his daily existence. The ideality in Hawthorne's face was so conspicuous that it is recognizable in every portrait of him. It was not the cold visionary expression of the abstract thinker, but a human poetic intelligence, which resolved all things into a spiritual alembic of its own. It is this which elevates him above all writers who only deal with the outer world as they find it, and add nothing to it from their own natures. George Brandes, the Danish critic and essayist, speaks of Hawthorne somewhere as "the baby poet;" but we suspect that if he had ever met the living Hawthorne, he would have stood very much in awe of him. It would not have been like meeting Ernest Rénan or John Stuart Mill. Although Hawthorne was not splenetic or rash, there was an occasional look in his eye which a prudent person might beware of. He was emphatically a man of courage. The wide and liberal interest which German scholars and writers have so long taken in the literature of other nations, has resulted in founding an informal literary tribunal in Germany, to which the rest of the world is accustomed to appeal. A. E. Schönbach, one of the most recent German writers on universal literature, gives his impression of Hawthorne in the following statement: "I find the distinguishing excellence of Hawthorne's imaginative writings in the union of profound, keen, psychological development of characters and problems with the most lucid objectivity and a joyous modern realism. Occasionally there appears a light and delicate humor, sometimes hidden in a mere adjective, or little phrase which lights up the gloomiest situation with a gentle ray of hope. Far from unimportant do I rate the charm of his language, its purity, its melody, its graceful flexibility, the wealth of vocabulary, the polish which rarely betrays the touch of the file. After, or with George Eliot, Hawthorne is the first English prose writer of our century. At the same time he sacrifices nothing of his peculiar American quality. Not only does he penetrate into the most secret inner movements of the old colonial life, as no one else has done, and reproduces the spirit of his forefathers with a power of intuition which no historical work could equal; but in all his other works, from the biography of General Pierce, to the 'Marble Faun,' Hawthorne shows the freshness and keenness, the precision and lucidity, and other qualities not easy to describe, which belong to American literature. He is its chief representative." [Footnote: "Gesammelte Aufsatze zur neueren Litteratur," p. 346.] Hawthorne has always been accorded a high position in literature, and as time goes on I believe this will be increased rather than diminished. In beauty of diction he is the first of American writers, and there are few that equal him in this respect in other languages. It is a pleasure to read him, simply for his form of expression, and apart from the meaning which he conveys in his sentences. It is like the grace of the Latin races,--like Dante and Chateaubriand; and the adaptation of his words is so perfect that we never have to think twice for his meaning. In those editions called the Elzevirs, which are so much prized by book collectors, the clearness and legibility of the type result from such a fine proportion of space and line that no other printer has succeeded in imitating it; and there is something similar to this in the construction of Hawthorne's sentences. He is the romance writer of the English language; and there is no form of literature which the human race prizes more. How many translations there have been of "The Vicar of Wakefield," and of "The Sorrows of Werther"! The latter is not one of Goethe's best, and yet it made him famous at the age of twenty-eight. The novel deals with what is new and surprising; the romance with what is old and universal. In "The Vicar of Wakefield" we have the old story of virtue outwitted by evil, which is in its turn outwitted by wisdom. There is nothing new in it except the charming exposition which Goldsmith's genius has given to the subject. Thackeray ridiculed "The Sorrows of Werther," and in the light of matured judgment the tale appears ridiculous; but it strikes home to the heart, because we all learn wisdom through such experiences, of which young Werther's is an extreme instance. It was only another example of the close relation that subsists between comedy and tragedy. It cannot be questioned that "The Scarlet Letter" ranks above "The Sorrows of Werther;" nor is it less evident that "The Marble Faun" falls short of "Wilhelm Meister" and "Don Quixote." [Footnote: See "Cervantes" in _North American Review_, May, 1905] Hawthorne's position, therefore, lies between these two--nearer perhaps to "Werther" than to "Wilhelm Meister." In certain respects he is surpassed by the great English novelists: Fielding, Scott, Thackeray, Dickens and Marian Evans; but he in turn surpasses them all in the perfection and poetic quality of his art. There is much poetry in Scott and Dickens, a little also in Thackeray and Miss Evans, but Hawthorne's poetic vein has a more penetrating tone, and appeals more deeply than Scott's verses. If power and versatility of characterization were to be the test of imaginative writing, Dickens would push closely on to Shakespeare; but we do not go to Shakespeare to read about Hamlet or Falstaff, or for the sake of the story, or even for his wisdom, but for the _tout ensemble_--to read Shakespeare. Raphael painted a dozen or more pictures on the same subject, but they are all original, interesting and valuable, because Raphael painted them. If it were not for the odd characters and variety of incident in Dickens's novels they would hardly be worth reading. Hawthorne's _dramatis personæ_ is not a long one, for his plots do not admit of it, but his characters are finely drawn, and the fact that they have not become popular types is rather in their favor. There are Dombeys and Shylocks in plenty, but who has ever met a Hamlet or a Rosalind in real life? A certain English writer promulgated a list of the hundred superior authors of all times and countries. There were no Americans in his catalogue, but he admitted that if the number was increased to one hundred and eighteen Hawthorne and Emerson might be included in it. Doubtless he had not heard of Webster or Alexander Hamilton, and many of his countrymen would be inclined to place Longfellow before Emerson. I have myself frequently counted over the great writers of all times and languages, weighing their respective values carefully in my mind, but I have never been able to discover more than thirty-five authors who seem to me decidedly superior to Hawthorne, nor above forty others who might be placed on an equality with him. [Footnote: Appendix C.] This, of course, is only an individual opinion, and should be accepted for what it is worth; but there are many ancient writers, like Hesiod, Xenophon, and Catullus, whose chief value resides in their antiquity, and a much larger number of modern authors, such as Balzac, Victor Hugo, Freytag, and Ruskin, who have been over-estimated in their own time. Petrarch, and the author of "Gil Bias," might be placed on a level with Hawthorne, but certainly not above him. Those whom he most closely resembles in style and subject matter are Goldsmith, Manzoni, and Auerbach. Yet Hawthorne is essentially a domestic writer,--a poetizer of the hearth-stone. Social life is always the proper subject for works of fiction, and political life should never enter into them, except as a subordinate element; but there is a border-land between the two, in which politics and society act and react on each other, and it is from this field that the great subjects for epic and dramatic poetry have always been reaped. Hawthorne only knew of this by hearsay. Of the strenuous conflict that continually goes on in political centres like London and New York, a struggle for wealth, for honor, and precedence; of plots and counterplots, of foiled ambition and ruined reputations,--with all this Hawthorne had but slight acquaintance. We miss in him the masculine vigor of Fielding, the humanity of Dickens, and the trenchant criticism of Thackeray; but he knew that the true poetry of life (at the present time) was to be found in quiet nooks and in places far off from the turbulent maelstrom of humanity, and in his own line he remains unrivalled. PORTRAITS OF HAWTHORNE Hawthorne had no more vanity in his nature than is requisite to preserve a good appearance in public, but he always sat for his portrait when asked to do so, and this was undoubtedly the most sensible way. He was first painted by Charles Osgood in 1840, a portrait which has at least the merit of a fine poetic expression. He was afterward painted by Thompson, Healy, and Emanuel Leutze, and drawn in crayon by Rowse and Eastman Johnson. Frances Osborne also painted a portrait of him from photographs in 1893, an excellent likeness, and notable especially for its far-off gaze. Of all these, Rowse's portrait is the finest work of art, for Rowse was a man of genius, but there is a slight tendency to exaggeration in it, and it does not afford so clear an idea of Hawthorne as he was, as the Osborne portrait. Healy was not very successful with Hawthorne, and Miss Lander's bust has no merit whatever. The following list contains most of the portraits and photographs of Hawthorne now known to exist, with their respective ownerships and locations. Oil portrait painted by Charles Osgood, in 1840. Owned by Mrs. Richard C. Manning. Crayon portrait drawn by Eastman H. Johnson, in 1846. Owned by Miss Alice M. Longfellow. Oil portrait painted by George P. A. Healy, in 1850. Now in the possession of Kirk Pierce, Esq. Oil portrait by Miss H. Frances Osborne, after a photograph by Silsbee, Case & Co., Boston. Crayon portrait drawn by Samuel W. Rowse, in 1866. Owned by Mrs. Annie Fields. Engraving after the portrait painted in 1850 by Cephas G. Thompson. Owned by Hon. Henry C. Leach. The Grolier Club bronze medallion, made in 1892, by Ringel d'Illzach. Owned by B. W. Pierson. Cabinet photograph, bust, by Elliott & Fry, London. Owned by Mrs. Richard C. Manning. Card photograph, full length, seated, with book in right hand, by Black & Case, Boston. Cabinet photograph, three-quarter length, standing beside a pillar, copy by Mackintire of the original photograph. Card photograph, three-quarter length, seated, from Warren's Photographic Studio, Boston. Card photograph, bust, by Brady, New York, with autographic signature. Owned by Hon. Henry C. Leach. Bust in the Concord (Massachusetts) Public Library, by Miss Louise Lander. Card photograph, bust, from Warren's Photographic Studio, Boston. Owned by Mrs. Richard C. Manning. Oil portrait by Emanuel Leutze, painted in April, 1852. Owned by Julian Hawthorne. Photograph by Mayall, London. The so-called "Motley photograph." Two photographs by Brady, full length; one seated, the other standing. Photograph showing Hawthorne, Ticknor and Fields standing together. _Editions of Nathaniel Hawthorne's Books published under his own Direction_ Fanshawe: A Tale, Boston, 1828. Twice-Told Tales, Boston, 1837. Another edition, Boston, 1842. Peter Parley's Universal History, Boston, 1837. The Gentle Boy: A Thrice-Told Tale, Boston, 1839. Grandfather's Chair: A History for Youth, Boston, 1841. Famous Old People: or Grandfather's Chair II, Boston, 1841. Liberty Tree: The Last Words of Grandfather's Chair, Boston, 1841. Biographical Stories for Children, Boston, 1842. Historical Tales for Youth, Boston, 1842. The Celestial Railroad, Boston, 1843. Mosses from an Old Manse, New York, 1846, 1851. The Scarlet Letter, Boston, 1850. True Stories from History and Biography, Boston, 1851. The House of the Seven Gables, Boston, 1852. A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys, Boston, 1851. Another edition, Boston, 1857. The Snow-Image and Other Tales, Boston, 1852. Another edition, Boston The Blithedale Romance, Boston, 1852. Life of Franklin Pierce, Boston, 1852. Tanglewood Tales for Girls and Boys, Boston, 1853. Transformation, or the Romance of Monte Beni, Smith & Elder, London, 1860. The Marble Faun, or the Romance of Monte Beni, Boston, 1860. Our Old Home, Boston, 1863. _A complete list of Hawthorne's contributions to American magazines will be found in the appendix to Conway's "Life of Hawthorne."_ Mrs. Emerson and Mrs. Hawthorne [Footnote: Read at the Emerson Club, at Boston, January 2, 1906] In 1892, when I was constructing the volume known as "Sketches from Concord and Appledore," I said in comparing Emerson with Hawthorne that one was like _day_, and the other like _night_. I was not aware that four years earlier M. D. Conway had made a similar statement in his Life of Hawthorne, which was published in London. Miss Rebecca Manning, Hawthorne's own cousin, still living at the age of eighty and an admirable old lady, distinctly confirms my statement, that "wherever Hawthorne went he carried twilight with him." Emerson, on the contrary, was of a sanguine temperament and an essentially sunny nature. His writings are full of good cheer, and the opening of his Divinity School Address is as full of summer sunshine as the finest July day. It was only necessary to see him look at the sunshine from his own porch to recognize how it penetrated into the depths of his nature. It would seem consistent with the rational order of things, that _day_ should be supplemented by _night_, and _night_ again by _day_; and here we are almost startled by the completeness of our allegory. We sometimes come across faces in the streets of a large city, which show by their expression that they are more accustomed to artificial light than to the light of the sun. Mrs. Emerson was one of these. She never seemed to be fully herself, until the lamps were lighted. Her pale face seemed to give forth moonlight, and its habitual expression was much like that of a Sister of Charity. It was said of her that she was the last in the house to retire at night, always reading or busying herself with household affairs, until twelve or one o'clock; but this mode of life would appear to have been suited to her organization, for in spite of her colorless look she lived to be over ninety. So far I can tread upon firm earth, without drawing upon my imagination, but in regard to Mrs. Hawthorne I cannot speak with the same assurance, for I only became acquainted with her after her husband's health had begun to fail, and the anxiety in her face was strongly marked; yet I have reason to believe that her temperament was originally sanguine and optimistic, and that she alternated from dreamy, pensive moods to bright vivacious ones. She certainly was very different from her husband. Her sister, Elizabeth Peabody, was the most sanguine person of her time, and her introduction of the kindergarten into America was accomplished through her unbounded hopefulness. The Wayside, where Mrs. Hawthorne lived, has an extended southern exposure. The house was always full of light, which is not often the case with New England country houses; and when she lived at Liverpool, where sunshine is a rare commodity, she became unwell, so that Mr. Hawthorne was obliged to send her to Madeira in order to avert a dangerous illness. These two estimable ladies were alike in the excellence of their housekeeping, the purity of their manners, their universal kindliness, and their devotion to the welfare of their husbands and children. It was a pleasure to pass them on the road-side; the fare at their tables was always of the nicest, even if it happened to be frugal; and people of all classes could have testified to their helpful liberality. In these respects they might almost have served as models, but otherwise they were as different as possible. Mrs. Emerson was of a tall, slender, and somewhat angular figure (like her husband), but she presided at table with a grace and dignity that quite justified his favorite epithet of "Queenie." There was even more of the Puritan left in her than there was in him, and although she encouraged the liberal movements and tendencies of her time, one always felt in her mental attitude the inflexibility of the moral law. To her mind there was no shady border-land between right and wrong, but the two were separated by a sharply defined line, which was never to be crossed, and she lived up to this herself, and, in theory at least, she had but little mercy for sinners. On one occasion I was telling Mr. Emerson of a fraudulent manufacturing company, which had failed, as it deserved to, and which was found on investigation to have kept two sets of books, one for themselves, and another for their creditors. Mrs. Emerson listened to this narrative with evident impatience, and at the close of it she exclaimed, "This world has become so wicked that if I were the maker of it, I should blow it up at once." Emerson himself did not like such stories; and although he once said that "all deaf children ought to be put in the water with their faces downward," he was not always willing to accept human nature for what it really is. Mrs. Emerson did not agree with her husband's religious views; neither did she adopt the transcendental faith, that the idea of God is innate in the human mind, so that we cannot be dispossessed of it. She belonged to the conservative branch of the Unitarian Church, which was represented by Reverend James Freeman Clarke and Doctor Andrew P. Peabody. The subject was one which was permitted to remain in abeyance between them, but Mrs. Emerson was naturally suspicious of those reverend gentlemen who called upon her husband, and this may have been the reason why he did not encourage the visits of clergymen like Samuel Johnson, Samuel Longfellow, and Professor Hedge, whom he greatly respected, and who should have been by good rights his chosen companions. I suppose all husbands are obliged to make these domestic compromises. Mrs. Emerson had also something of the spirit-militant in her. When David A. Wasson came to dine at Mr. Emerson's invitation, she said to him, by way of grace before meat: "I see you have been carrying on a controversy with Reverend Mr. Sears, of Wayland, and you will excuse me for expressing my opinion that Mr. Sears had the best of it." But after sounding this little nourish of trumpets, she was as kindly and hospitable as any one could desire. She was one of the earliest recruits to the anti-slavery cause,--not only a volunteer, but a recruiting officer as well,--and she made this decision entirely of her own mind, without any special encouragement from her husband or relatives. At the time of John Brown's execution she wanted to have the bells tolled in Concord, and urged her husband energetically to see that it was done. Mrs. Emerson was always thoroughly herself. There never was the shadow of an affectation upon her; nor more than a shadow of self-consciousness--very rare among conscientious persons. One of her fine traits was her fondness for flowers, which she cultivated in the little garden between her house and the mill-brook, with a loving assiduity. She is supposed to have inspired Emerson's poem, beginning: "O fair and stately maid, whose eyes Were kindled in the upper skies At the same torch that lighted mine: For so I must interpret still Thy sweet dominion o'er my will, A sympathy divine." There are other references to her in his published writings, which only those who were personally acquainted with her would recognize. * * * * * Mrs. Hawthorne belonged to the class of womankind which Shakespeare has typified in Ophelia, a tender-hearted, affectionate nature, too sensitive for the rough strains of life, and too innocent to recognize the guile in others. This was at once her strength and her weakness; but it was united, as often happens, with a fine artistic nature, and superior intelligence. Her face and manners both gave the impression of a wide and elevated culture. One could see that although she lived by the wayside, she had been accustomed to enter palaces. Her long residence in England, her Italian experience, her visit to the Court of Portugal, her enjoyment of fine pictures, poetry, and architecture, the acquaintance of distinguished men and women in different countries, had all left their impress upon her, combined in a quiet and lady-like harmony. Her conversation was cosmopolitan, and though she did not quite possess the narrative gift of her sister Elizabeth, it was often exceedingly interesting. Hawthorne has been looked upon as the necrologist of the Puritans, and yet a certain coloring of Puritanism adhered to him to the last. It was his wife who had entirely escaped from the old New England conventicle. Severity was at the opposite pole from her moral nature. Tolerant and charitable to the faults of others, her only fault was the lack of severity. She believed in the law of love, and when kind words did not serve her purpose she let matters take what course they would, trusting that good might fall, "At last far off at last to all." I suspect her pathway was by no means a flowery one. Mrs. Emerson's life had to be as stoical as her husband's, and Mrs. Hawthorne's, previous to the Liverpool consulate,--the consulship of Hawthorne,--was even more difficult. No one knew better than she the meaning of that heroism which each day requires. A writer in the _Atlantic Monthly_, reviewing Julian Hawthorne's biography of his father, emphasizes, "the dual selfishness of Mr. and Mrs. Hawthorne." Insensate words! There was no room for selfishness in the lives they led. In a certain sense they lived almost wholly for one another and for their children; but Hawthorne himself lived for all time and for all mankind, and his wife lived through him to the same purpose. The especial form of their material life was as essential to its spiritual outgrowth as the rose-bush is to the rose; and it would be a cankered selfishness to complain of them for it. Appendices APPENDIX A There is at least one error in the Symmes diary, which is however explainable, and need not vitiate the whole of it. It has been ascertained that the drowning of Henry Jackson in Songo River by being kicked in the mouth by another boy while swimming, took place in 1828, so that the statement to that effect in the diary, must have been interpolated. As it happened, however, another Henry Jackson was drowned in the Songo River, so Mr. Pickard says, more than twenty years before that, and it is quite possible that young Hawthorne overheard some talk about that catastrophe, and mistook it for a recent event; and that Symmes afterwards confounding the two Jacksons and the difference in time, amended Hawthorne's statement as we now have it. Mr. Pickard says in a recent letter: "This item alone led me to doubt. But I cannot doubt, the more I reflect upon it, that H. himself had a hand in most, if not all, the other items. Who but his uncle could have written that inscription? The negro Symmes could not have composed that--only a man of culture."... "The sketch of the sail on Sebago Lake surely was written by some one who was in that party. Symmes _might_ have been there, but he was a genius deserving the fame of a Chatterton if he really did this. Three of that party I personally knew--one (Sawyer) was a cousin of my grandfather. His sleight of hand, his skill with rifle, his being a 'votary of chance,' are traditions in my family." This does not differ essentially from the opinion I have already expressed in Chapter II. F. B. Sanborn, who is one of the best-informed of living men in regard to Hawthorne, takes a similar view. APPENDIX B In February, 1883, a review of "Nathaniel Hawthorne and his Wife" was published in the _Atlantic Monthly_, evidently written by a person with no good-will toward the family. Editors ought to beware of such reviews, for their character is easily recognized, and the effect they produce often reacts upon the publication that contains them. In the present instance, the ill-humor of the writer had evidently been bottled up for many years. To place typographical errors to the debit of an author's account--not very numerous for a work of eight hundred pages--suggests either an inexperienced or a strongly prejudiced critic. This is what the _Atlantic_ writer begins with, and he (or she) next proceeds to complain that the book does not contain a complete bibliography of Hawthorne's works; although many excellent biographies have been published without this, and it is quite possible that Hawthorne's son preferred not to insert it. No notice is taken of the many fine passages in the book, like the apostrophe upon Hawthorne's marriage, [Footnote: J. Hawthorne, i. 242,] and that excellent description of the performances of a trance medium at Florence, but continues in an ascending climax of fault-finding until he (or she) reaches the passage from Hawthorne's Roman diary concerning Margaret Fuller. [Footnote: J. Hawthorne, i. 30-35.] If public opinion has any value, this passage concerning Margaret Fuller's marriage ought not to have been published; but what can Margaret Fuller's friends and admirers expect? Do they think that a young American woman can go to a foreign country, and live with a foreign gentleman, in defiance of the customs of modern society, without subjecting herself to the severest criticism? It is true that she married Count d'Ossoli before her child was born, and her friends, who were certainly an enlightened class, always believed that she acted throughout from the most honorable motives (my own opinion is, that she acted in imitation of Goethe), but how can they expect the great mass of mankind to think so? Hawthorne had a right to his opinion, as well as Emerson and Channing, and although it was certainly not a very charitable opinion, we cannot doubt that it was an honest one. In regard to the marriage tie, Hawthorne was always strict and conservative. This is the climax of the _Atlantic_ critique, and its anti-climax is an excoriation of Hawthorne's son for neglecting to do equal and exact justice to James T. Fields. This truly is a grievous accusation. Fields was Hawthorne's publisher and would seem to have taken a personal and friendly interest in him besides, but we cannot look on it as a wholly unselfish interest. It was not like Hillard's, Pierce's, and Bridge's interest in Hawthorne. If Fields had not been his publisher, it is not probable that Hawthorne would have made his acquaintance; and if his son has not enlarged on Fields's good offices in bringing "The Scarlet Letter" before the public, there is an excellent reason for it, in the fact that Fields had already done so for himself in his "Yesterdays with Authors." That Fields's name should have been omitted in the index to "Nathaniel Hawthorne and his Wife," may have been an oversight; but, at all events, it is too microscopic a matter to deserve consideration in a first-class review. Are we become such babies, that it is no longer possible for a writer to tell the plain, ostensible truth concerning human nature, without having a storm raised about his head for it? George P. Bradford and Martin F. Tupper are similar instances, and like Boswell have suffered the penalty which accrues to men of small stature for associating with giants. APPENDIX C The great poets and other writers of all nations whom I conceive to be superior to Hawthorne, may be found in the following list: Homer, �schylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Pindar, Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, Demosthenes, Theocritus, Plutarch; Horace, Virgil, Cicero, Tacitus; Dante, Tasso, Petrarch; Cervantes, Calderon, Camoens; Molière, Racine, Descartes, Voltaire; Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, Kant; Swedenborg; Chaucer, Shakespeare, Bacon, Milton, and perhaps Burns and Byron; Alexander Hamilton, Napoleon. These also may be placed more on an equality with Hawthorne, although there will of course always be wide differences of opinion on that point: Hesiod, Herodotus, Menander, Aristophases; Livy, Cæsar, Lucretius, Juvenal; Ariosto, Macchiavelli, Manzoni, Lope de Vega, Buthas Pato; Corneille, Pascal, Rousseau; Wieland, Klopstock, Heine, Auerbach; Spenser, Ben Jonson, Fletcher, Fielding, Pope, Scott, Wordsworth, Shelley, Carlyle, Browning, Tennyson, Froude; Webster, Emerson, Wasson. Sappho, Bion, Moschus, and Cleanthes were certainly poets of a high order, but only some fragments of their poetry have survived. Gottfried of Strassburg, the Minnesinger, might be included, and some of the finest English poetry was written by unknown geniuses of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Ballads like "Chevy Chace" and the "Child of Elle" deserve a high place in the rank of poetry; and the German "Reineke Fuchs" is in its way without a rival. There may be other French, German, and Spanish writers of exceptional excellence with whom I am unacquainted, but I do not feel that any French or German novelists of the last century ought to be placed on a level with Hawthorne--only excepting Auerbach. Victor Hugo is grandiloquent, and the others all have some serious fault or limitation. I suppose that not one in ten of Emerson's readers has ever heard of Wasson, but he was the better prose writer of the two, and little inferior as a poet. More elevated he could not be, but more profound, just, logical and humane--that is, more like Hawthorne. Emerson could not have filled his place on the _Atlantic Monthly_ and the _North American Review_. Index Adams, John Quincy After-dinner speeches Alcott, A. Bronson "Ambitious Guest, The," "Ancestral Footstep, The," _Antinous_ of the villa Ludovisi "Arabella," the ship Arnold, Matthew "Artist of the Beautiful, The," Athenæan Society Atlantic Club Aurelius, Marcus Bacon's, Miss, volume published Balzac Bancroft, George Beethoven Bennoch, Francis "Blithedale Romance" Blodgett's boarding-house "Bloody Footstep" "Birth Mark, The," "Bosom Serpent, The," Bradford, George P Brandes, Danish critic Bridge, Horatio, Bright, Henry A. Brook Farm Brown, John Browning and Carlyle Browning, Mrs. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Buchanan, President Carlyle and Hawthorne Castor and Pollux, statues of "Celestial Railroad, The" Cenci, Beatrice, portrait of Channing, Ellery Channing, William H. Cilley and Graves duel Cilley, Jonathan description of Clarke, Edward H. Clarke, Rev. Dr. James F. "Code of Honor," the College skepticism Columbia, statue of Concord River Conway, Rev. M. D. Crab spider, the Crawford, sculptor "Critique of Pure Reason, The" Curtis, George William Dallas, George M. Dante's _Inferno_ Dickens "Doctor Grimshawe's Secret" Dolliver, Dr. "Dolliver Romance, The" Donatello's crime Dwight, John S., musical critic Elgin marbles Eliot, George Emerson essays Emerson, Mrs. R. W. her figure religious views English lakes "English Note-book" English scenery Essex County people Evans, Marian "Fancy's Show Box" "Fanshawe" "Faun of Praxiteles" "Felton, Septimius," Fielding Fields, James T Florentine art Fourier Fuller, Margaret as Zenobia her marriage Gardner, E. A., Prof Genius, its growth "Gentle Boy, The," Ghosts Gibson, sculptor his tinted Eves and Venuses Gladstone, William E., on transcendentalism Godkin, E. L. Goethe Golden Age, A Goodrich, S. G., editor "Great Carbuncle, The," "Great Stone Face, The," Guilty glimpses at hired models Gurney, Prof. E. W. "Hall of Fantasy, The," Harris, Dr. William T. Harvard Law School Hathorne, Daniel Hathorne, John witches' judge his last will his gravestone Hathorne, Joseph Hathorne, Nathaniel Hathorne, William Letter to British Ministry Hawthorne, Elizabeth Hawthorne, Julian Hawthorne, Louisa her death Hawthorne, Mrs. Sophia Peabody becomes engaged to Hawthorne writes to her mother encourages her husband praises her husband is out of health goes to Madeira is presented at court the original of Hilda at Concord her opinions character and style Hawthorne, Nathaniel, his English ancestors family name birthplace his lameness early poetry life at Sebago his first diary the budding of his genius fits for college "Pin Society" religious instruction decides on his vocation has the measles his life at Bowdoin outdoor sports is fined for gambling graduates at Bowdoin decides his profession publishes "Fanshawe" changes his name despondency goes to Lake Champlain wins his bet with Cilley commences his diary his supposed challenge thanks Longfellow goes to Berkshire Hills character of his diary his engagement enters Custom House goes to Brook Farm his marriage his true Arcadia his skating opinion of Emerson birth of a daughter his indolence style as an author returns to Robert Manning's house is appointed Surveyor of the Port son Julian is born occupies house on Mall street is removed from office publishes "Scarlet Letter" method of development sits for his portrait; goes to Lenox publishes "House of Seven Gables" birth of his daughter Rose leaves Lenox for Newton returns to Concord writes the "Life of Pierce" the Liverpool consulate sails for England as an office-holder his life in England makes a speech kindness to Delia Bacon resigns the Consulate as a law writer goes to Paris arrives at Rome journeys to Florence goes to the Vatican on modern sculpture returns to Rome visits Geneva summer at Redcar publishes the "Marble Faun Hawthorne the famous begins to dislike writing returns to Concord method of writing patriotism proposes to arm negroes preparatory sketches sojourns at Beverly Farms last entry in his journal dedicates book to President Pierce at home personal appearance seriously ill Hawthorne's philosophy his death his funeral religious convictions his position in literature Hawthorne, Rose, her birth her memoirs Hawthorne's mother her character her death Hawthorne, Una, her birth severe illness of Hilda, character of her tower Hillard, George S. Hoar, Miss Elizabeth Holiday epauletes Holmes, Oliver Wendell Hosmer, Harriet Houghton, Lord "House of the Seven Gables, The" Howe, Dr. Samuel G. Hunt, suicide of Miss Italian Note-book Jackson, Andrew James, Henry, Jr. James, Henry, Sr. Jameson, Mrs. Anna Jerrold, Douglas Kansas-Nebraska Bill Kant, Immanuel Kemble, Frances Kitridge, Doctor "Lady Eleanor's Mantle" _Laocoön_ Lathrop, George P. Leamington Lincoln, President Liverpool Consulate Longfellow, Henry W. reviews Hawthorne Loring, Frederick W. Loring, Dr. George B. Lowell, James Russell Mann, Horace Mann, Mrs. Horace Manning family Manning, Rebecca Manning, Richard Manning, Robert "Marble Faun, The," English reviews of analysis of its original McClellan, General George B. McMichael, Morton Melville, Hermann Mexican War Michel Angelo his _Last Judgment and Moses_ "Miroir, Monsieur du" "Mosses from an Old Manse" Motley's opinions "Mrs. Bullfrog" Niagara Falls, visit to _North American Review_ Nurse, Rebecca, a witch Offensive partisanship "Old Manse," the "Ontario Steamboat, The" O'Sullivan, an editor "Our Old Home" Parker, Theodore Peabody, Elizabeth Peabody, Sophia Amelia Philadelphia Hock Club Pickard, Samuel T. Pierce, Franklin elected Senator goes to the war nominated for President his father various Pike, William B. Poetic mind, the Politicians, opinion of Portraits of Hawthorne by Osgood, Healy, Rowse, and others Positivists Powers, Hiram his _America_ Prescott, George L Prince of Wales Pyncheon, Clifford Quakers, persecution of Raphael's _Transfiguration_ "Rappacini's Daughter" Reform Club of London Ripley, George Rock Ferry Roman Carnival Runnel, Mary, sweetheart of Daniel Hathorne Ruskin Sailors maltreated Salem architecture Salem, situation of Salem society Salem's sea-captains Sanborn, Frank B., attempt to kidnap "Scarlet Letter, The," Schönbach, A. E., German critic "Select Party, The," Shakespeare, authorship of Epitaph Shaw, Chief Justice Shelley Sheridan's Ride "Sights from a Steeple" Silsbee, Edward Sistine Chapel Skepticism of evil Slavery Question "Snow Image" Spartan discipline Story, William W. St. Petersburg _Venus_ Sumner and Motley Sumner, Charles Swartwout's defalcation Symms, William, a mulatto "Tanglewood Tales" Taylor, President Thoreau of marriage Ticknor, W. D., death of Tituba, the Aztec Tragedy, character of Trance medium, a Transcendentalism essence of Tupper, Martin Farquhar Turner, J. M. W. "Twice Told Tales" "Unpardonable Sin, The," Upham, the historian Vanity of Women Vasari _Venus dé Medici_ "Vicar of Wakefield" Victor Hugo Villa Manteüto "Virtuoso's Collection, The," "Vision at the Fountain, The," Ward's Tavern Warwick Castle Wasson, David A Waters, Henry F., researches of Wayside, The Webster, Daniel West Roxbury commune Whittier, the poet Wig Castle in Wigton Witchcraft persecution Wood, Warrington Worcester, Doctor, the lexicographer "Young Goodman Brown" 
7876	----	PASSAGES FROM THE ENGLISH NOTE-BOOKS OF NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE VOL. I. To Francis Bennoch, Esq., The dear and valued friend, who, by his generous and genial hospitality and unfailing sympathy, contributed so largely (as is attested by the book itself) to render Mr. Hawthorne's residence in England agreeable and homelike, these ENGLISH NOTES are dedicated, with sincere respect and regard, by The Editor. PREFACE It seems justly due to Mr. Hawthorne that the occasion of any portion of his private journals being brought before the Public should be made known, since they were originally designed for his own reference only. There had been a constant and an urgent demand for a life or memoir of Mr. Hawthorne; yet, from the extreme delicacy and difficulty of the subject, the Editor felt obliged to refuse compliance with this demand. Moreover, Mr. Hawthorne had frequently and emphatically expressed the hope that no one would attempt to write his Biography; and the Editor perceived that it would be impossible for any person, outside of his own domestic circle, to succeed in doing it, on account of his extreme reserve. But it was ungracious to do nothing, and therefore the Editor, believing that Mr. Hawthorne himself was alone capable of satisfactorily answering the affectionate call for some sketch of his life, concluded to publish as much as possible of his private records, and even extracts from his private letters, in order to gratify the desire of his friends and of literary artists to become more intimately acquainted with him. The Editor has been severely blamed and wondered at, in some instances, for allowing many things now published to see the light; but it has been a matter both of conscience and courtesy to withhold nothing that could be given up. Many of the journals were doubtless destroyed; for the earliest date found in his American papers was that of 1835. The Editor has transcribed the manuscripts just as they were left, without making any new arrangement or altering any sequence,--merely omitting some passages, and being especially careful to preserve whatever could throw any light upon his character. To persons on a quest for characteristics, however, each of his books reveals a great many, and it is believed that with the aid of the Notes (both American and English) the Tales and Romances will make out a very complete and true picture of his individuality; and the Notes are often an open sesame to the artistic works. Several thickly written pages of observations--fine and accurate etchings--have been omitted, sometimes because too personal with regard to himself or others, and sometimes because they were afterwards absorbed into one or another of the Romances or papers in Our Old Home. It seemed a pity not to give these original cartoons fresh from his mind, because they are so carefully finished at the first stroke. Yet, as Mr. Hawthorne chose his own way of presenting them to the public, it was thought better not to exhibit what he himself withheld. Besides, to any other than a fellow-artist they might seem mere repetitions. It is very earnestly hoped that these volumes of notes--American, English, and presently Italian--will dispel an often-expressed opinion that Mr. Hawthorne was gloomy and morbid. He had the inevitable pensiveness and gravity of a person who possessed what a friend of his called "the awful power of insight"; but his mood was always cheerful and equal, and his mind peculiarly healthful, and the airy splendor of his wit and humor was the light of his home. He saw too far to be despondent, though his vivid sympathies and shaping imagination often made him sad in behalf of others. He also perceived morbidness, wherever it existed, instantly, as if by the illumination of his own steady cheer; and he had the plastic power of putting himself into each person's situation, and of looking from every point of view, which made his charity most comprehensive. From this cause he necessarily attracted confidences, and became confessor to very many sinning and suffering souls, to whom he gave tender sympathy and help, while resigning judgment to the Omniscient and All-wise. Throughout his journals it will be seen that Mr. Hawthorne is entertaining, and not asserting, opinions and ideas. He questions, doubts, and reflects with his pen, and, as it were, instructs himself. So that these Note-Books should be read, not as definitive conclusions of his mind, but merely as passing impressions often. Whatever conclusions be arrived at are condensed in the works given to the world by his own hand, in which will never be found a careless word. He was so extremely scrupulous about the value and effect of every expression that the Editor has felt great compunction in allowing a single sentence to be printed. unrevised by himself; but, with the consideration of the above remarks always kept in mind, these volumes are intrusted to the generous interpretation of the reader. If any one must be harshly criticised, it ought certainly to be the Editor. When a person breaks in, unannounced, upon the morning hours of an artist, and finds him not in full dress, the intruder, and not the surprised artist, is doubtless at fault. S. H. Dresden, April, 1870. PASSAGES FROM HAWTHORNE'S ENGLISH NOTE-BOOKS Liverpool, August 4th, 1853.--A month lacking two days since we left America,--a fortnight and some odd days since we arrived in England. I began my services, such as they are, on Monday last, August 1st, and here I sit in my private room at the Consulate, while the Vice-Consul and clerk are carrying on affairs in the outer office. The pleasantest incident of the morning is when Mr. Pearce (the Vice-Consul) makes his appearance with the account-books, containing the receipts and expenditures of the preceding day, and deposits on my desk a little rouleau of the Queen's coin, wrapped up in a piece of paper. This morning there were eight sovereigns, four half-crowns, and a shilling,--a pretty fair day's work, though not more than the average ought to be. This forenoon, thus far, I have had two calls, not of business,--one from an American captain and his son, another from Mr. H---- B----, whom I met in America, and who has showed us great attention here. He has arranged for us to go to the theatre with some of his family this evening. Since I have been in Liverpool we have hardly had a day, until yesterday, without more or less of rain, and so cold and shivery that life was miserable. I am not warm enough even now, but am gradually getting acclimated in that respect. Just now I have been fooled out of half a crown by a young woman, who represents herself as an American and destitute, having come over to see an uncle whom she found dead, and she has no means of getting back again. Her accent is not that of an American, and her appearance is not particularly prepossessing, though not decidedly otherwise. She is decently dressed and modest in deportment, but I do not quite trust her face. She has been separated from her husband, as I understand her, by course of law, has had two children, both now dead. What she wants is to get back to America, and perhaps arrangements may be made with some shipmaster to take her as stewardess or in some subordinate capacity. My judgment, on the whole, is that she is an English woman, married to and separated from an American husband,--of no very decided virtue. I might as well have kept my half-crown, and yet I might have bestowed it worse. She is very decent in manner, cheerful, at least not despondent. At two o'clock I went over to the Royal Rock Hotel, about fifteen or twenty minutes' steaming from this side of the river. We are going there on Saturday to reside for a while. Returning, I found that, Mr. B., from the American Chamber of Commerce, had called to arrange the time and place of a visit to the Consul from a delegation of that body. Settled for to-morrow at quarter past one at Mr. Blodgett's. August 5th.--An invitation this morning from the Mayor to dine at the Town Hall on Friday next. Heaven knows I had rather dine at the humblest inn in the city, inasmuch as a speech will doubtless be expected from me. However, things must be as they may. At a quarter past one I was duly on hand at Mr. Blodgett's to receive the deputation from the Chamber of Commerce. They arrived pretty seasonably, in two or three carriages, and were ushered into the drawing-room,--seven or eight gentlemen, some of whom I had met before. Hereupon ensued a speech from Mr. B., the Chairman of the delegation, short and sweet, alluding to my literary reputation and other laudatory matters, and occupying only a minute or two. The speaker was rather embarrassed, which encouraged me a little, and yet I felt more diffidence on this occasion than in my effort at Mr. Crittenden's lunch, where, indeed, I was perfectly self-possessed. But here, there being less formality, and more of a conversational character in what was said, my usual diffidence could not so well be kept in abeyance. However, I did not break down to an intolerable extent, and, winding up my eloquence as briefly as possible, we had a social talk. Their whole stay could not have been much more than a quarter of an hour. A call, this morning, at the Consulate, from Dr. Bowrug, who is British minister, or something of the kind, in China, and now absent on a twelvemonth's leave. The Doctor is a brisk person, with the address of a man of the world,--free, quick to smile, and of agreeable manners. He has a good face, rather American than English in aspect, and does not look much above fifty, though he says he is between sixty and seventy. I should take him rather for an active lawyer or a man of business than for a scholar and a literary man. He talked in a lively way for ten or fifteen minutes, and then took his leave, offering me any service in his power in London,--as, for instance, to introduce me to the Athenaeum Club. August 8th.--Day before yesterday I escorted my family to Rock Ferry, two miles either up or down the Mersey (and I really don't know which) by steamer, which runs every half-hour. There are steamers going continually to Birkenhead and other landings, and almost always a great many passengers on the transit. At this time the boat was crowded so as to afford scanty standing-room; it being Saturday, and therefore a kind of gala-day. I think I have never seen a populace before coming to England; but this crowd afforded a specimen of one, both male and female. The women were the most remarkable; though they seemed not disreputable, there was in them a coarseness, a freedom, an--I don't know what, that was purely English. In fact, men and women here do things that would at least make them ridiculous in America. They are not afraid to enjoy themselves in their own way, and have no pseudo-gentility to support. Some girls danced upon the crowded deck, to the miserable music of a little fragment of a band which goes up and down the river on each trip of the boat. Just before the termination of the voyage a man goes round with a bugle turned upwards to receive the eleemosynary pence and half-pence of the passengers. I gave one of them, the other day, a silver fourpence, which fell into the vitals of the instrument, and compelled the man to take it to pieces. At Rock Ferry there was a great throng, forming a scene not unlike one of our muster-days or a Fourth of July, and there were bands of music and banners, and small processions after them, and a school of charity children, I believe, enjoying a festival. And there was a club of respectable persons, playing at bowls on the bowling-green of the hotel, and there were children, infants, riding on donkeys at a penny a ride, while their mothers walked alongside to prevent a fall. Yesterday, while we were at dinner, Mr. B. came in his carriage to take us to his residence, Poulton Hall. He had invited us to dine; but I misunderstood him, and thought he only intended to give us a drive. Poulton Hall is about three miles from Rock Ferry, the road passing through some pleasant rural scenery, and one or two villages, with houses standing close together, and old stone or brick cottages, with thatched roofs, and now and then a better mansion, apart among trees. We passed an old church, with a tower and spire, and, half-way up, a patch of ivy, dark green, and some yellow wall-flowers, in full bloom, growing out of the crevices of the stone. Mr. B. told us that the tower was formerly quite clothed with ivy from bottom to top, but that it had fallen away for lack of the nourishment that it used to find in the lime between the stones. This old church answered to my Transatlantic fancies of England better than anything I have yet seen. Not far from it was the Rectory, behind a deep grove of ancient trees; and there lives the Rector, enjoying a thousand pounds a year and his nothing-to-do, while a curate performs the real duty on a stipend of eighty pounds. We passed through a considerable extent of private road, and finally drove over a lawn, studded with trees and closely shaven, till we reached the door of Poulton Hall. Part of the mansion is three or four hundred years old; another portion is about a hundred and fifty, and still another has been built during the present generation. The house is two stories high, with a sort of beetle-browed roof in front. It is not very striking, and does not look older than many wooden houses which I have seen in America. There is a curious stately staircase, with a twisted balustrade much like that of the old Province House in Boston. The drawing-room is a handsome modern apartment, being beautifully painted and gilded and paper-hung, with a white marble fireplace and rich furniture, so that the impression is that of newness, not of age. It is the same with the dining-room, and all the rest of the interior so far as I saw it. Mr. B. did not inherit this old hall, nor, indeed, is he the owner, but only the tenant of it. He is a merchant of Liverpool, a bachelor, with two sisters residing with him. In the entrance-hall, there was a stuffed fox with glass eyes, which I never should have doubted to be an actual live fox except for his keeping so quiet; also some grouse and other game. Mr. B. seems to be a sportsman, and is setting out this week on an excursion to Scotland, moor-fowl shooting. While the family and two or three guests went to dinner, we walked out to see the place. The gardener, an Irishman, showed us through the garden, which is large and well cared for. They certainly get everything from Nature which she can possibly be persuaded to give them, here in England. There were peaches and pears growing against the high brick southern walls,--the trunk and branches of the trees being spread out perfectly flat against the wall, very much like the skin of a dead animal nailed up to dry, and not a single branch protruding. Figs were growing in the same way. The brick wall, very probably, was heated within, by means of pipes, in order to re-enforce the insufficient heat of the sun. It seems as if there must be something unreal and unsatisfactory in fruit that owes its existence to such artificial methods. Squashes were growing under glass, poor things! There were immensely large gooseberries in the garden; and in this particular berry, the English, I believe, have decidedly the advantage over ourselves. The raspberries, too, were large and good. I espied one gigantic hog-weed in the garden; and, really, my heart warmed to it, being strongly reminded of the principal product of my own garden at Concord. After viewing the garden sufficiently, the gardener led us to other parts of the estate, and we had glimpses of a delightful valley, its sides shady with beautiful trees, and a rich, grassy meadow at the bottom. By means of a steam-engine and subterranean pipes and hydrants, the liquid manure from the barn-yard is distributed wherever it is wanted over the estate, being spouted in rich showers from the hydrants. Under this influence, the meadow at the bottom of the valley had already been made to produce three crops of grass during the present season, and would produce another. The lawn around Poulton Hall, like thousands of other lawns in England, is very beautiful, but requires great care to keep it so, being shorn every three or four days. No other country will ever have this charm, nor the charm of lovely verdure, which almost makes up for the absence of sunshine. Without the constant rain and shadow which strikes us as so dismal, these lawns would be as brown as an autumn leaf. I have not, thus far, found any such magnificent trees as I expected. Mr. B. told me that three oaks, standing in a row on his lawn, were the largest in the county. They were very good trees, to be sure, and perhaps four feet in diameter near the ground, but with no very noble spread of foliage. In Concord there are, if not oaks, yet certainly elms, a great deal more stately and beautiful. But, on the whole, this lawn, and the old Hall in the midst of it, went a good way towards realizing some of my fancies of English life. By and by a footman, looking very quaint and queer in his livery coat, drab breeches, and white stockings, came to invite me to the table, where I found Mr. B. and his sisters and guests sitting at the fruit and wine. There were port, sherry, madeira, and one bottle of claret, all very good; but they take here much heavier wines than we drink now in America. After a tolerably long session we went to the tea-room, where I drank some coffee, and at about the edge of dusk the carriage drew up to the door to take us home. Mr. B. and his sisters have shown us genuine kindness, and they gave us a hearty invitation to come and ramble over the house whenever we pleased, during their absence in Scotland. They say that there are many legends and ghost-stories connected with the house; and there is an attic chamber, with a skylight, which is called the Martyr's chamber, from the fact of its having, in old times, been tenanted by a lady, who was imprisoned there, and persecuted to death for her religion. There is an old black-letter library, but the room containing it is shut, barred, and padlocked,--the owner of the house refusing to let it be opened, lest some of the books should be stolen. Meanwhile the rats are devouring them, and the damps destroying them. August 9th.--A pretty comfortable day, as to warmth, and I believe there is sunshine overhead; but a sea-cloud, composed of fog and coal-smoke, envelops Liverpool. At Rock Ferry, when I left it at half past nine, there was promise of a cheerful day. A good many gentlemen (or, rather, respectable business people) came in the boat, and it is not unpleasant, on these fine mornings, to take the breezy atmosphere of the river. The huge steamer Great Britain, bound for Australia, lies right off the Rock Ferry landing; and at a little distance are two old hulks of ships of war, dismantled, roofed over, and anchored in the river, formerly for quarantine purposes, but now used chiefly or solely as homes for old seamen, whose light labor it is to take care of these condemned ships. There are a great many steamers plying up and down the river to various landings in the vicinity; and a good many steam-tugs; also, many boats, most of which have dark-red or tan-colored sails, being oiled to resist the wet; also, here and there, a yacht or pleasure-boat, and a few ships riding stately at their anchors, probably on the point of sailing. The river, however, is by no means crowded; because the immense multitude of ships are ensconced in the docks, where their masts make an intricate forest for miles up and down the Liverpool shore. The small black steamers, whizzing industriously along, many of them crowded with passengers, snake up the chief life of the scene. The Mersey has the color of a mud-puddle, and no atmospheric effect, as far as I have seen, ever gives it a more agreeable tinge. Visitors to-day, thus far, have been H. A. B., with whom I have arranged to dine with us at Rock Ferry, and then he is to take us on board the Great Britain, of which his father is owner (in great part). Secondly, Monsieur H., the French Consul, who can speak hardly any English, and who was more powerfully scented with cigar-smoke than any man I ever encountered; a polite, gray-haired, red-nosed gentleman, very courteous and formal. Heaven keep him from me! At one o'clock, or thereabouts, I walked into the city, down through Lord Street, Church Street, and back to the Consulate through various untraceable crookednesses. Coming to Chapel Street, I crossed the graveyard of the old Church of St. Nicholas. This is, I suppose, the oldest sacred site in Liverpool, a church having stood here ever since the Conquest, though, probably, there is little or nothing of the old edifice in the present one, either the whole of the edifice or else the steeple, being thereto shaken by a chime of bells,-- perhaps both, at different times,--has tumbled down; but the present church is what we Americans should call venerable. When the first church was built, and long afterwards, it must have stood on the grassy verge of the Mersey; but now there are pavements and warehouses, and the thronged Prince's and George's Docks, between it and the river; and all around it is the very busiest bustle of commerce, rumbling wheels, hurrying men, porter-shops, everything that pertains to the grossest and most practical life. And, notwithstanding, there is the broad churchyard extending on three sides of it, just as it used to be a thousand years ago. It is absolutely paved from border to border with flat tombstones, on a level with the soil and with each other, so that it is one floor of stone over the whole space, with grass here and there sprouting between the crevices. All these stones, no doubt, formerly had inscriptions; but as many people continually pass, in various directions, across the churchyard, and as the tombstones are not of a very hard material, the records on many of them are effaced. I saw none very old. A quarter of a century is sufficient to obliterate the letters, and make all smooth, where the direct pathway from gate to gate lies over the stones. The climate and casual footsteps rub out any inscription in less than a hundred years. Some of the monuments are cracked. On many is merely cut "The burial place of" so and so; on others there is a long list of half-readable names; on some few a laudatory epitaph, out of which, however, it were far too tedious to pick the meaning. But it really is interesting and suggestive to think of this old church, first built when Liverpool was a small village, and remaining, with its successive dead of ten centuries around it, now that the greatest commercial city in the world has its busiest centre there. I suppose people still continue to be buried in the cemetery. The greatest upholders of burials in cities are those whose progenitors have been deposited around or within the city churches. If this spacious churchyard stood in a similar position in one of our American cities, I rather suspect that long ere now it would have run the risk of being laid out in building-lots, and covered with warehouses; even if the church itself escaped,--but it would not escape longer than till its disrepair afforded excuse for tearing it down. And why should it, when its purposes might be better served in another spot? We went on board the Great Britain before dinner, between five and six o'clock,--a great structure, as to convenient arrangement and adaptation, but giving me a strong impression of the tedium and misery of the long voyage to Australia. By way of amusement, she takes over fifty pounds' worth of playing-cards, at two shillings per pack, for the use of passengers; also, a small, well-selected library. After a considerable time spent on board, we returned to the hotel and dined, and Mr. B. took his leave at nine o'clock. August 10th.--I left Rock Ferry for the city at half past nine. In the boat which arrived thence, there were several men and women with baskets on their heads, for this is a favorite way of carrying burdens; and they trudge onward beneath them, without any apparent fear of an overturn, and seldom putting up a hand to steady them. One woman, this morning, had a heavy load of crockery; another, an immense basket of turnips, freshly gathered, that seemed to me as much as a man could well carry on his back. These must be a stiff-necked people. The women step sturdily and freely, and with not ungraceful strength. The trip over to town was pleasant, it being a fair morning, only with a low-hanging fog. Had it been in America, I should have anticipated a day of burning heat. Visitors this morning. Mr. Ogden of Chicago, or somewhere in the Western States, who arrived in England a fortnight ago, and who called on me at that time. He has since been in Scotland, and is now going to London and the Continent; secondly, the Captain of the Collins steamer Pacific, which sails to-day; thirdly, an American shipmaster, who complained that he had never, in his heretofore voyages, been able to get sight of the American Consul. Mr. Pearce's customary matutinal visit was unusually agreeable to-day, inasmuch as he laid on my desk nineteen golden sovereigns and thirteen shillings. It being the day of the steamer's departure, an unusual number of invoice certificates had been required,--my signature to each of which brings me two dollars. The autograph of a living author has seldom been so much in request at so respectable a price. Colonel Crittenden told me that he had received as much as fifty pounds on a single day. Heaven prosper the trade between America and Liverpool! August 15th.--Many scenes which I should have liked to record have occurred; but the pressure of business has prevented me from recording them from day to day. On Thursday I went, on invitation from Mr. B., to the prodigious steamer Great Britain, down the harbor, and some miles into the sea, to escort her off a little way on her voyage to Australia. There is an immense enthusiasm among the English people about this ship, on account of its being the largest in the world. The shores were lined with people to see her sail, and there were innumerable small steamers, crowded with men, all the way out into the ocean. Nothing seems to touch the English nearer than this question of nautical superiority; and if we wish to hit them to the quick, we must hit them there. On Friday, at 7 P.M., I went to dine with the Mayor. It was a dinner given to the Judges and the Grand Jury. The Judges of England, during the time of holding an Assize, are the persons first in rank in the kingdom. They take precedence of everybody else,--of the highest military officers, of the Lord Lieutenants, of the Archbishops,--of the Prince of Wales,--of all except the Sovereign, whose authority and dignity they represent. In case of a royal dinner, the Judge would lead the Queen to the table. The dinner was at the Town Hall, and the rooms and the whole affair were all in the most splendid style. Nothing struck me more than the footmen in the city livery. They really looked more magnificent in their gold-lace and breeches and white silk stockings than any officers of state. The rooms were beautiful; gorgeously painted and gilded, gorgeously lighted, gorgeously hung with paintings,--the plate was gorgeous, and the dinner gorgeous in the English fashion. After the removal of the cloth the Mayor gave various toasts, prefacing each with some remarks,--the first, of course, the Sovereign, after which "God save the Queen" was sung, the company standing up and joining in the chorus, their ample faces glowing with wine, enthusiasm, and loyalty. Afterwards the Bar, and various other dignities and institutions were toasted; and by and by came the toast to the United States, and to me, as their Representative. Hereupon either "Hail Columbia," or "Yankee Doodle," or some other of our national tunes (but Heaven knows which), was played; and at the conclusion, being at bay, and with no alternative, I got upon my legs, and made a response. They received me and listened to my nonsense with a good deal of rapping, and my speech seemed to give great satisfaction; my chief difficulty being in not knowing how to pitch my voice to the size of the room. As for the matter, it is not of the slightest consequence. Anybody may make an after-dinner speech who will be content to talk onward without saying anything. My speech was not more than two or three inches long; and, considering that I did not know a soul there, except the Mayor himself, and that I am wholly unpractised in all sorts of oratory, and that I had nothing to say, it was quite successful. I hardly thought it was in me, but, being once started, I felt no embarrassment, and went through it as coolly as if I were going to be hanged. Yesterday, after dinner, I took a walk with my family. We went through by-ways and private roads, and saw more of rural England, with its hedge-rows, its grassy fields, and its whitewashed old stone cottages, than we have before seen since our arrival. August 20th.--This being Saturday, there early commenced a throng of visitants to Rock Ferry. The boat in which I came over brought from the city a multitude of factory-people. They had bands of music, and banners inscribed with the names of the mills they belong to, and other devices: pale-looking people, but not looking exactly as if they were underfed. They are brought on reduced terms by the railways and steamers, and come from great distances in the interior. These, I believe, were from Preston. I have not yet had an opportunity of observing how they amuse themselves during these excursions. At the dock, the other day, the steamer arrived from Rock Ferry with a countless multitude of little girls, in coarse blue gowns, who, as they landed, formed in procession, and walked up the dock. These girls had been taken from the workhouses and educated at a charity-school, and would by and by be apprenticed as servants. I should not have conceived it possible that so many children could have been collected together, without a single trace of beauty or scarcely of intelligence in so much as one individual; such mean, coarse, vulgar features and figures betraying unmistakably a low origin, and ignorant and brutal parents. They did not appear wicked, but only stupid, animal, and soulless. It must require many generations of better life to wake the soul in them. All America could not show the like. August 22d.--A Captain Auld, an American, having died here yesterday, I went with my clerk and an American shipmaster to take the inventory of his effects. His boarding-house was in a mean street, an old dingy house, with narrow entrance,--the class of boarding-house frequented by mates of vessels, and inferior to those generally patronized by masters. A fat elderly landlady, of respectable and honest aspect, and her daughter, a pleasing young woman enough, received us, and ushered us into the deceased's bedchamber. It was a dusky back room, plastered and painted yellow; its one window looking into the very narrowest of back-yards or courts, and out on a confused multitude of back buildings, appertaining to other houses, most of them old, with rude chimneys of wash-rooms and kitchens, the bricks of which seemed half loose. The chattels of the dead man were contained in two trunks, a chest, a sail-cloth bag, and a barrel, and consisted of clothing, suggesting a thickset, middle-sized man; papers relative to ships and business, a spyglass, a loaded iron pistol, some books of navigation, some charts, several great pieces of tobacco, and a few cigars; some little plaster images, that he had probably bought for his children, a cotton umbrella, and other trumpery of no great value. In one of the trunks we found about twenty pounds' worth of English and American gold and silver, and some notes of hand, due in America. Of all these things the clerk made an inventory; after which we took possession of the money and affixed the consular seal to the trunks, bag, and chest. While this was going on, we heard a great noise of men quarrelling in an adjoining court; and, altogether, it seemed a squalid and ugly place to live in, and a most undesirable one to die in. At the conclusion of our labors, the young woman asked us if we would not go into another chamber, and look at the corpse, and appeared to think that we should be rather glad than otherwise of the privilege. But, never having seen the man during his lifetime, I declined to commence his acquaintance now. His bills for board and nursing amount to about the sum which we found in his trunk; his funeral expenses will be ten pounds more; the surgeon has sent in a bill of eight pounds, odd shillings; and the account of another medical man is still to be rendered. As his executor, I shall pay his landlady and nurse; and for the rest of the expenses, a subscription must be made (according to the custom in such cases) among the shipmasters, headed by myself. The funeral pomp will consist of a hearse, one coach, four men, with crape hatbands, and a few other items, together with a grave at five pounds, over which his friends will be entitled to place a stone, if they choose to do so, within twelve months. As we left the house, we looked into the dark and squalid dining-room, where a lunch of cold meat was set out; but having no associations with the house except through this one dead man, it seemed as if his presence and attributes pervaded it wholly. He appears to have been a man of reprehensible habits, though well advanced in years. I ought not to forget a brandy-flask (empty) among his other effects. The landlady and daughter made a good impression on me, as honest and respectable persons. August 24th.--Yesterday, in the forenoon, I received a note, and shortly afterwards a call at the Consulate from Miss H----, whom I apprehend to be a lady of literary tendencies. She said that Miss L. had promised her an introduction, but that, happening to pass through Liverpool, she had snatched the opportunity to make my acquaintance. She seems to be a mature lady, rather plain, but with an honest and intelligent face. It was rather a singular freedom, methinks, to come down upon a perfect stranger in this way,--to sit with him in his private office an hour or two, and then walk about the streets with him, as she did; for I did the honors of Liverpool, and showed her the public buildings. Her talk was sensible, but not particularly brilliant nor interesting; a good, solid personage, physically and intellectually. She is an English woman. In the afternoon, at three o'clock, I attended the funeral of Captain Auld. Being ushered into the dining-room of his boarding-house, I found brandy, gin, and wine set out on a tray, together with some little spicecakes. By and by came in a woman, who asked if I were going to the funeral; and then proceeded to put a mourning-band on my hat,--a black-silk band, covering the whole hat, and streaming nearly a yard behind. After waiting the better part of an hour, nobody else appeared, although several shipmasters had promised to attend. Hereupon, the undertaker was anxious to set forth; but the landlady, who was arrayed in shining black silk, thought it a shame that the poor man should be buried with such small attendance. So we waited a little longer, during which interval I heard the landlady's daughter sobbing and wailing in the entry; and but for this tender-heartedness there would have been no tears at all. Finally we set forth,--the undertaker, a friend of his, and a young man, perhaps the landlady's son, and myself, in the black-plumed coach, and the landlady, her daughter, and a female friend, in the coach behind. Previous to this, however, everybody had taken some wine or spirits; for it seemed to be considered disrespectful not to do so. Before us went the plumed hearse, a stately affair, with a bas-relief of funereal figures upon its sides. We proceeded quite across the city to the Necropolis, where the coffin was carried into a chapel, in which we found already another coffin, and another set of mourners, awaiting the clergyman. Anon he appeared,--a stern, broad-framed, large, and bald-headed man, in a black-silk gown. He mounted his desk, and read the service in quite a feeble and unimpressive way, though with no lack of solemnity. This done, our four bearers took up the coffin, and carried it out of the chapel; but, descending the steps, and, perhaps, having taken a little too much brandy, one of them stumbled, and down came the coffin,--not quite to the ground, however; for they grappled with it, and contrived, with a great struggle, to prevent the misadventure. But I really expected to see poor Captain Auld burst forth among us in his grave-clothes. The Necropolis is quite a handsome burial-place, shut in by high walls, so overrun with shrubbery that no part of the brick or stone is visible. Part of the space within is an ornamental garden, with flowers and green turf; the rest is strewn with flat gravestones, and a few raised monuments; and straight avenues run to and fro between. Captain Auld's grave was dug nine feet deep. It is his own for twelve months; but, if his friends do not choose to give him a stone, it will become a common grave at the end of that time; and four or five more bodies may then be piled upon his. Every one seemed greatly to admire the grave; the undertaker praised it, and also the dryness of its site, which he took credit to himself for having chosen. The grave-digger, too, was very proud of its depth, and the neatness of his handiwork. The clergyman, who had marched in advance of us from the chapel, now took his stand at the head of the grave, and, lifting his hat, proceeded with what remained of the service, while we stood bareheaded around. When he came to a particular part, "ashes to ashes, dust to dust," the undertaker lifted a handful of earth, and threw it rattling on the coffin,--so did the landlady's son, and so did I. After the funeral the undertaker's friend, an elderly, coarse-looking man, looked round him, and remarked that "the grass had never grown on the parties who died in the cholera year"; but at this the undertaker laughed in scorn. As we returned to the gate of the cemetery, the sexton met us, and pointed to a small office, on entering which we found the clergyman, who was waiting for his burial-fees. There was now a dispute between the clergyman and the undertaker; the former wishing to receive the whole amount for the gravestone, which the undertaker, of course, refused to pay. I explained how the matter stood; on which the clergyman acquiesced, civilly enough; but it was very strange to see the worldly, business-like way in which he entered into this squabble, so soon after burying poor Captain Auld. During our drive back in the mourning-coach, the undertaker, his friend, and the landlady's son still kept descanting on the excellence of the grave,--"Such a fine grave,"--"Such a nice grave,"--"Such a splendid grave,"--and, really, they seemed almost to think it worth while to die, for the sake of being buried there. They deemed it an especial pity that such a grave should ever become a common grave. "Why," said they to me, "by paying the extra price you may have it for your own grave, or for your family!" meaning that we should have a right to pile ourselves over the defunct Captain. I wonder how the English ever attain to any conception of a future existence, since they so overburden themselves with earth and mortality in their ideas of funerals. A drive with an undertaker, in a sable-plumed coach!--talking about graves!--and yet he was a jolly old fellow, wonderfully corpulent, with a smile breaking out easily all over his face,--although, once in a while, he looked professionally lugubrious. All the time the scent of that horrible mourning-coach is in my nostrils, and I breathe nothing but a funeral atmosphere. Saturday, August 27th.--This being the gala-day of the manufacturing people about Liverpool, the steamboats to Rock Ferry were seasonably crowded with large parties of both sexes. They were accompanied with two bands of music, in uniform; and these bands, before I left the hotel, were playing, in competition and rivalry with each other in the coach-yard, loud martial strains from shining brass instruments. A prize is to be assigned to one or to the other of these bands, and I suppose this was a part of the competition. Meanwhile the merry-making people who thronged the courtyard were quaffing coffee from blue earthen mugs, which they brought with them,--as likewise they brought the coffee, and had it made in the hotel. It had poured with rain about the time of their arrival, notwithstanding which they did not seem disheartened; for, of course, in this climate, it enters into all their calculations to be drenched through and through. By and by the sun shone out, and it has continued to shine and shade every ten minutes ever since. All these people were decently dressed; the men generally in dark clothes, not so smartly as Americans on a festal day, but so as not to be greatly different as regards dress. They were paler, smaller, less wholesome-looking and less intelligent, and, I think, less noisy, than so many Yankees would have been. The women and girls differed much more from what American girls and women would be on a pleasure-excursion, being so shabbily dressed, with no kind of smartness, no silks, nothing but cotton gowns, I believe, and ill-looking bonnets,-- which, however, was the only part of their attire that they seemed to care about guarding from the rain. As to their persons, they generally looked better developed and healthier than the men; but there was a woful lack of beauty and grace, not a pretty girl among them, all coarse and vulgar. Their bodies, it seems to me, are apt to be very long in proportion to their limbs,--in truth, this kind of make is rather characteristic of both sexes in England. The speech of these folks, in some instances, was so broad Lancashire that I could not well understand it. A WALK TO BEBBINGTON. Rock Ferry, August 29th.--Yesterday we all took a walk into the country. It was a fine afternoon, with clouds, of course, in different parts of the sky, but a clear atmosphere, bright sunshine, and altogether a Septembrish feeling. The ramble was very pleasant, along the hedge-lined roads in which there were flowers blooming, and the varnished holly, certainly one of the most beautiful shrubs in the world, so far as foliage goes. We saw one cottage which I suppose was several hundred years old. It was of stone, filled into a wooden frame, the black-oak of which was visible like an external skeleton; it had a thatched roof, and was whitewashed. We passed through a village,--higher Bebbington, I believe,--with narrow streets and mean houses all of brick or stone, and not standing wide apart from each other as in American country villages, but conjoined. There was an immense almshouse in the midst; at least, I took it to be so. In the centre of the village, too, we saw a moderate-sized brick house, built in imitation of a castle with a tower and turret, in which an upper and an under row of small cannon were mounted,--now green with moss. There were also battlements along the roof of the house, which looked as if it might have been built eighty or a hundred years ago. In the centre of it there was the dial of a clock, but the inner machinery had been removed, and the hands, hanging listlessly, moved to and fro in the wind. It was quite a novel symbol of decay and neglect. On the wall, close to the street, there were certain eccentric inscriptions cut into slabs of stone, but I could make no sense of them. At the end of the house opposite the turret, we peeped through the bars of an iron gate and beheld a little paved court-yard, and at the farther side of it a small piazza, beneath which seemed to stand the figure of a man. He appeared well advanced in years, and was dressed in a blue coat and buff breeches, with a white or straw hat on his head. Behold, too, in a kennel beside the porch, a large dog sitting on his hind legs, chained! Also, close beside the gateway, another man, seated in a kind of arbor! All these were wooden images; and the whole castellated, small, village-dwelling, with the inscriptions and the queer statuary, was probably the whim of some half-crazy person, who has now, no doubt, been long asleep in Bebbington churchyard. The bell of the old church was ringing as we went along, and many respectable-looking people and cleanly dressed children were moving towards the sound. Soon we reached the church, and I have seen nothing yet in England that so completely answered my idea of what such a thing was, as this old village church of Bebbington. It is quite a large edifice, built in the form of a cross, a low peaked porch in the side, over which, rudely cut in stone, is the date 1300 and something. The steeple has ivy on it, and looks old, old, old; so does the whole church, though portions of it have been renewed, but not so as to impair the aspect of heavy, substantial endurance, and long, long decay, which may go on hundreds of years longer before the church is a ruin. There it stands, among the surrounding graves, looking just the same as it did in Bloody Mary's days; just as it did in Cromwell's time. A bird (and perhaps many birds) had its nest in the steeple, and flew in and out of the loopholes that were opened into it. The stone framework of the windows looked particularly old. There were monuments about the church, some lying flat on the ground, others elevated on low pillars, or on cross slabs of stone, and almost all looking dark, moss-grown, and very antique. But on reading some of the inscriptions, I was surprised to find them very recent; for, in fact, twenty years of this climate suffices to give as much or more antiquity of aspect, whether to gravestone or edifice, than a hundred years of our own,--so soon do lichens creep over the surface, so soon does it blacken, so soon do the edges lose their sharpness, so soon does Time gnaw away the records. The only really old monuments (and those not very old) were two, standing close together, and raised on low rude arches, the dates on which were 1684 and 1686. On one a cross was rudely cut into the stone. But there may have been hundreds older than this, the records on which had been quite obliterated, and the stones removed, and the graves dug over anew. None of the monuments commemorate people of rank; on only one the buried person was recorded as "Gent." While we sat on the flat slabs resting ourselves, several little girls, healthy-looking and prettily dressed enough, came into the churchyard, and began to talk and laugh, and to skip merrily from one tombstone to another. They stared very broadly at us, and one of them, by and by, ran up to U. and J., and gave each of them a green apple, then they skipped upon the tombstones again, while, within the church, we heard them singing, sounding pretty much as I have heard it in our pine-built New England meeting-houses. Meantime the rector had detected the voices of these naughty little girls, and perhaps had caught glimpses of them through the windows; for, anon, out came the sexton, and, addressing himself to us, asked whether there had been any noise or disturbance in the churchyard. I should not have borne testimony against these little villagers, but S. was so anxious to exonerate our own children that she pointed out these poor little sinners to the sexton, who forthwith turned them out. He would have done the same to us, no doubt, had my coat been worse than it was; but, as the matter stood, his demeanor was rather apologetic than menacing, when he informed us that the rector had sent him. We stayed a little longer, looking at the graves, some of which were between the buttresses of the church and quite close to the wall, as if the sleepers anticipated greater comfort and security the nearer they could get to the sacred edifice. As we went out of the churchyard, we passed the aforesaid little girls, who were sitting behind the mound of a tomb, and busily babbling together. They called after us, expressing their discontent that we had betrayed them to the sexton, and saying that it was not they who made the noise. Going homeward, we went astray in a green lane, that terminated in the midst of a field, without outlet, so that we had to retrace a good many of our footsteps. Close to the wall of the church, beside the door, there was an ancient baptismal font of stone. In fact, it was a pile of roughly hewn stone steps, five or six feet high, with a block of stone at the summit, in which was a hollow about as big as a wash-bowl. It was full of rainwater. The church seems to be St. Andrew's Church, Lower Bebbington, built in 1100. September 1st.--To-day we leave the Rock Ferry Hotel, where we have spent nearly four weeks. It is a comfortable place, and we have had a good table and have been kindly treated. We occupied a large parlor, extending through the whole breadth of the house, with a bow-window, looking towards Liverpool, and adown the intervening river, and to Birkenhead, on the hither side. The river would be a pleasanter object, if it were blue and transparent, instead of such a mud-puddly hue; also, if it were always full to its brine; whereas it generally presents a margin, and sometimes a very broad one, of glistening mud, with here and there a small vessel aground on it. Nevertheless, the parlor-window has given us a pretty good idea of the nautical business of Liverpool; the constant objects being the little black steamers puffing unquietly along, sometimes to our own ferry, sometimes beyond it to Eastham, and sometimes towing a long string of boats from Runcorn or otherwhere up the river, laden with goods, and sometimes gallanting a tall ship in or out. Some of these ships lie for days together in the river, very majestic and stately objects, often with the flag of the stars and stripes waving over them. Now and then, after a gale at sea, a vessel comes in with her masts broken short off in the midst, and with marks of rough handling about the hull. Once a week comes a Cunard steamer, with its red funnel pipe whitened by the salt spray; and, firing off cannon to announce her arrival, she moors to a large iron buoy in the middle of the river, and a few hundred yards from the stone pier of our ferry. Immediately comes poring towards her a little mail-steamer, to take away her mail-bags and such of the passengers as choose to land; and for several hours afterwards the Cunard lies with the smoke and steam coming out of her, as if she were smoking her pipe after her toilsome passage across the Atlantic. Once a fortnight comes an American steamer of the Collins line; and then the Cunard salutes her with cannon, to which the Collins responds, and moors herself to another iron buoy, not far from the Cunard. When they go to sea, it is with similar salutes; the two vessels paying each other the more ceremonious respect, because they are inimical and jealous of each other. Besides these, there are other steamers of all sorts and sizes, for pleasure-excursions, for regular trips to Dublin, the Isle of Man, and elsewhither; and vessels which are stationary, as floating lights, but which seem to relieve one another at intervals; and small vessels, with sails looking as if made of tanned leather; and schooners, and yachts, and all manner of odd-looking craft, but none so odd as the Chinese junk. This junk lies by our own pier, and looks as if it were copied from some picture on an old teacup. Beyond all these objects we see the other side of the Mersey, with the delectably green fields opposite to us, while the shore becomes more and more thickly populated, until about two miles off we see the dense centre of the city, with the dome of the Custom House, and steeples and towers; and, close to the water, the spire of St. Nicholas; and above, and intermingled with the whole city scene, the duskiness of the coal-smoke gushing upward. Along the bank we perceive the warehouses of the Albert dock, and the Queen's tobacco warehouses, and other docks, and, nigher to us, a shipyard or two. In the evening all this sombre picture gradually darkens out of sight, and in its place appear only the lights of the city, kindling into a galaxy of earthly stars, for a long distance, up and down the shore; and, in one or two spots, the bright red gleam of a furnace, like the "red planet Mars"; and once in a while a bright, wandering beam gliding along the river, as a steamer cones or goes between us and Liverpool. ROCK PARK. September 2d.--We got into our new house in Rock Park yesterday. It is quite a good house, with three apartments, beside kitchen and pantry on the lower floor; and it is three stories high, with four good chambers in each story. It is a stone edifice, like almost all the English houses, and handsome in its design. The rent, without furniture, would probably have been one hundred pounds; furnished, it is one hundred and sixty pounds. Rock Park, as the locality is called, is private property, and is now nearly covered with residences for professional people, merchants, and others of the upper middling class; the houses being mostly built, I suppose, on speculation, and let to those who occupy them. It is the quietest place imaginable, there being a police station at the entrance, and the officer on duty allows no ragged or ill-looking person to pass. There being a toll, it precludes all unnecessary passage of carriages; and never were there more noiseless streets than those that give access to these pretty residences. On either side there is thick shrubbery, with glimpses through it of the ornamented portals, or into the trim gardens with smooth-shaven lawns, of no large extent, but still affording reasonable breathing-space. They are really an improvement on anything, save what the very rich can enjoy, in America. The former occupants of our house (Mrs. Campbell and family) having been fond of flowers, there are many rare varieties in the garden, and we are told that there is scarcely a month in the year when a flower will not be found there. The house is respectably, though not very elegantly, furnished. It was a dismal, rainy day yesterday, and we had a coal-fire in the sitting-room, beside which I sat last evening as twilight came on, and thought, rather sadly, how many times we have changed our home since we were married. In the first place, our three years at the Old Manse; then a brief residence at Salem, then at Boston, then two or three years at Salem again; then at Lenox, then at West Newton, and then again at Concord, where we imagined that we were fixed for life, but spent only a year. Then this farther flight to England, where we expect to spend four years, and afterwards another year or two in Italy, during all which time we shall have no real home. For, as I sat in this English house, with the chill, rainy English twilight brooding over the lawn, and a coal-fire to keep me comfortable on the first evening of September, and the picture of a stranger--the dead husband of Mrs. Campbell--gazing down at me from above the mantel-piece,--I felt that I never should be quite at home here. Nevertheless, the fire was very comfortable to look at, and the shape of the fireplace--an arch, with a deep cavity--was an improvement on the square, shallow opening of an American coal-grate. September 7th.--It appears by the annals of Liverpool, contained in Gore's Directory, that in 1076 there was a baronial castle built by Roger de Poictiers on the site of the present St. George's Church. It was taken down in 1721. The church now stands at one of the busiest points of the principal street of the city. The old Church of St. Nicholas, founded about the time of the Conquest, and more recently rebuilt, stood within a quarter of a mile of the castle. In 1150, Birkenhead Priory was founded on the Cheshire side of the Mersey. The monks used to ferry passengers across to Liverpool until 1282, when Woodside Ferry was established,--twopence for a horseman, and a farthing for a foot-passenger. Steam ferry-boats now cross to Birkenhead, Monk's Ferry, and Woodside every ten minutes; and I believe there are large hotels at all these places, and many of the business men of Liverpool have residences in them. In 1252 a tower was built by Sir John Stanley, which continued to be a castle of defence to the Stanley family for many hundred years, and was not finally taken down till 1820, when its site had become the present Water Street, in the densest commercial centre of the city. There appear to have been other baronial castles and residences in different parts of the city, as a hall in old Hall Street, built by Sir John de la More, on the site of which a counting-house now stands. This knightly family of De la More sometimes supplied mayors to the city, as did the family of the Earls of Derby. About 1582, Edward, Earl of Derby, maintained two hundred and fifty citizens of Liverpool, fed sixty aged persons twice a day, and provided twenty-seven hundred persons with meat, drink, and money every Good Friday. In 1644, Prince Rupert besieged the town for twenty-four days, and finally took it by storm. This was June 26th, and the Parliamentarians, under Sir John Meldrum, repossessed it the following October. In 1669 the Mayor of Liverpool kept an inn. In 1730 there was only one carriage in town, and no stage-coach came nearer than Warrington, the roads being impassable. In 1734 the Earl of Derby gave a great entertainment in the tower. In 1737 the Mayor was George Norton, a saddler, who frequently took, the chair with his leather apron on. His immediate predecessor seems to have been the Earl of Derby, who gave the above-mentioned entertainment during his mayoralty. Where George's Dock now is, there used to be a battery of fourteen eighteen-pounders for the defence of the town, and the old sport of bull-baiting was carried on in that vicinity, close to the Church of St. Nicholas. September 12th.--On Saturday a young man was found wandering about in West Derby, a suburb of Liverpool, in a state of insanity, and, being taken before a magistrate, he proved to be an American. As he seemed to be in a respectable station of life, the magistrate sent the master of the workhouse to me, in order to find out whether I would take the responsibility of his expenses, rather than have him put in the workhouse. My clerk went to investigate the matter, and brought me his papers. His name proves to be ---- ------, belonging to ------, twenty-five years of age. One of the papers was a passport from our legation in Naples; likewise there was a power of attorney from his mother (who seems to have been married a second time) to dispose of some property of hers abroad; a hotel bill, also, of some length, in which were various charges for wine; and, among other evidences of low funds, a pawnbroker's receipt for a watch, which he had pledged at five pounds. There was also a ticket for his passage to America, by the screw steamer Andes, which sailed on Wednesday last. The clerk found him to the last degree incommunicative; and nothing could be discovered from him but what the papers disclosed. There were about a dozen utterly unintelligible notes among the papers, written by himself since his derangement. I decided to put him into the insane hospital, where he now accordingly is, and to-morrow (by which time he may be in a more conversable mood) I mean to pay him a visit. The clerk tells me that there is now, and has been for three years, an American lady in the Liverpool almshouse, in a state of insanity. She is very accomplished, especially in music; but in all this time it has been impossible to find out who she is, or anything about her connections or previous life. She calls herself Jenny Lind, and as for any other name or identity she keeps her own secret. September 14th.--It appears that Mr. ------ (the insane young gentleman) being unable to pay his bill at the inn where he was latterly staying, the landlord had taken possession of his luggage, and satisfied himself in that way. My clerk, at my request, has taken his watch out of pawn. It proves to be not a very good one, though doubtless worth more than five pounds, for which it was pledged. The Governor of the Lunatic Asylum wrote me yesterday, stating that the patient was in want of a change of clothes, and that, according to his own account, he had left his luggage at the American Hotel. After office-hours, I took a cab, and set out with my clerk, to pay a visit to the Asylum, taking the American Hotel in our way. The American Hotel is a small house, not at all such a one as American travellers of any pretension would think of stopping at, but still very respectable, cleanly, and with a neat sitting-room, where the guests might assemble, after the American fashion. We asked for the landlady, and anon down she came, a round, rosy, comfortable-looking English dame of fifty or thereabouts. On being asked whether she knew a Mr. ------, she readily responded that he had been there, but, had left no luggage, having taken it away before paying his bill; and that she had suspected him of meaning to take his departure without paying her at all. Hereupon she had traced him to the hotel before mentioned, where she had found that he had stayed two nights,--but was then, I think, gone from thence. Afterwards she encountered him again, and, demanding her due, went with him to a pawnbroker's, where he pledged his watch and paid her. This was about the extent of the landlady's knowledge of the matter. I liked the woman very well, with her shrewd, good-humored, worldly, kindly disposition. Then we proceeded to the Lunatic Asylum, to which we were admitted by a porter at the gate. Within doors we found some neat and comely servant-women, one of whom showed us into a handsome parlor, and took my card to the Governor. There was a large bookcase, with a glass front, containing handsomely bound books, many of which, I observed, were of a religious character. In a few minutes the Governor came in, a middle-aged man, tall, and thin for an Englishman, kindly and agreeable enough in aspect, but not with the marked look of a man of force and ability. I should not judge from his conversation that he was an educated man, or that he had any scientific acquaintance with the subject of insanity. He said that Mr. ------ was still quite incommunicative, and not in a very promising state; that I had perhaps better defer seeing him for a few days; that it would not be safe, at present, to send him home to America without an attendant, and this was about all. But on returning home I learned from my wife, who had had a call from Mrs. Blodgett, that Mrs. Blodgett knew Mr. ------ and his mother, who has recently been remarried to a young husband, and is now somewhere in Italy. They seemed to have boarded at Mrs. Blodgett's house on their way to the Continent, and within a week or two, an acquaintance and pastor of Mr. ------, the Rev. Dr. ------, has sailed for America. If I could only have caught him, I could have transferred the care, expense, and responsibility of the patient to him. The Governor of the Asylum mentioned, by the way, that Mr. ------ describes himself as having been formerly a midshipman in the navy. I walked through the St. James's cemetery yesterday. It is a very pretty place, dug out of the rock, having formerly, I believe, been a stone-quarry. It is now a deep and spacious valley, with graves and monuments on its level and grassy floor, through which run gravel-paths, and where grows luxuriant shrubbery. On one of the steep sides of the valley, hewn out of the rock, are tombs, rising in tiers, to the height of fifty feet or more; some of them cut directly into the rock with arched portals, and others built with stone. On the other side the bank is of earth, and rises abruptly, quite covered with trees, and looking very pleasant with their green shades. It was a warm and sunny day, and the cemetery really had a most agreeable aspect. I saw several gravestones of Americans; but what struck me most was one line of an epitaph on an English woman, "Here rests in peace a virtuous wife." The statue of Huskisson stands in the midst of the valley, in a kind of mausoleum, with a door of plate-glass, through which you look at the dead statesman's effigy. September 22d.--. . . . Some days ago an American captain came to the office, and said he had shot one of his men, shortly after sailing from New Orleans, and while the ship was still in the river. As he described the event, he was in peril of his life from this man, who was an Irishman; and he fired his pistol only when the man was coming upon him, with a knife in one hand, and some other weapon of offence in the other, while he himself was struggling with one or two more of the crew. He was weak at the time, having just recovered from the yellow fever. The shots struck the man in the pit of the stomach, and he lived only about a quarter of an hour. No magistrate in England has a right to arrest or examine the captain, unless by a warrant from the Secretary of State, on the charge of murder. After his statement to me, the mother of the slain man went to the police officer, and accused him of killing her son. Two or three days since, moreover, two of the sailors came before me, and gave their account of the matter; and it looked very differently from that of the captain. According to them, the man had no idea of attacking the captain, and was so drunk that he could not keep himself upright without assistance. One of these two men was actually holding him up when the captain fired two barrels of his pistol, one immediately after the other, and lodged two balls in the pit of his stomach. The man sank down at once, saying, "Jack, I am killed,"--and died very shortly. Meanwhile the captain drove this man away, under threats of shooting him likewise. Both the seamen described the captain's conduct, both then and during the whole voyage, as outrageous, and I do not much doubt that it was so. They gave their evidence like men who wished to tell the truth, and were moved by no more than a natural indignation at the captain's wrong. I did not much like the captain from the first,--a hard, rough man, with little education, and nothing of the gentleman about him, a red face and a loud voice. He seemed a good deal excited, and talked fast and much about the event, but yet not as if it had sunk deeply into him. He observed that he "would not have had it happen for a thousand dollars," that being the amount of detriment which he conceives himself to suffer by the ineffaceable blood-stain on his hand. In my opinion it is little short of murder, if at all; but what would be murder on shore is almost a natural occurrence when done in such a hell on earth as one of these ships, in the first hours of the voyage. The men are then all drunk,-- some of them often in delirium tremens; and the captain feels no safety for his life except in making himself as terrible as a fiend. It is the universal testimony that there is a worse set of sailors in these short voyages between Liverpool and America than in any other trade whatever. There is no probability that the captain will ever be called to account for this deed. He gave, at the time, his own version of the affair in his log-book; and this was signed by the entire crew, with the exception of one man, who had hidden himself in the hold in terror of the captain. His mates will sustain his side of the question; and none of the sailors would be within reach of the American courts, even should they be sought for. October 1st.--On Thursday I went with Mr. Ticknor to Chester by railway. It is quite an indescribable old town, and I feel at last as if I had had a glimpse of old England. The wall encloses a large space within the town, but there are numerous houses and streets not included within its precincts. Some of the principal streets pass under the ancient gateways; and at the side there are flights of steps, giving access to the summit. Around the top of the whole wall, a circuit of about two miles, there runs a walk, well paved with flagstones, and broad enough for three persons to walk abreast. On one side--that towards the country--there is a parapet of red freestone three or four feet high. On the other side there are houses, rising up immediately from the wall, so that they seem a part of it. The height of it, I suppose, may be thirty or forty feet, and, in some parts, you look down from the parapet into orchards, where there are tall apple-trees, and men on the branches, gathering fruit, and women and children among the grass, filling bags or baskets. There are prospects of the surrounding country among the buildings outside the wall; at one point, a view of the river Dee, with an old bridge of arches. It is all very strange, very quaint, very curious to see how the town has overflowed its barrier, and how, like many institutions here, the ancient wall still exists, but is turned to quite another purpose than what it was meant for,--so far as it serves any purpose at all. There are three or four towers in the course of the circuit; the most interesting being one from the top of which King Charles the First is said to have seen the rout of his army by the Parliamentarians. We ascended the short flight of steps that led up into the tower, where an old man pointed out the site of the battle-field, now thickly studded with buildings, and told us what we had already learned from the guide-book. After this we went into the cathedral, which I will perhaps describe on some other occasion, when I shall have seen more of it, and to better advantage. The cloisters gave us the strongest impression of antiquity; the stone arches being so worn and blackened by time. Still an American must always have imagined a better cathedral than this. There were some immense windows of painted glass, but all modern. In the chapter-house we found a coal-fire burning in a grate, and a large heap of old books--the library of the cathedral--in a discreditable state of decay,--mildewed, rotten, neglected for years. The sexton told us that they were to be arranged and better ordered. Over the door, inside, hung two failed and tattered banners, being those of the Cheshire regiment. The most utterly indescribable feature of Chester is the Rows, which every traveller has attempted to describe. At the height of several feet above some of the oldest streets, a walk runs through the front of the houses, which project over it. Back of the walk there are shops; on the outer side is a space of two or three yards, where the shopmen place their tables, and stands, and show-cases; overhead, just high enough for persons to stand erect, a ceiling. At frequent intervals little narrow passages go winding in among the houses, which all along are closely conjoined, and seem to have no access or exit, except through the shops, or into these narrow passages, where you can touch each side with your elbows, and the top with your hand. We penetrated into one or two of them, and they smelt anciently and disagreeably. At one of the doors stood a pale-looking, but cheerful and good-natured woman, who told us that she had come to that house when first married, twenty-one years before, and had lived there ever since; and that she felt as if she had been buried through the best years of her life. She allowed us to peep into her kitchen and parlor,--small, dingy, dismal, but yet not wholly destitute of a home look. She said that she had seen two or three coffins in a day, during cholera times, carried out of that narrow passage into which her door opened. These avenues put me in mind of those which run through ant-hills, or those which a mole makes underground. This fashion of Rows does not appear to be going out; and, for aught I can see, it may last hundreds of years longer. When a house becomes so old as to be untenantable, it is rebuilt, and the new one is fashioned like the old, so far as regards the walk running through its front. Many of the shops are very good, and even elegant, and these Rows are the favorite places of business in Chester. Indeed, they have many advantages, the passengers being sheltered from the rain, and there being within the shops that dimmer light by which tradesmen like to exhibit their wares. A large proportion of the edifices in the Rows must be comparatively modern; but there are some very ancient ones, with oaken frames visible on the exterior. The Row, passing through these houses, is railed with oak, so old that it has turned black, and grown to be as hard as stone, which it might be mistaken for, if one did not see where names and initials have been cut into it with knives at some bygone period. Overhead, cross-beams project through the ceiling so low as almost to hit the head. On the front of one of these buildings was the inscription, "GOD'S PROVIDENCE IS MINE INHERITANCE," said to have been put there by the occupant of the house two hundred years ago, when the plague spared this one house only in the whole city. Not improbably the inscription has operated as a safeguard to prevent the demolition of the house hitherto; but a shopman of an adjacent dwelling told us that it was soon to be taken down. Here and there, about some of the streets through which the Rows do not run, we saw houses of very aged aspect, with steep, peaked gables. The front gable-end was supported on stone pillars, and the sidewalk passed beneath. Most of these old houses seemed to be taverns,--the Black Bear, the Green Dragon, and such names. We thought of dining at one of them, but, on inspection, they looked rather too dingy and close, and of questionable neatness. So we went to the Royal Hotel, where we probably fared just as badly at much more expense, and where there was a particularly gruff and crabbed old waiter, who, I suppose, thought himself free to display his surliness because we arrived at the hotel on foot. For my part, I love to see John Bull show himself. I must go again and again and again to Chester, for I suppose there is not a more curious place in the world. Mr. Ticknor, who has been staying at Rock Park with us since Tuesday, has steamed away in the Canada this morning. His departure seems to make me feel more abroad, more dissevered from my native country, than before. October 3d.--Saturday evening, at six, I went to dine with Mr. Aiken, a wealthy merchant here, to meet two of the sons of Burns. There was a party of ten or twelve, Mr. Aiken and his two daughters included. The two sons of Burns have both been in the Indian army, and have attained the ranks of Colonel and Major; one having spent thirty, and the other twenty-seven years in India. They are now old gentlemen of sixty and upwards, the elder with a gray head, the younger with a perfectly white one,--rather under than above the middle stature, and with a British roundness of figure,--plain, respectable, intelligent-looking persons, with quiet manners. I saw no resemblance in either of them to any portrait of their father. After the ladies left the table, I sat next to the Major, the younger of the two, and had a good deal of talk with him. He seemed a very kindly and social man, and was quite ready to speak about his father, nor was he at all reluctant to let it be seen how much he valued the glory of being descended from the poet. By and by, at Mr. Aiken's instance, he sang one of Burns's songs,--the one about "Annie" and the "rigs of barley." He sings in a perfectly simple style, so that it is little more than a recitative, and yet the effect is very good as to humor, sense, and pathos. After rejoining the ladies, he sang another, "A posie for my ain dear May," and likewise "A man's a man for a' that." My admiration of his father, and partly, perhaps, my being an American, gained me some favor with him, and he promised to give me what he considered the best engraving of Burns, and some other remembrance of him. The Major is that son of Burns who spent an evening at Abbotsford with Sir Walter Scott, when, as Lockhart writes, "the children sang the ballads of their sires." He spoke with vast indignation of a recent edition of his father's works by Robert Chambers, in which the latter appears to have wronged the poet by some misstatements.--I liked them both and they liked me, and asked me to go and see there at Cheltenham, where they reside. We broke up at about midnight. The members of this dinner-party were of the more liberal tone of thinking here in Liverpool. The Colonel and Major seemed to be of similar principles; and the eyes of the latter glowed, when he sang his father's noble verse, "The rank is but the guinea's stamp," etc. It would have been too pitiable if Burns had left a son who could not feel the spirit of that verse. October 8th.--Coning to my office, two or three mornings ago, I found Mrs. ------, the mother of Mr. ------, the insane young man of whom I had taken charge. She is a lady of fifty or thereabouts, and not very remarkable anyway, nor particularly lady-like. However, she was just come off a rapid journey, having travelled from Naples, with three small children, without taking rest, since my letter reached her. A son (this proved to be her new husband) of about twenty had come with her to the Consulate. She was, of course, infinitely grieved about the young man's insanity, and had two or three bursts of tears while we talked the matter over. She said he was the hope of her life,--the best, purest, most innocent child that ever was, and wholly free from every kind of vice. But it appears that he had a previous attack of insanity, lasting three months, about three years ago. After I had told her all I knew about him, including my personal observations at a visit a week or two since, we drove in a cab to the Asylum. It must have been a dismal moment to the poor lady, as we entered the gateway through a tall, prison-like wall. Being ushered into the parlor, the Governor soon appeared, and informed us that Mr. ------ had had a relapse within a few days, and was not now so well as when I saw him. He complains of unjust confinement, and seems to consider himself, if I rightly understand, under persecution for political reasons. The Governor, however, proposed to call him down, and I took my leave, feeling that it would be indelicate to be present at his first interview with his mother. So here ended my guardianship of the poor young fellow. In the afternoon I called at the Waterloo Hotel, where Mrs. ------ was staying, and found her in the coffee-room with the children. She had determined to take a lodging in the vicinity of the Asylum, and was going to remove thither as soon as the children had had something to eat. They seemed to be pleasant and well-behaved children, and impressed me more favorably than the mother, whom I suspect to be rather a foolish woman, although her present grief makes her appear in a more respectable light than at other times. She seemed anxious to impress me with the respectability and distinction of her connections in America, and I had observed the same tendency in the insane patient, at my interview with him. However, she has undoubtedly a mother's love for this poor shatterbrain, and this may weigh against the folly of her marrying an incongruously youthful second husband, and many other follies. This was day before yesterday, and I have heard nothing of her since. The same day I had applications for assistance in two other domestic affairs; one from an Irishman, naturalized in America, who wished me to get him a passage thither, and to take charge of his wife and family here, at my own private expense, until he could remit funds to carry them across. Another was from an Irishman, who had a power of attorney from a countrywoman of his in America, to find and take charge of an infant whom she had left in the Liverpool work-house, two years ago. I have a great mind to keep a list of all the business I am consulted about and employed in. It would be very curious. Among other things, all penniless Americans, or pretenders to Americanism, look upon me as their banker; and I could ruin myself any week, if I had not laid down a rule to consider every applicant for assistance an impostor until he prove himself a true and responsible man,--which it is very difficult to do. Yesterday there limped in a very respectable-looking old man, who described himself as a citizen of Baltimore, who had been on a trip to England and elsewhere, and, being detained longer than he expected, and having had an attack of rheumatism, was now short of funds to pay his passage home, and hoped that I would supply the deficiency. He had quite a plain, homely, though respectable manner, and, for aught I know, was the very honestest man alive; but as he could produce no kind of proof of his character and responsibility, I very quietly explained the impossibility of my helping him. I advised him to try to obtain a passage on board of some Baltimore ship, the master of which might be acquainted with him, or, at all events, take his word for payment, after arrival. This he seemed inclined to do, and took his leave. There was a decided aspect of simplicity about this old man, and yet I rather judge him to be an impostor. It is easy enough to refuse money to strangers and unknown people, or whenever there may be any question about identity; but it will not be so easy when I am asked for money by persons whom I know, but do not like to trust. They shall meet the eternal "No," however. October 13th.--In Ormerod's history of Chester it is mentioned that Randal, Earl of Chester, having made an inroad into Wales about 1225, the Welshmen gathered in mass against him, and drove him into the castle of Nothelert in Flintshire. The Earl sent for succor to the Constable of Chester, Roger Lacy, surnamed "Hell," on account of his fierceness. It was then fair-time at Chester, and the constable collected a miscellaneous rabble of fiddlers, players, cobblers, tailors, and all manner of debauched people, and led them to the relief of the Earl. At sight of this strange army the Welshmen fled; and forever after the Earl assigned to the constable of Chester power over all fiddlers, shoemakers, etc., within the bounds of Cheshire. The constable retained for himself and his heirs the control of the shoemakers; and made over to his own steward, Dutton, that of the fiddlers and players, and for many hundreds of years afterwards the Duttons of Dutton retained the power. On midsummer-day, they used to ride through Chester, attended by all the minstrels playing on their several instruments, to the Church of St. John, and there renew their licenses. It is a good theme for a legend. Sir Peter Leycester, writing in Charles the Second's time, copies the Latin deed from the constable to Dutton; rightly translated, it seems to mean "the magisterial power over all the lewd people . . . . in the whole of Cheshire," but the custom grew into what is above stated. In the time of Henry VII., the Duttons claimed, by prescriptive right, that the Cheshire minstrels should deliver them, at the feast of St. John, four bottles of wine and a lance, and that each separate minstrel should pay fourpence halfpenny. . . . Another account says Ralph Dutton was the constable's son-in-law, and "a lusty youth." October 19th.--Coming to the ferry this morning a few minutes before the boat arrived from town, I went into the ferry-house, a small stone edifice, and found there an Irishman, his wife and three children, the oldest eight or nine years old, and all girls. There was a good fire burning in the room, and the family was clustered round it, apparently enjoying the warmth very much; but when I went in both husband and wife very hospitably asked me to come to the fire, although there was not more than room at it for their own party. I declined on the plea that I was warm enough, and then the woman said that they were very cold, having been long on the road. The man was gray-haired and gray-bearded, clad in an old drab overcoat, and laden with a huge bag, which seemed to contain bedclothing or something of the kind. The woman was pale, with a thin, anxious, wrinkled face, but with a good and kind expression. The children were quite pretty, with delicate faces, and a look of patience and endurance in them, but yet as if they had suffered as little as they possibly could. The two elder were cuddled up close to the father, the youngest, about four years old, sat in its mother's lap, and she had taken off its small shoes and stockings, and was warming its feet at the fire. Their little voices had a sweet and kindly sound as they talked in low tones to their parents and one another. They all looked very shabby, and yet had a decency about them; and it was touching to see how they made themselves at home at this casual fireside, and got all the comfort they could out of the circumstances. By and by two or three market-women came in and looked pleasantly at them, and said a word or two to the children. They did not beg of me, as I supposed they would; but after looking at them awhile, I pulled out a piece of silver, and handed it to one of the little girls. She took it very readily, as if she partly expected it, and then the father and mother thanked me, and said they had been travelling a long distance, and had nothing to subsist upon, except what they picked up on the road. They found it impossible to live in England, and were now on their way to Liverpool, hoping to get a passage back to Ireland, where, I suppose, extreme poverty is rather better off than here. I heard the little girl say that she should buy bread with the money. There is not much that can be caught in the description of this scene; but it made me understand, better than before, how poor people feel, wandering about in such destitute circumstances, and how they suffer; and yet how they have a life not quite miserable, after all, and how family love goes along with them. Soon the boat arrived at the pier, and we all went on board; and as I sat in the cabin, looking up through a broken pane in the skylight, I saw the woman's thin face, with its anxious, motherly aspect; and the youngest child in her arms, shrinking from the chill wind, but yet not impatiently; and the eldest of the girls standing close by with her expression of childish endurance, but yet so bright and intelligent that it would evidently take but a few days to make a happy and playful child of her. I got into the interior of this poor family, and understand, through sympathy, more of them than I can tell. I am getting to possess some of the English indifference as to beggars and poor people; but still, whenever I come face to face with them, and have any intercourse, it seems as if they ought to be the better for me. I wish, instead of sixpence, I had given the poor family ten shillings, and denied it to a begging subscriptionist, who has just fleeced me to that amount. How silly a man feels in this latter predicament! I have had a good many visitors at the Consulate from the United States within a short time,--among others, Mr. D. D. Barnard, our late minister to Berlin, returning homeward to-day by the Arctic; and Mr. Sickles, Secretary of Legation to London, a fine-looking, intelligent, gentlemanly young man. . . . With him came Judge Douglas, the chosen man of Young America. He is very short, extremely short, but has an uncommonly good head, and uncommon dignity without seeming to aim at it, being free and simple in manners. I judge him to be a very able man, with the Western sociability and free-fellowship. Generally I see no reason to be ashamed of my countrymen who come out here in public position, or otherwise assuming the rank of gentlemen. October 20th.--One sees incidents in the streets here, occasionally, which could not be seen in an American city. For instance, a week or two since, I was passing a quiet-looking, elderly gentleman, when, all of a sudden, without any apparent provocation, he uplifted his stick, and struck a black-gowned boy a smart blow on the shoulders. The boy looked at him wofully and resentfully, but said nothing, nor can I imagine why the thing was done. In Tythebarne Street to-day I saw a woman suddenly assault a man, clutch at his hair, and cuff him about the ears. The man, who was of decent aspect enough, immediately took to his heels, full speed, and the woman ran after him, and, as far as I could discern the pair, the chase continued. October 22d.--At a dinner-party at Mr. Holland's last evening, a gentleman, in instance of Charles Dickens's unweariability, said that during some theatrical performances in Liverpool he acted in play and farce, spent the rest of the night making speeches, feasting, and drinking at table, and ended at seven o'clock in the morning by jumping leap-frog over the backs of the whole company. In Moore's diary he mentions a beautiful Guernsey lily having been given to his wife, and says that the flower was originally from Guernsey. A ship from there had been wrecked on the coast of Japan, having many of the lilies on board, and the next year the flowers appeared,--springing up, I suppose, on the wave-beaten strand. Wishing to send a letter to a dead man, who may be supposed to have gone to Tophet,--throw it into the fire. Sir Arthur Aston had his brains beaten out with his own wooden leg, at the storming of Tredagh in Ireland by Cromwell. In the county of Cheshire, many centuries ago, there lived a half-idiot, named Nixon, who had the gift of prophecy, and made many predictions about places, families, and important public events, since fulfilled. He seems to have fallen into fits of insensibility previous to uttering his prophecies. The family of Mainwaring (pronounced Mannering), of Bromborough, had an ass's head for a crest. "Richard Dawson, being sick of the plague, and perceiving he must die, rose out of his bed and made his grave, and caused his nephew to cast straw into the grave, which was not far from the house, and went and laid him down in the said grave, and caused clothes to be laid upon him, and so departed out of this world. This he did because he was a strong man, and heavier than his said nephew and a serving-wench were able to bury. He died about the 24th of August. Thus was I credibly told he did, 1625." This was in the township of Malpas, recorded in the parish register. At Bickley Hall, taken down a few years ago, used to be shown the room where the body of the Earl of Leicester was laid for a whole twelvemonth,--1659 to 1660,--he having been kept unburied all that time, owing to a dispute which of his heirs should pay his funeral expenses. November 5th.--We all, together with Mr. Squarey, went to Chester last Sunday, and attended the cathedral service. A great deal of ceremony, and not unimposing, but rather tedious before it was finished,--occupying two hours or more. The Bishop was present, but did nothing except to pronounce the benediction. In America the sermon is the principal thing; but here all this magnificent ceremonial of prayer and chanted responses and psalms and anthems was the setting to a short, meagre discourse, which would not have been considered of any account among the elaborate intellectual efforts of New England ministers. While this was going on, the light came through the stained glass windows and fell upon the congregation, tingeing them with crimson. After service we wandered about the aisles, and looked at the tombs and monuments,--the oldest of which was that of some nameless abbot, with a staff and mitre half obliterated from his tomb, which was under a shallow arch on one side of the cathedral. There were also marbles on the walls, and lettered stones in the pavement under our feet; but chiefly, if not entirely, of modern date. We lunched at the Royal Hotel, and then walked round the city walls, also crossing the bridge of one great arch over the Dee, and penetrating as far into Wales as the entrance of the Marquis of Westminster's Park at Eaton. It was, I think, the most lovely day as regards weather that I have seen in England. I passed, to-day, a man chanting a ballad in the street about a recent murder, in a voice that had innumerable cracks in it, and was most lugubrious. The other day I saw a man who was reading in a loud voice what seemed to be an account of the late riots and loss of life in Wigan. He walked slowly along the street as he read, surrounded by a small crowd of men, women, and children; and close by his elbow stalked a policeman, as if guarding against a disturbance. November 14th.--There is a heavy dun fog on the river and over the city to-day, the very gloomiest atmosphere that ever I was acquainted with. On the river the steamboats strike gongs or ring bells to give warning of their approach. There are lamps burning in the counting-rooms and lobbies of the warehouses, and they gleam distinctly through the windows. The other day, at the entrance of the market-house, I saw a woman sitting in a small hand-wagon, apparently for the purpose of receiving alms. There was no attendant at hand; but I noticed that one or two persons who passed by seemed to inquire whether she wished her wagon to be moved. Perhaps this is her mode of making progress about the city, by the voluntary aid of boys and other people who help to drag her. There is something in this--I don't yet well know what--that has impressed me, as if I could make a romance out of the idea of a woman living in this manner a public life, and moving about by such means. November 29th.--Mr. H. A. B. told me of his friend Mr. ------ (who was formerly attache to the British Legation at Washington, and whom I saw at Concord), that his father, a clergyman, married a second wife. After the marriage, the noise of a coffin being nightly carried down the stairs was heard in the parsonage. It could be distinguished when the coffin reached a certain broad lauding and rested on it. Finally, his father had to remove to another residence. Besides this, Mr. ------ had had another ghostly experience,--having seen a dim apparition of an uncle at the precise instant when the latter died in a distant place. The attache is a credible and honorable fellow, and talks of these matters as if he positively believed them. But Ghostland lies beyond the jurisdiction of veracity. In a garden near Chester, in taking down a summer-house, a tomb was discovered beneath it, with a Latin inscription to the memory of an old doctor of medicine, William Bentley, who had owned the place long ago, and died in 1680. And his dust and bones had lain beneath all the merry times in the summer-house. December 1st.--It is curious to observe how many methods people put in practice here to pick up a halfpenny. Yesterday I saw a man standing bareheaded and barelegged in the mud and misty weather, playing on a fife, in hopes to get a circle of auditors. Nobody, however, seemed to take any notice. Very often a whole band of musicians will strike up,-- passing a hat round after playing a tune or two. On board the ferry, until the coldest weather began, there were always some wretched musicians, with an old fiddle, an old clarinet, and an old verdigrised brass bugle, performing during the passage, and, as the boat neared the shore, sending round one of their number to gather contributions in the hollow of the brass bugle. They were a very shabby set, and must have made a very scanty living at best. Sometimes it was a boy with an accordion, and his sister, a smart little girl, with a timbrel,--which, being so shattered that she could not play on it, she used only to collect halfpence in. Ballad-singers, or rather chanters or croakers, are often to be met with in the streets, but hand-organ players are not more frequent than in our cities. I still observe little girls and other children barelegged and barefooted on the wet sidewalks. There certainly never was anything so dismal as the November weather has been; never any real sunshine; almost always a mist; sometimes a dense fog, like slightly rarefied wool, pervading the atmosphere. An epitaph on a person buried on a hillside in Cheshire, together with some others, supposed to have died of the plague, and therefore not admitted into the churchyards:-- "Think it not strange our bones ly here, Thine may ly thou knowst not where." Elizabeth Hampson. These graves were near the remains of two rude stone crosses, the purpose of which was not certainly known, although they were supposed to be boundary marks. Probably, as the plague-corpses were debarred from sanctified ground, the vicinity of these crosses was chosen as having a sort of sanctity. "Bang beggar,"--an old Cheshire term for a parish beadle. Hawthorne Hall, Cheshire, Macclesfield Hundred, Parish of Wilmslow, and within the hamlet of Morley. It was vested at an early period in the Lathoms of Irlam, Lancaster County, and passed through the Leighs to the Pages of Earlshaw. Thomas Leigh Page sold it to Mr. Ralph Bower of Wilmslow, whose children owned it in 1817. The Leighs built a chancel in the church of Wilmslow, where some of them are buried, their arms painted in the windows. The hall is an "ancient, respectable mansion of brick." December 2d.--Yesterday, a chill, misty December day, yet I saw a woman barefooted in the street, not to speak of children. Cold and uncertain as the weather is, there is still a great deal of small trade carried on in the open air. Women and men sit in the streets with a stock of combs and such small things to sell, the women knitting as if they sat by a fireside. Cheap crockery is laid out in the street, so far out that without any great deviation from the regular carriage-track a wheel might pass straight through it. Stalls of apples are innumerable, but the apples are not fit for a pig. In some streets herrings are very abundant, laid out on boards. Coals seem to be for sale by the wheelbarrowful. Here and there you see children with some small article for sale,--as, for instance, a girl with two linen caps. A somewhat overladen cart of coal was passing along and some small quantity of the coal fell off; no sooner had the wheels passed than several women and children gathered to the spot, like hens and chickens round a handful of corn, and picked it up in their aprons. We have nothing similar to these street-women in our country. December 10th.--I don't know any place that brings all classes into contiguity on equal ground so completely as the waiting-room at Rock Ferry on these frosty days. The room is not more than eight feet, square, with walls of stone, and wooden benches ranged round them, and an open stove in one corner, generally well furnished with coal. It is almost always crowded, and I rather suspect that many persons who have no fireside elsewhere creep in here and spend the most comfortable part of their day. This morning, when I looked into the room, there were one or two gentlemen and other respectable persons; but in the best place, close to the fire, and crouching almost into it, was an elderly beggar, with the raggedest of overcoats, two great rents in the shoulders of it disclosing the dingy lining, all bepatched with various stuff covered with dirt, and on his shoes and trousers the mud of an interminable pilgrimage. Owing to the posture in which he sat, I could not see his face, but only the battered crown and rim of the very shabbiest hat that ever was worn. Regardless of the presence of women (which, indeed, Englishmen seldom do regard when they wish to smoke), he was smoking a pipe of vile tobacco; but, after all, this was fortunate, because the man himself was not personally fragrant. He was terribly squalid,--terribly; and when I had a glimpse of his face, it well befitted the rest of his development,-- grizzled, wrinkled, weather-beaten, yet sallow, and down-looking, with a watchful kind of eye turning upon everybody and everything, meeting the glances of other people rather boldly, yet soon shrinking away; a long thin nose, a gray beard of a week's growth; hair not much mixed with gray, but rusty and lifeless;--a miserable object; but it was curious to see how he was not ashamed of himself, but seemed to feel that he was one of the estates of the kingdom, and had as much right to live as other men. He did just as he pleased, took the best place by the fire, nor would have cared though a nobleman were forced to stand aside for him. When the steamer's bell rang, he shouldered a large and heavy pack, like a pilgrim with his burden of sin, but certainly journeying to hell instead of heaven. On board he looked round for the best position, at first stationing himself near the boiler-pipe; but, finding the deck damp underfoot, he went to the cabin-door, and took his stand on the stairs, protected from the wind, but very incommodiously placed for those who wished to pass. All this was done without any bravado or forced impudence, but in the most quiet way, merely because he was seeking his own comfort, and considered that he had a right to seek it. It was an Englishman's spirit; but in our country, I imagine, a beggar considers himself a kind of outlaw, and would hardly assume the privileges of a man in any place of public resort. Here beggary is a system, and beggars are a numerous class, and make themselves, in a certain way, respected as such. Nobody evinced the slightest disapprobation of the man's proceedings. In America, I think, we should see many aristocratic airs on such provocation, and probably the ferry people would there have rudely thrust the beggar aside; giving him a shilling, however, which no Englishman would ever think of doing. There would also have been a great deal of fun made of his squalid and ragged figure; whereas nobody smiled at him this morning, nor in any way showed the slightest disrespect. This is good; but it is the result of a state of things by no means good. For many days there has been a great deal of fog on the river, and the boats have groped their way along, continually striking their bells, while, on all sides, there are responses of bell and gong; and the vessels at anchor look shadow-like as we glide past them, and the master of one steamer shouts a warning to the master of another which he meets. The Englishmen, who hate to run any risk without an equivalent object, show a good deal of caution and timidity on these foggy days. December 13th.--Chill, frosty weather; such an atmosphere as forebodes snow in New England, and there has been a little here. Yet I saw a barefooted young woman yesterday. The feet of these poor creatures have exactly the red complexion of their hands, acquired by constant exposure to the cold air. At the ferry-room, this morning, was a small, thin, anxious-looking woman, with a bundle, seeming in rather poor circumstances, but decently dressed, and eying other women, I thought, with an expression of slight ill-will and distrust; also, an elderly, stout, gray-haired woman, of respectable aspect, and two young lady-like persons, quite pretty, one of whom was reading a shilling volume of James's "Arabella Stuart." They talked to one another with that up-and-down intonation which English ladies practise, and which strikes an unaccustomed ear as rather affected, especially in women of size and mass. It is very different from an American lady's mode of talking: there is the difference between color and no color; the tone variegates it. One of these young ladies spoke to me, making some remark about the weather,--the first instance I have met with of a gentlewoman's speaking to an unintroduced gentleman. Besides these, a middle-aged man of the lower class, and also a gentleman's out-door servant, clad in a drab great-coat, corduroy breeches, and drab cloth gaiters buttoned from the knee to the ankle. He complained to the other man of the cold weather; said that a glass of whiskey, every half-hour, would keep a man comfortable; and, accidentally hitting his coarse foot against one of the young lady's feet, said, "Beg pardon, ma'am,"--which she acknowledged with a slight movement of the head. Somehow or other, different classes seem to encounter one another in an easier manner than with us; the shock is less palpable. I suppose the reason is that the distinctions are real, and therefore need not be continually asserted. Nervous and excitable persons need to talk a great deal, by way of letting off their steam. On board the Rock Ferry steamer, a gentleman coming into the cabin, a voice addresses him from a dark corner, "How do you do, sir?"--"Speak again!" says the gentleman. No answer from the dark corner; and the gentleman repeats, "Speak again!" The speaker now comes out of the dark corner, and sits down in a place where he can be seen. "Ah!" cries the gentleman, "very well, I thank you. How do you do? I did not recognize your voice." Observable, the English caution, shown in the gentleman's not vouchsafing to say, "Very well, thank you!" till he knew his man. What was the after life of the young man, whom Jesus, looking on, "loved," and bade him sell all that he had, and give to the poor, and take up his cross and follow him? Something very deep and beautiful might be made out of this. December 31st.--Among the beggars of Liverpool, the hardest to encounter is a man without any legs, and, if I mistake not, likewise deficient in arms. You see him before you all at once, as if he had sprouted halfway out of the earth, and would sink down and reappear in some other place the moment he has done with you. His countenance is large, fresh, and very intelligent; but his great power lies in his fixed gaze, which is inconceivably difficult to bear. He never once removes his eye from you till you are quite past his range; and you feel it all the same, although you do not meet his glance. He is perfectly respectful; but the intentness and directness of his silent appeal is far worse than any impudence. In fact, it is the very flower of impudence. I would rather go a mile about than pass before his battery. I feel wronged by him, and yet unutterably ashamed. There must be great force in the man to produce such an effect. There is nothing of the customary squalidness of beggary about him, but remarkable trimness and cleanliness. A girl of twenty or thereabouts, who vagabondizes about the city on her hands and knees, possesses, to a considerable degree, the same characteristics. I think they hit their victims the more effectually from being below the common level of vision. January 3d, 1854.--Night before last there was a fall of snow, about three or four inches, and, following it, a pretty hard frost. On the river, the vessels at anchor showed the snow along their yards, and on every ledge where it could lie. A blue sky and sunshine overhead, and apparently a clear atmosphere close at hand; but in the distance a mistiness became perceptible, obscuring the shores of the river, and making the vessels look dim and uncertain. The steamers were ploughing along, smoking their pipes through the frosty air. On the landing stage and in the streets, hard-trodden snow, looking more like my New England Home than anything I have yet seen. Last night the thermometer fell as low as 13 degrees, nor probably is it above 20 degrees to-day. No such frost has been known in England these forty years! and Mr. Wilding tells me that he never saw so much snow before. January 6th.--I saw, yesterday, stopping at a cabinet-maker's shop in Church Street, a coach with four beautiful white horses, and a postilion on each near-horse; behind, in the dicky, a footman; and on the box a coachman, all dressed in livery. The coach-panel bore a coat-of-arms with a coronet, and I presume it must have been the equipage of the Earl of Derby. A crowd of people stood round, gazing at the coach and horses; and when any of them spoke, it was in a lower tone than usual. I doubt not they all had a kind of enjoyment of the spectacle, for these English are strangely proud of having a class above them. Every Englishman runs to "The Times" with his little grievance, as a child runs to his mother. I was sent for to the police court the other morning, in the case of an American sailor accused of robbing a shipmate at sea. A large room, with a great coal-fire burning on one side, and above it the portrait of Mr. Rushton, deceased, a magistrate of many years' continuance. A long table, with chairs, and a witness-box. One of the borough magistrates, a merchant of the city, sat at the head of the table, with paper and pen and ink before him; but the real judge was the clerk of the court, whose professional knowledge and experience governed all the proceedings. In the short time while I was waiting, two cases were tried, in the first of which the prisoner was discharged. The second case was of a woman,--a thin, sallow, hard-looking, careworn, rather young woman,--for stealing a pair of slippers out of a shop: The trial occupied five minutes or less, and she was sentenced to twenty-one days' imprisonment,--whereupon, without speaking, she looked up wildly first into one policeman's face, then into another's, at the same time wringing her hands with no theatric gesture, but because her torment took this outward shape,--and was led away. The Yankee sailor was then brought up,--an intelligent, but ruffian-like fellow,--and as the case was out of the jurisdiction of the English magistrates, and as it was not worth while to get him sent over to America for trial, he was forthwith discharged. He stole a comforter. If mankind were all intellect, they would be continually changing, so that one age would be entirely unlike another. The great conservative is the heart, which remains the same in all ages; so that commonplaces of a thousand years' standing are as effective as ever. Monday, February 20th.--At the police court on Saturday, I attended the case of the second mate and four seamen of the John and Albert, for assaulting, beating, and stabbing the chief mate. The chief mate has been in the hospital ever since the assault, and was brought into the court to-day to give evidence,--a man of thirty, black hair, black eyes, a dark complexion, disagreeable expression; sallow, emaciated, feeble, apparently in pain, one arm disabled. He sat bent and drawn upward, and had evidently been severely hurt, and was not yet fit to be out of bed. He had some brandy-and-water to enable him to sustain himself. He gave his evidence very clearly, beginning (sailor-like) with telling in what quarter the wind was at the time of the assault, and which sail was taken in. His testimony bore on one man only, at whom he cast a vindictive look; but I think he told the truth as far as he knew and remembered it. Of the prisoners the second mate was a mere youth, with long sandy hair, and an intelligent and not unprepossessing face, dressed as neatly as a three or four weeks' captive, with small, or no means, could well allow, in a frock-coat, and with clean linen,--the only linen or cotton shirt in the company. The other four were rude, brutish sailors, in flannel or red-baize shirts. Three of them appeared to give themselves little concern; but the fourth, a red-haired and red-bearded man,--Paraman, by name,--evidently felt the pressure of the case upon himself. He was the one whom the mate swore to have given him the first blow; and there was other evidence of his having been stabbed with a knife. The captain of the ship, the pilot, the cook, and the steward, all gave their evidence; and the general bearing of it was, that the chief mate had a devilish temper, and had misused the second mate and crew,--that the four seamen had attacked him, and that Paraman had stabbed him; while all but the steward concurred in saying that the second mate had taken no part in the affray. The steward, however, swore to having seen him strike the chief mate with a wooden marlinspike, which was broken by the blow. The magistrate dismissed all but Paraman, whom I am to send to America for trial. In my opinion the chief mate got pretty nearly what he deserved, under the code of natural justice. While business was going forward, the magistrate, Mr. Mansfield, talked about a fancy ball at which he had been present the evening before, and of other matters grave and gay. It was very informal; we sat at the table, or stood with our backs to the fire; policemen came and went; witnesses were sworn on the greasiest copy of the Gospels I ever saw, polluted by hundreds and thousands of perjured kisses; and for hours the prisoners were kept standing at the foot of the table, interested to the full extent of their capacity, while all others were indifferent. At the close of the case, the police officers and witnesses applied to me about their expenses. Yesterday I took a walk with my wife and two children to Bebbington Church. A beautifully sunny morning. My wife and U. attended church, J. and I continued our walk. When we were at a little distance from the church, the bells suddenly chimed out with a most cheerful sound, and sunny as the morning. It is a pity we have no chimes of bells, to give the churchward summons, at home. People were standing about the ancient church-porch and among the tombstones. In the course of our walk, we passed many old thatched cottages, built of stone, and with what looked like a cow-house or pigsty at one end, making part of the cottage; also an old stone farm-house, which may have been a residence of gentility in its day. We passed, too, a small Methodist chapel, making one of a row of low brick edifices. There was a sound of prayer within. I never saw a more unbeautiful place of worship; and it had not even a separate existence for itself, the adjoining tenement being an alehouse. The grass along the wayside was green, with a few daisies. There was green holly in the hedges, and we passed through a wood, up some of the tree-trunks of which ran clustering ivy. February 23d.--There came to see me the other day a young gentleman with a mustache and a blue cloak, who announced himself as William Allingham, and handed me a copy of his poems, a thin volume, with paper covers, published by Routledge. I thought I remembered hearing his name, but had never seen any of his works. His face was intelligent, dark, pleasing, and not at all John-Bullish. He said that he had been employed in the Customs in Ireland, and was now going to London to live by literature,-- to be connected with some newspaper, I imagine. He had been in London before, and was acquainted with some of the principal literary people,-- among others, Tennyson and Carlyle. He seemed to have been on rather intimate terms with Tennyson. We talked awhile in my dingy and dusky Consulate, and he then took leave. His manners are good, and he appears to possess independence of mind. Yesterday I saw a British regiment march down to George's Pier, to embark in the Niagara for Malta. The troops had nothing very remarkable about them; but the thousands of ragged and squalid wretches, who thronged the pier and streets to gaze on them, were what I had not seen before in such masses. This was the first populace I have beheld; for even the Irish, on the other side of the water, acquire a respectability of aspect. John Bull is going with his whole heart into the Turkish war. He is very foolish. Whatever the Czar may propose to himself, it is for the interest of democracy that he should not be easily put down. The regiment, on its way to embark, carried the Queen's colors, and, side by side with them, the banner of the 28th,--yellow, with the names of the Peninsular and other battles in which it had been engaged inscribed on it in a double column. It is a very distinguished regiment; and Mr. Henry Bright mentioned as one of its distinctions, that Washington had formerly been an officer in it. I never heard of this. February 27th.--We walked to Woodside in the pleasant forenoon, and thence crossed to Liverpool. On our way to Woodside, we saw the remains of the old Birkenhead Priory, built of the common red freestone, much time-worn, with ivy creeping over it, and birds evidently at hone in its old crevices. These ruins are pretty extensive, and seem to be the remains of a quadrangle. A handsome modern church, likewise of the same red freestone, has been built on part of the site occupied by the Priory; and the organ was sounding within, while we walked about the premises. On some of the ancient arches, there were grotesquely carved stone faces. The old walls have been sufficiently restored to make them secure, without destroying their venerable aspect. It is a very interesting spot; and so much the more so because a modern town, with its brick and stone houses, its flags and pavements, has sprung up about the ruins, which were new a thousand years ago. The station of the Chester railway is within a hundred yards. Formerly the monks of this Priory kept the only ferry that then existed on the Mersey. At a dinner at Mr. Bramley Moore's a little while ago, we had a prairie-hen from the West of America. It was a very delicate bird, and a gentleman carved it most skilfully to a dozen guests, and had still a second slice to offer to them. Aboard the ferry-boat yesterday, there was a laboring man eating oysters. He took them one by one from his pocket in interminable succession, opened them with his jack-knife, swallowed each one, threw the shell overboard, and then sought for another. Having concluded his meal, he took out a clay tobacco-pipe, filled it, lighted it with a match, and smoked it,--all this, while the other passengers were looking at him, and with a perfect coolness and independence, such as no single man can ever feel in America. Here a man does not seem to consider what other people will think of his conduct, but only whether it suits his own convenience to do so and so. It may be the better way. A French military man, a veteran of all Napoleon's wars, is now living, with a false leg and arm, both movable by springs, false teeth, a false eye, a silver nose with a flesh-colored covering, and a silver plate replacing part of the skull. He has the cross of the Legion of Honor. March 18th.--On Saturday I went with Mr. B---- to the Dingle, a pleasant domain on the banks of the Mersey almost opposite to Rock Ferry. Walking home, we looked into Mr. Thorn's Unitarian Chapel, Mr. B----'s family's place of worship. There is a little graveyard connected with the chapel, a most uninviting and unpicturesque square of ground, perhaps thirty or forty yards across, in the midst of back fronts of city buildings. About half the space was occupied by flat tombstones, level with the ground, the remainder being yet vacant. Nevertheless, there were perhaps more names of men generally known to the world on these few tombstones than in any other churchyard in Liverpool,--Roscoe, Blanco White, and the Rev. William Enfield, whose name has a classical sound in my ears, because, when a little boy, I used to read his "Speaker" at school. In the vestry of the chapel there were many books, chiefly old theological works, in ancient print and binding, much mildewed and injured by the damp. The body of the chapel is neat, but plain, and, being not very large, has a kind of social and family aspect, as if the clergyman and his people must needs have intimate relations among themselves. The Unitarian sect in Liverpool have, as a body, great wealth and respectability. Yesterday I walked with my wife and children to the brow of a hill, overlooking Birkenhead and Tranmere, and commanding a fine view of the river, and Liverpool beyond. All round about new and neat residences for city people are springing up, with fine names,--Eldon Terrace, Rose Cottage, Belvoir Villa, etc., etc., with little patches of ornamented garden or lawn in front, and heaps of curious rock-work, with which the English are ridiculously fond of adorning their front yards. I rather think the middling classes--meaning shopkeepers, and other respectabilities of that level--are better lodged here than in America; and, what I did not expect, the houses are a great deal newer than in our new country! Of course, this can only be the case in places circumstanced like Liverpool and its suburbs. But, scattered among these modern villas, there are old stone cottages of the rudest structure, and doubtless hundreds of years old, with thatched roofs, into which the grass has rooted itself, and now looks verdant. These cottages are in themselves as ugly as possible, resembling a large kind of pigsty; but often, by dint of the verdure on their thatch and the shrubbery clustering about them, they look picturesque. The old-fashioned flowers in the gardens of New England--blue-bells, crocuses, primroses, foxglove, and many others--appear to be wild flowers here on English soil. There is something very touching and pretty in this fact, that the Puritans should have carried their field and hedge flowers, and nurtured theme in their gardens, until, to us, they seem entirely the product of cultivation. March 16th.--Yesterday, at the coroner's court, attending the inquest on a black sailor who died on board an American vessel, after her arrival at this port. The court-room is capable of accommodating perhaps fifty people, dingy, with a pyramidal skylight above, and a single window on one side, opening into a gloomy back court. A private room, also lighted with a pyramidal skylight, is behind the court-room, into which I was asked, and found the coroner, a gray-headed, grave, intelligent, broad, red-faced man, with an air of some authority, well mannered and dignified, but not exactly a gentleman,--dressed in a blue coat, with a black cravat, showing a shirt-collar above it. Considering how many and what a variety of cases of the ugliest death are constantly coming before him, he was much more cheerful than could be expected, and had a kind of formality and orderliness which I suppose balances the exceptionalities with which he has to deal. In the private room with him was likewise the surgeon, who professionally attends the court. We chatted about suicide and such matters,--the surgeon, the coroner, and I,--until the American case was ready, when we adjourned to the court-room, and the coroner began the examination. The American captain was a rude, uncouth Down-Easter, about thirty years old, and sat on a bench, doubled and bent into an indescribable attitude, out of which he occasionally straightened himself, all the time toying with a ruler, or some such article. The case was one of no interest; the man had been frost-bitten, and died from natural causes, so that no censure was deserved or passed upon the captain. The jury, who had been examining the body, were at first inclined to think that the man had not been frostbitten, but that his feet had been immersed in boiling water; but, on explanation by the surgeon, readily yielded their opinion, and gave the verdict which the coroner put into their mouths, exculpating the captain from all blame. In fact, it is utterly impossible that a jury of chance individuals should not be entirely governed by the judgment of so experienced and weighty a man as the coroner. In the court-room were two or three police officers in uniform, and some other officials, a very few idle spectators, and a few witnesses waiting to be examined. And while the case was going forward, a poor-looking woman came in, and I heard her, in an undertone, telling an attendant of a death that had just occurred. The attendant received the communication in a very quiet and matter-of-course way, said that it should be attended to, and the woman retired. THE DIARY OF A CORONER would be a work likely to meet with large popular acceptance. A dark passageway, only a few yards in extent, leads from the liveliest street in Liverpool to this coroner's court-room, where all the discussion is about murder and suicide. It seems, that, after a verdict of suicide, the corpse can only be buried at midnight, without religious rites. "His lines are cast in pleasant places,"--applied to a successful angler. A woman's chastity consists, like an onion, of a series of coats. You may strip off the outer ones without doing much mischief, perhaps none at all; but you keep taking off one after another, in expectation of coming to the inner nucleus, including the whole value of the matter. It proves however, that there is no such nucleus, and that chastity is diffused through the whole series of coats, is lessened with the removal of each, and vanishes with the final one, which you supposed would introduce you to the hidden pearl. March 23d.--Mr. B. and I took a cab Saturday afternoon, and drove out of the city in the direction of Knowsley. On our way we saw many gentlemen's or rich people's places, some of them dignified with the title of Halls,--with lodges at their gates, and standing considerably removed from the road. The greater part of them were built of brick,--a material with which I have not been accustomed to associate ideas of grandeur; but it was much in use here in Lancashire, in the Elizabethan age,--more, I think, than now. These suburban residences, however, are of much later date than Elizabeth's time. Among other places, Mr. B. called at the Hazels, the residence of Sir Thomas Birch, a kinsman of his. It is a large brick mansion, and has old trees and shrubbery about it, the latter very fine and verdant,--hazels, holly, rhododendron, etc. Mr. B. went in, and shortly afterwards Sir Thomas Birch came out,--a very frank and hospitable gentleman,--and pressed me to enter and take luncheon, which latter hospitality I declined. His house is in very nice order. He had a good many pictures, and, amongst them, a small portrait of his mother, painted by Sir Thomas Lawrence, when a youth. It is unfinished, and when the painter was at the height of his fame, he was asked to finish it. But Lawrence, after looking at the picture, refused to retouch it, saying that there was a merit in this early sketch which he could no longer attain. It was really a very beautiful picture of a lovely woman. Sir Thomas Birch proposed to go with us and get us admittance into Knowsley Park, where we could not possibly find entrance without his aid. So we went to the stables, where the old groom had already shown hospitality to our cabman, by giving his horse some provender, and himself some beer. There seemed to be a kindly and familiar sort of intercourse between the old servant and the Baronet, each of them, I presume, looking on their connection as indissoluble. The gate-warden of Knowsley Park was an old woman, who readily gave us admittance at Sir Thomas Birch's request. The family of the Earl of Derby is not now at the Park. It was a very bad time of year to see it; the trees just showing the earliest symptoms of vitality, while whole acres of ground were covered with large, dry, brown ferns,--which I suppose are very beautiful when green. Two or three hares scampered out of these ferns, and sat on their hind legs looking about them, as we drove by. A sheet of water had been drawn off, in order to deepen its bed. The oaks did not seem to me so magnificent as they should be in an ancient noble property like this. A century does not accomplish so much for a tree, in this slow region, as it does in ours. I think, however, that they were more individual and picturesque, with more character in their contorted trunks; therein somewhat resembling apple-trees. Our forest-trees have a great sameness of character, like our people,-- because one and the other grow too closely. In one part of the Park we came to a small tower, for what purpose I know not, unless as an observatory; and near it was a marble statue on a high pedestal. The statue had been long exposed to the weather, and was overgrown and ingrained with moss and lichens, so that its classic beauty was in some sort gothicized. A half-mile or so from this point, we saw the mansion of Knowsley, in the midst of a very fine prospect, with a tolerably high ridge of hills in the distance. The house itself is exceedingly vast, a front and two wings, with suites of rooms, I suppose, interminable. The oldest part, Sir Thomas Birch told us, is a tower of the time of Henry VII. Nevertheless, the effect is not overwhelming, because the edifice looks low in proportion to its great extent over the ground; and besides, a good deal of it is built of brick, with white window-frames, so that, looking at separate parts, I might think them American structures, without the smart addition of green Venetian blinds, so universal with us. Portions, however, were built of red freestone; and if I had looked at it longer, no doubt I should have admired it more. We merely drove round it from the rear to the front. It stands in my memory rather like a college or a hospital, than as the ancestral residence of a great English noble. We left the Park in another direction, and passed through a part of Lord Sefton's property, by a private road. By the by, we saw half a dozen policemen, in their blue coats and embroidered collars, after entering Knowsley Park; but the Earl's own servants would probably have supplied their place, had the family been at home. The mansion of Croxteth, the seat of Lord Sefton, stands near the public road, and, though large, looked of rather narrow compass after Knowsley. The rooks were talking together very loquaciously in the high tops of the trees near Sir Thomas Birch's house, it being now their building-time. It was a very pleasant sound, the noise being comfortably softened by the remote height. Sir Thomas said that more than half a century ago the rooks used to inhabit another grove of lofty trees, close in front of the house; but being noisy, and not altogether cleanly in their habits, the ladies of the family grew weary of them and wished to remove them. Accordingly, the colony was driven away, and made their present settlement in a grove behind the house. Ever since that time not a rook has built in the ancient grove; every year, however, one or another pair of young rooks attempt to build among the deserted tree-tops, but the old rooks tear the new nest to pieces as often as it is put together. Thus, either the memory of aged individual rooks or an authenticated tradition in their society has preserved the idea that the old grove is forbidden and inauspicious to them. A soil of General Arnold, named William Fitch Arnold, and born in 1794, now possesses the estate of Little Messenden Abbey, Bucks County, and is a magistrate for that county. He was formerly Captain of the 19th Lancers. He has now two sons and four daughters. The other three sons of General Arnold, all older than this one, and all military men, do not appear to have left children; but a daughter married to Colonel Phipps, of the Mulgrave family, has a son and two daughters. I question whether any of our true-hearted Revolutionary heroes have left a more prosperous progeny than this arch-traitor. I should like to know their feelings with respect to their ancestor. April 3d.--I walked with J-----, two days ago, to Eastham, a village on the road to Chester, and five or six miles from Rock Ferry. On our way we passed through a village, in the centre of which was a small stone pillar, standing on a pedestal of several steps, on which children were sitting and playing. I take it to have been an old Catholic cross; at least, I know not what else it is. It seemed very ancient. Eastham is the finest old English village I have seen, with many antique houses, and with altogether a rural and picturesque aspect, unlike anything in America, and yet possessing a familiar look, as if it were something I had dreamed about. There were thatched stone cottages intermixed with houses of a better kind, and likewise a gateway and gravelled walk, that perhaps gave admittance to the Squire's mansion. It was not merely one long, wide street, as in most New England villages, but there were several crooked ways, gathering the whole settlement into a pretty small compass. In the midst of it stood a venerable church of the common red freestone, with a most reverend air, considerably smaller than that of Bebbington, but more beautiful, and looking quite as old. There was ivy on its spire and elsewhere. It looked very quiet and peaceful, and as if it had received the people into its low arched door every Sabbath for many centuries. There were many tombstones about it, some level with the ground, some raised on blocks of stone, on low pillars, moss-grown and weather-worn; and probably these were but the successors of other stones that had quite crumbled away, or been buried by the accumulation of dead men's dust above them. In the centre of the churchyard stood an old yew-tree, with immense trunk, which was all decayed within, so that it is a wonder how the tree retains any life,--which, nevertheless, it does. It was called "the old Yew of Eastham," six hundred years ago! After passing through the churchyard, we saw the village inn on the other side. The doors were fastened, but a girl peeped out of the window at us, and let us in, ushering us into a very neat parlor. There was a cheerful fire in the grate, a straw carpet on the floor, a mahogany sideboard, and a mahogany table in the middle of the room; and, on the walls, the portraits of mine host (no doubt) and of his wife and daughters,--a very nice parlor, and looking like what I might have found in a country tavern at home, only this was an ancient house, and there is nothing at home like the glimpse, from the window, of the church, and its red, ivy-grown tower. I ordered some lunch, being waited on by the girl, who was very neat, intelligent, and comely,--and more respectful than a New England maid. As we came out of the inn, some village urchins left their play, and ran to me begging, calling me "Master!" They turned at once from play to begging, and, as I gave them nothing, they turned to their play again. This village is too far from Liverpool to have been much injured as yet by the novelty of cockney residences, which have grown up almost everywhere else, so far as I have visited. About a mile from it, however, is the landing-place of a steamer (which runs regularly, except in the winter months), where a large, new hotel is built. The grounds about it are extensive and well wooded. We got some biscuits at the hotel, and I gave the waiter (a splendid gentleman in black) four halfpence, being the surplus of a shilling. He bowed and thanked me very humbly. An American does not easily bring his mind to the small measure of English liberality to servants; if anything is to be given, we are ashamed not to give more, especially to clerical-looking persons, in black suits and white neckcloths. I stood on the Exchange at noon, to-day, to see the 18th Regiment, the Connaught Rangers, marching down to embark for the East. They were a body of young, healthy, and cheerful-looking men, and looked greatly better than the dirty crowd that thronged to gaze at them. The royal banner of England, quartering the lion, the leopard, and the harp, waved on the town-house, and looked gorgeous and venerable. Here and there a woman exchanged greetings with an individual soldier, as he marched along, and gentlemen shook hands with officers with whom they happened to be acquainted. Being a stranger in the land, it seemed as if I could see the future in the present better than if I had been an Englishman; so I questioned with myself how many of these ruddy-cheeked young fellows, marching so stoutly away, would ever tread English ground again. The populace did not evince any enthusiasm, yet there could not possibly be a war to which the country could assent more fully than to this. I somewhat doubt whether the English populace really feels a vital interest in the nation. Some years ago, a piece of rude marble sculpture, representing St. George and the Dragon, was found over the fireplace of a cottage near Rock Ferry, on the road to Chester. It was plastered over with pipe-clay, and its existence was unknown to the cottagers, until a lady noticed the projection and asked what it was. It was supposed to have originally adorned the walls of the Priory at Birkenhead. It measured fourteen and a half by nine inches, in which space were the heads of a king and queen, with uplifted hands, in prayer; their daughters also in prayer, and looking very grim; a lamb, the slain dragon, and St. George, proudly prancing on what looks like a donkey, brandishing a sword over his head. The following is a legend inscribed on the inner margin of a curious old box:-- "From Birkenhead into Hilbree A squirrel might leap from tree to tree." I do not know where Hilbree is; but all round Birkenhead a squirrel would scarcely find a single tree to climb upon. All is pavement and brick buildings now. Good Friday.--The English and Irish think it good to plant on this day, because it was the day when our Saviour's body was laid in the grave. Seeds, therefore, are certain to rise again. At dinner the other day, Mrs. ------ mentioned the origin of Franklin's adoption of the customary civil dress, when going to court as a diplomatist. It was simply that his tailor had disappointed him of his court suit, and he wore his plain one with great reluctance, because he had no other. Afterwards, gaining great success and praise by his mishap, he continued to wear it from policy. The grandmother of Mrs. ------ died fifty years ago, at the age of twenty-eight. She had great personal charms, and among them a head of beautiful chestnut hair. After her burial in the family tomb, the coffin of one of her children was laid on her own, so that the lid seems to have decayed, or been broken from this cause; at any rate, this was the case when the tomb was opened about a year ago. The grandmother's coffin was then found to be filled with beautiful, glossy, living chestnut ringlets, into which her whole substance seems to have been transformed, for there was nothing else but these shining curls, the growth of half a century in the tomb. An old man, with a ringlet of his youthful mistress treasured on his heart, might be supposed to witness this wonderful thing. Madam ------, who is now at my house, and very infirm, though not old, was once carried to the grave, and on the point of being buried. It was in Barbary, where her husband was Consul-General. He was greatly attached to her, and told the pall-bearers at the grave that he must see her once more. When her face was uncovered, he thought he discerned signs of life, and felt a warmth. Finally she revived, and for many years afterwards supposed the funeral procession to have been a dream; she having been partially conscious throughout, and having felt the wind blowing on her, and lifting the shroud from her feet,--for I presume she was to be buried in Oriental style, without a coffin. Long after, in London, when she was speaking of this dream, her husband told her the facts, and she fainted away. Whenever it is now mentioned, her face turns white. Mr. ------, her son, was born on shipboard, on the coast of Spain, and claims four nationalities,--those of Spain, England, Ireland, and the United States; his father being Irish, his mother a native of England, himself a naturalized citizen of the United States, and his father having registered his birth and baptism in a Catholic church of Gibraltar, which gives him Spanish privileges. He has hereditary claims to a Spanish countship. His infancy was spent in Barbary, and his lips first lisped in Arabic. There has been an unsettled and wandering character in his whole life. The grandfather of Madam ------, who was a British officer, once horsewhipped Paul Jones,--Jones being a poltroon. How singular it is that the personal courage of famous warriors should be so often called in question! May 20th.--I went yesterday to a hospital to take the oath of a mate to a protest. He had met with a severe accident by a fall on shipboard. The hospital is a large edifice of red freestone, with wide, airy passages, resounding with footsteps passing through them. A porter was waiting in the vestibule. Mr. Wilding and myself were shown to the parlor, in the first instance,--a neat, plainly furnished room, with newspapers and pamphlets lying on the table and sofas. Soon the surgeon of the house came,--a brisk, alacritous, civil, cheerful young man, by whom we were shown to the apartment where the mate was lying. As we went through the principal passage, a man was borne along in a chair looking very pale, rather wild, and altogether as if he had just been through great tribulation, and hardly knew as yet whereabouts he was. I noticed that his left arm was but a stump, and seemed done up in red baize,--at all events it was of a scarlet line. The surgeon shook his right hand cheerily, and he was carried on. This was a patient who had just had his arm cut off. He had been a rough person apparently, but now there was a kind of tenderness about him, through pain and helplessness. In the chamber where the mate lay, there were seven beds, all of them occupied by persons who had met with accidents. In the centre of the room was a stationary pine table, about the length of a man, intended, I suppose, to stretch patients upon for necessary operations. The furniture of the beds was plain and homely. I thought that the faces of the patients all looked remarkably intelligent, though they were evidently men of the lower classes. Suffering had educated them morally and intellectually. They gazed curiously at Mr. Wilding and me, but nobody said a word. In the bed next to the mate lay a little boy with a broken thigh. The surgeon observed that children generally did well with accidents; and this boy certainly looked very bright and cheerful. There was nothing particularly interesting about the mate. After finishing our business, the surgeon showed us into another room of the surgical ward, likewise devoted to cases of accident and injury. All the beds were occupied, and in two of them lay two American sailors who had recently been stabbed. They had been severely hurt, but were doing very well. The surgeon thought that it was a good arrangement to have several cases together, and that the patients kept up one another's spirits,--being often merry together. Smiles and laughter may operate favorably enough from bed to bed; but dying groans, I should think, must be somewhat of a discouragement. Nevertheless, the previous habits and modes of life of such people as compose the more numerous class of patients in a hospital must be considered before deciding this matter. It is very possible that their misery likes such bedfellows as it here finds. As we were taking our leave, the surgeon asked us if we should not like to see the operating-room; and before we could reply he threw open the door, and behold, there was a roll of linen "garments rolled in blood,"-- and a bloody fragment of a human arm! The surgeon glanced at me, and smiled kindly, but as if pitying my discomposure. Gervase Elwes, son of Sir Gervase Elwes, Baronet, of Stoke, Suffolk, married Isabella, daughter of Sir Thomas Hervey, Knight, and sister of the first Earl of Bristol. This Gervase died before his father, but left a son, Henry, who succeeded to the Baronetcy. Sir Henry died without issue, and was succeeded by his sister's son, John Maggott Twining, who assumed the name of Elwes. He was the famous miser, and must have had Hawthorne blood in him, through his grandfather, Gervase, whose mother was a Hawthorne. It was to this Gervase that my ancestor, William Hawthorne, devised some land in Massachusetts, "if he would come over, and enjoy it." My ancestor calls him his nephew. June 12th.--Barry Cornwall, Mr. Procter, called on me a week or more ago, but I happened not to be in the office. Saturday last he called again, and as I had crossed to Rock Park he followed me thither. A plain, middle-sized, English-looking gentleman, elderly, with short, white hair, and particularly quiet in his manners. He talks in a somewhat low tone without emphasis, scarcely distinct. His head has a good outline, and would look well in marble. I liked him very well. He talked unaffectedly, showing an author's regard to his reputation, and was evidently pleased to hear of his American celebrity. He said that in his younger days he was a scientific pugilist, and once took a journey to have a sparring encounter with the Game-Chicken. Certainly, no one would have looked for a pugilist in this subdued old gentleman. He is now Commissioner of Lunacy, and makes periodical circuits through the country, attending to the business of his office. He is slightly deaf, and this may be the cause of his unaccented utterance,--owing to his not being able to regulate his voice exactly by his own ear. He is a good man, and much better expressed by his real name, Procter, than by his poetical one, Barry Cornwall. . . . He took my hand in both of his at parting. . . . June 17th.--At eleven, at this season (and how much longer I know not), there is still a twilight. If we could only have such dry, deliciously warm evenings as we used to have in our own land, what enjoyment there might be in these interminable twilights! But here we close the window-shutters, and make ourselves cosey by a coal-fire. All three of the children, and, I think, my wife and myself, are going through the hooping-cough. The east-wind of this season and region is most horrible. There have been no really warm days; for though the sunshine is sometimes hot, there is never any diffused heat throughout the air. On passing from the sunshine into the shade, we immediately feel too cool. June 20th.--The vagabond musicians about town are very numerous. On board the steam ferry-boats, I have heretofore spoken of them. They infest them from May to November, for very little gain apparently. A shilling a day per man must be the utmost of their emolument. It is rather sad to see somewhat respectable old men engaged in this way, with two or three younger associates. Their instruments look much the worse for wear, and even my unmusical ear can distinguish more discord than harmony. They appear to be a very quiet and harmless people. Sometimes there is a woman playing on a fiddle, while her husband blows a wind instrument. In the streets it is not unusual to find a band of half a dozen performers, who, without any provocation or reason whatever, sound their brazen instruments till the houses re-echo. Sometimes one passes a man who stands whistling a tune most unweariably, though I never saw anybody give him anything. The ballad-singers are the strangest, from the total lack of any music in their cracked voices. Sometimes you see a space cleared in the street, and a foreigner playing, while a girl-- weather-beaten, tanned, and wholly uncomely in face and shabby in attire dances ballets. The common people look on, and never criticise or treat any of these poor devils unkindly or uncivilly; but I do not observe that they give them anything. A crowd--or, at all events, a moderate-sized group--is much more easily drawn together here than with us. The people have a good deal of idle and momentary curiosity, and are always ready to stop when another person has stopped, so as to see what has attracted his attention. I hardly ever pause to look at a shop-window, without being immediately incommoded by boys and men, who stop likewise, and would forthwith throng the pavement if I did not move on. June 30th.--If it is not known how and when a man dies, it makes a ghost of him for many years thereafter, perhaps for centuries. King Arthur is an example; also the Emperor Frederic, and other famous men, who were thought to be alive ages after their disappearance. So with private individuals. I had an uncle John, who went a voyage to sea about the beginning of the War of 1812, and has never returned to this hour. But as long as his mother lived, as many as twenty years, she never gave up the hope of his return, and was constantly hearing stories of persons whose description answered to his. Some people actually affirmed that they had seen him in various parts of the world. Thus, so far as her belief was concerned, he still walked the earth. And even to this day I never see his name, which is no very uncommon one, without thinking that this may be the lost uncle. Thus, too, the French Dauphin still exists, or a kind of ghost of him; the three Tells, too, in the cavern of Uri. July 6th.--Mr. Cecil, the other day, was saying that England could produce as fine peaches as any other country. I asked what was the particular excellence of a peach, and he answered, "Its cooling and refreshing quality, like that of a melon!" Just think of this idea of the richest, most luscious, of all fruits! But the untravelled Englishman has no more idea of what fruit is than of what sunshine is; he thinks he has tasted the first and felt the last, but they are both alike watery. I heard a lady in Lord Street talking about the "broiling sun," when I was almost in a shiver. They keep up their animal heat by means of wine and ale, else they could not bear this climate. July 19th.--A week ago I made a little tour in North Wales with Mr. Bright. We left Birkenhead by railway for Chester at two o'clock; thence for Bangor; thence by carriage over the Menai bridge to Beaumaris. At Beaumaris, a fine old castle,--quite coming up to my idea of what an old castle should be. A gray, ivy-hung exterior wall, with large round towers at intervals; within this another wall, the place of the portcullis between; and again, within the second wall the castle itself, with a spacious green court-yard in front. The outer wall is so thick that a passage runs in it all round the castle, which covers a space of three acres. This passage gives access to a chapel, still very perfect, and to various apartments in the towers,--all exceedingly dismal, and giving very unpleasant impressions of the way in which the garrison of the castle lived. The main castle is entirely roofless, but the hall and other rooms are pointed out by the guide, and the whole is tapestried with abundant ivy, so that my impression is of gray walls, with here and there a vast green curtain; a carpet of green over the floors of halls and apartments; and festoons around all the outer battlement, with an uneven and rather perilous foot-path running along the top. There is a fine vista through the castle itself, and the two gateways of the two encompassing walls. The passage within the wall is very rude, both underfoot and on each side, with various ascents and descents of rough steps,--sometimes so low that your head is in danger; and dark, except where a little light comes through a loophole or window in the thickness of the wall. In front of the castle a tennis-court was fitted up, by laying a smooth pavement on the ground, and casing the walls with tin or zinc, if I recollect aright. All this was open to the sky; and when we were there, some young men of the town were playing at the game. There are but very few of these tennis-courts in England; and this old castle was a very strange place for one. The castle is the property of Sir Richard Bulkely, whose seat is in the vicinity, and who owns a great part of the island of Anglesea, on which Beaumaris lies. The hotel where we stopped was the Bulkely Arms, and Sir Richard has a kind of feudal influence in the town. In the morning we walked along a delightful road, bordering on the Menai Straits, to Bangor Ferry. It was really a very pleasant road, overhung by a growth of young wood, exceedingly green and fresh. English trees are green all about their stems, owing to the creeping plants that overrun them. There were some flowers in the hedges, such as we cultivate in gardens. At the ferry, there was a whitewashed cottage; a woman or two, some children, and a fisherman-like personage, walking to and fro before the door. The scenery of the strait is very beautiful and picturesque, and directly opposite to us lay Bangor,--the strait being here almost a mile across. An American ship from Boston lay in the middle of it. The ferry-boat was just putting off for the Bangor side, and, by the aid of a sail, soon neared the shore. At Bangor we went to a handsome hotel, and hired a carriage and two horses for some Welsh place, the name of which I forget; neither can I remember a single name of the places through which we posted that day, nor could I spell them if I heard them pronounced, nor pronounce them if I saw them spelt. It was a circuit of about forty miles, bringing us to Conway at last. I remember a great slate-quarry; and also that many of the cottages, in the first part of our drive, were built of blocks of slate. The mountains were very bold, thrusting themselves up abruptly in peaks,--not of the dumpling formation, which is somewhat too prevalent among the New England mountains. At one point we saw Snowdon, with its bifold summit. We also visited the smaller waterfall (this is a translation of an unpronounceable Welsh name), which is the largest in Wales. It was a very beautiful rapid, and the guide-book considers it equal in sublimity to Niagara. Likewise there were one or two lakes which the guide-book greatly admired, but which to me, who remembered a hundred sheets of blue water in New England, seemed nothing more than sullen and dreary puddles, with bare banks, and wholly destitute of beauty. I think they were nowhere more than a hundred yards across. But the hills were certainly very good, and, though generally bare of trees, their outlines thereby were rendered the stronger and more striking. Many of the Welsh women, particularly the older ones, wear black beaver hats, high-crowned, and almost precisely like men's. It makes them look ugly and witchlike. Welsh is still the prevalent language, and the only one spoken by a great many of the inhabitants. I have had Welsh people in my office, on official business, with whom I could not communicate except through an interpreter. At some unutterable village we went into a little church, where we saw an old stone image of a warrior, lying on his back, with his hands clasped. It was the natural son (if I remember rightly) of David, Prince of Wales, and was doubtless the better part of a thousand years old. There was likewise a stone coffin of still greater age; some person of rank and renown had mouldered to dust within it, but it was now open and empty. Also, there were monumental brasses on the walls, engraved with portraits of a gentleman and lady in the costumes of Elizabeth's time. Also, on one of the pews, a brass record of some persons who slept in the vault beneath; so that, every Sunday, the survivors and descendants kneel and worship directly over their dead ancestors. In the churchyard, on a flat tombstone, there was the representation of a harp. I supposed that it must be the resting-place of a bard; but the inscription was in memory of a merchant, and a skilful manufacturer of harps. This was a very delightful town. We saw a great many things which it is now too late to describe, the sharpness of the first impression being gone; but I think I can produce something of the sentiment of it hereafter. We arrived at Conway late in the afternoon, to take the rail for Chester. I must see Conway, with its old gray wall and its unrivalled castle, again. It was better than Beaumaris, and I never saw anything more picturesque than the prospect from the castle-wall towards the sea. We reached Chester at 10 P. M. The next morning, Mr. Bright left for Liverpool before I was awake. I visited the Cathedral, where the organ was sounding, sauntered through the Rows, bought some playthings for the children, and left for home soon after twelve. Liverpool, August 8th.--Visiting the Zoological Gardens the other day with J-----, it occurred to me what a fantastic kind of life a person connected with them might be depicted as leading,--a child, for instance. The grounds are very extensive, and include arrangements for all kinds of exhibitions calculated to attract the idle people of a great city. In one enclosure is a bear, who climbs a pole to get cake and gingerbread from the spectators. Elsewhere, a circular building, with compartments for lions, wolves, and tigers. In another part of the garden is a colony of monkeys, the skeleton of an elephant, birds of all kinds. Swans and various rare water-fowl were swimming on a piece of water, which was green, by the by, and when the fowls dived they stirred up black mud. A stork was parading along the margin, with melancholy strides of its long legs, and came slowly towards us, as if for companionship. In one apartment was an obstreperously noisy society of parrots and macaws, most gorgeous and diversified of hue. These different colonies of birds and beasts were scattered about in various parts of the grounds, so that you came upon them unexpectedly. Also, there were archery and shooting-grounds, and a sewing. A theatre, also, at which a rehearsal was going on,--we standing at one of the doors, and looking in towards the dusky stage where the company, in their ordinary dresses, were rehearsing something that had a good deal of dance and action in it. In the open air there was an arrangement of painted scenery representing a wide expanse of mountains, with a city at their feet, and before it the sea, with actual water, and large vessels upon it, the vessels having only the side that would be presented to the spectator. But the scenery was so good that at a first casual glance I almost mistook it for reality. There was a refreshment-room, with drinks and cakes and pastry, but, so far as I saw, no substantial victual. About in the centre of the garden there was an actual, homely-looking, small dwelling-house, where perhaps the overlookers of the place live. Now this might be wrought, in an imaginative description, into a pleasant sort of a fool's paradise, where all sorts of unreal delights should cluster round some suitable personage; and it would relieve, in a very odd and effective way, the stern realities of life on the outside of the garden-walls. I saw a little girl, simply dressed, who seemed to have her habitat within the grounds. There was also a daguerreotypist, with his wife and family, carrying on his business in a shanty, and perhaps having his home in its inner room. He seemed to be an honest, intelligent, pleasant young man, and his wife a pleasant woman; and I had J-----'s daguerreotype taken for three shillings, in a little gilded frame. In the description of the garden, the velvet turf, of a charming verdure, and the shrubbery and shadowy walks and large trees, and the slopes and inequalities of ground, must not be forgotten. In one place there was a maze and labyrinth, where a person might wander a long while in the vain endeavor to get out, although all the time looking at the exterior garden, over the low hedges that border the walks of the maze. And this is like the inappreciable difficulties that often beset us in life. I will see it again before long, and get some additional record of it. August 10th.--We went to the Isle of Man, a few weeks ago, where S----- and the children spent a fortnight. I spent two Sundays with them. I never saw anything prettier than the little church of Kirk Madden there. It stands in a perfect seclusion of shadowy trees,--a plain little church, that would not be at all remarkable in another situation, but is most picturesque in its solitude and bowery environment. The churchyard is quite full and overflowing with graves, and extends down the gentle slope of a hill, with a dark mass of shadow above it. Some of the tombstones are flat on the ground, some erect, or laid horizontally on low pillars or masonry. There were no very old dates on any of these stones; for the climate soon effaces inscriptions, and makes a stone of fifty years look as old as one of five hundred,--unless it be slate, or something harder than the usual red freestone. There was an old Runic monument, however, near the centre of the churchyard, that had some strange sculpture on it, and an inscription still legible by persons learned in such matters. Against the tower of the church, too, there is a circular stone, with carving on it, said to be of immemorial antiquity. There is likewise a tall marble monument, as much as fifty feet high, erected some years ago to the memory of one of the Athol family by his brother-officers of a local regiment of which he was colonel. At one of the side-entrances of the church, and forming the threshold within the thickness of the wall, so that the feet of all who enter must tread on it, is a flat tombstone of somebody who felt himself a sinner, no doubt, and desired to be thus trampled upon. The stone is much worn. The structure is extremely plain inside and very small. On the walls, over the pews, are several monumental sculptures,--a quite elaborate one to a Colonel Murray, of the Coldstreamn Guards; his military profession being designated by banners and swords in marble.--Another was to a farmer. On one side of the church-tower there was a little penthouse, or lean-to,--merely a stone roof, about three or four feet high, and supported by a single pillar, beneath which was once deposited the bier. I have let too much time pass before attempting to record my impressions of the Isle of Man; but, as regards this church, no description can come up to its quiet beauty, its seclusion, and its every requisite for an English country church. Last Sunday I went to Eastham, and, entering the churchyard, sat down on a tombstone under the yew-tree which has been known for centuries as the Great Tree of Eastham. Some of the village people were sitting on the graves near the door; and an old woman came towards me, and said, in a low, kindly, admonishing tone, that I must not let the sexton see me, because he would not allow any one to be there in sacrament-time. I inquired why she and her companions were there, and she said they were waiting for the sacrament. So I thanked her, gave her a sixpence, and departed. Close under the eaves, I saw two upright stones, in memory of two old servants of the Stanley family,--one over ninety, and the other over eighty years of age. August 12th.--J----- and I went to Birkenhead Park yesterday. There is a large ornamental gateway to the Park, and the grounds within are neatly laid out, with borders of shrubbery. There is a sheet of water, with swans and other aquatic fowl, which swim about, and are fed with dainties by the visitors. Nothing can be more beautiful than a swan. It is the ideal of a goose,--a goose beautified and beatified. There were not a great many visitors, but some children were dancing on the green, and a few lover-like people straying about. I think the English behave better than the Americans at similar places. There was a camera-obscure, very wretchedly indistinct. At the refreshment-room were ginger-beer and British wines. August 21st.--I was in the Crown Court on Saturday, sitting in the sheriff's seat. The judge was Baron ------, an old gentleman of sixty, with very large, long features. His wig helped him to look like some strange kind of animal,--very queer, but yet with a sagacious, and, on the whole, beneficent aspect. During the session some mischievous young barrister occupied himself with sketching the judge in pencil; and, being handed about, it found its way to me. It was very like and very laughable, but hardly caricatured. The judicial wig is an exceedingly odd affair; and as it covers both ears, it would seem intended to prevent his Lordship, and justice in his person, from hearing any of the case on either side, that thereby he may decide the better. It is like the old idea of blindfolding the statue of Justice. It seems to me there is less formality, less distance between the judge, jury, witnesses, and bar, in the English courts than in our own. The judge takes a very active part in the trial, constantly asking a question of the witness on the stand, making remarks on the conduct of the trial, putting in his word on all occasions, and allowing his own sense of the matter in hand to be pretty plainly seen; so that, before the trial is over, and long before his own charge is delivered, he must have exercised a very powerful influence over the minds of the jury. All this is done, not without dignity, yet in a familiar kind of way. It is a sort of paternal supervision of the whole matter, quite unlike the cold awfulness of an American judge. But all this may be owing partly to the personal characteristics of Baron ------. It appeared to me, however, that, from the closer relations of all parties, truth was likely to be arrived at and justice to be done. As an innocent man, I should not be afraid to be tried by Baron ------. EATON HALL. August 24th.--I went to Eaton Hall yesterday with my wife and Mr. G. P. Bradford, via Chester. On our way, at the latter place, we visited St. John's Church. It is built of the same red freestone as the cathedral, and looked exceedingly antique, and venerable; this kind of stone, from its softness, and its liability to be acted upon by the weather, being liable to an early decay. Nevertheless, I believe the church was built above a thousand years ago,--some parts of it, at least,--and the surface of the tower and walls is worn away and hollowed in shallow sweeps by the hand of Time. There were broken niches in several places, where statues had formerly stood. All, except two or three, had fallen or crumbled away, and those which remained were much damaged. The face and details of the figure were almost obliterated. There were many gravestones round the church, but none of them of any antiquity. Probably, as the names become indistinguishable on the older stones, the graves are dug over again, and filled with new occupants and covered with new stones, or perhaps with the old ones newly inscribed. Closely connected with the church was the clergyman's house, a comfortable-looking residence; and likewise in the churchyard, with tombstones all about it, even almost at the threshold, so that the doorstep itself might have been a tombstone, was another house, of respectable size and aspect. We surmised that this might be the sexton's dwelling, but it proved not to be so; and a woman, answering our knock, directed us to the place where he might be found. So Mr. Bradford and I went in search of him, leaving S----- seated on a tombstone. The sexton was a jolly-looking, ruddy-faced man, a mechanic of some sort, apparently, and he followed us to the churchyard with much alacrity. We found S----- standing at a gateway, which opened into the most ancient, and now quite ruinous, part of the church, the present edifice covering much less ground than it did some centuries ago. We went through this gateway, and found ourselves in an enclosure of venerable walls, open to the sky, with old Norman arches standing about, beneath the loftiest of which the sexton told us the high altar used to stand. Of course, there were weeds and ivy growing in the crevices, but not so abundantly as I have seen them elsewhere. The sexton pointed out a piece of a statue that had once stood in one of the niches, and which he himself, I think, had dug up from several feet below the earth; also, in a niche of the walls, high above our heads, he showed us an ancient wooden coffin, hewn out of a solid log of oak, the hollow being made rudely in the shape of a human figure. This too had been dug up, and nobody knew how old it was. While we looked at all this solemn old trumpery, the curate, quite a young man, stood at the back door of his house, elevated considerably above the ruins, with his young wife (I presume) and a friend or two, chatting cheerfully among themselves. It was pleasant to see them there. After examining the ruins, we went inside of the church, and found it a dim and dusky old place, quite paved over with tombstones, not an inch of space being left in the aisles or near the altar, or in any nook or corner, uncovered by a tombstone. There were also mural monuments and escutcheons, and close against the wall lay the mutilated statue of a Crusader, with his legs crossed, in the style which one has so often read about. The old fellow seemed to have been represented in chain armor; but he had been more battered and bruised since death than even during his pugnacious life, and his nose was almost knocked away. This figure had been dug up many years ago, and nobody knows whom it was meant to commemorate. The nave of the church is supported by two rows of Saxon pillars, not very lofty, but six feet six inches (so the sexton says) in diameter. They are covered with plaster, which was laid on ages ago, and is now so hard and smooth that I took the pillars to be really composed of solid shafts of gray stone. But, at one end of the church, the plaster had been removed from two of the pillars, in order to discover whether they were still sound enough to support the building; and they prove to be made of blocks of red freestone, just as sound as when it came from the quarry; for though this stone soon crumbles in the open air, it is as good as indestructible when sheltered from the weather. It looked very strange to see the fresh hue of these two pillars amidst the dingy antiquity of the rest of the structure. The body of the church is covered with pews, the wooden enclosures of which seemed of antique fashion. There were also modern stoves; but the sexton said it was very cold there, in spite of the stoves. It had, I must say, a disagreeable odor pervading it, in which the dead people of long ago had doubtless some share,--a musty odor, by no means amounting to a stench, but unpleasant, and, I should think, unwholesome. Old wood-work, and old stones, and antiquity of all kinds, moral and physical, go to make up this smell. I observed it in the cathedral, and Chester generally has it, especially under the Rows. After all, the necessary damp and lack of sunshine, in such a shadowy old church as this, have probably more to do with it than the dead people have; although I did think the odor was particularly strong over some of the tombstones. Not having shillings to give the sexton, we were forced to give him half a crown. The Church of St. John is outside of the city walls. Entering the East gate, we walked awhile under the Rows, bought our tickets for Eaton Hall and its gardens, and likewise some playthings for the children; for this old city of Chester seems to me to possess an unusual number of toy-shops. Finally we took a cab, and drove to the Hall, about four miles distant, nearly the whole of the way lying through the wooded Park. There are many sorts of trees, making up a wilderness, which looked not unlike the woods of our own Concord, only less wild. The English oak is not a handsome tree, being short and sturdy, with a round, thick mass of foliage, lying all within its own bounds. It was a showery day. Had there been any sunshine, there might doubtless have been many beautiful effects of light and shadow in these woods. We saw one or two herds of deer, quietly feeding, a hundred yards or so distant. They appeared to be somewhat wilder than cattle, but, I think, not much wilder than sheep. Their ancestors have probably been in a half-domesticated state, receiving food at the hands of man, in winter, for centuries. There is a kind of poetry in this, quite as much as if they were really wild deer, such as their forefathers were, when Hugh Lupus used to hunt them. Our miserable cab drew up at the steps of Eaton Hall, and, ascending under the portico, the door swung silently open, and we were received very civilly by two old men,--one, a tall footman in livery; the other, of higher grade, in plain clothes. The entrance-hall is very spacious, and the floor is tessellated or somehow inlaid with marble. There was statuary in marble on the floor, and in niches stood several figures in antique armor, of various dates; some with lances, and others with battle-axes and swords. There was a two-handed sword, as much as six feet long; but not nearly so ponderous as I have supposed this kind of weapon to be, from reading of it. I could easily have brandished it. I don't think I am a good sight-seer; at least, I soon get satisfied with looking at the sights, and wish to go on to the next. The plainly dressed old man now led us into a long corridor, which goes, I think, the whole length of the house, about five hundred feet, arched all the way, and lengthened interminably by a looking-glass at the end, in which I saw our own party approaching like a party of strangers. But I have so often seen this effect produced in dry-goods stores and elsewhere, that I was not much impressed. There were family portraits and other pictures, and likewise pieces of statuary, along this arched corridor; and it communicated with a chapel with a scriptural altar-piece, copied from Rubens, and a picture of St. Michael and the Dragon, and two, or perhaps three, richly painted windows. Everything here is entirely new and fresh, this part having been repaired, and never yet inhabited by the family. This brand-newness makes it much less effective than if it had been lived in; and I felt pretty much as if I were strolling through any other renewed house. After all, the utmost force of man can do positively very little towards making grand things or beautiful things. The imagination can do so much more, merely on shutting one's eyes, that the actual effect seems meagre; so that a new house, unassociated with the past, is exceedingly unsatisfactory, especially when you have heard that the wealth mud skill of man has here done its best. Besides, the rooms, as we saw them, did not look by any means their best, the carpets not being down, and the furniture being covered with protective envelopes. However, rooms cannot be seen to advantage by daylight; it being altogether essential to the effect, that they should be illuminated by artificial light, which takes them somewhat out of the region of bare reality. Nevertheless, there was undoubtedly great splendor, for the details of which I refer to the guide-book. Among the family portraits, there was one of a lady famous for her beautiful hand; and she was holding it up to notice in the funniest way, --and very beautiful it certainly was. The private apartments of the family were not shown us. I should think it impossible for the owner of this house to imbue it with his personality to such a degree as to feel it to be his home. It must be like a small lobster in a shell much too large for him. After seeing what was to be seen of the rooms, we visited the gardens, in which are noble conservatories and hot-houses, containing all manner of rare and beautiful flowers, and tropical fruits. I noticed some large pines, looking as if they were really made of gold. The gardener (under-gardener I suppose he was) who showed this part of the spectacle was very intelligent as well as kindly, and seemed to take an interest in his business. He gave S----- a purple everlasting flower, which will endure a great many years, as a memento of our visit to Eaton Hall. Finally, we took a view of the front of the edifice, which is very fine, and much more satisfactory than the interior,--and returned to Chester. We strolled about under the unsavory Rows, sometimes scudding from side to side of the street, through the shower; took lunch in a confectioner's shop, and drove to the railway station in time for the three-o'clock train. It looked picturesque to see two little girls, hand in hand, racing along the ancient passages of the Rows; but Chester has a very evil smell. At the railroad station, S----- saw a small edition of "Twice-Told Tales," forming a volume of the Cottage Library; and, opening it, there was the queerest imaginable portrait of myself,--so very queer that we could not but buy it. The shilling edition of "The Scarlet Letter" and "Seven Gables" are at all the book-stalls and shop-windows; but so is "The Lamplighter," and still more trashy books. August 26th.--All past affairs, all home conclusions, all people whom I have known in America and meet again here, are strangely compelled to undergo a new trial. It is not that they suffer by comparison with circumstances of English life and forms of English manhood or womanhood; but, being free from my old surroundings, and the inevitable prejudices of home, I decide upon them absolutely. I think I neglected to record that I saw Miss Martineau a few weeks since. She is a large, robust, elderly woman, and plainly dressed; but withal she has so kind, cheerful, and intelligent a face that she is pleasanter to look at than most beauties. Her hair is of a decided gray, and she does not shrink from calling herself old. She is the most continual talker I ever heard; it is really like the babbling of a brook, and very lively and sensible too; and all the while she talks, she moves the bowl of her ear-trumpet from one auditor to another, so that it becomes quite an organ of intelligence and sympathy between her and yourself. The ear-trumpet seems a sensible part of her, like the antennae of some insects. If you have any little remark to make, you drop it in; and she helps you to make remarks by this delicate little appeal of the trumpet, as she slightly directs it towards you; and if you have nothing to say, the appeal is not strong enough to embarrass you. All her talk was about herself and her affairs; but it did not seem like egotism, because it was so cheerful and free from morbidness. And this woman is an Atheist, and thinks that the principle of life will become extinct when her body is laid in the grave! I will not think so; were it only for her sake. What! only a few weeds to spring out of her mortality, instead of her intellect and sympathies flowering and fruiting forever! September 13th.--My family went to Rhyl last Thursday, and on Saturday I joined them there, in company with O'Sullivan, who arrived in the Behama from Lisbon that morning. We went by way of Chester, and found S----- waiting for us at the Rhyl station. Rhyl is a most uninteresting place, --a collection of new lodging-houses and hotels, on a long sand-beach, which the tide leaves bare almost to the horizon. The sand is by no means a marble pavement, but sinks under the foot, and makes very heavy walking; but there is a promenade in front of the principal range of houses, looking on the sea, whereon we have rather better footing. Almost all the houses were full, and S----- had taken a parlor and two bedrooms, and is living after the English fashion, providing her own table, lights, fuel, and everything. It is very awkward to our American notions; but there is an independence about it, which I think must make it agreeable on better acquaintance. But the place is certainly destitute of attraction, and life seems to pass very heavily. The English do not appear to have a turn for amusing themselves. Sunday was a bright and hot day, and in the forenoon I set out on a walk, not well knowing whither, over a very dusty road, with not a particle of shade along its dead level. The Welsh mountains were before me, at the distance of three or four miles,--long ridgy hills, descending pretty abruptly upon the plain; on either side of the road, here and there, an old whitewashed, thatched stone cottage, or a stone farm-house, with an aspect of some antiquity. I never suffered so much before, on this side of the water, from heat and dust, and should probably have turned back had I not espied the round towers and walls of an old castle at some distance before me. Having looked at a guide-book, previously to setting out, I knew that this must be Rhyddlan Castle, about three miles from Rhyl; so I plodded on, and by and by entered an antiquated village, on one side of which the castle stood. This Welsh village is very much like the English villages, with narrow streets and mean houses or cottages, built in blocks, and here and there a larger house standing alone; everything far more compact than in our rural villages, and with no grassy street-margin nor trees; aged and dirty also, with dirty children staring at the passenger, and an undue supply of mean inns; most, or many of the men in breeches, and some of the women, especially the elder ones, in black beaver hats. The streets were paved with round pebbles, and looked squalid and ugly. The children and grown people stared lazily at me as I passed, but showed no such alert and vivacious curiosity as a community of Yankees would have done. I turned up a street that led me to the castle, which looked very picturesque close at hand,--more so than at a distance, because the towers and walls have not a sufficiently broken outline against the sky. There are several round towers at the angles of the wall very large in their circles, built of gray stone, crumbling, ivy-grown, everything that one thinks of in an old ruin. I could not get into the inner space of the castle without climbing over a fence, or clambering down into the moat; so I contented myself with walking round it, and viewing it from the outside. Through the gateway I saw a cow feeding on the green grass in the inner court of the castle. In one of the walls there was a large triangular gap, where perhaps the assailants had made a breach. Of course there were weeds on the ruinous top of the towers, and along the summit of the wall. This was the first castle built by Edward I. in Wales, and he resided here during the erection of Conway Castle, and here Queen Eleanor gave birth to a princess. Some few years since a meeting of Welsh bards was held within it. After viewing it awhile, and listening to the babble of some children who lay on the grass near by, I resumed my walk, and, meeting a Welshman in the village street, I asked him my nearest way back to Rhyl. "Dim Sassenach," said he, after a pause. How odd that an hour or two on the railway should have brought me amongst a people who speak no English! Just below the castle, there is an arched stone bridge over the river Clwyd, and the best view of the edifice is from hence. It stands on a gentle eminence, commanding the passage of the river, and two twin round towers rise close beside one another, whence, I suppose, archers have often drawn their bows against the wild Welshmen, on the river-banks. Behind was the line of mountains; and this was the point of defence between the hill country and the lowlands. On the bridge stood a good many idle Welshmen, leaning over the parapet, and looking at some small vessels that had come up the river from the sea. There was the frame of a new vessel on the stocks near by. As I returned, on my way home, I again inquired my way of a man in breeches, who, I found, could speak English very well. He was kind, and took pains to direct me, giving me the choice of three ways, viz. the one by which I came, another across the fields, and a third by the embankment along the river-side. I chose the latter, and so followed the course of the Clwyd, which is very ugly, with a tidal flow and wide marshy banks. On its farther side was Rhyddlan marsh, where a battle was fought between the Welsh and Saxons a thousand years ago. I have forgotten to mention that the castle and its vicinity was the scene of the famous battle of the fiddlers, between De Blandeville, Earl of Chester, and the Welsh, about the time of the Conqueror. CONWAY CASTLE. September 13th.--On Monday we went with O'Sullivan to Conway by rail. Certainly this must be the most perfect specimen of a ruinous old castle in the whole world; it quite fills up one's idea. We first walked round the exterior of the wall, at the base of which are hovels, with dirty children playing about them, and pigs rambling along, and squalid women visible in the doorways; but all these things melt into the picturesqueness of the scene, and do not harm it. The whole town of Conway is built in what was once the castle-yard, and the whole circuit of the wall is still standing in a delightful state of decay. At the angles, and at regular intervals, there are round towers, having half their circle on the outside of the walls, and half within. Most of these towers have a great crack pervading them irregularly from top to bottom; the ivy hangs upon them,--the weeds grow on the tops. Gateways, three or four of them, open through the walls, and streets proceed from them into the town. At some points, very old cottages or small houses are close against the sides, and, old as they are, they must have been built after the whole structure was a ruin. In one place I saw the sign of an alehouse painted on the gray stones of one of the old round towers. As we entered one of the gates, after making the entire circuit, we saw an omnibus coming down the street towards us, with its horn sounding. Llandudno was its place of destination; and, knowing no more about it than that it was four miles off, we took our seats. Llandudno is a watering-village at the base of the Great Orme's Head, at the mouth of the Conway River. In this omnibus there were two pleasant-looking girls, who talked Welsh together,--a guttural, childish kind of a babble. Afterwards we got into conversation with them, and found them very agreeable. One of them was reading Tupper's "Proverbial Philosophy." On reaching Llandudno, S----- waited at the hotel, while O'Sullivan, U----, and I ascended the Great Orme's Head. There are copper-mines here, and we heard of a large cave, with stalactites, but did not go so far as that. We found the old shaft of a mine, however, and threw stones down it, and counted twenty before we heard them strike the bottom. At the base of the Head, on the side opposite the village, we saw a small church with a broken roof, and horizontal gravestones of slate within the stone enclosure around it. The view from the hill was most beautiful,--a blue summer sea, with the distant trail of smoke from a steamer, and many snowy sails; in another direction the mountains, near and distant, some of them with clouds below their peaks. We went to one of the mines which are still worked, and boys came running to meet us with specimens of the copper ore for sale. The miners were not now hoisting ore from the shaft, but were washing and selecting the valuable fragments from great heaps of crumbled stone and earth. All about this spot there are shafts and well-holes, looking fearfully deep and black, and without the slightest protection, so that we might just as easily have walked into them as not. Having examined these matters sufficiently, we descended the hill towards the village, meeting parties of visitors, mounted on donkeys, which is a much more sensible way of ascending in a hot day than to walk. On the sides and summit of the hill we found yellow gorse,--heath of two colors, I think, and very beautiful,--and here and there a harebell. Owing to the long-continued dry weather, the grass was getting withered and brown, though not so much so as on American hill-pastures at this season. Returning to the village, we all went into a confectioner's shop, and made a good luncheon. The two prettiest young ladies whom I have seen in England came into the shop and ate cakes while we were there. They appeared to be living together in a lodging-house, and ordered some of their housekeeping articles from the confectioner. Next we went into the village bazaar,--a sort of tent or open shop, full of knick-knacks and gewgaws, and bought some playthings for the children. At half past one we took our seats in the omnibus, to return to Conway. We had as yet only seen the castle wall and the exterior of the castle; now we were to see the inside. Right at the foot of it an old woman has her stand for the sale of lithographic views of Conway and other places; but these views are ridiculously inadequate, so that we did not buy any of them. The admittance into the castle is by a wooden door of modern construction, and the present seneschal is, I believe, the sexton of a church. He remembered me as having been there a month or two ago; and probably, considering that I was already initiated, or else because he had many other visitors, he left us to wander about the castle at will. It is altogether impossible to describe Conway Castle. Nothing ever can have been so perfect in its own style, and for its own purposes, when it was first built; and now nothing else can be so perfect as a picture of ivy-grown, peaceful ruin. The banqueting-hall, all open to the sky and with thick curtains of ivy tapestrying the walls, and grass and weeds growing on the arches that overpass it, is indescribably beautiful. The hearthstones of the great old fireplaces, all about the castle, seem to be favorite spots for weeds to grow. There are eight large round towers, and out of four of them, I think, rise smaller towers, ascending to a much greater height, and once containing winding staircases, all of which are now broken, and inaccessible from below, though, in at least one of the towers, the stairs seemed perfect, high aloft. It must have been the rudest violence that broke down these stairs; for each step was a thick and heavy slab of stone, built into the wall of the tower. There is no such thing as a roof in any part; towers, hall, kitchen, all are open to the sky. One round tower, directly overhanging the railway, is so shattered by the falling away of the lower part, that you can look quite up into it and through it, while sitting in the cars; and yet it has stood thus, without falling into complete ruin, for more than two hundred years. I think that it was in this tower that we found the castle oven, an immense cavern, big enough to bake bread for an army. The railway passes exactly at the base of the high rock, on which this part of the castle is situated, and goes into the town through a great arch that has been opened in the castle wall. The tubular bridge across the Conway has been built in a style that accords with the old architecture, and I observed that one little sprig of ivy had rooted itself in the new structure. There are numberless intricate passages in the thickness of the castle walls, forming communications between tower and tower,--damp, chill passages, with rough stone on either hand, darksome, and very likely leading to dark pitfalls. The thickness of the walls is amazing; and the people of those days must have been content with very scanty light, so small were the apertures,--sometimes merely slits and loopholes, glimmering through many feet of thickness of stone. One of the towers was said to have been the residence of Queen Eleanor; and this was better lighted than the others, containing an oriel-window, looking out of a little oratory, as it seemed to be, with groined arches and traces of ornamental sculpture, so that we could dress up some imperfect image of a queenly chamber, though the tower was roofless and floorless. There was another pleasant little windowed nook, close beside the oratory, where the Queen might have sat sewing or looking down the river Conway at the picturesque headlands towards the sea. We imagined her stately figure in antique robes, standing beneath the groined arches of the oratory. There seem to have been three chambers, one above another, in these towers, and the one in which was the embowed window was the middle one. I suppose the diameter of each of these circular rooms could not have been more than twenty feet on the inside. All traces of wood-work and iron-work are quite gone from the whole castle. These are said to have been taken away by a Lord Conway in the reign of Charles II. There is a grassy space under the windows of Queen Eleanor's tower,--a sort of outwork of the castle, where probably, when no enemy was near, the Queen used to take the open air in summer afternoons like this. Here we sat down on the grass of the ruined wall, and agreed that nothing in the world could be so beautiful and picturesque as Conway Castle, and that never could there have been so fit a time to see it as this sunny, quiet, lovely afternoon. Sunshine adapts itself to the character of a ruin in a wonderful way; it does not "flout the ruins gray," as Scott says, but sympathizes with their decay, and saddens itself for their sake. It beautifies the ivy too. We saw, at the corner of this grass-plot around Queen Eleanor's tower, a real trunk of a tree of ivy, with so stalwart a stem, and such a vigorous grasp of its strong branches, that it would be a very efficient support to the wall, were it otherwise inclined to fall. O that we could have ivy in America! What is there to beautify us when our time of ruin comes? Before departing, we made the entire circuit of the castle on its walls, and O'Sullivan and I climbed by a ladder to the top of one of the towers. While there, we looked down into the street beneath, and saw a photographist preparing to take a view of the castle, and calling out to some little girl in some niche or on some pinnacle of the walls to stand still that he might catch her figure and face. I think it added to the impressiveness of the old castle, to see the streets and the kitchen-gardens and the homely dwellings that had grown up within the precincts of this feudal fortress, and the people of to-day following their little businesses about it. This does not destroy the charm; but tourists and idle visitors do impair it. The earnest life of to-day, however, petty and homely as it may be, has a right to its place alongside of what is left of the life of other days; and if it be vulgar itself, it does not vulgarize the scene. But tourists do vulgarize it; and I suppose we did so, just like others. We took the train back to Rhyl, where we arrived at about four o'clock, and, having dined, we again took the rail for Chester, and thence to Rock Park (that is, O'Sullivan and I), and reached home at about eleven o'clock. Yesterday, September 13th, I began to wear a watch from Bennet's, 65 Cheapside, London. W. C. Bennet warrants it as the best watch which they can produce. If it prove as good and as durable as he prophesies, J----- will find it a perfect time-keeper long after his father has done with Time. If I had not thought of his wearing it hereafter, I should have been content with a much inferior one. No. 39,620. September 20th.--I went back to Rhyl last Friday in the steamer. We arrived at the landing-place at nearly four o'clock, having started at twelve, and I walked thence to our lodgings, 18 West Parade. The children and their mother were all gone out, and I sat some time in our parlor before anybody came. The next morning I made an excursion in the omnibus as far as Ruthin, passing through Rhyddlan, St. Asaph, Denbigh, and reaching Ruthin at one o'clock. All these are very ancient places. St. Asaph has a cathedral which is not quite worthy of that name, but is a very large and stately church in excellent repair. Its square battlemented tower has a very fine appearance, crowning the clump of village houses on the hill-top, as you approach from Rhyddlan. The ascent of the hill is very steep; so it is at Denbigh and at Ruthin,--the steepest streets, indeed, that I ever climbed. Denbigh is a place of still more antique aspect than St. Asaph; it looks, I think, even older than Chester, with its gabled houses, many of their windows opening on hinges, and their fronts resting on pillars, with an open porch beneath. The castle makes an admirably ruinous figure on the hill, higher than the village. I had come hither with the purpose of inspecting it, but as it began to rain just then, I concluded to get into the omnibus and go to Ruthin. There was another steep ascent from the commencement of the long street of Ruthin, till I reached the market-place, which is of nearly triangular shape, and an exceedingly old-looking place. Houses of stone or plastered brick; one or two with timber frames; the roofs of an uneven line, and bulging out or sinking in; the slates moss-grown. Some of them have two peaks and even three in a row, fronting on the streets, and there is a stone market-house with a table of regulations. In this market-place there is said to be a stone on which King Arthur beheaded one of his enemies; but this I did not see. All these villages were very lively, as the omnibus drove in; and I rather imagine it was market-day in each of them,--there being quite a bustle of Welsh people. The old women came round the omnibus courtesying and intimating their willingness to receive alms,--witch-like women, such as one sees in pictures or reads of in romances, and very unlike anything feminine in America. Their style of dress cannot have changed for centuries. It was quite unexpected to me to hear Welsh so universally and familiarly spoken. Everybody spoke it. The omnibus-driver could speak but imperfect English; there was a jabber of Welsh all through the streets and market-places; and it flowed out with a freedom quite different from the way in which they expressed themselves in English. I had had an idea that Welsh was spoken rather as a freak and in fun than as a native language; it was so strange to find another language the people's actual and earnest medium of thought within so short a distance of England. But English is scarcely more known to the body of the Welsh people than to the peasantry of France. However, they sometimes pretend to ignorance, when they might speak it fairly enough. I took luncheon at the hotel where the omnibus stopped, and then went to search out the castle. It appears to have been once extensive, but the remains of it are now very few, except a part of the external wall. Whatever other portion may still exist, has been built into a modern castellated mansion, which has risen within the wide circuit of the fortress,--a handsome and spacious edifice of red freestone, with a high tower, on which a flag was flying. The grounds were well laid out in walks, and really I think the site of the castle could not have been turned to better account. I am getting tired of antiquity. It is certainly less interesting in the long run than novelty; and so I was well content with the fresh, warm, red hue of the modern house, and the unworn outline of its walls, and its cheerful, large windows; and was willing that the old ivy-grown ruins should exist now only to contrast with the modernisms. These ancient walls, by the by, are of immense thickness. There is a passage through the interior of a portion of them, the width from this interior passage to the outer one being fifteen feet on one side, and I know not how much on the other. It continued showery all day; and the omnibus was crowded. I had chosen the outside from Rhyl to Denbigh, but, all the rest of the journey, imprisoned myself within. On our way home, an old lady got into the omnibus,--a lady of tremendous rotundity; and as she tumbled from the door to the farthest part of the carriage, she kept advising all the rest of the passengers to get out. "I don't think there will be much rain, gentlemen," quoth she, "you'll be much more comfortable on the outside." As none of us complied, she glanced along the seats. "What! are you all Saas'uach?" she inquired. As we drove along, she talked Welsh with great fluency to one of the passengers, a young woman with a baby, and to as many others as could understand her. It has a strange, wild sound, like a language half blown away by the wind. The lady's English was very good; but she probably prided herself on her proficiency in Welsh. My excursion to-day had been along the valley of the Clwyd, a very rich and fertile tract of country. The next day we all took a long walk on the beach, picking up shells. On Monday we took an open carriage and drove to Rhyddlan; whence we sent back the carriage, meaning to walk home along the embankment of the river Clwyd, after inspecting the castle. The fortress is very ruinous, having been dismantled by the Parliamentarians. There are great gaps,--two, at least, in the walls that connect the round towers, of which there were six, one on each side of a gateway in front, and the same at a gateway towards the river, where there is a steep descent to a wall and square tower, at the water-side. Great pains and a great deal of gunpowder must have been used in converting this castle into a ruin. There were one or two fragments lying where they had fallen more than two hundred years ago, which, though merely a conglomeration of small stones and mortar, were just as hard as if they had been solid masses of granite. The substantial thickness of the walls is composed of these agglomerated small stones and mortar, the casing being hewn blocks of red freestone. This is much worn away by the weather, wherever it has been exposed to the air; but, under shelter, it looks as if it might have been hewn only a year or two ago. Each of the round towers had formerly a small staircase turret rising beside and ascending above it, in which a warder might be posted, but they have all been so battered and shattered that it is impossible for an uninstructed observer to make out a satisfactory plan of then. The interior of each tower was a small room, not more than twelve or fifteen feet across; and of these there seem to have been three stories, with loop-holes for archery and not much other light than what came through them. Then there are various passages and nooks and corners and square recesses in the stone, some of which must have been intended for dungeons, and the ugliest and gloomiest dungeons imaginable, for they could not have had any light or air. There is not, the least, splinter of wood-work remaining in any part of the castle,--nothing but bare stone, and a little plaster in one or two places, on the wall. In the front gateway we looked at the groove on each side, in which the portcullis used to rise and fall; and in each of the contiguous round towers there was a loop-hole, whence an enemy on the outer side of the portcullis might be shot through with an arrow. The inner court-yard is a parallelogram, nearly a square, and is about forty-five of my paces across. It is entirely grass-grown, and vacant, except for two or three trees that have been recently set out, and which are surrounded with palings to keep away the cows that pasture in and about the place. No window looks from the walls or towers into this court-yard; nor are there any traces of buildings having stood within the enclosure, unless it be what looks something like the flue of a chimney within one of the walls. I should suppose, however, that there must have been, when the castle was in its perfect state, a hall, a kitchen, and other commodious apartments and offices for the King and his train, such as there were at Conway and Beaumaris. But if so, all fragments have been carried away, and all hollows of the old foundations scrupulously filled up. The round towers could not have comprised all the accommodation of the castle. There is nothing more striking in these ruins than to look upward from the crumbling base, and see flights of stairs, still comparatively perfect, by which you might securely ascend to the upper heights of the tower, although all traces of a staircase have disappeared below, and the upper portion cannot be attained. On three sides of the fortress is a moat, about sixty feet wide, and cased with stone. It was probably of great depth in its day, but it is now partly filled up with earth, and is quite dry and grassy throughout its whole extent. On the inner side of the moat was the outer wall of the castle, portions of which still remain. Between the outer wall and the castle itself the space is also about sixty feet. The day was cloudy and lowering, and there were several little spatterings of rain, while we rambled about. The two children ran shouting hither and thither, and were continually clambering into dangerous places, racing along ledges of broken wall. At last they altogether disappeared for a good while; their voices, which had heretofore been plainly audible, were hushed, nor was there any answer when we began to call them, while making ready for our departure. But they finally appeared, coming out of the moat, where they had been picking and eating blackberries,--which, they said, grew very plentifully there, and which they were very reluctant to leave. Before quitting the castle, I must not forget the ivy, which makes a perfect tapestry over a large portion of the walls. We walked about the village, which is old and ugly; small, irregular streets, contriving to be intricate, though there are few of them; mean houses, joining to each other. We saw, in the principal one, the parliament house in which Edward I. gave a Charter, or allowed rights of some kind to his Welsh subjects. The ancient part of its wall is entirely distinguishable from what has since been built upon it. Thence we set out to walk along the embankment, although the sky looked very threatening. The wind, however, was so strong, and had such a full sweep at us, on the top of the bank, that we decided on taking a path that led from it across the moor. But we soon had cause to repent of this; for, which way soever we turned, we found ourselves cut off by a ditch or a little stream; so that here we were, fairly astray on Rhyddlan moor, the old battle-field of the Saxons and Britons, and across which, I suppose, the fiddlers and mountebanks had marched to the relief of the Earl of Chester. Anon, too, it began to shower; and it was only after various leaps and scramblings that we made our way to a large farm-house, and took shelter under a cart-shed. The back of the house to which we gained access was very dirty and ill-kept; some dirty children peeped at us as we approached, and nobody had the civility to ask us in; so we took advantage of the first cessation of the shower to resume our way. We were shortly overtaken by a very intelligent-looking and civil man, who seemed to have come from Rhyddlan, and said he was going to Rhyl. We followed his guidance over stiles and along hedge-row paths which we never could have threaded rightly by ourselves. By and by our kind guide had to stop at an intermediate farm; but he gave us full directions how to proceed, and we went on till it began to shower again pretty briskly, and we took refuge in a little bit of old stone cottage, which, small as it was, had a greater antiquity than any mansion in America. The door was open, and as we approached, we saw several children gazing at us; and their mother, a pleasant-looking woman, who seemed rather astounded at the visit that was about to befall her, tried to draw a tattered curtain over a part of her interior, which she fancied even less fit to be seen than the rest. To say the truth, the house was not at all better than a pigsty; and while we sat there, a pig came familiarly to the door, thrust in his snout, and seemed surprised that he should be driven away, instead of being admitted as one of the family. The floor was of brick; there was no ceiling, but only the peaked gable overhead. The room was kitchen, parlor, and, I suppose, bedroom for the whole family; at all events, there was only the tattered curtain between us and the sleeping accommodations. The good woman either could not or would not speak a word of English, only laughing when S----- said, "Dim Sassenach?" but she was kind and hospitable, and found a chair for each of us. She had been making some bread, and the dough was on the dresser. Life with these people is reduced to its simplest elements. It is only a pity that they cannot or do not choose to keep themselves cleaner. Poverty, except in cities, need not be squalid. When the shower abated a little, we gave all the pennies we had to the children, and set forth again. By the by, there were several colored prints stuck up against the walls, and there was a clock ticking in a corner and some paper-hangings pinned upon the slanting roof. It began to rain again before we arrived at Rhyl, and we were driven into a small tavern. After staying there awhile, we set forth between the drops; but the rain fell still heavier, so that we were pretty well damped before we got to our lodgings. After dinner, I took the rail for Chester and Rock Park, and S----- and the children and maid followed the next day. September 22d.--I dined on Wednesday evening at Mr. John Heywood's, Norris Green. Mr. Mouckton Mimes and lady were of the company. Mr. Mimes is a very agreeable, kindly man, resembling Longfellow a good deal in personal appearance; and he promotes, by his genial manners, the same pleasant intercourse which is so easily established with Longfellow. He is said to be a very kind patron of literary men, and to do a great deal of good among young and neglected people of that class. He is considered one of the best conversationists at present in society: it may very well be so; his style of talking being very simple and natural, anything but obtrusive, so that you might enjoy its agreeableness without suspecting it. He introduced me to his wife (a daughter of Lord Crewe), with whom and himself I had a good deal of talk. Mr. Milnes told me that he owns the land in Yorkshire, whence some of the pilgrims of the Mayflower emigrated to Plymouth, and that Elder Brewster was the Postmaster of the village. . . . He also said that in the next voyage of the Mayflower, after she carried the Pilgrims, she was employed in transporting a cargo of slaves from Africa,--to the West Indies, I suppose. This is a queer fact, and would be nuts for the Southerners. Mem.--An American would never understand the passage in Bunyan about Christian and Hopeful going astray along a by-path into the grounds of Giant Despair,--from there being no stiles and by-paths in our country. September 26th.--On Saturday evening my wife and I went to a soiree given by the Mayor and Mrs. Lloyd at the Town Hall to receive the Earl of Harrowby. It was quite brilliant, the public rooms being really magnificent, and adorned for the occasion with a large collection of pictures, belonging to Mr. Naylor. They were mostly, if not entirely, of modern artists,--of Turner, Wilkie, Landseer, and others of the best English painters. Turner's seemed too ethereal to have been done by mortal hands. The British Scientific Association being now in session here, many distinguished strangers were present. September 29th.--Mr. Monekton Milnes called on me at the Consulate day before yesterday. He is pleasant and sensible. Speaking of American politicians, I remarked that they were seldom anything but politicians, and had no literary or other culture beyond their own calling. He said the case was the same in England, and instanced Sir ------, who once called on him for information when an appeal had been made to him respecting two literary gentlemen. Sir ------ had never heard the names of either of these gentlemen, and applied to Mr. Milnes as being somewhat conversant with the literary class, to know whether they were distinguished and what were their claims. The names of the two literary men were James Sheridan Knowles and Alfred Tennyson. October 5th.--Yesterday I was present at a dejeuner on board the James Barnes, on occasion of her coming under the British flag, having been built for the Messrs. Barnes by Donald McKay of Boston. She is a splendid vessel, and magnificently fitted up, though not with consummate taste. It would be worth while that ornamental architects and upholsterers should study this branch of art, since the ship-builders seem willing to expend a good deal of money on it. In fact, I do not see that there is anywhere else so much encouragement to the exercise of ornamental art. I saw nothing to criticise in the solid and useful details of the ship; the ventilation, in particular, being free and abundant, so that the hundreds of passengers who will have their berths between decks, and at a still lower depth, will have good air and enough of it. There were four or five hundred persons, principally Liverpool merchants and their wives, invited to the dejeuner; and the tables were spread between decks, the berths for passengers not being yet put in. There was not quite light enough to make the scene cheerful, it being an overcast day; and, indeed, there was an English plainness in the arrangement of the festal room, which might have been better exchanged for the flowery American taste, which I have just been criticising. With flowers, and the arrangement of flags, we should have made something very pretty of the space between decks; but there was nothing to hide the fact that in a few days hence there would be crowded berths and sea-sick steerage passengers where we were now feasting. The cheer was very good,--cold fowl and meats; cold pies of foreign manufacture very rich, and of mysterious composition; and champagne in plenty, with other wines for those who liked them. I sat between two ladies, one of them Mrs. ------, a pleasant young woman, who, I believe, is of American provincial nativity, and whom I therefore regarded as half a countrywoman. We talked a good deal together, and I confided to her my annoyance at the prospect of being called up to answer a toast; but she did not pity me at all, though she felt, much alarm about her husband, Captain ------, who was in the same predicament. Seriously, it is the most awful part of my official duty,-- this necessity of making dinner-speeches at the Mayor's, and other public or semi-public tables. However, my neighborhood to Mrs. ------ was good for me, inasmuch as by laughing over the matter with her came to regard it in a light and ludicrous way; and so, when the time actually came, I stood up with a careless dare-devil feeling. The chairman toasted the president immediately after the Queen, and did me the honor to speak of myself in a most flattering manner, something like this: "Great by his position under the Republic,--greater still, I am bold to say, in the Republic of letters!" I made no reply at all to this; in truth, I forgot all about it when I began to speak, and merely thanked the company in behalf of the President, and my countrymen, and made a few remarks with no very decided point to them. However, they cheered and applauded, and I took advantage of the applause to sit down, and Mrs. ------ informed me that I had succeeded admirably. It was no success at all, to be sure; neither was it a failure, for I had aimed at nothing, and I had exactly hit it. But after sitting down, I was conscious of an enjoyment in speaking to a public assembly, and felt as if I should like to rise again. It is something like being under fire,--a sort of excitement, not exactly pleasure, but more piquant than most pleasures. I have felt this before, in the same circumstances; but, while on my legs, my impulse is to get through with my remarks and sit down again as quickly as possible. The next speech, I think, was by Rev. Dr. ------, the celebrated Arctic gentleman, in reply to a toast complimentary to the clergy. He turned aside from the matter in hand, to express his kind feelings towards America, where he said he had been most hospitably received, especially at Cambridge University. He also made allusions to me, and I suppose it would have been no more than civil in me to have answered with a speech in acknowledgment, but I did not choose to make another venture, so merely thanked him across the corner of the table, for he sat near me. He is a venerable-looking, white-haired gentleman, tall and slender, with a pale, intelligent, kindly face. Other speeches were made; but from beginning to end there was not one breath of eloquence, nor even one neat sentence; and I rather think that Englishmen would purposely avoid eloquence or neatness in after-dinner speeches. It seems to be no part of their object. Yet any Englishman almost, much more generally than Americans, will stand up and talk on in a plain way, uttering one rough, ragged, and shapeless sentence after another, and will have expressed himself sensibly, though in a very rude manner, before he sits down. And this is quite satisfactory to his audience, who, indeed, are rather prejudiced against the man who speaks too glibly. The guests began to depart shortly after three o'clock. This morning I have seen two reports of my little speech,--one exceedingly incorrect; another pretty exact, but not much to my taste, for I seem to have left out everything that would have been fittest to say. October 6th.--The people, for several days, have been in the utmost anxiety, and latterly in the highest exultation about Sebastopol,--and all England, and Europe to boot, have been fooled by the belief that it had fallen. This, however, now turns out to be incorrect; and the public visage is somewhat grim, in consequence. I am glad of it. In spite of his actual sympathies, it is impossible for a true American to be otherwise than glad. Success makes an Englishman intolerable; and, already, on the mistaken idea that the way was open to a prosperous conclusion of the war, The Times had begun to throw out menaces against America. I shall never love England till she sues to us for help, and, in the mean time, the fewer triumphs she obtains, the better for all parties. An Englishman in adversity is a very respectable character; he does not lose his dignity, but merely comes to a proper conception of himself. It is rather touching to an observer to see how much the universal heart is in this matter,--to see the merchants gathering round the telegraphic messages, posted on the pillars of the Exchange news-room, the people in the street who cannot afford to buy a paper clustering round the windows of the news-offices, where a copy is pinned up,--the groups of corporals and sergeants at the recruiting rendezvous, with a newspaper in the midst of them and all earnest and sombre, and feeling like one man together, whatever their rank. I seem to myself like a spy or a traitor when I meet their eyes, and am conscious that I neither hope nor fear in sympathy with them, although they look at me in full confidence of sympathy. Their heart "knoweth its own bitterness," and as for me, being a stranger and all alien, I "intermeddle not with their joy." October 9th.--My ancestor left England in 1630. I return in 1853. I sometimes feel as if I myself had been absent these two hundred and twenty-three years, leaving England just emerging from the feudal system, and finding it, on my return, on the verge of republicanism. It brings the two far-separated points of time very closely together, to view the matter thus. October 16th.--A day or two ago arrived the sad news of the loss of the Arctic by collision with a French steamer off Newfoundland, and the loss also of three or four hundred people. I have seldom been more affected by anything quite alien from my personal and friendly concerns, than by the death of Captain Luce and his son. The boy was a delicate lad, and it is said that he had never been absent from his mother till this time, when his father had taken him to England to consult a physician about a complaint in his hip. So his father, while the ship was sinking, was obliged to decide whether he would put the poor, weakly, timorous child on board the boat, to take his hard chance of life there, or keep him to go down with himself and the ship. He chose the latter; and within half an hour, I suppose, the boy was among the child-angels. Captain Luce could not do less than die, for his own part, with the responsibility of all those lost lives upon him. He may not have been in the least to blame for the calamity, but it was certainly too heavy a one for him to survive. He was a sensible man, and a gentleman, courteous, quiet, with something almost melancholy in his address and aspect. Oftentimes he has come into my inner office to say good-by before his departures, but I cannot precisely remember whether or no he took leave of me before this latest voyage. I never exchanged a great many words with him; but those were kind ones. October 19th.--It appears to be customary for people of decent station, but in distressed circumstances, to go round among their neighbors and the public, accompanied by a friend, who explains the case. I have been accosted in the street in regard to one of these matters; and to-day there came to my office a grocer, who had become security for a friend, and who was threatened with an execution,--with another grocer for supporter and advocate. The beneficiary takes very little active part in the affair, merely looking careworn, distressed, and pitiable, and throwing in a word of corroboration, or a sigh, or an acknowledgment, as the case may demand. In the present instance, the friend, a young, respectable-looking tradesman, with a Lancashire accent, spoke freely and simply of his client's misfortunes, not pressing the case unduly, but doing it full justice, and saying, at the close of the interview, that it was no pleasant business for himself. The broken grocer was an elderly man, of somewhat sickly aspect. The whole matter is very foreign to American habits. No respectable American would think of retrieving his affairs by such means, but would prefer ruin ten times over; no friend would take up his cause; no public would think it worth while to prevent the small catastrophe. And yet the custom is not without its good side as indicating a closer feeling of brotherhood, a more efficient sense of neighborhood, than exists among ourselves, although, perhaps, we are more careless of a fellow-creature's ruin, because ruin with us is by no means the fatal and irretrievable event that it is in England. I am impressed with the ponderous and imposing look of an English legal document,--an assignment of real estate in England, for instance,-- engrossed on an immense sheet of thickest paper, in a formal hand, beginning with "This Indenture" in German text, and with occasional phrases of form, breaking out into large script,--very long and repetitious, fortified with the Mayor of Manchester's seal, two or three inches in diameter, which is certified by a notary-public, whose signature, again, is to have my consular certificate and official seal. November 2d.--A young Frenchman enters, of gentlemanly aspect, with a grayish cloak or paletot overspreading his upper person, and a handsome and well-made pair of black trousers and well-fitting boots below. On sitting down, he does not throw off nor at all disturb the cloak. Eying him more closely, one discerns that he has no shirt-collar, and that what little is visible of his shirt-bosom seems not to be of to-day nor of yesterday,--perhaps not even of the day before. His manner is not very good; nevertheless, he is a coxcomb and a jackanapes. He avers himself a naturalized citizen of America, where he has been tutor in several families of distinction, and has been treated like a son. He left America on account of his health, and came near being tutor in the Duke of Norfolk's family, but failed for lack of testimonials; he is exceedingly capable and accomplished, but reduced in funds, and wants employment here, of the means of returning to America, where he intends to take a situation under government, which he is sure of obtaining. He mentioned a quarrel which he had recently had with an Englishman in behalf of America, and would have fought a duel had such been the custom of the country. He made the Englishman foam at the mouth, and told him that he had been twelve years at a military school, and could easily kill him. I say to him that I see little or no prospect of his getting employment here, but offer to inquire whether any situation, as clerk or otherwise, can be obtained for him in a vessel returning to America, and ask his address. He has no address. Much to my surprise, he takes his leave without requesting pecuniary aid, but hints that he shall call again. He is a very disagreeable young fellow, like scores of others who call on me in the like situation. His English is very good for a Frenchman, and he says he speaks it the least well of five languages. He has been three years in America, and obtained his naturalization papers, he says, as a special favor, and by means of strong interest. Nothing is so absolutely odious as the sense of freedom and equality pertaining to an American grafted on the mind of a native of any other country in the world. A naturalized citizen is HATEFUL. Nobody has a right to our ideas, unless born to them. November 9th.--I lent the above Frenchman a small sum; he advertised for employment as a teacher; and he called this morning to thank me for my aid, and says Mr. C------ has engaged him for his children, at a guinea a week, and that he has also another engagement. The poor fellow seems to have been brought to a very low ebb. He has pawned everything, even to his last shirt, save the one he had on, and had been living at the rate of twopence a day. I had procured him a chance to return to America, but he was ashamed to go back in such poor circumstances, and so determined to seek better fortune here. I like him better than I did,--partly, I suppose, because I have helped him. November 14th.--The other day I saw an elderly gentleman walking in Dale Street, apparently in a state of mania; for as he limped along (being afflicted with lameness) he kept talking to himself, and sometimes breaking out into a threat against some casual passenger. He was a very respectable-looking man; and I remember to have seen him last summer, in the steamer, returning from the Isle of Man, where he had been staying at Castle Mona. What a strange and ugly predicament it would be for a person of quiet habits to be suddenly smitten with lunacy at noonday in a crowded street, and to walk along through a dim maze of extravagances,-- partly conscious of then, but unable to resist the impulse to give way to them! A long-suppressed nature might be represented as bursting out in this way, for want of any other safety-valve. In America, people seem to consider the government merely as a political administration; and they care nothing for the credit of it, unless it be the administration of their own political party. In England, all people, of whatever party, are anxious for the credit of their rulers. Our government, as a knot of persons, changes so entirely every four years, that the institution has come to be considered a temporary thing. Looking at the moon the other evening, little R----- said, "It blooms out in the morning!" taking the moon to be the bud of the sun. The English are a most intolerant people. Nobody is permitted, nowadays, to have any opinion but the prevalent one. There seems to be very little difference between their educated and ignorant classes in this respect; if any, it is to the credit of the latter, who do not show tokens of such extreme interest in the war. It is agreeable, however, to observe how all Englishmen pull together,--how each man comes forward with his little scheme for helping on the war,--how they feel themselves members of one family, talking together about their common interest, as if they were gathered around one fireside; and then what a hearty meed of honor they award to their soldiers! It is worth facing death for. Whereas, in America, when our soldiers fought as good battles, with as great proportionate loss, and far more valuable triumphs, the country seemed rather ashamed than proud of them. Mrs. Heywood tells me that there are many Catholics among the lower classes in Lancashire and Cheshire,--probably the descendants of retainers of the old Catholic nobility and gentry, who are more numerous in these shires than in other parts of England. The present Lord Sefton's grandfather was the first of that race who became Protestant. December 25th.--Commodore P------ called to see me this morning,--a brisk, gentlemanly, offhand, but not rough, unaffected and sensible man, looking not so elderly as he ought, on account of a very well made wig. He is now on his return from a cruise in the East Indian seas, and goes home by the Baltic, with a prospect of being very well received on account of his treaty with Japan. I seldom meet with a man who puts himself more immediately on conversable terms than the Commodore. He soon introduced his particular business with me,--it being to inquire whether I would recommend some suitable person to prepare his notes and materials for the publication of an account of his voyage. He was good enough to say that he had fixed upon me, in his own mind, for this office; but that my public duties would of course prevent me from engaging in it. I spoke of Herman Melville, and one or two others; but he seems to have some acquaintance with the literature of the day, and did not grasp very cordially at any name that I could think of; nor, indeed, could I recommend any one with full confidence. It would be a very desirable task for a young literary man, or, for that matter, for an old one; for the world can scarcely have in reserve a less hackneyed theme than Japan. This is a most beautiful day of English winter; clear and bright, with the ground a little frozen, and the green grass along the waysides at Rock Ferry sprouting up through the frozen pools of yesterday's rain. England is forever green. On Christmas day, the children found wall-flowers, pansies, and pinks in the garden; and we had a beautiful rose from the garden of the hotel grown in the open air. Yet one is sensible of the cold here, as much as in the zero atmosphere of America. The chief advantage of the English climate is that we are not tempted to heat our rooms to so unhealthy a degree as in New England. I think I have been happier this Christmas than ever before,--by my own fireside, and with my wife and children about me,--more content to enjoy what I have,--less anxious for anything beyond it in this life. My early life was perhaps a good preparation for the declining half of life; it having been such a blank that any thereafter would compare favorably with it. For a long, long while, I have occasionally been visited with a singular dream; and I have an impression that I have dreamed it ever since I have been in England. It is, that I am still at college,--or, sometimes, even at school,--and there is a sense that I have been there unconscionably long, and have quite failed to make such progress as my contemporaries have done; and I seem to meet some of them with a feeling of shame and depression that broods over me as I think of it, even when awake. This dream, recurring all through these twenty or thirty years, must be one of the effects of that heavy seclusion in which I shut myself up for twelve years after leaving college, when everybody moved onward, and left me behind. How strange that it should come now, when I may call myself famous and prosperous!--when I am happy, too! January 3d, 1855.--The progress of the age is trampling over the aristocratic institutions of England, and they crumble beneath it. This war has given the country a vast impulse towards democracy. The nobility will never hereafter, I think, assume or be permitted to rule the nation in peace, or command armies in war, on any ground except the individual ability which may appertain to one of their number, as well as to a commoner. And yet the nobles were never positively more noble than now; never, perhaps, so chivalrous, so honorable, so highly cultivated; but, relatively to the rest of the world, they do not maintain their old place. The pressure of the war has tested and proved this fact, at home and abroad. At this moment it would be an absurdity in the nobles to pretend to the position which was quietly conceded to them a year ago. This one year has done the work of fifty ordinary ones; or, more accurately, it has made apparent what has long been preparing itself. January 6th.--The American ambassador called on me to-day and stayed a good while,--an hour or two. He is visiting at Mr. William Browne's, at Richmond Hill, having come to this region to bring his niece, who is to be bride's-maid at the wedding of an American girl. I like Mr. ------. He cannot exactly be called gentlemanly in his manners, there being a sort of rusticity about him; moreover, he has a habit of squinting one eye, and an awkward carriage of his head; hut, withal, a dignity in his large person, and a consciousness of high position and importance, which gives him ease and freedom. Very simple and frank in his address, he may be as crafty as other diplomatists are said to be; but I see only good sense and plainness of speech,--appreciative, too, and genial enough to make himself conversable. He talked very freely of himself and of other public people, and of American and English affairs. He returns to America, he says, next October, and then retires forever from public life, being sixty-four years of age, and having now no desire except to write memoirs of his times, and especially of the administration of Mr. Polk. I suggested a doubt whether the people would permit him to retire; and he immediately responded to my hint as regards his prospects for the Presidency. He said that his mind was fully made up, and that he would never be a candidate, and that he had expressed this decision to his friends in such a way as to put it out of his own power to change it. He acknowledged that he should have been glad of the nomination for the Presidency in 1852, but that it was now too late, and that he was too old,--and, in short, he seemed to be quite sincere in his nolo episcopari; although, really, he is the only Democrat, at this moment, whom it would not be absurd to talk of for the office. As he talked, his face flushed, and he seemed to feel inwardly excited. Doubtless, it was the high vision of half his lifetime which he here relinquished. I cannot question that he is sincere; but, of course, should the people insist upon having him for President, he is too good a patriot to refuse. I wonder whether he can have had any object in saying all this to me. He might see that it would be perfectly natural for me to tell it to General Pierce. But it is a very vulgar idea,--this of seeing craft and subtlety, when there is a plain and honest aspect. January 9th.--I dined at Mr. William Browne's (M. P.) last, evening with a large party. The whole table and dessert service was of silver. Speaking of Shakespeare, Mr. ------ said that the Duke of Somerset, who is now nearly fourscore, told him that the father of John and Charles Kemble had made all possible research into the events of Shakespeare's life, and that he had found reason to believe that Shakespeare attended a certain revel at Stratford, and, indulging too much in the conviviality of the occasion, he tumbled into a ditch on his way home, and died there! The Kemble patriarch was an aged man when he communicated this to the Duke; and their ages, linked to each other; would extend back a good way; scarcely to the beginning of the last century, however. If I mistake not, it was from the traditions of Stratford that Kemble had learned the above. I do not remember ever to have seen it in print,--which is most singular. Miss L---- has an English rather than an American aspect,--being of stronger outline than most of our young ladies, although handsomer than English women generally, extremely self-possessed and well poised without affectation or assumption, but quietly conscious of rank, as much so as if she were an Earl's daughter. In truth, she felt pretty much as an Earl's daughter would do towards the merchants' wives and daughters who made up the feminine portion of the party. I talked with her a little, and found her sensible, vivacious, and firm-textured, rather than soft and sentimental. She paid me some compliments; but I do not remember paying her any. Mr. J-----'s daughters, two pale, handsome girls, were present. One of them is to be married to a grandson of Mr. ------, who was also at the dinner. He is a small young man, with a thin and fair mustache, . . . . and a lady who sat next me whispered that his expectations are 6,000 pounds per annum. It struck me, that, being a country gentleman's son, he kept himself silent and reserved, as feeling himself too good for this commercial dinner-party; but perhaps, and I rather think so, he was really shy and had nothing to say, being only twenty-one, and therefore quite a boy among Englishmen. The only man of cognizable rank present, except Mr. ------ and the Mayor of Liverpool, was a Baronet, Sir Thomas Birch. January 17th.--S---- and I were invited to be present at the wedding of Mr. J-------'s daughter this morning, but we were also bidden to the funeral services of Mrs. G------, a young American lady; and we went to the "house of mourning," rather than to the "house of feasting." Her death was very sudden. I crossed to Rock Ferry on Saturday, and met her husband in the boat. He said his wife was rather unwell, and that he had just been sent for to see her; but he did not seem at all alarmed. And yet, on reaching home, he found her dead! The body is to be conveyed to America, and the funeral service was read over her in her house, only a few neighbors and friends being present. We were shown into a darkened room, where there was a dim gaslight burning, and a fire glimmering, and here and there a streak of sunshine struggling through the drawn curtains. Mr. G------ looked pale, and quite overcome with grief,--this, I suppose, being his first sorrow,--and he has a young baby on his hands, and no doubt, feels altogether forlorn in this foreign land. The clergyman entered in his canonicals, and we walked in a little procession into another room, where the coffin was placed. Mr. G------ sat down and rested his head on the coffin: the clergyman read the service; then knelt down, as did most of the company, and prayed with great propriety of manner, but with no earnestness,--and we separated. Mr. G------ is a small, smooth, and pretty young man, not emphasized in any way; but grief threw its awfulness about him to-day in a degree which I should not have expected. January 20th.--Mr. Steele, a gentleman of Rock Ferry, showed me this morning a pencil-case formerly belonging to Dr. Johnson. It is six or seven inches long, of large calibre, and very clumsily manufactured of iron, perhaps plated in its better days, but now quite bare. Indeed, it looks as rough as an article of kitchen furniture. The intaglio on the end is a lion rampant. On the whole, it well became Dr. Johnson to have used such a stalwart pencil-case. It had a six-inch measure on a part of it, so that it must have been at least eight inches long. Mr. Steele says he has seen a cracked earthen teapot, of large size, in which Miss Williams used to make tea for Dr. Johnson. God himself cannot compensate us for being born for any period short of eternity. All the misery endured here constitutes a claim for another life, and, still more, all the happiness; because all true happiness involves something more than the earth owns, and needs something more than a mortal capacity for the enjoyment of it. After receiving an injury on the head, a person fancied all the rest of his life that he heard voices flouting, jeering, and upbraiding him. February 19th.--I dined with the Mayor at the Town Hall last Friday evening. I sat next to Mr. W. J------, an Irish-American merchant, who is in very good standing here. He told me that he used to be very well acquainted with General Jackson, and that he was present at the street fight between him and the Bentons, and helped to take General Jackson off the ground. Colonel Benton shot at him from behind; but it was Jesse Benton's ball that hit him and broke his arm. I did not understand him to infer any treachery or cowardice from the circumstance of Colonel Benton's shooting at Jackson from behind, but, suppose it occurred in the confusion and excitement of a street fight. Mr. W. J------ seems to think that, after all, the reconciliation between the old General and Benton was merely external, and that they really hated one another as before. I do not think so. These dinners of the Mayors are rather agreeable than otherwise, except for the annoyance, in my case, of being called up to speak to a toast, and that is less disagreeable than at first. The suite of rooms at the Town House is stately and splendid, and all the Mayors, as far as I have seen, exercise hospitality in a manner worthy of the chief magistrates of a great city. They are supposed always to spend much more than their salary (which is 2,000 pounds) in these entertainments. The town provides the wines, I am told, and it might be expected that they should be particularly good,--at least, those which improve by age, for a quarter of a century should be only a moderate age for wine from the cellars of centuries-long institutions, like a corporate borough. Each Mayor might lay in a supply of the best vintage he could find, and trust his good name to posterity to the credit of that wine; and so he would be kindly and warmly remembered long after his own nose had lost its rubicundity. In point of fact, the wines seem to be good, but not remarkable. The dinner was good, and very handsomely served, with attendance enough, both in the hall below--where the door was wide open at the appointed hour, notwithstanding the cold--and at table; some being in the rich livery of the borough, and some in plain clothes. Servants, too, were stationed at various points from the hall to the reception-room; and the last one shouted forth the name of the entering guest. There were, I should think, about fifty guests at this dinner. Two bishops were present. The Bishops of Chester and New South Wales, dressed in a kind of long tunics, with black breeches and silk stockings, insomuch that I first fancied they were Catholics. Also Dr. McNeil, in a stiff-collared coat, looking more like a general than a divine. There were two officers in blue uniforms; and all the rest of us were in black, with only two white waistcoats,--my own being one,--and a rare sprinkling of white cravats. How hideously a man looks in them! I should like to have seen such assemblages as must have gathered in that reception-room, and walked with stately tread to the dining-hall, in times past, the Mayor and other civic dignitaries in their robes, noblemen in their state dresses, the Consul in his olive-leaf embroidery, everybody in some sort of bedizenment,--and then the dinner would have been a magnificent spectacle, worthy of the gilded hall, the rich table-service, and the powdered and gold-laced servitors. At a former dinner I remember seeing a gentleman in small-clothes, with a dress-sword; but all formalities of the kind are passing away. The Mayor's dinners, too, will no doubt be extinct before many years go by. I drove home from the Woodside Ferry in a cab with Bishop Burke and two other gentlemen. The Bishop is nearly seven feet high. After writing the foregoing account of a civic banquet, where I ate turtle-soup, salmon, woodcock, oyster patties, and I know not what else, I have been to the News-room and found the Exchange pavement densely thronged with people of all ages and of all manner of dirt and rags. They were waiting for soup-tickets, and waiting very patiently too, without outcry or disturbance, or even sour looks,--only patience and meekness in their faces. Well, I don't know that they have a right to be impatient of starvation; but, still there does seem to be an insolence of riches and prosperity, which one day or another will have a downfall. And this will be a pity, too. On Saturday I went with my friend Mr. Bright to Otterpool and to Larkhill to see the skaters on the private waters of those two seats of gentlemen; and it is a wonder to behold--and it is always a new wonder to me--how comfortable Englishmen know how to make themselves; locating their dwellings far within private grounds, with secure gateways and porters' lodges, and the smoothest roads and trimmest paths, and shaven lawns, and clumps of trees, and every bit of the ground, every hill and dell, made the most of for convenience and beauty, and so well kept that even winter cannot cause disarray; and all this appropriated to the same family for generations, so that I suppose they come to believe it created exclusively and on purpose for them. And, really, the result is good and beautiful. It is a home,--an institution which we Americans have not; but then I doubt whether anybody is entitled to a home in this world, in so full a sense. The day was very cold, and the skaters seemed to enjoy themselves exceedingly. They were, I suppose, friends of the owners of the grounds, and Mr. Bright said they were treated in a jolly way, with hot luncheons. The skaters practise skating more as an art, and can perform finer manoeuvres on the ice, than our New England skaters usually can, though the English have so much less opportunity for practice. A beggar-woman was haunting the grounds at Otterpool, but I saw nobody give her anything. I wonder how she got inside of the gate. Mr. W. J------ spoke of General Jackson as having come from the same part of Ireland as himself, and perhaps of the same family. I wonder whether he meant to say that the General was born in Ireland,--that having been suspected in America. February 21st.--Yesterday two companies of work-people came to our house in Rock Park, asking assistance, being out of work and with no resource other than charity. There were a dozen or more in each party. Their deportment was quiet and altogether unexceptionable,--no rudeness, no gruffness, nothing of menace. Indeed, such demonstrations would not have been safe, as they were followed about by two policemen; but they really seem to take their distress as their own misfortune and God's will, and impute it to nobody as a fault. This meekness is very touching, and makes one question the more whether they have all their rights. There have been disturbances, within a day or two, in Liverpool, and shops have been broken open and robbed of bread and money; but this is said to have been done by idle vagabonds, and not by the really hungry work-people. These last submit to starvation gently and patiently, as if it were an every-day matter with them, or, at least, nothing but what lay fairly within their horoscope. I suppose, in fact, their stomachs have the physical habit that makes hunger not intolerable, because customary. If they had been used to a full meat diet, their hunger would be fierce, like that of ravenous beasts; but now they are trained to it. I think that the feeling of an American, divided, as I am, by the ocean from his country, has a continual and immediate correspondence with the national feeling at home; and it seems to be independent of any external communication. Thus, my ideas about the Russian war vary in accordance with the state of the public mind at home, so that I am conscious whereabouts public sympathy is. March 7th.--J----- and I walked to Tranmere, and passed an old house which I suppose to be Tranmere Hall. Our way to it was up a hollow lane, with a bank and hedge on each side, and with a few thatched stone cottages, centuries old, their ridge-poles crooked and the stones time-worn, scattered along. At one point there was a wide, deep well, hewn out of the solid red freestone, and with steps, also hewn in solid rock, leading down to it. These steps were much hollowed by the feet of those who had come to the well; and they reach beneath the water, which is very high. The well probably supplied water to the old cotters and retainers of Tranmere Hall five hundred years ago. The Hall stands on the verge of a long hill which stretches behind Tranmere and as far as Birkenhead. It is an old gray stone edifice, with a good many gables, and windows with mullions, and some of them extending the whole breadth of the gable. In some parts of the house, the windows seem to have been built up; probably in the days when daylight was taxed. The form of the Hall is multiplex, the roofs sloping down and intersecting one another, so as to make the general result indescribable. There were two sun-dials on different sides of the house, both the dial-plates of which were of stone; and on one the figures, so far as I could see, were quite worn off, but the gnomon still cast a shadow over it in such a way that I could judge that it was about noon. The other dial had some half-worn hour-marks, but no gnomon. The chinks of the stones of the house were very weedy, and the building looked quaint and venerable; but it is now converted into a farm-house, with the farm-yard and outbuildings closely appended. A village, too, has grown up about it, so that it seems out of place among modern stuccoed dwellings, such as are erected for tradesmen and other moderate people who have their residences in the neighborhood of a great city. Among these there are a few thatched cottages, the homeliest domiciles that ever mortals lived in, belonging to the old estate. Directly across the street is a Wayside Inn, "licensed to sell wine, spirits, ale, and tobacco." The street itself has been laid out since the land grew valuable by the increase of Liverpool and Birkenhead; for the old Hall would never have been built on the verge of a public way. March 27th.--I attended court to day, at St. George's Hall, with my wife, Mr. Bright, and Mr. Channing, sitting in the High Sheriff's seat. It was the civil side, and Mr. Justice Cresswell presided. The lawyers, as far as aspect goes, seemed to me inferior to an American bar, judging from their countenances, whether as intellectual men or gentlemen. Their wigs and gowns do not impose on the spectator, though they strike him as an imposition. Their date is past. Mr. Warren, of the "Ten Thousand a Year," was in court,--a pale, thin, intelligent face, evidently a nervous man, more unquiet than anybody else in court,--always restless in his seat, whispering to his neighbors, settling his wig, perhaps with an idea that people single him out. St. George's Hall--the interior hall itself, I mean--is a spacious, lofty, and most rich and noble apartment, and very satisfactory. The pavement is made of mosaic tiles, and has a beautiful effect. April 7th.--I dined at Mr. J. P. Heywood's on Thursday, and met there Mr. and Mrs. ------ of Smithell's Hall. The Hall is an old edifice of some five hundred years, and Mrs. ------ says there is a bloody footstep at the foot of the great staircase. The tradition is that a certain martyr, in Bloody Mary's time, being examined before the occupant of the Hall, and committed to prison, stamped his foot, in earnest protest against the injustice with which he was treated. Blood issued from his foot, which slid along the stone pavement, leaving a long footmark, printed in blood. And there it has remained ever since, in spite of the scrubbings of all succeeding generations. Mrs. ------ spoke of it with much solemnity, real or affected. She says that they now cover the bloody impress with a carpet, being unable to remove it. In the History of Lancashire, which I looked at last night, there is quite a different account,--according to which the footstep is not a bloody one, but is a slight cavity or inequality in the surface of the stone, somewhat in the shape of a man's foot with a peaked shoe. The martyr's name was George Marsh. He was a curate, and was afterwards burnt. Mrs. ------ asked me to go and see the Hall and the footmark; and as it is in Lancashire, and not a great way off, and a curious old place, perhaps I may. April 12th.--The Earl of ------, whom I saw the other day at St. George's Hall, has a somewhat elderly look,--a pale and rather thin face, which strikes one as remarkably short, or compressed from top to bottom. Nevertheless, it has great intelligence, and sensitiveness too, I should think, but a cold, disagreeable expression. I should take him to be a man of not very pleasant temper,--not genial. He has no physical presence nor dignity, yet one sees him to be a person of rank and consequence. But, after all, there is nothing about him which it need have taken centuries of illustrious nobility to produce, especially in a man of remarkable ability, as Lord ------ certainly is. S-----, who attended court all through the Hapgood trial, and saw Lord ------ for hours together every day, has come to conclusions quite different from mine. She thinks him a perfectly natural person, without any assumption, any self-consciousness, any scorn of the lower world. She was delighted with his ready appreciation and feeling of what was passing around him,-- his quick enjoyment of a joke,--the simplicity and unaffectedness of his emotion at whatever incidents excited his interest,--the genial acknowledgment of sympathy, causing him to look round and exchange glances with those near him, who were not his individual friends, but barristers and other casual persons. He seemed to her all that a nobleman ought to be, entirely simple and free from pretence and self-assertion, which persons of lower rank can hardly help bedevilling themselves with. I saw him only for a very few moments, so cannot put my observation against hers, especially as I was influenced by what I had heard the Liverpool people say of him. I do not know whether I have mentioned that the handsomest man I have seen in England was a young footman of Mr. Heywood's. In his rich livery, he was a perfect Joseph Andrews. In my Romance, the original emigrant to America may have carried away with him a family secret, whereby it was in his power, had he so chosen, to have brought about the ruin of the family. This secret he transmits to his American progeny, by whom it is inherited throughout all the intervening generations. At last, the hero of the Romance comes to England, and finds, that, by means of this secret, he still has it in his power to procure the downfall of the family. It would be something similar to the story of Meleager, whose fate depended on the firebrand that his mother had snatched from the flames. April 24th.--On Saturday I was present at a dejeuner on board the Donald McKay; the principal guest being Mr. Layard, M. P. There were several hundred people, quite filling the between decks of the ship, which was converted into a saloon for the occasion. I sat next to Mr. Layard, at the head of the table, and so had a good opportunity of seeing and getting acquainted with him. He is a man in early middle age,--of middle stature, with an open, frank, intelligent, kindly face. His forehead is not expansive, but is prominent in the perceptive regions, and retreats a good deal. His mouth is full,--I liked him from the first. He was very kind and complimentary to me, and made me promise to go and see him in London. It would have been a very pleasant entertainment, only that my pleasure in it was much marred by having to acknowledge a toast, in honor of the President. However, such things do not trouble me nearly so much as they used to do, and I came through it tolerably enough. Mr. Layard's speech was the great affair of the day. He speaks with much fluency (though he assured me that he had to put great force upon himself to speak publicly), and, as he warms up, seems to engage with his whole moral and physical man,--quite possessed with what he has to say. His evident earnestness and good faith make him eloquent, and stand him instead of oratorical graces. His views of the position of England and the prospects of the war were as dark as well could be; and his speech was exceedingly to the purpose, full of common-sense, and with not one word of clap-trap. Judging from its effect upon the audience, he spoke the voice of the whole English people,--although an English Baronet, who sat next below me, seemed to dissent, or at least to think that it was not exactly the thing for a stranger to hear. It concluded amidst great cheering. Mr. Layard appears to be a true Englishman, with a moral force and strength of character, and earnestness of purpose, and fulness of common-sense, such as have always served England's turn in her past successes; but rather fit for resistance than progress. No doubt, he is a good and very able man; but I question whether he could get England out of the difficulties which he sees so clearly, or could do much better than Lord Palmerston, whom he so decries. April 25th.--Taking the deposition of sailors yesterday, in a case of alleged ill-usage by the officers of a vessel, one of the witnesses was an old seaman of sixty. In reply to some testimony of his, the captain said, "You were the oldest man in the ship, and we honored you as such." The mate also said that he never could have thought of striking an old man like that. Indeed, the poor old fellow had a kind of dignity and venerableness about him, though he confessed to having been drunk, and seems to have been a mischief-maker, what they call a sea-preacher,-- promoting discontent and grumbling. He must have been a very handsome man in his youth, having regular features of a noble and beautiful cast. His beard was gray; but his dark hair had hardly a streak of white, and was abundant all over his head. He was deaf, and seemed to sit in a kind of seclusion, unless when loudly questioned or appealed to. Once he broke forth from a deep silence thus, "I defy any man!" and then was silent again. It had a strange effect, this general defiance, which he meant, I suppose, in answer to some accusation that he thought was made against him. His general behavior throughout the examination was very decorous and proper; and he said he had never but once hitherto been before a consul, and that was in 1819, when a mate had ill-used him, and, "being a young man then, I gave him a beating,"--whereupon his face gleamed with a quiet smile, like faint sunshine on an old ruin. "By many a tempest has his beard been shook"; and I suppose he must soon go into a workhouse, and thence, shortly, to his grave. He is now in a hospital, having, as the surgeon certifies, some ribs fractured; but there does not appear to have been any violence used upon him aboard the ship of such a nature as to cause this injury, though he swears it was a blow from a rope, and nothing else. What struck me in the case was the respect and rank that his age seemed to give him, in the view of the officers; and how, as the captain's expression signified, it lifted him out of his low position, and made him a person to be honored. The dignity of his manner is perhaps partly owing to the ancient mariner, with his long experience, being an oracle among the forecastle men. May 3d.--It rains to-day, after a very long period of east-wind and dry weather. The east-wind here, blowing across the island, seems to be the least damp of all the winds; but it is full of malice and mischief, of an indescribably evil temper, and stabs one like a cold, poisoned dagger. I never spent so disagreeable a spring as this, although almost every day for a month has been bright. Friday, May 11th.--A few weeks ago, a sailor, a most pitiable object, came to my office to complain of cruelty from his captain and mate. They had beaten him shamefully, of which he bore grievous marks about his face and eyes, and bruises on his head and other parts of his person: and finally the ship had sailed, leaving him behind. I never in my life saw so forlorn a fellow, so ragged, so wretched; and even his wits seemed to have been beaten out of him, if perchance he ever had any. He got an order for the hospital; and there he has been, off and on, ever since, till yesterday, when I received a message that he was dying, and wished to see the Consul; so I went with Mr. Wilding to the hospital. We were ushered into the waiting-room,--a kind of parlor, with a fire in the grate, and a centre-table, whereon lay one or two medical journals, with wood engravings; and there was a young man, who seemed to be an official of the house, reading. Shortly the surgeon appeared,--a brisk, cheerful, kindly sort of person, whom I have met there on previous visits. He told us that the man was dying, and probably would not be able to communicate anything, but, nevertheless, ushered us up to the highest floor, and into the room where he lay. It was a large, oblong room, with ten or twelve beds in it, each occupied by a patient. The surgeon said that the hospital was often so crowded that they were compelled to lay some of the patients on the floor. The man whom we came to see lay on his bed in a little recess formed by a projecting window; so that there was a kind of seclusion for him to die in. He seemed quite insensible to outward things, and took no notice of our approach, nor responded to what was said to him,--lying on his side, breathing with short gasps,--his apparent disease being inflammation of the chest, although the surgeon said that he might be found to have sustained internal injury by bruises. he was restless, tossing his head continually, mostly with his eyes shut, and much compressed and screwed up, but sometimes opening them; and then they looked brighter and darker than when I first saw them. I think his face was not at any time so stupid as at his first interview with me; but whatever intelligence he had was rather inward than outward, as if there might be life and consciousness at a depth within, while as to external matters he was in a mist. The surgeon felt his wrist, and said that there was absolutely no pulsation, and that he might die at any moment, or might perhaps live an hour, but that there was no prospect of his being able to communicate with me. He was quite restless, nevertheless, and sometimes half raised himself in bed, sometimes turned himself quite over, and then lay gasping for an instant. His woollen shirt being thrust up on his arm, there appeared a tattooing of a ship and anchor, and other nautical emblems, on both of them, which another sailor-patient, on examining them, said must have been done years ago. This might be of some importance, because the dying man had told me, when I first saw him, that he was no sailor, but a farmer, and that, this being his first voyage, he had been beaten by the captain for not doing a sailor's duty, which he had had no opportunity of learning. These sea-emblems indicated that he was probably a seaman of some years' service. While we stood in the little recess, such of the other patients as were convalescent gathered near the foot of the bed; and the nurse came and looked on, and hovered about us,--a sharp-eyed, intelligent woman of middle age, with a careful and kind expression, neglecting nothing that was for the patient's good, yet taking his death as coolly as any other incident in her daily business. Certainly, it was a very forlorn death-bed; and I felt--what I have heretofore been inclined to doubt-- that it might, be a comfort to have persons whom one loves, to go with us to the threshold of the other world, and leave us only when we are fairly across it. This poor fellow had a wife and two children on the other side of the water. At first he did not utter any sound; but by and by he moaned a little, and gave tokens of being more sensible to outward concerns,--not quite so misty and dreamy as hitherto. We had been talking all the while--myself in a whisper, but the surgeon in his ordinary tones--about his state, without his paying any attention. But now the surgeon put his mouth down to the man's face and said, "Do you know that you are dying?" At this the patient's head began to move upon the pillow; and I thought at first that it was only the restlessness that he had shown all along; but soon it appeared to be an expression of emphatic dissent, a negative shake of the head. He shook it with all his might, and groaned and mumbled, so that it was very evident how miserably reluctant he was to die. Soon after this he absolutely spoke. "O, I want you to get me well! I want to get away from here!" in a groaning and moaning utterance. The surgeon's question had revived him, but to no purpose; for, being told that the Consul had come to see him, and asked whether he had anything to communicate, he said only, "O, I want him to get me well!" and the whole life that was left in him seemed to be unwillingness to die. This did not last long; for he soon relapsed into his first state, only with his face a little more pinched and screwed up, and his eyes strangely sunken. And lost in his head; and the surgeon said that there would be no use in my remaining. So I took my leave. Mr. Wilding had brought a deposition of the man's evidence, which he had clearly made at the Consulate, for him to sign, and this we left with the surgeon, in case there should be such an interval of consciousness and intelligence before death as to make it possible for him to sign it. But of this there is no probability. I have just received a note from the hospital, stating that the sailor, Daniel Smith, died about three quarters of an hour after I saw him. May 18th.--The above-mentioned Daniel Smith had about him a bundle of letters, which I have examined. They are all very yellow, stained with sea-water, smelling of bad tobacco-smoke, and much worn at the folds. Never were such ill-written letters, nor such incredibly fantastic spelling. They seem to be from various members of his family,--most of them from a brother, who purports to have been a deck-hand in the coasting and steamboat trade between Charleston and other ports; others from female relations; one from his father, in which he inquires how long his son has been in jail, and when the trial is to come on,--the offence, however, of which he was accused, not being indicated. But from the tenor of his brother's letters, it would appear that he was a small farmer in the interior of South Carolina, sending butter, eggs, and poultry to be sold in Charleston by his brother, and receiving the returns in articles purchased there. This was his own account of himself; and he affirmed, in his deposition before me, that he had never had any purpose of shipping for Liverpool, or anywhere else; but that, going on board the ship to bring a man's trunk ashore, he was compelled to remain and serve as a sailor. This was a hard fate, certainly, and a strange thing to happen in the United States at this day,--that a free citizen should be absolutely kidnapped, carried to a foreign country, treated with savage cruelty during the voyage, and left to die on his arrival. Yet all this has unquestionably been done, and will probably go unpunished. The seed of the long-stapled cotton, now cultivated in America, was sent there in 1786 from the Bahama Islands, by some of the royalist refugees, who had settled there. The inferior short-stapled cotton had been previously cultivated for domestic purposes. The seeds of every other variety have been tried without success. The kind now grown was first introduced into Georgia. Thus to the refugees America owes as much of her prosperity as is due to the cotton-crops, and much of whatever harm is to result from slavery. May 22d.--Captain J------ says that he saw, in his late voyage to Australia and India, a vessel commanded by an Englishman, who had with him his wife and thirteen children. This ship was the home of the family, and they had no other. The thirteen children had all been born on board, and had been brought up on board, and knew nothing of dry land, except by occasionally setting foot on it. Captain J------ is a very agreeable specimen of the American shipmaster, --a pleasant, gentlemanly man, not at all refined, and yet with fine and honorable sensibilities. Very easy in his manners and conversation, yet gentle,--talking on freely, and not much minding grammar; but finding a sufficient and picturesque expression for what he wishes to say; very cheerful and vivacious; accessible to feeling, as yesterday, when talking about the recent death of his mother. His voice faltered, and the tears came into his eyes, though before and afterwards he smiled merrily, and made us smile; fond of his wife, and carrying her about the world with him, and blending her with all his enjoyments; an excellent and sagacious man of business; liberal in his expenditure; proud of his ship and flag; always well dressed, with some little touch of sailor-like flashiness, but not a whit too much; slender in figure, with a handsome face, and rather profuse brown beard and whiskers; active and alert; about thirty-two. A daguerreotype sketch of any conversation of his would do him no justice, for its slang, its grammatical mistakes, its mistaken words (as "portable" for "portly"), would represent a vulgar man, whereas the impression he leaves is by no means that of vulgarity; but he is a character quite perfect within itself, fit for the deck and the cabin, and agreeable in the drawing-room, though not amenable altogether to its rules. Being so perfectly natural, he is more of a gentleman for those little violations of rule, which most men, with his opportunities, might escape. The men whose appeals to the Consul's charity are the hardest to be denied are those who have no country,---Hungarians, Poles, Cubans, Spanish-Americans, and French republicans. All exiles for liberty come to me, if the representative of America were their representative. Yesterday, came an old French soldier, and showed his wounds; to-day, a Spaniard, a friend of Lopez,--bringing his little daughter with him. He said he was starving, and looked so. The little girl was in good condition enough, and decently dressed.--May 23d. May 30th.--The two past days have been Whitsuntide holidays; and they have been celebrated at Tranmere in a manner very similar to that of the old "Election" in Massachusetts, as I remember it a good many years ago, though the festival has now almost or quite died out. Whitsuntide was kept up on our side of the water, I am convinced, under pretence of rejoicings at the election of Governor. It occurred at precisely the same period of the year,--the same week; the only difference being, that Monday and Tuesday are the Whitsun festival days, whereas, in Massachusetts, Wednesday was "Election day," and the acme of the merry-making. I passed through Tranmere yesterday forenoon, and lingered awhile to see the sports. The greatest peculiarity of the crowd, to my eye, was that they seemed not to have any best clothes, and therefore had put on no holiday suits,--a grimy people, as at all times, heavy, obtuse, with thick beer in their blood. Coarse, rough-complexioned women and girls were intermingled, the girls with no maiden trimness in their attire, large and blowsy. Nobody seemed to have been washed that day. All the enjoyment was of an exceedingly sombre character, so far as I saw it, though there was a richer variety of sports than at similar festivals in America. There were wooden horses, revolving in circles, to be ridden a certain number of rounds for a penny; also swinging cars gorgeously painted, and the newest named after Lord Raglan; and four cars balancing one another, and turned by a winch; and people with targets and rifles,-- the principal aim being to hit an apple bobbing on a string before the target; other guns for shooting at the distance of a foot or two, for a prize of filberts; and a game much in fashion, of throwing heavy sticks at earthen mugs suspended on lines, three throws for a penny. Also, there was a posture-master, showing his art in the centre of a ring of miscellaneous spectators, and handing round his bat after going through all his attitudes. The collection amounted to only one halfpenny, and, to eke it out, I threw in three more. There were some large booths with tables placed the whole length, at which sat men and women drinking and smoking pipes; orange-girls, a great many, selling the worst possible oranges, which had evidently been boiled to give them a show of freshness. There were likewise two very large structures, the walls made of boards roughly patched together, and rooted with canvas, which seemed to have withstood a thousand storms. Theatres were there, and in front there were pictures of scenes which were to be represented within; the price of admission being twopence to one theatre, and a penny to the other. But, small as the price of tickets was, I could not see that anybody bought them. Behind the theatres, close to the board wall, and perhaps serving as the general dressing-room, was a large windowed wagon, in which I suppose the company travel and live together. Never, to my imagination, was the mysterious glory that has surrounded theatrical representation ever since my childhood brought down into such dingy reality as this. The tragedy queens were the same coarse and homely women and girls that surrounded me on the green. Some of the people had evidently been drinking more than was good for them; but their drunkenness was silent and stolid, with no madness in it. No ebullition of any sort was apparent. May 31st.--Last Sunday week, for the first time, I heard the note of the cuckoo. "Cuck-oo--cuck-oo" it says, repeating the word twice, not in a brilliant metallic tone, but low and flute-like, without the excessive sweetness of the flute,--without an excess of saccharine juice in the sound. There are said to be always two cuckoos seen together. The note is very soft and pleasant. The larks I have not yet heard in the sky; though it is not infrequent to hear one singing in a cage, in the streets of Liverpool. Brewers' draymen are allowed to drink as much of their master's beverage as they like, and they grow very brawny and corpulent, resembling their own horses in size, and presenting, one would suppose, perfect pictures of physical comfort and well-being. But the least bruise, or even the hurt of a finger, is liable to turn to gangrene or erysipelas, and become fatal. When the wind blows violently, however clear the sky, the English say, "It is a stormy day." And, on the other hand, when the air is still, and it does not actually rain, however dark and lowering the sky may be, they say, "The weather is fine!" June 2d.--The English women of the lower classes have a grace of their own, not seen in each individual, but nevertheless belonging to their order, which is not to be found in American women of the corresponding class. The other day, in the police court, a girl was put into the witness-box, whose native graces of this sort impressed me a good deal. She was coarse, and her dress was none of the cleanest, and nowise smart. She appeared to have been up all night, too, drinking at the Tranmere wake, and had since ridden in a cart, covered up with a rug. She described herself as a servant-girl, out of place; and her charm lay in all her manifestations,--her tones, her gestures, her look, her way of speaking and what she said, being so appropriate and natural in a girl of that class; nothing affected; no proper grace thrown away by attempting to appear lady-like,--which an American girl would have attempted,--and she would also have succeeded in a certain degree. If each class would but keep within itself, and show its respect for itself by aiming at nothing beyond, they would all be more respectable. But this kind of fitness is evidently not to be expected in the future; and something else must be substituted for it. These scenes at the police court are often well worth witnessing. The controlling genius of the court, except when the stipendiary magistrate presides, is the clerk, who is a man learned in the law. Nominally the cases are decided by the aldermen, who sit in rotation, but at every important point there comes a nod or a whisper from the clerk; and it is that whisper which sets the defendant free or sends him to prison. Nevertheless, I suppose the alderman's common-sense and native shrewdness are not without their efficacy in producing a general tendency towards the right; and, no doubt, the decisions of the police court are quite as often just as those of any other court whatever. June 11th.--I walked with J----- yesterday to Bebington Church. When I first saw this church, nearly two years since, it seemed to me the fulfilment of my ideal of an old English country church. It is not so satisfactory now, although certainly a venerable edifice. There used some time ago to be ivy all over the tower; and at my first view of it, there was still a little remaining on the upper parts of the spire. But the main roots, I believe, were destroyed, and pains were taken to clear away the whole of the ivy, so that now it is quite bare,--nothing but homely gray stone, with marks of age, but no beauty. The most curious thing about the church is the font. It is a massive pile, composed of five or six layers of freestone in an octagon shape, placed in the angle formed by the projecting side porch and the wall of the church, and standing under a stained-glass window. The base is six or seven feet across, and it is built solidly up in successive steps, to the height of about six feet,--an octagonal pyramid, with the basin of the font crowning the pile hewn out of the solid stone, and about a foot in diameter and the same in depth. There was water in it from the recent rains,--water just from heaven, and therefore as holy as any water it ever held in old Romish times. The aspect of this aged font is extremely venerable, with moss in the basin and all over the stones; grass, and weeds of various kinds, and little shrubs, rooted in the chinks of the stones and between the successive steps. At each entrance of Rock Park, where we live, there is a small Gothic structure of stone, each inhabited by a policeman and his family; very small dwellings indeed, with the main apartment opening directly out-of-doors; and when the door is open, one can see the household fire, the good wife at work, perhaps the table set, and a throng of children clustering round, and generally overflowing the threshold. The policeman walks about the Park in stately fashion, with his silver-laced blue uniform and snow-white gloves, touching his hat to gentlemen who reside in the Park. In his public capacity he has rather an awful aspect, but privately he is a humble man enough, glad of any little job, and of old clothes for his many children, or, I believe, for himself. One of the two policemen is a shoemaker and cobbler. His pay, officially, is somewhere about a guinea a week. The Park, just now, is very agreeable to look at, shadowy with trees and shrubs, and with glimpses of green leaves and flower-gardens through the branches and twigs that line the iron fences. After a shower the hawthorn blossoms are delightfully fragrant. Golden tassels of the laburnum are abundant. I may have mentioned elsewhere the traditional prophecy, that, when the ivy should reach the top of Bebbington spire, the tower was doomed to fall. It lies still, therefore, a chance of standing for centuries. Mr. Turner tells me that the font now used is inside of the church, but the one outside is of unknown antiquity, and that it was customary, in papistical time, to have the font without the church. There is a little boy often on board the Rock Ferry steamer with an accordion,--an instrument I detest; but nevertheless it becomes tolerable in his hands, not so much for its music, as for the earnestness and interest with which he plays it. His body and the accordion together become one musical instrument on which his soul plays tunes, for he sways and vibrates with the music from head to foot and throughout his frame, half closing his eyes and uplifting his face, as painters represent St. Cecilia and other famous musicians; and sometimes he swings his accordion in the air, as if in a perfect rapture. After all, my ears, though not very nice, are somewhat tortured by his melodies, especially when confined within the cabin. The boy is ten years old, perhaps, and rather pretty; clean, too, and neatly dressed, very unlike all other street and vagabond children whom I have seen in Liverpool. People give him their halfpence more readily than to any other musicians who infest the boat. J-----, the other day, was describing a soldier-crab to his mother, he being much interested in natural history, and endeavoring to give as strong an idea as possible of its warlike characteristics, and power to harm those who molest it. Little R----- sat by, quietly listening and sewing, and at last, lifting her head, she remarked, "I hope God did not hurt himself, when he was making him!" LEAMINGTON. June 21st.--We left Rock Ferry and Liverpool on Monday the 18th by the rail for this place; a very dim and rainy day, so that we had no pleasant prospects of the country; neither would the scenery along the Great Western Railway have been in any case very striking, though sunshine would have made the abundant verdure and foliage warm and genial. But a railway naturally finds its way through all the common places of a country, and is certainly a most unsatisfactory mode of travelling, the only object being to arrive. However, we had a whole carriage to ourselves, and the children enjoyed the earlier part of the journey very much. We skirted Shrewsbury, and I think I saw the old tower of a church near the station, perhaps the same that struck Falstaff's "long hour." As we left the town I saw the Wrekin, a round, pointed hill of regular shape, and remembered the old toast, "To all friends round the Wrekin!" As we approached Birmingham, the country began to look somewhat Brummagemish, with its manufacturing chimneys, and pennons of flame quivering out of their tops; its forges, and great heaps of mineral refuse; its smokiness and other ugly symptoms. Of Birmingham itself we saw little or nothing, except the mean and new brick lodging-houses, on the outskirts of the town. Passing through Warwick, we had a glimpse of the castle,--an ivied wall and two turrets, rising out of imbosoming foliage; one's very idea of an old castle. We reached Leamington at a little past six, and drove to the Clarendon Hotel,--a very spacious and stately house, by far the most splendid hotel I have yet seen in England. The landlady, a courteous old lady in black, showed my wife our rooms, and we established ourselves in an immensely large and lofty parlor, with red curtains and ponderous furniture, perhaps a very little out of date. The waiter brought me the book of arrivals, containing the names of all visitors for from three to five years back. During two years I estimated that there had been about three hundred and fifty persons only, and while we were there, I saw nobody but ourselves to support the great hotel. Among the names were those of princes, earls, countesses, and baronets; and when the people of the house heard from R-----'s nurse that I too was a man of office, and held the title of Honorable in my own country, they greatly regretted that I entered myself as plain "Mister" in the book. We found this hotel very comfortable, and might doubtless have made it luxurious, had we chosen to go to five times the expense of similar luxuries in America; but we merely ordered comfortable things, and so came off at no very extravagant rate,--and with great honor, at all events, in the estimation of the waiter. During the afternoon we found lodgings, and established ourselves in them before dark. This English custom of lodgings, of which we had some experience at Rhyl last year, has its advantages; but is rather uncomfortable for strangers, who, in first settling themselves down, find that they must undertake all the responsibility of housekeeping at an instant's warming, and cannot get even a cup of tea till they have made arrangements with the grocer. Soon, however, there comes a sense of being at home, and by our exclusive selves, which never can be attained at hotels nor boarding-houses. Our house is well situated and respectably furnished, with the dinginess, however, which is inseparable from lodging-houses,--as if others had used these things before and would use them again after we had gone,--a well-enough adaptation, but a lack of peculiar appropriateness; and I think one puts off real enjoyment from a sense of not being truly fitted. July 1st.--On Friday I took the rail with J----- for Coventry. It was a bright and very warm day, oppressively so, indeed; though I think that there is never in this English climate the pervading warmth of an American summer day. The sunshine may be excessively hot, but an overshadowing cloud or the shade of a tree or of a building at once affords relief; and if the slightest breeze stirs, you feel the latent freshness of the air. Coventry is some nine or ten miles from Leamington. The approach to it from the railway presents nothing very striking,--a few church-towers, and one or two tall steeples; and the houses first seen are of modern and unnoticeable aspect. Getting into the interior of the town, however, you find the streets very crooked, and some of them very narrow. I saw one place where it seemed possible to shake hands from one jutting storied old house to another. There were whole streets of the same kind of houses, one story impending over another, such as used to be familiar to me in Salem, and in some streets of Boston. In fact, the whole aspect of the town--its irregularity and continual indirectness--reminded me very much of Boston, as I used to see it, in rare visits thither, when a child. These Coventry houses, however, many of them, are much larger than any of similar style that I have seen elsewhere, and they spread into greater bulk as they ascend, by means of one story jutting over the other. Probably the New-Englanders continued to follow this fashion of architecture after it had been abandoned in the mother country. The old house built, by Philip English, in Salem, dated about 1692; and it was in this style,--many gabled, and impending. Here the edifices of such architecture seem to be Elizabethan, and of earlier date. A woman in Stratford told us that the rooms, very low on the ground-floor, grew loftier from story to story to the attic. The fashion of windows, in Coventry, is such as I have not hitherto seen. In the highest story, a window of the ordinary height extends along the whole breadth of the house, ten, fifteen, perhaps twenty feet, just like any other window of a commonplace house, except for this inordinate width. One does not easily see what the inhabitants want of so much window-light; but the fashion is very general, and in modern houses, or houses that have been modernized, this style of window is retained. Thus young people who grow up amidst old people contract quaint and old-fashioned manners and aspect. I imagine that these ancient towns--such as Chester and Stratford, Warwick and Coventry--contain even a great deal more antiquity than meets the eye. You see many modern fronts; but if you peep or penetrate inside, you find an antique arrangement,--old rafters, intricate passages, and ancient staircases, which have put on merely a new outside, and are likely still to prove good for the usual date of a new house. They put such an immense and stalwart ponderosity into their frameworks, that I suppose a house of Elizabeth's time, if renewed, has at least an equal chance of durability with one that is new in every part. All the hotels in Coventry, so far as I noticed them, are old, with new fronts; and they have an archway for the admission of vehicles into the court-yard, and doors opening into the rooms of the building on each side of the arch. Maids and waiters are seen darting across the arched passage from door to door, and it requires a guide (in my case, at least) to show you the way to the coffee-room or the bar. I have never been up stairs in any of them, but can conceive of infinite bewilderment of zigzag corridors between staircase and chamber. It was fair-day in Coventry, and this gave what no doubt is an unusual bustle to the streets. In fact, I have not seen such crowded and busy streets in any English town; various kinds of merchandise being for sale in the open air, and auctioneers disposing of miscellaneous wares, pretty much as they do at musters and other gatherings in the United States. The oratory of the American auctioneer, however, greatly surpasses that of the Englishman in vivacity and fun. But this movement and throng, together with the white glow of the sun on the pavements, make the scene, in my recollection, assume an American aspect, and this is strange in so antique and quaint a town as Coventry. We rambled about without any definite aim, but found our way, I believe, to most of the objects that are worth seeing. St. Michael's Church was most magnificent,--so old, yet enduring; so huge, so rich; with such intricate minuteness in its finish, that, look as long as you will at it, you can always discover something new directly before your eyes. I admire this in Gothic architecture,--that you cannot master it all at once, that it is not a naked outline; but, as deep and rich as human nature itself, always revealing new ideas. It is as if the builder had built himself and his age up into it, and as if the edifice had life. Grecian temples are less interesting to me, being so cold and crystalline. I think this is the only church I have seen where there are any statues still left standing in the niches of the exterior walls. We did not go inside. The steeple of St. Michael's is three hundred and three feet high, and no doubt the clouds often envelop the tip of the spire. Trinity, another church with a tall spire, stands near St. Michael's, but did not attract me so much; though I, perhaps, might have admired it equally, had I seen it first or alone. We certainly know nothing of church-building in America, and of all English things that I have seen, methinks the churches disappoint me least. I feel, too, that there is something much more wonderful in them than I have yet had time to know and experience. In the course of the forenoon, searching about everywhere in quest of Gothic architecture, we found our way into St. Mary's Hall. The doors were wide open; it seemed to be public,--there was a notice on the wall desiring visitors to give nothing to attendants for showing it, and so we walked in. I observed, in the guide-books, that we should have obtained an order for admission from some member of the town council; but we had none, and found no need of it. An old woman, and afterwards an old man, both of whom seemed to be at home on the premises, told us that we might enter, and troubled neither themselves nor us any further. St. Mary's Hall is now the property of the Corporation of Coventry, and seems to be the place where the Mayor and Council hold their meetings. It was built by one of the old guilds or fraternities of merchants and tradesmen The woman shut the kitchen door when I approached, so that I did not see the great fireplaces and huge cooking-utensils which are said to be there. Whether these are ever used nowadays, and whether the Mayor of Coventry gives such hospitable banquets as the Mayor of Liverpool, I do not know. We went to the Red Lion, and had a luncheon of cold lamb and cold pigeon-pie. This is the best way of dining at English hotels,--to call the meal a luncheon, in which case you will get as good or better a variety than if it were a dinner, and at less than half the cost. Having lunched, we again wandered about town, and entered a quadrangle of gabled houses, with a church, and its churchyard on one side. This proved to be St. John's Church, and a part of the houses were the locality of Bond's Hospital, for the reception of ten poor men, and the remainder was devoted to the Bablake School. Into this latter I peered, with a real American intrusiveness, which I never found in myself before, but which I must now assume, or miss a great many things which I am anxious to see. Running along the front of the house, under the jut of the impending story, there was a cloistered walk, with windows opening on the quadrangle. An arched oaken door, with long iron hinges, admitted us into a school-room about twenty feet square, paved with brick tiles, blue and red. Adjoining this there is a larger school-room which we did not enter, but peeped at, through one of the inner windows, from the cloistered walk. In the room which we entered, there were seven scholars' desks, and an immense arched fireplace, with seats on each side, under the chimney, on a stone slab resting on a brick pedestal. The opening of the fireplace was at least twelve feet in width. On one side of the room were pegs for fifty-two boys' hats and clothes, and there was a boy's coat, of peculiar cut, hanging on a peg, with the number "50" in brass upon it. The coat looked ragged and shabby. An old school-book was lying on one of the desks, much tattered, and without a title; but it seemed to treat wholly of Saints' days and festivals of the Church. A flight of stairs, with a heavy balustrade of carved oak, ascended to a gallery, about eight or nine feet from the lower floor, which runs along two sides of the room, looking down upon it. The room is without a ceiling, and rises into a peaked gable, about twenty feet high. There is a large clock in it, and it is lighted by two windows, each about ten feet wide,--one in the gallery, and the other beneath it. Two benches or settles, with backs, stood one on each side of the fireplace. An old woman in black passed through the room while I was making my observations, and looked at me, but said nothing. The school was founded in 1563, by Thomas Whealby, Mayor of Coventry; the revenue is about 900 pounds, and admits children of the working-classes at eleven years old, clothes and provides for them, and finally apprentices them for seven years. We saw some of the boys playing in the quadrangle, dressed in long blue coats or gowns, with cloth caps on their heads. I know not how the atmosphere of antiquity, and massive continuance from age to age, which was the charm to me in this scene of a charity school-room, can be thrown over it in description. After noting down these matters, I looked into the quiet precincts of Bond's Hospital, which, no doubt, was more than equally interesting; but the old men were lounging about or lolling at length, looking very drowsy, and I had not the heart nor the face to intrude among them. There is something altogether strange to an American in these charitable institutions,--in the preservation of antique modes and customs which is effected by them, insomuch that, doubtless, without at all intending it, the founders have succeeded in preserving a model of their own long-past age down into the midst of ours, and how much later nobody can know. We were now rather tired, and went to the railroad, intending to go home; but we got into the wrong train, and were carried by express, with hurricane speed, to Bradon, where we alighted, and waited a good while for the return train to Coventry. At Coventry again we had more than an hour to wait, and therefore wandered wearily up into the city, and took another look at its bustling streets, in which there seems to be a good emblem of what England itself really is,--with a great deal of antiquity in it, and which is now chiefly a modification of the old. The new things are based and supported on the sturdy old things, and often limited and impeded by them; but this antiquity is so massive that there seems to be no means of getting rid of it without tearing society to pieces. July 2d.--To-day I shall set out on my return to Liverpool, leaving my family here. TO THE LAKES. July 4th.--I left Leamington on Monday, shortly after twelve, having been accompanied to the railway station by U---- and J-----, whom I sent away before the train started. While I was waiting, a rather gentlemanly, well-to-do, English-looking man sat down by me, and began to talk of the Crimea, of human affairs in general, of God and his Providence, of the coming troubles of the world, and of spiritualism, in a strange free way for an Englishman, or, indeed, for any man. It was easy to see that he was an enthusiast of some line or other. He being bound for Birmingham and I for Rugby, we soon had to part; but he asked my name, and told me his own, which I did not much attend to, and immediately forgot. [Here follows a long account of a visit to Lichfield and Uttoxeter, condensed in "Our Old Home."] July 6th.--The day after my arrival, by way of Lichfield and Uttoxeter, at Liverpool, the door of the Consulate opened, and in came the very sociable personage who accosted me at the railway station at Leamington. He was on his way towards Edinburgh, to deliver a course of lectures or a lecture, and had called, he said, to talk with me about spiritualism, being desirous of having the judgment of a sincere mind on the subject. In his own mind, I should suppose, he is past the stage of doubt and inquiry; for he told me that in every action of his life he is governed by the counsels received from the spiritual world through a medium. I did not inquire whether this medium (who is a small boy) had suggested his visit to me. My remarks to him were quite of a sceptical character in regard to the faith to which he had surrendered himself. He has formerly lived in America, and had had a son born there. He gave me a pamphlet written by himself, on the cure of consumption and other diseases by antiseptic remedies. I hope he will not bore me any more, though he seems to be a very sincere and good man; but these enthusiasts who adopt such extravagant ideas appear to one to lack imagination, instead of being misled by it, as they are generally supposed to be. NEWBY BRIDGE.--FOOT OF WINDERMERE. July 13th.--I left Liverpool on Saturday last, by the London and Northwestern Railway, for Leamington, spent Sunday there, and started on Monday for the English lakes, with the whole family. We should not have taken this journey just now, but I had an official engagement which it was convenient to combine with a pleasure-excursion. The first night we arrived at Chester, and put up at the Albion Hotel, where we found ourselves very comfortable. We took the rail at twelve the next day, and went as far as Milnethorpe station, where we engaged seats in an old-fashioned stage-coach, and came to Newby Bridge. I suppose there are not many of these coaches now running on any road in Great Britain; but this appears to be the genuine machine, in all respects, and especially in the round, ruddy coachman, well moistened with ale, good-natured, courteous, and with a proper sense of his dignity and important position. U----, J-----, and I mounted atop, S-----, nurse, and R----- got inside, and we bowled off merrily towards the hearts of the hills. It was more than half past nine when we arrived at Newby Bridge, and alighted at the Swan Hotel, where we now are. It is a very agreeable place: not striking as to scenery, but with a pleasant rural aspect. A stone bridge of five arches crosses the river Severn (which is the communication between Windermere Lake and Morecambe Bay) close to the house, which sits low--and well sheltered in the lap of hills,--an old-fashioned inn, where the landlord and his people have a simple and friendly way of dealing with their guests, and yet provide them with all sorts of facilities for being comfortable. They load our supper and breakfast tables with trout, cold beef, ham, toast, and muffins; and give us three fair courses for dinner, and excellent wine, the cost of all which remains to be seen. This is not one of the celebrated stations among the lakes; but twice a day the stage-coach passes from Milnethorpe towards Ulverton, and twice returns, and three times a little steamer passes to and fro between our hotel and the head of the lake. Young ladies, in broad-brimmed hats, stroll about, or row on the river in the light shallops, of which there are abundance; sportsmen sit on the benches under the windows of the hotel, arranging their fishing-tackle; phaetons and post-chaises, with postilions in scarlet jackets and white breeches, with one high-topped boot, and the other leathered far up on the leg to guard against friction between the horses, dash up to the door. Morning and night comes the stage-coach, and we inspect the outside passengers, almost face to face with us, from our parlor-windows, up one pair of stairs. Little boys, and J----- among them, spend hours on hours fishing in the clear, shallow river for the perch, chubs, and minnows that may be seen flashing, like gleams of light over the flat stones with which the bottom is paved. I cannot answer for the other boys, but J----- catches nothing. There are a good many trees on the hills and roundabout, and pleasant roads loitering along by the gentle river-side, and it has been so sunny and warm since we came here that we shall have quite a genial recollection of the place, if we leave it before the skies have time to frown. The day after we came, we climbed a high and pretty steep hill, through a path shadowed with trees and shrubbery, up to a tower, from the summit of which we had a wide view of mountain scenery and the greater part of Windermere. This lake is a lovely little pool among the hills, long and narrow, beautifully indented with tiny bays and headlands; and when we saw it, it was one smile (as broad a smile as its narrowness allowed) with really brilliant sunshine. All the scenery we have yet met with is in excellent taste, and keeps itself within very proper bounds,-- never getting too wild and rugged to shock the sensibilities of cultivated people, as American scenery is apt to do. On the rudest surface of English earth, there is seen the effect of centuries of civilization, so that you do not quite get at naked Nature anywhere. And then every point of beauty is so well known, and has been described so much, that one must needs look through other people's eyes, and feels as if he were seeing a picture rather than a reality. Man has, in short, entire possession of Nature here, and I should think young men might sometimes yearn for a fresher draught. But an American likes it. FURNESS ABBEY. Yesterday, July 12th, we took a phaeton and went to Furness Abbey,--a drive of about sixteen miles, passing along the course of the Leam to Morecambe Bay, and through Ulverton and other villages. These villages all look antique, and the smallest of them generally are formed of such close, contiguous clusters of houses, and have such narrow and crooked streets, that they give you an idea of a metropolis in miniature. The houses along the road (of which there are not many, except in the villages) are almost invariably old, built of stone, and covered with a light gray plaster; generally they have a little flower-garden in front, and, often, honeysuckles, roses, or some other sweet and pretty rustic adornment, are flowering over the porch. I have hardly had such images of simple, quiet, rustic comfort and beauty, as from the look of these houses; and the whole impression of our winding and undulating road, bordered by hedges, luxuriantly green, and not too closely clipped, accords with this aspect. There is nothing arid in an English landscape; and one cannot but fancy that the same may be true of English rural life. The people look wholesome and well-to-do,--not specimens of hard, dry, sunburnt muscle, like our yeomen,--and are kind and civil to strangers, sometimes making a little inclination of the head in passing. Miss Martineau, however, does not seem to think well of their mental and moral condition. We reached Furness Abbey about twelve. There is a railway station close by the ruins; and a new hotel stands within the precincts of the abbey grounds; and continually there is the shriek, the whiz, the rumble, the bell-ringing, denoting the arrival of the trains; and passengers alight, and step at once (as their choice may be) into the refreshment-room, to get a glass of ale or a cigar,--or upon the gravelled paths of the lawn, leading to the old broken walls and arches of the abbey. The ruins are extensive, and the enclosure of the abbey is stated to have covered a space of sixty-five acres. It is impossible to describe them. The most interesting part is that which was formerly the church, and which, though now roofless, is still surrounded by walls, and retains the remnants of the pillars that formerly supported the intermingling curves of the arches. The floor is all overgrown with grass, strewn with fragments and capitals of pillars. It was a great and stately edifice, the length of the nave and choir having been nearly three hundred feet, and that of the transept more than half as much. The pillars along the nave were alternately a round, solid one and a clustered one. Now, what remains of some of them is even with the ground; others present a stump just high enough to form a seat; and others are, perhaps, a man's height from the ground,--and all are mossy, and with grass and weeds rooted into their chinks, and here and there a tuft of flowers, giving its tender little beauty to their decay. The material of the edifice is a soft red stone, and it is now extensively overgrown with a lichen of a very light gray line, which, at a little distance, makes the walls look as if they had long ago been whitewashed, and now had partially returned to their original color. The arches of the nave and transept were noble and immense; there were four of them together, supporting a tower which has long since disappeared,--arches loftier than I ever conceived to have been made by man. Very possibly, in some cathedral that I have seen, or am yet to see, there may be arches as stately as these; but I doubt whether they can ever show to such advantage in a perfect edifice as they do in this ruin,--most of them broken, only one, as far as I recollect, still completing its sweep. In this state they suggest a greater majesty and beauty than any finished human work can show; the crumbling traces of the half-obliterated design producing somewhat of the effect of the first idea of anything admirable, when it dawns upon the mind of an artist or a poet,--an idea which, do what he may, he is sure to fall short of in his attempt to embody it. In the middle of the choir is a much-dilapidated monument of a cross-legged knight (a crusader, of course) in armor, very rudely executed; and, against the wall, lie two or three more bruised and battered warriors, with square helmets on their heads and visors down. Nothing can be uglier than these figures; the sculpture of those days seems to have been far behind the architecture. And yet they knew how to put a grotesque expression into the faces of their images, and we saw some fantastic shapes and heads at the lower points of arches which would do to copy into Punch. In the chancel, just at the point below where the high altar stands, was the burial-place of the old Barons of Kendal. The broken crusader, perhaps, represents one of them; and some of their stalwart bones might be found by digging down. Against the wall of the choir, near the vacant space where the altar was, are some stone seats with canopies richly carved in stone, all quite perfectly preserved, where the priests used to sit at intervals, during the celebration of mass. Conceive all these shattered walls, with here and there an arched door, or the great arched vacancy of a window; these broken stones and monuments scattered about; these rows of pillars up and down the nave; these arches, through which a giant might have stepped, and not needed to bow his head, unless in reverence to the sanctity of the place,--conceive it all, with such verdure and embroidery of flowers as the gentle, kindly moisture of the English climate procreates on all old things, making them more beautiful than new,--conceive it with the grass for sole pavement of the long and spacious aisle, and the sky above for the only roof. The sky, to be sure, is more majestic than the tallest of those arches; and yet these latter, perhaps, make the stronger impression of sublimity, because they translate the sweep of the sky to our finite comprehension. It was a most beautiful, warm, sunny day, and the ruins had all the pictorial advantage of bright light and deep shadows. I must not forget that birds flew in and out among the recesses, and chirped and warbled, and made themselves at home there. Doubtless, the birds of the present generation are the posterity of those who first settled in the ruins, after the Reformation; and perhaps the old monks of a still earlier day may have watched them building about the abbey, before it was a ruin at all. We had an old description of the place with us, aided by which we traced out the principal part of the edifice, such as the church, as already mentioned, and, contiguous to this, the Chapter-house, which is better preserved than the church; also the kitchen, and the room where the monks met to talk; and the range of wall, where their cells probably were. I never before had given myself the trouble to form any distinct idea of what an abbey or monastery was,--a place where holy rites were daily and continually to be performed, with places to eat and sleep contiguous and convenient, in order that the monks might always be at hand to perform those rites. They lived only to worship, and therefore lived under the same roof with their place of worship, which, of course, was the principal object in the edifice, and hallowed the whole of it. We found, too, at one end of the ruins, what is supposed to have been a school-house for the children of the tenantry or villeins of the abbey. All round this room is a bench of stone against the wall, and the pedestal also of the master's seat. There are, likewise, the ruins of the mill; and the mill-stream, which is just as new as ever it was, still goes murmuring and babbling, and passes under two or three old bridges, consisting of a low gray arch overgrown with grass and shrubbery. That stream was the most fleeting and vanishing thing about the ponderous and high-piled abbey; and yet it has outlasted everything else, and might still outlast another such edifice, and be none the worse for wear. There is not a great deal of ivy upon the walls, and though an ivied wall is a beautiful object, yet it is better not to have too much,--else it is but one wall of unbroken verdure, on which you can see none of the sculptural ornaments, nor any of the hieroglyphics of Time. A sweep of ivy here and there, with the gray wall everywhere showing through, makes the better picture; and I think that nothing is so effective as the little bunches of flowers, a mere handful, that grow in spots where the seeds have been carried by the wind ages ago. I have made a miserable botch of this description; it is no description, but merely an attempt to preserve something of the impression it made on me, and in this I do not seem to have succeeded at all. I liked the contrast between the sombreness of the old walls, and the sunshine falling through them, and gladdening the grass that floored the aisles; also, I liked the effect of so many idle and cheerful people, strolling into the haunts of the dead monks, and going babbling about, and peering into the dark nooks; and listening to catch some idea of what the building was from a clerical-looking personage, who was explaining it to a party of his friends. I don't know how well acquainted this gentleman might be with the subject; but he seemed anxious not to impart his knowledge too extensively, and gave a pretty direct rebuff to an honest man who ventured an inquiry of him. I think that the railway, and the hotel within the abbey grounds, add to the charm of the place. A moonlight solitary visit might be very good, too, in its way; but I believe that one great charm and beauty of antiquity is, that we view it out of the midst of quite another mode of life; and the more perfectly this can be done, the better. It can never be done more perfectly than at Furness Abbey, which is in itself a very sombre scene, and stands, moreover, in the midst of a melancholy valley, the Saxon name of which means the Vale of the Deadly Nightshade. The entrance to the stable-yard of the hotel is beneath a pointed arch of Saxon architecture, and on one side of this stands an old building, looking like a chapel, but which may have been a porter's lodge. The Abbot's residence was in this quarter; and the clerical personage, before alluded to, spoke of these as the oldest part of the ruins. About half a mile on the hither side of the abbey stands the village of Dalton, in which is a castle built on a Roman foundation, and which was afterwards used by the abbots (in their capacity of feudal lords) as a prison. The abbey was founded about 1027 by King Stephen, before he came to the throne; and the faces of himself and of his queen are still to be seen on one of the walls. We had a very agreeable drive home (our drive hither had been uncomfortably sunny and hot), and we stopped at Ulverton to buy a pair of shoes for J----- and some drawing-books and stationery. As we passed through the little town in the morning, it was all alive with the bustle and throng of the weekly market; and though this had ceased on our return, the streets still looked animated, because the heat of the day drew most of the population, I should imagine, out of doors. Old men look very antiquated here in their old-fashioned coats and breeches, sunning themselves by the wayside. We reached home somewhere about eight o'clock,--home I see I have called it; and it seems as homelike a spot as any we have found in England,--the old inn, close by the bridge, beside the clear river, pleasantly overshadowed by trees. It is entirely English, and like nothing that one sees in America; and yet. I feel as if I might have lived here a long while ago, and had now come back because I retained pleasant recollections of it. The children, too, make themselves at home. J----- spends his time from morning to night fishing for minnows or trout, and catching nothing at all, and U---- and R----- have been riding between fields and barn in a hay-cart. The roads give us beautiful walks along the river-side, or wind away among the gentle hills; and if we had nothing else to look at in these walks, the hedges and stone fences would afford interest enough, so many and pretty are the flowers, roses, honeysuckles, and other sweet things, and so abundantly does the moss and ivy grow among the old stones of the fences, which would never have a single shoot of vegetation on them in America till the very end of time. But here, no sooner is a stone fence built, than Nature sets to work to make it a part of herself. She adopts it and adorns it, as if it were her own child. A little sprig of ivy may be seen creeping up the side, and clinging fast with its many feet; a tuft of grass roots itself between two of the stones, where a little dust from the road has been moistened into soil for it: a small bunch of fern grows in another such crevice; a deep, soft, green moss spreads itself over the top and all along the sides of the fence; and wherever nothing else will grow, lichens adhere to the stones and variegate their lines. Finally, a great deal of shrubbery is sure to cluster along its extent, and take away all hardness from the outline; and so the whole stone fence looks as if God had had at least as much to do with it as man. The trunks of the trees, too, exhibit a similar parasitical vegetation. Parasitical is an unkind phrase to bestow on this beautiful love and kindness which seems to exist here between one plant and another; the strong thing--being always ready to give support and sustenance, and the weak thing to repay with beauty, so that both are the richer,--as in the case of ivy and woodbine, clustering up the trunk of a tall tree, and adding Corinthian grace to its lofty beauty. Mr. W------, our landlord, has lent us a splendid work with engravings, illustrating the antiquities of Furness Abbey. I gather from it that the hotel must have been rebuilt or repaired from an old manor-house, which was itself erected by a family of Prestons, after the Reformation, and was a renewal from the Abbot's residence. Much of the edifice probably, as it exists now, may have been part of the original one; and there are bas-reliefs of Scripture subjects, sculptured in stone, and fixed in the wall of the dining-room, which have been there since the Abbot's time. This author thinks that what we had supposed to be the school-house (on the authority of an old book) was really the building for the reception of guests, with its chapel. He says that the tall arches in the church are sixty feet high. The Earl of Burlington, I believe, is the present proprietor of the abbey. THE LAKES. July 16th.--On Saturday, we left Newby Bridge, and came by steamboat up Windermere Lake to Lowwood Hotel, where we now are. The foot of the lake is just above Newby Bridge, and it widens from that point, but never to such a breadth that objects are not pretty distinctly visible from shore to shore. The steamer stops at two or three places in the course of its voyage, the principal one being Bowness, which has a little bustle and air of business about it proper to the principal port of the lake. There are several small yachts, and many skiffs rowing about. The banks are everywhere beautiful, and the water, in one portion, is strewn with islands; few of which are large enough to be inhabitable, but they all seem to be appropriated, and kept in the neatest order. As yet, I have seen no wildness; everything is perfectly subdued and polished and imbued with human taste, except, indeed, the outlines of the hills, which continue very much the same as God made them. As we approached the head of the lake, the congregation of great hills in the distance became very striking. The shapes of these English mountains are certainly far more picturesque than those which I have seen in Eastern America, where their summits are almost invariably rounded, as I remember them. They are great hillocks, great bunches of earth, similar to one another in their developments. Here they have variety of shape, rising into peaks, falling in abrupt precipices, stretching along in zigzag outlines, and thus making the most of their not very gigantic masses, and producing a remarkable effect. We arrived at the Lowwood Hotel, which is very near the head of the lake, not long after two o'clock. It stands almost on the shore of Windermere, with only a green lawn between,--an extensive hotel, covering a good deal of ground; but low, and rather village-inn-like than lofty. We found the house so crowded as to afford us no very comfortable accommodations, either as to parlor or sleeping-rooms, and we find nothing like the home-feeling into which we at once settled down at Newby Bridge. There is a very pretty vicinity, and a fine view of mountains to the northwest, sitting together in a family group, sometimes in full sunshine, sometimes with only a golden gleam on one or two of them, sometimes all in a veil of cloud, from which here and there a great, dusky head raises itself, while you are looking at a dim obscurity. Nearer, there are high, green slopes, well wooded, but with such decent and well-behaved wood as you perceive has grown up under the care of man; still no wildness, no ruggedness,--as how should there be, when, every half-mile or so, a porter's lodge or a gentleman's gateway indicates that the whole region is used up for villas. On the opposite shore of the lake there is a mimic castle, which I suppose I might have mistaken for a real one two years ago. It is a great, foolish toy of gray stone. A steamboat comes to the pier as many as six times a day, and stage-coaches and omnibuses stop at the door still oftener, communicating with Ambleside and the town of Windermere, and with the railway, which opens London and all the world to us. We get no knowledge of our fellow-guests, all of whom, like ourselves, live in their own circles, and are just as remote from us as if the lake lay between. The only words I have spoken since arriving here have been to my own family or to a waiter, save to one or two young pedestrians who met me on a walk, and asked me the distance to Lowwood Hotel. "Just beyond here," said I, and I might stay for months without occasion to speak again. Yesterday forenoon J----- and I walked to Ambleside,--distant barely two miles. It is a little town, chiefly of modern aspect, built on a very uneven hillside, and with very irregular streets and lanes, which bewilder the stranger as much as those of a larger city. Many of the houses look old, and are probably the cottages and farm-houses which composed the rude village a century ago; but there are stuccoed shops and dwellings, such as may have been built within a year or two; and three hotels, one of which has the look of a good old village inn; and the others are fashionable or commercial establishments. Through the midst of the village comes tumbling and rumbling a mountain streamlet, rushing through a deep, rocky dell, gliding under an old stone inch, and turning, when occasion calls, the great block of a water-mill. This is the only very striking feature of the village,--the stream taking its rough pathway to the lake as it used to do before the poets had made this region fashionable. In the evening, just before eight o'clock, I took a walk alone, by a road which goes up the hill, back of our hotel, and which I supposed might be the road to the town of Windermere. But it went up higher and higher, and for the mile or two that it led me along, winding up, I saw no traces of a town; but at last it turned into a valley between two high ridges, leading quite away from the lake, within view of which the town of Windermere is situated. It was a very lonely road, though as smooth, hard, and well kept as any thoroughfare in the suburbs of a city; hardly a dwelling on either side, except one, half barn, half farm-house, and one gentleman's gateway, near the beginning of the road, and another more than a mile above. At, two or three points there were stone barns, which are here built with great solidity. At one place there was a painted board, announcing that a field of five acres was to be sold, and referring those desirous of purchasing to a solicitor in London. The lake country is but a London suburb. Nevertheless, the walk was lonely and lovely; the copses and the broad hillside, the glimpses of the lake, the great misty company of pikes and fells, beguiled me into a sense of something like solitude; and the bleating of the sheep, remote and near, had a like tendency. Gaining the summit of the hill, I had the best view of Windermere which I have yet attained,--the best, I should think, that can be had, though, being towards the south, it brings the softer instead of the more striking features of the landscape into view. But it shows nearly the whole extent of the lake, all the way from Lowwood, beyond Newby Bridge, and I think there can hardly be anything more beautiful in the world. The water was like a strip and gleam of sky, fitly set among lovely slopes of earth. It was no broader than many a river, and yet you saw at once that it could be no river, its outline being so different from that of a running stream, not straight nor winding, but stretching to one side or the other, as the shores made room for it. This morning it is raining, and we are not very comfortable nor contented, being all confined to our little parlor, which has a broken window, against which I have pinned The Times to keep out the chill damp air. U---- has been ill, in consequence of having been overheated at Newby Bridge. We have no books, except guide-books, no means of amusement, nothing to do. There are no newspapers, and I shall remember Lowwood not very agreeably. As far as we are concerned, it is a scrambling, ill-ordered hotel, with insufficient attendance, wretched sleeping-accommodations, a pretty fair table, but German-silver forks and spoons; our food does not taste very good, and yet there is really no definite fault to be found with it. Since writing the above, I have found the first volume of Sir Charles Grandison, and two of G. P. R. James's works, in the coffee-room. The days pass heavily here, and leave behind them a sense of having answered no very good purpose. They are long enough, at all events, for the sun does not set till after eight o'clock, and rises I know not when. One of the most remarkable distinctions between England and the United States is the ignorance into which we fall of whatever is going on in the world the moment we get away from the great thoroughfares and centres of life. In Leamington we heard no news from week's end to week's end, and knew not where to find a newspaper; and here the case is neither better nor worse. The rural people really seem to take no interest in public affairs; at all events, they have no intelligence on such subjects. It is possible that the cheap newspapers may, in time, find their way into the cottages, or, at least, into the country taverns; but it is not at all so now. If they generally know that Sebastopol is besieged, it is the extent of their knowledge. The public life of America is lived through the mind and heart of every man in it; here the people feel that they have nothing to do with what is going forward, and, I suspect, care little or nothing about it. Such things they permit to be the exclusive concern of the higher classes. In front of our hotel, on the lawn between us and the lake, there are two trees, which we have hitherto taken to be yews; but on examining them more closely, I find that they are pine-trees, and quite dead and dry, although they have the aspect of dark rich life. But this is caused by the verdure of two great ivy-vines, which have twisted round them like gigantic snakes, and, clambering up and throttling the life out of them, have put out branches, and made crowns of thick green leaves, so that, at a little distance, it is quite impossible not to take them for genuine trees. The trunks of the ivy-vines must be more than a foot in circumference, and one feels they have stolen the life that belonged to the pines. The dead branches of one of the pines stick out horizontally through the ivy-boughs. The other shows nothing but the ivy, and in shape a good deal resembles a poplar. When the pine trunks shall have quite crumbled away, the ivy-stems will doubtless have gained sufficient strength to sustain themselves independently. July 19th.--Yesterday S----- went down the lake in the steamboat to take U----, baby, and nurse to Newby Bridge, while the three rest of us should make a tour through the lake region. After mamma's departure, and when I had finished some letters, J----- and I set out on a walk, which finally brought us to Bowness, through much delightful shade of woods, and past beautiful rivulets or brooklets, and up and down many hills. This chief harbor of the lakes seemed alive and bustling with tourists, it being a sunny and pleasant day, so that they were all abroad, like summer insects. The town is a confused and irregular little place, of very uneven surface. There is an old church in it, and two or three large hotels. We stayed there perhaps half an hour, and then went to the pier, where shortly a steamer arrived, with music sounding,--on the deck of which, with her back to us, sat a lady in a gray travelling-dress. J----- cried out, "Mamma! mamma!" to which the lady deigned no notice, but, he repeating it, she turned round, and was as much surprised, no doubt, to see her husband and son, as if this little lake had been the great ocean, and we meeting each other from opposite shores of it. We soon steamed back to Lowwood, and took a car thence for Rydal and Grasmere, after a cold luncheon. At Bowness I met Miss Charlotte Cushman, who has been staying at the Lowwood Hotel with us since Monday, without either party being aware of it. Our road to Rydal lay through Ambleside, which is certainly a very pretty town, and looks cheerfully in a sunny day. We saw Miss Martineau's residence, called "The Knoll," standing high up on a hillock, and having at its foot a Methodist chapel, for which, or whatever place of Christian worship, this good lady can have no occasion. We stopped a moment in the street below her house, and deliberated a little whether to call on her; but concluded we would not. After leaving Ambleside, the road winds in and out among the hills, and soon brings us to a sheet (or napkin, rather than a sheet) of water, which the driver tells us is Rydal Lake! We had already heard that it was but three quarters of a mile long, and one quarter broad; still, it being an idea of considerable size in our minds, we had inevitably drawn its ideal, physical proportions on a somewhat corresponding scale. It certainly did look very small; and I said, in my American scorn, that I could carry it away easily in a porringer; for it is nothing more than a grass-bordered pool among the surrounding hills which ascend directly from its margin; so that one might fancy it, not, a permanent body of water, but a rather extensive accumulation of recent rain. Moreover, it was rippled with a breeze, and so, as I remember it, though the sun shone, it looked dull and sulky, like a child out of humor. Now, the best thing these small ponds can do is to keep perfectly calm and smooth, and not attempt to show off any airs of their own, but content themselves with serving as a mirror for whatever of beautiful or picturesque there may be in the scenery around them. The hills about Rydal Water are not very lofty, but are sufficiently so as objects of every-day view,-- objects to live with; and they are craggier than those we have hitherto seen, and bare of wood, which indeed would hardly grow on some of their precipitous sides. On the roadside, as we reach the foot of the lake, stands a spruce and rather large house of modern aspect, but with several gables and much overgrown with ivy,--a very pretty and comfortable house, built, adorned, and cared for with commendable taste. We inquired whose it was, and the coachman said it was "Mr. Wordsworth's," and that "Mrs. Wordsworth was still residing there." So we were much delighted to have seen his abode, and as we were to stay the night at Grasmere, about two miles farther on, we determined to come back and inspect it as particularly as should be allowable. Accordingly, after taking rooms at Brown's Hotel, we drove back in our return car, and, reaching the head of Rydal Water, alighted to walk through this familiar scene of so many years of Wordsworth's life. We ought to have seen De Quincey's former residence and Hartley Coleridge's cottage, I believe, on our way, but were not aware of it at the time. Near the lake there is a stone-quarry, and a cavern of some extent, artificially formed, probably by taking out the stone. Above the shore of the lake, not a great way from Wordsworth's residence, there is a flight of steps hewn in a rock and ascending to a rock seat where a good view of the lake may be attained; and, as Wordsworth has doubtless sat there hundreds of times, so did we ascend and sit down, and look at the hills and at the flags on the lake's shore. Reaching the house that had been pointed out to us as Wordsworth's residence, we began to peer about at its front and gables, and over the garden wall, on both sides of the road, quickening our enthusiasm as much as we could, and meditating to pilfer some flower or ivy-leaf from the house or its vicinity, to be kept as sacred memorials. At this juncture a man approached, who announced himself as the gardener of the place, and said, too, that this was not Wordsworth's house at all, but the residence of Mr. Ball, a Quaker gentleman; but that his ground adjoined Wordsworth's, and that he had liberty to take visitors through the latter. How absurd it would have been if we had carried away ivy-leaves and tender recollections from this domicile of a respectable Quaker! The gardener was an intelligent man, of pleasant, sociable, and respectful address; and as we went along he talked about the poet, whom he had known, and who, he said, was very familiar with the country people. He led us through Mr. Ball's grounds, up a steep hillside, by winding, gravelled walks, with summer-houses at points favorable for them. It was a very shady and pleasant spot, containing about an acre of ground, and all turned to good account by the manner of laying it out; so that it seemed more than it really is. In one place, on a small, smooth slab of slate, let into a rock, there is an inscription by Wordsworth, which I think I have read in his works, claiming kindly regards from those who visit the spot after his departure, because many trees had been spared at his intercession. His own grounds, or rather his ornamental garden, is separated from Mr. Ball's only by a wire fence, or some such barrier, and the gates have no fastening, so that the whole appears like one possession, and doubtless was so as regarded the poet's walks and enjoyments. We approached by paths so winding that I hardly know how the house stands in relation to the road; but, after much circuity, we really did see Wordsworth's residence,--an old house with an uneven ridge-pole, built of stone, no doubt, but plastered over with some neutral tint,--a house that would not have been remarkably pretty in itself, but so delightfully situated, so secluded, so hedged about with shrubbery, and adorned with flowers, so ivy-grown on one side, so beautified with the personal care of him who lived in it and loved it, that it seemed the very place for a poet's residence; and as if, while he lived so long in it, his poetry had manifested itself in flowers, shrubbery, and ivy. I never smelt such a delightful fragrance of flowers as there was all through the garden. In front of the house there is a circular terrace of two ascents, in raising which Wordsworth had himself performed much of the labor; and here there are seats, from which we obtained a fine view down the valley of the Rothay, with Windermere in the distance,--a view of several miles, and which we did not suppose could be seen, after winding among the hills so far from the lake. It is very beautiful and picture-like. While we sat here, S----- happened to refer to the ballad of little Barbara Lewthwaite, and J----- began to repeat the poem concerning her, and the gardener said that "little Barbara" had died not a great while ago, an elderly woman, leaving grown-up children behind her. Her marriage-name was Thompson, and the gardener believed there was nothing remarkable in her character. There is a summer-house at one extremity of the grounds, in deepest shadow, but with glimpses of mountain views through trees which shut it in, and which have spread intercepting boughs since Wordsworth died. It is lined with pine-cones, in a pretty way enough, but of doubtful taste. I rather wonder that people of real taste should help Nature out, and beautify her, or perhaps rather prettify her so much as they do,--opening vistas, showing one thing, hiding another, making a scene picturesque, whether or no. I cannot rid myself of the feeling that there is something false--a kind of humbug--in all this. At any rate, the traces of it do not contribute to my enjoyment, and, indeed, it ought to be done so exquisitely as to leave no trace. But I ought not to criticise in any way a spot which gave me so much pleasure, and where it is good to think of Wordsworth in quiet, past days, walking in his home-shadow of trees which he knew, and training flowers, and trimming shrubs, and chanting in an undertone his own verses up and down the winding walks. The gardener gave J----- a cone from the summer-house, which had fallen on the seat, and S----- got some mignonette, and leaves of laurel and ivy, and we wended our way back to the hotel. Wordsworth was not the owner of this house; it being the property of Lady Fleming. Mrs. Wordsworth still lives there, and is now at home. Five o'clock.---All day it has been cloudy and showery, with thunder now and then; the mists hang low on the surrounding hills, adown which, at various points, we can see the snow-white fall of little streamlets ("forces" they call them here) swollen by the rain. An overcast day is not so gloomy in the hill-country as in the lowlands; there are more breaks, more transfusion of skylight through the gloom, as has been the case to-day, and as I found in Lenox; we get better acquainted with clouds by seeing at what height they be on the hillsides, and find that the difference betwixt a fair day and a cloudy and rainy one is very superficial, after all. Nevertheless, rain is rain, and wets a man just as much among the mountains as anywhere else; so we have been kept within doors all day, till an hour or so ago, when J----- and I went down to the village in quest of the post-office. We took a path that leads from the hotel across the fields, and, coming into a wood, crosses the Rothay by a one-arched bridge and passes the village church. The Rothay is very swift and turbulent to-day, and hurries along with foam-specks on its surface, filling its banks from brim to brim,--a stream perhaps twenty feet wide, perhaps more; for I am willing that the good little river should have all it can fairly claim. It is the St. Lawrence of several of these English lakes, through which it flows, and carries off their superfluous waters. In its haste, and with its rushing sound, it was pleasant both to see and hear; and it sweeps by one side of the old churchyard where Wordsworth lies buried,--- the side where his grave is made. The church of Grasmere is a very plain structure, with a low body, on one side of which is a small porch with a pointed arch. The tower is square and looks ancient; but the whole is overlaid with plaster of a buff or pale yellow hue. It was originally built, I suppose, of rough shingly stones, as many of the houses hereabouts are now, and, like many of them, the plaster is used to give a finish. We found the gate of the churchyard wide open; and the grass was lying on the graves, having probably been mowed yesterday. It is but a small churchyard, and with few monuments of any pretension in it, most of them being slate headstones, standing erect. From the gate at which we entered, a distinct foot-track leads to the corner nearest the riverside, and I turned into it by a sort of instinct, the more readily as I saw a tourist-looking man approaching from that point, and a woman looking among the gravestones. Both of these persons had gone by the time I came up, so that J----- and I were left to find Wordsworth's grave all by ourselves. At this corner of the churchyard there is a hawthorn bush or tree, the extremest branches of which stretch as far as where Wordsworth lies. This whole corner seems to be devoted to himself and his family and friends; and they all lie very closely together, side by side, and head to foot, as room could conveniently be found. Hartley Coleridge lies a little behind, in the direction of the church, his feet being towards Wordsworth's head, who lies in the row of those of his own blood. I found out Hartley Coleridge's grave sooner than Wordsworth's; for it is of marble, and, though simple enough, has more of sculptured device about it, having been erected, as I think the inscription states, by his brother and sister. Wordsworth has only the very simplest slab of slate, with "William Wordsworth" and nothing else upon it. As I recollect it, it is the midmost grave of the row. It is or has been well grass-grown, but the grass is quite worn away from the top, though sufficiently luxuriant at the sides. It looks as if people had stood upon it, and so does the grave next to it, which I believe is one of his children. I plucked some grass and weeds from it, and as he was buried within so few years they may fairly be supposed to have drawn their nutriment from his mortal remains, and I gathered them from just above his head. There is no fault to be found with his grave,--within view of the hills, within sound of the river, murmuring near by,--no fault except that he is crowded so closely with his kindred; and, moreover, that, being so old a churchyard, the earth over him must all have been human once. He might have had fresh earth to himself; but he chose this grave deliberately. No very stately and broad-based monument can ever be erected over it without infringing upon, covering, and overshadowing the graves, not only of his family, but of individuals who probably were quite disconnected with him. But it is pleasant to think and know--were it but on the evidence of this choice of a resting-place--that he did not care for a stately monument. After leaving the churchyard, we wandered about in quest of the post-office, and for a long time without success. This little town of Grasmere seems to me as pretty a place as ever I met with in my life. It is quite shut in by hills that rise up immediately around it, like a neighborhood of kindly giants. These hills descend steeply to the verge of the level on which the village stands, and there they terminate at once, the whole site of the little town being as even as a floor. I call it a village; but it is no village at all,--all the dwellings standing apart, each in its own little domain, and each, I believe, with its own little lane leading to it, independently of the rest. Most of these are old cottages, plastered white, with antique porches, and roses and other vines trained against them, and shrubbery growing about them; and some are covered with ivy. There are a few edifices of more pretension and of modern build, but not so strikingly so as to put the rest out of countenance. The post-office, when we found it, proved to be an ivied cottage, with a good deal of shrubbery round it, having its own pathway, like the other cottages. The whole looks like a real seclusion, shut out from the great world by these encircling hills, on the sides of which, whenever they are not too steep, you see the division lines of property, and tokens of cultivation,--taking from them their pretensions to savage majesty, but bringing them nearer to the heart of man. Since writing the above, I have been again with S----- to see Wordsworth's grave, and, finding the door of the church open, we went in. A woman and little girl were sweeping at the farther end, and the woman came towards us out of the cloud of dust which she had raised. We were surprised at the extremely antique appearance of the church. It is paved with bluish-gray flagstones, over which uncounted generations have trodden, leaving the floor as well laid as ever. The walls are very thick, and the arched windows open through them at a considerable distance above the floor. There is no middle aisle; but first a row of pews next either wall, and then an aisle on each side of the pews, occupying the centre of the church,--then, two side aisles, but no middle one. And down through the centre or the church runs a row of five arches, very rude and round-headed, all of rough stone, supported by rough and massive pillars, or rather square, stone blocks, which stand in the pews, and stood in the same places probably, long before the wood of those pews began to grow. Above this row of arches is another row, built upon the same mass of stone, and almost as broad, but lower; and on this upper row rests the framework, the oaken beams, the black skeleton of the roof. It is a very clumsy contrivance for supporting the roof, and if it were modern, we certainly should condemn it as very ugly; but being the relic of a simple age it comes in well with the antique simplicity of the whole structure. The roof goes up, barn-like, into its natural angle, and all the rafters and cross-beams are visible. There is an old font; and in the chancel is a niche, where (judging from a similar one in Furness Abbey) the holy water used to be placed for the priest's use while celebrating mass. Around the inside of the porch is a stone bench, against the wall, narrow and uneasy, but where a great many people had sat, who now have found quieter resting-places. The woman was a very intelligent-looking person, not of the usual English ruddiness, but rather thin and somewhat pale, though bright, of aspect. Her way of talking was very agreeable. She inquired if we wished to see Wordsworth's monument, and at once showed it to us,--a slab of white marble fixed against the upper end of the central row of stone arches, with a pretty long inscription, and a profile bust, in bas-relief, of his aged countenance. The monument, is placed directly over Wordsworth's pew, and could best be seen and read from the very corner seat where he used to sit. The pew is one of those occupying the centre of the church, and is just across the aisle from the pulpit, and is the best of all for the purpose of seeing and hearing the clergyman, and likewise as convenient as any, from its neighborhood to the altar. On the other side of the aisle, beneath the pulpit, is Lady Fleming's pew. This and one or two others are curtained, Wordsworth's was not. I think I can bring up his image in that corner seat of his pew--a white-headed, tall, spare man, plain in aspect--better than in any other situation. The woman said that she had known him very well, and that he had made some verses on a sister of hers. She repeated the first lines, something about a lamb, but neither S----- nor I remembered them. On the walls of the chancel there are monuments to the Flemings, and painted escutcheons of their arms; and along the side walls also, and on the square pillars of the row of arches, there are other monuments, generally of white marble, with the letters of the inscription blackened. On these pillars, likewise, and in many places in the walls, were hung verses from Scripture, painted on boards. At one of the doors was a poor-box,--an elaborately carved little box, of oak, with the date 1648, and the name of the church--St. Oswald's--upon it. The whole interior of the edifice was plain, simple, almost to grimness,--or would have been so, only that the foolish church-wardens, or other authority, have washed it over with the same buff color with which they have overlaid the exterior. It is a pity; it lightens it up, and desecrates it greatly, especially as the woman says that there were formerly paintings on the walls, now obliterated forever. I could have stayed in the old church much longer, and could write much more about it, but there must be an end to everything. Pacing it from the farther end to the elevation before the altar, I found that it was twenty-five paces long. On looking again at the Rothay, I find I did it some injustice; for at the bridge, in its present swollen state, it is nearer twenty yards than twenty feet across. Its waters are very clear, and it rushes along with a speed which is delightful to see, after an acquaintance with the muddy and sluggish Avon and Leam. Since tea I have taken a stroll from the hotel in a different direction from heretofore, and passed the Swan Inn, where Scott used to go daily to get a draught of liquor, when he was visiting Wordsworth, who had no wine nor other inspiriting fluid in his house. It stands directly on the wayside,--a small, whitewashed house, with an addition in the rear that seems to have been built since Scott's time. On the door is the painted sign of a swan, and the name "Scott's Swan Hotel." I walked a considerable distance beyond it, but, a shower cooling up, I turned back, entered the inn, and, following the mistress into a snug little room, was served with a glass of bitter ale. It is a very plain and homely inn, and certainly could not have satisfied Scott's wants if he had required anything very far-fetched or delicate in his potations. I found two Westmoreland peasants in the room, with ale before them. One went away almost immediately; but the other remained, and, entering into conversation with him, he told me that he was going to New Zealand, and expected to sail in September. I announced myself as an American, and he said that a large party had lately gone from hereabouts to America; but he seemed not to understand that there was any distinction between Canada and the States. These people had gone to Quebec. He was a very civil, well-behaved, kindly sort of person, of a simple character, which I took to belong to the class and locality, rather than to himself individually. I could not very well understand all that he said, owing to his provincial dialect; and when he spoke to his own countrymen, or to the women of the house, I really could but just catch a word here and there. How long it takes to melt English down into a homogeneous mass! He told me that there was a public library in Grasmere to which he has access in common with the other inhabitants, and a reading-room connected with it, where he reads The Times in the evening. There was no American smartness in his mind. When I left the house, it was showering briskly; but the drops quite ceased, and the clouds began to break away before I reached my hotel, and I saw the new moon over my right shoulder. July 21st.--We left Grasmere yesterday, after breakfast; it being a delightful morning, with some clouds, but the cheerfullest sunshine on great part of the mountainsides and on ourselves. We returned, in the first place, to Ambleside, along the border of Grasmere Lake, which would be a pretty little piece of water, with its steep and high surrounding hills, were it not that a stubborn and straight-lined stone fence, running along the eastern shore, by the roadside, quite spoils its appearance. Rydal Water, though nothing can make a lake of it, looked prettier and less diminutive than at the first view; and, in fact, I find that it is impossible to know accurately how any prospect or other thing looks, until after at least a second view, which always essentially corrects the first. This, I think, is especially true in regard to objects which we have heard much about, and exercised our imagination upon; the first view being a vain attempt to reconcile our idea with the reality, and at the second we begin to accept the thing for what it really is. Wordsworth's situation is really a beautiful one; and Nab Scaur behind his house rises with a grand, protecting air. We passed Nab's cottage, in which De Quincey formerly lived, and where Hartley Coleridge lived and died. It is a small, buff-tinted, plastered stone cottage, immediately on the roadside, and originally, I should think, of a very humble class; but it now looks as if persons of taste might some time or other have sat down in it, and caused flowers to spring up about it. It is very agreeably situated under the great, precipitous hill, and with Rydal Water close at band, on the other side of the road. An advertisement of lodgings to let was put up on this cottage. I question whether any part of the world looks so beautiful as England-- this part of England, at least--on a fine summer morning. It makes one think the more cheerfully of human life to see such a bright universal verdure; such sweet, rural, peaceful, flower-bordered cottages,--not cottages of gentility, but dwellings of the laboring poor; such nice villas along the roadside, so tastefully contrived for comfort and beauty, and adorned more and more, year after year, with the care and after-thought of people who mean to live in them a great while, and feel as if their children might live in them also, and so they plant trees to overshadow their walks, and train ivy and all beautiful vines up against their walls, and thus live for the future in another sense than we Americans do. And the climate helps them out, and makes everything moist, and green, and full of tender life, instead of dry and arid, as human life and vegetable life is so apt to be with us. Certainly, England can present a more attractive face than we can; even in its humbler modes of life, to say nothing of the beautiful lives that might be led, one would think, by the higher classes, whose gateways, with broad, smooth gravelled drives leading through them, one sees every mile or two along the road, winding into some proud seclusion. All this is passing away, and society most assume new relations; but there is no harm in believing that there has been something very good in English life,-- good for all classes while the world was in a state out of which these forms naturally grew. Passing through Ambleside, our phaeton and pair turned towards Ullswater, which we were to reach through the Pass of Kirkstone. This is some three or four miles from Ambleside, and as we approached it the road kept ascending higher and higher, the hills grew more bare, and the country lost its soft and delightful verdure. At last the road became so steep that J----- and I alighted to walk. This is the aspiring road that Wordsworth speaks of in his ode; it passes through the gorge of precipitous hills,--or almost precipitous,--too much so for even the grass to grow on many portions, which are covered with gray smugly stones; and I think this pass, in its middle part, must have looked just the same when the Romans marched through it as it looks now. No trees could ever have grown on the steep hillsides, whereon even the English climate can generate no available soil. I do not know that I have seen anything more impressive than the stern gray sweep of these naked mountains, with nothing whatever to soften or adorn them. The notch of the White Mountains, as I remember it in my youthful days, is more wonderful and richly picturesque, but of quite a different character. About the centre and at the highest point of the pass stands an old stone building of mean appearance, with the usual sign of an alehouse, "Licensed to retail foreign spirits, ale, and tobacco," over the door, and another small sign, designating it as the highest inhabitable house in England. It is a chill and desolate place for a residence. They keep a visitor's book here, and we recorded our names in it, and were not too sorry to leave the mean little hovel, smelling as it did of tobacco-smoke, and possessing all other characteristics of the humblest alehouse on the level earth. The Kirkstone, which gives the pass its name, is not seen in approaching from Ambleside, until some time after you begin to descend towards Brothers' Water. When the driver first pointed it out, a little way up the hill on our left, it looked no more than a bowlder of a ton or two in weight, among a hundred others nearly as big; and I saw hardly any resemblance to a church or church-spire, to which the fancies of past generations have likened it. As we descended the pass, however, and left the stone farther and farther behind, it continued to show itself, and assumed a more striking and prominent aspect, standing out clearly relieved against the sky, so that no traveller would fail to observe it, where there are so few defined objects to attract notice, amid the naked monotony of the stern hills; though, indeed, if I had taken it for any sort of an edifice, it would rather have been for a wayside inn or a shepherd's hut than for a church. We lost sight of it, and again beheld it more and more brought out against the sky, by the turns of the road, several times in the course of our descent. There is a very fine view of Brothers' Water, shut in by steep hills, as we go down Kirkstone Pass. At about half past twelve we reached Patterdale, at the foot of Ullswater, and here took luncheon. The hotels are mostly very good all through this region, and this deserved that character. A black-coated waiter, of more gentlemanly appearance than most Englishmen, yet taking a sixpence with as little scruple as a lawyer would take his fee; the mistress, in lady-like attire, receiving us at the door, and waiting upon us to the carriage-steps; clean, comely housemaids everywhere at hand,-- all appliances, in short, for being comfortable, and comfortable, too, within one's own circle. And, on taking leave, everybody who has done anything for you, or who might by possibility have done anything, is to be feed. You pay the landlord enough, in all conscience; and then you pay all his servants, who have been your servants for the time. But, to say the truth, there is a degree of the same kind of annoyance in an American hotel, although it is not so much an acknowledged custom. Here, in the houses where attendance is not charged in the bill, no wages are paid by the host to those servants--chambermaid, waiter, and boots--who come into immediate contact with travellers. The drivers of the cars, phaetons, and flys are likewise unpaid, except by their passengers, and claim threepence a mile with the same sense of right as their masters in charging for the vehicles and horses. When you come to understand this claim, not as an appeal to your generosity, but as an actual and necessary part of the cost of the journey, it is yielded to with a more comfortable feeling; and the traveller has really option enough, as to the amount which he will give, to insure civility and good behavior on the driver's part. Ullswater is a beautiful lake, with steep hills walling it about, so steep, on the eastern side, that there seems hardly room for a road to run along the base. We passed up the western shore, and turned off from it about midway, to take the road towards Keswick. We stopped, however, at Lyulph's Tower, while our chariot went on up a hill, and took a guide to show us the way to Airey Force,--a small cataract, which is claimed as private property, and out of which, no doubt, a pretty little revenue is raised. I do not think that there can be any rightful appropriation, as private property, of objects of natural beauty. The fruits of the land, and whatever human labor can produce from it, belong fairly enough to the person who has a deed or a lease; but the beautiful is the property of him who can hive it and enjoy it. It is very unsatisfactory to think of a cataract under lock and key. However, we were shown to Airey Force by a tall and graceful mountain-maid, with a healthy cheek, and a step that had no possibility of weariness in it. The cascade is an irregular streak of foamy water, pouring adown a rude shadowy glen. I liked well enough to see it; but it is wearisome, on the whole, to go the rounds of what everybody thinks it necessary to see. It makes me a little ashamed. It is somewhat as if we were drinking out of the same glass, and eating from the same dish, as a multitude of other people. Within a few miles of Keswick, we passed along at the foot of Saddleback, and by the entrance of the Vale of St. John, and down the valley, on one of the slopes, we saw the Enchanted Castle. Thence we drove along by the course of the Greta, and soon arrived at Keswick, which lies at the base of Skiddaw, and among a brotherhood of picturesque eminences, and is itself a compact little town, with a market-house, built of the old stones of the Earl of Derwentwater's ruined castle, standing in the centre,--the principal street forking into two as it passes it. We alighted at the King's Arms, and went in search of Southey's residence, which we found easily enough, as it lies just on the outskirts of the town. We inquired of a group of people, two of whom, I thought, did not seem to know much about the matter; but the third, an elderly man, pointed it out at once,--a house surrounded by trees, so as to be seen only partially, and standing on a little eminence, a hundred yards or so from the road. We went up a private lane that led to the rear of the place, and so penetrated quite into the back-yard without meeting anybody,--passing a small kennel, in which were two hounds, who gazed at us, but neither growled nor wagged their tails. The house is three stories high, and seems to have a great deal of room in it, so as not to discredit its name, "Greta Hall,"--a very spacious dwelling for a poet. The windows were nearly all closed; there were no signs of occupancy, but a general air of neglect. S-----, who is bolder than I in these matters, ventured through what seemed a back garden gate, and I soon heard her in conversation with some man, who now presented himself, and proved to be a gardener. He said he had formerly acted in that capacity for Southey, although a gardener had not been kept by him as a regular part of his establishment. This was an old man with an odd crookedness of legs, and strange, disjointed limp. S----- had told him that we were Americans, and he took the idea that we had come this long distance, over sea and land, with the sole purpose of seeing Southey's residence, so that he was inclined to do what he could towards exhibiting it. This was but little; the present occupant (a Mr. Radday, I believe the gardener called him) being away, and the house shut up. But he showed us about the grounds, and allowed us to peep into the windows of what had been Southey's library, and into those of another of the front apartments, and showed us the window of the chamber in the rear, in which Southey died. The apartments into which we peeped looked rather small and low,--not particularly so, but enough to indicate an old building. They are now handsomely furnished, and we saw over one of the fireplaces an inscription about Southey; and in the corner of the same room stood a suit, of bright armor. It is taller than the country-houses of English gentlemen usually are, and it is even stately. All about, in front, beside it and behind, there is a great profusion of trees, most of which were planted by Southey, who came to live here more than fifty years ago, and they have, of course, grown much more shadowy now than he ever beheld them; for he died about fourteen years since. The grounds are well laid out, and neatly kept, with the usual lawn and gravelled walks, and quaint little devices in the ornamental way. These may be of later date than Southey's time. The gardener spoke respectfully of Southey, and of his first wife, and observed that "it was a great loss to the neighborhood when that family went down." The house stands directly above the Greta, the murmur of which is audible all about it; for the Greta is a swift little river, and goes on its way with a continual sound, which has both depth and breadth. The gardener led us to a walk along its banks, close by the Hall, where he said Southey used to walk for hours and hours together. He might, indeed, get there from his study in a moment. There are two paths, one above the other, well laid out on the steep declivity of the high bank; and there is such a very thick shade of oaks and elms, planted by Southey himself over the bank, that all the ground and grass were moist, although it had been a sunny day. It is a very sombre walk; not many glimpses of the sky through those dense boughs. The Greta is here, perhaps, twenty yards across, and very dark of hue, and its voice is melancholy and very suggestive of musings and reveries; but I should question whether it were favorable to any settled scheme of thought. The gardener told us that there used to be a pebbly beach on the margin of the river, and that it was Southey's habit to sit and write there, using a tree of peculiar shape for a table. An alteration in the current of the river has swept away the beach, and the tree, too, has fallen. All these things were interesting to me, although Southey was not, I think, a picturesque man, --not one whose personal character takes a strong hold on the imagination. In these walks he used to wear a pair of shoes heavily clamped with iron; very ponderous they must have been, from the particularity with which the gardener mentioned them. The gardener took leave of us at the front entrance of the grounds, and, returning to the King's Arms, we ordered a one-horse fly for the fall of Lodore. Our drive thither was along the banks of Derwentwater, and it is as beautiful a road, I imagine, as can be found in England or anywhere else. I like Derwentwater the best of all the lakes, so far as I have yet seen them. Skiddaw lies at the head of a long even ridge of mountains, rising into several peaks, and one higher than the rest. On the eastern side there are many noble eminences, and on the west, along which we drove, there is a part of the way a lovely wood, and nearly the whole distance a precipitous range of lofty cliffs, descending sheer down without any slope, except what has been formed in the lapse of ages by the fall of fragments, and the washing down of smaller stones. The declivity thus formed along the base of the cliffs is in some places covered with trees or shrubs; elsewhere it is quite bare and barren. The precipitous parts of the cliffs are very grand; the whole scene, indeed, might be characterized as one of stern grandeur with an embroidery of rich beauty, without lauding it too much. All the sternness of it is softened by vegetative beauty wherever it can possibly be thrown in; and there is not here, so strongly as along Windermere, evidence that human art has been helping out Nature. I wish it were possible to give any idea of the shapes of the hills; with these, at least, man has nothing to do, nor ever will have anything to do. As we approached the bottom of the lake, and of the beautiful valley in which it lies, we saw one hill that seemed to crouch down like a Titanic watch-dog, with its rear towards the spectator, guarding the entrance to the valley. The great superiority of these mountains over those of New England is their variety and definiteness of shape, besides the abundance everywhere of water prospects, which are wanting among our own hills. They rise up decidedly, and each is a hill by itself, while ours mingle into one another, and, besides, have such large bases that you can tell neither where they begin nor where they end. Many of these Cumberland mountains have a marked vertebral shape, so that they often look like a group of huge lions, lying down with their backs turned toward each other. They slope down steeply from narrow ridges; hence their picturesque seclusions of valleys and dales, which subdivide the lake region into so many communities. Our hills, like apple-dumplings in a dish, have no such valleys as these. There is a good inn at Lodore,--a small, primitive country inn, which has latterly been enlarged and otherwise adapted to meet the convenience of the guests brought thither by the fame of the cascade; but it is still a country inn, though it takes upon itself the title of hotel. We found pleasant rooms here, and established ourselves for the night. From this point we have a view of the beautiful lake, and of Skiddaw at the head of it. The cascade is within three or four minutes' walk, through the garden gate, towards the cliff, at the base of which the inn stands. The visitor would need no other guide than its own voice, which is said to be audible sometimes at the distance of four miles. As we were coming from Keswick, we caught glimpses of its white foam high up the precipice; and it is only glimpses that can be caught anywhere, because there is no regular sheet of falling water. Once, I think, it must have fallen abruptly over the edge of the long line of precipice that here extends along parallel with the shore of the lake; but, in the course of time, it has gnawed and sawed its way into the heart of the cliff,--this persistent little stream,--so that now it has formed a rude gorge, adown which it hurries and tumbles in the wildest way, over the roughest imaginable staircase. Standing at the bottom of the fall, you have a far vista sloping upward to the sky, with the water everywhere as white as snow, pouring and pouring down, now on one side of the gorge, now on the other, among immense bowlders, which try to choke its passage. It does not attempt to leap over these huge rocks, but finds its way in and out among then, and finally gets to the bottom after a hundred tumbles. It cannot be better described than in Southey's verses, though it is worthy of better poetry than that. After all, I do not know that the cascade is anything more than a beautiful fringe to the grandeur of the scene; for it is very grand,--this fissure through the cliff,--with a steep, lofty precipice on the right hand, sheer up and down, and on the other hand, too, another lofty precipice, with a slope of its own ruin on which trees and shrubbery have grown. The right-hand precipice, however, has shelves affording sufficient hold for small trees, but nowhere does it slant. If it were not for the white little stream falling gently downward, and for the soft verdure upon either precipice, and even along the very pathway of the cascade, it would be a very stern vista up that gorge. I shall not try to describe it any more. It has not been praised too much, though it may have been praised amiss. I went thither again in the morning, and climbed a good way up, through the midst of its rocky descent, and I think I could have reached the top in this way. It is remarkable that the bounds of the water, from one step of its broken staircase to another, give an impression of softness and gentleness; but there are black, turbulent pools among the great bowlders, where the stream seems angry at the difficulties which it meets with. Looking upward in the sunshine, I could see a rising mist, and I should not wonder if a speck of rainbow were sometimes visible. I noticed a small oak in the bed of the cascade, and there is a lighter vegetation scattered about. At noon we took a car for Portinscale, and drove back along the road to Keswick, through which we passed, stopping to get a perhaps of letters at the post-office, and reached Portinscale, which is a mile from Keswick. After dinner we walked over a bridge, and through a green lane, to the church where Southey is buried. It is a white church, of Norman architecture, with a low, square tower. As we approached, we saw two persons entering the portal, and, following them in, we found the sexton, who was a tall, thin old man, with white hair, and an intelligent, reverent face, showing the edifice to a stout, red-faced, self-important, good-natured John Bull of a gentleman. Without any question on our part, the old sexton immediately led us to Southey's monument, which is placed in a side aisle, where there is not breadth for it to stand free of the wall; neither is it in a very good light. But, it seemed to me a good work of art,--a recumbent figure of white marble, on a couch, the drapery of which he has drawn about him,--being quite enveloped in what may be a shroud. The sculptor has not intended to represent death, for the figure lies on its side, and has a book in its hand, and the face is lifelike, and looks full of expression,--a thin, high-featured, poetic face, with a finely proportioned head and abundant hair. It represents Southey rightly, at whatever age he died, in the full maturity of manhood, when he was strongest and richest. I liked the statue, and wished that it lay in a broader aisle, or in the chancel, where there is an old tomb of a knight and lady of the Ratcliffe family, who have held the place of honor long enough to yield it now to a poet. Southey's sculptor was Lough. I must not forget to mention that John Bull, climbing on a bench, to get a better view of the statue, tumbled off with a racket that resounded irreverently through the church. The old, white-headed, thin sexton was a model man of his class, and appeared to take a loving and cheerful interest in the building, and in those who, from age to age, have worshipped and been buried there. It is a very ancient and interesting church. Within a few years it has been thoroughly repaired as to the interior, and now looks as if it might endure ten more centuries; and I suppose we see little that is really ancient, except the double row of Norman arches, of light freestone, that support the oaken beams and rafters of the roof. All the walls, however, are venerable, and quite preserve the identity of the edifice. There is a stained-glass window of modern manufacture, and in one of the side windows, set amidst plain glass, there is a single piece, five hundred years old, representing St. Anthony, very finely executed, though it looks a little faded. Along the walls, on each side, between the arched windows, there are marble slabs affixed, with inscriptions to the memories of those who used to occupy the seats beneath. I remember none of great antiquity, nor any old monument, except that in the chancel, over the knight and lady of the Ratcliffe family. This consists of a slab of stone, on four small stone pillars, about two feet high. The slab is inlaid with a brass plate, on which is sculptured the knight in armor, and the lady in the costume of Elizabeth's time, exceedingly well done and well preserved, and each figure about eighteen inches in length. The sexton showed us a rubbing of them on paper. Under the slab, which, supported by the low stone pillars, forms a canopy for them, lie two sculptured figures of stone, of life size, and at full length, representing the same persons; but I think the sculptor was hardly equal in his art to the engraver. The most-curious antique relic in the church is the font. The bowl is very capacious, sufficiently so to admit of the complete immersion of a child of two or three months old. On the outside, in several compartments, there are bas-reliefs of Scriptural and symbolic subjects, --such as the tree of life, the word proceeding out of God's mouth, the crown of thorns,--all in the quaintest taste, sculptured by some hand of a thousand years ago, and preserving the fancies of monkish brains, in stone. The sexton was very proud of this font and its sculpture, and took a kindly personal interest, in showing it; and when we had spent as much time as we could inside, he led us to Southey's grave in the churchyard. He told us that he had known Southey long and well, from early manhood to old age; for he was only twenty-nine when he came to Keswick to reside. He had known Wordsworth too, and Coleridge, and Lovell; and he had seen Southey and Wordsworth walking arm in arm together in that churchyard. He seemed to revere Southey's memory, and said that he had been much lamented, and that as many as a hundred people came to the churchyard when he was buried. He spoke with great praise of Mrs. Southey, his first wife, telling of her charity to the poor, and how she was a blessing to the neighborhood; but he said nothing in favor of the second Mrs. Southey, and only mentioned her selling the library, and other things, after her husband's death, and going to London. Yet I think she was probably a good woman, and meets with less than justice because she took the place of another good woman, and had not time and opportunity to prove herself as good. As for Southey himself, my idea is, that few better or more blameless men have ever lived; but he seems to lack color, passion, warmth, or something that should enable me to bring him into close relation with myself. The graveyard where his body lies is not so rural and picturesque as that where Wordsworth is buried; although Skiddaw rises behind it, and the Greta is murmuring at no very great distance away. But the spot itself has a somewhat bare and bold aspect, with no shadow of trees, no shrubbery. Over his grave there is a ponderous, oblong block of slate, a native mineral of this region, as hard as iron, and which will doubtless last quite as long as Southey's works retain any vitality in English literature. It is not a monument fit for a poet. There is nothing airy or graceful about it,--and, indeed, there cannot be many men so solid and matter-of-fact as to deserve a tomb like that. Wordsworth's grave is much better, with only a simple headstone, and the grass growing over his mortality, which, for a thousand years, at least, it never can over Southey's. Most of the monuments are of this same black slate, and some erect headstones are curiously sculptured, and seem to have been recently erected. We now returned to the hotel, and took a car for the valley of St. John. The sky seemed to portend rain in no long time, and Skiddaw had put on his cap; but the people of the hotel and the driver said that there would be no rain this afternoon, and their opinion proved correct. After driving a few miles, we again cane within sight of the Enchanted Castle. It stands rather more than midway adown the declivity of one of the ridges that form the valley to the left, as you go southward, and its site would have been a good one for a fortress, intended to defend the lower entrance of this mountain defile. At a proper distance, it looks not unlike the gray dilapidation of a Gothic castle, which has been crumbling and crumbling away for ages, until Time might be supposed to have imperceptibly stolen its massive pile from man, and given it back to Nature; its towers and battlements and arched entrances being so much defaced and decayed that all the marks of human labor had nearly been obliterated, and the angles of the hewn stone rounded away, while mosses and weeds and bushes grow over it as freely as over a natural ledge of rocks. It is conceivable that in some lights, and in some states of the atmosphere, a traveller, at the entrance of the valley, might really imagine that he beheld a castle here; but, for myself, I must acknowledge that it required a willing fancy to make me see it. As we drew nearer, the delusion did not immediately grow less strong; but, at length, we found ourselves passing at the foot of the declivity, and, behold! it was nothing but an enormous ledge of rock, coming squarely out of the hillside, with other parts of the ledge cropping out in its vicinity. Looking back, after passing, we saw a knoll or hillock, of which the castled rock is the bare face. There are two or three stone cottages along the roadside, beneath the magic castle, and within the enchanted ground. Scott, in the Bridal of Triermain, locates the castle in the middle of the valley, and makes King Arthur ride around it, which any mortal would have great difficulty in doing. This vale of St. John has very striking scenery. Blencathra shuts it in to the northward, lying right across the entrance; and on either side there are lofty crags and declivities, those to the west being more broken and better wooded than the ridge to the eastward, which stretches along for several miles, steep, high, and bare, producing only grass enough for sheep pasture, until it rises into the dark brow of Helvellyn. Adown this ridge, seen afar, like a white ribbon, comes here and there a cascade, sending its voice before it, which distance robs of all its fury, and makes it the quietest sound in the world; and while you see the foamy leap of its upper course a mile or two away, you may see and hear the selfsame little brook babbling through a field, and passing under the arch of a rustic bridge beneath your feet. It is a deep seclusion, with mountains and crags on all sides. About a mile beyond the castle we stopped at a little wayside inn, the King's Head, and put up for the night. This, I believe, is the only inn which I have found in England--the only one where I have eaten and slept --that does not call itself a hotel. It is very primitive in its arrangements,--a long, low, whitewashed, unadorned, and ugly cottage of two stories. At one extremity is a barn and cow-house, and next to these the part devoted to the better class of guests, where we had our parlor and chambers, contiguous to which is the kitchen and common room, paved with flagstones,--and, lastly, another barn and stable; all which departments are not under separate roofs, but under the same long contiguity, and forming the same building. Our parlor opens immediately upon the roadside, without any vestibule. The house appears to be of some antiquity, with beams across the low ceilings; but the people made us pretty comfortable at bed and board, and fed us with ham and eggs, veal-steaks, honey, oatcakes, gooseberry-tarts, and such cates and dainties,--making a moderate charge for all. The parlor was adorned with rude engravings. I remember only a plate of the Duke of Wellington, at three stages of his life; and there were minerals, delved, doubtless, out of the hearts of the mountains, upon the mantel-piece. The chairs were of an antiquated fashion, and had very capacious seats. We were waited upon by two women, who looked and acted not unlike the countryfolk of New England,--say, of New Hampshire,--except that these may have been more deferential. While we remained here, I took various walks to get a glimpse of Helvellyn, and a view of Thirlmere,--which is rather two lakes than one, being so narrow at one point as to be crossed by a foot-bridge. Its shores are very picturesque, coming down abruptly upon it, and broken into crags and prominences, which view their shaggy faces in its mirror; and Helvellyn slopes steeply upward, from its southern shore, into the clouds. On its eastern bank, near the foot-bridge, stands Armboth House, which Miss Martineau says is haunted; and I saw a painted board at the entrance of the road which leads to it advertising lodgings there. The ghosts, of course, pay nothing for their accommodations. At noon, on the day after our arrival, J----- and I went to visit the Enchanted Castle; and we were so venturesome as to turn aside from the road, and ascend the declivity towards its walls, which indeed we hoped to surmount. It proved a very difficult undertaking, the site of the fortress being much higher and steeper than we had supposed; but we did clamber upon what we took for the most elevated portion, when lo! we found that we had only taken one of the outworks, and that there was a gorge of the hill betwixt us and the main walls; while the citadel rose high above, at more than twice the elevation which we had climbed. J----- wished to go on, and I allowed him to climb, till he appeared to have reached so steep and lofty a height that he looked hardly bigger than a monkey, and I should not at all have wondered had he come rolling down to the base of the rock where I sat. But neither did he get actually within the castle, though he might have done so but for a high stone fence, too difficult for him to climb, which runs from the rock along the hillside. The sheep probably go thither much oftener than any other living thing, and to them we left the castle of St. John, with a shrub waving from its battlements, instead of a banner. After dinner we ordered a car for Ambleside, and while it was getting ready, I went to look at the river of St. John, which, indeed, flows close beside our inn, only just across the road, though it might well be overlooked unless you specially sought for it. It is a brook brawling over the stones, very much as brooks do in New England, only we never think of calling them rivers there. I could easily have made a leap from shore to shore, and J----- scrambled across on no better footing than a rail. I believe I have complained of the want of brooks in other parts of England, but there is no want of them here, and they are always interesting, being of what size they may. We drove down the valley, and gazed at the vast slope of Helvellyn, and at Thirlmere beneath it, and at Eagle's Crag and Raven's Crag, which beheld themselves in it, and we cast many a look behind at Blencathra, and that noble brotherhood of mountains out of the midst of which we came. But, to say the truth, I was weary of fine scenery, and it seemed to me that I had eaten a score of mountains, and quaffed as many lakes, all in the space of two or three days,--and the natural consequence was a surfeit. There was scarcely a single place in all our tour where I should not have been glad to spend a month; but, by flitting so quickly from one point to another, I lost all the more recondite beauties, and had come away without retaining even the surface of much that I had seen. I am slow to feel,--slow, I suppose, to comprehend, and, like the anaconda, I need to lubricate any object a great deal before I can swallow it and actually make it my own. Yet I shall always enjoy having made this journey, and shall wonder the more at England, which comprehends so much, such a rich variety, within its narrow bounds. If England were all the world, it still would have been worth while for the Creator to have made it, and mankind would have had no cause to find fault with their abode; except that there is not room enough for so many as might be happy here. We left the great inverted arch of the valley behind us, looking back as long as we could at Blencathra, and Skiddaw over its shoulder, and the clouds were gathering over them at our last glimpse. Passing by Dummail Raise (which is a mound of stones over an old British king), we entered Westmoreland, and soon had the vale of Grasmere before us, with the church where Wordsworth lies, and Nab Scaur and Rydal Water farther on. At Ambleside we took another car for Newby Bridge, whither we drove along the eastern shore of Windermere. The superb scenery through which we had been passing made what we now saw look tame, although a week ago we should have thought it more than commonly interesting. Hawkshead is the only village on our road,--a small, whitewashed old town, with a whitewashed old Norman church, low, and with a low tower, on the same pattern with others that we have seen hereabouts. It was between seven and eight o'clock when we reached Newby Bridge, and heard U----'s voice greeting us, and saw her head, crowned with a wreath of flowers, looking down at us, out of the window of our parlor. And to-day, July 23d, I have written this most incomplete and unsatisfactory record of what we have done and seen since Wednesday last. I am pretty well convinced that all attempts at describing scenery, especially mountain scenery, are sheer nonsense. For one thing, the point of view being changed, the whole description, which you made up from the previous point of view, is immediately falsified. And when you have done your utmost, such items as those setting forth the scene in a play,--"a mountainous country, in the distance a cascade tumbling over a precipice, and in front a lake; on one side an ivy-covered cottage,"-- this dry detail brings the matter before one's mind's eyes more effectually than all the art of word-painting. July 27th.--We are still at Newby Bridge, and nothing has occurred of remarkable interest, nor have we made any excursions, beyond moderate walks. Two days have been rainy, and to-day there is more rain. We find such weather as tolerable here as it would probably be anywhere; but it passes rather heavily with the children,--and for myself, I should prefer sunshine. Though Mr. White's books afford me some entertainment, especially an odd volume of Ben Jonson's plays, containing "Volpone," "The Alchemist," "Bartholomew Fair," and others. "The Alchemist" is certainly a great play. We watch all arrivals and other events from our parlor window,--a stage-coach driving up four times in the twenty-four hours, with its forlorn outsiders, all saturated with rain; the steamer, from the head of the lake, landing a crowd of passengers, who stroll up to the hotel, drink a glass of ale, lean over the parapet of the bridge, gaze at the flat stones which pave the bottom of the Liver, and then hurry back to the steamer again; cars, phaetons, horsemen, all damped and disconsolate. There are a number of young men staying at the hotel, some of whom go forth in all the rain, fishing, and come back at nightfall, trudging heavily, but with creels on their backs that do not seem very heavy. Yesterday was fair, and enlivened us a good deal. Returning from a walk in the forenoon, I found a troop of yeomanry cavalry in the stable-yard of the hotel. They were the North Lancashire Regiment, and were on their way to Liverpool for the purpose of drill. Not being old campaigners, their uniforms and accoutrements were in so much the finer order, all bright, and looking span-new, and they themselves were a body of handsome and stalwart young men; and it was pleasant to look at their helmets, and red jackets and carbines, and steel scabbarded swords, and gallant steeds,--all so martial in aspect,--and to know that they were only play-soldiers, after all, and were never likely to do nor suffer any warlike mischief. By and by their bugles sounded, and they trotted away, wheeling over the ivy-grown stone bridge, and disappearing behind the trees on the Milnethorpe road. Our host comes forth from the bar with a bill, which he presents to an orderly-sergeant. He, the host, then tells me that he himself once rode many years, a trooper, in this regiment, and that all his comrades were larger men than himself. Yet Mr. Thomas White is a good-sized man, and now, at all events, rather overweight for a dragoon. Yesterday came one of those bands of music that seem to itinerate everywhere about the country. It consisted of a young woman who played the harp, a bass-viol player, a fiddler, a flutist, and a bugler, besides a little child, of whom, I suppose, the woman was the mother. They sat down on a bench by the roadside, opposite the house, and played several tunes, and by and by the waiter brought them a large pitcher of ale, which they quaffed with apparent satisfaction; though they seemed to be foreigners by their mustachios and sallow hue, and would perhaps have preferred a vinous potation. One would like to follow these people through their vagrant life, and see them in their social relations, and overhear their talk with each other. All vagrants are interesting; and there is a much greater variety of them here than in America,--people who cast themselves on Fortune, and take whatever she gives without a certainty of anything. I saw a travelling tinker yesterday,--a man with a leather apron, and a string of skewers hung at his girdle, and a pack over his shoulders, in which, no doubt, were his tools and materials of trade. It is remarkable what a natural interest everybody feels in fishing. An angler from the bridge immediately attracts a group to watch his luck. It is the same with J-----, fishing for minnows, on the platform near which the steamer lands its passengers. By the by, U---- caught a minnow last evening, and, immediately after, a good-sized perch,--her first fish. July 30th.--We left Newby Bridge, all of us, on Saturday, at twelve o'clock, and steamed up the lake to Ambleside; a pretty good day as to weather, but with a little tendency to shower. There was nothing new on the lake, and no new impressions, as far as I can remember. At Ambleside, S----- and nurse went shopping, after which we took a carriage for Grasmere, and established ourselves at Brown's Hotel. I find that my impressions from our previous sight of all these scenes do not change on revision. They are very beautiful; but, if I must say it, I am a little weary of them. We soon tire of things which we visit merely by way of spectacle, and with which we have no real and permanent connection. In such cases we very quickly wish the spectacle to be taken away, and another substituted; at all events I do not care about seeing anything more of the English lakes for at least a year. Perhaps a part of my weariness is owing to the hotel-life which we lead. At an English hotel the traveller feels as if everybody, from the landlord downward, united in a joint and individual purpose to fleece him, because all the attendants who come in contact with him are to be separately considered. So, after paying, in the first instance, a very heavy bill, for what would seem to cover the whole indebtedness, there remain divers dues still to be paid, to no trifling amount, to the landlord's servants,--dues not to be ascertained, and which you never can know whether you have properly satisfied. You can know, perhaps, when you have less than satisfied them, by the aspect of the waiter, which I wish I could describe, not disrespectful in the slightest degree, but a look of profound surprise, a gaze at the offered coin (which he nevertheless pockets) as if he either did not see it, or did not know it, or could not believe his eyesight;--all this, however, with the most quiet forbearance, a Christian-like non-recognition of an unmerited wrong and insult; and finally, all in a moment's space indeed, he quits you and goes about his other business. If you have given him too much, you are made sensible of your folly by the extra amount of his gratitude, and the bows with which he salutes you from the doorstep. Generally, you cannot very decidedly say whether you have been right or wrong; but, in almost all cases, you decidedly feel that you have been fleeced. Then the living at the best of English hotels, so far as my travels have brought me acquainted with them, deserves but moderate praise, and is especially lacking in variety. Nothing but joints, joints, joints; sometimes, perhaps, a meat-pie, which, if you eat it, weighs upon your conscience, with the idea that you have eaten the scraps of other people's dinners. At the lake hotels, the fare is lamb and mutton and grout,--the latter not always fresh, and soon tired of. We pay like nabobs, and are expected to be content with plain mutton. We spent the day yesterday at Grasmere, in quiet walks about the hotel; and at a little past six in the afternoon, I took my departure in the stage-coach for Windermere. The coach was greatly overburdened with outside passengers,--fifteen in all, besides the four insiders, and one of the fifteen formed the apex of an immense pile of luggage on the top. It seems to me miraculous that we did not topple over, the road being so hilly and uneven, and the driver, I suspect, none the steadier for his visits to all the tap-rooms along the route from Cockermouth. There was a tremendous vibration of the coach now and then; and I saw that, in case of our going over, I should be flung headlong against the high stone fence that bordered most of the road. In view of this I determined to muffle my head in the folds of my thick shawl at the moment of overturn, and as I could do no better for myself, I awaited my fate with equanimity. As far as apprehension goes, I had rather travel from Maine to Georgia by rail, than from Grasmere to Windermere by stage-coach. At Lowwood, the landlady espied me from the window, and sent out a large packet that had arrived by mail; but as it was addressed to some person of the Christian name of William, I did not venture to open it. She said, also, that a gentleman had been there, who very earnestly desired to see me, and I have since had reason to suppose that this was Allingham, the poet. We arrived at Windermere at half past seven, and waited nearly an hour for the train to start. I took a ticket for Lancaster, and talked there about the war with a gentleman in the coffee-room, who took me for an Englishman, as most people do nowadays, and I heard from him--as you may from all his countrymen--an expression of weariness and dissatisfaction with the whole business. These fickle islanders! How differently they talked a year ago! John Bull sees now that he never was in a worse predicament in his life; and yet it would not take much to make him roar as bellicosely as ever. I went to bed at eleven, and slept unquietly on feathers. I had purposed to rise betimes, and see the town of Lancaster before breakfast. But here I reckoned without my host; for, in the first place, I had no water for my ablutions, and my boots were not brushed; and so I could not get down stairs till the hour I named for my coffee and chops; and, secondly, the breakfast was delayed half an hour, though promised every minute. In fine, I had but just time to take a hasty walk round Lancaster Castle, and see what I could of the town on my way,--a not very remarkable town, built of stone, with taller houses than in the middle shires of England, narrow streets up and down an eminence on which the castle is situated, with the town immediately about it. The castle is a satisfactory edifice, but so renovated that the walls look almost entirely modern, with the exception of the fine old front, with the statue of an armed warrior, very likely John of Gaunt himself, in a niche over the Norman arch of the entrance. Close beside the castle stands an old church. The train left Lancaster at half past nine, and reached Liverpool at twelve, over as flat and uninteresting a country as I ever travelled. I have betaken myself to the Rock Ferry Hotel, where I am as comfortable as I could be anywhere but at home; but it is rather comfortless to think of hone as three years off, and three thousand miles away. With what a sense of utter weariness, not fully realized till then, we shall sink down on our own threshold, when we reach it. The moral effect of being without a settled abode is very wearisome. Our coachman from Grasmere to Windermere looked like a great beer-barrel, oozy with his proper liquor. I suppose such solid soakers never get upset. THE LAUNCH. August 2d.--Mr. ------ has urged me very much to go with his father and family to see the launch of a great ship which has been built for their house, and afterwards to partake of a picnic; so, on Tuesday morning I presented myself at the landing-stage, and met the party, to take passage for Chester. It was a showery morning, and looked wofully like a rainy day; but nothing better is to be expected in England; and, after all, there is seldom such a day that you cannot glide about pretty securely between the drops of rain. This, however, did not turn out one of those tolerable days, but grew darker and darker, and worse and worse; and was worst of all when we had passed about six miles beyond Chester, and were just on the borders of Wales, on the hither side of the river Dee, where the ship was to be launched. Here the train stopped, and absolutely deposited our whole party of excursionists, under a heavy shower, in the midst of a muddy potato-field, whence we were to wade through mud and mire to the ship-yard, almost half a mile off. Some kind Christian, I know not whom, gave me half of his umbrella, and half of his cloak, and thereby I got to a shed near the ship, without being entirely soaked through. The ship had been built on the banks of the Dee, at a spot where it is too narrow for her to be launched directly across, and so she lay lengthwise of the river, and was so arranged as to take the water parallel with the stream. She is, for aught I know, the largest ship in the world; at any rate, longer than the Great Britain,--an iron-screw steamer,--and looked immense and magnificent, and was gorgeously dressed out in flags. Had it been a pleasant day, all Chester and half Wales would have been there to see the launch; and, in spite of the rain, there were a good many people on the opposite shore, as well as on our side; and one or two booths, and many of the characteristics of a fair,--that is to say, men and women getting intoxicated without any great noise and confusion. The ship was expected to go off at about twelve o'clock, and at that juncture all Mr. ------'s friends assembled under the bows of the ship, where we were a little sheltered from the rain by the projection of that part of the vessel over our heads. The bottle of port-wine with which she was to be christened was suspended from the bows to the platform where we stood by a blue ribbon; and the ceremony was to be performed by Mrs. ------, who, I could see, was very nervous in anticipation of the ceremony. Mr. ------ kept giving her instructions in a whisper, and showing her how to throw the bottle; and as the critical moment approached, he took hold of it along with her. All this time we were waiting in momentary expectation of the ship going off, everything being ready, and only the touch of a spring, as it were, needed to make her slide into the water. But the chief manager kept delaying a little longer, and a little longer; though the pilot on board sent to tell him that it was time she was off. "Yes, yes; but I want as much water as I can get," answered the manager; and so he held on till, I suppose, the tide had raised the river Dee to its very acme of height. At last the word was given; the ship began slowly to move; Mrs. ------ threw the bottle against the bow with a spasmodic effort that dashed it into a thousand pieces, and diffused the fragrance of the old port all around, where it lingered several minutes. I did not think that there could have been such a breathless moment in an affair of this kind. The ship moved majestically down toward the river; and unless it were Niagara, I never saw anything grander and more impressive than the motion of this mighty mass as she departed from us. We on the platform, and everybody along both shores of the Dee, took off our hats in the rain, waved handkerchiefs, cheered, shouted,--"Beautiful!" "What a noble launch!" "Never was so fair a sight!"--and, really, it was so grand, that calm, majestic movement, that I felt the tears come into my eyes. The wooden pathway adown which she was gliding began to smoke with the friction; when all at once, when we expected to see her plunge into the Dee, she came to a full stop. Mr. ------, the father of my friend, a gentleman with white hair, a dark, expressive face, bright eyes, and an Oriental cast of features, immediately took the alarm. A moment before his countenance had been kindled with triumph; but now he turned pale as death, and seemed to grow ten years older while I was looking at him. Well he might, for his noble ship was stuck fast in the land of the Dee, and without deepening the bed of the river, I do not see how her vast iron hulk is ever to be got out. [This steamer was afterwards successfully floated off on the 29th of the same month.] There was no help for it. A steamboat was hitched on to the stranded vessel, but broke two or three cables without stirring her an inch. So, after waiting long after we had given up all hope, we went to the office of the ship-yard, and there took a lunch; and still the rain was pouring, pouring, pouring, and I never experienced a blacker affair in all my days. Then we had to wait a great while for a train to take us back, so that it was almost five o'clock before we arrived at Chester, where I spent an hour in rambling about the old town, under the Rows; and on the walls, looking down on the treetops, directly under my feet, and through their thick branches at the canal, which creeps at the base, and at the cathedral; walking under the dark intertwining arches of the cloisters, and looking up at the great cathedral tower, so wasted away externally by time and weather that it looks, save for the difference of color between white snow and red freestone, like a structure of snow, half dissolved by several warm days. At the lunch I met with a graduate of Cambridge (England), tutor of a grandson of Percival, with his pupil (Percival, the assassinated minister, I mean). I should not like this position of tutor to a young Englishman; it certainly has an ugly twang of upper servitude. I observed that the tutor gave his pupil the best seat in the railway carriage, and in all respects provided for his comfort before thinking of his own; and this, not as a father does for his child, out of love, but from a sense of place and duty, which I did not quite see how a gentleman could consent to feel. And yet this Mr. C------ was evidently a gentleman, and a quiet, intelligent, agreeable, and, no doubt, learned man. K------ being mentioned, Mr. C------ observed that he had known him well at college, having been his contemporary there. He did not like him, however,--thought him a "dangerous man," as well as I could gather; he thinks there is some radical defect in K------'s moral nature, a lack of sincerity; and, furthermore, he believes him to be a sensualist in his disposition, in support of which view he said Mr. K------ had made drawings, such as no pure man could have made, or could allow himself to show or look at. This was the only fact which Mr. C------ adduced, bearing on his opinion of K------; otherwise, it seemed to be one of those early impressions which a collegian gets of his fellow-students, and which he never gets rid of, whatever the character of the person may turn out to be in after years. I have judged several persons in this way, and still judge them so, though the world has cone to very different conclusions. Which is right?--the world, which has the man's whole mature life on its side; or his early companion, who has nothing for it but some idle passages of his youth? Mr. M------ remarked of newspaper reporters, that they may be known at all celebrations, and of any public occasion, by the enormous quantity of luncheon they eat. August 12th.--Mr. B------ dined with us at the Rock Ferry Hotel the day before yesterday. Speaking of Helvellyn, and the death of Charles Cough, about whom Wordsworth and Scott have both sung, Mr. B------ mentioned a version of that story which rather detracts from the character of the faithful dog. But somehow it lowers one's opinion of human nature itself, to be compelled so to lower one's standard of a dog's nature. I don't intend to believe the disparaging story, but it reminds me of the story of the New-Zealander who was asked whether he loved a missionary who had been laboring for his soul and those of his countrymen. "To be sure I loved him. Why, I ate a piece of him for my breakfast this morning!" For the last week or two I have passed my time between the hotel and the Consulate, and a weary life it is, and one that leaves little of profit behind it. I am sick to death of my office,--brutal captains and brutal sailors; continual complaints of mutual wrong, which I have no power to set right, and which, indeed, seem to have no right on either side; calls of idleness or ceremony from my travelling countrymen, who seldom know what they are in search of at the commencement of their tour, and never have attained any desirable end at the close of it; beggars, cheats, simpletons, unfortunates, so mixed up that it is impossible to distinguish one from another, and so, in self-defence, the Consul distrusts them all. . . . At the hotel, yesterday, there was a large company of factory people from Preston, who marched up from the pier with a band of military music playing before them. They spent the day in the gardens and ball-room of the hotel, dancing and otherwise merry-making; but I saw little of them, being at the Consulate. Towards evening it drizzled, and the assemblage melted away gradually; and when the band marched down to the pier, there were few to follow, although one man went dancing before the musicians, flinging out his arms, and footing it with great energy and gesticulation. Some young women along the road likewise began to dance as the music approached. Thackeray has a dread of servants, insomuch that he hates to address them, or to ask them for anything. His morbid sensibility, in this regard, has perhaps led him to study and muse upon them, so that he may be presumed to have a more intimate knowledge of this class than any other man. Carlyle dresses so badly, and wears such a rough outside, that the flunkies are rude to him at gentlemen's doors. In the afternoon J----- and I took a walk towards Tranmere Hall, and beyond, as far as Oxton. This part of the country, being so near Liverpool and Birkenhead, is all sprinkled over with what they call "Terraces," "Bellevues," and other pretty names for semi-detached villas ("Recluse Cottage" was one) for a somewhat higher class. But the old, whitewashed stone cottage is still frequent, with its roof of slate or thatch, which perhaps is green with weeds or grass. Through its open door, you see that it has a pavement of flagstones, or perhaps of red freestone; and hogs and donkeys are familiar with the threshold. The door always opens directly into the kitchen, without any vestibule; and, glimpsing in, you see that a cottager's life must be the very plainest and homeliest that ever was lived by men and women. Yet the flowers about the door often indicate a native capacity for the beautiful; but often there is only a pavement of round stones or of flagstones, like those within. At one point where there was a little bay, as it were, in the hedge fence, we saw something like a small tent or wigwam,--an arch of canvas three or four feet high, and open in front, under which sat a dark-complexioned woman and some children. The woman was sewing, and I took them for gypsies. August 17th.--Yesterday afternoon J----- and I went to Birkenhead Park, which I have already described. . . . It so happened that there was a large school spending its holiday there; a school of girls of the lower classes, to the number of a hundred and fifty, who disported themselves on the green, under the direction of the schoolmistresses and of an old gentleman. It struck me, as it always has, to observe how the lower orders of this country indicate their birth and station by their aspect and features. In America there would be a good deal of grace and beauty among a hundred and fifty children and budding girls, belonging to whatever rank of life. But here they had universally a most plebeian look,--stubbed, sturdy figures, round, coarse faces, snub-noses,--the most evident specimens of the brown bread of human nature. They looked wholesome and good enough, and fit to sustain their rough share of life; but it would have been impossible to make a lady out of any one of them. Climate, no doubt, has most to do with diffusing a slender elegance over American young-womanhood; but something, perhaps, is also due to the circumstance of classes not being kept apart there as they are here: they interfuse, amid the continual ups and downs of our social life; and so, in the lowest stations of life, you may see the refining influence of gentle blood. At all events, it is only necessary to look at such an assemblage of children as I saw yesterday, to be convinced that birth and blood do produce certain characteristics. To be sure, I have seen no similar evidence in England or elsewhere of old gentility refining and elevating the race. These girls were all dressed in black gowns, with white aprons and neckerchiefs, and white linen caps on their heads,--a very dowdyish attire, and well suited to their figures. I saw only two of their games,--in one, they stood in a circle, while two of their number chased one another within and without the ring of girls, which opened to let the fugitive pass, but closed again to impede the passage of the pursuer. The other was blind-man's-buff on a new plan: several of the girls, sometimes as many as twenty, being blinded at once, and pursuing a single one, who rang a hand-bell to indicate her whereabouts. This was very funny; the bell-girl keeping just beyond their reach, and drawing them after her in a huddled group, so that they sometimes tumbled over one another and lay sprawling. I think I have read of this game in Strutt's "English Sports and Pastimes." We walked from the Park home to Rock Ferry, a distance of three or four miles,--a part of which was made delightful by a foot-path, leading us through fields where the grass had just been mown, and others where the wheat harvest was commenced. The path led us into the very midst of the rural labor that was going forward; and the laborers rested a moment to look at us; in fact, they seemed to be more willing to rest than American laborers would have been. Children were loitering along this path or sitting down beside it; and we met one little maid, passing from village to village, intent on some errand. Reaching Tranmere, I went into an alehouse, nearly opposite the Hall, and called for a glass of ale. The doorstep before the house, and the flagstone floor of the entry and tap-room, were chalked all over in corkscrew lines,--an adornment that gave an impression of care and neatness, the chalked lines being evidently freshly made. It was a low, old-fashioned room ornamented with a couple of sea-shells, and an earthen-ware figure on the mantel-piece; also with advertisements of Allsop's ale, and other drinks, and with a pasteboard handbill of "The Ancient Order of Foresters"; any member of which, paying sixpence weekly, is entitled to ten shillings per week, and the attendance of a first-rate physician in sickness, and twelve pounds to be paid to his friends in case of death. Any member of this order, when travelling, is sure (says the handbill) to meet with a brother member to lend him a helping hand, there being nearly three thousand districts of this order, and more than a hundred and nine thousand members in Great Britain, whence it has extended to Australia, America, and other countries. Looking up at the gateway of Tranmere Hall, I discovered an inscription on the red freestone lintel, and, though much time-worn, I succeeded in reading it. "Labor omnia vincit. 1614." There were likewise some initials which I could not satisfactorily make out. The sense of this motto would rather befit the present agricultural occupants of the house than the idle gentlefolks who built and formerly inhabited it. SMITHELL'S HALL. August 25th.--On Thursday I went by invitation to Smithell's Hall in Bolton le Moors to dine and spend the night. The Hall is two or three miles from the town of Bolton, where I arrived by railway from Liverpool, and which seems to be a pretty large town, though the houses are generally modern, or with modernized fronts of brick or stucco. It is a manufacturing town, and the tall brick chimneys rise numerously in the neighborhood, and are so near Smithell's Hall that I suspect the atmosphere is somewhat impregnated with their breath. Mr. ------ can comfort himself with the rent which he receives from the factories erected upon his own grounds; and I suppose the value of his estate has greatly increased by the growth of manufactories; although, unless he wish to sell it, I do not see what good this can do him. Smithell's Hall is one of the oldest residences of England, and still retains very much the aspect that it must have had several centuries ago. The house formerly stood around all four sides of a quadrangle, enclosing a court, and with an entrance through an archway. One side of this quadrangle was removed in the time of the present Mr. ------'s father, and the front is now formed by the remaining three sides. They look exceedingly ancient and venerable, with their range of gables and lesser peaks. The house is probably timber-framed throughout, and is overlaid with plaster, and its generally light line is painted with a row of trefoils in black, producing a very quaint effect. The wing, forming one side of the quadrangle, is a chapel, and has been so from time immemorial; and Mr. ------ told me that he had a clergyman, and even a bishop, in his own diocese. The drawing-room is on the opposite side of the quadrangle; and through an arched door, in the central portion, there is a passage to the rear of the house. It is impossible to describe such an old rambling edifice as this, or to get any clear idea of its plan, even by going over it, without the aid of a map. Mr. ------ has added some portions, and altered others, but with due regard to harmony with the original structure, and the great body of it is still mediaeval. The entrance-hall opens right upon the quadrangular court; and is a large, low room, with a settle of carved old oak, and other old oaken furniture,--a centre-table with periodicals and newspapers on it,--some family pictures on the walls,--and a large, bright coal-fire in the spacious grate. The fire is always kept up, throughout summer and winter, and it seemed to me an excellent plan, and rich with cheerful effects; insuring one comfortable place, and that the most central in the house, whatever may be the inclemency of the weather. It was a cloudy, moist, showery day, when I arrived; and this fire gave me the brightest and most hospitable smile, and took away any shivery feeling by its mere presence. The servant showed me thence into a low-studded dining-room, where soon Mrs. ------ made her appearance, and, after some talk, brought me into the billiard-room, opening from the hall, where Mr. ------ and a young gentleman were playing billiards, and two ladies looking on. After the game was finished, Mr. ------ took me round to see the house and grounds. The peculiarity of this house is what is called "The Bloody Footstep." In the time of Bloody Mary, a Protestant clergyman--George Marsh by name --was examined before the then proprietor of the Hall, Sir Roger Barton, I think, and committed to prison for his heretical opinions, and was ultimately burned at the stake. As his guards were conducting him from the justice-room, through the stone-paved passage that leads from front to rear of Smithell's Hall, he stamped his foot upon one of the flagstones in earnest protestation against the wrong which he was undergoing. The foot, as some say, left a bloody mark in the stone; others have it, that the stone yielded like wax under his foot, and that there has been a shallow cavity ever since. This miraculous footprint is still extant; and Mrs. ------ showed it to me before her husband took me round the estate. It is almost at the threshold of the door opening from the rear of the house, a stone two or three feet square, set among similar ones, that seem to have been worn by the tread of many generations. The footprint is a dark brown stain in the smooth gray surface of the flagstone; and, looking sidelong at it, there is a shallow cavity perceptible, which Mrs. ------ accounted for as having been worn by people setting their feet just on this place, so as to tread the very spot, where the martyr wrought the miracle. The mark is longer than any mortal foot, as if caused by sliding along the stone, rather than sinking into it; and it might be supposed to have been made by a pointed shoe, being blunt at the heel, and decreasing towards the toe. The blood-stained version of the story is more consistent with the appearance of the mark than the imprint would be; for if the martyr's blood oozed out through his shoe and stocking, it might have made his foot slide along the stone, and thus have lengthened the shape. Of course it is all a humbug,--a darker vein cropping up through the gray flagstone; but, it is probably a fact, and, for aught I know, may be found in Fox's Book of Martyrs, that George Marsh underwent an examination in this house [There is a full and pathetic account of the examination and martyrdom of George Marsh in the eleventh section of Fox's Book of Martyrs, as I have just found (June 9, 1867). He went to Smithell's hall, among other places, to be questioned by Mr. Barton.--ED.]; and the tradition may have connected itself with the stone within a short time after the martyrdom; or, perhaps, when the old persecuting knight departed this life, and Bloody Mary was also dead, people who had stood at a little distance from the Hall door, and had seen George Marsh lift his hand and stamp his foot just at this spot,--perhaps they remembered this action and gesture, and really believed that Providence had thus made an indelible record of it on the stone; although the very stone and the very mark might have lain there at the threshold hundreds of years before. But, even if it had been always there, the footprint might, after the fact, be looked upon as a prophecy, from the time when the foundation of the old house was laid, that a holy and persecuted man should one day set his foot here, on the way that was to lead him to the stake. At any rate, the legend is a good one. Mrs. ------ tells me that the miraculous stone was once taken up from the pavement, and flung out of doors, where it remained many years; and in proof of this, it is cracked quite across at one end. This is a pity, and rather interferes with the authenticity, if not of the stone itself, yet of its position in the pavement. It is not far from the foot of the staircase, leading up to Sir Roger Barton's examination-room, whither we ascended, after examining the footprint. This room now opens sideways on the Chapel, into which it looks down, and which is spacious enough to accommodate a pretty large congregation. On one of the walls of the Chapel there is a marble tablet to the memory of one of the present family,--Mr.------'s father, I suppose; he being the first of the name who possessed the estate. The present owners, however, seem to feel pretty much the same pride in the antiquity and legends of the house as if it had come down to them in an unbroken succession of their own forefathers. It has, in reality, passed several times from one family to another, since the Conquest. Mr. ------ led me through a spacious old room, which was formerly panelled with carved oak, but which is converted into a brew-house, up a pair of stairs, into the garret of one of the gables, in order to show me the ancient framework of the house. It is of oak, and preposterously ponderous,--immense beams and rafters, which no modern walls could support,--a gigantic old skeleton, which architects say must have stood a thousand years; and, indeed, it is impossible to ascertain the date of the original foundation, though it is known to have been repaired and restored between five and six centuries ago. Of course, in the lapse of ages, it must continually have been undergoing minor changes, but without at all losing its identity. Mr. ------ says that this old oak wood, though it looks as strong and as solid as ever, has really lost its strength, and that it would snap short off, on application of any force. After this we took our walk through the grounds, which are well wooded, though the trees will bear no comparison with those which I have seen in the midland parts of England. It takes, I suspect, a much longer time for trees to attain a good size here than in America; and these trees, I think Mr. ------ told me, were principally set out by himself. He is upwards of sixty,--a good specimen of the old English country-gentleman, sensible, loving his land and his trees and his dogs and his game, doing a little justice-business, and showing a fitness for his position; so that you feel satisfied to have him keep it. He was formerly a member of Parliament. I had met him before at dinner at Mrs. H------'s. . . . He took pleasure in showing me his grounds, through which he has laid out a walk, winding up and down through dells and over hillocks, and now and then crossing a rustic bridge; so that you have an idea of quite an extensive domain. Beneath the trees there is a thick growth of ferns, serving as cover for the game. A little terrier-dog, who had hitherto kept us company, all at once disappeared; and soon afterwards we heard the squeak of some poor victim in the cover, whereupon Mr. ------ set out with agility, and ran to the rescue.--By and by the terrier came back with a very guilty look. From the wood we passed into the open park, whence we had a distant view of the house; and, returning thither, we viewed it in other aspects, and on all sides. One portion of it is occupied by Mr. ------'s gardener, and seems not to have been repaired, at least as to its exterior, for a great many years,--showing the old wooden frame, painted black, with plaster in the interstices; and broad windows, extending across the whole breadth of the rooms, with hundreds of little diamond-shaped panes of glass. Before dinner I was shown to my room, which opens from an ancient gallery, lined with oak, and lighted by a row of windows along one side of the quadrangle. Along this gallery are the doors of several sleeping-chambers, one of which--I think it is here--is called "The Dead Man's Chamber." It is supposed to have been the room where the corpses of persons connected with the household used to be laid out. My own room was called "The Beam Chamber," from am immense cross-beam that projects from the ceiling, and seems to be an entire tree, laid across, and left rough-hewn, though at present it is whitewashed. The but of the tree (for it diminishes from one end of the chamber to the other) is nearly two feet square, in its visible part. We dined, at seven o'clock, in a room some thirty-five or forty feet long, and proportionably broad, all panelled with the old carved oak which Mr. ------ took from the room which he had converted into a brew-house. The oak is now of a very dark brown hue, and, being highly polished, it produces a sombre but rich effect. It is supposed to be of the era of Henry the Seventh, and when I examined it the next morning, I found it very delicately and curiously wrought. There are carved profiles of persons in the costume of the times, done with great skill; also foliage, intricate puzzles of intersecting lines, sacred devices, anagrams, and, among others, the device of a bar across a tun, indicating the name of Barton. Most of the carving, however, is less elaborate and intricate than these specimens, being in a perpendicular style, and on one pattern. Before the wood grew so very dark, the beauty of the work must have been much more easily seen than now, as to particulars, though I hardly think that the general effect could have been better; at least, the sombre richness that overspreads the entire square of the room is suitable to such an antique house. An elaborate Gothic cornice runs round the whole apartment. The sideboard and other furniture are of Gothic patterns, and, very likely, of genuine antiquity; but the fireplace is perhaps rather out of keeping, being of white marble with the arms of this family sculptured on it. Though hardly sunset when we sat down to dinner, yet, it being an overcast day, and the oaken room so sombre, we had candles burning on the table; and, long before dinner was over, the candle-light was all the light we had. It is always pleasanter to dine by artificial light. Mrs. ------'s dinner was a good one, and Mr. ------'s wines were very good. I had Mrs. ------ on one side, and another lady on the other side. . . . After dinner there were two card-parties formed in the dining-room, at one of which there was a game of Vingt-et-un, and at the other a game of whist, at which Mrs. ------ and I lost several shillings to a Mrs. Halton and Mr. Gaskell. . . . After finishing our games at cards, Mrs. Halton drove off in a pony-chaise to her own house; the other ladies retired, and the gentlemen sat down to chat awhile over the hall fire, occasionally sipping a glass of wine-and-water, and finally we all went off to our rooms. It was past twelve o'clock when I composed myself to sleep, and I could not have slept long, when a tremendous clap of thunder woke me just in time to see a vivid flash of lightning. I saw no ghosts, though Mrs. ------ tells me there is one, which makes a disturbance, unless religious services are regularly kept up in the Chapel. In the morning, before breakfast, we had prayers, read by Mr. ------, in the oak dining-room, all the servants coming in, and everybody kneeling down. I should like to know how much true religious feeling is indicated by this regular observance of religious rites in English families. In America, if people kneel down to pray, it is pretty certain that they feel a genuine interest in the matter, and their daily life is supposed to be in accordance with their devotions. If an American is an infidel, he knows it; but an Englishman is often so without suspecting it,--being kept from that knowledge by this formality of family prayer, and his other regularities of external worship. . . . There was a parrot in a corner of the dining-room, and, when prayers were over, Mrs. ------ praised it very highly for having been so silent; it being Poll's habit, probably, to break in upon the sacred exercises with unseemly interjections and remarks. While we were at breakfast, Poll began to whistle and talk very vociferously, and in a tone and with expressions that surprised me, till I learned that the bird is usually kept in the kitchen and servants' hall, and is only brought into the dining-room at prayer-time and breakfast. Thus its mouth is full of kitchen talk, which flows out before the gentlefolks with the queerest effect. After breakfast I examined the carvings of the room. Mr. ------ has added to its decorations the coats of arms of all the successive possessors of the house, with those of the families into which they married, including the Ratcliffes, Stanleys, and others. From the dining-room I passed into the library, which contains books enough to make a rainy day pass pleasantly. I remember nothing else that I need to record; and as I sat by the hall fire, talking with Mr. Gaskell, at about eleven o'clock, the butler brought me word that a fly, which I had bespoken, was ready to convey me to the railway. I took leave of Mrs. ------, her last request being that I would write a ghost-story for her house,--and drove off. SHREWSBURY September 5th.--Yesterday we all of us set forth from Rock Ferry at half past twelve, and reached Shrewsbury between three and four o'clock, and took up our quarters at the Lion Hotel. We found Shrewsbury situated on an eminence, around which the Severn winds, making a peninsula of it, quite densely covered by the town. The streets ascend, and curve about, and intersect each other with the customary irregularity of these old English towns, so that it is quite impossible to go directly to any given point, or for a stranger to find his way to a place which he wishes to reach, though, by what seems a singular good fortune, the sought-for place is always offering itself when least expected. On this account I never knew such pleasant walking as in old streets like those of Shrewsbury. And there are passages opening under archways, and winding up between high edifices, very tempting to the explorer, and generally leading to some court, or some queer old range of buildings or piece of architecture, which it would be the greatest pity to miss seeing. There was a delightful want of plan in the laying out of these ancient towns. In fact, they never were laid out at all, nor were restrained by any plan whatever, but grew naturally, with streets as eccentric as the pathway of a young child toddling about the floor. The first curious thing we particularly noticed, when we strolled out after dinner, was the old market-house, which stands in the midst of an oblong square; a gray edifice, elevated on pillars and arches, and with the statue of an armed knight, Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York, in a central niche, in its front. The statue is older than the market-house, having been moved thither from one of the demolished towers of the city wall in 1795. The market-house was erected in 1595. There are other curious sculptures and carvings and quirks of architecture about this building; and the houses that stand about the square are, many of them, very striking specimens of what dwelling-houses used to be in Elizabeth's time, and earlier. I have seen no such stately houses, in that style, as we found here in Shrewsbury. There were no such fine ones in Coventry, Stratford, Warwick, Chester, nor anywhere else where we have been. Their stately height and spaciousness seem to have been owing to the fact that Shrewsbury was a sort of metropolis of the country round about, and therefore the neighboring gentry had their town-houses there, when London was several days' journey off, instead of a very few hours; and, besides, it was once much the resort of kings, and the centre-point of great schemes of war and policy. One such house, formerly belonging to a now extinct family, that of Ireland, rises to the height of four stories, and has a front consisting of what look like four projecting towers. There are ranges of embowered windows, one above another, to the full height of the house, and these are surmounted by peaked gables. The people of those times certainly did not deny themselves light; and while window-glass was an article of no very remote introduction, it was probably a point of magnificence and wealthy display to have enough of it. One whole side of the room must often have been formed by the window. This Ireland mansion, as well as all the rest of the old houses in Shrewsbury, is a timber house,--that is, a skeleton of oak, filled up with brick, plaster, or other material, and with the beams of the timber marked out with black paint; besides which, in houses of any pretension, there are generally trefoils, and other Gothic-looking ornaments, likewise painted black. They have an indescribable charm for me,--the more, I think, because they are wooden; but, indeed, I cannot tell why it is that I like them so well, and am never tired of looking at them. A street was a development of human life, in the days when these houses were built, whereas a modern street is but the cold plan of an architect, without individuality or character, and without the human emotion which a man kneads into the walls which he builds on a scheme of his own. We strolled to a pleasant walk under a range of trees, along the shore of the Severn. It is called the Quarry Walk. The Severn is a pretty river, the largest, I think (unless it be such an estuary as the Mersey), that I have met with in England; that is to say, about a fair stone's-throw across. It is very gentle in its course, and winds along between grassy and sedgy banks, with a good growth of weeds in some part of its current. It has one stately bridge, called the English Bridge, of several arches, and, as we sauntered along the Quarry Walk, we saw a ferry where the boat seemed to be navigated across by means of a rope, stretched from bank to bank of the river. After leaving the Quarry Walk, we passed an old tower of red freestone, the only one remaining of those formerly standing at intervals along the whole course of the town wall; and we also went along what little is now left of the wall itself. And thence, through the irregular streets, which gave no account of themselves, we found our way, I know not how, back to our hotel. It is an uncheerful old hotel, which takes upon itself to be in the best class of English country hotels, and charges the best price; very dark in the lower apartments, pervaded with a musty odor, but provided with a white-neckclothed waiter, who spares no ceremony in serving the joints of mutton. J----- and I afterwards walked forth again, and went this time to the castle, which stands exactly above the railway station. A path, from its breadth quite a street, leads up to the arched gateway; but we found a board, giving notice that these are private grounds, and no strangers admitted; so that we only passed through the gate a few steps, and looked about us, and retired, on perceiving a man approaching us through the trees and shrubbery. A private individual, it seems, has burrowed in this old warlike den, and turned the keep, and any other available apartment, into a modern dwelling, and laid out his pleasure-grounds within the precincts of the castle wall, which allows verge enough for the purpose. The ruins have been considerably repaired. This castle was built at various times, the keep by Edward I., and other portions at an earlier period, and it stands on the isthmus left by the Severn in its wandering course about the town. The Duke of Cleveland now owns it. I do not know who occupies it. In the course of this walk, we passed St. Mary's Church,--a very old church indeed, no matter how old, but say, eight hundred or a thousand years. It has a very tall spire, and the spire is now undergoing repairs; and, seeing the door open, I went into the porch, but found no admission further. Then, walking around it, through the churchyard, we saw that all the venerable Gothic windows--one of them grand in size-- were set with stained glass, representing coats of arms and ancient armor, and kingly robes, and saints with glories about their heads, and Scriptural people; but all of these, as far as our actual perception was concerned, quite colorless, and with only a cold outline, dimly filled up. Yet, had we been within the church, and had the sunlight been streaming through, what a warm, rich, gorgeous, roseate, golden life would these figures have showed! In the churchyard, close upon the street, so that its dust must be continually scattered over the spot, I saw a heavy gray tombstone, with a Latin inscription, purporting that Bishop Butler, the author of the Analogy, in his lifetime had chosen this as a burial-place for himself and his family. There is a statue of him within the church. From the top of the spire a man, above a hundred years ago, attempted to descend, by means of a rope, to the other side of the Severn; but the rope broke, and he fell in his midway flight, and was killed. It was an undertaking worthy of Sam Patch. There is a record of the fact on the outside of the tower. I remember nothing more that we saw yesterday; but, before breakfast, J----- and I sallied forth again, and inspected the gateway and interior court of the Council House,--a very interesting place, both in itself and for the circumstances connected with it, it having been the place where the councillors for the Welsh marches used to reside during their annual meetings; and Charles the First also lived here for six weeks in 1612. James II. likewise held his court here in 1687. The house was originally built in 1501,--that is, the Council House itself,--the gateway, and the house through which it passes, being of as late date as 1620. This latter is a fine old house, in the usual style of timber architecture, with the timber lines marked out, and quaint adornments in black paint; and the pillars of the gateway which passes beneath the front chamber are of curiously carved oak, which has probably stood the action of English atmosphere better than marble would have done. Passing through this gateway, we entered a court, and saw some old buildings more or less modernized, but without destroying their aged stateliness, standing round three sides of it, with arched entrances and bow-windows, and windows in the roofs, and peaked gables, and all the delightful irregularity and variety that these houses have, and which make them always so fresh,--and with so much detail that every minute you see something heretofore unseen. It must have been no unfit residence for a king and his court, when those three sides of the square, all composing one great fantastic house, were in their splendor. The square itself, too, must have been a busy and cheerful scene, thronged with attendants, guests, horses, etc. After breakfast, we all walked out, and, crossing the English Bridge, looked at the Severn over its parapet. The river is here broader than elsewhere, and very shallow, and has an island covered with bushes, about midway across. Just over the bridge we saw a church, of red freestone, and evidently very ancient. This is the Church of the Holy Cross, and is a portion of the Abbey of St. Peter and St. John, which formerly covered ten acres of ground. We did not have time to go into the church; but the windows and other points of architecture, so far as we could discern them, and knew how to admire them, were exceedingly venerable and beautiful. On the other side of the street, over a wide space, there are other remains of the old abbey; and the most interesting was a stone pulpit, now standing in the open air, seemingly in a garden, but which originally stood in the refectory of the abbey, and was the station whence one of the monks read to his brethren at their meals. The pulpit is much overgrown with ivy. We should have made further researches among these remains, though they seem now to be in private grounds; but a large mastiff came nut of his kennel, and, approaching us to the length of his iron chain, began barking very fiercely. Nor had we time to see half that we would gladly have seen and studied here and elsewhere about Shrewsbury. It would have been very interesting to have visited Hotspur's and Falstaff's battle-field, which is four miles from the town; too distant, certainly, for Falstaff to have measured the length of the fight by Shrewsbury clock. There is now a church, built there by Henry IV., and said to cover the bones of those slain in the battle. Returning into the town, we penetrated some narrow lanes, where, as the old story goes, people might almost shake hands across from the top windows of the opposite houses, impending towards each other. Emerging into a wider street, at a spot somewhat more elevated than other parts of the town, we went into a shop to buy some Royal Shrewsbury cakes, which we had seen advertised at several shop windows. They are a very rich cake, with plenty of eggs, sugar, and butter, and very little flour. A small public building of stone, of modern date, was close by; and asking the shopwoman what it was, she said it was the Butter Cross, or market for butter, eggs, and poultry. It is a remarkable site, for here, in ancient times, stood a stone cross, where heralds used to make proclamation, and where criminals of state used to be executed. David, the last of the Welsh princes, was here cruelly put to death by Edward I., and many noblemen were beheaded on this spot, after being taken prisoners in the battle of Shrewsbury. I can only notice one other memorable place in Shrewsbury, and that is the Raven Inn, where Farquhar wrote his comedy of "The Recruiting Officer" in 1701. The window of the room in which he wrote is said to look into the inn yard, and I went through the arched entrance to see if I could distinguish it. The hostlers were currying horses in the yard, and so stared at me that I gave but the merest glance. The Shrewsbury inns have not only the customary names of English inns,--as the Lion, the Stag,--but they have also the carved wooden figures of the object named, whereas, in all other towns, the name alone remains. We left Shrewsbury at half past ten, and arrived in London at about four in the afternoon. LONDON. September 7th.--On Wednesday, just before dusk, J----- and I walked forth, for the first time, in London. Our lodgings are in George Street, Hanover Square, No. 21; and St. George's Church, where so many marriages in romance and in fashionable life have been celebrated, is a short distance below our house, in the same street. The edifice seems to be of white marble, now much blackened with London smoke, and has a Grecian pillared portico. In the square, just above us, is a statue of William Pitt. We went down Bond Street, and part of Regent Street, just estraying a little way from our temporary nest, and taking good account of landmarks and corners, so as to find our way readily back again. It is long since I have had such a childish feeling; but all that I had heard and felt about the vastness of London made it seem like swimming in a boundless ocean, to venture one step beyond the only spot I knew. My first actual impression of London was of stately and spacious streets, and by no means so dusky and grimy as I had expected,--not merely in the streets about this quarter of the town, which is the aristocratic quarter, but in all the streets through which we had passed from the railway station. If I had not first been so imbued with the smoke and dinginess of Liverpool, I should doubtless have seen a stronger contrast betwixt dusky London and the cheerful glare of our American cities. There are no red bricks here; all are of a dark hue, and whatever of stone or stucco has been white soon clothes itself in mourning. Yesterday forenoon I went out alone, and plunged headlong into London, and wandered about all day, without any particular object in view, but only to lose myself for the sake of finding myself unexpectedly among things that I had always read and dreamed about. The plan was perfectly successful, for, besides vague and unprofitable wanderings, I saw, in the course of the day, Hyde Park, Regent's Park, Whitehall, the two new Houses of Parliament, Charing Cross, St. Paul's, the, Strand, Fleet Street, Cheapside, Whitechapel, Leadenhall Street, the Haymarket, and a great many other places, the names of which were classic in my memory. I think what interests me most here, is the London of the writers of Queen Anne's age,--whatever Pope, The Spectator, De Foe, and down as late as Johnson and Goldsmith, have mentioned. The Monument, for instance, which is of no great height nor beauty compared with that on Bunker Hill, charmed me prodigiously. St. Paul's appeared to me unspeakably grand and noble, and the more so from the throng and bustle continually going on around its base, without in the least disturbing the sublime repose of its great dome, and, indeed, of all its massive height and breadth. Other edifices may crowd close to its foundation, and people may tramp as they like about it; but still the great cathedral is as quiet and serene as if it stood in the middle of Salisbury Plain. There cannot be anything else in its way so good in the world as just this effect of St. Paul's in the very heart and densest tumult of London. I do not know whether the church is built of marble, or of whatever other white or nearly white material; but in the time that it has been standing there, it has grown black with the smoke of ages, through which there are nevertheless gleams of white, that make a most picturesque impression on the whole. It is much better than staring white; the edifice would not be nearly so grand without this drapery of black. I did not find these streets of the old city so narrow and irregular as I expected. All the principal ones are sufficiently broad, and there are few houses that look antique, being, I suppose, generally modern-fronted, when not actually of modern substance. There is little or no show or pretension in this part of London; it has a plain, business air,--an air of homely, actual life, as of a metropolis of tradesmen, who have been carrying on their traffic here, in sober earnest, for hundreds of years. You observe on the sign-boards, "Established ninety years in Threadneedle Street," "Established in 1109,"--denoting long pedigrees of silk-mercers and hosiers,--De Foe's contemporaries still represented by their posterity, who handle the hereditary yardstick on the same spot. I must not forget to say that I crossed the Thames over a bridge which, I think, is near Charing Cross. Afterwards, I found my way to London Bridge, where there was a delightful density of throng. The Thames is not so wide and majestic as I had imagined,--nothing like the Mersey, for example. As a picturesque object, however, flowing through the midst of a city, it would lose by any increase of width. Omnibuses are a most important aid to wanderers about London. I reached home, well wearied, about six o'clock. In the course of the day, I had seen one person whom I knew,--Mr. Clarke, to whom Henry B------ introduced me, when we went to see the great ship launched on the Dee. This, I believe, was in Regent Street. In that street, too, I saw a company of dragoons, beautifully mounted, and defensively armed, in brass helmets and steel cuirasses, polished to the utmost excess of splendor. It was a pretty sight. At one of the public edifices, on each side of the portal, sat a mounted trooper similarly armed, and with his carbine resting on his knee, just as motionless as a statue. This, too, as a picturesque circumstance, was very good, and really made an impression on me with respect to the power and stability of the government, though I could not help smiling at myself for it. But then the thought, that for generations an armed warrior has always sat just there, on his war-steed, and with his weapon in his hand, is pleasant to the imagination,-- although it is questionable whether his carbine be loaded; and, no doubt, if the authorities had any message to send, they would choose some other messenger than this heavy dragoon,--the electric wire, for instance. Still, if he and his horse were to be withdrawn from their post, night or day (for I suppose the sentinels are on duty all night), it seems as if the monarchy would be subverted, and the English constitution crumble into rubbish; and, in honest fact, it will signify something like that, when guard is relieved there for the last time. September 8th.--Yesterday forenoon S-----, the two eldest children, and I went forth into London streets, and proceeded down Regent Street, and thence to St. James's Park, at the entrance of which is a statue of somebody,--I forget whom. On the very spacious gravel-walks, covering several acres, in the rear of the Horse Guards, some soldiers were going through their exercise; and, after looking at them awhile, we strolled through the Park, alongside of a sheet of water, in which various kinds of ducks, geese, and rare species of waterfowl were swimming. There was one swan of immense size, which moved about among the lesser fowls like a stately, full-rigged ship among gunboats. By and by we found ourselves near what we since have discovered to be Buckingham Palace,--a long building, in the Italian style, but of no impressiveness, and which one soon wearies of looking at. The Queen having gone to Scotland the day before, the palace now looked deserted, although there was a one-horse cab, of shabby aspect, standing at the principal front, where doubtless the carriages of princes and the nobility draw up. There is a fountain playing before the palace, and water-fowl love to swim under its perpetual showers. These ducks and geese are very tame, and swim to the margin of the pond to be fed by visitors, looking up at you with great intelligence. S----- asked a man in a sober suit of livery (of whom we saw several about the Park), whose were some of the large mansions which we saw, and he pointed out Stafford House, the residence of the Duke of Sutherland, --a very noble edifice, much more beautiful than the palace, though not so large; also the house of the Earl of Ellesmere, and residences of other noblemen. This range of mansions, along the park, from the spot whence we viewed them, looks very much like Beacon Street, in Boston, bordering on the Common, allowing for a considerable enlargement of scale in favor of the Park residences. The Park, however, has not the beautiful elms that overshadow Boston Common, nor such a pleasant undulation of surface, nor the fine off-view of the country, like that across Charles River. I doubt whether London can show so delightful a spot as that Common, always excepting the superiority of English lawns, which, however, is not so evident in the London parks, there being less care bestowed on the grass than I should have expected. From this place we wandered into what I believe to be Hyde Park, attracted by a gigantic figure on horseback, which loomed up in the distance. The effect of this enormous steed and his rider is very grand, seen in the misty atmosphere. I do not understand why we did not see St. James's Palace, which is situated, I believe, at the extremity of the same range of mansions of which Stafford House is the opposite end. From the entrance of Hyde Park, we seem to have gone along Piccadilly, and, making two or three turns, and getting bewildered, I put S----- and the children into a cab, and sent them home. Continuing my wanderings, I went astray among squares of large aristocratic-looking edifices, all apparently new, with no shops among them, some yet unfinished, and the whole seeming like a city built for a colony of gentlefolks, who might be expected to emigrate thither in a body. It was a dreary business to wander there, turning corner after corner, and finding no way of getting into a less stately and more genial region. At last, however, I passed in front of the Queen's Mews, where sentinels were on guard, and where a jolly-looking man, in a splendidly laced scarlet coat and white-topped boots, was lounging at the entrance. He looked like the prince of grooms or coachmen. . . . The corner of Hyde Park was within a short distance, and I took a Hansom at the cab-stand there, and drove to the American Despatch Agency, 26 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, having some documents of state to be sent by to-day's steamer. The business of forwarding despatches to America, and distributing them to the various legations and consulates in Europe, must be a pretty extensive one; for Mr. Miller has a large office, and two clerks in attendance. From this point I went through Covent Garden Market, and got astray in the city, so that I can give no clear account of my afternoon's wanderings. I passed through Holborn, however, and I think it was from that street that I passed through an archway (which I almost invariably do, when I see one), and found myself in a very spacious, gravelled square, surrounded on the four sides by a continuous edifice of dark brick, very plain, and of cold and stern aspect. This was Gray's Inn, all tenanted by a multitude of lawyers. Passing thence, I saw "Furnival's Inn" over another archway, but, being on the opposite side of the street, I did not go thither. In Holborn, still, I went through another arched entrance, over which was "Staples Inn," and here likewise seemed to be offices; but, in a court opening inwards from this, there was a surrounding seclusion of quiet dwelling-houses, with beautiful green shrubbery and grass-plots in the court, and a great many sunflowers in full bloom. The windows were open; it was a lovely summer afternoon, and I have a sense that bees were humming in the court, though this may have been suggested by my fancy, because the sound would have been so well suited to the scene. A boy was reading at one of the windows. There was not a quieter spot in England than this, and it was very strange to have drifted into it so suddenly out of the bustle and rumble of Holborn; and to lose all this repose as suddenly, on passing through the arch of the outer court. In all the hundreds of years since London was built, it has not been able to sweep its roaring tide over that little island of quiet. In Holborn I saw the most antique-looking houses that I have yet met with in London, but none of very remarkable aspect. I think I must have been under a spell of enchantment to-day, connecting me with St. Paul's; for, trying to get away from it by various avenues, I still got bewildered, and again and again saw its great dome and pinnacles before me. I observe that the smoke has chiefly settled on the lower part of the edifice, leaving its loftier portions and its spires much less begrimed. It is very beautiful, very rich. I did not think that anything but Gothic architecture could so have interested me. The statues, the niches, the embroidery, as it were, of sculpture traced around it, produced a delightful effect. In front of St. Paul's there is a statue of Queen Anne, which looks rather more majestic, I doubt not, than that fat old dame ever did. St. Paul's churchyard had always been a place of immense interest in my imagination. It is merely the not very spacious street, running round the base of the church,--at least, this street is included in the churchyard, together with the enclosure immediately about the church, sowed with tombstones. I meant to look for the children's book-shop, but forgot it, or neglected it, from not feeling so much interest in a thing near at hand as when it seemed unattainable. I watched a man tearing down the brick wall of a house that did not appear very old; but it surprised me to see how crumbly the brick-work was, one stroke of his pick often loosening several bricks in a row. It is my opinion that brick houses, after a moderate term of years, stand more by habit and courtesy than through any adhesive force of the old mortar. I recommenced my wanderings; but I remember nothing else particularly claiming to be mentioned, unless it be Paternoster Row,--a little, narrow, darksome lane, in which, it being now dusk in that density of the city, I could not very well see what signs were over the doors. In this street, or thereabouts, I got into an omnibus, and, being set down near Regent's Circus, reached home well wearied. September 9th.--Yesterday, having some tickets to the Zoological Gardens, we went thither with the two eldest children. It was a most beautiful sunny day, the very perfection of English weather,--which is as much as to say, the best weather in the world, except, perhaps, some few days in an American October. These gardens are at the end of Regent's Park, farthest from London, and they are very extensive; though, I think, not quite worthy of London,--not so good as one would expect them to be,--not so fine and perfect a collection of beasts, birds, and fishes, as one might fairly look for, when the greatest metropolis of the world sets out to have such a collection at all.--My idea was, that here every living thing was provided for, in the way best suited to its nature and habits, and that the refinement of civilization had here restored a garden of Eden, where all the animal kingdom had regained a happy home. This is not quite the case; though, I believe, the creatures are as comfortable as could be expected, and there are certainly a good many strange beasts here. The hippopotamus is the chief treasure of the collection,--an immense, almost misshapen, mass of flesh. At this moment I do not remember anything that interested me except a sick monkey,--a very large monkey, and elderly he seemed to be. His keeper brought him some sweetened apple and water, and some tea; for the monkey had quite lost his appetite, and refused all ordinary diet. He came, however, quite eagerly, and smelt of the tea and apple, the keeper exhorting him very tenderly to eat. But the poor monkey shook his head slowly, and with the most pitiable expression, at the same time extending his hand to take the keeper's, as if claiming his sympathy and friendship. By and by the keeper (who is rather a surly fellow) essayed harsher measures, and insisted that the monkey should eat what had been brought for him, and hereupon ensued somewhat of a struggle, and the tea was overturned upon the straw of the bed. Then the keeper scolded him, and, seizing him by one arm, drew him out of his little bedroom into the larger cage, upon which the wronged monkey began a loud, dissonant, reproachful chatter, more expressive of a sense of injury than any words could be. Observing the spectators in front of the cage, he seemed to appeal to them, and addressed his chatter thitherward, and stretched out his long, lean arm and black hand between the bars, as if claiming the grasp of any one friend he might have in the whole world. He was placable, however; for when the keeper called him in a gentler tone, he hobbled towards him with a very stiff and rusty movement, and the scene closed with their affectionately hugging one another. But I fear the poor monkey will die. In a future state of being, I think it will be one of my inquiries, in reference to the mysteries of the present state, why monkeys were made. The Creator could not surely have meant to ridicule his own work. It might rather be fancied that Satan had perpetrated monkeys, with a malicious purpose of parodying the masterpiece of creation! The Aquarium, containing, in some of its compartments, specimens of the animal and vegetable life of the sea, and, in others, those of the fresh water, was richly worth inspecting; but not nearly so perfect as it might be. Now I think we have a right to claim, in a metropolitan establishment of this kind, in all its departments, a degree of perfection that shall quite outdo the unpractised thought of any man on that particular subject. There were a good many well-dressed people and children in the gardens, Saturday being a fashionable day for visiting them. One great amusement was feeding some bears with biscuits and cakes, of which they seemed exceedingly fond. One of the three bears clambered to the top of a high pole, whence he invited the spectators to hand him bits of cake on the end of a stick, or to toss them into his mouth, which he opened widely for that purpose. Another, apparently an elderly bear, not having skill nor agility for these gymnastics, sat on the ground, on his hinder end, groaning most pitifully. The third took what stray bits he could get, without earning them by any antics. At four o'clock there was some music from the band of the First Life-Guards, a great multitude of chairs being set on the greensward in the sunshine and shade, for the accommodation of the auditors. Here we had the usual exhibition of English beauty, neither superior nor otherwise to what I have seen in other parts of England. Before the music was over, we walked slowly homeward, along beside Regent's Park, which is very prettily laid out, but lacks some last touch of richness and beauty; though, after all, I do not well see what more could be done with grass, trees, and gravel-walks. The children, especially J-----, who had raced from one thing to another all day long, grew tired; so we put them into a cab, and walked slowly through Portland Place, where are a great many noble mansions, yet no very admirable architecture; none that possessed, nor that ever can possess, the indefinable charm of some of those poor old timber houses in Shrewsbury. The art of domestic architecture is lost. We can rear stately and beautiful dwellings (though we seldom do), but they do not seem proper to the life of man, in the same way that his shell is proper to the lobster; nor, indeed, is the mansion of the nobleman proper to him, in the same kind and degree, that a hut is proper to a peasant. From Portland Place we passed into Regent Street, and soon reached home. September 10th.--Yesterday forenoon we walked out with the children, intending for Charing Cross; but, missing our way, as usual, we went down a rather wide and stately street, and saw before us an old brick edifice with a pretty extensive front, over which rose a clock-tower,--the whole dingy, and looking both gloomy and mean. There was an arched entrance beneath the clock-tower, at which two Guardsmen, in their bear-skin caps, were stationed as sentinels; and from this circumstance, and our having some guess at the locality, we concluded the old brick building to be St. James's Palace. Otherwise we might have taken it for a prison, or for a hospital, which, in truth, it was at first intended for. But, certainly, there are many paupers in England who live in edifices of far more architectural pretension externally than this principal palace of the English sovereigns. Seeing other people go through the archway, we also went, meeting no impediment from the sentinels, and found ourselves in a large paved court, in the centre of which a banner was stuck down, with a few soldiers standing near it. This flag was the banner of the regiment of guards on duty. The aspect of the interior court was as naked and dismal as the outside, the brick being of that dark hue almost universal in England. On one side of the court there was a door which seemed to give admission to a chapel, into which several persons went, and probably we might have gone too, had we liked. From this court, we penetrated into at least two or three others; for the palace is very extensive, and all of it, so far as I could see, on the same pattern,--large, enclosed courts, paved, and quite bare of grass, shrubbery, or any beautiful thing,--dark, stern, brick walls, without the slightest show of architectural beauty, or even an ornament over the square, commonplace windows, looking down on those forlorn courts. A carriage-drive passes through it, if I remember aright, from the principal front, emerging by one of the sides; and I suppose that the carriages roll through the palace, at the levees and drawing-rooms. There was nothing to detain us here any long time, so we went from court to court, and came out through a side-opening. The edifice is battlemented all round, and this, with somewhat of fantastic in the shape of the clock-tower, is the only attempt at ornament in the whole. Then we skirted along St. James's Park, passing Marlborough House,--a red brick building,--and a very long range of stone edifices, which, whether they were public or private, one house or twenty, we knew not. We ascended the steps of the York column, and soon reached Charing Cross and Trafalgar Square, where there are more architectural monuments than in any other one place in London; besides two fountains, playing in large reservoirs of water, and various edifices of note and interest. Northumberland House, now, and for a long while, the town residence of the Percys, stands on the Strand side,--over the entrance a lion, very spiritedly sculptured, flinging out his long tail. On another side of the square is Morley's Hotel, exceedingly spacious, and looking more American than anything else in the hotel line that I have seen here. The Nelson monument, with Lord Nelson, in a cocked hat, on its top, is very grand in its effect. All about the square there were sundry loungers, people looking at the bas-reliefs on Nelson's Column, children paddling in the reservoirs of the fountains; and, it being a sunny day, it was a cheerful and lightsome, as well as an impressive scene. On second thoughts, I do not know but that London should have a far better display of architecture and sculpture than this, on its finest site, and in its very centre; for, after all, there is nothing of the very best. But I missed nothing at the time. In the afternoon S----- and I set out to attend divine service in Westminster Abbey. On our way thither we passed through Pall Mall, which is full of club-houses, and we were much struck with the beauty of the one lately erected for the Carleton Club. It is built of a buff-colored or yellowish stone, with pillars or pilasters of polished Aberdeen granite, wonderfully rich and beautiful; and there is a running border of sculptured figures all round the upper part of the building, besides other ornament and embroidery, wherever there was room or occasion for it. It being an oblong square, the smooth and polished aspect in this union of two rich colors in it,--this delicacy and minuteness of finish, this lavish ornament--made me think of a lady's jewel-box; and if it could be reduced to the size of about a foot square, or less, it would make the very prettiest one that ever was seen. I question whether it have any right to be larger than a jewel-box; but it is certainly a most beautiful edifice. We turned down Whitehall, at the head of which, over the very spot where the Regicides were executed, stands the bronze equestrian statue of Charles I.,--the statue that was buried under the earth during the whole of Cromwell's time, and emerged after the Restoration. We saw the Admiralty and the Horse-Guards, and, in front of the latter, the two mounted sentinels, one of whom was flirting and laughing with some girls. On the other side of the street stands the Banqueting-House, built by Inigo Jones; from a window of which King Charles stepped forth, wearing a kingly head, which, within a few minutes afterwards, fell with a dead thump on the scaffold. It was nobly done,-- and nobly suffered. How rich is history in the little space around this spot! I find that the day after I reached London, I entirely passed by Westminster Abbey without knowing it, partly because my eyes were attracted by the gaudier show of the new Houses of Parliament, and partly because this part of the Abbey has been so much repaired and renewed that it has not the marks of age. Looking at its front, I now found it very grand and venerable; but it is useless to attempt a description: these things are not to be translated into words; they can be known only by seeing them, and, until seen, it is well to shape out no idea of them. Impressions, states of mind, produced by noble spectacles of whatever kind, are all that it seems worth while to attempt reproducing with the pen. After coming out of the Abbey, we looked at the two Houses of Parliament, directly across the way,--an immense structure, and certainly most splendid, built of a beautiful warm-colored stone. The building has a very elaborate finish, and delighted me at first; but by and by I began to be sensible of a weariness in the effect, a lack of variety in the plan and ornament, a deficiency of invention; so that instead of being more and more interested the longer one looks, as is the case with an old Gothic edifice, and continually reading deeper into it, one finds that one has seen all in seeing a little piece, and that the magnificent palace has nothing better to show one or to do for one. It is wonderful how the old weather-stained and smoke-blackened Abbey shames down this brand-newness; not that the Parliament houses are not fine objects to look at, too. Yesterday morning we walked to Charing Cross, with U---- and J-----, and there took a cab to the Tower, driving thither through the Strand, Fleet Street, past St. Paul's, and amid all the thickest throng of the city. I have not a very distinct idea of the Tower, but remember that our cab drove within an outer gate, where we alighted at a ticket-office; the old royal fortress being now a regular show-place, at sixpence a head, including the sight of armory and crown-jewels. We saw about the gate several warders or yeomen of the guard, or beefeaters, dressed in scarlet coats of antique fashion, richly embroidered with golden crowns, both on the breast and back, and other royal devices and insignia; so that they looked very much like the kings on a pack of cards, or regular trumps, at all events. I believe they are old soldiers, promoted to this position for good conduct. One of them took charge of us, and when a sufficient number of visitors had collected with us, he led us to see what very small portion of the Tower is shown. There is a great deal of ground within the outer precincts; and it has streets and houses and inhabitants and a church within it; and, going up and down behind the warder, without any freedom to get acquainted with the place by strolling about, I know little more about it than when I went in,--only recollecting a mean and disagreeable confusion of brick walls, barracks, paved courts, with here and there a low bulky turret, of rather antique aspect, and, in front of one of the edifices, a range of curious old cannon, lying on the ground, some of them immensely large and long, and beautifully wrought in brass. I observed by a plan, however, that the White Tower, containing the armory, stands about in the centre of the fortress, and that it is a square, battlemented structure, having a turret at each angle. We followed the warder into the White Tower, and there saw, in the first place, a long gallery of mounted knights, and men at arms, which has been so often described that when I wish to recall it to memory I shall turn to some other person's account of it. I was much struck, however, with the beautiful execution of a good many of the suits of armor, and the exquisite detail with which they were engraved. The artists of those days attained very great skill, in this kind of manufacture. The figures of the knights, too, in full array, undoubtedly may have shown a combination of stateliness and grace which heretofore I have not believed in,--not seeing how it could be compatible with iron garments. But it is quite incomprehensible how, in the time of the heaviest armor, they could strike a blow, or possess any freedom of movement, except such as a turtle is capable of; and, in truth, they are said not to have been able to rise up when overthrown. They probably stuck out their lances, and rode straight at the enemy, depending upon upsetting him by their mass and weight. In the row of knights is Henry VIII.; also Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, who must have been an immensely bulky man; also, a splendid suit of armor, gilded all over, presented by the city of London to Charles I.; also, two or three suits of boys' armor, for the little princes of the House of Stuart. They began to wear these burdens betimes, in order that their manhood might be the more tolerant of them. We went through this gallery so hastily that it would have been about as well not to have seen it at all. Then we went up a winding stair to another room, containing armor and weapons, and beautiful brass cannon, that appeared to have been for ornament rather than use, some of them being quite covered with embossed sculpture, marvellously well wrought. In this room was John of Gaunt's suit, indicating a man seven feet high, and the armor seems to bear the marks of much wear; but this may be owing to great scrubbing, throughout the centuries since John of Gaunt died. There, too, we saw the cloak in which Wolfe fell, on the Plains of Abraham,--a coarse, faded, threadbare, light-colored garment, folded up under a glass case. Many other things we might have seen, worthy of being attended to, had there been time to look at them. Following into still another room, we were told that this was Sir Walter Raleigh's apartment, while confined in the Tower, so that it was within these walls that he wrote the History of the World. The room was formerly lighted by lancet windows, and must have been very gloomy; but, if he had the whole length of it to himself, it was a good space to walk and meditate in. On one side of the apartment is a low door, giving admittance, we were told, to the cell where Raleigh slept; so we went in, and found it destitute of any window, and so dark that we could not estimate its small extent except by feeling about. At the threshold of this sleeping-kennel, there were one or two inscriptions, scratched in the wall, but not, I believe, by Raleigh. In this apartment, among a great many other curious things, are shown the devilish instruments of torture which the Spaniards were bringing to England in their Armada; and, at the end of the room, sits Queen Elizabeth on horseback, in her high ruff and faded finery. Very likely none of these clothes were ever on her actual person. Here, too, we saw a headsman's block,--not that on which Raleigh was beheaded, which I would have given gold to see, but the one which was used for the Scotch Lords Kilmarnock, Lovat, and others, executed on account of the Rebellion of 1745. It is a block of oak, about two feet high, with a large knot in it, so that it would not easily be split by a blow of the axe; hewn and smoothed in a very workmanlike way, and with a hollow to accommodate the head and shoulders on each side. There were two or three very strong marks of the axe in the part over which the neck lay, and several smaller cuts; as if the first stroke nearly severed the head, and then the chopping off was finished by smaller blows, as we see a butcher cutting meat with his cleaver. A headsman's axe was likewise shown us,--its date unknown. In the White Tower we were shown the Regalia, under a glass, and within an iron cage. Edward the Confessor's golden staff was very finely wrought; and there were a great many pretty things; but I have a suspicion, I know not why, that these are not the real jewels,--at least, that such inestimable ones as the Koh-i-noor (or however it is spelt) are less freely exhibited. The warder then led us into a paved court, which he said was the place of execution of all royal personages and others, who, from motives of fear or favor, were beheaded privately. Raleigh was among these, and so was Anne Boleyn. We then followed to the Beauchamp Tower, where many state prisoners of note were confined, and where, on the walls of one of the chambers, there are several inscriptions and sculptures of various devices, done by the prisoners,--and very skilfully done, too, though perhaps with no better instrument than an old nail. These poor wretches had time and leisure enough to spend upon their work. This chamber is lighted by small lancet windows, pierced at equal intervals round the circle of the Beauchamp Tower; and it contains a large, square fireplace, in which is now placed a small modern stove. We were hurried away, before we could even glance at the inscriptions, and we saw nothing else, except the low, obscure doorway in the Bloody Tower, leading to the staircase, under which were found the supposed bones of the little princes; and lastly, the round, Norman arch, opening to the water passage, called the Traitor's Gate. Finally, we ate some cakes and buns in the refreshment-room connected with the ticket-office, and then left the fortress. The ancient moat, by the way, has been drained within a few years, and now forms a great hollow space, with grassy banks, round about the citadel. We now wished to see the Thames, and therefore threaded our way along Thames Street, towards London Bridge, passing through a fish-market, which I suppose to be the actual Billingsgate, whence originated all the foul language in England. Under London Bridge there is a station for steamers running to Greenwich and Woolwich. We got on board one of these, not very well knowing, nor much caring, whither it might take us, and steamed down the river, which is bordered with the shabbiest, blackest, ugliest, meanest buildings: it is the back side of the town; and, in truth, the muddy tide of the Thames deserves to see no better. There was a great deal of shipping in the river, and many steamers, and it was much more crowded than the Mersey, where all the ships go into docks; but the vessels were not so fine. By and by we reached Greenwich, and went ashore there, proceeding up from the quay, past beer-shops and eating-houses in great numbers and variety. Greenwich Hospital is here a very prominent object, and after passing along its extensive front, facing towards the river, we entered one of the principal gates, as we found ourselves free to do. We now left the hospital, and steamed back to London Bridge, whence we went up into the city, and, to finish the labors of the day, ascended the Monument. This seems to be still a favorite adventure with the cockneys; for we heard one woman, who went up with us, saying that she had been thinking of going up all her life, and another said that she had gone up thirty years ago. There is an iron railing, or rather a cage, round the top, through which it would be impossible for people to force their way, in order to precipitate themselves, as six persons have heretofore done. There was a mist over London, so that we did not gain a very clear view, except of the swarms of people running about, like ants, in the streets at the foot of the Monument. Descending, I put S----- and the children into a cab, and I myself wandered about the city. Passing along Fleet Street, I turned in through an archway, which I rightly guessed to be the entrance to the Temple. It is a very large space, containing many large, solemn, and serious edifices of dark brick, and no sooner do you pass under the arch than all the rumble and bustle of London dies away at once; and it seems as if a person might live there in perfect quiet, without suspecting that it was not always a Sabbath. People appear to have their separate residences here; but I do not understand what is the economy of their lives. Quite in the deepest interior of this region, there is a large garden, bordering on the Thames, along which it has a gravel-walk, and benches where it would be pleasant to sit. On one edge of the garden, there is some scanty shrubbery, and flowers of no great brilliancy; and the greensward, with which the garden is mostly covered, is not particularly rich nor verdant. Emerging from the Temple, I stopped at a tavern in the Strand, the waiter of which observed to me, "They say Sebastopol is taken, sir!" It was only such an interesting event that could have induced an English waiter to make a remark to a stranger, not called for in the way of business. The best view we had of the town--in fact, the only external view, and the only time we really saw the White Tower--was from the river, as we steamed past it. Here the high, square, battlemented White Tower, with the four turrets at its corners, rises prominently above all other parts of the fortress. September 13th.--Mr. ------, the American Minister, called on me on Tuesday, and left his card; an intimation that I ought sooner to have paid my respects to him; so yesterday forenoon I set out to find his residence, 56 Harley Street. It is a street out of Cavendish Square, in a fashionable quarter, although fashion is said to be ebbing away from it. The ambassador seems to intend some little state in his arrangements; but, no doubt, the establishment compares shabbily enough with those of the legations of other great countries, and with the houses of the English aristocracy. A servant, not in livery, or in a very unrecognizable one, opened the door for me, and gave my card to a sort of upper attendant, who took it in to Mr. ------. He had three gentlemen with him, so desired that I should be ushered into the office of the legation, until he should be able to receive me. Here I found a clerk or attache, Mr. M------, who has been two or three years on this side of the water; an intelligent person, who seems to be in correspondence with the New York Courier and Enquirer. By and by came in another American to get a passport for the Continent, and soon the three gentlemen took leave of the ambassador, and I was invited to his presence. The tall, large figure of Mr. ------ has a certain air of state and dignity; he carries his head in a very awkward way, but still looks like a man of long and high authority, and, with his white hair, is now quite venerable. There is certainly a lack of polish, a kind of rusticity, notwithstanding which you feel him to be a man of the world. I should think he might succeed very tolerably in English society, being heavy and sensible, cool, kindly, and good-humored, with a great deal of experience of life. We talked about various matters, politics among the rest; and he observed that if the President had taken the advice which he gave him in two long letters, before his inauguration, he would have had a perfectly quiet and successful term of office. The advice was, to form a perfectly homogeneous cabinet of Union men, and to satisfy the extremes of the party by a fair distribution of minor offices; whereas he formed his cabinet of extreme men, on both sides, and gave the minor offices to moderate ones. But the antislavery people, surely, had no representative in the cabinet. Mr. ------ further observed, that he thought the President had a fair chance of re-nomination, for that the South could not, in honor, desert him; to which I replied that the South had been guilty of such things heretofore. Mr. ------ thinks that the next Presidential term will be more important and critical, both as to our foreign relations and internal affairs, than any preceding one,--which I should judge likely enough to be the case, although I heard the sane prophecy often made respecting the present term. The ambassador dined with us at Rock Park a year or two ago, and I then felt, and always feel, as if he were a man of hearty feeling and simplicity, and certainly it would be unjust to conclude otherwise, merely from the fact (very suspicious, it is true) of his having been a life-long politician. After we had got through a little matter of business (respecting a young American who has enlisted at Liverpool), the Minister rang his bell, and ordered another visitor to be admitted; and so I took my leave. In the other room I found the Secretary of Legation,--a tall, slender man of about forty, with a small head and face,--gentlemanly enough, sensible, and well informed, yet I should judge, not quite up to his place. There was also a Dr. B------ from Michigan present, and I rather fancy the ambassador is quite as much bored with visitors as the consul at Liverpool. Before I left the office, Mr. ------ came in with Miss Sarah Clarke on his arm. She had come thither to get her passport vised; and when her business was concluded, we went out together. She was going farther towards the West End, and I into the city; so we soon parted, and I lost myself among the streets and squares, arriving at last at Oxford Street, though even then I did not know whether my face were turned cityward or in the opposite direction. Crossing Regent Street, however, I became sure of my whereabout, and went on through Holborn, and sought hither and thither for Grace Church Street, in order to find the American Consul, General Campbell; for I needed his aid to get a bank post-bill cashed. But I could not find the street, go where I would; so at last I went to No. 65 Cheapside, and introduced myself to Mr. ------, whom I already knew by letter, and by a good many of his poems, which he has sent me, and by two excellent watches, which I bought of him. This establishment, though it has the ordinary front of dingy brick, common to buildings in the city, looks like a time-long stand, the old shop of a London tradesman, with a large figure of a watch over the door, a great many watches (and yet no gorgeous show of them) in the window, a low, dark front shop, and a little room behind, where there was a chair or two. Mr. ------ is a small, slender young man, quite un-English in aspect, with black, curly hair, a thin, dark, colorless visage, very animated and of quick expression, with a nervous temperament. . . . He dismounted from a desk when my card was handed to him, and turned to me with a vivid, glad look of recognition. We talked, in the first place, about poetry and such matters, about England and America, and the nature and depth of their mutual dislike, and, of course, the slavery question came up, as it always does, in one way or another. Anon, I produced my bank post-bill; and Mr. ------ kindly engaged to identify me at the bank, being ready to swear to me, he said, on the strength of my resemblance to my engraved portrait. So we set out for the Bank of England, and, arriving there, were directed to the proper clerk, after much inquiry; but he told us that the bill was not yet due, having been drawn at seven days, and having two still to run,--which was the fact. As I was almost shillingless, Mr. ------ now offered to cash it for me. He is very kind and good. . . . Arriving at his shop again, he went out to procure the money, and soon returned with it. At my departure he gave me a copy of a new poem of his, entitled "Verdicts," somewhat in the manner of Lowell's satire. . . . Mr. ------ resides now at Greenwich, whither he hoped I would come and see him on my return to London. Perhaps I will, for I like him. It seems strange to see an Englishman with so little physical ponderosity and obtuseness of nerve. After parting from him, it being three o'clock or thereabouts, I resumed my wanderings about the city, of which I never weary as long as I can put one foot before the other. Seeing that the door of St. Paul's, under one of the semicircular porches, was partially open, I went in, and found that the afternoon service was about to be performed; so I remained to hear it, and to see what I could of the cathedral. What a total and admirable contrast between this and a Gothic church! the latter so dim and mysterious, with its various aisles, its intricacy of pointed arches, its dark walls and columns and pavement, and its painted glass windows, bedimming even what daylight might otherwise get into its eternal evening. But this cathedral was full of light, and light was proper to it. There were no painted windows, no dim recesses, but a wide and airy space beneath the dome; and even through the long perspective of the nave there was no obscurity, but one lofty and beautifully rounded arch succeeding to another, as far as the eye could reach. The walls were white, the pavement constructed of squares of gray and white marble. It is a most grand and stately edifice, and its characteristic stems to be to continue forever fresh and new; whereas such a church as Westminster Abbey must have been as venerable as it is now from the first day when it grew to be an edifice at all. How wonderful man is in his works! How glad I am that there can be two such admirable churches, in their opposite styles, as St. Paul's and Westminster Abbey! The organ was played while I was there, and there was an anthem beautifully chanted by voices that came from afar off and remotely above, as if out of a sunny sky. Meanwhile I looked at such monuments as were near; chiefly those erected to military or naval men,--Picton, General Ponsonby, Lord St. Vincent, and others; but against one of the pillars stands a statue of Dr. Johnson,--a noble and thoughtful figure, with a development of muscle befitting an athlete. I doubt whether sculptors do not err in point of taste, by making all their statues models of physical perfection, instead of expressing by them the individual character and habits of the man. The statue in the market-place at Lichfield has more of the homely truth of Johnson's actual personality than this. St. Paul's, as yet, is by no means crowded with monuments; there is, indeed, plenty of room for a mob of the illustrious, yet to come. But it seems to me that the character of the edifice would be injured by allowing the monuments to be clustered together so closely as at Westminster, by incrusting the walls with them, or letting the statues throng about the pedestals of columns. There must be no confusion in such a cathedral as this, and I question whether the effect will ever be better than it is now, when each monument has its distinct place, and as your eye wanders around, you are not distracted from noting each marble man, in his niche against the wall, or at the base of a marble pillar. Space, distance, light, regularity, are to be preserved, even if the result should be a degree of nakedness. I saw Mr. Appleton of the Legation, and Dr. Brown, on the floor of the cathedral. They were about to go over the whole edifice, and had engaged a guide for that purpose; but, as I intend to go thither again with S-----, I did not accompany them, but went away the quicker that one of the gentlemen put on his hat, and I was ashamed of being seen in company with a man who could wear his hat in a cathedral. Not that he meant any irreverence; but simply felt that he was in a great public building,--as big, nearly, as all out of doors,--and so forgot that it was a consecrated place of worship. The sky is the dome of a greater cathedral than St. Paul's, and built by a greater architect than Sir Christopher Wren, and yet we wear our hats unscrupulously beneath it. I remember no other event of importance, except that I penetrated into a narrow lane or court, either in the Strand or Fleet Street, where was a tavern, calling itself the "Old Thatched House," and purporting to have been Nell Gwyn's dairy. I met with a great many alleys and obscure archways, in the course of the day's wanderings. September 14th.--Yesterday, in the earlier part of the day, it poured with rain, and I did not go out till five o'clock in the afternoon; nor did I then meet with anything interesting. I walked through Albemarle Street, for the purpose of looking at Murray's shop, but missed it entirely, at my first inquisition. The street is one of hotels, principally, with only a few tradesmen's shops, and has a quiet, aristocratic aspect. On my return, down the other sidewalk, I did discover the famous publisher's locality; but merely by the name "Mr. Murray," engraved on a rather large brass plate, such as doctors use, on the door. There was no sign of a book, nor of its being a place of trade in any way; and I should have taken the house to be, if not a private mansion, then a lawyer's office. At seven o'clock S-----, U----, and I went to dine with Mr. R---- S------ in Portland Place. . . . Mr. S------'s house is a very fine one, and he gave us a very quiet, elegant, and enjoyable dinner, in much better taste and with less fuss than some others we have attended elsewhere. Mr. S------ is a friend of Thackeray, and, speaking of the last number of The Newcomes,--so touching that nobody can read it aloud without breaking down,--he mentioned that Thackeray himself had read it to James Russell Lowell and William Story in a cider-cellar! I read all the preceding numbers of The Newcomes to my wife, but happened not to have an opportunity to read this last, and was glad of it,--knowing that my eyes would fill, and my voice quiver. Mr. S------ likes Thackeray, and thinks him a good fellow. Mr. S------ has a--or I don't know but I ought better to say the--beautiful full-length picture of Washington by Stuart, and I was proud to see that noblest face and figure here in England. The picture of a man beside whom, considered physically, any English nobleman whom I have seen would look like common clay. Speaking of Thackeray, I cannot but wonder at his coolness in respect to his own pathos, and compare it with my emotions, when I read the last scene of The Scarlet Letter to my wife, just after writing it,--tried to read it rather, for my voice swelled and heaved, as if I were tossed up and down on an ocean as it subsides after a storm. But I was in a very nervous state then, having gone through a great diversity of emotion, while writing it, for many months. I think I have never overcome my own adamant in any other instance. Tumblers, hand-organists, puppet-showmen, bagpipers, and all such vagrant mirth-makers, are very numerous in the streets of London. The other day, passing through Fleet Street, I saw a crowd filling up a narrow court, and high above their heads a tumbler, standing on his head, on the top of a pole, that reached as high as the third story of the neighboring Houses. Sliding down the pole head foremost, he disappeared out of my sight. A multitude of Punches go the mounds continually. Two have passed through Hanover Street, where we reside, this morning. The first asked two shillings for his performance; so we sent him away. The second demanded, in the first place, half a crown; but finally consented to take a shilling, and gave us the show at that price, though much maimed in its proportions. Besides the spectators in our windows, he had a little crowd on the sidewalk, to whom he went round for contributions, but I did not observe that anybody gave him so much as a halfpenny. It is strange to see how many people are aiming at the small change in your pocket. In every square a beggar-woman meets you, and turns back to follow your steps with her miserable murmur. At the street-crossings there are old men or little girls with their brooms; urchins propose to brush your boots; and if you get into a cab, a man runs to open the door for you, and touches his hat for a fee, as he closes it again. September 15th.--It was raining yesterday, and I kept within doors till after four o'clock, when J----- and I took a walk into the city. Seeing the entrance to Clement's Inn, we went through it, and saw the garden, with a kneeling bronze figure in it; and when just in the midst of the Inn, I remembered that Justice Shallow was of old a student there. I do not well understand these Inns of Court, or how they differ from other places. Anybody seems to be free to reside in them, and a residence does not seem to involve any obligation to study law, or to have any connection therewith. Clement's Inn consists of large brick houses, accessible by narrow lanes and passages, but, by some peculiar privilege or enchantment, enjoying a certain quiet and repose, though in close vicinity to the noisiest part of the city. I got bewildered in the neighborhood of St. Paul's, and, try how I might to escape from it, its huge dusky dome kept showing itself before me, through one street and another. In my endeavors to escape it, I at one time found myself in St. John's Street, and was in hopes to have seen the old St. John's gate, so familiar for above a century on the cover of the Gentleman's Magazine. But I suppose it is taken down, for we went through the entire street, I think, and saw no trace of it. Either afterwards or before this we came upon Smithfield, a large irregular square, filled up with pens for cattle, of which, however, there were none in the market at that time. I leaned upon a post, at the western end of the square, and told J----- how the martyrs had been burnt at Smithfield in Bloody Mary's days. Again we drifted back to St. Paul's; and, at last, in despair of ever getting out of this enchanted region, I took a Hansom cab to Charing Cross, whence we easily made our way home. LIVERPOOL. September 16th.--I took the ten-o'clock train yesterday morning from the Euston station, and arrived at Liverpool at about five, passing through the valley of Trent, without touching at Birmingham. English scenery, on the tracks, is the tamest of the tame, hardly a noticeable hill breaking the ordinary gentle undulation of the landscape, but still the verdure and finish of the fields and parks make it worth while to throw out a glance now and then, as you rush by. Few separate houses are seen, as in America; but sometimes a village, with the square, gray, battlemented tower of its Norman church, and rows of thatched cottages, reminding one of the clustered mud-nests of swallows, under the eaves of a barn; here and there a lazy little river, like the Trent; perhaps, if you look sharply where the guide-book indicates, the turrets of an old castle in the distance; perhaps the great steeple and spires of a cathedral; perhaps the tall chimney of a manufactory; but, on the whole, the traveller comes to his journey's end unburdened with a single new idea. I observe that the harvest is not all gathered in as yet, and this rainy weather must look very gloomy to the farmer. I saw gleaners, yesterday, in the stubble-fields. There were two gentlemen in the same railway-carriage with me, and we did not exchange half a dozen words the whole day. I am here, established at Mrs. Blodgett's boarding-house, which I find quite full; insomuch that she had to send one of her sea-captains to sleep in another house, in order to make room for me. It is exclusively American society: four shipmasters, and a doctor from Pennsylvania, who has been travelling a year on the Continent, and who seems to be a man of very active intelligence, interested in everything, and especially in agriculture. . . . He asserted that we are fifty years ahead of England in agricultural science, and that he could cultivate English soil to far better advantage than English farmers do, and at vastly less expense. Their tendency to cling to old ideas, which retards them in everything else, keeps them behindhand in this matter too. Really, I do not know any other place in England where a man can be made so sensible that he lives in a progressive world as here in Mrs. Blodgett's boarding-house. The captains talk together about their voyages, and how they manage with their unruly mates and crews; and how freights are in America, and the prospects of business; and of equinoctial gales, and the qualities of different ships, and their commanders, and how crews, mates, and masters have all deteriorated since their remembrance. . . . But these men are alive, and talk of real matters, and of matters which they know. The shipmasters who come to Mrs. Blodgett's are favorable specimens of their class; being all respectable men, in the employ of good houses, and raised by their capacity to the command of first-rate ships. In my official intercourse with them, I do not generally see their best side; as they are seldom before me except as complainants, or when summoned to answer to some complaint made by a seaman. But hearing their daily talk, and listening to what is in their minds, and their reminiscences of what they have gone through, one becomes sensible that they are men of energy and ability, fit to be trusted, and retaining a hardy sense of honor, and a loyalty to their own country, the stronger because they have compared it with many others. Most of them are gentlemen, too, to a certain extent,--some more than others, perhaps; and none to a very exquisite point, or, if so, it is none the better for them as sailors or as men. September 17th.--It is singular to feel a sense of my own country returning upon me with the intercourse of the people whom I find here. . . . The doctor is much the most talkative of our company, and sometimes bores me thereby; though he seldom says anything that is not either instructive or amusing. He tells a curious story of Prince Albert, and how he avails himself of American sharp-shooting. During the doctor's tour in Scotland, which he has just finished, he became acquainted with one of the Prince's attaches, who invited him very earnestly to join his Royal highness's party, promising him a good gun, and a keeper to load it for him, two good dogs, besides as many cigars as he could smoke and as much wine as he could drink, on the condition that whatever game he shot should be the Prince's. "The Prince," said the attache, "is very fond of having Americans in his shooting-parties, on account of their being such excellent shots; and there was one with him last year who shot so admirably that his Royal Highness himself left off shooting in utter astonishment." The attache offered to introduce the doctor to the Prince, who would be certain to receive him very graciously. . . . I think, perhaps, we talk of kings and queens more at our table than people do at other tables in England; not, of course, that we like them better, or admire them more, but that they are curiosities. Yet I would not say that the doctor may not be susceptible on the point of royal attentions; for he told us with great complacency how emphatically, on two or three occasions, Louis Napoleon had returned his bow, and the last time had turned and made some remark (evidently about the doctor) to the Empress. . . . I ought not to omit mentioning that he has been told in France that he personally resembles the Emperor, and I suspect he is trying to heighten the resemblance by training his mustache on the pattern of that which adorns the imperial upper lip. He is a genuine American character, though modified by a good deal of travel; a very intelligent man, full of various ability, with eyes all over him for any object of interest,--a little of the bore, sometimes,--quick to appreciate character, with a good deal of tact, gentlemanly in his manners, but yet lacking a deep and delicate refinement. Not but that Americans are as capable of this last quality as other people are; but what with the circumstances amid which we grow up, and the peculiar activity of our minds, we certainly do often miss it. By the by, he advanced a singular proposition the other evening, namely, that the English people do not so well understand comfort, or attain it so perfectly in their domestic arrangements, as we do. I thought he hardly supported this opinion so satisfactorily as some of his other new ideas. I saw in an American paper yesterday, that an opera, still unfinished, had been written on the story of The Scarlet Letter, and that several scenes of it had been performed successfully in New York. I should think it might possibly succeed as an opera, though it would certainly fail as a play. LONDON. September 24th.--On Saturday, at half past three o'clock, I left Liverpool by the London and Northwest Railway for London. Mrs. Blodgett's table had been thinned by several departures during the week. . . . My mind had been considerably enlivened, and my sense of American superiority renewed, by intercourse with these people; and there is no danger of one's intellect becoming a standing pool in such society. I think better of American shipmasters, too, than I did from merely meeting them in my office. They keep up a continual discussion of professional matters, and of all things having any reference to their profession; the laws of insurance, the rights of vessels in foreign ports, the authority and customs of vessels of war with regard to merchantmen, etc.,--with stories and casual anecdotes of their sea-adventures, gales, shipwrecks, icebergs, and collisions of vessels, and hair-breadth escapes. Their talk runs very much on the sea, and on the land as connected with the sea; and their interest does not seem to extend very far beyond the wide field of their professional concerns. Nothing remarkable occurred on the journey to London. The greater part of the way there were only two gentlemen in the same compartment with me; and we occupied each our corner, with little other conversation than in comparing watches at the various stations. I got out of the carriage only once, at Rugby, I think, and for the last seventy or eighty miles the train did not stop. There was a clear moon the latter part of the journey, and the mist lay along the ground, looking very much like a surface of water. We reached London at about ten, and I found S----- expecting me. Yesterday the children went with Fanny to the Zoological Gardens; and, after sending them off, S----- and I walked to Piccadilly, and there took a cab for Kensington Gardens. It was a delightful day,--the best of all weather, the real English good weather,--more like an Indian summer than anything else within my experience; a mellow sunshine, with great warmth in it,--a soft, balmy air, with a slight haze through it. If the sun made us a little too warm, we had but to go into the shade to be immediately refreshed. The light of these days is very exquisite, so gently bright, without any glare,--a veiled glow. In short, it is the kindliest mood of Nature, and almost enough to compensate for chill and dreary months. Moreover, there is more of such weather here than the English climate has ever had credit for. Kensington Gardens form an eminently beautiful piece of artificial woodland and park scenery. The old palace of Kensington, now inhabited by the Duchess of Inverness, stands at one extremity; an edifice of no great mark, built of brick, covering much ground, and low in proportion to its extent. In front of it, at a considerable distance, there is a sheet of water; and in all directions there are vistas of wide paths among noble trees, standing in groves, or scattered in clumps; everything being laid out with free and generous spaces, so that you can see long streams of sunshine among the trees, and there is a pervading influence of quiet and remoteness. Tree does not interfere with tree; the art of man is seen conspiring with Nature, as if they had consulted together how to make a beautiful scene, and had taken ages of quiet thought and tender care to accomplish it. We strolled slowly along these paths, and sometimes deviated from them, to walk beneath the trees, many of the leaves of which lay beneath our feet, yellow and brown, and with a pleasant smell of vegetable decay. These were the leaves of chestnut-trees; the other trees (unless elms) have yet, hardly begun to shed their foliage, although you can discern a sober change of line in the woodland masses; and the trees individualize themselves by assuming each its own tint, though in a very modest way. If they could have undergone the change of an American autumn, it would have been like putting on a regal robe. Autumn often puts one on in America, but it is apt to be very ragged. There were a good many well-dressed people scattered through the grounds,--young men and girls, husbands with their wives and children, nursery-maids and little babes playing about in the grass. Anybody might have entered the gardens, I suppose; but only well-dressed people were there not, of the upper classes, but shop-keepers, clerks, apprentices, and respectability of that sort. It is pleasant to think that the people have the freedom, and therefore the property, of parks like this, more beautiful and stately than a nobleman can keep to himself. The extent of Kensington Gardens, when reckoned together with Hyde Park, from which it is separated only by a fence of iron rods, is very great, comprising miles of greensward and woodland. The large artificial sheet of water, called the Serpentine River, lies chiefly in Hyde Park, but comes partly within the precincts of the gardens. It is entitled to honorable mention among the English lakes, being larger than some that are world-celebrated,--several miles long, and perhaps a stone's-throw across in the widest part. It forms the paradise of a great many ducks of various breeds, which are accustomed to be fed by visitors, and come flying from afar, touching the water with their wings, and quacking loudly when bread or cake is thrown to them. I bought a bun of a little hunchbacked man, who kept a refreshment-stall near the Serpentine, and bestowed it pied-meal on these ducks, as we loitered along the bank. We left the park by another gate, and walked homeward, till we came to Tyburnia, and saw the iron memorial which marks where the gallows used to stand. Thence we turned into Park Lane, then into Upper Grosvenor Street, and reached Hanover Square sooner than we expected. In the evening I walked forth to Charing Cross, and thence along the Strand and Fleet Street, where I made no new discoveries, unless it were the Mitre Tavern. I mean to go into it some day. The streets were much thronged, and there seemed to be a good many young people,--lovers, it is to be hoped,--who had spent the day together, and were going innocently home. Perhaps so,--perhaps not. September 25th.--Yesterday forenoon J----- and I walked out, with no very definite purpose; but, seeing a narrow passageway from the Strand down to the river, we went through it, and gained access to a steamboat, plying thence to London Bridge. The fare was a halfpenny apiece, and the boat almost too much crowded for standing-room. This part of the river presents the water-side of London in a rather pleasanter aspect than below London Bridge,--the Temple, with its garden, Somerset House,--and generally, a less tumble-down and neglected look about the buildings; although, after all, the metropolis does not see a very stately face in its mirror. I saw Alsatia betwixt the Temple and Blackfriar's Bridge. Its precincts looked very narrow, and not particularly distinguishable, at this day, from the portions of the city on either side of it. At London Bridge we got aboard of a Woolwich steamer, and went farther down the river, passing the Custom-House and the Tower, the only prominent objects rising out of the dreary range of shabbiness which stretches along close to the water's edge. From this remote part of London we walked towards the heart of the city; and, as we went, matters seemed to civilize themselves by degrees, and the streets grew crowded with cabs, omnibuses, drays, and carts. We passed, I think, through Whitechapel, and, reaching St. Paul's, got into an omnibus, and drove to Regent Street, whence it was but a step or two home. In the afternoon, at four o'clock, S----- and I went to call on the American Ambassador and Miss L------. The lady was not at home, but we went in to see Mr. ------ and were shown into a stately drawing-room, the furniture of which was sufficiently splendid, but rather the worse for wear,--being hired furniture, no doubt. The ambassador shortly appeared, looking venerable, as usual,--or rather more so than usual,--benign, and very pale. His deportment towards ladies is highly agreeable and prepossessing, and he paid very kind attention to S-----, thereby quite confirming her previous good feeling towards him. She thinks that he is much changed since she saw him last, at dinner, at our house,--more infirm, more aged, and with a singular depression in his manner. I, too, think that age has latterly come upon him with great rapidity. He said that Miss L------ was going home on the 6th of October, and that he himself had long purposed going, but had received despatches which obliged him to put off his departure. The President, he said, had just written, requesting him to remain till April, but this he was determined not to do. I rather think that he does really wish to return, and not for any ambitious views concerning the Presidency, but from an old man's natural desire to be at home, and among his own people. S----- spoke to him about an order from the Lord Chamberlain for admission to view the two Houses of Parliament; and the ambassador drew from his pocket a colored silk handkerchief, and made a knot in it, in order to remind himself to ask the Lord Chamberlain. The homeliness of this little incident has a sort of propriety and keeping with much of Mr. ------'s manner, but I would rather not have him do so before English people. He arranged to send a close carriage for us to come and see him socially this evening. After leaving his house we drove round Hyde Park, and thence to Portland Place, where we left cards for Mrs. Russell Sturgis; thence into Regent's Park, thence home. U---- and J----- accompanied us throughout these drives, but remained in the carriage during our call on Mr. ------. In the evening I strolled out, and walked as far as St. Paul's,--never getting enough of the bustle of London, which may weary, but can never satisfy me. By night London looks wild and dreamy, and fills me with a sort of pleasant dread. It was a clear evening, with a bright English moon,--that is to say, what we Americans should call rather dim. September 26th.--Yesterday, at eleven, I walked towards Westminster Abbey, and as I drew near the Abbey bells were clamorous for joy, chiming merrily, musically, and, obstreperously,--the most rejoicing sound that can be conceived; and we ought to have a chime of bells in every American town and village, were it only to keep alive the celebration of the Fourth of July. I conjectured that there might have been another victory over the Russians, that perhaps the northern side of Sebastopol had surrendered; but soon I saw the riddle that these merry bells were proclaiming. There were a great many private carriages, and a large concourse of loungers and spectators, near the door of the church that stands close under the eaves of the Abbey. Gentlemen and ladies, gayly dressed, were issuing forth, carriages driving away, and others drawing up to the door in their turn; and, in short, a marriage had just been celebrated in the church, and this was the wedding-party. The last time I was there, Westminster was flinging out its great voice of joy for a national triumph; now, for the happy union of two lovers. What a mighty sympathizer is this old Abbey! It is pleasant to recognize the mould and fashion of English features through the marble of many of the statues and busts in the Abbey, even though they may be clad in Roman robes. I am inclined to think them, in many cases, faithful likenesses; and it brings them nearer to the mind, to see these original sculptures,--you see the man at but one remove, as if you caught his image in a looking-glass. The bust of Gay seemed to me very good,--a thoughtful and humorous sweetness in the face. Goldsmith has as good a position as any poet in the Abbey, his bust and tablet filling the pointed arch over a door that seems to lead towards the cloisters. No doubt he would have liked to be assured of so conspicuous a place. There is one monument to a native American, "Charles Wragg, Esq., of South Carolina,"--the only one, I suspect, in Westminster Abbey, and he acquired this memorial by the most un-American of qualities, his loyalty to his king. He was one of the refugees leaving America in 1777, and being shipwrecked on his passage the monument was put up by his sister. It is a small tablet with a representation of Mr. Wragg's shipwreck at the base. Next to it is the large monument of Sir Cloudesley Shovel, which I think Addison ridicules,--the Admiral, in a full-bottomed wig and Roman dress, but with a broad English face, reclining with his head on his hand, and looking at you with great placidity. I stood at either end of the nave, and endeavored to take in the full beauty and majesty of the edifice; but apparently was not in a proper state of mind, for nothing came of it. It is singular how like an avenue of overarching trees are these lofty aisles of a cathedral. Leaving the Abbey about one o'clock, I walked into the city as far as Grace Church Street, and there called on the American Consul, General ------, who had been warmly introduced to me last year by a letter from the President. I like the General; a kindly and honorable man, of simple manners and large experience of life. Afterwards I called on Mr. Oakford, an American connected in business with Mr. Crosby, from whom I wanted some information as to the sailing of steamers from Southampton to Lisbon. Mr. Crosby was not in town. . . . At eight o'clock Mr. ------ sent his carriage, according to previous arrangement, to take us to spend the evening socially. Miss L------ received us with proper cordiality, and looked quite becomingly,--more sweet and simple in aspect than when I have seen her in full dress. Shortly the ambassador appeared, and made himself highly agreeable; not that he is a brilliant conversationist, but his excellent sense and good-humor, and all that he has seen and been a part of, are sufficient resources to draw upon. We talked of the Queen, whom he spoke of with high respect; . . . . of the late Czar, whom he knew intimately while minister to Russia,--and he quite confirms all that has been said about the awful beauty of his person. Mr. ------'s characterization of him was quite favorable; he thought better of his heart than most people, and adduced his sports with a school of children,--twenty of whom, perhaps, he made to stand rigidly in a row, like so many bricks,--then, giving one a push, would laugh obstreperously to see the whole row tumble down. He would lie on his back, and allow the little things to scramble over him. His Majesty admitted Mr. ------ to great closeness of intercourse, and informed him of a conspiracy which was then on foot for the Czar's murder. On the evening, when the assassination was to take place, the Czar did not refrain from going to the public place where it was to be perpetrated, although, indeed, great precautions had been taken to frustrate the schemes of the conspirators. Mr. ------ said, that, in case the plot had succeeded, all the foreigners, including himself, would likewise have been murdered, the native Russians having a bitter hatred against foreigners. He observed that he had been much attached to the Czar, and had never joined in the English abuse of him. His sympathies, however, are evidently rather English than Russian, in this war. Speaking of the present emperor, he said that Lord Heytebury, formerly English ambassador in Russia, lately told him that he complimented the Czar Nicholas on the good qualities of his son, saying that he was acknowledged by all to be one of the most amiable youths in the world. "Too amiable, I fear, for his position," answered the Czar. "He has too much of his mother in him." September 27th.--Yesterday, much earlier than English people ever do such things, General ------ made us a call on his way to the Consulate, and sat talking a stricken hour or thereabouts. Scarcely had he gone when Mrs. Oakford and her daughter came. After sitting a long while, they took U---- to their house, near St. John's Wood, to spend the night. I had been writing my journal and official correspondence during such intervals as these calls left me; and now, concluding these businesses, S-----, J-----, and I went out and took a cab for the terminus of the Crystal Palace Railway, whither we proceeded over Waterloo Bridge, and reached the palace not far from three o'clock. It was a beautifully bright day, such as we have in wonderful succession this month. The Crystal Palace gleamed in the sunshine; but I do not think a very impressive edifice can be built of glass,--light and airy, to be sure, but still it will be no other than an overgrown conservatory. It is unlike anything else in England; uncongenial with the English character, without privacy, destitute of mass, weight, and shadow, unsusceptible of ivy, lichens, or any mellowness from age. The train of carriages stops within the domain of the palace, where there is a long ascending corridor up into the edifice. There was a very pleasant odor of heliotrope diffused through the air; and, indeed, the whole atmosphere of the Crystal Palace is sweet with various flower-scents, and mild and balmy, though sufficiently fresh and cool. It would be a delightful climate for invalids to spend the winter in; and if all England could be roofed over with glass, it would be a great improvement on its present condition. The first thing we did, before fairly getting into the palace, was to sit down in a large ante-hall, and get some bread and butter and a pint of Bass's pale ale, together with a cup of coffee for S-----. This was the best refreshment we could find at that spot; but farther within we found abundance of refreshment-rooms, and John Bull and his wife and family at fifty little round tables, busily engaged with cold fowl, cold beef, ham, tongue, and bottles of ale and stout, and half-pint decanters of sherry. The English probably eat with more simple enjoyment than any other people; not ravenously, as we often do, and not exquisitely and artificially, like the French, but deliberately and vigorously, and with due absorption in the business, so that nothing good is lost upon them. . . . It is remarkable how large a feature the refreshment-rooms make in the arrangements of the Crystal Palace. The Crystal Palace is a gigantic toy for the English people to play with. The design seems to be to reproduce all past ages, by representing the features of their interior architecture, costume, religion, domestic life, and everything that can be expressed by paint and plaster; and, likewise, to bring all climates and regions of the earth within these enchanted precincts, with their inhabitants and animals in living semblance, and their vegetable productions, as far as possible, alive and real. Some part of the design is already accomplished to a wonderful degree. The Indian, the Egyptian, and especially the Arabian, courts are admirably executed. I never saw or conceived anything so gorgeous as the Alhambra. There are Byzantine and mediaeval representations, too,-- reproductions of ancient apartments, decorations, statues from tombs, monuments, religious and funereal,--that gave me new ideas of what antiquity has been. It takes down one's overweening opinion of the present time, to see how many kinds of beauty and magnificence have heretofore existed, and are now quite passed away and forgotten; and to find that we, who suppose that, in all matters of taste, our age is the very flower-season of the time,--that we are poor and meagre as to many things in which they were rich. There is nothing gorgeous now. We live a very naked life. This was the only reflection I remember making, as we passed from century to century, through the succession of classic, Oriental, and mediaeval courts, adown the lapse of time,--seeing all these ages in as brief a space as the Wandering Jew might glance along them in his memory. I suppose a Pompeian house with its courts and interior apartments was as faithfully shown as it was possible to do it. I doubt whether I ever should feel at home in such a house. In the pool of a fountain, of which there are several beautiful ones within the palace, besides larger ones in the garden before it, we saw tropical plants growing,--large water-lilies of various colors, some white, like our Concord pond-lily, only larger, and more numerously leafed. There were great circular green leaves, lying flat on the water, with a circumference equal to that of a centre-table. Tropical trees, too, varieties of palm and others, grew in immense pots or tubs, but seemed not to enjoy themselves much. The atmosphere must, after all, be far too cool to bring out their native luxuriance; and this difficulty can never be got over at a less expense than that of absolutely stewing the visitors and attendants. Otherwise, it would be very practicable to have all the vegetable world, at least, within these precincts. The palace is very large, and our time was short, it being desirable to get home early; so, after a stay of little more than two hours, we took the rail back again, and reached Hanover Square at about six. After tea I wandered forth, with some thought of going to the theatre, and, passing the entrance of one, in the Strand, I went in, and found a farce in progress. It was one of the minor theatres, very minor indeed; but the pieces, so far as I saw them, were sufficiently laughable. There were some Spanish dances, too, very graceful and pretty. Between the plays a girl from the neighboring saloon came to the doors of the boxes, offering lemonade and ginger-beer to the occupants. A person in my box took a glass of lemonade, and shared it with a young lady by his side, both sipping out of the same glass. The audience seemed rather heavy,--not briskly responsive to the efforts of the performers, but good-natured, and willing to be pleased, especially with some patriotic dances, in which much waving and intermingling of the French and English flags was introduced. Theatrical performances soon weary me of late years; and I came away before the curtain rose on the concluding piece. September 28th.--8---- and I walked to Charing Cross yesterday forenoon, and there took a Hansom cab to St. Paul's Cathedral. It had been a thick, foggy morning, but had warmed and brightened into one of the balmiest and sunniest of noons. As we entered the cathedral, the long bars of sunshine were falling from its upper windows through the great interior atmosphere, and were made visible by the dust, or mist, floating about in it. It is a grand edifice, and I liked it quite as much as on my first view of it, although a sense of coldness and nakedness is felt when we compare it with Gothic churches. It is more an external work than the Gothic churches are, and is not so made out of the dim, awful, mysterious, grotesque, intricate nature of man. But it is beautiful and grand. I love its remote distances, and wide, clear spaces, its airy massiveness; its noble arches, its sky-like dome, which, I think, should be all over light, with ground-glass, instead of being dark, with only diminutive windows. We walked round, looking at the monuments, which are so arranged, at the bases of columns and in niches, as to coincide with the regularity of the cathedral, and be each an additional ornament to the whole, however defective individually as works of art. We thought that many of these monuments were striking and impressive, though there was a pervading sameness of idea,--a great many Victorys and Valors and Britannias, and a great expenditure of wreaths, which must have cost Victory a considerable sum at any florist's whom she patronizes. A very great majority of the memorials are to naval and military men, slain in Bonaparte's wars; men in whom one feels little or no interest (except Picton, Abercrombie, Moore, Nelson, of course, and a few others really historic), they having done nothing remarkable, save having been shot, nor shown any more brains than the cannonballs that killed them. All the statues have the dust of years upon then, strewn thickly in the folds of their marble garments, and on any limb stretched horizontally, and on their noses, so that the expression is much obscured. I think the nation might employ people to brush away the dust from the statues of its heroes. But, on the whole, it is very fine to look through the broad arches of the cathedral, and see, at the foot of some distant pillar, a group of sculptured figures, commemorating some man and deed that (whether worth remembering or not) the nation is so happy as to reverence. In Westminster Abbey, the monuments are so crowded, and so oddly patched together upon the walls, that they are ornamental only in a mural point of view; and, moreover, the quaint and grotesque taste of many of them might well make the spectator laugh,--an effect not likely to be produced by the monuments in St. Paul's. But, after all, a man might read the walls of the Abbey day after day with ever-fresh interest, whereas the cold propriety of the cathedral would weary him in due time. We did not ascend to the galleries and other points of interest aloft, nor go down into the vaults, where Nelson's sarcophagus is shown, and many monuments of the old Gothic cathedral, which stood on this site, before the great fire. They say that these lower regions are comfortably warm and dry; but as we walked round in front, within the iron railing of the churchyard, we passed an open door, giving access to the crypt, and it breathed out a chill like death upon us. It is pleasant to stand in the centre of the cathedral, and hear the noise of London, loudest all round this spot,--how it is calmed into a sound as proper to be heard through the aisles as the tones of its own organ. If St. Paul's were to be burnt again (having already been bunt and risen three or four times since the sixth century), I wonder whether it would ever be rebuilt in the same spot! I doubt whether the city and the nation are so religious as to consecrate their midmost heart for the site of a church, where land would be so valuable by the square inch. Coming from the cathedral, we went through Paternoster Row, and saw Ave Mary Lane; all this locality appearing to have got its nomenclature from monkish personages. We now took a cab for the British Museum, but found this to be one of the days on which strangers are not admitted; so we slowly walked into Oxford Street, and then strolled homeward, till, coming to a sort of bazaar, we went in and found a gallery of pictures. This bazaar proved to be the Pantheon, and the first picture we saw in the gallery was Haydon's Resurrection of Lazarus,--a great height and breadth of canvas, right before you as you ascend the stairs. The face of Lazarus is very awful, and not to be forgotten; it is as true as if the painter had seen it, or had been himself the resurrected man and felt it; but the rest of the picture signified nothing, and is vulgar and disagreeable besides. There are several other pictures by Haydon in this collection,--the Banishment of Aristides, Nero with his Harp, and the Conflagration of Rome; but the last is perfectly ridiculous, and all of them are exceedingly unpleasant. I should be sorry to live in a house that contained one of them. The best thing of Haydon was a hasty dash of a sketch for a small, full-length portrait of Wordsworth, sitting on the crag of a mountain. I doubt whether Wordsworth's likeness has ever been so poetically brought out. This gallery is altogether of modern painters, and it seems to be a receptacle for pictures by artists who can obtain places nowhere else,--at least, I never heard of their names before. They were very uninteresting, almost without exception, and yet some of the pictures were done cleverly enough. There is very little talent in this world, and what there is, it seems to me, is pretty well known and acknowledged. We don't often stumble upon geniuses in obscure corners. Leaving the gallery, we wandered through the rest of the bazaar, which is devoted to the sale of ladies' finery, jewels, perfumes, children's toys, and all manner of small and pretty rubbish. . . . In the evening I again sallied forth, and lost myself for an hour or two; at last recognizing my whereabouts in Tottenham Court Road. In such quarters of London it seems to be the habit of people to take their suppers in the open air. You see old women at the corners, with kettles of hot water for tea or coffee; and as I passed a butcher's open shop, he was just taking out large quantities of boiled beef, smoking hot. Butchers' stands are remarkable for their profuse expenditure of gas; it belches forth from the pipes in great flaring jets of flame, uncovered by any glass, and broadly illuminating the neighborhood. I have not observed that London ever goes to bed. September 29th.--Yesterday we walked to the British Museum. A sentinel or two kept guard before the gateway of this extensive edifice in Great Russell Street, and there was a porter at the lodge, and one or two policemen lounging about, but entrance was free, and we walked in without question. Officials and policemen were likewise scattered about the great entrance-hall, none of whom, however, interfered with us; so we took whatever way we chose, and wandered about at will. It is a hopeless, and to me, generally, a depressing business to go through an immense multifarious show like this, glancing at a thousand things, and conscious of some little titillation of mind from them, but really taking in nothing, and getting no good from anything. One need not go beyond the limits of the British Museum to be profoundly accomplished in all branches of science, art, and literature; only it would take a lifetime to exhaust it in any one department; but to see it as we did, and with no prospect of ever seeing it more at leisure, only impressed me with the truth of the old apothegm, "Life is short, and Art is long." The fact is, the world is accumulating too many materials for knowledge. We do not recognize for rubbish what is really rubbish; and under this head might be reckoned very many things one sees in the British Museum; and, as each generation leaves its fragments and potsherds behind it, such will finally be the desperate conclusion of the learned. We went first among some antique marbles,--busts, statues, terminal gods, with several of the Roman emperors among them. We saw here the bust whence Haydon took his ugly and ridiculous likeness of Nero,--a foolish thing to do. Julius Caesar was there, too, looking more like a modern old man than any other bust in the series. Perhaps there may be a universality in his face, that gives it this independence of race and epoch. We glimpsed along among the old marbles,--Elgin and others, which are esteemed such treasures of art;--the oddest fragments, many of them smashed by their fall from high places, or by being pounded to pieces by barbarians, or gnawed away by time; the surface roughened by being rained upon for thousands of years; almost always a nose knocked off; sometimes a headless form; a great deficiency of feet and hands,--poor, maimed veterans in this hospital of incurables. The beauty of the most perfect of them must be rather guessed at, and seen by faith, than with the bodily eye; to look at the corroded faces and forms is like trying to see angels through mist and cloud. I suppose nine tenths of those who seem to be in raptures about these fragments do not really care about them; neither do I. And if I were actually moved, I should doubt whether it were by the statues or by my own fancy. We passed, too, through Assyrian saloons and Egyptian saloons,--all full of monstrosities and horrible uglinesses, especially the Egyptian, and all the innumerable relics that I saw of them in these saloons, and among the mummies, instead of bringing me closer to them, removed me farther and farther; there being no common ground of sympathy between them and us. Their gigantic statues are certainly very curious. I saw a hand and arm up to the shoulder fifteen feet in length, and made of some stone that seemed harder and heavier than granite, not having lost its polish in all the rough usage that it has undergone. There was a fist on a still larger scale, almost as big as a hogshead. Hideous, blubber-lipped faces of giants, and human shapes with beasts' heads on them. The Egyptian controverted Nature in all things, only using it as a groundwork to depict, the unnatural upon. Their mummifying process is a result of this tendency. We saw one very perfect mummy,--a priestess, with apparently only one more fold of linen betwixt us and her antique flesh, and this fitting closely to her person from head to foot, so that we could see the lineaments of her face and the shape of her limbs as perfectly as if quite bare. I judge that she may have been very beautiful in her day,--whenever that was. One or two of the poor thing's toes (her feet were wonderfully small and delicate) protruded from the linen, and, perhaps, not having been so perfectly embalmed, the flesh had fallen away, leaving only some little bones. I don't think this young woman has gained much by not turning to dust in the time of the Pharaohs. We also saw some bones of a king that had been taken out of a pyramid; a very fragmentary skeleton. Among the classic marbles I peeped into an urn that once contained the ashes of dead people, and the bottom still had an ashy hue. I like this mode of disposing of dead bodies; but it would be still better to burn them and scatter the ashes, instead of hoarding them up,--to scatter them over wheat-fields or flowerbeds. Besides these antique halls, we wandered through saloons of antediluvian animals, some set up in skeletons, others imprisoned in solid stone; also specimens of still extant animals, birds, reptiles, shells, minerals,-- the whole circle of human knowledge and guess-work,--till I wished that the whole Past might be swept away, and each generation compelled to bury and destroy whatever it had produced, before being permitted to leave the stage. When we quit a house, we are expected to make it clean for the next occupant; why ought we not to leave a clean world for the next generation? We did not see the library of above half a million of volumes; else I suppose I should have found full occasion to wish that burnt and buried likewise. In truth, a greater part of it is as good as buried, so far as any readers are concerned. Leaving the Museum, we sauntered home. After a little rest, I set out for St. John's Wood, and arrived thither by dint of repeated inquiries. It is a pretty suburb, inhabited by people of the middling class. U---- met me joyfully, but seemed to have had a good time with Mrs. Oakford and her daughter; and, being pressed to stay to tea, I could not well help it. Before tea I sat talking with Mrs. Oakford and a friend of hers, Miss Clinch, about the Americans and the English, especially dwelling on the defects of the latter,--among which we reckoned a wretched meanness in money transactions, a lack of any embroidery of honor and liberality in their dealings, so that they require close watching, or they will be sure to take you at advantage. I hear this character of them from Americans on all hands, and my own experience confirms it as far as it goes, not merely among tradespeople, but among persons who call themselves gentlefolks. The cause, no doubt, or one cause, lies in the fewer chances of getting money here, the closer and sharper regulation of all the modes of life; nothing being left to liberal and gentlemanly feelings, except fees to servants. They are not gamblers in England, as we to some extent are; and getting their money painfully, or living within an accurately known income, they are disinclined to give up so much as a sixpence that they can possibly get. But the result is, they are mean in petty things. By and by Mr. Oakford came in, well soaked with the heaviest shower that I ever knew in England, which had been rattling on the roof of the little side room where we sat, and had caught him on the outside of the omnibus. At a little before eight o'clock I came home with U---- in a cab,--the gaslight glittering on the wet streets through which we drove, though the sky was clear overhead. September 30th.--Yesterday, a little before twelve, we took a cab, and went to the two Houses of Parliament,--the most immense building, methinks, that ever was built; and not yet finished, though it has now been occupied for years. Its exterior lies hugely along the ground, and its great unfinished tower is still climbing towards the sky; but the result (unless it be the riverfront, which I have not yet seen) seems not very impressive. The interior is much more successful. Nothing can be more magnificent and gravely gorgeous than the Chamber of Peers,--a large oblong hall, panelled with oak, elaborately carved, to the height of perhaps twenty feet. Then the balustrade of the gallery runs around the hall, and above the gallery are six arched windows on each side, richly painted with historic subjects. The roof is ornamented and gilded, and everywhere throughout there is embellishment of color and carving on the broadest scale, and, at the same time, most minute and elaborate; statues of full size in niches aloft; small heads of kings, no bigger than a doll; and the oak is carved in all parts of the panelling as faithfully as they used to do it in Henry VII's time,--as faithfully and with as good workmanship, but with nothing like the variety and invention which I saw in the dining-room of Smithell's Hall. There the artist wrought with his heart and head; but much of this work, I suppose, was done by machinery. Be that as it may, it is a most noble and splendid apartment, and, though so fine, there is not a touch of finery; it glistens and glows with even a sombre magnificence, owing to the rich, deep lines, and the dim light, bedimmed with rich colors by coming through the painted windows. In arched recesses, that serve as frames, at each end of the hall, there are three pictures by modern artists from English history; and though it was not possible to see them well as pictures, they adorned and enriched the walls marvellously as architectural embellishments. The Peers' seats are four rows of long sofas on each side, covered with red morocco; comfortable seats enough, but not adapted to any other than a decorously exact position. The woolsack is between these two divisions of sofas, in the middle passage of the floor,--a great square seat, covered with scarlet, and with a scarlet cushion set up perpendicularly for the Chancellor to lean against. In front of the woolsack there is another still larger ottoman, on which he might be at full length,--for what purpose intended, I know not. I should take the woolsack to be not a very comfortable seat, though I suppose it was originally designed to be the most comfortable one that could be contrived, in view of the Chancellor's much sitting. The throne is the first object you see on entering the hall, being close to the door; a chair of antique form, with a high, peaked back, and a square canopy above, the whole richly carved and quite covered with burnished gilding, besides being adorned with rows of rock crystals,-- which seemed to me of rather questionable taste. It is less elevated above the floor than one imagines it ought to be. While we were looking at it, I saw two Americans,--Western men, I should judge,--one of them with a true American slouch, talking to the policeman in attendance, and describing our Senate Chamber in contrast with the House of Lords. The policeman smiled and ah-ed, and seemed to make as courteous and liberal responses as he could. There was quite a mixed company of spectators, and, I think, other Americans present besides the above two and ourselves. The Lord Chamberlain's tickets appear to be distributed with great impartiality. There were two or three women of the lower middle class, with children or babies in arms, one of whom lifted up its voice loudly in the House of Peers. We next, after long contemplating this rich hall, proceeded through passages and corridors to a great central room, very beautiful, which seems to be used for purposes of refreshment, and for electric telegraphs; though I should not suppose this could be its primitive and ultimate design. Thence we went into the House of Commons, which is larger than the Chamber of Peers, and much less richly ornamented, though it would have appeared splendid had it come first in order. The speaker's chair, if I remember rightly, is loftier and statelier than the throne itself. Both in this hall and in that of the Lords, we were at first surprised by the narrow limits within which the great ideas of the Lords and Commons of England are physically realized; they would seem to require a vaster space. When we hear of members rising on opposite sides of the House, we think of them as but dimly discernible to their opponents, and uplifting their voices, so as to be heard afar; whereas they sit closely enough to feel each other's spheres, to note all expression of face, and to give the debate the character of a conversation. In this view a debate seems a much more earnest and real thing than as we read it in a newspaper. Think of the debaters meeting each other's eyes, their faces flushing, their looks interpreting their words, their speech growing into eloquence, without losing the genuineness of talk! Yet, in fact, the Chamber of Peers is ninety feet long and half as broad, and high, and the Chamber of Commons is still larger. Thence we went to Westminster Hall, through a gallery with statues on each side,--beautiful statues too, I thought; seven of them, of which four were from the times of the civil wars,--Clarendon, Falkland, Hampden, Selden, Somers, Mansfield, and Walpole. There is room for more in this corridor, and there are niches for hundreds of their marble brotherhood throughout the edifice; but I suppose future ages will have to fill the greater part of them. Yet I cannot help imagining that this rich and noble edifice has more to do with the past than with the future; that it is the glory of a declining empire; and that the perfect bloom of this great stone flower, growing out of the institutions of England, forbodes that they have nearly lived out their life. It sums up all. Its beauty and magnificence are made out of ideas that are gone by. We entered Westminster Hall (which is incorporated into this new edifice, and forms an integral part of it) through a lofty archway, whence a double flight of broad steps descends to the stone pavement. After the elaborate ornament of the rooms we had just been viewing, this venerable hall looks extremely simple and bare,--a gray stone floor, gray and naked stone walls, but a roof sufficiently elaborate, its vault being filled with carved beams and rafters of chestnut, very much admired and wondered at for the design and arrangement. I think it would have pleased me more to have seen a clear vaulted roof, instead of this intricacy of wooden points, by which so much skylight space is lost. They make (be it not irreverently said) the vast and lofty apartment look like the ideal of an immense barn. But it is a noble space, and all without the support of a single pillar. It is about eighty of my paces from the foot of the steps to the opposite end of the hall, and twenty-seven from side to side; very high, too, though not quite proportionately to its other dimensions. I love it for its simplicity and antique nakedness, and deem it worthy to have been the haunt and home of History through the six centuries since it was built. I wonder it does not occur to modern ingenuity to make a scenic representation, in this very hall, of the ancient trials for life or death, pomps, feasts, coronations, and every great historic incident in the lives of kings, Parliaments, Protectors, and all illustrious men, that have occurred here. The whole world cannot show another hall such as this, so tapestried with recollections of whatever is most striking in human annals. Westminster Abbey being just across the street, we went thither from the hall, and sought out the cloisters, which we had not yet visited. They are in excellent preservation,--broad walks, canopied with intermingled arches of gray stone, on which some sort of lichen, or other growth of ages (which seems, however, to have little or nothing vegetable in it), has grown. The pavement is entirely made of flat tombstones, inscribed with half-effaced names of the dead people beneath; and the wall all round bears the marble tablets which give a fuller record of their virtues. I think it was from a meditation in these cloisters that Addison wrote one of his most beautiful pieces in the Spectator. It is a pity that this old fashion of a cloistered walk is not retained in our modern edifices; it was so excellent for shelter and for shade during a thoughtful hour,--this sombre corridor beneath an arched stone roof, with the central space of richest grass, on which the sun might shine or the shower fall, while the monk or student paced through the prolonged archway of his meditations. As we came out from the cloisters, and walked along by the churchyard of the Abbey, a woman came begging behind us very earnestly. "A bit of bread," she said, "and I will give you a thousand blessings! Hunger is hard to bear. O kind gentleman and kind lady, a penny for a bit of bread! It is a hard thing that gentlemen and ladies should see poor people wanting bread, and make no difference whether they are good or bad." And so she followed us almost all round the Abbey, assailing our hearts in most plaintive terms, but with no success; for she did it far too well to be anything but an impostor, and no doubt she had breakfasted better, and was likely to have a better dinner, than ourselves. And yet the natural man cries out against the philosophy that rejects beggars. It is a thousand to one that they are impostors, but yet we do ourselves a wrong by hardening our hearts against them. At last, without turning round, I told her that I should give her nothing,--with some asperity, doubtless, for the effort to refuse creates a bitterer repulse than is necessary. She still followed us a little farther, but at last gave it up, with a deep groan. I could not have performed this act of heroism on my first arrival from America. Whether the beggar-woman had invoked curses on us, and Heaven saw fit to grant some slight response, I know not, but it now began to rain on my wife's velvet; so I put her and J----- into a cab, and hastened to ensconce myself in Westminster Abbey while the shower should last. Poets' Corner has never seemed like a strange place to me; it has been familiar from the very first; at all events, I cannot now recollect the previous conception, of which the reality has taken the place. I seem always to have known that somewhat dim corner, with the bare brown stone-work of the old edifice aloft, and a window shedding down its light on the marble busts and tablets, yellow with time, that cover the three walls of the nook up to a height of about twenty feet. Prior's is the largest and richest monument. It is observable that the bust and monument of Congreve are in a distant part of the Abbey. His duchess probably thought it a degradation to bring a gentleman among the beggarly poets. I walked round the aisles, and paced the nave, and came to the conclusion that Westminster Abbey, both in itself and for the variety and interest of its monuments, is a thousand times preferable to St. Paul's. There is as much difference as between a snow-bank and a chimney-corner in their relation to the human heart. By the by, the monuments and statues in the Abbey seem all to be carefully dusted. The shower being over, I walked down into the city, where I called on Mr. B------ and left S-----'s watch to be examined and put in order. He told me that he and his brother had lately been laying out and letting a piece of land at Blackheath, that had been left them by their father, and that the ground-rent would bring them in two thousand pounds per annum. With such an independent income, I doubt whether any American would consent to be anything but a gentleman,--certainly not an operative watchmaker. How sensible these Englishmen are in some things! Thence I went at a venture, and lost myself, of course. At one part of my walk I came upon St. Luke's Hospital, whence I returned to St. Paul's, and thence along Fleet Street and the Strand. Contiguous to the latter is Holywell Street,--a narrow lane, filled up with little bookshops and bookstalls, at some of which I saw sermons and other works of divinity, old editions of classics, and all such serious matters, while at stalls and windows close beside them (and, possibly, at the same stalls) there were books with title-pages displayed, indicating them to be of the most indecent kind. October 2d.--Yesterday forenoon I went with J----- into the city to 67 Grace Church Street, to get a bank post-note cashed by Mr. Oakford, and afterwards to the offices of two lines of steamers, in Moorgate Street and Leadenhall Street. The city was very much thronged. It is a marvel what sets so many people a going at all hours of the day. Then it is to be considered that these are but a small portion of those who are doing the business of the city; much the larger part being occupied in offices at desks, in discussions of plans of enterprise, out of sight of the public, while these earnest hurriers are merely the froth in the pot. After seeing the steam-officials, we went to London Bridge, which always swarms with more passengers than any of the streets. Descending the steps that lead to the level of the Thames, we took passage in a boat bound up the river to Chelsea, of which there is one starting every ten minutes, the voyage being of forty minutes' duration. It began to sprinkle a little just as we started; but after a slight showeriness, lasting till we had passed Westminster Bridge, the day grew rather pleasant. At Westminster Bridge we had a good view of the river-front of the two Houses of Parliament, which look very noble from this point,--a long and massive extent, with a delightful promenade for the legislative people exactly above the margin of the river. This is certainly a magnificent edifice, and yet I doubt whether it is so impressive as it might and ought to have been made, considering its immensity. It makes no more impression than you can well account to yourself for, and you rather wonder that it does not make more. The reason must be that the architect has not "builded better than he knew." He felt no power higher and wiser than himself, making him its instrument. He reckoned upon and contrived all his effects with malice aforethought, and therefore missed the crowning glory,--that being a happiness which God, out of his pure grace, mixes up with only the simple-hearted, best efforts of men. October 3d.--I again went into the city yesterday forenoon, to settle about the passages to Lisbon, taking J----- with me. From Hungerford Bridge we took the steamer to London Bridge, that being an easy and speedy mode of accomplishing distances that take many footsteps through the crowded thoroughfares. After leaving the steamer-office, we went back through the Strand, and, crossing Waterloo Bridge, walked a good way on to the Surrey side of the river; a coarse, dingy, disagreeable suburb, with shops apparently for country produce, for old clothes, second-hand furniture, for ironware, and other things bulky and inelegant. How many scenes and sorts of life are comprehended within London! There was much in the aspect of these streets that reminded me of a busy country village in America on an immensely magnified scale. Growing rather weary anon, we got into an omnibus, which took us as far as the Surrey Zoological Gardens, which J----- wished very much to see. They proved to be a rather poor place of suburban amusement; poor, at least, by daylight, their chief attraction for the public consisting in out-of-door representations of battles and sieges. The storming of Sebastopol (as likewise at the Cremorne Gardens) was advertised for the evening, and we saw the scenery of Sebastopol, painted on a vast scale, in the open air, and really looking like miles and miles of hill and water; with a space for the actual manoeuvring of ships on a sheet of real water in front of the scene, on which some ducks were now swimming about, in place of men-of-war. The climate of England must often interfere with this sort of performance; and I can conceive of nothing drearier for spectators or performers than a drizzly evening. Convenient to this central spot of entertainment there were liquor and refreshment rooms, with pies and cakes. The menagerie, though the ostensible staple of the gardens, is rather poor and scanty; pretty well provided with lions and lionesses, also one or two giraffes, some camels, a polar bear,--who plunged into a pool of water for bits of cake,--and two black bears, who sat on their haunches or climbed poles; besides a wilderness of monkeys, some parrots and macaws, an ostrich, various ducks, and other animal and ornithological trumpery; some skins of snakes so well stuffed that I took them for living serpents till J----- discovered the deception, and an aquarium, with a good many common fishes swimming among sea-weed. The garden is shaded with trees, and set out with greensward and gravel-walks, from which the people were sweeping the withered autumnal leaves, which now fall every day. Plaster statues stand here and there, one of them without a head, thus disclosing the hollowness of the trunk; there were one or two little drizzly fountains, with the water dripping over the rock-work, of which the English are so fond; and the buildings for the animals and other purposes had a flimsy, pasteboard aspect of pretension. The garden was in its undress; few visitors, I suppose, coming hither at this time of day,--only here and there a lady and children, a young man and girl, or a couple of citizens, loitering about. I take pains to remember these small items, because they suggest the day-life or torpidity of what may look very brilliant at night. These corked-up fountains, slovenly greensward, cracked casts of statues, pasteboard castles, and duck-pond Bay of Balaclava then shining out in magic splendor, and the shabby attendants whom we saw sweeping and shovelling probably transformed into the heroes of Sebastopol. J----- thought it a delightful place; but I soon grew very weary, and came away about four o'clock, and, getting into a city omnibus, we alighted on the hither side of Blackfriar's Bridge. Turning into Fleet Street, I looked about for a place to dine at, and chose the Mitre Tavern, in memory of Johnson and Boswell. It stands behind a front of modern shops, through which is an archway, giving admittance into a narrow court-yard, which, I suppose, was formerly open to Fleet Street. The house is of dark brick, and, comparing it with other London edifices, I should take it to have been at least refronted since Johnson's time; but within, the low, sombre coffee-room which we entered might well enough have been of that era or earlier. It seems to be a good, plain, respectable inn; and the waiter gave us each a plate of boiled beef, and, for dessert, a damson tart, which made up a comfortable dinner. After dinner, we zigzagged homeward through Clifford's link passage, Holborn, Drury Lane, the Strand, Charing Cross, Pall Mall, and Regent Street; but I remember only an ancient brick gateway as particularly remarkable. I think it was the entrance to Lincoln's Inn. We reached home at about six. There is a woman who has several times passed through this Hanover Street, in which we live, stopping occasionally to sing songs under the windows; and last evening, between nine and ten o'clock, she came and sang "Kathleen O'Moore" richly and sweetly. Her voice rose up out of the dim, chill street, and made our hearts throb in unison with it as we sat in our comfortable drawing-room. I never heard a voice that touched me more deeply. Somebody told her to go away, and she stopped like a nightingale suddenly shot; but, finding that S----- wished to know something about her, Fanny and one of the maids ran after her, and brought her into the hall. It seems she was educated to sing at the opera, and married an Italian opera-singer, who is now dead; lodging in a model lodging-house at threepence a night, and being a penny short to-night, she tried this method, in hope of getting this penny. She takes in plain sewing when she can get any, and picks up a trifle about the street by means of her voice, which, she says, was once sweet, but has now been injured by the poorness of her living. She is a pale woman, with black eyes, Fanny says, and may have been pretty once, but is not so now. It seems very strange, that with such a gift of Heaven, so cultivated, too, as her voice is, making even an unsusceptible heart vibrate like a harp-string, she should not have had an engagement among the hundred theatres and singing-rooms of London; that she should throw away her melody in the streets for the mere chance of a penury, when sounds not a hundredth part so sweet are worth from other lips purses of gold. October 5th.--It rained almost all day on Wednesday, so that I did not go out till late in the afternoon, and then only took a stroll along Oxford Street and Holborn, and back through Fleet Street and the Strand. Yesterday, at a little after ten, I went to the ambassador's to get my wife's passport for Lisbon. While I was talking with the clerk, Mr. ------ made his appearance in a dressing-gown, with a morning cheerfulness and alacrity in his manner. He was going to Liverpool with his niece, who returns to America by the steamer of Saturday. She has had a good deal of success in society here; being pretty enough to be remarked among English women, and with cool, self-possessed, frank, and quiet manners, which look very like the highest breeding. I next went to Westminster Abbey, where I had long promised myself another quiet visit; for I think I never could be weary of it; and when I finally leave England, it will be this spot which I shall feel most unwilling to quit forever. I found a party going through the seven chapels (or whatever their number may be), and again saw those stately and quaint old tombs,--ladies and knights stretched out on marble slabs, or beneath arches and canopies of stone, let into the walls of the Abbey, reclining on their elbows, in ruff and farthingale or riveted armor, or in robes of state, once painted in rich colors, of which only a few patches of scarlet now remain; bearded faces of noble knights, whose noses, in many cases, had been smitten off; and Mary, Queen of Scots, had lost two fingers of her beautiful hands, which she is clasping in prayer. There must formerly have been very free access to these tombs; for I observed that all the statues (so far as I examined them) were scratched with the initials of visitors, some of the names being dated above a century ago. The old coronation-chair, too, is quite covered, over the back and seat, with initials cut into it with pocket-knives, just as Yankees would do it; only it is not whittled away, as would have been its fate in our hands. Edward the Confessor's shrine, which is chiefly of wood, likewise abounds in these inscriptions, although this was esteemed the holiest shrine in England, so that pilgrims still come to kneel and kiss it. Our guide, a rubicund verger of cheerful demeanor, said that this was true in a few instances. There is a beautiful statue in memory of Horace Walpole's mother; and I took it to be really a likeness, till the verger said that it was a copy of a statue which her son had admired in Italy, and so had transferred it to his mother's grave. There is something characteristic in this mode of filial duty and honor. In all these chapels, full of the tombs and effigies of kings, dukes, arch-prelates, and whatever is proud and pompous in mortality, there is nothing that strikes me more than the colossal statue of plain Mr. Watt, sitting quietly in a chair, in St. Paul's Chapel, and reading some papers. He dwarfs the warriors and statesmen; and as to the kings, we smile at them. Telford is in another of the chapels. This visit to the chapels was much more satisfactory than my former one; although I in vain strove to feel it adequately, and to make myself sensible how rich and venerable was what I saw. This realization must come at its own time, like the other happinesses of life. It is unaccountable that I could not now find the seat of Sir George Downing's squire, though I examined particularly every seat on that side of Henry VII's Chapel, where I before found it. I must try again. . . . October 6th.--Yesterday was not an eventful day. I took J----- with me to the city, called on Mr. Sturgis at the Barings' House, and got his checks for a bank post-note. The house is at 8 Bishopsgate Street, Within. It has no sign of any kind, but stands back from the street, behind an iron-grated fence. The firm appears to occupy the whole edifice, which is spacious, and fit for princely merchants. Thence I went and paid for the passages to Lisbon (32 pounds) at the Peninsular Steam Company's office, and thence to call on General ------. I forgot to mention, that, first of all, I went to Mr. B------'s, whom I found kind and vivacious as usual. It now rained heavily, and, being still showery when we came to Cheapside again, we first stood under an archway (a usual resort for passengers through London streets), and then betook ourselves to sanctuary, taking refuge in St. Paul's Cathedral. The afternoon service was about to begin, so, after looking at a few of the monuments, we sat down in the choir, the richest and most ornamented part of the cathedral, with screens or partitions of oak, cunningly carved. Small white-robed choristers were flitting noiselessly about, making preparations for the service, which by and by began. It is a beautiful idea, that, several times in the course of the day, a man can slip out of the thickest throng and bustle of London into this religious atmosphere, and hear the organ, and the music of young, pure voices; but, after all, the rites are lifeless in our day. We found, on emerging, that we had escaped a very heavy shower, and it still sprinkled and misted as we went homeward through Holborn and Oxford Street. SOUTHAMPTON October 11th.--We all left London on Sunday morning, between ten and eleven, from the Waterloo station, and arrived in Southampton about two, without meeting with anything very remarkable on the way. We put up at Chapple's Castle Hotel, which is one of the class styled "commercial," and, though respectable, not such a one as the nobility and gentry usually frequent. I saw little difference in the accommodation, except that young women attended us instead of men,--a pleasant change. It was a showery day, but J----- and I walked out to see the shore and the town and the docks, and, if possible, the ship in which S----- was to sail. The most noteworthy object was the remains of an old castle, near the water-side; the square, gray, weed grown, weird keep of which shows some modern chimney-pots above its battlements, while remaining portions of the fortress are made to seem as one of the walls for coal-depots, and perhaps for small dwellings. The English characteristically patch new things into old things in this manner, materially, legally, constitutionally, and morally. Walking along the pier, we observed some pieces of ordnance, one of which was a large brass cannon of Henry VIII.'s time, about twelve feet long, and very finely made. The bay of Southampton presents a pleasant prospect, and I believe it is the great rendezvous of the yacht-club. Old and young seafaring people were strolling about, and lounging at corners, just as they do on Sunday afternoons in the minor seaports of America. From the shore we went up into the town, which is handsome, and of a cheerful aspect, with streets generally wide and well paved,--a cleanly town, not smoke-begrimed. The houses, if not modern, are, at least with few exceptions, new fronted. We saw one relic of antiquity,--a fine mediaeval gateway across the principal street, much more elevated than the gates of Chester, with battlements at the top, and a spacious apartment over the great arch for the passage of carriages, and the smaller one on each side for foot-passengers. There were two statues in armor or antique costume on the hither side of the gateway, and two old paintings on the other. This, so far as I know, is the only remnant of the old wall of Southampton. On Monday the morning was bright, alternating with a little showeriness. U----, J-----, and I went into the town to do some shopping before the steamer should sail; and a little after twelve we drove down to the dock. The Madeira is a pleasant-looking ship enough, not very large, but accommodating, I believe, about seventy passengers. We looked at my wife's little stateroom, with its three berths for herself and the two children; and then sat down in the saloon, and afterwards on deck, to spend the irksome and dreary hour or two before parting. Many of the passengers seemed to be Portuguese, undersized, dark, mustachioed people, smoking cigars. John Bull was fairly represented too. . . . U---- was cheerful, and R----- seemed anxious to get off. Poor Fanny was altogether cast down, and shed tears, either from regret at leaving her native land, or dread of sea-sickness, or general despondency, being a person of no spring of spirits. I waited till the captain came on board, --a middle-aged or rather elderly man, with a sensible expression, but, methought, with a hard, cold eye, to whom I introduced my wife, recommending her to his especial care, as she was unattended by any gentleman; and then we thought it best to cut short the parting scene. So we bade one another farewell; and, leaving them on the deck of the vessel, J----- and I returned to the hotel, and, after dining at the table d'hote, drove down to the railway. This is the first great parting that we have ever had. It was three o'clock when we left Southampton. In order to get to Worcester, where we were to spend the night, we strode, as it were, from one line of railway to another, two or three times, and did not arrive at our journey's end till long after dark. At Worcester we put ourselves into the hands of a cabman, who drove us to the Crown Hotel,--one of the old-fashioned hotels, with an entrance through an arched passage, by which vehicles were admitted into the inn-yard, which has also an exit, I believe, into another street. On one side of the arch was the coffee-room, where, after looking at our sleeping-chambers on the other side of the arch, we had some cold pigeon-pie for supper, and for myself a pint of ale. It should be mentioned, that, in the morning, before embarking S----- and the children on board the steamer, I saw a fragment of a rainbow among the clouds, and remembered the old adage bidding "sailors take warning." In the afternoon, as J----- and I were railing from Southampton, we saw another fragmentary rainbow, which, by the same adage, should be the "sailor's delight." The weather has rather tended to confirm the first omen, but the sea-captains tell me that the steamer must have gone beyond the scope of these winds. WORCESTER. October 14th.---In the morning of Tuesday, after breakfast in the coffee-room, J----- and I walked about to see the remarkables of Worcester. It is not a particularly interesting city, compared with other old English cities; the general material of the houses being red brick, and almost all modernized externally, whatever may be the age of their original framework. We saw a large brick jail in castellated style, with battlements,--a very barren and dreary-looking edifice; likewise, in the more central part of the town, a Guildhall with a handsome front, ornamented with a statue of Queen Anne above the entrance, and statues of Charles I. and Charles II. on either side of the door, with the motto, "Floreat semper civitas fidelis." Worcester seems to pride itself upon its loyalty. We entered the building, and in the large interior hall saw some old armor hanging on the wall at one end,-- corselets, helmets, greaves, and a pair of breeches of chain mail. An inscription told us that these suits of armor had been left by Charles I. after the battle of Worcester, and presented to the city at a much later date by a gentleman of the neighborhood. On the stone floor of the hall, under the armor, were two brass cannon, one of which had been taken from the French in a naval battle within the present century; the other was a beautiful piece, bearing, I think, the date of 1632, and manufactured in Brussels for the Count de Burgh, as a Latin inscription testified. This likewise was a relic of the battle of Worcester, where it had been lost by Charles. Many gentlemen--connected with the city government, I suppose--were passing through the hall; and, looking through its interior doors, we saw stately staircases and council-rooms panelled with oak or other dark wood. There seems to be a good deal of state in the government of these old towns. Worcester Cathedral would have impressed me much had I seen it earlier; though its aspect is less venerable than that of Chester or Lichfield, having been faithfully renewed and repaired, and stone-cutters and masons were even now at work on the exterior. At our first visit, we found no entrance; but coming again at ten o'clock, when the service was to begin, we found the door open, and the chorister-boys, in their white robes, standing in the nave and aisles, with elder people in the same garb, and a few black-robed ecclesiastics and an old verger. The interior of the cathedral has been covered with a light-colored paint at some recent period. There is, as I remember, very little stained glass to enrich and bedim the light; and the effect produced is a naked, daylight aspect, unlike what I have seen in any other Gothic cathedral. The plan of the edifice, too, is simple; a nave and side aisles, with great clustered pillars, from which spring the intersecting arches; and, somehow or other, the venerable mystery which I have found in Westminster Abbey and elsewhere does not lurk in these arches and behind these pillars. The choir, no doubt, is richer and more beautiful; but we did not enter it. I remember two tombs, with recumbent figures on there, between the pillars that divide the nave from the side aisles, and there were also mural monuments,--one, well executed, to an officer slain in the Peninsular war, representing him falling from his horse; another by a young widow to her husband, with an inscription of passionate grief, and a record of her purpose finally to sleep beside him. He died in 1803. I did not see on the monument any record of the consummation of her purpose; and so perhaps she sleeps beside a second husband. There are more antique memorials than these two on the wall, and I should have been interested to examine them; but the service was now about to begin in the choir, and at the far-off end of the nave the old verger waved his hand to banish us from the cathedral. At the same time he moved towards us, probably to say that he would show it to us after service; but having little time, and being so moderately impressed with what I had already seen, I took my departure, and so disappointed the old man of his expected shilling or half-crown. The tomb of King John is somewhere in this cathedral. We renewed our rambles through the town, and, passing the Museum of the Worcester Natural History Society, I yielded to J-----'s wish to go in. There are three days in the week, I believe, on which it is open to the public; but this being one of the close days, we were admitted on payment of a shilling. It seemed a very good and well-arranged collection in most departments of Natural History, and J-----, who takes more interest in these matters than I do, was much delighted. We were left to examine the hall and galleries quite at our leisure. Besides the specimens of beasts, birds, shells, fishes, minerals, fossils, insects, and all other natural things before the flood and since, there was a stone bearing a Roman inscription, and various antiquities, coins, and medals, and likewise portraits, some of which were old and curious. Leaving the museum, we walked down to the stone bridge over the Severn, which is here the largest river I have seen in England, except, of course, the Mersey and the Thames. A flight of steps leads from the bridge down to a walk along the river-side, and this we followed till we reached the spot where an angler was catching chubs and dace, under the walls of the bishop's palace, which here faces the river. It seems to be an old building, but with modern repairs and improvements. The angler had pretty good success while we were looking at him, drawing out two or three silvery fish, and depositing them in his basket, which was already more than half full. The Severn is not a transparent stream, and looks sluggish, but has really movement enough to carry the angler's float along pretty fast. There were two vessels of considerable size (that is, as large as small schooners) lying at the bridge. We now passed under an old stone archway, through a lane that led us from the river-side up past the cathedral, whence a gentleman and lady were just emerging, and the verger was closing the door behind them. We returned to our hotel, and ordered luncheon,--some cold chicken, cold ham, and ale, and after paying the bill (about fifteen shillings, to which I added five shillings for attendance) we took our departure in a fly for the railway. The waiter (a young woman), chambermaid, and boots, all favored us with the most benign and deferential looks at parting, whence it was easy to see that I had given them more than they had any claim to receive. Nevertheless, this English system of fees has its good side, and I never travel without finding the advantage of it, especially on railways, where the officials are strictly forbidden to take fees, and where, in consequence, a fee secures twice as much good service as anywhere else. Be it recorded, that I never knew an Englishman to refuse a shilling,--or, for that matter, a halfpenny. From Worcester we took tickets to Wolverhampton, and thence to Birkenhead. It grew dark before we reached Chester, and began to rain; and when we got to Birkenhead it was a pitiless, pelting storm, under which, on the deck of the steamboat, we crossed the detestable Mersey, two years' trial of which has made me detest it every day more and more. It being the night of rejoicing for the taking of Sebastopol and the visit of the Duke of Cambridge, we found it very difficult to get a cab on the Liverpool side; but after much waiting in the rain, and afterwards in one of the refreshment-rooms, on the landing stage, we took a Hansom and drove off. The cloudy sky reflected the illuminations, and we saw some gas-lighted stars and other devices, as we passed, very pretty, but much marred by the wind and rain. So we finally arrived at Mrs. Blodgett's, and made a good supper of ham and cold chicken, like our luncheon, after which, wet as we were, and drizzling as the weather was, and though it was two hours beyond his bedtime, I took J----- out to see the illuminations. I wonder what his mother would have said. But the boy must now begin to see life and to feel it. There was a crowd of people in the street; such a crowd that we could hardly make a passage through them, and so many cabs and omnibuses that it was difficult to cross the ways. Some of the illuminations were very brilliant; but there was a woful lack of variety and invention in the devices. The star of the garter, which kept flashing out from the continual extinguishment of the wind and rain,--V and A, in capital letters of light,--were repeated a hundred times; as were loyal and patriotic mottoes,--crowns formed by colored lamps. In some instances a sensible tradesman had illuminated his own sign, thereby at once advertising his loyalty and his business. Innumerable flags were suspended before the houses and across the streets, and the crowd plodded on, silent, heavy, and without any demonstration of joy, unless by the discharge of pistols close at one's ear. The rain, to be sure, was quite sufficient to damp any joyous ebullition of feeling; but the next day, when the rain had ceased, and when the streets were still thronged with people, there was the same heavy, purposeless strolling from place to place, with no more alacrity of spirit than while it rained. The English do not know how to rejoice; and, in their present circumstances, to say the truth, have not much to rejoice for. We soon came home; but I believe it was nearly, if not quite, eleven. At Mrs. Blodgett's, Mr. Archer (surgeon to some prison or house of correction here in Liverpool) spoke of an attorney who many years ago committed forgery, and, being apprehended, took a dose of prussic acid. Mr. Archer came with the stomach-pump, and asked the patient how much prussic acid he had taken. "Sir," he replied, attorney-like, "I decline answering that question!" He recovered, and afterwards arrived at great wealth in New South Wales. November 14th.--At dinner at Mr. Bright's, a week or two ago, Mr. Robertson Gladstone spoke of a magistrate of Liverpool, many years since, Sir John ------. Of a morning, sitting on the bench in the police court, he would take five shillings out of his pocket and say, "Here, Mr. Clerk, so much for my fine. I was drunk last night!" Mr. Gladstone witnessed this personally. November 16th.--I went to the North Hospital yesterday, to take the deposition of a dying man as to his ill treatment by the second and third mates of the ship Assyria, on the voyage from New Orleans. This hospital is a very gloomy place, with its wide bleak entries and staircases, which may be very good for summer weather, but which are most congenial at this bleak November season. I found the physicians of the house laughing and talking very cheerfully with Mr. Wilding, who had preceded me. We went forthwith, up two or three pairs of stairs, to the ward where the sick man lay, and where there were six or eight other beds, in almost each of which was a patient,--narrow beds, shabbily furnished. The man whom I came to see was the only one who was not perfectly quiet; neither was he very restless. The doctor, informing him of my presence, intimated that his disease might be lethal, and that I was come to hear what he had to say as to the causes of his death. Afterwards, a Testament was sought for, in order to swear him, and I administered the oath, and made him kiss the book. He then (in response to Mr. Wilding's questions) told how he had been beaten and ill-treated, hanged and thwacked, from the moment he came on board, to which usage he ascribed his death. Sometimes his senses seemed to sink away, so that I almost thought him dead; but by and by the questions would appear to reach him, and bring him back, and he went on with his evidence, interspersing it, however, with dying groans, and almost death rattles. In the midst of whatever he was saying, he often recurred to a sum of four dollars and a half, which he said he had put into the hands of the porter of the hospital, and which he wanted to get back. Several times he expressed his wish to return to America (of which he was not a native), and, on the whole, I do not think he had any real sense of his precarious condition, notwithstanding that he assented to the doctor's hint to that effect. He sank away so much at one time, that they brought him wine in a tin cup, with a spout to drink out of, and he mustered strength to raise himself in his bed and drink; then hemmed, with rather a disappointed air, as if it did not stimulate and refresh him, as drink ought to do. When he had finished his evidence (which Mr. Wilding took down in writing from his mouth), he marked his cross at the foot of the paper, and we ceased to torment him with further question. His deposition will probably do no good, so far as the punishment of the persons implicated is concerned; for he appears to have come on board in a sickly state, and never to have been well during the passage. On a pallet, close by his bed, lay another seaman of the same ship, who had likewise been abused by the same men, and bore more ostensible marks of ill usage than this man did, about the head and face. There is a most dreadful state of things aboard our ships. Hell itself can be no worse than some of them, and I do pray that some New-Englander with the rage of reform in him may turn his thoughts this way. The first step towards better things--the best practicable step for the present--is to legalize flogging on shipboard; thereby doing away with the miscellaneous assaults and batteries, kickings, fisticuffings, ropes'-endings, marline-spikings, which the inferior officers continually perpetrate, as the only mode of keeping up anything like discipline. As in many other instances, philanthropy has overshot itself by the prohibition of flogging, causing the captain to avoid the responsibility of solemn punishment, and leave his mates to make devils of themselves, by habitual and hardly avoidable ill treatment of the seamen. After I left the dying sailor, his features seemed to contract and grow sharp. Some young medical students stood about the bed, watching death creep upon him, and anticipating, perhaps, that in a day or two they would have the poor fellow's body on the dissecting-table. Dead patients, I believe, undergo this fate, unless somebody chooses to pay their funeral expenses; but the captain of the Assyria (who seems to be respectable and kind-hearted, though master of a floating hell) tells me that he means to bury the man at his own cost. This morning there is a note from the surgeon of the hospital, announcing his death, and likewise the dangerous state of his shipmate whom I saw on the pallet beside him. Sea-captains call a dress-coat a "claw-hammer." November 22d.--I went on board the ship William Lapscott, lying in the river, yesterday, to take depositions in reference to a homicide committed in New York. I sat on a sofa in the cabin, and Mr. Wilding at a table, with his writing-materials before him, and the crew were summoned, one by one,--rough, piratical-looking fellows, contrasting strongly with the gewgaw cabin in which I received them. There is no such finery on land as in the cabin of one of these ships in the Liverpool trade, finished off with a complete panelling of rosewood, mahogany, and bird's-eye maple, polished and varnished, and gilded along the cornices and the edges of the panels. It is all a piece of elaborate cabinet-work; and one does not altogether see why it should be given to the gales, and the salt-sea atmosphere, to be tossed upon the waves, and occupied by a rude shipmaster in his dreadnaught clothes, when the fairest lady in the land has no such boudoir. A telltale compass hung beneath the skylight, and a clock was fastened near it, and ticked loudly. A stewardess, with the aspect of a woman at home, went in and out of the cabin, about her domestic calls. Through the cabin door (it being a house on deck) I could see the arrangement of the ship. The first sailor that I examined was a black-haired, powerful fellow, in an oil-skin jacket, with a good face enough, though he, too, might have been taken for a pirate. In the affray in which the homicide occurred, he had received a cut across the forehead, and another slantwise across his nose, which had quite cut it in two, on a level with the face, and had thence gone downward to his lower jaw. But neither he nor any one else could give any testimony elucidating the matter into which I had come to inquire. A seaman had been stabbed just before the vessel left New York, and had been sent on shore and died there. Most of these men were in the affray, and all of then were within a few yards of the spot where it occurred; but those actually present all pleaded that they were so drunk that the whole thing was now like a dream, with no distinct images; and, if any had been sober, they took care to know nothing that could inculpate any individual. Perhaps they spoke truth; they certainly had a free and honest-like way of giving their evidence, as if their only object was to tell all the truth they knew. But I rather think, in the forecastle, and during the night-watches, they have whispered to one another a great deal more than they told me, and have come to a pretty accurate conclusion as to the man who gave the stab. While the examination proceeded, there was a drawing of corks in a side closet; and, at its conclusion, the captain asked us to stay to dinner, but we excused ourselves, and drank only a glass of wine. The captain apologized for not joining us, inasmuch as he had drunk no wine for the last seventeen years. He appears to be a particularly good and trustworthy man, and is the only shipmaster whom I have met with, who says that a crew can best be governed by kindness. In the inner closet there was a cage containing two land-birds, who had come aboard him, tired almost to death, three or four hundred miles from shore; and he had fed them and been tender of them, from a sense of what was due to hospitality. He means to give them to J-----. November 28th.--I have grown wofully aristocratic in my tastes, I fear, since coming to England; at all events, I am conscious of a certain disgust at going to dine in a house with a small entrance-hall and a narrow staircase, parlor with chintz curtains, and all other arrangements on a similar scale. This is pitiable. However, I really do not think I should mind these things, were it not for the bustle, the affectation, the intensity, of the mistress of the house. It is certain that a woman in England is either decidedly a lady or decidedly not a lady. There seems to be no respectable medium. Bill of fare: broiled soles, half of a roast pig, a haricot of mutton, stewed oysters, a tart, pears, figs, with sherry and port wine, both good, and the port particularly so. I ate some pig, and could hardly resist the lady's importunities to eat more; though to my fancy it tasted of swill,--had a flavor of the pigsty. On the parlor table were some poor editions of popular books, Longfellow's poems and others. The lady affects a literary taste, and bothered me about my own productions. A beautiful subject for a romance, or for a sermon, would be the subsequent life of the young man whom Jesus bade to sell all he had and give to the poor; and he went away sorrowful, and is not recorded to have done what he was bid. December 11th.--This has been a foggy morning and forenoon, snowing a little now and then, and disagreeably cold. The sky is of an inexpressibly dreary, dun color. It is so dark at times that I have to hold my book close to my eyes, and then again it lightens up a little. On the whole, disgustingly gloomy; and thus it has been for a long while past, although the disagreeableness seems to be very near the earth, and just above the steeples and house-tops very probably there may be a bright, sunshiny day. At about twelve there is a faint glow of sunlight, like the gleaming reflection from a not highly polished copper kettle. December 26th.--On Christmas eve and yesterday, there were little branches of mistletoe hanging in several parts of the house, in the kitchen, the entries, the parlor, and the smoking-room,--suspended from the gas-fittings. The maids of the house did their utmost to entrap the gentlemen boarders, old and young; under the privileged places, and there to kiss them, after which they were expected to pay a shilling. It is very queer, being customarily so respectful, that they should assume this license now, absolutely trying to pull the gentlemen into the kitchen by main force, and kissing the harder and more abundantly the more they were resisted. A little rosy-checked Scotch lass--at other times very modest --was the most active in this business. I doubt whether any gentleman but myself escaped. I heard old Mr. S------ parleying with the maids last evening, and pleading his age; but he seems to have met with no mercy, for there was a sound of prodigious smacking immediately afterwards. J----- was assaulted, and fought, most vigorously; but was outrageously kissed,--receiving some scratches, moreover, in the conflict. The mistletoe has white, wax-looking berries, and dull green leaves, with a parasitical stem. Early in the morning of Christmas day, long before daylight, I heard music in the street, and a woman's voice, powerful and melodious, singing a Christmas hymn. Before bedtime I presume one half of England, at a moderate calculation, was the worse for liquor. The market-houses, at this season, show the national taste for heavy feeding,--carcasses of prize oxen, immensely fat, and bulky; fat sheep, with their woolly heads and tails still on, and stars and other devices ingeniously wrought on the quarters; fat pigs, adorned with flowers, like corpses of virgins; hares, wild-fowl, geese, ducks, turkeys; and green boughs and banners suspended about the stalls,--and a great deal of dirt and griminess on the stone floor of the market-house, and on the persons of the crowd. There are some Englishmen whom I like,--one or two for whom I might say I have an affection; but still there is not the same union between us as if they were Americans. A cold, thin medium intervenes betwixt our most intimate approaches. It puts me in mind of Alnaschar and his princess, with the cold steel blade of his scimitar between them. Perhaps if I were at home I might feel differently; but in a foreign land I can never forget the distinction between English and American. January 1st, 1856.--Last night, at Mrs. Blodgett's, we sat up till twelve o'clock to open the front door, and let the New Year in. After the coming guest was fairly in the house, the back door was to be opened, to let the Old Year out; but I was tired, and did not wait for the latter ceremony. When the New Year made its entrance, there was a general shaking of hands, and one of the shipmasters said that it was customary to kiss the ladies all round; but to my great satisfaction, we did not proceed to such extremity. There was singing in the streets, and many voices of people passing, and when twelve had struck, all the bells of the town, I believe, rang out together. I went up stairs, sad and lonely, and, stepping into J-----'s little room, wished him a Happy New Year, as he slept, and many of them. To a cool observer, a country does not show to best advantage during a time of war. All its self-conceit is doubly visible, and, indeed, is sedulously kept uppermost by direct appeals to it. The country must be humbugged, in order to keep its courage up. Sentiment seems to me more abundant in middle-aged ladies in England than in the United States. I don't know how it may be with young ladies. The shipmasters bear testimony to the singular delicacy of common sailors in their behavior in the presence of women; and they say that this good trait is still strongly observable even in the present race of seamen, greatly deteriorated as it is. On shipboard, there is never an indecorous word or unseemly act said or done by sailors when a woman can be cognizant of it; and their deportment in this respect differs greatly from that of landsmen of similar position in society. This is remarkable, considering that a sailor's female acquaintances are usually and exclusively of the worst kind, and that his intercourse with them has no relation whatever to morality or decency. For this very reason, I suppose, he regards a modest woman as a creature divine and to be reverenced. January 16th.---I have suffered wofully from low spirits for some time past; and this has not often been the case since I grew to be a man, even in the least auspicious periods of my life. My desolate bachelor condition, I suppose, is the cause. Really, I have no pleasure in anything, and I feel my tread to be heavier, and my physical movement more sluggish, than in happier times. A weight is always upon me. My appetite is not good. I sleep ill, lying awake till late at night, to think sad thoughts and to imagine sombre things, and awaking before light with the same thoughts and fancies still in my mind. My heart sinks always as I ascend the stairs to my office, from a dim augury of ill news from Lisbon that I may perhaps hear,--of black-sealed letters, or some such horrors. Nothing gives me any joy. I have learned what the bitterness of exile is, in these days; and I never should have known it but for the absence of "Remote, unfriended, melancholy, slow,"--I can perfectly appreciate that line of Goldsmith; for it well expresses my own torpid, unenterprising, joyless state of mind and heart. I am like an uprooted plant, wilted and drooping. Life seems so purposeless as not to be worth the trouble of carrying it on any further. I was at a dinner, the other evening, at Mr. B------'s, where the entertainment was almost entirely American,--New York oysters, raw, stewed, and fried; soup of American partridges, particularly good; also terrapin soup, rich, but not to my taste; American pork and beans, baked in Yankee style; a noble American turkey, weighing thirty-one pounds; and, at the other end of the table, an American round of beef, which the Englishmen present allowed to be delicious, and worth a guinea an ounce. I forget the other American dishes, if there were any more,--O yes! canvas-back ducks, coming on with the sweets, in the usual English fashion. We ought to have had Catawba wine; but this was wanting, although there was plenty of hock, champagne, sherry, madeira, port, and claret. Our host is a very jolly man, and the dinner was a merrier and noisier one than any English dinner within my experience. February 8th.--I read to-day, in the little office-Bible (greasy with perjuries) St. Luke's account of the agony, the trial, the crucifixion, and the resurrection; and how Christ appeared to the two disciples, on their way to Emmaus, and afterwards to a company of disciples. On both these latter occasions he expounded the Scriptures to them, and showed the application of the old prophecies to himself; and it is to be supposed that he made them fully, or at least sufficiently, aware what his character was,--whether God, or man, or both, or something between, together with all other essential points of doctrine. But none of this doctrine or of these expositions is recorded, the mere facts being most simply stated, and the conclusion to which he led them, that, whether God himself, or the Son of God, or merely the Son of man, he was, at all events, the Christ foretold in the Jewish Scriptures. This last, therefore, must have been the one essential point. February 18th.--On Saturday there called on me an elderly Robinson-Crusoe sort of man, Mr. H------, shipwright, I believe, of Boston, who has lately been travelling in the East. About a year ago he was here, after being shipwrecked on the Dutch coast, and I assisted him to get home. Again, I have supplied him with five pounds, and my credit for an outside garment. He is a spare man, with closely cropped gray, or rather white hair, close-cropped whiskers fringing round his chin, and a close-cropped white mustache, with his under lip and a portion of his chin bare beneath,--sunburnt and weather-worn. He has been in Syria and Jerusalem, through the Desert, and at Sebastopol; and says he means to get Ticknor to publish his travels, and the story of his whole adventurous life, on his return home. A free-spoken, confiding, hardy, religious, unpolished, simple, yet world-experienced man; very talkative, and boring me with longer visits than I like. He has brought home, among other curiosities, "a lady's arm," as he calls it, two thousand years old,--a piece of a mummy, of course; also some coins, one of which, a gold coin of Vespasian, he showed me, and said he bought it of an Arab of the desert. The Bedouins possess a good many of these coins, handed down immemorially from father to son, and never sell them unless compelled by want. He had likewise a Hebrew manuscript of the Book of Ruth, on a parchment roll, which was put into his care to be given to Lord Haddo. He was at Sebastopol during the siege, and nearly got his head knocked off by a cannon-ball. His strangest statement is one in reference to Lord Raglan. He says that an English officer told him that his Lordship shut himself up, desiring not to be disturbed, as he needed sleep. When fifteen hours had gone by, his attendants thought it time to break open the door; and Lord Raglan was found dead, with a bottle of strychnine by the bedside. The affair, so far as the circumstances indicated suicide, was hushed up, and his death represented as a natural one. The English officer seems to have been an unscrupulous fellow, jesting thus with the fresh memory of his dead commander; for it is impossible to believe a word of the story. Even if Lord Raglan had wished for death, he would hardly have taken strychnine, when there were so many chances of being honorably shot. In Wood's Narrative of the Campaign, it is stated that he died surrounded by the members of his staff, after having been for some time ill. It appears, however, by the same statement, that no serious apprehensions had been entertained, until, one afternoon, he shut himself in, desiring not to be disturbed till evening. After two or three hours he called Lord Burghersh,--"Frank, Frank!" and was found to be almost in a state of collapse, and died that evening. Mr. H------'s story might very well have been a camp rumor. It seems to me that the British Ministry, in its notion of a life-peerage, shows an entire misunderstanding of what makes people desire the peerage. It is not for the immediate personal distinction; but because it removes the peer and his consanguinity from the common rank of men, and makes a separate order of them, as if they should grow angelic. A life-peer is but a mortal amid the angelic throng. February 28th.--I went yesterday with Mrs. ------ and another lady, and Mr. M------, to the West Derby Workhouse. . . . [Here comes in the visit to the West Derby Workhouse, which was made the subject of a paper in Our Old Home, called "Outside Glimpses of English Poverty." As the purpose in publishing these passages from the private note-books is to give to those who ask for a memoir of Mr. Hawthorne every possible incident recorded by himself which shows his character and nature, the editor thinks it proper to disclose the fact that Mr. Hawthorne was himself the gentleman of that party who took up in his arms the little child, so fearfully repulsive in its condition. And it seems better to quote his own words in reference to it, than merely to say it was he. Under date February 28, 1856. "After this, we went to the ward where the children were kept, and, on entering this, we saw, in the first place, two or three unlovely and unwholesome little imps, who were lazily playing together. One of them (a child about six years old, but I know not whether girl or boy) immediately took the strangest fancy for me. It was a wretched, pale, half-torpid little thing, with a humor in its eyes which the Governor said was the scurvy. I never saw, till a few moments afterwards, a child that I should feel less inclined to fondle. "But this little, sickly, humor-eaten fright prowled around me, taking hold of my skirts, following at my heels, and at last held up its hands, smiled in my face, and, standing directly before me, insisted on my taking it up! Not that it said a word, for I rather think it was underwitted, and could not talk; but its face expressed such perfect confidence that it was going to be taken up and made much of, that it was impossible not to do it. It was as if God had promised the child this favor on my behalf, and that I must needs fulfil the contract. I held my undesirable burden a little while; and, after setting the child down, it still followed me, holding two of my fingers and playing with them, just as if it were a child of my own. It was a foundling, and out of all human kind it chose me to be its father! We went up stairs into another ward; and, on coming down again, there was this same child waiting for me, with a sickly smile round its defaced mouth, and in its dim red eyes. . . . I never should have forgiven myself if I had repelled its advances."--ED.] After leaving the workhouse, we drove to Norris Green; and Mrs. ------ showed me round the grounds, which are very good and nicely kept. O these English homes, what delightful places they are! I wonder how many people live and die in the workhouse, having no other home, because other people have a great deal more home than enough. . . . We had a very pleasant dinner, and Mr. M------ and I walked back, four miles and a half, to Liverpool, where we arrived just before midnight. Why did Christ curse the fig-tree? It was not in the least to blame; and it seems most unreasonable to have expected it to bear figs out of season. Instead of withering it away, it would have been as great a miracle, and far more beautiful, and, one would think, of more beneficent influence, to have made it suddenly rich with ripe fruit. Then, to be sure, it might have died joyfully, having answered so good a purpose. I have been reminded of this miracle by the story of a man in Heywood, a town in Lancashire, who used such horribly profane language that a plane-tree in front of his cottage is said to have withered away from that hour. I can draw no moral from the incident of the fig-tree, unless it be that all things perish from the instant when they cease to answer some divine purpose. March 6th.--Yesterday I lunched on board Captain Russell's ship, the Princeton. These daily lunches on shipboard might answer very well the purposes of a dinner; being, in fact, noontide dinners, with soup, roast mutton, mutton-chops, and a macaroni pudding,--brandy, port and sherry wines. There were three elderly Englishmen at table, with white heads, which, I think, is oftener the predicament of elderly heads here than in America. One of these was a retired Custom-House officer, and the other two were connected with shipping in some way. There is a satisfaction in seeing Englishmen eat and drink, they do it so heartily, and, on the whole, so wisely,--trusting so entirely that there is no harm in good beef and mutton, and a reasonable quantity of good liquor; and these three hale old men, who had acted on this wholesome faith for so long, were proofs that it is well on earth to live like earthly creatures. In America, what squeamishness, what delicacy, what stomachic apprehension, would there not be among three stomachs of sixty or seventy years' experience! I think this failure of American stomachs is partly owing to our ill usage of our digestive powers, and partly to our want of faith in them. After lunch, we all got into an omnibus, and went to the Mersey Iron Foundry, to see the biggest piece of ordnance in the world, which is almost finished. The overseer of the works received us, and escorted us courteously throughout the establishment; which is very extensive, giving employment to a thousand men, what with night-work and day-work. The big gun is still on the axle, or turning-machine, by means of which it has been bored. It is made entirely of wrought and welded iron, fifty tons of which were originally used; and the gun, in its present state, bored out and smoothed away, weighs nearly twenty-three tons. It has, as yet, no trunnions, and does not look much like a cannon, but only a huge iron cylinder, immensely solid, and with a bore so large that a young man of nineteen shoved himself into it, the whole length, with a light, in order to see whether it is duly smooth and regular. I suppose it will have a better effect, as to the impression of size, when it is finished, polished, mounted, aid fully equipped, after the fashion of ordinary cannon. It is to throw a ball of three hundred pounds' weight five miles, and woe be to whatever ship or battlement shall bear the brunt! After inspecting the gun we went through other portions of the establishment, and saw iron in various stages of manufacture. I am not usually interested in manufacturing processes, being quite unable to understand them, at least in cotton-machinery and the like; but here there were such exhibitions of mighty strength, both of men and machines, that I had a satisfaction in looking on. We saw lumps of iron, intensely white-hot, and in all but a melting state, passed through rollers of various size and pressure, and speedily converted into long bars, which came curling and waving out of the rollers like great red ribbons, or like fiery serpents wriggling out of Tophet; and finally, being straightened out, they were laid to cool in heaps. Trip-hammers are very pleasant things to look at, working so massively as they do, and yet so accurately; chewing up the hot iron, as it were, and fashioning it into shape, with a sort of mighty and gigantic gentleness in their mode of action. What great things man has contrived, and is continually performing! What a noble brute he is! Also, I found much delight in looking at the molten iron, boiling and bubbling in the furnace, and sometimes slopping over, when stirred by the attendant. There were numberless fires on all sides, blinding us with their intense glow; and continually the pounding strokes of huge hammers, some wielded by machinery and others by human arms. I had a respect for these stalwart workmen, who seemed to be near kindred of the machines amid which they wrought,--mighty men, smiting stoutly, and looking into the fierce eyes of the furnace fearlessly, and handling the iron at a temperature which would have taken the skin off from ordinary fingers. They looked strong, indeed, but pale; for the hot atmosphere in which they live cannot but be deleterious, and I suppose their very strength wears them quickly out. But I would rather live ten years as an iron-smith than fifty as a tailor. So much heat can be concentrated into a mass of iron, that a lump a foot square heats all the atmosphere about it, and burns the face at a considerable distance. As the trip-hammer strikes the lump, it seems still more to intensify the heat by squeezing it together, and the fluid iron oozes out like sap or juice. "He was ready for the newest fashions!"--this expression was used by Mrs. Blodgett in reference to Mr. ------ on his first arrival in England, and it is a very tender way of signifying that a person is rather poorly off as to apparel. March 15th.--Mr. ------, our new ambassador, arrived on Thursday afternoon by the Atlantic, and I called at the Adelphi Hotel, after dinner, to pay him my respects. I found him and his family at supper. . . . They seem to be plain, affable people. . . . The ambassador is a venerable old gentleman, with a full head of perfectly white hair, looking not unlike an old-fashioned wig; and this, together with his collarless white neckcloth and his brown coat, gave him precisely such an aspect as one would expect in a respectable person of pre-revolutionary days. There was a formal simplicity, too, in his manners, that might have belonged to the same era. He must have been a very handsome man in his youthful days, and is now comely, very erect, moderately tall, not overburdened with flesh; of benign and agreeable address, with a pleasant smile; but his eyes, which are not very large, impressed me as sharp and cold. He did not at all stamp himself upon me as a man of much intellectual or characteristic vigor. I found no such matter in his conversation, nor did I feel it in the indefinable way by which strength always makes itself acknowledged. B------, though, somehow, plain and uncouth, yet vindicates himself as a large man of the world, able, experienced, fit to handle difficult circumstances of life; dignified, too, and able to hold his own in any society. Mr. ------ has a kind of venerable dignity; but yet, if a person could so little respect himself as to insult him, I should say that there was no innate force in Mr. ------ to prevent it. It is very strange that he should have made so considerable a figure in public life, filling offices that the strongest men would have thought worthy of their highest ambition. There must be something shrewd and sly under his apparent simplicity; narrow, cold, selfish, perhaps. I fancied these things in his eyes. He has risen in life by the lack of too powerful qualities, and by a certain tact, which enables him to take advantage of circumstances and opportunities, and avail himself of his unobjectionableness, just at the proper time. I suppose he must be pronounced a humbug, yet almost or quite an innocent one. Yet he is a queer representative to be sent from brawling and boisterous America at such a critical period. It will be funny if England sends him back again, on hearing the news of ------'s dismissal. Mr. ------ gives me the impression of being a very amiable man in his own family. He has brought his son with him, as Secretary of Legation,--a small young man, with a little mustache. It will be a feeble embassy. I called again the next morning, and introduced Mrs. ------, who, I believe, accompanied the ladies about town. This simplicity in Mr. ------'s manner puzzles and teases me; for, in spite of it, there was a sort of self-consciousness, as if he were being looked at,--as if he were having his portrait taken. LONDON. March 22d.--Yesterday,--no, day before yesterday,--I left Liverpool for London by rail, from the Lime Street station. The journey was a dull and monotonous one, as usual. Three passengers were in the same carriage with me at starting; but they dropped off; and from Rugby I was alone. We reached London after ten o'clock; and I took a cab for St. James's Place, No. 32, where I found Mr. B------ expecting me. He had secured a bedroom for me at this lodging-house, and I am to be free of his drawing-room during my stay. We breakfasted at nine, and then walked down to his counting-room, in Old Broad Street, in the city. It being a dim, dingy morning, London looked very dull, the more so as it was Good Friday, and therefore the streets were comparatively thin of people and vehicles, and had on their Sunday aspect. If it were not for the human life and bustle of London, it would be a very stupid place, with a heavy and dreary-monotony of unpicturesque streets. We went up Bolt Court, where Dr. Johnson used to live; and this was the only interesting site we saw. After spending some time in the counting-room, while Mr. ------ read his letters, we went to London Bridge, and took the steamer for Waterloo Bridge, with partly an intent to go to Richmond, but the day was so damp and dusky that we concluded otherwise. So we came home, visiting, on our way, the site of Covent Garden Theatre, lately burnt down. The exterior walls still remain perfect, and look quite solid enough to admit of the interior being renewed, but I believe it is determined to take them down. After a slight lunch and a glass of wine, we walked out, along Piccadilly, and to Hyde Park, which already looks very green, and where there were a good many people walking and driving, and rosy-faced children at play. Somehow or other the shine and charm are gone from London, since my last visit; and I did not very much admire, nor feel much interested in anything. We returned (and I, for my part, was much wearied) in time for dinner at five. The evening was spent at home in various talk, and I find Mr. ------ a very agreeable companion, and a young man of thought and information, with a self-respecting character, and I think him a safe person to live with. This St. James's Place is in close vicinity to St. James's Palace, the gateway and not very splendid front of which we can see from the corner. The club-houses and the best life of the town are near at hand. Addison, before his marriage, used to live in St. James's Place, and the house where Mr. Rogers recently died is up the court, not that this latter residence excites much interest in my mind. I remember nothing else very noteworthy in this first day's experience, except that on Sir Watkins Williams Wynn's door, not far from this house, I saw a gold knocker, which is said to be unscrewed every night lest it should be stolen. I don't know whether it be really gold; for it did not look so bright as the generality of brass ones. I received a very good letter from J----- this morning. He was to go to Mr. Bright's at Sandhays yesterday, and remain till Monday. After writing the above, I walked along the Strand, Fleet Street, Ludgate Hill and Cheapside to Wood Street,--a very narrow street, insomuch that one has to press close against the wall to escape being grazed when a cart is passing. At No. 77 I found the place of business of Mr. Bennoch, who came to see me at Rock Ferry with Mr. Jerdan, not long after my arrival in England. I found him in his office; but he did not at first recognize me, so much stouter have I grown during my residence in England,--a new man, as he says. Mr. Bennoch is a kindly, frank, very good man, and was bounteous in his plans for making my time pass pleasantly. We talked of ------, from whom he has just received a letter, and who says he will fight for England in case of a war. I let Bennoch know that I, at least, should take the other side. After arranging to go to Greenwich Fair, and afterwards to dine with Bennoch, I left him and went to Mr. ------'s office, and afterwards strayed forth again, and crossed London Bridge. Thence I rambled rather drearily along through several shabby and uninteresting streets on the other side of the Thames; and the dull streets in London are really the dullest and most disheartening in the world. By and by I found my way to Southwark Bridge, and so crossed to Upper Thames Street, which was likewise very stupid, though I believe Clenman's paternal house in "Little Dorrit" stands thereabouts. . . . Next, I got into Ludgate Hill, near St. Paul's, and being quite foot-weary, I took a Paddington omnibus, and rode up into Regent Street, whence I came home. March 24th.--Yesterday being a clear day for England, we determined upon an expedition to Hampton Court; so walked out betimes towards the Waterloo station; but first crossed the Thames by Westminster Bridge, and went to Lambeth Palace. It stands immediately on the bank of the river, not far above the bridge. We merely walked round it, and saw only an old stone tower or two, partially renewed with brick, and a high connecting wall, within which appeared gables and other portions of the palace, all of an ancient plan and venerable aspect, though evidently much patched up and restored in the course of the many ages since its foundation. There is likewise a church, part of which looks old, connected with the palace. The streets surrounding it have many gabled houses, and a general look of antiquity, more than some other parts of London. We then walked to the Waterloo station, on the same side of the river; and at twenty minutes past one took the rail for Hampton Court, distant some twelve or fifteen miles. On arriving at the terminus, we beheld Hampton Palace, on the other side of the Thames,--an extensive structure, with a front of red brick, long and comparatively low, with the great Hall which Wolsey built rising high above the rest. We crossed the river (which is here but a narrow stream) by a stone bridge. The entrance to the palace is about half a quarter of a mile from the railway, through arched gates, which give a long perspective into the several quadrangles. These quadrangles, one beyond another, are paved with stone, and surrounded by the brick walls of the palace, the many windows of which look in upon them. Soldiers were standing sentinel at the exterior gateways, and at the various doors of the palace; but they admitted everybody without question and without fee. Policemen, or other attendants, were in most of the rooms, but interfered with no one; so that, in this respect, it was one of the pleasantest places to visit that I have found in England. A good many people, of all classes, were strolling through the apartments. We first went into Wolsey's great Hall, up a most spacious staircase, the walls and ceiling of which were covered with an allegorical fresco by Verrio, wonderfully bright and well preserved; and without caring about the design or execution, I greatly liked the brilliancy of the colors. The great Hall is a most noble and beautiful room, above a hundred feet long and sixty high and broad. Most of the windows are of stained or painted glass, with elaborate designs, whether modern or ancient I know not, but certainly brilliant in effect. The walls, from the floor to perhaps half their height, are covered with antique tapestry, which, though a good deal faded, still retains color enough to be a very effective adornment, and to give an idea of how rich a mode of decking a noble apartment this must have been. The subjects represented were from Scripture, and the figures seemed colossal. On looking closely at this tapestry, you could see that it was thickly interwoven with threads of gold, still glistening. The windows, except one or two that are long, do not descend below the top of this tapestry, and are therefore twenty or thirty feet above the floor; and this manner of lighting a great room seems to add much to the impressiveness of the enclosed space. The roof is very magnificent, of carved oak, intricately and elaborately arched, and still as perfect to all appearance as when it was first made. There are banners, so fresh in their hues, and so untattered, that I think they must be modern, suspended along beneath the cornice of the hall, and exhibiting Wolsey's arms and badges. On the whole, this is a perfect sight, in its way. Next to the hall there is a withdrawing-room, more than seventy feet long, and twenty-five feet high. The walls of this apartment, too, are covered with ancient tapestry, of allegorical design, but more faded than that of the hall. There is also a stained-glass window; and a marble statue of Venus on a couch, very lean and not very beautiful; and some cartoons of Carlo Cignani, which have left no impression on my memory; likewise, a large model of a splendid palace of some East Indian nabob. I am not sure, after all, that Verrio's frescoed grand staircase was not in another part of the palace; for I remember that we went from it through an immensely long suite of apartments, beginning with the Guard-chamber. All these rooms are wainscoted with oak, which looks new, being, I believe, of the date of King William's reign. Over many of the doorways, or around the panels, there are carvings in wood by Gibbons, representing wreaths of flowers, fruit, and foliage, the most perfectly beautiful that can be conceived; and the wood being of a light hue (lime-wood, I believe), it has a fine effect on the dark oak panelling. The apartments open one beyond another, in long, long, long succession,-- rooms of state, and kings' and queens' bedchambers, and royal closets bigger than ordinary drawing-rooms, so that the whole suite must be half a mile, or it may be a mile, in extent. From the windows you get views of the palace-grounds, broad and stately walks, and groves of trees, and lawns, and fountains, and the Thames and adjacent country beyond. The walls of all these rooms are absolutely covered with pictures, including works of all the great masters, which would require long study before a new eye could enjoy them; and, seeing so many of them at once, and having such a nothing of time to look at them all, I did not even try to see any merit in them. Vandyke's picture of Charles I., on a white horse beneath an arched gateway, made more impression on me than any other, and as I recall it now, it seems as if I could see the king's noble, melancholy face, and armed form, remembered not in picture, but in reality. All Sir Peter Lely's lewd women, and Kneller's too, were in these rooms; and the jolly old stupidity of George III. and his family, many times repeated; and pictures by Titian, Rubens, and other famous hands, intermixed with many by West, which provokingly drew the eye away from their betters. It seems to me that a picture, of all other things, should be by itself; whereas people always congregate them in galleries. To endeavor really to see them, so arranged, is like trying to read a hundred poems at once,--a most absurd attempt. Of all these pictures, I hardly recollect any so well as a ridiculous old travesty of the Resurrection and Last Judgment, where the dead people are represented as coming to life at the sound of the trumpet,--the flesh re-establishing itself on the bones, one man picking up his skull, and putting it on his shoulders,--and all appearing greatly startled, only half awake, and at a loss what to do next. Some devils are dragging away the damned by the heels and on sledges, and above sits the Redeemer and some angelic and sainted people, looking complacently down upon the scene! We saw, in one of the rooms, the funeral canopy beneath which the Duke of Wellington lay in state,--very gorgeous, of black velvet embroidered with silver and adorned with escutcheons; also, the state bed of Queen Anne, broad, and of comfortable appearance, though it was a queen's,--the materials of the curtains, quilt, and furniture, red velvet, still brilliant in hue; also King William's bed and his queen Mary's, with enormously tall posts, and a good deal the worse for time and wear. The last apartment we entered was the gallery containing Raphael's cartoons, which I shall not pretend to admire nor to understand. I can conceive, indeed, that there is a great deal of expression in them, and very probably they may, in every respect, deserve all their fame; but on this point I can give no testimony. To my perception they were a series of very much faded pictures, dimly seen (for this part of the palace was now in shadow), and representing figures neither graceful nor beautiful, nor, as far as I could discern, particularly grand. But I came to them with a wearied mind and eye; and also I had a previous distaste to them through the medium of engravings. But what a noble palace, nobly enriched, is this Hampton Court! The English government does well to keep it up, and to admit the people freely into it, for it is impossible for even a Republican not to feel something like awe--at least a profound respect--for all this state, and for the institutions which are here represented, the sovereigns whose moral magnificence demands such a residence; and its permanence, too, enduring from age to age, and each royal generation adding new splendors to those accumulated by their predecessors. If one views the matter in another way, to be sure, we may feel indignant that such dolt-heads, rowdies, and every way mean people, as many of the English sovereigns have been, should inhabit these stately halls, contrasting its splendors with their littleness; but, on the whole, I readily consented within myself to be impressed for a moment with the feeling that royalty has its glorious side. By no possibility can we ever have such a place in America. Leaving Hampton Court at about four o'clock, we walked through Bushy Park,--a beautiful tract of ground, well wooded with fine old trees, green with moss, all up their twisted trunks,--through several villages, Twickenham among the rest, to Richmond. Before entering Twickenham, we passed a lath-and-plaster castellated edifice, much time-worn, and with the plaster peeling off from the laths, which I fancied might be Horace Walpole's toy-castle. Not that it really could have been; but it was like the image, wretchedly mean and shabby, which one forms of such a place, in its decay. From Hampton Court to the Star and Garter, on Richmond Hill, is about six miles. After glancing cursorily at the prospect, which is famous, and doubtless very extensive and beautiful if the English mistiness would only let it be seen, we took a good dinner in the large and handsome coffee-room of the hotel, and then wended our way to the rail-station, and reached home between eight and nine o'clock. We must have walked not far from fifteen miles in the course of the day. March 25th.--Yesterday, at one o'clock, I called by appointment on Mr. Bennoch, and lunched with him and his partners and clerks. This lunch seems to be a legitimate continuation of the old London custom of the master living at the same table with his apprentices. The meal was a dinner for the latter class. The table was set in an upper room of the establishment; and the dinner was a large joint of roast mutton, to which ten people sat down, including a German silk-merchant as a guest besides myself. Mr. Bennoch was at the head of the table, and one of his partners at the foot. For the apprentices there was porter to drink, and for the partners and guests some sparkling Moselle, and we had a sufficient dinner with agreeable conversation. Bennoch said that G. G------ used to be very fond of these lunches while in England. After lunch, Mr. Bennoch took me round the establishment, which is quite extensive, occupying, I think, two or three adjacent houses, and requiring more. He showed me innumerable packages of ribbons, and other silk manufactures, and all sorts of silks, from the raw thread to the finest fabrics. He then offered to show me some of the curiosities of old London, and took me first to Barber-Surgeons' Hall, in Monkwell Street. It was at this place that the first anatomical studies were instituted in England. At the time of its foundation, the Barbers and Surgeons were one company; but the latter, I believe, are now the exclusive possessors of the Hall. The edifice was built by Inigo Jones, and the principal room is a fine one, with finely carved wood-work on the ceiling and walls. There is a skylight in the roof, letting down a sufficient radiance on the long table beneath, where, no doubt, dead people have been dissected, and where, for many generations, it has been the custom of the society to hold its stated feasts. In this room hangs the most valuable picture by Holbein now in existence, representing the company of Barber-Surgeons kneeling before Henry VIII., and receiving their charter from his hands. The picture is about six feet square. The king is dressed in scarlet, and quite fulfils one's idea of his aspect. The Barber-Surgeons, all portraits, are an assemblage of grave-looking personages, in dark costumes. The company has refused five thousand pounds for this unique picture; and the keeper of the Hall told me that Sir Robert Peel had offered a thousand pounds for liberty to take out only one of the heads, that of a person named Pen, he conditioning to have a perfect fac-simile painted in. I did not see any merit in this head over the others. Beside this great picture hung a most exquisite portrait by Vandyke; an elderly, bearded man, of noble and refined countenance, in a rich, grave dress. There are many other pictures of distinguished men of the company, in long past times, and of some of the kings and great people of England, all darkened with age, and producing a rich and sombre effect, in this stately old hall. Nothing is more curious in London than these ancient localities and customs of the City Companies,--each trade and profession having its own hall, and its own institutions. The keeper next showed us the plate which is used at the banquets. I should like to be present at one of these feasts. I saw also an old vellum manuscript, in black-letter, which appeared to be a record of the proceedings of the company; and at the end there were many pages ruled for further entries, but none had been made in the volume for the last three or four hundred years. I think it was in the neighborhood of Barber-Surgeons' Hall, which stands amid an intricacy of old streets, where I should never have thought of going, that I saw a row of ancient almshouses, of Elizabethan structure. They looked wofully dilapidated. In front of one of them was an inscription, setting forth that some worthy alderman had founded this establishment for the support of six poor men; and these six, or their successors, are still supported, but no larger number, although the value of the property left for that purpose would now suffice for a much larger number. Then Mr. Bennoch took me to Cripplegate, and, entering the door of a house, which proved to be a sexton's residence, we passed by a side entrance into the church-porch of St. Giles, of which the sexton's house seems to be an indivisible contiguity. This is a very ancient church, that escaped the great fire of London. The galleries are supported by arches, the pillars of which are cased high upwards with oak; but all this oaken work and the oaken pews are comparatively modern, though so solid and dark that they agree well enough with the general effect of the church. Proceeding to the high altar, we found it surrounded with many very curious old monuments and memorials, some in carved oak, some in marble; grim old worthies, mostly in the costume of Queen Elizabeth's time. Here was the bust of Speed, the historian; here was the monument of Fox, author of The Book of Martyrs. High up on the wall, beside the altar, there was a black wooden coffin, and a lady sitting upright within it, with her hands clasped in prayer, it being her awakening moment at the Resurrection. Thence we passed down the centre aisle, and about midway we stopped before a marble bust, fixed against one of the pillars. And this was the bust of Milton! Yes, and Milton's bones lay beneath our feet; for he was buried under the pew over the door of which I was leaning. The bust, I believe, is the original of the one in Westminster Abbey. Treading over the tombstones of the old citizens of London, both in the aisles and the porch, and within doors and without, we went into the churchyard, one side of which is fenced in by a portion of London Wall, very solid, and still high, though the accumulation of human dust has covered much of its base. This is the most considerable portion now remaining of the ancient wall of London. The sexton now asked us to go into the tower of the church, that he might show us the oldest part of the structure, and we did so, and, looking down from the organ gallery, I saw a woman sitting alone in the church, waiting for the rector, whose ghostly consolation, I suppose, she needed. This old church-tower was formerly lighted by three large windows,--one of them of very great size; but the thrifty church-wardens of a generation or two ago had built them up with brick, to the great disfigurement of the church. The sexton called my attention to the organ-pipe, which is of sufficient size, I believe, to admit three men. From Cripplegate we went to Milton Street (as it is now called), through which we walked for a very excellent reason; for this is the veritable Grub Street, where my literary kindred of former times used to congregate. It is still a shabby-looking street, with old-fashioned houses, and inhabited chiefly by people of the poorer classes, though not by authors. Next we went to Old Broad Street, and, being joined by Mr. B------, we set off for London Bridge, turning out of our direct course to see London stone in Watling Street. This famous stone appears now to be built into the wall of St. Swithin's Church, and is so encased that you can only see and touch the top of it through a circular hole. There are one or two long cuts or indentations in the top, which are said to have been made by Jack Cade's sword when he struck it against the stone. If so, his sword was of a redoubtable temper. Judging by what I saw, London stone was a rudely shaped and unhewn post. At the London Bridge station, we took the rail for Greenwich, and, it being only about five miles off, we were not long in reaching the town. It was Easter Monday; and during the first three days of Easter, from time immemorial, a fair has been held at Greenwich, and this was what we had come to see. [This fair is described in Our Old Home, in "A Loudon Suburb."] Reaching Mr. Bennoch's house, we found it a pretty and comfortable one, and adorned with many works of art; for he seems to be a patron of art and literature, and a warm-hearted man, of active benevolence and vivid sympathies in many directions. His face shows this. I have never seen eyes of a warmer glow than his. On the walls of one room there were a good many sketches by Haydon, and several artists' proofs of fine engravings, presented by persons to whom he had been kind. In the drawing-room there was a marble bust of Mrs. ------, and one, I think, of himself, and one of the Queen, which Mr. Bennoch said was very good, and it is unlike any other I have seen. It is intended as a gift, from a number of subscribers, to Miss Nightingale. Likewise a crayon sketch of ------, looking rather morbid and unwholesome, as the poor lady really is. Also, a small picture of Mr. Bennoch in a military dress, as an officer, probably of city-horse. By and by came in a young gentleman, son of Haydon, the painter of high art, and one or two ladies staying in the house, and anon Mrs. ------. And so we went in to dinner. Bennoch is an admirable host, and warms his guests like a household fire by the influence of his kindly face and glowing eyes, and by such hospitable demeanor as best suits this aspect. After the cloth was removed, came in Mr. Newton Crosland, a young man who once called on me in Liverpool,--the husband of a literary lady, formerly Camilla Toulmin. The lady herself was coming to spend the evening. The husband (and I presume the wife) is a decided believer in spiritual manifestations. We talked of politics and spiritualism and literature; and before we rose from table, Mr. Bennoch drank the health of the ladies, and especially of Mrs. ------, in terms very kind towards her and me. I responded in her behalf as well as I could, and left it to Mr. Bowman, as a bachelor, to respond for the ladies generally,--which he did briefly, toasting Mrs. B------. We had heard the sound of the piano in the drawing-room for some time, and now adjourning thither, I had the pleasure to be introduced to Mrs. Newton Crosland,--a rather tall, thin, pale, and lady-like person, looking, I thought, of a sensitive character. She expressed in a low tone and quiet way great delight at seeing my distinguished self! for she is a vast admirer of The Scarlet Letter, and especially of the character of Hester; indeed, I remember seeing a most favorable criticism of the book from her pen, in one of the London magazines. . . . At eleven o'clock Mrs. Crosland entered the tiniest pony-carriage, and set forth for her own residence, with a lad walking at the pony's head, and carrying a lantern. . . . March 26th.--Yesterday was not a very eventful day. After writing in my journal I went out at twelve, and visited, for the first time, the National Gallery. It is of no use for me to criticise pictures, or to try to describe them, but I have an idea that I might acquire a taste, with a little attention to the subject, for I find I already begin to prefer some pictures to others. This is encouraging. Of those that I saw yesterday, I think I liked several by Murillo best. There were a great many people in the gallery, almost entirely of the middle, with a few of the lower classes; and I should think that the effect of the exhibition must at least tend towards refinement. Nevertheless, the only emotion that I saw displayed was in broad grins on the faces of a man and two women, at sight of a small picture of Venus, with a Satyr peeping at her with an expression of gross animal delight and merriment. Without being aware of it, this man and the two women were of that same Satyr breed. If I lived in London, I would endeavor to educate myself in this and other galleries of art; but as the case stands, it would be of no use. I saw two of Turner's landscapes; but did not see so much beauty in them as in some of Claude's. A view of the grand canal in Venice, by Canaletto, seemed to me wonderful,--absolutely perfect,--a better reality, for I could see the water of the canal moving and dimpling; and the palaces and buildings on each side were quite as good in their way. Leaving the gallery, I walked down into the city, and passed through Smithfield, where I glanced at St. Bartholomew's Hospital. . . . Then I went into St. Paul's, and walked all round the great cathedral, looking, I believe, at every monument on the floor. There is certainly nothing very wonderful in any of them, and I do wish it would not so generally happen that English warriors go into battle almost nude; at least, we must suppose so, from their invariably receiving their death-wounds in that condition. I will not believe that a sculptor or a painter is a man of genius unless he can wake the nobleness of his subject, illuminate and transfigure any given pattern of coat and breeches. Nevertheless, I never go into St. Paul's without being impressed anew with the grandeur of the edifice, and the general effect of these same groups of statuary ranged in their niches and at the bases of the pillars as adornments of the cathedral. Coming homeward, I went into the enclosure of the Temple, and near the entrance saw "Dr. Johnson's staircase" printed over a doorway; so I not only looked in, but went up the first flight, of some broad, well-worn stairs, passing my hand over a heavy, ancient, broken balustrade, on which, no doubt, Johnson's hand had often rested. It was here that Boswell used to visit him, in their early acquaintance. Before my lunch, I had gone into Bolt Court, where he died. This morning there have been letters from Mr. Wilding, enclosing an invitation to me to be one of the stewards of the anniversary dinner of the Literary Fund. No, I thank you, gentlemen! March 27th.--Yesterday I went out at about twelve, and visited the British Museum; an exceedingly tiresome affair. It quite crushes a person to see so much at once, and I wandered from hall to hall with a weary and heavy heart, wishing (Heaven forgive me!) that the Elgin marbles and the frieze of the Parthenon were all burnt into lime, and that the granite Egyptian statues were hewn and squared into building-stones, and that the mummies had all turned to dust two thousand years ago; and, in fine, that all the material relics of so many successive ages had disappeared with the generations that produced them. The present is burdened too much with the past. We have not time, in our earthly existence, to appreciate what is warm with life, and immediately around us; yet we heap up these old shells, out of which human life has long emerged, casting them off forever. I do not see how future ages are to stagger onward under all this dead weight, with the additions that will be continually made to it. After leaving the Museum, I went to see Bennoch, and arrange with him our expedition of to-day; and he read me a letter from Topper, very earnestly inviting me to come and spend a night or two with him. Then I wandered about the city, and was lost in the vicinity of Holborn; so that for a long while I was under a spell of bewilderment, and kept returning, in the strangest way, to the same point in Lincoln's Inn Fields. . . . Mr. Bowman and I went to the Princess's Theatre in the evening. Charles Kean performed in Louis XI. very well indeed,--a thoughtful and highly skilled actor,--much improved since I saw him, many years ago, in America. ALDERSHOTT CAMP. April 1st.--After my last date on Thursday, I visited the National Gallery. At three o'clock, having packed a travelling-bag, I went to Bennoch's office, and lunched with him; and at about five we took the rail from the Waterloo station for Aldershott Camp. At Tamborough we were cordially received by Lieutenant Shaw, of the North Cork Rifles, and were escorted by him, in a fly, to his quarters. The camp is a large city, composed of numberless wooden barracks, arranged in regular streets, on a wide, bleak heath, with an extensive and dreary prospect on all sides. Lieutenant Shaw assigned me one room in his hut, and Bennoch another, and made us as comfortable as kind hospitality could; but the huts are very small, and the rooms have no size at all; neither are they air-tight, and the sharp wind whistles in at the crevices; and, on the whole, of all discomfortable places, I am inclined to reckon Aldershott Camp the most so. I suppose the government has placed the camp on that windy heath, and built such wretched huts, for the very purpose of rendering life as little desirable as may be to the soldiers, so that they should throw it away the more willingly. At seven o'clock we dined at the regimental mess, with the officers of the North Cork. The mess-room is by far the most endurable place to be found in camp. The hut is large, and the mess-room is capable of receiving between thirty and forty guests, besides the officers of the regiment, when a great dinner-party is given. As I saw it, the whole space was divided into a dining-room and two anterooms by red curtains drawn across; and the second anteroom seems to be a general rendezvous for the officers, where they meet at all times, and talk, or look over the newspapers and the army-register, which constitute the chief of their reading. The Colonel and Lieutenant-Colonel of the regiment received Bennoch and me with great cordiality, as did all the other officers, and we sat down to a splendid dinner. All the officers of the regiment are Irishmen, and all of them, I believe, men of fortune; and they do what they can towards alleviating their hardships in camp by eating and drinking of the best that can be obtained of all good things. The table service and plate were as fine as those in any nobleman's establishment; the dishes numerous and admirably got up; and the wines delectable and genuine,--as they had need to be; for there is a great consumption of them. I liked these Irish officers exceedingly;--not that it would be possible to live long among them without finding existence a bore; for they have no thought, no intellectual movement, no ideas, that I was aware of, beyond horses, dogs, drill, garrisons, field-days, whist, wine, cigars, and all that kind of thing; yet they were really gentlemen living on the best terms with one another,--courteous, kind, most hospitable, with a rich Irish humor, softened down by social refinements,--not too refined either, but a most happy sort of behavior, as natural as that of children, and with a safe freedom that made one feel entirely at my ease. I think well of the Irish gentlemen, for their sakes; and I believe I might fairly attribute to Lieutenant-Colonel Stowell (next whom I sat) a higher and finer cultivation than the above description indicates. Indeed, many of them may have been capable of much more intellectual intercourse than that of the mess-table; but I suppose it would not have been in keeping with their camp life, nor suggested by it. Several of the elder officers were men who had been long in the army; and the Colonel--a bluff, hearty old soldier, with a profile like an eagle's head and beak--was a veteran of the Peninsula, and had a medal on his breast with clasps for three famous battles besides that of Waterloo. The regimental band played during dinner, and the Lieutenant-Colonel apologized to me for its not playing "Hail Columbia," the tune not coning within their musical accomplishments. It was no great matter, however; for I should not have distinguished it from any other tune; but, to do me what honor was possible, in the way of national airs, the band was ordered to play a series of negro melodies, and I was entirely satisfied. It is really funny that the "wood-notes wild" of those poor black slaves should have been played in a foreign laud as an honorable compliment to one of their white countrymen. After dinner we played whist, and then had some broiled bones for supper, and finally went home to our respective huts not much earlier than four o'clock. But I don't wonder these gentlemen sit up as long as they can keep their eyes open; for never was there anything so utterly comfortless as their camp-beds. They are really worse than the bed of honor, no wider, no softer, no warmer, and affording not nearly so sound sleep. Indeed, I got hardly any sleep at all, and almost as soon as I did close my eyes, the bugles sounded, and the drums beat reveille, and from that moment the camp was all astir; so I pretty soon uprose, and went to the mess-room for my breakfast, feeling wonderfully fresh and well, considering what my night had been. Long before this, however, this whole regiment, and all the other regiments, marched off to take part in a general review, and Bennoch and I followed, as soon as we had eaten a few mutton-chops. It was a bright, sunshiny day; but with a strong east-wind, as piercing and pitiless as ever blew; and this wide, undulating plain of Aldershott seemed just the place where the east-wind was at home. Still, it acted, on the whole, like an invigorating cordial; and whereas in pleasanter circumstances I should have lain down, and gone to sleep, I now felt as if I could do without sleep for a month. In due time we found out the place of the North Cork Regiment in the general battle-array, and were greeted as old comrades by the Colonel and other officers. Soon the soldiers (who, when we first reached them, were strolling about, or standing at ease) were called into order; and anon we saw a group of mounted officers riding along the lines, and among them a gentleman in a civilian's round hat, and plain frock and trousers, riding on a white horse. This group of riders turned the front of the regiment, and then passed along the rear, coming close to where we stood; and as the plainly dressed gentleman rode by, he bent towards me, and I tried to raise my hat, but did not succeed very well, because the fierce wind had compelled me to jam it tightly upon my head. The Duke of Cambridge (for this was he) is a comely-looking gentlemanly man, of bluff English face, with a great deal of brown beard about it. Though a pretty tall man, he appears, on horseback, broad and round in proportion to his height. I looked at him with a certain sort of interest, and a feeling of kindness; for one does feel kindly to whatever human being is anywise marked out from the rest, unless it be by his disagreeable qualities. The troops, from twelve to fifteen thousand, now fell into marching order, and went to attack a wood, where we were to suppose the enemy to be stationed. The sham-fight seemed to me rather clumsily managed, and without any striking incident or result. The officers had prophesied, the night before, that General K------, commanding in the camp, would make a muddle of it; and probably he did. After the review, the Duke of Cambridge with his attendant officers took their station, and all the regiments marched in front of him, saluting as they passed. As each colonel rode by, and as the banner of each regiment was lowered, the Duke lifted his hat. The most splendid effect of this parade was the gleam of the sun upon the long line of bayonets,--the sheen of all that steel appearing like a wavering fringe of light upon the dark masses of troops below. It was very fine. But I was glad when all was done, and I could go back to the mess-room, whither I carried an excellent appetite for luncheon. After this we walked about the camp,--looked at some model tents, inspected the arrangements and modes of living in the huts of the privates; and thus gained more and more adequate ideas of the vile uncomfortableness of a military life. Finally, I went to the anteroom and turned over the regimental literature,--a peerage and baronetage,--an army and militia register, a number of the Sporting Magazine, and one of the United Service, while Bennoch took another walk. Before dinner we both tried to catch a little nap by way of compensation for last night's deficiencies; but, for my part, the attempt was fruitless. The dinner was as splendid and as agreeable as that of the evening before; and I believe it was nearly two o'clock when Bennoch and I bade farewell to our kind entertainers. For my part I fraternized with these military gentlemen in a way that augurs the very best things for the future peace of the two countries. They all expressed the warmest sympathies towards America and it was easy to judge from their conversation that there is no real friendliness on the part of the military towards the French. The old antipathy is just as strong as ever,--stronger than ever, perhaps, on account of the comparatively more brilliant success of the French in this Russian war. So, with most Christian sentiments of peace and brotherly love, we returned to our hut, and lay down, each in his narrow bed. Early in the morning the drums and bugles began the usual bedevilment; and shortly after six I dressed, and we had breakfast at the mess-room, shook hands with Lieutenant Shaw (our more especial host), and drove off to the railway station at Ash. I know not whether I have mentioned that the villages neighboring to the camp have suffered terribly as regards morality from the vicinity of the soldiers. Quiet old English towns, that till within a little time ago had kept their antique simplicity and innocence, have now no such thing as female virtue in them, so far as the lower classes are concerned. This is expressing the matter too strongly, no doubt; but there is too much truth in it, nevertheless; and one of the officers remarked that even ladies of respectability had grown much more free in manners and conversation than at first. I have heard observations similar to this from a Nova-Scotian, in reference to the moral influence of soldiers when stationed in the provinces. WOOTON. Wooton stands in a hollow, near the summit of one of the long swells that here undulate over the face of the country. There is a good deal of wood behind it, as should be the case with the residence of the author of the Sylva; but I believe few, if any, of these trees are known to have been planted by John Evelyn, or even to have been coeval with his time. The house is of brick, partly ancient, and consists of a front and two projecting wings, with a porch and entrance in the centre. It has a desolate, meagre aspect, and needs something to give it life and stir and jollity. The present proprietor is of the old Evelyn family, and is now one of the two members of Parliament for Surrey; but he is a very shy and retiring man, unmarried, sees little company, and seems either not to know how to make himself comfortable or not to care about it. A servant told us that Mr. ------ had just gone out, but Tupper, who is apparently on intimate terms with him, thought it best that we should go into the house, while he went in search of the master. So the servant ushered us through a hall,--where were many family pictures by Lely, and, for aught I know, by Vandyke, and by Kneller, and other famous painters,--up a grand staircase, and into the library, the inner room of which contained the ponderous volumes which John Evelyn used to read. Nevertheless, it was a room of most barren aspect, without a carpet on the floor, with pine bookcases, with a common whitewashed ceiling, with no luxurious study-chairs, and without a fire. There was an open folio on the table, and a sheet of manuscript that appeared to have been recently written. I took down a book from the shelves (a volume of annals, connected with English history), and Tupper afterwards told us that this one single volume, for its rarity, was worth either two or three hundred pounds. Against one of the windows of this library there grows a magnolia-tree, with a very large stem, and at least fifty years old. Mrs. Tupper and I waited a good while, and then Bennoch and Tupper came back, without having found Mr. ------. Tupper wished very much to show the prayer-book used by King Charles at his execution, and some curious old manuscript volumes; but the servant said that his master always kept these treasures locked up, and trusted the key to nobody. We therefore had to take our leave without seeing them; and I have not often entered a house that one feels to be more forlorn than Wooton,--although we did have a glimpse of a dining-room, with a table laid for three or four guests, and looking quite brilliant with plate and glass and snowy napery. There was a fire, too, in this one room. Mr. ------ is making extensive alterations in the house, or has recently done so, and this is perhaps one reason of its ungenial meagreness and lack of finish. Before our departure from Wooton, Tupper had asked me to leave my card for Mr. ------; but I had no mind to overstep any limit of formal courtesy in dealing with an Englishman, and therefore declined. Tupper, however, on his own responsibility, wrote his name, Bennoch's, and mine on a piece of paper, and told the servant to show them to Mr. ------. We soon had experience of the good effect of this; for we had scarcely got back before somebody drove up to Tupper's door, and one of the girls, looking out, exclaimed that there was Mr. ------ himself, and another gentleman. He had set out, the instant he heard of our call, to bring the three precious volumes for me to see. This surely was most kind; a kindness which I should never have dreamed of expecting from a shy, retiring man like Mr. ------. So he and his friend were ushered into the dining-room, and introduced. Mr. ------ is a young-looking man, dark, with a mustache, rather small, and though he has the manners of a man who has seen the world, it evidently requires an effort in him to speak to anybody; and I could see his whole person slightly writhing itself, as it were, while he addressed me. This is strange in a man of his public position, member for the county, necessarily mixed up with life in many forms, the possessor of sixteen thousand pounds a year, and the representative of an ancient name. Nevertheless, I liked him, and felt as if I could become intimately acquainted with him, if circumstances were favorable; but, at a brief interview like this, it was hopeless to break through two great reserves; so I talked more with his companion--a pleasant young man, fresh from college, I should imagine--than with Mr. ------ himself. The three books were really of very great interest. One was an octavo volume of manuscript in John Evelyn's own hand, the beginning of his published diary, written as distinctly as print, in a small, clear character. It can be read just as easily as any printed book. Another was a Church of England prayer-book, which King Charles used on the scaffold, and which was stained with his sacred blood, and underneath are two or three lines in John Evelyn's hand, certifying this to be the very book. It is an octavo, or small folio, and seems to have been very little used, scarcely opened, except in one spot; its leaves elsewhere retaining their original freshness and elasticity. It opens most readily at the commencement of the common service; and there, on the left-hand page, is a discoloration, of a yellowish or brownish hue, about two thirds of an inch large, which, two hundred years ago and a little more, was doubtless red. For on that page had fallen a drop of King Charles's blood. The other volume was large, and contained a great many original letters, written by the king during his troubles. I had not time to examine them with any minuteness, and remember only one document, which Mr. ------ pointed out, and which had a strange pathos and pitifulness in it. It was a sort of due-bill, promising to pay a small sum for beer, which had been supplied to his Majesty, so soon as God should enable him, or the distracted circumstances of his kingdom make it possible,--or some touching and helpless expression of that kind. Prince Hal seemed to consider it an unworthy matter, that a great prince should think of "that poor creature, small beer," at all; but that a great prince should not be able to pay for it is far worse. Mr. ------ expressed his regret that I was not staying longer in this part of the country, as he would gladly have seen me at Wooten, and he succeeded in saying something about my books; and I hope I partly succeeded in showing him that I was very sensible of his kindness in letting me see those relics. I cannot say whether or no I expressed it sufficiently. It is better with such a man, or, indeed, with any man, to say too little than too much; and, in fact, it would have been indecorous in me to take too much of his kindness to my own share, Bennoch being likewise in question. We had a cup of coffee, and then took our leave; Tupper accompanying us part way down the village street, and bidding us an affectionate farewell. BATTLE ABBEY. Bennoch and I recommenced our travels, and, changing from one railway to another, reached Tunbridge Wells at nine or ten in the evening. . . . The next day was spent at Tunbridge Wells, which is famous for a chalybeate spring, and is a watering-place of note, most healthily situated on a high, breezy hill, with many pleasant walks in the neighborhood. . . . From Tunbridge Wells we transported ourselves to Battle,--the village in which is Battle Abbey. It is a large village, with many antique houses and some new ones; and in its principal street, on one side, with a wide, green space before it, you see the gray, embattled, outer wall, and great, square, battlemented entrance tower (with a turret at each corner), of the ancient Abbey. It is the perfect reality of a Gothic battlement and gateway, just as solid and massive as when it was first built, though hoary and venerable with the many intervening centuries. There are only two days in the week on which visitors are allowed entrance, and this was not one of them. Nevertheless, Bennoch was determined to get in, and he wished me to send Lady Webster my card with his own; but this I utterly refused, for the honor of America and for my own honor; because I will not do anything to increase the reputation we already have as a very forward people. Bennoch, however, called at a bookshop on the other side of the street, near the gateway of the castle; and making friends, as he has a marvellous tact in doing, with the bookseller, the latter offered to take in his card to the housekeeper, and see if Lady Webster would not relax her rule in our favor. Meanwhile, we went into the old church of Battle, which was built in Norman times, though subsequently to the Abbey. As we entered the church door, the bell rang for joy at the news of peace, which had just been announced by the London papers. The church has been whitewashed in modern times, and does not look so venerable as it ought, with its arches and pillared aisles. In the chancel stands a marble tomb, heavy, rich, and elaborate, on the top of which lie the broken-nosed statues of Sir Anthony Browne and his lady, who were the Lord and Lady of Battle Abbey in Henry VIII.'s time. The knight is in armor, and the lady in stately garb, and (save for their broken noses) they are in excellent preservation. The pavement of the chancel and aisles is all laid with tombstones, and on two or three of these there were engraved brasses, representing knights in armor, and churchmen, with inscriptions in Latin. Some of them are very old. On the walls, too, there are various monuments, principally of dignitaries connected with the Abbey. Two hatchments, in honor of persons recently dead, were likewise suspended in the chancel. The best pew of the church is, of course, that of the Webster family. It is curtained round, carpeted, furnished with chairs and footstools, and more resembles a parlor than a pew; especially as there is a fireplace in one of the pointed archways, which I suppose has been bricked up in order to form it. On the opposite side of the aisle is the pew of some other magnate, containing a stove. The rest of the parishioners have to keep themselves warm with the fervor of their own piety. I have forgotten what else was interesting, except that we were shown a stone coffin, recently dug up, in which was hollowed a place for the head of the corpse. Returning to the bookshop, we found that Lady Webster had sent her compliments, and would be very happy to have us see the Abbey. How thoroughly kind these English people can be when they like, and how often they like to be so! We lost no time in ringing the bell at the arched entrance, under the great tower, and were admitted by an old woman who lives, I believe, in the thickness of the wall. She told us her room used to be the prison of the Abbey, and under the great arch she pointed to a projecting beam, where she said criminals used to be hanged. At two of the intersecting points of the arches, which form the roof of the gateway, were carved faces of stone, said to represent King Harold and William the Conqueror. The exterior wall, of which this tower is the gateway, extends far along the village street, and encloses a very large space, within which stands the mansion, quite secluded from unauthorized visitors, or even from the sight of those without, unless it be at very distant eyeshot. We rang at the principal door of the edifice (it is under a deep arch, in the Norman style, but of modern date), and a footman let its in, and then delivered us over to a respectable old lady in black. She was a Frenchwoman by birth, but had been very long in the service of the family, and spoke English almost without an accent; her French blood being indicated only by her thin and withered aspect, and a greater gentility of manner than would have been seen in an Englishwoman of similar station. She ushered us first into a grand and noble hall, the arched and carved oaken roof of which ascended into the gable. It was nearly sixty feet long, and its height equal to its length,--as stately a hall, I should imagine, as is anywhere to be found in a private mansion. It was lighted, at one end, by a great window, beneath which, occupying the whole breadth of the hall, hung a vast picture of the Battle of Hastings; and whether a good picture or no, it was a rich adornment of the hall. The walls were wainscoted high upward with oak: they were almost covered with noble pictures of ancestry, and of kings and great men, and beautiful women; there were trophies of armor hung aloft; and two armed figures, one in brass mail, the other in bright steel, stood on a raised dais, underneath the great picture. At the end of the hall, opposite the picture, a third of the way up towards the roof, was a gallery. All these things that I have enumerated were in perfect condition, without rust, untouched by decay or injury of any kind; but yet they seemed to belong to a past age, and were mellowed, softened in their splendor, a little dimmed with time,--toned down into a venerable magnificence. Of all domestic things that I have seen in England, it satisfied me most. Then the Frenchwoman showed us into various rooms and offices, most of which were contrived out of the old abbey-cloisters, and the vaulted cells and apartments in which the monks used to live. If any house be haunted, I should suppose this might be. If any church-property bring a curse with it, as people say, I do not see how the owners of Battle Abbey can escape it, taking possession of and dwelling in these holy precincts, as they have done, and laying their kitchen hearth with the stones of overthrown altars. The Abbey was first granted, I believe, to Sir Anthony Browne, whom I saw asleep with his lady in the church. It was his first wife. I wish it had been his second; for she was Surrey's Geraldine. The posterity of Sir Anthony kept the place till 1719, and then sold it to the Websters, a family of Baronets, who are still the owners and occupants. The present proprietor is Sir Augustus Webster, whose mother is the lady that so kindly let us into the Abbey. Mr. Bennoch gave the nice old French lady half a crown, and we next went round among the ruined portions of the Abbey, under the gardener's guidance. We saw two ivied towers, insulated from all other ruins; and an old refectory, open to the sky, and a vaulted crypt, supported by pillars; and we saw, too, the foundation and scanty remains of a chapel, which had been long buried out of sight of man, and only dug up within present memory,--about forty years ago. There had always been a tradition that this was the spot where Harold had planted his standard, and where his body was found after the battle; and the discovery of the ruined chapel confirmed the tradition. I might have seen a great deal more, had there been time; and I have forgotten much of what I did see; but it is an exceedingly interesting place. There is an avenue of old yew-trees, which meet above like a cloistered arch; and this is called the Monks' Walk. I rather think they were ivy, though growing unsupported. As we were retiring, the gardener suddenly stopped, as if he were alarmed, and motioned to us to do the same, saying, "I believe it is my lady!" And so it was,--a tall and stately lady in black, trimming shrubs in the garden. She bowed to us very graciously,--we raised our hats, and thus we met and parted without more ado. As we went through the arch of the entrance tower, Bennoch gave the old female warder a shilling, and the gardener followed us to get half a crown. HASTINGS. We took a fly and driver from the principal hotel of Battle, and drove off for Hastings, about seven miles distant. Hastings is now a famous watering and sea-bathing place, and seems to be well sheltered from the winds, though open to the sea, which here stretches off towards France. We climbed a high and steep hill, terraced round its base with streets of modern lodging-houses, and crowned on its summit with the ruins of a castle, the foundation of which was anterior to the Conquest. This castle has no wall towards the sea, the precipice being too high and sheer to admit of attack on that side. I have quite exhausted my descriptive faculty for the present, so shall say nothing of this old castle, which indeed (the remains being somewhat scanty and scraggling) is chiefly picturesque and interesting from its bold position on such a headlong hill. Clambering down on another side from that of our ascent, we entered the town of Hastings, which seems entirely modern, and made up of lodging-houses, shops, hotels, parades, and all such makings up of watering-places generally. We took a delightful warm bath, washing off all weariness and naughtiness, and coming out new men. Then we walked to St. Leonard's,--a part of Hastings, I believe, but a mile or two from the castle, and there called at the lodgings of two friends of Bennoch. These were Mr. Martin, the author of Bon Gaultier's ballads, and his wife, the celebrated actress, Helen Faucett. Mr. Martin is a barrister, a gentleman whose face and manners suited me at once; a simple, refined, sincere, not too demonstrative person. His wife, too, I liked; a tall, dark, fine, and lady-like woman, with the simplest manners, that give no trouble at all, and so must be perfect. With these two persons I felt myself, almost in a moment, on friendly terms, and in true accord, and so I talked, I think, more than I have at any time since coming to London. We took a pleasant lunch at their house; and then they walked with us to the railway station, and there they took leave of Bennoch affectionately and of me hardly less so; for, in truth, we had grown to be almost friends in this very little while. And as we rattled away, I said to Bennoch earnestly, "What good people they are!"--and Bennoch smiled, as if he had known perfectly well that I should think and say so. And thus we rushed onward to London; and I reached St. James's Place between nine and ten o'clock, after a very interesting tour, the record of which I wish I could have kept as we went along, writing each day's history before another day's adventures began. END OF VOL. I. 
7881	----	PASSAGES FROM THE FRENCH AND ITALIAN NOTE-BOOKS OF NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE VOL. I. PASSAGES FROM HAWTHORNE'S NOTE-BOOKS IN FRANCE AND ITALY. FRANCE. Hotel de Louvre, January 6th, 1858.--On Tuesday morning, our dozen trunks and half-dozen carpet-bags being already packed and labelled, we began to prepare for our journey two or three hours before light. Two cabs were at the door by half past six, and at seven we set out for the London Bridge station, while it was still dark and bitterly cold. There were already many people in the streets, growing more numerous as we drove city-ward; and, in Newgate Street, there was such a number of market-carts, that we almost came to a dead lock with some of them. At the station we found several persons who were apparently going in the same train with us, sitting round the fire of the waiting-room. Since I came to England there has hardly been a morning when I should have less willingly bestirred myself before daylight; so sharp and inclement was the atmosphere. We started at half past eight, having taken through tickets to Paris by way of Folkestone and Boulogne. A foot-warmer (a long, flat tin utensil, full of hot water) was put into the carriage just before we started; but it did not make us more than half comfortable, and the frost soon began to cloud the windows, and shut out the prospect, so that we could only glance at the green fields--immortally green, whatever winter can do against them--and at, here and there, a stream or pool with the ice forming on its borders. It was the first cold weather of a very mild season. The snow began to fall in scattered and almost invisible flakes; and it seemed as if we had stayed our English welcome out, and were to find nothing genial and hospitable there any more. At Folkestone, we were deposited at a railway station close upon a shingly beach, on which the sea broke in foam, and which J----- reported as strewn with shells and star-fish; behind was the town, with an old church in the midst; and, close, at hand, the pier, where lay the steamer in which we were to embark. But the air was so wintry, that I had no heart to explore the town, or pick up shells with J----- on the beach; so we kept within doors during the two hours of our stay, now and then looking out of the windows at a fishing-boat or two, as they pitched and rolled with an ugly and irregular motion, such as the British Channel generally communicates to the craft that navigate it. At about one o'clock we went on board, and were soon under steam, at a rate that quickly showed a long line of the white cliffs of Albion behind us. It is a very dusky white, by the by, and the cliffs themselves do not seem, at a distance, to be of imposing height, and have too even an outline to be picturesque. As we increased our distance from England, the French coast came more and more distinctly in sight, with a low, wavy outline, not very well worth looking at, except because it was the coast of France. Indeed, I looked at it but little; for the wind was bleak and boisterous, and I went down into the cabin, where I found the fire very comfortable, and several people were stretched on sofas in a state of placid wretchedness. . . . . I have never suffered from sea-sickness, but had been somewhat apprehensive of this rough strait between England and France, which seems to have more potency over people's stomachs than ten times the extent of sea in other quarters. Our passage was of two hours, at the end of which we landed on French soil, and found ourselves immediately in the clutches of the custom-house officers, who, however, merely made a momentary examination of my passport, and allowed us to pass without opening even one of our carpet-bags. The great bulk of our luggage had been registered through to Paris, for examination after our arrival there. We left Boulogne in about an hour after our arrival, when it was already a darkening twilight. The weather had grown colder than ever, since our arrival in sunny France, and the night was now setting in, wickedly black and dreary. The frost hardened upon the carriage windows in such thickness that I could scarcely scratch a peep-hole through it; but, from such glimpses as I could catch, the aspect of the country seemed pretty much to resemble the December aspect of my dear native land,--broad, bare, brown fields, with streaks of snow at the foot of ridges, and along fences, or in the furrows of ploughed soil. There was ice wherever there happened to be water to form it. We had feet-warmers in the carriage, but the cold crept in nevertheless; and I do not remember hardly in my life a more disagreeable short journey than this, my first advance into French territory. My impression of France will always be that it is an Arctic region. At any season of the year, the tract over which we passed yesterday must be an uninteresting one as regards its natural features; and the only adornment, as far as I could observe, which art has given it, consists in straight rows of very stiff-looking and slender-stemmed trees. In the dusk they resembled poplar-trees. Weary and frost-bitten,--morally, if not physically,--we reached Amiens in three or four hours, and here I underwent much annoyance from the French railway officials and attendants, who, I believe, did not mean to incommode me, but rather to forward my purposes as far as they well could. If they would speak slowly and distinctly I might understand them well enough, being perfectly familiar with the written language, and knowing the principles of its pronunciation; but, in their customary rapid utterance, it sounds like a string of mere gabble. When left to myself, therefore, I got into great difficulties. . . . . It gives a taciturn personage like myself a new conception as to the value of speech, even to him, when he finds himself unable either to speak or understand. Finally, being advised on all hands to go to the Hotel du Rhin, we were carried thither in an omnibus, rattling over a rough pavement, through an invisible and frozen town; and, on our arrival, were ushered into a handsome salon, as chill as a tomb. They made a little bit of a wood-fire for us in a low and deep chimney-hole, which let a hundred times more heat escape up the flue than it sent into the room. In the morning we sallied forth to see the cathedral. The aspect of the old French town was very different from anything English; whiter, infinitely cleaner; higher and narrower houses, the entrance to most of which seeming to be through a great gateway, affording admission into a central court-yard; a public square, with a statue in the middle, and another statue in a neighboring street. We met priests in three-cornered hats, long frock-coats, and knee-breeches; also soldiers and gendarmes, and peasants and children, clattering over the pavements in wooden shoes. It makes a great impression of outlandishness to see the signs over the shop doors in a foreign tongue. If the cold had not been such as to dull my sense of novelty, and make all my perceptions torpid, I should have taken in a set of new impressions, and enjoyed them very much. As it was, I cared little for what I saw, but yet had life enough left to enjoy the cathedral of Amiens, which has many features unlike those of English cathedrals. It stands in the midst of the cold, white town, and has a high-shouldered look to a spectator accustomed to the minsters of England, which cover a great space of ground in proportion to their height. The impression the latter gives is of magnitude and mass; this French cathedral strikes one as lofty. The exterior is venerable, though but little time-worn by the action of the atmosphere; and statues still keep their places in numerous niches, almost as perfect as when first placed there in the thirteenth century. The principal doors are deep, elaborately wrought, pointed arches; and the interior seemed to us, at the moment, as grand as any that we had seen, and to afford as vast an idea of included space; it being of such an airy height, and with no screen between the chancel and nave, as in all the English cathedrals. We saw the differences, too, betwixt a church in which the same form of worship for which it was originally built is still kept up, and those of England, where it has been superseded for centuries; for here, in the recess of every arch of the side aisles, beneath each lofty window, there was a chapel dedicated to some Saint, and adorned with great marble sculptures of the crucifixion, and with pictures, execrably bad, in all cases, and various kinds of gilding and ornamentation. Immensely tall wax candles stand upon the altars of these chapels, and before one sat a woman, with a great supply of tapers, one of which was burning. I suppose these were to be lighted as offerings to the saints, by the true believers. Artificial flowers were hung at some of the shrines, or placed under glass. In every chapel, moreover, there was a confessional,--a little oaken structure, about as big as a sentry-box, with a closed part for the priest to sit in, and an open one for the penitent to kneel at, and speak, through the open-work of the priest's closet. Monuments, mural and others, to long-departed worthies, and images of the Saviour, the Virgin, and saints, were numerous everywhere about the church; and in the chancel there was a great deal of quaint and curious sculpture, fencing in the Holy of Holies, where the High Altar stands. There is not much painted glass; one or two very rich and beautiful rose-windows, however, that looked antique; and the great eastern window which, I think, is modern. The pavement has, probably, never been renewed, as one piece of work, since the structure was erected, and is foot-worn by the successive generations, though still in excellent repair. I saw one of the small, square stones in it, bearing the date of 1597, and no doubt there are a thousand older ones. It was gratifying to find the cathedral in such good condition, without any traces of recent repair; and it is perhaps a mark of difference between French and English character, that the Revolution in the former country, though all religious worship disappears before it, does not seem to have caused such violence to ecclesiastical monuments, as the Reformation and the reign of Puritanism in the latter. I did not see a mutilated shrine, or even a broken-nosed image, in the whole cathedral. But, probably, the very rage of the English fanatics against idolatrous tokens, and their smashing blows at them, were symptoms of sincerer religious faith than the French were capable of. These last did not care enough about their Saviour to beat down his crucified image; and they preserved the works of sacred art, for the sake only of what beauty there was in them. While we were in the cathedral, we saw several persons kneeling at their devotions on the steps of the chancel and elsewhere. One dipped his fingers in the holy water at the entrance: by the by, I looked into the stone basin that held it, and saw it full of ice. Could not all that sanctity at least keep it thawed? Priests--jolly, fat, mean-looking fellows, in white robes--went hither and thither, but did not interrupt or accost us. There were other peculiarities, which I suppose I shall see more of in my visits to other churches, but now we were all glad to make our stay as brief as possible, the atmosphere of the cathedral being so bleak, and its stone pavement so icy cold beneath our feet. We returned to the hotel, and the chambermaid brought me a book, in which she asked me to inscribe my name, age, profession, country, destination, and the authorization under which I travelled. After the freedom of an English hotel, so much greater than even that of an American one, where they make you disclose your name, this is not so pleasant. We left Amiens at half past one; and I can tell as little of the country between that place and Paris, as between Boulogne and Amiens. The windows of our railway carriage were already frosted with French breath when we got into it, and the ice grew thicker and thicker continually. I tried, at various times, to rub a peep-hole through, as before; but the ice immediately shot its crystallized tracery over it again; and, indeed, there was little or nothing to make it worth while to look out, so bleak was the scene. Now and then a chateau, too far off for its characteristics to be discerned; now and then a church, with a tall gray tower, and a little peak atop; here and there a village or a town, which we could not well see. At sunset there was just that clear, cold, wintry sky which I remember so well in America, but have never seen in England. At five we reached Paris, and were suffered to take a carriage to the hotel de Louvre, without any examination of the little luggage we had with us. Arriving, we took a suite of apartments, and the waiter immediately lighted a wax candle in each separate room. We might have dined at the table d'hote, but preferred the restaurant connected with and within the hotel. All the dishes were very delicate, and a vast change from the simple English system, with its joints, shoulders, beefsteaks, and chops; but I doubt whether English cookery, for the very reason that it is so simple, is not better for men's moral and spiritual nature than French. In the former case, you know that you are gratifying your animal needs and propensities, and are duly ashamed of it; but, in dealing with these French delicacies, you delude yourself into the idea that you are cultivating your taste while satisfying your appetite. This last, however, it requires a good deal of perseverance to accomplish. In the cathedral at Amiens there were printed lists of acts of devotion posted on the columns, such as prayers at the shrines of certain saints, whereby plenary indulgences might be gained. It is to be observed, however, that all these external forms were necessarily accompanied with true penitence and religious devotion. Hotel de Louvre, January 8th.--It was so fearfully cold this morning that I really felt little or no curiosity to see the city. . . . . Until after one o'clock, therefore, I knew nothing of Paris except the lights which I had seen beneath our window the evening before, far, far downward, in the narrow Rue St. Honore, and the rumble of the wheels, which continued later than I was awake to hear it, and began again before dawn. I could see, too, tall houses, that seemed to be occupied in every story, and that had windows on the steep roofs. One of these houses is six stories high. This Rue St. Honore is one of the old streets in Paris, and is that in which Henry IV. was assassinated; but it has not, in this part of it, the aspect of antiquity. After one o'clock we all went out and walked along the Rue de Rivoli. . . . . We are here, right in the midst of Paris, and close to whatever is best known to those who hear or read about it,--the Louvre being across the street, the Palais Royal but a little way off, the Tuileries joining to the Louvre, the Place de la Concorde just beyond, verging on which is the Champs Elysees. We looked about us for a suitable place to dine, and soon found the Restaurant des Echelles, where we entered at a venture, and were courteously received. It has a handsomely furnished saloon, much set off with gilding and mirrors; and appears to be frequented by English and Americans; its carte, a bound volume, being printed in English as well as French. . . . . It was now nearly four o'clock, and too late to visit the galleries of the Louvre, or to do anything else but walk a little way along the street. The splendor of Paris, so far as I have seen, takes me altogether by surprise: such stately edifices, prolonging themselves in unwearying magnificence and beauty, and, ever and anon, a long vista of a street, with a column rising at the end of it, or a triumphal arch, wrought in memory of some grand event. The light stone or stucco, wholly untarnished by smoke and soot, puts London to the blush, if a blush could be seen on its dingy face; but, indeed, London is not to be mentioned, nor compared even, with Paris. I never knew what a palace was till I had a glimpse of the Louvre and the Tuileries; never had my idea of a city been gratified till I trod these stately streets. The life of the scene, too, is infinitely more picturesque than that of London, with its monstrous throng of grave faces and black coats; whereas, here, you see soldiers and priests, policemen in cocked hats, Zonaves with turbans, long mantles, and bronzed, half-Moorish faces; and a great many people whom you perceive to be outside of your experience, and know them ugly to look at, and fancy them villanous. Truly, I have no sympathies towards the French people; their eyes do not win me, nor do their glances melt and mingle with mine. But they do grand and beautiful things in the architectural way; and I am grateful for it. The Place de la Concorde is a most splendid square, large enough for a nation to erect trophies in of all its triumphs; and on one side of it is the Tuileries, on the opposite side the Champs Elysees, and, on a third, the Seine, adown which we saw large cakes of ice floating, beneath the arches of a bridge. The Champs Elysees, so far as I saw it, had not a grassy soil beneath its trees, but the bare earth, white and dusty. The very dust, if I saw nothing else, would assure me that I was out of England. We had time only to take this little walk, when it began to grow dusk; and, being so pitilessly cold, we hurried back to our hotel. Thus far, I think, what I have seen of Paris is wholly unlike what I expected; but very like an imaginary picture which I had conceived of St. Petersburg,-- new, bright, magnificent, and desperately cold. A great part of this architectural splendor is due to the present Emperor, who has wrought a great change in the aspect of the city within a very few years. A traveller, if he looks at the thing selfishly, ought to wish him a long reign and arbitrary power, since he makes it his policy to illustrate his capital with palatial edifices, which are, however, better for a stranger to look at, than for his own people to pay for. We have spent to-day chiefly in seeing some of the galleries of the Louvre. I must confess that the vast and beautiful edifice struck me far more than the pictures, sculpture, and curiosities which it contains,-- the shell more than the kernel inside; such noble suites of rooms and halls were those through which we first passed, containing Egyptian, and, farther onward, Greek and Roman antiquities; the walls cased in variegated marbles; the ceilings glowing with beautiful frescos; the whole extended into infinite vistas by mirrors that seemed like vacancy, and multiplied everything forever. The picture-rooms are not so brilliant, and the pictures themselves did not greatly win upon me in this one day. Many artists were employed in copying them, especially in the rooms hung with the productions of French painters. Not a few of these copyists were females; most of them were young men, picturesquely mustached and bearded; but some were elderly, who, it was pitiful to think, had passed through life without so much success as now to paint pictures of their own. From the pictures we went into a suite of rooms where are preserved many relics of the ancient and later kings of France; more relics of the elder ones, indeed, than I supposed had remained extant through the Revolution. The French seem to like to keep memorials of whatever they do, and of whatever their forefathers have done, even if it be ever so little to their credit; and perhaps they do not take matters sufficiently to heart to detest anything that has ever happened. What surprised me most were the golden sceptre and the magnificent sword and other gorgeous relics of Charlemagne,--a person whom I had always associated with a sheepskin cloak. There were suits of armor and weapons that had been worn and handled by a great many of the French kings; and a religious book that had belonged to St. Louis; a dressing-glass, most richly set with precious stones, which formerly stood on the toilet-table of Catherine de' Medici, and in which I saw my own face where hers had been. And there were a thousand other treasures, just as well worth mentioning as these. If each monarch could have been summoned from Hades to claim his own relics, we should have had the halls full of the old Childerics, Charleses, Bourbons and Capets, Henrys and Louises, snatching with ghostly hands at sceptres, swords, armor, and mantles; and Napoleon would have seen, apparently, almost everything that personally belonged to him,--his coat, his cocked hats, his camp-desk, his field-bed, his knives, forks, and plates, and even a lock of his hair. I must let it all go. These things cannot be reproduced by pen and ink. Hotel de Louvre, January 9th.--. . . . Last evening Mr. Fezaudie called. He spoke very freely respecting the Emperor and the hatred entertained against him in France; but said that he is more powerful, that is, more firmly fixed as a ruler, than ever the first Napoleon was. We, who look back upon the first Napoleon as one of the eternal facts of the past, a great bowlder in history, cannot well estimate how momentary and insubstantial the great Captain may have appeared to those who beheld his rise out of obscurity. They never, perhaps, took the reality of his career fairly into their minds, before it was over. The present Emperor, I believe, has already been as long in possession of the supreme power as his uncle was. I should like to see him, and may, perhaps, do--so, as he is our neighbor, across the way. This morning Miss ------, the celebrated astronomical lady, called. She had brought a letter of introduction to me, while consul; and her purpose now was to see if we could take her as one of our party to Rome, whither she likewise is bound. We readily consented, for she seems to be a simple, strong, healthy-humored woman, who will not fling herself as a burden on our shoulders; and my only wonder is that a person evidently so able to take care of herself should wish to have an escort. We issued forth at about eleven, and went down the Rue St. Honore, which is narrow, and has houses of five or six stories on either side, between which run the streets like a gully in a rock. One face of our hotel borders and looks on this street. After going a good way, we came to an intersection with another street, the name of which I forget; but, at this point, Ravaillac sprang at the carriage of Henry IV. and plunged his dagger into him. As we went down the Rue St. Honore, it grew more and more thronged, and with a meaner class of people. The houses still were high, and without the shabbiness of exterior that distinguishes the old part of London, being of light-colored stone; but I never saw anything that so much came up to my idea of a swarming city as this narrow, crowded, and rambling street. Thence we turned into the Rue St. Denis, which is one of the oldest streets in Paris, and is said to have been first marked out by the track of the saint's footsteps, where, after his martyrdom, he walked along it, with his head under his arm, in quest of a burial-place. This legend may account for any crookedness of the street; for it could not reasonably be asked of a headless man that he should walk straight. Through some other indirections we at last found the Rue Bergere, down which I went with J----- in quest of Hottinguer et Co., the bankers, while the rest of us went along the Boulevards, towards the Church of the Madeleine. . . . . This business accomplished, J----- and I threaded our way back, and overtook the rest of the party, still a good distance from the Madeleine. I know not why the Boulevards are called so. They are a succession of broad walks through broad streets, and were much thronged with people, most of whom appeared to be bent more on pleasure than business. The sun, long before this, had come out brightly, and gave us the first genial and comfortable sensations which we have had in Paris. Approaching the Madeleine, we found it a most beautiful church, that might have been adapted from Heathenism to Catholicism; for on each side there is a range of magnificent pillars, unequalled, except by those of the Parthenon. A mourning-coach, arrayed in black and silver, was drawn up at the steps, and the front of the church was hung with black cloth, which covered the whole entrance. However, seeing the people going in, we entered along with them. Glorious and gorgeous is the Madeleine. The entrance to the nave is beneath a most stately arch; and three arches of equal height open from the nave to the side aisles; and at the end of the nave is another great arch, rising, with a vaulted half-dome, over the high altar. The pillars supporting these arches are Corinthian, with richly sculptured capitals; and wherever gilding might adorn the church, it is lavished like sunshine; and within the sweeps of the arches there are fresco paintings of sacred subjects, and a beautiful picture covers the hollow of the vault over the altar; all this, besides much sculpture; and especially a group above and around the high altar, representing the Magdalen smiling down upon angels and archangels, some of whom are kneeling, and shadowing themselves with their heavy marble wings. There is no such thing as making my page glow with the most distant idea of the magnificence of this church, in its details and in its whole. It was founded a hundred or two hundred years ago; then Bonaparte contemplated transforming it into a Temple of Victory, or building it anew as one. The restored Bourbons remade it into a church; but it still has a heathenish look, and will never lose it. When we entered we saw a crowd of people, all pressing forward towards the high altar, before which burned a hundred wax lights, some of which were six or seven feet high; and, altogether, they shone like a galaxy of stars. In the middle of the nave, moreover, there was another galaxy of wax candles burning around an immense pall of black velvet, embroidered with silver, which seemed to cover, not only a coffin, but a sarcophagus, or something still more huge. The organ was rumbling forth a deep, lugubrious bass, accompanied with heavy chanting of priests, out of which sometimes rose the clear, young voices of choristers, like light flashing out of the gloom. The church, between the arches, along the nave, and round the altar, was hung with broad expanses of black cloth; and all the priests had their sacred vestments covered with black. They looked exceedingly well; I never saw anything half so well got up on the stage. Some of these ecclesiastical figures were very stately and noble, and knelt and bowed, and bore aloft the cross, and swung the censers in a way that I liked to see. The ceremonies of the Catholic Church were a superb work of art, or perhaps a true growth of man's religious nature; and so long as men felt their original meaning, they must have been full of awe and glory. Being of another parish, I looked on coldly, but not irreverently, and was glad to see the funeral service so well performed, and very glad when it was over. What struck me as singular, the person who performed the part usually performed by a verger, keeping order among the audience, wore a gold-embroidered scarf, a cocked hat, and, I believe, a sword, and had the air of a military man. Before the close of the service a contribution-box--or, rather, a black velvet bag--was handed about by this military verger; and I gave J----- a franc to put in, though I did not in the least know for what. Issuing from the church, we inquired of two or three persons who was the distinguished defunct at whose obsequies we had been assisting, for we had some hope that it might be Rachel, who died last week, and is still above ground. But it proved to be only a Madame Mentel, or some such name, whom nobody had ever before heard of. I forgot to say that her coffin was taken from beneath the illuminated pall, and carried out of the church before us. When we left the Madeleine we took our way to the Place de la Concorde, and thence through the Elysian Fields (which, I suppose, are the French idea of heaven) to Bonaparte's triumphal arch. The Champs Elysees may look pretty in summer; though I suspect they must be somewhat dry and artificial at whatever season,--the trees being slender and scraggy, and requiring to be renewed every few years. The soil is not genial to them. The strangest peculiarity of this place, however, to eyes fresh from moist and verdant England, is, that there is not one blade of grass in all the Elysian Fields, nothing but hard clay, now covered with white dust. It gives the whole scene the air of being a contrivance of man, in which Nature has either not been invited to take any part, or has declined to do so. There were merry-go-rounds, wooden horses, and other provision for children's amusements among the trees; and booths, and tables of cakes, and candy-women; and restaurants on the borders of the wood; but very few people there; and doubtless we can form no idea of what the scene might become when alive with French gayety and vivacity. As we walked onward the Triumphal Arch began to loom up in the distance, looking huge and massive, though still a long way off. It was not, however, till we stood almost beneath it that we really felt the grandeur of this great arch, including so large a space of the blue sky in its airy sweep. At a distance it impresses the spectator with its solidity; nearer, with the lofty vacancy beneath it. There is a spiral staircase within one of its immense limbs; and, climbing steadily upward, lighted by a lantern which the doorkeeper's wife gave us, we had a bird's-eye view of Paris, much obscured by smoke or mist. Several interminable avenues shoot with painful directness right towards it. On our way homeward we visited the Place Vendome, in the centre of which is a tall column, sculptured from top to bottom, all over the pedestal, and all over the shaft, and with Napoleon himself on the summit. The shaft is wreathed round and roundabout with representations of what, as far as I could distinguish, seemed to be the Emperor's victories. It has a very rich effect. At the foot of the column we saw wreaths of artificial flowers, suspended there, no doubt, by some admirer of Napoleon, still ardent enough to expend a franc or two in this way. Hotel de Louvre, January 10th.--We had purposed going to the Cathedral of Notre Dame to-day, but the weather and walking were too unfavorable for a distant expedition; so we merely went across the street to the Louvre. . . . . . Our principal object this morning was to see the pencil drawings by eminent artists. Of these the Louvre has a very rich collection, occupying many apartments, and comprising sketches by Annibale Caracci, Claude, Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci, Michel Angelo, Rubens, Rembrandt, and almost all the other great masters, whether French, Italian, Dutch, or whatever else; the earliest drawings of their great pictures, when they had the glory of their pristine idea directly before their minds' eye,-- that idea which inevitably became overlaid with their own handling of it in the finished painting. No doubt the painters themselves had often a happiness in these rude, off-hand sketches, which they never felt again in the same work, and which resulted in disappointment, after they had done their best. To an artist, the collection must be most deeply interesting: to myself, it was merely curious, and soon grew wearisome. In the same suite of apartments, there is a collection of miniatures, some of them very exquisite, and absolutely lifelike, on their small scale. I observed two of Franklin, both good and picturesque, one of them especially so, with its cloud-like white hair. I do not think we have produced a man so interesting to contemplate, in many points of view, as he. Most of our great men are of a character that I find it impossible to warm into life by thought, or by lavishing any amount of sympathy upon them. Not so Franklin, who had a great deal of common and uncommon human nature in him. Much of the time, while my wife was looking at the drawings, I sat observing the crowd of Sunday visitors. They were generally of a lower class than those of week-days; private soldiers in a variety of uniforms, and, for the most part, ugly little men, but decorous and well behaved. I saw medals on many of their breasts, denoting Crimean service; some wore the English medal, with Queen Victoria's head upon it. A blue coat, with red baggy trousers, was the most usual uniform. Some had short-breasted coats, made in the same style as those of the first Napoleon, which we had seen in the preceding rooms. The policemen, distributed pretty abundantly about the rooms, themselves looked military, wearing cocked hats and swords. There were many women of the middling classes; some, evidently, of the lowest, but clean and decent, in colored gowns and caps; and laboring men, citizens, Sunday gentlemen, young artists, too, no doubt looking with educated eyes at these art-treasures, and I think, as a general thing, each man was mated with a woman. The soldiers, however, came in pairs or little squads, accompanied by women. I did not much like any of the French faces, and yet I am not sure that there is not more resemblance between them and the American physiognomy, than between the latter and the English. The women are not pretty, but in all ranks above the lowest they have a trained expression that supplies the place of beauty. I was wearied to death with the drawings, and began to have that dreary and desperate feeling which has often come upon me when the sights last longer than my capacity for receiving them. As our time in Paris, however, is brief and precious, we next inquired our way to the galleries of sculpture, and these alone are of astounding extent, reaching, I should think, all round one quadrangle of the Louvre, on the basement floor. Hall after hall opened interminably before us, and on either side of us, paved and incrusted with variegated and beautifully polished marble, relieved against which stand the antique statues and groups, interspersed with great urns and vases, sarcophagi, altars, tablets, busts of historic personages, and all manner of shapes of marble which consummate art has transmuted into precious stones. Not that I really did feel much impressed by any of this sculpture then, nor saw more than two or three things which I thought very beautiful; but whether it be good or no, I suppose the world has nothing better, unless it be a few world-renowned statues in Italy. I was even more struck by the skill and ingenuity of the French in arranging these sculptural remains, than by the value of the sculptures themselves. The galleries, I should judge, have been recently prepared, and on a magnificent system,--the adornments being yet by no means completed,--for besides the floor and wall-casings of rich, polished marble, the vaulted ceilings of some of the apartments are painted in fresco, causing them to glow as if the sky were opened. It must be owned, however, that the statuary, often time-worn and darkened from its original brilliancy by weather-stains, does not suit well as furniture for such splendid rooms. When we see a perfection of modern finish around them, we recognize that most of these statues have been thrown down from their pedestals, hundreds of years ago, and have been battered and externally degraded; and though whatever spiritual beauty they ever had may still remain, yet this is not made more apparent by the contrast betwixt the new gloss of modern upholstery, and their tarnished, even if immortal grace. I rather think the English have given really the more hospitable reception to the maimed Theseus, and his broken-nosed, broken-legged, headless companions, because flouting them with no gorgeous fittings up. By this time poor J----- (who, with his taste for art yet undeveloped, is the companion of all our visits to sculpture and picture galleries) was wofully hungry, and for bread we had given him a stone,--not one stone, but a thousand. We returned to the hotel, and it being too damp and raw to go to our Restaurant des Echelles, we dined at the hotel. In my opinion it would require less time to cultivate our gastronomic taste than taste of any other kind; and, on the whole, I am not sure that a man would not be wise to afford himself a little discipline in this line. It is certainly throwing away the bounties of Providence, to treat them as the English do, producing from better materials than the French have to work upon nothing but sirloins, joints, joints, steaks, steaks, steaks, chops, chops, chops, chops! We had a soup to-day, in which twenty kinds of vegetables were represented, and manifested each its own aroma; a fillet of stewed beef, and a fowl, in some sort of delicate fricassee. We had a bottle of Chablis, and renewed ourselves, at the close of the banquet, with a plate of Chateaubriand ice. It was all very good, and we respected ourselves far more than if we had eaten a quantity of red roast beef; but I am not quite sure that we were right. . . . . Among the relics of kings and princes, I do not know that there was anything more interesting than a little brass cannon, two or three inches long, which had been a toy of the unfortunate Dauphin, son of Louis XVI. There was a map,--a hemisphere of the world,--which his father had drawn for this poor boy; very neatly done, too. The sword of Louis XVI., a magnificent rapier, with a beautifully damasked blade, and a jewelled scabbard, but without a hilt, is likewise preserved, as is the hilt of Henry IV.'s sword. But it is useless to begin a catalogue of these things. What a collection it is, including Charlemagne's sword and sceptre, and the last Dauphin's little toy cannon, and so much between the two! Hotel de Louvre, January 11th.--This was another chill, raw day, characterized by a spitefulness of atmosphere which I do not remember ever to have experienced in my own dear country. We meant to have visited the Hotel des Invalides, but J----- and I walked to the Tivoli, the Place de la Concorde, the Champs Elysees, and to the Place de Beaujou, and to the residence of the American minister, where I wished to arrange about my passport. After speaking with the Secretary of Legation, we were ushered into the minister's private room, where he received me with great kindness. Mr. ------ is an old gentleman with a white head, and a large, florid face, which has an expression of amiability, not unmingled with a certain dignity. He did not rise from his arm-chair to greet me,--a lack of ceremony which I imputed to the gout, feeling it impossible that he should have willingly failed in courtesy to one of his twenty-five million sovereigns. In response to some remark of mine about the shabby way in which our government treats its officials pecuniarily, he gave a detailed account of his own troubles on that score; then expressed a hope that I had made a good thing out of my consulate, and inquired whether I had received a hint to resign; to which I replied that, for various reasons, I had resigned of my own accord, and before Mr. Buchanan's inauguration. We agreed, however, in disapproving the system of periodical change in our foreign officials; and I remarked that a consul or an ambassador ought to be a citizen both of his native country and of the one in which he resided; and that his possibility of beneficent influence depended largely on his being so. Apropos to which Mr. ------ said that he had once asked a diplomatic friend of long experience, what was the first duty of a minister. "To love his own country, and to watch over its interests," answered the diplomatist. "And his second duty?" asked Mr. ------. "To love and to promote the interests of the country to which he is accredited," said his friend. This is a very Christian and sensible view of the matter; but it can scarcely have happened once in our whole diplomatic history, that a minister can have had time to overcome his first rude and ignorant prejudice against the country of his mission; and if there were any suspicion of his having done so, it would be held abundantly sufficient ground for his recall. I like Mr. ------, a good-hearted, sensible old man. J----- and I returned along the Champs Elysees, and, crossing the Seine, kept on our way by the river's brink, looking at the titles of books on the long lines of stalls that extend between the bridges. Novels, fairy-tales, dream books, treatises of behavior and etiquette, collections of bon-mots and of songs, were interspersed with volumes in the old style of calf and gilt binding, the works of the classics of French literature. A good many persons, of the poor classes, and of those apparently well to do, stopped transitorily to look at these books. On the other side of the street was a range of tall edifices with shops beneath, and the quick stir of French life hurrying, and babbling, and swarming along the sidewalk. We passed two or three bridges, occurring at short intervals, and at last we recrossed the Seine by a bridge which oversteps the river, from a point near the National Institute, and reaches the other side, not far from the Louvre. . . . . Though the day was so disagreeable, we thought it best not to lose the remainder of it, and therefore set out to visit the Cathedral of Notre Dame. We took a fiacre in the Place de Carousel, and drove to the door. On entering, we found the interior miserably shut off from view by the stagings erected for the purpose of repairs. Penetrating from the nave towards the chancel, an official personage signified to us that we must first purchase a ticket for each grown person, at the price of half a franc each. This expenditure admitted us into the sacristy, where we were taken in charge by a guide, who came down upon us with an avalanche or cataract of French, descriptive of a great many treasures reposited in this chapel. I understood hardly more than one word in ten, but gathered doubtfully that a bullet which was shown us was the one that killed the late Archbishop of Paris, on the floor of the cathedral. [But this was a mistake. It was the archbishop who was killed in the insurrection of 1848. Two joints of his backbone were also shown.] Also, that some gorgeously embroidered vestments, which he drew forth, had been used at the coronation of Napoleon I. There were two large, full-length portraits hanging aloft in the sacristy, and a gold or silver gilt, or, at all events, gilt image of the Virgin, as large as life, standing on a pedestal. The guide had much to say about these, but, understanding him so imperfectly, I have nothing to record. The guide's supervision of us seemed not to extend beyond this sacristy, on quitting which he gave us permission to go where we pleased, only intimating a hope that we would not forget him; so I gave him half a franc, though thereby violating an inhibition on the printed ticket of entrance. We had been much disappointed at first by the apparently narrow limits of the interior of this famous church; but now, as we made our way round the choir, gazing into chapel after chapel, each with its painted window, its crucifix, its pictures, its confessional, and afterwards came back into the nave, where arch rises above arch to the lofty roof, we came to the conclusion that it was very sumptuous. It is the greatest of pities that its grandeur and solemnity should just now be so infinitely marred by the workmen's boards, timber, and ladders occupying the whole centre of the edifice, and screening all its best effects. It seems to have been already most richly ornamented, its roof being painted, and the capitals of the pillars gilded, and their shafts illuminated in fresco; and no doubt it will shine out gorgeously when all the repairs and adornments shall be completed. Even now it gave to my actual sight what I have often tried to imagine in my visits to the English cathedrals,-- the pristine glory of those edifices, when they stood glowing with gold and picture, fresh from the architects' and adorners' hands. The interior loftiness of Notre Dame, moreover, gives it a sublimity which would swallow up anything that might look gewgawy in its ornamentation, were we to consider it window by window, or pillar by pillar. It is an advantage of these vast edifices, rising over us and spreading about us in such a firmamental way, that we cannot spoil them by any pettiness of our own, but that they receive (or absorb) our pettiness into their own immensity. Every little fantasy finds its place and propriety in them, like a flower on the earth's broad bosom. When we emerged from the cathedral, we found it beginning to rain or snow, or both; and, as we had dismissed our fiacre at the door, and could find no other, we were at a loss what to do. We stood a few moments on the steps of the Hotel Dieu, looking up at the front of Notre Dame, with its twin towers, and its three deep-pointed arches, piercing through a great thickness of stone, and throwing a cavern-like gloom around these entrances. The front is very rich. Though so huge, and all of gray stone, it is carved and fretted with statues and innumerable devices, as cunningly as any ivory casket in which relics are kept; but its size did not so much impress me. . . . . Hotel de Louvre, January 12th.--This has been a bright day as regards weather; but I have done little or nothing worth recording. After breakfast, I set out in quest of the consul, and found him up a court, at 51 Rue Caumartin, in an office rather smaller, I think, than mine at Liverpool; but, to say the truth, a little better furnished. I was received in the outer apartment by an elderly, brisk-looking man, in whose air, respectful and subservient, and yet with a kind of authority in it, I recognized the vice-consul. He introduced me to Mr. ------, who sat writing in an inner room; a very gentlemanly, courteous, cool man of the world, whom I should take to be an excellent person for consul at Paris. He tells me that he has resided here some years, although his occupancy of the consulate dates only from November last. Consulting him respecting my passport, he gave me what appear good reasons why I should get all the necessary vises here; for example, that the vise of a minister carries more weight than that of a consul; and especially that an Austrian consul will never vise a passport unless he sees his minister's name upon it. Mr. ------ has travelled much in Italy, and ought to be able to give me sound advice. His opinion was, that at this season of the year I had better go by steamer to Civita Veechia, instead of landing at Leghorn, and thence journeying to Rome. On this point I shall decide when the time comes. As I left the office the vice-consul informed me that there was a charge of five francs and some sous for the consul's vise, a tax which surprised me,--the whole business of passports having been taken from consuls before I quitted office, and the consular fee having been annulled even earlier. However, no doubt Mr. ------ had a fair claim to my five francs; but, really, it is not half so pleasant to pay a consular fee as it used to be to receive it. Afterwards I walked to Notre Dame, the rich front of which I viewed with more attention than yesterday. There are whole histories, carved in stone figures, within the vaulted arches of the three entrances in this west front, and twelve apostles in a row above, and as much other sculpture as would take a month to see. We then walked quite round it, but I had no sense of immensity from it, not even that of great height, as from many of the cathedrals in England. It stands very near the Seine; indeed, if I mistake not, it is on an island formed by two branches of the river. Behind it, is what seems to be a small public ground (or garden, if a space entirely denuded of grass or other green thing, except a few trees, can be called so), with benches, and a monument in the midst. This quarter of the city looks old, and appears to be inhabited by poor people, and to be busied about small and petty affairs; the most picturesque business that I saw being that of the old woman who sells crucifixes of pearl and of wood at the cathedral door. We bought two of these yesterday. I must again speak of the horrible muddiness, not only of this part of the city, but of all Paris, so far as I have traversed it to-day. My ways, since I came to Europe, have often lain through nastiness, but I never before saw a pavement so universally overspread with mud-padding as that of Paris. It is difficult to imagine where so much filth can come from. After dinner I walked through the gardens of the Tuileries; but as dusk was coming on, and as I was afraid of being shut up within the iron railing, I did not have time to examine them particularly. There are wide, intersecting walks, fountains, broad basins, and many statues; but almost the whole surface of the gardens is barren earth, instead of the verdure that would beautify an English pleasure-ground of this sort. In the summer it has doubtless an agreeable shade; but at this season the naked branches look meagre, and sprout from slender trunks. Like the trees in the Champs Elysees, those, I presume, in the gardens of the Tuileries need renewing every few years. The same is true of the human race,--families becoming extinct after a generation or two of residence in Paris. Nothing really thrives here; man and vegetables have but an artificial life, like flowers stuck in a little mould, but never taking root. I am quite tired of Paris, and long for a home more than ever. MARSEILLES. Hotel d'Angleterre, January 15th.--On Tuesday morning, (12th) we took our departure from the Hotel de Louvre. It is a most excellent and perfectly ordered hotel, and I have not seen a more magnificent hall, in any palace, than the dining-saloon, with its profuse gilding, and its ceiling, painted in compartments; so that when the chandeliers are all alight, it looks a fit place for princes to banquet in, and not very fit for the few Americans whom I saw scattered at its long tables. By the by, as we drove to the railway, we passed through the public square, where the Bastille formerly stood; and in the centre of it now stands a column, surmounted by a golden figure of Mercury (I think), which seems to be just on the point of casting itself from a gilt ball into the air. This statue is so buoyant, that the spectator feels quite willing to trust it to the viewless element, being as sure that it would be borne up as that a bird would fly. Our first day's journey was wholly without interest, through a country entirely flat, and looking wretchedly brown and barren. There were rows of trees, very slender, very prim and formal; there was ice wherever there happened to be any water to form it; there were occasional villages, compact little streets, or masses of stone or plastered cottages, very dirty and with gable ends and earthen roofs; and a succession of this same landscape was all that we saw, whenever we rubbed away the congelation of our breath from the carriage windows. Thus we rode on, all day long, from eleven o'clock, with hardly a five minutes' stop, till long after dark, when we came to Dijon, where there was a halt of twenty-five minutes for dinner. Then we set forth again, and rumbled forward, through cold and darkness without, until we reached Lyons at about ten o'clock. We left our luggage at the railway station, and took an omnibus for the Hotel de Provence, which we chose at a venture, among a score of other hotels. As this hotel was a little off the direct route of the omnibus, the driver set us down at the corner of a street, and pointed to some lights, which he said designated the Hotel do Provence; and thither we proceeded, all seven of us, taking along a few carpet-bags and shawls, our equipage for the night. The porter of the hotel met us near its doorway, and ushered us through an arch, into the inner quadrangle, and then up some old and worn steps,--very broad, and appearing to be the principal staircase. At the first landing-place, an old woman and a waiter or two received us; and we went up two or three more flights of the same broad and worn stone staircases. What we could see of the house looked very old, and had the musty odor with which I first became acquainted at Chester. After ascending to the proper level, we were conducted along a corridor, paved with octagonal earthen tiles; on one side were windows, looking into the courtyard, on the other doors opening into the sleeping-chambers. The corridor was of immense length, and seemed still to lengthen itself before us, as the glimmer of our conductor's candle went farther and farther into the obscurity. Our own chamber was at a vast distance along this passage; those of the rest of the party were on the hither side; but all this immense suite of rooms appeared to communicate by doors from one to another, like the chambers through which the reader wanders at midnight, in Mrs. Radcliffe's romances. And they were really splendid rooms, though of an old fashion, lofty, spacious, with floors of oak or other wood, inlaid in squares and crosses, and waxed till they were slippery, but without carpets. Our own sleeping-room had a deep fireplace, in which we ordered a fire, and asked if there were not some saloon already warmed, where we could get a cup of tea. Hereupon the waiter led us back along the endless corridor, and down the old stone staircases, and out into the quadrangle, and journeyed with us along an exterior arcade, and finally threw open the door of the salle a manger, which proved to be a room of lofty height, with a vaulted roof, a stone floor, and interior spaciousness sufficient for a baronial hall, the whole bearing the same aspect of times gone by, that characterized the rest of the house. There were two or three tables covered with white cloth, and we sat down at one of them and had our tea. Finally we wended back to our sleeping-rooms,--a considerable journey, so endless seemed the ancient hotel. I should like to know its history. The fire made our great chamber look comfortable, and the fireplace threw out the heat better than the little square hole over which we cowered in our saloon at the Hotel de Louvre. . . . . In the morning we began our preparations for starting at ten. Issuing into the corridor, I found a soldier of the line, pacing to and fro there as sentinel. Another was posted in another corridor, into which I wandered by mistake; another stood in the inner court-yard, and another at the porte-cochere. They were not there the night before, and I know not whence nor why they came, unless that some officer of rank may have taken up his quarters at the hotel. Miss M------ says she heard at Paris, that a considerable number of troops had recently been drawn together at Lyons, in consequence of symptoms of disaffection that have recently shown themselves here. Before breakfast I went out to catch a momentary glimpse of the city. The street in which our hotel stands is near a large public square; in the centre is a bronze equestrian statue of Louis XIV.; and the square itself is called the Place de Louis le Grand. I wonder where this statue hid itself while the Revolution was raging in Lyons, and when the guillotine, perhaps, stood on that very spot. The square was surrounded by stately buildings, but had what seemed to be barracks for soldiers,--at any rate, mean little huts, deforming its ample space; and a soldier was on guard before the statue of Louis le Grand. It was a cold, misty morning, and a fog lay throughout the area, so that I could scarcely see from one side of it to the other. Returning towards our hotel, I saw that it had an immense front, along which ran, in gigantic letters, its title,-- HOTEL DE PROVENCE ET DES AMBASSADEURS. The excellence of the hotel lay rather in the faded pomp of its sleeping-rooms, and the vastness of its salle a manger, than in anything very good to eat or drink. We left it, after a poor breakfast, and went to the railway station. Looking at the mountainous heap of our luggage the night before, we had missed a great carpet-bag; and we now found that Miss M------'s trunk had been substituted for it, and, there being the proper number of packages as registered, it was impossible to convince the officials that anything was wrong. We, of course, began to generalize forthwith, and pronounce the incident to be characteristic of French morality. They love a certain system and external correctness, but do not trouble themselves to be deeply in the right; and Miss M------ suggested that there used to be parallel cases in the French Revolution, when, so long as the assigned number were sent out of prison to be guillotined, the jailer did not much care whether they were the persons designated by the tribunal or not. At all events, we could get no satisfaction about the carpet-bag, and shall very probably be compelled to leave Marseilles without it. This day's ride was through a far more picturesque country than that we saw yesterday. Heights began to rise imminent above our way, with sometimes a ruined castle wall upon them; on our left, the rail-track kept close to the hills; on the other side there was the level bottom of a valley, with heights descending upon it a mile or a few miles away. Farther off we could see blue hills, shouldering high above the intermediate ones, and themselves worthy to be called mountains. These hills arranged themselves in beautiful groups, affording openings between them, and vistas of what lay beyond, and gorges which I suppose held a great deal of romantic scenery. By and by a river made its appearance, flowing swiftly in the same direction that we were travelling,--a beautiful and cleanly river, with white pebbly shores, and itself of a peculiar blue. It rushed along very fast, sometimes whitening over shallow descents, and even in its calmer intervals its surface was all covered with whirls and eddies, indicating that it dashed onward in haste. I do not now know the name of this river, but have set it down as the "arrowy Rhone." It kept us company a long while, and I think we did not part with it as long as daylight remained. I have seldom seen hill-scenery that struck me more than some that we saw to-day, and the old feudal towers and old villages at their feet; and the old churches, with spires shaped just like extinguishers, gave it an interest accumulating from many centuries past. Still going southward, the vineyards began to border our track, together with what I at first took to be orchards, but soon found were plantations of olive-trees, which grow to a much larger size than I supposed, and look almost exactly like very crabbed and eccentric apple-trees. Neither they nor the vineyards add anything to the picturesqueness of the landscape. On the whole, I should have been delighted with all this scenery if it had not looked so bleak, barren, brown, and bare; so like the wintry New England before the snow has fallen. It was very cold, too; ice along the borders of streams, even among the vineyards and olives. The houses are of rather a different shape here than, farther northward, their roofs being not nearly so sloping. They are almost invariably covered with white plaster; the farm-houses have their outbuildings in connection with the dwelling,--the whole surrounding three sides of a quadrangle. We travelled far into the night, swallowed a cold and hasty dinner at Avignon, and reached Marseilles sorely wearied, at about eleven o'clock. We took a cab to the Hotel d'Angleterre (two cabs, to be quite accurate), and find it a very poor place. To go back a little, as the sun went down, we looked out of the window of our railway carriage, and saw a sky that reminded us of what we used to see day after day in America, and what we have not seen since; and, after sunset, the horizon burned and glowed with rich crimson and orange lustre, looking at once warm and cold. After it grew dark, the stars brightened, and Miss M------ from her window pointed out some of the planets to the children, she being as familiar with them as a gardener with his flowers. They were as bright as diamonds. We had a wretched breakfast, and J----- and I then went to the railway station to see about our luggage. On our walk back we went astray, passing by a triumphal arch, erected by the Marseillais, in honor of Louis Napoleon; but we inquired our way of old women and soldiers, who were very kind and courteous,--especially the latter,--and were directed aright. We came to a large, oblong, public place, set with trees, but devoid of grass, like all public places in France. In the middle of it was a bronze statue of an ecclesiastical personage, stretching forth his hands in the attitude of addressing the people or of throwing a benediction over them. It was some archbishop, who had distinguished himself by his humanity and devotedness during the plague of 1720. At the moment of our arrival the piazza was quite thronged with people, who seemed to be talking amongst themselves with considerable earnestness, although without any actual excitement. They were smoking cigars; and we judged that they were only loitering here for the sake of the sunshine, having no fires at home, and nothing to do. Some looked like gentlemen, others like peasants; most of them I should have taken for the lazzaroni of this Southern city,--men with cloth caps, like the classic liberty-cap, or with wide-awake hats. There were one or two women of the lower classes, without bonnets, the elder ones with white caps, the younger bareheaded. I have hardly seen a lady in Marseilles; and I suspect, it being a commercial city, and dirty to the last degree, ill-built, narrow-streeted, and sometimes pestilential, there are few or no families of gentility resident here. Returning to the hotel, we found the rest of the party ready to go out; so we all issued forth in a body, and inquired our way to the telegraph-office, in order to send my message about the carpet-bag. In a street through which we had to pass (and which seemed to be the Exchange, or its precincts), there was a crowd even denser, yes, much denser, than that which we saw in the square of the archbishop's statue; and each man was talking to his neighbor in a vivid, animated way, as if business were very brisk to-day. At the telegraph-office, we discovered the cause that had brought out these many people. There had been attempts on the Emperor's life,-- unsuccessful, as they seem fated to be, though some mischief was done to those near him. I rather think the good people of Marseilles were glad of the attempt, as an item of news and gossip, and did not very greatly care whether it were successful or no. It seemed to have roused their vivacity rather than their interest. The only account I have seen of it was in the brief public despatch from the Syndic (or whatever he be) of Paris to the chief authority of Marseilles, which was printed and posted in various conspicuous places. The only chance of knowing the truth with any fulness of detail would be to come across an English paper. We have had a banner hoisted half-mast in front of our hotel to-day as a token, the head-waiter tells me, of sympathy and sorrow for the General and other persons who were slain by this treasonable attempt. J----- and I now wandered by ourselves along a circular line of quays, having, on one side of us, a thick forest of masts, while, on the other, was a sweep of shops, bookstalls, sailors' restaurants and drinking-houses, fruit-sellers, candy-women, and all manner of open-air dealers and pedlers; little children playing, and jumping the rope, and such a babble and bustle as I never saw or heard before; the sun lying along the whole sweep, very hot, and evidently very grateful to those who basked in it. Whenever I passed into the shade, immediately from too warm I became too cold. The sunshine was like hot air; the shade, like the touch of cold steel,--sharp, hard, yet exhilarating. From the broad street of the quays, narrow, thread-like lanes pierced up between the edifices, calling themselves streets, yet so narrow, that a person in the middle could almost touch the houses on either hand. They ascended steeply, bordered on each side by long, contiguous walls of high houses, and from the time of their first being built, could never have had a gleam of sunshine in them,--always in shadow, always unutterably nasty, and often pestiferous. The nastiness which I saw in Marseilles exceeds my heretofore experience. There is dirt in the hotel, and everywhere else; and it evidently troubles nobody,--no more than if all the people were pigs in a pigsty. . . . . Passing by all this sweep of quays, J----- and I ascended to an elevated walk, overlooking the harbor, and far beyond it; for here we had our first view of the Mediterranean, blue as heaven, and bright with sunshine. It was a bay, widening forth into the open deep, and bordered with heights, and bold, picturesque headlands, some of which had either fortresses or convents on them. Several boats and one brig were under sail, making their way towards the port. I have never seen a finer sea-view. Behind the town, there seemed to be a mountainous landscape, imperfectly visible, in consequence of the intervening edifices. THE MEDITERRANEAN SEA. Steamer Calabrese, January 17th.--If I had remained at Marseilles, I might have found many peculiarities and characteristics of that Southern city to notice; but I fear that these will not be recorded if I leave them till I touch the soil of Italy. Indeed, I doubt whether there be anything really worth recording in the little distinctions between one nation and another; at any rate, after the first novelty is over, new things seem equally commonplace with the old. There is but one little interval when the mind is in such a state that it can catch the fleeting aroma of a new scene. And it is always so much pleasanter to enjoy this delicious newness than to attempt arresting it, that it requires great force of will to insist with one's self upon sitting down to write. I can do nothing with Marseilles, especially here on the Mediterranean, long after nightfall, and when the steamer is pitching in a pretty lively way. (Later.)--I walked out with J----- yesterday morning, and reached the outskirts of the city, whence we could see the bold and picturesque heights that surround Marseilles as with a semicircular wall. They rise into peaks, and the town, being on their lower slope, descends from them towards the sea with a gradual sweep. Adown the streets that descend these declivities come little rivulets, running along over the pavement, close to the sidewalks, as over a pebbly bed; and though they look vastly like kennels, I saw women washing linen in these streams, and others dipping up the water for household purposes. The women appear very much in public at Marseilles. In the squares and places you see half a dozen of them together, sitting in a social circle on the bottoms of upturned baskets, knitting, talking, and enjoying the public sunshine, as if it were their own household fire. Not one in a thousand of them, probably, ever has a household fire for the purpose of keeping themselves warm, but only to do their little cookery; and when there is sunshine they take advantage of it, and in the short season of rain and frost they shrug their shoulders, put on what warm garments they have, and get through the winter somewhat as grasshoppers and butterflies do,--being summer insects like then. This certainly is a very keen and cutting air, sharp as a razor, and I saw ice along the borders of the little rivulets almost at noonday. To be sure, it is midwinter, and yet in the sunshine I found myself uncomfortably warm, but in the shade the air was like the touch of death itself. I do not like the climate. There are a great number of public places in Marseilles, several of which are adorned with statues or fountains, or triumphal arches or columns, and set out with trees, and otherwise furnished as a kind of drawing-rooms, where the populace may meet together and gossip. I never before heard from human lips anything like this bustle and babble, this thousand-fold talk which you hear all round about you in the crowd of a public square; so entirely different is it from the dulness of a crowd in England, where, as a rule, everybody is silent, and hardly half a dozen monosyllables will come from the lips of a thousand people. In Marseilles, on the contrary, a stream of unbroken talk seems to bubble from the lips of every individual. A great many interesting scenes take place in these squares. From the window of our hotel (which looked into the Place Royale) I saw a juggler displaying his art to a crowd, who stood in a regular square about him, none pretending to press nearer than the prescribed limit. While the juggler wrought his miracles his wife supplied him with his magic materials out of a box; and when the exhibition was over she packed up the white cloth with which his table was covered, together with cups, cards, balls, and whatever else, and they took their departure. I have been struck with the idle curiosity, and, at the same time, the courtesy and kindness of the populace of Marseilles, and I meant to exemplify it by recording how Miss S------ and I attracted their notice, and became the centre of a crowd of at least fifty of them while doing no more remarkable thing than settling with a cab-driver. But really this pitch and swell is getting too bad, and I shall go to bed, as the best chance of keeping myself in an equable state. ROME. 37 Palazzo Larazani, Via Porta Pinciana, January 24th.--We left Marseilles in the Neapolitan steamer Calabrese, as noticed above, a week ago this morning. There was no fault to be found with the steamer, which was very clean and comfortable, contrary to what we had understood beforehand; except for the coolness of the air (and I know not that this was greater than that of the Atlantic in July), our voyage would have been very pleasant; but for myself, I enjoyed nothing, having a cold upon me, or a low fever, or something else that took the light and warmth out of everything. I went to bed immediately after my last record, and was rocked to sleep pleasantly enough by the billows of the Mediterranean; and, coming on deck about sunrise next morning, found the steamer approaching Genoa. We saw the city, lying at the foot of a range of hills, and stretching a little way up their slopes, the hills sweeping round it in the segment of a circle, and looking like an island rising abruptly out of the sea; for no connection with the mainland was visible on either side. There was snow scattered on their summits and streaking their sides a good way down. They looked bold, and barren, and brown, except where the snow whitened them. The city did not impress me with much expectation of size or splendor. Shortly after coming into the port our whole party landed, and we found ourselves at once in the midst of a crowd of cab-drivers, hotel-runnets, and coin missionaires, who assaulted us with a volley of French, Italian, and broken English, which beat pitilessly about our ears; for really it seemed as if all the dictionaries in the world had been torn to pieces, and blown around us by a hurricane. Such a pother! We took a commissionaire, a respectable-looking man, in a cloak, who said his name was Salvator Rosa; and he engaged to show us whatever was interesting in Genoa. In the first place, he took us through narrow streets to an old church, the name of which I have forgotten, and, indeed, its peculiar features; but I know that I found it pre-eminently magnificent,--its whole interior being incased in polished marble, of various kinds and colors, its ceiling painted, and its chapels adorned with pictures. However, this church was dazzled out of sight by the Cathedral of San Lorenzo, to which we were afterwards conducted, whose exterior front is covered with alternate slabs of black and white marble, which were brought, either in whole or in part, from Jerusalem. Within, there was a prodigious richness of precious marbles, and a pillar, if I mistake not, from Solomon's Temple; and a picture of the Virgin by St. Luke; and others (rather more intrinsically valuable, I imagine), by old masters, set in superb marble frames, within the arches of the chapels. I used to try to imagine how the English cathedrals must have looked in their primeval glory, before the Reformation, and before the whitewash of Cromwell's time had overlaid their marble pillars; but I never imagined anything at all approaching what my eyes now beheld: this sheen of polished and variegated marble covering every inch of its walls; this glow of brilliant frescos all over the roof, and up within the domes; these beautiful pictures by great masters, painted for the places which they now occupied, and making an actual portion of the edifice; this wealth of silver, gold, and gems, that adorned the shrines of the saints, before which wax candles burned, and were kept burning, I suppose, from year's end to year's end; in short, there is no imagining nor remembering a hundredth part of the rich details. And even the cathedral (though I give it up as indescribable) was nothing at all in comparison with a church to which the commissionaire afterwards led us; a church that had been built four or five hundred years ago, by a pirate, in expiation of his sins, and out of the profit of his rapine. This last edifice, in its interior, absolutely shone with burnished gold, and glowed with pictures; its walls were a quarry of precious stones, so valuable were the marbles out of which they were wrought; its columns and pillars were of inconceivable costliness; its pavement was a mosaic of wonderful beauty, and there were four twisted pillars made out of stalactites. Perhaps the best way to form some dim conception of it is to fancy a little casket, inlaid inside with precious stones, so that there shall not a hair's-breadth be left unprecious-stoned, and then to conceive this little bit of a casket iucreased to the magnitude of a great church, without losing anything of the excessive glory that was compressed into its original small compass, but all its pretty lustre made sublime by the consequent immensity. At any rate, nobody who has not seen a church like this can imagine what a gorgeous religion it was that reared it. In the cathedral, and in all the churches, we saw priests and many persons kneeling at their devotions; and our Salvator Rosa, whenever we passed a chapel or shrine, failed not to touch the pavement with one knee, crossing himself the while; and once, when a priest was going through some form of devotion, he stopped a few moments to share in it. He conducted us, too, to the Balbi Palace, the stateliest and most sumptuous residence, but not more so than another which he afterwards showed us, nor perhaps than many others which exist in Genoa, THE SUPERB. The painted ceilings in these palaces are a glorious adornment; the walls of the saloons, incrusted with various-colored marbles, give an idea of splendor which I never gained from anything else. The floors, laid in mosaic, seem too precious to tread upon. In the royal palace, many of the floors were of various woods, inlaid by an English artist, and they looked like a magnification of some exquisite piece of Tunbridge ware; but, in all respects, this palace was inferior to others which we saw. I say nothing of the immense pictorial treasures which hung upon the walls of all the rooms through which we passed; for I soon grew so weary of admirable things, that I could neither enjoy nor understand them. My receptive faculty is very limited, and when the utmost of its small capacity is full, I become perfectly miserable, and the more so the better worth seeing are the things I am forced to reject. I do not know a greater misery; to see sights, after such repletion, is to the mind what it would be to the body to have dainties forced down the throat long after the appetite was satiated. All this while, whenever we emerged into the vaultlike streets, we were wretchedly cold. The commissionaire took us to a sort of pleasure-garden, occupying the ascent of a hill, and presenting seven different views of the city, from as many stations. One of the objects pointed out to us was a large yellow house, on a hillside, in the outskirts of Genoa, which was formerly inhabited for six months by Charles Dickens. Looking down from the elevated part of the pleasure-gardens, we saw orange-trees beneath us, with the golden fruit hanging upon them, though their trunks were muffled in straw; and, still lower down, there was ice and snow. Gladly (so far as I myself was concerned) we dismissed the commissionaire, after he had brought us to the hotel of the Cross of Malta, where we dined; needlessly, as it proved, for another dinner awaited us, after our return on board the boat. We set sail for Leghorn before dark, and I retired early, feeling still more ill from my cold than the night before. The next morning we were in the crowded port of Leghorn. We all went ashore, with some idea of taking the rail for Pisa, which is within an hour's distance, and might have been seen in time for our departure with the steamer. But a necessary visit to a banker's, and afterwards some unnecessary formalities about our passports, kept us wandering through the streets nearly all day; and we saw nothing in the slightest degree interesting, except the tomb of Smollett, in the burial-place attached to the English Chapel. It is surrounded by an iron railing, and marked by a slender obelisk of white marble, the pattern of which is many times repeated over surrounding graves. We went into a Jewish synagogue,--the interior cased in marbles, and surrounded with galleries, resting upon arches above arches. There were lights burning at the altar, and it looked very like a Christian church; but it was dirty, and had an odor not of sanctity. In Leghorn, as everywhere else, we were chilled to the heart, except when the sunshine fell directly upon us; and we returned to the steamer with a feeling as if we were getting back to our home; for this life of wandering makes a three days' residence in one place seem like home. We found several new passengers on board, and among others a monk, in a long brown frock of woollen cloth, with an immense cape, and a little black covering over his tonsure. He was a tall figure, with a gray beard, and might have walked, just as he stood, out of a picture by one of the old masters. This holy person addressed me very affably in Italian; but we found it impossible to hold much conversation. The evening was beautiful, with a bright young moonlight, not yet sufficiently powerful to overwhelm the stars, and as we walked the deck, Miss M------ showed the children the constellations, and told their names. J----- made a slight mistake as to one of them, pointing it out to me as "O'Brien's belt!" Elba was presently in view, and we might have seen many other interesting points, had it not been for our steamer's practice of resting by day, and only pursuing its voyage by night. The next morning we found ourselves in the harbor of Civita Vecchia, and, going ashore with our luggage, went through a blind turmoil with custom-house officers, inspectors of passports, soldiers, and vetturino people. My wife and I strayed a little through Civita Vecchia, and found its streets narrow, like clefts in a rock (which seems to be the fashion of Italian towns), and smelling nastily. I had made a bargain with a vetturino to send us to Rome in a carriage, with four horses, in eight hours; and as soon as the custom-house and passport people would let us, we started, lumbering slowly along with our mountain of luggage. We had heard rumors of robberies lately committed on this route; especially of a Nova Scotia bishop, who was detained on the road an hour and a half, and utterly pillaged; and certainly there was not a single mile of the dreary and desolate country over which we passed, where we might not have been robbed and murdered with impunity. Now and then, at long distances, we came to a structure that was either a prison, a tavern, or a barn, but did not look very much like either, being strongly built of stone, with iron-grated windows, and of ancient and rusty aspect. We kept along by the seashore a great part of the way, and stopped to feed our horses at a village, the wretched street of which stands close along the shore of the Mediterranean, its loose, dark sand being made nasty by the vicinity. The vetturino cheated us, one of the horses giving out, as he must have known it would do, half-way on our journey; and we staggered on through cold and darkness, and peril, too, if the banditti were not a myth,-- reaching Rome not much before midnight. I perpetrated unheard-of briberies on the custom-house officers at the gates, and was permitted to pass through and establish myself at Spillman's Hotel, the only one where we could gain admittance, and where we have been half frozen ever since. And this is sunny Italy, and genial Rome! Palazzo Larazani, Via Porta Pinciana, February 3d.--We have been in Rome a fortnight to-day, or rather at eleven o'clock to-night; and I have seldom or never spent so wretched a time anywhere. Our impressions were very unfortunate, arriving at midnight, half frozen in the wintry rain, and being received into a cold and cheerless hotel, where we shivered during two or three days; meanwhile seeking lodgings among the sunless, dreary alleys which are called streets in Rome. One cold, bright day after another has pierced me to the heart, and cut me in twain as with a sword, keen and sharp, and poisoned at point and edge. I did not think that cold weather could have made me so very miserable. Having caught a feverish influenza, I was really glad of being muffled up comfortably in the fever heat. The atmosphere certainly has a peculiar quality of malignity. After a day or two we settled ourselves in a suite of ten rooms, comprehending one flat, or what is called the second piano of this house. The rooms, thus far, have been very uncomfortable, it being impossible to warm them by means of the deep, old-fashioned, inartificial fireplaces, unless we had the great logs of a New England forest to burn in them; so I have sat in my corner by the fireside with more clothes on than I ever wore before, and my thickest great-coat over all. In the middle of the day I generally venture out for an hour or two, but have only once been warm enough even in the sunshine, and out of the sun never at any time. I understand now the force of that story of Diogenes when he asked the Conqueror, as the only favor he could do him, to stand out of his sunshine, there being such a difference in these Southern climes of Europe between sun and shade. If my wits had not been too much congealed, and my fingers too numb, I should like to have kept a minute journal of my feelings and impressions during the past fortnight. It would have shown modern Rome in an aspect in which it has never yet been depicted. But I have now grown somewhat acclimated, and the first freshness of my discomfort has worn off, so that I shall never be able to express how I dislike the place, and how wretched I have been in it; and soon, I suppose, warmer weather will come, and perhaps reconcile me to Rome against my will. Cold, narrow lanes, between tall, ugly, mean-looking whitewashed houses, sour bread, pavements most uncomfortable to the feet, enormous prices for poor living; beggars, pickpockets, ancient temples and broken monuments, and clothes hanging to dry about them; French soldiers, monks, and priests of every degree; a shabby population, smoking bad cigars,--these would have been some of the points of my description. Of course there are better and truer things to be said. . . . . It would be idle for me to attempt any sketches of these famous sites and edifices,--St. Peter's, for example,--which have been described by a thousand people, though none of them have ever given me an idea of what sort of place Rome is. . . . . The Coliseum was very much what I had preconceived it, though I was not prepared to find it turned into a sort of Christian church, with a pulpit on the verge of the open space. . . . . The French soldiers, who keep guard within it, as in other public places in Rome, have an excellent opportunity to secure the welfare of their souls. February 7th.--I cannot get fairly into the current of my journal since we arrived, and already I perceive that the nice peculiarities of Roman life are passing from my notice before I have recorded them. It is a very great pity. During the past week I have plodded daily, for an hour or two, through the narrow, stony streets, that look worse than the worst backside lanes of any other city; indescribably ugly and disagreeable they are, . . . . without sidewalks, but provided with a line of larger square stones, set crosswise to each other, along which there is somewhat less uneasy walking. . . . . Ever and anon, even in the meanest streets, --though, generally speaking, one can hardly be called meaner than another,--we pass a palace, extending far along the narrow way on a line with the other houses, but distinguished by its architectural windows, iron-barred on the basement story, and by its portal arch, through which we have glimpses, sometimes of a dirty court-yard, or perhaps of a clean, ornamented one, with trees, a colonnade, a fountain, and a statue in the vista; though, more likely, it resembles the entrance to a stable, and may, perhaps, really be one. The lower regions of palaces come to strange uses in Rome. . . . . In the basement story of the Barberini Palace a regiment of French soldiers (or soldiers of some kind [we find them to be retainers of the Barberini family, not French]) seems to be quartered, while no doubt princes have magnificent domiciles above. Be it palace or whatever other dwelling, the inmates climb through rubbish often to the comforts, such as they may be, that await them above. I vainly try to get down upon paper the dreariness, the ugliness, shabbiness, un-home-likeness of a Roman street. It is also to be said that you cannot go far in any direction without coming to a piazza, which is sometimes little more than a widening and enlarging of the dingy street, with the lofty facade of a church or basilica on one side, and a fountain in the centre, where the water squirts out of some fantastic piece of sculpture into a great stone basin. These fountains are often of immense size and most elaborate design. . . . . There are a great many of these fountain-shapes, constructed under the orders of one pope or another, in all parts of the city; and only the very simplest, such as a jet springing from a broad marble or porphyry vase, and falling back into it again, are really ornamental. If an antiquary were to accompany me through the streets, no doubt he would point out ten thousand interesting objects that I now pass over unnoticed, so general is the surface of plaster and whitewash; but often I can see fragments of antiquity built into the walls, or perhaps a church that was a Roman temple, or a basement of ponderous stones that were laid above twenty centuries ago. It is strange how our ideas of what antiquity is become altered here in Rome; the sixteenth century, in which many of the churches and fountains seem to have been built or re-edified, seems close at hand, even like our own days; a thousand years, or the days of the latter empire, is but a modern date, and scarcely interests us; and nothing is really venerable of a more recent epoch than the reign of Constantine. And the Egyptian obelisks that stand in several of the piazzas put even the Augustan or Republican antiquities to shame. I remember reading in a New York newspaper an account of one of the public buildings of that city,--a relic of "the olden time," the writer called it; for it was erected in 1825! I am glad I saw the castles and Gothic churches and cathedrals of England before visiting Rome, or I never could have felt that delightful reverence for their gray and ivy-hung antiquity after seeing these so much older remains. But, indeed, old things are not so beautiful in this dry climate and clear atmosphere as in moist England. . . . . Whatever beauty there may be in a Roman ruin is the remnant of what was beautiful originally; whereas an English ruin is more beautiful often in its decay than even it was in its primal strength. If we ever build such noble structures as these Roman ones, we can have just as good ruins, after two thousand years, in the United States; but we never can have a Furness Abbey or a Kenilworth. The Corso, and perhaps some other streets, does not deserve all the vituperation which I have bestowed on the generality of Roman vias, though the Corso is narrow, not averaging more than nine paces, if so much, from sidewalk to sidewalk. But palace after palace stands along almost its whole extent,--not, however, that they make such architectural show on the street as palaces should. The enclosed courts were perhaps the only parts of these edifices which the founders cared to enrich architecturally. I think Linlithgow Palace, of which I saw the ruins during my last tour in Scotland, was built, by an architect who had studied these Roman palaces. There was never any idea of domestic comfort, or of what we include in the name of home, at all implicated in such structures, they being generally built by wifeless and childless churchmen for the display of pictures and statuary in galleries and long suites of rooms. I have not yet fairly begun the sight-seeing of Rome. I have been four or five times to St. Peter's, and always with pleasure, because there is such a delightful, summerlike warmth the moment we pass beneath the heavy, padded leather curtains that protect the entrances. It is almost impossible not to believe that this genial temperature is the result of furnace-heat, but, really, it is the warmth of last summer, which will be included within those massive walls, and in that vast immensity of space, till, six months hence, this winter's chill will just have made its way thither. It would be an excellent plan for a valetudinarian to lodge during the winter in St. Peter's, perhaps establishing his household in one of the papal tombs. I become, I think, more sensible of the size of St. Peter's, but am as yet far from being overwhelmed by it. It is not, as one expects, so big as all out of doors, nor is its dome so immense as that of the firmament. It looked queer, however, the other day, to see a little ragged boy, the very least of human things, going round and kneeling at shrine after shrine, and a group of children standing on tiptoe to reach the vase of holy water. . . . . On coming out of St. Peter's at my last visit, I saw a great sheet of ice around the fountain on the right hand, and some little Romans awkwardly sliding on it. I, too, took a slide, just for the sake of doing what I never thought to do in Rome. This inclement weather, I should suppose, must make the whole city very miserable; for the native Romans, I am told, never keep any fire, except for culinary purposes, even in the severest winter. They flee from their cheerless houses into the open air, and bring their firesides along with them in the shape of small earthen vases, or pipkins, with a handle by which they carry them up and down the streets, and so warm at least their hands with the lighted charcoal. I have had glimpses through open doorways into interiors, and saw them as dismal as tombs. Wherever I pass my summers, let me spend my winters in a cold country. We went yesterday to the Pantheon. . . . . When I first came to Rome, I felt embarrassed and unwilling to pass, with my heresy, between a devotee and his saint; for they often shoot their prayers at a shrine almost quite across the church. But there seems to be no violation of etiquette in so doing. A woman begged of us in the Pantheon, and accused my wife of impiety for not giving her an alms. . . . . People of very decent appearance are often unexpectedly converted into beggars as you approach them; but in general they take a "No" at once. February 9th.--For three or four days it has been cloudy and rainy, which is the greater pity, as this should be the gayest and merriest part of the Carnival. I go out but little,--yesterday only as far as Pakenham's and Hooker's bank in the Piazza de' Spagna, where I read Galignani and the American papers. At last, after seeing in England more of my fellow-compatriots than ever before, I really am disjoined from my country. To-day I walked out along the Pincian Hill. . . . . As the clouds still threatened rain, I deemed it my safest course to go to St. Peter's for refuge. Heavy and dull as the day was, the effect of this great world of a church was still brilliant in the interior, as if it had a sunshine of its own, as well as its own temperature; and, by and by, the sunshine of the outward world came through the windows, hundreds of feet aloft, and fell upon the beautiful inlaid pavement. . . . . Against a pillar, on one side of the nave, is a mosaic copy of Raphael's Transfiguration, fitly framed within a great arch of gorgeous marble; and, no doubt, the indestructible mosaic has preserved it far more completely than the fading and darkening tints in which the artist painted it. At any rate, it seemed to me the one glorious picture that I have ever seen. The pillar nearest the great entrance, on the left of the nave, supports the monument to the Stuart family, where two winged figures, with inverted torches, stand on either side of a marble door, which is closed forever. It is an impressive monument, for you feel as if the last of the race had passed through that door. Emerging from the church, I saw a French sergeant drilling his men in the piazza. These French soldiers are prominent objects everywhere about the city, and make up more of its sight and sound than anything else that lives. They stroll about individually; they pace as sentinels in all the public places; and they march up and down in squads, companies, and battalions, always with a very great din of drum, fife, and trumpet; ten times the proportion of music that the same number of men would require elsewhere; and it reverberates with ten times the noise, between the high edifices of these lanes, that it could make in broader streets. Nevertheless, I have no quarrel with the French soldiers; they are fresh, healthy, smart, honest-looking young fellows enough, in blue coats and red trousers; . . . . and, at all events, they serve as an efficient police, making Rome as safe as London; whereas, without them, it would very likely be a den of banditti. On my way home I saw a few tokens of the Carnival, which is now in full progress; though, as it was only about one o'clock, its frolics had not commenced for the day. . . . . I question whether the Romans themselves take any great interest in the Carnival. The balconies along the Corso were almost entirely taken by English and Americans, or other foreigners. As I approached the bridge of St. Angelo, I saw several persons engaged, as I thought, in fishing in the Tiber, with very strong lines; but on drawing nearer I found that they were trying to hook up the branches, and twigs, and other drift-wood, which the recent rains might have swept into the river. There was a little heap of what looked chiefly like willow twigs, the poor result of their labor. The hook was a knot of wood, with the lopped-off branches projecting in three or four prongs. The Tiber has always the hue of a mud-puddle; but now, after a heavy rain which has washed the clay into it, it looks like pease-soup. It is a broad and rapid stream, eddying along as if it were in haste to disgorge its impurities into the sea. On the left side, where the city mostly is situated, the buildings hang directly over the stream; on the other, where stand the Castle of St. Angelo and the Church of St. Peter, the town does not press so imminent upon the shore. The banks are clayey, and look as if the river had been digging them away for ages; but I believe its bed is higher than of yore. February 10th.--I went out to-day, and, going along the Via Felice and the Via delle Quattro Fontane, came unawares to the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, on the summit of the Esquiline Hill. I entered it, without in the least knowing what church it was, and found myself in a broad and noble nave, both very simple and very grand. There was a long row of Ionic columns of marble, twenty or thereabouts on each side, supporting a flat roof. There were vaulted side aisles, and, at the farther end, a bronze canopy over the high altar; and all along the length of the side aisles were shrines with pictures, sculpture, and burning lamps; the whole church, too, was lined with marble: the roof was gilded; and yet the general effect of severe and noble simplicity triumphed over all the ornament. I should have taken it for a Roman temple, retaining nearly its pristine aspect; but Murray tells us that it was founded A. D. 342 by Pope Liberius, on the spot precisely marked out by a miraculous fall of snow, in the month of August, and it has undergone many alterations since his time. But it is very fine, and gives the beholder the idea of vastness, which seems harder to attain than anything else. On the right hand, approaching the high altar, there is a chapel, separated from the rest of the church by an iron paling; and, being admitted into it with another party, I found it most elaborately magnificent. But one magnificence outshone another, and made itself the brightest conceivable for the moment. However, this chapel was as rich as the most precious marble could make it, in pillars and pilasters, and broad, polished slabs, covering the whole walls (except where there were splendid and glowing frescos; or where some monumental statuary or bas-relief, or mosaic picture filled up an arched niche). Its architecture was a dome, resting on four great arches; and in size it would alone have been a church. In the centre of the mosaic pavement there was a flight of steps, down which we went, and saw a group in marble, representing the nativity of Christ, which, judging by the unction with which our guide talked about it, must have been of peculiar sanctity. I hate to leave this chapel and church, without being able to say any one thing that may reflect a portion of their beauty, or of the feeling which they excite. Kneeling against many of the pillars there were persons in prayer, and I stepped softly, fearing lest my tread on the marble pavement should disturb them,--a needless precaution, however, for nobody seems to expect it, nor to be disturbed by the lack of it. The situation of the church, I should suppose, is the loftiest in Rome: it has a fountain at one end, and a column at the other; but I did not pay particular attention to either, nor to the exterior of the church itself. On my return, I turned aside from the Via delle Quattro Fontane into the Via Quirinalis, and was led by it into the Piazza di Monte Cavallo. The street through which I passed was broader, cleanlier, and statelier than most streets in Rome, and bordered by palaces; and the piazza had noble edifices around it, and a fountain, an obelisk, and two nude statues in the centre. The obelisk was, as the inscription indicated, a relic of Egypt; the basin of the fountain was an immense bowl of Oriental granite, into which poured a copious flood of water, discolored by the rain; the statues were colossal,--two beautiful young men, each holding a fiery steed. On the pedestal of one was the inscription, OPUS PHIDIAE; on the other, OPUS PRAXITELIS. What a city is this, when one may stumble, by mere chance,--at a street corner, as it were,--on the works of two such sculptors! I do not know the authority on which these statues (Castor and Pollux, I presume) are attributed to Phidias and Praxiteles; but they impressed me as noble and godlike, and I feel inclined to take them for what they purport to be. On one side of the piazza is the Pontifical Palace; but, not being aware of this at the time, I did not look particularly at the edifice. I came home by way of the Corso, which seemed a little enlivened by Carnival time; though, as it was not yet two o'clock, the fun had not begun for the day. The rain throws a dreary damper on the festivities. February 13th.--Day before yesterday we took J----- and R----- in a carriage, and went to see the Carnival, by driving up and down the Corso. It was as ugly a day, as respects weather, as has befallen us since we came to Rome,--cloudy, with an indecisive wet, which finally settled into a rain; and people say that such is generally the weather in Carnival time. There is very little to be said about the spectacle. Sunshine would have improved it, no doubt; but a person must have very broad sunshine within himself to be joyous on such shallow provocation. The street, at all events, would have looked rather brilliant under a sunny sky, the balconies being hung with bright-colored draperies, which were also flung out of some of the windows. . . . . Soon I had my first experience of the Carnival in a handful of confetti, right slap in my face. . . . . Many of the ladies wore loose white dominos, and some of the gentlemen had on defensive armor of blouses; and wire masks over the face were a protection for both sexes,--not a needless one, for I received a shot in my right eye which cost me many tears. It seems to be a point of courtesy (though often disregarded by Americans and English) not to fling confetti at ladies, or at non-combatants, or quiet bystanders; and the engagements with these missiles were generally between open carriages, manned with youths, who were provided with confetti for such encounters, and with bouquets for the ladies. We had one real enemy on the Corso; for our former friend Mrs. T------ was there, and as often as we passed and repassed her, she favored us with a handful of lime. Two or three times somebody ran by the carriage and puffed forth a shower of winged seeds through a tube into our faces and over our clothes; and, in the course of the afternoon, we were hit with perhaps half a dozen sugar-plums. Possibly we may not have received our fair share of these last salutes, for J----- had on a black mask, which made him look like an imp of Satan, and drew many volleys of confetti that we might otherwise have escaped. A good many bouquets were flung at our little R-----, and at us generally. . . . . This was what is called masking-day, when it is the rule to wear masks in the Corso, but the great majority of people appeared without them. . . . . Two fantastic figures, with enormous heads, set round with frizzly hair, came and grinned into our carriage, and J----- tore out a handful of hair (which proved to be sea-weed) from one of their heads, rather to the discomposure of the owner, who muttered his indignation in Italian. . . . . On comparing notes with J----- and R-----, indeed with U---- too, I find that they all enjoyed the Carnival much more than I did. Only the young ought to write descriptions of such scenes. My cold criticism chills the life out of it. February 14th.--Friday, 12th, was a sunny day, the first that we had had for some time; and my wife and I went forth to see sights as well as to make some calls that had long been due. We went first to the church of Santa Maria Maggiore, which I have already mentioned, and, on our return, we went to the Piazza di Monte Cavallo, and saw those admirable ancient statues of Castor and Pollux, which seem to me sons of the morning, and full of life and strength. The atmosphere, in such a length of time, has covered the marble surface of these statues with a gray rust, that envelops both the men and horses as with a garment; besides which, there are strange discolorations, such as patches of white moss on the elbows, and reddish streaks down the sides; but the glory of form overcomes all these defects of color. It is pleasant to observe how familiar some little birds are with these colossal statues,--hopping about on their heads and over their huge fists, and very likely they have nests in their ears or among their hair. We called at the Barberini Palace, where William Story has established himself and family for the next seven years, or more, on the third piano, in apartments that afford a very fine outlook over Rome, and have the sun in them through most of the day. Mrs. S---- invited us to her fancy ball, but we declined. On the staircase ascending to their piano we saw the ancient Greek bas-relief of a lion, whence Canova is supposed to have taken the idea of his lions on the monument in St. Peter's. Afterwards we made two or three calls in the neighborhood of the Piazza de' Spagna, finding only Mr. Hamilton Fish and family, at the Hotel d'Europe, at home, and next visited the studio of Mr. C. G. Thompson, whom I knew in Boston. He has very greatly improved since those days, and, being always a man of delicate mind, and earnestly desiring excellence for its own sake, he has won himself the power of doing beautiful and elevated works. He is now meditating a series of pictures from Shakespeare's "Tempest," the sketches of one or two of which he showed us, likewise a copy of a small Madonna, by Raphael, wrought with a minute faithfulness which it makes one a better man to observe. . . . . Mr. Thompson is a true artist, and whatever his pictures have of beauty comes from very far beneath the surface; and this, I suppose, is one weighty reason why he has but moderate success. I should like his pictures for the mere color, even if they represented nothing. His studio is in the Via Sistina; and at a little distance on the other side of the same street is William Story's, where we likewise went, and found him at work on a sitting statue of Cleopatra. William Story looks quite as vivid, in a graver way, as when I saw him last, a very young man. His perplexing variety of talents and accomplishments--he being a poet, a prose writer, a lawyer, a painter, a musician, and a sculptor--seems now to be concentrating itself into this latter vocation, and I cannot see why he should not achieve something very good. He has a beautiful statue, already finished, of Goethe's Margaret, pulling a flower to pieces to discover whether Faust loves her; a very type of virginity and simplicity. The statue of Cleopatra, now only fourteen days advanced in the clay, is as wide a step from the little maidenly Margaret as any artist could take; it is a grand subject, and he is conceiving it with depth and power, and working it out with adequate skill. He certainly is sensible of something deeper in his art than merely to make beautiful nudities and baptize them by classic names. By the by, he told me several queer stories of American visitors to his studio: one of them, after long inspecting Cleopatra, into which he has put all possible characteristics of her time and nation and of her own individuality, asked, "Have you baptized your statue yet?" as if the sculptor were waiting till his statue were finished before he chose the subject of it,--as, indeed, I should think many sculptors do. Another remarked of a statue of Hero, who is seeking Leander by torchlight, and in momentary expectation of finding his drowned body, "Is not the face a little sad?" Another time a whole party of Americans filed into his studio, and ranged themselves round his father's statue, and, after much silent examination, the spokesman of the party inquired, "Well, sir, what is this intended to represent?" William Story, in telling these little anecdotes, gave the Yankee twang to perfection. . . . . The statue of his father, his first work, is very noble, as noble and fine a portrait-statue as I ever saw. In the outer room of his studio a stone-cutter, or whatever this kind of artisan is called, was at work, transferring the statue of Hero from the plaster-cast into marble; and already, though still in some respects a block of stone, there was a wonderful degree of expression in the face. It is not quite pleasant to think that the sculptor does not really do the whole labor on his statues, but that they are all but finished to his hand by merely mechanical people. It is generally only the finishing touches that are given by his own chisel. Yesterday, being another bright day, we went to the basilica of St. John Lateran, which is the basilica next in rank to St. Peter's, and has the precedence of it as regards certain sacred privileges. It stands on a most noble site, on the outskirts of the city, commanding a view of the Sabine and Alban hills, blue in the distance, and some of them hoary with sunny snow. The ruins of the Claudian aqueduct are close at hand. The church is connected with the Lateran palace and museum, so that the whole is one edifice; but the facade of the church distinguishes it, and is very lofty and grand,--more so, it seems to me, than that of St. Peter's. Under the portico is an old statue of Constantine, representing him as a very stout and sturdy personage. The inside of the church disappointed me, though no doubt I should have been wonderstruck had I seen it a month ago. We went into one of the chapels, which was very rich in colored marbles; and, going down a winding staircase, found ourselves among the tombs and sarcophagi of the Corsini family, and in presence of a marble Pieta very beautifully sculptured. On the other side of the church we looked into the Torlonia Chapel, very rich and rather profusely gilded, but, as it seemed to me, not tawdry, though the white newness of the marble is not perfectly agreeable after being accustomed to the milder tint which time bestows on sculpture. The tombs and statues appeared like shapes and images of new-fallen snow. The most interesting thing which we saw in this church (and, admitting its authenticity, there can scarcely be a more interesting one anywhere) was the table at which the Last Supper was eaten. It is preserved in a corridor, on one side of the tribune or chancel, and is shown by torchlight suspended upon the wall beneath a covering of glass. Only the top of the table is shown, presenting a broad, flat surface of wood, evidently very old, and showing traces of dry-rot in one or two places. There are nails in it, and the attendant said that it had formerly been covered with bronze. As well as I can remember, it may be five or six feet square, and I suppose would accommodate twelve persons, though not if they reclined in the Roman fashion, nor if they sat as they do in Leonardo da Vinci's picture. It would be very delightful to believe in this table. There are several other sacred relics preserved in the church; for instance, the staircase of Pilate's house up which Jesus went, and the porphyry slab on which the soldiers cast lots for his garments. These, however, we did not see. There are very glowing frescos on portions of the walls; but, there being much whitewash instead of incrusted marble, it has not the pleasant aspect which one's eye learns to demand in Roman churches. There is a good deal of statuary along the columns of the nave, and in the monuments of the side aisles. In reference to the interior splendor of Roman churches, I must say that I think it a pity that painted windows are exclusively a Gothic ornament; for the elaborate ornamentation of these interiors puts the ordinary daylight out of countenance, so that a window with only the white sunshine coming through it, or even with a glimpse of the blue Italian sky, looks like a portion left unfinished, and therefore a blotch in the rich wall. It is like the one spot in Aladdin's palace which he left for the king, his father-in-law, to finish, after his fairy architects had exhausted their magnificence on the rest; and the sun, like the king, fails in the effort. It has what is called a porta santa, which we saw walled up, in front of the church, one side of the main entrance. I know not what gives it its sanctity, but it appears to be opened by the pope on a year of jubilee, once every quarter of a century. After our return . . . . . I took R----- along the Pincian Hill, and finally, after witnessing what of the Carnival could be seen in the Piazza del Popolo from that safe height, we went down into the Corso, and some little distance along it. Except for the sunshine, the scene was much the same as I have already described; perhaps fewer confetti and more bouquets. Some Americans and English are said to have been brought before the police authorities, and fined for throwing lime. It is remarkable that the jollity, such as it is, of the Carnival, does not extend an inch beyond the line of the Corso; there it flows along in a narrow stream, while in the nearest street we see nothing but the ordinary Roman gravity. February 15th.--Yesterday was a bright day, but I did not go out till the afternoon, when I took an hour's walk along the Pincian, stopping a good while to look at the old beggar who, for many years past, has occupied one of the platforms of the flight of steps leading from the Piazza de' Spagna to the Triniti de' Monti. Hillard commemorates him in his book. He is an unlovely object, moving about on his hands and knees, principally by aid of his hands, which are fortified with a sort of wooden shoes; while his poor, wasted lower shanks stick up in the air behind him, loosely vibrating as he progresses. He is gray, old, ragged, a pitiable sight, but seems very active in his own fashion, and bestirs himself on the approach of his visitors with the alacrity of a spider when a fly touches the remote circumference of his web. While I looked down at him he received alms from three persons, one of whom was a young woman of the lower orders; the other two were gentlemen, probably either English or American. I could not quite make out the principle on which he let some people pass without molestation, while he shuffled from one end of the platform to the other to intercept an occasional individual. He is not persistent in his demands, nor, indeed, is this a usual fault among Italian beggars. A shake of the head will stop him when wriggling towards you from a distance. I fancy he reaps a pretty fair harvest, and no doubt leads as contented and as interesting a life as most people, sitting there all day on those sunny steps, looking at the world, and making his profit out of it. It must be pretty much such an occupation as fishing, in its effect upon the hopes and apprehensions; and probably he suffers no more from the many refusals he meets with than the angler does, when he sees a fish smell at his bait and swim away. One success pays for a hundred disappointments, and the game is all the better for not being entirely in his own favor. Walking onward, I found the Pincian thronged with promenaders, as also with carriages, which drove round the verge of the gardens in an unbroken ring. To-day has been very rainy. I went out in the forenoon, and took a sitting for my bust in one of a suite of rooms formerly occupied by Canova. It was large, high, and dreary from the want of a carpet, furniture, or anything but clay and plaster. A sculptor's studio has not the picturesque charm of that of a painter, where there is color, warmth, and cheerfulness, and where the artist continually turns towards you the glow of some picture, which is resting against the wall. . . . . I was asked not to look at the bust at the close of the sitting, and, of course, I obeyed; though I have a vague idea of a heavy-browed physiognomy, something like what I have seen in the glass, but looking strangely in that guise of clay. . . . . It is a singular fascination that Rome exercises upon artists. There is clay elsewhere, and marble enough, and heads to model, and ideas may be made sensible objects at home as well as here. I think it is the peculiar mode of life that attracts, and its freedom from the inthralments of society, more than the artistic advantages which Rome offers; and, no doubt, though the artists care little about one another's works, yet they keep each other warm by the presence of so many of them. The Carnival still continues, though I hardly see how it can have withstood such a damper as this rainy day. There were several people-- three, I think--killed in the Corso on Saturday; some accounts say that they were run over by the horses in the race; others, that they were ridden down by the dragoons in clearing the course. After leaving Canova's studio, I stepped into the church of San Luigi de' Francesi, in the Via di Ripetta. It was built, I believe, by Catherine de' Medici, and is under the protection of the French government, and a most shamefully dirty place of worship, the beautiful marble columns looking dingy, for the want of loving and pious care. There are many tombs and monuments of French people, both of the past and present,-- artists, soldiers, priests, and others, who have died in Rome. It was so dusky within the church that I could hardly distinguish the pictures in the chapels and over the altar, nor did I know that there were any worth looking for. Nevertheless, there were frescos by Domenichino, and oil-paintings by Guido and others. I found it peculiarly touching to read the records, in Latin or French, of persons who had died in this foreign laud, though they were not my own country-people, and though I was even less akin to them than they to Italy. Still, there was a sort of relationship in the fact that neither they nor I belonged here. February 17th.--Yesterday morning was perfectly sunny, and we went out betimes to see churches; going first to the Capuchins', close by the Piazza Barberini. ["The Marble Faun" takes up this description of the church and of the dead monk, which we really saw, just as recounted, even to the sudden stream of blood which flowed from the nostrils, as we looked at him.-- ED.] We next went to the Trinita de' Monti, which stands at the head of the steps, leading, in several flights, from the Piazza de' Spagna. It is now connected with a convent of French nuns, and when we rang at a side door, one of the sisterhood answered the summons, and admitted us into the church. This, like that of the Capuchins', had a vaulted roof over the nave, and no side aisles, but rows of chapels instead. Unlike the Capuchins', which was filthy, and really disgraceful to behold, this church was most exquisitely neat, as women alone would have thought it worth while to keep it. It is not a very splendid church, not rich in gorgeous marbles, but pleasant to be in, if it were only for the sake of its godly purity. There was only one person in the nave; a young girl, who sat perfectly still, with her face towards the altar, as long as we stayed. Between the nave and the rest of the church there is a high iron railing, and on the other side of it were two kneeling figures in black, so motionless that I at first thought them statues; but they proved to be two nuns at their devotions; and others of the sisterhood came by and by and joined them. Nuns, at least these nuns, who are French, and probably ladies of refinement, having the education of young girls in charge, are far pleasanter objects to see and think about than monks; the odor of sanctity, in the latter, not being an agreeable fragrance. But these holy sisters, with their black crape and white muslin, looked really pure and unspotted from the world. On the iron railing above mentioned was the representation of a golden heart, pierced with arrows; for these are nuns of the Sacred Heart. In the various chapels there are several paintings in fresco, some by Daniele da Volterra; and one of them, the "Descent from the Cross," has been pronounced the third greatest picture in the world. I never should have had the slightest suspicion that it was a great picture at all, so worn and faded it looks, and so hard, so difficult to be seen, and so undelightful when one does see it. From the Trinita we went to the Santa Maria del Popolo, a church built on a spot where Nero is said to have been buried, and which was afterwards made horrible by devilish phantoms. It now being past twelve, and all the churches closing from twelve till two, we had not time to pay much attention to the frescos, oil-pictures, and statues, by Raphael and other famous men, which are to be seen here. I remember dimly the magnificent chapel of the Chigi family, and little else, for we stayed but a short time; and went next to the sculptor's studio, where I had another sitting for my bust. After I had been moulded for about an hour, we turned homeward; but my wife concluded to hire a balcony for this last afternoon and evening of the Carnival, and she took possession of it, while I went home to send to her Miss S------ and the two elder children. For my part, I took R-----, and walked, by way of the Pincian, to the Piazza del Popolo, and thence along the Corso, where, by this time, the warfare of bouquets and confetti raged pretty fiercely. The sky being blue and the sun bright, the scene looked much gayer and brisker than I had before found it; and I can conceive of its being rather agreeable than otherwise, up to the age of twenty. We got several volleys of confetti. R----- received a bouquet and a sugar-plum, and I a resounding hit from something that looked more like a cabbage than a flower. Little as I have enjoyed the Carnival, I think I could make quite a brilliant sketch of it, without very widely departing from truth. February 19th.--Day before yesterday, pretty early, we went to St. Peter's, expecting to see the pope cast ashes on the heads of the cardinals, it being Ash-Wednesday. On arriving, however, we found no more than the usual number of visitants and devotional people scattered through the broad interior of St. Peter's; and thence concluded that the ceremonies were to be performed in the Sistine Chapel. Accordingly, we went out of the cathedral, through the door in the left transept, and passed round the exterior, and through the vast courts of the Vatican, seeking for the chapel. We had blundered into the carriage-entrance of the palace; there is an entrance from some point near the front of the church, but this we did not find. The papal guards, in the strangest antique and antic costume that was ever seen,--a party-colored dress, striped with blue, red, and yellow, white and black, with a doublet and ruff, and trunk-breeches, and armed with halberds,--were on duty at the gateways, but suffered us to pass without question. Finally, we reached a large court, where some cardinals' red equipages and other carriages were drawn up, but were still at a loss as to the whereabouts of the chapel. At last an attendant kindly showed us the proper door, and led us up flights of stairs, along passages and galleries, and through halls, till at last we came to a spacious and lofty apartment adorned with frescos; this was the Sala Regia, and the antechamber to the Sistine Chapel. The attendant, meanwhile, had informed us that my wife could not be admitted to the chapel in her bonnet, and that I myself could not enter at all, for lack of a dress-coat; so my wife took off her bonnet, and, covering her head with her black lace veil, was readily let in, while I remained in the Sala Regia, with several other gentlemen, who found themselves in the same predicament as I was. There was a wonderful variety of costume to be seen and studied among the persons around me, comprising garbs that have been elsewhere laid aside for at least three centuries,--the broad, plaited, double ruff, and black velvet cloak, doublet, trunk-breeches, and sword of Queen Elizabeth's time,--the papal guard, in their striped and party-colored dress as before described, looking not a little like harlequins; other soldiers in helmets and jackboots; French officers of various uniform; monks and priests; attendants in old-fashioned and gorgeous livery; gentlemen, some in black dress-coats and pantaloons, others in wide-awake hats and tweed overcoats; and a few ladies in the prescribed costume of black; so that, in any other country, the scene might have been taken for a fancy ball. By and by, the cardinals began to arrive, and added their splendid purple robes and red hats to make the picture still more brilliant. They were old men, one or two very aged and infirm, and generally men of bulk and substance, with heavy faces, fleshy about the chin. Their red hats, trimmed with gold-lace, are a beautiful piece of finery, and are identical in shape with the black, loosely cocked beavers worn by the Catholic ecclesiastics generally. Wolsey's hat, which I saw at the Manchester Exhibition, might have been made on the same block, but apparently was never cocked, as the fashion now is. The attendants changed the upper portions of their master's attire, and put a little cap of scarlet cloth on each of their heads, after which the cardinals, one by one, or two by two, as they happened to arrive, went into the chapel, with a page behind each holding up his purple train. In the mean while, within the chapel, we heard singing and chanting; and whenever the voluminous curtains that hung before the entrance were slightly drawn apart, we outsiders glanced through, but could see only a mass of people, and beyond them still another chapel, divided from the hither one by a screen. When almost everybody had gone in, there was a stir among the guards and attendants, and a door opened, apparently communicating with the inner apartments of the Vatican. Through this door came, not the pope, as I had partly expected, but a bulky old lady in black, with a red face, who bowed towards the spectators with an aspect of dignified complaisance as she passed towards the entrance of the chapel. I took off my hat, unlike certain English gentlemen who stood nearer, and found that I had not done amiss, for it was the Queen of Spain. There was nothing else to be seen; so I went back through the antechambers (which are noble halls, richly frescoed on the walls and ceilings), endeavoring to get out through the same passages that had let me in. I had already tried to descend what I now supposed to be the Scala Santa, but had been turned back by a sentinel. After wandering to and fro a good while, I at last found myself in a long, long gallery, on each side of which were innumerable inscriptions, in Greek and Latin, on slabs of marble, built into the walls; and classic altars and tablets were ranged along, from end to end. At the extremity was a closed iron grating, from which I was retreating; but a French gentleman accosted me, with the information that the custode would admit me, if I chose, and would accompany me through the sculpture department of the Vatican. I acceded, and thus took my first view of those innumerable art-treasures, passing from one object to another, at an easy pace, pausing hardly a moment anywhere, and dismissing even the Apollo, and the Laocoon, and the Torso of Hercules, in the space of half a dozen breaths. I was well enough content to do so, in order to get a general idea of the contents of the galleries, before settling down upon individual objects. Most of the world-famous sculptures presented themselves to my eye with a kind of familiarity, through the copies and casts which I had seen; but I found the originals more different than I anticipated. The Apollo, for instance, has a face which I have never seen in any cast or copy. I must confess, however, taking such transient glimpses as I did, I was more impressed with the extent of the Vatican, and the beautiful order in which it is kept, and its great sunny, open courts, with fountains, grass, and shrubs, and the views of Rome and the Campagna from its windows,--more impressed with these, and with certain vastly capacious vases, and two seat sarcophagi,--than with the statuary. Thus I went round the whole, and was dismissed through the grated barrier into the gallery of inscriptions again; and after a little more wandering, I made my way out of the palace. . . . . Yesterday I went out betimes, and strayed through some portion of ancient Rome, to the Column of Trajan, to the Forum, thence along the Appian Way; after which I lost myself among the intricacies of the streets, and finally came out at the bridge of St. Angelo. The first observation which a stranger is led to make, in the neighborhood of Roman ruins, is that the inhabitants seem to be strangely addicted to the washing of clothes; for all the precincts of Trajan's Forum, and of the Roman Forum, and wherever else an iron railing affords opportunity to hang them, were whitened with sheets, and other linen and cotton, drying in the sun. It must be that washerwomen burrow among the old temples. The second observation is not quite so favorable to the cleanly character of the modern Romans; indeed, it is so very unfavorable, that I hardly know how to express it. But the fact is, that, through the Forum, . . . . and anywhere out of the commonest foot-track and roadway, you must look well to your steps. . . . . If you tread beneath the triumphal arch of Titus or Constantine, you had better look downward than upward, whatever be the merit of the sculptures aloft. . . . . After a while the visitant finds himself getting accustomed to this horrible state of things; and the associations of moral sublimity and beauty seem to throw a veil over the physical meannesses to which I allude. Perhaps there is something in the mind of the people of these countries that enables them quite to dissever small ugliness from great sublimity and beauty. They spit upon the glorious pavement of St. Peter's, and wherever else they like; they place paltry-looking wooden confessionals beneath its sublime arches, and ornament them with cheap little colored prints of the crucifixion; they hang tin hearts and other tinsel and trumpery at the gorgeous shrines of the saints, in chapels that are incrusted with gems, or marbles almost as precious; they put pasteboard statues of saints beneath the dome of the Pantheon; in short, they let the sublime and the ridiculous come close together, and are not in the least troubled by the proximity. It must be that their sense of the beautiful is stronger than in the Anglo-Saxon mind, and that it observes only what is fit to gratify it. To-day, which was bright and cool, my wife and I set forth immediately after breakfast, in search of the Baths of Diocletian, and the church of Santa Maria degl' Angeli. We went too far along the Via di Porta Pia, and after passing by two or three convents, and their high garden walls, and the villa Bonaparte on one side, and the villa Torlonia on the other, at last issued through the city gate. Before us, far away, were the Alban hills, the loftiest of which was absolutely silvered with snow and sunshine, and set in the bluest and brightest of skies. We now retraced our steps to the Fountain of the Termini, where is a ponderous heap of stone, representing Moses striking the rock; a colossal figure, not without a certain enormous might and dignity, though rather too evidently looking his awfullest. This statue was the death of its sculptor, whose heart was broken on account of the ridicule it excited. There are many more absurd aquatic devices in Rome, however, and few better. We turned into the Piazza de' Termini, the entrance of which is at this fountain; and after some inquiry of the French soldiers, a numerous detachment of whom appear to be quartered in the vicinity, we found our way to the portal of Santa Maria degl' Angeli. The exterior of this church has no pretensions to beauty or majesty, or, indeed, to architectural merit of any kind, or to any architecture whatever; for it looks like a confused pile of ruined brickwork, with a facade resembling half the inner curve of a large oven. No one would imagine that there was a church under that enormous heap of ancient rubbish. But the door admits you into a circular vestibule, once an apartment of Diocletian's Baths, but now a portion of the nave of the church, and surrounded with monumental busts; and thence you pass into what was the central hall; now, with little change, except of detail and ornament, transformed into the body of the church. This space is so lofty, broad, and airy, that the soul forthwith swells out and magnifies itself, for the sake of filling it. It was Michael Angelo who contrived this miracle; and I feel even more grateful to him for rescuing such a noble interior from destruction, than if he had originally built it himself. In the ceiling above, you see the metal fixtures whereon the old Romans hung their lamps; and there are eight gigantic pillars of Egyptian granite, standing as they stood of yore. There is a grand simplicity about the church, more satisfactory than elaborate ornament; but the present pope has paved and adorned one of the large chapels of the transept in very beautiful style, and the pavement of the central part is likewise laid in rich marbles. In the choir there are several pictures, one of which was veiled, as celebrated pictures frequently are in churches. A person, who seemed to be at his devotions, withdrew the veil for us, and we saw a Martyrdom of St. Sebastian, by Domenichino, originally, I believe, painted in fresco in St. Peter's, but since transferred to canvas, and removed hither. Its place at St. Peter's is supplied by a mosaic copy. I was a good deal impressed by this picture,--the dying saint, amid the sorrow of those who loved him, and the fury of his enemies, looking upward, where a company of angels, and Jesus with them, are waiting to welcome him and crown him; and I felt what an influence pictures might have upon the devotional part of our nature. The nailmarks in the hands and feet of Jesus, ineffaceable, even after he had passed into bliss and glory, touched my heart with a sense of his love for us. I think this really a great picture. We walked round the church, looking at other paintings and frescos, but saw no others that greatly interested us. In the vestibule there are monuments to Carlo Maratti and Salvator Rosa, and there is a statue of St. Bruno, by Houdon, which is pronounced to be very fine. I thought it good, but scarcely worthy of vast admiration. Houdon was the sculptor of the first statue of Washington, and of the bust, whence, I suppose, all subsequent statues have been, and will be, mainly modelled. After emerging from the church, I looked back with wonder at the stack of shapeless old brickwork that hid the splendid interior. I must go there again, and breathe freely in that noble space. February 20th.--This morning, after breakfast, I walked across the city, making a pretty straight course to the Pantheon, and thence to the bridge of St. Angelo, and to St. Peter's. It had been my purpose to go to the Fontana Paolina; but, finding that the distance was too great, and being weighed down with a Roman lassitude, I concluded to go into St. Peter's. Here I looked at Michael Angelo's Pieta, a representation of the dead Christ, in his mother's lap. Then I strolled round the great church, and find that it continues to grow upon me both in magnitude and beauty, by comparison with the many interiors of sacred edifices which I have lately seen. At times, a single, casual, momentary glimpse of its magnificence gleams upon my soul, as it were, when I happen to glance at arch opening beyond arch, and I am surprised into admiration. I have experienced that a landscape and the sky unfold the deepest beauty in a similar way; not when they are gazed at of set purpose, but when the spectator looks suddenly through a vista, among a crowd of other thoughts. Passing near the confessional for foreigners to-day, I saw a Spaniard, who had just come out of the one devoted to his native tongue, taking leave of his confessor, with an affectionate reverence, which--as well as the benign dignity of the good father--it was good to behold. . . . . I returned home early, in order to go with my wife to the Barberini Palace at two o'clock. We entered through the gateway, through the Via delle Quattro Fontane, passing one or two sentinels; for there is apparently a regiment of dragoons quartered on the ground-floor of the palace; and I stumbled upon a room containing their saddles, the other day, when seeking for Mr. Story's staircase. The entrance to the picture-gallery is by a door on the right hand, affording us a sight of a beautiful spiral staircase, which goes circling upward from the very basement to the very summit of the palace, with a perfectly easy ascent, yet confining its sweep within a moderate compass. We looked up through the interior of the spiral, as through a tube, from the bottom to the top. The pictures are contained in three contiguous rooms of the lower piano, and are few in number, comprising barely half a dozen which I should care to see again, though doubtless all have value in their way. One that attracted our attention was a picture of "Christ disputing with the Doctors," by Albert Duerer, in which was represented the ugliest, most evil-minded, stubborn, pragmatical, and contentious old Jew that ever lived under the law of Moses; and he and the child Jesus were arguing, not only with their tongues, but making hieroglyphics, as it were, by the motion of their hands and fingers. It is a very queer, as well as a very remarkable picture. But we passed hastily by this, and almost all others, being eager to see the two which chiefly make the collection famous,--Raphael's Fornarina, and Guido's portrait of Beatrice Cenci. These were found in the last of the three rooms, and as regards Beatrice Cenci, I might as well not try to say anything; for its spell is indefinable, and the painter has wrought it in a way more like magic than anything else. . . . . It is the most profoundly wrought picture in the world; no artist did it, nor could do it, again. Guido may have held the brush, but he painted "better than he knew." I wish, however, it were possible for some spectator, of deep sensibility, to see the picture without knowing anything of its subject or history; for, no doubt, we bring all our knowledge of the Cenci tragedy to the interpretation of it. Close beside Beatrice Cenci hangs the Fornarina. . . . . While we were looking at these works Miss M------ unexpectedly joined us, and we went, all three together, to the Rospigliosi Palace, in the Piazza di Monte Cavallo. A porter, in cocked hat, and with a staff of office, admitted us into a spacious court before the palace, and directed us to a garden on one side, raised as much as twenty feet above the level on which we stood. The gardener opened the gate for us, and we ascended a beautiful stone staircase, with a carved balustrade, bearing many marks of time and weather. Reaching the garden-level, we found it laid out in walks, bordered with box and ornamental shrubbery, amid which were lemon-trees, and one large old exotic from some distant clime. In the centre of the garden, surrounded by a stone balustrade, like that of the staircase, was a fish-pond, into which several jets of water were continually spouting; and on pedestals, that made part of the balusters, stood eight marble statues of Apollo, Cupid, nymphs, and other such sunny and beautiful people of classic mythology. There had been many more of these statues, but the rest had disappeared, and those which remained had suffered grievous damage, here to a nose, there to a hand or foot, and often a fracture of the body, very imperfectly mended. There was a pleasant sunshine in the garden, and a springlike, or rather a genial, autumnal atmosphere, though elsewhere it was a day of poisonous Roman chill. At the end of the garden, which was of no great extent, was an edifice, bordering on the piazza, called the Casino, which, I presume, means a garden-house. The front is richly ornamented with bas-reliefs, and statues in niches; as if it were a place for pleasure and enjoyment, and therefore ought to be beautiful. As we approached it, the door swung open, and we went into a large room on the ground-floor, and, looking up to the ceiling, beheld Guido's Aurora. The picture is as fresh and brilliant as if he had painted it with the morning sunshine which it represents. It could not be more lustrous in its lines, if he had given it the last touch an hour ago. Three or four artists were copying it at that instant, and positively their colors did not look brighter, though a great deal newer than his. The alacrity and movement, briskness and morning stir and glow, of the picture are wonderful. It seems impossible to catch its glory in a copy. Several artists, as I said, were making the attempt, and we saw two other attempted copies leaning against the wall, but it was easy to detect failure in just essential points. My memory, I believe, will be somewhat enlivened by this picture hereafter: not that I remember it very distinctly even now; but bright things leave a sheen and glimmer in the mind, like Christian's tremulous glimpse of the Celestial City. In two other rooms of the Casino we saw pictures by Domenichino, Rubens, and other famous painters, which I do not mean to speak of, because I cared really little or nothing about them. Returning into the garden, the sunny warmth of which was most grateful after the chill air and cold pavement of the Casino, we walked round the laguna, examining the statues, and looking down at some little fishes that swarmed at the stone margin of the pool. There were two infants of the Rospigliosi family: one, a young child playing with a maid and head-servant; another, the very chubbiest and rosiest boy in the world, sleeping on its nurse's bosom. The nurse was a comely woman enough, dressed in bright colors, which fitly set off the deep lines of her Italian face. An old painter very likely would have beautified and refined the pair into a Madonna, with the child Jesus; for an artist need not go far in Italy to find a picture ready composed and tinted, needing little more than to be literally copied. Miss M------ had gone away before us; but my wife and I, after leaving the Palazzo Rospigliosi, and on our way hone, went into the Church of St. Andrea, which belongs to a convent of Jesuits. I have long ago exhausted all my capacity of admiration for splendid interiors of churches, but methinks this little, little temple (it is not more than fifty or sixty feet across) has a more perfect and gem-like beauty than any other. Its shape is oval, with an oval dome, and, above that, another little dome, both of which are magnificently frescoed. Around the base of the larger dome is wreathed a flight of angels, and the smaller and upper one is encircled by a garland of cherubs,--cherub and angel all of pure white marble. The oval centre of the church is walled round with precious and lustrous marble of a red-veined variety interspersed with columns and pilasters of white; and there are arches opening through this rich wall, forming chapels, which the architect seems to have striven hard to make even more gorgeous than the main body of the church. They contain beautiful pictures, not dark and faded, but glowing, as if just from the painter's hands; and the shrines are adorned with whatever is most rare, and in one of them was the great carbuncle; at any rate, a bright, fiery gem as big as a turkey's egg. The pavement of the church was one star of various-colored marble, and in the centre was a mosaic, covering, I believe, the tomb of the founder. I have not seen, nor expect to see, anything else so entirely and satisfactorily finished as this small oval church; and I only wish I could pack it in a large box, and send it home. I must not forget that, on our way from the Barberini Palace, we stopped an instant to look at the house, at the corner of the street of the four fountains, where Milton was a guest while in Rome. He seems quite a man of our own day, seen so nearly at the hither extremity of the vista through which we look back, from the epoch of railways to that of the oldest Egyptian obelisk. The house (it was then occupied by the Cardinal Barberini) looks as if it might have been built within the present century; for mediaeval houses in Rome do not assume the aspect of antiquity; perhaps because the Italian style of architecture, or something similar, is the one more generally in vogue in most cities. February 21st.--This morning I took my way through the Porta del Popolo, intending to spend the forenoon in the Campagna; but, getting weary of the straight, uninteresting street that runs out of the gate, I turned aside from it, and soon found myself on the shores of the Tiber. It looked, as usual, like a saturated solution of yellow mud, and eddied hastily along between deep banks of clay, and over a clay bed, in which doubtless are hidden many a richer treasure than we now possess. The French once proposed to draw off the river, for the purpose of recovering all the sunken statues and relics; but the Romans made strenuous objection, on account of the increased virulence of malaria which would probably result. I saw a man on the immediate shore of the river, fifty feet or so beneath the bank on which I stood, sitting patiently, with an angling rod; and I waited to see what he might catch. Two other persons likewise sat down to watch him; but he caught nothing so long as I stayed, and at last seemed to give it up. The banks and vicinity of the river are very bare and uninviting, as I then saw them; no shade, no verdure,--a rough, neglected aspect, and a peculiar shabbiness about the few houses that were visible. Farther down the stream the dome of St. Peter's showed itself on the other side, seeming to stand on the outskirts of the city. I walked along the banks, with some expectation of finding a ferry, by which I might cross the river; but my course was soon interrupted by the wall, and I turned up a lane that led me straight back again to the Porta del Popolo. I stopped a moment, however, to see some young men pitching quoits, which they appeared to do with a good deal of skill. I went along the Via di Ripetta, and through other streets, stepping into two or three churches, one of which was the Pantheon. . . . . There are, I think, seven deep, pillared recesses around the circumference of it, each of which becomes a sufficiently capacious chapel; and alternately with these chapels there is a marble structure, like the architecture of a doorway, beneath which is the shrine of a saint; so that the whole circle of the Pantheon is filled up with the seven chapels and seven shrines. A number of persons were sitting or kneeling around; others came in while I was there, dipping their fingers in the holy water, and bending the knee, as they passed the shrines and chapels, until they reached the one which, apparently, they had selected as the particular altar for their devotions. Everybody seemed so devout, and in a frame of mind so suited to the day and place, that it really made me feel a little awkward not to be able to kneel down along with them. Unlike the worshippers in our own churches, each individual here seems to do his own individual acts of devotion, and I cannot but think it better so than to make an effort for united prayer as we do. It is my opinion that a great deal of devout and reverential feeling is kept alive in people's hearts by the Catholic mode of worship. Soon leaving the Pantheon, a few minutes' walk towards the Corso brought me to the Church of St. Ignazio, which belongs to the College of the Jesuits. It is spacious and of beautiful architecture, but not strikingly distinguished, in the latter particular, from many others; a wide and lofty nave, supported upon marble columns, between which arches open into the side aisles, and at the junction of the nave and transept a dome, resting on four great arches. The church seemed to be purposely somewhat darkened, so that I could not well see the details of the ornamentation, except the frescos on the ceiling of the nave, which were very brilliant, and done in so effectual a style, that I really could not satisfy myself that some of the figures did not actually protrude from the ceiling,--in short, that they were not colored bas-reliefs, instead of frescos. No words can express the beautiful effect, in an upholstery point of view, of this kind of decoration. Here, as at the Pantheon, there were many persons sitting silent, kneeling, or passing from shrine to shrine. I reached home at about twelve, and, at one, set out again, with my wife, towards St. Peter's, where we meant to stay till after vespers. We walked across the city, and through the Piazza de Navona, where we stopped to look at one of Bernini's absurd fountains, of which the water makes but the smallest part,--a little squirt or two amid a prodigious fuss of gods and monsters. Thence we passed by the poor, battered-down torso of Pasquin, and came, by devious ways, to the bridge of St. Angelo; the streets bearing pretty much their weekday aspect, many of the shops open, the market-stalls doing their usual business, and the people brisk and gay, though not indecorously so. I suppose there was hardly a man or woman who had not heard mass, confessed, and said their prayers; a thing which--the prayers, I mean--it would be absurd to predicate of London, New York, or any Protestant city. In however adulterated a guise, the Catholics do get a draught of devotion to slake the thirst of their souls, and methinks it must needs do them good, even if not quite so pure as if it came from better cisterns, or from the original fountain-head. Arriving at St. Peter's shortly after two, we walked round the whole church, looking at all the pictures and most of the monuments, . . . . and paused longest before Guido's "Archangel Michael overcoming Lucifer." This is surely one of the most beautiful things in the world, one of the human conceptions that are imbued most deeply with the celestial. . . . . We then sat down in one of the aisles and awaited the beginning of vespers, which we supposed would take place at half past three. Four o'clock came, however, and no vespers; and as our dinner-hour is five, . . . . we at last cane away without hearing the vesper hymn. February 23d.--Yesterday, at noon, we set out for the Capitol, and after going up the acclivity (not from the Forum, but from the opposite direction), stopped to look at the statues of Castor and Pollux, which, with other sculptures, look down the ascent. Castor and his brother seem to me to have heads disproportionately large, and are not so striking, in any respect, as such great images ought to be. But we heartily admired the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, . . . . and looked at a fountain, principally composed, I think, of figures representing the Nile and the Tiber, who loll upon their elbows and preside over the gushing water; and between them, against the facade of the Senator's Palace, there is a statue of Minerva, with a petticoat of red porphyry. Having taken note of these objects, we went to the museum, in an edifice on our left, entering the piazza, and here, in the vestibule, we found various old statues and relics. Ascending the stairs, we passed through a long gallery, and, turning to our left, examined somewhat more carefully a suite of rooms running parallel with it. The first of these contained busts of the Caesars and their kindred, from the epoch of the mightiest Julius downward; eighty-three, I believe, in all. I had seen a bust of Julius Caesar in the British Museum, and was surprised at its thin and withered aspect; but this head is of a very ugly old man indeed,--wrinkled, puckered, shrunken, lacking breadth and substance; careworn, grim, as if he had fought hard with life, and had suffered in the conflict; a man of schemes, and of eager effort to bring his schemes to pass. His profile is by no means good, advancing from the top of his forehead to the tip of his nose, and retreating, at about the same angle, from the latter point to the bottom of his chin, which seems to be thrust forcibly down into his meagre neck,--not that he pokes his head forward, however, for it is particularly erect. The head of Augustus is very beautiful, and appears to be that of a meditative, philosophic man, saddened with the sense that it is not very much worth while to be at the summit of human greatness after all. It is a sorrowful thing to trace the decay of civilization through this series of busts, and to observe how the artistic skill, so requisite at first, went on declining through the dreary dynasty of the Caesars, till at length the master of the world could not get his head carved in better style than the figure-head of a ship. In the next room there were better statues than we had yet seen; but in the last room of the range we found the "Dying Gladiator," of which I had already caught a glimpse in passing by the open door. It had made all the other treasures of the gallery tedious in my eagerness to come to that. I do not believe that so much pathos is wrought into any other block of stone. Like all works of the highest excellence, however, it makes great demands upon the spectator. He must make a generous gift of his sympathies to the sculptor, and help out his skill with all his heart, or else he will see little more than a skilfully wrought surface. It suggests far more than it shows. I looked long at this statue, and little at anything else, though, among other famous works, a statue of Antinous was in the same room. I was glad when we left the museum, which, by the by, was piercingly chill, as if the multitude of statues radiated cold out of their marble substance. We might have gone to see the pictures in the Palace of the Conservatori, and S-----, whose receptivity is unlimited and forever fresh, would willingly have done so; but I objected, and we went towards the Forum. I had noticed, two or three times, an inscription over a mean-looking door in this neighborhood, stating that here was the entrance to the prison of the holy apostles Peter and Paul; and we soon found the spot, not far from the Forum, with two wretched frescos of the apostles above the inscription. We knocked at the door without effect; but a lame beggar, who sat at another door of the same house (which looked exceedingly like a liquor-shop), desired us to follow him, and began to ascend to the Capitol, by the causeway leading from the Forum. A little way upward we met a woman, to whom the beggar delivered us over, and she led us into a church or chapel door, and pointed to a long flight of steps, which descended through twilight into utter darkness. She called to somebody in the lower regions, and then went away, leaving us to get down this mysterious staircase by ourselves. Down we went, farther and farther from the daylight, and found ourselves, anon, in a dark chamber or cell, the shape or boundaries of which we could not make out, though it seemed to be of stone, and black and dungeon-like. Indistinctly, and from a still farther depth in the earth, we heard voices,--one voice, at least,--apparently not addressing ourselves, but some other persons; and soon, directly beneath our feet, we saw a glimmering of light through a round, iron-grated hole in the bottom of the dungeon. In a few moments the glimmer and the voice came up through this hole, and the light disappeared, and it and the voice came glimmering and babbling up a flight of stone stairs, of which we had not hitherto been aware. It was the custode, with a party of visitors, to whom he had been showing St. Peter's dungeon. Each visitor was provided with a wax taper, and the custode gave one to each of us, bidding us wait a moment while he conducted the other party to the upper air. During his absence we examined the cell, as well as our dim lights would permit, and soon found an indentation in the wall, with an iron grate put over it for protection, and an inscription above informing us that the Apostle Peter had here left the imprint of his visage; and, in truth, there is a profile there,--forehead, nose, mouth, and chin,--plainly to be seen, an intaglio in the solid rock. We touched it with the tips of our fingers, as well as saw it with our eyes. The custode soon returned, and led us down the darksome steps, chattering in Italian all the time. It is not a very long descent to the lower cell, the roof of which is so low that I believe I could have reached it with my hand. We were now in the deepest and ugliest part of the old Mamertine Prison, one of the few remains of the kingly period of Rome, and which served the Romans as a state-prison for hundreds of years before the Christian era. A multitude of criminals or innocent persons, no doubt, have languished here in misery, and perished in darkness. Here Jugurtha starved; here Catiline's adherents were strangled; and, methinks, there cannot be in the world another such an evil den, so haunted with black memories and indistinct surmises of guilt and suffering. In old Rome, I suppose, the citizens never spoke of this dungeon above their breath. It looks just as bad as it is; round, only seven paces across, yet so obscure that our tapers could not illuminate it from side to side,-- the stones of which it is constructed being as black as midnight. The custode showed us a stone post, at the side of the cell, with the hole in the top of it, into which, he said, St. Peter's chain had been fastened; and he uncovered a spring of water, in the middle of the stone floor, which he told us had miraculously gushed up to enable the saint to baptize his jailer. The miracle was perhaps the more easily wrought, inasmuch as Jugurtha had found the floor of the dungeon oozy with wet. However, it is best to be as simple and childlike as we can in these matters; and whether St. Peter stamped his visage into the stone, and wrought this other miracle or no, and whether or no he ever was in the prison at all, still the belief of a thousand years and more gives a sort of reality and substance to such traditions. The custode dipped an iron ladle into the miraculous water, and we each of us drank a sip; and, what is very remarkable, to me it seemed hard water and almost brackish, while many persons think it the sweetest in Rome. I suspect that St. Peter still dabbles in this water, and tempers its qualities according to the faith of those who drink it. The staircase descending into the lower dungeon is comparatively modern, there having been no entrance of old, except through the small circular opening in the roof. In the upper cell the custode showed us an ancient flight of stairs, now built into the wall, which used to lead from the Capitol. The whole precincts are now consecrated, and I believe the upper portion, perhaps both upper and lower, are a shrine or a chapel. I now left S------ in the Forum, and went to call on Mr. J. P. K------ at the Hotel d'Europe. I found him just returned from a drive,--a gentleman of about sixty, or more, with gray hair, a pleasant, intellectual face, and penetrating, but not unkindly eyes. He moved infirmly, being on the recovery from an illness. We went up to his saloon together, and had a talk,--or, rather, he had it nearly all to himself,--and particularly sensible talk, too, and full of the results of learning and experience. In the first place, he settled the whole Kansas difficulty; then he made havoc of St. Peter, who came very shabbily out of his hands, as regarded his early character in the Church, and his claims to the position he now holds in it. Mr. K------ also gave a curious illustration, from something that happened to himself, of the little dependence that can be placed on tradition purporting to be ancient, and I capped his story by telling him how the site of my town-pump, so plainly indicated in the sketch itself, has already been mistaken in the city council and in the public prints. February 24th.--Yesterday I crossed the Ponte Sisto, and took a short ramble on the other side of the river; and it rather surprised me to discover, pretty nearly opposite the Capitoline Hill, a quay, at which several schooners and barks, of two or three hundred tons' burden, were moored. There was also a steamer, armed with a large gun and two brass swivels on her forecastle, and I know not what artillery besides. Probably she may have been a revenue-cutter. Returning I crossed the river by way of the island of St. Bartholomew over two bridges. The island is densely covered with buildings, and is a separate small fragment of the city. It was a tradition of the ancient Romans that it was formed by the aggregation of soil and rubbish brought down by the river, and accumulating round the nucleus of some sunken baskets. On reaching the hither side of the river, I soon struck upon the ruins of the theatre of Marcellus, which are very picturesque, and the more so from being closely linked in, indeed, identified with the shops, habitations, and swarming life of modern Rome. The most striking portion was a circular edifice, which seemed to have been composed of a row of Ionic columns standing upon a lower row of Doric, many of the antique pillars being yet perfect; but the intervening arches built up with brickwork, and the whole once magnificent structure now tenanted by poor and squalid people, as thick as mites within the round of an old cheese. From this point I cannot very clearly trace out my course; but I passed, I think, between the Circus Maximus and the Palace of the Caesars, and near the Baths of Caracalla, and went into the cloisters of the Church of San Gregorio. All along I saw massive ruins, not particularly picturesque or beautiful, but huge, mountainous piles, chiefly of brickwork, somewhat tweed-grown here and there, but oftener bare and dreary. . . . . All the successive ages since Rome began to decay have done their best to ruin the very ruins by taking away the marble and the hewn stone for their own structures, and leaving only the inner filling up of brickwork, which the ancient architects never designed to be seen. The consequence of all this is, that, except for the lofty and poetical associations connected with it, and except, too, for the immense difference in magnitude, a Roman ruin may be in itself not more picturesque than I have seen an old cellar, with a shattered brick chimney half crumbling down into it, in New England. By this time I knew not whither I was going, and turned aside from a broad, paved road (it was the Appian Way) into the Via Latina, which I supposed would lead to one of the city gates. It was a lonely path: on my right hand extensive piles of ruin, in strange shapes or shapelessness, built of the broad and thin old Roman bricks, such as may be traced everywhere, when the stucco has fallen away from a modern Roman house; for I imagine there has not been a new brick made here for a thousand years. On my left, I think, was a high wall, and before me, grazing in the road . . . . [the buffalo calf of the Marble Faun.--ED.]. The road went boldly on, with a well-worn track up to the very walls of the city; but there it abruptly terminated at an ancient, closed-up gateway. From a notice posted against a door, which appeared to be the entrance to the ruins on my left, I found that these were the remains of Columbaria, where the dead used to be put away in pigeon-holes. Reaching the paved road again, I kept on my course, passing the tomb of the Scipios, and soon came to the gate of San Sebastiano, through which I entered the Campagna. Indeed, the scene around was so rural, that I had fancied myself already beyond the walls. As the afternoon was getting advanced, I did not proceed any farther towards the blue hills which I saw in the distance, but turned to my left, following a road that runs round the exterior of the city wall. It was very dreary and solitary,-- not a house on the whole track, with the broad and shaggy Campagna on one side, and the high, bare wall, looking down over my head, on the other. It is not, any more than the other objects of the scene, a very picturesque wall, but is little more than a brick garden-fence seen through a magnifying-glass, with now and then a tower, however, and frequent buttresses, to keep its height of fifty feet from toppling over. The top was ragged, and fringed with a few weeds; there had been embrasures for guns and eyelet-holes for musketry, but these were plastered up with brick or stone. I passed one or two walled-up gateways (by the by, the Parts, Latina was the gate through which Belisarius first entered Rome), and one of these had two high, round towers, and looked more Gothic and venerable with antique strength than any other portion of the wall. Immediately after this I came to the gate of San Giovanni, just within which is the Basilica of St. John Lateran, and there I was glad to rest myself upon a bench before proceeding homeward. There was a French sentinel at this gateway, as at all the others; for the Gauls have always been a pest to Rome, and now gall her worse than ever. I observed, too, that an official, in citizen's dress, stood there also, and appeared to exercise a supervision over some carts with country produce, that were entering just then. February 25th.--We went this forenoon to the Palazzo Borghese, which is situated on a street that runs at right angles with the Corso, and very near the latter. Most of the palaces in Rome, and the Borghese among them, were built somewhere about the sixteenth century; this in 1590, I believe. It is an immense edifice, standing round the four sides of a quadrangle; and though the suite of rooms comprising the picture-gallery forms an almost interminable vista, they occupy only a part of the ground-floor of one side. We enter from the street into a large court, surrounded with a corridor, the arches of which support a second series of arches above. The picture-rooms open from one into another, and have many points of magnificence, being large and lofty, with vaulted ceilings and beautiful frescos, generally of mythological subjects, in the flat central part of the vault. The cornices are gilded; the deep embrasures of the windows are panelled with wood-work; the doorways are of polished and variegated marble, or covered with a composition as hard, and seemingly as durable. The whole has a kind of splendid shabbiness thrown over it, like a slight coating of rust; the furniture, at least the damask chairs, being a good deal worn, though there are marble and mosaic tables, which may serve to adorn another palace when this one crumbles away with age. One beautiful hall, with a ceiling more richly gilded than the rest, is panelled all round with large looking-glasses, on which are painted pictures, both landscapes and human figures, in oils; so that the effect is somewhat as if you saw these objects represented in the mirrors. These glasses must be of old date, perhaps coeval with the first building of the palace; for they are so much dimmed, that one's own figure appears indistinct in them, and more difficult to be traced than the pictures which cover them half over. It was very comfortless,-- indeed, I suppose nobody ever thought of being comfortable there, since the house was built,--but especially uncomfortable on a chill, damp day like this. My fingers were quite numb before I got half-way through the suite of apartments, in spite of a brazier of charcoal which was smouldering into ashes in two or three of the rooms. There was not, so far as I remember, a single fireplace in the suite. A considerable number of visitors--not many, however--were there; and a good many artists; and three or four ladies among them were making copies of the more celebrated pictures, and in all or in most cases missing the especial points that made their celebrity and value. The Prince Borghese certainly demeans himself like a kind and liberal gentleman, in throwing open this invaluable collection to the public to see, and for artists to carry away with them, and diffuse all over the world, so far as their own power and skill will permit. It is open every day of the week, except Saturday and Sunday, without any irksome restriction or supervision; and the fee, which custom requires the visitor to pay to the custode, has the good effect of making us feel that we are not intruders, nor received in an exactly eleemosynary way. The thing could not be better managed. The collection is one of the most celebrated in the world, and contains between eight and nine hundred pictures, many of which are esteemed masterpieces. I think I was not in a frame for admiration to-day, nor could achieve that free and generous surrender of myself which I have already said is essential to the proper estimate of anything excellent. Besides, how is it possible to give one's soul, or any considerable part of it, to a single picture, seen for the first time, among a thousand others, all of which set forth their own claims in an equally good light? Furthermore, there is an external weariness, and sense of a thousand-fold sameness to be overcome, before we can begin to enjoy a gallery of the old Italian masters. . . . . I remember but one painter, Francia, who seems really to have approached this awful class of subjects (Christs and Madonnas) in a fitting spirit; his pictures are very singular and awkward, if you look at them with merely an external eye, but they are full of the beauty of holiness, and evidently wrought out as acts of devotion, with the deepest sincerity; and are veritable prayers upon canvas. . . . . I was glad, in the very last of the twelve rooms, to come upon some Dutch and Flemish pictures, very few, but very welcome; Rubens, Rembrandt, Vandyke, Paul Potter, Teniers, and others,--men of flesh and blood, and warm fists, and human hearts. As compared with them, these mighty Italian masters seem men of polished steel; not human, nor addressing themselves so much to human sympathies, as to a formed, intellectual taste. March 1st.--To-day began very unfavorably; but we ventured out at about eleven o'clock, intending to visit the gallery of the Colonna Palace. Finding it closed, however, on account of the illness of the custode, we determined to go to the picture-gallery of the Capitol; and, on our way thither, we stepped into Il Gesu, the grand and rich church of the Jesuits, where we found a priest in white, preaching a sermon, with vast earnestness of action and variety of tones, insomuch that I fancied sometimes that two priests were in the agony of sermonizing at once. He had a pretty large and seemingly attentive audience clustered round him from the entrance of the church, half-way down the nave; while in the chapels of the transepts and in the remoter distances were persons occupied with their own individual devotion. We sat down near the chapel of St. Ignazio, which is adorned with a picture over the altar, and with marble sculptures of the Trinity aloft, and of angels fluttering at the sides. What I particularly noted (for the angels were not very real personages, being neither earthly nor celestial) was the great ball of lapis lazuli, the biggest in the world, at the feet of the First Person in the Trinity. The church is a splendid one, lined with a great variety of precious marbles, . . . . but partly, perhaps, owing to the dusky light, as well as to the want of cleanliness, there was a dingy effect upon the whole. We made but a very short stay, our New England breeding causing us to feel shy of moving about the church in sermon time. It rained when we reached the Capitol, and, as the museum was not yet open, we went into the Palace of the Conservators, on the opposite side of the piazza. Around the inner court of the ground-floor, partly under two opposite arcades, and partly under the sky, are several statues and other ancient sculptures; among them a statue of Julius Caesar, said to be the only authentic one, and certainly giving an impression of him more in accordance with his character than the withered old face in the museum; also, a statue of Augustus in middle age, still retaining a resemblance to the bust of him in youth; some gigantic heads and hands and feet in marble and bronze; a stone lion and horse, which lay long at the bottom of a river, broken and corroded, and were repaired by Michel Angelo; and other things which it were wearisome to set down. We inquired of two or three French soldiers the way into the picture-gallery; but it is our experience that French soldiers in Rome never know anything of what is around them, not even the name of the palace or public place over which they stand guard; and though invariably civil, you might as well put a question to a statue of an old Roman as to one of them. While we stood under the loggia, however, looking at the rain plashing into the court, a soldier of the Papal Guard kindly directed us up the staircase, and even took pains to go with us to the very entrance of the picture-rooms. Thank Heaven, there are but two of them, and not many pictures which one cares to look at very long. Italian galleries are at a disadvantage as compared with English ones, inasmuch as the pictures are not nearly such splendid articles of upholstery; though, very likely, having undergone less cleaning and varnishing, they may retain more perfectly the finer touches of the masters. Nevertheless, I miss the mellow glow, the rich and mild external lustre, and even the brilliant frames of the pictures I have seen in England. You feel that they have had loving care taken of them; even if spoiled, it is because they have been valued so much. But these pictures in Italian galleries look rusty and lustreless, as far as the exterior is concerned; and, really, the splendor of the painting, as a production of intellect and feeling, has a good deal of difficulty in shining through such clouds. There is a picture at the Capitol, the "Rape of Europa," by Paul Veronese, that would glow with wonderful brilliancy if it were set in a magnificent frame, and covered with a sunshine of varnish; and it is a kind of picture that would not be desecrated, as some deeper and holier ones might be, by any splendor of external adornment that could be bestowed on it. It is deplorable and disheartening to see it in faded and shabby plight,--this joyous, exuberant, warm, voluptuous work. There is the head of a cow, thrust into the picture, and staring with wild, ludicrous wonder at the godlike bull, so as to introduce quite a new sentiment. Here, and at the Borghese Palace, there were some pictures by Garofalo, an artist of whom I never heard before, but who seemed to have been a man of power. A picture by Marie Subleyras--a miniature copy from one by her husband, of the woman anointing the feet of Christ--is most delicately and beautifully finished, and would be an ornament to a drawing-room; a thing that could not truly be said of one in a hundred of these grim masterpieces. When they were painted life was not what it is now, and the artists had not the same ends in view. . . . . It depresses the spirits to go from picture to picture, leaving a portion of your vital sympathy at every one, so that you come, with a kind of half-torpid desperation, to the end. On our way down the staircase we saw several noteworthy bas-reliefs, and among them a very ancient one of Curtius plunging on horseback into the chasm in the Forum. It seems to me, however, that old sculpture affects the spirits even more dolefully than old painting; it strikes colder to the heart, and lies heavier upon it, being marble, than if it were merely canvas. My wife went to revisit the museum, which we had already seen, on the other side of the piazza; but, being cold, I left her there, and went out to ramble in the sun; for it was now brightly, though fitfully, shining again. I walked through the Forum (where a thorn thrust itself out and tore the sleeve of my talma) and under the Arch of Titus, towards the Coliseum. About a score of French drummers were beating a long, loud roll-call, at the base of the Coliseum, and under its arches; and a score of trumpeters responded to these, from the rising ground opposite the Arch of Constantine; and the echoes of the old Roman ruins, especially those of the Palace of the Caesars, responded to this martial uproar of the barbarians. There seemed to be no cause for it; but the drummers beat, and the trumpeters blew, as long as I was within hearing. I walked along the Appian Way as far as the Baths of Caracalla. The Palace of the Caesars, which I have never yet explored, appears to be crowned by the walls of a convent, built, no doubt, out of some of the fragments that would suffice to build a city; and I think there is another convent among the baths. The Catholics have taken a peculiar pleasure in planting themselves in the very citadels of paganism, whether temples or palaces. There has been a good deal of enjoyment in the destruction of old Rome. I often think so when I see the elaborate pains that have been taken to smash and demolish some beautiful column, for no purpose whatever, except the mere delight of annihilating a noble piece of work. There is something in the impulse with which one sympathizes; though I am afraid the destroyers were not sufficiently aware of the mischief they did to enjoy it fully. Probably, too, the early Christians were impelled by religious zeal to destroy the pagan temples, before the happy thought occurred of converting them into churches. March 3d.--This morning was U----'s birthday, and we celebrated it by taking a barouche, and driving (the whole family) out on the Appian Way as far as the tomb of Cecilia Metella. For the first time since we came to Rome, the weather was really warm,--a kind of heat producing languor and disinclination to active movement, though still a little breeze which was stirring threw an occasional coolness over us, and made us distrust the almost sultry atmosphere. I cannot think the Roman climate healthy in any of its moods that I have experienced. Close on the other side of the road are the ruins of a Gothic chapel, little more than a few bare walls and painted windows, and some other fragmentary structures which we did not particularly examine. U---- and I clambered through a gap in the wall, extending from the basement of the tomb, and thus, getting into the field beyond, went quite round the mausoleum and the remains of the castle connected with it. The latter, though still high and stalwart, showed few or no architectural features of interest, being built, I think, principally of large bricks, and not to be compared to English ruins as a beautiful or venerable object. A little way beyond Cecilia Metella's tomb, the road still shows a specimen of the ancient Roman pavement, composed of broad, flat flagstones, a good deal cracked and worn, but sound enough, probably, to outlast the little cubes which make the other portions of the road so uncomfortable. We turned back from this point and soon re-entered the gate of St. Sebastian, which is flanked by two small towers, and just within which is the old triumphal arch of Drusus,--a sturdy construction, much dilapidated as regards its architectural beauty, but rendered far more picturesque than it could have been in its best days by a crown of verdure on its head. Probably so much of the dust of the highway has risen in clouds and settled there, that sufficient soil for shrubbery to root itself has thus been collected, by small annual contributions, in the course of two thousand years. A little farther towards the city we turned aside from the Appian Way, and came to the site of some ancient Columbaria, close by what seemed to partake of the character of a villa and a farm-house. A man came out of the house and unlocked a door in a low building, apparently quite modern; but on entering we found ourselves looking into a large, square chamber, sunk entirely beneath the surface of the ground. A very narrow and steep staircase of stone, and evidently ancient, descended into this chamber; and, going down, we found the walls hollowed on all sides into little semicircular niches, of which, I believe, there were nine rows, one above another, and nine niches in each row. Thus they looked somewhat like the little entrances to a pigeon-house, and hence the name of Columbarium. Each semicircular niche was about a foot in its semidiameter. In the centre of this subterranean chamber was a solid square column, or pier, rising to the roof, and containing other niches of the same pattern, besides one that was high and deep, rising to the height of a man from the floor on each of the four sides. In every one of the semicircular niches were two round holes covered with an earthen plate, and in each hole were ashes and little fragments of bones,--the ashes and bones of the dead, whose names were inscribed in Roman capitals on marble slabs inlaid into the wall over each individual niche. Very likely the great ones in the central pier had contained statues, or busts, or large urns; indeed, I remember that some such things were there, as well as bas-reliefs in the walls; but hardly more than the general aspect of this strange place remains in my mind. It was the Columbarium of the connections or dependants of the Caesars; and the impression left on me was, that this mode of disposing of the dead was infinitely preferable to any which has been adopted since that day. The handful or two of dry dust and bits of dry bones in each of the small round holes had nothing disgusting in them, and they are no drier now than they were when first deposited there. I would rather have my ashes scattered over the soil to help the growth of the grass and daisies; but still I should not murmur much at having them decently pigeon-holed in a Roman tomb. After ascending out of this chamber of the dead, we looked down into another similar one, containing the ashes of Pompey's household, which was discovered only a very few years ago. Its arrangement was the same as that first described, except that it had no central pier with a passage round it, as the former had. While we were down in the first chamber the proprietor of the spot--a half-gentlemanly and very affable kind of person--came to us, and explained the arrangements of the Columbarium, though, indeed, we understood them better by their own aspect than by his explanation. The whole soil around his dwelling is elevated much above the level of the road, and it is probable that, if he chose to excavate, he might bring to light many more sepulchral chambers, and find his profit in them too, by disposing of the urns and busts. What struck me as much as anything was the neatness of these subterranean apartments, which were quite as fit to sleep in as most of those occupied by living Romans; and, having undergone no wear and tear, they were in as good condition as on the day they were built. In this Columbarium, measuring about twenty feet square, I roughly estimate that there have been deposited together the remains of at least seven or eight hundred persons, reckoning two little heaps of bones and ashes in each pigeon-hole, nine pigeon-holes in each row, and nine rows on each side, besides those on the middle pier. All difficulty in finding space for the dead would be obviated by returning to the ancient fashion of reducing them to ashes,--the only objection, though a very serious one, being the quantity of fuel that it would require. But perhaps future chemists may discover some better means of consuming or dissolving this troublesome mortality of ours. We got into the carriage again, and, driving farther towards the city, came to the tomb of the Scipios, of the exterior of which I retain no very definite idea. It was close upon the Appian Way, however, though separated from it by a high fence, and accessible through a gateway, leading into a court. I think the tomb is wholly subterranean, and that the ground above it is covered with the buildings of a farm-house; but of this I cannot be certain, as we were led immediately into a dark, underground passage, by an elderly peasant, of a cheerful and affable demeanor. As soon as he had brought us into the twilight of the tomb, he lighted a long wax taper for each of us, and led us groping into blacker and blacker darkness. Even little R----- followed courageously in the procession, which looked very picturesque as we glanced backward or forward, and beheld a twinkling line of seven lights, glimmering faintly on our faces, and showing nothing beyond. The passages and niches of the tomb seem to have been hewn and hollowed out of the rock, not built by any art of masonry; but the walls were very dark, almost black, and our tapers so dim that I could not gain a sufficient breadth of view to ascertain what kind of place it was. It was very dark, indeed; the Mammoth Cave of Kentucky could not be darker. The rough-hewn roof was within touch, and sometimes we had to stoop to avoid hitting our heads; it was covered with damps, which collected and fell upon us in occasional drops. The passages, besides being narrow, were so irregular and crooked, that, after going a little way, it would have been impossible to return upon our steps without the help of the guide; and we appeared to be taking quite an extensive ramble underground, though in reality I suppose the tomb includes no great space. At several turns of our dismal way, the guide pointed to inscriptions in Roman capitals, commemorating various members of the Scipio family who were buried here; among them, a son of Scipio Africanus, who himself had his death and burial in a foreign land. All these inscriptions, however, are copies,--the originals, which were really found here, having been removed to the Vatican. Whether any bones and ashes have been left, or whether any were found, I do not know. It is not, at all events, a particularly interesting spot, being such shapeless blackness, and a mere dark hole, requiring a stronger illumination than that of our tapers to distinguish it from any other cellar. I did, at one place, see a sort of frieze, rather roughly sculptured; and, as we returned towards the twilight of the entrance-passage, I discerned a large spider, who fled hastily away from our tapers,--the solitary living inhabitant of the tomb of the Scipios. One visit that we made, and I think it was before entering the city gates, I forgot to mention. It was to an old edifice, formerly called the Temple of Bacchus, but now supposed to have been the Temple of Virtue and Honor. The interior consists of a vaulted hall, which was converted from its pagan consecration into a church or chapel, by the early Christians; and the ancient marble pillars of the temple may still be seen built in with the brick and stucco of the later occupants. There is an altar, and other tokens of a Catholic church, and high towards the ceiling, there are some frescos of saints or angels, very curious specimens of mediaeval, and earlier than mediaeval art. Nevertheless, the place impressed me as still rather pagan than Christian. What is most remarkable about this spot or this vicinity lies in the fact that the Fountain of Egeria was formerly supposed to be close at hand; indeed, the custode of the chapel still claims the spot as the identical one consecrated by the legend. There is a dark grove of trees, not far from the door of the temple; but Murray, a highly essential nuisance on such excursions as this, throws such overwhelming doubt, or rather incredulity, upon the site, that I seized upon it as a pretext for not going thither. In fact, my small capacity for sight-seeing was already more than satisfied. On account of ------ I am sorry that we did not see the grotto, for her enthusiasm is as fresh as the waters of Egeria's well can be, and she has poetical faith enough to light her cheerfully through all these mists of incredulity. Our visits to sepulchral places ended with Scipio's tomb, whence we returned to our dwelling, and Miss M------ came to dine with us. March 10th.--On Saturday last, a very rainy day, we went to the Sciarra Palace, and took U---- with us. It is on the Corso, nearly opposite to the Piazza Colonna. It has (Heaven be praised!) but four rooms of pictures, among which, however, are several very celebrated ones. Only a few of these remain in my memory,--Raphael's "Violin Player," which I am willing to accept as a good picture; and Leonardo da Vinci's "Vanity and Modesty," which also I can bring up before my mind's eye, and find it very beautiful, although one of the faces has an affected smile, which I have since seen on another picture by the same artist, Joanna of Aragon. The most striking picture in the collection, I think, is Titian's "Bella Donna,"--the only one of Titian's works that I have yet seen which makes an impression on me corresponding with his fame. It is a very splendid and very scornful lady, as beautiful and as scornful as Gainsborough's Lady Lyndoch, though of an entirely different type. There were two Madonnas by Guido, of which I liked the least celebrated one best; and several pictures by Garofalo, who always produces something noteworthy. All the pictures lacked the charm (no doubt I am a barbarian to think it one) of being in brilliant frames, and looked as if it were a long, long while since they were cleaned or varnished. The light was so scanty, too, on that heavily clouded day, and in those gloomy old rooms of the palace, that scarcely anything could be fairly made out. [I cannot refrain from observing here, that Mr. Hawthorne's inexorable demand for perfection in all things leads him to complain of grimy pictures and tarnished frames and faded frescos, distressing beyond measure to eyes that never failed to see everything before him with the keenest apprehension. The usual careless observation of people both of the good and the imperfect is much more comfortable in this imperfect world. But the insight which Mr. Hawthorne possessed was only equalled by his outsight, and he suffered in a way not to be readily conceived, from any failure in beauty, physical, moral, or intellectual. It is not, therefore, mere love of upholstery that impels him to ask for perfect settings to priceless gems of art; but a native idiosyncrasy, which always made me feel that "the New Jerusalem," "even like a jasper stone, clear as crystal," "where shall in no wise enter anything that defileth, neither what worketh abomination nor maketh a lie," would alone satisfy him, or rather alone not give him actual pain. It may give an idea of this exquisite nicety of feeling to mention, that one day he took in his fingers a half-bloomed rose, without blemish, and, smiling with an infinite joy, remarked, "This is perfect. On earth a flower only can be perfect."--ED.] The palace is about two hundred and fifty years old, and looks as if it had never been a very cheerful place; most shabbily and scantily furnished, moreover, and as chill as any cellar. There is a small balcony, looking down on the Corso, which probably has often been filled with a merry little family party, in the carnivals of days long past. It has faded frescos, and tarnished gilding, and green blinds, and a few damask chairs still remain in it. On Monday we all went to the sculpture-gallery of the Vatican, and saw as much of the sculpture as we could in the three hours during which the public are admissible. There were a few things which I really enjoyed, and a few moments during which I really seemed to see them; but it is in vain to attempt giving the impression produced by masterpieces of art, and most in vain when we see them best. They are a language in themselves, and if they could be expressed as well any way except by themselves, there would have been no need of expressing those particular ideas and sentiments by sculpture. I saw the Apollo Belvedere as something ethereal and godlike; only for a flitting moment, however, and as if he had alighted from heaven, or shone suddenly out of the sunlight, and then had withdrawn himself again. I felt the Laocoon very powerfully, though very quietly; an immortal agony, with a strange calmness diffused through it, so that it resembles the vast rage of the sea, calm on account of its immensity; or the tumult of Niagara, which does not seem to be tumult, because it keeps pouring on for ever and ever. I have not had so good a day as this (among works of art) since we came to Rome; and I impute it partly to the magnificence of the arrangements of the Vatican,--its long vistas and beautiful courts, and the aspect of immortality which marble statues acquire by being kept free from dust. A very hungry boy, seeing in one of the cabinets a vast porphyry vase, forty-four feet in circumference, wished that he had it full of soup. Yesterday, we went to the Pamfili Doria Palace, which, I believe, is the most splendid in Rome. The entrance is from the Corso into a court, surrounded by a colonnade, and having a space of luxuriant verdure and ornamental shrubbery in the centre. The apartments containing pictures and sculptures are fifteen in number, and run quite round the court in the first piano,--all the rooms, halls, and galleries of beautiful proportion, with vaulted roofs, some of which glow with frescos; and all are colder and more comfortless than can possibly be imagined without having been in them. The pictures, most of them, interested me very little. I am of opinion that good pictures are quite as rare as good poets; and I do not see why we should pique ourselves on admiring any but the very best. One in a thousand, perhaps, ought to live in the applause of men, from generation to generation, till its colors fade or blacken out of sight, and its canvas rots away; the rest should be put in garrets, or painted over by newer artists, just as tolerable poets are shelved when their little day is over. Nevertheless, there was one long gallery containing many pictures that I should be glad to see again under more favorable circumstances, that is, separately, and where I might contemplate them quite undisturbed, reclining in an easy-chair. At one end of the long vista of this gallery is a bust of the present Prince Doria, a smooth, sharp-nosed, rather handsome young man, and at the other end his princess, an English lady of the Talbot family, apparently a blonde, with a simple and sweet expression. There is a noble and striking portrait of the old Venetian admiral, Andrea Doria, by Sebastian del Piombo, and some other portraits and busts of the family. In the whole immense range of rooms I saw but a single fireplace, and that so deep in the wall that no amount of blaze would raise the atmosphere of the room ten degrees. If the builder of the palace, or any of his successors, have committed crimes worthy of Tophet, it would be a still worse punishment for him to wander perpetually through this suite of rooms on the cold floors of polished brick tiles or marble or mosaic, growing a little chiller and chiller through every moment of eternity,-- or, at least, till the palace crumbles down upon him. Neither would it assuage his torment in the least to be compelled to gaze up at the dark old pictures,--the ugly ghosts of what may once have been beautiful. I am not going to try any more to receive pleasure from a faded, tarnished, lustreless picture, especially if it be a landscape. There were two or three landscapes of Claude in this palace, which I doubt not would have been exquisite if they had been in the condition of those in the British National Gallery; but here they looked most forlorn, and even their sunshine was sunless. The merits of historical painting may be quite independent of the attributes that give pleasure, and a superficial ugliness may even heighten the effect; but not so of landscapes. Via Porta, Palazzo Larazani, March 11th.--To-day we called at Mr. Thompson's studio, and . . . . he had on the easel a little picture of St. Peter released from prison by the angel, which I saw once before. It is very beautiful indeed, and deeply and spiritually conceived, and I wish I could afford to have it finished for myself. I looked again, too, at his Georgian slave, and admired it as much as at first view; so very warm and rich it is, so sensuously beautiful, and with an expression of higher life and feeling within. I do not think there is a better painter than Mr. Thompson living,--among Americans at least; not one so earnest, faithful, and religious in his worship of art. I had rather look at his pictures than at any except the very finest of the old masters, and, taking into consideration only the comparative pleasure to be derived, I would not except more than one or two of those. In painting, as in literature, I suspect there is something in the productions of the day that takes the fancy more than the works of any past age,--not greater merit, nor nearly so great, but better suited to this very present time. After leaving him, we went to the Piazza de' Termini, near the Baths of Diocletian, and found our way with some difficulty to Crawford's studio. It occupies several great rooms, connected with the offices of the Villa Negroni; and all these rooms were full of plaster casts and a few works in marble,--principally portions of his huge Washington monument, which he left unfinished at his death. Close by the door at which we entered stood a gigantic figure of Mason, in bag-wig, and the coat, waistcoat, breeches, and knee and shoe buckles of the last century, the enlargement of these unheroic matters to far more than heroic size having a very odd effect. There was a figure of Jefferson on the same scale; another of Patrick Henry, besides a horse's head, and other portions of the equestrian group which is to cover the summit of the monument. In one of the rooms was a model of the monument itself, on a scale, I should think, of about an inch to afoot. It did not impress me as having grown out of any great and genuine idea in the artist's mind, but as being merely an ingenious contrivance enough. There were also casts of statues that seemed to be intended for some other monument referring to Revolutionary times and personages; and with these were intermixed some ideal statues or groups,--a naked boy playing marbles, very beautiful; a girl with flowers; the cast of his Orpheus, of which I long ago saw the marble statue; Adam and Eve; Flora,--all with a good deal of merit, no doubt, but not a single one that justifies Crawford's reputation, or that satisfies me of his genius. They are but commonplaces in marble and plaster, such as we should not tolerate on a printed page. He seems to have been a respectable man, highly respectable, but no more, although those who knew him seem to have rated him much higher. It is said that he exclaimed, not very long before his death, that he had fifteen years of good work still in him; and he appears to have considered all his life and labor, heretofore, as only preparatory to the great things that he was to achieve hereafter. I should say, on the contrary, that he was a man who had done his best, and had done it early; for his Orpheus is quite as good as anything else we saw in his studio. People were at work chiselling several statues in marble from the plaster models,--a very interesting process, and which I should think a doubtful and hazardous one; but the artists say that there is no risk of mischief, and that the model is sure to be accurately repeated in the marble. These persons, who do what is considered the mechanical part of the business, are often themselves sculptors, and of higher reputation than those who employ them. It is rather sad to think that Crawford died before he could see his ideas in the marble, where they gleam with so pure and celestial a light as compared with the plaster. There is almost as much difference as between flesh and spirit. The floor of one of the rooms was burdened with immense packages, containing parts of the Washington monument, ready to be forwarded to its destination. When finished, and set up, it will probably make a very splendid appearance, by its height, its mass, its skilful execution; and will produce a moral effect through its images of illustrious men, and the associations that connect it with our Revolutionary history; but I do not think it will owe much to artistic force of thought or depth of feeling. It is certainly, in one sense, a very foolish and illogical piece of work,--Washington, mounted on an uneasy steed, on a very narrow space, aloft in the air, whence a single step of the horse backward, forward, or on either side, must precipitate him; and several of his contemporaries standing beneath him, not looking up to wonder at his predicament, but each intent on manifesting his own personality to the world around. They have nothing to do with one another, nor with Washington, nor with any great purpose which all are to work out together. March 14th.--On Friday evening I dined at Mr. T. B. Read's, the poet and artist, with a party composed of painters and sculptors,--the only exceptions being the American banker and an American tourist who has given Mr. Read a commission. Next to me at table sat Mr. Gibson, the English sculptor, who, I suppose, stands foremost in his profession at this day. He must be quite an old man now, for it was whispered about the table that he is known to have been in Rome forty-two years ago, and he himself spoke to me of spending thirty-seven years here, before he once returned home. I should hardly take him to be sixty, however, his hair being more dark than gray, his forehead unwrinkled, his features unwithered, his eye undimmed, though his beard is somewhat venerable. . . . . He has a quiet, self-contained aspect, and, being a bachelor, has doubtless spent a calm life among his clay and marble, meddling little with the world, and entangling himself with no cares beyond his studio. He did not talk a great deal; but enough to show that he is still an Englishman in many sturdy traits, though his accent has something foreign about it. His conversation was chiefly about India, and other topics of the day, together with a few reminiscences of people in Liverpool, where he once resided. There was a kind of simplicity both in his manner and matter, and nothing very remarkable in the latter. . . . . The gist of what he said (upon art) was condemnatory of the Pre-Raphaelite modern school of painters, of whom he seemed to spare none, and of their works nothing; though he allowed that the old Pre-Raphaelites had some exquisite merits, which the moderns entirely omit in their imitations. In his own art, he said the aim should be to find out the principles on which the Greek sculptors wrought, and to do the work of this day on those principles and in their spirit; a fair doctrine enough, I should think, but which Mr. Gibson can scarcely be said to practise. . . . . The difference between the Pre-Raphaelites and himself is deep and genuine, they being literalists and realists, in a certain sense, and he a pagan idealist. Methinks they have hold of the best end of the matter. March 18th.--To-day, it being very bright and mild, we set out, at noon, for an expedition to the Temple of Vesta, though I did not feel much inclined for walking, having been ill and feverish for two or three days past with a cold, which keeps renewing itself faster than I can get rid of it. We kept along on this side of the Corso, and crossed the Forum, skirting along the Capitoline Hill, and thence towards the Circus Maximus. On our way, looking down a cross street, we saw a heavy arch, and, on examination, made it out to be the Arch of Janus Quadrifrons, standing in the Forum Boarium. Its base is now considerably below the level of the surrounding soil, and there is a church or basilica close by, and some mean edifices looking down upon it. There is something satisfactory in this arch, from the immense solidity of its structure. It gives the idea, in the first place, of a solid mass constructed of huge blocks of marble, which time can never wear away, nor earthquakes shake down; and then this solid mass is penetrated by two arched passages, meeting in the centre. There are empty niches, three in a row, and, I think, two rows on each face; but there seems to have been very little effort to make it a beautiful object. On the top is some brickwork, the remains of a mediaeval fortress built by the Frangipanis, looking very frail and temporary being brought thus in contact with the antique strength of the arch. A few yards off, across the street, and close beside the basilica, is what appears to be an ancient portal, with carved bas-reliefs, and an inscription which I could not make out. Some Romans were lying dormant in the sun, on the steps of the basilica; indeed, now that the sun is getting warmer, they seem to take advantage of every quiet nook to bask in, and perhaps to go to sleep. We had gone but a little way from the arch, and across the Circus Maximus, when we saw the Temple of Vesta before us, on the hank of the Tiber, which, however, we could not see behind it. It is a most perfectly preserved Roman ruin, and very beautiful, though so small that, in a suitable locality, one would take it rather for a garden-house than an ancient temple. A circle of white marble pillars, much time-worn and a little battered, though but one of them broken, surround the solid structure of the temple, leaving a circular walk between it and the pillars, the whole covered by a modern roof which looks like wood, and disgraces and deforms the elegant little building. This roof resembles, as much as anything else, the round wicker cover of a basket, and gives a very squat aspect to the temple. The pillars are of the Corinthian order, and when they were new and the marble snow-white and sharply carved and cut, there could not have been a prettier object in all Rome; but so small an edifice does not appear well as a ruin. Within view of it, and, indeed, a very little way off, is the Temple of Fortuna Virilis, which likewise retains its antique form in better preservation than we generally find a Roman ruin, although the Ionic pillars are now built up with blocks of stone and patches of brickwork, the whole constituting a church which is fixed against the side of a tall edifice, the nature of which I do not know. I forgot to say that we gained admittance into the Temple of Vesta, and found the interior a plain cylinder of marble, about ten paces across, and fitted up as a chapel, where the Virgin takes the place of Vesta. In very close vicinity we came upon the Ponto Rotto, the old Pons Emilius which was broken down long ago, and has recently been pieced out by connecting a suspension bridge with the old piers. We crossed by this bridge, paying a toll of a baioccho each, and stopped in the midst of the river to look at the Temple of Vesta, which shows well, right on the brink of the Tiber. We fancied, too, that we could discern, a little farther down the river, the ruined and almost submerged piers of the Sublician bridge, which Horatius Cocles defended. The Tiber here whirls rapidly along, and Horatius must have had a perilous swim for his life, and the enemy a fair mark at his head with their arrows. I think this is the most picturesque part of the Tiber in its passage through Rome. After crossing the bridge, we kept along the right bank of the river, through the dirty and hard-hearted streets of Trastevere (which have in no respect the advantage over those of hither Rome), till we reached St. Peter's. We saw a family sitting before their door on the pavement in the narrow and sunny street, engaged in their domestic avocations,--the old woman spinning with a wheel. I suppose the people now begin to live out of doors. We entered beneath the colonnade of St. Peter's and immediately became sensible of an evil odor,--the bad odor of our fallen nature, which there is no escaping in any nook of Rome. . . . . Between the pillars of the colonnade, however, we had the pleasant spectacle of the two fountains, sending up their lily-shaped gush, with rainbows shining in their falling spray. Parties of French soldiers, as usual, were undergoing their drill in the piazza. When we entered the church, the long, dusty sunbeams were falling aslantwise through the dome and through the chancel behind it. . . . . March 23d.--On the 21st we all went to the Coliseum, and enjoyed ourselves there in the bright, warm sun,--so bright and warm that we were glad to get into the shadow of the walls and under the arches, though, after all, there was the freshness of March in the breeze that stirred now and then. J----- and baby found some beautiful flowers growing round about the Coliseum; and far up towards the top of the walls we saw tufts of yellow wall-flowers and a great deal of green grass growing along the ridges between the arches. The general aspect of the place, however, is somewhat bare, and does not compare favorably with an English ruin both on account of the lack of ivy and because the material is chiefly brick, the stone and marble having been stolen away by popes and cardinals to build their palaces. While we sat within the circle, many people, of both sexes, passed through, kissing the iron cross which stands in the centre, thereby gaining an indulgence of seven years, I believe. In front of several churches I have seen an inscription in Latin, "INDULGENTIA PLENARIA ET PERPETUA PRO CUNCTIS MORTUIS ET VIVIS"; than which, it seems to me, nothing more could be asked or desired. The terms of this great boon are not mentioned. Leaving the Coliseum, we went and sat down in the vicinity of the Arch of Constantine, and J----- and R----- went in quest of lizards. J----- soon caught a large one with two tails; one, a sort of afterthought, or appendix, or corollary to the original tail, and growing out from it instead of from the body of the lizard. These reptiles are very abundant, and J----- has already brought home several, which make their escape and appear occasionally darting to and fro on the carpet. Since we have been here, J----- has taken up various pursuits in turn. First he voted himself to gathering snail-shells, of which there are many sorts; afterwards he had a fever for marbles, pieces of which he found on the banks of the Tiber, just on the edge of its muddy waters, and in the Palace of the Caesars, the Baths of Caracalla, and indeed wherever else his fancy led him; verde antique, rosso antico, porphyry, giallo antico, serpentine, sometimes fragments of bas-reliefs and mouldings, bits of mosaic, still firmly stuck together, on which the foot of a Caesar had perhaps once trodden; pieces of Roman glass, with the iridescence glowing on them; and all such things, of which the soil of Rome is full. It would not be difficult, from the spoil of his boyish rambles, to furnish what would be looked upon as a curious and valuable museum in America. Yesterday we went to the sculpture-galleries of the Vatican. I think I enjoy these noble galleries and their contents and beautiful arrangement better than anything else in the way of art, and often I seem to have a deep feeling of something wonderful in what I look at. The Laocoon on this visit impressed me not less than before; it is such a type of human beings, struggling with an inextricable trouble, and entangled in a complication which they cannot free themselves from by their own efforts, and out of which Heaven alone can help them. It was a most powerful mind, and one capable of reducing a complex idea to unity, that imagined this group. I looked at Canova's Perseus, and thought it exceedingly beautiful, but, found myself less and less contented after a moment or two, though I could not tell why. Afterwards, looking at the Apollo, the recollection of the Perseus disgusted me, and yet really I cannot explain how one is better than the other. I was interested in looking at the busts of the Triumvirs, Antony, Augustus, and Lepidus. The first two are men of intellect, evidently, though they do not recommend themselves to one's affections by their physiognomy; but Lepidus has the strangest, most commonplace countenance that can be imagined,--small-featured, weak, such a face as you meet anywhere in a man of no mark, but are amazed to find in one of the three foremost men of the world. I suppose that it is these weak and shallow men, when chance raises them above their proper sphere, who commit enormous crimes without any such restraint as stronger men would feel, and without any retribution in the depth of their conscience. These old Roman busts, of which there are so many in the Vatican, have often a most lifelike aspect, a striking individuality. One recognizes them as faithful portraits, just as certainly as if the living originals were standing beside them. The arrangement of the hair and beard too, in many cases, is just what we see now, the fashions of two thousand years ago having come round again. March 25th.--On Tuesday we went to breakfast at William Story's in the Palazzo Barberini. We had a very pleasant time. He is one of the most agreeable men I know in society. He showed us a note from Thackeray, an invitation to dinner, written in hieroglyphics, with great fun and pictorial merit. He spoke of an expansion of the story of Blue Beard, which he himself had either written or thought of writing, in which the contents of the several chambers which Fatima opened, before arriving at the fatal one, were to be described. This idea has haunted my mind ever since, and if it had but been my own I am pretty sure that it would develop itself into something very rich. I mean to press William Story to work it out. The chamber of Blue Beard, too (and this was a part of his suggestion), might be so handled as to become powerfully interesting. Were I to take up the story I would create an interest by suggesting a secret in the first chamber, which would develop itself more and more in every successive hall of the great palace, and lead the wife irresistibly to the chamber of horrors. After breakfast, we went to the Barberini Library, passing through the vast hall, which occupies the central part of the palace. It is the most splendid domestic hall I have seen, eighty feet in length at least, and of proportionate breadth and height; and the vaulted ceiling is entirely covered, to its utmost edge and remotest corners, with a brilliant painting in fresco, looking like a whole heaven of angelic people descending towards the floor. The effect is indescribably gorgeous. On one side stands a Baldacchino, or canopy of state, draped with scarlet cloth, and fringed with gold embroidery; the scarlet indicating that the palace is inhabited by a cardinal. Green would be appropriate to a prince. In point of fact, the Palazzo Barberini is inhabited by a cardinal, a prince, and a duke, all belonging to the Barberini family, and each having his separate portion of the palace, while their servants have a common territory and meeting-ground in this noble hall. After admiring it for a few minutes, we made our exit by a door on the opposite side, and went up the spiral staircase of marble to the library, where we were received by an ecclesiastic, who belongs to the Barberini household, and, I believe, was born in it. He is a gentle, refined, quiet-looking man, as well he may be, having spent all his life among these books, where few people intrude, and few cares can come. He showed us a very old Bible in parchment, a specimen of the earliest printing, beautifully ornamented with pictures, and some monkish illuminations of indescribable delicacy and elaboration. No artist could afford to produce such work, if the life that he thus lavished on one sheet of parchment had any value to him, either for what could be done or enjoyed in it. There are about eight thousand volumes in this library, and, judging by their outward aspect, the collection must be curious and valuable; but having another engagement, we could spend only a little time here. We had a hasty glance, however, of some poems of Tasso, in his own autograph. We then went to the Palazzo Galitzin, where dwell the Misses Weston, with whom we lunched, and where we met a French abbe, an agreeable man, and an antiquarian, under whose auspices two of the ladies and ourselves took carriage for the Castle of St. Angelo. Being admitted within the external gateway, we found ourselves in the court of guard, as I presume it is called, where the French soldiers were playing with very dirty cards, or lounging about, in military idleness. They were well behaved and courteous, and when we had intimated our wish to see the interior of the castle, a soldier soon appeared, with a large unlighted torch in his hand, ready to guide us. There is an outer wall, surrounding the solid structure of Hadrian's tomb; to which there is access by one or two drawbridges; the entrance to the tomb, or castle, not being at the base, but near its central height. The ancient entrance, by which Hadrian's ashes, and those of other imperial personages, were probably brought into this tomb, has been walled up,--perhaps ever since the last emperor was buried here. We were now in a vaulted passage, both lofty and broad, which circles round the whole interior of the tomb, from the base to the summit. During many hundred years, the passage was filled with earth and rubbish, and forgotten, and it is but partly excavated, even now; although we found it a long, long and gloomy descent by torchlight to the base of the vast mausoleum. The passage was once lined and vaulted with precious marbles (which are now entirely gone), and paved with fine mosaics, portions of which still remain; and our guide lowered his flaming torch to show them to us, here and there, amid the earthy dampness over which we trod. It is strange to think what splendor and costly adornment were here wasted on the dead. After we had descended to the bottom of this passage, and again retraced our steps to the highest part, the guide took a large cannon-ball, and sent it, with his whole force, rolling down the hollow, arched way, rumbling, and reverberating, and bellowing forth long thunderous echoes, and winding up with a loud, distant crash, that seemed to come from the very bowels of the earth. We saw the place, near the centre of the mausoleum, and lighted from above, through an immense thickness of stone and brick, where the ashes of the emperor and his fellow-slumberers were found. It is as much as twelve centuries, very likely, since they were scattered to the winds, for the tomb has been nearly or quite that space of time a fortress; The tomb itself is merely the base and foundation of the castle, and, being so massively built, it serves just as well for the purpose as if it were a solid granite rock. The mediaeval fortress, with its antiquity of more than a thousand years, and having dark and deep dungeons of its own, is but a modern excrescence on the top of Hadrian's tomb. We now ascended towards the upper region, and were led into the vaults which used to serve as a prison, but which, if I mistake not, are situated above the ancient structure, although they seem as damp and subterranean as if they were fifty feet under the earth. We crept down to them through narrow and ugly passages, which the torchlight would not illuminate, and, stooping under a low, square entrance, we followed the guide into a small, vaulted room,--not a room, but an artificial cavern, remote from light or air, where Beatrice Cenci was confined before her execution. According to the abbe, she spent a whole year in this dreadful pit, her trial having dragged on through that length of time. How ghostlike she must have looked when she came forth! Guido never painted that beautiful picture from her blanched face, as it appeared after this confinement. And how rejoiced she must have been to die at last, having already been in a sepulchre so long! Adjacent to Beatrice's prison, but not communicating with it, was that of her step-mother; and next to the latter was one that interested me almost as much as Beatrice's,--that of Benvenuto Cellini, who was confined here, I believe, for an assassination. All these prison vaults are more horrible than can be imagined without seeing them; but there are worse places here, for the guide lifted a trap-door in one of the passages, and held his torch down into an inscrutable pit beneath our feet. It was an oubliette, a dungeon where the prisoner might be buried alive, and never come forth again, alive or dead. Groping about among these sad precincts, we saw various other things that looked very dismal; but at last emerged into the sunshine, and ascended from one platform and battlement to another, till we found ourselves right at the feet of the Archangel Michael. He has stood there in bronze for I know not how many hundred years, in the act of sheathing a (now) rusty sword, such being the attitude in which he appeared to one of the popes in a vision, in token that a pestilence which was then desolating Rome was to be stayed. There is a fine view from the lofty station over Rome and the whole adjacent country, and the abbe pointed out the site of Ardea, of Corioli, of Veii, and other places renowned in story. We were ushered, too, into the French commandant's quarters in the castle. There is a large hall, ornamented with frescos, and accessible from this a drawing-room, comfortably fitted up, and where we saw modern furniture, and a chess-board, and a fire burning clear, and other symptoms that the place had perhaps just been vacated by civilized and kindly people. But in one corner of the ceiling the abbe pointed out a ring, by which, in the times of mediaeval anarchy, when popes, cardinals, and barons were all by the ears together, a cardinal was hanged. It was not an assassination, but a legal punishment, and he was executed in the best apartment of the castle as an act of grace. The fortress is a straight-lined structure on the summit of the immense round tower of Hadrian's tomb; and to make out the idea of it we must throw in drawbridges, esplanades, piles of ancient marble balls for cannon; battlements and embrasures, lying high in the breeze and sunshine, and opening views round the whole horizon; accommodation for the soldiers; and many small beds in a large room. How much mistaken was the emperor in his expectation of a stately, solemn repose for his ashes through all the coming centuries, as long as the world should endure! Perhaps his ghost glides up and down disconsolate, in that spiral passage which goes from top to bottom of the tomb, while the barbarous Gauls plant themselves in his very mausoleum to keep the imperial city in awe. Leaving the Castle of St. Angelo, we drove, still on the same side of the Tiber, to the Villa Pamfili, which lies a short distance beyond the walls. As we passed through one of the gates (I think it was that of San Pancrazio) the abbe pointed out the spot where the Constable de Bourbon was killed while attempting to scale the walls. If we are to believe Benvenuto Cellini, it was he who shot the constable. The road to the villa is not very interesting, lying (as the roads in the vicinity of Rome often do) between very high walls, admitting not a glimpse of the surrounding country; the road itself white and dusty, with no verdant margin of grass or border of shrubbery. At the portal of the villa we found many carriages in waiting, for the Prince Doria throws open the grounds to all comers, and on a pleasant day like this they are probably sure to be thronged. We left our carriage just within the entrance, and rambled among these beautiful groves, admiring the live-oak trees, and the stone-pines, which latter are truly a majestic tree, with tall columnar stems, supporting a cloud-like density of boughs far aloft, and not a straggling branch between there and the ground. They stand in straight rows, but are now so ancient and venerable as to have lost the formal look of a plantation, and seem like a wood that might have arranged itself almost of its own will. Beneath them is a flower-strewn turf, quite free of underbrush. We found open fields and lawns, moreover, all abloom with anemones, white and rose-colored and purple and golden, and far larger than could be found out of Italy, except in hot-houses. Violets, too, were abundant and exceedingly fragrant. When we consider that all this floral exuberance occurs in the midst of March, there does not appear much ground for complaining of the Roman climate; and so long ago as the first week of February I found daisies among the grass, on the sunny side of the Basilica of St. John Lateran. At this very moment I suppose the country within twenty miles of Boston may be two feet deep with snow, and the streams solid with ice. We wandered about the grounds, and found them very beautiful indeed; nature having done much for them by an undulating variety of surface, and art having added a good many charms, which have all the better effect now that decay and neglect have thrown a natural grace over them likewise. There is an artificial ruin, so picturesque that it betrays itself; weather-beaten statues, and pieces of sculpture, scattered here and there; an artificial lake, with upgushing fountains; cascades, and broad-bosomed coves, and long, canal-like reaches, with swans taking their delight upon them. I never saw such a glorious and resplendent lustre of white as shone between the wings of two of these swans. It was really a sight to see, and not to be imagined beforehand. Angels, no doubt, have just such lustrous wings as those. English swans partake of the dinginess of the atmosphere, and their plumage has nothing at all to be compared to this; in fact, there is nothing like it in the world, unless it be the illuminated portion of a fleecy, summer cloud. While we were sauntering along beside this piece of water, we were surprised to see U---- on the other side. She had come hither with E---- S------ and her two little brothers, and with our R-----, the whole under the charge of Mrs. Story's nursery-maids. U---- and E---- crossed, not over, but beneath the water, through a grotto, and exchanged greetings with us. Then, as it was getting towards sunset and cool, we took our departure; the abbe, as we left the grounds, taking me aside to give me a glimpse of a Columbarium, which descends into the earth to about the depth to which an ordinary house might rise above it. These grounds, it is said, formed the country residence of the Emperor Galba, and he was buried here after his assassination. It is a sad thought that so much natural beauty and long refinement of picturesque culture is thrown away, the villa being uninhabitable during all the most delightful season of the year on account of malaria. There is truly a curse on Rome and all its neighborhood. On our way home we passed by the great Paolina fountain, and were assailed by many beggars during the short time we stopped to look at it. It is a very copious fountain, but not so beautiful as the Trevi, taking into view merely the water-gush of the latter. March 26th.--Yesterday, between twelve and one, our whole family went to the Villa Ludovisi, the entrance to which is at the termination of a street which passes out of the Piazza Barberini, and it is no very great distance from our own street, Via Porta Pinciana. The grounds, though very extensive, are wholly within the walls of the city, which skirt them, and comprise a part of what were formerly the gardens of Sallust. The villa is now the property of Prince Piombini, a ticket from whom procured us admission. A little within the gateway, to the right, is a casino, containing two large rooms filled with sculpture, much of which is very valuable. A colossal head of Juno, I believe, is considered the greatest treasure of the collection, but I did not myself feel it to be so, nor indeed did I receive any strong impression of its excellence. I admired nothing so much, I think, as the face of Penelope (if it be her face) in the group supposed also to represent Electra and Orestes. The sitting statue of Mars is very fine; so is the Arria and Paetus; so are many other busts and figures. By and by we left the casino and wandered among the grounds, threading interminable alleys of cypress, through the long vistas of which we could see here and there a statue, an urn, a pillar, a temple, or garden-house, or a bas-relief against the wall. It seems as if there must have been a time, and not so very long ago,--when it was worth while to spend money and thought upon the ornamentation of grounds in the neighborhood of Rome. That time is past, however, and the result is very melancholy; for great beauty has been produced, but it can be enjoyed in its perfection only at the peril of one's life. . . . . For my part, and judging from my own experience, I suspect that the Roman atmosphere, never wholesome, is always more or less poisonous. We came to another and larger casino remote from the gateway, in which the Prince resides during two months of the year. It was now under repair, but we gained admission, as did several other visitors, and saw in the entrance-hall the Aurora of Guercino, painted in fresco on the ceiling. There is beauty in the design; but the painter certainly was most unhappy in his black shadows, and in the work before us they give the impression of a cloudy and lowering morning which is likely enough to turn to rain by and by. After viewing the fresco we mounted by a spiral staircase to a lofty terrace, and found Rome at our feet, and, far off, the Sabine and Alban mountains, some of them still capped with snow. In another direction there was a vast plain, on the horizon of which, could our eyes have reached to its verge, we might perhaps have seen the Mediterranean Sea. After enjoying the view and the warm sunshine we descended, and went in quest of the gardens of Sallust, but found no satisfactory remains of them. One of the most striking objects in the first casino was a group by Bernini,--Pluto, an outrageously masculine and strenuous figure, heavily bearded, ravishing away a little, tender Proserpine, whom he holds aloft, while his forcible gripe impresses itself into her soft virgin flesh. It is very disagreeable, but it makes one feel that Bernini was a man of great ability. There are some works in literature that bear an analogy to his works in sculpture, when great power is lavished a little outside of nature, and therefore proves to be only a fashion,--and not permanently adapted to the tastes of mankind. March 27th.--Yesterday forenoon my wife and I went to St. Peter's to see the pope pray at the chapel of the Holy Sacrament. We found a good many people in the church, but not an inconvenient number; indeed, not so many as to make any remarkable show in the great nave, nor even in front of the chapel. A detachment of the Swiss Guard, in their strange, picturesque, harlequin-like costume, were on duty before the chapel, in which the wax tapers were all lighted, and a prie-dieu was arranged near the shrine, and covered with scarlet velvet. On each side, along the breadth of the side aisle, were placed seats, covered with rich tapestry or carpeting; and some gentlemen and ladies--English, probably, or American--had comfortably deposited themselves here, but were compelled to move by the guards before the pope's entrance. His Holiness should have appeared precisely at twelve, but we waited nearly half an hour beyond that time; and it seemed to me particularly ill-mannered in the pope, who owes the courtesy of being punctual to the people, if not to St. Peter. By and by, however, there was a stir; the guard motioned to us to stand away from the benches, against the backs of which we had been leaning; the spectators in the nave looked towards the door, as if they beheld something approaching; and first, there appeared some cardinals, in scarlet skull-caps and purple robes, intermixed with some of the Noble Guard and other attendants. It was not a very formal and stately procession, but rather straggled onward, with ragged edges, the spectators standing aside to let it pass, and merely bowing, or perhaps slightly bending the knee, as good Catholics are accustomed to do when passing before the shrines of saints. Then, in the midst of the purple cardinals, all of whom were gray-haired men, appeared a stout old man, with a white skull-cap, a scarlet, gold-embroidered cape falling over his shoulders, and a white silk robe, the train of which was borne up by an attendant. He walked slowly, with a sort of dignified movement, stepping out broadly, and planting his feet (on which were red shoes) flat upon the pavement, as if he were not much accustomed to locomotion, and perhaps had known a twinge of the gout. His face was kindly and venerable, but not particularly impressive. Arriving at the scarlet-covered prie-dieu, he kneeled down and took off his white skull-cap; the cardinals also kneeled behind and on either side of him, taking off their scarlet skull-caps; while the Noble Guard remained standing, six on one side of his Holiness and six on the other. The pope bent his head upon the prie-dieu, and seemed to spend three or four minutes in prayer; then rose, and all the purple cardinals, and bishops, and priests, of whatever degree, rose behind and beside him. Next, he went to kiss St. Peter's toe; at least I believe he kissed it, but I was not near enough to be certain; and lastly, he knelt down, and directed his devotions towards the high altar. This completed the ceremonies, and his Holiness left the church by a side door, making a short passage into the Vatican. I am very glad I have seen the pope, because now he may be crossed out of the list of sights to be seen. His proximity impressed me kindly and favorably towards him, and I did not see one face among all his cardinals (in whose number, doubtless, is his successor) which I would so soon trust as that of Pio Nono. This morning I walked as far as the gate of San Paolo, and, on approaching it, I saw the gray sharp pyramid of Caius Cestius pointing upward close to the two dark-brown, battlemented Gothic towers of the gateway, each of these very different pieces of architecture looking the more picturesque for the contrast of the other. Before approaching the gateway and pyramid, I walked onward, and soon came in sight of Monte Testaccio, the artificial hill made of potsherds. There is a gate admitting into the grounds around the hill, and a road encircling its base. At a distance, the hill looks greener than any other part of the landscape, and has all the curved outlines of a natural hill, resembling in shape a headless sphinx, or Saddleback Mountain, as I used to see it from Lenox. It is of very considerable height,--two or three hundred feet at least, I should say,--and well entitled, both by its elevation and the space it covers, to be reckoned among the hills of Rome. Its base is almost entirely surrounded with small structures, which seem to be used as farm-buildings. On the summit is a large iron cross, the Church having thought it expedient to redeem these shattered pipkins from the power of paganism, as it has so many other Roman ruins. There was a pathway up the hill, but I did not choose to ascend it under the hot sun, so steeply did it clamber up. There appears to be a good depth of soil on most parts of Monte Testaccio, but on some of the sides you observe precipices, bristling with fragments of red or brown earthenware, or pieces of vases of white unglazed clay; and it is evident that this immense pile is entirely composed of broken crockery, which I should hardly have thought would have aggregated to such a heap had it all been thrown here,--urns, teacups, porcelain, or earthen,--since the beginning of the world. I walked quite round the hill, and saw, at no great distance from it, the enclosure of the Protestant burial-ground, which lies so close to the pyramid of Caius Cestius that the latter may serve as a general monument to the dead. Deferring, for the present, a visit to the cemetery, or to the interior of the pyramid, I returned to the gateway of San Paolo, and, passing through it, took a view of it from the outside of the city wall. It is itself a portion of the wall, having been built into it by the Emperor Aurelian, so that about half of it lies within and half without. The brick or red stone material of the wall being so unlike the marble of the pyramid, the latter is as distinct, and seems as insulated, as if it stood alone in the centre of a plain; and really I do not think there is a more striking architectural object in Rome. It is in perfect condition, just as little ruined or decayed as on the day when the builder put the last peak on the summit; and it ascends steeply from its base, with a point so sharp that it looks as if it would hardly afford foothold to a bird. The marble was once white, but is now covered with a gray coating like that which has gathered upon the statues of Castor and Pollux on Monte Cavallo. Not one of the great blocks is displaced, nor seems likely to be through all time to come. They rest one upon another, in straight and even lines, and present a vast smooth triangle, ascending from a base of a hundred feet, and narrowing to an apex at the height of a hundred and twenty-five, the junctures of the marble slabs being so close that, in all these twenty centuries, only a few little tufts of grass, and a trailing plant or two, have succeeded in rooting themselves into the interstices. It is good and satisfactory to see anything which, being built for an enduring monument, has endured so faithfully, and has a prospect of such an interminable futurity before it. Once, indeed, it seemed likely to be buried; for three hundred years ago it had become covered to the depth of sixteen feet, but the soil has since been dug away from its base, which is now lower than that of the road which passes through the neighboring gate of San Paolo. Midway up the pyramid, cut in the marble, is an inscription in large Roman letters, still almost as legible as when first wrought. I did not return through the Paolo gateway, but kept onward, round the exterior of the wall, till I came to the gate of San Sebastiano. It was a hot and not a very interesting walk, with only a high bare wall of brick, broken by frequent square towers, on one side of the road, and a bank and hedge or a garden wall on the other. Roman roads are most inhospitable, offering no shade, and no seat, and no pleasant views of rustic domiciles; nothing but the wheel-track of white dust, without a foot path running by its side, and seldom any grassy margin to refresh the wayfarer's feet. April 3d.--A few days ago we visited the studio of Mr. ------, an American, who seems to have a good deal of vogue as a sculptor. We found a figure of Pocahontas, which he has repeated several times; another, which he calls "The Wept of the Wish-ton-Wish," a figure of a smiling girl playing with a cat and dog, and a schoolboy mending a pen. These two last were the only ones that gave me any pleasure, or that really had any merit; for his cleverness and ingenuity appear in homely subjects, but are quite lost in attempts at a higher ideality. Nevertheless, he has a group of the Prodigal Son, possessing more merit than I should have expected from Mr. ------, the son reclining his head on his father's breast, with an expression of utter weariness, at length finding perfect rest, while the father bends his benign countenance over him, and seems to receive him calmly into himself. This group (the plaster-cast standing beside it) is now taking shape out of an immense block of marble, and will be as indestructible as the Laocoon; an idea at once awful and ludicrous, when we consider that it is at best but a respectable production. I have since been told that Mr. ------ had stolen, adopted, we will rather say, the attitude and idea of the group from one executed by a student of the French Academy, and to be seen there in plaster. (We afterwards saw it in the Medici Casino.) Mr. ------ has now been ten years in Italy, and, after all this time, he is still entirely American in everything but the most external surface of his manners; scarcely Europeanized, or much modified even in that. He is a native of ------, but had his early breeding in New York, and might, for any polish or refinement that I can discern in him, still be a country shopkeeper in the interior of New York State or New England. How strange! For one expects to find the polish, the close grain and white purity of marble, in the artist who works in that noble material; but, after all, he handles club, and, judging by the specimens I have seen here, is apt to be clay, not of the finest, himself. Mr. ------ is sensible, shrewd, keen, clever; an ingenious workman, no doubt; with tact enough, and not destitute of taste; very agreeable and lively in his conversation, talking as fast and as naturally as a brook runs, without the slightest affectation. His naturalness is, in fact, a rather striking characteristic, in view of his lack of culture, while yet his life has been concerned with idealities and a beautiful art. What degree of taste he pretends to, he seems really to possess, nor did I hear a single idea from him that struck me as otherwise than sensible. He called to see us last evening, and talked for about two hours in a very amusing and interesting style, his topics being taken from his own personal experience, and shrewdly treated. He spoke much of Greenough, whom he described as an excellent critic of art, but possessed of not the slightest inventive genius. His statue of Washington, at the Capitol, is taken precisely from the Plodian Jupiter; his Chanting Cherubs are copied in marble from two figures in a picture by Raphael. He did nothing that was original with himself To-day we took R-----, and went to see Miss ------, and as her studio seems to be mixed up with Gibson's, we had an opportunity of glancing at some of his beautiful works. We saw a Venus and a Cupid, both of them tinted; and, side by side with them, other statues identical with these, except that the marble was left in its pure whiteness. We found Miss ------ in a little upper room. She has a small, brisk, wide-awake figure, not ungraceful; frank, simple, straightforward, and downright. She had on a robe, I think, but I did not look so low, my attention being chiefly drawn to a sort of man's sack of purple or plum-colored broadcloth, into the side-pockets of which her hands were thrust as she came forward to greet us. She withdrew one hand, however, and presented it cordially to my wife (whom she already knew) and to myself, without waiting for an introduction. She had on a shirt-front, collar, and cravat like a man's, with a brooch of Etruscan gold, and on her curly head was a picturesque little cap of black velvet, and her face was as bright and merry, and as small of feature as a child's. It looked in one aspect youthful, and yet there was something worn in it too. There never was anything so jaunty as her movement and action; she was very peculiar, but she seemed to be her actual self, and nothing affected or made up; so that, for my part, I gave her full leave to wear what may suit her best, and to behave as her inner woman prompts. I don't quite see, however, what she is to do when she grows older, for the decorum of age will not be consistent with a costume that looks pretty and excusable enough in a young woman. Miss ------ led us into a part of the extensive studio, or collection of studios, where some of her own works were to be seen: Beatrice Cenci, which did not very greatly impress me; and a monumental design, a female figure,--wholly draped even to the stockings and shoes,--in a quiet sleep. I liked this last. There was also a Puck, doubtless full of fun; but I had hardly time to glance at it. Miss ------ evidently has good gifts in her profession, and doubtless she derives great advantage from her close association with a consummate artist like Gibson; nor yet does his influence seem to interfere with the originality of her own conceptions. In one way, at least, she can hardly fail to profit,--that is, by the opportunity of showing her works to the throngs of people who go to see Gibson's own; and these are just such people as an artist would most desire to meet, and might never see in a lifetime, if left to himself. I shook hands with this frank and pleasant little person, and took leave, not without purpose of seeing her again. Within a few days, there have been many pilgrims in Rome, who come hither to attend the ceremonies of holy week, and to perform their vows, and undergo their penances. I saw two of them near the Forum yesterday, with their pilgrim staves, in the fashion of a thousand years ago. . . . . I sat down on a bench near one of the chapels, and a woman immediately came up to me to beg. I at first refused; but she knelt down by my side, and instead of praying to the saint prayed to me; and, being thus treated as a canonized personage, I thought it incumbent on me to be gracious to the extent of half a paul. My wife, some time ago, came in contact with a pickpocket at the entrance of a church; and, failing in his enterprise upon her purse, he passed in, dipped his thieving fingers in the holy water, and paid his devotions at a shrine. Missing the purse, he said his prayers, in the hope, perhaps, that the saint would send him better luck another time. April 10th.--I have made no entries in my journal recently, being exceedingly lazy, partly from indisposition, as well as from an atmosphere that takes the vivacity out of everybody. Not much has happened or been effected. Last Sunday, which was Easter Sunday, I went with J----- to St. Peter's, where we arrived at about nine o'clock, and found a multitude of people already assembled in the church. The interior was arrayed in festal guise, there being a covering of scarlet damask over the pilasters of the nave, from base to capital, giving an effect of splendor, yet with a loss as to the apparent dimensions of the interior. A guard of soldiers occupied the nave, keeping open a wide space for the passage of a procession that was momently expected, and soon arrived. The crowd was too great to allow of my seeing it in detail; but I could perceive that there were priests, cardinals, Swiss guards, some of them with corselets on, and by and by the pope himself was borne up the nave, high over the heads of all, sitting under a canopy, crowned with his tiara. He floated slowly along, and was set down in the neighborhood of the high altar; and the procession being broken up, some of its scattered members might be seen here and there, about the church,--officials in antique Spanish dresses; Swiss guards, in polished steel breastplates; serving-men, in richly embroidered liveries; officers, in scarlet coats and military boots; priests, and divers other shapes of men; for the papal ceremonies seem to forego little or nothing that belongs to times past, while it includes everything appertaining to the present. I ought to have waited to witness the papal benediction from the balcony in front of the church; or, at least, to hear the famous silver trumpets, sounding from the dome; but J----- grew weary (to say the truth, so did I), and we went on a long walk, out of the nearest city gate, and back through the Janiculum, and, finally, homeward over the Ponto Rotto. Standing on the bridge, I saw the arch of the Cloaca Maxima, close by the Temple of Vesta, with the water rising within two or three feet of its keystone. The same evening we went to Monte Cavallo, where, from the gateway of the Pontifical Palace, we saw the illumination of St. Peter's. Mr. Akers, the sculptor, had recommended this position to us, and accompanied us thither, as the best point from which the illumination could be witnessed at a distance, without the incommodity of such a crowd as would be assembled at the Pincian. The first illumination, the silver one, as it is called, was very grand and delicate, describing the outline of the great edifice and crowning dome in light; while the day was not yet wholly departed. As ------ finally remarked, it seemed like the glorified spirit of the Church, made visible, or, as I will add, it looked as this famous and never-to-be-forgotten structure will look to the imaginations of men, through the waste and gloom of future ages, after it shall have gone quite to decay and ruin: the brilliant, though scarcely distinct gleam of a statelier dome than ever was seen, shining on the background of the night of Time. This simile looked prettier in my fancy than I have made it look on paper. After we had enjoyed the silver illumination a good while, and when all the daylight had given place to the constellated night, the distant outline of St. Peter's burst forth, in the twinkling of an eye, into a starry blaze, being quite the finest effect that I ever witnessed. I stayed to see it, however, only a few minutes; for I was quite ill and feverish with a cold,--which, indeed, I have seldom been free from, since my first breathing of the genial atmosphere of Rome. This pestilence kept me within doors all the next day, and prevented me from seeing the beautiful fireworks that were exhibited in the evening from the platform on the Pincian, above the Piazza del Popolo. On Thursday, I paid another visit to the sculpture-gallery of the Capitol, where I was particularly struck with a bust of Cato the Censor, who must have been the most disagreeable, stubborn, ugly-tempered, pig-headed, narrow-minded, strong-willed old Roman that ever lived. The collection of busts here and at the Vatican are most interesting, many of the individual heads being full of character, and commending themselves by intrinsic evidence as faithful portraits of the originals. These stone people have stood face to face with Caesar, and all the other emperors, and with statesmen, soldiers, philosophers, and poets of the antique world, and have been to them like their reflections in a mirror. It is the next thing to seeing the men themselves. We went afterwards into the Palace of the Conservatori, and saw, among various other interesting things, the bronze wolf suckling Romulus and Remus, who sit beneath her dugs, with open mouths to receive the milk. On Friday, we all went to see the Pope's Palace on the Quirinal. There was a vast hall, and an interminable suite of rooms, cased with marble, floored with marble or mosaics or inlaid wood, adorned with frescos on the vaulted ceilings, and many of them lined with Gobelin tapestry; not wofully faded, like almost all that I have hitherto seen, but brilliant as pictures. Indeed, some of them so closely resembled paintings, that I could hardly believe they were not so; and the effect was even richer than that of oil-paintings. In every room there was a crucifix; but I did not see a single nook or corner where anybody could have dreamed of being comfortable. Nevertheless, as a stately and solemn residence for his Holiness, it is quite a satisfactory affair. Afterwards, we went into the Pontifical Gardens, connected with the palace. They are very extensive, and laid out in straight avenues, bordered with walls of box, as impervious as if of stone,--not less than twenty feet high, and pierced with lofty archways, cut in the living wall. Some of the avenues were overshadowed with trees, the tops of which bent over and joined one another from either side, so as to resemble a side aisle of a Gothic cathedral. Marble sculptures, much weather-stained, and generally broken-nosed, stood along these stately walks; there were many fountains gushing up into the sunshine; we likewise found a rich flower-garden, containing rare specimens of exotic flowers, and gigantic cactuses, and also an aviary, with vultures, doves, and singing birds. We did not see half the garden, but, stiff and formal as its general arrangement is, it is a beautiful place,--a delightful, sunny, and serene seclusion. Whatever it may be to the pope, two young lovers might find the Garden of Eden here, and never desire to stray out of its precincts. They might fancy angels standing in the long, glimmering vistas of the avenues. It would suit me well enough to have my daily walk along such straight paths, for I think them favorable to thought, which is apt to be disturbed by variety and unexpectedness. April 12th.--We all, except R-----, went to-day to the Vatican, where we found our way to the Stanze of Raphael, these being four rooms, or halls, painted with frescos. No doubt they were once very brilliant and beautiful; but they have encountered hard treatment since Raphael's time, especially when the soldiers of the Constable de Bourbon occupied these apartments, and made fires on the mosaic floors. The entire walls and ceilings are covered with pictures; but the handiwork or designs of Raphael consist of paintings on the four sides of each room, and include several works of art. The School of Athens is perhaps the most celebrated; and the longest side of the largest hall is occupied by a battle-piece, of which the Emperor Constantine is the hero, and which covers almost space enough for a real battle-field. There was a wonderful light in one of the pictures,--that of St. Peter awakened in his prison, by the angel; it really seemed to throw a radiance into the hall below. I shall not pretend, however, to have been sensible of any particular rapture at the sight of these frescos; so faded as they are, so battered by the mischances of years, insomuch that, through all the power and glory of Raphael's designs, the spectator cannot but be continually sensible that the groundwork of them is an old plaster wall. They have been scrubbed, I suppose,--brushed, at least,--a thousand times over, till the surface, brilliant or soft, as Raphael left it, must have been quite rubbed off, and with it, all the consummate finish, and everything that made them originally delightful. The sterner features remain, the skeleton of thought, but not the beauty that once clothed it. In truth, the frescos, excepting a few figures, never had the real touch of Raphael's own hand upon them, having been merely designed by him, and finished by his scholars, or by other artists. The halls themselves are specimens of antique magnificence, paved with elaborate mosaics; and wherever there is any wood-work, it is richly carved with foliage and figures. In their newness, and probably for a hundred years afterwards, there could not have been so brilliant a suite of rooms in the world. Connected with them--at any rate, not far distant--is the little Chapel of San Lorenzo, the very site of which, among the thousands of apartments of the Vatican, was long forgotten, and its existence only known by tradition. After it had been walled up, however, beyond the memory of man, there was still a rumor of some beautiful frescos by Fra Angelico, in an old chapel of Pope Nicholas V., that had strangely disappeared out of the palace, and, search at length being made, it was discovered, and entered through a window. It is a small, lofty room, quite covered over with frescos of sacred subjects, both on the walls and ceiling, a good deal faded, yet pretty distinctly preserved. It would have been no misfortune to me, if the little old chapel had remained still hidden. We next issued into the Loggie, which consist of a long gallery, or arcade or colonnade, the whole extent of which was once beautifully adorned by Raphael. These pictures are almost worn away, and so defaced as to be untraceable and unintelligible, along the side wall of the gallery; although traceries of Arabesque, and compartments where there seem to have been rich paintings, but now only an indistinguishable waste of dull color, are still to be seen. In the coved ceiling, however, there are still some bright frescos, in better preservation than any others; not particularly beautiful, nevertheless. I remember to have seen (indeed, we ourselves possess them) a series of very spirited and energetic engravings, old and coarse, of these frescos, the subject being the Creation, and the early Scripture history; and I really think that their translation of the pictures is better than the original. On reference to Murray, I find that little more than the designs is attributed to Raphael, the execution being by Giulio Romano and other artists. Escaping from these forlorn splendors, we went into the sculpture-gallery, where I was able to enjoy, in some small degree, two or three wonderful works of art; and had a perception that there were a thousand other wonders around me. It is as if the statues kept, for the most part, a veil about them, which they sometimes withdraw, and let their beauty gleam upon my sight; only a glimpse, or two or three glimpses, or a little space of calm enjoyment, and then I see nothing but a discolored marble image again. The Minerva Medica revealed herself to-day. I wonder whether other people are more fortunate than myself, and can invariably find their way to the inner soul of a work of art. I doubt it; they look at these things for just a minute, and pass on, without any pang of remorse, such as I feel, for quitting them so soon and so willingly. I am partly sensible that some unwritten rules of taste are making their way into my mind; that all this Greek beauty has done something towards refining me, though I am still, however, a very sturdy Goth. . . . . April 15th.--Yesterday I went with J----- to the Forum, and descended into the excavations at the base of the Capitol, and on the site of the Basilica of Julia. The essential elements of old Rome are there: columns, single, or in groups of two or three, still erect, but battered and bruised at some forgotten time with infinite pains and labor; fragments of other columns lying prostrate, together with rich capitals and friezes; the bust of a colossal female statue, showing the bosom and upper part of the arms, but headless; a long, winding space of pavement, forming part of the ancient ascent to the Capitol, still as firm and solid as ever; the foundation of the Capitol itself, wonderfully massive, built of immense square blocks of stone, doubtless three thousand years old, and durable for whatever may be the lifetime of the world; the Arch of Septimius, Severus, with bas-reliefs of Eastern wars; the Column of Phocas, with the rude series of steps ascending on four sides to its pedestal; the floor of beautiful and precious marbles in the Basilica of Julia, the slabs cracked across,--the greater part of them torn up and removed, the grass and weeds growing up through the chinks of what remain; heaps of bricks, shapeless bits of granite, and other ancient rubbish, among which old men are lazily rummaging for specimens that a stranger may be induced to buy,--this being an employment that suits the indolence of a modern Roman. The level of these excavations is about fifteen feet, I should judge, below the present street, which passes through the Forum, and only a very small part of this alien surface has been removed, though there can be no doubt that it hides numerous treasures of art and monuments of history. Yet these remains do not make that impression of antiquity upon me which Gothic ruins do. Perhaps it is so because they belong to quite another system of society and epoch of time, and, in view of them, we forget all that has intervened betwixt them and us; being morally unlike and disconnected with them, and not belonging to the same train of thought; so that we look across a gulf to the Roman ages, and do not realize how wide the gulf is. Yet in that intervening valley lie Christianity, the Dark Ages, the feudal system, chivalry and romance, and a deeper life of the human race than Rome brought to the verge of the gulf. To-day we went to the Colonna Palace, where we saw some fine pictures, but, I think, no masterpieces. They did not depress and dishearten me so much as the pictures in Roman palaces usually do; for they were in remarkably good order as regards frames and varnish; indeed, I rather suspect some of them had been injured by the means adopted to preserve their beauty. The palace is now occupied by the French Ambassador, who probably looks upon the pictures as articles of furniture and household adornment, and does not choose to have squares of black and forlorn canvas upon his walls. There were a few noble portraits by Vandyke; a very striking one by Holbein, one or two by Titian, also by Guercino, and some pictures by Rubens, and other forestieri painters, which refreshed my weary eyes. But--what chiefly interested me was the magnificent and stately hall of the palace; fifty-five of my paces in length, besides a large apartment at either end, opening into it through a pillared space, as wide as the gateway of a city. The pillars are of giallo antico, and there are pilasters of the same all the way up and down the walls, forming a perspective of the richest aspect, especially as the broad cornice flames with gilding, and the spaces between the pilasters are emblazoned with heraldic achievements and emblems in gold, and there are Venetian looking-glasses, richly decorated over the surface with beautiful pictures of flowers and Cupids, through which you catch the gleam of the mirror; and two rows of splendid chandeliers extend from end to end of the hall, which, when lighted up, if ever it be lighted up, now-a-nights, must be the most brilliant interior that ever mortal eye beheld. The ceiling glows with pictures in fresco, representing scenes connected with the history of the Colonna family; and the floor is paved with beautiful marbles, polished and arranged in square and circular compartments; and each of the many windows is set in a great architectural frame of precious marble, as large as the portal of a door. The apartment at the farther end of the hall is elevated above it, and is attained by several marble steps, whence it must have been glorious in former days to have looked down upon a gorgeous throng of princes, cardinals, warriors, and ladies, in such rich attire as might be worn when the palace was built. It is singular how much freshness and brightness it still retains; and the only objects to mar the effect were some ancient statues and busts, not very good in themselves, and now made dreary of aspect by their corroded surfaces,--the result of long burial under ground. In the room at the entrance of the hall are two cabinets, each a wonder in its way,--one being adorned with precious stones; the other with ivory carvings of Michael Angelo's Last Judgment, and of the frescos of Raphael's Loggie. The world has ceased to be so magnificent as it once was. Men make no such marvels nowadays. The only defect that I remember in this hall was in the marble steps that ascend to the elevated apartment at the end of it; a large piece had been broken out of one of them, leaving a rough irregular gap in the polished marble stair. It is not easy to conceive what violence can have done this, without also doing mischief to all the other splendor around it. April 16th.--We went this morning to the Academy of St. Luke (the Fine Arts Academy at Rome) in the Via Bonella, close by the Forum. We rang the bell at the house door; and after a few moments it was unlocked or unbolted by some unseen agency from above, no one making his appearance to admit us. We ascended two or three flights of stairs, and entered a hall, where was a young man, the custode, and two or three artists engaged in copying some of the pictures. The collection not being vastly large, and the pictures being in more presentable condition than usual, I enjoyed them more than I generally do; particularly a Virgin and Child by Vandyke, where two angels are singing and playing, one on a lute and the other on a violin, to remind the holy infant of the strains he used to hear in heaven. It is one of the few pictures that there is really any pleasure in looking at. There were several paintings by Titian, mostly of a voluptuous character, but not very charming; also two or more by Guido, one of which, representing Fortune, is celebrated. They did not impress me much, nor do I find myself strongly drawn towards Guido, though there is no other painter who seems to achieve things so magically and inscrutably as he sometimes does. Perhaps it requires a finer taste than mine to appreciate him; and yet I do appreciate him so far as to see that his Michael, for instance, is perfectly beautiful. . . . . In the gallery, there are whole rows of portraits of members of the Academy of St. Luke, most of whom, judging by their physiognomies, were very commonplace people; a fact which makes itself visible in a portrait, however much the painter may try to flatter his sitter. Several of the pictures by Titian, Paul Veronese, and other artists, now exhibited in the gallery, were formerly kept in a secret cabinet in the Capitol, being considered of a too voluptuous character for the public eye. I did not think them noticeably indecorous, as compared with a hundred other pictures that are shown and looked at without scruple;--Calypso and her nymphs, a knot of nude women by Titian, is perhaps as objectionable as any. But even Titian's flesh-tints cannot keep, and have not kept their warmth through all these centuries. The illusion and lifelikeness effervesces and exhales out of a picture as it grows old; and we go on talking of a charm that has forever vanished. From St. Luke's we went to San Pietro in Vincoli, occupying a fine position on or near the summit of the Esquiline mount. A little abortion of a man (and, by the by, there are more diminutive and ill-shapen men and women in Rome than I ever saw elsewhere, a phenomenon to be accounted for, perhaps, by their custom of wrapping the new-born infant in swaddling-clothes), this two-foot abortion hastened before us, as we drew nigh, to summon the sacristan to open the church door. It was a needless service, for which we rewarded him with two baiocchi. San Pietro is a simple and noble church, consisting of a nave divided from the side aisles by rows of columns, that once adorned some ancient temple; and its wide, unencumbered interior affords better breathing-space than most churches in Rome. The statue of Moses occupies a niche in one of the side aisles on the right, not far from the high altar. I found it grand and sublime, with a beard flowing down like a cataract; a truly majestic figure, but not so benign as it were desirable that such strength should be. The horns, about which so much has been said, are not a very prominent feature of the statue, being merely two diminutive tips rising straight up over his forehead, neither adding to the grandeur of the head, nor detracting sensibly from it. The whole force of this statue is not to be felt in one brief visit, but I agree with an English gentleman, who, with a large party, entered the church while we were there, in thinking that Moses has "very fine features,"--a compliment for which the colossal Hebrew ought to have made the Englishman a bow. Besides the Moses, the church contains some attractions of a pictorial kind, which are reposited in the sacristy, into which we passed through a side door. The most remarkable of these pictures is a face and bust of Hope, by Guido, with beautiful eyes lifted upwards; it has a grace which artists are continually trying to get into their innumerable copies, but always without success; for, indeed, though nothing is more true than the existence of this charm in the picture, yet if you try to analyze it, or even look too intently at it, it vanishes, till you look again with more trusting simplicity. Leaving the church, we wandered to the Coliseum, and to the public grounds contiguous to them, where a score and more of French drummers were beating each man his drum, without reference to any rub-a-dub but his own. This seems to be a daily or periodical practice and point of duty with them. After resting ourselves on one of the marble benches, we came slowly home, through the Basilica of Constantine, and along the shady sides of the streets and piazzas, sometimes, perforce, striking boldly through the white sunshine, which, however, was not so hot as to shrivel us up bodily. It has been a most beautiful and perfect day as regards weather, clear and bright, very warm in the sunshine, yet freshened throughout by a quiet stir in the air. Still there is something in this air malevolent, or, at least, not friendly. The Romans lie down and fall asleep in it, in any vacant part of the streets, and wherever they can find any spot sufficiently clean, and among the ruins of temples. I would not sleep in the open air for whatever my life may be worth. On our way home, sitting in one of the narrow streets, we saw an old woman spinning with a distaff; a far more ancient implement than the spinning-wheel, which the housewives of other nations have long since laid aside. April 18th.--Yesterday, at noon, the whole family of us set out on a visit to the Villa Borghese and its grounds, the entrance to which is just outside of the Porta del Popolo. After getting within the grounds, however, there is a long walk before reaching the casino, and we found the sun rather uncomfortably hot, and the road dusty and white in the sunshine; nevertheless, a footpath ran alongside of it most of the way through the grass and among the young trees. It seems to me that the trees do not put forth their leaves with nearly the same magical rapidity in this southern land at the approach of summer, as they do in more northerly countries. In these latter, having a much shorter time to develop themselves, they feel the necessity of making the most of it. But the grass, in the lawns and enclosures along which we passed, looked already fit to be mowed, and it was interspersed with many flowers. Saturday being, I believe, the only day of the week on which visitors are admitted to the casino, there were many parties in carriages, artists on foot, gentlemen on horseback, and miscellaneous people, to whom the door was opened by a custode on ringing a bell. The whole of the basement floor of the casino, comprising a suite of beautiful rooms, is filled with statuary. The entrance hall is a very splendid apartment, brightly frescoed, and paved with ancient mosaics, representing the combats with beasts and gladiators in the Coliseum, curious, though very rudely and awkwardly designed, apparently after the arts had begun to decline. Many of the specimens of sculpture displayed in these rooms are fine, but none of them, I think, possess the highest merit. An Apollo is beautiful; a group of a fighting Amazon, and her enemies trampled under her horse's feet, is very impressive; a Faun, copied from that of Praxiteles, and another, who seems to be dancing, were exceedingly pleasant to look at. I like these strange, sweet, playful, rustic creatures, . . . . linked so prettily, without monstrosity, to the lower tribes. . . . . Their character has never, that I know of, been wrought out in literature; and something quite good, funny, and philosophical, as well as poetic, might very likely be educed from them. . . . . The faun is a natural and delightful link betwixt human and brute life, with something of a divine character intermingled. The gallery, as it is called, on the basement floor of the casino, is sixty feet in length, by perhaps a third as much in breadth, and is (after all I have seen at the Colonna Palace and elsewhere) a more magnificent hall than I imagined to be in existence. It is floored with rich marble in beautifully arranged compartments, and the walls are almost entirely eased with marble of various sorts, the prevailing kind being giallo antico, intermixed with verd antique, and I know not what else; but the splendor of the giallo antico gives the character to the room, and the large and deep niches along the walls appear to be lined with the same material. Without coming to Italy, one can have no idea of what beauty and magnificence are produced by these fittings up of polished marble. Marble to an American means nothing but white limestone. This hall, moreover, is adorned with pillars of Oriental alabaster, and wherever is a space vacant of precious and richly colored marble it is frescoed with arabesque ornaments; and over the whole is a coved and vaulted ceiling, glowing with picture. There never can be anything richer than the whole effect. As to the sculpture here it was not very fine, so far as I can remember, consisting chiefly of busts of the emperors in porphyry; but they served a good purpose in the upholstery way. There were also magnificent tables, each composed of one great slab of porphyry; and also vases of nero antico, and other rarest substance. It remains to be mentioned that, on this almost summer day, I was quite chilled in passing through these glorious halls; no fireplace anywhere; no possibility of comfort; and in the hot season, when their coolness might be agreeable, it would be death to inhabit them. Ascending a long winding staircase, we arrived at another suite of rooms, containing a good many not very remarkable pictures, and a few more pieces of statuary. Among the latter, is Canova's statue of Pauline, the sister of Bonaparte, who is represented with but little drapery, and in the character of Venus holding the apple in her hand. It is admirably done, and, I have no doubt, a perfect likeness; very beautiful too; but it is wonderful to see how the artificial elegance of the woman of this world makes itself perceptible in spite of whatever simplicity she could find in almost utter nakedness. The statue does not afford pleasure in the contemplation. In one of these upper rooms are some works of Bernini; two of them, Aeneas and Anchises, and David on the point of slinging a stone at Goliath, have great merit, and do not tear and rend themselves quite out of the laws and limits of marble, like his later sculpture. Here is also his Apollo overtaking Daphne, whose feet take root, whose, finger-tips sprout into twigs, and whose tender body roughens round about with bark, as he embraces her. It did not seem very wonderful to me; not so good as Hillard's description of it made me expect; and one does not enjoy these freaks in marble. We were glad to emerge from the casino into the warm sunshine; and, for my part, I made the best of my way to a large fountain, surrounded by a circular stone seat of wide sweep, and sat down in a sunny segment of the circle. Around grew a solemn company of old trees,--ilexes, I believe,-- with huge, contorted trunks and evergreen branches, . . . . deep groves, sunny openings, the airy gush of fountains, marble statues, dimly visible in recesses of foliage, great urns and vases, terminal figures, temples, --all these works of art looking as if they had stood there long enough to feel at home, and to be on friendly and familiar terms with the grass and trees. It is a most beautiful place, . . . . and the Malaria is its true master and inhabitant! April 22d.--We have been recently to the studio of Mr. Brown [now dead], the American landscape-painter, and were altogether surprised and delighted with his pictures. He is a plain, homely Yankee, quite unpolished by his many years' residence in Italy; he talks ungrammatically, and in Yankee idioms; walks with a strange, awkward gait and stooping shoulders; is altogether unpicturesque; but wins one's confidence by his very lack of grace. It is not often that we see an artist so entirely free from affectation in his aspect and deportment. His pictures were views of Swiss and Italian scenery, and were most beautiful and true. One of them, a moonlight picture, was really magical,-- the moon shining so brightly that it seemed to throw a light even beyond the limits of the picture,--and yet his sunrises and sunsets, and noontides too, were nowise inferior to this, although their excellence required somewhat longer study, to be fully appreciated. I seemed to receive more pleasure front Mr. Brown's pictures than from any of the landscapes by the old masters; and the fact serves to strengthen me in the belief that the most delicate if not the highest charm of a picture is evanescent, and that we continue to admire pictures prescriptively and by tradition, after the qualities that first won them their fame have vanished. I suppose Claude was a greater landscape-painter than Brown; but for my own pleasure I would prefer one of the latter artist's pictures,--those of the former being quite changed from what he intended them to be by the effect of time on his pigments. Mr. Brown showed us some drawings from nature, done with incredible care and minuteness of detail, as studies for his paintings. We complimented him on his patience; but he said, "O, it's not patience,--it's love!" In fact, it was a patient and most successful wooing of a beloved object, which at last rewarded him by yielding itself wholly. We have likewise been to Mr. B------'s [now dead] studio, where we saw several pretty statues and busts, and among them an Eve, with her wreath of fig-leaves lying across her poor nudity; comely in some points, but with a frightful volume of thighs and calves. I do not altogether see the necessity of ever sculpturing another nakedness. Man is no longer a naked animal; his clothes are as natural to him as his skin, and sculptors have no more right to undress him than to flay him. Also, we have seen again William Story's Cleopatra,--a work of genuine thought and energy, representing a terribly dangerous woman; quiet enough for the moment, but very likely to spring upon you like a tigress. It is delightful to escape to his creations from this universal prettiness, which seems to be the highest conception of the crowd of modern sculptors, and which they almost invariably attain. Miss Bremer called on us the other day. We find her very little changed from what she was when she came to take tea and spend an evening at our little red cottage, among the Berkshire hills, and went away so dissatisfied with my conversational performances, and so laudatory of my brow and eyes, while so severely criticising my poor mouth and chin. She is the funniest little old fairy in person whom one can imagine, with a huge nose, to which all the rest of her is but an insufficient appendage; but you feel at once that she is most gentle, kind, womanly, sympathetic, and true. She talks English fluently, in a low quiet voice, but with such an accent that it is impossible to understand her without the closest attention. This was the real cause of the failure of our Berkshire interview; for I could not guess, half the time, what she was saying, and, of course, had to take an uncertain aim with my responses. A more intrepid talker than myself would have shouted his ideas across the gulf; but, for me, there must first be a close and unembarrassed contiguity with my companion, or I cannot say one real word. I doubt whether I have ever really talked with half a dozen persons in my life, either men or women. To-day my wife and I have been at the picture and sculpture galleries of the Capitol. I rather enjoyed looking at several of the pictures, though at this moment I particularly remember only a very beautiful face of a man, one of two heads on the same canvas by Vandyke. Yes; I did look with new admiration at Paul Veronese's "Rape of Europa." It must have been, in its day, the most brilliant and rejoicing picture, the most voluptuous, the most exuberant, that ever put the sunshine to shame. The bull has all Jupiter in him, so tender and gentle, yet so passionate, that you feel it indecorous to look at him; and Europa, under her thick rich stuffs and embroideries, is all a woman. What a pity that such a picture should fade, and perplex the beholder with such splendor shining through such forlornness! We afterwards went into the sculpture-gallery, where I looked at the Faun of Praxiteles, and was sensible of a peculiar charm in it; a sylvan beauty and homeliness, friendly and wild at once. The lengthened, but not preposterous ears, and the little tail, which we infer, have an exquisite effect, and make the spectator smile in his very heart. This race of fauns was the most delightful of all that antiquity imagined. It seems to me that a story, with all sorts of fun and pathos in it, might be contrived on the idea of their species having become intermingled with the human race; a family with the faun blood in them, having prolonged itself from the classic era till our own days. The tail might have disappeared, by dint of constant intermarriages with ordinary mortals; but the pretty hairy ears should occasionally reappear in members of the family; and the moral instincts and intellectual characteristics of the faun might be most picturesquely brought out, without detriment to the human interest of the story. Fancy this combination in the person of a young lady! I have spoken of Mr. Gibson's colored statues. It seems (at least Mr. Nichols tells me) that he stains them with tobacco juice. . . . . Were he to send a Cupid to America, he need not trouble himself to stain it beforehand. April 25th.--Night before last, my wife and I took a moonlight ramble through Rome, it being a very beautiful night, warm enough for comfort, and with no perceptible dew or dampness. We set out at about nine o'clock, and, our general direction being towards the Coliseum, we soon came to the Fountain of Trevi, full on the front of which the moonlight fell, making Bernini's sculptures look stately and beautiful, though the semicircular gush and fall of the cascade, and the many jets of the water, pouring and bubbling into the great marble basin, are of far more account than Neptune and his steeds, and the rest of the figures. . . . . We ascended the Capitoline Hill, and I felt a satisfaction in placing my hand on those immense blocks of stone, the remains of the ancient Capitol, which form the foundation of the present edifice, and will make a sure basis for as many edifices as posterity may choose to rear upon it, till the end of the world. It is wonderful, the solidity with which those old Romans built; one would suppose they contemplated the whole course of Time as the only limit of their individual life. This is not so strange in the days of the Republic, when, probably, they believed in the permanence of their institutions; but they still seemed to build for eternity, in the reigns of the emperors, when neither rulers nor people had any faith or moral substance, or laid any earnest grasp on life. Reaching the top of the Capitoline Hill, we ascended the steps of the portal of the Palace of the Senator, and looked down into the piazza, with the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius in the centre of it. The architecture that surrounds the piazza is very ineffective; and so, in my opinion, are all the other architectural works of Michael Angelo, including St. Peter's itself, of which he has made as little as could possibly be made of such a vast pile of material. He balances everything in such a way that it seems but half of itself. We soon descended into the piazza, and walked round and round the statue of Marcus Aurelius, contemplating it from every point and admiring it in all. . . . . On these beautiful moonlight nights, Rome appears to keep awake and stirring, though in a quiet and decorous way. It is, in fact, the pleasantest time for promenades, and we both felt less wearied than by any promenade in the daytime, of similar extent, since our residence in Rome. In future, I mean to walk often after nightfall. Yesterday, we set out betimes, and ascended the dome of St. Peter's. The best view of the interior of the church, I think, is from the first gallery beneath the dome. The whole inside of the dome is set with mosaic-work, the separate pieces being, so far as I could see, about half an inch square. Emerging on the roof, we had a fine view of all the surrounding Rome, including the Mediterranean Sea in the remote distance. Above us still rose the whole mountain of the great dome, and it made an impression on me of greater height and size than I had yet been able to receive. The copper ball at the summit looked hardly bigger than a man could lift; and yet, a little while afterwards, U----, J-----, and I stood all together in that ball, which could have contained a dozen more along with us. The esplanade of the roof is, of course, very extensive; and along the front of it are ranged the statues which we see from below, and which, on nearer examination, prove to be roughly hewn giants. There is a small house on the roof, where, probably, the custodes of this part of the edifice reside; and there is a fountain gushing abundantly into a stone trough, that looked like an old sarcophagus. It is strange where the water comes from at such a height. The children tasted it, and pronounced it very warm and disagreeable. After taking in the prospect on all sides we rang a bell, which summoned a man, who directed us towards a door in the side of the dome, where a custode was waiting to admit us. Hitherto the ascent had been easy, along a slope without stairs, up which, I believe, people sometimes ride on donkeys. The rest of the way we mounted steep and narrow staircases, winding round within the wall, or between the two walls of the dome, and growing narrower and steeper, till, finally, there is but a perpendicular iron ladder, by means of which to climb into the copper ball. Except through small windows and peep-holes, there is no external prospect of a higher point than the roof of the church. Just beneath the ball there is a circular room capable of containing a large company, and a door which ought to give access to a gallery on the outside; but the custode informed us that this door is never opened. As I have said, U----, J-----, and I clambered into the copper ball, which we found as hot as an oven; and, after putting our hands on its top, and on the summit of St. Peter's, were glad to clamber down again. I have made some mistake, after all, in my narration. There certainly is a circular balcony at the top of the dome, for I remember walking round it, and looking, not only across the country, but downwards along the ribs of the dome; to which are attached the iron contrivances for illuminating it on Easter Sunday. . . . . Before leaving the church we went to look at the mosaic copy of the "Transfiguration," because we were going to see the original in the Vatican, and wished to compare the two. Going round to the entrance of the Vatican, we went first to the manufactory of mosaics, to which we had a ticket of admission. We found it a long series of rooms, in which the mosaic artists were at work, chiefly in making some medallions of the heads of saints for the new church of St. Paul's. It was rather coarse work, and it seemed to me that the mosaic copy was somewhat stiffer and more wooden than the original, the bits of stone not flowing into color quite so freely as paint from a brush. There was no large picture now in process of being copied; but two or three artists were employed on small and delicate subjects. One had a Holy Family of Raphael in hand; and the Sibyls of Guercino and Domenichino were hanging on the wall, apparently ready to be put into mosaic. Wherever great skill and delicacy, on the artists' part were necessary, they seemed quite adequate to the occasion; but, after all, a mosaic of any celebrated picture is but a copy of a copy. The substance employed is a stone-paste, of innumerable different views, and in bits of various sizes, quantities of which were seen in cases along the whole series of rooms. We next ascended an amazing height of staircases, and walked along I know not what extent of passages, . . . . till we reached the picture-gallery of the Vatican, into which I had never been before. There are but three rooms, all lined with red velvet, on which hung about fifty pictures, each one of them, no doubt, worthy to be considered a masterpiece. In the first room were three Murillos, all so beautiful that I could have spent the day happily in looking at either of them; for, methinks, of all painters he is the tenderest and truest. I could not enjoy these pictures now, however, because in the next room, and visible through the open door, hung the "Transfiguration." Approaching it, I felt that the picture was worthy of its fame, and was far better than I could at once appreciate; admirably preserved, too, though I fully believe it must have possessed a charm when it left Raphael's hand that has now vanished forever. As church furniture and an external adornment, the mosaic copy is preferable to the original, but no copy could ever reproduce all the life and expression which we see here. Opposite to it hangs the "Communion of St. Jerome," the aged, dying saint, half torpid with death already, partaking of the sacrament, and a sunny garland of cherubs in the upper part of the picture, looking down upon him, and quite comforting the spectator with the idea that the old man needs only to be quite dead in order to flit away with them. As for the other pictures I did but glance at, and have forgotten them. The "Transfiguration" is finished with great minuteness and detail, the weeds and blades of grass in the foreground being as distinct as if they were growing in a natural soil. A partly decayed stick of wood with the bark is likewise given in close imitation of nature. The reflection of a foot of one of the apostles is seen in a pool of water at the verge of the picture. One or two heads and arms seem almost to project from the canvas. There is great lifelikeness and reality, as well as higher qualities. The face of Jesus, being so high aloft and so small in the distance, I could not well see; but I am impressed with the idea that it looks too much like human flesh and blood to be in keeping with the celestial aspect of the figure, or with the probabilities of the scene, when the divinity and immortality of the Saviour beamed from within him through the earthly features that ordinarily shaded him. As regards the composition of the picture, I am not convinced of the propriety of its being in two so distinctly separate parts,--the upper portion not thinking of the lower, and the lower portion not being aware of the higher. It symbolizes, however, the spiritual short-sightedness of mankind that, amid the trouble and grief of the lower picture, not a single individual, either of those who seek help or those who would willingly afford it, lifts his eyes to that region, one glimpse of which would set everything right. One or two of the disciples point upward, but without really knowing what abundance of help is to be had there. April 27th.--To-day we have all been with Mr. Akers to some studios of painters; first to that of Mr. Wilde, an artist originally from Boston. His pictures are principally of scenes from Venice, and are miracles of color, being as bright as if the light were transmitted through rubies and sapphires. And yet, after contemplating them awhile, we became convinced that the painter had not gone in the least beyond nature, but, on the contrary, had fallen short of brilliancies which no palette, or skill, or boldness in using color, could attain. I do not quite know whether it is best to attempt these things. They may be found in nature, no doubt, but always so tempered by what surrounds them, so put out of sight even while they seem full before our eyes, that we question the accuracy of a faithful reproduction of them on canvas. There was a picture of sunset, the whole sky of which would have outshone any gilded frame that could have been put around it. There was a most gorgeous sketch of a handful of weeds and leaves, such as may be seen strewing acres of forest-ground in an American autumn. I doubt whether any other man has ever ventured to paint a picture like either of these two, the Italian sunset or the American autumnal foliage. Mr. Wilde, who is still young, talked with genuine feeling and enthusiasm of his art, and is certainly a man of genius. We next went to the studio of an elderly Swiss artist, named Mueller, I believe, where we looked at a great many water-color and crayon drawings of scenes in Italy, Greece, and Switzerland. The artist was a quiet, respectable, somewhat heavy-looking old gentleman, from whose aspect one would expect a plodding pertinacity of character rather than quickness of sensibility. He must have united both these qualities, however, to produce such pictures as these, such faithful transcripts of whatever Nature has most beautiful to show, and which she shows only to those who love her deeply and patiently. They are wonderful pictures, compressing plains, seas, and mountains, with miles and miles of distance, into the space of a foot or two, without crowding anything or leaving out a feature, and diffusing the free, blue atmosphere throughout. The works of the English watercolor artists which I saw at the Manchester Exhibition seemed to me nowise equal to these. Now, here are three artists, Mr. Brown, Mr. Wilde, and Mr. Mueller, who have smitten me with vast admiration within these few days past, while I am continually turning away disappointed from the landscapes of the most famous among the old masters, unable to find any charm or illusion in them. Yet I suppose Claude, Poussin, and Salvator Rosa must have won their renown by real achievements. But the glory of a picture fades like that of a flower. Contiguous to Mr. Mueller's studio was that of a young German artist, not long resident in Rome, and Mr. Akers proposed that we should go in there, as a matter of kindness to the young man, who is scarcely known at all, and seldom has a visitor to look at his pictures. His studio comprised his whole establishment; for there was his little bed, with its white drapery, in a corner of the small room, and his dressing-table, with its brushes and combs, while the easel and the few sketches of Italian scenes and figures occupied the foreground. I did not like his pictures very well, but would gladly have bought them all if I could have afforded it, the artist looked so cheerful, patient, and quiet, doubtless amidst huge discouragement. He is probably stubborn of purpose, and is the sort of man who will improve with every year of his life. We could not speak his language, and were therefore spared the difficulty of paying him any compliments; but Miss Shepard said a few kind words to him in German. and seemed quite to win his heart, insomuch that he followed her with bows and smiles a long way down the staircase. It is a terrible business, this looking at pictures, whether good or bad, in the presence of the artists who paint them; it is as great a bore as to hear a poet read his own verses. It takes away all my pleasure in seeing the pictures, and even remakes me question the genuineness of the impressions which I receive from them. After this latter visit Mr. Akers conducted us to the shop of the jeweller Castellani, who is a great reproducer of ornaments in the old Roman and Etruscan fashion. These antique styles are very fashionable just now, and some of the specimens he showed us were certainly very beautiful, though I doubt whether their quaintness and old-time curiousness, as patterns of gewgaws dug out of immemorial tombs, be not their greatest charm. We saw the toilet-case of an Etruscan lady,--that is to say, a modern imitation of it,--with her rings for summer and winter, and for every day of the week, and for thumb and fingers; her ivory comb; her bracelets; and more knick-knacks than I can half remember. Splendid things of our own time were likewise shown us; a necklace of diamonds worth eighteen thousand scudi, together with emeralds and opals and great pearls. Finally we came away, and my wife and Miss Shepard were taken up by the Misses Weston, who drove with them to visit the Villa Albani. During their drive my wife happened to raise her arm, and Miss Shepard espied a little Greek cross of gold which had attached itself to the lace of her sleeve. . . . . Pray heaven the jeweller may not discover his loss before we have time to restore the spoil! He is apparently so free and careless in displaying his precious wares,--putting inestimable genes and brooches great and small into the hands of strangers like ourselves, and leaving scores of them strewn on the top of his counter,--that it would seem easy enough to take a diamond or two; but I suspect there must needs be a sharp eye somewhere. Before we left the shop he requested me to honor him with my autograph in a large book that was full of the names of his visitors. This is probably a measure of precaution. April 30th.--I went yesterday to the sculpture-gallery of the Capitol, and looked pretty thoroughly through the busts of the illustrious men, and less particularly at those of the emperors and their relatives. I likewise took particular note of the Faun of Praxiteles, because the idea keeps recurring to me of writing a little romance about it, and for that reason I shall endeavor to set down a somewhat minutely itemized detail of the statue and its surroundings. . . . . We have had beautiful weather for two or three days, very warm in the sun, yet always freshened by the gentle life of a breeze, and quite cool enough the moment you pass within the limit of the shade. . . . . In the morning there are few people there (on the Pincian) except the gardeners, lazily trimming the borders, or filling their watering-pots out of the marble-brimmed basin of the fountain; French soldiers, in their long mixed-blue surtouts, and wide scarlet pantaloons, chatting with here and there a nursery-maid and playing with the child in her care; and perhaps a few smokers, . . . . choosing each a marble seat or wooden bench in sunshine or shade as best suits him. In the afternoon, especially within an hour or two of sunset, the gardens are much more populous, and the seats, except when the sun falls full upon them, are hard to come by. Ladies arrive in carriages, splendidly dressed; children are abundant, much impeded in their frolics, and rendered stiff and stately by the finery which they wear; English gentlemen and Americans with their wives and families; the flower of the Roman population, too, both male and female, mostly dressed with great nicety; but a large intermixture of artists, shabbily picturesque; and other persons, not of the first stamp. A French band, comprising a great many brass instruments, by and by begins to play; and what with music, sunshine, a delightful atmosphere, flowers, grass, well-kept pathways, bordered with box-hedges, pines, cypresses, horse-chestnuts, flowering shrubs, and all manner of cultivated beauty, the scene is a very lively and agreeable one. The fine equipages that drive round and round through the carriage-paths are another noticeable item. The Roman aristocracy are magnificent in their aspect, driving abroad with beautiful horses, and footmen in rich liveries, sometimes as many as three behind and one sitting by the coachman. May 1st.--This morning, I wandered for the thousandth time through some of the narrow intricacies of Rome, stepping here and there into a church. I do not know the name of the first one, nor had it anything that in Rome could be called remarkable, though, till I came here, I was not aware that any such churches existed,--a marble pavement in variegated compartments, a series of shrines and chapels round the whole floor, each with its own adornment of sculpture and pictures, its own altar with tall wax tapers before it, some of which were burning; a great picture over the high altar, the whole interior of the church ranged round with pillars and pilasters, and lined, every inch of it, with rich yellow marble. Finally, a frescoed ceiling over the nave and transepts, and a dome rising high above the central part, and filled with frescos brought to such perspective illusion, that the edges seem to project into the air. Two or three persons are kneeling at separate shrines; there are several wooden confessionals placed against the walls, at one of which kneels a lady, confessing to a priest who sits within; the tapers are lighted at the high altar and at one of the shrines; an attendant is scrubbing the marble pavement with a broom and water, a process, I should think, seldom practised in Roman churches. By and by the lady finishes her confession, kisses the priest's hand, and sits down in one of the chairs which are placed about the floor, while the priest, in a black robe, with a short, white, loose jacket over his shoulders, disappears by a side door out of the church. I, likewise, finding nothing attractive in the pictures, take my departure. Protestantism needs a new apostle to convert it into something positive. . . . . I now found my way to the Piazza Navona. It is to me the most interesting piazza in Rome; a large oblong space, surrounded with tall, shabby houses, among which there are none that seem to be palaces. The sun falls broadly over the area of the piazza, and shows the fountains in it;--one a large basin with great sea-monsters, probably of Bernini's inventions, squirting very small streams of water into it; another of the fountains I do not at all remember; but the central one is an immense basin, over which is reared an old Egyptian obelisk, elevated on a rock, which is cleft into four arches. Monstrous devices in marble, I know not of what purport, are clambering about the cloven rock or burrowing beneath it; one and all of them are superfluous and impertinent, the only essential thing being the abundant supply of water in the fountain. This whole Piazza Navona is usually the scene of more business than seems to be transacted anywhere else in Rome; in some parts of it rusty iron is offered for sale, locks and keys, old tools, and all such rubbish; in other parts vegetables, comprising, at this season, green peas, onions, cauliflowers, radishes, artichokes, and others with which I have never made acquaintance; also, stalls or wheelbarrows containing apples, chestnuts (the meats dried and taken out of the shells), green almonds in their husks, and squash-seeds,--salted and dried in an oven,--apparently a favorite delicacy of the Romans. There are also lemons and oranges; stalls of fish, mostly about the size of smelts, taken from the Tiber; cigars of various qualities, the best at a baioccho and a half apiece; bread in loaves or in small rings, a great many of which are strung together on a long stick, and thus carried round for sale. Women and men sit with these things for sale, or carry them about in trays or on boards on their heads, crying them with shrill and hard voices. There is a shabby crowd and much babble; very little picturesqueness of costume or figure, however, the chief exceptions being, here and there, an old white-bearded beggar. A few of the men have the peasant costume,--a short jacket and breeches of light blue cloth and white stockings,--the ugliest dress I ever saw. The women go bareheaded, and seem fond of scarlet and other bright colors, but are homely and clumsy in form. The piazza is dingy in its general aspect, and very dirty, being strewn with straw, vegetable-tops, and the rubbish of a week's marketing; but there is more life in it than one sees elsewhere in Rome. On one side of the piazza is the Church of St. Agnes, traditionally said to stand on the site of the house where that holy maiden was exposed to infamy by the Roman soldiers, and where her modesty and innocence were saved by miracle. I went into the church, and found it very splendid, with rich marble columns, all as brilliant as if just built; a frescoed dome above; beneath, a range of chapels all round the church, ornamented not with pictures but bas-reliefs, the figures of which almost step and struggle out of the marble. They did not seem very admirable as works of art, none of them explaining themselves or attracting me long enough to study out their meaning; but, as part of the architecture of the church, they had a good effect. Out of the busy square two or three persons had stepped into this bright and calm seclusion to pray and be devout, for a little while; and, between sunrise and sunset of the bustling market-day, many doubtless snatch a moment to refresh their souls. In the Pantheon (to-day) it was pleasant looking up to the circular opening, to see the clouds flitting across it, sometimes covering it quite over, then permitting a glimpse of sky, then showing all the circle of sunny blue. Then would come the ragged edge of a cloud, brightened throughout with sunshine, passing and changing quickly,--not that the divine smile was not always the same, but continually variable through the medium of earthly influences. The great slanting beam of sunshine was visible all the way down to the pavement, falling upon motes of dust, or a thin smoke of incense imperceptible in the shadow. Insects were playing to and fro in the beam, high up toward the opening. There is a wonderful charm in the naturalness of all this, and one might fancy a swarm of cherubs coming down through the opening and sporting in the broad ray, to gladden the faith of worshippers on the pavement beneath; or angels bearing prayers upward, or bringing down responses to them, visible with dim brightness as they pass through the pathway of heaven's radiance, even the many hues of their wings discernible by a trusting eye; though, as they pass into the shadow, they vanish like the motes. So the sunbeam would represent those rays of divine intelligence which enable us to see wonders and to know that they are natural things. Consider the effect of light and shade in a church where the windows are open and darkened with curtains that are occasionally lifted by a breeze, letting in the sunshine, which whitens a carved tombstone on the pavement of the church, disclosing, perhaps, the letters of the name and inscription, a death's-head, a crosier, or other emblem; then the curtain falls and the bright spot vanishes. May 8th.--This morning my wife and I went to breakfast with Mrs. William Story at the Barberini Palace, expecting to meet Mrs. Jameson, who has been in Rome for a month or two. We had a very pleasant breakfast, but Mrs. Jameson was not present on account of indisposition, and the only other guests were Mrs. A------ and Mrs. H------, two sensible American ladies. Mrs. Story, however, received a note from Mrs. Jameson, asking her to bring us to see her at her lodgings; so in the course of the afternoon she called on us, and took us thither in her carriage. Mrs. Jameson lives on the first piano of an old palazzo on the Via di Ripetta, nearly opposite the ferry-way across the Tiber, and affording a pleasant view of the yellow river and the green bank and fields on the other side. I had expected to see an elderly lady, but not quite so venerable a one as Mrs. Jameson proved to be; a rather short, round, and massive personage, of benign and agreeable aspect, with a sort of black skullcap on her head, beneath which appeared her hair, which seemed once to have been fair, and was now almost white. I should take her to be about seventy years old. She began to talk to us with affectionate familiarity, and was particularly kind in her manifestations towards myself, who, on my part, was equally gracious towards her. In truth, I have found great pleasure and profit in her works, and was glad to hear her say that she liked mine. We talked about art, and she showed us a picture leaning up against the wall of the room; a quaint old Byzantine painting, with a gilded background, and two stiff figures (our Saviour and St. Catherine) standing shyly at a sacred distance from one another, and going through the marriage ceremony. There was a great deal of expression in their faces and figures; and the spectator feels, moreover, that the artist must have been a devout man,--an impression which we seldom receive from modern pictures, however awfully holy the subject, or however consecrated the place they hang in. Mrs. Jameson seems to be familiar with Italy, its people and life, as well as with its picture-galleries. She is said to be rather irascible in her temper; but nothing could be sweeter than her voice, her look, and all her manifestations to-day. When we were coming away she clasped my hand in both of hers, and again expressed the pleasure of having seen me, and her gratitude to me for calling on her; nor did I refrain from responding Amen to these effusions. . . . . Taking leave of Mrs. Jameson, we drove through the city, and out of the Lateran Gate; first, however, waiting a long while at Monaldini's bookstore in the Piazza de' Spagna for Mr. Story, whom we finally took up in the street, after losing nearly an hour. Just two miles beyond the gate is a space on the green campagna where, for some time past, excavations have been in progress, which thus far have resulted in the discovery of several tombs, and the old, buried, and almost forgotten church or basilica of San Stefano. It is a beautiful spot, that of the excavations, with the Alban hills in the distance, and some heavy, sunlighted clouds hanging above, or recumbent at length upon them, and behind the city and its mighty dome. The excavations are an object of great interest both to the Romans and to strangers, and there were many carriages and a great many visitors viewing the progress of the works, which are carried forward with greater energy than anything else I have seen attempted at Rome. A short time ago the ground in the vicinity was a green surface, level, except here and there a little hillock, or scarcely perceptible swell; the tomb of Cecilia Metella showing itself a mile or two distant, and other rugged ruins of great tombs rising on the plain. Now the whole site of the basilica is uncovered, and they have dug into the depths of several tombs, bringing to light precious marbles, pillars, a statue, and elaborately wrought sarcophagi; and if they were to dig into almost every other inequality that frets the surface of the campagna, I suppose the result might be the same. You cannot dig six feet downward anywhere into the soil, deep enough to hollow out a grave, without finding some precious relic of the past; only they lose somewhat of their value when you think that you can almost spurn them out of the ground with your foot. It is a very wonderful arrangement of Providence that these things should have been preserved for a long series of coming generations by that accumulation of dust and soil and grass and trees and houses over them, which will keep them safe, and cause their reappearance above ground to be gradual, so that the rest of the world's lifetime may have for one of its enjoyments the uncovering of old Rome. The tombs were accessible by long flights of steps going steeply downward, and they were thronged with so many visitors that we had to wait some little time for our own turn. In the first into which we descended we found two tombs side by side, with only a partition wall between; the outer tomb being, as is supposed, a burial-place constructed by the early Christians, while the adjoined and minor one was a work of pagan Rome about the second century after Christ. The former was much less interesting than the latter. It contained some large sarcophagi, with sculpture upon them of rather heathenish aspect; and in the centre of the front of each sarcophagus was a bust in bas-relief, the features of which had never been wrought, but were left almost blank, with only the faintest indications of a nose, for instance. It is supposed that sarcophagi were kept on hand by the sculptors, and were bought ready made, and that it was customary to work out the portrait of the deceased upon the blank face in the centre; but when there was a necessity for sudden burial, as may have been the case in the present instance, this was dispensed with. The inner tomb was found without any earth in it, just as it had been left when the last old Roman was buried there; and it being only a week or two since it was opened, there was very little intervention of persons, though much of time, between the departure of the friends of the dead and our own visit. It is a square room, with a mosaic pavement, and is six or seven paces in length and breadth, and as much in height to the vaulted roof. The roof and upper walls are beautifully ornamented with frescos, which were very bright when first discovered, but have rapidly faded since the admission of the air, though the graceful and joyous designs, flowers and fruits and trees, are still perfectly discernible. The room must have been anything but sad and funereal; on the contrary, as cheerful a saloon, and as brilliant, if lighted up, as one could desire to feast in. It contained several marble sarcophagi, covering indeed almost the whole floor, and each of them as much as three or four feet in length, and two much longer. The longer ones I did not particularly examine, and they seemed comparatively plainer; but the smaller sarcophagi were covered with the most delicately wrought and beautiful bas-reliefs that I ever beheld; a throng of glad and lovely shapes in marble clustering thickly and chasing one another round the sides of these old stone coffins. The work was as perfect as when the sculptor gave it his last touch; and if he had wrought it to be placed in a frequented hall, to be seen and admired by continual crowds as long as the marble should endure, he could not have chiselled with better skill and care, though his work was to be shut up in the depths of a tomb forever. This seems to me the strangest thing in the world, the most alien from modern sympathies. If they had built their tombs above ground, one could understand the arrangement better; but no sooner had they adorned them so richly, and furnished them with such exquisite productions of art, than they annihilated them with darkness. It was an attempt, no doubt, to render the physical aspect of death cheerful, but there was no good sense in it. We went down also into another tomb close by, the walls of which were ornamented with medallions in stucco. These works presented a numerous series of graceful designs, wrought by the hand in the short space of (Mr. Story said it could not have been more than) five or ten minutes, while the wet plaster remained capable of being moulded; and it was marvellous to think of the fertility of the artist's fancy, and the rapidity and accuracy with which he must have given substantial existence to his ideas. These too--all of them such adornments as would have suited a festal hall--were made to be buried forthwith in eternal darkness. I saw and handled in this tomb a great thigh-bone, and measured it with my own; it was one of many such relics of the guests who were laid to sleep in these rich chambers. The sarcophagi that served them for coffins could not now be put to a more appropriate use than as wine-coolers in a modern dining-room; and it would heighten the enjoyment of a festival to look at them. We would gladly have stayed much longer; but it was drawing towards sunset, and the evening, though bright, was unusually cool, so we drove home; and on the way, Mr. Story told us of the horrible practices of the modern Romans with their dead,--how they place them in the church, where, at midnight, they are stripped of their last rag of funeral attire, put into the rudest wooden coffins, and thrown into a trench,--a half-mile, for instance, of promiscuous corpses. This is the fate of all, except those whose friends choose to pay an exorbitant sum to have them buried under the pavement of a church. The Italians have an excessive dread of corpses, and never meddle with those of their nearest and dearest relatives. They have a horror of death, too, especially of sudden death, and most particularly of apoplexy; and no wonder, as it gives no time for the last rites of the Church, and so exposes them to a fearful risk of perdition forever. On the whole, the ancient practice was, perhaps, the preferable one; but Nature has made it very difficult for us to do anything pleasant and satisfactory with a dead body. God knows best; but I wish he had so ordered it that our mortal bodies, when we have done with them, might vanish out of sight and sense, like bubbles. A person of delicacy hates to think of leaving such a burden as his decaying mortality to the disposal of his friends; but, I say again, how delightful it would be, and how helpful towards our faith in a blessed futurity, if the dying could disappear like vanishing bubbles, leaving, perhaps, a sweet fragrance diffused for a minute or two throughout the death-chamber. This would be the odor of sanctity! And if sometimes the evaporation of a sinful soul should leave an odor not so delightful, a breeze through the open windows would soon waft it quite away. Apropos of the various methods of disposing of dead bodies, William Story recalled a newspaper paragraph respecting a ring, with a stone of a new species in it, which a widower was observed to wear upon his finger. Being questioned as to what the gem was, he answered, "It is my wife." He had procured her body to be chemically resolved into this stone. I think I could make a story on this idea: the ring should be one of the widower's bridal gifts to a second wife; and, of course, it should have wondrous and terrible qualities, symbolizing all that disturbs the quiet of a second marriage,--on the husband's part, remorse for his inconstancy, and the constant comparison between the dead wife of his youth, now idealized, and the grosser reality which he had now adopted into her place; while on the new wife's finger it should give pressures, shooting pangs into her heart, jealousies of the past, and all such miserable emotions. By the by, the tombs which we looked at and entered may have been originally above ground, like that of Cecilia Metella, and a hundred others along the Appian Way; though, even in this case, the beautiful chambers must have been shut up in darkness. Had there been windows, letting in the light upon the rich frescos and exquisite sculptures, there would have been a satisfaction in thinking of the existence of so much visual beauty, though no eye had the privilege to see it. But darkness, to objects of sight, is annihilation, as long as the darkness lasts. May 9th.--Mrs. Jameson called this forenoon to ask us to go and see her this evening; . . . . so that I had to receive her alone, devolving part of the burden on Miss Shepard and the three children, all of whom I introduced to her notice. Finding that I had not been farther beyond the walls of Rome than the tomb of Cecilia Metella, she invited me to take a drive of a few miles with her this afternoon. . . . . The poor lady seems to be very lame; and I am sure I was grateful to her for having taken the trouble to climb up the seventy steps of our staircase, and felt pain at seeing her go down them again. It looks fearfully like the gout, the affection being apparently in one foot. The hands, by the way, are white, and must once have been, perhaps now are, beautiful. She must have been a perfectly pretty woman in her day,--a blue or gray eyed, fair-haired beauty. I think that her hair is not white, but only flaxen in the extreme. At half past four, according to appointment, I arrived at her lodgings, and had not long to wait before her little one-horse carriage drove up to the door, and we set out, rumbling along the Via Scrofa, and through the densest part of the city, past the theatre of Marcellus, and thence along beneath the Palatine Hill, and by the Baths of Caracalla, through the gate of San Sebastiano. After emerging from the gate, we soon came to the little Church of "Domine, quo vadis?" Standing on the spot where St. Peter is said to have seen a vision of our Saviour bearing his cross, Mrs. Jameson proposed to alight; and, going in, we saw a cast from Michael Angelo's statue of the Saviour; and not far from the threshold of the church, yet perhaps in the centre of the edifice, which is extremely small, a circular stone is placed, a little raised above the pavement, and surrounded by a low wooden railing. Pointing to this stone, Mrs. Jameson showed me the prints of two feet side by side, impressed into its surface, as if a person had stopped short while pursuing his way to Rome. These, she informed me, were supposed to be the miraculous prints of the Saviour's feet; but on looking into Murray, I am mortified to find that they are merely facsimiles of the original impressions, which are treasured up among the relics of the neighboring Basilica of San Sebastiano. The marks of sculpture seemed to me, indeed, very evident in these prints, nor did they indicate such beautiful feet as should have belonged to the hearer of the best of glad tidings. Hence we drove on a little way farther, and came to the Basilica of San Sebastiano, where also we alighted, and, leaning on my arm, Mrs. Jameson went in. It is a stately and noble interior, with a spacious unencumbered nave, and a flat ceiling frescoed and gilded. In a chapel at the left of the entrance is the tomb of St. Sebastian,--a sarcophagus containing his remains, raised on high before the altar, and beneath it a recumbent statue of the saint pierced with gilded arrows. The sculpture is of the school of Bernini,--done after the design of Bernini himself, Mrs. Jameson said, and is more agreeable and in better taste than most of his works. We walked round the basilica, glancing at the pictures in the various chapels, none of which seemed to be of remarkable merit, although Mrs. Jameson pronounced rather a favorable verdict on one of St. Francis. She says that she can read a picture like the page of a book; in fact, without perhaps assuming more taste and judgment than really belong to her, it was impossible not to perceive that she gave her companion no credit for knowing one single simplest thing about art. Nor, on the whole, do I think she underrated me; the only mystery is, how she came to be so well aware of my ignorance on artistical points. In the basilica the Franciscan monks were arranging benches on the floor of the nave, and some peasant children and grown people besides were assembling, probably to undergo an examination in the catechism, and we hastened to depart, lest our presence should interfere with their arrangements. At the door a monk met us, and asked for a contribution in aid of his church, or some other religious purpose. Boys, as we drove on, ran stoutly along by the side of the chaise, begging as often as they could find breath, but were constrained finally to give up the pursuit. The great ragged bulks of the tombs along the Appian Way now hove in sight, one with a farm-house on its summit, and all of them preposterously huge and massive. At a distance, across the green campagna on our left, the Claudian aqueduct strode away over miles of space, and doubtless reached even to that circumference of blue hills which stand afar off, girdling Rome about. The tomb of Cecilia Metella came in sight a long while before we reached it, with the warm buff hue of its travertine, and the gray battlemented wall which the Caetanis erected on the top of its circular summit six hundred years ago. After passing it, we saw an interminable line of tombs on both sides of the way, each of which might, for aught I know, have been as massive as that of Cecilia Metella, and some perhaps still more monstrously gigantic, though now dilapidated and much reduced in size. Mrs. Jameson had an engagement to dinner at half past six, so that we could go but a little farther along this most interesting road, the borders of which are strewn with broken marbles; fragments of capitals, and nameless rubbish that once was beautiful. Methinks the Appian Way should be the only entrance to Rome,--through an avenue of tombs. The day had been cloudy, chill, and windy, but was now grown calmer and more genial, and brightened by a very pleasant sunshine, though great dark clouds were still lumbering up the sky. We drove homeward, looking at the distant dome of St. Peter's and talking of many things,--painting, sculpture, America, England, spiritualism, and whatever else came up. She is a very sensible old lady, and sees a great deal of truth; a good woman, too, taking elevated views of matters; but I doubt whether she has the highest and finest perceptions in the world. At any rate, she pronounced a good judgment on the American sculptors now in Rome, condemning them in the mass as men with no high aims, no worthy conception of the purposes of their art, and desecrating marble by the things they wrought in it. William Story, I presume, is not to be included in this censure, as she had spoken highly of his sculpturesque faculty in our previous conversation. On my part, I suggested that the English sculptors were little or nothing better than our own, to which she acceded generally, but said that Gibson had produced works equal to the antique,--which I did not dispute, but still questioned whether the world needed Gibson, or was any the better for him. We had a great dispute about the propriety of adopting the costume of the day in modern sculpture, and I contended that either the art ought to be given up (which possibly would be the best course), or else should be used for idealizing the man of the day to himself; and that, as Nature makes us sensible of the fact when men and women are graceful, beautiful, and noble, through whatever costume they wear, so it ought to be the test of the sculptor's genius that he should do the same. Mrs. Jameson decidedly objected to buttons, breeches, and all other items of modern costume; and, indeed, they do degrade the marble, and make high sculpture utterly impossible. Then let the art perish as one that the world has done with, as it has done with many other beautiful things that belonged to an earlier time. It was long past the hour of Mrs. Jameson's dinner engagement when we drove up to her door in the Via Ripetta. I bade her farewell with much good-feeling on my own side, and, I hope, on hers, excusing myself, however, from keeping the previous engagement to spend the evening with her, for, in point of fact, we had mutually had enough of one another for the time being. I am glad to record that she expressed a very favorable opinion of our friend Mr. Thompson's pictures. May 12th.--To-day we have been to the Villa Albani, to which we had a ticket of admission through the agency of Mr. Cass (the American Minister). We set out between ten and eleven o'clock, and walked through the Via Felice, the Piazza Barberini, and a long, heavy, dusty range of streets beyond, to the Porta Salara, whence the road extends, white and sunny, between two high blank walls to the gate of the villa, which is at no great distance. We were admitted by a girl, and went first to the casino, along an aisle of overshadowing trees, the branches of which met above our heads. In the portico of the casino, which extends along its whole front, there are many busts and statues, and, among them, one of Julius Caesar, representing him at an earlier period of life than others which I have seen. His aspect is not particularly impressive; there is a lack of chin, though not so much as in the older statues and busts. Within the edifice there is a large hall, not so brilliant, perhaps, with frescos and gilding as those at the Villa Borghese, but lined with the most beautiful variety of marbles. But, in fact, each new splendor of this sort outshines the last, and unless we could pass from one to another all in the same suite, we cannot remember them well enough to compare the Borghese with the Albani, the effect being more on the fancy than on the intellect. I do not recall any of the sculpture, except a colossal bas-relief of Antinous, crowned with flowers, and holding flowers in his hand, which was found in the ruins of Hadrian's Villa. This is said to be the finest relic of antiquity next to the Apollo and the Laocoon; but I could not feel it to be so, partly, I suppose, because the features of Autinous do not seem to me beautiful in themselves; and that heavy, downward look is repeated till I am more weary of it than of anything else in sculpture. We went up stairs and down stairs, and saw a good many beautiful things, but none, perhaps, of the very best and beautifullest; and second-rate statues, with the corroded surface of old marble that has been dozens of centuries under the ground, depress the spirits of the beholder. The bas-relief of Antinous has at least the merit of being almost as white and fresh, and quite as smooth, as if it had never been buried and dug up again. The real treasures of this villa, to the number of nearly three hundred, were removed to Paris by Napoleon, and, except the Antinous, not one of them ever came back. There are some pictures in one or two of the rooms, and among them I recollect one by Perugino, in which is a St. Michael, very devout and very beautiful; indeed, the whole picture (which is in compartments, representing the three principal points of the Saviour's history) impresses the beholder as being painted devoutly and earnestly by a religious man. In one of the rooms there is a small bronze Apollo, supposed by Winckelmann to be an original of Praxiteles; but I could not make myself in the least sensible of its merit. The rest of the things in the casino I shall pass over, as also those in the coffee-house,--an edifice which stands a hundred yards or more from the casino, with an ornamental garden, laid out in walks and flower-plats between. The coffee-house has a semicircular sweep of porch with a good many statues and busts beneath it, chiefly of distinguished Romans. In this building, as in the casino, there are curious mosaics, large vases of rare marble, and many other things worth long pauses of admiration; but I think that we were all happier when we had done with the works of art, and were at leisure to ramble about the grounds. The Villa Albani itself is an edifice separate from both the coffee-house and casino, and is not opened to strangers. It rises, palace-like, in the midst of the garden, and, it is to be hoped, has some possibility of comfort amidst its splendors.--Comfort, however, would be thrown away upon it; for besides that the site shares the curse that has fallen upon every pleasant place in the vicinity of Rome, . . . . it really has no occupant except the servants who take care of it. The Count of Castelbarco, its present proprietor, resides at Milan. The grounds are laid out in the old fashion of straight paths, with borders of box, which form hedges of great height and density, and as even as a brick wall at the top and sides. There are also alleys forming long vistas between the trunks and beneath the boughs of oaks, ilexes, and olives; and there are shrubberies and tangled wildernesses of palm, cactus, rhododendron, and I know not what; and a profusion of roses that bloom and wither with nobody to pluck and few to look at them. They climb about the sculpture of fountains, rear themselves against pillars and porticos, run brimming over the walls, and strew the path with their falling leaves. We stole a few, and feel that we have wronged our consciences in not stealing more. In one part of the grounds we saw a field actually ablaze with scarlet poppies. There are great lagunas; fountains presided over by naiads, who squirt their little jets into basins; sunny lawns; a temple, so artificially ruined that we half believed it a veritable antique; and at its base a reservoir of water, in which stone swans seemed positively to float; groves of cypress; balustrades and broad flights of stone stairs, descending to lower levels of the garden; beauty, peace, sunshine, and antique repose on every side; and far in the distance the blue hills that encircle the campagna of Rome. The day was very fine for our purpose; cheerful, but not too bright, and tempered by a breeze that seemed even a little too cool when we sat long in the shade. We enjoyed it till three o'clock. . . . . At the Capitol there is a sarcophagus with a most beautiful bas-relief of the discovery of Achilles by Ulysses, in which there is even an expression of mirth on the faces of many of the spectators. And to-day at the Albani a sarcophagus was ornamented with the nuptials of Peleus and Thetis. Death strides behind every man, to be sure, at more or less distance, and, sooner or later, enters upon any event of his life; so that, in this point of view, they might each and all serve for bas-reliefs on a sarcophagus; but the Romans seem to have treated Death as lightly and playfully as they could, and tried to cover his dart with flowers, because they hated it so much. May 15th.--My wife and I went yesterday to the Sistine Chapel, it being my first visit. It is a room of noble proportions, lofty and long, though divided in the midst by a screen or partition of white marble, which rises high enough to break the effect of spacious unity. There are six arched windows on each side of the chapel, throwing down their light from the height of the walls, with as much as twenty feet of space (more I should think) between them and the floor. The entire walls and ceiling of this stately chapel are covered with paintings in fresco, except the space about ten feet in height from the floor, and that portion was intended to be adorned by tapestries from pictures by Raphael, but, the design being prevented by his premature death, the projected tapestries have no better substitute than paper-hangings. The roof, which is flat at top, and coved or vaulted at the sides, is painted in compartments by Michael Angelo, with frescos representing the whole progress of the world and of mankind from its first formation by the Almighty . . . . till after the flood. On one of the sides of the chapel are pictures by Perugino, and other old masters, of subsequent events in sacred history; and the entire wall behind the altar, a vast expanse from the ceiling to the floor, is taken up with Michael Angelo's summing up of the world's history and destinies in his "Last Judgment." There can be no doubt that while these frescos continued in their perfection, there was nothing else to be compared with the magnificent and solemn beauty of this chapel. Enough of ruined splendor still remains to convince the spectator of all that has departed; but methinks I have seen hardly anything else so forlorn and depressing as it is now, all dusky and dim, even the very lights having passed into shadows, and the shadows into utter blackness; so that it needs a sunshiny day, under the bright Italian heavens, to make the designs perceptible at all. As we sat in the chapel there were clouds flitting across the sky; when the clouds came the pictures vanished; when the sunshine broke forth the figures sadly glimmered into something like visibility,--the Almighty moving in chaos,--the noble shape of Adam, the beautiful Eve; and, beneath where the roof curves, the mighty figures of sibyls and prophets, looking as if they were necessarily so gigantic because the thought within them was so massive. In the "Last Judgment" the scene of the greater part of the picture lies in the upper sky, the blue of which glows through betwixt the groups of naked figures; and above sits Jesus, not looking in the least like the Saviour of the world, but, with uplifted arm, denouncing eternal misery on those whom he came to save. I fear I am myself among the wicked, for I found myself inevitably taking their part, and asking for at least a little pity, some few regrets, and not such a stern denunciatory spirit on the part of Him who had thought us worth dying for. Around him stand grim saints, and, far beneath, people are getting up sleepily out of their graves, not well knowing what is about to happen; many of them, however, finding themselves clutched by demons before they are half awake. It would be a very terrible picture to one who should really see Jesus, the Saviour, in that inexorable judge; but it seems to me very undesirable that he should ever be represented in that aspect, when it is so essential to our religion to believe him infinitely kinder and better towards us than we deserve. At the last day--I presume, that is, in all future days, when we see ourselves as we are--man's only inexorable judge will be himself, and the punishment of his sins will be the perception of them. In the lower corner of this great picture, at the right hand of the spectator, is a hideous figure of a damned person, girdled about with a serpent, the folds of which are carefully knotted between his thighs, so as, at all events, to give no offence to decency. This figure represents a man who suggested to Pope Paul III. that the nudities of the "Last Judgment" ought to be draped, for which offence Michael Angelo at once consigned him to hell. It shows what a debtor's prison and dungeon of private torment men would make of hell if they had the control of it. As to the nudities, if they were ever more nude than now, I should suppose, in their fresh brilliancy, they might well have startled a not very squeamish eye. The effect, such as it is, of this picture, is much injured by the high altar and its canopy, which stands close against the wall, and intercepts a considerable portion of the sprawl of nakedness with which Michael Angelo has filled his sky. However, I am not unwilling to believe, with faith beyond what I can actually see, that the greatest pictorial miracles ever yet achieved have been wrought upon the walls and ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. In the afternoon I went with Mr. Thompson to see what bargain could be made with vetturinos for taking myself and family to Florence. We talked with three or four, and found them asking prices of various enormity, from a hundred and fifty scudi down to little more than ninety; but Mr. Thompson says that they always begin in this way, and will probably come down to somewhere about seventy-five. Mr. Thompson took me into the Via Portoghese, and showed me an old palace, above which rose--not a very customary feature of the architecture of Rome--a tall, battlemented tower. At one angle of the tower we saw a shrine of the Virgin, with a lamp, and all the appendages of those numerous shrines which we see at the street-corners, and in hundreds of places about the city. Three or four centuries ago, this palace was inhabited by a nobleman who had an only son and a large pet monkey, and one day the monkey caught the infant up and clambered to this lofty turret, and sat there with him in his arms grinning and chattering like the Devil himself. The father was in despair, but was afraid to pursue the monkey lest he should fling down the child from the height of the tower and make his escape. At last he vowed that if the boy were safely restored to him he would build a shrine at the summit of the tower, and cause it to be kept as a sacred place forever. By and by the monkey came down and deposited the child on the ground; the father fulfilled his vow, built the shrine, and made it obligatory, on all future possessors of the palace to keep the lamp burning before it. Centuries have passed, the property has changed hands; but still there is the shrine on the giddy top of the tower, far aloft over the street, on the very spot where the monkey sat, and there burns the lamp, in memory of the father's vow. This being the tenure by which the estate is held, the extinguishment of that flame might yet turn the present owner out of the palace. May 21st.--Mamma and I went, yesterday forenoon, to the Spada Palace, which we found among the intricacies of Central Rome; a dark and massive old edifice, built around a court, the fronts giving on which are adorned with statues in niches, and sculptured ornaments. A woman led us up a staircase, and ushered us into a great gloomy hall, square and lofty, and wearing a very gray and ancient aspect, its walls being painted in chiaroscuro, apparently a great many years ago. The hall was lighted by small windows, high upward from the floors, and admitting only a dusky light. The only furniture or ornament, so far as I recollect, was the colossal statue of Pompey, which stands on its pedestal at one side, certainly the sternest and severest of figures, and producing the most awful impression on the spectator. Much of the effect, no doubt, is due to the sombre obscurity of the hall, and to the loneliness in which the great naked statue stands. It is entirely nude, except for a cloak that hangs down from the left shoulder; in the left hand, it holds a globe; the right arm is extended. The whole expression is such as the statue might have assumed, if, during the tumult of Caesar's murder, it had stretched forth its marble hand, and motioned the conspirators to give over the attack, or to be quiet, now that their victim had fallen at its feet. On the left leg, about midway above the ankle, there is a dull, red stain, said to be Caesar's blood; but, of course, it is just such a red stain in the marble as may be seen on the statue of Antinous at the Capitol. I could not see any resemblance in the face of the statue to that of the bust of Pompey, shown as such at the Capitol, in which there is not the slightest moral dignity, or sign of intellectual eminence. I am glad to have seen this statue, and glad to remember it in that gray, dim, lofty hall; glad that there were no bright frescos on the walls, and that the ceiling was wrought with massive beams, and the floor paved with ancient brick. From this anteroom we passed through several saloons containing pictures, some of which were by eminent artists; the Judith of Guido, a copy of which used to weary me to death, year after year, in the Boston Athenaeum; and many portraits of Cardinals in the Spada family, and other pictures, by Guido. There were some portraits, also of the family, by Titian; some good pictures by Guercino; and many which I should have been glad to examine more at leisure; but, by and by, the custode made his appearance, and began to close the shutters, under pretence that the sunshine would injure the paintings,--an effect, I presume, not very likely to follow after two or three centuries' exposure to light, air, and whatever else might hurt them. However, the pictures seemed to be in much better condition, and more enjoyable, so far as they had merit, than those in most Roman picture-galleries; although the Spada Palace itself has a decayed and impoverished aspect, as if the family had dwindled from its former state and grandeur, and now, perhaps, smuggled itself into some out-of-the-way corner of the old edifice. If such be the case, there is something touching in their still keeping possession of Pompey's statue, which makes their house famous, and the sale of which might give them the means of building it up anew; for surely it is worth the whole sculpture-gallery of the Vatican. In the afternoon Mr. Thompson and I went, for the third or fourth time, to negotiate with vetturinos. . . . . So far as I know them they are a very tricky set of people, bent on getting as much as they can, by hook or by crook, out of the unfortunate individual who falls into their hands. They begin, as I have said, by asking about twice as much as they ought to receive; and anything between this exorbitant amount and the just price is what they thank heaven for, as so much clear gain. Nevertheless, I am not quite sure that the Italians are worse than other people even in this matter. In other countries it is the custom of persons in trade to take as much as they can get from the public, fleecing one man to exactly the same extent as another; here they take what they can obtain from the individual customer. In fact, Roman tradesmen do not pretend to deny that they ask and receive different prices from different people, taxing them according to their supposed means of payment; the article supplied being the same in one case as in another. A shopkeeper looked into his books to see if we were of the class who paid two pauls, or only a paul and a half for candles; a charcoal-dealer said that seventy baiocchi was a very reasonable sum for us to pay for charcoal, and that some persons paid eighty; and Mr. Thompson, recognizing the rule, told the old vetturino that "a hundred and fifty scudi was a very proper charge for carrying a prince to Florence, but not for carrying me, who was merely a very good artist." The result is well enough; the rich man lives expensively, and pays a larger share of the profits which people of a different system of trade-morality would take equally from the poor man. The effect on the conscience of the vetturino, however, and of tradesmen of all kinds, cannot be good; their only intent being, not to do justice between man and man, but to go as deep as they can into all pockets, and to the very bottom of some. We had nearly concluded a bargain, a day or two ago, with a vetturino to take or send us to Florence, via Perugia, in eight days, for a hundred scudi; but he now drew back, under pretence of having misunderstood the terms, though, in reality, no doubt, he was in hopes of getting a better bargain from somebody else. We made an agreement with another man, whom Mr. Thompson knows and highly recommends, and immediately made it sure and legally binding by exchanging a formal written contract, in which everything is set down, even to milk, butter, bread, eggs, and coffee, which we are to have for breakfast; the vetturino being to pay every expense for himself, his horses, and his passengers, and include it within ninety-five scudi, and five crowns in addition for buon-mano. . . . . . May 22d.--Yesterday, while we were at dinner, Mr. ------ called. I never saw him but once before, and that was at the door of our little red cottage in Lenox; he sitting in a wagon with one or two of the Sedgewicks, merely exchanging a greeting with me from under the brim of his straw hat, and driving on. He presented himself now with a long white beard, such as a palmer might have worn as the growth of his long pilgrimages, a brow almost entirely bald, and what hair he has quite hoary; a forehead impending, yet not massive; dark, bushy eyebrows and keen eyes, without much softness in them; a dark and sallow complexion; a slender figure, bent a little with age; but at once alert and infirm. It surprised me to see him so venerable; for, as poets are Apollo's kinsmen, we are inclined to attribute to them his enviable quality of never growing old. There was a weary look in his face, as if he were tired of seeing things and doing things, though with certainly enough still to see and do, if need were. My family gathered about him, and he conversed with great readiness and simplicity about his travels, and whatever other subject came up; telling us that he had been abroad five times, and was now getting a little home-sick, and had no more eagerness for sights, though his "gals" (as he called his daughter and another young lady) dragged him out to see the wonders of Rome again. His manners and whole aspect are very particularly plain, though not affectedly so; but it seems as if in the decline of life, and the security of his position, he had put off whatever artificial polish he may have heretofore had, and resumed the simpler habits and deportment of his early New England breeding. Not but what you discover, nevertheless, that he is a man of refinement, who has seen the world, and is well aware of his own place in it. He spoke with great pleasure of his recent visit to Spain. I introduced the subject of Kansas, and methought his face forthwith assumed something of the bitter keenness of the editor of a political newspaper, while speaking of the triumph of the administration over the Free-Soil opposition. I inquired whether he had seen S------, and he gave a very sad account of him as he appeared at their last meeting, which was in Paris. S------, he thought, had suffered terribly, and would never again be the man he was; he was getting fat; he talked continually of himself, and of trifles concerning himself, and seemed to have no interest for other matters; and Mr. ------ feared that the shock upon his nerves had extended to his intellect, and was irremediable. He said that S------ ought to retire from public life, but had no friend true enough to tell him so. This is about as sad as anything can be. I hate to have S------ undergo the fate of a martyr, because he was not naturally of the stuff that martyrs are made of, and it is altogether by mistake that he has thrust himself into the position of one. He was merely, though with excellent abilities, one of the best of fellows, and ought to have lived and died in good fellowship with all the world. S------ was not in the least degree excited about this or any other subject. He uttered neither passion nor poetry, but excellent good sense, and accurate information on whatever subject transpired; a very pleasant man to associate with, but rather cold, I should imagine, if one should seek to touch his heart with one's own. He shook hands kindly all round, but not with any warmth of gripe; although the ease of his deportment had put us all on sociable terms with him. At seven o'clock we went by invitation to take tea with Miss Bremer. After much search, and lumbering painfully up two or three staircases in vain, and at last going about in a strange circuity, we found her in a small chamber of a large old building, situated a little way from the brow of the Tarpeian Rock. It was the tiniest and humblest domicile that I have seen in Rome, just large enough to hold her narrow bed, her tea-table, and a table covered with books,--photographs of Roman ruins, and some pages written by herself. I wonder whether she be poor. Probably so; for she told us that her expense of living here is only five pauls a day. She welcomed us, however, with the greatest cordiality and lady-like simplicity, making no allusion to the humbleness of her environment (and making us also lose sight of it, by the absence of all apology) any more than if she were receiving us in a palace. There is not a better bred woman; and yet one does not think whether she has any breeding or no. Her little bit of a round table was already spread for us with her blue earthenware teacups; and after she had got through an interview with the Swedish Minister, and dismissed him with a hearty pressure of his hand between both her own, she gave us our tea, and some bread, and a mouthful of cake. Meanwhile, as the day declined, there had been the most beautiful view over the campagna, out of one of her windows; and, from the other, looking towards St. Peter's, the broad gleam of a mildly glorious sunset; not so pompous and magnificent as many that I have seen in America, but softer and sweeter in all its changes. As its lovely hues died slowly away, the half-moon shone out brighter and brighter; for there was not a cloud in the sky, and it seemed like the moonlight of my younger days. In the garden, beneath her window, verging upon the Tarpeian Rock, there was shrubbery and one large tree, softening the brow of the famous precipice, adown which the old Romans used to fling their traitors, or sometimes, indeed, their patriots. Miss Bremer talked plentifully in her strange manner,--good English enough for a foreigner, but so oddly intonated and accented, that it is impossible to be sure of more than one word in ten. Being so little comprehensible, it is very singular how she contrives to make her auditors so perfectly certain, as they are, that she is talking the best sense, and in the kindliest spirit. There is no better heart than hers, and not many sounder heads; and a little touch of sentiment comes delightfully in, mixed up with a quick and delicate humor and the most perfect simplicity. There is also a very pleasant atmosphere of maidenhood about her; we are sensible of a freshness and odor of the morning still in this little withered rose,--its recompense for never having been gathered and worn, but only diffusing fragrance on its stem. I forget mainly what we talked about,--a good deal about art, of course, although that is a subject of which Miss Bremer evidently knows nothing. Once we spoke of fleas,--insects that, in Rome, come home to everybody's business and bosom, and are so common and inevitable, that no delicacy is felt about alluding to the sufferings they inflict. Poor little Miss Bremer was tormented with one while turning out our tea. . . . . She talked, among other things, of the winters in Sweden, and said that she liked them, long and severe as they are; and this made me feel ashamed of dreading the winters of New England, as I did before coming from home, and do now still more, after five or six mild English Decembers. By and by, two young ladies came in,--Miss Bremen's neighbors, it seemed,--fresh from a long walk on the campagna, fresh and weary at the same time. One apparently was German, and the other French, and they brought her an offering of flowers, and chattered to her with affectionate vivacity; and, as we were about taking leave, Miss Bremer asked them to accompany her and us on a visit to the edge of the Tarpeian Rock. Before we left the room, she took a bunch of roses that were in a vase, and gave them to Miss Shepard, who told her that she should make her six sisters happy by giving one to each. Then we went down the intricate stairs, and, emerging into the garden, walked round the brow of the hill, which plunges headlong with exceeding abruptness; but, so far as I could see in the moonlight, is no longer quite a precipice. Then we re-entered the house, and went up stairs and down again, through intricate passages, till we got into the street, which was still peopled with the ragamuffins who infest and burrow in that part of Rome. We returned through an archway, and descended the broad flight of steps into the piazza of the Capitol; and from the extremity of it, just at the head of the long graded way, where Castor and Pollux and the old milestones stand, we turned to the left, and followed a somewhat winding path, till we came into the court of a palace. This court is bordered by a parapet, leaning over which we saw the sheer precipice of the Tarpeian Rock, about the height of a four-story house. . . . . On the edge of this, before we left the court, Miss Bremer bade us farewell, kissing my wife most affectionately on each cheek, . . . . and then turning towards myself, . . . . she pressed my hand, and we parted, probably never to meet again. God bless her good heart! . . . . She is a most amiable little woman, worthy to be the maiden aunt of the whole human race. I suspect, by the by, that she does not like me half so well as I do her; it is my impression that she thinks me unamiable, or that there is something or other not quite right about me. I am sorry if it be so, because such a good, kindly, clear-sighted, and delicate person is very apt to have reason at the bottom of her harsh thoughts, when, in rare cases, she allows them to harbor with her. To-day, and for some days past, we have been in quest of lodgings for next winter; a weary search, up interminable staircases, which seduce us upward to no successful result. It is very disheartening not to be able to place the slightest reliance on the integrity of the people we are to deal with; not to believe in any connection between their words and their purposes; to know that they are certainly telling you falsehoods, while you are not in a position to catch hold of the lie, and hold it up in their faces. This afternoon we called on Mr. and Mrs. ------ at the Hotel de l'Europe, but found only the former at home. We had a pleasant visit, but I made no observations of his character save such as I have already sufficiently recorded; and when we had been with him a little while, Mrs. Chapman, the artist's wife, Mr. Terry, and my friend, Mr. Thompson, came in. ------ received them all with the same good degree of cordiality that he did ourselves, not cold, not very warm, not annoyed, not ecstatically delighted; a man, I should suppose, not likely to have ardent individual preferences, though perhaps capable of stern individual dislikes. But I take him, at all events, to be a very upright man, and pursuing a narrow track of integrity; he is a man whom I would never forgive (as I would a thousand other men) for the slightest moral delinquency. I would not be bound to say, however, that he has not the little sin of a fretful and peevish habit; and yet perhaps I am a sinner myself for thinking so. May 23d.--This morning I breakfasted at William Story's, and met there Mr. Bryant, Mr. T------ (an English gentleman), Mr. and Mrs. Apthorp, Miss Hosmer, and one or two other ladies. Bryant was very quiet, and made no conversation audible to the general table. Mr. T------ talked of English politics and public men; the "Times" and other newspapers, English clubs and social habits generally; topics in which I could well enough bear my part of the discussion. After breakfast, and aside from the ladies, he mentioned an illustration of Lord Ellenborough's lack of administrative ability,--a proposal seriously made by his lordship in reference to the refractory Sepoys. . . . . We had a very pleasant breakfast, and certainly a breakfast is much preferable to a dinner, not merely in the enjoyment, while it is passing, but afterwards. I made a good suggestion to Miss Hosmer for the design of a fountain,--a lady bursting into tears, water gushing from a thousand pores, in literal translation of the phrase; and to call the statue "Niobe, all Tears." I doubt whether she adopts the idea; but Bernini would have been delighted with it. I should think the gush of water might be so arranged as to form a beautiful drapery about the figure, swaying and fluttering with every breath of wind, and rearranging itself in the calm; in which case, the lady might be said to have "a habit of weeping." . . . . Apart, with William Story, he and I talked of the unluckiness of Friday, etc. I like him particularly well. . . . . We have been plagued to-day with our preparations for leaving Rome to-morrow, and especially with verifying the inventory of furniture, before giving up the house to our landlord. He and his daughter have been examining every separate article, down even to the kitchen skewers, I believe, and charging us to the amount of several scudi for cracks and breakages, which very probably existed when we came into possession. It is very uncomfortable to have dealings with such a mean people (though our landlord is German),--mean in their business transactions; mean even in their beggary; for the beggars seldom ask for more than a mezzo baioccho, though they sometimes grumble when you suit your gratuity exactly to their petition. It is pleasant to record that the Italians have great faith in the honor of the English and Americans, and never hesitate to trust entire strangers, to any reasonable extent, on the strength of their being of the honest Anglo-Saxon race. This evening, U---- and I took a farewell walk in the Pincian Gardens to see the sunset; and found them crowded with people, promenading and listening to the music of the French baud. It was the feast of Whitsunday, which probably brought a greater throng than usual abroad. When the sun went down, we descended into the Piazza del Popolo, and thence into the Via Ripetta, and emerged through a gate to the shore of the Tiber, along which there is a pleasant walk beneath a grove of trees. We traversed it once and back again, looking at the rapid river, which still kept its mud-puddly aspect even in the clear twilight, and beneath the brightening moon. The great bell of St. Peter's tolled with a deep boom, a grand and solemn sound; the moon gleamed through the branches of the trees above us; and U---- spoke with somewhat alarming fervor of her love for Rome, and regret at leaving it. We shall have done the child no good office in bringing her here, if the rest of her life is to be a dream of this "city of the soul," and an unsatisfied yearning to come back to it. On the other hand, nothing elevating and refining can be really injurious, and so I hope she will always be the better for Rome, even if her life should be spent where there are no pictures, no statues, nothing but the dryness and meagreness of a New England village. JOURNEY TO FLORENCE. Civita Castellana, May 24th.--We left Rome this morning, after troubles of various kinds, and a dispute in the first place with Lalla, our female servant, and her mother. . . . . Mother and daughter exploded into a livid rage, and cursed us plentifully,--wishing that we might never come to our journey's end, and that we might all break our necks or die of apoplexy,--the most awful curse that an Italian knows how to invoke upon his enemies, because it precludes the possibility of extreme unction. However, as we are heretics, and certain of damnation therefore, anyhow, it does not much matter to us; and also the anathemas may have been blown back upon those who invoked them, like the curses that were flung out from the balcony of St Peter's during Holy Week and wafted by heaven's breezes right into the faces of some priests who stood near the pope. Next we had a disagreement, with two men who brought down our luggage, and put it on the vettura; . . . . and, lastly, we were infested with beggars, who hung round the carriages with doleful petitions, till we began to move away; but the previous warfare had put me into too stern a mood for almsgiving, so that they also were doubtless inclined to curse more than to bless, and I am persuaded that we drove off under a perfect shower of anathemas. We passed through the Porta del Popolo at about eight o'clock; and after a moment's delay, while the passport was examined, began our journey along the Flaminian Way, between two such high and inhospitable walls of brick or stone as seem to shut in all the avenues to Rome. We had not gone far before we heard military music in advance of us, and saw the road blocked up with people, and then the glitter of muskets, and soon appeared the drummers, fifers, and trumpeters, and then the first battalion of a French regiment, marching into the city, with two mounted officers at their head; then appeared a second and then a third battalion, the whole seeming to make almost an army, though the number on their caps showed them all to belong to one regiment,--the 1st; then came a battery of artillery, then a detachment of horse,--these last, by the crossed keys on their helmets, being apparently papal troops. All were young, fresh, good-looking men, in excellent trim as to uniform and equipments, and marched rather as if they were setting out on a campaign than returning from it; the fact being, I believe, that they have been encamped or in barracks within a few miles of the city. Nevertheless, it reminded me of the military processions of various kinds which so often, two thousand years ago and more, entered Rome over the Flaminian Way, and over all the roads that led to the famous city,--triumphs oftenest, but sometimes the downcast train of a defeated army, like those who retreated before Hannibal. On the whole, I was not sorry to see the Gauls still pouring into Rome; but yet I begin to find that I have a strange affection for it, and so did we all,--the rest of the family in a greater degree than myself even. It is very singular, the sad embrace with which Rome takes possession of the soul. Though we intend to return in a few months, and for a longer residence than this has been, yet we felt the city pulling at our heartstrings far more than London did, where we shall probably never spend much time again. It may be because the intellect finds a home there more than in any other spot in the world, and wins the heart to stay with it, in spite of a good many things strewn all about to disgust us. The road in the earlier part of the way was not particularly picturesque,--the country undulated, but scarcely rose into hills, and was destitute of trees; there were a few shapeless ruins, too indistinct for us to make out whether they were Roman or mediaeval. Nothing struck one so much, in the forenoon, as the spectacle of a peasant-woman riding on horseback as if she were a man. The houses were few, and those of a dreary aspect, built of gray stone, and looking bare and desolate, with not the slightest promise of comfort within doors. We passed two or three locandas or inns, and finally came to the village (if village it were, for I remember no houses except our osteria) of Castel Nuovo di Porta, where we were to take a dejeuner a la fourchette, which was put upon the table between twelve and one. On this journey, according to the custom of travellers in Italy, we pay the vetturino a certain sum, and live at his expense; and this meal was the first specimen of his catering on our behalf. It consisted of a beefsteak, rather dry and hard, but not unpalatable, and a large omelette; and for beverage, two quart bottles of red wine, which, being tasted, had an agreeable acid flavor. . . . . The locanda was built of stone, and had what looked like an old Roman altar in the basement-hall, and a shrine, with a lamp before it, on the staircase; and the large public saloon in which we ate had a brick floor, a ceiling with cross-beams, meagrely painted in fresco, and a scanty supply of chairs and settees. After lunch, we wandered out into a valley or ravine near the house, where we gathered some flowers, and J----- found a nest with the young birds in it, which, however, he put back into the bush whence he took it. Our afternoon drive was more picturesque and noteworthy. Soracte rose before us, bulging up quite abruptly out of the plain, and keeping itself entirely distinct from a whole horizon of hills. Byron well compares it to a wave just on the bend, and about to break over towards the spectator. As we approached it nearer and nearer, it looked like the barrenest great rock that ever protruded out of the substance of the earth, with scarcely a strip or a spot of verdure upon its steep and gray declivities. The road kept trending towards the mountain, following the line of the old Flaminian Way, which we could see, at frequent intervals, close beside the modern track. It is paved with large flag-stones, laid so accurately together, that it is still, in some places, as smooth and even as the floor of a church; and everywhere the tufts of grass find it difficult to root themselves into the interstices. Its course is straighter than that of the road of to-day, which often turns aside to avoid obstacles which the ancient one surmounted. Much of it, probably, is covered with the soil and overgrowth deposited in later years; and, now and then, we could see its flag-stones partly protruding from the bank through which our road has been cut, and thus showing that the thickness of this massive pavement was more than a foot of solid stone. We lost it over and over again; but still it reappeared, now on one side of us, now on the other; perhaps from beneath the roots of old trees, or the pasture-land of a thousand years old, and leading on towards the base of Soracte. I forget where we finally lost it. Passing through a town called Rignano, we found it dressed out in festivity, with festoons of foliage along both sides of the street, which ran beneath a triumphal arch, bearing an inscription in honor of a ducal personage of the Massimi family. I know no occasion for the feast, except that it is Whitsuntide. The town was thronged with peasants, in their best attire, and we met others on their way thither, particularly women and girls, with heads bare in the sunshine; but there was no tiptoe jollity, nor, indeed, any more show of festivity than I have seen in my own country at a cattle-show or muster. Really, I think, not half so much. The road still grew more and more picturesque, and now lay along ridges, at the bases of which were deep ravines and hollow valleys. Woods were not wanting; wilder forests than I have seen since leaving America, of oak-trees chiefly; and, among the green foliage, grew golden tufts of broom, making a gay and lovely combination of hues. I must not forget to mention the poppies, which burned like live coals along the wayside, and lit up the landscape, even a single one of them, with wonderful effect. At other points, we saw olive-trees, hiding their eccentricity of boughs under thick masses of foliage of a livid tint, which is caused, I believe, by their turning their reverse sides to the light and to the spectator. Vines were abundant, but were of little account in the scene. By and by we came in sight, of the high, flat table-land, on which stands Civita Castellana, and beheld, straight downward, between us and the town, a deep level valley with a river winding through it; it was the valley of the Treja. A precipice, hundreds of feet in height, falls perpendicularly upon the valley, from the site of Civita Castellana; there is an equally abrupt one, probably, on the side from which we saw it; and a modern road, skilfully constructed, goes winding down to the stream, crosses it by a narrow stone bridge, and winds upward into the town. After passing over the bridge, I alighted, with J----- and R-----, . . . . and made the ascent on foot, along walls of natural rock, in which old Etruscan tombs were hollowed out. There are likewise antique remains of masonry, whether Roman or of what earlier period, I cannot tell. At the summit of the acclivity, which brought us close to the town, our vetturino took us into the carriage again and quickly brought us to what appears to be really a good hotel, where all of us are accommodated with sleeping-chambers in a range, beneath an arcade, entirely secluded from the rest of the population of the hotel. After a splendid dinner (that is, splendid, considering that it was ordered by our hospitable vetturino), U----, Miss Shepard, J-----, and I walked out of the little town, in the opposite direction from our entrance, and crossed a bridge at the height of the table-land, instead of at its base. On either side, we had a view down into a profound gulf, with sides of precipitous rock, and heaps of foliage in its lap, through which ran the snowy track of a stream; here snowy, there dark; here hidden among the foliage, there quite revealed in the broad depths of the gulf. This was wonderfully fine. Walking on a little farther, Soracte came fully into view, starting with bold abruptness out of the middle of the country; and before we got back, the bright Italian moon was throwing a shower of silver over the scene, and making it so beautiful that it seemed miserable not to know how to put it into words; a foolish thought, however, for such scenes are an expression in themselves, and need not be translated into any feebler language. On our walk we met parties of laborers, both men and women, returning from the fields, with rakes and wooden forks over their shoulders, singing in chorus. It is very customary for women to be laboring in the fields. TO TERNI.--BORGHETTO. May 25th.--We were aroused at four o'clock this morning; had some eggs and coffee, and were ready to start between five and six; being thus matutinary, in order to get to Terni in time to see the falls. The road was very striking and picturesque; but I remember nothing particularly, till we came to Borghetto, which stands on a bluff, with a broad valley sweeping round it, through the midst of which flows the Tiber. There is an old castle on a projecting point; and we saw other battlemented fortresses, of mediaeval date, along our way, forming more beautiful ruins than any of the Roman remains to which we have become accustomed. This is partly, I suppose, owing to the fact that they have been neglected, and allowed to mantle their decay with ivy, instead of being cleaned, propped up, and restored. The antiquarian is apt to spoil the objects that interest him. Sometimes we passed through wildernesses of various trees, each contributing a different hue of verdure to the scene; the vine, also, marrying itself to the fig-tree, so that a man might sit in the shadow of both at once, and temper the luscious sweetness of the one fruit with the fresh flavor of the other. The wayside incidents were such as meeting a man and woman borne along as prisoners, handcuffed and in a cart; two men reclining across one another, asleep, and lazily lifting their heads to gaze at us as we passed by; a woman spinning with a distaff as she walked along the road. An old tomb or tower stood in a lonely field, and several caves were hollowed in the rocks, which might have been either sepulchres or habitations. Soracte kept us company, sometimes a little on one side, sometimes behind, looming up again and again, when we thought that we had done with it, and so becoming rather tedious at last, like a person who presents himself for another and another leave-taking after the one which ought to have been final. Honeysuckles sweetened the hedges along the road. After leaving Borghetto, we crossed the broad valley of the Tiber, and skirted along one of the ridges that border it, looking back upon the road that we had passed, lying white behind us. We saw a field covered with buttercups, or some other yellow flower, and poppies burned along the roadside, as they did yesterday, and there were flowers of a delicious blue, as if the blue Italian sky had been broken into little bits, and scattered down upon the green earth. Otricoli by and by appeared, situated on a bold promontory above the valley, a village of a few gray houses and huts, with one edifice gaudily painted in white and pink. It looked more important at a distance than we found it on our nearer approach. As the road kept ascending, and as the hills grew to be mountains, we had taken two additional horses, making six in all, with a man and boy running beside them, to keep them in motion. The boy had two club feet, so inconveniently disposed that it seemed almost inevitable for him to stumble over them at every step; besides which, he seemed to tread upon his ankles, and moved with a disjointed gait, as if each of his legs and thighs had been twisted round together with his feet. Nevertheless, he had a bright, cheerful, intelligent face, and was exceedingly active, keeping up with the horses at their trot, and inciting them to better speed when they lagged. I conceived a great respect for this poor boy, who had what most Italian peasants would consider an enviable birthright in those two club feet, as giving him a sufficient excuse to live on charity, but yet took no advantage of them; on the contrary, putting his poor misshapen hoofs to such good use as might have shamed many a better provided biped. When he quitted us, he asked no alms of the travellers, but merely applied to Gaetano for some slight recompense for his well-performed service. This behavior contrasted most favorably with that of some other boys and girls, who ran begging beside the carriage door, keeping up a low, miserable murmur, like that of a kennel-stream, for a long, long way. Beggars, indeed, started up at every point, when we stopped for a moment, and whenever a hill imposed a slower pace upon us; each village had its deformity or its infirmity, offering his wretched petition at the step of the carriage; and even a venerable, white-haired patriarch, the grandfather of all the beggars, seemed to grow up by the roadside, but was left behind from inability to join in the race with his light-footed juniors. No shame is attached to begging in Italy. In fact, I rather imagine it to be held an honorable profession, inheriting some of the odor of sanctity that used to be attached to a mendicant and idle life in the days of early Christianity, when every saint lived upon Providence, and deemed it meritorious to do nothing for his support. Murray's guide-book is exceedingly vague and unsatisfactory along this route; and whenever we asked Gaetano the name of a village or a castle, he gave some one which we had never heard before, and could find nothing of in the book. We made out the river Nar, however, or what I supposed to be such, though he called it Nera. It flows through a most stupendous mountain-gorge; winding its narrow passage between high hills, the broad sides of which descend steeply upon it, covered with trees and shrubbery, that mantle a host of rocky roughnesses, and make all look smooth. Here and there a precipice juts sternly forth. We saw an old castle on a hillside, frowning down into the gorge; and farther on, the gray tower of Narni stands upon a height, imminent over the depths below, and with its battlemented castle above now converted into a prison, and therefore kept in excellent repair. A long winding street passes through Narni, broadening at one point into a market-place, where an old cathedral showed its venerable front, and the great dial of its clock, the figures on which were numbered in two semicircles of twelve points each; one, I suppose, for noon, and the other for midnight. The town has, so far as its principal street is concerned, a city-like aspect, with large, fair edifices, and shops as good as most of those at Rome, the smartness of which contrasts strikingly with the rude and lonely scenery of mountain and stream, through which we had come to reach it. We drove through Narni without stopping, and came out from it on the other side, where a broad, level valley opened before us, most unlike the wild, precipitous gorge which had brought us to the town. The road went winding down into the peaceful vale, through the midst of which flowed the same stream that cuts its way between the impending hills, as already described. We passed a monk and a soldier,--the two curses of Italy, each in his way,-- walking sociably side by side; and from Narni to Terni I remember nothing that need be recorded. Terni, like so many other towns in the neighborhood, stands in a high and commanding position, chosen doubtless for its facilities of defence, in days long before the mediaeval warfares of Italy made such sites desirable. I suppose that, like Narni and Otricoli, it was a city of the Umbrians. We reached it between eleven and twelve o'clock, intending to employ the afternoon on a visit to the famous falls of Terni; but, after lowering all day, it has begun to rain, and we shall probably have to give them up. Half past eight o'clock.--It has rained in torrents during the afternoon, and we have not seen the cascade of Terni; considerably to my regret, for I think I felt the more interest in seeing it, on account of its being artificial. Methinks nothing was more characteristic of the energy and determination of the old Romans, than thus to take a river, which they wished to be rid of, and fling it over a giddy precipice, breaking it into ten million pieces by the fall. . . . . We are in the Hotel delle tre Colonne, and find it reasonably good, though not, so far as we are concerned, justifying the rapturous commendations of previous tourists, who probably travelled at their own charges. However, there is nothing really to be complained of, either in our accommodations or table, and the only wonder is how Gaetano contrives to get any profit out of our contract, since the hotel bills would alone cost us more than we pay him for the journey and all. It is worth while to record as history of vetturino commissary customs, that for breakfast this morning we had coffee, eggs, and bread and butter; for lunch an omelette, some stewed veal, and a dessert of figs and grapes, besides two decanters of a light-colored acid wine, tasting very like indifferent cider; for dinner, an excellent vermicelli soup, two young fowls, fricasseed, and a hind quarter of roast lamb, with fritters, oranges, and figs, and two more decanters of the wine aforesaid. This hotel is an edifice with a gloomy front upon a narrow street, and enterable through an arch, which admits you into an enclosed court; around the court, on each story, run the galleries, with which the parlors and sleeping-apartments communicate. The whole house is dingy, probably old, and seems not very clean; but yet bears traces of former magnificence; for instance, in our bedroom, the door of which is ornamented with gilding, and the cornices with frescos, some of which appear to represent the cascade of Terni, the roof is crossed with carved beams, and is painted in the interstices; the floor has a carpet, but rough tiles underneath it, which show themselves at the margin. The windows admit the wind; the door shuts so loosely as to leave great cracks; and, during the rain to-day, there was a heavy shower through our ceiling, which made a flood upon the carpet. We see no chambermaids; nothing of the comfort and neatness of an English hotel, nor of the smart splendors of an American one; but still this dilapidated palace affords us a better shelter than I expected to find in the decayed country towns of Italy. In the album of the hotel I find the names of more English travellers than of any other nation except the Americans, who, I think, even exceed the former; and, the route being the favorite one for tourists between Rome and Florence, whatever merit the inns have is probably owing to the demands of the Anglo-Saxons. I doubt not, if we chose to pay for it, this hotel would supply us with any luxury we might ask for; and perhaps even a gorgeous saloon and state bedchamber. After dinner, J----- and I walked out in the dusk to see what we could of Terni. We found it compact and gloomy (but the latter characteristic might well enough be attributed to the dismal sky), with narrow streets, paved from wall to wall of the houses, like those of all the towns in Italy; the blocks of paving-stone larger than the little square torments of Rome. The houses are covered with dingy stucco, and mostly low, compared with those of Rome, and inhospitable as regards their dismal aspects and uninviting doorways. The streets are intricate, as well as narrow; insomuch that we quickly lost our way, and could not find it again, though the town is of so small dimensions, that we passed through it in two directions, in the course of our brief wanderings. There are no lamp-posts in Terni; and as it was growing dark, and beginning to rain again, we at last inquired of a person in the principal piazza, and found our hotel, as I expected, within two minutes' walk of where we stood. FOLIGNO. May 26th.--At six o'clock this morning, we packed ourselves into our vettura, my wife and I occupying the coupe, and drove out of the city gate of Terni. There are some old towers near it, ruins of I know not what, and care as little, in the plethora of antiquities and other interesting objects. Through the arched gateway, as we approached, we had a view of one of the great hills that surround the town, looking partly bright in the early sunshine, and partly catching the shadows of the clouds that floated about the sky. Our way was now through the Vale of Terni, as I believe it is called, where we saw somewhat of the fertility of Italy: vines trained on poles, or twining round mulberry and other trees, ranged regularly like orchards; groves of olives and fields of grain. There are interminable shrines in all sorts of situations; some under arched niches, or little penthouses, with a brick-tiled roof, just large enough to cover them; or perhaps in some bit of old Roman masonry, on the wall of a wayside inn, or in a shallow cavity of the natural rock, or high upward in the deep cuts of the road; everywhere, in short, so that nobody need be at a loss when he feels the religious sentiment stir within him. Our way soon began to wind among the hills, which rose steep and lofty from the scanty, level space that lay between; they continually thrust themselves across the passage, and appeared as if determined to shut us completely in. A great hill would put its foot right before us; but, at the last moment, would grudgingly withdraw it, and allow us just room enough to creep by. Adown their sides we discerned the dry beds of mountain torrents, which had lived too fierce a life to let it be a long one. On here and there a hillside or promontory we saw a ruined castle or a convent, looking from its commanding height upon the road, which very likely some robber-knight had formerly infested with his banditti, retreating with his booty to the security of such strongholds. We came, once in a while, to wretched villages, where there was no token of prosperity or comfort; but perhaps there may have been more than we could appreciate, for the Italians do not seem to have any of that sort of pride which we find in New England villages, where every man, according to his taste and means, endeavors to make his homestead an ornament to the place. We miss nothing in Italy more than the neat doorsteps and pleasant porches and thresholds and delightful lawns or grass-plots, which hospitably invite the imagination into a sweet domestic interior. Everything, however sunny and luxuriant may be the scene around, is especially dreary and disheartening in the immediate vicinity of an Italian home. At Strettura (which, as the name indicates, is a very narrow part of the valley) we added two oxen to our horses, and began to ascend the Monte Somma, which, according to Murray, is nearly four thousand feet high where we crossed it. When we came to the steepest part of the ascent, Gaetano, who exercises a pretty decided control over his passengers, allowed us to walk; and we all, with one exception, alighted, and began to climb the mountain on foot. I walked on briskly, and soon left the rest of the party behind, reaching the top of the pass in such a short time that I could not believe it, and kept onward, expecting still another height to climb. But the road began to descend, winding among the depths of the hills as heretofore; now beside the dry, gravelly bed of a departed stream, now crossing it by a bridge, and perhaps passing through some other gorge, that yet gave no decided promise of an outlet into the world beyond. A glimpse might occasionally be caught, through a gap between the hill-tops, of a company of distant mountain-peaks, pyramidal, as these hills are apt to be, and resembling the camp of an army of giants. The landscape was not altogether savage; sometimes a hillside was covered with a rich field of grain, or an orchard of olive-trees, looking not unlike puffs of smoke, from the peculiar line of their foliage; but oftener there was a vast mantle of trees and shrubbery from top to bottom, the golden tufts of the broom shining out amid the verdure, and gladdening the whole. Nothing was dismal except the houses; those were always so, whether the compact, gray lines of village hovels, with a narrow street between, or the lonely farm-house, standing far apart from the road, built of stone, with window-gaps high in the wall, empty of glass; or the half-castle, half-dwelling, of which I saw a specimen or two, with what looked like a defensive rampart, drawn around its court. I saw no look of comfort anywhere; and continually, in this wild and solitary region, I met beggars, just as if I were still in the streets of Rome. Boys and girls kept beside me, till they delivered me into the hands of others like themselves; hoary grandsires and grandmothers caught a glimpse of my approach, and tottered as fast as they could to intercept me; women came out of the cottages, with rotten cherries on a plate, entreating me to buy them for a mezzo baioccho; a man, at work on the road, left his toil to beg, and was grateful for the value of a cent; in short, I was never safe from importunity, as long as there was a house or a human being in sight. We arrived at Spoleto before noon, and while our dejeuner was being prepared, looked down from the window of the inn into the narrow street beneath, which, from the throng of people in it, I judged to be the principal one: priests, papal soldiers, women with no bonnets on their heads; peasants in breeches and mushroom hats; maids and matrons, drawing water at a fountain; idlers, smoking on a bench under the window; a talk, a bustle, but no genuine activity. After lunch we walked out to see the lions of Spoleto, and found our way up a steep and narrow street that led us to the city gate, at which, it is traditionally said, Hannibal sought to force an entrance, after the battle of Thrasymene, and was repulsed. The gateway has a double arch, on the inner one of which is a tablet, recording the above tradition as an unquestioned historical fact. From the gateway we went in search of the Duomo, or cathedral, and were kindly directed thither by an officer, who was descending into the town from the citadel, which is an old castle, now converted into a prison. The cathedral seemed small, and did not much interest us, either by the Gothic front or its modernized interior. We saw nothing else in Spoleto, but went back to the inn and resumed our journey, emerging from the city into the classic valley of the Clitumnus, which we did not view under the best of auspices, because it was overcast, and the wind as chill as if it had the cast in it. The valley, though fertile, and smilingly picturesque, perhaps, is not such as I should wish to celebrate, either in prose or poetry. It is of such breadth and extent, that its frame of mountains and ridgy hills hardly serve to shut it in sufficiently, and the spectator thinks of a boundless plain, rather than of a secluded vale. After passing Le Vene, we came to the little temple which Byron describes, and which has been supposed to be the one immortalized by Pliny. It is very small, and stands on a declivity that falls immediately from the road, right upon which rises the pediment of the temple, while the columns of the other front find sufficient height to develop themselves in the lower ground. A little farther down than the base of the edifice we saw the Clitumnus, so recently from its source in the marble rock, that it was still as pure as a child's heart, and as transparent as truth itself. It looked airier than nothing, because it had not substance enough to brighten, and it was clearer than the atmosphere. I remember nothing else of the valley of Clitumnus, except that the beggars in this region of proverbial fertility are wellnigh profane in the urgency of their petitions; they absolutely fall down on their knees as you approach, in the same attitude as if they were praying to their Maker, and beseech you for alms with a fervency which I am afraid they seldom use before an altar or shrine. Being denied, they ran hastily beside the carriage, but got nothing, and finally gave over. I am so very tired and sleepy that I mean to mention nothing else to-night, except the city of Trevi, which, on the approach from Spoleto, seems completely to cover a high, peaked hill, from its pyramidal tip to its base. It was the strangest situation in which to build a town, where, I should suppose, no horse can climb, and whence no inhabitant would think of descending into the world, after the approach of age should begin to stiffen his joints. On looking back on this most picturesque of towns (which the road, of course, did not enter, as evidently no road could), I saw that the highest part of the hill was quite covered with a crown of edifices, terminating in a church-tower; while a part of the northern side was apparently too steep for building; and a cataract of houses flowed down the western and southern slopes. There seemed to be palaces, churches, everything that a city should have; but my eyes are heavy, and I can write no more about them, only that I suppose the summit of the hill was artificially tenured, so as to prevent its crumbling down, and enable it to support the platform of edifices which crowns it. May 27th.--We reached Foligno in good season yesterday afternoon. Our inn seemed ancient; and, under the same roof, on one side of the entrance, was the stable, and on the other the coach-house. The house is built round a narrow court, with a well of water at bottom, and an opening in the roof at top, whence the staircases are lighted that wind round the sides of the court, up to the highest story. Our dining-room and bedrooms were in the latter region, and were all paved with brick, and without carpets; and the characteristic of the whole was all exceeding plainness and antique clumsiness of fitting up. We found ourselves sufficiently comfortable, however; and, as has been the case throughout our journey, had a very fair and well-cooked dinner. It shows, as perhaps I have already remarked, that it is still possible to live well in Italy, at no great expense, and that the high prices charged to the forestieri at Rome and elsewhere are artificial, and ought to be abated. . . . . The day had darkened since morning, and was now ominous of rain; but as soon as we were established, we sallied out to see whatever was worth looking at. A beggar-boy, with one leg, followed us, without asking for anything, apparently only for the pleasure of our company, though he kept at too great a distance for conversation, and indeed did not attempt to speak. We went first to the cathedral, which has a Gothic front, and a modernized interior, stuccoed and whitewashed, looking as neat as a New England meeting-house, and very mean, after our familiarity with the gorgeous churches in other cities. There were some pictures in the chapels, but, I believe, all modern, and I do not remember a single one of them. Next we went, without any guide, to a church attached to a convent of Dominican monks, with a Gothic exterior, and two hideous pictures of Death,--the skeleton leaning on his scythe, one on each side of the door. This church, likewise, was whitewashed, but we understood that it had been originally frescoed all over, and by famous hands; but these pictures, having become much injured, they were all obliterated, as we saw,--all, that is to say, except a few specimens of the best preserved, which were spared to show the world what the whole had been. I thanked my stars that the obliteration of the rest had taken place before our visit; for if anything is dreary and calculated to make the beholder utterly miserable, it is a faded fresco, with spots of the white plaster dotted over it. Our one-legged boy had followed us into the church and stood near the door till he saw us ready to come out, when he hurried on before us, and waited a little way off to see whither we should go. We still went on at random, taking the first turn that offered itself, and soon came to another old church,--that of St. Mary within the Walls,--into which we entered, and found it whitewashed, like the other two. This was especially fortunate, for the doorkeeper informed us that, two years ago, the whole church (except, I suppose, the roof, which is of timber) had been covered with frescos by Pinturicchio, all of which had been ruthlessly obliterated, except a very few fragments. These he proceeded to show us; poor, dim ghosts of what may once have been beautiful,--now so far gone towards nothingness that I was hardly sure whether I saw a glimmering of the design or not. By the by, it was not Pinturicchio, as I have written above, but Giotto, assisted, I believe, by Cimabue, who painted these frescos. Our one-legged attendant had followed us also into this church, and again hastened out of it before us; and still we heard the dot of his crutch upon the pavement, as we passed from street to street. By and by a sickly looking man met us, and begged for "qualche cosa"; but the boy shouted to him, "Niente!" whether intimating that we would give him nothing, or that he himself had a prior claim to all our charity, I cannot tell. However, the beggar-man turned round, and likewise followed our devious course. Once or twice we missed him; but it was only because he could not walk so fast as we; for he appeared again as we emerged from the door of another church. Our one-legged friend we never missed for a moment; he kept pretty near us,--near enough to be amused by our indecision whither to go; and he seemed much delighted when it began to rain, and he saw us at a loss how to find our way back to the hotel. Nevertheless, he did not offer to guide us; but stumped on behind with a faster or slower dot of his crutch, according to our pace. I began to think that he must have been engaged as a spy upon our movements by the police who had taken away my passport at the city gate. In this way he attended us to the door of the hotel, where the beggar had already arrived. The latter again put in his doleful petition; the one-legged boy said not a word, nor seemed to expect anything, and both had to go away without so much as a mezzo baioccho out of our pockets. The multitude of beggars in Italy makes the heart as obdurate as a paving-stone. We left Foligno this morning, and, all ready for us at the door of the hotel, as we got into the carriage, were our friends, the beggar-man and the one-legged boy; the latter holding out his ragged hat, and smiling with as confident an air as if he had done us some very particular service, and were certain of being paid for it, as from contract. It was so very funny, so impudent, so utterly absurd, that I could not help giving him a trifle; but the man got nothing,--a fact that gives me a twinge or two, for he looked sickly and miserable. But where everybody begs, everybody, as a general rule, must be denied; and, besides, they act their misery so well that you are never sure of the genuine article. PERUGIA. May 25th.--As I said last night, we left Foligno betimes in the morning, which was bleak, chill, and very threatening, there being very little blue sky anywhere, and the clouds lying heavily on some of the mountain-ridges. The wind blew sharply right in U----'s face and mine, as we occupied the coupe, so that there must have been a great deal of the north in it. We drove through a wide plain--the Umbrian valley, I suppose--and soon passed the old town of Spello, just touching its skirts, and wondering how people, who had this rich and convenient plain from which to choose a site, could think of covering a huge island of rock with their dwellings,--for Spello tumbled its crooked and narrow streets down a steep descent, and cannot well have a yard of even space within its walls. It is said to contain some rare treasures of ancient pictorial art. I do not remember much that we saw on our route. The plains and the lower hillsides seemed fruitful of everything that belongs to Italy, especially the olive and the vine. As usual, there were a great many shrines, and frequently a cross by the wayside. Hitherto it had been merely a plain wooden cross; but now almost every cross was hung with various instruments, represented in wood, apparently symbols of the crucifixion of our Saviour,--the spear, the sponge, the crown of thorns, the hammer, a pair of pincers, and always St. Peter's cock, made a prominent figure, generally perched on the summit of the cross. From our first start this morning we had seen mists in various quarters, betokening that there was rain in those spots, and now it began to spatter in our own faces, although within the wide extent of our prospect we could see the sunshine falling on portions of the valley. A rainbow, too, shone out, and remained so long visible that it appeared to have made a permanent stain in the sky. By and by we reached Assisi, which is magnificently situated for pictorial purposes, with a gray castle above it, and a gray wall around it, itself on a mountain, and looking over the great plain which we had been traversing, and through which lay our onward way. We drove through the Piazza Grande to an ancient house a little beyond, where a hospitable old lady receives travellers for a consideration, without exactly keeping an inn. In the piazza we saw the beautiful front of a temple of Minerva, consisting of several marble pillars, fluted, and with rich capitals supporting a pediment. It was as fine as anything I had seen at Rome, and is now, of course, converted into a Catholic church. I ought to have said that, instead of driving straight to the old lady's, we alighted at the door of a church near the city gate, and went in to inspect some melancholy frescos, and thence clambered up a narrow street to the cathedral, which has a Gothic front, old enough, but not very impressive. I really remember not a single object that we saw within, but am pretty certain that the interior had been stuccoed and whitewashed. The ecclesiastics of old time did an excellent thing in covering the interiors of their churches with brilliant frescos, thus filling the holy places with saints and angels, and almost with the presence of the Divinity. The modern ecclesiastics do the next best thing in obliterating the wretched remnants of what has had its day and done its office. These frescos might be looked upon as the symbol of the living spirit that made Catholicism a true religion, and glorified it as long as it did live; now the glory and beauty have departed from one and the other. My wife, U----, and Miss Shepard now set out with a cicerone to visit the great Franciscan convent, in the church of which are preserved some miraculous specimens, in fresco and in oils, of early Italian art; but as I had no mind to suffer any further in this way, I stayed behind with J----- and R-----, who we're equally weary of these things. After they were gone we took a ramble through the city, but were almost swept away by the violence of the wind, which struggled with me for my hat, and whirled R----- before it like a feather. The people in the public square seemed much diverted at our predicament, being, I suppose, accustomed to these rude blasts in their mountain-home. However, the wind blew in momentary gusts, and then became more placable till another fit of fury came, and passed as suddenly as before. We walked out of the same gate through which we had entered,--an ancient gate, but recently stuccoed and whitewashed, in wretched contrast to the gray, venerable wall through which it affords ingress,--and I stood gazing at the magnificent prospect of the wide valley beneath. It was so vast that there appeared to be all varieties of weather in it at the same instant; fields of sunshine, tracts of storm,--here the coming tempest, there the departing one. It was a picture of the world on a vast canvas, for there was rural life and city life within the great expanse, and the whole set in a frame of mountains,--the nearest bold and dust-net, with the rocky ledges showing through their sides, the distant ones blue and dim,--so far stretched this broad valley. When I had looked long enough,--no, not long enough, for it would take a great while to read that page,--we returned within the gate, and we clambered up, past the cathedral and into the narrow streets above it. The aspect of everything was immeasurably old; a thousand years would be but a middle age for one of those houses, built so massively with huge stones and solid arches, that I do not see how they are ever to tumble down, or to be less fit for human habitation than they are now. The streets crept between them, and beneath arched passages, and up and down steps of stone or ancient brick, for it would be altogether impossible for a carriage to ascend above the Grand Piazza, though possibly a donkey or a chairman's mule might find foothold. The city seems like a stony growth out of the hillside, or a fossilized city,--so old and singular it is, without enough life and juiciness in it to be susceptible of decay. An earthquake is the only chance of its ever being ruined, beyond its present ruin. Nothing is more strange than to think that this now dead city--dead, as regards the purposes for which men live nowadays--was, centuries ago, the seat and birthplace almost of art, the only art in which the beautiful part of the human mind then developed itself. How came that flower to grow among these wild mountains? I do not conceive, however, that the people of Assisi were ever much more enlightened or cultivated on the side of art than they are at present. The ecclesiastics were then the only patrons; and the flower grew here because there was a great ecclesiastical garden in which it was sheltered and fostered. But it is very curious to think of Assisi, a school of art within, and mountain and wilderness without. My wife and the rest of the party returned from the convent before noon, delighted with what they had seen, as I was delighted not to have seen it. We ate our dejeuner, and resumed our journey, passing beneath the great convent, after emerging from the gate opposite to that of our entrance. The edifice made a very good spectacle, being of great extent, and standing on a double row of high and narrow arches, on which it is built up from the declivity of the hill. We soon reached the Church of St. Mary of the Angels, which is a modern structure, and very spacious, built in place of one destroyed by an earthquake. It is a fine church, opening out a magnificent space in its nave and aisles; and beneath the great dome stands the small old chapel, with its rude stone walls, in which St. Francis founded his order. This chapel and the dome appear to have been the only portions of the ancient church that were not destroyed by the earthquake. The dwelling of St. Francis is said to be also preserved within the church; but we did not see it, unless it were a little dark closet into which we squeezed to see some frescos by La Spagna. It had an old wooden door, of which U---- picked off a little bit of a chip, to serve as a relic. There is a fresco in the church, on the pediment of the chapel, by Overbeck, representing the Assumption of the Virgin. It did not strike me as wonderfully fine. The other pictures, of which there were many, were modern, and of no great merit. We pursued our way, and came, by and by, to the foot of the high hill on which stands Perugia, and which is so long and steep that Gaetano took a yoke of oxen to aid his horses in the ascent. We all, except my wife, walked a part of the way up, and I myself, with J----- for my companion, kept on even to the city gate,--a distance, I should think, of two or three miles, at least. The lower part of the road was on the edge of the hill, with a narrow valley on our left; and as the sun had now broken out, its verdure and fertility, its foliage and cultivation, shone forth in miraculous beauty, as green as England, as bright as only Italy. Perugia appeared above us, crowning a mighty hill, the most picturesque of cities; and the higher we ascended, the more the view opened before us, as we looked back on the course that we had traversed, and saw the wide valley, sweeping down and spreading out, bounded afar by mountains, and sleeping in sun and shadow. No language nor any art of the pencil can give an idea of the scene. When God expressed himself in the landscape to mankind, he did not intend that it should be translated into any tongue save his own immediate one. J----- meanwhile, whose heart is now wholly in snail-shells, was rummaging for them among the stones and hedges by the roadside; yet, doubtless, enjoyed the prospect more than he knew. The coach lagged far behind us, and when it came up, we entered the gate, where a soldier appeared, and demanded my passport. We drove to the Grand Hotel de France, which is near the gate, and two fine little boys ran beside the carriage, well dressed and well looking enough to have been a gentleman's sons, but claiming Gaetano for their father. He is an inhabitant of Perugia, and has therefore reached his own home, though we are still little more than midway to our journey's end. Our hotel proves, thus far, to be the best that we have yet met with. We are only in the outskirts of Perugia; the bulk of the city, where the most interesting churches and the public edifices are situated, being far above us on the hill. My wife, U----, Miss Shepard, and R----- streamed forth immediately, and saw a church; but J-----, who hates them, and I remained behind; and, for my part, I added several pages to this volume of scribble. This morning was as bright as morning could be, even in Italy, and in this transparent mountain atmosphere. We at first declined the services of a cicerone, and went out in the hopes of finding our way to whatever we wished to see, by our own instincts. This proved to be a mistaken hope, however; and we wandered about the upper city, much persecuted by a shabby old man who wished to guide us; so, at last, Miss Shepard went back in quest of the cicerone at the hotel, and, meanwhile, we climbed to the summit of the hill of Perugia, and, leaning over a wall, looked forth upon a most magnificent view of mountain and valley, terminating in some peaks, lofty and dim, which surely must be the Apennines. There again a young man accosted us, offering to guide us to the Cambio or Exchange; and as this was one of the places which we especially wished to see, we accepted his services. By the by, I ought to have mentioned that we had already entered a church (San Luigi, I believe), the interior of which we found very impressive, dim with the light of stained and painted windows, insomuch that it at first seemed almost dark, and we could only see the bright twinkling of the tapers at the shrines; but, after a few minutes, we discerned the tall octagonal pillars of the nave, marble, and supporting a beautiful roof of crossed arches. The church was neither Gothic nor classic, but a mixture of both, and most likely barbarous; yet it had a grand effect in its tinted twilight, and convinced me more than ever how desirable it is that religious edifices should have painted windows. The door of the Cambio proved to be one that we had passed several times, while seeking for it, and was very near the church just mentioned, which fronts on one side of the same piazza. We were received by an old gentleman, who appeared to be a public officer, and found ourselves in a small room, wainscoted with beautifully carved oak, roofed with a coved ceiling, painted with symbols of the planets, and arabesqued in rich designs by Raphael, and lined with splendid frescos of subjects, scriptural and historical, by Perugino. When the room was in its first glory, I can conceive that the world had not elsewhere to show, within so small a space, such magnificence and beauty as were then displayed here. Even now, I enjoyed (to the best of my belief, for we can never feel sure that we are not bamboozling ourselves in such matters) some real pleasure in what I saw; and especially seemed to feel, after all these ages, the old painter's devout sentiment still breathing forth from the religious pictures, the work of a hand that had so long been dust. When we had looked long at these, the old gentleman led us into a chapel, of the same size as the former room, and built in the same fashion, wainscoted likewise with old oak. The walls were also frescoed, entirely frescoed, and retained more of their original brightness than those we had already seen, although the pictures were the production of a somewhat inferior hand, a pupil of Perugino. They seemed to be very striking, however, not the less so, that one of them provoked an unseasonable smile. It was the decapitation of John the Baptist; and this holy personage was represented as still on his knees, with his hands clasped in prayer, although the executioner was already depositing the head in a charger, and the blood was spouting from the headless trunk, directly, as it were, into the face of the spectator. While we were in the outer room, the cicerone who first offered his services at the hotel had come in; so we paid our chance guide, and expected him to take his leave. It is characteristic of this idle country, however, that if you once speak to a person, or connect yourself with him by the slightest possible tie, you will hardly get rid of him by anything short of main force. He still lingered in the room, and was still there when I came away; for, having had as many pictures as I could digest, I left my wife and U---- with the cicerone, and set out on a ramble with J-----. We plunged from the upper city down through some of the strangest passages that ever were called streets; some of them, indeed, being arched all over, and, going down into the unknown darkness, looked like caverns; and we followed one of them doubtfully, till it opened out upon the light. The houses on each side were divided only by a pace or two, and communicated with one another, here and there, by arched passages. They looked very ancient, and may have been inhabited by Etruscan princes, judging from the massiveness of some of the foundation stones. The present inhabitants, nevertheless, are by no means princely,--shabby men, and the careworn wives and mothers of the people,--one of whom was guiding a child in leading-strings through these antique alleys, where hundreds of generations have trod before those little feet. Finally we came out through a gateway, the same gateway at which we entered last night. I ought to have mentioned, in the narrative of yesterday, that we crossed the Tiber shortly before reaching Perugia, already a broad and rapid stream, and already distinguished by the same turbid and mud-puddly quality of water that we see in it at Rome. I think it will never be so disagreeable to me hereafter, now that I find this turbidness to be its native color, and not (like that of the Thames) accruing from city sewers or any impurities of the lowlands. As I now remember, the small Chapel of Santa Maria degl' Angeli seems to have been originally the house of St. Francis. May 29th.--This morning we visited the Church of the Dominicans, where we saw some quaint pictures by Fra Angelico, with a good deal of religious sincerity in them; also a picture of St. Columba by Perugino, which unquestionably is very good. To confess the truth, I took more interest in a fair Gothic monument, in white marble, of Pope Benedict XII., representing him reclining under a canopy, while two angels draw aside the curtain, the canopy being supported by twisted columns, richly ornamented. I like this overflow and gratuity of device with which Gothic sculpture works out its designs, after seeing so much of the simplicity of classic art in marble. We then tried to find the Church of San Pietro in Martire, but without success, although every person of whom we inquired immediately attached himself or herself to us, and could hardly be got rid of by any efforts on our part. Nobody seemed to know the church we wished for, but all directed us to another Church of San Pietro, which contains nothing of interest; whereas the right church is supposed to contain a celebrated picture by Perugino. Finally, we ascended the hill and the city proper of Perugia (for our hotel is in one of the suburbs), and J----- and I set out on a ramble about the city. It was market-day, and the principal piazza, with the neighboring streets, was crowded with people. . . . . The best part of Perugia, that in which the grand piazzas and the principal public edifices stand, seems to be a nearly level plateau on the summit of the hill; but it is of no very great extent, and the streets rapidly run downward on either side. J----- and I followed one of these descending streets, and were led a long way by it, till we at last emerged from one of the gates of the city, and had another view of the mountains and valleys, the fertile and sunny wilderness in which this ancient civilization stands. On the right of the gate there was a rude country-path, partly overgrown with grass, bordered by a hedge on one side, and on the other by the gray city wall, at the base of which the track kept onward. We followed it, hoping that it would lead us to some other gate by which we might re-enter the city; but it soon grew so indistinct and broken, that it was evidently on the point of melting into somebody's olive-orchard or wheat-fields or vineyards, all of which lay on the other side of the hedge; and a kindly old woman of whom I inquired told me (if I rightly understood her Italian) that I should find no further passage in that direction. So we turned back, much broiled in the hot sun, and only now and then relieved by the shadow of an angle or a tower. A lame beggar-man sat by the gate, and as we passed him J----- gave him two baiocchi (which he himself had begged of me to buy an orange with), and was loaded with the pauper's prayers and benedictions as we entered the city. A great many blessings can be bought for very little money anywhere in Italy; and whether they avail anything or no, it is pleasant to see that the beggars have gratitude enough to bestow them in such abundance. Of all beggars I think a little fellow, who rode beside our carriage on a stick, his bare feet scampering merrily, while he managed his steed with one hand, and held out the other for charity, howling piteously the while, amused me most. PASSIGNANO. May 29th.--We left Perugia at about three o'clock to-day, and went down a pretty steep descent; but I have no particular recollection of the road till it again began to descend, before reaching the village of Magione. We all, except my wife, walked up the long hill, while the vettura was dragged after us with the aid of a yoke of oxen. Arriving first at the village, I leaned over the wall to admire the beautiful paese ("le bel piano," as a peasant called it, who made acquaintance with me) that lay at the foot of the hill, so level, so bounded within moderate limits by a frame of hills and ridges, that it looked like a green lake. In fact, I think it was once a real lake, which made its escape from its bed, as I have known some lakes to have done in America. Passing through and beyond the village, I saw, on a height above the road, a half-ruinous tower, with great cracks running down its walls, half-way from top to bottom. Some little children had mounted the hill with us, begging all the way; they were recruited with additional members in the village; and here, beneath the ruinous tower, a madman, as it seemed, assaulted us, and ran almost under the carriage-wheels, in his earnestness to get a baioccho. Ridding ourselves of these annoyances, we drove on, and, between five and six o'clock, came in sight of the Lake of Thrasymene, obtaining our first view of it, I think, in its longest extent. There were high hills, and one mountain with its head in the clouds, visible on the farther shore, and on the horizon beyond it; but the nearer banks were long ridges, and hills of only moderate height. The declining sun threw a broad sheen of brightness over the surface of the lake, so that we could not well see it for excess of light; but had a vision of headlands and islands floating about in a flood of gold, and blue, airy heights bounding it afar. When we first drew near the lake, there was but a narrow tract, covered with vines and olives, between it and the hill that rose on the other side. As we advanced, the tract grew wider, and was very fertile, as was the hillside, with wheat-fields, and vines, and olives, especially the latter, which, symbol of peace as it is, seemed to find something congenial to it in the soil stained long ago with blood. Farther onward, the space between the lake and hill grew still narrower, the road skirting along almost close to the water-side; and when we reached the town of Passignano there was but room enough for its dirty and ugly street to stretch along the shore. I have seldom beheld a lovelier scene than that of the lake and the landscape around it; never an uglier one than that of this idle and decaying village, where we were immediately surrounded by beggars of all ages, and by men vociferously proposing to row us out upon the lake. We declined their offers of a boat, for the evening was very fresh and cool, insomuch that I should have liked an outside garment,--a temperature that I had not anticipated, so near the beginning of June, in sunny Italy. Instead of a row, we took a walk through the village, hoping to come upon the shore of the lake, in some secluded spot; but an incredible number of beggar-children, both boys and girls, but more of the latter, rushed out of every door, and went along with us, all howling their miserable petitions at the same moment. The village street is long, and our escort waxed more numerous at every step, till Miss Shepard actually counted forty of these little reprobates, and more were doubtless added afterwards. At first, no doubt, they begged in earnest hope of getting some baiocchi; but, by and by, perceiving that we had determined not to give them anything, they made a joke of the matter, and began to laugh and to babble, and turn heels over head, still keeping about us, like a swarm of flies, and now and then begging again with all their might. There were as few pretty faces as I ever saw among the same number of children; and they were as ragged and dirty little imps as any in the world, and, moreover, tainted the air with a very disagreeable odor from their rags and dirt; rugged and healthy enough, nevertheless, and sufficiently intelligent; certainly bold and persevering too; so that it is hard to say what they needed to fit them for success in life. Yet they begin as beggars, and no doubt will end so, as all their parents and grandparents do; for in our walk through the village, every old woman and many younger ones held out their hands for alms, as if they had all been famished. Yet these people kept their houses over their heads; had firesides in winter, I suppose, and food out of their little gardens every day; pigs to kill, chickens, olives, wine, and a great many things to make life comfortable. The children, desperately as they begged, looked in good bodily ease, and happy enough; but, certainly, there was a look of earnest misery in the faces of some of the old women, either genuine or exceedingly well acted. I could not bear the persecution, and went into our hotel, determining not to venture out again till our departure; at least not in the daylight. My wife and the rest of the family, however, continued their walk, and at length were relieved from their little pests by three policemen (the very images of those in Rome, in their blue, long-skirted coats, cocked chapeaux-bras, white shoulder-belts, and swords), who boxed their ears, and dispersed them. Meanwhile, they had quite driven away all sentimental effusion (of which I felt more, really, than I expected) about the Lake of Thrasymene. The inn of Passignano promised little from its outward appearance; a tall, dark old house, with a stone staircase leading us up from one sombre story to another, into a brick-paved dining-room, with our sleeping-chambers on each side. There was a fireplace of tremendous depth and height, fit to receive big forest-logs, and with a queer, double pair of ancient andirons, capable of sustaining them; and in a handful of ashes lay a small stick of olive-wood,--a specimen, I suppose, of the sort of fuel which had made the chimney black, in the course of a good many years. There must have been much shivering and misery of cold around this fireplace. However, we needed no fire now, and there was promise of good cheer in the spectacle of a man cleaning some lake-fish for our dinner, while the poor things flounced and wriggled under the knife. The dinner made its appearance, after a long while, and was most plentiful, . . . . so that, having measured our appetite in anticipation of a paucity of food, we had to make more room for such overflowing abundance. When dinner was over, it was already dusk, and before retiring I opened the window, and looked out on Lake Thrasymene, the margin of which lies just on the other side of the narrow village street. The moon was a day or two past the full, just a little clipped on the edge, but gave light enough to show the lake and its nearer shores almost as distinctly as by day; and there being a ripple on the surface of the water, it made a sheen of silver over a wide space. AREZZO. May 30th.--We started at six o'clock, and left the one ugly street of Passignano, before many of the beggars were awake. Immediately in the vicinity of the village there is very little space between the lake in front and the ridge of hills in the rear; but the plain widened as we drove onward, so that the lake was scarcely to be seen, or often quite hidden among the intervening trees, although we could still discern the summits of the mountains that rise far beyond its shores. The country was fertile, presenting, on each side of the road, vines trained on fig-trees; wheat-fields and olives, in greater abundance than any other product. On our right, with a considerable width of plain between, was the bending ridge of hills that shut in the Roman army, by its close approach to the lake at Passignano. In perhaps half all hour's drive, we reached the little bridge that throws its arch over the Sanguinetto, and alighted there. The stream has but about a yard's width of water; and its whole course, between the hills and the lake, might well have been reddened and swollen with the blood of the multitude of slain Romans. Its name put me in mind of the Bloody Brook at Deerfield, where a company of Massachusetts men were massacred by the Indians. The Sanguinetto flows over a bed of pebbles; and J----- crept under the bridge, and got one of them for a memorial, while U----, Miss Shepard, and R----- plucked some olive twigs and oak leaves, and made them into wreaths together,--symbols of victory and peace. The tower, which is traditionally named after Hannibal, is seen on a height that makes part of the line of enclosing hills. It is a large, old castle, apparently of the Middle Ages, with a square front, and a battlemented sweep of wall. The town of Torres (its name, I think), where Hannibal's main army is supposed to have lain while the Romans came through the pass, was in full view; and I could understand the plan of the battle better than any system of military operations which I have hitherto tried to fathom. Both last night and to-day, I found myself stirred more sensibly than I expected by the influences of this scene. The old battle-field is still fertile in thoughts and emotions, though it is so many ages since the blood spilt there has ceased to make the grass and flowers grow more luxuriantly. I doubt whether I should feel so much on the field of Saratoga or Monmouth; but these old classic battle-fields belong to the whole world, and each man feels as if his own forefathers fought them. Mine, by the by, if they fought them at all, must have been on the side of Hannibal; for, certainly, I sympathized with him, and exulted in the defeat of the Romans on their own soil. They excite much the same emotion of general hostility that the English do. Byron has written some very fine stanzas on the battle-field,--not so good as others that he has written on classical scenes and subjects, yet wonderfully impressing his own perception of the subject on the reader. Whenever he has to deal with a statue, a ruin, a battle-field, he pounces upon the topic like a vulture, and tears out its heart in a twinkling, so that there is nothing more to be said. If I mistake not, our passport was examined by the papal officers at the last custom-house in the pontifical territory, before we traversed the path through which the Roman army marched to its destruction. Lake Thrasymene, of which we took our last view, is not deep set among the hills, but is bordered by long ridges, with loftier mountains receding into the distance. It is not to be compared to Windermere or Loch Lomond for beauty, nor with Lake Champlain and many a smaller lake in my own country, none of which, I hope, will ever become so historically interesting as this famous spot. A few miles onward our passport was countersigned at the Tuscan custom-house, and our luggage permitted to pass without examination on payment of a fee of nine or ten pauls, besides two pauls to the porters. There appears to be no concealment on the part of the officials in thus waiving the exercise of their duty, and I rather imagine that the thing is recognized and permitted by their superiors. At all events, it is very convenient for the traveller. We saw Cortona, sitting, like so many other cities in this region, on its hill, and arrived about noon at Arezzo, which also stretches up a high hillside, and is surrounded, as they all are, by its walls or the remains of one, with a fortified gate across every entrance. I remember one little village, somewhere in the neighborhood of the Clitumnus, which we entered by one gateway, and, in the course of two minutes at the utmost, left by the opposite one, so diminutive was this walled town. Everything hereabouts bears traces of times when war was the prevalent condition, and peace only a rare gleam of sunshine. At Arezzo we have put up at the Hotel Royal, which has the appearance of a grand old house, and proves to be a tolerable inn enough. After lunch, we wandered forth to see the town, which did not greatly interest me after Perugia, being much more modern and less picturesque in its aspect. We went to the cathedral,--a Gothic edifice, but not of striking exterior. As the doors were closed, and not to be opened till three o'clock, we seated ourselves under the trees, on a high, grassy space surrounded and intersected with gravel-walks,--a public promenade, in short, near the cathedral; and after resting ourselves here we went in search of Petrarch's house, which Murray mentions as being in this neighborhood. We inquired of several people, who knew nothing about the matter; one woman misdirected us, out of mere fun, I believe, for she afterwards met us and asked how we had succeeded. But finally, through ------'s enterprise and perseverance, we found the spot, not a stone's-throw from where we had been sitting. Petrarch's house stands below the promenade which I have just mentioned, and within hearing of the reverberations between the strokes of the cathedral bell. It is two stories high, covered with a light-colored stucco, and has not the slightest appearance of antiquity, no more than many a modern and modest dwelling-house in an American city. Its only remarkable feature is a pointed arch of stone, let into the plastered wall, and forming a framework for the doorway. I set my foot on the doorsteps, ascended them, and Miss Shepard and J----- gathered some weeds or blades of grass that grew in the chinks between the steps. There is a long inscription on a slab of marble set in the front of the house, as is the fashion in Arezzo when a house has been the birthplace or residence of a distinguished man. Right opposite Petrarch's birth-house--and it must have been the well whence the water was drawn that first bathed him--is a well which Boccaccio has introduced into one of his stories. It is surrounded with a stone curb, octagonal in shape, and evidently as ancient as Boccaccio's time. It has a wooden cover, through which is a square opening, and looking down I saw my own face in the water far beneath. There is no familiar object connected with daily life so interesting as a well; and this well or old Arezzo, whence Petrarch had drunk, around which he had played in his boyhood, and which Boccaccio has made famous, really interested me more than the cathedral. It lies right under the pavement of the street, under the sunshine, without any shade of trees about it, or any grass, except a little that grows in the crevices of its stones; but the shape of its stone-work would make it a pretty object in an engraving. As I lingered round it I thought of my own town-pump in old Salem, and wondered whether my townspeople would ever point it out to strangers, and whether the stranger would gaze at it with any degree of such interest as I felt in Boccaccio's well. O, certainly not; but yet I made that humble town-pump the most celebrated structure in the good town. A thousand and a thousand people had pumped there, merely to water oxen or fill their teakettles; but when once I grasped the handle, a rill gushed forth that meandered as far as England, as far as India, besides tasting pleasantly in every town and village of our own country. I like to think of this, so long after I did it, and so far from home, and am not without hopes of some kindly local remembrance on this score. Petrarch's house is not a separate and insulated building, but stands in contiguity and connection with other houses on each side; and all, when I saw them, as well as the whole street, extending down the slope of the hill, had the bright and sunny aspect of a modern town. As the cathedral was not yet open, and as J----- and I had not so much patience as my wife, we left her and Miss Shepard, and set out to return to the hotel. We lost our way, however, and finally had to return to the cathedral, to take a fresh start; and as the door was now open we went in. We found the cathedral very stately with its great arches, and darkly magnificent with the dim rich light coming through its painted windows, some of which are reckoned the most beautiful that the whole world has to show. The hues are far more brilliant than those of any painted glass I saw in England, and a great wheel window looks like a constellation of many-colored gems. The old English glass gets so smoky and dull with dust, that its pristine beauty cannot any longer be even imagined; nor did I imagine it till I saw these Italian windows. We saw nothing of my wife and Miss Shepard; but found afterwards that they had been much annoyed by the attentions of a priest who wished to show them the cathedral, till they finally told him that they had no money with them, when he left them without another word. The attendants in churches seem to be quite as venal as most other Italians, and, for the sake of their little profit, they do not hesitate to interfere with the great purposes for which their churches were built and decorated; hanging curtains, for instance, before all the celebrated pictures, or hiding them away in the sacristy, so that they cannot be seen without a fee. Returning to the hotel, we looked out of the window, and, in the street beneath, there was a very busy scene, it being Sunday, and the whole population, apparently, being astir, promenading up and down the smooth flag-stones, which made the breadth of the street one sidewalk, or at their windows, or sitting before their doors. The vivacity of the population in these parts is very striking, after the gravity and lassitude of Rome; and the air was made cheerful with the talk and laughter of hundreds of voices. I think the women are prettier than the Roman maids and matrons, who, as I think I have said before, have chosen to be very uncomely since the rape of their ancestresses, by way of wreaking a terrible spite and revenge. I have nothing more to say of Arezzo, except that, finding the ordinary wine very bad, as black as ink, and tasting as if it had tar and vinegar in it, we called for a bottle of Monte Pulciano, and were exceedingly gladdened and mollified thereby. INCISA. We left Arezzo early on Monday morning, the sun throwing the long shadows of the trees across the road, which at first, after we had descended the hill, lay over a plain. As the morning advanced, or as we advanced, the country grew more hilly. We saw many bits of rustic life,--such as old women tending pigs or sheep by the roadside, and spinning with a distaff; women sewing under trees, or at their own doors; children leading goats, tied by the horns, while they browse; sturdy, sunburnt creatures, in petticoats, but otherwise manlike, at work side by side with male laborers in the fields. The broad-brimmed, high-crowned hat of Tuscan straw is the customary female head-dress, and is as unbecoming as can possibly be imagined, and of little use, one would suppose, as a shelter from the sun, the brim continually blowing upward from the face. Some of the elder women wore black felt hats, likewise broad-brimmed; and the men wore felt hats also, shaped a good deal like a mushroom, with hardly any brim at all. The scenes in the villages through which we passed were very lively and characteristic, all the population seeming to be out of doors: some at the butcher's shop, others at the well; a tailor sewing in the open air, with a young priest sitting sociably beside him; children at play; women mending clothes, embroidering, spinning with the distaff at their own doorsteps; many idlers, letting the pleasant morning pass in the sweet-do-nothing; all assembling in the street, as in the common room of one large household, and thus brought close together, and made familiar with one another, as they can never be in a different system of society. As usual along the road we passed multitudes of shrines, where the Virgin was painted in fresco, or sometimes represented in bas-reliefs, within niches, or under more spacious arches. It would be a good idea to place a comfortable and shady seat beneath all these wayside shrines, where the wayfarer might rest himself, and thank the Virgin for her hospitality; nor can I believe that it would offend her, any more than other incense, if he were to regale himself, even in such consecrated spots, with the fragrance of a pipe or cigar. In the wire-work screen, before many of the shrines, hung offerings of roses and other flowers, some wilted and withered, some fresh with that morning's dew, some that never bloomed and never faded,--being artificial. I wonder that they do not plant rose-trees and all kinds of fragrant and flowering shrubs under the shrines, and twine and wreathe them all around, so that the Virgin may dwell within a bower of perpetual freshness; at least put flower-pots, with living plants, into the niche. There are many things in the customs of these people that might be made very beautiful, if the sense of beauty were as much alive now as it must have been when these customs were first imagined and adopted. I must not forget, among these little descriptive items, the spectacle of women and girls bearing huge bundles of twigs and shrubs, or grass, with scarlet poppies and blue flowers intermixed; the bundles sometimes so huge as almost to hide the woman's figure from head to heel, so that she looked like a locomotive mass of verdure and flowers; sometimes reaching only half-way down her back, so as to show the crooked knife slung behind, with which she had been reaping this strange harvest-sheaf. A Pre-Raphaelite painter--the one, for instance, who painted the heap of autumnal leaves, which we saw at the Manchester Exhibition--would find an admirable subject in one of these girls, stepping with a free, erect, and graceful carriage, her burden on her head; and the miscellaneous herbage and flowers would give him all the scope he could desire for minute and various delineation of nature. The country houses which we passed had sometimes open galleries or arcades on the second story and above, where the inhabitants might perform their domestic labor in the shade and in the air. The houses were often ancient, and most picturesquely time-stained, the plaster dropping in spots from the old brickwork; others were tinted of pleasant and cheerful lines; some were frescoed with designs in arabesques, or with imaginary windows; some had escutcheons of arms painted on the front. Wherever there was a pigeon-house, a flight of doves were represented as flying into the holes, doubtless for the invitation and encouragement of the real birds. Once or twice I saw a bush stuck up before the door of what seemed to be a wine-shop. If so, it is the ancient custom, so long disused in England, and alluded to in the proverb, "Good wine needs no bush." Several times we saw grass spread to dry on the road, covering half the track, and concluded it to have been cut by the roadside for the winter forage of his ass by some poor peasant, or peasant's wife, who had no grass land, except the margin of the public way. A beautiful feature of the scene to-day, as the preceding day, were the vines growing on fig-trees (?) [This interrogation-mark must mean that Mr. Hawthorne was not sure they were fig-trees.--ED.], and often wreathed in rich festoons from one tree to another, by and by to be hung with clusters of purple grapes. I suspect the vine is a pleasanter object of sight under this mode of culture than it can be in countries where it produces a more precious wine, and therefore is trained more artificially. Nothing can be more picturesque than the spectacle of an old grapevine, with almost a trunk of its own, clinging round its tree, imprisoning within its strong embrace the friend that supported its tender infancy, converting the tree wholly to its own selfish ends, as seemingly flexible natures are apt to do, stretching out its innumerable arms on every bough, and allowing hardly a leaf to sprout except its own. I must not yet quit this hasty sketch, without throwing in, both in the early morning, and later in the forenoon, the mist that dreamed among the hills, and which, now that I have called it mist, I feel almost more inclined to call light, being so quietly cheerful with the sunshine through it. Put in, now and then, a castle on a hilltop; a rough ravine, a smiling valley; a mountain stream, with a far wider bed than it at present needs, and a stone bridge across it, with ancient and massive arches;--and I shall say no more, except that all these particulars, and many better ones which escape me, made up a very pleasant whole. At about noon we drove into the village of Incisa, and alighted at the albergo where we were to lunch. It was a gloomy old house, as much like my idea of an Etruscan tomb as anything else that I can compare it to. We passed into a wide and lofty entrance-hall, paved with stone, and vaulted with a roof of intersecting arches, supported by heavy columns of stuccoed-brick, the whole as sombre and dingy as can well be. This entrance-hall is not merely the passageway into the inn, but is likewise the carriage-house, into which our vettura is wheeled; and it has, on one side, the stable, odorous with the litter of horses and cattle, and on the other the kitchen, and a common sitting-room. A narrow stone staircase leads from it to the dining-room, and chambers above, which are paved with brick, and adorned with rude frescos instead of paper-hangings. We look out of the windows, and step into a little iron-railed balcony, before the principal window, and observe the scene in the village street. The street is narrow, and nothing can exceed the tall, grim ugliness of the village houses, many of them four stories high, contiguous all along, and paved quite across; so that nature is as completely shut out from the precincts of this little town as from the heart of the widest city. The walls of the houses are plastered, gray, dilapidated; the windows small, some of them drearily closed with wooden shutters, others flung wide open, and with women's heads protruding, others merely frescoed, for a show of light and air. It would be a hideous street to look at in a rainy day, or when no human life pervaded it. Now it has vivacity enough to keep it cheerful. People lounge round the door of the albergo, and watch the horses as they drink from a stone trough, which is built against the wall of the house, and filled with the unseen gush of a spring. At first there is a shade entirely across the street, and all the within-doors of the village empties itself there, and keeps up a babblement that seems quite disproportioned even to the multitude of tongues that make it. So many words are not spoken in a New England village in a whole year as here in this single day. People talk about nothing as if they were terribly in earnest, and laugh at nothing as if it were all excellent joke. As the hot noon sunshine encroaches on our side of the street, it grows a little more quiet. The loungers now confine themselves to the shady margin (growing narrower and narrower) of the other side, where, directly opposite the albergo, there are two cafes and a wine-shop, "vendita di pane, vino, ed altri generi," all in a row with benches before them. The benchers joke with the women passing by, and are joked with back again. The sun still eats away the shadow inch by inch, beating down with such intensity that finally everybody disappears except a few passers-by. Doubtless the village snatches this half-hour for its siesta. There is a song, however, inside one of the cafes, with a burden in which several voices join. A girl goes through the street, sheltered under her great bundle of freshly cut grass. By and by the song ceases, and two young peasants come out of the cafe, a little affected by liquor, in their shirt-sleeves and bare feet, with their trousers tucked up. They resume their song in the street, and dance along, one's arm around his fellow's neck, his own waist grasped by the other's arm. They whirl one another quite round about, and come down upon their feet. Meeting a village maid coming quietly along, they dance up and intercept her for a moment, but give way to her sobriety of aspect. They pass on, and the shadow soon begins to spread from one side of the street, which presently fills again, and becomes once more, for its size, the noisiest place I ever knew. We had quite a tolerable dinner at this ugly inn, where many preceding travellers had written their condemnatory judgments, as well as a few their favorable ones, in pencil on the walls of the dining-room. TO FLORENCE. At setting off [from Incisa], we were surrounded by beggars as usual, the most interesting of whom were a little blind boy and his mother, who had besieged us with gentle pertinacity during our whole stay there. There was likewise a man with a maimed hand, and other hurts or deformities; also, an old woman who, I suspect, only pretended to be blind, keeping her eyes tightly squeezed together, but directing her hand very accurately where the copper shower was expected to fall. Besides these, there were a good many sturdy little rascals, vociferating in proportion as they needed nothing. It was touching, however, to see several persons--themselves beggars for aught I know--assisting to hold up the little blind boy's tremulous hand, so that he, at all events, might not lack the pittance which we had to give. Our dole was but a poor one, after all, consisting of what Roman coppers we had brought into Tuscany with us; and as we drove off, some of the boys ran shouting and whining after us in the hot sunshine, nor stopped till we reached the summit of the hill, which rises immediately from the village street. We heard Gaetano once say a good thing to a swarm of beggar-children, who were infesting us, "Are your fathers all dead?"--a proverbial expression, I suppose. The pertinacity of beggars does not, I think, excite the indignation of an Italian, as it is apt to do that of Englishmen or Americans. The Italians probably sympathize more, though they give less. Gaetano is very gentle in his modes of repelling them, and, indeed, never interferes at all, as long as there is a prospect of their getting anything. Immediately after leaving Incisa, we saw the Arno, already a considerable river, rushing between deep banks, with the greenish line of a duck-pond diffused through its water. Nevertheless, though the first impression was not altogether agreeable, we soon became reconciled to this line, and ceased to think it an indication of impurity; for, in spite of it, the river is still to a certain degree transparent, and is, at any rate, a mountain stream, and comes uncontaminated from its source. The pure, transparent brown of the New England rivers is the most beautiful color; but I am content that it should be peculiar to them. Our afternoon's drive was through scenery less striking than some which we had traversed, but still picturesque and beautiful. We saw deep valleys and ravines, with streams at the bottom; long, wooded hillsides, rising far and high, and dotted with white dwellings, well towards the summits. By and by, we had a distant glimpse of Florence, showing its great dome and some of its towers out of a sidelong valley, as if we were between two great waves of the tumultuous sea of hills; while, far beyond, rose in the distance the blue peaks of three or four of the Apennines, just on the remote horizon. There being a haziness in the atmosphere, however, Florence was little more distinct to us than the Celestial City was to Christian and Hopeful, when they spied at it from the Delectable Mountains. Keeping steadfastly onward, we ascended a winding road, and passed a grand villa, standing very high, and surrounded with extensive grounds. It must be the residence of some great noble; and it has an avenue of poplars or aspens, very light and gay, and fit for the passage of the bridal procession, when the proprietor or his heir brings home his bride; while, in another direction from the same front of the palace, stretches an avenue or grove of cypresses, very long, and exceedingly black and dismal, like a train of gigantic mourners. I have seen few things more striking, in the way of trees, than this grove of cypresses. From this point we descended, and drove along an ugly, dusty avenue, with a high brick wall on one side or both, till we reached the gate of Florence, into which we were admitted with as little trouble as custom-house officers, soldiers, and policemen can possibly give. They did not examine our luggage, and even declined a fee, as we had already paid one at the frontier custom-house. Thank heaven, and the Grand Duke! As we hoped that the Casa del Bello had been taken for us, we drove thither in the first place, but found that the bargain had not been concluded. As the house and studio of Mr. Powers were just on the opposite side of the street, I went to it, but found him too much engrossed to see me at the moment; so I returned to the vettura, and we told Gaetano to carry us to a hotel. He established us at the Albergo della Fontana, a good and comfortable house. . . . . Mr. Powers called in the evening,--a plain personage, characterized by strong simplicity and warm kindliness, with an impending brow, and large eyes, which kindle as he speaks. He is gray, and slightly bald, but does not seem elderly, nor past his prime. I accept him at once as an honest and trustworthy man, and shall not vary from this judgment. Through his good offices, the next day, we engaged the Casa del Bello, at a rent of fifty dollars a month, and I shall take another opportunity (my fingers and head being tired now) to write about the house, and Mr. Powers, and what appertains to him, and about the beautiful city of Florence. At present, I shall only say further, that this journey from Rome has been one of the brightest and most uncareful interludes of my life; we have all enjoyed it exceedingly, and I am happy that our children have it to look back upon. June 4th.--At our visit to Powers's studio on Tuesday, we saw a marble copy of the fisher-boy holding a shell to his ear, and the bust of Proserpine, and two or three other ideal busts; various casts of most of the ideal statues and portrait busts which he has executed. He talks very freely about his works, and is no exception to the rule that an artist is not apt to speak in a very laudatory style of a brother artist. He showed us a bust of Mr. Sparks by Persico,--a lifeless and thoughtless thing enough, to be sure,--and compared it with a very good one of the same gentleman by himself; but his chiefest scorn was bestowed on a wretched and ridiculous image of Mr. King, of Alabama, by Clark Mills, of which he said he had been employed to make several copies for Southern gentlemen. The consciousness of power is plainly to be seen, and the assertion of it by no means withheld, in his simple and natural character; nor does it give me an idea of vanity on his part to see and hear it. He appears to consider himself neglected by his country,--by the government of it, at least,--and talks with indignation of the byways and political intrigue which, he thinks, win the rewards that ought to be bestowed exclusively on merit. An appropriation of twenty-five thousand dollars was made, some years ago, for a work of sculpture by him, to be placed in the Capitol; but the intermediate measures necessary to render it effective have been delayed; while the above-mentioned Clark Mills-- certainly the greatest bungler that ever botched a block of marble--has received an order for an equestrian statue of Washington. Not that Mr. Powers is made bitter or sour by these wrongs, as he considers them; he talks of them with the frankness of his disposition when the topic comes in his way, and is pleasant, kindly, and sunny when he has done with it. His long absence from our country has made him think worse of us than we deserve; and it is an effect of what I myself am sensible, in my shorter exile: the most piercing shriek, the wildest yell, and all the ugly sounds of popular turmoil, inseparable from the life of a republic, being a million times more audible than the peaceful hum of prosperity and content which is going on all the while. He talks of going home, but says that he has been talking of it every year since he first came to Italy; and between his pleasant life of congenial labor, and his idea of moral deterioration in America, I think it doubtful whether he ever crosses the sea again. Like most exiles of twenty years, he has lost his native country without finding another; but then it is as well to recognize the truth,--that an individual country is by no means essential to one's comfort. Powers took us into the farthest room, I believe, of his very extensive studio, and showed us a statue of Washington that has much dignity and stateliness. He expressed, however, great contempt for the coat and breeches, and masonic emblems, in which he had been required to drape the figure. What would he do with Washington, the most decorous and respectable personage that ever went ceremoniously through the realities of life? Did anybody ever see Washington nude? It is inconceivable. He had no nakedness, but I imagine he was born with his clothes on, and his hair powdered, and made a stately bow on his first appearance in the world. His costume, at all events, was a part of his character, and must be dealt with by whatever sculptor undertakes to represent him. I wonder that so very sensible a man as Powers should not see the necessity of accepting drapery, and the very drapery of the day, if he will keep his art alive. It is his business to idealize the tailor's actual work. But he seems to be especially fond of nudity, none of his ideal statues, so far as I know them, having so much as a rag of clothes. His statue of California, lately finished, and as naked as Venus, seemed to me a very good work; not an actual woman, capable of exciting passion, but evidently a little out of the category of human nature. In one hand she holds a divining-rod. "She says to the emigrants," observed Powers, "'Here is the gold, if you choose to take it.'" But in her face, and in her eyes, very finely expressed, there is a look of latent mischief, rather grave than playful, yet somewhat impish or sprite-like; and, in the other hand, behind her back, she holds a bunch of thorns. Powers calls her eyes Indian. The statue is true to the present fact and history of California, and includes the age-long truth as respects the "auri sacra fames." . . . . When we had looked sufficiently at the sculpture, Powers proposed that we should now go across the street and see the Casa del Bello. We did so in a body, Powers in his dressing-gown and slippers, and his wife and daughters without assuming any street costume. The Casa del Bello is a palace of three pianos, the topmost of which is occupied by the Countess of St. George, an English lady, and two lower pianos are to be let, and we looked at both. The upper one would have suited me well enough; but the lower has a terrace, with a rustic summer-house over it, and is connected with a garden, where there are arbors and a willow-tree, and a little wilderness of shrubbery and roses, with a fountain in the midst. It has likewise an immense suite of rooms, round the four sides of a small court, spacious, lofty, with frescoed ceilings and rich hangings, and abundantly furnished with arm-chairs, sofas, marble tables, and great looking-glasses. Not that these last are a great temptation, but in our wandering life I wished to be perfectly comfortable myself, and to make my family so, for just this summer, and so I have taken the lower piano, the price being only fifty dollars per month (entirely furnished, even to silver and linen). Certainly this is something like the paradise of cheapness we were told of, and which we vainly sought in Rome. . . . . To me has been assigned the pleasantest room for my study; and when I like I can overflow into the summer-house or an arbor, and sit there dreaming of a story. The weather is delightful, too warm to walk, but perfectly fit to do nothing in, in the coolness of these great rooms. Every day I shall write a little, perhaps,--and probably take a brief nap somewhere between breakfast and tea,--but go to see pictures and statues occasionally, and so assuage and mollify myself a little after that uncongenial life of the consulate, and before going back to my own hard and dusty New England. After concluding the arrangement for the Casa del Bello, we stood talking a little while with Powers and his wife and daughter before the door of the house, for they seem so far to have adopted the habits of the Florentines as to feel themselves at home on the shady side of the street. The out-of-door life and free communication with the pavement, habitual apparently among the middle classes, reminds me of the plays of Moliere and other old dramatists, in which the street or the square becomes a sort of common parlor, where most of the talk and scenic business of the people is carried on. June 5th.--For two or three mornings after breakfast I have rambled a little about the city till the shade grew narrow beneath the walls of the houses, and the heat made it uncomfortable to be in motion. To-day I went over the Ponte Carraja, and thence into and through the heart of the city, looking into several churches, in all of which I found people taking advantage of the cool breadth of these sacred interiors to refresh themselves and say their prayers. Florence at first struck me as having the aspect of a very new city in comparison with Rome; but, on closer acquaintance, I find that many of the buildings are antique and massive, though still the clear atmosphere, the bright sunshine, the light, cheerful hues of the stucco, and--as much as anything else, perhaps--the vivacious character of the human life in the streets, take away the sense of its being an ancient city. The streets are delightful to walk in after so many penitential pilgrimages as I have made over those little square, uneven blocks of the Roman pavement, which wear out the boots and torment the soul. I absolutely walk on the smooth flags of Florence for the mere pleasure of walking, and live in its atmosphere for the mere pleasure of living; and, warm as the weather is getting to be, I never feel that inclination to sink down in a heap and never stir again, which was my dull torment and misery as long as I stayed in Rome. I hardly think there can be a place in the world where life is more delicious for its own simple sake than here. I went to-day into the Baptistery, which stands near the Duomo, and, like that, is covered externally with slabs of black and white marble, now grown brown and yellow with age. The edifice is octagonal, and on entering, one immediately thinks of the Pantheon,--the whole space within being free from side to side, with a dome above; but it differs from the severe simplicity of the former edifice, being elaborately ornamented with marble and frescos, and lacking that great eye in the roof that looks so nobly and reverently heavenward from the Pantheon. I did little more than pass through the Baptistery, glancing at the famous bronze doors, some perfect and admirable casts of which I had already seen at the Crystal Palace. The entrance of the Duomo being just across the piazza, I went in there after leaving the Baptistery, and was struck anew--for this is the third or fourth visit--with the dim grandeur of the interior, lighted as it is almost exclusively by painted windows, which seem to me worth all the variegated marbles and rich cabinet-work of St. Peter's. The Florentine Cathedral has a spacious and lofty nave, and side aisles divided from it by pillars; but there are no chapels along the aisles, so that there is far more breadth and freedom of interior, in proportion to the actual space, than is usual in churches. It is woful to think how the vast capaciousness within St. Peter's is thrown away, and made to seem smaller than it is by every possible device, as if on purpose. The pillars and walls of this Duomo are of a uniform brownish, neutral tint; the pavement, a mosaic work of marble; the ceiling of the dome itself is covered with frescos, which, being very imperfectly lighted, it is impossible to trace out. Indeed, it is but a twilight region that is enclosed within the firmament of this great dome, which is actually larger than that of St. Peter's, though not lifted so high from the pavement. But looking at the painted windows, I little cared what dimness there might be elsewhere; for certainly the art of man has never contrived any other beauty and glory at all to be compared to this. The dome sits, as it were, upon three smaller domes,--smaller, but still great,--beneath which are three vast niches, forming the transepts of the cathedral and the tribune behind the high altar. All round these hollow, dome-covered arches or niches are high and narrow windows crowded with saints, angels, and all manner of blessed shapes, that turn the common daylight into a miracle of richness and splendor as it passes through their heavenly substance. And just beneath the swell of the great central dome is a wreath of circular windows quite round it, as brilliant as the tall and narrow ones below. It is a pity anybody should die without seeing an antique painted window, with the bright Italian sunshine glowing through it. This is "the dim, religious light" that Milton speaks of; but I doubt whether he saw these windows when he was in Italy, or any but those faded or dusty and dingy ones of the English cathedrals, else he would have illuminated that word "dim" with some epithet that should not chase away the dimness, yet should make it shine like a million of rubies, sapphires, emeralds, and topazes,--bright in themselves, but dim with tenderness and reverence because God himself was shining through them. I hate what I have said. All the time that I was in the cathedral the space around the high altar, which stands exactly under the dome, was occupied by priests or acolytes in white garments, chanting a religious service. After coming out, I took a view of the edifice from a corner of the street nearest to the dome, where it and the smaller domes can be seen at once. It is greatly more satisfactory than St. Peter's in any view I ever had of it,--striking in its outline, with a mystery, yet not a bewilderment, in its masses and curves and angles, and wrought out with a richness of detail that gives the eyes new arches, new galleries, new niches, new pinnacles, new beauties, great and small, to play with when wearied with the vast whole. The hue, black and white marbles, like the Baptistery, turned also yellow and brown, is greatly preferable to the buff travertine of St. Peter's. From the Duomo it is but a moderate street's length to the Piazza del Gran Duca, the principal square of Florence. It is a very interesting place, and has on one side the old Governmental Palace,--the Palazzo Vecchio,--where many scenes of historic interest have been enacted; for example, conspirators have been hanged from its windows, or precipitated from them upon the pavement of the square below. It is a pity that we cannot take as much interest in the history of these Italian Republics as in that of England, for the former is much the more picturesque and fuller of curious incident. The sobriety of the Anglo-Saxon race--in connection, too, with their moral sense--keeps them from doing a great many things that would enliven the page of history; and their events seem to come in great masses, shoved along by the agency of many persons, rather than to result from individual will and character. A hundred plots for a tragedy might be found in Florentine history for one in English. At one corner of the Palazzo Vecchio is a bronze equestrian statue of Cosmo de' Medici, the first Grand Duke, very stately and majestic; there are other marble statues--one of David, by Michael Angelo--at each side of the palace door; and entering the court I found a rich antique arcade within, surrounded by marble pillars, most elaborately carved, supporting arches that were covered with faded frescos. I went no farther, but stepped across a little space of the square to the Loggia di Lanzi, which is broad and noble, of three vast arches, at the end of which, I take it, is a part of the Palazzo Uffizi fronting on the piazza. I should call it a portico if it stood before the palace door; but it seems to have been constructed merely for itself, and as a shelter for the people from sun and rain, and to contain some fine specimens of sculpture, as well antique as of more modern times. Benvenuto Cellini's Perseus stands here; but it did not strike me so much as the cast of it in the Crystal Palace. A good many people were under these great arches; some of whom were reclining, half or quite asleep, on the marble seats that are built against the back of the loggia. A group was reading an edict of the Grand Duke, which appeared to have been just posted on a board, at the farther end of it; and I was surprised at the interest which they ventured to manifest, and the freedom with which they seemed to discuss it. A soldier was on guard, and doubtless there were spies enough to carry every word that was said to the ear of absolute authority. Glancing myself at the edict, however, I found it referred only to the furtherance of a project, got up among the citizens themselves, for bringing water into the city; and on such topics, I suppose there is freedom of discussion. June 7th.--Saturday evening we walked with U---- and J----- into the city, and looked at the exterior of the Duomo with new admiration. Since my former view of it, I have noticed--which, strangely enough, did not strike me before--that the facade is but a great, bare, ugly space, roughly plastered over, with the brickwork peeping through it in spots, and a faint, almost invisible fresco of colors upon it. This front was once nearly finished with an incrustation of black and white marble, like the rest of the edifice; but one of the city magistrates, Benedetto Uguccione, demolished it, three hundred years ago, with the idea of building it again in better style. He failed to do so, and, ever since, the magnificence of the great church has been marred by this unsightly roughness of what should have been its richest part; nor is there, I suppose, any hope that it will ever be finished now. The campanile, or bell-tower, stands within a few paces of the cathedral, but entirely disconnected from it, rising to a height of nearly three hundred feet, a square tower of light marbles, now discolored by time. It is impossible to give an idea of the richness of effect produced by its elaborate finish; the whole surface of the four sides, from top to bottom, being decorated with all manner of statuesque and architectural sculpture. It is like a toy of ivory, which some ingenious and pious monk might have spent his lifetime in adorning with scriptural designs and figures of saints; and when it was finished, seeing it so beautiful, he prayed that it might be miraculously magnified from the size of one foot to that of three hundred. This idea somewhat satisfies me, as conveying an impression how gigantesque the campanile is in its mass and height, and how minute and varied in its detail. Surely these mediaeval works have an advantage over the classic. They combine the telescope and the microscope. The city was all alive in the summer evening, and the streets humming with voices. Before the doors of the cafes were tables, at which people were taking refreshment, and it went to my heart to see a bottle of English ale, some of which was poured foaming into a glass; at least, it had exactly the amber hue and the foam of English bitter ale; but perhaps it may have been merely a Florentine imitation. As we returned home over the Arno, crossing the Ponte di Santa Trinita, we were struck by the beautiful scene of the broad, calm river, with the palaces along its shores repeated in it, on either side, and the neighboring bridges, too, just as perfect in the tide beneath as in the air above,--a city of dream and shadow so close to the actual one. God has a meaning, no doubt, in putting this spiritual symbol continually beside us. Along the river, on both sides, as far as we could see, there was a row of brilliant lamps, which, in the far distance, looked like a cornice of golden light; and this also shone as brightly in the river's depths. The lilies of the evening, in the quarter where the sun had gone down, were very soft and beautiful, though not so gorgeous as thousands that I have seen in America. But I believe I must fairly confess that the Italian sky, in the daytime, is bluer and brighter than our own, and that the atmosphere has a quality of showing objects to better advantage. It is more than mere daylight; the magic of moonlight is somehow mixed up with it, although it is so transparent a medium of light. Last evening, Mr. Powers called to see us, and sat down to talk in a friendly and familiar way. I do not know a man of more facile intercourse, nor with whom one so easily gets rid of ceremony. His conversation, too, is interesting. He talked, to begin with, about Italian food, as poultry, mutton, beef, and their lack of savoriness as compared with our own; and mentioned an exquisite dish of vegetables which they prepare from squash or pumpkin blossoms; likewise another dish, which it will be well for us to remember when we get back to the Wayside, where we are overrun with acacias. It consists of the acacia-blossoms in a certain stage of their development fried in olive-oil. I shall get the receipt from Mrs. Powers, and mean to deserve well of my country by first trying it, and then making it known; only I doubt whether American lard, or even butter, will produce the dish quite so delicately as fresh Florence oil. Meanwhile, I like Powers all the better, because he does not put his life wholly into marble. We had much talk, nevertheless, on matters of sculpture, for he drank a cup of tea with us, and stayed a good while. He passed a condemnatory sentence on classic busts in general, saying that they were conventional, and not to be depended upon as trite representations of the persons. He particularly excepted none but the bust of Caracalla; and, indeed, everybody that has seen this bust must feel the justice of the exception, and so be the more inclined to accept his opinion about the rest. There are not more than half a dozen--that of Cato the Censor among the others--in regard to which I should like to ask his judgment individually. He seems to think the faculty of making a bust an extremely rare one. Canova put his own likeness into all the busts he made. Greenough could not make a good one; nor Crawford, nor Gibson. Mr. Harte, he observed,--an American sculptor, now a resident in Florence,--is the best man of the day for making busts. Of course, it is to be presumed that he excepts himself; but I would not do Powers the great injustice to imply that there is the slightest professional jealousy in his estimate of what others have done, or are now doing, in his own art. If he saw a better man than himself, he would recognize him at once, and tell the world of him; but he knows well enough that, in this line, there is no better, and probably none so good. It would not accord with the simplicity of his character to blink a fact that stands so broadly before him. We asked him what he thought, of Mr. Gibson's practice of coloring his statues, and he quietly and slyly said that he himself had made wax figures in his earlier days, but had left off making them now. In short, he objected to the practice wholly, and said that a letter of his on the subject had been published in the London "Athenaeum," and had given great offence to some of Mr. Gibson's friends. It appeared to me, however, that his arguments did not apply quite fairly to the case, for he seems to think Gibson aims at producing an illusion of life in the statue, whereas I think his object is merely to give warmth and softness to the snowy marble, and so bring it a little nearer to our hearts and sympathies. Even so far, nevertheless, I doubt whether the practice is defensible, and I was glad to see that Powers scorned, at all events, the argument drawn from the use of color by the antique sculptors, on which Gibson relies so much. It might almost be implied, from the contemptuous way in which Powers spoke of color, that he considers it an impertinence on the face of visible nature, and would rather the world had been made without it; for he said that everything in intellect or feeling can be expressed as perfectly, or more so, by the sculptor in colorless marble, as by the painter with all the resources of his palette. I asked him whether he could model the face of Beatrice Cenci from Guido's picture so as to retain the subtle expression, and he said he could, for that the expression depended entirely on the drawing, "the picture being a badly colored thing." I inquired whether he could model a blush, and he said "Yes"; and that he had once proposed to an artist to express a blush in marble, if he would express it in picture. On consideration, I believe one to be as impossible as the other; the life and reality of the blush being in its tremulousness, coming and going. It is lost in a settled red just as much as in a settled paleness, and neither the sculptor nor painter can do more than represent the circumstances of attitude and expression that accompany the blush. There was a great deal of truth in what Powers said about this matter of color, and in one of our interminable New England winters it ought to comfort us to think how little necessity there is for any hue but that of the snow. Mr. Powers, nevertheless, had brought us a bunch of beautiful roses, and seemed as capable of appreciating their delicate blush as we were. The best thing he said against the use of color in marble was to the effect that the whiteness removed the object represented into a sort of spiritual region, and so gave chaste permission to those nudities which would otherwise suggest immodesty. I have myself felt the truth of this in a certain sense of shame as I looked at Gibson's tinted Venus. He took his leave at about eight o'clock, being to make a call on the Bryants, who are at the Hotel de New York, and also on Mrs. Browning, at Casa Guidi. END OF VOL. I. PASSAGES FROM THE FRENCH AND ITALIAN NOTE-BOOKS OF NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE VOL. II. PASSAGES FROM HAWTHORNE'S NOTE-BOOKS IN FRANCE AND ITALY. FLORENCE (Continued). June 8th.--I went this morning to the Uffizi gallery. The entrance is from the great court of the palace, which communicates with Lung' Arno at one end, and with the Grand Ducal Piazza at the other. The gallery is in the upper story of the palace, and in the vestibule are some busts of the princes and cardinals of the Medici family,--none of them beautiful, one or two so ugly as to be ludicrous, especially one who is all but buried in his own wig. I at first travelled slowly through the whole extent of this long, long gallery, which occupies the entire length of the palace on both sides of the court, and is full of sculpture and pictures. The latter, being opposite to the light, are not seen to the best advantage; but it is the most perfect collection, in a chronological series, that I have seen, comprehending specimens of all the masters since painting began to be an art. Here are Giotto, and Cimabue, and Botticelli, and Fra Angelico, and Filippo Lippi, and a hundred others, who have haunted me in churches and galleries ever since I have been in Italy, and who ought to interest me a great deal more than they do. Occasionally to-day I was sensible of a certain degree of emotion in looking at an old picture; as, for example, by a large, dark, ugly picture of Christ hearing the cross and sinking beneath it, when, somehow or other, a sense of his agony, and the fearful wrong that mankind did (and does) its Redeemer, and the scorn of his enemies, and the sorrow of those who loved him, came knocking at any heart and got entrance there. Once more I deem it a pity that Protestantism should have entirely laid aside this mode of appealing to the religious sentiment. I chiefly paid attention to the sculpture, and was interested in a long series of busts of the emperors and the members of their families, and some of the great men of Rome. There is a bust of Pompey the Great, bearing not the slightest resemblance to that vulgar and unintellectual one in the gallery of the Capitol, altogether a different cast of countenance. I could not judge whether it resembled the face of the statue, having seen the latter so imperfectly in the duskiness of the hall of the Spada Palace. These, I presume, are the busts which Mr. Powers condemns, from internal evidence, as unreliable and conventional. He may be right,--and is far more likely, of course, to be right than I am,--yet there certainly seems to be character in these marble faces, and they differ as much among themselves as the same number of living faces might. The bust of Caracalla, however, which Powers excepted from his censure, certainly does give stronger assurance of its being an individual and faithful portrait than any other in the series. All the busts of Caracalla--of which I have seen many--give the same evidence of their truth; and I should like to know what it was in this abominable emperor that made him insist upon having his actual likeness perpetuated, with all the ugliness of its animal and moral character. I rather respect him for it, and still more the sculptor, whose hand, methinks, must have trembled as he wrought the bust. Generally these wicked old fellows, and their wicked wives and daughters, are not so hideous as we might expect. Messalina, for instance, has small and pretty features, though with rather a sensual development of the lower part of the face. The busts, it seemed to me, are usually superior as works of art to those in the Capitol, and either better preserved or more thoroughly restored. The bust of Nero might almost be called handsome here, though bearing his likeness unmistakably. I wish some competent person would undertake to analyze and develop his character, and how and by what necessity--with all his elegant tastes, his love of the beautiful, his artist nature--he grew to be such a monster. Nero has never yet had justice done him, nor have any of the wicked emperors; not that I suppose them to have been any less monstrous than history represents them; but there must surely have been something in their position and circumstances to render the terrible moral disease which seized upon them so generally almost inevitable. A wise and profound man, tender and reverent of the human soul, and capable of appreciating it in its height and depth, has a great field here for the exercise of his powers. It has struck me, in reading the history of the Italian republics, that many of the tyrants, who sprung up after the destruction of their liberties, resembled the worst of the Roman emperors. The subject of Nero and his brethren has often perplexed me with vain desires to come at the truth. There were many beautiful specimens of antique, ideal sculpture all along the gallery,--Apollos, Bacchuses, Venuses, Mercurys, Fauns,--with the general character of all of which I was familiar enough to recognize them at a glance. The mystery and wonder of the gallery, however, the Venus de' Medici, I could nowhere see, and indeed was almost afraid to see it; for I somewhat apprehended the extinction of another of those lights that shine along a man's pathway, and go out in a snuff the instant he comes within eyeshot of the fulfilment of his hopes. My European experience has extinguished many such. I was pretty well contented, therefore, not to find the famous statue in the whole of my long journey from end to end of the gallery, which terminates on the opposite side of the court from that where it commences. The ceiling, by the by, through the entire length, is covered with frescos, and the floor paved with a composition of stone smooth and polished like marble. The final piece of sculpture, at the end of the gallery, is a copy of the Laocoon, considered very fine. I know not why, but it did not impress me with the sense of mighty and terrible repose--a repose growing out of the infinitude of trouble-- that I had felt in the original. Parallel with the gallery, on both sides of the palace-court, there runs a series of rooms devoted chiefly to pictures, although statues and bas-reliefs are likewise contained in some of them. I remember an unfinished bas-relief by Michael Angelo of a Holy Family, which I touched with my finger, because it seemed as if he might have been at work upon it only an hour ago. The pictures I did little more than glance at, till I had almost completed again the circuit of the gallery, through this series of parallel rooms, and then I came upon a collection of French and Dutch and Flemish masters, all of which interested me more than the Italian generally. There was a beautiful picture by Claude, almost as good as those in the British National Gallery, and very like in subject; the sun near the horizon, of course, and throwing its line of light over the ripple of water, with ships at the strand, and one or two palaces of stately architecture on the shore. Landscapes by Rembrandt; fat Graces and other plump nudities by Rubens; brass pans and earthen pots and herrings by Terriers and other Dutchmen; none by Gerard Douw, I think, but several by Mieris; all of which were like bread and beef and ale, after having been fed too long on made dishes. This is really a wonderful collection of pictures; and from first, to last--from Giotto to the men of yesterday--they are in admirable condition, and may be appreciated for all the merit that they ever possessed. I could not quite believe that I was not to find the Venus de' Medici; and still, as I passed from one room to another, my breath rose and fell a little, with the half-hope, half-fear, that she might stand before me. Really, I did not know that I cared so much about Venus, or any possible woman of marble. At last, when I had come from among the Dutchmen, I believe, and was looking at some works of Italian artists, chiefly Florentines, I caught a glimpse of her through the door of the next room. It is the best room of the series, octagonal in shape, and hung with red damask, and the light comes down from a row of windows, passing quite round, beneath an octagonal dome. The Venus stands somewhat aside from the centre of the room, and is surrounded by an iron railing, a pace or two from her pedestal in front, and less behind. I think she might safely be left to the reverence her womanhood would win, without any other protection. She is very beautiful, very satisfactory; and has a fresh and new charm about her unreached by any cast or copy. The line of the marble is just so much mellowed by time, as to do for her all that Gibson tries, or ought to try to do for his statues by color, softening her, warming her almost imperceptibly, making her an inmate of the heart, as well as a spiritual existence. I felt a kind of tenderness for her; an affection, not as if she were one woman, but all womanhood in one. Her modest attitude, which, before I saw her I had not liked, deeming that it might be an artificial shame, is partly what unmakes her as the heathen goddess, and softens her into woman. There is a slight degree of alarm, too, in her face; not that she really thinks anybody is looking at her, yet the idea has flitted through her mind, and startled her a little. Her face is so beautiful and intellectual, that it is not dazzled out of sight by her form. Methinks this was a triumph for the sculptor to achieve. I may as well stop here. It is of no use to throw heaps of words upon her; for they all fall away, and leave her standing in chaste and naked grace, as untouched as when I began. She has suffered terribly by the mishaps of her long existence in the marble. Each of her legs has been broken into two or three fragments, her arms have been severed, her body has been broken quite across at the waist, her head has been snapped off at the neck. Furthermore, there have been grievous wounds and losses of substance in various tender parts of her person. But on account of the skill with which the statue has been restored, and also because the idea is perfect and indestructible, all these injuries do not in the least impair the effect, even when you see where the dissevered fragments have been reunited. She is just as whole as when she left the hands of the sculptor. I am glad to have seen this Venus, and to have found her so tender and so chaste. On the wall of the room, and to be taken in at the same glance, is a painted Venus by Titian, reclining on a couch, naked and lustful. The room of the Venus seems to be the treasure-place of the whole Uffizi Palace, containing more pictures by famous masters than are to be found in all the rest of the gallery. There were several by Raphael, and the room was crowded with the easels of artists. I did not look half enough at anything, but merely took a preliminary taste, as a prophecy of enjoyment to come. As we were at dinner to-day, at half past three, there was a ring at the door, and a minute after our servant brought a card. It was Mr. Robert Browning's, and on it was written in pencil an invitation for us to go to see them this evening. He had left the card and gone away; but very soon the bell rang again, and he had come back, having forgotten to give his address. This time he came in; and he shook hands with all of us, children and grown people, and was very vivacious and agreeable. He looked younger and even handsomer than when I saw him in London, two years ago, and his gray hairs seemed fewer than those that had then strayed into his youthful head. He talked a wonderful quantity in a little time, and told us--among other things that we should never have dreamed of--that Italian people will not cheat you, if you construe them generously, and put them upon their honor. Mr. Browning was very kind and warm in his expressions of pleasure at seeing us; and, on our part, we were all very glad to meet him. He must be an exceedingly likable man. . . . . They are to leave Florence very soon, and are going to Normandy, I think he said, for the rest of the summer. The Venus de' Medici has a dimple in her chin. June 9th.--We went last evening, at eight o'clock, to see the Brownings; and, after some search and inquiry, we found the Casa Guidi, which is a palace in a street not very far from our own. It being dusk, I could not see the exterior, which, if I remember, Browning has celebrated in song; at all events, Mrs. Browning has called one of her poems "Casa Guidi Windows." The street is a narrow one; but on entering the palace, we found a spacious staircase and ample accommodations of vestibule and hall, the latter opening on a balcony, where we could hear the chanting of priests in a church close by. Browning told us that this was the first church where an oratorio had ever been performed. He came into the anteroom to greet us, as did his little boy, Robert, whom they call Pennini for fondness. The latter cognomen is a diminutive of Apennino, which was bestowed upon him at his first advent into the world because he was so very small, there being a statue in Florence of colossal size called Apennino. I never saw such a boy as this before; so slender, fragile, and spirit-like,--not as if he were actually in ill health, but as if he had little or nothing to do with human flesh and blood. His face is very pretty and most intelligent, and exceedingly like his mother's. He is nine years old, and seems at once less childlike and less manly than would befit that age. I should not quite like to be the father of such a boy, and should fear to stake so much interest and affection on him as he cannot fail to inspire. I wonder what is to become of him,--whether he will ever grow to be a man,--whether it is desirable that he should. His parents ought to turn their whole attention to making him robust and earthly, and to giving him a thicker scabbard to sheathe his spirit in. He was born in Florence, and prides himself on being a Florentine, and is indeed as un-English a production as if he were native of another planet. Mrs. Browning met us at the door of the drawing-room, and greeted us most kindly,--a pale, small person, scarcely embodied at all; at any rate, only substantial enough to put forth her slender fingers to be grasped, and to speak with a shrill, yet sweet, tenuity of voice. Really, I do not see how Mr. Browning can suppose that he has an earthly wife any more than an earthly child; both are of the elfin race, and will flit away from him some day when he least thinks of it. She is a good and kind fairy, however, and sweetly disposed towards the human race, although only remotely akin to it. It is wonderful to see how small she is, how pale her cheek, how bright and dark her eyes. There is not such another figure in the world; and her black ringlets cluster down into her neck, and make her face look the whiter by their sable profusion. I could not form any judgment about her age; it may range anywhere within the limits of human life or elfin life. When I met her in London at Lord Houghton's breakfast-table, she did not impress me so singularly; for the morning light is more prosaic than the dim illumination of their great tapestried drawing-room; and besides, sitting next to her, she did not have occasion to raise her voice in speaking, and I was not sensible what a slender voice she has. It is marvellous to me how so extraordinary, so acute, so sensitive a creature can impress us, as she does, with the certainty of her benevolence. It seems to me there were a million chances to one that she would have been a miracle of acidity and bitterness. We were not the only guests. Mr. and Mrs. E------, Americans, recently from the East, and on intimate terms with the Brownings, arrived after us; also Miss F. H------, an English literary lady, whom I have met several times in Liverpool; and lastly came the white head and palmer-like beard of Mr. ------ with his daughter. Mr. Browning was very efficient in keeping up conversation with everybody, and seemed to be in all parts of the room and in every group at the same moment; a most vivid and quick-thoughted person, logical and common-sensible, as, I presume, poets generally are in their daily talk. Mr. ------, as usual, was homely and plain of manner, with an old-fashioned dignity, nevertheless, and a remarkable deference and gentleness of tone in addressing Mrs. Browning. I doubt, however, whether he has any high appreciation either of her poetry or her husband's, and it is my impression that they care as little about his. We had some tea and some strawberries, and passed a pleasant evening. There was no very noteworthy conversation; the most interesting topic being that disagreeable and now wearisome one of spiritual communications, as regards which Mrs. Browning is a believer, and her husband an infidel. Mr. ------ appeared not to have made up his mind on the matter, but told a story of a successful communication between Cooper the novelist and his sister, who had been dead fifty years. Browning and his wife had both been present at a spiritual session held by Mr. Hume, and had seen and felt the unearthly hands, one of which had placed a laurel wreath on Mrs. Browning's head. Browning, however, avowed his belief that these hands were affixed to the feet of Mr. Hume, who lay extended in his chair, with his legs stretched far under the table. The marvellousness of the fact, as I have read of it, and heard it from other eye-witnesses, melted strangely away in his hearty gripe, and at the sharp touch of his logic; while his wife, ever and anon, put in a little gentle word of expostulation. I am rather surprised that Browning's conversation should be so clear, and so much to the purpose at the moment, since his poetry can seldom proceed far without running into the high grass of latent meanings and obscure allusions. Mrs. Browning's health does not permit late hours, so we began to take heave at about ten o'clock. I heard her ask Mr. ------ if he did not mean to revisit Europe, and heard him answer, not uncheerfully, taking hold of his white hair, "It is getting rather too late in the evening now." If any old age can be cheerful, I should think his might be; so good a man, so cool, so calm, so bright, too, we may say. His life has been like the days that end in pleasant sunsets. He has a great loss, however, or what ought to be a great loss,--soon to be encountered in the death of his wife, who, I think, can hardly live to reach America. He is not eminently an affectionate man. I take him to be one who cannot get closely home to his sorrow, nor feel it so sensibly as he gladly would; and, in consequence of that deficiency, the world lacks substance to him. It is partly the result, perhaps, of his not having sufficiently cultivated his emotional nature. His poetry shows it, and his personal intercourse, though kindly, does not stir one's blood in the least. Little Pennini, during the evening, sometimes helped the guests to cake and strawberries; joined in the conversation, when he had anything to say, or sat down upon a couch to enjoy his own meditations. He has long curling hair, and has not yet emerged from his frock and short hose. It is funny to think of putting him into trousers. His likeness to his mother is strange to behold. June 10th.--My wife and I went to the Pitti Palace to-day; and first entered a court where, yesterday, she had seen a carpet of flowers, arranged for some great ceremony. It must have been a most beautiful sight, the pavement of the court being entirely covered by them, in a regular pattern of brilliant lines, so as really to be a living mosaic. This morning, however, the court had nothing but its usual stones, and the show of yesterday seemed so much the more inestimable as having been so evanescent. Around the walls of the court there were still some pieces of splendid tapestry which had made part of yesterday's magnificence. We went up the staircase, of regally broad and easy ascent, and made application to be admitted to see the grand-ducal apartments. An attendant accordingly took the keys, and ushered us first into a great hall with a vaulted ceiling, and then through a series of noble rooms, with rich frescos above and mosaic floors, hung with damask, adorned with gilded chandeliers, and glowing, in short, with more gorgeousness than I could have imagined beforehand, or can now remember. In many of the rooms were those superb antique cabinets which I admire more than any other furniture ever invented; only these were of unexampled art and glory, inlaid with precious stones, and with beautiful Florentine mosaics, both of flowers and landscapes,--each cabinet worth a lifetime's toil to make it, and the cost a whole palace to pay for it. Many of the rooms were covered with arras, of landscapes, hunting-scenes, mythological subjects, or historical scenes, equal to pictures in truth of representation, and possessing an indescribable richness that makes them preferable as a mere adornment of princely halls and chambers. Some of the rooms, as I have said, were laid in mosaic of stone and marble, otherwise in lovely patterns of various woods; others were covered with carpets, delightful to tread upon, and glowing like the living floor of flowers which my wife saw yesterday. There were tables, too, of Florentine mosaic, the mere materials of which--lapis lazuli, malachite, pearl, and a hundred other precious things--were worth a fortune, and made a thousand times more valuable by the artistic skill of the manufacturer. I toss together brilliant words by the handful, and make a rude sort of patchwork, but can record no adequate idea of what I saw in this suite of rooms; and the taste, the subdued splendor, so that it did not shine too high, but was all tempered into an effect at once grand and soft,--this was quite as remarkable as the gorgeous material. I have seen a very dazzling effect produced in the principal cabin of an American clipper-ship quite opposed to this in taste. After making the circuit of the grand-ducal apartments, we went into a door in the left wing of the palace, and ascended a narrow flight of stairs,--several tortuous flights indeed,--to the picture-gallery. It fills a great many stately halls, which themselves are well worth a visit for the architecture and frescos; only these matters become commonplace after travelling through a mile or two of them. The collection of pictures--as well for their number as for the celebrity and excellence of many of them--is the most interesting that I have seen, and I do not yet feel in a condition, nor perhaps ever shall, to speak of a single one. It gladdened my very heart to find that they were not darkened out of sight, nor apparently at all injured by time, but were well kept and varnished, brilliantly framed, and, no doubt, restored by skilful touches if any of them needed it. The artists and amateurs may say what they like; for my part, I know no drearier feeling than that inspired by a ruined picture,--ruined, that is, by time, damp, or rough treatment,--and I would a thousand times rather an artist should do his best towards reviving it, than have it left in such a condition. I do not believe, however, that these pictures have been sacrilegiously interfered with; at all events, I saw in the masterpieces no touch but what seemed worthy of the master-hand. The most beautiful picture in the world, I am convinced, is Raphael's "Madonna della Seggiola." I was familiar with it in a hundred engravings and copies, and therefore it shone upon one as with a familiar beauty, though infinitely more divine than I had ever seen it before. An artist was copying it, and producing certainly something very like a fac-simile, yet leaving out, as a matter of course, that mysterious something that renders the picture a miracle. It is my present opinion that the pictorial art is capable of something more like magic, more wonderful and inscrutable in its methods, than poetry or any other mode of developing the beautiful. But how does this accord with what I have been saying only a minute ago? How then can the decayed picture of a great master ever be restored by the touches of an inferior hand? Doubtless it never can be restored; but let some devoted worshipper do his utmost, and the whole inherent spirit of the divine picture may pervade his restorations likewise. I saw the "Three Fates" of Michael Angelo, which were also being copied, as were many other of the best pictures. Miss Fanny Howorth, whom I met in the gallery, told me that to copy the "Madonna della Seggiola," application must be made five years beforehand, so many are the artists who aspire to copy it. Michael Angelo's Fates are three very grim and pitiless old women, who respectively spin, hold, and cut the thread of human destiny, all in a mood of sombre gloom, but with no more sympathy than if they had nothing to do with us. I remember seeing an etching of this when I was a child, and being struck, even then, with the terrible, stern, passionless severity, neither loving us nor hating us, that characterizes these ugly old women. If they were angry, or had the least spite against human kind, it would render them the more tolerable. They are a great work, containing and representing the very idea that makes a belief in fate such a cold torture to the human soul. God give me the sure belief in his Providence! In a year's time, with the advantage of access to this magnificent gallery, I think I might come to have some little knowledge of pictures. At present I still know nothing; but am glad to find myself capable, at least, of loving one picture better than another. I cannot always "keep the heights I gain," however, and after admiring and being moved by a picture one day, it is within my experience to look at it the next as little moved as if it were a tavern-sign. It is pretty much the same with statuary; the same, too, with those pictured windows of the Duomo, which I described so rapturously a few days ago. I looked at them again the next morning, and thought they would have been hardly worthy of my eulogium, even had all the separate windows of the cathedral combined their narrow lights into one grand, resplendent, many-colored arch at the eastern end. It is a pity they are so narrow. England has many a great chancel-window that, though dimmer in its hues, dusty, and perhaps made up of heterogeneous fragments, eclipses these by its spacious breadth. From the gallery, I went into the Boboli Gardens, which are contiguous to the palace; but found them too sunny for enjoyment. They seem to consist partly of a wilderness; but the portion into which I strayed was laid out with straight walks, lined with high box-hedges, along which there was only a narrow margin of shade. I saw an amphitheatre, with a wide sweep of marble seat around it, enclosing a grassy space, where, doubtless, the Medici may have witnessed splendid spectacles. June 11th.--I paid another visit to the Uffizi gallery this morning, and found that the Venus is one of the things the charm of which does not diminish on better acquaintance. The world has not grown weary of her in all these ages; and mortal man may look on her with new delight from infancy to old age, and keep the memory of her, I should imagine, as one of the treasures of spiritual existence hereafter. Surely, it makes me more ready to believe in the high destinies of the human race, to think that this beautiful form is but nature's plan for all womankind, and that the nearer the actual woman approaches it, the more natural she is. I do not, and cannot think of her as a senseless image, but as a being that lives to gladden the world, incapable of decay and death; as young and fair to-day as she was three thousand years ago, and still to be young and fair as long as a beautiful thought shall require physical embodiment. I wonder how any sculptor has had the impertinence to aim at any other presentation of female beauty. I mean no disrespect to Gibson or Powers, or a hundred other men who people the world with nudities, all of which are abortions as compared with her; but I think the world would be all the richer if their Venuses, their Greek Slaves, their Eves, were burnt into quicklime, leaving us only this statue as our image of the beautiful. I observed to-day that the eyes of the statue are slightly hollowed out, in a peculiar way, so as to give them a look of depth and intelligence. She is a miracle. The sculptor must have wrought religiously, and have felt that something far beyond his own skill was working through his hands. I mean to leave off speaking of the Venus hereafter, in utter despair of saying what I wish; especially as the contemplation of the statue will refine and elevate my taste, and make it continually more difficult to express my sense of its excellence, as the perception of it grows upon one. If at any time I become less sensible of it, it will be my deterioration, not any defect in the statue. I looked at many of the pictures, and found myself in a favorable mood for enjoying them. It seems to me that a work of art is entitled to credit for all that it makes us feel in our best moments; and we must judge of its merits by the impression it then makes, and not by the coldness and insensibility of our less genial moods. After leaving the Uffizi Palace, . . . . I went into the Museum of Natural History, near the Pitti Palace. It is a very good collection of almost everything that Nature has made,--or exquisite copies of what she has made,--stones, shells, vegetables, insects, fishes, animals, man; the greatest wonders of the museum being some models in wax of all parts of the human frame. It is good to have the wholeness and summed-up beauty of woman in the memory, when looking at the details of her system as here displayed; for these last, to the natural eye, are by no means beautiful. But they are what belong only to our mortality. The beauty that makes them invisible is our immortal type, which we shall take away with us. Under glass cases, there were some singular and horribly truthful representations, in small wax figures, of a time of pestilence; the hasty burial, or tossing into one common sepulchre, of discolored corpses,--a very ugly piece of work, indeed. I think Murray says that these things were made for the Grand Duke Cosmo; and if so, they do him no credit, indicating something dark and morbid in his character. June 13th.--We called at the Powers's yesterday morning to leave R----- there for an hour or two to play with the children; and it being not yet quite time for the Pitti Palace, we stopped into the studio. Soon Mr. Powers made his appearance, in his dressing-gown and slippers and sculptor's cap, smoking a cigar. . . . . He was very cordial and pleasant, as I have always found him, and began immediately to be communicative about his own works, or any other subject that came up. There were two casts of the Venus de' Medici in the rooms, which he said were valuable in a commercial point of view, being genuine casts from the mould taken from the statue. He then gave us a quite unexpected but most interesting lecture on the Venus, demonstrating it, as he proceeded, by reference to the points which he criticised. The figure, he seemed to allow, was admirable, though I think he hardly classes it so high as his own Greek Slave or Eva; but the face, he began with saying, was that of an idiot. Then, leaning on the pedestal of the cast, he continued, "It is rather a bold thing to say, isn't it, that the sculptor of the Venus de' Medici did not know what he was about?" Truly, it appeared to me so; but Powers went on remorselessly, and showed, in the first place, that the eye was not like any eye that Nature ever made; and, indeed, being examined closely, and abstracted from the rest of the face, it has a very queer look,--less like a human eye than a half-worn buttonhole! Then he attacked the ear, which, he affirmed and demonstrated, was placed a good deal too low on the head, thereby giving an artificial and monstrous height to the portion of the head above it. The forehead met with no better treatment in his hands, and as to the mouth, it was altogether wrong, as well in its general make as in such niceties as the junction of the skin of the lips to the common skin around them. In a word, the poor face was battered all to pieces and utterly demolished; nor was it possible to doubt or question that it fell by its own demerits. All that could be urged in its defence--and even that I did not urge--being that this very face had affected me, only the day before, with a sense of higher beauty and intelligence than I had ever then received from sculpture, and that its expression seemed to accord with that of the whole figure, as if it were the sweetest note of the same music. There must be something in this; the sculptor disregarded technicalities, and the imitation of actual nature, the better to produce the effect which he really does produce, in somewhat the same way as a painter works his magical illusions by touches that have no relation to the truth if looked at from the wrong point of view. But Powers considers it certain that the antique sculptor had bestowed all his care on the study of the human figure, and really did not know how to make a face. I myself used to think that the face was a much less important thing with the Greeks, among whom the entire beauty of the form was familiarly seen, than with ourselves, who allow no other nudity. After annihilating the poor visage, Powers showed us his two busts of Proserpine and Psyche, and continued his lecture by showing the truth to nature with which these are modelled. I freely acknowledge the fact; there is no sort of comparison to be made between the beauty, intelligence, feeling, and accuracy of representation in these two faces and in that of the Venus de' Medici. A light--the light of a soul proper to each individual character--seems to shine from the interior of the marble, and beam forth from the features, chiefly from the eyes. Still insisting upon the eye, and hitting the poor Venus another and another and still another blow on that unhappy feature, Mr. Powers turned up and turned inward and turned outward his own Titanic orb,--the biggest, by far, that ever I saw in mortal head,--and made us see and confess that there was nothing right in the Venus and everything right in Psyche and Proserpine. To say the truth, their marble eyes have life, and, placing yourself in the proper position towards them, you can meet their glances, and feel them mingle with your own. Powers is a great man, and also a tender and delicate one, massive and rude of surface as he looks; and it is rather absurd to feel how he impressed his auditor, for the time being, with his own evident idea that nobody else is worthy to touch marble. Mr. B------ told me that Powers has had many difficulties on professional grounds, as I understood him, and with his brother artists. No wonder! He has said enough in my hearing to put him at swords' points with sculptors of every epoch and every degree between the two inclusive extremes of Phidias and Clark Mills. He has a bust of the reigning Grand Duchess of Tuscany, who sat to him for it. The bust is that of a noble-looking lady; and Powers remarked that royal personages have a certain look that distinguishes them from other people, and is seen in individuals of no lower rank. They all have it; the Queen of England and Prince Albert have it; and so likewise has every other Royalty, although the possession of this kingly look implies nothing whatever as respects kingly and commanding qualities. He said that none of our public men, whatever authority they may have held, or for whatever length of time, possess this look, but he added afterwards that Washington had it. Commanders of armies sometimes have it, but not in the degree that royal personages do. It is, as well as I could make out Powers's idea, a certain coldness of demeanor, and especially of eye, that surrounds them with an atmosphere through which the electricity of human brotherhood cannot pass. From their youth upward they are taught to feel themselves apart from the rest of mankind, and this manner becomes a second nature to them in consequence, and as a safeguard to their conventional dignity. They put themselves under glass, as it were (the illustration is my own), so that, though you see them, and see them looking no more noble and dignified than other mortals, nor so much so as many, still they keep themselves within a sort of sanctity, and repel you by an invisible barrier. Even if they invite you with a show of warmth and hospitality, you cannot get through. I, too, recognize this look in the portraits of Washington; in him, a mild, benevolent coldness and apartness, but indicating that formality which seems to have been deeper in him than in any other mortal, and which built up an actual fortification between himself and human sympathy. I wish, for once, Washington could come out of his envelopment and show us what his real dimensions were. Among other models of statues heretofore made, Powers showed us one of Melancholy, or rather of Contemplation, from Milton's "Penseroso"; a female figure with uplifted face and rapt look, "communing with the skies." It is very fine, and goes deeply into Milton's thought; but, as far as the outward form and action are concerned, I remember seeing a rude engraving in my childhood that probably suggested the idea. It was prefixed to a cheap American edition of Milton's poems, and was probably as familiar to Powers as to myself. It is very remarkable how difficult it seems to be to strike out a new attitude in sculpture; a new group, or a new single figure. One piece of sculpture Powers exhibited, however, which was very exquisite, and such as I never saw before. Opening a desk, he took out something carefully enclosed between two layers of cotton-wool, on removing which there appeared a little baby's hand most delicately represented in the whitest marble; all the dimples where the knuckles were to be, all the creases in the plump flesh, every infantine wrinkle of the soft skin being lovingly recorded. "The critics condemn minute representation," said Powers; "but you may look at this through a microscope and see if it injures the general effect." Nature herself never made a prettier or truer little hand. It was the hand of his daughter,--"Luly's hand," Powers called it,--the same that gave my own such a frank and friendly grasp when I first met "Luly." The sculptor made it only for himself and his wife, but so many people, he said, had insisted on having a copy, that there are now forty scattered about the world. At sixty years, Luly ought to have her hand sculptured again, and give it to her grandchildren with the baby's hand of five months old. The baby-hand that had done nothing, and felt only its mother's kiss; the old lady's hand that had exchanged the love-pressure, worn the marriage-ring, closed dead eyes,--done a lifetime's work, in short. The sentiment is rather obvious, but true nevertheless. Before we went away, Powers took us into a room apart--apparently the secretest room he had--and showed us some tools and machinery, all of his own contrivance and invention. "You see I am a bit of a Yankee," he observed. This machinery is chiefly to facilitate the process of modelling his works, for--except in portrait-busts--he makes no clay model as other sculptors do, but models directly in the plaster; so that instead of being crumbled, like clay, the original model remains a permanent possession. He has also invented a certain open file, which is of great use in finishing the surface of the marble; and likewise a machine for making these files and for punching holes through iron, and he demonstrated its efficiency by punching a hole through an iron bar, with a force equivalent to ten thousand pounds, by the mere application of a part of his own weight. These inventions, he says, are his amusement, and the bent of his nature towards sculpture must indeed have been strong, to counteract, in an American, such a capacity for the contrivance of steam-engines. . . . . I had no idea of filling so many pages of this journal with the sayings and characteristics of Mr. Powers, but the man and his talk are fresh, original, and full of bone and muscle, and I enjoy him much. We now proceeded to the Pitti Palace, and spent several hours pleasantly in its saloons of pictures. I never enjoyed pictures anywhere else as I do in Florence. There is an admirable Judith in this gallery by Allori; a face of great beauty and depth, and her hand clutches the head of Holofernes by the hair in a way that startles the spectator. There are two peasant Madonnas by Murillo; simple women, yet with a thoughtful sense of some high mystery connected with the baby in their arms. Raphael grows upon me; several other famous painters--Guido, for instance--are fading out of my mind. Salvator Rosa has two really wonderful landscapes, looking from the shore seaward; and Rubens too, likewise on a large scale, of mountain and plain. It is very idle and foolish to talk of pictures; yet, after poring over them and into them, it seems a pity to let all the thought excited by them pass into nothingness. The copyists of pictures are very numerous, both in the Pitti and Uffizi galleries; and, unlike sculptors, they appear to be on the best of terms with one another, chatting sociably, exchanging friendly criticism, and giving their opinions as to the best mode of attaining the desired effects. Perhaps, as mere copyists, they escape the jealousy that might spring up between rival painters attempting to develop original ideas. Miss Howorth says that the business of copying pictures, especially those of Raphael, is a regular profession, and she thinks it exceedingly obstructive to the progress or existence of a modern school of painting, there being a regular demand and sure sale for all copies of the old masters, at prices proportioned to their merit; whereas the effort to be original insures nothing, except long neglect, at the beginning of a career, and probably ultimate failure, and the necessity of becoming a copyist at last. Some artists employ themselves from youth to age in nothing else but the copying of one single and selfsame picture by Raphael, and grow at last to be perfectly mechanical, making, I suppose, the same identical stroke of the brush in fifty successive pictures. The weather is very hot now,--hotter in the sunshine, I think, than a midsummer day usually is in America, but with rather a greater possibility of being comfortable in the shade. The nights, too, are warm, and the bats fly forth at dusk, and the fireflies quite light up the green depths of our little garden. The atmosphere, or something else, causes a sort of alacrity in my mind and an affluence of ideas, such as they are; but it does not thereby make me the happier. I feel an impulse to be at work, but am kept idle by the sense of being unsettled with removals to be gone through, over and over again, before I can shut myself into a quiet room of my own, and turn the key. I need monotony too, an eventless exterior life, before I can live in the world within. June 15th.--Yesterday we went to the Uffizi gallery, and, of course, I took the opportunity to look again at the Venus de' Medici after Powers's attack upon her face. Some of the defects he attributed to her I could not see in the statue; for instance, the ear appeared to be in accordance with his own rule, the lowest part of it being about in a straight line with the upper lip. The eyes must be given up, as not, when closely viewed, having the shape, the curve outwards, the formation of the lids, that eyes ought to have; but still, at a proper distance, they seemed to have intelligence in them beneath the shadow cast by the brow. I cannot help thinking that the sculptor intentionally made every feature what it is, and calculated them all with a view to the desired effect. Whatever rules may be transgressed, it is a noble and beautiful face,--more so, perhaps, than if all rules had been obeyed. I wish Powers would do his best to fit the Venus's figure (which he does not deny to be admirable) with a face which he would deem equally admirable and in accordance with the sentiment of the form. We looked pretty thoroughly through the gallery, and I saw many pictures that impressed me; but among such a multitude, with only one poor mind to take note of them, the stamp of each new impression helps to obliterate a former one. I am sensible, however, that a process is going on, and has been ever since I came to Italy, that puts me in a state to see pictures with less toil, and more pleasure, and makes me more fastidious, yet more sensible of beauty where I saw none before. It is the sign, I presume, of a taste still very defective, that I take singular pleasure in the elaborate imitations of Van Mieris, Gerard Douw, and other old Dutch wizards, who painted such brass pots that you can see your face in them, and such earthen pots that they will surely hold water; and who spent weeks and months in turning a foot or two of canvas into a perfect microscopic illusion of some homely scene. For my part, I wish Raphael had painted the "Transfiguration" in this style, at the same time preserving his breadth and grandeur of design; nor do I believe that there is any real impediment to the combination of the two styles, except that no possible space of human life could suffice to cover a quarter part of the canvas of the "Transfiguration" with such touches as Gerard Douw's. But one feels the vast scope of this wonderful art, when we think of two excellences so far apart as that of this last painter and Raphael. I pause a good while, too, before the Dutch paintings of fruit and flowers, where tulips and roses acquire an immortal bloom, and grapes have kept the freshest juice in them for two or three hundred years. Often, in these pictures, there is a bird's-nest, every straw perfectly represented, and the stray feather, or the down that the mother-bird plucked from her bosom, with the three or four small speckled eggs, that seem as if they might be yet warm. These pretty miracles have their use in assuring us that painters really can do something that takes hold of us in our most matter-of-fact moods; whereas, the merits of the grander style of art may be beyond our ordinary appreciation, and leave us in doubt whether we have not befooled ourselves with a false admiration. Until we learn to appreciate the cherubs and angels that Raphael scatters through the blessed air, in a picture of the "Nativity," it is not amiss to look at, a Dutch fly settling on a peach, or a bumblebee burying himself in a flower. It is another token of imperfect taste, no doubt, that queer pictures and absurd pictures remain in my memory, when better ones pass away by the score. There is a picture of Venus, combing her son Cupid's head with a small-tooth comb, and looking with maternal care among his curls; this I shall not forget. Likewise, a picture of a broad, rubicund Judith by Bardone,--a widow of fifty, of an easy, lymphatic, cheerful temperament, who has just killed Holofernes, and is as self-complacent as if she had been carving a goose. What could possibly have stirred up this pudding of a woman (unless it were a pudding-stick) to do such a deed! I looked with much pleasure at an ugly, old, fat, jolly Bacchus, astride on a barrel, by Rubens; the most natural and lifelike representation of a tipsy rotundity of flesh that it is possible to imagine. And sometimes, amid these sensual images, I caught the divine pensiveness of a Madonna's face, by Raphael, or the glory and majesty of the babe Jesus in her arm, with his Father shining through him. This is a sort of revelation, whenever it comes. This morning, immediately after breakfast, I walked into the city, meaning to make myself better acquainted with its appearance, and to go into its various churches; but it soon grew so hot, that I turned homeward again. The interior of the Duomo was deliciously cool, to be sure,--cool and dim, after the white-hot sunshine; but an old woman began to persecute me, so that I came away. A male beggar drove me out of another church; and I took refuge in the street, where the beggar and I would have been two cinders together, if we had stood long enough on the sunny sidewalk. After my five summers' experience of England, I may have forgotten what hot weather is; but it does appear to me that an American summer is not so fervent as this. Besides the direct rays, the white pavement throws a furnace-heat up into one's face; the shady margin of the street is barely tolerable; but it is like going through the ordeal of fire to cross the broad bright glare of an open piazza. The narrow streets prove themselves a blessing at this season, except when the sun looks directly into them; the broad eaves of the houses, too, make a selvage of shade, almost always. I do not know what becomes of the street-merchants at the noontide of these hot days. They form a numerous class in Florence, displaying their wares--linen or cotton cloth, threads, combs, and all manner of haberdashery--on movable counters that are borne about on wheels. In the shady morning, you see a whole side of a street in a piazza occupied by them, all offering their merchandise at full cry. They dodge as they can from shade to shade; but at last the sunshine floods the whole space, and they seem to have melted away, leaving not a rag of themselves or what they dealt in. Cherries are very abundant now, and have been so ever since we came here, in the markets and all about the streets. They are of various kinds, some exceedingly large, insomuch that it is almost necessary to disregard the old proverb about making two bites of a cherry. Fresh figs are already spoken of, though I have seen none; but I saw some peaches this morning, looking as if they might be ripe. June 16th.--Mr. and Mrs. Powers called to see us last evening. Mr. Powers, as usual, was full of talk, and gave utterance to a good many instructive and entertaining ideas. As one instance of the little influence the religion of the Italians has upon their morals, he told a story of one of his servants, who desired leave to set up a small shrine of the Virgin in their room--a cheap print, or bas-relief, or image, such as are sold everywhere at the shops --and to burn a lamp before it; she engaging, of course, to supply the oil at her own expense. By and by, her oil-flask appeared to possess a miraculous property of replenishing itself, and Mr. Powers took measures to ascertain where the oil came from. It turned out that the servant had all the time been stealing the oil from them, and keeping up her daily sacrifice and worship to the Virgin by this constant theft. His talk soon turned upon sculpture, and he spoke once more of the difficulty imposed upon an artist by the necessity of clothing portrait statues in the modern costume. I find that he does not approve either of nudity or of the Roman toga for a modern statue; neither does he think it right to shirk the difficulty--as Chantrey did in the case of Washington --by enveloping him in a cloak; but acknowledges the propriety of taking the actual costume of the age and doing his best with it. He himself did so with his own Washington, and also with a statue that he made of Daniel Webster. I suggested that though this costume might not appear ridiculous to us now, yet, two or three centuries hence, it would create, to the people of that day, an impossibility of seeing the real man through the absurdity of his envelopment, after it shall have entirely grown out of fashion and remembrance; and Webster would seem as absurd to them then as he would to us now in the masquerade of some bygone day. It might be well, therefore, to adopt some conventional costume, never actual, but always graceful and noble. Besides, Webster, for example, had other costumes than that which he wore in public, and perhaps it was in those that he lived his most real life; his dressing-gown, his drapery of the night, the dress that he wore on his fishing-excursions; in these other costumes he spent three fourths of his time, and most probably was thus arrayed when he conceived the great thoughts that afterwards, in some formal and outside mood, he gave forth to the public. I scarcely think I was right, but am not sure of the contrary. At any rate, I know that I should have felt much more sure that I knew the real Webster, if I had seen him in any of the above-mentioned dresses, than either in his swallow-tailed coat or frock. Talking of a taste for painting and sculpture, Powers observed that it was something very different and quite apart from the moral sense, and that it was often, perhaps generally, possessed by unprincipled men of ability and cultivation. I have had this perception myself. A genuine love of painting and sculpture, and perhaps of music, seems often to have distinguished men capable of every social crime, and to have formed a fine and hard enamel over their characters. Perhaps it is because such tastes are artificial, the product of cultivation, and, when highly developed, imply a great remove from natural simplicity. This morning I went with U---- to the Uffizi gallery, and again looked with more or less attention at almost every picture and statue. I saw a little picture of the golden age, by Zucchero, in which the charms of youths and virgins are depicted with a freedom that this iron age can hardly bear to look at. The cabinet of gems happened to be open for the admission of a privileged party, and we likewise went in and saw a brilliant collection of goldsmiths' work, among which, no doubt, were specimens from such hands as Benvenuto Cellini. Little busts with diamond eyes; boxes of gems; cups carved out of precious material; crystal vases, beautifully chased and engraved, and sparkling with jewels; great pearls, in the midst of rubies; opals, rich with all manner of lovely lights. I remember Benvenuto Cellini, in his memoirs, speaks of manufacturing such playthings as these. I observed another characteristic of the summer streets of Florence to-day; tables, movable to and fro, on wheels, and set out with cool iced drinks and cordials. June 17th.--My wife and I went, this morning, to the Academy of Fine Arts, and, on our way thither, went into the Duomo, where we found a deliciously cool twilight, through which shone the mild gleam of the painted windows. I cannot but think it a pity that St. Peter's is not lighted by such windows as these, although I by no means saw the glory in them now that I have spoken of in a record of my former visit. We found out the monument of Giotto, a tablet, and portrait in bas-relief, on the wall, near the entrance of the cathedral, on the right hand; also a representation, in fresco, of a knight on horseback, the memorial of one John Rawkwood, close by the door, to the left. The priests were chanting a service of some kind or other in the choir, terribly inharmonious, and out of tune. . . . . On reaching the Academy, the soldier or policeman at the entrance directed us into the large hall, the walls of which were covered on both sides with pictures, arranged as nearly as possible in a progressive series, with reference to the date of the painters; so that here the origin and procession of the art may be traced through the course of, at least, two hundred years. Giotto, Cimabue, and others of unfamiliar names to me, are among the earliest; and, except as curiosities, I should never desire to look once at them, nor think of looking twice. They seem to have been executed with great care and conscientiousness, and the heads are often wrought out with minuteness and fidelity, and have so much expression that they tell their own story clearly enough; but it seems not to have been the painter's aim to effect a lifelike illusion, the background and accessories being conventional. The trees are no more like real trees than the feather of a pen, and there is no perspective, the figure of the picture being shadowed forth on a surface of burnished gold. The effect, when these pictures, some of them very large, were new and freshly gilded, must have been exceedingly brilliant, and much resembling, on an immensely larger scale, the rich illuminations in an old monkish missal. In fact, we have not now, in pictorial ornament, anything at all comparable to what their splendor must have been. I was most struck with a picture, by Fabriana Gentile, of the Adoration of the Magi, where the faces and figures have a great deal of life and action, and even grace, and where the jewelled crowns, the rich embroidered robes, and cloth of gold, and all the magnificence of the three kings, are represented with the vividness of the real thing: a gold sword-hilt, for instance, or a pair of gold spurs, being actually embossed on the picture. The effect is very powerful, and though produced in what modern painters would pronounce an unjustifiable way, there is yet pictorial art enough to reconcile it to the spectator's mind. Certainly, the people of the Middle Ages knew better than ourselves what is magnificence, and how to produce it; and what a glorious work must that have been, both in its mere sheen of burnished gold, and in its illuminating art, which shines thus through the gloom of perhaps four centuries. Fra Angelico is a man much admired by those who have a taste for Pre-Raphaelite painters; and, though I take little or no pleasure in his works, I can see that there is great delicacy of execution in his heads, and that generally he produces such a Christ, and such a Virgin, and such saints, as he could not have foreseen, except in a pure and holy imagination, nor have wrought out without saying a prayer between every two touches of his brush. I might come to like him, in time, if I thought it worth while; but it is enough to have an outside perception of his kind and degree of merit, and so to let him pass into the garret of oblivion, where many things as good, or better, are piled away, that our own age may not stumble over them. Perugino is the first painter whose works seem really worth preserving for the genuine merit that is in them, apart from any quaintness and curiosity of an ancient and new-born art. Probably his religion was more genuine than Raphael's, and therefore the Virgin often revealed herself to him in a loftier and sweeter face of divine womanhood than all the genius of Raphael could produce. There is a Crucifixion by him in this gallery, which made me partly feel as if I were a far-off spectator,--no, I did not mean a Crucifixion, but a picture of Christ dead, lying, with a calm, sweet face, on his mother's knees ["a Pieta"]. The most inadequate and utterly absurd picture here, or in any other gallery, is a head of the Eternal Father, by Carlo Dolce; it looks like a feeble saint, on the eve of martyrdom, and very doubtful how he shall be able to bear it; very finely and prettily painted, nevertheless. After getting through the principal gallery we went into a smaller room, in which are contained a great many small specimens of the old Tuscan artists, among whom Fra Angelico makes the principal figure. These pictures are all on wood, and seem to have been taken from the shrines and altars of ancient churches; they are predellas and triptychs, or pictures on three folding tablets, shaped quaintly, in Gothic peaks or arches, and still gleaming with backgrounds of antique gold. The wood is much worm-eaten, and the colors have often faded or changed from what the old artists meant then to be; a bright angel darkening into what looks quite as much like the Devil. In one of Fra Angelico's pictures,--a representation of the Last Judgment,--he has tried his saintly hand at making devils indeed, and showing them busily at work, tormenting the poor, damned souls in fifty ghastly ways. Above sits Jesus, with the throng of blessed saints around him, and a flow of tender and powerful love in his own face, that ought to suffice to redeem all the damned, and convert the very fiends, and quench the fires of hell. At any rate, Fra Angelico had a higher conception of his Saviour than Michael Angelo. June 19th.--This forenoon we have been to the Church of St. Lorenzo, which stands on the site of an ancient basilica, and was itself built more than four centuries ago. The facade is still an ugly height of rough brickwork, as is the case with the Duomo, and, I think, some other churches in Florence; the design of giving them an elaborate and beautiful finish having been delayed from cycle to cycle, till at length the day for spending mines of wealth on churches is gone by. The interior had a nave with a flat roof, divided from the side aisles by Corinthian pillars, and, at the farther end, a raised space around the high altar. The pavement is a mosaic of squares of black and white marble, the squares meeting one another cornerwise; the pillars, pilasters, and other architectural material is dark brown or grayish stone; and the general effect is very sombre, especially as the church is somewhat dimly lighted, and as the shrines along the aisles, and the statues, and the monuments of whatever kind, look dingy with time and neglect. The nave is thickly set with wooden seats, brown and worn. What pictures there are, in the shrines and chapels, are dark and faded. On the whole, the edifice has a shabby aspect. On each side of the high altar, elevated on four pillars of beautiful marble, is what looks like a great sarcophagus of bronze. They are, in fact, pulpits, and are ornamented with mediaeval bas-reliefs, representing scenes in the life of our Saviour. Murray says that the resting-place of the first Cosmo de' Medici, the old banker, who so managed his wealth as to get the posthumous title of "father of his country," and to make his posterity its reigning princes,--is in front of the high altar, marked by red and green porphyry and marble, inlaid into the pavement. We looked, but could not see it there. There were worshippers at some of the shrines, and persons sitting here and there along the nave, and in the aisles, rapt in devotional thought, doubtless, and sheltering themselves here from the white sunshine of the piazzas. In the vicinity of the choir and the high altar, workmen were busy repairing the church, or perhaps only making arrangements for celebrating the great festival of St. John. On the left hand of the choir is what is called the old sacristy, with the peculiarities or notabilities of which I am not acquainted. On the right hand is the new sacristy, otherwise called the Capella dei Depositi, or Chapel of the Buried, built by Michael Angelo, to contain two monuments of the Medici family. The interior is of somewhat severe and classic architecture, the walls and pilasters being of dark stone, and surmounted by a dome, beneath which is a row of windows, quite round the building, throwing their light down far beneath, upon niches of white marble. These niches are ranged entirely around the chapel, and might have sufficed to contain more than all the Medici monuments that the world would ever care to have. Only two of these niches are filled, however. In one of them sits Giuliano de' Medici, sculptured by Michael Angelo,--a figure of dignity, which would perhaps be very striking in any other presence than that of the statue which occupies the corresponding niche. At the feet of Giuliano recline two allegorical statues, Day and Night, whose meaning there I do not know, and perhaps Michael Angelo knew as little. As the great sculptor's statues are apt to do, they fling their limbs abroad with adventurous freedom. Below the corresponding niche, on the opposite side of the chapel, recline two similar statues, representing Morning and Evening, sufficiently like Day and Night to be their brother and sister; all, in truth, having sprung from the same father. . . . . But the statue that sits above these two latter allegories, Morning and Evening, is like no other that ever came from a sculptor's hand. It is the one work worthy of Michael Angelo's reputation, and grand enough to vindicate for him all the genius that the world gave him credit for. And yet it seems a simple thing enough to think of or to execute; merely a sitting figure, the face partly overshadowed by a helmet, one hand supporting the chin, the other resting on the thigh. But after looking at it a little while the spectator ceases to think of it as a marble statue; it comes to life, and you see that the princely figure is brooding over some great design, which, when he has arranged in his own mind, the world will be fain to execute for him. No such grandeur and majesty has elsewhere been put into human shape. It is all a miracle; the deep repose, and the deep life within it. It is as much a miracle to have achieved this as to make a statue that would rise up and walk. The face, when one gazes earnestly into it, beneath the shadow of its helmet, is seen to be calmly sombre; a mood which, I think, is generally that of the rulers of mankind, except in moments of vivid action. This statue is one of the things which I look at with highest enjoyment, but also with grief and impatience, because I feel that I do not come at all which it involves, and that by and by I must go away and leave it forever. How wonderful! To take a block of marble, and convert it wholly into thought, and to do it through all the obstructions and impediments of drapery; for there is nothing nude in this statue but the face and hands. The vest is the costume of Michael Angelo's century. This is what I always thought a sculptor of true genius should be able to do,--to show the man of whatever epoch, nobly and heroically, through the costume which he might actually have worn. The statue sits within a square niche of white marble, and completely fills it. It seems to me a pity that it should be thus confined. At the Crystal Palace, if I remember, the effect is improved by a free surrounding space. Its naturalness is as if it came out of the marble of its own accord, with all its grandeur hanging heavily about it, and sat down there beneath its weight. I cannot describe it. It is like trying to stop the ghost of Hamlet's father, by crossing spears before it. Communicating with the sacristy is the Medicean Chapel, which was built more than two centuries ago, for the reception of the Holy Sepulchre; arrangements having been made about that time to steal this most sacred relic from the Turks. The design failing, the chapel was converted by Cosmo II. into a place of sepulture for the princes of his family. It is a very grand and solemn edifice, octagonal in shape, with a lofty dome, within which is a series of brilliant frescos, painted not more than thirty years ago. These pictures are the only portion of the adornment of the chapel which interferes with the sombre beauty of the general effect; for though the walls are incrusted, from pavement to dome, with marbles of inestimable cost, and it is a Florentine mosaic on a grander scale than was ever executed elsewhere, the result is not gaudy, as in many of the Roman chapels, but a dark and melancholy richness. The architecture strikes me as extremely fine; each alternate side of the octagon being an arch, rising as high as the cornice of the lofty dome, and forming the frame of a vast niche. All the dead princes, no doubt, according to the general design, were to have been honored with statues within this stately mausoleum; but only two--those of Ferdinand I. and Cosmo II.--seem to have been placed here. They were a bad breed, and few of them deserved any better monument than a dunghill; and yet they have this grand chapel for the family at large, and yonder grand statue for one of its most worthless members. I am glad of it; and as for the statue, Michael Angelo wrought it through the efficacy of a kingly idea, which had no reference to the individual whose name it bears. In the piazza adjoining the church is a statue of the first Cosmo, the old banker, in Roman costume, seated, and looking like a man fit to hold authority. No, I mistake; the statue is of John de' Medici, the father of Cosmo, and himself no banker, but a soldier. June 21st.--Yesterday, after dinner, we went, with the two eldest children, to the Boboli Gardens. . . . . We entered by a gate, nearer to our house than that by the Pitti Palace, and found ourselves almost immediately among embowered walks of box and shrubbery, and little wildernesses of trees, with here and there a seat under an arbor, and a marble statue, gray with ancient weather-stains. The site of the garden is a very uneven surface, and the paths go upward and downward, and ascend, at their ultimate point, to a base of what appears to be a fortress, commanding the city. A good many of the Florentines were rambling about the gardens, like ourselves: little parties of school-boys; fathers and mothers, with their youthful progeny; young men in couples, looking closely into every female face; lovers, with a maid or two attendant on the young lady. All appeared to enjoy themselves, especially the children, dancing on the esplanades, or rolling down the slopes of the hills; and the loving pairs, whom it was rather embarrassing to come upon unexpectedly, sitting together on the stone seat of an arbor, with clasped hands, a passionate solemnity in the young man's face, and a downcast pleasure in the lady's. Policemen, in cocked hats and epaulets, cross-belts, and swords, were scattered about the grounds, but interfered with nobody, though they seemed to keep an eye on all. A sentinel stood in the hot sunshine, looking down over the garden from the ramparts of the fortress. For my part, in this foreign country, I have no objection to policemen or any other minister of authority; though I remember, in America, I had an innate antipathy to constables, and always sided with the mob against law. This was very wrong and foolish, considering that I was one of the sovereigns; but a sovereign, or any number of sovereigns, or the twenty-millionth part of a sovereign, does not love to find himself, as an American must, included within the delegated authority of his own servants. There is a sheet of water somewhere in the Boboli Gardens, inhabited by swans; but this we did not see. We found a smaller pond, however, set in marble, and surrounded by a parapet, and alive with a multitude of fish. There were minnows by the thousand, and a good many gold-fish; and J-----, who had brought some bread to feed the swans, threw in handfuls of crumbs for the benefit of these finny people. They seemed to be accustomed to such courtesies on the part of visitors; and immediately the surface of the water was blackened, at the spot where each crumb fell, with shoals of minnows, thrusting one another even above the surface in their eagerness to snatch it. Within the depths of the pond, the yellowish-green water--its hue being precisely that of the Arno-- would be reddened duskily with the larger bulk of two or three gold-fishes, who finally poked their great snouts up among the minnows, but generally missed the crumb. Beneath the circular margin of the pond, there are little arches, into the shelter of which the fish retire, when the noonday sun burns straight down into their dark waters. We went on through the garden-paths, shadowed quite across by the high walls of box, and reached an esplanade, whence we had a good view of Florence, with the bare brown ridges on the northern side of the Arno, and glimpses of the river itself, flowing like a street, between two rows of palaces. A great way off, too, we saw some of the cloud-like peaks of the Apennines, and, above them, the clouds into which the sun was descending, looking quite as substantial as the distant mountains. The city did not present a particularly splendid aspect, though its great Duomo was seen in the middle distance, sitting in its circle of little domes, with the tall campanile close by, and within one or two hundred yards of it, the high, cumbrous bulk of the Palazzo Vecchio, with its lofty, machicolated, and battlemented tower, very picturesque, yet looking exceedingly like a martin-box, on a pole. There were other domes and towers and spires, and here and there the distinct shape of an edifice; but the general picture was of a contiguity of red earthen roofs, filling a not very broad or extensive valley, among dry and ridgy hills, with a river-gleam lightening up the landscape a little. U---- took out her pencil and tablets, and began to sketch the tower of the Palazzo Vecchio; in doing which, she immediately became an object of curiosity to some little boys and larger people, who failed not, under such pretences as taking a grasshopper off her dress, or no pretence at all, to come and look over her shoulder. There is a kind of familiarity among these Florentines, which is not meant to be discourteous, and ought to be taken in good part. We continued to ramble through the gardens, in quest of a good spot from which to see the sunset, and at length found a stone bench, on the slope of a hill, whence the entire cloud and sun scenery was fully presented to us. At the foot of the hill were statues, and among them a Pegasus, with wings outspread; and, a little beyond, the garden-front of the Pitti Palace, which looks a little less like a state-prison here, than as it fronts the street. Girls and children, and young men and old, were taking their pleasure in our neighborhood; and, just before us, a lady stood talking with her maid. By and by, we discovered her to be Miss Howorth. There was a misty light, streaming down on the hither side of the ridge of hills, that was rather peculiar; but the most remarkable thing was the shape into which the clouds gathered themselves, after the disappearance of the sun. It was like a tree, with a broad and heavy mass of foliage, spreading high upward on the sky, and a dark and well-defined trunk, which rooted itself on the verge of the horizon. This morning we went to the Pitti Palace. The air was very sultry, and the pavements, already heated with the sun, made the space between the buildings seem like a close room. The earth, I think, is too much stoned out of the streets of an Italian city,--paved, like those of Florence, quite across, with broad flagstones, to the line where the stones of the houses on each side are piled up. Thunder rumbled over our heads, however, and the clouds were so dark that we scarcely hoped to reach the palace without feeling the first drops of the shower. The air still darkened and darkened, so that by the time we arrived at the suite of picture-rooms the pictures seemed all to be changed to Rembrandts; the shadows as black as midnight, with only some highly illuminated portions gleaming out. The obscurity of the atmosphere made us sensible how splendid is the adornment of these saloons. For the gilded cornices shone out, as did the gilding of the arches and wreathed circles that divide the ceiling into compartments, within which the frescos are painted, and whence the figures looked dimly down, like gods out of a mysterious sky. The white marble sculptures also gleamed from their height, where winged cupids or cherubs gambolled aloft in bas-reliefs; or allegoric shapes reclined along the cornices, hardly noticed, when the daylight comes brightly into the window. On the walls, all the rich picture-frames glimmered in gold, as did the framework of the chairs, and the heavy gilded pedestals of the marble, alabaster, and mosaic tables. These are very magnificent saloons; and since I have begun to speak of their splendor, I may as well add that the doors are framed in polished, richly veined marble, and the walls hung with scarlet damask. It was useless to try to see the pictures. All the artists engaged in copying laid aside their brushes; and we looked out into the square before the palace, where a mighty wind sprang up, and quickly raised a prodigious cloud of dust. It hid the opposite side of the street, and was carried, in a great dusky whirl, higher than the roofs of the houses, higher than the top of the Pitti Palace itself. The thunder muttered and grumbled, the lightning now and then flashed, and a few rain-drops pattered against the windows; but, for a long time, the shower held off. At last it came down in a stream, and lightened the air to such a degree that we could see some of the pictures, especially those of Rubens, and the illuminated parts of Salvator Rosa's, and, best of all, Titian's "Magdalen," the one with golden hair clustering round her naked body. The golden hair, indeed, seemed to throw out a glory of its own. This Magdalen is very coarse and sensual, with only an impudent assumption of penitence and religious sentiment, scarcely so deep as the eyelids; but it is a splendid picture, nevertheless, with those naked, lifelike arms, and the hands that press the rich locks about her, and so carefully permit those voluptuous breasts to be seen. She a penitent! She would shake off all pretence to it as easily as she would shake aside that clustering hair. . . . . Titian must have been a very good-for-nothing old man. I looked again at Michael Angelo's Fates to-day; but cannot satisfactorily make out what he meant by them. One of them--she who holds the distaff--has her mouth open, as if uttering a cry, and might be fancied to look somewhat irate. The second, who holds the thread, has a pensive air, but is still, I think, pitiless at heart. The third sister looks closely and coldly into the eyes of the second, meanwhile cutting the thread with a pair of shears. Michael Angelo, if I may presume to say so, wished to vary the expression of these three sisters, and give each a different one, but did not see precisely how, inasmuch as all the fatal Three are united, heart and soul, in one purpose. It is a very impressive group. But, as regards the interpretation of this, or of any other profound picture, there are likely to be as many interpretations as there are spectators. It is very curious to read criticisms upon pictures, and upon the same face in a picture, and by men of taste and feeling, and to find what different conclusions they arrive at. Each man interprets the hieroglyphic in his own way; and the painter, perhaps, had a meaning which none of them have reached; or possibly he put forth a riddle, without himself knowing the solution. There is such a necessity, at all events, of helping the painter out with the spectator's own resources of feeling and imagination, that you can never be sure how much of the picture you have yourself made. There is no doubt that the public is, to a certain extent, right and sure of its ground, when it declares, through a series of ages, that a certain picture is a great work. It is so; a great symbol, proceeding out of a great mind; but if it means one thing, it seems to mean a thousand, and, often, opposite things. June 27th.--I have had a heavy cold and fever almost throughout the past week, and have thereby lost the great Florentine festivity, the Feast of St. John, which took place on Thursday last, with the fireworks and illuminations the evening before, and the races and court ceremonies on the day itself. However, unless it were more characteristic and peculiar than the Carnival, I have not missed anything very valuable. Mr. Powers called to see me one evening, and poured out, as usual, a stream of talk, both racy and oracular in its character. Speaking of human eyes, he observed that they did not depend for their expression upon color, nor upon any light of the soul beaming through them, nor any glow of the eyeball, nor upon anything but the form and action of the surrounding muscles. He illustrates it by saying, that if the eye of a wolf, or of whatever fiercest animal, could be placed in another setting, it would be found capable of the utmost gentleness of expression. "You yourself," said he, "have a very bright and sharp look sometimes; but it is not in the eye itself." His own eyes, as I could have sworn, were glowing all the time he spoke; and, remembering how many times I have seemed to see eyes glow, and blaze, and flash, and sparkle, and melt, and soften; and how all poetry is illuminated with the light of ladies' eyes; and how many people have been smitten by the lightning of an eye, whether in love or anger, it was difficult to allow that all this subtlest and keenest fire is illusive, not even phosphorescent, and that any other jelly in the same socket would serve as well as the brightest eye. Nevertheless, he must be right; of course he must, and I am rather ashamed ever to have thought otherwise. Where should the light come from? Has a man a flame inside of his head? Does his spirit manifest itself in the semblance of flame? The moment we think of it, the absurdity becomes evident. I am not quite sure, however, that the outer surface of the eye may not reflect more light in some states of feeling than in others; the state of the health, certainly, has an influence of this kind. I asked Powers what he thought of Michael Angelo's statue of Lorenzo de' Medici. He allowed that its effect was very grand and mysterious; but added that it owed this to a trick,--the effect being produced by the arrangement of the hood, as he called it, or helmet, which throws the upper part of the face into shadow. The niche in which it sits has, I suppose, its part to perform in throwing a still deeper shadow. It is very possible that Michael Angelo may have calculated upon this effect of sombre shadow, and legitimately, I think; but it really is not worthy of Mr. Powers to say that the whole effect of this mighty statue depends, not on the positive efforts of Michael Angelo's chisel, but on the absence of light in a space of a few inches. He wrought the whole statue in harmony with that small part of it which he leaves to the spectator's imagination, and if he had erred at any point, the miracle would have been a failure; so that, working in marble, he has positively reached a degree of excellence above the capability of marble, sculpturing his highest touches upon air and duskiness. Mr. Powers gave some amusing anecdotes of his early life, when he was a clerk in a store in Cincinnati. There was a museum opposite, the proprietor of which had a peculiar physiognomy that struck Powers, insomuch that he felt impelled to make continual caricatures of it. He used to draw them upon the door of the museum, and became so familiar with the face, that he could draw them in the dark; so that, every morning, here was this absurd profile of himself, greeting the museum-man when he came to open his establishment. Often, too, it would reappear within an hour after it was rubbed out. The man was infinitely annoyed, and made all possible efforts to discover the unknown artist, but in vain; and finally concluded, I suppose, that the likeness broke out upon the door of its own accord, like the nettle-rash. Some years afterwards, the proprietor of the museum engaged Powers himself as an assistant; and one day Powers asked him if he remembered this mysterious profile. "Yes," said he, "did you know who drew them?" Powers took a piece of chalk, and touched off the very profile again, before the man's eyes. "Ah," said he, "if I had known it at the time, I would have broken every bone in your body!" Before he began to work in marble, Powers had greater practice and success in making wax figures, and he produced a work of this kind called "The Infernal Regions," which he seemed to imply had been very famous. He said he once wrought a face in wax which was life itself, having made the eyes on purpose for it, and put in every hair in the eyebrows individually, and finished the whole with similar minuteness; so that, within the distance of a foot or two, it was impossible to tell that the face did not live. I have hardly ever before felt an impulse to write down a man's conversation as I do that of Mr. Powers. The chief reason is, probably, that it is so possible to do it, his ideas being square, solid, and tangible, and therefore readily grasped and retained. He is a very instructive man, and sweeps one's empty and dead notions out of the way with exceeding vigor; but when you have his ultimate thought and perception, you feel inclined to think and see a little further for yourself. He sees too clearly what is within his range to be aware of any region of mystery beyond. Probably, however, this latter remark does him injustice. I like the man, and am always glad to encounter the mill-stream of his talk. . . . . Yesterday he met me in the street (dressed in his linen blouse and slippers, with a little bit of a sculptor's cap on the side of his head), and gave utterance to a theory of colds, and a dissertation on the bad effects of draughts, whether of cold air or hot, and the dangers of transfusing blood from the veins of one living subject to those of another. On the last topic, he remarked that, if a single particle of air found its way into the veins, along with the transfused blood, it caused convulsions and inevitable death; otherwise the process might be of excellent effect. Last evening, we went to pass the evening with Miss Blagden, who inhabits a villa at Bellosguardo, about a mile outside of the walls. The situation is very lofty, and there are good views from every window of the house, and an especially fine one of Florence and the hills beyond, from the balcony of the drawing-room. By and by came Mr. Browning, Mr. Trollope, Mr. Boott and his young daughter, and two or three other gentlemen. . . . . Browning was very genial and full of life, as usual, but his conversation has the effervescent aroma which you cannot catch, even if you get the very words that seem to be imbued with it. He spoke most rapturously of a portrait of Mrs. Browning, which an Italian artist is painting for the wife of an American gentleman, as a present from her husband. The success was already perfect, although there had been only two sittings as yet, and both on the same day; and in this relation, Mr. Browning remarked that P------, the American artist, had had no less than seventy-three sittings of him for a portrait. In the result, every hair and speck of him was represented; yet, as I inferred from what he did not say, this accumulation of minute truths did not, after all, amount to the true whole. I do not remember much else that Browning said, except a playful abuse of a little King Charles spaniel, named Frolic, Miss Blagden's lap-dog, whose venerable age (he is eleven years old) ought to have pleaded in his behalf. Browning's nonsense is of very genuine and excellent quality, the true babble and effervescence of a bright and powerful mind; and he lets it play among his friends with the faith and simplicity of a child. He must be an amiable man. I should like him much, and should make him like me, if opportunities were favorable. I conversed principally with Mr. Trollope, the son, I believe, of the Mrs. Trollope to whom America owes more for her shrewd criticisms than we are ever likely to repay. Mr. Trollope is a very sensible and cultivated man, and, I suspect, an author: at least, there is a literary man of repute of this name, though I have never read his works. He has resided in Italy eighteen years. It seems a pity to do this. It needs the native air to give life a reality; a truth which I do not fail to take home regretfully to myself, though without feeling much inclination to go back to the realities of my own. We had a pleasant cup of tea, and took a moonlight view of Florence from the balcony. . . . . June 28th.--Yesterday afternoon, J----- and I went to a horse-race, which took place in the Corso and contiguous line of streets, in further celebration of the Feast of St. John. A crowd of people was already collected, all along the line of the proposed race, as early as six o'clock; and there were a great many carriages driving amid the throng, open barouches mostly, in which the beauty and gentility of Florence were freely displayed. It was a repetition of the scene in the Corso at Rome, at Carnival time, without the masks, the fun, and the confetti. The Grand Duke and Duchess and the Court likewise made their appearance in as many as seven or eight coaches-and-six, each with a coachman, three footmen, and a postilion in the royal livery, and attended by a troop of horsemen in scarlet coats and cocked hats. I did not particularly notice the Grand Duke himself; but, in the carriage behind him, there sat only a lady, who favored the people along the street with a constant succession of bows, repeated at such short intervals, and so quickly, as to be little more than nods; therefore not particularly graceful or majestic. Having the good fortune, to be favored with one of these nods, I lifted my hat in response, and may therefore claim a bowing acquaintance with the Grand Duchess. She is a Bourbon of the Naples family, and was a pale, handsome woman, of princely aspect enough. The crowd evinced no enthusiasm, nor the slightest feeling of any kind, in acknowledgment of the presence of their rulers; and, indeed, I think I never saw a crowd so well behaved; that is, with so few salient points, so little ebullition, so absolutely tame, as the Florentine one. After all, and much contrary to my expectations, an American crowd has incomparably more life than any other; and, meeting on any casual occasion, it will talk, laugh, roar, and be diversified with a thousand characteristic incidents and gleams and shadows, that you see nothing of here. The people seems to have no part even in its own gatherings. It comes together merely as a mass of spectators, and must not so much as amuse itself by any activity of mind. The race, which was the attraction that drew us all together, turned out a very pitiful affair. When we had waited till nearly dusk, the street being thronged quite across, insomuch that it seemed impossible that it should be cleared as a race-course, there came suddenly from every throat a quick, sharp exclamation, combining into a general shout. Immediately the crowd pressed back on each side of the street; a moment afterwards, there was a rapid pattering of hoofs over the earth with which the pavement was strewn, and I saw the head and back of a horse rushing past. A few seconds more, and another horse followed; and at another little interval, a third. This was all that we had waited for; all that I saw, or anybody else, except those who stood on the utmost verge of the course, at the risk of being trampled down and killed. Two men were killed in this way on Thursday, and certainly human life was never spent for a poorer object. The spectators at the windows, to be sure, having the horses in sight for a longer time, might get a little more enjoyment out of the affair. By the by, the most picturesque aspect of the scene was the life given to it by the many faces, some of them fair ones, that looked out from window and balcony, all along the curving line of lofty palaces and edifices, between which the race-course lay; and from nearly every window, and over every balcony, was flung a silken texture, or cloth of brilliant line, or piece of tapestry or carpet, or whatever adornment of the kind could be had, so as to dress up the street in gala attire. But, the Feast of St. John, like the Carnival, is but a meagre semblance of festivity, kept alive factitiously, and dying a lingering death of centuries. It takes the exuberant mind and heart of a people to keep its holidays alive. I do not know whether there be any populace in Florence, but I saw none that I recognized as such, on this occasion. All the people were respectably dressed and perfectly well behaved; and soldiers and priests were scattered abundantly among the throng. On my way home, I saw the Teatro Goldoni, which is in our own street, lighted up for a representation this Sunday evening. It shocked my New England prejudices a little. Thus forenoon, my wife and I went to the Church of Santa Croce, the great monumental deposit of Florentine worthies. The piazza before it is a wide, gravelled square, where the liberty of Florence, if it really ever had any genuine liberty, came into existence some hundreds of years ago, by the people's taking its own rights into its hands, and putting its own immediate will in execution. The piazza has not much appearance of antiquity, except that the facade of one of the houses is quite covered with ancient frescos, a good deal faded and obliterated, yet with traces enough of old glory to show that the colors must have been well laid on. The front of the church, the foundation of which was laid six centuries ago, is still waiting for its casing of marbles, and I suppose will wait forever, though a carpenter's staging is now erected before it, as if with the purpose of doing something. The interior is spacious, the length of the church being between four and five hundred feet. There is a nave, roofed with wooden cross-beams, lighted by a clere-story and supported on each side by seven great pointed arches, which rest upon octagonal pillars. The octagon seems to be a favorite shape in Florence. These pillars were clad in yellow and scarlet damask, in honor of the Feast of St. John. The aisles, on each side of the nave, are lighted with high and somewhat narrow windows of painted glass, the effect of which, however, is much diminished by the flood of common daylight that comes in through the windows of the clere-story. It is like admitting too much of the light of reason and worldly intelligence into the mind, instead of illuminating it wholly through a religious medium. The many-hued saints and angels lose their mysterious effulgence, when we get white light enough, and find we see all the better without their help. The main pavement of the church is brickwork; but it is inlaid with many sepulchral slabs of marble, on some of which knightly or priestly figures are sculptured in bas-relief. In both of the side aisles there are saintly shrines, alternating with mural monuments, some of which record names as illustrious as any in the world. As you enter, the first monument, on your right is that of Michael Angelo, occupying the ancient burial-site of his family. The general design is a heavy sarcophagus of colored marble, with the figures of Sculpture, Painting, and Architecture as mourners, and Michael Angelo's bust above, the whole assuming a pyramidal form. You pass a shrine, within its framework of marble pillars and a pediment, and come next to Dante's monument, a modern work, with likewise its sarcophagus, and some huge, cold images weeping and sprawling over it, and an unimpressive statue of Dante sitting above. Another shrine intervenes, and next you see the tomb of Alfieri, erected to his memory by the Countess of Albany, who pays, out of a woman's love, the honor which his country owed him. Her own monument is in one of the chapels of the transept. Passing the next shrine you see the tomb of Macchiavelli, which, I think, was constructed not many years after his death. The rest of the monuments, on this side of the church, commemorate people of less than world-wide fame; and though the opposite side has likewise a monument alternating with each shrine, I remember only the names of Raphael Morghen and of Galileo. The tomb of the latter is over against that of Michael Angelo, being the first large tomb on the left-hand wall as you enter the church. It has the usual heavy sarcophagus, surmounted by a bust of Galileo, in the habit of his time, and is, of course, duly provided with mourners in the shape of Science or Astronomy, or some such cold-hearted people. I wish every sculptor might be at once imprisoned for life who shall hereafter chisel an allegoric figure; and as for those who have sculptured them heretofore, let them be kept in purgatory till the marble shall have crumbled away. It is especially absurd to assign to this frozen sisterhood of the allegoric family the office of weeping for the dead, inasmuch as they have incomparably less feeling than a lump of ice, which might contrive to shed a tear if the sun shone on it. But they seem to let themselves out, like the hired mourners of an English funeral, for the very reason that, having no interest in the dead person, nor any affections or emotions whatever, it costs them no wear and tear of heart. All round both transepts of the church there is a series of chapels, into most of which we went, and generally found an inscrutably dark picture over the altar, and often a marble bust or two, or perhaps a mediaeval statue of a saint or a modern monumental bas-relief in marble, as white as new-fallen snow. A chapel of the Bonapartes is here, containing memorials of two female members of the family. In several chapels, moreover, there were some of those distressing frescos, by Giotto, Cimabue, or their compeers, which, whenever I see them,--poor, faded relics, looking as if the Devil had been rubbing and scrubbing them for centuries, in spite against the saints,--my heart sinks and my stomach sickens. There is no other despondency like this; it is a new shade of human misery, akin to the physical disease that comes from dryrot in a wall. These frescos are to a church what dreary, old remembrances are to a mind; the drearier because they were once bright: Hope fading into Disappointment, Joy into Grief, and festal splendor passing into funereal duskiness, and saddening you all the more by the grim identity that you find to exist between gay things and sorrowful ones. Only wait long enough, and they turn out to be the very same. All the time we were in the church some great religious ceremony had been going forward; the organ playing and the white-robed priests bowing, gesticulating, and making Latin prayers at the high altar, where at least a hundred wax tapers were burning in constellations. Everybody knelt, except ourselves, yet seemed not to be troubled by the echoes of our passing footsteps, nor to require that we should pray along with them. They consider us already lost irrevocably, no doubt, and therefore right enough in taking no heed of their devotions; not but what we took so much heed, however, as to give the smallest possible disturbance. By and by we sat down in the nave of the church till the ceremony should be concluded; and then my wife left me to go in quest of yet another chapel, where either Cimabue or Giotto, or both, have left some of their now ghastly decorations. While she was gone I threw my eyes about the church, and came to the conclusion that, in spite of its antiquity, its size, its architecture, its painted windows, its tombs of great men, and all the reverence and interest that broods over them, it is not an impressive edifice. Any little Norman church in England would impress me as much, and more. There is something, I do not know what, but it is in the region of the heart, rather than in the intellect, that Italian architecture, of whatever age or style, never seems to reach. Leaving the Santa Croce, we went next in quest of the Riccardi Palace. On our way, in the rear of the Grand Ducal Piazza, we passed by the Bargello, formerly the palace of the Podesta of Florence, and now converted into a prison. It is an immense square edifice of dark stone, with a tall, lank tower rising high above it at one corner. Two stone lions, symbols of the city, lash their tails and glare at the passers-by; and all over the front of the building windows are scattered irregularly, and grated with rusty iron bars; also there are many square holes, which probably admit a little light and a breath or two of air into prisoners' cells. It is a very ugly edifice, but looks antique, and as if a vast deal of history might have been transacted within it, or have beaten, like fierce blasts, against its dark, massive walls, since the thirteenth century. When I first saw the city it struck me that there were few marks of antiquity in Florence; but I am now inclined to think otherwise, although the bright Italian atmosphere, and the general squareness and monotony of the Italian architecture, have their effect in apparently modernizing everything. But everywhere we see the ponderous Tuscan basements that never can decay, and which will look, five hundred years hence, as they look now; and one often passes beneath an abbreviated remnant of what was once a lofty tower, perhaps three hundred feet high, such as used to be numerous in Florence when each noble of the city had his own warfare to wage; and there are patches of sculpture that look old on houses, the modern stucco of which causes them to look almost new. Here and there an unmistakable antiquity stands in its own impressive shadow; the Church of Or San Michele, for instance, once a market, but which grew to be a church by some inherent fitness and inevitable consecration. It has not the least the aspect of a church, being high and square, like a mediaeval palace; but deep and high niches are let into its walls, within which stand great statues of saints, masterpieces of Donatello, and other sculptors of that age, before sculpture began to be congealed by the influence of Greek art. The Riccardi Palace is at the corner of the Via Larga. It was built by the first Cosmo de' Medici, the old banker, more than four centuries ago, and was long the home of the ignoble race of princes which he left behind him. It looks fit to be still the home of a princely race, being nowise dilapidated nor decayed externally, nor likely to be so, its high Tuscan basement being as solid as a ledge of rock, and its upper portion not much less so, though smoothed into another order of stately architecture. Entering its court from the Via Larga, we found ourselves beneath a pillared arcade, passing round the court like a cloister; and on the walls of the palace, under this succession of arches, were statues, bas-reliefs, and sarcophagi, in which, first, dead Pagans had slept, and then dead Christians, before the sculptured coffins were brought hither to adorn the palace of the Medici. In the most prominent place was a Latin inscription of great length and breadth, chiefly in praise of old Cosino and his deeds and wisdom. This mansion gives the visitor a stately notion of the life of a commercial man in the days when merchants were princes; not that it seems to be so wonderfully extensive, nor so very grand, for I suppose there are a dozen Roman palaces that excel it in both these particulars. Still, we cannot but be conscious that it must have been, in some sense, a great man who thought of founding a homestead like this, and was capable of filling it with his personality, as the hand fills a glove. It has been found spacious enough, since Cosmo's time, for an emperor and a pope and a king, all of whom have been guests in this house. After being the family mansion of the Medici for nearly two centuries, it was sold to the Riccardis, but was subsequently bought of then by the government, and it is now occupied by public offices and societies. After sufficiently examining the court and its antiquities, we ascended a noble staircase that passes, by broad flights and square turns, to the region above the basement. Here the palace is cut up and portioned off into little rooms and passages, and everywhere there were desks, inkstands, and men, with pens in their fingers or behind their ears. We were shown into a little antique chapel, quite covered with frescos in the Giotto style, but painted by a certain Gozzoli. They were in pretty good preservation, and, in fact, I am wrong in comparing them to Giotto's works, inasmuch as there must have been nearly two hundred years between the two artists. The chapel was furnished with curiously carved old chairs, and looked surprisingly venerable within its little precinct. We were next guided into the grand gallery, a hall of respectable size, with a frescoed ceiling, on which is represented the blue sky, and various members of the Medici family ascending through it by the help of angelic personages, who seem only to have waited for their society to be perfectly happy. At least, this was the meaning, so far as I could make it out. Along one side of the gallery were oil-pictures on looking-glasses, rather good than otherwise; but Rome, with her palaces and villas, takes the splendor out of all this sort of thing elsewhere. On our way home, and on our own side of the Ponte Vecchio, we passed the Palazzo Guicciardini, the ancient residence of the historian of Italy, who was a politic statesman of his day, and probably as cruel and unprincipled as any of those whose deeds he has recorded. Opposite, across the narrow way, stands the house of Macchiavelli, who was his friend, and, I should judge, an honester man than he. The house is distinguished by a marble tablet, let into the wall, commemorative of Macchiavelli, but has nothing antique or picturesque about it, being in a continuous line with other smooth-faced and stuccoed edifices. June 30th.--Yesterday, at three o'clock P. M., I went to see the final horse-race of the Feast of St. John, or rather to see the concourse of people and grandees whom it brought together. I took my stand in the vicinity of the spot whence the Grand Duke and his courtiers view the race, and from this point the scene was rather better worth looking at than from the street-corners whence I saw it before. The vista of the street, stretching far adown between two rows of lofty edifices, was really gay and gorgeous with the silks, damasks, and tapestries of all bright hues, that flaunted from windows and balconies, whence ladies looked forth and looked down, themselves making the liveliest part of the show. The whole capacity of the street swarmed with moving heads, leaving scarce room enough for the carriages, which, as on Sunday, passed up and down, until the signal for the race was given. Equipages, too, were constantly arriving at the door of the building which communicates with the open loggia, where the Grand Ducal party sit to see and to be seen. Two sentinels were standing at the door, and presented arms as each courtier or ambassador, or whatever dignity it might be, alighted. Most of them had on gold-embroidered court-dresses; some of them had military uniforms, and medals in abundance at the breast; and ladies also came, looking like heaps of lace and gauze in the carriages, but lightly shaking themselves into shape as they went up the steps. By and by a trumpet sounded, a drum beat, and again appeared a succession of half a dozen royal equipages, each with its six horses, its postilion, coachman, and three footmen, grand with cocked hats and embroidery; and the gray-headed, bowing Grand Duke and his nodding Grand Duchess as before. The Noble Guard ranged themselves on horseback opposite the loggia; but there was no irksome and impertinent show of ceremony and restraint upon the people. The play-guard of volunteer soldiers, who escort the President of the United States in his Northern progresses, keep back their fellow-citizens much more sternly and immitigably than the Florentine guard kept back the populace from its despotic sovereign. This morning J----- and I have been to the Uffizi gallery. It was his first visit there, and he passed a sweeping condemnation upon everything he saw, except a fly, a snail-shell, a caterpillar, a lemon, a piece of bread, and a wineglass, in some of the Dutch pictures. The Venus de' Medici met with no sort of favor. His feeling of utter distaste reacted upon me, and I was sensible of the same weary lack of appreciation that used to chill me through, in my earlier visits to picture-galleries; the same doubt, moreover, whether we do not bamboozle ourselves in the greater part of the admiration which we learn to bestow. I looked with some pleasure at one of Correggio's Madonnas in the Tribune,--no divine and deep-thoughted mother of the Saviour, but a young woman playing with her first child, as gay and thoughtless as itself. I looked at Michael Angelo's Madonna, in which William Ware saw such prophetic depth of feeling; but I suspect it was one of the many instances in which the spectator sees more than the painter ever dreamed of. Straying through the city, after leaving the gallery, we went into the Church of Or San Michele, and saw in its architecture the traces of its transformation from a market into a church. In its pristine state it consisted of a double row of three great open arches, with the wind blowing through them, and the sunshine falling aslantwise into them, while the bustle of the market, the sale of fish, flesh, or fruit went on within, or brimmed over into the streets that enclosed them on every side. But, four or five hundred years ago, the broad arches were built up with stone-work; windows were pierced through and filled with painted glass; a high altar, in a rich style of pointed Gothic, was raised; shrines and confessionals were set up; and here it is, a solemn and antique church, where a man may buy his salvation instead of his dinner. At any rate, the Catholic priests will insure it to him, and take the price. The sculpture within the beautifully decorated niches, on the outside of the church, is very curious and interesting. The statues of those old saints seem to have that charm of earnestness which so attracts the admirers of the Pre-Raphaelite painters. It appears that a picture of the Virgin used to hang against one of the pillars of the market-place while it was still a market, and in the year 1291 several miracles were wrought by it, insomuch that a chapel was consecrated for it. So many worshippers came to the shrine that the business of the market was impeded, and ultimately the Virgin and St. Michael won the whole space for themselves. The upper part of the edifice was at that time a granary, and is still used for other than religious purposes. This church was one spot to which the inhabitants betook themselves much for refuge and divine assistance during the great plague described by Boccaccio. July 2d.--We set out yesterday morning to visit the Palazzo Buonarotti, Michael Angelo's ancestral home. . . . . It is in the Via Ghibellina, an ordinary-looking, three-story house, with broad-brimmed eaves, a stuccoed front, and two or three windows painted in fresco, besides the real ones. Adown the street, there is a glimpse of the hills outside of Florence. The sun shining heavily directly upon the front, we rang the door-bell, and then drew back into the shadow that fell from the opposite side of the street. After we had waited some time a man looked out from an upper window, and a woman from a lower one, and informed us that we could not be admitted now, nor for two or three months to come, the house being under repairs. It is a pity, for I wished to see Michael Angelo's sword and walking-stick and old slippers, and whatever other of his closest personalities are to be shown. . . . . We passed into the Piazza of the Grand Duke, and looked into the court of the Palazzo Vecchio, with its beautifully embossed pillars; and, seeing just beyond the court a staircase of broad and easy steps, we ascended it at a venture. Upward and upward we went, flight after flight of stairs, and through passages, till at last we found an official who ushered us into a large saloon. It was the Hall of Audience. Its heavily embossed ceiling, rich with tarnished gold, was a feature of antique magnificence, and the only one that it retained, the floor being paved with tiles and the furniture scanty or none. There were, however, three cabinets standing against the walls, two of which contained very curious and exquisite carvings and cuttings in ivory; some of them in the Chinese style of hollow, concentric balls; others, really beautiful works of art: little crucifixes, statues, saintly and knightly, and cups enriched with delicate bas-reliefs. The custode pointed to a small figure of St. Sebastian, and also to a vase around which the reliefs seemed to assume life. Both these specimens, he said, were by Benvenuto Cellini, and there were many others that might well have been wrought by his famous hand. The third cabinet contained a great number and variety of crucifixes, chalices, and whatever other vessels are needed in altar service, exquisitely carved out of amber. They belong to the chapel of the palace, and into this holy closet we were now conducted. It is large enough to accommodate comfortably perhaps thirty worshippers, and is quite covered with frescos by Ghirlandaio in good preservation, and with remnants enough of gilding and bright color to show how splendid the chapel must have been when the Medicean Grand Dukes used to pray here. The altar is still ready for service, and I am not sure that some of the wax tapers were not burning; but Lorenzo the Magnificent was nowhere to be seen. The custode now led us back through the Hall of Audience into a smaller room, hung with pictures chiefly of the Medici and their connections, among whom was one Carolina, an intelligent and pretty child, and Bianca Capella. There was nothing else to show us, except a very noble and most spacious saloon, lighted by two large windows at each end, coming down level with the floor, and by a row of windows on one side just beneath the cornice. A gilded framework divides the ceiling into squares, circles, and octagons, the compartments of which are filled with pictures in oil; and the walls are covered with immense frescos, representing various battles and triumphs of the Florentines. Statues by Michael Angelo, John of Bologna, and Bandinello, as well historic as ideal, stand round the hall, and it is really a fit theatre for the historic scenes of a country to be acted in. It was built, moreover, with the idea of its being the council-hall of a free people; but our own little Faneuil, which was meant, in all simplicity, to be merely a spot where the townspeople should meet to choose their selectmen, has served the world better in that respect. I wish I had more room to speak of this vast, dusky, historic hall. [This volume of journal closes here.] July 4th 1858.--Yesterday forenoon we went to see the Church of Santa Maria Novella. We found the piazza, on one side of which the church stands, encumbered with the amphitheatrical ranges of wooden seats that had been erected to accommodate the spectators of the chariot-races, at the recent Feast of St. John. The front of the church is composed of black and white marble, which, in the course of the five centuries that it has been built, has turned brown and yellow. On the right hand, as you approach, is a long colonnade of arches, extending on a line with the facade, and having a tomb beneath every arch. This colonnade forms one of the enclosing walls of a cloister. We found none of the front entrances open, but on our left, in a wall at right angles with the church, there was an open gateway, approaching which, we saw, within the four-sided colonnade, an enclosed green space of a cloister. This is what is called the Chiostro Verde, so named from the prevailing color of the frescos with which the walls beneath the arches are adorned. This cloister is the reality of what I used to imagine when I saw the half-ruinous colonnades connected with English cathedrals, or endeavored to trace out the lines along the broken wall of some old abbey. Not that this extant cloister, still perfect and in daily use for its original purposes, is nearly so beautiful as the crumbling ruin which has ceased to be trodden by monkish feet for more than three centuries. The cloister of Santa Maria has not the seclusion that is desirable, being open, by its gateway, to the public square; and several of the neighbors, women as well as men, were loitering within its precincts. The convent, however, has another and larger cloister, which I suppose is kept free from interlopers. The Chiostro Verde is a walk round the four sides of a square, beneath an arched and groined roof. One side of the walk looks upon an enclosed green space with a fountain or a tomb (I forget which) in the centre; the other side is ornamented all along with a succession of ancient frescos, representing subjects of Scripture history. In the days when the designs were more distinct than now, it must have been a very effective way for a monk to read Bible history, to see its personages and events thus passing visibly beside him in his morning and evening walks. Beneath the frescos on one side of the cloistered walk, and along the low stone parapet that separates it from the grass-plat on the other, are inscriptions to the memory of the dead who are buried underneath the pavement. The most of these were modern, and recorded the names of persons of no particular note. Other monumental slabs were inlaid with the pavement itself. Two or three Dominican monks, belonging to the convent, passed in and out, while we were there, in their white habits. After going round three sides, we came to the fourth, formed by the wall of the church, and heard the voice of a priest behind a curtain that fell down before a door. Lifting it aside, we went in, and found ourselves in the ancient chapter-house, a large interior formed by two great pointed arches crossing one another in a groined roof. The broad spaces of the walls were entirely covered with frescos that are rich even now, and must have glowed with an inexpressible splendor, when fresh from the artists' hands, five hundred years ago. There is a long period, during which frescos illuminate a church or a hall in a way that no other adornment can; when this epoch of brightness is past, they become the dreariest ghosts of perished magnificence. . . . . This chapter-house is the only part of the church that is now used for the purposes of public worship. There are several confessionals, and two chapels or shrines, each with its lighted tapers. A priest performed mass while we were there, and several persons, as usual, stepped in to do a little devotion, either praying on their own account, or uniting with the ceremony that was going forward. One man was followed by two little dogs, and in the midst of his prayers, as one of the dogs was inclined to stray about the church, he kept snapping his fingers to call him back. The cool, dusky refreshment of these holy places, affording such a refuge from the hot noon of the streets and piazzas, probably suggests devotional ideas to the people, and it may be, when they are praying, they feel a breath of Paradise fanning them. If we could only see any good effects in their daily life, we might deem it an excellent thing to be able to find incense and a prayer always ascending, to which every individual may join his own. I really wonder that the Catholics are not better men and women. When we had looked at the old frescos, . . . . we emerged into the cloister again, and thence ventured into a passage which would have led us to the Chiostro Grande, where strangers, and especially ladies, have no right to go. It was a secluded corridor, very neatly kept, bordered with sepulchral monuments, and at the end appeared a vista of cypress-trees, which indeed were but an illusory perspective, being painted in fresco. While we loitered along the sacristan appeared and offered to show us the church, and led us into the transept on the right of the high altar, and ushered us into the sacristy, where we found two artists copying some of Fra Angelico's pictures. These were painted on the three wooden leaves of a triptych, and, as usual, were glorified with a great deal of gilding, so that they seemed to float in the brightness of a heavenly element. Solomon speaks of "apples of gold in pictures of silver." The pictures of Fra Angelico, and other artists of that age, are really pictures of gold; and it is wonderful to see how rich the effect, and how much delicate beauty is attained (by Fra Angelico at least) along with it. His miniature-heads appear to me much more successful than his larger ones. In a monkish point of view, however, the chief value of the triptych of which I am speaking does not lie in the pictures, for they merely serve as the framework of some relics, which are set all round the edges of the three leaves. They consist of little bits and fragments of bones, and of packages carefully tied up in silk, the contents of which are signified in Gothic letters appended to each parcel. The sacred vessels of the church are likewise kept in the sacristy. . . . . Re-entering the transept, our guide showed us the chapel of the Strozzi family, which is accessible by a flight of steps from the floor of the church. The walls of this chapel are covered with frescos by Orcagna, representing around the altar the Last Judgment, and on one of the walls heaven and the assembly of the blessed, and on the other, of course, hell. I cannot speak as to the truth of the representation; but, at all events, it was purgatory to look at it. . . . . We next passed into the choir, which occupies the extreme end of the church behind the great square mass of the high altar, and is surrounded with a double row of ancient oaken seats of venerable shape and carving. The choir is illuminated by a threefold Gothic window, full of richly painted glass, worth all the frescos that ever stained a wall or ceiling; but these walls, nevertheless, are adorned with frescos by Ghirlandaio, and it is easy to see must once have made a magnificent appearance. I really was sensible of a sad and ghostly beauty in many of the figures; but all the bloom, the magic of the painter's touch, his topmost art, have long ago been rubbed off, the white plaster showing through the colors in spots, and even in large spaces. Any other sort of ruin acquires a beauty proper to its decay, and often superior to that of its pristine state; but the ruin of a picture, especially of a fresco, is wholly unredeemed; and, moreover, it dies so slowly that many generations are likely to be saddened by it. We next saw the famous picture of the Virgin by Cimabue, which was deemed a miracle in its day, . . . . and still brightens the sombre walls with the lustre of its gold ground. As to its artistic merits, it seems to me that the babe Jesus has a certain air of state and dignity; but I could see no charm whatever in the broad-faced Virgin, and it would relieve my mind and rejoice my spirit if the picture were borne out of the church in another triumphal procession (like the one which brought it there), and reverently burnt. This should be the final honor paid to all human works that have served a good office in their day, for when their day is over, if still galvanized into false life, they do harm instead of good. . . . . The interior of Santa Maria Novella is spacious and in the Gothic style, though differing from English churches of that order of architecture. It is not now kept open to the public, nor were any of the shrines and chapels, nor even the high altar itself, adorned and lighted for worship. The pictures that decorated the shrines along the side aisles have been removed, leaving bare, blank spaces of brickwork, very dreary and desolate to behold. This is almost worse than a black oil-painting or a faded fresco. The church was much injured by the French, and afterwards by the Austrians, both powers having quartered their troops within the holy precincts. Its old walls, however, are yet stalwart enough to outlast another set of frescos, and to see the beginning and the end of a new school of painting as long-lived as Cimabue's. I should be sorry to have the church go to decay, because it was here that Boccaccio's dames and cavaliers encountered one another, and formed their plan of retreating into the country during the plague. . . . . At the door we bought a string of beads, with a small crucifix appended, in memory of the place. The beads seem to be of a grayish, pear-shaped seed, and the seller assured us that they were the tears of St. Job. They were cheap, probably because Job shed so many tears in his lifetime. It being still early in the day, we went to the Uffizi gallery, and after loitering a good while among the pictures, were so fortunate as to find the room of the bronzes open. The first object that attracted us was John of Bologna's Mercury, poising himself on tiptoe, and looking not merely buoyant enough to float, but as if he possessed more than the eagle's power of lofty flight. It seems a wonder that he did not absolutely fling himself into the air when the artist gave him the last touch. No bolder work was ever achieved; nothing so full of life has been done since. I was much interested, too, in the original little wax model, two feet high, of Benvenuto Cellini's Perseus. The wax seems to be laid over a wooden framework, and is but roughly finished off. . . . . In an adjoining room are innumerable specimens of Roman and Etruscan bronzes, great and small. A bronze Chimera did not strike me as very ingeniously conceived, the goat's head being merely an adjunct, growing out of the back of the monster, without possessing any original and substantive share in its nature. The snake's head is at the end of the tail. The object most really interesting was a Roman eagle, the standard of the Twenty-fourth Legion, about the size of a blackbird. July 8th.--On the 6th we went to the Church of the Annunziata, which stands in the piazza of the same name. On the corner of the Via dei Servi is the palace which I suppose to be the one that Browning makes the scene of his poem, "The Statue and the Bust," and the statue of Duke Ferdinand sits stately on horseback, with his face turned towards the window, where the lady ought to appear. Neither she nor the bust, however, was visible, at least not to my eyes. The church occupies one side of the piazza, and in front of it, as likewise on the two adjoining sides of the square, there are pillared arcades, constructed by Brunelleschi or his scholars. After passing through these arches, and still before entering the church itself, you come to an ancient cloister, which is now quite enclosed in glass as a means of preserving some frescos of Andrea del Sarto and others, which are considered valuable. Passing the threshold of the church, we were quite dazzled by the splendor that shone upon us from the ceiling of the nave, the great parallelograms of which, viewed from one end, look as if richly embossed all over with gold. The whole interior, indeed, has an effect of brightness and magnificence, the walls being covered mostly with light-colored marble, into which are inlaid compartments of rarer and richer marbles. The pillars and pilasters, too, are of variegated marbles, with Corinthian capitals, that shine just as brightly as if they were of solid gold, so faithfully have they been gilded and burnished. The pavement is formed of squares of black and white marble. There are no side aisles, but ranges of chapels, with communication from one to another, stand round the whole extent of the nave and choir; all of marble, all decorated with pictures, statues, busts, and mural monuments; all worth, separately, a day's inspection. The high altar is of great beauty and richness, . . . . and also the tomb of John of Bologna in a chapel at the remotest extremity of the church. In this chapel there are some bas-reliefs by him, and also a large crucifix, with a marble Christ upon it. I think there has been no better sculptor since the days of Phidias. . . . . The church was founded by seven gentlemen of Florence, who formed themselves into a religious order called "Servants of Mary." Many miraculous cures were wrought here; and the church, in consequence, was so thickly hung with votive offerings of legs, arms, and other things in wax, that they used to tumble upon people's heads, so that finally they were all cleared out as rubbish. The church is still, I should imagine, looked upon as a place of peculiar sanctity; for while we were there it had an unusual number of kneeling worshippers, and persons were passing from shrine to shrine all round the nave and choir, praying awhile at each, and thus performing a pilgrimage at little cost of time and labor. One old gentleman, I observed, carried a cushion or pad, just big enough for one knee, on which he carefully adjusted his genuflexions before each altar. An old woman in the choir prayed alternately to us and to the saints, with most success, I hope, in her petitions to the latter, though certainly her prayers to ourselves seemed the more fervent of the two. When we had gone entirely round the church, we came at last to the chapel of the Annunziata, which stands on the floor of the nave, on the left hand as we enter. It is a very beautiful piece of architecture,--a sort of canopy of marble, supported upon pillars; and its magnificence within, in marble and silver, and all manner of holy decoration, is quite indescribable. It was built four hundred years ago, by Pietro de' Medici, and has probably been growing richer ever since. The altar is entirely of silver, richly embossed. As many people were kneeling on the steps before it as could find room, and most of them, when they finished their prayers, ascended the steps, kissed over and over again the margin of the silver altar, laid their foreheads upon it, and then deposited an offering in a box placed upon the altar's top. From the dulness of the chink in the only case when I heard it, I judged it to be a small copper coin. In the inner part of this chapel is preserved a miraculous picture of the "Santissima Annunziata," painted by angels, and held in such holy repute that forty thousand dollars have lately been expended in providing a new crown for the sacred personage represented. The picture is now veiled behind a curtain; and as it is a fresco, and is not considered to do much credit to the angelic artists, I was well contented not to see it. We found a side door of the church admitting us into the great cloister, which has a walk of intersecting arches round its four sides, paved with flat tombstones, and broad enough for six people to walk abreast. On the walls, in the semicircles of each successive arch, are frescos representing incidents in the lives of the seven founders of the church, and all the lower part of the wall is incrusted with marble inscriptions to the memory of the dead, and mostly of persons who have died not very long ago. The space enclosed by the cloistered walk, usually made cheerful by green grass, has a pavement of tombstones laid in regular ranges. In the centre is a stone octagonal structure, which at first I supposed to be the tomb of some deceased mediaeval personage; but, on approaching, I found it a well, with its bucket hanging within the curb, and looking as if it were in constant use. The surface of the water lay deep beneath the deepest dust of the dead people, and thence threw up its picture of the sky; but I think it would not be a moderate thirst that would induce me to drink of that well. On leaving the church we bought a little gilt crucifix. . . . . On Sunday evening I paid a short visit to Mr. Powers, and, as usual, was entertained and instructed with his conversation. It did not, indeed, turn upon artistical subjects; but the artistic is only one side of his character, and, I think, not the principal side. He might have achieved valuable success as an engineer and mechanician. He gave a dissertation on flying-machines, evidently from his own experience, and came to the conclusion that it is impossible to fly by means of steam or any other motive-power now known to man. No force hitherto attained would suffice to lift the engine which generated it. He appeared to anticipate that flying will be a future mode of locomotion, but not till the moral condition of mankind is so improved as to obviate the bad uses to which the power might be applied. Another topic discussed was a cure for complaints of the chest by the inhalation of nitric acid; and he produced his own apparatus for that purpose, being merely a tube inserted into a bottle containing a small quantity of the acid, just enough to produce the gas for inhalation. He told me, too, a remedy for burns accidentally discovered by himself; viz., to wear wash-leather, or something equivalent, over the burn, and keep it constantly wet. It prevents all pain, and cures by the exclusion of the air. He evidently has a great tendency to empirical remedies, and would have made a natural doctor of mighty potency, possessing the shrewd sense, inventive faculty, and self-reliance that such persons require. It is very singular that there should be an ideal vein in a man of this character. This morning he called to see me, with intelligence of the failure of the new attempt to lay the electric cable between England and America; and here, too, it appears the misfortune might have been avoided if a plan of his own for laying the cable had been adopted. He explained his process, and made it seem as practicable as to put up a bell-wire. I do not remember how or why (but appositely) he repeated some verses, from a pretty little ballad about fairies, that had struck his fancy, and he wound up his talk with some acute observations on the characters of General Jackson and other public men. He told an anecdote, illustrating the old general's small acquaintance with astronomical science, and his force of will in compelling a whole dinner-party of better instructed people than himself to succumb to him in an argument about eclipses and the planetary system generally. Powers witnessed the scene himself. He thinks that General Jackson was a man of the keenest and surest intuitions, in respect to men and measures, but with no power of reasoning out his own conclusions, or of imparting them intellectually to other persons. Men who have known Jackson intimately, and in great affairs, would not agree as to this intellectual and argumentative deficiency, though they would fully allow the intuitive faculty. I have heard General Pierce tell a striking instance of Jackson's power of presenting his own view of a subject with irresistible force to the mind of the auditor. President Buchanan has likewise expressed to me as high admiration of Jackson as I ever heard one man award to another. Surely he was a great man, and his native strength, as well of intellect as character, compelled every man to be his tool that came within his reach; and the more cunning the individual might be, it served only to make him the sharper tool. Speaking of Jackson, and remembering Raphael's picture of Pope Julius II., the best portrait in the whole world, and excellent in all its repetitions, I wish it had been possible for Raphael to paint General Jackson! Referring again to General Jackson's intuitions, and to Powers's idea that he was unable to render a reason to himself or others for what he chose to do, I should have thought that this very probably might have been the case, were there not such strong evidence to the contrary. The highest, or perhaps any high administrative ability is intuitive, and precedes argument, and rises above it. It is a revelation of the very thing to be done, and its propriety and necessity are felt so strongly that very likely it cannot be talked about; if the doer can likewise talk, it is an additional and gratuitous faculty, as little to be expected as that a poet should be able to write an explanatory criticism on his own poem. The English overlook this in their scheme of government, which requires that the members of the national executive should be orators, and the readiest and most fluent orators that can be found. The very fact (on which they are selected) that they are men of words makes it improbable that they are likewise men of deeds. And it is only tradition and old custom, founded on an obsolete state of things, that assigns any value to parliamentary oratory. The world has done with it, except as an intellectual pastime. The speeches have no effect till they are converted into newspaper paragraphs; and they had better be composed as such, in the first place, and oratory reserved for churches, courts of law, and public dinner-tables. July 10th.--My wife and I went yesterday forenoon to see the Church of San Marco, with which is connected a convent of Dominicans. . . . . The interior is not less than three or four hundred years old, and is in the classic style, with a flat ceiling, gilded, and a lofty arch, supported by pillars, between the nave and choir. There are no side aisles, but ranges of shrines on both sides of the nave, each beneath its own pair of pillars and pediments. The pavement is of brick, with here and there a marble tombstone inlaid. It is not a magnificent church; but looks dingy with time and apparent neglect, though rendered sufficiently interesting by statues of mediaeval date by John of Bologna and other old sculptors, and by monumental busts and bas-reliefs: also, there is a wooden crucifix by Giotto, with ancient gilding on it; and a painting of Christ, which was considered a wonderful work in its day. Each shrine, or most of them, at any rate, had its dark old picture, and there is a very old and hideous mosaic of the Virgin and two saints, which I looked at very slightly, with the purpose of immediately forgetting it. Savonarola, the reforming monk, was a brother of this convent, and was torn from its shelter, to be subsequently hanged and burnt in the Grand Ducal Piazza. A large chapel in the left transept is of the Salviati family, dedicated to St. Anthony, and decorated with several statues of saints, and with some old frescos. When we had more than sufficiently examined these, the custode proposed to show us some frescos of Fra Angelico, and conducted us into a large cloister, under the arches of which, and beneath a covering of glass, he pointed to a picture of St. Dominic kneeling at the Cross. There are two or three others by the angelic friar in different parts of the cloister, and a regular series, filling up all the arches, by various artists. Its four-sided, cloistered walk surrounds a square, open to the sky as usual, and paved with gray stones that have no inscriptions, but probably are laid over graves. Its walls, however, are incrusted, and the walk itself is paved with monumental inscriptions on marble, none of which, so far as I observed, were of ancient date. Either the fashion of thus commemorating the dead is not ancient in Florence, or the old tombstones have been removed to make room for new ones. I do not know where the monks themselves have their burial-place; perhaps in an inner cloister, which we did not see. All the inscriptions here, I believe, were in memory of persons not connected with the convent. A door in the wall of the cloister admitted us into the chapter-house, its interior moderately spacious, with a roof formed by intersecting arches. Three sides of the walls were covered with blessed whitewash; but on the fourth side, opposite to the entrance, was a great fresco of the Crucifixion, by Fra Angelico, surrounded with a border or pictured framework, in which are represented the heads of saints, prophets, and sibyls, as large as life. The cross of the Saviour and those of the thieves were painted against a dark red sky; the figures upon them were lean and attenuated, evidently the vague conceptions of a man who had never seen a naked figure. Beneath, was a multitude of people, most of whom were saints who had lived and been martyred long after the Crucifixion; and some of these had wounds from which gilded rays shone forth, as if the inner glory and blessedness of the holy men blazed through them. It is a very ugly picture, and its ugliness is not that of strength and vigor, but of weakness and incompetency. Fra Angelico should have confined himself to miniature heads, in which his delicacy of touch and minute labor often produce an excellent effect. The custode informed us that there were more frescos of this pious artist in the interior of the convent, into which I might be allowed admittance, but not my wife. I declined seeing them, and heartily thanked heaven for my escape. Returning through the church, we stopped to look at a shrine on the right of the entrance, where several wax candles were lighted, and the steps of which were crowded with worshippers. It was evidently a spot of special sanctity, and, approaching the steps, we saw, behind a gilded framework of stars and protected by glass, a wooden image of the Saviour, naked, covered with spots of blood, crowned with thorns, and expressing all the human wretchedness that the carver's skill could represent. The whole shrine, within the glass, was hung with offerings, as well of silver and gold as of tinsel and trumpery, and the body of Christ glistened with gold chains and ornaments, and with watches of silver and gold, some of which appeared to be of very old manufacture, and others might be new. Amid all this glitter the face of pain and grief looked forth, not a whit comforted. While we stood there, a woman, who had been praying, arose from her knees and laid an offering of a single flower upon the shrine. The corresponding arch, on the opposite side of the entrance, contained a wax-work within a large glass case, representing the Nativity. I do not remember how the Blessed Infant looked, but the Virgin was gorgeously dressed in silks, satins, and gauzes, with spangles and ornaments of all kinds, and, I believe, brooches of real diamonds on her bosom. Her attire, judging from its freshness and newness of glitter, might have been put on that very morning. July 13th.--We went for the second time, this morning, to the Academy of Fine Arts, and I looked pretty thoroughly at the Pre-Raphaelite pictures, few of which are really worth looking at nowadays. Cimabue and Giotto might certainly be dismissed, henceforth and forever, without any detriment to the cause of good art. There is what seems to me a better picture than either of these has produced, by Bonamico Buffalmacco, an artist of about their date or not long after. The first real picture in the series is the "Adoration of the Magi," by Gentile da Fabriano, a really splendid work in all senses, with noble and beautiful figures in it, and a crowd of personages, managed with great skill. Three pictures by Perugino are the only other ones I cared to look at. In one of these, the face of the Virgin who holds the dead Christ on her knees has a deeper expression of woe than can ever have been painted since. After Perugino the pictures cease to be interesting; the art came forward with rapid strides, but the painters and their productions do not take nearly so much hold of the spectator as before. They all paint better than Giotto and Cimabue,--in some respects better than Perugino; but they paint in vain, probably because they were not nearly so much in earnest, and meant far less, though possessing the dexterity to express far more. Andrea del Sarto appears to have been a good painter, yet I always turn away readily from his pictures. I looked again, and for a good while, at Carlo Dolce's portrait of the Eternal Father, for it is a miracle and masterpiece of absurdity, and almost equally a miracle of pictorial art. It is the All-powerless, a fair-haired, soft, consumptive deity, with a mouth that has fallen open through very weakness. He holds one hand on his stomach, as if the wickedness and wretchedness of mankind made him qualmish; and he is looking down out of Heaven with an expression of pitiable appeal, or as if seeking somewhere for assistance in his heavy task of ruling the universe. You might fancy such a being falling on his knees before a strong-willed man, and beseeching him to take the reins of omnipotence out of his hands. No wonder that wrong gets the better of right, and that good and ill are confounded, if the Supreme Head were as here depicted; for I never saw, and nobody else ever saw, so perfect a representation of a person burdened with a task infinitely above his strength. If Carlo Dolce had been wicked enough to know what he was doing, the picture would have been most blasphemous,--a satire, in the very person of the Almighty, against all incompetent rulers, and against the rickety machine and crazy action of the universe. Heaven forgive me for such thoughts as this picture has suggested! It must be added that the great original defect in the character as here represented is an easy good-nature. I wonder what Michael Angelo would have said to this painting. In the large, enclosed court connected with the Academy there are a number of statues, bas-reliefs, and casts, and what was especially interesting, the vague and rude commencement of a statue of St. Matthew by Michael Angelo. The conceptions of this great sculptor were so godlike that he seems to have been discontented at not likewise possessing the godlike attribute of creating and embodying them with an instantaneous thought, and therefore we often find sculptures from his hand left at the critical point of their struggle to get out of the marble. The statue of St. Matthew looks like the antediluvian fossil of a human being of an epoch when humanity was mightier and more majestic than now, long ago imprisoned in stone, and half uncovered again. July 16th.--We went yesterday forenoon to see the Bargello. I do not know anything more picturesque in Florence than the great interior court of this ancient Palace of the Podesta, with the lofty height of the edifice looking down into the enclosed space, dark and stern, and the armorial bearings of a long succession of magistrates carved in stone upon the walls, a garland, as it were, of these Gothic devices extending quite round the court. The best feature of the whole is the broad stone staircase, with its heavy balustrade, ascending externally from the court to the iron-grated door in the second story. We passed the sentinels under the lofty archway that communicates with the street, and went up the stairs without being questioned or impeded. At the iron-grated door, however, we were met by two officials in uniform, who courteously informed us that there was nothing to be exhibited in the Bargello except an old chapel containing some frescos by Giotto, and that these could only be seen by making a previous appointment with the custode, he not being constantly on hand. I was not sorry to escape the frescos, though one of them is a portrait of Dante. We next went to the Church of the Badia, which is built in the form of a Greek cross, with a flat roof embossed and once splendid with now tarnished gold. The pavement is of brick, and the walls of dark stone, similar to that of the interior of the cathedral (pietra serena), and there being, according to Florentine custom, but little light, the effect was sombre, though the cool gloomy dusk was refreshing after the hot turmoil and dazzle of the adjacent street. Here we found three or four Gothic tombs, with figures of the deceased persons stretched in marble slumber upon them. There were likewise a picture or two, which it was impossible to see; indeed, I have hardly ever met with a picture in a church that was not utterly wasted and thrown away in the deep shadows of the chapel it was meant to adorn. If there is the remotest chance of its being seen, the sacristan hangs a curtain before it for the sake of his fee for withdrawing it. In the chapel of the Bianco family we saw (if it could be called seeing) what is considered the finest oil-painting of Fra Filippo Lippi. It was evidently hung with reference to a lofty window on the other side of the church, whence sufficient light might fall upon it to show a picture so vividly painted as this is, and as most of Fra Filippo Lippi's are. The window was curtained, however, and the chapel so dusky that I could make out nothing. Several persons came in to say their prayers during the little time that we remained in the church, and as we came out we passed a good woman who sat knitting in the coolness of the vestibule, which was lined with mural tombstones. Probably she spends the day thus, keeping up the little industry of her fingers, slipping into the church to pray whenever a devotional impulse swells into her heart, and asking an alms as often as she sees a person of charitable aspect. From the church we went to the Uffizi gallery, and reinspected the greater part of it pretty faithfully. We had the good fortune, too, again to get admittance into the cabinet of bronzes, where we admired anew the wonderful airiness of John of Bologna's Mercury, which, as I now observed, rests on nothing substantial, but on the breath of a zephyr beneath him. We also saw a bronze bust of one of the Medici by Benvenuto Cellini, and a thousand other things the curiosity of which is overlaid by their multitude. The Roman eagle, which I have recorded to be about the size of a blackbird, I now saw to be as large as a pigeon. On our way towards the door of the gallery, at our departure, we saw the cabinet of gems open, and again feasted our eyes with its concentrated brilliancies and magnificences. Among them were two crystal cups, with engraved devices, and covers of enamelled gold, wrought by Benvenuto Cellini, and wonderfully beautiful. But it is idle to mention one or two things, when all are so beautiful and curious; idle, too, because language is not burnished gold, with here and there a brighter word flashing like a diamond; and therefore no amount of talk will give the slightest idea of one of these elaborate handiworks. July 27th.--I seldom go out nowadays, having already seen Florence tolerably well, and the streets being very hot, and myself having been engaged in sketching out a romance [The Marble Faun.--ED.], which whether it will ever come to anything is a point yet to be decided. At any rate, it leaves me little heart for journalizing and describing new things; and six months of uninterrupted monotony would be more valuable to me just now, than the most brilliant succession of novelties. Yesterday I spent a good deal of time in watching the setting out of a wedding party from our door; the bride being the daughter of an English lady, the Countess of ------. After all, there was nothing very characteristic. The bridegroom is a young man of English birth, son of the Countess of St. G------, who inhabits the third piano of this Casa del Bello. The very curious part of the spectacle was the swarm of beggars who haunted the street all day; the most wretched mob conceivable, chiefly women, with a few blind people, and some old men and boys. Among these the bridal party distributed their beneficence in the shape of some handfuls of copper, with here and there a half-paul intermixed; whereupon the whole wretched mob flung themselves in a heap upon the pavement, struggling, lighting, tumbling one over another, and then looking up to the windows with petitionary gestures for more and more, and still for more. Doubtless, they had need enough, for they looked thin, sickly, ill-fed, and the women ugly to the last degree. The wedding party had a breakfast above stairs, which lasted till four o'clock, and then the bridegroom took his bride in a barouche and pair, which was already crammed with his own luggage and hers. . . . . He was a well-looking young man enough, in a uniform of French gray with silver epaulets; more agreeable in aspect than his bride, who, I think, will have the upper hand in their domestic life. I observed that, on getting into the barouche, he sat down on her dress, as he could not well help doing, and received a slight reprimand in consequence. After their departure, the wedding guests took their leave; the most noteworthy person being the Pope's Nuncio (the young man being son of the Pope's Chamberlain, and one of the Grand Duke's Noble Guard), an ecclesiastical personage in purple stockings, attended by two priests, all of whom got into a coach, the driver and footmen of which wore gold-laced cocked hats and other splendors. To-day I paid a short visit to the gallery of the Pitti Palace. I looked long at a Madonna of Raphael's, the one which is usually kept in the Grand Duke's private apartments, only brought into the public gallery for the purpose of being copied. It is the holiest of all Raphael's Madonnas, with a great reserve in the expression, a sense of being apart, and yet with the utmost tenderness and sweetness; although she drops her eyelids before her like a veil, as it were, and has a primness of eternal virginity about the mouth. It is one of Raphael's earlier works, when he mixed more religious sentiment with his paint than afterwards. Perugino's pictures give the impression of greater sincerity and earnestness than Raphael's, though the genius of Raphael often gave him miraculous vision. July 28th.--Last evening we went to the Powers's, and sat with them on the terrace, at the top of the house, till nearly ten o'clock. It was a delightful, calm, summer evening, and we were elevated far above all the adjacent roofs, and had a prospect of the greater part of Florence and its towers, and the surrounding hills, while directly beneath us rose the trees of a garden, and they hardly sent their summits higher than we sat. At a little distance, with only a house or two between, was a theatre in full action, the Teatro Goldoni, which is an open amphitheatre, in the ancient fashion, without any roof. We could see the upper part of the proscenium, and, had we been a little nearer, might have seen the whole performance, as did several boys who crept along the tops of the surrounding houses. As it was, we heard the music and the applause, and now and then an actor's stentorian tones, when we chose to listen. Mrs. P------ and my wife, U---- and Master Bob, sat in a group together, and chatted in one corner of our aerial drawing-room, while Mr. Powers and myself leaned against the parapet, and talked of innumerable things. When the clocks struck the hour, or the bells rang from the steeples, as they are continually doing, I spoke of the sweetness of the Florence bells, the tones of some of them being as if the bell were full of liquid melody, and shed it through the air on being upturned. I had supposed, in my lack of musical ear, that the bells of the Campanile were the sweetest; but Mr. Powers says that there is a defect in their tone, and that the bell of the Palazzo Vecchio is the most melodious he ever heard. Then he spoke of his having been a manufacturer of organs, or, at least, of reeds for organs, at one period of his life. I wonder what he has not been! He told me of an invention of his in the musical line, a jewsharp with two tongues; and by and by he produced it for my inspection. It was carefully kept in a little wooden case, and was very neatly and elaborately constructed, with screws to tighten it, and a silver centre-piece between the two tongues. Evidently a great deal of thought had been bestowed on this little harp; but Mr. Powers told me that it was an utter failure, because the tongues were apt to interfere and jar with one another, although the strain of music was very sweet and melodious-- as he proved, by playing on it a little--when everything went right. It was a youthful production, and he said that its failure had been a great disappointment to him at the time; whereupon I congratulated him that his failures had been in small matters, and his successes in great ones. We talked, furthermore, about instinct and reason, and whether the brute creation have souls, and, if they have none, how justice is to be done them for their sufferings here; and Mr. Powers came finally to the conclusion that brutes suffer only in appearance, and that God enjoys for them all that they seem to enjoy, and that man is the only intelligent and sentient being. We reasoned high about other states of being; and I suggested the possibility that there might be beings inhabiting this earth, contemporaneously with us, and close beside us, but of whose existence and whereabout we could have no perception, nor they of ours, because we are endowed with different sets of senses; for certainly it was in God's power to create beings who should communicate with nature by innumerable other senses than those few which we possess. Mr. Powers gave hospitable reception to this idea, and said that it had occurred to himself; and he has evidently thought much and earnestly about such matters; but is apt to let his idea crystallize into a theory, before he can have sufficient data for it. He is a Swedenborgian in faith. The moon had risen behind the trees, while we were talking, and Powers intimated his idea that beings analogous to men--men in everything except the modifications necessary to adapt them to their physical circumstances--inhabited the planets, and peopled them with beautiful shapes. Each planet, however, must have its own standard of the beautiful, I suppose; and probably his sculptor's eye would not see much to admire in the proportions of an inhabitant of Saturn. The atmosphere of Florence, at least when we ascend a little way into it, suggests planetary speculations. Galileo found it so, and Mr. Powers and I pervaded the whole universe; but finally crept down his garret-stairs, and parted, with a friendly pressure of the hand. VILLA MONTANTO. MONTE BENI. August 2d.--We had grown weary of the heat of Florence within the walls, . . . . there being little opportunity for air and exercise except within the precincts of our little garden, which, also, we feared might breed malaria, or something akin to it. We have therefore taken this suburban villa for the two next months, and, yesterday morning, we all came out hither. J----- had preceded us with B. P------. The villa is on a hill called Bellosguardo, about a mile beyond the Porta Romana. Less than half an hour's walk brought us, who were on foot, to the iron gate of our villa, which we found shut and locked. We shouted to be let in, and while waiting for somebody to appear, there was a good opportunity to contemplate the external aspect of the villa. After we had waited a few minutes, J----- came racing down to the gate, laughing heartily, and said that Bob and he had been in the house, but had come out, shutting the door behind them; and as the door closed with a springlock, they could not get in again. Now as the key of the outer gate as well as that of the house itself was in the pocket of J-----'s coat, left inside, we were shut out of our own castle, and compelled to carry on a siege against it, without much likelihood of taking it, although the garrison was willing to surrender. But B. P------ called in the assistance of the contadini who cultivate the ground, and live in the farm-house close by; and one of them got into a window by means of a ladder, so that the keys were got, the gates opened, and we finally admitted. Before examining any other part of the house, we climbed to the top of the tower, which, indeed, is not very high, in proportion to its massive square. Very probably, its original height was abbreviated, in compliance with the law that lowered so many of the fortified towers of noblemen within the walls of Florence. . . . . The stairs were not of stone, built in with the original mass of the tower, as in English castles, but of now decayed wood, which shook beneath us, and grew more and more crazy as we ascended. It will not be many years before the height of the tower becomes unattainable. . . . . Near at hand, in the vicinity of the city, we saw the convent of Monte Olivetto, and other structures that looked like convents, being built round an enclosed square; also numerous white villas, many of which had towers, like that we were standing upon, square and massive, some of them battlemented on the summit, and others apparently modernized for domestic purposes. Among them U---- pointed out Galileo's tower, whither she made an excursion the other day. It looked lower than our own, but seemed to stand on a higher elevation. We also saw the duke's villa, the Poggio, with a long avenue of cypresses leading from it, as if a funeral were going forth. And having wasted thus much of description on the landscape, I will finish with saying that it lacked only water to be a very fine one. It is strange what a difference the gleam of water makes, and how a scene awakens and comes to life wherever it is visible. The landscape, moreover, gives the beholder (at least, this beholder) a sense of oppressive sunshine and scanty shade, and does not incite a longing to wander through it on foot, as a really delightful landscape should. The vine, too, being cultivated in so trim a manner, does not suggest that idea of luxuriant fertility, which is the poetical notion of a vineyard. The olive-orchards have a pale and unlovely hue. An English view would have been incomparably richer in its never-fading green; and in my own country, the wooded hills would have been more delightful than these peaks and ridges of dreary and barren sunshine; and there would have been the bright eyes of half a dozen little lakes, looking heavenward, within an extent like that of the Val d' Arno. By and by mamma's carriage came along the dusty road, and passed through the iron gateway, which we had left open for her reception. We shouted down to her and R-----, and they waved their handkerchiefs upward to us; and, on my way down, I met R----- and the servant coming up through the ghostly rooms. The rest of the day we spent mostly in exploring the premises. The house itself is of almost bewildering extent, insomuch that we might each of us have a suite of rooms individually. I have established myself on the ground-floor, where I have a dressing-room, a large vaulted saloon, hung with yellow damask, and a square writing-study, the walls and ceilings of the two latter apartments being ornamented with angels and cherubs aloft in fresco, and with temples, statues, vases, broken columns, peacocks, parrots, vines, and sunflowers below. I know not how many more saloons, anterooms, and sleeping-chambers there are on this same basement story, besides an equal number over them, and a great subterranean establishment. I saw some immense jars there, which I suppose were intended to hold oil; and iron kettles, for what purpose I cannot tell. There is also a chapel in the house, but it is locked up, and we cannot yet with certainty find the door of it, nor even, in this great wilderness of a house, decide absolutely what space the holy precincts occupy. Adjoining U----'s chamber, which is in the tower, there is a little oratory, hung round with sacred prints of very ancient date, and with crucifixes, holy-water vases, and other consecrated things; and here, within a glass case, there is the representation of an undraped little boy in wax, very prettily modelled, and holding up a heart that looks like a bit of red sealing-wax. If I had found him anywhere else I should have taken him for Cupid; but, being in an oratory, I presume him to have some religious signification. In the servants' room a crucifix hung on one side of the bed, and a little vase for holy water, now overgrown with a cobweb, on the other; and, no doubt, all the other sleeping-apartments would have been equally well provided, only that their occupants were to be heretics. The lower floor of the house is tolerably furnished, and looks cheerful with its frescos, although the bare pavements in every room give an impression of discomfort. But carpets are universally taken up in Italy during summer-time. It must have been an immense family that could have ever filled such a house with life. We go on voyages of discovery, and when in quest of any particular point, are likely enough to fetch up at some other. This morning I had difficulty in finding my way again to the top of the tower. One of the most peculiar rooms is constructed close to the tower, under the roof of the main building, but with no external walls on two sides! It is thus left open to the air, I presume for the sake of coolness. A parapet runs round the exposed sides for the sake of security. Some of the palaces in Florence have such open loggias in their upper stories, and I saw others on our journey hither, after arriving in Tuscany. The grounds immediately around the house are laid out in gravel-walks, and ornamented with shrubbery, and with what ought to be a grassy lawn; but the Italian sun is quite as little favorable to beauty of that kind as our own. I have enjoyed the luxury, however, almost for the first time since I left my hill-top at the Wayside, of flinging myself at full length on the ground without any fear of catching cold. Moist England would punish a man soundly for taking such liberties with her greensward. A podere, or cultivated tract, comprising several acres, belongs to the villa, and seems to be fertile, like all the surrounding country. The possessions of different proprietors are not separated by fences, but only marked out by ditches; and it seems possible to walk miles and miles, along the intersecting paths, without obstruction. The rural laborers, so far as I have observed, go about in their shirt-sleeves, and look very much like tanned and sunburnt Yankees. Last night it was really a work of time and toil to go about making our defensive preparations for the night; first closing the iron gate, then the ponderous and complicated fastenings of the house door, then the separate barricadoes of each iron-barred window on the lower floor, with a somewhat slighter arrangement above. There are bolts and shutters, however, for every window in the house, and I suppose it would not be amiss to put them all in use. Our garrison is so small that we must depend more upon the strength of our fortifications than upon our own active efforts in case of an attack. In England, in an insulated country house, we should need all these bolts and bars, and Italy is not thought to be the safer country of the two. It deserves to be recorded that the Count Montanto, a nobleman, and seemingly a man of property, should deem it worth while to let his country seat, and reside during the hot months in his palace in the city, for the consideration of a comparatively small sum a month. He seems to contemplate returning hither for the autumn and winter, when the situation must be very windy and bleak, and the cold death-like in these great halls; and then, it is to be supposed, he will let his palace in town. The Count, through the agency of his son, bargained very stiffly for, and finally obtained, three dollars in addition to the sum which we at first offered him. This indicates that even a little money is still a matter of great moment in Italy. Signor del Bello, who, I believe, is also a nobleman, haggled with us about some cracked crockery at our late residence, and finally demanded and received fifty cents in compensation. But this poor gentleman has been a spendthrift, and now acts as the agent of another. August 3d.--Yesterday afternoon William Story called on me, he being on a day or two's excursion from Siena, where he is spending the summer with his family. He was very entertaining and conversative, as usual, and said, in reply to my question whether he were not anxious to return to Cleopatra, that he had already sketched out another subject for sculpture, which would employ him during next winter. He told me, what I was glad to hear, that his sketches of Italian life, intended for the "Atlantic Monthly," and supposed to be lost, have been recovered. Speaking of the superstitiousness of the Italians, he said that they universally believe in the influence of the evil eye. The evil influence is supposed not to be dependent on the will of the possessor of the evil eye; on the contrary, the persons to whom he wishes well are the very ones to suffer by it. It is oftener found in monks than in any other class of people; and on meeting a monk, and encountering his eye, an Italian usually makes a defensive sign by putting both hands behind him, with the forefingers and little fingers extended, although it is a controverted point whether it be not more efficacious to extend the hand with its outspread fingers towards the suspected person. It is considered an evil omen to meet a monk on first going out for the day. The evil eye may be classified with the phenomena of mesmerism. The Italians, especially the Neapolitans, very generally wear amulets. Pio Nono, perhaps as being the chief of all monks and other religious people, is supposed to have an evil eye of tenfold malignancy; and its effect has been seen in the ruin of all schemes for the public good so soon as they are favored by him. When the pillar in the Piazza de' Spagna, commemorative of his dogma of the Immaculate Conception, was to be erected, the people of Rome refused to be present, or to have anything to do with it, unless the pope promised to abstain from interference. His Holiness did promise, but so far broke his word as to be present one day while it was being erected, and on that day a man was killed. A little while ago there was a Lord Clifford, an English Catholic nobleman, residing in Italy, and, happening to come to Rome, he sent his compliments to Pio Nono, and requested the favor of an interview. The pope, as it happened, was indisposed, or for some reason could not see his lordship, but very kindly sent him his blessing. Those who knew of it shook their heads, and intimated that it would go ill with his lordship now that he had been blessed by Pio Nono, and the very next day poor Lord Clifford was dead! His Holiness had better construe the scriptural injunction literally, and take to blessing his enemies. I walked into town with J------ this morning, and, meeting a monk in the Via Furnace, I thought it no more than reasonable, as the good father fixed his eyes on me, to provide against the worst by putting both hands behind me, with the forefingers and little fingers stuck out. In speaking of the little oratory connected with U----'s chamber, I forgot to mention the most remarkable object in it. It is a skull, the size of life (or death). . . . . This part of the house must be very old, probably coeval with the tower. The ceiling of U----'s apartment is vaulted with intersecting arches; and adjoining it is a very large saloon, likewise with a vaulted and groined ceiling, and having a cushioned divan running all round the walls. The windows of these rooms look out on the Val d' Arno. The apartment above this saloon is of the same size, and hung with engraved portraits, printed on large sheets by the score and hundred together, and enclosed in wooden frames. They comprise the whole series of Roman emperors, the succession of popes, the kings of Europe, the doges of Venice, and the sultans of Turkey. The engravings bear different dates between 1685 and thirty years later, and were executed at Rome. August 4th.--We ascended our tower yesterday afternoon to see the sunset. In my first sketch of the Val d' Arno I said that the Arno seemed to hold its course near the bases of the hills. I now observe that the line of trees which marks its current divides the valley into two pretty equal parts, and the river runs nearly east and west. . . . . At last, when it was growing dark, we went down, groping our way over the shaky staircases, and peeping into each dark chamber as we passed. I gratified J----- exceedingly by hitting my nose against the wall. Reaching the bottom, I went into the great saloon, and stood at a window watching the lights twinkle forth, near and far, in the valley, and listening to the convent bells that sounded from Monte Olivetto, and more remotely still. The stars came out, and the constellation of the Dipper hung exactly over the Val d' Arno, pointing to the North Star above the hills on my right. August 12th.--We drove into town yesterday afternoon, with Miss Blagden, to call on Mr. Kirkup, an old Englishman who has resided a great many years in Florence. He is noted as an antiquarian, and has the reputation of being a necromancer, not undeservedly, as he is deeply interested in spirit-rappings, and holds converse, through a medium, with dead poets and emperors. He lives in an old house, formerly a residence of the Knights Templars, hanging over the Arno, just as you come upon the Ponte Vecchio; and, going up a dark staircase and knocking at a door on one side of the landing-place, we were received by Mr. Kirkup. He had had notice of our visit, and was prepared for it, being dressed in a blue frock-coat of rather an old fashion, with a velvet collar, and in a thin waistcoat and pantaloons fresh from the drawer; looking very sprucely, in short, and unlike his customary guise, for Miss Blagden hinted to us that the poor gentleman is generally so untidy that it is not quite pleasant to take him by the hand. He is rather low of stature, with a pale, shrivelled face, and hair and beard perfectly white, and the hair of a particularly soft and silken texture. He has a high, thin nose, of the English aristocratic type; his eyes have a queer, rather wild look, and the eyebrows are arched above them, so that he seems all the time to be seeing something that strikes him with surprise. I judged him to be a little crack-brained, chiefly on the strength of this expression. His whole make is delicate, his hands white and small, and his appearance and manners those of a gentleman, with rather more embroidery of courtesy than belongs to an Englishman. He appeared to be very nervous, tremulous, indeed, to his fingers' ends, without being in any degree disturbed or embarrassed by our presence. Finally, he is very deaf; an infirmity that quite took away my pleasure in the interview, because it is impossible to say anything worth while when one is compelled to raise one's voice above its ordinary level. He ushered us through two or three large rooms, dark, dusty, hung with antique-looking pictures, and lined with bookcases containing, I doubt not, a very curious library. Indeed, he directed my attention to one case, and said that he had collected those works, in former days, merely for the sake of laughing at them. They were books of magic and occult sciences. What he seemed really to value, however, were some manuscript copies of Dante, of which he showed us two: one, a folio on parchment, beautifully written in German text, the letters as clear and accurately cut as printed type; the other a small volume, fit, as Mr. Kirkup said, to be carried in a capacious mediaeval sleeve. This also was on vellum, and as elegantly executed as the larger one; but the larger had beautiful illuminations, the vermilion and gold of which looked as brilliant now as they did five centuries ago. Both of these books were written early in the fourteenth century. Mr. Kirkup has also a plaster cast of Dante's face, which he believes to be the original one taken from his face after death; and he has likewise his own accurate tracing from Giotto's fresco of Dante in the chapel of the Bargello. This fresco was discovered through Mr. Kirkup's means, and the tracing is particularly valuable, because the original has been almost destroyed by rough usage in drawing out a nail that had been driven into the eye. It represents the profile of a youthful but melancholy face, and has the general outline of Dante's features in other portraits. Dante has held frequent communications with Mr. Kirkup through a medium, the poet being described by the medium as wearing the same dress seen in the youthful portrait, but as hearing more resemblance to the cast taken from his dead face than to the picture from his youthful one. There was a very good picture of Savonarola in one of the rooms, and many other portraits, paintings, and drawings, some of them ancient, and others the work of Mr. Kirkup himself. He has the torn fragment of an exquisite drawing of a nude figure by Rubens, and a portfolio of other curious drawings. And besides books and works of art, he has no end of antique knick-knackeries, none of which we had any time to look at; among others some instruments with which nuns used to torture themselves in their convents by way of penance. But the greatest curiosity of all, and no antiquity, was a pale, large-eyed little girl, about four years old, who followed the conjurer's footsteps wherever he went. She was the brightest and merriest little thing in the world, and frisked through those shadowy old chambers, among the dead people's trumpery, as gayly as a butterfly flits among flowers and sunshine. The child's mother was a beautiful girl named Regina, whose portrait Mr. Kirkup showed us on the wall. I never saw a more beautiful and striking face claiming to be a real one. She was a Florentine, of low birth, and she lived with the old necromancer as his spiritual medium. He showed us a journal, kept during her lifetime, and read from it his notes of an interview with the Czar Alexander, when that potentate communicated to Mr. Kirkup that he had been poisoned. The necromancer set a great value upon Regina, . . . . and when she died he received her poor baby into his heart, and now considers it absolutely his own. At any rate, it is a happy belief for him, since he has nothing else in the world to love, and loves the child entirely, and enjoys all the bliss of fatherhood, though he must have lived as much as seventy years before he began to taste it. The child inherits her mother's gift of communication with the spiritual world, so that the conjurer can still talk with Regina through the baby which she left, and not only with her, but with Dante, and any other great spirit that may choose to visit him. It is a very strange story, and this child might be put at once into a romance, with all her history and environment; the ancient Knight Templar palace, with the Arno flowing under the iron-barred windows, and the Ponte Vecchio, covered with its jewellers' shops, close at hand; the dark, lofty chambers with faded frescos on the ceilings, black pictures hanging on the walls, old books on the shelves, and hundreds of musty antiquities, emitting an odor of past centuries; the shrivelled, white-bearded old man, thinking all the time of ghosts, and looking into the child's eyes to seek them; and the child herself, springing so freshly out of the soil, so pretty, so intelligent, so playful, with never a playmate save the conjurer and a kitten. It is a Persian kitten, and lay asleep in a window; but when I touched it, it started up at once in as gamesome a mood as the child herself. The child looks pale, and no wonder, seldom or never stirring out of that old palace, or away from the river atmosphere. Miss Blagden advised Mr. Kirkup to go with her to the seaside or into the country, and he did not deny that it might do her good, but seemed to be hampered by an old man's sluggishness and dislike of change. I think he will not live a great while, for he seems very frail. When he dies the little girl will inherit what property he may leave. A lady, Catharine Fleeting, an Englishwoman, and a friend of Mr. Kirkup, has engaged to take her in charge. She followed us merrily to the door, and so did the Persian kitten, and Mr. Kirkup shook hands with us, over and over again, with vivacious courtesy, his manner having been characterized by a great deal of briskness throughout the interview. He expressed himself delighted to have met one (whose books he had read), and said that the day would be a memorable one to him,--which I did not in the least believe. Mr. Kirkup is an intimate friend of Trelawny, author of "Adventures of a Younger Son," and, long ago, the latter promised him that, if he ever came into possession of the family estate, he would divide it with him. Trelawny did really succeed to the estate, and lost no time in forwarding to his friend the legal documents, entitling him to half of the property. But Mr. Kirkup declined the gift, as he himself was not destitute, and Trelawny had a brother. There were two pictures of Trelawny in the saloons, one a slight sketch on the wall, the other a half-length portrait in a Turkish dress; both handsome, but indicating no very amiable character. It is not easy to forgive Trelawny for uncovering dead Byron's limbs, and telling that terrible story about them,--equally disgraceful to himself, be it truth or a lie. It seems that Regina had a lover, and a sister who was very disreputable It rather adds than otherwise to the romance of the affair,--the idea that this pretty little elf has no right whatever to the asylum which she has found. Her name is Imogen. The small manuscript copy of Dante which he showed me was written by a Florentine gentleman of the fourteenth century, one of whose ancestors the poet had met and talked with in Paradise. August 19th.--Here is a good Italian incident, which I find in Valery. Andrea del Castagno was a painter in Florence in the fifteenth century; and he had a friend, likewise a painter, Domenico of Venice. The latter had the secret of painting in oils, and yielded to Castagno's entreaties to impart it to him. Desirous of being the sole possessor of this great secret, Castagno waited only the night to assassinate Domenico, who so little suspected his treachery, that he besought those who found him bleeding and dying to take him to his friend Castagno, that he might die in his arms. The murderer lived to be seventy-four years old, and his crime was never suspected till he himself revealed it on his death-bed. Domenico did actually die in Castagno's arms. The death scene would have been a good one for the latter to paint in oils. September 1st.--Few things journalizable have happened during the last month, because Florence and the neighborhood have lost their novelty; and furthermore, I usually spend the whole day at home, having been engaged in planning and sketching out a romance. I have now done with this for the present, and mean to employ the rest of the time we stay here chiefly in revisiting the galleries, and seeing what remains to be seen in Florence. Last Saturday, August 28th, we went to take tea at Miss Blagden's, who has a weekly reception on that evening. We found Mr. Powers there, and by and by Mr. Boott and Mr. Trollope came in. Miss ------ has lately been exercising her faculties as a spiritual writing-medium; and, the conversation turning on that subject, Mr. Powers related some things that he had witnessed through the agency of Mr. Home, who had held a session or two at his house. He described the apparition of two mysterious hands from beneath a table round which the party were seated. These hands purported to belong to the aunt of the Countess Cotterel, who was present, and were a pair of thin, delicate, aged, lady-like hands and arms, appearing at the edge of the table, and terminating at the elbow in a sort of white mist. One of the hands took up a fan and began to use it. The countess then said, "Fan yourself as you used to do, dear aunt"; and forthwith the hands waved the fan back and forth in a peculiar manner, which the countess recognized as the manner of her dead aunt. The spirit was then requested to fan each member of the party; and accordingly, each separate individual round the table was fanned in turn, and felt the breeze sensibly upon his face. Finally, the hands sank beneath the table, I believe Mr. Powers said; but I am not quite sure that they did not melt into the air. During this apparition, Mr. Home sat at the table, but not in such a position or within such distance that he could have put out or managed the spectral hands; and of this Mr. Powers satisfied himself by taking precisely the same position after the party had retired. Mr. Powers did not feel the hands at this time, but he afterwards felt the touch of infant hands, which were at the time invisible. He told of many of the wonders, which seem to have as much right to be set down as facts as anything else that depends on human testimony. For example, Mr. K------, one of the party, gave a sudden start and exclamation. He had felt on his knee a certain token, which could have been given him only by a friend, long ago in his grave. Mr. Powers inquired what was the last thing that had been given as a present to a deceased child; and suddenly both he and his wife felt a prick as of some sharp instrument, on their knees. The present had been a penknife. I have forgotten other incidents quite as striking as these; but, with the exception of the spirit-hands, they seemed to be akin to those that have been produced by mesmerism, returning the inquirer's thoughts and veiled recollections to himself, as answers to his queries. The hands are certainly an inexplicable phenomenon. Of course, they are not portions of a dead body, nor any other kind of substance; they are impressions on the two senses, sight and touch, but how produced I cannot tell. Even admitting their appearance,--and certainly I do admit it as freely and fully as if I had seen them myself,--there is no need of supposing them to come from the world of departed spirits. Powers seems to put entire faith in the verity of spiritual communications, while acknowledging the difficulty of identifying spirits as being what they pretend to be. He is a Swedenborgian, and so far prepared to put faith in many of these phenomena. As for Home, Powers gives a decided opinion that he is a knave, but thinks him so organized, nevertheless, as to be a particularly good medium for spiritual communications. Spirits, I suppose, like earthly people, are obliged to use such instruments as will answer their purposes; but rather than receive a message from a dead friend through the organism of a rogue or charlatan, methinks I would choose to wait till we meet. But what most astonishes me is the indifference with which I listen to these marvels. They throw old ghost stories quite into the shade; they bring the whole world of spirits down amongst us, visibly and audibly; they are absolutely proved to be sober facts by evidence that would satisfy us of any other alleged realities; and yet I cannot force my mind to interest myself in them. They are facts to my understanding, which, it might have been anticipated, would have been the last to acknowledge them; but they seem not to be facts to my intuitions and deeper perceptions. My inner soul does not in the least admit them; there is a mistake somewhere. So idle and empty do I feel these stories to be, that I hesitated long whether or no to give up a few pages of this not very important journal to the record of them. We have had written communications through Miss ------ with several spirits; my wife's father, mother, two brothers, and a sister, who died long ago, in infancy; a certain Mary Hall, who announces herself as the guardian spirit of Miss ------; and, queerest of all, a Mary Runnel, who seems to be a wandering spirit, having relations with nobody, but thrusts her finger into everybody's affairs. My wife's mother is the principal communicant; she expresses strong affection, and rejoices at the opportunity of conversing with her daughter. She often says very pretty things; for instance, in a dissertation upon heavenly music; but there is a lack of substance in her talk, a want of gripe, a delusive show, a sentimental surface, with no bottom beneath it. The same sort of thing has struck me in all the poetry and prose that I have read from spiritual sources. I should judge that these effusions emanated from earthly minds, but had undergone some process that had deprived them of solidity and warmth. In the communications between my wife and her mother, I cannot help thinking that (Miss ------ being unconsciously in a mesmeric state) all the responses are conveyed to her fingers from my wife's mind. . . . . We have tried the spirits by various test questions, on every one of which they have failed egregiously. Here, however, the aforesaid Mary Runnel comes into play. The other spirits have told us that the veracity of this spirit is not to be depended upon; and so, whenever it is possible, poor Mary Runnel is thrust forward to bear the odium of every mistake or falsehood. They have avowed themselves responsible for all statements signed by themselves, and have thereby brought themselves into more than one inextricable dilemma; but it is very funny, where a response or a matter of fact has not been thus certified, how invariably Mary Runnel is made to assume the discredit of it, on its turning out to be false. It is the most ingenious arrangement that could possibly have been contrived; and somehow or other, the pranks of this lying spirit give a reality to the conversations which the more respectable ghosts quite fail in imparting. The whole matter seems to me a sort of dreaming awake. It resembles a dream, in that the whole material is, from the first, in the dreamer's mind, though concealed at various depths below the surface; the dead appear alive, as they always do in dreams; unexpected combinations occur, as continually in dreams; the mind speaks through the various persons of the drama, and sometimes astonishes itself with its own wit, wisdom, and eloquence, as often in dreams; but, in both cases, the intellectual manifestations are really of a very flimsy texture. Mary Runnel is the only personage who does not come evidently from dream-land; and she, I think, represents that lurking scepticism, that sense of unreality, of which we are often conscious, amid the most vivid phantasmagoria of a dream. I should be glad to believe in the genuineness of these spirits, if I could; but the above is the conclusion to which my soberest thoughts tend. There remains, of course, a great deal for which I cannot account, and I cannot sufficiently wonder at the pigheadedness both of metaphysicians and physiologists, in not accepting the phenomena, so far as to make them the subject of investigation. In writing the communications, Miss ------ holds the pencil rather loosely between her fingers; it moves rapidly, and with equal facility whether she fixes her eyes on the paper or not. The handwriting has far more freedom than her own. At the conclusion of a sentence, the pencil lays itself down. She sometimes has a perception of each word before it is written; at other times, she is quite unconscious what is to come next. Her integrity is absolutely indubitable, and she herself totally disbelieves in the spiritual authenticity of what is communicated through her medium. September 3d.--We walked into Florence yesterday, betimes after breakfast, it being comfortably cool, and a gray, English sky; though, indeed, the clouds had a tendency to mass themselves more than they do on an overcast English day. We found it warmer in Florence, but, not inconveniently so, even in the sunniest streets and squares. We went to the Uffizi gallery, the whole of which with its contents is now familiar to us, except the room containing drawings; and our to-day's visit was especially to them. The door giving admittance to them is the very last in the gallery; and the rooms, three in number, are, I should judge, over the Loggia de' Lanzi, looking on the Grand Ducal Piazza. The drawings hang on the walls, framed and glazed; and number, perhaps, from one to two hundred in each room; but this is only a small portion of the collection, which amounts, it is said, to twenty thousand, and is reposited in portfolios. The sketches on the walls are changed, from time to time, so as to exhibit all the most interesting ones in turn. Their whole charm is artistic, imaginative, and intellectual, and in no degree of the upholstery kind; their outward presentment being, in general, a design hastily shadowed out, by means of colored crayons, on tinted paper, or perhaps scratched rudely in pen and ink; or drawn in pencil or charcoal, and half rubbed out; very rough things, indeed, in many instances, and the more interesting on that account, because it seems as if the artist had bestirred himself to catch the first glimpse of an image that did but reveal itself and vanish. The sheets, or sometimes scraps of paper, on which they are drawn, are discolored with age, creased, soiled; but yet you are magnetized by the hand of Raphael, Michael Angelo, Leonardo, or whoever may have jotted down those rough-looking master-touches. They certainly possess a charm that is lost in the finished picture; and I was more sensible of forecasting thought, skill, and prophetic design, in these sketches than in the most consummate works that have been elaborated from them. There is something more divine in these; for I suppose the first idea of a picture is real inspiration, and all the subsequent elaboration of the master serves but to cover up the celestial germ with something that belongs to himself. At any rate, the first sketch is the more suggestive, and sets the spectator's imagination at work; whereas the picture, if a good one, leaves him nothing to do; if bad, it confuses, stupefies, disenchants, and disheartens him. First thoughts have an aroma and fragrance in them, that they do not lose in three hundred years; for so old, and a good deal more, are some of these sketches. None interested me more than some drawings, on separate pieces of paper, by Perugino, for his picture of the mother and friends of Jesus round his dead body, now at the Pitti Palace. The attendant figures are distinctly made out, as if the Virgin, and John, and Mary Magdalen had each favored the painter with a sitting; but the body of Jesus lies in the midst, dimly hinted with a few pencil-marks. There were several designs by Michael Angelo, none of which made much impression on me; the most striking was a very ugly demon, afterwards painted in the Sistine Chapel. Raphael shows several sketches of Madonnas,--one of which has flowered into the Grand Duke's especial Madonna at the Pitti Palace, but with a different face. His sketches were mostly very rough in execution; but there were two or three designs for frescos, I think, in the Vatican, very carefully executed; perhaps because these works were mainly to be done by other hands than his own. It seems to one that the Pre-Raphaelite artists made more careful drawings than the later ones; and it rather surprised me to see how much science they possessed. We looked at few other things in the gallery; and, indeed, it was not one of the days when works of art find me impressible. We stopped a little while in the Tribune, but the Venus de' Medici seemed to me to-day little more than any other piece of yellowish white marble. How strange that a goddess should stand before us absolutely unrecognized, even when we know by previous revelations that she is nothing short of divine! It is also strange that, unless when one feels the ideal charm of a statue, it becomes one of the most tedious and irksome things in the world. Either it must be a celestial thing or an old lump of stone, dusty and time-soiled, and tiring out your patience with eternally looking just the same. Once in a while you penetrate through the crust of the old sameness, and see the statue forever new and immortally young. Leaving the gallery we walked towards the Duomo, and on our way stopped to look at the beautiful Gothic niches hollowed into the exterior walls of the Church of San Michele. They are now in the process of being cleaned, and each niche is elaborately inlaid with precious marbles, and some of them magnificently gilded; and they are all surmounted with marble canopies as light and graceful as frost-work. Within stand statues, St. George, and many other saints, by Donatello and others, and all taking a hold upon one's sympathies, even if they be not beautiful. Classic statues escape you with their slippery beauty, as if they were made of ice. Rough and ugly things can be clutched. This is nonsense, and yet it means something. . . . . The streets were thronged and vociferative with more life and outcry than usual. It must have been market-day in Florence, for the commerce of the streets was in great vigor, narrow tables being set out in them, and in the squares, burdened with all kinds of small merchandise, such as cheap jewelry, glistening as brightly as what we had just seen in the gem-room of the Uffizi; crockery ware; toys, books, Italian and French; silks; slippers; old iron; all advertised by the dealers with terribly loud and high voices, that reverberated harshly from side to side of the narrow streets. Italian street-cries go through the head; not that they are so very sharp, but exceedingly hard, like a blunt iron bar. We stood at the base of the Campanile, and looked at the bas-reliefs which wreathe it round; and, above them, a row of statues; and from bottom to top a marvellous minuteness of inlaid marbles, filling up the vast and beautiful design of this heaven-aspiring tower. Looking upward to its lofty summit,--where angels might alight, lapsing downward from heaven, and gaze curiously at the bustle of men below,--I could not but feel that there is a moral charm in this faithful minuteness of Gothic architecture, filling up its outline with a million of beauties that perhaps may never be studied out by a single spectator. It is the very process of nature, and no doubt produces an effect that we know not of. Classic architecture is nothing but an outline, and affords no little points, no interstices where human feelings may cling and overgrow it like ivy. The charm, as I said, seems to be moral rather than intellectual; for in the gem-room of the Uffizi you may see fifty designs, elaborated on a small scale, that have just as much merit as the design of the Campanile. If it were only five inches long, it might be a case for some article of toilet; being two hundred feet high, its prettiness develops into grandeur as well as beauty, and it becomes really one of the wonders of the world. The design of the Pantheon, on the contrary, would retain its sublimity on whatever scale it might be represented. Returning homewards, we crossed the Ponte Vecchio, and went to the Museum of Natural History, where we gained admittance into the rooms dedicated to Galileo. They consist of a vestibule, a saloon, and a semicircular tribune, covered with a frescoed dome, beneath which stands a colossal statue of Galileo, long-bearded, and clad in a student's gown, or some voluminous garb of that kind. Around the tribune, beside and behind the statue, are six niches,--in one of which is preserved a forefinger of Galileo, fixed on a little gilt pedestal, and pointing upward, under a glass cover. It is very much shrivelled and mummy-like, of the color of parchment, and is little more than a finger-bone, with the dry skin or flesh flaking away from it; on the whole, not a very delightful relic; but Galileo used to point heavenward with this finger, and I hope has gone whither he pointed. Another niche contains two telescopes, wherewith he made some of his discoveries; they are perhaps a yard long, and of very small calibre. Other astronomical instruments are displayed in the glass cases that line the rooms; but I did not understand their use any better than the monks, who wished to burn Galileo for his heterodoxy about the planetary system. . . . . After dinner I climbed the tower. . . . . Florence lay in the sunshine, level, compact, and small of compass. Above the tiled roofs rose the tower of the Palazzo Vecchio, the loftiest and the most picturesque, though built, I suppose, with no idea of making it so. But it attains, in a singular degree, the end of causing the imagination to fly upward and alight on its airy battlements. Near it I beheld the square mass of Or San Michele, and farther to the left the bulky Duomo and the Campanile close beside it, like a slender bride or daughter; the dome of San Lorenzo too. The Arno is nowhere visible. Beyond, and on all sides of the city, the hills pile themselves lazily upward in ridges, here and there developing into a peak; towards their bases white villas were strewn numerously, but the upper region was lonely and bare. As we passed under the arch of the Porta Romana this morning, on our way into the city, we saw a queer object. It was what we at first took for a living man, in a garb of light reddish or yellowish red color, of antique or priestly fashion, and with a cowl falling behind. His face was of the same hue, and seemed to have been powdered, as the faces of maskers sometimes are. He sat in a cart, which he seemed to be driving into the Deity with a load of earthen jars and pipkins, the color of which was precisely like his own. On closer inspection, this priestly figure proved to be likewise an image of earthenware, but his lifelikeness had a very strange and rather ghastly effect. Adam, perhaps, was made of just such red earth, and had the complexion of this figure. September 7th.--I walked into town yesterday morning, by way of the Porta San Frediano. The gate of a city might be a good locality for a chapter in a novel, or for a little sketch by itself, whether by painter or writer. The great arch of the gateway, piercing through the depth and height of the massive masonry beneath the battlemented summit; the shadow brooding below, in the immense thickness of the wall and beyond it, the vista of the street, sunny and swarming with life; outside of the gate, a throng of carts, laden with fruits, vegetables, small flat barrels of wine, waiting to be examined by the custom-house officers; carriages too, and foot-passengers entering, and others swarming outward. Under the shadowy arch are the offices of the police and customs, and probably the guard-room of the soldiers, all hollowed out in the mass of the gateway. Civil officers loll on chairs in the shade, perhaps with an awning over their heads. Where the sun falls aslantwise under the arch a sentinel, with musket and bayonet, paces to and fro in the entrance, and other soldiers lounge close by. The life of the city seems to be compressed and made more intense by this barrier; and on passing within it you do not breathe quite so freely, yet are sensible of an enjoyment in the close elbowing throng, the clamor of high voices from side to side of the street, and the million of petty sights, actions, traffics, and personalities, all so squeezed together as to become a great whole. The street by which I entered led me to the Carraja Bridge; crossing which, I kept straight onward till I came to the Church of Santa Maria Novella. Doubtless, it looks just the same as when Boccaccio's party stood in a cluster on its broad steps arranging their excursion to the villa. Thence I went to the Church of St. Lorenzo, which I entered by the side door, and found the organ sounding and a religious ceremony going forward. It is a church of sombre aspect, with its gray walls and pillars, but was decked out for some festivity with hangings of scarlet damask and gold. I sat awhile to rest myself, and then pursued my way to the Duomo. I entered, and looked at Sir John Hawkwood's painted effigy, and at several busts and statues, and at the windows of the chapel surrounding the dome, through which the sunshine glowed, white in the outer air, but a hundred-hued splendor within. I tried to bring up the scene of Lorenzo de' Medici's attempted assassination, but with no great success; and after listening a little while to the chanting of the priests and acolytes, I went to the Bank. It is in a palace of which Raphael was the architect, in the Piazza Gran Duca. I next went, as a matter of course, to the Uffizi gallery, and, in the first place, to the Tribune, where the Venus de' Medici deigned to reveal herself rather more satisfactorily than at my last visit. . . . . I looked into all the rooms, bronzes, drawings, and gem-room; a volume might easily be written upon either subject. The contents of the gem-room especially require to be looked at separately in order to convince one's self of their minute magnificences; for, among so many, the eye slips from one to another with only a vague outward sense that here are whole shelves full of little miracles, both of nature's material and man's workmanship. Greater [larger] things can be reasonably well appreciated with a less scrupulous though broader attention; but in order to estimate the brilliancy of the diamond eyes of a little agate bust, for instance, you have to screw your mind down to them and nothing else. You must sharpen your faculties of observation to a point, and touch the object exactly on the right spot, or you do not appreciate it at all. It is a troublesome process when there are a thousand such objects to be seen. I stood at an open window in the transverse corridor, and looked down upon the Arno, and across at the range of edifices that impend over it on the opposite side. The river, I should judge, may be a hundred or a hundred and fifty yards wide in its course between the Ponte alle Grazie and the Ponte Vecchio; that is, the width between strand and strand is at least so much. The river, however, leaves a broad margin of mud and gravel on its right bank, on which water-weeds grow pretty abundantly, and creep even into the stream. On my first arrival in Florence I thought the goose-pond green of the water rather agreeable than otherwise; but its hue is now that of unadulterated mud, as yellow as the Tiber itself, yet not impressing me as being enriched with city sewerage like that other famous river. From the Ponte alle Grazie downward, half-way towards the Ponte Vecchio, there is an island of gravel, and the channel on each side is so shallow as to allow the passage of men and horses wading not overleg. I have seen fishermen wading the main channel from side to side, their feet sinking into the dark mud, and thus discoloring the yellow water with a black track visible, step by step, through its shallowness. But still the Arno is a mountain stream, and liable to be tetchy and turbulent like all its kindred, and no doubt it often finds its borders of hewn stone not too far apart for its convenience. Along the right shore, beneath the Uffizi and the adjacent buildings, there is a broad paved way, with a parapet; on the opposite shore the edifices are built directly upon the river's edge, and impend over the water, supported upon arches and machicolations, as I think that peculiar arrangement of buttressing arcades is called. The houses are picturesquely various in height, from two or three stories to seven; picturesque in hue likewise,--pea-green, yellow, white, and of aged discoloration,--but all with green blinds; picturesque also in the courts and galleries that look upon the river, and in the wide arches that open beneath, intended perhaps to afford a haven for the household boat. Nets were suspended before one or two of the houses, as if the inhabitants were in the habit of fishing out of window. As a general effect, the houses, though often palatial in size and height, have a shabby, neglected aspect, and are jumbled too closely together. Behind their range the city swells upward in a hillside, which rises to a great height above, forming, I believe, a part of the Boboli Gardens. I returned homewards over the Ponte Vecchio, which is a continuous street of ancient houses, except over the central arch, so that a stranger might easily cross the river without knowing it. In these small, old houses there is a community of goldsmiths, who set out their glass cases, and hang their windows with rings, bracelets, necklaces, strings of pearl, ornaments of malachite and coral, and especially with Florentine mosaics; watches, too, and snuff-boxes of old fashion or new; offerings for shrines also, such as silver hearts pierced with swords; an infinity of pretty things, the manufacture of which is continually going on in the little back-room of each little shop. This gewgaw business has been established on the Ponte Vecchio for centuries, although, long since, it was an art of far higher pretensions than now. Benvenuto Cellini had his workshop here, probably in one of these selfsame little nooks. It would have been a ticklish affair to be Benvenuto's fellow-workman within such narrow limits. Going out of the Porta Romana, I walked for some distance along the city wall, and then, turning to the left, toiled up the hill of Bellosguardo, through narrow zigzag lanes between high walls of stone or plastered brick, where the sun had the fairest chance to frizzle me. There were scattered villas and houses, here and there concentrating into a little bit of a street, paved with flag-stones from side to side, as in the city, and shadowed quite across its narrowness by the height of the houses. Mostly, however, the way was inhospitably sunny, and shut out by the high wall from every glimpse of a view, except in one spot, where Florence spread itself before my eyes, with every tower, dome, and spire which it contains. A little way farther on my own gray tower rose before me, the most welcome object that I had seen in the course of the day. September 10th.--I went into town again yesterday, by way of the Porta San Frediano, and observed that this gate (like the other gates of Florence, as far as I have observed) is a tall, square structure of stone or brick, or both, rising high above the adjacent wall, and having a range of open loggie in the upper story. The arch externally is about half the height of the structure. Inside, towards the town, it rises nearly to the roof. On each side of the arch there is much room for offices, apartments, storehouses, or whatever else. On the outside of the gate, along the base, are those iron rings and sockets for torches, which are said to be the distinguishing symbol of illustrious houses. As contrasted with the vista of the narrow, swarming street through the arch from without, the view from the inside might be presented with a glimpse of the free blue sky. I strolled a little about Florence, and went into two or three churches; into that of the Annunziata for one. I have already described this church, with its general magnificence, and it was more magnificent than ever to-day, being hung with scarlet silk and gold-embroidery. A great many people were at their devotions, thronging principally around the Virgin's shrine. I was struck now with the many bas-reliefs and busts in the costume of their respective ages, and seemingly with great accuracy of portraiture, in the passage leading from the front of the church into the cloisters. The marble was not at all abashed nor degraded by being made to assume the guise of the mediaeval furred robe, or the close-fitting tunic with elaborate ruff, or the breastplate and gorget, or the flowing wig, or whatever the actual costume might be; and one is sensible of a rectitude and reality in the affair, and respects the dead people for not putting themselves into an eternal masquerade. The dress of the present day will look equally respectable in one or two hundred years. The Fair is still going on, and one of its principal centres is before this church, in the Piazza of the Annunziata. Cloth is the chief commodity offered for sale, and none of the finest; coarse, unbleached linen and cotton prints for country-people's wear, together with yarn, stockings, and here and there an assortment of bright-colored ribbons. Playthings, of a very rude fashion, were also displayed; likewise books in Italian and French; and a great deal of iron-work. Both here and in Rome they have this odd custom of offering rusty iron implements for sale, spread out on the pavements. There was a good deal of tinware, too, glittering in the sunshine, especially around the pedestal of the bronze statue of Duke Ferdinand, who curbs his horse and looks down upon the bustling piazza in a very stately way. . . . . The people attending the fair had mostly a rustic appearance; sunburnt faces, thin frames; no beauty, no bloom, no joyousness of young or old; an anxious aspect, as if life were no easy or holiday matter with them; but I should take them to be of a kindly nature, and reasonably honest. Except the broad-brimmed Tuscan hats of the women, there was no peculiarity of costume. At a careless glance I could very well have mistaken most of the men for Yankees; as for the women, there is very little resemblance between them and ours,--the old being absolutely hideous, and the young ones very seldom pretty. It was a very dull crowd. They do not generate any warmth among themselves by contiguity; they have no pervading sentiment, such as is continually breaking out in rough merriment from an American crowd; they have nothing to do with one another; they are not a crowd, considered as one mass, but a collection of individuals. A despotic government has perhaps destroyed their principle of cohesion, and crumbled them to atoms. Italian crowds are noted for their civility; possibly they deserve credit for native courtesy and gentleness; possibly, on the other hand, the crowd has not spirit and self-consciousness enough to be rampant. I wonder whether they will ever hold another parliament in the Piazza of Santa Croce! I paid a visit to the gallery of the Pitti Palace. There is too large an intermixture of Andrea del Sarto's pictures in this gallery; everywhere you see them, cold, proper, and uncriticisable, looking so much like first-rate excellence, that you inevitably quarrel with your own taste for not admiring them. . . . . It was one of the days when my mind misgives me whether the pictorial art be not a humbug, and when the minute accuracy of a fly in a Dutch picture of fruit and flowers seems to me something more reliable than the master-touches of Raphael. The gallery was considerably thronged, and many of the visitors appeared to be from the country, and of a class intermediate between gentility and labor. Is there such a rural class in Italy? I saw a respectable-looking man feeling awkward and uncomfortable in a new and glossy pair of pantaloons not yet bent and creased to his natural movement. Nothing pleased me better to-day than some amber cups, in one of the cabinets of curiosities. They are richly wrought, and the material is as if the artist had compressed a great deal of sunshine together, and when sufficiently solidified had moulded these cups out of it and let them harden. This simile was suggested by ------. Leaving the palace, I entered the Boboli Gardens, and wandered up and down a good deal of its uneven surface, through broad, well-kept edges of box, sprouting loftily, trimmed smoothly, and strewn between with cleanly gravel; skirting along plantations of aged trees, throwing a deep shadow within their precincts; passing many statues, not of the finest art, yet approaching so near it, as to serve just as good a purpose for garden ornament; coming now and then to the borders of a fishpool, or a pond, where stately swans circumnavigated an island of flowers;--all very fine and very wearisome. I have never enjoyed this garden; perhaps because it suggests dress-coats, and such elegant formalities. September 11th.--We have heard a good deal of spirit matters of late, especially of wonderful incidents that attended Mr. Home's visit to Florence, two or three years ago. Mrs. Powers told a very marvellous thing; how that when Mr. Home was holding a seance in her house, and several persons present, a great scratching was heard in a neighboring closet. She addressed the spirit, and requested it not to disturb the company then, as they were busy with other affairs, promising to converse with it on a future occasion. On a subsequent night, accordingly, the scratching was renewed, with the utmost violence; and in reply to Mrs. Powers's questions, the spirit assured her that it was not one, but legion, being the ghosts of twenty-seven monks, who were miserable and without hope! The house now occupied by Powers was formerly a convent, and I suppose these were the spirits of all the wicked monks that had ever inhabited it; at least, I hope that there were not such a number of damnable sinners extant at any one time. These ghostly fathers must have been very improper persons in their lifetime, judging by the indecorousness of their behavior even after death, and in such dreadful circumstances; for they pulled Mrs. Powers's skirts so hard as to break the gathers. . . . . It was not ascertained that they desired to have anything done for their eternal welfare, or that their situation was capable of amendment anyhow; but, being exhorted to refrain from further disturbance, they took their departure, after making the sign of the cross on the breast of each person present. This was very singular in such reprobates, who, by their own confession, had forfeited all claim to be benefited by that holy symbol: it curiously suggests that the forms of religion may still be kept up in purgatory and hell itself. The sign was made in a way that conveyed the sense of something devilish and spiteful; the perpendicular line of the cross being drawn gently enough, but the transverse one sharply and violently, so as to leave a painful impression. Perhaps the monks meant this to express their contempt and hatred for heretics; and how queer, that this antipathy should survive their own damnation! But I cannot help hoping that the case of these poor devils may not be so desperate as they think. They cannot be wholly lost, because their desire for communication with mortals shows that they need sympathy, therefore are not altogether hardened, therefore, with loving treatment, may be restored. A great many other wonders took place within the knowledge and experience of Mrs. P------. She saw, not one pair of hands only, but many. The head of one of her dead children, a little boy, was laid in her lap, not in ghastly fashion, as a head out of the coffin and the grave, but just as the living child might have laid it on his mother's knees. It was invisible, by the by, and she recognized it by the features and the character of the hair, through the sense of touch. Little hands grasped hers. In short, these soberly attested incredibilities are so numerous that I forget nine tenths of them, and judge the others too cheap to be written down. Christ spoke the truth surely, in saying that men would not believe, "though one rose from the dead." In my own case, the fact makes absolutely no impression. I regret such confirmation of truth as this. Within a mile of our villa stands the Villa Columbaria, a large house, built round a square court. Like Mr. Powers's residence, it was formerly a convent. It is inhabited by Major Gregorie, an old soldier of Waterloo and various other fights, and his family consists of Mrs. ------, the widow of one of the Major's friends, and her two daughters. We have become acquainted with the family, and Mrs. ------, the married daughter, has lent us a written statement of her experiences with a ghost, who has haunted the Villa Columbaria for many years back. He had made Mrs. ------ aware of his presence in her room by a sensation of extreme cold, as if a wintry breeze were blowing over her; also by a rustling of the bed-curtains; and, at such times, she had a certain consciousness, as she says, that she was not ALONE. Through Mr. Home's agency, the ghost was enabled to explain himself, and declared that he was a monk, named Giannane, who died a very long time ago in Mrs. ------'s present bedchamber. He was a murderer, and had been in a restless and miserable state ever since his death, wandering up and down the house, but especially haunting his own death-chamber and a staircase that communicated with the chapel of the villa. All the interviews with this lost spirit were attended with a sensation of severe cold, which was felt by every one present. He made his communications by means of table-rapping, and by the movements of chairs and other articles, which often assumed an angry character. The poor old fellow does not seem to have known exactly what he wanted with Mrs. ------, but promised to refrain from disturbing her any more, on condition that she would pray that he might find some repose. He had previously declined having any masses said for his soul. Rest, rest, rest, appears to be the continual craving of unhappy spirits; they do not venture to ask for positive bliss: perhaps, in their utter weariness, would rather forego the trouble of active enjoyment, but pray only for rest. The cold atmosphere around this monk suggests new ideas as to the climate of Hades. If all the afore-mentioned twenty-seven monks had a similar one, the combined temperature must have been that of a polar winter. Mrs. ------ saw, at one time, the fingers of her monk, long, yellow, and skinny; these fingers grasped the hands of individuals of the party, with a cold, clammy, and horrible touch. After the departure of this ghost other seances were held in her bedchamber, at which good and holy spirits manifested themselves, and behaved in a very comfortable and encouraging way. It was their benevolent purpose, apparently, to purify her apartments from all traces of the evil spirit, and to reconcile her to what had been so long the haunt of this miserable monk, by filling it with happy and sacred associations, in which, as Mrs. ------ intimates, they entirely succeeded. These stories remind me of an incident that took place at the old manse, in the first summer of our marriage. . . . . September 17th.--We walked yesterday to Florence, and visited the church of St. Lorenzo, where we saw, for the second time, the famous Medici statues of Michael Angelo. I found myself not in a very appreciative state, and, being a stone myself, the statue of Lorenzo was at first little more to me than another stone; but it was beginning to assume life, and would have impressed me as it did before if I had gazed long enough. There was a better light upon the face, under the helmet, than at my former visit, although still the features were enough overshadowed to produce that mystery on which, according to Mr. Powers, the effect of the statue depends. I observe that the costume of the figure, instead of being mediaeval, as I believe I have stated, is Roman; but, be it what it may, the grand and simple character of the figure imbues the robes with its individual propriety. I still think it the greatest miracle ever wrought in marble. We crossed the church and entered a cloister on the opposite side, in quest of the Laurentian Library. Ascending a staircase we found an old man blowing the bellows of the organ, which was in full blast in the church; nevertheless he found time to direct us to the library door. We entered a lofty vestibule, of ancient aspect and stately architecture, and thence were admitted into the library itself; a long and wide gallery or hall, lighted by a row of windows on which were painted the arms of the Medici. The ceiling was inlaid with dark wood, in an elaborate pattern, which was exactly repeated in terra-cotta on the pavement beneath our feet. Long desks, much like the old-fashioned ones in schools, were ranged on each side of the mid aisle, in a series from end to end, with seats for the convenience of students; and on these desks were rare manuscripts, carefully preserved under glass; and books, fastened to the desks by iron chains, as the custom of studious antiquity used to be. Along the centre of the hall, between the two ranges of desks, were tables and chairs, at which two or three scholarly persons were seated, diligently consulting volumes in manuscript or old type. It was a very quiet place, imbued with a cloistered sanctity, and remote from all street-cries and rumble of the city,--odorous of old literature,--a spot where the commonest ideas ought not to be expressed in less than Latin. The librarian--or custode he ought rather to be termed, for he was a man not above the fee of a paul--now presented himself, and showed us some of the literary curiosities; a vellum manuscript of the Bible, with a splendid illumination by Ghirlandaio, covering two folio pages, and just as brilliant in its color as if finished yesterday. Other illuminated manuscripts--or at least separate pages of them, for the volumes were kept under glass, and not to be turned over--were shown us, very magnificent, but not to be compared with this of Ghirlandaio. Looking at such treasures I could almost say that we have left behind us more splendor than we have kept alive to our own age. We publish beautiful editions of books, to be sure, and thousands of people enjoy them; but in ancient times the expense that we spread thinly over a thousand volumes was all compressed into one, and it became a great jewel of a book, a heavy folio, worth its weight in gold. Then, what a spiritual charm it gives to a book to feel that every letter has been individually wrought, and the pictures glow for that individual page alone! Certainly the ancient reader had a luxury which the modern one lacks. I was surprised, moreover, to see the clearness and accuracy of the chirography. Print does not surpass it in these respects. The custode showed us an ancient manuscript of the Decameron; likewise, a volume containing the portraits of Petrarch and of Laura, each covering the whole of a vellum page, and very finely done. They are authentic portraits, no doubt, and Laura is depicted as a fair-haired beauty, with a very satisfactory amount of loveliness. We saw some choice old editions of books in a small separate room; but as these were all ranged in shut bookcases, and as each volume, moreover, was in a separate cover or modern binding, this exhibition did us very little good. By the by, there is a conceit struggling blindly in my mind about Petrarch and Laura, suggested by those two lifelike portraits, which have been sleeping cheek to cheek through all these centuries. But I cannot lay hold of it. September 21st.--Yesterday morning the Val d' Arno was entirely filled with a thick fog, which extended even up to our windows, and concealed objects within a very short distance. It began to dissipate itself betimes, however, and was the forerunner of an unusually bright and warm day. We set out after breakfast and walked into town, where we looked at mosaic brooches. These are very pretty little bits of manufacture; but there seems to have been no infusion of fresh fancy into the work, and the specimens present little variety. It is the characteristic commodity of the place; the central mart and manufacturing locality being on the Ponte Vecchio, from end to end of which they are displayed in cases; but there are other mosaic shops scattered about the town. The principal devices are roses,--pink, yellow, or white,--jasmines, lilies of the valley, forget-me-nots, orange blossoms, and others, single or in sprigs, or twined into wreaths; parrots, too, and other birds of gay plumage,-- often exquisitely done, and sometimes with precious materials, such as lapis lazuli, malachite, and still rarer gems. Bracelets, with several different, yet relative designs, are often very beautiful. We find, at different shops, a great inequality of prices for mosaics that seemed to be of much the same quality. We went to the Uffizi gallery, and found it much thronged with the middle and lower classes of Italians; and the English, too, seemed more numerous than I have lately seen them. Perhaps the tourists have just arrived here, starting at the close of the London season. We were amused with a pair of Englishmen who went through the gallery; one of them criticising the pictures and statues audibly, for the benefit of his companion. The critic I should take to be a country squire, and wholly untravelled; a tall, well-built, rather rough, but gentlemanly man enough; his friend, a small personage, exquisitely neat in dress, and of artificial deportment, every attitude and gesture appearing to have been practised before a glass. Being but a small pattern of a man, physically and intellectually, he had thought it worth while to finish himself off with the elaborateness of a Florentine mosaic; and the result was something like a dancing-master, though without the exuberant embroidery of such persons. Indeed, he was a very quiet little man, and, though so thoroughly made up, there was something particularly green, fresh, and simple in him. Both these Englishmen were elderly, and the smaller one had perfectly white hair, glossy and silken. It did not make him in the least venerable, however, but took his own character of neatness and prettiness. He carried his well-brushed and glossy hat in his hand in such a way as not to ruffle its surface; and I wish I could put into one word or one sentence the pettiness, the minikinfinical effect of this little man; his self-consciousness so lifelong, that, in some sort, he forgot himself even in the midst of it; his propriety, his cleanliness and unruffledness; his prettiness and nicety of manifestation, like a bird hopping daintily about. His companion, as I said, was of a completely different type; a tall, gray-haired man, with the rough English face, a little tinted with port wine; careless, natural manner, betokening a man of position in his own neighborhood; a loud voice, not vulgar, nor outraging the rules of society, but betraying a character incapable of much refinement. He talked continually in his progress through the gallery, and audibly enough for us to catch almost everything he said, at many yards' distance. His remarks and criticisms, addressed to his small friend, were so entertaining, that we strolled behind him for the sake of being benefited by them; and I think he soon became aware of this, and addressed himself to us as well as to his more immediate friend. Nobody but an Englishman, it seems to me, has just this kind of vanity,--a feeling mixed up with scorn and good-nature; self-complacency on his own merits, and as an Englishman; pride at being in foreign parts; contempt for everybody around him; a rough kindliness towards people in general. I liked the man, and should be glad to know him better. As for his criticism, I am sorry to remember only one. It was upon the picture of the Nativity, by Correggio, in the Tribune, where the mother is kneeling before the Child, and adoring it in an awful rapture, because she sees the eternal God in its baby face and figure. The Englishman was highly delighted with this picture, and began to gesticulate, as if dandling a baby, and to make a chirruping sound. It was to him merely a representation of a mother fondling her infant. He then said, "If I could have my choice of the pictures and statues in the Tribune, I would take this picture, and that one yonder" (it was a good enough Enthronement of the Virgin by Andrea del Sarto) "and the Dancing Faun, and let the rest go." A delightful man; I love that wholesome coarseness of mind and heart, which no education nor opportunity can polish out of the genuine Englishman; a coarseness without vulgarity. When a Yankee is coarse, he is pretty sure to be vulgar too. The two critics seemed to be considering whether it were practicable to go from the Uffizi to the Pitti gallery; but "it confuses one," remarked the little man, "to see more than one gallery in a day." (I should think so,--the Pitti Palace tumbling into his small receptacle on the top of the Uffizi.) "It does so," responded the big man, with heavy emphasis. September 23d.--The vintage has been going on in our podere for about a week, and I saw a part of the process of making wine, under one of our back windows. It was on a very small scale, the grapes being thrown into a barrel, and crushed with a sort of pestle; and as each estate seems to make its own wine, there are probably no very extensive and elaborate appliances in general use for the manufacture. The cider-making of New England is far more picturesque; the great heap of golden or rosy apples under the trees, and the cider-mill worked by a circumgyratory horse, and all agush with sweet juice. Indeed, nothing connected with the grape-culture and the vintage here has been picturesque, except the large inverted pyramids in which the clusters hang; those great bunches, white or purple, really satisfy my idea both as to aspect and taste. We can buy a large basketful for less than a paul; and they are the only things that one can never devour too much of--and there is no enough short of a little too much without subsequent repentance. It is a shame to turn such delicious juice into such sour wine as they make in Tuscany. I tasted a sip or two of a flask which the contadini sent us for trial,-- the rich result of the process I had witnessed in the barrel. It took me altogether by surprise; for I remembered the nectareousness of the new cider which I used to sip through a straw in my boyhood, and I never doubted that this would be as dulcet, but finer and more ethereal; as much more delectable, in short, as these grapes are better than puckery cider apples. Positively, I never tasted anything so detestable, such a sour and bitter juice, still lukewarm with fermentation; it was a wail of woe, squeezed out of the wine-press of tribulation, and the more a man drinks of such, the sorrier he will be. Besides grapes, we have had figs, and I have now learned to be very fond of them. When they first began to appear, two months ago, they had scarcely any sweetness, and tasted very like a decaying squash: this was an early variety, with purple skins. There are many kinds of figs, the best being green-skinned, growing yellower as they ripen; and the riper they are, the more the sweetness within them intensifies, till they resemble dried figs in everything, except that they retain the fresh fruit-flavor; rich, luscious, yet not palling. We have had pears, too, some of them very tolerable; and peaches, which look magnificently, as regards size and downy blush, but, have seldom much more taste than a cucumber. A succession of fruits has followed us, ever since our arrival in Florence:--first, and for a long time, abundance of cherries; then apricots, which lasted many weeks, till we were weary of them; then plums, pears, and finally figs, peaches, and grapes. Except the figs and grapes, a New England summer and autumn would give us better fruit than any we have found in Italy. Italy beats us I think in mosquitoes; they are horribly pungent little satanic particles. They possess strange intelligence, and exquisite acuteness of sight and smell,--prodigious audacity and courage to match it, insomuch that they venture on the most hazardous attacks, and get safe off. One of them flew into my mouth, the other night, and sting me far down in my throat; but luckily I coughed him up in halves. They are bigger than American mosquitoes; and if you crush them, after one of their feasts, it makes a terrific bloodspot. It is a sort of suicide--at least, a shedding of one's own blood--to kill them; but it gratifies the old Adam to do it. It shocks me to feel how revengeful I am; but it is impossible not to impute a certain malice and intellectual venom to these diabolical insects. I wonder whether our health, at this season of the year, requires that we should be kept in a state of irritation, and so the mosquitoes are Nature's prophetic remedy for some disease; or whether we are made for the mosquitoes, not they for us. It is possible, just possible, that the infinitesimal doses of poison which they infuse into us are a homoeopathic safeguard against pestilence; but medicine never was administered in a more disagreeable way. The moist atmosphere about the Arno, I suppose, produces these insects, and fills the broad, ten-mile valley with them; and as we are just on the brim of the basin, they overflow into our windows. September 25th.--U---- and I walked to town yesterday morning, and went to the Uffizi gallery. It is not a pleasant thought that we are so soon to give up this gallery, with little prospect (none, or hardly any, on my part) of ever seeing it again. It interests me and all of us far more than the gallery of the Pitti Palace, wherefore I know not, for the latter is the richer of the two in admirable pictures. Perhaps it is the picturesque variety of the Uffizi--the combination of painting, sculpture, gems, and bronzes--that makes the charm. The Tribune, too, is the richest room in all the world; a heart that draws all hearts to it. The Dutch pictures, moreover, give a homely, human interest to the Uffizi; and I really think that the frequency of Andrea del Santo's productions at the Pitti Palace--looking so very like masterpieces, yet lacking the soul of art and nature--have much to do with the weariness that comes from better acquaintance with the latter gallery. The splendor of the gilded and frescoed saloons is perhaps another bore; but, after all, my memory will often tread there as long as I live. What shall we do in America? Speaking of Dutch pictures, I was much struck yesterday, as frequently before, with a small picture by Teniers the elder. It seems to be a pawnbroker in the midst of his pledges; old earthen jugs, flasks, a brass kettle, old books, and a huge pile of worn-out and broken rubbish, which he is examining. These things are represented with vast fidelity, yet with bold and free touches, unlike the minute, microscopic work of other Dutch masters; and a wonderful picturesqueness is wrought out of these humble materials, and even the figure and head of the pawnbroker have a strange grandeur. We spent no very long time at the Uffizi, and afterwards crossed the Ponte alle Grazie, and went to the convent of San Miniato, which stands on a hill outside of the Porta San Gallo. A paved pathway, along which stand crosses marking stations at which pilgrims are to kneel and pray, goes steeply to the hill-top, where, in the first place, is a smaller church and convent than those of San Miniato. The latter are seen at a short distance to the right, the convent being a large, square battlemented mass, adjoining which is the church, showing a front of aged white marble, streaked with black, and having an old stone tower behind. I have seen no other convent or monastery that so well corresponds with my idea of what such structures were. The sacred precincts are enclosed by a high wall, gray, ancient, and luxuriously ivy-grown, and lofty and strong enough for the rampart of a fortress. We went through the gateway and entered the church, which we found in much disarray, and masons at work upon the pavement. The tribune is elevated considerably above the nave, and accessible by marble staircases; there are great arches and a chapel, with curious monuments in the Gothic style, and ancient carvings and mosaic works, and, in short, a dim, dusty, and venerable interior, well worth studying in detail. . . . . The view of Florence from the church door is very fine, and seems to include every tower, dome, or whatever object emerges out of the general mass. September 28th.--I went to the Pitti Palace yesterday, and to the Uffizi to-day, paying them probably my last visit, yet cherishing an unreasonable doubt whether I may not see them again. At all events, I have seen them enough for the present, even what is best of them; and, at the same time, with a sad reluctance to bid them farewell forever, I experience an utter weariness of Raphael's old canvas, and of the time-yellowed marble of the Venus de' Medici. When the material embodiment presents itself outermost, and we perceive them only by the grosser sense, missing their ethereal spirit, there is nothing so heavily burdensome as masterpieces of painting and sculpture. I threw my farewell glance at the Venus de' Medici to-day with strange insensibility. The nights are wonderfully beautiful now. When the moon was at the full, a few nights ago, its light was an absolute glory, such as I seem only to have dreamed of heretofore, and that only in my younger days. At its rising I have fancied that the orb of the moon has a kind of purple brightness, and that this tinge is communicated to its radiance until it has climbed high aloft and sheds a flood of white over hill and valley. Now that the moon is on the wane, there is a gentler lustre, but still bright; and it makes the Val d' Arno with its surrounding hills, and its soft mist in the distance, as beautiful a scene as exists anywhere out of heaven. And the morning is quite as beautiful in its own way. This mist, of which I have so often spoken, sets it beyond the limits of actual sense and makes it ideal; it is as if you were dreaming about the valley,--as if the valley itself were dreaming, and met you half-way in your own dream. If the mist were to be withdrawn, I believe the whole beauty of the valley would go with it. Until pretty late in the morning, we have the comet streaming through the sky, and dragging its interminable tail among the stars. It keeps brightening from night to night, and I should think must blaze fiercely enough to cast a shadow by and by. I know not whether it be in the vicinity of Galileo's tower, and in the influence of his spirit, but I have hardly ever watched the stars with such interest as now. September 29th.--Last evening I met Mr. Powers at Miss Blagden's, and he talked about his treatment, by our government in reference, to an appropriation of twenty-five thousand dollars made by Congress for a statue by him. Its payment and the purchase of the statue were left at the option of the President, and he conceived himself wronged because the affair was never concluded. . . . . As for the President, he knows nothing of art, and probably acted in the matter by the advice of the director of public works. No doubt a sculptor gets commissions as everybody gets public employment and emolument of whatever kind from our government, not by merit or fitness, but by political influence skilfully applied. As Powers himself observed, the ruins of our Capitol are not likely to afford sculptures equal to those which Lord Elgin took from the Parthenon, if this be the system under which they are produced. . . . . I wish our great Republic had the spirit to do as much, according to its vast means, as Florence did for sculpture and architecture when it was a republic; but we have the meanest government and the shabbiest, and--if truly represented by it--we are the meanest and shabbiest people known in history. And yet the less we attempt to do for art the better, if our future attempts are to have no better result than such brazen troopers as the equestrian statue of General Jackson, or even such naked respectabilities as Greenough's Washington. There is something false and affected in our highest taste for art; and I suppose, furthermore, we are the only people who seek to decorate their public institutions, not by the highest taste among them, but by the average at best. There was also at Miss Blagden's, among other company, Mr. ------, an artist in Florence, and a sensible man. I talked with him about Home, the medium, whom he had many opportunities of observing when the latter was in these parts. Mr. ------ says that Home is unquestionably a knave, but that he himself is as much perplexed at his own preternatural performances as any other person; he is startled and affrighted at the phenomena which he produces. Nevertheless, when his spiritual powers fall short, he does his best to eke them out with imposture. This moral infirmity is a part of his nature, and I suggested that perhaps if he were of a firmer and healthier moral make, if his character were sufficiently sound and dense to be capable of steadfast principle, he would not have possessed the impressibility that fits him for the so-called spiritual influences. Mr. ------ says that Louis Napoleon is literally one of the most skilful jugglers in the world, and that probably the interest he has taken in Mr. Home was caused partly by a wish to acquire his art. This morning Mr. Powers invited me to go with him to the Grand Duke's new foundry, to see the bronze statue of Webster which has just been cast from his model. It is the second cast of the statue, the first having been shipped some months ago on board of a vessel which was lost; and, as Powers observed, the statue now lies at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean somewhere in the vicinity of the telegraphic cable. We were received with much courtesy and emphasis by the director of the foundry, and conducted into a large room walled with bare, new brick, where the statue was standing in front of the extinct furnace: a majestic Webster indeed, eight feet high, and looking even more colossal than that. The likeness seemed to me perfect, and, like a sensible man, Powers' has dressed him in his natural costume, such as I have seen Webster have on while making a speech in the open air at a mass meeting in Concord,--dress-coat buttoned pretty closely across the breast, pantaloons and boots,--everything finished even to a seam and a stitch. Not an inch of the statue but is Webster; even his coat-tails are imbued with the man, and this true artist has succeeded in showing him through the broadcloth as nature showed him. He has felt that a man's actual clothes are as much a part of him as his flesh, and I respect him for disdaining to shirk the difficulty by throwing the meanness of a cloak over it, and for recognizing the folly of masquerading our Yankee statesman in a Roman toga, and the indecorousness of presenting him as a brassy nudity. It would have been quite as unjustifiable to strip him to his skeleton as to his flesh. Webster is represented as holding in his right hand the written roll of the Constitution, with which he points to a bundle of fasces, which he keeps from falling by the grasp of his left, thus symbolizing him as the preserver of the Union. There is an expression of quiet, solid, massive strength in the whole figure; a deep, pervading energy, in which any exaggeration of gesture would lessen and lower the effect. He looks really like a pillar of the state. The face is very grand, very Webster stern and awful, because he is in the act of meeting a great crisis, and yet with the warmth of a great heart glowing through it. Happy is Webster to have been so truly and adequately sculptured; happy the sculptor in such a subject, which no idealization of a demigod could have supplied him with. Perhaps the statue at the bottom of the sea will be cast up in some future age, when the present race of man is forgotten, and if so, that far posterity will look up to us as a grander race than we find ourselves to be. Neither was Webster altogether the man he looked. His physique helped him out, even when he fell somewhat short of its promise; and if his eyes had not been in such deep caverns their fire would not have looked so bright. Powers made me observe how the surface of the statue was wrought to a sort of roughness instead of being smoothed, as is the practice of other artists. He said that this had cost him great pains, and certainly it has an excellent effect. The statue is to go to Boston, and I hope will be placed in the open air, for it is too mighty to be kept under any roof that now exists in America. . . . . After seeing this, the director showed us some very curious and exquisite specimens of castings, such as baskets of flowers, in which the most delicate and fragile blossoms, the curl of a petal, the finest veins in a leaf, the lightest flower-spray that ever quivered in a breeze, were perfectly preserved; and the basket contained an abundant heap of such sprays. There were likewise a pair of hands, taken actually from life, clasped together as they were, and they looked like parts of a man who had been changed suddenly from flesh to brass. They were worn and rough and unhandsome hands, and so very real, with all their veins and the pores of the skin, that it was shocking to look at them. A bronze leaf, cast also from the life, was as curious and more beautiful. Taking leave of Powers, I went hither and thither about Florence, seeing for the last time things that I have seen many times before: the market, for instance, blocking up a line of narrow streets with fruit-stalls, and obstreperous dealers crying their peaches, their green lemons, their figs, their delicious grapes, their mushrooms, their pomegranates, their radishes, their lettuces. They use one vegetable here which I have not known so used elsewhere; that is, very young pumpkins or squashes, of the size of apples, and to be cooked by boiling. They are not to my taste, but the people here like unripe things,--unripe fruit, unripe chickens, unripe lamb. This market is the noisiest and swarmiest centre of noisy and swarming Florence, and I always like to pass through it on that account. I went also to Santa Croce, and it seemed to me to present a longer vista and broader space than almost any other church, perhaps because the pillars between the nave and aisles are not so massive as to obstruct the view. I looked into the Duomo, too, and was pretty well content to leave it. Then I came homeward, and lost my way, and wandered far off through the white sunshine, and the scanty shade of the vineyard walls, and the olive-trees that here and there branched over them. At last I saw our own gray battlements at a distance, on one side, quite out of the direction in which I was travelling, so was compelled to the grievous mortification of retracing a great many of my weary footsteps. It was a very hot day. This evening I have been on the towertop star-gazing, and looking at the comet, which waves along the sky like an immense feather of flame. Over Florence there was an illuminated atmosphere, caused by the lights of the city gleaming upward into the mists which sleep and dream above that portion of the valley, as well as the rest of it. I saw dimly, or fancied I saw, the hill of Fiesole on the other side of Florence, and remembered how ghostly lights were seen passing thence to the Duomo on the night when Lorenzo the Magnificent died. From time to time the sweet bells of Florence rang out, and I was loath to come down into the lower world, knowing that I shall never again look heavenward from an old tower-top in such a soft calm evening as this. Yet I am not loath to go away; impatient rather; for, taking no root, I soon weary of any soil in which I may be temporarily deposited. The same impatience I sometimes feel or conceive of as regards this earthly life. . . . . I forgot to mention that Powers showed me, in his studio, the model of the statue of America, which he wished the government to buy. It has great merit, and embodies the ideal of youth, freedom, progress, and whatever we consider as distinctive of our country's character and destiny. It is a female figure, vigorous, beautiful, planting its foot lightly on a broken chain, and pointing upward. The face has a high look of intelligence and lofty feeling; the form, nude to the middle, has all the charms of womanhood, and is thus warmed and redeemed out of the cold allegoric sisterhood who have generally no merit in chastity, being really without sex. I somewhat question whether it is quite the thing, however, to make a genuine woman out of an allegory we ask, Who is to wed this lovely virgin? and we are not satisfied to banish her into the realm of chilly thought. But I liked the statue, and all the better for what I criticise, and was sorry to see the huge package in which the finished marble lies bundled up, ready to be sent to our country,--which does not call for it. Mr. Powers and his two daughters called to take leave of us, and at parting I expressed a hope of seeing him in America. He said that it would make him very unhappy to believe that he should never return thither; but it seems to me that he has no such definite purpose of return as would be certain to bring itself to pass. It makes a very unsatisfactory life, thus to spend the greater part of it in exile. In such a case we are always deferring the reality of life till a future moment, and, by and by, we have deferred it till there are no future moments; or, if we do go back, we find that life has shifted whatever of reality it had to the country where we deemed ourselves only living temporarily; and so between two stools we come to the ground, and make ourselves a part of one or the other country only by laying our bones in its soil. It is particularly a pity in Powers's case, because he is so very American in character, and the only convenience for him of his Italian residence is, that here he can supply himself with marble, and with workmen to chisel it according to his designs. SIENA. October 2d.--Yesterday morning, at six o'clock, we left our ancient tower, and threw a parting glance--and a rather sad one--over the misty Val d' Arno. This summer will look like a happy one in our children's retrospect, and also, no doubt, in the years that remain to ourselves; and, in truth, I have found it a peaceful and not uncheerful one. It was not a pleasant morning, and Monte Morello, looking down on Florence, had on its cap, betokening foul weather, according to the proverb. Crossing the suspension-bridge, we reached the Leopoldo railway without entering the city. By some mistake,--or perhaps because nobody ever travels by first-class carriages in Tuscany,--we found we had received second-class tickets, and were put into a long, crowded carriage, full of priests, military men, commercial travellers, and other respectable people, facing one another lengthwise along the carriage, and many of them smoking cigars. They were all perfectly civil, and I think I must own that the manners of this second-class would compare favorably with those of an American first-class one. At Empoli, about an hour after we started, we had to change carriages, the main train proceeding to Leghorn. . . . . My observations along the road were very scanty: a hilly country, with several old towns seated on the most elevated hill-tops, as is common throughout Tuscany, or sometimes a fortress with a town on the plain at its base; or, once or twice, the towers and battlements of a mediaeval castle, commanding the pass below it. Near Florence the country was fertile in the vine and olive, and looked as unpicturesque as that sort of fertility usually makes it; not but what I have come to think better of the tint of the olive-leaf than when I first saw it. In the latter part of our journey I remember a wild stream, of a greenish hue, but transparent, rushing along over a rough bed, and before reaching Siena we rumbled into a long tunnel, and emerged from it near the city. . . . . We drove up hill and down (for the surface of Siena seems to be nothing but an irregularity) through narrow old streets, and were set down at the Aquila Nera, a grim-looking albergo near the centre of the town. Mrs. S------ had already taken rooms for us there, and to these we were now ushered up the highway of a dingy stone staircase, and into a small, brick-paved parlor. The house seemed endlessly old, and all the glimpses that we caught of Siena out of window seemed more ancient still. Almost within arm's reach, across a narrow street, a tall palace of gray, time-worn stone clambered skyward, with arched windows, and square windows, and large windows and small, scattered up and down its side. It is the Palazzo Tolomei, and looks immensely venerable. From the windows of our bedrooms we looked into a broader street, though still not very wide, and into a small piazza, the most conspicuous object in which was a column, hearing on its top a bronze wolf suckling Romulus and Remus. This symbol is repeated in other parts of the city, and scours to indicate that the Sienese people pride themselves in a Roman origin. In another direction, over the tops of the houses, we saw a very high tower, with battlements projecting around its summit, so that it was a fortress in the air; and this I have since found to be the Palazzo Publico. It was pleasant, looking downward into the little old piazza and narrow streets, to see the swarm of life on the pavement, the life of to-day just as new as if it had never been lived before; the citizens, the priests, the soldiers, the mules and asses with their panniers, the diligence lumbering along, with a postilion in a faded crimson coat bobbing up and down on the off-horse. Such a bustling scene, vociferous, too, with various street-cries, is wonderfully set off by the gray antiquity of the town, and makes the town look older than if it were a solitude. Soon Mr. and Mrs. Story came, and accompanied us to look for lodgings. They also drove us about the city in their carriage, and showed us the outside of the Palazzo Publico, and of the cathedral and other remarkable edifices. The aspect of Siena is far more picturesque than that of any other town in Italy, so far as I know Italian towns; and yet, now that I have written it, I remember Perugia, and feel that the observation is a mistake. But at any rate Siena is remarkably picturesque, standing on such a site, on the verge and within the crater of an extinct volcano, and therefore being as uneven as the sea in a tempest; the streets so narrow, ascending between tall, ancient palaces, while the side streets rush headlong down, only to be threaded by sure-footed mules, such as climb Alpine heights; old stone balconies on the palace fronts; old arched doorways, and windows set in frames of Gothic architecture; arcades, resembling canopies of stone, with quaintly sculptured statues in the richly wrought Gothic niches of each pillar;--everything massive and lofty, yet minutely interesting when you look at it stone by stone. The Florentines, and the Romans too, have obliterated, as far as they could, all the interest of their mediaeval structures by covering them with stucco, so that they have quite lost their character, and affect the spectator with no reverential idea of age. Here the city is all overwritten with black-letter, and the glad Italian sun makes the effect so much the stronger. We took a lodging, and afterwards J----- and I rambled about, and went into the cathedral for a moment, and strayed also into the Piazza del Campo, the great public square of Siena. I am not in the mood for further description of public places now, so shall say a word or two about the old palace in which we have established ourselves. We have the second piano, and dwell amid faded grandeur, having for our saloon what seems to have been a ball-room. It is ornamented with a great fresco in the centre of the vaulted ceiling, and others covering the sides of the apartment, and surrounded with arabesque frameworks, where Cupids gambol and chase one another. The subjects of the frescos I cannot make out, not that they are faded like Giotto's, for they are as fresh as roses, and are done in an exceedingly workmanlike style; but they are allegories of Fame and Plenty and other matters, such as I could never understand. Our whole accommodation is in similar style,--spacious, magnificent, and mouldy. In the evening Miss S------ and I drove to the railway, and on the arrival of the train from Florence we watched with much eagerness the unlading of the luggage-van. At last the whole of our ten trunks and tin bandbox were produced, and finally my leather bag, in which was my journal and a manuscript book containing my sketch of a romance. It gladdened my very heart to see it, and I shall think the better of Tuscan promptitude and accuracy for so quickly bringing it back to me. (It was left behind, under one of the rail-carriage seats.) We find all the public officials, whether of railway, police, or custom-house, extremely courteous and pleasant to encounter; they seem willing to take trouble and reluctant to give it, and it is really a gratification to find that such civil people will sometimes oblige you by taking a paul or two aside. October 3d.--I took several strolls about the city yesterday, and find it scarcely extensive enough to get lost in; and if we go far from the centre we soon come to silent streets, with only here and there an individual; and the inhabitants stare from their doors and windows at the stranger, and turn round to look at him after he has passed. The interest of the old town would soon be exhausted for the traveller, but I can conceive that a thoughtful and shy man might settle down here with the view of making the place a home, and spend many years in a sombre kind of happiness. I should prefer it to Florence as a residence, but it would be terrible without an independent life in one's own mind. U---- and I walked out in the afternoon, and went into the Piazza del Campo, the principal place of the city, and a very noble and peculiar one. It is much in the form of an amphitheatre, and the surface of the ground seems to be slightly scooped out, so that it resembles the shallow basin of a shell. It is thus a much better site for an assemblage of the populace than if it were a perfect level. A semicircle or truncated ellipse of stately and ancient edifices surround the piazza, with arches opening beneath them, through which streets converge hitherward. One side of the piazza is a straight line, and is occupied by the Palazzo Publico, which is a most noble and impressive Gothic structure. It has not the mass of the Palazzo Vecchio at Florence, but is more striking. It has a long battlemented front, the central part of which rises eminent above the rest, in a great square bulk, which is likewise crowned with battlements. This is much more picturesque than the one great block of stone into which the Palazzo Vecchio is consolidated. At one extremity of this long front of the Palazzo Publico rises a tower, shooting up its shaft high, high into the air, and bulging out there into a battlemented fortress, within which the tower, slenderer than before, climbs to a still higher region. I do not know whether the summit of the tower is higher or so high as that of the Palazzo Vecchio; but the length of the shaft, free of the edifice, is much greater, and so produces the more elevating effect. The whole front of the Palazzo Publico is exceedingly venerable, with arched windows, Gothic carvings, and all the old-time ornaments that betoken it to have stood a great while, and the gray strength that will hold it up at least as much longer. At one end of the facade, beneath the shadow of the tower, is a grand and beautiful porch, supported on square pillars, within each of which is a niche containing a statue of mediaeval sculpture. The great Piazza del Campo is the market-place of Siena. In the morning it was thronged with booths and stalls, especially of fruit and vegetable dealers; but as in Florence, they melted away in the sunshine, gradually withdrawing themselves into the shadow thrown from the Palazzo Publico. On the side opposite the palace is an antique fountain of marble, ornamented with two statues and a series of bas-reliefs; and it was so much admired in its day that its sculptor received the name "Del Fonte." I am loath to leave the piazza and palace without finding some word or two to suggest their antique majesty, in the sunshine and the shadow; and how fit it seemed, notwithstanding their venerableness, that there should be a busy crowd filling up the great, hollow amphitheatre, and crying their fruit and little merchandises, so that all the curved line of stately old edifices helped to reverberate the noise. The life of to-day, within the shell of a time past, is wonderfully fascinating. Another point to which a stranger's footsteps are drawn by a kind of magnetism, so that he will be apt to find himself there as often as he strolls out of his hotel, is the cathedral. It stands in the highest part of the city, and almost every street runs into some other street which meanders hitherward. On our way thither, U---- and I came to a beautiful front of black and white marble, in somewhat the same style as the cathedral; in fact, it was the baptistery, and should have made a part of it, according to the original design, which contemplated a structure of vastly greater extent than this actual one. We entered the baptistery, and found the interior small, but very rich in its clustered columns and intersecting arches, and its frescos, pictures, statues, and ornaments. Moreover, a father and mother had brought their baby to be baptized, and the poor little thing, in its gay swaddling-clothes, looked just like what I have seen in old pictures, and a good deal like an Indian pappoose. It gave one little slender squeak when the priest put the water on its forehead, and then was quiet again. We now went round to the facade of the cathedral. . . . . It is of black and white marble, with, I believe, an intermixture of red and other colors; but time has toned them down, so that white, black, and red do not contrast so strongly with one another as they may have done five hundred years ago. The architecture is generally of the pointed Gothic style, but there are likewise carved arches over the doors and windows, and a variety which does not produce the effect of confusion,--a magnificent eccentricity, an exuberant imagination flowering out in stone. On high, in the great peak of the front, and throwing its colored radiance into the nave within, there is a round window of immense circumference, the painted figures in which we can see dimly from the outside. But what I wish to express, and never can, is the multitudinous richness of the ornamentation of the front: the arches within arches, sculptured inch by inch, of the deep doorways; the statues of saints, some making a hermitage of a niche, others standing forth; the scores of busts, that look like faces of ancient people gazing down out of the cathedral; the projecting shapes of stone lions,--the thousand forms of Gothic fancy, which seemed to soften the marble and express whatever it liked, and allow it to harden again to last forever. But my description seems like knocking off the noses of some of the busts, the fingers and toes of the statues, the projecting points of the architecture, jumbling them all up together, and flinging them down upon the page. This gives no idea of the truth, nor, least of all, can it shadow forth that solemn whole, mightily combined out of all these minute particulars, and sanctifying the entire space of ground over which this cathedral-front flings its shadow, or on which it reflects the sun. A majesty and a minuteness, neither interfering with the other, each assisting the other; this is what I love in Gothic architecture. We went in and walked about; but I mean to go again before sketching the interior in my poor water-colors. October 4th.--On looking again at the Palazzo Publico, I see that the pillared portal which I have spoken of does not cover an entrance to the palace, but is a chapel, with an altar, and frescos above it. Bouquets of fresh flowers are on the altar, and a lamp burns, in all the daylight, before the crucifix. The chapel is quite unenclosed, except by an openwork balustrade of marble, on which the carving looks very ancient. Nothing could be more convenient for the devotions of the crowd in the piazza, and no doubt the daily prayers offered at the shrine might be numbered by the thousand,--brief, but I hope earnest,--like those glimpses I used to catch at the blue sky, revealing so much in an instant, while I was toiling at Brook Farm. Another picturesque thing about the Palazzo Publico is a great stone balcony quaintly wrought, about midway in the front and high aloft, with two arched windows opening into it. After another glimpse at the cathedral, too, I realize how utterly I have failed in conveying the idea of its elaborate ornament, its twisted and clustered pillars, and numberless devices of sculpture; nor did I mention the venerable statues that stand all round the summit of the edifice, relieved against the sky,--the highest of all being one of the Saviour, on the topmost peak of the front; nor the tall tower that ascends from one side of the building, and is built of layers of black and white marble piled one upon another in regular succession; nor the dome that swells upward close beside this tower. Had the cathedral been constructed on the plan and dimensions at first contemplated, it would have been incomparably majestic; the finished portion, grand as it is, being only what was intended for a transept. One of the walls of what was to have been the nave is still standing, and looks like a ruin, though, I believe, it has been turned to account as the wall of a palace, the space of the never-completed nave being now a court or street. The whole family of us were kindly taken out yesterday, to dine and spend the day at the Villa Belvedere with our friends Mr. and Mrs. Story. The vicinity of Siena is much more agreeable than that of Florence, being cooler, breezier, with more foliage and shrubbery both near at hand and in the distance; and the prospect, Mr. Story told us, embraces a diameter of about a hundred miles between hills north and south. The Villa Belvedere was built and owned by an Englishman now deceased, who has left it to his butler, and its lawns and shrubbery have something English in their character, and there was almost a dampness in the grass, which really pleased me in this parched Italy. Within the house the walls are hung with fine old-fashioned engravings from the pictures of Gainsborough, West, and other English painters. The Englishman, though he had chosen to live and die in Italy, had evidently brought his native tastes and peculiarities along with him. Mr. Story thinks of buying this villa: I do not know but I might be tempted to buy it myself if Siena were a practicable residence for the entire year; but the winter here, with the bleak mountain-winds of a hundred miles round about blustering against it, must be terribly disagreeable. We spent a very pleasant day, turning over books or talking on the lawn, whence we could behold scenes picturesque afar, and rich vineyard glimpses near at hand. Mr. Story is the most variously accomplished and brilliant person, the fullest of social life and fire, whom I ever met; and without seeming to make an effort, he kept us amused and entertained the whole day long; not wearisomely entertained neither, as we should have been if he had not let his fountain play naturally. Still, though he bubbled and brimmed over with fun, he left the impression on me that . . . . there is a pain and care, bred, it may be, out of the very richness of his gifts and abundance of his outward prosperity. Rich, in the prime of life, . . . . and children budding and blossoming around him as fairly as his heart could wish, with sparkling talents,--so many, that if he choose to neglect or fling away one, or two, or three, he would still have enough left to shine with,--who should be happy if not he? . . . . Towards sunset we all walked out into the podere, pausing a little while to look down into a well that stands on the verge of the lawn. Within the spacious circle of its stone curb was an abundant growth of maidenhair, forming a perfect wreath of thickly clustering leaves quite round, and trailing its tendrils downward to the water which gleamed beneath. It was a very pretty sight. Mr. Story bent over the well and uttered deep, musical tones, which were reverberated from the hollow depths with wonderful effect, as if a spirit dwelt within there, and (unlike the spirits that speak through mediums) sent him back responses even profounder and more melodious than the tones that awakened them. Such a responsive well as this might have been taken for an oracle in old days. We went along paths that led from one vineyard to another, and which might have led us for miles across the country. The grapes had been partly gathered, but still there were many purple or white clusters hanging heavily on the vines. We passed cottage doors, and saw groups of contadini and contadine in their festal attire, and they saluted us graciously; but it was observable that one of the men generally lingered on our track to see that no grapes were stolen, for there were a good many young people and children in our train, not only our own, but some from a neighboring villa. These Italian peasants are a kindly race, but, I doubt, not very hospitable of grape or fig. There was a beautiful sunset, and by the time we reached the house again the comet was already visible amid the unextinguished glow of daylight. A Mr. and Mrs. B------, Scotch people from the next villa, had come to see the Storys, and we sat till tea-time reading, talking, William Story drawing caricatures for his children's amusement and ours, and all of us sometimes getting up to look at the comet, which blazed brighter and brighter till it went down into the mists of the horizon. Among the caricatures was one of a Presidential candidate, evidently a man of very malleable principles, and likely to succeed. Late in the evening (too late for little Rosebud) we drove homeward. The streets of old Siena looked very grim at night, and it seemed like gazing into caverns to glimpse down some of the side streets as we passed, with a light burning dimly at the end of them. It was after ten when we reached home, and climbed up our gloomy staircase, lighted by the glimmer of some wax moccoli which I had in my pocket. October 5th.--I have been two or three times into the cathedral; . . . . the whole interior is of marble, in alternate lines of black and white, each layer being about eight inches in width and extending horizontally. It looks very curiously, and might remind the spectator of a stuff with horizontal stripes. Nevertheless, the effect is exceedingly rich, these alternate lines stretching away along the walls and round the clustered pillars, seen aloft, and through the arches; everywhere, this inlay of black and white. Every sort of ornament that could be thought of seems to have been crammed into the cathedral in one place or another: gilding, frescos, pictures; a roof of blue, spangled with golden stars; a magnificent wheel-window of old painted glass over the entrance, and another at the opposite end of the cathedral; statues, some of marble, others of gilded bronze; pulpits of carved marble; a gilded organ; a cornice of marble busts of the popes, extending round the entire church; a pavement, covered all over with a strange kind of mosaic work in various marbles, wrought into marble pictures of sacred subjects; immense clustered pillars supporting the round arches that divide the nave from the side aisles; a clere-story of windows within pointed arches;--it seemed as if the spectator were reading an antique volume written in black-letter of a small character, but conveying a high and solemn meaning. I can find no way of expressing its effect on me, so quaint and venerable as I feel this cathedral to be in its immensity of striped waistcoat, now dingy with five centuries of wear. I ought not to say anything that might detract from the grandeur and sanctity of the blessed edifice, for these attributes are really uninjured by any of the Gothic oddities which I have hinted at. We went this morning to the Institute of the Fine Arts, which is interesting as containing a series of the works of the Sienese painters from a date earlier than that of Cimabue. There is a dispute, I believe, between Florence and Siena as to which city may claim the credit of having originated the modern art of painting. The Florentines put forward Cimabue as the first artist, but as the Sienese produce a picture, by Guido da Siena, dated before the birth of Cimabue, the victory is decidedly with them. As to pictorial merit, to my taste there is none in either of these old painters, nor in any of their successors for a long time afterwards. At the Institute there are several rooms hung with early productions of the Sienese school, painted before the invention of oil-colors, on wood shaped into Gothic altar-pieces. The backgrounds still retain a bedimmed splendor of gilding. There is a plentiful use of red, and I can conceive that the pictures must have shed an illumination through the churches where they were displayed. There is often, too, a minute care bestowed on the faces in the pictures, and sometimes a very strong expression, stronger than modern artists get, and it is very strange how they attained this merit while they were so inconceivably rude in other respects. It is remarkable that all the early faces of the Madonna are especially stupid, and all of the same type, a sort of face such as one might carve on a pumpkin, representing a heavy, sulky, phlegmatic woman, with a long and low arch of the nose. This same dull face continues to be assigned to the Madonna, even when the countenances of the surrounding saints and angels are characterized with power and beauty, so that I think there must have been some portrait of this sacred personage reckoned authentic, which the early painters followed and religiously repeated. At last we came to a picture by Sodoma, the most illustrious representative of the Sienese school. It was a fresco; Christ bound to the pillar, after having been scourged. I do believe that painting has never done anything better, so far as expression is concerned, than this figure. In all these generations since it was painted it must have softened thousands of hearts, drawn down rivers of tears, been more effectual than a million of sermons. Really, it is a thing to stand and weep at. No other painter has done anything that can deserve to be compared to this. There are some other pictures by Sodoma, among them a Judith, very noble and admirable, and full of a profound sorrow for the deed which she has felt it her mission to do. Aquila Nera, October 7th.--Our lodgings in Siena had been taken only for five days, as they were already engaged after that period; so yesterday we returned to our old quarters at the Black Eagle. In the forenoon J----- and I went out of one of the gates (the road from it leads to Florence) and had a pleasant country walk. Our way wound downward, round the hill on which Siena stands, and gave us views of the Duomo and its campanile, seemingly pretty near, after we had walked long enough to be quite remote from them. Sitting awhile on the parapet of a bridge, I saw a laborer chopping the branches off a poplar-tree which he had felled; and, when it was trimmed, he took up the large trunk on one of his shoulders and carried it off, seemingly with ease. He did not look like a particularly robust man; but I have never seen such an herculean feat attempted by an Englishman or American. It has frequently struck me that the Italians are able to put forth a great deal of strength in such insulated efforts as this; but I have been told that they are less capable of continued endurance and hardship than our own race. I do not know why it should be so, except that I presume their food is less strong than ours. There was no other remarkable incident in our walk, which lay chiefly through gorges of the hills, winding beneath high cliffs of the brown Siena earth, with many pretty scenes of rural landscape; vineyards everywhere, and olive-trees; a mill on its little stream, over which there was an old stone bridge, with a graceful arch; farm-houses; a villa or two; subterranean passages, passing from the roadside through the high banks into the vineyards. At last we turned aside into a road which led us pretty directly to another gate of the city, and climbed steeply upward among tanneries, where the young men went about with their well-shaped legs bare, their trousers being tucked up till they were strictly breeches and nothing else. The campanile stood high above us; and by and by, and very soon, indeed, the steep ascent of the street brought us into the neighborhood of the Piazza del Campo, and of our own hotel. . . . . From about twelve o'clock till one, I sat at my chamber window watching the specimens of human life as displayed in the Piazza Tolomei. [Here follow several pages of moving objects.] . . . . Of course, a multitude of other people passed by, but the curiousness of the catalogue is the prevalence of the martial and religious elements. The general costume of the inhabitants is frocks or sacks, loosely made, and rather shabby; often, shirt-sleeves; or the coat hung over one shoulder. They wear felt hats and straw. People of respectability seem to prefer cylinder hats, either black or drab, and broadcloth frock-coats in the French fashion; but, like the rest, they look a little shabby. Almost all the women wear shawls. Ladies in swelling petticoats, and with fans, some of which are highly gilded, appear. The people generally are not tall, but have a sufficient breadth of shoulder; in complexion, similar to Americans; bearded, universally. The vehicle used for driving is a little gig without a top; but these are seldom seen, and still less frequently a cab or other carriages. The gait of the people has not the energy of business or decided purpose. Everybody appears to lounge, and to have time for a moment's chat, and a disposition to rest, reason or none. After dinner I walked out of another gate of the city, and wandered among some pleasant country lanes, bordered with hedges, and wearing an English aspect; at least, I could fancy so. The vicinity of Siena is delightful to walk about in; there being a verdant outlook, a wide prospect of purple mountains, though no such level valley as the Val d' Arno; and the city stands so high that its towers and domes are seen more picturesquely from many points than those of Florence can be. Neither is the pedestrian so cruelly shut into narrow lanes, between high stone-walls, over which he cannot get a glimpse of landscape. As I walked by the hedges yesterday I could have fancied that the olive-trunks were those of apple-trees, and that I was in one or other of the two lands that I love better than Italy. But the great white villas and the farm-houses were unlike anything I have seen elsewhere, or that I should wish to see again, though proper enough to Italy. October 9th.--Thursday forenoon, 8th, we went to see the Palazzo Publico. There are some fine old halls and chapels, adorned with ancient frescos and pictures, of which I remember a picture of the Virgin by Sodoma, very beautiful, and other fine pictures by the same master. The architecture of these old rooms is grand, the roofs being supported by ponderous arches, which are covered with frescos, still magnificent, though faded, darkened, and defaced. We likewise saw an antique casket of wood, enriched with gilding, which had once contained an arm of John the Baptist,--so the custode told us. One of the halls was hung with the portraits of eight popes and nearly forty cardinals, who were natives of Siena. I have done hardly any other sight-seeing except a daily visit to the cathedral, which I admire and love the more the oftener I go thither. Its striped peculiarity ceases entirely to interfere with the grandeur and venerable beauty of its impression; and I am never weary of gazing through the vista of its arches, and noting continually something that I had not seen before in its exuberant adornment. The pavement alone is inexhaustible, being covered all over with figures of life-size or larger, which look like immense engravings of Gothic or Scriptural scenes. There is Absalom hanging by his hair, and Joab slaying him with a spear. There is Samson belaboring the Philistines with the jawbone of an ass. There are armed knights in the tumult of battle, all wrought with wonderful expression. The figures are in white marble, inlaid with darker stone, and the shading is effected by means of engraved lines in the marble, filled in with black. It would be possible, perhaps, to print impressions from some of these vast plates, for the process of cutting the lines was an exact anticipation of the modern art of engraving. However, the same thing was done--and I suppose at about the same period--on monumental brasses, and I have seen impressions or rubbings from those for sale in the old English churches. Yesterday morning, in the cathedral, I watched a woman at confession, being curious to see how long it would take her to tell her sins, the growth of a week perhaps. I know not how long she had been confessing when I first observed her, but nearly an hour passed before the priest came suddenly from the confessional, looking weary and moist with perspiration, and took his way out of the cathedral. The woman was left on her knees. This morning I watched another woman, and she too was very long about it, and I could see the face of the priest behind the curtain of the confessional, scarcely inclining his ear to the perforated tin through which the penitent communicated her outpourings. It must be very tedious to listen, day after day, to the minute and commonplace iniquities of the multitude of penitents, and it cannot be often that these are redeemed by the treasure-trove of a great sin. When her confession was over the woman came and sat down on the same bench with me, where her broad-brimmed straw hat was lying. She seemed to be a country woman, with a simple, matronly face, which was solemnized and softened with the comfort that she had obtained by disburdening herself of the soil of worldly frailties and receiving absolution. An old woman, who haunts the cathedral, whispered to her, and she went and knelt down where a procession of priests were to pass, and then the old lady begged a cruzia of me, and got a half-paul. It almost invariably happens, in church or cathedral, that beggars address their prayers to the heretic visitor, and probably with more unction than to the Virgin or saints. However, I have nothing to say against the sincerity of this people's devotion. They give all the proof of it that a mere spectator can estimate. Last evening we all went out to see the comet, which then reached its climax of lustre. It was like a lofty plume of fire, and grew very brilliant as the night darkened. October 10th.--This morning, too, we went to the cathedral, and sat long listening to the music of the organ and voices, and witnessing rites and ceremonies which are far older than even the ancient edifice where they were exhibited. A good many people were present, sitting, kneeling, or walking about,--a freedom that contrasts very agreeably with the grim formalities of English churches and our own meeting-houses. Many persons were in their best attire; but others came in, with unabashed simplicity, in their old garments of labor, sunburnt women from their toil among the vines and olives. One old peasant I noticed with his withered shanks in breeches and blue yarn stockings. The people of whatever class are wonderfully tolerant of heretics, never manifesting any displeasure or annoyance, though they must see that we are drawn thither by curiosity alone, and merely pry while they pray. I heartily wish the priests were better men, and that human nature, divinely influenced, could be depended upon for a constant supply and succession of good and pure ministers, their religion has so many admirable points. And then it is a sad pity that this noble and beautiful cathedral should be a mere fossil shell, out of which the life has died long ago. But for many a year yet to come the tapers will burn before the high altar, the Host will be elevated, the incense diffuse its fragrance, the confessionals be open to receive the penitents. I saw a father entering with two little bits of boys, just big enough to toddle along, holding his hand on either side. The father dipped his fingers into the marble font of holy water,--which, on its pedestals, was two or three times as high as those small Christians, --and wetted a hand of each, and taught them how to cross themselves. When they come to be men it will be impossible to convince those children that there is no efficacy in holy water, without plucking up all religious faith and sentiment by the roots. Generally, I suspect, when people throw off the faith they were born in, the best soil of their hearts is apt to cling to its roots. Raised several feet above the pavement, against every clustered pillar along the nave of the cathedral, is placed a statue of Gothic sculpture. In various places are sitting statues of popes of Sienese nativity, all of whom, I believe, have a hand raised in the act of blessing. Shrines and chapels, set in grand, heavy frames of pillared architecture, stand all along the aisles and transepts, and these seem in many instances to have been built and enriched by noble families, whose arms are sculptured on the pedestals of the pillars, sometimes with a cardinal's hat above to denote the rank of one of its members. How much pride, love, and reverence in the lapse of ages must have clung to the sharp points of all this sculpture and architecture! The cathedral is a religion in itself, --something worth dying for to those who have an hereditary interest in it. In the pavement, yesterday, I noticed the gravestone of a person who fell six centuries ago in the battle of Monte Aperto, and was buried here by public decree as a meed of valor. This afternoon I took a walk out of one of the city gates, and found the country about Siena as beautiful in this direction as in all others. I came to a little stream flowing over into a pebbly bed, and collecting itself into pools, with a scanty rivulet between. Its glen was deep, and was crossed by a bridge of several lofty and narrow arches like those of a Roman aqueduct. It is a modern structure, however. Farther on, as I wound round along the base of a hill which fell down upon the road by precipitous cliffs of brown earth, I saw a gray, ruined wall on the summit, surrounded with cypress-trees. This tree is very frequent about Siena, and the scenery is made soft and beautiful by a variety of other trees and shrubbery, without which these hills and gorges would have scarcely a charm. The road was thronged with country people, mostly women and children, who had been spending the feast-day in Siena; and parties of boys were chasing one another through the fields, pretty much as boys do in New England of a Sunday, but the Sienese lads had not the sense of Sabbath-breaking like our boys. Sunday with these people is like any other feast-day, and consecrated cheerful enjoyment. So much religious observance, as regards outward forms, is diffused through the whole week that they have no need to intensify the Sabbath except by making it gladden the other days. Returning through the same gate by which I had come out, I ascended into the city by a long and steep street, which was paved with bricks set edgewise. This pavement is common in many of the streets, which, being too steep for horses and carriages, are meant only to sustain the lighter tread of mules and asses. The more level streets are paved with broad, smooth flag-stones, like those of Florence,--a fashion which I heartily regret to change for the little penitential blocks of Rome. The walls of Siena in their present state, and so far as I have seen them, are chiefly brick; but there are intermingled fragments of ancient stone-work, and I wonder why the latter does not prevail more largely. The Romans, however,--and Siena had Roman characteristics,--always liked to build of brick, a taste that has made their ruins (now that the marble slabs are torn off) much less grand than they ought to have been. I am grateful to the old Sienese for having used stone so largely in their domestic architecture, and thereby rendered their city so grimly picturesque, with its black palaces frowning upon one another from arched windows, across narrow streets, to the height of six stories, like opposite ranks of tall men looking sternly into one another's eyes. October 11th.--Again I went to the cathedral this morning, and spent an hour listening to the music and looking through the orderly intricacies of the arches, where many vistas open away among the columns of the choir. There are five clustered columns on each side of the nave; then under the dome there are two more arches, not in a straight line, but forming the segment of a circle; and beyond the circle of the dome there are four more arches, extending to the extremity of the chancel. I should have said, instead of "clustered columns" as above, that there are five arches along the nave supported by columns. This cathedral has certainly bewitched me, to write about it so much, effecting nothing with my pains. I should judge the width of each arch to be about twenty feet, and the thickness of each clustered pillar is eight; or ten more, and the length of the entire building may be between two and three hundred feet; not very large, certainly, but it makes an impression of grandeur independent of size. . . . . I never shall succeed even in reminding myself of the venerable magnificence of this minster, with its arches, its columns, its cornice of popes' heads, its great wheel windows, its manifold ornament, all combining in one vast effect, though many men have labored individually, and through a long course of time, to produce this multifarious handiwork and headwork. I now took a walk out of the city. A road turned immediately to the left as I emerged from the city, and soon proved to be a rustic lane leading past several villas and farm-houses. It was a very pleasant walk, with vineyards and olive-orchards on each side, and now and then glimpses of the towers and sombre heaped-up palaces of Siena, and now a rural seclusion again; for the hills rise and the valleys fall like the swell and subsidence of the sea after a gale, so that Siena may be quite hidden within a quarter of a mile of its wall, or may be visible, I doubt not, twenty miles away. It is a fine old town, with every promise of health and vigor in its atmosphere, and really, if I could take root anywhere, I know not but it could as well be here as in another place. It would only be a kind of despair, however, that would ever make me dream of finding a home in Italy; a sense that I had lost my country through absence or incongruity, and that earth is not an abiding-place. I wonder that we Americans love our country at all, it having no limits and no oneness; and when you try to make it a matter of the heart, everything falls away except one's native State; neither can you seize hold of that unless you tear it out of the Union, bleeding and quivering. Yet unquestionably, we do stand by our national flag as stoutly as any people in the world, and I myself have felt the heart throb at sight of it as sensibly as other men. I think the singularity of our form of government contributes to give us a kind of patriotism, by separating us from other nations more entirely. If other nations had similar institutions,--if England, especially, were a democracy,--we should as readily make ourselves at home in another country as now in a new State. October 12th.--And again we went to the cathedral this forenoon, and the whole family, except myself, sketched portions of it. Even Rosebud stood gravely sketching some of the inlaid figures of the pavement. As for me, I can but try to preserve some memorial of this beautiful edifice in ill-fitting words that never hit the mark. This morning visit was not my final one, for I went again after dinner and walked quite round the whole interior. I think I have not yet mentioned the rich carvings of the old oaken seats round the choir, and the curious mosaic of lighter and darker woods, by which figures and landscapes are skilfully represented on the backs of some of the stalls. The process seems to be the same as the inlaying and engraving of the pavement, the material in one case being marble, in the other wood. The only other thing that I particularly noticed was, that in the fonts of holy water at the front entrance, marble fish are sculptured in the depths of the basin, and eels and shellfish crawling round the brim. Have I spoken of the sumptuous carving of the capitals of the columns? At any rate I have left a thousand beauties without a word. Here I drop the subject. As I took my parting glance the cathedral had a gleam of golden sunshine in its far depths, and it seemed to widen and deepen itself, as if to convince me of my error in saying, yesterday, that it is not very large. I wonder how I could say it. After taking leave of the cathedral, I found my way out of another of the city gates, and soon turned aside into a green lane. . . . . Soon the lane passed through a hamlet consisting of a few farm-houses, the shabbiest and dreariest that can be conceived, ancient, and ugly, and dilapidated, with iron-grated windows below, and heavy wooden shutters on the windows above,--high, ruinous walls shutting in the courts, and ponderous gates, one of which was off its hinges. The farm-yards were perfect pictures of disarray and slovenly administration of home affairs. Only one of these houses had a door opening on the road, and that was the meanest in the hamlet. A flight of narrow stone stairs ascended from the threshold to the second story. All these houses were specimens of a rude antiquity, built of brick and stone, with the marks of arched doors and windows where a subsequent generation had shut up the lights, or the accesses which the original builders had opened. Humble as these dwellings are,--though large and high compared with rural residences in other countries,--they may very probably date back to the times when Siena was a warlike republic, and when every house in its neighborhood had need to be a fortress. I suppose, however, prowling banditti were the only enemies against whom a defence would be attempted. What lives must now be lived there,--in beastly ignorance, mental sluggishness, hard toil for little profit, filth, and a horrible discomfort of fleas; for if the palaces of Italy are overrun with these pests, what must the country hovels be! . . . . We are now all ready for a start to-morrow. RADICOFANI. October 13th.--We arranged to begin our journey at six. . . . . It was a chill, lowering morning, and the rain blew a little in our faces before we had gone far, but did not continue long. The country soon lost the pleasant aspect which it wears immediately about Siena, and grew very barren and dreary. Then it changed again for the better, the road leading us through a fertility of vines and olives, after which the dreary and barren hills came back again, and formed our prospect throughout most of the day. We stopped for our dejeuner a la fourchette at a little old town called San Quirico, which we entered through a ruined gateway, the town being entirely surrounded by its ancient wall. This wall is far more picturesque than that of Siena, being lofty and built of stone, with a machicolation of arches running quite round its top, like a cornice. It has little more than a single street, perhaps a quarter of a mile long, narrow, paved with flag-stones in the Florentine fashion, and lined with two rows of tall, rusty stone houses, without a gap between them from end to end. The cafes were numerous in relation to the size of the town, and there were two taverns,--our own, the Eagle, being doubtless the best, and having three arched entrances in its front. Of these, the middle one led to the guests' apartments, the one on the right to the barn, and that on the left to the stable, so that, as is usual in Italian inns, the whole establishment was under one roof. We were shown into a brick-paved room on the first floor, adorned with a funny fresco of Aurora on the ceiling, and with some colored prints, both religious and profane. . . . . As we drove into the town we noticed a Gothic church with two doors of peculiar architecture, and while our dejeuner was being prepared we went to see it. The interior had little that was remarkable, for it had been repaired early in the last century, and spoilt of course; but an old triptych is still hanging in a chapel beside the high altar. It is painted on wood, and dates back beyond the invention of oil-painting, and represents the Virgin and some saints and angels. Neither is the exterior of the church particularly interesting, with the exception of the carving and ornaments of two of the doors. Both of them have round arches, deep and curiously wrought, and the pillars of one of the two are formed of a peculiar knot or twine in stone-work, such as I cannot well describe, but it is both ingenious and simple. These pillars rest on two nondescript animals, which look as much like walruses as anything else. The pillars of the other door consist of two figures supporting the capitals, and themselves standing on two handsomely carved lions. The work is curious, and evidently very ancient, and the material a red freestone. After lunch, J----- and I took a walk out of the gate of the town opposite to that of our entrance. There were no soldiers on guard, as at city gates of more importance; nor do I think that there is really any gate to shut, but the massive stone gateway still stands entire over the empty arch. Looking back after we had passed through, I observed that the lofty upper story is converted into a dove-cot, and that pumpkins were put to ripen in some open chambers at one side. We passed near the base of a tall, square tower, which is said to be of Roman origin. The little town is in the midst of a barren region, but its immediate neighborhood is fertile, and an olive-orchard, venerable of aspect, lay on the other side of the pleasant lane with its English hedges, and olive-trees grew likewise along the base of the city wall. The arched machicolations, which I have before mentioned, were here and there interrupted by a house which was built upon the old wall or incorporated into it; and from the windows of one of then I saw ears of Indian corn hung out to ripen in the sun, and somebody was winnowing grain at a little door that opened through the wall. It was very pleasant to see the ancient warlike rampart thus overcome with rustic peace. The ruined gateway is partly overgrown with ivy. Returning to our inn, along the street, we saw ------ sketching one of the doors of the Gothic church, in the midst of a crowd of the good people of San Quirico, who made no scruple to look over her shoulder, pressing so closely as hardly to allow her elbow-room. I must own that I was too cowardly to come forward and take my share of this public notice, so I turned away to the inn and there awaited her coming. Indeed, she has seldom attempted to sketch without finding herself the nucleus of a throng. VITERBO. The Black Eagle, October 14th.--Perhaps I had something more to say of San Quirico, but I shall merely add that there is a stately old palace of the Piccolomini close to the church above described. It is built in the style of the Roman palaces, and looked almost large enough to be one of them. Nevertheless, the basement story, or part of it, seems to be used as a barn and stable, for I saw a yoke of oxen in the entrance. I cannot but mention a most wretched team of vettura-horses which stopped at the door of our albergo: poor, lean, downcast creatures, with deep furrows between their ribs; nothing but skin and bone, in short, and not even so much skin as they should have had, for it was partially worn off from their backs. The harness was fastened with ropes, the traces and reins were ropes; the carriage was old and shabby, and out of this miserable equipage there alighted an ancient gentleman and lady, whom our waiter affirmed to be the Prefect of Florence and his wife. We left San Quirico at two o'clock, and followed an ascending road till we got into the region above the clouds; the landscape was very wide, but very dreary and barren, and grew more and more so till we began to climb the mountain of Radicofani, the peak of which had been blackening itself on the horizon almost the whole day. When we had come into a pretty high region we were assailed by a real mountain tempest of wind, rain, and hail, which pelted down upon us in good earnest, and cooled the air a little below comfort. As we toiled up the mountain its upper region presented a very striking aspect, looking as if a precipice had been smoothed and squared for the purpose of rendering the old castle on its summit more inaccessible than it was by nature. This is the castle of the robber-knight, Ghino di Tacco, whom Boccaccio introduces into the Decameron. A freebooter of those days must have set a higher value on such a rock as this than if it had been one mass of diamond, for no art of mediaeval warfare could endanger him in such a fortress. Drawing yet nearer, we found the hillside immediately above us strewn with thousands upon thousands of great fragments of stone. It looked as if some great ruin had taken place there, only it was too vast a ruin to have been the dismemberment and dissolution of anything made by man. We could now see the castle on the height pretty distinctly. It seemed to impend over the precipice; and close to the base of the latter we saw the street of a town on as strange and inconvenient a foundation as ever one was built upon. I suppose the inhabitants of the village were dependants of the old knight of the castle; his brotherhood of robbers, as they married and had families, settled there under the shelter of the eagle's nest. But the singularity is, how a community of people have contrived to live and perpetuate themselves so far out of the reach of the world's help, and seemingly with no means of assisting in the world's labor. I cannot imagine how they employ themselves except in begging, and even that branch of industry appears to be left to the old women and the children. No house was ever built in this immediate neighborhood for any such natural purpose as induces people to build them on other sites. Even our hotel, at which we now arrived, could not be said to be a natural growth of the soil; it had originally been a whim of one of the Grand Dukes of Tuscany,--a hunting-palace,--intended for habitation only during a few weeks of the year. Of all dreary hotels I ever alighted at, methinks this is the most so; but on first arriving I merely followed the waiter to look at our rooms, across stone-paved basement-halls dismal as Etruscan tombs; up dim staircases, and along shivering corridors, all of stone, stone, stone, nothing but cold stone. After glancing at these pleasant accommodations, my wife and I, with J-----, set out to ascend the hill and visit the town of Radicofani. It is not more than a quarter of a mile above our hotel, and is accessible by a good piece of road, though very steep. As we approached the town, we were assailed by some little beggars; but this is the case all through Italy, in city or solitude, and I think the mendicants of Radicofani are fewer than its proportion. We had not got far towards the village, when, looking back over the scene of many miles that lay stretched beneath us, we saw a heavy shower apparently travelling straight towards us over hill and dale. It seemed inevitable that it should soon be upon us, so I persuaded my wife to return to the hotel; but J----- and I kept onward, being determined to see Radicofani with or without a drenching. We soon entered the street; the blackest, ugliest, rudest old street, I do believe, that ever human life incrusted itself with. The first portion of it is the overbrimming of the town in generations subsequent to that in which it was surrounded by a wall; but after going a little way we came to a high, square tower planted right across the way, with an arched gateway in its basement story, so that it looked like a great short-legged giant striding over the street of Radicofani. Within the gateway is the proper and original town, though indeed the portion outside of the gate is as densely populated, as ugly, and as ancient, as that within. The street was very narrow, and paved with flag-stones not quite so smooth as those of Florence; the houses are tall enough to be stately, if they were not so inconceivably dingy and shabby; but, with their half-dozen stories, they make only the impression of hovel piled upon hovel,--squalor immortalized in undecaying stone. It was now getting far into the twilight, and I could not distinguish the particularities of the little town, except that there were shops, a cafe or two, and as many churches, all dusky with age, crowded closely together, inconvenient stifled too in spite of the breadth and freedom of the mountain atmosphere outside the scanty precincts of the street. It was a death-in-life little place, a fossilized place, and yet the street was thronged, and had all the bustle of a city; even more noise than a city's street, because everybody in Radicofani knows everybody, and probably gossips with everybody, being everybody's blood relation, as they cannot fail to have become after they and their forefathers have been shut up together within the narrow walls for many hundred years. They looked round briskly at J----- and me, but were courteous, as Italians always are, and made way for us to pass through the throng, as we kept on still ascending the steep street. It took us but a few minutes to reach the still steeper and winding pathway which climbs towards the old castle. After ascending above the village, the path, though still paved, becomes very rough, as if the hoofs of Ghino di Tacco's robber cavalry had displaced the stones and they had never been readjusted. On every side, too, except where the path just finds space enough, there is an enormous rubbish of huge stones, which seems to have fallen from the precipice above, or else to have rained down out of the sky. We kept on, and by and by reached what seemed to have been a lower outwork of the castle on the top; there was the massive old arch of a gateway, and a great deal of ruin of man's work, beside the large stones that here, as elsewhere, were scattered so abundantly. Within the wall and gateway just mentioned, however, there was a kind of farm-house, adapted, I suppose, out of the old ruin, and I noticed some ears of Indian corn hanging out of a window. There were also a few stacks of hay, but no signs of human or animal life; and it is utterly inexplicable to me, where these products of the soil could have come from, for certainly they never grew amid that barrenness. We had not yet reached Ghino's castle, and, being now beneath it, we had to bend our heads far backward to see it rising up against the clear sky while we were now in twilight. The path upward looked terribly steep and rough, and if we had climbed it we should probably have broken our necks in descending again into the lower obscurity. We therefore stopped here, much against J-----'s will, and went back as we came, still wondering at the strange situation of Radicofani; for its aspect is as if it had stepped off the top of the cliff and lodged at its base, though still in danger of sliding farther down the hillside. Emerging from the compact, grimy life of its street, we saw that the shower had swept by, or probably had expended itself in a region beneath us, for we were above the scope of many of the showery clouds that haunt a hill-country. There was a very bright star visible, I remember, and we saw the new moon, now a third towards the full, for the first time this evening. The air was cold and bracing. But I am excessively sleepy, so will not describe our great dreary hotel, where a blast howled in an interminable corridor all night. It did not seem to have anything to do with the wind out of doors, but to be a blast that had been casually shut in when the doors were closed behind the last Grand Duke who came hither and departed, and ever since it has been kept prisoner, and makes a melancholy wail along the corridor. The dreamy stupidity of this conceit proves how sleepy I am. SETTE VENE. October 15th.--We left Radicofani long before sunrise, and I saw that ceremony take place from the coupe of the vettura for the first time in a long while. A sunset is the better sight of the two. I have always suspected it, and have been strengthened in the idea whenever I have had an opportunity of comparison. Our departure from Radicofani was most dreary, except that we were very glad to get away; but, the cold discomfort of dressing in a chill bedroom by candlelight, and our uncertain wandering through the immense hotel with a dim taper in search of the breakfast-room, and our poor breakfast of eggs, Italian bread, and coffee,--all these things made me wish that people were created with roots like trees, so they could not befool themselves with wandering about. However, we had not long been on our way before the morning air blew away all our troubles, and we rumbled cheerfully onward, ready to encounter even the papal custom-house officers at Ponte Centino. Our road thither was a pretty steep descent. I remember the barren landscape of hills, with here and there a lonely farm-house, which there seemed to be no occasion for, where nothing grew. At Ponte Centino my passport was examined, and I was invited into an office where sat the papal custom-house officer, a thin, subtle-looking, keen-eyed, sallow personage, of aspect very suitable to be the agent of a government of priests. I communicated to him my wish to pass the custom-house without giving the officers the trouble of examining my luggage. He inquired whether I had any dutiable articles, and wrote for my signature a declaration in the negative; and then he lifted a sand-box, beneath which was a little heap of silver coins. On this delicate hint I asked what was the usual fee, and was told that fifteen pauls was the proper sum. I presume it was entirely an illegal charge, and that he had no right to pass any luggage without examination; but the thing is winked at by the authorities, and no money is better spent for the traveller's convenience than these fifteen pauls. There was a papal military officer in the room, and he, I believe, cheated me in the change of a Napoleon, as his share of the spoil. At the door a soldier met me with my passport, and looked as if he expected a fee for handing it to me; but in this he was disappointed. After I had resumed my seat in the coupe, the porter of the custom-house--a poor, sickly-looking creature, half dead with the malaria of the place--appeared, and demanded a fee for doing nothing to my luggage. He got three pauls, and looked but half contented. This whole set of men seem to be as corrupt as official people can possibly be; and yet I hardly know whether to stigmatize them as corrupt, because it is not their individual delinquency, but the operation of a regular system. Their superiors know what men they are, and calculate upon their getting a living by just these means. And, indeed, the custom-house and passport regulations, as they exist in Italy, would be intolerable if there were not this facility of evading them at little cost. Such laws are good for nothing but to be broken. We now began to ascend again, and the country grew fertile and picturesque. We passed many mules and donkeys, laden with a sort of deep firkin on each side of the saddle, and these were heaped up with grapes, both purple and white. We bought some, and got what we should have thought an abundance at small price, only we used to get twice as many at Montanto for the same money. However, a Roman paul bought us three or four pounds even here. We still ascended, and came soon to the gateway of the town of Acquapendente, which stands on a height that seems to descend by natural terraces to the valley below. . . . . French soldiers, in their bluish-gray coats and scarlet trousers, were on duty at the gate, and one of them took my passport and the vetturino's, and we then drove into the town to wait till they should be vised. We saw but one street, narrow, with tall, rusty, aged houses, built of stone, evil smelling; in short, a kind of place that would be intolerably dismal in cloudy England, and cannot be called cheerful even under the sun of Italy. . . . . Priests passed, and burly friars, one of whom was carrying a wine-barrel on his head. Little carts, laden with firkins of grapes, and donkeys with the same genial burden, brushed passed our vettura, finding scarce room enough in the narrow street. All the idlers of Acquapendente--and they were many--assembled to gaze at us, but not discourteously. Indeed, I never saw an idle curiosity exercised in such a pleasant way as by the country-people of Italy. It almost deserves to be called a kindly interest and sympathy, instead of a hard and cold curiosity, like that of our own people, and it is displayed with such simplicity that it is evident no offence is intended. By and by the vetturino brought his passport and my own, with the official vise, and we kept on our way, still ascending, passing through vineyards and olives, and meeting grape-laden donkeys, till we came to the town of San Lorenzo Nuovo, a place built by Pius VI. as the refuge for the people of a lower town which had been made uninhabitable by malaria. The new town, which I suppose is hundreds of years old, with all its novelty shows strikingly the difference between places that grow up and shape out their streets of their own accord, as it were, and one that is built on a settled plan of malice aforethought. This little rural village has gates of classic architecture, a spacious piazza, and a great breadth of straight and rectangular streets, with houses of uniform style, airy and wholesome looking to a degree seldom seen on the Continent. Nevertheless, I must say that the town looked hatefully dull and ridiculously prim, and, of the two, I had rather spend my life in Radicofani. We drove through it, from gate to gate, without stopping, and soon came to the brow of a hill, whence we beheld, right beneath us, the beautiful lake of Bolsena; not exactly at our feet, however, for a portion of level ground lay between, haunted by the pestilence which has depopulated all these shores, and made the lake and its neighborhood a solitude. It looked very beautiful, nevertheless, with a sheen of a silver mid a gray like that of steel as the wind blew and the sun shone over it; and, judging by my own feelings, I should really have thought that the breeze from its surface was bracing and healthy. Descending the hill, we passed the ruins of the old town of San Lorenzo, of which the prim village on the hill-top may be considered the daughter. There is certainly no resemblance between parent and child, the former being situated on a sort of precipitous bluff, where there could have been no room for piazzas and spacious streets, nor accessibility except by mules, donkeys, goats, and people of Alpine habits. There was an ivy-covered tower on the top of the bluff, and some arched cavern mouths that looked as if they opened into the great darkness. These were the entrances to Etruscan tombs, for the town on top had been originally Etruscan, and the inhabitants had buried themselves in the heart of the precipitous bluffs after spending their lives on its summit. Reaching the plain, we drove several miles along the shore of the lake, and found the soil fertile and generally well cultivated, especially with the vine, though there were tracks apparently too marshy to be put to any agricultural purpose. We met now and then a flock of sheep, watched by sallow-looking and spiritless men and boys, who, we took it for granted, would soon perish of malaria, though, I presume, they never spend their nights in the immediate vicinity of the lake. I should like to inquire whether animals suffer from the bad qualities of the air. The lake is not nearly so beautiful on a nearer view as it is from the hill above, there being no rocky margin, nor bright, sandy beach, but everywhere this interval of level ground, and often swampy marsh, betwixt the water and the hill. At a considerable distance from the shore we saw two islands, one of which is memorable as having been the scene of an empress's murder, but I cannot stop to fill my journal with historical reminiscences. We kept onward to the town of Bolsena, which stands nearly a mile from the lake, and on a site higher than the level margin, yet not so much so, I should apprehend, as to free it from danger of malaria. We stopped at an albergo outside of the wall of the town, and before dinner had time to see a good deal of the neighborhood. The first aspect of the town was very striking, with a vista into its street through the open gateway, and high above it an old, gray, square-built castle, with three towers visible at the angles, one of them battlemented, one taller than the rest, and one partially ruined. Outside of the town-gate there were some fragments of Etruscan ruin, capitals of pillars and altars with inscriptions; these we glanced at, and then made our entrance through the gate. There it was again,--the same narrow, dirty, time-darkened street of piled-up houses which we have so often seen; the same swarm of ill-to-do people, grape-laden donkeys, little stands or shops of roasted chestnuts, peaches, tomatoes, white and purple figs; the same evidence of a fertile land, and grimy poverty in the midst of abundance which nature tries to heap into their hands. It seems strange that they can never grasp it. We had gone but a little way along this street, when we saw a narrow lane that turned aside from it and went steeply upward. Its name was on the corner,--the Via di Castello,--and as the castle promised to be more interesting than anything else, we immediately began to ascend. The street--a strange name for such an avenue--clambered upward in the oddest fashion, passing under arches, scrambling up steps, so that it was more like a long irregular pair of stairs than anything that Christians call a street; and so large a part of it was under arches that we scarcely seemed to be out of doors. At last U----, who was in advance, emerged into the upper air, and cried out that we had ascended to an upper town, and a larger one than that beneath. It really seemed like coming up out of the earth into the midst of the town, when we found ourselves so unexpectedly in upper Bolsena. We were in a little nook, surrounded by old edifices, and called the Piazza del Orologio, on account of a clock that was apparent somewhere. The castle was close by, and from its platform there was a splendid view of the lake and all the near hill-country. The castle itself is still in good condition, and apparently as strong as ever it was as respects the exterior walls; but within there seemed to be neither floor nor chamber, nothing but the empty shell of the dateless old fortress. The stones at the base and lower part of the building were so massive that I should think the Etrurians must have laid them; and then perhaps the Romans built a little higher, and the mediaeval people raised the battlements and towers. But we did not look long at the castle, our attention being drawn to the singular aspect of the town itself, which--to speak first of its most prominent characteristic--is the very filthiest place, I do believe, that was ever inhabited by man. Defilement was everywhere; in the piazza, in nooks and corners, strewing the miserable lanes from side to side, the refuse of every day, and of accumulated ages. I wonder whether the ancient Romans were as dirty a people as we everywhere find those who have succeeded them; for there seems to have been something in the places that have been inhabited by Romans, or made famous in their history, and in the monuments of every kind that they have raised, that puts people in mind of their very earthliness, and incites them to defile therewith whatever temple, column, ruined palace, or triumphal arch may fall in their way. I think it must be an hereditary trait, probably weakened and robbed of a little of its horror by the influence of milder ages; and I am much afraid that Caesar trod narrower and fouler ways in his path to power than those of modern Rome, or even of this disgusting town of Bolsena. I cannot imagine anything worse than these, however. Rotten vegetables thrown everywhere about, musty straw, standing puddles, running rivulets of dissolved nastiness,--these matters were a relief amid viler objects. The town was full of great black hogs wallowing before every door, and they grunted at us with a kind of courtesy and affability as if the town were theirs, and it was their part to be hospitable to strangers. Many donkeys likewise accosted us with braying; children, growing more uncleanly every day they lived, pestered us with begging; men stared askance at us as they lounged in corners, and women endangered us with slops which they were flinging from doorways into the street. No decent words can describe, no admissible image can give an idea of this noisome place. And yet, I remember, the donkeys came up the height loaded with fruit, and with little flat-sided barrels of wine; the people had a good atmosphere--except as they polluted it themselves--on their high site, and there seemed to be no reason why they should not live a beautiful and jolly life. I did not mean to write such an ugly description as the above, but it is well, once for all, to have attempted conveying an idea of what disgusts the traveller, more or less, in all these Italian towns. Setting aside this grand characteristic, the upper town of Bolsena is a most curious and interesting place. It was originally an Etruscan city, the ancient Volsinii, and when taken and destroyed by the Romans was said to contain two thousand statues. Afterwards the Romans built a town upon the site, including, I suppose, the space occupied by the lower city, which looks as if it had brimmed over like Radicofani, and fallen from the precipitous height occupied by the upper. The latter is a strange confusion of black and ugly houses, piled massively out of the ruins of former ages, built rudely and without plan, as a pauper would build his hovel, and yet with here and there an arched gateway, a cornice, a pillar, that might have adorned a palace. . . . . The streets are the narrowest I have seen anywhere,--of no more width, indeed, than may suffice for the passage of a donkey with his panniers. They wind in and out in strange confusion, and hardly look like streets at all, but, nevertheless, have names printed on the corners, just as if they were stately avenues. After looking about us awhile and drawing half-breaths so as to take in the less quantity of gaseous pollution, we went back to the castle, and descended by a path winding downward from it into the plain outside of the town-gate. It was now dinner-time, . . . . and we had, in the first place, some fish from the pestiferous lake; not, I am sorry to say, the famous stewed eels which, Dante says, killed Pope Martin, but some trout. . . . . By the by, the meal was not dinner, but our midday colazione. After despatching it, we again wandered forth and strolled round the outside of the lower town, which, with the upper one, made as picturesque a combination as could be desired. The old wall that surrounds the lower town has been appropriated, long since, as the back wall of a range of houses; windows have been pierced through it; upper chambers and loggie have been built upon it; so that it looks something like a long row of rural dwellings with one continuous front or back, constructed in a strange style of massive strength, contrasting with the vines that here and there are trained over it, and with the wreaths of yellow corn that hang from the windows. But portions of the old battlements are interspersed with the line of homely chambers and tiled house-tops. Within the wall the town is very compact, and above its roofs rises a rock, the sheer, precipitous bluff on which stands the upper town, whose foundations impend over the highest roof in the lower. At one end is the old castle, with its towers rising above the square battlemented mass of the main fortress; and if we had not seen the dirt and squalor that dwells within this venerable outside, we should have carried away a picture of gray, grim dignity, presented by a long past age to the present one, to put its mean ways and modes to shame. ------ sat diligently sketching, and children came about her, exceedingly unfragrant, but very courteous and gentle, looking over her shoulders, and expressing delight as they saw each familiar edifice take its place in the sketch. They are a lovable people, these Italians, as I find from almost all with whom we come in contact; they have great and little faults, and no great virtues that I know of; but still are sweet, amiable, pleasant to encounter, save when they beg, or when you have to bargain with them. We left Bolsena and drove to Viterbo, passing the gate of the picturesque town of Montefiascone, over the wall of which I saw spires and towers, and the dome of a cathedral. I was sorry not to taste, in its own town, the celebrated est, which was the death-draught of the jolly prelate. At Viterbo, however, I called for some wine of Montefiascone, and had a little straw-covered flask, which the waiter assured us was the genuine est-wine. It was of golden color, and very delicate, somewhat resembling still champagne, but finer, and requiring a calmer pause to appreciate its subtle delight. Its good qualities, however, are so evanescent, that the finer flavor became almost imperceptible before we finished the flask. Viterbo is a large, disagreeable town, built at the foot of a mountain, the peak of which is seen through the vista of some of the narrow streets. There are more fountains in Viterbo than I have seen in any other city of its size, and many of them of very good design. Around most of them there were wine-hogsheads, waiting their turn to be cleansed and rinsed, before receiving the wine of the present vintage. Passing a doorway, J----- saw some men treading out the grapes in a great vat with their naked feet. Among the beggars here, the loudest and most vociferous was a crippled postilion, wearing his uniform jacket, green, faced with red; and he seemed to consider himself entitled still to get his living from travellers, as having been disabled in the way of his profession. I recognized his claim, and was rewarded with a courteous and grateful bow at our departure. . . . . To beggars--after my much experience both in England and Italy--I give very little, though I am not certain that it would not often be real beneficence in the latter country. There being little or no provision for poverty and age, the poor must often suffer. Nothing can be more earnest than their entreaties for aid; nothing seemingly more genuine than their gratitude when they receive it. They return you the value of their alms in prayers, and say, "God will accompany you." Many of them have a professional whine, and a certain doleful twist of the neck and turn of the head, which hardens my heart against them at once. A painter might find numerous models among them, if canvas had not already been more than sufficiently covered with their style of the picturesque. There is a certain brick-dust colored cloak worn in Viterbo, not exclusively by beggars, which, when ragged enough, is exceedingly artistic. ROME. 68 Piazza Poli, October 17th.--We left Viterbo on the 15th, and proceeded, through Monterosi, to Sette Verse. There was nothing interesting at Sette Verse, except an old Roman bridge, of a single arch, which had kept its sweep, composed of one row of stones, unbroken for two or more thousand years, and looked just as strong as ever, though gray with age, and fringed with plants that found it hard to fix themselves in its close crevices. The next day we drove along the Cassian Way towards Rome. It was a most delightful morning, a genial atmosphere; the more so, I suppose, because this was the Campagna, the region of pestilence and death. I had a quiet, gentle, comfortable pleasure, as if, after many wanderings, I was drawing near Rome, for, now that I have known it once, Rome certainly does draw into itself my heart, as I think even London, or even little Concord itself, or old sleepy Salem, never did and never will. Besides, we are to stay here six months, and we had now a house all prepared to receive us; so that this present approach, in the noontide of a genial day, was most unlike our first one, when we crept towards Rome through the wintry midnight, benumbed with cold, ill, weary, and not knowing whither to betake ourselves. Ah! that was a dismal tine! One thing, however, that disturbed even my present equanimity a little was the necessity of meeting the custom-house at the Porta del Popolo; but my past experience warranted me in believing that even these ogres might be mollified by the magic touch of a scudo; and so it proved. We should have escaped any examination at all, the officer whispered me, if his superior had not happened to be present; but, as the case stood, they took down only one trunk from the top of the vettura, just lifted the lid, closed it again, and gave us permission to proceed. So we came to 68 Piazza Poli, and found ourselves at once at home, in such a comfortable, cosey little house, as I did not think existed in Rome. I ought to say a word about our vetturino, Constantino Bacci, an excellent and most favorable specimen of his class; for his magnificent conduct, his liberality, and all the good qualities that ought to be imperial, S----- called him the Emperor. He took us to good hotels, and feasted us with the best; he was kind to us all, and especially to little Rosebud, who used to run by his side, with her small white hand in his great brown one; he was cheerful in his deportment, and expressed his good spirits by the smack of his whip, which is the barometer of a vetturino's inward weather; he drove admirably, and would rumble up to the door of an albergo, and stop to a hair's-breadth just where it was most convenient for us to alight; he would hire postilions and horses, where other vetturini would take nothing better than sluggish oxen, to help us up the hilly roads, so that sometimes we had a team of seven; he did all that we could possibly require of him, and was content and more, with a buon mono of five scudi, in addition to the stipulated price. Finally, I think the tears had risen almost to his eyelids when we parted with him. Our friends, the Thompsons, through whose kindness we procured this house, called to see us soon after our arrival. In the afternoon, I walked with Rosebud to the Medici Gardens, and on our way thither, we espied our former servant, Lalla, who flung so many and such bitter curses after us, on our departure from Rome, sitting at her father's fruit-stall. Thank God, they have not taken effect. After going to the Medici, we went to the Pincian Gardens, and looked over into the Borghese grounds, which, methought, were more beautiful than ever. The same was true of the sky, and of every object beneath it; and as we came homeward along the Corso, I wondered at the stateliness and palatial magnificence of that noble street. Once, I remember, I thought it narrow, and far unworthy of its fame. In the way of costume, the men in goat-skin breeches, whom we met on the Campagna, were very striking, and looked like Satyrs. October 21st.--. . . . I have been twice to St. Peter's, and was impressed more than at any former visit by a sense of breadth and loftiness, and, as it were, a visionary splendor and magnificence. I also went to the Museum of the Capitol; and the statues seemed to me more beautiful than formerly, and I was not sensible of the cold despondency with which I have so often viewed them. Yesterday we went to the Corsini Palace, which we had not visited before. It stands in the Trastevere, in the Longara, and is a stately palace, with a grand staircase, leading to the first floor, where is situated the range of picture-rooms. There were a good many fine pictures, but none of them have made a memorable impression on my mind, except a portrait by Vandyke, of a man in point-lace, very grand and very real. The room in which this picture hung had many other portraits by Holbein, Titian, Rembrandt, Rubens, and other famous painters, and was wonderfully rich in this department. In another, there was a portrait of Pope Julius II., by Raphael, somewhat differing from those at the Pitti and the Uffizi galleries in Florence, and those I have seen in England and Paris; thinner, paler, perhaps older, more severely intellectual, but at least, as high a work of art as those. The palace has some handsome old furniture, and gilded chairs, covered with leather cases, possibly relics of Queen Christina's time, who died here. I know not but the most curious object was a curule chair of marble, sculptured all out of one piece, and adorned with bas-reliefs. It is supposed to be Etruscan. It has a circular back, sweeping round, so as to afford sufficient rests for the elbows; and, sitting down in it, I discovered that modern ingenuity has not made much real improvement on this chair of three or four thousand years ago. But some chairs are easier for the moment, yet soon betray you, and grow the more irksome. We strolled along Longara, and found the piazza of St. Peter's full of French soldiers at their drill. . . . . We went quite round the interior of the church, and perceiving the pavement loose and broken near the altar where Guido's Archangel is placed, we picked up some bits of rosso antico and gray marble, to be set in brooches, as relics. We have the snuggest little set of apartments in Rome, seven rooms, including an antechamber; and though the stairs are exceedingly narrow, there is really a carpet on them,--a civilized comfort, of which the proudest palaces in the Eternal City cannot boast. The stairs are very steep, however, and I should not wonder if some of us broke our noses down them. Narrowness of space within doors strikes us all rather ludicrously, yet not unpleasantly, after being accustomed to the wastes and deserts of the Montanto Villa. It is well thus to be put in training for the over-snugness of our cottage in Concord. Our windows here look out on a small and rather quiet piazza, with an immense palace on the left hand, and a smaller yet statelier one on the right, and just round the corner of the street, leading out of our piazza, is the Fountain of Trevi, of which I can hear the plash in the evening, when other sounds are hushed. Looking over what I have said of Sodoma's "Christ Bound," at Sierra, I see that I have omitted to notice what seems to me one of its most striking characteristics,--its loneliness. You feel as if the Saviour were deserted, both in heaven and earth; the despair is in him which made him say, "My God, why hast thou forsaken me?" Even in this extremity, however, he is still Divine, and Sodoma almost seems to have reconciled the impossibilities of combining an omnipresent divinity with a suffering and outraged humanity. But this is one of the cases in which the spectator's imagination completes what the artist merely hints at. Mr. ------, the sculptor, called to see us, the other evening, and quite paid Powers off for all his trenchant criticisms on his brother artists. He will not allow Powers to be an artist at all, or to know anything of the laws of art, although acknowledging him to be a great bust-maker, and to have put together the Greek Slave and the Fisher-Boy very ingeniously. The latter, however (he says), is copied from the Apollino in the Tribune of the Uzi; and the former is made up of beauties that had no reference to one another; and he affirms that Powers is ready to sell, and has actually sold, the Greek Slave, limb by limb, dismembering it by reversing the process of putting it together,--a head to one purchaser, an arm or a foot to another, a hand to a third. Powers knows nothing scientifically of the human frame, and only succeeds in representing it as a natural bone-doctor succeeds in setting a dislocated limb by a happy accident or special providence. (The illustration was my own, and adopted by Mr. ------.) Yet Mr. ------ seems to acknowledge that he did succeed. I repeat these things only as another instance how invariably every sculptor uses his chisel and mallet to smash and deface the marble-work of every other. I never heard Powers speak of Mr. ------, but can partly imagine what he would have said. Mr. ------ spoke of Powers's disappointment about the twenty-five-thousand-dollar appropriation from Congress, and said that he was altogether to blame, inasmuch as he attempted to sell to the nation for that sum a statue which, to Mr. ------'s certain knowledge, he had already offered to private persons for a fifth part of it. I have not implicit faith in Mr. ------'s veracity, and doubt not Powers acted fairly in his own eyes. October 23d.--I am afraid I have caught one of the colds which the Roman air continually affected me with last winter; at any rate, a sirocco has taken the life out of me, and I have no spirit to do anything. This morning I took a walk, however, out of the Porta Maggiore, and looked at the tomb of the baker Eurysaces, just outside of the gate,--a very singular ruin covered with symbols of the man's trade in stone-work, and with bas-reliefs along the cornice, representing people at work, making bread. An inscription states that the ashes of his wife are likewise reposited there, in a bread-basket. The mausoleum is perhaps twenty feet long, in its largest extent, and of equal height; and if good bakers were as scarce in ancient Rome as in the modern city, I do not wonder that they were thought worthy of stately monuments. None of the modern ones deserve any better tomb than a pile of their own sour loaves. I walked onward a good distance beyond the gate alongside of the arches of the Claudian aqueduct, which, in this portion of it, seems to have had little repair, and to have needed little, since it was built. It looks like a long procession, striding across the Campagna towards the city, and entering the gate, over one of its arches, within the gate, I saw two or three slender jets of water spurting from the crevices; this aqueduct being still in use to bring the Acqua Felice into Rome. Returning within the walls, I walked along their inner base, to the Church of St. John Lateran, into which I went, and sat down to rest myself, being languid and weary, and hot with the sun, though afraid to trust the coolness of the shade. I hate the Roman atmosphere; indeed, all my pleasure in getting back--all my home-feeling--has already evaporated, and what now impresses me, as before, is the languor of Rome,--its weary pavements, its little life, pressed down by a weight of death. Quitting St. John Lateran, I went astray, as I do nine times out of ten in these Roman intricacies, and at last, seeing the Coliseum in the vista of a street, I betook myself thither to get a fresh start. Its round of stones looked vast and dreary, but not particularly impressive. The interior was quite deserted; except that a Roman, of respectable appearance, was making a pilgrimage at the altars, kneeling and saying a prayer at each one. Outside of the Coliseum, a neat-looking little boy came and begged of me; and I gave him a baiocco, rather because he seemed to need it so little than for any other reason. I observed that he immediately afterwards went and spoke to a well-dressed man, and supposed that the child was likewise begging of him. I watched the little boy, however, and saw that, in two or three other instances, after begging of other individuals, he still returned to this well-dressed man; the fact being, no doubt, that the latter was fishing for baiocci through the medium of his child,--throwing the poor little fellow out as a bait, while he himself retained his independent respectability. He had probably come out for a whole day's sport; for, by and by, he went between the arches of the Coliseum, followed by the child, and taking with him what looked like a bottle of wine, wrapped in a handkerchief. November 2d.--The weather lately would have suited one's ideal of an English November, except that there have been no fogs; but of ugly, hopeless clouds, chill, shivering winds, drizzle, and now and then pouring rain, much more than enough. An English coal-fire, if we could see its honest face within doors, would compensate for all the unamiableness of the outside atmosphere; but we might ask for the sunshine of the New Jerusalem, with as much hope of getting it. It is extremely spirit-crushing, this remorseless gray, with its icy heart; and the more to depress the whole family, U---- has taken what seems to be the Roman fever, by sitting down in the Palace of the Caesars, while Mrs. S----- sketched the ruins. . . . . [During four months of the illness of his daughter, Mr. Hawthorne wrote no word of Journal.--ED.] February 27th, 1859.--For many days past, there have been tokens of the coming Carnival in the Corso and the adjacent streets; for example, in the shops, by the display of masks of wire, pasteboard, silk, or cloth, some of beautiful features, others hideous, fantastic, currish, asinine, huge-nosed, or otherwise monstrous; some intended to cover the whole face, others concealing only the upper part, also white dominos, or robes bedizened with gold-lace and theatric splendors, displayed at the windows of mercers or flaunting before the doors. Yesterday, U---- and I came along the Corso, between one and two o'clock, after a walk, and found all these symptoms of impending merriment multiplied and intensified; . . . . rows of chairs, set out along the sidewalks, elevated a foot or two by means of planks; great baskets, full of confetti, for sale in the nooks and recesses of the streets; bouquets of all qualities and prices. The Corso was becoming pretty well thronged with people; but, until two o'clock, nobody dared to fling as much as a rosebud or a handful of sugar-plums. There was a sort of holiday expression, however, on almost everybody's face, such as I have not hitherto seen in Rome, or in any part of Italy; a smile gleaming out, an aurora of mirth, which probably will not be very exuberant in its noontide. The day was so sunny and bright that it made this opening scene far more cheerful than any day of the last year's carnival. As we threaded our way through the Corso, U---- kept wishing she could plunge into the fun and uproar as J----- would, and for my own part, though I pretended to take no interest in the matter, I could have bandied confetti and nosegays as readily and as riotously as any urchin there. But my black hat and grave talma would have been too good a mark for the combatants, . . . . so we went home before a shot was fired. . . . . March 7th.--I, as well as the rest of the family, have followed up the Carnival pretty faithfully, and enjoyed it as well, or rather better than could have been expected; principally in the street, as a more looker-on,--which does not let one into the mystery of the fun,--and twice from a balcony, where I threw confetti, and partly understood why the young people like it so much. Certainly, there cannot well be a more picturesque spectacle in human life, than that stately, palatial avenue of the Corso, the more picturesque because so narrow, all hung with carpets and Gobelin tapestry, and the whole palace-heights alive with faces; and all the capacity of the street thronged with the most fantastic figures that either the fancies of folks alive at this day are able to contrive, or that live traditionally from year to year. . . . . The Prince of Wales has fought manfully through the Carnival with confetti and bouquets, and U---- received several bouquets from him, on Saturday, as her carriage moved along. March 8th.--I went with U---- to Mr. Motley's balcony, in the Corso, and saw the Carnival from it yesterday afternoon; but the spectacle is strangely like a dream, in respect to the difficulty of retaining it in the mind and solidifying it into a description. I enjoyed it a good deal, and assisted in so far as to pelt all the people in cylinder hats with handfuls of confetti. The scene opens with a long array of cavalry, who ride through the Corso, preceded by a large band, playing loudly on their brazen instruments. . . . . There were some splendid dresses, particularly contadina costumes of scarlet and gold, which seem to be actually the festal attire of that class of people, and must needs be so expensive that one must serve for a lifetime, if indeed it be not an inheritance. . . . . March 9th.--I was, yesterday, an hour or so among the people on the sidewalks of the Corso, just on the edges of the fun. They appeared to be in a decorous, good-natured mood, neither entering into the merriment, nor harshly repelling; and when groups of maskers overflowed among them, they received their jokes in good part. Many women of the lower class were in the crowd of bystanders; generally broad and sturdy figures, clad evidently in their best attire, and wearing a good many ornaments; such as gold or coral beads and necklaces, combs of silver or gold, heavy ear-rings, curiously wrought brooches, perhaps cameos or mosaics, though I think they prefer purely metallic work to these. One ornament very common among them is a large bodkin, which they stick through their hair. It is usually of silver, but sometimes it looks like steel, and is made in the shape of a sword,--a long Spanish thrusting sword, for example. Dr. Franco told us a story of a woman of Trastevere, who was addressed rudely at the Carnival by a gentleman; she warned him to desist, but as he still persisted, she drew the bodkin from her hair, and stabbed him to the heart. By and by I went to Mr. Motley's balcony, and looked down on the closing scenes of the Carnival. Methought the merry-makers labored harder to be mirthful, and yet were somewhat tired of their eight play-days; and their dresses looked a little shabby, rumpled, and draggled; but the lack of sunshine--which we have had on all the preceding days--may have produced this effect. The wheels of some of the carriages were wreathed round and spoked with green foliage, making a very pretty and fanciful appearance, as did likewise the harnesses of the horses, which were trimmed with roses. The pervading noise and uproar of human voices is one of the most effective points of the matter; but the scene is quite indescribable, and its effect not to be conceived without both witnessing and taking part in it. If you merely look at it, it depresses you; if you take even the slightest share in it, you become aware that it has a fascination, and you no longer wonder that the young people, at least, take such delight in plunging into this mad river of fun that goes roaring between the narrow limits of the Corso. As twilight came on, the moccoli commenced, and as it grew darker the whole street twinkled with lights, which would have been innumerable if every torch-bearer had not been surrounded by a host of enemies, who tried to extinguish his poor little twinkle. It was a pity to lose so much splendor as there might have been; but yet there was a kind of symbolism in the thought that every one of those thousands of twinkling lights was in charge of somebody, who was striving with all his might to keep it alive. Not merely the street-way, but all the balconies and hundreds of windows were lit up with these little torches; so that it seemed as if the stars had crumbled into glittering fragments, and rained down upon the Corso, some of them lodging upon the palace-fronts, some falling on the ground. Besides this, there were gas-lights burning with a white flame; but this illumination was not half so interesting as that of the torches, which indicated human struggle. All this time there were myriad voices shouting, "SENZA MOCCOLO!" and mingling into one long roar. We, in our balcony, carried on a civil war against one another's torches, as is the custom of human beings, within even the narrowest precincts; but after a while we grew tired, and so did the crowd, apparently; for the lights vanished, one after another, till the gas-lights--which at first were an unimportant part of the illumination--shone quietly out, overpowering the scattered twinkles of the moccoli. They were what the fixed stars are to the transitory splendors of human life. Mr. Motley tells me, that it was formerly the custom to have a mock funeral of harlequin, who was supposed to die at the close of the Carnival, during which he had reigned supreme, and all the people, or as many as chose, bore torches at his burial. But this being considered an indecorous mockery of Popish funereal customs, the present frolic of the moccoli was instituted,--in some sort, growing out of it. All last night, or as much of it as I was awake, there was a noise of song and of late revellers in the streets; but to-day we have waked up in the sad and sober season of Lent. It is worthy of remark, that all the jollity of the Carnival is a genuine ebullition of spirit, without the aid of wine or strong drink. March 11th.--Yesterday we went to the Catacomb of St. Calixtus, the entrance to which is alongside of the Appian Way, within sight of the tomb of Cecilia Metella. We descended not a very great way under ground, by a broad flight of stone steps, and, lighting some wax tapers, with which we had provided ourselves, we followed the guide through a great many intricate passages, which mostly were just wide enough for me to touch the wall on each side, while keeping my elbows close to my body; and as to height, they were from seven to ten feet, and sometimes a good deal higher It was rather picturesque, when we saw the long line of our tapers, for another large party had joined us, twinkling along the dark passage, and it was interesting to think of the former inhabitants of these caverns. . . . . In one or two places there was the round mark in the stone or plaster, where a bottle had been deposited. This was said to have been the token of a martyr's burial-place, and to have contained his blood. After leaving the Catacomb, we drove onward to Cecilia Metella's tomb, which we entered and inspected. Within the immensely massive circular substance of the tomb was a round, vacant space, and this interior vacancy was open at the top, and had nothing but some fallen stones and a heap of earth at the bottom. On our way home we entered the Church of "Domine, quo vadis," and looked at the old fragment of the Appian Way, where our Saviour met St. Peter, and left the impression of his feet in one of the Roman paving-stones. The stone has been removed, and there is now only a fac-simile engraved in a block of marble, occupying the place where Jesus stood. It is a great pity they had not left the original stone; for then all its brother-stones in the pavement would have seemed to confirm the truth of the legend. While we were at dinner, a gentleman called and was shown into the parlor. We supposed it to be Mr. May; but soon his voice grew familiar, and my wife was sure it was General Pierce, so I left the table, and found it to be really he. I was rejoiced to see him, though a little saddened to see the marks of care and coming age, in many a whitening hair, and many a furrow, and, still more, in something that seemed to have passed away out of him, without leaving any trace. His voice, sometimes, sounded strange and old, though generally it was what it used to be. He was evidently glad to see me, glad to see my wife, glad to see the children, though there was something melancholy in his tone, when he remarked what a stout boy J----- had grown. Poor fellow! he has neither son nor daughter to keep his heart warm. This morning I have been with him to St. Peter's, and elsewhere about the city, and find him less changed than he seemed to be last night; not at all changed in heart and affections. We talked freely about all matters that came up; among the rest, about the project--recognizable by many tokens--for bringing him again forward as a candidate for the Presidency next year. He appears to be firmly resolved not again to present himself to the country, and is content to let his one administration stand, and to be judged by the public and posterity on the merits of that. No doubt he is perfectly sincere; no doubt, too, he would again be a candidate, if a pretty unanimous voice of the party should demand it. I retain all my faith in his administrative faculty, and should be glad, for his sake, to have it fully rccognized; but the probabilities, as far as I can see, do not indicate for him another Presidential term. March 15th.--This morning I went with my wife and Miss Hoar to Miss Hosmer's studio, to see her statue of Zenobia. We found her in her premises, springing about with a bird-like action. She has a lofty room, with a skylight window; it was pretty well warmed with a stove, and there was a small orange-tree in a pot, with the oranges growing on it, and two or three flower-shrubs in bloom. She herself looked prettily, with her jaunty little velvet cap on the side of her head, whence came clustering out, her short brown curls; her face full of pleasant life and quick expression; and though somewhat worn with thought and struggle, handsome and spirited. She told us that "her wig was growing as gray as a rat." There were but very few things in the room; two or three plaster busts, a headless cast of a plaster statue, and a cast of the Minerva Medica, which perhaps she had been studying as a help towards the design of her Zenobia; for, at any rate, I seemed to discern a resemblance or analogy between the two. Zenobia stood in the centre of the room, as yet unfinished in the clay, but a very noble and remarkable statue indeed, full of dignity and beauty. It is wonderful that so brisk a woman could have achieved a work so quietly impressive; and there is something in Zenobia's air that conveys the idea of music, uproar, and a great throng all about her; whilst she walks in the midst of it, self-sustained, and kept in a sort of sanctity by her native pride. The idea of motion is attained with great success; you not only perceive that she is walking, but know at just what tranquil pace she steps, amid the music of the triumph. The drapery is very fine and full; she is decked with ornaments; but the chains of her captivity hang from wrist to wrist; and her deportment--indicating a soul so much above her misfortune, yet not insensible to the weight of it--makes these chains a richer decoration than all her other jewels. I know not whether there be some magic in the present imperfect finish of the statue, or in the material of clay, as being a better medium of expression than even marble; but certainly I have seldom been more impressed by a piece of modern sculpture. Miss Hosmer showed us photographs of her Puck--which I have seen in the marble--and likewise of the Will-o'-the-Wisp, both very pretty and fanciful. It indicates much variety of power, that Zenobia should be the sister of these, which would seem the more natural offspring of her quick and vivid character. But Zenobia is a high, heroic ode. . . . . On my way up the Via Babuino, I met General Pierce. We have taken two or three walks together, and stray among the Roman ruins, and old scenes of history, talking of matters in which he is personally concerned, yet which are as historic as anything around us. He is singularly little changed; the more I see him, the more I get him back, just such as he was in our youth. This morning, his face, air, and smile were so wonderfully like himself of old, that at least thirty years are annihilated. Zenobia's manacles serve as bracelets; a very ingenious and suggestive idea. March 18th.--I went to the sculpture-gallery of the Capitol yesterday, and saw, among other things, the Venus in her secret cabinet. This was my second view of her: the first time, I greatly admired her; now, she made no very favorable impression. There are twenty Venuses whom I like as well, or better. On the whole, she is a heavy, clumsy, unintellectual, and commonplace figure; at all events, not in good looks to-day. Marble beauties seem to suffer the same occasional eclipses as those of flesh and blood. We looked at the Faun, the Dying Gladiator, and other famous sculptures; but nothing had a glory round it, perhaps because the sirocco was blowing. These halls of the Capitol have always had a dreary and depressing effect upon me, very different from those of the Vatican. I know not why, except that the rooms of the Capitol have a dingy, shabby, and neglected look, and that the statues are dusty, and all the arrangements less magnificent than at the Vatican. The corroded and discolored surfaces of the statues take away from the impression of immortal youth, and turn Apollo [The Lycian Apollo] himself into an old stone; unless at rare intervals, when he appears transfigured by a light gleaming from within. March 23d.--I am wearing away listlessly these last precious days of my abode in Rome. U----'s illness is disheartening, and by confining ------, it takes away the energy and enterprise that were the spring of all our movements. I am weary of Rome, without having seen and known it as I ought, and I shall be glad to get away from it, though no doubt there will be many yearnings to return hereafter, and many regrets that I did not make better use of the opportunities within my grasp. Still, I have been in Rome long enough to be imbued with its atmosphere, and this is the essential condition of knowing a place; for such knowledge does not consist in having seen every particular object it contains. In the state of mind in which I now stand towards Rome, there is very little advantage to be gained by staying here longer. And yet I had a pleasant stroll enough yesterday afternoon, all by myself, from the Corso down past the Church of St. Andrea della Valle,-- the site where Caesar was murdered,--and thence to the Farnese Palace, the noble court of which I entered; thence to the Piazza Cenci, where I looked at one or two ugly old palaces, and fixed on one of them as the residence of Beatrice's father; then past the Temple of Vesta, and skirting along the Tiler, and beneath the Aventine, till I somewhat unexpectedly came in sight of the gray pyramid of Caius Cestius. I went out of the city gate, and leaned on the parapet that encloses the pyramid, advancing its high, unbroken slope and peak, where the great blocks of marble still fit almost as closely to one another as when they were first laid; though, indeed, there are crevices just large enough for plants to root themselves, and flaunt and trail over the face of this great tomb; only a little verdure, however, over a vast space of marble, still white in spots, but pervadingly turned gray by two thousand years' action of the atmosphere. Thence I came home by the Caelian, and sat down on an ancient flight of steps under one of the arches of the Coliseum, into which the sunshine fell sidelong. It was a delightful afternoon, not precisely like any weather that I have known elsewhere; certainly never in America, where it is always too cold or too hot. It, resembles summer more than anything which we New-Englanders recognize in our idea of spring, but there was an indescribable something, sweet, fresh, gentle, that does not belong to summer, and that thrilled and tickled my heart with a feeling partly sensuous, partly spiritual. I go to the Bank and read Galignani and the American newspapers; thence I stroll to the Pincian or to the Medici Gardens; I see a good deal of General Pierce, and we talk over his Presidential life, which, I now really think, he has no latent desire nor purpose to renew. Yet he seems to have enjoyed it while it lasted, and certainly he was in his element as an administrative man; not far-seeing, not possessed of vast stores of political wisdom in advance of his occasions, but endowed with a miraculous intuition of what ought to be done just at the time for action. His judgment of things about him is wonderful, and his Cabinet recognized it as such; for though they were men of great ability, he was evidently the master-mind among them. None of them were particularly his personal friends when he selected them; they all loved him when they parted; and he showed me a letter, signed by all, in which they expressed their feelings of respect and attachment at the close of his administration. There was a noble frankness on his part, that kept the atmosphere always clear among them, and in reference to this characteristic Governor Marcy told him that the years during which he had been connected with his Cabinet had been the happiest of his life. Speaking of Caleb Cushing, he told me that the unreliability, the fickleness, which is usually attributed to him, is an actual characteristic, but that it is intellectual, not moral. He has such comprehensiveness, such mental variety and activity, that, if left to himself, he cannot keep fast hold of one view of things, and so cannot, without external help, be a consistent man. He needs the influence of a more single and stable judgment to keep him from divergency, and, on this condition, he is a most inestimable coadjutor. As regards learning and ability, he has no superior. Pierce spoke the other day of the idea among some of his friends that his life had been planned, from a very early period, with a view to the station which he ultimately reached. He smiled at the notion, said that it was inconsistent with his natural character, and that it implied foresight and dexterity beyond what any mortal is endowed with. I think so too; but nevertheless, I was long and long ago aware that he cherished a very high ambition, and that, though he might not anticipate the highest things, he cared very little about inferior objects. Then as to plans, I do not think that he had any definite ones; but there was in him a subtle faculty, a real instinct, that taught him what was good for him,--that is to say, promotive of his political success,--and made him inevitably do it. He had a magic touch, that arranged matters with a delicate potency, which he himself hardly recognized; and he wrought through other minds so that neither he nor they always knew when and how far they were under his influence. Before his nomination for the Presidency I had a sense that it was coming, and it never seemed to me an accident. He is a most singular character; so frank, so true, so immediate, so subtle, so simple, so complicated. I passed by the tower in the Via Portoghese to-day, and observed that the nearest shop appears to be for the sale of cotton or linen cloth. . . . . The upper window of the tower was half open; of course, like all or almost all other Roman windows, it is divided vertically, and each half swings back on hinges. . . . . Last week a fritter-establishment was opened in our piazza. It was a wooden booth erected in the open square, and covered with canvas painted red, which looked as if it had withstood much rain and sunshine. In front were three great boughs of laurel, not so much for shade, I think, as ornament. There were two men, and their apparatus for business was a sort of stove, or charcoal furnace, and a frying-pan to place over it; they had an armful or two of dry sticks, some flour, and I suppose oil, and this seemed to be all. It was Friday, and Lent besides, and possibly there was some other peculiar propriety in the consumption of fritters just then. At all events, their fire burned merrily from morning till night, and pretty late into the evening, and they had a fine run of custom; the commodity being simply dough, cut into squares or rhomboids, and thrown into the boiling oil, which quickly turned them to a light brown color. I sent J----- to buy some, and, tasting one, it resembled an unspeakably bad doughnut, without any sweetening. In fact, it was sour, for the Romans like their bread, and all their preparations of flour, in a state of acetous fermentation, which serves them instead of salt or other condiment. This fritter-shop had grown up in a night, like Aladdin's palace, and vanished as suddenly; for after standing through Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, it was gone on Monday morning, and a charcoal-strewn place on the pavement where the furnace had been was the only memorial of it. It was curious to observe how immediately it became a lounging-place for idle people, who stood and talked all day with the fritter-friers, just as they might at any old shop in the basement, of a palace, or between the half-buried pillars of the Temple of Minerva, which had been familiar to them and their remote grandfathers. April 14th.--Yesterday afternoon I drove with Mr. and Mrs. Story and Mr. Wilde to see a statue of Venus, which has just been discovered, outside of the Porta Portese, on the other side of the Tiber. A little distance beyond the gate we came to the entrance of a vineyard, with a wheel-track through the midst of it; and, following this, we soon came to a hillside, in which an excavation had been made with the purpose of building a grotto for keeping and storing wine. They had dug down into what seemed to be an ancient bathroom, or some structure of that kind, the excavation being square and cellar-like, and built round with old subterranean walls of brick and stone. Within this hollow space the statue had been found, and it was now standing against one of the walls, covered with a coarse cloth, or a canvas bag. This being removed, there appeared a headless marble figure, earth-stained, of course, and with a slightly corroded surface, but wonderfully delicate and beautiful, the shape, size, and attitude, apparently, of the Venus de' Medici, but, as we all thought, more beautiful than that. It is supposed to be the original, from which the Venus de' Medici was copied. Both arms were broken off, but the greater part of both, and nearly the whole of one hand, had been found, and these being adjusted to the figure, they took the well-known position before the bosom and the middle, as if the fragmentary woman retained her instinct of modesty to the last. There were the marks on the bosom and thigh where the fingers had touched; whereas in the Venus de' Medici, if I remember rightly, the fingers are sculptured quite free of the person. The man who showed the statue now lifted from a corner a round block of marble, which had been lying there among other fragments, and this he placed upon the shattered neck of the Venus; and behold, it was her head and face, perfect, all but the nose! Even in spite of this mutilation, it seemed immediately to light up and vivify the entire figure; and, whatever I may heretofore have written about the countenance of the Venus de' Medici, I here record my belief that that head has been wrongfully foisted upon the statue; at all events, it is unspeakably inferior to this newly discovered one. This face has a breadth and front which are strangely deficient in the other. The eyes are well opened, most unlike the buttonhole lids of the Venus de' Medici; the whole head is so much larger as to entirely obviate the criticism that has always been made on the diminutive head of the De' Medici statue. If it had but a nose! They ought to sift every handful of earth that has been thrown out of the excavation, for the nose and the missing hand and fingers must needs be there; and, if they were found, the effect would be like the reappearance of a divinity upon earth. Mutilated as we saw her, it was strangely interesting to be present at the moment, as it were, when she had just risen from her long burial, and was shedding the unquenchable lustre around her which no eye had seen for twenty or more centuries. The earth still clung about her; her beautiful lips were full of it, till Mr. Story took a thin chip of wood and cleared it away from between them. The proprietor of the vineyard stood by; a man with the most purple face and hugest and reddest nose that I ever beheld in my life. It must have taken innumerable hogsheads of his thin vintage to empurple his face in this manner. He chuckled much over the statue, and, I suppose, counts upon making his fortune by it. He is now awaiting a bid from the Papal government, which, I believe, has the right of pre-emption whenever any relics of ancient art are discovered. If the statue could but be smuggled out of Italy, it might command almost any price. There is not, I think, any name of a sculptor on the pedestal, as on that of the Venus de' Medici. A dolphin is sculptured on the pillar against which she leans. The statue is of Greek marble. It was first found about eight days ago, but has been offered for inspection only a day or two, and already the visitors come in throngs, and the beggars gather about the entrance of the vineyard. A wine shop, too, seems to have been opened on the premises for the accommodation of this great concourse, and we saw a row of German artists sitting at a long table in the open air, each with a glass of thin wine and something to eat before him; for the Germans refresh nature ten times to other persons once. How the whole world might be peopled with antique beauty if the Romans would only dig! April 19th.--General Pierce leaves Rome this morning for Venice, by way of Ancona, and taking the steamer thence to Trieste. I had hoped to make the journey along with him; but U----'s terrible illness has made it necessary for us to continue here another mouth, and we are thankful that this seems now to be the extent of our misfortune. Never having had any trouble before that pierced into my very vitals, I did not know what comfort there might be in the manly sympathy of a friend; but Pierce has undergone so great a sorrow of his own, and has so large and kindly a heart, and is so tender and so strong, that he really did the good, and I shall always love him the better for the recollection of his ministrations in these dark days. Thank God, the thing we dreaded did not come to pass. Pierce is wonderfully little changed. Indeed, now that he has won and enjoyed--if there were any enjoyment in it--the highest success that public life could give him, he seems more like what he was in his early youth than at any subsequent period. He is evidently happier than I have ever known him since our college days; satisfied with what he has been, and with the position in the country that remains to him, after filling such an office. Amid all his former successes,--early as they came, and great as they were,--I always perceived that something gnawed within him, and kept him forever restless and miserable. Nothing he won was worth the winning, except as a step gained toward the summit. I cannot tell how early he began to look towards the Presidency; but I believe he would have died an unhappy man without it. And yet what infinite chances there seemed to be against his attaining it! When I look at it in one way, it strikes me as absolutely miraculous; in another, it came like an event that I had all along expected. It was due to his wonderful tact, which is of so subtle a character that he himself is but partially sensible of it. I have found in him, here in Rome, the whole of my early friend, and even better than I used to know him; a heart as true and affectionate, a mind much widened and deepened by his experience of life. We hold just the same relation to each other as of yore, and we have passed all the turning-off places, and may hope to go on together still the same dear friends as long as we live. I do not love him one whit the less for having been President, nor for having done me the greatest good in his power; a fact that speaks eloquently in his favor, and perhaps says a little for myself. If he had been merely a benefactor, perhaps I might not have borne it so well; but each did his best for the other as friend for friend. May 15th.--Yesterday afternoon we went to the Barberini picture-gallery to take a farewell look at the Beatrice Cenci, which I have twice visited before since our return from Florence. I attempted a description of it at my first visit, more than a year ago, but the picture is quite indescribable and unaccountable in its effect, for if you attempt to analyze it you can never succeed in getting at the secret of its fascination. Its peculiar expression eludes a straightforward glance, and can only be caught by side glimpses, or when the eye falls upon it casually, as it were, and without thinking to discover anything, as if the picture had a life and consciousness of its own, and were resolved not to betray its secret of grief or guilt, though it wears the full expression of it when it imagines itself unseen. I think no other such magical effect can ever have been wrought by pencil. I looked close into its eyes, with a determination to see all that there was in them, and could see nothing that might not have been in any young girl's eyes; and yet, a moment afterwards, there was the expression--seen aside, and vanishing in a moment--of a being unhumanized by some terrible fate, and gazing at me out of a remote and inaccessible region, where she was frightened to be alone, but where no sympathy could reach her. The mouth is beyond measure touching; the lips apart, looking as innocent as a baby's after it has been crying. The picture never can be copied. Guido himself could not have done it over again. The copyists get all sorts of expression, gay, as well as grievous; some copies have a coquettish air, a half-backward glance, thrown alluring at the spectator, but nobody ever did catch, or ever will, the vanishing charm of that sorrow. I hated to leave the picture, and yet was glad when I had taken my last glimpse, because it so perplexed and troubled me not to be able to get hold of its secret. Thence we went to the Church of the Capuchins, and saw Guido's Archangel. I have been several times to this church, but never saw the picture before, though I am familiar with the mosaic copy at St. Peter's, and had supposed the latter to be an equivalent representation of the original. It is nearly or quite so as respects the general effect; but there is a beauty in the archangel's face that immeasurably surpasses the copy,--the expression of heavenly severity, and a degree of pain, trouble, or disgust, at being brought in contact with sin, even for the purpose of quelling and punishing it. There is something finical in the copy, which I do not find in the original. The sandalled feet are here those of an angel; in the mosaic they are those of a celestial coxcomb, treading daintily, as if he were afraid they would be soiled by the touch of Lucifer. After looking at the Archangel we went down under the church, guided by a fleshy monk, and saw the famous cemetery, where the dead monks of many centuries back have been laid to sleep in sacred earth from Jerusalem. . . . . FRANCE. Hotel des Colonies, Marseilles, May 29th, Saturday.--Wednesday was the day fixed for our departure from Rome, and after breakfast I walked to the Pincian, and saw the garden and the city, and the Borghese grounds, and St. Peter's in an earlier sunlight than ever before. Methought they never looked so beautiful, nor the sky so bright and blue. I saw Soracte on the horizon, and I looked at everything as if for the last time; nor do I wish ever to see any of these objects again, though no place ever took so strong a hold of my being as Rome, nor ever seemed so close to me and so strangely familiar. I seem to know it better than my birthplace, and to have known it longer; and though I have been very miserable there, and languid with the effects of the atmosphere, and disgusted with a thousand things in its daily life, still I cannot say I hate it, perhaps might fairly own a love for it. But life being too short for such questionable and troublesome enjoyments, I desire never to set eyes on it again. . . . . . . . . We traversed again that same weary and dreary tract of country which we passed over in a winter afternoon and night on our first arrival in Rome. It is as desolate a country as can well be imagined, but about midway of our journey we came to the sea-shore, and kept very near it during the rest of the way. The sight and fragrance of it were exceedingly refreshing after so long an interval, and U---- revived visibly as we rushed along, while J----- chuckled and contorted himself with ineffable delight. We reached Civita Vecchia in three or four hours, and were there subjected to various troubles. . . . . All the while Miss S------ and I were bothering about the passport, the rest of the family sat in the sun on the quay, with all kinds of bustle and confusion around them; a very trying experience to U---- after the long seclusion and quiet of her sick-chamber. But she did not seem to suffer from it, and we finally reached the steamer in good condition and spirits. . . . . I slept wretchedly in my short and narrow berth, more especially as there was an old gentleman who snored as if he were sounding a charge; it was terribly hot too, and I rose before four o'clock, and was on deck amply in time to watch the distant approach of sunrise. We arrived at Leghorn pretty early, and might have gone ashore and spent the day. Indeed, we had been recommended by Dr. Franco, and had fully purposed to spend a week or ten days there, in expectation of benefit to U----'s health from the sea air and sea bathing, because he thought her still too feeble to make the whole voyage to Marseilles at a stretch. But she showed herself so strong that we thought she would get as much good from our three days' voyage as from the days by the sea-shore. Moreover, . . . . we all of us still felt the languor of the Roman atmosphere, and dreaded the hubbub and crazy confusion of landing at an Italian port. . . . . So we lay in the harbor all day without stirring from the steamer. . . . . It would have been pleasant, however, to have gone to Pisa, fifteen miles off, and seen the leaning tower; but, for my part, I have arrived at that point where it is somewhat pleasanter to sit quietly in any spot whatever than to see whatever grandest or most beautiful thing. At least this was my mood in the harbor of Leghorn. From the deck of the steamer there were many things visible that might have been interesting to describe: the boats of peculiar rig, and covered with awning; the crowded shipping; the disembarkation of horses from the French cavalry, which were lowered from steamers into gondolas or lighters, and hung motionless, like the sign of the Golden Fleece, during the transit, only kicking a little when their feet happened to graze the vessel's side. One horse plunged overboard, and narrowly escaped drowning. There was likewise a disembarkation of French soldiers in a train of boats, which rowed shoreward with sound of trumpet. The French are concentrating a considerable number of troops at this point. Our steamer was detained by order of the French government to take on board despatches; so that, instead of sailing at dusk, as is customary, we lay in the harbor till seven of the next morning. A number of young Sardinian officers, in green uniform, came on board, and a pale and picturesque-looking Italian, and other worthies of less note,--English, American, and of all races,--among them a Turk with a little boy in Christian dress; also a Greek gentleman with his young bride. At the appointed time we weighed anchor for Genoa, and had a beautiful day on the Mediterranean, and for the first time in my life I saw the real dark blue of the sea. I do not remember noticing it on my outward voyage to Italy. It is the most beautiful hue that can be imagined, like a liquid sky; and it retains its lustrous blue directly under the side of the ship, where the water of the mid-Atlantic looks greenish. . . . . We reached Genoa at seven in the afternoon. . . . . Genoa looks most picturesquely from the sea, at the foot of a sheltering semicircle of lofty hills; and as we lay in the harbor we saw, among other interesting objects, the great Doria Palace, with its gardens, and the cathedral, and a heap and sweep of stately edifices, with the mountains looking down upon he city, and crowned with fortresses. The variety of hue in the houses, white, green, pink, and orange, was very remarkable. It would have been well to go ashore here for an hour or two and see the streets, --having already seen the palaces, churches, and public buildings at our former visit,--and buy a few specimens of Genoa goldsmiths' work; but I preferred the steamer's deck, so the evening passed pleasantly away; the two lighthouses at the entrance of the port kindled up their fires, and at nine o'clock the evening gun thundered from the fortress, and was reverberated from the heights. We sailed away at eleven, and I was roused from my first sleep by the snortings and hissings of the vessel as she got under way. At Genoa we took on board some more passengers, an English nobleman with his lady being of the number. These were Lord and Lady J------, and before the end of our voyage his lordship talked to me of a translation of Tasso in which he is engaged, and a stanza or two of which he repeated to me. I really liked the lines, and liked too the simplicity and frankness with which he spoke of it to me a stranger, and the way be seemed to separate his egotism from the idea which he evidently had that he is going to make an excellent translation. I sincerely hope it may be so. He began it without any idea of publishing it, or of ever bringing it to a conclusion, but merely as a solace and occupation while in great trouble during an illness of his wife, but he has gradually come to find it the most absorbing occupation he ever undertook; and as Mr. Gladstone and other high authorities give him warm encouragement, he now means to translate the entire poem, and to publish it with beautiful illustrations, and two years hence the world may expect to see it. I do not quite perceive how such a man as this--a man of frank, warm, simple, kindly nature, but surely not of a poetical temperament, or very refined, or highly cultivated--should make a good version of Tasso's poems; but perhaps the dead poet's soul may take possession of this healthy organization, and wholly turn him to its own purposes. The latter part of our voyage to-day lay close along the coast of France, which was hilly and picturesque, and as we approached Marseilles was very bold and striking. We steered among rocky islands, rising abruptly out of the sea, mere naked crags, without a trace of verdure upon them, and with the surf breaking at their feet. They were unusual specimens of what hills would look like without the soil, that is to them what flesh is to a skeleton. Their shapes were often wonderfully fine, and the great headlands thrust themselves out, and took such lines of light and shade that it seemed like sailing through a picture. In the course of the afternoon a squall came up and blackened the sky all over in a twinkling; our vessel pitched and tossed, and a brig a little way from us had her sails blown about in wild fashion. The blue of the sea turned as black as night, and soon the rain began to spatter down upon us, and continued to sprinkle and drizzle a considerable time after the wind had subsided. It was quite calm and pleasant when we entered the harbor of Marseilles, which lies at the foot of very fair hills, and is set among great cliffs of stone. I did not attend much to this, however, being in dread of the difficulty of landing and passing through the custom-house with our twelve or fourteen trunks and numberless carpet-bags. The trouble vanished into thin air, nevertheless, as we approached it, for not a single trunk or bag was opened, and, moreover, our luggage and ourselves were not only landed, but the greater part of it conveyed to the railway without any expense. Long live Louis Napoleon, say I. We established ourselves at the Hotel des Colonies, and then Mss S------, J-----, and I drove hither and thither about Marseilles, making arrangements for our journey to Avignon, where we mean to go to-day. We might have avoided a good deal of this annoyance; but travellers, like other people, are continually getting their experience just a little too late. It was after nine before we got back to the hotel and took our tea in peace. AVIGNON. Hotel de l'Europe, June 1st.--I remember nothing very special to record about Marseilles; though it was really like passing from death into life, to find ourselves in busy, cheerful, effervescing France, after living so long between asleep and awake in sluggish Italy. Marseilles is a very interesting and entertaining town, with its bold surrounding heights, its wide streets,--so they seemed to us after the Roman alleys,--its squares, shady with trees, its diversified population of sailors, citizens, Orientals, and what not; but I have no spirit for description any longer; being tired of seeing things, and still more of telling myself about them. Only a young traveller can have patience to write his travels. The newest things, nowadays, have a familiarity to my eyes; whereas in their lost sense of novelty lies the charm and power of description. On Monday (30th May), though it began with heavy rain, we set early about our preparations for departure, . . . . and, at about three, we left the Hotel des Colonies. It is a very comfortable hotel, though expensive. The Restaurant connected with it occupies the enclosed court-yard and the arcades around it; and it was a good amusement to look down from the surrounding gallery, communicating with our apartments, and see the fashion and manner of French eating, all the time going forward. In sunny weather a great awning is spread over the whole court, across from the upper stories of the house. There is a grass-plat in the middle, and a very spacious and airy dining-saloon is thus formed. Our railroad carriage was comfortable, and we found in it, besides two other Frenchwomen, two nuns. They were very devout, and sedulously read their little books of devotion, repeated prayers under their breath, kissed the crucifixes which hung at their girdles, and told a string of beads, which they passed from one to the other. So much were they occupied with these duties, that they scarcely looked at the scenery along the road, though, probably, it is very rare for them to see anything outside of their convent walls. They never failed to mutter a prayer and kiss the crucifix whenever we plunged into a tunnel. If they glanced at their fellow-passengers, it was shyly and askance, with their lips in motion all the time, like children afraid to let their eyes wander from their lesson-book. One of them, however, took occasion to pull down R-----'s dress, which, in her frisky movements about the carriage, had got out of place, too high for the nun's sense of decorum. Neither of them was at all pretty, nor was the black stuff dress and white muslin cap in the least becoming, neither were their features of an intelligent or high-bred stamp. Their manners, however, or such little glimpses as I could get of them, were unexceptionable; and when I drew a curtain to protect one of them from the sun, she made me a very courteous gesture of thanks. We had some very good views both of sea and hills; and a part of our way lay along the banks of the Rhone. . . . . By the by, at the station at Marseilles I bought the two volumes of the "Livre des Merveilles," by a certain author of my acquaintance, translated into French, and printed and illustrated in very pretty style. Miss S------ also bought them, and, in answer to her inquiry for other works by the same author, the bookseller observed that "she did not think Monsieur Nathaniel had published anything else." The Christian name deems to be the most important one in France, and still more especially in Italy. We arrived at Avignon, Hotel de l'Europe, in the dusk of the evening. . . . . The lassitude of Rome still clings to us, and I, at least, feel no spring of life or activity, whether at morn or eve. In the morning we found ourselves very pleasantly situated as regards lodgings. The gallery of our suite of rooms looks down as usual into an enclosed court, three sides of which are formed by the stone house and its two wings, and the third by a high wall, with a gateway of iron between two lofty stone pillars, which, for their capitals, have great stone vases, with grass growing in them, and hanging over the brim. There is a large plane-tree in one corner of the court, and creeping plants clamber up trellises; and there are pots of flowers and bird-cages, all of which give a very fresh and cheerful aspect to the enclosure. The court is paved with small round stones; the omnibus belonging to the hotel, and all the carriages of guests drive into it; and the wide arch of the stable-door opens under the central part of the house. Nevertheless, the scene is not in all respects that of a stable-yard; for gentlemen and ladies come from the salle a manger and other rooms, and stand talking in the court, or occupy chairs and seats there; children play about; the hostess or her daughter often appears and talks with her guests or servants; dogs lounge, and, in short, the court might well enough be taken for the one scene of a classic play. The hotel seems to be of the first class, though such would not be indicated, either in England or America, by thus mixing up the stable with the lodgings. I have taken two or three rambles about the town, and have climbed a high rock which dominates over it, and gives a most extensive view from the broad table-land of its summit. The old church of Avignon --as old as the times of its popes, and older--stands close beside this mighty and massive crag. We went into it, and found it a dark old place, with broad, interior arches, and a singularly shaped dome; a venerable Gothic and Grecian porch, with ancient frescos in its arched spaces; some dusky pictures within; an ancient chair of stone, formerly occupied by the popes, and much else that would have been exceedingly interesting before I went to Rome. But Rome takes the charm out of an inferior antiquity, as well as the life out of human beings. This forenoon J----- and I have crossed the Rhone by a bridge, just the other side of one of the city gates, which is near our hotel. We walked along the riverside, and saw the ruins of an ancient bridge, which ends abruptly in the midst of the stream; two or three arches still making tremendous strides across, while the others have long ago been crumbled away by the rush of the rapid river. The bridge was originally founded by St. Benezet, who received a Divine order to undertake the work, while yet a shepherd-boy, with only three sous in his pocket; and he proved the authenticity of the mission by taking an immense stone on his shoulder, and laying it for the foundation. There is still an ancient chapel midway on the bridge, and I believe St. Benezet lies buried there, in the midst of his dilapidated work. The bridge now used is considerably lower down the stream. It is a wooden suspension-bridge, broader than the ancient one, and doubtless more than supplies its place; else, unquestionably, St. Benezet would think it necessary to repair his own. The view from the inner side of this ruined structure, grass-grown and weedy, and leading to such a precipitous plunge into the swift river, is very picturesque, in connection with the gray town and above it, the great, massive bulk of the cliff, the towers of the church, and of a vast old edifice, shapeless, ugly, and venerable, which the popes built and occupied as their palace, many centuries ago. . . . . After dinner we all set out on a walk, in the course of which we called at a bookseller's shop to show U---- an enormous cat, which I had already seen. It is of the Angora breed, of a mottled yellow color, and is really a wonder; as big and broad as a tolerably sized dog, very soft and silken, and apparently of the gentlest disposition. I never imagined the like, nor felt anything so deeply soft as this great beast. Its master seems very fond and proud of it; and, great favorite as the cat is, she does not take airs upon herself, but is gently shy and timid in her demonstrations. We ascended the great Rocher above the palace of the popes, and on our way looked into the old church, which was so dim in the decline of day that we could not see within the dusky arches, through which the chapels communicated with the nave. Thence we pursued our way up the farther ascent, and, standing on the edge of the precipice,--protected by a parapet of stone, and in other places by an iron railing,--we could look down upon the road that winds its dusky track far below, and at the river Rhone, which eddies close beside it. This is indeed a massive and lofty cliff, and it tumbles down so precipitously that I could readily have flung myself from the bank, and alighted on my head in the middle of the river. The Rhone passes so near its base that I threw stones a good way into its current. We talked with a man of Avignon, who leaned over the parapet near by, and he was very kind in explaining the points of view, and told us that the river, which winds and doubles upon itself so as to look like at least two rivers, is really the Rhone alone. The Durance joins with it within a few miles below Avignon, but is here invisible. Hotel de l'Europe, June 2d.--This morning we went again to the Duomo of the popes; and this time we allowed the custode, or sacristan, to show us the curiosities of it. He led us into a chapel apart, and showed us the old Gothic tomb of Pope John XXII., where the recumbent statue of the pope lies beneath one of those beautiful and venerable canopies of stone which look at once so light and so solemn. I know not how many hundred years old it is, but everything of Gothic origin has a faculty of conveying the idea of age; whereas classic forms seem to have nothing to do with time, and so lose the kind of impressiveness that arises from suggestions of decay and the past. In the sacristy the guide opened a cupboard that contained the jewels and sacred treasures of the church, and showed a most exquisite figure of Christ in ivory, represented as on a cross of ebony; and it was executed with wonderful truth and force of expression, and with great beauty likewise. I do not see what a full-length marble statue could have had that was lacking in this little ivory figure of hardly more than a foot high. It is about two centuries old, by an unknown artist. There is another famous ivory statuette in Avignon which seems to be more celebrated than this, but can hardly be superior. I shall gladly look at it if it comes in my way. Next to this, the prettiest thing the man showed us was a circle of emeralds, in one of the holy implements; and then he exhibited a little bit or a pope's skull; also a great old crozier, that looked as if made chiefly of silver, and partly gilt; but I saw where the plating of silver was worn away, and betrayed the copper of its actual substance. There were two or three pictures in the sacristy, by ancient and modern French artists, very unlike the productions of the Italian masters, but not without a beauty of their own. Leaving the sacristy, we returned into the church, where U---- and J----- began to draw the pope's old stone chair. There is a beast, or perhaps more than one, grotesquely sculptured upon it; the seat is high and square, the back low and pointed, and it offers no enticing promise to a weary man. The interior of the church is massively picturesque, with its vaulted roof, and a stone gallery, heavily ornamented, running along each side of the nave. Each arch of the nave gives admittance to a chapel, in all of which there are pictures, and sculptures in most of them. One of these chapels is of the time of Charlemagne, and has a vaulted roof of admirable architecture, covered with frescos of modern date and little merit. In an adjacent chapel is the stone monument of Pope Benedict, whose statue reposes on it, like many which I have seen in the cathedral of York and other old English churches. In another part we saw a monument, consisting of a plain slab supported on pillars; it is said to be of a Roman or very early Christian epoch. In another chapel was a figure of Christ in wax, I believe, and clothed in real drapery; a very ugly object. Also, a figure reposing under a slab, which strikes the spectator with the idea that it is really a dead person enveloped in a shroud. There are windows of painted glass in some of the chapels; and the gloom of the dimly lighted interior, especially beneath the broad, low arches, is very impressive. While we were there some women assembled at one of the altars, and went through their acts of devotion without the help of a priest; one and another of them alternately repeating prayers, to which the rest responded. The murmur of their voices took a musical tone, which was reverberated by the vaulted arches. U---- and I now came out; and, under the porch, we found an old woman selling rosaries, little religious books, and other holy things. We bought two little medals of the Immaculate Virgin, one purporting to be of silver, the other of gold; but as both together cost only two or three sous, the genuineness of the material may well be doubted. We sat down on the steps, of a crucifix which is placed in front of the church, and the children began to draw the porch, of which I hardly know whether to call the architecture classic or Gothic (as I said before); at all events it has a venerable aspect, and there are frescos within its arches by Simone Memmi. . . . . The popes' palace is contiguous to the church, and just below it, on the hillside. It is now occupied as barracks by some regiments of soldiers, a number of whom were lounging before the entrance; but we passed the sentinel without being challenged, and addressed ourselves to the concierge, who readily assented to our request to be shown through the edifice. A French gentleman and lady, likewise, came with similar purpose, and went the rounds along with us. The palace is such a confused heap and conglomeration of buildings, that it is impossible to get within any sort of a regular description. It is a huge, shapeless mass of architecture; and if it ever had any pretence to a plan, it has lost it in the modern alterations. For instance, an immense and lofty chapel, or rather church, has had two floors, one above the other, laid at different stages of its height; and the upper one of these floors, which extends just where the arches of the vaulted root begin to spring from the pillars, is ranged round with the beds of one of the regiments of soldiers. They are small iron bedsteads, each with its narrow mattress, and covered with a dark blanket. On some of them lay or lounged a soldier; other soldiers were cleaning their accoutrements; elsewhere we saw parties of them playing cards. So it was wherever we went among those large, dingy, gloomy halls and chambers, which, no doubt, were once stately and sumptuous, with pictures, with tapestry, and all sorts of adornment that the Middle Ages knew how to use. The windows threw a sombre light through embrasures at least two feet thick. There were staircases of magnificent breadth. We were shown into two small chapels, in different parts of the building, both containing the remains of old frescos wofully defaced. In one of them was a light, spiral staircase of iron, built in the centre of the room as a means of contemplating the frescos, which were said to be the work of our old friend Giotto. . . . . Finally, we climbed a long, long, narrow stair, built in the thickness of the wall, and thus gained access to the top of one of the towers, whence we saw the noblest landscapes, mountains, plains, and the Rhone, broad and bright, winding hither and thither, as if it had lost its way. Beneath our feet was the gray, ugly old palace, and its many courts, just as void of system and as inconceivable as when we were burrowing through its bewildering passages. No end of historical romances might be made out of this castle of the popes; and there ought to be a ghost in every room, and droves of them in some of the rooms; for there have been murders here in the gross and in detail, as well hundreds of years ago, as no longer back than the French Revolution, when there was a great massacre in one of the courts. Traces of this bloody business were visible in actual stains on the wall only a few years ago. Returning to the room of the concierge, who, being a little stiff with age, had sent an attendant round with us, instead of accompanying us in person, he showed us a picture of Rienzi, the last of the Roman tribunes, who was once a prisoner here. On a table, beneath the picture, stood a little vase of earthenware containing some silver coin. We took it as a hint, in the customary style of French elegance, that a fee should be deposited here, instead of being put into the hand of the concierge; so the French gentleman deposited half a franc, and I, in my magnificence, twice as much. Hotel de l'Europe, June 6th.--We are still here. . . . . I have been daily to the Rocher des Dons, and have grown familiar with the old church on its declivity. I think I might become attached to it by seeing it often. A sombre old interior, with its heavy arches, and its roof vaulted like the top of a trunk; its stone gallery, with ponderous adornments, running round three sides. I observe that it is a daily custom of the old women to say their prayers in concert, sometimes making a pilgrimage, as it were, from chapel to chapel. The voice of one of them is heard running through the series of petitions, and at intervals the voices of the others join and swell into a chorus, so that it is like a river connecting a series of lakes; or, not to use so gigantic a simile, the one voice is like a thread, on which the beads of a rosary are strung. One day two priests came and sat down beside these prayerful women, and joined in their petitions. I am inclined to hope that there is something genuine in the devotion of these old women. The view from the top of the Rocker des Dons (a contraction of Dominis) grows upon me, and is truly magnificent; a vast mountain-girdled plain, illuminated by the far windings and reaches of the Rhone. The river is here almost as turbid as the Tiber itself; but, I remember, in the upper part of its course the waters are beautifully transparent. A powerful rush is indicated by the swirls and eddies of its broad surface. Yesterday was a race day at Avignon, and apparently almost the whole population and a great many strangers streamed out of the city gate nearest our hotel, on their way to the race-course. There were many noticeable figures that might come well into a French picture or description; but only one remains in my memory,--a young man with a wooden leg, setting off for the course--a walk of several miles, I believe--with prodigious courage and alacrity, flourishing his wooden leg with an air and grace that seemed to render it positively flexible. The crowd returned towards sunset, and almost all night long, the streets and the whole air of the old town were full of song and merriment. There was a ball in a temporary structure, covered with an awning, in the Place d'Horloge, and a showman has erected his tent and spread forth his great painted canvases, announcing an anaconda and a sea-tiger to be seen. J----- paid four sous for admittance, and found that the sea-tiger was nothing but a large seal, and the anaconda altogether a myth. I have rambled a good deal about the town. Its streets are crooked and perplexing, and paved with round pebbles for the most part, which afford more uncomfortable pedestrianism than the pavement of Rome itself. It is an ancient-looking place, with some large old mansions, but few that are individually impressive; though here and there one sees an antique entrance, a corner tower, or other bit of antiquity, that throws a venerable effect over the gray commonplace of past centuries. The town is not overclean, and often there is a kennel of unhappy odor. There appear to have been many more churches and devotional establishments under the ancient dominion of the popes than have been kept intact in subsequent ages; the tower and facade of a church, for instance, form the front of a carpenter's shop, or some such plebeian place. The church where Laura lay has quite disappeared, and her tomb along with it. The town reminds me of Chester, though it does not in the least resemble it, and is not nearly so picturesque. Like Chester, it is entirely surrounded by a wall; and that of Avignon--though it has no delightful promenade on its top, as the wall of Chester has--is the more perfectly preserved in its mediaeval form, and the more picturesque of the two. J----- and I have once or twice walked nearly round it, commencing from the gate of Ouelle, which is very near our hotel. From this point it stretches for a considerable distance along by the river, and here there is a broad promenade, with trees, and blocks of stone for seats; on one side "the arrowy Rhone," generally carrying a cooling breeze along with it; on the other, the gray wall, with its battlements and machicolations, impending over what was once the moat, but which is now full of careless and untrained shrubbery. At intervals there are round towers swelling out from the wall, and rising a little above it. After about half a mile along the river-side the wall turns at nearly right angles, and still there is a wide road, a shaded walk, a boulevard; and at short distances are cafes, with their little round tables before the door, or small shady nooks of shrubbery. So numerous are these retreats and pleasaunces that I do not see how the little old town can support them all, especially as there are a great many cafes within the walls. I do not remember seeing any soldiers on guard at the numerous city gates, but there is an office in the side of each gate for levying the octroi, and old women are sometimes on guard there. This morning, after breakfast, J----- and I crossed the suspension-bridge close by the gate nearest our hotel, and walked to the ancient town of Villeneuve, on the other side of the Rhone. The first bridge leads to an island, from the farther side of which another very long one, with a timber foundation, accomplishes the passage of the other branch of the Rhone. There was a good breeze on the river, but after crossing it we found the rest of the walk excessively hot. This town of Villeneuve is of very ancient origin, and owes its existence, it is said, to the famous holiness of a female saint, which gathered round her abode and burial-place a great many habitations of people who reverenced her. She was the daughter of the King of Saragossa, and I presume she chose this site because it was so rocky and desolate. Afterwards it had a long mediaeval history; and in the time of the Avignon popes, the cardinals, regretful of their abandoned Roman villas, built pleasure-houses here, so that the town was called Villa Nueva. After they had done their best, it must have seemed to these poor cardinals but a rude and sad exchange for the Borghese, the Albani, the Pamfili Doria, and those other perfectest results of man's luxurious art. And probably the tradition of the Roman villas had really been kept alive, and extant examples of them all the way downward from the times of the empire. But this Villeneuve is the stoniest, roughest town that can be imagined. There are a few large old houses, to be sure, but built on a line with shabby village dwellings and barns, and so presenting little but samples of magnificent shabbiness. Perhaps I might have found traces of old splendor if I had sought for them; but, not having the history of the place in my mind, I passed through its scrambling streets without imagining that Princes of the Church had once made their abode here. The inhabitants now are peasants, or chiefly such; though, for aught I know, some of the French noblesse may burrow in these palaces that look so like hovels. A large church, with a massive tower, stands near the centre of the town; and, of course, I did not fail to enter its arched door,--a pointed arch, with many frames and mouldings, one within another. An old woman was at her devotions, and several others came in and knelt during my stay there. It was quite an interesting interior; a long nave, with six pointed arches on each side, beneath which were as many chapels. The walls were rich with pictures, not only in the chapels, but up and down the nave, above the arches. There were gilded virgins, too, and much other quaint device that produced an effect that I rather liked than otherwise. At the end of the church, farthest from the high altar, there were four columns of exceedingly rich marble, and a good deal more of such precious material was wrought into the chapels and altars. There was an old stone seat, also, of some former pope or prelate. The church was dim enough to cause the lamps in the shrines to become points of vivid light, and, looking from end to end, it was a long, venerable, tarnished, Old World vista, not at all tampered with by modern taste. We now went on our way through the village, and, emerging from a gate, went clambering towards the castle of St. Andre, which stands, perhaps, a quarter of a mile beyond it. This castle was built by Philip le Bel, as a restraint to the people of Avignon in extending their power on this side of the Rhone. We happened not to take the most direct way, and so approached the castle on the farther side and were obliged to go nearly round the hill on which it stands, before striking into the path which leads to its gate. It crowns a very bold and difficult hill, directly above the Rhone, opposite to Avignon,--which is so far off that objects are not minutely distinguishable,--and looking down upon the long, straggling town of Villeneuve. It must have been a place of mighty strength, in its day. Its ramparts seem still almost entire, as looked upon from without, and when, at length, we climbed the rough, rocky pathway to the entrance, we found the two vast round towers, with their battlemented summits and arched gateway between them, just as perfect as they could have been five hundred or more years ago. Some external defences are now, however, in a state of ruin; and there are only the remains of a tower, that once arose between the two round towers, and was apparently much more elevated than they. A little in front of the gate was a monumental cross of stone; and in the arch, between the two round towers, were two little boys at play; and an old woman soon showed herself, but took no notice of us. Casting our eyes within the gateway, we saw what looked a rough village street, betwixt old houses built ponderously of stone, but having far more the aspect of huts than of castle-hails. They were evidently the dwellings of peasantry, and people engaged in rustic labor; and no doubt they have burrowed into the primitive structures of the castle, and, as they found convenient, have taken their crumbling materials to build barns and farm-houses. There was space and accommodation for a very considerable population; but the men were probably at work in the fields, and the only persons visible were the children aforesaid, and one or two old women bearing bundles of twigs on their backs. They showed no curiosity respecting us, and though the wide space included within the castle-rampart seemed almost full of habitations ruinous or otherwise, I never found such a solitude in any ruin before. It contrasts very favorably in this particular with English castles, where, though you do not find rustic villages within the warlike enclosure, there is always a padlocked gate, always a guide, and generally half a dozen idle tourists. But here was only antiquity, with merely the natural growth of fungous human life upon it. We went to the end of the castle court and sat down, for lack of other shade, among some inhospitable nettles that grew close to the wall. Close by us was a great gap in the ramparts,--it may have been a breach which was once stormed through; and it now afforded us an airy and sunny glimpse of distant hills. . . . . J----- sketched part of the broken wall, which, by the by, did not seem to me nearly so thick as the walls of English castles. Then we returned through the gate, and I stopped, rather impatiently, under the hot sun, while J----- drew the outline of the two round towers. This done, we resumed our way homeward, after drinking from a very deep well close by the square tower of Philip le Bel. Thence we went melting through the sunshine, which beat upward as pitilessly from the white road as it blazed downwards from the sky. . . . . GENEVA. Hotel d'Angleterre, June 11th.--We left Avignon on Tuesday, 7th, and took the rail to Valence, where we arrived between four and five, and put up at the Hotel de la Poste, an ancient house, with dirty floors and dirt generally, but otherwise comfortable enough. . . . . Valence is a stately old town, full of tall houses and irregular streets. We found a cathedral there, not very large, but with a high and venerable interior, a nave supported by tall pillars, from the height of which spring arches. This loftiness is characteristic of French churches, as distinguished from those of Italy. . . . . We likewise saw, close by the cathedral, a large monument with four arched entrances meeting beneath a vaulted roof; but, on inquiry of an old priest and other persons, we could get no account of it, except that it was a tomb, and of unknown antiquity. The architecture seemed classic, and yet it had some Gothic peculiarities, and it was a reverend and beautiful object. Had I written up my journal while the town was fresh in my remembrance, I might have found much to describe; but a succession of other objects have obliterated most of the impressions I have received here. Our railway ride to Valence was intolerably hot. I have felt nothing like it since leaving America, and that is so long ago that the terrible discomfort was just as good as new. . . . . We left Valence at four, and came that afternoon to Lyons, still along the Rhone. Either the waters of this river assume a transparency in winter which they lose in summer, or I was mistaken in thinking them transparent on our former journey. They are now turbid; but the hue does not suggest the idea of a running mud-puddle, as the water of the Tiber does. No streams, however, are so beautiful in the quality of their waters as the clear, brown rivers of New England. The scenery along this part of the Rhone, as we have found all the way from Marseilles, is very fine and impressive; old villages, rocky cliffs, castellated steeps, quaint chateaux, and a thousand other interesting objects. We arrived at Lyons at five o'clock, and went to the Hotel de l'Univers, to which we had been recommended by our good hostess at Avignon. The day had become showery, but J----- and I strolled about a little before nightfall, and saw the general characteristics of the place. Lyons is a city of very stately aspect, hardly inferior to Paris; for it has regular streets of lofty houses, and immense squares planted with trees, and adorned with statues and fountains. New edifices of great splendor are in process of erection; and on the opposite side of the Rhone, where the site rises steep and high, there are structures of older date, that have an exceedingly picturesque effect, looking down upon the narrow town. The next morning I went out with J----- in quest of my bankers, and of the American Consul; and as I had forgotten the directions of the waiter of the hotel, I of course went astray, and saw a good deal more of Lyons than I intended. In my wanderings I crossed the Rhone, and found myself in a portion of the city evidently much older than that with which I had previously made acquaintance; narrow, crooked, irregular, and rudely paved streets, full of dingy business and bustle,--the city, in short, as it existed a century ago, and how much earlier I know not. Above rises that lofty elevation of ground which I before noticed; and the glimpses of its stately old buildings through the openings of the street were very picturesque. Unless it be Edinburgh, I have not seen any other city that has such striking features. Altogether unawares, immediately after crossing the bridge, we came upon the cathedral; and the grand, time-blackened Gothic front, with its deeply arched entrances, seemed to me as good as anything I ever saw,--unexpectedly more impressive than all the ruins of Rome. I could but merely glance at its interior; so that its noble height and venerable space, filled with the dim, consecrated light of pictured windows, recur to me as a vision. And it did me good to enjoy the awfulness and sanctity of Gothic architecture again, after so long shivering in classic porticos. . . . . We now recrossed the river. . . . . The Frank methods and arrangements in matters of business seem to be excellent, so far as effecting the proposed object is concerned; but there is such an inexorable succession of steel-wrought forms, that life is not long enough for so much accuracy. The stranger, too, goes blindfold through all these processes, not knowing what is to turn up next, till, when quite in despair, he suddenly finds his business mysteriously accomplished. . . . . We left Lyons at four o'clock, taking the railway for Geneva. The scenery was very striking throughout the journey; but I allowed the hills, deep valleys, high impending cliffs, and whatever else I saw along the road, to pass from me without an ink-blot. We reached Geneva at nearly ten o'clock. . . . . It is situated partly on low, flat ground, bordering the lake, and behind this level space it rises by steep, painfully paved streets, some of which can hardly be accessible by wheeled carriages. The prosperity of the town is indicated by a good many new and splendid edifices, for commercial and other purposes, in the vicinity of the lake; but intermixed with these there are many quaint buildings of a stern gray color, and in a style of architecture that I prefer a thousand times to the monotony of Italian streets. Immensely high, red roofs, with windows in them, produce an effect that delights me. They are as ugly, perhaps, as can well be conceived, but very striking and individual. At each corner of these ancient houses frequently is a tower, the roof of which rises in a square pyramidal form, or, if the tower be round, in a round pyramidal form. Arched passages, gloomy and grimy, pass from one street to another. The lower town creeps with busy life, and swarms like an ant-hill; but if you climb the half-precipitous streets, you find yourself among ancient and stately mansions, high roofed, with a strange aspect of grandeur about them, looking as if they might still be tenanted by such old magnates as dwelt in them centuries ago. There is also a cathedral, the older portion exceedingly fine; but it has been adorned at some modern epoch with a Grecian portico,--good in itself, but absurdly out of keeping with the edifice which it prefaces. This being a Protestant country, the doors were all shut,--an inhospitality that made me half a Catholic. It is funny enough that a stranger generally profits by all that is worst for the inhabitants of the country where he himself is merely a visitor. Despotism makes things all the pleasanter for the stranger. Catholicism lends itself admirably to his purposes. There are public gardens (one, at least) in Geneva. . . . . Nothing struck me so much, I think, as the color of the Rhone, as it flows under the bridges in the lower town. It is absolutely miraculous, and, beautiful as it is, suggests the idea that the tubs of a thousand dyers have emptied their liquid indigo into the stream. When once you have conquered and thrust out this idea, it is an inexpressible delight to look down into this intense, brightly transparent blue, that hurries beneath you with the speed of a race-horse. The shops of Geneva are very tempting to a traveller, being full of such little knick-knacks as he would be glad to carry away in memory of the place: wonderful carvings in wood and ivory, done with exquisite taste and skill; jewelry that seems very cheap, but is doubtless dear enough, if you estimate it by the solid gold that goes into its manufacture; watches, above all things else, for a third or a quarter of the price that one pays in England, looking just as well, too, and probably performing the whole of a watch's duty as uncriticisably. The Swiss people are frugal and inexpensive in their own habits, I believe, plain and simple, and careless of ornament; but they seem to reckon on other people's spending a great deal of money for gewgaws. We bought some of their wooden trumpery, and likewise a watch for U----. . . . . Next to watches, jewelry, and wood-carving, I should say that cigars were one of the principal articles of commerce in Geneva. Cigar-shops present themselves at every step or two, and at a reasonable rate, there being no duties, I believe, on imported goods. There was no examination of our trunks on arrival, nor any questions asked on that score. VILLENEUVE. Hotel de Byron, June 12th.--Yesterday afternoon we left Geneva by a steamer, starting from the quay at only a short distance from our hotel. The forenoon had been showery; but the suit now came out very pleasantly, although there were still clouds and mist enough to give infinite variety to the mountain scenery. At the commencement of our voyage the scenery of the lake was not incomparably superior to that of other lakes on which I have sailed, as Lake Windermere, for instance, or Loch Lomond, or our own Lake Champlain. It certainly grew more grand and beautiful, however, till at length I felt that I had never seen anything worthy to be put beside it. The southern shore has the grandest scenery; the great hills on that side appearing close to the water's edge, and after descending, with headlong slope, directly from their rocky and snow-streaked summits down into the blue water. Our course lay nearer to the northern shore, and all our stopping-places were on that side. The first was Coppet, where Madame de Stael or her father, or both, were either born or resided or died, I know not which, and care very little. It is a picturesque village, with an old church, and old, high-roofed, red-tiled houses, the whole looking as if nothing in it had been changed for many, many years. All these villages, at several of which we stopped momentarily, look delightfully unmodified by recent fashions. There is the church, with its tower crowned by a pyramidal roof, like an extinguisher; then the chateau of the former lord, half castle and half dwelling-house, with a round tower at each corner, pyramid topped; then, perhaps, the ancient town-house or Hotel de Ville, in an open paved square; and perhaps the largest mansion in the whole village will have been turned into a modern inn, but retaining all its venerable characteristics of high, steep sloping roof, and antiquated windows. Scatter a delightful shade of trees among the houses, throw in a time-worn monument of one kind or another, swell out the delicious blue of the lake in front, and the delicious green of the sunny hillside sloping up and around this closely congregated neighborhood of old, comfortable houses, and I do not know what more I can add to this sketch. Often there was an insulated house or cottage, embowered in shade, and each seeming like the one only spot in the wide world where two people that had good consciences and loved each other could spend a happy life. Half-ruined towers, old historic castles, these, too, we saw. And all the while, on the other side of the lake, were the high hills, sometimes dim, sometimes black, sometimes green, with gray precipices of stone, and often snow-patches, right above the warm sunny lake whereon we were sailing. We passed Lausanne, which stands upward, on the slope of the hill, the tower of its cathedral forming a conspicuous object. We mean to visit this to-morrow; so I may pretermit further mention of it here. We passed Vevay and Clarens, which, methought, was particularly picturesque; for now the hills had approached close to the water on the northern side also, and steep heights rose directly above the little gray church and village; and especially I remember a rocky cliff which ascends into a rounded pyramid, insulated from all other peaks and ridges. But if I could perform the absolute impossibility of getting one single outline of the scene into words, there would be all the color wanting, the light, the haze, which spiritualizes it, and moreover makes a thousand and a thousand scenes out of that single one. Clarens, however, has still another interest for me; for I found myself more affected by it, as the scene of the love of St. Preux and Julie, than I have often been by scenes of poetry and romance. I read Rousseau's romance with great sympathy, when I was hardly more than a boy; ten years ago, or thereabouts, I tried to read it again without success; but I think, from my feeling of yesterday, that it still retains its hold upon my imagination. Farther onward, we saw a white, ancient-looking group of towers, beneath a mountain, which was so high, and rushed so precipitately down upon this pile of building as quite to dwarf it; besides which, its dingy whiteness had not a very picturesque effect. Nevertheless, this was the Castle of Chillon. It appears to sit right upon the water, and does not rise very loftily above it. I was disappointed in its aspect, having imagined this famous castle as situated upon a rock, a hundred, or, for aught I know, a thousand feet above the surface of the lake; but it is quite as impressive a fact--supposing it to be true--that the water is eight hundred feet deep at its base. By this time, the mountains had taken the beautiful lake into their deepest heart; they girdled it quite round with their grandeur and beauty, and, being able to do no more for it, they here withheld it from extending any farther; and here our voyage came to an end. I have never beheld any scene so exquisite; nor do I ask of heaven to show me any lovelier or nobler one, but only to give me such depth and breadth of sympathy with nature, that I may worthily enjoy this. It is beauty more than enough for poor, perishable mortals. If this be earth, what must heaven be! It was nearly eight o'clock when we arrived; and then we had a walk of at least a mile to the Hotel Byron. . . . . I forgot to mention that in the latter part of our voyage there was a shower in some part of the sky, and though none of it fell upon us, we had the benefit of those gentle tears in a rainbow, which arched itself across the lake from mountain to mountain, so that our track lay directly under this triumphal arch. We took it as a good omen, nor were we discouraged, though, after the rainbow had vanished, a few sprinkles of the shower came down. We found the Hotel Byron very grand indeed, and a good one too. There was a beautiful moonlight on the lake and hills, but we contented ourselves with looking out of our lofty window, whence, likewise, we had a sidelong glance at the white battlements of Chillon, not more than a mile off, on the water's edge. The castle is wofully in need of a pedestal. If its site were elevated to a height equal to its own, it would make a far better appearance. As it now is, it looks, to speak profanely of what poetry has consecrated, when seen from the water, or along the shore of the lake, very like an old whitewashed factory or mill. This morning I walked to the Castle of Chillon with J-----, who sketches everything he sees, from a wildflower or a carved chair to a castle or a range of mountains. The morning had sunshine thinly scattered through it; but, nevertheless, there was a continual sprinkle, sometimes scarcely perceptible, and then again amounting to a decided drizzle. The road, which is built along on a little elevation above the lake shore, led us past the Castle of Chillon; and we took a side-path, which passes still nearer the castle gate. The castle stands on an isthmus of gravel, permanently connecting it with the mainland. A wooden bridge, covered with a roof, passes from the shore to the arched entrance; and beneath this shelter, which has wooden walls as well as roof and floor, we saw a soldier or gendarme who seemed to act as warder. As it sprinkled rather more freely than at first, I thought of appealing to his hospitality for shelter from the rain, but concluded to pass on. The castle makes a far better appearance on a nearer view, and from the land, than when seen at a distance, and from the water. It is built of stone, and seems to have been anciently covered with plaster, which imparts the whiteness to which Byron does much more than justice, when he speaks of "Chillon's snow-white battlements." There is a lofty external wall, with a cluster of round towers about it, each crowned with its pyramidal roof of tiles, and from the central portion of the castle rises a square tower, also crowned with its own pyramid to a considerably greater height than the circumjacent ones. The whole are in a close cluster, and make a fine picture of ancient strength when seen at a proper proximity; for I do not think that distance adds anything to the effect. There are hardly any windows, or few, and very small ones, except the loopholes for arrows and for the garrison of the castle to peep from on the sides towards the water; indeed, there are larger windows at least in the upper apartments; but in that direction, no doubt, the castle was considered impregnable. Trees here and there on the land side grow up against the castle wall, on one part of which, moreover, there was a green curtain of ivy spreading from base to battlement. The walls retain their machicolations, and I should judge that nothing had been [altered], nor any more work been done upon the old fortress than to keep it in singularly good repair. It was formerly a castle of the Duke of Savoy, and since his sway over the country ceased (three hundred years at least), it has been in the hands of the Swiss government, who still keep some arms and ammunition there. We passed on, and found the view of it better, as we thought, from a farther point along the road. The raindrops began to spatter down faster, and we took shelter under an impending precipice, where the ledge of rock had been blasted and hewn away to form the road. Our refuge was not a very convenient and comfortable one, so we took advantage of the partial cessation of the shower to turn homeward, but had not gone far when we met mamma and all her train. As we were close by the castle entrance, we thought it advisable to seek admission, though rather doubtful whether the Swiss gendarme might not deem it a sin to let us into the castle on Sunday. But he very readily admitted us under his covered drawbridge, and called an old man from within the fortress to show us whatever was to be seen. This latter personage was a staid, rather grim, and Calvinistic-looking old worthy; but he received us without scruple, and forthwith proceeded to usher us into a range of most dismal dungeons, extending along the basement of the castle, on a level with the surface of the lake. First, if I remember aright, we came to what he said had been a chapel, and which, at all events, looked like an aisle of one, or rather such a crypt as I have seen beneath a cathedral, being a succession of massive pillars supporting groined arches,--a very admirable piece of gloomy Gothic architecture. Next, we came to a very dark compartment of the same dungeon range, where he pointed to a sort of bed, or what might serve for a bed, hewn in the solid rock, and this, our guide said, had been the last sleeping-place of condemned prisoners on the night before their execution. The next compartment was still duskier and dismaller than the last, and he bade us cast our eyes up into the obscurity and see a beam, where the condemned ones used to be hanged. I looked and looked, and closed my eyes so as to see the clearer in this horrible duskiness on opening them again. Finally, I thought I discerned the accursed beam, and the rest of the party were certain that they saw it. Next beyond this, I think, was a stone staircase, steep, rudely cut, and narrow, down which the condemned were brought to death; and beyond this, still on the same basement range of the castle, a low and narrow [corridor] through which we passed and saw a row of seven massive pillars, supporting two parallel series of groined arches, like those in the chapel which we first entered. This was Bonnivard's prison, and the scene of Byron's poem. The arches are dimly lighted by narrow loopholes, pierced through the immensely thick wall, but at such a height above the floor that we could catch no glimpse of land or water, or scarcely of the sky. The prisoner of Chillon could not possibly have seen the island to which Byron alludes, and which is a little way from the shore, exactly opposite the town of Villeneuve. There was light enough in this long, gray, vaulted room, to show us that all the pillars were inscribed with the names of visitors, among which I saw no interesting one, except that of Byron himself, which is cut, in letters an inch long or more, into one of the pillars next to that to which Bonnivard was chained. The letters are deep enough to remain in the pillar as long as the castle stands. Byron seems to have had a fancy for recording his name in this and similar ways; as witness the record which I saw on a tree of Newstead Abbey. In Bonnivard's pillar there still remains an iron ring, at the height of perhaps three feet from the ground. His chain was fastened to this ring, and his only freedom was to walk round this pillar, about which he is said to have worn a path in the stone pavement of the dungeon; but as the floor is now covered with earth or gravel, I could not satisfy myself whether this be true. Certainly six years, with nothing else to do in them save to walk round the pillar, might well suffice to wear away the rock, even with naked feet. This column, and all the columns, were cut and hewn in a good style of architecture, and the dungeon arches are not without a certain gloomy beauty. On Bonnivard's pillar, as well as on all the rest, were many names inscribed; but I thought better of Byron's delicacy and sensitiveness for not cutting his name into that very pillar. Perhaps, knowing nothing of Bonnivard's story, he did not know to which column he was chained. Emerging from the dungeon-vaults, our guide led us through other parts of the castle, showing us the Duke of Savoy's kitchen, with a fireplace at least twelve feet long; also the judgment-hall, or some such place, hung round with the coats of arms of some officers or other, and having at one end a wooden post, reaching from floor to ceiling, and having upon it the marks of fire. By means of this post, contumacious prisoners were put to a dreadful torture, being drawn up by cords and pulleys, while their limbs were scorched by a fire underneath. We also saw a chapel or two, one of which is still in good and sanctified condition, and was to be used this very day, our guide told us, for religious purposes. We saw, moreover, the Duke's private chamber, with a part of the bedstead on which he used to sleep, and be haunted with horrible dreams, no doubt, and the ghosts of wretches whom he had tortured and hanged; likewise the bedchamber of his duchess, that had in its window two stone seats, where, directly over the head of Bonnivard, the ducal pair might look out on the beautiful scene of lake and mountains, and feel the warmth of the blessed sun. Under this window, the guide said, the water of the lake is eight hundred feet in depth; an immense profundity, indeed, for an inland lake, but it is not very difficult to believe that the mountain at the foot of which Chillon stands may descend so far beneath the water. In other parts of the lake and not distant, more than nine hundred feet have been sounded. I looked out of the duchess's window, and could certainly see no appearance of a bottom in the light blue water. The last thing that the guide showed us was a trapdoor, or opening, beneath a crazy old floor. Looking down into this aperture we saw three stone steps, which we should have taken to be the beginning of a flight of stairs that descended into a dungeon, or series of dungeons, such as we had already seen. But inspecting them more closely, we saw that the third step terminated the flight, and beyond was a dark vacancy. Three steps a person would grope down, planting his uncertain foot on a dimly seen stone; the fourth step would be in the empty air. The guide told us that it used to be the practice to bring prisoners hither, under pretence of committing them to a dungeon, and make them go down the three steps and that fourth fatal one, and they would never more be heard of; but at the bottom of the pit there would be a dead body, and in due time a mouldy skeleton, which would rattle beneath the body of the next prisoner that fell. I do not believe that it was anything more than a secret dungeon for state prisoners whom it was out of the question either to set at liberty or bring to public trial. The depth of the pit was about forty-five feet. Gazing intently down, I saw a faint gleam of light at the bottom, apparently coming from some other aperture than the trap-door over which we were bending, so that it must have been contemplated to supply it with light and air in such degree as to support human life. U---- declared she saw a skeleton at the bottom; Miss S------ thought she saw a hand, but I saw only the dim gleam of light. There are two or three courts in the castle, but of no great size. We were now led across one of them, and dismissed out of the arched entrance by which we had come in. We found the gendarme still keeping watch on his roofed drawbridge, and as there was the same gentle shower that had been effusing itself all the morning, we availed ourselves of the shelter, more especially as there were some curiosities to examine. These consisted chiefly of wood-carvings,--such as little figures in the national costume, boxes with wreaths of foliage upon them, paper knives, the chamois goat, admirably well represented. We at first hesitated to make any advances towards trade with the gendarme because it was Sunday, and we fancied there might be a Calvinistic scruple on his part about turning a penny on the Sabbath; but from the little I know of the Swiss character, I suppose they would be as ready as any other men to sell, not only such matters, but even their own souls, or any smaller--or shall we say greater--thing on Sunday or at any other time. So we began to ask the prices of the articles, and met with no difficulty in purchasing a salad spoon and fork, with pretty bas-reliefs carved on the handles, and a napkin-ring. For Rosebud's and our amusement, the gendarme now set a musical-box a-going; and as it played a pasteboard figure of a dentist began to pull the tooth of a pasteboard patient, lifting the wretched simulacrum entirely from the ground, and keeping him in this horrible torture for half an hour. Meanwhile, mamma, Miss Shepard, U----, and J----- sat down all in a row on a bench and sketched the mountains; and as the shower did not cease, though the sun most of the time shone brightly, they were kept actual prisoners of Chillon much longer than we wished to stay. We took advantage of the first cessation,--though still the drops came dimpling into the water that rippled against the pebbles beneath the bridge,--of the first partial cessation of the shower, to escape, and returned towards the hotel, with this kindliest of summer rains falling upon us most of the way In the afternoon the rain entirely ceased, and the weather grew delightfully radiant, and warmer than could well be borne in the sunshine. U---- and I walked to the village of Villeneuve, --a mile from the hotel,--and found a very commonplace little old town of one or two streets, standing on a level, and as uninteresting as if there were not a hill within a hundred miles. It is strange what prosaic lines men thrust in amid the poetry of nature. . . . . Hotel de l'Angleterre, Geneva, June 14th.--Yesterday morning was very fine, and we had a pretty early breakfast at Hotel Byron, preparatory to leaving it. This hotel is on a magnificent scale of height and breadth, its staircases and corridors being the most spacious I have seen; but there is a kind of meagreness in the life there, and a certain lack of heartiness, that prevented us from feeling at home. We were glad to get away, and took the steamer on our return voyage, in excellent spirits. Apparently it had been a cold night in the upper regions, for a great deal more snow was visible on some of the mountains than we had before observed; especially a mountain called "Diableries" presented a silver summit, and broad sheets and fields of snow. Nothing ever can have been more beautiful than those groups of mighty hills as we saw them then, with the gray rocks, the green slopes, the white snow-patches and crests, all to be seen at one glance, and the mists and fleecy clouds tumbling, rolling, hovering about their summits, filling their lofty valleys, and coming down far towards the lower world, making the skyey aspects so intimate with the earthly ones, that we hardly knew whether we were sojourning in the material or spiritual world. It was like sailing through the sky, moreover, to be borne along on such water as that of Lake Leman,--the bluest, brightest, and profoundest element, the most radiant eye that the dull earth ever opened to see heaven withal. I am writing nonsense, but it is because no sense within my mind will answer the purpose. Some of these mountains, that looked at no such mighty distance, were at least forty or fifty miles off, and appeared as if they were near neighbors and friends of other mountains, from which they were really still farther removed. The relations into which distant points are brought, in a view of mountain scenery, symbolize the truth which we can never judge within our partial scope of vision, of the relations which we bear to our fellow-creatures and human circumstances. These mighty mountains think that they have nothing to do with one another, each seems itself its own centre, and existing for itself alone; and yet to an eye that can take them all in, they are evidently portions of one grand and beautiful idea, which could not be consummated without the lowest and the loftiest of them. I do not express this satisfactorily, but have a genuine meaning in it nevertheless. We passed again by Chillon, and gazed at it as long as it was distinctly visible, though the water view does no justice to its real picturesqueness, there being no towers nor projections on the side towards the lake, nothing but a wall of dingy white, with an indentation that looks something like a gateway. About an hour and a half brought us to Ouchy, the point where passengers land to take the omnibus to Lausanne. The ascent from Ouchy to Lausanne is a mile and a half, which it took the omnibus nearly half an hour to accomplish. We left our shawls and carpet-bags in the salle a manger of the Hotel Faucon, and set forth to find the cathedral, the pinnacled tower of which is visible for a long distance up and down the lake. Prominent as it is, however, it is by no means very easy to find it while rambling through the intricate streets and declivities of the town itself, for Lausanne is the town, I should fancy, in all the world the most difficult to go directly from one point to another. It is built on the declivity of a hill, adown which run several valleys or ravines, and over these the contiguity of houses extends, so that the communication is kept up by means of steep streets and sometimes long weary stairs, which must be surmounted and descended again in accomplishing a very moderate distance. In some inscrutable way we at last arrived at the cathedral, which stands on a higher site than any other in Lausanne. It has a very venerable exterior, with all the Gothic grandeur which arched mullioned windows, deep portals, buttresses, towers, and pinnacles, gray with a thousand years, can give to architecture. After waiting awhile we obtained entrance by means of an old woman, who acted the part of sacristan, and was then showing the church to some other visitors. The interior disappointed us; not but what it was very beautiful, but I think the excellent repair that it was in, and the Puritanic neatness with which it is kept, does much towards effacing the majesty and mystery that belong to an old church. Every inch of every wall and column, and all the mouldings and tracery, and every scrap of grotesque carving, had been washed with a drab mixture. There were likewise seats all up and down the nave, made of pine wood, and looking very new and neat, just such seats as I shall see in a hundred meeting-houses (if ever I go into so many) in America. Whatever might be the reason, the stately nave, with its high-groined roof, the clustered columns and lofty pillars, the intersecting arches of the side-aisles, the choir, the armorial and knightly tombs that surround what was once the high altar, all produced far less effect than I could have thought beforehand. As it happened, we had more ample time and freedom to inspect this cathedral than any other that we have visited, for the old woman consented to go away and leave us there, locking the door behind her. The others, except Rosebud, sat down to sketch such portions as struck their fancy; and for myself, I looked at the monuments, of which some, being those of old knights, ladies, bishops, and a king, were curious from their antiquity; and others are interesting as bearing memorials of English people, who have died at Lausanne in comparatively recent years. Then I went up into the pulpit, and tried, without success, to get into the stone gallery that runs all round the nave; and I explored my way into various side apartments of the cathedral, which I found fitted up with seats for Sabbath schools, perhaps, or possibly for meetings of elders of the Church. I opened the great Bible of the church, and found it to be a French version, printed at Lille some fifty years ago. There was also a liturgy, adapted, probably, to the Lutheran form of worship. In one of the side apartments I found a strong box, heavily clamped with iron, and having a contrivance, like the hopper of a mill, by which money could be turned into the top, while a double lock prevented its being abstracted again. This was to receive the avails of contributions made in the church; and there were likewise boxes, stuck on the ends of long poles, wherewith the deacons could go round among the worshippers, conveniently extending the begging-box to the remotest curmudgeon among them all. From the arrangement of the seats in the nave, and the labels pasted or painted on them, I judged that the women sat on one side and the men on the other, and the seats for various orders of magistrates, and for ecclesiastical and collegiate people, were likewise marked out. I soon grew weary of these investigations, and so did Rosebud and J-----, who essayed to amuse themselves with running races together over the horizontal tombstones in the pavement of the choir, treading remorselessly over the noseless effigies of old dignitaries, who never expected to be so irreverently treated. I put a stop to their sport, and banished them to different parts of the cathedral; and by and by, the old woman appeared again, and released us from durance. . . . . While waiting for our dejeuner, we saw the people dining at the regular table d'hote of the hotel, and the idea was strongly borne in upon me, that the professional mystery of a male waiter is a very unmanly one. It is so absurd to see the solemn attentiveness with which they stand behind the chairs, the earnestness of their watch for any crisis that may demand their interposition, the gravity of their manner in performing some little office that the guest might better do for himself, their decorous and soft steps; in short, as I sat and gazed at them, they seemed to me not real men, but creatures with a clerical aspect, engendered out of a very artificial state of society. When they are waiting on myself, they do not appear so absurd; it is necessary to stand apart in order to see them properly. We left Lausanne--which was to us a tedious and weary place--before four o'clock. I should have liked well enough to see the house of Gibbon, and the garden in which he walked, after finishing "The Decline and Fall"; but it could not be done without some trouble and inquiry, and as the house did not come to see me, I determined not to go and see the house. There was, indeed, a mansion of somewhat antique respectability, near our hotel, having a garden and a shaded terrace behind it, which would have answered accurately enough to the idea of Gibbon's residence. Perhaps it was so; far more probably not. Our former voyages had been taken in the Hirondelle; we now, after broiling for some time in the sunshine by the lakeside, got on board of the Aigle, No. 2. There were a good many passengers, the larger proportion of whom seemed to be English and American, and among the latter a large party of talkative ladies, old and young. The voyage was pleasant while we were protected from the sun by the awning overhead, but became scarcely agreeable when the sun had descended so low as to shine in our faces or on our backs. We looked earnestly for Mont Blanc, which ought to have been visible during a large part of our course; but the clouds gathered themselves hopelessly over the portion of the sky where the great mountain lifted his white peak; and we did not see it, and probably never shall. As to the meaner mountains, there were enough of them, and beautiful enough; but we were a little weary, and feverish with the heat. . . . . I think I had a head-ache, though it is so unusual a complaint with me, that I hardly know it when it comes. We were none of us sorry, therefore, when the Eagle brought us to the quay of Geneva, only a short distance from our hotel. . . . . To-day I wrote to Mr. Wilding, requesting him to secure passages for us from Liverpool on the 15th of next month, or 1st of August. It makes my heart thrill, half pleasantly, half otherwise; so much nearer does this step seem to bring that home whence I have now been absent six years, and which, when I see it again, may turn out to be not my home any longer. I likewise wrote to Bennoch, though I know not his present address; but I should deeply grieve to leave England without seeing him. He and Henry Bright are the only two men in England to whom I shall be much grieved to bid farewell; but to the island itself I cannot bear to say that word as a finality. I shall dreamily hope to come back again at some indefinite time; rather foolishly perhaps, for it will tend to take the substance out of my life in my own land. But this, I suspect, is apt to be the penalty of those who stay abroad and stay too long. HAVRE. Hotel Wheeler, June 22d.--We arrived at this hotel last evening from Paris, and find ourselves on the borders of the Petit Quay Notre Dame, with steamers and boats right under our windows, and all sorts of dock-business going on briskly. There are barrels, bales, and crates of goods; there are old iron cannon for posts; in short, all that belongs to the Wapping of a great seaport. . . . . The American partialities of the guests [of this hotel] are consulted by the decorations of the parlor, in which hang two lithographs and colored views of New York, from Brooklyn and from Weehawken. The fashion of the house is a sort of nondescript mixture of Frank, English, and American, and is not disagreeable to us after our weary experience of Continental life. The abundance of the food is very acceptable in comparison with the meagreness of French and Italian meals; and last evening we supped nobly on cold roast beef and ham, set generously before us, in the mass, instead of being doled out in slices few and thin. The waiter has a kindly sort of manner, and resembles the steward of a vessel rather than a landsman; and, in short, everything here has undergone a change, which might admit of very effective description. I may now as well give up all attempts at journalizing. So I shall say nothing of our journey across France from Geneva. . . . . To-night, we shall take our departure in a steamer for Southampton, whence we shall go to London; thence, in a week or two, to Liverpool; thence to Boston and Concord, there to enjoy--if enjoyment it prove--a little rest and a sense that we are at home. [More than four months were now taken up in writing "The Marble Faun," in great part at the seaside town of Redcar, Yorkshire, Mr. Hawthorne having concluded to remain another year in England, chiefly to accomplish that romance. In Redcar, where he remained till September or October, he wrote no journal, but only the book. He then went to Leamington, where he finished "The Marble Faun" in March, and there is a little journalizing soon after leaving Redcar.--ED.] ENGLAND. Leamington, November 14th, 1859.--J---- and I walked to Lillington the other day. Its little church was undergoing renovation when we were here two years ago, and now seems to be quite renewed, with the exception of its square, gray, battlemented tower, which has still the aspect of unadulterated antiquity. On Saturday J----- and I walked to Warwick by the old road, passing over the bridge of the Avon, within view of the castle. It is as fine a piece of English scenery as exists anywhere,-- the quiet little river, shadowed with drooping trees, and, in its vista, the gray towers and long line of windows of the lordly castle, with a picturesquely varied outline; ancient strength, a little softened by decay. . . . . The town of Warwick, I think, has been considerably modernized since I first saw it. The whole of the central portion of the principal street now looks modern, with its stuccoed or brick fronts of houses, and, in many cases, handsome shop windows. Leicester Hospital and its adjoining chapel still look venerably antique; and so does a gateway that half bestrides the street. Beyond these two points on either side it has a much older aspect. The modern signs heighten the antique impression. February 5th, 1860.--Mr. and Mrs. Bennoch are staying for a little while at Mr. B------'s at Coventry, and Mr. B------ called upon us the other day, with Mr. Bennoch, and invited us to go and see the lions of Coventry; so yesterday U---- and I went. It was not my first visit, therefore I have little or nothing to record, unless it were to describe a ribbon-factory into which Mr. B------ took us. But I have no comprehension of machinery, and have only a confused recollection of an edifice of four or five stories, on each floor of which were rows of huge machines, all busy with their iron hands and joints in turning out delicate ribbons. It was very curious and unintelligible to me to observe how they caused different colored patterns to appear, and even flowers to blossom, on the plain surface of a ribbon. Some of the designs were pretty, and I was told that one manufacturer pays 500 pounds annually to French artists (or artisans, for I do not know whether they have a connection with higher art) merely for new patterns of ribbons. The English find it impossible to supply themselves with tasteful productions of this sort merely from the resources of English fancy. If an Englishman possessed the artistic faculty to the degree requisite to produce such things, he would doubtless think himself a great artist, and scorn to devote himself to these humble purposes. Every Frenchman is probably more of an artist than one Englishman in a thousand. We ascended to the very roof of the factory, and gazed thence over smoky Coventry, which is now a town of very considerable size, and rapidly on the increase. The three famous spires rise out of the midst, that of St. Michael being the tallest and very beautiful. Had the day been clear, we should have had a wide view on all sides; for Warwickshire is well laid out for distant prospects, if you can only gain a little elevation from which to see them. Descending from the roof, we next went to see Trinity Church, which has just come through an entire process of renovation, whereby much of its pristine beauty has doubtless been restored; but its venerable awfulness is greatly impaired. We went into three churches, and found that they had all been subjected to the same process. It would be nonsense to regret it, because the very existence of these old edifices is involved in their being renewed; but it certainly does deprive them of a great part of their charm, and puts one in mind of wigs, padding, and all such devices for giving decrepitude the aspect of youth. In the pavement of the nave and aisles there are worn tombstones, with defaced inscriptions, and discolored marbles affixed against the wall; monuments, too, where a mediaeval man and wife sleep side by side on a marble slab; and other tombs so old that the inscriptions are quite gone. Over an arch, in one of the churches, there was a fresco, so old, dark, faded, and blackened, that I found it impossible to make out a single figure or the slightest hint of the design. On the whole, after seeing the churches of Italy, I was not greatly impressed with these attempts to renew the ancient beauty of old English minsters; it would be better to preserve as sedulously as possible their aspect of decay, in which consists the principal charm. . . . . On our way to Mr. B------'s house, we looked into the quadrangle of a charity-school and old men's hospital, and afterwards stepped into a large Roman Catholic church, erected within these few years past, and closely imitating the mediaeval architecture and arrangements. It is strange what a plaything, a trifle, an unserious affair, this imitative spirit makes of a huge, ponderous edifice, which if it had really been built five hundred years ago would have been worthy of all respect. I think the time must soon come when this sort of thing will be held in utmost scorn, until the lapse of time shall give it a claim to respect. But, methinks, we had better strike out any kind of architecture, so it be our own, however wretched, than thus tread back upon the past. Mr. B------ now conducted us to his residence, which stands a little beyond the outskirts of the city, on the declivity of a hill, and in so windy a spot that, as he assured me, the very plants are blown out of the ground. He pointed to two maimed trees whose tops were blown off by a gale two or three years since; but the foliage still covers their shortened summits in summer, so that he does not think it desirable to cut them down. In America, a man of Mr. B------'s property would take upon himself the state and dignity of a millionaire. It is a blessed thing in England, that money gives a man no pretensions to rank, and does not bring the responsibilities of a great position. We found three or four gentlemen to meet us at dinner,--a Mr. D------ and a Mr. B------, an author, having written a book called "The Philosophy of Necessity," and is acquainted with Emerson, who spent two or three days at his house when last in England. He was very kindly appreciative of my own productions, as was also his wife, next to whom I sat at dinner. She talked to me about the author of "Adam Bede," whom she has known intimately all her life. . . . . Miss Evans (who wrote "Adam Bede") was the daughter of a steward, and gained her exact knowledge of English rural life by the connection with which this origin brought her with the farmers. She was entirely self-educated, and has made herself an admirable scholar in classical as well as in modern languages. Those who knew her had always recognized her wonderful endowments, and only watched to see in what way they would develop themselves. She is a person of the simplest manners and character, amiable and unpretending, and Mrs. B------ spoke of her with great affection and respect. . . . . Mr. B------, our host, is an extremely sensible man; and it is remarkable how many sensible men there are in England,--men who have read and thought, and can develop very good ideas, not exactly original, yet so much the product of their own minds that they can fairly call them their own. February 18th.--. . . . This present month has been somewhat less dismal than the preceding ones; there have been some sunny and breezy days when there was life in the air, affording something like enjoyment in a walk, especially when the ground was frozen. It is agreeable to see the fields still green through a partial covering of snow; the trunks and branches of the leafless trees, moreover, have a verdant aspect, very unlike that of American trees in winter, for they are covered with a delicate green moss, which is not so observable in summer. Often, too, there is a twine of green ivy up and down the trunk. The other day, as J----- and I were walking to Whitnash, an elm was felled right across our path, and I was much struck by this verdant coating of moss over all its surface,--the moss plants too minute to be seen individually, but making the whole tree green. It has a pleasant effect here, where it is the natural aspect of trees in general; but in America a mossy tree-trunk is not a pleasant object, because it is associated with damp, low, unwholesome situations. The lack of foliage gives many new peeps and vistas, hereabouts, which I never saw in summer. March 17th.--J----- and I walked to Warwick yesterday forenoon, and went into St. Mary's Church, to see the Beauchamp chapel. . . . . On one side of it were some worn steps ascending to a confessional, where the priest used to sit, while the penitent, in the body of the church, poured his sins through a perforated auricle into this unseen receptacle. The sexton showed us, too, a very old chest which had been found in the burial vault, with some ancient armor stored away in it. Three or four helmets of rusty iron, one of them barred, the last with visors, and all intolerably weighty, were ranged in a row. What heads those must have been that could bear such massiveness! On one of the helmets was a wooden crest--some bird or other--that of itself weighed several pounds. . . . . April 23d.--We have been here several weeks. . . . . Had I seen Bath earlier in my English life, I might have written many pages about it, for it is really a picturesque and interesting city. It is completely sheltered in the lap of hills, the sides of the valley rising steep and high from the level spot on which it stands, and through which runs the muddy little stream of the Avon. The older part of the town is on the level, and the more modern growth--the growth of more than a hundred years--climbs higher and higher up the hillside, till the upper streets are very airy and lofty. The houses are built almost entirely of Bath stone, which in time loses its original buff color, and is darkened by age and coal-smoke into a dusky gray; but still the city looks clean and pure as compared with most other English towns. In its architecture, it has somewhat of a Parisian aspect, the houses having roofs rising steep from their high fronts, which are often adorned with pillars, pilasters, and other good devices, so that you see it to be a town built with some general idea of beauty, and not for business. There are Circuses, Crescents, Terraces, Parades, and all such fine names as we have become familiar with at Leamington, and other watering-places. The declivity of most of the streets keeps them remarkably clean, and they are paved in a very comfortable way, with large blocks of stone, so that the middle of the street is generally practicable to walk upon, although the sidewalks leave no temptation so to do, being of generous width. In many alleys, and round about the abbey and other edifices, the pavement is of square flags, like those of Florence, and as smooth as a palace floor. On the whole, I suppose there is no place in England where a retired man, with a moderate income, could live so tolerably as at Bath; it being almost a city in size and social advantages; quite so, indeed, if eighty thousand people make a city,--and yet having no annoyance of business nor spirit of worldly struggle. All modes of enjoyment that English people like may be had here; and even the climate is said to be milder than elsewhere in England. How this may be, I know not; but we have rain or passing showers almost every day since we arrived, and I suspect the surrounding hills are just about of that inconvenient height, that keeps catching clouds, and compelling them to squeeze out their moisture upon the included valley. The air, however, certainly is preferable to that of Leamington. . . . . There are no antiquities except the abbey, which has not the interest of many other English churches and cathedrals. In the midst of the old part of the town stands the house which was formerly Beau Nash's residence, but which is now part of the establishment of an ale-merchant. The edifice is a tall, but rather mean-looking, stone building, with the entrance from a little side court, which is so cumbered with empty beer-barrels as hardly to afford a passage. The doorway has some architectural pretensions, being pillared and with some sculptured devices--whether lions or winged heraldic monstrosities I forget--on the pediment. Within, there is a small entry, not large enough to be termed a hall, and a staircase, with carved balustrade, ascending by angular turns and square landing-places. For a long course of years, ending a little more than a century ago, princes, nobles, and all the great and beautiful people of old times, used to go up that staircase, to pay their respects to the King of Bath. On the side of the house there is a marble slab inserted, recording that here he resided, and that here he died in 1767, between eighty and ninety years of age. My first acquaintance with him was in Smollett's "Roderick Random," and I have met him in a hundred other novels. His marble statue is in a niche at one end of the great pump-room, in wig, square-skirted coat, flapped waistcoat, and all the queer costume of the period, still looking ghost-like upon the scene where he used to be an autocrat. Marble is not a good material for Beau Nash, however; or, if so, it requires color to set him off adequately. . . . . It is usual in Bath to see the old sign of the checker-board on the doorposts of taverns. It was originally a token that the game might be played there, and is now merely a tavern-sign. LONDON. 31 Hertford Street, Mayfair, May 16th, 1860.--I came hither from Bath on the 14th, and am staying with my friends, Mr. and Mrs. Motley. I would gladly journalize some of my proceedings, and describe things and people; but I find the same coldness and stiffness in my pen as always since our return to England. I dined with the Motleys at Lord Dufferin's, on Monday evening, and there met, among a few other notable people, the Honorable Mrs. Norton, a dark, comely woman, who doubtless was once most charming, and still has charms, at above fifty years of age. In fact, I should not have taken her to be greatly above thirty, though she seems to use no art to make herself look younger, and talks about her time of life, without any squeamishness. Her voice is very agreeable, having a sort of muffled quality, which is excellent in woman. She is of a very cheerful temperament, and so has borne a great many troubles without being destroyed by them. But I can get no color into my sketch, so shall leave it here. London, May 17th. [From a letter.]--Affairs succeed each other so fast, that I have really forgotten what I did yesterday. I remember seeing my dear friend, Henry Bright, and listening to him, as we strolled in the Park, and along the Strand. To-day I met at breakfast Mr. Field Talfourd, who promises to send you the photograph of his portrait of Mr. Browning. He was very agreeable, and seemed delighted to see me again. At lunch, we had Lord Dufferin, the Honorable Mrs. Norton, and Mr. Sterling (author of the "Cloister Life of Charles V."), with whom we are to dine on Sunday. You would be stricken dumb, to see how quietly I accept a whole string of invitations, and what is more, perform my engagements without a murmur. A German artist has come to me with a letter of introduction, and a request that I will sit to him for a portrait in bas-relief. To this, likewise, I have assented! subject to the condition that I shall have my leisure. The stir of this London life, somehow or other, has done me a wonderful deal of good, and I feel better than for months past. This is strange, for if I had my choice, I should leave undone almost all the things I do. I have had time to see Bennoch only once. [This closes the European Journal. After Mr. Hawthorne's return to America, he published "Our Old Home," and began a new romance, of which two chapters appeared in the Atlantic Monthly. But the breaking out of the war stopped all imaginative work with him, and all journalizing, until 1862, when he went to Maine for a little excursion, and began another journal, from which I take one paragraph, giving a slight note of his state of mind at an interesting period of his country's history. --ED.] West Gouldsborough, August 15th, 1862.--It is a week ago, Saturday, since J----- and I reached this place, . . . . Mr. Barney S. Hill's. At Hallowell, and subsequently all along the route, the country was astir with volunteers, and the war is all that seems to be alive, and even that doubtfully so. Nevertheless, the country certainly shows a good spirit, the towns offering everywhere most liberal bounties, and every able-bodied man feels an immense pull and pressure upon him to go to the war. I doubt whether any people was ever actuated by a more genuine and disinterested public spirit; though, of course, it is not unalloyed with baser motives and tendencies. We met a train of cars with a regiment or two just starting for the South, and apparently in high spirits. Everywhere some insignia of soldiership were to be seen,-- bright buttons, a red stripe down the trousers, a military cap, and sometimes a round-shouldered bumpkin in the entire uniform. They require a great deal to give them the aspect of soldiers; indeed, it seems as if they needed to have a good deal taken away and added, like the rough clay of a sculptor as it grows to be a model. The whole talk of the bar-rooms and every other place of intercourse was about enlisting and the war, this being the very crisis of trial, when the voluntary system is drawing to an end, and the draft almost immediately to commence. END OF VOL. II. 
7878	----	PASSAGES FROM THE ENGLISH NOTE-BOOKS OF NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE VOL. I. To Francis Bennoch, Esq., The dear and valued friend, who, by his generous and genial hospitality and unfailing sympathy, contributed so largely (as is attested by the book itself) to render Mr. Hawthorne's residence in England agreeable and homelike, these ENGLISH NOTES are dedicated, with sincere respect and regard, by The Editor. PREFACE It seems justly due to Mr. Hawthorne that the occasion of any portion of his private journals being brought before the Public should be made known, since they were originally designed for his own reference only. There had been a constant and an urgent demand for a life or memoir of Mr. Hawthorne; yet, from the extreme delicacy and difficulty of the subject, the Editor felt obliged to refuse compliance with this demand. Moreover, Mr. Hawthorne had frequently and emphatically expressed the hope that no one would attempt to write his Biography; and the Editor perceived that it would be impossible for any person, outside of his own domestic circle, to succeed in doing it, on account of his extreme reserve. But it was ungracious to do nothing, and therefore the Editor, believing that Mr. Hawthorne himself was alone capable of satisfactorily answering the affectionate call for some sketch of his life, concluded to publish as much as possible of his private records, and even extracts from his private letters, in order to gratify the desire of his friends and of literary artists to become more intimately acquainted with him. The Editor has been severely blamed and wondered at, in some instances, for allowing many things now published to see the light; but it has been a matter both of conscience and courtesy to withhold nothing that could be given up. Many of the journals were doubtless destroyed; for the earliest date found in his American papers was that of 1835. The Editor has transcribed the manuscripts just as they were left, without making any new arrangement or altering any sequence,--merely omitting some passages, and being especially careful to preserve whatever could throw any light upon his character. To persons on a quest for characteristics, however, each of his books reveals a great many, and it is believed that with the aid of the Notes (both American and English) the Tales and Romances will make out a very complete and true picture of his individuality; and the Notes are often an open sesame to the artistic works. Several thickly written pages of observations--fine and accurate etchings--have been omitted, sometimes because too personal with regard to himself or others, and sometimes because they were afterwards absorbed into one or another of the Romances or papers in Our Old Home. It seemed a pity not to give these original cartoons fresh from his mind, because they are so carefully finished at the first stroke. Yet, as Mr. Hawthorne chose his own way of presenting them to the public, it was thought better not to exhibit what he himself withheld. Besides, to any other than a fellow-artist they might seem mere repetitions. It is very earnestly hoped that these volumes of notes--American, English, and presently Italian--will dispel an often-expressed opinion that Mr. Hawthorne was gloomy and morbid. He had the inevitable pensiveness and gravity of a person who possessed what a friend of his called "the awful power of insight"; but his mood was always cheerful and equal, and his mind peculiarly healthful, and the airy splendor of his wit and humor was the light of his home. He saw too far to be despondent, though his vivid sympathies and shaping imagination often made him sad in behalf of others. He also perceived morbidness, wherever it existed, instantly, as if by the illumination of his own steady cheer; and he had the plastic power of putting himself into each person's situation, and of looking from every point of view, which made his charity most comprehensive. From this cause he necessarily attracted confidences, and became confessor to very many sinning and suffering souls, to whom he gave tender sympathy and help, while resigning judgment to the Omniscient and All-wise. Throughout his journals it will be seen that Mr. Hawthorne is entertaining, and not asserting, opinions and ideas. He questions, doubts, and reflects with his pen, and, as it were, instructs himself. So that these Note-Books should be read, not as definitive conclusions of his mind, but merely as passing impressions often. Whatever conclusions be arrived at are condensed in the works given to the world by his own hand, in which will never be found a careless word. He was so extremely scrupulous about the value and effect of every expression that the Editor has felt great compunction in allowing a single sentence to be printed. unrevised by himself; but, with the consideration of the above remarks always kept in mind, these volumes are intrusted to the generous interpretation of the reader. If any one must be harshly criticised, it ought certainly to be the Editor. When a person breaks in, unannounced, upon the morning hours of an artist, and finds him not in full dress, the intruder, and not the surprised artist, is doubtless at fault. S. H. Dresden, April, 1870. PASSAGES FROM HAWTHORNE'S ENGLISH NOTE-BOOKS Liverpool, August 4th, 1853.--A month lacking two days since we left America,--a fortnight and some odd days since we arrived in England. I began my services, such as they are, on Monday last, August 1st, and here I sit in my private room at the Consulate, while the Vice-Consul and clerk are carrying on affairs in the outer office. The pleasantest incident of the morning is when Mr. Pearce (the Vice-Consul) makes his appearance with the account-books, containing the receipts and expenditures of the preceding day, and deposits on my desk a little rouleau of the Queen's coin, wrapped up in a piece of paper. This morning there were eight sovereigns, four half-crowns, and a shilling,--a pretty fair day's work, though not more than the average ought to be. This forenoon, thus far, I have had two calls, not of business,--one from an American captain and his son, another from Mr. H---- B----, whom I met in America, and who has showed us great attention here. He has arranged for us to go to the theatre with some of his family this evening. Since I have been in Liverpool we have hardly had a day, until yesterday, without more or less of rain, and so cold and shivery that life was miserable. I am not warm enough even now, but am gradually getting acclimated in that respect. Just now I have been fooled out of half a crown by a young woman, who represents herself as an American and destitute, having come over to see an uncle whom she found dead, and she has no means of getting back again. Her accent is not that of an American, and her appearance is not particularly prepossessing, though not decidedly otherwise. She is decently dressed and modest in deportment, but I do not quite trust her face. She has been separated from her husband, as I understand her, by course of law, has had two children, both now dead. What she wants is to get back to America, and perhaps arrangements may be made with some shipmaster to take her as stewardess or in some subordinate capacity. My judgment, on the whole, is that she is an English woman, married to and separated from an American husband,--of no very decided virtue. I might as well have kept my half-crown, and yet I might have bestowed it worse. She is very decent in manner, cheerful, at least not despondent. At two o'clock I went over to the Royal Rock Hotel, about fifteen or twenty minutes' steaming from this side of the river. We are going there on Saturday to reside for a while. Returning, I found that, Mr. B., from the American Chamber of Commerce, had called to arrange the time and place of a visit to the Consul from a delegation of that body. Settled for to-morrow at quarter past one at Mr. Blodgett's. August 5th.--An invitation this morning from the Mayor to dine at the Town Hall on Friday next. Heaven knows I had rather dine at the humblest inn in the city, inasmuch as a speech will doubtless be expected from me. However, things must be as they may. At a quarter past one I was duly on hand at Mr. Blodgett's to receive the deputation from the Chamber of Commerce. They arrived pretty seasonably, in two or three carriages, and were ushered into the drawing-room,--seven or eight gentlemen, some of whom I had met before. Hereupon ensued a speech from Mr. B., the Chairman of the delegation, short and sweet, alluding to my literary reputation and other laudatory matters, and occupying only a minute or two. The speaker was rather embarrassed, which encouraged me a little, and yet I felt more diffidence on this occasion than in my effort at Mr. Crittenden's lunch, where, indeed, I was perfectly self-possessed. But here, there being less formality, and more of a conversational character in what was said, my usual diffidence could not so well be kept in abeyance. However, I did not break down to an intolerable extent, and, winding up my eloquence as briefly as possible, we had a social talk. Their whole stay could not have been much more than a quarter of an hour. A call, this morning, at the Consulate, from Dr. Bowrug, who is British minister, or something of the kind, in China, and now absent on a twelvemonth's leave. The Doctor is a brisk person, with the address of a man of the world,--free, quick to smile, and of agreeable manners. He has a good face, rather American than English in aspect, and does not look much above fifty, though he says he is between sixty and seventy. I should take him rather for an active lawyer or a man of business than for a scholar and a literary man. He talked in a lively way for ten or fifteen minutes, and then took his leave, offering me any service in his power in London,--as, for instance, to introduce me to the Athenaeum Club. August 8th.--Day before yesterday I escorted my family to Rock Ferry, two miles either up or down the Mersey (and I really don't know which) by steamer, which runs every half-hour. There are steamers going continually to Birkenhead and other landings, and almost always a great many passengers on the transit. At this time the boat was crowded so as to afford scanty standing-room; it being Saturday, and therefore a kind of gala-day. I think I have never seen a populace before coming to England; but this crowd afforded a specimen of one, both male and female. The women were the most remarkable; though they seemed not disreputable, there was in them a coarseness, a freedom, an--I don't know what, that was purely English. In fact, men and women here do things that would at least make them ridiculous in America. They are not afraid to enjoy themselves in their own way, and have no pseudo-gentility to support. Some girls danced upon the crowded deck, to the miserable music of a little fragment of a band which goes up and down the river on each trip of the boat. Just before the termination of the voyage a man goes round with a bugle turned upwards to receive the eleemosynary pence and half-pence of the passengers. I gave one of them, the other day, a silver fourpence, which fell into the vitals of the instrument, and compelled the man to take it to pieces. At Rock Ferry there was a great throng, forming a scene not unlike one of our muster-days or a Fourth of July, and there were bands of music and banners, and small processions after them, and a school of charity children, I believe, enjoying a festival. And there was a club of respectable persons, playing at bowls on the bowling-green of the hotel, and there were children, infants, riding on donkeys at a penny a ride, while their mothers walked alongside to prevent a fall. Yesterday, while we were at dinner, Mr. B. came in his carriage to take us to his residence, Poulton Hall. He had invited us to dine; but I misunderstood him, and thought he only intended to give us a drive. Poulton Hall is about three miles from Rock Ferry, the road passing through some pleasant rural scenery, and one or two villages, with houses standing close together, and old stone or brick cottages, with thatched roofs, and now and then a better mansion, apart among trees. We passed an old church, with a tower and spire, and, half-way up, a patch of ivy, dark green, and some yellow wall-flowers, in full bloom, growing out of the crevices of the stone. Mr. B. told us that the tower was formerly quite clothed with ivy from bottom to top, but that it had fallen away for lack of the nourishment that it used to find in the lime between the stones. This old church answered to my Transatlantic fancies of England better than anything I have yet seen. Not far from it was the Rectory, behind a deep grove of ancient trees; and there lives the Rector, enjoying a thousand pounds a year and his nothing-to-do, while a curate performs the real duty on a stipend of eighty pounds. We passed through a considerable extent of private road, and finally drove over a lawn, studded with trees and closely shaven, till we reached the door of Poulton Hall. Part of the mansion is three or four hundred years old; another portion is about a hundred and fifty, and still another has been built during the present generation. The house is two stories high, with a sort of beetle-browed roof in front. It is not very striking, and does not look older than many wooden houses which I have seen in America. There is a curious stately staircase, with a twisted balustrade much like that of the old Province House in Boston. The drawing-room is a handsome modern apartment, being beautifully painted and gilded and paper-hung, with a white marble fireplace and rich furniture, so that the impression is that of newness, not of age. It is the same with the dining-room, and all the rest of the interior so far as I saw it. Mr. B. did not inherit this old hall, nor, indeed, is he the owner, but only the tenant of it. He is a merchant of Liverpool, a bachelor, with two sisters residing with him. In the entrance-hall, there was a stuffed fox with glass eyes, which I never should have doubted to be an actual live fox except for his keeping so quiet; also some grouse and other game. Mr. B. seems to be a sportsman, and is setting out this week on an excursion to Scotland, moor-fowl shooting. While the family and two or three guests went to dinner, we walked out to see the place. The gardener, an Irishman, showed us through the garden, which is large and well cared for. They certainly get everything from Nature which she can possibly be persuaded to give them, here in England. There were peaches and pears growing against the high brick southern walls,--the trunk and branches of the trees being spread out perfectly flat against the wall, very much like the skin of a dead animal nailed up to dry, and not a single branch protruding. Figs were growing in the same way. The brick wall, very probably, was heated within, by means of pipes, in order to re-enforce the insufficient heat of the sun. It seems as if there must be something unreal and unsatisfactory in fruit that owes its existence to such artificial methods. Squashes were growing under glass, poor things! There were immensely large gooseberries in the garden; and in this particular berry, the English, I believe, have decidedly the advantage over ourselves. The raspberries, too, were large and good. I espied one gigantic hog-weed in the garden; and, really, my heart warmed to it, being strongly reminded of the principal product of my own garden at Concord. After viewing the garden sufficiently, the gardener led us to other parts of the estate, and we had glimpses of a delightful valley, its sides shady with beautiful trees, and a rich, grassy meadow at the bottom. By means of a steam-engine and subterranean pipes and hydrants, the liquid manure from the barn-yard is distributed wherever it is wanted over the estate, being spouted in rich showers from the hydrants. Under this influence, the meadow at the bottom of the valley had already been made to produce three crops of grass during the present season, and would produce another. The lawn around Poulton Hall, like thousands of other lawns in England, is very beautiful, but requires great care to keep it so, being shorn every three or four days. No other country will ever have this charm, nor the charm of lovely verdure, which almost makes up for the absence of sunshine. Without the constant rain and shadow which strikes us as so dismal, these lawns would be as brown as an autumn leaf. I have not, thus far, found any such magnificent trees as I expected. Mr. B. told me that three oaks, standing in a row on his lawn, were the largest in the county. They were very good trees, to be sure, and perhaps four feet in diameter near the ground, but with no very noble spread of foliage. In Concord there are, if not oaks, yet certainly elms, a great deal more stately and beautiful. But, on the whole, this lawn, and the old Hall in the midst of it, went a good way towards realizing some of my fancies of English life. By and by a footman, looking very quaint and queer in his livery coat, drab breeches, and white stockings, came to invite me to the table, where I found Mr. B. and his sisters and guests sitting at the fruit and wine. There were port, sherry, madeira, and one bottle of claret, all very good; but they take here much heavier wines than we drink now in America. After a tolerably long session we went to the tea-room, where I drank some coffee, and at about the edge of dusk the carriage drew up to the door to take us home. Mr. B. and his sisters have shown us genuine kindness, and they gave us a hearty invitation to come and ramble over the house whenever we pleased, during their absence in Scotland. They say that there are many legends and ghost-stories connected with the house; and there is an attic chamber, with a skylight, which is called the Martyr's chamber, from the fact of its having, in old times, been tenanted by a lady, who was imprisoned there, and persecuted to death for her religion. There is an old black-letter library, but the room containing it is shut, barred, and padlocked,--the owner of the house refusing to let it be opened, lest some of the books should be stolen. Meanwhile the rats are devouring them, and the damps destroying them. August 9th.--A pretty comfortable day, as to warmth, and I believe there is sunshine overhead; but a sea-cloud, composed of fog and coal-smoke, envelops Liverpool. At Rock Ferry, when I left it at half past nine, there was promise of a cheerful day. A good many gentlemen (or, rather, respectable business people) came in the boat, and it is not unpleasant, on these fine mornings, to take the breezy atmosphere of the river. The huge steamer Great Britain, bound for Australia, lies right off the Rock Ferry landing; and at a little distance are two old hulks of ships of war, dismantled, roofed over, and anchored in the river, formerly for quarantine purposes, but now used chiefly or solely as homes for old seamen, whose light labor it is to take care of these condemned ships. There are a great many steamers plying up and down the river to various landings in the vicinity; and a good many steam-tugs; also, many boats, most of which have dark-red or tan-colored sails, being oiled to resist the wet; also, here and there, a yacht or pleasure-boat, and a few ships riding stately at their anchors, probably on the point of sailing. The river, however, is by no means crowded; because the immense multitude of ships are ensconced in the docks, where their masts make an intricate forest for miles up and down the Liverpool shore. The small black steamers, whizzing industriously along, many of them crowded with passengers, snake up the chief life of the scene. The Mersey has the color of a mud-puddle, and no atmospheric effect, as far as I have seen, ever gives it a more agreeable tinge. Visitors to-day, thus far, have been H. A. B., with whom I have arranged to dine with us at Rock Ferry, and then he is to take us on board the Great Britain, of which his father is owner (in great part). Secondly, Monsieur H., the French Consul, who can speak hardly any English, and who was more powerfully scented with cigar-smoke than any man I ever encountered; a polite, gray-haired, red-nosed gentleman, very courteous and formal. Heaven keep him from me! At one o'clock, or thereabouts, I walked into the city, down through Lord Street, Church Street, and back to the Consulate through various untraceable crookednesses. Coming to Chapel Street, I crossed the graveyard of the old Church of St. Nicholas. This is, I suppose, the oldest sacred site in Liverpool, a church having stood here ever since the Conquest, though, probably, there is little or nothing of the old edifice in the present one, either the whole of the edifice or else the steeple, being thereto shaken by a chime of bells,-- perhaps both, at different times,--has tumbled down; but the present church is what we Americans should call venerable. When the first church was built, and long afterwards, it must have stood on the grassy verge of the Mersey; but now there are pavements and warehouses, and the thronged Prince's and George's Docks, between it and the river; and all around it is the very busiest bustle of commerce, rumbling wheels, hurrying men, porter-shops, everything that pertains to the grossest and most practical life. And, notwithstanding, there is the broad churchyard extending on three sides of it, just as it used to be a thousand years ago. It is absolutely paved from border to border with flat tombstones, on a level with the soil and with each other, so that it is one floor of stone over the whole space, with grass here and there sprouting between the crevices. All these stones, no doubt, formerly had inscriptions; but as many people continually pass, in various directions, across the churchyard, and as the tombstones are not of a very hard material, the records on many of them are effaced. I saw none very old. A quarter of a century is sufficient to obliterate the letters, and make all smooth, where the direct pathway from gate to gate lies over the stones. The climate and casual footsteps rub out any inscription in less than a hundred years. Some of the monuments are cracked. On many is merely cut "The burial place of" so and so; on others there is a long list of half-readable names; on some few a laudatory epitaph, out of which, however, it were far too tedious to pick the meaning. But it really is interesting and suggestive to think of this old church, first built when Liverpool was a small village, and remaining, with its successive dead of ten centuries around it, now that the greatest commercial city in the world has its busiest centre there. I suppose people still continue to be buried in the cemetery. The greatest upholders of burials in cities are those whose progenitors have been deposited around or within the city churches. If this spacious churchyard stood in a similar position in one of our American cities, I rather suspect that long ere now it would have run the risk of being laid out in building-lots, and covered with warehouses; even if the church itself escaped,--but it would not escape longer than till its disrepair afforded excuse for tearing it down. And why should it, when its purposes might be better served in another spot? We went on board the Great Britain before dinner, between five and six o'clock,--a great structure, as to convenient arrangement and adaptation, but giving me a strong impression of the tedium and misery of the long voyage to Australia. By way of amusement, she takes over fifty pounds' worth of playing-cards, at two shillings per pack, for the use of passengers; also, a small, well-selected library. After a considerable time spent on board, we returned to the hotel and dined, and Mr. B. took his leave at nine o'clock. August 10th.--I left Rock Ferry for the city at half past nine. In the boat which arrived thence, there were several men and women with baskets on their heads, for this is a favorite way of carrying burdens; and they trudge onward beneath them, without any apparent fear of an overturn, and seldom putting up a hand to steady them. One woman, this morning, had a heavy load of crockery; another, an immense basket of turnips, freshly gathered, that seemed to me as much as a man could well carry on his back. These must be a stiff-necked people. The women step sturdily and freely, and with not ungraceful strength. The trip over to town was pleasant, it being a fair morning, only with a low-hanging fog. Had it been in America, I should have anticipated a day of burning heat. Visitors this morning. Mr. Ogden of Chicago, or somewhere in the Western States, who arrived in England a fortnight ago, and who called on me at that time. He has since been in Scotland, and is now going to London and the Continent; secondly, the Captain of the Collins steamer Pacific, which sails to-day; thirdly, an American shipmaster, who complained that he had never, in his heretofore voyages, been able to get sight of the American Consul. Mr. Pearce's customary matutinal visit was unusually agreeable to-day, inasmuch as he laid on my desk nineteen golden sovereigns and thirteen shillings. It being the day of the steamer's departure, an unusual number of invoice certificates had been required,--my signature to each of which brings me two dollars. The autograph of a living author has seldom been so much in request at so respectable a price. Colonel Crittenden told me that he had received as much as fifty pounds on a single day. Heaven prosper the trade between America and Liverpool! August 15th.--Many scenes which I should have liked to record have occurred; but the pressure of business has prevented me from recording them from day to day. On Thursday I went, on invitation from Mr. B., to the prodigious steamer Great Britain, down the harbor, and some miles into the sea, to escort her off a little way on her voyage to Australia. There is an immense enthusiasm among the English people about this ship, on account of its being the largest in the world. The shores were lined with people to see her sail, and there were innumerable small steamers, crowded with men, all the way out into the ocean. Nothing seems to touch the English nearer than this question of nautical superiority; and if we wish to hit them to the quick, we must hit them there. On Friday, at 7 P.M., I went to dine with the Mayor. It was a dinner given to the Judges and the Grand Jury. The Judges of England, during the time of holding an Assize, are the persons first in rank in the kingdom. They take precedence of everybody else,--of the highest military officers, of the Lord Lieutenants, of the Archbishops,--of the Prince of Wales,--of all except the Sovereign, whose authority and dignity they represent. In case of a royal dinner, the Judge would lead the Queen to the table. The dinner was at the Town Hall, and the rooms and the whole affair were all in the most splendid style. Nothing struck me more than the footmen in the city livery. They really looked more magnificent in their gold-lace and breeches and white silk stockings than any officers of state. The rooms were beautiful; gorgeously painted and gilded, gorgeously lighted, gorgeously hung with paintings,--the plate was gorgeous, and the dinner gorgeous in the English fashion. After the removal of the cloth the Mayor gave various toasts, prefacing each with some remarks,--the first, of course, the Sovereign, after which "God save the Queen" was sung, the company standing up and joining in the chorus, their ample faces glowing with wine, enthusiasm, and loyalty. Afterwards the Bar, and various other dignities and institutions were toasted; and by and by came the toast to the United States, and to me, as their Representative. Hereupon either "Hail Columbia," or "Yankee Doodle," or some other of our national tunes (but Heaven knows which), was played; and at the conclusion, being at bay, and with no alternative, I got upon my legs, and made a response. They received me and listened to my nonsense with a good deal of rapping, and my speech seemed to give great satisfaction; my chief difficulty being in not knowing how to pitch my voice to the size of the room. As for the matter, it is not of the slightest consequence. Anybody may make an after-dinner speech who will be content to talk onward without saying anything. My speech was not more than two or three inches long; and, considering that I did not know a soul there, except the Mayor himself, and that I am wholly unpractised in all sorts of oratory, and that I had nothing to say, it was quite successful. I hardly thought it was in me, but, being once started, I felt no embarrassment, and went through it as coolly as if I were going to be hanged. Yesterday, after dinner, I took a walk with my family. We went through by-ways and private roads, and saw more of rural England, with its hedge-rows, its grassy fields, and its whitewashed old stone cottages, than we have before seen since our arrival. August 20th.--This being Saturday, there early commenced a throng of visitants to Rock Ferry. The boat in which I came over brought from the city a multitude of factory-people. They had bands of music, and banners inscribed with the names of the mills they belong to, and other devices: pale-looking people, but not looking exactly as if they were underfed. They are brought on reduced terms by the railways and steamers, and come from great distances in the interior. These, I believe, were from Preston. I have not yet had an opportunity of observing how they amuse themselves during these excursions. At the dock, the other day, the steamer arrived from Rock Ferry with a countless multitude of little girls, in coarse blue gowns, who, as they landed, formed in procession, and walked up the dock. These girls had been taken from the workhouses and educated at a charity-school, and would by and by be apprenticed as servants. I should not have conceived it possible that so many children could have been collected together, without a single trace of beauty or scarcely of intelligence in so much as one individual; such mean, coarse, vulgar features and figures betraying unmistakably a low origin, and ignorant and brutal parents. They did not appear wicked, but only stupid, animal, and soulless. It must require many generations of better life to wake the soul in them. All America could not show the like. August 22d.--A Captain Auld, an American, having died here yesterday, I went with my clerk and an American shipmaster to take the inventory of his effects. His boarding-house was in a mean street, an old dingy house, with narrow entrance,--the class of boarding-house frequented by mates of vessels, and inferior to those generally patronized by masters. A fat elderly landlady, of respectable and honest aspect, and her daughter, a pleasing young woman enough, received us, and ushered us into the deceased's bedchamber. It was a dusky back room, plastered and painted yellow; its one window looking into the very narrowest of back-yards or courts, and out on a confused multitude of back buildings, appertaining to other houses, most of them old, with rude chimneys of wash-rooms and kitchens, the bricks of which seemed half loose. The chattels of the dead man were contained in two trunks, a chest, a sail-cloth bag, and a barrel, and consisted of clothing, suggesting a thickset, middle-sized man; papers relative to ships and business, a spyglass, a loaded iron pistol, some books of navigation, some charts, several great pieces of tobacco, and a few cigars; some little plaster images, that he had probably bought for his children, a cotton umbrella, and other trumpery of no great value. In one of the trunks we found about twenty pounds' worth of English and American gold and silver, and some notes of hand, due in America. Of all these things the clerk made an inventory; after which we took possession of the money and affixed the consular seal to the trunks, bag, and chest. While this was going on, we heard a great noise of men quarrelling in an adjoining court; and, altogether, it seemed a squalid and ugly place to live in, and a most undesirable one to die in. At the conclusion of our labors, the young woman asked us if we would not go into another chamber, and look at the corpse, and appeared to think that we should be rather glad than otherwise of the privilege. But, never having seen the man during his lifetime, I declined to commence his acquaintance now. His bills for board and nursing amount to about the sum which we found in his trunk; his funeral expenses will be ten pounds more; the surgeon has sent in a bill of eight pounds, odd shillings; and the account of another medical man is still to be rendered. As his executor, I shall pay his landlady and nurse; and for the rest of the expenses, a subscription must be made (according to the custom in such cases) among the shipmasters, headed by myself. The funeral pomp will consist of a hearse, one coach, four men, with crape hatbands, and a few other items, together with a grave at five pounds, over which his friends will be entitled to place a stone, if they choose to do so, within twelve months. As we left the house, we looked into the dark and squalid dining-room, where a lunch of cold meat was set out; but having no associations with the house except through this one dead man, it seemed as if his presence and attributes pervaded it wholly. He appears to have been a man of reprehensible habits, though well advanced in years. I ought not to forget a brandy-flask (empty) among his other effects. The landlady and daughter made a good impression on me, as honest and respectable persons. August 24th.--Yesterday, in the forenoon, I received a note, and shortly afterwards a call at the Consulate from Miss H----, whom I apprehend to be a lady of literary tendencies. She said that Miss L. had promised her an introduction, but that, happening to pass through Liverpool, she had snatched the opportunity to make my acquaintance. She seems to be a mature lady, rather plain, but with an honest and intelligent face. It was rather a singular freedom, methinks, to come down upon a perfect stranger in this way,--to sit with him in his private office an hour or two, and then walk about the streets with him, as she did; for I did the honors of Liverpool, and showed her the public buildings. Her talk was sensible, but not particularly brilliant nor interesting; a good, solid personage, physically and intellectually. She is an English woman. In the afternoon, at three o'clock, I attended the funeral of Captain Auld. Being ushered into the dining-room of his boarding-house, I found brandy, gin, and wine set out on a tray, together with some little spicecakes. By and by came in a woman, who asked if I were going to the funeral; and then proceeded to put a mourning-band on my hat,--a black-silk band, covering the whole hat, and streaming nearly a yard behind. After waiting the better part of an hour, nobody else appeared, although several shipmasters had promised to attend. Hereupon, the undertaker was anxious to set forth; but the landlady, who was arrayed in shining black silk, thought it a shame that the poor man should be buried with such small attendance. So we waited a little longer, during which interval I heard the landlady's daughter sobbing and wailing in the entry; and but for this tender-heartedness there would have been no tears at all. Finally we set forth,--the undertaker, a friend of his, and a young man, perhaps the landlady's son, and myself, in the black-plumed coach, and the landlady, her daughter, and a female friend, in the coach behind. Previous to this, however, everybody had taken some wine or spirits; for it seemed to be considered disrespectful not to do so. Before us went the plumed hearse, a stately affair, with a bas-relief of funereal figures upon its sides. We proceeded quite across the city to the Necropolis, where the coffin was carried into a chapel, in which we found already another coffin, and another set of mourners, awaiting the clergyman. Anon he appeared,--a stern, broad-framed, large, and bald-headed man, in a black-silk gown. He mounted his desk, and read the service in quite a feeble and unimpressive way, though with no lack of solemnity. This done, our four bearers took up the coffin, and carried it out of the chapel; but, descending the steps, and, perhaps, having taken a little too much brandy, one of them stumbled, and down came the coffin,--not quite to the ground, however; for they grappled with it, and contrived, with a great struggle, to prevent the misadventure. But I really expected to see poor Captain Auld burst forth among us in his grave-clothes. The Necropolis is quite a handsome burial-place, shut in by high walls, so overrun with shrubbery that no part of the brick or stone is visible. Part of the space within is an ornamental garden, with flowers and green turf; the rest is strewn with flat gravestones, and a few raised monuments; and straight avenues run to and fro between. Captain Auld's grave was dug nine feet deep. It is his own for twelve months; but, if his friends do not choose to give him a stone, it will become a common grave at the end of that time; and four or five more bodies may then be piled upon his. Every one seemed greatly to admire the grave; the undertaker praised it, and also the dryness of its site, which he took credit to himself for having chosen. The grave-digger, too, was very proud of its depth, and the neatness of his handiwork. The clergyman, who had marched in advance of us from the chapel, now took his stand at the head of the grave, and, lifting his hat, proceeded with what remained of the service, while we stood bareheaded around. When he came to a particular part, "ashes to ashes, dust to dust," the undertaker lifted a handful of earth, and threw it rattling on the coffin,--so did the landlady's son, and so did I. After the funeral the undertaker's friend, an elderly, coarse-looking man, looked round him, and remarked that "the grass had never grown on the parties who died in the cholera year"; but at this the undertaker laughed in scorn. As we returned to the gate of the cemetery, the sexton met us, and pointed to a small office, on entering which we found the clergyman, who was waiting for his burial-fees. There was now a dispute between the clergyman and the undertaker; the former wishing to receive the whole amount for the gravestone, which the undertaker, of course, refused to pay. I explained how the matter stood; on which the clergyman acquiesced, civilly enough; but it was very strange to see the worldly, business-like way in which he entered into this squabble, so soon after burying poor Captain Auld. During our drive back in the mourning-coach, the undertaker, his friend, and the landlady's son still kept descanting on the excellence of the grave,--"Such a fine grave,"--"Such a nice grave,"--"Such a splendid grave,"--and, really, they seemed almost to think it worth while to die, for the sake of being buried there. They deemed it an especial pity that such a grave should ever become a common grave. "Why," said they to me, "by paying the extra price you may have it for your own grave, or for your family!" meaning that we should have a right to pile ourselves over the defunct Captain. I wonder how the English ever attain to any conception of a future existence, since they so overburden themselves with earth and mortality in their ideas of funerals. A drive with an undertaker, in a sable-plumed coach!--talking about graves!--and yet he was a jolly old fellow, wonderfully corpulent, with a smile breaking out easily all over his face,--although, once in a while, he looked professionally lugubrious. All the time the scent of that horrible mourning-coach is in my nostrils, and I breathe nothing but a funeral atmosphere. Saturday, August 27th.--This being the gala-day of the manufacturing people about Liverpool, the steamboats to Rock Ferry were seasonably crowded with large parties of both sexes. They were accompanied with two bands of music, in uniform; and these bands, before I left the hotel, were playing, in competition and rivalry with each other in the coach-yard, loud martial strains from shining brass instruments. A prize is to be assigned to one or to the other of these bands, and I suppose this was a part of the competition. Meanwhile the merry-making people who thronged the courtyard were quaffing coffee from blue earthen mugs, which they brought with them,--as likewise they brought the coffee, and had it made in the hotel. It had poured with rain about the time of their arrival, notwithstanding which they did not seem disheartened; for, of course, in this climate, it enters into all their calculations to be drenched through and through. By and by the sun shone out, and it has continued to shine and shade every ten minutes ever since. All these people were decently dressed; the men generally in dark clothes, not so smartly as Americans on a festal day, but so as not to be greatly different as regards dress. They were paler, smaller, less wholesome-looking and less intelligent, and, I think, less noisy, than so many Yankees would have been. The women and girls differed much more from what American girls and women would be on a pleasure-excursion, being so shabbily dressed, with no kind of smartness, no silks, nothing but cotton gowns, I believe, and ill-looking bonnets,-- which, however, was the only part of their attire that they seemed to care about guarding from the rain. As to their persons, they generally looked better developed and healthier than the men; but there was a woful lack of beauty and grace, not a pretty girl among them, all coarse and vulgar. Their bodies, it seems to me, are apt to be very long in proportion to their limbs,--in truth, this kind of make is rather characteristic of both sexes in England. The speech of these folks, in some instances, was so broad Lancashire that I could not well understand it. A WALK TO BEBBINGTON. Rock Ferry, August 29th.--Yesterday we all took a walk into the country. It was a fine afternoon, with clouds, of course, in different parts of the sky, but a clear atmosphere, bright sunshine, and altogether a Septembrish feeling. The ramble was very pleasant, along the hedge-lined roads in which there were flowers blooming, and the varnished holly, certainly one of the most beautiful shrubs in the world, so far as foliage goes. We saw one cottage which I suppose was several hundred years old. It was of stone, filled into a wooden frame, the black-oak of which was visible like an external skeleton; it had a thatched roof, and was whitewashed. We passed through a village,--higher Bebbington, I believe,--with narrow streets and mean houses all of brick or stone, and not standing wide apart from each other as in American country villages, but conjoined. There was an immense almshouse in the midst; at least, I took it to be so. In the centre of the village, too, we saw a moderate-sized brick house, built in imitation of a castle with a tower and turret, in which an upper and an under row of small cannon were mounted,--now green with moss. There were also battlements along the roof of the house, which looked as if it might have been built eighty or a hundred years ago. In the centre of it there was the dial of a clock, but the inner machinery had been removed, and the hands, hanging listlessly, moved to and fro in the wind. It was quite a novel symbol of decay and neglect. On the wall, close to the street, there were certain eccentric inscriptions cut into slabs of stone, but I could make no sense of them. At the end of the house opposite the turret, we peeped through the bars of an iron gate and beheld a little paved court-yard, and at the farther side of it a small piazza, beneath which seemed to stand the figure of a man. He appeared well advanced in years, and was dressed in a blue coat and buff breeches, with a white or straw hat on his head. Behold, too, in a kennel beside the porch, a large dog sitting on his hind legs, chained! Also, close beside the gateway, another man, seated in a kind of arbor! All these were wooden images; and the whole castellated, small, village-dwelling, with the inscriptions and the queer statuary, was probably the whim of some half-crazy person, who has now, no doubt, been long asleep in Bebbington churchyard. The bell of the old church was ringing as we went along, and many respectable-looking people and cleanly dressed children were moving towards the sound. Soon we reached the church, and I have seen nothing yet in England that so completely answered my idea of what such a thing was, as this old village church of Bebbington. It is quite a large edifice, built in the form of a cross, a low peaked porch in the side, over which, rudely cut in stone, is the date 1300 and something. The steeple has ivy on it, and looks old, old, old; so does the whole church, though portions of it have been renewed, but not so as to impair the aspect of heavy, substantial endurance, and long, long decay, which may go on hundreds of years longer before the church is a ruin. There it stands, among the surrounding graves, looking just the same as it did in Bloody Mary's days; just as it did in Cromwell's time. A bird (and perhaps many birds) had its nest in the steeple, and flew in and out of the loopholes that were opened into it. The stone framework of the windows looked particularly old. There were monuments about the church, some lying flat on the ground, others elevated on low pillars, or on cross slabs of stone, and almost all looking dark, moss-grown, and very antique. But on reading some of the inscriptions, I was surprised to find them very recent; for, in fact, twenty years of this climate suffices to give as much or more antiquity of aspect, whether to gravestone or edifice, than a hundred years of our own,--so soon do lichens creep over the surface, so soon does it blacken, so soon do the edges lose their sharpness, so soon does Time gnaw away the records. The only really old monuments (and those not very old) were two, standing close together, and raised on low rude arches, the dates on which were 1684 and 1686. On one a cross was rudely cut into the stone. But there may have been hundreds older than this, the records on which had been quite obliterated, and the stones removed, and the graves dug over anew. None of the monuments commemorate people of rank; on only one the buried person was recorded as "Gent." While we sat on the flat slabs resting ourselves, several little girls, healthy-looking and prettily dressed enough, came into the churchyard, and began to talk and laugh, and to skip merrily from one tombstone to another. They stared very broadly at us, and one of them, by and by, ran up to U. and J., and gave each of them a green apple, then they skipped upon the tombstones again, while, within the church, we heard them singing, sounding pretty much as I have heard it in our pine-built New England meeting-houses. Meantime the rector had detected the voices of these naughty little girls, and perhaps had caught glimpses of them through the windows; for, anon, out came the sexton, and, addressing himself to us, asked whether there had been any noise or disturbance in the churchyard. I should not have borne testimony against these little villagers, but S. was so anxious to exonerate our own children that she pointed out these poor little sinners to the sexton, who forthwith turned them out. He would have done the same to us, no doubt, had my coat been worse than it was; but, as the matter stood, his demeanor was rather apologetic than menacing, when he informed us that the rector had sent him. We stayed a little longer, looking at the graves, some of which were between the buttresses of the church and quite close to the wall, as if the sleepers anticipated greater comfort and security the nearer they could get to the sacred edifice. As we went out of the churchyard, we passed the aforesaid little girls, who were sitting behind the mound of a tomb, and busily babbling together. They called after us, expressing their discontent that we had betrayed them to the sexton, and saying that it was not they who made the noise. Going homeward, we went astray in a green lane, that terminated in the midst of a field, without outlet, so that we had to retrace a good many of our footsteps. Close to the wall of the church, beside the door, there was an ancient baptismal font of stone. In fact, it was a pile of roughly hewn stone steps, five or six feet high, with a block of stone at the summit, in which was a hollow about as big as a wash-bowl. It was full of rainwater. The church seems to be St. Andrew's Church, Lower Bebbington, built in 1100. September 1st.--To-day we leave the Rock Ferry Hotel, where we have spent nearly four weeks. It is a comfortable place, and we have had a good table and have been kindly treated. We occupied a large parlor, extending through the whole breadth of the house, with a bow-window, looking towards Liverpool, and adown the intervening river, and to Birkenhead, on the hither side. The river would be a pleasanter object, if it were blue and transparent, instead of such a mud-puddly hue; also, if it were always full to its brine; whereas it generally presents a margin, and sometimes a very broad one, of glistening mud, with here and there a small vessel aground on it. Nevertheless, the parlor-window has given us a pretty good idea of the nautical business of Liverpool; the constant objects being the little black steamers puffing unquietly along, sometimes to our own ferry, sometimes beyond it to Eastham, and sometimes towing a long string of boats from Runcorn or otherwhere up the river, laden with goods, and sometimes gallanting a tall ship in or out. Some of these ships lie for days together in the river, very majestic and stately objects, often with the flag of the stars and stripes waving over them. Now and then, after a gale at sea, a vessel comes in with her masts broken short off in the midst, and with marks of rough handling about the hull. Once a week comes a Cunard steamer, with its red funnel pipe whitened by the salt spray; and, firing off cannon to announce her arrival, she moors to a large iron buoy in the middle of the river, and a few hundred yards from the stone pier of our ferry. Immediately comes poring towards her a little mail-steamer, to take away her mail-bags and such of the passengers as choose to land; and for several hours afterwards the Cunard lies with the smoke and steam coming out of her, as if she were smoking her pipe after her toilsome passage across the Atlantic. Once a fortnight comes an American steamer of the Collins line; and then the Cunard salutes her with cannon, to which the Collins responds, and moors herself to another iron buoy, not far from the Cunard. When they go to sea, it is with similar salutes; the two vessels paying each other the more ceremonious respect, because they are inimical and jealous of each other. Besides these, there are other steamers of all sorts and sizes, for pleasure-excursions, for regular trips to Dublin, the Isle of Man, and elsewhither; and vessels which are stationary, as floating lights, but which seem to relieve one another at intervals; and small vessels, with sails looking as if made of tanned leather; and schooners, and yachts, and all manner of odd-looking craft, but none so odd as the Chinese junk. This junk lies by our own pier, and looks as if it were copied from some picture on an old teacup. Beyond all these objects we see the other side of the Mersey, with the delectably green fields opposite to us, while the shore becomes more and more thickly populated, until about two miles off we see the dense centre of the city, with the dome of the Custom House, and steeples and towers; and, close to the water, the spire of St. Nicholas; and above, and intermingled with the whole city scene, the duskiness of the coal-smoke gushing upward. Along the bank we perceive the warehouses of the Albert dock, and the Queen's tobacco warehouses, and other docks, and, nigher, to us, a shipyard or two. In the evening all this sombre picture gradually darkens out of sight, and in its place appear only the lights of the city, kindling into a galaxy of earthly stars, for a long distance, up and down the shore; and, in one or two spots, the bright red gleam of a furnace, like the "red planet Mars"; and once in a while a bright, wandering beam gliding along the river, as a steamer cones or goes between us and Liverpool. ROCK PARK. September 2d.--We got into our new house in Rock Park yesterday. It is quite a good house, with three apartments, beside kitchen and pantry on the lower floor; and it is three stories high, with four good chambers in each story. It is a stone edifice, like almost all the English houses, and handsome in its design. The rent, without furniture, would probably have been one hundred pounds; furnished, it is one hundred and sixty pounds. Rock Park, as the locality is called, is private property, and is now nearly covered with residences for professional people, merchants, and others of the upper middling class; the houses being mostly built, I suppose, on speculation, and let to those who occupy them. It is the quietest place imaginable, there being a police station at the entrance, and the officer on duty allows no ragged or ill-looking person to pass. There being a toll, it precludes all unnecessary passage of carriages; and never were there more noiseless streets than those that give access to these pretty residences. On either side there is thick shrubbery, with glimpses through it of the ornamented portals, or into the trim gardens with smooth-shaven lawns, of no large extent, but still affording reasonable breathing-space. They are really an improvement on anything, save what the very rich can enjoy, in America. The former occupants of our house (Mrs. Campbell and family) having been fond of flowers, there are many rare varieties in the garden, and we are told that there is scarcely a month in the year when a flower will not be found there. The house is respectably, though not very elegantly, furnished. It was a dismal, rainy day yesterday, and we had a coal-fire in the sitting-room, beside which I sat last evening as twilight came on, and thought, rather sadly, how many times we have changed our home since we were married. In the first place, our three years at the Old Manse; then a brief residence at Salem, then at Boston, then two or three years at Salem again; then at Lenox, then at West Newton, and then again at Concord, where we imagined that we were fixed for life, but spent only a year. Then this farther flight to England, where we expect to spend four years, and afterwards another year or two in Italy, during all which time we shall have no real home. For, as I sat in this English house, with the chill, rainy English twilight brooding over the lawn, and a coal-fire to keep me comfortable on the first evening of September, and the picture of a stranger--the dead husband of Mrs. Campbell--gazing down at me from above the mantel-piece,--I felt that I never should be quite at home here. Nevertheless, the fire was very comfortable to look at, and the shape of the fireplace--an arch, with a deep cavity--was an improvement on the square, shallow opening of an American coal-grate. September 7th.--It appears by the annals of Liverpool, contained in Gore's Directory, that in 1076 there was a baronial castle built by Roger de Poictiers on the site of the present St. George's Church. It was taken down in 1721. The church now stands at one of the busiest points of the principal street of the city. The old Church of St. Nicholas, founded about the time of the Conquest, and more recently rebuilt, stood within a quarter of a mile of the castle. In 1150, Birkenhead Priory was founded on the Cheshire side of the Mersey. The monks used to ferry passengers across to Liverpool until 1282, when Woodside Ferry was established,--twopence for a horseman, and a farthing for a foot-passenger. Steam ferry-boats now cross to Birkenhead, Monk's Ferry, and Woodside every ten minutes; and I believe there are large hotels at all these places, and many of the business men of Liverpool have residences in them. In 1252 a tower was built by Sir John Stanley, which continued to be a castle of defence to the Stanley family for many hundred years, and was not finally taken down till 1820, when its site had become the present Water Street, in the densest commercial centre of the city. There appear to have been other baronial castles and residences in different parts of the city, as a hall in old Hall Street, built by Sir John de la More, on the site of which a counting-house now stands. This knightly family of De la More sometimes supplied mayors to the city, as did the family of the Earls of Derby. About 1582, Edward, Earl of Derby, maintained two hundred and fifty citizens of Liverpool, fed sixty aged persons twice a day, and provided twenty-seven hundred persons with meat, drink, and money every Good Friday. In 1644, Prince Rupert besieged the town for twenty-four days, and finally took it by storm. This was June 26th, and the Parliamentarians, under Sir John Meldrum, repossessed it the following October. In 1669 the Mayor of Liverpool kept an inn. In 1730 there was only one carriage in town, and no stage-coach came nearer than Warrington, the roads being impassable. In 1734 the Earl of Derby gave a great entertainment in the tower. In 1737 the Mayor was George Norton, a saddler, who frequently took, the chair with his leather apron on. His immediate predecessor seems to have been the Earl of Derby, who gave the above-mentioned entertainment during his mayoralty. Where George's Dock now is, there used to be a battery of fourteen eighteen-pounders for the defence of the town, and the old sport of bull-baiting was carried on in that vicinity, close to the Church of St. Nicholas. September 12th.--On Saturday a young man was found wandering about in West Derby, a suburb of Liverpool, in a state of insanity, and, being taken before a magistrate, he proved to be an American. As he seemed to be in a respectable station of life, the magistrate sent the master of the workhouse to me, in order to find out whether I would take the responsibility of his expenses, rather than have him put in the workhouse. My clerk went to investigate the matter, and brought me his papers. His name proves to be ---- ------, belonging to ------, twenty-five years of age. One of the papers was a passport from our legation in Naples; likewise there was a power of attorney from his mother (who seems to have been married a second time) to dispose of some property of hers abroad; a hotel bill, also, of some length, in which were various charges for wine; and, among other evidences of low funds, a pawnbroker's receipt for a watch, which he had pledged at five pounds. There was also a ticket for his passage to America, by the screw steamer Andes, which sailed on Wednesday last. The clerk found him to the last degree incommunicative; and nothing could be discovered from him but what the papers disclosed. There were about a dozen utterly unintelligible notes among the papers, written by himself since his derangement. I decided to put him into the insane hospital, where he now accordingly is, and to-morrow (by which time he may be in a more conversable mood) I mean to pay him a visit. The clerk tells me that there is now, and has been for three years, an American lady in the Liverpool almshouse, in a state of insanity. She is very accomplished, especially in music; but in all this time it has been impossible to find out who she is, or anything about her connections or previous life. She calls herself Jenny Lind, and as for any other name or identity she keeps her own secret. September 14th.--It appears that Mr. ------ (the insane young gentleman) being unable to pay his bill at the inn where he was latterly staying, the landlord had taken possession of his luggage, and satisfied himself in that way. My clerk, at my request, has taken his watch out of pawn. It proves to be not a very good one, though doubtless worth more than five pounds, for which it was pledged. The Governor of the Lunatic Asylum wrote me yesterday, stating that the patient was in want of a change of clothes, and that, according to his own account, he had left his luggage at the American Hotel. After office-hours, I took a cab, and set out with my clerk, to pay a visit to the Asylum, taking the American Hotel in our way. The American Hotel is a small house, not at all such a one as American travellers of any pretension would think of stopping at, but still very respectable, cleanly, and with a neat sitting-room, where the guests might assemble, after the American fashion. We asked for the landlady, and anon down she came, a round, rosy, comfortable-looking English dame of fifty or thereabouts. On being asked whether she knew a Mr. ------, she readily responded that he had been there, but, had left no luggage, having taken it away before paying his bill; and that she had suspected him of meaning to take his departure without paying her at all. Hereupon she had traced him to the hotel before mentioned, where she had found that he had stayed two nights,--but was then, I think, gone from thence. Afterwards she encountered him again, and, demanding her due, went with him to a pawnbroker's, where he pledged his watch and paid her. This was about the extent of the landlady's knowledge of the matter. I liked the woman very well, with her shrewd, good-humored, worldly, kindly disposition. Then we proceeded to the Lunatic Asylum, to which we were admitted by a porter at the gate. Within doors we found some neat and comely servant-women, one of whom showed us into a handsome parlor, and took my card to the Governor. There was a large bookcase, with a glass front, containing handsomely bound books, many of which, I observed, were of a religious character. In a few minutes the Governor came in, a middle-aged man, tall, and thin for an Englishman, kindly and agreeable enough in aspect, but not with the marked look of a man of force and ability. I should not judge from his conversation that he was an educated man, or that he had any scientific acquaintance with the subject of insanity. He said that Mr. ------ was still quite incommunicative, and not in a very promising state; that I had perhaps better defer seeing him for a few days; that it would not be safe, at present, to send him home to America without an attendant, and this was about all. But on returning home I learned from my wife, who had had a call from Mrs. Blodgett, that Mrs. Blodgett knew Mr. ------ and his mother, who has recently been remarried to a young husband, and is now somewhere in Italy. They seemed to have boarded at Mrs. Blodgett's house on their way to the Continent, and within a week or two, an acquaintance and pastor of Mr. ------, the Rev. Dr. ------, has sailed for America. If I could only have caught him, I could have transferred the care, expense, and responsibility of the patient to him. The Governor of the Asylum mentioned, by the way, that Mr. ------ describes himself as having been formerly a midshipman in the navy. I walked through the St. James's cemetery yesterday. It is a very pretty place, dug out of the rock, having formerly, I believe, been a stone-quarry. It is now a deep and spacious valley, with graves and monuments on its level and grassy floor, through which run gravel-paths, and where grows luxuriant shrubbery. On one of the steep sides of the valley, hewn out of the rock, are tombs, rising in tiers, to the height of fifty feet or more; some of them cut directly into the rock with arched portals, and others built with stone. On the other side the bank is of earth, and rises abruptly, quite covered with trees, and looking very pleasant with their green shades. It was a warm and sunny day, and the cemetery really had a most agreeable aspect. I saw several gravestones of Americans; but what struck me most was one line of an epitaph on an English woman, "Here rests in peace a virtuous wife." The statue of Huskisson stands in the midst of the valley, in a kind of mausoleum, with a door of plate-glass, through which you look at the dead statesman's effigy. September 22d.--. . . . Some days ago an American captain came to the office, and said he had shot one of his men, shortly after sailing from New Orleans, and while the ship was still in the river. As he described the event, he was in peril of his life from this man, who was an Irishman; and he fired his pistol only when the man was coming upon him, with a knife in one hand, and some other weapon of offence in the other, while he himself was struggling with one or two more of the crew. He was weak at the time, having just recovered from the yellow fever. The shots struck the man in the pit of the stomach, and he lived only about a quarter of an hour. No magistrate in England has a right to arrest or examine the captain, unless by a warrant from the Secretary of State, on the charge of murder. After his statement to me, the mother of the slain man went to the police officer, and accused him of killing her son. Two or three days since, moreover, two of the sailors came before me, and gave their account of the matter; and it looked very differently from that of the captain. According to them, the man had no idea of attacking the captain, and was so drunk that he could not keep himself upright without assistance. One of these two men was actually holding him up when the captain fired two barrels of his pistol, one immediately after the other, and lodged two balls in the pit of his stomach. The man sank down at once, saying, "Jack, I am killed,"--and died very shortly. Meanwhile the captain drove this man away, under threats of shooting him likewise. Both the seamen described the captain's conduct, both then and during the whole voyage, as outrageous, and I do not much doubt that it was so. They gave their evidence like men who wished to tell the truth, and were moved by no more than a natural indignation at the captain's wrong. I did not much like the captain from the first,--a hard, rough man, with little education, and nothing of the gentleman about him, a red face and a loud voice. He seemed a good deal excited, and talked fast and much about the event, but yet not as if it had sunk deeply into him. He observed that he "would not have had it happen for a thousand dollars," that being the amount of detriment which he conceives himself to suffer by the ineffaceable blood-stain on his hand. In my opinion it is little short of murder, if at all; but what would be murder on shore is almost a natural occurrence when done in such a hell on earth as one of these ships, in the first hours of the voyage. The men are then all drunk,-- some of them often in delirium tremens; and the captain feels no safety for his life except in making himself as terrible as a fiend. It is the universal testimony that there is a worse set of sailors in these short voyages between Liverpool and America than in any other trade whatever. There is no probability that the captain will ever be called to account for this deed. He gave, at the time, his own version of the affair in his log-book; and this was signed by the entire crew, with the exception of one man, who had hidden himself in the hold in terror of the captain. His mates will sustain his side of the question; and none of the sailors would be within reach of the American courts, even should they be sought for. October 1st.--On Thursday I went with Mr. Ticknor to Chester by railway. It is quite an indescribable old town, and I feel at last as if I had had a glimpse of old England. The wall encloses a large space within the town, but there are numerous houses and streets not included within its precincts. Some of the principal streets pass under the ancient gateways; and at the side there are flights of steps, giving access to the summit. Around the top of the whole wall, a circuit of about two miles, there runs a walk, well paved with flagstones, and broad enough for three persons to walk abreast. On one side--that towards the country--there is a parapet of red freestone three or four feet high. On the other side there are houses, rising up immediately from the wall, so that they seem a part of it. The height of it, I suppose, may be thirty or forty feet, and, in some parts, you look down from the parapet into orchards, where there are tall apple-trees, and men on the branches, gathering fruit, and women and children among the grass, filling bags or baskets. There are prospects of the surrounding country among the buildings outside the wall; at one point, a view of the river Dee, with an old bridge of arches. It is all very strange, very quaint, very curious to see how the town has overflowed its barrier, and how, like many institutions here, the ancient wall still exists, but is turned to quite another purpose than what it was meant for,--so far as it serves any purpose at all. There are three or four towers in the course of the circuit; the most interesting being one from the top of which King Charles the First is said to have seen the rout of his army by the Parliamentarians. We ascended the short flight of steps that led up into the tower, where an old man pointed out the site of the battle-field, now thickly studded with buildings, and told us what we had already learned from the guide-book. After this we went into the cathedral, which I will perhaps describe on some other occasion, when I shall have seen more of it, and to better advantage. The cloisters gave us the strongest impression of antiquity; the stone arches being so worn and blackened by time. Still an American must always have imagined a better cathedral than this. There were some immense windows of painted glass, but all modern. In the chapter-house we found a coal-fire burning in a grate, and a large heap of old books--the library of the cathedral--in a discreditable state of decay,--mildewed, rotten, neglected for years. The sexton told us that they were to be arranged and better ordered. Over the door, inside, hung two failed and tattered banners, being those of the Cheshire regiment. The most utterly indescribable feature of Chester is the Rows, which every traveller has attempted to describe. At the height of several feet above some of the oldest streets, a walk runs through the front of the houses, which project over it. Back of the walk there are shops; on the outer side is a space of two or three yards, where the shopmen place their tables, and stands, and show-cases; overhead, just high enough for persons to stand erect, a ceiling. At frequent intervals little narrow passages go winding in among the houses, which all along are closely conjoined, and seem to have no access or exit, except through the shops, or into these narrow passages, where you can touch each side with your elbows, and the top with your hand. We penetrated into one or two of them, and they smelt anciently and disagreeably. At one of the doors stood a pale-looking, but cheerful and good-natured woman, who told us that she had come to that house when first married, twenty-one years before, and had lived there ever since; and that she felt as if she had been buried through the best years of her life. She allowed us to peep into her kitchen and parlor,--small, dingy, dismal, but yet not wholly destitute of a home look. She said that she had seen two or three coffins in a day, during cholera times, carried out of that narrow passage into which her door opened. These avenues put me in mind of those which run through ant-hills, or those which a mole makes underground. This fashion of Rows does not appear to be going out; and, for aught I can see, it may last hundreds of years longer. When a house becomes so old as to be uutenantable, it is rebuilt, and the new one is fashioned like the old, so far as regards the walk running through its front. Many of the shops are very good, and even elegant, and these Rows are the favorite places of business in Chester. Indeed, they have many advantages, the passengers being sheltered from the rain, and there being within the shops that dimmer light by which tradesmen like to exhibit their wares. A large proportion of the edifices in the Rows must be comparatively modern; but there are some very ancient ones, with oaken frames visible on the exterior. The Row, passing through these houses, is railed with oak, so old that it has turned black, and grown to be as hard as stone, which it might be mistaken for, if one did not see where names and initials have been cut into it with knives at some bygone period. Overhead, cross-beams project through the ceiling so low as almost to hit the head. On the front of one of these buildings was the inscription, "GOD'S PROVIDENCE IS MINE INHERITANCE," said to have been put there by the occupant of the house two hundred years ago, when the plague spared this one house only in the whole city. Not improbably the inscription has operated as a safeguard to prevent the demolition of the house hitherto; but a shopman of an adjacent dwelling told us that it was soon to be taken down. Here and there, about some of the streets through which the Rows do not run, we saw houses of very aged aspect, with steep, peaked gables. The front gable-end was supported on stone pillars, and the sidewalk passed beneath. Most of these old houses seemed to be taverns,--the Black Bear, the Green Dragon, and such names. We thought of dining at one of them, but, on inspection, they looked rather too dingy and close, and of questionable neatness. So we went to the Royal Hotel, where we probably fared just as badly at much more expense, and where there was a particularly gruff and crabbed old waiter, who, I suppose, thought himself free to display his surliness because we arrived at the hotel on foot. For my part, I love to see John Bull show himself. I must go again and again and again to Chester, for I suppose there is not a more curious place in the world. Mr. Ticknor, who has been staying at Rock Park with us since Tuesday, has steamed away in the Canada this morning. His departure seems to make me feel more abroad, more dissevered from my native country, than before. October 3d.--Saturday evening, at six, I went to dine with Mr. Aiken, a wealthy merchant here, to meet two of the sons of Burns. There was a party of ten or twelve, Mr. Aiken and his two daughters included. The two sons of Burns have both been in the Indian army, and have attained the ranks of Colonel and Major; one having spent thirty, and the other twenty-seven years in India. They are now old gentlemen of sixty and upwards, the elder with a gray head, the younger with a perfectly white one,--rather under than above the middle stature, and with a British roundness of figure,--plain, respectable, intelligent-looking persons, with quiet manners. I saw no resemblance in either of them to any portrait of their father. After the ladies left the table, I sat next to the Major, the younger of the two, and had a good deal of talk with him. He seemed a very kindly and social man, and was quite ready to speak about his father, nor was he at all reluctant to let it be seen how much he valued the glory of being descended from the poet. By and by, at Mr. Aiken's instance, he sang one of Burns's songs,--the one about "Annie" and the "rigs of barley." He sings in a perfectly simple style, so that it is little more than a recitative, and yet the effect is very good as to humor, sense, and pathos. After rejoining the ladies, he sang another, "A posie for my ain dear May," and likewise "A man's a man for a' that." My admiration of his father, and partly, perhaps, my being an American, gained me some favor with him, and he promised to give me what he considered the best engraving of Burns, and some other remembrance of him. The Major is that son of Burns who spent an evening at Abbotsford with Sir Walter Scott, when, as Lockhart writes, "the children sang the ballads of their sires." He spoke with vast indignation of a recent edition of his father's works by Robert Chambers, in which the latter appears to have wronged the poet by some misstatements.--I liked them both and they liked me, and asked me to go and see there at Cheltenham, where they reside. We broke up at about midnight. The members of this dinner-party were of the more liberal tone of thinking here in Liverpool. The Colonel and Major seemed to be of similar principles; and the eyes of the latter glowed, when he sang his father's noble verse, "The rank is but the guinea's stamp," etc. It would have been too pitiable if Burns had left a son who could not feel the spirit of that verse. October 8th.--Coning to my office, two or three mornings ago, I found Mrs. ------, the mother of Mr. ------, the insane young man of whom I had taken charge. She is a lady of fifty or thereabouts, and not very remarkable anyway, nor particularly lady-like. However, she was just come off a rapid journey, having travelled from Naples, with three small children, without taking rest, since my letter reached her. A son (this proved to be her new husband) of about twenty had come with her to the Consulate. She was, of course, infinitely grieved about the young man's insanity, and had two or three bursts of tears while we talked the matter over. She said he was the hope of her life,--the best, purest, most innocent child that ever was, and wholly free from every kind of vice. But it appears that he had a previous attack of insanity, lasting three months, about three years ago. After I had told her all I knew about him, including my personal observations at a visit a week or two since, we drove in a cab to the Asylum. It must have been a dismal moment to the poor lady, as we entered the gateway through a tall, prison-like wall. Being ushered into the parlor, the Governor soon appeared, and informed us that Mr. ------ had had a relapse within a few days, and was not now so well as when I saw him. He complains of unjust confinement, and seems to consider himself, if I rightly understand, under persecution for political reasons. The Governor, however, proposed to call him down, and I took my leave, feeling that it would be indelicate to be present at his first interview with his mother. So here ended my guardianship of the poor young fellow. In the afternoon I called at the Waterloo Hotel, where Mrs. ------ was staying, and found her in the coffee-room with the children. She had determined to take a lodging in the vicinity of the Asylum, and was going to remove thither as soon as the children had had something to eat. They seemed to be pleasant and well-behaved children, and impressed me more favorably than the mother, whom I suspect to be rather a foolish woman, although her present grief makes her appear in a more respectable light than at other times. She seemed anxious to impress me with the respectability and distinction of her connections in America, and I had observed the same tendency in the insane patient, at my interview with him. However, she has undoubtedly a mother's love for this poor shatterbrain, and this may weigh against the folly of her marrying an incongruously youthful second husband, and many other follies. This was day before yesterday, and I have heard nothing of her since. The same day I had applications for assistance in two other domestic affairs; one from an Irishman, naturalized in America, who wished me to get him a passage thither, and to take charge of his wife and family here, at my own private expense, until he could remit funds to carry them across. Another was from an Irishman, who had a power of attorney from a countrywoman of his in America, to find and take charge of an infant whom she had left in the Liverpool work-house, two years ago. I have a great mind to keep a list of all the business I am consulted about and employed in. It would be very curious. Among other things, all penniless Americans, or pretenders to Americanism, look upon me as their banker; and I could ruin myself any week, if I had not laid down a rule to consider every applicant for assistance an impostor until he prove himself a true and responsible man,--which it is very difficult to do. Yesterday there limped in a very respectable-looking old man, who described himself as a citizen of Baltimore, who had been on a trip to England and elsewhere, and, being detained longer than he expected, and having had an attack of rheumatism, was now short of funds to pay his passage home, and hoped that I would supply the deficiency. He had quite a plain, homely, though respectable manner, and, for aught I know, was the very honestest man alive; but as he could produce no kind of proof of his character and responsibility, I very quietly explained the impossibility of my helping him. I advised him to try to obtain a passage on board of some Baltimore ship, the master of which might be acquainted with him, or, at all events, take his word for payment, after arrival. This he seemed inclined to do, and took his leave. There was a decided aspect of simplicity about this old man, and yet I rather judge him to be an impostor. It is easy enough to refuse money to strangers and unknown people, or whenever there may be any question about identity; but it will not be so easy when I am asked for money by persons whom I know, but do not like to trust. They shall meet the eternal "No," however. October 13th.--In Ormerod's history of Chester it is mentioned that Randal, Earl of Chester, having made an inroad into Wales about 1225, the Welshmen gathered in mass against him, and drove him into the castle of Nothelert in Flintshire. The Earl sent for succor to the Constable of Chester, Roger Lacy, surnamed "Hell," on account of his fierceness. It was then fair-time at Chester, and the constable collected a miscellaneous rabble of fiddlers, players, cobblers, tailors, and all manner of debauched people, and led them to the relief of the Earl. At sight of this strange army the Welshmen fled; and forever after the Earl assigned to the constable of Chester power over all fiddlers, shoemakers, etc., within the bounds of Cheshire. The constable retained for himself and his heirs the control of the shoemakers; and made over to his own steward, Dutton, that of the fiddlers and players, and for many hundreds of years afterwards the Duttons of Dutton retained the power. On midsummer-day, they used to ride through Chester, attended by all the minstrels playing on their several instruments, to the Church of St. John, and there renew their licenses. It is a good theme for a legend. Sir Peter Leycester, writing in Charles the Second's time, copies the Latin deed from the constable to Dutton; rightly translated, it seems to mean "the magisterial power over all the lewd people . . . . in the whole of Cheshire," but the custom grew into what is above stated. In the time of Henry VII., the Duttons claimed, by prescriptive right, that the Cheshire minstrels should deliver them, at the feast of St. John, four bottles of wine and a lance, and that each separate minstrel should pay fourpence halfpenny. . . . . Another account says Ralph Dutton was the constable's son-in-law, and "a lusty youth." October 19th.--Coming to the ferry this morning a few minutes before the boat arrived from town, I went into the ferry-house, a small stone edifice, and found there an Irishman, his wife and three children, the oldest eight or nine years old, and all girls. There was a good fire burning in the room, and the family was clustered round it, apparently enjoying the warmth very much; but when I went in both husband and wife very hospitably asked me to come to the fire, although there was not more than room at it for their own party. I declined on the plea that I was warm enough, and then the woman said that they were very cold, having been long on the road. The man was gray-haired and gray-bearded, clad in an old drab overcoat, and laden with a huge bag, which seemed to contain bedclothing or something of the kind. The woman was pale, with a thin, anxious, wrinkled face, but with a good and kind expression. The children were quite pretty, with delicate faces, and a look of patience and endurance in them, but yet as if they had suffered as little as they possibly could. The two elder were cuddled up close to the father, the youngest, about four years old, sat in its mother's lap, and she had taken off its small shoes and stockings, and was warming its feet at the fire. Their little voices had a sweet and kindly sound as they talked in low tones to their parents and one another. They all looked very shabby, and yet had a decency about them; and it was touching to see how they made themselves at home at this casual fireside, and got all the comfort they could out of the circumstances. By and by two or three market-women came in and looked pleasantly at them, and said a word or two to the children. They did not beg of me, as I supposed they would; but after looking at them awhile, I pulled out a piece of silver, and handed it to one of the little girls. She took it very readily, as if she partly expected it, and then the father and mother thanked me, and said they had been travelling a long distance, and had nothing to subsist upon, except what they picked up on the road. They found it impossible to live in England, and were now on their way to Liverpool, hoping to get a passage back to Ireland, where, I suppose, extreme poverty is rather better off than here. I heard the little girl say that she should buy bread with the money. There is not much that can be caught in the description of this scene; but it made me understand, better than before, how poor people feel, wandering about in such destitute circumstances, and how they suffer; and yet how they have a life not quite miserable, after all, and how family love goes along with them. Soon the boat arrived at the pier, and we all went on board; and as I sat in the cabin, looking up through a broken pane in the skylight, I saw the woman's thin face, with its anxious, motherly aspect; and the youngest child in her arms, shrinking from the chill wind, but yet not impatiently; and the eldest of the girls standing close by with her expression of childish endurance, but yet so bright and intelligent that it would evidently take but a few days to make a happy and playful child of her. I got into the interior of this poor family, and understand, through sympathy, more of them than I can tell. I am getting to possess some of the English indifference as to beggars and poor people; but still, whenever I come face to face with them, and have any intercourse, it seems as if they ought to be the better for me. I wish, instead of sixpence, I had given the poor family ten shillings, and denied it to a begging subscriptionist, who has just fleeced me to that amount. How silly a man feels in this latter predicament! I have had a good many visitors at the Consulate from the United States within a short time,--among others, Mr. D. D. Barnard, our late minister to Berlin, returning homeward to-day by the Arctic; and Mr. Sickles, Secretary of Legation to London, a fine-looking, intelligent, gentlemanly young man. . . . . With him came Judge Douglas, the chosen man of Young America. He is very short, extremely short, but has an uncommonly good head, and uncommon dignity without seeming to aim at it, being free and simple in manners. I judge him to be a very able man, with the Western sociability and free-fellowship. Generally I see no reason to be ashamed of my countrymen who come out here in public position, or otherwise assuming the rank of gentlemen. October 20th.--One sees incidents in the streets here, occasionally, which could not be seen in an American city. For instance, a week or two since, I was passing a quiet-looking, elderly gentleman, when, all of a sudden, without any apparent provocation, he uplifted his stick, and struck a black-gowned boy a smart blow on the shoulders. The boy looked at him wofully and resentfully, but said nothing, nor can I imagine why the thing was done. In Tythebarne Street to-day I saw a woman suddenly assault a man, clutch at his hair, and cuff him about the ears. The man, who was of decent aspect enough, immediately took to his heels, full speed, and the woman ran after him, and, as far as I could discern the pair, the chase continued. October 22d.--At a dinner-party at Mr. Holland's last evening, a gentleman, in instance of Charles Dickens's unweariability, said that during some theatrical performances in Liverpool he acted in play and farce, spent the rest of the night making speeches, feasting, and drinking at table, and ended at seven o'clock in the morning by jumping leap-frog over the backs of the whole company. In Moore's diary he mentions a beautiful Guernsey lily having been given to his wife, and says that the flower was originally from Guernsey. A ship from there had been wrecked on the coast of Japan, having many of the lilies on board, and the next year the flowers appeared,--springing up, I suppose, on the wave-beaten strand. Wishing to send a letter to a dead man, who may be supposed to have gone to Tophet,--throw it into the fire. Sir Arthur Aston had his brains beaten out with his own wooden leg, at the storming of Tredagh in Ireland by Cromwell. In the county of Cheshire, many centuries ago, there lived a half-idiot, named Nixon, who had the gift of prophecy, and made many predictions about places, families, and important public events, since fulfilled. He seems to have fallen into fits of insensibility previous to uttering his prophecies. The family of Mainwaring (pronounced Mannering), of Bromborough, had an ass's head for a crest. "Richard Dawson, being sick of the plague, and perceiving he must die, rose out of his bed and made his grave, and caused his nephew to cast straw into the grave, which was not far from the house, and went and laid him down in the said grave, and caused clothes to be laid upon him, and so departed out of this world. This he did because he was a strong man, and heavier than his said nephew and a serving-wench were able to bury. He died about the 24th of August. Thus was I credibly told he did, 1625." This was in the township of Malpas, recorded in the parish register. At Bickley Hall, taken down a few years ago, used to be shown the room where the body of the Earl of Leicester was laid for a whole twelvemonth,--1659 to 1660,--he having been kept unburied all that time, owing to a dispute which of his heirs should pay his funeral expenses. November 5th.--We all, together with Mr. Squarey, went to Chester last Sunday, and attended the cathedral service. A great deal of ceremony, and not unimposing, but rather tedious before it was finished,--occupying two hours or more. The Bishop was present, but did nothing except to pronounce the benediction. In America the sermon is the principal thing; but here all this magnificent ceremonial of prayer and chanted responses and psalms and anthems was the setting to a short, meagre discourse, which would not have been considered of any account among the elaborate intellectual efforts of New England ministers. While this was going on, the light came through the stained glass windows and fell upon the congregation, tingeing them with crimson. After service we wandered about the aisles, and looked at the tombs and monuments,--the oldest of which was that of some nameless abbot, with a staff and mitre half obliterated from his tomb, which was under a shallow arch on one side of the cathedral. There were also marbles on the walls, and lettered stones in the pavement under our feet; but chiefly, if not entirely, of modern date. We lunched at the Royal Hotel, and then walked round the city walls, also crossing the bridge of one great arch over the Dee, and penetrating as far into Wales as the entrance of the Marquis of Westminster's Park at Eaton. It was, I think, the most lovely day as regards weather that I have seen in England. I passed, to-day, a man chanting a ballad in the street about a recent murder, in a voice that had innumerable cracks in it, and was most lugubrious. The other day I saw a man who was reading in a loud voice what seemed to be an account of the late riots and loss of life in Wigan. He walked slowly along the street as he read, surrounded by a small crowd of men, women, and children; and close by his elbow stalked a policeman, as if guarding against a disturbance. November 14th.--There is a heavy dun fog on the river and over the city to-day, the very gloomiest atmosphere that ever I was acquainted with. On the river the steamboats strike gongs or ring bells to give warning of their approach. There are lamps burning in the counting-rooms and lobbies of the warehouses, and they gleam distinctly through the windows. The other day, at the entrance of the market-house, I saw a woman sitting in a small hand-wagon, apparently for the purpose of receiving alms. There was no attendant at hand; but I noticed that one or two persons who passed by seemed to inquire whether she wished her wagon to be moved. Perhaps this is her mode of making progress about the city, by the voluntary aid of boys and other people who help to drag her. There is something in this--I don't yet well know what--that has impressed me, as if I could make a romance out of the idea of a woman living in this manner a public life, and moving about by such means. November 29th.--Mr. H. A. B. told me of his friend Mr. ------ (who was formerly attache to the British Legation at Washington, and whom I saw at Concord), that his father, a clergyman, married a second wife. After the marriage, the noise of a coffin being nightly carried down the stairs was heard in the parsonage. It could be distinguished when the coffin reached a certain broad lauding and rested on it. Finally, his father had to remove to another residence. Besides this, Mr. ------ had had another ghostly experience,--having seen a dim apparition of an uncle at the precise instant when the latter died in a distant place. The attache is a credible and honorable fellow, and talks of these matters as if he positively believed them. But Ghostland lies beyond the jurisdiction of veracity. In a garden near Chester, in taking down a summer-house, a tomb was discovered beneath it, with a Latin inscription to the memory of an old doctor of medicine, William Bentley, who had owned the place long ago, and died in 1680. And his dust and bones had lain beneath all the merry times in the summer-house. December 1st.--It is curious to observe how many methods people put in practice here to pick up a halfpenny. Yesterday I saw a man standing bareheaded and barelegged in the mud and misty weather, playing on a fife, in hopes to get a circle of auditors. Nobody, however, seemed to take any notice. Very often a whole band of musicians will strike up,-- passing a hat round after playing a tune or two. On board the ferry, until the coldest weather began, there were always some wretched musicians, with an old fiddle, an old clarinet, and an old verdigrised brass bugle, performing during the passage, and, as the boat neared the shore, sending round one of their number to gather contributions in the hollow of the brass bugle. They were a very shabby set, and must have made a very scanty living at best. Sometimes it was a boy with an accordion, and his sister, a smart little girl, with a timbrel,--which, being so shattered that she could not play on it, she used only to collect halfpence in. Ballad-singers, or rather chanters or croakers, are often to be met with in the streets, but hand-organ players are not more frequent than in our cities. I still observe little girls and other children barelegged and barefooted on the wet sidewalks. There certainly never was anything so dismal as the November weather has been; never any real sunshine; almost always a mist; sometimes a dense fog, like slightly rarefied wool, pervading the atmosphere. An epitaph on a person buried on a hillside in Cheshire, together with some others, supposed to have died of the plague, and therefore not admitted into the churchyards:-- "Think it not strange our bones ly here, Thine may ly thou knowst not where." Elizabeth Hampson. These graves were near the remains of two rude stone crosses, the purpose of which was not certainly known, although they were supposed to be boundary marks. Probably, as the plague-corpses were debarred from sanctified ground, the vicinity of these crosses was chosen as having a sort of sanctity. "Bang beggar,"--an old Cheshire term for a parish beadle. Hawthorne Hall, Cheshire, Macclesfield Hundred, Parish of Wilmslow, and within the hamlet of Morley. It was vested at an early period in the Lathoms of Irlam, Lancaster County, and passed through the Leighs to the Pages of Earlshaw. Thomas Leigh Page sold it to Mr. Ralph Bower of Wilmslow, whose children owned it in 1817. The Leighs built a chancel in the church of Wilmslow, where some of them are buried, their arms painted in the windows. The hall is an "ancient, respectable mansion of brick." December 2d.--Yesterday, a chill, misty December day, yet I saw a woman barefooted in the street, not to speak of children. Cold and uncertain as the weather is, there is still a great deal of small trade carried on in the open air. Women and men sit in the streets with a stock of combs and such small things to sell, the women knitting as if they sat by a fireside. Cheap crockery is laid out in the street, so far out that without any great deviation from the regular carriage-track a wheel might pass straight through it. Stalls of apples are innumerable, but the apples are not fit for a pig. In some streets herrings are very abundant, laid out on boards. Coals seem to be for sale by the wheelbarrowful. Here and there you see children with some small article for sale,--as, for instance, a girl with two linen caps. A somewhat overladen cart of coal was passing along and some small quantity of the coal fell off; no sooner had the wheels passed than several women and children gathered to the spot, like hens and chickens round a handful of corn, and picked it up in their aprons. We have nothing similar to these street-women in our country. December 10th.--I don't know any place that brings all classes into contiguity on equal ground so completely as the waiting-room at Rock Ferry on these frosty days. The room is not more than eight feet, square, with walls of stone, and wooden benches ranged round them, and an open stove in one corner, generally well furnished with coal. It is almost always crowded, and I rather suspect that many persons who have no fireside elsewhere creep in here and spend the most comfortable part of their day. This morning, when I looked into the room, there were one or two gentlemen and other respectable persons; but in the best place, close to the fire, and crouching almost into it, was an elderly beggar, with the raggedest of overcoats, two great rents in the shoulders of it disclosing the dingy lining, all bepatched with various stuff covered with dirt, and on his shoes and trousers the mud of an interminable pilgrimage. Owing to the posture in which he sat, I could not see his face, but only the battered crown and rim of the very shabbiest hat that ever was worn. Regardless of the presence of women (which, indeed, Englishmen seldom do regard when they wish to smoke), he was smoking a pipe of vile tobacco; but, after all, this was fortunate, because the man himself was not personally fragrant. He was terribly squalid,--terribly; and when I had a glimpse of his face, it well befitted the rest of his development,-- grizzled, wrinkled, weather-beaten, yet sallow, and down-looking, with a watchful kind of eye turning upon everybody and everything, meeting the glances of other people rather boldly, yet soon shrinking away; a long thin nose, a gray beard of a week's growth; hair not much mixed with gray, but rusty and lifeless;--a miserable object; but it was curious to see how he was not ashamed of himself, but seemed to feel that he was one of the estates of the kingdom, and had as much right to live as other men. He did just as he pleased, took the best place by the fire, nor would have cared though a nobleman were forced to stand aside for him. When the steamer's bell rang, he shouldered a large and heavy pack, like a pilgrim with his burden of sin, but certainly journeying to hell instead of heaven. On board he looked round for the best position, at first stationing himself near the boiler-pipe; but, finding the deck damp underfoot, he went to the cabin-door, and took his stand on the stairs, protected from the wind, but very incommodiously placed for those who wished to pass. All this was done without any bravado or forced impudence, but in the most quiet way, merely because he was seeking his own comfort, and considered that he had a right to seek it. It was an Englishman's spirit; but in our country, I imagine, a beggar considers himself a kind of outlaw, and would hardly assume the privileges of a man in any place of public resort. Here beggary is a system, and beggars are a numerous class, and make themselves, in a certain way, respected as such. Nobody evinced the slightest disapprobation of the man's proceedings. In America, I think, we should see many aristocratic airs on such provocation, and probably the ferry people would there have rudely thrust the beggar aside; giving him a shilling, however, which no Englishman would ever think of doing. There would also have been a great deal of fun made of his squalid and ragged figure; whereas nobody smiled at him this morning, nor in any way showed the slightest disrespect. This is good; but it is the result of a state of things by no means good. For many days there has been a great deal of fog on the river, and the boats have groped their way along, continually striking their bells, while, on all sides, there are responses of bell and gong; and the vessels at anchor look shadow-like as we glide past them, and the master of one steamer shouts a warning to the master of another which he meets. The Englishmen, who hate to run any risk without an equivalent object, show a good deal of caution and timidity on these foggy days. December 13th.--Chill, frosty weather; such an atmosphere as forebodes snow in New England, and there has been a little here. Yet I saw a barefooted young woman yesterday. The feet of these poor creatures have exactly the red complexion of their hands, acquired by constant exposure to the cold air. At the ferry-room, this morning, was a small, thin, anxious-looking woman, with a bundle, seeming in rather poor circumstances, but decently dressed, and eying other women, I thought, with an expression of slight ill-will and distrust; also, an elderly, stout, gray-haired woman, of respectable aspect, and two young lady-like persons, quite pretty, one of whom was reading a shilling volume of James's "Arabella Stuart." They talked to one another with that up-and-down intonation which English ladies practise, and which strikes an unaccustomed ear as rather affected, especially in women of size and mass. It is very different from an American lady's mode of talking: there is the difference between color and no color; the tone variegates it. One of these young ladies spoke to me, making some remark about the weather,--the first instance I have met with of a gentlewoman's speaking to an unintroduced gentleman. Besides these, a middle-aged man of the lower class, and also a gentleman's out-door servant, clad in a drab great-coat, corduroy breeches, and drab cloth gaiters buttoned from the knee to the ankle. He complained to the other man of the cold weather; said that a glass of whiskey, every half-hour, would keep a man comfortable; and, accidentally hitting his coarse foot against one of the young lady's feet, said, "Beg pardon, ma'am,"--which she acknowledged with a slight movement of the head. Somehow or other, different classes seem to encounter one another in an easier manner than with us; the shock is less palpable. I suppose the reason is that the distinctions are real, and therefore need not be continually asserted. Nervous and excitable persons need to talk a great deal, by way of letting off their steam. On board the Rock Ferry steamer, a gentleman coming into the cabin, a voice addresses him from a dark corner, "How do you do, sir?"--"Speak again!" says the gentleman. No answer from the dark corner; and the gentleman repeats, "Speak again!" The speaker now comes out of the dark corner, and sits down in a place where he can be seen. "Ah!" cries the gentleman, "very well, I thank you. How do you do? I did not recognize your voice." Observable, the English caution, shown in the gentleman's not vouchsafing to say, "Very well, thank you!" till he knew his man. What was the after life of the young man, whom Jesus, looking on, "loved," and bade him sell all that he had, and give to the poor, and take up his cross and follow him? Something very deep and beautiful might be made out of this. December 31st.--Among the beggars of Liverpool, the hardest to encounter is a man without any legs, and, if I mistake not, likewise deficient in arms. You see him before you all at once, as if he had sprouted halfway out of the earth, and would sink down and reappear in some other place the moment he has done with you. His countenance is large, fresh, and very intelligent; but his great power lies in his fixed gaze, which is inconceivably difficult to bear. He never once removes his eye from you till you are quite past his range; and you feel it all the same, although you do not meet his glance. He is perfectly respectful; but the intentness and directness of his silent appeal is far worse than any impudence. In fact, it is the very flower of impudence. I would rather go a mile about than pass before his battery. I feel wronged by him, and yet unutterably ashamed. There must be great force in the man to produce such an effect. There is nothing of the customary squalidness of beggary about him, but remarkable trimness and cleanliness. A girl of twenty or thereabouts, who vagabondizes about the city on her hands and knees, possesses, to a considerable degree, the same characteristics. I think they hit their victims the more effectually from being below the common level of vision. January 3d, 1854.--Night before last there was a fall of snow, about three or four inches, and, following it, a pretty hard frost. On the river, the vessels at anchor showed the snow along their yards, and on every ledge where it could lie. A blue sky and sunshine overhead, and apparently a clear atmosphere close at hand; but in the distance a mistiness became perceptible, obscuring the shores of the river, and making the vessels look dim and uncertain. The steamers were ploughing along, smoking their pipes through the frosty air. On the landing stage and in the streets, hard-trodden snow, looking more like my New England Home than anything I have yet seen. Last night the thermometer fell as low as 13 degrees, nor probably is it above 20 degrees to-day. No such frost has been known in England these forty years! and Mr. Wilding tells me that he never saw so much snow before. January 6th.--I saw, yesterday, stopping at a cabinet-maker's shop in Church Street, a coach with four beautiful white horses, and a postilion on each near-horse; behind, in the dicky, a footman; and on the box a coachman, all dressed in livery. The coach-panel bore a coat-of-arms with a coronet, and I presume it must have been the equipage of the Earl of Derby. A crowd of people stood round, gazing at the coach and horses; and when any of them spoke, it was in a lower tone than usual. I doubt not they all had a kind of enjoyment of the spectacle, for these English are strangely proud of having a class above them. Every Englishman runs to "The Times" with his little grievance, as a child runs to his mother. I was sent for to the police court the other morning, in the case of an American sailor accused of robbing a shipmate at sea. A large room, with a great coal-fire burning on one side, and above it the portrait of Mr. Rushton, deceased, a magistrate of many years' continuance. A long table, with chairs, and a witness-box. One of the borough magistrates, a merchant of the city, sat at the head of the table, with paper and pen and ink before him; but the real judge was the clerk of the court, whose professional knowledge and experience governed all the proceedings. In the short time while I was waiting, two cases were tried, in the first of which the prisoner was discharged. The second case was of a woman,--a thin, sallow, hard-looking, careworn, rather young woman,--for stealing a pair of slippers out of a shop: The trial occupied five minutes or less, and she was sentenced to twenty-one days' imprisonment,--whereupon, without speaking, she looked up wildly first into one policeman's face, then into another's, at the same time wringing her hands with no theatric gesture, but because her torment took this outward shape,--and was led away. The Yankee sailor was then brought up,--an intelligent, but ruffian-like fellow,--and as the case was out of the jurisdiction of the English magistrates, and as it was not worth while to get him sent over to America for trial, he was forthwith discharged. He stole a comforter. If mankind were all intellect, they would be continually changing, so that one age would be entirely unlike another. The great conservative is the heart, which remains the same in all ages; so that commonplaces of a thousand years' standing are as effective as ever. Monday, February 20th.--At the police court on Saturday, I attended the case of the second mate and four seamen of the John and Albert, for assaulting, beating, and stabbing the chief mate. The chief mate has been in the hospital ever since the assault, and was brought into the court to-day to give evidence,--a man of thirty, black hair, black eyes, a dark complexion, disagreeable expression; sallow, emaciated, feeble, apparently in pain, one arm disabled. He sat bent and drawn upward, and had evidently been severely hurt, and was not yet fit to be out of bed. He had some brandy-and-water to enable him to sustain himself. He gave his evidence very clearly, beginning (sailor-like) with telling in what quarter the wind was at the time of the assault, and which sail was taken in. His testimony bore on one man only, at whom he cast a vindictive look; but I think he told the truth as far as he knew and remembered it. Of the prisoners the second mate was a mere youth, with long sandy hair, and an intelligent and not unprepossessing face, dressed as neatly as a three or four weeks' captive, with small, or no means, could well allow, in a frock-coat, and with clean linen,--the only linen or cotton shirt in the company. The other four were rude, brutish sailors, in flannel or red-baize shirts. Three of them appeared to give themselves little concern; but the fourth, a red-haired and red-bearded man,--Paraman, by name,--evidently felt the pressure of the case upon himself. He was the one whom the mate swore to have given him the first blow; and there was other evidence of his having been stabbed with a knife. The captain of the ship, the pilot, the cook, and the steward, all gave their evidence; and the general bearing of it was, that the chief mate had a devilish temper, and had misused the second mate and crew,--that the four seamen had attacked him, and that Paraman had stabbed him; while all but the steward concurred in saying that the second mate had taken no part in the affray. The steward, however, swore to having seen him strike the chief mate with a wooden marlinspike, which was broken by the blow. The magistrate dismissed all but Paraman, whom I am to send to America for trial. In my opinion the chief mate got pretty nearly what he deserved, under the code of natural justice. While business was going forward, the magistrate, Mr. Mansfield, talked about a fancy ball at which he had been present the evening before, and of other matters grave and gay. It was very informal; we sat at the table, or stood with our backs to the fire; policemen came and went; witnesses were sworn on the greasiest copy of the Gospels I ever saw, polluted by hundreds and thousands of perjured kisses; and for hours the prisoners were kept standing at the foot of the table, interested to the full extent of their capacity, while all others were indifferent. At the close of the case, the police officers and witnesses applied to me about their expenses. Yesterday I took a walk with my wife and two children to Bebbington Church. A beautifully sunny morning. My wife and U. attended church, J. and I continued our walk. When we were at a little distance from the church, the bells suddenly chimed out with a most cheerful sound, and sunny as the morning. It is a pity we have no chimes of bells, to give the churchward summons, at home. People were standing about the ancient church-porch and among the tombstones. In the course of our walk, we passed many old thatched cottages, built of stone, and with what looked like a cow-house or pigsty at one end, making part of the cottage; also an old stone farm-house, which may have been a residence of gentility in its day. We passed, too, a small Methodist chapel, making one of a row of low brick edifices. There was a sound of prayer within. I never saw a more unbeautiful place of worship; and it had not even a separate existence for itself, the adjoining tenement being an alehouse. The grass along the wayside was green, with a few daisies. There was green holly in the hedges, and we passed through a wood, up some of the tree-trunks of which ran clustering ivy. February 23d.--There came to see me the other day a young gentleman with a mustache and a blue cloak, who announced himself as William Allingham, and handed me a copy of his poems, a thin volume, with paper covers, published by Routledge. I thought I remembered hearing his name, but had never seen any of his works. His face was intelligent, dark, pleasing, and not at all John-Bullish. He said that he had been employed in the Customs in Ireland, and was now going to London to live by literature,-- to be connected with some newspaper, I imagine. He had been in London before, and was acquainted with some of the principal literary people,-- among others, Tennyson and Carlyle. He seemed to have been on rather intimate terms with Tennyson. We talked awhile in my dingy and dusky Consulate, and he then took leave. His manners are good, and he appears to possess independence of mind. Yesterday I saw a British regiment march down to George's Pier, to embark in the Niagara for Malta. The troops had nothing very remarkable about them; but the thousands of ragged and squalid wretches, who thronged the pier and streets to gaze on them, were what I had not seen before in such masses. This was the first populace I have beheld; for even the Irish, on the other side of the water, acquire a respectability of aspect. John Bull is going with his whole heart into the Turkish war. He is very foolish. Whatever the Czar may propose to himself, it is for the interest of democracy that he should not be easily put down. The regiment, on its way to embark, carried the Queen's colors, and, side by side with them, the banner of the 28th,--yellow, with the names of the Peninsular and other battles in which it had been engaged inscribed on it in a double column. It is a very distinguished regiment; and Mr. Henry Bright mentioned as one of its distinctions, that Washington had formerly been an officer in it. I never heard of this. February 27th.--We walked to Woodside in the pleasant forenoon, and thence crossed to Liverpool. On our way to Woodside, we saw the remains of the old Birkenhead Priory, built of the common red freestone, much time-worn, with ivy creeping over it, and birds evidently at hone in its old crevices. These ruins are pretty extensive, and seem to be the remains of a quadrangle. A handsome modern church, likewise of the same red freestone, has been built on part of the site occupied by the Priory; and the organ was sounding within, while we walked about the premises. On some of the ancient arches, there were grotesquely carved stone faces. The old walls have been sufficiently restored to make them secure, without destroying their venerable aspect. It is a very interesting spot; and so much the more so because a modern town, with its brick and stone houses, its flags and pavements, has sprung up about the ruins, which were new a thousand years ago. The station of the Chester railway is within a hundred yards. Formerly the monks of this Priory kept the only ferry that then existed on the Mersey. At a dinner at Mr. Bramley Moore's a little while ago, we had a prairie-hen from the West of America. It was a very delicate bird, and a gentleman carved it most skilfully to a dozen guests, and had still a second slice to offer to them. Aboard the ferry-boat yesterday, there was a laboring man eating oysters. He took them one by one from his pocket in interminable succession, opened them with his jack-knife, swallowed each one, threw the shell overboard, and then sought for another. Having concluded his meal, he took out a clay tobacco-pipe, filled it, lighted it with a match, and smoked it,--all this, while the other passengers were looking at him, and with a perfect coolness and independence, such as no single man can ever feel in America. Here a man does not seem to consider what other people will think of his conduct, but only whether it suits his own convenience to do so and so. It may be the better way. A French military man, a veteran of all Napoleon's wars, is now living, with a false leg and arm, both movable by springs, false teeth, a false eye, a silver nose with a flesh-colored covering, and a silver plate replacing part of the skull. He has the cross of the Legion of Honor. March 18th.--On Saturday I went with Mr. B---- to the Dingle, a pleasant domain on the banks of the Mersey almost opposite to Rock Ferry. Walking home, we looked into Mr. Thorn's Unitarian Chapel, Mr. B----'s family's place of worship. There is a little graveyard connected with the chapel, a most uninviting and unpicturesque square of ground, perhaps thirty or forty yards across, in the midst of back fronts of city buildings. About half the space was occupied by flat tombstones, level with the ground, the remainder being yet vacant. Nevertheless, there were perhaps more names of men generally known to the world on these few tombstones than in any other churchyard in Liverpool,--Roscoe, Blanco White, and the Rev. William Enfield, whose name has a classical sound in my ears, because, when a little boy, I used to read his "Speaker" at school. In the vestry of the chapel there were many books, chiefly old theological works, in ancient print and binding, much mildewed and injured by the damp. The body of the chapel is neat, but plain, and, being not very large, has a kind of social and family aspect, as if the clergyman and his people must needs have intimate relations among themselves. The Unitarian sect in Liverpool have, as a body, great wealth and respectability. Yesterday I walked with my wife and children to the brow of a hill, overlooking Birkenhead and Tranmere, and commanding a fine view of the river, and Liverpool beyond. All round about new and neat residences for city people are springing up, with fine names,--Eldon Terrace, Rose Cottage, Belvoir Villa, etc., etc., with little patches of ornamented garden or lawn in front, and heaps of curious rock-work, with which the English are ridiculously fond of adorning their front yards. I rather think the middling classes--meaning shopkeepers, and other respectabilities of that level--are better lodged here than in America; and, what I did not expect, the houses are a great deal newer than in our new country! Of course, this can only be the case in places circumstanced like Liverpool and its suburbs. But, scattered among these modern villas, there are old stone cottages of the rudest structure, and doubtless hundreds of years old, with thatched roofs, into which the grass has rooted itself, and now looks verdant. These cottages are in themselves as ugly as possible, resembling a large kind of pigsty; but often, by dint of the verdure on their thatch and the shrubbery clustering about them, they look picturesque. The old-fashioned flowers in the gardens of New England--blue-bells, crocuses, primroses, foxglove, and many others--appear to be wild flowers here on English soil. There is something very touching and pretty in this fact, that the Puritans should have carried their field and hedge flowers, and nurtured theme in their gardens, until, to us, they seem entirely the product of cultivation. March 16th.--Yesterday, at the coroner's court, attending the inquest on a black sailor who died on board an American vessel, after her arrival at this port. The court-room is capable of accommodating perhaps fifty people, dingy, with a pyramidal skylight above, and a single window on one side, opening into a gloomy back court. A private room, also lighted with a pyramidal skylight, is behind the court-room, into which I was asked, and found the coroner, a gray-headed, grave, intelligent, broad, red-faced man, with an air of some authority, well mannered and dignified, but not exactly a gentleman,--dressed in a blue coat, with a black cravat, showing a shirt-collar above it. Considering how many and what a variety of cases of the ugliest death are constantly coming before him, he was much more cheerful than could be expected, and had a kind of formality and orderliness which I suppose balances the exceptionalities with which he has to deal. In the private room with him was likewise the surgeon, who professionally attends the court. We chatted about suicide and such matters,--the surgeon, the coroner, and I,--until the American case was ready, when we adjourned to the court-room, and the coroner began the examination. The American captain was a rude, uncouth Down-Easter, about thirty years old, and sat on a bench, doubled and bent into an indescribable attitude, out of which he occasionally straightened himself, all the time toying with a ruler, or some such article. The case was one of no interest; the man had been frost-bitten, and died from natural causes, so that no censure was deserved or passed upon the captain. The jury, who had been examining the body, were at first inclined to think that the man had not been frostbitten, but that his feet had been immersed in boiling water; but, on explanation by the surgeon, readily yielded their opinion, and gave the verdict which the coroner put into their mouths, exculpating the captain from all blame. In fact, it is utterly impossible that a jury of chance individuals should not be entirely governed by the judgment of so experienced and weighty a man as the coroner. In the court-room were two or three police officers in uniform, and some other officials, a very few idle spectators, and a few witnesses waiting to be examined. And while the case was going forward, a poor-looking woman came in, and I heard her, in an undertone, telling an attendant of a death that had just occurred. The attendant received the communication in a very quiet and matter-of-course way, said that it should be attended to, and the woman retired. THE DIARY OF A CORONER would be a work likely to meet with large popular acceptance. A dark passageway, only a few yards in extent, leads from the liveliest street in Liverpool to this coroner's court-room, where all the discussion is about murder and suicide. It seems, that, after a verdict of suicide, the corpse can only be buried at midnight, without religious rites. "His lines are cast in pleasant places,"--applied to a successful angler. A woman's chastity consists, like an onion, of a series of coats. You may strip off the outer ones without doing much mischief, perhaps none at all; but you keep taking off one after another, in expectation of coming to the inner nucleus, including the whole value of the matter. It proves however, that there is no such nucleus, and that chastity is diffused through the whole series of coats, is lessened with the removal of each, and vanishes with the final one, which you supposed would introduce you to the hidden pearl. March 23d.--Mr. B. and I took a cab Saturday afternoon, and drove out of the city in the direction of Knowsley. On our way we saw many gentlemen's or rich people's places, some of them dignified with the title of Halls,--with lodges at their gates, and standing considerably removed from the road. The greater part of them were built of brick,--a material with which I have not been accustomed to associate ideas of grandeur; but it was much in use here in Lancashire, in the Elizabethan age,--more, I think, than now. These suburban residences, however, are of much later date than Elizabeth's time. Among other places, Mr. B. called at the Hazels, the residence of Sir Thomas Birch, a kinsman of his. It is a large brick mansion, and has old trees and shrubbery about it, the latter very fine and verdant,--hazels, holly, rhododendron, etc. Mr. B. went in, and shortly afterwards Sir Thomas Birch came out,--a very frank and hospitable gentleman,--and pressed me to enter and take luncheon, which latter hospitality I declined. His house is in very nice order. He had a good many pictures, and, amongst them, a small portrait of his mother, painted by Sir Thomas Lawrence, when a youth. It is unfinished, and when the painter was at the height of his fame, he was asked to finish it. But Lawrence, after looking at the picture, refused to retouch it, saying that there was a merit in this early sketch which he could no longer attain. It was really a very beautiful picture of a lovely woman. Sir Thomas Birch proposed to go with us and get us admittance into Knowsley Park, where we could not possibly find entrance without his aid. So we went to the stables, where the old groom had already shown hospitality to our cabman, by giving his horse some provender, and himself some beer. There seemed to be a kindly and familiar sort of intercourse between the old servant and the Baronet, each of them, I presume, looking on their connection as indissoluble. The gate-warden of Knowsley Park was an old woman, who readily gave us admittance at Sir Thomas Birch's request. The family of the Earl of Derby is not now at the Park. It was a very bad time of year to see it; the trees just showing the earliest symptoms of vitality, while whole acres of ground were covered with large, dry, brown ferns,--which I suppose are very beautiful when green. Two or three hares scampered out of these ferns, and sat on their hind legs looking about them, as we drove by. A sheet of water had been drawn off, in order to deepen its bed. The oaks did not seem to me so magnificent as they should be in an ancient noble property like this. A century does not accomplish so much for a tree, in this slow region, as it does in ours. I think, however, that they were more individual and picturesque, with more character in their contorted trunks; therein somewhat resembling apple-trees. Our forest-trees have a great sameness of character, like our people,-- because one and the other grow too closely. In one part of the Park we came to a small tower, for what purpose I know not, unless as an observatory; and near it was a marble statue on a high pedestal. The statue had been long exposed to the weather, and was overgrown and ingrained with moss and lichens, so that its classic beauty was in some sort gothicized. A half-mile or so from this point, we saw the mansion of Kuowsley, in the midst of a very fine prospect, with a tolerably high ridge of hills in the distance. The house itself is exceedingly vast, a front and two wings, with suites of rooms, I suppose, interminable. The oldest part, Sir Thomas Birch told us, is a tower of the time of Henry VII. Nevertheless, the effect is not overwhelming, because the edifice looks low in proportion to its great extent over the ground; and besides, a good deal of it is built of brick, with white window-frames, so that, looking at separate parts, I might think them American structures, without the smart addition of green Venetian blinds, so universal with us. Portions, however, were built of red freestone; and if I had looked at it longer, no doubt I should have admired it more. We merely drove round it from the rear to the front. It stands in my memory rather like a college or a hospital, than as the ancestral residence of a great English noble. We left the Park in another direction, and passed through a part of Lord Sefton's property, by a private road. By the by, we saw half a dozen policemen, in their blue coats and embroidered collars, after entering Knowsley Park; but the Earl's own servants would probably have supplied their place, had the family been at home. The mansion of Croxteth, the seat of Lord Sefton, stands near the public road, and, though large, looked of rather narrow compass after Knowsley. The rooks were talking together very loquaciously in the high tops of the trees near Sir Thomas Birch's house, it being now their building-time. It was a very pleasant sound, the noise being comfortably softened by the remote height. Sir Thomas said that more than half a century ago the rooks used to inhabit another grove of lofty trees, close in front of the house; but being noisy, and not altogether cleanly in their habits, the ladies of the family grew weary of them and wished to remove them. Accordingly, the colony was driven away, and made their present settlement in a grove behind the house. Ever since that time not a rook has built in the ancient grove; every year, however, one or another pair of young rooks attempt to build among the deserted tree-tops, but the old rooks tear the new nest to pieces as often as it is put together. Thus, either the memory of aged individual rooks or an authenticated tradition in their society has preserved the idea that the old grove is forbidden and inauspicious to them. A soil of General Arnold, named William Fitch Arnold, and born in 1794, now possesses the estate of Little Messenden Abbey, Bucks County, and is a magistrate for that county. He was formerly Captain of the 19th Lancers. He has now two sons and four daughters. The other three sons of General Arnold, all older than this one, and all military men, do not appear to have left children; but a daughter married to Colonel Phipps, of the Mulgrave family, has a son and two daughters. I question whether any of our true-hearted Revolutionary heroes have left a more prosperous progeny than this arch-traitor. I should like to know their feelings with respect to their ancestor. April 3d.--I walked with J-----, two days ago, to Eastham, a village on the road to Chester, and five or six miles from Rock Ferry. On our way we passed through a village, in the centre of which was a small stone pillar, standing on a pedestal of several steps, on which children were sitting and playing. I take it to have been an old Catholic cross; at least, I know not what else it is. It seemed very ancient. Eastham is the finest old English village I have seen, with many antique houses, and with altogether a rural and picturesque aspect, unlike anything in America, and yet possessing a familiar look, as if it were something I had dreamed about. There were thatched stone cottages intermixed with houses of a better kind, and likewise a gateway and gravelled walk, that perhaps gave admittance to the Squire's mansion. It was not merely one long, wide street, as in most New England villages, but there were several crooked ways, gathering the whole settlement into a pretty small compass. In the midst of it stood a venerable church of the common red freestone, with a most reverend air, considerably smaller than that of Bebbington, but more beautiful, and looking quite as old. There was ivy on its spire and elsewhere. It looked very quiet and peaceful, and as if it had received the people into its low arched door every Sabbath for many centuries. There were many tombstones about it, some level with the ground, some raised on blocks of stone, on low pillars, moss-grown and weather-worn; and probably these were but the successors of other stones that had quite crumbled away, or been buried by the accumulation of dead men's dust above them. In the centre of the churchyard stood an old yew-tree, with immense trunk, which was all decayed within, so that it is a wonder how the tree retains any life,--which, nevertheless, it does. It was called "the old Yew of Eastham," six hundred years ago! After passing through the churchyard, we saw the village inn on the other side. The doors were fastened, but a girl peeped out of the window at us, and let us in, ushering us into a very neat parlor. There was a cheerful fire in the grate, a straw carpet on the floor, a mahogany sideboard, and a mahogany table in the middle of the room; and, on the walls, the portraits of mine host (no doubt) and of his wife and daughters,--a very nice parlor, and looking like what I might have found in a country tavern at home, only this was an ancient house, and there is nothing at home like the glimpse, from the window, of the church, and its red, ivy-grown tower. I ordered some lunch, being waited on by the girl, who was very neat, intelligent, and comely,--and more respectful than a New England maid. As we came out of the inn, some village urchins left their play, and ran to me begging, calling me "Master!" They turned at once from play to begging, and, as I gave them nothing, they turned to their play again. This village is too far from Liverpool to have been much injured as yet by the novelty of cockney residences, which have grown up almost everywhere else, so far as I have visited. About a mile from it, however, is the landing-place of a steamer (which runs regularly, except in the winter months), where a large, new hotel is built. The grounds about it are extensive and well wooded. We got some biscuits at the hotel, and I gave the waiter (a splendid gentleman in black) four halfpence, being the surplus of a shilling. He bowed and thanked me very humbly. An American does not easily bring his mind to the small measure of English liberality to servants; if anything is to be given, we are ashamed not to give more, especially to clerical-looking persons, in black suits and white neckcloths. I stood on the Exchange at noon, to-day, to see the 18th Regiment, the Connaught Rangers, marching down to embark for the East. They were a body of young, healthy, and cheerful-looking men, and looked greatly better than the dirty crowd that thronged to gaze at them. The royal banner of England, quartering the lion, the leopard, and the harp, waved on the town-house, and looked gorgeous and venerable. Here and there a woman exchanged greetings with an individual soldier, as he marched along, and gentlemen shook hands with officers with whom they happened to be acquainted. Being a stranger in the land, it seemed as if I could see the future in the present better than if I had been an Englishman; so I questioned with myself how many of these ruddy-cheeked young fellows, marching so stoutly away, would ever tread English ground again. The populace did not evince any enthusiasm, yet there could not possibly be a war to which the country could assent more fully than to this. I somewhat doubt whether the English populace really feels a vital interest in the nation. Some years ago, a piece of rude marble sculpture, representing St. George and the Dragon, was found over the fireplace of a cottage near Rock Ferry, on the road to Chester. It was plastered over with pipe-clay, and its existence was unknown to the cottagers, until a lady noticed the projection and asked what it was. It was supposed to have originally adorned the walls of the Priory at Birkenhead. It measured fourteen and a half by nine inches, in which space were the heads of a king and queen, with uplifted hands, in prayer; their daughters also in prayer, and looking very grim; a lamb, the slain dragon, and St. George, proudly prancing on what looks like a donkey, brandishing a sword over his head. The following is a legend inscribed on the inner margin of a curious old box:-- "From Birkenhead into Hilbree A squirrel might leap from tree to tree." I do not know where Hilbree is; but all round Birkenhead a squirrel would scarcely find a single tree to climb upon. All is pavement and brick buildings now. Good Friday.--The English and Irish think it good to plant on this day, because it was the day when our Saviour's body was laid in the grave. Seeds, therefore, are certain to rise again. At dinner the other day, Mrs. ------ mentioned the origin of Franklin's adoption of the customary civil dress, when going to court as a diplomatist. It was simply that his tailor had disappointed him of his court suit, and he wore his plain one with great reluctance, because he had no other. Afterwards, gaining great success and praise by his mishap, he continued to wear it from policy. The grandmother of Mrs. ------ died fifty years ago, at the age of twenty-eight. She had great personal charms, and among them a head of beautiful chestnut hair. After her burial in the family tomb, the coffin of one of her children was laid on her own, so that the lid seems to have decayed, or been broken from this cause; at any rate, this was the case when the tomb was opened about a year ago. The grandmother's coffin was then found to be filled with beautiful, glossy, living chestnut ringlets, into which her whole substance seems to have been transformed, for there was nothing else but these shining curls, the growth of half a century in the tomb. An old man, with a ringlet of his youthful mistress treasured on his heart, might be supposed to witness this wonderful thing. Madam ------, who is now at my house, and very infirm, though not old, was once carried to the grave, and on the point of being buried. It was in Barbary, where her husband was Consul-General. He was greatly attached to her, and told the pall-bearers at the grave that he must see her once more. When her face was uncovered, he thought he discerned signs of life, and felt a warmth. Finally she revived, and for many years afterwards supposed the funeral procession to have been a dream; she having been partially conscious throughout, and having felt the wind blowing on her, and lifting the shroud from her feet,--for I presume she was to be buried in Oriental style, without a coffin. Long after, in London, when she was speaking of this dream, her husband told her the facts, and she fainted away. Whenever it is now mentioned, her face turns white. Mr. ------, her son, was born on shipboard, on the coast of Spain, and claims four nationalities,--those of Spain, England, Ireland, and the United States; his father being Irish, his mother a native of England, himself a naturalized citizen of the United States, and his father having registered his birth and baptism in a Catholic church of Gibraltar, which gives him Spanish privileges. He has hereditary claims to a Spanish countship. His infancy was spent in Barbary, and his lips first lisped in Arabic. There has been an unsettled and wandering character in his whole life. The grandfather of Madam ------, who was a British officer, once horsewhipped Paul Jones,--Jones being a poltroon. How singular it is that the personal courage of famous warriors should be so often called in question! May 20th.--I went yesterday to a hospital to take the oath of a mate to a protest. He had met with a severe accident by a fall on shipboard. The hospital is a large edifice of red freestone, with wide, airy passages, resounding with footsteps passing through them. A porter was waiting in the vestibule. Mr. Wilding and myself were shown to the parlor, in the first instance,--a neat, plainly furnished room, with newspapers and pamphlets lying on the table and sofas. Soon the surgeon of the house came,--a brisk, alacritous, civil, cheerful young man, by whom we were shown to the apartment where the mate was lying. As we went through the principal passage, a man was borne along in a chair looking very pale, rather wild, and altogether as if he had just been through great tribulation, and hardly knew as yet whereabouts he was. I noticed that his left arm was but a stump, and seemed done up in red baize,--at all events it was of a scarlet line. The surgeon shook his right hand cheerily, and he was carried on. This was a patient who had just had his arm cut off. He had been a rough person apparently, but now there was a kind of tenderness about him, through pain and helplessness. In the chamber where the mate lay, there were seven beds, all of them occupied by persons who had met with accidents. In the centre of the room was a stationary pine table, about the length of a man, intended, I suppose, to stretch patients upon for necessary operations. The furniture of the beds was plain and homely. I thought that the faces of the patients all looked remarkably intelligent, though they were evidently men of the lower classes. Suffering had educated them morally and intellectually. They gazed curiously at Mr. Wilding and me, but nobody said a word. In the bed next to the mate lay a little boy with a broken thigh. The surgeon observed that children generally did well with accidents; and this boy certainly looked very bright and cheerful. There was nothing particularly interesting about the mate. After finishing our business, the surgeon showed us into another room of the surgical ward, likewise devoted to cases of accident and injury. All the beds were occupied, and in two of them lay two American sailors who had recently been stabbed. They had been severely hurt, but were doing very well. The surgeon thought that it was a good arrangement to have several cases together, and that the patients kept up one another's spirits,--being often merry together. Smiles and laughter may operate favorably enough from bed to bed; but dying groans, I should think, must be somewhat of a discouragement. Nevertheless, the previous habits and modes of life of such people as compose the more numerous class of patients in a hospital must be considered before deciding this matter. It is very possible that their misery likes such bedfellows as it here finds. As we were taking our leave, the surgeon asked us if we should not like to see the operating-room; and before we could reply he threw open the door, and behold, there was a roll of linen "garments rolled in blood,"-- and a bloody fragment of a human arm! The surgeon glanced at me, and smiled kindly, but as if pitying my discomposure. Gervase Elwes, son of Sir Gervase Elwes, Baronet, of Stoke, Suffolk, married Isabella, daughter of Sir Thomas Hervey, Knight, and sister of the first Earl of Bristol. This Gervase died before his father, but left a son, Henry, who succeeded to the Baronetcy. Sir Henry died without issue, and was succeeded by his sister's son, John Maggott Twining, who assumed the name of Elwes. He was the famous miser, and must have had Hawthorne blood in him, through his grandfather, Gervase, whose mother was a Hawthorne. It was to this Gervase that my ancestor, William Hawthorne, devised some land in Massachusetts, "if he would come over, and enjoy it." My ancestor calls him his nephew. June 12th.--Barry Cornwall, Mr. Procter, called on me a week or more ago, but I happened not to be in the office. Saturday last he called again, and as I had crossed to Rock Park he followed me thither. A plain, middle-sized, English-looking gentleman, elderly, with short, white hair, and particularly quiet in his manners. He talks in a somewhat low tone without emphasis, scarcely distinct. His head has a good outline, and would look well in marble. I liked him very well. He talked unaffectedly, showing an author's regard to his reputation, and was evidently pleased to hear of his American celebrity. He said that in his younger days he was a scientific pugilist, and once took a journey to have a sparring encounter with the Game-Chicken. Certainly, no one would have looked for a pugilist in this subdued old gentleman. He is now Commissioner of Lunacy, and makes periodical circuits through the country, attending to the business of his office. He is slightly deaf, and this may be the cause of his unaccented utterance,--owing to his not being able to regulate his voice exactly by his own ear. He is a good man, and much better expressed by his real name, Procter, than by his poetical one, Barry Cornwall. . . . . He took my hand in both of his at parting. . . . . June 17th.--At eleven, at this season (and how much longer I know not), there is still a twilight. If we could only have such dry, deliciously warm evenings as we used to have in our own land, what enjoyment there might be in these interminable twilights! But here we close the window-shutters, and make ourselves cosey by a coal-fire. All three of the children, and, I think, my wife and myself, are going through the hooping-cough. The east-wind of this season and region is most horrible. There have been no really warm days; for though the sunshine is sometimes hot, there is never any diffused heat throughout the air. On passing from the sunshine into the shade, we immediately feel too cool. June 20th.--The vagabond musicians about town are very numerous. On board the steam ferry-boats, I have heretofore spoken of them. They infest them from May to November, for very little gain apparently. A shilling a day per man must be the utmost of their emolument. It is rather sad to see somewhat respectable old men engaged in this way, with two or three younger associates. Their instruments look much the worse for wear, and even my unmusical ear can distinguish more discord than harmony. They appear to be a very quiet and harmless people. Sometimes there is a woman playing on a fiddle, while her husband blows a wind instrument. In the streets it is not unusual to find a band of half a dozen performers, who, without any provocation or reason whatever, sound their brazen instruments till the houses re-echo. Sometimes one passes a man who stands whistling a tune most unweariably, though I never saw anybody give him anything. The ballad-singers are the strangest, from the total lack of any music in their cracked voices. Sometimes you see a space cleared in the street, and a foreigner playing, while a girl-- weather-beaten, tanned, and wholly uncomely in face and shabby in attire dances ballets. The common people look on, and never criticise or treat any of these poor devils unkindly or uncivilly; but I do not observe that they give them anything. A crowd--or, at all events, a moderate-sized group--is much more easily drawn together here than with us. The people have a good deal of idle and momentary curiosity, and are always ready to stop when another person has stopped, so as to see what has attracted his attention. I hardly ever pause to look at a shop-window, without being immediately incommoded by boys and men, who stop likewise, and would forthwith throng the pavement if I did not move on. June 30th.--If it is not known how and when a man dies, it makes a ghost of him for many years thereafter, perhaps for centuries. King Arthur is an example; also the Emperor Frederic, and other famous men, who were thought to be alive ages after their disappearance. So with private individuals. I had an uncle John, who went a voyage to sea about the beginning of the War of 1812, and has never returned to this hour. But as long as his mother lived, as many as twenty years, she never gave up the hope of his return, and was constantly hearing stories of persons whose description answered to his. Some people actually affirmed that they had seen him in various parts of the world. Thus, so far as her belief was concerned, he still walked the earth. And even to this day I never see his name, which is no very uncommon one, without thinking that this may be the lost uncle. Thus, too, the French Dauphin still exists, or a kind of ghost of him; the three Tells, too, in the cavern of Uri. July 6th.--Mr. Cecil, the other day, was saying that England could produce as fine peaches as any other country. I asked what was the particular excellence of a peach, and he answered, "Its cooling and refreshing quality, like that of a melon!" Just think of this idea of the richest, most luscious, of all fruits! But the untravelled Englishman has no more idea of what fruit is than of what sunshine is; he thinks he has tasted the first and felt the last, but they are both alike watery. I heard a lady in Lord Street talking about the "broiling sun," when I was almost in a shiver. They keep up their animal heat by means of wine and ale, else they could not bear this climate. July 19th.--A week ago I made a little tour in North Wales with Mr. Bright. We left Birkenhead by railway for Chester at two o'clock; thence for Bangor; thence by carriage over the Menai bridge to Beaumaris. At Beaumaris, a fine old castle,--quite coming up to my idea of what an old castle should be. A gray, ivy-hung exterior wall, with large round towers at intervals; within this another wall, the place of the portcullis between; and again, within the second wall the castle itself, with a spacious green court-yard in front. The outer wall is so thick that a passage runs in it all round the castle, which covers a space of three acres. This passage gives access to a chapel, still very perfect, and to various apartments in the towers,--all exceedingly dismal, and giving very unpleasant impressions of the way in which the garrison of the castle lived. The main castle is entirely roofless, but the hall and other rooms are pointed out by the guide, and the whole is tapestried with abundant ivy, so that my impression is of gray walls, with here and there a vast green curtain; a carpet of green over the floors of halls and apartments; and festoons around all the outer battlement, with an uneven and rather perilous foot-path running along the top. There is a fine vista through the castle itself, and the two gateways of the two encompassing walls. The passage within the wall is very rude, both underfoot and on each side, with various ascents and descents of rough steps,--sometimes so low that your head is in danger; and dark, except where a little light comes through a loophole or window in the thickness of the wall. In front of the castle a tennis-court was fitted up, by laying a smooth pavement on the ground, and casing the walls with tin or zinc, if I recollect aright. All this was open to the sky; and when we were there, some young men of the town were playing at the game. There are but very few of these tennis-courts in England; and this old castle was a very strange place for one. The castle is the property of Sir Richard Bulkely, whose seat is in the vicinity, and who owns a great part of the island of Anglesea, on which Beaumaris lies. The hotel where we stopped was the Bulkely Arms, and Sir Richard has a kind of feudal influence in the town. In the morning we walked along a delightful road, bordering on the Menai Straits, to Bangor Ferry. It was really a very pleasant road, overhung by a growth of young wood, exceedingly green and fresh. English trees are green all about their stems, owing to the creeping plants that overrun them. There were some flowers in the hedges, such as we cultivate in gardens. At the ferry, there was a whitewashed cottage; a woman or two, some children, and a fisherman-like personage, walking to and fro before the door. The scenery of the strait is very beautiful and picturesque, and directly opposite to us lay Bangor,--the strait being here almost a mile across. An American ship from Boston lay in the middle of it. The ferry-boat was just putting off for the Bangor side, and, by the aid of a sail, soon neared the shore. At Bangor we went to a handsome hotel, and hired a carriage and two horses for some Welsh place, the name of which I forget; neither can I remember a single name of the places through which we posted that day, nor could I spell them if I heard them pronounced, nor pronounce them if I saw them spelt. It was a circuit of about forty miles, bringing us to Conway at last. I remember a great slate-quarry; and also that many of the cottages, in the first part of our drive, were built of blocks of slate. The mountains were very bold, thrusting themselves up abruptly in peaks,--not of the dumpling formation, which is somewhat too prevalent among the New England mountains. At one point we saw Snowdon, with its bifold summit. We also visited the smaller waterfall (this is a translation of an unpronounceable Welsh name), which is the largest in Wales. It was a very beautiful rapid, and the guide-book considers it equal in sublimity to Niagara. Likewise there were one or two lakes which the guide-book greatly admired, but which to me, who remembered a hundred sheets of blue water in New England, seemed nothing more than sullen and dreary puddles, with bare banks, and wholly destitute of beauty. I think they were nowhere more than a hundred yards across. But the hills were certainly very good, and, though generally bare of trees, their outlines thereby were rendered the stronger and more striking. Many of the Welsh women, particularly the older ones, wear black beaver hats, high-crowned, and almost precisely like men's. It makes them look ugly and witchlike. Welsh is still the prevalent language, and the only one spoken by a great many of the inhabitants. I have had Welsh people in my office, on official business, with whom I could not communicate except through an interpreter. At some unutterable village we went into a little church, where we saw an old stone image of a warrior, lying on his back, with his hands clasped. It was the natural son (if I remember rightly) of David, Prince of Wales, and was doubtless the better part of a thousand years old. There was likewise a stone coffin of still greater age; some person of rank and renown had mouldered to dust within it, but it was now open and empty. Also, there were monumental brasses on the walls, engraved with portraits of a gentleman and lady in the costumes of Elizabeth's time. Also, on one of the pews, a brass record of some persons who slept in the vault beneath; so that, every Sunday, the survivors and descendants kneel and worship directly over their dead ancestors. In the churchyard, on a flat tombstone, there was the representation of a harp. I supposed that it must be the resting-place of a bard; but the inscription was in memory of a merchant, and a skilful manufacturer of harps. This was a very delightful town. We saw a great many things which it is now too late to describe, the sharpness of the first impression being gone; but I think I can produce something of the sentiment of it hereafter. We arrived at Conway late in the afternoon, to take the rail for Chester. I must see Conway, with its old gray wall and its unrivalled castle, again. It was better than Beaumaris, and I never saw anything more picturesque than the prospect from the castle-wall towards the sea. We reached Chester at 10 P. M. The next morning, Mr. Bright left for Liverpool before I was awake. I visited the Cathedral, where the organ was sounding, sauntered through the Rows, bought some playthings for the children, and left for home soon after twelve. Liverpool, August 8th.--Visiting the Zoological Gardens the other day with J-----, it occurred to me what a fantastic kind of life a person connected with them might be depicted as leading,--a child, for instance. The grounds are very extensive, and include arrangements for all kinds of exhibitions calculated to attract the idle people of a great city. In one enclosure is a bear, who climbs a pole to get cake and gingerbread from the spectators. Elsewhere, a circular building, with compartments for lions, wolves, and tigers. In another part of the garden is a colony of monkeys, the skeleton of an elephant, birds of all kinds. Swans and various rare water-fowl were swimming on a piece of water, which was green, by the by, and when the fowls dived they stirred up black mud. A stork was parading along the margin, with melancholy strides of its long legs, and came slowly towards its, as if for companionship. In one apartment was an obstreperously noisy society of parrots and macaws, most gorgeous and diversified of hue. These different colonies of birds and beasts were scattered about in various parts of the grounds, so that you came upon them unexpectedly. Also, there were archery and shooting-grounds, and a sewing. A theatre, also, at which a rehearsal was going on,--we standing at one of the doors, and looking in towards the dusky stage where the company, in their ordinary dresses, were rehearsing something that had a good deal of dance and action in it. In the open air there was an arrangement of painted scenery representing a wide expanse of mountains, with a city at their feet, and before it the sea, with actual water, and large vessels upon it, the vessels having only the side that would be presented to the spectator. But the scenery was so good that at a first casual glance I almost mistook it for reality. There was a refreshment-room, with drinks and cakes and pastry, but, so far as I saw, no substantial victual. About in the centre of the garden there was an actual, homely-looking, small dwelling-house, where perhaps the overlookers of the place live. Now this might be wrought, in an imaginative description, into a pleasant sort of a fool's paradise, where all sorts of unreal delights should cluster round some suitable personage; and it would relieve, in a very odd and effective way, the stern realities of life on the outside of the garden-walls. I saw a little girl, simply dressed, who seemed to have her habitat within the grounds. There was also a daguerreotypist, with his wife and family, carrying on his business in a shanty, and perhaps having his home in its inner room. He seemed to be an honest, intelligent, pleasant young man, and his wife a pleasant woman; and I had J-----'s daguerreotype taken for three shillings, in a little gilded frame. In the description of the garden, the velvet turf, of a charming verdure, and the shrubbery and shadowy walks and large trees, and the slopes and inequalities of ground, must not he forgotten. In one place there was a maze and labyrinth, where a person might wander a long while in the vain endeavor to get out, although all the time looking at the exterior garden, over the low hedges that border the walks of the maze. And this is like the inappreciable difficulties that often beset us in life. I will see it again before long, and get some additional record of it. August 10th.--We went to the Isle of Man, a few weeks ago, where S----- and the children spent a fortnight. I spent two Sundays with them. I never saw anything prettier than the little church of Kirk Madden there. It stands in a perfect seclusion of shadowy trees,--a plain little church, that would not be at all remarkable in another situation, but is most picturesque in its solitude and bowery environment. The churchyard is quite full and overflowing with graves, and extends down the gentle slope of a hill, with a dark mass of shadow above it. Some of the tombstones are flat on the ground, some erect, or laid horizontally on low pillars or masonry. There were no very old dates on any of these stones; for the climate soon effaces inscriptions, and makes a stone of fifty years look as old as one of five hundred,--unless it be slate, or something harder than the usual red freestone. There was an old Runic monument, however, near the centre of the churchyard, that had some strange sculpture on it, and an inscription still legible by persons learned in such matters. Against the tower of the church, too, there is a circular stone, with carving on it, said to be of immemorial antiquity. There is likewise a tall marble monument, as much as fifty feet high, erected some years ago to the memory of one of the Athol family by his brother-officers of a local regiment of which he was colonel. At one of the side-entrances of the church, and forming the threshold within the thickness of the wall, so that the feet of all who enter must tread on it, is a flat tombstone of somebody who felt himself a sinner, no doubt, and desired to be thus trampled upon. The stone is much worn. The structure is extremely plain inside and very small. On the walls, over the pews, are several monumental sculptures,--a quite elaborate one to a Colonel Murray, of the Coldstreamn Guards; his military profession being designated by banners and swords in marble.--Another was to a farmer. On one side of the church-tower there was a little penthouse, or lean-to,--merely a stone roof, about three or four feet high, and supported by a single pillar, beneath which was once deposited the bier. I have let too much time pass before attempting to record my impressions of the Isle of Man; but, as regards this church, no description can come up to its quiet beauty, its seclusion, and its every requisite for an English country church. Last Sunday I went to Eastham, and, entering the churchyard, sat down on a tombstone under the yew-tree which has been known for centuries as the Great Tree of Eastham. Some of the village people were sitting on the graves near the door; and an old woman came towards me, and said, in a low, kindly, admonishing tone, that I must not let the sexton see me, because he would not allow any one to be there in sacrament-time. I inquired why she and her companions were there, and she said they were waiting for the sacrament. So I thanked her, gave her a sixpence, and departed. Close under the eaves, I saw two upright stones, in memory of two old servants of the Stanley family,--one over ninety, and the other over eighty years of age. August 12th.--J----- and I went to Birkenhead Park yesterday. There is a large ornamental gateway to the Park, and the grounds within are neatly laid out, with borders of shrubbery. There is a sheet of water, with swans and other aquatic fowl, which swim about, and are fed with dainties by the visitors. Nothing can be more beautiful than a swan. It is the ideal of a goose,--a goose beautified and beatified. There were not a great many visitors, but some children were dancing on the green, and a few lover-like people straying about. I think the English behave better than the Americans at similar places. There was a camera-obscure, very wretchedly indistinct. At the refreshment-room were ginger-beer and British wines. August 21st.--I was in the Crown Court on Saturday, sitting in the sheriff's seat. The judge was Baron ------, an old gentleman of sixty, with very large, long features. His wig helped him to look like some strange kind of animal,--very queer, but yet with a sagacious, and, on the whole, beneficent aspect. During the session some mischievous young barrister occupied himself with sketching the judge in pencil; and, being handed about, it found its way to me. It was very like and very laughable, but hardly caricatured. The judicial wig is an exceedingly odd affair; and as it covers both ears, it would seem intended to prevent his Lordship, and justice in his person, from hearing any of the case on either side, that thereby he may decide the better. It is like the old idea of blindfolding the statue of Justice. It seems to me there is less formality, less distance between the judge, jury, witnesses, and bar, in the English courts than in our own. The judge takes a very active part in the trial, constantly asking a question of the witness on the stand, making remarks on the conduct of the trial, putting in his word on all occasions, and allowing his own sense of the matter in hand to be pretty plainly seen; so that, before the trial is over, and long before his own charge is delivered, he must have exercised a very powerful influence over the minds of the jury. All this is done, not without dignity, yet in a familiar kind of way. It is a sort of paternal supervision of the whole matter, quite unlike the cold awfulness of an American judge. But all this may be owing partly to the personal characteristics of Baron ------. It appeared to me, however, that, from the closer relations of all parties, truth was likely to be arrived at and justice to be done. As an innocent man, I should not be afraid to be tried by Baron ------. EATON HALL. August 24th.--I went to Eaton Hall yesterday with my wife and Mr. G. P. Bradford, via Chester. On our way, at the latter place, we visited St. John's Church. It is built of the same red freestone as the cathedral, and looked exceedingly antique, and venerable; this kind of stone, from its softness, and its liability to be acted upon by the weather, being liable to an early decay. Nevertheless, I believe the church was built above a thousand years ago,--some parts of it, at least,--and the surface of the tower and walls is worn away and hollowed in shallow sweeps by the hand of Time. There were broken niches in several places, where statues had formerly stood. All, except two or three, had fallen or crumbled away, and those which remained were much damaged. The face and details of the figure were almost obliterated. There were many gravestones round the church, but none of them of any antiquity. Probably, as the names become indistinguishable on the older stones, the graves are dug over again, and filled with new occupants and covered with new stones, or perhaps with the old ones newly inscribed. Closely connected with the church was the clergyman's house, a comfortable-looking residence; and likewise in the churchyard, with tombstones all about it, even almost at the threshold, so that the doorstep itself might have been a tombstone, was another house, of respectable size and aspect. We surmised that this might be the sexton's dwelling, but it proved not to be so; and a woman, answering our knock, directed us to the place where he might be found. So Mr. Bradford and I went in search of him, leaving S----- seated on a tombstone. The sexton was a jolly-looking, ruddy-faced man, a mechanic of some sort, apparently, and he followed us to the churchyard with much alacrity. We found S----- standing at a gateway, which opened into the most ancient, and now quite ruinous, part of the church, the present edifice covering much less ground than it did some centuries ago. We went through this gateway, and found ourselves in an enclosure of venerable walls, open to the sky, with old Norman arches standing about, beneath the loftiest of which the sexton told us the high altar used to stand. Of course, there were weeds and ivy growing in the crevices, but not so abundantly as I have seen them elsewhere. The sexton pointed out a piece of a statue that had once stood in one of the niches, and which he himself, I think, had dug up from several feet below the earth; also, in a niche of the walls, high above our heads, he showed us an ancient wooden coffin, hewn out of a solid log of oak, the hollow being made rudely in the shape of a human figure. This too had been dug up, and nobody knew how old it was. While we looked at all this solemn old trumpery, the curate, quite a young man, stood at the back door of his house, elevated considerably above the ruins, with his young wife (I presume) and a friend or two, chatting cheerfully among themselves. It was pleasant to see them there. After examining the ruins, we went inside of the church, and found it a dim and dusky old place, quite paved over with tombstones, not an inch of space being left in the aisles or near the altar, or in any nook or corner, uncovered by a tombstone. There were also mural monuments and escutcheons, and close against the wall lay the mutilated statue of a Crusader, with his legs crossed, in the style which one has so often read about. The old fellow seemed to have been represented in chain armor; but he had been more battered and bruised since death than even during his pugnacious life, and his nose was almost knocked away. This figure had been dug up many years ago, and nobody knows whom it was meant to commemorate. The nave of the church is supported by two rows of Saxon pillars, not very lofty, but six feet six inches (so the sexton says) in diameter. They are covered with plaster, which was laid on ages ago, and is now so hard and smooth that I took the pillars to be really composed of solid shafts of gray stone. But, at one end of the church, the plaster had been removed from two of the pillars, in order to discover whether they were still sound enough to support the building; and they prove to be made of blocks of red freestone, just as sound as when it came from the quarry; for though this stone soon crumbles in the open air, it is as good as indestructible when sheltered from the weather. It looked very strange to see the fresh hue of these two pillars amidst the dingy antiquity of the rest of the structure. The body of the church is covered with pews, the wooden enclosures of which seemed of antique fashion. There were also modern stoves; but the sexton said it was very cold there, in spite of the stoves. It had, I must say, a disagreeable odor pervading it, in which the dead people of long ago had doubtless some share,--a musty odor, by no means amounting to a stench, but unpleasant, and, I should think, unwholesome. Old wood-work, and old stones, and antiquity of all kinds, moral and physical, go to make up this smell. I observed it in the cathedral, and Chester generally has it, especially under the Rows. After all, the necessary damp and lack of sunshine, in such a shadowy old church as this, have probably more to do with it than the dead people have; although I did think the odor was particularly strong over some of the tombstones. Not having shillings to give the sexton, we were forced to give him half a crown. The Church of St. John is outside of the city walls. Entering the East gate, we walked awhile under the Rows, bought our tickets for Eaton Hall and its gardens, and likewise some playthings for the children; for this old city of Chester seems to me to possess an unusual number of toy-shops. Finally we took a cab, and drove to the Hall, about four miles distant, nearly the whole of the way lying through the wooded Park. There are many sorts of trees, making up a wilderness, which looked not unlike the woods of our own Concord, only less wild. The English oak is not a handsome tree, being short and sturdy, with a round, thick mass of foliage, lying all within its own bounds. It was a showery day. Had there been any sunshine, there might doubtless have been many beautiful effects of light and shadow in these woods. We saw one or two herds of deer, quietly feeding, a hundred yards or so distant. They appeared to be somewhat wilder than cattle, but, I think, not much wilder than sheep. Their ancestors have probably been in a half-domesticated state, receiving food at the hands of man, in winter, for centuries. There is a kind of poetry in this, quite as much as if they were really wild deer, such as their forefathers were, when Hugh Lupus used to hunt them. Our miserable cab drew up at the steps of Eaton Hall, and, ascending under the portico, the door swung silently open, and we were received very civilly by two old men,--one, a tall footman in livery; the other, of higher grade, in plain clothes. The entrance-hall is very spacious, and the floor is tessellated or somehow inlaid with marble. There was statuary in marble on the floor, and in niches stood several figures in antique armor, of various dates; some with lances, and others with battle-axes and swords. There was a two-handed sword, as much as six feet long; but not nearly so ponderous as I have supposed this kind of weapon to be, from reading of it. I could easily have brandished it. I don't think I am a good sight-seer; at least, I soon get satisfied with looking at the sights, and wish to go on to the next. The plainly dressed old man now led us into a long corridor, which goes, I think, the whole length of the house, about five hundred feet, arched all the way, and lengthened interminably by a looking-glass at the end, in which I saw our own party approaching like a party of strangers. But I have so often seen this effect produced in dry-goods stores and elsewhere, that I was not much impressed. There were family portraits and other pictures, and likewise pieces of statuary, along this arched corridor; and it communicated with a chapel with a scriptural altar-piece, copied from Rubens, and a picture of St. Michael and the Dragon, and two, or perhaps three, richly painted windows. Everything here is entirely new and fresh, this part having been repaired, and never yet inhabited by the family. This brand-newness makes it much less effective than if it had been lived in; and I felt pretty much as if I were strolling through any other renewed house. After all, the utmost force of man can do positively very little towards making grand things or beautiful things. The imagination can do so much more, merely on shutting one's eyes, that the actual effect seems meagre; so that a new house, unassociated with the past, is exceedingly unsatisfactory, especially when you have heard that the wealth mud skill of man has here done its best. Besides, the rooms, as we saw them, did not look by any means their best, the carpets not being down, and the furniture being covered with protective envelopes. However, rooms cannot be seen to advantage by daylight; it being altogether essential to the effect, that they should be illuminated by artificial light, which takes them somewhat out of the region of bare reality. Nevertheless, there was undoubtedly great splendor, for the details of which I refer to the guide-book. Among the family portraits, there was one of a lady famous for her beautiful hand; and she was holding it up to notice in the funniest way, --and very beautiful it certainly was. The private apartments of the family were not shown us. I should think it impossible for the owner of this house to imbue it with his personality to such a degree as to feel it to be his home. It must be like a small lobster in a shell much too large for him. After seeing what was to be seen of the rooms, we visited the gardens, in which are noble conservatories and hot-houses, containing all manner of rare and beautiful flowers, and tropical fruits. I noticed some large pines, looking as if they were really made of gold. The gardener (under-gardener I suppose he was) who showed this part of the spectacle was very intelligent as well as kindly, and seemed to take an interest in his business. He gave S----- a purple everlasting flower, which will endure a great many years, as a memento of our visit to Eaton Hall. Finally, we took a view of the front of the edifice, which is very fine, and much more satisfactory than the interior,--and returned to Chester. We strolled about under the unsavory Rows, sometimes scudding from side to side of the street, through the shower; took lunch in a confectioner's shop, and drove to the railway station in time for the three-o'clock train. It looked picturesque to see two little girls, hand in hand, racing along the ancient passages of the Rows; but Chester has a very evil smell. At the railroad station, S----- saw a small edition of "Twice-Told Tales," forming a volume of the Cottage Library; and, opening it, there was the queerest imaginable portrait of myself,--so very queer that we could not but buy it. The shilling edition of "The Scarlet Letter" and "Seven Gables" are at all the book-stalls and shop-windows; but so is "The Lamplighter," and still more trashy books. August 26th.--All past affairs, all home conclusions, all people whom I have known in America and meet again here, are strangely compelled to undergo a new trial. It is not that they suffer by comparison with circumstances of English life and forms of English manhood or womanhood; but, being free from my old surroundings, and the inevitable prejudices of home, I decide upon them absolutely. I think I neglected to record that I saw Miss Martineau a few weeks since. She is a large, robust, elderly woman, and plainly dressed; but withal she has so kind, cheerful, and intelligent a face that she is pleasanter to look at than most beauties. Her hair is of a decided gray, and she does not shrink from calling herself old. She is the most continual talker I ever heard; it is really like the babbling of a brook, and very lively and sensible too; and all the while she talks, she moves the bowl of her ear-trumpet from one auditor to another, so that it becomes quite an organ of intelligence and sympathy between her and yourself. The ear-trumpet seems a sensible part of her, like the antennae of some insects. If you have any little remark to make, you drop it in; and she helps you to make remarks by this delicate little appeal of the trumpet, as she slightly directs it towards you; and if you have nothing to say, the appeal is not strong enough to embarrass you. All her talk was about herself and her affairs; but it did not seem like egotism, because it was so cheerful and free from morbidness. And this woman is an Atheist, and thinks that the principle of life will become extinct when her body is laid in the grave! I will not think so; were it only for her sake. What! only a few weeds to spring out of her mortality, instead of her intellect and sympathies flowering and fruiting forever! September 13th.--My family went to Rhyl last Thursday, and on Saturday I joined them there, in company with O'Sullivan, who arrived in the Behama from Lisbon that morning. We went by way of Chester, and found S----- waiting for us at the Rhyl station. Rhyl is a most uninteresting place, --a collection of new lodging-houses and hotels, on a long sand-beach, which the tide leaves bare almost to the horizon. The sand is by no means a marble pavement, but sinks under the foot, and makes very heavy walking; but there is a promenade in front of the principal range of houses, looking on the sea, whereon we have rather better footing. Almost all the houses were full, and S----- had taken a parlor and two bedrooms, and is living after the English fashion, providing her own table, lights, fuel, and everything. It is very awkward to our American notions; but there is an independence about it, which I think must make it agreeable on better acquaintance. But the place is certainly destitute of attraction, and life seems to pass very heavily. The English do not appear to have a turn for amusing themselves. Sunday was a bright and hot day, and in the forenoon I set out on a walk, not well knowing whither, over a very dusty road, with not a particle of shade along its dead level. The Welsh mountains were before me, at the distance of three or four miles,--long ridgy hills, descending pretty abruptly upon the plain; on either side of the road, here and there, an old whitewashed, thatched stone cottage, or a stone farm-house, with an aspect of some antiquity. I never suffered so much before, on this side of the water, from heat and dust, and should probably have turned back had I not espied the round towers and walls of an old castle at some distance before me. Having looked at a guide-book, previously to setting out, I knew that this must be Rhyddlan Castle, about three miles from Rhyl; so I plodded on, and by and by entered an antiquated village, on one side of which the castle stood. This Welsh village is very much like the English villages, with narrow streets and mean houses or cottages, built in blocks, and here and there a larger house standing alone; everything far more compact than in our rural villages, and with no grassy street-margin nor trees; aged and dirty also, with dirty children staring at the passenger, and an undue supply of mean inns; most, or many of the men in breeches, and some of the women, especially the elder ones, in black beaver hats. The streets were paved with round pebbles, and looked squalid and ugly. The children and grown people stared lazily at me as I passed, but showed no such alert and vivacious curiosity as a community of Yankees would have done. I turned up a street that led me to the castle, which looked very picturesque close at hand,--more so than at a distance, because the towers and walls have not a sufficiently broken outline against the sky. There are several round towers at the angles of the wall very large in their circles, built of gray stone, crumbling, ivy-grown, everything that one thinks of in an old ruin. I could not get into the inner space of the castle without climbing over a fence, or clambering down into the moat; so I contented myself with walking round it, and viewing it from the outside. Through the gateway I saw a cow feeding on the green grass in the inner court of the castle. In one of the walls there was a large triangular gap, where perhaps the assailants had made a breach. Of course there were weeds on the ruinous top of the towers, and along the summit of the wall. This was the first castle built by Edward I. in Wales, and he resided here during the erection of Conway Castle, and here Queen Eleanor gave birth to a princess. Some few years since a meeting of Welsh bards was held within it. After viewing it awhile, and listening to the babble of some children who lay on the grass near by, I resumed my walk, and, meeting a Welshman in the village street, I asked him my nearest way back to Rhyl. "Dim Sassenach," said he, after a pause. How odd that an hour or two on the railway should have brought me amongst a people who speak no English! Just below the castle, there is an arched stone bridge over the river Clwyd, and the best view of the edifice is from hence. It stands on a gentle eminence, commanding the passage of the river, and two twin round towers rise close beside one another, whence, I suppose, archers have often drawn their bows against the wild Welshmen, on the river-banks. Behind was the line of mountains; and this was the point of defence between the hill country and the lowlands. On the bridge stood a good many idle Welshmen, leaning over the parapet, and looking at some small vessels that had come up the river from the sea. There was the frame of a new vessel on the stocks near by. As I returned, on my way home, I again inquired my way of a man in breeches, who, I found, could speak English very well. He was kind, and took pains to direct me, giving me the choice of three ways, viz. the one by which I came, another across the fields, and a third by the embankment along the river-side. I chose the latter, and so followed the course of the Clwyd, which is very ugly, with a tidal flow and wide marshy banks. On its farther side was Rhyddlan marsh, where a battle was fought between the Welsh and Saxons a thousand years ago. I have forgotten to mention that the castle and its vicinity was the scene of the famous battle of the fiddlers, between De Blandeville, Earl of Chester, and the Welsh, about the time of the Conqueror. CONWAY CASTLE. September 13th.--On Monday we went with O'Sullivan to Conway by rail. Certainly this must be the most perfect specimen of a ruinous old castle in the whole world; it quite fills up one's idea. We first walked round the exterior of the wall, at the base of which are hovels, with dirty children playing about them, and pigs rambling along, and squalid women visible in the doorways; but all these things melt into the picturesqueness of the scene, and do not harm it. The whole town of Conway is built in what was once the castle-yard, and the whole circuit of the wall is still standing in a delightful state of decay. At the angles, and at regular intervals, there are round towers, having half their circle on the outside of the walls, and half within. Most of these towers have a great crack pervading them irregularly from top to bottom; the ivy hangs upon them,--the weeds grow on the tops. Gateways, three or four of them, open through the walls, and streets proceed from them into the town. At some points, very old cottages or small houses are close against the sides, and, old as they are, they must have been built after the whole structure was a ruin. In one place I saw the sign of an alehouse painted on the gray stones of one of the old round towers. As we entered one of the gates, after making the entire circuit, we saw an omnibus coming down the street towards us, with its horn sounding. Llandudno was its place of destination; and, knowing no more about it than that it was four miles off, we took our seats. Llandudno is a watering-village at the base of the Great Orme's Head, at the mouth of the Conway River. In this omnibus there were two pleasant-looking girls, who talked Welsh together,--a guttural, childish kind of a babble. Afterwards we got into conversation with them, and found them very agreeable. One of them was reading Tupper's "Proverbial Philosophy." On reaching Llandudno, S----- waited at the hotel, while O'Sullivan, U----, and I ascended the Great Orme's Head. There are copper-mines here, and we heard of a large cave, with stalactites, but did not go so far as that. We found the old shaft of a mine, however, and threw stones down it, and counted twenty before we heard them strike the bottom. At the base of the Head, on the side opposite the village, we saw a small church with a broken roof, and horizontal gravestones of slate within the stone enclosure around it. The view from the hill was most beautiful,--a blue summer sea, with the distant trail of smoke from a steamer, and many snowy sails; in another direction the mountains, near and distant, some of them with clouds below their peaks. We went to one of the mines which are still worked, and boys came running to meet us with specimens of the copper ore for sale. The miners were not now hoisting ore from the shaft, but were washing and selecting the valuable fragments from great heaps of crumbled stone and earth. All about this spot there are shafts and well-holes, looking fearfully deep and black, and without the slightest protection, so that we might just as easily have walked into them as not. Having examined these matters sufficiently, we descended the hill towards the village, meeting parties of visitors, mounted on donkeys, which is a much more sensible way of ascending in a hot day than to walk. On the sides and summit of the hill we found yellow gorse,--heath of two colors, I think, and very beautiful,--and here and there a harebell. Owing to the long-continued dry weather, the grass was getting withered and brown, though not so much so as on American hill-pastures at this season. Returning to the village, we all went into a confectioner's shop, and made a good luncheon. The two prettiest young ladies whom I have seen in England came into the shop and ate cakes while we were there. They appeared to be living together in a lodging-house, and ordered some of their housekeeping articles from the confectioner. Next we went into the village bazaar,--a sort of tent or open shop, full of knick-knacks and gewgaws, and bought some playthings for the children. At half past one we took our seats in the omnibus, to return to Conway. We had as yet only seen the castle wall and the exterior of the castle; now we were to see the inside. Right at the foot of it an old woman has her stand for the sale of lithographic views of Conway and other places; but these views are ridiculously inadequate, so that we did not buy any of them. The admittance into the castle is by a wooden door of modern construction, and the present seneschal is, I believe, the sexton of a church. He remembered me as having been there a month or two ago; and probably, considering that I was already initiated, or else because he had many other visitors, he left us to wander about the castle at will. It is altogether impossible to describe Conway Castle. Nothing ever can have been so perfect in its own style, and for its own purposes, when it was first built; and now nothing else can be so perfect as a picture of ivy-grown, peaceful ruin. The banqueting-hall, all open to the sky and with thick curtains of ivy tapestrying the walls, and grass and weeds growing on the arches that overpass it, is indescribably beautiful. The hearthstones of the great old fireplaces, all about the castle, seem to be favorite spots for weeds to grow. There are eight large round towers, and out of four of them, I think, rise smaller towers, ascending to a much greater height, and once containing winding staircases, all of which are now broken, and inaccessible from below, though, in at least one of the towers, the stairs seemed perfect, high aloft. It must have been the rudest violence that broke down these stairs; for each step was a thick and heavy slab of stone, built into the wall of the tower. There is no such thing as a roof in any part; towers, hall, kitchen, all are open to the sky. One round tower, directly overhanging the railway, is so shattered by the falling away of the lower part, that you can look quite up into it and through it, while sitting in the cars; and yet it has stood thus, without falling into complete ruin, for more than two hundred years. I think that it was in this tower that we found the castle oven, an immense cavern, big enough to bake bread for an army. The railway passes exactly at the base of the high rock, on which this part of the castle is situated, and goes into the town through a great arch that has been opened in the castle wall. The tubular bridge across the Conway has been built in a style that accords with the old architecture, and I observed that one little sprig of ivy had rooted itself in the new structure. There are numberless intricate passages in the thickness of the castle walls, forming communications between tower and tower,--damp, chill passages, with rough stone on either hand, darksome, and very likely leading to dark pitfalls. The thickness of the walls is amazing; and the people of those days must have been content with very scanty light, so small were the apertures,--sometimes merely slits and loopholes, glimmering through many feet of thickness of stone. One of the towers was said to have been the residence of Queen Eleanor; and this was better lighted than the others, containing an oriel-window, looking out of a little oratory, as it seemed to be, with groined arches and traces of ornamental sculpture, so that we could dress up some imperfect image of a queenly chamber, though the tower was roofless and floorless. There was another pleasant little windowed nook, close beside the oratory, where the Queen might have sat sewing or looking down the river Conway at the picturesque headlands towards the sea. We imagined her stately figure in antique robes, standing beneath the groined arches of the oratory. There seem to have been three chambers, one above another, in these towers, and the one in which was the embowed window was the middle one. I suppose the diameter of each of these circular rooms could not have been more than twenty feet on the inside. All traces of wood-work and iron-work are quite gone from the whole castle. These are said to have been taken away by a Lord Conway in the reign of Charles II. There is a grassy space under the windows of Queen Eleanor's tower,--a sort of outwork of the castle, where probably, when no enemy was near, the Queen used to take the open air in summer afternoons like this. Here we sat down on the grass of the ruined wall, and agreed that nothing in the world could be so beautiful and picturesque as Conway Castle, and that never could there have been so fit a time to see it as this sunny, quiet, lovely afternoon. Sunshine adapts itself to the character of a ruin in a wonderful way; it does not "flout the ruins gray," as Scott says, but sympathizes with their decay, and saddens itself for their sake. It beautifies the ivy too. We saw, at the corner of this grass-plot around Queen Eleanor's tower, a real trunk of a tree of ivy, with so stalwart a stem, and such a vigorous grasp of its strong branches, that it would be a very efficient support to the wall, were it otherwise inclined to fall. O that we could have ivy in America! What is there to beautify us when our time of ruin comes? Before departing, we made the entire circuit of the castle on its walls, and O'Sullivan and I climbed by a ladder to the top of one of the towers. While there, we looked down into the street beneath, and saw a photographist preparing to take a view of the castle, and calling out to some little girl in some niche or on some pinnacle of the walls to stand still that he might catch her figure and face. I think it added to the impressiveness of the old castle, to see the streets and the kitchen-gardens and the homely dwellings that had grown up within the precincts of this feudal fortress, and the people of to-day following their little businesses about it. This does not destroy the charm; but tourists and idle visitors do impair it. The earnest life of to-day, however, petty and homely as it may be, has a right to its place alongside of what is left of the life of other days; and if it be vulgar itself, it does not vulgarize the scene. But tourists do vulgarize it; and I suppose we did so, just like others. We took the train back to Rhyl, where we arrived at about four o'clock, and, having dined, we again took the rail for Chester, and thence to Rock Park (that is, O'Sullivan and I), and reached home at about eleven o'clock. Yesterday, September 13th, I began to wear a watch from Bennet's, 65 Cheapside, London. W. C. Bennet warrants it as the best watch which they can produce. If it prove as good and as durable as he prophesies, J----- will find it a perfect time-keeper long after his father has done with Time. If I had not thought of his wearing it hereafter, I should have been content with a much inferior one. No. 39,620. September 20th.--I went back to Rhyl last Friday in the steamer. We arrived at the landing-place at nearly four o'clock, having started at twelve, and I walked thence to our lodgings, 18 West Parade. The children and their mother were all gone out, and I sat some time in our parlor before anybody came. The next morning I made an excursion in the omnibus as far as Ruthin, passing through Rhyddlan, St. Asaph, Denbigh, and reaching Ruthin at one o'clock. All these are very ancient places. St. Asaph has a cathedral which is not quite worthy of that name, but is a very large and stately church in excellent repair. Its square battlemented tower has a very fine appearance, crowning the clump of village houses on the hill-top, as you approach from Rhyddlan. The ascent of the hill is very steep; so it is at Denbigh and at Ruthin,--the steepest streets, indeed, that I ever climbed. Denbigh is a place of still more antique aspect than St. Asaph; it looks, I think, even older than Chester, with its gabled houses, many of their windows opening on hinges, and their fronts resting on pillars, with an open porch beneath. The castle makes an admirably ruinous figure on the hill, higher than the village. I had come hither with the purpose of inspecting it, but as it began to rain just then, I concluded to get into the omnibus and go to Ruthin. There was another steep ascent from the commencement of the long street of Ruthin, till I reached the market-place, which is of nearly triangular shape, and an exceedingly old-looking place. Houses of stone or plastered brick; one or two with timber frames; the roofs of an uneven line, and bulging out or sinking in; the slates moss-grown. Some of them have two peaks and even three in a row, fronting on the streets, and there is a stone market-house with a table of regulations. In this market-place there is said to be a stone on which King Arthur beheaded one of his enemies; but this I did not see. All these villages were very lively, as the omnibus drove in; and I rather imagine it was market-day in each of them,--there being quite a bustle of Welsh people. The old women came round the omnibus courtesying and intimating their willingness to receive alms,--witch-like women, such as one sees in pictures or reads of in romances, and very unlike anything feminine in America. Their style of dress cannot have changed for centuries. It was quite unexpected to me to hear Welsh so universally and familiarly spoken. Everybody spoke it. The omnibus-driver could speak but imperfect English; there was a jabber of Welsh all through the streets and market-places; and it flowed out with a freedom quite different from the way in which they expressed themselves in English. I had had an idea that Welsh was spoken rather as a freak and in fun than as a native language; it was so strange to find another language the people's actual and earnest medium of thought within so short a distance of England. But English is scarcely more known to the body of the Welsh people than to the peasantry of France. However, they sometimes pretend to ignorance, when they might speak it fairly enough. I took luncheon at the hotel where the omnibus stopped, and then went to search out the castle. It appears to have been once extensive, but the remains of it are now very few, except a part of the external wall. Whatever other portion may still exist, has been built into a modern castellated mansion, which has risen within the wide circuit of the fortress,--a handsome and spacious edifice of red freestone, with a high tower, on which a flag was flying. The grounds were well laid out in walks, and really I think the site of the castle could not have been turned to better account. I am getting tired of antiquity. It is certainly less interesting in the long run than novelty; and so I was well content with the fresh, warm, red hue of the modern house, and the unworn outline of its walls, and its cheerful, large windows; and was willing that the old ivy-grown ruins should exist now only to contrast with the modernisms. These ancient walls, by the by, are of immense thickness. There is a passage through the interior of a portion of them, the width from this interior passage to the outer one being fifteen feet on one side, and I know not how much on the other. It continued showery all day; and the omnibus was crowded. I had chosen the outside from Rhyl to Denbigh, but, all the rest of the journey, imprisoned myself within. On our way home, an old lady got into the omnibus,--a lady of tremendous rotundity; and as she tumbled from the door to the farthest part of the carriage, she kept advising all the rest of the passengers to get out. "I don't think there will be much rain, gentlemen," quoth she, "you'll be much more comfortable on the outside." As none of us complied, she glanced along the seats. "What! are you all Saas'uach?" she inquired. As we drove along, she talked Welsh with great fluency to one of the passengers, a young woman with a baby, and to as many others as could understand her. It has a strange, wild sound, like a language half blown away by the wind. The lady's English was very good; but she probably prided herself on her proficiency in Welsh. My excursion to-day had been along the valley of the Clwyd, a very rich and fertile tract of country. The next day we all took a long walk on the beach, picking up shells. On Monday we took an open carriage and drove to Rhyddlan; whence we sent back the carriage, meaning to walk home along the embankment of the river Clwyd, after inspecting the castle. The fortress is very ruinous, having been dismantled by the Parliamentarians. There are great gaps,--two, at least, in the walls that connect the round towers, of which there were six, one on each side of a gateway in front, and the same at a gateway towards the river, where there is a steep descent to a wall and square tower, at the water-side. Great pains and a great deal of gunpowder must have been used in converting this castle into a ruin. There were one or two fragments lying where they had fallen more than two hundred years ago, which, though merely a conglomeration of small stones and mortar, were just as hard as if they had been solid masses of granite. The substantial thickness of the walls is composed of these agglomerated small stones and mortar, the casing being hewn blocks of red freestone. This is much worn away by the weather, wherever it has been exposed to the air; but, under shelter, it looks as if it might have been hewn only a year or two ago. Each of the round towers had formerly a small staircase turret rising beside and ascending above it, in which a warder might be posted, but they have all been so battered and shattered that it is impossible for an uninstructed observer to make out a satisfactory plan of then. The interior of each tower was a small room, not more than twelve or fifteen feet across; and of these there seem to have been three stories, with loop-holes for archery and not much other light than what came through them. Then there are various passages and nooks and corners and square recesses in the stone, some of which must have been intended for dungeons, and the ugliest and gloomiest dungeons imaginable, for they could not have had any light or air. There is not, the least, splinter of wood-work remaining in any part of the castle,--nothing but bare stone, and a little plaster in one or two places, on the wall. In the front gateway we looked at the groove on each side, in which the portcullis used to rise and fall; and in each of the contiguous round towers there was a loop-hole, whence an enemy on the outer side of the portcullis might be shot through with an arrow. The inner court-yard is a parallelogram, nearly a square, and is about forty-five of my paces across. It is entirely grass-grown, and vacant, except for two or three trees that have been recently set out, and which are surrounded with palings to keep away the cows that pasture in and about the place. No window looks from the walls or towers into this court-yard; nor are there any traces of buildings having stood within the enclosure, unless it be what looks something like the flue of a chimney within one of the walls. I should suppose, however, that there must have been, when the castle was in its perfect state, a hall, a kitchen, and other commodious apartments and offices for the King and his train, such as there were at Conway and Beaumaris. But if so, all fragments have been carried away, and all hollows of the old foundations scrupulously filled up. The round towers could not have comprised all the accommodation of the castle. There is nothing more striking in these ruins than to look upward from the crumbling base, and see flights of stairs, still comparatively perfect, by which you might securely ascend to the upper heights of the tower, although all traces of a staircase have disappeared below, and the upper portion cannot be attained. On three sides of the fortress is a moat, about sixty feet wide, and cased with stone. It was probably of great depth in its day, but it is now partly filled up with earth, and is quite dry and grassy throughout its whole extent. On the inner side of the moat was the outer wall of the castle, portions of which still remain. Between the outer wall and the castle itself the space is also about sixty feet. The day was cloudy and lowering, and there were several little spatterings of rain, while we rambled about. The two children ran shouting hither and thither, and were continually clambering into dangerous places, racing along ledges of broken wall. At last they altogether disappeared for a good while; their voices, which had heretofore been plainly audible, were hushed, nor was there any answer when we began to call them, while making ready for our departure. But they finally appeared, coming out of the moat, where they had been picking and eating blackberries,--which, they said, grew very plentifully there, and which they were very reluctant to leave. Before quitting the castle, I must not forget the ivy, which makes a perfect tapestry over a large portion of the walls. We walked about the village, which is old and ugly; small, irregular streets, contriving to be intricate, though there are few of them; mean houses, joining to each other. We saw, in the principal one, the parliament house in which Edward I. gave a Charter, or allowed rights of some kind to his Welsh subjects. The ancient part of its wall is entirely distinguishable from what has since been built upon it. Thence we set out to walk along the embankment, although the sky looked very threatening. The wind, however, was so strong, and had such a full sweep at us, on the top of the bank, that we decided on taking a path that led from it across the moor. But we soon had cause to repent of this; for, which way soever we turned, we found ourselves cut off by a ditch or a little stream; so that here we were, fairly astray on Rhyddlan moor, the old battle-field of the Saxons and Britons, and across which, I suppose, the fiddlers and mountebanks had marched to the relief of the Earl of Chester. Anon, too, it began to shower; and it was only after various leaps and scramblings that we made our way to a large farm-house, and took shelter under a cart-shed. The back of the house to which we gained access was very dirty and ill-kept; some dirty children peeped at us as we approached, and nobody had the civility to ask us in; so we took advantage of the first cessation of the shower to resume our way. We were shortly overtaken by a very intelligent-looking and civil man, who seemed to have come from Rhyddlan, and said he was going to Rhyl. We followed his guidance over stiles and along hedge-row paths which we never could have threaded rightly by ourselves. By and by our kind guide had to stop at an intermediate farm; but he gave us full directions how to proceed, and we went on till it began to shower again pretty briskly, and we took refuge in a little bit of old stone cottage, which, small as it was, had a greater antiquity than any mansion in America. The door was open, and as we approached, we saw several children gazing at us; and their mother, a pleasant-looking woman, who seemed rather astounded at the visit that was about to befall her, tried to draw a tattered curtain over a part of her interior, which she fancied even less fit to be seen than the rest. To say the truth, the house was not at all better than a pigsty; and while we sat there, a pig came familiarly to the door, thrust in his snout, and seemed surprised that he should he driven away, instead of being admitted as one of the family. The floor was of brick; there was no ceiling, but only the peaked gable overhead. The room was kitchen, parlor, and, I suppose, bedroom for the whole family; at all events, there was only the tattered curtain between us and the sleeping accommodations. The good woman either could not or would not speak a word of English, only laughing when S----- said, "Dim Sassenach?" but she was kind and hospitable, and found a chair for each of us. She had been making some bread, and the dough was on the dresser. Life with these people is reduced to its simplest elements. It is only a pity that they cannot or do not choose to keep themselves cleaner. Poverty, except in cities, need not be squalid. When the shower abated a little, we gave all the pennies we had to the children, and set forth again. By the by, there were several colored prints stuck up against the walls, and there was a clock ticking in a corner and some paper-hangings pinned upon the slanting roof. It began to rain again before we arrived at Rhyl, and we were driven into a small tavern. After staying there awhile, we set forth between the drops; but the rain fell still heavier, so that we were pretty well damped before we got to our lodgings. After dinner, I took the rail for Chester and Rock Park, and S----- and the children and maid followed the next day. September 22d.--I dined on Wednesday evening at Mr. John Heywood's, Norris Green. Mr. Mouckton Mimes and lady were of the company. Mr. Mimes is a very agreeable, kindly man, resembling Longfellow a good deal in personal appearance; and he promotes, by his genial manners, the same pleasant intercourse which is so easily established with Longfellow. He is said to be a very kind patron of literary men, and to do a great deal of good among young and neglected people of that class. He is considered one of the best conversationists at present in society: it may very well be so; his style of talking being very simple and natural, anything but obtrusive, so that you might enjoy its agreeableness without suspecting it. He introduced me to his wife (a daughter of Lord Crewe), with whom and himself I had a good deal of talk. Mr. Milnes told me that he owns the land in Yorkshire, whence some of the pilgrims of the Mayflower emigrated to Plymouth, and that Elder Brewster was the Postmaster of the village. . . . . He also said that in the next voyage of the Mayflower, after she carried the Pilgrims, she was employed in transporting a cargo of slaves from Africa,--to the West Indies, I suppose. This is a queer fact, and would be nuts for the Southerners. Mem.--An American would never understand the passage in Bunyan about Christian and Hopeful going astray along a by-path into the grounds of Giant Despair,--from there being no stiles and by-paths in our country. September 26th.--On Saturday evening my wife and I went to a soiree given by the Mayor and Mrs. Lloyd at the Town Hall to receive the Earl of Harrowby. It was quite brilliant, the public rooms being really magnificent, and adorned for the occasion with a large collection of pictures, belonging to Mr. Naylor. They were mostly, if not entirely, of modern artists,--of Turner, Wilkie, Landseer, and others of the best English painters. Turner's seemed too ethereal to have been done by mortal hands. The British Scientific Association being now in session here, many distinguished strangers were present. September 29th.--Mr. Monekton Milnes called on me at the Consulate day before yesterday. He is pleasant and sensible. Speaking of American politicians, I remarked that they were seldom anything but politicians, and had no literary or other culture beyond their own calling. He said the case was the same in England, and instanced Sir ------, who once called on him for information when an appeal had been made to him respecting two literary gentlemen. Sir ------ had never heard the names of either of these gentlemen, and applied to Mr. Milnes as being somewhat conversant with the literary class, to know whether they were distinguished and what were their claims. The names of the two literary men were James Sheridan Knowles and Alfred Tennyson. October 5th.--Yesterday I was present at a dejeuner on board the James Barnes, on occasion of her coming under the British flag, having been built for the Messrs. Barnes by Donald McKay of Boston. She is a splendid vessel, and magnificently fitted up, though not with consummate taste. It would be worth while that ornamental architects and upholsterers should study this branch of art, since the ship-builders seem willing to expend a good deal of money on it. In fact, I do not see that there is anywhere else so much encouragement to the exercise of ornamental art. I saw nothing to criticise in the solid and useful details of the ship; the ventilation, in particular, being free and abundant, so that the hundreds of passengers who will have their berths between decks, and at a still lower depth, will have good air and enough of it. There were four or five hundred persons, principally Liverpool merchants and their wives, invited to the dejeuner; and the tables were spread between decks, the berths for passengers not being yet put in. There was not quite light enough to make the scene cheerful, it being an overcast day; and, indeed, there was an English plainness in the arrangement of the festal room, which might have been better exchanged for the flowery American taste, which I have just been criticising. With flowers, and the arrangement of flags, we should have made something very pretty of the space between decks; but there was nothing to hide the fact that in a few days hence there would be crowded berths and sea-sick steerage passengers where we were now feasting. The cheer was very good,--cold fowl and meats; cold pies of foreign manufacture very rich, and of mysterious composition; and champagne in plenty, with other wines for those who liked them. I sat between two ladies, one of them Mrs. ------, a pleasant young woman, who, I believe, is of American provincial nativity, and whom I therefore regarded as half a countrywoman. We talked a good deal together, and I confided to her my annoyance at the prospect of being called up to answer a toast; but she did not pity me at all, though she felt, much alarm about her husband, Captain ------, who was in the same predicament. Seriously, it is the most awful part of my official duty,-- this necessity of making dinner-speeches at the Mayor's, and other public or semi-public tables. However, my neighborhood to Mrs. ------ was good for me, inasmuch as by laughing over the matter with her came to regard it in a light and ludicrous way; and so, when the time actually came, I stood up with a careless dare-devil feeling. The chairman toasted the president immediately after the Queen, and did me the honor to speak of myself in a most flattering manner, something like this: "Great by his position under the Republic,--greater still, I am bold to say, in the Republic of letters!" I made no reply at all to this; in truth, I forgot all about it when I began to speak, and merely thanked the company in behalf of the President, and my countrymen, and made a few remarks with no very decided point to them. However, they cheered and applauded, and I took advantage of the applause to sit down, and Mrs. ------ informed me that I had succeeded admirably. It was no success at all, to be sure; neither was it a failure, for I had aimed at nothing, and I had exactly hit it. But after sitting down, I was conscious of an enjoyment in speaking to a public assembly, and felt as if I should like to rise again. It is something like being under fire,--a sort of excitement, not exactly pleasure, but more piquant than most pleasures. I have felt this before, in the same circumstances; but, while on my legs, my impulse is to get through with my remarks and sit down again as quickly as possible. The next speech, I think, was by Rev. Dr. ------, the celebrated Arctic gentleman, in reply to a toast complimentary to the clergy. He turned aside from the matter in hand, to express his kind feelings towards America, where he said he had been most hospitably received, especially at Cambridge University. He also made allusions to me, and I suppose it would have been no more than civil in me to have answered with a speech in acknowledgment, but I did not choose to make another venture, so merely thanked him across the corner of the table, for he sat near me. He is a venerable-looking, white-haired gentleman, tall and slender, with a pale, intelligent, kindly face. Other speeches were made; but from beginning to end there was not one breath of eloquence, nor even one neat sentence; and I rather think that Englishmen would purposely avoid eloquence or neatness in after-dinner speeches. It seems to be no part of their object. Yet any Englishman almost, much more generally than Americans, will stand up and talk on in a plain way, uttering one rough, ragged, and shapeless sentence after another, and will have expressed himself sensibly, though in a very rude manner, before he sits down. And this is quite satisfactory to his audience, who, indeed, are rather prejudiced against the man who speaks too glibly. The guests began to depart shortly after three o'clock. This morning I have seen two reports of my little speech,--one exceedingly incorrect; another pretty exact, but not much to my taste, for I seem to have left out everything that would have been fittest to say. October 6th.--The people, for several days, have been in the utmost anxiety, and latterly in the highest exultation about Sebastopol,--and all England, and Europe to boot, have been fooled by the belief that it had fallen. This, however, now turns out to be incorrect; and the public visage is somewhat grim, in consequence. I am glad of it. In spite of his actual sympathies, it is impossible for a true American to be otherwise than glad. Success makes an Englishman intolerable; and, already, on the mistaken idea that the way was open to a prosperous conclusion of the war, The Times had begun to throw out menaces against America. I shall never love England till she sues to us for help, and, in the mean time, the fewer triumphs she obtains, the better for all parties. An Englishman in adversity is a very respectable character; he does not lose his dignity, but merely comes to a proper conception of himself. It is rather touching to an observer to see how much the universal heart is in this matter,--to see the merchants gathering round the telegraphic messages, posted on the pillars of the Exchange news-room, the people in the street who cannot afford to buy a paper clustering round the windows of the news-offices, where a copy is pinned up,--the groups of corporals and sergeants at the recruiting rendezvous, with a newspaper in the midst of them and all earnest and sombre, and feeling like one man together, whatever their rank. I seem to myself like a spy or a traitor when I meet their eyes, and am conscious that I neither hope nor fear in sympathy with them, although they look at me in full confidence of sympathy. Their heart "knoweth its own bitterness," and as for me, being a stranger and all alien, I "intermeddle not with their joy." October 9th.--My ancestor left England in 1630. I return in 1853. I sometimes feel as if I myself had been absent these two hundred and twenty-three years, leaving England just emerging from the feudal system, and finding it, on my return, on the verge of republicanism. It brings the two far-separated points of time very closely together, to view the matter thus. October 16th.--A day or two ago arrived the sad news of the loss of the Arctic by collision with a French steamer off Newfoundland, and the loss also of three or four hundred people. I have seldom been more affected by anything quite alien from my personal and friendly concerns, than by the death of Captain Luce and his son. The boy was a delicate lad, and it is said that he had never been absent from his mother till this time, when his father had taken him to England to consult a physician about a complaint in his hip. So his father, while the ship was sinking, was obliged to decide whether he would put the poor, weakly, timorous child on board the boat, to take his hard chance of life there, or keep him to go down with himself and the ship. He chose the latter; and within half an hour, I suppose, the boy was among the child-angels. Captain Luce could not do less than die, for his own part, with the responsibility of all those lost lives upon him. He may not have been in the least to blame for the calamity, but it was certainly too heavy a one for him to survive. He was a sensible man, and a gentleman, courteous, quiet, with something almost melancholy in his address and aspect. Oftentimes he has come into my inner office to say good-by before his departures, but I cannot precisely remember whether or no he took leave of me before this latest voyage. I never exchanged a great many words with him; but those were kind ones. October 19th.--It appears to be customary for people of decent station, but in distressed circumstances, to go round among their neighbors and the public, accompanied by a friend, who explains the case. I have been accosted in the street in regard to one of these matters; and to-day there came to my office a grocer, who had become security for a friend, and who was threatened with an execution,--with another grocer for supporter and advocate. The beneficiary takes very little active part in the affair, merely looking careworn, distressed, and pitiable, and throwing in a word of corroboration, or a sigh, or an acknowledgment, as the case may demand. In the present instance, the friend, a young, respectable-looking tradesman, with a Lancashire accent, spoke freely and simply of his client's misfortunes, not pressing the case unduly, but doing it full justice, and saying, at the close of the interview, that it was no pleasant business for himself. The broken grocer was an elderly man, of somewhat sickly aspect. The whole matter is very foreign to American habits. No respectable American would think of retrieving his affairs by such means, but would prefer ruin ten times over; no friend would take up his cause; no public would think it worth while to prevent the small catastrophe. And yet the custom is not without its good side as indicating a closer feeling of brotherhood, a more efficient sense of neighborhood, than exists among ourselves, although, perhaps, we are more careless of a fellow-creature's ruin, because ruin with us is by no means the fatal and irretrievable event that it is in England. I am impressed with the ponderous and imposing look of an English legal document,--an assignment of real estate in England, for instance,-- engrossed on an immense sheet of thickest paper, in a formal hand, beginning with "This Indenture" in German text, and with occasional phrases of form, breaking out into large script,--very long and repetitious, fortified with the Mayor of Manchester's seal, two or three inches in diameter, which is certified by a notary-public, whose signature, again, is to have my consular certificate and official seal. November 2d.--A young Frenchman enters, of gentlemanly aspect, with a grayish cloak or paletot overspreading his upper person, and a handsome and well-made pair of black trousers and well-fitting boots below. On sitting down, he does not throw off nor at all disturb the cloak. Eying him more closely, one discerns that he has no shirt-collar, and that what little is visible of his shirt-bosom seems not to be of to-day nor of yesterday,--perhaps not even of the day before. His manner is not very good; nevertheless, he is a coxcomb and a jackanapes. He avers himself a naturalized citizen of America, where he has been tutor in several families of distinction, and has been treated like a son. He left America on account of his health, and came near being tutor in the Duke of Norfolk's family, but failed for lack of testimonials; he is exceedingly capable and accomplished, but reduced in funds, and wants employment here, of the means of returning to America, where he intends to take a situation under government, which he is sure of obtaining. He mentioned a quarrel which he had recently had with an Englishman in behalf of America, and would have fought a duel had such been the custom of the country. He made the Englishman foam at the mouth, and told him that he had been twelve years at a military school, and could easily kill him. I say to him that I see little or no prospect of his getting employment here, but offer to inquire whether any situation, as clerk or otherwise, can be obtained for him in a vessel returning to America, and ask his address. He has no address. Much to my surprise, he takes his leave without requesting pecuniary aid, but hints that he shall call again. He is a very disagreeable young fellow, like scores of others who call on me in the like situation. His English is very good for a Frenchman, and he says he speaks it the least well of five languages. He has been three years in America, and obtained his naturalization papers, he says, as a special favor, and by means of strong interest. Nothing is so absolutely odious as the sense of freedom and equality pertaining to an American grafted on the mind of a native of any other country in the world. A naturalized citizen is HATEFUL. Nobody has a right to our ideas, unless born to them. November 9th.--I lent the above Frenchman a small sum; he advertised for employment as a teacher; and he called this morning to thank me for my aid, and says Mr. C------ has engaged him for his children, at a guinea a week, and that he has also another engagement. The poor fellow seems to have been brought to a very low ebb. He has pawned everything, even to his last shirt, save the one he had on, and had been living at the rate of twopence a day. I had procured him a chance to return to America, but he was ashamed to go back in such poor circumstances, and so determined to seek better fortune here. I like him better than I did,--partly, I suppose, because I have helped him. November 14th.--The other day I saw an elderly gentleman walking in Dale Street, apparently in a state of mania; for as he limped along (being afflicted with lameness) he kept talking to himself, and sometimes breaking out into a threat against some casual passenger. He was a very respectable-looking man; and I remember to have seen him last summer, in the steamer, returning from the Isle of Man, where he had been staying at Castle Mona. What a strange and ugly predicament it would be for a person of quiet habits to be suddenly smitten with lunacy at noonday in a crowded street, and to walk along through a dim maze of extravagances,-- partly conscious of then, but unable to resist the impulse to give way to them! A long-suppressed nature might be represented as bursting out in this way, for want of any other safety-valve. In America, people seem to consider the government merely as a political administration; and they care nothing for the credit of it, unless it be the administration of their own political party. In England, all people, of whatever party, are anxious for the credit of their rulers. Our government, as a knot of persons, changes so entirely every four years, that the institution has come to be considered a temporary thing. Looking at the moon the other evening, little R----- said, "It blooms out in the morning!" taking the moon to be the bud of the sun. The English are a most intolerant people. Nobody is permitted, nowadays, to have any opinion but the prevalent one. There seems to be very little difference between their educated and ignorant classes in this respect; if any, it is to the credit of the latter, who do not show tokens of such extreme interest in the war. It is agreeable, however, to observe how all Englishmen pull together,--how each man comes forward with his little scheme for helping on the war,--how they feel themselves members of one family, talking together about their common interest, as if they were gathered around one fireside; and then what a hearty meed of honor they award to their soldiers! It is worth facing death for. Whereas, in America, when our soldiers fought as good battles, with as great proportionate loss, and far more valuable triumphs, the country seemed rather ashamed than proud of them. Mrs. Heywood tells me that there are many Catholics among the lower classes in Lancashire and Cheshire,--probably the descendants of retainers of the old Catholic nobility and gentry, who are more numerous in these shires than in other parts of England. The present Lord Sefton's grandfather was the first of that race who became Protestant. December 25th.--Commodore P------ called to see me this morning,--a brisk, gentlemanly, offhand, but not rough, unaffected and sensible man, looking not so elderly as he ought, on account of a very well made wig. He is now on his return from a cruise in the East Indian seas, and goes home by the Baltic, with a prospect of being very well received on account of his treaty with Japan. I seldom meet with a man who puts himself more immediately on conversable terms than the Commodore. He soon introduced his particular business with me,--it being to inquire whether I would recommend some suitable person to prepare his notes and materials for the publication of an account of his voyage. He was good enough to say that he had fixed upon me, in his own mind, for this office; but that my public duties would of course prevent me from engaging in it. I spoke of Herman Melville, and one or two others; but he seems to have some acquaintance with the literature of the day, and did not grasp very cordially at any name that I could think of; nor, indeed, could I recommend any one with full confidence. It would be a very desirable task for a young literary man, or, for that matter, for an old one; for the world can scarcely have in reserve a less hackneyed theme than Japan. This is a most beautiful day of English winter; clear and bright, with the ground a little frozen, and the green grass along the waysides at Rock Ferry sprouting up through the frozen pools of yesterday's rain. England is forever green. On Christmas day, the children found wall-flowers, pansies, and pinks in the garden; and we had a beautiful rose from the garden of the hotel grown in the open air. Yet one is sensible of the cold here, as much as in the zero atmosphere of America. The chief advantage of the English climate is that we are not tempted to heat our rooms to so unhealthy a degree as in New England. I think I have been happier this Christmas than ever before,--by my own fireside, and with my wife and children about me,--more content to enjoy what I have,--less anxious for anything beyond it in this life. My early life was perhaps a good preparation for the declining half of life; it having been such a blank that any thereafter would compare favorably with it. For a long, long while, I have occasionally been visited with a singular dream; and I have an impression that I have dreamed it ever since I have been in England. It is, that I am still at college,--or, sometimes, even at school,--and there is a sense that I have been there unconscionably long, and have quite failed to make such progress as my contemporaries have done; and I seem to meet some of them with a feeling of shame and depression that broods over me as I think of it, even when awake. This dream, recurring all through these twenty or thirty years, must be one of the effects of that heavy seclusion in which I shut myself up for twelve years after leaving college, when everybody moved onward, and left me behind. How strange that it should come now, when I may call myself famous and prosperous!--when I am happy, too! January 3d, 1855.--The progress of the age is trampling over the aristocratic institutions of England, and they crumble beneath it. This war has given the country a vast impulse towards democracy. The nobility will never hereafter, I think, assume or be permitted to rule the nation in peace, or command armies in war, on any ground except the individual ability which may appertain to one of their number, as well as to a commoner. And yet the nobles were never positively more noble than now; never, perhaps, so chivalrous, so honorable, so highly cultivated; but, relatively to the rest of the world, they do not maintain their old place. The pressure of the war has tested and proved this fact, at home and abroad. At this moment it would be an absurdity in the nobles to pretend to the position which was quietly conceded to them a year ago. This one year has done the work of fifty ordinary ones; or, more accurately, it has made apparent what has long been preparing itself. January 6th.--The American ambassador called on me to-day and stayed a good while,--an hour or two. He is visiting at Mr. William Browne's, at Richmond Hill, having come to this region to bring his niece, who is to be bride's-maid at the wedding of an American girl. I like Mr. ------. He cannot exactly be called gentlemanly in his manners, there being a sort of rusticity about him; moreover, he has a habit of squinting one eye, and an awkward carriage of his head; hut, withal, a dignity in his large person, and a consciousness of high position and importance, which gives him ease and freedom. Very simple and frank in his address, he may be as crafty as other diplomatists are said to be; but I see only good sense and plainness of speech,--appreciative, too, and genial enough to make himself conversable. He talked very freely of himself and of other public people, and of American and English affairs. He returns to America, he says, next October, and then retires forever from public life, being sixty-four years of age, and having now no desire except to write memoirs of his times, and especially of the administration of Mr. Polk. I suggested a doubt whether the people would permit him to retire; and he immediately responded to my hint as regards his prospects for the Presidency. He said that his mind was fully made up, and that he would never be a candidate, and that he had expressed this decision to his friends in such a way as to put it out of his own power to change it. He acknowledged that he should have been glad of the nomination for the Presidency in 1852, but that it was now too late, and that he was too old,--and, in short, he seemed to be quite sincere in his nolo episcopari; although, really, he is the only Democrat, at this moment, whom it would not be absurd to talk of for the office. As he talked, his face flushed, and he seemed to feel inwardly excited. Doubtless, it was the high vision of half his lifetime which he here relinquished. I cannot question that he is sincere; but, of course, should the people insist upon having him for President, he is too good a patriot to refuse. I wonder whether he can have had any object in saying all this to me. He might see that it would be perfectly natural for me to tell it to General Pierce. But it is a very vulgar idea,--this of seeing craft and subtlety, when there is a plain and honest aspect. January 9th.--I dined at Mr. William Browne's (M. P.) last, evening with a large party. The whole table and dessert service was of silver. Speaking of Shakespeare, Mr. ------ said that the Duke of Somerset, who is now nearly fourscore, told him that the father of John and Charles Kemble had made all possible research into the events of Shakespeare's life, and that he had found reason to believe that Shakespeare attended a certain revel at Stratford, and, indulging too much in the conviviality of the occasion, he tumbled into a ditch on his way home, and died there! The Kemble patriarch was an aged man when he communicated this to the Duke; and their ages, linked to each other; would extend back a good way; scarcely to the beginning of the last century, however. If I mistake not, it was from the traditions of Stratford that Kemble had learned the above. I do not remember ever to have seen it in print,--which is most singular. Miss L---- has an English rather than an American aspect,--being of stronger outline than most of our young ladies, although handsomer than English women generally, extremely self-possessed and well poised without affectation or assumption, but quietly conscious of rank, as much so as if she were an Earl's daughter. In truth, she felt pretty much as an Earl's daughter would do towards the merchants' wives and daughters who made up the feminine portion of the party. I talked with her a little, and found her sensible, vivacious, and firm-textured, rather than soft and sentimental. She paid me some compliments; but I do not remember paying her any. Mr. J-----'s daughters, two pale, handsome girls, were present. One of them is to be married to a grandson of Mr. ------, who was also at the dinner. He is a small young man, with a thin and fair mustache, . . . . and a lady who sat next me whispered that his expectations are 6,000 pounds per annum. It struck me, that, being a country gentleman's son, he kept himself silent and reserved, as feeling himself too good for this commercial dinner-party; but perhaps, and I rather think so, he was really shy and had nothing to say, being only twenty-one, and therefore quite a boy among Englishmen. The only man of cognizable rank present, except Mr. ------ and the Mayor of Liverpool, was a Baronet, Sir Thomas Birch. January 17th.--S---- and I were invited to be present at the wedding of Mr. J-------'s daughter this morning, but we were also bidden to the funeral services of Mrs. G------, a young American lady; and we went to the "house of mourning," rather than to the "house of feasting." Her death was very sudden. I crossed to Rock Ferry on Saturday, and met her husband in the boat. He said his wife was rather unwell, and that he had just been sent for to see her; but he did not seem at all alarmed. And yet, on reaching home, he found her dead! The body is to be conveyed to America, and the funeral service was read over her in her house, only a few neighbors and friends being present. We were shown into a darkened room, where there was a dim gaslight burning, and a fire glimmering, and here and there a streak of sunshine struggling through the drawn curtains. Mr. G------ looked pale, and quite overcome with grief,--this, I suppose, being his first sorrow,--and he has a young baby on his hands, and no doubt, feels altogether forlorn in this foreign land. The clergyman entered in his canonicals, and we walked in a little procession into another room, where the coffin was placed. Mr. G------ sat down and rested his head on the coffin: the clergyman read the service; then knelt down, as did most of the company, and prayed with great propriety of manner, but with no earnestness,--and we separated. Mr. G------ is a small, smooth, and pretty young man, not emphasized in any way; but grief threw its awfulness about him to-day in a degree which I should not have expected. January 20th.--Mr. Steele, a gentleman of Rock Ferry, showed me this morning a pencil-case formerly belonging to Dr. Johnson. It is six or seven inches long, of large calibre, and very clumsily manufactured of iron, perhaps plated in its better days, but now quite bare. Indeed, it looks as rough as an article of kitchen furniture. The intaglio on the end is a lion rampant. On the whole, it well became Dr. Johnson to have used such a stalwart pencil-case. It had a six-inch measure on a part of it, so that it must have been at least eight inches long. Mr. Steele says he has seen a cracked earthen teapot, of large size, in which Miss Williams used to make tea for Dr. Johnson. God himself cannot compensate us for being born for any period short of eternity. All the misery endured here constitutes a claim for another life, and, still more, all the happiness; because all true happiness involves something more than the earth owns, and needs something more than a mortal capacity for the enjoyment of it. After receiving an injury on the head, a person fancied all the rest of his life that he heard voices flouting, jeering, and upbraiding him. February 19th.--I dined with the Mayor at the Town Hall last Friday evening. I sat next to Mr. W. J------, an Irish-American merchant, who is in very good standing here. He told me that he used to be very well acquainted with General Jackson, and that he was present at the street fight between him and the Bentons, and helped to take General Jackson off the ground. Colonel Benton shot at him from behind; but it was Jesse Benton's ball that hit him and broke his arm. I did not understand him to infer any treachery or cowardice from the circumstance of Colonel Benton's shooting at Jackson from behind, but, suppose it occurred in the confusion and excitement of a street fight. Mr. W. J------ seems to think that, after all, the reconciliation between the old General and Benton was merely external, and that they really hated one another as before. I do not think so. These dinners of the Mayors are rather agreeable than otherwise, except for the annoyance, in my case, of being called up to speak to a toast, and that is less disagreeable than at first. The suite of rooms at the Town House is stately and splendid, and all the Mayors, as far as I have seen, exercise hospitality in a manner worthy of the chief magistrates of a great city. They are supposed always to spend much more than their salary (which is 2,000 pounds) in these entertainments. The town provides the wines, I am told, and it might be expected that they should be particularly good,--at least, those which improve by age, for a quarter of a century should be only a moderate age for wine from the cellars of centuries-long institutions, like a corporate borough. Each Mayor might lay in a supply of the best vintage he could find, and trust his good name to posterity to the credit of that wine; and so he would be kindly and warmly remembered long after his own nose had lost its rubicundity. In point of fact, the wines seem to be good, but not remarkable. The dinner was good, and very handsomely served, with attendance enough, both in the hall below--where the door was wide open at the appointed hour, notwithstanding the cold--and at table; some being in the rich livery of the borough, and some in plain clothes. Servants, too, were stationed at various points from the hall to the reception-room; and the last one shouted forth the name of the entering guest. There were, I should think, about fifty guests at this dinner. Two bishops were present. The Bishops of Chester and New South Wales, dressed in a kind of long tunics, with black breeches and silk stockings, insomuch that I first fancied they were Catholics. Also Dr. McNeil, in a stiff-collared coat, looking more like a general than a divine. There were two officers in blue uniforms; and all the rest of us were in black, with only two white waistcoats,--my own being one,--and a rare sprinkling of white cravats. How hideously a man looks in them! I should like to have seen such assemblages as must have gathered in that reception-room, and walked with stately tread to the dining-hall, in times past, the Mayor and other civic dignitaries in their robes, noblemen in their state dresses, the Consul in his olive-leaf embroidery, everybody in some sort of bedizenment,--and then the dinner would have been a magnificent spectacle, worthy of the gilded hall, the rich table-service, and the powdered and gold-laced servitors. At a former dinner I remember seeing a gentleman in small-clothes, with a dress-sword; but all formalities of the kind are passing away. The Mayor's dinners, too, will no doubt be extinct before many years go by. I drove home from the Woodside Ferry in a cab with Bishop Burke and two other gentlemen. The Bishop is nearly seven feet high. After writing the foregoing account of a civic banquet, where I ate turtle-soup, salmon, woodcock, oyster patties, and I know not what else, I have been to the News-room and found the Exchange pavement densely thronged with people of all ages and of all manner of dirt and rags. They were waiting for soup-tickets, and waiting very patiently too, without outcry or disturbance, or even sour looks,--only patience and meekness in their faces. Well, I don't know that they have a right to he impatient of starvation; but, still there does seem to be an insolence of riches and prosperity, which one day or another will have a downfall. And this will be a pity, too. On Saturday I went with my friend Mr. Bright to Otterpool and to Larkhill to see the skaters on the private waters of those two seats of gentlemen; and it is a wonder to behold--and it is always a new wonder to me--how comfortable Englishmen know how to make themselves; locating their dwellings far within private grounds, with secure gateways and porters' lodges, and the smoothest roads and trimmest paths, and shaven lawns, and clumps of trees, and every bit of the ground, every hill and dell, made the most of for convenience and beauty, and so well kept that even winter cannot cause disarray; and all this appropriated to the same family for generations, so that I suppose they come to believe it created exclusively and on purpose for them. And, really, the result is good and beautiful. It is a home,--an institution which we Americans have not; but then I doubt whether anybody is entitled to a home in this world, in so full a sense. The day was very cold, and the skaters seemed to enjoy themselves exceedingly. They were, I suppose, friends of the owners of the grounds, and Mr. Bright said they were treated in a jolly way, with hot luncheons. The skaters practise skating more as an art, and can perform finer manoeuvres on the ice, than our New England skaters usually can, though the English have so much less opportunity for practice. A beggar-woman was haunting the grounds at Otterpool, but I saw nobody give her anything. I wonder how she got inside of the gate. Mr. W. J------ spoke of General Jackson as having come from the same part of Ireland as himself, and perhaps of the same family. I wonder whether he meant to say that the General was born in Ireland,--that having been suspected in America. February 21st.--Yesterday two companies of work-people came to our house in Rock Park, asking assistance, being out of work and with no resource other than charity. There were a dozen or more in each party. Their deportment was quiet and altogether unexceptionable,--no rudeness, no gruffness, nothing of menace. Indeed, such demonstrations would not have been safe, as they were followed about by two policemen; but they really seem to take their distress as their own misfortune and God's will, and impute it to nobody as a fault. This meekness is very touching, and makes one question the more whether they have all their rights. There have been disturbances, within a day or two, in Liverpool, and shops have been broken open and robbed of bread and money; but this is said to have been done by idle vagabonds, and not by the really hungry work-people. These last submit to starvation gently and patiently, as if it were an every-day matter with them, or, at least, nothing but what lay fairly within their horoscope. I suppose, in fact, their stomachs have the physical habit that makes hunger not intolerable, because customary. If they had been used to a full meat diet, their hunger would be fierce, like that of ravenous beasts; but now they are trained to it. I think that the feeling of an American, divided, as I am, by the ocean from his country, has a continual and immediate correspondence with the national feeling at home; and it seems to be independent of any external communication. Thus, my ideas about the Russian war vary in accordance with the state of the public mind at home, so that I am conscious whereabouts public sympathy is. March 7th.--J----- and I walked to Tranmere, and passed an old house which I suppose to be Tranmere Hall. Our way to it was up a hollow lane, with a bank and hedge on each side, and with a few thatched stone cottages, centuries old, their ridge-poles crooked and the stones time-worn, scattered along. At one point there was a wide, deep well, hewn out of the solid red freestone, and with steps, also hewn in solid rock, leading down to it. These steps were much hollowed by the feet of those who had come to the well; and they reach beneath the water, which is very high. The well probably supplied water to the old cotters and retainers of Tranmere Hall five hundred years ago. The Hall stands on the verge of a long hill which stretches behind Tranmere and as far as Birkenhead. It is an old gray stone edifice, with a good many gables, and windows with mullions, and some of them extending the whole breadth of the gable. In some parts of the house, the windows seem to have been built up; probably in the days when daylight was taxed. The form of the Hall is multiplex, the roofs sloping down and intersecting one another, so as to make the general result indescribable. There were two sun-dials on different sides of the house, both the dial-plates of which were of stone; and on one the figures, so far as I could see, were quite worn off, but the gnomon still cast a shadow over it in such a way that I could judge that it was about noon. The other dial had some half-worn hour-marks, but no gnomon. The chinks of the stones of the house were very weedy, and the building looked quaint and venerable; but it is now converted into a farm-house, with the farm-yard and outbuildings closely appended. A village, too, has grown up about it, so that it seems out of place among modern stuccoed dwellings, such as are erected for tradesmen and other moderate people who have their residences in the neighborhood of a great city. Among these there are a few thatched cottages, the homeliest domiciles that ever mortals lived in, belonging to the old estate. Directly across the street is a Wayside Inn, "licensed to sell wine, spirits, ale, and tobacco." The street itself has been laid out since the land grew valuable by the increase of Liverpool and Birkenhead; for the old Hall would never have been built on the verge of a public way. March 27th.--I attended court to day, at St. George's Hall, with my wife, Mr. Bright, and Mr. Channing, sitting in the High Sheriff's seat. It was the civil side, and Mr. Justice Cresswell presided. The lawyers, as far as aspect goes, seemed to me inferior to an American bar, judging from their countenances, whether as intellectual men or gentlemen. Their wigs and gowns do not impose on the spectator, though they strike him as an imposition. Their date is past. Mr. Warren, of the "Ten Thousand a Year," was in court,--a pale, thin, intelligent face, evidently a nervous man, more unquiet than anybody else in court,--always restless in his seat, whispering to his neighbors, settling his wig, perhaps with an idea that people single him out. St. George's Hall--the interior hall itself, I mean--is a spacious, lofty, and most rich and noble apartment, and very satisfactory. The pavement is made of mosaic tiles, and has a beautiful effect. April 7th.--I dined at Mr. J. P. Heywood's on Thursday, and met there Mr. and Mrs. ------ of Smithell's Hall. The Hall is an old edifice of some five hundred years, and Mrs. ------ says there is a bloody footstep at the foot of the great staircase. The tradition is that a certain martyr, in Bloody Mary's time, being examined before the occupant of the Hall, and committed to prison, stamped his foot, in earnest protest against the injustice with which he was treated. Blood issued from his foot, which slid along the stone pavement, leaving a long footmark, printed in blood. And there it has remained ever since, in spite of the scrubbings of all succeeding generations. Mrs. ------ spoke of it with much solemnity, real or affected. She says that they now cover the bloody impress with a carpet, being unable to remove it. In the History of Lancashire, which I looked at last night, there is quite a different account,--according to which the footstep is not a bloody one, but is a slight cavity or inequality in the surface of the stone, somewhat in the shape of a man's foot with a peaked shoe. The martyr's name was George Marsh. He was a curate, and was afterwards burnt. Mrs. ------ asked me to go and see the Hall and the footmark; and as it is in Lancashire, and not a great way off, and a curious old place, perhaps I may. April 12th.--The Earl of ------, whom I saw the other day at St. George's Hall, has a somewhat elderly look,--a pale and rather thin face, which strikes one as remarkably short, or compressed from top to bottom. Nevertheless, it has great intelligence, and sensitiveness too, I should think, but a cold, disagreeable expression. I should take him to be a man of not very pleasant temper,--not genial. He has no physical presence nor dignity, yet one sees him to be a person of rank and consequence. But, after all, there is nothing about him which it need have taken centuries of illustrious nobility to produce, especially in a man of remarkable ability, as Lord ------ certainly is. S-----, who attended court all through the Hapgood trial, and saw Lord ------ for hours together every day, has come to conclusions quite different from mine. She thinks him a perfectly natural person, without any assumption, any self-consciousness, any scorn of the lower world. She was delighted with his ready appreciation and feeling of what was passing around him,-- his quick enjoyment of a joke,--the simplicity and unaffectedness of his emotion at whatever incidents excited his interest,--the genial acknowledgment of sympathy, causing him to look round and exchange glances with those near him, who were not his individual friends, but barristers and other casual persons. He seemed to her all that a nobleman ought to be, entirely simple and free from pretence and self-assertion, which persons of lower rank can hardly help bedevilling themselves with. I saw him only for a very few moments, so cannot put my observation against hers, especially as I was influenced by what I had heard the Liverpool people say of him. I do not know whether I have mentioned that the handsomest man I have seen in England was a young footman of Mr. Heywood's. In his rich livery, he was a perfect Joseph Andrews. In my Romance, the original emigrant to America may have carried away with him a family secret, whereby it was in his power, had he so chosen, to have brought about the ruin of the family. This secret he transmits to his American progeny, by whom it is inherited throughout all the intervening generations. At last, the hero of the Romance comes to England, and finds, that, by means of this secret, he still has it in his power to procure the downfall of the family. It would be something similar to the story of Meleager, whose fate depended on the firebrand that his mother had snatched from the flames. April 24th.--On Saturday I was present at a dejeuner on board the Donald McKay; the principal guest being Mr. Layard, M. P. There were several hundred people, quite filling the between decks of the ship, which was converted into a saloon for the occasion. I sat next to Mr. Layard, at the head of the table, and so had a good opportunity of seeing and getting acquainted with him. He is a man in early middle age,--of middle stature, with an open, frank, intelligent, kindly face. His forehead is not expansive, but is prominent in the perceptive regions, and retreats a good deal. His mouth is full,--I liked him from the first. He was very kind and complimentary to me, and made me promise to go and see him in London. It would have been a very pleasant entertainment, only that my pleasure in it was much marred by having to acknowledge a toast, in honor of the President. However, such things do not trouble me nearly so much as they used to do, and I came through it tolerably enough. Mr. Layard's speech was the great affair of the day. He speaks with much fluency (though he assured me that he had to put great force upon himself to speak publicly), and, as he warms up, seems to engage with his whole moral and physical man,--quite possessed with what he has to say. His evident earnestness and good faith make him eloquent, and stand him instead of oratorical graces. His views of the position of England and the prospects of the war were as dark as well could be; and his speech was exceedingly to the purpose, full of common-sense, and with not one word of clap-trap. Judging from its effect upon the audience, he spoke the voice of the whole English people,--although an English Baronet, who sat next below me, seemed to dissent, or at least to think that it was not exactly the thing for a stranger to hear. It concluded amidst great cheering. Mr. Layard appears to be a true Englishman, with a moral force and strength of character, and earnestness of purpose, and fulness of common-sense, such as have always served England's turn in her past successes; but rather fit for resistance than progress. No doubt, he is a good and very able man; but I question whether he could get England out of the difficulties which he sees so clearly, or could do much better than Lord Palmerston, whom he so decries. April 25th.--Taking the deposition of sailors yesterday, in a case of alleged ill-usage by the officers of a vessel, one of the witnesses was an old seaman of sixty. In reply to some testimony of his, the captain said, "You were the oldest man in the ship, and we honored you as such." The mate also said that he never could have thought of striking an old man like that. Indeed, the poor old fellow had a kind of dignity and venerableness about him, though he confessed to having been drunk, and seems to have been a mischief-maker, what they call a sea-preacher,-- promoting discontent and grumbling. He must have been a very handsome man in his youth, having regular features of a noble and beautiful cast. His beard was gray; but his dark hair had hardly a streak of white, and was abundant all over his head. He was deaf, and seemed to sit in a kind of seclusion, unless when loudly questioned or appealed to. Once he broke forth from a deep silence thus, "I defy any man!" and then was silent again. It had a strange effect, this general defiance, which he meant, I suppose, in answer to some accusation that he thought was made against him. His general behavior throughout the examination was very decorous and proper; and he said he had never but once hitherto been before a consul, and that was in 1819, when a mate had ill-used him, and, "being a young man then, I gave him a beating,"--whereupon his face gleamed with a quiet smile, like faint sunshine on an old ruin. "By many a tempest has his beard been shook"; and I suppose he must soon go into a workhouse, and thence, shortly, to his grave. He is now in a hospital, having, as the surgeon certifies, some ribs fractured; but there does not appear to have been any violence used upon him aboard the ship of such a nature as to cause this injury, though he swears it was a blow from a rope, and nothing else. What struck me in the case was the respect and rank that his age seemed to give him, in the view of the officers; and how, as the captain's expression signified, it lifted him out of his low position, and made him a person to be honored. The dignity of his manner is perhaps partly owing to the ancient mariner, with his long experience, being an oracle among the forecastle men. May 3d.--It rains to-day, after a very long period of east-wind and dry weather. The east-wind here, blowing across the island, seems to be the least damp of all the winds; but it is full of malice and mischief, of an indescribably evil temper, and stabs one like a cold, poisoned dagger. I never spent so disagreeable a spring as this, although almost every day for a month has been bright. Friday, May 11th.--A few weeks ago, a sailor, a most pitiable object, came to my office to complain of cruelty from his captain and mate. They had beaten him shamefully, of which he bore grievous marks about his face and eyes, and bruises on his head and other parts of his person: and finally the ship had sailed, leaving him behind. I never in my life saw so forlorn a fellow, so ragged, so wretched; and even his wits seemed to have been beaten out of him, if perchance he ever had any. He got an order for the hospital; and there he has been, off and on, ever since, till yesterday, when I received a message that he was dying, and wished to see the Consul; so I went with Mr. Wilding to the hospital. We were ushered into the waiting-room,--a kind of parlor, with a fire in the grate, and a centre-table, whereon lay one or two medical journals, with wood engravings; and there was a young man, who seemed to be an official of the house, reading. Shortly the surgeon appeared,--a brisk, cheerful, kindly sort of person, whom I have met there on previous visits. He told us that the man was dying, and probably would not be able to communicate anything, but, nevertheless, ushered us up to the highest floor, and into the room where he lay. It was a large, oblong room, with ten or twelve beds in it, each occupied by a patient. The surgeon said that the hospital was often so crowded that they were compelled to lay some of the patients on the floor. The man whom we came to see lay on his bed in a little recess formed by a projecting window; so that there was a kind of seclusion for him to die in. He seemed quite insensible to outward things, and took no notice of our approach, nor responded to what was said to him,--lying on his side, breathing with short gasps,--his apparent disease being inflammation of the chest, although the surgeon said that he might be found to have sustained internal injury by bruises. he was restless, tossing his head continually, mostly with his eyes shut, and much compressed and screwed up, but sometimes opening them; and then they looked brighter and darker than when I first saw them. I think his face was not at any time so stupid as at his first interview with me; but whatever intelligence he had was rather inward than outward, as if there might be life and consciousness at a depth within, while as to external matters he was in a mist. The surgeon felt his wrist, and said that there was absolutely no pulsation, and that he might die at any moment, or might perhaps live an hour, but that there was no prospect of his being able to communicate with me. He was quite restless, nevertheless, and sometimes half raised himself in bed, sometimes turned himself quite over, and then lay gasping for an instant. His woollen shirt being thrust up on his arm, there appeared a tattooing of a ship and anchor, and other nautical emblems, on both of them, which another sailor-patient, on examining them, said must have been done years ago. This might be of some importance, because the dying man had told me, when I first saw him, that he was no sailor, but a farmer, and that, this being his first voyage, he had been beaten by the captain for not doing a sailor's duty, which he had had no opportunity of learning. These sea-emblems indicated that he was probably a seaman of some years' service. While we stood in the little recess, such of the other patients as were convalescent gathered near the foot of the bed; and the nurse came and looked on, and hovered about us,--a sharp-eyed, intelligent woman of middle age, with a careful and kind expression, neglecting nothing that was for the patient's good, yet taking his death as coolly as any other incident in her daily business. Certainly, it was a very forlorn death-bed; and I felt--what I have heretofore been inclined to doubt-- that it might, be a comfort to have persons whom one loves, to go with us to the threshold of the other world, and leave us only when we are fairly across it. This poor fellow had a wife and two children on the other side of the water. At first he did not utter any sound; but by and by he moaned a little, and gave tokens of being more sensible to outward concerns,--not quite so misty and dreamy as hitherto. We had been talking all the while--myself in a whisper, but the surgeon in his ordinary tones--about his state, without his paying any attention. But now the surgeon put his mouth down to the man's face and said, "Do you know that you are dying?" At this the patient's head began to move upon the pillow; and I thought at first that it was only the restlessness that he had shown all along; but soon it appeared to be an expression of emphatic dissent, a negative shake of the head. He shook it with all his might, and groaned and mumbled, so that it was very evident how miserably reluctant he was to die. Soon after this he absolutely spoke. "O, I want you to get me well! I want to get away from here!" in a groaning and moaning utterance. The surgeon's question had revived him, but to no purpose; for, being told that the Consul had come to see him, and asked whether he had anything to communicate, he said only, "O, I want him to get me well!" and the whole life that was left in him seemed to be unwillingness to die. This did not last long; for he soon relapsed into his first state, only with his face a little more pinched and screwed up, and his eyes strangely sunken. And lost in his head; and the surgeon said that there would be no use in my remaining. So I took my leave. Mr. Wilding had brought a deposition of the man's evidence, which he had clearly made at the Consulate, for him to sign, and this we left with the surgeon, in case there should be such an interval of consciousness and intelligence before death as to make it possible for him to sign it. But of this there is no probability. I have just received a note from the hospital, stating that the sailor, Daniel Smith, died about three quarters of an hour after I saw him. May 18th.--The above-mentioned Daniel Smith had about him a bundle of letters, which I have examined. They are all very yellow, stained with sea-water, smelling of bad tobacco-smoke, and much worn at the folds. Never were such ill-written letters, nor such incredibly fantastic spelling. They seem to be from various members of his family,--most of them from a brother, who purports to have been a deck-hand in the coasting and steamboat trade between Charleston and other ports; others from female relations; one from his father, in which he inquires how long his son has been in jail, and when the trial is to come on,--the offence, however, of which he was accused, not being indicated. But from the tenor of his brother's letters, it would appear that he was a small farmer in the interior of South Carolina, sending butter, eggs, and poultry to be sold in Charleston by his brother, and receiving the returns in articles purchased there. This was his own account of himself; and he affirmed, in his deposition before me, that he had never had any purpose of shipping for Liverpool, or anywhere else; but that, going on board the ship to bring a man's trunk ashore, he was compelled to remain and serve as a sailor. This was a hard fate, certainly, and a strange thing to happen in the United States at this day,--that a free citizen should be absolutely kidnapped, carried to a foreign country, treated with savage cruelty during the voyage, and left to die on his arrival. Yet all this has unquestionably been done, and will probably go unpunished. The seed of the long-stapled cotton, now cultivated in America, was sent there in 1786 from the Bahama Islands, by some of the royalist refugees, who had settled there. The inferior short-stapled cotton had been previously cultivated for domestic purposes. The seeds of every other variety have been tried without success. The kind now grown was first introduced into Georgia. Thus to the refugees America owes as much of her prosperity as is due to the cotton-crops, and much of whatever harm is to result from slavery. May 22d.--Captain J------ says that he saw, in his late voyage to Australia and India, a vessel commanded by an Englishman, who had with him his wife and thirteen children. This ship was the home of the family, and they had no other. The thirteen children had all been born on board, and had been brought up on board, and knew nothing of dry land, except by occasionally setting foot on it. Captain J------ is a very agreeable specimen of the American shipmaster, --a pleasant, gentlemanly man, not at all refined, and yet with fine and honorable sensibilities. Very easy in his manners and conversation, yet gentle,--talking on freely, and not much minding grammar; but finding a sufficient and picturesque expression for what he wishes to say; very cheerful and vivacious; accessible to feeling, as yesterday, when talking about the recent death of his mother. His voice faltered, and the tears came into his eyes, though before and afterwards he smiled merrily, and made us smile; fond of his wife, and carrying her about the world with him, and blending her with all his enjoyments; an excellent and sagacious man of business; liberal in his expenditure; proud of his ship and flag; always well dressed, with some little touch of sailor-like flashiness, but not a whit too much; slender in figure, with a handsome face, and rather profuse brown beard and whiskers; active and alert; about thirty-two. A daguerreotype sketch of any conversation of his would do him no justice, for its slang, its grammatical mistakes, its mistaken words (as "portable" for "portly"), would represent a vulgar man, whereas the impression he leaves is by no means that of vulgarity; but he is a character quite perfect within itself, fit for the deck and the cabin, and agreeable in the drawing-room, though not amenable altogether to its rules. Being so perfectly natural, he is more of a gentleman for those little violations of rule, which most men, with his opportunities, might escape. The men whose appeals to the Consul's charity are the hardest to be denied are those who have no country,---Hungarians, Poles, Cubans, Spanish-Americans, and French republicans. All exiles for liberty come to me, if the representative of America were their representative. Yesterday, came an old French soldier, and showed his wounds; to-day, a Spaniard, a friend of Lopez,--bringing his little daughter with him. He said he was starving, and looked so. The little girl was in good condition enough, and decently dressed.--May 23d. May 30th.--The two past days have been Whitsuntide holidays; and they have been celebrated at Tranmere in a manner very similar to that of the old "Election" in Massachusetts, as I remember it a good many years ago, though the festival has now almost or quite died out. Whitsuntide was kept up on our side of the water, I am convinced, under pretence of rejoicings at the election of Governor. It occurred at precisely the same period of the year,--the same week; the only difference being, that Monday and Tuesday are the Whitsun festival days, whereas, in Massachusetts, Wednesday was "Election day," and the acme of the merry-making. I passed through Tranmere yesterday forenoon, and lingered awhile to see the sports. The greatest peculiarity of the crowd, to my eye, was that they seemed not to have any best clothes, and therefore had put on no holiday suits,--a grimy people, as at all times, heavy, obtuse, with thick beer in their blood. Coarse, rough-complexioned women and girls were intermingled, the girls with no maiden trimness in their attire, large and blowsy. Nobody seemed to have been washed that day. All the enjoyment was of an exceedingly sombre character, so far as I saw it, though there was a richer variety of sports than at similar festivals in America. There were wooden horses, revolving in circles, to be ridden a certain number of rounds for a penny; also swinging cars gorgeously painted, and the newest named after Lord Raglan; and four cars balancing one another, and turned by a winch; and people with targets and rifles,-- the principal aim being to hit an apple bobbing on a string before the target; other guns for shooting at the distance of a foot or two, for a prize of filberts; and a game much in fashion, of throwing heavy sticks at earthen mugs suspended on lines, three throws for a penny. Also, there was a posture-master, showing his art in the centre of a ring of miscellaneous spectators, and handing round his bat after going through all his attitudes. The collection amounted to only one halfpenny, and, to eke it out, I threw in three more. There were some large booths with tables placed the whole length, at which sat men and women drinking and smoking pipes; orange-girls, a great many, selling the worst possible oranges, which had evidently been boiled to give them a show of freshness. There were likewise two very large structures, the walls made of boards roughly patched together, and rooted with canvas, which seemed to have withstood a thousand storms. Theatres were there, and in front there were pictures of scenes which were to be represented within; the price of admission being twopence to one theatre, and a penny to the other. But, small as the price of tickets was, I could not see that anybody bought them. Behind the theatres, close to the board wall, and perhaps serving as the general dressing-room, was a large windowed wagon, in which I suppose the company travel and live together. Never, to my imagination, was the mysterious glory that has surrounded theatrical representation ever since my childhood brought down into such dingy reality as this. The tragedy queens were the same coarse and homely women and girls that surrounded me on the green. Some of the people had evidently been drinking more than was good for them; but their drunkenness was silent and stolid, with no madness in it. No ebullition of any sort was apparent. May 31st.--Last Sunday week, for the first time, I heard the note of the cuckoo. "Cuck-oo--cuck-oo" it says, repeating the word twice, not in a brilliant metallic tone, but low and flute-like, without the excessive sweetness of the flute,--without an excess of saccharine juice in the sound. There are said to be always two cuckoos seen together. The note is very soft and pleasant. The larks I have not yet heard in the sky; though it is not infrequent to hear one singing in a cage, in the streets of Liverpool. Brewers' draymen are allowed to drink as much of their master's beverage as they like, and they grow very brawny and corpulent, resembling their own horses in size, and presenting, one would suppose, perfect pictures of physical comfort and well-being. But the least bruise, or even the hurt of a finger, is liable to turn to gangrene or erysipelas, and become fatal. When the wind blows violently, however clear the sky, the English say, "It is a stormy day." And, on the other hand, when the air is still, and it does not actually rain, however dark and lowering the sky may be, they say, "The weather is fine!" June 2d.--The English women of the lower classes have a grace of their own, not seen in each individual, but nevertheless belonging to their order, which is not to be found in American women of the corresponding class. The other day, in the police court, a girl was put into the witness-box, whose native graces of this sort impressed me a good deal. She was coarse, and her dress was none of the cleanest, and nowise smart. She appeared to have been up all night, too, drinking at the Tranmere wake, and had since ridden in a cart, covered up with a rug. She described herself as a servant-girl, out of place; and her charm lay in all her manifestations,--her tones, her gestures, her look, her way of speaking and what she said, being so appropriate and natural in a girl of that class; nothing affected; no proper grace thrown away by attempting to appear lady-like,--which an American girl would have attempted,--and she would also have succeeded in a certain degree. If each class would but keep within itself, and show its respect for itself by aiming at nothing beyond, they would all be more respectable. But this kind of fitness is evidently not to be expected in the future; and something else must be substituted for it. These scenes at the police court are often well worth witnessing. The controlling genius of the court, except when the stipendiary magistrate presides, is the clerk, who is a man learned in the law. Nominally the cases are decided by the aldermen, who sit in rotation, but at every important point there comes a nod or a whisper from the clerk; and it is that whisper which sets the defendant free or sends him to prison. Nevertheless, I suppose the alderman's common-sense and native shrewdness are not without their efficacy in producing a general tendency towards the right; and, no doubt, the decisions of the police court are quite as often just as those of any other court whatever. June 11th.--I walked with J----- yesterday to Bebington Church. When I first saw this church, nearly two years since, it seemed to me the fulfilment of my ideal of an old English country church. It is not so satisfactory now, although certainly a venerable edifice. There used some time ago to be ivy all over the tower; and at my first view of it, there was still a little remaining on the upper parts of the spire. But the main roots, I believe, were destroyed, and pains were taken to clear away the whole of the ivy, so that now it is quite bare,--nothing but homely gray stone, with marks of age, but no beauty. The most curious thing about the church is the font. It is a massive pile, composed of five or six layers of freestone in an octagon shape, placed in the angle formed by the projecting side porch and the wall of the church, and standing under a stained-glass window. The base is six or seven feet across, and it is built solidly up in successive steps, to the height of about six feet,--an octagonal pyramid, with the basin of the font crowning the pile hewn out of the solid stone, and about a foot in diameter and the same in depth. There was water in it from the recent rains,--water just from heaven, and therefore as holy as any water it ever held in old Romish times. The aspect of this aged font is extremely venerable, with moss in the basin and all over the stones; grass, and weeds of various kinds, and little shrubs, rooted in the chinks of the stones and between the successive steps. At each entrance of Rock Park, where we live, there is a small Gothic structure of stone, each inhabited by a policeman and his family; very small dwellings indeed, with the main apartment opening directly out-of-doors; and when the door is open, one can see the household fire, the good wife at work, perhaps the table set, and a throng of children clustering round, and generally overflowing the threshold. The policeman walks about the Park in stately fashion, with his silver-laced blue uniform and snow-white gloves, touching his hat to gentlemen who reside in the Park. In his public capacity he has rather an awful aspect, but privately he is a humble man enough, glad of any little job, and of old clothes for his many children, or, I believe, for himself. One of the two policemen is a shoemaker and cobbler. His pay, officially, is somewhere about a guinea a week. The Park, just now, is very agreeable to look at, shadowy with trees and shrubs, and with glimpses of green leaves and flower-gardens through the branches and twigs that line the iron fences. After a shower the hawthorn blossoms are delightfully fragrant. Golden tassels of the laburnum are abundant. I may have mentioned elsewhere the traditional prophecy, that, when the ivy should reach the top of Bebbington spire, the tower was doomed to fall. It lies still, therefore, a chance of standing for centuries. Mr. Turner tells me that the font now used is inside of the church, but the one outside is of unknown antiquity, and that it was customary, in papistical time, to have the font without the church. There is a little boy often on board the Rock Ferry steamer with an accordion,--an instrument I detest; but nevertheless it becomes tolerable in his hands, not so much for its music, as for the earnestness and interest with which he plays it. His body and the accordion together become one musical instrument on which his soul plays tunes, for he sways and vibrates with the music from head to foot and throughout his frame, half closing his eyes and uplifting his face, as painters represent St. Cecilia and other famous musicians; and sometimes he swings his accordion in the air, as if in a perfect rapture. After all, my ears, though not very nice, are somewhat tortured by his melodies, especially when confined within the cabin. The boy is ten years old, perhaps, and rather pretty; clean, too, and neatly dressed, very unlike all other street and vagabond children whom I have seen in Liverpool. People give him their halfpence more readily than to any other musicians who infest the boat. J-----, the other day, was describing a soldier-crab to his mother, he being much interested in natural history, and endeavoring to give as strong an idea as possible of its warlike characteristics, and power to harm those who molest it. Little R----- sat by, quietly listening and sewing, and at last, lifting her head, she remarked, "I hope God did not hurt himself, when he was making him!" LEAMINGTON. June 21st.--We left Rock Ferry and Liverpool on Monday the 18th by the rail for this place; a very dim and rainy day, so that we had no pleasant prospects of the country; neither would the scenery along the Great Western Railway have been in any case very striking, though sunshine would have made the abundant verdure and foliage warm and genial. But a railway naturally finds its way through all the common places of a country, and is certainly a most unsatisfactory mode of travelling, the only object being to arrive. However, we had a whole carriage to ourselves, and the children enjoyed the earlier part of the journey very much. We skirted Shrewsbury, and I think I saw the old tower of a church near the station, perhaps the same that struck Falstaff's "long hour." As we left the town I saw the Wrekin, a round, pointed hill of regular shape, and remembered the old toast, "To all friends round the Wrekin!" As we approached Birmingham, the country began to look somewhat Brummagemish, with its manufacturing chimneys, and pennons of flame quivering out of their tops; its forges, and great heaps of mineral refuse; its smokiness and other ugly symptoms. Of Birmingham itself we saw little or nothing, except the mean and new brick lodging-houses, on the outskirts of the town. Passing through Warwick, we had a glimpse of the castle,--an ivied wall and two turrets, rising out of imbosoming foliage; one's very idea of an old castle. We reached Leamington at a little past six, and drove to the Clarendon Hotel,--a very spacious and stately house, by far the most splendid hotel I have yet seen in England. The landlady, a courteous old lady in black, showed my wife our rooms, and we established ourselves in an immensely large and lofty parlor, with red curtains and ponderous furniture, perhaps a very little out of date. The waiter brought me the book of arrivals, containing the names of all visitors for from three to five years back. During two years I estimated that there had been about three hundred and fifty persons only, and while we were there, I saw nobody but ourselves to support the great hotel. Among the names were those of princes, earls, countesses, and baronets; and when the people of the house heard from R-----'s nurse that I too was a man of office, and held the title of Honorable in my own country, they greatly regretted that I entered myself as plain "Mister" in the book. We found this hotel very comfortable, and might doubtless have made it luxurious, had we chosen to go to five times the expense of similar luxuries in America; but we merely ordered comfortable things, and so came off at no very extravagant rate,--and with great honor, at all events, in the estimation of the waiter. During the afternoon we found lodgings, and established ourselves in them before dark. This English custom of lodgings, of which we had some experience at Rhyl last year, has its advantages; but is rather uncomfortable for strangers, who, in first settling themselves down, find that they must undertake all the responsibility of housekeeping at an instant's warming, and cannot get even a cup of tea till they have made arrangements with the grocer. Soon, however, there comes a sense of being at home, and by our exclusive selves, which never can be attained at hotels nor boarding-houses. Our house is well situated and respectably furnished, with the dinginess, however, which is inseparable from lodging-houses,--as if others had used these things before and would use them again after we had gone,--a well-enough adaptation, but a lack of peculiar appropriateness; and I think one puts off real enjoyment from a sense of not being truly fitted. July 1st.--On Friday I took the rail with J----- for Coventry. It was a bright and very warm day, oppressively so, indeed; though I think that there is never in this English climate the pervading warmth of an American summer day. The sunshine may be excessively hot, but an overshadowing cloud or the shade of a tree or of a building at once affords relief; and if the slightest breeze stirs, you feel the latent freshness of the air. Coventry is some nine or ten miles from Leamington. The approach to it from the railway presents nothing very striking,--a few church-towers, and one or two tall steeples; and the houses first seen are of modern and unnoticeable aspect. Getting into the interior of the town, however, you find the streets very crooked, and some of them very narrow. I saw one place where it seemed possible to shake hands from one jutting storied old house to another. There were whole streets of the same kind of houses, one story impending over another, such as used to be familiar to me in Salem, and in some streets of Boston. In fact, the whole aspect of the town--its irregularity and continual indirectness--reminded me very much of Boston, as I used to see it, in rare visits thither, when a child. These Coventry houses, however, many of them, are much larger than any of similar style that I have seen elsewhere, and they spread into greater bulk as they ascend, by means of one story jutting over the other. Probably the New-Englanders continued to follow this fashion of architecture after it had been abandoned in the mother country. The old house built, by Philip English, in Salem, dated about 1692; and it was in this style,--many gabled, and impending. Here the edifices of such architecture seem to be Elizabethan, and of earlier date. A woman in Stratford told us that the rooms, very low on the ground-floor, grew loftier from story to story to the attic. The fashion of windows, in Coventry, is such as I have not hitherto seen. In the highest story, a window of the ordinary height extends along the whole breadth of the house, ten, fifteen, perhaps twenty feet, just like any other window of a commonplace house, except for this inordinate width. One does not easily see what the inhabitants want of so much window-light; but the fashion is very general, and in modern houses, or houses that have been modernized, this style of window is retained. Thus young people who grow up amidst old people contract quaint and old-fashioned manners and aspect. I imagine that these ancient towns--such as Chester and Stratford, Warwick and Coventry--contain even a great deal more antiquity than meets the eye. You see many modern fronts; but if you peep or penetrate inside, you find an antique arrangement,--old rafters, intricate passages, and ancient staircases, which have put on merely a new outside, and are likely still to prove good for the usual date of a new house. They put such an immense and stalwart ponderosity into their frameworks, that I suppose a house of Elizabeth's time, if renewed, has at least an equal chance of durability with one that is new in every part. All the hotels in Coventry, so far as I noticed them, are old, with new fronts; and they have an archway for the admission of vehicles into the court-yard, and doors opening into the rooms of the building on each side of the arch. Maids and waiters are seen darting across the arched passage from door to door, and it requires a guide (in my case, at least) to show you the way to the coffee-room or the bar. I have never been up stairs in any of them, but can conceive of infinite bewilderment of zigzag corridors between staircase and chamber. It was fair-day in Coventry, and this gave what no doubt is an unusual bustle to the streets. In fact, I have not seen such crowded and busy streets in any English town; various kinds of merchandise being for sale in the open air, and auctioneers disposing of miscellaneous wares, pretty much as they do at musters and other gatherings in the United States. The oratory of the American auctioneer, however, greatly surpasses that of the Englishman in vivacity and fun. But this movement and throng, together with the white glow of the sun on the pavements, make the scene, in my recollection, assume an American aspect, and this is strange in so antique and quaint a town as Coventry. We rambled about without any definite aim, but found our way, I believe, to most of the objects that are worth seeing. St. Michael's Church was most magnificent,--so old, yet enduring; so huge, so rich; with such intricate minuteness in its finish, that, look as long as you will at it, you can always discover something new directly before your eyes. I admire this in Gothic architecture,--that you cannot master it all at once, that it is not a naked outline; but, as deep and rich as human nature itself, always revealing new ideas. It is as if the builder had built himself and his age up into it, and as if the edifice had life. Grecian temples are less interesting to me, being so cold and crystalline. I think this is the only church I have seen where there are any statues still left standing in the niches of the exterior walls. We did not go inside. The steeple of St. Michael's is three hundred and three feet high, and no doubt the clouds often envelop the tip of the spire. Trinity, another church with a tall spire, stands near St. Michael's, but did not attract me so much; though I, perhaps, might have admired it equally, had I seen it first or alone. We certainly know nothing of church-building in America, and of all English things that I have seen, methinks the churches disappoint me least. I feel, too, that there is something much more wonderful in them than I have yet had time to know and experience. In the course of the forenoon, searching about everywhere in quest of Gothic architecture, we found our way into St. Mary's Hall. The doors were wide open; it seemed to be public,--there was a notice on the wall desiring visitors to give nothing to attendants for showing it, and so we walked in. I observed, in the guide-books, that we should have obtained an order for admission from some member of the town council; but we had none, and found no need of it. An old woman, and afterwards an old man, both of whom seemed to be at home on the premises, told us that we might enter, and troubled neither themselves nor us any further. St. Mary's Hall is now the property of the Corporation of Coventry, and seems to be the place where the Mayor and Council hold their meetings. It was built by one of the old guilds or fraternities of merchants and tradesmen The woman shut the kitchen door when I approached, so that I did not see the great fireplaces and huge cooking-utensils which are said to be there. Whether these are ever used nowadays, and whether the Mayor of Coventry gives such hospitable banquets as the Mayor of Liverpool, I do not know. We went to the Red Lion, and had a luncheon of cold lamb and cold pigeon-pie. This is the best way of dining at English hotels,--to call the meal a luncheon, in which case you will get as good or better a variety than if it were a dinner, and at less than half the cost. Having lunched, we again wandered about town, and entered a quadrangle of gabled houses, with a church, and its churchyard on one side. This proved to be St. John's Church, and a part of the houses were the locality of Bond's Hospital, for the reception of ten poor men, and the remainder was devoted to the Bablake School. Into this latter I peered, with a real American intrusiveness, which I never found in myself before, but which I must now assume, or miss a great many things which I am anxious to see. Running along the front of the house, under the jut of the impending story, there was a cloistered walk, with windows opening on the quadrangle. An arched oaken door, with long iron hinges, admitted us into a school-room about twenty feet square, paved with brick tiles, blue and red. Adjoining this there is a larger school-room which we did not enter, but peeped at, through one of the inner windows, from the cloistered walk. In the room which we entered, there were seven scholars' desks, and an immense arched fireplace, with seats on each side, under the chimney, on a stone slab resting on a brick pedestal. The opening of the fireplace was at least twelve feet in width. On one side of the room were pegs for fifty-two boys' hats and clothes, and there was a boy's coat, of peculiar cut, hanging on a peg, with the number "50" in brass upon it. The coat looked ragged and shabby. An old school-book was lying on one of the desks, much tattered, and without a title; but it seemed to treat wholly of Saints' days and festivals of the Church. A flight of stairs, with a heavy balustrade of carved oak, ascended to a gallery, about eight or nine feet from the lower floor, which runs along two sides of the room, looking down upon it. The room is without a ceiling, and rises into a peaked gable, about twenty feet high. There is a large clock in it, and it is lighted by two windows, each about ten feet wide,--one in the gallery, and the other beneath it. Two benches or settles, with backs, stood one on each side of the fireplace. An old woman in black passed through the room while I was making my observations, and looked at me, but said nothing. The school was founded in 1563, by Thomas Whealby, Mayor of Coventry; the revenue is about 900 pounds, and admits children of the working-classes at eleven years old, clothes and provides for them, and finally apprentices them for seven years. We saw some of the boys playing in the quadrangle, dressed in long blue coats or gowns, with cloth caps on their heads. I know not how the atmosphere of antiquity, and massive continuance from age to age, which was the charm to me in this scene of a charityschool-room, can be thrown over it in description. After noting down these matters, I looked into the quiet precincts of Bond's Hospital, which, no doubt, was more than equally interesting; but the old men were lounging about or lolling at length, looking very drowsy, and I had not the heart nor the face to intrude among them. There is something altogether strange to an American in these charitable institutions,--in the preservation of antique modes and customs which is effected by them, insomuch that, doubtless, without at all intending it, the founders have succeeded in preserving a model of their own long-past age down into the midst of ours, and how much later nobody can know. We were now rather tired, and went to the railroad, intending to go home; but we got into the wrong train, and were carried by express, with hurricane speed, to Bradon, where we alighted, and waited a good while for the return train to Coventry. At Coventry again we had more than an hour to wait, and therefore wandered wearily up into the city, and took another look at its bustling streets, in which there seems to be a good emblem of what England itself really is,--with a great deal of antiquity in it, and which is now chiefly a modification of the old. The new things are based and supported on the sturdy old things, and often limited and impeded by them; but this antiquity is so massive that there seems to be no means of getting rid of it without tearing society to pieces. July 2d.--To-day I shall set out on my return to Liverpool, leaving my family here. TO THE LAKES. July 4th.--I left Leamington on Monday, shortly after twelve, having been accompanied to the railway station by U---- and J-----, whom I sent away before the train started. While I was waiting, a rather gentlemanly, well-to-do, English-looking man sat down by me, and began to talk of the Crimea, of human affairs in general, of God and his Providence, of the coming troubles of the world, and of spiritualism, in a strange free way for an Englishman, or, indeed, for any man. It was easy to see that he was an enthusiast of some line or other. He being bound for Birmingham and I for Rugby, we soon had to part; but he asked my name, and told me his own, which I did not much attend to, and immediately forgot. [Here follows a long account of a visit to Lichfield and Uttoxeter, condensed in "Our Old Home."] July 6th.--The day after my arrival, by way of Lichfield and Uttoxeter, at Liverpool, the door of the Consulate opened, and in came the very sociable personage who accosted me at the railway station at Leamington. He was on his way towards Edinburgh, to deliver a course of lectures or a lecture, and had called, he said, to talk with me about spiritualism, being desirous of having the judgment of a sincere mind on the subject. In his own mind, I should suppose, he is past the stage of doubt and inquiry; for he told me that in every action of his life he is governed by the counsels received from the spiritual world through a medium. I did not inquire whether this medium (who is a small boy) had suggested his visit to me. My remarks to him were quite of a sceptical character in regard to the faith to which he had surrendered himself. He has formerly lived in America, and had had a son born there. He gave me a pamphlet written by himself, on the cure of consumption and other diseases by antiseptic remedies. I hope he will not bore me any more, though he seems to be a very sincere and good man; but these enthusiasts who adopt such extravagant ideas appear to one to lack imagination, instead of being misled by it, as they are generally supposed to be. NEWBY BRIDGE.--FOOT OF WINDERMERE. July 13th.--I left Liverpool on Saturday last, by the London and Northwestern Railway, for Leamington, spent Sunday there, and started on Monday for the English lakes, with the whole family. We should not have taken this journey just now, but I had an official engagement which it was convenient to combine with a pleasure-excursion. The first night we arrived at Chester, and put up at the Albion Hotel, where we found ourselves very comfortable. We took the rail at twelve the next day, and went as far as Milnethorpe station, where we engaged seats in an old-fashioned stage-coach, and came to Newby Bridge. I suppose there are not many of these coaches now running on any road in Great Britain; but this appears to be the genuine machine, in all respects, and especially in the round, ruddy coachman, well moistened with ale, good-natured, courteous, and with a proper sense of his dignity and important position. U----, J-----, and I mounted atop, S-----, nurse, and R----- got inside, and we bowled off merrily towards the hearts of the hills. It was more than half past nine when we arrived at Newby Bridge, and alighted at the Swan Hotel, where we now are. It is a very agreeable place: not striking as to scenery, but with a pleasant rural aspect. A stone bridge of five arches crosses the river Severn (which is the communication between Windermere Lake and Morecambe Bay) close to the house, which sits low--and well sheltered in the lap of hills,--an old-fashioned inn, where the landlord and his people have a simple and friendly way of dealing with their guests, and yet provide them with all sorts of facilities for being comfortable. They load our supper and breakfast tables with trout, cold beef, ham, toast, and muffins; and give us three fair courses for dinner, and excellent wine, the cost of all which remains to be seen. This is not one of the celebrated stations among the lakes; but twice a day the stage-coach passes from Milnethorpe towards Ulverton, and twice returns, and three times a little steamer passes to and fro between our hotel and the head of the lake. Young ladies, in broad-brimmed hats, stroll about, or row on the river in the light shallops, of which there are abundance; sportsmen sit on the benches under the windows of the hotel, arranging their fishing-tackle; phaetons and post-chaises, with postilions in scarlet jackets and white breeches, with one high-topped boot, and the other leathered far up on the leg to guard against friction between the horses, dash up to the door. Morning and night comes the stage-coach, and we inspect the outside passengers, almost face to face with us, from our parlor-windows, up one pair of stairs. Little boys, and J----- among them, spend hours on hours fishing in the clear, shallow river for the perch, chubs, and minnows that may be seen flashing, like gleams of light over the flat stones with which the bottom is paved. I cannot answer for the other boys, but J----- catches nothing. There are a good many trees on the hills and roundabout, and pleasant roads loitering along by the gentle river-side, and it has been so sunny and warm since we came here that we shall have quite a genial recollection of the place, if we leave it before the skies have time to frown. The day after we came, we climbed a high and pretty steep hill, through a path shadowed with trees and shrubbery, up to a tower, from the summit of which we had a wide view of mountain scenery and the greater part of Windermere. This lake is a lovely little pool among the hills, long and narrow, beautifully indented with tiny bays and headlands; and when we saw it, it was one smile (as broad a smile as its narrowness allowed) with really brilliant sunshine. All the scenery we have yet met with is in excellent taste, and keeps itself within very proper bounds,-- never getting too wild and rugged to shock the sensibilities of cultivated people, as American scenery is apt to do. On the rudest surface of English earth, there is seen the effect of centuries of civilization, so that you do not quite get at naked Nature anywhere. And then every point of beauty is so well known, and has been described so much, that one must needs look through other people's eyes, and feels as if he were seeing a picture rather than a reality. Man has, in short, entire possession of Nature here, and I should think young men might sometimes yearn for a fresher draught. But an American likes it. FURNESS ABBEY. Yesterday, July 12th, we took a phaeton and went to Furness Abbey,--a drive of about sixteen miles, passing along the course of the Leam to Morecambe Bay, and through Ulverton and other villages. These villages all look antique, and the smallest of them generally are formed of such close, contiguous clusters of houses, and have such narrow and crooked streets, that they give you an idea of a metropolis in miniature. The houses along the road (of which there are not many, except in the villages) are almost invariably old, built of stone, and covered with a light gray plaster; generally they have a little flower-garden in front, and, often, honeysuckles, roses, or some other sweet and pretty rustic adornment, are flowering over the porch. I have hardly had such images of simple, quiet, rustic comfort and beauty, as from the look of these houses; and the whole impression of our winding and undulating road, bordered by hedges, luxuriantly green, and not too closely clipped, accords with this aspect. There is nothing arid in an English landscape; and one cannot but fancy that the same may be true of English rural life. The people look wholesome and well-to-do,--not specimens of hard, dry, sunburnt muscle, like our yeomen,--and are kind and civil to strangers, sometimes making a little inclination of the head in passing. Miss Martineau, however, does not seem to think well of their mental and moral condition. We reached Furness Abbey about twelve. There is a railway station close by the ruins; and a new hotel stands within the precincts of the abbey grounds; and continually there is the shriek, the whiz, the rumble, the bell-ringing, denoting the arrival of the trains; and passengers alight, and step at once (as their choice may be) into the refreshment-room, to get a glass of ale or a cigar,--or upon the gravelled paths of the lawn, leading to the old broken walls and arches of the abbey. The ruins are extensive, and the enclosure of the abbey is stated to have covered a space of sixty-five acres. It is impossible to describe them. The most interesting part is that which was formerly the church, and which, though now roofless, is still surrounded by walls, and retains the remnants of the pillars that formerly supported the intermingling curves of the arches. The floor is all overgrown with grass, strewn with fragments and capitals of pillars. It was a great and stately edifice, the length of the nave and choir having been nearly three hundred feet, and that of the transept more than half as much. The pillars along the nave were alternately a round, solid one and a clustered one. Now, what remains of some of them is even with the ground; others present a stump just high enough to form a seat; and others are, perhaps, a man's height from the ground,--and all are mossy, and with grass and weeds rooted into their chinks, and here and there a tuft of flowers, giving its tender little beauty to their decay. The material of the edifice is a soft red stone, and it is now extensively overgrown with a lichen of a very light gray line, which, at a little distance, makes the walls look as if they had long ago been whitewashed, and now had partially returned to their original color. The arches of the nave and transept were noble and immense; there were four of them together, supporting a tower which has long since disappeared,--arches loftier than I ever conceived to have been made by man. Very possibly, in some cathedral that I have seen, or am yet to see, there may be arches as stately as these; but I doubt whether they can ever show to such advantage in a perfect edifice as they do in this ruin,--most of them broken, only one, as far as I recollect, still completing its sweep. In this state they suggest a greater majesty and beauty than any finished human work can show; the crumbling traces of the half-obliterated design producing somewhat of the effect of the first idea of anything admirable, when it dawns upon the mind of an artist or a poet,--an idea which, do what he may, he is sure to fall short of in his attempt to embody it. In the middle of the choir is a much-dilapidated monument of a cross-legged knight (a crusader, of course) in armor, very rudely executed; and, against the wall, lie two or three more bruised and battered warriors, with square helmets on their heads and visors down. Nothing can be uglier than these figures; the sculpture of those days seems to have been far behind the architecture. And yet they knew how to put a grotesque expression into the faces of their images, and we saw some fantastic shapes and heads at the lower points of arches which would do to copy into Punch. In the chancel, just at the point below where the high altar stands, was the burial-place of the old Barons of Kendal. The broken crusader, perhaps, represents one of them; and some of their stalwart bones might be found by digging down. Against the wall of the choir, near the vacant space where the altar was, are some stone seats with canopies richly carved in stone, all quite perfectly preserved, where the priests used to sit at intervals, during the celebration of mass. Conceive all these shattered walls, with here and there an arched door, or the great arched vacancy of a window; these broken stones and monuments scattered about; these rows of pillars up and down the nave; these arches, through which a giant might have stepped, and not needed to bow his head, unless in reverence to the sanctity of the place,--conceive it all, with such verdure and embroidery of flowers as the gentle, kindly moisture of the English climate procreates on all old things, making them more beautiful than new,--conceive it with the grass for sole pavement of the long and spacious aisle, and the sky above for the only roof. The sky, to be sure, is more majestic than the tallest of those arches; and yet these latter, perhaps, make the stronger impression of sublimity, because they translate the sweep of the sky to our finite comprehension. It was a most beautiful, warm, sunny day, and the ruins had all the pictorial advantage of bright light and deep shadows. I must not forget that birds flew in and out among the recesses, and chirped and warbled, and made themselves at home there. Doubtless, the birds of the present generation are the posterity of those who first settled in the ruins, after the Reformation; and perhaps the old monks of a still earlier day may have watched them building about the abbey, before it was a ruin at all. We had an old description of the place with us, aided by which we traced out the principal part of the edifice, such as the church, as already mentioned, and, contiguous to this, the Chapter-house, which is better preserved than the church; also the kitchen, and the room where the monks met to talk; and the range of wall, where their cells probably were. I never before had given myself the trouble to form any distinct idea of what an abbey or monastery was,--a place where holy rites were daily and continually to be performed, with places to eat and sleep contiguous and convenient, in order that the monks might always be at hand to perform those rites. They lived only to worship, and therefore lived under the same roof with their place of worship, which, of course, was the principal object in the edifice, and hallowed the whole of it. We found, too, at one end of the ruins, what is supposed to have been a school-house for the children of the tenantry or villeins of the abbey. All round this room is a bench of stone against the wall, and the pedestal also of the master's seat. There are, likewise, the ruins of the mill; and the mill-stream, which is just as new as ever it was, still goes murmuring and babbling, and passes under two or three old bridges, consisting of a low gray arch overgrown with grass and shrubbery. That stream was the most fleeting and vanishing thing about the ponderous and high-piled abbey; and yet it has outlasted everything else, and might still outlast another such edifice, and be none the worse for wear. There is not a great deal of ivy upon the walls, and though an ivied wall is a beautiful object, yet it is better not to have too much,--else it is but one wall of unbroken verdure, on which you can see none of the sculptural ornaments, nor any of the hieroglyphics of Time. A sweep of ivy here and there, with the gray wall everywhere showing through, makes the better picture; and I think that nothing is so effective as the little bunches of flowers, a mere handful, that grow in spots where the seeds have been carried by the wind ages ago. I have made a miserable botch of this description; it is no description, but merely an attempt to preserve something of the impression it made on me, and in this I do not seem to have succeeded at all. I liked the contrast between the sombreness of the old walls, and the sunshine falling through them, and gladdening the grass that floored the aisles; also, I liked the effect of so many idle and cheerful people, strolling into the haunts of the dead monks, and going babbling about, and peering into the dark nooks; and listening to catch some idea of what the building was from a clerical-looking personage, who was explaining it to a party of his friends. I don't know how well acquainted this gentleman might be with the subject; but he seemed anxious not to impart his knowledge too extensively, and gave a pretty direct rebuff to an honest man who ventured an inquiry of him. I think that the railway, and the hotel within the abbey grounds, add to the charm of the place. A moonlight solitary visit might be very good, too, in its way; but I believe that one great charm and beauty of antiquity is, that we view it out of the midst of quite another mode of life; and the more perfectly this can be done, the better. It can never be done more perfectly than at Furness Abbey, which is in itself a very sombre scene, and stands, moreover, in the midst of a melancholy valley, the Saxon name of which means the Vale of the Deadly Nightshade. The entrance to the stable-yard of the hotel is beneath a pointed arch of Saxon architecture, and on one side of this stands an old building, looking like a chapel, but which may have been a porter's lodge. The Abbot's residence was in this quarter; and the clerical personage, before alluded to, spoke of these as the oldest part of the ruins. About half a mile on the hither side of the abbey stands the village of Dalton, in which is a castle built on a Roman foundation, and which was afterwards used by the abbots (in their capacity of feudal lords) as a prison. The abbey was founded about 1027 by King Stephen, before he came to the throne; and the faces of himself and of his queen are still to be seen on one of the walls. We had a very agreeable drive home (our drive hither had been uncomfortably sunny and hot), and we stopped at Ulverton to buy a pair of shoes for J----- and some drawing-books and stationery. As we passed through the little town in the morning, it was all alive with the bustle and throng of the weekly market; and though this had ceased on our return, the streets still looked animated, because the heat of the day drew most of the population, I should imagine, out of doors. Old men look very antiquated here in their old-fashioned coats and breeches, sunning themselves by the wayside. We reached home somewhere about eight o'clock,--home I see I have called it; and it seems as homelike a spot as any we have found in England,--the old inn, close by the bridge, beside the clear river, pleasantly overshadowed by trees. It is entirely English, and like nothing that one sees in America; and yet. I feel as if I might have lived here a long while ago, and had now come back because I retained pleasant recollections of it. The children, too, make themselves at home. J----- spends his time from morning to night fishing for minnows or trout, and catching nothing at all, and U---- and R----- have been riding between fields and barn in a hay-cart. The roads give us beautiful walks along the river-side, or wind away among the gentle hills; and if we had nothing else to look at in these walks, the hedges and stone fences would afford interest enough, so many and pretty are the flowers, roses, honeysuckles, and other sweet things, and so abundantly does the moss and ivy grow among the old stones of the fences, which would never have a single shoot of vegetation on them in America till the very end of time. But here, no sooner is a stone fence built, than Nature sets to work to make it a part of herself. She adopts it and adorns it, as if it were her own child. A little sprig of ivy may be seen creeping up the side, and clinging fast with its many feet; a tuft of grass roots itself between two of the stones, where a little dust from the road has been moistened into soil for it: a small bunch of fern grows in another such crevice; a deep, soft, green moss spreads itself over the top and all along the sides of the fence; and wherever nothing else will grow, lichens adhere to the stones and variegate their lines. Finally, a great deal of shrubbery is sure to cluster along its extent, and take away all hardness from the outline; and so the whole stone fence looks as if God had had at least as much to do with it as man. The trunks of the trees, too, exhibit a similar parasitical vegetation. Parasitical is an unkind phrase to bestow on this beautiful love and kindness which seems to exist here between one plant and another; the strong thing--being always ready to give support and sustenance, and the weak thing to repay with beauty, so that both are the richer,--as in the case of ivy and woodbine, clustering up the trunk of a tall tree, and adding Corinthian grace to its lofty beauty. Mr. W------, our landlord, has lent us a splendid work with engravings, illustrating the antiquities of Furness Abbey. I gather from it that the hotel must have been rebuilt or repaired from an old manor-house, which was itself erected by a family of Prestons, after the Reformation, and was a renewal from the Abbot's residence. Much of the edifice probably, as it exists now, may have been part of the original one; and there are bas-reliefs of Scripture subjects, sculptured in stone, and fixed in the wall of the dining-room, which have been there since the Abbot's time. This author thinks that what we had supposed to be the school-house (on the authority of an old book) was really the building for the reception of guests, with its chapel. He says that the tall arches in the church are sixty feet high. The Earl of Burlington, I believe, is the present proprietor of the abbey. THE LAKES. July 16th.--On Saturday, we left Newby Bridge, and came by steamboat up Windermere Lake to Lowwood Hotel, where we now are. The foot of the lake is just above Newby Bridge, and it widens from that point, but never to such a breadth that objects are not pretty distinctly visible from shore to shore. The steamer stops at two or three places in the course of its voyage, the principal one being Bowness, which has a little bustle and air of business about it proper to the principal port of the lake. There are several small yachts, and many skiffs rowing about. The banks are everywhere beautiful, and the water, in one portion, is strewn with islands; few of which are large enough to be inhabitable, but they all seem to be appropriated, and kept in the neatest order. As yet, I have seen no wildness; everything is perfectly subdued and polished and imbued with human taste, except, indeed, the outlines of the hills, which continue very much the same as God made them. As we approached the head of the lake, the congregation of great hills in the distance became very striking. The shapes of these English mountains are certainly far more picturesque than those which I have seen in Eastern America, where their summits are almost invariably rounded, as I remember them. They are great hillocks, great bunches of earth, similar to one another in their developments. Here they have variety of shape, rising into peaks, falling in abrupt precipices, stretching along in zigzag outlines, and thus making the most of their not very gigantic masses, and producing a remarkable effect. We arrived at the Lowwood Hotel, which is very near the head of the lake, not long after two o'clock. It stands almost on the shore of Windermere, with only a green lawn between,--an extensive hotel, covering a good deal of ground; but low, and rather village-inn-like than lofty. We found the house so crowded as to afford us no very comfortable accommodations, either as to parlor or sleeping-rooms, and we find nothing like the home-feeling into which we at once settled down at Newby Bridge. There is a very pretty vicinity, and a fine view of mountains to the northwest, sitting together in a family group, sometimes in full sunshine, sometimes with only a golden gleam on one or two of them, sometimes all in a veil of cloud, from which here and there a great, dusky head raises itself, while you are looking at a dim obscurity. Nearer, there are high, green slopes, well wooded, but with such decent and well-behaved wood as you perceive has grown up under the care of man; still no wildness, no ruggedness,--as how should there be, when, every half-mile or so, a porter's lodge or a gentleman's gateway indicates that the whole region is used up for villas. On the opposite shore of the lake there is a mimic castle, which I suppose I might have mistaken for a real one two years ago. It is a great, foolish toy of gray stone. A steamboat comes to the pier as many as six times a day, and stage-coaches and omnibuses stop at the door still oftener, communicating with Ambleside and the town of Windermere, and with the railway, which opens London and all the world to us. We get no knowledge of our fellow-guests, all of whom, like ourselves, live in their own circles, and are just as remote from us as if the lake lay between. The only words I have spoken since arriving here have been to my own family or to a waiter, save to one or two young pedestrians who met me on a walk, and asked me the distance to Lowwood Hotel. "Just beyond here," said I, and I might stay for months without occasion to speak again. Yesterday forenoon J----- and I walked to Ambleside,--distant barely two miles. It is a little town, chiefly of modern aspect, built on a very uneven hillside, and with very irregular streets and lanes, which bewilder the stranger as much as those of a larger city. Many of the houses look old, and are probably the cottages and farm-houses which composed the rude village a century ago; but there are stuccoed shops and dwellings, such as may have been built within a year or two; and three hotels, one of which has the look of a good old village inn; and the others are fashionable or commercial establishments. Through the midst of the village comes tumbling and rumbling a mountain streamlet, rushing through a deep, rocky dell, gliding under an old stone inch, and turning, when occasion calls, the great block of a water-mill. This is the only very striking feature of the village,--the stream taking its rough pathway to the lake as it used to do before the poets had made this region fashionable. In the evening, just before eight o'clock, I took a walk alone, by a road which goes up the hill, back of our hotel, and which I supposed might be the road to the town of Windermere. But it went up higher and higher, and for the mile or two that it led me along, winding up, I saw no traces of a town; but at last it turned into a valley between two high ridges, leading quite away from the lake, within view of which the town of Windermere is situated. It was a very lonely road, though as smooth, hard, and well kept as any thoroughfare in the suburbs of a city; hardly a dwelling on either side, except one, half barn, half farm-house, and one gentleman's gateway, near the beginning of the road, and another more than a mile above. At, two or three points there were stone barns, which are here built with great solidity. At one place there was a painted board, announcing that a field of five acres was to be sold, and referring those desirous of purchasing to a solicitor in London. The lake country is but a London suburb. Nevertheless, the walk was lonely and lovely; the copses and the broad hillside, the glimpses of the lake, the great misty company of pikes and fells, beguiled me into a sense of something like solitude; and the bleating of the sheep, remote and near, had a like tendency. Gaining the summit of the hill, I had the best view of Windermere which I have yet attained,--the best, I should think, that can be had, though, being towards the south, it brings the softer instead of the more striking features of the landscape into view. But it shows nearly the whole extent of the lake, all the way from Lowwood, beyond Newby Bridge, and I think there can hardly be anything more beautiful in the world. The water was like a strip and gleam of sky, fitly set among lovely slopes of earth. It was no broader than many a river, and yet you saw at once that it could be no river, its outline being so different from that of a running stream, not straight nor winding, but stretching to one side or the other, as the shores made room for it. This morning it is raining, and we are not very comfortable nor contented, being all confined to our little parlor, which has a broken window, against which I have pinned The Times to keep out the chill damp air. U---- has been ill, in consequence of having been overheated at Newby Bridge. We have no books, except guide-books, no means of amusement, nothing to do. There are no newspapers, and I shall remember Lowwood not very agreeably. As far as we are concerned, it is a scrambling, ill-ordered hotel, with insufficient attendance, wretched sleeping-accommodations, a pretty fair table, but German-silver forks and spoons; our food does not taste very good, and yet there is really no definite fault to be found with it. Since writing the above, I have found the first volume of Sir Charles Grandison, and two of G. P. R. James's works, in the coffee-room. The days pass heavily here, and leave behind them a sense of having answered no very good purpose. They are long enough, at all events, for the sun does not set till after eight o'clock, and rises I know not when. One of the most remarkable distinctions between England and the United States is the ignorance into which we fall of whatever is going on in the world the moment we get away from the great thoroughfares and centres of life. In Leamington we heard no news from week's end to week's end, and knew not where to find a newspaper; and here the case is neither better nor worse. The rural people really seem to take no interest in public affairs; at all events, they have no intelligence on such subjects. It is possible that the cheap newspapers may, in time, find their way into the cottages, or, at least, into the country taverns; but it is not at all so now. If they generally know that Sebastopol is besieged, it is the extent of their knowledge. The public life of America is lived through the mind and heart of every man in it; here the people feel that they have nothing to do with what is going forward, and, I suspect, care little or nothing about it. Such things they permit to be the exclusive concern of the higher classes. In front of our hotel, on the lawn between us and the lake, there are two trees, which we have hitherto taken to be yews; but on examining them more closely, I find that they are pine-trees, and quite dead and dry, although they have the aspect of dark rich life. But this is caused by the verdure of two great ivy-vines, which have twisted round them like gigantic snakes, and, clambering up and throttling the life out of them, have put out branches, and made crowns of thick green leaves, so that, at a little distance, it is quite impossible not to take them for genuine trees. The trunks of the ivy-vines must be more than a foot in circumference, and one feels they have stolen the life that belonged to the pines. The dead branches of one of the pines stick out horizontally through the ivy-boughs. The other shows nothing but the ivy, and in shape a good deal resembles a poplar. When the pine trunks shall have quite crumbled away, the ivy-stems will doubtless have gained sufficient strength to sustain themselves independently. July 19th.--Yesterday S----- went down the lake in the steamboat to take U----, baby, and nurse to Newby Bridge, while the three rest of us should make a tour through the lake region. After mamma's departure, and when I had finished some letters, J----- and I set out on a walk, which finally brought us to Bowness, through much delightful shade of woods, and past beautiful rivulets or brooklets, and up and down many hills. This chief harbor of the lakes seemed alive and bustling with tourists, it being a sunny and pleasant day, so that they were all abroad, like summer insects. The town is a confused and irregular little place, of very uneven surface. There is an old church in it, and two or three large hotels. We stayed there perhaps half an hour, and then went to the pier, where shortly a steamer arrived, with music sounding,--on the deck of which, with her back to us, sat a lady in a gray travelling-dress. J----- cried out, "Mamma! mamma!" to which the lady deigned no notice, but, he repeating it, she turned round, and was as much surprised, no doubt, to see her husband and son, as if this little lake had been the great ocean, and we meeting each other from opposite shores of it. We soon steamed back to Lowwood, and took a car thence for Rydal and Grasmere, after a cold luncheon. At Bowness I met Miss Charlotte Cushman, who has been staying at the Lowwood Hotel with us since Monday, without either party being aware of it. Our road to Rydal lay through Ambleside, which is certainly a very pretty town, and looks cheerfully in a sunny day. We saw Miss Martineau's residence, called "The Knoll," standing high up on a hillock, and having at its foot a Methodist chapel, for which, or whatever place of Christian worship, this good lady can have no occasion. We stopped a moment in the street below her house, and deliberated a little whether to call on her; but concluded we would not. After leaving Ambleside, the road winds in and out among the hills, and soon brings us to a sheet (or napkin, rather than a sheet) of water, which the driver tells us is Rydal Lake! We had already heard that it was but three quarters of a mile long, and one quarter broad; still, it being an idea of considerable size in our minds, we had inevitably drawn its ideal, physical proportions on a somewhat corresponding scale. It certainly did look very small; and I said, in my American scorn, that I could carry it away easily in a porringer; for it is nothing more than a grass-bordered pool among the surrounding hills which ascend directly from its margin; so that one might fancy it, not, a permanent body of water, but a rather extensive accumulation of recent rain. Moreover, it was rippled with a breeze, and so, as I remember it, though the sun shone, it looked dull and sulky, like a child out of humor. Now, the best thing these small ponds can do is to keep perfectly calm and smooth, and not attempt to show off any airs of their own, but content themselves with serving as a mirror for whatever of beautiful or picturesque there may be in the scenery around them. The hills about Rydal Water are not very lofty, but are sufficiently so as objects of every-day view,-- objects to live with; and they are craggier than those we have hitherto seen, and bare of wood, which indeed would hardly grow on some of their precipitous sides. On the roadside, as we reach the foot of the lake, stands a spruce and rather large house of modern aspect, but with several gables and much overgrown with ivy,--a very pretty and comfortable house, built, adorned, and cared for with commendable taste. We inquired whose it was, and the coachman said it was "Mr. Wordsworth's," and that "Mrs. Wordsworth was still residing there." So we were much delighted to have seen his abode, and as we were to stay the night at Grasmere, about two miles farther on, we determined to come back and inspect it as particularly as should be allowable. Accordingly, after taking rooms at Brown's Hotel, we drove back in our return car, and, reaching the head of Rydal Water, alighted to walk through this familiar scene of so many years of Wordsworth's life. We ought to have seen De Quincey's former residence and Hartley Coleridge's cottage, I believe, on our way, but were not aware of it at the time. Near the lake there is a stone-quarry, and a cavern of some extent, artificially formed, probably by taking out the stone. Above the shore of the lake, not a great way from Wordsworth's residence, there is a flight of steps hewn in a rock and ascending to a rock seat where a good view of the lake may be attained; and, as Wordsworth has doubtless sat there hundreds of times, so did we ascend and sit down, and look at the hills and at the flags on the lake's shore. Reaching the house that had been pointed out to us as Wordsworth's residence, we began to peer about at its front and gables, and over the garden wall, on both sides of the road, quickening our enthusiasm as much as we could, and meditating to pilfer some flower or ivy-leaf from the house or its vicinity, to be kept as sacred memorials. At this juncture a man approached, who announced himself as the gardener of the place, and said, too, that this was not Wordsworth's house at all, but the residence of Mr. Ball, a Quaker gentleman; but that his ground adjoined Wordsworth's, and that he had liberty to take visitors through the latter. How absurd it would have been if we had carried away ivy-leaves and tender recollections from this domicile of a respectable Quaker! The gardener was an intelligent man, of pleasant, sociable, and respectful address; and as we went along he talked about the poet, whom he had known, and who, he said, was very familiar with the country people. He led us through Mr. Ball's grounds, up a steep hillside, by winding, gravelled walks, with summer-houses at points favorable for them. It was a very shady and pleasant spot, containing about an acre of ground, and all turned to good account by the manner of laying it out; so that it seemed more than it really is. In one place, on a small, smooth slab of slate, let into a rock, there is an inscription by Wordsworth, which I think I have read in his works, claiming kindly regards from those who visit the spot after his departure, because many trees had been spared at his intercession. His own grounds, or rather his ornamental garden, is separated from Mr. Ball's only by a wire fence, or some such barrier, and the gates have no fastening, so that the whole appears like one possession, and doubtless was so as regarded the poet's walks and enjoyments. We approached by paths so winding that I hardly know how the house stands in relation to the road; but, after much circuity, we really did see Wordsworth's residence,--an old house with an uneven ridge-pole, built of stone, no doubt, but plastered over with some neutral tint,--a house that would not have been remarkably pretty in itself, but so delightfully situated, so secluded, so hedged about with shrubbery, and adorned with flowers, so ivy-grown on one side, so beautified with the personal care of him who lived in it and loved it, that it seemed the very place for a poet's residence; and as if, while he lived so long in it, his poetry had manifested itself in flowers, shrubbery, and ivy. I never smelt such a delightful fragrance of flowers as there was all through the garden. In front of the house there is a circular terrace of two ascents, in raising which Wordsworth had himself performed much of the labor; and here there are seats, from which we obtained a fine view down the valley of the Rothay, with Windermere in the distance,--a view of several miles, and which we did not suppose could be seen, after winding among the hills so far from the lake. It is very beautiful and picture-like. While we sat here, S----- happened to refer to the ballad of little Barbara Lewthwaite, and J----- began to repeat the poem concerning her, and the gardener said that "little Barbara" had died not a great while ago, an elderly woman, leaving grown-up children behind her. Her marriage-name was Thompson, and the gardener believed there was nothing remarkable in her character. There is a summer-house at one extremity of the grounds, in deepest shadow, but with glimpses of mountain views through trees which shut it in, and which have spread intercepting boughs since Wordsworth died. It is lined with pine-cones, in a pretty way enough, but of doubtful taste. I rather wonder that people of real taste should help Nature out, and beautify her, or perhaps rather prettify her so much as they do,--opening vistas, showing one thing, hiding another, making a scene picturesque, whether or no. I cannot rid myself of the feeling that there is something false--a kind of humbug--in all this. At any rate, the traces of it do not contribute to my enjoyment, and, indeed, it ought to be done so exquisitely as to leave no trace. But I ought not to criticise in any way a spot which gave me so much pleasure, and where it is good to think of Wordsworth in quiet, past days, walking in his home-shadow of trees which he knew, and training flowers, and trimming shrubs, and chanting in an undertone his own verses up and down the winding walks. The gardener gave J----- a cone from the summer-house, which had fallen on the seat, and S----- got some mignonette, and leaves of laurel and ivy, and we wended our way back to the hotel. Wordsworth was not the owner of this house; it being the property of Lady Fleming. Mrs. Wordsworth still lives there, and is now at home. Five o'clock.---All day it has been cloudy and showery, with thunder now and then; the mists hang low on the surrounding hills, adown which, at various points, we can see the snow-white fall of little streamlets ("forces" they call them here) swollen by the rain. An overcast day is not so gloomy in the hill-country as in the lowlands; there are more breaks, more transfusion of skylight through the gloom, as has been the case to-day, and as I found in Lenox; we get better acquainted with clouds by seeing at what height they be on the hillsides, and find that the difference betwixt a fair day and a cloudy and rainy one is very superficial, after all. Nevertheless, rain is rain, and wets a man just as much among the mountains as anywhere else; so we have been kept within doors all day, till an hour or so ago, when J----- and I went down to the village in quest of the post-office. We took a path that leads from the hotel across the fields, and, coming into a wood, crosses the Rothay by a one-arched bridge and passes the village church. The Rothay is very swift and turbulent to-day, and hurries along with foam-specks on its surface, filling its banks from brim to brim,--a stream perhaps twenty feet wide, perhaps more; for I am willing that the good little river should have all it can fairly claim. It is the St. Lawrence of several of these English lakes, through which it flows, and carries off their superfluous waters. In its haste, and with its rushing sound, it was pleasant both to see and hear; and it sweeps by one side of the old churchyard where Wordsworth lies buried,--- the side where his grave is made. The church of Grasmere is a very plain structure, with a low body, on one side of which is a small porch with a pointed arch. The tower is square and looks ancient; but the whole is overlaid with plaster of a buff or pale yellow hue. It was originally built, I suppose, of rough shingly stones, as many of the houses hereabouts are now, and, like many of them, the plaster is used to give a finish. We found the gate of the churchyard wide open; and the grass was lying on the graves, having probably been mowed yesterday. It is but a small churchyard, and with few monuments of any pretension in it, most of them being slate headstones, standing erect. From the gate at which we entered, a distinct foot-track leads to the corner nearest the riverside, and I turned into it by a sort of instinct, the more readily as I saw a tourist-looking man approaching from that point, and a woman looking among the gravestones. Both of these persons had gone by the time I came up, so that J----- and I were left to find Wordsworth's grave all by ourselves. At this corner of the churchyard there is a hawthorn bush or tree, the extremest branches of which stretch as far as where Wordsworth lies. This whole corner seems to be devoted to himself and his family and friends; and they all lie very closely together, side by side, and head to foot, as room could conveniently be found. Hartley Coleridge lies a little behind, in the direction of the church, his feet being towards Wordsworth's head, who lies in the row of those of his own blood. I found out Hartley Coleridge's grave sooner than Wordsworth's; for it is of marble, and, though simple enough, has more of sculptured device about it, having been erected, as I think the inscription states, by his brother and sister. Wordsworth has only the very simplest slab of slate, with "William Wordsworth" and nothing else upon it. As I recollect it, it is the midmost grave of the row. It is or has been well grass-grown, but the grass is quite worn away from the top, though sufficiently luxuriant at the sides. It looks as if people had stood upon it, and so does the grave next to it, which I believe is one of his children. I plucked some grass and weeds from it, and as he was buried within so few years they may fairly be supposed to have drawn their nutriment from his mortal remains, and I gathered them from just above his head. There is no fault to be found with his grave,--within view of the hills, within sound of the river, murmuring near by,--no fault except that he is crowded so closely with his kindred; and, moreover, that, being so old a churchyard, the earth over him must all have been human once. He might have had fresh earth to himself; but he chose this grave deliberately. No very stately and broad-based monument can ever be erected over it without infringing upon, covering, and overshadowing the graves, not only of his family, but of individuals who probably were quite disconnected with him. But it is pleasant to think and know--were it but on the evidence of this choice of a resting-place--that he did not care for a stately monument. After leaving the churchyard, we wandered about in quest of the post-office, and for a long time without success. This little town of Grasmere seems to me as pretty a place as ever I met with in my life. It is quite shut in by hills that rise up immediately around it, like a neighborhood of kindly giants. These hills descend steeply to the verge of the level on which the village stands, and there they terminate at once, the whole site of the little town being as even as a floor. I call it a village; but it is no village at all,--all the dwellings standing apart, each in its own little domain, and each, I believe, with its own little lane leading to it, independently of the rest. Most of these are old cottages, plastered white, with antique porches, and roses and other vines trained against them, and shrubbery growing about them; and some are covered with ivy. There are a few edifices of more pretension and of modern build, but not so strikingly so as to put the rest out of countenance. The post-office, when we found it, proved to be an ivied cottage, with a good deal of shrubbery round it, having its own pathway, like the other cottages. The whole looks like a real seclusion, shut out from the great world by these encircling hills, on the sides of which, whenever they are not too steep, you see the division lines of property, and tokens of cultivation,--taking from them their pretensions to savage majesty, but bringing them nearer to the heart of man. Since writing the above, I have been again with S----- to see Wordsworth's grave, and, finding the door of the church open, we went in. A woman and little girl were sweeping at the farther end, and the woman came towards us out of the cloud of dust which she had raised. We were surprised at the extremely antique appearance of the church. It is paved with bluish-gray flagstones, over which uncounted generations have trodden, leaving the floor as well laid as ever. The walls are very thick, and the arched windows open through them at a considerable distance above the floor. There is no middle aisle; but first a row of pews next either wall, and then an aisle on each side of the pews, occupying the centre of the church,--then, two side aisles, but no middle one. And down through the centre or the church runs a row of five arches, very rude and round-headed, all of rough stone, supported by rough and massive pillars, or rather square, stone blocks, which stand in the pews, and stood in the same places probably, long before the wood of those pews began to grow. Above this row of arches is another row, built upon the same mass of stone, and almost as broad, but lower; and on this upper row rests the framework, the oaken beams, the black skeleton of the roof. It is a very clumsy contrivance for supporting the roof, and if it were modern, we certainly should condemn it as very ugly; but being the relic of a simple age it comes in well with the antique simplicity of the whole structure. The roof goes up, barn-like, into its natural angle, and all the rafters and cross-beams are visible. There is an old font; and in the chancel is a niche, where (judging from a similar one in Furness Abbey) the holy water used to be placed for the priest's use while celebrating mass. Around the inside of the porch is a stone bench, against the wall, narrow and uneasy, but where a great many people had sat, who now have found quieter resting-places. The woman was a very intelligent-looking person, not of the usual English ruddiness, but rather thin and somewhat pale, though bright, of aspect. Her way of talking was very agreeable. She inquired if we wished to see Wordsworth's monument, and at once showed it to us,--a slab of white marble fixed against the upper end of the central row of stone arches, with a pretty long inscription, and a profile bust, in bas-relief, of his aged countenance. The monument, is placed directly over Wordsworth's pew, and could best be seen and read from the very corner seat where he used to sit. The pew is one of those occupying the centre of the church, and is just across the aisle from the pulpit, and is the best of all for the purpose of seeing and hearing the clergyman, and likewise as convenient as any, from its neighborhood to the altar. On the other side of the aisle, beneath the pulpit, is Lady Fleming's pew. This and one or two others are curtained, Wordsworth's was not. I think I can bring up his image in that corner seat of his pew--a white-headed, tall, spare man, plain in aspect--better than in any other situation. The woman said that she had known him very well, and that he had made some verses on a sister of hers. She repeated the first lines, something about a lamb, but neither S----- nor I remembered them. On the walls of the chancel there are monuments to the Flemings, and painted escutcheons of their arms; and along the side walls also, and on the square pillars of the row of arches, there are other monuments, generally of white marble, with the letters of the inscription blackened. On these pillars, likewise, and in many places in the walls, were hung verses from Scripture, painted on boards. At one of the doors was a poor-box,--an elaborately carved little box, of oak, with the date 1648, and the name of the church--St. Oswald's--upon it. The whole interior of the edifice was plain, simple, almost to grimness,--or would have been so, only that the foolish church-wardens, or other authority, have washed it over with the same buff color with which they have overlaid the exterior. It is a pity; it lightens it up, and desecrates it greatly, especially as the woman says that there were formerly paintings on the walls, now obliterated forever. I could have stayed in the old church much longer, and could write much more about it, but there must be an end to everything. Pacing it from the farther end to the elevation before the altar, I found that it was twenty-five paces long. On looking again at the Rothay, I find I did it some injustice; for at the bridge, in its present swollen state, it is nearer twenty yards than twenty feet across. Its waters are very clear, and it rushes along with a speed which is delightful to see, after an acquaintance with the muddy and sluggish Avon and Leam. Since tea I have taken a stroll from the hotel in a different direction from heretofore, and passed the Swan Inn, where Scott used to go daily to get a draught of liquor, when he was visiting Wordsworth, who had no wine nor other inspiriting fluid in his house. It stands directly on the wayside,--a small, whitewashed house, with an addition in the rear that seems to have been built since Scott's time. On the door is the painted sign of a swan, and the name "Scott's Swan Hotel." I walked a considerable distance beyond it, but, a shower cooling up, I turned back, entered the inn, and, following the mistress into a snug little room, was served with a glass of bitter ale. It is a very plain and homely inn, and certainly could not have satisfied Scott's wants if he had required anything very far-fetched or delicate in his potations. I found two Westmoreland peasants in the room, with ale before them. One went away almost immediately; but the other remained, and, entering into conversation with him, he told me that he was going to New Zealand, and expected to sail in September. I announced myself as an American, and he said that a large party had lately gone from hereabouts to America; but he seemed not to understand that there was any distinction between Canada and the States. These people had gone to Quebec. He was a very civil, well-behaved, kindly sort of person, of a simple character, which I took to belong to the class and locality, rather than to himself individually. I could not very well understand all that he said, owing to his provincial dialect; and when he spoke to his own countrymen, or to the women of the house, I really could but just catch a word here and there. How long it takes to melt English down into a homogeneous mass! He told me that there was a public library in Grasmere to which he has access in common with the other inhabitants, and a reading-room connected with it, where he reads The Times in the evening. There was no American smartness in his mind. When I left the house, it was showering briskly; but the drops quite ceased, and the clouds began to break away before I reached my hotel, and I saw the new moon over my right shoulder. July 21st.--We left Grasmere yesterday, after breakfast; it being a delightful morning, with some clouds, but the cheerfullest sunshine on great part of the mountainsides and on ourselves. We returned, in the first place, to Ambleside, along the border of Grasmere Lake, which would be a pretty little piece of water, with its steep and high surrounding hills, were it not that a stubborn and straight-lined stone fence, running along the eastern shore, by the roadside, quite spoils its appearance. Rydal Water, though nothing can make a lake of it, looked prettier and less diminutive than at the first view; and, in fact, I find that it is impossible to know accurately how any prospect or other thing looks, until after at least a second view, which always essentially corrects the first. This, I think, is especially true in regard to objects which we have heard much about, and exercised our imagination upon; the first view being a vain attempt to reconcile our idea with the reality, and at the second we begin to accept the thing for what it really is. Wordsworth's situation is really a beautiful one; and Nab Scaur behind his house rises with a grand, protecting air. We passed Nab's cottage, in which De Quincey formerly lived, and where Hartley Coleridge lived and died. It is a small, buff-tinted, plastered stone cottage, immediately on the roadside, and originally, I should think, of a very humble class; but it now looks as if persons of taste might some time or other have sat down in it, and caused flowers to spring up about it. It is very agreeably situated under the great, precipitous hill, and with Rydal Water close at band, on the other side of the road. An advertisement of lodgings to let was put up on this cottage. I question whether any part of the world looks so beautiful as England-- this part of England, at least--on a fine summer morning. It makes one think the more cheerfully of human life to see such a bright universal verdure; such sweet, rural, peaceful, flower-bordered cottages,--not cottages of gentility, but dwellings of the laboring poor; such nice villas along the roadside, so tastefully contrived for comfort and beauty, and adorned more and more, year after year, with the care and after-thought of people who mean to live in them a great while, and feel as if their children might live in them also, and so they plant trees to overshadow their walks, and train ivy and all beautiful vines up against their walls, and thus live for the future in another sense than we Americans do. And the climate helps them out, and makes everything moist, and green, and full of tender life, instead of dry and arid, as human life and vegetable life is so apt to be with us. Certainly, England can present a more attractive face than we can; even in its humbler modes of life, to say nothing of the beautiful lives that might be led, one would think, by the higher classes, whose gateways, with broad, smooth gravelled drives leading through them, one sees every mile or two along the road, winding into some proud seclusion. All this is passing away, and society most assume new relations; but there is no harm in believing that there has been something very good in English life,-- good for all classes while the world was in a state out of which these forms naturally grew. Passing through Ambleside, our phaeton and pair turned towards Ullswater, which we were to reach through the Pass of Kirkstone. This is some three or four miles from Ambleside, and as we approached it the road kept ascending higher and higher, the hills grew more bare, and the country lost its soft and delightful verdure. At last the road became so steep that J----- and I alighted to walk. This is the aspiring road that Wordsworth speaks of in his ode; it passes through the gorge of precipitous hills,--or almost precipitous,--too much so for even the grass to grow on many portions, which are covered with gray smugly stones; and I think this pass, in its middle part, must have looked just the same when the Romans marched through it as it looks now. No trees could ever have grown on the steep hillsides, whereon even the English climate can generate no available soil. I do not know that I have seen anything more impressive than the stern gray sweep of these naked mountains, with nothing whatever to soften or adorn them. The notch of the White Mountains, as I remember it in my youthful days, is more wonderful and richly picturesque, but of quite a different character. About the centre and at the highest point of the pass stands an old stone building of mean appearance, with the usual sign of an alehouse, "Licensed to retail foreign spirits, ale, and tobacco," over the door, and another small sign, designating it as the highest inhabitable house in England. It is a chill and desolate place for a residence. They keep a visitor's book here, and we recorded our names in it, and were not too sorry to leave the mean little hovel, smelling as it did of tobacco-smoke, and possessing all other characteristics of the humblest alehouse on the level earth. The Kirkstone, which gives the pass its name, is not seen in approaching from Ambleside, until some time after you begin to descend towards Brothers' Water. When the driver first pointed it out, a little way up the hill on our left, it looked no more than a bowlder of a ton or two in weight, among a hundred others nearly as big; and I saw hardly any resemblance to a church or church-spire, to which the fancies of past generations have likened it. As we descended the pass, however, and left the stone farther and farther behind, it continued to show itself, and assumed a more striking and prominent aspect, standing out clearly relieved against the sky, so that no traveller would fail to observe it, where there are so few defined objects to attract notice, amid the naked monotony of the stern hills; though, indeed, if I had taken it for any sort of an edifice, it would rather have been for a wayside inn or a shepherd's hut than for a church. We lost sight of it, and again beheld it more and more brought out against the sky, by the turns of the road, several times in the course of our descent. There is a very fine view of Brothers' Water, shut in by steep hills, as we go down Kirkstone Pass. At about half past twelve we reached Patterdale, at the foot of Ullswater, and here took luncheon. The hotels are mostly very good all through this region, and this deserved that character. A black-coated waiter, of more gentlemanly appearance than most Englishmen, yet taking a sixpence with as little scruple as a lawyer would take his fee; the mistress, in lady-like attire, receiving us at the door, and waiting upon us to the carriage-steps; clean, comely housemaids everywhere at hand,-- all appliances, in short, for being comfortable, and comfortable, too, within one's own circle. And, on taking leave, everybody who has done anything for you, or who might by possibility have done anything, is to be feed. You pay the landlord enough, in all conscience; and then you pay all his servants, who have been your servants for the time. But, to say the truth, there is a degree of the same kind of annoyance in an American hotel, although it is not so much an acknowledged custom. Here, in the houses where attendance is not charged in the bill, no wages are paid by the host to those servants--chambermaid, waiter, and boots--who come into immediate contact with travellers. The drivers of the cars, phaetons, and flys are likewise unpaid, except by their passengers, and claim threepence a mile with the same sense of right as their masters in charging for the vehicles and horses. When you come to understand this claim, not as an appeal to your generosity, but as an actual and necessary part of the cost of the journey, it is yielded to with a more comfortable feeling; and the traveller has really option enough, as to the amount which he will give, to insure civility and good behavior on the driver's part. Ullswater is a beautiful lake, with steep hills walling it about, so steep, on the eastern side, that there seems hardly room for a road to run along the base. We passed up the western shore, and turned off from it about midway, to take the road towards Keswick. We stopped, however, at Lyulph's Tower, while our chariot went on up a hill, and took a guide to show us the way to Airey Force,--a small cataract, which is claimed as private property, and out of which, no doubt, a pretty little revenue is raised. I do not think that there can be any rightful appropriation, as private property, of objects of natural beauty. The fruits of the land, and whatever human labor can produce from it, belong fairly enough to the person who has a deed or a lease; but the beautiful is the property of him who can hive it and enjoy it. It is very unsatisfactory to think of a cataract under lock and key. However, we were shown to Airey Force by a tall and graceful mountain-maid, with a healthy cheek, and a step that had no possibility of weariness in it. The cascade is an irregular streak of foamy water, pouring adown a rude shadowy glen. I liked well enough to see it; but it is wearisome, on the whole, to go the rounds of what everybody thinks it necessary to see. It makes me a little ashamed. It is somewhat as if we were drinking out of the same glass, and eating from the same dish, as a multitude of other people. Within a few miles of Keswick, we passed along at the foot of Saddleback, and by the entrance of the Vale of St. John, and down the valley, on one of the slopes, we saw the Enchanted Castle. Thence we drove along by the course of the Greta, and soon arrived at Keswick, which lies at the base of Skiddaw, and among a brotherhood of picturesque eminences, and is itself a compact little town, with a market-house, built of the old stones of the Earl of Derwentwater's ruined castle, standing in the centre,--the principal street forking into two as it passes it. We alighted at the King's Arms, and went in search of Southey's residence, which we found easily enough, as it lies just on the outskirts of the town. We inquired of a group of people, two of whom, I thought, did not seem to know much about the matter; but the third, an elderly man, pointed it out at once,--a house surrounded by trees, so as to be seen only partially, and standing on a little eminence, a hundred yards or so from the road. We went up a private lane that led to the rear of the place, and so penetrated quite into the back-yard without meeting anybody,--passing a small kennel, in which were two hounds, who gazed at us, but neither growled nor wagged their tails. The house is three stories high, and seems to have a great deal of room in it, so as not to discredit its name, "Greta Hall,"--a very spacious dwelling for a poet. The windows were nearly all closed; there were no signs of occupancy, but a general air of neglect. S-----, who is bolder than I in these matters, ventured through what seemed a back garden gate, and I soon heard her in conversation with some man, who now presented himself, and proved to be a gardener. He said he had formerly acted in that capacity for Southey, although a gardener had not been kept by him as a regular part of his establishment. This was an old man with an odd crookedness of legs, and strange, disjointed limp. S----- had told him that we were Americans, and he took the idea that we had come this long distance, over sea and land, with the sole purpose of seeing Southey's residence, so that he was inclined to do what he could towards exhibiting it. This was but little; the present occupant (a Mr. Radday, I believe the gardener called him) being away, and the house shut up. But he showed us about the grounds, and allowed us to peep into the windows of what had been Southey's library, and into those of another of the front apartments, and showed us the window of the chamber in the rear, in which Southey died. The apartments into which we peeped looked rather small and low,--not particularly so, but enough to indicate an old building. They are now handsomely furnished, and we saw over one of the fireplaces an inscription about Southey; and in the corner of the same room stood a suit, of bright armor. It is taller than the country-houses of English gentlemen usually are, and it is even stately. All about, in front, beside it and behind, there is a great profusion of trees, most of which were planted by Southey, who came to live here more than fifty years ago, and they have, of course, grown much more shadowy now than he ever beheld them; for he died about fourteen years since. The grounds are well laid out, and neatly kept, with the usual lawn and gravelled walks, and quaint little devices in the ornamental way. These may be of later date than Southey's time. The gardener spoke respectfully of Southey, and of his first wife, and observed that "it was a great loss to the neighborhood when that family went down." The house stands directly above the Greta, the murmur of which is audible all about it; for the Greta is a swift little river, and goes on its way with a continual sound, which has both depth and breadth. The gardener led us to a walk along its banks, close by the Hall, where he said Southey used to walk for hours and hours together. He might, indeed, get there from his study in a moment. There are two paths, one above the other, well laid out on the steep declivity of the high bank; and there is such a very thick shade of oaks and elms, planted by Southey himself over the bank, that all the ground and grass were moist, although it had been a sunny day. It is a very sombre walk; not many glimpses of the sky through those dense boughs. The Greta is here, perhaps, twenty yards across, and very dark of hue, and its voice is melancholy and very suggestive of musings and reveries; but I should question whether it were favorable to any settled scheme of thought. The gardener told us that there used to be a pebbly beach on the margin of the river, and that it was Southey's habit to sit and write there, using a tree of peculiar shape for a table. An alteration in the current of the river has swept away the beach, and the tree, too, has fallen. All these things were interesting to me, although Southey was not, I think, a picturesque man, --not one whose personal character takes a strong hold on the imagination. In these walks he used to wear a pair of shoes heavily clamped with iron; very ponderous they must have been, from the particularity with which the gardener mentioned them. The gardener took leave of us at the front entrance of the grounds, and, returning to the King's Arms, we ordered a one-horse fly for the fall of Lodore. Our drive thither was along the banks of Derwentwater, and it is as beautiful a road, I imagine, as can be found in England or anywhere else. I like Derwentwater the best of all the lakes, so far as I have yet seen them. Skiddaw lies at the head of a long even ridge of mountains, rising into several peaks, and one higher than the rest. On the eastern side there are many noble eminences, and on the west, along which we drove, there is a part of the way a lovely wood, and nearly the whole distance a precipitous range of lofty cliffs, descending sheer down without any slope, except what has been formed in the lapse of ages by the fall of fragments, and the washing down of smaller stones. The declivity thus formed along the base of the cliffs is in some places covered with trees or shrubs; elsewhere it is quite bare and barren. The precipitous parts of the cliffs are very grand; the whole scene, indeed, might be characterized as one of stern grandeur with an embroidery of rich beauty, without lauding it too much. All the sternness of it is softened by vegetative beauty wherever it can possibly be thrown in; and there is not here, so strongly as along Windermere, evidence that human art has been helping out Nature. I wish it were possible to give any idea of the shapes of the hills; with these, at least, man has nothing to do, nor ever will have anything to do. As we approached the bottom of the lake, and of the beautiful valley in which it lies, we saw one hill that seemed to crouch down like a Titanic watch-dog, with its rear towards the spectator, guarding the entrance to the valley. The great superiority of these mountains over those of New England is their variety and definiteness of shape, besides the abundance everywhere of water prospects, which are wanting among our own hills. They rise up decidedly, and each is a hill by itself, while ours mingle into one another, and, besides, have such large bases that you can tell neither where they begin nor where they end. Many of these Cumberland mountains have a marked vertebral shape, so that they often look like a group of huge lions, lying down with their backs turned toward each other. They slope down steeply from narrow ridges; hence their picturesque seclusions of valleys and dales, which subdivide the lake region into so many communities. Our hills, like apple-dumplings in a dish, have no such valleys as these. There is a good inn at Lodore,--a small, primitive country inn, which has latterly been enlarged and otherwise adapted to meet the convenience of the guests brought thither by the fame of the cascade; but it is still a country inn, though it takes upon itself the title of hotel. We found pleasant rooms here, and established ourselves for the night. From this point we have a view of the beautiful lake, and of Skiddaw at the head of it. The cascade is within three or four minutes' walk, through the garden gate, towards the cliff, at the base of which the inn stands. The visitor would need no other guide than its own voice, which is said to be audible sometimes at the distance of four miles. As we were coming from Keswick, we caught glimpses of its white foam high up the precipice; and it is only glimpses that can be caught anywhere, because there is no regular sheet of falling water. Once, I think, it must have fallen abruptly over the edge of the long line of precipice that here extends along parallel with the shore of the lake; but, in the course of time, it has gnawed and sawed its way into the heart of the cliff,--this persistent little stream,--so that now it has formed a rude gorge, adown which it hurries and tumbles in the wildest way, over the roughest imaginable staircase. Standing at the bottom of the fall, you have a far vista sloping upward to the sky, with the water everywhere as white as snow, pouring and pouring down, now on one side of the gorge, now on the other, among immense bowlders, which try to choke its passage. It does not attempt to leap over these huge rocks, but finds its way in and out among then, and finally gets to the bottom after a hundred tumbles. It cannot be better described than in Southey's verses, though it is worthy of better poetry than that. After all, I do not know that the cascade is anything more than a beautiful fringe to the grandeur of the scene; for it is very grand,--this fissure through the cliff,--with a steep, lofty precipice on the right hand, sheer up and down, and on the other hand, too, another lofty precipice, with a slope of its own ruin on which trees and shrubbery have grown. The right-hand precipice, however, has shelves affording sufficient hold for small trees, but nowhere does it slant. If it were not for the white little stream falling gently downward, and for the soft verdure upon either precipice, and even along the very pathway of the cascade, it would be a very stern vista up that gorge. I shall not try to describe it any more. It has not been praised too much, though it may have been praised amiss. I went thither again in the morning, and climbed a good way up, through the midst of its rocky descent, and I think I could have reached the top in this way. It is remarkable that the bounds of the water, from one step of its broken staircase to another, give an impression of softness and gentleness; but there are black, turbulent pools among the great bowlders, where the stream seems angry at the difficulties which it meets with. Looking upward in the sunshine, I could see a rising mist, and I should not wonder if a speck of rainbow were sometimes visible. I noticed a small oak in the bed of the cascade, and there is a lighter vegetation scattered about. At noon we took a car for Portinscale, and drove back along the road to Keswick, through which we passed, stopping to get a perhaps of letters at the post-office, and reached Portinscale, which is a mile from Keswick. After dinner we walked over a bridge, and through a green lane, to the church where Southey is buried. It is a white church, of Norman architecture, with a low, square tower. As we approached, we saw two persons entering the portal, and, following them in, we found the sexton, who was a tall, thin old man, with white hair, and an intelligent, reverent face, showing the edifice to a stout, red-faced, self-important, good-natured John Bull of a gentleman. Without any question on our part, the old sexton immediately led us to Southey's monument, which is placed in a side aisle, where there is not breadth for it to stand free of the wall; neither is it in a very good light. But, it seemed to me a good work of art,--a recumbent figure of white marble, on a couch, the drapery of which he has drawn about him,--being quite enveloped in what may be a shroud. The sculptor has not intended to represent death, for the figure lies on its side, and has a book in its hand, and the face is lifelike, and looks full of expression,--a thin, high-featured, poetic face, with a finely proportioned head and abundant hair. It represents Southey rightly, at whatever age he died, in the full maturity of manhood, when he was strongest and richest. I liked the statue, and wished that it lay in a broader aisle, or in the chancel, where there is an old tomb of a knight and lady of the Ratcliffe family, who have held the place of honor long enough to yield it now to a poet. Southey's sculptor was Lough. I must not forget to mention that John Bull, climbing on a bench, to get a better view of the statue, tumbled off with a racket that resounded irreverently through the church. The old, white-headed, thin sexton was a model man of his class, and appeared to take a loving and cheerful interest in the building, and in those who, from age to age, have worshipped and been buried there. It is a very ancient and interesting church. Within a few years it has been thoroughly repaired as to the interior, and now looks as if it might endure ten more centuries; and I suppose we see little that is really ancient, except the double row of Norman arches, of light freestone, that support the oaken beams and rafters of the roof. All the walls, however, are venerable, and quite preserve the identity of the edifice. There is a stained-glass window of modern manufacture, and in one of the side windows, set amidst plain glass, there is a single piece, five hundred years old, representing St. Anthony, very finely executed, though it looks a little faded. Along the walls, on each side, between the arched windows, there are marble slabs affixed, with inscriptions to the memories of those who used to occupy the seats beneath. I remember none of great antiquity, nor any old monument, except that in the chancel, over the knight and lady of the Ratcliffe family. This consists of a slab of stone, on four small stone pillars, about two feet high. The slab is inlaid with a brass plate, on which is sculptured the knight in armor, and the lady in the costume of Elizabeth's time, exceedingly well done and well preserved, and each figure about eighteen inches in length. The sexton showed us a rubbing of them on paper. Under the slab, which, supported by the low stone pillars, forms a canopy for them, lie two sculptured figures of stone, of life size, and at full length, representing the same persons; but I think the sculptor was hardly equal in his art to the engraver. The most-curious antique relic in the church is the font. The bowl is very capacious, sufficiently so to admit of the complete immersion of a child of two or three months old. On the outside, in several compartments, there are bas-reliefs of Scriptural and symbolic subjects, --such as the tree of life, the word proceeding out of God's mouth, the crown of thorns,--all in the quaintest taste, sculptured by some hand of a thousand years ago, and preserving the fancies of monkish brains, in stone. The sexton was very proud of this font and its sculpture, and took a kindly personal interest, in showing it; and when we had spent as much time as we could inside, he led us to Southey's grave in the churchyard. He told us that he had known Southey long and well, from early manhood to old age; for he was only twenty-nine when he came to Keswick to reside. He had known Wordsworth too, and Coleridge, and Lovell; and he had seen Southey and Wordsworth walking arm in arm together in that churchyard. He seemed to revere Southey's memory, and said that he had been much lamented, and that as many as a hundred people came to the churchyard when he was buried. He spoke with great praise of Mrs. Southey, his first wife, telling of her charity to the poor, and how she was a blessing to the neighborhood; but he said nothing in favor of the second Mrs. Southey, and only mentioned her selling the library, and other things, after her husband's death, and going to London. Yet I think she was probably a good woman, and meets with less than justice because she took the place of another good woman, and had not time and opportunity to prove herself as good. As for Southey himself, my idea is, that few better or more blameless men have ever lived; but he seems to lack color, passion, warmth, or something that should enable me to bring him into close relation with myself. The graveyard where his body lies is not so rural and picturesque as that where Wordsworth is buried; although Skiddaw rises behind it, and the Greta is murmuring at no very great distance away. But the spot itself has a somewhat bare and bold aspect, with no shadow of trees, no shrubbery. Over his grave there is a ponderous, oblong block of slate, a native mineral of this region, as hard as iron, and which will doubtless last quite as long as Southey's works retain any vitality in English literature. It is not a monument fit for a poet. There is nothing airy or graceful about it,--and, indeed, there cannot he many men so solid and matter-of-fact as to deserve a tomb like that. Wordsworth's grave is much better, with only a simple headstone, and the grass growing over his mortality, which, for a thousand years, at least, it never can over Southey's. Most of the monuments are of this same black slate, and some erect headstones are curiously sculptured, and seem to have been recently erected. We now returned to the hotel, and took a car for the valley of St. John. The sky seemed to portend rain in no long time, and Skiddaw had put on his cap; but the people of the hotel and the driver said that there would be no rain this afternoon, and their opinion proved correct. After driving a few miles, we again cane within sight of the Enchanted Castle. It stands rather more than midway adown the declivity of one of the ridges that form the valley to the left, as you go southward, and its site would have been a good one for a fortress, intended to defend the lower entrance of this mountain defile. At a proper distance, it looks not unlike the gray dilapidation of a Gothic castle, which has been crumbling and crumbling away for ages, until Time might be supposed to have imperceptibly stolen its massive pile from man, and given it back to Nature; its towers and battlements and arched entrances being so much defaced and decayed that all the marks of human labor had nearly been obliterated, and the angles of the hewn stone rounded away, while mosses and weeds and bushes grow over it as freely as over a natural ledge of rocks. It is conceivable that in some lights, and in some states of the atmosphere, a traveller, at the entrance of the valley, might really imagine that he beheld a castle here; but, for myself, I must acknowledge that it required a willing fancy to make me see it. As we drew nearer, the delusion did not immediately grow less strong; but, at length, we found ourselves passing at the foot of the declivity, and, behold! it was nothing but an enormous ledge of rock, coming squarely out of the hillside, with other parts of the ledge cropping out in its vicinity. Looking back, after passing, we saw a knoll or hillock, of which the castled rock is the bare face. There are two or three stone cottages along the roadside, beneath the magic castle, and within the enchanted ground. Scott, in the Bridal of Triermain, locates the castle in the middle of the valley, and makes King Arthur ride around it, which any mortal would have great difficulty in doing. This vale of St. John has very striking scenery. Blencathra shuts it in to the northward, lying right across the entrance; and on either side there are lofty crags and declivities, those to the west being more broken and better wooded than the ridge to the eastward, which stretches along for several miles, steep, high, and bare, producing only grass enough for sheep pasture, until it rises into the dark brow of Helvellyn. Adown this ridge, seen afar, like a white ribbon, comes here and there a cascade, sending its voice before it, which distance robs of all its fury, and makes it the quietest sound in the world; and while you see the foamy leap of its upper course a mile or two away, you may see and hear the selfsame little brook babbling through a field, and passing under the arch of a rustic bridge beneath your feet. It is a deep seclusion, with mountains and crags on all sides. About a mile beyond the castle we stopped at a little wayside inn, the King's Head, and put up for the night. This, I believe, is the only inn which I have found in England--the only one where I have eaten and slept --that does not call itself a hotel. It is very primitive in its arrangements,--a long, low, whitewashed, unadorned, and ugly cottage of two stories. At one extremity is a barn and cow-house, and next to these the part devoted to the better class of guests, where we had our parlor and chambers, contiguous to which is the kitchen and common room, paved with flagstones,--and, lastly, another barn and stable; all which departments are not under separate roofs, but under the same long contiguity, and forming the same building. Our parlor opens immediately upon the roadside, without any vestibule. The house appears to be of some antiquity, with beams across the low ceilings; but the people made us pretty comfortable at bed and board, and fed us with ham and eggs, veal-steaks, honey, oatcakes, gooseberry-tarts, and such cates and dainties,--making a moderate charge for all. The parlor was adorned with rude engravings. I remember only a plate of the Duke of Wellington, at three stages of his life; and there were minerals, delved, doubtless, out of the hearts of the mountains, upon the mantel-piece. The chairs were of an antiquated fashion, and had very capacious seats. We were waited upon by two women, who looked and acted not unlike the countryfolk of New England,--say, of New Hampshire,--except that these may have been more deferential. While we remained here, I took various walks to get a glimpse of Helvellyn, and a view of Thirlmere,--which is rather two lakes than one, being so narrow at one point as to be crossed by a foot-bridge. Its shores are very picturesque, coming down abruptly upon it, and broken into crags and prominences, which view their shaggy faces in its mirror; and Helvellyn slopes steeply upward, from its southern shore, into the clouds. On its eastern bank, near the foot-bridge, stands Armboth House, which Miss Martineau says is haunted; and I saw a painted board at the entrance of the road which leads to it advertising lodgings there. The ghosts, of course, pay nothing for their accommodations. At noon, on the day after our arrival, J----- and I went to visit the Enchanted Castle; and we were so venturesome as to turn aside from the road, and ascend the declivity towards its walls, which indeed we hoped to surmount. It proved a very difficult undertaking, the site of the fortress being much higher and steeper than we had supposed; but we did clamber upon what we took for the most elevated portion, when lo! we found that we had only taken one of the outworks, and that there was a gorge of the hill betwixt us and the main walls; while the citadel rose high above, at more than twice the elevation which we had climbed. J----- wished to go on, and I allowed him to climb, till he appeared to have reached so steep and lofty a height that he looked hardly bigger than a monkey, and I should not at all have wondered had he come rolling down to the base of the rock where I sat. But neither did he get actually within the castle, though he might have done so but for a high stone fence, too difficult for him to climb, which runs from the rock along the hillside. The sheep probably go thither much oftener than any other living thing, and to them we left the castle of St. John, with a shrub waving from its battlements, instead of a banner. After dinner we ordered a car for Ambleside, and while it was getting ready, I went to look at the river of St. John, which, indeed, flows close beside our inn, only just across the road, though it might well be overlooked unless you specially sought for it. It is a brook brawling over the stones, very much as brooks do in New England, only we never think of calling them rivers there. I could easily have made a leap from shore to shore, and J----- scrambled across on no better footing than a rail. I believe I have complained of the want of brooks in other parts of England, but there is no want of them here, and they are always interesting, being of what size they may. We drove down the valley, and gazed at the vast slope of Helvellyn, and at Thirlmere beneath it, and at Eagle's Crag and Raven's Crag, which beheld themselves in it, and we cast many a look behind at Blencathra, and that noble brotherhood of mountains out of the midst of which we came. But, to say the truth, I was weary of fine scenery, and it seemed to me that I had eaten a score of mountains, and quaffed as many lakes, all in the space of two or three days,--and the natural consequence was a surfeit. There was scarcely a single place in all our tour where I should not have been glad to spend a month; but, by flitting so quickly from one point to another, I lost all the more recondite beauties, and had come away without retaining even the surface of much that I had seen. I am slow to feel,--slow, I suppose, to comprehend, and, like the anaconda, I need to lubricate any object a great deal before I can swallow it and actually make it my own. Yet I shall always enjoy having made this journey, and shall wonder the more at England, which comprehends so much, such a rich variety, within its narrow bounds. If England were all the world, it still would have been worth while for the Creator to have made it, and mankind would have had no cause to find fault with their abode; except that there is not room enough for so many as might be happy here. We left the great inverted arch of the valley behind us, looking back as long as we could at Blencathra, and Skiddaw over its shoulder, and the clouds were gathering over them at our last glimpse. Passing by Dummail Raise (which is a mound of stones over an old British king), we entered Westmoreland, and soon had the vale of Grasmere before us, with the church where Wordsworth lies, and Nab Scaur and Rydal Water farther on. At Ambleside we took another car for Newby Bridge, whither we drove along the eastern shore of Windermere. The superb scenery through which we had been passing made what we now saw look tame, although a week ago we should have thought it more than commonly interesting. Hawkshead is the only village on our road,--a small, whitewashed old town, with a whitewashed old Norman church, low, and with a low tower, on the same pattern with others that we have seen hereabouts. It was between seven and eight o'clock when we reached Newby Bridge, and heard U----'s voice greeting us, and saw her head, crowned with a wreath of flowers, looking down at us, out of the window of our parlor. And to-day, July 23d, I have written this most incomplete and unsatisfactory record of what we have done and seen since Wednesday last. I am pretty well convinced that all attempts at describing scenery, especially mountain scenery, are sheer nonsense. For one thing, the point of view being changed, the whole description, which you made up from the previous point of view, is immediately falsified. And when you have done your utmost, such items as those setting forth the scene in a play,--"a mountainous country, in the distance a cascade tumbling over a precipice, and in front a lake; on one side an ivy-covered cottage,"-- this dry detail brings the matter before one's mind's eyes more effectually than all the art of word-painting. July 27th.--We are still at Newby Bridge, and nothing has occurred of remarkable interest, nor have we made any excursions, beyond moderate walks. Two days have been rainy, and to-day there is more rain. We find such weather as tolerable here as it would probably be anywhere; but it passes rather heavily with the children,--and for myself, I should prefer sunshine. Though Mr. White's books afford me some entertainment, especially an odd volume of Ben Jonson's plays, containing "Volpone," "The Alchemist," "Bartholomew Fair," and others. "The Alchemist" is certainly a great play. We watch all arrivals and other events from our parlor window,--a stage-coach driving up four times in the twenty-four hours, with its forlorn outsiders, all saturated with rain; the steamer, from the head of the lake, landing a crowd of passengers, who stroll up to the hotel, drink a glass of ale, lean over the parapet of the bridge, gaze at the flat stones which pave the bottom of the Liver, and then hurry back to the steamer again; cars, phaetons, horsemen, all damped and disconsolate. There are a number of young men staying at the hotel, some of whom go forth in all the rain, fishing, and come back at nightfall, trudging heavily, but with creels on their backs that do not seem very heavy. Yesterday was fair, and enlivened us a good deal. Returning from a walk in the forenoon, I found a troop of yeomanry cavalry in the stable-yard of the hotel. They were the North Lancashire Regiment, and were on their way to Liverpool for the purpose of drill. Not being old campaigners, their uniforms and accoutrements were in so much the finer order, all bright, and looking span-new, and they themselves were a body of handsome and stalwart young men; and it was pleasant to look at their helmets, and red jackets and carbines, and steel scabbarded swords, and gallant steeds,--all so martial in aspect,--and to know that they were only play-soldiers, after all, and were never likely to do nor suffer any warlike mischief. By and by their bugles sounded, and they trotted away, wheeling over the ivy-grown stone bridge, and disappearing behind the trees on the Milnethorpe road. Our host comes forth from the bar with a bill, which he presents to an orderly-sergeant. He, the host, then tells me that he himself once rode many years, a trooper, in this regiment, and that all his comrades were larger men than himself. Yet Mr. Thomas White is a good-sized man, and now, at all events, rather overweight for a dragoon. Yesterday came one of those bands of music that seem to itinerate everywhere about the country. It consisted of a young woman who played the harp, a bass-viol player, a fiddler, a flutist, and a bugler, besides a little child, of whom, I suppose, the woman was the mother. They sat down on a bench by the roadside, opposite the house, and played several tunes, and by and by the waiter brought them a large pitcher of ale, which they quaffed with apparent satisfaction; though they seemed to be foreigners by their mustachios and sallow hue, and would perhaps have preferred a vinous potation. One would like to follow these people through their vagrant life, and see them in their social relations, and overhear their talk with each other. All vagrants are interesting; and there is a much greater variety of them here than in America,--people who cast themselves on Fortune, and take whatever she gives without a certainty of anything. I saw a travelling tinker yesterday,--a man with a leather apron, and a string of skewers hung at his girdle, and a pack over his shoulders, in which, no doubt, were his tools and materials of trade. It is remarkable what a natural interest everybody feels in fishing. An angler from the bridge immediately attracts a group to watch his luck. It is the same with J-----, fishing for minnows, on the platform near which the steamer lands its passengers. By the by, U---- caught a minnow last evening, and, immediately after, a good-sized perch,--her first fish. July 30th.--We left Newby Bridge, all of us, on Saturday, at twelve o'clock, and steamed up the lake to Ambleside; a pretty good day as to weather, but with a little tendency to shower. There was nothing new on the lake, and no new impressions, as far as I can remember. At Ambleside, S----- and nurse went shopping, after which we took a carriage for Grasmere, and established ourselves at Brown's Hotel. I find that my impressions from our previous sight of all these scenes do not change on revision. They are very beautiful; but, if I must say it, I am a little weary of them. We soon tire of things which we visit merely by way of spectacle, and with which we have no real and permanent connection. In such cases we very quickly wish the spectacle to be taken away, and another substituted; at all events I do not care about seeing anything more of the English lakes for at least a year. Perhaps a part of my weariness is owing to the hotel-life which we lead. At an English hotel the traveller feels as if everybody, from the landlord downward, united in a joint and individual purpose to fleece him, because all the attendants who come in contact with him are to be separately considered. So, after paying, in the first instance, a very heavy bill, for what would seem to cover the whole indebtedness, there remain divers dues still to be paid, to no trifling amount, to the landlord's servants,--dues not to be ascertained, and which you never can know whether you have properly satisfied. You can know, perhaps, when you have less than satisfied them, by the aspect of the waiter, which I wish I could describe, not disrespectful in the slightest degree, but a look of profound surprise, a gaze at the offered coin (which he nevertheless pockets) as if he either did not see it, or did not know it, or could not believe his eyesight;--all this, however, with the most quiet forbearance, a Christian-like non-recognition of an unmerited wrong and insult; and finally, all in a moment's space indeed, he quits you and goes about his other business. If you have given him too much, you are made sensible of your folly by the extra amount of his gratitude, and the bows with which he salutes you from the doorstep. Generally, you cannot very decidedly say whether you have been right or wrong; but, in almost all cases, you decidedly feel that you have been fleeced. Then the living at the best of English hotels, so far as my travels have brought me acquainted with them, deserves but moderate praise, and is especially lacking in variety. Nothing but joints, joints, joints; sometimes, perhaps, a meat-pie, which, if you eat it, weighs upon your conscience, with the idea that you have eaten the scraps of other people's dinners. At the lake hotels, the fare is lamb and mutton and grout,--the latter not always fresh, and soon tired of. We pay like nabobs, and are expected to be content with plain mutton. We spent the day yesterday at Grasmere, in quiet walks about the hotel; and at a little past six in the afternoon, I took my departure in the stage-coach for Windermere. The coach was greatly overburdened with outside passengers,--fifteen in all, besides the four insiders, and one of the fifteen formed the apex of an immense pile of luggage on the top. It seems to me miraculous that we did not topple over, the road being so hilly and uneven, and the driver, I suspect, none the steadier for his visits to all the tap-rooms along the route from Cockermouth. There was a tremendous vibration of the coach now and then; and I saw that, in case of our going over, I should be flung headlong against the high stone fence that bordered most of the road. In view of this I determined to muffle my head in the folds of my thick shawl at the moment of overturn, and as I could do no better for myself, I awaited my fate with equanimity. As far as apprehension goes, I had rather travel from Maine to Georgia by rail, than from Grasmere to Windermere by stage-coach. At Lowwood, the landlady espied me from the window, and sent out a large packet that had arrived by mail; but as it was addressed to some person of the Christian name of William, I did not venture to open it. She said, also, that a gentleman had been there, who very earnestly desired to see me, and I have since had reason to suppose that this was Allingham, the poet. We arrived at Windermere at half past seven, and waited nearly an hour for the train to start. I took a ticket for Lancaster, and talked there about the war with a gentleman in the coffee-room, who took me for an Englishman, as most people do nowadays, and I heard from him--as you may from all his countrymen--an expression of weariness and dissatisfaction with the whole business. These fickle islanders! How differently they talked a year ago! John Bull sees now that he never was in a worse predicament in his life; and yet it would not take much to make him roar as bellicosely as ever. I went to bed at eleven, and slept unquietly on feathers. I had purposed to rise betimes, and see the town of Lancaster before breakfast. But here I reckoned without my host; for, in the first place, I had no water for my ablutions, and my boots were not brushed; and so I could not get down stairs till the hour I named for my coffee and chops; and, secondly, the breakfast was delayed half an hour, though promised every minute. In fine, I had but just time to take a hasty walk round Lancaster Castle, and see what I could of the town on my way,--a not very remarkable town, built of stone, with taller houses than in the middle shires of England, narrow streets up and down an eminence on which the castle is situated, with the town immediately about it. The castle is a satisfactory edifice, but so renovated that the walls look almost entirely modern, with the exception of the fine old front, with the statue of an armed warrior, very likely John of Gaunt himself, in a niche over the Norman arch of the entrance. Close beside the castle stands an old church. The train left Lancaster at half past nine, and reached Liverpool at twelve, over as flat and uninteresting a country as I ever travelled. I have betaken myself to the Rock Ferry Hotel, where I am as comfortable as I could be anywhere but at home; but it is rather comfortless to think of hone as three years off, and three thousand miles away. With what a sense of utter weariness, not fully realized till then, we shall sink down on our own threshold, when we reach it. The moral effect of being without a settled abode is very wearisome. Our coachman from Grasmere to Windermere looked like a great beer-barrel, oozy with his proper liquor. I suppose such solid soakers never get upset. THE LAUNCH. August 2d.--Mr. ------ has urged me very much to go with his father and family to see the launch of a great ship which has been built for their house, and afterwards to partake of a picnic; so, on Tuesday morning I presented myself at the landing-stage, and met the party, to take passage for Chester. It was a showery morning, and looked wofully like a rainy day; but nothing better is to be expected in England; and, after all, there is seldom such a day that you cannot glide about pretty securely between the drops of rain. This, however, did not turn out one of those tolerable days, but grew darker and darker, and worse and worse; and was worst of all when we had passed about six miles beyond Chester, and were just on the borders of Wales, on the hither side of the river Dee, where the ship was to be launched. Here the train stopped, and absolutely deposited our whole party of excursionists, under a heavy shower, in the midst of a muddy potato-field, whence we were to wade through mud and mire to the ship-yard, almost half a mile off. Some kind Christian, I know not whom, gave me half of his umbrella, and half of his cloak, and thereby I got to a shed near the ship, without being entirely soaked through. The ship had been built on the banks of the Dee, at a spot where it is too narrow for her to be launched directly across, and so she lay lengthwise of the river, and was so arranged as to take the water parallel with the stream. She is, for aught I know, the largest ship in the world; at any rate, longer than the Great Britain,--an iron-screw steamer,--and looked immense and magnificent, and was gorgeously dressed out in flags. Had it been a pleasant day, all Chester and half Wales would have been there to see the launch; and, in spite of the rain, there were a good many people on the opposite shore, as well as on our side; and one or two booths, and many of the characteristics of a fair,--that is to say, men and women getting intoxicated without any great noise and confusion. The ship was expected to go off at about twelve o'clock, and at that juncture all Mr. ------'s friends assembled under the bows of the ship, where we were a little sheltered from the rain by the projection of that part of the vessel over our heads. The bottle of port-wine with which she was to be christened was suspended from the bows to the platform where we stood by a blue ribbon; and the ceremony was to be performed by Mrs. ------, who, I could see, was very nervous in anticipation of the ceremony. Mr. ------ kept giving her instructions in a whisper, and showing her how to throw the bottle; and as the critical moment approached, he took hold of it along with her. All this time we were waiting in momentary expectation of the ship going off, everything being ready, and only the touch of a spring, as it were, needed to make her slide into the water. But the chief manager kept delaying a little longer, and a little longer; though the pilot on board sent to tell him that it was time she was off. "Yes, yes; but I want as much water as I can get," answered the manager; and so he held on till, I suppose, the tide had raised the river Dee to its very acme of height. At last the word was given; the ship began slowly to move; Mrs. ------ threw the bottle against the bow with a spasmodic effort that dashed it into a thousand pieces, and diffused the fragrance of the old port all around, where it lingered several minutes. I did not think that there could have been such a breathless moment in an affair of this kind. The ship moved majestically down toward the river; and unless it were Niagara, I never saw anything grander and more impressive than the motion of this mighty mass as she departed from us. We on the platform, and everybody along both shores of the Dee, took off our hats in the rain, waved handkerchiefs, cheered, shouted,--"Beautiful!" "What a noble launch!" "Never was so fair a sight!"--and, really, it was so grand, that calm, majestic movement, that I felt the tears come into my eyes. The wooden pathway adown which she was gliding began to smoke with the friction; when all at once, when we expected to see her plunge into the Dee, she came to a full stop. Mr. ------, the father of my friend, a gentleman with white hair, a dark, expressive face, bright eyes, and an Oriental cast of features, immediately took the alarm. A moment before his countenance had been kindled with triumph; but now he turned pale as death, and seemed to grow ten years older while I was looking at him. Well he might, for his noble ship was stuck fast in the land of the Dee, and without deepening the bed of the river, I do not see how her vast iron hulk is ever to be got out. [This steamer was afterwards successfully floated off on the 29th of the same month.] There was no help for it. A steamboat was hitched on to the stranded vessel, but broke two or three cables without stirring her an inch. So, after waiting long after we had given up all hope, we went to the office of the ship-yard, and there took a lunch; and still the rain was pouring, pouring, pouring, and I never experienced a blacker affair in all my days. Then we had to wait a great while for a train to take us back, so that it was almost five o'clock before we arrived at Chester, where I spent an hour in rambling about the old town, under the Rows; and on the walls, looking down on the treetops, directly under my feet, and through their thick branches at the canal, which creeps at the base, and at the cathedral; walking under the dark intertwining arches of the cloisters, and looking up at the great cathedral tower, so wasted away externally by time and weather that it looks, save for the difference of color between white snow and red freestone, like a structure of snow, half dissolved by several warm days. At the lunch I met with a graduate of Cambridge (England), tutor of a grandson of Percival, with his pupil (Percival, the assassinated minister, I mean). I should not like this position of tutor to a young Englishman; it certainly has an ugly twang of upper servitude. I observed that the tutor gave his pupil the best seat in the railway carriage, and in all respects provided for his comfort before thinking of his own; and this, not as a father does for his child, out of love, but from a sense of place and duty, which I did not quite see how a gentleman could consent to feel. And yet this Mr. C------ was evidently a gentleman, and a quiet, intelligent, agreeable, and, no doubt, learned man. K------ being mentioned, Mr. C------ observed that he had known him well at college, having been his contemporary there. He did not like him, however,--thought him a "dangerous man," as well as I could gather; he thinks there is some radical defect in K------'s moral nature, a lack of sincerity; and, furthermore, he believes him to be a sensualist in his disposition, in support of which view he said Mr. K------ had made drawings, such as no pure man could have made, or could allow himself to show or look at. This was the only fact which Mr. C------ adduced, bearing on his opinion of K------; otherwise, it seemed to be one of those early impressions which a collegian gets of his fellow-students, and which he never gets rid of, whatever the character of the person may turn out to be in after years. I have judged several persons in this way, and still judge them so, though the world has cone to very different conclusions. Which is right?--the world, which has the man's whole mature life on its side; or his early companion, who has nothing for it but some idle passages of his youth? Mr. M------ remarked of newspaper reporters, that they may be known at all celebrations, and of any public occasion, by the enormous quantity of luncheon they eat. August 12th.--Mr. B------ dined with us at the Rock Ferry Hotel the day before yesterday. Speaking of Helvellyn, and the death of Charles Cough, about whom Wordsworth and Scott have both sung, Mr. B------ mentioned a version of that story which rather detracts from the character of the faithful dog. But somehow it lowers one's opinion of human nature itself, to be compelled so to lower one's standard of a dog's nature. I don't intend to believe the disparaging story, but it reminds me of the story of the New-Zealander who was asked whether he loved a missionary who had been laboring for his soul and those of his countrymen. "To be sure I loved him. Why, I ate a piece of him for my breakfast this morning!" For the last week or two I have passed my time between the hotel and the Consulate, and a weary life it is, and one that leaves little of profit behind it. I am sick to death of my office,--brutal captains and brutal sailors; continual complaints of mutual wrong, which I have no power to set right, and which, indeed, seem to have no right on either side; calls of idleness or ceremony from my travelling countrymen, who seldom know what they are in search of at the commencement of their tour, and never have attained any desirable end at the close of it; beggars, cheats, simpletons, unfortunates, so mixed up that it is impossible to distinguish one from another, and so, in self-defence, the Consul distrusts them all. . . . . At the hotel, yesterday, there was a large company of factory people from Preston, who marched up from the pier with a band of military music playing before them. They spent the day in the gardens and ball-room of the hotel, dancing and otherwise merry-making; but I saw little of them, being at the Consulate. Towards evening it drizzled, and the assemblage melted away gradually; and when the band marched down to the pier, there were few to follow, although one man went dancing before the musicians, flinging out his arms, and footing it with great energy and gesticulation. Some young women along the road likewise began to dance as the music approached. Thackeray has a dread of servants, insomuch that he hates to address them, or to ask them for anything. His morbid sensibility, in this regard, has perhaps led him to study and muse upon them, so that he may be presumed to have a more intimate knowledge of this class than any other man. Carlyle dresses so badly, and wears such a rough outside, that the flunkies are rude to him at gentlemen's doors. In the afternoon J----- and I took a walk towards Tranmere Hall, and beyond, as far as Oxton. This part of the country, being so near Liverpool and Birkenhead, is all sprinkled over with what they call "Terraces," "Bellevues," and other pretty names for semi-detached villas ("Recluse Cottage" was one) for a somewhat higher class. But the old, whitewashed stone cottage is still frequent, with its roof of slate or thatch, which perhaps is green with weeds or grass. Through its open door, you see that it has a pavement of flagstones, or perhaps of red freestone; and hogs and donkeys are familiar with the threshold. The door always opens directly into the kitchen, without any vestibule; and, glimpsing in, you see that a cottager's life must be the very plainest and homeliest that ever was lived by men and women. Yet the flowers about the door often indicate a native capacity for the beautiful; but often there is only a pavement of round stones or of flagstones, like those within. At one point where there was a little bay, as it were, in the hedge fence, we saw something like a small tent or wigwam,--an arch of canvas three or four feet high, and open in front, under which sat a dark-complexioned woman and some children. The woman was sewing, and I took them for gypsies. August 17th.--Yesterday afternoon J----- and I went to Birkenhead Park, which I have already described. . . . . It so happened that there was a large school spending its holiday there; a school of girls of the lower classes, to the number of a hundred and fifty, who disported themselves on the green, under the direction of the schoolmistresses and of an old gentleman. It struck me, as it always has, to observe how the lower orders of this country indicate their birth and station by their aspect and features. In America there would be a good deal of grace and beauty among a hundred and fifty children and budding girls, belonging to whatever rank of life. But here they had universally a most plebeian look,--stubbed, sturdy figures, round, coarse faces, snub-noses,--the most evident specimens of the brown bread of human nature. They looked wholesome and good enough, and fit to sustain their rough share of life; but it would have been impossible to make a lady out of any one of them. Climate, no doubt, has most to do with diffusing a slender elegance over American young-womanhood; but something, perhaps, is also due to the circumstance of classes not being kept apart there as they are here: they interfuse, amid the continual ups and downs of our social life; and so, in the lowest stations of life, you may see the refining influence of gentle blood. At all events, it is only necessary to look at such an assemblage of children as I saw yesterday, to be convinced that birth and blood do produce certain characteristics. To be sure, I have seen no similar evidence in England or elsewhere of old gentility refining and elevating the race. These girls were all dressed in black gowns, with white aprons and neckerchiefs, and white linen caps on their heads,--a very dowdyish attire, and well suited to their figures. I saw only two of their games,--in one, they stood in a circle, while two of their number chased one another within and without the ring of girls, which opened to let the fugitive pass, but closed again to impede the passage of the pursuer. The other was blind-man's-buff on a new plan: several of the girls, sometimes as many as twenty, being blinded at once, and pursuing a single one, who rang a hand-bell to indicate her whereabouts. This was very funny; the bell-girl keeping just beyond their reach, and drawing them after her in a huddled group, so that they sometimes tumbled over one another and lay sprawling. I think I have read of this game in Strutt's "English Sports and Pastimes." We walked from the Park home to Rock Ferry, a distance of three or four miles,--a part of which was made delightful by a foot-path, leading us through fields where the grass had just been mown, and others where the wheat harvest was commenced. The path led us into the very midst of the rural labor that was going forward; and the laborers rested a moment to look at us; in fact, they seemed to be more willing to rest than American laborers would have been. Children were loitering along this path or sitting down beside it; and we met one little maid, passing from village to village, intent on some errand. Reaching Tranmere, I went into an alehouse, nearly opposite the Hall, and called for a glass of ale. The doorstep before the house, and the flagstone floor of the entry and tap-room, were chalked all over in corkscrew lines,--an adornment that gave an impression of care and neatness, the chalked lines being evidently freshly made. It was a low, old-fashioned room ornamented with a couple of sea-shells, and an earthen-ware figure on the mantel-piece; also with advertisements of Allsop's ale, and other drinks, and with a pasteboard handbill of "The Ancient Order of Foresters"; any member of which, paying sixpence weekly, is entitled to ten shillings per week, and the attendance of a first-rate physician in sickness, and twelve pounds to be paid to his friends in case of death. Any member of this order, when travelling, is sure (says the handbill) to meet with a brother member to lend him a helping hand, there being nearly three thousand districts of this order, and more than a hundred and nine thousand members in Great Britain, whence it has extended to Australia, America, and other countries. Looking up at the gateway of Tranmere Hall, I discovered an inscription on the red freestone lintel, and, though much time-worn, I succeeded in reading it. "Labor omnia vincit. 1614." There were likewise some initials which I could not satisfactorily make out. The sense of this motto would rather befit the present agricultural occupants of the house than the idle gentlefolks who built and formerly inhabited it. SMITHELL'S HALL. August 25th.--On Thursday I went by invitation to Smithell's Hall in Bolton le Moors to dine and spend the night. The Hall is two or three miles from the town of Bolton, where I arrived by railway from Liverpool, and which seems to be a pretty large town, though the houses are generally modern, or with modernized fronts of brick or stucco. It is a manufacturing town, and the tall brick chimneys rise numerously in the neighborhood, and are so near Smithell's Hall that I suspect the atmosphere is somewhat impregnated with their breath. Mr. ------ can comfort himself with the rent which he receives from the factories erected upon his own grounds; and I suppose the value of his estate has greatly increased by the growth of manufactories; although, unless he wish to sell it, I do not see what good this can do him. Smithell's Hall is one of the oldest residences of England, and still retains very much the aspect that it must have had several centuries ago. The house formerly stood around all four sides of a quadrangle, enclosing a court, and with an entrance through an archway. One side of this quadrangle was removed in the time of the present Mr. ------'s father, and the front is now formed by the remaining three sides. They look exceedingly ancient and venerable, with their range of gables and lesser peaks. The house is probably timber-framed throughout, and is overlaid with plaster, and its generally light line is painted with a row of trefoils in black, producing a very quaint effect. The wing, forming one side of the quadrangle, is a chapel, and has been so from time immemorial; and Mr. ------ told me that he had a clergyman, and even a bishop, in his own diocese. The drawing-room is on the opposite side of the quadrangle; and through an arched door, in the central portion, there is a passage to the rear of the house. It is impossible to describe such an old rambling edifice as this, or to get any clear idea of its plan, even by going over it, without the aid of a map. Mr. ------ has added some portions, and altered others, but with due regard to harmony with the original structure, and the great body of it is still mediaeval. The entrance-hall opens right upon the quadrangular court; and is a large, low room, with a settle of carved old oak, and other old oaken furniture,--a centre-table with periodicals and newspapers on it,--some family pictures on the walls,--and a large, bright coal-fire in the spacious grate. The fire is always kept up, throughout summer and winter, and it seemed to me an excellent plan, and rich with cheerful effects; insuring one comfortable place, and that the most central in the house, whatever may be the inclemency of the weather. It was a cloudy, moist, showery day, when I arrived; and this fire gave me the brightest and most hospitable smile, and took away any shivery feeling by its mere presence. The servant showed me thence into a low-studded dining-room, where soon Mrs. ------ made her appearance, and, after some talk, brought me into the billiard-room, opening from the hall, where Mr. ------ and a young gentleman were playing billiards, and two ladies looking on. After the game was finished, Mr. ------ took me round to see the house and grounds. The peculiarity of this house is what is called "The Bloody Footstep." In the time of Bloody Mary, a Protestant clergyman--George Marsh by name --was examined before the then proprietor of the Hall, Sir Roger Barton, I think, and committed to prison for his heretical opinions, and was ultimately burned at the stake. As his guards were conducting him from the justice-room, through the stone-paved passage that leads from front to rear of Smithell's Hall, he stamped his foot upon one of the flagstones in earnest protestation against the wrong which he was undergoing. The foot, as some say, left a bloody mark in the stone; others have it, that the stone yielded like wax under his foot, and that there has been a shallow cavity ever since. This miraculous footprint is still extant; and Mrs. ------ showed it to me before her husband took me round the estate. It is almost at the threshold of the door opening from the rear of the house, a stone two or three feet square, set among similar ones, that seem to have been worn by the tread of many generations. The footprint is a dark brown stain in the smooth gray surface of the flagstone; and, looking sidelong at it, there is a shallow cavity perceptible, which Mrs. ------ accounted for as having been worn by people setting their feet just on this place, so as to tread the very spot, where the martyr wrought the miracle. The mark is longer than any mortal foot, as if caused by sliding along the stone, rather than sinking into it; and it might be supposed to have been made by a pointed shoe, being blunt at the heel, and decreasing towards the toe. The blood-stained version of the story is more consistent with the appearance of the mark than the imprint would be; for if the martyr's blood oozed out through his shoe and stocking, it might have made his foot slide along the stone, and thus have lengthened the shape. Of course it is all a humbug,--a darker vein cropping up through the gray flagstone; but, it is probably a fact, and, for aught I know, may be found in Fox's Book of Martyrs, that George Marsh underwent an examination in this house [There is a full and pathetic account of the examination and martyrdom of George Marsh in the eleventh section of Fox's Book of Martyrs, as I have just found (June 9, 1867). He went to Smithell's hall, among other places, to be questioned by Mr. Barton.--ED.]; and the tradition may have connected itself with the stone within a short time after the martyrdom; or, perhaps, when the old persecuting knight departed this life, and Bloody Mary was also dead, people who had stood at a little distance from the Hall door, and had seen George Marsh lift his hand and stamp his foot just at this spot,--perhaps they remembered this action and gesture, and really believed that Providence had thus made an indelible record of it on the stone; although the very stone and the very mark might have lain there at the threshold hundreds of years before. But, even if it had been always there, the footprint might, after the fact, be looked upon as a prophecy, from the time when the foundation of the old house was laid, that a holy and persecuted man should one day set his foot here, on the way that was to lead him to the stake. At any rate, the legend is a good one. Mrs. ------ tells me that the miraculous stone was once taken up from the pavement, and flung out of doors, where it remained many years; and in proof of this, it is cracked quite across at one end. This is a pity, and rather interferes with the authenticity, if not of the stone itself, yet of its position in the pavement. It is not far from the foot of the staircase, leading up to Sir Roger Barton's examination-room, whither we ascended, after examining the footprint. This room now opens sideways on the Chapel, into which it looks down, and which is spacious enough to accommodate a pretty large congregation. On one of the walls of the Chapel there is a marble tablet to the memory of one of the present family,--Mr.------'s father, I suppose; he being the first of the name who possessed the estate. The present owners, however, seem to feel pretty much the same pride in the antiquity and legends of the house as if it had come down to them in an unbroken succession of their own forefathers. It has, in reality, passed several times from one family to another, since the Conquest. Mr. ------ led me through a spacious old room, which was formerly panelled with carved oak, but which is converted into a brew-house, up a pair of stairs, into the garret of one of the gables, in order to show me the ancient framework of the house. It is of oak, and preposterously ponderous,--immense beams and rafters, which no modern walls could support,--a gigantic old skeleton, which architects say must have stood a thousand years; and, indeed, it is impossible to ascertain the date of the original foundation, though it is known to have been repaired and restored between five and six centuries ago. Of course, in the lapse of ages, it must continually have been undergoing minor changes, but without at all losing its identity. Mr. ------ says that this old oak wood, though it looks as strong and as solid as ever, has really lost its strength, and that it would snap short off, on application of any force. After this we took our walk through the grounds, which are well wooded, though the trees will bear no comparison with those which I have seen in the midland parts of England. It takes, I suspect, a much longer time for trees to attain a good size here than in America; and these trees, I think Mr. ------ told me, were principally set out by himself. He is upwards of sixty,--a good specimen of the old English country-gentleman, sensible, loving his land and his trees and his dogs and his game, doing a little justice-business, and showing a fitness for his position; so that you feel satisfied to have him keep it. He was formerly a member of Parliament. I had met him before at dinner at Mrs. H------'s. . . . . He took pleasure in showing me his grounds, through which he has laid out a walk, winding up and down through dells and over hillocks, and now and then crossing a rustic bridge; so that you have an idea of quite an extensive domain. Beneath the trees there is a thick growth of ferns, serving as cover for the game. A little terrier-dog, who had hitherto kept us company, all at once disappeared; and soon afterwards we heard the squeak of some poor victim in the cover, whereupon Mr. ------ set out with agility, and ran to the rescue.--By and by the terrier came back with a very guilty look. From the wood we passed into the open park, whence we had a distant view of the house; and, returning thither, we viewed it in other aspects, and on all sides. One portion of it is occupied by Mr. ------'s gardener, and seems not to have been repaired, at least as to its exterior, for a great many years,--showing the old wooden frame, painted black, with plaster in the interstices; and broad windows, extending across the whole breadth of the rooms, with hundreds of little diamond-shaped panes of glass. Before dinner I was shown to my room, which opens from an ancient gallery, lined with oak, and lighted by a row of windows along one side of the quadrangle. Along this gallery are the doors of several sleeping-chambers, one of which--I think it is here--is called "The Dead Man's Chamber." It is supposed to have been the room where the corpses of persons connected with the household used to be laid out. My own room was called "The Beam Chamber," from am immense cross-beam that projects from the ceiling, and seems to be an entire tree, laid across, and left rough-hewn, though at present it is whitewashed. The but of the tree (for it diminishes from one end of the chamber to the other) is nearly two feet square, in its visible part. We dined, at seven o'clock, in a room some thirty-five or forty feet long, and proportionably broad, all panelled with the old carved oak which Mr. ------ took from the room which he had converted into a brew-house. The oak is now of a very dark brown hue, and, being highly polished, it produces a sombre but rich effect. It is supposed to be of the era of Henry the Seventh, and when I examined it the next morning, I found it very delicately and curiously wrought. There are carved profiles of persons in the costume of the times, done with great skill; also foliage, intricate puzzles of intersecting lines, sacred devices, anagrams, and, among others, the device of a bar across a tun, indicating the name of Barton. Most of the carving, however, is less elaborate and intricate than these specimens, being in a perpendicular style, and on one pattern. Before the wood grew so very dark, the beauty of the work must have been much more easily seen than now, as to particulars, though I hardly think that the general effect could have been better; at least, the sombre richness that overspreads the entire square of the room is suitable to such an antique house. An elaborate Gothic cornice runs round the whole apartment. The sideboard and other furniture are of Gothic patterns, and, very likely, of genuine antiquity; but the fireplace is perhaps rather out of keeping, being of white marble with the arms of this family sculptured on it. Though hardly sunset when we sat down to dinner, yet, it being an overcast day, and the oaken room so sombre, we had candles burning on the table; and, long before dinner was over, the candle-light was all the light we had. It is always pleasanter to dine by artificial light. Mrs. ------'s dinner was a good one, and Mr. ------'s wines were very good. I had Mrs. ------ on one side, and another lady on the other side. . . . . After dinner there were two card-parties formed in the dining-room, at one of which there was a game of Vingt-et-un, and at the other a game of whist, at which Mrs. ------ and I lost several shillings to a Mrs. Halton and Mr. Gaskell. . . . . After finishing our games at cards, Mrs. Halton drove off in a pony-chaise to her own house; the other ladies retired, and the gentlemen sat down to chat awhile over the hall fire, occasionally sipping a glass of wine-and-water, and finally we all went off to our rooms. It was past twelve o'clock when I composed myself to sleep, and I could not have slept long, when a tremendous clap of thunder woke me just in time to see a vivid flash of lightning. I saw no ghosts, though Mrs. ------ tells me there is one, which makes a disturbance, unless religious services are regularly kept up in the Chapel. In the morning, before breakfast, we had prayers, read by Mr. ------, in the oak dining-room, all the servants coming in, and everybody kneeling down. I should like to know how much true religious feeling is indicated by this regular observance of religious rites in English families. In America, if people kneel down to pray, it is pretty certain that they feel a genuine interest in the matter, and their daily life is supposed to be in accordance with their devotions. If an American is an infidel, he knows it; but an Englishman is often so without suspecting it,--being kept from that knowledge by this formality of family prayer, and his other regularities of external worship. . . . . There was a parrot in a corner of the dining-room, and, when prayers were over, Mrs. ------ praised it very highly for having been so silent; it being Poll's habit, probably, to break in upon the sacred exercises with unseemly interjections and remarks. While we were at breakfast, Poll began to whistle and talk very vociferously, and in a tone and with expressions that surprised me, till I learned that the bird is usually kept in the kitchen and servants' hall, and is only brought into the dining-room at prayer-time and breakfast. Thus its mouth is full of kitchen talk, which flows out before the gentlefolks with the queerest effect. After breakfast I examined the carvings of the room. Mr. ------ has added to its decorations the coats of arms of all the successive possessors of the house, with those of the families into which they married, including the Ratcliffes, Stanleys, and others. From the dining-room I passed into the library, which contains books enough to make a rainy day pass pleasantly. I remember nothing else that I need to record; and as I sat by the hall fire, talking with Mr. Gaskell, at about eleven o'clock, the butler brought me word that a fly, which I had bespoken, was ready to convey me to the railway. I took leave of Mrs. ------, her last request being that I would write a ghost-story for her house,--and drove off. SHREWSBURY September 5th.--Yesterday we all of us set forth from Rock Ferry at half past twelve, and reached Shrewsbury between three and four o'clock, and took up our quarters at the Lion Hotel. We found Shrewsbury situated on an eminence, around which the Severn winds, making a peninsula of it, quite densely covered by the town. The streets ascend, and curve about, and intersect each other with the customary irregularity of these old English towns, so that it is quite impossible to go directly to any given point, or for a stranger to find his way to a place which he wishes to reach, though, by what seems a singular good fortune, the sought-for place is always offering itself when least expected. On this account I never knew such pleasant walking as in old streets like those of Shrewsbury. And there are passages opening under archways, and winding up between high edifices, very tempting to the explorer, and generally leading to some court, or some queer old range of buildings or piece of architecture, which it would be the greatest pity to miss seeing. There was a delightful want of plan in the laying out of these ancient towns. In fact, they never were laid out at all, nor were restrained by any plan whatever, but grew naturally, with streets as eccentric as the pathway of a young child toddling about the floor. The first curious thing we particularly noticed, when we strolled out after dinner, was the old market-house, which stands in the midst of an oblong square; a gray edifice, elevated on pillars and arches, and with the statue of an armed knight, Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York, in a central niche, in its front. The statue is older than the market-house, having been moved thither from one of the demolished towers of the city wall in 1795. The market-house was erected in 1595. There are other curious sculptures and carvings and quirks of architecture about this building; and the houses that stand about the square are, many of them, very striking specimens of what dwelling-houses used to be in Elizabeth's time, and earlier. I have seen no such stately houses, in that style, as we found here in Shrewsbury. There were no such fine ones in Coventry, Stratford, Warwick, Chester, nor anywhere else where we have been. Their stately height and spaciousness seem to have been owing to the fact that Shrewsbury was a sort of metropolis of the country round about, and therefore the neighboring gentry had their town-houses there, when London was several days' journey off, instead of a very few hours; and, besides, it was once much the resort of kings, and the centre-point of great schemes of war and policy. One such house, formerly belonging to a now extinct family, that of Ireland, rises to the height of four stories, and has a front consisting of what look like four projecting towers. There are ranges of embowered windows, one above another, to the full height of the house, and these are surmounted by peaked gables. The people of those times certainly did not deny themselves light; and while window-glass was an article of no very remote introduction, it was probably a point of magnificence and wealthy display to have enough of it. One whole side of the room must often have been formed by the window. This Ireland mansion, as well as all the rest of the old houses in Shrewsbury, is a timber house,--that is, a skeleton of oak, filled up with brick, plaster, or other material, and with the beams of the timber marked out with black paint; besides which, in houses of any pretension, there are generally trefoils, and other Gothic-looking ornaments, likewise painted black. They have an indescribable charm for me,--the more, I think, because they are wooden; but, indeed, I cannot tell why it is that I like them so well, and am never tired of looking at them. A street was a development of human life, in the days when these houses were built, whereas a modern street is but the cold plan of an architect, without individuality or character, and without the human emotion which a man kneads into the walls which he builds on a scheme of his own. We strolled to a pleasant walk under a range of trees, along the shore of the Severn. It is called the Quarry Walk. The Severn is a pretty river, the largest, I think (unless it be such an estuary as the Mersey), that I have met with in England; that is to say, about a fair stone's-throw across. It is very gentle in its course, and winds along between grassy and sedgy banks, with a good growth of weeds in some part of its current. It has one stately bridge, called the English Bridge, of several arches, and, as we sauntered along the Quarry Walk, we saw a ferry where the boat seemed to be navigated across by means of a rope, stretched from bank to bank of the river. After leaving the Quarry Walk, we passed an old tower of red freestone, the only one remaining of those formerly standing at intervals along the whole course of the town wall; and we also went along what little is now left of the wall itself. And thence, through the irregular streets, which gave no account of themselves, we found our way, I know not how, back to our hotel. It is an uncheerful old hotel, which takes upon itself to be in the best class of English country hotels, and charges the best price; very dark in the lower apartments, pervaded with a musty odor, but provided with a white-neckclothed waiter, who spares no ceremony in serving the joints of mutton. J----- and I afterwards walked forth again, and went this time to the castle, which stands exactly above the railway station. A path, from its breadth quite a street, leads up to the arched gateway; but we found a board, giving notice that these are private grounds, and no strangers admitted; so that we only passed through the gate a few steps, and looked about us, and retired, on perceiving a man approaching us through the trees and shrubbery. A private individual, it seems, has burrowed in this old warlike den, and turned the keep, and any other available apartment, into a modern dwelling, and laid out his pleasure-grounds within the precincts of the castle wall, which allows verge enough for the purpose. The ruins have been considerably repaired. This castle was built at various times, the keep by Edward I., and other portions at an earlier period, and it stands on the isthmus left by the Severn in its wandering course about the town. The Duke of Cleveland now owns it. I do not know who occupies it. In the course of this walk, we passed St. Mary's Church,--a very old church indeed, no matter how old, but say, eight hundred or a thousand years. It has a very tall spire, and the spire is now undergoing repairs; and, seeing the door open, I went into the porch, but found no admission further. Then, walking around it, through the churchyard, we saw that all the venerable Gothic windows--one of them grand in size-- were set with stained glass, representing coats of arms and ancient armor, and kingly robes, and saints with glories about their heads, and Scriptural people; but all of these, as far as our actual perception was concerned, quite colorless, and with only a cold outline, dimly filled up. Yet, had we been within the church, and had the sunlight been streaming through, what a warm, rich, gorgeous, roseate, golden life would these figures have showed! In the churchyard, close upon the street, so that its dust must be continually scattered over the spot, I saw a heavy gray tombstone, with a Latin inscription, purporting that Bishop Butler, the author of the Analogy, in his lifetime had chosen this as a burial-place for himself and his family. There is a statue of him within the church. From the top of the spire a man, above a hundred years ago, attempted to descend, by means of a rope, to the other side of the Severn; but the rope broke, and he fell in his midway flight, and was killed. It was an undertaking worthy of Sam Patch. There is a record of the fact on the outside of the tower. I remember nothing more that we saw yesterday; but, before breakfast, J----- and I sallied forth again, and inspected the gateway and interior court of the Council House,--a very interesting place, both in itself and for the circumstances connected with it, it having been the place where the councillors for the Welsh marches used to reside during their annual meetings; and Charles the First also lived here for six weeks in 1612. James II. likewise held his court here in 1687. The house was originally built in 1501,--that is, the Council House itself,--the gateway, and the house through which it passes, being of as late date as 1620. This latter is a fine old house, in the usual style of timber architecture, with the timber lines marked out, and quaint adornments in black paint; and the pillars of the gateway which passes beneath the front chamber are of curiously carved oak, which has probably stood the action of English atmosphere better than marble would have done. Passing through this gateway, we entered a court, and saw some old buildings more or less modernized, but without destroying their aged stateliness, standing round three sides of it, with arched entrances and bow-windows, and windows in the roofs, and peaked gables, and all the delightful irregularity and variety that these houses have, and which make them always so fresh,--and with so much detail that every minute you see something heretofore unseen. It must have been no unfit residence for a king and his court, when those three sides of the square, all composing one great fantastic house, were in their splendor. The square itself, too, must have been a busy and cheerful scene, thronged with attendants, guests, horses, etc. After breakfast, we all walked out, and, crossing the English Bridge, looked at the Severn over its parapet. The river is here broader than elsewhere, and very shallow, and has an island covered with bushes, about midway across. Just over the bridge we saw a church, of red freestone, and evidently very ancient. This is the Church of the Holy Cross, and is a portion of the Abbey of St. Peter and St. John, which formerly covered ten acres of ground. We did not have time to go into the church; but the windows and other points of architecture, so far as we could discern them, and knew how to admire them, were exceedingly venerable and beautiful. On the other side of the street, over a wide space, there are other remains of the old abbey; and the most interesting was a stone pulpit, now standing in the open air, seemingly in a garden, but which originally stood in the refectory of the abbey, and was the station whence one of the monks read to his brethren at their meals. The pulpit is much overgrown with ivy. We should have made further researches among these remains, though they seem now to be in private grounds; but a large mastiff came nut of his kennel, and, approaching us to the length of his iron chain, began barking very fiercely. Nor had we time to see half that we would gladly have seen and studied here and elsewhere about Shrewsbury. It would have been very interesting to have visited Hotspur's and Falstaff's battle-field, which is four miles from the town; too distant, certainly, for Falstaff to have measured the length of the fight by Shrewsbury clock. There is now a church, built there by Henry IV., and said to cover the bones of those slain in the battle. Returning into the town, we penetrated some narrow lanes, where, as the old story goes, people might almost shake hands across from the top windows of the opposite houses, impending towards each other. Emerging into a wider street, at a spot somewhat more elevated than other parts of the town, we went into a shop to buy some Royal Shrewsbury cakes, which we had seen advertised at several shop windows. They are a very rich cake, with plenty of eggs, sugar, and butter, and very little flour. A small public building of stone, of modern date, was close by; and asking the shopwoman what it was, she said it was the Butter Cross, or market for butter, eggs, and poultry. It is a remarkable site, for here, in ancient times, stood a stone cross, where heralds used to make proclamation, and where criminals of state used to be executed. David, the last of the Welsh princes, was here cruelly put to death by Edward I., and many noblemen were beheaded on this spot, after being taken prisoners in the battle of Shrewsbury. I can only notice one other memorable place in Shrewsbury, and that is the Raven Inn, where Farquhar wrote his comedy of "The Recruiting Officer" in 1701. The window of the room in which he wrote is said to look into the inn yard, and I went through the arched entrance to see if I could distinguish it. The hostlers were currying horses in the yard, and so stared at me that I gave but the merest glance. The Shrewsbury inns have not only the customary names of English inns,--as the Lion, the Stag,--but they have also the carved wooden figures of the object named, whereas, in all other towns, the name alone remains. We left Shrewsbury at half past ten, and arrived in London at about four in the afternoon. LONDON. September 7th.--On Wednesday, just before dusk, J----- and I walked forth, for the first time, in London. Our lodgings are in George Street, Hanover Square, No. 21; and St. George's Church, where so many marriages in romance and in fashionable life have been celebrated, is a short distance below our house, in the same street. The edifice seems to be of white marble, now much blackened with London smoke, and has a Grecian pillared portico. In the square, just above us, is a statue of William Pitt. We went down Bond Street, and part of Regent Street, just estraying a little way from our temporary nest, and taking good account of landmarks and corners, so as to find our way readily back again. It is long since I have had such a childish feeling; but all that I had heard and felt about the vastness of London made it seem like swimming in a boundless ocean, to venture one step beyond the only spot I knew. My first actual impression of London was of stately and spacious streets, and by no means so dusky and grimy as I had expected,--not merely in the streets about this quarter of the town, which is the aristocratic quarter, but in all the streets through which we had passed from the railway station. If I had not first been so imbued with the smoke and dinginess of Liverpool, I should doubtless have seen a stronger contrast betwixt dusky London and the cheerful glare of our American cities. There are no red bricks here; all are of a dark hue, and whatever of stone or stucco has been white soon clothes itself in mourning. Yesterday forenoon I went out alone, and plunged headlong into London, and wandered about all day, without any particular object in view, but only to lose myself for the sake of finding myself unexpectedly among things that I had always read and dreamed about. The plan was perfectly successful, for, besides vague and unprofitable wanderings, I saw, in the course of the day, Hyde Park, Regent's Park, Whitehall, the two new Houses of Parliament, Charing Cross, St. Paul's, the, Strand, Fleet Street, Cheapside, Whitechapel, Leadenhall Street, the Haymarket, and a great many other places, the names of which were classic in my memory. I think what interests me most here, is the London of the writers of Queen Anne's age,--whatever Pope, The Spectator, De Foe, and down as late as Johnson and Goldsmith, have mentioned. The Monument, for instance, which is of no great height nor beauty compared with that on Bunker Hill, charmed me prodigiously. St. Paul's appeared to me unspeakably grand and noble, and the more so from the throng and bustle continually going on around its base, without in the least disturbing the sublime repose of its great dome, and, indeed, of all its massive height and breadth. Other edifices may crowd close to its foundation, and people may tramp as they like about it; but still the great cathedral is as quiet and serene as if it stood in the middle of Salisbury Plain. There cannot be anything else in its way so good in the world as just this effect of St. Paul's in the very heart and densest tumult of London. I do not know whether the church is built of marble, or of whatever other white or nearly white material; but in the time that it has been standing there, it has grown black with the smoke of ages, through which there are nevertheless gleams of white, that make a most picturesque impression on the whole. It is much better than staring white; the edifice would not be nearly so grand without this drapery of black. I did not find these streets of the old city so narrow and irregular as I expected. All the principal ones are sufficiently broad, and there are few houses that look antique, being, I suppose, generally modern-fronted, when not actually of modern substance. There is little or no show or pretension in this part of London; it has a plain, business air,--an air of homely, actual life, as of a metropolis of tradesmen, who have been carrying on their traffic here, in sober earnest, for hundreds of years. You observe on the sign-boards, "Established ninety years in Threadneedle Street," "Established in 1109,"--denoting long pedigrees of silk-mercers and hosiers,--De Foe's contemporaries still represented by their posterity, who handle the hereditary yardstick on the same spot. I must not forget to say that I crossed the Thames over a bridge which, I think, is near Charing Cross. Afterwards, I found my way to London Bridge, where there was a delightful density of throng. The Thames is not so wide and majestic as I had imagined,--nothing like the Mersey, for example. As a picturesque object, however, flowing through the midst of a city, it would lose by any increase of width. Omnibuses are a most important aid to wanderers about London. I reached home, well wearied, about six o'clock. In the course of the day, I had seen one person whom I knew,--Mr. Clarke, to whom Henry B------ introduced me, when we went to see the great ship launched on the Dee. This, I believe, was in Regent Street. In that street, too, I saw a company of dragoons, beautifully mounted, and defensively armed, in brass helmets and steel cuirasses, polished to the utmost excess of splendor. It was a pretty sight. At one of the public edifices, on each side of the portal, sat a mounted trooper similarly armed, and with his carbine resting on his knee, just as motionless as a statue. This, too, as a picturesque circumstance, was very good, and really made an impression on me with respect to the power and stability of the government, though I could not help smiling at myself for it. But then the thought, that for generations an armed warrior has always sat just there, on his war-steed, and with his weapon in his hand, is pleasant to the imagination,-- although it is questionable whether his carbine be loaded; and, no doubt, if the authorities had any message to send, they would choose some other messenger than this heavy dragoon,--the electric wire, for instance. Still, if he and his horse were to be withdrawn from their post, night or day (for I suppose the sentinels are on duty all night), it seems as if the monarchy would be subverted, and the English constitution crumble into rubbish; and, in honest fact, it will signify something like that, when guard is relieved there for the last time. September 8th.--Yesterday forenoon S-----, the two eldest children, and I went forth into London streets, and proceeded down Regent Street, and thence to St. James's Park, at the entrance of which is a statue of somebody,--I forget whom. On the very spacious gravel-walks, covering several acres, in the rear of the Horse Guards, some soldiers were going through their exercise; and, after looking at them awhile, we strolled through the Park, alongside of a sheet of water, in which various kinds of ducks, geese, and rare species of waterfowl were swimming. There was one swan of immense size, which moved about among the lesser fowls like a stately, full-rigged ship among gunboats. By and by we found ourselves near what we since have discovered to be Buckingham Palace,--a long building, in the Italian style, but of no impressiveness, and which one soon wearies of looking at. The Queen having gone to Scotland the day before, the palace now looked deserted, although there was a one-horse cab, of shabby aspect, standing at the principal front, where doubtless the carriages of princes and the nobility draw up. There is a fountain playing before the palace, and water-fowl love to swim under its perpetual showers. These ducks and geese are very tame, and swim to the margin of the pond to be fed by visitors, looking up at you with great intelligence. S----- asked a man in a sober suit of livery (of whom we saw several about the Park), whose were some of the large mansions which we saw, and he pointed out Stafford House, the residence of the Duke of Sutherland, --a very noble edifice, much more beautiful than the palace, though not so large; also the house of the Earl of Ellesmere, and residences of other noblemen. This range of mansions, along the park, from the spot whence we viewed them, looks very much like Beacon Street, in Boston, bordering on the Common, allowing for a considerable enlargement of scale in favor of the Park residences. The Park, however, has not the beautiful elms that overshadow Boston Common, nor such a pleasant undulation of surface, nor the fine off-view of the country, like that across Charles River. I doubt whether London can show so delightful a spot as that Common, always excepting the superiority of English lawns, which, however, is not so evident in the London parks, there being less care bestowed on the grass than I should have expected. From this place we wandered into what I believe to be Hyde Park, attracted by a gigantic figure on horseback, which loomed up in the distance. The effect of this enormous steed and his rider is very grand, seen in the misty atmosphere. I do not understand why we did not see St. James's Palace, which is situated, I believe, at the extremity of the same range of mansions of which Stafford House is the opposite end. From the entrance of Hyde Park, we seem to have gone along Piccadilly, and, making two or three turns, and getting bewildered, I put S----- and the children into a cab, and sent them home. Continuing my wanderings, I went astray among squares of large aristocratic-looking edifices, all apparently new, with no shops among them, some yet unfinished, and the whole seeming like a city built for a colony of gentlefolks, who might be expected to emigrate thither in a body. It was a dreary business to wander there, turning corner after corner, and finding no way of getting into a less stately and more genial region. At last, however, I passed in front of the Queen's Mews, where sentinels were on guard, and where a jolly-looking man, in a splendidly laced scarlet coat and white-topped boots, was lounging at the entrance. He looked like the prince of grooms or coachmen. . . . . The corner of Hyde Park was within a short distance, and I took a Hansom at the cab-stand there, and drove to the American Despatch Agency, 26 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, having some documents of state to be sent by to-day's steamer. The business of forwarding despatches to America, and distributing them to the various legations and consulates in Europe, must be a pretty extensive one; for Mr. Miller has a large office, and two clerks in attendance. From this point I went through Covent Garden Market, and got astray in the city, so that I can give no clear account of my afternoon's wanderings. I passed through Holborn, however, and I think it was from that street that I passed through an archway (which I almost invariably do, when I see one), and found myself in a very spacious, gravelled square, surrounded on the four sides by a continuous edifice of dark brick, very plain, and of cold and stern aspect. This was Gray's Inn, all tenanted by a multitude of lawyers. Passing thence, I saw "Furnival's Inn" over another archway, but, being on the opposite side of the street, I did not go thither. In Holborn, still, I went through another arched entrance, over which was "Staples Inn," and here likewise seemed to be offices; but, in a court opening inwards from this, there was a surrounding seclusion of quiet dwelling-houses, with beautiful green shrubbery and grass-plots in the court, and a great many sunflowers in full bloom. The windows were open; it was a lovely summer afternoon, and I have a sense that bees were humming in the court, though this may have been suggested by my fancy, because the sound would have been so well suited to the scene. A boy was reading at one of the windows. There was not a quieter spot in England than this, and it was very strange to have drifted into it so suddenly out of the bustle and rumble of Holborn; and to lose all this repose as suddenly, on passing through the arch of the outer court. In all the hundreds of years since London was built, it has not been able to sweep its roaring tide over that little island of quiet. In Holborn I saw the most antique-looking houses that I have yet met with in London, but none of very remarkable aspect. I think I must have been under a spell of enchantment to-day, connecting me with St. Paul's; for, trying to get away from it by various avenues, I still got bewildered, and again and again saw its great dome and pinnacles before me. I observe that the smoke has chiefly settled on the lower part of the edifice, leaving its loftier portions and its spires much less begrimed. It is very beautiful, very rich. I did not think that anything but Gothic architecture could so have interested me. The statues, the niches, the embroidery, as it were, of sculpture traced around it, produced a delightful effect. In front of St. Paul's there is a statue of Queen Anne, which looks rather more majestic, I doubt not, than that fat old dame ever did. St. Paul's churchyard had always been a place of immense interest in my imagination. It is merely the not very spacious street, running round the base of the church,--at least, this street is included in the churchyard, together with the enclosure immediately about the church, sowed with tombstones. I meant to look for the children's book-shop, but forgot it, or neglected it, from not feeling so much interest in a thing near at hand as when it seemed unattainable. I watched a man tearing down the brick wall of a house that did not appear very old; but it surprised me to see how crumbly the brick-work was, one stroke of his pick often loosening several bricks in a row. It is my opinion that brick houses, after a moderate term of years, stand more by habit and courtesy than through any adhesive force of the old mortar. I recommenced my wanderings; but I remember nothing else particularly claiming to be mentioned, unless it be Paternoster Row,--a little, narrow, darksome lane, in which, it being now dusk in that density of the city, I could not very well see what signs were over the doors. In this street, or thereabouts, I got into an omnibus, and, being set down near Regent's Circus, reached home well wearied. September 9th.--Yesterday, having some tickets to the Zoological Gardens, we went thither with the two eldest children. It was a most beautiful sunny day, the very perfection of English weather,--which is as much as to say, the best weather in the world, except, perhaps, some few days in an American October. These gardens are at the end of Regent's Park, farthest from London, and they are very extensive; though, I think, not quite worthy of London,--not so good as one would expect them to be,--not so fine and perfect a collection of beasts, birds, and fishes, as one might fairly look for, when the greatest metropolis of the world sets out to have such a collection at all.--My idea was, that here every living thing was provided for, in the way best suited to its nature and habits, and that the refinement of civilization had here restored a garden of Eden, where all the animal kingdom had regained a happy home. This is not quite the case; though, I believe, the creatures are as comfortable as could he expected, and there are certainly a good many strange beasts here. The hippopotamus is the chief treasure of the collection,--an immense, almost misshapen, mass of flesh. At this moment I do not remember anything that interested me except a sick monkey,--a very large monkey, and elderly he seemed to be. His keeper brought him some sweetened apple and water, and some tea; for the monkey had quite lost his appetite, and refused all ordinary diet. He came, however, quite eagerly, and smelt of the tea and apple, the keeper exhorting him very tenderly to eat. But the poor monkey shook his head slowly, and with the most pitiable expression, at the same time extending his hand to take the keeper's, as if claiming his sympathy and friendship. By and by the keeper (who is rather a surly fellow) essayed harsher measures, and insisted that the monkey should eat what had been brought for him, and hereupon ensued somewhat of a struggle, and the tea was overturned upon the straw of the bed. Then the keeper scolded him, and, seizing him by one arm, drew him out of his little bedroom into the larger cage, upon which the wronged monkey began a loud, dissonant, reproachful chatter, more expressive of a sense of injury than any words could be. Observing the spectators in front of the cage, he seemed to appeal to them, and addressed his chatter thitherward, and stretched out his long, lean arm and black hand between the bars, as if claiming the grasp of any one friend he might have in the whole world. He was placable, however; for when the keeper called him in a gentler tone, he hobbled towards him with a very stiff and rusty movement, and the scene closed with their affectionately hugging one another. But I fear the poor monkey will die. In a future state of being, I think it will be one of my inquiries, in reference to the mysteries of the present state, why monkeys were made. The Creator could not surely have meant to ridicule his own work. It might rather be fancied that Satan had perpetrated monkeys, with a malicious purpose of parodying the masterpiece of creation! The Aquarium, containing, in some of its compartments, specimens of the animal and vegetable life of the sea, and, in others, those of the fresh water, was richly worth inspecting; but not nearly so perfect as it might be. Now I think we have a right to claim, in a metropolitan establishment of this kind, in all its departments, a degree of perfection that shall quite outdo the unpractised thought of any man on that particular subject. There were a good many well-dressed people and children in the gardens, Saturday being a fashionable day for visiting them. One great amusement was feeding some bears with biscuits and cakes, of which they seemed exceedingly fond. One of the three bears clambered to the top of a high pole, whence he invited the spectators to hand him bits of cake on the end of a stick, or to toss them into his mouth, which he opened widely for that purpose. Another, apparently an elderly bear, not having skill nor agility for these gymnastics, sat on the ground, on his hinder end, groaning most pitifully. The third took what stray bits he could get, without earning them by any antics. At four o'clock there was some music from the band of the First Life-Guards, a great multitude of chairs being set on the greensward in the sunshine and shade, for the accommodation of the auditors. Here we had the usual exhibition of English beauty, neither superior nor otherwise to what I have seen in other parts of England. Before the music was over, we walked slowly homeward, along beside Regent's Park, which is very prettily laid out, but lacks some last touch of richness and beauty; though, after all, I do not well see what more could be done with grass, trees, and gravel-walks. The children, especially J-----, who had raced from one thing to another all day long, grew tired; so we put them into a cab, and walked slowly through Portland Place, where are a great many noble mansions, yet no very admirable architecture; none that possessed, nor that ever can possess, the indefinable charm of some of those poor old timber houses in Shrewsbury. The art of domestic architecture is lost. We can rear stately and beautiful dwellings (though we seldom do), but they do not seem proper to the life of man, in the same way that his shell is proper to the lobster; nor, indeed, is the mansion of the nobleman proper to him, in the same kind and degree, that a hut is proper to a peasant. From Portland Place we passed into Regent Street, and soon reached home. September 10th.--Yesterday forenoon we walked out with the children, intending for Charing Cross; but, missing our way, as usual, we went down a rather wide and stately street, and saw before us an old brick edifice with a pretty extensive front, over which rose a clock-tower,--the whole dingy, and looking both gloomy and mean. There was an arched entrance beneath the clock-tower, at which two Guardsmen, in their bear-skin caps, were stationed as sentinels; and from this circumstance, and our having some guess at the locality, we concluded the old brick building to be St. James's Palace. Otherwise we might have taken it for a prison, or for a hospital, which, in truth, it was at first intended for. But, certainly, there are many paupers in England who live in edifices of far more architectural pretension externally than this principal palace of the English sovereigns. Seeing other people go through the archway, we also went, meeting no impediment from the sentinels, and found ourselves in a large paved court, in the centre of which a banner was stuck down, with a few soldiers standing near it. This flag was the banner of the regiment of guards on duty. The aspect of the interior court was as naked and dismal as the outside, the brick being of that dark hue almost universal in England. On one side of the court there was a door which seemed to give admission to a chapel, into which several persons went, and probably we might have gone too, had we liked. From this court, we penetrated into at least two or three others; for the palace is very extensive, and all of it, so far as I could see, on the same pattern,--large, enclosed courts, paved, and quite bare of grass, shrubbery, or any beautiful thing,--dark, stern, brick walls, without the slightest show of architectural beauty, or even an ornament over the square, commonplace windows, looking down on those forlorn courts. A carriage-drive passes through it, if I remember aright, from the principal front, emerging by one of the sides; and I suppose that the carriages roll through the palace, at the levees and drawing-rooms. There was nothing to detain us here any long time, so we went from court to court, and came out through a side-opening. The edifice is battlemented all round, and this, with somewhat of fantastic in the shape of the clock-tower, is the only attempt at ornament in the whole. Then we skirted along St. James's Park, passing Marlborough House,--a red brick building,--and a very long range of stone edifices, which, whether they were public or private, one house or twenty, we knew not. We ascended the steps of the York column, and soon reached Charing Cross and Trafalgar Square, where there are more architectural monuments than in any other one place in London; besides two fountains, playing in large reservoirs of water, and various edifices of note and interest. Northumberland House, now, and for a long while, the town residence of the Percys, stands on the Strand side,--over the entrance a lion, very spiritedly sculptured, flinging out his long tail. On another side of the square is Morley's Hotel, exceedingly spacious, and looking more American than anything else in the hotel line that I have seen here. The Nelson monument, with Lord Nelson, in a cocked hat, on its top, is very grand in its effect. All about the square there were sundry loungers, people looking at the bas-reliefs on Nelson's Column, children paddling in the reservoirs of the fountains; and, it being a sunny day, it was a cheerful and lightsome, as well as an impressive scene. On second thoughts, I do not know but that London should have a far better display of architecture and sculpture than this, on its finest site, and in its very centre; for, after all, there is nothing of the very best. But I missed nothing at the time. In the afternoon S----- and I set out to attend divine service in Westminster Abbey. On our way thither we passed through Pall Mall, which is full of club-houses, and we were much struck with the beauty of the one lately erected for the Carleton Club. It is built of a buff-colored or yellowish stone, with pillars or pilasters of polished Aberdeen granite, wonderfully rich and beautiful; and there is a running border of sculptured figures all round the upper part of the building, besides other ornament and embroidery, wherever there was room or occasion for it. It being an oblong square, the smooth and polished aspect in this union of two rich colors in it,--this delicacy and minuteness of finish, this lavish ornament--made me think of a lady's jewel-box; and if it could be reduced to the size of about a foot square, or less, it would make the very prettiest one that ever was seen. I question whether it have any right to be larger than a jewel-box; but it is certainly a most beautiful edifice. We turned down Whitehall, at the head of which, over the very spot where the Regicides were executed, stands the bronze equestrian statue of Charles I.,--the statue that was buried under the earth during the whole of Cromwell's time, and emerged after the Restoration. We saw the Admiralty and the Horse-Guards, and, in front of the latter, the two mounted sentinels, one of whom was flirting and laughing with some girls. On the other side of the street stands the Banqueting-House, built by Inigo Jones; from a window of which King Charles stepped forth, wearing a kingly head, which, within a few minutes afterwards, fell with a dead thump on the scaffold. It was nobly done,-- and nobly suffered. How rich is history in the little space around this spot! I find that the day after I reached London, I entirely passed by Westminster Abbey without knowing it, partly because my eyes were attracted by the gaudier show of the new Houses of Parliament, and partly because this part of the Abbey has been so much repaired and renewed that it has not the marks of age. Looking at its front, I now found it very grand and venerable; but it is useless to attempt a description: these things are not to be translated into words; they can be known only by seeing them, and, until seen, it is well to shape out no idea of them. Impressions, states of mind, produced by noble spectacles of whatever kind, are all that it seems worth while to attempt reproducing with the pen. After coming out of the Abbey, we looked at the two Houses of Parliament, directly across the way,--an immense structure, and certainly most splendid, built of a beautiful warm-colored stone. The building has a very elaborate finish, and delighted me at first; but by and by I began to be sensible of a weariness in the effect, a lack of variety in the plan and ornament, a deficiency of invention; so that instead of being more and more interested the longer one looks, as is the case with an old Gothic edifice, and continually reading deeper into it, one finds that one has seen all in seeing a little piece, and that the magnificent palace has nothing better to show one or to do for one. It is wonderful how the old weather-stained and smoke-blackened Abbey shames down this brand-newness; not that the Parliament houses are not fine objects to look at, too. Yesterday morning we walked to Charing Cross, with U---- and J-----, and there took a cab to the Tower, driving thither through the Strand, Fleet Street, past St. Paul's, and amid all the thickest throng of the city. I have not a very distinct idea of the Tower, but remember that our cab drove within an outer gate, where we alighted at a ticket-office; the old royal fortress being now a regular show-place, at sixpence a head, including the sight of armory and crown-jewels. We saw about the gate several warders or yeomen of the guard, or beefeaters, dressed in scarlet coats of antique fashion, richly embroidered with golden crowns, both on the breast and back, and other royal devices and insignia; so that they looked very much like the kings on a pack of cards, or regular trumps, at all events. I believe they are old soldiers, promoted to this position for good conduct. One of them took charge of us, and when a sufficient number of visitors had collected with us, he led us to see what very small portion of the Tower is shown. There is a great deal of ground within the outer precincts; and it has streets and houses and inhabitants and a church within it; and, going up and down behind the warder, without any freedom to get acquainted with the place by strolling about, I know little more about it than when I went in,--only recollecting a mean and disagreeable confusion of brick walls, barracks, paved courts, with here and there a low bulky turret, of rather antique aspect, and, in front of one of the edifices, a range of curious old cannon, lying on the ground, some of them immensely large and long, and beautifully wrought in brass. I observed by a plan, however, that the White Tower, containing the armory, stands about in the centre of the fortress, and that it is a square, battlemented structure, having a turret at each angle. We followed the warder into the White Tower, and there saw, in the first place, a long gallery of mounted knights, and men at arms, which has been so often described that when I wish to recall it to memory I shall turn to some other person's account of it. I was much struck, however, with the beautiful execution of a good many of the suits of armor, and the exquisite detail with which they were engraved. The artists of those days attained very great skill, in this kind of manufacture. The figures of the knights, too, in full array, undoubtedly may have shown a combination of stateliness and grace which heretofore I have not believed in,--not seeing how it could be compatible with iron garments. But it is quite incomprehensible how, in the time of the heaviest armor, they could strike a blow, or possess any freedom of movement, except such as a turtle is capable of; and, in truth, they are said not to have been able to rise up when overthrown. They probably stuck out their lances, and rode straight at the enemy, depending upon upsetting him by their mass and weight. In the row of knights is Henry VIII.; also Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, who must have been an immensely bulky man; also, a splendid suit of armor, gilded all over, presented by the city of London to Charles I.; also, two or three suits of boys' armor, for the little princes of the House of Stuart. They began to wear these burdens betimes, in order that their manhood might be the more tolerant of them. We went through this gallery so hastily that it would have been about as well not to have seen it at all. Then we went up a winding stair to another room, containing armor and weapons, and beautiful brass cannon, that appeared to have been for ornament rather than use, some of them being quite covered with embossed sculpture, marvellously well wrought. In this room was John of Gaunt's suit, indicating a man seven feet high, and the armor seems to bear the marks of much wear; but this may be owing to great scrubbing, throughout the centuries since John of Gaunt died. There, too, we saw the cloak in which Wolfe fell, on the Plains of Abraham,--a coarse, faded, threadbare, light-colored garment, folded up under a glass case. Many other things we might have seen, worthy of being attended to, had there been time to look at them. Following into still another room, we were told that this was Sir Walter Raleigh's apartment, while confined in the Tower, so that it was within these walls that he wrote the History of the World. The room was formerly lighted by lancet windows, and must have been very gloomy; but, if he had the whole length of it to himself, it was a good space to walk and meditate in. On one side of the apartment is a low door, giving admittance, we were told, to the cell where Raleigh slept; so we went in, and found it destitute of any window, and so dark that we could not estimate its small extent except by feeling about. At the threshold of this sleeping-kennel, there were one or two inscriptions, scratched in the wall, but not, I believe, by Raleigh. In this apartment, among a great many other curious things, are shown the devilish instruments of torture which the Spaniards were bringing to England in their Armada; and, at the end of the room, sits Queen Elizabeth on horseback, in her high ruff and faded finery. Very likely none of these clothes were ever on her actual person. Here, too, we saw a headsman's block,--not that on which Raleigh was beheaded, which I would have given gold to see, but the one which was used for the Scotch Lords Kilmarnock, Lovat, and others, executed on account of the Rebellion of 1745. It is a block of oak, about two feet high, with a large knot in it, so that it would not easily be split by a blow of the axe; hewn and smoothed in a very workmanlike way, and with a hollow to accommodate the head and shoulders on each side. There were two or three very strong marks of the axe in the part over which the neck lay, and several smaller cuts; as if the first stroke nearly severed the head, and then the chopping off was finished by smaller blows, as we see a butcher cutting meat with his cleaver. A headsman's axe was likewise shown us,--its date unknown. In the White Tower we were shown the Regalia, under a glass, and within an iron cage. Edward the Confessor's golden staff was very finely wrought; and there were a great many pretty things; but I have a suspicion, I know not why, that these are not the real jewels,--at least, that such inestimable ones as the Koh-i-noor (or however it is spelt) are less freely exhibited. The warder then led us into a paved court, which he said was the place of execution of all royal personages and others, who, from motives of fear or favor, were beheaded privately. Raleigh was among these, and so was Anne Boleyn. We then followed to the Beauchamp Tower, where many state prisoners of note were confined, and where, on the walls of one of the chambers, there are several inscriptions and sculptures of various devices, done by the prisoners,--and very skilfully done, too, though perhaps with no better instrument than an old nail. These poor wretches had time and leisure enough to spend upon their work. This chamber is lighted by small lancet windows, pierced at equal intervals round the circle of the Beauchamp Tower; and it contains a large, square fireplace, in which is now placed a small modern stove. We were hurried away, before we could even glance at the inscriptions, and we saw nothing else, except the low, obscure doorway in the Bloody Tower, leading to the staircase, under which were found the supposed bones of the little princes; and lastly, the round, Norman arch, opening to the water passage, called the Traitor's Gate. Finally, we ate some cakes and buns in the refreshment-room connected with the ticket-office, and then left the fortress. The ancient moat, by the way, has been drained within a few years, and now forms a great hollow space, with grassy banks, round about the citadel. We now wished to see the Thames, and therefore threaded our way along Thames Street, towards London Bridge, passing through a fish-market, which I suppose to be the actual Billingsgate, whence originated all the foul language in England. Under London Bridge there is a station for steamers running to Greenwich and Woolwich. We got on board one of these, not very well knowing, nor much caring, whither it might take us, and steamed down the river, which is bordered with the shabbiest, blackest, ugliest, meanest buildings: it is the back side of the town; and, in truth, the muddy tide of the Thames deserves to see no better. There was a great deal of shipping in the river, and many steamers, and it was much more crowded than the Mersey, where all the ships go into docks; but the vessels were not so fine. By and by we reached Greenwich, and went ashore there, proceeding up from the quay, past beer-shops and eating-houses in great numbers and variety. Greenwich Hospital is here a very prominent object, and after passing along its extensive front, facing towards the river, we entered one of the principal gates, as we found ourselves free to do. We now left the hospital, and steamed back to London Bridge, whence we went up into the city, and, to finish the labors of the day, ascended the Monument. This seems to be still a favorite adventure with the cockneys; for we heard one woman, who went up with us, saying that she had been thinking of going up all her life, and another said that she had gone up thirty years ago. There is an iron railing, or rather a cage, round the top, through which it would be impossible for people to force their way, in order to precipitate themselves, as six persons have heretofore done. There was a mist over London, so that we did not gain a very clear view, except of the swarms of people running about, like ants, in the streets at the foot of the Monument. Descending, I put S----- and the children into a cab, and I myself wandered about the city. Passing along Fleet Street, I turned in through an archway, which I rightly guessed to be the entrance to the Temple. It is a very large space, containing many large, solemn, and serious edifices of dark brick, and no sooner do you pass under the arch than all the rumble and bustle of London dies away at once; and it seems as if a person might live there in perfect quiet, without suspecting that it was not always a Sabbath. People appear to have their separate residences here; but I do not understand what is the economy of their lives. Quite in the deepest interior of this region, there is a large garden, bordering on the Thames, along which it has a gravel-walk, and benches where it would be pleasant to sit. On one edge of the garden, there is some scanty shrubbery, and flowers of no great brilliancy; and the greensward, with which the garden is mostly covered, is not particularly rich nor verdant. Emerging from the Temple, I stopped at a tavern in the Strand, the waiter of which observed to me, "They say Sebastopol is taken, sir!" It was only such an interesting event that could have induced an English waiter to make a remark to a stranger, not called for in the way of business. The best view we had of the town--in fact, the only external view, and the only time we really saw the White Tower--was from the river, as we steamed past it. Here the high, square, battlemented White Tower, with the four turrets at its corners, rises prominently above all other parts of the fortress. September 13th.--Mr. ------, the American Minister, called on me on Tuesday, and left his card; an intimation that I ought sooner to have paid my respects to him; so yesterday forenoon I set out to find his residence, 56 Harley Street. It is a street out of Cavendish Square, in a fashionable quarter, although fashion is said to be ebbing away from it. The ambassador seems to intend some little state in his arrangements; but, no doubt, the establishment compares shabbily enough with those of the legations of other great countries, and with the houses of the English aristocracy. A servant, not in livery, or in a very unrecognizable one, opened the door for me, and gave my card to a sort of upper attendant, who took it in to Mr. ------. He had three gentlemen with him, so desired that I should be ushered into the office of the legation, until he should be able to receive me. Here I found a clerk or attache, Mr. M------, who has been two or three years on this side of the water; an intelligent person, who seems to be in correspondence with the New York Courier and Enquirer. By and by came in another American to get a passport for the Continent, and soon the three gentlemen took leave of the ambassador, and I was invited to his presence. The tall, large figure of Mr. ------ has a certain air of state and dignity; he carries his head in a very awkward way, but still looks like a man of long and high authority, and, with his white hair, is now quite venerable. There is certainly a lack of polish, a kind of rusticity, notwithstanding which you feel him to be a man of the world. I should think he might succeed very tolerably in English society, being heavy and sensible, cool, kindly, and good-humored, with a great deal of experience of life. We talked about various matters, politics among the rest; and he observed that if the President had taken the advice which he gave him in two long letters, before his inauguration, he would have had a perfectly quiet and successful term of office. The advice was, to form a perfectly homogeneous cabinet of Union men, and to satisfy the extremes of the party by a fair distribution of minor offices; whereas he formed his cabinet of extreme men, on both sides, and gave the minor offices to moderate ones. But the antislavery people, surely, had no representative in the cabinet. Mr. ------ further observed, that he thought the President had a fair chance of re-nomination, for that the South could not, in honor, desert him; to which I replied that the South had been guilty of such things heretofore. Mr. ------ thinks that the next Presidential term will be more important and critical, both as to our foreign relations and internal affairs, than any preceding one,--which I should judge likely enough to be the case, although I heard the sane prophecy often made respecting the present term. The ambassador dined with us at Rock Park a year or two ago, and I then felt, and always feel, as if he were a man of hearty feeling and simplicity, and certainly it would be unjust to conclude otherwise, merely from the fact (very suspicious, it is true) of his having been a life-long politician. After we had got through a little matter of business (respecting a young American who has enlisted at Liverpool), the Minister rang his bell, and ordered another visitor to be admitted; and so I took my leave. In the other room I found the Secretary of Legation,--a tall, slender man of about forty, with a small head and face,--gentlemanly enough, sensible, and well informed, yet I should judge, not quite up to his place. There was also a Dr. B------ from Michigan present, and I rather fancy the ambassador is quite as much bored with visitors as the consul at Liverpool. Before I left the office, Mr. ------ came in with Miss Sarah Clarke on his arm. She had come thither to get her passport vised; and when her business was concluded, we went out together. She was going farther towards the West End, and I into the city; so we soon parted, and I lost myself among the streets and squares, arriving at last at Oxford Street, though even then I did not know whether my face were turned cityward or in the opposite direction. Crossing Regent Street, however, I became sure of my whereabout, and went on through Holborn, and sought hither and thither for Grace Church Street, in order to find the American Consul, General Campbell; for I needed his aid to get a bank post-bill cashed. But I could not find the street, go where I would; so at last I went to No. 65 Cheapside, and introduced myself to Mr. ------, whom I already knew by letter, and by a good many of his poems, which he has sent me, and by two excellent watches, which I bought of him. This establishment, though it has the ordinary front of dingy brick, common to buildings in the city, looks like a time-long stand, the old shop of a London tradesman, with a large figure of a watch over the door, a great many watches (and yet no gorgeous show of them) in the window, a low, dark front shop, and a little room behind, where there was a chair or two. Mr. ------ is a small, slender young man, quite un-English in aspect, with black, curly hair, a thin, dark, colorless visage, very animated and of quick expression, with a nervous temperament. . . . . He dismounted from a desk when my card was handed to him, and turned to me with a vivid, glad look of recognition. We talked, in the first place, about poetry and such matters, about England and America, and the nature and depth of their mutual dislike, and, of course, the slavery question came up, as it always does, in one way or another. Anon, I produced my bank post-bill; and Mr. ------ kindly engaged to identify me at the bank, being ready to swear to me, he said, on the strength of my resemblance to my engraved portrait. So we set out for the Bank of England, and, arriving there, were directed to the proper clerk, after much inquiry; but he told us that the bill was not yet due, having been drawn at seven days, and having two still to run,--which was the fact. As I was almost shillingless, Mr. ------ now offered to cash it for me. He is very kind and good. . . . . Arriving at his shop again, he went out to procure the money, and soon returned with it. At my departure he gave me a copy of a new poem of his, entitled "Verdicts," somewhat in the manner of Lowell's satire. . . . . Mr. ------ resides now at Greenwich, whither he hoped I would come and see him on my return to London. Perhaps I will, for I like him. It seems strange to see an Englishman with so little physical ponderosity and obtuseness of nerve. After parting from him, it being three o'clock or thereabouts, I resumed my wanderings about the city, of which I never weary as long as I can put one foot before the other. Seeing that the door of St. Paul's, under one of the semicircular porches, was partially open, I went in, and found that the afternoon service was about to be performed; so I remained to hear it, and to see what I could of the cathedral. What a total and admirable contrast between this and a Gothic church! the latter so dim and mysterious, with its various aisles, its intricacy of pointed arches, its dark walls and columns and pavement, and its painted glass windows, bedimming even what daylight might otherwise get into its eternal evening. But this cathedral was full of light, and light was proper to it. There were no painted windows, no dim recesses, but a wide and airy space beneath the dome; and even through the long perspective of the nave there was no obscurity, but one lofty and beautifully rounded arch succeeding to another, as far as the eye could reach. The walls were white, the pavement constructed of squares of gray and white marble. It is a most grand and stately edifice, and its characteristic stems to be to continue forever fresh and new; whereas such a church as Westminster Abbey must have been as venerable as it is now from the first day when it grew to be an edifice at all. How wonderful man is in his works! How glad I am that there can be two such admirable churches, in their opposite styles, as St. Paul's and Westminster Abbey! The organ was played while I was there, and there was an anthem beautifully chanted by voices that came from afar off and remotely above, as if out of a sunny sky. Meanwhile I looked at such monuments as were near; chiefly those erected to military or naval men,--Picton, General Ponsonby, Lord St. Vincent, and others; but against one of the pillars stands a statue of Dr. Johnson,--a noble and thoughtful figure, with a development of muscle befitting an athlete. I doubt whether sculptors do not err in point of taste, by making all their statues models of physical perfection, instead of expressing by them the individual character and habits of the man. The statue in the market-place at Lichfield has more of the homely truth of Johnson's actual personality than this. St. Paul's, as yet, is by no means crowded with monuments; there is, indeed, plenty of room for a mob of the illustrious, yet to come. But it seems to me that the character of the edifice would be injured by allowing the monuments to be clustered together so closely as at Westminster, by incrusting the walls with them, or letting the statues throng about the pedestals of columns. There must be no confusion in such a cathedral as this, and I question whether the effect will ever be better than it is now, when each monument has its distinct place, and as your eye wanders around, you are not distracted from noting each marble man, in his niche against the wall, or at the base of a marble pillar. Space, distance, light, regularity, are to be preserved, even if the result should be a degree of nakedness. I saw Mr. Appleton of the Legation, and Dr. Brown, on the floor of the cathedral. They were about to go over the whole edifice, and had engaged a guide for that purpose; but, as I intend to go thither again with S-----, I did not accompany them, but went away the quicker that one of the gentlemen put on his hat, and I was ashamed of being seen in company with a man who could wear his hat in a cathedral. Not that he meant any irreverence; but simply felt that he was in a great public building,--as big, nearly, as all out of doors,--and so forgot that it was a consecrated place of worship. The sky is the dome of a greater cathedral than St. Paul's, and built by a greater architect than Sir Christopher Wren, and yet we wear our hats unscrupulously beneath it. I remember no other event of importance, except that I penetrated into a narrow lane or court, either in the Strand or Fleet Street, where was a tavern, calling itself the "Old Thatched House," and purporting to have been Nell Gwyn's dairy. I met with a great many alleys and obscure archways, in the course of the day's wanderings. September 14th.--Yesterday, in the earlier part of the day, it poured with rain, and I did not go out till five o'clock in the afternoon; nor did I then meet with anything interesting. I walked through Albemarle Street, for the purpose of looking at Murray's shop, but missed it entirely, at my first inquisition. The street is one of hotels, principally, with only a few tradesmen's shops, and has a quiet, aristocratic aspect. On my return, down the other sidewalk, I did discover the famous publisher's locality; but merely by the name "Mr. Murray," engraved on a rather large brass plate, such as doctors use, on the door. There was no sign of a book, nor of its being a place of trade in any way; and I should have taken the house to be, if not a private mansion, then a lawyer's office. At seven o'clock S-----, U----, and I went to dine with Mr. R---- S------ in Portland Place. . . . . Mr. S------'s house is a very fine one, and he gave us a very quiet, elegant, and enjoyable dinner, in much better taste and with less fuss than some others we have attended elsewhere. Mr. S------ is a friend of Thackeray, and, speaking of the last number of The Newcomes,--so touching that nobody can read it aloud without breaking down,--he mentioned that Thackeray himself had read it to James Russell Lowell and William Story in a cider-cellar! I read all the preceding numbers of The Newcomes to my wife, but happened not to have an opportunity to read this last, and was glad of it,--knowing that my eyes would fill, and my voice quiver. Mr. S------ likes Thackeray, and thinks him a good fellow. Mr. S------ has a--or I don't know but I ought better to say the--beautiful full-length picture of Washington by Stuart, and I was proud to see that noblest face and figure here in England. The picture of a man beside whom, considered physically, any English nobleman whom I have seen would look like common clay. Speaking of Thackeray, I cannot but wonder at his coolness in respect to his own pathos, and compare it with my emotions, when I read the last scene of The Scarlet Letter to my wife, just after writing it,--tried to read it rather, for my voice swelled and heaved, as if I were tossed up and down on an ocean as it subsides after a storm. But I was in a very nervous state then, having gone through a great diversity of emotion, while writing it, for many months. I think I have never overcome my own adamant in any other instance. Tumblers, hand-organists, puppet-showmen, bagpipers, and all such vagrant mirth-makers, are very numerous in the streets of London. The other day, passing through Fleet Street, I saw a crowd filling up a narrow court, and high above their heads a tumbler, standing on his head, on the top of a pole, that reached as high as the third story of the neighboring Houses. Sliding down the pole head foremost, he disappeared out of my sight. A multitude of Punches go the mounds continually. Two have passed through Hanover Street, where we reside, this morning. The first asked two shillings for his performance; so we sent him away. The second demanded, in the first place, half a crown; but finally consented to take a shilling, and gave us the show at that price, though much maimed in its proportions. Besides the spectators in our windows, he had a little crowd on the sidewalk, to whom he went round for contributions, but I did not observe that anybody gave him so much as a halfpenny. It is strange to see how many people are aiming at the small change in your pocket. In every square a beggar-woman meets you, and turns back to follow your steps with her miserable murmur. At the street-crossings there are old men or little girls with their brooms; urchins propose to brush your boots; and if you get into a cab, a man runs to open the door for you, and touches his hat for a fee, as he closes it again. September 15th.--It was raining yesterday, and I kept within doors till after four o'clock, when J----- and I took a walk into the city. Seeing the entrance to Clement's Inn, we went through it, and saw the garden, with a kneeling bronze figure in it; and when just in the midst of the Inn, I remembered that Justice Shallow was of old a student there. I do not well understand these Inns of Court, or how they differ from other places. Anybody seems to be free to reside in them, and a residence does not seem to involve any obligation to study law, or to have any connection therewith. Clement's Inn consists of large brick houses, accessible by narrow lanes and passages, but, by some peculiar privilege or enchantment, enjoying a certain quiet and repose, though in close vicinity to the noisiest part of the city. I got bewildered in the neighborhood of St. Paul's, and, try how I might to escape from it, its huge dusky dome kept showing itself before me, through one street and another. In my endeavors to escape it, I at one time found myself in St. John's Street, and was in hopes to have seen the old St. John's gate, so familiar for above a century on the cover of the Gentleman's Magazine. But I suppose it is taken down, for we went through the entire street, I think, and saw no trace of it. Either afterwards or before this we came upon Smithfield, a large irregular square, filled up with pens for cattle, of which, however, there were none in the market at that time. I leaned upon a post, at the western end of the square, and told J----- how the martyrs had been burnt at Smithfield in Bloody Mary's days. Again we drifted back to St. Paul's; and, at last, in despair of ever getting out of this enchanted region, I took a Hansom cab to Charing Cross, whence we easily made our way home. LIVERPOOL. September 16th.--I took the ten-o'clock train yesterday morning from the Euston station, and arrived at Liverpool at about five, passing through the valley of Trent, without touching at Birmingham. English scenery, on the tracks, is the tamest of the tame, hardly a noticeable hill breaking the ordinary gentle undulation of the landscape, but still the verdure and finish of the fields and parks make it worth while to throw out a glance now and then, as you rush by. Few separate houses are seen, as in America; but sometimes a village, with the square, gray, battlemented tower of its Norman church, and rows of thatched cottages, reminding one of the clustered mud-nests of swallows, under the eaves of a barn; here and there a lazy little river, like the Trent; perhaps, if you look sharply where the guide-book indicates, the turrets of an old castle in the distance; perhaps the great steeple and spires of a cathedral; perhaps the tall chimney of a manufactory; but, on the whole, the traveller comes to his journey's end unburdened with a single new idea. I observe that the harvest is not all gathered in as yet, and this rainy weather must look very gloomy to the farmer. I saw gleaners, yesterday, in the stubble-fields. There were two gentlemen in the same railway-carriage with me, and we did not exchange half a dozen words the whole day. I am here, established at Mrs. Blodgett's boarding-house, which I find quite full; insomuch that she had to send one of her sea-captains to sleep in another house, in order to make room for me. It is exclusively American society: four shipmasters, and a doctor from Pennsylvania, who has been travelling a year on the Continent, and who seems to be a man of very active intelligence, interested in everything, and especially in agriculture. . . . . He asserted that we are fifty years ahead of England in agricultural science, and that he could cultivate English soil to far better advantage than English farmers do, and at vastly less expense. Their tendency to cling to old ideas, which retards them in everything else, keeps them behindhand in this matter too. Really, I do not know any other place in England where a man can be made so sensible that he lives in a progressive world as here in Mrs. Blodgett's boarding-house. The captains talk together about their voyages, and how they manage with their unruly mates and crews; and how freights are in America, and the prospects of business; and of equinoctial gales, and the qualities of different ships, and their commanders, and how crews, mates, and masters have all deteriorated since their remembrance. . . . . But these men are alive, and talk of real matters, and of matters which they know. The shipmasters who come to Mrs. Blodgett's are favorable specimens of their class; being all respectable men, in the employ of good houses, and raised by their capacity to the command of first-rate ships. In my official intercourse with them, I do not generally see their best side; as they are seldom before me except as complainants, or when summoned to answer to some complaint made by a seaman. But hearing their daily talk, and listening to what is in their minds, and their reminiscences of what they have gone through, one becomes sensible that they are men of energy and ability, fit to be trusted, and retaining a hardy sense of honor, and a loyalty to their own country, the stronger because they have compared it with many others. Most of them are gentlemen, too, to a certain extent,--some more than others, perhaps; and none to a very exquisite point, or, if so, it is none the better for them as sailors or as men. September 17th.--It is singular to feel a sense of my own country returning upon me with the intercourse of the people whom I find here. . . . . The doctor is much the most talkative of our company, and sometimes bores me thereby; though he seldom says anything that is not either instructive or amusing. He tells a curious story of Prince Albert, and how he avails himself of American sharp-shooting. During the doctor's tour in Scotland, which he has just finished, he became acquainted with one of the Prince's attaches, who invited him very earnestly to join his Royal highness's party, promising him a good gun, and a keeper to load it for him, two good dogs, besides as many cigars as he could smoke and as much wine as he could drink, on the condition that whatever game he shot should be the Prince's. "The Prince," said the attache, "is very fond of having Americans in his shooting-parties, on account of their being such excellent shots; and there was one with him last year who shot so admirably that his Royal Highness himself left off shooting in utter astonishment." The attache offered to introduce the doctor to the Prince, who would be certain to receive him very graciously. . . . . I think, perhaps, we talk of kings and queens more at our table than people do at other tables in England; not, of course, that we like them better, or admire them more, but that they are curiosities. Yet I would not say that the doctor may not be susceptible on the point of royal attentions; for he told us with great complacency how emphatically, on two or three occasions, Louis Napoleon had returned his bow, and the last time had turned and made some remark (evidently about the doctor) to the Empress. . . . . I ought not to omit mentioning that he has been told in France that he personally resembles the Emperor, and I suspect he is trying to heighten the resemblance by training his mustache on the pattern of that which adorns the imperial upper lip. He is a genuine American character, though modified by a good deal of travel; a very intelligent man, full of various ability, with eyes all over him for any object of interest,--a little of the bore, sometimes,--quick to appreciate character, with a good deal of tact, gentlemanly in his manners, but yet lacking a deep and delicate refinement. Not but that Americans are as capable of this last quality as other people are; but what with the circumstances amid which we grow up, and the peculiar activity of our minds, we certainly do often miss it. By the by, he advanced a singular proposition the other evening, namely, that the English people do not so well understand comfort, or attain it so perfectly in their domestic arrangements, as we do. I thought he hardly supported this opinion so satisfactorily as some of his other new ideas. I saw in an American paper yesterday, that an opera, still unfinished, had been written on the story of The Scarlet Letter, and that several scenes of it had been performed successfully in New York. I should think it might possibly succeed as an opera, though it would certainly fail as a play. LONDON. September 24th.--On Saturday, at half past three o'clock, I left Liverpool by the London and Northwest Railway for London. Mrs. Blodgett's table had been thinned by several departures during the week. . . . . My mind had been considerably enlivened, and my sense of American superiority renewed, by intercourse with these people; and there is no danger of one's intellect becoming a standing pool in such society. I think better of American shipmasters, too, than I did from merely meeting them in my office. They keep up a continual discussion of professional matters, and of all things having any reference to their profession; the laws of insurance, the rights of vessels in foreign ports, the authority and customs of vessels of war with regard to merchantmen, etc.,--with stories and casual anecdotes of their sea-adventures, gales, shipwrecks, icebergs, and collisions of vessels, and hair-breadth escapes. Their talk runs very much on the sea, and on the land as connected with the sea; and their interest does not seem to extend very far beyond the wide field of their professional concerns. Nothing remarkable occurred on the journey to London. The greater part of the way there were only two gentlemen in the same compartment with me; and we occupied each our corner, with little other conversation than in comparing watches at the various stations. I got out of the carriage only once, at Rugby, I think, and for the last seventy or eighty miles the train did not stop. There was a clear moon the latter part of the journey, and the mist lay along the ground, looking very much like a surface of water. We reached London at about ten, and I found S----- expecting me. Yesterday the children went with Fanny to the Zoological Gardens; and, after sending them off, S----- and I walked to Piccadilly, and there took a cab for Kensington Gardens. It was a delightful day,--the best of all weather, the real English good weather,--more like an Indian summer than anything else within my experience; a mellow sunshine, with great warmth in it,--a soft, balmy air, with a slight haze through it. If the sun made us a little too warm, we had but to go into the shade to be immediately refreshed. The light of these days is very exquisite, so gently bright, without any glare,--a veiled glow. In short, it is the kindliest mood of Nature, and almost enough to compensate for chill and dreary months. Moreover, there is more of such weather here than the English climate has ever had credit for. Kensington Gardens form an eminently beautiful piece of artificial woodland and park scenery. The old palace of Kensington, now inhabited by the Duchess of Inverness, stands at one extremity; an edifice of no great mark, built of brick, covering much ground, and low in proportion to its extent. In front of it, at a considerable distance, there is a sheet of water; and in all directions there are vistas of wide paths among noble trees, standing in groves, or scattered in clumps; everything being laid out with free and generous spaces, so that you can see long streams of sunshine among the trees, and there is a pervading influence of quiet and remoteness. Tree does not interfere with tree; the art of man is seen conspiring with Nature, as if they had consulted together how to make a beautiful scene, and had taken ages of quiet thought and tender care to accomplish it. We strolled slowly along these paths, and sometimes deviated from them, to walk beneath the trees, many of the leaves of which lay beneath our feet, yellow and brown, and with a pleasant smell of vegetable decay. These were the leaves of chestnut-trees; the other trees (unless elms) have yet, hardly begun to shed their foliage, although you can discern a sober change of line in the woodland masses; and the trees individualize themselves by assuming each its own tint, though in a very modest way. If they could have undergone the change of an American autumn, it would have been like putting on a regal robe. Autumn often puts one on in America, but it is apt to be very ragged. There were a good many well-dressed people scattered through the grounds,--young men and girls, husbands with their wives and children, nursery-maids and little babes playing about in the grass. Anybody might have entered the gardens, I suppose; but only well-dressed people were there not, of the upper classes, but shop-keepers, clerks, apprentices, and respectability of that sort. It is pleasant to think that the people have the freedom, and therefore the property, of parks like this, more beautiful and stately than a nobleman can keep to himself. The extent of Kensington Gardens, when reckoned together with Hyde Park, from which it is separated only by a fence of iron rods, is very great, comprising miles of greensward and woodland. The large artificial sheet of water, called the Serpentine River, lies chiefly in Hyde Park, but comes partly within the precincts of the gardens. It is entitled to honorable mention among the English lakes, being larger than some that are world-celebrated,--several miles long, and perhaps a stone's-throw across in the widest part. It forms the paradise of a great many ducks of various breeds, which are accustomed to be fed by visitors, and come flying from afar, touching the water with their wings, and quacking loudly when bread or cake is thrown to them. I bought a bun of a little hunchbacked man, who kept a refreshment-stall near the Serpentine, and bestowed it pied-meal on these ducks, as we loitered along the bank. We left the park by another gate, and walked homeward, till we came to Tyburnia, and saw the iron memorial which marks where the gallows used to stand. Thence we turned into Park Lane, then into Upper Grosvenor Street, and reached Hanover Square sooner than we expected. In the evening I walked forth to Charing Cross, and thence along the Strand and Fleet Street, where I made no new discoveries, unless it were the Mitre Tavern. I mean to go into it some day. The streets were much thronged, and there seemed to be a good many young people,--lovers, it is to be hoped,--who had spent the day together, and were going innocently home. Perhaps so,--perhaps not. September 25th.--Yesterday forenoon J----- and I walked out, with no very definite purpose; but, seeing a narrow passageway from the Strand down to the river, we went through it, and gained access to a steamboat, plying thence to London Bridge. The fare was a halfpenny apiece, and the boat almost too much crowded for standing-room. This part of the river presents the water-side of London in a rather pleasanter aspect than below London Bridge,--the Temple, with its garden, Somerset House,--and generally, a less tumble-down and neglected look about the buildings; although, after all, the metropolis does not see a very stately face in its mirror. I saw Alsatia betwixt the Temple and Blackfriar's Bridge. Its precincts looked very narrow, and not particularly distinguishable, at this day, from the portions of the city on either side of it. At London Bridge we got aboard of a Woolwich steamer, and went farther down the river, passing the Custom-House and the Tower, the only prominent objects rising out of the dreary range of shabbiness which stretches along close to the water's edge. From this remote part of London we walked towards the heart of the city; and, as we went, matters seemed to civilize themselves by degrees, and the streets grew crowded with cabs, omnibuses, drays, and carts. We passed, I think, through Whitechapel, and, reaching St. Paul's, got into an omnibus, and drove to Regent Street, whence it was but a step or two home. In the afternoon, at four o'clock, S----- and I went to call on the American Ambassador and Miss L------. The lady was not at home, but we went in to see Mr. ------ and were shown into a stately drawing-room, the furniture of which was sufficiently splendid, but rather the worse for wear,--being hired furniture, no doubt. The ambassador shortly appeared, looking venerable, as usual,--or rather more so than usual,--benign, and very pale. His deportment towards ladies is highly agreeable and prepossessing, and he paid very kind attention to S-----, thereby quite confirming her previous good feeling towards him. She thinks that he is much changed since she saw him last, at dinner, at our house,--more infirm, more aged, and with a singular depression in his manner. I, too, think that age has latterly come upon him with great rapidity. He said that Miss L------ was going home on the 6th of October, and that he himself had long purposed going, but had received despatches which obliged him to put off his departure. The President, he said, had just written, requesting him to remain till April, but this he was determined not to do. I rather think that he does really wish to return, and not for any ambitious views concerning the Presidency, but from an old man's natural desire to be at home, and among his own people. S----- spoke to him about an order from the Lord Chamberlain for admission to view the two Houses of Parliament; and the ambassador drew from his pocket a colored silk handkerchief, and made a knot in it, in order to remind himself to ask the Lord Chamberlain. The homeliness of this little incident has a sort of propriety and keeping with much of Mr. ------'s manner, but I would rather not have him do so before English people. He arranged to send a close carriage for us to come and see him socially this evening. After leaving his house we drove round Hyde Park, and thence to Portland Place, where we left cards for Mrs. Russell Sturgis; thence into Regent's Park, thence home. U---- and J----- accompanied us throughout these drives, but remained in the carriage during our call on Mr. ------. In the evening I strolled out, and walked as far as St. Paul's,--never getting enough of the bustle of London, which may weary, but can never satisfy me. By night London looks wild and dreamy, and fills me with a sort of pleasant dread. It was a clear evening, with a bright English moon,--that is to say, what we Americans should call rather dim. September 26th.--Yesterday, at eleven, I walked towards Westminster Abbey, and as I drew near the Abbey bells were clamorous for joy, chiming merrily, musically, and, obstreperously,--the most rejoicing sound that can be conceived; and we ought to have a chime of bells in every American town and village, were it only to keep alive the celebration of the Fourth of July. I conjectured that there might have been another victory over the Russians, that perhaps the northern side of Sebastopol had surrendered; but soon I saw the riddle that these merry bells were proclaiming. There were a great many private carriages, and a large concourse of loungers and spectators, near the door of the church that stands close under the eaves of the Abbey. Gentlemen and ladies, gayly dressed, were issuing forth, carriages driving away, and others drawing up to the door in their turn; and, in short, a marriage had just been celebrated in the church, and this was the wedding-party. The last time I was there, Westminster was flinging out its great voice of joy for a national triumph; now, for the happy union of two lovers. What a mighty sympathizer is this old Abbey! It is pleasant to recognize the mould and fashion of English features through the marble of many of the statues and busts in the Abbey, even though they may be clad in Roman robes. I am inclined to think them, in many cases, faithful likenesses; and it brings them nearer to the mind, to see these original sculptures,--you see the man at but one remove, as if you caught his image in a looking-glass. The bust of Gay seemed to me very good,--a thoughtful and humorous sweetness in the face. Goldsmith has as good a position as any poet in the Abbey, his bust and tablet filling the pointed arch over a door that seems to lead towards the cloisters. No doubt he would have liked to be assured of so conspicuous a place. There is one monument to a native American, "Charles Wragg, Esq., of South Carolina,"--the only one, I suspect, in Westminster Abbey, and he acquired this memorial by the most un-American of qualities, his loyalty to his king. He was one of the refugees leaving America in 1777, and being shipwrecked on his passage the monument was put up by his sister. It is a small tablet with a representation of Mr. Wragg's shipwreck at the base. Next to it is the large monument of Sir Cloudesley Shovel, which I think Addison ridicules,--the Admiral, in a full-bottomed wig and Roman dress, but with a broad English face, reclining with his head on his hand, and looking at you with great placidity. I stood at either end of the nave, and endeavored to take in the full beauty and majesty of the edifice; but apparently was not in a proper state of mind, for nothing came of it. It is singular how like an avenue of overarching trees are these lofty aisles of a cathedral. Leaving the Abbey about one o'clock, I walked into the city as far as Grace Church Street, and there called on the American Consul, General ------, who had been warmly introduced to me last year by a letter from the President. I like the General; a kindly and honorable man, of simple manners and large experience of life. Afterwards I called on Mr. Oakford, an American connected in business with Mr. Crosby, from whom I wanted some information as to the sailing of steamers from Southampton to Lisbon. Mr. Crosby was not in town. . . . . At eight o'clock Mr. ------ sent his carriage, according to previous arrangement, to take us to spend the evening socially. Miss L------ received us with proper cordiality, and looked quite becomingly,--more sweet and simple in aspect than when I have seen her in full dress. Shortly the ambassador appeared, and made himself highly agreeable; not that he is a brilliant conversationist, but his excellent sense and good-humor, and all that he has seen and been a part of, are sufficient resources to draw upon. We talked of the Queen, whom he spoke of with high respect; . . . . of the late Czar, whom he knew intimately while minister to Russia,--and he quite confirms all that has been said about the awful beauty of his person. Mr. ------'s characterization of him was quite favorable; he thought better of his heart than most people, and adduced his sports with a school of children,--twenty of whom, perhaps, he made to stand rigidly in a row, like so many bricks,--then, giving one a push, would laugh obstreperously to see the whole row tumble down. He would lie on his back, and allow the little things to scramble over him. His Majesty admitted Mr. ------ to great closeness of intercourse, and informed him of a conspiracy which was then on foot for the Czar's murder. On the evening, when the assassination was to take place, the Czar did not refrain from going to the public place where it was to be perpetrated, although, indeed, great precautions had been taken to frustrate the schemes of the conspirators. Mr. ------ said, that, in case the plot had succeeded, all the foreigners, including himself, would likewise have been murdered, the native Russians having a bitter hatred against foreigners. He observed that he had been much attached to the Czar, and had never joined in the English abuse of him. His sympathies, however, are evidently rather English than Russian, in this war. Speaking of the present emperor, he said that Lord Heytebury, formerly English ambassador in Russia, lately told him that he complimented the Czar Nicholas on the good qualities of his son, saying that he was acknowledged by all to be one of the most amiable youths in the world. "Too amiable, I fear, for his position," answered the Czar. "He has too much of his mother in him." September 27th.--Yesterday, much earlier than English people ever do such things, General ------ made us a call on his way to the Consulate, and sat talking a stricken hour or thereabouts. Scarcely had he gone when Mrs. Oakford and her daughter came. After sitting a long while, they took U---- to their house, near St. John's Wood, to spend the night. I had been writing my journal and official correspondence during such intervals as these calls left me; and now, concluding these businesses, S-----, J-----, and I went out and took a cab for the terminus of the Crystal Palace Railway, whither we proceeded over Waterloo Bridge, and reached the palace not far from three o'clock. It was a beautifully bright day, such as we have in wonderful succession this month. The Crystal Palace gleamed in the sunshine; but I do not think a very impressive edifice can be built of glass,--light and airy, to be sure, but still it will be no other than an overgrown conservatory. It is unlike anything else in England; uncongenial with the English character, without privacy, destitute of mass, weight, and shadow, unsusceptible of ivy, lichens, or any mellowness from age. The train of carriages stops within the domain of the palace, where there is a long ascending corridor up into the edifice. There was a very pleasant odor of heliotrope diffused through the air; and, indeed, the whole atmosphere of the Crystal Palace is sweet with various flower-scents, and mild and balmy, though sufficiently fresh and cool. It would be a delightful climate for invalids to spend the winter in; and if all England could be roofed over with glass, it would be a great improvement on its present condition. The first thing we did, before fairly getting into the palace, was to sit down in a large ante-hall, and get some bread and butter and a pint of Bass's pale ale, together with a cup of coffee for S-----. This was the best refreshment we could find at that spot; but farther within we found abundance of refreshment-rooms, and John Bull and his wife and family at fifty little round tables, busily engaged with cold fowl, cold beef, ham, tongue, and bottles of ale and stout, and half-pint decanters of sherry. The English probably eat with more simple enjoyment than any other people; not ravenously, as we often do, and not exquisitely and artificially, like the French, but deliberately and vigorously, and with due absorption in the business, so that nothing good is lost upon them. . . . . It is remarkable how large a feature the refreshment-rooms make in the arrangements of the Crystal Palace. The Crystal Palace is a gigantic toy for the English people to play with. The design seems to be to reproduce all past ages, by representing the features of their interior architecture, costume, religion, domestic life, and everything that can be expressed by paint and plaster; and, likewise, to bring all climates and regions of the earth within these enchanted precincts, with their inhabitants and animals in living semblance, and their vegetable productions, as far as possible, alive and real. Some part of the design is already accomplished to a wonderful degree. The Indian, the Egyptian, and especially the Arabian, courts are admirably executed. I never saw or conceived anything so gorgeous as the Alhambra. There are Byzantine and mediaeval representations, too,-- reproductions of ancient apartments, decorations, statues from tombs, monuments, religious and funereal,--that gave me new ideas of what antiquity has been. It takes down one's overweening opinion of the present time, to see how many kinds of beauty and magnificence have heretofore existed, and are now quite passed away and forgotten; and to find that we, who suppose that, in all matters of taste, our age is the very flower-season of the time,--that we are poor and meagre as to many things in which they were rich. There is nothing gorgeous now. We live a very naked life. This was the only reflection I remember making, as we passed from century to century, through the succession of classic, Oriental, and mediaeval courts, adown the lapse of time,--seeing all these ages in as brief a space as the Wandering Jew might glance along them in his memory. I suppose a Pompeian house with its courts and interior apartments was as faithfully shown as it was possible to do it. I doubt whether I ever should feel at home in such a house. In the pool of a fountain, of which there are several beautiful ones within the palace, besides larger ones in the garden before it, we saw tropical plants growing,--large water-lilies of various colors, some white, like our Concord pond-lily, only larger, and more numerously leafed. There were great circular green leaves, lying flat on the water, with a circumference equal to that of a centre-table. Tropical trees, too, varieties of palm and others, grew in immense pots or tubs, but seemed not to enjoy themselves much. The atmosphere must, after all, be far too cool to bring out their native luxuriance; and this difficulty can never be got over at a less expense than that of absolutely stewing the visitors and attendants. Otherwise, it would be very practicable to have all the vegetable world, at least, within these precincts. The palace is very large, and our time was short, it being desirable to get home early; so, after a stay of little more than two hours, we took the rail back again, and reached Hanover Square at about six. After tea I wandered forth, with some thought of going to the theatre, and, passing the entrance of one, in the Strand, I went in, and found a farce in progress. It was one of the minor theatres, very minor indeed; but the pieces, so far as I saw them, were sufficiently laughable. There were some Spanish dances, too, very graceful and pretty. Between the plays a girl from the neighboring saloon came to the doors of the boxes, offering lemonade and ginger-beer to the occupants. A person in my box took a glass of lemonade, and shared it with a young lady by his side, both sipping out of the same glass. The audience seemed rather heavy,--not briskly responsive to the efforts of the performers, but good-natured, and willing to be pleased, especially with some patriotic dances, in which much waving and intermingling of the French and English flags was introduced. Theatrical performances soon weary me of late years; and I came away before the curtain rose on the concluding piece. September 28th.--8---- and I walked to Charing Cross yesterday forenoon, and there took a Hansom cab to St. Paul's Cathedral. It had been a thick, foggy morning, but had warmed and brightened into one of the balmiest and sunniest of noons. As we entered the cathedral, the long bars of sunshine were falling from its upper windows through the great interior atmosphere, and were made visible by the dust, or mist, floating about in it. It is a grand edifice, and I liked it quite as much as on my first view of it, although a sense of coldness and nakedness is felt when we compare it with Gothic churches. It is more an external work than the Gothic churches are, and is not so made out of the dim, awful, mysterious, grotesque, intricate nature of man. But it is beautiful and grand. I love its remote distances, and wide, clear spaces, its airy massiveness; its noble arches, its sky-like dome, which, I think, should be all over light, with ground-glass, instead of being dark, with only diminutive windows. We walked round, looking at the monuments, which are so arranged, at the bases of columns and in niches, as to coincide with the regularity of the cathedral, and be each an additional ornament to the whole, however defective individually as works of art. We thought that many of these monuments were striking and impressive, though there was a pervading sameness of idea,--a great many Victorys and Valors and Britannias, and a great expenditure of wreaths, which must have cost Victory a considerable sum at any florist's whom she patronizes. A very great majority of the memorials are to naval and military men, slain in Bonaparte's wars; men in whom one feels little or no interest (except Picton, Abercrombie, Moore, Nelson, of course, and a few others really historic), they having done nothing remarkable, save having been shot, nor shown any more brains than the cannonballs that killed them. All the statues have the dust of years upon then, strewn thickly in the folds of their marble garments, and on any limb stretched horizontally, and on their noses, so that the expression is much obscured. I think the nation might employ people to brush away the dust from the statues of its heroes. But, on the whole, it is very fine to look through the broad arches of the cathedral, and see, at the foot of some distant pillar, a group of sculptured figures, commemorating some man and deed that (whether worth remembering or not) the nation is so happy as to reverence. In Westminster Abbey, the monuments are so crowded, and so oddly patched together upon the walls, that they are ornamental only in a mural point of view; and, moreover, the quaint and grotesque taste of many of them might well make the spectator laugh,--an effect not likely to be produced by the monuments in St. Paul's. But, after all, a man might read the walls of the Abbey day after day with ever-fresh interest, whereas the cold propriety of the cathedral would weary him in due time. We did not ascend to the galleries and other points of interest aloft, nor go down into the vaults, where Nelson's sarcophagus is shown, and many monuments of the old Gothic cathedral, which stood on this site, before the great fire. They say that these lower regions are comfortably warm and dry; but as we walked round in front, within the iron railing of the churchyard, we passed an open door, giving access to the crypt, and it breathed out a chill like death upon us. It is pleasant to stand in the centre of the cathedral, and hear the noise of London, loudest all round this spot,--how it is calmed into a sound as proper to be heard through the aisles as the tones of its own organ. If St. Paul's were to be burnt again (having already been bunt and risen three or four times since the sixth century), I wonder whether it would ever be rebuilt in the same spot! I doubt whether the city and the nation are so religious as to consecrate their midmost heart for the site of a church, where land would be so valuable by the square inch. Coming from the cathedral, we went through Paternoster Row, and saw Ave Mary Lane; all this locality appearing to have got its nomenclature from monkish personages. We now took a cab for the British Museum, but found this to be one of the days on which strangers are not admitted; so we slowly walked into Oxford Street, and then strolled homeward, till, coming to a sort of bazaar, we went in and found a gallery of pictures. This bazaar proved to be the Pantheon, and the first picture we saw in the gallery was Haydon's Resurrection of Lazarus,--a great height and breadth of canvas, right before you as you ascend the stairs. The face of Lazarus is very awful, and not to be forgotten; it is as true as if the painter had seen it, or had been himself the resurrected man and felt it; but the rest of the picture signified nothing, and is vulgar and disagreeable besides. There are several other pictures by Haydon in this collection,--the Banishment of Aristides, Nero with his Harp, and the Conflagration of Rome; but the last is perfectly ridiculous, and all of them are exceedingly unpleasant. I should be sorry to live in a house that contained one of them. The best thing of Haydon was a hasty dash of a sketch for a small, full-length portrait of Wordsworth, sitting on the crag of a mountain. I doubt whether Wordsworth's likeness has ever been so poetically brought out. This gallery is altogether of modern painters, and it seems to be a receptacle for pictures by artists who can obtain places nowhere else,--at least, I never heard of their names before. They were very uninteresting, almost without exception, and yet some of the pictures were done cleverly enough. There is very little talent in this world, and what there is, it seems to me, is pretty well known and acknowledged. We don't often stumble upon geniuses in obscure corners. Leaving the gallery, we wandered through the rest of the bazaar, which is devoted to the sale of ladies' finery, jewels, perfumes, children's toys, and all manner of small and pretty rubbish. . . . . In the evening I again sallied forth, and lost myself for an hour or two; at last recognizing my whereabouts in Tottenham Court Road. In such quarters of London it seems to be the habit of people to take their suppers in the open air. You see old women at the corners, with kettles of hot water for tea or coffee; and as I passed a butcher's open shop, he was just taking out large quantities of boiled beef, smoking hot. Butchers' stands are remarkable for their profuse expenditure of gas; it belches forth from the pipes in great flaring jets of flame, uncovered by any glass, and broadly illuminating the neighborhood. I have not observed that London ever goes to bed. September 29th.--Yesterday we walked to the British Museum. A sentinel or two kept guard before the gateway of this extensive edifice in Great Russell Street, and there was a porter at the lodge, and one or two policemen lounging about, but entrance was free, and we walked in without question. Officials and policemen were likewise scattered about the great entrance-hall, none of whom, however, interfered with us; so we took whatever way we chose, and wandered about at will. It is a hopeless, and to me, generally, a depressing business to go through an immense multifarious show like this, glancing at a thousand things, and conscious of some little titillation of mind from them, but really taking in nothing, and getting no good from anything. One need not go beyond the limits of the British Museum to be profoundly accomplished in all branches of science, art, and literature; only it would take a lifetime to exhaust it in any one department; but to see it as we did, and with no prospect of ever seeing it more at leisure, only impressed me with the truth of the old apothegm, "Life is short, and Art is long." The fact is, the world is accumulating too many materials for knowledge. We do not recognize for rubbish what is really rubbish; and under this head might be reckoned very many things one sees in the British Museum; and, as each generation leaves its fragments and potsherds behind it, such will finally be the desperate conclusion of the learned. We went first among some antique marbles,--busts, statues, terminal gods, with several of the Roman emperors among them. We saw here the bust whence Haydon took his ugly and ridiculous likeness of Nero,--a foolish thing to do. Julius Caesar was there, too, looking more like a modern old man than any other bust in the series. Perhaps there may be a universality in his face, that gives it this independence of race and epoch. We glimpsed along among the old marbles,--Elgin and others, which are esteemed such treasures of art;--the oddest fragments, many of them smashed by their fall from high places, or by being pounded to pieces by barbarians, or gnawed away by time; the surface roughened by being rained upon for thousands of years; almost always a nose knocked off; sometimes a headless form; a great deficiency of feet and hands,--poor, maimed veterans in this hospital of incurables. The beauty of the most perfect of them must be rather guessed at, and seen by faith, than with the bodily eye; to look at the corroded faces and forms is like trying to see angels through mist and cloud. I suppose nine tenths of those who seem to be in raptures about these fragments do not really care about them; neither do I. And if I were actually moved, I should doubt whether it were by the statues or by my own fancy. We passed, too, through Assyrian saloons and Egyptian saloons,--all full of monstrosities and horrible uglinesses, especially the Egyptian, and all the innumerable relics that I saw of them in these saloons, and among the mummies, instead of bringing me closer to them, removed me farther and farther; there being no common ground of sympathy between them and us. Their gigantic statues are certainly very curious. I saw a hand and arm up to the shoulder fifteen feet in length, and made of some stone that seemed harder and heavier than granite, not having lost its polish in all the rough usage that it has undergone. There was a fist on a still larger scale, almost as big as a hogshead. Hideous, blubber-lipped faces of giants, and human shapes with beasts' heads on them. The Egyptian controverted Nature in all things, only using it as a groundwork to depict, the unnatural upon. Their mummifying process is a result of this tendency. We saw one very perfect mummy,--a priestess, with apparently only one more fold of linen betwixt us and her antique flesh, and this fitting closely to her person from head to foot, so that we could see the lineaments of her face and the shape of her limbs as perfectly as if quite bare. I judge that she may have been very beautiful in her day,--whenever that was. One or two of the poor thing's toes (her feet were wonderfully small and delicate) protruded from the linen, and, perhaps, not having been so perfectly embalmed, the flesh had fallen away, leaving only some little bones. I don't think this young woman has gained much by not turning to dust in the time of the Pharaohs. We also saw some bones of a king that had been taken out of a pyramid; a very fragmentary skeleton. Among the classic marbles I peeped into an urn that once contained the ashes of dead people, and the bottom still had an ashy hue. I like this mode of disposing of dead bodies; but it would be still better to burn them and scatter the ashes, instead of hoarding them up,--to scatter them over wheat-fields or flowerbeds. Besides these antique halls, we wandered through saloons of antediluvian animals, some set up in skeletons, others imprisoned in solid stone; also specimens of still extant animals, birds, reptiles, shells, minerals,-- the whole circle of human knowledge and guess-work,--till I wished that the whole Past might be swept away, and each generation compelled to bury and destroy whatever it had produced, before being permitted to leave the stage. When we quit a house, we are expected to make it clean for the next occupant; why ought we not to leave a clean world for the next generation? We did not see the library of above half a million of volumes; else I suppose I should have found full occasion to wish that burnt and buried likewise. In truth, a greater part of it is as good as buried, so far as any readers are concerned. Leaving the Museum, we sauntered home. After a little rest, I set out for St. John's Wood, and arrived thither by dint of repeated inquiries. It is a pretty suburb, inhabited by people of the middling class. U---- met me joyfully, but seemed to have had a good time with Mrs. Oakford and her daughter; and, being pressed to stay to tea, I could not well help it. Before tea I sat talking with Mrs. Oakford and a friend of hers, Miss Clinch, about the Americans and the English, especially dwelling on the defects of the latter,--among which we reckoned a wretched meanness in money transactions, a lack of any embroidery of honor and liberality in their dealings, so that they require close watching, or they will be sure to take you at advantage. I hear this character of them from Americans on all hands, and my own experience confirms it as far as it goes, not merely among tradespeople, but among persons who call themselves gentlefolks. The cause, no doubt, or one cause, lies in the fewer chances of getting money here, the closer and sharper regulation of all the modes of life; nothing being left to liberal and gentlemanly feelings, except fees to servants. They are not gamblers in England, as we to some extent are; and getting their money painfully, or living within an accurately known income, they are disinclined to give up so much as a sixpence that they can possibly get. But the result is, they are mean in petty things. By and by Mr. Oakford came in, well soaked with the heaviest shower that I ever knew in England, which had been rattling on the roof of the little side room where we sat, and had caught him on the outside of the omnibus. At a little before eight o'clock I came home with U---- in a cab,--the gaslight glittering on the wet streets through which we drove, though the sky was clear overhead. September 30th.--Yesterday, a little before twelve, we took a cab, and went to the two Houses of Parliament,--the most immense building, methinks, that ever was built; and not yet finished, though it has now been occupied for years. Its exterior lies hugely along the ground, and its great unfinished tower is still climbing towards the sky; but the result (unless it be the riverfront, which I have not yet seen) seems not very impressive. The interior is much more successful. Nothing can be more magnificent and gravely gorgeous than the Chamber of Peers,--a large oblong hall, panelled with oak, elaborately carved, to the height of perhaps twenty feet. Then the balustrade of the gallery runs around the hall, and above the gallery are six arched windows on each side, richly painted with historic subjects. The roof is ornamented and gilded, and everywhere throughout there is embellishment of color and carving on the broadest scale, and, at the same time, most minute and elaborate; statues of full size in niches aloft; small heads of kings, no bigger than a doll; and the oak is carved in all parts of the panelling as faithfully as they used to do it in Henry VII's time,--as faithfully and with as good workmanship, but with nothing like the variety and invention which I saw in the dining-room of Smithell's Hall. There the artist wrought with his heart and head; but much of this work, I suppose, was done by machinery. Be that as it may, it is a most noble and splendid apartment, and, though so fine, there is not a touch of finery; it glistens and glows with even a sombre magnificence, owing to the rich, deep lines, and the dim light, bedimmed with rich colors by coming through the painted windows. In arched recesses, that serve as frames, at each end of the hall, there are three pictures by modern artists from English history; and though it was not possible to see them well as pictures, they adorned and enriched the walls marvellously as architectural embellishments. The Peers' seats are four rows of long sofas on each side, covered with red morocco; comfortable seats enough, but not adapted to any other than a decorously exact position. The woolsack is between these two divisions of sofas, in the middle passage of the floor,--a great square seat, covered with scarlet, and with a scarlet cushion set up perpendicularly for the Chancellor to lean against. In front of the woolsack there is another still larger ottoman, on which he might be at full length,--for what purpose intended, I know not. I should take the woolsack to be not a very comfortable seat, though I suppose it was originally designed to be the most comfortable one that could be contrived, in view of the Chancellor's much sitting. The throne is the first object you see on entering the hall, being close to the door; a chair of antique form, with a high, peaked back, and a square canopy above, the whole richly carved and quite covered with burnished gilding, besides being adorned with rows of rock crystals,-- which seemed to me of rather questionable taste. It is less elevated above the floor than one imagines it ought to be. While we were looking at it, I saw two Americans,--Western men, I should judge,--one of them with a true American slouch, talking to the policeman in attendance, and describing our Senate Chamber in contrast with the House of Lords. The policeman smiled and ah-ed, and seemed to make as courteous and liberal responses as he could. There was quite a mixed company of spectators, and, I think, other Americans present besides the above two and ourselves. The Lord Chamberlain's tickets appear to be distributed with great impartiality. There were two or three women of the lower middle class, with children or babies in arms, one of whom lifted up its voice loudly in the House of Peers. We next, after long contemplating this rich hall, proceeded through passages and corridors to a great central room, very beautiful, which seems to be used for purposes of refreshment, and for electric telegraphs; though I should not suppose this could be its primitive and ultimate design. Thence we went into the House of Commons, which is larger than the Chamber of Peers, and much less richly ornamented, though it would have appeared splendid had it come first in order. The speaker's chair, if I remember rightly, is loftier and statelier than the throne itself. Both in this hall and in that of the Lords, we were at first surprised by the narrow limits within which the great ideas of the Lords and Commons of England are physically realized; they would seem to require a vaster space. When we hear of members rising on opposite sides of the House, we think of them as but dimly discernible to their opponents, and uplifting their voices, so as to be heard afar; whereas they sit closely enough to feel each other's spheres, to note all expression of face, and to give the debate the character of a conversation. In this view a debate seems a much more earnest and real thing than as we read it in a newspaper. Think of the debaters meeting each other's eyes, their faces flushing, their looks interpreting their words, their speech growing into eloquence, without losing the genuineness of talk! Yet, in fact, the Chamber of Peers is ninety feet long and half as broad, and high, and the Chamber of Commons is still larger. Thence we went to Westminster Hall, through a gallery with statues on each side,--beautiful statues too, I thought; seven of them, of which four were from the times of the civil wars,--Clarendon, Falkland, Hampden, Selden, Somers, Mansfield, and Walpole. There is room for more in this corridor, and there are niches for hundreds of their marble brotherhood throughout the edifice; but I suppose future ages will have to fill the greater part of them. Yet I cannot help imagining that this rich and noble edifice has more to do with the past than with the future; that it is the glory of a declining empire; and that the perfect bloom of this great stone flower, growing out of the institutions of England, forbodes that they have nearly lived out their life. It sums up all. Its beauty and magnificence are made out of ideas that are gone by. We entered Westminster Hall (which is incorporated into this new edifice, and forms an integral part of it) through a lofty archway, whence a double flight of broad steps descends to the stone pavement. After the elaborate ornament of the rooms we had just been viewing, this venerable hall looks extremely simple and bare,--a gray stone floor, gray and naked stone walls, but a roof sufficiently elaborate, its vault being filled with carved beams and rafters of chestnut, very much admired and wondered at for the design and arrangement. I think it would have pleased me more to have seen a clear vaulted roof, instead of this intricacy of wooden points, by which so much skylight space is lost. They make (be it not irreverently said) the vast and lofty apartment look like the ideal of an immense barn. But it is a noble space, and all without the support of a single pillar. It is about eighty of my paces from the foot of the steps to the opposite end of the hall, and twenty-seven from side to side; very high, too, though not quite proportionately to its other dimensions. I love it for its simplicity and antique nakedness, and deem it worthy to have been the haunt and home of History through the six centuries since it was built. I wonder it does not occur to modern ingenuity to make a scenic representation, in this very hall, of the ancient trials for life or death, pomps, feasts, coronations, and every great historic incident in the lives of kings, Parliaments, Protectors, and all illustrious men, that have occurred here. The whole world cannot show another hall such as this, so tapestried with recollections of whatever is most striking in human annals. Westminster Abbey being just across the street, we went thither from the hall, and sought out the cloisters, which we had not yet visited. They are in excellent preservation,--broad walks, canopied with intermingled arches of gray stone, on which some sort of lichen, or other growth of ages (which seems, however, to have little or nothing vegetable in it), has grown. The pavement is entirely made of flat tombstones, inscribed with half-effaced names of the dead people beneath; and the wall all round bears the marble tablets which give a fuller record of their virtues. I think it was from a meditation in these cloisters that Addison wrote one of his most beautiful pieces in the Spectator. It is a pity that this old fashion of a cloistered walk is not retained in our modern edifices; it was so excellent for shelter and for shade during a thoughtful hour,--this sombre corridor beneath an arched stone roof, with the central space of richest grass, on which the sun might shine or the shower fall, while the monk or student paced through the prolonged archway of his meditations. As we came out from the cloisters, and walked along by the churchyard of the Abbey, a woman came begging behind us very earnestly. "A bit of bread," she said, "and I will give you a thousand blessings! Hunger is hard to bear. O kind gentleman and kind lady, a penny for a bit of bread! It is a hard thing that gentlemen and ladies should see poor people wanting bread, and make no difference whether they are good or bad." And so she followed us almost all round the Abbey, assailing our hearts in most plaintive terms, but with no success; for she did it far too well to be anything but an impostor, and no doubt she had breakfasted better, and was likely to have a better dinner, than ourselves. And yet the natural man cries out against the philosophy that rejects beggars. It is a thousand to one that they are impostors, but yet we do ourselves a wrong by hardening our hearts against them. At last, without turning round, I told her that I should give her nothing,--with some asperity, doubtless, for the effort to refuse creates a bitterer repulse than is necessary. She still followed us a little farther, but at last gave it up, with a deep groan. I could not have performed this act of heroism on my first arrival from America. Whether the beggar-woman had invoked curses on us, and Heaven saw fit to grant some slight response, I know not, but it now began to rain on my wife's velvet; so I put her and J----- into a cab, and hastened to ensconce myself in Westminster Abbey while the shower should last. Poets' Corner has never seemed like a strange place to me; it has been familiar from the very first; at all events, I cannot now recollect the previous conception, of which the reality has taken the place. I seem always to have known that somewhat dim corner, with the bare brown stone-work of the old edifice aloft, and a window shedding down its light on the marble busts and tablets, yellow with time, that cover the three walls of the nook up to a height of about twenty feet. Prior's is the largest and richest monument. It is observable that the bust and monument of Congreve are in a distant part of the Abbey. His duchess probably thought it a degradation to bring a gentleman among the beggarly poets. I walked round the aisles, and paced the nave, and came to the conclusion that Westminster Abbey, both in itself and for the variety and interest of its monuments, is a thousand times preferable to St. Paul's. There is as much difference as between a snow-bank and a chimney-corner in their relation to the human heart. By the by, the monuments and statues in the Abbey seem all to be carefully dusted. The shower being over, I walked down into the city, where I called on Mr. B------ and left S-----'s watch to be examined and put in order. He told me that he and his brother had lately been laying out and letting a piece of land at Blackheath, that had been left them by their father, and that the ground-rent would bring them in two thousand pounds per annum. With such an independent income, I doubt whether any American would consent to be anything but a gentleman,--certainly not an operative watchmaker. How sensible these Englishmen are in some things! Thence I went at a venture, and lost myself, of course. At one part of my walk I came upon St. Luke's Hospital, whence I returned to St. Paul's, and thence along Fleet Street and the Strand. Contiguous to the latter is Holywell Street,--a narrow lane, filled up with little bookshops and bookstalls, at some of which I saw sermons and other works of divinity, old editions of classics, and all such serious matters, while at stalls and windows close beside them (and, possibly, at the same stalls) there were books with title-pages displayed, indicating them to be of the most indecent kind. October 2d.--Yesterday forenoon I went with J----- into the city to 67 Grace Church Street, to get a bank post-note cashed by Mr. Oakford, and afterwards to the offices of two lines of steamers, in Moorgate Street and Leadenhall Street. The city was very much thronged. It is a marvel what sets so many people a going at all hours of the day. Then it is to be considered that these are but a small portion of those who are doing the business of the city; much the larger part being occupied in offices at desks, in discussions of plans of enterprise, out of sight of the public, while these earnest hurriers are merely the froth in the pot. After seeing the steam-officials, we went to London Bridge, which always swarms with more passengers than any of the streets. Descending the steps that lead to the level of the Thames, we took passage in a boat bound up the river to Chelsea, of which there is one starting every ten minutes, the voyage being of forty minutes' duration. It began to sprinkle a little just as we started; but after a slight showeriness, lasting till we had passed Westminster Bridge, the day grew rather pleasant. At Westminster Bridge we had a good view of the river-front of the two Houses of Parliament, which look very noble from this point,--a long and massive extent, with a delightful promenade for the legislative people exactly above the margin of the river. This is certainly a magnificent edifice, and yet I doubt whether it is so impressive as it might and ought to have been made, considering its immensity. It makes no more impression than you can well account to yourself for, and you rather wonder that it does not make more. The reason must be that the architect has not "builded better than he knew." He felt no power higher and wiser than himself, making him its instrument. He reckoned upon and contrived all his effects with malice aforethought, and therefore missed the crowning glory,--that being a happiness which God, out of his pure grace, mixes up with only the simple-hearted, best efforts of men. October 3d.--I again went into the city yesterday forenoon, to settle about the passages to Lisbon, taking J----- with me. From Hungerford Bridge we took the steamer to London Bridge, that being an easy and speedy mode of accomplishing distances that take many footsteps through the crowded thoroughfares. After leaving the steamer-office, we went back through the Strand, and, crossing Waterloo Bridge, walked a good way on to the Surrey side of the river; a coarse, dingy, disagreeable suburb, with shops apparently for country produce, for old clothes, second-hand furniture, for ironware, and other things bulky and inelegant. How many scenes and sorts of life are comprehended within London! There was much in the aspect of these streets that reminded me of a busy country village in America on an immensely magnified scale. Growing rather weary anon, we got into an omnibus, which took us as far as the Surrey Zoological Gardens, which J----- wished very much to see. They proved to be a rather poor place of suburban amusement; poor, at least, by daylight, their chief attraction for the public consisting in out-of-door representations of battles and sieges. The storming of Sebastopol (as likewise at the Cremorne Gardens) was advertised for the evening, and we saw the scenery of Sebastopol, painted on a vast scale, in the open air, and really looking like miles and miles of hill and water; with a space for the actual manoeuvring of ships on a sheet of real water in front of the scene, on which some ducks were now swimming about, in place of men-of-war. The climate of England must often interfere with this sort of performance; and I can conceive of nothing drearier for spectators or performers than a drizzly evening. Convenient to this central spot of entertainment there were liquor and refreshment rooms, with pies and cakes. The menagerie, though the ostensible staple of the gardens, is rather poor and scanty; pretty well provided with lions and lionesses, also one or two giraffes, some camels, a polar bear,--who plunged into a pool of water for bits of cake,--and two black bears, who sat on their haunches or climbed poles; besides a wilderness of monkeys, some parrots and macaws, an ostrich, various ducks, and other animal and ornithological trumpery; some skins of snakes so well stuffed that I took them for living serpents till J----- discovered the deception, and an aquarium, with a good many common fishes swimming among sea-weed. The garden is shaded with trees, and set out with greensward and gravel-walks, from which the people were sweeping the withered autumnal leaves, which now fall every day. Plaster statues stand here and there, one of them without a head, thus disclosing the hollowness of the trunk; there were one or two little drizzly fountains, with the water dripping over the rock-work, of which the English are so fond; and the buildings for the animals and other purposes had a flimsy, pasteboard aspect of pretension. The garden was in its undress; few visitors, I suppose, coming hither at this time of day,--only here and there a lady and children, a young man and girl, or a couple of citizens, loitering about. I take pains to remember these small items, because they suggest the day-life or torpidity of what may look very brilliant at night. These corked-up fountains, slovenly greensward, cracked casts of statues, pasteboard castles, and duck-pond Bay of Balaclava then shining out in magic splendor, and the shabby attendants whom we saw sweeping and shovelling probably transformed into the heroes of Sebastopol. J----- thought it a delightful place; but I soon grew very weary, and came away about four o'clock, and, getting into a city omnibus, we alighted on the hither side of Blackfriar's Bridge. Turning into Fleet Street, I looked about for a place to dine at, and chose the Mitre Tavern, in memory of Johnson and Boswell. It stands behind a front of modern shops, through which is an archway, giving admittance into a narrow court-yard, which, I suppose, was formerly open to Fleet Street. The house is of dark brick, and, comparing it with other London edifices, I should take it to have been at least refronted since Johnson's time; but within, the low, sombre coffee-room which we entered might well enough have been of that era or earlier. It seems to be a good, plain, respectable inn; and the waiter gave us each a plate of boiled beef, and, for dessert, a damson tart, which made up a comfortable dinner. After dinner, we zigzagged homeward through Clifford's link passage, Holborn, Drury Lane, the Strand, Charing Cross, Pall Mall, and Regent Street; but I remember only an ancient brick gateway as particularly remarkable. I think it was the entrance to Lincoln's Inn. We reached home at about six. There is a woman who has several times passed through this Hanover Street, in which we live, stopping occasionally to sing songs under the windows; and last evening, between nine and ten o'clock, she came and sang "Kathleen O'Moore" richly and sweetly. Her voice rose up out of the dim, chill street, and made our hearts throb in unison with it as we sat in our comfortable drawing-room. I never heard a voice that touched me more deeply. Somebody told her to go away, and she stopped like a nightingale suddenly shot; but, finding that S----- wished to know something about her, Fanny and one of the maids ran after her, and brought her into the hall. It seems she was educated to sing at the opera, and married an Italian opera-singer, who is now dead; lodging in a model lodging-house at threepence a night, and being a penny short to-night, she tried this method, in hope of getting this penny. She takes in plain sewing when she can get any, and picks up a trifle about the street by means of her voice, which, she says, was once sweet, but has now been injured by the poorness of her living. She is a pale woman, with black eyes, Fanny says, and may have been pretty once, but is not so now. It seems very strange, that with such a gift of Heaven, so cultivated, too, as her voice is, making even an unsusceptible heart vibrate like a harp-string, she should not have had an engagement among the hundred theatres and singing-rooms of London; that she should throw away her melody in the streets for the mere chance of a penury, when sounds not a hundredth part so sweet are worth from other lips purses of gold. October 5th.--It rained almost all day on Wednesday, so that I did not go out till late in the afternoon, and then only took a stroll along Oxford Street and Holborn, and back through Fleet Street and the Strand. Yesterday, at a little after ten, I went to the ambassador's to get my wife's passport for Lisbon. While I was talking with the clerk, Mr. ------ made his appearance in a dressing-gown, with a morning cheerfulness and alacrity in his manner. He was going to Liverpool with his niece, who returns to America by the steamer of Saturday. She has had a good deal of success in society here; being pretty enough to be remarked among English women, and with cool, self-possessed, frank, and quiet manners, which look very like the highest breeding. I next went to Westminster Abbey, where I had long promised myself another quiet visit; for I think I never could be weary of it; and when I finally leave England, it will be this spot which I shall feel most unwilling to quit forever. I found a party going through the seven chapels (or whatever their number may be), and again saw those stately and quaint old tombs,--ladies and knights stretched out on marble slabs, or beneath arches and canopies of stone, let into the walls of the Abbey, reclining on their elbows, in ruff and farthingale or riveted armor, or in robes of state, once painted in rich colors, of which only a few patches of scarlet now remain; bearded faces of noble knights, whose noses, in many cases, had been smitten off; and Mary, Queen of Scots, had lost two fingers of her beautiful hands, which she is clasping in prayer. There must formerly have been very free access to these tombs; for I observed that all the statues (so far as I examined them) were scratched with the initials of visitors, some of the names being dated above a century ago. The old coronation-chair, too, is quite covered, over the back and seat, with initials cut into it with pocket-knives, just as Yankees would do it; only it is not whittled away, as would have been its fate in our hands. Edward the Confessor's shrine, which is chiefly of wood, likewise abounds in these inscriptions, although this was esteemed the holiest shrine in England, so that pilgrims still come to kneel and kiss it. Our guide, a rubicund verger of cheerful demeanor, said that this was true in a few instances. There is a beautiful statue in memory of Horace Walpole's mother; and I took it to be really a likeness, till the verger said that it was a copy of a statue which her son had admired in Italy, and so had transferred it to his mother's grave. There is something characteristic in this mode of filial duty and honor. In all these chapels, full of the tombs and effigies of kings, dukes, arch-prelates, and whatever is proud and pompous in mortality, there is nothing that strikes me more than the colossal statue of plain Mr. Watt, sitting quietly in a chair, in St. Paul's Chapel, and reading some papers. He dwarfs the warriors and statesmen; and as to the kings, we smile at them. Telford is in another of the chapels. This visit to the chapels was much more satisfactory than my former one; although I in vain strove to feel it adequately, and to make myself sensible how rich and venerable was what I saw. This realization must come at its own time, like the other happinesses of life. It is unaccountable that I could not now find the seat of Sir George Downing's squire, though I examined particularly every seat on that side of Henry VII's Chapel, where I before found it. I must try again. . . . . October 6th.--Yesterday was not an eventful day. I took J----- with me to the city, called on Mr. Sturgis at the Barings' House, and got his checks for a bank post-note. The house is at 8 Bishopsgate Street, Within. It has no sign of any kind, but stands back from the street, behind an iron-grated fence. The firm appears to occupy the whole edifice, which is spacious, and fit for princely merchants. Thence I went and paid for the passages to Lisbon (32 pounds) at the Peninsular Steam Company's office, and thence to call on General ------. I forgot to mention, that, first of all, I went to Mr. B------'s, whom I found kind and vivacious as usual. It now rained heavily, and, being still showery when we came to Cheapside again, we first stood under an archway (a usual resort for passengers through London streets), and then betook ourselves to sanctuary, taking refuge in St. Paul's Cathedral. The afternoon service was about to begin, so, after looking at a few of the monuments, we sat down in the choir, the richest and most ornamented part of the cathedral, with screens or partitions of oak, cunningly carved. Small white-robed choristers were flitting noiselessly about, making preparations for the service, which by and by began. It is a beautiful idea, that, several times in the course of the day, a man can slip out of the thickest throng and bustle of London into this religious atmosphere, and hear the organ, and the music of young, pure voices; but, after all, the rites are lifeless in our day. We found, on emerging, that we had escaped a very heavy shower, and it still sprinkled and misted as we went homeward through Holborn and Oxford Street. SOUTHAMPTON October 11th.--We all left London on Sunday morning, between ten and eleven, from the Waterloo station, and arrived in Southampton about two, without meeting with anything very remarkable on the way. We put up at Chapple's Castle Hotel, which is one of the class styled "commercial," and, though respectable, not such a one as the nobility and gentry usually frequent. I saw little difference in the accommodation, except that young women attended us instead of men,--a pleasant change. It was a showery day, but J----- and I walked out to see the shore and the town and the docks, and, if possible, the ship in which S----- was to sail. The most noteworthy object was the remains of an old castle, near the water-side; the square, gray, weed grown, weird keep of which shows some modern chimney-pots above its battlements, while remaining portions of the fortress are made to seem as one of the walls for coal-depots, and perhaps for small dwellings. The English characteristically patch new things into old things in this manner, materially, legally, constitutionally, and morally. Walking along the pier, we observed some pieces of ordnance, one of which was a large brass cannon of Henry VIII.'s time, about twelve feet long, and very finely made. The bay of Southampton presents a pleasant prospect, and I believe it is the great rendezvous of the yacht-club. Old and young seafaring people were strolling about, and lounging at corners, just as they do on Sunday afternoons in the minor seaports of America. From the shore we went up into the town, which is handsome, and of a cheerful aspect, with streets generally wide and well paved,--a cleanly town, not smoke-begrimed. The houses, if not modern, are, at least with few exceptions, new fronted. We saw one relic of antiquity,--a fine mediaeval gateway across the principal street, much more elevated than the gates of Chester, with battlements at the top, and a spacious apartment over the great arch for the passage of carriages, and the smaller one on each side for foot-passengers. There were two statues in armor or antique costume on the hither side of the gateway, and two old paintings on the other. This, so far as I know, is the only remnant of the old wall of Southampton. On Monday the morning was bright, alternating with a little showeriness. U----, J-----, and I went into the town to do some shopping before the steamer should sail; and a little after twelve we drove down to the dock. The Madeira is a pleasant-looking ship enough, not very large, but accommodating, I believe, about seventy passengers. We looked at my wife's little stateroom, with its three berths for herself and the two children; and then sat down in the saloon, and afterwards on deck, to spend the irksome and dreary hour or two before parting. Many of the passengers seemed to be Portuguese, undersized, dark, mustachioed people, smoking cigars. John Bull was fairly represented too. . . . . U---- was cheerful, and R----- seemed anxious to get off. Poor Fanny was altogether cast down, and shed tears, either from regret at leaving her native land, or dread of sea-sickness, or general despondency, being a person of no spring of spirits. I waited till the captain came on board, --a middle-aged or rather elderly man, with a sensible expression, but, methought, with a hard, cold eye, to whom I introduced my wife, recommending her to his especial care, as she was unattended by any gentleman; and then we thought it best to cut short the parting scene. So we bade one another farewell; and, leaving them on the deck of the vessel, J----- and I returned to the hotel, and, after dining at the table d'hote, drove down to the railway. This is the first great parting that we have ever had. It was three o'clock when we left Southampton. In order to get to Worcester, where we were to spend the night, we strode, as it were, from one line of railway to another, two or three times, and did not arrive at our journey's end till long after dark. At Worcester we put ourselves into the hands of a cabman, who drove us to the Crown Hotel,--one of the old-fashioned hotels, with an entrance through an arched passage, by which vehicles were admitted into the inn-yard, which has also an exit, I believe, into another street. On one side of the arch was the coffee-room, where, after looking at our sleeping-chambers on the other side of the arch, we had some cold pigeon-pie for supper, and for myself a pint of ale. It should be mentioned, that, in the morning, before embarking S----- and the children on board the steamer, I saw a fragment of a rainbow among the clouds, and remembered the old adage bidding "sailors take warning." In the afternoon, as J----- and I were railing from Southampton, we saw another fragmentary rainbow, which, by the same adage, should be the "sailor's delight." The weather has rather tended to confirm the first omen, but the sea-captains tell me that the steamer must have gone beyond the scope of these winds. WORCESTER. October 14th.---In the morning of Tuesday, after breakfast in the coffee-room, J----- and I walked about to see the remarkables of Worcester. It is not a particularly interesting city, compared with other old English cities; the general material of the houses being red brick, and almost all modernized externally, whatever may be the age of their original framework. We saw a large brick jail in castellated style, with battlements,--a very barren and dreary-looking edifice; likewise, in the more central part of the town, a Guildhall with a handsome front, ornamented with a statue of Queen Anne above the entrance, and statues of Charles I. and Charles II. on either side of the door, with the motto, "Floreat semper civitas fidelis." Worcester seems to pride itself upon its loyalty. We entered the building, and in the large interior hall saw some old armor hanging on the wall at one end,-- corselets, helmets, greaves, and a pair of breeches of chain mail. An inscription told us that these suits of armor had been left by Charles I. after the battle of Worcester, and presented to the city at a much later date by a gentleman of the neighborhood. On the stone floor of the hall, under the armor, were two brass cannon, one of which had been taken from the French in a naval battle within the present century; the other was a beautiful piece, bearing, I think, the date of 1632, and manufactured in Brussels for the Count de Burgh, as a Latin inscription testified. This likewise was a relic of the battle of Worcester, where it had been lost by Charles. Many gentlemen--connected with the city government, I suppose--were passing through the hall; and, looking through its interior doors, we saw stately staircases and council-rooms panelled with oak or other dark wood. There seems to be a good deal of state in the government of these old towns. Worcester Cathedral would have impressed me much had I seen it earlier; though its aspect is less venerable than that of Chester or Lichfield, having been faithfully renewed and repaired, and stone-cutters and masons were even now at work on the exterior. At our first visit, we found no entrance; but coming again at ten o'clock, when the service was to begin, we found the door open, and the chorister-boys, in their white robes, standing in the nave and aisles, with elder people in the same garb, and a few black-robed ecclesiastics and an old verger. The interior of the cathedral has been covered with a light-colored paint at some recent period. There is, as I remember, very little stained glass to enrich and bedim the light; and the effect produced is a naked, daylight aspect, unlike what I have seen in any other Gothic cathedral. The plan of the edifice, too, is simple; a nave and side aisles, with great clustered pillars, from which spring the intersecting arches; and, somehow or other, the venerable mystery which I have found in Westminster Abbey and elsewhere does not lurk in these arches and behind these pillars. The choir, no doubt, is richer and more beautiful; but we did not enter it. I remember two tombs, with recumbent figures on there, between the pillars that divide the nave from the side aisles, and there were also mural monuments,--one, well executed, to an officer slain in the Peninsular war, representing him falling from his horse; another by a young widow to her husband, with an inscription of passionate grief, and a record of her purpose finally to sleep beside him. He died in 1803. I did not see on the monument any record of the consummation of her purpose; and so perhaps she sleeps beside a second husband. There are more antique memorials than these two on the wall, and I should have been interested to examine them; but the service was now about to begin in the choir, and at the far-off end of the nave the old verger waved his hand to banish us from the cathedral. At the same time he moved towards us, probably to say that he would show it to us after service; but having little time, and being so moderately impressed with what I had already seen, I took my departure, and so disappointed the old man of his expected shilling or half-crown. The tomb of King John is somewhere in this cathedral. We renewed our rambles through the town, and, passing the Museum of the Worcester Natural History Society, I yielded to J-----'s wish to go in. There are three days in the week, I believe, on which it is open to the public; but this being one of the close days, we were admitted on payment of a shilling. It seemed a very good and well-arranged collection in most departments of Natural History, and J-----, who takes more interest in these matters than I do, was much delighted. We were left to examine the hall and galleries quite at our leisure. Besides the specimens of beasts, birds, shells, fishes, minerals, fossils, insects, and all other natural things before the flood and since, there was a stone bearing a Roman inscription, and various antiquities, coins, and medals, and likewise portraits, some of which were old and curious. Leaving the museum, we walked down to the stone bridge over the Severn, which is here the largest river I have seen in England, except, of course, the Mersey and the Thames. A flight of steps leads from the bridge down to a walk along the river-side, and this we followed till we reached the spot where an angler was catching chubs and dace, under the walls of the bishop's palace, which here faces the river. It seems to be an old building, but with modern repairs and improvements. The angler had pretty good success while we were looking at him, drawing out two or three silvery fish, and depositing them in his basket, which was already more than half full. The Severn is not a transparent stream, and looks sluggish, but has really movement enough to carry the angler's float along pretty fast. There were two vessels of considerable size (that is, as large as small schooners) lying at the bridge. We now passed under an old stone archway, through a lane that led us from the river-side up past the cathedral, whence a gentleman and lady were just emerging, and the verger was closing the door behind them. We returned to our hotel, and ordered luncheon,--some cold chicken, cold ham, and ale, and after paying the bill (about fifteen shillings, to which I added five shillings for attendance) we took our departure in a fly for the railway. The waiter (a young woman), chambermaid, and boots, all favored us with the most benign and deferential looks at parting, whence it was easy to see that I had given them more than they had any claim to receive. Nevertheless, this English system of fees has its good side, and I never travel without finding the advantage of it, especially on railways, where the officials are strictly forbidden to take fees, and where, in consequence, a fee secures twice as much good service as anywhere else. Be it recorded, that I never knew an Englishman to refuse a shilling,--or, for that matter, a halfpenny. From Worcester we took tickets to Wolverhampton, and thence to Birkenhead. It grew dark before we reached Chester, and began to rain; and when we got to Birkenhead it was a pitiless, pelting storm, under which, on the deck of the steamboat, we crossed the detestable Mersey, two years' trial of which has made me detest it every day more and more. It being the night of rejoicing for the taking of Sebastopol and the visit of the Duke of Cambridge, we found it very difficult to get a cab on the Liverpool side; but after much waiting in the rain, and afterwards in one of the refreshment-rooms, on the landing stage, we took a Hansom and drove off. The cloudy sky reflected the illuminations, and we saw some gas-lighted stars and other devices, as we passed, very pretty, but much marred by the wind and rain. So we finally arrived at Mrs. Blodgett's, and made a good supper of ham and cold chicken, like our luncheon, after which, wet as we were, and drizzling as the weather was, and though it was two hours beyond his bedtime, I took J----- out to see the illuminations. I wonder what his mother would have said. But the boy must now begin to see life and to feel it. There was a crowd of people in the street; such a crowd that we could hardly make a passage through them, and so many cabs and omnibuses that it was difficult to cross the ways. Some of the illuminations were very brilliant; but there was a woful lack of variety and invention in the devices. The star of the garter, which kept flashing out from the continual extinguishment of the wind and rain,--V and A, in capital letters of light,--were repeated a hundred times; as were loyal and patriotic mottoes,--crowns formed by colored lamps. In some instances a sensible tradesman had illuminated his own sign, thereby at once advertising his loyalty and his business. Innumerable flags were suspended before the houses and across the streets, and the crowd plodded on, silent, heavy, and without any demonstration of joy, unless by the discharge of pistols close at one's ear. The rain, to be sure, was quite sufficient to damp any joyous ebullition of feeling; but the next day, when the rain had ceased, and when the streets were still thronged with people, there was the same heavy, purposeless strolling from place to place, with no more alacrity of spirit than while it rained. The English do not know how to rejoice; and, in their present circumstances, to say the truth, have not much to rejoice for. We soon came home; but I believe it was nearly, if not quite, eleven. At Mrs. Blodgett's, Mr. Archer (surgeon to some prison or house of correction here in Liverpool) spoke of an attorney who many years ago committed forgery, and, being apprehended, took a dose of prussic acid. Mr. Archer came with the stomach-pump, and asked the patient how much prussic acid he had taken. "Sir," he replied, attorney-like, "I decline answering that question!" He recovered, and afterwards arrived at great wealth in New South Wales. November 14th.--At dinner at Mr. Bright's, a week or two ago, Mr. Robertson Gladstone spoke of a magistrate of Liverpool, many years since, Sir John ------. Of a morning, sitting on the bench in the police court, he would take five shillings out of his pocket and say, "Here, Mr. Clerk, so much for my fine. I was drunk last night!" Mr. Gladstone witnessed this personally. November 16th.--I went to the North Hospital yesterday, to take the deposition of a dying man as to his ill treatment by the second and third mates of the ship Assyria, on the voyage from New Orleans. This hospital is a very gloomy place, with its wide bleak entries and staircases, which may be very good for summer weather, but which are most congenial at this bleak November season. I found the physicians of the house laughing and talking very cheerfully with Mr. Wilding, who had preceded me. We went forthwith, up two or three pairs of stairs, to the ward where the sick man lay, and where there were six or eight other beds, in almost each of which was a patient,--narrow beds, shabbily furnished. The man whom I came to see was the only one who was not perfectly quiet; neither was he very restless. The doctor, informing him of my presence, intimated that his disease might be lethal, and that I was come to hear what he had to say as to the causes of his death. Afterwards, a Testament was sought for, in order to swear him, and I administered the oath, and made him kiss the book. He then (in response to Mr. Wilding's questions) told how he had been beaten and ill-treated, hanged and thwacked, from the moment he came on board, to which usage he ascribed his death. Sometimes his senses seemed to sink away, so that I almost thought him dead; but by and by the questions would appear to reach him, and bring him back, and he went on with his evidence, interspersing it, however, with dying groans, and almost death rattles. In the midst of whatever he was saying, he often recurred to a sum of four dollars and a half, which he said he had put into the hands of the porter of the hospital, and which he wanted to get back. Several times he expressed his wish to return to America (of which he was not a native), and, on the whole, I do not think he had any real sense of his precarious condition, notwithstanding that he assented to the doctor's hint to that effect. He sank away so much at one time, that they brought him wine in a tin cup, with a spout to drink out of, and he mustered strength to raise himself in his bed and drink; then hemmed, with rather a disappointed air, as if it did not stimulate and refresh him, as drink ought to do. When he had finished his evidence (which Mr. Wilding took down in writing from his mouth), he marked his cross at the foot of the paper, and we ceased to torment him with further question. His deposition will probably do no good, so far as the punishment of the persons implicated is concerned; for he appears to have come on board in a sickly state, and never to have been well during the passage. On a pallet, close by his bed, lay another seaman of the same ship, who had likewise been abused by the same men, and bore more ostensible marks of ill usage than this man did, about the head and face. There is a most dreadful state of things aboard our ships. Hell itself can be no worse than some of them, and I do pray that some New-Englander with the rage of reform in him may turn his thoughts this way. The first step towards better things--the best practicable step for the present--is to legalize flogging on shipboard; thereby doing away with the miscellaneous assaults and batteries, kickings, fisticuffings, ropes'-endings, marline-spikings, which the inferior officers continually perpetrate, as the only mode of keeping up anything like discipline. As in many other instances, philanthropy has overshot itself by the prohibition of flogging, causing the captain to avoid the responsibility of solemn punishment, and leave his mates to make devils of themselves, by habitual and hardly avoidable ill treatment of the seamen. After I left the dying sailor, his features seemed to contract and grow sharp. Some young medical students stood about the bed, watching death creep upon him, and anticipating, perhaps, that in a day or two they would have the poor fellow's body on the dissecting-table. Dead patients, I believe, undergo this fate, unless somebody chooses to pay their funeral expenses; but the captain of the Assyria (who seems to be respectable and kind-hearted, though master of a floating hell) tells me that he means to bury the man at his own cost. This morning there is a note from the surgeon of the hospital, announcing his death, and likewise the dangerous state of his shipmate whom I saw on the pallet beside him. Sea-captains call a dress-coat a "claw-hammer." November 22d.--I went on board the ship William Lapscott, lying in the river, yesterday, to take depositions in reference to a homicide committed in New York. I sat on a sofa in the cabin, and Mr. Wilding at a table, with his writing-materials before him, and the crew were summoned, one by one,--rough, piratical-looking fellows, contrasting strongly with the gewgaw cabin in which I received them. There is no such finery on land as in the cabin of one of these ships in the Liverpool trade, finished off with a complete panelling of rosewood, mahogany, and bird's-eye maple, polished and varnished, and gilded along the cornices and the edges of the panels. It is all a piece of elaborate cabinet-work; and one does not altogether see why it should be given to the gales, and the salt-sea atmosphere, to be tossed upon the waves, and occupied by a rude shipmaster in his dreadnaught clothes, when the fairest lady in the land has no such boudoir. A telltale compass hung beneath the skylight, and a clock was fastened near it, and ticked loudly. A stewardess, with the aspect of a woman at home, went in and out of the cabin, about her domestic calls. Through the cabin door (it being a house on deck) I could see the arrangement of the ship. The first sailor that I examined was a black-haired, powerful fellow, in an oil-skin jacket, with a good face enough, though he, too, might have been taken for a pirate. In the affray in which the homicide occurred, he had received a cut across the forehead, and another slantwise across his nose, which had quite cut it in two, on a level with the face, and had thence gone downward to his lower jaw. But neither he nor any one else could give any testimony elucidating the matter into which I had come to inquire. A seaman had been stabbed just before the vessel left New York, and had been sent on shore and died there. Most of these men were in the affray, and all of then were within a few yards of the spot where it occurred; but those actually present all pleaded that they were so drunk that the whole thing was now like a dream, with no distinct images; and, if any had been sober, they took care to know nothing that could inculpate any individual. Perhaps they spoke truth; they certainly had a free and honest-like way of giving their evidence, as if their only object was to tell all the truth they knew. But I rather think, in the forecastle, and during the night-watches, they have whispered to one another a great deal more than they told me, and have come to a pretty accurate conclusion as to the man who gave the stab. While the examination proceeded, there was a drawing of corks in a side closet; and, at its conclusion, the captain asked us to stay to dinner, but we excused ourselves, and drank only a glass of wine. The captain apologized for not joining us, inasmuch as he had drunk no wine for the last seventeen years. He appears to be a particularly good and trustworthy man, and is the only shipmaster whom I have met with, who says that a crew can best be governed by kindness. In the inner closet there was a cage containing two land-birds, who had come aboard him, tired almost to death, three or four hundred miles from shore; and he had fed them and been tender of them, from a sense of what was due to hospitality. He means to give them to J-----. November 28th.--I have grown wofully aristocratic in my tastes, I fear, since coming to England; at all events, I am conscious of a certain disgust at going to dine in a house with a small entrance-hall and a narrow staircase, parlor with chintz curtains, and all other arrangements on a similar scale. This is pitiable. However, I really do not think I should mind these things, were it not for the bustle, the affectation, the intensity, of the mistress of the house. It is certain that a woman in England is either decidedly a lady or decidedly not a lady. There seems to be no respectable medium. Bill of fare: broiled soles, half of a roast pig, a haricot of mutton, stewed oysters, a tart, pears, figs, with sherry and port wine, both good, and the port particularly so. I ate some pig, and could hardly resist the lady's importunities to eat more; though to my fancy it tasted of swill,--had a flavor of the pigsty. On the parlor table were some poor editions of popular books, Longfellow's poems and others. The lady affects a literary taste, and bothered me about my own productions. A beautiful subject for a romance, or for a sermon, would be the subsequent life of the young man whom Jesus bade to sell all he had and give to the poor; and he went away sorrowful, and is not recorded to have done what he was bid. December 11th.--This has been a foggy morning and forenoon, snowing a little now and then, and disagreeably cold. The sky is of an inexpressibly dreary, dun color. It is so dark at times that I have to hold my book close to my eyes, and then again it lightens up a little. On the whole, disgustingly gloomy; and thus it has been for a long while past, although the disagreeableness seems to be very near the earth, and just above the steeples and house-tops very probably there may be a bright, sunshiny day. At about twelve there is a faint glow of sunlight, like the gleaming reflection from a not highly polished copper kettle. December 26th.--On Christmas eve and yesterday, there were little branches of mistletoe hanging in several parts of the house, in the kitchen, the entries, the parlor, and the smoking-room,--suspended from the gas-fittings. The maids of the house did their utmost to entrap the gentlemen boarders, old and young; under the privileged places, and there to kiss them, after which they were expected to pay a shilling. It is very queer, being customarily so respectful, that they should assume this license now, absolutely trying to pull the gentlemen into the kitchen by main force, and kissing the harder and more abundantly the more they were resisted. A little rosy-checked Scotch lass--at other times very modest --was the most active in this business. I doubt whether any gentleman but myself escaped. I heard old Mr. S------ parleying with the maids last evening, and pleading his age; but he seems to have met with no mercy, for there was a sound of prodigious smacking immediately afterwards. J----- was assaulted, and fought, most vigorously; but was outrageously kissed,--receiving some scratches, moreover, in the conflict. The mistletoe has white, wax-looking berries, and dull green leaves, with a parasitical stem. Early in the morning of Christmas day, long before daylight, I heard music in the street, and a woman's voice, powerful and melodious, singing a Christmas hymn. Before bedtime I presume one half of England, at a moderate calculation, was the worse for liquor. The market-houses, at this season, show the national taste for heavy feeding,--carcasses of prize oxen, immensely fat, and bulky; fat sheep, with their woolly heads and tails still on, and stars and other devices ingeniously wrought on the quarters; fat pigs, adorned with flowers, like corpses of virgins; hares, wild-fowl, geese, ducks, turkeys; and green boughs and banners suspended about the stalls,--and a great deal of dirt and griminess on the stone floor of the market-house, and on the persons of the crowd. There are some Englishmen whom I like,--one or two for whom I might say I have an affection; but still there is not the same union between us as if they were Americans. A cold, thin medium intervenes betwixt our most intimate approaches. It puts me in mind of Alnaschar and his princess, with the cold steel blade of his scimitar between them. Perhaps if I were at home I might feel differently; but in a foreign land I can never forget the distinction between English and American. January 1st, 1856.--Last night, at Mrs. Blodgett's, we sat up till twelve o'clock to open the front door, and let the New Year in. After the coming guest was fairly in the house, the back door was to be opened, to let the Old Year out; but I was tired, and did not wait for the latter ceremony. When the New Year made its entrance, there was a general shaking of hands, and one of the shipmasters said that it was customary to kiss the ladies all round; but to my great satisfaction, we did not proceed to such extremity. There was singing in the streets, and many voices of people passing, and when twelve had struck, all the bells of the town, I believe, rang out together. I went up stairs, sad and lonely, and, stepping into J-----'s little room, wished him a Happy New Year, as he slept, and many of them. To a cool observer, a country does not show to best advantage during a time of war. All its self-conceit is doubly visible, and, indeed, is sedulously kept uppermost by direct appeals to it. The country must be humbugged, in order to keep its courage up. Sentiment seems to me more abundant in middle-aged ladies in England than in the United States. I don't know how it may be with young ladies. The shipmasters bear testimony to the singular delicacy of common sailors in their behavior in the presence of women; and they say that this good trait is still strongly observable even in the present race of seamen, greatly deteriorated as it is. On shipboard, there is never an indecorous word or unseemly act said or done by sailors when a woman can be cognizant of it; and their deportment in this respect differs greatly from that of landsmen of similar position in society. This is remarkable, considering that a sailor's female acquaintances are usually and exclusively of the worst kind, and that his intercourse with them has no relation whatever to morality or decency. For this very reason, I suppose, he regards a modest woman as a creature divine and to be reverenced. January 16th.---I have suffered wofully from low spirits for some time past; and this has not often been the case since I grew to be a man, even in the least auspicious periods of my life. My desolate bachelor condition, I suppose, is the cause. Really, I have no pleasure in anything, and I feel my tread to be heavier, and my physical movement more sluggish, than in happier times. A weight is always upon me. My appetite is not good. I sleep ill, lying awake till late at night, to think sad thoughts and to imagine sombre things, and awaking before light with the same thoughts and fancies still in my mind. My heart sinks always as I ascend the stairs to my office, from a dim augury of ill news from Lisbon that I may perhaps hear,--of black-sealed letters, or some such horrors. Nothing gives me any joy. I have learned what the bitterness of exile is, in these days; and I never should have known it but for the absence of "Remote, unfriended, melancholy, slow,"--I can perfectly appreciate that line of Goldsmith; for it well expresses my own torpid, unenterprising, joyless state of mind and heart. I am like an uprooted plant, wilted and drooping. Life seems so purposeless as not to be worth the trouble of carrying it on any further. I was at a dinner, the other evening, at Mr. B------'s, where the entertainment was almost entirely American,--New York oysters, raw, stewed, and fried; soup of American partridges, particularly good; also terrapin soup, rich, but not to my taste; American pork and beans, baked in Yankee style; a noble American turkey, weighing thirty-one pounds; and, at the other end of the table, an American round of beef, which the Englishmen present allowed to be delicious, and worth a guinea an ounce. I forget the other American dishes, if there were any more,--O yes! canvas-back ducks, coming on with the sweets, in the usual English fashion. We ought to have had Catawba wine; but this was wanting, although there was plenty of hock, champagne, sherry, madeira, port, and claret. Our host is a very jolly man, and the dinner was a merrier and noisier one than any English dinner within my experience. February 8th.--I read to-day, in the little office-Bible (greasy with perjuries) St. Luke's account of the agony, the trial, the crucifixion, and the resurrection; and how Christ appeared to the two disciples, on their way to Emmaus, and afterwards to a company of disciples. On both these latter occasions he expounded the Scriptures to them, and showed the application of the old prophecies to himself; and it is to be supposed that he made them fully, or at least sufficiently, aware what his character was,--whether God, or man, or both, or something between, together with all other essential points of doctrine. But none of this doctrine or of these expositions is recorded, the mere facts being most simply stated, and the conclusion to which he led them, that, whether God himself, or the Son of God, or merely the Son of man, he was, at all events, the Christ foretold in the Jewish Scriptures. This last, therefore, must have been the one essential point. February 18th.--On Saturday there called on me an elderly Robinson-Crusoe sort of man, Mr. H------, shipwright, I believe, of Boston, who has lately been travelling in the East. About a year ago he was here, after being shipwrecked on the Dutch coast, and I assisted him to get home. Again, I have supplied him with five pounds, and my credit for an outside garment. He is a spare man, with closely cropped gray, or rather white hair, close-cropped whiskers fringing round his chin, and a close-cropped white mustache, with his under lip and a portion of his chin bare beneath,--sunburnt and weather-worn. He has been in Syria and Jerusalem, through the Desert, and at Sebastopol; and says he means to get Ticknor to publish his travels, and the story of his whole adventurous life, on his return home. A free-spoken, confiding, hardy, religious, unpolished, simple, yet world-experienced man; very talkative, and boring me with longer visits than I like. He has brought home, among other curiosities, "a lady's arm," as he calls it, two thousand years old,--a piece of a mummy, of course; also some coins, one of which, a gold coin of Vespasian, he showed me, and said he bought it of an Arab of the desert. The Bedouins possess a good many of these coins, handed down immemorially from father to son, and never sell them unless compelled by want. He had likewise a Hebrew manuscript of the Book of Ruth, on a parchment roll, which was put into his care to be given to Lord Haddo. He was at Sebastopol during the siege, and nearly got his head knocked off by a cannon-ball. His strangest statement is one in reference to Lord Raglan. He says that an English officer told him that his Lordship shut himself up, desiring not to be disturbed, as he needed sleep. When fifteen hours had gone by, his attendants thought it time to break open the door; and Lord Raglan was found dead, with a bottle of strychnine by the bedside. The affair, so far as the circumstances indicated suicide, was hushed up, and his death represented as a natural one. The English officer seems to have been an unscrupulous fellow, jesting thus with the fresh memory of his dead commander; for it is impossible to believe a word of the story. Even if Lord Raglan had wished for death, he would hardly have taken strychnine, when there were so many chances of being honorably shot. In Wood's Narrative of the Campaign, it is stated that he died surrounded by the members of his staff, after having been for some time ill. It appears, however, by the same statement, that no serious apprehensions had been entertained, until, one afternoon, he shut himself in, desiring not to be disturbed till evening. After two or three hours he called Lord Burghersh,--"Frank, Frank!" and was found to be almost in a state of collapse, and died that evening. Mr. H------'s story might very well have been a camp rumor. It seems to me that the British Ministry, in its notion of a life-peerage, shows an entire misunderstanding of what makes people desire the peerage. It is not for the immediate personal distinction; but because it removes the peer and his consanguinity from the common rank of men, and makes a separate order of them, as if they should grow angelic. A life-peer is but a mortal amid the angelic throng. February 28th.--I went yesterday with Mrs. ------ and another lady, and Mr. M------, to the West Derby Workhouse. . . . . [Here comes in the visit to the West Derby Workhouse, which was made the subject of a paper in Our Old Home, called "Outside Glimpses of English Poverty." As the purpose in publishing these passages from the private note-books is to give to those who ask for a memoir of Mr. Hawthorne every possible incident recorded by himself which shows his character and nature, the editor thinks it proper to disclose the fact that Mr. Hawthorne was himself the gentleman of that party who took up in his arms the little child, so fearfully repulsive in its condition. And it seems better to quote his own words in reference to it, than merely to say it was he. Under date February 28, 1856. "After this, we went to the ward where the children were kept, and, on entering this, we saw, in the first place, two or three unlovely and unwholesome little imps, who were lazily playing together. One of them (a child about six years old, but I know not whether girl or boy) immediately took the strangest fancy for me. It was a wretched, pale, half-torpid little thing, with a humor in its eyes which the Governor said was the scurvy. I never saw, till a few moments afterwards, a child that I should feel less inclined to fondle. But this little, sickly, humor-eaten fright prowled around me, taking hold of my skirts, following at my heels, and at last held up its hands, smiled in my face, and, standing directly before me, insisted on my taking it up! Not that it said a word, for I rather think it was underwitted, and could not talk; but its face expressed such perfect confidence that it was going to be taken up and made much of, that it was impossible not to do it. It was as if God had promised the child this favor on my behalf, and that I must needs fulfil the contract. I held my undesirable burden a little while; and, after setting the child down, it still followed me, holding two of my fingers and playing with them, just as if it were a child of my own. It was a foundling, and out of all human kind it chose me to be its father! We went up stairs into another ward; and, on coming down again, there was this same child waiting for me, with a sickly smile round its defaced mouth, and in its dim red eyes. . . . . I never should have forgiven myself if I had repelled its advances."--ED.] After leaving the workhouse, we drove to Norris Green; and Mrs. ------ showed me round the grounds, which are very good and nicely kept. O these English homes, what delightful places they are! I wonder how many people live and die in the workhouse, having no other home, because other people have a great deal more home than enough. . . . . We had a very pleasant dinner, and Mr. M------ and I walked back, four miles and a half, to Liverpool, where we arrived just before midnight. Why did Christ curse the fig-tree? It was not in the least to blame; and it seems most unreasonable to have expected it to bear figs out of season. Instead of withering it away, it would have been as great a miracle, and far more beautiful, and, one would think, of more beneficent influence, to have made it suddenly rich with ripe fruit. Then, to be sure, it might have died joyfully, having answered so good a purpose. I have been reminded of this miracle by the story of a man in Heywood, a town in Lancashire, who used such horribly profane language that a plane-tree in front of his cottage is said to have withered away from that hour. I can draw no moral from the incident of the fig-tree, unless it be that all things perish from the instant when they cease to answer some divine purpose. March 6th.--Yesterday I lunched on board Captain Russell's ship, the Princeton. These daily lunches on shipboard might answer very well the purposes of a dinner; being, in fact, noontide dinners, with soup, roast mutton, mutton-chops, and a macaroni pudding,--brandy, port and sherry wines. There were three elderly Englishmen at table, with white heads, which, I think, is oftener the predicament of elderly heads here than in America. One of these was a retired Custom-House officer, and the other two were connected with shipping in some way. There is a satisfaction in seeing Englishmen eat and drink, they do it so heartily, and, on the whole, so wisely,--trusting so entirely that there is no harm in good beef and mutton, and a reasonable quantity of good liquor; and these three hale old men, who had acted on this wholesome faith for so long, were proofs that it is well on earth to live like earthly creatures. In America, what squeamishness, what delicacy, what stomachic apprehension, would there not be among three stomachs of sixty or seventy years' experience! I think this failure of American stomachs is partly owing to our ill usage of our digestive powers, and partly to our want of faith in them. After lunch, we all got into an omnibus, and went to the Mersey Iron Foundry, to see the biggest piece of ordnance in the world, which is almost finished. The overseer of the works received us, and escorted us courteously throughout the establishment; which is very extensive, giving employment to a thousand men, what with night-work and day-work. The big gun is still on the axle, or turning-machine, by means of which it has been bored. It is made entirely of wrought and welded iron, fifty tons of which were originally used; and the gun, in its present state, bored out and smoothed away, weighs nearly twenty-three tons. It has, as yet, no trunnions, and does not look much like a cannon, but only a huge iron cylinder, immensely solid, and with a bore so large that a young man of nineteen shoved himself into it, the whole length, with a light, in order to see whether it is duly smooth and regular. I suppose it will have a better effect, as to the impression of size, when it is finished, polished, mounted, aid fully equipped, after the fashion of ordinary cannon. It is to throw a ball of three hundred pounds' weight five miles, and woe be to whatever ship or battlement shall bear the brunt! After inspecting the gun we went through other portions of the establishment, and saw iron in various stages of manufacture. I am not usually interested in manufacturing processes, being quite unable to understand them, at least in cotton-machinery and the like; but here there were such exhibitions of mighty strength, both of men and machines, that I had a satisfaction in looking on. We saw lumps of iron, intensely white-hot, and in all but a melting state, passed through rollers of various size and pressure, and speedily converted into long bars, which came curling and waving out of the rollers like great red ribbons, or like fiery serpents wriggling out of Tophet; and finally, being straightened out, they were laid to cool in heaps. Trip-hammers are very pleasant things to look at, working so massively as they do, and yet so accurately; chewing up the hot iron, as it were, and fashioning it into shape, with a sort of mighty and gigantic gentleness in their mode of action. What great things man has contrived, and is continually performing! What a noble brute he is! Also, I found much delight in looking at the molten iron, boiling and bubbling in the furnace, and sometimes slopping over, when stirred by the attendant. There were numberless fires on all sides, blinding us with their intense glow; and continually the pounding strokes of huge hammers, some wielded by machinery and others by human arms. I had a respect for these stalwart workmen, who seemed to be near kindred of the machines amid which they wrought,--mighty men, smiting stoutly, and looking into the fierce eyes of the furnace fearlessly, and handling the iron at a temperature which would have taken the skin off from ordinary fingers. They looked strong, indeed, but pale; for the hot atmosphere in which they live cannot but be deleterious, and I suppose their very strength wears them quickly out. But I would rather live ten years as an iron-smith than fifty as a tailor. So much heat can be concentrated into a mass of iron, that a lump a foot square heats all the atmosphere about it, and burns the face at a considerable distance. As the trip-hammer strikes the lump, it seems still more to intensify the heat by squeezing it together, and the fluid iron oozes out like sap or juice. "He was ready for the newest fashions!"--this expression was used by Mrs. Blodgett in reference to Mr. ------ on his first arrival in England, and it is a very tender way of signifying that a person is rather poorly off as to apparel. March 15th.--Mr. ------, our new ambassador, arrived on Thursday afternoon by the Atlantic, and I called at the Adelphi Hotel, after dinner, to pay him my respects. I found him and his family at supper. . . . . They seem to be plain, affable people. . . . . The ambassador is a venerable old gentleman, with a full head of perfectly white hair, looking not unlike an old-fashioned wig; and this, together with his collarless white neckcloth and his brown coat, gave him precisely such an aspect as one would expect in a respectable person of pre-revolutionary days. There was a formal simplicity, too, in his manners, that might have belonged to the same era. He must have been a very handsome man in his youthful days, and is now comely, very erect, moderately tall, not overburdened with flesh; of benign and agreeable address, with a pleasant smile; but his eyes, which are not very large, impressed me as sharp and cold. He did not at all stamp himself upon me as a man of much intellectual or characteristic vigor. I found no such matter in his conversation, nor did I feel it in the indefinable way by which strength always makes itself acknowledged. B------, though, somehow, plain and uncouth, yet vindicates himself as a large man of the world, able, experienced, fit to handle difficult circumstances of life; dignified, too, and able to hold his own in any society. Mr. ------ has a kind of venerable dignity; but yet, if a person could so little respect himself as to insult him, I should say that there was no innate force in Mr. ------ to prevent it. It is very strange that he should have made so considerable a figure in public life, filling offices that the strongest men would have thought worthy of their highest ambition. There must be something shrewd and sly under his apparent simplicity; narrow, cold, selfish, perhaps. I fancied these things in his eyes. He has risen in life by the lack of too powerful qualities, and by a certain tact, which enables him to take advantage of circumstances and opportunities, and avail himself of his unobjectionableness, just at the proper time. I suppose he must be pronounced a humbug, yet almost or quite an innocent one. Yet he is a queer representative to be sent from brawling and boisterous America at such a critical period. It will be funny if England sends him back again, on hearing the news of ------'s dismissal. Mr. ------ gives me the impression of being a very amiable man in his own family. He has brought his son with him, as Secretary of Legation,--a small young man, with a little mustache. It will be a feeble embassy. I called again the next morning, and introduced Mrs. ------, who, I believe, accompanied the ladies about town. This simplicity in Mr. ------'s manner puzzles and teases me; for, in spite of it, there was a sort of self-consciousness, as if he were being looked at,--as if he were having his portrait taken. LONDON. March 22d.--Yesterday,--no, day before yesterday,--I left Liverpool for London by rail, from the Lime Street station. The journey was a dull and monotonous one, as usual. Three passengers were in the same carriage with me at starting; but they dropped off; and from Rugby I was alone. We reached London after ten o'clock; and I took a cab for St. James's Place, No. 32, where I found Mr. B------ expecting me. He had secured a bedroom for me at this lodging-house, and I am to be free of his drawing-room during my stay. We breakfasted at nine, and then walked down to his counting-room, in Old Broad Street, in the city. It being a dim, dingy morning, London looked very dull, the more so as it was Good Friday, and therefore the streets were comparatively thin of people and vehicles, and had on their Sunday aspect. If it were not for the human life and bustle of London, it would be a very stupid place, with a heavy and dreary-monotony of unpicturesque streets. We went up Bolt Court, where Dr. Johnson used to live; and this was the only interesting site we saw. After spending some time in the counting-room, while Mr. ------ read his letters, we went to London Bridge, and took the steamer for Waterloo Bridge, with partly an intent to go to Richmond, but the day was so damp and dusky that we concluded otherwise. So we came home, visiting, on our way, the site of Covent Garden Theatre, lately burnt down. The exterior walls still remain perfect, and look quite solid enough to admit of the interior being renewed, but I believe it is determined to take them down. After a slight lunch and a glass of wine, we walked out, along Piccadilly, and to Hyde Park, which already looks very green, and where there were a good many people walking and driving, and rosy-faced children at play. Somehow or other the shine and charm are gone from London, since my last visit; and I did not very much admire, nor feel much interested in anything. We returned (and I, for my part, was much wearied) in time for dinner at five. The evening was spent at home in various talk, and I find Mr. ------ a very agreeable companion, and a young man of thought and information, with a self-respecting character, and I think him a safe person to live with. This St. James's Place is in close vicinity to St. James's Palace, the gateway and not very splendid front of which we can see from the corner. The club-houses and the best life of the town are near at hand. Addison, before his marriage, used to live in St. James's Place, and the house where Mr. Rogers recently died is up the court, not that this latter residence excites much interest in my mind. I remember nothing else very noteworthy in this first day's experience, except that on Sir Watkins Williams Wynn's door, not far from this house, I saw a gold knocker, which is said to be unscrewed every night lest it should be stolen. I don't know whether it be really gold; for it did not look so bright as the generality of brass ones. I received a very good letter from J----- this morning. He was to go to Mr. Bright's at Sandhays yesterday, and remain till Monday. After writing the above, I walked along the Strand, Fleet Street, Ludgate Hill and Cheapside to Wood Street,--a very narrow street, insomuch that one has to press close against the wall to escape being grazed when a cart is passing. At No. 77 I found the place of business of Mr. Bennoch, who came to see me at Rock Ferry with Mr. Jerdan, not long after my arrival in England. I found him in his office; but he did not at first recognize me, so much stouter have I grown during my residence in England,--a new man, as he says. Mr. Bennoch is a kindly, frank, very good man, and was bounteous in his plans for making my time pass pleasantly. We talked of ------, from whom he has just received a letter, and who says he will fight for England in case of a war. I let Bennoch know that I, at least, should take the other side. After arranging to go to Greenwich Fair, and afterwards to dine with Bennoch, I left him and went to Mr. ------'s office, and afterwards strayed forth again, and crossed London Bridge. Thence I rambled rather drearily along through several shabby and uninteresting streets on the other side of the Thames; and the dull streets in London are really the dullest and most disheartening in the world. By and by I found my way to Southwark Bridge, and so crossed to Upper Thames Street, which was likewise very stupid, though I believe Clenman's paternal house in "Little Dorrit" stands thereabouts. . . . . Next, I got into Ludgate Hill, near St. Paul's, and being quite foot-weary, I took a Paddington omnibus, and rode up into Regent Street, whence I came home. March 24th.--Yesterday being a clear day for England, we determined upon an expedition to Hampton Court; so walked out betimes towards the Waterloo station; but first crossed the Thames by Westminster Bridge, and went to Lambeth Palace. It stands immediately on the bank of the river, not far above the bridge. We merely walked round it, and saw only an old stone tower or two, partially renewed with brick, and a high connecting wall, within which appeared gables and other portions of the palace, all of an ancient plan and venerable aspect, though evidently much patched up and restored in the course of the many ages since its foundation. There is likewise a church, part of which looks old, connected with the palace. The streets surrounding it have many gabled houses, and a general look of antiquity, more than some other parts of London. We then walked to the Waterloo station, on the same side of the river; and at twenty minutes past one took the rail for Hampton Court, distant some twelve or fifteen miles. On arriving at the terminus, we beheld Hampton Palace, on the other side of the Thames,--an extensive structure, with a front of red brick, long and comparatively low, with the great Hall which Wolsey built rising high above the rest. We crossed the river (which is here but a narrow stream) by a stone bridge. The entrance to the palace is about half a quarter of a mile from the railway, through arched gates, which give a long perspective into the several quadrangles. These quadrangles, one beyond another, are paved with stone, and surrounded by the brick walls of the palace, the many windows of which look in upon them. Soldiers were standing sentinel at the exterior gateways, and at the various doors of the palace; but they admitted everybody without question and without fee. Policemen, or other attendants, were in most of the rooms, but interfered with no one; so that, in this respect, it was one of the pleasantest places to visit that I have found in England. A good many people, of all classes, were strolling through the apartments. We first went into Wolsey's great Hall, up a most spacious staircase, the walls and ceiling of which were covered with an allegorical fresco by Verrio, wonderfully bright and well preserved; and without caring about the design or execution, I greatly liked the brilliancy of the colors. The great Hall is a most noble and beautiful room, above a hundred feet long and sixty high and broad. Most of the windows are of stained or painted glass, with elaborate designs, whether modern or ancient I know not, but certainly brilliant in effect. The walls, from the floor to perhaps half their height, are covered with antique tapestry, which, though a good deal faded, still retains color enough to be a very effective adornment, and to give an idea of how rich a mode of decking a noble apartment this must have been. The subjects represented were from Scripture, and the figures seemed colossal. On looking closely at this tapestry, you could see that it was thickly interwoven with threads of gold, still glistening. The windows, except one or two that are long, do not descend below the top of this tapestry, and are therefore twenty or thirty feet above the floor; and this manner of lighting a great room seems to add much to the impressiveness of the enclosed space. The roof is very magnificent, of carved oak, intricately and elaborately arched, and still as perfect to all appearance as when it was first made. There are banners, so fresh in their hues, and so untattered, that I think they must be modern, suspended along beneath the cornice of the hall, and exhibiting Wolsey's arms and badges. On the whole, this is a perfect sight, in its way. Next to the hall there is a withdrawing-room, more than seventy feet long, and twenty-five feet high. The walls of this apartment, too, are covered with ancient tapestry, of allegorical design, but more faded than that of the hall. There is also a stained-glass window; and a marble statue of Venus on a couch, very lean and not very beautiful; and some cartoons of Carlo Cignani, which have left no impression on my memory; likewise, a large model of a splendid palace of some East Indian nabob. I am not sure, after all, that Verrio's frescoed grand staircase was not in another part of the palace; for I remember that we went from it through an immensely long suite of apartments, beginning with the Guard-chamber. All these rooms are wainscoted with oak, which looks new, being, I believe, of the date of King William's reign. Over many of the doorways, or around the panels, there are carvings in wood by Gibbons, representing wreaths of flowers, fruit, and foliage, the most perfectly beautiful that can be conceived; and the wood being of a light hue (lime-wood, I believe), it has a fine effect on the dark oak panelling. The apartments open one beyond another, in long, long, long succession,-- rooms of state, and kings' and queens' bedchambers, and royal closets bigger than ordinary drawing-rooms, so that the whole suite must be half a mile, or it may be a mile, in extent. From the windows you get views of the palace-grounds, broad and stately walks, and groves of trees, and lawns, and fountains, and the Thames and adjacent country beyond. The walls of all these rooms are absolutely covered with pictures, including works of all the great masters, which would require long study before a new eye could enjoy them; and, seeing so many of them at once, and having such a nothing of time to look at them all, I did not even try to see any merit in them. Vandyke's picture of Charles I., on a white horse beneath an arched gateway, made more impression on me than any other, and as I recall it now, it seems as if I could see the king's noble, melancholy face, and armed form, remembered not in picture, but in reality. All Sir Peter Lely's lewd women, and Kneller's too, were in these rooms; and the jolly old stupidity of George III. and his family, many times repeated; and pictures by Titian, Rubens, and other famous hands, intermixed with many by West, which provokingly drew the eye away from their betters. It seems to me that a picture, of all other things, should be by itself; whereas people always congregate them in galleries. To endeavor really to see them, so arranged, is like trying to read a hundred poems at once,--a most absurd attempt. Of all these pictures, I hardly recollect any so well as a ridiculous old travesty of the Resurrection and Last Judgment, where the dead people are represented as coming to life at the sound of the trumpet,--the flesh re-establishing itself on the bones, one man picking up his skull, and putting it on his shoulders,--and all appearing greatly startled, only half awake, and at a loss what to do next. Some devils are dragging away the damned by the heels and on sledges, and above sits the Redeemer and some angelic and sainted people, looking complacently down upon the scene! We saw, in one of the rooms, the funeral canopy beneath which the Duke of Wellington lay in state,--very gorgeous, of black velvet embroidered with silver and adorned with escutcheons; also, the state bed of Queen Anne, broad, and of comfortable appearance, though it was a queen's,--the materials of the curtains, quilt, and furniture, red velvet, still brilliant in hue; also King William's bed and his queen Mary's, with enormously tall posts, and a good deal the worse for time and wear. The last apartment we entered was the gallery containing Raphael's cartoons, which I shall not pretend to admire nor to understand. I can conceive, indeed, that there is a great deal of expression in them, and very probably they may, in every respect, deserve all their fame; but on this point I can give no testimony. To my perception they were a series of very much faded pictures, dimly seen (for this part of the palace was now in shadow), and representing figures neither graceful nor beautiful, nor, as far as I could discern, particularly grand. But I came to them with a wearied mind and eye; and also I had a previous distaste to them through the medium of engravings. But what a noble palace, nobly enriched, is this Hampton Court! The English government does well to keep it up, and to admit the people freely into it, for it is impossible for even a Republican not to feel something like awe--at least a profound respect--for all this state, and for the institutions which are here represented, the sovereigns whose moral magnificence demands such a residence; and its permanence, too, enduring from age to age, and each royal generation adding new splendors to those accumulated by their predecessors. If one views the matter in another way, to be sure, we may feel indignant that such dolt-heads, rowdies, and every way mean people, as many of the English sovereigns have been, should inhabit these stately halls, contrasting its splendors with their littleness; but, on the whole, I readily consented within myself to be impressed for a moment with the feeling that royalty has its glorious side. By no possibility can we ever have such a place in America. Leaving Hampton Court at about four o'clock, we walked through Bushy Park,--a beautiful tract of ground, well wooded with fine old trees, green with moss, all up their twisted trunks,--through several villages, Twickenham among the rest, to Richmond. Before entering Twickenham, we passed a lath-and-plaster castellated edifice, much time-worn, and with the plaster peeling off from the laths, which I fancied might be Horace Walpole's toy-castle. Not that it really could have been; but it was like the image, wretchedly mean and shabby, which one forms of such a place, in its decay. From Hampton Court to the Star and Garter, on Richmond Hill, is about six miles. After glancing cursorily at the prospect, which is famous, and doubtless very extensive and beautiful if the English mistiness would only let it be seen, we took a good dinner in the large and handsome coffee-room of the hotel, and then wended our way to the rail-station, and reached home between eight and nine o'clock. We must have walked not far from fifteen miles in the course of the day. March 25th.--Yesterday, at one o'clock, I called by appointment on Mr. Bennoch, and lunched with him and his partners and clerks. This lunch seems to be a legitimate continuation of the old London custom of the master living at the same table with his apprentices. The meal was a dinner for the latter class. The table was set in an upper room of the establishment; and the dinner was a large joint of roast mutton, to which ten people sat down, including a German silk-merchant as a guest besides myself. Mr. Bennoch was at the head of the table, and one of his partners at the foot. For the apprentices there was porter to drink, and for the partners and guests some sparkling Moselle, and we had a sufficient dinner with agreeable conversation. Bennoch said that G. G------ used to be very fond of these lunches while in England. After lunch, Mr. Bennoch took me round the establishment, which is quite extensive, occupying, I think, two or three adjacent houses, and requiring more. He showed me innumerable packages of ribbons, and other silk manufactures, and all sorts of silks, from the raw thread to the finest fabrics. He then offered to show me some of the curiosities of old London, and took me first to Barber-Surgeons' Hall, in Monkwell Street. It was at this place that the first anatomical studies were instituted in England. At the time of its foundation, the Barbers and Surgeons were one company; but the latter, I believe, are now the exclusive possessors of the Hall. The edifice was built by Inigo Jones, and the principal room is a fine one, with finely carved wood-work on the ceiling and walls. There is a skylight in the roof, letting down a sufficient radiance on the long table beneath, where, no doubt, dead people have been dissected, and where, for many generations, it has been the custom of the society to hold its stated feasts. In this room hangs the most valuable picture by Holbein now in existence, representing the company of Barber-Surgeons kneeling before Henry VIII., and receiving their charter from his hands. The picture is about six feet square. The king is dressed in scarlet, and quite fulfils one's idea of his aspect. The Barber-Surgeons, all portraits, are an assemblage of grave-looking personages, in dark costumes. The company has refused five thousand pounds for this unique picture; and the keeper of the Hall told me that Sir Robert Peel had offered a thousand pounds for liberty to take out only one of the heads, that of a person named Pen, he conditioning to have a perfect fac-simile painted in. I did not see any merit in this head over the others. Beside this great picture hung a most exquisite portrait by Vandyke; an elderly, bearded man, of noble and refined countenance, in a rich, grave dress. There are many other pictures of distinguished men of the company, in long past times, and of some of the kings and great people of England, all darkened with age, and producing a rich and sombre effect, in this stately old hall. Nothing is more curious in London than these ancient localities and customs of the City Companies,--each trade and profession having its own hall, and its own institutions. The keeper next showed us the plate which is used at the banquets. I should like to be present at one of these feasts. I saw also an old vellum manuscript, in black-letter, which appeared to be a record of the proceedings of the company; and at the end there were many pages ruled for further entries, but none had been made in the volume for the last three or four hundred years. I think it was in the neighborhood of Barber-Surgeons' Hall, which stands amid an intricacy of old streets, where I should never have thought of going, that I saw a row of ancient almshouses, of Elizabethan structure. They looked wofully dilapidated. In front of one of them was an inscription, setting forth that some worthy alderman had founded this establishment for the support of six poor men; and these six, or their successors, are still supported, but no larger number, although the value of the property left for that purpose would now suffice for a much larger number. Then Mr. Bennoch took me to Cripplegate, and, entering the door of a house, which proved to be a sexton's residence, we passed by a side entrance into the church-porch of St. Giles, of which the sexton's house seems to be an indivisible contiguity. This is a very ancient church, that escaped the great fire of London. The galleries are supported by arches, the pillars of which are cased high upwards with oak; but all this oaken work and the oaken pews are comparatively modern, though so solid and dark that they agree well enough with the general effect of the church. Proceeding to the high altar, we found it surrounded with many very curious old monuments and memorials, some in carved oak, some in marble; grim old worthies, mostly in the costume of Queen Elizabeth's time. Here was the bust of Speed, the historian; here was the monument of Fox, author of The Book of Martyrs. High up on the wall, beside the altar, there was a black wooden coffin, and a lady sitting upright within it, with her hands clasped in prayer, it being her awakening moment at the Resurrection. Thence we passed down the centre aisle, and about midway we stopped before a marble bust, fixed against one of the pillars. And this was the bust of Milton! Yes, and Milton's bones lay beneath our feet; for he was buried under the pew over the door of which I was leaning. The bust, I believe, is the original of the one in Westminster Abbey. Treading over the tombstones of the old citizens of London, both in the aisles and the porch, and within doors and without, we went into the churchyard, one side of which is fenced in by a portion of London Wall, very solid, and still high, though the accumulation of human dust has covered much of its base. This is the most considerable portion now remaining of the ancient wall of London. The sexton now asked us to go into the tower of the church, that he might show us the oldest part of the structure, and we did so, and, looking down from the organ gallery, I saw a woman sitting alone in the church, waiting for the rector, whose ghostly consolation, I suppose, she needed. This old church-tower was formerly lighted by three large windows,--one of them of very great size; but the thrifty church-wardens of a generation or two ago had built them up with brick, to the great disfigurement of the church. The sexton called my attention to the organ-pipe, which is of sufficient size, I believe, to admit three men. From Cripplegate we went to Milton Street (as it is now called), through which we walked for a very excellent reason; for this is the veritable Grub Street, where my literary kindred of former times used to congregate. It is still a shabby-looking street, with old-fashioned houses, and inhabited chiefly by people of the poorer classes, though not by authors. Next we went to Old Broad Street, and, being joined by Mr. B------, we set off for London Bridge, turning out of our direct course to see London stone in Watling Street. This famous stone appears now to be built into the wall of St. Swithin's Church, and is so encased that you can only see and touch the top of it through a circular hole. There are one or two long cuts or indentations in the top, which are said to have been made by Jack Cade's sword when he struck it against the stone. If so, his sword was of a redoubtable temper. Judging by what I saw, London stone was a rudely shaped and unhewn post. At the London Bridge station, we took the rail for Greenwich, and, it being only about five miles off, we were not long in reaching the town. It was Easter Monday; and during the first three days of Easter, from time immemorial, a fair has been held at Greenwich, and this was what we had come to see. [This fair is described in Our Old Home, in "A Loudon Suburb."] Reaching Mr. Bennoch's house, we found it a pretty and comfortable one, and adorned with many works of art; for he seems to be a patron of art and literature, and a warm-hearted man, of active benevolence and vivid sympathies in many directions. His face shows this. I have never seen eyes of a warmer glow than his. On the walls of one room there were a good many sketches by Haydon, and several artists' proofs of fine engravings, presented by persons to whom he had been kind. In the drawing-room there was a marble bust of Mrs. ------, and one, I think, of himself, and one of the Queen, which Mr. Bennoch said was very good, and it is unlike any other I have seen. It is intended as a gift, from a number of subscribers, to Miss Nightingale. Likewise a crayon sketch of ------, looking rather morbid and unwholesome, as the poor lady really is. Also, a small picture of Mr. Bennoch in a military dress, as an officer, probably of city-horse. By and by came in a young gentleman, son of Haydon, the painter of high art, and one or two ladies staying in the house, and anon Mrs. ------. And so we went in to dinner. Bennoch is an admirable host, and warms his guests like a household fire by the influence of his kindly face and glowing eyes, and by such hospitable demeanor as best suits this aspect. After the cloth was removed, came in Mr. Newton Crosland, a young man who once called on me in Liverpool,--the husband of a literary lady, formerly Camilla Toulmin. The lady herself was coming to spend the evening. The husband (and I presume the wife) is a decided believer in spiritual manifestations. We talked of politics and spiritualism and literature; and before we rose from table, Mr. Bennoch drank the health of the ladies, and especially of Mrs. ------, in terms very kind towards her and me. I responded in her behalf as well as I could, and left it to Mr. Bowman, as a bachelor, to respond for the ladies generally,--which he did briefly, toasting Mrs. B------. We had heard the sound of the piano in the drawing-room for some time, and now adjourning thither, I had the pleasure to be introduced to Mrs. Newton Crosland,--a rather tall, thin, pale, and lady-like person, looking, I thought, of a sensitive character. She expressed in a low tone and quiet way great delight at seeing my distinguished self! for she is a vast admirer of The Scarlet Letter, and especially of the character of Hester; indeed, I remember seeing a most favorable criticism of the book from her pen, in one of the London magazines. . . . . At eleven o'clock Mrs. Crosland entered the tiniest pony-carriage, and set forth for her own residence, with a lad walking at the pony's head, and carrying a lantern. . . . . March 26th.--Yesterday was not a very eventful day. After writing in my journal I went out at twelve, and visited, for the first time, the National Gallery. It is of no use for me to criticise pictures, or to try to describe them, but I have an idea that I might acquire a taste, with a little attention to the subject, for I find I already begin to prefer some pictures to others. This is encouraging. Of those that I saw yesterday, I think I liked several by Murillo best. There were a great many people in the gallery, almost entirely of the middle, with a few of the lower classes; and I should think that the effect of the exhibition must at least tend towards refinement. Nevertheless, the only emotion that I saw displayed was in broad grins on the faces of a man and two women, at sight of a small picture of Venus, with a Satyr peeping at her with an expression of gross animal delight and merriment. Without being aware of it, this man and the two women were of that same Satyr breed. If I lived in London, I would endeavor to educate myself in this and other galleries of art; but as the case stands, it would be of no use. I saw two of Turner's landscapes; but did not see so much beauty in them as in some of Claude's. A view of the grand canal in Venice, by Canaletto, seemed to me wonderful,--absolutely perfect,--a better reality, for I could see the water of the canal moving and dimpling; and the palaces and buildings on each side were quite as good in their way. Leaving the gallery, I walked down into the city, and passed through Smithfield, where I glanced at St. Bartholomew's Hospital. . . . . Then I went into St. Paul's, and walked all round the great cathedral, looking, I believe, at every monument on the floor. There is certainly nothing very wonderful in any of them, and I do wish it would not so generally happen that English warriors go into battle almost nude; at least, we must suppose so, from their invariably receiving their death-wounds in that condition. I will not believe that a sculptor or a painter is a man of genius unless he can wake the nobleness of his subject, illuminate and transfigure any given pattern of coat and breeches. Nevertheless, I never go into St. Paul's without being impressed anew with the grandeur of the edifice, and the general effect of these same groups of statuary ranged in their niches and at the bases of the pillars as adornments of the cathedral. Coming homeward, I went into the enclosure of the Temple, and near the entrance saw "Dr. Johnson's staircase" printed over a doorway; so I not only looked in, but went up the first flight, of some broad, well-worn stairs, passing my hand over a heavy, ancient, broken balustrade, on which, no doubt, Johnson's hand had often rested. It was here that Boswell used to visit him, in their early acquaintance. Before my lunch, I had gone into Bolt Court, where he died. This morning there have been letters from Mr. Wilding, enclosing an invitation to me to be one of the stewards of the anniversary dinner of the Literary Fund. No, I thank you, gentlemen! March 27th.--Yesterday I went out at about twelve, and visited the British Museum; an exceedingly tiresome affair. It quite crushes a person to see so much at once, and I wandered from hall to hall with a weary and heavy heart, wishing (Heaven forgive me!) that the Elgin marbles and the frieze of the Parthenon were all burnt into lime, and that the granite Egyptian statues were hewn and squared into building-stones, and that the mummies had all turned to dust two thousand years ago; and, in fine, that all the material relics of so many successive ages had disappeared with the generations that produced them. The present is burdened too much with the past. We have not time, in our earthly existence, to appreciate what is warm with life, and immediately around us; yet we heap up these old shells, out of which human life has long emerged, casting them off forever. I do not see how future ages are to stagger onward under all this dead weight, with the additions that will be continually made to it. After leaving the Museum, I went to see Bennoch, and arrange with him our expedition of to-day; and he read me a letter from Topper, very earnestly inviting me to come and spend a night or two with him. Then I wandered about the city, and was lost in the vicinity of Holborn; so that for a long while I was under a spell of bewilderment, and kept returning, in the strangest way, to the same point in Lincoln's Inn Fields. . . . . Mr. Bowman and I went to the Princess's Theatre in the evening. Charles Kean performed in Louis XI. very well indeed,--a thoughtful and highly skilled actor,--much improved since I saw him, many years ago, in America. ALDERSHOTT CAMP. April 1st.--After my last date on Thursday, I visited the National Gallery. At three o'clock, having packed a travelling-bag, I went to Bennoch's office, and lunched with him; and at about five we took the rail from the Waterloo station for Aldershott Camp. At Tamborough we were cordially received by Lieutenant Shaw, of the North Cork Rifles, and were escorted by him, in a fly, to his quarters. The camp is a large city, composed of numberless wooden barracks, arranged in regular streets, on a wide, bleak heath, with an extensive and dreary prospect on all sides. Lieutenant Shaw assigned me one room in his hut, and Bennoch another, and made us as comfortable as kind hospitality could; but the huts are very small, and the rooms have no size at all; neither are they air-tight, and the sharp wind whistles in at the crevices; and, on the whole, of all discomfortable places, I am inclined to reckon Aldershott Camp the most so. I suppose the government has placed the camp on that windy heath, and built such wretched huts, for the very purpose of rendering life as little desirable as may be to the soldiers, so that they should throw it away the more willingly. At seven o'clock we dined at the regimental mess, with the officers of the North Cork. The mess-room is by far the most endurable place to be found in camp. The hut is large, and the mess-room is capable of receiving between thirty and forty guests, besides the officers of the regiment, when a great dinner-party is given. As I saw it, the whole space was divided into a dining-room and two anterooms by red curtains drawn across; and the second anteroom seems to be a general rendezvous for the officers, where they meet at all times, and talk, or look over the newspapers and the army-register, which constitute the chief of their reading. The Colonel and Lieutenant-Colonel of the regiment received Bennoch and me with great cordiality, as did all the other officers, and we sat down to a splendid dinner. All the officers of the regiment are Irishmen, and all of them, I believe, men of fortune; and they do what they can towards alleviating their hardships in camp by eating and drinking of the best that can be obtained of all good things. The table service and plate were as fine as those in any nobleman's establishment; the dishes numerous and admirably got up; and the wines delectable and genuine,--as they had need to be; for there is a great consumption of them. I liked these Irish officers exceedingly;--not that it would be possible to live long among them without finding existence a bore; for they have no thought, no intellectual movement, no ideas, that I was aware of, beyond horses, dogs, drill, garrisons, field-days, whist, wine, cigars, and all that kind of thing; yet they were really gentlemen living on the best terms with one another,--courteous, kind, most hospitable, with a rich Irish humor, softened down by social refinements,--not too refined either, but a most happy sort of behavior, as natural as that of children, and with a safe freedom that made one feel entirely at my ease. I think well of the Irish gentlemen, for their sakes; and I believe I might fairly attribute to Lieutenant-Colonel Stowell (next whom I sat) a higher and finer cultivation than the above description indicates. Indeed, many of them may have been capable of much more intellectual intercourse than that of the mess-table; but I suppose it would not have been in keeping with their camp life, nor suggested by it. Several of the elder officers were men who had been long in the army; and the Colonel--a bluff, hearty old soldier, with a profile like an eagle's head and beak--was a veteran of the Peninsula, and had a medal on his breast with clasps for three famous battles besides that of Waterloo. The regimental band played during dinner, and the Lieutenant-Colonel apologized to me for its not playing "Hail Columbia," the tune not coning within their musical accomplishments. It was no great matter, however; for I should not have distinguished it from any other tune; but, to do me what honor was possible, in the way of national airs, the band was ordered to play a series of negro melodies, and I was entirely satisfied. It is really funny that the "wood-notes wild" of those poor black slaves should have been played in a foreign laud as an honorable compliment to one of their white countrymen. After dinner we played whist, and then had some broiled bones for supper, and finally went home to our respective huts not much earlier than four o'clock. But I don't wonder these gentlemen sit up as long as they can keep their eyes open; for never was there anything so utterly comfortless as their camp-beds. They are really worse than the bed of honor, no wider, no softer, no warmer, and affording not nearly so sound sleep. Indeed, I got hardly any sleep at all, and almost as soon as I did close my eyes, the bugles sounded, and the drums beat reveille, and from that moment the camp was all astir; so I pretty soon uprose, and went to the mess-room for my breakfast, feeling wonderfully fresh and well, considering what my night had been. Long before this, however, this whole regiment, and all the other regiments, marched off to take part in a general review, and Bennoch and I followed, as soon as we had eaten a few mutton-chops. It was a bright, sunshiny day; but with a strong east-wind, as piercing and pitiless as ever blew; and this wide, undulating plain of Aldershott seemed just the place where the east-wind was at home. Still, it acted, on the whole, like an invigorating cordial; and whereas in pleasanter circumstances I should have lain down, and gone to sleep, I now felt as if I could do without sleep for a month. In due time we found out the place of the North Cork Regiment in the general battle-array, and were greeted as old comrades by the Colonel and other officers. Soon the soldiers (who, when we first reached them, were strolling about, or standing at ease) were called into order; and anon we saw a group of mounted officers riding along the lines, and among them a gentleman in a civilian's round hat, and plain frock and trousers, riding on a white horse. This group of riders turned the front of the regiment, and then passed along the rear, coming close to where we stood; and as the plainly dressed gentleman rode by, he bent towards me, and I tried to raise my hat, but did not succeed very well, because the fierce wind had compelled me to jam it tightly upon my head. The Duke of Cambridge (for this was he) is a comely-looking gentlemanly man, of bluff English face, with a great deal of brown beard about it. Though a pretty tall man, he appears, on horseback, broad and round in proportion to his height. I looked at him with a certain sort of interest, and a feeling of kindness; for one does feel kindly to whatever human being is anywise marked out from the rest, unless it be by his disagreeable qualities. The troops, from twelve to fifteen thousand, now fell into marching order, and went to attack a wood, where we were to suppose the enemy to be stationed. The sham-fight seemed to me rather clumsily managed, and without any striking incident or result. The officers had prophesied, the night before, that General K------, commanding in the camp, would make a muddle of it; and probably he did. After the review, the Duke of Cambridge with his attendant officers took their station, and all the regiments marched in front of him, saluting as they passed. As each colonel rode by, and as the banner of each regiment was lowered, the Duke lifted his hat. The most splendid effect of this parade was the gleam of the sun upon the long line of bayonets,--the sheen of all that steel appearing like a wavering fringe of light upon the dark masses of troops below. It was very fine. But I was glad when all was done, and I could go back to the mess-room, whither I carried an excellent appetite for luncheon. After this we walked about the camp,--looked at some model tents, inspected the arrangements and modes of living in the huts of the privates; and thus gained more and more adequate ideas of the vile uncomfortableness of a military life. Finally, I went to the anteroom and turned over the regimental literature,--a peerage and baronetage,--an army and militia register, a number of the Sporting Magazine, and one of the United Service, while Bennoch took another walk. Before dinner we both tried to catch a little nap by way of compensation for last night's deficiencies; but, for my part, the attempt was fruitless. The dinner was as splendid and as agreeable as that of the evening before; and I believe it was nearly two o'clock when Bennoch and I bade farewell to our kind entertainers. For my part I fraternized with these military gentlemen in a way that augurs the very best things for the future peace of the two countries. They all expressed the warmest sympathies towards America and it was easy to judge from their conversation that there is no real friendliness on the part of the military towards the French. The old antipathy is just as strong as ever,--stronger than ever, perhaps, on account of the comparatively more brilliant success of the French in this Russian war. So, with most Christian sentiments of peace and brotherly love, we returned to our hut, and lay down, each in his narrow bed. Early in the morning the drums and bugles began the usual bedevilment; and shortly after six I dressed, and we had breakfast at the mess-room, shook hands with Lieutenant Shaw (our more especial host), and drove off to the railway station at Ash. I know not whether I have mentioned that the villages neighboring to the camp have suffered terribly as regards morality from the vicinity of the soldiers. Quiet old English towns, that till within a little time ago had kept their antique simplicity and innocence, have now no such thing as female virtue in them, so far as the lower classes are concerned. This is expressing the matter too strongly, no doubt; but there is too much truth in it, nevertheless; and one of the officers remarked that even ladies of respectability had grown much more free in manners and conversation than at first. I have heard observations similar to this from a Nova-Scotian, in reference to the moral influence of soldiers when stationed in the provinces. WOOTON. Wooton stands in a hollow, near the summit of one of the long swells that here undulate over the face of the country. There is a good deal of wood behind it, as should be the case with the residence of the author of the Sylva; but I believe few, if any, of these trees are known to have been planted by John Evelyn, or even to have been coeval with his time. The house is of brick, partly ancient, and consists of a front and two projecting wings, with a porch and entrance in the centre. It has a desolate, meagre aspect, and needs something to give it life and stir and jollity. The present proprietor is of the old Evelyn family, and is now one of the two members of Parliament for Surrey; but he is a very shy and retiring man, unmarried, sees little company, and seems either not to know how to make himself comfortable or not to care about it. A servant told us that Mr. ------ had just gone out, but Tupper, who is apparently on intimate terms with him, thought it best that we should go into the house, while he went in search of the master. So the servant ushered us through a hall,--where were many family pictures by Lely, and, for aught I know, by Vandyke, and by Kneller, and other famous painters,--up a grand staircase, and into the library, the inner room of which contained the ponderous volumes which John Evelyn used to read. Nevertheless, it was a room of most barren aspect, without a carpet on the floor, with pine bookcases, with a common whitewashed ceiling, with no luxurious study-chairs, and without a fire. There was an open folio on the table, and a sheet of manuscript that appeared to have been recently written. I took down a book from the shelves (a volume of annals, connected with English history), and Tupper afterwards told us that this one single volume, for its rarity, was worth either two or three hundred pounds. Against one of the windows of this library there grows a magnolia-tree, with a very large stem, and at least fifty years old. Mrs. Tupper and I waited a good while, and then Bennoch and Tupper came back, without having found Mr. ------. Tupper wished very much to show the prayer-book used by King Charles at his execution, and some curious old manuscript volumes; but the servant said that his master always kept these treasures locked up, and trusted the key to nobody. We therefore had to take our leave without seeing them; and I have not often entered a house that one feels to be more forlorn than Wooton,--although we did have a glimpse of a dining-room, with a table laid for three or four guests, and looking quite brilliant with plate and glass and snowy napery. There was a fire, too, in this one room. Mr. ------ is making extensive alterations in the house, or has recently done so, and this is perhaps one reason of its ungenial meagreness and lack of finish. Before our departure from Wooton, Tupper had asked me to leave my card for Mr. ------; but I had no mind to overstep any limit of formal courtesy in dealing with an Englishman, and therefore declined. Tupper, however, on his own responsibility, wrote his name, Bennoch's, and mine on a piece of paper, and told the servant to show them to Mr. ------. We soon had experience of the good effect of this; for we had scarcely got back before somebody drove up to Tupper's door, and one of the girls, looking out, exclaimed that there was Mr. ------ himself, and another gentleman. He had set out, the instant he heard of our call, to bring the three precious volumes for me to see. This surely was most kind; a kindness which I should never have dreamed of expecting from a shy, retiring man like Mr. ------. So he and his friend were ushered into the dining-room, and introduced. Mr. ------ is a young-looking man, dark, with a mustache, rather small, and though he has the manners of a man who has seen the world, it evidently requires an effort in him to speak to anybody; and I could see his whole person slightly writhing itself, as it were, while he addressed me. This is strange in a man of his public position, member for the county, necessarily mixed up with life in many forms, the possessor of sixteen thousand pounds a year, and the representative of an ancient name. Nevertheless, I liked him, and felt as if I could become intimately acquainted with him, if circumstances were favorable; but, at a brief interview like this, it was hopeless to break through two great reserves; so I talked more with his companion--a pleasant young man, fresh from college, I should imagine--than with Mr. ------ himself. The three books were really of very great interest. One was an octavo volume of manuscript in John Evelyn's own hand, the beginning of his published diary, written as distinctly as print, in a small, clear character. It can be read just as easily as any printed book. Another was a Church of England prayer-book, which King Charles used on the scaffold, and which was stained with his sacred blood, and underneath are two or three lines in John Evelyn's hand, certifying this to be the very book. It is an octavo, or small folio, and seems to have been very little used, scarcely opened, except in one spot; its leaves elsewhere retaining their original freshness and elasticity. It opens most readily at the commencement of the common service; and there, on the left-hand page, is a discoloration, of a yellowish or brownish hue, about two thirds of an inch large, which, two hundred years ago and a little more, was doubtless red. For on that page had fallen a drop of King Charles's blood. The other volume was large, and contained a great many original letters, written by the king during his troubles. I had not time to examine them with any minuteness, and remember only one document, which Mr. ------ pointed out, and which had a strange pathos and pitifulness in it. It was a sort of due-bill, promising to pay a small sum for beer, which had been supplied to his Majesty, so soon as God should enable him, or the distracted circumstances of his kingdom make it possible,--or some touching and helpless expression of that kind. Prince Hal seemed to consider it an unworthy matter, that a great prince should think of "that poor creature, small beer," at all; but that a great prince should not be able to pay for it is far worse. Mr. ------ expressed his regret that I was not staying longer in this part of the country, as he would gladly have seen me at Wooten, and he succeeded in saying something about my books; and I hope I partly succeeded in showing him that I was very sensible of his kindness in letting me see those relics. I cannot say whether or no I expressed it sufficiently. It is better with such a man, or, indeed, with any man, to say too little than too much; and, in fact, it would have been indecorous in me to take too much of his kindness to my own share, Bennoch being likewise in question. We had a cup of coffee, and then took our leave; Tupper accompanying us part way down the village street, and bidding us an affectionate farewell. BATTLE ABBEY. Bennoch and I recommenced our travels, and, changing from one railway to another, reached Tunbridge Wells at nine or ten in the evening. . . . . The next day was spent at Tunbridge Wells, which is famous for a chalybeate spring, and is a watering-place of note, most healthily situated on a high, breezy hill, with many pleasant walks in the neighborhood. . . . . From Tunbridge Wells we transported ourselves to Battle,--the village in which is Battle Abbey. It is a large village, with many antique houses and some new ones; and in its principal street, on one side, with a wide, green space before it, you see the gray, embattled, outer wall, and great, square, battlemented entrance tower (with a turret at each corner), of the ancient Abbey. It is the perfect reality of a Gothic battlement and gateway, just as solid and massive as when it was first built, though hoary and venerable with the many intervening centuries. There are only two days in the week on which visitors are allowed entrance, and this was not one of them. Nevertheless, Bennoch was determined to get in, and he wished me to send Lady Webster my card with his own; but this I utterly refused, for the honor of America and for my own honor; because I will not do anything to increase the reputation we already have as a very forward people. Bennoch, however, called at a bookshop on the other side of the street, near the gateway of the castle; and making friends, as he has a marvellous tact in doing, with the bookseller, the latter offered to take in his card to the housekeeper, and see if Lady Webster would not relax her rule in our favor. Meanwhile, we went into the old church of Battle, which was built in Norman times, though subsequently to the Abbey. As we entered the church door, the bell rang for joy at the news of peace, which had just been announced by the London papers. The church has been whitewashed in modern times, and does not look so venerable as it ought, with its arches and pillared aisles. In the chancel stands a marble tomb, heavy, rich, and elaborate, on the top of which lie the broken-nosed statues of Sir Anthony Browne and his lady, who were the Lord and Lady of Battle Abbey in Henry VIII.'s time. The knight is in armor, and the lady in stately garb, and (save for their broken noses) they are in excellent preservation. The pavement of the chancel and aisles is all laid with tombstones, and on two or three of these there were engraved brasses, representing knights in armor, and churchmen, with inscriptions in Latin. Some of them are very old. On the walls, too, there are various monuments, principally of dignitaries connected with the Abbey. Two hatchments, in honor of persons recently dead, were likewise suspended in the chancel. The best pew of the church is, of course, that of the Webster family. It is curtained round, carpeted, furnished with chairs and footstools, and more resembles a parlor than a pew; especially as there is a fireplace in one of the pointed archways, which I suppose has been bricked up in order to form it. On the opposite side of the aisle is the pew of some other magnate, containing a stove. The rest of the parishioners have to keep themselves warm with the fervor of their own piety. I have forgotten what else was interesting, except that we were shown a stone coffin, recently dug up, in which was hollowed a place for the head of the corpse. Returning to the bookshop, we found that Lady Webster had sent her compliments, and would be very happy to have us see the Abbey. How thoroughly kind these English people can be when they like, and how often they like to be so! We lost no time in ringing the bell at the arched entrance, under the great tower, and were admitted by an old woman who lives, I believe, in the thickness of the wall. She told us her room used to be the prison of the Abbey, and under the great arch she pointed to a projecting beam, where she said criminals used to be hanged. At two of the intersecting points of the arches, which form the roof of the gateway, were carved faces of stone, said to represent King Harold and William the Conqueror. The exterior wall, of which this tower is the gateway, extends far along the village street, and encloses a very large space, within which stands the mansion, quite secluded from unauthorized visitors, or even from the sight of those without, unless it be at very distant eyeshot. We rang at the principal door of the edifice (it is under a deep arch, in the Norman style, but of modern date), and a footman let its in, and then delivered us over to a respectable old lady in black. She was a Frenchwoman by birth, but had been very long in the service of the family, and spoke English almost without an accent; her French blood being indicated only by her thin and withered aspect, and a greater gentility of manner than would have been seen in an Englishwoman of similar station. She ushered us first into a grand and noble hall, the arched and carved oaken roof of which ascended into the gable. It was nearly sixty feet long, and its height equal to its length,--as stately a hall, I should imagine, as is anywhere to be found in a private mansion. It was lighted, at one end, by a great window, beneath which, occupying the whole breadth of the hall, hung a vast picture of the Battle of Hastings; and whether a good picture or no, it was a rich adornment of the hall. The walls were wainscoted high upward with oak: they were almost covered with noble pictures of ancestry, and of kings and great men, and beautiful women; there were trophies of armor hung aloft; and two armed figures, one in brass mail, the other in bright steel, stood on a raised dais, underneath the great picture. At the end of the hall, opposite the picture, a third of the way up towards the roof, was a gallery. All these things that I have enumerated were in perfect condition, without rust, untouched by decay or injury of any kind; but yet they seemed to belong to a past age, and were mellowed, softened in their splendor, a little dimmed with time,--toned down into a venerable magnificence. Of all domestic things that I have seen in England, it satisfied me most. Then the Frenchwoman showed us into various rooms and offices, most of which were contrived out of the old abbey-cloisters, and the vaulted cells and apartments in which the monks used to live. If any house be haunted, I should suppose this might be. If any church-property bring a curse with it, as people say, I do not see how the owners of Battle Abbey can escape it, taking possession of and dwelling in these holy precincts, as they have done, and laying their kitchen hearth with the stones of overthrown altars. The Abbey was first granted, I believe, to Sir Anthony Browne, whom I saw asleep with his lady in the church. It was his first wife. I wish it had been his second; for she was Surrey's Geraldine. The posterity of Sir Anthony kept the place till 1719, and then sold it to the Websters, a family of Baronets, who are still the owners and occupants. The present proprietor is Sir Augustus Webster, whose mother is the lady that so kindly let us into the Abbey. Mr. Bennoch gave the nice old French lady half a crown, and we next went round among the ruined portions of the Abbey, under the gardener's guidance. We saw two ivied towers, insulated from all other ruins; and an old refectory, open to the sky, and a vaulted crypt, supported by pillars; and we saw, too, the foundation and scanty remains of a chapel, which had been long buried out of sight of man, and only dug up within present memory,--about forty years ago. There had always been a tradition that this was the spot where Harold had planted his standard, and where his body was found after the battle; and the discovery of the ruined chapel confirmed the tradition. I might have seen a great deal more, had there been time; and I have forgotten much of what I did see; but it is an exceedingly interesting place. There is an avenue of old yew-trees, which meet above like a cloistered arch; and this is called the Monks' Walk. I rather think they were ivy, though growing unsupported. As we were retiring, the gardener suddenly stopped, as if he were alarmed, and motioned to us to do the same, saying, "I believe it is my lady!" And so it was,--a tall and stately lady in black, trimming shrubs in the garden. She bowed to us very graciously,--we raised our hats, and thus we met and parted without more ado. As we went through the arch of the entrance tower, Bennoch gave the old female warder a shilling, and the gardener followed us to get half a crown. HASTINGS. We took a fly and driver from the principal hotel of Battle, and drove off for Hastings, about seven miles distant. Hastings is now a famous watering and sea-bathing place, and seems to be well sheltered from the winds, though open to the sea, which here stretches off towards France. We climbed a high and steep hill, terraced round its base with streets of modern lodging-houses, and crowned on its summit with the ruins of a castle, the foundation of which was anterior to the Conquest. This castle has no wall towards the sea, the precipice being too high and sheer to admit of attack on that side. I have quite exhausted my descriptive faculty for the present, so shall say nothing of this old castle, which indeed (the remains being somewhat scanty and scraggling) is chiefly picturesque and interesting from its bold position on such a headlong hill. Clambering down on another side from that of our ascent, we entered the town of Hastings, which seems entirely modern, and made up of lodging-houses, shops, hotels, parades, and all such makings up of watering-places generally. We took a delightful warm bath, washing off all weariness and naughtiness, and coming out new men. Then we walked to St. Leonard's,--a part of Hastings, I believe, but a mile or two from the castle, and there called at the lodgings of two friends of Bennoch. These were Mr. Martin, the author of Bon Gaultier's ballads, and his wife, the celebrated actress, Helen Faucett. Mr. Martin is a barrister, a gentleman whose face and manners suited me at once; a simple, refined, sincere, not too demonstrative person. His wife, too, I liked; a tall, dark, fine, and lady-like woman, with the simplest manners, that give no trouble at all, and so must be perfect. With these two persons I felt myself, almost in a moment, on friendly terms, and in true accord, and so I talked, I think, more than I have at any time since coming to London. We took a pleasant lunch at their house; and then they walked with us to the railway station, and there they took leave of Bennoch affectionately and of me hardly less so; for, in truth, we had grown to be almost friends in this very little while. And as we rattled away, I said to Bennoch earnestly, "What good people they are!"--and Bennoch smiled, as if he had known perfectly well that I should think and say so. And thus we rushed onward to London; and I reached St. James's Place between nine and ten o'clock, after a very interesting tour, the record of which I wish I could have kept as we went along, writing each day's history before another day's adventures began. END OF VOL. I. PASSAGES FROM THE ENGLISH NOTE-BOOKS OF NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE VOL. II. PASSAGES FROM HAWTHORNE'S ENGLISH NOTE-BOOKS. LONDON.--MILTON-CLUB DINNER. April 4th, 1856.--On Tuesday I went to No. 14 Ludgate Hill, to dine with Bennoch at the Milton Club; a club recently founded for dissenters, nonconformists, and people whose ideas, religious or political, are not precisely in train with the establishment in church and state. I was shown into a large reading-room, well provided with periodicals and newspapers, and found two or three persons there; but Bennoch had not yet arrived. In a few moments, a tall gentleman with white hair came in,--a fine and intelligent-looking man, whom I guessed to be one of those who were to meet me. He walked about, glancing at the periodicals; and soon entered Mr. Tupper, and, without seeing me, exchanged warm greetings with the white-haired gentleman. "I suppose," began Mr. Tupper, "you have come to meet--" Now, conscious that my name was going to be spoken, and not knowing but the excellent Mr. Tupper might say something which he would not, quite like me to overhear, I advanced at once, with outstretched hand, and saluted him. He expressed great joy at the recognition, and immediately introduced me to Mr. Hall. The dining-room was pretty large and lofty, and there were sixteen guests at table, most of them authors, or people connected with the press; so that the party represented a great deal of the working intellect of London at this present day and moment,--the men whose plays, whose songs, whose articles, are just now in vogue. Mr. Tom Taylor was one of the very few whose writings I had known anything about. He is a tall, slender, dark young man, not English-looking, and wearing colored spectacles, so that I should readily have taken him for an American literary man. I did not have much opportunity of talking with him, nor with anybody else, except Dr. ------, who seemed a shrewd, sensible man, with a certain slight acerbity of thought. Mr. Herbert Ingram, recently elected member of Parliament, was likewise present, and sat on Bennoch's left. It was a very good dinner, with an abundance of wine, which Bennoch sent round faster than was for the next day's comfort of his guests. It is singular that I should thus far have quite forgotten W------ H--------, whose books I know better than those of any other person there. He is a white-headed, stout, firm-looking, and rather wrinkled-faced old gentleman, whose temper, I should imagine, was not the very sweetest in the world. There is all abruptness, a kind of sub-acidity, if not bitterness, in his address; he seemed not to be, in short, so genial as I should have anticipated from his books. As soon as the cloth was removed, Bennoch, without rising from his chair, made a speech in honor of his eminent and distinguished guest, which illustrious person happened to be sitting in the selfsame chair that I myself occupied. I have no recollection of what he said, nor of what I said in reply, but I remember that both of us were cheered and applauded much more than the occasion deserved. Then followed about fifty other speeches; for every single individual at table was called up (as Tupper said, "toasted and roasted"), and, for my part, I was done entirely brown (to continue T-----'s figure). Everybody said something kind, not a word or idea of which can I find in my memory. Certainly, if I never get any more praise in my life, I have had enough of it for once. I made another little bit of a speech, too, in response to something that was said in reference to the present difficulties between England and America, and ended, as a proof that I deemed war impossible, with drinking success to the British army, and calling on Lieutenant Shaw, of the Aldershott Camp, to reply. I am afraid I must have said something very wrong, for the applause was vociferous, and I could hear the gentlemen whispering about the table, "Good!" "Good!" "Yes, he is a fine fellow,"--and other such ill-earned praises; and I took shame to myself, and held my tongue (publicly) the rest of the evening. But in such cases something must be allowed to the excitement of the moment, and to the effect of kindness and goodwill, so broadly and warmly displayed; and even a sincere man must not be held to speak as if he were under oath. We separated, in a blessed state of contentment with one another, at about eleven; and (lest I should starve before morning) I went with Mr. D------ to take supper at his house in Park Lane. Mr. D------ is a pale young gentleman, of American aspect, being a West-Indian by birth. He is one of the principal writers of editorials for the Times. We were accompanied in the carriage by another gentleman, Mr. M------, who is connected with the management of the same paper. He wrote the letters from Scutari, which drew so much attention to the state of the hospitals. Mr. D------ is the husband of the former Miss ------, the actress, and when we reached his house, we found that she had just come home from the theatre, and was taking off her stage-dress. Anon she came down to the drawing-room,--a seemingly good, simple, and intelligent lady, not at all pretty, and, I should think, older than her husband. She was very kind to me, and told me that she had read one of my books--The House of the Seven Gables--thirteen years ago; which I thought remarkable, because I did not write it till eight or nine years afterwards. The principal talk during supper (which consisted of Welsh-rabbit and biscuits, with champagne and sodawater) was about the Times, and the two contributors expressed vast admiration of Mr. ------, who has the chief editorial management of the paper. It is odd to find how little we outsiders know of men who really exercise a vast influence on affairs, for this Mr. ------ is certainly of far more importance in the world than a minister of state. He writes nothing himself; but the character of the Times seems to depend upon his intuitive, unerring judgment; and if ever he is absent from his post, even for a day or two, they say that the paper immediately shows it. In reply to my questions, they appeared to acknowledge that he was a man of expediency, but of a very high expediency, and that he gave the public the very best principles which it was capable of receiving. Perhaps it may be so: the Times's articles are certainly not written in so high a moral vein as might be wished; but what they lack in height they gain in breadth. Every sensible man in England finds his own best common-sense there; and, in effect, I think its influence is wholesome. Apropos of public speaking, Dr. ------ said that Sir Lytton Bulwer asked him (I think the anecdote was personal to himself) whether he felt his heart beat when he was going to speak. "Yes." "Does your voice frighten you?" "Yes." "Do all your ideas forsake you?" "Yes." "Do you wish the floor to open and swallow you?" "Yes." "Why, then, you'll make an orator!" Dr. ------ told of Canning, too, how once, before rising to speak in the House of Commons, he bade his friend feel his pulse, which was throbbing terrifically. "I know I shall make one of my best speeches," said Canning, "because I'm in such an awful funk!" President Pierce, who has a great deal of oratorical power, is subject to a similar horror and reluctance. REFORM-CLUB DINNER. April 5th.--On Thursday, at eight o'clock, I went to the Reform Club, to dine with Dr. ------. The waiter admitted me into a great basement hall, with a tessellated or mosaic or somehow figured floor of stone, and lighted from a dome of lofty height. In a few minutes Dr. ------ appeared, and showed me about the edifice, which is very noble and of a substantial magnificence that was most satisfactory to behold,--no wood-work imitating better materials, but pillars and balustrades of marble, and everything what it purports to be. The reading-room is very large, and luxuriously comfortable, and contains an admirable library: there are rooms and conveniences for every possible purpose; and whatever material for enjoyment a bachelor may need, or ought to have, he can surely find it here, and on such reasonable terms that a small income will do as much for him as a far greater one on any other system. In a colonnade, on the first floor, surrounding the great basement hall, there are portraits of distinguished reformers, and black niches for others yet to come. Joseph Hume, I believe, is destined to fill one of these blanks; but I remarked that the larger part of the portraits, already hung up, are of men of high rank,--the Duke of Sussex, for instance; Lord Durham, Lord Grey; and, indeed, I remember no commoner. In one room, I saw on the wall the fac-simile, so common in the United States, of our Declaration of Independence. Descending again to the basement hall, an elderly gentleman came in, and was warmly welcomed by Dr. ------. He was a very short man, but with breadth enough, and a back excessively bent,--bowed almost to deformity; very gray hair, and a face and expression of remarkable briskness and intelligence. His profile came out pretty boldly, and his eyes had the prominence that indicates, I believe, volubility of speech, nor did he fail to talk from the instant of his appearance; and in the tone of his voice, and in his glance, and in the whole man, there was something racy,--a flavor of the humorist. His step was that of an aged man, and he put his stick down very decidedly at every footfall; though as he afterwards told me that he was only fifty-two, he need not yet have been infirm. But perhaps he has had the gout; his feet, however, are by no means swollen, but unusually small. Dr. ------ introduced him as Mr. Douglas Jerrold, and we went into the coffee-room to dine. The coffee-room occupies one whole side of the edifice, and is provided with a great many tables, calculated for three or four persons to dine at; and we sat down at one of these, and Dr. ------ ordered some mulligatawny soup, and a bottle of white French wine. The waiters in the coffee-room are very numerous, and most of them dressed in the livery of the Club, comprising plush breeches and white-silk stockings; for these English Reformers do not seem to include Republican simplicity of manners in their system. Neither, perhaps, is it anywise essential. After the soup, we had turbot, and by and by a bottle of Chateau Margaux, very delectable; and then some lambs' feet, delicately done, and some cutlets of I know not what peculiar type; and finally a ptarmigan, which is of the same race of birds as the grouse, but feeds high up towards the summits of the Scotch mountains. Then some cheese, and a bottle of Chambertin. It was a very pleasant dinner, and my companions were both very agreeable men; both taking a shrewd, satirical, yet not ill-natured, view of life and people, and as for Mr. Douglas Jerrold, he often reminded me of E---- C------, in the richer veins of the latter, both by his face and expression, and by a tincture of something at once wise and humorously absurd in what he said. But I think he has a kinder, more genial, wholesomer nature than E----, and under a very thin crust of outward acerbity I grew sensible of a very warm heart, and even of much simplicity of character in this man, born in London, and accustomed always to London life. I wish I had any faculty whatever of remembering what people say; but, though I appreciate anything good at the moment, it never stays in my memory; nor do I think, in fact, that anything definite, rounded, pointed, separable, and transferable from the general lump of conversation was said by anybody. I recollect that they laughed at Mr. ------, and at his shedding a tear into a Scottish river, on occasion of some literary festival. . . . . They spoke approvingly of Bulwer, as valuing his literary position, and holding himself one of the brotherhood of authors; and not so approvingly of Charles Dickens, who, born a plebeian, aspires to aristocratic society. But I said that it was easy to condescend, and that Bulwer knew he could not put off his rank, and that he would have all the advantages of it in spite of his authorship. We talked about the position of men of letters in England, and they said that the aristocracy hated and despised and feared them; and I asked why it was that literary men, having really so much power in their hands, were content to live unrecognized in the State. Douglas Jerrold talked of Thackeray and his success in America, and said that he himself purposed going and had been invited thither to lecture. I asked him whether it was pleasant to a writer of plays to see them performed; and he said it was intolerable, the presentation of the author's idea being so imperfect; and Dr. ------ observed that it was excruciating to hear one of his own songs sung. Jerrold spoke of the Duke of Devonshire with great warmth, as a true, honest, simple, most kind-hearted man, from whom he himself had received great courtesies and kindnesses (not, as I understood, in the way of patronage or essential favors); and I (Heaven forgive me!) queried within myself whether this English reforming author would have been quite so sensible of the Duke's excellence if his Grace had not been a duke. But indeed, a nobleman, who is at the same time a true and whole-hearted man, feeling his brotherhood with men, does really deserve some credit for it. In the course of the evening, Jerrold spoke with high appreciation of Emerson; and of Longfellow, whose Hiawatha he considered a wonderful performance; and of Lowell, whose Fable for Critics he especially admired. I mentioned Thoreau, and proposed to send his works to Dr. ------, who, being connected with the Illustrated News, and otherwise a writer, might be inclined to draw attention to then. Douglas Jerrold asked why he should not have them too. I hesitated a little, but as he pressed me, and would have an answer, I said that I did not feel quite so sure of his kindly judgment on Thoreau's books; and it so chanced that I used the word "acrid" for lack of a better, in endeavoring to express my idea of Jerrold's way of looking at men and books. It was not quite what I meant; but, in fact, he often is acrid, and has written pages and volumes of acridity, though, no doubt, with an honest purpose, and from a manly disgust at the cant and humbug of the world. Jerrold said no more, and I went on talking with Dr. ------; but, in a minute or two, I became aware that something had gone wrong, and, looking at Douglas Jerrold, there was an expression of pain and emotion on his face. By this time a second bottle of Burgundy had been opened (Clos Vougeot, the best the Club could produce, and far richer than the Chambertin), and that warm and potent wine may have had something to do with the depth and vivacity of Mr. Jerrold's feelings. But he was indeed greatly hurt by that little word "acrid." "He knew," he said, "that the world considered him a sour, bitter, ill-natured man; but that such a man as I should have the sane opinion was almost more than he could bear." As he spoke, he threw out his arms, sank back in his seat, and I was really a little apprehensive of his actual dissolution into tears. Hereupon I spoke, as was good need, and though, as usual, I have forgotten everything I said, I am quite sure it was to the purpose, and went to this good fellow's heart, as it came warmly from my own. I do remember saying that I felt him to be as genial as the glass of Burgundy which I held in my hand; and I think that touched the very right spot; for he smiled, and said he was afraid the Burgundy was better than he, but yet he was comforted. Dr. ------ said that he likewise had a reputation for bitterness; and I assured him, if I might venture to join myself to the brotherhood of two such men, that I was considered a very ill-natured person by many people in my own country. Douglas Jerrold said he was glad of it. We were now in sweetest harmony, and Jerrold spoke more than it would become me to repeat in praise of my own books, which he said he admired, and he found the man more admirable than his books! I hope so, certainly. We now went to the Haymarket Theatre, where Douglas Jerrold is on the free list; and after seeing a ballet by some Spanish dancers, we separated, and betook ourselves to our several homes. I like Douglas Jerrold very much. April 8th.--On Saturday evening, at ten o'clock, I went to a supper-party at Mr. D------'s, and there met five or six people,--Mr. Faed, a young and distinguished artist; Dr. Eliotson, a dark, sombre, taciturn, powerful-looking man, with coal-black hair, and a beard as black, fringing round his face; Mr. Charles Reade, author of Christie Johnstone and other novels, and many plays,--a tall man, more than thirty, fair-haired, and of agreeable talk and demeanor. On April 6th, I went to the Waterloo station, and there meeting Bennoch and Dr. ------, took the rail for Woking, where we found Mr. Hall's carriage waiting to convey us to Addlestone, about five miles off. On arriving we found that Mr. and Mrs. Hall had not yet returned from church. Their place is an exceedingly pretty one, and arranged in very good taste. The house is not large; but is filled, in every room, with fine engravings, statuettes, ingenious prettinesses or beautifulnesses in the way of flower-stands, cabinets, and things that seem to have bloomed naturally out of the characters of its occupants. There is a conservatory connected with the drawing-room, and enriched with lovely plants, one of which has a certain interest as being the plant on which Coleridge's eyes were fixed when he died. This conservatory is likewise beautified with several very fine casts of statues by modern sculptors, among which was the Greek Slave of Powers, which my English friends criticised as being too thin and meagre; but I defended it as in accordance with American ideas of feminine beauty. From the conservatory we passed into the garden, but did not minutely examine it, knowing that Mr. Hall would wish to lead us through it in person. So, in the mean time, we took a walk in the neighborhood, over stiles and along by-paths, for two or three miles, till we reached the old village of Chertsey. In one of its streets stands an ancient house, gabled, and with the second story projecting over the first, and bearing an inscription to the purport that the poet Cowley had once resided, and, I think, died there. Thence we passed on till we reached a bridge over the Thames, which at this point, about twenty-five miles from London, is a narrow river, but looks clean and pure, and unconscious what abominations the city sewers will pour into it anon. We were caught in two or three showers in the course of our walk; but got back to Firfield without being very much wetted. Our host and hostess had by this time returned from church, and Mrs. Hall came frankly and heartily to the door to greet us, scolding us (kindly) for having got wet. . . . . I liked her simple, easy, gentle, quiet manners, and I liked her husband too. He has a wide and quick sympathy, and expresses it freely. . . . . The world is the better for him. The shower being now over, we went out upon the beautiful lawn before his house, where there were a good many trees of various kinds, many of which have been set out by persons of great or small distinction, and are labelled with their names. Thomas Moore's name was appended to one; Maria Edgeworth's to another; likewise Fredrika Bremer's, Jenny Lind's; also Grace Greenwood's, and I know not whose besides. This is really a pleasant method of enriching one's grounds with memorials of friends, nor is there any harm in making a shrubbery of celebrities. Three holes were already dug, and three new trees lay ready to be planted, and for me there was a sumach to plant,--a tree I never liked; but Mr. Hall said that they had tried to dig up a hawthorn, but found it clung too fast to the soil. So, since better might not be, and telling Mr. Hall that I supposed I should have a right to hang myself on this tree whenever I chose, I seized a spade, and speedily shovelled in a great deal of dirt; and there stands my sumach, an object of interest to posterity! Bennoch also and Dr. ------ set out their trees, and indeed, it was in some sense a joint affair, for the rest of the party held up each tree, while its godfather shovelled in the earth; but, after all, the gardener had more to do with it than we. After this important business was over, Mr. Hall led us about his rounds, which are very nicely planned and ordered; and all this he has bought, and built, and laid out, from the profits of his own and his wife's literary exertions. We dined early, and had a very pleasant dinner, and, after the cloth was removed, Mr. Hall was graciously pleased to drink my health, following it with a long tribute to my genius. I answered briefly; and one half of my short speech was in all probability very foolish. . . . . After the ladies (there were three, one being a girl of seventeen, with rich auburn hair, the adopted daughter of the Halls) had retired, Dr. ------ having been toasted himself, proposed Mrs. Hall's health. I did not have a great deal of conversation with Mrs. Hall; but enough to make me think her a genuine and good woman, unspoilt by a literary career, and retaining more sentiment than even most girls keep beyond seventeen. She told me that it had been the dream of her life to see Longfellow and myself! . . . . Her dream is half accomplished now, and, as they say Longfellow is coming over this summer, the remainder may soon be rounded out. On taking leave, our kind hosts presented me with some beautiful flowers, and with three volumes of a work, by themselves, on Ireland; and Dr. ------ was favored also with some flowers, and a plant in a pot, and Bennoch too had his hands full, . . . . and we went on our way rejoicing. [Here follows an account of the Lord Mayor's dinner, taken mostly for Our Old Home; but I think I will copy this more exact description of the lady mentioned in "Civic Banquets."--ED.] . . . . My eyes were mostly drawn to a young lady, who sat nearly opposite me, across the table. She was, I suppose, dark, and yet not dark, but rather seemed to be of pure white marble, yet not white; but the purest and finest complexion, without a shade of color in it, yet anything but sallow or sickly. Her hair was a wonderful deep raven-black, black as night, black as death; not raven-black, for that has a shiny gloss, and hers had not, but it was hair never to be painted nor described,--wonderful hair, Jewish hair. Her nose had a beautiful outline, though I could see that it was Jewish too; and that, and all her features, were so fine that sculpture seemed a despicable art beside her, and certainly my pen is good for nothing. If any likeness could be given, however; it must be by sculpture, not painting. She was slender and youthful, and yet had a stately and cold, though soft and womanly grace; and, looking at her, I saw what were the wives of the old patriarchs in their maiden or early-married days,--what Judith was, for, womanly as she looked, I doubt, not she could have slain a man in a just cause,--what Bathsheba was, only she seemed to have no sin in her,-- perhaps what Eve was, though one could hardly think her weak enough to eat the apple. . . . . Whether owing to distinctness of race, my sense that she was a Jewess, or whatever else, I felt a sort of repugnance, simultaneously with my perception that she was an admirable creature. THE HOUSE OF COMMONS. At ten o'clock the next day [after the Lord Mayor's dinner] I went to lunch with Bennoch, and afterwards accompanied him to one of the government offices in Downing Street. He went thither, not on official business, but on a matter connected with a monument to Miss Mitford, in which Mr. Harness, a clergyman and some sort of a government clerk, is interested. I gathered from this conversation that there is no great enthusiasm about the monumental affair among the British public. It surprised me to hear allusions indicating that Miss Mitford was not the invariably amiable person that her writings would suggest; but the whole drift of what they said tended, nevertheless, towards the idea that she was an excellent and generous person, loved most by those who knew her best. From Downing Street we crossed over and entered Westminster Hall, and passed through it, and up the flight of steps at its farthest end, and along the avenue of statues, into the vestibule of the House of Commons. It was now somewhat past five, and we stood at the inner entrance of the House, to see the members pass in, Bennoch pointing out to me the distinguished ones. I was not much impressed with the appearance of the members generally; they seemed to me rather shabbier than English gentlemen usually, and I saw or fancied in many of them a certain self-importance, as they passed into the interior, betokening them to be very full of their dignity. Some of them looked more American--more like American politicians--than most Englishmen do. There was now and then a gray-headed country gentleman, the very type of stupidity; and two or three city members came up and spoke to Bennoch, and showed themselves quite as dull, in their aldermanic way, as the country squires. . . . . Bennoch pointed out Lord John Russell, a small, very short, elderly gentleman, in a brown coat, and so large a hat--not large of brim, but large like a peck-measure--that I saw really no face beneath it. By and by came a rather tall, slender person, in a black frock-coat, buttoned up, and black pantaloons, taking long steps, but I thought rather feebly or listlessly. His shoulders were round, or else he had a habitual stoop in them. He had a prominent nose, a thin face, and a sallow, very sallow complexion; . . . . and had I seen him in America I should have taken him for a hard-worked editor of a newspaper, weary and worn with night-labor and want of exercise,--aged before his time. It was Disraeli, and I never saw any other Englishman look in the least like him; though, in America, his appearance would not attract notice as being unusual. I do not remember any other noteworthy person whom we saw enter; in fact, the House had already been some time in session, and most of the members were in their places. We were to dine at the Refectory of the House with the new member for Boston; and, meanwhile, Bennoch obtained admittance for us into the Speaker's gallery, where we had a view of the members, and could hear what was going on. A Mr. Muntz was speaking on the Income Tax, and he was followed by Sir George Cornewall Lewis and others; but it was all very uninteresting, without the slightest animation or attempt at oratory,--which, indeed, would have been quite out of place. We saw Lord Palmerston; but at too great a distance to distinguish anything but a gray head. The House had daylight in it when we entered, and for some time afterwards; but, by and by, the roof, which I had taken to be a solid and opaque ceiling, suddenly brightened, and showed itself to be transparent; a vast expanse of tinted and figured glass, through which came down a great, mild radiance on the members below. The character of the debate, however, did not grow more luminous or vivacious; so we went down into the vestibule, and there waited for Mr. ------, who soon came and led us into the Refectory. It was very much like the coffee-room of a club. The strict rule forbids the entrance of any but members of Parliament; but it seems to be winked at, although there is another room, opening beyond this, where the law of seclusion is strictly enforced. The dinner was good, not remarkably so, but good enough,--a soup, some turbot or salmon, cutlets, and I know not what else, and claret, sherry, and port; for, as Mr. ------ said, "he did not wish to be stingy." Mr. ------ is a self-made man, and a strong instance of the difference between the Englishman and the American, when self-made, and without early education. He is no more a gentleman now than when he began life, --not a whit more refined, either outwardly or inwardly; while the American would have been, after the same experience, not distinguishable outwardly, and perhaps as refined within, as nine tenths of the gentlemen born, in the House of Commons. And, besides, an American comes naturally to any distinctions to which success in life may bring him; he takes them as if they were his proper inheritance, and in no wise to be wondered at. Mr. ------, on the other hand, took evidently a childish delight in his position, and felt a childish wonder in having arrived at it; nor did it seem real to him, after all. . . . . We again saw Disraeli, who has risen from the people by modes perhaps somewhat like those of Mr. ------. He came and stood near our table, looking at the bill of fare, and then sat down on the opposite side of the room with another gentleman, and ate his dinner. The story of his marriage does him much credit; and indeed I am inclined to like Disraeli, as a man who has made his own place good among a hostile aristocracy, and leads instead of following them. From the House of Commons we went to Albert Smith's exhibition, or lecture, of the ascent of Mont Blanc, to which Bennoch had orders. It was very amusing, and in some degree instructive. We remained in the saloon at the conclusion of the lecture; and when the audience had dispersed, Mr. Albert Smith made his appearance. . . . . Nothing of moment happened the next day, at least, not till two o'clock, when I went with Mr. Bowman to Birch's eating-house (it is not Birch's now, but this was the name of the original founder, who became an alderman, and has long been dead) for a basin of turtle-soup. It was very rich, very good, better than we had at the Lord Mayor's, and the best I ever ate. In the evening, Mr. J. B. Davis, formerly our Secretary of Legation, called to take us to dine at Mr. ------'s in Camden Town. Mr. ------ calls his residence Vermont House; but it hardly has a claim to any separate title, being one of the centre houses of a block. I forget whether I mentioned his calling on me. He is a Vermonter, a graduate of Yale College, who has been here several years, and has established a sort of book brokerage, buying libraries for those who want them, and rare works and editions for American collectors. His business naturally brings him into relations with literary people; and he is himself a kindly and pleasant man. On our arrival we found Mr. D------ and one of his sisters already there; and soon came a Mr. Peabody, who, if I mistake not, is one of the Salem Peabodys, and has some connection with the present eminent London Mr. Peabody. At any rate, he is a very sensible, well-instructed, and widely and long travelled man. Mr. Tom Taylor was also expected; but, owing to some accident or mistake, he did not come for above an hour, all which time our host waited. . . . . But Mr. Tom Taylor, a wit, a satirist, and a famous diner out, is too formidable and too valuable a personage to be treated cavalierly. In the interim Mr. ------ showed us some rare old books, which he has in his private collection, a black-letter edition of Chaucer, and other specimens of the early English printers; and I was impressed, as I have often been, with the idea that we have made few, if any, improvements in the art of printing, though we have greatly facilitated the modes of it. He showed us Dryden's translation of Virgil, with Dr. Johnson's autograph in it and a large collection of Bibles, of all dates,--church Bibles, family Bibles of the common translation, and older ones. He says he has written or is writing a history of the Bible (as a printed work, I presume). Many of these Bibles had, no doubt, been in actual and daily use from generation to generation; but they were now all splendidly bound, and were likewise very clean and smooth,--in fact, every leaf had been cleansed by a delicate process, a part of which consisted in soaking the whole book in a tub of water, during several days. Mr. ------ is likewise rich in manuscripts, having a Spanish document with the signature of the son of Columbus; a whole little volume in Franklin's handwriting, being the first specimen of it; and the original manuscripts of many of the songs of Burns. Among these I saw "Auld Lang Syne," and "Bruce's Address to his Army." We amused ourselves with these matters as long as we could; but at last, as there was to be a party in the evening, dinner could no longer be put off; so we took our seats at table, and immediately afterwards Mr. Taylor made his appearance with his wife and another lady. Mr. Taylor is reckoned a brilliant conversationist; but I suppose he requires somebody to draw him out and assist him; for I could hear nothing that I thought very remarkable on this occasion. He is not a kind of man whom I can talk with, or greatly help to talk; so, though I sat next to him, nothing came of it. He told me some stories of his life in the Temple,--little funny incidents, that he afterwards wrought into his dramas; in short, a sensible, active-minded, clearly perceptive man, with a humorous way of showing up men and matters. . . . . I wish I could know exactly what the English style good conversation. Probably it is something like plum-pudding,--as heavy, but seldom so rich. After dinner Mr. Tom Taylor and Mr. D------, with their respective ladies, took their leave; but when we returned to the drawing-room, we found it thronged with a good many people. Mr. S. C. Hall was there with his wife, whom I was glad to see again, for this was the third time of meeting her, and, in this whirl of new acquaintances, I felt quite as if she were an old friend. Mr. William Howitt was also there, and introduced me to his wife,--a very natural, kind, and pleasant lady; and she presented me to one or two daughters. Mr. Marston, the dramatist, was also introduced to me; and Mr. Helps, a thin, scholarly, cold sort of a man. Dr. Mackay and his wife were there, too; and a certain Mr. Jones, a sculptor,--a jolly, large, elderly person, with a twinkle in his eye. Also a Mr. Godwin, who impressed me as quite a superior person, gentlemanly, cultivated, a man of sensibility; but it is quite impossible to take a clear imprint from any one character, where so many are stamped upon one's notice at once. This Mr. Godwin, as we were discussing Thackeray, said that he is most beautifully tender and devoted to his wife, whenever she can be sensible of his attentions. He says that Thackeray, in his real self, is a sweet, sad man. I grew weary of so many people, especially of the ladies, who were rather superfluous in their oblations, quite stifling me, indeed, with the incense that they burnt under my nose. So far as I could judge, they had all been invited there to see me. It is ungracious, even hoggish, not to be gratified with the interest they expressed in me; but then it is really a bore, and one does not know what to do or say. I felt like the hippopotamus, or-- to use a more modest illustration--like some strange insect imprisoned under a tumbler, with a dozen eyes watching whatever I did. By and by, Mr. Jones, the sculptor, relieved me by standing up against the mantel-piece, and telling an Irish story, not to two or three auditors, but to the whole drawing-room, all attentive as to a set exhibition. It was very funny. The next day after this I went with Mr. Bowman to call on our minister, and found that he, and four of the ladies of his family, with his son, had gone to the Queen's Drawing-room. We lunched at the Wellington; and spent an hour or more in looking out of the window of that establishment at the carriages, with their pompous coachmen and footmen, driving to and from the Palace of St. James, and at the Horse Guards, with their bright cuirasses, stationed along the street. . . . . Then I took the rail for Liverpool. . . . . While I was still at breakfast at the Waterloo, J----- came in, ruddy-cheeked, smiling, very glad to see me, and looking, I thought, a good deal taller than when I left him. And so ended my London excursion, which has certainly been rich in incident and character, though my account of it be but meagre. SCOTLAND.--GLASGOW. May 10th.--Last Friday, May 2d, I took the rail, with Mr. Bowman, from the Lime Street station, for Glasgow. There was nothing of much interest along the road, except that, when we got beyond Penrith, we saw snow on the tops of some of the hills. Twilight came on as we were entering Scotland; and I have only a recollection of bleak and bare hills and villages dimly seen, until, nearing Glasgow, we saw the red blaze of furnace-lights at frequent iron-founderies. We put up at the Queen's Hotel, where we arrived about ten o'clock; a better hotel than I have anywhere found in England,--new, well arranged, and with brisk attendance. In the morning I rambled largely about Glasgow, and found it to be chiefly a modern-built city, with streets mostly wide and regular, and handsome houses and public edifices of a dark gray stone. In front of our hotel, in an enclosed green space, stands a tall column surmounted by a statue of Sir Walter Scott,--a good statue, I should think, as conveying the air and personal aspect of the man. There is a bronze equestrian statue of the Queen in one of the streets, and one or two more equestrian or other statues of eminent persons. I passed through the Trongate and the Gallow-Gate, and visited the Salt-Market, and saw the steeple of the Tolbooth, all of which Scott has made interesting; and I went through the gate of the University, and penetrated into its enclosed courts, round which the College edifices are built. They are not Gothic, but of the age, I suppose, of James I.,--with odd-looking, conical-roofed towers, and here and there the bust of a benefactor in niches round the courts, and heavy stone staircases ascending from the pavement, outside the buildings, all of dark gray granite, cold, hard, and venerable. The University stands in High Street, in a dense part of the town, and a very old and shabby part, too. I think the poorer classes of Glasgow excel even those in Liverpool in the bad eminence of filth, uncombed and unwashed children, drunkenness, disorderly deportment, evil smell, and all that makes city poverty disgusting. In my opinion, however, they are a better-looking people than the English (and this is true of all classes), more intelligent of aspect, with more regular features. I looked for the high cheek-bones, which have been attributed, as a characteristic feature, to the Scotch, but could not find them. What most distinguishes them front the English is the regularity of the nose, which is straight, or sometimes a little curved inward; whereas the English nose has no law whatever, but disports itself in all manner of irregularity. I very soon learned to recognize the Scotch face, and when not too Scotch, it is a handsome one. In another part of the High Street, up a pretty steep slope, and on one side of a public green, near an edifice which I think is a medical college, stands St. Mungo's Cathedral. It is hardly of cathedral dimensions, though a large and fine old church. The price of a ticket of admittance is twopence; so small that it might be as well to make the entrance free. The interior is in excellent repair, with the nave and side aisles, and clustered pillars, and intersecting arches, that belong to all these old churches; and a few monuments along the walls. I was going away without seeing any more than this; but the verger, a friendly old gentleman, with a hearty Scotch way of speaking, told me that the crypts were what chiefly interested strangers; and so he guided me down into the foundation-story of the church, where there is an intricacy and entanglement of immensely massive and heavy arches, supporting the structure above. The view through these arches, among the great shafts of the columns, was very striking. In the central part is a monument; a recumbent figure, if I remember rightly, but it is not known whom it commemorates. There is also a monument to a Scotch prelate, which seems to have been purposely defaced, probably in Covenant times. These intricate arches were the locality of one of the scenes in "Rob Roy," when Rob gives Frank Osbaldistone some message or warning, and then escapes from him into the obscurity behind. In one corner is St. Mungo's well, secured with a wooden cover; but I should not care to drink water that comes from among so many old graves. After viewing the cathedral, I got back to the hotel just in time to go from thence to the steamer wharf, and take passage up the Clyde. There was nothing very interesting in this little voyage. We passed many small iron steamers, and some large ones; and green fields along the river-shores, villas, villages, and all such suburban objects; neither am I quite sure of the name of the place we landed at, though I think it was Bowling. Here we took the railway for Balloch; and the only place or thing I remember during this transit was a huge bluff or crag, rising abruptly from a river-side, and looking, in connection with its vicinity to the Highlands, just such a site as would be taken for the foundation of a castle. On inquiry it turned out that this abrupt and double-headed hill (for it has two summits, with a cleft between) is the site of Dumbarton Castle, for ages one of the strongest fortresses in Scotland, and still kept up as a garrisoned place. At the distance and point of view at which we passed it, the castle made no show. Arriving at Balloch, we found it a small village, with no marked features, and a hotel, where we got some lunch, and then we took a stroll over the bridge across the Levers, while waiting for the steamer to take us up Loch Lomond. It was a beautiful afternoon, warm and sunny; and after walking about a mile, we had a fine view of Loch Lomond, and of the mountains around and beyond it,--Ben Lomond among the rest. It is vain, at a week's distance, to try to remember the shapes of mountains; so I shall attempt no description of them, and content myself with saying that they did not quite come up to my anticipations. In due time we returned to our hotel, and found in the coffee-room a tall, white-haired, venerable gentleman, and a pleasant-looking young lady, his daughter. They had been eating lunch, and the young lady helped her father on with his outside garment, and his comforter, and gave him his stick, just as any other daughter might do,--all of which I mention because he was a nobleman; and, moreover, had engaged all the post-horses at the inn, so that we could not continue our travels by land, along the side of Loch Lomond, as we had first intended. At four o'clock the railway train arrived again, with a very moderate number of passengers, who (and we among them) immediately embarked on board a neat little steamer which was waiting for us. The day was bright and cloudless; but there was a strong, cold breeze blowing down the lake, so that it was impossible, without vast discomfort, to stand in the bow of the steamer and look at the scenery. I looked at it, indeed, along the sides, as we passed, and on our track behind; and no doubt it was very fine; but from all the experience I have had, I do not think scenery can be well seen from the water. At any rate, the shores of Loch Lomond have faded completely out of my memory; nor can I conceive that they really were very striking. At a year's interval, I can recollect the cluster of hills around the head of Lake Windermere; at twenty years' interval, I remember the shores of Lake Champlain; but of the shores of this Scottish lake I remember nothing except some oddly shaped rocks, called "The Cobbler and his Daughter," on a mountain-top, just before we landed. But, indeed, we had very imperfect glimpses of the hills along the latter part of the course, because the wind had grown so very cold that we took shelter below, and merely peeped at Loch Lomond's sublimities from the cabin-windows. The whole voyage up Loch Lomond is, I think, about thirty-two miles; but we landed at a place called Tarbet, much short of the ultimate point. There is here a large hotel; but we passed it, and walked onward a mile or two to Arroquhar, a secluded glen among the hills, where is a new hotel, built in the old manor-house style, and occupying the site of what was once a castle of the chief of the MacFarlanes. Over the portal is a stone taken from the former house, bearing the date 1697. There is a little lake near the house, and the hills shut in the whole visible scene so closely that there appears no outlet nor communication with the external world; but in reality this little lake is connected with Loch Long, and Loch Long is an arm of the sea; so that there is water communication between Arroquhar and Glasgow. We found this a very beautiful place; and being quite sheltered from all winds that blew, we strolled about late into the prolonged twilight, and admired the outlines of the surrounding hills, and fancied resemblances to various objects in the shapes of the crags against the evening sky. The sun had not set till nearly, if not quite, eight o'clock; and before the daylight had quite gone, the northern lights streamed out, and I do not think that there was much darkness over the glen of Arroquhar that night. At all events, before the darkness came, we withdrew into the coffee-room. We had excellent beds and sleeping-rooms in this new hotel, and I remember nothing more till morning, when we were astir betimes, and had some chops for breakfast. Then our host, Mr. Macregor, who is also the host of our hotel at Glasgow, and has many of the characteristics of an American landlord, claiming to be a gentleman and the equal of his guests, took us in a drosky, and drove us to the shore of Loch Lomond, at a point about four miles from Arroquhar. The lake is here a mile and a half wide, and it was our object to cross to Inversnaid, on the opposite shore; so first we waved a handkerchief, and then kindled some straw on the beach, in order to attract the notice of the ferryman at Inversnaid. It was half an hour before our signals and shoutings resulted in the putting off of a boat, with two oarsmen, who made the transit pretty speedily; and thus we got across Loch Lomond. At Inversnaid there is a small hotel, and over the rock on which it stands a little waterfall tumbles into the lake,--a very little one, though I believe it is reckoned among the other picturesque features of the scene. We were now in Rob Roy's country, and at the distance of a mile or so, along the shore of the lake, is Rob Roy's cave, where he and his followers are supposed to have made their abode in troublous times. While lunch was getting ready, we again took the boat, and went thither. Landing beneath a precipitous, though not very lofty crag, we clambered up a rude pathway, and came to the mouth of the cave, which is nothing but a fissure or fissures among some great rocks that have tumbled confusedly together. There is hardly anywhere space enough for half a dozen persons to crowd themselves together, nor room to stand upright. On the whole, it is no cave at all, but only a crevice; and, in the deepest and darkest part, you can look up and see the sky. It may have sheltered Rob Roy for a night, and might partially shelter any Christian during a shower. Returning to the hotel, we started in a drosky (I do not know whether this is the right name of the vehicle, or whether it has a right name, but it is a carriage in which four persons sit back to back, two before and two behind) for Aberfoyle. The mountain-side ascends very steeply from the inn door, and, not to damp the horse's courage in the outset, we went up on foot. The guide-book says that the prospect from the summit of the ascent is very fine; but I really believe we forgot to turn round and look at it. All through our drive, however, we had mountain views in plenty, especially of great Ben Lomond, with his snow-covered head, round which, since our entrance into the Highlands, we had been making a circuit. Nothing can possibly be drearier than the mountains at this season; bare, barren, and bleak, with black patches of withered heath variegating the dead brown of the herbage on their sides; and as regards trees the hills are perfectly naked. There were no frightful precipices, no boldly picturesque features, along our road; but high, weary slopes, showing miles and miles of heavy solitude, with here and there a highland hut, built of stone and thatched; and, in one place, an old gray, ruinous fortress, a station of the English troops after the rebellion of 1715; and once or twice a village of hills, the inhabitants of which, old and young, ran to their doors to stare at us. For several miles after we left Inversnaid, the mountain-stream which makes the waterfall brawled along the roadside. All the hills are sheep-pastures, and I never saw such wild, rough, ragged-looking creatures as the sheep, with their black faces and tattered wool. The little lambs were very numerous, poor things, coming so early in the season into this inclement region; and it was laughable to see how invariably, when startled by our approach, they scampered to their mothers, and immediately began to suck. It would seem as if they sought a draught from the maternal udder, wherewith to fortify and encourage their poor little hearts; but I suppose their instinct merely drove them close to their dams, and, being there, they took advantage of their opportunity. These sheep must lead a hard life during the winter; for they are never fed nor sheltered. The day was sunless, and very uncomfortably cold; and we were not sorry to walk whenever the steepness of the road gave us cause. I do not remember what o'clock it was, but not far into the afternoon, when we reached the Baillie Nicol-Jarvie Inn at Aberfoyle; a scene which is much more interesting in the pages of Rob Roy than we found it in reality. Here we got into a sort of cart, and set out, over another hill-path, as dreary as or drearier than the last, for the Trosachs. On our way, we saw Ben Venue, and a good many other famous Bens, and two or three lochs; and when we reached the Trosachs, we should probably have been very much enraptured if our eyes had not already been weary with other mountain shapes. But, in truth, I doubt if anybody ever does really see a mountain, who goes for the set and sole purpose of seeing it. Nature will not let herself be seen in such cases. You must patiently bide her time; and by and by, at some unforeseen moment, she will quietly and suddenly unveil herself, and for a brief space allow you to look right into the heart of her mystery. But if you call out to her peremptorily, "Nature! unveil yourself this very moment!" she only draws her veil the closer; and you may look with all your eyes, and imagine that you see all that she can show, and yet see nothing. Thus, I saw a wild and confused assemblage of heights, crags, precipices, which they call the Trosachs, but I saw them calmly and coldly, and was glad when the drosky was ready to take us on to Callender. The hotel at the Trosachs, by the by, is a very splendid one, in the form of an old feudal castle, with towers and turrets. All among these wild hills there is set preparation for enraptured visitants; and it seems strange that the savage features do not subside of their own accord, and that there should still be cold winds and snow on the top of Ben Lomond, and rocks and heather, and ragged sheep, now that there are so many avenues by which the commonplace world is sluiced in among the Highlands. I think that this fashion of the picturesque will pass away. We drove along the shore of Lake Vennachar, and onward to Callender, which I believe is either the first point in the Lowlands or the last in the Highlands. It is a large village on the river Teith. We stopped here to dine, and were some time in getting any warmth into our benumbed bodies; for, as I said before, it was a very cold day. Looking from the window of the hotel, I saw a young man in Highland dress, with bare thighs, marching through the village street towards the Lowlands, with a martial and elastic step, as if he were going forth to conquer and occupy the world. I suppose he was a soldier who had been absent on leave, returning to the garrison at Stirling. I pitied his poor thighs, though he certainly did not look uncomfortable. After dinner, as dusk was coming on and we had still a long drive before us (eighteen miles, I believe), we took a close carriage and two horses, and set off for Stirling. The twilight was too obscure to show many things along the road, and by the time we drove into Stirling we could but dimly see the houses in the long street in which stood our hotel. There was a good fire in the coffee-room, which looked like a drawing-room in a large old-fashioned mansion, and was hung round with engravings of the portraits of the county members, and a master of fox-hounds, and other pictures. We made ourselves comfortable with some tea, and retired early. In the morning we were stirring betimes, and found Stirling to be a pretty large town, of rather ancient aspect, with many gray stone houses, the gables of which are notched on either side, like a flight of stairs. The town stands on the slope of a hill, at the summit of which, crowning a long ascent, up which the paved street reaches all the way to its gate, is Stirling Castle. Of course we went thither, and found free entrance, although the castle is garrisoned by five or six hundred men, among whom are barelegged Highlanders (I must say that this costume is very fine and becoming, though their thighs did look blue and frost-bitten) and also some soldiers of other Scotch regiments, with tartan trousers. Almost immediately on passing the gate, we found an old artillery-man, who undertook to show us round the castle. Only a small portion of it seems to be of great antiquity. The principal edifice within the castle wall is a palace, that was either built or renewed by James VI.; and it is ornamented with strange old statues, one of which is his own. The old Scottish Parliament House is also here. The most ancient part of the castle is the tower, where one of the Earls of Douglas was stabbed by a king, and afterwards thrown out of the window. In reading this story, one imagines a lofty turret, and the dead man tumbling headlong from a great height; but, in reality, the window is not more than fifteen or twenty feet from the garden into which he fell. This part of the castle was burned last autumn; but is now under repair, and the wall of the tower is still stanch and strong. We went up into the chamber where the murder took place, and looked through the historic window. Then we mounted the castle wall, where it broods over a precipice of many hundred feet perpendicular, looking down upon a level plain below, and forth upon a landscape, every foot of which is richly studded with historic events. There is a small peep-hole in the wall, which Queen Mary is said to have been in the habit of looking through. It is a most splendid view; in the distance, the blue Highlands, with a variety of mountain outlines that I could have studied unweariably; and in another direction, beginning almost at the foot of the Castle Hill, were the Links of Forth, where, over a plain of miles in extent the river meandered, and circled about, and returned upon itself again and again and again, as if knotted into a silver chain, which it was difficult to imagine to be all one stream. The history of Scotland might be read from this castle wall, as on a book of mighty page; for here, within the compass of a few miles, we see the field where Wallace won the battle of Stirling, and likewise the battle-field of Bannockburn, and that of Falkirk, and Sheriffmuir, and I know not how many besides. Around the Castle Hill there is a walk, with seats for old and infirm persons, at points sheltered from the wind. We followed it downward, and I think we passed over the site where the games used to be held, and where, this morning, some of the soldiers of the garrison were going through their exercises. I ought to have mentioned, that, passing through the inner gateway of the castle, we saw the round tower, and glanced into the dungeon, where the Roderic Dhu of Scott's poem was left to die. It is one of the two round towers, between which the portcullis rose and fell. EDINBURGH.--THE PALACE OF HOLYROOD. At eleven o'clock we took the rail for Edinburgh, and I remember nothing more, except that the cultivation and verdure of the country were very agreeable, after our experience of Highland barrenness and desolation, until we found the train passing close at the base of the rugged crag of Edinburgh Castle. We established ourselves at Queen's Hotel, in Prince's Street, and then went out to view the city. The monument to Sir Walter Scott--a rather fantastic and not very impressive affair, I thought-- stands almost directly in front of a hotel. We went along Prince's Street, and thence, by what turns I know not, to the Palace of Holyrood, which stands on a low and sheltered site, and is a venerable edifice. Arthur's Seat rises behind it,--a high hill, with a plain between. As we drew near the Palace, Mr. Bowman, who has been here before, pointed out the windows of Queen Mary's apartments, in a circular tower on the left of the gateway. On entering the enclosed quadrangle, we bought tickets for sixpence each, admitting us to all parts of the Palace that are shown to visitors; and first we went into a noble hall or gallery, a long and stately room, hung with pictures of ancient Scottish kings; and though the pictures were none of them authentic, they, at least, answer an excellent purpose in the way of upholstery. It was here that the young Pretender gave the ball which makes one of the scenes in Waverley. Thence we passed into the old historic rooms of the Palace,--Darnley's and Queen Mary's apartments, which everybody has seen and described. They are very dreary and shabby-looking rooms, with bare floors, and here and there a piece of tapestry, faded into a neutral tint; and carved and ornamented ceilings, looking shabbier than plain whitewash. We saw Queen Mary's old bedstead, low, with four tall posts,--and her looking-glass, which she brought with her from France, and which has often reflected the beauty that set everybody mad,--and some needlework and other womanly matters of hers; and we went into the little closet where she was having such a cosey supper-party with two or three friends, when the conspirators broke in, and stabbed Rizzio before her face. We saw, too, the blood-stain at the threshold of the door in the next room, opening upon the stairs. The body of Rizzio was flung down here, and the attendant told us that it lay in that spot all night. The blood-stain covers a large space,--much larger than I supposed,--and it gives the impression that there must have been a great pool and sop of blood on all the spot covered by Rizzio's body, staining the floor deeply enough never to be washed out. It is now of a dark brown hue; and I do not see why it may not be the genuine, veritable stain. The floor, thereabouts, appears not to have been scrubbed much; for I touched it with my finger, and found it slightly rough; but it is strange that the many footsteps should not have smoothed it, in three hundred years. One of the articles shown us in Queen Mary's apartments was the breastplate supposed to have been worn by Lord Ruthven at the murder, a heavy plate of iron, and doubtless a very uncomfortable waistcoat. HOLYROOD ABBEY. From the Palace, we passed into the contiguous ruin of Holyrood Abbey; which is roofless, although the front, and some broken columns along the nave, and fragments of architecture here and there, afford hints of a magnificent Gothic church in bygone times. It deserved to be magnificent; for here have been stately ceremonials, marriages of kings, coronations, investitures, before the high altar, which has now been overthrown or crumbled away; and the floor--so far as there is any floor --consists of tombstones of the old Scottish nobility. There are likewise monuments, bearing the names of illustrious Scotch families; and inscriptions, in the Scotch dialect, on the walls. In one of the front towers,--the only remaining one, indeed,--we saw the marble tomb of a nobleman, Lord Belhaven, who is represented reclining on the top,--with a bruised nose, of course. Except in Westminster Abbey, I do not remember ever to have seen an old monumental statue with the nose entire. In all political or religious outbreaks, the mob's first impulse is to hit the illustrious dead on their noses. At the other end of the Abbey, near the high altar, is the vault where the old Scottish kings used to be buried; but, looking in through the window, I saw only a vacant space,--no skull, nor bone, nor the least fragment of a coffin. In fact, I believe the royal dead were turned out of their last home, on occasion of the Revolutionary movements, at the accession of William III. HIGH STREET AND THE GRASS-MARKET. Quitting the Abbey and the Palace, we turned into the Canongate, and passed thence into High Street, which, I think, is a continuation of the Canongate; and being now in the old town of Edinburgh, we saw those immensely tall houses, seven stories high, where the people live in tiers, all the way from earth to middle air. They were not so quaint and strange looking as I expected; but there were some houses of very antique individuality, and among them that of John Knox, which looks still in good repair. One thing did not in the least fall short of my expectations,--the evil odor, for which Edinburgh has an immemorial renown,--nor the dirt of the inhabitants, old and young. The town, to say the truth, when you are in the midst of it, has a very sordid, grimy, shabby, upswept, unwashen aspect, grievously at variance with all poetic and romantic associations. From the High Street we turned aside into the Grass-Market, the scene of the Porteous Mob; and we found in the pavement a cross on the site where the execution of Porteous is supposed to have taken place. THE CASTLE. Returning thence to the High Street, we followed it up to the Castle, which is nearer the town, and of more easy access from it, than I had supposed. There is a large court or parade before the castle gate, with a parapet on the abrupt side of the hill, looking towards Arthur's Seat and Salisbury Crags, mud overhanging a portion of the old town. As we leaned over this parapet, my nose was conscious of the bad odor of Edinburgh, although the streets, whence it must have come, were hundreds of feet below. I have had some experience of this ugly smell in the poor streets of Liverpool; but I think I never perceived it before crossing the Atlantic. It is the odor of an old system of life; the scent of the pine forests is still too recent with us for it to be known in America. The Castle of Edinburgh is free (as appears to be the case with all garrisoned places in Great Britain) to the entrance of any peaceable person. So we went in, and found a large space enclosed within the walls, and dwellings for officers, and accommodation for soldiers, who were being drilled, or loitering about; and as the hill still ascends within the external wall of the castle, we climbed to the summit, and there found an old soldier whom we engaged to be our guide. He showed us Mons Meg, a great old cannon, broken at the breech, but still aimed threateningly from the highest ramparts; and then he admitted us into an old chapel, said to have been built by a Queen of Scotland, the sister of Harold, King of England, and occupying the very highest part of the hill. It is the smallest place of worship I ever saw, but of venerable architecture, and of very solid construction. The old soldier had not much more to show us; but he pointed out the window whence one of the kings of Scotland is said, when a baby, to have been lowered down, the whole height of the castle, to the bottom of the precipice on which it stands,--a distance of seven hundred feet. After the soldier had shown us to the extent of his jurisdiction, we went into a suite of rooms, in one of which I saw a portrait of Queen Mary, which gave me, for the first time, an idea that she was really a very beautiful woman. In this picture she is wonderfully so,--a tender womanly grace, which was none the less tender and graceful for being equally imbued with queenly dignity and spirit. It was too lovely a head to be cut off. I should be glad to know the authenticity of this picture. I do not know that we did anything else worthy of note, before leaving Edinburgh. There is matter enough, in and about the town, to interest the visitor for a very long time; but when the visit is calculated on such brevity as ours was, we get weary of the place, before even these few hours come to an end. Thus, for my part, I was not sorry when, in the course of the afternoon, we took the rail for Melrose, where we duly arrived, and put up at the George Inn. MELROSE. Melrose is a village of rather antique aspect, situated on the slope and at the bottom of the Eildon Hills, which, from this point of view, appear like one hill, with a double summit. The village, as I said, has an old look, though many of the houses have at least been refronted at some recent date; but others are as ancient, I suppose, as the days when the Abbey was in its splendor,--a rustic and peasant-like antiquity, however, low-roofed, and straw-thatched. There is an aged cross of stone in the centre of the town. Our first object, of course, was to see the Abbey, which stands just on the outskirts of the village, and is attainable only by applying at a neighboring house, the inhabitant of which probably supports himself, and most comfortably, too, as a showman of the ruin. He unlocked the wooden gate, and admitted us into what is left of the Abbey, comprising only the ruins of the church, although the refectory, the dormitories, and the other parts of the establishment, formerly covered the space now occupied by a dozen village houses. Melrose Abbey is a very satisfactory ruin, all carpeted along its nave and transepts with green grass; and there are some well-grown trees within the walls. We saw the window, now empty, through which the tints of the painted glass fell on the tombstone of Michael Scott, and the tombstone itself, broken in three pieces, but with a cross engraven along its whole length. It must have been the monument of an old monk or abbot, rather than a wizard. There, too, is still the "marble stone" on which the monk and warrior sat them down, and which is supposed to mark the resting-place of Alexander of Scotland. There are remains, both without and within the Abbey, of most curious and wonderfully minute old sculpture,--foliage, in places where it is almost impossible to see them, and where the sculptor could not have supposed that they would be seen, but which yet are finished faithfully, to the very veins of each leaf, in stone; and there is a continual variety of this accurate toil. On the exterior of the edifice there is equal minuteness of finish, and a great many niches for statues; all of which, I believe, are now gone, although there are carved faces at some points and angles. The graveyard around the Abbey is still the only one which the village has, and is crowded with gravestones, among which I read the inscription of one erected by Sir Walter Scott to the memory of Thomas Pardy, one of his servants. Some sable birds--either rooks or jackdaws-- were flitting about the ruins, inside and out. Mr. Bowman and I talked about revisiting Melrose by moonlight; but, luckily, there was to be no moon that evening. I do not myself think that daylight and sunshine make a ruin less effective than twilight or moonshine. In reference to Scott's description, I think he deplorably diminishes the impressiveness of the scene by saying that the alternate buttresses, seen by moonlight, look as if made of ebon and ivory. It suggests a small and very pretty piece of cabinet-work; not these gray, rough walls, which Time has gnawed upon for a thousand years, without eating them away. Leaving the Abbey, we took a path or a road which led us to the river Tweed, perhaps a quarter of a mile off; and we crossed it by a foot-bridge,--a pretty wide stream, a dimpling breadth of transparent water flowing between low banks, with a margin of pebbles. We then returned to our inn, and had tea, and passed a quiet evening by the fireside. This is a good, unpretentious inn; and its visitors' book indicates that it affords general satisfaction to those who come here. In the morning we breakfasted on broiled salmon, taken, no doubt, in the neighboring Tweed. There was a very coarse-looking man at table with us, who informed us that he owned the best horse anywhere round the Eildon Hills, and could make the best cast for a salmon, and catch a bigger fish than anybody,--with other self-laudation of the same kind. The waiter afterwards told us that he was the son of an Admiral in the neighborhood; and soon, his horse being brought to the door, we saw him mount and ride away. He sat on horseback with ease and grace, though I rather suspect, early as it was, that he was already in his cups. The Scotch seem to me to get drunk at very unseasonable hours. I have seen more drunken people here than during all my residence in England, and, generally, early in the day. Their liquor, so far as I have observed, makes them good-natured and sociable, imparting a perhaps needed geniality to their cold natures. After breakfast we took a drosky, or whatever these fore-and-aft-seated vehicles are called, and set out for DRYBURGH ABBEY, three miles distant. It was a cold though rather bright morning, with a most shrewd and bitter wind, which blew directly in my face as I sat beside the driver. An English wind is bad enough, but methinks a Scotch one, is rather worse; at any rate, I was half frozen, and wished Dryburgh Abbey in Tophet, where it would have been warmer work to go and see it. Some of the border hills were striking, especially the Cowden Knowe, which ascends into a prominent and lofty peak. Such villages as we passed did not greatly differ from English villages. By and by we came to the banks of the Tweed, at a point where there is a ferry. A carriage was on the river-bank, the driver waiting beside it; for the people who came in it had already been ferried across to see the Abbey. The ferryman here is a young girl; and, stepping into the boat, she shoved off, and so skilfully took advantage of the eddies of the stream, which is here deep and rapid, that we were soon on the other side. She was by no means an uncomely maiden, with pleasant Scotch features, and a quiet intelligence of aspect, gleaming into a smile when spoken to; much tanned with all kinds of weather, and, though slender, yet so agile and muscular that it was no shame for a man to let himself be rowed by her. From the ferry we had a walk of half a mile, more or less, to a cottage, where we found another young girl, whose business it is to show the Abbey. She was of another mould than the ferry-maiden,--a queer, shy, plaintive sort of a body,--and answered all our questions in a low, wailing tone. Passing through an apple-orchard, we were not long in reaching the Abbey, the ruins of which are much more extensive and more picturesque than those of Melrose, being overrun with bushes and shrubbery, and twined about with ivy, and all such vegetation as belongs, naturally, to old walls. There are the remains of the refectory, and other domestic parts of the Abbey, as well as the church, and all in delightful state of decay,--not so far gone but that we had bits of its former grandeur in the columns and broken arches, and in some portions of the edifice that still retain a roof. In the chapter-house we saw a marble statue of Newton, wofully maltreated by damps and weather; and though it had no sort of business there, it fitted into the ruins picturesquely enough. There is another statue, equally unauthorized; both having been placed here by a former Earl of Buchan, who seems to have been a little astray in his wits. On one side of the church, within an arched recess, are the monuments of Sir Walter Scott and his family,--three ponderous tombstones of Aberdeen granite, polished, but already dimmed and dulled by the weather. The whole floor of the recess is covered by these monuments, that of Sir Walter being the middle one, with Lady (or, as the inscription calls her, Dame) Scott beyond him, next to the church wall, and some one of his sons or daughters on the hither side. The effect of his being buried here is to make the whole of Dryburgh Abbey his monument. There is another arched recess, twin to the Scott burial-place, and contiguous to it, in which are buried a Pringle family; it being their ancient place of sepulture. The spectator almost inevitably feels as if they were intruders, although their rights here are of far older date than those of Scott. Dryburgh Abbey must be a most beautiful spot of a summer afternoon; and it was beautiful even on this not very genial morning, especially when the sun blinked out upon the ivy, and upon the shrubberied paths that wound about the ruins. I think I recollect the birds chirruping in this neighborhood of it. After viewing it sufficiently,--sufficiently for this one time,--we went back to the ferry, and, being set across by the same Undine, we drove back to Melrose. No longer riding against the wind, I found it not nearly so cold as before. I now noticed that the Eildon Hills, seen from this direction, rise from one base into three distinct summits, ranged in a line. According to "The Lay of the Last Minstrel," they were cleft into this shape by the magic of Michael Scott. Reaching Melrose . . . . without alighting, we set off for ABBOTSFORD, three miles off. The neighborhood of Melrose, leading to Abbotsford, has many handsome residences of modern build and very recent date,--suburban villas, each with its little lawn and garden ground, such as we see in the vicinity of Liverpool. I noticed, too, one castellated house, of no great size, but old, and looking as if its tower were built, not for show, but for actual defence in the old border warfare. We were not long in reaching Abbotsford. The house, which is more compact, and of considerably less extent than I anticipated, stands in full view from the road, and at only a short distance from it, lower down towards the river. Its aspect disappointed me; but so does everything. It is but a villa, after all; no castle, nor even a large manor-house, and very unsatisfactory when you consider it in that light. Indeed, it impressed me, not as a real house, intended for the home of human beings,--a house to die in or to be born in,--but as a plaything,-- something in the same category as Horace Walpole's Strawberry Hill. The present owner seems to have found it insufficient for the actual purposes of life; for he is adding a wing, which promises to be as extensive as the original structure. We rang at the front door (the family being now absent), and were speedily admitted by a middle-aged or somewhat elderly man,--the butler, I suppose, or some upper servant,--who at once acceded to our request to be permitted to see the house. We stepped from the porch immediately into the entrance-hall; and having the great Hall of Battle Abbey in my memory, and the ideal of a baronial hall in my mind, I was quite taken aback at the smallness and narrowness and lowness of this; which, however, is a very fine one, on its own little scale. In truth, it is not much more than a vestibule. The ceiling is carved; and every inch of the walls is covered with claymores, targets, and other weapons and armor, or old-time curiosities, tastefully arranged, many of which, no doubt, have a history attached to them,--or had, in Sir Walter's own mind. Our attendant was a very intelligent person, and pointed out much that was interesting; but in such a multitudinous variety it was almost impossible to fix the eye upon any one thing. Probably the apartment looked smaller than it really was, on account of being so wainscoted and festooned with curiosities. I remember nothing particularly, unless it be the coal-grate in the fireplace, which was one formerly used by Archbishop Sharpe, the prelate whom Balfour of Burley murdered. Either in this room or the next one, there was a glass case containing the suit of clothes last worn by Scott,--a short green coat, somewhat worn, with silvered buttons, a pair of gray tartan trousers, and a white hat. It was in the hall that we saw these things; for there too, I recollect, were a good many walking-sticks that had been used by Scott, and the hatchet with which he was in the habit of lopping branches from his trees, as he walked among them. From the hall we passed into the study;--a small room, lined with the books which Sir Walter, no doubt, was most frequently accustomed to refer to; and our guide pointed out some volumes of the Moniteur, which he used while writing the history of Napoleon. Probably these were the driest and dullest volumes in his whole library. About mid-height of the walls of the study there is a gallery, with a short flight of steps for the convenience of getting at the upper books. A study-table occupied the centre of the room, and at one end of the table stands an easy-chair, covered with morocco, and with ample space to fling one's self back. The servant told me that I might sit down in this chair, for that Sir Walter sat there while writing his romances, "and perhaps," quoth the man, smiling, "you may catch some inspiration." What a bitter word this would have been if he had known me to be a romance-writer! "No, I never shall be inspired to write romances!" I answered, as if such an idea had never occurred to me. I sat down, however. This study quite satisfied me, being planned on principles of common-sense, and made to work in, and without any fantastic adaptation of old forms to modern uses. Next to the study is the library, an apartment of respectable size, and containing as many books as it can hold, all protected by wire-work. I did not observe what or whose works were here; but the attendant showed us one whole compartment full of volumes having reference to ghosts, witchcraft, and the supernatural generally. It is remarkable that Scott should have felt interested in such subjects, being such a worldly and earthly man as he was; but then, indeed, almost all forms of popular superstition do clothe the ethereal with earthly attributes, and so make it grossly perceptible. The library, like the study, suited me well,--merely the fashion of the apartment, I mean,--and I doubt not it contains as many curious volumes as are anywhere to be met with within a similar space. The drawing-room adjoins it; and here we saw a beautiful ebony cabinet, which was presented to Sir Walter by George IV.; and some pictures of much interest,--one of Scott himself at thirty-five, rather portly, with a heavy face, but shrewd eyes, which seem to observe you closely. There is a full-length of his eldest son, an officer of dragoons, leaning on his charger; and a portrait of Lady Scott,--a brunette, with black hair and eyes, very pretty, warm, vivacious, and un-English in her aspect. I am not quite sure whether I saw all these pictures in the drawing-room, or some of them in the dining-room; but the one that struck me most--and very much indeed--was the head of Mary, Queen of Scots, literally the head cut off and lying on a dish. It is said to have been painted by an Italian or French artist, two days after her death. The hair curls or flows all about it; the face is of a death-like hue, but has an expression of quiet, after much pain and trouble,--very beautiful, very sweet and sad; and it affected me strongly with the horror and strangeness of such a head being severed from its body. Methinks I should not like to have it always in the room with me. I thought of the lovely picture of Mary that I had seen at Edinburgh Castle, and reflected what a symbol it would be,--how expressive of a human being having her destiny in her own hands,--if that beautiful young Queen were painted as carrying this dish, containing her own woful head, and perhaps casting a curious and pitiful glance down upon it, as if it were not her own. Also, in the drawing-room, there was a plaster cast of Sir Walter's face, taken after death; the only one in existence, as our guide assured us. It is not often that one sees a homelier set of features than this; no elevation, no dignity, whether bestowed by nature or thrown over them by age or death; sunken cheeks, the bridge of the nose depressed, and the end turned up; the mouth puckered, and no chin whatever, or hardly any. The expression was not calm and happy; but rather as if he were in a perturbed slumber, perhaps nothing short of nightmare. I wonder that the family allow this cast to be shown,--the last record that there is of Scott's personal reality, and conveying such a wretched and unworthy idea of it. Adjoining the drawing-room is the dining-room, in one corner of which, between two windows, Scott died. It was now a quarter of a century since his death; but it seemed to me that we spoke with a sort of hush in our voices, as if he were still dying here, or had but just departed. I remember nothing else in this room. The next one is the armory, which is the smallest of all that we had passed through; but its walls gleam with the steel blades of swords, and the barrels of pistols, matchlocks, firelocks, and all manner of deadly weapons, whether European or Oriental; for there are many trophies here of East Indian warfare. I saw Rob Roy's gun, rifled and of very large bore; and a beautiful pistol, formerly Claverhouse's; and the sword of Montrose, given him by King Charles, the silver hilt of which I grasped. There was also a superb claymore, in an elaborately wrought silver sheath, made for Sir Walter Scott, and presented to him by the Highland Society, for his services in marshalling the clans when George IV. came to Scotland. There were a thousand other things, which I knew must be most curious, yet did not ask nor care about them, because so many curiosities drive one crazy, and fret one's heart to death. On the whole, there is no simple and great impression left by Abbotsford; and I felt angry and dissatisfied with myself for not feeling something which I did not and could not feel. But it is just like going to a museum, if you look into particulars; and one learns from it, too, that Scott could not have been really a wise man, nor an earnest one, nor one that grasped the truth of life; he did but play, and the play grew very sad toward its close. In a certain way, however, I understand his romances the better for having seen his house; and his house the better for having read his romances. They throw light on one another. We had now gone through all the show-rooms; and the next door admitted us again into the entrance-hall, where we recorded our names in the visitors' book. It contains more names of Americans, I should judge, from casting my eyes back over last year's record, than of all other people in the world, including Great Britain. Bidding farewell to Abbotsford, I cannot but confess a sentiment of remorse for having visited the dwelling-place--as just before I visited the grave of the mighty minstrel and romancer with so cold a heart and in so critical a mood,--his dwelling-place and his grave whom I had so admired and loved, and who had done so much for my happiness when I was young. But I, and the world generally, now look at him from a different point of view; and, besides, these visits to the actual haunts of famous people, though long dead, have the effect of making us sensible, in some degree, of their human imperfections, as if we actually saw them alive. I felt this effect, to a certain extent, even with respect to Shakespeare, when I visited Stratford-on-Avon. As for Scott, I still cherish him in a warm place, and I do not know that I have any pleasanter anticipation, as regards books, than that of reading all his novels over again after we get back to the Wayside. [This Mr. Hawthorne did, aloud to his family, the year following his return to America.--ED.] It was now one or two o'clock, and time for us to take the rail across the borders. Many a mile behind us, as we rushed onward, we could see the threefold Eildon Hill, and probably every pant of the engine carried us over some spot of ground which Scott has made fertile with poetry. For Scotland--cold, cloudy, barren little bit of earth that it is--owes all the interest that the world feels in it to him. Few men have done so much for their country as he. However, having no guide-book, we were none the wiser for what we saw out of the window of the rail-carriage; but, now and then, a castle appeared, on a commanding height, visible for miles round, and seemingly in good repair,--now, in some low and sheltered spot, the gray walls of an abbey; now, on a little eminence, the ruin of a border fortress, and near it the modern residence of the laird, with its trim lawn and shrubbery. We were not long in coming to BERWICK, a town which seems to belong both to England and Scotland, or perhaps is a kingdom by itself, for it stands on both sides of the boundary river, the Tweed, where it empties into the German Ocean. From the railway bridge we had a good view over the town, which looks ancient, with red roofs on all the gabled houses; and it being a sunny afternoon, though bleak and chill, the sea-view was very fine. The Tweed is here broad, and looks deep, flowing far beneath the bridge, between high banks. This is all that I can say of Berwick (pronounced Berrick), for though we spent above an hour at the station waiting for the train, we were so long in getting our dinner, that we had not time for anything else. I remember, however, some gray walls, that looked like the last remains of an old castle, near the railway station. We next took the train for NEWCASTLE, the way to which, for a considerable distance, lies within sight of the sea; and in close vicinity to the shore we saw Holy Isle, on which are the ruins of an abbey. Norham Castle must be somewhere in this neighborhood, on the English shore of the Tweed. It was pretty late in the afternoon--almost nightfall--when we reached Newcastle, over the roofs of which, as over those of Berwick, we had a view from the railway, and like Berwick, it was a congregation of mostly red roofs; but, unlike Berwick (the atmosphere over which was clear and transparent), there came a gush of smoke from every chimney, which made it the dimmest and smokiest place I ever saw. This is partly owing to the iron founderies and furnaces; but each domestic chimney, too, was smoking on its own account,--coal being so plentiful there, no doubt, that the fire is always kept freshly heaped with it, reason or none. Out of this smoke-cloud rose tall steeples; and it was discernible that the town stretched widely over an uneven surface, on the banks of the Tyne, which is navigable up hither ten miles from the sea for pretty large vessels. We established ourselves at the Station Hotel, and then walked out to see something of the town; but I remember only a few streets of duskiness and dinginess, with a glimpse of the turrets of a castle to which we could not find our way. So, as it was getting twilightish and very cold, we went back to the hotel, which is a very good one, better than any one I have seen in the South of England, and almost or quite as good as those of Scotland. The coffee-room is a spacious and handsome apartment, adorned with a full-length portrait of Wellington, and other pictures, and in the whole establishment there was a well-ordered alacrity and liberal provision for the comfort of guests that one seldom sees in English inns. There are a good many American guests in Newcastle, and through all the North. An old Newcastle gentleman and his friend came into the smoking-room, and drank three glasses of hot whiskey-toddy apiece, and were still going on to drink more when we left them. These respectable persons probably went away drunk that night, yet thought none the worse of themselves or of one another for it. It is like returning to times twenty years gone by for a New-Englander to witness such simplicity of manners. The next morning, May 8th, I rose and breakfasted early, and took the rail soon after eight o'clock, leaving Mr. Bowman behind; for he had business in Newcastle, and would not follow till some hours afterwards. There is no use in trying to make a narrative of anything that one sees along an English railway. All I remember of this tract of country is that one of the stations at which we stopped for an instant is called "Washington," and this is, no doubt, the old family place, where the De Wessyngtons, afterwards the Washingtons, were first settled in England. Before reaching York, first one old lady and then another (Quaker) lady got into the carriage along with me; and they seemed to be going to York, on occasion of some fair or celebration. This was all the company I had, and their advent the only incident. It was about eleven o'clock when I beheld York Cathedral rising huge above the old city, which stands on the river Ouse, separated by it from the railway station, but communicating by a ferry (or two) and a bridge. I wandered forth, and found my way over the latter into the ancient and irregular streets of YORK, crooked, narrow, or of unequal width, puzzling, and many of them bearing the name of the particular gate in the old walls of the city to which they lead. There were no such fine, ancient, stately houses as some of those in Shrewsbury were, nor such an aspect of antiquity as in Chester; but still York is a quaint old place, and what looks most modern is probably only something old, hiding itself behind a new front, as elsewhere in England. I found my way by a sort of instinct, as directly as possible, to YORK MINSTER. It stands in the midst of a small open space,--or a space that looks small in comparison with the vast bulk of the cathedral. I was not so much impressed by its exterior as I have usually been by Gothic buildings; because it is rectangular in its general outline and in its towers, and seems to lack the complexity and mysterious plan which perplexes and wonder-strikes me in most cathedrals. Doubtless, however, if I had known better how to admire it, I should have found it wholly admirable. At all events, it has a satisfactory hugeness. Seeking my way in, I at first intruded upon the Registry of Deeds, which occupies a building patched up against the mighty side of the cathedral, and hardly discernible, so small the one and so large the other. I finally hit upon the right door, and I felt no disappointment in my first glance around at the immensity of enclosed space;--I see now in my mind's eye a dim length of nave, a breadth in the transepts like a great plain, and such an airy height beneath the central tower that a worshipper could certainly get a good way towards heaven without rising above it. I only wish that the screen, or whatever they call it, between the choir and nave, could be thrown down, so as to give us leave to take in the whole vastitude at once. I never could understand why, after building a great church, they choose to sunder it in halves by this mid-partition. But let me be thankful for what I got, and especially for the height and massiveness of the clustered pillars that support the arches on which rests the central tower. I remember at Furness Abbey I saw two tall pillars supporting a broken arch, and thought it, the most majestic fragment of architecture that could possibly be. But these pillars have a nobler height, and these arches a greater sweep. What nonsense to try to write about a cathedral! There is a great, cold bareness and bleakness about the interior; for there are very few monuments, and those seem chiefly to be of ecclesiastical people. I saw no armed knights, asleep on the tops of their tombs; but there was a curious representation of a skeleton, at full length, under the table-slab of one of the monuments. The walls are of a grayish hue, not so agreeable as the rich dark tint of the inside of Westminster Abbey; but a great many of the windows are still filled with ancient painted glass, the very small squares and pieces of which are composed into splendid designs of saints and angels, and scenes from Scripture. There were a few watery blinks of sunshine out of doors, and whenever these came through the old painted windows, some of the more vivid colors were faintly thrown upon the pavement of the cathedral,--very faintly, it is true; for, in the first place, the sunshine was not brilliant; and painted glass, too, fades in the course of the ages, perhaps, like all man's other works. There were two or three windows of modern manufacture, and far more magnificent, as to brightness of color and material beauty, than the ancient ones; but yet they looked vulgar, glaring, and impertinent in comparison, because such revivals or imitations of a long-disused art cannot have the good faith and earnestness of the originals. Indeed, in the very coloring, I felt the same difference as between heart's blood and a scarlet dye. It is a pity, however, that the old windows cannot be washed, both inside and out, for now they have the dust of centuries upon them. The screen or curtain between the nave and choir has eleven carved figures, at full length, which appeared to represent kings, some of them wearing crowns, and bearing sceptres or swords. They were in wood, and wrought by some Gothic hand. These carvings, and the painted windows, and the few monuments, are all the details that the mind can catch hold of in the immensity of this cathedral; and I must say that it was a dreary place on that cold, cloudy day. I doubt whether a cathedral is a sort of edifice suited to the English climate. The first buildings of the kind were probably erected by people who had bright and constant sunshine, and who desired a shadowy awfulness--like that of a forest, with its arched wood-paths--into which to retire in their religious moments. In America, on a hot summer's day, how delightful its cool and solemn depths would be! The painted windows, too, were evidently contrived, in the first instance, by persons who saw how effective they would prove when a vivid sun shone through them. But in England, the interior of a cathedral, nine days out of ten, is a vast sullenness, and as chill as death and the tomb. At any rate, it was so to-day, and so thought one of the old vergers, who kept walking as briskly as he could along the width of the transepts. There were several of these old men when I first came in, but they went off, all but this one, before I departed. None of them said a word to me, nor I to them; and admission to the Minster seems to be entirely free. After emerging from this great gloom, I wandered to and fro about York, and contrived to go astray within no very wide space. If its history be authentic, it is an exceedingly old city, having been founded about a thousand years before the Christian era. There used to be a palace of the Roman emperors here, and the Emperor Severus died here, as did some of his successors; and Constantine the Great was born here. I know not what, if any, relics of those earlier times there may be; but York is still partly surrounded with a wall, and has several gates, which the city authorities take pains to keep in repair. I grow weary in my endeavor to find my way back to the railway, and inquired it of one of the good people of York,--a respectable, courteous, gentlemanly person,-- and he told me to walk along the walls. Then he went on a considerable distance; but seemed to repent of not doing more for me; so he waited till I came up, and, walking along by my side, pointed out the castle, now the jail, and the place of execution, and directed me to the principal gateway of the city, and instructed me how to reach the ferry. The path along the wall leads, in one place, through a room over the arch of a gateway,--a low, thick-walled, stone apartment, where doubtless the gatekeeper used to lodge, and to parley with those who desired entrance. I found my way to the ferry over the Ouse, according to this kind Yorkist's instructions. The ferryman told me that the fee for crossing was a halfpenny, which seemed so ridiculously small that I offered him more; but this unparalleled Englishman declined taking anything beyond his rightful halfpenny. This seems so wonderful to me that I can hardly trust my own memory. Reaching the station, I got some dinner, and at four o'clock, just as I was starting, came Mr. Bowman, my very agreeable and sensible travelling companion. Our journeying together was ended here; for he was to keep on to London, and I to return to Liverpool. So we parted, and I took the rail westward across England, through a very beautiful, and in some degree picturesque, tract of country, diversified with hills, through the valleys and vistas of which goes the railroad, with dells diverging from it on either hand, and streams and arched bridges, and old villages, and a hundred pleasant English sights. After passing Rochdale, however, the dreary monotony of Lancashire succeeded this variety. Between nine and ten o'clock I reached the Tithebarn station in Liverpool. Ever since until now, May 17th, I have employed my leisure moments in scribbling off the journal of my tour; but it has greatly lost by not having been written daily, as the scenes and occurrences were fresh. The most picturesque points can be seized in no other way, and the hues of the affair fade as quickly as those of a dying dolphin; or as, according to Audubon, the plumage of a dead bird. One thing that struck me as much as anything else in the Highlands I had forgotten to put down. In our walk at Balloch, along the road within view of Loch Lomond and the neighboring hills, it was a brilliant sunshiny afternoon, and I never saw any atmosphere so beautiful as that among the mountains. It was a clear, transparent, ethereal blue, as distinct as a vapor, and yet by no means vaporous, but a pure, crystalline medium. I have witnessed nothing like this among the Berkshire hills nor elsewhere. York is full of old churches, some of them very antique in appearance, the stones weather-worn, their edges rounded by time, blackened, and with all the tokens of sturdy and age-long decay; and in some of them I noticed windows quite full of old painted glass, a dreary kind of minute patchwork, all of one dark and dusty hue, when seen from the outside. Yet had I seen them from the interior of the church, there doubtless would have been rich and varied apparitions of saints, with their glories round their heads, and bright-winged angels, and perhaps even the Almighty Father himself, so far as conceivable and representable by human powers. It requires light from heaven to make them visible. If the church were merely illuminated from the inside,--that is, by what light a man can get from his own understanding,--the pictures would be invisible, or wear at best but a miserable aspect. LIVERPOOL. May 24th.--Day before yesterday I had a call at the Consulate from one of the Potentates of the Earth,--a woolly-haired negro, rather thin and spare, between forty and fifty years of age, plainly dressed; at the first glimpse of whom, I could readily have mistaken him for some ship's steward, seeking to enter a complaint of his captain. However, this was President Roberts, of Liberia, introduced by a note from Mrs. O'Sullivan, whom he has recently met in Madeira. I was rather favorably impressed with him; for his deportment was very simple, and without any of the flourish and embroidery which a negro might be likely to assume on finding himself elevated from slavery to power. He is rather shy, reserved, at least, and undemonstrative, yet not harshly so,--in fine, with manners that offer no prominent points for notice or criticism; although I felt, or thought I felt, that his color was continually before his mind, and that he walks cautiously among men, as conscious that every new introduction is a new experiment. He is not in the slightest degree an interesting man (so far as I discovered in a very brief interview), apart from his position and history; his face is not striking, nor so agreeable as if it were jet black; but there may be miles and miles of depth in him which I know nothing of. Our conversation was of the most unimportant character; for he had called merely to deliver the note, and sat only a few minutes, during which he merely responded to my observations, and originated no remarks. Intelligence, discretion, tact,-- these are probably his traits; not force of character and independence. The same day I took the rail from the Little Street station for MANCHESTER, to meet Bennoch, who had asked me thither to dine with him. I had never visited Manchester before, though now so long resident within twenty miles of it; neither is it particularly worth visiting, unless for the sake of its factories, which I did not go to see. It is a dingy and heavy town, with very much the aspect of Liverpool, being, like the latter, built almost entirely within the present century. I stopped at the Albion Hotel, and, as Bennoch was out, I walked forth to view the city, and made only such observations as are recorded above. Opposite the hotel stands the Infirmary,--a very large edifice, which, when erected, was on the outskirts, or perhaps in the rural suburbs, of the town, but it is now almost in its centre. In the enclosed space before it stands the statue of Peel, and sits a statue of Dr. Dalton, the celebrated chemist, who was a native of Manchester. Returning to the hotel, I sat down in the room where we were to dine, and in due time Bennoch made his appearance, with the same glow and friendly warmth in his face that I had left burning there when we parted in London. If this man has not a heart, then no man ever had. I like him inexpressibly for his heart and for his intellect, and for his flesh and blood; and if he has faults, I do not know them, nor care to know them, nor value him the less if I did know them. He went to his room to dress; and in the mean time a middle-aged, dark man, of pleasant aspect, with black hair, black eyebrows, and bright, dark eyes came in, limping a little, but not much. He seemed not quite a man of the world, a little shy in manner, yet he addressed me kindly and sociably. I guessed him to be Mr. Charles Swain, the poet, whom Mr. Bennoch had invited to dinner. Soon came another guest whom Mr. Swain introduced to me as Mr. ------, editor of the Manchester Examiner. Then came Bennoch, who made us all regularly acquainted, or took for granted that we were so; and lastly appeared a Mr. W------, a merchant in Manchester, and a very intelligent man; and the party was then complete. Mr. Swain, the poet, is not a man of fluent conversation; he said, indeed, very little, but gave me the impression of amiability and simplicity of character, with much feeling. Mr. W------ is a very sensible man. He has spent two or three years in America, and seems to have formed juster conclusions about us than most of his countrymen do. He is the only Englishman, I think, whom I have met, who fairly acknowledges that the English do cherish doubt, jealousy, suspicion, in short, an unfriendly feeling, towards the Americans. It is wonderful how every American, whatever class of the English he mingles with, is conscious of this feeling, and how no Englishman, except this sole Mr. W------, will confess it. He expressed some very good ideas, too, about the English and American press, and the reasons why the Times may fairly be taken as the exponent of British feeling towards us, while the New York Herald, immense as its circulation is, can be considered, in no similar degree or kind, the American exponent. We sat late at table, and after the other guests had retired, Bennoch and I had some very friendly talk, and he proposed that on my wife's return we should take up our residence in his house at Blackheath, while Mrs. Bennoch and himself were absent for two months on a trip to Germany. If his wife and mine ratify the idea, we will do so. The next morning we went out to see the Exchange, and whatever was noticeable about the town. Time being brief, I did not visit the cathedral, which, I believe, is a thousand years old. There are many handsome shops in Manchester; and we went into one establishment, devoted to pictures, engravings, and decorative art generally, which is most perfect and extensive. The firm, if I remember, is that of the Messrs. Agnew, and, though originating here, they have now a house in London. Here I saw some interesting objects, purchased by them at the recent sale of the Rogers collection; among other things, a slight pencil and water-color sketch by Raphael. An unfinished affair, done in a moment, as this must have been, seems to bring us closer to the hand that did it than the most elaborately painted picture can. Were I to see the Transfiguration, Raphael would still be at the distance of centuries. Seeing this little sketch, I had him very near me. I know not why,-- perhaps it might be fancied that he had only laid down the pencil for an instant, and would take it up again in a moment more. I likewise saw a copy of a handsome, illustrated edition of Childe Harold, presented by old John Murray to Mr. Rogers, with an inscription on the fly-leaf, purporting that it was a token of gratitude from the publisher, because, when everybody else thought him imprudent in giving four hundred guineas for the poem, Mr. Rogers told him it would turn out the best bargain he ever made. There was a new picture by Millais, the distinguished Pre-Raphaelite artist, representing a melancholy parting between two lovers. The lady's face had a great deal of sad and ominous expression; but an old brick wall, overrun with foliage, was so exquisitely and elaborately wrought that it was hardly possible to look at the personages of the picture. Every separate leaf of the climbing and clustering shrubbery was painfully made out; and the wall was reality itself, with the weather-stains, and the moss, and the crumbling lime between the bricks. It is not well to be so perfect in the inanimate, unless the artist can likewise make man and woman as lifelike, and to as great a depth, too, as the Creator does. Bennoch left town for some place in Yorkshire, and I for Liverpool. I asked him to come and dine with me at the Adelphi, meaning to ask two or three people to meet him; but he had other engagements, and could not spare a day at present, though he promises to come before long. Dining at Mr. Rathbone's one evening last week (May 21st), it was mentioned that BORROW, author of the Bible in Spain, is supposed to be of gypsy descent by the mother's side. Hereupon Mr. Martineau mentioned that he had been a schoolfellow of Borrow, and though he had never heard of his gypsy blood, he thought it probable, from Borrow's traits of character. He said that, Borrow had once run away from school, and carried with him a party of other boys, meaning to lead a wandering life. If an Englishman were individually acquainted with all our twenty-five millions of Americans, and liked every one of them, and believed that each man of those millions was a Christian, honest, upright, and kind, he would doubt, despise, and hate them in the aggregate, however he might love and honor the individuals. Captain ------ and his wife Oakum; they spent all evening at Mrs. B------'s. The Captain is a Marblehead man by birth, not far from sixty years old; very talkative and anecdotic in regard to his adventures; funny, good-humored, and full of various nautical experience. Oakum (it is a nickname which he gives his wife) is an inconceivably tall woman,-- taller than he,--six feet, at least, and with a well-proportioned largeness in all respects, but looks kind and good, gentle, smiling,--and almost any other woman might sit like a baby on her lap. She does not look at all awful and belligerent, like the massive English women one often sees. You at once feel her to be a benevolent giantess, and apprehend no harm from her. She is a lady, and perfectly well mannered, but with a sort of naturalness and simplicity that becomes her; for any the slightest affectation would be so magnified in her vast personality that it would be absolutely the height of the ridiculous. This wedded pair have no children, and Oakum has so long accompanied her husband on his voyages that I suppose by this time she could command a ship as well as he. They sat till pretty late, diffusing cheerfulness all about them, and then, "Come, Oakum," cried the Captain, "we must hoist sail!" and up rose Oakum to the ceiling, and moved tower-like to the door, looking down with a benignant smile on the poor little pygmy women about her. "Six feet," did I say? Why, she must he seven, eight, nine; and, whatever be her size, she is as good as she is big. June 11th.--Monday night (9th), just as I was retiring, I received a telegraphic message announcing my wife's arrival at SOUTHAMPTON. So, the next day, I arranged the consular business for an absence of ten days, and set forth with J-----, and reached Birmingham, between eight and nine, evening. We put up at the Queen's Hotel, a very large establishment, contiguous to the railway. Next morning we left Birmingham, and made our first stage to Leamington, where we had to wait nearly an hour, which we spent in wandering through some of the streets that had been familiar to us last year. Leamington is certainly a beautiful town, new, bright, clean, and as unlike as possible to the business towns of England. However, the sun was burning hot, and I could almost have fancied myself in America. From Leamington we took tickets for Oxford, where we were obliged to make another stop of two hours; and these we employed to what advantage we could, driving up into town, and straying hither and thither, till J-----'s weariness weighed upon me, and I adjourned with him to a hotel. Oxford is an ugly old town, of crooked and irregular streets, gabled houses, mostly plastered of a buff or yellow hue; some new fronts; and as for the buildings of the University, they seem to be scattered at random, without any reference to one another. I passed through an old gateway of Christ Church, and looked at its enclosed square, and that is, in truth, pretty much all I then saw of the University of Oxford. From Christ Church we rambled along a street that led us to a bridge across the Isis; and we saw many row-boats lying in the river,--the lightest craft imaginable, unless it were an Indian canoe. The Isis is but a narrow stream, and with a sluggish current. I believe the students of Oxford are famous for their skill in rowing. To me as well as to J----- the hot streets were terribly oppressive; so we went into the Roebuck Hotel, where we found a cool and pleasant coffee-room. The entrance to this hotel is through an arch, opening from High Street, and giving admission into a paved court, the buildings all around being part of the establishment,--old edifices with pointed gables and old-fashioned projecting windows, but all in fine repair, and wearing a most quiet, retired, and comfortable aspect. The court was set all round with flowers, growing in pots or large pedestalled vases; on one side was the coffee-room, and all the other public apartments, and the other side seemed to be taken up by the sleeping-chambers and parlors of the guests. This arrangement of an inn, I presume, is very ancient, and it resembles what I have seen in the hospitals, free schools, and other charitable establishments in the old English towns; and, indeed, all large houses were arranged on somewhat the same principle. By and by two or three young men came in, in wide-awake hats, and loose, blouse-like, summerish garments; and from their talk I found them to be students of the University, although their topics of conversation were almost entirely horses and boats. One of them sat down to cold beef and a tankard of ale; the other two drank a tankard of ale together, and went away without paying for it,--rather to the waiter's discontent. Students are very much alike, all the world over, and, I suppose, in all time; but I doubt whether many of my fellows at college would have gone off without paying for their beer. We reached Southampton between seven and eight o'clock. I cannot write to-day. June 15th.--The first day after we reached Southampton was sunny and pleasant; but we made little use of the fine weather, except that S----- and I walked once along the High Street, and J----- and I took a little ramble about town in the afternoon. The next day there was a high and disagreeable wind, and I did not once stir out of the house. The third day, too, I kept entirely within doors, it being a storm of wind and rain. The Castle Hotel stands within fifty yards of the water-side; so that this gusty day showed itself to the utmost advantage,--the vessels pitching and tossing at their moorings, the waves breaking white out of a tumultuous gray surface, the opposite shore glooming mistily at the distance of a mile or two; and on the hither side boatmen and seafaring people scudding about the pier in waterproof clothes; and in the street, before the hotel door, a cabman or two, standing drearily beside his horse. But we were sunny within doors. Yesterday it was breezy, sunny, shadowy, showery; and we ordered a cab to take us to Clifton Villa, to call on Mrs. ------, a friend of B------'s, who called on us the day after our arrival. Just, as we were ready to start, Mrs. ------ again called, and accompanied us back to her house. It is in Shirley, about two miles from Southampton pier, and is a pleasant suburban villa, with a pretty ornamented lawn and shrubbery about it. Mrs. ------ is an instructress of young ladies; and at B------'s suggestion, she is willing to receive us for two or three weeks, during the vacation, until we are ready to go to London. She seems to be a pleasant and sensible woman, and to-morrow we shall decide whether to go there. There was nothing very remarkable in this drive; and, indeed, my stay hereabouts thus far has been very barren of sights and incidents externally interesting, though the inner life has been rich. Southampton is a very pretty town, and has not the dinginess to which I have been accustomed in many English towns. The High Street reminds me very much of American streets in its general effect; the houses being mostly stuccoed white or light, and cheerful in aspect, though doubtless they are centuries old at heart. The old gateway, which I presume I have mentioned in describing my former visit to Southampton, stands across High Street, about in the centre of the town, and is almost the only token of antiquity that presents itself to the eye. June 17th.--Yesterday morning, June 16th, S-----, Mrs. ------, and I took the rail for Salisbury, where we duly arrived without any accident or anything noticeable, except the usual verdure and richness of an English summer landscape. From the railway station we walked up into Salisbury, with the tall spire (four hundred feet high) of the cathedral before our eyes. Salisbury is an antique city, but with streets more regular than I have seen in most old towns, and the houses have a more picturesque aspect than those of Oxford, for instance, where almost all are mean-looking alike,--though I could hardly judge of Oxford on that hot, weary day. Through one or more of the streets there runs a swift, clear little stream, which, being close to the pavement, and bordered with stone, may be called, I suppose, a kennel, though possessing the transparent purity of a rustic rivulet. It is a brook in city garb. We passed under the pointed arch of a gateway, which stands in one of the principal streets, and soon came in front of THE CATHEDRAL. I do not remember any cathedral with so fine a site as this, rising up out of the centre of a beautiful green, extensive enough to show its full proportions, relieved and insulated from all other patchwork and impertinence of rusty edifices. It is of gray stone, and looks as perfect as when just finished, and with the perfection, too, that could not have come in less than six centuries of venerableness, with a view to which these edifices seem to have been built. A new cathedral would lack the last touch to its beauty and grandeur. It needs to be mellowed and ripened, like some pictures; although I suppose this awfulness of antiquity was supplied, in the minds of the generation that built cathedrals, by the sanctity which they attributed to them. Salisbury Cathedral is far more beautiful than that of York, the exterior of which was really disagreeable to my eye; but this mighty spire and these multitudinous gray pinnacles and towers ascend towards heaven with a kind of natural beauty, not as if man had contrived them. They might be fancied to have grown up, just as the spires of a tuft of grass do, at the same time that they have a law of propriety and regularity among themselves. The tall spire is of such admirable proportion that it does not seem gigantic; and indeed the effect of the whole edifice is of beauty rather than weight and massiveness. Perhaps the bright, balmy sunshine in which we saw it contributed to give it a tender glory, and to soften a little its majesty. When we went in, we heard the organ, the forenoon service being near conclusion. If I had never seen the interior of York Cathedral, I should have been quite satisfied, no doubt, with the spaciousness of this nave and these side aisles, and the height of their arches, and the girth of these pillars; but with that recollection in my mind they fell a little short of grandeur. The interior is seen to disadvantage, and in a way the builder never meant it to be seen; because there is little or no painted glass, nor any such mystery as it makes, but only a colorless, common daylight, revealing everything without remorse. There is a general light hue, moreover, like that of whitewash, over the whole of the roof and walls of the interior, pillars, monuments, and all; whereas, originally, every pillar was polished, and the ceiling was ornamented in brilliant colors, and the light came, many-hued, through the windows, on all this elaborate beauty, in lieu of which there is nothing now but space. Between the pillars that separate the nave from the side aisles, there are ancient tombs, most of which have recumbent statues on them. One of these is Longsword, Earl of Salisbury, son of Fair Rosamond, in chain mail; and there are many other warriors and bishops, and one cross-legged Crusader, and on one tombstone a recumbent skeleton, which I have likewise seen in two or three other cathedrals. The pavement of the aisles and nave is laid in great part with flat tombstones, the inscriptions on which are half obliterated, and on the walls, especially in the transepts, there are tablets, among which I saw one to the poet Bowles, who was a canon of this cathedral. The ecclesiastical dignitaries bury themselves and monument themselves to the exclusion of almost everybody else, in these latter times; though still, as of old, the warrior has his place. A young officer, slain in the Indian wars, was memorialized by a tablet, and may be remembered by it, six hundred years hence, as we now remember the old Knights and Crusaders. It deserves to be mentioned that I saw one or two noses still unbroken among these recumbent figures. Most of the antique statues, on close examination, proved to be almost, entirely covered with names and initials, scratched over the once polished surface. The cathedral and its relics must have been far less carefully watched, at some former period, than now. Between the nave and the choir, as usual, there is a screen that half destroys the majesty of the building, by abridging the spectator of the long vista which he might otherwise have of the whole interior at a glance. We peeped through the barrier, and saw some elaborate monuments in the chancel beyond; but the doors of the screen are kept locked, so that the vergers may raise a revenue by showing strangers through the richest part of the cathedral. By and by one of these vergers came through the screen, with a gentleman and lady whom he was taking round, and we joined ourselves to the party. He showed us into the cloisters, which had long been neglected and ruinous, until the time of Bishop Dennison, the last prelate, who has been but a few years dead. This Bishop has repaired and restored the cloisters in faithful adherence to the original plan; and they now form a most delightful walk about a pleasant and verdant enclosure, in the centre of which sleeps good Bishop Dennison, with a wife on either side of him, all three beneath broad flat stones. Most cloisters are darksome and grim; but these have a broad paved walk beneath the vista of arches, and are light, airy, and cheerful; and from one corner you can get the best possible view of the whole height and beautiful proportion of the cathedral spire. One side of this cloistered walk seems to be the length of the nave of the cathedral. There is a square of four such sides; and of places for meditation, grave, yet not too sombre, it seemed to me one of the best. While we stayed there, a jackdaw was walking to and fro across the grassy enclosure, and haunting around the good Bishop's grave. He was clad in black, and looked like a feathered ecclesiastic; but I know not whether it were Bishop Dennison's ghost, or that of some old monk. On one side of the cloisters, and contiguous to the main body of the cathedral, stands the chapter-house. Bishop Dennison had it much at heart to repair this part of the holy edifice; and, if I mistake not, did begin the work; for it had been long ruinous, and in Cromwell's time his dragoons stationed their horses there. Little progress, however, had been made in the repairs when the Bishop died; and it was decided to restore the building in his honor, and by way of monument to him. The repairs are now nearly completed; and the interior of this chapter-house gave me the first idea, anywise adequate, of the splendor of these Gothic church edifices. The roof is sustained by one great central pillar of polished marble,--small pillars clustered about a great central column, which rises to the ceiling, and there gushes out with various beauty, that overflows all the walls; as if the fluid idea had sprung out of that fountain, and grown solid in what we see. The pavement is elaborately ornamented; the ceiling is to be brilliantly gilded and painted, as it was of yore, and the tracery and sculptures around the walls are to be faithfully renewed from what remains of the original patterns. After viewing the chapter-house, the verger--an elderly man of grave, benign manner, clad in black and talking of the cathedral and the monuments as if he loved them--led us again into the nave of the cathedral, and thence within the screen of the choir. The screen is as poor as possible,--mere barren wood-work, without the least attempt at beauty. In the chancel there are some meagre patches of old glass, and some of modern date, not very well worth looking at. We saw several interesting monuments in this part of the cathedral,--one belonging to the ducal family of Somerset, and erected in the reign of James I.; it is of marble, and extremely splendid and elaborate, with kneeling figures and all manner of magnificence,--more than I have seen in any monument except that of Mary of Scotland in Westminster Abbey. The more ancient tombs are also very numerous, and among them that of the Bishop who founded the cathedral. Within the screen, against the wall, is erected a monument, by Chantrey, to the Earl of Malmesbury; a full-length statue of the Earl in a half-recumbent position, holding an open volume and looking upward,--a noble work,--a calm, wise, thoughtful, firm, and not unbenignant face. Beholding its expression, it really was impossible not to have faith in the high character of the individual thus represented; and I have seldom felt this effect from any monumental bust or statue, though I presume it is always aimed at. I am weary of trying to describe cathedrals. It is utterly useless; there is no possibility of giving the general effect, or any shadow of it, and it is miserable to put down a few items of tombstones, and a bit of glass from a painted window, as if the gloom and glory of the edifice were thus to be reproduced. Cathedrals are almost the only things (if even those) that have quite filled out my ideal here in this old world; and cathedrals often make me miserable from my inadequacy to take them wholly in; and, above all, I despise myself when I sit down to describe them. We now walked around the Close, which is surrounded by some of the quaintest and comfortablest ecclesiastical residences that can be imagined. These are the dwelling-houses of the Dean and the canons, and whatever other high officers compose the Bishop's staff; and there was one large brick mansion, old, but not so ancient as the rest, which we took to be the Bishop's palace. I never beheld anything--I must say again so cosey, so indicative of domestic comfort for whole centuries together,--houses so fit to live in or to die in, and where it would be so pleasant to lead a young wife beneath the antique portal, and dwell with her till husband and wife were patriarchal,--as these delectable old houses. They belong naturally to the cathedral, and have a necessary relation to it, and its sanctity is somehow thrown over them all, so that they do not quite belong to this world, though they look full to overflowing of whatever earthly things are good for man. These are places, however, in which mankind makes no progress; the rushing tumult of human life here subsides into a deep, quiet pool, with perhaps a gentle circular eddy, but no onward movement. The same identical thought, I suppose, goes round in a slow whirl from one generation to another, as I have seen a withered leaf do in the vortex of a brook. In the front of the cathedral there is a most stately and beautiful tree, which flings its verdure upward to a very lofty height; but far above it rises the tall spire, dwarfing the great tree by comparison. When the cathedral had sufficiently oppressed us with its beauty, we returned to sublunary matters, and went wandering about Salisbury in search of a luncheon, which we finally took in a confectioner's shop. Then we inquired hither and thither, at various livery-stables, for a conveyance to Stonehenge, and at last took a fly from the Lamb Hotel. The drive was over a turnpike for the first seven miles, over a bare, ridgy country, showing little to interest us. We passed a party of seven or eight men, in a coarse uniform dress, resembling that worn by convicts and apparently under the guardianship of a stout, authoritative, yet rather kindly-looking man with a cane. Our driver said that they were lunatics from a neighboring asylum, out for a walk. Seven miles from Salisbury, we turned aside from the turnpike, and drove two miles across Salisbury Plain, which is an apparently boundless extent of unenclosed land, treeless and houseless. It is not exactly a plain, but a green sea of long and gentle swells and subsidences, affording views of miles upon miles to a very far horizon. We passed large flocks of sheep, with the shepherds watching them; but the dogs seemed to take most of the care of the flocks upon their own shoulders, and would scamper to turn the sheep when they inclined to stray whither they should not; and then arose a thousand-fold bleating, not unpleasant to the ear; for it did not apparently indicate any fear or discomfort on the part of the flock. The sheep and lambs are all black-faced, and have a very funny expression. As we drove over the plain (my seat was beside the driver), I saw at a distance a cluster of large gray stones, mostly standing upright, and some of them slightly inclined towards each other, --very irregular, and so far off forming no very picturesque or noteworthy spectacle. Of course I knew at once that this was STONEHENGE, and also knew that the reality was going to dwindle wofully within my ideal, as almost everything else does. When we reached the spot, we found a picnic-party just finishing their dinner, on one of the overthrown stones of the druidical temple; and within the sacred circle an artist was painting a wretched daub of the scene, and an old shepherd --the very Shepherd of Salisbury Plain sat erect in the centre of the ruin. There never was a ruder thing than Stonehenge made by mortal hands. It is so very rude that it seems as if Nature and man had worked upon it with one consent, and so it is all the stranger and more impressive from its rudeness. The spectator wonders to see art and contrivance, and a regular and even somewhat intricate plan, beneath all the uncouth simplicity of this arrangement of rough stones; and certainly, whatever was the intellectual and scientific advancement of the people who built Stonehenge, no succeeding architects will ever have a right to triumph over them; for nobody's work in after times is likely to endure till it becomes a mystery as to who built it, and how, and for what purpose. Apart from the moral considerations suggested by it, Stonehenge is not very well worth seeing. Materially, it is one of the poorest of spectacles, and when complete, it must have been even less picturesque than now,--a few huge, rough stones, very imperfectly squared, standing on end, and each group of two supporting a third large stone on their tops; other stones of the same pattern overthrown and tumbled one upon another; and the whole comprised within a circuit of about a hundred feet diameter; the short, sheep-cropped grass of Salisbury Plain growing among all these uncouth bowlders. I am not sure that a misty, lowering day would not have better suited Stonehenge, as the dreary midpoint of the great, desolate, trackless plain; not literally trackless, however, for the London and Exeter Road passes within fifty yards of the ruins, and another road intersects it. After we had been there about an hour, there came a horseman within the Druid's circle,--evidently a clerical personage by his white neckcloth, though his loose gray riding pantaloons were not quite in keeping. He looked at us rather earnestly, and at last addressed Mrs. ------, and announced himself as Mr. Hinchman,--a clergyman whom she had been trying to find in Salisbury, in order to avail herself of him as a cicerone; and he had now ridden hither to meet us. He told us that the artist whom we found here could give us more information than anybody about Stonehenge; for it seems he has spent a great many years here, painting and selling his poor sketches to visitors, and also selling a book which his father wrote about the remains. This man showed, indeed, a pretty accurate, acquaintance with these old stones, and pointed out, what is thought to be the altar-stone, and told us of some relation between this stone and two other stones, and the rising of the sun at midsummer, which might indicate that Stonehenge was a temple of solar worship. He pointed out, too, to how little depth the stones were planted in the earth, insomuch that I have no doubt the American frosts would overthrow Stonehenge in a single winter; and it is wonderful that it should have stood so long, even in England. I have forgotten what else he said; but I bought one of his books, and find it a very unsatisfactory performance, being chiefly taken up with an attempt to prove these remains to be an antediluvian work, constructed, I think the author says, under the superintendence of Father Adam himself! Before our departure we were requested to write our names in the album which the artist keeps for the purpose; and he pointed out Ex-President Fillmore's autograph, and those of one or two other Americans who have been here within a short time. It is a very curious life that this artist leads, in this great solitude, and haunting Stonehenge like the ghost of a Druid; but he is a brisk little man, and very communicative on his one subject. Mr. Hinchman rode with us over the plain, and pointed out Salisbury spire, visible close to Stonehenge. Under his guidance we returned by a different road from that which brought us thither,--and a much more delightful one. I think I never saw such continued sylvan beauty as this road showed us, passing through a good deal of woodland scenery,--fine old trees, standing each within its own space, and thus having full liberty to outspread itself, and wax strong and broad for ages, instead of being crowded, and thus stifled and emaciated, as human beings are here, and forest-trees are in America. Hedges, too, and the rich, rich verdure of England; and villages full of picturesque old houses, thatched, and ivied, or perhaps overrun with roses,--and a stately mansion in the Elizabethan style; and a quiet stream, gliding onward without a ripple from its own motion, but rippled by a large fish darting across it; and over all this scene a gentle, friendly sunshine, not ardent enough to crisp a single leaf or blade of grass. Nor must the village church be forgotten, with its square, battlemented tower, dating back to the epoch of the Normans. We called at a house where one of Mrs. ------'s pupils was residing with her aunt,--a thatched house of two stories high, built in what was originally a sand-pit, but which, in the course of a good many years, has been transformed into the most delightful and homelike little nook almost that can be found in England. A thatched cottage suggests a very rude dwelling indeed; but this had a pleasant parlor and drawing-room, and chambers with lattice-windows, opening close beneath the thatched roof; and the thatch itself gives an air to the place as if it were a bird's nest, or some such simple and natural habitation. The occupants are an elderly clergyman, retired from professional duty, and his sister; and having nothing else to do, and sufficient means, they employ themselves in beautifying this sweet little retreat,-- planting new shrubbery, laying out new walks around it, and helping Nature to add continually another charm; and Nature is certainly a more genial playfellow in England than in my own country. She is always ready to lend her aid to any beautifying purpose. Leaving these good people, who were very hospitable, giving tea and offering wine, we reached Salisbury in time to take the train for Southampton. June 18th.--Yesterday we left the Castle Hotel, after paying a bill of twenty pounds for a little more than a week's board. In America we could not very well have lived so simply, but we might have lived luxuriously for half the money. This Castle Hotel was once an old Roman castle, the landlord says, and the circular sweep of the tower is still seen towards the street, although, being painted white, and built up with modern additions, it would not be taken for an ancient structure. There is a dungeon beneath it, in which the landlord keeps his wine. J----- and I, quitting the hotel, walked towards Shinley along the water-side, leaving the rest of the family to follow in a fly. There are many traces, along the shore, of the fortifications by which Southampton was formerly defended towards the water, and very probably their foundations may be as ancient as Roman times. Our hotel was no doubt connected with this chain of defences, which seems to have consisted of a succession of round towers, with a wall extending from one to another. We saw two or three of these towers still standing, and likely to stand, though ivy-grown and ruinous at the summit, and intermixed and even amalgamated with pot-houses and mean dwellings; and often, through an antique arch, there was a narrow doorway, giving access to the house of some sailor or laborer or artisan, and his wife gossiping at it with her neighbor, or his children playing about it. After getting beyond the precincts of Southampton our walk was not very interesting, except to J-----, who kept running down to the verge of the water, looking for shells and sea-insects. June 29th.--Yesterday, 28th, I left Liverpool from the Lime Street station; an exceedingly hot day for England, insomuch that the rail carriages were really uncomfortable. I have now passed over the London and Northwestern Railway so often that the northern part of it is very wearisome, especially as it has few features of interest even to a new observer. At Stafford--no, at Wolverhampton--we diverged to a track which I have passed over only once before. We stopped an hour and a quarter at Wolverhampton, and I walked up into the town, which is large and old,--old, at least, in its plan, or lack of plan,--the streets being irregular, and straggling over an uneven surface. Like many of the English towns, it reminds me of Boston, though dingier. The sun was so hot that I actually sought the shady sides of the streets; and this, of itself, is one long step towards establishing a resemblance between an English town and an American one. English railway carriages seem to me more tiresome than any other; and I suppose it is owing to the greater motion, arising from their more elastic springs. A slow train, too, like that which I was now in, is more tiresome than a quick one, at least to the spirits, whatever it may be to the body. We loitered along through afternoon and evening, stopping at every little station, and nowhere getting to the top of our speed, till at last, in the late dusk, we reached GLOUCESTER, and I put up at the Wellington Hotel, which is but a little way from the station. I took tea and a slice or two of ham in the coffee-room, and had a little talk with two people there; one of whom, on learning that I was an American, said, "But I suppose you have now been in England some time?" He meant, finding me not absolutely a savage, that I must have been caught a good while ago. . . . . The next morning I went into the city, the hotel being on its outskirts, and rambled along in search of the cathedral. Some church-bells were chiming and clashing for a wedding or other festal occasion, and I followed the sound, supposing that it might proceed from the cathedral, but this was not the case. It was not till I had got to a bridge over the Severn, quite out of the town, that I saw again its tower, and knew how to shape my course towards it. I did not see much that was strange or interesting in Gloucester. It is old, with a good many of those antique Elizabethan houses with two or three peaked gables on a line together; several old churches, which always cluster about a cathedral, like chickens round a hen; a hospital for decayed tradesmen; another for bluecoat boys; a great many butcher's shops, scattered in all parts of the town, open in front, with a counter or dresser on which to display the meat, just in the old fashion of Shakespeare's house. It is a large town, and has a good deal of liveliness and bustle, in a provincial way. In short, judging by the sheep, cattle, and horses, and the people of agricultural aspect that I saw about the streets, I should think it must have been market-day. I looked here and there for the old Bell Inn, because, unless I misremember, Fielding brings Tom Jones to this inn, while he and Partridge were travelling together. It is still extant; for, on my arrival the night before, a runner from it had asked me to go thither; but I forgot its celebrity at the moment. I saw nothing of it in my rambles about Gloucester, but at last I found THE CATHEDRAL, though I found no point from which a good view of the exterior can be seen. It has a very beautiful and rich outside, however, and a lofty tower, very large and ponderous, but so finished off, and adorned with pinnacles, and all manner of architectural devices,--wherewith these old builders knew how to alleviate their massive structures,--that it seems to sit lightly in the air. The porch was open, and some workmen were trundling barrows into the nave; so I followed, and found two young women sitting just within the porch, one of whom offered to show me round the cathedral. There was a great dust in the nave, arising from the operations of the workmen. They had been laying a new pavement, and scraping away the plaster, which had heretofore been laid over the pillars and walls. The pillars come out from the process as good as new,--great, round, massive columns, not clustered like those of most cathedrals; they are twenty-one feet in circumference, and support semicircular arches. I think there are seven of these columns, on each side of the nave, which did not impress me as very spacious; and the dust and racket of the work-people quite destroyed the effect which should have been produced by the aisles and arches; so that I hardly stopped to glance at this part, though I saw some mural monuments and recumbent statues along the walls. The choir is separated from the nave by the usual screen, and now by a sail-cloth or something of that kind, drawn across, in order to keep out the dust, while the repairs are going on. When the young woman conducted me hither, I was at once struck by the magnificent eastern window, the largest in England, which fills, or looks vast enough to fill, all that end of the cathedral,--a most splendid window, full of old painted glass, which looked as bright as sunshine, though the sun was not really shining through it. The roof of the choir is of oak and very fine, and as much as ninety feet high. There are chapels opening from the choir, and within them the monuments of the eminent people who built them, and of benefactors or prelates, or of those otherwise illustrious in their day. My recollection of what I saw here is very dim and confused; more so than I anticipated. I remember somewhere within the choir the tomb of Edward II. with his effigy upon the top of it, in a long robe, with a crown on his head, and a ball and sceptre in his hand; likewise, a statue of Robert, son of the Conqueror, carved in Irish oak and painted. He lolls in an easy posture on his tomb, with one leg crossed lightly over the other, to denote that he was a Crusader. There are several monuments of mitred abbots who formerly presided over the cathedral. A Cavalier and his wife, with the dress of the period elaborately represented, lie side by side in excellent preservation; and it is remarkable that though their noses are very prominent, they have come down from the past without any wear and tear. The date of the Cavalier's death is 1637, and I think his statue could not have been sculptured until after the Restoration, else he and his dame would hardly have come through Cromwell's time unscathed. Here, as in all the other churches in England, Cromwell is said to have stabled his horses, and broken the windows, and belabored the old monuments. There is one large and beautiful chapel, styled the Lady's Chapel, which is, indeed, a church by itself, being ninety feet long, and comprising everything that appertains to a place of worship. Here, too, there are monuments, and on the floor are many old bricks and tiles, with inscriptions on them, or Gothic devices, and flat tombstones, with coats of arms sculptured on them; as, indeed, there are everywhere else, except in the nave, where the new pavement has obliterated them. After viewing the choir and the chapels, the young woman led me down into the crypts below, where the dead persons who are commemorated in the upper regions were buried. The low ponderous pillars and arches of these crypts are supposed to be older than the upper portions of the building. They are about as perfect, I suppose, as when new, but very damp, dreary, and darksome; and the arches intersect one another so intricately, that, if the girl had deserted me, I might easily have got lost there. These are chapels where masses used to be said for the souls of the deceased; and my guide said that a great many skulls and bones had been dug up here. No doubt a vast population has been deposited in the course of a thousand years. I saw two white skulls, in a niche, grinning as skulls always do, though it is impossible to see the joke. These crypts, or crypts like these, are doubtless what Congreve calls the "aisles and monumental caves of Death," in that passage which Dr. Johnson admired so much. They are very singular,--something like a dark shadow or dismal repetition of the upper church below ground. Ascending from the crypts, we went next to the cloisters, which are in a very perfect state, and form an unbroken square about the green grass-plot, enclosed within. Here also it is said Cromwell stabled his horses; but if so, they were remarkably quiet beasts, for tombstones, which form the pavement, are not broken, nor cracked, nor bear any hoof-marks. All around the cloisters, too, the stone tracery that shuts them in like a closed curtain, carefully drawn, remains as it was in the days of the monks, insomuch that it is not easy to get a glimpse of the green enclosure. Probably there used to be painted glass in the larger apertures of this stone-work; otherwise it is perfect. These cloisters are very different from the free, open, and airy ones of Salisbury; but they are more in accordance with our notions of monkish habits; and even at this day, if I were a canon of Gloucester, I would put that dim ambulatory to a good use. The library is adjacent to the cloisters, and I saw some rows of folios and quartos. I have nothing else to record about the cathedral, though if I were to stay there a month, I suppose it might then begin to be understood. It is wicked to look at these solemn old churches in a hurry. By the by, it was not built in a hurry; but in full three hundred years, having been begun in 1188 and only finished in 1498, not a great many years before Papistry began to go out of vogue in England. From Gloucester I took the rail for Basingstoke before noon. The first part of the journey was through an uncommonly beautiful tract of country, hilly, but not wild; a tender and graceful picturesqueness,--fine, single trees and clumps of trees, and sometimes wide woods, scattered over the landscape, and filling the nooks of the hills with luxuriant foliage. Old villages scattered frequently along our track, looking very peaceful, with the peace of past ages lingering about them; and a rich, rural verdure of antique cultivation everywhere. Old country-seats--specimens of the old English hall or manor-house--appeared on the hillsides, with park-scenery surrounding the mansions; and the gray churches rose in the midst of all the little towns. The beauty of English scenery makes me desperate, it is so impossible to describe it, or in any way to record its impression, and such a pity to leave it undescribed; and, moreover, I always feel that I do not get from it a hundredth or a millionth part of the enjoyment that there really is in it, hurrying past it thus. I was really glad when we rumbled into a tunnel, piercing for a long distance through a hill; and, emerging on the other side, we found ourselves in a comparatively level and uninteresting tract of country, which lasted till we reached Southampton. English scenery, to be appreciated and to be reproduced with pen and pencil, requires to be dwelt upon long, and to be wrought out with the nicest touches. A coarse and hasty brush is not the instrument for such work. July 6th.--Monday, June 30th, was a warm and beautiful day, and my wife and I took a cab from Southampton and drove to NETLEY ABBEY, about three or four miles. The remains of the Abbey stand in a sheltered place, but within view of Southampton Water; and it is a most picturesque and perfect ruin, all ivy-grown, of course, and with great trees where the pillars of the nave used to stand, and also in the refectory and the cloister court; and so much soil on the summit of the broken walls, that weeds flourish abundantly there, and grass too; and there was a wild rosebush, in full bloom, as much as thirty or forty feet from the ground. S----- and I ascended a winding stair, leading up within a round tower, the steps much foot-worn; and, reaching the top, we came forth at the height where a gallery had formerly run round the church, in the thickness of the wall. The upper portions of the edifice were now chiefly thrown down; but I followed a foot-path, on the top of the remaining wall, quite to the western entrance of the church. Since the time when the Abbey was taken from the monks, it has been private property; and the possessor, in Henry VIII.'s days, or subsequently, built a residence for himself within its precincts out of the old materials. This has now entirely disappeared, all but some unsightly old masonry, patched into the original walls. Large portions of the ruin have been removed, likewise, to be used as building-materials elsewhere; and this is the Abbey mentioned, I think, by Dr. Watts, concerning which a Mr. William Taylor had a dream while he was contemplating pulling it down. He dreamed that a part of it fell upon his head; and, sure enough, a piece of the wall did come down and crush him. In the nave I saw a large mass of conglomerated stone that had fallen from the wall between the nave and cloisters, and thought that perhaps this was the very mass that killed poor Mr. Taylor. The ruins are extensive and very interesting; but I have put off describing them too long, and cannot make a distinct picture of them now. Moreover, except to a spectator skilled in architecture, all ruined abbeys are pretty much alike. As we came away, we noticed some women making baskets at the entrance, and one of them urged us to buy some of her handiwork; for that she was the gypsy of Netley Abbey, and had lived among the ruins these thirty years. So I bought one for a shilling. She was a woman with a prominent nose, and weather-tanned, but not very picturesque or striking. TO BLACKHEATH. On the 6th July, we left the Villa, with our enormous luggage, and took our departure from Southampton by the noon train. The main street of Southampton, though it looks pretty fresh and bright, must be really antique, there being a great many projecting windows, in the old-time style, and these make the vista of the street very picturesque. I have no doubt that I missed seeing many things more interesting than the few that I saw. Our journey to London was without any remarkable incident, and at the Waterloo station we found one of Mr. Bennoch's clerks, under whose guidance we took two cabs for the East Kent station at London Bridge, and there railed to Blackheath, where we arrived in the afternoon. On Thursday I went into London by one of the morning trains, and wandered about all day,--visiting the Exhibition of the Royal Academy, and Westminster Abbey and St. Paul's, the two latter of which I have already written about in former journals. On Friday, S-----, J-----, and I walked over the heath, and through the Park to Greenwich, and spent some hours in the Hospital. The painted hall struck me much more than at my first view of it; it is very beautiful indeed, and the effect of its frescoed ceiling most rich and magnificent, the assemblage of glowing hues producing a general result of splendor. . . . . In the evening I went with Mr. and Mrs. ------ to a conversazione at Mrs. Newton Crosland's, who lives on Blackheath. . . . . I met with one person who interested me,--Mr. Bailey, the author of Festus; and I was surprised to find myself already acquainted with him. It is the same Mr. Bailey whom I met a few months ago, when I first dined at Mr. -----'s,--a dark, handsome, rather picturesque-looking man, with a gray beard, and dark hair, a little dimmed with gray. He is of quiet and very agreeable deportment, and I liked him and believed in him. . . . . There is sadness glooming out of him, but no unkindness nor asperity. Mrs. Crosland's conversazione was enriched with a supper, and terminated with a dance, in which Mr. ------ joined with heart and soul, but Mrs. ------ went to sleep in her chair, and I would gladly have followed her example if I could have found a chair to sit upon. In the course of the evening I had some talk with a pale, nervous young lady, who has been a noted spiritual medium. Yesterday I went into town by the steamboat from Greenwich to London Bridge, with a nephew of Mr. ------'s, and, calling at his place of business, he procured us an order from his wine-merchants, by means of which we were admitted into THE WINE-VAULTS OF THE LONDON DOCKS. We there found parties, with an acquaintance, who was going, with two French gentlemen, into the vaults. It is a good deal like going down into a mine, each visitor being provided with a lamp at the end of a stick; and following the guide along dismal passages, running beneath the streets, and extending away interminably,--roughly arched overhead with stone, from which depend festoons of a sort of black fungus, caused by the exhalations of the wine. Nothing was ever uglier than this fungus. It is strange that the most ethereal effervescence of rich wine can produce nothing better. The first series of vaults which we entered were filled with port-wine, and occupied a space variously estimated at from eleven to sixteen acres,--which I suppose would hold more port-wine than ever was made. At any rate, the pipes and butts were so thickly piled that in some places we could hardly squeeze past them. We drank from two or three vintages; but I was not impressed with any especial excellence in the wine. We were not the only visitors, for, far in the depths of the vault, we passed a gentleman and two young ladies, wandering about like the ghosts of defunct wine-bibhers, in a Tophet specially prepared for then. People employed here sometimes go astray, and, their lamps being extinguished, they remain long in this everlasting gloom. We went likewise to the vaults of sherry-wine, which have the same characteristics as those just described, but are less extensive. It is no guaranty for the excellence or even for the purity of the wine, that it is kept in these cellars, under the lock and key of the government; for the merchants are allowed to mix different vintages, according to their own pleasure, and to adulterate it as they like. Very little of the wine probably comes out as it goes in, or is exactly what it pretends to be. I went back to Mr. ------'s office, and we drove together to make some calls jointly and separately. I went alone to Mrs. Heywood's; afterwards with Mr. ------ to the American minister's, whom we found at home; and I requested of him, on the part of the Americans at Liverpool, to tell me the facts about the American gentleman being refused admittance to the Levee. The ambassador did not seem to me to make his point good for having withdrawn with the rejected guest. July 9th. (Our wedding-day.)--We were invited yesterday evening to Mrs. S. C. Hall's, where Jenny Lind was to sing; so we left Blackheath at about eight o'clock in a brougham, and reached Ashley Place, as the dusk was gathering, after nine. The Halls reside in a handsome suite of apartments, arranged on the new system of flats, each story constituting a separate tenement, and the various families having an entrance-hall in common. The plan is borrowed from the Continent, and seems rather alien to the traditionary habits of the English; though, no doubt, a good degree of seclusion is compatible with it. Mr. Hall received us with the greatest cordiality before we entered the drawing-room. Mrs. Hall, too, greeted us with most kindly warmth. Jenny Lind had not yet arrived; but I found Dr. Mackay there, and I was introduced to Miss Catherine Sinclair, who is a literary lady, though none of her works happen to be known to me. Soon the servant announced Madam Goldschmidt, and this famous lady made her appearance, looking quite different from what I expected. Mrs. Hall established her in the inner drawing-room, where was a piano and a harp; and shortly after, our hostess came to me, and said that Madam Goldschmidt wished to be introduced to me. There was a gentle peremptoriness in the summons, that made it something like being commanded into the presence of a princess; a great favor, no doubt, but yet a little humbling to the recipient. However, I acquiesced with due gratitude, and was presented accordingly. She made room for me on the sofa, and I sat down, and began to talk. Jenny Lind is rather tall,--quite tall, for a woman,--certainly no beauty, but with sense and self-reliance in her aspect and manners. She was suffering under a severe cold, and seemed worn down besides, so probably I saw her under disadvantages. Her conversation is quite simple, and I should have great faith in her sincerity; and there is about her the manner of a person who knows the world, and has conquered it. She said something or other about The Scarlet Letter; and, on my part, I paid her such compliments as a man could pay who had never heard her sing. . . . . Her conversational voice is an agreeable one, rather deep, and not particularly smooth. She talked about America, and of our unwholesome modes of life, as to eating and exercise, and of the ill-health especially of our women; but I opposed this view as far as I could with any truth, insinuating my opinion that we are about as healthy as other people, and affirming for a certainty that we live longer. In good faith, so far as I have any knowledge of the matter, the women of England are as generally out of health as those of America; always something has gone wrong with them; and as for Jenny Lind, she looks wan and worn enough to be an American herself. This charge of ill-health is almost universally brought forward against us nowadays,--and, taking the whole country together, I do not believe the statistics will bear it out. The rooms, which were respectably filled when we arrived, were now getting quite full. I saw Mr. Stevens, the American man of libraries, and had some talk with him; and Durham, the sculptor; and Mr. and Mrs. Hall introduced me to various people, some of whom were of note,--for instance, Sir Emerson Tennent, a man of the world, of some parliamentary distinction, wearing a star; Mr. Samuel Lover, a most good-natured, pleasant Irishman, with a shining and twinkling visage; Miss Jewsbury, whom I found very conversable. She is known in literature, but not to me. We talked about Emerson, whom she seems to have been well acquainted with while he was in England; and she mentioned that Miss Martineau had given him a lock of hair; it was not her own hair, but a mummy's. After our return, Mrs. ------ told us that Miss Jewsbury had written, among other things, three histories, and as she asked me to introduce her to S-----, and means to cultivate our acquaintance, it would be well to know something of them. We were told that she is now employed in some literary undertaking of Lady Morgan's, who, at the age of ninety, is still circulating in society, and is as brisk in faculties as ever. I should like to see her ladyship, that is, I should not be sorry to see her; for distinguished people are so much on a par with others, socially, that it would be foolish to be overjoyed at seeing anybody whomsoever. Leaving out the illustrious Jenny Lind, I suspect that I was myself the greatest lion of the evening; for a good many persons sought the felicity of knowing me, and had little or nothing to say when that honor and happiness was conferred on them. It is surely very wrong and ill-mannered in people to ask for an introduction unless they are prepared to make talk; it throws too great an expense and trouble on the wretched lion, who is compelled, on the spur of the moment, to convert a conversable substance out of thin air, perhaps for the twentieth time that evening. I am sure I did not say--and I think I did not hear said-- one rememberable word in the course of this visit; though, nevertheless, it was a rather agreeable one. In due season ices and jellies were handed about; and some ladies and gentlemen--professional, perhaps--were kind enough to sing songs, and play on the piano and harp, while persons in remote corners went on with whatever conversation they had in hand. Then came supper; but there were so many people to go into the supper-room that we could not all crowd thither together, and, coming late, I got nothing but some sponge-cake and a glass of champagne, neither of which I care for. After supper, Mr. Lover sang some Irish songs, his own in music and words, with rich, humorous effect, to which the comicality of his face contributed almost as much as his voice and words. The Lord Mayor looked in for a little while, and though a hard-featured Jew enough, was the most picturesque person there. July 10th.--Mrs. Heywood had invited me to dinner last evening. . . . . Her house is very finely situated, overlooking Hyde Park, and not a great way from where Tyburn tree used to stand. When I arrived, there were no guests but Mr. and Mrs. D------; but by and by came Mr. Monckton Milnes and lady, the Bishop of Lichfield, Mr. Tom Taylor, Mr. Ewart, M. P., Sir Somebody Somerville, Mr. and Mrs. Musgrave, and others. Mr. Milnes, whom I had not seen for more than a year, greeted me very cordially, and so did Mr. Taylor. I took Mrs. Musgrave in to dinner. She is an Irish lady, and Mrs. Heywood had recommended her to me as being very conversable; but I had a good deal more talk with Mrs. M------, with whom I was already acquainted, than with her. Mrs. M------ is of noble blood, and therefore not snobbish,--quite unaffected, gentle, sweet, and easy to get on with, reminding me of the best-mannered American women. But how can anything characteristic be said or done among a dozen people sitting at table in full dress? Speaking of full dress, the Bishop wore small-clothes and silk stockings, and entered the drawing-room with a three-cornered hat, which he kept flattened out under his arm. He asked the briefest blessing possible, and, sitting at the ultra end of the table, I heard nothing further from him till he officiated as briefly before the cloth was withdrawn. Mrs. M------ talked about Tennyson, with whom her husband was at the University, and whom he continues to know intimately. She says that he considers Maud his best poem. He now lives in the Isle of Wight, spending all the year round there, and has recently bought the place on which he resides. She was of opinion that he would have been gratified by my calling on him, which I had wished to do, while we were at Southampton; but this is a liberty which I should hardly venture upon with a shy man like Tennyson,--more especially as he might perhaps suspect me of doing it on the score of my own literary character. But I should like much to see him Mr. Tom Taylor, during dinner, made some fun for the benefit of the ladies on either side of him. I liked him very well this evening. When the ladies had not long withdrawn, and after the wine had once gone round, I asked Mr. Heywood to make my apologies to Mrs. Heywood, and took leave; all London lying betwixt me and the London Bridge station, where I was to take the rail homeward. At the station I found Mr. Bennoch, who had been dining with the Lord Mayor to meet Sir William Williams, and we railed to Greenwich, and reached home by midnight. Mr. and Mrs. Bennoch have set out on their Continental journey to-day,--leaving us, for a little space, in possession of what will be more like a home than anything that we shall hereafter find in England. This afternoon I had taken up the fourth volume of Jerdan's Autobiography,--wretched twaddle, though it records such constant and apparently intimate intercourse with distinguished people,--and was reading it, between asleep and awake, on the sofa, when Mr. Jerdan himself was announced. I saw him, in company with Mr. Bennoch, nearly three years ago, at Rock Park, and wondered then what there was in so uncouth an individual to get him so freely into polished society. He now looks rougher than ever,--time-worn, but not reverend; a thatch of gray hair on his head; an imperfect set of false teeth; a careless apparel, checked trousers, and a stick, for he had walked a mile or two from his own dwelling. I suspect--and long practice at the Consulate has made me keen-sighted-- that Mr. Jerdan contemplated some benefit from my purse; and, to the extent of a sovereign or so, I would not mind contributing to his comfort. He spoke of a secret purpose of Mr. ------ and himself to obtain me a degree or diploma in some Literary Institution,--what one I know not, and did not ask; but the honor cannot be a high one, if this poor old fellow can do aught towards it. I am afraid he is a very disreputable senior, but certainly not the less to be pitied on that account; and there was something very touching in his stiff and infirm movement, as he resumed his stick and took leave, waving me a courteous farewell, and turning upon me a smile, grim with age, as he went down the steps. In that gesture and smile I fancied some trace of the polished man of society, such as he may have once been; though time and hard weather have roughened him, as they have the once polished marble pillars which I saw so rude in aspect at Netley Abbey. Speaking of Dickens last evening, Mr. ------ mentioned his domestic tastes,--how he preferred home enjoyments to all others, and did not willingly go much into society. Mrs. ------, too, the other day told us of his taking on himself all possible trouble as regards his domestic affairs. . . . . There is a great variety of testimony, various and varied, as to the character of Dickens. I must see him before I finally leave England. July 13th.--On Friday morning (11th), at nine o'clock, I took the rail into town to breakfast with Mr. Milnes. As he had named a little after ten as the hour, I could not immediately proceed to his house, and so walked moderately over London Bridge and into the city, meaning to take a cab from Charing Cross, or thereabouts. Passing through some street or other, contiguous to Cheapside, I saw in a court-yard the entrance to the Guildhall, and stepped in to look at it. It is a spacious hall, about one hundred and fifty feet long, and perhaps half as broad, paved with flagstones which look worn and some of them cracked across; the roof is very lofty and was once vaulted, but has been shaped anew in modern times. There is a vast window partly filled with painted glass, extending quite along each end of the hall, and a row of arched windows on either side, throwing their light from far above downward upon the pavement. This fashion of high windows, not reaching within twenty or thirty feet of the floor, serves to give great effect to the large enclosed space of an antique hall. Against the walls are several marble monuments; one to the Earl of Chatham, a statue of white marble, with various allegorical contrivances, fronting an obelisk or pyramid of dark marble; and another to his son, William Pitt, of somewhat similar design and of equal size; each of them occupying the whole space, I believe, between pavement and ceiling. There is likewise a statue of Beckford, a famous Lord Mayor,--the most famous except Whittington, and that one who killed Wat Tyler; and like those two, his fame is perhaps somewhat mythological, though he lived and bustled within less than a century. He is said to have made a bold speech to the King; but this I will not believe of any Englishman--at least, of any plebeian Englishman--until I hear it. But there stands his statue in the Guildhall in the act of making his speech, as if the monstrous attempt had petrified him. Lord Nelson, too, has a monument, and so, I think, has some other modern worthy. At one end of the hall, under one of the great painted windows, stand three or four old statues of mediaeval kings, whose identities I forget; and in the two corners of the opposite end are two gigantic absurdities of painted wood, with grotesque visages, whom I quickly recognized as Gog and Magog. They stand each on a pillar, and seem to be about fifteen feet high, and look like enormous playthings for the children of giants; and it is strange to see them in this solemn old hall, among the memorials of dead heroes and statesmen. There is an annual banquet in the Guildhall, given by the Lord Mayor and sheriffs, and I believe it is the very acme of civic feasting. After viewing the hall, as it still lacked something of ten, I continued my walk through that entanglement of city streets, and quickly found myself getting beyond my reckoning. I cannot tell whither I went, but I passed through a very dirty region, and I remember a long, narrow, evil-odored street, cluttered up with stalls, in which were vegetables and little bits of meat for sale; and there was a frowzy multitude of buyers and sellers. Still I blundered on, and was getting out of the density of the city into broader streets, but still shabby ones, when, looking at my watch, I found it to be past ten, and no cab-stand within sight. It was a quarter past when I finally got into one; and the driver told me that it would take half an hour to go from thence to Upper Brook Street; so that I was likely to exceed the license implied in Mr. Milnes's invitation. Whether I was quite beyond rule I cannot say; but it did not lack more than ten minutes of eleven when I was ushered up stairs, and I found all the company assembled. However, it is of little consequence, except that if I had come early, I should have been introduced to many of the guests, whom now I could only know across the table. Mrs. Milnes greeted me very kindly, and Mr. Milnes came towards me with an elderly gentleman in a blue coat and gray pantaloons,--with a long, rather thin, homely visage, exceedingly shaggy eyebrows, though no great weight of brow, and thin gray hair, and introduced me to the Marquis of Lansdowne. The Marquis had his right hand wrapped up in a black-silk handkerchief; so he gave me his left, and, from some awkwardness in meeting it, when I expected the right, I gave him only three of my fingers,--a thing I never did before to any person, and it is droll that I should have done it to a Marquis. He addressed me with great simplicity and natural kindness, complimenting me on my works, and speaking about the society of Liverpool in former days. Lord Lansdowne was the friend of Moore, and has about him the aroma communicated by the memories of many illustrious people with whom he has associated. Mr. Ticknor, the Historian of Spanish Literature, now greeted me. Mr. Milnes introduced me to Mrs. Browning, and assigned her to me to conduct into the breakfast-room. She is a small, delicate woman, with ringlets of dark hair, a pleasant, intelligent, and sensitive face, and a low, agreeable voice. She looks youthful and comely, and is very gentle and lady-like. And so we proceeded to the breakfast-room, which is hung round with pictures; and in the middle of it stood a large round table, worthy to have been King Arthur's, and here we seated ourselves without any question of precedence or ceremony. On one side of me was an elderly lady, with a very fine countenance, and in the course of breakfast I discovered her to be the mother of Florence Nightingale. One of her daughters (not Florence) was likewise present. Mrs. Milnes, Mrs. Browning, Mrs. Nightingale, and her daughter were the only ladies at table; and I think there were as many as eight or ten gentlemen, whose names--as I came so late--I was left to find out for myself, or to leave unknown. It was a pleasant and sociable meal, and, thanks to my cold beef and coffee at home, I had no occasion to trouble myself much about the fare; so I just ate some delicate chicken, and a very small cutlet, and a slice of dry toast, and thereupon surceased from my labors. Mrs. Browning and I talked a good deal during breakfast, for she is of that quickly appreciative and responsive order of women with whom I can talk more freely than with any man; and she has, besides, her own originality, wherewith to help on conversation, though, I should say, not of a loquacious tendency. She introduced the subject of spiritualism, which, she says, interests her very much; indeed, she seems to be a believer. Mr. Browning, she told me, utterly rejects the subject, and will not believe even in the outward manifestations, of which there is such overwhelming evidence. We also talked of Miss Bacon; and I developed something of that lady's theory respecting Shakespeare, greatly to the horror of Mrs. Browning, and that of her next neighbor,--a nobleman, whose name I did not hear. On the whole, I like her the better for loving the man Shakespeare with a personal love. We talked, too, of Margaret Fuller, who spent her last night in Italy with the Brownings; and of William Story, with whom they have been intimate, and who, Mrs. Browning says, is much stirred about spiritualism. Really, I cannot help wondering that so fine a spirit as hers should not reject the matter, till, at least, it is forced upon her. I like her very much. Mrs. Nightingale had been talking at first with Lord Lansdowne, who sat next her, but by and by she turned to nee, and began to speak of London smoke Then, there being a discussion about Lord Byron on the other side of the table, she spoke to me about Lady Byron, whom she knows intimately, characterizing her as a most excellent and exemplary person, high-principled, unselfish, and now devoting herself to the care of her two grandchildren,--their mother, Byron's daughter, being dead. Lady Byron, she says, writes beautiful verses. Somehow or other, all this praise, and more of the same kind, gave me an idea of an intolerably irreproachable person; and I asked Mrs. Nightingale if Lady Byron were warm-hearted. With some hesitation, or mental reservation,--at all events, not quite outspokenly,--she answered that she was. I was too much engaged with these personal talks to attend much to what was going on elsewhere; but all through breakfast I had been more and more impressed by the aspect of one of the guests, sitting next to Milnes. He was a man of large presence,--a portly personage, gray-haired, but scarcely as yet aged; and his face had a remarkable intelligence, not vivid nor sparkling, but conjoined with great quietude,--and if it gleamed or brightened at one time more than another, it was like the sheen over a broad surface of sea. There was a somewhat careless self-possession, large and broad enough to be called dignity; and the more I looked at him, the more I knew that he was a distinguished person, and wondered who. He might have been a minister of state; only there is not one of them who has any right to such a face and presence. At last,--I do not know how the conviction came,--but I became aware that it was Macaulay, and began to see some slight resemblance to his portraits. But I have never seen any that is not wretchedly unworthy of the original. As soon as I knew him, I began to listen to his conversation, but he did not talk a great deal, contrary to his usual custom; for I am told he is apt to engross all the talk to himself. Probably he may have been restrained by the presence of Ticknor, and Mr. Palfrey, who were among his auditors and interlocutors; and as the conversation seemed to turn much on American subjects, he could not well have assumed to talk them down. I am glad to have seen him,--a face fit for a scholar, a man of the world, a cultivated intelligence. After we left the table, and went into the library, Mr. Browning introduced himself to me,--a younger man than I expected to see, handsome, with brown hair. He is very simple and agreeable in manner, gently impulsive, talking as if his heart were uppermost. He spoke of his pleasure in meeting me, and his appreciation of my books; and--which has not often happened to me--mentioned that The Blithedale Romance was the one he admired most. I wonder why. I hope I showed as much pleasure at his praise as he did at mine; for I was glad to see how pleasantly it moved him. After this, I talked with Ticknor and Miles, and with Mr. Palfrey, to whom I had been introduced very long ago by George Hillard, and had never seen him since. We looked at some autographs, of which Mr. Milnes has two or three large volumes. I recollect a leaf from Swift's Journal to Stella; a letter from Addison; one from Chatterton, in a most neat and legible hand; and a characteristic sentence or two and signature of Oliver Cromwell, written in a religious book. There were many curious volumes in the library, but I had not time to look at them. I liked greatly the manners of almost all,--yes, as far as I observed,-- all the people at this breakfast, and it was doubtless owing to their being all people either of high rank or remarkable intellect, or both. An Englishman can hardly be a gentleman, unless he enjoy one or other of these advantages; and perhaps the surest way to give him good manners is to make a lord of him, or rather of his grandfather or great-grandfather. In the third generation, scarcely sooner, he will be polished into simplicity and elegance, and his deportment will be all the better for the homely material out of which it is wrought and refined. The Marquis of Lansdowne, for instance, would have been a very commonplace man in the common ranks of life; but it has done him good to be a nobleman. Not that his tact is quite perfect. In going up to breakfast, he made me precede him; in returning to the library, he did the same, although I drew back, till he impelled me up the first stair, with gentle persistence. By insisting upon it, he showed his sense of condescension much more than if, when he saw me unwilling to take precedence, he had passed forward, as if the point were not worth either asserting or yielding. Heaven knows, it was in no humility that I would have trodden behind him. But he is a kind old man; and I am willing to believe of the English aristocracy generally that they are kind, and of beautiful deportment; for certainly there never can have been mortals in a position more advantageous for becoming so. I hope there will come a time when we shall be so; and I already know a few Americans, whose noble and delicate manners may compare well with any I have seen. I left the house with Mr. Palfrey. He has cone to England to make some researches in the State Paper Office, for the purposes of a work which he has in hand. He mentioned to me a letter which he had seen, written from New England in the time of Charles II. and referring to the order sent by the minister of that day for the appearance of Governor Bellingham and my ancestor on this side of the water. The signature of this letter is an anagram of my ancestor's name. The letter itself is a very bold and able one, controverting the propriety of the measure above indicated; and Mr. Palfrey feels certain that it was written by my aforesaid ancestor. I mentioned my wish to ascertain the place in England whence the family emigrated; and Mr. Palfrey took me to the Record Office, and introduced me to Mr. Joseph Hunter,--a venerable and courteous gentleman, of antiquarian pursuits. The office was odorous of musty parchments, hundreds of years old. Mr. Hunter received me with great kindness, and gave me various old records and rolls of parchment, in which to seek for my family name; but I was perplexed with the crabbed characters, and soon grew weary and gave up the quest. He says that it is very seldom that an American family, springing from the early settlers, can be satisfactorily traced back to their English ancestry. July 16th.--Monday morning I took the rail from Blackheath to London. It is a very pleasant place, Blackheath, and far more rural than one would expect, within five or six miles of London,--a great many trees, making quite a mass of foliage in the distance; green enclosures; pretty villas, with their nicely kept lawns, and gardens, with grass-plots and flower borders; and village streets, set along the sidewalks with ornamental trees; and the houses standing a little back, and separated one from another,--all this within what is called the Park, which has its gateways, and the sort of semi-privacy with which I first became acquainted at Rock Park. From the London Bridge station I took a cab for Paddington, and then had to wait above two hours before a train started for Birkenhead. Meanwhile I walked a little about the neighborhood, which is very dull and uninteresting; made up of crescents and terraces, and rows of houses that have no individuality, and second-rate shops,--in short, the outskirts of the vast city, when it begins to have a kind of village character but no rurality or sylvan aspect, as at Blackheath. My journey, when at last we started, was quite unmarked by incident, and extremely tedious; it being a slow train, which plods on without haste and without rest. At about ten o'clock we reached Birkenhead, and there crossed the familiar and detestable Mersey, which, as usual, had a cloudy sky brooding over it. Mrs. Blodgett received me most hospitably, but was impelled, by an overflow of guests, to put me into a little back room, looking into the court, and formerly occupied by my predecessor, General Armstrong. . . . . She expressed a hope that I might not see his ghost,--nor have I, as yet. Speaking of ghosts, Mr. H. A. B------ told me a singular story to-day of an apparition that haunts the Times Office, in Printing-House Square. A Mr. W------ is the engineer of the establishment, and has his residence in the edifice, which is built, I believe, on the site of Merchant Taylor's school,--an old house that was no longer occupied for its original purpose, and, being supposed haunted, was left untenanted. The father-in-law of Mr. W------, an old sea-captain, came on a visit to him and his wife, and was put into their guest-chamber, where he passed the night. The next morning, assigning no very satisfactory reason, he cut his visit short and went away. Shortly afterwards, a young lady came to visit the W------'s; but she too went away the next morning,--going first to make a call, as she said, to a friend, and sending thence for her trunks. Mrs. W------ wrote to this young lady, asking an explanation. The young lady replied, and gave a singular account of an apparition,-- how she was awakened in the night by a bright light shining through the window, which was parallel to the bed; then, if I remember rightly, her curtains were withdrawn, and a shape looked in upon her,--a woman's shape, she called it; but it was a skeleton, with lambent flames playing about its bones, and in and out among the ribs. Other persons have since slept in this chamber, and some have seen the shape, others not. Mr. W------ has slept there himself without seeing anything. He has had investigations by scientific people, apparently under the idea that the phenomenon might have been caused by some of the Times's work-people, playing tricks on the magic-lantern principle; but nothing satisfactory has thus far been elucidated. Mr. B------ had this story from Mrs. Gaskell. . . . . Supposing it a ghost, nothing else is so remarkable as its choosing to haunt the precincts of the Times newspaper. July 29th.--On Saturday, 26th, I took the rail from the Lime Street station for London, via the Trent Valley, and reached Blackheath in the evening. . . . . Sunday morning my wife and I, with J-----, railed into London, and drove to the Essex Street Chapel, where Mr. Channing was to preach. The Chapel is the same where Priestley and Belsham used to preach,--one of the plainest houses of worship I was ever in, as simple and undecorated as the faith there inculcated. They retain, however, all the form and ceremonial of the English Established Church, though so modified as to meet the doctrinal views of the Unitarians. There may be good sense in this, inasmuch as it greatly lessens the ministerial labor to have a stated form of prayer, instead of a necessity for extempore outpourings; but it must be, I should think, excessively tedious to the congregation, especially as, having made alterations in these prayers, they cannot attach much idea of sanctity to them. [Here follows a long record of Mr. Hawthorne's visit to Miss Bacon,-- condensed in Our Old Hone, in the paper called "Recollections of a Gifted Woman."] August 2d.--On Wednesday (30th July) we went to Marlborough House to see the Vernon gallery of pictures. They are the works, almost entirely of English artists of the last and present century, and comprise many famous paintings; and I must acknowledge that I had more enjoyment of them than of those portions of the National Gallery which I had before seen,-- including specimens of the grand old masters. My comprehension has not reached their height. I think nothing pleased me more than a picture by Sir David Wilkie,--The Parish Beadle, with a vagrant boy and a monkey in custody; it is exceedingly good and true throughout, and especially the monkey's face is a wonderful production of genius, condensing within itself the whole moral and pathos of the picture. Marlborough House was the residence of the Great Duke, and is to be that of the Prince of Wales, when another place is found for the pictures. It adjoins St. James's Palace. In its present state it is not a very splendid mansion, the rooms being small, though handsomely shaped, with vaulted ceilings, and carved white-marble fireplaces. I left S----- here after an hour or two, and walked forth into the hot and busy city with J-----. . . . . I called at Routledge's bookshop, in hopes to make an arrangement with him about Miss Bacon's business. But Routledge himself is making a journey in the north, and neither of the partners was there, so that I shall have to go thither some other day. Then we stepped into St. Paul's Cathedral to cool ourselves, and it was delightful so to escape from the sunny, sultry turmoil of Fleet Street and Ludgate, and find ourselves at once in this remote, solemn, shadowy seclusion, marble-cool. O that we had cathedrals in America, were it only for the sensuous luxury! We strolled round the cathedral, and I delighted J----- much by pointing out the monuments of three British generals, who were slain in America in the last war,--the naughty and bloodthirsty little man! We then went to Guildhall, where I thought J----- would like to see Gog and Magog; but he had never heard of those illustrious personages, and took no interest in them. . . . . But truly I am grateful to the piety of former times for raising this vast, cool canopy of marble [St. Paul's] in the midst of the feverish city. I wandered quite round it, and saw, in a remote corner, a monument to the officers of the Coldstream Guards, slain in the Crimea. It was a mural tablet, with the names of the officers on an escutcheon; and two privates of the Guards, in marble bas-relief, were mourning over them. Over the tablet hung two silken banners, new and glossy, with the battles in which the regiment has been engaged inscribed on them,--not merely Crimean but Peninsular battles. These banners will bang there till they drop away in tatters. After thus refreshing myself in the cathedral, I went again to Routledge's in Farrington Street, and saw one of the firm. He expressed great pleasure at seeing me, as indeed he might, having published and sold, without any profit on my part, uncounted thousands of my books. I introduced the subject of Miss Bacon's work; and he expressed the utmost willingness to do everything in his power towards bringing it before the world, but thought that his firm--it being their business to publish for the largest circle of readers--was not the most eligible for the publication of such a book. Very likely this may be so. At all events, however, I am to send him the manuscript, and he will at least give me his advice and assistance in finding a publisher. He was good enough to express great regret that I had no work of my own to give him for publication; and, truly, I regret it too, since, being a resident in England, I could now have all the publishing privileges of a native author. He presented me with a copy of an illustrated edition of Longfellow's Poems, and I took my leave. Thence I went to the Picture Gallery at the British Institution, where there are three rooms full of paintings by the first masters, the property of private persons. Every one of them, no doubt, was worth studying for a long, long time; and I suppose I may have given, on an average, a minute to each. What an absurdity it would seem, to pretend to read two or three hundred poems, of all degrees between an epic and a ballad, in an hour or two! And a picture is a poem, only requiring the greater study to be felt and comprehended; because the spectator must necessarily do much for himself towards that end. I saw many beautiful things,--among them some landscapes by Claude, which to the eye were like the flavor of a rich, ripe melon to the palate. August 7th.--Yesterday we took the rail for London, it being a fine, sunny day, though not so very warm as many of the preceding days have been. . . . . We went along Piccadilly as far as the Egyptian Hall. It is quite remarkable how comparatively quiet the town has become, now that the season is over. One can see the difference in all the region west of Temple Bar; and, indeed, either the hot weather or some other cause seems to have operated in assuaging the turmoil in the city itself. I never saw London Bridge so little thronged as yesterday. At the Egyptian Hall, or in the same edifice, there is a gallery of pictures, the property of Lord Ward, who allows the public to see them, five days of the week, without any trouble or restriction,--a great kindness on his Lordship's part, it must be owned. It is a very valuable collection, I presume, containing specimens of many famous old masters; some of the early and hard pictures by Raphael and his master and fellow-pupils,--very curious, and nowise beautiful; a perfect, sunny glimpse of Venice, by Canaletto; and saints, and Scriptural, allegorical, and mythological people, by Titian, Guido, Correggio, and many more names than I can remember. There is likewise a dead Magdalen by Canova, and a Venus by the same, very pretty, and with a vivid light of joyous expression in her face; . . . . also Powers's Greek Slave, in which I see little beauty or merit; and two or three other statues. We then drove to Ashley Place, to call on Mrs. S. C. Hall, whom we found at home. In fact, Wednesday is her reception-day; although, as now everybody is out of town, we were the only callers. She is an agreeable and kindly woman. She told us that her husband and herself propose going to America next year, and I heartily wish they may meet with a warm and friendly reception. I have been seldom more assured of the existence of a heart than in her; also a good deal of sentiment. She had been visiting Bessie, the widow of Moore, at Sloperton, and gave S----- a rose from his cottage. Such things are very true and unaffected in her. The only wonder is that she has not lost such girlish freshness of feeling as prompts them. We did not see Mr. Hall, he having gone to the Crystal Palace. Taking our leave, we returned along Victoria Street--a new street, penetrating through what was recently one of the worst parts of the town, and now bordered with large blocks of buildings, in a dreary, half-finished state, and left so for want of funds--till we came to Westminster Abbey. We went in and spent an hour there, wandering all round the nave and aisles, admiring the grand old edifice itself, but finding more to smile at than to admire in the monuments. . . . . The interior view of the Abbey is better than can be described; the heart aches, as one gazes at it, for lack of power and breadth enough to take its beauty and grandeur in. The effect was heightened by the sun shining through the painted window in the western end, and by the bright sunshine that came through the open portal, and lay on the pavement,--that space so bright, the rest of the vast floor so solemn and sombre. At the western end, in a corner from which spectators are barred out, there is a statue of Wordsworth, which I do not recollect seeing at any former visit. Its only companion in the same nook is Pope's friend, Secretary Craggs. Downing Street, that famous official precinct, took its name from Sir George Downing, who was proprietor or lessee of property there. He was a native of my own old native town, and his descendants still reside there,--collateral descendants, I suppose,--and follow the drygoods business (drapers). August 10th.--I journeyed to Liverpool via Chester. . . . . One sees a variety of climate, temperature, and season in a ride of two hundred miles, north and south, through England. Near London, for instance, the grain was reaped, and stood in sheaves in the stubble-fields, over which girls and children might be seen gleaning; farther north, the golden, or greenish-golden, crops were waving in the wind. In one part of our way the atmosphere was hot and dry; at another point it had been cooled and refreshed by a heavy thunder-shower, the pools of which still lay along our track. It seems to me that local varieties of weather are more common in this island, and within narrower precincts, than in America. . . . . I never saw England of such a dusky and dusty green before,--almost sunbrowned, indeed. Sometimes the green hedges formed a marked framework to a broad sheet of golden grain-field. As we drew near Oxford, just before reaching the station I had a good view of its domes, towers, and spires,--better, I think, than when J----- and I rambled through the town a month or two ago. Mr. Frank Scott Haydon, of the Record Office, London, writes me that he has found a "Henry Atte Hawthorne" on a roll which he is transcribing, of the first Edward III. He belonged to the Parish of Aldremeston, in the hundred of Blakenhurste, Worcester County. August 21st.--Yesterday, at twelve o'clock, I took the steamer for Runcorn, from the pier-head. In the streets, I had noticed that it was a breezy day; but on the river there was a very stiff breeze from the northeast, right ahead, blowing directly in our face the whole way; and truly this river Mersey is never without a breeze, and generally in the direction of its course,--an evil-tempered, unkindly, blustering wind, that you cannot meet without being exasperated by it. As it came straight against us, it was impossible to find a shelter anywhere on deck, except it were behind the stove-pipe; and, besides, the day was overcast and threatening rain. I have undergone very miserable hours on the Mersey, where, in the space of two years, I voyaged thousands of miles,--and this trip to Runcorn reminded me of them, though it was less disagreeable after more than a twelvemonth's respite. We had a good many passengers on board, most of whom were of the second class, and congregated on the forward deck; more women than men, I think, and some of them with their husbands and children. Several produced lunch and bottles, and refreshed themselves very soon after we started. By and by the wind became so disagreeable that I went below, and sat in the cabin, only occasionally looking out, to get a peep at the shores of the river, which I had never before seen above Eastham. However, they are not worth looking at; level and monotonous, without trees or beauty of any kind,--here and there a village, and a modern church, on the low ridge behind; perhaps, a windmill, which the gusty day had set busily to work. The river continues very wide--no river indeed, but an estuary--during almost the whole distance to Runcorn; and nearly at the end of our voyage we approached some abrupt and prominent hills, which, many a time, I have seen on my passages to Rock Ferry, looking blue and dim, and serving for prophets of the weather; for when they can be distinctly seen adown the river, it is a token of coming rain. We met many vessels, and passed many which were beating up against the wind, and which keeled over, so that their decks must have dipped,--schooners and vessels that come from the Bridgewater Canal. We shipped a sea ourselves, which gave the fore-deck passengers a wetting. Before reaching Runcorn, we stopped to land some passengers at another little port, where there was a pier and a lighthouse, and a church within a few yards of the river-side,--a good many of the river-craft, too, in dock, forming quite a crowd of masts. About ten minutes' further steaming brought us to Runcorn, where were two or three tall manufacturing chimneys, with a pennant of black smoke from each; two vessels of considerable size on the stocks; a church or two; and a meagre, uninteresting, shabby, brick-built town, rising from the edge of the river, with irregular streets,--not village-like, but paved, and looking like a dwarfed, stunted city. I wandered through it till I came to a tall, high-pedestalled windmill on the outer verge, the vans of which were going briskly round. Thence retracing my steps, I stopped at a poor hotel, and took lunch, and, finding that I was in time to take the steamer back, I hurried on board, and we set sail (or steam) before three. I have heard of an old castle at Runcorn, but could discover nothing of it. It was well that I returned so promptly, for we had hardly left the pier before it began to rain, and there was a heavy downfall throughout the voyage homeward. Runcorn is fourteen miles from Liverpool, and is the farthest point to which a steamer runs. I had intended to come home by rail,--a circuitous route,--but the advice of the landlady of the hotel, and the aspect of the weather, and a feeling of general discouragement prevented me. An incident in S. C. Hall's Ireland, of a stone cross, buried in Cromwell's time, to prevent its destruction by his soldiers. It was forgotten, and became a mere doubtful tradition, but one old man had been told by his father, and he by his father, etc., that it was buried near a certain spot; and at last, two hundred years after the cross was buried, the vicar of the parish dug in that spot and found it. In my (English) romance, an American might bring the tradition from over the sea, and so discover the cross, which had been altogether forgotten. August 24th.--Day before yesterday I took the rail for Southport,--a cool, generally overcast day, with glimmers of faint sunshine. The ride is through a most uninteresting tract of country, at first, glimpses of the river, with the thousands of masts in the docks; the dismal outskirts of a great town, still spreading onward, with beginnings of streets, and insulated brick buildings and blocks; farther on, a wide monotony of level plain, and here and there a village and a church; almost always a windmill in sight, there being plenty of breeze to turn its vans on this windy coast. The railway skirts along the sea the whole distance, but is shut out from the sight of it by the low sand-hills, which seem to have been heaped up by the waves. There are one or two lighthouses on the shore. I have not seen a drearier landscape, even in Lancashire. Reaching Southport at three, I rambled about, with a view to discover whether it be a suitable residence for my family during September. It is a large village, or rather more than a village, which seems to be almost entirely made up of lodging-houses, and, at any rate, has been built up by the influx of summer visitors,--a sandy soil, level, and laid out with well-paved streets, the principal of which are enlivened with bazaars, markets, shops, hotels of various degrees, and a showy vivacity of aspect. There are a great many donkey-carriages,--large vehicles, drawn by a pair of donkeys; bath-chairs, with invalid ladies; refreshment-rooms in great numbers,--a place where everybody seems to be a transitory guest, nobody at home. The main street leads directly down to the sea-shore, along which there is an elevated embankment, with a promenade on the top, and seats, and the toll of a penny. The shore itself, the tide being then low, stretched out interminably seaward, a wide waste of glistering sands; and on the dry border, people were riding on donkeys, with the drivers whipping behind; and children were digging with their little wooden spades; and there were donkey-carriages far out on the sands,--a pleasant and breezy drive. A whole city of bathing-machines was stationed near the shore, and I saw others in the seaward distance. The sea-air was refreshing and exhilarating, and if S----- needs a seaside residence, I should think this might do as well as any other. I saw a large brick edifice, enclosed within a wall, and with somewhat the look of an almshouse or hospital; and it proved to be an Infirmary, charitably established for the reception of poor invalids, who need sea-air and cannot afford to pay for it. Two or three of such persons were sitting under its windows. I do not think that the visitors of Southport are generally of a very opulent class, but of the middle rank, from Manchester and other parts of this northern region. The lodging-houses, however, are of sufficiently handsome style and arrangement. OXFORD. [Mr. Hawthorne extracted from his recorded Oxford experiences his excursion to Blenheim, but left his observations of the town itself untouched,--and these I now transcribe.--ED.] August 31st.--. . . . Yesterday we took the rail for London, and drove across the city to the Paddington station, where we met Bennoch, and set out with him for Oxford. I do not quite understand the matter, but it appears that we were expected guests of Mr. Spiers, a very hospitable gentleman, and Ex-Mayor of Oxford, and a friend of Bennoch and of the Halls. Mr. S. C. Hall met us at the Oxford station, and under his guidance we drove to a quiet, comfortable house in St. Giles Street, where rooms had been taken for us. Durham, the sculptor, is likewise of the party. After establishing ourselves at these lodgings, we walked forth to take a preliminary glimpse of the city, and Mr. Hall, being familiar with the localities, served admirably as a guide. If I remember aright, I spoke very slightingly of the exterior aspect of Oxford, as I saw it with J----- during an hour or two's stay here, on my way to Southampton (to meet S----- on her return from Lisbon). I am bound to say that my impressions are now very different; and that I find Oxford exceedingly picturesque and rich in beauty and grandeur and in antique stateliness. I do not remember very particularly what we saw,--time-worn fronts of famous colleges and halls of learning everywhere about the streets, and arched entrances; passing through which, we saw bits of sculpture from monkish hands,--the most grotesque and ludicrous faces, as if the slightest whim of these old carvers took shape in stone, the material being so soft and manageable by them; an ancient stone pulpit in the quadrangle of Maudlin College (Magdalen), one of only three now extant in England; a splendid--no, not splendid, but dimly magnificent--chapel, belonging to the same College, with painted windows of rare beauty, not brilliant with diversified hues, but of a sombre tint. In this chapel there is an alabaster monument,--a recumbent figure of the founder's father, as large as life,--which, though several centuries old, is as well preserved as if fresh from the chisel. In the High Street, which, I suppose, is the noblest old street in England, Mr. Hall pointed out, the Crown Inn, where Shakespeare used to spend the night, and was most hospitably welcomed by the pretty hostess (the mother of Sir William Davenant) on his passage between Stratford and London. It is a three-story house, with other houses contiguous,--an old timber mansion, though now plastered and painted of a yellowish line. The ground-floor is occupied as a shoe-shop; but the rest of the house is still kept as a tavern. . . . . It is not now term time, and Oxford loses one of its most characteristic features by the absence of the gownsmen; but still there is a good deal of liveliness in the streets. We walked as far as a bridge beyond Maudlin College, and then drove homeward. At six we went to dine with the hospitable Ex-Mayor, across the wide, tree-bordered street; for his house is nearly opposite our lodgings. He is an intelligent and gentlemanly person, and was Mayor two years ago, and has done a great deal to make peace between the University and the town, heretofore bitterly inimical. His house is adorned with pictures and drawings, and he has an especial taste for art. . . . . The dinner-table was decorated with pieces of plate, vases, and other things, which were presented to him as tokens of public or friendly regard and approbation of his action in the Mayoralty. After dinner, too, he produced a large silver snuff-box, which had been given him on the same account; in fact, the inscription affirmed that it was one of five pieces of plate so presented. The vases are really splendid,--one of them two feet high, and richly ornamented. It will hold five or six bottles of wine, and he said that it had been filled, and, I believe, sent round as a loving-cup at some of his entertainments. He cordially enjoys these things, and his genuine benevolence produces all this excellent hospitality. . . . . But Bennoch proposed a walk, and we set forth. We rambled pretty extensively about the streets, sometimes seeing the shapes of old edifices dimly and doubtfully, it being an overcast night; or catching a partial view of a gray wall, or a pillar, or a Gothic archway, by lamplight. . . . . The clock had some time ago struck eleven, when we were passing under a long extent of antique wall and towers, which were those of Baliol College. Mr. D------ led us into the middle of the street, and showed us a cross, which was paved into it, on a level with the rest of the road. This was the spot where Latimer and Ridley and another Bishop were martyred in Bloody Mary's time. There is a memorial to them in another street; but this, where I set my foot at nearly midnight, was the very spot where their flesh burned to ashes, and their bones whitened. It has been a most beautiful morning, and I have seen few pleasanter scenes than this street in which we lodge, with its spacious breadth, its two rows of fine old trees, with sidewalks as wide as the whole width of some streets; and, on the opposite side, the row of houses, some of them ancient with picturesque gables, partially disclosed through the intervening foliage. . . . . From our window we have a slantwise glimpse, to the right, of the walls of St. John's College, and the general aspect of St. Giles. It is of an antiquity not to shame those mediaeval halls. Our own lodgings are in a house that seems to be very old, with panelled walls, and beams across the ceilings, lattice-windows in the chambers, and a musty odor such as old houses inevitably have. Nevertheless, everything is extremely neat, clean, and comfortable; and in term time our apartments are occupied by a Mr. Stebbing, whose father is known in literature by some critical writings, and who is a graduate and an admirable scholar. There is a bookcase of five shelves, containing his books, mostly standard works, and indicating a safe and solid taste. After lunch to-day we (that is, Mrs. Hall, her adopted daughter, S-----, and I, with the Ex-Mayor) set forth, in an open barouche, to see the remarkables of Oxford, while the rest of the guests went on foot. We first drew up at New College (a strange name for such an old place, but it was new some time since the Conquest), and went through its quiet and sunny quadrangles, and into its sunny and shadowy gardens. I am in despair about the architecture and old edifices of these Oxford colleges, it is so impossible to express them in words. They are themselves--as the architect left them, and as Time has modified and improved them--the expression of an idea which does not admit of being otherwise expressed, or translated into anything else. Those old battlemented walls around the quadrangles; many gables; the windows with stone pavilions, so very antique, yet some of them adorned with fresh flowers in pots,--a very sweet contrast; the ivy mantling the gray stone; and the infinite repose, both in sunshine and shadow,--it is as if half a dozen bygone centuries had set up their rest here, and as if nothing of the present time ever passed through the deeply recessed archway that shuts in the College from the street. Not but what people have very free admittance; and many parties of young men and girls and children came into the gardens while we were there. These gardens of New College are indescribably beautiful,--not gardens in an American sense, but lawns of the richest green and softest velvet grass, shadowed over by ancient trees, that have lived a quiet life here for centuries, and have been nursed and tended with such care, and so sheltered from rude winds, that certainly they must have been the happiest of all trees. Such a sweet, quiet, sacred, stately seclusion-- so age-long as this has been, and, I hope, will continue to be--cannot exist anywhere else. One side of the garden wall is formed by the ancient wall of the city, which Cromwell's artillery battered, and which still retains its pristine height and strength. At intervals, there are round towers that formed the bastions; that is to say, on the exterior they are round towers, but within, in the garden of the College, they are semicircular recesses, with iron garden-seats arranged round them. The loop-holes through which the archers and musketeers used to shoot still pierce through deep recesses in the wall, which is here about six feet thick. I wish I could put into one sentence the whole impression of this garden, but it could not be done in many pages. We looked also at the outside of the wall, and Mr. Parker, deeply skilled in the antiquities of the spot, showed us a weed growing,--here in little sprigs, there in large and heavy festoons,--hanging plentifully downward from a shallow root. It is called the Oxford plant, being found only here, and not easily, if at all, introduced anywhere else. It bears a small and pretty blue flower, not altogether unlike the forget-me-not, and we took some of it away with us for a memorial. We went into the chapel of New College, which is in such fresh condition that I think it must be modern; and yet this cannot be, since there are old brasses inlaid into tombstones in the pavement, representing mediaeval ecclesiastics and college dignitaries; and busts against the walls, in antique garb; and old painted windows, unmistakable in their antiquity. But there is likewise a window, lamentable to look at, which was painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds, and exhibits strikingly the difference between the work of a man who performed it merely as a matter of taste and business, and what was done religiously and with the whole heart; at least, it shows that the artists and public of the last age had no sympathy with Gothic art. In the chancel of this church there are more painted windows, which I take to be modern, too, though they are in much better taste, and have an infinitely better effect, than Sir Joshua's. At any rate, with the sunshine through them, they looked very beautiful, and tinted the high altar and the pavement with brilliant lines. The sacristan opened a tall and narrow little recess in the wall of the chancel, and showed it entirely filled with the crosier of William of Wickham. It appears to be made of silver gilt, and is a most rich and elaborate relic, at least six feet high. Modern art cannot, or does not, equal the chasing and carving of this splendid crosier, which is enriched with figures of saints and, apostles, and various Gothic devices,--very minute, but all executed as faithfully as if the artist's salvation had depended upon every notch he made in the silver. . . . . Leaving New College, Bennoch and I, under Mr. Parker's guidance, walked round Christ Church meadows, part of our way lying along the banks of the Cherwell, which unites with the Isis to form the Thames, I believe. The Cherwell is a narrow and remarkably sluggish stream; but is deep in spots, and capriciously so,--so that a person may easily step from knee-deep to fifteen feet in depth. A gentleman present used a queer expression in reference to the drowning of two college men; he said "it was an awkward affair." I think this is equal to Longfellow's story of the Frenchman who avowed himself very much "displeased" at the news of his father's death. At the confluence of the Cherwell and Isis we saw a good many boats, belonging to the students of the various colleges; some of them being very large and handsome barges, capable of accommodating a numerous party, with room on board for dancing and merry-making. Some of them are calculated to be drawn by horses, in the manner of canal-boats; others are propellable by oars. It is practicable to perform the voyage between Oxford and London--a distance of about one hundred and thirty miles--in three days. The students of Oxford are famous boatmen; there is a constant rivalship, on this score, among the different colleges; and annually, I believe, there is a match between Oxford and Cambridge. The Cambridge men beat the Oxonians in this year's trial. On our return into the city, we passed through Christ Church, which, as regards the number of students, is the most considerable college of the University. It has a stately dome; but my memory is confused with battlements, towers, and gables, and Gothic staircases and cloisters. If there had been nothing else in Oxford but this one establishment, my anticipations would not have been disappointed. The bell was tolling for worship in the chapel; and Mr. Parker told us that Dr. Pusey is a canon, or in some sort of dignity, in Christ Church, and would soon probably make his appearance in the quadrangle, on his way to chapel; so we walked to and fro, waiting an opportunity to see him. A gouty old dignitary, in a white surplice, came hobbling along from one extremity of the court; and by and by, from the opposite corner, appeared Dr. Pusey, also in a white surplice, and with a lady by his side. We met him, and I stared pretty fixedly at him, as I well might; for he looked on the ground, as if conscious that he would be stared at. He is a man past middle life, of sufficient breadth and massiveness, with a pale, intellectual, manly face. He was talking with the lady, and smiled, but not jollily. Mr. Parker, who knows him, says that he is a man of kind and gentle affections. The lady was his niece. Thence we went through High Street and Broad Street, and passing by Baliol College,--a most satisfactory pile and range of old towered and gabled edifices,--we came to the cross on the pavement, which is supposed to mark the spot where the bishops were martyred. But Mr. Parker told us the mortifying fact, that he had ascertained that this could not possibly have been the genuine spot of martyrdom, which must have taken place at a point within view, but considerably too far off to be moistened by any tears that may be shed here. It is too bad. We concluded the rambles of the day by visiting the gardens of St. John's College; and I desire, if possible, to say even more in admiration of them than of those of New College,--such beautiful lawns, with tall, ancient trees, and heavy clouds of foliage, and sunny glimpses through archways of leafy branches, where, to-day, we could see parties of girls, making cheerful contrast with the sombre walls and solemn shade. The world, surely, has not another place like Oxford; it is a despair to see such a place and ever to leave it, for it would take a lifetime and more than one, to comprehend and enjoy it satisfactorily. At dinner, to-day, the golden vases were all ranged on the table, the largest and central one containing a most magnificent bouquet of dahlias and other bright-hued flowers. On Tuesday, our first visit was to Christ Church, where we saw the large and stately hall, above a hundred feet long by forty wide, and fifty to the top of its carved oaken roof, which is ornamented with festoons, as it were, and pendants of solid timber. The walls are panelled with oak, perhaps half-way upward, and above are the rows of arched windows on each side; but, near the upper end, two great windows come nearly to the floor. There is a dais, where the great men of the College and the distinguished guests sit at table, and the tables of the students are arranged along the length of the hall. All around, looking down upon those who sit at meat, are the portraits of a multitude of illustrious personages who were members of the learned fraternity in times past; not a portrait being admitted there (unless it he a king, and I remember only Henry VIII.) save those who were actually students on the foundation, receiving the eleemosynary aid of the College. Most of them were divines; but there are likewise many statesmen, eminent during the last three hundred years, and, among many earlier ones, the Marquis of Wellesley and Canning. It is an excellent idea, for their own glory, and as examples to the rising generations, to have this multitude of men, who have done good and great things, before the eyes of those who ought to do as well as they, in their own time. Archbishops, Prime Ministers, poets, deep scholars,--but, doubtless, an outward success has generally been their claim to this position, and Christ Church may have forgotten a better man than the best of them. It is not, I think, the tendency of English life, nor of the education of their colleges, to lead young men to high moral excellence, but to aim at illustrating themselves in the sight of mankind. Thence we went into the kitchen, which is arranged very much as it was three centuries ago, with two immense fireplaces. There was likewise a gridiron, which, without any exaggeration, was large enough to have served for the martyrdom of St. Lawrence. The college dinners are good, but plain, and cost the students one shilling and eleven pence each, being rather cheaper than a similar one could be had at an inn. There is no provision for breakfast or supper in commons; but they can have these meals sent to their rooms from the buttery, at a charge proportioned to the dishes they order. There seems to be no necessity for a great expenditure on the part of Oxford students. From the kitchen we went to the chapel, which is the cathedral of Oxford, and well worth seeing, if there had not been so many other things to see. It is now under repair, and there was a great heap of old wood-work and panelling lying in one of the aisles, which had been stripped away from some of the ancient pillars, leaving them as good as new. There is a shrine of a saint, with a wooden canopy over it; and some painted glass, old and new; and a statue of Cyril Jackson, with a face of shrewdness and insight; and busts, as mural monuments. Our next visit was to MERTON COLLEGE, which, though not one of the great colleges, is as old as any of them, and looks exceedingly venerable. We were here received by a friend of Mr. Spiers, in his academic cap, but without his gown, which is not worn, except in term time. He is a very civil gentleman, and showed us some antique points of architecture,--such as a Norman archway, with a passage over it, through which the Queen of Charles I. used to go to chapel; and an edifice of the thirteenth century, with a stone roof, which is considered to be very curious. How ancient is the aspect of these college quadrangles! so gnawed by time as they are, so crumbly, so blackened, and so gray where they are not black,--so quaintly shaped, too, with here a line of battlement and there a row of gables; and here a turret, with probably a winding stair inside; and lattice-windows, with stone mullions, and little panes of glass set in lead; and the cloisters, with a long arcade, looking upon the green or pebbled enclosure. The quality of the stone has a great deal to do with the apparent antiquity. It is a stone found in the neighborhood of Oxford, and very soon begins to crumble and decay superficially, when exposed to the weather; so that twenty years do the work of a hundred, so far as appearances go. If you strike one of the old walls with a stick, a portion of it comes powdering down. The effect of this decay is very picturesque, and is especially striking, I think, on edifices of classic architecture, such as some of the Oxford colleges are, greatly enriching the Grecian columns, which look so cold when the outlines are hard and distinct. The Oxford people, however, are tired of this crumbly stone, and when repairs are necessary, they use a more durable material, which does not well assort with the antiquity into which it is intruded. Mr. E------ showed us the library of Merton College. It occupies two sides of an old building, and has a very delightful fragrance of ancient books. The halls containing it are vaulted, and roofed with oak, not carved and ornamented, but laid flat, so that they look very like a grand and spacious old garret. All along, there is a row of alcoves on each side, with rude benches and reading-desks, in the simplest style, and nobody knows how old. The books look as old as the building. The more valuable were formerly chained to the bookcases; and a few of them have not yet broken their chains. It was a good emblem of the dark and monkish ages, when learning was imprisoned in their cloisters, and chained in their libraries, in the days when the schoolmaster had not yet gone abroad. Mr. E------ showed us a very old copy of the Bible; and a vellum manuscript, most beautifully written in black-letter and illuminated, of the works of Duns Scotus, who was a scholar of Merton College. He then showed us the chapel, a large part of which has been renewed and ornamented with pictured windows and other ecclesiastical splendor, and paved with encaustic tiles, according to the Puseyite taste of the day; for Merton has adopted the Puseyite doctrines, and is one of their chief strongholds in Oxford. If they do no other good, they at least do much for the preservation and characteristic restoration of the old English churches; but perhaps, even here, there is as much antiquity spoiled as retained. In the portion of the chapel not yet restored, we saw the rude old pavement, inlaid with gravestones, in some of which were brasses, with the figures of the college dignitaries, whose dust slumbered beneath; and I think it was here that I saw the tombstone of Anthony-a-Wood, the gossiping biographer of the learned men of Oxford. From the chapel we went into the college gardens, which are very pleasant, and possess the advantage of looking out on the broad verdure of Christ Church meadows and the river beyond. We loitered here awhile, and then went to Mr. ------'s rooms, to which the entrance is by a fine old staircase. They had a very comfortable, aspect,--a wainscoted parlor and bedroom, as nice and cosey as a bachelor could desire, with a good collection of theological books; and on a peg hung his gown, with a red border about it, denoting him to be a proproctor. He was kind enough to order a lunch, consisting of bread and cheese, college ale, and a certain liquor called "Archdeacon." . . . . We ate and drank, . . . . and, bidding farewell to good Mr. E------, we pursued our way to the RATCLIFFE LIBRARY. This is a very handsome edifice, of a circular shape; the lower story consisting altogether of arches, open on all sides, as if to admit anybody to the learning here stored up. I always see great beauty and lightsomeness in these classic and Grecian edifices, though they seem cold and intellectual, and not to have had their mortar moistened with human life-blood, nor to have the mystery of human life in them, as Gothic structures do. The library is in a large and beautiful room, in the story above the basement, and, as far as I saw, consisted chiefly or altogether of scientific works. I saw Silliman's Journal on one of the desks, being the only trace of American science, or American learning or ability in any department, which I discovered in the University of Oxford. After seeing the library, we went to the top of the building, where we had an excellent view of Oxford and the surrounding country. Then we went to the Convocation Hall, and afterwards to the theatre, where S----- sat down in the Chancellor's chair, which is very broad, and ponderously wrought of oak. I remember little here, except the amphitheatre of benches, and the roof, which seems to be supported by golden ropes, and on the wall, opposite the door, some full-length portraits, among which one of that ridiculous coxcomb, George IV., was the most prominent. These kings thrust themselves impertinently forward by bust, statue, and picture, on all occasions, and it is not wise in them to show their shallow foreheads among men of mind. THE BODLEIAN LIBRARY. Mr. Spiers tried to get us admittance to the Bodleian Library; but this is just the moment when it is closed for the purpose of being cleaned; so we missed seeing the principal halls of this library, and were only admitted into what was called the Picture Gallery. This, however, satisfied all my desires, so far as the backs of books are concerned, for they extend through a gallery, running round three sides of a quadrangle, making an aggregate length of more than four hundred feet,--a solid array of bookcases, full of books, within a protection of open iron-work. Up and down the gallery there are models of classic temples; and about midway in its extent stands a brass statue of Earl Pembroke, who was Chancellor of the University in James I's time; not in scholarly garb, however, but in plate and mail, looking indeed like a thunderbolt of war. I rapped him with my knuckles, and he seemed to be solid metal, though, I should imagine, hollow at heart. A thing which interested me very much was the lantern of Guy Fawkes. It was once tinned, no doubt, but is now nothing but rusty iron, partly broken. As this is called the Picture Gallery, I must not forget the pictures, which are ranged in long succession over the bookcases, and include almost all Englishmen whom the world has ever heard of, whether in statesmanship or literature, I saw a canvas on which had once been a lovely and unique portrait of Mary of Scotland; but it was consigned to a picture-cleaner to be cleansed, and, discovering that it was painted over another picture, he had the curiosity to clean poor Mary quite away, thus revealing a wishy-washy woman's face, which now hangs in the gallery. I am so tired of seeing notable things that I almost wish that whatever else is remarkable in Oxford could he obliterated in some similar manner. From the Bodleian we went to THE TAYLOR INSTITUTE, which was likewise closed; but the woman who had it in charge had formerly been a servant of Mr. Spiers, and he so overpersuaded her that she finally smiled and admitted us. It would truly have been a pity to miss it; for here, on the basement floor, are the original models of Chantrey's busts and statues, great and small; and in the rooms above are a far richer treasure,--a large collection of original drawings by Raphael and Michael Angelo. These are far better for my purpose than their finished pictures,--that is to say, they bring me much closer to the hands that drew them and the minds that imagined them. It is like looking into their brains, and seeing the first conception before it took shape outwardly (I have somewhere else said about the same thing of such sketches). I noticed one of Raphael's drawings, representing the effect of eloquence; it was a man speaking in the centre of a group, between whose ears and the orator's mouth connecting lines were drawn. Raphael's idea must have been to compose his picture in such a way that their auricular organs should not fail to be in a proper relation with the eloquent voice; and though this relation would not have been individually traceable in the finished picture, yet the general effect--that of deep and entranced attention--would have been produced. In another room there are some copies of Raphael's cartoons, and some queer mediaeval pictures, as stiff and ugly as can well be conceived, yet successful in telling their own story. We looked a little while at these, and then, thank Heaven! went home and dressed for dinner. I can write no more to-day. Indeed, what a mockery it is to write at all! [Here follows the drive to Cumnor Place, Stanton Harcourt, Nuneham Courtney, Godstowe, etc.,--already published in Our Old Home.--ED.] September 9th.--The morning after our excursion on the Thames was as bright and beautiful as many preceding ones had been. After breakfast S----- and I walked a little about the town, and bought Thomas a Kempis, in both French and English, for U----. . . . . Mr. De la Motte, the photographer, had breakfasted with us, and Mr. Spiers wished him to take a photograph of our whole party. So, in the first place, before the rest were assembled, he made an experimental group of such as were there; and I did not like my own aspect very much. Afterwards, when we were all come, he arranged us under a tree in the garden,--Mr. and Mrs. Spiers, with their eldest son, Mr. and Mrs. Hall and Fanny, Mr. Addison, my wife and me,--and stained the glass with our figures and faces in the twinkling of an eye; not S-----'s face, however, for she turned it away, and left only a portion of her bonnet and dress,--and Mrs. Hall, too, refused to countenance the proceeding. But all the rest of us were caught to the life, and I was really a little startled at recognizing myself so apart from myself, and done so quickly too. This was the last important incident of our visit to Oxford, except that Mr. Spiers was again most hospitable at lunch. Never did anybody attend more faithfully to the comfort of his friends than does this good gentleman. But he has shown himself most kind in every possible way, and I shall always feel truly grateful. No better way of showing our sense of his hospitality, and all the trouble he has taken for us (and our memory of him), has occurred to us, than to present him with a set of my Tales and Romances; so, by the next steamer, I shall write to Ticknor and Fields to send them, elegantly bound, and S----- will emblazon his coat of arms in each volume. He accompanied us and Mr. and Mrs. Hall to the railway station, and we left Oxford at two o'clock. It had been a very pleasant visit, and all the persons whom we met were kind and agreeable, and disposed to look at one another in a sunny aspect. I saw a good deal of Mr. Hall. He is a thoroughly genuine man, of kind heart and true affections, a gentleman of taste and refinement, and full of humor. On the Saturday after our return to Blackheath, we went to HAMPTON COURT, about which, as I have already recorded a visit to it, I need say little here. But I was again impressed with the stately grandeur of Wolsey's great Hall, with its great window at each end, and one side window, descending almost to the floor, and a row of windows on each side, high towards the roof, and throwing down their many-colored light on the stone pavement, and on the Gobelin tapestry, which must have been gorgeously rich when the walls were first clothed with it. I fancied, then, that no modern architect could produce so fine a room; but oddly enough, in the great entrance-hall of the Euston station, yesterday, I could not see how this last fell very much short of Wolsey's Hall in grandeur. We were quite wearied in passing through the endless suites of rooms in Hampton Court, and gazing at the thousands of pictures; it is too much for one day,--almost enough for one life, in such measure as life can be bestowed on pictures. It would have refreshed us had we spent half the time in wandering about the grounds, which, as we glimpsed at them from the windows of the Palace, seemed very beautiful, though laid out with an antique formality of straight lines and broad gravelled paths. Before the central window there is a beautiful sheet of water, and a fountain upshooting itself and plashing into it, with a continuous and pleasant sound. How beautifully the royal robe of a monarchy is embroidered! Palaces, pictures, parks! They do enrich life; and kings and aristocracies cannot keep these things to themselves, they merely take care of them for others. Even a king, with all the glory that can be shed around him, is but the liveried and bedizened footman of his people, and the toy of their delight. I am very glad that I came to this country while the English are still playing with such a toy. Yesterday J----- and I left Blackheath, and reached Liverpool last night. The rest of my family will follow in a few days; and so finishes our residence in Bennoch's house, where I, for my part, have spent some of the happiest hours that I have known since we left our American home. It is a strange, vagabond, gypsy sort of life,--this that we are leading; and I know not whether we shall finally be spoiled for any other, or shall enjoy our quiet Wayside, as we never did before, when once we reach it again. The evening set in misty and obscure; and it was dark almost when J----- and I arrived at the landing stage on our return. I was struck with the picturesque effect of the high tower and tall spire of St. Nicholas, rising upward, with dim outline, into the duskiness; while midway of its height the dial-plates of an illuminated clock blazed out, like two great eyes of a giant. September 13th.--On Saturday my wife, with all her train, arrived at Mrs. B------'s; and on Tuesday--vagabonds as we are--we again struck our tent, and set out for SOUTHPORT. I do not know what sort of character it will form in the children,--this unsettled, shifting, vagrant life, with no central home to turn to, except what we carry in ourselves. It was a windy day, and, judging by the look of the trees, on the way to Southport, it must be almost always windy, and with the blast in one prevailing direction; for invariably their branches, and the whole contour and attitude of the tree, turn from seaward, with a strangely forlorn aspect. Reaching Southport, we took an omnibus, and under the driver's guidance came to our tall stone house, fronting on the sands, and styled "Brunswick Terrace." . . . . The English system of lodging-houses has its good points; but it is, nevertheless, a contrivance for bearing the domestic cares of home about with you whithersoever you go; and immediately you have to set about producing your own bread and cheese. However, Fanny took most of this trouble off our hands, though there was inevitably the stiffness and discomfort of a new housekeeping on the first day of our arrival; besides that, it was cool, and the wind whistled and grumbled and eddied into the chinks of the house. Meanwhile, in all my experience of Southport, I have never yet seen the sea, but only an interminable breadth of sands, looking pooly or plashy in some places, and barred across with drier reaches of sand, but no expanse of water. It must be miles and miles, at low water, to the veritable sea-shore. We are about twenty miles north of Liverpool, on the border of the Irish Sea; and Ireland and, I suppose, the Isle of Man intervene betwixt us and the ocean, not much to our benefit; for the air of the English coast, under ocean influences, is said to be milder than when it comes across the land,--milder, therefore, above or below Ireland, because then the Gulf Stream ameliorates it. Betimes, the forenoon after our arrival, I had to take the rail to Liverpool, but returned, a little after five, in the midst of a rain,-- still low water and interminable sands; still a dreary, howling blast. We had a cheerful fireside, however, and should have had a pleasant evening, only that the wind on the sea made us excessively drowsy. This morning we awoke to hear the wind still blustering, and blowing up clouds, with fitful little showers, and soon blowing them away again, and letting the brightest of sunshine fall over the plashy waste of sand. We have already walked forth on the shore with J----- and R-----, who pick up shells, and dig wells in the sand with their little wooden spades; but soon we saw a rainbow on the western sky, and then a shower came spattering down upon us in good earnest. We first took refuge under the bridge that stretches between the two portions of the promenade; but as there was a chill draught there, we made the best of our way home. The sun has now again come out brightly, though the wind is still tumbling a great many clouds about the sky. Evening.--Later, I walked out with U----, and, looking seaward, we saw the foam and spray of the advancing tide, tossed about on the verge of the horizon,--a long line, like the crests and gleaming helmets of an army. In about half an hour we found almost the whole waste of sand covered with water, and white waves breaking out all over it; but, the bottom being so nearly level, and the water so shallow, there was little of the spirit and exultation of the sea in a strong breeze. Of the long line of bathing-machines, one after another was hitched to a horse, and trundled forth into the water, where, at a long distance from shore, the bathers found themselves hardly middle deep. September 19th.--The wind grumbled and made itself miserable all last night, and this morning it is still howling as ill-naturedly as ever, and roaring and rumbling in the chimneys. The tide is far out, but, from an upper window, I fancied, at intervals, that I could see the plash of the surf-wave on the distant limit of the sand; perhaps, however, it was only a gleam on the sky. Constantly there have been sharp spatters of rain, hissing and rattling against the windows, while a little before or after, or perhaps simultaneously, a rainbow, somewhat watery of texture, paints itself on the western clouds. Gray, sullen clouds hang about the sky, or sometimes cover it with a uniform dulness; at other times, the portions towards the sun gleam almost lightsomely; now, there may be an airy glimpse of clear blue sky in a fissure of the clouds; now, the very brightest of sunshine comes out all of a sudden, and gladdens everything. The breadth of sands has a various aspect, according as there are pools, or moisture enough to glisten, or a drier tract; and where the light gleams along a yellow ridge or bar, it is like sunshine itself. Certainly the temper of the day shifts; but the smiles come far the seldomest, and its frowns and angry tears are most reliable. By seven o'clock pedestrians began to walk along the promenade, close buttoned against the blast; later, a single bathing-machine got under way, by means of a horse, and travelled forth seaward; but within what distance it finds the invisible margin I cannot say,--at all events, it looks like a dreary journey. Just now I saw a sea-gull, wheeling on the blast, close in towards the promenade. September 21st.--Yesterday morning was bright, sunny and windy, and cool and exhilarating. I went to Liverpool at eleven, and, returning at five, found the weather still bright and cool. The temperature, methinks, must soon diminish the population of Southport, which, judging from appearances, must be mainly made up of temporary visitors. There is a newspaper, The Southport Visitor, published weekly, and containing a register of all the visitants in the various hotels and lodging-houses. It covers more than two sides of the paper, to the amount of some hundreds. The guests come chiefly from Liverpool, Manchester, and the neighboring country-towns, and belong to the middle classes. It is not a fashionable watering-place. Only one nobleman's name, and those of two or three baronets, now adorn the list. The people whom we see loitering along the beach and the promenade have, at best, a well-to-do, tradesmanlike air. I do not find that there are any public amusements; nothing but strolling on the sands, donkey-riding, or drives in donkey-carts; and solitary visitors must find it a dreary place. Yet one or two of the streets are brisk and lively, and, being well thronged, have a holiday aspect. There are no carriages in town save donkey-carts; some of which are drawn by three donkeys abreast, and are large enough to hold a whole family. These conveyances will take you far out on the sands through wet and dry. The beach is haunted by The Flying Dutchman, --a sort of boat on wheels, schooner-rigged with sails, and which sometimes makes pretty good speed, with a fair wind. This morning we have been walking with J----- and R----- out over the "ribbed sea sands," a good distance from shore. Throughout the week, the tides will be so low as not to cover the shallow basin of this bay, if a bay it be. The weather was sullen, with now and then a faint gleam of sunshine, lazily tracing our shadows on the sand; the wind rather quieter than on preceding days. . . . . In the sunshine the sands seem to be frequented by great numbers of gulls, who begin to find the northern climate too wintry. You see their white wings in the sunlight, but they become almost or quite invisible in the shade. We shall soon have an opportunity of seeing how a watering-place looks when the season is quite over; for we have concluded to remain here till December, and everybody else will take flight in a week or two. A short time ago, in the evening, in a street of Liverpool, I saw a decent man, of the lower orders, taken much aback by being roughly brushed against by a rowdy fellow. He looked after him, and exclaimed indignantly, "Is that a Yankee?" It shows the kind of character we have here. October 7th.--On Saturday evening, I gave a dinner to Bennoch, at the Adelphi Hotel. The chief point or characteristic of English customs was, that Mr. Radley, our landlord, himself attended at table, and officiated as chief waiter. He has a fortune of 100,000 pounds,--half a million of dollars,--and is an elderly man of good address and appearance. In America, such a man would very probably be in Congress; at any rate, he would never conceive the possibility of changing plates, or passing round the table with hock and champagne. Some of his hock was a most rich and imperial wine, such as can hardly be had on the Rhine itself. There were eight gentlemen besides Bennoch. A donkey, the other day, stubbornly refusing to come out of a boat which had brought him across the Mersey; at last, after many kicks had been applied, and other persecutions of that kind, a man stepped forward, addressing him affectionately, "Come along, brother,"--and the donkey obeyed at once. October 26th.--On Thursday, instead of taking the rail for Liverpool, I set out, about eleven, for a long walk. It was an overcast morning, such as in New England would have boded rain; but English clouds are not nearly so portentous as American in that respect. Accordingly, the sun soon began to peep through crevices, and I had not gone more than a mile or two when it shone a little too warmly for comfort, yet not more than I liked. It was very much like our pleasant October days at home; indeed, the climates of the two countries more nearly coincide during the present month than at any other season of the year. The air was almost perfectly still; but once in a while it stirred, and breathed coolly in my face; it is very delightful, this latent freshness, in a warm atmosphere. The country about Southport has as few charms as it is possible for any region to have. In the close neighborhood of the shore, it is nothing but sand-hillocks, covered with coarse grass; and this is the original nature of the whole site on which the town stands, although it is now paved, and has been covered with soil enough to make gardens, and to nourish here and there a few trees. A little farther inland the surface seems to have been marshy, but has been drained by ditches across the fields and along the roadside; and the fields are embanked on all sides with parapets of earth which appear as if intended to keep out inundations. In fact, Holland itself cannot be more completely on a level with the sea. The only dwellings are the old, whitewashed stone cottages, with thatched roofs, on the brown straw of which grow various weeds and mosses, brightening it with green patches, and sprouting along the ridgepole,--the homeliest hovels that ever mortals lived in, and which they share with pigs and cows at one end. Hens, too, run in and out of the door. One or two of these hovels bore signs, "Licensed to sell beer, ale, and tobacco," and generally there were an old woman and some children visible. In all cases there was a ditch, full of water, close at hand, stagnant, and often quite covered with a growth of water-weeds,--very unwholesome, one would think, in the neighborhood of a dwelling; and, in truth, the children and grown people did look pale. In the fields, along the roadside, men and women were harvesting their carrots and other root-crops, especially digging potatoes,--the pleasantest of all farm labor, in my opinion, there being such a continual interest in opening the treasures of each hill. As I went on, the country began to get almost imperceptibly less flat, and there was some little appearance of trees. I had determined to go to Ormskirk, but soon got out of the way, and came to a little hamlet that looked antique and picturesque, with its small houses of stone and brick, built, with the one material and repaired with the other perhaps ages afterward. Here I inquired my way of a woman, who told me, in broad Lancashire dialect, "that I main go back, and turn to my left, till I came to a finger-post"; and so I did, and found another little hamlet, the principal object in which was a public-house, with a large sign, representing a dance round a Maypole. It was now about one o'clock; so I entered, and, being ushered into what, I suppose, they called the coffee-room, I asked for some cold neat and ale. There was a jolly, round, rather comely woman for a hostess, with a free, hospitable, yet rather careless manner. The coffee-room smelt rather disagreeably of bad tobacco-smoke, and was shabbily furnished with an old sofa and flag-bottomed chairs, and adorned with a print of "Old Billy," a horse famous for a longevity of about sixty years; and also with colored engravings of old-fashioned hunting-scenes, conspicuous with scarlet coats. There was a very small bust of Milton on the mantel-piece. By and by the remains of an immense round of beef, three quarters cut away, were put on the table; then some smoking-hot potatoes; and finally the hostess told me that their own dinner was just ready, and so she had brought me in some hot chops, thinking I might prefer them to the cold meat. I did prefer them; and they were stewed or fried chops, instead of broiled, and were very savory. There was household bread too, and rich cheese, and a pint of ale, home brewed, not very mighty, but good to quench thirst, and, by way of condiment, some pickled cabbage; so, instead of a lunch, I made quite a comfortable dinner. Moreover, there was a cold pudding on the table, and I called for a clean plate, and helped myself to some of it. It was of rice, and was strewn over, rather than intermixed, with some kinds of berries, the nature of which I could not exactly make out. I then set forth again. It was still sunny and warm, and I walked more slowly than before dinner; in fact, I did little more than lounge along, sitting down, at last, on the stone parapet of a bridge. The country grew more pleasant, more sylvan, and, though still of a level character, not so drearily flat. Soon appeared the first symptom that I had seen of a gentleman's residence,--a lodge at a park gate, then a long stretch of wall, with a green lawn, and afterwards an extent of wooded land; then another gateway, with a neat lodge on each side of it, and, lastly, another extent of wood. The Hall or Mansion-house, however, was nowhere apparent, being, doubtless, secluded deep and far within its grounds. I inquired of a boy who was the owner of the estate, and he answered, "Mr. Scarisbrick"; and no doubt it is a family of local eminence. Along the road,--an old inn; some aged stone houses, built for merely respectable occupants; a canal, with two canal-boats, heaped up with a cargo of potatoes; two little girls, who were watching lest some cows should go astray, and had their two little chairs by the roadside, and their dolls and other playthings, and so followed the footsteps of the cows all day long. I met two boys, coming from Ormskirk, mounted on donkeys, with empty panniers, on which they had carried vegetables to market. Finally, between two and three o'clock, I saw the great tower of Ormskirk Church, with its spire, not rising out of the tower, but sprouting up close beside it; and, entering the town, I directed my steps first to this old church. ORMSKIRK CHURCH. It stands on a gentle eminence, sufficient to give it a good site, and has a pavement of flat gravestones in front. It is doubtless, as regards its foundation, a very ancient church, but has not exactly a venerable aspect, being in too good repair, and much restored in various parts; not ivy-grown, either, though green with moss here and there. The tower is square and immensely massive, and might have supported a very lofty spire; so that it is the more strange that what spire it has should be so oddly stuck beside it, springing out of the church wall. I should have liked well enough to enter the church, as it is the burial-place of the Earls of Derby, and perhaps may contain some interesting monuments; but as it was all shut up, and even the iron gates of the churchyard closed and locked, I merely looked at the outside. From the church, a street leads to the market-place, in which I found a throng of men and women, it being market-day; wares of various kinds, tin, earthen, and cloth, set out on the pavements; droves of pigs; ducks and fowls; baskets of eggs; and a man selling quack medicines, recommending his nostrums as well as he could. The aspect of the crowd was very English,--portly and ruddy women; yeomen with small-clothes and broad-brimmed hats, all very quiet and heavy and good-humored. Their dialect was so provincial that I could not readily understand more than here and there a word. But, after all, there were few traits that could be made a note of. I soon grew weary of the scene, and so I went to the railway station, and waited there nearly an hour for the train to take me to Southport. Ormskirk is famous for its gingerbread, which women sell to the railway passengers at a sixpence for a rouleau of a dozen little cakes. November 30th.--A week ago last Monday, Herman Melville came to see me at the Consulate, looking much as he used to do, and with his characteristic gravity and reserve of manner. . . . . We soon found ourselves on pretty much our former terms of sociability and confidence. . . . . He is thus far on his way to Constantinople. I do not wonder that he found it necessary to take an airing through the world, after so many years of toilsome pen-labor, following upon so wild and adventurous a youth as his was. I invited him to come and stay with us at Southport, as long as he might remain in this vicinity, and accordingly he did come the next day. . . . . On Wednesday we took a pretty long walk together, and sat down in a hollow among the sand-hills, sheltering ourselves from the high cool wind. Melville, as he always does, began to reason of Providence and futurity, and of everything else that lies beyond human ken. . . . . He has a very high and noble nature, and is better worth immortality than the most of us. . . . . On Saturday we went to Chester together. I love to take every opportunity of going to Chester; it being the one only place, within easy reach of Liverpool, which possesses any old English interest. We went to THE CATHEDRAL. Its gray nave impressed me more than at any former visit. Passing into the cloisters, an attendant took possession of us, and showed us about. Within the choir there is a profusion of very rich oaken carving, both on the screen that separates it from the nave, and on the seats and walls; very curious and most elaborate, and lavished (one would say) most wastefully, where nobody would think of looking for it,--where, indeed, amid the dimness of the cathedral, the exquisite detail of the elaboration could not possibly be seen. Our guide lighted some of the gas-burners, of which there are many hundreds, to help us see them; but it required close scrutiny, even then. It must have been out of the question, when the whole means of illumination were only a few smoky torches or candles. There was a row of niches, where the monks used to stand, for four hours together, in the performance of some of their services; and to relieve them a little, they were allowed partially to sit on a projection of the seats, which were turned up in the niche for that purpose; but if they grew drowsy, so as to fail to balance themselves, the seat was so contrived as to slip down, thus bringing the monk to the floor. These projections on the seats are each and all of them carved with curious devices, no two alike. The guide showed us one, representing, apparently, the first quarrel of a new-married couple, wrought with wonderful expression. Indeed, the artist never failed to bring out his idea in the most striking manner,--as, for instance, Satan, under the guise of a lion, devouring a sinner bodily; and again in the figure of a dragon, with a man halfway down his gullet, the legs hanging out. The carver may not have seen anything grotesque in this, nor intended it at all by way of joke; but certainly there would appear to be a grim mirthfulness in some of the designs. One does not see why such fantasies should be strewn about the holy interior of a cathedral, unless it were intended to contain everything that belongs to the heart of man, both upward and downward. In a side aisle of the choir, we saw a tomb, said to be that of the Emperor Henry IV. of Germany, though on very indistinct authority. This is an oblong tomb, carved, and, on one side, painted with bright colors and gilded. During a very long period it was built and plastered into the wall, and the exterior side was whitewashed; but, on being removed, the inner side was found to have been ornamented with gold and color, in the manner in which we now see it. If this were customary with tombs, it must have added vastly to the gorgeous magnificence, to which the painted windows and polished pillars and ornamented ceilings contributed so much. In fact, a cathedral in its fresh estate seems to have been like a pavilion of the sunset, all purple and gold; whereas now it more resembles deepest and grayest twilight. Afterwards, we were shown into the ancient refectory, now used as the city grammar-school, and furnished with the usual desks and seats for the boys. In one corner of this large room was the sort of pulpit or elevated seat, with a broken staircase of stone ascending to it, where one of the monks used to read to his brethren, while sitting at their meals. The desks were cut and carved with the scholars' knives, just as they used to be in the school-rooms where I was a scholar. Thence we passed into the chapter-house, but, before that, we went through a small room, in which Melville opened a cupboard, and discovered a dozen or two of wine-bottles; but our guide told us that they were now empty, and never were meant for jollity, having held only sacramental wine. In the chapter-house, we saw the library, some of the volumes of which were antique folios. There were two dusty and tattered banners hanging on the wall, and the attendant promised to make us laugh by something that he would tell us about them. The joke was that these two banners had been in the battle of Bunker Hill; and our countrymen, he said, always smiled on hearing this. He had discovered us to be Americans by the notice we took of a mural tablet in the choir, to the memory of a Lieutenant-Governor Clarke, of New York, who died in Chester before the Revolution. From the chapter-house he ushered us back into the nave, ever and anon pointing out some portion of the edifice more ancient than the rest, and when I asked him how he knew this, he said that he had learnt it from the archaeologists, who could read off such things like a book. This guide was a lively, quick-witted man, who did his business less by rote, and more with a vivacious interest, than any guide I ever met. After leaving the cathedral we sought out the Yacht Inn, near the water-gate. This was, for a long period of time, the principal inn of Chester, and was the house at which Swift once put up, on his way to Holyhead, and where he invited the clergy to come and sup with him. We sat down in a small snuggery, conversing with the landlord. The Chester people, according to my experience, are very affable, and fond of talking with strangers about the antiquities and picturesque characteristics of their town. It partly lives, the landlord told us, by its visitors, and many people spend the summer here on account of the antiquities and the good air. He showed us a broad, balustraded staircase, leading into a large, comfortable, old-fashioned parlor, with windows looking on the street and on the Custom House that stood opposite. This was the room where Swift expected to receive the clergy of Chester; and on one of the window-panes were two acrid lines, written with the diamond of his ring, satirizing those venerable gentlemen, in revenge for their refusing his invitation. The first line begins rather indistinctly; but the writing grows fully legible, as it proceeds. The Yacht Tavern is a very old house, in the gabled style. The timbers and framework are still perfectly sound. In the same street is the Bishop's house (so called as having been the residence of a prelate long ago), which is covered with curious sculpture, representing Scriptural scenes. And in the same neighborhood is the county court, accessible by an archway, through which we penetrated, and found ourselves in a passage, very ancient and dusky, overlooked from the upper story by a gallery, to which an antique staircase ascended, with balustrades and square landing-places. A printer saw us here, and asked us into his printing-office, and talked very affably; indeed, he could have hardly been more civil, if he had known that both Melville and I have given a good deal of employment to the brethren of his craft. December 15th.--An old gentleman has recently paid me a good many visits,--a Kentucky man, who has been a good deal in England and Europe generally without losing the freshness and unconventionality of his earlier life. He was a boatman, and afterwards captain of a steamer on the Ohio and Mississippi; but has gained property, and is now the owner of mines of coal and iron, which he is endeavoring to dispose of here in England. A plain, respectable, well-to-do-looking personage, of more than seventy years; very free of conversation, and beginning to talk with everybody as a matter of course; tall, stalwart, a dark face, with white curly hair and keen eyes; and an expression shrewd, yet kindly and benign. He fought through the whole War of 1812, beginning with General Harrison at the battle of Tippecanoe, which he described to me. He says that at the beginning of the battle, and for a considerable time, he heard Tecumseh's voice, loudly giving orders. There was a man named Wheatley in the American camp, a strange, incommunicative person,--a volunteer, making war entirely on his own book, and seeking revenge for some relatives of his, who had been killed by the Indians. In the midst of the battle this Wheatley ran at a slow trot past R------ (my informant), trailing his rifle, and making towards the point where Tecumseh's voice was heard. The fight drifted around, and R------ along with it; and by and by he reached a spot where Wheatley lay dead, with his head on Tecumseh's breast. Tecumseh had been shot with a rifle, but, before expiring, appeared to have shot Wheatley with a pistol, which he still held in his hand. R------ affirms that Tecumseh was flayed by the Kentucky men on the spot, and his skin converted into razor-straps. I have left out the most striking point of the narrative, after all, as R------ told it, viz. that soon after Wheatley passed him, he suddenly ceased to hear Tecumseh's voice ringing through the forest, as he gave his orders. He was at the battle of New Orleans, and gave me the story of it from beginning to end; but I remember only a few particulars in which he was personally concerned. He confesses that his hair bristled upright--every hair in his head--when he heard the shouts of the British soldiers before advancing to the attack. His uncomfortable sensations lasted till he began to fire, after which he felt no more of them. It was in the dusk of the morning, or a little before sunrise, when the assault was made; and the fight lasted about two hours and a half, during which R------ fired twenty-four times; and said he, "I saw my object distinctly each time, and I was a good rifle-shot." He was raising his rifle to fire the twenty-fifth time, when an American officer, General Carroll, pressed it down, and bade him fire no more. "Enough is enough," quoth the General. For there needed no more slaughter, the British being in utter rout and confusion. In this retreat many of the enemy would drop down among the dead, then rise, run a considerable distance, and drop again, thus confusing the riflemen's aim. One fellow had thus got about four hundred and fifty yards from the American line, and, thinking himself secure, he made a derisive gesture. "I'll have a shot at him anyhow," cried a rifleman; so he fired, and the poor devil dropped. R------ himself, with one of his twenty-four shots, hit a British officer, who fell forward on his face, about thirty paces from our line, and as the enemy were then retreating (they advanced and were repelled two or three times) he ran out, and turned him over on his back. The officer was a man about thirty-eight, tall and fine-looking; his eyes were wide open, clear and bright, and were fixed full on R------ with a somewhat stern glance, but there was the sweetest and happiest smile over his face that could be conceived. He seemed to be dead;--at least, R------ thinks that he did not really see him, fixedly as he appeared to gaze. The officer held his sword in his hand, and R------ tried in vain to wrest it from him, until suddenly the clutch relaxed. R------ still keeps the sword hung up over his mantel-piece. I asked him how the dead man's aspect affected him. He replied that he felt nothing at the time; but that ever since, in all trouble, in uneasy sleep, and whenever he is out of tune, or waking early, or lying awake at night, he sees this officer's face, with the clear bright eyes and the pleasant smile, just as distinctly as if he were bending over him. His wound was in the breast, exactly on the spot that R------ had aimed at, and bled profusely. The enemy advanced in such masses, he says, that it was impossible not to hit them unless by purposely firing over their heads. After the battle, R------ leaped over the rampart, and took a prisoner who was standing unarmed in the midst of the slain, having probably dropped down during the heat of the action, to avoid the hail-storm of rifle-shots. As he led him in, the prisoner paused, and pointed to an officer who was lying dead beside his dead horse, with his foot still in the stirrup. "There lies our General," said he. The horse had been killed by a grape-shot, and Pakenham himself, apparently, by a six-pounder ball, which had first struck the earth, covering him from head to foot with mud and clay, and had then entered his side, and gone upward through his breast. His face was all besmirched with the moist earth. R------ took the slain General's foot out of the stirrup, and then went to report his death. Much more he told me, being an exceedingly talkative old man, and seldom, I suppose, finding so good a listener as myself. I like the man,--a good-tempered, upright, bold and free old fellow; of a rough breeding, but sufficiently smoothed by society to be of pleasant intercourse. He is as dogmatic as possible, having formed his own opinions, often on very disputable grounds, and hardened in them; taking queer views of matters and things, and giving shrewd and not ridiculous reasons for them; but with a keen, strong sense at the bottom of his character. A little while ago I met an Englishman in a railway carriage, who suggests himself as a kind of contrast to this warlike and vicissitudinous backwoodsman. He was about the same age as R------, but had spent, apparently, his whole life in Liverpool, and has long occupied the post of Inspector of Nuisances,--a rather puffy and consequential man; gracious, however, and affable, even to casual strangers like myself. The great contrast betwixt him and the American lies in the narrower circuit of his ideas; the latter talking about matters of history of his own country and the world,--glancing over the whole field of politics, propounding opinions and theories of his own, and showing evidence that his mind had operated for better or worse on almost all conceivable matters; while the Englishman was odorous of his office, strongly flavored with that, and otherwise most insipid. He began his talk by telling me of a dead body which he had lately discovered in a house in Liverpool, where it had been kept about a fortnight by the relatives, partly from want of funds for the burial, and partly in expectation of the arrival of some friends from Glasgow. There was a plate of glass in the coffin-lid, through which the Inspector of Nuisances, as he told me, had looked and seen the dead man's face in an ugly state of decay, which he minutely described. However, his conversation was not altogether of this quality; for he spoke about larks, and how abundant they are just now, and what a good pie they make, only they must be skinned, else they will have a bitter taste. We have since had a lark-pie ourselves, and I believe it was very good in itself; only the recollection of the Nuisance-man's talk was not a very agreeable flavor. A very racy and peculiarly English character might be made out of a man like this, having his life-concern wholly with the disagreeables of a great city. He seemed to be a good and kindly person, too, but earthy,--even as if his frame had been moulded of clay impregnated with the draining of slaughter-houses. December 21st.--On Thursday evening I dined for the first time with the new Mayor at the Town Hall. I wish to preserve all the characteristic traits of such banquets, because, being peculiar to England, these municipal feasts may do well to picture in a novel. There was a big old silver tobacco-box, nearly or quite as large round as an ordinary plate, out of which the dignitaries of Liverpool used to fill their pipes, while sitting in council or after their dinners. The date "1690" was on the lid. It is now used as a snuff-box, and wends its way, from guest to guest, round the table. We had turtle, and, among other good things, American canvasback ducks. . . . . These dinners are certainly a good institution, and likely to be promotive of good feeling; the Mayor giving them often, and inviting, in their turn, all the respectable and eminent citizens of whatever political bias. About fifty gentlemen were present that evening. I had the post of honor at the Mayor's right hand; and France, Turkey, and Austria were toasted before the Republic, for, as the Mayor whispered me, he must first get his allies out of the way. The Turkish Consul and the Austrian both made better English speeches than any Englishman, during the evening; for it is inconceivable what shapeless and ragged utterances Englishmen are content to put forth, without attempting anything like a wholeness; but inserting a patch here and a patch there, and finally getting out what they wish to say, indeed, but in most disorganized guise. . . . . I can conceive of very high enjoyment in making a speech; one is in such a curious sympathy with his audience, feeling instantly how every sentence affects them, and wonderfully excited and encouraged by the sense that it has gone to the right spot. Then, too, the imminent emergency, when a man is overboard, and must sink or swim, sharpens, concentrates, and invigorates the mind, and causes matters of thought and sentiment to assume shape and expression, though, perhaps, it seemed hopeless to express them, just before you rose to speak. Yet I question much whether public speaking tends to elevate the orator, intellectually or morally; the effort, of course, being to say what is immediately received by the audience, and to produce an effect on the instant. I don't quite see how an honest man can be a good and successful orator; but I shall hardly undertake to decide the question on my merely post-prandial experience. The Mayor toasted his guests by their professions,--the merchants, for instance, the bankers, the solicitors,--and while one of the number responded, his brethren also stood up, each in his place, thus giving their assent to what he said. I think the very worst orator was a major of Artillery, who spoke in a meek, little, nervous voice, and seemed a good deal more discomposed than probably he would have been in the face of the enemy. The first toast was "The Ladies," to which an old bachelor responded. December 31st.--Thus far we have come through the winter, on this bleak and blasty shore of the Irish Sea, where, perhaps, the drowned body of Milton's friend Lycidas might have been washed ashore more than two centuries ago. This would not be very likely, however, so wide a tract of sands, never deeply covered by the tide, intervening betwixt us and the sea. But it is an excessively windy place, especially here on the Promenade; always a whistle and a howl,--always an eddying gust through the corridors and chambers,--often a patter of hail or rain or snow against the windows; and in the long evenings the sounds outside are very much as if we were on shipboard in mid-ocean, with the waves dashing against the vessel's sides. I go to town almost daily, starting at about eleven, and reaching Southport again at a little past live; by which time it is quite dark, and continues so till nearly eight in the morning. Christmas time has been marked by few characteristics. For a week or two previous to Christmas day, the newspapers contained rich details respecting market-stalls and butchers' shops,--what magnificent carcasses of prize oxen and sheep they displayed. . . . . The Christmas Waits came to us on Christmas eve, and on the day itself, in the shape of little parties of boys or girls, singing wretched doggerel rhymes, and going away well pleased with the guerdon of a penny or two. Last evening came two or three older choristers at pretty near bedtime, and sang some carols at our door. They were psalm tunes, however. Everybody with whom we have had to do, in any manner of service, expects a Christmas-box; but, in most cases, a shilling is quite a satisfactory amount. We have had holly and mistletoe stuck up on the gas-fixtures and elsewhere about the house. On the mantel-piece in the coroner's court the other day, I saw corked and labelled phials, which it may be presumed contained samples of poisons that have brought some poor wretches to their deaths, either by murder or suicide. This court might be wrought into a very good and pregnant description, with its grimy gloom illuminated by a conical skylight, constructed to throw daylight down on corpses; its greasy Testament covered over with millions of perjured kisses; the coroner himself, whose life is fed on all kinds of unnatural death; its subordinate officials, who go about scenting murder, and might be supposed to have caught the scent in their own garments; its stupid, brutish juries, settling round corpses like flies; its criminals, whose guilt is brought face to face with them here, in closer contact than at the subsequent trial. O---- P------, the famous Mormonite, called on me a little while ago,--a short, black-haired, dark-complexioned man; a shrewd, intelligent, but unrefined countenance, excessively unprepossessing; an uncouth gait and deportment; the aspect of a person in comfortable circumstances, and decently behaved, but of a vulgar nature and destitute of early culture. I think I should have taken him for a shoemaker, accustomed to reflect in a rude, strong, evil-disposed way on matters of this world and the next, as he sat on his bench. He said he had been residing in Liverpool about six months; and his business with me was to ask for a letter of introduction that should gain him admittance to the British Museum, he intending a visit to London. He offered to refer me to respectable people for his character; but I advised him to apply to Mr. Dallas, as the proper person for his purpose. March 1st, 1857.--On the night of last Wednesday week, our house was broken into by robbers. They entered by the back window of the breakfast-room, which is the children's school-room, breaking or cutting a pane of glass, so as to undo the fastening. I have a dim idea of having heard a noise through my sleep; but if so, it did not more than slightly disturb me. U---- heard it, she being at watch with R-----; and J-----, having a cold, was also wakeful, and thought the noise was of servants moving about below. Neither did the idea of robbers occur to U----. J-----, however, hearing U---- at her mother's door, asking for medicine for R-----, called out for medicine for his cold, and the thieves probably thought we were bestirring ourselves, and so took flight. In the morning the servants found the hall door and the breakfast-room window open; some silver cups and some other trifles of plate were gone from the sideboard, and there were tokens that the whole lower part of the house had been ransacked; but the thieves had evidently gone off in a hurry, leaving some articles which they would have taken, had they been more at leisure. We gave information to the police, and an inspector and constable soon came to make investigations, taking a list of the missing articles, and informing themselves as to all particulars that could be known. I did not much expect ever to hear any more of the stolen property; but on Sunday a constable came to request my presence at the police-office to identify the lost things. The thieves had been caught in Liverpool, and some of the property found upon them, and some of it at a pawnbroker's where they had pledged it. The police-office is a small dark room, in the basement story of the Town Hall of Southport; and over the mantel-piece, hanging one upon another, there are innumerable advertisements of robberies in houses, and on the highway,--murders, too, and garrotings; and offences of all sorts, not only in this district, but wide away, and forwarded from other police-stations. Bring thus aggregated together, one realizes that there are a great many more offences than the public generally takes note of. Most of these advertisements were in pen and ink, with minute lists of the articles stolen; but the more important were in print; and there, too, I saw the printed advertisement of our own robbery, not for public circulation, but to be handed about privately, among police-officers and pawnbrokers. A rogue has a very poor chance in England, the police being so numerous, and their system so well organized. In a corner of the police-office stood a contrivance for precisely measuring the heights of prisoners; and I took occasion to measure J-----, and found him four feet seven inches and a half high. A set of rules for the self-government of police-officers was nailed on the door, between twenty and thirty in number, and composing a system of constabulary ethics. The rules would be good for men in almost any walk of life; and I rather think the police-officers conform to them with tolerable strictness. They appear to be subordinated to one another on the military plan. The ordinary constable does not sit down in the presence of his inspector, and this latter seems to be half a gentleman; at least, such is the bearing of our Southport inspector, who wears a handsome uniform of green and silver, and salutes the principal inhabitants, when meeting them in the street, with an air of something like equality. Then again there is a superintendent, who certainly claims the rank of a gentleman, and has perhaps been an officer in the army. The superintendent of this district was present on this occasion. The thieves were brought down from Liverpool on Tuesday, and examined in the Town Hall. I had been notified to be present, but, as a matter of courtesy, the police-officers refrained from calling me as a witness, the evidence of the servants being sufficient to identify the property. The thieves were two young men, not much over twenty,--James and John Macdonald, terribly shabby, dirty, jail-bird like, yet intelligent of aspect, and one of them handsome. The police knew them already, and they seemed not much abashed by their position. There were half a dozen magistrates on the bench,--idle old gentlemen of Southport and the vicinity, who lounged into the court, more as a matter of amusement than anything else, and lounged out again at their own pleasure; for these magisterial duties are a part of the pastime of the country gentlemen of England. They wore their hats on the bench. There were one or two of them more active than their fellows; but the real duty was done by the Clerk of the Court. The seats within the bar were occupied by the witnesses, and around the great table sat some of the more respectable people of Southport; and without the bar were the commonalty in great numbers; for this is said to be the first burglary that has occurred here within the memory of man, and so it has caused a great stir. There seems to be a strong case against the prisoners. A boy attached to the railway testified to having seen them at Birchdale on Wednesday afternoon, and directed them on their way to Southport; Peter Pickup recognized them as having applied to him for lodgings in the course of that evening; a pawnbroker swore to one of them as having offered my top-coat for sale or pledge in Liverpool; and my boots were found on the feet of one of them,--all this in addition to other circumstances of pregnant suspicion. So they were committed for trial at the Liverpool assizes, to be holden some time in the present month. I rather wished them to escape. February 27th.--Coming along the promenade, a little before sunset, I saw the mountains of the Welsh coast shadowed very distinctly against the horizon. Mr. Channing told me that he had seen these mountains once or twice during his stay at Southport; but, though constantly looking for them, they have never before greeted my eyes in all the months that we have spent here. It is said that the Isle of Man is likewise discernible occasionally; but as the distance must be between sixty and seventy miles, I should doubt it. How misty is England! I have spent four years in a gray gloom. And yet it suits me pretty well. TO YORK. April 10th.--At Skipton. My wife, J-----, and I left Southport to-day for a short tour to York and its neighborhood. The weather has been exceedingly disagreeable for weeks past, but yesterday and to-day have been pleasant, and we take advantage of the first glimpses of spring-like weather. We came by Preston, along a road that grew rather more interesting as we proceeded to this place, which is about sixty miles from Southport, and where we arrived between five and six o'clock. First of all, we got some tea; and then, as it was a pleasant sunset, we set forth from our old-fashioned inn to take a walk. Skipton is an ancient town, and has an ancient though well-repaired aspect, the houses being built of gray stone, but in no picturesque shapes; the streets well paved; the site irregular and rising gradually towards Skipton Castle, which overlooks the town, as an old lordly castle ought to overlook the feudal village which it protects. The castle was built shortly after the Conquest by Robert de Romeli, and was afterwards the property and residence of the famous Cliffords. We met an honest man, as we approached the gateway, who kindly encouraged us to apply for admittance, notwithstanding it was Good Friday; telling us how to find the housekeeper, who would probably show us over the castle. So we passed through the gate, between two embattled towers; and in the castle court we met a flock of young damsels, who had been rambling about the precincts. They likewise directed us in our search for the housekeeper, and S-----, being bolder than I in such assaults on feudal castles, led the way down a dark archway, and up an exterior stairway, and, knocking at a door, immediately brought the housekeeper to a parley. She proved to be a nowise awful personage, but a homely, neat, kindly, intelligent, and middle-aged body. She seemed to be all alone in this great old castle, and at once consented to show us about,--being, no doubt, glad to see any Christian visitors. The castle is now the property of Sir R. Tufton; but the present family do not make it their permanent residence, and have only occasionally visited it. Indeed, it could not well be made an eligible or comfortable residence, according to modern ideas; the rooms occupying the several stories of large round towers, and looking gloomy and sombre, if not dreary,--not the less so for what has been done to modernize them; for instance, modern paper-hangings, and, in some of the rooms, marble fireplaces. They need a great deal more light and higher ceilings; and I rather imagine that the warm, rich effect of glowing tapestry is essential to keep one's spirit cheerful in these ancient rooms. Modern paper-hangings are too superficial and wishy-washy for the purpose. Tapestry, it is true, there is now, completely covering the walls of several of the rooms, but all faded into ghastliness; nor could some of it have been otherwise than ghastly, even in its newness, for it represented persons suffering various kinds of torture, with crowds of monks and nuns looking on. In another room there was the story of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, and other subjects not to be readily distinguished in the twilight that was gathering in these antique chambers. We saw, too, some very old portraits of the Cliffords and the Thanets, in black frames, and the pictures themselves sadly faded and neglected. The famous Countess Anne of Pembroke, Dorset, and Montgomery was represented on one of the leaves of a pair of folding doors, and one of her husbands, I believe, on the other leaf. There was the picture of a little idiot lordling, who had choked himself to death; and a portrait of Oliver Cromwell, who battered this old castle, together with almost every other English or Welsh castle that I ever saw or heard of. The housekeeper pointed out the grove of trees where his cannon were planted during the siege. There was but little furniture in the rooms; amongst other articles, an antique chair, in which Mary, Queen of Scots, is said to have rested. The housekeeper next took us into the part of the castle which has never been modernized since it was repaired, after the siege of Cromwell. This is a dismal series of cellars above ground, with immensely thick walls, letting in but scanty light, and dim staircases of stone; and a large hall, with a vast fireplace, where every particle of heat must needs have gone up chimney,--a chill and heart-breaking place enough. Quite in the midst of this part of the castle is the court-yard,--a space of some thirty or forty feet in length and breadth, open to the sky, but shut completely in on every side by the buildings of the castle, and paved over with flat stones. Out of this pavement, however, grows a yew-tree, ascending to the tops of the towers, and completely filling, with its branches and foliage, the whole open space between them. Some small birds--quite a flock of them--were twittering and fluttering among the upper branches. We went upward, through two or three stories of dismal rooms,--among others, through the ancient guard-room,--till we came out on the roof of one of the towers, and had a very fine view of an amphitheatre of ridgy hills which shut in and seclude the castle and the town. The upper foliage was within our reach, close to the parapet of the tower; so we gathered a few twigs as memorials. The housekeeper told us that the yew-tree is supposed to be eight hundred years old, and, comparing it with other yews that I have seen, I should judge that it must measure its antiquity by centuries, at all events. It still seems to be in its prime. Along the base of the castle, on the opposite side to the entrance, flows a stream, sending up a pleasant murmur from among the trees. The housekeeper said it was not a stream, but only a "wash," whatever that may be; and I conjecture that it creates the motive-power of some factory-looking edifices, which we saw on our first arrival at Skipton. We now took our leave of the housekeeper, and came homeward to our inn, where I have written the foregoing pages by a bright fire; but I think I write better descriptions after letting the subject lie in my mind a day or two. It is too new to be properly dealt with immediately after coming from the scene. The castle is not at all crumbly, but in excellent repair, though so venerable. There are rooks cawing about the shapeless patches of their nests, in the tops of the trees. In the castle wall, as well as in the round towers of the gateway, there seem to be little tenements, perhaps inhabited by the servants and dependants of the family. They looked in very good order, with tokens of present domesticity about them. The whole of this old castle, indeed, was as neat as a new, small dwelling, in spite of an inevitable musty odor of antiquity. April 11th.--This morning we took a carriage and two horses, and set out for BOLTON PRIORY, a distance of about six miles. The morning was cool, with breezy clouds, intermingled with sunshine, and, on the whole, as good as are nine tenths of English mornings. J----- sat beside the driver, and S----- and I in the carriage, all closed but one window. As we drove through Skipton, the little town had a livelier aspect than yesterday when it wore its Good Friday's solemnity; but now its market-place was thronged, principally with butchers, displaying their meat under little movable pent-houses, and their customers. The English people really like to think and talk of butcher's meat, and gaze at it with delight; and they crowd through the avenues of the market-houses and stand enraptured round a dead ox. We passed along by the castle wall, and noticed the escutcheon of the Cliffords or the Thanets carved in stone over the portal, with the motto Desormais, the application of which I do not well see; these ancestral devices usually referring more to the past, than to the future. There is a large old church, just at the extremity of the village, and just below the castle, on the slope of the hill. The gray wall of the castle extends along the road a considerable distance, in good repair, with here and there a buttress, and the semicircular bulge of a tower. The scenery along the road was not particularly striking,--long slopes, descending from ridges; a generally hard outline of country, with not many trees, and those, as yet, destitute of foliage. It needs to be softened with a good deal of wood. There were stone farm-houses, looking ancient, and able to last till twice as old. Instead of the hedges, so universal in other parts of England, there were stone fences of good height and painful construction, made of small stones, which I suppose have been picked up out of the fields through hundreds of years. They reminded me of old Massachusetts, though very unlike our rude stone walls, which, nevertheless, last longer than anything else we build. Another New England feature was the little brooks, which here and there flowed across our road, rippling over the pebbles, clear and bright. I fancied, too, an intelligence and keenness in some of the Yorkshire physiognomies, akin to those characteristics in my countrymen's faces. We passed an ancient, many-gabled inn, large, low, and comfortable, bearing the name of the Devonshire House, as does our own hotel, for the Duke of Devonshire is a great proprietor in these parts. A mile or so beyond, we came to a gateway, broken through what, I believe, was an old wall of the Priory grounds; and here we alighted, leaving our driver to take the carriage to the inn. Passing through this hole in the wall, we saw the ruins of the Priory at the bottom of the beautiful valley about a quarter of a mile off; and, well as the monks knew how to choose the sites of their establishments, I think they never chose a better site than this,--in the green lap of protecting hills, beside a stream, and with peace and fertility looking down upon it on every side. The view down the valley is very fine, and, for my part, I am glad that some peaceable and comfort-loving people possessed these precincts for many hundred years, when nobody else knew how to appreciate peace and comfort. The old gateway tower, beneath which was formerly the arched entrance into the domain of the Priory, is now the central part of a hunting-seat of the Duke of Devonshire, and the edifice is completed by a wing of recent date on each side. A few hundred yards from this hunting-box are the remains of the Priory, consisting of the nave of the old church, which is still in good repair, and used as the worshipping-place of the neighborhood (being a perpetual curacy of the parish of Skipton), and the old ruined choir, roofless, with broken arches, ivy-grown, but not so rich and rare a ruin as either Melrose, Netley, or Furness. Its situation makes its charm. It stands near the river Wharfe,--a broad and rapid stream, which hurries along between high banks, with a sound which the monks must have found congenial to their slumberous moods. It is a good river for trout, too; and I saw two or three anglers, with their rods and baskets, passing through the ruins towards its shore. It was in this river Wharfe that the boy of Egremont was drowned, at the Strid, a mile or two higher up the stream. In the first place, we rambled round the exterior of the ruins; but, as I have said, they are rather bare and meagre in comparison with other abbeys, and I am not sure that the especial care and neatness with which they are preserved does not lessen their effect on the beholder. Neglect, wildness, crumbling walls, the climbing and conquering ivy; masses of stone lying where they fell; trees of old date, growing where the pillars of the aisles used to stand,--these are the best points of ruined abbeys. But, everything here is kept with such trimness that it gives you the idea of a petrifaction. Decay is no longer triumphant; the Duke of Devonshire has got the better of it. The grounds around the church and the ruins are still used for burial, and there are several flat tombstones and altar tombs, with crosiers engraved or carved upon them, which at first I took to be the memorials of bishops or abbots, and wondered that the sculpture should still be so distinct. On one, however, I read the date 1850 and the name of a layman; for the tombstones were all modern, the humid English atmosphere giving them their mossy look of antiquity, and the crosier had been assumed only as a pretty device. Close beside the ruins there is a large, old stone farm-house, which must have been built on the site of a part of the Priory,--the cells, dormitories, refectory, and other portions pertaining to the monks' daily life, I suppose, and built, no doubt, with the sacred stones. I should imagine it would be a haunted house, swarming with cowled spectres. We wished to see the interior of the church, and procured a guide from this farm-house,--the sexton, probably,--a gray-haired, ruddy, cheery, and intelligent man, of familiar though respectful address. The entrance of the church was undergoing improvement, under the last of the abbots, when the Reformation occurred; and it has ever remained in an unfinished state, till now it is mossy with age, and has a beautiful tuft of wall-flowers growing on a ledge over the Gothic arch of the doorway. The body of the church is of much anterior date, though the oaken roof is supposed to have been renewed in Henry VIII's time. This, as I said before, was the nave of the old Abbey church, and has a one-sided and unbalanced aspect, there being only a single aisle, with its row of sturdy pillars. The pavement is covered with pews of old oak, very homely and unornamental; on the side opposite the aisle there are two or three windows of modern stained glass, somewhat gaudy and impertinent; there are likewise some hatchments and escutcheons over the altar and elsewhere. On the whole, it is not an impressive interior; but, at any rate, it had the true musty odor which I never conceived of till I came to England,--the odor of dead men's decay, garnered up and shut in, and kept from generation to generation; not disgusting nor sickening, because it is so old, and of the past. On one side of the altar there was a small square chapel,--or what had once been a chapel, separated from the chancel by a partition about a man's height, if I remember aright. Our guide led us into it, and observed that some years ago the pavement had been taken up in this spot, for burial purposes; but it was found that it had already been used in that way, and that the corpses had been buried upright. Inquiring further, I found that it was the Clapham family, and another that was called Morley, that were so buried; and then it occurred to me that this was the vault Wordsworth refers to in one of his poems,--the burial-place of the Claphams and Mauleverers, whose skeletons, for aught I know, were even then standing upright under our feet. It is but a narrow place, perhaps a square of ten feet. We saw little or nothing else that was memorable, unless it were the signature of Queen Adelaide in a visitors' book. On our way back to Skipton it rained and hailed, but the sun again shone out before we arrived. We took the train for Leeds at half past ten, and arrived there in the afternoon, passing the ruined Abbey of Kirkstall on our way. The ruins looked more interesting than those of Bolton, though not so delightfully situated, and now in the close vicinity of manufactories, and only two or three miles from Leeds. We took a dish of soup, and spent a miserable hour in and about the railway station of Leeds; whence we departed at four, and reached YORK in an hour or two. We put up at the Black Swan, and before tea went out, on the cool bright edge of evening, to get a glimpse of the cathedral, which impressed me more grandly than when I first saw it, nearly a year ago. Indeed, almost any object gains upon me at the second sight. I have spent the evening in writing up my journal,--an act of real virtue. After walking round the cathedral, we went up a narrow and crooked street, very old and shabby, but with an antique house projecting as much as a yard over the pavement on one side,--a timber house it seemed to be, plastered over and stained yellow or buff. There was no external door, affording entrance into this edifice; but about midway of its front we came to a low, Gothic, stone archway, passing right through the house; and as it looked much time-worn, and was sculptured with untraceable devices, we went through. There was an exceedingly antique, battered, and shattered pair of oaken leaves, which used doubtless to shut up the passage in former times, and keep it secure; but for the last centuries, probably, there has been free ingress and egress. Indeed, the portal arch may never have been closed since the Reformation. Within, we found a quadrangle, of which the house upon the street formed one side, the others being composed of ancient houses, with gables in a row, all looking upon the paved quadrangle, through quaint windows of various fashion. An elderly, neat, pleasant-looking woman now came in beneath the arch, and as she had a look of being acquainted here, we asked her what the place was; and she told us, that in the old Popish times the prebends of the cathedral used to live here, to keep them from doing mischief in the town. The establishment, she said, was now called "The College," and was let in rooms and small tenements to poor people. On consulting the York Guide, I find that her account was pretty correct; the house having been founded in Henry VI.'s time, and called St. William's College, the statue of the patron saint being sculptured over the arch. It was intended for the residence of the parsons and priests of the cathedral, who had formerly caused troubles and scandals by living in the town. We returned to the front of the cathedral on our way homeward, and an old man stopped us, to inquire if we had ever seen the Fiddler of York. We answered in the negative, and said that we had not time to see him now; but the old gentleman pointed up to the highest pinnacle of the southern front, where stood the Fiddler of York, one of those Gothic quaintnesses which blotch the grandeur and solemnity of this and other cathedrals. April 12th.--This morning was bleak and most ungenial; a chilly sunshine, a piercing wind, a prevalence of watery cloud,--April weather, without the tenderness that ought to be half revealed in it. This is EASTER SUNDAY, and service at the cathedral commenced at half past ten; so we set out betimes and found admittance into the vast nave, and thence into the choir. An attendant ushered S----- and J----- to a seat at a distance from me, and then gave me a place in one of the stalls where the monks used to sit or kneel while chanting the services. I think these stalls are now appropriated to the prebends. They are of carved oaken wood, much less elaborate and wonderfully wrought than those of Chester Cathedral, where all was done with head and heart, each a separate device, instead of cut, by machinery like this. The whole effect of this carved work, however, lining the choir with its light tracery and pinnacles, is very fine. The whole choir, from the roof downward, except the old stones of the outer walls, is of modern renovation, it being but a few years since this part of the cathedral was destroyed by fire. The arches and pillars and lofty roof, however, have been well restored; and there was a vast east window, full of painted glass, which, if it be modern, is wonderfully chaste and Gothic-like. All the other windows have painted glass, which does not flare and glare as if newly painted. But the light, whitewashed aspect of the general interior of the choir has a cold and dreary effect. There is an enormous organ, all clad in rich oaken carving, of similar pattern to that of the stalls. It was communion day, and near the high altar, within a screen, I saw the glistening of the gold vessels wherewith the services were to be performed. The choir was respectably filled with a pretty numerous congregation, among whom I saw some officers in full dress, with their swords by their sides, and one, old white-bearded warrior, who sat near me, seemed very devout at his religious exercises. In front of me and on the corresponding benches, on the other side of the choir, sat two rows of white-robed choristers, twenty in all, and these, with some women; performed the vocal part of the music. It is not good to see musicians, for they are sometimes coarse and vulgar people, and so the auditor loses faith in any fine and spiritual tones that they may breathe forth. The services of Easter Sunday comprehend more than the ordinary quantity of singing and chanting; at all events, nearly an hour and a half were thus employed, with some intermixture of prayers and reading of Scriptures; and, being almost congealed with cold, I thought it would never come to an end. The spirit of my Puritan ancestors was mighty within me, and I did not wonder at their being out of patience with all this mummery, which seemed to me worse than papistry because it was a corruption of it. At last a canon gave out the text, and preached a sermon about twenty minutes long,--the coldest, driest, most superficial rubbish; for this gorgeous setting of the magnificent cathedral, the elaborate music, and the rich ceremonies seem inevitably to take the life out of the sermon, which, to be anything, must be all. The Puritans showed their strength of mind and heart by preferring a sermon an hour and a half long, into which the preacher put his whole soul, and lopping away all these externals, into which religious life had first leafed and flowered, and then petrified. After the service, while waiting for my wife in the nave, I was accosted by a young gentleman who seemed to be an American, and whom I have certainly seen before, but whose name I could not recollect. This, he said, was his first visit to York, and he was evidently inclined to join me in viewing the curiosities of the place, but, not knowing his name, I could not introduce him to my wife, and so made a parting salute. After dinner, we set forth and took a promenade along the wall, and a ramble through some of the crooked streets, noting the old, jutting-storied houses, story above story, and the old churches, gnawed like a bone by the tooth of Time, till we came suddenly to the Black Swan before we expected it. . . . . I rather fancy that I must have observed most of the external peculiarities at my former visit, and therefore need not make another record of them in this journal. In the course of our walk we saw a procession of about fifty charity-school boys, in flat caps, each with bands under his chin, and a green collar to his coat; all looking unjoyous, and as if they had no home nor parents' love. They turned into a gateway, which closed behind them; and as the adjoining edifice seemed to be a public institution,--at least, not private,--we asked what it was, and found it to be a hospital or residence for Old Maiden ladies, founded by a gentlewoman of York; I know not whether she herself is of the sisterhood. It must be a very singular institution, and worthy of intimate study, if it were possible to make one's way within the portal. After writing the above, J----- and I went out for another ramble before tea; and, taking a new course, we came to a grated iron fence and gateway, through which we could see the ruins of St. Mary's Abbey. They are very extensive, and situated quite in the midst of the city, and the wall and then a tower of the Abbey seem to border more than one of the streets. Our walk was interesting, as it brought us unexpectedly upon several relics of antiquity,--a loop-holed and battlemented gateway; and at various points fragments of the old Gothic stone-work, built in among more recent edifices, which themselves were old; grimness intermixed with quaintness and grotesqueness; old fragments of religious or warlike architecture mingled with queer domestic structures,--the general effect sombre, sordid, and grimy; but yet with a fascination that makes us fain to linger about such scenes, and come to them again. We passed round the cathedral, and saw jackdaws fluttering round the pinnacles, while the bells chimed the quarters, and little children played on the steps under the grand arch of the entrance. It is very stately, very beautiful, this minster; and doubtless would be very satisfactory, could I only know it long and well enough,--so rich as its front is, even with almost all the niches empty of their statues; not stern in its effect, which I suppose must be owing to the elaborate detail with which its great surface is wrought all over, like the chasing of a lady's jewel-box, and yet so grand! There is a dwelling-house on one side, gray with antiquity, which has apparently grown out of it like an excrescence; and though a good-sized edifice, yet the cathedral is so large that its vastness is not in the least deformed by it. If it be a dwelling-house, I suppose it is inhabited by the person who takes care of the cathedral. This morning, while listening to the tedious chanting and lukewarm sermon, I depreciated the whole affair, cathedral and all; but now I do more justice, at least to the latter, and am only sorry that its noble echoes must follow at every syllable, and re-reverberate at the commas and semicolons, such poor discourses as the canon's. But, after all, it was the Puritans who made the sermon of such importance in religious worship as we New-Englanders now consider it; and we are absurd in considering this magnificent church and all those embroidered ceremonies only in reference to it. Before going back to the hotel, I went again up the narrow and twisted passage of College Street, to take another glance at St. William's College. I underestimated the projection of the front over the street; it is considerably more than three feet, and is about eight or nine feet above the pavement. The little statue of St. William is an alto-relievo over the arched entrance, and has an escutcheon of arms on each side, all much defaced. In the interior of the quadrangle, the houses have not gables nor peaked fronts, but have peaked windows on the red-tiled roofs. The doorway, opposite the entrance-arch, is rather stately; and on one side is a large, projecting window, which is said to belong to the room where the printing-press of Charles I. was established in the days of the Parliament. THE MINSTER. Monday, April 13th.--This morning was chill, and, worse, it was showery, so that our purposes to see York were much thwarted. At about ten o'clock, however, we took a cab, and drove to the cathedral, where we arrived while service was going on in the choir, and ropes were put up as barriers between us and the nave; so that we were limited to the south transept, and a part of one of the aisles of the choir. It was dismally cold. We crept cheerlessly about within our narrow precincts (narrow, that is to say, in proportion to the vast length and breadth of the cathedral), gazing up into the hollow height of the central tower, and looking at a monumental brass, fastened against one of the pillars, representing a beruffed lady of the Tudor times, and at the canopied tomb of Archbishop de Grey, who ruled over the diocese in the thirteenth century. Then we went into the side aisle of the choir, where there were one or two modern monuments; and I was appalled to find that a sermon was being preached by the ecclesiastic of the day, nor were there any signs of an imminent termination. I am not aware that there was much pith in the discourse, but there was certainly a good deal of labor and earnestness in the preacher's mode of delivery; although, when he came to a close, it appeared that the audience was not more than half a dozen people. The barriers being now withdrawn, we walked adown the length of the nave, which did not seem to me so dim and vast as the recollection which I have had of it since my visit of a year ago. But my pre-imaginations and my memories are both apt to play me false with all admirable things, and so create disappointments for me, while perhaps the thing itself is really far better than I imagine or remember it. We engaged an old man, one of the attendants pertaining to the cathedral, to be our guide, and he showed us first the stone screen in front of the choir, with its sculptured kings of England; and then the tombs in the north transept,-- one of a modern archbishop, and one of an ancient one, behind which the insane person who set fire to the church a few years ago hid himself at nightfall. Then our guide unlocked a side door, and led us into the chapter-house,--an octagonal hall, with a vaulted roof, a tessellated floor, and seven arched windows of old painted glass, the richest that I ever saw or imagined, each looking like an inestimable treasury of precious stories, with a gleam and glow even in the sullen light of this gray morning. What would they be with the sun shining through them! With all their brilliancy, moreover, they were as soft as rose-leaves. I never saw any piece of human architecture so beautiful as this chapter-house; at least, I thought so while I was looking at it, and think so still; and it owed its beauty in very great measure to the painted windows: I remember looking at these windows from the outside yesterday, and seeing nothing but an opaque old crust of conglomerated panes of glass; but now that gloomy mystery was radiantly solved. Returning into the body of the cathedral, we next entered the choir, where, instead of the crimson cushions and draperies which we had seen yesterday, we found everything folded in black. It was a token of mourning for one of the canons, who died on Saturday night. The great east window, seventy-five feet high, and full of old painted glass in many exquisitely wrought and imagined Scriptural designs, is considered the most splendid object in the Minster. It is a pity that it is partially hidden from view, even in the choir, by a screen before the high altar; but indeed, the Gothic architects seem first to imagine beautiful and noble things, and then to consider how they may best be partially screened from sight. A certain secrecy and twilight effect belong to their plan. We next went round the side aisles of the choir, which contain many interesting monuments of prelates, and a specimen of the very common Elizabethan design of an old gentleman in a double ruff and trunk breeches, with one of his two wives on either side of him, all kneeling in prayer; and their conjoint children, in two rows, kneeling in the lower compartments of the tomb. We saw, too, a rich marble monument of one of the Strafford family, and the tombstone of the famous Earl himself,--a flat tombstone in the pavement of the aisle, covering the vault where he was buried, and with four iron rings fastened into the four corners of the stone whereby to lift it. And now the guide led us into the vestry, where there was a good fire burning in the grate, and it really thawed my heart, which was congealed with the dismal chill of the cathedral. Here we saw a good many curious things,--for instance, two wooden figures in knightly armor, which had stood sentinels beside the ancient clock before it was replaced by a modern one; and, opening a closet, the guide produced an old iron helmet, which had been found in a tomb where a knight had been buried in his armor; and three gold rings and one brass one, taken out of the graves, and off the finger-bones of mediaeval archbishops,--one of them with a ruby set in it; and two silver-gilt chalices, also treasures of the tombs; and a wooden head, carved in human likeness, and painted to the life, likewise taken from a grave where an archbishop was supposed to have been buried. They found no veritable skull nor bones, but only this block-head, as if Death had betrayed the secret of what the poor prelate really was. We saw, too, a canopy of cloth, wrought with gold threads, which had been borne over the head of King James I., when he came to York, on his way to receive the English Crown. There were also some old brass dishes, In which pence used to be collected in monkish times. Over the door of this vestry were hung two banners of a Yorkshire regiment, tattered in the Peninsular wars, and inscribed with the names of the battles through which they had been borne triumphantly; and Waterloo was among them. The vestry, I think, occupies that excrescential edifice which I noticed yesterday as having grown out of the cathedral. After looking at these things, we went down into the crypts, under the choir. These were very interesting, as far as we could see them; being more antique than anything above ground, but as dark as any cellar. There is here, in the midst of these sepulchral crypts, a spring of water, said to be very pure and delicious, owing to the limestone through which the rain that feeds its source is filtered. Near it is a stone trough, in which the monks used to wash their hands. I do not remember anything more that we saw at the cathedral, and at noon we returned to the Black Swan. The rain still continued, so that S----- could not share in any more of my rambles, but J----- and I went out again, and discovered the Guildhall. It is a very ancient edifice of Richard II.'s time, and has a statue over the entrance which looks time-gnawed enough to be of coeval antiquity, although in reality it is only a representation of George II. in his royal robes. We went in, and found ourselves in a large and lofty hall, with an oaken roof and a stone pavement, and the farther end was partitioned off as a court of justice. In that portion of the hall the Judge was on the bench, and a trial was going forward; but in the hither portion a mob of people, with their hats on, were lounging and talking, and enjoying the warmth of the stoves. The window over the judgment-seat had painted glass in it, and so, I think, had some of the hall windows. At the end of the hall hung a great picture of Paul defending himself before Agrippa, where the Apostle looked like an athlete, and had a remarkably bushy black beard. Between two of the windows hung an Indian bell from Burmah, ponderously thick and massive. Both the picture and the bell had been presented to the city as tokens of affectionate remembrance by its children; and it is pleasant to think that such failings exist in these old stable communities, and that there are permanent localities where such gifts can be kept from generation to generation. At four o'clock we left the city of York, still in a pouring rain. The Black Swan, where we had been staying, is a good specimen of the old English inn, sombre, quiet, with dark staircases, dingy rooms, curtained beds,--all the possibilities of a comfortable life and good English fare, in a fashion which cannot have been much altered for half a century. It is very homelike when one has one's family about him, but must be prodigiously stupid for a solitary man. We took the train for Manchester, over pretty much the same route that I travelled last year. Many of the higher hills in Yorkshire were white with snow, which, in our lower region, softened into rain; but as we approached Manchester, the western sky reddened, and gave promise of better weather. We arrived at nearly eight o'clock, and put up at the Palatine Hotel. In the evening I scrawled away at my journal till past ten o'clock; for I have really made it a matter of conscience to keep a tolerably full record of my travels, though conscious that everything good escapes in the process. In the morning we went out and visited the MANCHESTER CATHEDRAL, a particularly black and grimy edifice, containing some genuine old wood carvings within the choir. We stayed a good while, in order to see some people married. One couple, with their groomsman and bride's-maid, were sitting within the choir; but when the clergyman was robed and ready, there entered five other couples, each attended by groomsman and bride's-maid. They all were of the lower orders; one or two respectably dressed, but most of them poverty-stricken,--the men in their ordinary loafer's or laborer's attire, the women with their poor, shabby shawls drawn closely about them; faded untimely, wrinkled with penury and care; nothing fresh, virgin-like, or hopeful about them; joining themselves to their mates with the idea of making their own misery less intolerable by adding another's to it. All the six couple stood up in a row before the altar, with the groomsmen and bride's-maids in a row behind them; and the clergyman proceeded to marry them in such a way that it almost seemed to make every man and woman the husband and wife of every other. However, there were some small portions of the service directed towards each separate couple; and they appeared to assort themselves in their own fashion afterwards, each one saluting his bride with a kiss. The clergyman, the sexton, and the clerk all seemed to find something funny in this affair; and the woman who admitted us into the church smiled too, when she told us that a wedding-party was waiting to be married. But I think it was the saddest thing we have seen since leaving home; though funny enough if one likes to look at it from a ludicrous point of view. This mob of poor marriages was caused by the fact that no marriage fee is paid during Easter. This ended the memorable things of our tour; for my wife and J----- left Manchester for Southport, and I for Liverpool, before noon. April 19th.--On the 15th, having been invited to attend at the laying of the corner-stone of MR. BROWNE'S FREE LIBRARY, I went to the Town Hall, according to the programme, at eleven o'clock. There was already a large number of people (invited guests, members of the Historical Society, and other local associations) assembled in the great hall-room, and one of these was delivering an address to Mr. Browne as I entered. Approaching the outer edge of the circle, I was met and cordially greeted by Monckton Milnes, whom I like, and who always reminds me of Longfellow, though his physical man is more massive. While we were talking together, a young man approached him with a pretty little expression of surprise and pleasure at seeing him there. He had a slightly affected or made-up manner, and was rather a comely person. Mr. Milnes introduced him to me as Lord ------. Hereupon, of course, I observed him more closely; and I must say that I was not long in discovering a gentle dignity and half-imperceptible reserve in his manner; but still my first impression was quite as real as my second one. He occupies, I suppose, the foremost position among the young men of England, and has the fairest prospects of a high course before him; nevertheless, he did not impress me as possessing the native qualities that could entitle him to a high public career. He has adopted public life as his hereditary profession, and makes the very utmost of all his abilities, cultivating himself to a determined end, knowing that he shall have every advantage towards attaining his object. His natural disadvantages must have been, in some respects, unusually great; his voice, for instance, is not strong, and appeared to me to have a more positive defect than mere weakness. Doubtless he has struggled manfully against this defect; and it made me feel a certain sympathy, and, indeed, a friendliness, for which he would not at all have thanked me, had he known it. I felt, in his person, what a burden it is upon human shoulders, the necessity of keeping up the fame and historical importance of an illustrious house; at least, when the heir to its honors has sufficient intellect and sensibility to feel the claim that his country and his ancestors and his posterity all have upon him. Lord ------ is fully capable of feeling these claims; but I would not care, methinks, to take his position, unless I could have considerably more than his strength. In a little while we formed ourselves into a procession, four in a row, and set forth from the Town Hall, through James Street, Lord Street, Lime Street, all the way through a line of policemen and a throng of people; and all the windows were alive with heads, and I never before was so conscious of a great mass of humanity, though perhaps I may often have seen as great a crowd. But a procession is the best point of view from which to see the crowd that collects together. The day, too, was very fine, even sunshiny, and the streets dry,--a blessing which cannot be overestimated; for we should have been in a strange trim for the banquet, had we been compelled to wade through the ordinary mud of Liverpool. The procession itself could not have been a very striking object. In America, it would have had a hundred picturesque and perhaps ludicrous features,--the symbols of the different trades, banners with strange devices, flower-shows, children, volunteer soldiers, cavalcades, and every suitable and unsuitable contrivance; but we were merely a trail of ordinary-looking individuals, in great-coats, and with precautionary umbrellas. The only characteristic or professional costume, as far as I noticed, was that of the Bishop of Chester, in his flat cap and black-silk gown; and that of Sir Henry Smith, the General of the District, in full uniform, with a star and half a dozen medals on his breast. Mr. Browne himself, the hero of the day, was the plainest and simplest man of all,--an exceedingly unpretending gentleman in black; small, white-haired, pale, quiet, and respectable. I rather wondered why he chose to be the centre of all this ceremony; for he did not seem either particularly to enjoy it, or to be at all incommoded by it, as a more nervous and susceptible man might have been. The site of the projected edifice is on one of the streets bordering on St. George's Hall; and when we came within the enclosure, the corner-stone, a large square of red freestone, was already suspended over its destined place. It has a brass plate let into it, with an inscription, which will perhaps not be seen again till the present English type has grown as antique as black-letter is now. Two or three photographs were now taken of the site, the corner-stone, Mr. Browne, the distinguished guests, and the crowd at large; then ensued a prayer from the Bishop of Chester, and speeches from Mr. Holme, Mr. Browne, Lord ------, Sir John Pakington, Sir Henry Smith, and as many others as there was time for. Lord ------ acquitted himself very creditably, though brought out unexpectedly, and with evident reluctance. I am convinced that men, liable to be called on to address the public, keep a constant supply of commonplaces in their minds, which, with little variation, can be adapted to one subject about as well as to another; and thus they are always ready to do well enough, though seldom to do particularly well. From the scene of the corner-stone, we went to St. George's Hall, where a drawing-room and dressing-room had been prepared for the principal guests. Before the banquet, I had some conversation with Sir James Kay Shuttleworth, who had known Miss Bronte very intimately, and bore testimony to the wonderful fidelity of Mrs. Gaskell's life of her. He seemed to have had an affectionate regard for her, and said that her marriage promised to have been productive of great happiness; her husband being not a remarkable man, but with the merit of an exceeding love for her. Mr. Browne now took me up into the gallery, which by this time was full of ladies; and thence we had a fine view of the noble hall, with the tables laid, in readiness for the banquet. I cannot conceive of anything finer than this hall: it needs nothing but painted windows to make it perfect, and those I hope it may have one day or another. At two o'clock we sat down to the banquet, which hardly justified that name, being only a cold collation, though sufficiently splendid in its way. In truth, it would have been impossible to provide a hot dinner for nine hundred people in a place remote from kitchens. The principal table extended lengthwise of the hall, and was a little elevated above the other tables, which stretched across, about twenty in all. Before each guest, besides the bill of fare, was laid a programme of the expected toasts, among which appeared my own name, to be proposed by Mr. Monckton Milnes. These things do not trouble me quite as much as they used, though still it sufficed to prevent much of the enjoyment which I might have had if I could have felt myself merely a spectator. My left-hand neighbor was Colonel Campbell of the Artillery; my right-hand one was Mr. Picton, of the Library Committee; and I found them both companionable men, especially the Colonel, who had served in China and in the Crimea, and owned that he hated the French. We did not make a very long business of the eatables, and then came the usual toasts of ceremony, and afterwards those more peculiar to the occasion, one of the first of which was "The House of Stanley," to which Lord ------ responded. It was a noble subject, giving scope for as much eloquence as any man could have brought to bear upon it, and capable of being so wrought out as to develop and illustrate any sort of conservative or liberal tendencies which the speaker might entertain. There could not be a richer opportunity for reconciling and making friends betwixt the old system of society and the new; but Lord ------ did not seem to make anything of it. I remember nothing that he said excepting his statement that the family had been five hundred years connected with the town of Liverpool. I wish I could have responded to "The House of Stanley," and his Lordship could have spoken in my behalf. None of the speeches were remarkably good; the Bishop of Chester's perhaps the best, though he is but a little man in aspect, not at all filling up one's idea of a bishop, and the rest were on an indistinguishable level, though, being all practised speakers, they were less hum-y and ha-y than English orators ordinarily are. I was really tired to death before my own turn came, sitting all that time, as it were, on the scaffold, with the rope round my neck. At last Monckton Milnes was called up and made a speech, of which, to my dismay, I could hardly hear a single word, owing to his being at a considerable distance, on the other side of the chairman, and flinging his voice, which is a bass one, across the hall, instead of adown it, in my direction. I could not distinguish one word of any allusions to my works, nor even when he came to the toast, did I hear the terms in which he put it, nor whether I was toasted on my own basis, or as representing American literature, or as Consul of the United States. At all events, there was a vast deal of clamor; and uprose peers and bishop, general, mayor, knights and gentlemen, everybody in the hall greeting me with all the honors. I had uprisen, too, to commence my speech; but had to sit down again till matters grew more quiet, and then I got up, and proceeded to deliver myself with as much composure as I ever felt at my own fireside. It is very strange, this self-possession and clear-sightedness which I have experienced when standing before an audience, showing me my way through all the difficulties resulting from my not having heard Monckton Milnes's speech; and on since reading the latter, I do not see how I could have answered it better. My speech certainly was better cheered than any other; especially one passage, where I made a colossus of Mr. Browne, at which the audience grew so tumultuous in their applause that they drowned my figure of speech before it was half out of my mouth. After rising from table, Lord ------ and I talked about our respective oratorical performances; and he appeared to have a perception that he is not naturally gifted in this respect. I like Lord ------, and wish that it were possible that we might know one another better. If a nobleman has any true friend out of his own class, it ought to be a republican. Nothing further of interest happened at the banquet, and the next morning came out the newspapers with the reports of my speech, attributing to me a variety of forms of ragged nonsense, which, poor speaker as I am, I was quite incapable of uttering. May 10th.--The winter is over, but as yet we scarcely have what ought to be called spring; nothing but cold east-winds, accompanied with sunshine, however, as east-winds generally are in this country. All milder winds seem to bring rain. The grass has been green for a month,--indeed, it has never been entirely brown,--and now the trees and hedges are beginning to be in foliage. Weeks ago the daisies bloomed, even in the sandy grass-plot bordering on the promenade beneath our front windows; and in the progress of the daisy, and towards its consummation, I saw the propriety of Burns's epithet, "wee, modest, crimson-nipped flower,"--its little white petals in the bud being fringed all round with crimson, which fades into pure white when the flower blooms. At the beginning of this month I saw fruit-trees in blossom, stretched out flat against stone walls, reminding me of a dead bird nailed against the side of a barn. But it has been a backward and dreary spring; and I think Southport, in the course of it, has lost its advantage over the rest of the Liverpool neighborhood in point of milder atmosphere. The east-wind feels even rawer here than in the city. Nevertheless, the columns, of the Southport Visitor begin to be well replenished with the names of guests, and the town is assuming its aspect of summer life. To say the truth, except where cultivation has done its utmost, there is very little difference between winter and summer in the mere material aspect of Southport; there being nothing but a waste of sand intermixed with plashy pools to seaward, and a desert of sand-hillocks on the land side. But now the brown, weather-hardened donkey-women haunt people that stray along the reaches, and delicate persons face the cold, rasping, ill-tempered blast on the promenade, and children dig in the sands; and, for want of something better, it seems to be determined that this shall be considered spring. Southport is as stupid a place as I ever lived in; and I cannot but bewail our ill fortune to have been compelled to spend so many months on these barren sands, when almost every other square yard of England contains something that would have been historically or poetically interesting. Our life here has been a blank. There was, indeed, a shipwreck, a month or two ago, when a large ship came ashore within a mile from our windows; the larger portion of the crew landing safely on the hither sands, while six or seven betook themselves to the boat, and were lost in attempting to gain the shore, on the other side of the Ribble. After a lapse of several weeks, two or three of their drowned bodies were found floating in this vicinity, and brought to Southport for burial; so that it really is not at all improbable that Milton's Lycidas floated hereabouts, in the rise and lapse of the tides, and that his bones may still be whitening among the sands. In the same gale that wrecked the above-mentioned vessel, a portion of a ship's mast was driven ashore, after evidently having been a very long time in and under water; for it was covered with great barnacles, and torn sea-weed, insomuch that there was scarcely a bare place along its whole length; clusters of sea-anemones were sticking to it, and I know not what strange marine productions besides. J----- at once recognized the sea-anemones, knowing them by his much reading of Gosse's Aquarium; and though they must now have been two or three days high and dry out of water, he made an extempore aquarium out of a bowl, and put in above a dozen of these strange creatures. In a little while they bloomed out wonderfully, and even seemed to produce young anemones; but, from some fault in his management, they afterwards grew sickly and died. S----- thinks that the old storm-shattered mast, so studded with the growth of the ocean depths, is a relic of the Spanish Armada which strewed its wrecks along all the shores of England; but I hardly think it would have taken three hundred years to produce this crop of barnacles and sea-anemones. A single summer might probably have done it. Yesterday we all of us except R----- went to Liverpool to see the performances of an American circus company. I had previously been, a day or two before, with J-----, and had been happy to perceive that the fact of its being an American establishment really induced some slight swelling of the heart within me. It is ridiculous enough, to be sure, but I like to find myself not wholly destitute of this noble weakness, patriotism. As for the circus, I never was fond of that species of entertainment, nor do I find in this one the flash and glitter and whirl which I remember in other American exhibitions. [Here follow the visits to Lincoln and Boston, printed in Our Old Home. --ED.] May 27th.--We left Boston by railway at noon, and arrived in PETERBOROUGH in about an hour and a quarter, and have put up at the Railway Hotel. After dinner we walked into the town to see THE CATHEDRAL, of the towers and arches of which we had already had a glimpse from our parlor window. Our journey from Boston hitherward was through a perfectly level country,--the fens of Lincolnshire,--green, green, and nothing else, with old villages and farm-houses and old church-towers; very pleasant and rather wearisomely monotonous. To return to Peterborough. It is a town of ancient aspect; and we passed, on our way towards the market-place, a very ancient-looking church, with a very far projecting porch, opening in front and on each side through arches of broad sweep. The street by which we approached from our hotel led us into the market-place, which had what looked like an old Guildhall on one side. On the opposite side, above the houses, appeared the towers of the cathedral, and a street leads from the market-place to its front, through an arched gateway, which used to be the external entrance to the abbey, I suppose, of which the cathedral was formerly the church. The front of the cathedral is very striking, and unlike any other that I have seen; being formed by three lofty and majestic arches in a row, with three gable peaks above them, forming a sort of colonnade, within which is the western entrance of the nave. The towers are massive, but low in proportion to their bulk. There are no spires, but pinnacles and statues, and all the rich detail of Gothic architecture, the whole of a venerable gray line. It is in perfect repair, and has not suffered externally, except by the loss of multitudes of statues, gargoyles, and miscellaneous eccentricities of sculpture, which used to smile, frown, laugh, and weep over the faces of these old fabrics. We entered through a side portal, and sat down on a bench in the nave, and kept ourselves quiet; for the organ was sounding, and the choristers were chanting in the choir. The nave and transepts are very noble, with clustered pillars and Norman arches, and a great height under the central tower; the whole, however, being covered with plaster and whitewash, except the roof, which is of painted oak. This latter adornment has the merit, I believe, of being veritably ancient; but certainly I should prefer the oak of its native hue, for the effect of the paint is to make it appear as if the ceiling were covered with imitation mosaic-work or an oil-cloth carpet. After sitting awhile, we were invited by a verger, who came from within the screen, to enter the choir and hear the rest of the service. We found the choristers there in their white garments, and an audience of half a dozen people, and had time to look at the interior of the choir. All the carved wood-work of the tabernacle, the Bishop's throne, the prebends' stalls, and whatever else, is modern; for this cathedral seems to have suffered wofully from Cromwell's soldiers, who hacked at the old oak, and hammered and pounded upon the marble tombs, till nothing of the first and very few of the latter remain. It is wonderful how suddenly the English people lost their sense of the sanctity of all manner of externals in religion, without losing their religion too. The French, in their Revolution, underwent as sudden a change; but they became pagans and atheists, and threw away the substance with the shadow. I suspect that the interior arrangement of the choir and the chancel has been greatly modernized; for it is quite unlike anything that I have seen elsewhere. Instead of one vast eastern window, there are rows of windows lighting the Lady Chapel, and seen through rows of arches in the screen of the chancel; the effect being, whoever is to have the credit of it, very rich and beautiful. There is, I think, no stained glass in the windows of the nave, though in the windows of the chancel there is some of recent date, and from fragments of veritable antique. The effect of the whole interior is grand, expansive, and both ponderous and airy; not dim, mysterious, and involved, as Gothic interiors often are, the roundness and openness of the arches being opposed to this latter effect. When the chanting came to a close, one verger took his stand at the entrance of the choir, and another stood farther up the aisle, and then the door of a stall opened, and forth came a clerical dignity of much breadth and substance, aged and infirm, and was ushered out of the choir with a great deal of ceremony. We took him for the bishop, but he proved to be only a canon. We now engaged an attendant to show us through the Lady Chapel and the other penetralia, which it did not take him long to accomplish. One of the first things he showed us was the tombstone, in the pavement of the southern aisle, beneath which Mary, Queen of Scots, had been originally buried, and where she lay for a quarter of a century, till borne to her present resting-place in Westminster Abbey. It is a plain marble slab, with no inscription. Near this, there was a Saxon monument of the date 870, with sculpture in relief upon it,--the memorial of an Abbot Hedda, who was killed by the Danes when they destroyed the monastery that preceded the abbey and church. I remember, likewise, the recumbent figure of the prelate, whose face has been quite obliterated by Puritanic violence; and I think that there is not a single tomb older than the parliamentary wars, which has not been in like manner battered and shattered, except the Saxon abbot's just mentioned. The most pretentious monument remaining is that of a Mr. Deacon, a gentleman of George I.'s time, in wig and breeches, leaning on his elbow, and resting one hand upon a skull. In the north aisle, precisely opposite to that of Queen Mary, the attendant pointed out to us the slab beneath which lie the ashes of Catharine of Aragon, the divorced queen of Henry VIII. In the nave there was an ancient font, a venerable and beautiful relic, which has been repaired not long ago, but in such a way as not to lessen its individuality. This sacred vessel suffered especial indignity from Cromwell's soldiers; insomuch that if anything could possibly destroy its sanctity, they would have effected that bad end. On the eastern wall of the nave, and near the entrance, hangs the picture of old Scarlet, the sexton who buried both Mary of Scotland and Catharine of Aragon, and not only these two queens, but everybody else in Peterborough, twice over. I think one feels a sort of enmity and spite against these grave-diggers, who live so long, and seem to contract a kindred and partnership with Death, being boon companions with him, and taking his part against mankind. In a chapel or some side apartment, there were two pieces of tapestry wretchedly faded, the handiwork of two nuns, and copied from two of Raphael's cartoons. We now emerged from the cathedral, and walked round its exterior, admiring it to our utmost capacity, and all the more because we had not heard of it beforehand, and expected to see nothing so huge, majestic, grand, and gray. And of all the lovely closes that I ever beheld, that of Peterborough Cathedral is to me the most delightful; so quiet it is, so solemnly and nobly cheerful, so verdant, so sweetly shadowed, and so presided over by the stately minster, and surrounded by ancient and comely habitations of Christian men. The most enchanting place, the most enviable as a residence in all this world, seemed to me that of the Bishop's secretary, standing in the rear of the cathedral, and bordering on the churchyard; so that you pass through hallowed precincts in order to come at it, and find it a Paradise, the holier and sweeter for the dead men who sleep so near. We looked through the gateway into the lawn, which really seemed hardly to belong to this world, so bright and soft the sunshine was, so fresh the grass, so lovely the trees, so trained and refined and mellowed down was the whole nature of the spot, and so shut in and guarded from all intrusion. It is in vain to write about it; nowhere but in England can there be such a spot, nor anywhere but in the close of Peterborough Cathedral. May 28th.--I walked up into the town this morning, and again visited the cathedral. On the way, I observed the Falcon Inn, a very old-fashioned hostelry, with a thatched roof, and what looked like the barn door or stable door in a side front. Very likely it may have been an inn ever since Queen Elizabeth's time. The Guildhall, as I supposed it to be, in the market-place, has a basement story entirely open on all sides, but from its upper story it communicates with a large old house in the rear. I have not seen an older-looking town than Peterborough; but there is little that is picturesque about it, except within the domain of the cathedral. It was very fortunate for the beauty and antiquity of these precincts, that Henry VIII. did not suffer the monkish edifices of the abbey to be overthrown and utterly destroyed, as was the case with so many abbeys, at the Reformation; but, converting the abbey church into a cathedral, he preserved much of the other arrangement of the buildings connected with it. And so it happens that to this day we have the massive and stately gateway, with its great pointed arch, still keeping out the world from those who have inherited the habitations of the old monks; for though the gate is never closed, one feels himself in a sacred seclusion the instant he passes under the archway. And everywhere there are old houses that appear to have been adapted from the monkish residences, or from their spacious offices, and made into convenient dwellings for ecclesiastics, or vergers, or great or small people connected with the cathedral; and with all modern comfort they still retain much of the quaintness of the olden time,--arches, even rows of arcades, pillars, walls, beautified with patches of Gothic sculpture, not wilfully put on by modern taste, but lingering from a long past; deep niches, let into the fronts of houses, and occupied by images of saints; a growth of ivy, overspreading walls, and just allowing the windows to peep through,--so that no novelty, nor anything of our hard, ugly, and actual life comes into these limits, through the defences of the gateway, without being mollified and modified. Except in some of the old colleges of Oxford, I have not seen any other place that impressed me in this way; and the grounds of Peterborough Cathedral have the advantage over even the Oxford colleges, insomuch that the life is here domestic,--that of the family, that of the affections,--a natural life, which one deludes himself with imagining may be made into something sweeter and purer in this beautiful spot than anywhere else. Doubtless the inhabitants find it a stupid and tiresome place enough, and get morbid and sulky, and heavy and obtuse of head and heart, with the monotony of their life. But still I must needs believe that a man with a full mind, and objects to employ his affection, ought to be very happy here. And perhaps the forms and appliances of human life are never fit to make people happy until they cease to be used for the purposes for which they were directly intended, and are taken, as it were, in a sidelong application. I mean that the monks, probably, never enjoyed their own edifices while they were a part of the actual life of the day, so much as these present inhabitants now enjoy them when a new use has grown up apart from the original one. Towards noon we all walked into the town again, and on our way went into the old church with the projecting portal, which I mentioned yesterday. A woman came hastening with the keys when she saw us looking up at the door. The interior had an exceeding musty odor, and was very ancient, with side aisles opening by a row of pointed arches into the nave, and a gallery of wood on each side, and built across the two rows of arches. It was paved with tombstones, and I suppose the dead people contributed to the musty odor. Very naked and unadorned it was, except with a few mural monuments of no great interest. We stayed but a little while, and amply rewarded the poor woman with a sixpence. Thence we proceeded to the cathedral, pausing by the way to look at the old Guildhall, which is no longer a Guildhall, but a butter-market; and then we bought some prints of exterior and interior views of the Minster, of which there are a great variety on note-paper, letter-sheets, large engravings, and lithographs. It is very beautiful; there seems to be nothing better than to say this over again. We found the doors most hospitably open, and every part entirely free to us,--a kindness and liberality which we have nowhere else experienced in England, whether as regards cathedrals or any other public buildings. My wife sat down to draw the font, and I walked through the Lady Chapel meanwhile, pausing over the empty bed of Queen Mary, and the grave of Queen Catharine, and looking at the rich and sumptuous roof, where a fountain, as it were, of groins of arches spouts from numberless pilasters, intersecting one another in glorious intricacy. Under the central tower, opening to either transept, to the nave, and to the choir, are four majestic arches, which I think must equal in height those of which I saw the ruins, and one, all but perfect, at Furness Abbey. They are about eighty feet high. I may as well give up Peterborough here, though I hate to leave it undescribed even to the tufts of yellow flowers, which grow on the projections high out of reach, where the winds have sown their seeds in soil made by the aged decay of the edifice. I could write a page, too, about the rooks or jackdaws that flit and clamor about the pinnacles, and dart in and out of the eyelet-holes, the piercings,--whatever they are called,--in the turrets and buttresses. On our way back to the hotel, J----- saw an advertisement of some knights in armor that were to tilt to-day; so he and I waited, and by and by a procession appeared, passing through the antique market-place, and in front of the abbey gateway, which might have befitted the same spot three hundred years ago. They were about twenty men-at-arms on horseback, with lances and banners. We were a little too near for the full enjoyment of the spectacle; for, though some of the armor was real, I could not help observing that other suits were made of silver paper or gold tinsel. A policeman (a queer anomaly in reference to such a mediaeval spectacle) told us that they were going to joust and run at the ring, in a field a little beyond the bridge. TO NOTTINGHAM. May 28th.--We left Peterborough this afternoon, and, however reluctant to leave the cathedral, we were glad to get away from the hotel; for, though outwardly pretentious, it is a wretched and uncomfortable place, with scanty table, poor attendance, and enormous charges. The first stage of our journey to-day was to Grantham, through a country the greater part of which was as level as the Lincolnshire landscapes have been, throughout our experience of them. We saw several old villages, gathered round their several churches; and one of these little communities, "Little Byforth," had a very primitive appearance,--a group of twenty or thirty dwellings of stone and thatch, without a house among them that could be so modern as a hundred years. It is a little wearisome to think of people living from century to century in the same spot, going in and out of the same doors, cultivating the same fields, meeting the same faces, and marrying one another over and over again; and going to the same church, and lying down in the same churchyard,--to appear again, and go through the same monotonous round in the next generation. At Grantham, our route branches off from the main line; and there was a delay of about an hour, during which we walked up into the town, to take a nearer view of a tall gray steeple which we saw from the railway station. The streets that led from the station were poor and commonplace; and, indeed, a railway seems to have the effect of making its own vicinity mean. We noticed nothing remarkable until we got to the marketplace, in the centre of which there is a cross, doubtless of great antiquity, though it is in too good condition not to have been recently repaired. It consists of an upright pillar, with a pedestal of half a dozen stone steps, which are worn hollow by the many feet that have scraped their hobnailed shoes upon them. Among these feet, it is highly probable, may have been those of Sir Isaac Newton, who was a scholar of the free school of this town; and when J----- scampered up the steps, we told him so. Visible from the market-place also stands the Angel Inn, which seems to be a wonderfully old inn, being adorned with gargoyles and other antique sculpture, with projecting windows, and an arched entrance, and presenting altogether a frontispiece of so much venerable state that I feel curious to know its history. Had I been aware that the chief hotel of Grantham were such a time-honored establishment, I should have arranged to pass the night there, especially as there were interesting objects enough in the town to occupy us pleasantly. The church--the steeple of which is seen over the market-place, but is removed from it by a street or two--is very fine; the tower and spire being adorned with arches, canopies, and niches,--twelve of the latter for the twelve Apostles, all of whom have now vanished,--and with fragments of other Gothic ornaments. The jackdaws have taken up their abodes in the crevices and crannies of the upper half of the steeple. We left Grantham at nearly seven, and reached NOTTINGHAM just before eight. The castle, situated on a high and precipitous rock, directly over the edge of which look the walls, was visible, as we drove from the station to our hotel. We followed the advice of a railway attendant in going first to the May Pole, which proved to be a commercial inn, with the air of a drinking-shop, in a by-alley; and, furthermore, they could not take us in. So we drove to the George the Fourth, which seems to be an excellent house; and here I have remained quiet, the size of the town discouraging me from going out in the twilight which was fast coming on after tea. These are glorious long days for travel; daylight fairly between four in the morning and nine at night, and a margin of twilight on either side. May 29th.--After breakfast, this morning, I wandered out and lost myself; but at last found the post-office, and a letter from Mr. Wilding, with some perplexing intelligence. Nottingham is an unlovely and uninteresting town. The castle I did not see; but, I happened upon a large and stately old church, almost cathedralic in its dimensions. On returning to the hotel, we deliberated on the mode of getting to Newstead Abbey, and we finally decided upon taking a fly, in which conveyance, accordingly, we set out before twelve. It was a slightly overcast day, about half intermixed of shade and sunshine, and rather cool, but not so cool that we could exactly wish it warmer. Our drive to Newstead lay through what was once a portion of Sherwood Forest, though all of it, I believe, has now become private property, and is converted into fertile fields, except where the owners of estates have set out plantations. We have now passed out of the fen-country, and the land rises and falls in gentle swells, presenting a pleasant, but not striking, character of scenery. I remember no remarkable object on the road,--here and there an old inn, a gentleman's seat of moderate pretension, a great deal of tall and continued hedge, a quiet English greenness and rurality, till, drawing near NEWSTEAD ABBEY, we began to see copious plantations, principally of firs, larches, and trees of that order, looking very sombre, though with some intermingling of lighter foliage. It was after one when we reached "The Hut,"--a small, modern wayside inn, almost directly across the road from the entrance-gate of Newstead. The post-boy calls the distance ten miles from Nottingham. He also averred that it was forbidden to drive visitors within the gates; so we left the fly at the inn, and set out to walk from the entrance to the house. There is no porter's lodge; and the grounds, in this outlying region, had not the appearance of being very primly kept, but were well wooded with evergreens, and much overgrown with ferns, serving for cover for hares, which scampered in and out of their hiding-places. The road went winding gently along, and, at the distance of nearly a mile, brought us to a second gate, through which we likewise passed, and walked onward a good way farther, seeing much wood, but as yet nothing of the Abbey. At last, through the trees, we caught a glimpse of its battlements, and saw, too, the gleam of water, and then appeared the Abbey's venerable front. It comprises the western wall of the church, which is all that remains of that fabric,--a great, central window, entirely empty, without tracery or mullions; the ivy clambering up on the inside of the wall, and hanging over in front. The front of the inhabited part of the house extends along on a line with this church wall, rather low, with battlements along its top, and all in good keeping with the ruinous remnant. We met a servant, who replied civilly to our inquiries about the mode of gaining admittance, and bade us ring a bell at the corner of the principal porch. We rang accordingly, and were forthwith admitted into a low, vaulted basement, ponderously wrought with intersecting arches, dark and rather chilly, just like what I remember to have seen at Battle Abbey; and, after waiting here a little while, a respectable elderly gentlewoman appeared, of whom we requested to be shown round the Abbey. She courteously acceded, first presenting us to a book in which to inscribe our names. I suppose ten thousand people, three fourths of them Americans, have written descriptions of Newstead Abbey; and none of them, so far as I have read, give any true idea of the place; neither will my description, if I write one. In fact, I forget very much that I saw, and especially in what order the objects came. In the basement was Byron's bath,--a dark and cold and cellarlike hole, which it must have required good courage to plunge into; in this region, too, or near it, was the chapel, which Colonel Wildman has decorously fitted up, and where service is now regularly performed, but which was used as a dog's kennel in Byron's time. After seeing this, we were led to Byron's own bedchamber, which remains just as when he slept in it,--the furniture and all the other arrangements being religiously preserved. It was in the plainest possible style, homely, indeed, and almost mean,--an ordinary paper-hanging, and everything so commonplace that it was only the deep embrasure of the window that made it look unlike a bedchamber in a middling-class lodging-house. It would have seemed difficult, beforehand, to fit up a room in that picturesque old edifice so that it should be utterly void of picturesqueness; but it was effected in this apartment, and I suppose it is a specimen of the way in which old mansions used to be robbed of their antique character, and adapted to modern tastes, before mediaeval antiquities came into fashion. Some prints of the Cambridge colleges, and other pictures indicating Byron's predilections at the time, and which he himself had hung there, were on the walls. This, the housekeeper told us, had been the Abbot's chamber, in the monastic time. Adjoining it is the haunted room, where the ghostly monk, whom Byron introduces into Don Juan, is said to have his lurking-place. It is fitted up in the same style as Byron's, and used to be occupied by his valet or page. No doubt in his Lordship's day, these were the only comfortable bedrooms in the Abbey; and by the housekeeper's account of what Colonel Wildman has done, it is to be inferred that the place must have been in a most wild, shaggy, tumble-down condition, inside and out, when he bought it. It is very different now. After showing us these two apartments of Byron and his servant, the housekeeper led us from one to another and another magnificent chamber fitted up in antique style, with oak panelling, and heavily carved bedsteads, of Queen Elizabeth's time, or of the Stuarts, hung with rich tapestry curtains of similar date, and with beautiful old cabinets of carved wood, sculptured in relief, or tortoise-shell and ivory. The very pictures and realities, these rooms were, of stately comfort; and they were called by the name of kings,--King Edward's, King Charles II's, King Henry VII's chamber; and they were hung with beautiful pictures, many of them portraits of these kings. The chimney-pieces were carved and emblazoned; and all, so far as I could judge, was in perfect keeping, so that if a prince or noble of three centuries ago were to come to lodge at Newstead Abbey, he would hardly know that he had strayed out of his own century. And yet he might have known by some token, for there are volumes of poetry and light literature on the tables in these royal bedchambers, and in that of Henry VII. I saw The House of the Seven Gables and The Scarlet Letter in Routledge's edition. Certainly the house is admirably fitted up; and there must have been something very excellent and comprehensive in the domestic arrangements of the monks, since they adapt themselves so well to a state of society entirely different from that in which they originated. The library is a very comfortable room, and provocative of studious ideas, though lounging and luxurious. It is long, and rather low, furnished with soft couches, and, on the whole, though a man might dream of study, I think he would be most likely to read nothing but novels there. I know not what the room was in monkish times, but it was waste and ruinous in Lord Byron's. Here, I think, the housekeeper unlocked a beautiful cabinet, and took out the famous skull which Lord Byron transformed into a drinking-goblet. It has a silver rim and stand, but still the ugly skull is bare and evident, and the naked inner bone receives the wine. I should think it would hold at least a quart,--enough to overpower any living head into which this death's-head should transfer its contents; and a man must be either very drunk or very thirsty, before he would taste wine out of such a goblet. I think Byron's freak was outdone by that of a cousin of my own, who once solemnly assured me that he had a spittoon made out of the skull of his enemy. The ancient coffin in which the goblet-skull was found was shown us in the basement of the Abbey. There was much more to see in the house than I had any previous notion of; but except the two chambers already noticed, nothing remained the least as Byron left it. Yes, another place there was,--his own small dining-room, with a table of moderate size, where, no doubt, the skull-goblet has often gone its rounds. Colonel Wildman's dining-room was once Byron's shooting-gallery, and the original refectory of the monks. It is now magnificently arranged, with a vaulted roof, a music-gallery at one end, suits of armor and weapons on the walls, and mailed arms extended, holding candelabras. There are one or two painted windows, commemorative of the Peninsular war, and the battles in which the Colonel and his two brothers fought,--for these Wildmen seem to have been mighty troopers, and Colonel Wildman is represented as a fierce-looking mustachioed hussar at two different ages. The housekeeper spoke of him affectionately, but says that he is now getting into years, and that they fancy him failing. He has no children. He appears to have been on good terms with Byron, and had the latter ever returned to England, he was under promise to make his first visit to his old home, and it was in such an expectation that Colonel Wildman had kept Byron's private apartments in the same condition in which he found them. Byron was informed of all the Colonel's fittings up and restorations, and when he introduces the Abbey in Don Juan, the poet describes it, not as he himself left it, but as Colonel Wildman has restored it. There is a beautiful drawing-room, and all these apartments are adorned with pictures, the collection being especially rich in portraits by Sir Peter Lely,--that of Nell Gwynn being one, who is one of the few beautiful women whom I have seen on canvas. We parted with the housekeeper, and I with a good many shillings, at the door by which we entered; and our next business was to see the private grounds and gardens. A little boy attended us through the first part of our progress, but soon appeared the veritable gardener,--a shrewd and sensible old man, who has been very many years on the place. There was nothing of special interest as concerning Byron until we entered the original old monkish garden, which is still laid out in the same fashion as the monks left it, with a large, oblong piece of water in the centre, and terraced banks rising at two or three different stages with perfect regularity around it; so that the sheet of water looks like the plate of an immense looking-glass, of which the terraces form the frame. It seems as if, were there any giant large enough, he might raise up this mirror and set it on end. In the monks' garden, there is a marble statue of Pan, which, the gardener told us, was brought by the "Wicked Lord" (great-uncle of Byron) from Italy, and was supposed by the country people to represent the Devil, and to be the object of his worship,--a natural idea enough, in view of his horns and cloven feet and tail, though this indicates, at all events, a very jolly devil. There is also a female statue, beautiful from the waist upward, but shaggy and cloven-footed below, and holding a little cloven-footed child by the hand. This, the old gardener assured us, was Pandora, wife of the above-mentioned Pan, with her son. Not far from this spot, we came to the tree on which Byron carved his own name and that of his sister Augusta. It is a tree of twin stems,--a birch-tree, I think,--growing up side by side. One of the stems still lives and flourishes, but that on which he carved the two names is quite dead, as if there had been something fatal in the inscription that has made it forever famous. The names are still very legible, although the letters had been closed up by the growth of the bark before the tree died. They must have been deeply cut at first. There are old yew-trees of unknown antiquity in this garden, and many other interesting things; and among them may be reckoned a fountain of very pure water, called the "Holy Well," of which we drank. There are several fountains, besides the large mirror in the centre of the garden; and these are mostly inhabited by carp, the genuine descendants of those which peopled the fish-ponds in the days of the monks. Coming in front of the Abbey, the gardener showed us the oak that Byron planted, now a vigorous young tree; and the monument which he erected to his Newfoundland dog, and which is larger than most Christians get, being composed of a marble, altar-shaped tomb, surrounded by a circular area of steps, as much as twenty feet in diameter. The gardener said, however, that Byron intended this, not merely as the burial-place of his dog, but for himself too, and his sister. I know not how this may have been, but this inconvenience would have attended his being buried there, that, on transfer of the estate, his mortal remains would have become the property of some other man. We had now come to the empty space,--a smooth green lawn, where had once been the Abbey church. The length had been sixty-four yards, the gardener said, and within his remembrance there had been many remains of it, but now they are quite removed, with the exception of the one ivy-grown western wall, which, as I mentioned, forms a picturesque part of the present front of the Abbey. Through a door in this wall the gardener now let us out. . . . . In the evening our landlady, who seems to be a very intelligent woman, of a superior class to most landladies, came into our parlor, while I was out, and talked about the present race of Byrons and Lovelaces, who have often been at this house. There seems to be a taint in the Byron blood which makes those who inherit it wicked, mad, and miserable. Even Colonel Wildman comes in for a share of this ill luck, for he has almost ruined himself by his expenditure on the estate, and by his lavish hospitality, especially to the Duke of Sussex, who liked the Colonel, and used often to visit him during his lifetime, and his Royal Highness's gentlemen ate and drank Colonel Wildman almost up. So says our good landlady. At any rate, looking at this miserable race of Byrons, who held the estate so long, and at Colonel Wildman, whom it has ruined in forty years, we might see grounds for believing in the evil fate which is supposed to attend confiscated church property. Nevertheless, I would accept the estate, were it offered me. . . . . Glancing back, I see that I have omitted some items that were curious in describing the house; for instance, one of the cabinets had been the personal property of Queen Elizabeth. It seems to me that the fashion of modern furniture has nothing to equal these old cabinets for beauty and convenience. In the state apartments, the floors were so highly waxed and polished that we slid on them as if on ice, and could only make sure of our footing by treading on strips of carpeting that were laid down. June 7th.--We left Nottingham a week ago, and made our first stage to Derby, where we had to wait an hour or two at a great, bustling, pell-mell, crowded railway station. It was much thronged with second and third class passengers, coming and departing in continual trains; for these were the Whitsuntide holidays, which set all the lower orders of English people astir. This time of festival was evidently the origin of the old "Election" holidays in Massachusetts; the latter occurring at the same period of the year, and being celebrated (so long as they could be so) in very much the same way, with games, idleness, merriment of set purpose, and drunkenness. After a weary while we took the train for MATLOCK, via Ambergate, and arrived of the former place late in the afternoon. The village of Matlock is situated on the banks of the Derwent, in a delightful little nook among the hills, which rise above it in steeps, and in precipitous crags, and shut out the world so effectually that I wonder how the railway ever found it out. Indeed, it does make its approach to this region through a long tunnel. It was a beautiful, sunny afternoon when we arrived, and my present impressions are, that I have never seen anywhere else such exquisite scenery as that which surrounds the village. The street itself, to be sure, is commonplace enough, and hot, dusty, and disagreeable; but if you look above it, or on either side, there are green hills descending abruptly down, and softened with woods, amid which are seen villas, cottages, castles; and beyond the river is a line of crags, perhaps three hundred feet high, clothed with shrubbery in some parts from top to bottom, but in other places presenting a sheer precipice of rock, over which tumbles, as it were, a cascade of ivy and creeping plants. It is very beautiful, and, I might almost say, very wild; but it has those characteristics of finish, and of being redeemed from nature, and converted into a portion of the adornment of a great garden, which I find in all English scenery. Not that I complain of this; on the contrary, there is nothing that delights an American more, in contrast with the roughness and ruggedness of his native scenes,--to which, also, he might be glad to return after a while. We put up at the old Bath Hotel,--an immense house, with passages of such extent that at first it seemed almost a day's journey from parlor to bedroom. The house stands on a declivity, and after ascending one pair of stairs, we came, in travelling along the passageway, to a door that opened upon a beautifully arranged garden, with arbors and grottos, and the hillside rising steep above. During all the time of our stay at Matlock there was brilliant sunshine, and, the grass and foliage being in their freshest and most luxuriant phase, the place has left as bright a picture as I have anywhere in my memory. The morning after our arrival we took a walk, and, following the sound of a church-bell, entered what appeared to be a park, and, passing along a road at the base of a line of crags, soon came in sight of a beautiful church. I rather imagine it to be the place of worship of the Arkwright family, whose seat is in this vicinity,--the descendants of the famous Arkwright who contributed so much towards turning England into a cotton manufactory. We did not enter the church, but passed beyond it, and over a bridge, and along a road that ascended among the hills and finally brought us out by a circuit to the other end of Matlock village, after a walk of three or four miles. In the afternoon we took a boat across the Derwent,--a passage which half a dozen strokes of the oars accomplished, --and reached a very pleasant seclusion called "The Lovers' Walk." A ferriage of twopence pays for the transit across the river, and gives the freedom of these grounds, which are threaded with paths that meander and zigzag to the top of the precipitous ridge, amid trees and shrubbery, and the occasional ease of rustic seats. It is a sweet walk for lovers, and was so for us; although J-----, with his scramblings and disappearances, and shouts from above, and headlong scamperings down the precipitous paths, occasionally frightened his mother. After gaining the heights, the path skirts along the precipice, allowing us to see down into the village street, and, nearer, the Derwent winding through the valley so close beneath us that we might have flung a stone into it. These crags would be very rude and harsh if left to themselves, but they are quite softened and made sweet and tender by the great deal of foliage that clothes their sides, and creeps and clambers over them, only letting a stern face of rock be seen here and there, and with a smile rather than a frown. The next day, Monday, we went to see the grand cavern. The entrance is high up on the hillside, whither we were led by a guide, of whom there are many, and they all pay tribute to the proprietor of the cavern. There is a small shed by the side of the cavern mouth, where the guide provided himself and us with tallow candles, and then led us into the darksome and ugly pit, the entrance of which is not very imposing, for it has a door of rough pine boards, and is kept under lock and key. This is the disagreeable phase-one of the disagreeable phases--of man's conquest over nature in England,--cavern mouths shut up with cellar doors, cataracts under lock and key, precipitous crags compelled to figure in ornamented gardens,--and all accessible at a fixed amount of shillings or pence. It is not possible to draw a full free breath under such circumstances. When you think of it, it makes the wildest scenery look like the artificial rock-work which Englishmen are so fond of displaying in the little bit of grass-plot under their suburban parlor windows. However, the cavern was dreary enough and wild enough, though in a mean sort of way; for it is but a long series of passages and crevices, generally so narrow that you scrape your elbows, and so low that you hit your head. It has nowhere a lofty height, though sometimes it broadens out into ample space, but not into grandeur, the roof being always within reach, and in most places smoky with the tallow candles that have been held up to it. A very dirty, sordid, disagreeable burrow, more like a cellar gone mad than anything else; but it served to show us how the crust of the earth is moulded. This cavern was known to the Romans, and used to be worked by them as a lead-mine. Derbyshire spar is now taken from it; and in some of its crevices the gleam of the tallow candles is faintly reflected from the crystallizations; but, on the whole, I felt like a mole, as I went creeping along, and was glad when we came into the sunshine again. I rather think my idea of a cavern is taken from the one in the Forty Thieves, or in Gil Blas,--a vast, hollow womb, roofed and curtained with obscurity. This reality is very mean. Leaving the cavern, we went to the guide's cottage, situated high above the village, where he showed us specimens of ornaments and toys manufactured by himself from Derbyshire spar and other materials. There was very pretty mosaic work, flowers of spar, and leaves of malachite, and miniature copies of Cleopatra's Needle, and other Egyptian monuments, and vases of graceful pattern, brooches, too, and many other things. The most valuable spar is called Blue John, and is only to be found in one spot, where, also, the supply is said to be growing scant. We bought a number of articles, and then came homeward, still with our guide, who showed us, on the way, the Romantic Rocks. These are some crags which have been rent away and stand insulated from the hillside, affording a pathway between it and then; while the places can yet be seen where the sundered rocks would fit into the craggy hill if there were but a Titan strong enough to adjust them again. It is a very picturesque spot, and the price for seeing it is twopence; though in our case it was included in the four shillings which we had paid for seeing the cavern. The representative men of England are the showmen and the policemen; both very good people in their way. Returning to the hotel, J----- and his mother went through the village to the river, near the railway, where J----- set himself to fishing, and caught three minnows. I followed, after a while, to fetch them back, and we called into one or two of the many shops in the village, which have articles manufactured of the spar for sale. Some of these are nothing short of magnificent. There was an inlaid table, valued at sixty guineas, and a splendid ornament for any drawing-room; another, inlaid with the squares of a chess-board. We heard of a table in the possession of the Marquis of Westminster, the value of which is three hundred guineas. It would be easy and pleasant to spend a great deal of money in such things as we saw there; but all our purchases in Matlock did not amount to more than twenty shillings, invested in brooches, shawl-pins, little vases and toys, which will be valuable to us as memorials on the other side of the water. After this, we visited a petrifying cave, of which there are several hereabouts. The process of petrifaction requires some months, or perhaps a year or two, varying with the size of the article to be operated upon. The articles are placed in the cave, under the drippings from the roof, and a hard deposit is formed upon them, and sometimes, as in the case of a bird's-nest, causes a curious result,-- every straw and hair being immortalized and stiffened into stone. A horse's head was in process of petrifaction; and J----- bought a broken eggshell for a penny, though larger articles are expensive. The process would appear to be entirely superficial,--a mere crust on the outside of things,--but we saw some specimens of petrified oak, where the stony substance seemed to be intimately incorporated with the wood, and to have really changed it into stone. These specimens were immensely ponderous, and capable of a high polish, which brought out beautiful streaks and shades. One might spend a very pleasant summer in Matlock, and I think there can be no more beautiful place in the world; but we left it that afternoon, and railed to Manchester, where we arrived between ten and eleven at night. The next day I left S----- to go to the Art Exhibition, and took J----- with me to Liverpool, where I had an engagement that admitted of no delay. Thus ended our tour, in which we had seen but a little bit of England, yet rich with variety and interest. What a wonderful land! It is our forefathers' land; our land, for I will not give up such a precious inheritance. We are now back again in flat and sandy Southport, which, during the past week, has been thronged with Whitsuntide people, who crowd the streets, and pass to and fro along the promenade, with a universal and monotonous air of nothing to do, and very little enjoyment. It is a pity that poor folks cannot employ their little hour of leisure to better advantage, in a country where the soil is so veined with gold. These are delightfully long days. Last night, at half past nine, I could read with perfect ease in parts of the room remote from the window; and at nearly half past eleven there was a broad sheet of daylight in the west, gleaming brightly over the plashy sands. I question whether there be any total night at this season. June 21st.--Southport, I presume, is now in its most vivid aspect; there being a multitude of visitors here, principally of the middling classes, and a frequent crowd, whom I take to be working-people from Manchester and other factory towns. It is the strangest place to come to for the pleasures of the sea, of which we scarcely have a glimpse from month's end to mouth's end, nor any fresh, exhilarating breath from it, but a lazy, languid atmosphere, brooding over the waste of sands; or even if there be a sulky and bitter wind blowing along the promenade, it still brings no salt elixir. I never was more weary of a place in all my life, and never felt such a disinterested pity as for the people who come here for pleasure. Nevertheless, the town has its amusements; in the first place, the daylong and perennial one of donkey-riding along the sands, large parties of men and girls pottering along together; the Flying Dutchman trundles hither and thither when there is breeze enough; an arch cry-man sets up his targets on the beach; the bathing-houses stand by scores and fifties along the shore, and likewise on the banks of the Ribble, a mile seaward; the hotels have their billiard-rooms; there is a theatre every evening; from morning till night comes a succession of organ-grinders, playing interminably under your window; and a man with a bassoon and a monkey, who takes your pennies and pulls off his cap in acknowledgment; and wandering minstrels, with guitar and voice; and a Highland bagpipe, squealing out a tangled skein of discord, together with a Highland maid, who dances a hornpipe; and Punch and Judy,--in a word, we have specimens of all manner of vagrancy that infests England. In these long days, and long and pleasant ones, the promenade is at its liveliest about nine o'clock, which is but just after sundown; and our little R----- finds it difficult to go to sleep amid so much music as comes to her ears from bassoon, bagpipe, organ, guitar, and now and then a military band. One feature of the place is the sick and infirm people, whom we see dragged along in bath-chairs, or dragging their own limbs languidly; or sitting on benches; or meeting in the streets, and making acquaintance on the strength of mutual maladies,--pale men leaning on their ruddy wives; cripples, three or four together in a ring, and planting their crutches in the centre. I don't remember whether I have ever mentioned among the notabilities of Southport the Town Crier,--a meek-looking old man, who sings out his messages in a most doleful tone, as if he took his title in a literal sense, and were really going to cry, or crying in the world's behalf; one other stroller, a foreigner with a dog, shaggy round the head and shoulders, and closely shaven behind. The poor little beast jumped through hoops, ran about on two legs of one side, danced on its hind legs, or on its fore paws, with its hind ones straight up in the air,--all the time keeping a watch on his master's eye, and evidently mindful of many a beating. June 25th.--The war-steamer Niagara came up the Mersey a few days since, and day before yesterday Captain Hudson called at my office,--a somewhat meagre, elderly gentleman, of simple and hearty manners and address, having his purser, Mr. Eldredge, with him, who, I think, rather prides himself upon having a Napoleonic profile. The captain is an old acquaintance of Mrs. Blodgett, and has cone ashore principally with a view to calling on her; so, after we had left our cards for the Mayor, I showed these naval gentlemen the way to her house. Mrs. Blodgett and Miss W------ were prodigiously glad to see him and they all three began to talk of old times and old acquaintances; for when Mrs. Blodgett was a rich lady at Gibraltar, she used to have the whole navy-list at her table,--young midshipmen and lieutenants then perhaps, but old, gouty, paralytic commodores now, if still even partly alive. It was arranged that Mrs. Blodgett, with as many of the ladies of her family as she chose to bring, should accompany me on my official visit to the ship the next day; and yesterday we went accordingly, Mrs. Blodgett, Miss W------, and six or seven American captains' wives, their husbands following in another boat. I know too little of ships to describe one, or even to feel any great interest in the details of this or of any other ship; but the nautical people seemed to see much to admire. She lay in the Sloyne, in the midst of a broad basin of the Mersey, with a pleasant landscape of green England, now warm with summer sunshine, on either side, with churches and villa residences, and suburban and rural beauty. The officers of the ship are gentlemanly men, externally very well mannered, although not polished and refined to any considerable extent. At least, I have not found naval men so, in general; but still it is pleasant to see Americans who are not stirred by such motives as usually interest our countrymen,--no hope nor desire of growing rich, but planting their claims to respectability on other grounds, and therefore acquiring a certain nobleness, whether it be inherent in their nature or no. It always seems to me they look down upon civilians with quiet and not ill-natured scorn, which one has the choice of smiling or being provoked at. It is not a true life which they lead, but shallow and aimless; and unsatisfactory it must be to the better minds among them; nor do they appear to profit by what would seem the advantages presented to them in their world-wide, though not world-deep experience. They get to be very clannish too. After seeing the ship, we landed, all of us, ladies and captain, and went to the gardens of the Rock Ferry Hotel, where J----- and I stayed behind the rest. TO SCOTLAND. June 28th.--On the 26th my wife, J-----, and I left Southport, taking the train for Preston, and as we had to stop an hour or two before starting for Carlisle, I walked up into the town. The street through which most of my walk lay was brick-built, lively, bustling, and not particularly noteworthy; but, turning a little way down another street, the town had a more ancient aspect. The day was intensely hot, the sun lying bright and broad as ever I remember it in an American city; so that I was glad to get back again to the shade and shelter of the station. The heat and dust, moreover, made our journey to Carlisle very uncomfortable. It was through very pretty, and sometimes picturesque scenery, being on the confines of the hill-country, which we could see on our left, dim and blue; and likewise we had a refreshing breath from the sea in passing along the verge of Morecambe Bay. We reached Carlisle at about five o'clock, and, after taking tea at the Bush Hotel, set forth to look at the town. The notable objects were a castle and a cathedral; and we first found our way to the castle, which stands on elevated ground, on the side of the city towards Scotland. A broad, well-constructed path winds round the castle at the base of the wall, on the verge of a steep descent to the plain beneath, through which winds the river Eden. Along this path we walked quite round the castle, a circuit of perhaps half a mile,-- pleasant, being shaded by the castle's height and by the foliage of trees. The walls have been so much rebuilt and restored that it is only here and there that we see an old buttress, or a few time-worn stones intermixed with the new facing with which the aged substance is overlaid. The material is red freestone, which seems to be very abundant in this part of the country. We found no entrance to the castle till the path had led us from the free and airy country into a very mean part of the town, where the wretched old houses thrust themselves between us and the castle wall, and then, passing through a narrow street, we walked up what appeared like a by-lane, and the portal of the castle was before us. There was a sentry-box just within the gate, and a sentinel was on guard, for Carlisle Castle is a national fortress, and has usually been a depot for arms and ammunition. The sergeant, or corporal of the guard, sat reading within the gateway, and, on my request for admittance, he civilly appointed one of the soldiers to conduct us to the castle. As I recollect, the chief gateway of the castle, with the guard-room in the thickness of the wall, is situated some twenty yards behind the first entrance where we met the sentinel. It was an intelligent young soldier who showed as round the castle, and very civil, as I always find soldiers to be. He had not anything particularly interesting to show, nor very much to say about it; and what be did say, so far as it referred to the history of the castle, was probably apocryphal. The castle has an inner and outer ward on the descent of the hill; and included within the circuit of the exterior wall. Having been always occupied by soldiers, it has not been permitted to assume the picturesque aspect of a ruin, but the buildings of the interior have either been constantly repaired, as they required it, or have been taken down when past repair. We saw a small part of the tower where Mary, Queen of Scots, was confined on her first coming to England; these remains consist only of a portion of a winding stone staircase, at which we glanced through a window. The keep is very large and massive, and, no doubt, old in its inner substance. We ascended to the castle walls, and looked out over the river towards the Scottish hills, which are visible in the distance,--the Scottish border being not more than eight or nine miles off. Carlisle Castle has stood many sieges, and witnessed many battles under its walls. There are now, on its ramparts, only some half a dozen old-fashioned guns, which our soldier told us had gone quite out of use in these days. They were long iron twelve-pounders, with one or two carronades. The soldier was of an artillery regiment, and wore the Crimean medal. He said the garrison now here consists only of about twenty men, all of whom had served in the Crimea, like himself. They seem to lead a very dull and monotonous life, as indeed it must be, without object or much hope, or any great employment of the present, like prisoners, as indeed they are. Our guide showed us on the rampart a place where the soldiers had been accustomed to drop themselves down at night, hanging by their hands from the top of the wall, and alighting on their feet close beside the path on the outside. The height seemed at least that of an ordinary house, but the soldier said that nine times out of ten the fall might be ventured without harm; and he spoke from experience, having himself got out of the castle in this manner. The place is now boarded up, so as to make egress difficult or impossible. The castle, after all, was not particularly worth seeing. The soldier's most romantic story was of a daughter of Lord Scroope, a former governor of the castle, when Mary of Scotland was confined here. She attempted to assist the Queen in escaping, but was shot dead in the gateway by the warder; and the soldier pointed out the very spot where the poor young lady fell and died;--all which would be very interesting were there a word of truth in the story. But we liked our guide for his intelligence, simplicity, and for the pleasure which he seemed to take, as an episode of his dull daily life, in talking to strangers. He observed that the castle walls were solid, and, indeed, there was breadth enough to drive a coach and four along the top; but the artillery of the Crimea would have shelled them into ruins in a very few hours. When we got back to the guard-house, he took us inside, and showed the dismal and comfortless rooms where soldiers are confined for drunkenness, and other offences against military laws, telling us that he himself had been confined there, and almost perished with cold. I should not much wonder if he were to get into durance again, through misuse of the fee which I put into his hand at parting. The cathedral is at no great distance from the castle; and though the streets are mean and sordid in the vicinity, the close has the antique repose and shadowy peace, at once domestic and religious, which seem peculiar and universal in cathedral closes. The foundation of this cathedral church is very ancient, it having been the church portion of an old abbey, the refectory and other remains of which are still seen around the close. But the whole exterior of the building, except here and there a buttress, and one old patch of gray stones, seems to have been renewed within a very few years with red freestone; and, really, I think it is all the more beautiful for being new,--the ornamental parts being so sharply cut, and the stone, moreover, showing various shadings, which will disappear when it gets weatherworn. There is a very large and fine east window, of recent construction, wrought with delicate stone tracery. The door of the south transept stood open, though barred by an iron grate. We looked in, and saw a few monuments on the wall, but found nobody to give us admittance. The portal of this entrance is very lovely with wreaths of stone foliage and flowers round the arch, recently carved; yet not so recently but that the swallows have given their sanction to it, as if it were a thousand years old, and have built their nests in the deeply carved recesses. While we were looking, a little bird flew into the small opening between two of these petrified flowers, behind which was his nest, quite out of sight. After some attempts to find the verger, we went back to the hotel. . . . . In the morning my wife and J----- went back to see the interior of the cathedral, while I strayed at large about the town, again passing round the castle site, and thence round the city, where I found some inconsiderable portions of the wall which once girt it about. It was market-day in Carlisle, and the principal streets were much thronged with human life and business on that account; and in as busy a street as any stands a marble statue, in robes of antique state, fitter for a niche in Westminster Abbey than for the thronged street of a town. It is a statue of the Earl of Lonsdale, Lord Lieutenant of Cumberland, who died about twenty years ago. [Here follows the record of the visits to the "Haunts of Burns," already published in Our Old Home.--ED.] GLASGOW. July 1st.--Immediately after our arrival yesterday, we went out and inquired our way to the cathedral, which we reached through a good deal of Scotch dirt, and a rabble of Scotch people of all sexes and ages. The women of Scotland have a faculty of looking exceedingly ugly as they grow old. The cathedral I have already noticed in the record of my former visit to Scotland. I did it no justice then, nor shall do it any better justice now; but it is a fine old church, although it makes a colder and severer impression than most of the Gothic architecture which I have elsewhere seen. I do not know why this should be so; for portions of it are wonderfully rich, and everywhere there are arches opening beyond arches, and clustered pillars and groined roofs, and vistas, lengthening along the aisles. The person who shows it is an elderly man of jolly aspect and demeanor; he is enthusiastic about the edifice, and makes it the thought and object of his life; and being such a merry sort of man, always saying something mirthfully, and yet, in all his thoughts, words, and actions, having reference to this solemn cathedral, he has the effect of one of the corbels or gargoyles,--those ludicrous, strange sculptures which the Gothic architects appended to their arches. The upper portion of the minster, though very stately and beautiful, is not nearly so extraordinary as the crypts. Here the intricacy of the arches, and the profound system on which they are arranged, is inconceivable, even when you see them,--a whole company of arches uniting in one keystone; arches uniting to form a glorious canopy over the shrine or tomb of a prelate; arches opening through and beyond one another, whichever way you look,-- all amidst a shadowy gloom, yet not one detail wrought out the less beautifully and delicately because it could scarcely be seen. The wreaths of flowers that festoon one of the arches are cut in such relief that they do but just adhere to the stone on which they grow. The pillars are massive, and the arches very low, the effect being a twilight, which at first leads the spectator to imagine himself underground; but by and by I saw that the sunshine came in through the narrow windows, though it scarcely looked like sunshine then. For many years these crypts were used as burial-ground, and earth was brought in, for the purpose of making graves; so that the noble columns were half buried, and the beauty of the architecture quite lost and forgotten. Now the dead men's bones and the earth that covered them have all been removed, leaving the original pavement of the crypt, or a new one in its stead, with only the old relics of saints, martyrs, and heroes underneath, where they have lain so long that they have become a part of the spot. . . . . I was quite chilled through, and the old verger regretted that we had not come during the late hot weather, when the everlasting damp and chill of the spot would have made us entirely comfortable. These crypts originated in the necessity of keeping the floor of the upper cathedral on one level, the edifice being built on a declivity, and the height of the crypt being measured by the descent of the site. After writing the above, we walked out and saw something of the newer portion of Glasgow; and, really, I am inclined to think it the stateliest of cities. The Exchange and other public buildings, and the shops in Buchanan Street, are very magnificent; the latter, especially, excelling those of London. There is, however, a pervading sternness and grimness resulting from the dark gray granite, which is the universal building-material both of the old and new edifices. Later in the forenoon we again walked out, and went along Argyle Street, and through the Trongate and the Salt-Market. The two latter were formerly the principal business streets, and together with High Street, the abode of the rich merchants and other great people of the town. High Street, and, still more, the Salt-Market, now swarm with the lower orders to a degree which I never witnessed elsewhere; so that it is difficult to make one's way among the sullen and unclean crowd, and not at all pleasant to breathe in the noisomeness of the atmosphere. The children seem to have been unwashed from birth. Some of the gray houses appear to have once been stately and handsome, and have their high gable ends notched at the edges, like a flight of stairs. We saw the Tron steeple, and the statue of King William III., and searched for the Old Tolbooth. . . . . Wandering up the High Street, we turned once more into the quadrangle of the University, and mounted a broad stone staircase which ascends square, and with right-angular turns on one corner, on the outside of the edifices. It is very striking in appearance, being ornamented with a balustrade, on which are large globes of stone, and a great lion and unicorn curiously sculptured on the opposite side. While we waited here, staring about us, a man approached, and offered to show us the interior. He seemed to be in charge of the College buildings. We accepted his offer, and were led first up this stone staircase, and into a large and stately hall, panelled high towards the ceiling with dark oak, and adorned with elaborately carved cornices, and other wood-work. There was a long reading-table towards one end of the hall, on which were laid pamphlets and periodicals; and a venerable old gentleman, with white head and bowed shoulders, sat there reading a newspaper. This was the Principal of the University, and as he looked towards us graciously, yet as if expecting some explanation of our entrance, I approached and apologized for intruding on the plea of our being strangers and anxious to see the College. He made a courteous response, though in exceedingly decayed and broken accents, being now eighty-six years old, and gave us free leave to inspect everything that was to be seen. This hall was erected two years after the Restoration of Charles II., and has been the scene, doubtless, of many ceremonials and high banquetings since that period; and, among other illustrious personages, Queen Victoria has honored it with her presence. Thence we went into several recitation or lecture rooms in various parts of the buildings; but they were all of an extreme plainness, very unlike the rich old Gothic libraries and chapels and halls which we saw in Oxford. Indeed, the contrast between this Scotch severity and that noble luxuriance, and antique majesty, and rich and sweet repose of Oxford, is very remarkable, both within the edifices and without. But we saw one or two curious things,--for instance, a chair of mahogany, elaborately carved with the arms of Scotland and other devices, and having a piece of the kingly stone of Scone inlaid in its seat. This chair is used by the Principal on certain high occasions, and we ourselves, of course, sat down in it. Our guide assigned to it a date preposterously earlier than could have been the true one, judging either by the character of the carving or by the fact that mahogany has not been known or used much more than a century and a half. Afterwards he led us into the Divinity Hall, where, he said, there were some old portraits of historic people, and among them an original picture of Mary, Queen of Scots. There was, indeed, a row of old portraits at each end of the apartment,--for instance, Zachariah Boyd, who wrote the rhyming version of the Bible, which is still kept, safe from any critical eye, in the library of the University to which he presented this, besides other more valuable benefactions,--for which they have placed his bust in a niche in the principal quadrangle; also, John Knox makes one of the row of portraits; and a dozen or two more of Scotch worthies, all very dark and dingy. As to the picture of Mary of Scotland, it proved to be not hers at all, but a picture of Queen Mary, the consort of William III., whose portrait, together with that of her sister, Queen Anne, hangs in the same row. We told our guide this, but he seemed unwilling to accept it as a fact. There is a museum belonging to the University; but this, for some reason or other, could not be shown to us just at this time, and there was little else to show. We just looked at the gardens, but, though of large extent, they are so meagre and bare--so unlike that lovely shade of the Oxford gardens--that we did not care to make further acquaintance with them. Then we went back to our hotel, and if there were not already more than enough of description, both past and to come, I should describe George's Square, on one side of which the hotel is situated. A tall column rises in the grassy centre of it, lifting far into the upper air a fine statue of Sir Walter Scott, which we saw to great advantage last night, relieved against the sunset sky; and there are statues of Sir John Moore, a native of Glasgow, and of James Watt, at corners of the square. Glasgow is certainly a noble city. After lunch we embarked on board the steamer, and came up the Clyde. Ben Lomond, and other Highland hills, soon appeared on the horizon; we passed Douglas Castle on a point of land projecting into the river; and, passing under the precipitous height of Dumbarton Castle, which we had long before seen, came to our voyage's end at this village, where we have put up at the Elephant Hotel. July 2d.--After tea, not far from seven o'clock, it being a beautiful decline of day, we set out to walk to DUMBARTON CASTLE, which stands apart from the town, and is said to have been once surrounded by the waters of the Clyde. The rocky height on which the castle stands is a very striking object, bulging up out of the Clyde, with abrupt decision, to the elevation of five hundred feet. The summit is cloven in twain, the cleft reaching nearly to the bottom on the side towards the river, but not coming down so deeply on the landward side. It is precipitous all around; and wherever the steepness admits, or does not make assault impossible, there are gray ramparts round the hill, with cannon threatening the lower world. Our path led its beneath one of these precipices several hundred feet sheer down, and with an ivied fragment of ruined wall at the top. A soldier who sat by the wayside told us that this was called the "Lover's Leap," because a young girl, in some love-exigency, had once jumped down from it, and came safely to the bottom. We reached the castle gate, which is near the shore of the Clyde, and there found another artillery soldier, who guided us through the fortress. He said that there were now but about a dozen soldiers stationed in the castle, and no officer. The lowest battery looks towards the river, and consists of a few twelve-pound cannon; but probably the chief danger of attack was from the land, and the chief pains have been taken to render the castle defensible in that quarter. There are flights of stone stairs ascending up through the natural avenue, in the cleft of the double-summited rock; and about midway there is an arched doorway, beneath which there used to be a portcullis,--so that if an enemy had won the lower part of the fortress, the upper portion was still inaccessible. Where the cleft of the rock widens into a gorge, there are several buildings, old, but not appertaining to the ancient castle, which has almost entirely disappeared. We ascended both summits, and, reaching the loftiest point on the right, stood upon the foundation of a tower that dates back to the fifth century, whence we had a glorious prospect of Highlands and Lowlands; the chief object being Ben Lomond, with its great dome, among a hundred other blue and misty hills, with the sun going down over them; and, in another direction, the Clyde, winding far downward through the plain, with the headland of Dumbeck close at hand, and Douglas Castle at no great distance. On the ramparts beneath us the soldier pointed out the spot where Wallace scaled the wall, climbing an apparently inaccessible precipice, and taking the castle. The principal parts of the ancient castle appear to have been on the other and lower summit of the hill, and thither we now went, and traced the outline of its wall, although none of it is now remaining. Here is the magazine, still containing some powder, and here is a battery of eighteen-pound guns, with pyramids of balls, all in readiness against an assault; which, however, hardly any turn of human affairs can hereafter bring about. The appearance of a fortress is kept up merely for ceremony's sake; and these cannon have grown antiquated. Moreover, as the soldier told us, they are seldom or never fired, even for purposes of rejoicing or salute, because their thunder produces the singular effect of depriving the garrison of water. There is a large tank, and the concussion causes the rifts of the stone to open, and thus lets the water out. Above this battery, and elsewhere about the fortress, there are warders' turrets of stone, resembling great pepper-boxes. When Dr. Johnson visited the castle, he introduced his bulky person into one of these narrow receptacles, and found it difficult to get out again. A gentleman who accompanied him was just stepping forward to offer his assistance, but Boswell whispered him to take no notice, lest Johnson should be offended; so they left him to get out as he could. He did finally extricate himself, else we might have seen his skeleton in the turret. Boswell does not tell this story, which seems to have been handed down by local tradition. The less abrupt declivities of the rock are covered with grass, and afford food for a few sheep, who scamper about the heights, and seem to have attained the dexterity of goats in clambering. I never knew a purer air than this seems to be, nor a lovelier golden sunset. Descending into the gorge again, we went into the armory, which is in one of the buildings occupying the space between the two hill-tops. It formerly contained a large collection of arms; but these have been removed to the Tower of London, and there are now only some tattered banners, of which I do not know the history, and some festoons of pistols, and grenades, shells, and grape and canister shot, kept merely as curiosities; and, far more interesting than the above, a few battle-axes, daggers, and spear-heads from the field of Bannockburn; and, more interesting still, the sword of William Wallace. It is a formidable-looking weapon, made for being swayed with both hands, and, with its hilt on the floor, reached about to my chin; but the young girl who showed us the armory said that about nine inches had been broken off the point. The blade was not massive, but somewhat thin, compared with its great length; and I found that I could blandish it, using both hands, with perfect ease. It is two-edged, without any gaps, and is quite brown and lustreless with old rust, from point to hilt. These were all the memorables of our visit to Dumbarton Castle, which is a most interesting spot, and connected with a long series of historical events. It was first besieged by the Danes, and had a prominent share in all the warfare of Scotland, so long as the old warlike times and manners lasted. Our soldier was very intelligent and courteous, but, as usual with these guides, was somewhat apocryphal in his narrative; telling us that Mary, Queen of Scots, was confined here before being taken to England, and that the cells in which she then lived are still extant, under one of the ramparts. The fact is, she was brought here when a child of six years old, before going to France, and doubtless scrambled up and down these heights as freely and merrily as the sheep we saw. We now returned to our hotel, a very nice one, and found the street of Dumbarton all alive in the summer evening with the sports of children and the gossip of grown people. There was almost no night, for at twelve o'clock there was still a golden daylight, and Yesterday, before it died, must have met the Morrow. In the lower part of the fortress there is a large sun-dial of stone, which was made by a French officer imprisoned here during the Peninsular war. It still numbers faithfully the hours that are sunny, and it is a lasting memorial of him, in the stronghold of his enemies. INVERANNAN. Evening.--After breakfast at Dumbarton, I went out to look at the town, which is of considerable size, and possesses both commerce and manufactures. There was a screw-steamship at the pier, and many sailor-looking people were seen about the streets. There are very few old houses, though still the town retains an air of antiquity which one does not well see how to account for, when everywhere there is a modern front, and all the characteristics of a street built to-day. Turning from the main thoroughfare I crossed a bridge over the Clyde, and gained from it the best view of the cloven crag of Dumbarton Castle that I had yet found. The two summits are wider apart, more fully relieved from each other, than when seen from other points; and the highest ascends into a perfect pyramid, the lower one being obtusely rounded. There seem to be iron-works, or some kind of manufactory, on the farther side of the bridge; and I noticed a quaint, chateau-like mansion, with hanging turrets standing apart from the street, probably built by some person enriched by business. We left Dumbarton at noon, taking the rail to Balloch, and the steamer to the head of Loch Lomond. Wild mountain scenery is not very good to describe, nor do I think any distinct impressions are ever conveyed by such attempts; so I mean to be brief in what I saw about this part of our tour, especially as I suspect that I have said whatever I knew how to say in the record of my former visit to the Highlands. As for Loch Lomond, it lies amidst very striking scenery, being poured in among the gorges of steep and lofty mountains, which nowhere stand aside to give it room, but, on the contrary, do their best to shut it in. It is everywhere narrow, compared with its length of thirty miles; but it is the beauty of a lake to be of no greater width than to allow of the scenery of one of its shores being perfectly enjoyed from the other. The scenery of the Highlands, so far as I have seen it, cannot properly be called rich, but stern and impressive, with very hard outlines, which are unsoftened, mostly, by any foliage, though at this season they are green to their summits. They have hardly flesh enough to cover their bones,--hardly earth enough to lie over their rocky substance,--as may be seen by the minute variety,--the notched and jagged appearance of the profile of their sides and tops; this being caused by the scarcely covered rocks wherewith these great hills are heaped together. Our little steamer stopped at half a dozen places on its voyage up the lake, most of them being stations where hotels have been established. Morally, the Highlands must have been more completely sophisticated by the invention of railways and steamboats than almost any other part of the world; but physically it can have wrought no great change. These mountains, in their general aspect, must be very much the same as they were thousands of years ago; for their sides never were capable of cultivation, nor even with such a soil and so bleak an atmosphere could they have been much more richly wooded than we see them now. They seem to me to be among the unchangeable things of nature, like the sea and sky; but there is no saying what use human ingenuity may hereafter put them to. At all events, I have no doubt in the world that they will go out of fashion in due time; for the taste for mountains and wild scenery is, with most people, an acquired taste, and it was easy to see to-day that nine people in ten care nothing about them. One group of gentlemen and ladies--at least, men and women--spent the whole time in listening to a trial for murder, which was read aloud by one of their number from a newspaper. I rather imagine that a taste for trim gardens is the most natural and universal taste as regards landscape. But perhaps it is necessary for the health of the human mind and heart that there should be a possibility of taking refuge in what is wild and uncontaminated by any meddling of man's hand, and so it has been ordained that science shall never alter the aspect of the sky, whether stern, angry, or beneficent,-- nor of the awful sea, either in calm or tempest,--nor of these rude Highlands. But they will go out of general fashion, as I have said, and perhaps the next fashionable taste will be for cloud land,--that is, looking skyward, and observing the wonderful variety of scenery, that now constantly passes unnoticed, among the clouds. At the head of the lake, we found that there was only a horse-cart to convey our luggage to the hotel at Inverannan, and that we ourselves must walk, the distance being two miles. It had sprinkled occasionally during our voyage, but was now sunshiny, and not excessively warm; so we set forth contentedly enough, and had an agreeable walk along an almost perfectly level road; for it is one of the beauties of these hills, that they descend abruptly down, instead of undulating away forever. There were lofty heights on each side of us, but not so lofty as to have won a distinctive name; and adown their sides we could see the rocky pathways of cascades, which, at this season, are either quite dry, or mere trickles of a rill. The hills and valleys abound in streams, sparkling through pebbly beds, and forming here and there a dark pool; and they would be populous with trout if all England, with one fell purpose, did not come hither to fish them. A fisherman must find it difficult to gratify his propensities in these days; for even the lakes and streams in Norway are now preserved. J-----, by the way, threatens ominously to be a fisherman. He rode the latter portion of the way to the hotel on the luggage-cart; and when we arrived, we found that he had already gone off to catch fish, or to attempt it (for there is as much chance of his catching a whale as a trout), in a mountain stream near the house. I went in search of him, but without success, and was somewhat startled at the depth and blackness of some of the pools into which the stream settled itself and slept. Finally, he came in while we were at dinner. We afterwards walked out with him, to let him play at fishing again, and discovered on the bank of the stream a wonderful oak, with as many as a dozen holes springing either from close to the ground or within a foot or two of it, and looking like twelve separate trees, at least, instead of one. INVERSNAID. July 3d.--Last night seemed to close in clear, and even at midnight it was still light enough to read; but this morning rose on us misty and chill, with spattering showers of rain. Clouds momentarily settled and shifted on the hill-tops, shutting us in even more completely than these steep and rugged green walls would be sure to do, even in the clearest weather. Often these clouds came down and enveloped us in a drizzle, or rather a shower, of such minute drops that they had not weight enough to fall. This, I suppose, was a genuine Scotch mist; and as such it is well enough to have experienced it, though I would willingly never see it again. Such being the state of the weather, my wife did not go out at all, but I strolled about the premises, in the intervals of rain-drops, gazing up at the hillsides, and recognizing that there is a vast variety of shape, of light and shadow, and incidental circumstance, even in what looks so monotonous at first as the green slope of a hill. The little rills that come down from the summits were rather more distinguishable than yesterday, having been refreshed by the night's rain; but still they were very much out of proportion with the wide pathways of bare rock adown which they ran. These little rivulets, no doubt, often lead through the wildest scenery that is to be found in the Highlands, or anywhere else, and to the formation and wildness of which they have greatly contributed by sawing away for countless ages, and thus deepening the ravines. I suspect the American clouds are more picturesque than those of Great Britain, whatever our mountains may be; at least, I remember the Berkshire hills looking grander, under the influence of mist and cloud, than the Highlands did to-day. Our clouds seem to be denser and heavier, and more decided, and form greater contrasts of light and shade. I have remarked in England that the cloudy firmament, even on a day of settled rain, always appears thinner than those I had been accustomed to at home, so as to deceive me with constant expectations of better weather. It has been the same to-day. Whenever I looked upward, I thought it might be going to clear up; but, instead of that, it began to rain more in earnest after midday, and at half past two we left Inverannan in a smart shower. At the head of the lake, we took the steamer, with the rain pouring more heavily than ever, and landed at Inversnaid under the same dismal auspices. We left a very good hotel behind us, and have come to another that seems also good. We are more picturesquely situated at this spot than at Inverannan, our hotel being within a short distance of the lake shore, with a glen just across the water, which will doubtless be worth looking at when the mist permits us to see it. A good many tourists were standing about the door when we arrived, and looked at us with the curiosity of idle and weather-bound people. The lake is here narrow, but a hundred fathoms deep; so that a great part of the height of the mountains which beset it round is hidden beneath its surface. July 4th.--This morning opened still misty, but with a more hopeful promise than yesterday, and when I went out, after breakfast, there were gleams of sunshine here and there on the hillsides, falling, one did not exactly see how, through the volumes of cloud. Close beside the hotel of Inversnaid is the waterfall; all night, my room being on that side of the house, I had heard its voice, and now I ascended beside it to a point where it is crossed by a wooden bridge. There is thence a view, upward and downward, of the most striking descents of the river, as I believe they call it, though it is but a mountain-stream, which tumbles down an irregular and broken staircase in its headlong haste to reach the lake. It is very picturesque, however, with its ribbons of white foam over the precipitous steps, and its deep black pools, overhung by black rocks, which reverberate the rumble of the falling water. J----- and I ascended a little distance along the cascade, and then turned aside; he going up the hill, and I taking a path along its side which gave me a view across the lake. I rather think this particular stretch of Loch Lomond, in front of Inversnaid, is the most beautiful lake and mountain view that I have ever seen. It is so shut in that you can see nothing beyond, nor would suspect anything more to exist than this watery vale among the hills; except that, directly opposite, there is the beautiful glen of Invernglass, which winds away among the feet of Ben Crook, Ben Ein, Ben Vain, and Ben Voirlich, standing mist-inwreathed together. The mists, this morning, had a very soft and beautiful effect, and made the mountains tenderer than I have hitherto felt them to be; and they lingered about their heads like morning-dreams, flitting and retiring, and letting the sunshine in, and snatching it away again. My wife came up, and we enjoyed it together, till the steamer came smoking its pipe along the loch, stopped to land some passengers, and steamed away again. While we stood there, a Highlander passed by us, with a very dark tartan, and bare shanks, most enormously calved. I presume he wears the dress for the sole purpose of displaying those stalwart legs; for he proves to be no genuine Gael, but a manufacturer, who has a shooting-box, or a share in one, on the hill above the hotel. We now engaged a boat, and were rowed to Rob Roy's cave, which is perhaps half a mile distant up the lake. The shores look much more striking from a rowboat, creeping along near the margin, than from a steamer in the middle of the loch; and the ridge, beneath which Rob's cave lies, is precipitous with gray rocks, and clothed, too, with thick foliage. Over the cave itself there is a huge ledge of rock, from which immense fragments have tumbled down, ages and ages ago, and fallen together in such a way as to leave a large irregular crevice in Rob Roy's cave. We scrambled up to its mouth by some natural stairs, and scrambled down into its depths by the aid of a ladder. I suppose I have already described this hole in the record of my former visit. Certainly, Rob Roy, and Robert Bruce, who is said to have inhabited it before him, were not to be envied their accommodations; yet these were not so very intolerable when compared with a Highland cabin, or with cottages such as Burns lived in. J----- had chosen to remain to fish. On our return from the cave, we found that he had caught nothing; but just as we stepped into the boat, a fish drew his float far under water, and J------ tugging at one end of the line, and the fish at the other, the latter escaped, with the hook in his month. J------ avers that he saw the fish, and gives its measurement as about eighteen inches; but the fishes that escape us are always of tremendous size. The boatman thought, however, that it might have been a pike. THE TROSACHS' HOTEL.--ARDCHEANOCHROCHAN. July 5th.--Not being able to get a post-chaise, we took places in the omnibus for the bead of Loch Katrine. Going up to pay a parting visit to the waterfall before starting, I met with Miss C------, as she lately was, who is now on her wedding tour as Mrs. B------. She was painting the falls in oil, with good prospect of a successful picture. She came down to the hotel to see my wife, and soon afterwards J----- and I set out to ascend the steep hill that comes down upon the lake of Inversnaid, leaving the omnibus to follow at leisure. The Highlander who took us to Rob Roy's cave had foreboded rain, from the way in which the white clouds hung about the mountain-tops; nor was his augury at fault, for just at three o'clock, the time he foretold, there were a few rain-drops, and a more defined shower during the afternoon, while we were on Loch Katrine. The few drops, however, did not disturb us; and, reaching the top of the hill, J----- and I turned aside to examine the old stone fortress which was erected in this mountain pass to bridle the Highlanders after the rebellion of 1745. It stands in a very desolate and dismal situation, at the foot of long bare slopes, on mossy ground, in the midst of a disheartening loneliness, only picturesque because it is so exceedingly ungenial and unlovely. The chief interest of this spot in the fact that Wolfe, in his earlier military career, was stationed here. The fortress was a very plain structure, built of rough stones, in the form of a parallelogram, one side of which I paced, and found it between thirty and forty of my paces long. The two ends have fallen down; the two sides that remain are about twenty feet high, and have little port-holes for defence, but no openings of the size of windows. The roof is gone, and the interior space overgrown with grass. Two little girls were at play in one corner, and, going round to the rear of the ruin, I saw that a small Highland cabin had been built against the wall. A dog sat in the doorway, and gave notice of my approach, and some hens kept up their peculiarly domestic converse about the door. We kept on our way, often looking back towards Loch Lomond, and wondering at the grandeur which Ben Vain and Ben Voirlich, and the rest of the Ben fraternity, had suddenly put on. The mists which had hung about them all day had now descended lower, and lay among the depths and gorges of the hills, where also the sun shone softly down among them, and filled those deep mountain laps, as it were, with a dimmer sunshine. Ben Vain, too, and his brethren, had a veil of mist all about them, which seemed to render them really transparent; and they had unaccountably grown higher, vastly higher, than when we viewed them from the shore of the lake. It was as if we were looking at them through the medium of a poet's imagination. All along the road, since we left Inversnaid, there had been the stream, which there formed the waterfall, and which here was brawling down little declivities, and sleeping in black pools, which we disturbed by flinging stones into them from the roadside. We passed a drunken old gentleman, who civilly bade me "good day"; and a man and woman at work in a field, the former of whom shouted to inquire the hour; and we had come in sight of little Loch Arklet before the omnibus came up with us. It was about five o'clock when we reached the head of LOCH KATRINE, and went on board the steamer Rob Roy; and, setting forth on our voyage, a Highland piper made music for us the better part of the way. We did not see Loch Katrine, perhaps, under its best presentment; for the surface was roughened with a little wind, and darkened even to inky blackness by the clouds that overhung it. The hill-tops, too, wore a very dark frown. A lake of this size cannot be terrific, and is therefore seen to best advantage when it is beautiful. The scenery of its shores is not altogether so rich and lovely as I had preimagined; not equal, indeed, to the best parts of Loch Lomond,--the hills being lower and of a more ridgy shape, and exceedingly bare, at least towards the lower end. But they turn the lake aside with headland after headland, and shut it in closely, and open one vista after another, so that the eye is never weary, and, least of all, as we approach the end. The length of the loch is ten miles, and at its termination it meets the pass of the Trosachs, between Ben An and Ben Venue, which are the rudest and shaggiest of hills. The steamer passes Ellen's Isle, but to the right, which is the side opposite to that on which Fitz-James must be supposed to have approached it. It is a very small island, situated where the loch narrows, and is perhaps less than a quarter of a mile distant from either shore. It looks like a lump of rock, with just soil enough to support a crowd of dwarf oaks, birches, and firs, which do not grow so high as to be shadowy trees. Our voyage being over, we landed, and found two omnibuses, one of which took us through the famous pass of the Trosachs, a distance of a mile and a quarter, to a hotel, erected in castellated guise by Lord Willoughby d'Eresby. We were put into a parlor within one of the round towers, panelled all round, and with four narrow windows, opening through deep embrasures. No play-castle was ever more like the reality, and it is a very good hotel, like all that we have had experience of in the Highlands. After tea we walked out, and visited a little kirk that stands near the shore of Loch Achray, at a good point of view for seeing the hills round about. This morning opened cloudily; but after breakfast I set out alone, and walked through the pass of the Trosachs, and thence by a path along the right shore of the lake. It is a very picturesque and beautiful path, following the windings of the lake,--now along the beach, now over an impending bank, until it comes opposite to Ellen's Isle, which on this side looks more worthy to be the island of the poem than as we first saw it. Its shore is craggy and precipitous, but there was a point where it seemed possible to land, nor was it too much to fancy that there might be a rustic habitation among the shrubbery of this rugged spot. It is foolish to look into these matters too strictly. Scott evidently used as much freedom with his natural scenery as he did with his historic incidents; and he could have made nothing of either one or the other if he had been more scrupulous in his arrangement and adornment of them. In his description of the Trosachs, he has produced something very beautiful, and as true as possible, though certainly its beauty has a little of the scene-painter's gloss on it. Nature is better, no doubt, but Nature cannot be exactly reproduced on canvas or in print; and the artist's only resource is to substitute something that may stand instead of and suggest the truth. The path still kept onward, after passing Ellen's Isle, and I followed it, finding it wilder, more shadowy with overhanging foliage of trees, old and young,--more like a mountain-path in Berkshire or New Hampshire, yet still with an Old World restraint and cultivation about it,--the farther I went. At last I came upon some bars, and though the track was still seen beyond, I took this as a hint to stop, especially as I was now two or three miles from the hotel, and it just then began to rain. My umbrella was a poor one at best, and had been tattered and turned inside out, a day or two ago, by a gust on Loch Lomond; but I spread it to the shower, and, furthermore, took shelter under the thickest umbrage I could find. The rain came straight down, and bubbled in the loch; the little rills gathered force, and plashed merrily over the stones; the leaves of the trees condensed the shower into large drops, and shed them down upon me where I stood. Still I was comfortable enough in a thick Skye Tweed, and waited patiently till the rain abated; then took my way homeward, and admired the pass of the Trosachs more than when I first traversed it. If it has a fault, it is one that few scenes in Great Britain share with it,--that is, the trees and shrubbery, with which the precipices are shagged, conceal them a little too much. A crag, streaked with black and white, here and there shows its head aloft, or its whole height from base to summit, and suggests that more of such sublimity is bidden than revealed. I think, however, that it is this unusual shagginess which made the scene a favorite with Scott, and with the people on this side of the ocean generally. There are many scenes as good in America, needing only the poet. July 6th.--We dined yesterday at the table d'hote, at the suggestion of the butler, in order to give less trouble to the servants of the hotel, and afford them an opportunity to go to kirk. The dining-room is in accordance with the rest of the architecture and fittings up of the house, and is a very good reproduction of an old baronial hall, with high panellings and a roof of dark, polished wood. There were about twenty guests at table; and if they and the waiters had been dressed in mediaeval costume, we might have imagined ourselves banqueting in the Middle Ages. After dinner we all took a walk through the Trosachs' pass again, and by the right-hand path along the lake as far as Ellen's Isle. It was very pleasant, there being gleams of calm evening sunshine gilding the mountain-sides, and putting a golden crown occasionally on the Tread of Ben Venue. It is wonderful how many aspects a mountain has,--how many mountains there are in every single mountain!---how they vary too, in apparent attitude and bulk. When we reached the lake its surface was almost unruffled, except by now and then the narrow pathway of a breeze, as if the wing of an unseen spirit had just grazed it in flitting across. The scene was very beautiful, and, on the whole, I do not know that Walter Scott has overcharged his description, although he has symbolized the reality by types and images which it might not precisely suggest to other minds. We were reluctant to quit the spot, and cherish still a hope of seeing it again, though the hope does not seem very likely to be gratified. This was a lowering and sullen morning, but soon after breakfast I took a walk in the opposite direction to Loch Katrine, and reached the Brig of Turk, a little beyond which is the new Trosachs' Hotel, and the little rude village of Duncraggan, consisting of a few hovels of stone, at the foot of a bleak and dreary hill. To the left, stretching up between this and other hills, is the valley of Glenfinlas,--a very awful region in Scott's poetry and in Highland tradition, as the haunt of spirits and enchantments. It presented a very desolate prospect. The walk back to the Trosachs showed me Ben Venue and Ben An under new aspects,--the bare summit of the latter rising in a perfect pyramid, whereas from other points of view it looks like quite a different mountain. Sometimes a gleam of sunshine came out upon the rugged side of Ben Venue, but his prevailing mood, like that of the rest of the landscape, was stern and gloomy. I wish I could give an idea of the variety of surface upon one of these hillsides,--so bulging out and hollowed in, so bare where the rock breaks through, so shaggy in other places with heath, and then, perhaps, a thick umbrage of birch, oak, and ash ascending from the base high upward. When I think I have described them, I remember quite a different aspect, and find it equally true, and yet lacking something to make it the whole or an adequate truth. J----- had gone with me part of the way, but stopped to fish with a pin-hook in Loch Achray, which bordered along our path. When I returned, I found him much elated at having caught a fish, which, however, had got away, carrying his pin-hook along with it. Then he had amused himself with taking some lizards by the tail, and had collected several in a small hollow of the rocks. We now walked home together, and at half past three we took our seats in a genuine old-fashioned stage-coach, of which there are few specimens now to be met with. The coachman was smartly dressed in the Queen's scarlet, and was a very pleasant and affable personage, conducting himself towards the passengers with courteous authority. Inside we were four, including J-----, but on the top there were at least a dozen, and I would willingly have been there too, but had taken an inside seat, under apprehension of rain, and was not allowed to change it. Our drive was not marked by much describable incident. On changing horses at Callender, we alighted, and saw Ben Ledi behind us, making a picturesque background to the little town, which seems to be the meeting-point of the Highlands and Lowlands. We again changed horses at Doune, an old town, which would doubtless have been well worth seeing, had time permitted. Thence we kept on till the coach drew up at a spacious hotel, where we alighted, fancying that we had reached Stirling, which was to have been our journey's end; but, after fairly establishing ourselves, we found that it was the BRIG OF ALLAN. The place is three miles short of Stirling. Nevertheless, we did not much regret the mistake, finding that the Brig of Allan is the principal Spa of Scotland, and a very pleasant spot, to all outward appearance. After tea we walked out, both up and down the village street, and across the bridge, and up a gentle eminence beyond it, whence we had a fine view of a glorious plain, out of which rose several insulated headlands. One of these was the height on which stands Stirling Castle, and which reclines on the plain like a hound or a lion or a sphinx, holding the castle on the highest part, where its head should be. A mile or two distant from this picturesque hill rises another, still more striking, called the Abbey Craig, on which is a ruin, and where is to be built the monument to William Wallace. I cannot conceive a nobler or more fitting pedestal. The sullenness of the day had vanished, the air was cool but invigorating, and the cloud scenery was as fine as that below it. . . . . Though it was nearly ten o'clock, the boys of the village were in full shout and play, for these long and late summer evenings keep the children out of bed interminably. STIRLING. July 7th.--We bestirred ourselves early this morning, . . . . and took the rail for Stirling before eight. It is but a few minutes' ride, so that doubtless we were earlier on the field than if we had slept at Stirling. After our arrival our first call was at the post-office, where I found a large package containing letters from America, but none from U----. We then went to a bookseller's shop, and bought some views of Stirling and the neighborhood; and it is surprising what a quantity and variety of engravings there are of every noted place that we have visited. You seldom find two sets alike. It is rather nauseating to find that what you came to see has already been looked at in all its lights, over and over again, with thousand-fold repetition; and, beyond question, its depictment in words has been attempted still oftener than with the pencil. It will be worth while to go back to America, were it only for the chance of finding a still virgin scene. We climbed the steep slope of the Castle Hill, sometimes passing an antique-looking house, with a high, notched gable, perhaps with an ornamented front, until we came to the sculptures and battlemented wall, with an archway, that stands just below the castle. . . . . A shabby-looking man now accosted us, and could hardly be shaken off. I have met with several such boors in my experience of sight-seeing. He kept along with us, in spite of all hints to the contrary, and insisted on pointing out objects of interest. He showed us a house in Broad Street, below the castle and cathedral, which he said had once been inhabited by Henry Darnley, Queen Mary's husband. There was little or nothing peculiar in its appearance; a large, gray, gabled house standing lengthwise to the street, with three windows in the roof, and connected with other houses on each side. Almost directly across the street, he pointed to an archway, through the side of a house, and, peeping through it, we found a soldier on guard in a court-yard, the sides of which were occupied by an old mansion of the Argyle family, having towers at the corners, with conical tops, like those reproduced in the hotel at the Trosachs. It is now occupied as a military hospital. Shaking off our self-inflicted guide, we now made our way to the castle parade, and to the gateway, where a soldier with a tremendously red nose and two medals at once took charge of us. Beyond all doubt, I have written quite as good a description of the castle and Carse of Stirling in a former portion of my journal as I can now write. We passed through the outer rampart of Queen Anne; through the old round gate-tower of an earlier day, and beneath the vacant arch where the portcullis used to fall, thus reaching the inner region, where stands the old palace on one side, and the old Parliament House on the other. The former looks aged, ragged, and rusty, but makes a good appearance enough pictorially, being adorned all round about with statues, which may have been white marble once, but are as gray as weather-beaten granite now, and look down from between the windows above the basement story. A photograph would give the idea of very rich antiquity, but as it really stands, looking on a gravelled court-yard, and with "CANTEEN" painted on one of its doors, the spectator does not find it very impressive. The great hall of this palace is now partitioned off into two or three rooms, and the whole edifice is arranged to serve as barracks. Of course, no trace of ancient magnificence, if anywise destructible, can be left in the interior. We were not shown into this palace, nor into the Parliament House, nor into the tower, where King James stabbed the Earl of Douglas. When I was here a year ago, I went up the old staircase and into the room where the murder was committed, although it had recently been the scene of a fire, which consumed as much of it as was inflammable. The window whence the Earl's body was thrown then remained; but now the whole tower seems to have been renewed, leaving only the mullions of the historic window. We merely looked up at the new, light-colored freestone of the restored tower in passing, and ascended to the ramparts, where we found one of the most splendid views, morally and materially, that this world can show. Indeed, I think there cannot be such a landscape as the Carse of Stirling, set in such a frame as it is,--the Highlands, comprehending our friends, Ben Lomond, Ben Venue, Ben An, and the whole Ben brotherhood, with the Grampians surrounding it to the westward and northward, and in other directions some range of prominent objects to shut it in; and the plain itself, so worthy of the richest setting, so fertile, so beautiful, so written over and over again with histories. The silver Links of Forth are as sweet and gently picturesque an object as a man sees in a lifetime. I do not wonder that Providence caused great things to happen on this plain; it was like choosing a good piece of canvas to paint a great picture upon. The battle of Bannockburn (which we saw beneath us, with the Gillie's Hill on the right) could not have been fought upon a meaner plain, nor Wallace's victory gained; and if any other great historic act still remains to be done in this country, I should imagine the Carse of Stirling to be the future scene of it. Scott seems to me hardly to have done justice--to this landscape, or to have bestowed pains enough to put it in strong relief before the world; although it is from the light shed on it, and so much other Scottish scenery, by his mind, that we chiefly see it, and take an interest in it. . . . . I do not remember seeing the hill of execution before,--a mound on the same level as the castle's base, looking towards the Highlands. A solitary cow was now feeding upon it. I should imagine that no person could ever have been unjustly executed there; the spot is too much in the sight of heaven and earth to countenance injustice. Descending from the ramparts, we went into the Armory, which I did not see on my former visit. The superintendent of this department is an old soldier of very great intelligence and vast communicativeness, and quite absorbed in thinking of and handling weapons; for he is a practical armorer. He had few things to show us that were very interesting,--a helmet or two, a bomb and grenade from the Crimea; also some muskets from the same quarter, one of which, with a sword at the end, he spoke of admiringly, as the best weapon in the collection, its only fault being its extreme weight. He showed us, too, some Minie rifles, and whole ranges of the old-fashioned Brown Bess, which had helped to win Wellington's victories; also the halberts of sergeants now laid aside, and some swords that had been used at the battle of Sheriffmuir. These latter were very short, not reaching to the floor, when I held one of them, point downward, in my hand. The shortness of the blade and consequent closeness of the encounter must have given the weapon a most dagger-like murderousness. Ranging in the hall of arms, there were two tattered banners that had gone through the Peninsular battles, one of them belonging to the gallant 42d Regiment. The armorer gave my wife a rag from each of these banners, consecrated by so much battle-smoke; also a piece of old oak, half burned to charcoal, which had been rescued from the panelling of the Douglas Tower. We saw better things, moreover, than all these rusty weapons and ragged flags; namely, the pulpit and communion-table of John Knox. The frame of the former, if I remember aright, is complete; but one or two of the panels are knocked out and lost, and, on the whole, it looks as if it had been shaken to pieces by the thunder of his holdings forth,--much worm-eaten, too, is the old oak wood, as well it may be, for the letters MD (1500) are carved on its front. The communion-table is polished, and in much better preservation. Then the armorer showed us a Damascus blade, of the kind that will cut a delicate silk handkerchief while floating in the air; and some inlaid matchlock guns. A child's little toy-gun was lying on a workbench among all this array of weapons; and when I took it up and smiled, he said that it was his son's. So he called in a little fellow four years old, who was playing in the castle yard, and made him go through the musket exercise, which he did with great good-will. This small Son of a Gun, the father assured us, cares for nothing but arms, and has attained all his skill with the musket merely by looking at the soldiers on parade. . . . . Our soldier, who had resigned the care of us to the armorer, met us again at the door, and led us round the remainder of the ramparts, dismissing us finally at the gate by which we entered. All the time we were in the castle there had been a great discordance of drums and fifes, caused by the musicians who were practising just under the walls; likewise the sergeants were drilling their squads of men, and putting them through strange gymnastic motions. Most, if not all, of the garrison belongs to a Highland regiment, and those whom we saw on duty, in full costume, looked very martial and gallant. Emerging from the castle, we took the broad and pleasant footpath, which circles it about midway on the grassy steep which descends from the rocky precipice on which the walls are built. This is a very beautiful walk, and affords a most striking view of the castle, right above our heads, the height of its wall forming one line with the precipice. The grassy hillside is almost as precipitous as the dark gray rock that rises out of it, to form the foundations of the castle; but wild rose-bushes, both of a white and red variety, are abundant here, and all in bloom; nor are these the only flowers. There is also shrubbery in some spots, tossing up green waves against the precipice; and broad sheets of ivy here and there mantle the headlong rock, which also has a growth of weeds in its crevices. The castle walls above, however, are quite bare of any such growth. Thus, looking up at the old storied fortress, and looking down over the wide, historic plain, we wandered half-way round the castle, and then, retracing our steps, entered the town close by an old hospital. A hospital it was, or had been intended for; but the authorities of the town had made some convenient arrangement with those entitled to its charity, and had appropriated the ancient edifice to themselves. So said a boy who showed us into the Guildhall,--an apartment with a vaulted oaken roof, and otherwise of antique aspect and furniture; all of which, however, were modern restorations. We then went into an old church or cathedral, which was divided into two parts; one of them, in which I saw the royal arms, being probably for the Church-of-England service, and the other for the Kirk of Scotland. I remember little or nothing of this edifice, except that the Covenanters had uplifted it with pews and a gallery, and whitewash; though I doubt not it was a stately Gothic church, with innumerable enrichments and incrustations of beauty, when it passed from popish hands into theirs. Thence we wandered downward, through a back street, amid very shabby houses, some of which bore tokens of having once been the abodes of courtly and noble personages. We paused before one that displayed, I think, the sign of a spirit-retailer, and looked as disreputable as a house could, yet was built of stalwart stone, and had two circular towers in front, once, doubtless, crowned with conical tops. We asked an elderly man whether he knew anything of the history of this house; and he said that he had been acquainted with it for almost fifty years, but never knew anything noteworthy about it. Reaching the foot of the hill, along whose back the streets of Stirling run, and which blooms out into the Castle Craig, we returned to the railway, and at noon took leave of Stirling. I forgot to tell of the things that awakened rather more sympathy in us than any other objects in the castle armory. These were some rude weapons--pikes, very roughly made; and old rusty muskets, broken and otherwise out of order; and swords, by no means with Damascus blades-- that had been taken from some poor weavers and other handicraft men who rose against the government in 1820. I pitied the poor fellows much, seeing how wretched were their means of standing up against the cannon, bayonets, swords, shot, shell, and all manner of murderous facilities possessed by their oppressors. Afterwards, our guide showed, in a gloomy quadrangle of the castle, the low windows of the dungeons where two of the leaders of the insurrectionists had been confined before their execution. I have not the least shadow of doubt that these men had a good cause to fight for; but what availed it with such weapons! and so few even of those! . . . . I believe I cannot go on to recount any further this evening the experiences of to-day. It has been a very rich day; only that I have seen more than my sluggish powers of reception can well take in at once. After quitting Stirling, we came in somewhat less than an hour to LINLITHGOW, and, alighting, took up our quarters at the Star and Garter Hotel, which, like almost all the Scottish caravan-saries of which we have had experience, turns out a comfortable one. . . . . We stayed within doors for an hour or two, and I busied myself with writing up my journal. At about three, however, the sky brightened a little, and we set forth through the ancient, rusty, and queer-looking town of Linlithgow, towards the palace and the ancient church, which latter was one of St. David's edifices, and both of which stand close together, a little removed from the long street of the village. But I can never describe them worthily, and shall make nothing of the description if I attempt it now. July 8th.--At about three o'clock yesterday, as I said, we walked forth through the ancient street of Linlithgow, and, coming to the market-place, stopped to look at an elaborate and heavy stone fountain, which we found by an inscription to be the fac-simile of an old one that used to stand on the same site. Turning to the right, the outer entrance to the palace fronts on this market-place, if such it be; and close to it, a little on one side, is the church. A young woman, with a key in her hand, offered to admit us into the latter; so we went in, and found it divided by a wall across the middle into two parts. The hither portion, being the nave, was whitewashed, and looked as bare and uninteresting as an old Gothic church of St. David's epoch possibly could do. The interior portion, being the former choir, is covered with pews over the whole floor, and further defaced by galleries, that unmercifully cut midway across the stately and beautiful arches. It is likewise whitewashed. There were, I believe, some mural monuments of Bailies and other such people stuck up about the walls, but nothing that much interested me, except an ancient oaken chair, which the girl said was the chair of St. Crispin, and it was fastened to the wall, in the holiest part of the church. I know not why it was there; but as it had been the chair of so distinguished a personage, we all sat down in it. It was in this church that the apparition of St. James appeared to King James IV., to warn him against engaging in that war which resulted in the battle of Flodden, where he and the flower of his nobility were slain. The young woman showed us the spot where the apparition spake to him,--a side chapel, with a groined roof, at the end of the choir next the nave. The Covenanters seem to have shown some respect to this one chapel, by refraining from drawing the gallery across its height; so that, except for the whitewash, and the loss of the painted glass in the window, and probably of a good deal of rich architectural detail, it looks as it did when the ghostly saint entered beneath its arch, while the king was kneeling there. We stayed but a little while in the church, and then proceeded to the palace, which, as I said, is close at hand. On entering the outer enclosure through an ancient gateway, we were surprised to find how entire the walls seemed to be; but the reason is, I suppose, that the ruins have not been used as a stone-quarry, as has almost always been the case with old abbeys and castles. The palace took fire and was consumed, so far as consumable, in 1745, while occupied by the soldiers of General Hawley; but even yet the walls appear so stalwart that I should imagine it quite possible to rebuild and restore the stately rooms on their original plan. It was a noble palace, one hundred and seventy-five feet in length by one hundred and sixty-five in breadth, and though destitute of much architectural beauty externally, yet its aspect from the quadrangle which the four sides enclose is venerable and sadly beautiful. At each of the interior angles there is a circular tower, up the whole height of the edifice and overtopping it, and another in the centre of one of the sides, all containing winding staircases. The walls facing upon the enclosed quadrangle are pierced with many windows, and have been ornamented with sculpture, rich traces of which still remain over the arched entrance-ways; and in the grassy centre of the court there is the ruin and broken fragments of a fountain, which once used to play for the delight of the king and queen, and lords and ladies, who looked down upon it from hall and chamber. Many old carvings that belonged to it are heaped together there; but the water has disappeared, though, had it been a natural spring, it would have outlasted all the heavy stone-work. As far as we were able, and could find our way, we went through every room of the palace, all round the four sides. From the first floor upwards it is entirely roofless. In some of the chambers there is an accumulation of soil, and a goodly crop of grass; in others there is still a flooring of flags or brick tiles, though damp and moss-grown, and with weeds sprouting between the crevices. Grass and weeds, indeed, have found soil enough to flourish in, even on the highest ranges of the walls, though at a dizzy height above the ground; and it was like an old and trite touch of romance, to see how the weeds sprouted on the many hearth-stones and aspired under the chimney-flues, as if in emulation of the long-extinguished flame. It was very mournful, very beautiful, very delightful, too, to see how Nature takes back the palace, now that kings have done with it, and adopts it as a part of her great garden. On one side of the quadrangle we found the roofless chamber where Mary, Queen of Scots, was born, and in the same range the bedchamber that was occupied by several of the Scottish Jameses; and in one corner of the latter apartment there is a narrow, winding staircase, down which I groped, expecting to find a door, either into the enclosed quadrangle or to the outside of the palace. But it ends in nothing, unless it be a dungeon; and one does not well see why the bedchamber of the king should be so convenient to a dungeon. It is said that King James III. once escaped down this secret stair, and lay concealed from some conspirators who had entered his chamber to murder him. This range of apartments is terminated, like the other sides of the palace, by a circular tower enclosing a staircase, up which we mounted, winding round and round, and emerging at various heights, until at last we found ourselves at the very topmost point of the edifice; and here there is a small pepper-box of a turret, almost as entire as when the stones were first laid. It is called Queen Margaret's bower, and looks forth on a lovely prospect of mountain and plain, and on the old red roofs of Linlithgow town, and on the little loch that lies within the palace grounds. The cold north-wind blew chill upon us through the empty window-frames, which very likely were never glazed; but it must be a delightful nook in a calmer and warmer summer evening. Descending from this high perch, we walked along ledges and through arched corridors, and stood, contemplative, in the dampness of the banqueting-hall, and sat down on the seats that still occupy the embrasures of the deep windows. In one of the rooms, the sculpture of a huge fireplace has recently been imitated and restored, so as to give an idea of what the richness of the adornments must have been when the building was perfect. We burrowed down, too, a little way, in the direction of the cells, where prisoners used to be confined; but these were too ugly and too impenetrably dark to tempt us far. One vault, exactly beneath a queen's very bedchamber, was designated as a prison. I should think bad dreams would have winged up, and made her pillow an uncomfortable one. There seems to be no certain record as respects the date of this palace, except that the most recent part was built by James I., of England, and bears the figures 1620 on its central tower. In this part were the kitchens and other domestic offices. In Robert Bruce's time there was a castle here, instead of a palace, and an ancestor of our friend Bennoch was the means of taking it from the English by a stratagem in which valor went halves. Four centuries afterwards, it was a royal residence, and might still have been nominally so, had not Hawley's dragoons lighted their fires on the floors of the magnificent rooms; but, on the whole, I think it more valuable as a ruin than if it were still perfect. Scotland, and the world, needs only one Holyrood; and Linlithgow, were it still a perfect palace, must have been second in interest to that, from its lack of association with historic events so grand and striking. After tea we took another walk, and this time went along the High Street, in quest of the house whence Bothwellhaugh fired the shot that killed the Regent Murray. It has been taken down, however; or, if any part of it remain, it has been built into and incorporated with a small house of dark stone, which forms one range with two others that stand a few feet back from the general line of the street. It is as mean-looking and commonplace an edifice as is anywhere to be seen, and is now occupied by one Steele, a tailor. We went under a square arch (if an arch can be square), that goes quite through the house, and found ourselves in a little court; but it was not easy to identify anything as connected with the historic event, so we did but glance about us, and returned into the street. It is here narrow, and as Bothwellhaugh stood in a projecting gallery, the Regent must have been within a few yards of the muzzle of his carbine. The street looks as old as any that I have seen, except, perhaps, a vista here and there in Chester,--the houses all of stone, many of them tall, with notched gables, and with stone staircases going up outside, the steps much worn by feet now dust; a pervading ugliness, which yet does not fail to be picturesque; a general filth and evil odor of gutters and people, suggesting sorrowful ideas of what the inner houses must be, when the outside looks and smells so badly; and, finally, a great rabble of the inhabitants, talking, idling, sporting, staring about their own thresholds and those of dram-shops, the town being most alive in the long twilight of the summer evening. There was nothing uncivil in the deportment of these dirty people, old or young; but they did stare at us most unmercifully. We walked very late, entering, after all that we had seen, into the palace grounds, and skirting along Linlithgow Loch, which would be very beautiful if its banks were made shadowy with trees, instead of being almost bare. We viewed the palace on the outside, too, and saw what had once been the principal entrance, but now looked like an arched window, pretty high in the wall; for it had not been accessible except by a drawbridge. I might write pages in telling how venerable the ruin, looked, as the twilight fell deeper and deeper around it; but we have had enough of Linlithgow, especially as there have been so many old palaces and old towns to write about, and there will still be more. We left Linlithgow early this morning, and reached Edinburgh in half an hour. To-morrow I suppose I shall try to set down what I see; at least, some points of it. July 9th.--Arriving at EDINBURGH, and acting under advice of the cabman, we drove to Addison's Alma Hotel, which we find to be in Prince's Street, having Scott's monument a few hundred yards below, and the Castle Hill about as much above. The Edinburgh people seem to be accustomed to climb mountains within their own houses; so we had to mount several staircases before we reached our parlor, which is a very good one, and commands a beautiful view of Prince's Street, and of the picturesque old town, and the valley between, and of the castle on its hill. Our first visit was to the castle, which we reached by going across the causeway that bridges the valley, and has some edifices of Grecian architecture on it, contrasting strangely with the nondescript ugliness of the old town, into which we immediately pass. As this is my second visit to Edinburgh, I surely need not dwell upon describing it at such length as if I had never been here before. After climbing up through various wards of the castle to the topmost battery, where Mons Meg holds her station, looking like an uncouth dragon,--with a pile of huge stone balls beside her for eggs,--we found that we could not be admitted to Queen Mary's apartments, nor to the crown-room, till twelve o'clock; moreover, that there was no admittance to the crown-room without tickets from the crown-office, in Parliament Square. There being no help for it, I left my wife and J----- to wander through the fortress, and came down through High Street in quest of Parliament Square, which I found after many inquiries of policemen, and after first going to the Justiciary Court, where there was a great throng endeavoring to get in; for the trial of Miss Smith for the murder of her lover is causing great excitement just now. There was no difficulty made about the tickets, and, returning, found S----- and J-----; but J----- grew tired of waiting, and set out to return to our hotel, through the great strange city, all by himself. Through means of an attendant, we were admitted into Queen Margaret's little chapel, on the top of the rock; and then we sat down, in such shelter as there was, to avoid the keen wind, blowing through the embrasures of the ramparts, and waited as patiently as we could. Twelve o'clock came, and we went into the crown-room, with a throng of other visitors,--so many that they could only be admitted in separate groups. The Regalia of Scotland lie on a circular table within an iron railing, round and round which the visitors pass, gazing with all their eyes. The room was dark, however, except for the dim twinkle of a candle or gaslight; and the regalia did not show to any advantage, though there are some rich jewels, set in their ancient gold. The articles consist of a two-handed sword, with a hilt and scabbard of gold, ornamented with gems, and a mace, with a silver handle, all very beautifully made; besides the golden collar and jewelled badge of the Garter, and something else which I forget. Why they keep this room so dark I cannot tell; but it is a poor show, and gives the spectator an idea of the poverty of Scotland, and the minuteness of her sovereignty, which I had not gathered from her royal palaces. Thence we went into Queen Mary's room, and saw that beautiful portrait-- that very queen and very woman--with which I was so much impressed at my last visit. It is wonderful that this picture does not drive all the other portraits of Mary out of the field, whatever may be the comparative proofs of their authenticity. I do not know the history of this one, except that it is a copy by Sir William Gordon of a picture by an Italian, preserved at Dunrobin Castle. After seeing what the castle had to show, which is but little except itself, its rocks, and its old dwellings of princes and prisoners, we came down through the High Street, inquiring for John Knox's house. It is a strange-looking edifice, with gables on high, projecting far, and some sculpture, and inscriptions referring to Knox. There is a tobacconist's shop in the basement story, where I learned that the house used to be shown to visitors till within three months, but it is now closed, for some reason or other. Thence we crossed a bridge into the new town, and came back through Prince's Street to the hotel, and had a good dinner, as preparatory to fresh wearinesses; for there is no other weariness at all to be compared to that of sight-seeing. In mid afternoon we took a cab and drove to Holyrood Palace, which I have already described, as well as the chapel, and do not mean to meddle with either of them again. We looked at our faces in the old mirrors that Queen Mary brought from France with her, and which had often reflected her own lovely face and figure; and I went up the winding stair through which the conspirators ascended. This, I think, was not accessible at my former visit. Before leaving the palace, one of the attendants advised us to see some pictures in the apartments occupied by the Marquis of Breadalbane during the queen's residence here. We found some fine old portraits and other paintings by Vandyke, Sir Peter Lely, Sir Godfrey Kneller, and a strange head by Rubens, amid all which I walked wearily, wishing that there were nothing worth looking at in the whole world. My wife differs altogether from me in this matter; . . . . but we agreed, on this occasion, in being tired to death. Just as we got through with the pictures, I became convinced of what I had been dimly suspecting all the while, namely, that at my last visit to the palace I had seen these selfsame pictures, and listened to the selfsame woman's civil answers, in just the selfsame miserable weariness of mood. We left the palace, and toiled up through the dirty Canongate, looking vainly for a fly, and employing our time, as well as we could, in looking at the squalid mob of Edinburgh, and peeping down the horrible vistas of the closes, which were swarming with dirty life, as some mouldy and half-decayed substance might swarm with insects,--vistas down alleys where sin, sorrow, poverty, drunkenness, all manner of sombre and sordid earthly circumstances, had imbued the stone, brick, and wood of the habitations for hundreds of years. And such a multitude of children too; that was a most striking feature. After tea I went down into the valley between the old town and the new, which is now laid out as an ornamental garden, with grass, shrubbery, flowers, gravelled walks, and frequent seats. Here the sun was setting, and gilded the old town with its parting rays, making it absolutely the most picturesque scene possible to be seen. The mass of tall, ancient houses, heaped densely together, looked like a Gothic dream; for there seemed to be towers and all sorts of stately architecture, and spires ascended out of the mass; and above the whole was the castle, with a diadem of gold on its topmost turret. It wanted less than a quarter of nine when the last gleam faded from the windows of the old town, and left the crowd of buildings dim and indistinguishable, to reappear on the morrow in squalor, lifting their meanness skyward, the home of layer upon layer of unfortunate humanity. The change symbolized the difference between a poet's imagination of life in the past--or in a state which he looks at through a colored and illuminated medium--and the sad reality. This morning we took a cab, and set forth between ten and eleven to see Edinburgh and its environs; driving past the University, and other noticeable objects in the old town, and thence out to Arthur's Seat. Salisbury Crags are a very singular feature of the outskirts. From the heights, beneath Arthur's Seat, we had a fine prospect of the sea, with Leith and Portobello in the distance, and of a fertile plain at the foot of the hill. In the course of our drive our cabman pointed out Dumbiedikes' house; also the cottage of Jeanie Deans,--at least, the spot where it formerly stood; and Muschat's Cairn, of which a small heap of stones is yet remaining. Near this latter object are the ruins of St. Anthony's Chapel, a roofless gable, and other remains, standing on the abrupt hillside. We drove homeward past a parade-ground on which a body of cavalry was exercising, and we met a company of infantry on their route thither. Then we drove near Calton Hill, which seems to be not a burial-ground, although the site of stately monuments. In fine, we passed through the Grass-Market, where we saw the cross in the pavement in the street, marking the spot, as I recorded before, where Porteous was executed. Thence we passed through the Cowgate, all the latter part of our drive being amongst the tall, quaint edifices of the old town, alike venerable and squalid. From the Grass-Market the rock of the castle looks more precipitous than as we had hitherto seen it, and its prisons, palaces, and barracks approach close to its headlong verge, and form one steep line with its descent. We drove quite round the Castle Hill, and returned down Prince's Street to our hotel. There can be no other city in the world that affords more splendid scenery, both natural and architectural, than Edinburgh. Then we went to St. Giles's Cathedral, which I shall not describe, it having been kirkified into three interior divisions by the Covenanters; and I left my wife to take drawings, while J----- and I went to Short's Observatory, near the entrance of the castle. Here we saw a camera-obscura, which brought before us, without our stirring a step, almost all the striking objects which we had been wandering to and fro to see. We also saw the mites in cheese, gigantically magnified by a solar microscope; likewise some dioramic views, with all which I was mightily pleased, and for myself, being tired to death of sights, I would as lief see them as anything else. We found, on calling for mamma at St. Giles's, that she had gone away; but she rejoined us between four and five o'clock at our hotel, where the next thing we did was to dine. Again after dinner we walked out, looking at the shop-windows of jewellers, where ornaments made of cairngorm pebbles are the most peculiar attraction. As it was our wedding-day, . . . . I gave S----- a golden and amethyst-bodied cairngorm beetle with a ruby head; and after sitting awhile in Prince's Street Gardens, we came home. July 10th.--Last evening I walked round the castle rock, and through the Grass-Market, where I stood on the inlaid cross in the pavement, thence down the High Street beyond John Knox's house. The throng in that part of the town was very great. There is a strange fascination in these old streets, and in the peeps down the closes; but it doubtless would be a great blessing were a fire to sweep through the whole of ancient Edinburgh. This system of living on flats, up to I know not what story, must be most unfavorable to cleanliness, since they have to fetch their water all that distance towards heaven, and how they get rid of their rubbish is best known to themselves. My wife has gone to Roslin this morning, and since her departure it has been drizzly, so that J----- and I, after a walk through the new part of the town, are imprisoned in our parlor with little resource except to look across the valley to the castle, where Mons Meg is plainly visible on the upper platform, and the lower ramparts, zigzagging about the edge of the precipice, which nearly in front of us is concealed or softened by a great deal of shrubbery, but farther off descends steeply down to the grass below. Somewhere on this side of the rock was the point where Claverhouse, on quitting Edinburgh before the battle of Killiecrankie, clambered up to hold an interview with the Duke of Gordon. What an excellent thing it is to have such striking and indestructible landmarks and time-marks that they serve to affix historical incidents to, and thus, as it were, nail down the Past for the benefit of all future ages! The old town of Edinburgh appears to be situated, in its densest part, on the broad back of a ridge, which rises gradually to its termination in the precipitous rock, on which stands the castle. Between the old town and the new is the valley, which runs along at the base of this ridge, and which, in its natural state, was probably rough and broken, like any mountain gorge. The lower part of the valley, adjacent to the Canongate, is now a broad hollow space, fitted up with dwellings, shops, or manufactories; the next portion, between two bridges, is converted into an ornamental garden free to the public, and contains Scott's beautiful monument,--a canopy of Gothic arches and a fantastic spire, beneath which he sits, thoughtful and observant of what passes in the contiguous street; the third portion of the valley, above the last bridge, is another ornamental garden, open only to those who have pass-keys. It is an admirable garden, with a great variety of surface, and extends far round the castle rock, with paths that lead up to its very base, among leafy depths of shrubbery, and winds beneath the sheer, black precipice. J----- and I walked there this forenoon, and took refuge from a shower beneath an overhanging jut of the rock, where a bench had been placed, and where a curtain of hanging ivy helped to shelter us. On our return to the hotel, we found mamma just alighting from a cab. She had had very bad fortune in her excursion to Roslin, having had to walk a long distance to the chapel, and being caught in the rain; and, after all, she could only spend seven minutes in viewing the beautiful Roslin architecture. MELROSE. July 11th.--We left Edinburgh, where we had found at Addison's, 87 Prince's Street, the most comfortable hotel in Great Britain, and went to Melrose, where we put up at the George. This is all travelled ground with me, so that I need not much perplex myself with further description, especially as it is impossible, by any repetition of attempts, to describe Melrose Abbey. We went thither immediately after tea, and were shown over the ruins by a very delectable old Scotchman, incomparably the best guide I ever met with. I think he must take pains to speak the Scotch dialect, he does it with such pungent felicity and effect, and it gives a flavor to everything he says, like the mustard and vinegar in a salad. This is not the man I saw when here before. The Scotch dialect is still, in a greater or less degree, universally prevalent in Scotland, insomuch that we generally find it difficult to comprehend the answers to our questions, though more, I think, from the unusual intonation than either from strange words or pronunciation. But this old man, though he spoke the most unmitigated Scotch, was perfectly intelligible,--perhaps because his speech so well accorded with the classic standard of the Waverley Novels. Moreover, he is thoroughly acquainted with the Abbey, stone by stone; and it was curious to see him, as we walked among its aisles, and over the grass beneath its roofless portions, pick up the withered leaves that had fallen there, and do other such little things, as a good housewife might do to a parlor. I have met with two or three instances where the guardian of an old edifice seemed really to love it, and this was one, although the old man evidently had a Scotch Covenanter's contempt and dislike of the faith that founded the Abbey. He repeated King David's dictum that King David the First was "a sair saint for the crown," as bestowing so much wealth on religious edifices; but really, unless it be Walter Scott, I know not any Scotchman who has done so much for his country as this same St. David. As the founder of Melrose and many other beautiful churches and abbeys, he left magnificent specimens of the only kind of poetry which the age knew how to produce; and the world is the better for him to this day,--which is more, I believe, than can be said of any hero or statesman in Scottish annals. We went all over the ruins, of course, and saw the marble stone of King Alexander, and the spot where Bruce's heart is said to be buried, and the slab of Michael Scott, with the cross engraved upon it; also the exquisitely sculptured kail-leaves, and other foliage and flowers, with which the Gothic artists inwreathed this edifice, bestowing more minute and faithful labor than an artist of these days would do on the most delicate piece of cabinet-work. We came away sooner than we wished, but we hoped to return thither this morning; and, for my part, I cherish a presentiment that this will not be our last visit to Scotland and Melrose. . . . . J----- and I then walked to the Tweed, where we saw two or three people angling, with naked legs, or trousers turned up, and wading among the rude stones that make something like a dam over the wide and brawling stream. I did not observe that they caught any fish, but J----- was so fascinated with the spectacle that he pulled out his poor little fishing-line, and wished to try his chance forthwith. I never saw the angler's instinct stronger in anybody. We walked across the foot-bridge that here spans the Tweed; and J----- observed that he did not see how William of Deloraine could have found so much difficulty in swimming his horse across so shallow a river. Neither do I. It now began to sprinkle, and we hastened back to the hotel. It was not a pleasant morning; but we started immediately after breakfast for ABBOTSFORD, which is but about three miles distant. The country between Melrose and that place is not in the least beautiful, nor very noteworthy,--one or two old irregular villages; one tower that looks principally domestic, yet partly warlike, and seems to be of some antiquity; and an undulation, or rounded hilly surface of the landscape, sometimes affording wide vistas between the slopes. These hills, which, I suppose, are some of them on the Abbotsford estate, are partly covered with woods, but of Scotch fir, or some tree of that species, which creates no softened undulation, but overspreads the hill like a tightly fitting wig. It is a cold, dreary, disheartening neighborhood, that of Abbotsford; at least, it has appeared so to me at both of my visits,--one of which was on a bleak and windy May morning, and this one on a chill, showery morning of midsummer. The entrance-way to the house is somewhat altered since my last visit; and we now, following the direction of a painted finger on the wall, went round to a side door in the basement story, where we found an elderly man waiting as if in expectation of visitors. He asked us to write our names in a book, and told us that the desk on the leaf of which it lay was the one in which Sir Walter found the forgotten manuscript of Waverley, while looking for some fishing-tackle. There was another desk in the room, which had belonged to the Colonel Gardiner who appears in Waverley. The first apartment into which our guide showed us was Sir Walter's study, where I again saw his clothes, and remarked how the sleeve of his old green coat was worn at the cuff,--a minute circumstance that seemed to bring Sir Walter very near me. Thence into the library; thence into the drawing-room, whence, methinks, we should have entered the dining-room, the most interesting of all, as being the room where he died. But this room seems not to be shown now. We saw the armory, with the gun of Rob Roy, into the muzzle of which I put my finger, and found the bore very large; the beautifully wrought pistol of Claverhouse, and a pair of pistols that belonged to Napoleon; the sword of Montrose, which I grasped, and drew half out of the scabbard; and Queen Mary's iron jewel-box, six or eight inches long, and two or three high, with a lid rounded like that of a trunk, and much corroded with rust. There is no use in making a catalogue of these curiosities. The feeling in visiting Abbotsford is not that of awe; it is little more than going to a museum. I do abhor this mode of making pilgrimages to the shrines of departed great men. There is certainly something wrong in it, for it seldom or never produces (in me, at least) the right feeling. It is an odd truth, too, that a house is forever after spoiled and ruined as a home, by having been the abode of a great man. His spirit haunts it, as it were, with a malevolent effect, and takes hearth and hall away from the nominal possessors, giving all the world the right to enter there because he had such intimate relations with all the world. We had intended to go to Dryburgh Abbey; but as the weather more than threatened rain, . . . . we gave up the idea, and so took the rail for Berwick, after one o'clock. On our road we passed several ruins in Scotland, and some in England,--one old castle in particular, beautifully situated beside a deep-banked stream. The road lies for many miles along the coast, affording a fine view of the German Ocean, which was now blue, sunny, and breezy, the day having risen out of its morning sulks. We waited an hour or more at Berwick, and J----- and I took a hasty walk into the town. It is a rough and rude assemblage of rather mean houses, some of which are thatched. There seems to have been a wall about the town at a former period, and we passed through one of the gates. The view of the river Tweed here is very fine, both above and below the railway bridge, and especially where it flows, a broad tide, and between high banks, into the sea. Thence we went onward along the coast, as I have said, pausing a few moments in smoky Newcastle, and reaching Durham about eight o'clock. DURHAM. I wandered out in the dusk of the evening,--for the dusk comes on comparatively early as we draw southward,--and found a beautiful and shadowy path along the river-side, skirting its high banks, up and adown which grow noble elms. I could not well see, in that obscurity of twilight boughs, whither I was going, or what was around me; but I judged that the castle or cathedral, or both, crowned the highest line of the shore, and that I was walking at the base of their walls. There was a pair of lovers in front of me, and I passed two or three other tender couples. The walk appeared to go on interminably by the river-side, through the same sweet shadow; but I turned and found my way into the cathedral close, beneath an ancient archway, whence, issuing again, I inquired my way to the Waterloo Hotel, where we had put up. ITEMS.--We saw the Norham Castle of Marmion, at a short distance from the station of the same name. Viewed from the railway, it has not a very picturesque appearance,--a high, square ruin of what I suppose was the keep.--At Abbotsford, treasured up in a glass case in the drawing-room, were memorials of Sir Walter Scott's servants and humble friends,--for instance, a brass snuff-box of Tom Purdie,--there, too, among precious relics of illustrious persons.--In the armory, I grasped with some interest the sword of Sir Adam Ferguson, which he had worn in the Peninsular war. Our guide said, of his own knowledge, that "he was a very funny old gentleman." He died only a year or two since. July 11th.--The morning after our arrival in Durham being Sunday, we attended service in the cathedral. . . . . We found a tolerable audience, seated on benches, within and in front of the choir; and people continually strayed in and out of the sunny churchyard and sat down, or walked softly and quietly up and down the side aisle. Sometimes, too, one of the vergers would come in with a handful of little boys, whom he had caught playing among the tombstones. DURHAM CATHEDRAL has one advantage over the others which I have seen, there being no organ-screen, nor any sort of partition between the choir and nave; so that we saw its entire length, nearly five hundred feet, in one vista. The pillars of the nave are immensely thick, but hardly of proportionate height, and they support the round Norman arch; nor is there, as far as I remember, a single pointed arch in the cathedral. The effect is to give the edifice an air of heavy grandeur. It seems to have been built before the best style of church architecture had established itself; so that it weighs upon the soul, instead of helping it to aspire. First, there are these round arches, supported by gigantic columns; then, immediately above, another row of round arches, behind which is the usual gallery that runs, as it were, in the thickness of the wall, around the nave of the cathedral; then, above all, another row of round arches, enclosing the windows of the clere-story. The great pillars are ornamented in various ways,--some with a great spiral groove running from bottom to top; others with two spirals, ascending in different directions, so as to cross over one another; some are fluted or channelled straight up and down; some are wrought with chevrons, like those on the sleeve of a police-inspector. There are zigzag cuttings and carvings, which I do not know how to name scientifically, round the arches of the doors and windows; but nothing that seems to have flowered out spontaneously, as natural incidents of a grand and beautiful design. In the nave, between the columns of the side aisles, I saw one or two monuments. . . . . The cathedral service is very long; and though the choral part of it is pleasant enough, I thought it not best to wait for the sermon, especially as it would have been quite unintelligible, so remotely as I sat in the great space. So I left my seat, and after strolling up and down the aisle a few times, sallied forth into the churchyard. On the cathedral door there is a curious old knocker, in the form of a monstrous face, which was placed there, centuries ago, for the benefit of fugitives from justice, who used to be entitled to sanctuary here. The exterior of the cathedral, being huge, is therefore grand; it has a great central tower, and two at the western end; and reposes in vast and heavy length, without the multitude of niches, and crumbling statues, and richness of detail, that make the towers and fronts of some cathedrals so endlessly interesting. One piece of sculpture I remember,--a carving of a cow, a milk-maid, and a monk, in reference to the legend that the site of the cathedral was, in some way, determined by a woman bidding her cow go home to Dunholme. Cadmus was guided to the site of his destined city in some such way as this. It was a very beautiful day, and though the shadow of the cathedral fell on this side, yet, it being about noontide, it did not cover the churchyard entirely, but left many of the graves in sunshine. There were not a great many monuments, and these were chiefly horizontal slabs, some of which looked aged, but on closer inspection proved to be mostly of the present century. I observed an old stone figure, however, half worn away, which seemed to have something like a bishop's mitre on its head, and may perhaps have lain in the proudest chapel of the cathedral before occupying its present bed among the grass. About fifteen paces from the central tower, and within its shadow, I found a weather-worn slab of marble, seven or eight feet long, the inscription on which interested me somewhat. It was to the memory of Robert Dodsley, the bookseller, Johnson's acquaintance, who, as his tombstone rather superciliously avers, had made a much better figure as an author than "could have been expected in his rank of life." But, after all, it is inevitable that a man's tombstone should look down on him, or, at all events, comport itself towards him "de haut en bas." I love to find the graves of men connected with literature. They interest me more, even though of no great eminence, than those of persons far more illustrious in other walks of life. I know not whether this is because I happen to be one of the literary kindred, or because all men feel themselves akin, and on terms of intimacy, with those whom they know, or might have known, in books. I rather believe that the latter is the case. My wife had stayed in the cathedral, but she came out at the end of the sermon, and told me of two little birds, who had got into the vast interior, and were in great trouble at not being able to find their way out again. Thus, two winged souls may often have been imprisoned within a faith of heavy ceremonials. We went round the edifice, and, passing into the close, penetrated through an arched passage into the crypt, which, methought, was in a better style of architecture than the nave and choir. At one end stood a crowd of venerable figures leaning against the wall, being stone images of bearded saints, apostles, patriarchs, kings,--personages of great dignity, at all events, who had doubtless occupied conspicuous niches in and about the cathedral till finally imprisoned in this cellar. I looked at every one, and found not an entire nose among them, nor quite so many heads as they once had. Thence we went into the cloisters, which are entire, but not particularly interesting. Indeed, this cathedral has not taken hold of my affections, except in one aspect, when it was exceedingly grand and beautiful. After looking at the crypt and the cloisters, we returned through the close and the churchyard, and went back to the hotel through a path by the river-side. This is the same dim and dusky path through which I wandered the night before, and in the sunshine it looked quite as beautiful as I knew it must,-- a shadow of elm-trees clothing the high bank, and overarching the paths above and below; some of the elms growing close to the water-side, and flinging up their topmost boughs not nearly so high as where we stood, and others climbing upward and upward, till our way wound among their roots; while through the foliage the quiet river loitered along, with this lovely shade on both its banks, to pass through the centre of the town. The stately cathedral rose high above us, and farther onward, in a line with it, the battlemented walls of the old Norman castle, gray and warlike, though now it has become a University. This delightful walk terminates at an old bridge in the heart of the town; and the castle hangs immediately over its busiest street. On this bridge, last night, in the embrasure, or just over the pier, where there is a stone seat, I saw some old men seated, smoking their pipes and chatting. In my judgment, a river flowing through the centre of a town, and not too broad to make itself familiar, nor too swift, but idling along, as if it loved better to stay there than to go, is the pleasantest imaginable piece of scenery; so transient as it is, and yet enduring,--just the same from life's end to life's end; and this river Wear, with its sylvan wildness, and yet so sweet and placable, is the best of all little rivers,--not that it is so very small, but with a bosom broad enough to be crossed by a three-arched bridge. Just above the cathedral there is a mill upon its shore, as ancient as the times of the Abbey. We went homeward through the market-place and one or two narrow streets; for the town has the irregularity of all ancient settlements, and, moreover, undulates upward and downward, and is also made more unintelligible to a stranger, in its points and bearings, by the tortuous course of the river. After dinner J----- and I walked along the bank opposite to that on which the cathedral stands, and found the paths there equally delightful with those which I have attempted to describe. We went onward while the river gleamed through the foliage beneath us, and passed so far beyond the cathedral that we began to think we were getting into the country, and that it was time to return; when all at once we saw a bridge before us, and beyond that, on the opposite bank of the Wear, the cathedral itself! The stream had made a circuit without our knowing it. We paused upon the bridge, and admired and wondered at the beauty and glory of the scene, with those vast, ancient towers rising out of the green shade, and looking as if they were based upon it. The situation of Durham Cathedral is certainly a noble one, finer even than that of Lincoln, though the latter stands even at a more lordly height above the town. But as I saw it then, it was grand, venerable, and sweet, all at once; and I never saw so lovely and magnificent a scene, nor, being content with this, do I care to see a better. The castle beyond came also into the view, and the whole picture was mirrored in the tranquil stream below. And so, crossing the bridge, the path led us back through many a bower of hollow shade; and we then quitted the hotel, and took the rail for YORK, where we arrived at about half past nine. We put up at the Black Swan, with which we had already made acquaintance at our previous visit to York. It is a very ancient hotel; for in the coffee-room I saw on the wall an old printed advertisement, announcing that a stage-coach would leave the Black Swan in London, and arrive at the Black Swan in York, with God's permission, in four days. The date was 1706; and still, after a hundred and fifty years, the Black Swan receives travellers in Coney Street. It is a very good hotel, and was much thronged with guests when we arrived, as the Sessions come on this week. We found a very smart waiter, whose English faculties have been brightened by a residence of several years in America. In the morning, before breakfast, I strolled out, and walked round the cathedral, passing on my way the sheriff's javelin-men, in long gowns of faded purple embroidered with gold, carrying halberds in their hands; also a gentleman in a cocked hat, gold-lace, and breeches, who, no doubt, had something to do with the ceremonial of the Sessions. I saw, too, a procession of a good many old cabs and other carriages, filled with people, and a banner flaunting above each vehicle. These were the piano-forte makers of York, who were going out of town to have a jollification together. After breakfast we all went to the cathedral, and no sooner were we within it than we found how much our eyes had recently been educated, by our greater power of appreciating this magnificent interior; for it impressed us both with a joy that we never felt before. J----- felt it too, and insisted that the cathedral must have been altered and improved since we were last here. But it is only that we have seen much splendid architecture since then, and so have grown in some degree fitted to enjoy it. York Cathedral (I say it now, for it is my present feeling) is the most wonderful work that ever came from the hands of man. Indeed, it seems like "a house not made with hands," but rather to have come down from above, bringing an awful majesty and sweetness with it and it is so light and aspiring, with all its vast columns and pointed arches, that one would hardly wonder if it should ascend back to heaven again by its mere spirituality. Positively the pillars and arches of the choir are so very beautiful that they give the impression of being exquisitely polished, though such is not the fact; but their beauty throws a gleam around them. I thank God that I saw this cathedral again, and I thank him that he inspired the builder to make it, and that mankind has so long enjoyed it, and will continue to enjoy it. July 14th.--We left York at twelve o'clock, and were delayed an hour or two at Leeds, waiting for a train. I strolled up into the town, and saw a fair, with puppet-shows, booths of penny actors, merry-go-rounds, clowns, boxers, and other such things as I saw, above a year ago, at Greenwich fair, and likewise at Tranmere, during the Whitsuntide holidays. We resumed our journey, and reached Southport in pretty good trim at about nine o'clock. It has been a very interesting tour. We find Southport just as we left it, with its regular streets of little and big lodging-houses, where the visitors perambulate to and fro without any imaginable object. The tide, too, seems not to have been up over the waste of sands since we went away; and far seaward stands the same row of bathing-machines, and just on the verge of the horizon a gleam of water, --even this being not the sea, but the mouth of the river Ribble, seeking the sea amid the sandy desert. But we shall soon say good-by to Southport. OLD TRAFFORD, MANCHESTER. July 22d.--We left Southport for good on the 20th, and have established ourselves in this place, in lodgings that had been provided for us by Mr. Swain; our principal object being to spend a few weeks in the proximity of the Arts' Exhibition. We are here, about three miles from the Victoria Railway station in Manchester on one side, and nearly a mile from the Exhibition on the other. This is a suburb of Manchester, and consists of a long street, called the Stratford Road, bordered with brick houses two stories high, such as are usually the dwellings of tradesmen or respectable mechanics, but which are now in demand for lodgings, at high prices, on account of the Exhibition. It seems to be rather a new precinct of the city, and the houses, though ranged along a continuous street, are but a brick border of the green fields in the rear. Occasionally you get a glimpse of this country aspect between two houses; but the street itself, even with its little grass-plots and bits of shrubbery under the front windows, is as ugly as it can be made. Some of the houses are better than I have described; but the brick used here in building is very unsightly in hue and surface. Betimes in the morning the Exhibition omnibuses begin to trundle along, and pass at intervals of two and a half minutes through the day,--immense vehicles constructed to carry thirty-nine passengers, and generally with a good part of that number inside and out. The omnibuses are painted scarlet, bordered with white, have three horses abreast, and a conductor in a red coat. They perform the journey from this point into town in about half an hour; and yesterday morning, being in a hurry to get to the railway station, I found that I could outwalk them, taking into account their frequent stoppages. We have taken the whole house (except some inscrutable holes, into which the family creeps), of respectable people, who never took lodgers until this juncture. Their furniture, however, is of the true lodging-house pattern, sofas and chairs which have no possibility of repose in them; rickety tables; an old piano and old music, with "Lady Helen Elizabeth" somebody's name written on it. It is very strange how nothing but a genuine home can ever look homelike. They appear to be good people; a little girl of twelve, a daughter, waits on table; and there is an elder daughter, who yesterday answered the door-bell, looking very like a young lady, besides five or six smaller children, who make less uproar of grief or merriment than could possibly be expected. The husband is not apparent, though I see his hat in the hall. The house is new, and has a trim, light-colored interior of half-gentility. I suppose the rent, in ordinary times, might be 25 pounds per annum; but we pay at the rate of 335 pounds for the part which we occupy. This, like all the other houses in the neighborhood, was evidently built to be sold or let; the builder never thought of living in it himself, and so that subtile element, which would have enabled him to create a home, was entirely left out. This morning, J----- and I set forth on a walk, first towards the palace of the Arts' Exhibition, which looked small compared with my idea of it, and seems to be of the Crystal Palace order of architecture, only with more iron to its glass. Its front is composed of three round arches in a row. We did not go in. . . . . Turning to the right, we walked onward two or three miles, passing the Botanic Garden, and thence along by suburban villas, Belgrave terraces, and other such prettinesses in the modern Gothic or Elizabethan style, with fancifully ornamented flower-plats before them; thence by hedgerows and fields, and through two or three villages, with here and there an old plaster and timber-built thatched house, among a street full of modern brick-fronts,--the alehouse, or rural inn, being generally the most ancient house in the village. It was a sultry, heavy day, and I walked without much enjoyment of the air and exercise. We crossed a narrow and swift river, flowing between deep banks. It must have been either the Mersey, still an infant stream, and little dreaming of the thousand mighty ships that float on its farther tide, or else the Irwell, which empties into the Mersey. We passed through the village beyond this stream, and went to the railway station, and then were brought back to Old Trafford, and deposited close by the Exhibition. It has showered this afternoon; and I beguiled my time for half an hour by setting down the vehicles that went past; not that they were particularly numerous, but for the sake of knowing the character of the travel along the road. July 26th.--Day before yesterday we went to the Arts' Exhibition, of which I do not think that I have a great deal to say. The edifice, being built more for convenience than show, appears better in the interior than from without,--long vaulted vistas, lighted from above, extending far away, all hung with pictures; and, on the floor below, statues, knights in armor, cabinets, vases, and all manner of curious and beautiful things, in a regular arrangement. Scatter five thousand people through the scene, and I do not know how to make a better outline sketch. I was unquiet, from a hopelessness of being able to enjoy it fully. Nothing is more depressing to me than the sight of a great many pictures together; it is like having innumerable books open before you at once, and being able to read only a sentence or two in each. They bedazzle one another with cross lights. There never should be more than one picture in a room, nor more than one picture to be studied in one day. Galleries of pictures are surely the greatest absurdities that ever were contrived, there being no excuse for them, except that it is the only way in which pictures can be made generally available and accessible. We went first into the Gallery of British Painters, where there were hundreds of pictures, every one of which would have interested me by itself; but I could not fix nay mind on one more than another, so I wandered about, to get a general idea of the Exhibition. Truly it is very fine; truly, also, every great show is a kind of humbug. I doubt whether there were half a dozen people there who got the kind of enjoyment that it was intended to create,--very respectable people they seemed to be, and very well behaved, but all skimming the surface, as I did, and none of them so feeding on what was beautiful as to digest it, and make it a part of themselves. Such a quantity of objects must be utterly rejected before you can get any real profit from one! It seemed like throwing away time to look twice even at whatever was most precious; and it was dreary to think of not fully enjoying this collection, the very flower of Time, which never bloomed before, and never, by any possibility, can bloom again. Viewed hastily, moreover, it is somewhat sad to think that mankind, after centuries of cultivation of the beautiful arts, can produce no more splendid spectacle than this. It is not so very grand, although, poor as it is, I lack capacity to take in even the whole of it. What gave me most pleasure (because it required no trouble nor study to come at the heart of it) were the individual relics of antiquity, of which there are some very curious ones in the cases ranged along the principal saloon or nave of the building. For example, the dagger with which Felton killed the Duke of Buckingham,--a knife with a bone handle and a curved blade, not more than three inches long; sharp-pointed, murderous-looking, but of very coarse manufacture. Also, the Duke of Alva's leading staff of iron; and the target of the Emperor Charles V., which seemed to be made of hardened leather, with designs artistically engraved upon it, and gilt. I saw Wolsey's portrait, and, in close proximity to it, his veritable cardinal's hat in a richly ornamented glass case, on which was an inscription to the effect that it had been bought by Charles Kean at the sale of Horace Walpole's collection. It is a felt hat with a brim about six inches wide all round, and a rather high crown; the color was, doubtless, a bright red originally, but now it is mottled with a grayish hue, and there are cracks in the brim, as if the hat had seen a good deal of wear. I suppose a far greater curiosity than this is the signet-ring of one of the Pharaohs, who reigned over Egypt during Joseph's prime ministry,--a large ring to be worn on the thumb, if at all,--of massive gold, seal part and all, and inscribed with some characters that looked like Hebrew. I had seen this before in Mr. Mayer's collection in Liverpool. The mediaeval and English relics, however, interested me more,--such as the golden and enamelled George worn by Sir Thomas More; or the embroidered shirt of Charles I.,--the very one, I presume, which he wore at his execution. There are no blood-marks on it, it being very nicely washed and folded. The texture of the linen cloth--if linen it be--is coarser than any peasant would wear at this day, but the needle-work is exceedingly fine and elaborate. Another relic of the same period,--the Cavalier General Sir Jacob Astley's buff-coat, with his belt and sword; the leather of the buff-coat, for I took it between my fingers, is about a quarter of an inch thick, of the same material as a wash-leather glove, and by no means smoothly dressed, though the sleeves are covered with silver-lace. Of old armor, there are admirable specimens; and it makes one's head ache to look at the iron pots which men used to thrust their heads into. Indeed, at one period they seem to have worn an inner iron cap underneath the helmet. I doubt whether there ever was any age of chivalry. . . . . It certainly was no chivalric sentiment that made men case themselves in impenetrable iron, and ride about in iron prisons, fearfully peeping at their enemies through little slits and gimlet-holes. The unprotected breast of a private soldier must have shamed his leaders in those days. The point of honor is very different now. I mean to go again and again, many times more, and will take each day some one department, and so endeavor to get some real use and improvement out of what I see. Much that is most valuable must be immitigably rejected; but something, according to the measure of my poor capacity, will really be taken into my mind. After all, it was an agreeable day, and I think the next one will be more so. July 28th.--Day before yesterday I paid a second visit to the Exhibition, and devoted the day mainly to seeing the works of British painters, which fill a very large space,--two or three great saloons at the right side of the nave. Among the earliest are Hogarth's pictures, including the Sigismunda, which I remember to have seen before, with her lover's heart in her hand, looking like a monstrous strawberry; and the March to Finchley, than which nothing truer to English life and character was ever painted, nor ever can be; and a large stately portrait of Captain Coram, and others, all excellent in proportion as they come near to ordinary life, and are wrought out through its forms. All English painters resemble Hogarth in this respect. They cannot paint anything high, heroic, and ideal, and their attempts in that direction are wearisome to look at; but they sometimes produce good effects by means of awkward figures in ill-made coats and small-clothes, and hard, coarse-complexioned faces, such as they might see anywhere in the street. They are strong in homeliness and ugliness, weak in their efforts at the beautiful. Sir Thomas Lawrence attains a sort of grace, which you feel to be a trick, and therefore get disgusted with it. Reynolds is not quite genuine, though certainly he has produced some noble and beautiful heads. But Hogarth is the only English painter, except in the landscape department; there are no others who interpret life to me at all, unless it be some of the modern Pre-Raphaelites. Pretty village scenes of common life,--pleasant domestic passages, with a touch of easy humor in them,--little pathoses and fancynesses, are abundant enough; and Wilkie, to be sure, has done more than this, though not a great deal more. His merit lies, not in a high aim, but in accomplishing his aim so perfectly. It is unaccountable that the English painters' achievements should be so much inferior to those of the English poets, who have really elevated the human mind; but, to be sure, painting has only become an English art subsequently to the epochs of the greatest poets, and since the beginning of the last century, during which England had no poets. I respect Haydon more than I once did, not for his pictures, they being detestable to see, but for his heroic rejection of whatever his countrymen and he himself could really do, and his bitter resolve to achieve something higher,-- failing in which, he died. No doubt I am doing vast injustice to a great many gifted men in what I have here written,--as, for instance, Copley, who certainly has painted a slain man to the life; and to a crowd of landscape-painters, who have made wonderful reproductions of little English streams and shrubbery, and cottage doors and country lanes. And there is a picture called "The Evening Gun" by Danby,--a ship of war on a calm, glassy tide, at sunset, with the cannon-smoke puffing from her porthole; it is very beautiful, and so effective that you can even hear the report breaking upon the stillness, with so grand a roar that it is almost like stillness too. As for Turner, I care no more for his light-colored pictures than for so much lacquered ware or painted gingerbread. Doubtless this is my fault, my own deficiency; but I cannot help it,--not, at least, without sophisticating myself by the effort. The only modern pictures that accomplish a higher end than that of pleasing the eye--the only ones that really take hold of my mind, and with a kind of acerbity, like unripe fruit--are the works of Hunt, and one or two other painters of the Pre-Raphaelite school. They seem wilfully to abjure all beauty, and to make their pictures disagreeable out of mere malice; but at any rate, for the thought and feeling which are ground up with the paint, they will bear looking at, and disclose a deeper value the longer you look. Never was anything so stiff and unnatural as they appear; although every single thing represented seems to be taken directly out of life and reality, and, as it were, pasted down upon the canvas. They almost paint even separate hairs. Accomplishing so much, and so perfectly, it seems unaccountable that the picture does not live; but Nature has an art beyond these painters, and they leave out some medium,--some enchantment that should intervene, and keep the object from pressing so baldly and harshly upon the spectator's eyeballs. With the most lifelike reproduction, there is no illusion. I think if a semi-obscurity were thrown over the picture after finishing it to this nicety, it might bring it nearer to nature. I remember a heap of autumn leaves, every one of which seems to have been stiffened with gum and varnish, and then put carefully down into the stiffly disordered heap. Perhaps these artists may hereafter succeed in combining the truth of detail with a broader and higher truth. Coming from such a depth as their pictures do, and having really an idea as the seed of them, it is strange that they should look like the most made-up things imaginable. One picture by Hunt that greatly interested me was of some sheep that had gone astray among heights and precipices, and I could have looked all day at these poor, lost creatures,--so true was their meek alarm and hopeless bewilderment, their huddling together, without the slightest confidence of mutual help; all that the courage and wisdom of the bravest and wisest of them could do being to bleat, and only a few having spirits enough even for this. After going through these modern masters, among whom were some French painters who do not interest me at all, I did a miscellaneous business, chiefly among the water-colors and photographs, and afterwards among the antiquities and works of ornamental art. I have forgotten what I saw, except the breastplate and helmet of Henry of Navarre, of steel, engraved with designs that have been half obliterated by scrubbing. I remember, too, a breastplate of an Elector of Saxony, with a bullet-hole through it. He received his mortal wound through that hole, and died of it two days afterwards, three hundred years ago. There was a crowd of visitors, insomuch that, it was difficult to get a satisfactory view of the most interesting objects. They were nearly all middling-class people; the Exhibition, I think, does not reach the lower classed at all; in fact, it could not reach them, nor their betters either, without a good deal of study to help it out. I shall go to-day, and do my best to get profit out of it. July 30th.--We all, with R----- and Fanny, went to the Exhibition yesterday, and spent the day there; not J-----, however, for he went to the Botanical Gardens. After some little skirmishing with other things, I devoted myself to the historical portraits, which hang on both sides of the great nave, and went through them pretty faithfully. The oldest are pictures of Richard II. and Henry IV. and Edward IV. and Jane Shore, and seem to have little or no merit as works of art, being cold and stiff, the life having, perhaps, faded out of them; but these older painters were trustworthy, inasmuch as they had no idea of making a picture, but only of getting the face before them on canvas as accurately as they could. All English history scarcely supplies half a dozen portraits before the time of Henry VIII.; after that period, and through the reigns of Elizabeth and James, there are many ugly pictures by Dutchmen and Italians; and the collection is wonderfully rich in portraits of the time of Charles I. and the Commonwealth. Vandyke seems to have brought portrait-painting into fashion; and very likely the king's love of art diffused a taste for it throughout the nation, and remotely suggested, even to his enemies, to get their pictures painted. Elizabeth has perpetuated her cold, thin visage on many canvases, and generally with some fantasy of costume that makes her ridiculous to all time. There are several of Mary of Scotland, none of which have a gleam of beauty; but the stiff old brushes of these painters could not catch the beautiful. Of all the older pictures, the only one that I took pleasure in looking at was a portrait of Lord Deputy Falkland, by Vansomer, in James I.'s time,--a very stately, full-length figure in white, looking out of the picture as if he saw you. The catalogue says that this portrait suggested an incident in Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto; but I do not remember it. I have a haunting doubt of the value of portrait-painting; that is to say, whether it gives you a genuine idea of the person purporting to be represented. I do not remember ever to have recognized a man by having previously seen his portrait. Vandyke's pictures are full of grace and nobleness, but they do not look like Englishmen,--the burly, rough, wine-flushed and weather-reddened faces, and sturdy flesh and blood, which we see even at the present day, when they must naturally have become a good deal refined from either the country gentleman or the courtier of the Stuarts' age. There is an old, fat portrait of Gervoyse Holles, in a buff-coat,--a coarse, hoggish, yet manly man. The painter is unknown; but I honor him, and Gervoyse Holles too,--for one was willing to be truly rendered, and the other dared to do it. It seems to be the aim of portrait-painters generally, especially of those who have been most famous, to make their pictures as beautiful and noble as can anywise consist with retaining the very slightest resemblance to the person sitting to them. They seldom attain even the grace and beauty which they aim at, but only hit some temporary or individual taste. Vandyke, however, achieved graces that rise above time and fashion, and so did Sir Peter Lely, in his female portraits; but the doubt is, whether the works of either are genuine history. Not more so, I suspect, than the narrative of a historian who should seek to make poetry out of the events which he relates, rejecting those which could not possibly be thus idealized. I observe, furthermore, that a full-length portrait has seldom face enough; not that it lacks its fair proportion by measurement, but the artist does not often find it possible to make the face so intellectually prominent as to subordinate the figure and drapery. Vandyke does this, however. In his pictures of Charles I., for instance, it is the melancholy grace of the visage that attracts the eye, and it passes to the rest of the composition only by an effort. Earlier and later pictures are but a few inches of face to several feet of figure and costume, and more insignificant than the latter because seldom so well done; and I suspect the same would generally be the case now, only that the present simplicity of costume gives the face a chance to be seen. I was interrupted here, and cannot resume the thread; but considering how much of his own conceit the artist puts into a portrait, how much affectation the sitter puts on, and then again that no face is the same to any two spectators; also, that these portraits are darkened and faded with age, and can seldom be more than half seen, being hung too high, or somehow or other inconvenient, on the whole, I question whether there is much use in looking at them. The truest test would be, for a man well read in English history and biography, and himself an observer of insight, to go through the series without knowing what personages they represented, and write beneath each the name which the portrait vindicated for itself. After getting through the portrait-gallery, I went among the engravings and photographs, and then glanced along the old masters, but without seriously looking at anything. While I was among the Dutch painters, a gentleman accosted me. It was Mr. J------, whom I once met at dinner with Bennoch. He told me that "the Poet Laureate" (as he called him) was in the Exhibition rooms; and as I expressed great interest, Mr. J------ was kind enough to go in quest of him. Not for the purpose of introduction, however, for he was not acquainted with Tennyson. Soon Mr. J------ returned, and said that he had found the Poet Laureate,--and, going into the saloon of the old masters, we saw him there, in company with Mr. Woolner, whose bust of him is now in the Exhibition. Gazing at him with all my eyes, I liked him well, and rejoiced more in him than in all the other wonders of the Exhibition. How strange that in these two or three pages I cannot get one single touch that may call him up hereafter! I would most gladly have seen more of this one poet of our day, but forbore to follow him; for I must own that it seemed mean to be dogging him through the saloons, or even to look at him, since it was to be done stealthily, if at all. He is as un-English as possible; indeed an Englishman of genius usually lacks the national characteristics, and is great abnormally. Even the great sailor, Nelson, was unlike his countrymen in the qualities that constituted him a hero; he was not the perfection of an Englishman, but a creature of another kind,--sensitive, nervous, excitable, and really more like a Frenchman. Un-English as he was, Tennyson had not, however, an American look. I cannot well describe the difference; but there was something more mellow in him,--softer, sweeter, broader, more simple than we are apt to be. Living apart from men as he does would hurt any one of us more than it does him. I may as well leave him here, for I cannot touch the central point. August 2d.--Day before yesterday I went again to the Exhibition, and began the day with looking at the old masters. Positively, I do begin to receive some pleasure from looking at pictures; but as yet it has nothing to do with any technical merit, nor do I think I shall ever get so far as that. Some landscapes by Ruysdael, and some portraits by Murillo, Velasquez, and Titian, were those which I was most able to appreciate; and I see reason for allowing, contrary to my opinion, as expressed a few pages back, that a portrait may preserve some valuable characteristics of the person represented. The pictures in the English portrait-gallery are mostly very bad, and that may be the reason why I saw so little in them. I saw too, at this last visit, a Virgin and Child, which appeared to me to have an expression more adequate to the subject than most of the innumerable virgins and children, in which we see only repetitions of simple maternity; indeed, any mother, with her first child, would serve an artist for one of them. But, in this picture the Virgin had a look as if she were loving the infant as her own child, and at the same time rendering him an awful worship, as to her Creator. While I was sitting in the central saloon, listening to the music, a young man accosted me, presuming that I was so-and-so, the American author. He himself was a traveller for a publishing firm; and he introduced conversation by talking of Uttoxeter, and my description of it in an annual. He said that the account had caused a good deal of pique among the good people of Uttoxeter, because of the ignorance which I attribute to them as to the circumstance which connects Johnson with their town. The spot where Johnson stood can, it appears, still be pointed out. It is on one side of the market-place, and not in the neighborhood of the church. I forget whether I recorded, at the time, that an Uttoxeter newspaper was sent me, containing a proposal that a statue or memorial should be erected on the spot. It would gratify me exceedingly if such a result should come from my pious pilgrimage thither. My new acquaintance, who was cockneyish, but very intelligent and agreeable, went on to talk about many literary matters and characters; among others, about Miss Bronte, whom he had seen at the Chapter Coffee-House, when she and her sister Anne first went to London. He was at that time connected with the house of ------ and ------, and he described the surprise and incredulity of Mr.------, when this little, commonplace-looking woman presented herself as the author of Jane Eyre. His story brought out the insignificance of Charlotte Bronte's aspect, and the bluff rejection of her by Mr. ------, much more strongly than Mrs. Gaskell's narrative. Chorlton Road, August 9th.--We have changed our lodgings since my last date, those at Old Trafford being inconvenient, and the landlady a sharp, peremptory housewife, better fitted to deal with her own family than to be complaisant to guests. We are now a little farther from the Exhibition, and not much better off as regards accommodation, but the housekeeper is a pleasant, civil sort of a woman, auspiciously named Mrs. Honey. The house is a specimen of the poorer middle-class dwellings as built nowadays,--narrow staircase, thin walls, and, being constructed for sale, very ill put together indeed,--the floors with wide cracks between the boards, and wide crevices admitting both air and light over the doors, so that the house is full of draughts. The outer walls, it seems to me, are but of one brick in thickness, and the partition walls certainly no thicker; and the movements, and sometimes the voices, of people in the contiguous house are audible to us. The Exhibition has temporarily so raised the value of lodgings here that we have to pay a high price for even such a house as this. Mr. Wilding having gone on a tour to Scotland, I had to be at the Consulate every day last week till yesterday; when I absented myself from duty, and went to the Exhibition. U---- and I spent an hour together, looking principally at the old Dutch masters, who seem to me the most wonderful set of men that ever handled a brush. Such lifelike representations of cabbages, onions, brass kettles, and kitchen crockery; such blankets, with the woollen fuzz upon them; such everything I never thought that the skill of man could produce! Even the photograph cannot equal their miracles. The closer you look, the more minutely true the picture is found to be, and I doubt if even the microscope could see beyond the painter's touch. Gerard Dow seems to be the master among these queer magicians. A straw mat, in one of his pictures, is the most miraculous thing that human art has yet accomplished; and there is a metal vase, with a dent in it, that is absolutely more real than reality. These painters accomplish all they aim at,--a praise, methinks, which can be given to no other men since the world began. They must have laid down their brushes with perfect satisfaction, knowing that each one of their million touches had been necessary to the effect, and that there was not one too few nor too many. And it is strange how spiritual and suggestive the commonest household article--an earthen pitcher, for example-- becomes, when represented with entire accuracy. These Dutchmen got at the soul of common things, and so made them types and interpreters of the spiritual world. Afterwards I looked at many of the pictures of the old masters, and found myself gradually getting a taste for them; at least, they give me more and more pleasure the oftener I come to see them. Doubtless, I shall be able to pass for a man of taste by the time I return to America. It is an acquired taste, like that for wines; and I question whether a man is really any truer, wiser, or better for possessing it. From the old masters, I went among the English painters, and found myself more favorably inclined towards some of them than at my previous visits; seeing something wonderful even in Turner's lights and mists and yeasty waves, although I should like him still better if his pictures looked in the least like what they typify. The most disagreeable of English painters is Etty, who had a diseased appetite for woman's flesh, and spent his whole life, apparently, in painting them with enormously developed busts. I do not mind nudity in a modest and natural way; but Etty's women really thrust their nudity upon you with malice aforethought, . . . . and the worst of it is they are not beautiful. Among the last pictures that I looked at was Hogarth's March to Finchley; and surely nothing can be covered more thick and deep with English nature than that piece of canvas. The face of the tall grenadier in the centre, between two women, both of whom have claims on him, wonderfully expresses trouble and perplexity; and every touch in the picture meant something and expresses what it meant. The price of admission, after two o'clock, being sixpence, the Exhibition was thronged with a class of people who do not usually come in such large numbers. It was both pleasant and touching to see how earnestly some of them sought to get instruction from what they beheld. The English are a good and simple people, and take life in earnest. August 14th.--Passing by the gateway of the Manchester Cathedral the other morning, on my way to the station, I found a crowd collected, and, high overhead, the bells were chiming for a wedding. These chimes of bells are exceedingly impressive, so broadly gladsome as they are, filling the whole air, and every nook of one's heart with sympathy. They are good for a people to rejoice with, and good also for a marriage, because through all their joy there is something solemn,--a tone of that voice which we have heard so often at funerals. It is good to see how everybody, up to this old age of the world, takes an interest in weddings, and seems to have a faith that now, at last, a couple have come together to make each other happy. The high, black, rough old cathedral tower sent out its chime of bells as earnestly as for any bridegroom and bride that came to be married five hundred years ago. I went into the churchyard, but there was such a throng of people on its pavement of flat tombstones, and especially such a cluster along the pathway by which the bride was to depart, that I could only see a white dress waving along, and really do not know whether she was a beauty or a fright. The happy pair got into a post-chaise that was waiting at the gate, and immediately drew some crimson curtains, and so vanished into their Paradise. There were two other post-chaises and pairs, and all three had postilions in scarlet. This is the same cathedral where, last May, I saw a dozen couples married in the lump. In a railway carriage, two or three days ago, an old merchant made rather a good point of one of the uncomfortable results of the electric telegraph. He said that formerly a man was safe from bad news, such as intelligence of failure of debtors, except at the hour of opening his letters in the morning; and then he was in some degree prepared for it, since, among (say) fifteen letters, he would be pretty certain to find some "queer" one. But since the telegraph has come into play, he is never safe, and may be hit with news of failure, shipwreck, fall of stocks, or whatever disaster, at all hours of the day. I went to the Exhibition on Wednesday with U----, and looked at the pencil sketches of the old masters; also at the pictures generally, old and new. I particularly remember a spring landscape, by John Linnell the younger. It is wonderfully good; so tender and fresh that the artist seems really to have caught the evanescent April and made her permanent. Here, at least, is eternal spring. I saw a little man, behind an immense beard, whom I take to be the Duke of Newcastle; at least, there was a photograph of him in the gallery, with just such a beard. He was at the Palace on that day. August 16th.--I went again to the Exhibition day before yesterday, and looked much at both the modern and ancient pictures, as also at the water-colors. I am making some progress as a connoisseur, and have got so far as to be able to distinguish the broader differences of style,-- as, for example, between Rubens and Rembrandt. I should hesitate to claim any more for myself thus far. In fact, however, I do begin to have a liking for good things, and to be sure that they are good. Murillo seems to me about the noblest and purest painter that ever lived, and his "Good Shepherd" the loveliest picture I have seen. It is a hopeful symptom, moreover, of improving taste, that I see more merit in the crowd of painters than I was at first competent to acknowledge. I could see some of their defects from the very first; but that is the earliest stage of connoisseurship, after a formal and ignorant admiration. Mounting a few steps higher, one sees beauties. But how much study, how many opportunities, are requisite to form and cultivate a taste! The Exhibition must be quite thrown away on the mass of spectators. Both they and I are better able to appreciate the specimens of ornamental art contained in the Oriental Room, and in the numerous cases that are ranged up and down the nave. The gewgaws of all Time are here, in precious metals, glass, china, ivory, and every other material that could be wrought into curious and beautiful shapes; great basins and dishes of embossed gold from the Queen's sideboard, or from the beaufets of noblemen; vessels set with precious stones; the pastoral staffs of prelates, some of them made of silver or gold, and enriched with gems, and what have been found in the tombs of the bishops; state swords, and silver maces; the rich plate of colleges, elaborately wrought,--great cups, salvers, tureens, that have been presented by loving sons to their Alma Mater; the heirlooms of old families, treasured from generation to generation, and hitherto only to be seen by favored friends; famous historical jewels, some of which are painted in the portraits of the historical men and women that hang on the walls; numerous specimens of the beautiful old Venetian glass, some of which looks so fragile that it is a wonder how it could bear even the weight of the wine, that used to be poured into it, without breaking. These are the glasses that tested poison, by being shattered into fragments at its touch. The strangest and ugliest old crockery, pictured over with monstrosities,--the Palissy ware, embossed with vegetables, fishes, lobsters, that look absolutely real; the delicate Sevres china, each piece made inestimable by pictures from a master's hand;--in short, it is a despair and misery to see so much that is curious and beautiful, and to feel that far the greater portion of it will slip out of the memory, and be as if we had never seen it. But I mean to look again and again at these things. We soon perceive that the present day does not engross all the taste and ingenuity that has ever existed in the mind of man; that, in fact, we are a barren age in that respect. August 20th.--I went to the Exhibition on Monday, and again yesterday, and measurably enjoyed both visits. I continue to think, however, that a picture cannot be fully enjoyed except by long and intimate acquaintance with it, nor can I quite understand what the enjoyment of a connoisseur is. He is not usually, I think, a man of deep, poetic feeling, and does not deal with the picture through his heart, nor set it in a poem, nor comprehend it morally. If it be a landscape, he is not entitled to judge of it by his intimacy with nature; if a picture of human action, he has no experience nor sympathy of life's deeper passages. However, as my acquaintance with pictures increases, I find myself recognizing more and more the merit of the acknowledged masters of the art; but, possibly, it is only because I adopt the wrong principles which may have been laid down by the connoisseurs. But there can be no mistake about Murillo,-- not that I am worthy to admire him yet, however. Seeing the many pictures of Holy Families, and the Virgin and Child, which have been painted for churches and convents, the idea occurs, that it was in this way that the poor monks and nuns gratified, as far as they could, their natural longing for earthly happiness. It was not Mary and her heavenly Child that they really beheld, or wished for; but an earthly mother rejoicing over her baby, and displaying it probably to the world as an object worthy to be admired by kings,--as Mary does, in the Adoration of the Magi. Every mother, I suppose, feels as if her first child deserved everybody's worship. I left the Exhibition at three o'clock, and went to Manchester, where I sought out Mr. C S------- in his little office. He greeted me warmly, and at five we took the omnibus for his house, about four miles from town. He seems to be on pleasant terms with his neighbors, for almost everybody that got into the omnibus exchanged kindly greetings with him, and indeed his kindly, simple, genial nature comes out so evidently that it would be difficult not to like him. His house stands, with others, in a green park,--a small, pretty, semi-detached suburban residence of brick, with a lawn and garden round it. In close vicinity, there is a deep clough or dell, as shaggy and wild as a poet could wish, and with a little stream running through it, as much as five miles long. The interior of the house is very pretty, and nicely, even handsomely and almost sumptuously, furnished; and I was very glad to find him so comfortable. His recognition as a poet has been hearty enough to give him a feeling of success, for he showed me various tokens of the estimation in which he is held,--for instance, a presentation copy of Southey's works, in which the latter had written "Amicus amico,--poeta poetae." He said that Southey had always been most kind to him. . . . . There were various other testimonials from people of note, American as well as English. In his parlor there is a good oil-painting of himself, and in the drawing-room a very fine crayon sketch, wherein his face, handsome and agreeable, is lighted up with all a poet's ecstasy; likewise a large and fine engraving from the picture. The government has recognized his poetic merit by a pension of fifty pounds,--a small sung, it is true, but enough to mark him out as one who has deserved well of his country. . . . . The man himself is very good and lovable. . . . . I was able to gratify him by saying that I had recently seen many favorable notices of his poems in the American newspapers; an edition having been published a few months since on our side of the ocean. He was much pleased at this, and asked me to send him the notices. . . . . August 30th.--I have been two or three times to the Exhibition since my last date, and enjoy it more as I become familiar with it. There is supposed to be about a third of the good pictures here which England contains; and it is said that the Tory nobility and gentry have contributed to it much more freely and largely than the Whigs. The Duke of Devonshire, for instance, seems to have sent nothing. Mr. Ticknor, the Spanish historian, whom I met yesterday, observed that we should not think quite so much of this Exhibition as the English do after we have been to Italy, although it is a good school in which to gain a preparatory knowledge of the different styles of art. I am glad to hear that there are better things still to be seen. Nevertheless, I should suppose that certain painters are better represented here than they ever have been or will be elsewhere. Vandyke, certainly, can be seen nowhere else so well; Rembrandt and Rubens have satisfactory specimens; and the whole series of English pictorial achievement is shown more perfectly than within any other walls. Perhaps it would be wise to devote myself to the study of this latter, and leave the foreigners to be studied on their own soil. Murillo can hardly have done better than in the pictures by him which we see here. There is nothing of Raphael's here that is impressive. Titian has some noble portraits, but little else that I care to see. In all these old masters, Murillo only excepted, it is very rare, I must say, to find any trace of natural feeling and passion; and I am weary of naked goddesses, who never had any real life and warmth in the painter's imagination,--or, if so, it was the impure warmth of an unchaste woman, who sat for him. Last week I dined at Mr. F. Heywood's to meet Mr. Adolphus, the author of a critical work on the Waverley Novels, published long ago, and intended to prove, from internal evidence, that they were written by Sir Walter Scott. . . . . His wife was likewise of the party, . . . . and also a young Spanish lady, their niece, and daughter of a Spaniard of literary note. She herself has literary tastes and ability, and is well known to Prescott, whom, I believe, she has assisted in his historical researches, and also to Professor Ticknor; and furthermore she is very handsome and unlike an English damsel, very youthful and maiden-like; and her manners have all ardor and enthusiasm that were pleasant to see, especially as she spoke warmly of my writings; and yet I should wrong her if I left the impression of her being forthputting and obtrusive, for it was not the fact in the least. She speaks English like a native, insomuch that I should never have suspected her to be anything else. My nerves recently have not been in an exactly quiet and normal state. I begin to weary of England and need another clime. September 6th.--I think I paid my last visit to the Exhibition, and feel as if I had had enough of it, although I have got but a small part of the profit it might have afforded me. But pictures are certainly quite other things to me now from what they were at my first visit; it seems even as if there were a sort of illumination within them, that makes me see them more distinctly. Speaking of pictures, the miniature of Anne of Cleves is here, on the faith of which Henry VIII. married her; also, the picture of the Infanta of Spain, which Buckingham brought over to Charles I. while Prince of Wales. This has a delicate, rosy prettiness. One rather interesting portion of the Exhibition is the Refreshment-room, or rather rooms; for very much space is allowed both to the first and second classes. I have looked most at the latter, because there John Ball and his wife may be seen in full gulp aid guzzle, swallowing vast quantities of cold boiled beef, thoroughly moistened with porter or bitter ale; and very good meat and drink it is. At my last visit, on Friday, I met Judge Pollock of Liverpool, who introduced me to a gentleman in a gray slouched hat as Mr. Du Val, an artist, resident in Manchester; and Mr. Du Val invited me to dine with him at six o'clock. So I went to Carlton Grove, his residence, and found it a very pretty house, with its own lawn and shrubbery about it. . . . . There was a mellow fire in the grate, which made the drawing-room very cosey and pleasant, as the dusk came on before dinner. Mr. Du Val looked like an artist, and like a remarkable man. . . . . We had very good talk, chiefly about the Exhibition, and Du Val spoke generously and intelligently of his brother-artists. He says that England might furnish five exhibitions, each one as rich as the present. I find that the most famous picture here is one that I have hardly looked at, "The Three Marys," by Annibal Caracci. In the drawing-room there were several pictures and sketches by Du Val, one of which I especially liked,--a misty, moonlight picture of the Mersey, near Seacombe. I never saw painted such genuine moonlight. . . . . I took my leave at half past ten, and found my cab at the door, and my cabman snugly asleep inside of it; and when Mr. Du Val awoke him, he proved to be quite drunk, insomuch that I hesitated whether to let him clamber upon the box, or to take post myself, and drive the cabman home. However, I propounded two questions to him: first, whether his horse would go of his own accord; and, secondly, whether be himself was invariably drunk at that time of night, because, if it were his normal state, I should be safer with him drunk than sober. Being satisfied on these points, I got in, and was driven home without accident or adventure; except, indeed, that the cabman drew up and opened the door for me to alight at a vacant lot on Stratford Road, just as if there had been a house and home and cheerful lighted windows in that vacancy. On my remonstrance he resumed the whip and reins, and reached Boston Terrace at last; and, thanking me for an extra sixpence as well as he could speak, he begged me to inquire for "Little John" whenever I next wanted a cab. Cabmen are, as a body, the most ill-natured and ungenial men in the world; but this poor little man was excellently good-humored. Speaking of the former rudeness of manners, now gradually refining away, of the Manchester people, Judge ------ said that, when he first knew Manchester, women, meeting his wife in the street, would take hold of her dress and say, "Ah, three and sixpence a yard!" The men were very rough, after the old Lancashire fashion. They have always, however, been a musical people, and this may have been a germ of refinement in them. They are still much more simple and natural than the Liverpool people, who love the aristocracy, and whom they heartily despise. It is singular that the great Art-Exhibition should have come to pass in the rudest great town in England. LEAMINGTON. Lansdowne Cirrus, September 10th.--We have become quite weary of our small, mean, uncomfortable, and unbeautiful lodgings at Chorlton Road, with poor and scanty furniture within doors, and no better prospect from the parlor windows than a mud-puddle, larger than most English lakes, on a vacant building-lot opposite our house. The Exhibition, too, was fast becoming a bore; for you must really love a picture, in order to tolerate the sight of it many times. Moreover, the smoky and sooty air of that abominable Manchester affected my wife's throat disadvantageously; so, on a Tuesday morning, we struck our tent and set forth again, regretting to leave nothing except the kind disposition of Mrs. Honey, our housekeeper. I do not remember meeting with any other lodging-house keeper who did not grow hateful and fearful on short acquaintance; but I attribute this, not so much to the people themselves, as, primarily, to the unfair and ungenerous conduct of some of their English guests, who feel so sure of being cheated that they always behave as if in an enemy's country, and therefore they find it one. The rain poured down upon us as we drove away in two cabs, laden with mountainous luggage to the London Road station; and the whole day was grim with cloud and moist with showers. We went by way of Birmingham, and stayed three hours at the great dreary station there, waiting for the train to Leamington, whither Fanny had gone forward the day before to secure lodgings for us (as she is English, and understands the matter) We all were tired and dull by the time we reached the Leamington station, where a note from Fanny gave us the address of our lodgings. Lansdowne Circus is really delightful after that ugly and grimy suburb of Manchester. Indeed, there could not possibly be a greater contrast than between Leamington and Manchester,--the latter built only for dirty uses, and scarcely intended as a habitation for man; the former so cleanly, so set out with shade trees, so regular in its streets, so neatly paved, its houses so prettily contrived and nicely stuccoed, that it does not look like a portion of the work-a-day world. KENILWORTH. September 13th.--The weather was very uncertain through the last week, and yesterday morning, too, was misty and sunless; notwithstanding which we took the rail for Kenilworth before eleven. The distance from Leamington is less than five miles, and at the Kenilworth station we found a little bit of an omnibus, into which we packed ourselves, together with two ladies, one of whom, at least, was an American. I begin to agree partly with the English, that we are not a people of elegant manners. At all events there is sometimes a bare, hard, meagre sort of deportment, especially in our women, that has not its parallel elsewhere. But perhaps what sets off this kind of behavior, and brings it into alto relievo, is the fact of such uncultivated persons travelling abroad, and going to see sights that would not be interesting except to people of some education and refinement. We saw but little of the village of Kenilworth, passing through it sidelong fashion, in the omnibus; but I learn that it has between three and four thousand inhabitants, and is of immemorial antiquity. We saw a few old, gabled, and timber-framed houses; but generally the town was of modern aspect, although less so in the immediate vicinity of the castle gate, across the road from which there was an inn, with bowling-greens, and a little bunch of houses and shops. Apart from the high road there is a gate-house, ancient, but in excellent repair, towered, turreted, and battlemented, and looking like a castle in itself. Until Cromwell's time, the entrance to the castle used to be beneath an arch that passed through this structure; but the gate-house being granted to one of the Parliament officers, he converted it into a residence, and apparently added on a couple of gables, which now look quite as venerable as the rest of the edifice. Admission within the outer grounds of the castle is now obtained through a little wicket close beside the gate-house, at which sat one or two old men, who touched their hats to us in humble willingness to accept a fee. One of them had guide-books for sale; and, finding that we were not to be bothered by a cicerone, we bought one of his books. The ruins are perhaps two hundred yards from the gate-house and the road, and the space between is a pasture for sheep, which also browse in the inner court, and shelter themselves in the dungeons and state apartments of the castle. Goats would be fitter occupants, because they would climb to the tops of the crumbling towers, and nibble the weeds and shrubbery that grow there. The first part of the castle which we reach is called Caesar's Tower, being the oldest portion of the ruins, and still very stalwart and massive, and built of red freestone, like all the rest. Caesar's Tower being on the right, Leicester's Buildings, erected by the Earl of Leicester, Queen Elizabeth's favorite, are on the left; and between these two formerly stood other structures which have now as entirely disappeared as if they had never existed; and through the wide gap, thus opened, appears the grassy inner court, surrounded on three sides by half-fallen towers and shattered walls. Some of these were erected by John of Gaunt; and among these ruins is the Banqueting-Hall,-- or rather was,--for it has now neither floor nor roof, but only the broken stone-work of some tall, arched windows, and the beautiful, old ivied arch of the entrance-way, now inaccessible from the ground. The ivy is very abundant about the ruins, and hangs its green curtains quite from top to bottom of some of the windows. There are likewise very large and aged trees within the castle, there being no roof nor pavement anywhere, except in some dungeon-like nooks; so that the trees having soil and air enough, and being sheltered from unfriendly blasts, can grow as if in a nursery. Hawthorn, however, next to ivy, is the great ornament and comforter of these desolate ruins. I have not seen so much nor such thriving hawthorn anywhere else,--in the court, high up on crumbly heights, on the sod that carpets roofless rooms,--everywhere, indeed, and now rejoicing in plentiful crops of red berries. The ivy is even more wonderfully luxuriant; its trunks being, in some places, two or three feet in diameter, and forming real buttresses against the walls, which are actually supported and vastly strengthened by this parasite, that clung to them at first only for its own convenience, and now holds them up, lest it should be ruined by their fall. Thus an abuse has strangely grown into a use, and I think we may sometimes see the same fact, morally, in English matters. There is something very curious in the close, firm grip which the ivy fixes upon the wall, closer and closer for centuries. Neither is it at all nice as to what it clutches, in its necessity for support. I saw in the outer court an old hawthorn-tree, to which a plant of ivy had married itself, and the ivy trunk and the hawthorn trunk were now absolutely incorporated, and in their close embrace you could not tell which was which. At one end of the Banqueting-Hall, there are two large bay-windows, one of which looks into the inner court, and the other affords a view of the surrounding country. The former is called Queen Elizabeth's Dressing-room. Beyond the Banqueting-Hall is what is called the Strong Tower, up to the top of which we climbed principally by the aid of the stones that have tumbled down from it. A lady sat half-way down the crumbly descent, within the castle, on a camp-stool, and before an easel, sketching this tower, on the summit of which we sat. She said it was Amy Robsart's Tower; and within it, open to the day, and quite accessible, we saw a room that we were free to imagine had been occupied by her. I do not find that these associations of real scenes with fictitious events greatly heighten the charm of them. By this time the sun had come out brightly, and with such warmth that we were glad to sit down in the shadow. Several sight-seers were now rambling about, and among them some school-boys, who kept scrambling up to points whither no other animal, except a goat, would have ventured. Their shouts and the sunshine made the old castle cheerful; and what with the ivy and the hawthorn, and the other old trees, it was very beautiful and picturesque. But a castle does not make nearly so interesting and impressive a ruin as an abbey, because the latter was built for beauty, and on a plan in which deep thought and feeling were involved; and having once been a grand and beautiful work, it continues grand and beautiful through all the successive stages of its decay. But a castle is rudely piled together for strength and other material conveniences; and, having served these ends, it has nothing left to fall back upon, but crumbles into shapeless masses, which are often as little picturesque as a pile of bricks. Without the ivy and the shrubbery, this huge Kenilworth would not be a pleasant object, except for one or two window-frames, with broken tracery, in the Banqueting-Hall. . . . . We stayed from eleven till two, and identified the various parts of the castle as well as we could by the guide-book. The ruins are very extensive, though less so than I should have imagined, considering that seven acres were included within the castle wall. But a large part of the structures have been taken away to build houses in Kenilworth village and elsewhere, and much, too, to make roads with, and a good deal lies under the green turf in the court-yards, inner and outer. As we returned to the gate, my wife and U---- went into the gate-house to see an old chimney-piece, and other antiquities, and J----- and I proceeded a little way round the outer wall, and saw the remains of the moat, and Lin's Tower,--a real and shattered fabric of John of Gaunt. The omnibus now drove up, and one of the old men at the gate came hobbling up to open the door, and was rewarded with a sixpence, and we drove down to the King's Head. . . . . We then walked out and bought prints of the castle, and inquired our way to the church and to the ruins of the Priory. The latter, so far as we could discover them, are very few and uninteresting; and the church, though it has a venerable exterior, and an aged spire, has been so modernized within, and in so plain a fashion, as to have lost what beauty it may once have had. There were a few brasses and mural monuments, one of which was a marble group of a dying woman and her family by Westmacott. The sexton was a cheerful little man, but knew very little about his church, and nothing of the remains of the Priory. The day was spent very pleasantly amid this beautiful green English scenery, these fine old Warwickshire trees, and broad, gently swelling fields. LIVERPOOL. September 17th.--I took the train for Rugby, and thence to Liverpool. The most noticeable character at Mrs. Blodgett's now is Mr. T------, a Yankee, who has seen the world, and gathered much information and experience already, though still a young man,--a handsome man, with black curly hair, a dark, intelligent, bright face, and rather cold blue eyes, but a very pleasant air and address. His observing faculties are very strongly developed in his forehead, and his reflective ones seem to be adequate to making some, if not the deepest, use of what he sees. He has voyaged and travelled almost all over the world, and has recently published a book of his peregrinations, which has been well received. He is of exceeding fluent talk, though rather too much inclined to unfold the secret springs of action in Louis Napoleon, and other potentates, and to tell of revolutions that are coming at some unlooked-for moment, but soon. Still I believe in his wisdom and foresight about as much as in any other man's. There are no such things. He is a merchant, and meditates settling in London, and making a colossal fortune there during the next ten or twenty years; that being the period during which London is to hold the exchanges of the world, and to continue its metropolis. After that, New York is to be the world's queen city. There is likewise here a young American, named A------, who has been at a German University, and favors us with descriptions of his student life there, which seems chiefly to have consisted in drinking beer and fighting duels. He shows a cut on his nose as a trophy of these combats. He has with him a dog of St. Bernard, who is a much more remarkable character than himself,--an immense dog, a noble and gentle creature; and really it touches my heart that his master is going to take him from his native snow-mountain to a Southern plantation to die. Mr. A------ says that there are now but five of these dogs extant at the convent; there having, within two or three years, been a disease among them, with which this dog also has suffered. His master has a certificate of his genuineness, and of himself being the rightful purchaser; and he says that as he descended the mountain, every peasant along the road stopped him, and would have compelled him to give up the dog had he not produced this proof of property. The neighboring mountaineers are very jealous of the breed being taken away, considering them of such importance to their own safety. This huge animal, the very biggest dog I ever saw, though only eleven months old, and not so high by two or three inches as he will be, allows Mr. ------ to play with him, and take him on his shoulders (he weighs, at least, a hundred pounds), like any lapdog. LEAMINGTON. Lansdowne Circus, October 10th.--I returned hither from Liverpool last week, and have spent the time idly since then, reposing myself after the four years of unnatural restraint in the Consulate. Being already pretty well acquainted with the neighborhood of Leamington, I have little or nothing to record about the prettiest, cheerfullest, cleanest of English towns. On Saturday we took the rail for Coventry, about a half-hour's travel distant. I had been there before, more than two years ago. . . . . No doubt I described it on my first visit; and it is not remarkable enough to be worth two descriptions,--a large town of crooked and irregular streets and lanes, not looking nearly so ancient as it is, because of new brick and stuccoed fronts which have been plastered over its antiquity; although still there are interspersed the peaked gables of old-fashioned, timber-built houses; or an archway of worn stone, which, if you pass through it, shows like an avenue from the present to the past; for just in the rear of the new-fangled aspect lurks the old arrangement of court-yards, and rustiness, and grimness, that would not be suspected from the exterior. Right across the narrow street stands St. Michael's Church with its tall, tall tower and spire. The body of the church has been almost entirely recased with stone since I was here before; but the tower still retains its antiquity, and is decorated with statues that look down from their lofty niches seemingly in good preservation. The tower and spire are most stately and beautiful, the whole church very noble. We went in, and found that the vulgar plaster of Cromwell's time has been scraped from the pillars and arches, leaving them all as fresh and splendid as if just made. We looked also into Trinity Church, which stands close by St. Michael's, separated only, I think, by the churchyard. We also visited St. John's Church, which is very venerable as regards its exterior, the stone being worn and smoothed--if not roughened, rather--by centuries of storm and fitful weather. This wear and tear, however, has almost ceased to be a charm to my mind, comparatively to what it was when I first began to see old buildings. Within, the church is spoiled by wooden galleries, built across the beautiful pointed arches. We saw nothing else particularly worthy of remark except Ford's Hospital, in Grey Friars' Street. It has an Elizabethan front of timber and plaster, facing on the street, with two or three peaked gables in a row, beneath which is a low, arched entrance, giving admission into a small paved quadrangle, open to the sky above, but surrounded by the walls, lozenge-paned windows, and gables of the Hospital. The quadrangle is but a few paces in width, and perhaps twenty in length; and, through a half-closed doorway, at the farther end, there was a glimpse into a garden. Just within the entrance, through an open door, we saw the neat and comfortable apartment of the Matron of the Hospital; and, along the quadrangle, on each side, there were three or four doors, through which we glanced into little rooms, each containing a fireplace, a bed, a chair or two,--a little, homely, domestic scene, with one old woman in the midst of it; one old woman in each room. They are destitute widows, who have their lodging and home here,--a small room for each one to sleep, cook, and be at home in,--and three and sixpence a week to feed and clothe themselves with,--a cloak being the only garment bestowed on them. When one of the sisterhood dies each old woman has to pay twopence towards the funeral; and so they slowly starve and wither out of life, and claim each their twopence contribution in turn. I am afraid they have a very dismal time. There is an old man's hospital in another part of the town, on a similar plan. A collection of sombre and lifelike tales might be written on the idea of giving the experiences of these Hospitallers, male and female; and they might be supposed to be written by the Matron of one, who had acquired literary taste and practice as a governess,--and by the Master of the other, a retired school-usher. It was market-day in Coventry, and far adown the street leading from it there were booths and stalls, and apples, pears, toys, books, among which I saw my Twice-Told Tales, with an awful portrait of myself as frontispiece,--and various country produce, offered for sale by men, women, and girls. The scene looked lively, but had not much vivacity in it. October 27th.--The autumn has advanced progressively, and is now fairly established, though still there is much green foliage, in spite of many brown trees, and an enormous quantity of withered leaves, too damp to rustle, strewing the paths,--whence, however, they are continually swept up and carried off in wheelbarrows, either for neatness or for the agricultural worth, as manure, of even a withered leaf. The pastures look just as green as ever,--a deep, bright verdure, that seems almost sunshine in itself, however sombre the sky may be. The little plats of grass and flowers, in front of our circle of houses, might still do credit to an American midsummer; for I have seen beautiful roses here within a day or two; and dahlias, asters, and such autumnal flowers, are plentiful; and I have no doubt that the old year's flowers will bloom till those of the new year appear. Really, the English winter is not so terrible as ours. October 30th.--Wednesday was one of the most beautiful of all days, and gilded almost throughout with the precious English sunshine,--the most delightful sunshine ever made, both for its positive fine qualities and because we seldom get it without too great an admixture of water. We made no use of this lovely day, except to walk to an Arboretum and Pinetum on the outskirts of the town. U---- and Mrs. Shepard made an excursion to Guy's Cliff. [Here comes in the visit to Leicester's Hospital and Redfern's Shop, and St. Mary's Church, printed in Our Old Home.--ED.] From Redfern's we went back to the market-place, expecting to find J----- at the Museum, but the keeper said he had gone away. We went into this museum, which contains the collections in Natural History, etc., of a county society. It is very well arranged, and is rich in specimens of ornithology, among which was an albatross, huge beyond imagination. I do not think that Coleridge could have known the size of the fowl when he caused it to be hung round the neck of his Ancient Mariner. There were a great many humming-birds from various parts of the world, and some of their breasts actually gleamed and shone as with the brightest lustre of sunset. Also, many strange fishes, and a huge pike taken from the river Avon, and so long that I wonder how he could turn himself about in such a little river as the Avon is near Warwick. A great curiosity was a bunch of skeleton leaves and flowers, prepared by a young lady, and preserving all the most delicate fibres of the plant, looking like inconceivably fine lace-work, white as snow, while the substance was quite taken away. In another room there were minerals, shells, and a splendid collection of fossils, among which were remains of antediluvian creatures, several feet long. In still another room, we saw some historical curiosities,--the most interesting of which were two locks of reddish-brown hair, one from the head and one from the beard of Edward IV. They were fastened to a manuscript letter which authenticates the hair as having been taken from King Edward's tomb in 1739. Near these relics was a seal of the great Earl of Warwick, the mighty kingmaker; also a sword from Bosworth Field, smaller and shorter than those now in use; for, indeed, swords seem to have increased in length, weight, and formidable aspect, now that the weapon has almost ceased to be used in actual warfare. The short Roman sword was probably more murderous than any weapon of the same species, except the bowie-knife. Here, too, were Parliamentary cannon-balls, etc. . . . . [The visit to Whitnash intervenes here.--ED.] LONDON. 24 Great Russell Street, November 10th.--We have been thinking and negotiating about taking lodgings in London lately, and this morning we left Leamington and reached London with no other misadventure than that of leaving the great bulk of our luggage behind us,--the van which we hired to take it to the railway station having broken down under its prodigious weight, in the middle of the street. On our journey we saw nothing particularly worthy of note,--but everywhere the immortal verdure of England, scarcely less perfect than in June, so far as the fields are concerned, though the foliage of the trees presents pretty much the same hues as those of our own forests, after the gayety and gorgeousness have departed from them. Our lodgings are in close vicinity to the British Museum, which is the great advantage we took them for. I felt restless and uncomfortable, and soon strolled forth, without any definite object, and walked as far as Charing Cross. Very dull and dreary the city looked, and not in the least lively, even where the throng was thickest and most brisk. As I trudged along, my reflection was, that never was there a dingier, uglier, less picturesque city than London; and that it is really wonderful that so much brick and stone, for centuries together, should have been built up with so poor a result. Yet these old names of the city--Fleet Street, Ludgate Hill, the Strand-used to throw a glory over these homely precincts when I first saw them, and still do so in a less degree. Where Farrington Street opens upon Fleet Street, moreover, I had a glimpse of St. Paul's, along Ludgate Street, in the gathering dimness, and felt as if I saw an old friend. In that neighborhood--speaking of old friends--I met Mr. Parker of Boston, who told me sad news of a friend whom I love as much as if I had known him for a lifetime, though he is, indeed, but of two or three years' standing. He said that my friend's bankruptcy is in to-day's Gazette. Of all men on earth, I had rather this misfortune should have happened to any other; but I hope and think he has sturdiness and buoyancy enough to rise up beneath it. I cannot conceive of his face otherwise than with a glow on it, like that of the sun at noonday. Before I reached our lodgings, the dusk settled into the streets, and a mist bedewed and bedamped me, and I went astray, as is usual with me, and had to inquire my way; indeed, except in the principal thoroughfares, London is so miserably lighted that it is impossible to recognize one's whereabouts. On my arrival I found our parlor looking cheerful with a brisk fire; . . . . but the first day or two in new lodgings is at best an uncomfortable time. Fanny has just come in with more unhappy news about ------. Pray Heaven it may not be true! . . . . Troubles are a sociable brotherhood; they love to come hand in hand, or sometimes, even, to come side by side, with long looked-for and hoped-for good fortune. . . . . November 11th.--This morning we all went to the British Museum, always a most wearisome and depressing task to me. I strolled through the lower rooms with a good degree of interest, looking at the antique sculptures, some of which were doubtless grand and beautiful in their day. . . . . The Egyptian remains are, on the whole, the more satisfactory; for, though inconceivably ugly, they are at least miracles of size and ponderosity,--for example, a hand and arm of polished granite, as much as ten feet in length. The upper rooms, containing millions of specimens of Natural History, in all departments, really made my heart ache with a pain and woe that I have never felt anywhere but in the British Museum, and I hurried through them as rapidly as I could persuade J----- to follow me. We had left the rest of the party still intent on the Grecian sculptures; and though J----- was much interested in the vast collection of shells, he chose to quit the Museum with me in the prospect of a stroll about London. He seems to have my own passion for thronged streets, and the utmost bustle of human life. We went first to the railway station, in quest of our luggage, which we found. Then we made a pretty straight course down to Holborn, and through Newgate Street, stopping a few moments to look through the iron fence at the Christ's Hospital boys, in their long blue coats and yellow petticoats and stockings. It was between twelve and one o'clock; and I suppose this was their hour of play, for they were running about the enclosed space, chasing and overthrowing one another, without their caps, with their yellow petticoats tucked up, and all in immense activity and enjoyment. They were eminently a healthy and handsome set of boys. Then we went into Cheapside, where I called at Mr. Bennett's shop, to inquire what are the facts about ------. When I mentioned his name, Mr. Bennett shook his head and expressed great sorrow; but, on further talk, I found that he referred only to the failure, and had heard nothing about the other rumor. It cannot, therefore, be true; for Bennett lives in his neighborhood, and could not have remained ignorant of such a calamity. There must be some mistake; none, however, in regard to the failure, it having been announced in the Times. From Bennett's shop--which is so near the steeple of Bow Church that it would tumble upon it if it fell over--we strolled still eastward, aiming at London Bridge; but missed it, and bewildered ourselves among many dingy and frowzy streets and lanes. I bore towards the right, however, knowing that that course must ultimately bring me to the Thames; and at last I saw before me ramparts, towers, circular and square, with battlemented summits, large sweeps and curves of fortification, as well as straight and massive walls and chimneys behind them (all a great confusion--to my eye), of ancient and more modern structure, and four loftier turrets rising in the midst; the whole great space surrounded by a broad, dry moat, which now seemed to be used as an ornamental walk, bordered partly with trees. This was the Tower; but seen from a different and more picturesque point of view than I have heretofore gained of it. Being so convenient for a visit, I determined to go in. At the outer gate, which is not a part of the fortification, a sentinel walks to and fro, besides whom there was a warder, in the rich old costume of Henry VIII's time, looking very gorgeous indeed,--as much so as scarlet and gold can make him. As J----- and I were not going to look at the Jewel-room, we loitered about in the open space, before the White Tower, while the tall, slender, white-haired, gentlemanly warder led the rest of the party into that apartment. We found what one might take for a square in a town, with gabled houses lifting their peaks on one side, and various edifices enclosing the other sides, and the great White Tower,--now more black than white,--rising venerable, and rather picturesque than otherwise, the most prominent object in the scene. I have no plan nor available idea of it whatever in my mind, but it seems really to be a town within itself, with streets, avenues, and all that pertains to human life. There were soldiers going through their exercise in the open space, and along at the base of the White Tower lay a great many cannon and mortars, some of which were of Turkish manufacture, and immensely long and ponderous. Others, likewise of mighty size, had once belonged to the famous ship Great Harry, and had lain for ages under the sea. Others were East-Indian. Several were beautiful specimens of workmanship. The mortars--some so large that a fair-sized man might easily be rammed into them--held their great mouths slanting upward to the sky, and mostly contained a quantity of rain-water. While we were looking at these warlike toys,--for I suppose not one of them will ever thunder in earnest again,--the warder reappeared with his ladies, and, leading us all to a certain part of the open space, he struck his foot on the small stones with which it is paved, and told us that we were standing on the spot where Anne Boleyn and Catharine Parr were beheaded. It is not exactly in the centre of the square, but on a line with one of the angles of the White Tower. I forgot to mention that the middle of the open space is occupied by a marble statue of Wellington, which appeared to me very poor and laboriously spirited. Lastly, the warder led us under the Bloody Tower, and by the side of the Wakefield Tower, and showed us the Traitor's Gate, which is now closed up, so as to afford no access to the Thames. No; we first visited the Beauchamp Tower, famous as the prison of many historical personages. Some of its former occupants have left their initials or names, and inscriptions of piety and patience, cut deep into the freestone of the walls, together with devices--as a crucifix, for instance--neatly and skilfully done. This room has a long, deep fireplace; it is chiefly lighted by a large window, which I fancy must have been made in modern times; but there are four narrow apertures, throwing in a little light through deep alcoves in the thickness of the octagon wall. One would expect such a room to be picturesque; but it is really not of striking aspect, being low, with a plastered ceiling,--the beams just showing through the plaster,--a boarded floor, and the walls being washed over with a buff color. A warder sat within a railing, by the great window, with sixpenny books to sell, containing transcripts of the inscriptions on the walls. We now left the Tower, and made our way deviously westward, passing St. Paul's, which looked magnificently and beautifully, so huge and dusky as it was, with here and there a space on its vast form where the original whiteness of the marble came out like a streak of moonshine amid the blackness with which time has made it grander than it was in its newness. It is a most noble edifice; and I delight, too, in the statues that crown some of its heights, and in the wreaths of sculpture which are hung around it. November 12th.--This morning began with such fog, that at the window of my chamber, lighted only from a small court-yard, enclosed by high, dingy walls, I could hardly see to dress. It kept alternately darkening, and then brightening a little, and darkening again, so much that we could but just discern the opposite houses; but at eleven or thereabouts it grew so much clearer that we resolved to venture out. Our plan for the day was to go in the first place to Westminster Abbey; and to the National Gallery, if we should find time. . . . . The fog darkened again as we went down Regent Street, and the Duke of York's Column was but barely visible, looming vaguely before us; nor, from Pall Mall, was Nelson's Pillar much more distinct, though methought his statue stood aloft in a somewhat clearer atmosphere than ours. Passing Whitehall, however, we could scarcely see Inigo Jones's Banqueting-House, on the other side of the street; and the towers and turrets of the new Houses of Parliament were all but invisible, as was the Abbey itself; so that we really were in some doubt whither we were going. We found our way to Poets' Corner, however, and entered those holy precincts, which looked very dusky and grim in the smoky light. . . . . I was strongly impressed with the perception that very commonplace people compose the great bulk of society in the home of the illustrious dead. It is wonderful how few names there are that one cares anything about a hundred years after their departure; but perhaps each generation acts in good faith in canonizing its own men. . . . . But the fame of the buried person does not make the marble live,--the marble keeps merely a cold and sad memory of a man who would else be forgotten. No man who needs a monument ever ought to have one. The painted windows of the Abbey, though mostly modern, are exceedingly rich and beautiful; and I do think that human art has invented no other such magnificent method of adornment as this. Our final visit to-day was to the National Gallery, where I came to the conclusion that Murillo's St. John was the most lovely picture I have ever seen, and that there never was a painter who has really made the world richer, except Murillo. November 12th.--This morning we issued forth, and found the atmosphere chill and almost frosty, tingling upon our cheeks. . . . . The gateway of Somerset House attracted us, and we walked round its spacious quadrangle, encountering many government clerks hurrying to their various offices. At least, I presumed them to be so. This is certainly a handsome square of buildings, with its Grecian facades and pillars, and its sculptured bas-reliefs, and the group of statuary in the midst of the court. Besides the part of the edifice that rises above ground, there appear to be two subterranean stories below the surface. From Somerset House we pursued our way through Temple Bar, but missed it, and therefore entered by the passage from what was formerly Alsatia, but which now seems to be a very respectable and humdrum part of London. We came immediately to the Temple Gardens, which we walked quite round. The grass is still green, but the trees are leafless, and had an aspect of not being very robust, even at more genial seasons of the year. There were, however, large quantities of brilliant chrysanthemums, golden, and of all hues, blooming gorgeously all about the borders; and several gardeners were at work, tending these flowers, and sheltering them from the weather. I noticed no roses, nor even rose-bushes, in the spot where the factions of York and Lancaster plucked their two hostile flowers. Leaving these grounds, we went to the Hall of the Middle Temple, where we knocked at the portal, and, finding it not fastened, thrust it open. A boy appeared within, and the porter or keeper, at a distance, along the inner passage, called to us to enter; and, opening the door of the great hall, left us to view it till he should be at leisure to attend to us. Truly it is a most magnificent apartment; very lofty,--so lofty, indeed, that the antique oak roof was quite hidden, as regarded all its details, in the sombre gloom that brooded under its rafters. The hall was lighted by four great windows, I think, on each of the two sides, descending half-way from the ceiling to the floor, leaving all beneath enclosed by oaken panelling, which, on three sides, was carved with escutcheons of such members of the society as have held the office of reader. There is likewise, in a large recess or transept, a great window, occupying the full height of the hall, and splendidly emblazoned with the arms of the Templars who have attained to the dignity of Chief Justices. The other windows are pictured, in like manner, with coats of arms of local dignitaries connected with the Temple; and besides all these there are arched lights, high towards the roof, at either end full of richly and chastely colored glass, and all the illumination that the great hall had come through these glorious panes, and they seemed the richer for the sombreness in which we stood. I cannot describe, or even intimate, the effect of this transparent glory, glowing down upon us in that gloomy depth of the hall. The screen at the lower end was of carved oak, very dark and highly polished, and as old as Queen Elizabeth's time. The keeper told us that the story of the Armada was said to be represented in these carvings, but in the imperfect light we could trace nothing of it out. Along the length of the apartment were set two oaken tables for the students of law to dine upon; and on the dais, at the upper end, there was a cross-table for the big-wigs of the society; the latter being provided with comfortable chairs, and the former with oaken benches. From a notification, posted near the door, I gathered that the cost of dinners is two shillings to each gentleman, including, as the attendant told me, ale and wine. I am reluctant to leave this hall without expressing how grave, how grand, how sombre, and how magnificent I feel it to be. As regards historical association, it was a favorite dancing-hall of Queen Elizabeth, and Sir Christopher Hatton danced himself into her good graces here. We next went to the Temple Church, and, finding the door ajar, made free to enter beneath its Norman arches, which admitted us into a circular vestibule, very ancient and beautiful. In the body of the church beyond we saw a boy sitting, but nobody either forbade or invited our entrance. On the floor of the vestibule lay about half a score of Templars,--the representatives of the warlike priests who built this church and formerly held these precincts,--all in chain armor, grasping their swords, and with their shields beside them. Except two or three, they lay cross-legged, in token that they had really fought for the Holy Sepulchre. I think I have seen nowhere else such well-preserved monumental knights as these. We proceeded into the interior of the church, and were greatly impressed with its wonderful beauty,--the roof springing, as it were, in a harmonious and accordant fountain, out of the clustered pillars that support its groined arches; and these pillars, immense as they are, are polished like so many gems. They are of Purbeck marble, and, if I mistake not, had been covered with plaster for ages until latterly redeemed and beautified anew. But the glory of the church is its old painted windows; and, positively, those great spaces over the chancel appeared to be set with all manner of precious stones,--or it was as if the many-colored radiance of heaven were breaking upon us,--or as if we saw the wings of angels, storied over with richly tinted pictures of holy things. But it is idle to talk of this marvellous adornment; it is to be seen and wondered at, not written about. Before we left the church, the porter made his appearance, in time to receive his fee,-- which somebody, indeed, is always ready to stretch out his hand for. And so ended our visit to the Temple, which, by the by, though close to the midmost bustle of London, is as quiet as if it were always Sunday there. We now went to St. Paul's. U---- and Miss Shepard ascended to the Whispering Gallery, and we, sitting under the dome, at the base of one of the pillars, saw them far above us, looking very indistinct, for those misty upper-depths seemed almost to be hung with clouds. This cathedral, I think, does not profit by gloom, but requires cheerful sunshine to show it to the best advantage. The statues and sculptures in St. Paul's are mostly covered with years of dust, and look thereby very grim and ugly; but there are few memories there from which I should care to brush away the dust, they being, in nine cases out of ten, naval and military heroes of second or third class merit. I really remember no literary celebrity admitted solely on that account, except Dr. Johnson. The Crimean war has supplied two or three monuments, chiefly mural tablets; and doubtless more of the same excrescences will yet come out upon the walls. One thing that I newly noticed was the beautiful shape of the great, covered marble vase that serves for a font. From St. Paul's we went down Cheapside, and, turning into King Street, visited Guildhall, which we found in process of decoration for a public ball, to take place next week. It looked rather gewgawish thus gorgeous, being hung with flags of all nations, and adorned with military trophies; and the scene was repeated by a range of looking-glasses at one end of the room. The execrably painted windows really shocked us by their vulgar glare, after those of the Temple Hall and Church; yet, a few years ago, I might very likely have thought them beautiful. Our own national banner, I must remember to say, was hanging in Guildhall, but with only ten stars, and an insufficient number of stripes. November 15th.--Yesterday morning we went to London Bridge and along Lower Thames Street, and quickly found ourselves in Billingsgate Market, --a dirty, evil-smelling, crowded precinct, thronged with people carrying fish on their heads, and lined with fish-shops and fish-stalls, and pervaded with a fishy odor. The footwalk was narrow,--as indeed was the whole street,--and filthy to travel upon; and we had to elbow our way among rough men and slatternly women, and to guard our heads from the contact of fish-trays; very ugly, grimy, and misty, moreover, is Billingsgate Market, and though we heard none of the foul language of which it is supposed to be the fountain-head, yet it has its own peculiarities of behavior. For instance, U---- tells me that one man, staring at her and her governess as they passed, cried out, "What beauties!"--another, looking under her veil, greeted her with, "Good morning, my love!" We were in advance, and heard nothing of these civilities. Struggling through this fishy purgatory, we caught sight of the Tower, as we drew near the end of the street; and I put all my party under charge of one of the Trump Cards, not being myself inclined to make the rounds of the small part of the fortress that is shown, so soon after my late visit. When they departed with the warder, I set out by myself to wander about the exterior of the Tower, looking with interest at what I suppose to be Tower Hill,--a slight elevation of the large open space into which Great Tower Street opens; though, perhaps, what is now called Trinity Square may have been a part of Tower Hill, and possibly the precise spot where the executions took place. Keeping to the right, round the Tower, I found the moat quite surrounded by a fence of iron rails, excluding me from a pleasant gravel-path, among flowers and shrubbery, on the inside, where I could see nursery-maids giving children their airings. Possibly these may have been the privileged inhabitants of the Tower, which certainly might contain the population of a large village. The aspect of the fortress has so much that is new and modern about it that it can hardly be called picturesque, and yet it seems unfair to withhold that epithet from such a collection of gray ramparts. I followed the iron fence quite round the outer grounds, till it approached the Thames, and in this direction the moat and the pleasure-ground terminate in a narrow graveyard, which extends beneath the walls, and looks neglected and shaggy with long grass. It appeared to contain graves enough, but only a few tombstones, of which I could read the inscription of but one; it commemorated a Mr. George Gibson, a person of no note, nor apparently connected with the place. St. Katharine's Dock lies along the Thames, in this vicinity; and while on one side of me were the Tower, the quiet gravel-path, and the shaggy graveyard, on the other were draymen and their horses, dock-laborers, sailors, empty puncheons, and a miscellaneous spectacle of life,--including organ-grinders, men roasting chestnuts over small ovens on the sidewalk, boys and women with boards or wheelbarrows of apples, oyster-stands, besides pedlers of small wares, dirty children at play, and other figures and things that a Dutch painter would seize upon. I went a little way into St. Katharine's Dock, and found it crowded with great ships; then, returning, I strolled along the range of shops that front towards this side of the Tower. They have all something to do with ships, sailors, and commerce; being for the sale of ships' stores, nautical instruments, arms, clothing, together with a tavern and grog-shop at every other door; bookstalls, too, covered with cheap novels and song-books; cigar-shops in great numbers; and everywhere were sailors, and here and there a soldier, and children at the doorsteps, and women showing themselves at the doors or windows of their domiciles. These latter figures, however, pertain rather to the street up which I walked, penetrating into the interior of this region, which, I think, is Blackwall--no, I forget what its name is. At all events, it has an ancient and most grimy and rough look, with its old gabled houses, each of them the seat of some petty trade and business in its basement story. Among these I saw one house with three or four peaks along its front,--a second story projecting over the basement, and the whole clapboarded over. . . . . There was a butcher's stall in the lower story, with a front open to the street, in the ancient fashion, which seems to be retained only by butchers' shops. This part of London having escaped the Great Fire, I suppose there may be many relics of architectural antiquity hereabouts. At the end of an hour I went back to the Refreshment-room, within the outer gate of the Tower, where the rest of us shortly appeared. We now returned westward by way of Great Tower Street, Eastcheap, and Cannon Street, and, entering St. Paul's, sat down beneath the misty dome to rest ourselves. The muffled roar of the city, as we heard it there, is very soothing, and keeps one listening to it, somewhat as the flow of a river keeps us looking at it. It is a grand and quiet sound; and, ever and anon, a distant door slammed somewhere in the cathedral, and reverberated long and heavily, like the roll of thunder or the boom of cannon. Every noise that is loud enough to be heard in so vast an edifice melts into the great quietude. The interior looked very sombre, and the dome hung over us like a cloudy sky. I wish it were possible to pass directly from St. Paul's into York Minster, or from the latter into the former; that is, if one's mind could manage to stagger under both in the same day. There is no other way of judging of their comparative effect. Under the influence of that grand lullaby,--the roar of the city,--we sat for some time after we were sufficiently rested; but at last plunged forth again, and went up Newgate Street, pausing to look through the iron railings of Christ's Hospital. The boys, however, were not at play; so we went onward, in quest of Smithfield, and on our way had a greeting from Mr. Silsbee, a gentleman of our own native town. Parting with him, we found Smithfield, which is still occupied with pens for cattle, though I believe it has ceased to be a cattle-market. Except it be St. Bartholomew's hospital on one side, there is nothing interesting in this ugly square; though, no doubt, a few feet under the pavement there are bones and ashes as precious as anything of the kind on earth. I wonder when men will begin to erect monuments to human error; hitherto their pillars and statues have only been for the sake of glorification. But, after all, the present fashion may be the better and wholesomer. . . . . November 16th.--Mr. Silsbee called yesterday, and talked about matters of art, in which he is deeply interested, and which he has had good opportunities of becoming acquainted with, during three years' travel on the Continent. He is a man of great intelligence and true feeling, and absolutely brims over with ideas,--his conversation flowing in a constant stream, which it appears to be no trouble whatever to him to keep up. . . . . He took his leave after a long call, and left with us a manuscript, describing a visit to Berlin, which I read to my wife in the evening. It was well worth reading. He made an engagement to go with us to the Crystal Palace, and came rather for that purpose this morning. We drove to the London Bridge station, where we bought return tickets that entitled us to admission to the Palace, as well as conveyance thither, for half a crown apiece. On our arrival we entered by the garden front, thus gaining a fine view of the ornamental grounds, with their fountains and stately pathways, bordered with statues; and of the edifice itself, so vast and fairy-like, looking as if it were a bubble, and might vanish at a touch. There is as little beauty in the architecture of the Crystal Palace, however, as was possible to be with such gigantic use of such a material. No doubt, an architectural order of which we have as yet little or no idea is to be developed from the use of glass as a building-material, instead of brick and stone. It will have its own rules and its own results; but, meanwhile, even the present Palace is positively a very beautiful object. On entering we found the atmosphere chill and comfortless,--more so, it seemed to me, than the open air itself. It was not a genial day; though now and then the sun gleamed out, and once caused fine effects in the glasswork of a crystal fountain in one of the courts. We were under Mr. Silshee's guidance for the day, . . . . and first we looked at the sculpture, which is composed chiefly of casts or copies of the most famous statues of all ages, and likewise of those crumbs and little fragments which have fallen from Time's jaw,--and half-picked bones, as it were, that have been gathered up from spots where he has feasted full,--torsos, heads and broken limbs, some of them half worn away, as if they had been rolled over and over in the sea. I saw nothing in the sculptural way, either modern or antique, that impressed me so much as a statue of a nude mother by a French artist. In a sitting posture, with one knee over the other, she was clasping her highest knee with both hands; and in the hollow cradle thus formed by her arms lay two sweet little babies, as snug and close to her heart as if they had not yet been born,--two little love-blossoms,--and the mother encircling them and pervading them with love. But an infinite pathos and strange terror are given to this beautiful group by some faint bas-reliefs on the pedestal, indicating that the happy mother is Eve, and Cain and Abel the two innocent babes. Then we went to the Alhambra, which looks like an enchanted palace. If it had been a sunny day, I should have enjoyed it more; but it was miserable to shiver and shake in the Court of the Lions, and in those chambers which were contrived as places of refuge from a fervid temperature. Furthermore, it is not quite agreeable to see such clever specimens of stage decoration; they are so very good that it gets to be past a joke, without becoming actual earnest. I had not a similar feeling in respect to the reproduction of mediaeval statues, arches, doorways, all brilliantly colored as in the days of their first glory; yet I do not know but that the first is as little objectionable as the last. Certainly, in both cases, scenes and objects of a past age are here more vividly presented to the dullest mind than without such material facilities they could possibly be brought before the most powerful imagination. Truly, the Crystal Palace, in all its departments, offers wonderful means of education. I marvel what will come of it. Among the things that I admired most was Benvenuto Cellini's statue of Perseus holding the head of Medusa, and standing over her headless and still writhing body, out of which, at the severed neck, gushed a vast exuberance of snakes. Likewise, a sitting statue, by Michel Angelo, of one of the Medici, full of dignity and grace and reposeful might. Also the bronze gate of a baptistery in Florence, carved all over with relieves of Scripture subjects, executed in the most lifelike and expressive manner. The cast itself was a miracle of art. I should have taken it for the genuine original bronze. We then wandered into the House of Diomed, which seemed to me a dismal abode, affording no possibility of comfort. We sat down in one of the rooms, on an iron bench, very cold. It being by this time two o'clock, we went to the Refreshment-room and lunched; and before we had finished our repast, my wife discovered that she had lost her sable tippet, which she had been carrying on her arm. Mr. Silsbee most kindly and obligingly immediately went in quest of it, . . . . but to no purpose. . . . . Upon entering the Tropical Saloon, we found a most welcome and delightful change of temperature among those gigantic leaves of banyan-trees, and the broad expanse of water-plants, floating on lakes, and spacious aviaries, where birds of brilliant plumage sported and sang amid such foliage as they knew at home. Howbeit, the atmosphere was a little faint and sickish, perhaps owing to the odor of the half-tepid water. The most remarkable object here was the trunk of a tree, huge beyond imagination, --a pine-tree from California. It was only the stripped-off bark, however, which had been conveyed hither in segments, and put together again beyond the height of the palace roof; and the hollow interior circle of the tree was large enough to contain fifty people, I should think. We entered and sat down in all the remoteness from one another that is attainable in a good-sized drawing-room. We then ascended the gallery to get a view of this vast tree from a more elevated position, and found it looked even bigger from above. Then we loitered slowly along the gallery as far as it extended, and afterwards descended into the nave; for it was getting dusk, and a horn had sounded, and a bell rung a warning to such as delayed in the remote regions of the building. Mr. Silsbee again most kindly went in quest of the sables, but still without success. . . . . I have not much enjoyed the Crystal Palace, but think it a great and admirable achievement. November 19th.--On Tuesday evening Mr. Silsbee came to read some letters which he has written to his friends, chiefly giving his observations on Art, together with descriptions of Venice and other cities on the Continent. They were very good, and indicate much sensibility and talent. After the reading we had a little oyster-supper and wine. I had written a note to ------, and received an answer, indicating that he was much weighed down by his financial misfortune. . . . . However, he desired me to come and see him; so yesterday morning I wended my way down into the city, and after various reluctant circumlocutions arrived at his house. The interior looked confused and dismal. It seems to me nobody else runs such risks as a man of business, because he risks everything. Every other man, into whatever depth of poverty he may sink, has still something left, be he author, scholar, handicraftman, or what not; the merchant has nothing. We parted with a long and strong grasp of the hand, and ------ promised to come and see us soon. . . . . On my way home I called at Truebner's in Pater Noster Row. . . . . I waited a few minutes, he being busy with a tall, muscular, English-built man, who, after he had taken leave, Truebner told me was Charles Reade. I once met him at an evening party, but should have been glad to meet him again, now that I appreciate him so much better after reading Never too Late to Mend. December 6th.--All these days, since my last date, have been marked by nothing very well worthy of detail and description. I have walked the streets a great deal in the dull November days, and always take a certain pleasure in being in the midst of human life,--as closely encompassed by it as it is possible to be anywhere in this world; and in that way of viewing it there is a dull and sombre enjoyment always to be had in Holborn, Fleet Street, Cheapside, and the other busiest parts of London. It is human life; it is this material world; it is a grim and heavy reality. I have never had the same sense of being surrounded by materialisms and hemmed in with the grossness of this earthly existence anywhere else; these broad, crowded streets are so evidently the veins and arteries of an enormous city. London is evidenced in every one of them, just as a megatherium is in each of its separate bones, even if they be small ones. Thus I never fail of a sort of self-congratulation in finding myself, for instance, passing along Ludgate Hill; but, in spite of this, it is really an ungladdened life to wander through these huge, thronged ways, over a pavement foul with mud, ground into it by a million of footsteps; jostling against people who do not seem to be individuals, but all one mass, so homogeneous is the street-walking aspect of them; the roar of vehicles pervading me,--wearisome cabs and omnibuses; everywhere the dingy brick edifices heaving themselves up, and shutting out all but a strip of sullen cloud, that serves London for a sky,--in short, a general impression of grime and sordidness; and at this season always a fog scattered along the vista of streets, sometimes so densely as almost to spiritualize the materialism and make the scene resemble the other world of worldly people, gross even in ghostliness. It is strange how little splendor and brilliancy one sees in London,--in the city almost none, though some in the shops of Regent Street. My wife has had a season of indisposition within the last few weeks, so that my rambles have generally been solitary, or with J----- only for a companion. I think my only excursion with my wife was a week ago, when we went to Lincoln's Inn Fields, which truly are almost fields right in the heart of London, and as retired and secluded as if the surrounding city were a forest, and its heavy roar were the wind among the branches. We gained admission into the noble Hall, which is modern, but built in antique style, and stately and beautiful exceedingly. I have forgotten all but the general effect, with its lofty oaken roof, its panelled walls, with the windows high above, and the great arched window at one end full of painted coats of arms, which the light glorifies in passing through them, as if each were the escutcheon of some illustrious personage. Thence we went to the chapel of Lincoln's Inn, where, on entering, we found a class of young choristers receiving instruction from their music-master, while the organ accompanied their strains. These young, clear, fresh, elastic voices are wonderfully beautiful; they are like those of women, yet have something more birdlike and aspiring, more like what one conceives of the singing of angels. As for the singing of saints and blessed spirits that have once been human, it never can resemble that of these young voices; for no duration of heavenly enjoyments will ever quite take the mortal sadness out of it. In this chapel we saw some painted windows of the time of James I., a period much subsequent, to the age when painted glass was in its glory; but the pictures of Scriptural people in these windows were certainly very fine,--the figures being as large as life, and the faces having much expression. The sunshine came in through some of them, and produced a beautiful effect, almost as if the painted forms were the glorified spirits of those holy personages. After leaving Lincoln's Inn, we looked at Gray's Inn, which is a great, quiet domain, quadrangle beyond quadrangle, close beside Holborn, and a large space of greensward enclosed within it. It is very strange to find so much of ancient quietude right in the monster city's very jaws, which yet the monster shall not eat up,--right in its very belly, indeed, which yet, in all these ages, it shall not digest and convert into the same substance as the rest of its bustling streets. Nothing else in London is so like the effect of a spell, as to pass under one of these archways, and find yourself transported from the jumble, mob, tumult, uproar, as of an age of week-days condensed into the present hour, into what seems an eternal sabbath. Thence we went into Staple Inn, I think it was,--which has a front upon Holborn of four or five ancient gables in a row, and a low arch under the impending story, admitting you into a paved quadrangle, beyond which you have the vista of another. I do not understand that the residences and chambers in these Inns of Court are now exclusively let to lawyers; though such inhabitants certainly seem to preponderate there. Since then J----- and I walked down into the Strand, and found ourselves unexpectedly mixed up with a crowd that grew denser as we approached Charing Cross, and became absolutely impermeable when we attempted to make our way to Whitehall. The wicket in the gate of Northumberland House, by the by, was open, and gave me a glimpse of the front of the edifice within,--a very partial glimpse, however, and that obstructed by the solid person of a footman, who, with some women, were passing out from within. The crowd was a real English crowd, perfectly undemonstrative, and entirely decorous, being composed mostly of well-dressed people, and largely of women. The cause of the assemblage was the opening of Parliament by the Queen, but we were too late for any chance of seeing her Majesty. However, we extricated ourselves from the multitude, and, going along Pall Mall, got into the Park by the steps at the foot of the Duke of York's Column, and thence went to the Whitehall Gateway, outside of which we found the Horse Guards drawn up,--a regiment of black horses and burnished cuirasses. On our way thither an open carriage came through the gateway into the Park, conveying two ladies in court dresses; and another splendid chariot pressed out through the gateway,--the coachman in a cocked hat and scarlet and gold embroidery, and two other scarlet and gold figures hanging behind. It was one of the Queen's carriages, but seemed to have nobody in it. I have forgotten to mention what, I think, produced more effect on me than anything else, namely, the clash of the bells from the steeple of St. Martin's Church and those of St. Margaret. Really, London seemed to cry out through them, and bid welcome to the Queen. December 7th.--This being a muddy and dismal day, I went only to the BRITISH MUSEUM, which is but a short walk down the street (Great Russell Street). I have now visited it often enough to be on more familiar terms with it than at first, and therefore do not feel myself so weighed down by the many things to be seen. I have ceased to expect or hope or wish to devour and digest the whole enormous collection; so I content myself with individual things, and succeed in getting now and then a little honey from them. Unless I were studying some particular branch of history or science or art, this is the best that can be done with the British Museum. I went first to-day into the Townley Gallery, and so along through all the ancient sculpture, and was glad to find myself able to sympathize more than heretofore with the forms of grace and beauty which are preserved there,--poor, maimed immortalities as they are,--headless and legless trunks, godlike cripples, faces beautiful and broken-nosed,-- heroic shapes which have stood so long, or lain prostrate so long, in the open air, that even the atmosphere of Greece has almost dissolved the external layer of the marble; and yet, however much they may be worn away, or battered and shattered, the grace and nobility seem as deep in them as the very heart of the stone. It cannot be destroyed, except by grinding them to powder. In short, I do really believe that there was an excellence in ancient sculpture, which has yet a potency to educate and refine the minds of those who look at it even so carelessly and casually as I do. As regards the frieze of the Parthenon, I must remark that the horses represented on it, though they show great spirit and lifelikeness, are rather of the pony species than what would be considered fine horses now. Doubtless, modern breeding has wrought a difference in the animal. Flaxman, in his outlines, seems to have imitated these classic steeds of the Parthenon, and thus has produced horses that always appeared to me affected and diminutively monstrous. From the classic sculpture, I passed through an Assyrian room, where the walls are lined with great slabs of marble sculptured in bas-relief with scenes in the life of Senmacherib, I believe; very ugly, to be sure, yet artistically done in their own style, and in wonderfully good preservation. Indeed, if the chisel had cut its last stroke in them yesterday, the work could not be more sharp and distinct. In glass cases, in this room, are little relics and scraps of utensils, and a great deal of fragmentary rubbish, dug up by Layard in his researches,-- things that it is hard to call anything but trash, but which yet may be of great significance as indicating the modes of life of a long-past race. I remember nothing particularly just now, except some pieces of broken glass, iridescent with certainly the most beautiful hues in the world,--indescribably beautiful, and unimaginably, unless one can conceive of the colors of the rainbow, and a thousand glorious sunsets, and the autumnal forest-leaves of America, all condensed upon a little fragment of a glass cup,--and that, too, without becoming in the least glaring or flagrant, but mildly glorious, as we may fancy the shifting lines of an angel's wing may be. I think this chaste splendor will glow in my memory for years to come. It is the effect of time, and cannot be imitated by any known process of art. I have seen it in specimens of old Roman glass, which has been famous here in England; but never in anything is there the brilliancy of these Oriental fragments. How strange that decay, in dark places, and underground, and where there are a billion chances to one that nobody will ever see its handiwork, should produce these beautiful effects! The glass seems to become perfectly brittle, so that it would vanish, like a soap-bubble, if touched. Ascending the stairs, I went through the halls of fossil remains,--which I care little for, though one of them is a human skeleton in limestone,-- and through several rooms of mineralogical specimens, including all the gems in the world, among which is seen, not the Koh-i-noor itself, but a fac-simile of it in crystal. I think the aerolites are as interesting as anything in this department, and one piece of pure iron, laid against the wall of the room, weighs about fourteen hundred pounds. Whence could it have come? If these aerolites are bits of other planets, how happen they to be always iron? But I know no more of this than if I were a philosopher. Then I went through rooms of shells and fishes and reptiles and tortoises, crocodiles and alligators and insects, including all manner of butterflies, some of which had wings precisely like leaves, a little withered and faded, even the skeleton and fibres of the leaves represented; and immense hairy spiders, covering, with the whole circumference of their legs, a space as big as a saucer; and centipedes little less than a foot long; and winged insects that look like jointed twigs of a tree. In America, I remember, when I lived in Lenox, I found an insect of this species, and at first really mistook it for a twig. It was smaller than these specimens in the Museum. I suppose every creature, almost, that runs or creeps or swims or flies, is represented in this collection of Natural History; and it puzzles me to think what they were all made for, though it is quite as mysterious why man himself was made. By and by I entered the room of Egyptian mummies, of which there are a good many, one of which, the body of a priestess, is unrolled, except the innermost layer of linen. The outline of her face is perfectly visible. Mummies of cats, dogs, snakes, and children are in the wall-cases, together with a vast many articles of Egyptian manufacture and use,--even children's toys; bread, too, in flat cakes; grapes, that have turned to raisins in the grave; queerest of all, methinks, a curly wig, that is supposed to have belonged to a woman,--together with the wooden box that held it. The hair is brown, and the wig is as perfect as if it had been made for some now living dowager. From Egypt we pass into rooms containing vases and other articles of Grecian and Roman workmanship, and funeral urns, and beads, and rings, none of them very beautiful. I saw some splendid specimens, however, at a former visit, when I obtained admission to a room not indiscriminately shown to visitors. What chiefly interested me in that room was a cast taken from the face of Cromwell after death; representing a wide-mouthed, long-chinned, uncomely visage, with a triangular English nose in the very centre. There were various other curiosities, which I fancied were safe in my memory, but they do not now come uppermost. To return to my to-day's progress through the Museum;--next to the classic rooms are the collections of Saxon and British and early English antiquities, the earlier portions of which are not very interesting to me, possessing little or no beauty in themselves, and indicating a kind of life too remote from our own to be readily sympathized with. Who cares for glass beads and copper brooches, and knives, spear-heads, and swords, all so rusty that they look as much like pieces of old iron hoop as anything else? The bed of the Thames has been a rich treasury of antiquities, from the time of the Roman Conquest downwards; it seems to preserve bronze in considerable perfection, but not iron. Among the mediaeval relics, the carvings in ivory are often very exquisite and elaborate. There are likewise caskets and coffers, and a thousand other Old World ornamental works; but I saw so many and such superior specimens of them at the Manchester Exhibition, that I shall say nothing of them here. The seal-ring of Mary, Queen of Scots, is in one of the cases; it must have been a thumb-ring, judging from its size, and it has a dark stone, engraved with armorial bearings. In another case is the magic glass formerly used by Dr. Doe, and in which, if I rightly remember, used to be seen prophetic visions or figures of persons and scenes at a distance. It is a round ball of glass or crystal, slightly tinged with a pinkish hue, and about as big as a small apple, or a little bigger than an egg would be if perfectly round. This ancient humbug kept me looking at it perhaps ten minutes; and I saw my own face dimly in it, but no other vision. Lastly, I passed through the Ethnographical Rooms; but I care little for the varieties of the human race,--all that is really important and interesting being found in our own variety. Perhaps equally in any other. This brought me to the head of one of the staircases, descending which I entered the library. Here--not to speak of the noble rooms and halls--there are numberless treasures beyond all price; too valuable in their way for me to select any one as more curious and valuable than many others. Letters of statesmen and warriors of all nations, and several centuries back,--among which, long as it has taken Europe to produce them, I saw none so illustrious as those of Washington, nor more so than Franklin's, whom America gave to the world in her nonage; and epistles of poets and artists, and of kings, too, whose chirography appears to have been much better than I should have expected from fingers so often cramped in iron gauntlets. In another case there were the original autograph copies of several famous works,--for example, that of Pope's Homer, written on the backs of letters, the direction and seals of which appear in the midst of "the Tale of Troy divine," which also is much scratched and interlined with Pope's corrections; a manuscript of one of Ben Jonson's masques; of the Sentimental Journey, written in much more careful and formal style than might be expected, the book pretending to be a harum-scarum; of Walter Scott's Kenilworth, bearing such an aspect of straightforward diligence that I shall hardly think of it again as a romance;--in short, I may as well drop the whole matter here. All through the long vista of the king's library, we come to cases in which--with their pages open beneath the glass--we see books worth their weight in gold, either for their uniqueness or their beauty, or because they have belonged to illustrious men, and have their autographs in them. The copy of the English translation of Montaigne, containing the strange scrawl of Shakespeare's autograph, is here. Bacon's name is in another book; Queen Elizabeth's in another; and there is a little devotional volume, with Lady Jane Grey's writing in it. She is supposed to have taken it to the scaffold with her. Here, too, I saw a copy, which was printed at a Venetian press at the time, of the challenge which the Admirable Crichton caused to be posted on the church doors of Venice, defying all the scholars of Italy to encounter him. But if I mention one thing, I find fault with myself for not putting down fifty others just as interesting,--and, after all, there is an official catalogue, no doubt, of the whole. As I do not mean to fill any more pages with the British Museum, I will just mention the hall of Egyptian antiquities on the ground-floor of the edifice, though I did not pass through it to-day. They consist of things that would be very ugly and contemptible if they were not so immensely magnified; but it is impossible not to acknowledge a certain grandeur, resulting from the scale on which those strange old sculptors wrought. For instance, there is a granite fist of prodigious size, at least a yard across, and looking as if it were doubled in the face of Time, defying him to destroy it. All the rest of the statue to which it belonged seems to have vanished; but this fist will certainly outlast the Museum, and whatever else it contains, unless it be some similar Egyptian ponderosity. There is a beetle, wrought out of immensely hard black stone, as big as a hogshead. It is satisfactory to see a thing so big and heavy. Then there are huge stone sarcophagi, engraved with hieroglyphics within and without, all as good as new, though their age is reckoned by thousands of years. These great coffins are of vast weight and mass, insomuch that when once the accurately fitting lids were shut down, there might have seemed little chance of their being lifted again till the Resurrection. I positively like these coffins, they are so faithfully made, and so black and stern,--and polished to such a nicety, only to be buried forever; for the workmen, and the kings who were laid to sleep within, could never have dreamed of the British Museum. There is a deity named Pasht, who sits in the hall, very big, very grave, carved of black stone, and very ludicrous, wearing a dog's head. I will just mention the Rosetta Stone, with a Greek inscription, and another in Egyptian characters which gave the clew to a whole field of history; and shall pretermit all further handling of this unwieldy subject. In all the rooms I saw people of the poorer classes, some of whom seemed to view the objects intelligently, and to take a genuine interest in them. A poor man in London has great opportunities of cultivating himself if he will only make the best of them; and such an institution as the British Museum can hardly fail to attract, as the magnet does steel, the minds that are likeliest to be benefited by it in its various departments. I saw many children there, and some ragged boys. It deserves to be noticed that some small figures of Indian Thugs, represented as engaged in their profession and handiwork of cajoling and strangling travellers, have been removed from the place which they formerly occupied in the part of the Museum shown to the general public. They are now in the more private room, and the reason of their withdrawal is, that, according to the Chaplain of Newgate, the practice of garroting was suggested to the English thieves by this representation of Indian Thugs. It is edifying, after what I have written in the preceding paragraph, to find that the only lesson known to have been inculcated here is that of a new mode of outrage. December 8th.--This morning, when it was time to rise, there was but a glimmering of daylight, and we had candles on the breakfast-table at nearly ten o'clock. All abroad there was a dense dim fog brooding through the atmosphere, insomuch that we could hardly see across the street. At eleven o'clock I went out into the midst of the fog-bank, which for the moment seemed a little more interfused with daylight; for there seem to be continual changes in the density of this dim medium, which varies so much that now you can but just see your hand before you, and a moment afterwards you can see the cabs dashing out of the duskiness a score of yards off. It is seldom or never, moreover, an unmitigated gloom, but appears to be mixed up with sunshine in different proportions; sometimes only one part sun to a thousand of smoke and fog, and sometimes sunshine enough to give the whole mass a coppery line. This would have been a bright sunny day but for the interference of the fog; and before I had been out long, I actually saw the sun looking red and rayless, much like the millionth magnification of a new halfpenny. I was bound towards Bennoch's; for he had written a note to apologize for not visiting us, and I had promised to call and see him to-day. I went to Marlborough House to look at the English pictures, which I care more about seeing, here in England, than those of foreign artists, because the latter will be found more numerously and better on the Continent. I saw many pictures that pleased me; nothing that impressed me very strongly. Pictorial talent seems to be abundant enough, up to a certain point; pictorial genius, I should judge, is among the rarest of gifts. To be sure, I very likely might not recognize it where it existed; and yet it ought to have the power of making itself known even to the uninstructed mind, as literary genius does. If it exist only for connoisseurs, it is a very suspicious matter. I looked at all Turner's pictures, and at many of his drawings; and must again confess myself wholly unable to understand more than a very few of them. Even those few are tantalizing. At a certain distance you discern what appears to be a grand and beautiful picture, which you shall admire and enjoy infinitely if you can get within the range of distinct vision. You come nearer, and find only blotches of color and dabs of the brush, meaning nothing when you look closely, and meaning a mystery at the point where the painter intended to station you. Some landscapes there were, indeed, full of imaginative beauty, and of the better truth etherealized out of the prosaic truth of Nature; only it was still impossible actually to see it. There was a mist over it; or it was like a tract of beautiful dreamland, seen dimly through sleep, and glimmering out of sight, if looked upon with wide-open eyes. These were the more satisfactory specimens. There were many others which I could not comprehend in the remotest degree; not even so far as to conjecture whether they purported to represent earth, sea, or sky. In fact, I should not have known them to be pictures at all, but might have supposed that the artist had been trying his brush on the canvas, mixing up all sorts of hues, but principally white paint, and now and then producing an agreeable harmony of color without particularly intending it. Now that I have done my best to understand them without an interpreter, I mean to buy Ruskin's pamphlet at my next visit, and look at them through his eyes. But I do not think that I can be driven out of the idea that a picture ought to have something in common with what the spectator sees in nature. Marlborough House may be converted, I think, into a very handsome residence for the young Prince of Wales. The entrance from the court-yard is into a large, square central hall, the painted ceiling of which is at the whole height of the edifice, and has a gallery on one side, whence it would be pleasant to look down on a festal scene below. The rooms are of fine proportions, with vaulted ceilings, and with fireplaces and mantel-pieces of great beauty, adorned with pillars and terminal figures of white and of variegated marble; and in the centre of each mantel-piece there is a marble tablet, exquisitely sculptured with classical designs, done in such high relief that the figures are sometimes almost disengaged from the background. One of the subjects was Androcles, or whatever was his name, taking the thorn out of the lion's foot. I suppose these works are of the era of the first old Duke and Duchess. After all, however, for some reason or other, the house does not at first strike you as a noble and princely one, and you have to convince yourself of it by examining it more in detail. On leaving Marlborough House, I stepped for a few moments into the National Gallery, and looked, among other things, at the Turners and Claudes that hung there side by side. These pictures, I think, are quite the most comprehensible of Turner's productions; but I must say I prefer the Claudes. The latter catches "the light that never was on sea or land" without taking you quite away from nature for it. Nevertheless, I will not be quite certain that I care for any painter except Murillo, whose St. John I should like to own. As far as my own pleasure is concerned, I could not say as much for any other picture; for I have always found an infinite weariness and disgust resulting from a picture being too frequently before my eyes. I had rather see a basilisk, for instance, than the very best of those old, familiar pictures in the Boston Athenaeum; and most of those in the National Gallery might soon affect me in the same way. From the Gallery I almost groped my way towards the city, for the fog seemed to grow denser and denser as I advanced; and when I reached St. Paul's, the sunny intermixture above spoken of was at its minimum, so that, the smoke-cloud grew really black about the dome and pinnacles, and the statues of saints looked down dimly from their standpoints on high. It was very grand, however, to see the pillars and porticos, and the huge bulk of the edifice, heaving up its dome from an obscure foundation into yet more shadowy obscurity; and by the time I reached the corner of the churchyard nearest Cheapside, the whole vast cathedral had utterly vanished, leaving "not a wrack behind," unless those thick, dark vapors were the elements of which it had been composed, and into which it had again dissolved. It is good to think, nevertheless,--and I gladly accept the analogy and the moral,--that the cathedral was really there, and as substantial as ever, though those earthly mists had hidden it from mortal eyes. I found ------ in better spirits than when I saw him last, but his misfortune has been too real not to affect him long and deeply. He was cheerful, however, and his face shone with almost its old lustre. It has still the cheeriest glow that I ever saw in any human countenance. I went home by way of Holborn, and the fog was denser than ever,--very black, indeed more like a distillation of mud than anything else; the ghost of mud,--the spiritualized medium of departed mud, through which the dead citizens of London probably tread in the Hades whither they are translated. So heavy was the gloom, that gas was lighted in all the shop-windows; and the little charcoal-furnaces of the women and boys, roasting chestnuts, threw a ruddy, misty glow around them. And yet I liked it. This fog seems an atmosphere proper to huge, grimy London; as proper to London as that light neither of the sun nor moon is to the New Jerusalem. On reaching home, I found the same fog diffused through the drawing-room, though how it could have got in is a mystery. Since nightfall, however, the atmosphere is clear again. December 20th.--Here we are still in London, at least a month longer than we expected, and at the very dreariest and dullest season of the year. Had I thought of it sooner, I might have found interesting people enough to know, even when all London is said to be out of town; but meditating a stay only of a week or two (on our way to Rome), it did not seem worth while to seek acquaintances. I have been out only for one evening; and that was at Dr. ------'s, who had been attending all the children in the measles. (Their illness was what detained us.) He is a homoeopathist, and is known in scientific or general literature; at all events, a sensible and enlightened man, with an un-English freedom of mind on some points. For example, he is a Swedenborgian, and a believer in modern spiritualism. He showed me some drawings that had been made under the spiritual influence by a miniature-painter who possesses no imaginative power of his own, and is merely a good mechanical and literal copyist; but these drawings, representing angels and allegorical people, were done by an influence which directed the artist's hand, he not knowing what his next touch would be, nor what the final result. The sketches certainly did show a high and fine expressiveness, if examined in a trustful mood. Dr. ------ also spoke of Mr. Harris, the American poet of spiritualism, as being the best poet of the day; and he produced his works in several volumes, and showed me songs, and paragraphs of longer poems, in support of his opinion. They seemed to me to have a certain light and splendor, but not to possess much power, either passionate or intellectual. Mr. Harris is the medium of deceased poets, Milton and Lord Byron among the rest; and Dr. ------ said that Lady Byron--who is a devoted admirer of her husband, in spite of their conjugal troubles--pronounced some of these posthumous strains to be worthy of his living genius. Then the Doctor spoke of various strange experiences which he himself has had in these spiritual matters; for he has witnessed the miraculous performances of Home, the American medium, and he has seen with his own eyes, and felt with his own touch, those ghostly hands and arms the reality of which has been certified to me by other beholders. Dr. ------ tells me that they are cold, and that it is a somewhat awful matter to see and feel them. I should think so, indeed. Do I believe in these wonders? Of course; for how is it possible to doubt either the solemn word or the sober observation of a learned and sensible man like Dr. ------? But again, do I really believe it? Of course not; for I cannot consent to have heaven and earth, this world and the next, beaten up together like the white and yolk of an egg, merely out of respect to Dr. ------'s sanity and integrity. I would not believe my own sight, nor touch of the spiritual hands; and it would take deeper and higher strains than those of Mr. Harris to convince me. I think I might yield to higher poetry or heavenlier wisdom than mortals in the flesh have ever sung or uttered. Meanwhile, this matter of spiritualism is surely the strangest that ever was heard of; and yet I feel unaccountably little interest in it,--a sluggish disgust, and repugnance to meddle with it,--insomuch that I hardly feel as if it were worth this page or two in my not very eventful journal. One or two of the ladies present at Dr. ------'s little party seemed to be mediums. I have made several visits to the picture-galleries since my last date; and I think it fair towards my own powers of appreciation to record that I begin to appreciate Turner's pictures rather better than at first. Not that I have anything to recant as respects those strange, white-grounded performances in the chambers at the Marlborough House; but some of his happier productions (a large landscape illustrative of Childe Harold, for instance) seem to me to have more magic in them than any other pictures. I admire, too, that misty, morning landscape in the National Gallery; and, no doubt, his very monstrosities are such as only he could have painted, and may have an infinite value for those who can appreciate the genius in them. The shops in London begin to show some tokens of approaching Christmas; especially the toy-shops, and the confectioners',--the latter ornamenting their windows with a profusion of bonbons and all manner of pygmy figures in sugar; the former exhibiting Christmas-trees, hung with rich and gaudy fruit. At the butchers' shops, there is a great display of fat carcasses, and an abundance of game at the poulterers'. We think of going to the Crystal Palace to spend the festival day, and eat our Christmas dinner; but, do what we may, we shall have no home feeling or fireside enjoyment. I am weary, weary of London and of England, and can judge now how the old Loyalists must have felt, condemned to pine out their lives here, when the Revolution had robbed them of their native country. And yet there is still a pleasure in being in this dingy, smoky, midmost haunt of men; and I trudge through Fleet Street and Ludgate Street and along Cheapside with an enjoyment as great as I ever felt in a wood-path at home; and I have come to know these streets as well, I believe, as I ever knew Washington Street in Boston, or even Essex Street in my stupid old native town. For Piccadilly or for Regent Street, though more brilliant promenades, I do not care nearly so much. December 27th.--Still leading an idle life, which, however, may not be quite thrown away, as I see some things, and think many thoughts. The other day we went to Westminster Abbey, and through the chapels; and it being as sunny a day as could well be in London, and in December, we could judge, in some small degree, what must have been the splendor of those tombs and monuments when first erected there. I presume I was sufficiently minute in describing my first visit to the chapels, so I shall only mention the stiff figure of a lady of Queen Elizabeth's court, reclining on the point of her elbow under a mural arch through all these dusty years; . . . . and the old coronation-chair, with the stone of Scone beneath the seat, and the wood-work cut and scratched all over with names and initials. . . . . I continue to go to the picture-galleries. I have an idea that the face of Murillo's St. John has a certain mischievous intelligence in it. This has impressed me almost from the first. It is a boy's face, very beautiful and very pleasant too, but with an expression that one might fairly suspect to be roguish if seen in the face of a living boy. About equestrian statues, as those of various kings at Charing Cross, and otherwhere about London, and of the Duke of Wellington opposite Apsley House, and in front of the Exchange, it strikes me as absurd, the idea of putting a man on horseback on a place where one movement of the steed forward or backward or sideways would infallibly break his own and his rider's neck. The English sculptors generally seem to have been aware of this absurdity, and have endeavored to lessen it by making the horse as quiet as a cab-horse on the stand, instead of rearing rampant, like the bronze group of Jackson at Washington. The statue of Wellington, at the Piccadilly corner of the Park, has a stately and imposing effect, seen from far distances, in approaching either through the Green Park, or from the Oxford Street corner of Hyde Park. January 3d, 1858.--On Thursday we had the pleasure of a call from Mr. Coventry Patmore, to whom Dr. Wilkinson gave me a letter of introduction, and on whom I had called twice at the British Museum without finding him. We had read his Betrothal and Angel in the House with unusual pleasure and sympathy, and therefore were very glad to make his personal acquaintance. He is a man of much more youthful aspect than I had expected, . . . . a slender person to be an Englishman, though not remarkably so had he been an American; with an intelligent, pleasant, and sensitive face,--a man very evidently of refined feelings and cultivated mind. . . . . He is very simple and agreeable in his manners; a little shy, yet perfectly frank, and easy to meet on real grounds. . . . . He said that his wife had proposed to come with him, and had, indeed, accompanied him to town, but was kept away. . . . . We were very sorry for this, because Mr. Patmore seems to acknowledge her as the real "Angel in the House," although he says she herself ignores all connection with the poem. It is well for her to do so, and for her husband to feel that the character is her real portrait; and both, I suppose, are right. It is a most beautiful and original poem,--a poem for happy married people to read together, and to understand by the light of their own past and present life; but I doubt whether the generality of English people are capable of appreciating it. I told Mr. Patmore that I thought his popularity in America would be greater than at home, and he said that it was already so; and he appeared to estimate highly his American fame, and also our general gift of quicker and more subtle recognition of genius than the English public. . . . . We mutually gratified each other by expressing high admiration of one another's works, and Mr. Patmore regretted that in the few days of our further stay here we should not have time to visit him at his home. It would really give me pleasure to do so. . . . . I expressed a hope of seeing him in Italy during our residence there, and he seemed to think it possible, as his friend, and our countryman, Thomas Buchanan Read, had asked him to come thither and be his guest. He took his leave, shaking hands with all of us because he saw that we were of his own people, recognizing him as a true poet. He has since given me the new edition of his poems, with a kind rote. We are now making preparations for our departure, which we expect will take place on Tuesday; and yesterday I went to our Minister's to arrange about the passport. The very moment I rang at his door, it swung open, and the porter ushered me with great courtesy into the anteroom; not that he knew me, or anything about me, except that I was an American citizen. This is the deference which an American servant of the public finds it expedient to show to his sovereigns. Thank Heaven, I am a sovereign again, and no longer a servant; and really it is very singular how I look down upon our ambassadors and dignitaries of all sorts, not excepting the President himself. I doubt whether this is altogether a good influence of our mode of government. I did not see, and, in fact, declined seeing, the Minister himself, but only his son, the Secretary of Legation, and a Dr. P------, an American traveller just from the Continent. He gave a fearful account of the difficulties that beset a person landing with much luggage in Italy, and especially at Civita Vecchia, the very port at which we intended to debark. I have been so long in England that it seems a cold and shivery thing to go anywhere else. Bennoch came to take tea with us on the 5th, it being his first visit since we came to London, and likewise his farewell visit on our leaving for the Continent. On his departure, J----- and I walked a good way down Oxford Street and Holborn with him, and I took leave of him with the kindest wishes for his welfare. END OF VOL. II.